“Stop it. I’m taking you home. It’s the only ride you’re getting from me.”
Sitting back on her heels, she’s still too close.
“You think I’m ugly?”
“No! Jesus, no.”
And he realizes he means it. He takes his eyes from the road long enough to look at her. Not ugly. Even her head isn’t ugly to him anymore. The ravaged scalp is as delicate as the shell of a bird’s egg, the studs and chains like rickrack outlining the curves and convolutions of her ears, the ring violating her nostril, a mysterious contradiction. Tonight the chains keep the narrow porcelain of her child’s face from shattering. With his fingertips he traces her arm to the curve of her neck and cups the side of her skull to draw her head to his shoulder. He can hear the rattle in her lungs when she breathes. The place in his chest where the anger was empties out. Taking a deep breath, he spreads his hand over her face, touching her chains, her skin.
“You’re beautiful, Deanie. I don’t why, but you are.”
“Then what’s the big deal?”
“I never did it before,” he blurts.
With a little laugh in her throat, she licks the palm of his hand like a kitten.
Reluctantly he returns his hand to the wheel. She’s doing it to him again. She’s not beautiful, he tells himself. She’s a freak. Some of her is beautiful, he amends, her skin and her hands and her eyes, her eyebrows, her mouth, her tits, her body—right. Jackoff.
“You need it,” she tells him with the confidence of a mom urging spinach on a reluctant three-year-old. “No wonder you’re so tight-assed.”
At least she doesn’t laugh.
Sick to his stomach with arousal, he speaks to himself as much as to her. “It ain’t gonna happen. Go sit on the other side right now.”
“Why not?”
The willful bratty cry ignites his anger again. “Maybe I don’t want to be another guy in the locker room blowing off about getting wasted and screwing you. Like that sleazy fuck Chapin, making jokes about you giving him head.”
As if the sharp intake of her breath actually hurts her, her hands cross over her breastbone and she shrinks away from him.
It’s the truth, Sam wants to say, but his throat constricts a moment too late. When he forces something out, it’s a mutter. He doubts she can hear him saying he’s sorry.
Suddenly she snatches the basketball from the floor and drives it into the side of his head.
For an instant there is only the burst of pain in his ear that makes him jerk the wheel inadvertently. The truck starts to slide. Blinking back the pricking tears of pain, he manages to reassert control. He makes a careful turn onto Depot with a headache knotting behind his eyes.
She cries silently, shoulders heaving, back of her hand wiping at her face. Great. Got her crying again. He’s found his special talent in life. Streetlight washes over her with the weird penetration of an X ray, rendering her more than exposed, more than naked, almost transparent. When he reaches out to touch her arm, she knocks away his hand. All at once, she grabs her gear and dives for the passenger door.
“Wait a minute, wait, what are you doing?”
Yanking the door handle, she heaves her gear ahead of her and tumbles out of the truck. He hurls himself across the seat after her. As his feet hit the ground, they gain no purchase, just keep on sliding. Sam grabs at the open door and for an instant it’s in his grip. Then his weight, still moving as his feet skate through the slushy snow, pulls the door forward on its hinges. He skates in the slick. His feet leave the ground. Body twisting as he clutches at the door, he goes down flailing, streetlights spinning in his eyes like oncoming headlights.
13
In a storm of white flecks the world comes all apart. It’s as if the color and shape and substance of reality were flaking away like brittle wallpaper, the black universe showing through behind it. Streetlight spatters into myriad feeble points like candle-flames wavering in mirrors. Then Sam knows he’s on his back in wet cold snow, blinking flakes out his eyes and tasting them in his mouth as he gasps for the breath he’s knocked out of himself. Taste of blood in his mouth—bit his tongue somehow. He’s wrenched his shoulder and the back of his scalp feels like somebody bludgeoned him. He stares up into the snowspill from the sky. Slowly, he rolls and hauls himself to his feet. On touching the back of his head, his fingertips come away wet and red. A second feel is reassuring; he’s cut his scalp but it’s minor, maybe an inch long.
She’s gone, disappeared into the snow. Probably home by now. Shit, he forgot to ask her to give him back his sweatshirt. It’s his favorite; it used to be his father’s. Frankie gave it to Reuben one Christmas and Sam grabbed it out of the dryer one day a couple years later when he was desperate for some clean duds. For a while the two of them teased each other, kiting it from each other’s dresser or the laundry, but then it was his, like his father knew how it made Sam feel tight with him to wear it. And after a while it was just another sweatshirt. Only he hates the thought maybe he’s lost it for good.
His eyes still seek her as the world begins to spin out from under him and ‘god falls in a stuttering descent. His body tumbles and twists, the back of his head bounces on the edge of the door, as he pours bonelessly to the white ground. When the fan of descending images closes, there is silence. Her vision is grainy with the snow, colors diluted, edges blurred. And the snow under his head leaks a pool of darkness.
The Mutant struggles to a sitting
