Whitney Collins - Big Bad - Stories

“Well, aren’t you a bloomin’ daisy?” he’d say. “Looks like I shoulda brung a stick instead. To keep the boys away.”

And every fall, Mabel would play deaf to this and offer up a silent prayer of thanks that a palm reader in a low-cut blouse had seen divorce between Daddy-o’s thumb and forefinger when Mabel was only nine.

When Mabel moved seven miles over to Harrison High, she hoped Daddy-o would miss a beat. But on her first Monday of tenth grade at 3:30 sharp, she found him leaning against a bike rack with a dry hibiscus and a smile cracked white with remnants of Florida zinc.

“Guess who’s coming to dinner?”

Mabel stared. Last time Daddy-o’d been in town, alongside a banded stack of his Can Do! pamphlets, she’d found a bowie knife in his glove compartment. She’d also found an old photograph of her mother graffitied with a felt-tip mustache. She hadn’t been sure the duo was connected, but it did give her reason enough not to sit across from him in a restaurant.

“I already ate,” Mabel finally said.

“Well, hot dog,” Daddy-o beamed. “Let’s go for dessert.”

At the Dairy Queen, Mabel refused a soft serve cone. She knew letting Daddy-o treat her to something would make her feel beholden. She might even break down and confess that she sometimes imagined local meteorologist Brent Westerly as her new dad, the sort of man who would eat T-bones and make her mother forget how much she liked drinking. A man who would pay his taxes and own a set of encyclopedias and have his pilot’s license. Mabel watched her father pay for a cone of his own by digging into a beaded satchel and producing a proud palmful of dimes.

“Milk does a body good,” her father insisted. “You’re missing out, Maybe Baby.”

Mabel went to stand at the old jukebox where she watched the shaky metal arm reach out for 45s the same way her mother reached out for her after one too many wine coolers.

“Is he still so inexcusably happy ? Is everything still so peachy-goddamn-keen for him?” her mother would slur. “Jesus. You’d never know he’d had the accident. You could bury the bastard in manure and he’d shovel his way out, grinning that crap-eating grin of his, looking for a unicorn.”

“Bite?” Daddy-o asked, offering his cone.

“I don’t think so.” Mabel wrinkled her nose, then quoted her mother. “Not from a man who can’t tell the difference between baby shit and butterscotch.”

Daddy-o let loose with an amused hoot. “Now that …,” he began.

“Oh, shut up.” Mabel slumped down in the booth and watched her father’s reflection in the stainless napkin dispenser. “Just shut up.”

She waited for his face to fall, for Daddy-o’s optimism to give way to defeat. But “Can Do!” was all he said, and he pulled an imaginary zipper across his mouth in the shape of a permanent smile.

During his annual backward migration from the Florida Panhandle to the Ohio Valley, Daddy-o’s first choice in accommodations was the Happy Thicket Motor Lodge. He liked its brown canvas bedspreads, its tiny lobby that sold smoked almonds, its kitschy ice buckets painted to resemble little wood stumps. But he especially liked the motel’s massive neon sign that rose fifty feet high from a cluster of tall white pines and blinked good tidings for all. It featured a glowing, spotted fawn that jumped a smiling log in three robotic flashes and a red, beaming Happy that made him just that.

“I tell you what’d be a laugh and a half, Maybe. Is if the owners of this here place had sense enough to screw a red bulb into Bambi there’s nose come Yuletide.” He squirted cheese from a can onto a Triscuit. “What all would that set them back? Ninety-nine cents and ten minutes on a cherry-picker?”

Mabel noticed her father’s hand had assumed a quiver in the past eight months—a sporadic jerking not unlike the buzzing yellow NO beside the sign’s serene green VACANCY —and for a moment she felt compelled to entertain him. To tell him about biology class and how, last year, Peter Sawgrass had put the tiny snout of a dissected fetal pig inside his left nostril. Or how junior Dawn Beretti had lost the tip of her tongue at a slumber party when dared to lick peanut butter from a mousetrap. Or how, just today, she’d seen a bunch of pills in the girls’ locker room toilet giving off strands of purple dye like Easter egg tablets.

“What do you think is more dramatic?” Janet Yuri had whispered to Mabel in English class. “Killing yourself or killing someone else?”

Mabel had shrugged, not out of ambivalence, but out of dumb wonder Janet would ask her opinion. She’d never worked a boy’s button fly or known the bitter taste of sixteen aspirins on her tongue. She didn’t staple her skirt hem three inches higher on the school bus or hide marijuana joints in her knee socks.

“I think both,” Janet had mused. “A scorned lover and then yourself.”

At the time, Mabel had silently agreed to disagree, but now, as she watched Daddy-o eating crackers through a smile, whose trembling hand remembered something he refused to, Mabel thought Janet was probably right. A person should have big reasons for dying. And unlike Daddy-o, big reasons for living.

Daddy-o squirted cheese on a cracker and held it out for Mabel. Two dots for eyes and a big cheesy smile. Mabel turned the cracker upside down so it looked like two eyes under a frowning forehead, then she threw it into the motel trash can. She no longer felt compelled to entertain him. He already was and for no good reason.

“I find it works best like this,” Daddy-o said on Wednesday. He stretched out as long as he could in the back of the yellow van, then folded his hands corpse-like across his chest and closed his eyes. “I start with my toenails.”

Mabel stared up at the van’s velveteen ceiling where Daddy-o had tacked a postcard of Tahiti, and a starry map of the universe, and a bumper sticker that said: I Brake for Butterflies . She wiggled her toes. Janet Yuri had passed her a note in English class with four scribbled ballpoint drawings and the words: Pick One .

“I think of coconuts and waterfalls,” Daddy-o murmured. “I imagine a place where the lion lays down with the lamb.”

Mabel had taken her time to decide. There’d been a stick figure hanging from a noose, a stick figure jumping off a skyscraper, a stick figure with red ballpoint ink spraying dramatically from its wrists, and finally, a stick figure lying next to a bottle of tiny black dots.

“Sleeping pills,” Janet had whispered.

In the background, Daddy-o took a conscious inhalation. “‘Hey, diddle, diddle, the cat and the fiddle.’” His exhale sounded like a long, exaggerated sigh of relief. “‘The cow jumped over the moon.’”

Mabel had taken Janet’s fate into her own hands. While the class read aloud from Shakespeare, she drew a fifth option: a stick figure being hit by an asteroid. Ha! Mabel had scrawled on the bottom after circling the scenario. Ha! Ha! Ha!

Janet hadn’t seen the humor. For the remainder of English class she stared straight ahead, and when the bell finally rang, she dropped a note on Mabel’s desk before storming into the hall.

It must be nice , it said, to have so much to joke about .

Mabel looked over at her father. There was that smile. That stubborn arc of idiocy. “Why did you draw a mustache on that picture of Mom?” Mabel asked suddenly. “Why do you keep a knife around?”

Daddy-o didn’t open his eyes and he didn’t stop smiling. “I thought if I made your mother look ugly I wouldn’t miss her so much.”