Hick - Andrea Portes [64]
“There’s not a night I turn the light and don’t see him. Every day. Every night. And a thousand times in between. it’s like trying to get a hug from a scorpion.”
She laughs real hard now, you could turn this laugh inside out and never find the light in it.
“But that don’t mean I don’t got him in every cell of my body. That don’t mean I won’t till they put me in the dirt and even then.”
Forget about the smile. Erase the laugh. that’s gone now.
“I tell time by him.”
Show’s over. she’s got her hands back and her body back and her eyes back together.
“But as long as he’s alive, I ain’t safe . . . and neither are you, kid.”
“Well, don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine—”
“Goddamnit, Luli.”
It comes out of her like a sob before I know that church voice is gone for good.
“How long you been here?”
“I dunno. Three days, maybe.”
She bites her lip, stern.
“I got some good news for ya, Luli,” she says then. “Believe it or not, I called Campbell and that old geezer made it, kid. He actually made it. Don’t that just beat all?”
“I guess.”
Above her, and I hadn’t noticed this before, on the paneled wall behind, is a tiny oil painting, the size of a piece of paper, turned on its side. it’s a picture of that big white arch you always see in Paris, with the road coming out towards you, and all the people walking on the sidewalk, either forwards or away, fuzzy, like it’s raining. I look down from the hurrying Paris folks and see Glenda, biting her nails, assessing my state of disgrace.
“I’m gonna make it better, okay?”
I make a nod, but to tell you the truth, there’s nothing to make better anymore. There’s nothing wrong here, even. Not now that I got replaced by the side of the road.
But she starts rifling through her purse, peering and sorting and throwing back receipts and tissues and lipsticks that keep coming back up, again and again, like they’re on an invisible conveyor belt, turning up everything from last night to that last bar to the bar before that.
She mumbles something about a knife or scissors or just something to cut with goddamnit. She breathes out hard and comes up with a set of keys, some hairpins, a needle and a safety pin. She gets up without a word, throws the sheets down and starts working on the ropes.
I watch her in silence, ashamed, not knowing what to say. She doesn’t know I got replaced. She bends over me, squinting at the lock, working and reworking, jimmying this way and that, trying and retrying. She keeps tripping over herself, hurried, wanting to be done, wanting to get the hell out of Dodge and wouldn’t you?
The lock unhitches and she breathes a sigh of relief, hurried, untangling the ropes around me. Through the flush of her cheeks and the rush of her movements, the looming threat of our current situation washes over me and I shudder to think what Eddie would do if he came back and saw this little set-up. He wouldn’t be using sweet words then.
I start helping Glenda untie. The two of us, like spiders bending over the ropes, unweaving the strings of thresh web and then this one over here and then that one over there. This is the kind of thing you’d give up on if you had a choice.
Gradual, the ropes cross less and less until they fall off altogether. I go to make a stand but realize something’s wrong with my legs. They’re cramped up, slow, brittle, like they belong to someone else and I am just middle management.
Glenda starts tearing the room to pieces, some kind of hurricane whirlwind, throwing pillows and drawers to her feet, before she stops on a dime, the eye of the storm, turning back to me.
“Where is it?”
“Where’s what?
“You know, the money, where is it?”
“I thought you gave it to Eddie, to take me off your hands.”
“What?”
“Eddie said you gave it to him to get rid of me.”
“That fucking snake. I thought you ran off. Motherfucker.”
“Wull, I thought you didn’t like me no more.”
“Aw, fuck, kid, I wouldn’t do that. You