MOUNT VERNON/FONTANA
Polly lived her next days underwater. Noises sounded muffled, like she was hearing them through plugged ears. Her arms and legs moved slow and heavy. Lights turned to prisms in her eyes. She wasn’t hot and she wasn’t cold.
She didn’t mind being underwater. She felt all sealed up, like one of those fish who could live at the bottom of the sea and carry the weight of the whole ocean on their backs without being crushed.
She thought about Mom. The way she snorted when she laughed, the way she flicked bottle caps across the room with snapping fingers. How she was dead now. It was because her dad’s world had crashed back into hers that Mom was dead. She didn’t know if she hated him or not. She was too far underwater to know.
They got a room in a different motel just like the last one. They stayed below the highway in Mount Vernon, where the Mexicans lived. Other white people made her dad nervous, made him touch the pistol he kept in his back pocket. She guessed Mexicans didn’t wear blue thunderbolt tattoos.
They didn’t talk unless they had to, which was fine with Polly. They watched teevee in the motel room. Her dad started the morning with push-ups and shadowboxing. Polly watched, but the bear lay face-first on the bed and did push-ups in time with her dad. They ate from trucks and taco stands. Polly couldn’t eat more than a bite or two at a time. Her stomach felt small. Three bites max. The beans and tortillas tasted bland to her waterlogged tongue.
Her dad said they were waiting. He didn’t say what they were waiting for. People had to know that she was gone. They had to be looking for her, didn’t they? Maybe Maria from school, or even Mrs. Ray, her teacher. Or even the police. She was missing, she guessed. It seemed weird to think about. She wasn’t missing. She was right where she was. She thought it was the police who were really missing. They were the ones who weren’t where they were supposed to be, which was coming to get her. At night when her dad snored she thought about finding them herself, her and the bear slipping out the door. She might even have done it if she hadn’t been underwater.
Their third night in the new motel, her dad said he was done waiting. He dressed in his dark clothes, the black hoodie. It made him look like a criminal, which Polly guessed made sense. He took out the pistol, which she now knew used to belong to her stepfather Tom. He popped it open so she could see the bullets’ butts, he spun the barrel around, and then he slammed it shut. It wasn’t how Tom treated his guns at all, the way he’d taught Polly to treat them, like they were living and treacherous things.
Somewhere else in the motel, a couple argued in Spanish. The argument turned into screaming. There were crashes and crunches along with the screams. Someone yelled for la policía. Polly wondered if they should go help, but the thought seemed far away.
The fighting made her dad even more nervous. It made him touch his pocket where the gun was. He muttered curse words under his breath. He walked back and forth across the room. He threw punches in the air. He looked out the window. He turned back to Polly.
“Come on,” he said. “You’re coming with me.”
They drove to a block up against the edge of the mountains. Nate shut off the headlights. They rolled slow and silent like a submarine.
They stopped in front of the one house on the block with lights still burning. Pickup trucks and dirt bikes were parked out front. He shut off the engine and opened his door. Guitar fuzz drifted through the night, that kind of rock music that sounded like the bellows of sea monsters. Somewhere men were laughing, loud and loose. The kind of laughs that would have made Polly scared if she could feel anything at all.
“Stay here,” Nate said. “No matter what you hear.”
He stepped out of the car, pushed the door shut slow so it barely clicked at all. He walked toward the side of the house, hand in the hoodie pocket. On the gun, Polly thought. He moved around the side of the house and out of view.
She wanted to know where he was going with the gun. Before, she would have just thought it and then the fear would take over and she would just let the thought stay inside her. If a thought stays inside you, Polly wondered, did it matter that you thought it at all? But this time, because she was underwater, she didn’t feel the fear she usually felt.
“Let’s go,” she said to the bear. The bear nodded at her and placed a paw to its muzzle like shh.
She opened her door and slipped out into the night. She looked down the street, lit in dots by stuttering streetlights that wound down the road and out of sight. She heard her dad’s voice behind the house. She followed it, the air so summer thick she felt she could lift her feet off the ground and swim through it. Dead grass crunched under her feet.
Light spilled out one window on the side of the house. A shape moved inside. Polly moved toward it. It was a woman mixing cranberry juice and vodka. There was nothing but window screen between them. The woman picked up her drink and took a sip. She did the that’s-strong-shimmy, just the way Polly’s mom did it. The woman tipped in a little more cranberry cocktail and twirled the drink in her hand to stir it. The motions were all familiar to Polly, but not quite right, like echoes off a cliff wall. It seemed to Polly that it ought to have made her feel something, but it didn’t.
Polly heard voices in the backyard. She moved away from the window. Her foot caught on uncoiled hose. She went down in sharp brown grass. She stayed down. She belly-crawled to the corner of the house to peek in the backyard, the bear tucked tight against her armpit.
Her dad stood with his back to her. He was a shadow in front of a big green grill in the center of the yard. Two men sat in lawn chairs close by. A chicken sat upright on the grill, beer bubbling from a can stuffed inside it.
One of the men was huge, with a white T-shirt that stretched over his rolls of fat. His earlobes had been stretched out so they hung off his ears like flabbergasted mouths. He had a swastika tattoo on his neck. Polly hadn’t ever seen one outside a book before.
The other had a beard like a goat. He had eyes like a goat too. At least there was something in them that didn’t seem like people eyes. He had a cup in his lap and brown dribble on his chin. He was shirtless against the heat. He had a coffin tattooed over his heart. He had a bottle of beer resting tucked between his legs.
“Nate,” that one said. “Didn’t know you were out.”
“I’m out. How you been, Jake?”
