Armadillos Read online

  George twitched her nose and nodded, eyes glassy, grin rigid.

  Marjorie reached into an inside pocket of her jacket and pulled out a small bag of dope. She placed it on the coffee table. From another pocket she took some folded bank bills and tucked them into her mom’s hand.

  ‘That should do you until I get back,’ she said. ‘Don’t let Hank smoke all of it, y’hear?’

  ‘Oh, Marjorie. He’s a good man,’ said George.

  She lifted the dope from the table and began to crumble a little bit into papers.

  ‘Sure he is,’ Marjorie replied, picking bits of rubber from under her nails and flicking it on the floor. ‘The best.’

  George took three or four good long drags on her joint. Everything was focused around her face as she breathed in, lips pursed, eyes tightly closed. It wasn’t just her face that changed from rigid to relaxed; she sank into herself, looking a little bit the way my seat felt.

  The door to the trailer pulled open and an old guy aged around sixty came in.

  Weirdest walk I ever saw on a man. John Wayne to the power of a thousand. Marjorie told me later that Hank spent his whole life on a Harley, and as a result he couldn’t stand up straight. Take his bike away, he stayed in the exact same shape. Only time he came off the bike was when he was filling her up. He’d waddle in to pay for the gas like he was wearing a full diaper. True enough, it was the worst cowboy impersonation ever. Biker leathers, a long blond moustache and a red bandana around his head completed the look. He bent down to kiss George on the mouth and I swear I heard Marjorie growl.

  ‘Sweetheart, we have visitors.’ George waved vaguely in our direction before letting her arms flop at her sides. For a second, I thought he was going to come over. Marjorie had taken position behind the sofa so I was closest. If he laid one finger on me, I’d bite it off.

  ‘Good to see you, Marjorie.’ He sat down and helped himself to George’s papers and the dope.

  ‘That there is for Ma. Alright, Hank?’

  He sat back straight away, holding his hands up in defense as though she were about to punch him, even though a sofa and coffee table separated them.

  ‘Sure, Marjorie. Whatever you say.’

  ‘Don’t be silly now.’ George waved vaguely in the direction of the stuff on the table. ‘Go on, Hank. Marjorie don’t mean it.’

  There was a split second of tense silence, broken by the creak of leather when Hank flexed his arms beneath his biker jacket. He leaned forward with a sly smile on his face and a wink for Marjorie. ‘Just a small one, Marjorie. Couples gotta be on the same wavelength. You’ll find that out yourself one day when you find a man of your own.’

  ‘Oh, Hank.’ George giggled. ‘He don’t mean it, sweetheart.’

  ‘What I want a man for? I can smoke my dope all by myself.’

  ‘Oh, Marj,’ said George. ‘Relax, baby.’

  George took another toke and offered it to Marjorie, who shook her head.

  ‘It’s yours, Ma. For the pain.’ She said those words pointedly at Hank but he was already building the next joint.

  George looked at Marjorie, begging with her eyes not to say any more. Marjorie shrugged her shoulders and George sank back in her chair.

  ‘Do another for me, honey. Will you?’ she asked Hank.

  Hank patted her bare thigh. ‘Already on it, babe.’

  I wished the sofa would swallow me up. The overhead lights were on full and the glare seemed to exaggerate every expression, every look that passed between them. George pointed at me.

  ‘What you do to your hand there, honey?’

  She took me by surprise. I lifted my bandaged hand and my mouth fell open, though nothing came out.

  ‘She ran into a door, Ma,’ said Marj, dryly.

  ‘Translation: mind your own damn business,’ said Hank. ‘Nice way to speak to your mother.’

  ‘You got any family, Aggie?’ George smiled brightly, and kicked her little feet up and down in front of her like a kid on a fairground ride.

  ‘Uh, no. Not really.’

  ‘Not really, huh?’ said George, sadly. ‘Kids, huh, Hank? When they’re little, they sit on your lap. When they’re older, they sit on your heart.’

  ‘Aint that the truth, George. Aint that the truth.’ He patted her thigh, and shook his head in sorrow.

  Marjorie looked at me, eyes blazing, her mouth stretched tight. Her cheeks were starting to crowd her lips. When she was old, they’d hang lower than her jaw.

