Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned: Stories Page 15

  “Gesundheit,” the man said, peering back at her with fond gray eyes set deep in merry creases. His blond hair was thinning just a little bit in front, showing a flecked scalp, but you had to look close to see that. A more obvious thing was the condition of his right arm. It was scarred badly at the shoulder. A rumpled welt snaked down the inside of his biceps, tapering almost to his wrist. Black hairs, thick and glossy as stray sutures, punched through the scar here and there. The arm bore three tattoos, all of women, done in surprisingly good taste, none of them posed nude or in an indecent way. The one on his upper arm showed a lady in her middle years, sitting as for a school portrait, her hair parted down the center, wearing a pair of large glasses with half-smoked lenses. A second woman on his forearm was smiling at a little bat-eared dog she cradled in her hands. The third showed a woman dressed in capri pants, fishing in the surf with the sun going down. Jacey had to look at it awhile to notice that in all three pictures, the woman was the same.

  “You live near here?” the man asked.

  “Pretty close: right off Smithfield Road, which I call Shitfield Road,” said Jacey, fast and nervous. “There’s nothing going on out here. I wish I lived in town.”

  “Yeah, town’s pretty good if bankers and spear chuckers are your thing,” the man said.

  He shook a cigarette from a green pack and offered one to Jacey, which she took. She leaned back, smoked, one palm braced on the rock. The bluff was behind her. She hoped Maya and Leander were getting a full load of her, her hair hanging down her back with the sun on it, the beer she’d bravely gotten for herself, and the admirable tobacco smoke rising from her hand.

  “I’m Stewart Quick,” the man said. “What’s your name?”

  Jacey told him June, her mother’s name.

  “Now, I like that,” he said. “The girl I probably should have married was named August.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  Quick drew his lips back from his teeth and squinted amiably into the past. “I don’t know—fear, stupidity, cash, her old man, and the most god-awful mole you’ve ever seen, right here,” said Quick, pointing at the place where his right nostril joined his cheek. “It was about like a golf ball.”

  Jacey covered her mouth to hide her braces and laughed into her hand.

  “So how old are you, June?” he asked her.

  “Guess.” She dropped her empty bottle in the creek as she’d seen Quick do.

  “Forty-five,” he said, handing her another.

  “Shut up,” said Jacey. “I’m eighteen.”

  “Now, there’s a coincidence,” he said. “I’m eighteen, too.”

  Then he wanted to know things about Jacey: how long she’d lived there on Smithfield Road, what she’d read in school, if she planned to go to college, what she would study there. She told him what felt to her like clever, nimble lies. She figured she’d go to Emory and study premed, but a part of her felt tugged to New York, where a school whose name escaped her had offered her a full ride to study acting and voice.

  To everything she said, Stewart Quick would smile and nod and tell her how full of good sense she was, how gifted she must be to have such fine prospects at her feet.

  Then he gazed at the rise, at the thick green canopy of oak and gum and pine. “Your buddies still up there?” he asked. “Maybe they’d like to come down and fuck up with us out here on the creek.” Jacey didn’t like the sound of that. It wounded her to think that Quick didn’t feel it, as she did, the special, private atmosphere of just the two of them together on the warm stone.

  “Nah,” said Jacey. “Those people are stale. I’m not trying to see any more of them today. Hey, let me ask you something, Stewart.”

  “Yeah, all right.”

  “Who’s that on your arm?” she said. “She’s pretty. It’s all the same lady, right?”

  Quick looked over his tattoos, angling his arm in a pained, ungainly way that caused his lower lip to jut out and shine. “Yeah, my mother. As far as I’m concerned, this is her arm, right here.”

  “How do you mean, ‘hers’?” Jacey pictured that torn and whiskered limb stuck onto that proper-looking woman and she giggled into her bottle.

  “I mean I wouldn’t have it if it wasn’t for her.”

  “You wouldn’t have you if it wasn’t for her,” said Jacey, feeling light and bold with beer.

  “If it wasn’t for her I’d have lost it, is what I’m saying,” said Stewart Quick. The sun slid behind the trees and the light went to bits.

  “In the war?” said Jacey.

  “Shit, no,” said Stewart Quick. “It wasn’t in a war; it was in a fuckin’ car wash. You want to hear the story?”

