This is the Part Where You Laugh (10 page)

Princess Catherine Yurievskaya, you sit tall in your photograph, your thick hair pinned up, your head tilted with the weight of it. You are in a formal dress, but I will cut that off of you with a pair of scissors. I don't want you to be formal forever.

You became a professional singer in France after you left Russia, and you will stand next to me in your slip, dressless, and sing while you look out the window of our house in the country. I will rub lotion into your hands as you sing in French, and when I turn your palms up, I will see the lines of your life extending like a cottonwood tree over a river.

The fighting of the Whites and the Reds passed your city and you wandered between the armies. You walked for miles, hungry, alone, your face like a young girl's even though you were 39 years old at the time of the Revolution. No one knows your age now, and to me, you are ageless. I cannot see the lines around your eyes or the creases across your forehead. Your lines vanish like disappearing ink.

You were wronged at birth, born to a mistress of the tsar, illegitimate and unrecognized until Alexander II married your mother when you were two. For a year you were the favored child. A toddler. Then the emperor was assassinated and that favor went away. Was that your one blessed year? I want to give you another year like that. Then another year after that.

You will ask me to take off your slip and pour lotion on your back. You will ask me to rub your body as I rubbed your hands, next to the window. I will cover your skin in lotion, the glistening of the lotion like jewels under the moonlight.

You will ask me to lay on top of you and be still, the weight of my body holding you solidly to the earth.

Creature folds the pages and puts them in his pocket. “What do you think?”

“Honestly? I think that one was kind of sad, man.”

“Yeah, I know,” Creature says. “When I read the true details about her life, she seemed super sad. Only two family members attended her funeral.”

“Only two people?”

“That's what I read. But what do you think about the pages?”

“I don't know. I'm not a writer.”

“Well, did you like it?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I was interested the whole time, so that's a good sign, right?”

Creature pulls the pages back out of his pocket, unfolds them, and looks at them again. He says, “ 'Cause I'm not sure if this entry fits with the rest. The tone's a lot different on this one.”

“I don't know, man. Maybe that's okay, right? I mean, I'm not a writer, but everything doesn't have to be the same, you know?”

Creature leans his head back and thinks about that. Then he nods and puts the pages back in his pocket.

I say, “You really like reading about Russian history, huh?”

“Yeah,” he says, “it's super interesting. I never knew anything about Russia until I read a few things online last year, and now I'm hooked. The Revolution was crazy. How they executed the Romanov family and all that? It was like a purge, like an extermination.”

“And you put some of those facts in the book. Some of your facts are real, right?”

“All of them are real but the love stuff. The sex stuff. And I try to make those parts ridiculous. I want my guidebook to be disguised history, like a complex basketball play. Entertainment on top, but reality underneath, something about these lives, these women. Complex.”

“That's cool,” I say. “I like complex in certain situations. Like basketball.”

“All right,” Creature says, “like basketball. So give me an example.”

This is a game we play sometimes. He gives me a challenge, and I have to answer it quickly.

“All right,” I say. “How about…Let's see….Set up the high pick like it's a pick-and-roll for the four and the point. Point baits with a jab step. Roll the four off to the top of the key as the other three run double backdoor cuts. The five screens for the two. The two screens for the three after. So the pick-and-roll is the first bait, and the first backdoor is set up too. Defenders come high and run through. Then the second backdoor is the layin or dunk. Two ball fakes, and the assist comes on a bounce pass or an alley-oop.”

“Oh, baby.” Creature laughs at me. “You're as nerdy as I am with writing and Russian history.”

“Like you always say, Creat, I know what I like.”

The games under the bridge tonight aren't good, no quality players, and Creature dominates without trying very hard. In one game, the high pick-and-roll fools the other team four times in a row and I hit him for layups and dunks, until it doesn't fool the other team on the fifth run and I pop a long jumper off the screen.

Creature shrugs and says, “That kind of night, I guess.”

There isn't a single good game.

Afterward, while we're unlocking our bikes to go, I see something in the ivy on the lit-up side of the nearby bridge pylon. “Hey, Creat, what is that?”

He looks. “I don't know.”

