Whitney Collins - Big Bad - Stories

AFTER SCHOOL, TO escape my Uncle Drake and his collarbone jabs, I like to climb up on the roof of Mom’s and my straw-colored house with a fresh pack of Luckies and a cream soda. Where the crappy back porch juts out from our cracker box, there’s a small shingled ridge I can straddle like a bronco, slide my sneakers into the gutters like stirrups, and pretend to gallop my sorry self out of this place. Up on the roof, I get a wide view of the world I don’t understand anymore—where the dust-colored plains rush toward a sky that backs away, hands up, the same way Mom does, surrendering against the kitchen wall, when Drake has too much to drink and even more to say. Up here, I can see the desperation of the Oklahoma landscape, how it tries to offer up something worth looking at—just like the homely girls do in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven—but most of the time the sad view falls flat: a distant patch of houses that seem stuck into the earth by old television antennae, a wind-beaten stand of crippled cottonwoods, or that dark skid in the road, where the highway turns toward Enid. That charcoal line the rain won’t wash away; that mark I can touch with the tip of my cigarette, out there, where they found my dad’s motorcycle. A place about two hundred feet from where he landed.

Drake hasn’t caught on to the fact that I sit up here. Sometimes, when he comes out to the backyard to shoot starlings with his slingshot, I’m still on the roof, a phantom cowboy he can’t see. I can hear the things he says to himself: who owes him money, who’s worthless, where he’s gonna tell someone to go. He paces the yard, like he’s in a courtroom, his bald head, white and shiny with two lines of lavender stubble over each ear, as bold as a moonlit honeydew. From up here, I find out what he thinks of me: soft . And what he thought of my dad: softer .

Things were better before Drake came along with his dented suitcase and bottle of strawberry Boone’s looking for a place to shower and shit. Mom’s mouth didn’t stay all screwed up like a cat’s behind. She didn’t get short with me for leaving my Jockeys on the floor or for drinking straight from the carton. She brought me Butterfingers from the vending machine at work, did that little something with her bangs that looked fresh. Now she’s just sagging down like our gutters from her mooch of a brother and his wet-leaf attitude. He’s stocked our freezer with Stouffer’s, parked his truck on our pansy bed, put a big oily stain on the headrest of my dead father’s recliner.

At night, Drake watches Wheel of Fortune while Mom boils him a bag of creamed chipped beef. He picks his cuticles with a pocketknife and sits with his feet spread wide, his unlaced boots sticking out their leather tongues at me. I know he’s got something other than Wheel on his mind. Don’t think the irony that the show is really a glorified version of hangman is lost on me. My uncle can think of plenty of people he’d like to see strung up, from the hippies and the Commies to Carter. Personally, I think Drake’s in a cult. Not the kind that worries itself with comets or Kool-Aid or cornfields. The kind that sticks to the basics. The kind that thinks that God’ll only bless America when it’s as straight and white as a shower-curtain rod.

Mom says it’s good for a boy my age to have a man his age around our two-bit house. Says it’ll teach me the ins and outs of manhood. I say screw Drake. Don’t keep him around on account of my hairless dick. I’d be better off with a dog. That’s all I ever asked for anyway. And maybe some Saturdays at Radio Shack where I can use the remote-control cars without having to buy them.

Drake plays like he knows a lot. When we sit around the glasstop table, he puts his greasy hands all over where Mom Windexed and talks like it went out of style with his ex-wife’s rack. He yammers about interest rates and bass fishing and how Oklahoma has too many Cherokee and how to install a ceiling fan, which he has yet to do. He eats off Mom’s plate, wipes his face from forehead to chin with a paper towel at the end of the meal. He tells me what I need to do with my life, saves that for dessert. Over tapioca he gets bossy.

“See, what this boy needs, Eileen, is direction.”

“That’s right,” I say. “Direction outta town.”

Drake flicks my earlobe with his pudding spoon. “That’s what I’m getting at, Sis. Mickey here’ll smart-ass you straight to hell when you ain’t looking.”

So, Drake signs me up for some derelict day camp. Summer’s coming in. Leaves are shooting out like bright green fly-rod feathers on the tops of the trees. The asphalt smells as strong as moth balls by the bus stop. And by ten o’clock, it’s hot enough for me to start stinking ripe in algebra where I watch Joe Yutt watch Patricia Smurt and wish it was the other way around. Drake says once school’s out, I’ll be spending my time at the Bar None Ranch for Boys. Some dust patch ten miles out of town that specializes in fixing dopes that’ve gotten too big for their britches. He’s done the research, he tells Mom. There’ll be manual labor, farm animals to tend to, healthy competition.

Drake’s as wrong about the camp as he is in the head. The other boys don’t seem all that troubled to me. Mostly just bored guys who’ve taken to slouching since their foreheads went greasy. I’ve only seen one switchblade and two Playboys and for the most part, the humidity keeps everyone in the shade talking about tits and carburetors. Most days we just get out of running laps by hiding behind a broken-down Partridge Family–looking bus and smoking butts we find crushed in the tire treads. Sometimes we dig a hole for what they say’ll be a new pool. Sometimes we kick a ball around that’s as soft and useless as an old udder. And the farm animals are nothing more than some goats that’ll ram you if you don’t give up your Doritos fast enough.

I play like I’m interested in the things the guys concern themselves with: pacing out a baseball diamond, bragging on how to hot-wire a car, claiming I’ve seen a girl’s privates in the light of day. But the old swimming pool’s what calls my name, even though it’s got a thin slime of slippery green all around the vinyl liner and no slide to speak of. I spend most of my time there, under the charge of a fatty named Troy, who’s got a glass eye and a goiter and shows me how to clean the filters.

“Gotta pull them leaves up and out, up and out,” he says, like it’s some kind of calculus problem. “Reach in there good, Mickey, and pull them leaves up and out.”

I’m there mostly for the rodents. I found a bloated weasel one day, a slick chipmunk the next, a waterlogged squirrel like a girl’s wet ponytail down by the drain yesterday. As interesting looking as they are drowned, I prefer to find them alive. To reach in with that long, rusted net and strain them out like macaroni, flip them over a fence where they can dry out in the ragweed and catch their breath. Nothing worse than thinking about them swimming all night. Treading water by the light of the moon, scraping their tiny claws against the green sides. That really gets to me. So, I try to find Troy first thing in the morning. Last Thursday I gave my Cheetos to a rabbit that’d been doing laps for who knows how long.

Troy’s as ugly as they come. His one good eye is as dumb as a cow’s, and his fake one just stares out at nothing like a swirly planet I should know by now. Sometimes he takes out his glass eye when he swims. Just pops it out like a little wet saucer and puts it in a groove on the picnic table. I watch the eye while it watches Troy while Troy watches the backs of boys playing Wiffle ball as he floats around like a colorless turd in the Oklahoma sun.