Made in the U.S.A. (27 page)
“Lutie, you should see all this stuff out there. They’ve got everything for clowns: unicycles, big rubber shoes, wigs, makeup, fake noses, stilts, costumes for firemen, policemen. Johnny dressed up in a gorilla costume and I shot him ’cause I was a policeman.
“We rode around in a clown bus, I saw a tiger and two cubs, real ones; a mama elephant and her new baby; a giraffe taller than this room and—”
“Whoopee!”
“I can’t wait to take you out there. You’ll love it.”
“I’d rather walk into a hive of bees.”
“And we seined for minnows. You know what that means?”
“Fate, I so don’t want to know what that means.”
“’Cause tomorrow we’re going fishing and I’m going to stay for supper and spend the night.”
“Is this supposed to be thrilling news to me?”
Fate’s enthusiasm faded as quickly as it had enveloped him. He got up from the rocking chair and walked across the room to the window, looking out at Mama’s flower garden.
“You know, Lutie, I’ve never spent the night with a friend. I’ve never gone fishing or been asked to supper. You know why?”
“Could be ’cause you’re such a dork.”
“No, it’s because I’ve never had a friend before. Never.”
T
HE NEXT MORNING
, when Mama Sim brought in the breakfast tray, Lutie pushed it away, claiming she couldn’t eat.
“What’s the problem?”
“I’m sick, that’s the problem. I told you I need some more of those pills.”
“I could get you a Tylenol,” Mama said. “It might take the edge off your discomfort.”
“Dammit, I don’t have discomfort; I have pain.”
Eyeing empty suitcases and bags on the floor, their contents left wherever they’d landed as Lutie had tossed them out late last night, Mama said, “Looks like you decided to unpack after all.”
Lutie glared but said nothing.
“Did you find what you were looking for?”
“You know I didn’t.”
“Why, Lutie, how would I know that?”
“Because you took it, you Mexican bitch.”
Mama pulled herself to her full height, looking as if she’d grown by a couple of inches. She closed her eyes to count silently to ten, her habit since childhood. But Lutie’s accusation made her so angry, she barely made it to six.
“Now, you listen to me and listen good, because I won’t say this but once. You were welcomed into my home, brought here by someone who cares for you. I’ve done all I know to do to make you comfortable and help you to heal. I’ve treated you with kindness and respect.
“You may call me Mama, Mama Sim, or Mrs. Salazar Vargas, but if you ever call me a Mexican bitch again, or refer to me with any term of disrespect, you’ll find your baggage in my front yard, where you may retrieve it, then move on.
“In the meantime, you may help yourself to anything in my kitchen, but I will not be serving you meals in bed again. And I expect you, beginning now, to clean up after yourself and to help out with chores.
“Have you got that straight?”
“Yes,” Lutie said with a look of shock on her face.
“Yes, what?”
“Yes, Mrs. Salazar Vargas,” she said with as much sarcasm as she could manage given the ass stomping she’d just gotten.
“The Tylenol is in the left-hand drawer of the kitchen cabinet,” Mama Sim said as she left the room.
Lutie stared at the closed door for minutes, feeling angry, sad, guilty, and miserable. Finally she covered her head with the blanket and began to cry. She didn’t know how long she’d slept when she heard Fate’s voice.
“Lutie? You okay?”
When she lowered the blanket, he could tell she’d been crying. “What’s the matter?” he asked.
“I feel like shit, and that old woman won’t give me any more of my pills.
My
pills. She probably took them herself.”
“Why would she do that?”
“Never mind. What do you want?”
“I’m going over to Johnny’s and I won’t be back until tomorrow morning, so I came by to say good-bye and see if there’s anything you need.”
“Yes! I need my purse. See that?” She pointed to the mess on the floor, on the dresser, the rocker, the bedside table, and a small chest. “I went through it all. No purse. You told me it was in the trunk.”
“It was.”
Lutie’s eyes brightened a bit. “You think it’s still there?”
“No, it’s here.” He went into the closet, reached behind a stack of blankets, and retrieved her purse. When he handed it to her, she was practically bouncing on the bed.
“Why’d you put it there?”
“You were so worried about it, I thought maybe I should hide it.”