Something pink. I walk up there. It's the hood of a jacket. A woman's jacket. The woman is mostly hidden by the ivy. She's sloped downhill, her feet high, her head low, and she's passed out. One sleeve is rolled up and the needle is still in her arm, attached to the syringe.

Creature says, “Is it her?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.” I kneel down. “What should we do?”

Creature says, “With a passed-out junkie? Nothing. I'm sorry, but there's nothing we can do about that.”

“Is she still breathing?”

“I don't know,” Creature says. “Come on, baby.”

I lean in and listen for her breath. Watch her chest to see if it rises and falls, and it does. “She's still breathing.”

“Okay, then let's go. Come on.”

“No, hold up.” I stand and look at her. Think.

Creature says, “Look, Travis, I get why you care so much, but really, there's nothing for us to do here. We can't fix this or even really help her.”

I hold up one finger. “Just a minute. I'm gonna turn her right-side up and onto her side.”

“Why?”

“So she doesn't choke if she pukes.”

“Okay,” Creature says. “Just don't get poked with that needle or some shit like that, all right? And junkies sometimes have needles in their pockets too.”

“I know.”

I take hold of the woman's ankles and I pull her downhill and rotate her around until her feet are below her head. Then I find an old sweatshirt in the ivy, tilt her on her side, and prop her head up on the sweatshirt. “There,” I say.

Creature says, “Okay. Now you're ready to go?”

“All right.”

We walk down and get our bikes. Pedal across the river at Maurie Jacobs Park, then over Delta Highway on the Neon Bridge, back to the trailer-park loops.

I park my bike behind the shed and go inside to make some food. Grandpa's in the living room watching the game of the night on ESPN. I make a sandwich and go in next to him. Eat and drink a glass of water while the Indians bat during the 7th inning.

Grandpa stands halfway up, teeters, and falls back onto the couch.

“Grandpa?”

He tries to stand again and makes it to his feet this time, but has to lean over and steady himself by holding the coffee table. He mumbles, “I just…” He sounds like a voice recording played on the wrong speed.

“Grandpa, what the hell?”

“I just…” He giggles and stands back up. Balances. Leans over and holds the table again. “I took some…I smoked a little…”

“A little?”

“I just…”

“Grandpa, what did you do?”

He sits down on the coffee table. Puts his hands out in the air, feeling for something invisible. “Her pills were…”

“Wait, you took Grandma's pain pills?”

“A few.”

“Grandpa, if you do all this stuff at the same time, you might die. You understand me?”

“Die,” he says, and laughs. He puts both hands on his knees to steady himself. Laughs so hard that he's shaking.

I stand up. “I'm going back out.”

I leave the house and slam the door. Hop off the porch, get my bike, and start pedaling. I don't have anywhere to go, so I don't go far, just down to the Chevron to grab a Coke. I park my bike and lock it next to the bathrooms. Walk around the corner to the front door. There's a man handing out some kind of pamphlet, and he hands one to me. I start to read it and the man says, “It's about the battle that changed the world.”

I hold the pamphlet. Look up.

“Son,” he says, and points at me, “there will be things beyond your control in this life. Things you can't handle.”

“Excuse me?”

“You'll need help,” he says. He's still pointing at me. “This world is dark and difficult. The road is not easy. And there will be things beyond your control.”

I laugh in his face. “Things beyond my control?” I look at the pamphlet in my hand. It has a picture of a man on his knees holding a big black book. In the upper right-hand corner it says
SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTISTS
.

The man says, “Things far beyond your control. You're young, though, so you don't know it yet, but this world is difficult. When you grow up and move out of Mom and Dad's house, when they're no longer cooking for you and doing your laundry, and making your life easy, you're going to find out a whole lot about yourself and the real world.”

“The real world…” I shake my head. I can feel the anger in my body like ripples on a pond, the circles spreading out, expanding, going to the edges of my skin.

“See,” the man says, “you don't believe me now because your life is so easy, but in the real world, the world you don't understand yet, there will be…”

I punch him.

I don't even think about it. I just punch him. And it's a good punch, one of those shots where it lands right where I aim and everything about it feels perfect, from how I throw it to where it lands. I catch the man on his chin and his head rips sideways and he goes down quick against the wall, and I know he's knocked out the second he falls.

