Day 43

You ever wake up one morning in a bed that you didn’t pay for and wonder, what the fuck do people see in me? You ever wander into the kitchen full of other people’s food that they’ll let you eat and think, It’s a travesty that I’m here, why do they let me do this?

You ever think about what other people do, suffer, eat shit, roll over for a couple dollars for you to have, that you just piss away on shit you don’t need. You ever have all of these sentiments in your head and its too much to bear so you tell yourself to forget it, and like that you make yourself forget. I wanted these eggs, that what I came in here for, I woke up and wanted these eggs, that’s all I came into this kitchen for.

I’ve been thinking about a lot of things like that lately. Lynda and I have been having sleep over’s at my apartment every Thursday. I pick her up from Uncle Tor’s and she smiles at me as she likes their green front door and I think, why are you so happy to see me? We’re just going to drive to the corner store near the VFW and buy a pack of Marlboro 27’s to split. You usually only smoke menthols but the chocolaty taste of the 27’s are “all right too”, is what you say. Lynda smiles and gets in the driver’s side, but its hard, you have to use the inside handle, and I can’t reach it where I sit so I have to roll down the window and have her pop it. She gets in and I ask her if drowsy Uncle Tor knows that she’s leaving and she’ll say no. And then we’ll drive to the Mexican corner store by the VFW because we both know the twenty three year old son of the owner from our friend Bennie, and we’ll say “Julio, we need a fix,” and Julio will give us the smokes and a lighter for free or a box of matches if his dad’s there and we’ll thank him.

You’ll say something about how Julio was looking at me again and I’ll want to say, “Fuck you for saying that,” and I will, but you’ll think I just don’t like him, not that it isn’t possible for someone to like me.

I feel like this isn’t the story I need to tell anymore. This is all selfish, boo-hoo, bullshit anyway. I need to tell you about Kingdom Come. Lynda took it, stole it right from underneath Cole’s fucking nose and nobody even noticed. She swiped it and showed it to me. At first I didn’t believe her, I said, “Fuck you, there’s no way.”

And then she pulled her blue backpack off the heaps of fast food wrappers on the driver’s side floor and inside there it is, the bat that shoved you out of the home you lived in for fifteen years. She holds it in her lap like nothing, like it isn’t a gnarled hunk of history. She runs her hands over tufts of dust and I want to slap her hands away, to tell her to stop it, leave the dust, its better dusty, because that means he’s forgetting about it.

We drive past Cole’s place and just stare at it, how simple the place looks, how nice. There are six lawn gnomes and a couple of plastic deer. You can tell they are a couple because you deer has antlers and a tuxedo bow tie and another has doe spots on its rump and a red ribbon on its head. They are facing it each like their too scared to kiss, or waiting for one another to blink. Cole did all this to the front yard, when Mom had it there was a garden to the East side, it didn’t grow much else besides pumpkins, something about the soil having too much sodium, but that was enough. I would stand with her on the front stairs and we would talk about what we would want to carve into them this year and each time she would say a witch and I would say a cat. And each year we carved them. I don’t know why I told you that either, that doesn’t have to do—I’ll shut up and get to the story.

We stand outside for a while and Lynda says, “I’m going to fuck that Deer up.”

“Cool, do it.” Is what I said back.

And she opens the door and hauls off from the car low, the hood of her green sweatshirt pulled tight over her head. She gets to the deer and gets into a slugger stance and I’m outside of the car, leaning against the hood of the car, the lights off of his garage are just enough to make a long shadow off her nose and I catch the grimace on her face as she brings the heavy bat around and shatters the deer’s head like a fucking million fireworks. The go spinning and I cover my hands to my mouth to keep from laughing at it all. She goes to the gnomes and smashes them all with overhead tomahawk chops and cracks their smiling gnomey faces to pebbles. Then to the orchid pile which was my mother’s garden and something inside of me want to run to where Lynda is now and steal the bat from her and go nuts, when she knocks one plant loose, I want to catch it and rip it in my teeth. But I bite the elastic near my wrists on my hoodie, and Lynda keeps going, for a while, until she stops and stares at the door. And everything is quiet except for the dog barking, and from the way the bark echoes I couldn’t tell if the dog was the next lot over or a mile away.

She’s standing with the bat in the slugger stance still, it high, her right elbow far out, staring at the door like it might burst open at any second, but the light in the living room never shifts away from black.

“Lyn,” I whisper as loud as I can from my place by the car, “Lyn, what the fuck are you doing?”

And she twists in her stance and I can see that the bunched top of her hood is covering her eyes.

“I,” she says, “I thought.”

“Get the fuck back over here.” I whisper shout at her and my arms are making wide “come hither” motions. She looks back at the door one more time before she pivots and takes huge leaping steps away, towards my car. I scramble back towards the driver’s side door and then we’re both inside, and kingdom king is back in Lyn’s lap. We’re driving and I don’t have my headlights on until Lynda tell me that I don’t have them on.

“We’re in fucking bat county,” she says in between big gulps of breath. “Turn your fucking lights on Rosie.”

