“Cute.” He wipes his hand on his pants. “Look, I don’t give a shit if you play hoops or if you don’t. Make you a promise, though. I ever happen to see you kite so much as a pack of Big Red again, I’ll shop you. It’s the least I can do, seeing as how you were willing to put my ass on the line for a pack of Camels.”
Turning on his heel, Sam takes only a couple of strides toward the stairway when she launches herself from behind him and is on his back, driving her knees into his kidneys as she gets him by the windpipe. He staggers back, choking. He can’t breathe, let alone shake the bitch-monkey. Panicking, he throws himself into a forward roll, so she is underneath him and his weight knocks the breath out of her. He comes up on all fours and she is flat on her back, gasping for air. When he touches one of her outflung hands, their coldness shocks him. Crouching next to her, he gets his hands under her shoulders. Her wiry muscle can’t disguise how close to the surface her bones are. As he boosts her to her feet and holds her upright, she is too busy shaking and shivering to offer resistance.
“Are you okay?”
She jerks away from him.
“Come on,” he pleads. “I’ll take you home. What are you doing down here, anyway? There must be warmer places to have a smoke.”
Using the trailing end of her headscarf to wipe her running nose, she mutters, “Shortcut.” She gestures upstream. “Go by the Mill and through the woods and come out on Depot.”
“In the pitch dark?”
Her voice is weighted with sullen scorn. “I know my way.”
A glance around locates her gear next to the swing and he picks it up. Wordlessly, they trudge up the steps. He slings her backpack and gym bag into the cab of his truck. When he tries to give her a hand up, she swats away his hand. Inside, she curls up against the closed door to sulk.
Sam hunches over the wheel. His basketball on the floor of the cab rocks and rolls with the forward motion of the truck. The shivering Mutant hugs herself in her corner.
“You want something hot to drink? Some cocoa?”
She kicks at the glovebox. “I want a fucking drag!”
Looking away in disgust, Sam sticks the truck into gear.
The Mutant boots the glovebox again and then in a fury, delivers a fusillade of kicks that pop the box open. Papers, maps and assorted junk come vomiting out.
Sam pulls over to the nearest curb, yanks the stick into park and lunges across the seat toward her. All he means to do is to put her out of the truck. The flare of terror in her eyes as she cringes, warding him off with her palms, tucking up her body to protect herself, stuns him. He withdraws hastily to his side of the cab. She peeks warily at him and then straightens up, pretending she hadn’t been visibly intimidated.
“I wasn’t going to pop you one,” he says. “Just put you out on the sidewalk.”
“What difference does it make? You’re a fucking fascist bully!”
Shifting gears again, he snorts. “With a busted glovebox. That was mature, Deanie, very mature. As always.”
“Yeah, well, fuck you, ‘god.”
“You wish.”
She can’t suppress a giggle.
On Main Street, he pulls over to the curb and pops out of the truck with a promise to be right back.
Buying her a pack of butts, the Mutant hopes, as Samgod foots it to the Corner, where the plate-glass windows throw glowing cold light into the street. She shivers at the instant’s alchemy as he moves from shadow into the gilding light. He leans over the counter to speak to the girl, in a proletarian tableau vivant Hopper might have painted. Samgod wouldn’t know about Hopper, of course; Art is just short for Arthur to guys like him.
Swiftly she searches the junk from the glovebox, the contents of his gym bag—shit, a Bible! the idiot drags one around with him! all marked up too with highlighter like he actually reads it—looks under the bench seat and runs her fingers into the cracks of the bench and seatback. Nothing. She doesn’t expect a bag of weed or a vial of powder but everybody has something, if only change fallen between the seats. Except Samgod, the bozo. Not even a frigging returnable empty kicking around on the floor.
Opening the driver’s side door, he finds her going through the pharmacy sack. Unabashed, she keeps rummaging in it without so much as an upward glance. His own hands are fully occupied with two cardboard cups of cocoa.
“Anything you can use?”
“What the hell are breast pads? I never heard of them.”
“Yeah, well some people got nothing to brag on but their ignorance. My stepmother’s nursing the baby. Sometimes her milk leaks.”
“Yuk,” the Mutant says.
This from somebody who regularly gobs on other people. Jesus. Fishing a paper bag from his jacket pocket, he extends it to her.
The Mutant snatches the bag, letting the pharmacy stuff fall to the floor. Her fingers crab at the little bag but it contains only a couple of jelly donuts. Disgusted, she slams herself back against the seat and stuffs most of one donut into her mouth. Jelly squirts red onto her fingers. She slurps and swallows noisily. Eats with all the finesse of Indy gumming up mashed bananas. Sam watches her licking her fingers, working her tongue around her lips to get the dribbles of jelly and the powdered sugar. She looks inside the bag, hooks out the second donut and stuffs it too, without asking if he wants it. He is reminded of Pearl’s Siamese, with her face in the dish before he has finished emptying the can into it.
The illumination from the cafe highlights a pattern in the glossy weave of her headscarf. After a blank second it comes to him: brocade, linen brocade. Nice sound, nice way
