The Removed(10)

Slowly, I stepped out of the tub and watched the water drain as it made a loud sucking noise. I got dressed and went through my bag for a cigarette. The room felt much dimmer than before. I looked to the curtain and saw part of it trembling from the blowing air conditioner. On TV, an old movie showed a crippled boy taking his first steps. I sat on the edge of the bed and watched. The boy’s mother fell to her knees. A crowd of people surrounded the boy. There was no sound. I changed the channel with the remote and saw a movie with De Niro, the young, tough De Niro, sitting in a dingy apartment, writing in a notebook. De Niro, talking to himself, strapping a gun to his arm and ankle. Pointing a pistol at his reflection in the mirror.

I spoke into the tape recorder. I said, “Because I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.” I said, “I’m sorry I got high.” I talked for a while about what I loved about Rae, pretending I was being interviewed by the brother I barely remembered. I said, “Ray-Ray and Rae.”

By sunrise I had spoken thousands of words into the recorder. At the window beside the door, I peeked out the curtains and looked up at the morning sky. I could see the open land past the parking lot, dust swirling in the wind. I could see the motel sign, the pink VACANCY flashing. A hawk swooped down and landed on the sign. From my bag I took out the oxycodone pill bottle, tilting the last few pills into my hand, and swallowed them with a beer.

I put on Rae’s broken sunglasses and lay down in bed to try to sleep. A surge of pain went right to my head, and I saw myself projected forward into the darkness, an eccentric and intense sensation. Outside the window, I saw my ancestors walking and falling. Some were crawling. I saw the soft, yellow light on the horizon. I saw the rain lifting from earth to sky.





Sonja Echota


SEPTEMBER 1

Quah, Oklahoma

I SECRETLY WATCHED VIN HOFF for months before I ever met him. I’m not kidding. This was not love—let me be clear on that, though I had an immediate attraction to him. The attraction was really quite strong. There was also the fact that Vin was in his early twenties, and I was thirty-one. I have always liked younger men.

The public library downtown where I worked had a comfortable shaded area beside the south entrance where I parked my bicycle. After work, sometimes, I sat on the steps by the entrance and observed Vin playing with his son in their yard across the street. I’m aware how strange it looks for a woman to ride a bicycle to work, but I never liked to drive. I was, in fact, the only woman who parked a bicycle at the library. All the other bicycles belonged to kids.

Vin looked rough around the edges, drove both a car and a motorcycle, and was a single dad. I loved hearing the sound of his laughter. He was a musician who played guitar in a David Bowie tribute band downtown at the Branch, a local bar near the university in town. He was broad-shouldered, with the short, unkempt hair of a fashionable young man. He looked young in a sort of James Dean way, usually dressed in blue jeans and T-shirts.

His son was a boy of seven or eight named Luka. I learned this one afternoon as I watched Vin and Luka play from the library steps. “Luka, Luka!” Vin would say. Luka flapped his arms like a bird. He ran across the lawn and fell down. He jumped and pointed to the sky. I watched from afar and clapped for him. Overhead, clouds darkened from an approaching storm. When it started raining, Vin and Luka went inside, but I stood under the awning of the library, waiting for the rain to let up, thinking they might come back. I pulled out my sack lunch and ate cold pasta from a plastic container. I stomped on the ants with my old black boots. The people who came in and out of the library must’ve thought I was homeless.

For months I watched them and never saw the boy’s mother. Vin and Luka came and went frequently. When they weren’t home, I sat on the steps playing on my phone or reading the novels of Colette, which I had checked out from the library. With every passing week I grew more comfortable with what I was doing, sitting on the steps and reading and watching this younger man and his son.

The first time I was close to Vin was when he took Luka for a walk and I followed them a few blocks to a diner on Main Street. Inside the diner I stood behind them in line, so close I could see the creases on the back of Vin’s neck. Luka wore a red T-shirt and blue jeans. His arms were well-tanned, his hands small. He had light-brown hair trimmed short on the sides. Had I actually reached out and touched him that day, tapped him on the back with a finger or nudged him on the shoulder, had I met them in that moment, I wonder if things would’ve been different. As it was, though, the waitress seated them at a small table near the window, and I didn’t have any money, so I left.

Another time I rode my bicycle to the liquor store, and by coincidence, Vin was there. He was buying a bottle of wine. He paid with cash and said something that made the girl at the register laugh. Did he know her, I wondered, and what exactly did he say to her? I turned away so he couldn’t see my face. After he left, I asked the girl at the counter what he had said, and she looked confused. “Do you know him?” I asked.

“A little,” she said. “He comes in every now and then. I think his name is Vin.”

“I know his name,” I said, and left. But the truth was that I didn’t know his name, and now I did, so I was quite happy.

WHEN I WAS YOUNG, Papa told me to watch out for boys. They’re like snakes, he said. They will creep up on you and trick you when you’re vulnerable. My mother laughed at Papa anytime he said things like this, and I didn’t believe him. Once there was a boy I liked in school who didn’t like me back. His name was Thomas and we were in sixth grade. I sat behind him and stared at the back of his head. I liked something about the way his hair was unkempt, the way he slouched in his desk, the sneakers he wore. His blue jeans, his collared shirts. His small, delicate hands. I remember thinking I wanted to go swimming with him, envisioning us playing in a pool somewhere, splashing around. We would wrestle and I would dunk him and hold him underwater. He would spring up out of the water and kiss me. It was a fantasy I enjoyed. At school, some of the boys liked to say that Thomas had once peed in the bed during a sleepover. One day they were laughing about it. Thomas was trying not to cry, but I could see his eyes fill with tears. He was so cute it didn’t matter to me whether he cried at school or peed the bed in sixth grade. But he never paid any attention to me. One day I approached him on the playground, grabbed his finger, and twisted his hand. I felt sure that if I could just get him to talk to me, he would like me. Thomas pulled his hand away and yelled at me to stop. He looked at me with this sad look, and I started laughing, happy I got his attention. Then he walked away and never talked to me again.