  Jacey said she did.

  “Well, I had this boss. I’m telling you, if you asked me for an asshole, and I gave you that guy, you’d have owed me back some change. Anyway, one day we had a bunch of cars lined up, honking their horns and shit, and this guy’s yelling at me to get some clean towels out of the washing machine. Now, I’m not talking an ordinary washing machine. This thing spun about ten times as fast as what you’ve got at home. So he’s going nuts on me, ‘Get some towels! Goddammit, get them towels, Stew!’ I go over to the machine. I open it up and reach in, only it’s not through spinning yet, so what it does, it tears my arm off and dislocates my elbow and crushes up my hand.”

  “Holy shit, seriously?” said Jacey.

  “Yeah, I didn’t even know what’d happened, I was in shock so bad. I just walk out into the parking lot in the middle of the afternoon, and it’s full of all these people trying to get their Mercedeses and shit cleaned after work. They look up and they see this kid and he’s dragging his arm behind him on the concrete like a toy boat, just hanging on by a little thing of skin. Doctors said ‘Hell with it, take it off.’ But my mom went in there, fuckin’ went primal on them, screaming, raising hell. Made them put it back on. They said there wasn’t any point. She said, ‘I don’t give a fuck if it turns black and rots. You sew my son’s arm back on. If it dies, we’ll cut it off again. But you sew that damn thing on.’ ”

  Quick held up his hand and gave it a remote, appraising look, as though it was a rare object he’d picked up in a store, something he admired but could not afford to buy.

  “Kind of a miracle, I guess,” said Jacey.

  “Pretty cut-rate miracle,” he said. “Bone hurts like shit a lot of the time. Plus, I don’t have hardly any feeling in my hand.”

  “That sucks,” Jacey said.

  Now Quick was touching his thumb to the fingers of his damaged hand, one by one, watching the performance closely, smiling with a kind of mystified amusement. “I don’t know. Makes you glad for what you got, I guess. Also, there’s something about it, having this part of you you can’t feel. Kind of like being two people at once.”

  “It’s not boring, at least,” said Jacey. “I think it looks cool, looks tight, those scars and everything.”

  Quick laughed. He opened another beer and, in handing it to Jacey, he arranged himself beside her, propped on his side, his head close enough to her knee that she could feel his breath drying the sweat on her skin. “How about we swap?” he said. “You take this arm, and I get, I don’t know. Maybe I have this leg.”

  Jacey shied away. “You wouldn’t want my big, dumb leg,” she said.

  “Wrong again,” said Quick. “Premium merchandise. Mint condition, except this bit of stuff right here.”

  Quick put his bad hand around Jacey’s calf. He brought his other one to his mouth, sucked for a moment on his thumb, and then used it to rub slow circles over a brown splotch on the inside of Jacey’s left leg, just below the knee. She let him do it for a moment. Then she eased her leg from his grasp. It very much alarmed her, the glistening patch Stewart Quick had left there, but she feared it might offend him if she wiped it away. “It’s a birthmark,” she murmured. When she was a child, her mother had taught Jacey to use the mark to tell her left from right. “When I was little, it was shaped like a fish.
It still kind of is.”

  She had another sip from the bottle, and watched a tiny red beetle struggle through a crevice in the rock. Quick sat up. He took the beer from her, grasped her chin between his forefinger and thumb, and kissed her lightly on the mouth. Then he drew back and watched her with a spreading grin.

  “That all right, June?” he said. “Thought I saw you wanting to.”

  Her lips tingled from Quick’s stubble, a complicated sensation. She wondered if her mouth looked different now, disfigured maybe, or possibly altered in a good and glamorous way. She had an urge to touch her lips, but she didn’t, afraid that the older man might see it as a rebuke of the unbidden gift.

  “Yeah, no,” said Jacey. “I was. I mean, I’m glad you did.”

  Quick let out a satisfied sigh, loud and crisp as a steam leak. “Goddammit, are you kidding me?” he cried. “This is summertime, right here. This is what I’m talking about. This is what a day’s supposed to be.”

  “I know,” said Jacey. “I wish there was more of it left.”

