Research: Journals
The Journal
Past Issues
28.2
Anthony Varallo
The PinesA few weeks after the holidays, Derek Trotter wrestled our Christmas tree from the trash and drove it to Campfire Lake, where Tank, the biggest catfish in the state, was once videotaped swallowing a tossed pinecone. I watched Derek from my bedroom window; I had just finished reading my sister's diary--it had a flimsy brass "lock" that opened when you turned a paper clip inside it. The diary had been my father's Christmas gift to her, but so far she'd only written a page.
When Derek knocked, I went downstairs. "Are you going to be using this?" he asked. He gestured toward the tree, already bungeed into the trunk. "Anymore?" He wore a blue ski mask with stitched reindeer gamboling around its top.
"No," I said. "I think we're all done with it." I tried not to notice his mask, which was like trying not to notice yourself in a mirror. He was sixteen and known around the neighborhood as something of a bully.
"You should be," he said. "I mean, it's almost Valentine's Day."
"I know," I said.
"I mean, what the hell, right?"
"Right," I said. His eyes were pink-lidded, flecked with crust. I'd heard that Derek Trotter had once blinded his sister with a paintball gun.
"You gonna need that tree on Valentine's Day? Is that the plan? Give it to your girlfriend?" His laugh was like a stomped balloon. "Like, 'Here honey, this's for you.'"
"No," I said.
"Because that's one lame gift," he said. He spat into the geranium pot in which nothing had flowered for months. "You let me know if you see any more trees."
I considered this. "Okay."
"I mean it." His voice drifted into a minor key. "I need them." When Derek pulled away, I could see our tree juddering against the trunk.
It was our first Christmas since our parents split, and we'd forgotten about the tree into February. It had been my father's job to do that kind of thing, liberate the tree from the stand, drag it to the end of the driveway and lean it against our Rubbermaid trash cans, whose lids quietly refused to seal the summer after he moved away. Now it was up to me to replace blown fuses, flatten spiders that noiselessly toured the tub, and saw the lowest branches of the Christmas tree so that the stand would accept its width. I had chopped one branch, then the next, then another, trying to make the bottom even, but only ended up making the tree look strangely bare underneath, like a bride raising her hem.
My father taught art at a local high school. He had been a painter in New York for a while, but things hadn't worked out, and he'd fallen in love with my mother in the midst of his disappointment and married her too quickly. Or so our mother said. "Sometimes I wonder if we're ever really supposed to leave home," she once told me, when we were watching a movie I was too young to follow. In it, a woman ran across a grassy field while black planes passed overhead. "Whose idea was that anyway?"
When he'd lived with us, my father's studio had been the windowed storage shed at the foot of the driveway. He'd moved all the rakes, shovels, and household tools to one side, and set up an easel and drafting table on the other, although the table was always covered with junk mail and the only painting I ever saw on the easel was a birthday present for Ally, a green seahorse with one beach-glass eye, glued to the canvas. Up close, the glass was thinly scratched, luminous.
"If you look hard enough, you can see my name in there," Ally said, surprising me one afternoon when I was about to snoop through her closet. I peered closer, half hoping to see it and half wanting to tell Ally how dumb that was.
"I see it," I lied. "Alicia E. Foster."
"There's no E," she said.
Ally was nine. Once, she had been the one to pet strange dogs, brave the back of the school bus, and defy my parents' orders that we go to bed. Now she had started wearing her Winnie the Pooh pajamas into the evening, when the three of us would settle around the television for dinner. Once I found the pajamas at the bottom of the stairs, heaped together with all the other laundry that never managed to get done. Bright yellow, with Winnie's cheery, depressed smile aimed out at me, I took them by the sleeve and balled them into the space behind the dryer, but only ended up taking them out again before anyone knew. I was eleven years old and driven by guilt. There seemed to be no end of things you could feel guilty for. It was amazing. Sometimes, when I was paging through Ally's diary, I was sure someone was watching me from the doorway, disapproving. "I'm sorry," I'd say. "I'm so sorry."
