Whitney Collins - Big Bad - Stories

Years later on a Sunday drive home from the beach, Teddy stopped at a rest area with his young family. It was a dark and dated pit stop, but it had clean-enough bathrooms, and while Teddy’s wife tended to their son and daughter, Teddy stood in the vestibule with his hands on his hips and stared at the vending machines. He peered into one that offered crackers and chips, and then into a second that offered water and juice, before he finally paused to consider the space between the two machines. There, tucked in the shadows and bolted to the wall, was a small, nondescript box. Curious, Teddy moved closer and saw that the box was made of glass and steel. It was smudged with fingerprints but inside were a set of yellowed false teeth and three brass buttons and a neat row of crude bullets. Teddy frowned. He felt his stomach do a little flip, and he leaned in closer still. There wasn’t a plaque anywhere to be found, just a little strip of paper inside the box, upon which was typed the word: REPLICAS. Teddy bent over until his nose touched the box. He stared until his eyes watered. For a moment, he could hear the scraping of Leonard’s tools and was back on Leonard’s bed, suspended in amber, right at the threshold of the afterlife. He saw Leonard’s nimbus of hair, felt Leonard’s warm hand on his cheek. He heard Leonard say: You’re the best friend that I’ve got here, Teddy. You’re a good guy .

And then: his wife and children. Loud and soapy and fresh, their shoes squeaking against the floor. “Vending machines!” they squealed. “Can we have quarters, Daddy? Can we? Can we?”

Teddy couldn’t speak. Their presence was suddenly tin plates clattering all around. He stormed from the rest area and went out to the car and sat panting behind the wheel. When his wife and children finally climbed back in, Teddy started the car and gunned the engine. He put all the windows down and drove off, fast and erratically, first in one lane and then in another. In the roar of the hot summer wind, as he sped westward, Teddy could once again see the horse. It had gone mad from fear and was galloping toward the horizon in a cloud of dust. Behind it, clinging to the training lead, was Teddy. He thought he had let go long ago, but he realized he never had. He realized he never could, even if he wanted to.

JARROD HAD BEEN called to the girl’s house to fix her satellite dish, but when he got to the peeling blue rental and walked around its weedy perimeter, he saw that the girl didn’t have a satellite dish. She had cable. Jarrod tried to explain the difference between the two services while the girl stood barefoot on the stoop wearing a see-through tank top and a pair of minuscule cutoffs. Jarrod noticed that the girl had dirty feet—filthy, really—and that her toenails were painted the color of mustard. Both of her pinkie toes were curled in for warmth against the other toes like two cold grubs. While Jarrod talked, he imagined the girl shoeless at the drugstore, standing in the nail polish aisle for a while before stealing a bottle of yellow polish when no one was looking. He saw the girl walk right past the cashier, carefree and careless, her brown feet slapping the tile. For a good portion of his satellite-and-cable explanation, Jarrod looked at the girl’s feet and imagined her shoplifting. He did this to avoid looking her in the eye. Every time he looked up, there the girl was, staring at him hard and brave and dumb, chewing slow on a wad of gum. It made Jarrod feel dizzy to look at her head-on. It made him feel like he might keel over in the red landscape gravel that was scattered around the tiny house.

“What I’m getting at,” Jarrod finally said, “is that I can’t fix your satellite dish, because you got no satellite dish. And I’m not allowed to fix the cable seeing how I don’t even work for the cable company.”

The girl twisted a lock of dry copper hair around one of her fingers until her finger turned lilac. “Aw, now,” she said. “Ain’t fixing a TV just fixing a TV? Whatever happened to being a gentleman?” She winked at Jarrod and switched her wad of gum from one cheek to the other. Jarrod could see her flat breasts through the white tank top. They looked like two eggs in a skillet and he thought he might lose consciousness. “I’m sure you can figure out how to fix it.” The girl exhaled. “I really need my TV because TV is my whole life.”

Jarrod looked over his shoulder. He looked at the white company van parked on the street. There was a picture of a big red satellite painted on the van. The driver’s side window was half-down but it didn’t look like it was going to rain. “All right,” Jarrod said. “But real quick or else I might get fired.”

Inside the rental house, a giant dog with clouded eyes got itself up on all fours with some struggle when Jarrod entered. It came over to Jarrod and nosed around his crotch and thumped its heavy tail against the wall in apparent approval.

“Get the fuck off the nice man, Oreo,” the girl said. “Don’t worry about Oreo. He’s my stupid roommate’s stupid dog. He doesn’t bite or nothing. He just bothers the living shit out of everyone.” The girl kicked laundry and magazines out of the way with a dirty foot. “You want something to drink?” she asked. “I got the blue Gatorade. The light blue kind. And I got tap water and milk, but I don’t think the milk’s any good anymore.”

When the girl bent over to push some old newspapers out of their path, Jarrod could see high up where the girl’s legs changed from legs to ass. Her skin went from smooth and tan to white and dimpled. There was nothing gradual about it. It was like two countries on top of each other, ice cream on a cone. “I’m not thirsty,” Jarrod said. “But you better show me that TV. I can’t take all day here.”

“All right,” the girl said. “But it ain’t much.”

The girl took Jarrod down a banged-up narrow hall. She opened a door at the end of it and a burst of air-conditioned air hit Jarrod in the face. The room was as dark as midnight and it smelled like fruit punch. The girl clicked on a little lamp and the little lamp flickered on to reveal a mattress on the floor covered in clothes. The walls were sloppy-painted the color of bubblegum. In the corner, an outdated television sat on a milk crate, its rabbit-ear antennae wrapped in aluminum foil.

“I’m a mess,” the girl said. “Always will be.”

Jarrod waded through towels and clothes. He went to the television and held one of the antennae ears in his hand. “You have cable and you don’t even have this hooked up to cable,” he said. “This thing is just plugged into the wall like a radio.”

The girl gave a sheepish smile and shrugged. “Aw, all right,” she said. “I’m busted.”

Jarrod let go of the antennae and scowled.

“See, now. I didn’t call for no repairman,” the girl said. “I’m just laying an egg is all.”

Jarrod looked at the girl the way she’d looked at him when he had tried to explain the difference between satellite and cable.

“Ovulation,” the girl said. “This is that week in the month I’m most likely to get pregnant and I need someone to get me pregnant.”

“Ohhh no,” Jarrod said, suddenly enlightened. He went to step over the clothes, to go back the way he’d come, but Oreo was standing right in the way he needed to go, slapping his big tail against a dresser missing most of its drawers. “I ain’t getting anybody pregnant. No ma’am, no sir.”

The girl backed up against her bedroom door and by the time Jarrod got to her, she had her spine pressed up against the doorknob. “The Robinsons’ baby,” she said fast. “I let it drown in the ocean.” Jarrod went to reach behind the girl and she lifted up a knee. “I was their babysitter last summer and I let go of the baby and it drowned.” The girl choked for a second, like she might cry. “They never found it neither. Thanks to me, their baby wasn’t only killed but lost, too.” Jarrod looked at the girl’s raised knee. He didn’t think she could do him much harm. “They’re pretty bad off now, the Robinsons are. Who wouldn’t be with a baby at the bottom of the ocean? But I’m going to get pregnant and have them a baby and put the baby on their porch in a laundry basket and then leave town for good.”