Bones & All Page 8

  How could I? How could I be so stupid?

  It made sense, of course, from Mama’s point of view. I wouldn’t have needed more than a hundred dollars to get me from Cincinnati to Sandhorn. I’d wasted most of it going in the opposite direction.

  I lugged my rucksack into a filthy restroom, locked myself in the last stall, and cried. I was nearly penniless and definitely homeless. Why hadn’t I taken Sully up on his offer? Why hadn’t I listened?

  I wore myself out, then emerged from the restroom with stinging eyes but a fresh sense of purpose. I’d get to Sandhorn the way any broke person would: by sticking out my thumb.

  Out on the street, I asked the nicest-looking taxi driver I could find how best to hitch a ride to Minnesota. “I’d go up the street to the college,” he said, pointing the way. “Good time to find a lift, with all the students going home for the summer.”

  After twenty minutes I came to the edge of the college campus, with tidy brick sidewalks and a bright green lawn beyond the open gate. There were students all over the place: walking from one hall to another, reading on park benches, and playing Frisbee. I fished a piece of cardboard out of a trash bin and wrote NEED A RIDE TO MINNESOTA. Then I sat down to wait. I tried to read, but the words danced, rearranging themselves on the page. Eventually I closed my book and thought of my dad and how we’d spend our first weekend together painting the walls in my new bedroom. Lavender or teal?

  An hour later a shadow fell across my lap. “I’m driving home to Minneapolis,” the girl said. “Can you help pay for gas?” She was tall and tanned and wearing a T-shirt that said MISSOURI STATE VOLLEYBALL.

  I nodded, uncrossed my legs, and, wobbling a little, got to my feet.

  “Cool,” she said. “You’re lucky, I was on my way out.”

  Her name was Samantha, and she wasn’t interested in getting chummy, which was just as well. Like I said, I’d never had a girl friend.

  We stopped for gas somewhere in Iowa, and when Samantha got back in the car she said, “It was twenty bucks. Can you give me ten?”

  “I’ve only got fifteen dollars left.”

  “I hate to break it to you, but fifteen bucks isn’t going to get you very far anyway. What are you going to do once you get to Minneapolis?”

  “I’ll just find another ride to Sandhorn.”

  Samantha gave me a funny look, then she started the engine and we got back onto the highway. I took out a five-dollar bill and tucked it in the ashtray, where she kept the spare change, but she didn’t say anything. I’d told her I would help pay for gas, and it would have been mean of me to go back on it, even if she could have been nicer.

  An hour later I told her I had to go to the bathroom, and she seemed annoyed. “You couldn’t have gone when we stopped for gas?”

  “I didn’t have to go then.”

  We drove on in silence for a couple more miles, but when we passed a sign for Walmart she took the exit and pulled into the parking lot.

  “Thanks,” I said, and ran inside.

  When I came out again I found my rucksack in an empty parking space. I couldn’t believe it. I just stood there awhile staring at where her car had been. What was the point of giving her gas money if she was only going to leave me in the middle of nowhere?

  I took out my wallet and counted my money again. Ten bucks and a smattering of dimes and quarters. The thought of hitching another ride made me want to lock myself back in the restroom and never come out.

  Wait a minute, I thought. This wasn’t my fault. What she’d done made no sense. Why offer me a ride and then turn me out?

  Maybe she’d smelled it on me. None of the girls at school had ever liked me either.

  I tried to take a deep breath and think of what I should do next. But I didn’t want to do anything next. I didn’t want to be here—I didn’t want to be anywhere.

  I pressed my fists to my eyes, and for a few minutes I forgot the world. I couldn’t even think clearly enough to wish again that I’d gone with Sully. I didn’t have any tissues so I wiped my cheeks and nose with the sleeve of my T-shirt, and all the while people were walking past me into the store. Some tried not to look at me, and others stared at me like I had three heads. I looked up at one man in a Cubs jersey. He turned as red as the logo on his shirt and hurried through the automatic doors.

  Suddenly I thought of my mother, crying her heart out over the salad bowl in a kitchen I’d never see the inside of. I got up, dusted the grit off the backside of my jeans, and picked up my rucksack.

