Lucky's Girl (4 page)

You never went up there.

You never even tried.

Then old Jerry Kaminsky’s voice had come on the line, and you’d known he was dead. What was that, three years ago? You’d spoken with Jerry like he was a complete stranger, like you’d never met the man. He was a stranger to you, wasn’t he? Elton Township was a life you’d forgotten after you’d married Kelly. You’d kept up with your uncle, had made the effort to call him once a week ‘til you’d met her, skipping a week and then another. Weeks had turned into months and months had turned into years and now you’re finally running back, but he’s dead. Kenny felt the tears building up in his eyes, felt the first one run down his cheek. He wiped it away quickly.

Jake glanced at him, then looked away.
Fuck you asshole, you’re useless.

Jenny observed from behind the big black wayfarers but didn’t look away.

Jake blamed him for their mother’s death, and for what had happened to Jenny. That’s how little boys are, black and white. Straightforward – right or wrong, good or bad, guilty or innocent. And the guy who should’ve protected them from calamity hadn’t.

Jenny was a different story. She didn’t blame anyone. Instead, she’d just shut down. The little girl had gone, leaving behind a silent woman in a little girl’s body. He knew children needed to stay children for as long as possible, as kids who became adults too soon didn’t grow up right. He’d seen it over and over with the guys on the rigs. They weren’t kids but neither were they adults. They made adult decisions but there was a part of them which had refused to grow up.

Maybe the big green silence of the U.P. could give them the space to come back to their childhoods. Maybe they could reenter themselves and start over. Maybe he was just running because that was all he knew how to do.

Kenny took a breath. “Are you okay, Jake?”

Jake looked back, eyes hardening. “I’m fine.”

Then he looked back out the window, continuing to chew.

“Jenny, sweetie?”

“I’m okay, Dad.” Her voice was barely above a whisper, the way it had been ever since he’d picked her up at the E.R.

“I’m sorry about what happened at the rest stop kids, I just couldn’t see both sides of the building at once and when I went back around…”

Jenny attempted a wan smile. “It’s okay, Daddy, don’t worry about it.”

Jake was still looking out the window, ignoring them, ignoring
him
specifically.

“Jake?”

Jake turned to him with an expression he’d seen before. Blank, hard, just like the faces of those kids in National Geographic. Kids in warzones, kids who weren’t kids. They weren’t adults, but they weren’t kids either. They were something else. Blank, hard, lost, and alone. Unreachable.

Was Stuckey’s in the middle of nowhere Missouri the right place for this kind of talk? Was anywhere?

“Jake, I need you to talk to me.”

The boy just looked back out the window, squinting at the distant trucks roaring down the interstate.

“Jake, look at me, Son.”

Jake’s head snapped back. “What? I can hear you!”

Kenny took a sip of his Coke, trying to look in control. “Son, it’s time to come back to us. We’ve gotta be a family. We don’t have to talk about it right now, but you’ve gotta let me in, let us in.”

Jake’s expression changed. Quizzical and puzzled. “
Us
? Mom’s dead.”

Jenny’s shoulders slumped and her head bowed, she looked like she might go face down in her fries. She was checking out, disassociating, not there anymore.

Jake turned to his sister, then back to Kenny and shrugged. “She’s gone too.”

Kenny shook his head in brief little bursts. “No, no, she isn’t! She’s right here, she’s your sister and my daughter and you’re my son, we’re a fam…”

“You’re just some guy I call dad. I don’t know you. Why can’t we go live with Grandpa and Grandma? I’d rather be with them than you.”

After Kelly had died, Kenny had gotten the call from her dad. Theirs had always been a strained relationship. They’d never seen him as worthy of their daughter, but they adored their grandchildren. They had moved from Arizona to a big house in Conroe when Kelly had Jenny so they could be a constant in their grandkids’ lives. It was no secret they’d blamed Kenny for Kelly’s death and for Jenny’s rape, even though they hadn’t noticed Kelly’s decline either and had probably bought the clothes Kenny believed had encouraged the behavior which had invited the trouble. They were rich white people. They wanted their daughter to drive a convertible and play tennis and marry a dentist.
Fucking assholes
. If they were so perfect why hadn’t they seen her weight loss? Why had they thought it was okay for a preteen girl to wear makeup and talk like those kids on TV and….

