Whitney Collins - Big Bad - Stories

My father had a green thumb. “He could grow anything,” my mother sometimes says. “Except a pair,” Drake always says back. In our backyard, you can still see where the old tomato plants laced themselves around the wire fence, the black vines of last year snagged like dead snakes. My dad could grow tomatoes as big as grapefruits, as red as blood. “They’re just like people, Mickey,” he’d say. “The more bullshit you feed them, the stronger they end up.” Sometimes he’d eat them straight from the garden, like apples. He carried a saltshaker in his pocket from July to September and when he saw a ripe one, he’d just pluck it right from the vine and start tapping out some table salt on it before a rabbit or squirrel could beat him to it. “Your dad is weird as hell,” a friend once said, looking out my bedroom window. “You’re weird as hell,” I repeated that night to my dad. “Everyone says so.” My mother had cried at that. Right there at the dinner table, with her face in her palms like I’d finally learned the truth. But my dad didn’t flinch. In fact, he apologized. He said sorry, plain and calm, then ate the rest of his meal in peace. Then he said it again as he washed the dishes and again before bed. My father said sorry enough times that night to convince me he was wrong and everyone else was right.

Drake asks me how everything’s panning out over at Bar None. I don’t tell him the place’d be better named Bar Nothing-to-Do ’cause he’d quit paying the fifteen dollars a day to send me there. I just tell him we’re digging an Olympic-size pool and that I’ve learned to lasso a heifer. I tell him my counselor makes us eat dirt if we cop out on our push-ups. I tell him I had to run a mile with a cement block duct-taped to my back. I probably shouldn’t exaggerate. It just makes Drake think he’s the best thing since sliced pizza and it makes my mother fill that beanbag ashtray on her knee with one half-smoked Misty after another. But I like going. I like getting up every day at six and walking to the 7-Eleven where the sawed-off bus comes to pick me and a bunch of losers up. I like the early morning, the way the creeping heat feels like a word on the tip of my tongue, the way a Lucky Strike goes with powdered donuts, the way no one says a thing as the bus bounces through the cottonwoods like a rusty mattress.

Troy’s studying to get on Jeopardy! He keeps trivia books in the screen house and when the sun gets to his neck and the twelve noon heat rash breaks over the collar of one of his two Hawaiian shirts he starts up with the flash cards.

“Did you know George Washington had a dog named Sweet Lips?” He puts bug spray on his toes, says that’s where a vampire bat would bite if it had the chance. His breasts hang low like a woman’s. “Or that Teddy Roosevelt had a guinea pig named Father O’Grady and a snake named Emily Spinach?”

Troy pinches himself into an old lawn chair, lets his swim trunks ride up tight around his groin in a way that looks like torture. He licks his thumb to peel through the cards, sweats like he’s breaking a fever. Something about him is too damn kind. I eat Raisinets slow in the shady stench of sunscreen and wonder if Troy has ever been laid.

“Calvin Coolidge,” Troy offers, “had his head rubbed with Vaseline while he ate breakfast in bed.”

I don’t clue Troy in that this sort of bullshit isn’t on Jeopardy! “What else?” I say.

He tells me that rats and horses don’t vomit, that rubber bands last longer if refrigerated, that during an hour’s swim at a municipal pool, the average person ingests a half liter of urine.

“Is ours a municipal pool?” I ask.

“No,” Troy says. “And don’t make it one.”

I look out at the other guys playing football. It’s supposed to be touch, but all I see is tackle. One kid’s face has been rubbed in the dust so he looks like the kind of person Drake would strangle. Troy takes a dainty sip from a thermos. I bet my chocolate raisins he knows how to knit.

“And believe it or not,” Troy continues, “the closest relative to the Tyrannosaurus rex is the common chicken.”

I snort, flick three candies out to melt on the concrete like rabbit pellets, hope to attract some ants that’ll have Troy spraying Raid like a nervous housewife. “That’s a crock,” I respond.

“No,” Troy says, holding up a card. “It’s true.”

“Who gives a shit?” I ask.

“Language ,” Troy reminds. “And I do,” he adds. “I give a shoot.”

Drake says I look awful pale for a boy who’s outside all day. I tell him we’re painting the inside of a barn. That I spend all my time up in the rafters with a can of whitewash trying to breathe through the bird crap. That I’m lucky I haven’t died from histoplasmosis. He says that sounds productive, but then he frowns; something in his eyes glints a warning at me, a flash of minnow on muddy brown. “And who’s teaching you big words like that?”

I shrug. He leans back in the rocker and stares at me for a second, burning a red ring of humiliation around my neck.

Troy tells me Winston Churchill was born in a ladies’ bathroom, that the spiny anteater is the only animal that doesn’t experience REM sleep, that two-thirds of the world’s eggplant is grown in New Jersey. I tell him I found a garter snake in the filter that looked a hell of a lot like last week’s lawnmower belt and that we’re running low on chlorine tablets. He puts a hand on my shoulder and thanks me for being responsible. His thumb thinks twice about touching my earlobe—the same one Drake went at with the tapioca spoon. Troy’s real eye is dulled by something he won’t mention, but his fake one looks like the circle of green vinyl pool when you’re down at the bottom looking up at the sun. A place where you go to be born or die. I feel an itching in my gut, like I’ve eaten fire ants for breakfast, so I go kick around the deflated ball for a while with the other boys and make sure to find the smallest kid and rub his face in the mud.

Drake’s got himself a new slingshot and a bunch of beads that look like the pie weights Mom used to use when she baked instead of boiled. He sits in the backyard before dinner and kills starlings.

“Did you know,” he says, “these birds aren’t even from America? The Chinese shipped ’em over here, Mickey. Them and the egg roll.”

He takes one down with a plump thud. It flutters a dying wing like Patricia Smurt flutters her tongue around a pencil in algebra class, the way Troy does his eyelashes when the sunscreen drips low.

“What does that tell you about going where you don’t belong?” Drake picks up the bird by its legs, shows me where his white marble cracked its gut, and launches it into Mrs. Pitkin’s yard with one high arc where it lands on her charcoal grill.

Dinner is served , I think.

Troy only touches me on the shoulder. You can tell his thumb thinks about the ear, but it’s too shy to try. I go through pool manuals and circle chutes and ladders with a furred-up ballpoint while he rattles off numbers that don’t mean crap. 293 ways to make change for a dollar. 119 grooves on the edge of a quarter. 345 pounds of pressure to crack a macadamia nut .

“And get this,” Troy says. “American Airlines saved forty thousand dollars in one year by eliminating one olive in each salad.”

“Who eats olives anyway?” I say. Then I feel Drake looking over my shoulder, even though he’s not around. “Queers. That’s who.”

Troy swallows hard and shuts his eyes like a bullfrog. He’s stored up lots of words for his neck to get that swollen. When he opens his eyes, the glass one looks sad as hell. Out the hazy green window, I can see three boys smacking a goat on the ass with the yellow Wiffle ball bat. It glows like a sword in the hot midday sun. I tear out a picture of the most expensive swimming pool slide, wad it up, and throw it at Troy who blinks only one of his eyes.