  “Oh, there’s plenty,” Quick said. “There’s lots of it to go.” Quick dipped his hand in the current and daubed the folds of his neck with creek water. “Something just hit me, June.”

  “What’s that?”

  “What we need to do to have ourselves the perfect day, we could go up the road to Hidden Lake and take a swim. I just remembered it’s Saturday. They’ll have a band set up and shit. Got that beer tent going. That’s where I need to be.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know,” said Jacey. “I’ve got to meet some people at seven.”

  Quick looked at his watch. “Well, it’s, what, four now, but do what you got to,” he said. “I’m just talking about going for an hour or so. That’s what I’m going to do.”

  The red beetle was turning puzzled circles in the shadow of Jacey’s ankle. She ushered it onto the narrow canoe of a willow leaf, and set the leaf in the water. It surged through the eddy and out of sight. Then she glanced back at the bluff and saw only leaves. “I guess,” said Jacey. “I guess that’d be cool.”

  Briskly, Stewart Quick donned his shirt and packed away his radio. Then he led Jacey across the creek and down the path, a different one from the path she’d come in on. In fifteen minutes, they reached the trailhead where Quick’s car, a two-door Mitsubishi Lancer, was parked. He’d geared it out at some expense—smoked glass, chrome rims, and a large aftermarket windjammer swooping up from the trunk. Quick opened the door for her. Jacey balked. “Just an hour? You swear?” she said.

  “No question,” said Quick. She got in.

  Quick stowed his gear in the backseat. He inserted the key and rolled the windows down but didn’t crank the motor. “Hey, come here,” he said to Jacey.

  “What?” she said.

  “Come on over here, June.”

  She didn’t move. Quick leaned over the emergency brake and put his mouth on Jacey’s, not as gently as before. He drove his tongue through her teeth and put the palm of his damaged hand against the front of her shorts, moving it with painful force, as though trying to rouse enough sensation for his deaf nerves to feel. Nausea gathered in Jacey’s belly. She was sure she was going to vomit or yell, but to humiliate herself in front of the older man seemed an agony at least as bad. Her hand was reaching for the door handle when Quick abruptly turned away and gripped the wheel, and ground the heel of his other hand against his eye, as though something was lodged in there. He mumbled something to himself that Jacey couldn’t hear.

  For a moment, Jacey thought Quick might open the door and take her back into the woods, but he started the car, pulled onto the road, and patted Jacey’s knee in a friendly way. “How we doing there, June? We hanging in?”

  “Fine, all right,” said Jacey. “Oh, shit, actually, hey, Stewart? I just remembered. Can we turn up here real quick? I need to go by my house for just a second. I want to get my suit.”

  “You don’t need to fool with that,” said Stewart Quick.

  “Yes, I do. I want to swim. You said we would.”

  “You can go in what you got on,” said Stewart Quick. “It’s a laid-back place. People don’t care.”

  “Well, I care,” Jacey said shrilly. “I’m not going around all day in wet, cold shorts. Now, I need to get my suit.”

  Quick went silent. She could hear him breathing through his nose. Then he gave a dry, clicking laugh with no amusement in it. “All right, sister,” he said. “Whatever you like.”

  And the car slowed to make the turn.

  Her heart beat dizzily. She didn’t feel it in her chest so much as on her chin where Quick had grasped it, behind her denim shorts, in her lips, and on her leg where his rough thumb had tried to rub her birthmark off. She had no plan for what to do once she got back to her mother’s house, but she figured once she was inside with the door closed, something would come to her.

  Quick’s Lancer rolled past the Fenhagens’, where the twins were out front, wrestling in a plastic pool. They passed the McLures’. Their teenage son was burning the weeds out of the ditch at the edge of their lawn. In the afternoon sun, the flames were invisible, just a band of jellied air.

  “It’s just here,” said Jacey. They rounded the curve. Quick pulled up to the house. Jacey’s father’s silver Buick was in the driveway, three hours early, and when she saw it, what she did not feel was relief.

  “Whoa,” said Stewart Quick. “Who’s this guy?”

  Her father was out there on the lawn, pulling dead petals from the rosebushes he’d planted there many years before. At the sound of Quick’s tires on the gravel, before he could even make out his daughter behind the tinted glass of the shotgun window, he turned and gave a clumsy wave, the brown petals spilling from his hand.