Lutie checked the billfold. Empty. She shook out some loose tissues, which yielded a dime. She removed her cosmetics, a plastic claw for her hair, a broken comb, and a half stick of gum. When the purse finally looked empty, she upended it on the bed. No fake tube of lipstick filled with rolling papers; no sunglass case with a rolled-up plastic bag of pot concealed behind the cheap leather lining; no silver compact with a hidden compartment of coke.
Nothing.
“You took my stuff, didn’t you, Fate?” He could hear the familiar tone of anger building in her voice, but this time he was determined not to back down.
“If you’re talking about the marijuana, the coke, and the pills, yes. I threw them away.”
“Where?!” Now her anger was moving into rage territory.
“I threw them in a trash barrel at a QuikTrip in Arizona while Juan was inside paying for gas.”
“You had no fucking right to do that, you stupid little prick. It was mine!”
“Well, it’s not yours now, and you might have a hard time hooking up with a pusher out here.”
“Don’t bet on it, asshole.”
“Lutie, this is the time, the perfect time, for you to get yourself straightened out. You’ve been off that crap for days now.”
“No, you fool, I’ve just been taking a different kind of dope that you and Juan gave me all the way from Vegas to right here in Boondock, America. And then Mama Simple took up where you left off. Can’t say they’d be my drugs of choice, but they gave me a nice buzz before they knocked me out.”
Lutie shifted into a different position on the bed, pushed the whole mess she’d taken from her purse into a pile, and began to conduct one more thorough examination with the thought that she’d missed something. Something important. And she had.
“Where are Floy’s keys?”
“In her car.”
“And where the hell is her car?”
“Juan left it in Las Vegas. Said he was afraid it wouldn’t hold up for the trip.”
“So you just let him walk away from
our car
?”
“It wasn’t ours anyway. It was Floy’s.”
“Yeah, and she probably needs it about now, huh?”
“Lutie, I didn’t know what to do. You were hurt. Hurt bad. I thought you might die. But here was a man who offered to help us, so . . .”
Fate sat down in the rocker and ran his hands through his hair as she’d seen him do hundreds of times before.
“Well, what’s done is done,” she said. “We can’t change that. And by now, Floy’s car’s been stripped or stolen or hauled off to the junkyard or a police compound. So we’re going to have to figure out another way to get around.”
“To get around where?”
“Vegas, stupid. Las Vegas. We’ve got to stay on the move or—”
“Lutie, maybe going back there, back to Vegas, isn’t our only choice. Have you thought of that?”
“Where do you want to go?”
“I don’t know. But why can’t we stay here for a while? We’re not in any special danger here, are we?”
“Fate, by now we’ve broken so many laws, they can send us to prison if they find out who we are.”
“They? You mean these circus people?”
“No. The law.”
“But we’re not even sure the law is looking for us. And if they are, why would they be looking down here in Oklahoma?”
“Fate, I hope you don’t think I’m going to make my home here in Circusville, U.S.A.”
“But it wouldn’t hurt for us to stick around here for a while, would it? Just until we decide where we want to go. Besides, it’s better than living in a car or staying in a motel like the Gold Digger. We’re clean, we get three meals a day. And we’re safe, Lutie. We’re safe.”
“Fate, I’m not going to settle for being safe. I’m going to be somebody. And that damn sure ain’t gonna happen here in Dorktown.”
T
hough Fate’s day had started off badly—a confrontation with Lutie was never a good beginning—he decided to let it go. To dwell on the ugly, hurtful words she’d spat at him would change nothing between them, but it could spoil his time with Johnny if he kept thinking about what she’d said.
After Dub learned that Fate had never fished before, he decided to go out with the boys to anchor his old johnboat over the hole he baited every New Year’s Day with their Christmas tree. Both he and Johnny had taken some monster crappie from the spot, and the occasional bass or catfish, too.
Knowing that Fate would be unfamiliar with the awkward feel and sometimes stubbornness of a rod and reel, he tied a couple of cane poles to the side of the boat. After they gathered up the minnows they’d captured yesterday, and a can of worms they’d dug when Fate arrived, they set out with the lunch Katy had packed them and had their lines in the water ten minutes later.
For the first hour or so, Johnny caught a couple of crappie and Dub caught three, plus a two-pound bass. Fate lost six hooks, broke his line four times in the brush beneath the boat, and cast twice into a weeping willow tree at the edge of the bank.
