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(1987: The Making of Rat Girl)
1
Two days after Triss Coghlin graduated from sixth grade, her mother packed everything that would fit into the trunk of the car, told the twins they’d have to leave their tricycles behind, and they all headed south to make another new start. They were going to Florida this time, so Triss’s mother could get a job at Epcot Center. “You have to go with your dream,” Patty Coghlin told Triss as she slammed the trunk lid down. “Go for the gusto, like it says on TV,” she said, and then she started to cry.
That was the first Triss had heard about any Florida dreams, but she was used to her mother’s sudden changes of plan. Florida sounded okay. Better than Flint, Michigan, which was where the last change had landed them a year ago, where her father was supposed to open an auto repair but had joined AA instead, and then split. In Florida, people lay around on the beach, their backs all shiny with oil. Oranges grew there. You could pick them off the trees. “Hey you guys,” she told her brothers, “we’re going to live in a house made out of a giant hollowed-out orange.”
Dickie and Davey were only five. Triss was nearly twelve, and they believed whatever she told them. “Our beds will be hollowed-out giant orange seeds,” she said. “When you turn on the faucets, juice will come out instead of water.”
The twins didn’t seem to care where they were going, as long as they got to take their GI Joes. They didn’t even seem particularly sad about the tricycles. Maybe they figured by the time they got to Florida they’d be big enough to have real bikes. They sat in the back seat making gun noises and things-blowing-up noises and didn’t even look out the window as the car pulled away. Triss didn’t turn around either, but she watched the dirty red-brick apartment building growing smaller in the passenger-side mirror. It was an ugly building. Their apartment had smelled like bug spray. In Florida there’d be beaches and palm trees. Pink houses and yellow ones and aqua blue, the color of swimming pools.
As they left the city behind and drove south through green countryside she pretended that Florida was where her father had gone too, and when they got there they’d find him. She pretended that he hadn’t left, exactly, he’d just gone on ahead to find a place for them. He’d be there when they arrived, with his dark hair slicked back and his shirt unbuttoned all the way down to his belt so you could see his tattoos, and a house already rented, ready for them to move in.
She knew it wasn’t really true. She knew he really meant it when he left this time, because he didn’t take just his clothes, he took the barbecue grill and his saxophone and the signed picture of Jerry García. But it didn’t hurt to pretend. “Will we live near the beach?” she asked. “Can we have a boat?” But her mother was crying again and didn’t answer.
Somehow on the way to Florida they got lost. They took a wrong turn and then their car started pouring blue smoke and then the engine quit. It was 10 o’clock at night, raining hard. They were somewhere in Ohio. Triss’s mom held the roadmap over her head for an umbrella while she called a towtruck and then they all splashed across the street from the pay phone into a Taco Bell to wait.
All day long Patty Coghlin had had the look in her eyes that meant her blood chemicals were out of balance. She’d explained to Triss long ago that when she got worried or stressed her alcohol level dropped too low and then she made unwise decisions. A drink or two steadied her mind, she said, and Triss had believed that when she was little. Right now she could tell her mother was wishing the Taco Bell was the kind of restaurant that had a liquor license. Triss figured she had maybe five minutes to think of some distraction before her mother asked the counter guy what a thirsty girl was supposed to do for a drink around here. That’s what she always said, and the guy usually had plenty of suggestions. Sometimes she’d go off with him and be gone for hours, and Triss would have to look after her brothers till she got back.
Just then the door opened and another lady came into the Taco Bell, carrying a baby wrapped in a dirty blue blanket. She and Triss’s mom struck up a conversation, and pretty soon they were telling each other their life stories. After a while the baby pooped —Triss could smell it — but the two women kept on talking and Triss’s mom kept nodding her head, and the lady showed her something on the map. Triss had to get the food herself when it was ready and make Dickie and Davey wash their hands. And the next thing she knew, they weren’t going to Florida anymore, they were going to New Jersey to live on a farm and feed the hungry of the world.
“What about your job?” Triss asked. By that time the other woman had taken her two chicken burritos and large Diet Coke and her smelly baby and driven away into the night, without even changing the baby’s diaper. New Jersey? A farm? “What about Epcot Center?”
“One job’s as good as another,” her mother said, “and farm work’s healthy work, out in the fresh air and sunshine. And we’ll be helping people —won’t that make you feel good?” She had folded the soggy roadmap and put it in her purse, but now she shook it out and spread it across the table to show Triss where they were headed. “There’ll be kids for you and your brothers to play with. Other moms, too. It’ll be like one big family.” She tilted Triss’s chin up and gave her a smile. “Won’t it be nice to be in a family again?”
Triss looked at the map. There were directions scribbled in the margin, and a phone number, ink seeping into the damp paper. “No dads?”
“Oh, honey,” her mother said. “Give that up. He’s gone.”
2
Their car kept breaking down. First it was the water pump, then the alternator, and then the battery went dead. The car was so old it was hard to find parts. It took days to get where they were going, and as soon as they pulled off the road onto the gravel turn-out by the gate, the engine died again.
Her mother gave a tired sigh. “Well,” she said. “Here we are.”
Triss had never thought very much about farms, but when she did she pictured horses and cows and a red barn with a silo. What she saw now was four or five little flat-roofed gray cinderblock buildings lined up like boxes in front of one larger one. Beyond, empty green fields steamed in the humid afternoon sun. In the distance the fields ended at a line of black trees and as Triss watched, a red tractor, small as a toy, crawled into view on the top of a rise and then disappeared again. Behind her, across the two-lane road from the cinderblock boxes, stood a wooden shack with its windows boarded over, a pair of rusty gas pumps in the gravel out in front. One had a row of bullet holes, neat as buttons, running down it.
“No way,” Triss said. “This is the boonies.”
“What did you expect? Farms are in the country.” Her mother frowned. “I wonder where everyone is. I called ahead. Archibald knew we were coming.”
Before she could ask who Archibald was, Triss felt Davey poking her in the ribs. Davey was the quiet one. He had always let Dickie do most of the talking, but since their father left he’d stopped speaking entirely, just kind of hummed if he wanted your attention. He was humming now, and pointing. Then she noticed a bike leaning against one of the boxes, an old station wagon parked next to another, a swing set with one broken swing half-hidden behind a third. The cinderblock buildings were houses.
“Here comes a car.” Patty squinted into the afternoon sun. “I’ll bet that’s him.”
Archibald was a tall, thick-chested man with white hair in a long braid and a cowboy hat with a feather. His tie-dyed shirt made Triss miss her father so much her stomach hurt. He showed them where to put their stuff in one of the little cinderblock houses, and as soon as they’d unloaded the car, before they unpacked or had a chance to choose who was sleeping in which bed, he came knocking on the door.
“Orientation time,” he said, beckoning them all outside. “This is the best part. I feel blessed when I can welcome someone new into the family, and introduce them to the work we do here.” He smiled at Triss’s mother. “I’m sure glad you met up with Charlene and she steered you folks here,” he said. “Charlene's a real ambassador." He smiled again. His teeth were square and white. "You’re going to love it here, Patty, you’re going to fit right in, I can tell. The kids too. This is a great place for kids.” He reached out to shake Triss’s hand. She folded her arms across her chest, pretending to stare at a bluejay screeching on a power wire, but the twins grabbed onto him like they’d known him all their lives.
Archibald led them around behind the little houses. Two mothers and their kids lived in each, he told them. Ten women, forty children. Their house looked like all the others, except that its front door had once been painted yellow. Charlene the ambassador had just moved out. Triss and her family would be sharing with a woman named Aggie and her three little girls. “No dads?” Triss asked.
