A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty (20 page)

After a couple of miles, the woods ended on my side in a fenced field with ratty bald patches al through it. Right in the front corner was a rusted-out Dodge Dart with no doors or tires or even wheels. It rested on its bel y. Inside it, three damp nanny goats were huddled up out of the rain. There was a wheel ess truck next to it with a skinny boy goat hanging his head out of the driver’s-side window, trying to drink raindrops. Toward the back I saw a fleet of rusting old sedans, al different colors, al with the wheels and doors gone, chock-ful of jostling sheep. We were in Ducktown for reals now. Roger turned the music down and slowed to a crawl, looking around.

The woods ended in another meadow on his side, dotted with ten or twelve trailers. On the far side, the scrubby meadow backed right up to a mess of bushes and loblol y pines and old, spreading oak trees. There was a double-wide mobile home in the corner closest to us. Cars were parked al around here, too. These ones stil had al their pieces, although one of the Buicks looked like its back door was held on with duct tape. As soon as it died, some Duckins would no doubt strip it down and fil it up with chickens.

Roger pul ed the car over across the street from that first double-wide.

“We gotta start somewhere,” he said. There were some ranch houses farther up that faced the road, also ful of Duckins, and if we turned off onto the next two crossroads, we’d find more mobile-home meadows in between the fields and more little pieces of woods. There were a lot of Duckins.

This meadow was fenced, too, as if the people Duckins were as likely to wander into traffic as their leathery old goats were. He shut the car off, and the music stopped, and we could hear this high-pitched beeping noise coming through the open window. It was too breathy and hooty-sounding to be a machine. It was more like if a real y sad monkey tried to imitate a truck backing up. It was loud enough for us to both hear it over the sound of rain beating hard on the Volvo’s metal roof.

“What is that?” I asked. “Is someone crying?”

Roger shrugged, mystified as me. “Let’s go see.”

“Freakin’ pouring,” I said. I grabbed one of the blankets out of the backseat and flopped it around to unfold it. I draped it over my head like a little kid playing Mary in a Christmas pageant. Roger pul ed his hoodie up, and we got out.

The weird beeping was coming from the double-wide, it seemed like, but the gate was al the way down in the middle of the fence, fifty feet past it.

The sorrowful hooting got louder as we dashed across the street, then quieter as we ran down the fence. The gate was wide enough to let the cars in and out, held shut by a loop of wire around a post. Roger reached for it, his hoodie already soaked. I was doing better under the blanket, so I tried to hold a piece of it over him as he got the gate open and we went through.

The double-wide was a white rectangle of cheap siding, sticking up on poles about a foot off the ground. There were three handmade wooden steps leading up to the front door, al saggy and half rotten. There wasn’t anything like a porch, only a strip of awning over the steps. We ran under it, crowded together on the middle step.

The noise was driving me crazy. It came about once every five seconds, but not completely regular. There were al these wind socks and pinwheels stuck in the ground on either side of the stairs, where normal people might plant flowers. The socks hung limp in the rain, but most of the pinwheels spun madly, flinging droplets.

“WTH? Is it a person? Inside? Do the pinwheels make that noise?” I shifted from foot to foot, al nerved up. We were on Duckins property, off the county road, and at their creepy mercy.

“I dunno.” Roger’s eyes glowed out of his hoodie like he was some kind of lunatic Jawa and being kil ed and eaten by a Duckins was the very most fun he could imagine. “You should let me do the talking. I’m a hel a better liar.”

I nodded, although I wasn’t al that sure if that was true. Maybe last week it had been. But now? I hadn’t used a single pee stick, and I’d been giving Big al kinds of backchat and fol owing Patti Duckins around, being stealthy and intrepid and stealing things. I probably could pick up lying, too, easy as Big picked up eggs and milk.

He banged the door three times with his fist. While we waited, I kept looking around to find who was making that breathy beep. It sounded like it was coming from real y close, like right under my feet, but it was hard to track the sound with the rain drumming so hard on the plastic awning. I final y thought to look straight down, between the slats of the steps. Eyes stared up at me from under the stairs. I let out a little scream and went leaping backward, right into the rain.

Roger hol ered, “Hey!” and turned his back on the door.

I stayed out in the rain and bent to peer under the steps.

