Sinners Circle (6 page)

Before
I go to work, I deal with the body of the girl in my bed. I undo the gag strap
behind her head
first,
pry the black ball out of her
mouth, which is sort of tough because her jaw has gone cold with her teeth
really stuck in the thing. I wrap her body in a sheet and drag it into the
bathroom attached to my bedroom. I dump her in the tub and flick off the light,
then
I toss the gag into the dishwasher with all the
other gag balls and dishes crusted with blood.

The neighborhood begins a half
mile away from my house, which is practically in the middle of nowhere beside
the park. I swing by a corner store, pick up a pack of cigarettes and stop at
the coffee shop Alison works at which is super convenient because it’s on the
same strip of business as
Fantasy Z
,
the porn store I work at. Alison is
wiping down a table when I come in and she tosses the rag onto an empty chair
and gives me a hug.

“Hi
hun
,
how are you this lovely morning?”

“Good good. How are you?”

“God, just shoot me. Serious.”
She leans in close, pretending no one can hear. “I’m sick of this place.”

That girl she works with, the one
Alison says has a thing for me, Trisha, she pops up from under the counter,
arms loaded with coffee cups and stacks of java jackets that amazingly don’t
spill all over the place when she tilts this way and that, putting stuff here
and there around the till.

I walk over to her. “Can I get a
coffee?”

She laughs, gives me a wink while
her fingers peck at the buttons on the register. “I don’t know. Can you?”

“I want a medium.”

“Room for cream?”

“No.”

“No cream?”

“Nope.”

“No sugar?”

“
Naw
.”

“So, just... black then?”

“Uh huh.”

“Ok.” Her voice turns to nearly
inaudible mumbles as she turns around and fills a mug with coffee. “One black
coffee it is then.”

Alison picks up the rag, moves to
another table, barely wiping it at all. I look out the window at the passing
cars,
Trisha sets the mug on the counter. “That’s two
dollars and...”

“I need it to go.”

She stops, looks down at the mug
and bumps her palm against her forehead. “Oh my god, that’s right. I’m so
sorry!”

She dumps the cup out in the
sink, grabs
a
to
go
one, fills it and is all red faced
when she rings it up. “Sorry.
Mondays!”

Today is Wednesday. I smile, wrap
my fingers around the warm cylinder of wax and paper, filled to the brim with
boiling black caffeine. “That’s OK.”

Around noon Alison comes into my
store and asks if I’m seeing anyone right now. I think of the girl in my
bathtub, stiff and wrapped in a sheet. “No, whatever I had, it’s pretty dead.”

She smiles and says, “Trisha was
wondering, but don’t tell her I said that,” and goes back to work.

Absolutely nothing happens for
the next four hours. I’m cleaning a display of Acryl dildos with a feather
duster, thinking about how I’d once read somewhere that the term
dildo
originally referred to this dick
shaped peg that sailors used to lock the oars on their boats, when I hear the
bell above the door ringing.

I turn, and no kidding, I’m dead
serious, in strolls a little girl with this older guy behind her. The guy’s got
a sun hat on and one of those douche bag beards, the chin strap kind. He’s
clearly over forty, his gut is proof of
that,
and on
top of everything else, he’s wearing socks with sandals. The little girl
bounces over to the movies.

I know I should do something, but
I can’t. I just can’t stop staring, the feather duster hovering over the tips
of all those
dildos,
I cannot believe what I am
seeing.

The little girl picks up a movie,
flips it over to look at the back. She tugs on the guy’s shirt. “Get one with
big dicks! Some big black dicks! I want to see some big cocks tonight!”

Harry comes out of his office
holding that clip
chart,
he sees me with my mouth hung
open and looks over at the two. He stops in mid step, eyes popping out of his
head,
we both look at each other—the same look of horror on
our faces.