“No dads. No men at all,” said Archibald. When he smiled his gums showed, a dark unhealthy red that reminded Triss of liver. “Except for me,” he said. “What d’you think of that?”
“Cock in the henhouse,” Patty laughed. She laughed again and fluttered her eyelids when Archibald said no, it was nothing like that. Triss’s head had begun to ache. She didn’t like the way her mother’s eyes never left Archibald, or the way she kept fussing with her hair. Triss knew the signs. Any minute now her mother was probably going to ask where a thirsty girl could get a drink. Instead, she said she was ready for “the grand tour.”
First Archibald took them to the big building, the Center. He showed them the kitchen, explaining that the women and older girls took turns cooking; there were no stoves or refrigerators in the houses. Next to the kitchen was a long room with tables and benches where everyone ate. “We’re a family here,” he told them. “We do things together.” At one end of that room was a TV and a pingpong table and some games. At the other end a door opened into a green-tiled bathroom with shower stalls and two tubs. Yes, he said, the little houses had bathrooms of their own. “Toilets and basins.” He winked. “Even in a family, some things ought to be private.”
Triss’s idea of a garden was her grandmother’s backyard plot in Indiana: four rows of Silver Queen corn, some pole beans and tomato vines. Archibald’s garden looked bigger than the high school football field where Triss’s dad used to jog around the track. Beyond the garden were cornfields. A dozen or so women and kids knelt here and there among the garden rows, hats shading their faces, hands busy with the plants. At the far end, a couple of bigger kids were stacking crates into the bed of a pickup truck.
“We feed the hungry,” Archibald said. “That’s our mission.” Feeding the hungry was noble work, he told them. Patty Coghlin and her children were lucky to have found their way here so they could be part of it.
Part of what? Triss wondered, but Archibald was already leading the way across the road to the small wooden building with the gas pumps. The store, he called it. “Open Wednesdays and Saturdays noon to five,” he said, undoing a padlock and pushing open the warped front door. Hot dusty air flowed out. “Snacks and soft drinks, a few staples and sundries.” He turned to Patty. “I make the weekly shopping run on Mondays. If you need anything, get your list to me on Sunday. For the first six months, we don’t encourage independent trips to town.”
When they had seen everything there was to see, he sat them all down at a table and talked about hard work and sacrifice and discipline. “Here, everyone works,” he said. “You saw people weeding the garden just now. And we’ve got a crew stringing bobwire today, out past the cornfield. The older children look after the younger ones. Everyone contributes. No one shirks. If anyone shirks,” he paused, looking straight at Triss, “or if anyone lies or steals, everyone feels the sting. We know how lucky we are to have this work to do.” The longer he talked the faster his words came, until finally he got up from his chair and began pacing back and forth, his white hair glistening like sugar as he paused for a moment in the sunny doorway, spreading his arms as if he wanted to hug the big garden with its rows of tomatoes and beans.
“We water the ground with our sweat,” he went on. “We’re part of our own harvest — think of that!” Then he paused, patting his shirt pocket. “Would anyone like a stick of gum?” Patty took one, and of course the twins did. Triss looked at the pack he offered, one stick pulled halfway out, limp with the heat and lolling like a tongue, its sweet smell escaping like minty breath. She shook her head. Just like that, for no reason she could name, she’d decided: it was Archibald’s fault, even more than her mother’s, that they were here.
Once he began to explain the farm’s routine and the rules, though, she relaxed a little. Patty Coghlin wasn’t suited for life on a farm, and pretty soon she’d realize it and change her plan again. She was young for a mom, and pretty, with shiny brown hair that was darker than Triss’s and curly instead of straight. She liked a good time, dancing and movies and shopping at the mall. No way she was going to stay here in the boonies every weekend, watching TV with a bunch of other women. No way, either, she was going to get up at six every morning to pull weeds and pick bugs off of lettuce. No way she’d whitewash fences, or wash fifty people’s breakfast dishes by hand in a big steel sink and chip the polish off her nails. According to Archibald, all their car needed was a distributor cap. He’d order one, he said, and when it arrived he’d put it in for them. After six months, he said, if all went well, Patty and her kids could take a drive into town.
Triss leaned her elbows on the sticky table. She let her eyes slide closed. Her mother would have them out of here in a week.
3
“This place is where they dump the people they don’t want,” Collin said. Collin was a funny-looking kid, a funny light tan all over — skin, hair, eyes, even his lips and eyebrows. His front teeth were long and stuck out a little. He was two years older than Triss but not as tall, the only other one who seemed to understand how weird the farm really was. A human junkyard, he called it, Rejectsville, and he called Archibald the Junkman. But unlike Triss, Collin treated the whole thing as a joke. “Old Junkie’s keeping us for spare parts,” he’d say, and cackle with laughter. Or “We’re the Ree-jects,” proudly, like it was the name of a sports team or rock band or something.
“Speak for yourself,” Triss always said. “We’re on our way to Florida. We’re just waiting for a part for our car.”
“Sure you are,” Collin snickered, and he kept on saying it even after Triss knuckled him right on the same bruise where she’d hit him yesterday. “You’re not leaving,” he said. “Where you gonna go? You belong right here in Rejectsville, under the Junkman’s nose with everybody else.”
Three weeks had passed. At first Triss had kept quiet, learning to thin seedlings and mix pesticides and make oatmeal for fifty people while she waited for her mother to realize that her blood chemistry had gotten screwed up and she’d made an unwise decision. She’d told herself that soon the car would be fixed and they would leave, even if they had to sneak away in the night. But the car still didn’t run and Patty was settling in, making herself comfortable, making friends with the other moms. She and Aggie, their housemate, and a bunch of others would sit around in the evenings and smoke dope and tell each other how lucky they were to be rid of their shitty husbands, and then cry.
It worried Triss still more that her mother didn’t complain about getting up early, or try to sneak off to town or smuggle in a sixpack even when some of the other women did. She worked hard and without complaining at whatever chore she was assigned. She did jobs Triss would never have believed, like unstopping toilets and once even pulling the guts out of some chickens that Archibald had brought with their heads and feet and feathers still on. Hard work and sacrifice gave her a sense of purpose, she said. And Archibald … “He’s a visionary,” she’d told Triss just last night. “He has a picture in his mind of the way the world ought to be.”
“Like this?” Triss had waved an arm, indicating the shabby, crowded little living room and, through the open door, the other shabby little houses and the ramshackle store across the road. “Get him some glasses!”
“Don’t be so smart.” Patty had been reading a book called The Greening of America. She closed it, marking her place with her thumb, and gave Triss a look. “He wants the world to be a better place, that’s all, and the way to get there is through hard work and cooperation. I used to know that. But then I fell in with a bad crowd, and I forgot. I’m grateful to be back on track again. I feel like I’ve come home.”
Collin said, “Everybody in this place is missing a piece or something. That’s why we’re here.”
“You’re missing your brain.” Triss knew she didn’t belong here. She wasn’t missing any pieces. She wasn’t like the other kids and she wasn’t like Collin either, who liked to start fires with a little plastic magnifying glass he carried in his pocket on a keyring with a key on it that he said was to his father’s car, which he said he knew how to drive.
“We’re going to Epcot Center,” she told him. “I’ve been there before, with my dad. Right before he got arrested.” That was the story she’d told — that her dad was a bank robber and jewel thief and the whole family had lived in a mansion. But then he got caught.
