AMPULEX COMPRESSA by Justin Quarry
The sound of roaches playing on the floor. This is what wakes the boy. The way their little legs click-clack against the linoleum, he imagines they wear microscopic high heels. He looks over the side of his mattress and there they are, climbing one another. Smiley is the one being climbed. Once, the boy kept Smiley on a leash, a long string tied to his bedpost. Then the boy let Smiley go. He dripped a glob of the mother’s nail polish on Smiley’s back so he would always know which roach Smiley was. The glob is mostly round and has a sheen, like a pink pearl burrowed in Smiley’s exoskeleton. The other roaches seem to be digging at it, aiming to steal it. The boy shoos them all, Smiley included, back into the baseboard.
He tries to sleep again. He tries to find the thread of his last dream. From the bathroom beside his bedroom, the boom box atop the toilet begins to thunder Country Top Forty. The boy needs to pee. The boy can never sleep in the morning. Sometimes the boy wishes he lived somewhere he could sleep all day. Once, when he was seventeen, he almost left the mother. He was going to live with the father, back when the father was living. The boy had a window seat on the plane. As the plane lifted from the runway, the boy watched its wing break off at the seam. The plane flopped then slammed back on the ground, nose skidding. When the boy disembarked, the mother was waiting in the airport, oblivious of the crash, like she had known all along he would never leave. The airline gave the boy a fat check, decorated with zeros, plus ten percent off future travel. The boy stayed with the mother, and the mother quit her jobs. The boy and the mother spent the money on electronics, identical trucks, and champagne made in Texas. Now the money is gone. The money has been gone for years. Electronics have been pawned and a truck has been sold to pay rent on a smaller apartment. Now the boy is not really a boy but twenty-five years old.
In the bathroom is the mother, shoving her nose at the mirror. She wears an old nylon gown, worn thin and transparent in places the boy wishes it were thick and opaque. She is small and slim and her skin is mostly good though she always sleeps in full make-up. She wakes with it smudged, as though in the middle of the night someone tried to erase her face. “Do I got one?” she asks the boy, shoving her nose at him.
The mother has a nose hair. The tweezers are still missing. The boy bends her nose back and reaches for the nail clippers. The mother’s eyes water, and the boy snips as far as he can inside her nostril. He picks the offending wisp off her lip, and “There,” he says, offering it to her on his finger.
The boom box rattles on the toilet according to the song it plays. The boom box is one of three things the father willed the boy. The boy also received a gumball machine that can double as an aquarium and a pistol which the mother and the boy pawned before the electronics. The money the father earned pumping gas he left to his other children who the boy has never met.
“How’s your veins this morning?” the mother asks. “Bruises healed?”
The boy shows her the crook of one arm. He thumps it hard, and two veins illuminate, bright blue, intersecting in the shape of a wishbone. The area around the wishbone has faded to yellow, as if the spot were only stained with self-tanner.
“Cha-ching,” the mother says, making a fist and jerking back to simulate the operation of a slot machine. “Fifty dollars.” She reveals her own arms, likewise healed. She is often mistaken for late twenties, though on the donation forms at the clinic she puts a checkmark by early forties. The clinic pays twenty-five dollars per donation.
“Goody gumdrops,” says the boy as he lifts the toilet seat. “I have to excrete now.”
The boy and the mother perform a number of tasks to make quick cash. For instance, clean mohair. Bales of it, enough to fill their living-dining room, arrive each week from goat farms in Wyoming, Oklahoma, and both Dakotas. They wash it in the sinks and tub with a special solution they were mailed when they called the hotline to sign up. Sometimes, when they get behind, they do not clean the mohair but spray the bales with Pledge so that at least the mohair smells cleaned. From their house it goes to a factory, and from that factory to other factories where it is mostly used for teddy bears – this is what the literature with the starter kit said.
Also the boy and the mother sell their plasma. The first time they visited the clinic they sold their blood, but then they learned that peddling plasma is a more lucrative business: plasma can be taken once a week, blood only every two months. If their arms are healed – and if they’re lucky – they can even sneak by and sell plasma every three days.
This afternoon the clinic receptionist tightens her nonexistent lips and raises an eyebrow at them, suspicious.
“What?” the mother says, though the receptionist has made no comment and is tearing off forms for them. “Can’t you count your days of the week?”