Kelly’s dad had said he wanted the kids. They could provide a better life than he could. He could come see them whenever he wanted, but a guy working the rigs couldn’t be a dad…
and never had been able to be a dad or a husband deserving of their daughter.

Kenny blubbered that he was their dad, that he’d take care of them, that they were a family. Then he packed them in the truck and here they were; in the middle of nowhere headed to the very edge of nowhere.

What kind of a dad was he?

What kind of a man was he?

The tears were unavoidable now. “Jake, please… I’m sorry.”

Jake just turned back to the window to look at the trucks silently roaring through the middle of nowhere.

***

Lucky wiped the fog from the motel bathroom mirror. He had three days’ growth of beard, his luxurious brown hair hung limp and greasy around his face. His eyes were lined with grit, his cheeks burned by the wind. But when his chopper blew past a woman in a car, her eyes followed him until he was no more. A rock star on a holy pilgrimage. Guys like Jim Morrison wrote about guys like Lucky, but even they didn’t get it.

Lucky never questioned, Lucky
did
.

Lucky never apologized, because Lucky was
right
.

Every woman who’d hand over her husband’s money after handing over her body did so because Lucky
did them right
. There was no question that they could think of another man while they fucked and sucked, fighting to taste his perfect seed.

He
saved
them.

He
gave
them the real deal.

And now they could go through their life fulfilled because they
knew
.

And now, Lucky knew too.

The past was in the fucking rearview mirror. Regret, guilt, all that crap was for squares who didn’t know shit. Since he’d hit the road all those years ago, the past had hardly ever raised its boring head to intrude on Lucky being Lucky. If there was such a thing as regret it was that he hadn’t hit the road sooner to taste what life was really about; pussy, money, and more pussy.

He looked in the mirror, having to think hard. Was there a single day he hadn’t fucked at least one chick? And when he’d figured out how to put a real tribe together, it had usually been more than one chick at a time. They would swarm over each other, over him, and lose themselves completely, licking and sucking like they were out of their minds on Ecstasy. Girls were just that way with him when he fucked them. In fact they were like that as soon as they started talking to him. A lot of women asked him if they could suck his cock within the first few minutes of meeting him. That was just who he was. Wherever he went, guys called him Lucky before he’d even told them his nickname. Faggots had the same reaction to him as well. Some
straight
guys wanted to make an exception in his case, and no matter what, spoke to him like an old friend they trusted completely.

Yeah, he had some advantages over regular Joe. He was
strong
, had been born that way. He wasn’t weak like other people. He was the real deal because he knew what life was about. That’s why the Big Tree had found him worthy. Other people were fucking weak, and the lowest form of weakness was stupidity. The height of strength was that he
knew
, he didn’t have to
ask
, he just knew and didn’t fucking
doubt
himself. He didn’t give a shit what people thought and was amazed to find out people cared what other people thought about them.

He first saw this weakness in grade school but had never focused on it because he didn’t care what they were thinking. He was too busy doing
his
thing. Football, basketball, baseball, soccer. He was always the star player, there was just no two ways about it. He was constantly in motion, developing every team into a winning unit. He was the leader, period. That was just who he was. No one questioned it. Hell, he didn’t even know
how
to question it. It wasn’t until later that he really understood other people’s weakness.

Other people, in their own minds, existed
in relation
to other people.

He didn’t.

At first he would listen to his father’s Sunday sermons with rapt admiration. The Rev was a fantastic storyteller. He wove the smallest details of life into a context parallel with the lives of the Biblical prophets. It was clever and entertaining, but gradually Lucky had found a desperate desire to help people who were more amusing in their crippled state. His dad had wanted to fix them, but Lucky just ignored them until they did something to get his attention. This was why the Big Tree had judged him worthy to wield its undefiled wisdom; he was born free to live life on
his
terms.

