A wounded deer leaps hig.., p.14
A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest, page 14
Travis is a little older than me, the same grade as Foxy, and he skateboards behind the school every chance he can get. His mom promised him if he finishes this school year, he can drop out to become a professional skateboarder, and now all he does is count the weeks. He decorated a t-shirt with a sharpie to read Moss River Sucks! He hates this town. We all do. We can feel it more strongly than the adults—that this is a place closing in on itself, sinking down into a deep hole of its own making.
Travis is a legend all the way down to the first-graders. He wears fingerless gloves and a red leather jacket, same as his hero Michael Jackson. I work hard to get the “Thriller” video and Gary out of my head. Last year, Travis won first place at a skate contest in Portland, and at the school assembly, the principal made him come up on stage to get a high-five. At lunch, Travis was showing off the bus ticket his mom got him to go to L.A. with his older brothers to compete down there.
“It’s not fair,” says Toby when I tell him. He has a look in his eyes like he’s going to kill someone if he can’t find a way to get on that bus, too—not to L.A., but to anywhere else. He rubs his sneaker in the dirt, and I think he’s either going to punch something or run away. Toby says he can’t tell what size Travis’s dick is but that he saw Hanky-Panky’s little dick again last night when he came out of the shower with no towel. When he saw Toby watching him, he grabbed it and wagged it around until Toby ran to his room.
“Penises are disgusting,” Toby concludes and starts telling me about how you can tell how big someone’s penis is by how big their nose is but then stops talking because Travis’s skateboard rolls by us and Travis comes running after it, yelling back to his friends about if they saw him jump over the curb higher than the last time.
Mom got me a plastic board with cheap wheels from Kmart that doesn’t roll or bend right and is hard to turn, but I’ve started bringing it to school, wanting to be part of this. The teachers never go to the empty parking lot across the street from the school so that’s where kids go to do their skateboarding tricks, with no one to get angry and threaten to call home. I weave between Travis and his friends, who laugh at jokes I don’t understand. They nod and give high-fives over various things they say under their breath, and one of them asks Travis why he lets babies hang around now. He shrugs and says something that makes them shut up. Toby is upset because I haven’t been sitting with him as much, but sometimes he watches us skate around anyway, looking more alone than ever as the cannery smokestack sends up its gray fumes.
After school, Travis lets me help him set up a course to weave in and out of for practice. I try to go through, to keep up—try not to fall where the cement gets bumpy. When I look up, Travis’s not behind me as I thought, but off to the side, still and watching. He comes over to me, his shove unexpected, and I fall backward onto my elbows, ripping open the fabric of my jacket at the armpit. He comes at me again, pulls me up, grabs my jacket, and shoves me against the back wall. He’s about to punch me in the stomach or slam me hard but then he leans down and presses his cold, wet mouth against mine, and his dirty fingers rub around my crotch through my jeans. His face doesn’t show any feelings and his lips are hard. The knives slice but something else rises, too: a warm electricity.
“You kiss like a fucking boy,” he tells me when he is done, then gives me one final shove backward against the wall and watches me—his taut face smeared with disappointment now.
I wonder how he knows this—maybe he has his own White Richard or has kissed boys in his grade, or other younger kids like me. There are sixth-graders who call him a faggot in the halls, but I thought it was because he has long hair and listens to Depeche Mode too loud on his Walkman.
“You kiss like a boy,” he says again, but I didn’t think I had kissed him at all.
I flash to Foxy, who no one in our neighborhood has heard from since what happened.
“You better not tell anyone about this,” Travis says, close enough that I could lick the stray eyelash off his cheek.
My stomach knives are strangely still. Their gleaming blades wait together in a line, looking for a sign. I wipe off my mouth, step away from Travis, and pick up my skateboard. He sits down on the ground and punches his own leg over and over, a dull boy drum. He is not looking at me anymore—he’s somewhere else—at a skate competition far away. I walk, then run toward home, don’t look back. Two blocks from our house I throw up on the sidewalk, bits of dark stuff thick with red.
