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Chapter 17. Tumbleweed girl.
It all ends at the diner. Smelling of smoke, dressed in clothes that haven’t been worn or washed in months, they walk into June’s grandfather’s diner, Dick’s Diner if you’ll recall. Grab a table. Make yourself comfortable.
Jamie heaves Lana’s unconscious body against the window. Beaver holds the pot carefully in his hands like an unearthed bone.
Dick appears at their table, notepad in hand. “Welcome back,” he says. “What can I get started for y’all?”
And the other time someone helped Marshall, did something kind and selfless for him, fostering a companionship that has followed him throughout his life and now sits on a very precarious sort of cliff.
It looked like this: Marshall at thirteen years old in a big, greasy Eagles tee sipping Coke through a plastic straw from an extra-large Burger King Styrofoam cup in the mall food court. He’s got a thousand mile stare held in his pale eyes like he can see down the thread of time and is envisioning himself laid bare on a white pyre to be set to flame by a doubtful lion but really he’s just watching this girl across the sprawl who is looking at him right back.
“Hey.” A voice sharp like gravel attempts to sever the thread but time is thin and fragile only in particular ways. “Hey!” A thwack on the back of his head and the thread unravels.
“Look at me when I’m fucking talking to you,” Marshall’s father had said. He was counting bills at their plastic table with one hand and swallowing soggy fries with the other. Sometimes the hands swapped jobs without announcement and grease and filth were given easy breeding grounds. “You listenin’?”
Marshall nodded, limp hair falling across his unlistening face.
“When my guy gets here don’t say shit, okay? This is a fucking drug deal, not tea time, got it?”
Marshall sucked his soda to the bottom until the straw emptied out and all that was left were a few unsatisfying droplets of sugar pelting the back of his throat. “Okay,” he said.
“Good man,” Eddie replied.
Of course Marshall had lots that he wanted to say. Chiefly: Can I go home? A drug deal in the middle of a mall, are you fucking stupid? What would you do if we were caught? What do you think death is? Can I have some more fries? These were the typical things that Marshall imagined young boys talked to their fathers about. The only difference was Marshall would ask his father nothing, knowing the answer would be false or outright physically violent for no reason other than sometimes violence can be a language of its own, maybe the only language Marshall understood. Boys teach each other hate. He wasn’t quite sure what girls teach each other but whatever it was, he could see it in this girl’s eyes. She was still watching him, gaze dull as a butter knife but latched onto him as though he were a television too difficult to turn off.
Her hair was so big and tangled. He imagined her as a tumbleweed falling across a barren landscape until she hooked herself on something and shook around there until it let her go and that would go on and on and on and that was what she looked like. He wanted to draw her.
She was all by herself. No older than him and eating boxed noodles at a high table, legs dangling off her stool. The box was covered in abstract stains and so that he figured she must have pulled it from the trash. He wanted to comb her hair and buy her chocolate or something. He didn’t have the money for much more than that, just pocket change.
A scrawny, bearded guy sat down at the table with them. He sported a duffle bag over his shoulder which carried the stuff that poisoned his mom. Marshall wanted to push the gangly man down the escalator and watch him fall and fall and fall until he was a bloody, broken mess, a tangled mass of jutting, torn up limbs. But boys don’t do violence to men, only the other way around. He dreamed of being a man someday so he could do terrible things too.
Eddie said, “Hey, man.”
And then he glared at Marshall and Marshall remembered his part. “Hi Uncle Andrew,” he said loudly and with fervor.
They nodded their approval which is all any man could want from another man and fell into negotiations. Neon lights flashed all around. Electronic pop music played from many speakers and there were children sitting on the lap of a fake and vaguely scary Easter bunny. People wore smiles on their faces or yelled at crying babies and everyone was holding some sort of plastic. Shopping bags, cell phones, balloons, Gameboys, fake Easter eggs, tiny bags with white powder. The world was a manufactured thing.
Always, Marshall could see the way it would end.
Eddie counted his bills again. Everything came in small baggies. Some of the stuff inside was even pretty, some of it even looking like something real. Marshall followed the exchange of money, the dropping of bags into other bags. He watched it with burning concentration as if he could destroy it with his mind.