The mother is still printing and checking boxes as the boy leans back on a woven lawn chair in the gift area. The gift area is what the receptionist calls the section of the big room where fluids are drawn. Soon the nurse glides over to the boy’s station, noiseless. She is tall, slightly bigger than the boy, and has her hair divided down the middle in half-braided pigtails. A wig, the boy suspects, because even half-braided it’s longer than it was on Friday. Nearly always, such as today, she wears a padded bra with overstuffed cups and atop one of these foam mounds, a button featuring each of her three children’s faces.
“You have the sexiest veins in history,” the nurse says, sliding a needle in, tapping his arm. She almost closes her eyes and gazes down at him, dreamily, while his blood spurts up the tube.
The boy and the mother aren’t lucky – the boy and the nurse have something going on, and this is why the boy and the mother are allowed to sell every few days. The second time they snuck back, the nurse confronted the boy in the refreshment nook, the only area of the clinic walled off with partitions. The mother was still in the gift area giving, leaking slowly. The boy dropped his juice and kissed the nurse, a vanilla wafer in his mouth, then slipped his hand down the back of her scrubs. It was the first way he thought to keep her quiet. Later he wondered why it wasn’t the third or fourth way he thought to keep her quiet. Maybe the boy had wanted to kiss the nurse all along.
The mother doesn’t know about the boy and the nurse. The mother is the only one who believes she and the boy are lucky. The plane crash, the fat check: Luck, the mother says. The boy hasn’t told the mother about the nurse because, once, the mother said if the boy ever got a girl, she would get rid of the boy’s girl like the boy got rid of the mother’s man. This was after the boy spiked the man’s two-liter with vodka, which soon reverted the man to a raging alcoholic. The man, and the mother’s anger, led the boy to think of his father, and then to board the plane. The mother gave up on the man by the time the boy’s check cleared, and so the boy and the mother lived happily ever after, or at least for a little while. But still the boy thinks the mother remembers the man and what she threatened.
“I think she’s on to us,” the boy tells the nurse. Overhead, a device spins his blood, separating the plasma from the rest of it, then shoots the leftovers back into his arm. The machine will repeat the process of collection and replacement until a reservoir hanging under it is filled with a creamy yellow liquid.
The nurse glances over her shoulder at the mother. A male nurse hooks the mother up in another lawn chair across the expanse of indoor/outdoor carpet, and already, with her free arm, the mother is talking very loudly into her cell phone. She does this so the other donors will notice she can afford such technology and not think she is poor like they are. Sometimes, if there’s no one to call, she has boisterous conversations with herself, phone at her ear turned off.
The nurse says, “Momma doesn’t look like she knows about us.”
“No, her.” The boy fingers the receptionist who’s wiping her computer screen with the end of the bow tied around her collar. “She’s on to my mom and me.”
“Oh. Carolyn’s just mad cause she’s got AIDS.”
The boy stares down at his needle.
“I’m just joshin’ ya!” the nurse says. She shakes her shoulders at him in an attempt to shimmy her breasts, but the foam cups remain motionless. Only her children’s faces wiggle.
“Watch it,” he says, checking to see if the mother is looking.
The nurse enjoys taunting the boy in this way, and though it makes him nervous, the boy enjoys being taunted: the thrill of getting caught. To taunt the nurse, he occasionally calls her house from pay phones, and when someone else answers he mimics a bird or a dolphin. The nurse doesn’t want to get caught either.
The mother can be heard discussing a beautiful dress, wine from France, and a two-thousand-dollar Pekingese.
“Who’s Momma always talking to?” the nurse asks.
“This one guy she sees,” the boy says. “Or herself. She’s not a big fan of the Monday crowd.”
“I don’t blame her. Mondays it’s all weirdos. Present company not included.”
A man with his shirt unbuttoned and bits of tissue clotted to his shaven neck staggers past them. “What about me?” he asks the nurse.
“Yeah, sure, you too,” the nurse says. When the man dives in a chair down the row, causing it to fold, the nurse says, “See? I’d pretend to talk to somebody else, too. I pretend all the time.” The nurse surveys the space behind her to see if the coast is clear. “I’ll tell you a secret. I’m not really a nurse.”
