Novel Excerpt

Penny used to read all those books about the kids who were kept locked up in the attic and tortured. They had sex with each other and then they got hold of the woman who did that to them, the grandmother, I think it was, and tortured her right back. I was over at her trailer just before summer vacation, and her parents were out somewhere, and she pulled a half full, half smashed pack of cigarettes out from under her mattress and read me this whole chapter where the grandmother is tied up to her bed and one of the girls is whipping her. Penny kept lighting smokes and letting them burn each other in the big abalone shell we called the ash trough, and she read the thing straight through.

There was a part where the girl is looking at her grandmother's privates, all going bald and grey and she thinks it's disgusting. Penny slowed down, there, and took a few drags off a few different butts smoldering away in the trough. I don't remember how the chapter ended. Mostly I just remember Penny and the smoke all around her and the way she spit out the words like the girl in the book must have.

She had one shelf in her room. Bunches of stuffed animals on one end, then all these attic books on the other. There was a white First Communion bible, too, in the middle, separating everything. Her aunt gave it to her, even though Penny didn't have any First Communion. She said it was something Catholics did so that the Pope could pray for them. Her old man said that Catholics were worse than Jews and Communists because it said right there in Revelations all about the Whore of Babylon. When Penny's folks got married, her old man said he wasn't having any of her mother's Pollack loving Commie shit in his house, so Penny had to leave the school she went to, and come to mine. But her aunt gave her that silky white bible anyway. Sometimes I thought Penny's old man and mine were right, because our bible was serious, just some gold lettering and black leather, and here this one that was supposed to be for a little kid was all satiny, like whore's sheets.

I felt bad for thinking that, though, because Penny kept a string of beads in her pocket that she said the Mother gave her when she had to change schools. I knew she fiddled with those pink plastic beads whenever her old man came home drunk after her mother didn't come home at all. And I knew how that was. I had a piece of polished agate I lifted from Perhams that I kept in my pocket, just like that.

Penny read me all of those books, one time or another. Read them up at the lake, or out in the tent with a Coleman lantern burning. Even read me some over the phone from Dorothea Dix. She got put up there after she tried to let all her blood out through her Achilles' tendon. She must have snuck those books in the same way she snuck in the new razors, because you're not supposed to commit suicide on the Ward, and I bet you're not supposed to be reading no sick books about sick families, either.

I think they made her happy, though. In a weird sort of way. I think they made her happy, the way she told me that watching the blood stream out behind her as she swam to the deep end of the quarry did. I believed her. I listened to her tell me that, and I believed her because of her voice. When her mother called me the next day to ask me what Penny had said, needing to know, needing to know because I was the last person Penny talked to, I told her Penny said she was happy. Just really, really happy.

Another car, and I need to move before I let this one wash over me. Or maybe I need to let it take me wherever it wants to go and my toes are all needles and numb when I stand up and there’s an oily little creek and a clump of trees just past it and I don’t go back to the road. I walk back into that memory as I go into those trees looking not at all like Penny’s woods but all the same just like where she took me. First there are stinking piles of toilet paper and Kleenex and diapers and then, further in, the stream coils back and the tree trunks are clean and the road is far enough away for quiet. There’s a patch of moss and then I’m down, hand still curled around that leg, wet face to the sky and watching nothing but the shadow of Penny on my eyelids.

"I'm getting ready to tell you about my best ever way of letting my worries go," she’d whispered at me while she ran her pointer finger around the calluses on her other elbow. "I'm getting ready to tell you, because it's way, way better, even, than my books." Her tongue came out, just the tip to the corner of her mouth, when she said that. When she said, "my books," and I should have known right then and there to shut her up. Those books of hers were some creepy shit.

"Only thing is, you can never, ever talk about it, not with me, anyways, after I tell you. You go right on ahead and tell it to whoever you want, long as you don't mention my name, you know, so they don't go thinking I'm nuts again and come and want to lock me up all over."

Out under just a yellow porch light, I could see the way Penny's lips got thin and clamped and curled at the edges like a smirk, maybe, only scary. "No way am I ever gonna do anything gets you put back in that place."

"Yeah, whatever," she muttered, starting in a fishing boat sway from side to side she took up sometimes, when something big was moving around inside her. She did that swaying thing even more after she got back from the hospital, that first time. Made me kind of dizzy to be around her.

"Yeah, whatever. Just don't ever mention it to me, personally, again, after I explain it to you. Because that'd just wreck it, just sure as shit spoil the whole thing, and it's all I got, sometimes."

I pulled a roll of butterscotch lifesavers out of my pocket and held them out to her. The ripped open foil part hung down like a loose bumper. Penny took the candy from my hands, tore off that silvery strip and looped it around her thumb. The roll disappeared into her fist. "Okay, you get it.”