Then I take a step back. The man is crumpled in front of me and his Seventh-day Adventists pamphlets are spilling onto the cement. There's a gust of wind, and a few of the pamphlets flap and skitter away like small birds.

Someone across the lot yells, “Hey!”

I turn.

It's one of the gas-pump attendants. He's walking toward me from the far pump. He says, “Hold it right there.”

But I sprint around the side of the building to my bike, pull the key out of my pocket, unlock it quick, and hop on. Start pedaling. I look back and see the guy coming around the corner. He yells, “You better stop right there.”

I don't. I bike behind the Carpet Store to the alley that leads to the Home Depot. It's dark in that alley, between the industrial Dumpsters, and I slow down to think about where I should go next. But there's nowhere to go. So I bike the crossroad to the trailer park, the hedge, and the back entrance to the loops. I pedal to my house, park my bike behind the shed, and walk down to my tent.

This is one of those times when I know that things are going to be messed up no matter what. Like when they couldn't find my mom and the Department of Human Services lady told me they were going to put me in what she called “a temporary placement.” And then those two years. I thought things would be better now since I called my grandparents and I'm living here.

But nothing erases the bad. Nothing puts it away forever. The bad is like one of those overgrown Himalayan blackberry patches that we have everywhere in western Oregon. You can cut it back or even burn it to the ground, you can burn it and dump salt over the top, but it doesn't matter. It's coming back. That things has roots, it has incredible unseen roots that live and wait in the dark underground, and it's only a matter of time before it's up again, before that thing is growing three inches a day, snaking along the surface, then hoisting itself into the air on unseen wires, animated, and the bright green thorns along the stems are thin and sharp as razor blades. The only way through the thicket is to take the cutting.

Nighttime. Lying on my sleeping bag. I hear someone's footsteps in the grass. Flip-flops clicking against the bottoms of someone's feet. My tent flap is open—I never zipped it closed—so I wait until I can see who it is.

“Creature?” I say.

“Who's Creature?” It's a girl's voice.

“Natalie?”

“Yeah?”

I scramble to my knees and crawl out of my tent. “Why are you…?”

“I don't know,” she says. “Maybe because I had a really shitty day.” Her face is lit from the side by the porch light. Her eyes are pure black.

“Yeah?” I say. “I had a shitty day too.”

Natalie says, “Wanna trade stories, then? See whose day was more messed up?”

“All right, let's do it.”

We sit down on the bank above the lake. There's a warm breeze blowing from behind us, little ripples in front of us.

“You go first,” I say. “Why was your day so terrible?”

“Stepdad,” she says. “He's a dick. But worse than that, he's weird.”

I wait for her to say more. Stare at the lake. The lights from the houses opposite are rippling on the water. The reflections are orange and yellow.

I say, “So your stepdad?”

“Yeah, my stepdad. His name's Will, and he's a real piece of shit.”

“Because…”

“I don't know. It's hard to explain. He acts nice, seems nice. He has a good job, and he dresses well. We have a nice house and all that. People seem to like him, or at least his friends do, but I don't like his friends.”

“But your mom does?”

“She seems to. She seems to have bought in to that whole nice-house, nice-car crap. But I feel like she doesn't see who Will really is.”

“Is he good to her?”

“Mostly.”

“Mostly?”

Natalie takes a deep breath. “He gets pissed about stupid little things sometimes. But then he's nice most of the time.”

“Okay,” I say. “And…”

“Well,” Natalie says, “he makes me uncomfortable.”

I wait for her to explain.

She says, “See, most of the time I just get a bad feeling, but today it was obvious.”

“What did he do?”

Natalie sighs. “It's embarrassing.”

“It's fine,” I say. “You don't have to tell me.” I shrug like I don't care. But the truth is, I really want to know.

“See,” she says, “I went to the park to do a soccer workout, and it was super hot today—you know how hot it was—and I was totally sweaty and gross. So when I got home, I wanted to take a shower. I didn't even think about it. I just went into the bathroom and took a shower. But when I finished, when I turned the water off and pulled back the curtain to grab my towel, he was right there. Will was right there.”

“What do you mean ‘Will was right there'?”

“He was right there in the bathroom. He was pissing in the toilet right next to me, while I was finishing showering.”