The boy straightens up in the chair. His shirt catches in the woven slats. “What are you then?”
“I took some classes and all,” says the nurse. “I just had Ken mock up a certificate to show people.” Ken is the nurse’s husband who the boy makes noises at. Once, the boy did a bird noise at her five-year-old daughter, but it caused too much confusion. The daughter kept squawking back. Now if a child answers, the boy just hangs up the phone. The nurse says, “That’s the way life is. You can be anything you want if you can just convince people that that’s what you are. Isn’t that a hoot?”
The boy stares down at the skinny ridge beneath his skin. The boy looks up at the nurse and sees that the nurse is not really a nurse but she is still the same person capable of putting this needle in him.
“That a wig?” he asks, gesturing toward her braids.
The nurse pulls the ends of them out to arm span, tugging. The braids cling to her scalp and stretch her forehead. “Extensions. See?”
The device over the boy’s head beeps as a last shot of blood slides into his arm. The nurse slips the needle out and whispers, “I swear, I bet even JFK didn’t have such sexy veins.”
For lunch the next day, the boy and the mother split the contents of a pre-packed Easter basket. They eat at a red metal table in the corner of the living-dining room, wads of mohair drying in five-gallon buckets underneath it. The mother requests the head, feet, and tail of the bunny, and the boy takes the leftover torso. Everything else in the plastic basket is divided equally.
The mother leaves to retrieve their mail from the complex courtyard. While she is gone, the boy moves through the apartment, springing mousetraps. The mother has baited these traps with a gel resembling peanut butter that poisons roaches. It is not enough for the roaches to take this gel and contaminate their colonies; the mother wants to snap them in half, individually. The boy doesn’t believe the roaches should die. After all, the roaches were in the apartment. The mother, however, claims the roaches arrived in the mohair, and so now, when new bales are delivered, she and the boy fog them with a toxic spray in the courtyard. Before the boy hears the door slam, he finds a trap thrown in the kitchen and half a roach lodged under its metal arm. The other half is missing, as if it crawled off or was launched across the room, behind the two-burner stove. The boy inspects the roach half’s back – the half is not half of Smiley.
The mother strolls in the kitchen with sweat bejeweling her eyebrows. As she thumbs through the mail, a drop threatens to fall on an envelope. Without looking up, she hands the boy his disability check from the government. When the settlement money ran out, the boy and the mother claimed he couldn’t work due to emotional trauma caused by the plane crash. Now he receives several hundred dollars each month, and this makes the boy and the mother’s bread and butter. The mother has told the boy to hide a portion of every check so she can’t spend it. If they save enough, they have agreed they will buy a plasma television.
The mother tears the end off a neon green envelope and removes a folded stack of papers. “Hey, look at this,” the mother says as she scans the top page, a flyer the same color as the envelope. Its heading reads MAKE CHRISTIAN CASH FAST!!!! with zigzags all around it, implying the text is explosive. “What’s the difference between Christian cash and regular cash?” she asks the boy.
The boy reads the fine print, but the flyer never explains this. “Maybe they pray over it or throw holy water on it. Or maybe it’s a church that pays you.”
The mother drops the papers to her side, and for a long while gazes out the kitchen window. Eventually the boy angles to see what she’s staring at, but there is nothing in the courtyard save broken swings, patches of crabgrass, a decorative windmill.
The mother finally looks down at the papers again, but the mousetrap catches her eye. With her foot she nudges it, and the roach half that rides it. “I guess this makes five.”
The boy has read that a cockroach can live a month without its head. “Four and a half, you mean?” The boy has also learned that there is a wasp which can sting a roach’s brain, disable the roach’s escape reflexes, the wasp’s venom turning the roach into a zombie. This lets the wasp use the roach’s antennae to lead it to the wasp’s den, where the wasp lays eggs in the roach’s live body. But without a head, the boy thinks, and thus a brain, perhaps a roach is immune to such a thing.
The mother doesn’t seem to care, and soon she is on the phone asking, “Do we have to be baptized to do this?”
And soon the boy is at the bank depositing his check in their account, minus fifty dollars. With these checks, with the savings – with the settlement from the airline – the boy could have left the mother long ago. The boy remembers this each time he hands over a new check to the teller, the teller returning a single bill in a white sleeve. He remembers he could go somewhere, anywhere, with anyone, and today he considers going there with the nurse. He wonders who the nurse would become in this new place with him. He wonders if other people would believe who he pretended to be.
