The loop, p.3
The Loop, page 3
Lucy looked over at Bucket’s puppy-dog face and thought that this woman deserved to be called something fancy like Antoinette.
“So those are my names. Now it’s your turn.”
“Fine. It’s not very interesting, really. It’s Bakhit. Bakhit, that’s all.”
“Bakhit. I like that. Kind of, I don’t know, exotic.”
Lucy riled. Exotic. Always fucking “exotic.” It’s a common name where he’s from.
Bucket smiled, putty in Toni’s hands.
Toni asked, “So why Bucket, then?”
“Oh, I don’t…”
“Come on! Nobody’s been in this store for the last three hours. The store cat’s got fucking diabetes. He lies there all day.” Toni pointed to a mound of tabby cat lumped in one of the store windows. “Please. Tell me something interesting.”
“Okay. It’s what my little brother Dalir called me, back when we lived in Pakistan. He couldn’t get ‘Bakhit’ quite right. He’d follow me around saying, ‘Bucket! Bucket!’ and we’d all laugh.”
“Oh my god—that’s so cute.”
“Yeah, but, uh…” Lucy saw something pass over Bucket’s face—maybe the realization that she was listening, or that he was about to talk about a part of his past he kept closed away. “My little brother, he, uh, passed away. He got some kind of fever that made his brain shut down… and after that my parents were so sad for a long time. We barely spoke. And when they came out of that they decided that we had to move, to get away from… everything, I guess. So then we ended up in California, before we moved up to Oregon. And once we moved up here, I noticed they’d started calling me Bucket instead of Bakhit. At first it really bothered me, but after a while I kind of figured it was part of… You know, it came from my brother. So I was cool with it.”
“Whoa. Damn… I’m sorry.”
“It is what it is, you know?” Bucket tried to lighten the mood. “Besides, this name is easier for me. Now I only have to spell out ‘Marwani’ when I’m on the phone. But everybody gets ‘Bucket’ right off the bat.”
And with that, Lucy had learned more about Bucket than she’d been able to discover in two years of friendship. She figured the FBI should hire dancers to run their interrogations.
But Toni wasn’t working at The Exchange today, and Lucy noticed Bucket’s disappointment after he scanned the store. Diabetic cat? Check. Rows of dusty old albums? Check. The woman Bucket hoped he’d one day marry? Negative. Judah was working, and he was nice, and always smelled like beer and cigarettes, and it was fun to ask him about the band patches all over his jean jacket, but still… no Toni/Antoinette/Amity.
Plus, Lucy’s corner-store pretzel tasted like it had been on the rotating rack since the days of the pyramids, so it was a rough outing so far.
At least I’m away from the perpetually concerned faces. At least I’m not answering all those carefully phrased questions meant to help me along the path to healing.
One thing about raising yourself as the child of two raging alcoholics was that you developed an allergy to being nurtured. Lucy liked that about herself, but it really fucked with the Hendersons’ parental instincts.
Lucy ditched her shitty pretzel in the store trash, keeping one small piece, which she offered to the store cat. The cat opened an eye, batted the pretzel chunk with his paw, gave the offering one lick, and then fell back into its diabetic stupor.
C’est la vie.
Album zone-out time—flipping through row after row of vinyl, breathing calmly through her nose, giggling at the occasional album cover, maybe even holding up the worst ones for Bucket to dig. Bucket was fine hanging out—she caught him checking the front door for Toni’s arrival, though she never came.
Lucy wondered who Toni was with at that moment. And what did her name mean to them?
She looked at Bucket again. He saw her looking, and pretended to browse through a stand full of sleazy old comic books. But it wasn’t long before his eyes drifted to the door again.
People are lonely, you know?
After an hour, Lucy finally felt her shoulders drop for the first time in too long. She let her fingers drift across some slip mats mounted to the wall and felt them pull against her, and she felt a rare moment of longing for the forests near where she was born, for the rough bark on the trees and the way it abraded her skin and made her hands feel open and alive. She closed her eyes and tried to remember the smell of that place, the way it had felt like home before the authorities came to take her away and place her in the orphanage and put her name and picture in the adoption database.