Our mother worked as a telephone operator. Sometimes she'd work the late shift and we'd get a babysitter. Ally and I liked that. John was our favorite: talkative, assertive, full of silly voices, he liked to bring a telescoping chin-up bar that he braced high between the living room door jamb, raising Ally and me to it like we were part of a circus act.
"You're the man," he'd say, after I'd hung there for awhile, unable to lift myself more than an inch. "Think it. Know it. Feel it."
"The man," I'd stammer. My arms trembled, and my face grew hot, but I wanted to stay that way for a while. I wanted someone to take a picture of us together like that.
Sometimes we couldn't find a sitter. On those nights it was my job to look out after things. I'd jump whenever the phone rang--always my mother, on break, speaking to me through her headset, her voice both magnified and undersized, as if she were talking through a bottle. "I just had a guy ask me what the capital of Philadelphia was," she'd laugh, as I turned on the brass lamp beside my father's old fish tank, empty, bereft of pebbles. There was a light inside the tank and I turned that on, too, as I did the bedroom light, the bathroom light, and the diamond-shaped fixtures at the top of the stairs, the ones my father sometimes cleaned with a damp rag when Christmas rolled around, the ones that made the ceiling look like it was snowing electricity. "What did you tell him?" I'd say.
Later, I would find Ally asleep in front of the TV. She'd have her knees tucked up to her chin, a limp pillow across her lap, her thumb newly wet from sucking. The sight of her chewed nails made me want to shake her until the former Ally shook free, like I'd seen in the movies.
Ally, I'd say, snap out of it. Her eyes would flutter, wary of light.
W-where am I? she'd say.
Home, I'd whisper.
Home?
I'd release my grip. She'd wipe a tear from her eye.
Home, she'd say. Oh-- home !
That spring two teenage boys were killed in a car crash just outside our neighborhood. They'd been drinking. Driving too fast. I knew the rest from the newspaper reports and local TV, knew that their names were Justin and Neil, that one had played soccer and the other had just won a scholarship to Penn, knew that their car had lifted off the road and struck a telephone pole so high up it must have been, as I overheard a teacher say, like a plane clipping a mountain. I knew that place in the road. A sudden rise that my father sometimes took too fast, on my request, when we were alone together and the only sound was the do-lang-do-lang of oldies radio and the air whistling through the passenger window. "Do the turn," I'd say, then slouch down and see the sky fatten above the dash, the effect like launching into space.
"Woo," my father would say.
"Woo," I'd say.
Sometimes, when my mother worked nights, I'd turn on all the downstairs lights and wash the dishes that no one seemed to wash anymore: Ally's milk glasses on the living room end table, my mother's coffee cups beside the microwave, pebbly with grounds and hard to scrub, and my peanut butter toast plates, flecked with black crumbs that swirled around the kitchen drain and finally disappeared into the wherever beneath the sink. I liked washing the dishes. I liked having all the lights on. It put it me at a kind of ease. I kept imagining a scene in my head where Justin and Neil showed up at our door, barely scratched, hungry for toast, and I fed them at the kitchen table on plates that glistened around the edges. "Wow," they'd whisper. "Now that's clean."
After a while we stopped bothering with sitters. "Randy tied up the phone for two hours," my mother would say, or, "John never remembers messages," but Ally and I knew the truth: the house was a wreck; we didn't want anyone in. In. The opposite of out, where clothes dryers didn't break, leaving jeans and T-shirts to sag from kitchen chairs, where fireplaces weren't crammed with pizza boxes and flattened milk cartons, where Post-It notes-- Call about furnace! --didn't go unread for weeks, lose their filmy grip and slip beneath the refrigerator that rocked each time the compressor kicked in. I spent my evenings watching TV with Ally, eating gooey maraschino cherries straight from the jar, or rectangles of baking chocolate we found in the back of the pantry, leftovers from the days of holiday parties and weekend guests. Ally's favorite was a drink she called Ruby Red--grenadine, tonic water, and the liquid from the bottom of the cherry jar--which she made especially in time for prime-time TV, where grown-ups fell in love on a tall cruise ship, played out their fantasies on a remote island, and shot a man in a ten-gallon hat over love.
