“Anybody can copy a horse out of a book,” she said.
“You're probably right.” He took the picture back and went into his room with the red truck wallpaper and Snoopy bedspread.
The troll cut the black electrical tape with his pocketknife, pressed a strip down over her mouth, climbed into the front seat, and started the engine. She told her brother the drawing was beautiful and tacked it up on her bulletin board between her Winnie the Pooh postcard and the one of leaping dolphins. Her brother took her hand and said you couldn't touch dolphins because they got head colds and sore throats from the germs on your fingers. Dolphins liked people and wanted to come up on the land and get married, eat cheeseburgers, sleep in warm beds. Her brother said their dad was getting sick of his new wife and soon they'd both be coming back home. The troll was talking too, as he backed the van. But Sandy only half-listened, lying as she was in the grass behind the mess hall at camp, reading the letter her mother sent from home. The bear was over in the raspberry bushes, complaining about the thorns, picking nubs in his striped silk vest, and eating all the biggest berries himself.
“The caterpillar,” he said, “wasn't feeling very well. His symptoms are quite exotic: winged hallucinations and a longing for an Indian headdress. But to be honest,” the bear said sheepishly, “I'm afraid I've stepped on him. This happened once with a rather congenial cricket. One misstep and the most satisfying friendships are gone forever. It makes you think about God,” the bear said sadly. “It's so annoying leaving everything up to him.”
Nine: GINGER
Ted spread his wool army blanket on the ground, picked up glass shards and sharp rocks, though he couldn't stop the razor-tipped leaves of the kudzu from snaking closer. Through the blanket she felt bent grass, stiff weeds, and underneath cold damp dirt. He slipped his hand under her shirt, pushed her bra up so the underwire dug into flesh above the nipple, coned and flattened her breasts so they felt like animal teats. Above them a blurry drunkard's star was framed by gray branches. Trapped between that heaven and this earth, they were like the sinful Adam and Eve, Ginger thought, but instead of being cast out, God confined them to the polluted garden, to these fouled and fucked-up woods.
“You scared the hell out of me,” Ginger said as he undid her jeans, the metal button, the tingly silver teeth. This was a repentant fuck, so he treated her delicately and with great reverence like the common cup. Gently, he pulled her other tennis shoe off and pitched it into the kudzu near a rain-soaked sweater, then wriggled her pants down and crouched between her legs. By her head, a plastic grocery bag spilled out a roast bone, old spaghetti, yogurt cups, paper diapers that smelled of ammonia and melted butter. Junk mail and slimy plastic wrap were intertwined with the vines of kudzu.
Ted flattened his tongue and she felt his rough taste buds against her labia and looked down, watching how he moved his head like a dog drinks. And this thought was the raft that floated her over to pleasure. Sometimes it took a vision of herself, butt up, back arched, breasts hanging. Sometimes it was a rhythmic bar of his tongue strokes that pushed her out of this material world into the pure purgatory of sensation, that moment when the dirty words — clit, cock, and pussy — filled up with blood and became the language of desire. This reversal cast the fetid garbage, Ted's own palpable body odor, cigarette smoke, and sour milk into a metallic lick, the tangy taste of death's cock. The planet's gravitational spin swung her hand off the blanket into what felt like dry rice and wilted bok choy, ancient Chinese food in a splayed white paper carton. Ants ran from the scene, each holding a white kernel on their backs. Ted's voice box crackled like a jag of radio static. She put her hands into his long hair, cupped his scarred cheek against her lifeline, felt the stretched skin, the sinewy knots. Stray light from the condominium complex snagged in Ted's hair, his shirt fell open, exposing his bruised nipples; between them a crucifix, the minuscule body of a dying man nailed up on a tiny silver cross.
* * *
Steve sat in front of the fire in the barn, knees to his chest, shoulders straight, the position of Indian forefathers in museum dioramas. It was a small fire started with newspaper stoked with broken branches and an old tree stump. Flames encased them in red light and reflected in the snaggletoothed pieces of glass left along the edges of the TV screen. She could tell by Steve's swollen features that he was drunk and by his wide, dilated pupils that he'd recently snorted lots of cocaine. In front of him was a fairy circle of white plastic carnations and fallen feathers, in the center a carefully folded blood-soaked rag, the hospital's name stamped along the hem.
Ted's flushed face was weirdly translucent as he flipped the blanket up and spread it over the barn's dirt floor.
“Your dad was in the hospital today giving communion to some old lady.” Steve squinted his eyes, as if trying to squeeze out tiny tear bullets that would pockmark Ginger's face. Ted grabbed her hand; it was a warning that Steve was in one of his crazy moods.
“What a bunch of shit.” He poked the fire with a stick.
“Lay off her,” Ted said. “She hurt her ankle.”
“Fuck her ankle.” Steve stood up, his spit hissing on the embers. “What about all that shit she said to you in the mall?” He pointed at her.
Ginger felt her face flare up, her heart pound against her ribs. He's going to kill me, she thought, and Ted won't do a thing.
In the backseat Ted arranged the army blanket and the peony pillows from his bed. Everything he owned was in the car and Ginger could tell by the fast-food wrappers on the floor and the half-filled plastic gallon of springwater that here's where he'd been hiding out. She got under the blanket and put her bad leg up on the armrest. Ted made the rounds, the long gray parking lots, the dark fast-food chains, and the strips of ratty woods, over and over until it was three in the morning. Ginger watched light play in the long strands of Ted's hair and Steve's body rising and falling as he slept, hunched against the passenger door up front. Strip-mall lights strung out mile after mile like a necklace of meteors. She felt trapped in a film loop, the scenery out the window painfully familiar, but for all the kinship she felt it might as well be outer space.
“I thought I heard someone trying to break in down here,” her father said as he stood above her bed. “The door rattled and there was a knocking at the window and a voice like your mother's warning everybody to eat properly and not to bump the fontanel on the baby's head.”
“You're dreaming,” Ginger said, trying to see if he had on his striped pajamas or black suit. Slowly her eyes focused on his white clerical collar floating below his face like a leash. “Go back to bed.”
“I can't sleep. Mulhoffer invited the assistant minister from Deerpath Creek to preach tomorrow. He said it would be a nice change of pace.” Ginger heard the mellow sax notes of one of his jazz records in the stairwell and could smell that her father had been smoking cigarettes. “Promise you'll come,” he said, stepping closer to her bed.