The little girl picks up another
movie. “They do facials in this one?” She’s twisting a pig tail around her
finger when I hear the bell above the door again. Two guys walk through the
door, freezing a few paces in, then start shuffling backwards to leave.
Harry’s
whole face goes red and he charges up to the jerk
in the sun hat with the chin strap rapist beard and slams his whole fist
against the rack of DVDs.

“Hey! What the hell are you doing
in here with a little girl, asshole? What the...” He looks down at her and
stops shouting. His face goes redder than a burning tomato, his lips forming a
huge
O
. The customers by the door,
they move a little closer, I drop the duster when the little girl screams,
throwing the movies onto the floor, “I’m
not
a
little girl
, you idiot! I’m a
fucking midget
!”

Harry gives them free rentals for
a month and
lets
the guy take home a pair of edible
underwear, the girl gets a dildo on the house.

After they leave Harry comes up
to me shaking his head, “Wow, dodged a bullet on that one.”

“How so?”

He shrugs, slips his hands in his
pockets and look around the empty store. “Little people, they’ve got good
lawyers.”

“Oh?”

“Could’ve got defamation on that
one.
Shoot, I
was close to
smackin
’ the guy!”

“Well, it’s understandable I
suppose.”

“Yeah, but
still
.
Last thing we need to read about in the papers is a porn store owner pummeling
a midget couple in his place of business,
ya
know?”

“They weren’t both midgets...”

“Yeah, but you know what I mean.”

I shrug too. “Yeah I guess.”

“You’re off soon, huh?”

“Yep.”

“Ok,
well
just tidy up a bit. I’ll count till if you take out the trash.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I got some numbers I have
to add from last night, balance some digits.”

I sit down on the stool behind
the counter. “Harry, you
know
I can
count till...”

He takes his hands out of his pockets,
waves them and touches my arm, which sort of
creeps
me
out. “No no, it’s not that. I know you can be trusted on this shit, but I
really do have to add some numbers up. To be honest...” He looks around the
store again. “Just between you and me, I don’t think the other guy who comes in
nights is all that together, if you know what I mean?”

“Huh?”

“I think he’s got some...” he
taps his nostril, “... some habits and I doubt he’s covering them all too well
with his salary.”

“Oh.”

“Think he’s got sticky fingers,
and is dipping them in the cash register now and again.”

“Oh.”

He leans in a little and half
whispers, “I think he’s the reason we lost those gag balls, too.”

“You think he’s stealing stock?”

“Yeah, I do.”

I shrug again and pretend that
his point is really sinking in. “Yeah, I guess that makes sense.”

“I got to keep an eye on him.”

“Yeah, totally.
Keep your eye on the creep.”

I swing the bags of trash into
the alley dumpster out back, light a smoke and look at the passing helicopters
shining their spot lights against the sides of glass buildings. I’ve never
stolen cash from here, I don’t think
it’s
right. The
girls I take home and get rid of, they’ve always got some cash on them, so I
just take whatever they’ve got in their purses and that’s always covered my
extra expenses fine. However, I don’t want Harry to see me ringing in gag balls
and dildos.

In the two years I’ve worked here
he’s told me a few times about girls wandering in and asking for me, and he’s
always had this lingering look in his eye whenever my personal life is brought
up. I just try and keep that aspect of myself under wraps with him. Last thing
I need is him asking me about my sex life and me having to think about drinking
blood and sewing rats into women’s stomachs after the orgasm. Well, I don’t
really mind thinking about that, just not while I’m at work with my horny
middle aged boss.

Strangely enough, I’ve never met
the other guy who works here. I know it’s him, me and some other guy who works
part time nights here, I mean I’ve seen them once or twice, but we’ve never
really spoken. Except for once when he needed me to hand him his jacket, but
that’s it.

I walk around the side of the
building, kiss Lilly on the cheek and take her out for Greek food. She tells me
about a friend of hers who hooks on the other side of town and is now missing.

When
I came home the front door to our trailer was open, just swinging on its
hinges, banging lightly against the tin shell of our mobile home. Inside, the
hideaway bed was tucked in, the drawers where full of my socks, the floor
strewn with my dirty underwear, but all of mom’s stuff was gone.

