Authors: Lindsay Hunter
Daddy's (6 page)
And Mom dead a year and buried in two plots to accommodate her size. And Dad living in the city with a different man now. And me here all this while so hungry, eating pies, eating cakes, eating bags of pretzels hot dogs sugar crystals chocolate bars pizza wheels gallons of milk pints of liquor a million beers marshmallow fluff peanut butter loaves your old teddy bear the drapes in the living room Deandra’s panties a collection of river rocks fistsfuls of mud an old tire a rusted padlock a ring of keys a baby tooth an entire pumpkin the nails from my fingers the hair from my head any blood I emit and all those bits of the highway that get kicked up every time someone drives out of this town.
WOLF RIVER
Johnson communicated he could go for a lunch. In the corner office our boss had his head in his hands. An orange balloon floated by the window. Johnson whispered, More than anything I’d like a beer, an apple turnover, and some pussy. Right about now. The orange balloon hovered, caught on something. Our boss said, Goddamn it all Jesus Mother of God and the balloon freed itself. Or the wind freed it. It went up and I watched it reflected in the glass building across the way. Tiny bit of orange.
I’d once gone camping with a girl. She built a fire the way her grandpa had shown her. Or maybe it was an uncle. Teepee of kindling. Match. Puckered lips blowing until the fire could breathe on its own. We burned the weenies and then the marshmallows. Shared an apple instead. The girl told me about this river in her hometown, how its banks were rocky and gray. How the rocks looked like wolf bodies. How she pretended it was a river of wolves. As the fire was dying she howled into it. Like this, she said. Swim in. I put my hands on her, then in her. The fire spit and crackled. A last ditch. The girl quit howling.
Our boss waved a twenty in the air. Coffee black, he said. Johnson wondered which diner had the least slobby waitresses. The orange balloon was a black dot, a floating period in the sky. Johnson said, Tits. You know? I tried to remember what happened to the girl. Europe maybe. Or some kind of nanny position somewhere else. But anyway, that orange balloon and that orange fire. Stamping out the urge to howl in the elevator. Then me and Johnson hitting the sidewalk, a different kind of river.
THIS ONE
You wake up. Put just a T-shirt on because those jeans eat at your ass and it’s too early for that yet. You make what your daddy proudly called hillbilly coffee. That guy in your bed is moaning in his sleep, pointing his toes. His junk’s all shriveled and caught up in that black tangle. You think how if that were you you’d be more modest, even in your sleep. You think, I don’t believe I like this one very much. Then you remember putting your mouth on that thing, just for a second the night before, and how grateful he seemed, how his body instantly went from tense and strong to flop-relaxed and jelly, how that alarmed and disgusted you so you pretended it was just a stop on the way to kissing his lower abdomen. Now you rub your tongue against the roof of your mouth to equalize the bitter taste, a taste close to the one that time your mama boiled the hot dogs in the pot of de-limer your daddy was using, you sick for days after only a couple bites. It was a accident, you tell people. You’d probably say that now, should there be the same people in your house staring with you at this man with the thick rope chain around his neck and the missing molar. It was a accident. I needed a ride. You laugh to yourself, Lord did you ever need a ride.
And now the man is waking up, doing snow angels in your bed and yawning wide. You think, I should not allow him to see me standing in the doorway watching him. You think, that would give him some kind of wrong idea. But after he is done fisting the sleep from his eyes he sees you anyway. You think, let him. The man smiles, and maybe it’s not a missing molar, maybe it’s closer to the front than that. His hands are at his chest, scratching his nipple area. Girly, he says to you, I got me some morning wood. You see for yourself but it ain’t promising, looking like it’s on the other side of wilting. A lazy type of erection. You remember your daddy warning you about lazy men, saying Check the hands darlin, the uglier the better, your daddy missing the nails on both thumbs and always offering your mama his index finger to use as a nail file. You don’t remember the feel of this man’s hands. You couldn’t pull his hands from a police lineup. You say to the man, nodding toward that mess of a crotch: That ain’t much to write home about, but it is more like you’ve said it to the room and the room has soaked up your quiet tones and anyway the man is yawning again, doing that thing people do when they feel right at home, stretching and yawning something closer to a shout than a yawn.
There’s coffee, you say to the man in a louder voice. You want to get the ball rolling. You imagine yourself enjoying a quiet morning once the man has left, staying in your T-shirt until the late afternoon, and then who knows. Maybe dinner in front of the TV. Maybe a stop by the bar. It all seems like years in the future. You are pleased at the thought. The man starts playing with himself. The man is left-handed and this fact seems to render the man special somehow. You think the words Handicapped, Disabled, Special. No one in your family is left-handed. You realize that maybe you’ve only ever encountered left-handed people on the TV. Don’t drink coffee, the man says. I drink something else, and there’s that hole in the gums again, he has apparently said something suggestive to you but you’re having trouble picturing exactly what he means. You realize if he closed his mouth and his eyes you’d probably give him another go, due to that left-handedness. And maybe you’ve said that last thing out loud because his eyes snap shut and he purses his lips, his tongue roving around, but maybe that’s just his usual masturbating face. That hand gets faster, the flesh at his belly shuddering.
You are having a hard time with this man’s comfort level in a stranger’s house. It seems rude to you to feel so at home in a place that isn’t his home. But despite yourself you are turned on. You feel disgusted but inflamed. You tell yourself it’s that left hand. It’s downright exotic. In you go, your ankles cracking at the first few steps. You straddle the man, yank the crotch of your underwear over because getting them off would take forever and you barely have seconds before the magic of the moment would subside. The man pumps three times before pushing you off. Your underwear snaps to. The man says Hoo-eee. He wipes himself off on your top sheet but misses the dollop just under his chin.
You and the man lay there. You study the swollen corner of your ceiling, decide to pop it with a safety pin sometime soon. You wonder if that would be a big enough hole. The man gets up and in the blurry corner of your eye he is dressing himself. He goes into the kitchen and you hear him touching things in your refridge. He reappears in your doorway and you watch him unpeel a slice of cheese from its plastic sleeve, then mash it into a cube. You wonder if he is trying to fashion a new tooth. You got damn near fuckall to eat, young lady, the man says. Your daddy used to call you young lady when you were in trouble. You think, Am I in trouble? The man walks over and kisses the air over your hairline, holding his crotch like it aches. The man says Damn, says your name, which you don’t remember telling him. When he is gone you think about getting dressed, calling someone, going into town. You think about doing a lot of things. Instead you lie in bed and listen to a neighbor down the road mowing his grass, the sound of that motor goddamn ripping you to shreds.
OUT THERE
People burn cars out there. My father took us out there when I was eleven and we burned GranGran’s car, him shaking the lighter fluid over the hood and up against the sides like he was seasoning it, then he let me and Lily toss the lighter through the passenger window but we had to promise to run as soon as it left our hands. ‘Less you want me to roll you in hot sauce and eat you like a crispy wing, you’ll run your little asses fast as you can. We kept our promise and felt the fire at our backs but didn’t get to see it start, when we turned around it was going like it’d been alive forever.
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