You Only Get Letters from Jail Page 22

  He lifted his face from her and tucked his hair back and surveyed the setting sun, the grass around us, the pile of rocks near the car. “It’s getting to be time,” he said. “We can’t wait too much longer.”

  Ricky pulled a plastic bucket out of the trunk—a white five-gallon one with a twist-off lid and a wire-bail handle. “How do you know I didn’t follow you down to the lake? Make sure you two didn’t do anything that I wouldn’t like,” he said.

  I thought about the three paths I’d seen, but the third one had been older and fainter than the two that Debbie and I had made. I looked at Kenny again, but he just shrugged and kicked at a faded Schlitz can in the grass.

  “You remember that time we stalked those two nurses all night, Kenny?” Ricky said. He had flipped the bucket over and was sitting on it. “Remember how fucking good at it I was? I told you, I was the best guy on patrol—they used to call me Whisper—I could walk across a wide open space without a sound.”

  Kenny just nodded, but I couldn’t tell if it was in agreement or not.

  “You remember that one nurse? What was her name? That younger one. Nancy?” “Diana,” Kenny said.

  “Yeah, yeah, that’s right. Diana. Man, she was a cocktease.” Ricky picked up a beer from the ground, twisted the cap, checked the puzzle, and started drinking.

  “You scared her half to death,” Kenny said. “You broke into her car that time, remember? You were in her backseat when she got off shift.” He was smiling and grinding the toe of his tennis shoe into the dirt.

  “She liked it, don’t you get it? Man, she just thought she was mad. She liked the attention. That’s what girls want. A little attention. A little love.” He stood up and it took him a second to get his feet under him and I thought he was going to fall, go down on the leg he claimed had been shot up in the war, and I couldn’t help but think about what Debbie had told me, how he had hurt his leg falling out of a tree, and how she had said it was partly her fault. Ricky put his arm around my shoulders and pulled himself against me so that we were both unsteady and then I planted my feet and pulled him upright and I could feel his hot breath in my face and smell the beer and hear the words he was saying before they even left his mouth.

  “You have to learn how to give a girl the right kind of attention, you get it?” He swayed backward and his left foot swung out and hit the bucket and sent it sideways and rolling across the grass. “You did everything wrong.”

  I could see spit bubbles foaming in the corner of his mouth and I wanted to look away but I knew that there was no help to make him stop talking. That I just had to wait for him to stop. Kenny was staring down at his toe in the dirt and Debbie had wandered toward the front of the car and was sitting in the passenger seat with her legs out and that was all I could see, her tan legs sticking out from the side of the Plymouth.

  “It’s time to do this, Kenny,” Ricky said. “Turn the headlights on.” He loosened his grip on my shoulders and stepped away and he was surprisingly quick and steady and sure on his feet. He grabbed a gas can in one hand and the rim of the bucket in his other and he walked around to the front of the car and set both in the grass, then came back and picked up another gas can and took his beer from the bumper where he had left it.

  Kenny reached into the car and there was sudden light and everything that had been dissolving into shadows was pulled back into place. The sun was still visible on the horizon, a thin white band between the hillsides and the violet dark above, and the few scattered clouds that I had seen before had thickened and become heavy as a wedge on the far side of the lake.

  Ricky pulled Debbie from the car and she stood up and he shuffled her against him in an awkward hug and I watched to see if her muscles would tense and pull him close in return, if her hands would move, slide the distance of his back, if she would bury her head in his chest and hold on to him, but it was all over before I had enough time to read the signs.

  “Okay, the only way this is gonna work is if everybody clears their heads and gets rid of fear. You can’t be afraid. No matter what. No screaming and no fear. Got it?” Ricky asked.

  He put his index finger under Debbie’s chin and lifted her face up so her eyes could meet his. “Got it?”

  She nodded and then he let go of her and she sat back down in the seat and I watched a red line form under the frayed edges of her cutoffs where her shorts cut into her thighs.

  “So what’s the plan?” my brother called over to Ricky.

  “Just follow my lead. No screaming and no fear. Keep the bucket close, okay? All I need are three. That’s what the Holy Roller told me. He’d give me a hundred bucks for three.”

  “What is he talking about?” I whispered to Kenny. Ricky was climbing up the rock pile with a gasoline can in his hand.

  “Holy Roller homecoming tomorrow out near the Foursquare church and some guy offered Ricky good money to get him the snakes. He’s giving me twenty bucks for the ride.”

  “Snakes?” I said.

  In the distance the sky lit up, a sudden flash that turned the clouds the color of ripe plums and reflected the hillsides on the lake. “Jesus,” I said.

  “Heat lightning,” Kenny said. “Listen.”

  I wanted to know how many times Ricky had been out here before—he knew the way without hesitation—I wanted to know if he had ever brought a girl with him. I thought about Suzy Eberhardt and whether or not she knew the way out to the emptiness of this dead yellow grass, too, if she had ever taken off for the lake, and if Ricky was with her, if he stayed two steps behind her and kept falling back until his footsteps didn’t make sound and he watched her walk while she tugged at the hem of her shorts and crushed a path for him to follow.

