Scott Heim - Mysterious Skin

I met Wendy on her porch. She had screwed a glowing taillight into the back end of her brother’s bike, and I spotted her from two blocks away. She stood in the light’s flashing red, waiting for me, bundled in her coat and scarf. She looked beautiful. “It’s freezing,” she yelled as I skidded to a halt. “And you’re conning me into following you to your new whorehouse.”

We rode toward Carey. I wanted to write a schedule on the park bathroom walls, to “fill the johns in on their new merchandise,” as I’d told Wendy. I’d already been thinking about what fifty dollars a week could bring-more drugs for Wendy and me, a new pair of high-tops, even a real tree this coming Christmas in place of the artificial one Mom kept in our neighbor’s cellar.

I stuck a pair of Charlie’s wax lips over my own. When we stopped at the tracks for an oncoming train, Wendy leaned toward me and kissed them.

In the pitch black, the park was downright creepy. I propped my bike against a tree, and Wendy let hers fall to the ground. We pussyfooted toward the men’s bathroom. It was unlocked, and she switched on the light.

In magenta crayon, I drew an erupting volcano, then wrote: “Saturday afternoons, from 2 until 3. Ready to please.” That sounded stupid, so I x’ed out the last three words and wrote “Young and willing.” Under it, in green, I scribbled a dollar sign. In less than twenty-four hours, I thought, I’ve become a hustler.

“Let’s head home,” Wendy said, “before frostbite sets in.”

I stopped her. “Wait. I want to show you something.” I unzipped. Wendy looked at me as if I were crazy. I pointed to my dick, to the bruises from that afternoon, already purple from the teeth marks Charlie left on my skin. “Look what the guy did to me,” I said. “No brains whatsoever in the blow job department.”

“Put that back in your pants, exhibitionist.” She stomped out, lecturing. “From now on, don’t let anyone do that to you. Your prick is not a candy cane. Next time somebody might chomp the whole thing off. You should start carrying Mace or a switchblade. At least charge them extra if they do that to you.”

“I didn’t realize it was hurting until it was over.” I bit a chunk from the wax lips and handed the rest to her. “Here. An early Merry Christmas.” The cold knifed my skin. I zipped back up.

We biked another half mile west. Our bodies hurtled through the dark. My eyes teared up, blurring the city lights that zoomed past us in stark, rhinestoney streams. After a while, the wind numbed me completely. I wiggled my fingers, barely feeling the gloves. I thought of the twenty-dollar bill in my wallet.

We sped past the entrance road to the Riviera Drive-In Theater. It had been closed since summer, but a feeble light still illuminated the marquee. Random letters were stuck there, and someone had rearranged them to spell HES COMING SOON. Wendy and I abandoned our bikes. We climbed the fence and walked forward, through the labyrinth of speaker poles. The projection booth’s paint was chipping. Ahead of us, the rectangular drive-in screen resembled a gigantic white envelope. It obliterated part of the sky, the open door to an empty world.

We stopped in the lot’s center. It was nearly midnight. The silence snuck up on us. I listened carefully for a siren, a dog’s bark, or a car horn, but I heard nothing. I remember thinking, It should be snowing now, and then, as if I’d punched a button marked MIRACLES, the sky lit up, speckled with thousands of moving flakes.

I felt I had to speak to prove this was happening. “It’s snowing.”

I took Wendy’s hand. Snowflakes clung to our coats. “I wish they were showing a movie right now,” she whispered. “A film about our lives, everything that’s happened so far. And we would be the only ones standing here, just you and me.”

With her free hand, she unhooked a speaker from its pole. She twiddled the dials and lifted it to her ear. “Listen. I hear something. It’s the voice of God.” She laughed, and I leaned to where she held the speaker, the side of my head brushing against its chilly ridges. The snow began tumbling faster in sharp diagonal darts. I closed my eyes and listened. Wendy gripped my fingers tighter. After a while, I heard a whispering from deep within the speaker. It could have been something as explainable as Wendy playing a joke, or our gloves bristling together, or the wind that gusted the flakes around us. But I wanted the noise to be something else. “Yes,” I told her, “I hear him.” The rest of the world had frozen, and Wendy and I were all that remained. I brushed snow from her face. “I hear him.”

The summer air seemed ready to burst into flame. I finished mowing the grass and stretched in the rubber-ribbed lawn chair. Ten feet away, my mother stood with her head tilted, her sunglasses reflecting two white specks of sun, and aimed her gun at a pyramid of 7-UP bottles. Bang-bang-bang. Only a green shard remained from the top bottle, but her other shots had missed. “I’ll flunk my accuracy test tomorrow,” she said.

“Keep practicing,” I said. I was dressed in sandals and shorts, my bare knees smudged with grass stains. I sipped orange juice through a straw. I had basted my chest with suntan oil that smelled like toasted coconut.

The newspaper and mail had arrived early that morning: a telephone bill, a postcard from Deborah showing Haight Street under a tie-dyed sky, and a membership notice from the National Rifle Association for my mother. The other letters came from colleges in Indiana, Arizona, and a Kansas Christian school called Bethany that had no doubt gotten my name from some church function I’d participated in years ago. “Congratulations Christian Graduate,” the envelope said. I dumped the letters on the grass unread. I’d already decided to stay close to home for two years and attend the community college in Hutchinson.

My mother reloaded and aimed again. The bullets missed, missed, and missed, whizzing down the hill on the house’s north side. She gingerly placed her.38 on the grass. Watching my usually serious mother at target practice made me want to laugh. I wondered what the town’s busybodies thought, whether avenues of women were standing on their porches, squinting toward our house. Maybe a write-up would appear in the weekly paper, something like “Shots Heard on North Side of Town.” Since my father and Deborah had left, I reasoned that Little River regarded my mother and I as weirdos: the forever solemn, gun-toting divorcee and her acned, bookworm son.

My mother rubbed the gun against her thigh, slipping it into an imaginary holster. “Get dressed,” she said. “It’s time to go food shopping, and I need the company.” In the month since I’d finished high school, this had become our Saturday routine: a trek to Hutchinson to buy the week’s groceries, then stop for chocolate-and-vanilla-swirl ice cream cones on the way home. We were both free for the day-me from my occasional lawn-mowing jobs, and my mother from the prison.

Inside, I bounded the stairs to my room. I kicked aside paperbacks, plucked a shirt from a pile of clothes, and slipped it over my oily shoulders. Downstairs, I grabbed the newspaper and followed my mother out the door.

The heat rose in visible waves from the highway. My mother drove forward. She flipped a switch, and cool air filled the Toyota ’s front seat. I withdrew my mother’s country-western cassette from the car stereo slot, retired it to the glove compartment, and replaced it with a tape by Kraftwerk. My mother protested but began tapping her fingers on the steering wheel. The band’s robotic voices droned lyrics about romancing a machine. I “sang” along, then unrolled the Hutchinson News and scanned the headlines: COMMISSIONER INDICTED ON RAPE CHARGE; FLOOD WARNING FOR RENO COUNTY.