At school it was rumored that our science teacher, Mrs. Harrar, was having an affair with Mr. Di Gregory, the softball coach. "They were caught doing it in the locker room," people said. "Mr. Woods found them. That's why he quit," the rumor went, making several disparate parts fit, neatly, like a trombone to its case. "Because Mr. Woods was also doing it with Mrs. Harrar. He couldn't take it. Seeing them doing it like that. He broke down right there and cried. He's in therapy now. Last weekend someone saw him at the mall talking to the water fountain outside Nordstrom. He was tossing pennies in, muttering Bubbly, bubbly, bubbly ."
I was in sixth grade and didn't know any girls. Once, my social studies teacher had said, "You know, if you cornered me in a dark alley and asked me to list all the state capitals for my life, I'd probably be dead." An idea that haunted me: If you cornered me in a dark alley and asked me to introduce you to girls I knew, I'd probably be dead .
I did know Janna, my father's new girlfriend, but that hardly seemed to count. Janna had been a student of his a few years back. She was in college now, splitting her time between my father's tiny, two-bedroom apartment and her duplex, which she shared with a blind man named Al, whom, she said, could induce squirrels to climb on his shoulders, two and three at a time, simply by calling out, "Nut-a-cluck-cluck, nut-a-click-click."
"He thinks it's no big deal," Janna said.
We were watching movies in the small bedroom, where my father had pushed two sofas against the wall; at night these became beds for Ally and me. Janna was sitting next to me, her leg touching mine, while my father lay on the other sofa, his head propped by cushions: he and Janna made a show of not sitting together when we were around, as if Janna was a boarder whose name he could never quite remember. Ally sat beside me, sucking her thumb on the sly. "Sometimes I hear mice in this sofa," she whispered. "I think they've got a house in there."
"Actually, it's a school," Janna said. "For gifted mice. Micesourri. Maybe you've heard of it." She squeezed the cushion behind Ally's head. "Sometimes you can make the bells go off that way."
"Really?"
"Unless it's a holiday," Janna said. "Then what's the use?"
I looked at my father. I wanted him to say something. I wanted him to say, "There's no mice in the sofa, Ally. And there's no bells in the cushions, because I wouldn't let that kind of thing happen to the place where you two sleep. Understand?" But he didn't. He turned a smile on the two of them, and allowed his socked foot to touch Janna's leg. That day we'd gone to a petting zoo where dirty goats chewed my shoelaces into a slimy pulp. I'd been so busy screwing my mouth into a smile I didn't even notice that I'd started to cry until I pushed my way into the men's restroom, where the mirrors afforded an embarrassing view of grandfathers shaking themselves before cascading urinals. I washed my hands like they were part of a game whose object was to get as much water on your fingers as possible without rinsing the soap away.
"All day I've been thinking we should watch a movie together," my father said, "and here we are watching a movie together." He tapped the sofa armrest. "It's a lucky thing when you can have days like that. Makes you feel thankful."
"We had a blast," Janna said.
"Yeah," Ally said, forgetting the tantrum she'd thrown in the Dairy Queen parking lot when she saw yellowjackets spiraling above the trash cans.
"It was fun," I said.
"Because I that's how I feel. Lucky," my father said. "Lucky to be together." He gave us an awkward smile, and for a moment I was afraid I was going to see my father cry. "All of us together like this."
Sometimes, when she was in a mood, my mother would say, "Your father always wants to think he's happy, even though he never is. Did you ever notice that about him?"
I said I didn't know.
"It's not hard to notice," she said. "Once you do, you can't stop noticing it."
When Janna came in to say goodnight, she'd tell us stories from her childhood. She'd grown up on a farm in rural Ohio. I liked to imagine Janna and me hanging out in a barn, where pigeons chuckled quietly from shadowy lofts. "Wow," I'd say, if it ever came to pass, "here we are in a barn."
"Yeah," Janna would say, "here we are."