“Hah!” Collin always said, but she could tell he almost believed her. Some days she almost believed the story herself.
“My dad’s in Florida right now,” she said. “He’s got this great tan. What’re you gonna buy today?”
It was Wednesday. They’d finished their morning chores and were waiting in the shade of the tool shed for Archibald to open up the store. They could see him out in the cornfield, a Phillies cap turned backwards on his head and his long braid hanging down. He was looking at the corn and the marijuana, which was another crop he grew, with a little short black-haired guy called Henry who’d started coming around.
“He’s in jail, but he’s getting out pretty soon,” she said. The story rolled off her tongue without her having to think, while her mind busied itself deciding what to buy with the three dollars she’d partly earned and partly won pitching pennies. Fritos, a grape soda, maybe Oreos. “He’s gonna meet us at Epcot. We’re gonna live on his boat. He had to give back all the money he stole from the banks, but he still has the diamonds. They’re hidden.” Leaning back against the wall of the shed she closed her eyes and imagined herself inside the hot, stuffy little store, taking her time, looking at everything, her mind almost made up but open to sudden inspiration.
“Where?” Collin asked.
“Where what? The diamonds? How would I know?” Oreos. Crispy dark chocolate. She could feel it crumbling between her teeth. “I hope his memory’s good. He had a map but when the cops came to arrest him he tore it up in little pieces and flushed it down the john.”
“You’re so full of shit,” Collin said, admiringly. He had his magnifying glass out and was focusing a spot of sunlight on his bare thigh, seeing how long he could stand it. His record was nine and a half minutes; there were burn marks all up and down both of his legs.
“Your whole leg’s gonna catch on fire.” Triss slapped at his hand. Not Oreos. Twinkies. Her mouth watered at the thought of the soft cake and the creamy filling that didn’t taste so much as feel, pure sweet sensation on her tongue. And a little notebook for sketching, and a pencil. The store hadn’t been open on Saturday. Archibald had caught Nardo Ramírez with two cans of 7-Up in the waistband of his shorts last week, and everyone had to be punished.
Collin spat on the end of his finger and wiped it on his leg where he’d been burning himself. He looked at his watch. “Dang,” he said. “Not even close.” Then he said, “Henry’s in the Mafia. He buys grass from the Junkman and sells it to a guy in a white stretch limousine.”
“Now you’re full of shit,” Triss said. “What guy in a white limousine?”
“Just some guy. He came to the store last week.” Then he said, “I’m gonna get Fritos and a box of doughnuts. If I live that long. I’m starving.”
“Me too.” Triss was always hungry. She hated the food here. Even when it was her mother’s turn to cook, everything tasted like school cafeteria. It wasn’t fair — all those acres of lettuce and green peas that Henry carted off in his truck to feed the hungry, but day after day, their breakfast was canned beans and bacon, their lunch was canned chili with beans, and dinner was beans and more beans. She and Collin had tried to count their farts one day, but they lost track before lunchtime.
A few nights ago she’d dreamed of apple pie. The dream woke her up. She climbed out the window and sneaked around behind the houses to the garden. The tomatoes were just turning orange on the side that got the most sun, and they were as hard as apples. She pretended they were apples. How many did she eat — four, five? — sitting there in the flat white moonlight gulping them down in half-chewed chunks before they all came up again and her mother found out and smacked her so hard she saw fireworks.
Collin shoved his magnifying glass back into his pocket and stood up. “Here they come.” He jerked his chin toward the men making their slow way back through the field. Half a dozen kids were already waiting, clumped up in front of the store. Rejects and mutants, she thought; Collin was right. There was Bobby Trask, who wet his bed every night. Mary Lopiano and Susie Gunther, who’d eat the green worms off tomato plants for a dime. Nardo Ramírez, with spots of ringworm showing through his hair, and the black eye somebody’d given him for stealing the sodas and depriving everyone of their weekend treats. Only her brothers looked like normal little kids; she supposed it took a little while to get mutantized enough that it showed. When the kids saw Archibald coming, they scrambled forward, shoving up close to the door. Others came running and crowded in too. Bigger kids trampled little kids. Archibald pushed past them all and bent to unlock the door.
“Look at ’em!” Collin grinned as the kids swarmed around Archibald. He nudged Triss with his elbow and then crossed his eyes and hung his tongue out the side of his mouth. “Rejects and mutants. The Junkman and his junk.” Then he said, “Let’s go. I hope the damn Cokes are cold this time. Last week I think old Archie left the cans out in the sun.”
Triss stood up too. Something was thumping in her chest, rising up and threatening to choke her. She gripped Collin’s arm. “What?” he said. “Jeez!” He pulled loose and backed away, rubbing the red marks above his elbow. “What?”
“Stay here,” she said. He stared at her. His eyes were the color of the tan spots on her father’s army pants. For a second or two it almost seemed he understood. His tan eyelids flickered. Then he smirked and looked away. “Are you nuts?”
“We don’t have to be like them.” Her throat was so tight she could barely speak.
“Who cares about them? I’ve been waiting a week for something decent to eat.”
He turned, but she grabbed him by the neck of his tee shirt and pulled him back. “I’m not a Ree-ject, I’m not a mutant, and I don’t belong here.” Her voice sounded harsh and strange: “I don’t even want a damn soda or any damn candy if I have to buy it from Archibald. You go on if you want to, but I’d rather starve!”
4
“What kind of cake are you having for your birthday?” Susie Gunther asked. She and Triss were weeding the carrots. Susie couldn’t remember which ones were weeds and kept pulling up the wrong things, so every so often Triss had to stop and poke five or six carrots back into the ground. Weeding was okay, though. Of all her chores, she liked working in the garden the best, liked the feel and the smell of the warm crumbly dirt.
“My mom usually makes angel food,” she said. “We always have two kinds of ice cream, Rocky Road and something else, whatever my mom feels like, for a surprise.”
“What presents did you ask for?”
“Nothing.” Triss straightened up on her knees and rubbed her shoulder, frowning.
Earlier that morning Archibald had stopped her as she was leaving the tool shed. “I hear you got a special day coming up next week.” His smile gave her the creeps. “You can pick out a present from the store, birthday girl,” he’d said. “Your choice. Anything you want.”
She’d shoved her hands into her pockets. “No thanks.”
So fast she didn’t even see it move, his hand — sunburned, callused, the nails broken and dirty -- had clamped down on her shoulder, not quite hard enough to hurt. “Haven’t seen you in the store lately.” Still smiling, showing his liver-colored gums. “Don’t you like Cokes and candy anymore?” Below his hand, her arm looked brittle and skinny as a stick.
Glancing away she muttered, “You can give mine to some of those hungry people we’re supposed to feed.”
“Are you mocking me?” He pushed his face into hers, so close she could see the little hairs growing out of the pores on his oily sunburned nose. He smelled like sweat and fertilizer and spearmint gum. His grip tightened. Pain shot down her arm.
“Let go!”
“Kid, you better not mock me,” he’d said. “You’ll be sorry if you do.”
“I only asked for one thing,” Triss told Susie. “But it’s a secret.”
For weeks Triss had pestered her mom: “Know what I want for my birthday? I want us to go to Florida. Say yes and I’ll never ask for anything else as long as I live.”
“Mm-hmm,” Patty Coghlin might say if she’d been smoking.
