Caring Is Creepy (11 page)

“If it’s got to come out, it’s got to come out. You can talk to me about that stuff all you want.” So he went ahead and told me a few more things. How he wished he had a dog—he’d always had a dog since he was a boy. How he missed eating barbeque at the restaurant in his hometown. How bummed he was about not being able to take the illustration class he’d signed up for. He explained how his fiancée broke up with him two weeks after he got back from Iraq. Wrote him a Dear John letter and tucked it under the wiper on his car. It sounded to him like she’d gotten it off the Internet someplace. How-to-break-up-with-a-vet-dot-com. She ended up marrying a guy he used to play football with in high school, one of the crew he ran with back then, drank beer with. “This is a guy who used to yell and scream about how he wanted to kill him a whole shitload of towelheads. Course, he never signed up for shit.” The news about the wedding hit Logan in the head like a big, pointy rock. His exact words. “They even had the nerve to send me an invitation. That’s why I went out there with the bat. Left a surprise for them in the parking lot.”

“A bat?”

“It was nothing,” he said. “Just being stupid. I didn’t hurt anybody. I thought about smashing out the headlights on their limo. I couldn’t even do that. I left the bat on the hood and went home.”

We had another one of those long, uncomfortable moments of silence. When this kind of awkward pause happened at home, my mom would say, “Somewhere, an idiot has been born.” But I didn’t know him well enough yet to make a joke like that. Finally, he said, “So, about that picnic?” We made plans to meet that Friday at Guido Gardens, a religious park at the edge of town, and go out
into the country somewhere nice for the picnic. I could have kept listening to him for hours, but Dani’s mom started moving around upstairs and I got nervous and told him I had to go.

I checked on Dani, who was still asleep. Her fight with Hazel had left her with a big black eye and a bite mark on her arm that looked like a Doberman had been gnawing on her. Maybe she could wear a long-sleeved shirt, but her eye was a mess no amount of makeup was going to hide. And you can’t wear sunglasses at breakfast unless you play in a rock band. She looked worse than awful—like a halfway rotted eggplant. When her mom saw that, she’d be grounded for the rest of her life.

I didn’t bother leaving a note.

“S
o, anyway,” Dani said. “Someone phoned my mom this morning and said they saw us last night.”

“Who?”

“That’s the crazy thing. I don’t know. They called while Mom and me were having breakfast. Dad had gone to work already. But what really gets me is they lied.”

“They lied?”

The AC had crapped out completely sometime in the early afternoon, and there’s only so much a box fan can do, even if you move it around with you from room to room. The air felt as thick as cream of mushroom soup. Every inch of my body was coated with greasy sweat. But when Dani said this, it seemed to cool and congeal into a clammy paste. I chewed off a hangnail.

“Yeah, whoever this was said they saw us in Statesboro.”

After this last bit of bad news, I accidentally swallowed the tiny bit of skin.

“How would we get to Statesboro?” I asked her. Statesboro was about twenty miles away.

“That’s what I told my mom. She thinks we went with some older boys.” Dani let out a long, nervous laugh. “Close enough to the truth to rattle me when she told me. This person said he saw us in the Waffle House on Main Street. I told my mom to call the Waffle House and ask, but she won’t.”

“He?”

“A figure of speech, Lynn. Ever hear of those?” She made a snuffling sound. I had a mind to hang up on her. Then, between breaths, she dropped the sarcasm. “Actually, I have a feeling it was a
she
.”

“You don’t think it was the same one who sent the e-mails, do you?” I didn’t want to believe this was possible.

“Uh-uh.” Dani munched on something as she talked and this made it hard to understand what she was saying. “My mom knew this person, whoever it was. She said she wouldn’t tell me who it was because she didn’t want me trying to get back at them. And now I’m grounded for an extra fucking month. I’m not supposed to use the phone for a month either. She even hid my cell charger. I bet it was that bitch Hazel that called. My mom knows her. I’m starting to think Hazel’s behind the e-mails too. I don’t know how she did it, but I know it was her.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “That sounds too smart for Hazel. Plus, we got the e-mails before you all fought.”