"The two of us," I'd say, and then--what? What came next? "Sure is drafty in here?" Sure is drafty in here!
If Janna said goodnight to me last, I'd try to engage her in some conspiratorial conversation. "I'm worried about Ally," I'd whisper.
"Really? Why?"
"Did you see the way she freaked about those yellowjackets? She pulls stuff like that all the time now. I don't get it."
"We'll have to keep an eye out," Janna said. "That's for sure." She'd leave the bedroom door a little open, the way Ally liked it. In the semi-darkness, I'd try to think of the saddest things I knew: a nighttime hobby of mine. I liked to feel a little chill, then pull the blankets around me, feeling warm and safe. I imagined myself riding along with Neil and Justin, telling them to slow down. I sat in back, windblown and panicked. "Please," I'd say, "I know something you don't." The two of them would ignore me, laughing, passing another Coors.
"I know something you don't," they'd laugh. "Oh, I know something you don't ."
The next time I saw Derek Trotter he was kicking holes in our deck. I was upstairs, camped beneath my bedsheets, my underwear to my ankles, paging through one of Ally's Nancy Drew mysteries. I had a thing for the illustrations. Whenever my mom and Ally were away I liked to take the books to bed with me and gradually remove my clothes, glancing through the illustrations, until I felt my heart beating in my ears. I liked the captions the best. "Don't move!" Nancy cautioned. "You're at the edge of the precipice!" I'd read them aloud, then feel suddenly embarrassed, closing the book and dressing in a matter of seconds.
"You ever heard of weatherproofing?" Derek said, when I opened the sliding glass door to the deck.
"Sort of?" I said.
"Yeah, you sort of heard of everything." He stomped his boot through another board. The board splintered and fell away, leaving a hole. "Jesus H. Someone could fall right through and break their fucking leg. Is that what you want? A lawsuit?"
"No," I said.
"Don't you know what a tort is?"
"What's a tort?"
"Well, it's a--well, goddamit, you can't have these boards all rotted out like this. Jesus!"
I stepped onto the deck and looked through a hole. Below, the part of the lawn I was afraid to mow, grass as high as my socks. It was late May, and I'd been out of school less than a week.
"We've gotta knock the rest out," Derek said, "before someone falls through." The logic of this suddenly arranged itself before me, plainly, like a vision.
"Okay," I said.
I watched Derek stomp the rotted boards with his heavy-heeled workboots. I had never noticed, until now, that Derek Trotter's left arm was shorter than the right. His left hand was undersized, too, with pale, knobby fingers, and thick, uncut nails that trapped half-moons of dirt underneath. He was barely taller than me. Whenever he spoke, thin bands of saliva hinged the corners of his mouth. Watching him, it occurred to me that Derek Trotter must have been unpopular and lonely; an idea which filled me with a gray sort of kindliness towards him.
"What the fuck you looking at me like that for?" he said.
"Nothing," I said.
He put a finger to my chest. "Don't think I don't know that you're going to grow up faggy," he said. "Everybody knows."
I wanted to say, What do you mean everybody knows? but Derek slapped me on the head. "Now, get down there and pick up those boards."
"You hit me," I said.
"Ooh, I hit you," Derek said. "Maybe you hit yourself." He laughed. "Ever think of that?"
I stood beneath the deck, shaken. "I hate it down here," I said. Derek stood above, watching me through a hole. Light slanted in from the spaces where the deck no longer was.
"Maybe if you mowed the goddamned grass it wouldn't be so bad. It's a little thing called lawn care," Derek said.
"I saw a snake down here one time."
Derek stomped the board above my head. "You know what?" he said. "You're a little girl. Seriously. That grass is just grass, you dumbshit. It's like any other grass anyplace else."
Like any other , I thought as I stepped through, gathering the splintered boards in my arms. They were dry and brittle, with bent nails dangling from their ends. It occurred to me that my father had helped build this deck, that he might have put those nails in himself. When Derek descended the deck stairs, I slipped one of the nails into my jeans pocket.
"Put those in my trunk," he said.
I looked at him like he'd asked me my opinion of snowflakes.
