Chuck Hogan - Devils in Exile

“It looks pretty,” said Danielle.

“Pre-tty,” repeated Doreen. Though she seemed more taken with the velvet pouch it had come in.

Mrs. Vetti said, “That is much too fine for her.”

Danielle responded with a long, uncomfortable stare.

Mrs. Vetti pretended not to notice, picking up one of the wrapped presents. “Look, Doreen.” She ripped it open. “A pillow. A new pillow. Hypoallergenic.”

Maven stared at Danielle, wondering what she might do. Danielle was touching the bracelet on her sister’s wrist, petting it with one finger.

Mr. Vetti, oblivious to the gift giving, asked her, “Where are you living now?”

Danielle did not answer. She never even turned to acknowledge the question. She looked at her sister’s face, then hugged her in her seat, pressing her cheek against Doreen’s cheek, whispering, “I love you,” then standing and walking out to the foyer.

Doreen touched her cheek with her long-nailed hand, finding it wet from Danielle’s tears. She wiped hard, nearly slapping herself, wanting the wetness off her.

The screen door slammed, and Maven realized that Danielle had left.

She had him pull over in front of Beano’s Packie, under an arrow sign made up of flashing red, white, and blue bulbs. “You wanna get us a sixer?” she said.

“Look, Danny, you don’t want to—”

“Fine,” she said, throwing open the door and getting out. “Jesus.”

They left the mercedes in an old office park and walked past large mounds of excavated earth left over from the office park’s construction decades before. Danielle led the way into the adjoining lot of undeveloped land, bordering the commuter rail tracks.

The Pits, as the area was known to Gridley teenagers, overlapped Gridley and neighboring Avon. Shared police jurisdiction — and being accessible only on foot — meant essentially no police jurisdiction, and so into this no-man’s-land came the party kids looking for a weekend place to drink and hang.

Danielle set down the bag of beer, pulling out a quart of Mount Gay rum. “Fuck, look at this wasteland.” The low areas were littered with cans, bottles, and rotting tires. “And this was it. This was the place. Our Club Precipice. This shithole.”

Maven pulled a Red Stripe out of the bag. She of course bought beer that required a bottle opener. Maven had been in a similar fix many times in Eden. He hooked one of his lower incisors under the serrated edge of the cap, biting down, using his teeth for an opener. He spit out the cap and drank half at a gulp.

“I have to see that again,” said Danielle.

He opened one for her.

“I’m gonna clip you on my key chain,” she said, turning and wandering, double-fisted, toward the unfenced tracks.

Maven drank again. Now he was her babysitter. He went to a big rock slathered with years of graffiti, that the kids used to call Painted Rock, and leaned against it, facing the tracks.

He had been here once in high school, taken by a friend who straddled the line between outcast and in-crowd. They took turns drinking one bottle of horribly sour white wine while nobody talked to them. After a while he and his friend went off exploring, thinking maybe they could spy into some bedroom windows from atop the high dunes. When they came back, some kid who was popular but not tough asked if they were gay, which got everyone laughing because it was so hilarious to pick on losers. So Maven went back along the paths to a dead raccoon they had seen, picking it up by its tail and coming back to drop it into the comedian’s lap while he sat talking to some girl. The kid totally lost his shit and went running off screaming across the train tracks, slapping at himself as though his clothes were on fire, and Maven and his friend split, having had not such a bad night after all.

Someone had erected a cairn of stones from the track bed, and Danielle was dismantling it, hurling the stones into the trees, one by one. Maven watched her, wondering why that DEA cop would be asking questions about her and not Royce.

“Hey!” he said. “Come off of there.”

She turned and flipped him off. “What, you think I’m going to jump in front of an oncoming train or something? Trains jump in front of me, fuck.” She yelled it loud, both ways down the tracks: “Fuck!” The echoes carried off like escaping footsteps.

Maven smashed his bottle and opened another with his teeth. Everything smelled the same as it had those interminable summers, growing up. Wildflowers and berries, everything baking in the sun.

Danielle tossed her beer bottle, which landed in the bushes and did not shatter. She turned to walk off the tracks and stumbled on the stones, falling onto her ass. She kicked at the offending stones, smiling at herself, but didn’t get up. She sat there staring at Maven.

“What?” he said.

“You. Either you hate me right now, or you love me.”

Maven felt a cool tingle. “What are you talking about?”

“Nobody else puts up with me. Nobody bothers. You waste soooo much time on your boss’s girlfriend.”

“It’s true.”

“Okay. That’s not hate.”

Maven was annoyed enough to be truthful. “Then I guess I’m just another idiot in a long line of idiots.”

“I wonder who has the lower opinion of themselves, you or me?”

“It’s me.”

“But you don’t act out.” She took another drink, squinting up and down the sunny tracks. “Birthdays suck, you know that?”

She tossed the open quart of rum over to him. He caught it without spilling any and took a drink.

She got to her feet, still looking down the line at the train tracks heading into the city. “I was going to get magazine covers. I was going to make a million dollars and Doreen was going to come to New York with me, and I was going to take care of her.” She looked back at Maven with a smile that was pure pain. “And look how that turned out. Look how I turned out.”

Maven didn’t know what to say, or how to say it. She came over and took the rum back from him and drank.

“What else can you do with your teeth?” she asked, looking at him. “I had a friend who could do that thing where you knot a cherry stem with your tongue. She tried to teach me, but I sucked at it.” She was squinting, her face angled up toward the sun. “I want to see your tattoo.”

“I don’t have any tattoos.”

“The one that says BORN TO LOSE, where is it?” She raised his shirt, revealing his torso, halfheartedly trying to turn him around. “On your shoulders?”

“Hey,” he said, not persuasively.

Her hands stayed on his hard chest, flat but tender, a cross between a tickle and a caress. “This thing you have for me, Gridley. It’s not just a freshman hard-on, is it?”

“What thing?”

She grinned and pressed up against him, hands sliding down to his hips, just above the waistband of his cargo shorts. “You still think I’m something, don’t you?”

“I... Jesus... I know you are.”

His shirt was still up around his armpits, and she was brushing her clothed chest against his bare torso. He was getting hard against her hip. “What about your girlfriend? What would she say if she saw—”

“Don’t talk about her.”

Danielle’s mouth came up to his neck. She nuzzled his throat, whispering, “You ever think about me when you’re with her?”

He hadn’t done anything yet. His hands were still down at his sides. He was trying to think about Royce. Trying to remind himself of all the things the man had done for him. But it wasn’t going well.

He said into her ear, “You know I do.”

She kissed him on the mouth. Firm, yet yielding. Tasting, wanting to be tasted.

He was right up at that line. That line he would not cross. Because once across it, he was all in.