Whitney Collins - Big Bad - Stories

Mabel didn’t buy it. “And the knife?”

This time Daddy-o opened his eyes and raised up on his elbow and his smile softened to a grin. “Remember this, Mabel. The happier you are, the more danger you’re in. People fear goodness.”

Mabel did buy this. She saw every day that misery loved company.

Daddy-o laid back down and closed his eyes and his smile returned less forcefully. “‘The little dog laughed to see such sport,’” he whispered. “‘And the dish ran away with the spoon.’”

When Daddy-o wasn’t cleaning toilets for chump change, he was walking the streets with his seventy-five-cent Can Do! pamphlets, preaching and teaching to those willing to listen to his concocted brand of salvation. It was a little bit Norman Vincent Peale, a little bit John Lennon. It involved thinking positive and eight tracks of sitar music, incessant smiling and zoning out. Daddy-o called it a sunny outlook, an “attitude of gratitude.” Her mother called it plain and simple denial. The proprietor of the Happy Thicket Motor Lodge called it nuts.

“That ole man a-yours,” he said to Mabel in the parking lot. “He ain’t right in the head. If I find drugs in his room, you can bet your ass I’ll call the authorities.”

Mabel stared. “Did you say something about my ass? ’Cause if you did, it’ll be me on the phone.”

“Well, well,” the owner shook his head. “Someone sure don’t take after her daddy.”

“And it’s not drugs,” Mabel said. “It’s optimism.”

“I say it’s drugs,” said the man.

“I say drop dead,” said Mabel.

Janet Yuri cornered Mabel in the girl’s bathroom at morning break on Thursday. “Well, if it isn’t Little Miss Sunshine,” Janet said. “Seen any asteroids lately?”

Mabel smiled, then fast decided against it. “I’m no sunshine.”

Janet rolled her eyes. “Oh, sweetheart. You’re as dark as a May day. I bet the worst thing to happen to you is a B. B-plus? Oh, sorry. A-minus.”

Mabel thought of her father. How after the accident she and her mother had gone to visit him in the hospital. How her father had smiled through the bandages, how his swollen purple mouth could barely open for the straw that Mabel held to it. How he’d tried to whisper a knock-knock joke but didn’t have the strength to get past the second knock .

“You know, Janet,” Mabel heard herself say, “some people can’t be broken.”

Janet leaned in close to Mabel as if she might kiss her. “Oh yeah?” she said. “Like who?”

“My dad,” Mabel said. “He’s never down.”

“Then he’s a liar,” Janet whispered, leaning in to unbutton the top button of Mabel’s blouse. “Just like you.”

That day after school, Daddy-o drove Mabel out a winding country road to a fishing pond. He paid a man in a peeling shack four dollars, before backing the van right up to the water’s edge and opening the rear doors so it looked like the two of them were floating at sea. Daddy-o sat on a tattered pink cushion in the back of the van and folded his legs underneath him and Mabel did the same.

“We’re not fishing for fish today, Maybe Baby,” Daddy smiled. “We’re fishing for enlightenment.”

“Hmph,” Mabel said. “Looks like someone’s out four bucks.”

At that, Daddy-o laughed and laughed until his cheeks shone with tears. Mabel watched his joy with secret distrust and sad delight. The scar that ran along his jawline, as raised and shiny as a nightcrawler, was unaffected by Daddy-o’s glee, unlike the three men who’d jumped him outside the bowling lanes, where he whistled while he worked as a janitor. They’d cracked him across the face with a baseball bat, because, as Mabel had heard her mother tell a neighbor: “He owed them thirty dollars for weed, but what they really wanted was to beat the smile off his face.”

At last, Daddy-o stopped his cackling and grew as serious as he knew how. He closed his eyes and placed his hands, palms up, on his knees. “Some people say om,” he said. “But I say home.”

Mabel scowled. Home made her think of a scummy landlord, a parade of wine coolers on a Formica countertop, a stale plaid sleeping bag curled in a Volkswagen bus. Daddy-o read her mind.

“I don’t mean home as in Apartment 7B, Maybe. I mean h-o-m-e home as in you and me both know we ain’t from here.” Daddy-o’s eyes stayed closed as he said this, and Mabel watched him with fresh curiosity. He breathed in deep. He breathed out home . His face softened and thawed to something blank, relieved from the chore of constant optimism. When Mabel saw Daddy-o forget she was there, she closed her eyes and copied him, breathing home-home-home until she heard Daddy-o say, from somewhere distant but clear: “Let the things that get you down fall away.”

The yellow van’s dashboard appeared in Mabel’s mind, and she imagined Daddy-o turning the steering wheel as far left as it could go. A line of his loose smoked almonds slid all the way to one end of the dashboard, then, one after another, the almonds fell to the floor until there were no more. Mabel followed suit, shedding herself of everything that got her down: the bowie knife, the beaded satchel of dimes, a noose, an asteroid, a handful of purple pills, her mother, and Janet Yuri. Her mother and Janet Yuri. Mabel, empty, felt herself rise. She felt herself breathe home until she was out, hovering above the pond, floating warm on her tattered pink cushion, a little levitating lily pad. Mabel looked down at the mercury thumbprint of water, out at the hills that blushed with fall. She could hear Daddy-o laughing, but she couldn’t see him.

“Looks like I got my money’s worth after all!” Daddy-o shouted.

Mabel looked left and right. “Where are you?” she called.

“Up here,” Daddy-o called. “Above you!”

Mabel looked up to see Daddy-o twenty feet higher, flat on his stomach, swimming through the sky. “Looks like you got some work to do.”

Mabel pushed down at her sides to move the air away, but only rose two inches vertically. “I can’t go any higher!”

“We don’t say can’t , Mabel. We say can. That right there’s your problem!”

Mabel opened her mouth to say can , but all that came out was:

“Help!”

“ Can !” answered Daddy-o.

“Help!” repeated Mabel.

Daddy-o swam down to Mabel with a grin. “Can’t always seems easier at first, but in the long run, it’s just more work.” He lifted her cushion up over his head on one hand, as if to prove the ease of can . “It’s like I’m delivering a pizza!” Daddy-o cried, as they soared up to where the clouds looked like a dark afternoon rain. “A supreme one!”

Mabel caught herself smiling as they flew out over the country-side. Delivered was exactly how she felt.

That night, Daddy-o dropped Mabel off at home at eleven thirty.

“Christ, Wade.” Mabel’s mother posed in the doorway, furious, her lit cigarette tapped repeatedly of ashes it did not possess. “It’s a fucking school night. What in the hell have you two been doing?”

“Aw, now,” Daddy-o drawled. “We’ve just been fishing.”

“Fishing?” her mother shouted. “For what? For your visitation rights to get yanked?”

Daddy-o flashed his pearlies and gave a shrug that Mabel’s mother knew all too well, the one she’d ultimately left him over. A shrug that insinuated he didn’t know, didn’t care, didn’t see what all the fuss was about.

“Don’t tell me he got you wrapped up in his hocus-pocus.” Mabel’s mother said after Daddy-o hightailed it back to the Happy Thicket. “Don’t tell me you’re buying into his BS.”