The Scamp (25 page)

He held it so close to my face I could taste it. The paper, the singe of the lighter. But he laid it on his own lip like a cigarette. His hair, dirty brown and too long, limp on his neck.

Watch this, Ray, he said. His hands shook.

The blast lit up the inside of my eyelids like my brain was on fire.

It tasted like the flat chalk of ash and the salt of skin. I saw Chuck's mouth moving, open and wet, the look of his teeth, the front two yellowed from smoking cigarettes, his lips. There was a string of spit connecting his lips while he yelled. At me. I couldn't hear him though. I couldn't hear anything but the fuzz of the explosion. The trees, everything around me, silent and still. Chuck put me in the back of the car, deaf and stuck to the hot seat. I don't remember where we went from there. There was a hospital parking lot where I waited in the car, but that was later. Chuck in
the front seat, smoking, waiting. That hospital is gone now, changed over to a medical center, just nurses and a clinic and offices. Not a place where anyone goes to die.

Couper comes out toweled off and undressed. I lie with my head on my arm, my face turned toward him, and the TV still going on the weather channel, the weekend outlook, the UV index, and firework safety. It's almost like I've never seen him naked, him standing there. I've never had a look from that far away. We're always so up close.

He's more athletic than I've given him credit for. Has less of a belly than I'd thought. If I had to describe him to someone, I'd say he was big in the middle, middle-aged, with two different colored eyes, but it doesn't do him justice at all. He's muscular in his arms and thighs, his calves, thin at the ankle, blooming with strength below the cup of his knee. His cock, just a few degrees off high noon, and completely out of sync with what he says.

I'm out of condoms.

You were out, I say, holding out my arm. Why didn't you get them?

He shrugs. Other things on my mind.

I've been having unprotected sex for years, I say.

Yeah? he says. How has that worked out for you?

Not great, I say.

Why aren't you on the pill? he says.

I've tried it, I say. I don't like it. It makes me feel fat and cranky and tired.

So does pregnancy, he says. He chuckles at his own joke.

What do you know about it? I say.

I said I didn't have kids, he says then. I didn't say I never had a pregnant wife.

When his face darkens, I feel a nervous flutter, high, in between my ribs, like a bird is trapped there. I prop up to my elbows.

Come here, I say, and it takes him a minute, but he does. He sits close and I sit up, and lay my hands on the sides of his face. Tell me.

That's when he decides he wants to fuck me. It takes me forever to get into it, because I can't stop thinking about what he means, and he keeps grabbing, not my ass, but my hands, he holds them above my head, and presses his face, his baby-smooth and sweet-smelling face, against my collarbone.

Even after, he doesn't say much.

What is there to say?

My first wife's name was Debra, he says. We were young. We lost a baby at five months, he says. A boy.

Five months old? I say.

Five months into the pregnancy, he says.

Jesus, I say, because I can picture it. A roughly formed baby with fingers and a heartbeat, so small you could hold him in your hand. Then, Do you know why?

No, he says. There wasn't the same technology back then. I mean, he says, and rolls his eyes to the ceiling, this kid would be older than you. Maybe it's better, he says then. That's what the doctor told us. It was for the best.

People say shitty things, I say. I try to sit up, but he holds me down, half underneath him. All kinds of things might be better, I say. It might be better if we died in a car crash tomorrow.

I know.

It might be better if you never met me.

No, he says. But I know.

What did you do? I say. With the baby? I'm afraid to ask, because I'm afraid the answer is, they just dispose of it, like it's waste. Human garbage.

After sex, he has an emptiness that makes me not want to look at him. The mask of confidence gone, his face, flushed but sunken. He kisses my forehead and moves off and we lie on our backs, in that cheap, clean room. The bed, softer than it should be in the middle, so your butt is lower than your shoulders.

It was born, he says. I mean, she had to deliver it, even though it was already dead. We had to bury him.

Did you name him? I say. I think of the graves in the cemetery in town, the old graves in the cemetery where Summer is buried with her whole name, Summer Rose Jenkins, that say only
Baby.

Yeah, he says, but nothing further.

