Читать книгу Stony River - Tricia Dower - Страница 11

October 28, 1955

The moon was out by the time Chevy Man dumped Tereza back at Tony’s Garage on Route 1 and Grove, a block from her apartment building. She hustled down the sidewalk, pimply cold in tight white shorts and a pink sweater. She was too busy cooking up the story she’d give Ma and Jimmy to notice Linda on her stoop across the street. Linda called out to her but Tereza didn’t slow down.

Linda stumbled after her. “Hey, Wait up!”

“Beat it!” Tereza hurled the words over her shoulder. Miss Goody Two-Shoes probably wanted to brag about having her weekend homework done already. Tereza should’ve been in eighth grade, not seventh with Linda, but she’d missed too much. Whenever a school snooped into her injuries, Jimmy would find different work and they’d move.

“What were you doing at Tony’s?”

Tereza turned around, just short of her own porch steps. “You seen me?”

“Yeah, after school, getting into a car.”

“You rat on me, I swear I’ll kill you.”

“Rat on you about what?”

In work pants and undershirt, Jimmy exploded onto the porch, a long belt wound around his hand. “Get up here, you little whore. I know what you been doing.”

Tereza backed up and Jimmy ran down the stairs. Tereza shoved Linda out of the way as Jimmy let loose with the belt, flicking it like a whip.

“Go ahead, you piece of shit,” Tereza said, dancing around. “The worst you can do is kill me. Do it and make me happy. I dare you.”

Linda dashed back to her house, screaming “Daddy!”

Tereza led Jimmy in circles down the middle of the street. He lashed the pavement with the belt, looking more and more pathetic as she zigged and zagged out of his reach.

“Ooh, big brave man,” she taunted. “Takin’ on a girl.”

Linda’s old man appeared at his front door and stood like a mummy. Linda ran into the street, waving her chubby arms, yelling at Jimmy to stop. It distracted him long enough for Tereza to scuttle to the end of the street, turn left and run like spit along the highway’s edge. Jimmy wouldn’t hurt Linda. Even so, Tereza owed her one. The ground burned under her thin-soled shoes and her lungs nearly blasted through her ribs but she didn’t look behind her until she made it to the White Castle a few blocks away. Jimmy hadn’t followed. Winded or too lazy, she didn’t care which. She bent over and clutched her knees, panting. Waited to catch her breath before opening the door to the smell of cigs and steamed onions. Richie, the beanpole, and blubbery Vlad perched on stools at the counter with a new guy, coffee cups and a choked ashtray spread out before them.

“Hey, Teeze,” Vlad said, moving his hand like he was jerking off. “Here to suck my dick?”

“Got five bucks?” she asked, still breathing hard. That was what Chevy Man had given her. Enough for fifty Castle burgers.

Vlad and Richie laughed like she was joking.

“You’re nibbing out,” Richie said, copping a feel of her left tit as she slid onto the stool beside him. He had a pencil behind his ear, as usual. A doodler: spaceships and ray guns mostly, sometimes the Green Giant with a hard-on.

“Asshole,” she said, slapping his hand away, but she wasn’t cheesed off at him. Vlad either. Talking dirty was their way of showing they liked her. She only ever let them stick their tongues in her mouth and flash their dicks at her. Guys were so impressed with their dicks.

“My cousin Buddy from Linden,” Richie said, nodding toward the new guy, two stools away, next to Vlad. “His grandma is my mom’s aunt.” Buddy spun slowly toward her and nodded. Pouty lower lip, sleepy eyes, slicked-back hair blonder than Richie’s. Under his black leather jacket, a white T-shirt strained against his muscles.

“You a body builder?” Tereza asked.

Buddy smiled at her with half a mouth and cracked his knuckles.

Richie smirked. “The next Charles Atlas.”

Buddy spun off his stool and swaggered toward Tereza, his pointy-toed black boots scraping the floor and his shiny black pants squeezing his thighs. He shrugged off his jacket and draped it around her shoulders. “Turning frosty out there,” he said, not letting his gaze slide down to her chest like most guys. Something stirred between her legs.

