Malus Domestica (11 page)

“Over.”

“You didn’t
say
anything!” squealed Ginny.

“You didn’t say
over
again!”

“Over over
over!”

Delilah shrilled,
“Over over over over over!”
into the mike and it became a battle of who could blast the other off the radio saying “Over” the loudest, then fell apart into the high cackling of little girls.

“I’m sorry I missed your birthday,” said Delilah. “I had to go to practice. My mom makes me. How old are you now? Seventy
kabillion?”

“Noooooo.
I turned seven today.”

“Good,” Delilah said into the radio. “Now we’re even.
Oh!
I’m really close to the base.”

“How close?”

Delilah looked up at the jungle gym and its birdcage shadow. “I’m like, really close,” she said, and then a shape peeled itself away from the darkness under the security lights.

Ginny was making a break for it. The girl ran smack into the metal bars, catching herself with her hands and throwing her chubby legs up into the tangle of piping. She sat down and kicked her feet in satisfaction, peering around the complex like a hawk on the lookout for field mice.

Delilah turned and crept alongside the base of the apartment building, loping around the corner, and then broke into a sprint down the sidewalk, past a row of identical front porches.

Everybody else was holed up in their cookie cutter apartments, living room lamps lighting up windows with a honeyed glow. The detritus of a dozen childhoods lay scattered across the tiny front lawns: tricycles, various pieces of Fisher-Price playsets, plastic ray-guns, action figures.

The parking lot flush with the sidewalk was populated with two-dozen vehicles of various makes, models, and conditions; one of them was her father Billy’s rattletrap pickup, a modest brown machine with OY painted on the tailgate, the T and OTA having faded away years ago.

“Where
are
you?” Ginny said.

Delilah keyed her mike. “You’ll never know if you don’t come looking! You can’t sit on the base, I can’t get near it. You’re cheating!”

“Nuh-
uh!
 
. . . over.”

“Yuh-huh! Over!”

“Okay, okay. I’ll come look. But you better be in a
really good
hiding place. I’ll give you thirty-five seconds.”

A big blue Dumpster loomed at the end of the parking lot. She briefly considered hiding there, but then remembered how bad it smelled the last time she’d been out that way to take out the garbage.

Hmm. She wasn’t crawling into one of the culverts by the street frontage, no way. That only left the vehicles.

She tested her father’s truck, but the doors were locked. Delilah thought about lying down in the back, but scrapped that as an easily-foiled plan. All Ginny had to do was walk up and look over the tailgate.

She climbed into the back anyway and tried to pry the rear cab window open, but it was latched shut.

Climbing back out again, the girl got on her knees and looked underneath the truck, hoping there was space to crawl under, but there was a patch of oil Delilah didn’t want to wallow around in. For a kid, she could be surprisingly meticulous—her stepmother Janele was always saying how proud she was that her baby always picked up after herself. Delilah didn’t do it out of some moral rectitude, she just hated being in a dirty house. Hated having crumbs on her bare feet, hated dipping her elbow in ketchup congealing on the kitchen table.

Delilah’s biological mother was quite the opposite. In her stale, dark house lived six skinny cats, two big stupid dogs, and a Plexiglas aquarium that allegedly held a hamster that Delilah had never seen.

She hated the cats. They were the worst.

She got down and peeked under the next car. There was considerably less of a mess underneath, but the undercarriage was so low there was no hope of being able to squeeze into it. She stood up and that’s when she saw it. On the other side of the strip of parking-spaces, at the end of a row of empty slots, was a pickup truck.

It was a Ford, a big one, old. Comparatively speaking, the red paint job was dull; it reflected the security lights about as well as an eggshell. A camper-shell covered the bed like a turtle, the same brick-red as the body.

But what grabbed Delilah’s attention was the bright green snake spray-painted up the side of the bed wall.

This was new. Surely she would have seen such a spectacular work of art around the complex before. This was without a doubt a new neighbor that she hoped her father would befriend in the near future, so she could see who would drive around town with this on his truck. And for certain, that person would have to be a man, because this emerald-skinned jungle dragon could only belong to a man.