What? I say.

I named him Couper, he says.

Why? I blurt out. We left the heavy, light-blocking curtains open a crack and a strip of light wiggles across the bed when the curtains move above the air conditioner.

I felt like part of me died, he says.

What did she think of that? I say.

She divorced me.

We eat at the Sizzler. Beforehand, we go to Walmart and buy cheap bathing suits for the pool later, and Couper gets an atlas for when his phone doesn't work, and lays it on the table between us at the Sizzler. We've been eating fast food and gas station snacks for so long that this feels like Sunday dinner.

I can't remember the last time my mother cooked anything. She used to. Real stuff like pork chops and meatloaf. Cube steaks dredged in flour and deep-fried in a cast-iron skillet.

How long have you been on the road? I ask him. What I wonder is what Amanda cooked, or Debra, or the ones in between. I wonder how I will ever learn to cook anything in a borrowed house, in a camper.

All my life, he says. He smiles, still looking down at the map, but he reaches for my hand.

For real, I say. Before you came to South Lake.

He scratches his head. A few weeks, he says.

Where were you?

Down here.

The chill inside the Sizzler is too much contrast from the heat outside, and I shiver. When the waitress comes, I ask for hot tea.

Doing the same thing? I ask Couper.

Somewhat.

I watch his finger trace a line up roads on the map, toward the seam.

Are you just going in circles? I say and I'm kidding, and not, and I don't know how he'll take it.

I hope not, he says. He takes his finger off the road map. What happened, he says, with Summer?

After? I say. It just kind of fell apart.

I mean, is she buried?

Oh. Yeah. What else? I say.

I knew someone whose baby was cremated, he says. Human remains are small. Even an adult. When they give you back the urn, he says, most of what's in there is the wooden casket they use. The actual body, small. A baby, he says, even smaller. A Dixie cup.

No one has ever talked to me this way. With this frank, open clarity about what has happened. About the body disintegrating. I want to bust open. I want to hug him. I want to not be in the Sizzler anymore.

Eli's parents were really mad, I say.

At you? he says.

At all of it.

We stood on opposite sides of the gravesite, neither side talking to the other. Eli with his parents, the Reverend and Mrs. Charles Jenkins, and Eli's older sister, Naomi, who'd never even met me or Summer. Naomi was one of those rabid homeschooling fundamentalists, living in Virginia. Her husband worked for the government. She had all these boys, like a year apart, seven, six, five, four, all of them with her, but not the husband, and
she kept crying into Eli's shoulder, and calling him Elijah, the way his mother did. June Carol was immaculate in deep purple. On our side, just me and Chuck, who held my elbow, and kept stepping away to cough, to clear his throat, from nerves, I didn't know.

My mother didn't come. She was going to, but they had the service early. It was supposed to be at nine, and they waited until nine thirty, nine forty-five even, the little boys still at first, but then bumping into each other and the littlest one started to cry so that Reverend had to shove him over to June Carol for sympathy. My mother didn't get up. Chuck had tried to get her going, but she wouldn't budge. She was coherent enough to swear at him though. Said she'd had bad dreams. Fucking spiders in my bed, she said, but that was all. So it was just me and Chuck, who's my uncle but not my dad, and not even my mother's husband. He wore his best shirt, which is striped and blue, and blue jeans that were clean, and boots. He rolled up the sleeves because it was August, and hot. I had a dress that was brown with flowers, sleeveless and long. Pretty. Not for a funeral. Not for the mother of a dead baby to wear.

Eli's father said the Lord's Prayer. He said the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. He said the Lord sees fit to gift us with children, and relies on us to shepherd them through life, to return them to Him, as faithful children of God, but that only the Lord knows when that return is coming. Stay awake, he said, and watch. For you know not the hour.

June Carol put a little paper picture of Jesus with the children and lambs on top of the casket, but then covered it with dirt.

The rest of us are buried in Huntington, a town away. All the Reeds in a row: RayJohn, my dad, Buddy, the youngest Reed brother, who was only twenty-six when he died four-wheeling. Newton, which was Nudie's real name. Theodora, Khaki's mother. Donald, who we called Doe. Aubrey, the baby who was only a few days old.

