The shot, p.3
The Shot, page 3
It’s the same way she feels about Denise: that these people she is bound to could at least try not to play right into the assumptions people make about them. When Kristy is at Irvings she pays close attention to the way the customers dress, the way they carry themselves, how they never question that anything they desire is just a tap of a credit card away. She tries her best, using her staff discount on sale items, to fit in. Once, when serving a woman from out of town who she was sure she’d never see again, Kristy lied and said that her parents owned Irvings, and she was home from college working for the summer. ‘One day,’ Kristy had told her, handing back her credit card and the bag filled with the fifteen-hundred-dollar purse the woman had just casually purchased, ‘I’ll have to take over, so they want me to learn the ropes now.’ The woman had believed her so easily, which had given Kristy a momentary jolt of confidence before bitterness grabbed her by the ankles and pulled her back down. See, the bitterness told Max, I could have done it. I could have kept up . . . if you’d given me a chance.
The trailer smells like grease and salt. ‘There’s KFC in the kitchen if you want some, honey,’ her mom says.
‘Thanks.’
Mercy gets up from her place at Kristy’s dad’s feet and follows her into the kitchen. A cardboard bucket of deep-fried chicken pieces is leaking oil onto the kitchen counter next to a smaller bucket of mashed potatoes, a tray of biscuits, a cup of gravy, and an untouched carton of purely symbolic salad, iceberg lettuce so devoid of nutrition it is practically white.
‘Auntie June bring this over for you?’ Kristy yells from the kitchen. Her parents don’t drive unless they absolutely have to. When they do, it’s a slow, agonizing ordeal involving two walkers, back-up oxygen, lots of breath-catching breaks and a drama or two involving cars parked in a disabled spot without the requisite sticker. Her parents seem to sniff them out, blocking the offending vehicle, engine idling, waiting for the criminal to return from the pharmacy or the bank or wherever, and then refusing to let them pull away until they’ve apologized. And meant it. Needless to say these exchanges don’t always go well.
They’d never go into town just to get KFC.
‘Yep!’ her mom yells back from the living room. ‘Sends you her love.’ Kristy sneaks Mercy a bit of chicken then makes herself a plate and brings it back into the living room. Her mom kind of heaves herself up to make a bit of room for Kristy at the end of the couch and mutes the television. ‘Did you hear about the shark attack?’
‘Yeah, Mom. I see the news,’ Kristy snaps, chewing the rubbery meat.
‘Well, just stay out of the water until they catch that monster.’
Kristy nods and chews aggressively. Her mom sticks her cold toes under Kristy’s thigh, which Kristy can’t stand. She growls at her until she removes them. Mercy’s head twists at the sound of Kristy’s growl, and she thumps her tail against the floor in applause.
‘How was work?’ Her mom tries again, still staring at the TV screen.
‘Fine,’ Kristy says through a mouthful of dry, crumbly biscuit. Mercy is drooling and staring at her, her only front leg pawing at the air.
‘Sell anything?’
‘No. Slow day.’
‘Oh, well, that’s too bad. Par for the course in your career, though, isn’t it? You’re nice to the customers, aren’t you? Not all Mopey Molly, I hope?’
Kristy’s jaw tenses. ‘Yeah, Mom. Just a slow day.’
‘Did you see Mr. or Mrs. Irv–’
‘MOM. Can we not? Can we please have one night where you don’t ask about them? To answer your question, I didn’t see the Irvings today, but even if I had, it’s not like we’re friends or anything. They don’t, like, treat me different.’
‘Well excuuuuse me for living,’ her mom says, pursing her lips and unmuting the TV. They watch the rest of Everybody Loves Raymond, two episodes of Friends and Law & Order in silence.
She can’t sleep. It’s so freaking hot. She expects these sweaty nights in August but not in early June. She knows she won’t be sleeping tonight. She’s stuck in a feedback loop of Max. Alternating between missing him (his lips, his chest, his voice) and hating him (his lips, his chest, his voice). She looks at her phone: two am. She turns on her bedside lamp, waking Mercy, who looks at her expectantly from where she was sleeping at the foot of Kristy’s bed. Kristy loves this dog: her marbled mutt’s coat, her pink nose, one blue eye and one brown, and, of course, her three-leggedness.