An undulating hose of diamond-shaped scales uncoiled from the tail-light to the driver’s-side door. Each scale shone with its own sharp shine, reflecting some source of light beyond the ken of the canvas. At the leading end of the dragonesque body was a great gawping mouth full of teeth and writhing bifurcated tongue, dominated by a pair of white fangs the size and shape of bananas.

Honey-amber screwhead eyes gazed out at her, as big as fists and just as menacing. The eye seemed to be three-dimensional. Prying it out, she discovered that underneath was the gasoline receptacle. The gas cap was the snake’s eye! How clever.

It was a bit of a ratty truck to have such a gloriously cheesy picture painted on it, but then when you thought about it, the medium fit the subject well. She wondered who it belonged to, and what he was like, as the girl reached up and put her hand on its swollen metal belly, still warm with the day’s beating.

She imagined a man with a bushy brown mustache and a bald head, with a band of curly hair that started at one ear and went round the back of his head to the other. He would be wearing a stained white T-shirt and a pair of jeans that never quite managed to hide his butt-crack. He’d be covering his baldness with a ball cap, with some silly saying on it. “I Hunt Because My Wife Can’t Climb Trees” maybe, like what her father had hanging from the mounted buck-head in the apartment, along with his
Duck Commander
cap.

She noticed that the snake’s tail extended past the tail-light on this side. Delilah went around the back and found that the body stretched across the tailgate, went behind the passenger tail-light, and came out again on the passenger fender.

After that it coiled twice and clinging tightly to the very tip was a barechested woman in Viking gear, her pendulous cone-shaped tits squeezed between her outstretched arms. The barbarian Barbie gripped the last slender inch of the snake’s tail as if it were a baseball bat and dug in with both heels. If Delilah were twenty years older, she probably would have read more into the image.

She touched the hand-painted woman; her dusky arms and glowing lightning-god eyes stood out from the truck-body around it, a paint-depth bas relief. The winecork nipples stood out like Braille.

“Time’s up!” said the radio.

The sudden voice gave Delilah a jolt and she almost dropped it. Her heart leapt with a shot of adrenaline and she looked around for a place to stash herself. Running around the rear of the snake truck, she noticed that the camper-top’s door was open a bit. She cupped her hands against the milky glass and peered through the parentheses of her fingers, but couldn’t see inside.

“I’m coming to find you!” Ginny called from somewhere to her distant right, shouting in a singsong voice.

Delilah lifted the sash and climbed into the back of the truck, letting it sigh back down on pneumatic hinges. It closed with a hollow
click.

Inside the camper shell, it was stifling hot and the air seemed sapped of oxygen; grainy, almost, with the smell of earth and a murk of forest-smells. A dulled tang of pine. The side windows were painted over with the red of the body, coloring the faint light from the streetlamps a boudoir crimson. Crammed against the back of the cab was a fluffy black bale of pine needles. Many of the needles had slipped out and now coated the floor of the truckbed with a thin, crunchy carpet.

To Delilah’s right as she climbed in was a burlap sack with
Fertilizer
stenciled across the front, an enormous sack big enough to drape from one end of the bed to the other. It was full of something large, bulbous, as big as the girl herself. Next to that was a Stihl weed-trimmer with a well-gnawed line, encrusted with mulched grass and reeking of gasoline.

A gardener-man, then,
Delilah thought, duck-walking over to the bale of pine needles and settling down beside it.
I wonder if he plants tulips?
She loved tulips, loved the light sweet smell of them.

“I’m going to find you,” said Ginny from somewhere in front of the truck. It had been parked facing the apartment building, with the rear pointing at the dark street. Delilah could hear her new shoes clopping along the pavement as she skipped from car to car. “Ah-
ha!
. . . no, I guess not.”

Delilah froze in place and slowed her breathing; inhaled . . . exhaled . . . inhaled . . . exhaled through her mouth. Her belly rose and fell under her
My Little Pony
t-shirt and she pinched the seams of her jeans, anticipating her discovery in the hot dark camper, studying the rough denim with her fingertips as she listened.

“Are you in here?” Ginny asked. She heard a car door open with a metallic crackle.

A couple of heartbeats passed. “Nope.” The door slammed shut,
ker-tunk!

Silence.

Delilah sat there in the gas-smelling dark, straining at the limit of her hearing, pine needles poking her through her jeans. She could hear the other girl doing something superficial, manipulating something with her hands.