I wonder what Tyler, Alex, and Lisa are doing right then, imagine them at home eating a snack that one of their moms made, something warm and sweet. They are in clean clothes on a white couch, watching something funny on TV. They’re together and happy and far away—even though probably just a few streets over from this puddle of vomit below me.
At home, I want to cry but can’t. I lie on the couch because Mom and Gary aren’t home, so there’s no one to tell me to go to my closet and leave them alone. I let Bingo lick my entire face clean. He tells me not to worry, that everyone has a bad day sometimes.
I get up and run a bath like Mom does for me, shoving my ripped jacket underneath my mattress. The hot water stings my elbows, stings my palms, and stings everything else, while I use the washcloth to rub away the skin where Travis’s fingers prodded. I dip my head under, paw my shorn head, and blow bubbles to the top like a sea creature.
Dried off and in my closet, I call Toby on the walkie-talkie, not sure how much to explain.
“Travis messed with me,” I say, not telling him about the secret warmth—I won’t tell anyone that part.
Over, over.
“Everyone says he’s a pedo,” Toby tells me through the static, and my silence must tell him I’m lost because he explains: “Travis is probably going to grow up and have sex with little kids. Over.”
All the knives that live in my stomach started slicing, and back in the bathroom, I sit over the toilet and have to flush twice to make sure Mom won’t see my blood coming out more than ever before.
All of it comes to me at that moment, one minute sitting alone with these old feelings and this new word explained, and the next moment floating up so fast like a taut balloon, away from my sore body, away from Toby explaining that it’s regular kids who can turn into monsters, up to the top of our house, but it isn’t daylight anymore—everything is black.
I am back in the bathroom with White Richard, before Mom gets home and pounds on the door to save me. The tiles are faded white with cracked grout between each one. The curtains are ones Mom sewed from an old sheet—pale blue with small, yellow flowers, fraying at the hems. The bathtub faucet drips, drips, drips—just one small leak, but the porcelain is stained darker where the water hits. White Richard has one of his meaty hands holding me still. He uses the weight of that arm to keep me right there before him so I can’t float away, can’t escape out through the window and up and gone to be with the plants and animals outside. With his other hand, knuckles calloused and scarred, he is pulling off my superhero underwear, the ones with Spiderman throwing out a web that I begged Mom to get me. He leans down closer, and I see dark hairs sprouting from his chin, his gray, cracked lips, and I can smell him. Old meat. Old onions. Now he is at the V of my legs with his cold, mean mouth saying, You like it, don’t tell anyone, You like it, don’t tell anyone.
Over and over—it will never stop.
There’s a sound outside, a shrill bird calling out for help. It’s a blue jay on the branch outside the bathroom window. He scrapes his beak on the branch like sharpening a dull knife, looks in the window and squawks again: Noooo, Nooo, Nooo.
White Richard moves his hand over my mouth even though I’m dead silent, trying not to breathe even—I am willing Mom to come home and stop this. I’m willing the bird to fly to Old Oak and not tell anyone what he saw. I don’t want the animals to know this is possible, this feeling that is so much worse than any other. I’m crying but with no sound, just two warm, salty creeks streaking down. I know that I don’t exist to White Richard—I’m not a real person at all.
Do I exist? I ask the walls, because the bird couldn’t keep listening and flew away. I can’t hear any kind of answer over the sound of White Richard’s ragged breathing. I look down and his penis has slithered part of the way out of his jeans. It’s dark pink and alive and he knows I’ve looked. He smiles a wide smile, and says, It’s so big now. He takes it all the way out. It is throbbing as if it has its own heartbeat, its own mind, and he rubs it all over my stomach and up to my lips and then down to where I’m cold and wet from his mean mouth between my legs. His breathing gets louder and louder and my tears have all dried up. He gasps like he’s dying and then Mom is banging on the cheap, plywood door.
Over, over.
Mom is home now, and the White Richard from all those years ago is gone, too, disappeared like a ghost back into my memories.
Mom is shaking me saying, “Wake up, wake up! Baby, are you okay?”