"Now."
"It's the lack of a male influence," Derek said as I dumped the boards into the trunk. "Everybody knows that's what'll drive you faggy in the end." He laughed, wiped his nose. " In the end . God, that's good."
A few weeks later I would ride with him to Campfire Lake. We'd steal a paddleboat and paddle it to the center of the lake. The lake would be skinned with spring pollen and lily-white buds. I'd touch my hand to the water. But for now I stood in my driveway and tried to think of ways to explain what had happened to the deck.
"Tell them a dog did it," Derek said.
"A dog did it," I told my mother. We were standing in front of the sliding glass doors, open for the first truly hot day of summer.
"A dog?"
"He was huge," I said. "I heard him the other night when I was putting Ally to bed. She made me look outside because she thought it was a wolf. So I looked," I said, almost seeing it myself. "And there he was."
"And there he was," my mother said.
"Stomping his paws right through." Before Derek had closed the trunk, he'd lifted one of the splintered boards to his lips and tasted it with his tongue. "He was scary," I said.
I understood that my mother did not believe me, that she only felt guilty for being away at night when I might pursue some sort of mischief with all its attendant lies, but I did not want to understand that, so I allowed myself to think I had fooled her. The next few weeks when she left for work, I'd wait on our front porch for Derek Trotter. He'd slow the car in front of the house, not bothering with the driveway, as I ran to the door and opened its heavy latch with both hands. "Just like a puppy dog," Derek said, after I'd drawn my seatbelt across my chest.
Outside, neighborhood houses sped by like places in a dream.
The first time I'd rode with him, Derek had pulled into a ritzy neighborhood a mile from the camp, then slowly patrolled all the cul-de-sacs, dead ends, and unmarked avenues, stopping wherever someone had left their trash. "Go check," he said.
"For what?"
"Pine."
"I'll get in trouble."
"Trouble for what?" Derek said. "Is there a law against taking trash?" This was one of Derek's favorite questions, and he used it often, as when we lit fires beside the lake (no, I couldn't exactly say I'd heard of a law against that) or stole sodas from the Pepsi machine inside the boathouse (in a way, they'd been left there for us, hadn't they?) or unchained the seagreen paddleboat that took us to the center of Campfire Lake (well, that's what a paddleboat was for anyway, wasn't it?).
That day we found a wooden patio chair, left out with the other garbage. "Holy shit," Derek whispered. "Tank is gonna go apeshit for that."
"Yeah," I said. "Apeshit."
Derek flicked his middle finger against my ear. "Don't curse to be cool. Makes you sound ignorant." My ear throbbed, and I felt tears in my eyes.
"But you said--"
"I said get that fucking chair," Derek said. "Now."
I lifted it into the trunk, hating Derek, wanting to tell him what an asshole he was--that was the word I would use, too, see how he liked it--but I didn't. Instead, I said, "It won't fit. The trunk can't close."
"Then hold it down," Derek said.
Right , I thought, gathering myself into the trunk, holding the hood against the chair. Inside, the scratchy carpet was slightly damp and malodorous but, as we pulled away, I saw the long windows of the showplace homes, felt the wind around my shoulders and knees, and it was like settling down into bed with the door partly open and Janna about to kiss me goodnight. I readjusted my legs and rocked with the motion of the car.
At one time Campfire Lake had been a real summer camp with kids from the whole state traipsing in with mosquito netting, flashlights, and a vague ignorance of anything having to do with nature, but that was all years ago. Now it had become a ghost camp, rented out for occasional retreats and artist "colonies," quiet for months on end. We pulled into the gravel parking lot, where weeds jutted out from white rocks with the words W E L C O M E C A M P E R S painted on in a joyless black script. From the parking lot, it was a slow climb up a marshy hill--this was my favorite, the swallows and nuthatches taking flight whenever the tacklebox rattled--then the narrow passage beneath the waterfall where the top lake emptied into the second, smaller lake, a green pool with branches and logs floating on top. Sometimes Derek would stop by the largest log, where box turtles congregated, and push each off with the tip of his fishing rod. "Stupid turtles," he'd say. "Thinking they're the whole world."