  ‘Hurry up with that toke, Hank, will you?’ George said. ‘I got an awful ache today.’

  Marjorie got up from the sofa arm and stepped over the coffee table on her way to the door, causing Hank’s papers to fly up and the tobacco to spill.

  ‘Aggie. Time to go.’

  She kissed her ma on the head before she left. I followed, and as I closed the door behind me I heard him cursing.

  ‘He’s an asshole,’ Marjorie spat out the window as we pulled away from the trailer park. I didn’t speak, fearful I’d say the wrong thing and bring her wrath down on me.

  ‘Smokes all her weed all the fucking time. It’s fucking medicinal for Ma. Medicinal. And he smokes it all. Such a fucking asshole.’

  She wasn’t shouting about it, just stating it all as fact.

  ‘For a week last month, she couldn’t get out of bed. A whole fucking week due to the pain in her joints. And where was he? At some fucking rally somewhere on his precious fucking bike.’

  ‘Your ma seems pretty stuck on him,’ I said, as the road disappeared beneath us faster and faster. We were passing the houses with kids’ toys but she was making like we were on the freeway. ‘You wanna maybe slow down, Marjorie?’

  She slammed the brake on and we shuddered to a halt. She turned to me with wide eyes full of worry.

  ‘Did you see that?’ she said.

  ‘No, what?’ I asked, but she was already out the car.

  I jumped out after her and walked behind the car. There, a few feet ahead, Marjorie was crouched over something lying by the side of the road. My instincts were screaming at me to get the hell out of there.

  ‘Did I hit it? Was it me, do you think? Aggie, do you think it was me?’

  I edged closer and saw it was just an armadillo with its back end squished. Marj looked up at me and the anxiety in her eyes crushed any joke I’d been about to make. I placed my hand on her shoulder.

  ‘I didn’t feel anything, Marjorie. I don’t think it was you.’

  She nodded back towards the car and told me to go open the trunk.

  ‘Do you see a blanket?’ she called. I rummaged among the junk until I found a real nice wool blanket tucked away at the back.

  ‘Bring it over,’ she said.

  I watched in disbelief as she bundled up that dead armadillo, wrapping it like a baby in finest wool, before carrying it to the car and laying it down.

  ‘We’ll bury him on the way back,’ she said.

  ‘Hell, Marjorie, don’t you know your skin can fall off from touching them varmints?’

  ‘Naw, you mean leprosy. You gotta be careful is all. You can catch a lot worse from humans.’

  ‘Aint that the truth.’

  She closed the trunk but she looked at me oddly, like maybe she’d never considered I’d had a life before winding up at the house. ‘What you mean by that?’

  I shook my head. Hadn’t meant to say it. I pulled open the passenger door but she caught my eye over the car roof.

  ‘You got a Hank in your life, too, huh?’

  ‘Hank’s nothing compared to my folks.’

  ‘He aint just a freeloader, Aggie.’

  Her words sat heavy in the small distance between us.

  ‘It gets so you recognize it,’ she said, ‘I missed it with Freak, I guess because it’s so damn hard to get past the fact she’s a sneaky little thief. But you? I saw it in you alright. Those cuts on your arms. It aint out of boredom, is it?’

  A noise came out of me. Something somewhere betwee
n a snigger and a sigh.

  ‘I don’t hear no mirth in that laugh, Aggie.’

  She’d got it so wrong.

  ‘Fuck off, Marj. You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  She was a bear of a woman, an ugly bear at that. Who’d do anything to her?

  ‘What, you think it could only happen to you? Think cos you’re pretty?’

  Shame prickled my cheeks, and my tongue felt over-large in my mouth, but a door had been opened, and we talked the whole way back, listening to honky-tonk at a low volume out of respect to our deceased passenger. I confessed the story of my whore mother, who ran away from my Bible-loving father, and my brothers who fought, and my sister who raised me.

  ‘Brothers, huh?’ said Marjorie at one point. ‘They single?’ She roared with a laughter I hadn’t known she possessed. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I aint right. I’m so fucking bad, man.’ But the laughter kept coming until she remembered the corpse in the trunk and clapped a hand over her mouth. I couldn’t not smile along. I didn’t bother to explain that Cy was a bastard and that we’d no clue where Ash was, that we’d woken one morning to find him gone. Jojo cried and I ran outside to see if he’d taken Jack King, but the boat was still there. My young mind still believed it would take us to Momma.