“I’m going to get that bitch.” In the background, a door squeaked open. I heard the hum of a refrigerator. “My mom let Wynn come over because I told her the Internet was messing up again. I showed him the new e-mails. All he did was babble a bunch of nerdish at me. But he’s coming over later to try and figure them out while I watch
Judge Judy
. I think he’s cooking up a plan and—” Dani groaned. “Oh God, my life sucks. We’re out of Diet Coke.”

“Is the punishment written in stone?”

Sometimes Dani’s mom would give in after a few days and let her off the hook. I guess it depended on how steamed up she was about all this. The Statesboro business sounded bad. It was one thing to wander around Metter, but Statesboro had college boys and every mother in town had a fear of Georgia Southern frat boys.

“Yeah.”

“Is she going to call my mom?” I hadn’t thought of this till now.

“I don’t know,” Dani said. “I told her not to.”

I wasn’t sure if I believed this. “Thanks.”

“I said to her, ‘This is just as much a punishment for her. Where else does the poor girl have to go?’ But don’t worry, she’s only dangerous when she’s first mad. Like a kicked dog. If she hasn’t done it already, I don’t think she’ll—”

“I talked to Logan today.” I grinned at the mouthpiece of the phone.

“You did?” Her voice went up an octave and she choked a little on whatever crunchy thing she was eating. This was very satisfying to hear.

“He said he can hardly wait to meet me.” Not exactly true, but I felt inspired. “We’re going on a picnic.”

“Shit, got to go. She’s back.”

T
he phone rang again, and I picked it up because I thought it was Dani calling back.

“Hey, Dani, what is it?”

A man breathed heavily into the phone. Before that first breath was through, I knew who this was. The mean man who called before. I recognized the wheezy sound and the way he blew out air with a kind of grunt at the end. After his second noisy suck of air, I matched up the breath with the man. Not that it made me any happier to of figured it out. This was Marty. H.K.’s uncle, who ran the Bow Wow club. The boss creep. The head thug. The mouth breather.

“You tell Hayes I found his car.” His voice had a flat sound to it, bored almost, as if he was reading from a piece of paper he’d already read a hundred times. “I’m taking it as mine and it don’t count for nothing toward what he already owes, not even the vig. You hear me?”

That bad night flashed through my head again like pictures in a PowerPoint presentation. The paper cutter goes
whomp
. The little pink nub jumps across the table. The hand squirts red. Plain, old-fashioned fear turned my insides into goo.

“I don’t speak for Hayes,” I told him, trying to keep the wobble out of my voice.

“Shit. You tell him, you tell him this—” He made a long sound of disgust, like he was clearing his throat. “I ain’t going to let this
slide. You tell him that. He goes to fucking China—I don’t care—I’ll find him. You tell him it don’t have to go bad for him. But, but,
but
, if he don’t get with it, I’m going to send Butthole Gibbs after his sorry ass. Hayes will know what I mean. He’s got two days.”

Then he hung up.

This is the end of summer, I thought.

P
astor Guido was a local televangelist. Even though he was from New Jersey, most people liked him anyway. His wife’s people were from Metter, so that made up for it some. In fact, I think my mom’s aunt was his wife’s second cousin once removed or something like that. He had this little TV show that came on once in the morning after the local news out of Savannah and once after the late news at eleven.
A Seed from the Sower
, it was called. Only fifteen minutes long. It always started with some lame joke and ended with a passage from the Bible.

Pastor Guido built the garden a couple years before I was born. My father took me there every year to see the Christmas lights. At the gate they’d usually put up a huge plaster birthday cake with electric candles that said,
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JESUS
! Thirty-three candles. I’d count them each year. Once I asked my dad, “Shouldn’t it be one thousand nine hundred and ninety-some candles.” He said, “Shhh, these people are as serious as a heart attack.”

The gardens were about forty minutes away from my house if you walked. Half that if you rode a bike. They were pretty in a loud way, like a Hawaiian shirt. Artificially colored streams ran along fiberglass beds and splashed from cement waterfalls and fountains. The whole place was only about three acres, but it was strangely shaped and filled with trees and covered pavilions, so it seemed a lot bigger. Someone told me once that if you walked every path it was exactly eight miles. The paths were made of brick and lined
with black-eyed Susans and ferns and bright purple coneflowers. No matter where you were in the park you could hear Muzak versions of famous gospel songs playing out of hidden speakers.

