This Is Not Your City (11 page)

“I hope so.”

“No, you seduced me with the World Champion Cow of the Insane. With the Cherry Parade. I didn't know it was going to be like this.”

“Like what?”

“Look around.”

“What?”

“If you don't know, I don't know how to tell you.”

“There's the Humongous Fungus Fest next summer,” Charlie offered. “The World's Largest Fungus is in the upper peninsula.”

“I've fallen for that before,” Robin told him.

 

There was an email every day now from Mr. Zendler, for a week straight:

Robin did know: last night she and Charlie had watched
Law & Order
and played gin rummy. But even this could not entirely dissipate the threat of Mr. Zendler's message.

“I looked up the Humongous Fungus Fest,” Robin offered. An ice storm had taken out the electricity during
CSI,
and Charlie was lighting candles. “It's underground. The fungus.”

“Oh,” Charlie said. “I just always pictured a giant mushroom. I've never actually been.”

“Armillaria Bulbosa, thirty-seven acres. You know what the featured events are?”

Charlie shrugged, his shape outlined by a votive candle he'd lit in an empty jar.

“A cribbage tournament, pie social, and Finn vs. Polack softball game.”

“I'd have thought that's up your alley. You liked the nun museum.”

“Finn vs. Polack softball? I have my limits, Charlie. You don't know me at all.”

Robin printed out copies of the emails and made an appointment to speak with Mrs. Halstead. They met in her office, a woodpaneled room in the community center basement, a narrow rectangular window at the top of the wall almost flush with the parking lot outside. Mrs. Halstead was horrified.

“We'll get him out of the class before tomorrow,” she said. “I'll talk to him. Maybe have my husband give him a call. There are people he still listens to. Honey, why did you wait so long?”

“You don't have to throw him out of the class, really. I want him to have the opportunity to learn—if he needs to get hold of his son sometime, or—”

“Honey, he's been coming to these classes since they started. If he's been playing dumb, well, he's been playing.”

Robin paused. “Still. I didn't come to you to—to have him thrown out.”

“Then you came to what? Because these emails are entirely unacceptable.”

“I wanted—” Robin found she couldn't say it, and trailed off, the pink pipe cleaner she used as a screen-pointer bent around her fingers. Outside the thin basement window the snow was patchy and ugly, the parking lot covered in gravel and salt.

“You want to know if it's true.”

Robin nodded, realizing as she did that she didn't trust herself to speak. Her throat felt tight and stretched, how she imagined swallowing the sleeve of a raincoat felt, the glass and metal cuff of a light bulb.

“Oh, Honey. Honey. Mr. Zendler is crazy. He's holed up out there in the park by himself, and I know he looks awfully frail, but he's crazy as a loon. He hates the summer people. He hates the new people. The police have hauled him in for boobytrapping the woods. He put up tripwires across snowmobile paths. Someone could have been killed.”

“So he doesn't—”

“He hates everyone, really. He's been banned from the Pirate's Booty for harassing the girls. Someone told me he'd been banned from the Elks' Bingo game for trying to cheat.”

“He doesn't—know anything, about Charlie?”

“I've known Charlie since he was six years old. Has he given you any reason—”

“No, I just—”

“Then Good Lord, stop looking for one. Charlie's a good boy. And if you believe this nonsense over—”

“I'm sorry, okay? I'm sorry. No one told me Mr. Zendler was batshit insane, okay?” Robin jerked up out of the plastic chair Mrs. Halstead had offered her. “How would I know that? How would I know you all knew?”

“Sit down, Honey.”

Robin fell back into the chair, bent at the waist with her arms wrapped around her stomach.

“You couldn't. I suppose you couldn't.”

Robin leaned her forehead against the edge of the desk, and her voice floated back up to Mrs. Halstead from the floor. “I feel really stupid now.”

“Don't. I'm sorry I didn't know what was happening.”

“You won't tell him?” Robin asked, turning her head so her cheek was resting on the table, her eyes looking up at Mrs. Halstead.

