Claire Watkins - Battleborn - Stories

Now Lena is limp in the light from the hotel television, as though, underneath her splotchy skin, her bones are no longer adequately bound together. She stares at our girl from between the two beds, her naked body like a question she can’t ask, a prayer she can’t recall. Behind Lena, the two young men look to our girl. The big one is shirtless, with his pants splayed open. The other has removed his pants, though he still wears his collared shirt, buttoned up. His bare ass glows blue in the light from the TV and he holds his dick in his hand. She forces herself to wonder what they want from her, though she knows. Permission.

Once, before Lena got her license, the girls were waiting at the county clinic for Lena’s mother to drive them home, and they found a file folder filled with pictures of diseased genitals mounted on heavy card stock. Lena said her mother used them when she gave sex-ed talks at the high school. Our girl flipped through them. Lena giggled and looked away, saying the pictures were gross. Our girl went on. They were gross, but in a curious, enthralling way, like a topographical map of a place she would never visit. But then there was one photograph in which the photographer, or the doctor — Who takes these pictures? she had wondered suddenly, then thought, A nurse, probably, or an intern — had captured the patient’s thumb and index finger where they held the penis. She could see the man’s grooved thumbnail and a little rind of skin peeling back from the cuticle. It made her wish she weren’t a woman.

In the hotel room, Lena reaches for her friend. She says her name. The boys look to her too, even the one called Tom, above her. Our girl takes Lena’s hand.

It’s okay, she says. We’re having fun.

She urges her friend back to the bed, gently, as though pulling the last bit of something shameful and malignant out through the tips of Lena’s limp fingers.

Afterward, on the way down to the lobby, our girl watches her own face in the polished doors of the elevator, and then Lena’s, puffed around the eyes and mouth, her hair clumped to one side where they’d poured something on her. Through the summer, the tight circles in which the girls circumnavigate the pizza parlor will overlap less and less each day. Sometimes our girl will be at the oven, watching Lena’s back as she works the line, and the heat will well up in her and she’ll want to cry out. But what would she say? Sometimes, as she cuts a pizza, boiling grease cupped in a piece of pepperoni will spatter up and burn the back of her hand, or her bare forearm. This will bring her some relief.

That summer, Lena will shrink and yellow. Her eyes will develop a milky film. Even her big teeth will seem to recede into their gums, as though the whole of her is gradually succumbing to the dimensions of their town, its unpaved streets, its irrigation ditches and fields of stinking alfalfa. The four walls of the pizza parlor, the low popcorned ceiling of her mother’s manufactured home. When Jeremy the delivery boy shuffles back to the walk-in where Lena stocks the commissary and asks her to come over to watch his band practice, she’ll say yes, her voice wet with inevitability and exhaustion. The master bedroom of his trailer will start to feel like her own. Jeremy’s love for her will be an unquestioning and simple thing, with rising swells of covetousness. It will be this particular strain of love — that’s what he’ll call it — that makes him hit her for the first time, on the Fourth of July, on the darkened plot of packed dirt in front of a house party where she’d danced too closely with a friend of his. Our girl will watch this from the porch of the house, where a crowd will have gathered. She will do nothing.

By September, she and Lena will not even nod in the halls. When the announcement comes over the intercom first period, our girl will try to make herself feel the things she is supposed to feel: grief for dead people in buildings she didn’t know existed, sorrow for a place she can’t envision. Deadened, but afraid of the deadening, she will look across the classroom to Lena, hoping to inflict upon herself that sickly shame that the sight of her old friend now evokes, thinking it the least she could do. But Lena — standing humped beside her left-handed desk with her right hand over her heart, crying — will be barely recognizable. This will bring our girl a sturdy rising comfort, a swelling buoyancy: A person can change in an instant. This, almost solely, will take her away from here.

The loudspeaker will emit a disembodied human breath. Things will never be the same, it will say, as if she needs to be told this. As if she doesn’t know the instability of a tall tower, a city’s hunger for ruin. As if this weren’t what she came for.

This happens every summer. A tourist hikes into the desert outside Las Vegas without enough water and gets lost. Most of them die. This summer it’s an Italian, a student, twenty years old, according to the Nye County Register . Manny, the manager of the Cherry Patch Ranch, reads the story to Darla, his best girl, while they tan beside the pool in the long late sun.

“His friend found his way back and told the authorities, thank God. Seven days they give this kid to live out here.” Manny checks his watch. “Well, six. Paper’s a day old.”

“Fucking tourists,” says Darla, lifting her head from Us Weekly . She lies facedown, topless, on a beach towel laid over the sun-warped wooden picnic table she pulled next to Manny’s cracking plastic lounger. Darla has worked at the ranch for two years, nothing to Manny’s fifteen, but longer than most girls last out here, long enough to be called a veteran. She may have tits like a gymnast but she’s smart for twenty and has a round, bright face with a gap between her front teeth that makes her look five years younger — a true asset in this business. Straight men eat her shit up.

Once, she and Lacy dyed their hair together, the same shade of coppery strawberry blond. Manny warned them it was a mistake. “Bad for business,” he said. “Men want variety.” But he marveled as the very next client to pass through the front door pointed to the two new redheads and asked, “How much for a mother-daughter party?”

Poor Lacy’s lip began to quiver — as if she just realized she was old enough to be the girl’s mother — but Darla simply slipped her fingers through Lacy’s and said, “What do you think, Momma? Four grand?”

“Put that shit away,” she says now. “You’re depressing me.”

Manny lingers on the story of the missing foreigner for a moment longer, more exhilarated than is respectful to a boy likely dying of thirst. He scans the other goings-on of the rednecks and dirt farmers and Jesus freaks in Nye. The Lady Spartans win the three-A state softball championship. Ponderosa Dairy petitions BLM for more land. He can’t be blamed for wanting some excitement around here. He puts the paper under his chair.

Darla checks her phone and turns over on the picnic table, exposing her small stark breasts to the sun. She folds her magazine back along its spine and leans over to Manny, tapping a picture of a shirtless movie star standing in the Malibu surf, dripping wet. “I met him,” she says. “In L.A. He used to come into Spearmint all the time. One of my girlfriends gave him a lap dance. Said he had a huge cock.”

“Girl, don’t tell me that. I’m so horny I could rape the Schwan’s man.”

“I’ll trade you,” she says, slipping her hand gingerly between her legs. “My twat is sore.” She goes back to her magazine. Manny watches the heat waves warp and wobble the mountains in the distance. Six days. Poor kid. Soon, Darla lifts her sunglasses and presses two fingers to her left breast. “Am I burning?”