The Heart is Deceitful above All Things Page 4

  I stare at the poster on the bathroom door of a girl on her knees, her mouth on a man’s thing, no cowboy hat in front of it.

  They’re arguing. There are other posters on the walls, all the girls have yellow hair like Sarah, and they’re all naked.

  She comes out still wearing the sheet; he follows wrapped in a towel. They say nothing. He goes into the little kitchen, where I hear him open the refrigerator. She grabs some pillows and a blanket off the bed and goes into the bathroom.

  I watch him, through a small window cut in through the kitchen wall, unwrap some chicken.

  ‘You hungry?’ he calls out, opening the microwave. My mouth’s suddenly wet.

  ‘Naw. The chili dog you got me is still settin’ in me.’

  ‘OK.’ He shuts the microwave door and punches buttons that beep.

  I say nothing.

  I learned about being greedy. I wouldn’t eat the sandwich she had made, Spam on day-old white bread. We pulled over on the side of the road to eat. I kept my lips compressed as she pushed the sandwich against my mouth.

  When it was dinnertime she got a drive-through burger and fries.

  ‘You got your sandwich now, don’tcha.’ I watched her eat, and I didn’t touch the sandwich sitting on plastic wrap on my lap. When she was asleep I opened the chocolate-chip cookies hidden under her jacket in the backseat. I ate them all.

  She woke up and saw the crumbs and the empty package at my feet. She opened the car door and held her finger down my throat until the cookies came back.

  ‘Those were mine, greedy pig. Steal from me again, pig, and see what happens.’

  ‘Johnny, come in here!’ she yells from the bathroom.

  She’s not talking to me, so I don’t move.

  ‘Get in here!’

  The smell of fried chicken fills the room. She comes out of the bathroom.

  ‘Hey.’ She motions me over. ‘You deaf ? . . . Come in here.’ I follow her into the bathroom. She closes the door.

  ‘You’re Johnny, remember? I’m Monique. Got it?’ I nod. There are more posters on the wall. One girl has brown hair.

  ‘You’ll sleep in here.’ She points in the tub. A few pillows cover the bottom, and a blanket’s on top.

  ‘Get on in . . .’ I climb into the tub, its sides low enough for me to get over easily. I stand on the pillows, staring up at her.

  The sheet is still wrapped around her like a dress. I know she has all the same stuff the girls on the posters do. I’ve seen her changing in the car.

  ‘Take off your shoes. You gotta go?’ I shake my head and sit on the pillows and pull off my sneakers. I do have to piss but can’t with all the girls on the wall watching, staring out with vague smiles in poses like snakes.

  ‘Johnny, OK, remember, Monique. Johnny.’ She points at herself, then at me.

  She flicks the light off.

  ‘Good night.’

  She closes the door. I look around. I feel my eyes to make sure they’re open. A thin line around the door glows yellow, and I hear hushed laughing and talking. Soon the light around the door disappears and their voices melt into grunts and moans.

  I pull the blanket up around me to block out the sound. I know what he’s doing to her, I knew all along what he would do and I said nothing. I didn’t warn her.

  I lay in the tub, squeezing my eyes tight against all the blue eyes blankly gazing out from the walls into the black.

  I hear her cry out. I should go and do something. I hold the blanket over my ears.

  When I wake she’ll be gone and there will be a new poster on his wall.

  She yells out again, and I know it will be her up on the wall like the others, frozen and trapped forever staring out and hating me for forgetting her.

  ‘Only way your brother is gonna learn not to piss himself is a whipping he remembers.’

  The pillows I slept on lie stained and wet on the floor next to the bed. She found I’d had another accident when she went to put the pillows back.

  He’s pulled out a brown leather belt from the small closet near the kitchen, and he’s clutching it doubled.

  ‘Luther, I didn’t know you had it in you to be so fatherly.’ She’s in a T-shirt; it’s too big and stained yellow under the armpits, it looks like his.

  When she first came in the bathroom earlier this morning and sat on the toilet, all I could do was sit up in the tub and stare at her.

  ‘Who are you to be sittin’ in judgment of me, huh?’

  ‘You’re not one of the posters!’ I said.

  She wadded up some toilet paper and ran it under the sink tap. ‘How rude are you? Well, that’s how you got here, got news for you!’

