Whitney Collins - Big Bad - Stories

Jarrod put one hand on the girl’s knee and reached behind her with his other for the doorknob. He’d get rough with her if he had to. He thought about how he could move her. He could shove her to the side and run. He could push her to the floor. He could do that and get free and back to the van, but before Jarrod could decide exactly how, the girl reached out and clicked off the little lamp and the room went midnight again. Jarrod felt the girl’s hands, cold and gentle, one on his knee and one on his forearm. “Don’t worry,” she said softly. “I don’t have anything you can catch. I just got me a fresh egg and it’s not going to stay fresh long.”

The girl took Jarrod’s hand and slid it up the back of her shorts’ leg where the two countries met and before he knew it, Jarrod was doing what he hadn’t planned on doing. He was stumbling with her over the sea of laundry, over to the mattress on the floor. Once they were down, the girl’s tank top went off and Jarrod’s hands were on her flat skillet chest. The room was cold and the girl was cold, so Jarrod put as much of himself onto her and into her as he could. The girl made little mouse-like squeaks. Jarrod heard himself breathe like he was being chased. He felt himself leave his body and come back into it, leave his body and come back into it. Up close, the girl smelled like cherries, and with his eyes closed, Jarrod couldn’t help but imagine that all that was in him was going into the girl to make something that would solve a terrible problem.

When it was over, Jarrod opened his eyes and the girl clicked on another little lamp by the mattress on the floor. This lamp was shaped like a horse and where the lamp part rose out of the horse, right where a saddle might be, Jarrod imagined himself on the horse’s back and the girl behind him, her arms around his waist. He suddenly saw himself as important. On the other side of the mattress, the girl stayed on her back and brought her knees to her chest.

“This keeps the swimmers in,” she said matter-of-factly. “It gives them a chance to find the egg.”

Jarrod noticed that the girl’s top two teeth were crooked and as she concentrated on her position, they poked out over her bottom lip. For a second, Jarrod wanted to touch her face, gentle, but then a bolt of fear shot through him and he squeezed his eyes together.

“You need to come back tomorrow,” she said. “We should do what we just did for at least five days in a row.” Jarrod didn’t know what to say to that. He felt again as if he might faint. He opened his eyes forcefully and got up from the mattress and put on his pants. He felt weak, like the time he’d had the flu as a boy. Like the time he’d given blood in high school. “You hear me?” the girl said. “Five more days.”

Jarrod didn’t answer. He went down the narrow hall and out to the van. Outside, the world was hot and blinding and he could hardly breathe. When he sat down behind the wheel, he could see a faint yellow dust all over the dashboard where the pollen had settled while he and the girl had been in the dark, doing what they’d done.

Jarrod made a promise to himself that he wouldn’t go back to the girl. He spent the whole next day on roofs, adjusting satellites for better reception. He explained to housewives and shut-ins and blank, unemployed men how warm weather affected the satellites. He told them how when roofs got hot, the pads that the satellites sat on got soft. How the satellites shifted on the shingles and quit working the way they were meant to work. He spent the day listening to himself talk to people who didn’t care what he said, while he heard, in a far corner of his mind, the girl, squeaking like a mouse. Every so often, Jarrod could smell the smell of fruit punch in his nose. He’d just be sitting on a roof, sweating and thinking of the girl’s cold, dark room when all of sudden it was cherries, everywhere. It happened enough that by the time Jarrod got off work at six he couldn’t think straight. He couldn’t think of anything to do other than what he had promised himself he wouldn’t.

“You been swimming?” the girl asked when he showed up on the stoop. Her feet were still filthy, but this time her toes were painted the color of the sky. She had on the same shorts, it seemed, but another thin tank top, this one striped, that put her small breasts in jail.

“Might as well been,” Jarrod said. “The roofs out there are hot.”

“I imagine,” the girl said like she wasn’t imagining it at all. “Well, come on in. I was about to give up on you.”

Jarrod followed the girl inside the house and, on cue, the big dog with the cloudy eyes got up with some struggle and came over to Jarrod and nosed his crotch and thumped his tail against the wall.

“Oreo likes you more than he likes my roommate,” the girl said, kicking more things out of the way with her filthy feet. “Dogs can smell liars, you know. And that’s what his owner is—a big fat one.”

Jarrod kept quiet and followed the girl down the narrow hall. When she opened her bedroom door and the darkness and coldness and smell of fruit punch washed over him like a wave, Jarrod felt relieved. There was some part of him that had been afraid it would be different than the day before, but it was like a tape rewound and played again—a song he was starting to know the words to. Inside, the girl clicked on the first lamp on the dresser and Jarrod saw the TV wrapped in foil and the sloppy pink walls.

“Still a mess,” the girl said without apology. “Always will be.” Then she clicked off the first lamp and took Jarrod by the hand and led him over to the mattress and down they went as they had before. In the cold dark, the girl made the same noises as before and Jarrod breathed like he was being chased and when it was all over, the girl clicked on the little horse lamp by the mattress and brought her knees to her chest and poked her two crooked front teeth out over her bottom lip. After some time, she spoke.

“I’m gonna tell you something I never told anyone before, but I didn’t drop the Robinsons’ baby on accident. I let go of her on purpose.”

Jarrod squeezed his eyes shut until the black behind his eyes turned to violet. In his mind, he saw the horse from the horse lamp. He saw himself and the girl on the shiny orange horse and the girl’s arms were wrapped around his waist. Behind his tight eyes, he and the girl were riding under a white sky across a desert of white sand. The girl was pregnant. A baby—their baby—grew inside her and pushed against Jarrod’s back.

“I was just out there waist-deep in the ocean with the baby and I was holding her under the armpits and dipping her down into the water. And every time I went and dipped her down in the cold water, the baby’s face got all big and scared.” The girl paused to make a sound, and Jarrod guessed she was imitating the baby’s expression. “The way that baby made her face look just did something to me. It made me not like her. She just had this perfect world lined up for herself with her perfect mother and her perfect father and that face of hers just made me feel like the worst thing she was ever gonna know was cold water.” The girl sighed. “I didn’t like that. I knew she would grow up to be no good to anybody if her only trouble was cold water. So, I let go of her for a minute to see what would happen and she got away from me fast. The wave came and I let go and then she was gone.”

The girl didn’t say anything for a while. In Jarrod’s mind, the horse galloped across the white sand noiselessly and without effort. The desert was neither hot nor cold and the more Jarrod rode the horse toward the horizon, it occurred to him that they weren’t in the desert at all. They were at the bottom of the ocean—a drained one.