It was no use. That place—the good in it—felt lost to her. This was her world now—sharp, brittle, sticky juniper trees and frigid desert nights where the air felt as empty and mean as the faces of the white boys who laughed at her and lusted after her at the same time. A place full of kids with no money and kids with all the money, and every once in a while, a kid with a goddamn bloody textbook raised above his head talking about signals in his brain.
Her shoulders were back up to her ears.
Goddamnit!
Time to go anyway. Bucket had work at Culbertson’s the next morning. The Hendersons wanted Lucy to have a session with some grief counselor, even though she told them she was fine.
“I trust you, Lucy, but I’m having a hard time believing you’re fine.”
On top of having to deal with that overbearing grief bullshit, there was a rumor that the district was going to push for three more days of attendance, despite the tragedies at each school. Supposedly some of the more influential parents in the community demanded that the district still hold a graduation ceremony. If that was true, it meant that Lucy and Bucket actually had some homework to complete.
She tried to imagine sitting at the kitchen table and working on her differentials.
“This is the answer. You gave us the answer.”
Then that crunching sound as Mr. Chambers’s face collapsed.
Fuck the grades, she thought. They can give me a pass.
Bucket was up at the front counter, joking with Judah about buying a sticker for his car that read “Pipe Layers Union.” He said, “I like it because it’s subtle.”
“Really? That strikes you as subtle?”
“Sure. I mean, if I got an honest bumper sticker, it would just say, ‘10-Inch Pussy Wrecker.’ But this sticker lets the ladies know I can take care of business without being so direct.”
Judah laughed. “You must be packing some serious heat.”
“Well, I’m not going to talk too much about it. It’s not really your business. But I can say that my girlfriend in California—”
“Oh, shit. Here we go,” Lucy said.
“Pay her no mind. I was saying, I had a gorgeous girlfriend in California, before my parents moved us to this shitbrick city. No offense.”
Judah held up his hands, palms out. “Hey, I’m not the mayor. And this town blows.”
“So this girl, she was a model, so beautiful, but so skinny, you know what I’m saying?”
Judah nodded.
“And since I have what I have, it was tough for her. I’m going to be a gentleman about it, but I can tell you that I had to stick four fingers in her to loosen her up before she could take the D.”
Judah laughed and shook his head. Lucy wondered why boys instantly lost fifty IQ points the moment they started talking about sex.
“So, anyway,” Bucket said, “I better buy this sticker.”
“You got it, buddy. On the house.” Judah pulled the sticker from under the glass and passed it to Bucket. “I’ll charge it to my employee account.”
“Thanks, dude.”
“No problem, kid. I could listen to you run bullshit all day.”
Bucket beamed.
“Besides,” Judah continued, “you two seem like good kids. Especially compared to what I put up with from some of those little Brower Butte bastards. Shoplifting shit, even though they have the money. Fucking with the cat. Little creeps. And you wouldn’t believe the stuff they say to Toni.”
Lucy instantly recalled the litany of names and gestures she and Bucket regularly endured—how easily those boys said things like “goat fucker” and “jumping bean”—and her eyes dropped to the floor. She looked over at Bucket and saw he was clenching his jaw.
Judah must have been watching them closely. “Yeah… you guys know, right? That shit never changes. Even when I was a kid. Different guys, same attitude. I lived over past Westerhaus, if that gives you some idea of how I was growing up, and I’d look at those kids and imagine having what they had, all those opportunities, no serious worries, and I was so jealous. And later, when I was selling a little weed, those guys wanted me around, so I’d hang with them. Their cars were cool, I guess. Sometimes I got laid rolling with them. But I was always nervous. Just something about them that felt… off.”