“Thanks,” she said, slipping her arms into the sleeves still warm from his body. The jacket weighed her shoulders down. “The name’s Tereza, not Teeze.”

“Pleased to meet you, Tereza,” Buddy said. He cupped one of her hands in both of his, as you might a wounded bird. He released it seconds later, turned his small, high ass to her and strutted back to his seat.

“What’s with your eyes, Ter-eese-a?” Richie asked. “Your old man try to punch your lights out again?”

She fished around in her pocketbook and pulled out a small mirror. “Mascara,” she said, licking a finger and swiping at the purple streaks. Her eyes must have leaked doing Chevy Man. She lifted Richie’s cig from the ashtray and took a long drag that went to her head. “He’s not my old man,” she said. “My real father speaks three languages.” She paused to pick tobacco off her tongue. “Jimmy only speaks cave man. Ugga, ugga.”

Richie slapped his thigh and hooted. Vlad’s laugh was more like a wheeze.

“He tried to belt-whip me but I got away.”

“Want me to take care of him?” Buddy asked.

She snorted. Who was this guy?

“Don’t laugh, Teeze,” Richie said. “He can rip a phone book in half and hold me over his head with one arm. Show her, Buddy.”

Buddy’s face flushed. “Later, Rich.”

“I’ll take a rain check,” Tereza said, although she liked the idea of Buddy hoisting Jimmy off his feet with one hand and flattening his pointy nose with the other.

Buddy stood abruptly. “Time to cruise town. Coming along, m’lady?”

“He’s got a cool car, Teeze.”

“What are you, his pimp?” she said. Richie looked hurt. Tough gazzobbies. “Can’t,” she said to Buddy. Ma would be having a cow by now assuming Jimmy had told her what happened. She shook one arm out of the jacket but Buddy held up his hand.

“Keep it until you get home.” He pulled the pencil from behind Richie’s ear and wrote his phone number on a napkin. “Call me. I’ll come pick it up.”

Richie and Vlad stood to leave.

“See you on the flipside,” Vlad said. He tried to be cool but slobbered when he spoke and lived with his Russian immigrant mother. Some people said they were spies.

The three guys filed out. Tereza stayed on her stool, chewing over Buddy’s offer. Why’d she keep taking Jimmy’s shit? And why didn’t Ma make him stop?

“Hey, Buddy!” she called out. “You got a flashlight in that car?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

With Buddy’s phone number and flashlight in her pocketbook, she ordered an orange soda and, for a buck, a sack of the little square burgers you could down in three bites. She liked having her own money, spending it how she wanted.

Allen would be in bed already. If she were home, she’d be skulking into the room they shared and undressing in the dark. Instead she headed for the woods where she and Linda had played that lame shipwrecked game in the summer. It was just plain dumb Linda wanted to live there forever. And it was just plain dumb for Tereza to wait to be rescued from Jimmy.

Buddy’s flashlight beamed the way four blocks to the hollowed-out log and the crowbar, then to Crazy Haggerty’s house. It loomed like a ghost ship in the night sea. Sounds leaped out of the quiet dark—a truck downshifting on the highway, a dog’s whiny yelps. Each left a shivery silence when it died. Buddy’s jacket swished and crunched as she walked, keeping half of her warm at least. Her toes were numb in the ballerinas Linda claimed would ruin her arches.

Tereza hadn’t been back to Haggerty’s since she’d climbed the drainpipe in June. (In gym, she could shinny up a rope like nobody’s business. In gym, nobody called her dumb.) Every window and door was boarded up now, including the one she’d propped open with a rock. She crowbarred the nails from the plywood covering the door—whoever put it up had done a half-assed job—then stood aside and shoved the board over the steps. It fell with a loud thud. Shit. She slunk around the side and waited. When it felt safe, she crept back, forced the lock and counted to ten before pushing open the door.

Not more than a foot away was Crazy Haggerty.

She screamed and nearly pissed her pants before realizing she was looking at a coat and a hat on a hook at the bottom of some steps. Recovering, she climbed the steps and called out, “Yoo hoo, is anybody?”—the only funny line in that hokey show Ma loved. Her shaky voice tumbled out huge in the high-ceilinged room.

