Caring Is Creepy (6 page)

“So, he’s a war hero, too,” was Dani’s reaction.

We only got to exchange messages for about twenty minutes because he was using someone else’s laptop and they kicked him off to play a video game where you were a giant ant and you had to herd aphids, or some such, but before he said good-bye, he gave us his cell phone number.

“I can already see us drinking frozen daiquiris down on River Street,” Dani said. “This is beautiful.”

Dani was all set for me to call him right away—she had visions of daiquiris dancing in her head—but I reminded her of one of her own rules.
Always wait three days to call
.

O
n the day after I learned L.L. meant Logan Loy, it got up to one hundred and two degrees by lunchtime. This always meant more accident victims over at the hospital. According to Dr. Drose, people had a tendency to go loony with the heat because it broiled their brains. During the winter, a tense situation might stay tense—say, for example, an out-of-work husband cooped up at night with his overworked wife—but during a hot summer spell, this same situation would pop—the pop in this case coming from the same husband’s fist making contact with his wife’s nose, or from the skillet of a work-frazzled wife on the husband’s skull. What it meant in my day-to-day life was that there were twice as many patients to attend to and Mom hardly ever came home, and when she did she’d be in some weird zone like she was now, sitting in front of the TV and spooning nacho cheese dip straight out of the jar while drinking a cup of coffee and smoking a cigarette—all at the same time. I’m not kidding. I saw her take a drag while she chewed.

“Lynn, honey,” she said, as I opened the refrigerator. Her voice had a tight sound to it. I thought she might of noticed the missing beer.

“Yeah?”

“If Hayes comes by—” She jabbed out her half-smoked cigarette and gulped down the rest of her coffee.

“Uh-huh.”

“Do me a favor and don’t let him in the house.”

I stopped rummaging in the crisper and turned to look at her.

“You all break up?”

“Jesus, Lynn.”

“Well, then, how come?”

“I’d just prefer him to stay out of the house when I’m not around.”

“What? He steal something?”

Mom ignored this.

“You sure you all ain’t breaking up?” I couldn’t help but smile.

She pushed herself off the couch with a groan, picked up her purse, and stretched both arms above her head. “He’s just going through a spell.” She inspected her reflection in one of the glass doors of the china hutch, making a face like she was intent on scaring something inside there. The gravy boat, maybe. She wiped away a smudge of stray lipstick from a front tooth with her thumb.

“I think he’s taking them dog pills himself,” I said. “Cross my heart, I could of sworn I saw fresh fur growing on the back of his neck the other day.”

She gave me a look and picked up her quilted cigarette bag. “Just don’t let him in, alright? You think you can handle that?”

“When are you going to be home again?”

She opened the kitchen door and stepped out. “I have no idea, honey. Delia had to go to Brunswick for her uncle’s funeral and I’m covering her shift.”

“There’s nothing to eat here.”

“In the coffee can on top of the fridge, there’s some money. Use that to buy a frozen burrito or something at the Texaco station.”

I pulled it down and popped the plastic top off. “There’s only a handful of change in here.”

“Lynn, please.” She made her
bad teenager, heel
expression. Then she shut the door and was off.

I
let it ring three times before I picked it up.

“Hey,” a man said. It was a voice I didn’t recognize, so I waited for him to say something else before I answered him. “Hello.” The pitch of his voice went up a little on the
o
. “Somebody there?” The man spoke in a gruff, southern accent, definitely a Wiregrass accent, so I thought he might be someone my mom knew.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hayes there?”

“What?” I said.

“Hayes. I’m looking for Hayes. He there?”

“No, sir.”

“You know when he’ll be back?” The man coughed. It was a cough that sounded about twenty thousand cigarettes deep. “Ma’am?” he added after a cautious pause.

“He doesn’t live here, sir.”

“That don’t matter. He’s over there a lot, ain’t he?”

“Sometimes.” I let out a breath, wondering if I’d made a mistake admitting this. “I don’t understand what you want.” I forced myself to leave off the
sir
at the end.

“How about,” he said, “you just give me the address where you are.”

“If you’re looking for him, why don’t you go to his house? That’s usually what people do when they’re trying to find somebody. Not call a stranger’s house asking after street addresses they have no business with.”

