A Stranger in This World (6 page)

The drunk smiles slowly. “I thought I said three hundred. I
don’t know, man, I’m drunk. I’m liable to say damn near anything.”

“You want to do this or not?”

“Course I do—wouldn’t you want to stay out of jail if you could? It only makes sense.”

Still he doesn’t budge, rooted to the fender of the blue Chevrolet while the ocean wind blows through the streetlights and the telephone poles. He seems to be deciding something.

“Well, shit,” he finally says. He turns to Tina. “You mind driving? I’m a little fucked up still.”

“Where are we going?” she asks.

“Money’s at my place. I don’t carry that kind of cash with me, do you?”

Bobby says, “You didn’t tell me you didn’t have the money.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t have it,” the drunk says, grinning. “I said I didn’t have it here. Either way, though, any way you want it.”

Tina senses a sinister turn to this conversation: suddenly the drunk seems sly, in control. Tina thinks that she would rather be anywhere else than here (longing for the neutrality of work, of television, the empty, clean light of the supermarket).

“She can drive,” Bobby says. “I’ll follow you. How far away is it anyway?”

“Over the river and through the woods, to Grandmother’s house we go,” the sly drunk sings. “The horse knows the way to carry the sleigh through the white and drifting snow-o!”

“Shut the fuck up,” Bobby says.

Tina sees the anger start into the drunk’s eyes again, then quickly stored (for future reference, future use) as his eyes slide to half-mast again, as he thrusts a meaty hand toward
Bobby. “My name is Lyle,” he says. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

He slumps in the passenger seat, fat and regal, fumbling a Merit out of the crumpled pack on the dash. The inside of his car is like an ashtray with chairs.

Tina eases the Monte Carlo into reverse and the cars uncouple. The metal of the bumpers grinds and squeals but Bobby’s Volvo doesn’t look any worse than before, really, and Lyle’s car seems to be running fine, though one of the headlights is pointed up into the night. As they idle out of town with Bobby following, the crazy headlight hits the sensors on the streetlight poles and they all switch off, so that a curtain of darkness follows behind them.

“About four miles out, straight down this road,” Lyle says. “I’ll show you before the turn. What’d you do there?” He aims his cigarette at her forearms in their braces.

“It’s a work thing,” Tina says. “Repetitive motion disorder.”

(Between the big, important parts of the machine are wear zones, parts designed to absorb the vibration or the pounding of the engines. Without these cheap, replaceable parts, the big machines would have to take the punishment themselves. They would rattle themselves to bits. This is just the way
things work, Tina knows, though it’s strange to feel worn-out at twenty-four.)

“I thought it was something kinky,” Lyle says, blinking at her bound wrists. “You look like you’re capable of it.”

Tina stiffens her grip on the wheel, startled out of her self-pity into a strange present.

“I mean that as a compliment,” Lyle says.

The night is running by outside the windows of the car, beach pines and surprised-looking oaks in the glare of the crazy headlight. The yellow centerline runs under the car like Morse code: W-e h-a-v-e a m-e-s-s-a-g-e f-o-r T-i-n-a, W-e h-a-v-e a m-e-s-s-a-g-e f-o-r T-i-n-a, W-e h-a-v-e a m-e-s-s-a-g-e f-o-r T-i-n-a … 
Take me away
, she replies,
get me out of here
. Bobby’s Volvo seems like an island of safety, bobbing down the broken road behind them, connected by nothing more solid than the beams of his headlights. She longs to sit beside him on the taped-up seat. She imagines herself driving home at four in the morning while he sleeps beside her. The smell of the sea is all around them, soft muck of the tideflats and the stench of rotting clams.

Lyle leans toward her and traces a line with his finger from the base of her throat, between her breasts and down the center of her belly, stopping below her navel, letting his hand rest there. At first this seems unreal. She can’t quite bring herself to reaction, and then it comes to her: that is his hand, this is my body.

“Get the fuck off me,” Tina says.

Lyle complies, in no particular hurry. “I didn’t think you’d mind,” he says.

“Do you want me to stop the car?” She sounds like a substitute teacher, even to her own ears.

“Suit yourself,” Lyle says, “but I don’t think your boyfriend would be too happy about that, do you? We’re talking about three hundred dollars here, three hundred dollars of my money.”