I slept on the floor because I
couldn’t pull out the bed; my arms weren’t strong enough, so yeah, I slept on
the floor for two days, the door open swinging in the rain and sun and clouded
weather of those forty-eight hours. I missed school and had my first cigarette
on the soggy carpet step, staring at the trailer adjacent to us, feeling
nothing, not even moving the hair from between my lips when the wind blew it
there.

The sleepy social worker showed
up on the second morning. The messy, drawn out bitch, yawned through sentences
like, “Your mother is now a missing person.” And, “Do you know if there is any
coffee in here?”

She opened the cabinets, and when
she saw there
was
only peanut butter and a mini box of
Corn Flakes she shut them, asked me to move, pulled out the hideaway bed and
collapsed onto it.
“Nope, no coffee.”

I just stared at her for a full
ten minutes, her eyes closed, her lips moving in little gasps, like a fish
pulled out of water and tossed onto the floor of a boat. When she woke up, she
looked around, hands absent-mindedly patting her bangs. “Ok, so you ready?”

The only thing I took out of that
trailer was my Donkey Kong pajamas.

I spent the next four years in a
foster home, sleeping in the same room with a deaf girl named Gina. She taught
me sign language and how to dance to music by feeling the vibrations. I taught
her how to make paper airplanes and toys out of twist ties. The first year I
was there, she showed me pictures of her dead parents. The second year, she
showed me how to read brail. The third year, she showed me how to eat
pussy. And the fourth year she showed me
a newspaper detailing the torture and death of an American citizen at the hands
of eight children ranging in age between seven and twelve down in Mexico. The
kids, all orphans, called themselves pirates. They sailed around the coasts of
Mexico in stolen boats, robbing and looting from elderly store owners and lost
tourists. The kids, they found a woman passed out drunk inside one of their
hideouts, some abandoned shack in the middle of nowhere. The kids, the boys,
they kept her there for over a week, locked in the shack, beating her with
chains, pushing pins in her arms and legs and leaving them there for a day or
two. Then they raped her, starting out slow and curious, putting all kinds of
things in her from around the house, the boat, their pockets. They pushed
paperclips inside her urethra, forced crabs inside her vagina, and eventually
made her eat their shit while they pulled all the hair out of her head with
their sticky little hands. Those eight wetback throwaways broke her legs and
all her teeth. The newspaper said when the police found her she didn’t have a
face and one of her arms was missing. The kids only got caught because after
the lady was dead the older boys started raping the youngest one and making him
eat
their feces. The little boy ran away, got taken in
to the cop shop by some day sailing tourists. At the police station, the little
smudge agreed to show authorities where the other ‘pirates’ were hiding. When
the cops got there, they found the boys, beating and raping each other. Shoving
handfuls of shit down each
others
throats.

Two weeks after Gina showed me
that newspaper, she was eating me out in the bathtub when my foster mom knocked
on the door. “You girls are too old to be in the bath together...”

I was wearing my bathrobe walking
past the kitchen, drinking a coke when my foster mom said, “Amanda, can you
come in here, please?”

Two police officers were sitting
at the dinner table while my foster mom, Debbie, was crying into a dish rag.
This first cop to speak, he looked like the kind of guy you could slap in the
mouth and he would think it was his fault and probably apologize for getting in
the way of your hand. He looked like a wimpier Don
Knotts
,
like his legs were made of wet bread and his spine was nothing more than a cord
of garden worms. This wimp looked at the other police man who stood up, took
off his cowboy hat and stared at his shoes, shoes that I couldn’t see, because
the breakfast table was covering his legs.

“Amanda, Miss, could you come
here for a minute please? We’d like to talk to you.”

I walked over to the table, put
my coke down, Debbie moved the can away from the ledge. I remember thinking the
policeman with the cowboy hat should really have put the
fuckin
’
thing back on because he was so damn bald without it. The cowboy cop took out a
newspaper tucked in his arm pit and unrolled it on the table. “Miss, I believe
we’ve found your mother, Francis Troy.”