I stand up too quickly, coughing up an acidic sickness, and the world spins around me. Mom is so worried, trying to figure something out. She pulls me close into her chest, and her neck smells like lavender soap and sweat. Again and again, she asks me what happened, but I don’t want to talk about White Richard’s ghost, don’t want to risk bringing him back again.
I ask to stay in bed with Bingo and Moonshadow curled up near me, these creatures who won’t ask me to explain anything, no matter what happened or what will happen next. These peaceful animals know how to get along. Mom makes me chamomile tea with honey and sits next to me in the closet, pulling me in to lean against her. The walkie-talkie is mostly static now. The batteries are running low. Mom rubs my back like she won’t ever stop as I drift off into an exhausted, dark dream of nothingness.
Gary came home late last night, and I was already asleep in bed, too tired to keep watch. This morning he comes out of Mom’s bedroom wearing black and blue all over his big swollen cheeks. He can’t open his mouth because he has a jaw brace holding his teeth closed. Mom says poor baby and pets the back of his head like he’s an injured mountain lion, claws half pulled back.
He can’t yell at us for now and I start to think we got lucky, but then—his arms and legs and feet still work, and his scabby fist is clenching and unclenching to a strange rhythm.
Mom says he’ll have to eat everything through a straw for at least a month, maybe longer. She says for breakfast it’ll be scrambled eggs in the blender, and for dinner, hamburger and mashed potatoes the same way.
Mom doesn’t have regular friends, only boyfriends. She used to talk to her old friend Angela but doesn’t anymore, says Angela can’t be trusted, that she’s a conniving bitch she wishes she’d never met. Cherry and Mom aren’t friends either, but sometimes they wave to each other from across the road, a half-hearted wave, neither wanting to get too close—two wary coyotes, keeping a safe distance.
As we drive by Toby’s house, Mom and I keep our eyes straight ahead, not wanting to attract attention—Hanky-Panky is in the yard yelling about something, looking rabid.
“Hank is a sadist,” Mom tells me as we pass their house and pull into the driveway. “Lots of men are sadists. That’s why you can’t go over there.”
Mom and I eat dinner and I don’t ask where Gary is, don’t say I think Gary is a sadist, too. I try to relax and just be glad he is somewhere else.
“Do you think my dad ever thinks of us? Do you think he wants to come and meet me someday?” I ask.
It comes out before I can figure out if it’s the wrong or right thing to talk about.
She looks out the window, and rubs her neck.
“Daniel is not coming for you, babe,” she says. “I never told him I was pregnant. I was afraid I’d have to share you, or he would try to take you away from me. And I thought he might not believe that you were his.”
I run my finger along my forearm, press the muscle down to the bone, and will myself to be the color of a dark bruise. Mom watches me, then says she needs some alone time and gets up to throw away the pile of cigarette butts collecting in the clay ashtray I made for her in art class.
Outside, the sun is poking out between large, fluffy clouds. The mushroom factory is running, and its thick fumes rise over the treetops to reach us, rank and unavoidable. Disappointment sits heavy on my shoulders, squeezing the back of my neck. This is all there is. No one else is coming for me. Back in my closet, I use my fingernail to scrape some of the yellow off the wall, scratch my true name into the wood. Rocky Washington. Rocky Washington. Rocky Washington. I turn on the walkie-talkie, hoping Toby picks up.
“Toby, are you there? Over,” I say, not having much hope. Maybe the batteries have finally died, though I can still hear something coming through.
Toby has been talking to me less and less. I’ve been trying to figure out what I did wrong to make him go away. Mom has been going away more too and I can’t make her stay either. When Toby does pick up, at first I’m relieved, ready to see if he wants to go out to the field with me, to get away from our coyote-den houses. Right away though, scared animal fear takes over. Toby is crying and not even trying to pretend he isn’t.
I can’t understand what he’s saying through his tears and wailing and breathing too fast but then he screams in one sick breath, the walkie-talkie clear of static for a last broadcast.
“He’s a rapist and a pedo and I couldn’t stop him and now I’ve done this thing.”