I don't know what they did with the miscarriages or the stillborn.

There are more of us dead than there are alive.

When Teddy died, they left the casket closed. We sat in the front row and my mother just folded in half, her face down on her knees. Khaki was late. When she did come, she showed up in her mother's own dress, a little big for her, but not by much. She filled it out better than anyone might have thought she would, looking at her in her regular clothes, her T-shirt and shorts. The dress was discoey and short, diagonal burgundy and gray stripes, off one shoulder, with an uneven hem, the side without a sleeve hanging lower than the other, and all the stripes slanting that way too. Khaki sashayed up to the front in stockings that were too big, sagging at the knee and ankle, and more opaque than sheer, and a pair of strappy sandals.

My mother pressed her face into her knees.

There was music playing, low organ music like you'd have in church, except that we weren't in church, we
were in a generic-looking funeral home that used to be a restaurant and still kind of looked like one. It wasn't the type of stately home you see in some small towns, a big old Victorian with a front porch. There was no organ, just a CD playing. If you took out the churchy stuff, the flowers and the fake stained glass, it was just a room, like you'd have any meeting in. Khaki stood there in the middle of the aisle, with no one to greet her even, no one got up and went to her, and she just stood still, staring at the closed silver casket, the spray of white flowers laid over the lid. Doe came up from the back of the room then, and grabbed her shoulder so hard he left a red-and-white handprint on her bare skin. He turned her face to his and said something low in her ear, and when she answered him, he slapped her. That sound, the loudest thing in the room. They left, each of them walking down different sides of the room. We were the only ones there. Everyone else was dead.

twenty

KHAKI

Tennessee came to me with a monster in her belly. Her bare feet were bleeding, her little baby belly hard and beginning to show. She had run from an apartment in Venice Beach, after her mama had died from heroin, to her granddad's in Kentucky, to her sister's in Virginia, to me. She'd hitchhiked, she said, from California all the way to Kentucky, the last leg of it with a college boy who was driving to South Carolina.

He coulda taken me all the way, she said, her voice sunny and drippy sweet. Her granddad had a new wife, in her twenties, but he was still sweet on Tennessee, and now she'd got a belly the same way her mama had gotten one, from the same man, and at pret' near the same age, she said.

She rattled on a litany of women. Lila and Stephanie and April. April was fat like dough, she told me, and couldn't keep house or keep her kid from wetting the bed, and Stephanie, she said, tried to give me to Jesus.

She thought her baby might be deformed. When she ran from her aunt Stephanie's suburban home, from her well-groomed and well-fed cousins, she had walked and hitchhiked all the way, barefoot with nothing but the clothes on her body. She'd thrown up and walked off fifteen, even twenty pounds, so she was all arms and legs and little round bubble belly that you couldn't quite see, but you could feel.

They'd wanted her to have it. Her aunt and uncle.

Uncle Jason told me, Tennessee said, birth is a woman at her finest.

I smirked. He ain't never seen me, I said.

It was Dakota who found her, after I'd found Dakota. Dakota looked like a monster, with her blunt black hair and her eye sewn shut from where her own brother carved it from her head. She had a deep scar through both lips, making a C, forming an arrow with her mouth.

She found Tennessee asleep in the old part of the cemetery, where the grass grew long and soft. Where the trees made a bit of shelter.

You go ahead and kill me, Tennesee told her, but do it quick.

But Dakota is the sweetest, softest, strongest soul I've met. She picked up Tennessee like she was made of glass and brought her home to me.

It was Dakota who bathed her and put her in a white nightgown and laid her in my bed. When she woke, I was there with her, I held her hands, I asked her how old she was, if she knew she was pregnant.

I'm fifteen, Tennessee said. The baby's a monster.

All babies are monsters.

I told her I could relieve her of the monster. That I could give her a new name, a new life.

My name is Haylee, she said.

Not anymore it isn't, I said. I kissed her forehead. I ought to call you sugar, I said, but I think your name is Tennessee.