“Like you’re waiting for them to be mean?” asked Lucy. The few times she’d tried to be social with the Brower Butte kids, she’d felt like either an accessory—“My Ethnic Friend”—or a curiosity to be studied like a bug under the magnifying glass until they got bored and decided to start pulling off wings.
“Yeah. Sometimes it did turn mean. Like one night, I’m walking with a bunch of those guys, coming back from a party at Roake Falls, and Justin Norris sees a cat. Total stray, ribs sticking out. And Justin squats down and starts making little noises to the cat and holding out his hand like he’s got food, and you know the other guys are making jokes right away. ‘Justin thinks he can gets some pussy.’ That kind of shit. So finally the cat kind of slinks over, hesitant, but he’s hungry, and the moment he gets close enough, Justin grabs him by the back of his neck, picks him up, and then drop-kicks the thing as hard and far as he can.”
“What?”
“Yeah. So I heard it yowl, and hit a tree, and behind me they’re all, ‘Holy fuck, Norris!’ and, ‘Oh my god!’ and laughter. Mainly laughter. That was the worst part. Like this was the thing that finally lit them up and made them feel. But there was something underneath it, like they were scared too, I guess. Before that, they seemed so bored. I was always too busy working or worrying to be really bored… but these guys… I remember seeing Todd’s freezer once, out in his garage, packed with fucking food, and he looked at it and moaned and said, ‘I hate all this shit.’ ”
Lucy looked at Bucket, trying to figure out a subtle face that would say, Dude’s got issues.
Bucket didn’t look over at her. Instead he asked, “So what happened to the cat?”
“We could hear it howling out in the trees. And I remember Todd saying, ‘You smashed that pussy, Norris!’ and then for whatever reason we all started walking toward the sound. And when we found the cat, it was wrecked. Back leg bent the wrong way, bone sticking out. Blood coming from its mouth. So right away I grabbed the closest rock I could find and I bent down and finished it off. Fast and clean. One hit. I told myself I was saving the cat from more pain. That coyotes would have come. But the truth was that I could feel it, like in my bones, that those guys weren’t done with the cat. That things were going to get worse.”
Lucy pictured the way boys’ faces would change when they were in a group together. It happened with girls sometimes too. Whatever was wrong in them, it was lined up like dominoes. Only took one falling over and the rest went bad.
Judah continued. “So… yeah. That was my last time rolling with that crew. I wondered what would have happened if I had told the police the next day, but my family always taught me that we don’t talk to cops, and besides, Justin’s dad was on rotary, and he owns, like, half the bullet factory. Plus, they would have flipped it on me. ‘Judah freaked out and killed a cat.’ All their voices against mine.”
“Yeah.”
“What’s weird is I see Justin now, in town. He’s over at St. Andrews, in pediatrics. Sometimes I see him out at the bars with his friends. Most of ’em got fat, had kids, that whole route, and they still look so bored. And it kind of creeps me out, because I look at them and I wonder what they’re doing these days that makes them laugh the way I heard them laugh back then.”
There was a long silence.
Lucy said, “Maybe they grew out of being like that.” This had long been a secret hope of Lucy’s, that time and age would make people better to one another.
Judah took a sip from his huge mug of black coffee and looked at Lucy. “Yeah. I hope so. But then I see their kids and they have that same look in their eyes. I don’t know… My girlfriend says I’m classist as shit, but she grew up with decent money. But it’s like their parents passed on a sickness in the genes. Or it’s the money. I don’t know… And then you have what happened over at Spring Meadow. That Carmichael kid was poorer than dirt, but obviously he was a psycho too. I’m friends with his uncle Scott, and he said it doesn’t make any sense at all. That family’s definitely got issues, but Scott said the kid didn’t have a violent bone in his body. So what the hell? And the Miller kid… He always seemed nice when he came in, one of the good ones despite the money, the world lined up in front of him, and his own mom mercs him in his sleep? Jesus… What the hell is going on in this town? Sometimes it feels like things are fucked up in every direction, you know?”
A thick, wet-sounding ululating noise came from near the entrance of the store, pulling their attention away before Lucy or Bucket could say a word.