His first catch of the day was the jeans he was wearing; his second was Johnny’s cap, which caused Dub to exchange Fate’s rod and reel for one of the cane poles he’d been wise enough to bring along.
Fishing now with live bait was a different ball game. Fate was so squeamish about baiting his hook with a worm that he tried several times to do it with his eyes closed. The result? Some punctured fingers. But after he landed his first fish, a perch about five inches long, he learned to thread a worm onto a hook with more ease and less pity. The trick, he decided, was not to think of the worm’s mom.
Once, at Dub’s suggestion, he tried to bait a minnow, but it slipped from his fingers into the water. He held a firmer grip on the next one he grabbed from the minnow bucket, but when he realized that he’d hooked the tiny fish in the eye, he went back to worms. Unfortunately, the image of a blind minnow swimming helplessly somewhere in the lake came to his mind several times during the day.
They started in on the lunch Katy had prepared for them a little early, so by ten o’clock not even a crumb of angel food cake was left in the basket.
They fished through the afternoon; their stringers grew heavy with fresh fish, but it was thirst that finally forced them to head in. They’d been as greedy with their bottled drinks as they had been with the sandwiches, pickles, potato salad, chips, and cake.
Dub cleaned the fish at a makeshift sink with a garden hose hooked to it behind the house, performing a special kind of postmortem procedure that Fate didn’t care to watch.
So while they had time, before the sun set, Johnny took Fate to his secret spot, a tree house he’d built himself. The steps were sturdy lengths of scrap wood Mr. Wooten had given him at the lumberyard. Each piece, about sixteen inches long, had been nailed every foot or so from the bottom of an ancient misshapen tree to nearly the top, a sixty-foot wild oak that Johnny claimed to be a hundred years old.
The “house” he’d built near the top felt secure, but Fate, not crazy about heights, didn’t spend much time looking down.
The room—the only room—wasn’t tall enough for either boy to stand in, but Johnny had bought two old beanbag chairs at a garage sale for a dollar each, so the “accommodations,” as Johnny liked to say, “were pretty danged comfortable.”
He’d tacked up three pictures of
Playboy
Bunnies on the walls and a newspaper clipping of his T-ball team. He had an orange crate turned on its side to serve as a library for his books—all sci-fi—and from behind the crate he took out his collection of treasures, which he kept in a lidded tin box that had once held cookies, according to the logo stamped on the lid.
But now it held unique marbles, rusted keys, a packaged condom, a robin’s egg, an empty brown medicine bottle, an antique glass doorknob, a girl’s pair of pink underpants, a broken pocket watch, a school picture of a girl with a ponytail, and a letter he’d written her but never sent.
“Do you love her, Johnny?”
“I saw her feet once. She was barefoot, playing in mud with her little brother. Mud squishing between her toes, her nails painted pink. She has the prettiest feet I’ve ever seen, so yeah, I guess I might love her.”
“Did you tell her?”
“Heck, no! And you’re the only person I’ve ever told, so if anyone finds out . . .”
“Sure. It’s our secret, then. Forever.”
They fumbled a handshake they’d seen basketball players use on TV, but they messed it up so badly that they fell back on their beanbags, laughing. Fate laughed so hard, he had to work to regain his breath. But he didn’t care.
He had a friend, his first—a
best
friend who took him to his tree house and showed him his secret love letter.
He couldn’t remember ever feeling so happy before in all his life.
“Now, let me show you the best of all.” From beneath the treasure box, he removed a magazine called
Sizzle,
which was full of girls advertising themselves as dates. Some wore panties and bras, some just panties, and some were entirely naked—one with gigantic breasts, both held to her mouth so she could kiss the nipples.
“I didn’t know girls did that,” Fate said.
“Well, there’s the proof.”
As Johnny turned the pages and the boys pored over the photos, several crowded onto each page, Fate saw a naked girl with small breasts posed on a chair with her head tilted back, her mouth open as she touched herself “down there.” The girl in the picture was Lutie.
Since Johnny paid more attention to one of the girls with her butt pointed to the camera, Fate hoped he wouldn’t recognize Lutie when he finally met her. But just to be sure, when they heard Dub call to them from the house, Fate lagged behind his new, best friend and carefully tore out the page with Lutie’s picture and folded it into his pocket.