I chose this place to meet Logan because there were lots of hidden nooks where we could talk and not be seen. The place I had in mind was at the very end of the gardens near the road. A wrought-iron bench beside a waterfall. It was surrounded by weeping willows and plastic statues of geese. It’d take a long time to find it if you didn’t know where to look, and if you wanted to get out of the gardens fast, all you had to do was jump over a couple of bushes and you were out on Turner Street. A sign behind the bench said,
PLEASE ALLOW ME TO COMFORT YOUR SOUL
. I hoped Logan might do something very much like that.

T
wo middle-aged women pushed into the restroom when I was at the tail end of cleaning up—in fact, practically just about taking a shower in the sink. With the heat index, it was pushing a hundred and ten. I’d had to pedal along a busy road for most of the way, so to really get an idea of how I looked, add a few cups of dust and grit to a bucket of sweat and pour that over the image of me in your head. By the time I finished washing, the sink looked like somebody had scrubbed a pig in it. I finished off my transformation by putting on Mom’s old blue-and-white polka-dot dress, the one Dani said made me look older, and rubbing my neck with a perfume sample out of that month’s
Vogue
. The women turned their fancy hats and pinched little frowns on me. As I stumbled out, the first one nearly knocked me into the wall with her breasts, which were so big and mushed together, they looked like a single, jumbo-size loaf of Wonder bread set up there above her bellybutton.

Clamped down on the head of the second woman was a hat with a fake flower bed glued to the brim. This fancy bit of headgear resembled a natural history exhibit I’d once seen on a field trip to the state park museum. All it needed was a stuffed owl. She clucked her tongue and, after a last headshake in my direction, said, “Gary told me he was overjoyed to see my mama.
Overjoyed
. But he can’t fool me. I know that man like the back of my hand. He is
up
to something. Mark my words.”

“You got to watch them every second, Carrie.” The big-bosomed lady’s voice boomed inside the tiled room.

And then the door banged shut.

I’ve wondered often about that word—
overjoyed
. People say it a lot, but it usually doesn’t make sense the way they use it. If you overdo something, then it most often means you’ve done it too much, like overeating, which can keep you up all night groaning and clutching your belly or send you racing to the toilet. Does a big, greedy gobbling of joy give a person some other variety of indigestion? Joy lives mainly in the head, right? So then it stands to reason a day of overjoying will end in a night of headaches and sinus trouble. Since joy is a feeling that generally escapes me, it’s a rare day I get the opportunity for joying of any kind, much less overjoying. I suspect the term that best applies to my usual state is
underjoyed
. The day I met Logan for the first time I was afraid to hope for anything as extravagant as joy. I wished I had real breasts instead of these two little hen’s eggs with match-head nipples. I wished Dani’d been there in the bathroom to help me with the makeup. All I wanted was to avoid embarrassing myself. If I could manage that, it would be a good day. Joy could wait for later.

The gardens were almost empty, so it was hard to keep a lookout for Logan without him seeing me do it. The last time I’d been here was almost five years earlier, with my Sunday school class. I couldn’t think of any easy place for us to meet before I took him back to the little nook at the south end of the garden to talk, so I told him to wait for me at the gate. He said he’d wear a red shirt.

I sat on a bench about a hundred feet from the entrance. Across the goldfish pond, three solemn men in dark suits talked quietly. Every once in a while I’d hear one of them quote something with a scripture sound to it.
Thees
and
thous
and the like. It was a quarter after four and I was sweating again, even though I was in the shade. The gnats found me right away and launched an invasion into my
ears and up my nose. I sang peppy radio songs in my head and tried to think of nothing. School started in a matter of days, but I couldn’t quite make myself believe it. Sitting there, waiting to meet up with a soldier I might later even kiss (fingers crossed), made the idea of high school as distant and unreal to me as a family sitcom from the eighties rerun on cable. Metter High School seemed like some other world that didn’t have anything to do with what was happening to me now.