Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

“You want to pick it up or should I?”

“You do it.”

Turtle catches the scorpion by the tail and swings it lashing into the air. It claws at her, dripping Tabasco, jointed, cricket-yellow legs spidering in the air, descending one after another in some reflexive movement of walking. He throws off flecks of Tabasco with his urgent twitchings. Turtle holds it out.

Cayenne says, “Oh god!”

Turtle says, “You got this.”

“Oh god.” She dances away nervously and excitedly, comes back.

“Do it,” Turtle says. The scorpion strains his claws up, trying to curl back on himself and reach Turtle’s fingers. His eyes are small black points set in his rusty-red armature. Their gloss catches the headlights.

“I can’t!” Cayenne says, hopping up and down.

The scorpion strains for Turtle and then drops to full extension, dripping, the red droplets running from his claws. Cayenne opens her mouth, comes up from underneath the scorpion, and closes her mouth on it.

“Bite the tail,” Turtle says. “Bite the thing off.”

Cayenne gnashes her teeth and the tail peels away in Turtle’s fingers, and Turtle flicks it into the duff. Cayenne hesitates, mouth locked closed.

“Chew!” Turtle says. “Chew!”

Cayenne’s eyes bulge. She chews hard, and then swallows. Turtle claps her on the shoulder. The girl puts her hands on her knees, gasping and distraught.

“You okay?” Turtle says.

“Christ!” she says, grasping at her heart with the fingertips of her unwounded hand. “I’m so nervous my heart hurts! It does!”

Turtle laughs, and then Cayenne laughs, too.

“That was so gross!”

“Nah. Nah. It was fine.”

“Let’s bring one back for Martin!”

“All right,” Turtle says. They lift aside boards until they find another scorpion, and this one Turtle carries back to the truck and drops into the Big Gulp cup. They drive back in the dark, the road now deserted, the headlights cutting across the forest. Cayenne sucks on her thumb. They pull onto Highway 1, and turn north. Buckhorn Hill is south. They are going toward town.

“Where are we going?”

“I need to pick up something,” Turtle says.

“Okay,” Cayenne says.

“Just something I thought of.”

“What?” Cayenne says.

“It’s nothing,” Turtle says.

“Julia, have you ever been stung?”

“No.”

“Never?”

“Never.”

“Oh.”

They drive in silence.

“Julia?”

“Yes?”

“Nothing.”

“What?”

“ I’ve been bitten before, though.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. There are these bugs that bite you and lay eggs in your skin. Then all the little bugs hatch under your skin.”

“Really?” Turtle has never heard of such a thing.

“Yeah, and I had a big bite, and so what my stepdad, really my mom’s boyfriend, I guess, but kind of my stepdad, what he did is, he had, like, a beer bottle and he heated it up on the stove, with, you know—he heated it up until it was, like— really hot and the air inside of it was really hot, and then he put it on my arm, and it sucked onto my arm, and when it cooled, it, like, suctioned out all the spider eggs. Like a vacuum. Like they were all white and stringy. He sucked them all out and it was okay after that.”

“Christ.”

“What?”

“Just— Christ. I guess.”

“Have you ever had that happen, Julia?”

“No.”

“Really?”

“I’ve never even heard of that.”

“It happens all the time. You don’t have that here?”

“All the time?”

“Yeah. That people get, like, the bugs in their skin? Yeah.”

“Would that even work?” Turtle is having trouble imagining the bottle trick.

“Yeah, it works. You’ve never had those bugs?”

“No.”

“They’re—you know.” The girl scratches at her arm. “You know—under your skin.”

“No,” Turtle says, “I didn’t know that was even possible.”

“Oh yeah. And, like, the people at the hospital, they don’t even believe you.”

“You went to the hospital?”

“Yeah. Oh yeah, all the time. Like, if you can’t pay for a doctor, you can just go to the ER. They have to take you. It’s the law. That’s what my stepdad says. But you go in and the doctor won’t even look at it. They just pretend like it’s not happening. They won’t CT scan it or anything.”

“Huh.”

They drive through Mendocino, and up into Fort Bragg, where Turtle pulls off the highway and into the parking lot of the Rite Aid. She leaves Cayenne in the car and walks through the sliding doors. There are no other customers in the store. The lights are bleakly bright, and there is a single checker at the counter. Turtle walks to the back, to the closed pharmacy. She walks along the aisles until she finds the pregnancy tests. She kneels down in front of these, picks up a pink box, and walks quickly back to the front, where she pays with cash, peeling the bills off with shaking hands. The checker is an old woman with reddish, curled hair, and she does not look at Turtle, but says, “You all right, honey?”

Turtle picks up the box and stuffs it into her pocket. She says, “Yeah, I’m fine.”

The checker says, “Honey, you sure? You need anything?”

Turtle is about to turn and walk away, and the woman says, “You got somewhere to stay for tonight?”

Turtle turns back. She says, “I’m fine. Yeah, I’ve got somewhere to stay.”

The woman keeps looking down, not directly at Turtle. She says, “All right, sweetheart. Be safe. Have a nice night.”

Turtle turns and walks out to the truck.

When she gets in the truck, Cayenne says, “What was that?”

“Nothing.”

“What did you buy?”

“I didn’t buy anything.”

“Oh.”

“Cayenne—how long have you been with Martin?”

Cayenne chews her lip. She is so small. Her feet do not reach the floor of the cab. She swings them a little. She is flat-chested and all elbows. For one moment, Turtle looks at her and thinks, I could drop this girl off at Anna’s house. Go to a phone book, find Anna’s address, and just drop her off. Tell Martin she ran away.

“How long, Cayenne?”

“Like, a little more than two weeks.”

Turtle cracks her knuckles.

“What, Julie?”

“I’m just losing my fucking mind, is all.”

Turtle is looking out at the parking lot.

“What?”

“What was it like, with him?”

“Good,” Cayenne says.

“What does that mean?”

“Really, really good,” Cayenne says.

“Good?”

“Yeah.”

“It was good?”

“Why, Julie?”

“Do you need to see, I don’t know, a doctor?”

“For my finger? It still hurts, but it’s less painful now than before, Julie.”

“Where are you from, Cayenne?”

“Washington. Like, eastern Washington.”

“I know, but what happened?”

Cayenne slips her thumb into her mouth, turns to study her own dark reflection in the window. Turtle sits awkwardly beside her in the cab. She starts the truck and swings around in the empty parking lot and out onto the road. She drives slowly, waiting for Cayenne to say more, but she doesn’t. They are silent, except for the scorpion knocking against the edges of the Big Gulp cup, and Turtle is reminded of her grandfather and the time they had driven back home with that big crab knocking against the sides of its bucket. She thinks, I wish to hell he was here, he would know what to do. But Turtle thinks then, maybe he wouldn’t, maybe he’d be just as useless all over again. There is so much of her life she doesn’t understand. She knows what happened, but why it happened and what it meant, she doesn’t know.