  At the sight of her father, the fear went out of Jacey, and cold mortification took its place. There he stood, not yet forty, bald as an apple, and beaming out an uncomprehending fat-boy’s smile. His face, swollen with a recent sunburn, glowed against the green dark of the rosebushes at his back. He wore the cheap rubber sandals Jacey hated, and a black T-shirt airbrushed with the heads of howling wolves, whose smaller twin lay at the bottom of Jacey’s closet with the price tag still attached. Exhausted gray socks collapsed around his thick ankles, which rose to the familiar legs Jacey herself was afflicted with, bowed and trunk-like things a lifetime of exercise would never much improve. Her humiliation was sudden and solid and without thought or reason. But the wordless, exposed sensation overwhelming her was that her father wasn’t quite a person, not really, but a private part of her, a curse of pinkness and squatness and cureless vulnerability that was Jacey’s right alone to keep hidden from the world. Whatever desirable thing Stewart Quick had seen in her, she knew it couldn’t survive the association with the stolid smiler walking toward her over the Bermuda grass.

  Jacey opened the door. “You coming back?” asked Quick, his voice a little urgent.

  She didn’t answer. “There she is,” her father said. “Where you been, Jace? I’ve been waiting here an hour.”

  “Well, what the hell for?” hissed Jacey. “Seven’s what you said.”

  “Oh,” said her father. “I tried to call. I got off early. I just thought before we grabbed dinner we’d go out to Emerald Pointe.”

  Her father looked beyond her to the crass yellow bird of Stewart Quick’s idling Mitsubishi.

  “Who’s that, Jacey? Who’re you with?”

  Behind her a car door opened, and Quick called out her mother’s name. Jacey jogged past her father to the house. She had to dodge Leander’s moped to reach the brick path. Probably, they’d be back here any second, he and Maya, to swell the day’s festival of shame to its maximum pitch. Jacey ran through the door, up the carpeted stairs to her bedroom, to discover some small good news. The cat, after many hours of imprisonment, had finally gotten around to the pigeon hatchling on Jacey’s bed, though its appetite had given out with a pink foot and a bruised triangle of bald wing remaining on the quilt. Whe
n Jacey came panting through the door, the cat leaped from the windowsill where it had been napping, and bounded to the bed. It slouched around the leavings of the bird, watching Jacey with wrathful eyes. But after a while, the cat relaxed and, satisfied that Jacey posed no threat, took up the last of its meal.

  ON THE SHOW

  Now it’s dark. The sun has slipped behind the orange groves, disclosing the garbled rainbow of the carnival rides. The blaring reds of the Devil’s Choir and the blue-white of the Giant Wheel and the strobing greens of the Orbiter and the chasing yellow and purple of the Chaises Volantes mingle and the sky glows hyena brown. Panic takes hold among the egrets in the drainage canal. They flee for the live-oak tree that surveils the hay-bale corral of the World’s Smallest Horse. For a time, the tree moves with a white restlessness of egrets stowing and unstowing their overlong wings.

  Shadow falls across the Crab Rangoon stand. A Florida anole, cocked on the shoulder of the propane tank beside the service window, slips down the tank’s enamel face into a crescent of deep rust. Against the lizard’s belly, the rust’s soothing friction offers an illusion of heat, and the lizard’s hide goes from the color of a new leaf to the color of a dead one.

  The lizard’s movement catches the eye of Henry Lemons, seven years old, who reaches for it, curling his fingers so that they form a small damp hollow around the animal.

  “What’d you get?” asks Randy Cloatch, age ten, who stands beside him. The two boys just met tonight. Jim Lemons, Henry’s father, has come to the fair on a blind date with Sheila Cloatch, Randy’s mother. Jim Lemons is the manager of a market research firm in Norton Beach, whose city limits lie two miles down the road. Sheila’s sister, Destiny Cloatch, works in the call center, and she arranged the date.

  Their evening together is going very well—too well for Henry and Randy, who for forty minutes have been loitering on the midway, watching the couple go around and around way up there on the Giant Wheel. They can see Randy’s mother’s hair, so blond it shines white, gusting around the yellow baseball cap Jim Lemons wears to hide a bald place on his scalp.