“There’s a dog up under here,” I cal ed to him. The poor thing was wet through, with its hair plastered down so I could see how skinny it was.

“What kind?” he asked.

I shrugged. It wasn’t any kind of dog in particular. I took a step closer, and Roger also bent to peer between the stairs at it. It had a boxy head that was too big for its body. It was mostly honey brown with bits of white and black on it. It looked like a beagle had done a genetic drive-by shooting on a mixed-up terrier. The dog’s mouth hung open a little, and I realized the sad noise was coming out of it. It was so skinny and ragged, and it looked at me like it didn’t even real y see me, beeping mournful y to itself. I hadn’t seen a dog in this bad a shape since Bunnies.

“Oh, man, poor thing!” Roger yel ed over the rain, and I straightened up just as the door swung open. He stood up then, too, turning fast to face it.

A woman Duckins stood framed in the doorway, glaring at us. It was hard to tel her age, like with al of them, because she was so leathery and scrabbly-looking. Her hair hung in strings around her face, and her long, droopy boobs were almost fal ing out of an honest-to-God tube top.

“What?” she hol ered in Roger’s face. The rain was even louder now, because with the door open I could hear it pounding on the mobile home’s flat roof.

I edged back under the awning, standing behind Roger on the bottom step. I couldn’t stop looking up and down between her and the dog, his eyes peering up from between the steps. He sounded like Road Runner under there,
meep-meep
, if Road Runner real y needed to be on antidepressants.

“What d’you want?” When she opened her mouth, I saw that her front two teeth had been broken out, kind of on the bias, so they looked like isosceles triangles. Or fangs.

Roger answered her, but I couldn’t hear exactly what he said with his back to me and over the rain sounds and the sad dog.

The Duckins lady yel ed, “She lives down Nickerjack a piece, in a green ranch house! And what you shitty babies think you’re doin’, knocking for Patti on
my
door, I’d like to know!”

Roger was hol ering back something about the textbook.

I boosted myself up onto the second step, crowding in behind Roger, and asked, “Is that your dog?”

The Duckins lady blew her breath out at me. It stank of drinking so bad I went back down a step.

“He’s up under my got’damn porch, so what do you think, Miss Smarty?”

I said, “He’s real wet,” and she took a threatening step toward me, right to the edge of her doorway. She had on saggy old jeans that looked like they were about to slide off her skanky hips, and her bare feet had long trol toenails, half-moons of pure black dirt under the nail like the filth version of a French pedicure.

“Patti don’t live here. Now, get your asses off my stairs and leave my got’damn dog alone. He likes it there.”

The dog made that miserable
meep
again, like it was cal ing her a liar.

Roger shot me an irked look over his shoulder and hol ered, loud enough for me to hear this time, “I’m not sure what green ranch house you mean! Does Patti maybe live anyplace near Noveen Duckins?”

The second he said that name, Noveen, the women took her threatening, pointy gaze off me and put it hard on him. Her eyes went al slitty, and she made this hawky mucous noise down in her throat. She spit a big globby wad of spit so thick and yel ow I could see it shoot through the rain past Roger’s ear.

“Get your shitty baby asses offa my steps!” She slammed her door.

Roger turned around, mouthing,
Wow
. He grabbed my arm as he went by me and dragged me back across the meadow to the gate. I could hear that poor dog beeping after us, fading as we ran to the gate and then coming back louder as we came down the other side of the fence to the car.

We jumped in and sat there dripping al over the leather seats.

“We can’t leave that dog there,” I said.

Roger was already starting the car up, saying, “You can’t put a dog down your pants, and anyway, that woman had a shotgun. I saw it in the room right behind her. But, Mosey, did you clock the look on her face when I said Noveen’s name?”

“God, that poor dog,” I said. “No more random Duckins doors, please. I wil throw up.”

“I know, right?” But he didn’t look ready to throw up. He looked like he’d just come off the Rock ’n’ Rol er Coaster and was hot to go again. He started up the car, saying, “Let’s go up the street and see if we can find the house. Green, she said. If Noveen is Duckins non grata, maybe Patti knows why.”

We drove between a row of brick cube houses and another meadow with animal cars before we saw a ranch house facing the street with enough peely paint stil clinging to the siding to qualify as green. We pul ed off across the road from it and waited for Patti Duckins’s stupid bus to get al the way out here and drop her off.

