Caring Is Creepy (24 page)

Logan stopped making faces. He cocked his head and looked at me. “Okay,” he said. “Then let’s figure a way for me to get out of here if
you’re
so worried about getting into trouble.”

“That’s not what I meant and you know it.”

“When your mom’s gone, I sleep all the time ’cause it’s dark. But only for about five minutes at a time because I have these
dreams
you wouldn’t believe, and then since it’s dark, the dreams just kind of slip into my awake time. Everything’s getting mixed up.” His eyes were red and shiny, like they’d been coated with a thick layer of varnish and had yet to dry.

“Fine. Leave tomorrow.”

“
Leave tomorrow. Leave tomorrow
,” he screeched in a piss-poor imitation of my voice. “You say that every Goddamned day. What if I left right now?” He crab-walked toward the door.

“You take one step out of this house and I’ll call the police.” I waved the card Officer Watkins gave me. “Three-eight-three, four-four-four-three. Here, take it, I memorized it already.”

Logan held the card up to the flickering candlelight and peered at it for a good, long while before saying anything. “You wouldn’t do that.”

“Go ahead and see.”

“I’ll tell them you’ve been keeping me prisoner, that you stole my clothes.”

“Yeah?” I said, squeezing my hands into fists. The nails dug into
my palms. “Yeah?” Something sizzled inside my head. My anger glowed inside me like a lightbulb filament. “And I’ll say you overpowered me and then forced me to have sex. That you climbed in through the
window
and raped me.”

“Bullshit,” he said, but it got him to thinking. I could see it in his eyes.

I stared at him.

“So, okay, now I see where we are. I get it.” Except he didn’t. He didn’t get it at all. His voice cracked. “I liked you. The most. What the hell happened?”

I saw I’d broken something between us. I thumbed my eyes to keep from crying.

“I’m sorry, Logan. I didn’t mean that. It just came out. I swear.”

“Sure,” he said, “whatever.”

“I mean it. I do love you. I do.” And I did. When I said it, I did.

“Maybe,” he said, “but that’s the first time I’ve heard you say it. And it don’t change nothing.”

He turned away and picked up a crayon. I touched him on the shoulder, but he shrugged me off. After that, I saw there wouldn’t be any more talking. At least not that night. I crawled back out into my room.

“You can’t watch me all the time,” he said.

After I climbed out of the storage space that night, I moved my dresser into the closet. I didn’t push it all the way against the door. I wanted him to be able to breathe, after all, and escape in case of emergency, but there was no way he was getting out of there tonight without me hearing him. Anger made me shiver. Whenever things got tough, I was the first thing people dropped. Just like with Dani, my mom, my dad. And now him. If he really tried to leave tomorrow, I knew just what I’d do. I’d go to the school nurse and sham a bad case of PMS. They always let you leave for that. Then I would call the police with an anonymous tip
from her office when she went to tell the front office, so the police couldn’t track my cell phone. And then I’d come home in time to wave and smile as they dragged little Logan off. Yeah, that’s what I’d do. But even as I pictured all this in my mind, step by step by step, I knew I’d never do it. Plus, I remembered: tomorrow was Saturday.

I
t was a little after two in the morning Saturday when I heard a trashed-out car pulling up into the driveway. The exhaust backfired with a bang like a shotgun blast and echoed off the front of the house. That ought to be driving Logan just this side of crazy, I thought. Nothing good could come of a visit from anyone at this hour. I slipped my cell between the elastic of my panties and my hip. Just in case. I left the lights off in my room, but I cracked the door.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing driving here?” my mom yelled. It didn’t even sound like my mom’s voice, but it was. Shrill and ragged, loud and drunk. “We had an agreement. Now anybody passing by is going to see that piece of shit you stole out front and know you’re here.”

“Borrowed,” a man mumbled. Whoever it was talking spoke so low it took me a moment to puzzle the sound into a word. There was only one person it could be.

“Goddamnit, Hayes, what’s wrong with you? Are you stupid as all that?” There was a wet sob in her voice that made my own throat burn with held-back tears. I wanted to go out there and hit him in the crotch with the first heavy object that came to hand.

“Do you want me to move it?” His voice was thick and slow and sad.