Their hands were rough. Eddie had a tattoo of sharp teeth on his wrist. He did not talk about what things meant or why he did them. This too was being part of a man. They completed their exchange and both appeared satisfied.
Marshall rattled around the ice at the bottom of his cup. “That’s not the same amount as last time,” he said and he only said it because it was true, not because it mattered to him nor did he want any more of that stuff to get into his mother’s veins but he couldn’t help being the sort of boy who noticed everything, certainly did see his father count out the usual number of bills and the dealer dropping less than normal into Eddie’s backpack on the floor. In time he would learn to keep things to himself, when he became a man he would learn to shut up but that day he had spoken.
He knew he was wrong when he saw that look spark across the men’s faces. The kind of tired anger that men can wield and shield. The flare in the brow and the widened nostrils that registers concept more than fact. He was not permitted to speak and he’d said something stupid.
The men towered above him. The boy is a lesson to be learned.
“What have I fuckin’ told you about running your mouth when daddy is doing business?” Eddie seethed.
This is not business, Marshall wanted to insist. This is not business, this is the hook to get caught on. This is the medicine that dulls the manufactured world. This is what parents do when their only son is a child with a child’s needs and two people who reject their own needs must care for him. This is America. Noise and plastic and drugs and men who know anger better than they know their wives.
But Marshall knew that none of this provided the correct answer. He knew the correct answer and so he said, “You told me ‘don’t say shit when my guy gets here, this is a drug deal, not tea time.’” This was obviously the correct answer because it was verbatim what Eddie Father had said and still it earned him a swift kick in the shins underneath the table.
“Don’t be fuckin’ smart boy,” Eddie growled. Men can growl like animals, too.
Don’t be smart. Be dumb? Marshall could be a fucking idiot if that was what was required of him.
“I don’t even know what drugs are,” he said.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Uncle Andrew said. “What the fuck is this, Ed? You tryna hustle me?”
Trust between two broken men is as quiet as getting fucked in the ass. Eddie inhaled sharply. “Now look what you fucking did, boy!”
Marshall made two men upset with facts and followed orders. He’d learned many times before that the truth can make men angry but he forgot. And anyhow, they were already angry all the time. Could anger only breed more anger? And somehow he’d helped them cross a threshold that now made him bad? He didn’t know yet how sensitive the acquisition of drugs was. He did not know it was as vital to an addict as an organ transplant. He did not know how powerless it made his father to need rocks in his veins to be alive. He did not know what powerless people will do to feel powerful.
Marshall, through his bangs, replied, “I was just sayin’.”
Which was when Eddie’s anger stopped being a feeling and became a physical manifestation. The watched pot was intent on overflowing, and he took Marshall by the hair and threw him to the ground. His head smacked against the hard tile and he felt the space in his lungs where there had been breath a moment before.
When the edges of his vision began to unblur, he saw a lion standing over him with all the interest of a cat playing with a mouse. No, not a lion, but a tumbleweed. She reached out an arm and helped him up. He’d barely returned to his seat and the crowded food court had already wandered back to their conversations and consumption when the girl walked up to Uncle Andrew and said, “Just give him the rest, dad.” She pulled a final small baggy from her pocket.
The red lightning that dug itself into Uncle Andrew’s forehead told Marshall that this girl was going to be hurt later for this. He knew that violence was different for girls and he hoped it was less than what was dealt to him.
Eddie stared in disbelief, letting the little lion girl drop hard drugs into his dry, unwashed palms.
She’d always been so bold. Consequences had always meant so little to her. Was that it? With fire in her hand and someone she loved bared before her, could she not see the consequences of the flame? Of death?
This was the first time Marshall had been offered a simple kindness at another’s expense.
He was reminded today that kind people can be cruel too.
She’s unconscious still, cheek pressed against the cold glass, hot and slow breath fogging up the window. It’s raining outside like the day they first came to this diner, only the sky is harder now, solid like a block of marble, late December clouds threatening to turn water to ice and all the world to white.
They’ve already eaten.
They don’t know when to wake her up or what to say once she’s back.
It’s just Dick and that other guy again. His name is Jerry, they learned. They were watching a football game before and now they’re watching a bunch of men and one sexy lady talk about the football game they just watched.