This made him laugh until he coughed again, and then he coughed until he brought up something he felt the need to hawk and spit. The thick, wet sound of it came out of his mouth and through the phone lines. Then he hung up.

“I
think I’m ready to have sex,” Dani told me.

“With who?”

“I don’t mean I have someone picked out. I just feel like I’m ready now. I’m old enough. I might even need it.” She went over to her bed and lay on her back. Her hair spilled onto the quilt like a black puddle of oil and she stretched out her arms and sighed.

“How do you know?”

She closed her eyes and kicked her legs up in the air, pumping them like she was riding an invisible bike. The springs in the mattress made a soft ping sound each time she kicked out a foot. “I can feel it.”

“In your head?” I got up and sat beside her on the bed. Her pedaling made me bounce.

“No, of course not. I feel it right there.” She stopped her imaginary bike race and pointed to a spot right above her belly button.

“Your stomach?” I said, carefully.

“Somewhere inside there. Maybe it’s my womb. It’s a kind of tickly-itchy feeling. I can’t quite explain it.”

“Your womb itches?” Something about this cracked me up and I giggled.

“Don’t act like such a baby. I’m serious. I think it might be, I don’t know, unnatural maybe.”

“Well, my womb doesn’t itch.”

Upstairs, her mom stomped across the living room. A faucet turned on and off.

“I don’t think I’m supposed to want it this much,” Dani whispered to me without moving her lips and then glanced up at the ceiling as though her mom might be squatting on the floor, listening with a drinking glass pressed to the linoleum.

“But you haven’t even done it before. How do you know that’s what it is you want so bad?” I put a hand on my belly and tried to feel around inside my womb with my mind. “Maybe you’re just constipated again, like when you had to get the enema treatment.”

Dani sat up to pick a piece of pink sock fluff out from between her toes. “Ever since I kissed Wayne Keegan last month, I’ve been feeling like this.”

“You told me his mouth tasted like cheddar cheese.”

“That’s the mystery of it.” She put a fist under her chin. Her look said:
I am now assuming a thoughtful expression
. “It wasn’t Wayne, exactly. Just the act of kissing. I think it started a chemical reaction. You know, inside. Now it will never stop and I’ll have to keep doing it and doing it.”

“Well, don’t do it with Wayne Keegan. He’ll tell everyone.”

“I didn’t say I was going to do it with anybody. I just said I wanted to. Sometimes, Lynn, you’re so literal. I can’t believe I even try with you.”

“I’d want to do it too, but only if the right guy came around.”

“You’re just saying that. You’ll probably stay a virgin till you’re thirty.” Dani closed her eyes and shook her head. Her mom did the exact same thing to Dani when she was frustrated with her. I had the urge to tell her this, but then the half-fight we were having would turn into a whole fight and I wasn’t up to fighting with Dani that day.

“I do, too,” I said, not sure at all if I did. “Really. Just not with someone from our school.”

“Of course not,” Dani said, sitting up and becoming even more serious. “I told you before, your type shouldn’t even be in high school. Your type is at least a college sophomore.” She studied my face like an
Us Weekly
photo spread. “Have you even looked at that sheet I made you?”

“That’s what I’m talking about. If I did it, I’d want a college sophomore. Maybe some guy from Georgia Southern.”

“Hah!” Dani said, flicking me on the knee hard enough to sting. “I knew you hadn’t read it. I was testing you. I said your type was a college freshman. You’re not mature enough for a sophomore.”

“And you are?”

“Sometimes,” Dani said, closing her eyes again and shaking her head, “I don’t think you get me at all.”

“You know, Dani,” I said, and then it slipped right out, “your mom does that exact same thing where she closes her eyes and shakes her head like that.” I did a little imitation. “Exactly the same as what you’re doing now. She did it to you at dinner tonight when you told her—”

Dani made a loud, shrill sound.

I
broke the three-day rule out of boredom and general all around twitchiness about this Hayes weirdness, and then more boredom heaped on top. The house felt stuffy and smaller than normal. The window air conditioner in the living room wasn’t working right again. It made coughing sounds and the air coming out was barely cool. I watched TV. I read my mom’s back issues of
Cosmopolitan
from the stack in the bathroom. I walked in circles and talked to myself. I was about driven crazy with nervous energy and nowhere to put it. If you looked at it this way, and I did, I had no choice but to break the three-day rule.

