Lindsay Hunter - Ugly Girls

She was nothing special now, just an old dirty sheet. But even old dirty sheets need a bed , she thought to herself, that old wickedness like a tingle in her gut. Maybe being in Travis’s would make her new again, turn her into something else.

A foul smell was coming in from the window. Perry knew it was likely the piles of manure for sale outside the hardware store they were passing, but still she couldn’t shake the feeling that the smell was her.

NOW IT WAS JIM who was calling in, letting his voice weaken and working a catch into his throat, apologizing earnestly but not too many times, which would have been a sure giveaway. Myra never learned that lesson. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, hope you can forgive me for putting you out like this ; whoever was on the other end of the line surely rolling their eyes.

Jim simply said, “I hate to do this, but I’m not going to make it in tonight, I’m in bed with the flu or something. Sorry, man.”

Cut and dry, that was the key, because a truly sick person wouldn’t feel guilty for not coming in. Myra’s guilt was as obvious as a burning flag. Myra was all tells.

He found himself doing this more lately. Comparing himself with Myra to see who came out the better person. He always won, and the feeling he got from this had become like an addiction. He had a taste for it, especially on the drive home, when he knew he’d have to pretend not to see so many things. Beer cans and bottles under the couch, Myra in the same shirt as yesterday, the phone off the hook, the TV as loud as a field of blenders. I don’t hide my beer , he’d think. Or, I’ve never been so sick that I don’t want a fresh shirt .

It was what kept them together, now. In the beginning it had been sex and the mystery that comes with slowly realizing you were sharing your time with another human being, same as you, someone that also chewed food and had nightmares and shat in the toilet. It had been a comfort that was hard-won and therefore protected fiercely, and then it had slowly crumbled, fight by fight, into the ruins it was now. Here, in this pile, the week they hadn’t spoken to each other because Jim had gotten off the couch and walked into the bathroom in the middle of Myra, hands to her face, crying about being a drunk, the evening’s third beer held between her thighs. Over in that pile, all the disagreements over Perry. Gravel shrine to all the nights they’d rejected each other, or worse, done the deed and felt all the lonelier after. Fallen column from when she said she touched that boy. Pebbles and rocks and boulders and whole cracked walls, all overtaking the trailer, and pretty soon it wouldn’t be so easy to push everything to the side to make a clear path to the door. They’d just slowly bury themselves alive, one trying to spite the other.

The thing was, he had known this about Myra. Hell, on their first date he’d pushed her up against the wall outside the restaurant and kissed her, had tasted the stale yeast of beer even though she’d been sipping wine at the table. He’d known just what he was signing up for when he married her. And that kept him right where he was more than anything.

“You ain’t going in?” she asked him now.

“No,” he answered.

“You really sick?” She put her hand to his forehead, and he let her.

“No,” he said. “I just need a night off.”

This was the truth. Ever since the night he’d beaten Herman’s bed to shit, even being in the trailer with his half-drunk wife was more appealing than going into that place. But more than that, he wanted to keep an eye on Perry. She’d been too accommodating when he made her delete her Facebook profile; it had seemed almost like a relief. He’d driven her to and from school each day, and she’d stayed in her room over the weekend, door cracked so he could see her in there. Made him wonder if this Jamey was stalking her, if she needed help more than she was letting on. Jim had waffled on going in or calling in, but Perry hadn’t come home yet, and that had made his choice all the easier.

“Might take a drive,” he told Myra. He hadn’t told her about what Herman had said. He didn’t want her to get hysterical, and he didn’t want to get upset if she didn’t become hysterical. When he’d insisted Perry get rid of Facebook and change her phone number, he hadn’t given Myra a reason, and she hadn’t asked. That was how she lived life: dipping her toe in whenever it suited her, and it usually didn’t.

Here he went again, comparing. Well, so be it. Myra didn’t give a shit, but he did.

And then the doorbell rang. Something in Jim wanted to grab Myra and throw her back on the couch, bark at her to leave it be. Maybe it was because she made sure to swig back the rest of the bottle she was nursing before she heaved herself up. Maybe it was something else, something beyond what he could see.

“It’s that woman again,” Myra said.

“Which?”

“I never told you,” she said, standing over him, her voice flat. “This woman from a few doors over come by asking after her son. Said he ain’t been home in days. Thirty years old or something! I told her he’s a grown man, he’ll turn up if he wants to.”

He stood, and now he did push her, just a little, with his forearm, more like he was guiding her back to the couch a hair too roughly. It felt good, great even, but it was a notch on the other side of the tally: now she had one over on him.

“’Scuse,” he said, to make up for it. “I’ll get it.”

“Free country,” Myra said.

The woman was enormous, especially on the bottom. Shaped like a chocolate kiss, everything tapering toward the top. Her hair was thin, not nearly enough of it to be proportionate to the rest of her. Jim could smell the baby powder over something sour, and he was touched, she was trying not to be so monstrous. Still, the powder caught in his throat, and when he tried to get out “Help you?” he coughed in her face instead.

“The lady of the house told me if I come by with a photo of my son she’d help spread the word,” she said. The flesh on her upper arms trembled; it was clear holding herself up took a considerable amount of effort. “It’s been going on six days now that he’s been missing.”

“You file a report?” Jim asked. He wanted to help this woman. He stood up straight, preparing to answer whatever she said next with I happen to be in law enforcement .

“Well, I ain’t of the mind to do that since he’s been in trouble with the law priorly,” the woman said, her arms trembling faster now.

“Oh?” Jim said.

“I ain’t proud of it, and he wasn’t neither,” she said, “but it is what it is. My fear is that he’s fallen into old ways, and I’d rather handle that myself than turn him over.”

“You say you brought a photo?” Jim asked. He wanted to get a good look at this boy. If he was out breaking the law Jim wanted to be sure he knew what he looked like so he could bring him in himself.

“Yessir,” the woman said. She held out a crumpled Polaroid of a young man holding his hand up, mid-yell. An eye and a cheek and part of his hairline, that’s all Jim could make out. Even with that little bit, a curl of recognition began unfolding in his gut.

“His name’s Jameson. Jamey,” the woman told him.

But she hadn’t needed to say it, because all at once it came to him. His cell was always meticulous. Another man had tried stabbing him with a fork, and neither could say why. He had called Jim sir . He was in prison for statutory rape and assault with a deadly weapon. He had tried to kill a girl, but she had gotten away after stabbing him, leaping a fence and rushing in the sliding glass door of an elderly couple’s home, stark naked but for one sock, gash like a wide mouth in her neck, grinning blood.