  The gust of refrigerated air as I walked through the automatic doors almost dried my cheeks. A Walmart is a city unto itself, every department its own neighborhood, blue shopping carts gliding between them like cars. You could go for miles under those cold fluorescent lights, past the lawnmowers and paint chips and crib sets and lipstick displays. You could even sleep here, in theory anyway, on beds heaped with too many throw pillows.

  In the cafeteria I stood at the long glass counter and surveyed my options: shrink-wrapped tuna fish on Wonder Bread; a sausage patty on an English muffin; and under a heating lamp, a red and white paper boat of macaroni and cheese dried to an orange crust on top. If I was going to spend half my remaining cash on food tonight, I wouldn’t drop it here.

  Candy. If I could only have a Snickers bar, I could forget all this. For a minute and a half I could pretend I was normal.

  I rounded the corner of the candy section and stopped short. There was a man in his underwear teetering up the aisle. I’ve seen all kinds of weirdos at Walmart, and in the summer there are always men heading for the refrigerated section in their swimming trunks and flip-flops, but this guy was a whole new species.

  Swimming trunks and cowboy boots would have been ridiculous enough, but he was wearing cowboy boots, a Stetson, a wifebeater, and a pair of tatty old boxer shorts you could kind of see through. There were long brown stains beneath the arms of his undershirt, like he’d drunk so much beer he’d begun to sweat it.

  Maybe if he’d been old and drunk off his rocker the sight of him would’ve just been sad, but he was too young and too sober not to be totally creepy. He swung his basket as he walked—if walked was the word—and muttered to himself. “I don’t gotta take this shit. I’m sick an’ tired a’ you blamin’ me for everything, woman. I’m gonna show you, oh boy, am I gonna show you, woman.”

  A recorded message came on the loudspeaker as the drunk man ranted to himself. “Walmart Value of the Day! Family-size bottles of Tide detergent are buy one, get one free, for a limited time only!”

  He should take advantage of that one. Behind me a woman with a shopping cart turned into the aisle, and as she passed me I saw her catch sight of the drunken cowboy and freeze. No, I could almost hear her thinking. It’s too late to turn around. He’d already seen her. So she moved down the aisle, cautiously, glancing up only to make sure she wasn’t going to run into him with her cart.

  But that was enough. “What’choo lookin’ at?” he called to her. Well, she certainly wasn’t going to say A drunken moron, so she didn’t say anything. He swung his head around and stared at her with glassy eyes. “I saaaaaaaid, what’choo lookin’ at, bitch?”

  She froze, clenching the handlebar of her shopping cart with pale knuckles. She looked back at me, and I tried to smile sympathetically. We both glanced up and down the aisle, but no one in a blue polo shirt was coming to escort him out. It was too quiet beneath the elevator music on the loudspeaker, as if all the Walmart employees had gone on their dinner break at the same time.

  “What, you deaf, bitch?” the drunk guy was shouting. “Hear this, you dumb ho?”

  “Hey!” Now someone else was striding down the aisle behind me. He passed me and stood in front of the woman’s shopping cart. He had tousled dirty blond hair and was wearing a green baseball jersey, jeans, and work boots. “You can’t talk to a lady like that. You’re out of control, pal.”

  “Pal!” the cowboy scoffed. “I ain’t your pal.” There was spittle in the
corners of his mouth. Yup. Rabid.

  From the back I could tell the guy in the green jersey was older than I was—eighteen, maybe twenty. He gave the woman a look over his shoulder. Mouthing “Thanks,” she turned and wheeled her cart out of the aisle. I should have left too, but you know how it is when somebody’s behaving badly in public. You’re riveted to the spot just waiting to see what will happen next.

  The drunken cowboy reached for the boy in green, but he neatly ducked out of the way. “Now you listen here, you dumb-ass pretty-boy son of a bitch,” the cowboy yelled, making another grab for the boy’s shirt, “you ain’t got no right to tell me what to do.”

