The Onion Girl (18 page)

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Authors: Charles de Lint

BOOK: The Onion Girl
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That first time he pretty much come as soon as I got his dick outta his pants, but he learned quick how to make me happy, too. I swear I never knowed it could be so … guess tender's the word I'm looking for here. We had us maybe eight months of that, best times of my life, bar none, so I guess I shoulda knowed something bad was on its way, but it took me by surprise all the same.
No, I just never seen it coming, his leaving me like he did.
Happened one Sunday night, the hour hand creeping up on 4:00 A.M. I wasn't gone more'n three, four minutes. Just long enough to slip 'round the corner to the 7-Eleven and get us some coffee. Just long enough for some strung-out junkie to come into the copy shop with a pistol in his fist.
I didn't know that when I run into him in the doorway. He banged right into me on the way out, knocking the coffee outta my hands. Them foam cups exploded when they hit the pavement and I was already yelling at the guy. But then I seen the mitt full of money in the one hand, the gun in the other.
He was set to give me a whipping with that pistol of his. I could see that plain, no doubt in my mind. Everything slowed down and sped up, like I was drowning in molasses, but sliding down this steep slope at the same time. I saw the hand with the gun go up, setting to hit me, and was already backpedaling outta the way when I hear Hector cry out from inside.
“No!” he yells and comes clean over the counter like some old coon hound jumping a stump.
The gun in the junkie's hand stops coming at my head. It points at Hector. It goes off.
The bullet hits Hector square in the chest and he goes flying back over the counter. It seems to take forever for him to land. The junkie's halfway down the block while I'm just staring at Hector. Watching him fall. He hits the counter, slides off. There's this look of surprise on his face that woulda been funny any other time. He disappears behind the counter and then there's just this big red smear left on the top.
I can't hear a damn thing as I go tearing into the copy shop. My ears are ringing fit to bust from that gunshot, fired so close to my head. I come skidding around the side of the counter, but I'm way too late. Hector's already up and gone and all I got left of him is this limp, bloody body that looks like him, but don't feel like much of nothing. Nothing that's alive, leastways.
I'm still holding his head on my lap when the cops arrive.
I don't go to that funeral neither.
Everybody at work don't know what to make of me when I show up the next night for my shift, but what am I supposed to do? It ain't me done nothing wrong. And I sure wasn't gonna lose my job just because Hector took off on me. And 'sides, with him gone, there was no one else to do the work on the computer like he did. 'Cept me, of course.
Look, I know I'm sounding like some psycho, but I ain't stupid. Some junkie shot my boyfriend, I'm not pretending any different. But Hector, he didn't have to go and die on me, now did he? He didn't have to leave me behind, all on my own, 'cept for Pinky.
All that kindness of his was just setting me up for this deep dark fall.
And then Pinky left me, too.
I don't know how many hundreds of films Pinky made, but it were a lot. Not like she starred in 'em all or nothing. In the beginning she just got the bit parts, but then she started getting what she called the ingenue roles. She'd be the innocent little cornpone gal who'd get pulled into all that debauchery, which was kinda funny to me, knowing her like I did. If they wasn't already using the term “sex bomb,” somebody woulda had to invent it for her.
But the thing is, she surprised me. She was pretty good at the acting part of it, so maybe, if she'd got her a decent break of some kind, she coulda been a real actress. Hard to tell, though, seeing's how she let herself be seduced by all the attention she was getting on the porn scene and all. I guess in the end she was happy enough being a big fish in a little pond.
'Cept after a whiles they just wasn't calling so much no more. Now when she got offered a part, it was playing the mama—once it was even a grandma—or in some scene where they got them a dozen or more folks going at it and she'd just be one more face in the crowd. And it just kept going on downhill from there.
It was her own damn fault. She lived too hard and all them drugs and the booze took their toll on her good looks. She got this hardness to her and I swear she started in looking twice her age. She could still perform, but the porn industry's just like the rest of the world. They want their sweet young things. Want 'em pretty and built like only surgery can build 'em. 'Specially in this damn town.
Get to looking like Pinky and the work just dries up on you.
She still had her die-hard fans, but let me tell you, after seeing some of them at them trade shows, they weren't nothing to be proud of. I seen hounds drag home better'n them, gophers and squirrels and crap, two, three days dead.
Even the Web site was a-floundering and eventually I just shut her down. To make any money she was gonna have to start doing animals or kids or something, and there was no way I was gonna let her do that. And to give Pinky her due, she drew the line her own self.
But I knew she was hurting. She missed the sex some, but mostly she missed the attention. She always was the kinda gal who liked to drop her panties in public, just for a laugh, but where that's maybe kinda cute and sexy on a younger gal, it don't seem near so endearing when you're looking as haggard and burned-out as poor 'ol Pinky come to be.
The day she got offered the job of a fluffer—you know, the gal who gets the men hard for their scenes with the women on camera—well, she just lost it. I think the casting director was feeling sorry for her—being nice, you know, giving her some work—but Pinky didn't see it that away. She went after that woman with a knife and cut her bad. Cut her and a couple of others on the set till somebody brought her down and then the cops come and took her away.
That was in '95 and after we got done with the courts and all, she pulled six years in the pen.
We couldn't afford no decent lawyer so we had to go with the one the court appointed for us, but I can't even really blame him. See, we couldn't post Pinky's bail so she had to stay in jail all through the trial. That had its good and bad points. Being in there was like going through detox, and it weaned her off the dope and booze, but she ended up looking so rough and haggard I'm surprised she didn't get more time just on account of looking the way she did, this being L.A. and all.