But when the boy got off the one-winged plane, the mother fell to her knees in the airport and clamped her arms around his feet – this before she even learned of the crash. And this was all the boy had wanted before he boarded the plane, for the mother to beg him to stay. For the mother to realize that she needed the boy, that the boy and the mother depended on each other. Now the mother depends on the boy more than ever. Now if the boy leaves it will be like when the father left them both. She will have to take three jobs she hates, and at home she will keep her shade drawn against the daylight, not even leaving her bed to eat. Except now, when she finishes cleaning motel rooms and packing meat, she won’t have a boy waiting there to tell her one day she’ll be lucky.
The man the mother now sees is manager of the Highway 67 branch of Lightning Moolah. They met one week after the settlement ran out and the mother and the boy needed a loan. Because the mother went on a date with the manager that night, he waived the typical thirty-percent interest. The mother still hasn’t paid the loan back. Neither the manager nor the mother hasn’t spoken of the loan in two years.
The manager is on the short side with thick arms and wide shoulders, pale-skinned and -eyed. He usually comes to the apartment after he gets off at eight and is still wearing a sport coat – herringbone, pinstripe. The boy knows these things only because twice the manager has arrived before the boy has left the apartment. Since the two-liter, this is the unspoken arrangement between the boy and the mother: Anytime the mother has a date, the boy disappears until midnight.
The manager is also balding, but the mother is fine with this. Once, she said that by the time his hair is all gone, she will have been gone long ago. The boy takes some comfort in this each night he departs their home for her date.
On these nights, which happen no more than once a week, the boy tries to meet up with the nurse. Sometimes they spend the time groping around in her Taurus or a cemetery. Sometimes the nurse must stay at home to play board games with Ken and the children. In this case, the boy sneaks into the fifteen-screen theater or wanders the aisles of a twenty-four-hour pharmacy. Today, when the boy called the clinic to ask the nurse about tonight, the receptionist said she wasn’t in and took a message. Ten minutes later the nurse called back, rap blaring and horns honking, and told him to meet her that night outside the county library.
Ten minutes, twenty minutes, thirty minutes the boy waits on the library steps, three blocks from the apartment. A group of teenage girls bang down the steps and slide down the rails on their skateboards. One girl falls off at the bottom, and her skateboard flies up and slaps the ground behind her.
The boy watches for the nurse’s blue Taurus. The nurse is often late. An enormous red van eases up along the curb and throws on its parking lights, which apparently includes a strobe light mounted on the van’s roof. The van has BLOOD BUS etched in big white letters along its side, underscored with a black line that zigzags near its end to mimic a heart monitor. The nurse rolls down the window and asks, “How much for head?”
The boy climbs in on the passenger side. “How did you manage this?” he says, scanning the interior. The Blood Bus reeks of sterility. The front is immaculate, though its accessories are dated – the nurse’s seatbelt only stretches across her lap, no CD player. The back, where blood is given, sits in darkness like a big hole that needs filling.
“We did a drive at the mall. In front of Bass Pro,” the nurse says. “Ken thinks I have to work late, but Shawna loaded all the blood up in her Buick. Fit in her trunk fine. I got the Bus all night.”
The boy reaches over and traces his fingers over the nurse’s thigh, under fuchsia scrubs so thin they would probably dissolve in water.
The nurse flicks a switch and a long fluorescent bulb mounted on the ceiling lights the back. “Wanna?” asks the nurse, her thumb jutting in that direction.
Everything is white, except the blue velour curtains pulled across the windows. Close to one wall lies a stretcher with a cluster of tiny rust-colored spots stained on its sheet. Beside the stretcher rises a rack hung with clear, skinny tubes and plastic baggies. On the other, roomier side of the stretcher are two stools, a short podium holding a clipboard, and a miniature refrigerator.
The boy and the nurse flop down on the stretcher. Immediately the stretcher takes flight, crashing against the rear door, and the nurse slides off the crunchy mattress, giggling. They push the stretcher back into position. The nurse locks the brakes. Still giggling, she points to the cluster of stains. “The last guy was a real dripper,” she says, exploding in laughter.