Apparently the bus didn’t come this far, because when we final y saw her, she was walking along the shoulder of the road. The rain was stil fal ing out of the sky in sheets, but she trudged along with her head down, taking it. Her faded blue T-shirt stuck to her bony frame, and the weight of the rain made her draggy floral skirt hang so low the hem almost touched her feet. She wasn’t wearing a skirt for any holy reason, like how the girls at Cal can’t wear pants and even the cheerleader skirts come to four inches above the knee. I’d seen Patti at school in overal s and torn pants and even a jean mini so short that her butt almost hung out from under. Like most Duckins, she wore whatever crap they had in her size in the “Clothes by the Pound” bin at Goodwil .

Roger and I both slumped down low in our seats. She stomped past us without so much as glancing in our direction, heading straight to the green ranch house and going inside.

I said, “Dude, look at her. I’m so not a Duckins.” It came out sounding real y fervent, almost like a prayer.

Roger didn’t notice. “Let’s go ask her about Noveen.” He was stil jazzed.

We were too wet by now to bother even trying, so we dashed across the street and up onto the porch, me kinda hunched over Patti’s textbook to protect it. Roger pressed the doorbel , but we didn’t hear it chime inside. After a minute, Roger knocked.

A fadey-looking lady with grayed-out hair and big pooches under her eyes opened the door. She had a cigarette clamped between two of her side teeth. The eye on the Marlboro side was squinched half shut against the smoke. If she was surprised to see us on her porch, she didn’t react.

Just blinked at us, dumb as a lizard, and said, “What.”

I looked nervously at Roger, and he was looking back at me, jerking his head encouragingly at the textbook I had clutched. I held it up and said, “I go to school with your…um, with the girl who lives here?”

The woman blinked at me. Now I had surprised her. “You here to see Patti-Cakes?”

“Yes, ma’am?” I said. “She left her book at school.”

The woman stared at me, real hard, and then said, “You brung her book back to her?” I nodded, and she swung the door wide. “Come on in.”

She shut it hard behind us with a raspy clang that sounded final and awful. Roger started peering around, unabashedly curious. We were standing in a room like a den, but with no sofa or TV, just a bunch of armchairs in a circle. Against the far wal , I saw a big pile of blankets dumped onto a recliner, and it wasn’t until the blanket pile rasped out, “Who the hel is that then?” that I realized an old man with a bald head and stumpy, gappy teeth was swaddled up in it like a baby. His head stuck out the top with his hair tufting up like it was more of the rumpled blankets.

“Shush, Daddy,” the woman said. “It’s friends of Patti’s from school.” Then the two of them stared at us like we were space aliens, like no friends had ever come for Patti from school before. I guess they hadn’t.

“Is Patti home?” Roger asked.

The woman smoked at him for a second, like stil wondering at our existence, and then hol ered “Patti!” without turning her head. A good minute passed, and then Patti came up from the hal and stood in the doorway staring at us, hostile and suspicious. She had changed into dry clothes, a faded shirt, and a pair of striped men’s pajama pants.

“What do you want?” she said to me.

I said, “Hey. I’m Mo—”

“I know who you are. What do you want?”

“Now, don’t be a little bitch,” the woman said, real mild, though. “Your friends come al a way out here, doin’ you a favor. You offer them a drank of something.” She said it perfectly like that, “drank,” as if it was something that had already happened instead of a noun.

I held the book up in front of myself with both hands, like a shield. “You left this at school,” I said.

“Naw I din’t.” Patti’s eyes went slitty in the exact same shape as the tube-top woman’s had. I didn’t think my eyes went into that shape, even when I narrowed them. Patti took one step toward me, peering at the book through the smoky haze, and then her lower lip pooched out and her eyebrows came down. She took a quick step in and snatched it out of my hands. “How’d you git my book?”

I blinked at her with no good answer ready. Her mom, or whatever the smoking woman was to her, saved me. “Patti! You quit being nasty.” She said to me, “You want some lemonade or something?”

“That would be lovely,” Roger said, super polite, very Calvary kid, but he couldn’t stop jiggling his leg and looking around, taking it in like an anthropologist who’s had too much Red Bul . He peered at what looked like a heap of trash in one corner and a pile of what was maybe laundry or rags in another. It was like it was the set of some vile movie about squalid people to him, not real.