Novel Excerpt
“Come on,” Penny said, and led me out back of her place, into the woods and toward the power lines. There was a patch of garden that mostly wasn’t garden anymore, except for you could still see where the borders were from a few crooked pieces of post that once held twine, and some of those plants that never quit coming back, year after year, rising up from their own forgotten and neglected selves dropping seeds. Someone kept a patch of vegetables back there, once, for selling or canning. Never did know who. I figured maybe her mom but never asked. Some things you just didn’t bring up with Penny, unless you wanted to stand witness to her starting in that wobbling and then setting in on herself the way she did, digging and clawing at any soft spot her fingers found, adding to the shallow scabs she had all over, or picking off the ones already there. Her arms and legs looked like she had the worst case of chickenpox ever, just itching and scabbing and picking till Kingdom Come.
Penny walked right past that once upon a time garden, not even looking at it or the mound of kitchen scraps and stove ashes. The woods started up quick and even, back there, a few feet of picker bushes and wild raspberries and then we were into where the pine trees shade kept the ground soft with red gold needles and easy to walk through. There was something like a path and I guessed Penny came back here often enough to keep so much as moss and fern from coming up ready and thick.
“Ain’t no one uses this but me, see,” she said, and I felt a thing like a finger of ice move up my neck. She had a knack for answering things you never had spoken out loud. “No one but me, anymore, at least. Pop says once there was plenty folks would walk back here to get at the spring, but since the State said it was poison no one bothers, not even him.”
Her old man wasn’t the only one by a long shot who watered old batteries and radiators bought out of scrap cars for salvage, but hers was the one that got himself caught. Left too much junk out front for new neighbors to see. Living near the lake meant that Penny got to walk there, easy, at night, and it was tempting to envy her that, but it was even easier to feel good that you didn’t deal with folks bitching about your dogs or your music or your dooryard that they wanted you to call a lawn and take more pains over than you would a newborn baby.
“Shit, you ain’t taking me all the way out here to try to get me to drink something that was supposed to cure aches and pains better than aspirin, unless it killed you first,” I put my palm up against the whip of a twig snapping back behind Penny, “Because I ain’t got pains worth all that trouble.”
“More pains than you want to tell,” she muttered, not even bothering to turn and look at me.
Doing that mind reading thing again, and what I wanted to do was push her down, trip her and watch her fall, maybe face first into one of those big hunks of rock growing out of the ground, cool and sharp and glittering with bits of Fool’s Gold. That made me feel all sorts of ugly, so instead I just asked, “Yeah? So since when are you the expert on what’s hurting folks?”
Penny broke off a long piece of branch from a Spruce tree dying by the path. She turned, quick, and pointed it square between my eyes.
“Don’t need to be an expert. “Me and you, we got a few of the same sources, is all, just like this spring we’re walking towards.” She dropped the stick and turned back ahead, wiping papery moss and dead bark from her hands. “Wouldn’t be showing you this, if we didn’t.”
She would do that, too. Tell you things she knew about you and your life without telling you right out what it was she knew or how she was knowing it, but still and all, nailing you right dead through the center. Seems like she still can, even dead, because here I am, alive and miles away from poison springs and dead gardens and I can’t get up off this ground here, can’t make myself stop. Can’t make myself stop looking at this broken, dirty doll leg but not seeing it at all. Looking straight through it and back to what Penny showed me there, that day, and thinking if I’d have really been seeing then, maybe I would have seen clear to what was coming next and maybe I could have done something to stop it.
Seems to me, now, here with this headache, that all we need to know is right there in front of us all the time, the whole damn story already written out just as clear as when God first thought it and what goes wrong is us not looking. Like whoever’s mom wasn’t watching to see that this doll didn’t end up out the window, or like me not paying mind to the stories Penny tried to tell me.
Once, while she sat in her dad's beat up hammock and shaved her legs dry, no water, no soap, just the scrape, scrape, scrape of a razor on bare skin, she told me that the first boy who ever broke her heart was her daddy. I watched her whack the blade on the palm of her hand to knock out what looked like tiny dust bunnies, grey and fuzzy like that, only it was dead skin and hair and I thought it was crazy that she could do that, that way, swinging in a little boat of frayed canvas, and not so much as knick herself, not even once. Me, when I finally got around to bothering to try, which was maybe once or twice a year, when it was too hot even for me to wear jeans, I'd sure as shit end up looking like I'd run into barbed wire all up and down my shins.
Sun out so hot, Penny's shoulders had a thousand freckles already and I could feel sweat pouring down where I would have had cleavage, if I were Penny, or Cathi. Shlick, shlick, shlick of that razor taking off skin and stubble and leaving Penny's legs shiny and smooth like a river rock and I was wondering if they'd be that cool and sweet to touch.
"Whadd'ya mean by that, your old man breaking your heart, Penny? What kind of sense does that make?" I found a jagged edge on my thumbnail and worked it with my teeth. It pulled too low and I felt where, if I kept at it, it was going to bleed. Too late to stop, anyway, because at that point it would snag on my pocket, next time I reached for my lighter, which I had a feeling was going to be right away, as soon as I'd let that question work its way out from my mouth.
Penny had a way of pushing her eyes out at you in a real hard stare and half closing them at the same time, like she'd just noticed that you had some big old oozing thing growing on your face and she was trying to not let you see how disgusted she was.
"More sense than all those little girlies, come Junior High dance night, think they got themselves something to cry about because their date is pouring punch for another girl." She leaned over close to the full moon of her knee and went after the hairs in the dents there. "Think they finally got some great tragedy to write in their little five year diaries." She sat back up again, smoothing one palm over her knee, then leaned back, fast. So fast I thought she'd flip, and then she hung her head over the hammock, upside down. "Yeah, just because some pencil neck they barely ever even talked to before is doing the clutch and grab with a girl who ain't got no more titties than a chicken, they think they finally made it. Finally got the go home and kill yourself tragedy." She put both her arms up over her head and slashed two quick strokes with the razor, over her wrists. Then she laughed, hard and ugly, sat up, and threw the thing at me.
"Only thing is, the stupid little bitches don't know no better than to go sideways, and with a safety razor, at that."