My job, once we reached the upper lake, was to wade in to my knees and unlock the paddleboat we used to paddle to the center. Once there, we'd dump whatever pine we'd found: the chair, a bundle of boards, a tiny evergreen I'd had to hold with both arms while my feet strained against the pedals. Dumping the pines was Derek's idea. Our first trip out, he'd explained. "It's like this: Tank loves pine. Everybody knows it's his personal thing, right? He loves pine trees, pinecones, pinewood--shit, he'd probably get a boner for an air-freshener. So I've been stacking them high, making a nice little pine house for him, and one day he's going to be sitting in it thinking, 'This is such a nice pine house. I hope I never have to leave.' And then he's going say, 'But what's with this toothache?' and that's when I'm going to say, 'That's my goddamned Mister Twister hooking your fat fucking lip, you piece-of-shit fish!'"
"It's like On Golden Pond ," I said.
Derek glanced at me. "What's a golden pond?"
I explained the movie to him.
"Jesus. Is that the kind of shit you watch?" He spat a loogie into the water. "Sounds like a bitch flick to me."
My second job was to steal sodas from the ancient Pepsi machine in the boathouse. Derek liked to drink soda at all times, since, he explained, the carbonation helped cleanse your teeth and keep bad tastes away. He sometimes gargled with Mountain Dew while I watched, intrigued. "That's how Indians used to do it," he'd say, wiping his mouth. To help carry the sodas, Derek let me take his GripRite! fishing net, which had a magnificent green handle with the shiny GripRite! logo stuck above the rubber grip. When Derek was out of earshot, I liked to talk into the net like it was a microphone. "He's approaching the waterfall," I'd say, with a sportscaster's urgency. "Folks, looks like he's entered the boathouse in record time."
There was a girls ' bathroom inside the boathouse and sometimes I went in there to wash my hands and feel the thrill of being inside a forbidden place. Fishing bored me. I hated standing on shore all day while Derek paddled around in the boat, snagging and unsnagging his line from the glut of pines deep beneath the surface. When he got tired of drifting around , he'd paddle in and cast from the shore, sticking his fishing rod in the flat apron of wet dirt that rimmed the lake. This seemed to go against the very idea of fishing itself, which I pointed out to him once as he slurped a Pepsi I'd nearly dropped on the walk back.
"Makes no difference," he said. "Hooks 'em just the same."
The day we dropped the patio chair in, we watched as it resisted sinking, steady above the water, defying all physics. Then the back legs tipped, suddenly, and the chair rocked back onto itself, like a kid accidentally dozing in algebra. The water was murky, but I could just make out the legs slipping into the darkness. When it was gone, I could see the two of us reflected in the water's surface, eager, and a little in awe. "The water makes us look squiggly," I said.
Derek slapped my neck. "Stop saying shit like that," he said.
By August, my father and Janna had moved into a townhouse a few miles from the high school where my father's faculty yearbook photo showed his lips drawn into an implied smile, another doomed beard finding strange purchase along the boyish slope of his jaw. This year's caption was " Anybody got a paintbrush?! "
" Anybody got a paintbrush?! " Janna said. "Don't you think they could have come up with something better?" The four of us were unloading boxes of books in the middle of the curtainless living room. Ally and I had been distracted by a box of my father's old Bob b sey Twins books. On the flyleaf of each, my father's first attempts at self-portraits, an almond-eyed boy with grim lips and cropped hair.
"Oh, I don't pay any attention to those kinds of things," my father said.
Janna tossed the yearbook aside. "Well, maybe you should," she said. "Maybe someone should take these kids aside and tell them they're not as clever as they think they are. I know I'd like to."
My father shrugged. "Not sure what good that'd do," he said. Beneath each portrait my father had included his name, address, and phone number; a habit that endured in all my school drawings. I liked the idea of someone finding them later on, wondering if they should call.
"God, I used to think I was everything ," Janna said.
