Josie And Jack: A Novel Part 14

The sheets on Becka's bed were printed with faded yellow flowers. Her green s.h.a.g carpet was matted and soiled, and there was a dead fly on the windowsill. I rolled over and buried my head in the pillow, which smelled like cigarette smoke and shampoo. I didn't cry.

When I woke, the sun had gone down. Jack was sleeping in the bed next to me, wearing only his shorts, with one arm thrown over the side of the bed and the other hand on the small of my back, underneath my blouse. The night was warm, and the places where his skin touched mine were sticky with sweat. He had opened the windows and pushed my hair up and away from the back of my neck, so that it lay like a skein of silk on the pillow next to me. The cool breeze from the window should have been pleasant, but I was miserable and the breeze smelled of sulfur and stale water.

I stretched slightly. The movement woke Jack. He opened his eyes and blinked.

"Well, hi, sweetie," he said sleepily, stretching his words in an ugly parody of Becka's accent.

I rolled over so that my back was to him. Jack propped himself up on his elbow. "What do you think of ol' Becka?" He tugged on my ear. "Sweet li'l thing, ain't she?"

"Are we staying here?" My voice was cracked with sleep.

He sighed.

"The thing is," he said, "I really do need money. I can sell the stuff we brought with us, but it'll take a few days. This is a small town. People get suspicious. Now, Becka"-the blouse that I was wearing didn't have any sleeves, and he slid one hand into the armhole so that he could rub the tense place next to my shoulder blade-"Becka makes money. Tons of it. Cash."

"How?"

"Stripping. Sleazy, but lucrative." He half-laughed. "After you went to sleep, her first question was whether you'd need a job and her second question was how old you were."

"Am I old enough?"

"Nope. And it would be over my dead body, but I didn't tell her that." As he spoke, his hand moved down my arm to cup my elbow.

"G.o.d, I missed you," he whispered.

I pulled away.

He looked hurt and surprised. "Ouch."

I refused to feel guilty. Instead I said, "What's that smell?"

"We're about half a mile from the sewage treatment plant. Welcome to Erie's low-rent district. I'll take you out to the lake sometime. You'll like that." Now he was playing with my hair, stretching it out on the pillowcase, combing it smooth with his fingers. Despite its awful smell, the breeze felt good on my skin.

"I thought Lake Erie was toxic."

"It was. It's better now. I think they even do some fis.h.i.+ng in it." Jack pulled at the back of my blouse, moving it up close to my bra strap. I felt him trace our initials on my skin.

"Just because there are fish doesn't mean you should eat them," I said. "Are you sleeping with her?"

He sighed and flopped over onto his back. "What if I am? It's a roof over my head. Yours, too, now."

I shrugged. The only sound that I could hear was Jack's shallow breathing.

"I'm glad you're here," he said. "I really did miss you."

I turned to look at him. "It's a lot. This is a lot." In the glare from the streetlight outside, I could see him gazing thoughtfully at me.

He got to his knees on the bed. "Take off your s.h.i.+rt."

"Why?"

"Just do it."

I let him pull the blouse over my head, leaving me in my bra. Then he knelt behind me and began to rub my back, slowly and precisely. While he kneaded my muscles and stroked the outlines of my bones, he said, "Look, we'll get out of here soon. I promise. But Becka can't know we're planning to leave. She'll flip out, kick us both out on the street. She thinks she's my G.o.dd.a.m.ned girlfriend, for Christ's sake."

"How long?" Jack's hands were starting to make all this mess seem very far away.

"Soon." He leaned down and kissed the skin between my shoulder blades. "We'll go somewhere good, a big city. Get our own place, n.o.body to bother us. n.o.body who knows anything about us. Maybe New York." He sighed. "I was drifting, and this was where I washed up."

"I don't know where I am," I said, and he said, "You're with me."

We were curled together, our arms and legs intertwined, like two starfish at the bottom of the ocean.

"I promise you," my brother said. "I'll get you out of here. I'll take care of you. I promise."

At five in the morning, the alarm clock went off and I stumbled to the couch before Becka came home. When the front door opened, I pretended to be asleep.

When Jack left, later that morning, I stirred enough to open my eyes and see him standing at the open door, wearing jeans and a black T-s.h.i.+rt, staring down at his upturned palm through a pair of sungla.s.ses. Then he closed his hand and stuffed it into his pocket. I heard the soft clink of coins sliding against one another.

The world on the other side of the door was glaring white in the sun. My heavy eyelids closed. When I woke up, he was gone and Becka was sprawled out on her bed in a bleary tangle of limbs and sheets and carbon black hair.

