“Right,” Sam agrees.
He has been hearing much the same commentary since he can remember. Even as a little boy, he had been the biggest little boy in the county.
“How’s Deanie?”
“She’s sick. I had a dog sounded like her, I’d put a slug in its head.”
Lord turns toward the woman, who has drifted back to the couch and stares at the tube. “Turn that fucking box down, Jude! How’m I s’posed to be able to think with that faggot screeching?”
The woman quickly points a clicker at the television and shoots down the volume.
“Where was I? You wanna beer?” The offer is automatic, distracted.
“No thanks.” Still standing in the doorway, Sam peers past the man into the small house. It’s poorly lit and there’s little to see. Woman in front of the tube, a dinette and kitchen appliances on the other side of the room, a rickety stairway, a couple of doors, to a bathroom, to the cellar, to a shed maybe. The place smells like a party the morning after, stale cigarettes and booze—the man’s beer, the hard stuff the woman’s knocking back, and the odor of stale empties from a trash bag slumped on the kitchen floor like an alcoholic Santa’s forgotten sack. There’s another smell, the one underneath all the others, far worse than any of the fetid odors in the dark corners of the Mill. He can’t put a name to it but he’s smelled it before and it makes his already queasy stomach reel.
“I’m on my way home. Just stopped for a minute.”
The man empties the can in his grip and crushes it. He looks at it thoughtfully. “Yeah, well. Waste a your time, buck.”
The creak of a hinge draws Sam’s eye to the wall under the stairway. The Mutant huddles in the crack of the door, her hand tight on the knob as if the door were a shield. She’s smaller and thinner, in a pair of boy’s flannel pajamas printed with cowboys and Indians on a faded red ground. She hasn’t shaved her head in several days and her skull’s covered with a dark fuzz, like a newborn’s. Eyes huge with fever, she is chainless and barefoot.
Any worry of an embarrassing surge of lust for her is ludicrous. It seems impossible he ever felt an instant’s horniness for this sick waif, let alone ever touched her intimately.
She snuffles. “Whatcha want?”
A beer, Sam thinks. A case of it. A tall hot redhead. A smile. Jesus, anything but to be here.
“How are you?”
Shuffling her feet, she shrugs. “How’d it go?”
Sam hesitates. “Girls lost by one point.”
Her pale face tightens. “Oh.”
“Guys won.”
“The goddamn door’s open,” Lord says. “We’re heating the fucking outadoors here, buck.”
Sam steps inside and closes the door.
Anger contorts Lord’s face and he starts to turn toward the Mutant. She flinches. Only then does Sam realize he’s missed his cue. Lord had been telling him to go.
The Mutant opens her door a little more but still holds it between her and Lord. She says quickly, “Sorry I wasn’t there.”
For an instant, Sam can see into her room. It makes no sense at first, before he understands the ghostly multiple Sams and fragments of Sam are reflections, as are the pinpoint flames rippling like Pentecostal fires from lighted candles in her room, a room full of mirrors like a funhouse.
“I’m better,” she is saying. “Be back at school Friday.”
Sam fumbles for the door behind him. “Thought you’d want to know. Hope you feel better.”
For an instant only, she looks right at him. Her face is like her mirrored room, a melting montage of anger and shame and terror. He even sees himself reflected there, a distorted batrachian monster. Like a feral animal retreating into its earth, she shrinks away behind her bedroom door.
Sam backs into the winter night.
12
The candle flame quivers at the end of her cigarette as she lights it with shaking fingers.
Tony kicks open the door and she drops the butt and the candle and he punches her in the stomach. She falls to the bed, retching and coughing and clutching herself.
“What’s Hotshot comin’ ‘round for? Take your fuckin’ temperature?”
Anxious not to provoke him with a defensive gesture, she uses wiping her nose with her forearm to protect her face, if only for a fraction of a second. Even that ephemeral reassurance helps steady her nerves.
“I dunno. He’s a big stupid retard. Numb as one of those Irish setters. Catch a Frisbee like a frog zapping a fly but after he’s got it he don’t know what to do with it.”
To the Mutant’s relief, Tony laughs.
“Yeah, I can see him humpin’ your leg.” The vision so amuses Tony that he elaborates on it. “Christ, him and you, almost be worth seeing. Saint Bernard jumpin’ one of them bald ratty little beaner mutts—what d’y call ‘em?”
“Chihuahuas,” she mutters.
Tony wraps a hand around her wrist. “You with Hotshot last weekend, you didn’t come home?”
“With J.C., I was with J.C. Friday night. I just got wasted, Tony. Passed out. That’s all.”
“That faggot Chapin. He didn’t peddle good shit, I’d break his faggot ass for him. He like to watch? Is that it? You pull a train and he gets to watch? You think I’m stupid or something? I know what you get up to. That’s how you pay me back for everything I’ve done for you. I put a roof over your head, I feed you, I take care a you, I love you better than your mother. And you whore around. Just like she does.”
The Mutant throws her arms around Tony’s thighs. “No, Tony, no I don’t.”
Tony presses her face into his crotch. “You think anybody else would ever be so good to you? You’re just as ugly inside as you always been outside. Hotshot comes ‘round here again, I’ll break your fuckin’ face.”
Frantically, the Mutant rubs her face against his erection. “He won’t be around again, Tony. I promise.”
Burning paint fumes tar the air.
Tony pushes her away.
