take that bubble bath with you when you wanted? Because I was reading how Hindu people don’t take baths, they don’t want to just sit there in their own wet dirt.”
“Nope,” says Tahnee, and Julie knows that is all Tahnee is going to say.
The heat gets to them quickly. Tahnee’s pace slows to a trudge as they walk down the block. Some days out here when the temperature approaches a hundred and twenty, the asphalt melts. The houses are close together, no grass or trees grow and many of the front yards have been concreted over – everyone knows what the development has been built upon, that is why no one can ever sell their house; though one or two have been abandoned by the occupants; these are boarded up.
There is no sidewalk in this neighborhood but at the end of the dead-end street is a large field, bigger than a football field, with short dead grass and a large sign that says, COMMUNITY PLAYING FIELD COURTESY BERMESE PYTHION TECH. The field is divided in the center by a narrow trough, pencil wide, filled with an oozing black substance that makes any organized sport impossible; sooner or later some kid always gets a foot caught in that… stuff, which can melt a sneaker in a minute and a half. It’s leakage from the swamp. Beyond the field is the marshland.
The kids have built a pathway: you leap from the door of a dishwasher to the hood from a car, to a sinking tire onto an old board. In the bubbly pitch in between, the garbage belches and viscous material, the consistency and color of melted bubblegum, rises and sinks. A quarter of a mile out beyond the field, a half a mile or less from the eight-lane highway, behind some ten-foot tall weeds, is the clubhouse-shack.
Julie doesn’t particularly like steeting. She was eight when Tahnee first commanded her to inhale from a jar of Blixsteetgluf. The battery-acid coolness of the initial inhalation, the sensation of brain-matter plunged into dry ice; the lingering taste of… fermented milk and something blue and chemical… but then there are the two or three minutes that are – if not fantastic, the way Tahnee seems to find it – at least a sort of temporary delicate explosion: gigantic butterfly wings made of glass appear from nowhere and break.
What she hates is the way her tongue gets fat – this happens to everybody – and so she has to say “da” instead of “the”, you can’t say “th” which means that everybody knows what you’ve been doing – and the after, that horrible stench that lingers for hours on her skin and in her mouth, and the sense that she can’t hear. Also, she almost always gets the skeeves, real bad.
If she had a choice, Julie wouldn’t do it at all.
Oh boy, though, it is fun for Tahnee! She can just feel that icy stuff hit the brain and la-di-da-di-dim, that big gray ball of scrambled eggs up there just starting to… curdle around the edges; think of Little Miss Muffet screaming and pissing on that tuffet, think of eggs hitting the sidewalk, think of wham! A cleaver cutting right through the top of the head, everything kinda tumbling: who needs brains anyway, who was going to put them to any use?
Tahnee can always look up whatever she wants on the computer: let’s say she has to know about a pop star having sex with, say, a movie star, how they went about it, doggy fashion or… she can look it up online and see it there, right in front of her!
And it is more fun to watch if her cortex is a little bit frazzled, blast the mushy stuff right out of existence, life is short! Tahnee knows she is going places, she is going right to the top, though she doesn’t know yet exactly how; and later, perhaps – if she hasn’t outgrown him – she’ll collect Locu and have him as her little slave, that is, if she hasn’t gotten tired of him. For the moment, he has to be punished; it was his idea to come by the other night and now not only is she in trouble with Mom, Locu is grounded.
While Tahnee inhales, Julie is just coming out of that initial polar land into a place that is even nastier, with her edges thawing like a plate of frozen cottage cheese in the microwave. She hears something behind the shack. Someone is out there.
Over the years the shack (or shak) has gotten more tilted; it’s listing on its own petard, askew. The place is jammed with discarded mattresses, a greasy grill atop a charred hibachi where sometimes a kid will barbecue a Tundertube Pop made from that extruded tasty paste that is never so good as when it is cooked outdoors. “Did you hear dat?” says Julie who is now in the state they call trapped-in-ice. “I’m scared, get a stick, Tahnee!”
“I don’t know,” Tahnee says. “I didn’t hear anyding, Julie.”
“You didn’t hear dat?”
“Maybe. You getting da skeeves again, Julie.” More noise. Now she’s got the skeeves coming on, too. “Locu, is dat you? Cut it out, you’ve pulled dat stupid trick too many times. It’s not funny.”
Locu has a way of hiding in some cubbyhole or up on the platform where there is another mattress and jumping out to scare them. “Please Tahnee. I’m scared.”
“Whatever.” Red-eyed, frozen-custard head, Tahnee goes out to look. Around the back someone (it had to have been Mason, the local Daply’s Urge kid) has wiped his ass with an old t-shirt and left the used rag next to the piled coil. “Watch where you step,” someone says. “What a dump!”
Weird man, Tahnee thinks; he has the most peculiar skin, translucent, almost greenish beads of sweat on an oddly flat nose yet all in all not unattractive – those slightly bulging eyes, luminous and darkly pellucid. Too bad about the stupid hair, kind of greenish algae-colored – what the heck had he been thinking? He has a strange ominous presence, kind of cool, even cold. Maybe he’d been in jail? It’s only when she’s high that Tahnee has such complicated thoughts. “Who you?” Tahnee says, bleary-eyed.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you, nackets,” he says. “I’m not dangerous.” He grins.
Tahnee grins back – he’s mesmerizing! – then curls her lip. Nackets? Who talks that way any more? This guy must be ancient, forty years old or something! “What are you, some kind a poncidee?”
“I came out to do a little target practice.” He has some kind of gun, she doesn’t know anything about guns; a big plastic gun.
“Keko desu,” says Tahnee to Julie as she peeks out from the shack. “Ck, as bu?”
“Who’s that?”
“Aw, dat’s Sissy.”
“Yeah? Sissy want to try it?”
Julie is scared. Julie has been warned against rapists, serial killers, pimps and strangers. But when she looks at him and he looks back at her she is overcome with a shyness unlike any other she has experienced. Oh! The air starts to vibrate. She can’t stop staring at him. He doesn’t move. Tahnee starts to giggle loudly. They resemble cartoon characters complete with lights and bells going off all around them. Julie is still frightened but she says, “Yes, I would like to try!” surprising herself. At school that is the one physical activity she is good at, in Homeland Security Defense, Self-Defense, WEM and Product Testing, she has amazing aim, it is practically the only thing that had saved her from flunking out of gym. She has never seen this type of weapon before, but Julie bets she will surprise the hell out of him, like a character in a movie, bam bam bam.
“Neat,” Julie says, trembling slightly. “What do we shoot at?”
“Come outside and I’ll show you. What’s your name, sister?”
“Julie.”
“I’m Cliffort Manwaring-Troutwig. Old baseball family. Unfortunately, I wasn’t cut out for the game, not with these hands. Worse than a foghorn for reminding me.”
He holds up his hands. It is true, there are webs between each finger, connecting thumb to index finger, index to middle and so on. Julie winces. “You kids live around here?” he asks.
“Yeah, down de block. Dis is our clubhouse.”
Manwaring-Troutwig