Kristy gets out of bed and makes her way to the living room, Mercy following, and sinks down into her father’s giant recliner. Turning on the TV, she flips through the channels until she finds a documentary on black holes. Score, Kristy thinks. These are her favorite. Anything to do with the cosmos, with astronomy, even the ones on UFOs and aliens – she can’t get enough. The dreamy artist’s renditions of nebulae and galaxies, like colored ink mixing and swirling in the darkest of darks, the soft narration, the yoga-studio music, all of it soothes her, and fascinates her.
If you were unlucky enough to fall into a black hole, the narrator is saying in a soft baritone, it would be a very unpleasant way to go. It would be death by expansion, or rather, death by being pulled apart – bone by bone, limb by limb, every molecule in your body being torn away by gravity. The notion stirs Kristy, the pain of this theoretical death is not enough to drown the unnerving impulse she feels that if she were standing on the precipice of a black hole, she might just go ahead and jump right in. Not because she wants to die, but because she desperately wants to know what happens after. What would become of her? Would all the atoms formerly known as Kristy reconstitute themselves and make her something different? Something better? To find out seems worth it. She’s seen enough of these documentaries to know that nobody actually knows – a fact which astonishes her. It seems wild to Kristy that you can make a living just professionally guessing, spitballing ideas about things that nobody really knows for sure, about things that may not even exist. You can make money and get big important jobs – you can be interviewed for a documentary about black holes – just by presenting an idea.
Theoretical physics, she knows this is called, the Discovery Channel having given her a mini education on the topic. Her brain seems to just click with this stuff, when there are graphic animations depicting string theory or dark matter. She always finds that she understands – at least in a basic, fundamental way – without much effort; so unlike how she used to feel when she was in the classroom. Why couldn’t learning always be this way? She finds that with imagery and artistry, with the slow cadence of a narrator, her mind switches on. So different from the way that the words in books, equations on chalkboards and the aggressive text of standardized test sheets always seemed to wobble and pull apart – as if they’d fallen into a black hole.
Before she knows it, the credits are rolling, and she is still wide awake. Her phone tells her it is 2:56 am. Rather than lulling her to sleep, the documentary has only made her more alert. She turns the TV off and looks down at Mercy, who knows what she’s about to say. It’s their middle of the night secret and she’s game. More than game – all the muscle and sinew in her little body ache for it.
‘Let’s run, girl,’ Kristy whispers and Mercy leaps off the couch, tail whipping to and fro. Kristy throws on her shorts and a sports bra, laces up her shoes, grabs a bottle of water, and girl and dog sneak out of the trailer noiselessly. If her mom and dad knew she went on these night runs they’d freak. Murderers and rapists and who-knows-what. Alligators, even.
They start off slowly, jogging past The Queen and her gently swaying branches. Mercy is elated and keeps looking up at Kristy with that canine gratitude that makes humans feel unworthy. The trailer park is landscaped with tiny versions of what real houses have big versions of: miniature fountains, miniature white-picket fences, miniature flower boxes and miniature bird feeders. It’s like one of those little towns in a model train set. It annoys her, all this pride. The hand-carved wooden signs hanging off aluminum awnings saying Grandma’s House or The Love Shack or merely The Johnsons put her in a foul mood. It’s like the residents of Puerto Seguro Residential Park are trying to pretend they live over at the Lagoon. Pretending that they don’t live in dolled-up soda cans with their little squares of grass and potted gardens, their porch swings sans porches. Everything is portable, foldable, and secondhand. Everyone is always pretending that it’s enough, that this is all they ever wanted anyways. Their cleanliness and neighborliness can’t make up for the fact that it’s a fucking trailer park. What are they trying to prove? It should just be what it is. They should have the busted-up cars and the bicycles missing wheels and the empty beer cans blowing across the gravel like trailer-park tumbleweeds. They should have the rust and the leaks and the anger. Spiky rancour ricochets through her like a pinball. They should look like what they are: trailer trash.
