Dani made me take the empty beer bottles with me. When the knock came, they were sitting in a plastic bag right there on our kitchen table. I should of tossed them in the grass on the bike ride home, but A) I was paranoid someone would see me and tell my mom or the police, and B) that’s littering. I was still trying to think how I could dump them before my mom got back where there’d be zero chance of getting caught.
A decent breeze was blowing outside, so I’d left open the front and kitchen doors. Our window AC sucked rather than blew. It was a clear shot from the front door, down the hallway to the kitchen, and out the back door beside the sink, so I saw right away who it was. I thought about jumping over the breakfast bar that separated the kitchen from the living room, but it was too late. I’d been spotted.
“Your mama leave a package for me, cornflake?” Hayes asked through the screen door. He tapped again at the wooden frame with the Lucite cane he sometimes had a need for. He was the cutest of my mom’s boyfriends, I’ll give him that: short brown hair gelled up in spikes and a face like an oversexed soap opera villain. He must of done lots of sit-ups each morning because the times I saw him with his shirt off, his belly looked flat and tight and tan. On that day, however, he looked like the dog’s dirty ass. When I let him in, he took off his sunglasses and his eyes were half hidden by puffy, greenish skin. His feet were bare and moist and blackened. Wherever he walked, he left behind gray moisture prints.
“I don’t think she did, hoss,” I said. I talked through my teeth, so he wouldn’t smell the beer on my breath. I’d had four to Dani’s two.
“Are you positive?” Hayes did a jittery little dance in the kitchen doorway. He lifted his arms and sent out whiffs of nastiness that smelled like the rotty juice that sometimes collects at the bottom of the fridge’s produce drawer.
“If she did, she didn’t tell me about it,” I said, finding myself unconsciously imitating his weird jitter dance.
“I’m just going to go back and have me a look.” He pushed past me before I had a chance to answer and kind of loped through the kitchen, favoring his short leg and wincing each time he took a step. I watched from the doorway and held my breath. He knocked over the sack of bottles on the kitchen table I’d tried to hide with newspaper, and I thought, Oh shit, now I’m doomed, but he didn’t seem to notice or care. Hayes spent a few minutes rummaging about in the kitchen cabinets, before giving up to stumble through the living room, bumping into the shelves that held my mom’s boat-in-a-bottle collection and almost knocking some down. He set them straight before going back into her bedroom. After shutting the door, Hayes commenced to tossing shit around in there and making a sound like a raccoon in a dumpster.
Our house was smallish, five rooms if you counted the bathroom, six if you counted the carport, and seven if you counted the little attic access between my closet and the living room. The front hallway, lined with elementary school photos of me from Kmart, led to a junction at the kitchen, forward took you past the sink to the kitchen door. If you took a right, you went into our biggest room, the living room, which stretched across the middle of the house from front to back like a saddle. From there, a worn trail in the carpet led straight past the couch, along the front windows, to the side hallway, a bathroom built for one, and on to our two non-spacious bedrooms. Mom’s was on the left and had a good bit more moving-around space than mine. At the end of the hall, across from our rattletrap washer-dryer, was the door to my perfectly square, perfectly tiny sleeping box.
Five minutes of mayhem later, Hayes went limping into the bathroom, mumbling “fuck” over and over again like a prayer. What sounded a lot like my Suave Wild Cherry Blossom conditioner fell and rattled around in the shower. When he came out again this time, he had orange stuff on his upper lip. I thought for a moment he’d been drinking the liquid soap. Then I noticed the prescription cough syrup bottle in his hand. Hayes tossed it with a clatter into the sink.
“Bad cough,” he said.
“Ah,” I said.
I didn’t remember him coughing once since he’d come, but if he had a craving to gulp syrup, it wasn’t any skin off my behind.
“When’s your wrinkled old ma get off?” he said
I didn’t answer, since I’d heard her tell him this information twice already over the phone. I sat on the couch and looked at a man wrestle an alligator on the television. Hayes sat down beside me, stretching his back until it cracked. “Yu-up.” He turned this into two long syllables. “So you playing the silent game with me here or maybe you just need a couple Q-tips? Huh? What’s the good word, Little Flipper?” He made a dolphin sound. I edged away from him on the couch.
Without looking away from the TV, I told him she’d be home tomorrow morning. This was a trick my mom had taught me after I’d complained about him bugging me. “Just stop paying him any mind,” Mom told me, “and he’ll quit after a while. He just wants a reaction, any reaction.”
“Okay,” he said, almost to himself, and yawned wide enough to make his jaw pop. “That’s alright. That’ll work.” He sat there for a few more seconds, breathing loudly and tapping out a complicated beat with his fingers on the back of the couch. Eight loud, wet sneezes came out, one right after another. Then he jumped up all of a sudden, banging his knee against the coffee table.
“Well, I’ll be shoving off then.” He limped over to the hall and looked about in a dazed way. I knew what he wanted.
“On the floor in the kitchen.” I pointed to where his cane rested under a chair. “See you,” I said.
“Yeah.” He furrowed his forehead at me. “Thanks.”
The hole in his muffler must of grown a good bit bigger, because I could hear that crap Toyota truck of his until it got out to the state highway. Hayes had a tendency toward moodiness, worse than my mom sometimes, but even for him this was whack-a-doo behavior. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it, but I knew better than to ask my mom for an explanation. I figured I’d be better off not saying anything at all unless she asked.