Judah looked at the clock on the wall and made an alarmed face as he was pulled from his soapbox into the now.
“Oh, shit—Blumpers!”
“Blumpers?” Lucy asked.
“Store cat. I’m late for his shot. Damn it.” Judah bent behind the counter and rose with a small hypodermic needle in his hand. “He gets all crashy and weird without this. Falls off whatever he’s lying on. The meds make his shit smell like that liquid smoke you use when you’re making jerky, but I guess that’s better than him dying. Sort of.”
Blumpers mewled out another sad, strangled noise from his window seat, and the sound made Lucy think of that other cat, the one from Judah’s story. She imagined how it must have felt in those last moments—hopeful, and confused, and soaring through the air, and crushed.
Then killed.
Rocks slamming down.
Textbooks slamming down.
Screams and purple smoke. Gunfire and blood.
Her anxiety rose. Her heart sped, skin hot across her chest and face.
What happened that day? What did I see?
Judah looked at her. “You all right?”
“Yeah… I’m fine.”
But she wasn’t, and she felt tears coming, and she guessed that if she started crying she might not be able to stop for a very long time, so she ran out of The Exchange and into the cool air of the early evening.
Once she made it to Bucket’s car, she leaned forward and rested her arms against the roof and shook against a surge of fresh embarrassment.
Bucket followed, putting a gentle hand on her shoulder. “What’s going on?”
Lucy turned and straightened, then sniffled and blinked back the tears, which wanted loose. “I don’t even know anymore.”
“Yeah.”
“Like, do you ever feel like the last few weeks didn’t even really happen? Like they couldn’t have?”
Bucket leaned against the side of his car, and Lucy joined him. The sun was setting, and the air would grow cold soon. Lucy shivered as the first desert breeze rolled against her skin.
Judah was in the window to the store, bending over Blumpers to administer his meds. He looked out the window to Lucy and Bucket. His face read confused, but he offered a conciliatory wave before returning to his side job as a cat nurse.
Bucket spoke. “Sometimes, right when I wake up, I forget that any of it happened at all. Then I see my parents’ faces, how worried they are, and it all comes back. You can’t hide from it. Anywhere.”
Lucy nodded and watched the sun lower in the sky, painting the clouds. They glowed pink, then shifted to dark purple.
Lucy smelled smoke again, and wondered what she had breathed in that classroom. And what was Chris saying about “ops” and “protocols?” Had she imagined that? How had those men with guns arrived so quickly? They hadn’t even looked like cops…
Her breath shortened. Her head swam again.
“You think it’ll always feel like this?” she asked.
Bucket thought for a moment. “It can’t, right? My mom always says, ‘The only constant in life is change.’ When I was little that made me feel scared. But now… things have got to change, right? Because if it feels like this forever…”
“If it stays this way, we’re going to have to see how far we can make it in your car.” Lucy thought of when the Hendersons had arrived to take custody of her. Sometimes things did get better, for a while at least.
Am I better off here, though? Really? I just watched two people die.
Bucket slapped the roof of his car. “Run in this? It’s on its last legs. Besides, what do we do for money?”
“Rob banks.”
“Really?”
“Well… no. I can’t stand wearing masks. But we could sell the shit we own. You save up your Culbertson’s money. We hop hostels and live cheap. We go north to Portland. I heard they’ll let you live in a tent there.”
“You want to live in a tent?”
“Not really. But I don’t think I can live here either. You heard Judah… It’s not going to change.”
“Uh, Judah’s kind of a burnout. I mean, he’s a nice guy, but he’s stuck in high school, you know? And he’s got a Nightwatchman bumper sticker on his truck. That’s like all that conspiracy theory bullshit. So maybe not a guy to run to for life advice.”
“Fine. Fuck it, dude! If you’re going to Negative Nelly all my shit, then you can take me home.”
“Fine. Hop in.” Bucket mope-walked around the front of his car and got out his keys.