“He what?”

“Pissing. Peeing. He was peeing in the toilet next to the shower. I saw his…”

“No.”

“Yeah, I saw it,” she says. “How creepy is that?”

“Real creepy. Weird too. You weren't joking.”

“No,” she says. “That's fucked up, huh? He was standing there over the toilet…just holding his, um…He was just shaking it off.”

I want to ask if Will's thing was soft or hard. I'm curious, and it matters. I want to ask about that, but I also don't want to ask a girl I still don't know that well that question. Then I think of something else. “Wait,” I say. “Do you only have one bathroom in the house?”

“No. We have four.”

“Four bathrooms?”

“Yeah.”

“So why did he use the one where you were showering?”

“Exactly,” she says. “What the hell?”

“Were other people home? Was your mom home?”

“No. She was still at work.”

“So it was just the two of you home. You have four bathrooms, and he took a piss in the one where you were showering.”

“Right.”

“Wow. I don't know what to say about that.”

Natalie picks up a handful of gravel and throws it in the water in front of us. She says, “I can't believe he saw me naked.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah,” Natalie says. “I screamed and cussed at him, and he acted like it was some kind of big misunderstanding. A mistake. He kept saying how sorry he was and that he just went to pee without thinking, that he just walked in there by accident.”

“No, no, no,” I say. “No way.”

“I know, right? Fuck that. It wasn't a mistake.” Natalie takes another handful of gravel and sorts the rocks in her hand. Moves the little ones toward her thumb, the big ones out to her fingertips. Then she tilts her hand and lets them fall off.

I say, “I'm sorry. That sucks.”

“Yeah, it does.”

“That's messed up.”

Neither of us says anything for a minute. There are black lines on the water in between the ripples of orange and yellow light. The lines shift, and above them, on the east side, the windows of the houses are wide and bright.

Natalie stands up.

“What is it?”

“Shhh.” She sneaks forward.

I stand and try to see what she's seeing.

She crouches down by the edge of the water, on the left side of my little gravel beach. She reaches into the long reeds, reaches with both hands, then stops.

I say again, “What is it?”

She lunges and clasps something in her hands. Stands up. “Got it.”

In the dark, I can't see what she's holding. “What is it?”

“A frog.” She sits down again. “So why was your day wonderful?”

“Well,” I say, “the highlight was when I punched a Seventh-day Adventist.”

“You what?”

“I punched a missionary guy.”

Natalie cups her other hand over the frog's head and looks straight at me. “Really?”

I nod.

“Was he hurt?”

“I don't know if he was hurt for real, but I know I knocked him out.”

“What the…How hard did you hit him?”

“Pretty hard. I knocked him out and then I took off. Ran to my bike and pedaled away.”

Natalie shakes her head. “But why'd you punch him in the first place?”

“It's sort of hard to explain,” I say. “My grandpa…”

Natalie waits for me to explain. She pets the frog some more. “Your grandpa was there?”

“No, no. It's a long story.”

“Well,” she says, “I'm kind of in a hurry to get back to my stepdad's den of perversion, so I don't really have much time right now….” Natalie pushes me.

“All right,” I say. “I'll explain then. My grandpa gets high.”

“Your grandpa?”

“Yeah.”

“High? Like, smokes weed?”

“Yeah.”

Natalie giggles. Then she stops herself. “I'm sorry. That's not funny.”

“He gets high every day, smokes my grandma's medical weed. She has a card since she's been sick.”

“And he smokes hers?”

“Yep.”

“Every day?”

“Yep. He smokes a ton. Gets super high.”

“This is your grandpa we're talking about? An old man?”

“Right, I know. It sounds like something a person would make up, but I'm not. He smokes all the time, and my grandma's not doing well. But Grandpa doesn't seem to be worried about that. He just watches baseball and smokes weed. Eats Doritos or brownie batter. And tonight he took a bunch of Grandma's pain pills and got all messed up. He couldn't even stand right.”

“Like, he was wobbly?”

“And mumbling.”

“Oh damn,” Natalie holds the frog in one hand and points back at my house with her other hand. “Do you live with them all year? With your grandma and grandpa?”

“Yep.”

“Full-time? Even during the school year?”

I nod.