For all her pining, for all her imitating, for all her Wanting – Kristy has never wanted knockoffs, she wants the real deal. She’s learned this in the handbag department at Irvings. Irma has warned her that sometimes people try to return a knockoff Chanel or Coach for cash. Irma keeps a box of the cheap replicas expressly for the purpose of training employees in the art of detection. If you look closely enough, Irma has taught her, there is always a telltale flaw, a bit of wayward stitching, untrimmed lining, a crooked seam. Kristy understands why people want the fakes. She knows what they think a Coach bag – even a cheap imitation – can do for them. Plenty of women at the park have them. They are shields of dignity, amulets of worthiness, talismans of significance. But Kristy doesn’t want to play make-believe. She knows that no Coach bag – authentic or counterfeit – would have secured her a seat at Max’s table.
She picks up speed, trying to outrun her thoughts.
Girl and dog run out of the miniature world of the park into the wild, feral night. The frogs are screaming and hushing, screaming and hushing, giving her a rhythm to pace herself to. Mercy transforms into something less domesticated, making Kristy wonder again how she lost her limb. She’d come limping home four years ago with her front right leg hanging by a thread of flesh and tendon, the bone snapped through, blood all over her fur. What struck Kristy most was her calmness, her preternatural focus. She made her way right to Kristy, bypassing Kristy’s shocked parents, and looked at her as if to say: You, take care of this. ‘Mom,’ Kristy had said, matching Mercy’s steadiness, ‘you are going to have to drive to the vet, now. No dramas.’ To her credit, her mom hadn’t argued and, actually – miraculously – had helped Kristy carry Mercy to the car where she sat in the back seat with her, their eyes locked the whole way, their breath in sync. The vet couldn’t believe Mercy wasn’t already dead. She was even more surprised when she made a full recovery. ‘What do you think happened?’ they’d asked Dr. Pratt. ‘No idea,’ she’d said, ‘but whatever it was, looks like Mercy must’ve won.’ Now, Kristy swears Mercy runs faster than she used to out of spite. That’s my girl, she thinks, clicking her tongue in encouragement. Cliché or not, Kristy can’t bring herself to feel humiliated by Mercy’s flaws in the way she is by her parents’, by Denise’s, by her own. For Mercy, she feels only raw, unfiltered love.
The air is humid and she’s already dripping, beads of sweat running down her forehead, down her spine, coating her arms, turning her into something slick and fleet-footed, more amphibian than mammal. The road out of the park is a single lane all the way to Seguro Boulevard, flanked on both sides by swamp and marsh. She loves that musty, muddy smell, tinged with brine. The moon is taking the night off, but light seems to emanate from somewhere. Kristy ticks off constellations in her head as she runs beneath them, greeting them like friends: Centaurus, Scorpius, Perseus, Cassiopeia, the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper. Everything glows just enough for her to make out the shapes of ferns and palms and bush, leaves as sharp as blades. Berry bugs feed on her ankles but she tunes them out.
An opossum darts across the road and she jumps. Mercy growls and makes a half-hearted attempt to follow it into the dark tangle of mangrove and cordgrass but is all too happy to return to Kristy when she calls her name. They merge with the night, Kristy and Mercy, and merge with each other, make each other something new, something third. These are the only moments when Kristy’s body makes any sense to her. When it is doing what it is built to do. Fish swim. Birds fly. Mosquitos bite. Kristy runs.
The air gets saltier still, with a hint of decay, a sign they’re trading the swamp for the oyster beds. Mercy sniffs the air, using the changing scents like a map. Calcified oyster shells jut out of the mud like little tombstones. Kristy can’t believe people eat oysters; they’re like the phlegm of the earth. As a guest in Max’s world she’d eaten lots of things meant to be delicious – expensive rarities that have their own utensils: oyster and fondue forks, caviar spoons, special knives for different kinds of cheese . . . She’d never really liked any of it.
