Whitney Collins - Big Bad - Stories

“Fuck,” I say.

Troy frowns, puts down his cards, leans out of his mildewed lawn chair to touch me on the shoulder. “Is something on your mind?” he says. “Is there something you want to tell me?”

I look sideways at his hand, splotchy, like he spilled bleach on it. I see his thumb think about my ear. I bolt from the screen house and head for the goat pen where I grab the black one by its stunted horns, two hard thumbs that jab up at heaven, and try to take it down.

Patricia Smurt starts showing up at the 7-Eleven at night. In just three weeks she’s gone big and soft in the top and rear, and when she leans on the windows of cars to talk to guys two years older, her miniskirt rides up to show the beginning of a backside that’s no longer my age. She pours vodka in her Slurpee, laughs like she’s being filmed.

Later, on the roof, I think about pinning her down, my knees on her shoulders, my crotch on the center rosebud of her bra, the one I can see when she bends down to pick up used lottery tickets. I’d like her to smack me, just once, so I’d know I was real. Then I’d like her to smack me again, to prove I’m a fake. I take a long drag off my Lucky, and I gaze in the dark to where the highway’s charcoal skid must be. I wonder if my dad is still there, trapped in time, looking down at his motorcycle and shaking his head. I bet he doesn’t even know he’s gone. I bet he just keeps looking at his motorcycle and shaking his head and wondering how he’s going to fix the mess it’s in, a scene rewound and replayed for eternity. I see him, hands on his hips, fuming and frustrated on the gravel shoulder looking up to the sky, then back toward the house to that tiny pinpoint on the roof, where my cigarette glows orange and I pretend he mistakes it for Mars. I raise my left hand off the shingles, my palm facing out toward him, and I think about waving him home, waving him on.

Drake’s taken down eleven starlings since he brought home the slingshot. I think of that poem, four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie. I’d like to make Drake eat what he kills. His eyes have changed, too. Now there are schools of mean minnows flashing around on black silt. He yells during Wheel . Calls Vanna a whore, calls Sajak a faggot. I take that as my sign to leave and go to the 7-Eleven where I sit by the newspaper stand with a cold root beer in my crotch and watch Patricia Smurt straddle the bicycle rack while she giggles to jocks and throws her hair around like a hooker. Nights, I keep dreaming that Patricia Smurt’s blue raspberry tongue shows up in the pool filter and Troy won’t let me keep it. I dream that Drake shoots Troy’s hand off my shoulder, then tosses it on Mrs. Pitkin’s grill.

Troy says he’s almost done studying. He knows that peanuts are an important ingredient in dynamite, that every child in Belgium is required by law to take harmonica lessons, and that the shortest complete sentence in the English language is I am .

“I am,” he says. “I am . The shortest darn sentence, Mickey. Isn’t that something? I am.”

I don’t say anything. I clean three leaves out of the filter and try to imagine them on Patricia Smurt in the Garden of Eden, but all I can see is Troy out the corner of my eye going through his flash cards like the nicest damn kid in school. I eat my lunch alone under a cottonwood. Something’s itching at my gut again. Like there were sparks in my sandwich. In the distance I can see Troy hunched over something in the grass. Probably looking for a four-leaf clover. I know I could crack off that wandering thumb of his with a snap and use it to hitchhike somewhere other than here.

The itching in my gut won’t go away. Lasts through a boiled dinner that I can’t eat. Gets worse when Drake takes down a red cardinal with one of his marbles and lays it on the lawn chair like a sunburned hand. I take off early for the 7-Eleven before Vanna can flip the first F of the night. Patricia Smurt’s already there, her tongue already baby blue. She gives me the time of day since the jocks have yet to show.

“What say, Mickey Mouse?” She pushes her straw over one perfect tooth.

“I dunno,” I say. “Gonna buy some smokes, I guess.”

“Oh yeah?” she says. “Why dontcha get yourself a Slurpee while you’re in there?”

“I don’t like them,” I say.

“I can make you like them,” she says.

“I doubt it.”

“Well,” she says, pulling the straw off her tooth and running a blue tongue across her lips. “You ever heard of tryin’?”

The itching in my gut reaches up to my throat and I picture it getting as fat as Troy’s. But whatever Patricia pours into my drink seems to help me forget. She says she wants a ride on my bike, sits her big denim ass on my handlebars, and as I pedal to the baseball field, her hair flies back into my mouth and chokes me. She smells like candy and gasoline and thinks everything’s worth laughing about.

Behind the bleachers, we pass a car parked in the shade. Night’s coming in with a better attitude than the day, and through a daze of gnats, I see what looks like Troy sitting in the car. I think I hear music. I think I see a boy in the passenger seat snapping his fingers and laughing.

“Who’s that?” Patricia asks.

“Nobody,” I say. “Nobody I ever seen.”

But I feel those ants well up in my throat, and then one of my eyes goes blind. And before Troy can look my way, I yell at Patricia to get back on the handlebars. We go down to where a creek used to be before the world ran dry, and before I can catch my breath, Patricia takes off her shirt, shows me a second’s worth of that pink rosebud on her bra, and pushes me into the brown dust like I’m the smallest guy on the team.

I see blue tongues in my mind, Wiffle ball bats as gold as swords, feel myself working at the soft green of the pool sides, reaching up to that circle of sun where you go to be born or die. I feel Troy’s thumb on my ear and I know something I didn’t know before.

After Patricia leaves, I stay down in the creek bed and keep catching a whiff of candy and fuel. I smoke a half pack of Luckies and look up at the stars where I play I can make out a constellation of my dad. I can see him on the motorcycle, two stars for a muffler, three for his grin, and five for the helmet he shoulda been wearing in the first place.

At dawn, I make up my mind like never before and hop the sawed-off bus to Bar None. When I get there, I watch Troy from behind the one good cottonwood, see how he sits pinched in his chair like he’s being hugged. Thanks to the night before, there’s a new type of smile on his face, one that looks like it belongs in the filter. I wait for him to go look for something up at the so-called lodge, and then I go down to the screen house and stand over his flash cards. I pick them up and hesitate before I fling them above my head.

They go up in the air like a flock of white doves and fall, as if shot from the sky, onto the surface of the pool. And then, off to the side, I see the picnic table, see how in its third groove rests Troy’s glass eye. It’s seen me in action. It knows what went down. It’s taken it all in without a blink, without squeezing out a tear.

The eye feels right in my hand and good in my pocket. It goes with me as I leave the screen house, as I hitchhike back to town, as I pick up my bike from the 7-Eleven where Patricia Smurt pretends not to see me. I feel it at my side, smooth and heavy, as I sit up on the roof of Mom’s and my house with Drake’s slingshot and wait for the back of his head to appear over the little cement patio after work. Let him ask Mom again if I’m a man or a fag. Let him ask it again as I aim that glass eye and answer, “I am. I am.”