She cooked me breakfast after she woke up, around two: bacon, sausage, French toast soaked in egg and deep-fried in oil until it was crisp and golden. The kitchen was already thick with humidity and I'd woken with damp and p.r.i.c.kly skin, but the hot food was good and I ate until my face was sticky with syrup and grease and my body felt heavy.

"Sweetie," Becka said, "you ate that like you ain't seen home-cooked food in about a million years."

That accent is a put-on, I thought. "It feels like it."

She started to clear the dishes. "Shame your brother had to run off like that this morning."

"Where did he go?"

"Don't know. I don't bother asking anymore." She dropped the last of the dishes in the sink and let the faucet run over them for a minute. "None of our friends are awake that early, I can tell you that much. They're mostly night people. " She was twisting her long hair into a ponytail. There was a small, spotted window above the sink and her eyes were fixed on something outside.

"Me too."

She smiled and said, "That so?" in a tone I didn't like. I wasn't sure how to respond, so I said, "Well, he missed the food."

Becka shrugged. "Aw, he never eats my breakfasts anyway. Kind of nice to have somebody to cook for." She fastened the ponytail with a purple barrette and shook her head to test it. Then she wheeled around to face me. The rapid switch was disconcerting. "Jack said you didn't bring hardly any clothes with you. You want to go shopping this afternoon?"

"I don't have any money," I said, watching her carefully.

Becka waved that away with one hand. "Jack gave me some to spend on you, and I've got more if that's not enough. Besides, this way we girls can get to know each other. You can tell me all your brother's dirty little secrets." She winked.

"You sure you want to know?"

"You mean, watch out what you wish for and all that?" She laughed. There was a sudden bitter edge to her voice. "Smart girl."

"I was just kidding."

"I wasn't," she said, a little shortly. Then, with another whirlwind mood change, she smiled a big, toothy smile and told me to run and get myself cleaned up, now, so that we could head on out.

Definitely a put-on, I thought.

The store where Becka took me shopping was a huge concrete building with a row of plate-gla.s.s windows facing a vast asphalt parking lot. Becka took the lot at about fifty. I just had time to read a sign taped to one of the windows, wis.h.i.+ng the best of luck to the Erie High School Laker Band; then Becka whipped the Ford into a parking s.p.a.ce, barely missing an abandoned shopping cart.

As soon as the key was out of the ignition I was out of the car, grateful for the solid feel of asphalt below my shoes. It took Becka another five minutes to sort out her sungla.s.ses and check her lipstick and make sure she had her wallet. I stared at the bright sun glinting mercilessly on the other cars in the lot and began to feel awkward.

"You're just like your brother," she said as she got out of the car. "Everything is fast, fast, fast. At least you wait for me." She shook her head. "I swear, if that man weren't so d.a.m.n s.e.xy, I'd never put up with half his bulls.h.i.+t. "

On the sidewalk in front of the store, there was a miniature coin-operated carousel. The battered fibergla.s.s animals were something like ducks and something like dogs; the bright colors had been faded by the weather and the red paint on the base was beginning to rust and flake off. The carousel was revolving slowly, the noise from the engine inside it all but drowning out the tinny music. There was a crying baby with food on its face clinging desperately to the back of one of the animals, while two women talked calmly over its head.

"Something wrong?" Becka asked.

I shrugged and gave her a fake, sunny smile as we pa.s.sed through the automatic doors into the air-conditioned, fluorescent-lit store. "If you were a kid, would you want anything to do with that?"

She gave me a puzzled look. "You mean the merry-go-round?"

"I guess so. That thing outside, with the baby on it."

"That's a weird thing to think," she said.

The last new piece of clothing I'd had was my Christmas dress. My wardrobe back on the Hill had been a mixture of Jack's castoffs and my mother's left-behinds; that day in the store, I was wearing a cotton blouse that used to be Crazy Mary's and a cut-off pair of Jack's jeans. I didn't much care about clothes, especially girly clothes; so when I saw the part of the store where Becka wanted to shop, filled with row upon row of s.h.i.+ning chrome racks hung with bright primary colors and cheerful prints, I wanted to laugh out loud. I couldn't wear this stuff. She had to be kidding.

But I soon discovered that Becka was nothing if not serious when it came to clothes, particularly trendy clothes. She gave me a bright orange dress to try on that made me feel like a traffic cone. When I looked at myself in the narrow mirror outside the dressing room, I said, without thinking, "Well, if nothing else works out, I can always find some road construction to stand next to."

Becka sniffed. "I think it's adorable."

"You don't think it's a little bright?" I stroked the stiff fabric and tried to sound as if I really valued her opinion.

"Wouldn't have picked it out if I didn't like it." She turned away, her face expressionless. "But maybe I don't have your educated taste."