I thought the time I done in county was the worst point of my life, but the years Pinky spent in the penitentiary put a lie to that. And the curious thing is, I finally come to understand my mama moving close to the prison to be near Del like she did back when, 'cause I done the same thing now with Pinky.
‘Stead of walking to work, I had to commute now. It was 'bout an hour on the bus. They say nobody walks in L.A., well, yeah, maybe, but there's a lotta us can't afford no car, not even some old piece a crap held together with tape and baling wire. And you know who we are. The blacks and the Mexicans, the immigrants and the white trash like me. Man, you get you a car and already you're living high. Can't afford an apartment? Hell, you can live in your car.
But I didn't mind the long ride. I had me Hector's notebook computer—it was in the copy shop when he died and nobody was paying any attention when I just kinda acquired it for my own. Tell you the truth, I think that's pretty much the way he got it, “found” it somewheres. I'd bring it back and forth on the bus with me, sit in my seat and work on the programs, do my E-mail and stuff like that. Made the time fly by.
Occasionally some asshole'd try to rip me off—I mean, think about it. I'm just this little-bitty thing, riding public transport with a computer on my lap. You can hock one of them suckers for a week's worth of fixes. But the first bunch tried to rob me, that switchblade of mine was in my fist and they knowed from the look in my eyes I wasn't above cutting however many's it took. After that I took to carrying a gun. A few times of waving it in their faces and word got out, I guess, 'cause I didn't get bothered no more.
I kept working at the copy shop, but I didn't make no more friends and nobody much liked working with me on that late shift. Maybe they
was scared, on account of what happened to Hector, but mostly I think they just didn't take a liking to me. I wasn't making no effort to be sociable no more. What was the point? Look where it got me the last time.
Lotsa times they'd blow me off and I'd be in there all on my own-some, but it didn't trouble me none. I had the shareware programs to keep me busy. I kept it up so I wouldn't get bored, but all them little five- and ten-dollar checks from my satisfied customers that come trickling in let me save up for some new equipment, too. It let me go out and pay honest money for my upgrades and the like.
I visited Pinky once a week, that was all I had to look forward to.
And I had my dreams.
The whole time me and Hector was seeing each other, I never had me no more of them wolf dreams. And even after he up and left me, I didn't have me nothing that I'd be remembering come morning. But once they took Pinky away, them dreams come back again.
I call 'em dreams but they always felt like more. It was liking being alive, only in a different place. I'd be running through the woods and fields, all my senses big and intense, the unfamiliar body of the wolf like an old friend. You see different when you're an animal, hear different, and lordy lordy, do you use your nose different. There's whole stories written on every smell you take in.
And then there's the hunt: the chase and the kill. I guess it answered to the hunger in me, to that piece of darkness I found inside me the night I cut my brother Del and set myself free. I couldn't go around killing things in my day-to-day life—though there were customers in the copy shop that sore tried my patience a time or two—so I killed 'em here, in my wolf dreams.
I wasn't much good at the hunting at first. Partly it was me fighting the wolf's nature—it knew what to do, but I had my own ideas, 'cept the wolf knew its limitations and I had to learn them. I couldn't hunt the big game. For that you needed a pack. And those damn field mice and voles and the like weren't easy to catch. But I got me the hang of it. I liked the crunch of all them little bones, but it weren't satisfying in the long run. I knew I needed me some serious meat.
So I needed a pack. Hell, not just for the hunting, but 'cause I was
lonely, too. Not for friends, and talking and going out and the like, but for the idea that I wasn't the only thing like me in the world.
I don't rightly know where they come from, but I called and they showed up, five or six of 'em, all bitches, ready to hunt. At first I didn't know if they was like me, dreaming 'bout being a wolf here, or if they belonged to this place and I just called 'em to me from wherever they'd been running afore.
I know what you're thinking. Where'd I ever get the idea them dreams could be taking place in some other place that's just as real as what's right here in front of us? A body went and told me that and I'd think somebody put a stop payment on their reality checks. But I'll tell you this: I knew that place was real. Just someplace else. And the way I come to figure that for certain was when I realized one of them wolf bitches had Pinky's eyes.
So whiles I can't rightly say where the others come from, I can pretty much guess how I got Pinky. It was just me missing her so bad. I must've pulled her out of her own dreams and into my own. Into this place that sometimes feels more real than the world where my boyfriend's dead and my best friend's in prison and I ain't nothing but a nobody. Thing was, I didn't know if Pinky knew and it wasn't something I was prepared to go asking her. It wasn't that I was scared of looking foolish in front of her. I been foolish and a lot worse in front of her. It was that she might look at me and not know what I was talking about. That all these nights we's a-running in the dreamwoods together are just something I'm making up in my sleep.
But maybe six months after they put her away, I come visiting Pinky like I always do. I'm regular as clockwork, there whenever she's allowed a visit. It's hard looking at her through the window, the glass all dirty and scratched, talking on a damn phone, but what's the option? Not being able to look at her at all? Not being able to talk to her and let her know somebody on the outside cares for her?
“You 'member those dreams you used to have?” she asks after we been through the how-dos and all. “'Bout wolves and such?”
I get a funny feeling. Nothing bad, just a kind a itch, deep in my stomach.
“Sure,” I say.
“Well, I been having 'em, too.”
I don't say anything for a long moment. I look at her through the glass. There's a moment when I see the wolf in her face, then it's gone like it never was.
“I know,” I tell her. “They're real, them dreams. Don't ask me why or how, 'cause I can't say. But nights when we're sleeping, you and me, somehow we're out running them woods at the same time.”

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