  I strained my ears but all I could hear was the radio turned down to a mumble, and the sound of Ricky climbing up the side of the boulder pile, shoes scraping rock, and the occasional metallic ping of the gas can banging into jutting edges. “I don’t hear anything,” I said.

  “Exactly,” he said. “No thunder. That storm is miles away.”

  “Man there’s a lot of flowers up here,” Ricky said. “It’s strange how something like these would try so hard to stay alive when it seems impossible for them to live.”

  When Ricky reached the top of the boulder pile he unscrewed the lid on the gas can, tipped it upside down, and started pouring. “Let’s hope it only takes one can,” he said. “Fucking government and their gas prices.” Even from the distance I could smell the gas, sweet, wet, and heavy. I could see the yellow rocks darken as he pointed the nozzle in the gaps between the boulders and tipped the can over and over again.

  “What’s he doing?” I asked Kenny.

  “Forcing the snakes out. They’ve been holed up in there all day, soaking up the heat from the sun. So Ricky is dumping some gas into their nests. The gas will piss them off and out they’ll crawl.”

  “Is he going to light it on fire?” I asked.

  “No need to—check it out.”

  “Here they come,” Ricky shouted, and then he remembered his own rule about no screaming and let go of a whisper that was little more than a hoarse yell. “Get the bucket ready.”

  “Go sit in the car,” my brother said. He shoved me toward the driver’s side and I stumbled that direction, and then I heard Debbie screaming and I saw her scrambling to pull the door shut and there were snakes on the ground, quite a few of them, sidewinding across the dead grass in shocked knots of twos and threes, their yellow-and-green-patterned bodies tangled and taut.

  Ricky had jumped from the rock pile and he was on the ground now, running in circles, and there were shouts, and I watched him bend over and pull his hand back and I could see snakes grouped tight in the wide spread of the headlights, confused and ready to strike, their tails thin brown points rising up from the coils. The sky lit up again, a double shotgun blast of light, bang and then bang, but soundless in the distance, and I wondered how many miles away it was, the storm that we could not hear.

  I felt D
ebbie’s hand on my arm and the radio was still tuned to the out-of-town rock station, and I could hear the music but not the words, and Debbie’s hand was cool and her grip was tight in that familiar way that I remembered from before. Through the windshield we watched Ricky and Kenny run around the snakes, turn in circles, and run back again. Kenny’s job seemed to be to hold the bucket and he was swinging it in such a way that had there been anything inside it would have been spun out and tossed a distance, but as it was the bucket was empty and Kenny was staying close to the front of the car, where maybe he could jump on the hood if he needed to get out of the way.

  It was Ricky I was most fascinated with. He moved almost gracefully, and there was a fixed expression on his face, something beyond concentration, and his eyes were dark and everything about him was poised to strike with just as much potential threat as the snakes. He was using one hand to distract them, get their attention, misdirect, and the other hand would come in at a quick angle, almost from behind, and reach for the neck. I watched him miss over and over again, but he never lost his position or the look of focus on his face. Then I saw something behind him, just to the edge of where the headlights reached, and I realized that the Laura Scudder’s bag had been kicked from the grass and what had been underneath it was now tossed into the light—a thin brown sandal with a heavy sole, lying on its side, caught in the grip of weeds.

  It was over in a matter of minutes, the rock pile emptied of snakes, all but three of them scattered to the darkness and the thick dead grass beyond our lights. The slow unlucky ones were in the bucket, twisting over and over on themselves, tails buzzing, striking blindly at the plastic. Kenny spun the lid on them and all we could hear was the sound of their heads beating against the sides.

  “I got bit,” Ricky said. He held up his hand and turned the back of his wrist toward us and I could see that it was red and already puffed up and there was a thin smear of blood running down his arm and dripping into the dirt.

  “Shit,” my brother said, and he took Ricky’s arm and held it in front of the headlights so he could get a better look at the damage.

  We got out of the car and Debbie helped me kick the beer bottles out of the way and we put the gas cans back, and even though I was afraid to touch the bucket, I made myself pick it up and put it in the trunk because Debbie was watching me. We helped Ricky get into the backseat of the car, and then I went around and got in the front passenger seat, and Kenny handed Ricky a beer and said something about making a tourniquet, but Ricky just shook his head and took a drink. “I gave in to fear,” he said. “The Holy Roller told me that I wouldn’t get bit if I kept fear out of my heart and believed in Jesus, and I guess I didn’t. And he said that if I didn’t, then that was Jesus’s way, too.”

  Debbie was in the backseat with Ricky and I could hear her shifting around, feel her knees press into the back of my seat, and part of me wondered if it was deliberate or not, if she was sending me a message through code.

  “This would be a good time to call in a chopper, take my ass out of this war,” Ricky said.

