The Dust of 100 Dogs - A. S. King [37]
Her mother’s voice finally broke through when she reached the queue for the deck. Emer, trust yourself.
Emer nodded.
She arrived on deck and found the small quarters she would share with thirty other women. Most looked like prostitutes and barmaids. Emer reminded herself that the men in Tortuga—pirates and murderers though they may be—needed women like any other man does. They needed love and hot meals, a home and a wife, the same as any man.
Emer didn’t yet know what would really happen. She didn’t yet know that these men had no idea she and her thirty young companions were even on their way—and that they weren’t as welcome as the signs and posters had claimed. She didn’t yet know that when she arrived, there would be no one man who would pick her out and love her, but the lust of one hundred men, prowling the night, with no notion of loving at all.
The Adams family home went up for sale in late March of my senior year. It was a hard day. How many times had we heard our mother rejoice, “If anything ever goes wrong, at least we have this house”? I swear, whenever she said anything like that, I felt jinxed, and when the for sale sign went up, I felt as if it was somehow her fault.
The house had come to them free of charge from my father’s uncle, back when they’d moved to Hollow Ford from London just after my father came home from Vietnam. Stuck between two shag-carpet bi-levels with out-of-ground pools and the yellow glow of colonial-style bug lamps on new aluminum siding, our little sixty-year-old house looked dignified but run-down. It could barely compete.
But any money was better than no money, and my parents needed any money. In the time it took to find another place to live, some lucky family from Ohio agreed to pay my father $85,000 for our house. Over the next few weeks, I helped move the furniture we had left out into the yard, along with the rest of our redundant material clutter for a garage sale that earned us about two hundred bucks. It was hard to watch those things get sold, especially all by myself. Patricia would never have let her roller skates go, and Pat would have hated to watch his air rifle end up in the back of an old Ford station wagon.
We moved into a medium-sized trailer, with two tiny bedrooms and a kerosene heater in the living room. I don’t know how much it cost or where the rest of the money had gone, but I think that, by that point, my parents had run up plenty of debt and probably used any extra profit from the house to pay things off.
The trailer park seemed like the land that time forgot. There was a pay phone fifty yards away from our place, under a streetlight, and the gravel roads had huge potholes that filled up when it rained. There were no kids, and most of the people who lived there were old enough to be my grandparents.
Junior didn’t come around anymore, after we moved. It could have been the two guard dogs the old Italians in the next trailer kept chained to their fence all night, or the fact that we had nothing left. Or maybe he’d overdosed and had fallen into a lake and died. With drug addicts, it’s like that. You never really know.
By mid-April, school had become my main focus. Even though I hadn’t tried, I started to become more popular because of my grades. It was nice. Up until then, I’d thought my senior year was going to be the same boring waiting game that my whole life had been, but I actually was having some fun.
First, Susan convinced me to join the Quiz Bowl team. Ms. Houseman put me in the starting line-up as the history expert, even though I couldn’t make it to the after-school practices on account of my night shift at McDonald’s. I made a few friends and had a good time traveling from school to school competing, even though we didn’t always win.
Then, Susan