The boy wishes that when they met like this the nurse would remove the button with her children’s faces. Sometimes when they’re doing this, and the boy gets a glimpse of the children, all he can do is wonder if they are anything like he was at their ages. He wonders if Ken has taught them to tie a string around a dragonfly so they can lead it through the air like a miniature kite.
The boy senses that asking the nurse to take off her children would offend her. The boy asks the nurse to take off her shirt instead. He unhooks the foam cups to unwrap her breasts, which are small but plenty. Her nipples fade into her skin with no clear line of demarcation. The ends are soft and bright pink and puckered like sugary candies that will melt on the boy’s tongue. He kneads them with his lips. She presses her chin against her chest, watching. She rubs the back of his head.
Then they are surrounded by banging. Things, loud things, hit the Blood Bus everywhere as though it is hailing toasters. The boy and the nurse part the curtains and see the skateboarding girls clubbing the vehicle with their fists and laughing.
“Twits!” the nurse yells. “You better not dent this!” Strangely, she starts pounding the Bus herself from the inside. The girls laugh louder, club harder. The nurse stoops forward to the driver’s seat and speeds off, topless. For a few seconds the girls roll beside the Blood Bus but soon disappear far behind it.
The boy drops back on the stretcher, staring up at the fluorescent light until it blinds him. “Where are we going?”
The nurse doesn’t seem to hear the boy over the Crystal Gayle tape playing. The boy doesn’t ask again. After several minutes the Blood Bus comes to a stop, but this time the nurse leaves the engine running. The boy decides he doesn’t want to know where they are. He doesn’t look out the window.
After the boy and the nurse finish what they started, the nurse stays on top and immediately asks, “Now what do you want to do?”
All the possibilities of what to do, and where to go, blossom in the boy’s head. His skull is packed full of ideas, light and fragrant. If he didn’t know the woman squatting over him, she could be anyone. He wonders if in that case she told him she were royalty, would he believe her. He wonders if she didn’t know him, and he said he was a hit man or a married man or a pilot, would she buy it.
“I want to show you something,” the boy says.
They dress. The boy directs the nurse from an alley behind an abandoned grocery store back toward the library. At a field near the apartment complex he tells the nurse to pull over. He opens the glove compartment, digging through booklets, rubber gloves, a hamburger wrapper. “Does this thing have a flashlight?” the boy asks. Following a search of the back, the nurse determines that the Blood Bus does not have a flashlight. The nurse starts a list on the clipboard entitled “Supplies.”
The moonlight and streetlight are enough for them to see their way into the field, which is empty except for two trees in the very middle. Farther, where the streetlight does not extend, the boy opens his cell phone and keeps pressing END to illuminate a path. The dirt is loose and sandy. As the boy tramps along, his feet sometimes sink, filling his sneakers.
“How much farther?” asks the nurse. She takes her shoes off and empties them.
The boy leads her to the smaller tree. The tree is stunted or dying. At the tree’s base, he hands her the phone and tells her to continue pushing buttons in his direction. He lifts a big rock and heaves it to the side. He paws through the dirt on which the rock sat until he unearths an old taco sauce jar. The boy stands up to show the nurse.
“All this money is mine,” he says, unscrewing the lid. “We’re saving it, but it’s mine.”
The nurse pats out the thick roll of cash and sniffs it, as if to confirm it is legitimate. “That’s a lot,” she says, without counting.
The boy takes out the fifty dollars the teller gave him and adds another layer to the roll. The phone blinks out. The boy and the nurse stand there in the dark, listening to each other breathe. A short train passes on the tracks which slice through the field.
When the train is gone, the boy says, “If you could go anywhere in the world, where would it be?”
The nurse takes two breaths. “The ocean,” she says. “I’ve never seen the ocean. I think I’d like to cut up a starfish just to watch what it would do.”
“I’ve never been to the ocean either,” the boy says. The nurse breathes two more times. “Maybe we could go sometime,” he says.
“Maybe,” the nurse says. From her blouse pocket, behind her children, she removes something. The boy holds it close to his face – a five-dollar bill. He puts this in the jar, and the jar in the ground.