  “There is no war,” Debbie said. “You weren’t ever there.” I could hear her voice take on an edge and I was waiting for Kenny to start the car so we could chew up back road to cut the distance between here and home.

  “Don’t talk like that,” Ricky said. “You don’t know anything,” he said. “You know less than nothing.” And then he made a sound that I had never heard before, something high-pitched and like an animal in pain, and I jerked around in my seat and saw that Debbie had her hand around his wrist and I could see that her nails were biting into Ricky’s swollen skin.

  “Be honest about one thing,” she said. “Just be honest for once. Admit that you don’t know anything about Suzy Eberhardt.”

  There were tears running down Ricky’s face, I could see their shine in our little bit of light, and he raised his left hand and I thought for a second that he might hit her, just pull back and knock her off his arm, but instead he tucked his hair behind his ear and wiped the back of his good wrist against his face.

  “Scooter Tabor was in front of me,” Ricky whispered. “We were in double canopy and he took a step and I was thinking about smoking, and wishing I had a cigarette stuffed into my hat, and there was a sound and all the air got sucked up and then I was flying, lifted right up off the ground, and Scooter Tabor got blown up and I took the scatter in my leg.” He wiped his eyes again and then Debbie let go of his hand and he put it against his chest and cradled it and began a slow rocking motion, back and forth, in his seat.

  “Forget it,” she said.

  Kenny flipped the key forward in the ignition and at first there was the tired sound of the starter turning and waiting for the engine to catch and then the sound faded out to a click, and the headlights dimmed and then died. “Fuck,” Kenny said.

  In the darkness I could hear things but they all seemed to be coming from inside the car. When we had gone camping, there had been crickets, thousands of them all around us, their noise a constant wall of sound, but out here there wasn’t anything, no crickets, no bugs, no frogs.

  Kenny turned the key again and this time the starter didn’t even try. There was just a sputter of dry clicks, and then one click, and then nothing at all.

  “What’s going on, man?” Ricky asked.

  “Fucking battery, I guess,” Kenny said. “We shouldn’t have had the radio on all day. The doors open. The dome light was on. Shit, I don’t know. How long did we run the headlights?”

  Nobody said anything, but I thought that I could hear Ricky crying, or not really crying, but breathing heavy and making a low noise in the back of his throat. The heat lightning went off again, lighting up the lake so that it looked as flat and reflective as smoked glass. I looked out toward the front of the car and tried to see the potato chip bag, the marker for the brown sandal I had seen in the weeds, but there wasn’t enough light from the sky to see much of anything except for the vague sense of shapes. The windows were down and the breeze from the afternoon was back, the residual of down-canyon winds, and I thought that I could smell wet ground and rain, but I knew that we were still weeks and miles away from storms.

  Debbie shifted behind me, but this time I could not feel the pressure of her knees into the back of my seat and I wondered if that was part of the code, too. Kenny turned the key again and there was nothing. “Let’s just keep everything off,” he said. “The battery will charge itself and then we can get the car started and get the fuck out of here.” Kenny looked over his shoulder toward Ricky. “Hold your hand above your heart. It’ll slow the shit down.” In the fall my brother would move away to college, and he wanted to be an architect and build things and when my father had asked him why didn’t he want to be a doctor, he had all of that experience in the hospital, my brother just said that his job was to push a mop through things that spilled out of bodies, and he couldn’t imagine spending the rest of his life in that smell.

  Out beyond the hood of the car, near where the stand of scrub oaks began, I thought I could see a shape move past, a shift in the shadows, maybe a deer, but I knew that my mind liked to play these tricks on me and it was probably just my imagination. Kenny said we would sit there and let the battery charge itself, it would just take a little while, and even though I knew that wasn’t true, it sounded good to me.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This collection would not be possible without the help of many people who have contributed to the construction of these stories in many ways. I would like to thank Corinne Litchfield, Kevin McKenna, and Deborah Meltvedt for inspiration; Jan Haag and Shelby Angel for reading and cheerleading; Kate Asche for opportunities; Dylan and Molly Gyurke for laughter; Jan and Scott Winnett, Jim Baker, and Suzanne Barnett for family; Melinda and David Ruger for much support; Pam for getting me started many years ago; all the people at Tin House Books for their hard work to make this book beautiful; Nanci McCloskey for tireless effort; Rob Spillman and Danielle Svetcov for taking cha
nces and believing in my writing; and especially to Meg Storey, who found the best in every page of these stories, and then made them better.

  PHOTO: © KEVIN F. MCKENNA

  JODI ANGEL’s first collection of short stories, The History of Vegas, was published in 2005 and was named a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2005 as well as an LA Times Book Review Discovery. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Zoetrope: All-Story, One Story, the Sycamore Review, and Esquire/Byliner, among other publications and anthologies. Her stories have received several Pushcart Prize nominations and “A Good Deuce” received a special mention in The Best American Short Stories 2012. She grew up in a small town in Northern California—in a family of girls.