“Surviving,” the one called Jake said. He said it with a smile that wasn’t a smile. Like smiling was just a trick he’d learned.
The fat one laughed like a dog, arf arf arf.
“Surviving,” the fat one said. “Can’t say that for everyone, can we?”
Polly felt something bubble inside her, rivers flowing under ice. She stood up. She walked out from the shadow of the house without even knowing what she was doing. She stood near the door that led to the back of the house. They didn’t see her. She was out of the light and small besides. Standing there invisible made something flash through her, some kind of electric shock. It was the most she’d felt in days. It got stronger when her dad took the pistol out from his pocket. Polly watched the gun come out of her dad’s pocket and point itself at the man, and Polly knew she should have been scared but she wasn’t.
The chrome of the pistol glowed orange from the grill light. The fat man sat up in his lawn chair looking at the pistol. The one her dad called Jake didn’t move, he just smiled that not-smile. Even in the dim Polly could see his teeth were lacquered brown with chaw resin. He lifted his cup to his lips and spat. Polly saw the tattoos on his arm. The two blue lightning bolts.
“There’s a greenlight on me,” her dad said.
“No shit.”
“My daughter too.”
“Yup.”
“You okay with them killing a little girl?”
“Hey, man. I don’t make the rules.”
“You and my brother were always cool.”
“That what you think? Shit, man, you really that dumb? Ain’t nobody was cool with your brother. He was a scary motherfucker is all. You come here thinking me and him was friends, you’re wasting your time.”
The door next to Polly swung open and light spilled out into the yard. The men turned to face it. It felt like they were looking right at Polly. Something told her not to move. She’d read it in a book, predators see motion.
“Jake? Everything all right?” the woman with the cranberry drink called from the doorway.
“Tell her to go inside,” her dad said.
“Get back in the house,” Jake said.
“Who’s that out there with you?”
“I said back in the house.”
“Is that a gun? I’m calling the cops.”
“The fuck you are. Get back in the house and stay there, you stupid bitch.”
Polly watched the woman go inside, a fast walk, the kind of walk you did when you didn’t want the other person to see your face change.
“You know who did Avis?” her dad asked Jake. Her mom’s name made Polly take a step toward the men.
Jake raised his eyebrows like maybe.
The chicken dribbled beer into the grill. The fire flared. The dribbling beer hissed.
“Tell me who killed her.”
“You did,” Jake said. “You did when you stuck that knife into Crazy Craig’s brother. That greenlight ain’t ever going away. Do yourself a favor, kill yourself and the girl too. That way at least you can make it soft and easy. Cause when the Steel does it, it’s going to go the other way.”
Later on Polly couldn’t believe just how fast her dad moved in that moment. The one named Jake sprung up fast like he’d been waiting for it to happen, but he was still too slow. Her dad hit him with the pistol. Polly saw red splashes in the dark. She bit down, snapped a skin chunk off the inside of her lip. She felt warm liquid in her mouth. She felt pain. But it was her pain, and she was glad for it.
Her dad got his two hands in Jake’s hair and kneed him in the face. It made a hollow sound, almost funny. Polly felt the jolt of it inside her.
Jake slumped back into his chair. His face looked like an earthquake to Polly. He coughed red tobacco chaw mud. It slid down the front of his chest. It left a streak across the coffin. His eyes slam-danced in their sockets.
Polly kept waiting for the fear to come, the fear that made her run in Antelope Valley. But instead she inched closer, close enough to smell the stink of the fighting men. She was close enough that if the men hadn’t been so locked in on each other they would see her, dark or no.
The fat one stood. Her dad turned the gun on him. The man sat back down too fast. He slapstick somersaulted as the chair flipped over. He stayed facedown on the grass.
“You know who done it,” her dad said. “I need his name. I need to know where to find him. You’re going to tell me.”
“Fuck all that,” Jake said. Polly guessed that’s what it was anyway. It was hard to tell with the way the words came out of his torn mouth.
“You’re going to tell me who did Avis.”
Jake spat pink. Her dad kicked the grill. The chicken tumbled to the ground. It belched beer foam. The grill laid a glowing tongue of hot coals across the lawn.
The fat man said, “Oh shit.”
Hot wind rustled Polly’s hair. It made the dead grass scratch and tickle her ankles.
Her dad lifted Jake to his feet by the hair. He dragged him to the coals that sat smoking in the grass. He kicked Jake’s foot out from under him, twisted his body, took him down again. Jake landed in the coals back-first. He sizzled.
Her dad held Jake onto the coals. The fat man said, “Fuck.” Jake screamed. Nate let him up. Jake scrambled off the coals. A chunk of charcoal had cooked itself tight to Jake’s back. Nate kicked it off. He picked up the cooler. He dumped ice and meltwater and a couple of floating empties onto Jake’s back. The water shushed as it drenched cooking flesh.
“I need the name,” her dad said.
Jake talked mushmouth. He spat red glop and curse words. He said something about magic. At least that’s what Polly heard.
Magic done it.
Her dad let him go. The words meant something to him.
“Magic,” her dad said like it wasn’t crazy. He nodded like that figures. “Tell me where.”
Jake said something Polly couldn’t make out. Maybe an address?
“I find you’re lying I’ll be back,” Nate said.
The sudden knowledge that they were done, that they’d see her soon, filled Polly. She went back around the side of the house and climbed back in the car. The wind had shifted. The night air blew cool now. She could hear bugs all around. She felt shivery, like how she felt coming out of cold water on a summer day. She ran her hands over her arms. The peach fuzz on her legs. Fingers through her hair to her scalp. She felt her face. That’s when her fingers told her she was smiling.