The picture of the woman on the
gray paper, printed in halftone, she sat in the living room of our trailer for
five years, on top of the TV watching my mother and I watch whatever was on. I
was sitting in the shopping cart chewing gum and fucking up my shoe laces when
she got the picture taken at
Walmart
. When she got
the prints back, she spilled gin all over them except for the one we put up on
top of the TV.

Debbie, sobbing into that old
shitty rag that smells like garbage, she isn’t sad, she’s just trying to make
the story better. Trying to make herself part of something half the country
will hear about. The bald cowboy is blowing bad breath up my nose as his mouth
contorts around the words, “Francis Troy has been identified as the victim of a
child gang slaying down in Mexico. All suspects have been apprehended. The
State would be willing to pay your way to see the case in court, if you’re
willing to attend the trial.”

There is a moment in our lives
when things change. For a lot of people this happens after death. Their ways of
thinking, their views of others, their awareness is brought to an entirely
different plateau. But for some, when this happens in the midst of life, the
reality of objects, others, what is being said, become crystal clear. I saw the
man in the cowboy hat wiggling his tongue around words he didn’t fully
understand. I saw the age on his face, the wrinkles on Debbie’s face. I noticed
she had her nice slippers on, I noticed the wimp with the gun and the shiny
badge pinned to his shirt didn’t really give a fuck. And even if he did, he
couldn’t bring my mom back. He wouldn’t be putting those eight Mexican kids in
prison. Even if he had the best intentions in the world, he couldn’t do shit
about anything. And because of this, in reality, he held no honest authority.

What was coming out of the
cowboy’s mouth, they were just words.
Sentences in fragments
that I couldn’t hear.
I couldn’t put together. I reached for my coke,
when I dropped it in the kitchen I just kept walking until my back was against
my bedroom wall, my bum on the carpet.

I heard words floating through
the door, words like “Francis” and “Marcy” and “raped by cousin.” Excited
voices popping, “both runaways from Mennonite commune,” “Francis kept the
baby... Amanda.” I could hear Gina splashing around in the tub, her fingers
skipping across the water.

Whoever was in charge, whoever’s
finger hovered over the button of my fate, decided it was in my best interest
to stay with Debbie and Gina until Marcy could fix up a suitable place for me.

While I waited at Debbie’s for
Marcy, I filled the big plastic laundry basket with
water,
I put the cat in it, and held the lid shut until the bucket stopped shaking. I
broke into my neighbor’s house and stole his pornography. I beat a rabbit to
death with a hammer and pushed pencils up our other neighbor’s dog’s ass. I lit
the garage on fire and kicked a two year old in the back at the supermarket
when no one was looking. And I never got caught or blamed for any of this
stuff. I could literally break a cats front legs and everyone would say, “
Aww
, there’s that girl we saw in her pajamas crying on the
news about her deadbeat murdered mother.” When Gina would eat me out, I would
pull the sides of her hair hard enough until her little deaf screams came out
in high whistles. She’d spend all day hiding away from me, crying and saying
she was sorry and she loved me. She’d hug me and wave her arms around saying,
“Don’t you love me anymore?” I didn’t even use my hands to tell her I couldn’t
feel anything with her anymore, I walked into her until she was against the
wall and our faces where too close for her to read my lips. I told her I didn’t
want to fuck her if I couldn’t put my fist in her. She went away crying, coming
back, her hands flailing around, telling me she was trying to get herself to
open enough. She never could and the last night I was there, I snuck over to
her bed while she was asleep, put all my weight on her chest and fisted her
until the sides of her pillow were soaked with tears, her lips shredded from
biting down so hard.

The next morning, that same
sleepy social worker came over and asked Debbie for coffee and then she drove
me to Marcy’s house. The house my dad owned and left to the commune at his
passing. They in turn gave it to Marcy, this house, the one I live in now,
sixteen years later.