JOYELLE MCSWEENEY
2 CHAPTERS (from Nylund, the Sarcographer)
Chapter 9
When I was a child she was a child always right in front of me in a yellow sundress with orange and pink that softened and grew more sincerely botanical all over her as she grew up through it, her sharp knees poking out and her arms bent up around her head to fit in the frame. But when I grew up too I saw her only sideways, then through the few hazy centimeters between my eye and glasses. Daisy putting on ugly orange lipstick in the flipdown mirror of Big Cousin’s car, and then pulling out the crumped map from under her and blotting it, leaving loud orange kissmarks across the faded flanks of the tristate. When she was driving it was the day that got the full view of her, and her hair all winging out around her in scrolling downdrafts and letters that were ugly and beautiful like child’s play. Then I would look forward too at the road and wonder what it was seeing of me through the glass. Daisy and me had the same curls and my hair could be long—it could snarl up into pagodas or ziggurats or be soaped up into shark fins and maybe the road was right now looking at me and trying to see the way ground water would leave it for estuaries and runoffs or maybe read its own future, its own veined self splitting over the scuttling back horizon.
This was when Big Cousin had the night shift and would sleep drunk through the day. At first we’d try all manner of stealth, rolling the car down the lawn to the street before starting it, but the morning Daisy threw a coffee cup at the exhaust hood over the stove and the impact crashed a fry pan to the floor, and there was no response from Big Cousin’s room, was the day she marched out there in her plastic shoes and started the car right outside his window. I slid into the seat next to her and we drove out side by side along the diamondflecked, morning-lit lanes of truancy.
I need some coffee.
You threw yours at the wall!
That’s what I mean, Nylund. I need some coffee.
Don’t act so grownup.
Who’s driving?
Something about the beginning of adventures made us fractious rather than thrilled. It should have felt like a sheet’s slow light-filled rise from the line before dropping back down straight again, but instead it started slow like a headache.
And I need a smoke.
We’ll get caught.
He smokes.
Whatever.
How much money do you have with you?
Back at the house.
Jeez, Nylund!
Well why’d you leave so fast?
Daisy had no money because what she got she would spend immediately on whatever had been catching her eye at Woolworth all that week. The smallness of her wants were like the sleek little garden snakes hiding in the leafpiles and sandboxes that might grip against but mostly slide off of your bare arm. Near, real but dissolving. Soon becoming part of everything else.
Now she brought the car to a much protesting halt. There was noone in sight on the gravel road which had deep runoff ditches for shoulders and then the fields rising on both sides of it. First she reversed the car pointlessly and smokily for some twenty yards. Then she turned the car hard to the left and our first wheel made the first stutter over the ditch. I watched the high hard line of the brown field tilt as if from a sudden change of disposition. Then she threw the gear back and wrenched it hard the other way and we were pointed mostly in the right direction though canted off now towards the other shoulder, our back tire testing the decent. She sped us back to our own lane and our own grey house was still sitting there like a grey cake waiting to be remembered.
Now go in and get it.
I went into the quiet house and there was nothing to notice. There was a little dish on the bureau and mostly change on it and some half pulled red tickets from the fair last year. I thought there was some money in the drawer among the socks and I fished around till I felt the paper and I did. I shoved it all in my jeans pocket. I came back out blinking into the sunlight and settled into the car next to Daisy again and we started over.
In the gravel lot outside the Bait N Gas Daisy made me dig it all out of my pocket and hand it crumpled into her hand. I waited in the car. She dallied a pretty long time and then she came out with a plastic bag heavy with provisions, a tabloid sticking out the top. She handed it to me without a word and we drove off again, taking a right and heading nowhere in particular till we just stopped right in the road. We climbed out and over the couple feet of mud and up the quick rising side of the hill. We sat against the fence, my jeans legs getting wet. We could look down at the rusty roof of Big Cousin’s car and at the hill beyond it identical to the one we were sitting on, but noone sitting on it. The blue sky rose above it with a blank expression. Daisy smoked and we split the orange soda. We looked at the glossy pictures in the tabloid and Daisy read the stories in a serious voice. There was other stuff in the bag, bubble tape, some trading cards for a game we hadn’t heard of, beef jerky. I asked Daisy how she paid for all this stuff and she said they just let her have it, they were nice.
You stole it.
They were nice. They let me have it.
You stole it.
Nylund, who cares. Who cares about it.
I opened the packet of trading cards and lifted out the dry, powdery stick of gum. I put it in my mouth, and it tasted awful. I dumped in some orange soda, which helped, but after a few seconds I just spat the whole thing out. There were five cards in the little packet, with cartoon robot drawings on the front. One was a female cartoon robot with a narrow socket waist where the two halves of her machine body met and a little bikini stretched over that. That’s you, I said, holding it up for her. She looked at it, then brought her thumb and index finger close to it and flicked it away. I held up each of the cards in turn and she flicked them away, over my shoulder and between the white rungs of the fence. They must have settled in the turned earth behind me. Now we were just looking at each other. An earth burial for the robots. Diet of worms. I had a bad taste in my mouth. The vein-hued and the colorless grubs rotoring the soil to get at the cardboard instincts. Wrong stuff in my wiring. Gummed paper guts. Play-brite vinyl sheathing my still copper blood.
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