Brackish rivulets thicken until there is something of a current, less than a river and more than a stream: the dregs from the meatier Intracoastal Waterway a few miles west. Enough water to build a modest bridge over. This is where they take their break. She puts one leg and then the other on top of the concrete ledge of the bridge and stretches. Mercy is squatting by the mile marker; Kristy listens to the sharp sluicing of her peeing. Instinctively, she brushes her hand across the cellulite on her thighs.
Max always said he liked her body. Didn’t mind that she was as tall as him. That her thighs and butt were bigger than those of the skinny cheerleaders most guys liked. She could never borrow a pair of his jeans to parade around in as proof of their intimacy. He always said he loved to watch her run. Cheered her on from the sidelines as she won the track and field title for Puerto Seguro High two years in a row. He said guys like some booty, even if they won’t admit it. Said those other girls have nothing to hold on to. And he did hold on to her, whenever they could find time alone. After school at his house, in his car parked behind the old closed-down hospital. He had grabbed handfuls of her like reaching into a pillowcase full of Halloween candy. Selfish and needy. Nibbled and kissed and licked and squeezed and spread. He said she was like a woman from a different era. He liked to remind her that if Marilyn Monroe were alive today, people would say she was fat. Kristy never knew how to respond to this bit of historical trivia, but her responses were not a general requirement to Max’s pronouncements, especially the ones he believed were compliments. Her silence was translated as demure appreciation. Sometimes – usually prompted by sex scenes in movies or even the way Denise talks about sex with Mr. Noonan – Kristy wonders if she actually enjoyed Max’s ministrations. Had it felt as good as it was supposed to? Had she had an orgasm? Sure, it felt good, she supposes – well, it didn’t feel bad. But when she remembers their sex, she mostly recalls his pleasure, his rapture, and it occurs to her that perhaps what she enjoyed most was the power her body seemed to have over his body.
Now, she wonders if it was only the flesh and bone of her, the way she’d learned to move lightly on top of him, to secure him between her thighs, to push when he pressed and to press when he pushed, that had bound Max to her. Had that been her only currency? The only thing she could do that the skinny cheerleaders who buzzed around him couldn’t? Even so, her body – for all its strength and power – hadn’t been enough to hold him here.
She opens the bottle of water and takes a long swig before calling Mercy away from whatever she’s sniffing. Kristy pours some water into the palm of her hand, carefully and slowly so that it’ll make it into the dog’s mouth and not evaporate into the asphalt, still hot from the scorching day. She loves the feel of Mercy’s tongue lapping the water off her palm; it makes her feel useful in a deep, primal way. She may not have gotten good enough grades to get into college, and didn’t have the money to go even if she had; her boyfriend may have dumped her out of the blue on graduation day to go live a life that seemed off-limits to her; her parents might be trailer park couch potatoes . . . but she can give her thirsty dog some fucking water, goddammit.
From the bridge, she can just make out the glowing orbs of the streetlights of downtown Puerto Seguro. What would even be open this late? Nothing downtown. If she headed out of town going south, she’d find the notorious Mudflats. She and Max had always wanted to go to Mudflats. It was a legendary watering hole in Puerto Seguro. Its clapboard walls and tin roof were rumored to be over a hundred years old. Some said it had even managed to stay open during Prohibition. Others said it had, at one time, been a brothel. Wild things were said to take place at Mudflats; beer bottles broken over heads and fistfights over women. Managing to get into Mudflats was a massive coup among Puerto Seguro’s teenagers, but Max and Kristy had never dared to try. Drinking ages are ridiculous, they’d agreed. It’s not as if they didn’t drink anyways. Max always said it was fucked up that in the sixties guys were drafted to go and fight and die in Vietnam but couldn’t even get a beer. ‘That’s true,’ she’d said, ‘and what about the guys fighting over in Afghanistan?’ But then she worried she’d gotten the country wrong. Or maybe mispronounced it, or that maybe the war was over and she didn’t know, so she just pressed her mouth against his before he could laugh at her or tell her that it wouldn’t kill her to watch the news or pay attention in school.
