He was always talking about getting a cabin in Canada, a place with a woodstove and outdoor plumbing. He'd heard the hippie talk about all the eccentrics who lived up there, the Vietnam vets and the witchy-poo ladies who collected herbs and practiced white magic. Sometimes he wanted California, to sleep on Venice beach and work at one of the open-air bars along the strip. Since the accident he had a new plan almost every week; every scenario projected him out of his scarred body and into a place where his face was whole and beautiful and his every gesture imparted with subtle meaning.
Reaching down, she gathered the remaining items and put them in the shoe box, pulled the top sheet up over the blood stain, and turned off the little coiled desk lamp. She stood for a minute in the dark room, looking into the woods behind the condos. On the other side was the back of a fast-food restaurant, its green Dumpster and glittery blue-gray asphalt. Bright artificial light played in the leaves, and it was then, just as she'd turned her back to the window and was stepping into the hallway, that she heard someone crying, the voice like a string of tiny diamonds cut for a birthstone ring.
“Steve!” Ginger knocked on his bedroom door with the knuckle of her pointer finger. “Are you in there?” The sobbing stopped and the noises that followed formed an equation of panic, a tittery silence, a shush, then the bedsprings shifting against the floor and denim slapping up against skin. Steve walked across the carpet and opened the door just enough to frame his flushed chest. A blast of heat that reeked of come and blood wafted out, a scent she remembered from going down into a neighbor's furnace room, to see a cat give birth to kittens.
A line of blonde hairs ran down his stomach into his pants and his eyes were so bloodshot she knew he was both stoned and drunk. He tipped a can of beer up to his lips and smiled, glancing back toward the bed.
“What's so funny?” Ginger asked.
“Nothing,” Steve said, looking down at the carpet and trying to contain his shit-eating grin.
“You got a girl in there?” Ginger asked.
Steve looked at her with a defiant smile and let the door swing open a few inches so Ginger could see the girl coiled under his army blanket, mascara smeared around her eyes and her face slick with tears. The inverted cross and pentacle plaque over her head, the black light poster of a wizard nearby, and that smell, dirty sheets, his blood-soaked hospital clothes, ribboned with the delicate scent of the girl's body like a single tulip dipped in salt water.
“I should go,” the girl said, shifting in the bed to wrap the blanket around her as she stood, then turned away, bending over so her ribs pressed out of her back. She slipped her T-shirt over her shoulders and pulled up her jeans.
“You don't have to go just because this prude shows up,” Steve said. “It's a free fucking country. Anybody can do anything they want.”
The girl didn't answer, just finished dressing and slipped awkwardly past him and into the hallway. Steve's long hair hung in his face, obscuring all but his green eyes and shiny forehead, the hard curve of his upper lip. “The Minister's daughter,” he taunted Ginger, “rescuing the lamb from slaughter. How touching.” He laughed as the girl followed Ginger down the darkened hallway.
“You bitches can fuck each other in hell for all I care,” Steve yelled.
The girl led the way through the darkest part of the forest, far from the condo lights and the backyard spots of the subdivision. Trash clumped in the weeds; rain ruined paperbacks and silver gum wrappers. These woods were domesticated; an old fort hung precariously in one tree, a tire swing in another. She chattered nervously, telling Ginger how on summer nights she'd snuck over to swim in the condo pool and play with the condo kids, who always had firecrackers and porno magazines and could blow smoke rings. “Once we built a hut out of branches and wet newspapers and made Indian paste out of cornflakes and water. We did a lot of stuff,” the girl said, “had wedding ceremonies and beauty contests where the winners wore necklaces made out of beer tabs.”
The path led up into a backyard, past a picnic table and a swingless swing-set frame. There was no furniture in the split-level's rec room, no light on by the garage. The girl's jaw started to tremble and she said she didn't know what made her go over there. “Come and spend the night at my house,” she begged. “Nobody's home.”
“No, you go back,” Ginger told her. “Make sure the front door is locked. You'll be okay.” She touched the cool inside of the girl's wrist, the delicate tendons and subtle pulse. The girl swung into her chest, her damp lips in the angle of Ginger's neck.
The match's flame sent a prism of fractured light over the blackbirds’ oily feathers. Orange sequined their wings as they huddled in their own shit on piles of bound newspaper. The deer's eyes like marbles dipped in mayonnaise, an earwig climbed up a nostril, and slivers of dried ligament were pasted with soured blood to the top of the TV. She felt in her pocket for the baptismal candle she'd taken from the junk drawer in the church kitchen. She'd thought she'd have to use the small Christmas Eve candles with the cardboard skirts her father kept in a box in his office closet, but the old baptismal candle was there in the drawer, meant for a baby girl with its tiny pink rosebuds and cream-colored dove. With a swivel of her wrist, she worked the candle into the red dirt, took the big tarnished serving spoon from her pocket, and stabbed it into the earth over and over until she could lever out wedges of dirt. With her fingers she picked out bits of broken glass, an earthworm, molten pebbles like tiny internal organs. Breathing through her mouth, she avoided the voluptuous stink of the deer and the blackbird droppings like scuzzy ocean foam. Dirt packed under her fingernails as she used the edge of the spoon to hack through a thick root. Chips of geometrical ice fluttered in the candle's light, first frost forming on the goat grass that grew along the inner barn walls. She coiled each half of the severed vine, like baby snakes, in the dirt. The blackbirds were upset, picked at their feathers, made subtle sounds like a lady in church searching for a hard candy at the bottom of her purse.
She placed the small plastic cross against the granules of dirt and pulled the flare out of the deer's head, ripped it off the top of the television. Its expression seemed to have changed; maybe it was a trick of light, but the stoic stare was tempered now by the mouth's smirky angle, the wry tip of the deer's head. There was a drapery panel of paisley material in a pile of rain-soaked clothes out in the dump, near the ash trees and the earth balls where she'd once seen a black snake, and she hoped to use the cloth as a burial shroud. Candlelight sparked the frosted sumac berries, the kudzu leaves. She walked out of the barn among skunk weed and fisted ferns, a baby's cracked car seat and water-wasted Playboys. The flame blew sideways and dimmed. She cupped her hand around the flame, felt the fire's heat in the soft part of her palm. She heard a sound in the trees and terror quivered through her. It wasn't the furtive moves of squirrels or the sneaky sound of rats gnawing into garbage, but the sting of electrified flesh, like a belly flop, or a slap across the face. The toe of her tennis shoe caught on a kudzu vine and as she went down, five warm fingers wrapped around her ankle. Leaves flew up as she flung her arms out and kicked with her free leg. A blackberry briar ripped across her cheek and a star zigzagged like white neon.
Eight: SANDY
With every thrust of his hips, soft pubic hair and balls hit Sandy's chin and she let out a gasp, her tongue a rag carpet, her chapped lips stretched into an O, the cracked corners stinging. Worms moved inside the earth, inching their fleshy bodies through the dark; they met and whispered like French lovers, twisting themselves into knots and bracelets. She kept her eyes closed, relaxing each part of her body like when the gym teacher played the wave tape and the girls learned yoga and stress management. Worms needed oxygen when their muddy tunnels slogged full of water, so on rainy days they sprawled out pink and obsequious onto the sidewalk, letting their ridged skin breathe. The rounded shadow of her umbrella fell over their pink bodies, and Sandy, in her yellow rain slicker with the ducks on the pocket and little yellow boots to match, crushed each under her plastic sole. Gray globulars glistening on the cement, usually a sliver kept its wits and squirmed for cover in the damp blades of green grass.