She waved the flashlight around, lighting up cupboards, a bucket in the sink, a pan on the wood stove. The air reeked like the Creature from the Black Lagoon had sloshed through. The flashlight landed on a light switch. A dud. She ventured deeper into the room, whipping around each time a floorboard squeaked. She stumbled over an empty dog dish, making it rattle.

In a room off the kitchen sat six chairs and a fancy table even bigger than Linda’s. A circular staircase split the house. She shot a beam up to the landing. The darkness closed around the beam like a fist. Tomorrow, in better light, she’d climb the stairs. The flashlight guided her to a room as big as her family’s whole apartment. A picture window, shuttered from outside, reflected the flashlight. The lumpy dark furniture could’ve been Dracula’s. The air was cold and the radiators silent. At home, they’d be banging out heat, Ma moaning because only the super could control them.

She tried another light switch. Crap. It wasn’t too late to go home. Ma and Jimmy would be drinking beer and watching TV on the floor because they didn’t have a couch. Jimmy might’ve had enough beer to forget he was mad at her. She was pretty sure he was bluffing about knowing what she was doing at Tony’s.

She’d been sneaking into men’s cars a couple times a week after school for over a month. The idea came to her after she found out Linda’s old man dropped off their turd-brown Nash at Tony’s Garage in the morning when it needed work and walked to his job. Linda’s ma didn’t drive. Once the car was fixed, it would sit behind the garage with the others, where the mechanics couldn’t see, until Linda’s old man returned. Tereza cut school one day to check it out for herself. Most men leaving cars wore suits and hats and carried briefcases. They looked well off. And safe.

Tereza chose newer cars with full ashtrays. She’d have the Wonder Bread bag of tobacco in her pocketbook as she hid in the back, turning herself into a ball on the floor behind the driver’s seat. Sometimes she had to wait a leg-cramping hour or more but wondering who might turn up gave her a charge. Like buying Cracker Jacks not knowing the prize you’d get.

After a man drove a short distance away, she’d edge onto the back seat and make little waking-up sounds, scaring the bejesus out of him. He’d pull over and she’d apologize, handing him a story about not getting any shuteye because she didn’t want to disturb her dying mama lying in the only bed in the teeny room they rented. She’d tell him she was selling tobacco to pay for the doctor. She’d practiced her pitiful, naive, come-on look in the bathroom mirror for days before the first time. Some men went apeshit and ordered her out. A few forked over a couple bucks and a lecture. But there were others. She’d taken in forty-three bucks so far, none from tobacco. But if Jimmy knew, now, because Tony had found out, she was screwed.

Heavy dark drapes covered two living-room windows. Tereza yanked on one set until rod and all crashed in a dusty, coughing cloud. She blanketed herself in the drapes and sat on a couch, hugging the flashlight as a weapon to her chest, her sharp ears listening to the house stretch and yawn, burp and fart. She dragged three chairs from the dining room and stacked them against the door. Anyone trying to get in would make a racket and warn her.

Back on the couch, she closed her eyes and saw the dead giveaway plywood she’d left on the ground. To the kitchen again, to unblock the back door. No sign of other earthlings. She stepped outside, dragged the board into the kitchen, dropped it on the floor and blocked the door again. Maybe now she could sleep.

She shrugged off her shoes, made a pillow of Buddy’s spicy-smelling jacket, stretched out sideways on the scratchy couch, drew her legs to her chest and rubbed her toes back to life. Remembering a mouse in Ma’s slipper two houses ago, she tucked her shoes next to her pocketbook under her blanket of drapes.

It must have been boss when there was only her and her mother, Reenie. Just Tez, as Ma called her, and Reenie. She wasn’t quite four when Jimmy came along. She didn’t remember having Ma to herself but it must have been heaven. Ma looked younger than thirty-three and, with makeup, Tez older than thirteen. They had the same curly black hair and brown eyes. If not for Jimmy, they could’ve lived as sisters. She closed her eyes and sank into that warm thought.

• • •

“Ter-eeeeez-a!”