“Charlie?”

Robin nodded, her head still pressed against the desk.

“No, I won't tell him.”

“Thank you.”

“No need, Honey. No need.”

“This weekend,” Charlie said that night over Scrabble, “I thought we could maybe get out of town. Go south to visit your parents. Stop in Battle Creek and go to Cereal City, or this Historic Seventh-Day Adventists Village I read about. Since the Fungus Fest sounds like it isn't worth waiting for.”

“I don't hate it here, Charlie.”

Charlie didn't say anything, just put down his tiles. He made H-I-T-S and Robin wanted to tell him, No, save the S for later. Add it to something with an X or Z. “I don't hate it here. I want to be here with you. I'd sell saltwater taffy at the Salty Dawg's in Wharftown all summer, okay? I'd re-apply at the Pirate's Booty.”

“You don't have to do that. My dad said you're the steadiest girl he's ever seen with a nail gun. You can work for him again next summer, if you want.”

“I'm just saying I want to be here with you. I'm in love with you, and I just want to make that clear.”

“Okay. I'm in love with you, too. And I'd like to take you to Cereal City.”

“I went as a kid. You have to wear hairnets. But I could never pass up a Historic Adventist Village.”

“They have costumed re-enactors who lead singalongs.”

“Of what? ‘99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall'?”

“Nineteenth-century hymns.”

“You
have
been holding out on me.”

“We can leave Saturday morning,” Charlie said, and Robin pictured them throwing their backpacks behind the seats in Charlie's pickup. She'd hosed out the bed after taking Mr. Zendler's garbage to the dump, and the water had frozen in a sheet of cloudy ice across the bottom of the truck, pine needles and leaves caught in the flood and freeze. They'd drive to the Historic Adventist Village in Battle Creek, and try on buckle shoes and goofy hats and bonnets, and they would sit on the hard wooden pews of a re-created clapboard church, and they would sing
Happy Day, Happy Day,
and there would be no doubt in her mind that it was so.

I live in a good house now, with an attic where the roof makes a triangle and the heat collects. I stand up there and look out back to the barbed wire where our property meets the neighbor's, and past that the highway. The neighbor still farms, soy planted right up against the fence. We haven't planted anything, unless you count the animals. That's what Leo does, what he grows. From the attic you can see the kennels laid out in a half circle in the backyard, all figured so the mean ones don't fight, the sweet ones calm the fussy ones down, and the bitches can't get puppies. Leo can hold them all in his head, who needs what and eats what and is looking sick and should probably be sold on before it looks any sicker. He's got a good mind for organization. I've got a good mind for keeping stuff tidy, which is important in a house like this, which is big and decent and full of what a person needs, but has fifteen dogs caged up in the back. Fifteen give or take. In a good month, take.

Leo got a real nasty scratch about a month ago, spiraling from the back of his hand down the inside of his arm. I had him sit on the bathroom counter while I got alcohol and cotton balls out of the cupboard. I dabbed my way down his arm. “Second time this week,” I said. “You should watch yourself better.”

“It wasn't the rottie,” he said, looking up, and I couldn't tell whether or not he liked what I'd done to the ceiling. It's light
blue now, with clouds. I did the clouds with a can of white paint and more cotton balls, more dabbing.

“If it wasn't the rottie—”

“One of the cage doors. I need to go back out with the wire cutters.”

“You need one of those shots?”

“Tetanus? I'm fine,” he said, but there's no way of knowing with Leo if he meant fine because he'd had one or fine because fine's what you are when you don't think too much about yourself, about how you're really doing and what you really need. We're both of us fine most of the time.

