Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

Cayenne does not look up. Her pointer finger is tightly wrapped in gauze and buddy-taped to her middle finger to keep her from using it. She lies on her stomach, intent on her book. She swings her feet through the air, ignoring Turtle.

Turtle touches the girl’s bare shoulder with the toe of her boot. The girl looks up, her face stiff and sullen.

“You’re coming with me.”

“What?” Cayenne says. This is how she always replies. Turtle can look right at the girl and say something and the girl will look back and say, “What?”

“For fuck’s sake, get up.”

The girl dog-ears her page, heaves herself up. She does everything one-handed.

“What are you reading?”

“What?”

“It’s a different book, right?”

The girl closes it, looks at the cover.

“Did he buy you that book?”

“So?”

“Come on,” Turtle says, and grabs the girl by the upper arm, the girl coming along more like a puppet than a child, and she pushes her into the passenger seat of the truck. Turtle gets in on the driver’s side.

“Where are we going?”

“I don’t know,” Turtle says, “but we can’t stay here.” She wants to take the girl by the hair and dash her into the window for hating her. She wants to reach into that cunt’s small mind and crush that hate out like crushing out a candlewick, and she thinks, you cannot hate me, you cannot think the things you think about me.

“All right.” The girl says it sullenly, as if she did not really consent, says it with a bitter, hateful, passive-aggressive resignation, the way her mom, or her aunt, or someone, said it in the face of each new circumstance.

“Hey,” Turtle says. “Hey, don’t you be a little cunt with me.”

The girl sits, looking down at her book.

“You have somewhere you want to go?”

Cayenne shakes her head.

“That’s what I thought,” Turtle says.

Turtle shifts the truck into gear and pulls back onto the road. She turns north onto the coast highway with no clear idea of where they are going. Jacob has not been to see her in the last week. To keep herself from going north, toward Jacob’s, she turns east onto the Comptche Ukiah Road by the Stanford Inn and the Ravens Restaurant. On their left, the slopes cut away to Big River. The light comes purple-green through the trees. Turtle still has no clear idea of where she is taking them. The girl is silent beside her in the cab. They come to a set of warning signs posted by the road, and then a long section of road where the left-hand lane has sheared away. They can see strewn plates of blacktop among the trees below. The road becomes a single lane that Turtle threads slowly, both of them looking at the ragged edge of blacktop. Then through the town of Comptche, a handful of houses fronting the road, a redwood schoolhouse with a couple of basketball hoops, a general store, and the junction with Flynn Creek Road. Turtle keeps them on the Comptche road and they climb into the hills, winding past ranches, into narrower and more difficult roads. She drives slowly. The only way she knows to think about this problem is to imagine she is reaching out to herself some years ago. It is a bad idea, but she can turn up nothing else in her mind. They turn off onto a deeply rutted track of orange clay covered in oak leaves. They follow it for a quarter of a mile until they come to a yellow Forest Service gate, where Turtle parks.

She gets out, stops. She pockets Grandpa’s Tabasco, checks the shotgun’s magazine, and slings it. Then she walks around to the girl’s door, opens it, says, “Come on. We walk from here.”

Cayenne stares at her.

“Come on,” Turtle says.

The girl does not move. She makes no expression.

“Christ,” Turtle says. “Jesus Christ.”

She walks away, leaving the door open and the headlights on. After a moment, the girl hops out of the cab and follows. Turtle turns, waits, and they continue together. Dead branches are strewn across the road. Saplings grow in the median. They come to a wide pullout where heaps of scrap lumber and stacks of tar paper shingles stand rotting underneath towering redwoods, and they can see down a boggy slope above a creek, a single cottage in the clearing, the eaves hung with lichen, the shingles chinked with moss and scattered by ravens, leaving bare spots of patchy tar paper. Jacob and Brett showed her this place. Some building project abandoned by its owners.

“Julia,” Cayenne says. “What are we doing?”

“Come on.”

Turtle walks over to a heap of lumber, old clapboard siding of some kind, covered now in redwood needles. She squats down, slips her fingertips beneath a board, and lifts it aside. The board beneath is covered in rotting duff, marked with the paths of some crawling creature. Centipedes go snaking for cover. Cayenne comes over, stares down with sullen, stifled interest. Turtle lifts aside the next board, and this one, too, is empty, except for a single copper-gold California slender salamander, four inches long, its skin as supple and moist as the flesh of an eye, with tiny, almost vestigial, legs. Turtle indicates the slender salamander, and Cayenne purses her lips. Turtle lifts this board aside, sets it carefully down. There are dirt and leaves crushed between these boards, and creeping white roots, and Turtle is about to lift this board up when she sees the scorpion: big, with yellow jointed legs, her body like a scab blackened with age, holding the same depth of color. On her back, heaped scorplings, each as white and moist as ant eggs, with the small black dots for lateral eyes and the small, single black dots for median eyes.

Turtle picks the creature up by the barbed tail. She draws her knife and straight-razors it down the scorpion’s back, shaving the scorplings into the leaf litter. They salt the board, crawling in every direction, bright white against the duff. The scorpion lashes and twists under the knife, arching her back and reaching desperately with her claws, her ocher mouthpieces flaring and closing.

Cayenne gasps. “Careful!” she says.

Turtle holds the scorpion up to the headlights, and the light shines through the coil of her guts. Cayenne draws closer. The scorpion strains, reaching through the air, curling and falling back to her full length. Turtle lowers the lashing scorpion into her mouth and tears off the tail and discards it among the scattered, swarming scorplings. She chews, passing the lashing arachnid from one line of molars to the other, the integument cracking apart. Turtle swallows.

“Oh my god!” Cayenne says.

“You want to try?”

“Oh my god!” Cayenne says again.

“Come on.”

“No!”

“Give it a try.”

“No!” Cayenne says.

“You sure?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t be a pussy,” Turtle says.

“Okay, okay,” Cayenne says. “Maybe.”

The next scorpion is larger, his armor a pitted rust color. He turns in confusion from right to left, and then arches his body, displaying claws and tail. The bulb is pus-yellow, and the stinger itself is a thin black hook. Where plates of his rust-color armor abut, the integument is textured with chitinous warts.

Turtle takes the Tabasco from her back pocket, shakes a dash out onto the scorpion, which flinches. She says, “You like hot sauce?”

“This is gross,” Cayenne says, knocking her knees together, touching her fingertips together.

“Yeah?” Turtle says.

“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” Cayenne says, but she says it excitedly, almost urgently.

“Puts hair on your ovaries,” Turtle says.

Cayenne gives a startled, nervous laugh. Then she says, “I like hot sauce.”

“All right,” Turtle says. She dashes more Tabasco onto the scorpion, which swings its claws, opening and closing them, and moves to strike with its tail. The Tabasco is very bright in the headlights.