  She threw the wet toilet paper, it splattered and stuck in the center of my chest.

  ‘Get over here.’ He motions me to the bed.

  ‘He’s never been spanked before, Luther, my parents spoilt him bad.’ She puts her arm around his bare waist and smiles at him. He adjusts his boxers. ‘Gonna be a lot more than spanking goin’ on here.’

  He hits the bed with the belt. I jump. ‘Let’s go!’

  ‘See, you would so make a real good daddy . . .’ She pats his chest. The flattened morning light streams past the venetian blinds, making thick bars on the floor between me and the bed.

  He reaches out, grabs my arm, and jerks me toward the mattress. He pushes me over it, my face bounces on the crumpled sheets. My teeth start chattering. I try to push myself up, but he shoves me back down.

  ‘Get his things down,’ he orders.

  Sarah leans over and yanks on my jeans and pulls them down.

  ‘They’re wet again! I told him too many times already, next time he wets that’s it . . .’ Her hands slide into my underwear waistband.

  ‘Your parents oughtn’t to be spoilin’ him . . . he wouldn’t be messin’ my good goose feathers pillows.’ The belt slaps at the mattress again. ‘Damn, he smells like a alleyway in the city.’

  She slides my underwear down to my ankles with my jeans. ‘He pisses it, he wears it. Won’t wash it till he learns.’ She moves away from me.

  ‘Now, son, I’m gonna whip you a beatin’ you can be proud of, and you won’t be wetting like a little baby no more. Ya hear?’

  I nod my head small. I want my clothes to smell like Sarah’s do. When she sent me into a gas station to buy us chips while she put in gas, a girl behind me on line tapped me on the shoulder. As I turned she said, ‘You stink.’ A man with her shushed her, but she stuck her tongue out at me and held her nose when they walked back to their car.

  ‘Where your cigarettes at, honey?’

  ‘Table . . . you sure you wantin’ to stay for this?’

  I hear her sitting at the table, and the crackle of the cigarette pack.

  ‘Oh, I’ve got and seen my father give so many hellfire beatings I could sleep through it.’ She flicks the lighter.

  ‘Thought they didn’t give no whippings?’

  ‘Huh?’ She coughs some. ‘No, no, just him, spoilt just him.’ She waves away her smoke.

  ‘’Coz once I start, I ain’t stoppin’ till I’m done, you hear?’

  ‘I’m so proud of you, I know I picked right last night.’

  He steps back. I hear the belt whistle down and then a loud crack against my body, but before I’m aware of the pain it happens again and I feel it, a sudden deep slashing into my flesh. I scream.

  ‘Goddamn spoilt brat . . .’ He leans over, pulls my head back, and covers my mouth with his hand. ‘I can’t have him hollering, Monique.’

  ‘Put the sheet in his mouth,’ she says, exhaling.

  ‘You’re only makin’ it worse off for yourself, now be a man.’ He moves his fingers off my mouth. I gasp and scream. His hand smashes back against my mouth, his other hand grabs some sheet and balls it. He frees my mouth, and as I open to scream the sheet is stuffed into my mouth. It’s wet and sticky. I try to pull it out.

  ‘Goddamn it!’ He jerks my arms backward and holds my wrists behind
me. ‘You didn’t wanna make me madder!’

  The belt hurls down across my ass, and I scream against the sheet. The thick, salty wetness on it coats my mouth, and I retch, while the belt keeps coming harder and harder and harder.

  THE HEART IS DECEITFUL

  ABOVE ALL THINGS

  The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?

  Jeremiah 17:9

  THE ONES THAT buy me candy don’t last long. The ones that slap her last longer, but not as long as the ones that beat her with their fists and me with their belt.

  We live in the car, driving until she meets the next one. Sometimes she tells him about me, her brother. Sometimes I’m her sister. ‘Men like girls, not boys,’ she says. ‘You wanna come inside, don’t ya?’

  Sometimes I stay hidden in the car until he’s gone to work. I lie in the cradle at the foot space of the backseat and disappear.

  Sometimes she gives me the halves of the pills I ask for. They’re white, but they make it all dark, not the dream where my limbs are blown across the open brittle road until red-winged crows descend from the white sun, carrying my limbs farther and farther away until I wake up screaming, struggling to reattach.