“Mm-hmm, we’ll see.” If she hadn’t been smoking her eyes would flash and she’d tell Triss what a good deal they had here at the farm. Rent-free house, free food, lots of friends -- just like family! -- plus Archibald was a visionary and they were working for the greater good. “Dickie and Davey love it here,” she always said. Hadn’t Triss noticed how happy they were?
Triss had noticed. Davey was even starting to talk again. “Don’t be so selfish,” her mother would say. “Don’t mess it up for everyone!”
That night Triss tried again. Patty had shared a joint with Aggie after dinner and was in a mellow mood. The twins and Aggie’s two little girls were asleep. Aggie had gone next door. It seemed like a good time. “You remember what I asked for, don’t you?” she began.
“A bike, was it? Honey, I don’t think we can afford a bike this year.” Patty was giving herself a manicure. Once a week she got out her cosmetics case. She’d wash her hair in the bathroom basin instead of showering in the big bathroom, slather cream on her face, rub almond-smelling lotion into her hair and wrap a towel around it. Then she’d soak her hands in warm water with special soap and use a special brush to get the stains out from under her nails and around her cuticles. She’d dab a little cream on Triss’s face too, and do Triss’s nails when she had finished with her own. “How about some pretty clothes for school?”
“Mom, I told you. I told you yesterday, and the day before. Did you forget?” The bathroom was so small Triss had to put the lid down on the toilet and sit on that. Aggie’s thick gray socks, the feet stained like they’d been soaked in tea, hung dripping from a string tied from the light fixture to a nail in the top of the window frame. “Living here stinks,” Triss said. “And don’t try to tell me it’s like a family. Dad’s not here. And —” She hesitated. She hadn’t made up her mind whether to show her mother the marks Archibald’s fingers had left.
“We’re so lucky to have found our way here,” Patty went on. “We’re hooked into the cycle now, remember? Watering the earth with our sweat, growing crops to feed the hungry.”
“How about us? How come we aren’t feeding ourselves any better than we do?”
Patty dabbed lotion onto her cuticles. Sacrifice was important too, she said. “I know it’s hard to understand, honey, you’ll just have to trust me. Here, give me your hand, let me put some of this on you too. Doesn’t that smell good?”
Triss leaned back and closed her eyes, giving herself over to her mother’s touch, the warm fingers sliding over her own, smoothing on the fragrant lotion. This was the best moment of the week — her mom relaxed, humming songs the way she had as far back as Triss could remember. Triss could relax too, and sail away on her mother’s voice as if it were a kite floating her high above the farm, and she could look down and everything would be tiny and far away.
“You know I’ve always been idealistic,” Patty said, working on Triss’s cuticles with a Q-tip. “I’ve told you how I ran away from home when I was just barely sixteen, and went to San Francisco to find peace and love.”
“And rock’n’roll,” Triss said, leaning contentedly against her mother’s shoulder. She knew the story by heart. “And you lived in a big purple and green house with a lot of other people, with an upside down American flag on the door. And everyone shared their food and wanted to move out to the country and grow pot and soybeans— ”
Triss sat up straight. Harsh fluorescent light bounced off the chrome faucet and handles above the sink. She blinked. “Mom, are you trying to be a hippie again?”
“I ran away because I wanted my freedom,” her mother said. “Freedom!”
“What’s free about living here? We can’t go anywhere, we might as well be in goddam jail.”
Patty Coghlin set down the Q-tips and lotion. She took Triss’s face between her hands and looked into her eyes. “Honey, here’s something I never told you. When I got to San Francisco it was too late. The party was over. There wasn’t anything left of it but bad acid and worse lies. The ideals were gone, and the sweetness and trust and love, and anybody’s only hope was to get the hell out. Even that house with the upside-down flag — I saw a picture of it, that’s all, on a poster in a store. It wasn’t real anymore, none of it. But I didn’t understand. I wasn’t but a kid, and when my friends split for Oregon I stayed behind. And there were decisions I had to make, living on my own in a big city, and I didn’t know enough to make them, so I just guessed. And I guessed wrong, just about every damn time.”
“Like about Dad? Did you guess wrong about Dad too?”
Patty blinked, and some kind of expression passed quickly across her face and was gone. “Freedom’s not what you want,” she said. She took Triss’s hand and dipped it in the soapy water in the basin. “Freedom can eat you alive, honey. What you want is someone with a vision. If you can find a man with a vision, he can take the guesswork out.”
“But . . . Archibald?”
“I know you don’t like him, honey, but I do. He’s a good man.”
“He’s porking Collin’s mom.”
“He’s what?” Patty jerked back; her elbow sent the L’Oreal bottle clattering to the floor where it spun like a pointer on the linoleum. “Who told you that?” she asked, voice cold and eyes colder. “That little liar Collin?”
“He’s porking Aggie too. I heard them. He’s a creep. Look!” She pulled the sleeve of her tee shirt up over her shoulder. “He hurt my arm. I hate it here! I want us to leave, I don’t even care where we go.”
Her mother’s lips tightened as she bent to peer at the marks left by Archibald’s fingers. “Oh honey,” she said. “I’m sorry. He shouldn’t have done that.” Then, “Well, the skin’s not broken. It doesn’t look too bad. Here, I’ll rub a little lotion on it for you.” And then, “What were you doing that made him mad?”
“Nothing! We were just talking, and he grabbed me!”
Pulling the towel from her head, Patty ran a comb quickly through her hair. “I hope you weren’t mouthing off. He hates that.” Her hand was shaking. “And I don’t want to hear another goddam word about leaving, do you understand? We’re staying here. I’m not moving from this place. This is home.” Breathing hard, she threw the towel onto the floor and slammed out of the bathroom. A moment later Triss heard her shoving things around in the bedroom they shared.
Triss picked up the towel and the bottle of lotion. She closed the toilet lid and sat down. Her mom was reaarranging the furniture. She did that when she was upset. For months after her father left, Triss would come home from school and think she’d let herself into the wrong apartment. “Are you okay?” she called after awhile. She heard a thump, and her mother’s muttered fuck-god-damn! “Mom?” She waited. Glass broke. Her mother cursed again. “Mommy? Hey, you’re probably right, okay? I mean, probably Collin was lying. You know how he does. And maybe Aggie was having a bad dream or something. Probably that’s what I heard.” Silence. “I guess maybe I did mouth off a little bit to Archibald. I didn’t mean to, but maybe I did.”
Her mother appeared in the doorway, face twisted, tears streaming down. She grabbed Triss by the shoulders, gave her a shake and then hugged her tight. “I don’t mean to yell at you, honey, you’re my big girl and I love you. And I love the twins and I loved your daddy too, but he’s gone. This is our life now.” She nuzzled her face against Triss’s neck the way she used to when Triss was little. “Sweetheart, I need you to help me, okay? You know what upsets me and you keep on doing it, and sometimes I can’t even think, baby, I just get so confused.”
“I’m sorry, Mommy.”
“I know you are. I know, and I want you to do something for me, honey. Will you do something really important for me, something that’ll really help?”
“Sure, Mom.” Triss closed her eyes. Her mother’s hair smelled so good, her skin was so soft. “What?”
“I don’t want you to call me Mom or Mommy anymore, okay? Or even Patty. I want you to call me Meadow.”
5
Some days after she’d finished her chores, Triss would sit beside the road, pretending it ran north and south instead of east and west, pretending it dropped straight down like a string with a rock tied to it, straight down the map to Florida and all she had to do was start walking and keep on going till she got there. If you walked east, she reasoned, following the signs to Atlantic City, and you turned right when you got to a crossroads, that would be south. It would take about a week, she figured, maybe more, but she wouldn’t give up. FLORIDA, the sign would say. And he’d be waiting.