He reaches for a cigarette but the pack is empty. When he opens the glove compartment for a fresh pack, Tina sees (or thinks she sees, in the dim light of the glove-box bulb, in the corner of her eye, in the moment before he slams the compartment shut again) a thing that scares her dry-mouthed and upright, a bright blue electrical surge.

“He is your boyfriend, isn’t he?” Lyle asks, fumbling with the cellophane. “Reason I ask is, he looks like a faggot, sort of.”

“Just shut up, OK?”

“I’m just making conversation, to pass the time. I don’t mean anything by it, you know, I don’t have anything against faggots even. I just like to know where I stand.”

“Please,” Tina says, and she hears herself begging, and she knows he hears it, too. “Please, just for a minute, don’t talk.”

She can still feel, as if it were drawn in red paint or in blood, the line his finger traced down the center of her body.

She can still see, like a photograph printed on her retina, the bright silvery outline of the little gun she saw, or thought she saw, she can’t be sure, next to the cigarettes in Lyle’s glove compartment. “This is our turn here,” Lyle announces. “Down this dirt road here. We’re almost home.”

Sometime in high school, Tina decided that her mother lived a life of fear, a search for protection from a dangerous world.

What she called “love” was only an inability to take care of herself. When she said to Tina “I love you, sweetheart,” what Tina heard was “Help me, help me, help me.”

Tina will never be like her; she’s promised herself. But as they turn off the main road, down a series of twisting sandy tracks (turning with no plain design, again and again, through stickweeds and copses of damp black trees, the ocean always near, as if they were following a vein into some obscure part of the human body), she catches herself stealing glances at the rear-view mirror and thinking sentimentally of how much she loves Bobby. She might turn a corner and he would be gone, without her ever having said good-bye. Sentimental, like a black-and-white movie on late-night TV.

At the end of the end of the road is a house trailer lying on its side in the mud.

“This is it,” Lyle says. Tina looks around; there’s no place else. She kills the engine. As Lyle gets out he turns to Bobby and yells, “Leave your lights on.”

No business with the glove compartment, though, Tina notices; at least he doesn’t have the gun. In the headlights of the Volvo she watches him clamber up a wooden staircase alongside the greasy bottom of the trailer, then drag himself on top—what was once the front. He opens the screen door up and the front door down and lowers himself into the hole. In a moment the porch light burns to life up on top; lights shine out the sideways windows and Lyle’s head reappears through the
door, like a tank captain peering out his turret. He yells, “You coming or not?”

Standing next to Bobby in the damp sand and rank salt-grass, Tina whispers, “I don’t want to, Bobby. This is weird.”

“We don’t have to,” Bobby says; then, after a minute, “I could use the money, though. He’s just drunk.”

“He tried to feel me up in the car.”

“We’ll just go,” Bobby says. “We’ll just get the money and go.”

Neither of them moves for a few seconds. Clouds have moved in and covered the moon, a low, soft ceiling. Tina gets the feeling that the world ends at the farthest reach of the yellow porch light, an eternity of soft black nothing beyond. But then she hears, as her ears adjust to the quiet, the muffled rhythm of the surf, not far away. The yellow robs the colors, converts them to shades of gray, and again she gets the black-and-white movie feeling, the last look at a place where something happened. The wind blows through the autumn-dead leaves with a sharp, malignant rustle.

“We’ll just get the money and go,” Bobby says.

Inside, the built-in furniture is all sideways, sideways sofas, sideways sinks, carpet on one wall and acoustic tile on the other, where a chandelier sags flat. A stove dangles from the ceiling. Lyle motions them to sit, a couch at right angles to the floor, so they sit on the back and rest against the seat. One of the legs of the stepladder that leads to the overhead door is
resting on a poster of two nude girls in the surf at sunset, a splashing horse galloping through the shallows behind them.

Lyle reaches into the refrigerator, lying on its back on the floor, and pulls out a six-pack of midget cans.

“Instant martini,” he says loudly. “Martini-in-a-can. Can I interest you?”

Before they can reply he starts throwing cans at them. One of them nearly hits Tina in the head but Bobby catches it. “Shit,” Bobby says softly.

“We’ve got to go,” Tina announces, to the room in general. She’s losing track of things; she’s not even scared anymore, which she knows is not right. She can’t quite put anything in context. The ceiling in front of her, for instance, appears completely different now that it is presented as a wall.

Lyle wades through dishes and towels and piles of upturned sex magazines toward them, spilling cigarette ashes as he goes. “It isn’t that I don’t give a shit,” he says, “although I don’t.”