  Sometimes we go into stores and I borrow what she tells me. Under my coat inside my pants, the bologna packages go. The cold beer bottles slide down my sleeves, the ends held closed with thick rubber bands so by the time I’m back in the car my hands are numb and bright white. When I borrow right we drive away fast, laughing while stuffing our mouths with strings of bologna and drinking the sour dull fizz from the bottles. When I borrow wrong––a bottle falls out when I loosen a rubber band or I get stopped on my way out the sliding doors––then the world moves like in those old hand-cranked movies I’d looked at in arcades. Everyone surrounds and moves away from me at the same time. She yanks my pants, and her hand comes down fast across my bare ass again and again. It’s a trick, she had told me. They usually stop her, tell her it’s OK. They calm her down, give her coffee or something. She tells them I’m a behavior problem, and she cries. They stare at me, shake their heads, and suck their tongues. Sometimes we have to really trick them if they’re really mad by spanking me again. Sometimes not in the back private room, but with everyone seeing. It works ’cause they never call the police on me. But when we get back to the car she doesn’t drive away fast and laugh. She stays mad, sometimes for a day or two, not speaking to me at all, not giving me any of what she had to buy, making me be in the back and out of her sight. I know it’s not real, though, I remind myself she’s just tricking them in case they have ‘eyes in the back of their heads’ like her father, and maybe their eyes went in our car.

  Sometimes when she stops at a bar, she comes out and goes in his truck. ‘Man don’t drive a truck, can’t drive home a fuck,’ I whisper her rhyme while they drive away. But I know how to go with the flashlight from under the seat when everyone is gone and it’s quiet, just like we do together; going around back, digging into the bags and finding food ‘hardly bit, not wet with spit’. When I do it alone I pretend she’s next to me being lookout. I even whisper to her about what I find.

  ‘Bag of pretzels.’

  ‘That’ll do us fine. What else ya got there, kid?’ I make her say.

  Then there’s the one she married. I stay in his apartment while they drive up to Atlantic City for their honeymoon. They’re supposed to be gone for two nights. The door is locked with a key on the inside as well as out, which makes me feel safer. But as the nights keep going by and my Kraft singles go down, even the end pieces of Wonder are gone, I watch out the back window as the garbagemen load up the bags I can’t get into.

  I keep all the lights on at night and sleep in the day after my favorite Bugs Bunny cartoon show. After four nights I know they aren’t coming back, so I stand on a chair and draw pictures of her on the white walls with a black marker. I do it all night until the first violet blur of morning creeping in lets me feel my hand is cramped and see the walls are covered.

  After six nights he comes home without her. ‘She married me and run off when I runned out of money,’ he says, his head in his hands. He says nothing about the walls, even though I have already prepared and stand holding a belt, doubled over. He only cries looking at the potato figures of her stuck flat on his walls. While he cries I pull the cellophane film off the last cheese slice, eat it, and go to sleep even though the moon is still a yellowish scar in all the black.

  I wake up screaming; the crows’ red wings flash over my eyes as he pulls my legs apart, his hot breath against my neck, claws push my face down into the pillow. And for the first time they peck at me, and it’s worse than I ever imagined. It’s a drill blade twisting and hollowing me out between my legs, and he cries her name again and again in my ear until it bleeds.

  I stop trying to crawl away. I float up with my marker and draw her on the ceiling whenever the crows attack again.

  The towel under me is turning crimson and soggy like tomato bread soap.

  ‘Les’ go,’ he says when it’s night again, and dresses me, putting a new towel on me instead of my underwear, inside my pants. He carries me to the car, where I fall against the wall waiting for him to unlock the door. He drives me in our car she’d left, not his truck.

  We drive a long time and turn onto a dirt road. Suddenly the car stops. ‘Sorry,’ he says, takes the flashlight from under the seat, and leaves. I pull myself up and watch the torch he carries swing over the crowd of skinny trees like a flame scanning a matchbook. I stare until the glow of light is gone, only the funneled moon through too many trees.