When she tired of that, sometimes she’d draw pictures in her spiral notebook. She wanted to draw palm trees and sailboats and her father with his hair in a ponytail and his tattoos, but nothing ever looked very realistic. All her people turned into cartoon animals: her dad was some kind of weasel, her mom a scared little rabbit. She tried to draw a cartoon strip about how they got back together again and lived happily, but even on paper all they seemed to want to do was fight.
Some days she’d sit in her mother’s car and watch for the Mafia guy in his white limo, even though that was another of Collin’s lies. Sometimes she’d pretend she was driving, or riding in a train. At night too she dreamed of heading south. At first the dreams were like the stories she’d told: she arrived, and he was there. But then they changed. The car swerved over a cliff, or the other passengers got off the train, leaving her alone with Archibald. One night she dreamed she got all the way to Florida, or where Florida was supposed to be, but it was gone. There was a wire-mesh fence at the end of the road, and she stood there with her fingers hooked in it, looking at a giant hole in the ground.
It seemed to Triss that she was doomed to stay on the farm forever. The days all ran together; even her birthday blended in and nearly disappeared. Collin gave her a flashlight. Her mother —Meadow —gave her a pink shirt with beaded flowers on the front, and a bottle of hand lotion. The twins had made crayon drawings, Dickie’s of army tanks, Davey’s of little stick figures sitting in a semi-circle in front of a brown square. “Me,” he said, pointing to the little figures. “Dickie, Jimmy, Tina. Watching TV.”
Collin was the only person she could talk to. Sometimes she thought he was crazy, sometimes she thought it was an act. Sometimes he seemed completely normal and would tell her about his uncle who raced stock cars and the foster homes he’d lived in because his mother used to have a smack habit and had to go to rehab. Sometimes at night she’d sneak out and meet him and they’d sit on the hood of the car and smoke cigarettes. One night he told her he’d had two older sisters who’d drowned in a swimming pool so long ago he barely remembered them. Before that his mother hadn’t been a junkie. At first Triss thought he was lying and then she was pretty sure he wasn’t.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know,” Collin said. A row of new burn marks dotted his left leg. One, just above his knee, was infected and oozing, glistening in the moonlight. He scratched at it with a fingernail. “They just drowned, that’s all. My mom won’t talk about it.” His father lived in Cincinnati. “He got married again, has a whole new family.” They sat without speaking for a few minutes, passing a cigarette between them. Then Collin took a last long drag and stubbed the butt out on the palm of his hand.
“Quit doing that,” Triss said. “It makes me sick!”
“I hitched out to Cincinnati last year,” Collin went on, “found his street and everything. But when I got there I knew it wouldn’t work, so I just hitched on back again.” He paused, lit another cigarette. “Fuck him,” he said. “Who needs him anyways, right?”
Triss rolled onto her stomach and began to pick at the disintegrating rubber of the windshield wipers. The moon was so bright she could see all the way to the edge of the fields, where the black trees began. The road stretched off into the distance, shining like a river. When she looked inside the car she could see the box with the distributor cap just sitting there on the front seat where anyone could steal it. She said, “I could drive this stupid car if I knew how to put that part in.”
“Sure you could drive it. It’s a stick shift, idiot.”
He was right. She thought for a minute. “Could you?”
“Piece of cake, if I had the keys and the battery’s got juice.”
The battery was new, one of the things that had had to be replaced back in Pennsylvania or somewhere. Collin said, “You know what else is a piece of cake? Putting in a distributor cap.”
“Liar.”
“Am not. I watched my uncle.”
Triss glanced over at him —a weird skinny kid picking at a scab on his thigh. It was crazy, but she believed him. “So, if I find the keys, will you put the cap thing in?”
“Maybe.” He grinned. “You’re gonna hire me to be your chauffeur?”
“Would you do it?”
“Hell no. We wouldn’t make it five miles.”
“We might.”
“Nah.” He spat on his finger, wet the scab and scratched it loose. “We’d get caught, and there’d be cops all over this place.” He laughed. “The Junkman’d love that! He’d get busted, growing all that pot.”
“Why? My dad used to grow it.”
“Your dad’s in fucking jail, you dork.”
“Not for that, you dork.”
Collin lit another cigarette. He leaned back on one elbow and took a deep, thoughtful drag. “Fuck ‘em. Let the Junkman deal. Find the damn keys and let’s go to Atlantic City, at least.”
6
The next morning Henry pulled his truck into the parking area, but instead of telling everyone to start loading vegetables, Archibald pointed to Triss and her brothers and half a dozen other kids. He told their mothers to clean them up and make sure they had on clean clothes, they were going to town. The kids rode in the back of the truck. Meadow got in the front with Henry, and some other women climbed into Archibald’s old Chevy with the burned-out taillight. Triss wondered if they were going shopping. Maybe they’d all get some new clothes and have pizza for lunch. But they drove right past the entrance to the mall and stopped in front of a red brick building. Garson School, said a sign over the door.
Right up to the moment when the lady in the office started asking what grade Triss had been in last year and what was the last school she’d gone to, Triss kept hoping her mother would explain that there’d been a mistake. But Meadow never mentioned Florida. She answered all the woman’s questions about vaccinations and shots, the two adults talking back and forth like Triss and the twins weren’t even there. Through the half-open door Triss could see the other moms and kids waiting their turn. Fat, gray-haired Mrs. Ramírez; Bobby Trask’s mother, bony as a skeleton, coughing into her handkerchief. The other moms too looked old and tired, beaten down from bad food and hard work. They had straggly hair and wore baggy jeans, or shorts that showed their veiny legs. With their faded clothes and ragged haircuts, the kids looked just as bad.
Meadow was different. She wore a long flowered skirt and hoop earrings; her hair shone softly from last night’s Herbal Essence rinse. Triss hoped the office lady could see that she wasn’t like the others, that she was an idealist who just kept guessing wrong, and Triss wasn’t like the other kids either.
“We can enroll the boys in kindergarten,” the woman was saying. “Your daughter will go to the middle school. They’ll need her transcript.”
“I’m not going to school here.” It came out louder than Triss intended, and ended with a squeak. Meadow and the woman looked at her, both of them with their eyebrows raised. Triss cleared her throat. “I’m not,” she said, and with a sudden burst of joy, she realized it just might be true. Collin was going to fix the car. Collin knew how to drive the car. She’d find the keys, and one way or another, they’d avoid the cops, and escape from the farm forever.
“Please excuse my daughter,” said Meadow over the top of Triss’s head. “She misses her father. I’ll make sure her records arrive in time.” Then her fingers wrapped around Triss’s arm and her voice hissed, “Stand up. We’re leaving. Not one more word, do you hear me?” She gave the woman at the desk a bright smile, and marched Triss and the twins out the door.
7
“It’s stupid to start a new school when I won’t be staying. The twins can go if they want.” Her brothers had spent the last three days playing kindergarten and drawing pictures of the school building that Meadow taped to the wall by the front door. Dickie’s showed a big smiling yellow sun dripping orange rays down onto its roof. ShcoOL, he’d printed underneath. Davey’s had a chimney, like a house, with curling smoke. A path lined with flowers wound its way to the wide-open front door. “They’ll probably like it,” Triss said. “But not me.”
