East of Denver (16 page)

Before we got out of the car, Clarissa said, “You think D.J. could help us with the bank?”

“How so?”

“I don't know. Something.”

I pretended to think for a moment. “No.”

“Why?”

“He's a jackass.”

Clarissa said, “I suppose.”

“Don't you go telling him about it.”

“I wouldn't tell him.”

I said, “Just don't.”

“There isn't anything to tell him.”

“That's right.”

We got out of the car.

I said to Clarissa, “And put those coins somewhere safe.”

“They're safe.”

“Where are they?”

She smiled and twitched her head a little. “I gave them to those kids.”

“All of them?”

“The whole bag.”

I said, “That was awful nice of you.”

I didn't know what else to say. It
was
nice of her. The kids were poor.

Vaughn was dead. The plan was gone. The bank job was a dream. Dumb. Over. Right then, I resolved to let it go.

She saw it in my eyes. She said, “The plan wasn't any good. It was just us talking to a dead guy in a basement.”

I let Pa drive back from Clarissa's. He drove and drove, never getting anywhere close to home. He drove slower and slower and the pastures and cattle and wheat fields crawled by. There'd been so many moments when he was a compass that pointed us to where we needed to be. He didn't
know
he was a compass, but he
was
. It happened so many times that I assumed that he always, at the shriveled-up core of his brain, knew what he was doing.

After twenty minutes of random rambling, the fuel needle was touching red and we were nowhere near home. Pa had lost his true north.

He slowed the pickup to a stop. He rubbed the steering wheel with his thumb.

“I don't know where I am.”

“Let me drive, Pa.”

He agreed, but insisted on sitting in the back of the truck. He howled like a dog all the way home.

CHAPTER 20

PEACHES AND VENUS

Some mornings, while Pa was brushing his teeth or trying to climb into his britches, I'd sneak out of the house and go to the garden to watch the plants grow. I would lie on my stomach with my chin propped up on my fist and stare at one blade of a carrot leaf. At first, it would look as still as anything. Then there'd be a tiny movement, like a wake-up stretch. And as I lay on the ground breathing slow, I'd see that tiny blade uncurl and grow longer, cell by cell.

Mornings in the garden were the prettiest thing I ever saw. Apparently, I'd been watering properly. Everything was stout and green and climbing toward the sky. We had rows of sweet corn, onions, carrots, two kinds of peppers, and some fine, fine tomato plants. The tomatoes had grown out of their cages and started creeping up, out, and over. The plants were already heavy with fruit. It wouldn't be long before they turned red. The whole garden—every part of it—made me happy. Those mornings, I enjoyed every morsel of that happiness right up until Dad walked out of the house with his pants on backward and hollered for breakfast.

While we waited for the garden to get ripe, we continued our canned-food diet. The pantry, which had seemed bottomless a few months earlier, was now almost three-quarters empty. I allowed Dad to choose what we ate. I'd point him to the pantry and tell him to bring me two cans. Whatever he brought back, we ate. Chili and chowder. Ravioli and string beans. Peaches and peaches. I didn't much care for peaches. Sweet and syrupy and that furry, wet skin.

That pantry was going to run out someday. When that day came, I sure hoped the garden would come thru for us. If not, we were looking at a lean winter. I had counted our money and we had twelve dollars between us. Not counting the eighty thousand dollars of debt.

The thing is, we
could
have robbed that bank if Vaughn hadn't killed himself. This is assuming our plan would have worked, which it would have. This is assuming we could have gotten Vaughn out of that basement, which we would have, if he hadn't of killed himself. Now, though, with Clarissa being philanthropical with our coins and me spending my mornings staring at carrot leaves, it was ridiculous to even think about rallying for our last, victorious strike.

Poor Clarissa. In bed one night, dragging myself thru the piss-poor novelization of
Back to the Future
, I started thinking of her. I looked at the clock. It wasn't even ten thirty. She was probably reading a romance novel on her couch. Her TV was probably tuned to the news. I wondered what she was wearing. I wondered if she'd started back to eating yet.

Pa was downstairs, snoring in his bed.

I closed
Back to the Future
, pulled on a pair of britches, and found a T-shirt. It wasn't any trouble sneaking out.

I took the pickup. The moon was big so I decided to drive without the lights on. I eased along, admiring the silver-grey outlines of the ditches, watching out for deer.

A hundred yards from Clarissa's place, I shut off the engine and coasted into her yard. I parked a ways from her house. I didn't want to scare her. The shades were down but I could see the blue of the TV flickering thru the fabric. I sat in the truck for a while with the windows down. Crickets chirped.