  A flash in my eyes blinds me, but I can hear them. ‘Nurse, hold him still now!’ Another flash. I struggle, but I’m held firm. ‘Turn him round.’ I am moved to my stomach, my legs held apart. Another flash behind me. I squint past the floating spots and see two policemen across from me, standing, frowning, and drinking from steaming paper cups. I scream and kick. ‘Help us out here, Officer, if you don’t mind.’ One moves forward, putting down his cup, and presses down on my back. Another flash. ‘To the side, turn him.’ My body is turned and held sideways on the white paper spread beneath me.

  ‘What’s your name?’ the cop says, his stale breath coating my face. I kick out hard as I can. ‘Goddamn it! He hit the camera! Hold him still!’ The hands clamp down on me, pushing my head and chest down hard onto the mushy vinyl tabletop, the paper ripped and soaked from my drool. ‘What’s your name?!’ the cop says again. ‘They found ID in the car?’ Another flash above me. I see my clothes crumpled in a corner, and the red-stained towel pokes out from a trash basket. I’m naked.

  ‘He needs stitches, you about done?’ Another flash. The cop blocking the door, still drinking, rests his other hand on his gun. I scream again. ‘Nurse, restraints!’

  ‘One more photograph! Turn him sideways . . . spread his legs . . . wider . . . perfect, OK, great! Thanks, guys. Hope you get the bastard that did this, see ya.’

  ‘Let’s get these restraints goin’.’

  I’m pushed onto my stomach, my arms are pulled out, as are my legs, and soft cuffs freeze them to the board. Something is sliding under me, lifting my hips, and straps are pulled across my legs, back, and head. Voices rumble around me. ‘Tell me your name!’ the cop standing above me orders. ‘You want us to catch this guy?!’

  ‘OK, you’re gonna feel a sharp stick,’ the doctor says.

  And off in the distance I hear the beating,

  ‘OK, one more stick.’

  of their wings . . .

  ‘And one last stick.’

  and the room bleeds with their jagged red feathers

  ‘OK, here we go . . .’

  and razor beaks filled with

  ‘Gonna fix you right up.’

  parts of me.

  TOYBOXED

  THE WOMAN HOLDS two dolls. Her hair is in a tight yellow bun that pulls the ends of her eyes back into slants. She smiles quick little flashes at me, then frowns
down at the dolls. The big man doll’s pants go down, she takes them down. His thing sticks out, dark yarn surrounding it like a dirty mop head.

  ‘The little boy doll is blond like you,’ she says.

  The room we’re in is pink, with pictures of smiling children hanging on the walls. There’s a dollhouse in the corner with a rubber family inside. I’m sitting on a rug that has games woven into it, like hopscotch, and a marble circle. I’m sitting on the alphabet Indian style, the way she is. The boy doll has a round hole for a mouth and ‘freckles like you have,’ she says, and pats my nose.

  The man doll fits his thing into the boy’s mouth like a puzzle piece. She makes him do it. Her shoes end in sharp little points, and some of her foot skin hangs over the edges.

  ‘Pay attention,’ she says, and clears her throat. ‘This is bad.’ She shakes her finger at the dolls. ‘Bad, bad man.’ Her fingernails are red, like Sarah’s. She makes the man pull the little boy’s pants down with his mittenlike hands. I dig my fingers into the Day-Glo fuzz of the alphabet rug and make them disappear.

  ‘Are you watching? Watch the dolls now, pay attention.’ She shakes the dolls. The man’s thing bounces up and down. The little boy’s thing wobbles. There’s no yarn around it. ‘Owie owie,’ she says while she puts the man doll’s pink thing into a round hole in the boy doll’s bottom. She shakes them in the air, their feet dangling like they’ve just been hung. ‘Owie owie,’ she says as she brings them together and apart, together and apart. They sound like two pillows hitting each other.

  ‘How does the little boy feel?’ she asks me, not stopping them. There’s a large box behind her. It’s painted like a toy drum, blue with white Xs. A large braid with a red bow hangs out over the edge.

  ‘Watch now, come on, pay attention.’ She shakes them harder. ‘How does he . . .’ She taps the little boy. ‘Feel? Hmm? You can tell me, it’s okay. You are safe now.’ She smiles vaguely and extends her arms so the dolls are closer to me. There’s a little brown stain on her peach blouse. I’m careful not to stain my clothes so Sarah doesn’t get pissed, because people will think we’re trash.