I was long done with the alcohol, but I was standing between Leo's legs and he'd put his feet together behind me, up against the backs of my thighs. I still had his left hand in mine. I brushed the backs of his knuckles. “The gangrene's back,” he said, which it was, but he doesn't need to warn me like he thinks he does. He doesn't really have gangrene, just some weird skin thing that makes him itch so bad he scratches even in his sleep, until the skin breaks open and starts oozing, sometimes blood and sometimes something clear and sometimes both together, so his skin shines in the light like a pink glaze, like glass or pastry. He always warns me, before I uncover an elbow, or the back of a knee, or lift his shirt to find a patch on his belly. I kissed the back of his hand, a clear part, close to his wrist. His legs dropped down and he let me go, his heels kicking the cupboard doors.

“I'll go start dinner,” I said.

“I'll be back in soon,” he said, and hopped down off the counter. He's much taller than me, long like a noodle and skinny in his jeans. His hair's long but not too long, tied back and never greasy. He's got a Cheshire cat inked on his left front forearm. The tattoo seems to keep away the gangrene, and he jokes that he's going to save up, become the Illustrated Man, stop selling dogs at the Pick-n-Trades and just sell tickets for people to see him in his shorts.

For dinner I broiled some frozen fish, microwaved some frozen peas, baked a couple of potatoes. The window over the sink faces the back, and Leo had the dunk tank out. I guess you're supposed to spray flea stuff around the kennels, air them
out with no dogs inside, but we're almost full up until the Pick-n-Trade in Joplin, and there's nowhere to move the dogs to. So he took them one by one out of the kennels and dumped them in the tank, pyrethrum insecticide mixed with water, strong enough to keep the fleas off them until market. It's bad for their eyes and skin, worse for their tempers, but Class B dealers don't mind with temperament. Leo had gloves on, a pair he stole from the outfitter's offices at the slaughterhouse, but the Rottweiler might have gotten him anyway. We've had her here for a month, since Leo found her in the Lamar classifieds and went to pick her up. I think she's homesick.

The fish didn't taste like much, but Leo's always gracious. “Where'd you learn this one?” he asks. “How'd you make that?” I sewed two buttons back onto a shirt of his the other day, which doesn't take more than a needle and a pair of eyes, but he acted like he'd seen a miracle. Did my mother sew, he asked, had she taught me, and I wanted to laugh but then he'd ask what was funny. It wasn't something my mom would care about, the way other people looked in their clothes. When Mouse got boobs I was the one who had to tell her that she needed a bra. The elastic had gone out of my old ones, but I could drive by then so we went to Wal-Mart and charged some things. It was a nice afternoon, doing that together.

Mouse lives in St. Louis now. She's going to college, studying biology. She sends me postcards, always of the Arch, the Mississippi River, things I already know how they look like. I'd like to see her campus, the streets where she lives, but she's never volunteered. She says she has a boyfriend who's studying business, and I thought about writing back how Leo has a business, too, but then she'd ask selling what.
Lyssa,
she writes.
Mango of my eye and possum of my heart. How goes it? I took summer term classes so I've got more finals already. I don't think I'll be able to make it for a visit. How's what's-his-face? It's cold and rainy in St. Louis. Hope the weather's better in Neosho. Love and Squalor, Mouse.
She always signs the postcards
Love and Squalor,
and I know it's a joke, but I don't get what's funny.

Leo only bunches part time. He works days over at National Beef. He's one of the top guys there who's not management, a
twelve-dollar-an-hour man. He started off down the chain, but now he's a knocker. He stands up on the catwalk with a bolt gun and lets the cows have it as they come down the chute. “Pow, right between the eyes,” he told me. He talks big but I don't think he enjoys it all that much. He stands eight hours in his rubber coverall, goggles, his hair tied back and stuffed under a net. The slaughterhouse has been losing money so steady they've got the line speed up to a cow every nine seconds, trying to do in volume what they can't do in beef prices. Down the chute and up by the ankles, Leo's quick hand on the bolt gun the only thing saving the cows from being butchered alive. “Goddamn angel of mercy,” Leo says. “What kind of a life does a cow have, anyway?” He says top line speed is 400 an hour, which means Leo can kill 3,200 animals in a day, minus his breaks, two fifteenminute ones and a half hour for lunch.