I got out of the truck, careful not to make too much noise, and started toward the trailer. The crickets got quiet. I could hear the TV. A commercial for a used car lot in Lakewood. I walked up the steps and knocked on her door.

The TV went silent. The light was still flickering; she must have pressed “Mute” on the remote control. She didn't answer the door. I knocked again, softly. I didn't want to scare her.

Still nothing. Then a walking noise. I could tell she was still losing weight just from the sound of her footsteps. The porch light came on directly to the right of my face. I leaned back to avoid the mess of bugs that headed for the bulb. Then she opened the door and told me to stop lurking around and get the hell inside.

She was wearing a pair of sweatpants and a real loose T-shirt, probably something from her fat days. Her hair was blonder than I remembered it.

She pointed me to the chair across from her sofa and said, “What are you up to, Shakespeare Williams, visiting people at all hours?”

“I was just reading. Started wondering about you.”

Her eyes got somewhat slitty. I wasn't sure if she was being suspicious or seductive.

I continued, “I bet myself a nickel that you were reading a dumb romance book and watching TV.”

She leaned her head toward her end table. Facedown and open was a book called
Devil's Honeymoon
. “Dumb, yes. Romance, no.” She picked it up. “It's this new genre called Jesus Fiction. My mom heard about it from Jerry Linkenbach's mom. Remember Jerry? He was a couple of years younger. I guess he lives in Denver and knows the guy who publishes these things.”

She handed it to me. It featured a painting of Satan throwing fireballs at a heart-shaped bed whose occupants resembled Jennifer Aniston and a shirtless Christ.

“Looks pretty good.”

“It's less blasphemous than you'd expect. You believe in God, Shakes?”

“Occasionally.” I handed her the book.

She looked at the cover and then put it back on the end table. “Things okay at home?”

“Not bad. Dad's asleep.”

She said, “What if he has another one of his sleepwalking spells?”

“It's unlikely.” I smiled to show that I didn't take offense at the fact that she had just questioned my ability to watch over my own father.

She turned the TV volume back on, low. Curled her legs up underneath herself on the couch. “It's kind of funny, you coming here.”

“How's that?”

“I was thinking I might start eating again. I wonder if I have the heart for anorexia anymore.”

I said, “I hear it can be unhealthy.”

“I saw a thing on the news the other day about pro-ana. You ever heard of it? It's a movement of women—girls mostly—who band together so they can starve themselves to within one foot from the grave. Pro-ana. Pro-anorexia. See? They're taking back the negative connotations of eating disorders. It's mostly on the Internet, with websites and stuff. They share tips on how to deal with hunger pains and they share pictures of each other and of supermodels. They call it ‘thinspiration.' The news people were explaining about how awful it was that skinny people were celebrating themselves. It was annoying. Let them be, I say. I shut off the TV and I went online and found a pro-ana website where people were doing a forum to encourage each other.”

“Like a blog?”

“No, a forum. You type in questions and other people give you answers. Anybody can do it. You ask for advice on how to avoid gaining weight for the holidays or what vitamins to eat so you don't die. The most popular question, though, was, ‘Do you think I'm fat?' When you ask that question, you post a picture of yourself and then other people comment on it. All these people. All these girls were tiny, like they'd just been released from a concentration camp. Everyone would give positive comments. ‘You go, girl!' Stuff like that. It was so positive.

“I wanted to be part of that positivity. So I put up a picture of myself. I don't have anything recent, though, so I posted something from last Christmas. My mom took it while I was eating a piece of pie. I was wearing a hideous sweater and I was as fat as I'd ever been in my entire life. It was disgusting. The perfect ‘before' picture. I put it up with a note that explained that I'd lost seventy-four pounds since then and how neat it was to meet so many like-minded people.”

I said, “You must have gotten a lot of good positiveness.”

“The next day, I went back to the forum and there were one hundred and sixty-eight comments on my post. The first one said, ‘Seventy four pounds is a good start. But you have a long way to go. Keep trying.' The next one said, ‘Yeah. A couple more years and you'll look like a walrus instead of a whale.' The next one was, ‘We want thinspiration, not something to make us puke. Next time you want to post a picture of yourself, do us all a favor and go to a bulimia site.' And on and on. I read every one.”

I said, “Sounds like a bunch of assholes.”

“They weren't all bad. I mean, the first seventy were aimed directly at me. But after that, they started going at each other. There was this one turd who called herself buli-pulpit75. She said, ‘I'm bulimic and I think it's totally uncool of you people to say that we're losers.' It turned into a bulimia-versus-anorexia battle for a while. Vicious. Then a crew of badasses came on the scene. They called themselves the Athleticunts. I guess there's a thing called anorexia athletica where people are compulsive exercisers. They rolled in and told everyone to shut the fuck up and grow a pair.”