“What I want you to do is to get the hell out of here. I almost lost my job today because of you and your stupid shit … ah, damn it, Hayes.” The yell left her voice. Now my mom’s words sagged
in the middle and stumbled at the ends. I don’t remember ever hearing her sound like this before, so defeated.

“I’m sorry,” Hayes said. He sounded like a beat dog. “I was trying to help us.”

“Us? Us? You’re such a fucking liar,” my mom said. The refrigerator door slammed and the bottles on the inside shelf clanged together.

“Darla, wait.”

“
Darla, wait
,” Mom mimicked back in an ugly falsetto.

“I’m in over my head with this one, Darla, I really need—”

“No, Hayes, no. I won’t.”

“Wait till you hear me out.”

“It don’t matter what you say. I’m done, Hayes. Got it? Through.”

Hayes didn’t say anything I could hear, and this was probably a smart move on his part.

“Well,” Mom said after taking a noisy slurp of beer, “did your cousin lend you a hundred and fifty grand?”

Hayes mumbled.

“I guess that means you’re shit out of luck.”

The closet door thumped against the dresser. Oh shit, not now. Thank God and all his angel buddies Mom and Hayes were too wound up to hear it. I tiptoed over to the closet and poked my head in. Logan’s hair stuck out around the drawers.

“Lynn, are you and your mom in trouble?”

“No, sweetie, just my mom breaking up with Hayes.”

He made a raspy laughing noise. “Don’t sound like he’s taking it so well, huh?”

“Nope.”

Hayes spoke very, very quietly. Soft, sorry syllables that sounded an awful lot like an apology from where I stood behind my bedroom door. This went on for quite a while. I couldn’t make out
one word of it, so I edged out into the hall until I could match the sounds to words and put the words into sentences—all the while careful as hell not to get too close.

I felt sick and sorry. Listening to Hayes, I heard myself—trying to spin bullshit into something shiny and believable. I slumped against the wall and slid to the floor, yanking my T-shirt over my knees. In some strange and awful way, I had this powerful feeling it was me that brought this entire mess into our house. I tied the strings to each trouble. Me seeing Hayes that night at the Bow Wow club was a big one. I felt sure it had been this that caused Marty’s creeps to come to our house. They’d only reeled in that string, whether they knew it or not. And Marty would never of tried sneaking into the house had I not tied the next one. Bringing Logan home and keeping him locked up behind my closet brought Marty here. See how they match up? The causes and effects were too clear for me to ignore. I knew these things were true the way I knew the sun would come up in the morning. If not for me, Hayes would of seen the end of his bad behavior somewhere far from our house. If I’d only left well enough alone, my biggest worry right now would be the Algebra II exam next Friday. Who knew what other ugly, ill-intentioned people were reeling in the different lines I’d tied right that very minute?

“Darla,” Hayes said, so strenuous in his pleading that his voice trembled, “listen to me, please. I fucked up. I know that. I can’t undo it. But the man is going to fucking kill me. You do get that, don’t you? Not beat the shit out of me. They already done that.
Kill me dead
. Jason told me—”

“Who?” Mom wailed.

“The one what let me use his car. The beater out front. I’ve been sleeping in it different places every night. Jason, he told me he saw Butthole Gibbs parked outside your house today looking for me. You know what he brought with him?”

“Great. Now you’ve led yet another asshole straight to my house. Lynn is here for God’s sake. Use your head.” Something crashed against the wall. “Get the hell out of here now or I’ll call the police myself.”

“You wouldn’t call the police on me,” he said, but he didn’t sound so sure. “Wait. I didn’t tell you yet. Butthole came in a panel van and parked across the street. Stayed all afternoon just looking at the house. And he left a great, big pile of shit down at the foot of your driveway. You can make me leave, and I will, but it’s not only me they’re after anymore. They think we’re partners. All of them think that or they wouldn’t be coming by and fucking with you and Lynnie the way they’ve done.”

Mom laughed like a frog.
Croak, croak, croak
. This didn’t stop Hayes one bit. He kept on and on, but he spoke in that low, mumbly voice again and I couldn’t make out enough of the words to puzzle any sense out of them. Pills, dogs, fucking, trouble. After a while the words sputtered out and someone started sobbing, but I couldn’t tell whether it was him or my mom or both. The refrigerator door opened, rattled and shut. And then a couple of minutes later it opened again. But the door to the house never opened, so I guess she let him stay, or at least didn’t make him leave. There’s some difference there, but not all that much. I wanted to go out and talk with her, but I knew very well my mom’s anger could easily turn on me. I sat down next to my bedroom door and thought, Jesus, has there ever been a day when I haven’t been the mother around here. And then I thought, We’re both shitty mothers. I didn’t raise her right.