Just after midnight, the nurse drops off the boy at a gas station neighboring the apartment complex. The mother is not home, though every light is on in the apartment. It is as if the mother has been kidnapped, as if the mother is missing. Occasionally on these date nights the mother never comes home but instead seems to reappear when the boy wakes up in the morning, like magic. But tonight, as he switches the lights off, the boy doesn’t think of this, he only thinks of the nurse’s contribution.
When he goes to brush his teeth he finds Smiley in the bathroom sink. Except Smiley is still and pale and looking rather peaked. The boy nudges Smiley, accidentally cracking him open. Or not Smiley, but Smiley’s exoskeleton, hollow, the pink pearl broken.
Smiley out there somewhere unidentifiable.
The next morning, the boy seems to wake into a dream. The apartment sounds motherless, stuffed with silence. The boy looks in the living-dining room, finds no one, then goes to the bathroom to see if Smiley has returned to the scene of his molting. Last night, the boy tucked Smiley’s exoskeleton in a toothpick box and tucked the toothpick box under his bed.
But the sink is empty and the counter is clear except for a white plastic stick with a plus sign on one end. The stick has a faint odor, like soggy cereal. When the boy checks the trash, he confirms the stick is a test. According to the box, the taker of this test is pregnant.
The boy carries the stick with him through the apartment. The mother’s bedroom is empty. He discovers her in the kitchen, staring out at the courtyard again. The roach half has slipped from the mousetrap onto the linoleum.
The mother doesn’t move but must see the flash of white, the test, in her peripheral vision. “It’s just like when it was you,” she says. “Knowing you were no bigger than a worm but feeling like you were taking over my whole body. Like I was just full of you.” The mother shifts her weight and narrows her eyes in the courtyard. The courtyard is empty. “I never threw up once.”
The boy imagines that space inside the mother: dark and warm; so loud with functions that the loudness sounds exactly like silence. That space that only belonged to him, that now belongs to someone else. Now the mother’s womb is like this apartment: people moving in and out. Except the boy can never go back to the mother’s womb, see what the last person has done to the place.
“That guy?” the boy asks. For the boy has never said the manager’s name.
“He’ll help,” the mother says. “I know he will. I just have to tell him.”
The boy feels nauseous and woozy. It is as if something has just begun to grow inside his own body. The thing expands and uncurls, pulsates, snakes up his throat and plunks its head on his tongue. If he opens his mouth, the thing will lunge at the mother.
The mother uncrosses the boy’s arms. She inspects the arms’ crooks, one of which is tinged yellow with a faded purple nucleus. “It’s been three days,” she says.
The boy showers and towels dry. He hangs his head over the bathroom sink but never vomits. The mother is still posted at the kitchen window when he finishes dressing. The boy asks her if she’s going to the clinic like that, in her gown.
The mother gives the boy a look like what-are-you-thinking. “I can’t give. What if the baby needs it?”
On the doorstep the boy finds three bales of mohair from South Dakota. He drags each one into the living-dining room by the thin brown rope tied around it. Particles drift off the bales into the sunlight, glowing like light bulb filaments. The mother plops down on a bale. She takes her phone out of a pocket in the gown and starts dialing. “Can you come over tomorrow night?” the boy hears her say wearily before he leaves.
At the clinic, the receptionist clamps a form in a clipboard for the boy before the boy even reaches her desk. Today the receptionist has drawn a reddish-brown circle, like lips, around her mouth. “Where’s your wife?” she asks.
“Wife?” The thing inside the boy twitches, then resettles in his stomach. “She’s my mother.”
“Same last name.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Because she’s my mother.”
Four people lie hooked up in the gift area wearing the same Smith Family Reunion T-shirt. One of them has scooted her lawn chair and equipment in the middle of the room so she can chat with two of her companions. The fourth person, a bald man, has a cap over his face, asleep. The nurse leads the boy to a station away from this group next to the refreshment nook.
“I swear,” the nurse says, “these veins,” as she inserts the needle in the boy’s unbruised arm. The nurse leans over the boy, dressed in teal scrubs, her children dangling: two freckled girls with pigtails and missing teeth, an ugly baby with an old man’s face.
Now there is no reason for the boy to stay with the mother. She will have another child, like these children, and it will comfort her, like the boy has for years, and in time this child can just as easily clean mohair and make donations. The government will send the mother a check to take care of it, to pay rent, and she will no longer need the boy or the boy’s money.
