Caring Is Creepy (18 page)

“Hey, soldier boy,” I whispered, “I’m here now. Your farm girl.”

Logan didn’t wake up all the way until I pinched his earlobe with the longer of my two thumbnails. He jerked awake with a ragged, wet gasp, as though he’d just burst through the surface of the ocean after holding his breath too long. His eyes were huge and terrified. And he had a hard-on. The way it supported the weight of the sweaty sheets looked uncomfortable. I flicked the flashlight back toward myself to reassure him about who I was. But Logan still didn’t see me. I planted a kiss on his forehead and hoped it’d grow in there and crowd out his inner crybaby.

“Bad dream,” Logan said, as if there’d been some doubt on this count. “Hajjis were going to rape you.”

“I had a bad dream about you too,” I said.

“They took your breasts. Cut them off and burned them.”

“Take a deep breath now.”

Logan hummed a few notes and in a weird, wavering voice sang a few lines about how he’d have to think things over before he—I think this is what he said—smashed it through his skull.

“What the hell?” I said. But the tune was almost familiar.

“That damn song was playing in my head. And everything smelled like burning plastic.” He clenched the muscles in his jaw and neck into hard, tight ropes. “As soon as I get to liking something, it gets taken away in my dreams.”

Then I got it. “Caring Is Creepy.” The lyrics had changed somehow in his singing—been warped, like everything else.

“You mostly have nightmares about bad things happening to people you love?” I slipped that love in there as an experiment. When he didn’t say anything about this, I put a hand on his forehead. He was burning up. “I think you got a fever,” I said.

I
saw it happen while I waited for the bus Wednesday morning. I’d just said good-bye to my mom and was watching her walk over to the hospital when I noticed the tow truck. A yellow light flashed on its roof and I recognized the guy driving, but I couldn’t remember his name. He graduated at the end of my freshman year and went to work for his dad. A horn beeped again and again as he backed the truck up behind Logan’s car and made the ramp slide down. It didn’t even occur to me at first what the guy was doing. By the time I finally did realize, I was like,
Oh, now I won’t have to lie anymore
.

I thought of telling Logan right then, but I would of missed the bus.

And Logan wasn’t going anywhere anyway without his clothes.

After school, when I came back and told him, he just closed his eyes. That’s it. I tried to talk to him, but he wouldn’t even make a sound, so I touched his penis with my hand until it got hard, rubbing the underside of the tip with my thumb like he’d shown me. “That there is the sweet spot” was the way he put it. Logan didn’t look at me or say a word while I did all this, but he didn’t stop me either. After a minute or so, he grabbed me by the shoulders and rolled me on my back. Then we had sex using one of Dani’s condoms.

“Just one more thing,” he said after he finished, just as calm as you please. “One more Goddamned thing.”

L
ogan’s state of mind changed a little every day, going sour like milk left out on the counter. I knew it’d gotten serious when I came home from school on Thursday and found him messing about in my bedroom. He was squatting down behind the door and poking through the dirty laundry basket. The blinds were open and anyone passing by could easily of seen him. Like my mom, for one. His lips stretched into an awful smile when he saw me. If I squinted, I could still see the cute, sweet Logan I first met, but he was doing a damn good job disguising him.

“Oh,” Logan said, “it’s just you.” He wore a pair of my faded yellow panties on his head like a hat.

“Yes,” I said, edging around him to close the blinds, “it’s me.”

“Good, yeah, good.” He whipped the panties off his head and tried to stuff them back in the basket along with one of my T-shirts before I noticed. But I noticed. “I thought it was your mom,” he said quickly, pretending to wipe some sweat off his forehead.

“Whew. That’s a relief.”

Standing there naked in my bedroom, Logan looked so completely out of place he might well of been something I’d hallucinated. This would of made more sense than the actual truth of the situation. His hair was squashed down in the front and sticking up on the side. Dirt was smeared all over his chest and legs. In the late afternoon light, you could see where his beard stubble had come in. It looked like brown mold. The skin around his eyes had turned
a bruised color. I wanted to scream. For a second, I thought my head would pop and splatter the walls of my bedroom. That’s how angry I felt. I couldn’t believe he would actually leave me without saying good-bye or anything. Because that’s exactly what I thought he was getting ready to do—scrounge together an outfit from my dirty clothes and abandon me.