The way he says it makes me know I need to tell Mom; I can’t keep this to myself. In her room, she has a book in her hand, but it’s unopened and she’s just rubbing her forehead and kind of rocking herself back and forth like she does sometimes when it is all too much. When I tell her about Toby crying, she curses and says she won’t get to rest until she’s dead, but then she hears the panic in my voice when I tell her what he said. She pulls on her shoes and follows me out the door and across the road. The sky is dark again—the sun has decided to stay behind the clouds forever.
We knock on the door and it opens on its own. Hanky-Panky’s car is gone, fresh tracks through the mud where it usually sits. As soon as we step inside my stomach knives shimmer—things are not right. Cherry is on the couch, crumpled like a limp doll tossed out of a car on the side of the freeway. She has cuts on her face slicing across her cheeks, scabs of red and brown. Her right arm is clearly broken—there’s more dried blood along her shoulder and her elbow hangs at a disorienting angle, tied up in an old sheet.
There are pill bottles open on the coffee table and an empty bottle of whiskey peeks out from the back cushions of the couch. Ice in a plastic bag is melting onto the floor. Mom goes over to her, but Cherry’s eyes are wide and scared. She tries to shake her head no, and then looks with such intensity into the bathroom that we look away from her toward the bathroom, too. That’s where we see Toby on the floor, leaning against the doorframe. There’s blood on his hands and on his jeans that are pulled halfway down, his face whiter than any face I’ve ever seen. Mr. Kohl once showed us slides of albino animals and explained the genes, but Toby is whiter than that.
Hanky-Panky must have done something to Toby, maybe stabbed him when he tried to protect Cherry, maybe shot him. There’s so much blood, and the knife that Hanky-Panky gave him sits in Toby’s right hand. It comes to me in a sick flood that Toby has done this to himself.
“I don’t want to be a man, don’t want to hurt anyone,” Toby says to us, his voice so clear it’s an eerie choir of one. I don’t understand how he can speak at all. “So I cut it off.”
Mom covers her mouth with her hand like she’s in the part of a horror movie when the monster first jumps out. She runs back to the other room to look for their phone to call an ambulance. She follows the cord to find it under some old magazine, and punches in 911. Her voice is frantic as she gives the address and answers their questions, says a boy is hurt, says she doesn’t know exactly what happened.
My feet are two dead weights cemented into the floor. I look back toward Cherry who is passed out cold now, and her busted-up face has no expression at all, like she’s been gone for a long time—not dead, but not alive either. Her red hair is damp with sweat and sticks out in all directions like she’s a punk rocker—like she plays the drums in a band in Portland—not like a beaten-up mom with a hurt kid and a bad boyfriend.
I take a step closer to the bathroom, smell cold metal, and can’t bring my eyes to where Toby’s penis should be because I don’t want to know if he did it all the way or not. I don’t know what to do or say. Maybe if I was back in my closet with the walkie-talkie I could think of something useful to tell him, but standing here I have nothing to offer. The knife has fallen to the floor with a clank next to Toby’s red-wet leg. It catches the flashing light coming through the cracked bathroom window above the toilet as the ambulance finally pulls up outside, screaming its siren screams, scaring away all the nightbirds who gathered on the clothesline to find out what happened.
Mom leaves but doesn’t tell me where she’s going, just that she’ll be back soon. I look for her journal as soon as the door clicks behind her, but it’s not in the same place by her bed. I look through her dresser drawers, push around her holey underwear and worn socks, then find it under a stack of books. I don’t go back to the beginning like I did before, but to the end, to the last thing she’s written.
I think Smokey remembered what happened with Richard and I’m afraid Gary could do the same or worse. He is out of his mind right now—wanting his drugs and losing his shit. Even his skin smells like anger, it comes out rancid in his sweat at night. I don’t know how to get rid of him. I don’t know what he will do if I try. I don’t want to be the mother who ends up at the shelter. If I could send Smokey somewhere else I would. I’d do that and handle Gary on my own. Aunt Josephine would know how to help. Gary said if I leave him he’ll kill me, kill Smokey, set the house on fire, burn it all to the ground. When he apologizes now I know I can’t trust anything he says anymore. I’ve got to get us away.