“I liked that field last night,” the nurse says. A line of blood glides back down from the device. “It’s fun knowing we have money buried.” The nurse jiggles her eyebrows. “Maybe we can go back there again. At night, you know.”
The boy is irritated. “When else? Night’s the only time we’re together. Like that.”
“What about right now?” The nurse points over the partition behind her. “We can go in the refreshment nook. It’ll be exciting.” She scans the room, a grin swelling her face. “Where’s Momma?”
The mother will have the manager to help her. She will no longer need the boy or the boy’s money. “She’s pregnant,” he says.
The nurse isn’t stunned. She reaches up and fingers the reservoir of plasma. “Momma’s hot dates caught up with her, I guess.”
“Let’s leave,” says the boy, straightening the tube over his arm. He sits upright, and the slats in the chair pinch his thigh. “Let’s leave and go to the ocean.”
“Go to the ocean? That’s a long way off!”
“I thought that’s where you wanted to go. What about that five dollars?”
“Right now I’ve only got a week of vacation. And Ken – what am I supposed to tell Ken?”
Three Smiths make their way to the refreshment nook, laughing and joking. The man is still asleep in the lawn chair, now disengaged from the equipment.
“I don’t mean just go for a week,” the boy says. “I thought maybe, like, for good. Maybe we could even live at the ocean.”
The nurse gazes down at the boy as though he suggested they leave here for hell to open an ice cream parlor. The boy knows she must be thinking of her children. The boy wants to tell her to screw the children. The boy wonders if this is what the father thought before the father left.
“Your kids, we could take them with us,” he says. “Right?”
The nurse doesn’t answer. She fiddles with the tube, the boy’s blood passing through her fingers. She stares at her thumb, appearing to indicate she’s considering.
“Just meet me tomorrow night,” the boy says. “At the tree.”
Someone gets shoved against a refreshment nook partition, knocking it out of position. A Smith snickers. A beep sounds above the boy’s head, and finally the nurse agrees to meet him while the manager meets the mother.
The mother wants the apartment to be perfect. It is seven-thirty the next day, and the boy and the mother are finishing the final touches. Final touches include spraying Windex in the air when the mother believes the apartment doesn’t smell clean enough. The apartment never smells clean enough. They have spent the day mopping and scrubbing, dusting their few pieces of furniture. They have also gotten caught up on all their mohair washing. Still wet, now they search for places to hide it: closets and cabinets, but mostly in the boy’s room where the manager is sure not to travel. The boy even hangs strands of it from four tacks on the wall that secure a poster of the Magna Carta above his mattress. The whitish curls drip, and drip, down his wall, and the wall seems to be crying.
The boy is not bitter in helping the mother prepare the apartment for the manager. The boy is not jealous. The boy sees each swipe of his rag, each transfer of their hair as one task closer to independence. Once the apartment is perfect, the mother will tell the manager, and the manager will care for the mother, and the mother will have the baby. The mother will have the baby, and the boy will be free.
The manager arrives early. The boy is still shoving mohair under his bed when he hears a short knock and then the manager’s voice in the living-dining room. The boy pushes the remaining mohair under the bed in one big clump, ramming the toothpick box against the baseboard. He grabs his backpack, crammed with clothes, in case he can convince the nurse to leave tonight.
At the door, the manager tips a nonexistent hat to the boy at the door. In the manager’s hands is a bouquet of roses and carnations. He wears a camel hair coat too hot even for the night and jeans creases.
The boy tilts his chin up to acknowledge the manager. They stand there facing one another in silence. The manager scratches along his hairline and says, “That’s one super mom you’ve got there,” motioning toward the mother. The mother grabs the flowers, wrapped in a cone of plastic, and makes big eyes at the boy, cueing his departure.
As the boy walks down the street he decides, if he leaves tonight, this is how he will remember the mother: standing beside that man, her arm linked in his, holding a bouquet of flowers. Her eyes wide, as if in shock, or terror, that she will marry the manager.