  We pulled over to bury the varmint beneath some trees in a public park. She did the whole thing herself.

  I never found out why Marj wanted me to come with her on that trip home, but I sure as hell began to see a whole other side to Beast Woman.

  17

  We got back to the house to find Freak and Ade playing cards by candlelight at the counter in the kitchen. Freak lit up like a firework when we walked in.

  ‘Hey, Marj,’ she said. ‘Ade and me are playing strip poker. Come sit with us a while.’

  ‘It’s normal poker,’ said Ade, with a look to Freak.

  ‘No, thanks,’ Marjorie scowled. ‘You want a sandwich, Aggie?’

  She took some bread out and inspected it before picking out a couple of moldy areas and spreading cream cheese across what was left. I told her I was all set for moldy sandwiches and Freak did her forced vomity laugh. I didn’t mean for it to be like that. I’d been making a joke but I could tell Marjorie felt foolish. I felt bad.

  ‘Where you been?’ Freak wanted to know. I hadn’t had a chance to tell her I was helping Marjorie out with her armadillos. Somehow I knew it wouldn’t go down too well. Marjorie seized her opportunity.

  ‘Me and Aggie’s been over seeing my ma. Just hanging out, you know.’

  Freak turned to me. I shrugged and nodded. Didn’t see why I should be feeling weird about it. I hardly saw anything of her these days. I’d have told her if I’d seen her.

  ‘Sweet,’ said Freak, looking back at the cards in her hand.

  Marjorie left her sandwich and moved closer to Ade. She bent down and in a low voice said right in his ear, ‘Ma said to say hi. She misses you.’

  I didn’t remember George saying anything like that, but Ade was interested now which I guess was the point. He put his cards face down on the counter and turned to us.

  ‘How’s George doing?’ he asked.

  Freak concentrated real hard on her hand.

  Marjorie shrugged. ‘Same old, Ade. How you doing?’

  ‘Uh, I need to speak to you actually,’ Ade replied. Freak’s head shot up faster than chilli through a hound dog.

  The faintest flicker of a smile passed over Marjorie’s face. ‘Anytime you need me, Ade. You know that.’

  Freak threw her cards down and stormed out the kitchen, banging into me as she went.

  ‘Reckon you should go see what’s up with Lil’ Miss Scarface, Ade,’ Marj suggested, mildly.

  He frowned in disapproval but did as he was told.

  ‘I’ll catch you later,’ he said, as he left. ‘It’s about what we were talking about earlier.’

  ‘Sure thing, Ade.’

  Marjorie returned to making her sandwich. ‘Sure you don’t want one, Aggie? Else this bread’s only good for trash.’

  ‘Nah, I’m good. Don’t throw it, though. It’ll do for ducks.’

  I took what was left and headed back to my room. Ade had asked me to take Freak out the next day. He thought she was sticking to the house too much. Said there was a balance to be struck between wandering the streets at night, and clinging to his shirt-tails through the day. Of course, Freak didn’t know about that conversation and I’d no intention of telling her, especially as Ade had given me thirty bucks to entertain her with. Not that Freak needed the money. I knew she had a big stash of rolled bills under a board in our room. I figured she was smart to keep that quiet. I figured I was smarter not to let on that I knew about it. She was lucky I was an honest person, though I’m sure she would have disagreed with that.

  Next day we were kicking around the streets downtown. Ade’s thirty bucks didn’t last long and soon we were stuck for something to do. Mid-afternoon Freak said she needed to visit the Sad Place to see Mr Dee about something. I thought maybe Ade would be so happy she was showing a bit of independence, he might give me another thirty bucks to take her out again sometime. We arranged to meet up later and I took a walk. The heat had sent everyone indoors. Only signs of life were the cars. You stayed cool in a car, as long as it didn’t go by the name of Oprah.

  Beneath my feet, sunk into the stone of the street, were the names of dead people. Born, raised and died in Dallas, now their names were part of the city forever. I liked that. It was proof they’d been here.