She woke to a room as cold and gloomy as the night before, shot up and listened but the voice didn’t call again. She must’ve dreamt it. Light splintered from the edges of the plywood covering the window. She wouldn’t have known it was already nine if not for the glow-in-the-dark watch Ma had gotten her with Green Stamps so she’d be on time once in a while.

Allen would be having Sugar Pops and grape juice in the Howdy Doody glass that used to be hers. Ma, a boiled egg and rye toast. Jimmy, three basted eggs, six bacon strips and four pancakes. Tereza did the breakfast dishes on Saturdays and, later, took Allen to the movies so Ma and Jimmy could screw. They didn’t say they were going to but, when Tereza and Allen returned, that telltale fishy odor would be in the air and Ma’s voice would be throatier.

On Saturdays Jimmy was nicer to Tereza, probably afraid she’d crap out on babysitting. She hated the full-of-himself way he doled out the money: only enough for two tickets and a puny box of Dots to share, like nothing was theirs unless he gave it to them and what Ma made was his too. Ma acted like Saturday’s Jimmy was the real one. Embarrassed to own up to marrying a jerk, probably, because what would that make her?

“Give him credit once in a while,” Ma would say, “and you’ll see how sweet he can be.”

She might as well have told Tereza to balance on one finger. Jimmy hardly ever smacked Ma and Allen. He never hit their jaws so hard they practically amputated their tongues with their teeth. That time, he’d been scared shitless the hospital would call the cops. He bought her a Dale Evans lamp and didn’t raise a hand to her for months. That was when she was eleven and keener on Dale Evans.

She played the flashlight around the room: cobwebs, purple old lady flowers on the wallpaper, a pink and beige rug clumped with dog hair, a fireplace she’d use if she wasn’t afraid the smoke would give her away, half-a-dozen candlesticks as tall as her ringing the room, a windup phonograph and stack of records on a small dark table, bookshelves so high even Haggerty would’ve had to stand on tiptoe to reach the top shelf.

She couldn’t have gotten through that many books if she gave her life to it. The kids at school rolled their eyes when she read aloud. Nobody believed the words bounced around like Mexican jumping beans and gave her a headache. Her eyes tested perfect. Teachers said she didn’t apply herself; she only wanted to clown around and distract the class. She couldn’t help it if she was funny as hell. She could belch the alphabet from A to K. Do a great Elmer Fudd, Desi Arnaz, Imogene Coca.

She had to pee. “If I was a john, I’d be upstairs,” she said but she wasn’t ready to chance it. Something had skittered above her head during the night. Probably mice, but it could’ve been rats or foot-long radioactive tarantulas. She peed into a pan that had been left on the stove—the inside was furry. Nauseating, Linda would’ve said. She emptied it down the sink and turned on the tap to rinse the pan. Nothing came out. What a crock. She’d suss out the backyard pump later, under cover of night. The thought of no water until then made her mouth go dry.

How long did it take to die of thirst?

Searching for something to drink, she happened upon the gassy lagoon smell: a bag of oozing potatoes. “Them! Them!” she screamed, like the stunned kid in the movie smelling the giant mutant ants. If Richie were here, he’d be splitting a gut.

She found dishes, oatmeal, crackers, powdered milk and—cowabunga!—cans of baked beans, corn, peas, stewed tomatoes, green beans and Spam. Jimmy hated Spam because that was all the Navy fed them during the war. She rooted around for a can opener and spoon. Sat at the dining-room table’s high-mucky-muck end, spooning baked beans from the can and washing them down with stewed tomatoes. Miranda and Haggerty must’ve eaten by candlelight. Two brass holders with white candles stood on the table, one candle melted down more than the other.

A candlelight meal with Tereza’s father had snookered Ma. She’d met him in a tavern on a sleety January night two days before his Army unit was to go overseas, exactly where he wasn’t allowed to say. He asked her out for supper the next night and she said yes. Not much else to the story, Ma would say whenever Tereza pestered. She didn’t know if he made it back alive. Tereza was frosted Ma hadn’t asked for a picture.

“He gave me you. Who needs a picture?” But two years ago, she brought home a poster of John Derek in Rogues of Sherwood Forest and said, “Your father looked like this except darker.”