Natalie sets the frog down. Nudges its back to make it jump toward the water. Then she wipes her hands on the grass. “And this missionary guy, he said…”

“He said that my life was too easy now but that soon enough I'd realize what the real world was like—how difficult life can be.”

“Wow,” she says. “Super condescending.”

“I let him talk for a minute, but then I just punched him.”

Natalie laughs. “Sorry, but that's pretty funny. And maybe he learned a good lesson, right? Maybe he'll learn how to talk to people.”

“Maybe,” I say, “but I've got to stop punching people. I can't afford to do that anymore.”

“Wait, is this something you do regularly? Is my shirtless neighbor boy secretly a UFC fighter?”

We both laugh, and I shake my head. Natalie's next to me, her smooth, strong legs six inches away. I want to run my hand up and down those legs, but instead I look away. Creature told me once that if you want a girl, do the opposite of everything you think of, the opposite of everything you want to do. He also said that ignoring a girl for a minute or two will do wonders. I force myself to look away from Natalie, and try not to say anything.

While I'm still looking the other direction, Natalie leans against me, bumps my shoulder with hers. “You and punching, huh? You might have a little bit of a problem?”

“I guess I might even punch myself. You never know.” I smile at her.

Her shoulder is still touching my shoulder. I like the way she feels leaning against me. A breeze comes from behind us and I consider putting my arm around her. But then I think of Creature's advice and I lean away again. I don't want to, but I lean just far enough away that Natalie and I are not touching anymore.

Natalie's phone buzzes and she taps the screen to check the text. “It's my stepdad.”

For some reason—just a reaction—I grab her phone out of her hands and throw it over my shoulder.

“Hey,” Natalie says, “why'd you…”

“I hate those things. Plus, your stepdad sounds like a dick.”

“True,” she says, and kisses me. Just like that.

I've kissed girls before, but it's been a while since I have, and I'm not expecting it. Natalie kisses me and I kiss her back, and she's holding my face, and she tastes like mint ChapStick, her lips and the tip of her tongue. I smell the mint on her lips and the lake water on her hands, and the smell of torn grass.

We slide onto the ground and roll over. I roll up on top of her, and her body feels long and lean underneath me, strong, and I love the feeling of our bodies against each other, and she's still holding my face in her hands and she's kissing me hard. I'm kissing her too and I can feel the dark of the sky changing above us and the ground moving underneath our bodies like everything is tilting and spinning fast.

Natalie rolls us over, and then she's on top of me. She kisses me slower then, sucks at my bottom lip, kisses the side of my neck.

I open my eyes. See the night above the outline of her head, the first stars pricking through the deep blue.

She kisses me on the mouth again, then stops and pushes up. Says, “I've been wanting to do that for a while now.”

I want to be kissing her again. I want to take her shirt off, want to feel her skin against mine.

She puts her hand flat on my chest. She says, “I like my no-shirt neighbor boy.”

“If you want me to, I could put my shirt on more often.”

“No, no, it's okay,” she says. “Don't wear too much clothing. It'll probably restrict your movements or something, make you claustrophobic, might even mess up your basketball game.”

“Right,” I say. “I'll just keep my shirt off for basketball purposes, then.”

“Good,” Natalie says, “and that way I'll be able to continue objectifying you.” She smiles and leans down, kisses me once more, then stands up. “Where'd you throw my phone?”

We search around in the grass for the phone. It takes a while to find it, and I'm glad I didn't throw it farther. It's wedged in a wide crack in the dirt between two big clumps of grass. I hand it to Natalie. “Here it is.”

“Thanks.” She checks her texts, then locks the screen and slides the phone into her bra. It's those little things that girls do sometimes that devastate me: sliding a phone into a bra, adjusting panties under a skirt, redoing a ponytail.

Natalie turns and walks down the footpath toward the blackberry growth.

I say, “Want me to walk you home?”

“No,” she says. “I'm okay. I've got mace on my keychain and it's only old people who live here. I think I can mace an old man all by myself.”

“But what if your mom's not home yet?”

She turns around and looks at me, walks backward as she talks. “Then I'll mace my stepdad.”

I laugh, but it's not funny.

She puts one hand up and waves, then disappears into the shadows of the blackberry growth.