“You know that shirt would never fit you,” I said in a mean voice. If I used that same voice on Dani, she wouldn’t speak to me for a week. I decided to ignore the panty hat for the time being. “What are you doing?”

“I heard your mom go out the front door, so I made a quick trip to the bathroom. It weren’t the kind of thing I could do in a Coke bottle.” He swallowed hard and stared at his filthy feet. “Then I thought I’d get the next book in that Green Gable series you got me started on. I was only out here for a few minutes. I’m sorry.” He looked more than a tad scared. His mouth tightened up into that strange grimace again, and he winced like he expected me to beat him. “It’s just that …”

His face fell. I thought for a moment he might even cry. Seeing all this, I stopped being mad at him. Almost right away, truth be told. Even so, I knew I couldn’t just leave this sit. I needed to do something to punish him in case he thought about leaving me ever again. I couldn’t have that. No, sir.

“It’s just—well—it’s been thundering all day. I know you’ll think it’s stupid, but the thunder sounded like something bad. I freaked out a little bit. I couldn’t stay back there anymore. All the air was gone. I had to get out. I’m sorry, Lynn Marie.” Logan panted some and his eyes bounced around his sockets like Super Balls.

“Logan, honey, if you’ve got to go to the bathroom, you should really try and wait until I’m here.” This time I made sure to speak in a much nicer voice. Later, I realized it was the same voice I used when I talked to strange dogs. I didn’t think of this at the time, and
it kind of freaked me out afterward when I did. “What if my mom’s boyfriend came in? Then you and me would of been in a world of shit. Let me tell you.”

“Your mom has a boyfriend?”

“Yeah. Hayes. He’s a real dick. There’s no telling what he would of done if he found you.” I gave him my elementary school teacher frown.

Really, if Hayes had stumbled into dirty, wild-Indian-looking Logan, he would of screamed, turned tail and run until he puked, but I didn’t tell Logan that. It was funny to think of this happening, but not that funny. If Hayes did come in and find him, I’d still be in a world of shit, as Logan had got me saying.

“Shit,” Logan said again. This was his main word these days. He used it when he was startled or angry or sad or happy. The longer he stayed in the storage space, the smaller his vocabulary seemed to get. Then his face lit up. It appeared a hopeful thought had fought its way into his brain. After poking around behind my clothes basket, he turned and smiled. “I nearly forgot. I made you something.” He handed me a tiny paper man about the length of my face made of dozens of intricate folds. Logan had even found a way to make the man appear to have curly hair. “It’s me.”

I nodded. Looking closer, I realized he’d torn a page from
Anne of Green Gables
. This made me none too happy, as it was one of my all-time favorite books. He saw right away what had come into my head.

“Don’t worry. I made sure to use a boring page. It’s where she’s up in her room all upset about something that happened at school the day before.”

I opened my mouth to say how we might disagree about what constituted boring, but I didn’t see the point. All manner of feelings were wrestling around in my chest. Me and Logan stood there and stared at each other. He smiled at me in a hopeful, annoying way. I tried to quick-think of some way of punishing him without him
knowing that that was what I was doing. Just something to throw a scare into him, so he’d make sure and stay in the storage room unless I told him it was okay to come out.

That’s when the doorbell rang. We both shut up. Logan yanked at his earlobe as if he meant to pull it off. Something in his chest whistled when he breathed. I moved first.

“On the double, you,” I said, giving him a little shove. “Get back in there.”

Logan didn’t react for a very long set of stretchy seconds. His face turned the color of cigarette ash. I grabbed his arm and gave him a good, hard tug. Still, he wouldn’t budge. I flashed him my sternest what-the-hell look. Sweat dotted his forehead and upper lip. His eyes lost focus, like he was peering at something a football field away. I’ll admit, it frightened me some.

“Come on,” I said. “Get.”