Although Tereza couldn’t find a speck of John Derek in her face, she went to all his movies after that. Her favorite was The Adventures of Hajji Baba. He played a lowly barber who rescued a beautiful princess as mouthy as Tereza. “Complaints flow from your lips like water from a spring,” the barber told the princess, or something like that.

She wasn’t finished eating before the beans and last night’s burgers began making her guts hot. She fled up the hallway stairs, not caring who or what might be hiding there. After a false turn, she found the crapper in time but had to wipe herself with her skivvies. She tossed them into the claw-foot tub and pulled her shorts over her bare ass. Forgetting about the water, she tried to flush. Swore. Haggerty’s house was bad news.

In the small scratched mirror over the waste-of-time sink, she looked clown-faced from yesterday’s makeup. Her coarse black hair pointed every which way and she’d sprouted half a dozen new zits. She fingered the lump of bone where her jaw had healed and imagined the shellacking she’d get if she went home now, Ma standing with her back against the wall and her hand on her throat, whimpering, “Oh, Jimmy,” Allen hiding under the bed. Tereza could take the blows. Worse would be looking up at that King Tut expression on his face after he decked her. Ma said Tereza was too stubborn for her own good but sometimes stubborn was all you had.

To the left of the john was a room with nothing in it except a mattress on the floor with dark stains reaching out like bloody fingers. It gave her the shivers. Across from that room was another with a four-poster bed still made up. Against one wall stood an antique desk with a bookcase and four big drawers. The desk and bookcase were locked. She could’ve busted into them easy but Linda would’ve said whoever boarded up the place left everything inside because Miranda was coming back and deserved better than busted stuff.

A bathrobe, workpants and shirt, so worn out she could see Haggerty’s shape in them, hung in a tall, dark sour-smelling wardrobe. On shelves: underwear, snot rags and socks. Wearing a dead geezer’s clothes gave her the creeps but warmth was warmth. The green plaid shirt came below her knees and the maroon bathrobe fell to the floor, its sleeves flopping over her hands like Dopey’s. Something in the pocket bumped her leg: a silver flask etched with a harp. She unscrewed it. Sniffed. Took a swig. It burned her throat in a good way and tasted like smoke.

Lighter and bolder, she heigh-hoed down the hall and came to a room with a rumpled bed and a tall narrow dresser. Off the room was an alcove with a crib and a pail of stiff, moldy diapers. Beside Miranda’s bed—it had to be hers—was a pot of turds. Tereza took another nip from the flask. The heat the house had sucked from her slowly returned.

A door off the alcove led to narrow stairs. Up she climbed, one hand beaming the flashlight, the other on the wall, feeling the way. A long, unfinished room with a small window waited up top, the window not boarded. Bands of sun from it lit up a bunch of crap on the wooden floor—dust balls, shredded insulation, mouse turds. Tereza swiped off a spot by the window with a sleeve of Haggerty’s bathrobe and knelt. She lifted her face to the autumn sun’s stingy warmth then looked down. From this perch Miranda could have eyeballed her and Linda on their way to smoke punks.

She looked for chains. Why Miranda hadn’t escaped bamboozled her. Maybe Haggerty had worshiped the devil. It would be swell if she and Miranda could live here together someday, close to Ma but safe from Jimmy. They’d tear down the plywood and shutters, push the drapes aside and let sun, like melted butter, pour into every room.

2 pm. Had Allen gotten to the movies? Abbot and Costello Meet the Mummy was supposed to be on. He loved Abbot and Costello. After Tereza brought Allen back from the movies she’d usually hook up with Richie, Vlad, Vinnie and whoever else was at the White Castle, maybe play ball with them in the empty lot beside Vinnie’s house. It was October now and ball was over. She tipped the flask back.

3:40 pm. Downstairs again, carrying a blanket from Miranda’s room for later. In a closet under the staircase, hard to see in the dim light, she found a gun nearly as tall as her, with a long, skinny nose and a polished wood butt padded in red rubber. She managed to heft its weight and rest the rubber pad against her shoulder. Pretending Jimmy was at the front door, she aimed and said, “Bang, bang, you’re dead.”