I said, “Pair of what? Tits that look like busted balloons?”

Clarissa snickered. “Finally, someone called acuteangel came in and said, ‘I have anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and anorexia athletica. I'm so weak I can barely type. You are all inside of my soul. It breaks my heart that we're fighting like this. I understand where you're coming from, but this destructive behavior has to stop. We must unite. Can't we all just agree that Orca is a fat cow and let it go?' Just like that, acuteangel saved the day for three types of eating disorders. They hugged and kissed and moved on to the subject of Fiona Apple's ankles. The end.” Clarissa took a deep breath. “Sorry for boring you to death.”

“You should post a picture of yourself like you are now. That'll shut them up.”

Clarissa shook her head. “It won't do anything. Those gals are sick. Their priorities are screwed up, their brains are lying to them, and they can't see straight. I don't resent them. I feel sorry for them. I thought I could be their friend but I'm not one of them. They told me so. So why in the world should I keep trying to be like them? I'm hungry. I want to eat.”

“You should eat.”

She brought a tin of smoked oysters back from the kitchen and sat on the couch. She said, “Sit here, next to me.” I did. Then she put her hand on the back of my neck and pushed my head down so my ear was against her belly. I never heard a stomach make so much racket in my whole life.

I said, “It sounds like a bowling alley in there.” I tried to turn around to see if she thought I was funny, but she kept my ear clamped to her belly. My nose was basically in her crotch. I wondered what it smelled like.

I heard her open the oyster tin. Then she said, “Listen to this. Just one, for starters.” I could hear her salivate as she put that first oyster into her mouth.
I
started salivating. My head was clamped right between her boobs and her Venus. She may have been skinny, but she was a good kind of skinny. Not that skeleton type, but something with a little cushion.

She swallowed the oyster. Inside her stomach it was like applause. A whole stadium full of people. I heard her slurp some more of the oysters. I could tell she was leaning her neck back and dumping the whole tin into her mouth, oil and all.

The applause grew louder. She thrusted her tummy forward. She must have been arching her back in pure pleasure. Who wouldn't? It had been months since she had eaten anything but juice and vitamins.

Just to see what she'd do, I put my hand on her thigh. She ran her fingers thru my hair. It made me feel real happy.

Then she puked on my head.

There wasn't a whole bunch. A plop, really. Plenty enough to ruin the moment. I sat up and sort of waited for her to do something about it. I could feel it in my hair, working its way down to my ear.

Clarissa's mouth opened up and closed again. Her eyes jiggled back and forth. Then she screamed and ran into the bathroom.

She didn't come out for forever.

I went to the kitchen and wetted down a washcloth. I wiped my head clean. When I shook the cloth, a clump of half-chewed oysters landed in the sink. It wasn't terribly pukey. I ran some water, rinsed the mess down the drain. Then I took the cloth into the living room and wiped the couch clean. Wasn't much to it.

She was still in the bathroom. I put my ear on the door. She was brushing her teeth. I knocked on the door. The brushing stopped. I said, “You can come out.”

I heard her spit into the sink. I pictured her with the toothbrush half hanging out of her mouth. She said, “I puked.”

“It wasn't that bad.”

“I have emetophobia, remember?”

“Emetophobia?”

“Fear of vomiting.”

I said, “I'm pretty sure it won't happen again. I think you vomited out everything that you put in.”

“It got all over you.”

“Oysters clean up easy. Come out.”

“You don't understand how awful this is for me.”

“Sure, I do. You're freaked out. You can be freaked out in there, alone, or you can be freaked out here, with me.”

A pause. Then, “Well.”

“Good.”

“Give me a minute.”

The shower turned on. The minute turned into half an hour. I turned on the TV.
The Jeffery Towner Show
was on. All his guests were lousy.

When she finally came out, she was wearing a robe, a real thick, soft-looking number.

I said, “Feel better?”

She said, “Nobody takes emetophobia seriously.”

“You're speaking to someone who doesn't have a sense of smell. Talk about not being taken seriously.”

She sat down next to me on the couch and said, “Maybe I went too fast.”

“You were in there for close to an hour.”

“Not the bathroom. The food. The eating.”

“That. Yeah, too fast.” I took a chance, tried to be cute. “You're just out of practice. Judging by what landed on my head, it appears that you've forgotten how to chew.”

Her cheeks bulged. She put her hand over her mouth. I jumped up from the couch.