“You’re going too. We’re staying here. End of discussion.” Meadow was rolling a joint, making a mess as usual, so as usual Triss did it for her. Her mother made a mess of a lot of things, and she was always putting things away and then forgetting where they were and Triss would have to find them. Now she couldn’t find her lighter, or any matches. “Did you take them?” she asked Triss. “I catch you smoking again you’re in the shit, young lady.”
Triss sighed. “Aggie’s got your lighter. I saw her with it at lunch. I don’t know why she doesn’t just get her own. And there’s matches in the bathroom.” This was the third time in a week the lighter had disappeared. Triss had hunted for it enough to know that her mother’s car keys were nowhere in the house. She supposed Archibald had them.
“Here.” She got the matches from the bathroom and handed her mother the joint she’d rolled. It was lumpy and crooked, a bad job but the best she could do with the dusty, crumbly grass they’d been getting lately. She’d heard some of the moms complaining that it was old stuff Archibald had had around for years, that it had catnip in it, or oregano. It was a punishment, the women had said; something some one of them had done, but they all had to feel the sting. Bobby Trask’s mother recalled a time when somebody had done something so bad that there’d been no grass at all for a week. “What happened to her?” one of the other moms asked.
“No one would speak to her,” said Mrs. Trask. “Her or her kids. Not a word. After a while they all just packed up one night and disappeared.”
Triss wondered if that could have been Charlene, the woman they’d met at the Taco Bell, back in Ohio. Charlene the ambassador. Maybe it had been her idea of a joke to send Triss’s family on to the place where everyone had turned against her.
“It’s always hard to start a new school,” Meadow was saying. Smoke leaked from her mouth with every word. “You’ll get used to it, though. You’re my big girl. Think of all the new friends you’ll make. I’ll bet you get a boyfriend!”
“You can’t make me go.”
Meadow shoved back from the table, eyes narrowed. “I can make you go. I’m your mother. It’s the law. You can go to school, or you can go to Juvenile Hall.”
“You wouldn’t dare say a word.” Triss felt her cheeks grow hot. “If I get busted, you get busted. Everybody does! Growing pot’s illegal, Mom. Old Archie can kiss his stupid farm goodbye.”
“You little shit,” Meadow said. She grabbed Triss by the front of her shirt. “You’ll go to school and like it. Now get out of here before I really get mad at you.”
It was Saturday afternoon and everyone else was still over at the store. When Triss climbed the pine tree she could see them milling around outside, looking like a bunch of sheep. She had her notebook with her, and that’s how she drew them, as a herd of scraggly sheep with burrs and twigs in their wool. Only her brothers were fluffy and clean, but they were still sheep. The moms were cows, Archibald was a rattlesnake. After awhile she saw Collin heading her way. She drew him as a dog —a collie, of course.
“Hey!” he called when he saw her. She jumped down and went to meet him. Collin had a big yellow peach in each hand and was biting chunks from first one and then the other, chewing with his eyes dreamily half-closed. “God that’s good,” he said. “You missed out today, no shit.”
“Me and my mom had a fight,” she began. Then, “You got those from Archibald?” He’d never brought fresh fruit to the store, not once all summer long.
“Aren’t they humongous? And they’re sweet as sugar. He’s got a couple of bushel baskets of ’em.” Collin took another bite. “Or did, anyway. He’s giving ’em away free.”
“Give me one?”
Collin shook his head. “I thought you didn’t want anything to do with anything of the Junkman’s.”
She picked up a rock and tossed it at a crow sitting on the fence. The crow squawked, flapped heavily upward, then settled again on the fence a few yards away.
“I don’t. Who wants a damn peach anyways? They’re probably all bruised and mooshy.”
Collin grinned. Juice was running down his chin and he wiped it with the back of his wrist. “Like I said, you missed out.” Then he said, “Find your brothers. They had three or four each, maybe more, dragging ’em around in a pillowcase like they’d been out trick-or-treating.”
8
Triss couldn’t find the twins. She figured they were holed up somewhere stuffing their faces, and it would serve them right if they both got stomach aches. Down by the swing set she ran into Nardo and Bobby. The ground around them was littered with wrinkled red pits, but their peaches were all gone. “Archibald’s still got some,” Nardo told her. “Why don’t you ask him?”
“No way.” Still, when she saw him loading boxes into his car in front of the store a little later, she drifted in that direction. The peach basket was half-hidden by one of the boxes; she could tell by the way his arm muscles bunched when he lifted it that there were still plenty of peaches. Archibald leaned into the trunk, rearranged the contents then tried to fit another box inside too. When it wouldn’t go, he lifted out the basket and set it on the ground.
Triss worked her way closer, from behind the fence to behind a tree to the shadow of the store itself. She couldn’t see the peaches, but their scent perfumed the humid air. Archibald cussed to himself; the boxes still refused to fit. Before long he straightened up and disappeared inside the store.
She started toward the car — Just grab one and run, he’ll never know! — then froze as a door slammed shut. “Well well,” Archibald said. “Hello, stranger.”
Triss gulped air. “I’m looking for my brothers.”
“Yeah?” He walked past her, close enough that she could smell his sweat and cigarettes. “They were here earlier.” Reaching down into the basket, he lifted out a peach. “All the kids were,” he said. “All but you.” He shoved the basket toward her with his foot. “Want one?”
She shook her head, unable to speak. She couldn’t remember ever wanting anything so badly in all her life.
“Why don’t you like me?” asked Archibald. Triss forced herself to meet his eyes. You blink, he wins, she told herself.
“I like you,” he said. “I like your mom and your brothers, but I like you something special.”
Sure you do, she thought, but a second peach had appeared in his other hand, a rosier, deeper, downier gold than the first.
“You make me kind of mad sometimes, but that’s okay. I like your spirit.” He offered the peach. “Take it. I want us to be friends.” She shook her head again. He took a step toward her, and then another, the peach resting on the flat of his outstretched palm, the soft fuzz of its skin catching the reddish afternoon sun and glowing like the cheek of a baby. “You’re different than the others,” he said softly. “Spunky. I like that.” The peach’s perfume almost made her dizzy. Her stomach growled. “Go on, take it, girl. It’s good.”
“I don’t want it!” Triss took a step back, but somehow, magically, the peach had found its way into her hand. Its curved velvety shape filled her palm. She raised it to her nose, breathing in its smell. Fuzz tickled her upper lip.
“You know,” he went on, his voice not just soft but gentle as a stroking hand, “I think you and me have more in common than you know.”
Closing her eyes, she took a bite, feeling the soft pop as her teeth sank through the skin and the flood of sweet juice on her tongue.
“That’s the way,” he told her softly. “That’s my spunky little girl.”
Spit it out! she told herself, spit it right in his face, but too late. She chewed, swallowed, bit into the peach again, and again, scarcely chewing now but eating in helpless, ravenous gulps, juice dribbling from the corners of her mouth. When the first peach was gone a second appeared in its place and she gulped that down as well. Archibald watched in silence. When she was finished, he took a handkerchief from his back pocket, wet a corner on his tongue, then leaned forward and carefully wiped the juice from her lips. “Thank you,” she heard herself say.
9
Triss didn’t go in for dinner. She threw rocks at her mother’s car for awhile; the steel gave off a satisfying ping each time she hit it. When her arm was tired and it was too dark to see she climbed onto the hood to wait for Collin. The car was an old blue Pontiac that her dad used to drive before he got his Blazer. He’d told her that Pontiac was the name of an Indian chief, and that blue was his lucky color. “This car will take care of you,” he used to say, which was a joke. “Be good to your machinery, and it’ll be good to you.” And then he’d driven off in his almost-new truck and left her and her mom and the twins with this piece of shit.
