Homesick for Another World(33)

“Oh, honey!” cried one of the women, dropping the hose.

“Something’s wrong,” the girl stammered, stunned.

“Well, honey, what happened? Did you fall? Did you hurt yourself?” the women were asking. The girl caught my eye as they surrounded her. I put the lid on the trash and watched as the women guided the girl across the muddy grass. They made her sit down in a lawn chair in the shade. One of them went inside to call for help. I went back into the house and got the girl’s flyers and twenty dollars from my wallet. When I got back outside, she was panting. I handed her the money, and she grabbed my forearm, smeared her blood all over it, squeezed it, shrieking, contracting her face in pain.

“Hang on, honey,” the neighbor said, frowning at me, her fat hands stroking the girl’s smooth, sweaty brow. “Help is on the way.”

? ? ?

When the ambulance left that afternoon, I took a walk down to the Omec. Squatting by the edge of the river, I washed the blood off my arm. I took the crystals out and let them plunk down into the rushing water, threw the crumpled foil at the wind, and watched it hit the surface and float away. I looked up at the pale, overcast sky, the crows circling then gliding down to a nest of rotting garbage on the opposite bank. I sat on a hot rock and let the sun warm my bones. My thighs splayed out; my white skin tightened and burned. It was nice there with the cool breeze, the sound of the traffic through the trees, the earthy stench of mud. An empty Coke can tinkled a rhythm against the rock, shaken by the current. A toad hopped across my foot.

Later that evening I dragged the sunlamp out onto the curb, thinking maybe the zombies would find it. The next morning it was still there, so I dragged it back inside. I walked up Riverside Road. I got what I wanted. I walked back home.





AN HONEST WOMAN


They met one summer day through the high chain-link fence between their backyards. His yard was just plain dry brown dirt. Hers was full of dusty bags of fertilizer andtools haphazardly scattered where she’d started planting flowers in the tough soil. The man had seen neighbors come and go over the many years he’d lived there, in the dark corner of the cul-de-sac. “Through seven presidents,” he told the girl, laughing nervously and swatting his neck as if to catch mosquitoes. He was only sixty but looked far older. Vitiligo had stripped his brittle hair of its color, made his face seem riddled with fat freckles. The girl was pretty, sturdy, in her early thirties. She had been living next door to the man for two months already. He had just been waiting for the proper moment to introduce himself.

“I’m Jeb,” the man said.

“That’s a long time, Jeb,” the girl said to him. “That many presidents.”

Jeb laughed again and sighed and looked at her through the fence. His shock of white hair gleamed in a single ray of light falling from the girl’s yard into his. His strange, spotted face and bulbous nose made the girl look away. White strands of loose thread hung down from her jean shorts and fluttered around her thighs. Her breasts, Jeb noticed, were untethered—no bra. What color were her eyes? Jeb looked down at them, perplexed to find that they were of different colors, one a strange, violet shade of blue, the other green with flecks of black and honey. Coils of green rubber hose snaked through the mess in the yard behind her. He was glad, he told the girl, to have a new neighbor, and relieved that the property was being cared for after so long. The previous owners of the house had ripped out its walls, banged around all day, left busted garbage bags of broken plaster on the curb, chalking up the blacktop. The bank had taken it over in a terrible state of disrepair, then sold it to the girl for next to nothing.

“How are you and your husband liking the neighborhood?” Jeb asked through the fence. But he already knew that the boy was gone. Over the last few weeks, Jeb had watched the boy and the girl through the scrim of brown paper covering their den windows. He’d heard their spats and squabbles. The boy’s motorcycle had been missing from its spot under the garage awning for days.

“Trevor left,” the girl said, crossing her arms. She looked down at the ground, hid her toes behind a tall tuft of crabgrass.

“He’s at work,” Jeb said, nodding, pretending to misinterpret her. “What is his profession, if I may ask?”

“No, I mean he’s gone,” the girl said. “For good this time.”

“He’s left you all alone?” Jeb hooked the fingers of one hand into the chain-link fence and took a step toward her. He placed his other hand over his heart and let his strange, sagging mandible soften into a deep frown. “That’s just awful. Poor dear.” He shook his head.

“Whatever, you know,” the girl said. She made fists of her hands, then spread her fingers out like bombs exploding. “That’s life.”

“I do know,” Jeb said gravely, his thick lips trembling in false sympathy. That was one way he knew to affect women—to seem overcome by his own unruly emotions, and then to apologize for them. “I’m sorry,” he said, gasping and frowning again. Jeb saw that there was no ring on the girl’s finger. She wasn’t a widow or a divorcée; she was only newly single, and not for long, Jeb supposed. “I just know the feeling all too well,” he said.

“Shit, don’t cry,” the girl said. Despite being pretty and soft of flesh, there was something harsh about her, Jeb thought. Something crude.