That night Janna tucked me in in my new room. My father had hung a sheet across the window, blocking out the streetlight that made clicking noises I'd thought were fingernails tapping the windowpane. It was the first time I'd ever been alone in a bedroom with Janna. "Sometimes I get freaked out by the streetlight," I said. She sat next to me, her hair still wet from a before-bed shower. "I wake up and think it's someone outside." Janna put a hand to my head and gently rubbed my hair.
"Sometimes everything seems freaky," she said.
Janna's body gave off a whiff of lavender and citrus. I balled my fists beneath the pillow and felt tears in my eyes. "Janna," I whispered.
"Hm?"
"I heard those boys," I said. "The boys who died."
"You did?"
"I'm pretty sure. I mean, I heard something." I paused. "I've never told anyone before."
"That's okay," Janna said, but I couldn't tell what was supposed to be okay. The thing was, I wasn't really sure I'd heard the accident. I remembered putting Ally to bed, closing her door. I remembered turning on the hall lights and the lights outside. I heard a noise. A sound like a shopping cart slipping into another. I opened the front door and listened. I heard insects, a dog barking. A truck gearing down. I closed the door. "I think about it sometimes," I said.
"I'll bet," Janna said.
The next morning I found Ally in the bathroom, crying. "I don't know how to make it go," she said. She had the tubwater running, unable to figure out the shower. "You just press the brass button in," I said.
" You do it!" she cried. "I don't get it!"
"Ally," I said, "it's a shower like any other shower, and a button like any other button. Just press it, and the shower will turn on." I closed the door and listened to her sobbing. A moment later I heard the shower kick in. When I walked away I could hear Ally singing "Deck the Halls" in a voice I'd never noticed was lovely before
"He's on to me," Derek said. We were picking lures from Derek's tackle box. "He's sick of everything I've got."
"This one's nice," I said, selecting a plastic minnow with two chandelier hooks hanging form each end. "I like the hooks."
"Saltwater lure," Derek said.
It was the end of August and I'd grown tired of the quest for Tank. Some days Derek would reel in a catfish and I feel a flicker of excitement--at long last, the end--but these, according to Derek, were Tank's "bitches," and he'd toss them back. Other days Derek would catch sunfish, whose sharp dorsal fins always pricked him when he dislodged the hook, and throw them into the campfire I was allowed to stoke with dead branches and leaves. "Serves you right," Derek would say. "Burn in hell."
Derek found a lure, then ordered me to go get soda. When I returned, he cracked open a Mr. Pibb, then spat it out. "Jesus. This soda's piss-warm." He threw the can into the weeds. "Tastes like canned shit." I told him they must have just restocked the machine. Derek turned on me. "Don't you think I know that?" he said. "You think you're smarter than me now? Some kind of soda expert?"
"No," I said.
"Mr. Pibb himself?"
"You shouldn't litter like that."
Derek grabbed me by my T-shirt and swung me to the ground. "You're a goddamned baby," he said. He kicked me in the side. "Now see if you can get us some cold sodas, Mr. Pibb."
I lingered in the girls ' bathroom. I locked the door and ran my hands under the sink. In the mirror, my eyes looked raw, red. I wiped my hands on my shorts and decided I would spend the rest of my life in the girls ' bathroom at Campfire Lake. I sat on a radiator and twirled the GripRite! between my feet, idly. I shouldn't have been surprised when Derek knocked, but I was. "I'm not coming out," I said.
"Don't be stupid," Derek said. "Open the door."
"I'm tired of you hitting me."
A moment later I heard Derek rattling the Pepsi machine. Then a metallic tapping against the bathroom door. "Listen," he said. Tap, tap . "You hear that? I got you a nice cold Pepsi. Now come on. Why don't you come out here and drink it? Ok?" Tap . "Doesn't that sound good? Mmm, that's refreshment."
"You take me for granted."
"Oh, Christ . What do you think you are, my girlfriend ? 'You take me for granted.' That's funny."
"You're not really my friend."
Derek laughed. "You know what? You don't have any friends. Ever notice that? Unless we're counting your freaky little sister. Little Miss Freakface."