  The boy turned his head and looked at me then, and a funny feeling ran clear through me. If he felt it too, he didn’t let on. He turned back to the drunk guy and said, so calmly it gave me goose bumps, “You’re right. But either way, I think we should take it outside.” Without another glance at me he walked toward the back of the store, which struck me as odd, but the cowboy probably couldn’t think that clearly even when he was sober. He stumbled after the boy in green, dropping his basket on the floor, but then he doubled back and picked up a six-pack of beer before staggering out of the aisle. I peeked in the overturned basket: beef jerky and a jumbo bag of Milky Way bars. A can of baked beans rolled out onto the white linoleum.

  For a while I wandered through the aisles—garden tools, pet food, cosmetics—trying to calm down after what I’d seen, not just the crazy drunken cowboy but the boy in the green jersey too. I still felt weird, like when I found Mrs. Harmon and the floor fell away from my feet.

  A mother and daughter were poring over the Maybelline display. “Here, how about this one,” the woman said, handing her daughter a compact of pale blue eye shadow. “That’ll go good with your eyes.” The girl didn’t look old enough to be wearing makeup. At least, Mama wouldn’t have thought so.

  I went back to the canned goods aisle, picked up a can of chickpeas, and put it down again. What was wrong with me? I needed to eat, and making a decision shouldn’t require a spreadsheet. It wasn’t like having ten bucks left would actually do me any good if I held on to it, like it could keep me fed beyond a couple of highway diner meals.

  I didn’t have to spend it. I’d never shoplifted before, and as I weighed the prospect I temporarily lost my appetite. I didn’t want to be that kind of person, and anyway I wasn’t hungry enough to shoplift.

  That’s true, I thought. But I will be eventually.

  A can of chickpeas, such a stupid thing to steal—it only cost fifty-nine cents—but I figured taking something cheaper wasn’t quite as wrong. There was no one else in the aisle. I stuffed the can into my rucksack and walked out of the canned goods section as casually as I could.

  It would have been a mistake to leave the store right away, so I forced myself to keep wandering. I turned the corner into the stationery aisle, looked over a shelf of three-subject notebooks, and noticed something out of place: a shrink-wrapped sandwich. White bread, tuna salad, a colorless leaf of iceberg lettuce peeking out. It was like it had Take me, you might as well written on it in big red letters. I picked it up and stuffed it in with the chickpeas. I didn’t even want the stupid sandwich, but it would fill me up and no one else would have bought it anyway.

  And then, before I realized it, I was back in the candy aisle. There was nobody here now, and the drunken cowboy’s shopping basket was still tipped over on the floor. I jumped when the next Walmart special came chirping out of nowhere: “Get ready for the best Memorial Day ever with a brand-new Weber grill, fifty dollars off for a limited time only! Grill those burgers in style!”

  I headed back to the front of the store, past the cafeteria and the checkout aisles and the lawnmower and patio furniture displays. I thought about the drunken cowboy and the boy in green. I’ve been to a hundred Walmarts, and there’s never an exit in the back.

  I passed through the automatic doors and sighed. No alarm went off and nobody came running after me. I sat down on the curb past the shopping carts, but I didn’t take out the sandwich. I wasn’t all that hungry now that I actually had something to eat.

  A fluorescent bulb flickered in the twilight. I heard the automatic doors open and close, and a shadow fell across my lap for the second time that day. I glanced up and saw a skinny boy in a blue polo shirt standing at the curb a few feet away from me. He worked here. “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey.” Man, I thought, his acne is really bad. I turned back to my sneakers. I hate it when there’s something wrong with somebody and you end up thinking of them as the girl or boy with the problem, as if the hundred extra pounds or the lazy eye is the only important thing there is to know about them.

  The boy pulled out a pack of cigarettes and stuck one between his lips. “You got a can opener in your purse?”

  My heart began to thud. “What?”

  “That tin of beans.” He struck a match and lit the cigarette, and for a second it made him seem older. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen. He had the biggest Adam’s apple I’d ever seen. I didn’t say anything. “It’s a strange thing to steal,” he went on. “Usually girls take lipstick or nail polish.”

  “You were watching me?”

  “I didn’t see you do it. I just noticed the can peeking out of your bag as you were walking out.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “If you have to tell your boss, I understand. I wouldn’t want you to lose your job.”

