Once upon a time, she had needed to close her eyes but now she never does. She sees herself and him in the mirrors, broken and multiplied, minimized and magnified, a jigsaw of bodies and faces. Picasso, the Mutant thinks, remembering the colored plates from a folio in the high school library. Maybe he was into mirrors too. Did they have blotter back then?
She hears Judy arrive home. The cupboard opens, the heavy bottle clunks on the counter. Jack Daniel’s gurgles into a coffee cup.
“Tony,” Judy calls.
He doesn’t answer.
“I’m home,” Judy says.
The couch creaks under Judy; the TV blares on. It’s Family Feud. Judy laughs with pleasure. She never misses it.
Huffing dirty words, Tony does the funky chicken and collapses on the Mutant. His weight crushes her for a moment while he catches his breath and then he rolls off her. His pants are tangled around his ankles. He pulls them up, buttons his shirt, tucks it in.
She studies the reflection of her left shoulder in a wedge of mirror. When she can save the money, it would be a good place for a tattoo, except sometimes she gets a zit there. Tony turns around, gives her bottom a hard slap that makes her body jump on the mattress.
“That’s a good girl,” he mutters.
He is still zipping up when he opens the door.
The Mutant looks back over her bare shoulder. Briefly Judy glances away from the TV screen. In the blue flicker, her eyes are moist with terror. The Mutant meets her mother’s eyes calmly. Hastily, Judy returns her gaze to the TV. A fraction of a second later, Judy starts to laugh. She laughs hard and for a long time, but by then Tony has closed the door on the Mutant’s room and joined Judy on the couch. Family Feud is one of his faves, too.
The Mutant puts on her clothes again and picks up the papers and books Pig Tony has shoved on the floor. She turns on the radio again. Sitting cross-legged on her rumpled cot, she does her homework.
Sitting at the kitchen table, Sam holds his baby sister and massages her sore gums. She chews furiously, wetly, on his finger, while clutching at the headphones riding his collarbone.
The kitchen radio is putting out Axl Rose.
W. Axl Rose. Waxl. Possessed by Janis Joplin, Sam thinks, and he’s even wearing her old clothes.
Reuben washes the pots while Pearl puts away the leftovers. Sam’s stepmother embraces his father from behind and bumps him gently against the sink counter. Reuben laughs. Sinuously she slides around in front of him and he pins her against the counter. She locks her arms around his neck and he lifts her up to kiss her and pushes her back toward the sinkful of soapy water. She shrieks and struggles. He tickles her. They are getting foamy water all over themselves and the kitchen and having a fine old time. From his angle of view, Sam cannot help noticing that his father is getting a hard-on.
Slinging Indy over his shoulder, Sam ducks into the living room. He flops onto the carpet, lets Indy down to crawl, and pulls his headphones up over his ears. He gropes for the play button of the Walkman hooked to his belt. When he glances toward the kitchen he sees his father and stepmother swaying in each other’s arms to something on the radio he can’t hear over the dub of hardcore grunge in his Walkman.
The baby clutches at his thigh. In the gold iris of her left eye is the same piewedge of brass as in her mother’s grey eyes; it is a familial stain that comes down in the female line. Pearl’s light eyes against her gloriously mahogany skin are certainly arresting. Rick Woods has told Sam that his grandmother calls such light eyes in a person of color devil eyes. Sam guesses his little sister qualifies as a person of color too, but hers is amber, her thick ringlets not black as Pearl’s but tawny. Indy is rapidly losing her infant frog-shape. She crawls along Sam’s prone body to tug at his lower lip. She breaks wind and her alien golden eyes widen in surprise.
All at once Reuben is stooping over Sam to pick up the baby. He says something and Sam nods, though he doesn’t hear it over the Bastards’ confessional “Shit for Brains.” Sam rolls to his feet and bounds upstairs. In his bedroom, he goes to his knees on his bed, startling Pearl’s Siamese cat from her nap on his pillow. Tearing his headphones and Walkman off with one hand, he thumbs the power buttons on the sound system on the wall at the head of his bed. The cat scampers from the room.
From outside, below his bedroom window, comes the sound of Reuben’s truck’s ignition. His father is taking Pearl and the baby to the farmhouse. They are rebuilding the original Styles homestead, fire-gutted shortly after Reuben married Pearl. For now, they crowd this smaller house she inherited. Evenings and weekends, if he doesn’t have work at the garage or caretaking to do, Reuben works at the farmhouse. Pearl and the baby often accompany him.
With basketball, homework and the few hours he can put in at the garage himself, Sam has little time left to help with the farmhouse—a few hours of a Sunday afternoon at best. And it feels weird to be there. It was hard enough to see it in ruins from the fire but now it is becoming something else—Reuben is not rebuilding it exactly but altering it in various ways.
With money and time so short, the rebuilding has gone slowly and now it looks as if it won’t be finished before Sam graduates high school. He wonders if he will really ever live in the farmhouse again—or should. Maybe he should bail out in June, find his