“Goddammit!” She punched the front fender and then sucked her stinging knuckles. But in that moment something clicked, some vague memory of her father slapping that same fender, saying to her mom Okay, next time you lock yourself out . . . .
She dropped to her knees in the dirt beside the front wheel and reached up inside the dirty fenderwell, wincing as her fingers touched spiderwebs and yielding lumps that were probably gypsy moth cocoons. Holding her breath she groped systematically, front to back, and finally, snugged in between a pair of bolts, held tight by its strong magnet, she discovered the oil-caked keybox. The grimy lid opened easily enough, and inside, only a little rusty, lay two keys.
The light was on in the room that Collin shared with Nardo and Jaime Ramírez. Triss could hear women’s voices from the front of the house, and a radio tuned to a Spanish station. Frogs sang in the culvert beside the road and somewhere in the distance an owl hooted. Rapping sharply on Collin’s window she called to him under her breath.
In a moment his face appeared behind the screen. “What’s up?”
His eyes widened when she pulled the keys from her pocket and danced them in front of him.“Come on,” she said. “I’ll get my flashlight and meet you at the car in ten minutes.”
“Wait a sec!”
“What?” She had turned toward her house but stopped and faced him. He didn’t answer. “What?”
He’d moved back from the window. His head was a round black shape, his face featureless. “You don’t expect me to fix that car now, do you? Tonight?”
“You said it was a piece of cake.” She rocked back on her heels. “You said it would take you just a few minutes, that you’d watched your uncle. Don’t tell me you were lying.” Not a word from beyond the window screen. The owl hooted again and the frogs fell silent. “Don’t tell me you can’t do it!” The minute the words left her mouth a cold lump lodged like an ice cube in her chest.
“Of course I can do it,” he told her. “Fifteen minutes, max. But we better wait till tomorrow after chores so I can see what I’m doing.”
“So people can see what we’re doing, you mean?” She snorted. “Good plan! You’re just amazingly brilliant sometimes. Come on, Collin, don’t be chicken!”
She knew he couldn’t let her get away with calling him chicken, but even so it was almost half an hour before he joined her at the car. “Had to get some tools,” was his excuse. “And my flashlight batteries are almost dead.”
“We can use mine.” Triss removed the distributor cap from its box and cradled it in her hands. It was a domed cylinder of hard dark-brown plastic that gleamed in the moonlight, the inside divided into chambers that reminded her of a cutaway model of a human heart that she’d seen in a doctor’s office once. The resemblance pleased her. In a way, that’s what they were doing —giving her mother’s car a transplant so it would last long enough to take them to Florida.
“Come on, let’s quit wasting time.” She shoved the cap toward Collin. “Put it in and let’s go.”
“Tonight?” His voice squeaked. The dim orange beam of his flash wiped across her face and away. “You’re out of your mind.”
It had only occurred to her that moment that they should leave right away, but she grabbed the idea and held on. If she didn’t leave now, if she had time to think it over, she might never go. “At least let’s make sure the car will start.”
“Somebody’ll hear us.”
“That’s why I think we should just go. Before they have a chance to really figure out what’s going on. I’ve got fifteen bucks cash and — she patted her hip pocket —Meadow’s Visa card.”
“Like anyone’ll let you use it!”
“They might, you don’t know. I’ll forge a note like I used to when I skipped school. Just shut up and put the cap thing on.”
“This is totally nuts!” Collin took a step backwards and put his hands in his pockets. “No way. This is the stupidest, most retarded…”
“Fuck you, Collin, you lying little creep!” Triss tossed the distributor cap onto the front seat of the car and walked away. Her eyes burned and her heart thumped unevenly in her chest. “You come and tell me when you get it fixed,” she flung at him over her shoulder. “Don’t even talk to me till it’s done.”
Perhaps an hour passed. Triss was in bed but she couldn’t sleep. Her heart was still pounding, and every time she thought of what she had almost done, had been ready to do, it pounded even harder. She supposed she ought to be glad Collin had lied; he’d saved her from the stupidest mistake of her life.
It was a warm, humid night without a breath of breeze. Triss kicked off the top sheet and sprawled sideways across her narrow bed, watching out the window as clouds wisped lazily across the fat yellow face of the moon. In the other bed her mother suddenly flung an arm out as if she was sowing seed and said in a clear voice, “Cornflakes for everyone.” Then with a sigh she rolled over, drew her knees up and settled more deeply into her pillow.
Cornflakes for everyone. Why had Triss thought Florida would be better than here? Her father wasn’t there, her mother wouldn’t get a job at Epcot Center. For all Triss knew, Florida was filled with guys just as bad as Archibald, places just as crazy as the farm. If so, Patty Coghlin — Meadow — would find them. Or they would find her mother; some crazy Ambassador Charlene would wash out of a rainstorm into a Taco Bell in Miami with a map in her hand. Either way, Triss would be just as stuck as she was right now.
“Pssst!” An urgent whisper. At first she thought it was her mother, dreaming again. “Triss!” from just outside the window. “Come on, hurry up!”
Collin! He’d fixed the car! Silently she rolled out of bed, scooped up clothing, flashlight, shoes. Goodbye, Meadow. Goodbye, Mom. Pausing at the door to the room where the twins and Charlene’s older girl slept: Goodbye, Dickie and Davey, I’ll miss you guys. The little house closed around her like a sweaty hand. Goodbye goodbye. She let herself out the front door and gave a low whistle to let Collin know she was waiting.
10
Collin hadn’t fixed the car. He waited till they were almost there to tell her. He stood there in the flat silvery moonlight that made the scabs on his legs look like punched-out holes and tried to feed her some story about needing a different tool.
Triss glared, fists on hips. “I told you….”
“I know, but tomorrow I’ll look in Archie’s toolbox. I promise,” reaching as if to touch her arm then thinking better of it. “But guess what! I found a way into the store.”
She felt like killing him. Picking up something heavy and whacking him till he begged for mercy. Then she thought about the store, where she hadn’t set foot since early summer. The candy and cookies she’d missed out on because she wouldn’t buy from Archibald. Here was a chance to steal from Archibald! She could take care of Collin tomorrow.
The plywood sheets over the store’s back window had warped and splintered with age, and some of the nails had worked loose. The heads stuck out far enough that Collin had been able to wedge the claws of a hammer under them and wiggle them looser still. He’d found a sawhorse somewhere and climbed on it now to pry them the rest of the way, his bare skinny-toed feet gripping the crossbar like a monkey’s, working away silently in the moonlight that lit up the bare gravel and the empty road running past. The window was high enough that even standing on the sawhorse with Triss steadying his legs he could barely reach the nails along the top edge of the plywood. Finally he just pulled the lower edge away from the window frame and held it for Triss to squeeze through.
Inside, the air was heavy and still and hot. She smelled mice and sour milk and sweat — and peaches, the ghosts of peaches so cloying and sweet that she gagged and had to breathe through her mouth. It was dark in there, the kind of thick, muffled dark that felt like someone had covered her head with a blanket. By contrast, the moonlit night outside where Collin waited seemed impossibly bright. Somebody had to have seen them. Someone had to see Collin as he wriggled under the plywood flap she braced open for him, his thin legs waving in the silvery air. Someone would see, and tell on them. Archibald would be furious, and everyone would feel the sting.