  The boy shrugged. “My boss steals shit all the time. Especially stuff from the electronics department. We’re supposed to send the floor models back after a while, but sometimes he’ll tell the home office they’re damaged so he can keep them. He must have a TV in every room in his house by now. Bathrooms too.”

  “That’s crazy,” I said.

  “Lots of people steal and never get caught.” He looked me in the eye as he took a drag on the cigarette. “I don’t see why you should.”

  I might as well tell him about the tuna. “I took this too.” I drew the sandwich out of my bag.

  “Probably past its sell-by date.” He shrugged again. “Doesn’t count as stealing if it was going in the Dumpster.”

  “Oh.” I pulled off the cellophane and offered him half, then felt stupid for doing it.

  “Nah,” he said. “Thanks though. My name’s Andy. What’s yours?”

  “Maren.”

  “That’s a nice name. I’ve never heard it before.”

  “Yeah,” I said between bites of tuna fish. “Usually it’s Karen.”

  “It’s nicer than Karen.”

  “Thanks.” I watched Andy take a puff on the cigarette and exhale through his nose. “You shouldn’t smoke.” Then I laughed. Me, calling out somebody else’s vice!

  He gave me a funny look. “Are you still hungry?”

  I shook my head.

  “Yeah, you are. You look like you haven’t had much to eat lately.”

  “It lasts longer if you don’t eat as much.”

  “Money, you mean?”

  I nodded, and he paused. “Listen—I get off in an hour. Do you want to stick around?”

  I nodded again. Andy was nice, and it wasn’t like I had anyplace else to go. Maybe he had a couch I could sleep on. In my head a little voice said, Watch it.

  He stamped out his cigarette, and I followed him back into the store. The can of chickpeas was burning a hole in my bag. I was amazed nobody took any notice of me.

  Andy pulled out a pack of cinnamon gum and offered me a stick. “No, thanks,” I said. Mama had never let me chew gum.

  “I’m in receiving,” he said, “so I’m usually in the back. I’ll meet you by the TVs at nine, okay?” I nodded, and he disappeared through the swinging doors into the storage room.

  I went to the home furnishings department and hid my bag under the dust ruffle on one of the show beds, and then walked to the canned goods aisle to return the chickpeas. I went through all the aisles of toys, watching kids beg for Pokémon cards or Spice Gi
rls dolls from their parents. I passed by the little girls saying “Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease,” and everybody looked straight through me. It felt good to pretend I was invisible.

  I wandered back to the electronics section. It was time for the nightly news, and President Clinton’s face was on every television on the wall. Someday all these TVs would belong to Andy’s boss. There was still half an hour left before Andy got off work, but I kept watching because I was tired of going up and down the aisles looking at all the things I couldn’t buy.

  They showed a piece of old footage, from the whole impeachment thing earlier that year. “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” said the president.

  “It’s one thing to tell lies,” I heard someone beside me say. “It’s something else to do it on national television.” It was the other guy from the candy aisle—the boy in green.

  “Yeah.” (Why couldn’t I think of a better reply?)

  “You from around here?”

  “No. You?”

  “No.” He didn’t say any more after that, so we just stood there for a while, in silence, watching the wall of TVs. Monica Lewinsky had hired new lawyers.

  Someone tapped me on the shoulder, and I turned around. Andy was carrying a plastic bag. “Ready?”

  “See you later,” I said to the boy in green. I just wanted him to turn around and look at me, but he didn’t take his eyes off the TV screen as I went by behind him. It seemed like he was trying to act like he didn’t care. “See ya,” he said.

  Something nagged at me as I turned the corner out of the electronics section. That hat … He hadn’t had a hat on before. And now he was wearing a Stetson.

  Before we left I went back to the bedding department for my rucksack. I walked a few steps behind Andy to the far end of the parking lot, to a gold Chevy Nova loaded with bumper stickers. MEAN PEOPLE SUCK. FOREVER GRATEFUL, FOREVER DEAD. WHEN I GET MY POWERS BACK, YOU WILL ALL GROVEL BEFORE ME.

  He unlocked the passenger’s-side door first and handed me the bag. “I’m not going to take you anywhere,” he said. “Not unless you want me to. I just thought we could sit for a while and you could eat and we could talk.”