  Maybe I’d put one in for Momma. To Marilyn, with love from Aggie.

  It struck me then that my thought wasn’t real. I had no feelings. It was Jojo who made me love Momma. All the talk of how she read books and baked pies and sang songs. In my head was a big empty space where Momma should be, and beside it, like a misshapen jigsaw piece that just wouldn’t fit, stood the Disney momma Jojo had built for me. I’d try harder to love her. That was how I’d been trained, I thought, as my feet pressed down on all the names, on all the people who’d been loved enough to be remembered.

  I waited in the shade of an office block for the lights to change so I could cross the road. The only other person in sight was a tourist, a fact made obvious not only because they were out in the midday heat but also because they stood in the full glare of the sun while they waited for traffic to stop. Behind them were beautiful long shadows cast off by two-hundred-foot buildings. They’d catch on eventually but not before they turned lobster pink. Their problem, not mine.

  I crossed over and headed downhill to the park where there was plenty of shade. I approached a bench until I saw a pair of feet in black socks sticking out one end. Someone else who had nothing to do and nowhere to go. I got closer and saw a middle-aged black guy whose snores told the world he was unconscious. A couple of sleeping ducks kept guard on the ground in front of him. Some lookouts they turned out to be.

  I walked to the bridge over the river. Nothing much of anything to look at. Behind me, a phlegmy cough. The guy on the bench stood up, wandered over to a tree and spat up the contents of his lungs. He kicked dust over the top, removed his shirt and sat back down again. If he saw me, he didn’t care.

  Something crashed in the trees next to me, and I jumped clean out my skin.

  ‘Y’alright, honey?’ called the guy on the bench.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I answered back, feeling ridiculous.

  Sitting under a tree big enough to shade a circus, I looked out. The old guy on the bench slumped like he was drunk but I knew it was just the heat. It made the whole day drunk. Even the air swayed and trembled under the weight of the sun. Birds sang. High up in the dark bushy trees they could afford to be cocky. Their chatter mixed with the sound of distant construction, and when a plane flew low overhead they didn’t budge from their shelter. They just sang even louder. I liked that.

  Birds slowly gathered around me and I threw Marjorie’s moldy bread for them. One duck in particular, its brown eyes
framed in a red face, got up real close. Ignoring the bread I put down, it tipped its head to the side and stared at me till I blinked and looked away. I’d never lost a stare-out with a duck before. A warm wind blew over. The duck came closer and closer. It must have learned to trust humans. Humans tend not to hurt ducks. Sure, they’ll eat them, but they won’t kick them or anything like that. Just feed them bread and crumbs. More than they’ll do for each other in a lot of cases.

  More ducks arrived and settled down beside me. One real ugly one, with bumpy red eyebrows and a black face, fussed and gasped like it needed water.

  ‘Stupid duck,’ I said. ‘See? There’s a whole river right there. Go get a drink, stupid duck.’

  It waddled right over and sat down at my feet, gasping the whole time. Hard to feel sorry for something so ugly and stupid. Unless you’re Marjorie, I thought. And I remembered Jojo shooting that hog. Well, I wasn’t Marjorie and I wasn’t Jojo. I stamped my foot and it flapped its wings. I stamped again and it got up. I stamped and chased it all the way to the river, but when it realized what I’d done, it stopped and tried to run back through my legs. We did a kind of dance and eventually I won. It dropped in with a splash and dipped its head up and down in the rolling water. I’d never seen a happy duck before and before I knew it, I was laughing.

  I threw the last of the bread in and turned around, taking in the whole park. Squirrels jumped between trees and the occasional passing cyclist reminded me there was still enjoyment to be had from life. Enjoyment that didn’t involve stealing from folks. I straightened the bandage around my wrist. I wasn’t looking forward to getting back to work.

  Freak was in a good mood when she came back. Mr Dee had slipped her some dough.

  ‘He’s kind of like an uncle to me,’ she said, spreading the money out and fanning herself.

  Money didn’t excite me the way it did Freak. For me it was a tool. It was just what you needed to get by.

  ‘What you gonna do with that?’ I asked.

  ‘I got plans. Confidential.’

  ‘You could buy something for Tawanna’s baby.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ she laughed. ‘But here, you can have this.’