Justin Taylor - Flings - Stories

“This was very stupid,” I say, in my most imposing teacher voice, only slightly betrayed now by a quaver as I get louder. “Monumentally stupid. It’s dangerous out here at night — you have no idea!”

“Lady, this is like the most boring place on earth,” the boy says, rising to his feet with the girl’s shirt in his hand, positioning himself behind her as though he were the one half undressed. She reaches back for the shirt and takes it, brings it forward and holds it up in both hands, shakes a few blades of grass from the fabric and only then grudgingly puts it on before walking off without so much as a word. The boy follows close on her heels through the succession of unfenced yards. When I’m sure they’re gone I shut the lights off and go back in.

In the fridge there are two boneless chicken breasts, a pound of lean ground beef I’d meant for meatballs, and a packet of deli-sliced turkey. I gather it all into my arms and carry it out to the patio, out the screen door, into the dark. I kneel in the warm grass and peel back wrappers — the first chicken breast bounces off a tree trunk; the second hits the water with a plop. I toss the slick deli rounds like Frisbees and they land like lily pads but sink after a few seconds. Cold beef squishes between my fingers and mucks up under my nails. I ignore the rising drone of flies that my work has drawn, focusing instead on a welcome wave of exhaustion coming over me, and what a blessing it would be to ride that wave — lie down in the grass by the calm black water, wake up next to my husband on a white beach in Macau.

We lived in a sludge-colored building with open-air hallways and stairs. My unit was on the second floor and faced the road. Terese and Mazie had a ground-floor unit that faced the back lot and a shuttered strip mall across the way. (You couldn’t call them apartments, quite, but “rooms” seemed sad, somehow, so I went with units. The building itself I called the Hardluck Arms.) I was in my unit, watching a nature program about sharks. It said that because of how their gills work, sharks can never stop swimming or they drown. Now what would that be like, I wondered, to live your whole life in motion — to never even know what it meant to rest?

This was in Alabama in a small town I think it’s fair to assume you’ve never heard of, halfway between Tuscaloosa and Mobile. The closest decent-size place is actually Meridian, but I was having a disinclination toward Mississippi around that time. My little brother, Benny, was a lawyer in Tallahassee, which was — in the other direction — far but not as far as it felt like; Florida can be that way. And he had a beach house on the panhandle in Carrabelle, which was even closer: six hours, about, and you could do it in less if you took 43 to 10 and didn’t stop to eat. I hadn’t had occasion — that is, invitation — to visit Benny in a while, but when I did go I preferred the smaller roads and the slower pace. If you were of a certain mind-set, say my ex-wife’s, you might read quite a bit into that statement. But then if you were my ex-wife you might do all kinds of things, such as the things you did (or I thought you did) that made me do what I did — no reason to rehash particulars here — the upshot of all of which is her back with her mother in Oxford, and me disinclined toward Mississippi, established here at the Hardluck Arms.

Mazie was Terese’s daughter, age three, blessed gift of a marital — if it was marital — disaster which I understood to have been similar enough to what I’d gone through to sympathize fully and not ask too many questions. Nobody ever gets free of the past, of course, but there’s something to be said for living as though you could or even already have. If not you might just crawl into your own backstory like a cave and sit there on your rented bed, brooding to death in the Hardluck dark.

Anyway I first met the girls in the laundry room. I was walking out with my things and had to squeeze past them because Terese had her heaping basket on her knee, barely keeping it steady with one hand, and meanwhile her kid’s longways under her other arm, wriggling and squirming and shrieking with pain-in-the-ass delight. I put my things down on a dryer.

“Hey, you need a hand,” I said. It wasn’t a question. “Pick one for me to hold while you get the other settled.” Thought I was being cute but then she handed me the kid. I cooed and bounced her while Terese put the wash in. She packed it so tight I wondered if the clothes could even move around in there, and if the machine would handle the weight without straining to break, but I got that she didn’t want to pay for two machines. Every penny, right?

Terese was wearing these jeans shorts that cupped her rear, a damn nice one, I thought, for a mother or otherwise. Blue plastic flip-flops and sunglasses, toenails freshly painted seasick green — I liked it. She got her detergent poured and turned to face me, the machine groaning to life behind her. She had gray eyes and was maybe five years older than I’d took her for when I was looking at her ass.

She was a waitress at the P. F. Chang’s over in Thomasville and worked the dinner shift, so getting her out on a date was tough. We always got a late start and then there was the extra time to pay the babysitter for. She had this high school girl she used. I offered — gallantly, I thought — to cover the sitter from whenever she met up with me until whenever we got back to the Arms. At first that came to just a couple hours, but one night she came back to my unit for a nightcap and things got interesting and then we kind of nodded off and woke up and it was three a.m., her cell ringing — the poor sitter in tears. Had we had an accident? What was her own father going to think when she dragged home at such an hour? She hardly seemed relieved to learn that we were right upstairs.

So we hatched a new plan. I would babysit while Terese was at work, and she would bring back a doggie bag for us to have a late dinner with when she got home, by which time Mazie would hopefully be asleep and we could have our late-night date right there in her unit. We would try it and see. Which gets me back to where I left off when I started telling it: I was watching my shark show.

When it ended I shut off the TV, cranked the window open, and sat in my chair chain-smoking so I’d be good and nic’d up and not want one too bad while I was with the kid. Terese hadn’t ever said that I couldn’t (or that I could) smoke in front of Mazie, but I had noticed that she herself usually tried to hide it, and anyway the general gist these days seems to be that kids aren’t supposed to see.

I stubbed my butt, closed the window, striped some Old Spice on my jeans to cover up any leftover smoke smell, hustled downstairs, and was right on time.

Mazie was on the floor in front of the couch, watching a video. Cartoon sunflowers were singing a song about needing rain and sunshine both to grow up tall. Everything in its right place; there is a season; all good things in all good time. I couldn’t help but wonder, Is it healthy that we sell kids this load of horseshit and then they have to find out how it really is the hard way later on? I for one did not feel any taller for having been rained on. On the other hand, what you would say if you told them the truth wasn’t anything you’d want to put in the mouth of a flower and set to a tune.

“Are you ready to cooperate with Wade?” Terese asked her daughter.

“I coperate!” Mazie said without turning from the TV.

“Good girl,” her mother said. Then, to me, “Christ, I’m late. Okay, well, you two have fun.”

I walked Terese to her own front door and held it open for her. She put her arms round my neck for a hug. I put my arms around her waist, grazing her hips with my hands as I went by, then giving her a good squeeze when I had her wrapped up. She squeezed me back and her face was in my neck hollow and she laid a quick kiss there as tight heat prickled up my spine. I was feeling very focused all of a sudden, or somehow more awake than I had been a moment ago — something important, I understood dimly, was about to change or perhaps already had. We let each other go and I cleared my throat. She went out the door and I shut it behind her. The sound drew Mazie’s attention. “Mommy?” she said and, not seeing her, started to wail.