Dark Places(18)
Either way felt weird. Either way would lead to jokes. Trey was the kind of guy that would look for something just slightly but truly wrong about you that you didn’t even notice and point it out to the whole room. Nice highwaters was the first thing Trey ever said to him. Ben was wearing jeans that were maybe, possibly, half an inch too short. Maybe an inch. Nice highwaters. Diondra had screeched at that. Ben had waited for her to stop laughing, and Trey to start talking again. He’d waited ten minutes, saying nothing, just trying to sit at an angle where his socks wouldn’t peek out too much. Then he’d retreated to the bathroom, unlooped his belt a notch, pulled the jeans down near his hips. When he came back to the room—Diondra’s downstairs rec room, with blue carpet and beanbags everywhere like mushrooms—the second thing Trey ever said to him was, “Your belt’s down to your dick now, man. Ain’t foolin’ no one.”
Ben rattled down the trail in the cold shade of winter, more flakes of snow floating in the air like dust motes. Even when he turned sixteen, he wouldn’t have a car. His mom had a Cavalier that she bought at an auction; it had once been a rental car. They couldn’t afford a second one, she’d already told Ben that. They’d have to share, which immediately made Ben not want to use it at all. He already pictured trying to pick up Diondra in a car that smelled of hundreds of other people, a car that smelled completely used—old french fries and other people’s sex stains—and on top of that, a car that was now cluttered with girls’ schoolbooks and yarn dolls and plastic bracelets. That wouldn’t work. Diondra said he could drive her car (she was seventeen, another problem, because wasn’t that sort of embarrassing to be two grades below your girlfriend?). But that was a much better vision: the two of them in her red CRX, with its jacked-up rear end, Diondra’s menthol cigarettes filling the car with perfumey smoke, Slayer blasting. Yeah, much better.
They’d drive out of this crap town, to Wichita, where her uncle owned a sporting-goods store and might give him a job. Ben had tried out for both the basketball and football teams and been cut early and hard, in a don’t-come-back sort of way, so spending his days in a big room filled with basketballs and footballs seemed ironic. Then again, with all that equipment around, he might be able to practice, get good enough to join some men’s league or something. Seemed like there must be a plus-side.
Of course, the biggest plus-side was Diondra. He and Diondra in their own apartment in Wichita, eating McDonald’s and watching TV and having sex and smoking entire packs of cigarettes in a night. Ben didn’t smoke much when Diondra wasn’t around—she was the addict, she smoked so much she smelled like tobacco even after a shower, like if she slit her skin, menthol vapor would ooze out. He’d come to like it, it smelled like comfort and home to him, the way warm bread might to someone else. So that’s how it would be: He and Diondra, with her brown spiraly curls all crunchy with gel (another smell that was all her—that sharp, grape-y sting of her hair), sitting on the sofa watching the soap operas she taped every day. He’d gotten caught up in the drama: big-shouldered ladies drinking champagne with diamonds flashing from their fingers while they cheated or their husbands cheated or people got amnesia and cheated. He would come home from work, his hands smelling of that dusty basketball leather smell, and she’d have bought his McDonald’s or Taco Bell and they’d hang out and joke about the spangly ladies on TV, and Diondra would point out the ones with the nicest nails, she loved her nails, and then she’d insist on painting his, or putting lipstick on him, which she loved to do, she loved to make him pretty, she always said. They’d end up in a tickle fight on the bed, naked with ketchup packets smashed to their backs, and Diondra would monkey-laugh so loud the neighbors would bang on the ceiling.
This image wasn’t quite complete. He’d deliberately left out one very frightening detail, just completely erased certain realities. That can’t be a good sign. It meant the entire thing was a daydream. He was an idiot kid who couldn’t even have something as small as a shitty apartment in Wichita. Not even something as tiny as that could he have. He felt a surge of familiar fury. His life was a long line of denials, just waiting for him.
Annihilation. Again he saw axes, guns, bloody bodies smashed into the ground. Screaming giving way to whimpers and birdsong. He wanted to bleed more.
Libby Day
NOW
When I was a kid, I lived with Runner’s second cousin in Holcomb, Kansas, for about five months while poor Aunt Diane recuperated from my particularly furious twelfth year. I don’t remember much about those five months except that we took a class trip to Dodge City to learn about Wyatt Earp. We thought we’d see guns, buffalo, whores. Instead, about twenty of us shuffled and elbowed into a series of small file rooms, looking up records, the entire day packed with dust motes and whining. Earp himself made no impression on me, but I adored those Old West villains, with their dripping mustaches and slouchy clothes and eyes that glowed like nickel. An outlaw was always described as “a liar and a thief.” And there, in one of those inside-smelling rooms, the file clerk droning on about the art of archiving, I jiggled with the good cheer of meeting a fellow traveler. Because I thought, “That’s me.”
I am a liar and a thief. Don’t let me into your house, and if you do, don’t leave me alone. I take things. You can catch me with your string of fine pearls clickering in my greedy little paws, and I’ll tell you they reminded me of my mother’s and I just had to touch them, just for a second, and I’m so sorry, I don’t know what came over me.