“Specialist Loy,” he said when he answered the phone. His voice sounded softer than I expected. And kind. I’m not sure if I can explain what a
kind
voice sounds like. Sort of even and deep. In the background a man yelled, “You sunk my fucking battleship!” Two or three other guys in the room laughed at that. I didn’t say anything right away. I just sort of let his voice sink in. “Loy here,” he said after a moment. The second time he spoke he sounded impatient, not irritated, more like he was pressed for time.

“Hey,” I said, “Specialist Loy.”

“Hey.” His voice changed again. It became even softer and there was a hint of something new in it. Playfulness, maybe. “Who’s this?”

“This is, uh—”

“Lynn?”

“Yeah.”

“Really?”

“It is.” I flopped down on the couch and put my bare feet up against the wall. The kitchen phone’s cord stretched tight as a laundry line.

“I didn’t expect you to actually call.”

“Why not?” I pinged the cord with my big toe and tried to imagine his face. A medium-sized forehead and dark, well-defined eyebrows. A nice, straight nose and good-sized lips. A dimple in his chin. No, no, scratch that, I thought. No chin dimples. It ruined the picture.

“I don’t know,” he said. There was a muffled crash on his end. I heard him tell someone to take it outside.

“Do you have a roommate?”

“Yeah, but that wasn’t him. Just some guys from down the hall throwing a football around.”

I didn’t know what to say. My belly felt like it was full of buzzing radio static. I sat up straight and put my feet on the floor. I watched the moisture prints on the wall shrink and vanish.

“Lynn?” His voice got just the teeniest bit higher. “You still there?”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Sorry.”

“You know, you sound a lot like I imagined you would. What are you doing?”

“I’m bored. I’m stuck in the house today.”

“I wish I could drive up there and do something fun with you, but I’ve got to do some bullshit scut work. Excuse my language. I got in trouble this morning.”

“In trouble for what?”

“Oh, it was stupid.” He let out a long breath. “I failed room inspection three times this week, so now I’ve got to go rake pea gravel up on the roof of the armory.”

“Was your room really messy?” I pictured dirty socks on the floor and wrinkled uniforms tossed over the back of a chair.

“No, my sergeant just has it out for me. He has ever since I got transferred to his unit. I never even got discharged. As soon as I came home, they just reassigned me. I got stop-lossed, you know?”

Logan explained why this stop-loss business was bullshit. For a year they’d been telling him he’d get out on such-and-such a day. Less than a month before he was set to leave, they showed him the fine print on his contract, which basically said the Army had him as long as they needed him. All his plans were ruined in the time it takes to drink a Coke. He’d already signed up for a graphic design course at the DeVry Institute. His dream was to illustrate graphic novels. To top it off, nothing Logan did was good enough for his new sergeant. This last time he got in trouble it was because his bed wasn’t made right. The sergeant couldn’t bounce a quarter off it. If he messed up one more time, the man threatened to “section his ass.” I couldn’t help but imagine an ass being pried apart like a grapefruit.

“A quarter?” I asked, thinking of my bed.

“He has it in for me. I’d leave today if I could.”

“Why don’t you then?”

He groaned. “I wish it were that simple. I’d be in a world of shit if I just up and left. Take a lesson from me. Always read the small print before you sign your name to something.”

“You couldn’t just run away? Go to Canada or something? No one could say you were a coward. I mean, you already went once, right?”

“I guess.” He paused for a second, like he might actually be thinking about it. I only said it for something to say. I didn’t expect him to take me serious. “But here’s the thing, if they caught me, I’d probably go to jail. At best, they’d give me a dishonorable discharge and with that on my record it’d be impossible to get a decent job.
Worst of all, they’d cancel my G.I. bill and then it’s bye-bye tuition money and bye-bye DeVry Institute.” He sniffed twice and clucked his tongue. “But yeah, if I wanted, I probably could skip. It wouldn’t be all that hard. If this fucking sergeant doesn’t get off of my ass, I just might.”