“We need to get going,” Bobby says. “Why don’t we settle this thing?”

(Tina witnesses the pale blobs of magazine skin crumpling under Lyle’s feet, little imaginary girls.)

“You didn’t even read about that storm, I bet,” Lyle says. “Turned this fucker right over.”

“I’ve got to get to work tomorrow,” Bobby says. “I’ve got to check in by nine.”

“No, you don’t,” Lyle says, suddenly sharp. “You don’t have to be anywhere in the morning, or you wouldn’t be here in the first place. Nobody’s expecting you.” He pops the top of the tiny can and drinks the martini off on one pull, sighs, then
grins at them. “Miracles of modern technology. But I’ll go get what you came for, if y’all are in that much of a hurry.”

Lyle shuffles off through the wreckage, using a step stool to boost himself onto the wall of the back hallway, crawling along, dropping into one of the bedrooms with a heavy, booming sound. What would happen if he landed on a window?

“This place is creeping me out,” Tina whispers.

“What’s he going to do? Shoot us?” Bobby asks, annoyed. “This is like regular life. It isn’t TV, it isn’t the movies.”

The perpetrator emerged from the back of the mobile home with what we now believe is the weapon in the case
(a generation of cop shows and local news taught her this language, the captain sweating in the hallway under the temporary lights, the revolver dangling from his finger).
As best we can reconstruct the incident …

He tumbles down from the hallway wall, down into the kitchen, and when he straightens up again, she sees that he is holding the little chrome gun in his hand and that his fly is open and that his big soft cock is out.

“Watch this,” he says.

He holds the pistol (both hands, the way they do on TV) and fires two bullets the length of the trailer, two messy holes
in the far wall. “Nobody can hear us out here,” he says, “not this time of year. Just so you know that.”

There’s so much to think about, the extraordinary size of his cock, like something from a different species, and the gun—where did he get it? is it the same one? did Lyle get out somehow?—yet there’s so little time. Suddenly purposeful, Lyle strides quickly to Tina, wraps his free hand in her hair and forces her to her knees in front of him, while keeping the gun on Bobby. “All right, girlfriend,” Lyle says. “You can do me now.”

A sudden, sickening conviction sweeps through her, the knowledge that this was all her fault, that if she had been smarter or stronger or somehow better, this would never have happened, and tears of futility and rage—rage at herself, at her circumstances—began to form in her eyes.

“You think I’m fucking kidding?” Lyle says, tapping her temple with the barrel of the gun. “Take it now, girlfriend.”

“Leave her alone,” Bobby says quietly.

“You want it first?” Lyle says, turning toward Bobby; and in his face Tina sees an accumulation of anger, a lifetime’s worth, a million dollar’s worth of rage. “I’ll fucking give it to you first. We’ve got all fucking night here.”

He tosses Tina’s head aside, as if he were throwing her away, sits heavily on the sofa next to Bobby and caresses his smooth head, one hand behind Bobby’s neck, the other holding the pistol to his throat. As Tina’s mind starts to clear (an incessant buzzing confusion of fear and anger and inability to make sense, still), she sees that Lyle’s eyes are blank, and she understands, for the first time, what people mean by blind rage: he isn’t seeing them at all, but a life’s worth of insults and injuries. This has nothing to do with Tina and Bobby.

“Just let us go, please,” she says quietly. “We won’t say anything.”

This enrages Lyle still further. “You think I’m fucking kidding?” he says. He raises the pistol from Bobby’s neck and fires another shot through the wall behind their head, the floor, really. Tina’s ears ring with the noise. “Now come on,” Lyle says, pressing the barrel to Bobby’s neck again, pulling his head closer.

This is like a dream, she thinks, everything so clear and sharp, and terrible things are happening, and she can’t seem to move her arms or do anything about it, she can only watch: Bobby opens his mouth comically wide and takes Lyle’s cock inside him, the little gun glittering like an ornament at his throat. This conjunction of flesh seems impossible, categorically wrong, and yet there it is, the physical fact, and Tina feels the dazed blankness that comes from trying to hold too many ideas at a time. A flush of anger, at Lyle specifically—at all the things he’s showing her that she never wanted to see. Now Bobby seems nothing more than an extension of Lyle’s cock, a toy of Lyle’s desires; tears are standing on his cheeks as he starts to pump his head back and forth, slowly, and Lyle’s head eases back on the worn brown sofa cushions.