Элизабет Мун - Moon Flights

That’s when she saw the notice, printed in thick black letters on what looked like a three-by-five card. “If nudity offends You,” it said, “Please do not ring this Bell.” Right beside the grimy-looking doorbell button. Just right out there in public, talking about nudity. Louanne felt her neck getting even hotter than the afternoon sun should make it. Probably kept the kids away, and probably fooled the few door-to-door salesmen, but it wasn’t going to fool her. Nobody went around without clothes in a trailer park, not and lived to tell about it. She put her thumb firmly on the button and pushed hard.

She heard it ring, a nasty buzz, and then footsteps coming toward the door. Despite herself, her palms were sweaty. Just remember, she told herself, that you don’t have $82.67, and they owe it to you. Then the door opened.

It wasn’t so much the nudity that offended her as the smell. It wasn’t like she’d never smelled people before…. In fact, one of the things that made her so careful was remembering how it was at Aunt Ethel and Uncle Bert’s, the summer she’d spent with them. She wasn’t squeamish about it, exactly, but she did like things clean. But this was something else. A sort of heavy smell, which reminded her a little of the specialty gourmet shop in the mall near her sister Peggy’s house in north Dallas—but reminded her a lot more of dirty old horse hooves. Bad. Not quite rotten, but not healthy, either; and the bare body of the woman staring at her through a tattered screen door had the same look as the smell that wafted out into the hot afternoon.

Louanne swallowed with determination and tried to fix her eyes on the woman’s face… where she thought the face would be, anyway, hard as it was to see past the sunlit screen into the half-light where the woman stood. The woman was tall—would be taller than Louanne even if she stood on the ground—and up above her like that, a step higher, she looked really big, almost as big as the man. Louanne’s eyes slid downward despite herself. She was big, with broad shoulders gleaming, slightly sweaty, and big—Louanne dragged her gaze upward again. She saw a quick gleam of teeth.

“Yes?” the woman said. Even in that word, Louanne knew she wasn’t local. “Can I help you?” The rest of the phrase confirmed it—she sounded foreign almost, certainly not like anyone from around Behrnville.

“You’re plugged into my outlet,” said Louanne, gritting her teeth. She had written all this out, during her lunch hour, and rehearsed it several times. “You’re stealing electricity from me, and you owe me sixty dollars, because that’s how much my bill went up.” She stopped suddenly, arrested by the woman’s quick movement. The screen door pushed outward, and Louanne stepped back, involuntarily, back to the gravel of the parking slot. Now sunlight fell full on the woman, and Louanne struggled not to look. The woman’s face had creased in an expression of mingled confusion and concern that didn’t fool Louanne for a minute.

“Please?” she said. She didn’t even look to see if anyone outside the trailer was looking at her, which made Louanne even surer the whole thing was an act. “Stealing? What have you lost?”

A bad act, too. Louanne had seen kids in school do better. Contempt stiffened her courage. “Your cord,” she said, pointing, “is plugged into my outlet. You are using my electricity, and I have to pay for it, and you owe me sixty dollars.” She’d decided on that, because she was sure not to get what she asked for…. If she asked for sixty dollars, she might get thirty dollars, and she could just squeeze the rest if she didn’t go out this weekend at all, and didn’t buy any beer, or that red blouse she’d been looking at.

“You sell electricity?” the woman asked, still acting dumb and crazy. Louanne glared at her.

“You thought it was free? Come on, Lady… I can call a deputy and file a complaint—” Actually, she wouldn’t ever do that, because she knew what would happen in the trailer park if she did, but maybe this lady who was too crazy or stupid to wear clothes or use a sink drain or take showers wouldn’t know that. And in fact, the lady looked worried.

“I don’t have any money,” she said. “You’ll have to wait until my husband comes home—”

Louanne had heard that excuse before, from both sides of a closed door. It was worth about the same as “the check’s in the mail,” but another billow of that disgusting smell convinced her she didn’t want to stomp in and make a search for the cash she was sure she’d find hidden under one pillow or another.

“I want it tonight,” she said loudly. “And don’t go trying to sneak away.” She expected some kind of whining argument, but the woman nodded quickly.

“I tell him, as soon as he comes in. Where are you?” Louanne pointed to her own trailer, wondering if maybe the woman really was foreign, and maybe in that case she ought to warn her about standing there in broad daylight, in the open door of her trailer, without a stitch on her sleek, rounded, glistening body. But the screen was closing now, and just as Louanne regretted not having gotten her foot up onto the doorsill, the door clicked shut, and the woman flipped the hook over into the eye. “I tell him soon,” the woman said again. “I’m sorry if we cause trouble. Very sorry.” The inner door started to close.

“You’ll be sorry if you don’t pay up,” said Louanne to the closing door. “Sixty dollars!” She turned away before it slammed in her face, and walked back to her own lot, sure she could feel the woman’s eyes on her back. She wasn’t too happy with the way it had gone, but, thinking about it, realized it could have been worse. Who knows what a crazy naked woman might have done, big as she was? Louanne decided to stay in her visiting clothes until the man came home, and, safely inside her own kitchen, she fixed herself a salad.

She had to admit she was kind of stunned by the whole thing. It had been awhile since she’d seen another woman naked, not since she’d gone to work for the county, anyway. She saw herself, of course, when she showered, and like that, but she didn’t spend a lot of time on it. She’d rather look at Jack or whoever. When she looked at herself, she saw the kind of things they talked about in makeovers in the magazines: this too long, and that too short, and the other things too wide or narrow or the wrong color. It was more fun to have Jack or whoever look at her, because all the men ever seemed to see was what they liked. “Mmmm, cute,” they say, touching here and there and tugging this and patting that, and it was, on the whole, more fun than looking at yourself in a mirror and wondering why God gave you hips wide enough for triplets and nothing to nurse them with. Not that that was her problem, Louanne reminded herself, but that’s how her friend Casey had put it, the last time they skinny-dipped together in the river, on a dare, the last week of high school.

But that woman. She could nurse anything, up to an elephant, Louanne thought, and besides that…. She frowned, trying now to remember what she’d tried so hard not to see. She hadn’t been particularly dark, but she hadn’t been pale, either. A sort of brown-egg color, all over, with no light areas where even the most daring of Louanne’s friends had light areas…. You could tan nude under a sunlamp or on certain beaches, but you couldn’t go naked all the time. But this woman had had no markings at all, on a belly smooth as a beach ball. And—odd for someone who smelled so—she had shaved. Louanne shook her head, wondering. Her aunt Ethel had never shaved, and Louanne had come to hate the sight of her skinny legs, hairy and patched brown with age spots, sticking out from under her shabby old print dresses. But this woman… the gleaming smoothness of her skin, almost as if it had been oiled, all over, not a single flaw…. Louanne shivered without knowing why.