Apart from sports, he loved hunting. Now, the way that he hunted was different from other people. When he’d nailed a deer on his first time, he’d been with his dad which meant he couldn’t explore how he’d really wanted to. Lucky had remembered walking up to the buck, a big hole in its ribcage gushing out blood. It had still tried to run, its legs kicking but without the strength to walk. Its eyes had rolled around madly, not understanding why it couldn’t run away. It wanted to but couldn’t.

Lucky’s dad shot him a worried glance. “I’m sorry about this, Son, I wish you didn’t have to see this on your first time out.”

Then his father had pulled out a big knife and had sat next to the deer, just out of reach of the antlers. He kneeled down, whispering soothingly and gently stroking its fur. Then he put his hands over its eyes and cut its throat.

When the knife had slashed across the buck’s throat, Lucky had reached out a hand and yelled “Wait!” with an expression of pure panic on his face.

In that moment he’d known he was stronger than other people. His dad had killed the deer to
end
its suffering. Lucky had been fascinated:
he
wanted to watch the deer feeling every last moment of its pain. He wanted to
know,
and his weak silly dad had ended it right when it had gotten interesting. He was disappointed but in so doing had discovered a whole new realm of the senses to experiment with.

He smiled sweetly. “It’s okay, Dad, you did the right thing. That was pretty rough for this big ol’ buck, eh?”

The Rev had never suspected a thing. He’d never know that his son was prowling the woods for animals to experiment on with metal, fire, and sometimes even household chemicals. He loved their thrashing and screaming, trying to live, trying not to feel the pain he became so adept at administering. It was during one of these experiments that the Big Tree had first called out to him.

He’d wounded a fawn with a .22 and had wanted to cut its hooves off with bolt cutters. Would it try to run still? Would it be able to? What exactly would it do?

He was just about to start cutting when the wind blew through his mind, images swaying with the leaves on the breeze.
He should go to Grove Island! No one would see him, he could wade over to the island carrying the deer to the Big Tree.

It made perfect sense, yet none at all. He carried it kicking and yelping through the woods to the shore of Elton Lake and waded across, completely oblivious to the fact that someone could have seen him. But he was determined like never before, had pushed aside the nagging thoughts:
What are you doing? Stop! You’re going to get caught!
It had never occurred to him ‘til later in life, but that was the first time he’d doubted himself. But he wasn’t alone in his head that day, he was with his new teacher: The Big Tree.

He set the fawn down before the towering tree where the bad kids would make campfires and smoke pot. He sat on a gnarled clump of the giant tree’s roots. The Big Tree certainly was a weird thing, wider that any white pine but gnarled and knotty like no tree he’d ever seen. The other kids said Grove Island was haunted and the Big Tree was where the ghosts lived. The Indians thought Grove Island was bad juju. But they were fools, none of them knew what it meant to know. They were weak, and he was strong.

The Big Tree was a God,
his
God.

He closed his eyes, breathing in and out. No one told him to, he just did. Exactly like the people in church getting slain in the spirit and speaking in tongues, the spirit of the Big Tree washed over and through him. He chanted strings of monosyllables, over and over until patterns became verses, prayers in a tongue not spoken for thousands of years.

He was shown how it was and how it should be.

Man was a Hunter but had fallen through his worship of weakness. Those who came to the Big Tree gave up their weakness, their reasons and rationalizations, and embraced their true nature. They would kill as they pleased, fuck as they pleased, and worship a true God.

He let the chant carry his hands to the knife. He slid it through the delicate skin of the fawn’s belly. It screamed, the blood pouring over his hands as he reached inside and pulled a handful of intestines into the sunlight.

And he KNEW
!

The next day he would take the little girl who sat in front of him in class. Her name was Mary. She’d always looked over her shoulder at him, blushing a deep shade of scarlet whenever he caught her. He would follow her home and approach her at the trailer where she lived with her parents. Her parents wouldn’t be home. She was too in love with him to resist. He would push her down on the couch and pull off her panties. He would shove in his cock and there would be blood. She would cry, but he wouldn’t stop until he was ready. Then he would make her suck it and force her to swallow his first ejaculation.