"At least she doesn't have to hang around with little kids just to feel big," I said.
Derek beat against the door. "Come on out and say that, shithead. Come on!"
I stood, but didn't walk to the door.
"Right. Didn't think so. You know what? You're a faggot," Derek said. "And that's all you'll ever be." I heard him lean against the door, putting his lips to the crack. "And by the way, that Pepsi was Diet, so fuck you!"
I waited twenty minutes before opening the door. It was too far to walk home, plus I needed to get my socks and shoes from the lakeside, so I meandered along the smaller lake, knocking pebbles in with a swing of the GripRite!, deciding how to approach Derek. My plan: run if he came towards me. I was worrying the details of my escape route, when I noticed a gray fish moving just beneath the surface of green algae. He swam beside a log, and I recognized him as Tank the way I recognized my name in cursive. When I scooped him into the GripRite! one of his long whiskers lopped over the side of the net. He was heavy as a sack of rice.
"Derek," I said, when I'd gotten within earshot. "I've got something to show you."
Derek turned, knee-deep in the lake, negotiating a snag. "What? Your bra and panties?"
I'd had never known, until then, the feeling of winning--and winning big. Once, in third grade, I'd won a gift certificate for selling the most holiday candles (my mom ran a small operation out of her office), but it had been a long tough drought ever since. I watched Derek step onshore and felt the triumph and regret peculiar to overdogs.
"No," I said. "It's your fucking fish." I hoisted the net in the air. Tank flapped inside, his thick tail writhing.
"Holy," Derek said.
I held the net over the water. "And he hates pine." Tank fell with a heavy plop, scaring up clouds of murky water. And then I felt blood on my tongue, felt Derek's bony knuckles against my face, head, side. I covered as best I could, but he was too much. "You goddamned piece of--" He landed punches on my arms and shoulders. I knew I was crying, but I wasn't ashamed. "It's not that bad," I said.
"Shut up!"
"It's not that bad at all."
When Derek left me, I lay on the ground for a while, feeling the blood pulsing in my temples.
There is one night that marks the end of that summer, although it was not the night I explained my cuts and bruises to my mother, not the night my father told Ally and me that he and Janna were getting engaged, not the night I stopped turning all the lights on. It was the night Ally and I heard a knock at the door, heavy, insistent. "Open up!" a voice said. "Please!"
I looked at Ally and felt my legs go rubbery. "Don't!" I hissed. "It's Derek." We were standing in the front foyer, Ally in her pajamas, me holding an iron fireplace poker, ready for Derek to break through, enraged.
"Please!" a female voice said, "we've been in an accident!"
When Ally opened the door, we saw two teenagers, a boy in a leather jacket hugged to the chest of a blond-haired girl. There was blood down the boy's face. The girl held a blood-soaked newspaper to his eye. "We saw your lights," she said.
Ally led them to the kitchen, while I hid in the living room, afraid they were criminals. I couldn't stop my legs from shaking. I watched as Ally sat the girl down at the kitchen table, then led the boy to the sink. She turned the faucet on and held a damp dishtowel to his eye.
"I'm so thirsty," the boy said. "You have no idea."
Ally took a cup from the drying rack and filled it with water. "This water is magic," she said.
"Magic water," the boy said. Ally held it to his lips.
"We hit a pole," the girl said. She began to cry. "My parents are going to kill me."
"I've never been so thirsty," the boy said. "This is the thirstiest I've ever been." He was stooped towards the sink, his ringed fingers gripping the countertop. Ally folded the towel against his eye. The fold clouded with blood. "We were driving," he explained.
He would lose that eye. I would know. I would see him, years later, when I entered state college, just miles from home. He would stand on streetcorners, a biker-boy with a studded jacket and mutton chops, a dramatic black patch over his left eye. A little muttdog would trail at his feet, tethered to a public bench where kids with skateboards smoked inelegantly under the elms. He would heckle me for quarters.
But that night he stood against the sink, newly damaged, as Ally fed him cup after cup of tapwater. "When we saw those lights," he said, "we knew this was home."