With a grunt, Collin pulled himself inside and landed on the floor beside her. In darkness, mindful of the wide cracks between the boards across the front windows, they felt their way along the wall to the shelves of cookies and chips. The mingled smells of oily potatoes and chocolate filled Triss’s nose and for a while she forgot her disappointment about the car, and she forgot about Archibald. But midway through a bag of Fritos she remembered again — his eyes on her, crawly as bugs; the handkerchief wet with his spit brushing her lips — and imagined his rage when he discovered the break-in. Everyone would be punished, lined up by the kitchen door on Wednesday, baking in the sun while he explained why the store wouldn’t be open that day or next Saturday, or maybe ever. “Some of you don’t miss the water till the well runs dry,” he’d say, “so I’m capping the well. Too bad I can’t let your moms into the store either,” and he’d look around at the tired, beaten-down women and the raggedy littlest kids clutching their moms’ legs and sucking their thumbs and getting ready to cry. “Now ain’t this a sorry affair,” he’d say. “Now ain’t this a shame. But the only way I can see to open up the store is if whoever it was broke in and robbed me comes forward and confesses.” And he’d look straight at her and Collin, because there was no way in hell it could be anyone else and everybody knew it.
The chips in her mouth tasted like iodine. “We better get outta here!” She flicked the flashlight on just long enough to reveal crumpled bags and candy wrappers, the litter of crumbs on the floor. “God, you’re such a pig. We’re gonna get killed. Everybody’s gonna get killed. We gotta clean this up!”
But even as she spoke, even as Collin bent and began to gather up his mess, another feeling came over her — a light, free feeling that made her want to laugh out loud. It was almost as if she was someone else, not Triss at all, someone not even human. Not a sheep. Not a snake, not Collin-collie dog. I’m the Rat Girl! she thought. Rat Girl, with long teeth and claws that tore into bags of cookies and chips, shredding the paper and plastic and flinging it aside. She didn’t eat what she opened, she threw chips on the floor and smeared chocolate on the walls. She pulled rolls of paper towels and toilet paper from the shelves and ripped them open too.
“Are you nuts?” Collin’s face was a gray blob in the heavy darkness. Rat Girl growled and tore open a box of Frosted Flakes. She twisted the top off a bottle of something with a potent, spicy smell: molasses. She turned the bottle upside down and when it felt empty in her hand she threw it as hard as she could. Glass shattered — one of the most satisfying sounds she knew. “The hell you doing?” Collin demanded.
Triss didn’t know. But the dusty shelves, the Coke machine with its cap of oily grime, the chips and candy bars and cream-filled cupcakes in their taut swollen plastic wrappings sweating in the heat — it was all just so. . .crappy. Triss wanted ice cream and milkshakes and sodas served in tall glasses with scalloped rims like they’d had at the Creamery in that town on the lake where her mom and dad had taken her for a week one summer before the twins were born. She wanted Chicken in a Basket with mashed potatoes and gravy and coleslaw and hot rolls with little pats of foil-wrapped butter. She wanted corn on the cob. She wanted ginger ale with maraschino cherry juice and a big spoonful of orange sherbet, the way her granny used to make it. A real birthday cake with chocolate frosting, HAPPY BIRTHDAY TRISS in hard pink sugar on the top, instead of the Sara Lee cake in a box Meadow had bought this year.
“Come on,” she said, switching on the flashlight, no longer afraid that anyone would see them, or caring if anyone did. “Let’s see if we can open the cash register.”
“Good idea,” Collin said. “That way it’ll look like a regular robbery.”
“I don’t care about that. I just want to do it.”
Collin disappeared into the back closet where Archibald kept coils of rope and rolls of duct tape and string. He was still eating; she could hear the rustle of a bag every time his hand went in for more.
“Hey,” he called suddenly. “Bring the flash; I found something.” What he’d found, shoved to the back of the shelf behind the rope and duct tape, was a small green canvas suitcase.
“You think it’s money?”
Old clothes, Triss thought. Dirty sweatshirts, underwear with yellow stains. On this side of the room even the licorice Collin was sucking couldn’t hide the smell of sour old man. The case was held shut with a cheap little padlock. He’d left the hammer outside, so he smacked the lock with a soup can.
Not money, not old clothes. Old magazines, musty, the pages wrinkled and stuck together as if they’d been wet. Triss leaned over Collin’s shoulder for a closer look, playing the light over the contents of the bag and then quickly away. “I’m gonna puke.”
He grabbed the light out of her hand. “Check this out. Oh man, I can’t believe it!”
Triss had seen naked women in magazines — her dad used to read Playboy and Hustler, hiding them under the couch when he saw her coming, so of course she’d looked as soon as she was alone. She’d even seen pictures of people fucking, and her dad’s friend Hal had had a deck of playing cards that showed men playing dog and sucking each other’s dicks. Triss had thought the cards were funny, in a scary way. She hadn’t liked the way Hal had wanted to sit right next to her on the couch with his arm around her when she looked at them, but whenever he asked if she wanted to see them again she’d always said yes.
There wasn’t anything funny about the pictures in the magazine Collin was paging through now. People whipping each other, and worse: people with their bodies cut open and their insides hanging out. Trick photography, Collin said, like special effects in the movies, but Triss didn’t think so. In one picture, a pig was eating a man’s guts, which looked like a long floppy sausage. Collin giggled when he saw that, a shivery sound that made the hair stand up on Triss’s arms.
Something had hold of her stomach. It squeezed and released, squeezed and released; she felt like throwing up. Yet something else kept her leaning over Collin's shoulder, and pulled her eyes back when she tried to look away. “I’m outta here,” she managed at last. “Put that shit back in the bag and let’s go.” When Collin didn’t move she twisted the flashlight away from him and rapped him on the wrist with it. “Okay, sit here in the dark, you sick mutant. I don’t care.”
They should never have come here. She should have grabbed Collin by the neck and made him at least try to put the distributor cap in the car, made him keep trying and trying till he got it right. Surely he’d have been able to figure it out, if only she’d made him try. They could have been miles away by now. Instead, they were in the shit.
Briefly, as she struggled to lift the plywood flap high enough to let herself out the window, she considered trying to tidy up, so maybe Archibald wouldn’t be too mad. But it was hopeless. Rat Girl had done too good a job. Straddling the sill, head, shoulders and one leg outside in the cooling air, she considered possible punishments. They’d have to clean the store, of course — down on their knees with scrub brushes — and pay Archibald for the damage. The store would be closed to everyone. Maybe forever. And it would be her fault and it wouldn’t stop with that. Archibald would find other ways to make her pay and keep on paying.
She knew something else as well: she had ruined things here for her mother too, and for that Meadow would never forgive her.
“I’m leaving” she said into the shadows behind her. “You want to come?” Collin didn’t answer. Paper rustled. What the hell was he doing, looking at those sick magazines in the dark? “Okay, mutant. Bye,” and she dropped to the ground, a nail scraping her arm as the plywood flap swung closed. As she started to leave she stepped on something hard. Without a second thought she picked up the hammer and turned back to the window. The nails were still in place. She banged them home.
* * *
The moon still floated high above the trees; there was plenty of light. Rat Girl’s shadow stretched out along the road before her, tall and long-legged as she could feel herself becoming. She walked east, following signs for Atlantic City. At the first crossroads she turned right, turned south, ready to walk the whole way to Florida if that's what it took. But when a car rolled up behind her, heading south too, she lifted her thumb. She wasn’t worried it might be someone from the farm. It couldn’t be much past midnight. She wouldn’t be missed for hours.
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