“’Fore I could get that box for him, he pushed me out of the way and grabbed it. He coulda left. I thought he would. But he had to do one of those things they do. Those extras.” Her head lowered, shook once. “They just cain’t resist.”
He’d seen the legs on the floor by now, the rest of the body blocked from view by the big metal desk, and he needed to get Louie here, get an ambulance first, but he couldn’t pick up the phone, couldn’t get that motion going because he was listening to her, hearing it in the waves of quiet that rolled over him, quiet riding on waves of quiet, waves widening out from a center-the bayou, singing with insects and frogs, the surge-and-retreat, keening whir of it, the stir in muddy water, and her voice low as that chorus, he heard how she was still holding the bottle when the man licked the knife and cut her, and after he licked it again, she broke the bottle on the edge of the desk and shoved it up through his throat. Then she took the book and she sat down.
“You gonna find some boys.”
“Delpha,” Phelan whispered. The half of her face he could see wore a sheen of sweat. He laced his fingers through the brown hair, soothed it back.
Not a cloud in the gray-blue eyes that met his. The horizon inside them was clear.
CATGIRL by CLAUDIA SMITH
The girls are waiting for the ferry, dangling their legs out the side of the van, popsicle juice dripping down their chins. Four girls: Trina, Tricia, Grace, and Allie. Tricia and Trina, the blond twins. Grace Hobel, the quiet one, their best friend. And Allie, kicking Grace in the shins gleefully. She wants the twins for her very own. They are beautiful, those two, and Allie wants to enter their twin world, to learn their twinspeak, to braid their matching white-blond hair. The twins’ mother is from Sweden. Allie loves her icewater eyes, her high cheekbones. She wears sunglasses and drinks throughout the day, but in a way that makes her seem slightly mussed, and not soused. Allie wants those twins for sleepovers. They smell like Ivory soap, those two. Even on the beach, after days of swimming in the ocean, they smell sweetly of summer. Not Grace. Grace is getting breasts and has already started her period. She has a body odor problem.
So these girls, setting off on their weekend with a mother the other mothers like because she is pretty and rich, know they will run on the beach, build sand castles, and stand around a bonfire with boys. They lick sticky fingers and sing a song about a smashed bumblebee.
At first, they don’t notice the man who is behind them, watching, although if they did it would give them a kick; they like it when people watch them, especially together.
Then Grace sees the man and covers her mouth. She jabs Tricia’s ribs.
“He likes your creamy thighs,” Allie says, just to see if Grace will hide behind her fingers. She does.
“He looks like Kenny Rogers,” Trina says, and he does.
“Maybe he
They sing “The Gambler” and point and laugh. He squints his eyes. They slam the door. The ferry has arrived.
Melanie, the twins’ mother, puts out her cigarette. They are listening to Neil Diamond. Even Neil Diamond has a kind of soulful glamour when Melanie Parks listens to him.
This all happened years ago, in the summer of 1982.
The girls stand on the ferry, throwing day-old bread at the seagulls. Grace stands at the prow, looking down, waiting to be splashed. She turns green yet will not back away. She is prone to seasickness. But she never backs out of a dare. The girls have to admire her for that.
They feed the gulls, then run to the back of the boat when the birds dive down. Grace tells a story about mean boys who throw Pop Rocks at the gulls.
“That is just so sad,” the twins say.
“Did you think of that together?” Allie asks.
“What?” they say together.
“When you talk together like that. Like you have the same thoughts. It’s cool,” Allie says.
“We are nothing alike,” Tricia says.
Grace smiles, a close-lipped smile. Allie wonders if she does that because of her overbite. It’s a cute overbite. Allie likes her again. She has velvety hair and she is good at anything school-related, as long as it doesn’t involve athletics. Grace and Allie are the A students; the twins, they are B-plus with an occasional A.
“I’m going inside,” Tricia says, and this disappoints Allie. She likes it out on the boat. She sniffs the air; it smells briney, with a hint of dirty bathroom. She would like to stay to see if any dolphins follow the ferry, but she won’t be separated from her twins. Once inside, they play Go Fish until the boat docks.
The house is on Crystal Beach. The twins have spent their summers here since they were tots, running up and down the stairs in matching T-shirts. There are only a few rules at the beach: take off your flip-flops on the balcony before you go inside, so that you don’t track sand in everywhere; and be sure to check in before sundown with Melanie.
Inside, the house is all one big room, with a little harvestgold kitchenette and a claw-footed bathtub behind the sink. The house is furnished with rattan and wicker, and there are four big beds. But the girls will sleep out on the balcony on cots, facing the sea.
Maybe on Saturday Melanie will take them back on the ferry to Galveston, where they can eat shrimp in little glass bowls with red cocktail sauce and bottomless glasses of Coke. Melanie is prone to sudden bursts of happiness, and the girls love her for it. Sometimes on these trips she takes them all to get their toenails painted. Or she’ll take them to Murdoch’s to buy matching sunglasses and netted bags of shells.
At Crystal Beach they can run as far as they want. At night the girls will find older boys. One boy, Murph, drives a Jeep and they all pile in and scream and he speeds through the water, splashing. “Ah, naw,” he says, when Tricia kisses the back of his neck. “He tasted like man-sweat,” she whispers to them later. They sing him songs.
There’s a teenager at the beach when they get there. Her name is Sylvia, and she is some distant relation to the twins and Melanie. She and Melanie make daiquiris and sleep on the balcony, slathered in coconut oil. The girls agree that Sylvia is not nearly so beautiful as Melanie, although she is sixteen, the age of beauty. The girls-it was Tricia or Trina who came to this conclusion, Allie can’t remember which-all agree. Sixteen is the age; the age that it is appropriate to lose your virginity, to have a boyfriend, to wear a miniskirt.
More interesting than the teenager, there is a girl across the dunes. This girl introduces herself on the second day. Her name is Brandy. Her voice is rich and throaty, like a smoker’s.
“It’s sort of beautiful,” Grace says.
