For fishing, you dug them up in the backyard, pulled them out of the earth and dropped them in a coffee tin with clumps of moist dirt. Her father showed her how to run the sharp metal up through the worm's body, so the whole hook wore a flesh-colored coat. If you got out of bed at night an Indian might grab your ankle and if no one left the night light on, then you'd stay in bed. Sometimes she dived headfirst under the covers, where there were colored fish like in the dentist's salt-water aquarium. He likes me because I lie still. Her brother put slugs in a jar, sprinkled salt on them, and watched as they blistered in the sun. He'd cut green tomato caterpillars with his Swiss army knife into tiny bite-sized pieces and helped their father pour gasoline on the Japanese caterpillars’ webby homes in the backyard trees.
All morning the caterpillar bad-mouthed worms, how they lay around on the forest floor smelly and lazy as drunks. He felt superior because he had a hundred legs and a velvet coat of shiny blues and greens.
“But it's not nice,” the bear said, “to be so uppity. What about ‘all God's creatures great and small?” They both leaned against a big maple, listening to rain slap at the highest leaves and watching the turtle open her stonelike mouth and press out her gray tongue to the beads of water that dangled off tendril ferns.
“It's easy for you to say.” The caterpillar was always touchy about his genealogy. “You come from an old family, one known for its lack of common sense and lyrical appointments.”
“I've never understood all that,” the bear said yawning. “If we're all here now, aren't all our families the same age?”
“I admire your Socio-Marxist tendencies,” the caterpillar said, stretching out on the collar of the bear's evening coat, as if he might nap. “But the most important thing to remember is not to take anybody else's toys.”
“You make it sound so easy,” he said sleepily, shifting his rump off a jagged rock and tipping his hat down over his eyes. “If only it were so.” The bear sighed as if he were made out of caramel, a quivering baritone that intermingled with the prickly static moving in and out of the troll's lungs. Sandy opened her eyes. His belly rested on her forehead like a fat cow and she could see up the tunnel of his loose shirt to where chest hairs grew like ocean grass around his nipples. Each of his kneecaps pressed against an ear, magnifying the back-and-forth rub of his khaki pants. His hands gripped the headrest, pelvis repeatedly flattening down, then tipping up over her face.
The worm strained to multiply and even though she didn't really have breasts, she didn't want the little girl T-shirts anymore. She wanted a training bra and had snuck over to the lingerie department to look at them. Weary of the salesgirls and suddenly embarrassed, she fled to the toy department, the far counter where they kept the expensive baby dolls locked up behind glass. His pelvis cracked against her skull and the troll swung his knee over her face and knelt beside her, trying to catch his breath. She tipped her head sideways and gagged up warm Coke laced with come. The sky behind the windshield was a green-blue cellophane. He stood, hunched over, squeezed between the front seats, got his cigarettes from the glove compartment, his glasses from the storage shelf, and a beer from the cardboard twelve-pack on the floor. They didn't stay in motels anymore. He'd taken to sleeping beside her on the mattress, spreading the afghan over them both, curling up behind in a parody of marital bliss. He opened the driver side door and the harsh overhead bulb lit up the van, attracted a pair of tiny moths, made her feel like a girl in the water-stained porno magazines she found in the woods behind the house. He left the door ajar and walked out into the trees to smoke his cigarette, finish the warm beer, and pee inconsolably into the roots of a maple. Last night she'd seen the troll, sitting on a stump, wiping his eyes with one of his cloth handkerchiefs, shoulders heaving.
Turning her head away from the little puddle of puke, she saw the file folder where he kept his love letter. It must have fallen when he'd pressed himself between the seats. Her wrists were secured together with tape, but she managed to lift the folder into the light and open it to the first page.
Michael Jackson told me he never liked Lisa Marie, but he had to marry her because the king came to him in a dream and demanded that he be her second husband. If he has on white, then it’s the real king, the Love Me Tender king and you should listen to him. But if he has on green sequin trousers and a silk shirt then it’s the fake king and you should disregard everything he says. You may wonder why I took girl, that’s very secret and only for the king to know himself, it may have to do with office politics in a certain giant corporation and that the board of directors wants me dead. This is because I read the secret documents and found out about my non-person status. I challenged this 666 man to prove to me he had not tampered with the weather map and I warned the world about this christ killer in 1978. People don’t know, but Jesus once had a girl he kept tied up. He did many things to her, like sprinkle whisky on her forehead and feed her plums. Even though she was heavy he carried this girl on his back like a baby and he’d test her to make sure she was real. The Las Girl is a white cat with a pink tongue. Anyone can fuck her anytime they want. The magazines are filled with girls and no one seems to realize you can take one whenever you want.
The pages flew out of her grasp and there was the troll's face. Orbiting bugs reflected in his glasses and a soft blue vein swelled above his eyebrow. Why hadn't she heard the door open? The troll heaved his weight up into the driver's seat. His jaw trembled and she smiled to assure him it was all right. Already he turned his ring around so the ruby was palm up and he swung his arm up over his head. She closed her eyes; there were reasons. Before all this, whenever the light fell a certain way across her bedspread, she'd think of herself as a girl in a movie, watching rain beat against the window, the subdivision houses snaking off like a necklace into the horizon.
Sometimes she wrestled her brother down to the ground, sat on his chest, and dangled a drop of spit over his face while he twisted his head back and forth screaming for her to stop. She complained about unloading the dishwasher and taking out the garbage and sometimes she said hateful things to her mother that hinted at the reasons Dad left her. A desperateness came over her, a feeling of knowing the limits of her own mind, and she'd say sneaky things to everybody aimed at making them feel bad about themselves. She lied too, told strangers that she lived on a farm, that her mother was a lawyer and her father away in New York City on business. She'd lost a lot of friends because she lied; they got suspicious of everything she said, then started avoiding her in the hallways at school.
This summer her mother kept asking her brother if he'd packed, if he had everything ready. She'd taken a bath, put on a new dress and red lipstick, then sat at the kitchen table flipping through a magazine, glancing up every few minutes at the clock. He'd come into Sandy's room and sat on the edge of the bed, told her how weird it was that Mom hated Dad, because he didn't even think about her that much. His relief at going home was so palpable it infiltrated everything he said, made him flushed and talkative. He told about the video arcade in the mall and how they rented movies and watched them in the basement. Sandy felt pressure building up around her heart; she couldn't look at her brother and finally picked up the picture he'd drawn her as a good-bye present, a depiction on tracing paper of two white horses drinking from a stream.