I
’m not sure if it was Logan banging on the little door or the thunderclouds crashing against each other in the sky above my house, but something woke me up with a start that made me knock my head against the bedroom door. My cell phone told me it was 3:12
A.M
. A huge sheet of lightning lit the front hallway like a camera flash. I waited for the bang, but it never came. Heat lightning. My Earth Science teacher, Dr. Yarbrough, once told us true lightning is hotter than the surface of the sun, but heat lightning isn’t even as hot as the surface of your skin. It’s trick lightning. All flash and no bang. And I felt something very much like it, all bright and fake.

My neck hurt and my mouth felt gummy. In the closet, Logan whined like a chained-up dog. A high, lonesome sound. It made my arm hair bristle to hear it. I hushed him, but it did no good. When I leaned in through the door and whispered for him to quit, he said something I didn’t understand about hajjis and started to cough. I smelled cigarette smoke again and it pissed me off. Mom and Hayes murmured. The TV yammered behind their voices. Then a heavy thump shook the floor behind me. I knew exactly what made it.

Logan sat on my bed wearing a pair of jeans a good two sizes too big and nothing else. Laid across his knees was a pink Wiffle ball bat with a jagged piece of metal tied to the fat end with a shoelace. It looked as though he’d dug up my crusty old Easy-Bake Oven from one of the boxes back there, disassembled the thing, and
weaponized it. With his right hand he stropped what looked to be a butter knife against a ragged leather belt. The cutting side was shiny and sharper than a butter knife has any business being. Before I had a chance to say something about all this, he held up a hand.

“Just wait,” he said, without looking away from the knife, “and hear me out.”

Clearly, something had changed. He sat up straight. His hair still looked messy, but he’d done something to it. Maybe patted it into place. Even his eyes looked clearer. The knife made throat-clearing noises as it scraped the leather. Logan whipped it back and forth five more times. Then he raised his head.

“Keep your voice down. I seen one out there, but there may be more. If they don’t know we’re onto them, we keep some tactical advantage.”

“Who?”

“Hajjis. I knew it was only a matter of time before they found me. You’d think I’d be scared, but I ain’t. I aim to be free of this shit once and for all.”

“Logan,” I said, trying to keep my voice down, “what the hell? Every time a door slams it’s hajjis.”

“That’s right. Before I only heard them. This time I’ve
seen
them.” He pointed to his eye with the butter knife. “One I spotted had an M-4. Ain’t no mistake about it.”

Suddenly, he hunched his shoulders and held up both hands, commanding silence. Without meaning to, I went to one knee and listened. Logan widened his eyes at me and smiled. This smile had nothing to do with me. His head swung back and forth, following some imagined sound.

“Hear that?” he asked.

I nearly said no, but then I did hear something. A leaf clawed against a window screen. For half a moment, he had me going there. I let my breath out through my nose.

“Wind,” I said, but I whispered it.

“Nuh-uh.” Logan smiled that faraway smile again. “Not possible.”

I tried to think of something I could say to calm him down, but he was up and past me before I’d even managed the fuzzy outline of a thought. I made a grab for his newfound jeans, but he twisted away. Logan opened the door wide enough to slip through sideways, settled the bat against his shoulder and disappeared into the hall.

“Logan, don’t,” I said, but it was too late. The boy was beyond listening to anything I had to say to him. Some bit of wet wiring inside that pretty head of his had truly gone awry. It shouldn’t of shocked me, but it did. And it was even worse knowing I’d been the cause of it. I didn’t find him this way. I made him this way. There wasn’t a thing to do but follow him out into the trouble.

“W
hat in the hell?” Hayes said, but he didn’t do much more than lean forward.

My mom stood. She looked from Logan over to me, and then back to him. I had no idea what she made of him in his falling off jeans and his pink Wiffle weapon. A tipped-over beer gurgled across her bare toes and onto the carpet.