“Over over
over!”
barked the radio.

She gasped and turned it off. Hopefully, Ginny didn’t hear that. She slid an inch to her left as quietly as she could manage and pressed her shoulder and hip against the bristly straw bale.

Ginny sounded closer. She gave a surfer-like “Woah,” and walked right up to the snake truck. “Check that out.”

Delilah listened to her creep around the vehicle, taking in the entirety of the artwork. The girl trailed a hand down the side of the panel, starting at the gas cap and sliding down to the tail-light with susurrant hiss that sounded more snakelike than Delilah wanted to admit. She shifted to get away from a needle that was poking her in the butt and rested her feet against the burlap sack. Whatever was inside was solid but had a strange sort of give. Whatever it was, it wasn’t fertilizer.

“Woah,” Ginny said again, this time from the passenger side of the truck. She giggled. “Look at those boobies. She looks like Thor. Haha.”

Delilah could hear her breathing even over her own. Ginny was a tall, Nordic little blonde girl that never had any trouble clearing her plate at dinner and stayed stocky and moon-faced even though she was an active kid and played kickball. Delilah could see Ginny in her mind’s eye, swiping a wispy lock of hair out of her big pink grinning face.

A voice called from the apartment building. Ginny’s mother. “Regina! Time to come in!”

Ginny sighed. “Okay, mama,” she called back. She walked away. Delilah thought about popping out to surprise her, but realized that she could re-use this spot for next time. Why ruin it now? “Okay, Lilah! You can come out now!” shouted Ginny. “I have to go back in!”

Delilah stayed quiet, took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Then it hit her: she really
was
a ninja! She had gone undetected. She was a stealth master. She was Jackie Chan, Zhang Ziyi, Jet Li, Michelle Yeoh, all rolled into one. She got up off the floor of the bed and crouched there in the womblike red shadow, striking a kung-fu pose. “Kyah,” she whispered spirit-shouts to herself. “Wishaw. Eeyah!”

She threw a punch, and then another with the other hand, then tried to kick but the low ceiling didn’t give her enough room to maintain her center of balance, so she fell back on her butt. She caught herself with her hands, raking the inside of her forearm down the rock-chipped edge of the weed-trimmer head. “Ouch!”

Her hand was on some angular object inside the burlap bag. It was flat on one side.

She raised her arm into the light and examined it; the trimmer hadn’t broken the skin but there was a four-inch red welt that throbbed and smarted. She hugged it to her belly and groaned. Tugging back the rim of the burlap sack, Delilah saw a New Balance tennis shoe.

The great cogs of time ground to a halt. Even the forest full of cicadas silenced themselves, though not all at once—they dwindled to three or four and then one buzzing razz that tapered off into nothing. All thought of kung-fu and ninjas and Michelle Yeoh fled her mind. She was a seven-year-old girl again, bewildered and vulnerable and alone.

Fear didn’t quite enter into it, at least not yet. Right then she had rationed off some part of logic that told her the bag was full of old hand-me-down shoes; maybe a load of clothes destined for the Goodwill store. Perhaps the owner of the truck was a good-hearted man that collected old giveaways for the church and took them to the consignment store.

She pressed her fingertips against the burlap sack again and felt another shoe inside. Good. It was a bag of shoes. A big bag of shoes for the church. She relaxed and peeled the bag open a little bit more.

Wrapped in a striped sock, a skinny ankle protruded from the mouth of the shoe. It was slender and hairless, pale. A tiny pink scar at the top of the calf.

Delilah’s mouth moved, but nothing came out. If something had come from her mouth, it would have been “Mama. Mama. Mama.” over and over again, but for some reason her voice-box didn’t want to work, the wind wouldn’t catch the guitar strings, her throat wouldn’t respond. She just kept mouthing the word over and over again.

Her legs didn’t want to work either. She wanted to get out of the truck, to crawl over to the sash and push it open, throw herself out of the camper shell, and run home. But she couldn’t quite wrap her mind around the sight of seeing a little boy’s legs poking out of a fertilizer bag in the back of a stranger’s truck, and it was the confusion that kept her frozen. Instead of directing her feet to propel her outside, her brain could only spin in place, trying to reconcile one with the other, tires in deep mud.