Marshall isn’t sure what they are waiting for. Where can they go from here?
Beaver has been humming a tune for a while now, watching the rain fall on the dark pavement. He stops now and turns to Marshall. “What are you gonna do when she wakes up?”
It’s a good question and one that refuses to take any shape in Marshall’s head. He understands and still he is angry. Anger is such a possessive feeling. His whole body is tense and there is an ugly, pulsing thing in his chest that wants to be cruel and unforgiving. He cannot align this feeling with the love that he has for his friend. He knows her better than he knows Jamie or even himself. Lana has always been the sort to stare at the ceiling with him and after each exhale of smoke, she’d reveal the thing he most wanted to hear from her. She is an intuitive and smart person. She has always been a safe thing for him to fall into, a place to press skin against skin, rest his head on her breasts, feel her spindly fingers run through his hair and whisper safety into his skull. Even under a sea of hallucinogens she could always hold him close and soothe him with her beating heart.
The first time they had sex was a fumbling, instinctual thing, his hardness against her thigh and need like a necessity or an imperative. They didn’t kiss until it was over and Marshall was a panting red mess hiding tears on the inside of his arm. She sang a song to him, the song irrelevant, something dark and sweet, and she ran her nails up and down the soft skin of his back, shot up her arm so he could feel her skin sigh against his. They were imperfect and they were there.
“I don’t know,” Marshall says now. “I don’t know anything.”
Beaver cradles his own hands in his lap. “I hit her,” he says softly, like just the words can have the same crushing power as his helmet, the action enough to fracture his self-image.
Marshall can’t say anything. If he opens his mouth it will be full of self-pity and it will only further the narrative he’s decided upon which is that all of this is his fault. Every bad decision has stemmed from him and he is the reason for every individual plight and no one has ever asked him to take responsibility for his actions and so he is holding onto them while they pump more anger into his tired body.
Jamie is distant, tired, perhaps somewhere else but he reaches across the table and holds Beaver’s hand. His other hand he places atop Marshall’s. They stay like that, connected, until she wakes up.
She takes only a short moment to accept the change in circumstances, then waves Dick down to order coffee and flapjacks. Beaver stands so she can go to the bathroom and when she returns, her dirty hair is combed out and pulled into a bun that does not look happy with its containment. She’s wiped the dirt from her face and changed out of her cult dress. Jeans and a hoodie. The sight of her as the way she’s always been only confuses Marshall further. She’s still herself underneath it all. Why did she do it?
She sits. Sips on her coffee. She sighs and looks weary beyond her years. And then she says, “I’m pregnant.”
Silence drops like a brick.
“They gotta pass the fuckin’ ball,” Jerry says.
Jamie focuses his gaze on Lana and she nods. “Yeah, it’s Maya’s. She told me she was infertile, but obviously that was a lie. Ha.”
Dick delivers flapjacks. He hasn’t asked yet why they’ve come back. They haven’t mentioned that his granddaughter chased them around with a sledgehammer.
“I’ve known for a couple months now,” Lana explains. “Surprisingly, it’s the first time I’ve ever gotten pregnant. I always used to be able to ward it off with some witchy shit no matter how unsafe I was being. I just wanted a safe place to have the kid. Somewhere to raise them far from all the types of shit I grew up around. I don’t even feel the kid inside me yet but I know I would kill for it. I’d do anything to give it a good life.”
Marshall can’t look at her. He looks at Beaver and his small hands and the things he thought he was keeping those hands from resorting to. Those hands were meant to care for sweet animals and play video games.
Lana clears her throat nervously. “I, um, well I’m sorry, Marsh. I imagine you wanna kill me, yeah?”
Her assumption is gutting and the pain only deepens because she is correct. Marshall is made up of terrible and violent impulses. He wants to cry. “Yeah,” he says. “I guess I do.”
She just nods. She nods for a while. Jamie is the only one who is bothering to really look at and see her. The sexy lady on the television has big boobs and has to act like she doesn’t care what the men think about her and her sexy sex body. A banner at the bottom of the screen cites dozens of bombings in a country across the ocean.
“So,” Lana says. “I should probably go on my own then. Find somewhere safe to have my baby. And…yeah. That’s it, I guess.”