And my fat fucking fingers fumble with the knob on the wiper knob and I turn the blades on for a second and curse under my breath.

We drive for twenty minutes, and I circle the twenty four hour diner on Lennox a few times and we stare at the neon sign together. Lynda stops breathing heavy as I turn back out onto the high way and go north, away from the city, til we’re out of sight of the last lamppost and then farm country that rolls dark on either side of the car. Its fall and I think the corn stalks have all been harvested, I think its all corn anyway.

“I’m going to park over there,” And I point to a farm road and swoops away from the road and we both take long breaths once we’re over from the shoulder and the car is idling. Lynda holds the back close to her chest now and I watch her, from somewhere a cigarette is in my mouth and Lynda lights it with a free hand with the Blackhawks Bic that’s in the well beneath the emergency brake.

“Why did you do that?” I ask her, and blow the smoke out the side of my mouth towards the cracked window.

“I thought it would be good,” is what Lynda says. Her smoke is lit but she’s not smoking, still holding the bat close to her. “We both hate him, right? We both would’ve wanted that.”

I think about the way Cole had held Kingdom come in his hands, out in front of him, like a accusing finger at my mother with her big black right eye, and me sitting in the grass. And I think, yeah, yeah this is probably right.

“You don’t ever think about doing something like this? I mean you’ve told me enough about him that I hate him too. Don’t you wish you could get back at him for all the shit he’s put you through? Breaking a plastic deer’s head is nothing. It was probably his wife’s anyway.”

“I know.” I say. “Fuck him.”

I think about coffee a week after we got thrown out of our house, that was ours, but was in his name and that he was going to keep. They weren’t married, my mother and Cole, and nothing was ever in her name, nothing, and we were in the twenty four hour diner on Lennox and I bought us coffee because I still had the ten dollars of my allowance that Cole gave to me for mowing the lawn. I had clipped the vine of a pumpkin and had felt terrible. We sipped black coffee with lots of sugar and stayed there all morning until she had to go to work. I slept in the hot back seat of the car until she got out.

A week later her black eye has gone away and we go back to Cole’s house. I watch from the driver’s side door, almost like tonight, and Cole won’t open the screen door for Mom. He talks to her with her lips brushing against the screen, his spit dribbles through it.

“Let me get my wallet and pack a bag for Rosie.” She doesn’t look at him.

“No,” he says, “no, you don’t”

He keeps repeating that, “No, you don’t” to anything she says until she comes back to the car.

There’s a silence in the car and Lynda tosses the cigarette she didn’t smoke out the window and I light another.

“There’s a storage locker filled with everything that Mom and I had a few miles from here. It has all of my clothes, and toys. It has all of my Mom’s things, and all of the stuff she had from your mom. He locked it up, just so we couldn’t have it.”

Lynda nods her head a few times and I turn on the radio, but its NPR so there isn’t a beat to make it look okay.

“I want to go there—I want to go there and get everything back.”

“How?”

And she keeps nodding her head until I back out of the farm road and still with my lights off I drive forward. We don’t see another car and pass the farm with the toppled over corn silo, and the trailer park with the sewage puddle the size of a swimming pool, and then another quiet mile and we turn into the storage area. There is no gate, there are just rows and rows of lockers with heavy locks the size of door knockers on them.

“Which one is it?” asks Lyn. She’s leaning forward, unlit cigarette hanging from the corner of her lip, still with her hood synched up tight.”

I point the cherry of my cigarette at a big one down at the far side of lane of lockers.

“Its that one, the double locker, he put away so much shit that he didn’t have enough room for just one of them.”

Lynda nods her head again to a beat I can’t hear and she’s outside of the car. The rain makes her look up, neither of us had noticed it. She rounds to my side of the car and gestures for me to get out. I light a new cigarette with one still in my mouth.

“I’ll get out after this next one, you go, I’ll get out.”

She pauses for a minute, still with the unlit 27 drooping now from the soak of the downpour, and when I break eye contact for a moment she goes to the far side of the lane. She gets all the way down and then points with Kingdgom at the locker. I chirp the horn at her to signal that it’s the right one, and she turns to it and pulls down on the lock the size of her waist. She squares herself about three feet away and then raises the bat above her head tomahawk style again. And then I honk one more time and she stops.

It takes me five minutes to walk down there and my hair is soaked by the time I reach her.

“I want to do it.” I’m out of breath from too many cigarettes and from trying to jog to her.

Lynda looks me over and then shakes her head and goes to raise Kingdom again.

“No,” I say and throw my hands on her skinny forearms. “Give the fucking thing to me.”

And she does, and now I raise it up as high as it will go over my head. My heart feels like a sub-pump, knocking and bouncing around in my ribcage and I look at the lock dripping rain water and lick my lips and bite my tongue as I swing down and shatter the thing. The blow breaks the off Kingdom come and it clatters to the side. Lynda gasps into her hands and then runs to the lock on the door.

I’m still catching my breath as she draws the door up and the smell of old things hits my nose.