6:10 pm. Dark enough to risk stepping outside. She unblocked the door, took the bucket from the sink and dashed to the Ma and Pa Kettle pump in the sharp cold air. The handle squeaked when she lifted it. She pumped hard and fast until water gushed and splashed her feet, lugged the full bucket inside, dipped a cup into it, took a drink and waited to croak or at least double over in agony. When she didn’t, she filled every glass and cup in the house for later. Washed herself with the rest, toted the dirty water up to the bathroom and flushed away the reeking evidence of herself. Then back down the stairs to hurl the oozing potatoes toward the river and refill the bucket.

The booze had worn a hungry hole in her stomach. She opened the green beans and peas and set the cans on the coffee table in Dracula’s room. She lit the candles on the tall holders with wooden matches from a tin box on the mantle. Spectacular! A movie set, with candles as spotlights. In the dim mirror of the picture window, she watched herself eat, then cross the room in that dumbass outfit to check out the records beside the old phonograph. She cranked up the machine and put a record on the turntable. It wobbled slightly as a man sang, “Yes, we have no bananas” like he was in a tunnel. She mugged it up for the spotlights, turning her hand into a megaphone and wah-wahing to the tune through her nose. She pretended Miranda was watching, laughing and saying, “You fracture me, Tez.”

Tez sang and drank from the flask. Before long the room did a dance, her insides swayed and her ears felt full of water. She sat down heavily on the couch and stared at the drunken flickers of candlelight until her head fell onto Buddy’s jacket. She pulled Miranda’s blanket over her and drew her legs up to her chest like the babies in jars at the State Fair last year. Embryos that didn’t make it, Ma had said when Tereza got agitated, not poor little bastards nobody wanted.

• • •

She dreamed about a TV wedding. When the preacher said, “forsaking all others,” the realization Ma had been forsaking her for Jimmy since she was four years old smacked her clear across the face. She woke to a throbbing head and a mouth crusted with drool, her whole body pissed off as she trudged to the kitchen. She couldn’t stand this cold, dark prison any longer. If she had a boat, she’d row down the river all the way to the ocean and let herself get swallowed by a whale.

Leaning against the sink, chugging glass after glass of water with shaky hands, she spotted a door on the landing at the bottom of the kitchen stairs, went down to it and turned the knob.

Locked.

She got the crowbar. Linda wouldn’t have approved but Linda wasn’t there. If Tereza left without seeing what was behind the door she’d always wonder. So what if it was something that killed her? She didn’t exactly have great plans for the future.

She broke open the door, fired up the flashlight and started down another set of stairs, swiping at cobwebs. The air smelled like a wet mop. A mouse scurried in front of her and disappeared into shadows. The basement was long and narrow, one half filled with crap, the other set up for some kind of meeting. On the crap side, dried-up plants hung from a clothesline strung beside a boiler. The boiler looked like a dead bug with four pipe legs reaching up into nowhere. She’d check out the boxes of junk cluttering the floor later. The other half of the room was squawking for attention.

A harp, like the one on the flask, leaned against a black-draped table in front of the black curtain and white pillars she and Linda had seen. The black hooded robe still dangled from a hook. Pinned to the curtain was a hand-drawn picture that looked like the one-celled creature Mr. Boynton had shown them under a microscope. Weird objects sat on the table just so. A metal goblet wearing a necklace of acorns and seashells. A creepy animal horn. A tall white candle. A wooden stick. A long piece of knotted yarn. A black-handled knife. Three jingle bells on a string. The stick, polished and tapered at the end, looked like a wand. Tereza picked it up, tapped the air and said, “Bibbidy bobbidi boo,” but she was still there, still pond-scum ugly. She lifted the knife and blew the dust off it. Its double-edged blade, six or seven inches long, fit in her pocketbook.

Ma claimed Tereza had ESP because she always knew when it was safe to come home. What if Miranda and Tereza were tuned to the same frequency? It would explain why Miranda had looked across to where Linda and Tereza were hiding the day the cops took her away and why Tereza had known she’d hole up in this house one day. The voice calling her yesterday could’ve been Miranda’s, the objects on the table a coded message.

Tereza had to break into the desk now. Miranda would want her to.