"No, I didn't mean-" But then I shut my mouth. I could tell by the set of her shoulders that it wouldn't matter whether I apologized or not.

Becka moved among the racks of clothes and I shuffled after her silently. I heard exchanges all around me, flowing as fluidly as water from a rainspout. Becka said to the clerk, "How you doing today?" and the clerk said, "Not so bad, still hotter than blazes out there?" and Becka said, "Sure is," and it all seemed so easy for them. Meanwhile, there I was, about as fluid as a slab of granite. It would have been funny if it hadn't been so terrifying. In the outside world, people cared about the weather; they cared about their weekends; they cared about their baseball teams. n.o.body cared about the theoretical ramifications of black hole entropy. I didn't really care, either, but my world was made up of the things that Raeburn thought were necessary and true; in Becka's world, I was like a gear uncaught, and there was nothing in the whole of string theory that could make me a part of what I had been thrust into.

Becka spun a chrome rack around and pulled out another sundress, this one bright green. "How about this one?"

"Nice," I said.

Jack came home later that day. I was wearing one of the dresses that Becka had bought for me. I felt stupid in it and he laughed when he saw me, which didn't help my mood or hers. Finally he suggested that he and I take a drive around Erie, so that I could get my bearings, and Becka said, her voice heavy with sarcasm, "Oh, what a nice idea."

"The Becka Capriola mood swing is a force of nature," Jack said when we were alone in the car. "Watch for it. It bites." Becka's house was on the east side of town. Jack drove west down tree-lined streets through a neighborhood full of Victorian houses and wide gra.s.sy lawns, and I thought, this must be how the other half lives; but a few blocks later, we were back in the land of small box houses, scrubby ill-watered lawns, and old cars with paint fading under a thick coat of dust. Closer to the water, the boxes had been painted, and sleek, expensive cars sat in front of tidy gardens. To the right of us, the bay between Presque Isle and the mainland stretched and glittered in the sun, and I thought, of course. Now that the water's cleaner, this is hot property.

"There's not much money here," I said.

"It's hidden. The summer people live up near the state park, on the peninsula. Gated themselves off from the highway and everything." Jack's lip curled contemptuously. "They're the ones who are going to buy all that stuff we took from Raeburn."

"What are we going to do? Go door to door?"

"Becka's got a friend who can fence things for us."

"Great. Let's meet him."

"You really want to get out of here."

"She doesn't like me, Jack. She doesn't want me here."

"She wants me here," Jack answered. "And if she wants me, she'd d.a.m.n well better be nice to you."

That was true and we both knew it. All the same, it didn't take Becka long to get sick of me. I understood. She was in love with my brother, or at least enthralled by him; I could tell because when she talked about him, her voice held the same awe as when she talked about the characters on the soap operas she watched in the afternoons. She and Jack had met in a tattoo parlor on Peach Street, she said.

"Jack doesn't have any tattoos," I said.

"Neither do I," Becka said. "But one of the ink guys down there is a friend of mine. I go down to see him sometimes, on my day off."

"What was Jack doing in a tattoo parlor?"

"Meeting me. What the h.e.l.l does it matter? I went in there to talk to Mike, and there he was. He was staying with this awful girl, over on Sixteenth Street. Wasn't a week later I said to him, 'Sweetheart, you just go ahead and move your stuff in with old Becka until you decide you need to be moving on.' And the rest is history."

"And then I came along and ruined everything." I meant it as a joke.

"Oh, no, honey!" Her smile was forced. "Nothing like that! You're a cutie pie. I'm happy to have you here, just as long as you want to stay. It's exactly like having a little sister again."

But later that night, when Jack returned from driving her to work, he was grinning. "What did you say to our little Becka? She's been stricken with a guilty conscience. Thinks you think she hates you."

"She's right. I do think she hates me."

"So do I. But why is she all wrapped up about it now?"

I told him what I'd said to her that afternoon, and he said, "My small scheming sister, you're brilliant," and kissed me. I didn't tell him that I hadn't been scheming at all.

Later he said, "There is a downside, however. Our guilt-stricken Becka now feels the need to prove her goodwill, so on her next day off we're all piling into the car and going to the beach. Together."

I groaned.

"Oh, it gets better. Becka's going to bring along a friend for you."

"No, Jack," I said, but he put a hand on my knee and said, "It's okay. It's the same friend I was telling you about. You'll like him. His name is Michael."

"That's why you were in the tattoo parlor."

He lifted an eyebrow. "Somebody's been telling stories."

"So who's this girl you were living with, over on-what was it-Fifteenth Street?"

"Sixteenth."

"Sixteenth. What was her story?"