I reached over and pinched his other earlobe. It worked to snap him out of it this time, too. I filed away my new bit of Logan lore for the next time I needed to hustle his ass someplace quick. When he finally moved, he moved fast, faster than I would have believed. Logan turned and scrambled back into that closet like a squirrel chased by a dog. He plowed through my clothes, tripping over my nice neat row of flip-flops and knocking my black cotton dress off its hanger. Oh, Logan, my overgrown, naked first grader. His ass wiggled as he crawled through the attic door. Since I was around him all the time, I sometimes forgot he was naked. But seeing him run like that, I remembered and I couldn’t help but smile.

I
stood there in the hall for quite some time, wincing at myself in the mirror like a Mongolian-type idiot. I wasn’t paying attention the way I should of. That’s where I went bad wrong. The bell rang a second time and then went silent for several minutes. Right as I moved toward the window to take a peek at the person on my front stoop, the door opened slowly. This can’t be, I thought, I’m sure I locked it. A man stepped in, tucking something shiny into his jacket pocket and blinking against the dim hallway. At first he appeared normal enough. If you didn’t know any better, and I didn’t, you’d probably think he was the type who might work in an insurance office or sell furniture down at Badcock’s on Broad Street. In the gush of sunlight from the door, the normal-seeming man’s eyes were the bright blue of swimming-pool water in a TV show. He had a bushy orange mustache two shades darker than his head hair and an oversized potato of a nose with a tangle of purple veins at the tip.

“Hey,” I asked, “what on earth are you doing?”

At first blush, this man gave me the impression he was a good deal more surprised to see me than I was to see him. He didn’t say anything for a moment. He didn’t, for example, apologize for busting into a stranger’s house. Instead, he stood and gawked at me. It wasn’t until I heard him breathe that I had an awful inkling of who this could be, and even then, I wasn’t completely positive. Mouth breathing sounds different over the phone than it does when the
person huffing and slurping his air stands about a half-dozen Bibles away. The normal-seeming man’s show of surprise vanished as quick as it came, but still he said nothing, just stood there shifting his weight from foot to foot and jangling something in his pocket.

“Excuse me,” I said to my visitor, not wanting to listen to his breathing any longer. I put on a stern face and crossed my arms. “What can I do for you, sir?” I found myself imitating my mom’s official voice, the one she used when she first picked up the phone and didn’t know yet who was calling.

“Are you the, uh, lady of the house?” This man, who might or might not be Marty Keegan, spoke in a low, rough voice, but he didn’t sound especially mean. Still and all, I won’t lie, the whole business had me rattled.

“No, my mother is at work.” I continued to use my most proper voice.

“Darling, mind if I step inside?” Maybe-Marty pointed with his chin toward the hallway behind me in a lazy sort of way.

And here’s where the situation tilted and slipped away from me. I didn’t have a chance to say anything back to this, and he didn’t even wait to see if I meant to. The man brushed me aside like I was nothing. With the size of those hands, if he wanted to, he could of picked me up and chucked me out on the front lawn with just one. As he stepped past, that flabby gut of his sent me banging into the wall. I saw right off there were about fifty ways this thing could go and nearly all of them were bad. It was then I went from uncomfortable to feeling well and truly scared.

“My mom don’t allow strangers in the house if she ain’t here,” I told the man’s back, forgetting to speak proper now that I’d swallowed a full dose of twitchy fear.

“I ain’t a stranger, little pullet.”

“Strange to me,” I squeaked.

“But not to your mama. She’d know my name if you said it to
her.” He smiled with his mouth, but his eyes looked as flat and gray as nickels. In the murky light of the hallway, the blue in them vanished. “Anyway, I bet your mama carries on with a lot of strange men.”

I took offense but couldn’t get my lips to function. I stood with my mouth open. The floorboards groaned as he traipsed into the living room and glanced around in a way that made me think he was looking for something specific. I knew he wanted Hayes, but the way he studied the room wasn’t the way you’d look for a person. It occurred to me for the briefest moment he could be an undercover agent from the Army looking for Logan, or somebody from the FBI looking for Hayes; however, these ideas were only foolishness and soon tossed aside. I didn’t kid myself any longer about the man. Once he shoved his way into the house, I knew this was Marty and I was in a giant, hairy fix. Meanwhile, he made his way through the house like he had it in his head to go visit my mom’s bedroom next. Or, God forbid, mine.