Steve gave a condescending snort and Ted glanced at her with a look that said Stop encouraging that girl. But Ginger liked her, knew she was talking so much because she was lonely, that she needed some attention.
“I don't feel so good,” the girl said suddenly. She was offended by Ted's and Steve's patronizing silence and slumped back heavily against the seat to pout.
Ginger turned around, “Are you going to be sick?”
The girl shook her head, tightened her lips, and leaned her cheek against the window. She was trying to be brave, the way little girls do when they've scraped their knee or have a splinter, when a bumblebee's wiggled into their frilly anklet and stuck its stinger into the pink flesh of their soles.
“So where are we going?” Steve asked. At first he couldn't keep his eyes off the girl's tiny breasts, but her talking had ruined all that and now he just wanted her out of the car.
“I live in Woodbridge Hills,” the girl said, “right up there.” She clung to the door handle, her breath making little clouded circles that she wiped away with her sleeve.
Ted made a left turn off the road into a pre-fab subdivision hugging the highway. The entrance was marked with a well-lit bill-board surrounded by white gravel. Streets were named after the contractor's daughters: Ashley Court, Jennifer Street, and Laura Lane.
A lot of women were abandoned here, left to raise teenagers in exhausted-looking split-levels. Mothers who were at work, or at the club, or so tired in the evening they didn't care what happened. Some slept all weekend with their doors locked; some went out to the Hilton Bar and drank margaritas. Inside these houses, the TV was always on and kids jumped on the beds until the slats broke and had wrestling competitions in the basement. Walls were smudged with food and toothpaste and she'd even seen muddy tennis-shoe tracks on the ceiling, as if divorce had made the children light as feathers.
“Go slow,” the girl said, as they passed a blue ranch house. Inside its bay window, a table lamp underlit ceramic comedy and tragedy masks mounted over the couch. “That one,” the girl said, pointing to a white split-level, with burgundy shutters and a colonial eagle hung over the door. “That's it,” the girl said, “that's Sandy's house.”
The silver Tot Finder sticker drew Ginger's eye to the second-floor window, and deep inside the room a votive candle burned on a white dresser. Next to the dresser was the painted door Ginger’ d seen in the newspaper; the white unicorn, the rainbow, the fluffy clouds, all painted in a sweet amateurish style by Sand y herself.
“Is anyone in there?” Steve asked.
“Her mother,” the girl said. “Her father lives in a different state with some other woman.”
The light went on in the second-floor window. Beyond the sheer curtains Ginger could see the edge of a double bed and a long, low chest with a portable TV on top. The curtain floated up and the round anxious face of a woman hovered there in the dark pane of glass.
“Shit,” Steve said. “Let's get the fuck out of here.”
Ted skidded up the road. The girl started to cry and said that Sandy was the nicest girl, that there was always something kind of sad about her, that sometimes she wore the same skirt all week and her tops and bottoms didn't always match and sometimes too, when she was nervous, she stuttered. “God,” the girl screamed, “I can't stand it!”
There was no fire, just glowing embers giving off a hazy orange light, though it was still easy to see the deer's head balanced on top of the TV. Ted had dragged the TV from the dump and set it up at the edge of the fire. All the knobs were missing and the screen was smashed out. Inside, a metal board with Japanese writing and a lattice of multicolored wires snaked this way and that. He carved a hole into the top of the deer's head with his jackknife and stuck in a red flare, kept for emergencies in the trunk of his car. The pink flame was low now, directly above the fur, like a Pentecostal fire. Ginger was thinking the deer was the last one left and there was no doubt it did have an apocalyptic look, the way wax spilled onto the fur and thickened blood dripped over the edges of the television. But the thought was crazy; there were thousands of deer, maybe millions.
While the others had taken the flashlight and gone to look for more firewood, Ginger went out to pee around back in the safe spot of feather moss and butter fern, where she'd never seen a snake and there was no poison ivy. She walked down the pressed-dirt path, past the sumac grove and the dead cat in the open box, its skeleton delicate as a chalk math problem. In the woods she lifted her skirt and squatted, listened to the sound of her urine hitting leaves, then walked to where a cushionless couch was set up around a cold campfire. Burnt Bud cans. Blackened angles of wood. The low-lying mist clung to the weeds, made her feel dreamy, and she threw herself down on a safe-looking patch of grass and thought of the deer, how it hovered above the hood in the sliver of sky between the dark tree line on either side of the road. It was the earth's spinning that made it seem to pause and float.
An airplane's red lights divided the splatter of stars and she could feel the bright eyes of angels in the icy constellations and sense a sort of second-place grace spreading over her. Wind rocked the leaves, made her shiver and curl up sideways with an ear to the earth. There was the rumbling of the highway, but then behind her what sounded like a footstep, a crackle of dry leaves; a twig snapped. She pushed herself up into a monkey squat, turned toward the barn, thought of yelling for Ted. But if she spoke the devil would come after her, fierce as a rabid bat. If he was watching her now, there were a hundred places he could hide. She felt the thick lips of her pussy still flushed and filled with blood.
Four: SANDY
A strip of light, radiant as a fluorescent tube, shone up from under the closed door, illuminating the edge of the bare mattress, her bound ankles, pale blood-starved feet, the toenails like lavender shells. Millions of dust particles swirled around, made her feel like a tiny figure inside a glass dome, where the miniature scene never changes and specks of white plastic careen around sublime as real snow.
The cat raised its sleepy head, looked with indifference toward the door, then, satisfied no one was coming down the hall, shifted its belly and walked over her, hip to rib to shoulder bone, as if these were raised rocks and her flesh a riverbed. Crouching, it tongued her ear, with sly little strokes that resounded roughly through the cartilage. Sometimes the cat chewed her hair, and at first, before she learned to keep her eyes shut, it had batted her lashes as if they were spiders.
She listened to the rain behind the boarded window, the TV downstairs, and for any sound of his presence among these. The laugh track rose and fell and she heard him hack, clear the petal of phlegm from his throat, shift his weight on the couch. She sensed his anticipation, obvious and uncomfortable as summertime humidity. It was nearly time, and she needed to let the seconds build to minutes, the minutes to hours, listening to the fly trapped inside the ceiling fixture buzz hysterically against the glass.
He stood, took one step, then another. She pressed her ear to the mattress, felt the muscles in her neck harden and separate. The steps varied in cadence from carpet to wood to bathroom tiles, then stopped. She heard the stream of his pee, first hard, then softer until he flushed and the water swirled down the drain. He jiggled the handle until the tank started to fill up. Drops of urine flooded her vagina; pee trickled between her legs, puddling in the crack of her rear, then soaked through the fabric of her nightgown into the bare mattress. The smell of urine tightened her stomach muscles, stretched her nightgown up like a tent between her hip bones. She struggled to wiggle her butt off the damp spot. It was okay, she said to herself, it didn't really mean anything. I am still the same person. She tried to move again, but each time, the cord that ran under the mattress forced her back into the cold pee.