Small fireworks explode in the sky, one at a time. They pop, grow sparkling roots, crackle, and extinguish. The boy watches them and tries to remember if it’s a holiday. It isn’t. The boy turns on his flashlight, a long metal bar, navigating the field. Closer in, he shines it directly at the stunted tree; the nurse is nowhere to be seen. The boy drops his bag beside the rock marking the taco sauce jar. He sits at the foot of the tree, resting his back and head against the trunk. He waits. He stares at the road, waiting for the headlights of the Taurus. He gazes into the darkness, waiting for the nurse to emerge from night. A firework whistles through the air but never explodes. The boy hears something drop on the ground near his feet. He switches his flashlight back on and discovers a white ball marked with blue stars, fixed on a red stick. He can’t resist snapping off the brittle, blackened fuse.
The boy looks at his watch. The nurse is over an hour late. Often the nurse is late because she has to do dishes or a kid won’t sleep. The boy settles under the tree. He pulls inside his shirt and imagines being found there, asleep. He wonders what the nurse will do to wake him.
The boy dreams he is driving through the desert toward a peppermint, big as Mount Everest. Bald, the nurse sits in the passenger seat with a map in her lap, tracing a blue line with her finger. The boy doesn’t know where they are, but somehow he understands that the peppermint is their destination. Still he isn’t sure if they will eat the peppermint once they arrive, or camp at its base.
The boy stirs. The boy checks his watch again – two hours later. There is no sign of the nurse, and the boy figures she couldn’t get away. He huffs. He grabs a fistful of dirt and slings it. As long as he is here he decides to deposit the money he received the day before for his plasma. When the boy delivers the jar from its hole, however, he sees the jar is empty save half a piece of notebook paper.
If you’re reading this you will know the money is gone and so am I, said the piece of paper. Sorry! Ken and me have always wanted to go to Disney World and so do the kids. So I have took this money so we could go. Don’t be mad. I will pay you back every last dime of it and will understand if you want to bury it somewhere else next.
The jar rolls from the boys fingers back into the ground. He drops the note there, too, and doesn’t cover it. Everything inside his body seems to stop functioning: no sound, no movement. The boy stays squatted over the hole so long he loses feeling in his legs; the field sprouts pins into his feet.
The boy doesn’t bother to check the time before he goes back to the apartment. Outside it appears no one is home anyway – the streetlamps reflect like the face of ghosts against the dark windowpanes. The boy unlocks the door and fumbles along the wall for the light switch. The living-dining room illuminates, and the mother is seated on one end of the couch, an old overstuffed jalopy with scenes of ancient China printed on its upholstery. The mother says, “He’s gone,” as soon as the lights come on, as though this is the opening line of a play. “I told him, and he just left, like . . . like . . .”
The boy slumps on the other end of the couch. Across the room he sees another mousetrap carefully concealed behind the TV. Its arm is thrown, but the boy has no desire to see if the roach is Smiley. It is impossible to know if the roach is Smiley, to know if Smiley is alive or dead. On her way to Orlando, the boy imagines the nurse stopping at the beach. While the nurse sits in the sand holding the baby with one hand, sipping something fruity with the other, Ken and the girls wade into the ocean. They venture farther and farther and farther until their feet are kicking above the surface behind them. But then, one by one, the three of them are jerked under the water. The ocean, as far as the nurse can see, is stained red. She is so shocked that when she stands she drops the ugly baby, who hits a conch shell and splits his head.
This, or something equally tragic, could be happening to the nurse while the boy is trapped in the apartment with the mother. The boy wonders if it is just as wrong to wish such a thing upon someone who wronged him, or if it is only wrong if he tells someone, or only if it happens. Sometimes the boy wonders who wished his life to happen to him. Sometimes he thinks he wished his life upon himself. For the boy never truly believed he would leave the mother when he boarded the plane; the plane must have crashed because he never believed it would fly him away.
The mother looks at the boy. “We can’t get that plasma TV. We’re going to need the money – one way or the other.” The mother turns away and gazes straight ahead, like the boy, as though they are both staring at the same invisibly dazzling thing. “Whether I keep the baby, or not.”
The boy thinks they could sell it. Better than if the mother should kill it, for killing a thing implies it is worthless, and worthless, after all, is the same as priceless: in each case, no value can be determined. Selling the baby will only be a matter of getting a buyer to believe its life is neither of these two things, but something in the middle.
Justin Quarry’s short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in TriQuarterly, LIT, Fiction, Sou’wester, and The Southeast Review.