Marshall kicks himself. “That’s it, I guess.”
She must look sad. Or maybe she looks like nothing. Maybe she is without remorse like him. He’s done terrible things to protect children in danger. He shouldn’t be this fucking angry.
Lana gathers her things. She doesn’t have much. Before she gets up she turns to Beaver and says, “You’re the one that hit me, Beaver?” His silence is his answer. “Thanks, really. I didn’t wanna kill Marshall but I would have. I really thought that his death would protect us. Because of the cult we were in. I’m sorry you had to hit me, Beaver. But thank you.”
She kisses his helmet. Offers a small wave. Takes her flapjacks for the road. Lana leaves and they do not watch her rain-soaked frame walk away. They do not imagine where she will end up. They do not wonder if she will live. Turn to drugs. Sell her pregnant body. Lose her baby. They let her go. They do nothing. We know that this is a choice.
Beaver goes next. Marshall has broken something inside this kid that he promised to protect. He was never meant to see violence like this. His father and mother gone. Did Marshall really think that he could be some sort of father figure to this kid? He’s a killer. A cruel, heartless beast. Irredeemable. Even in this sweet kid’s departure, this boy that he loves, all he can think of is himself. He will drown in his self-pity.
John Beaver stands up on the booth’s cushioned seat so he is taller than Marshall for once. He closes his eyes and presses his forehead against Marshall’s. Damp skin and cold metal. There is love there, of course there is love, and there is admiration, too. Beaver holds no grudge. Beaver is not angry about any of it. But he’s a smart kid, too. He can see the web of decision and indecision that brought them to this moment and with clarity he can see now that getting wrapped up in a cult and almost watching a guy get sacrificed for a child is much worse than whatever fate waits for him back in Georgia. Even John Beaver can see that Marshall is no savior.
John Beaver sighs and his breath contains all the weight he carries and it is far too heavy.
“Thanks, Marsh,” Beaver says. “For everything. It coulda gone different but it didn’t. And that’s just how it is. I’ll be okay.”
Marshall cannot say anything. There is a part of his heart being torn out of his chest and it takes all of his words with it. Beaver knocks his helmet against Marshall’s head and then he leaves. Out the front door and into the truck’s passenger seat to wait for the inevitable.
Jamie’s head falls on Marshall’s shoulder. Neither can bring themselves to cry. They are not ready to mourn something they’ve just acquired.
“I have to take him home,” Jamie says and the words are strained and Marshall can hear in his voice that he does not want to be speaking, but to tell him in their quiet secret language would break them both. “I have to go home.”
Marshall’s throat is tight. “I can’t go home.”
“I know,” Jamie says.
“I’m sorry for loving you.”
Jamie exhales, picks his head up and looks hard at the man next to him. “Why didn’t you fight, Mars?”
Marshall does not reply. Cold hands, cold feet.
“I screamed it with every word and look and gesture I know,” Jamie says with difficulty. “I begged you to fight. For me or for yourself or for anything. Why wouldn’t you fight? Why won’t you fight for anything?”
Marshall squeezes his eyes shut hard to make it all end faster. Quiet men are easier to leave. He must be left.
Jamie drags up some final kindness for his sake. Kindness he doesn’t deserve. “This wasn’t a mistake, Marshall,” he says. “We all just wanted to be safe. And free. It was just harder than we thought to do the right things. It was just hard.”
Marshall hugs Jamie really tight for as long as he thinks he deserves, but cannot offer him any further words. Kisses him on the nose. Pulls away and lets him stand.
Please take care of yourself, Marshall signs.
Jamie’s eyes are wet. He’s beautiful. “I’m not sorry for loving you.” His voice no longer strains. “Probably the only good choice I ever made.”
It must be a lie but Marshall holds onto it anyway. Jamie gets in the truck and pulls out of the parking lot. Marshall closes his eyes and listens to the engine’s rattle fade into the ambient hum of the diner. It’s just Marshall and his backpack now. Always should have been. He’s alone now just like he always should have been.
Previous chapter. Next chapter.
Thank you forever.
. . . . Yeah, I guess there was no other way for this to go. But I had hoped! Wow, gonna go and repair my heart with ice cream now.
💔