The Spot: Stories

Idea was to stake out the town for days on end, if necessary, watching over cups of coffee in Ralston’s diner, knowing full well she’d have to pass that way eventually. Women like that follow strict shopping patterns. A town like Gallipolis has a limited number of retail establishments. The idea was to catch her off guard, to poke the gun into her face and to force her into the car. The idea was to let her know that she had been moving through life the way a fish moves through the water, unable to see the fluid, unable to sort out the larger picture. The idea would be to somehow shift the burden of the botch from my shoulders to her shoulders, heaving it like a duffel loaded with bones of the dead. Then she’d have to raise her arms instinctually — seeing the bag heading her way — and catch it the way a fireman embraces a falling child, bending her knees to ease the weight, lowering herself as far as she could to the ground, staggering under the great weight of the botch itself, catching her balance on the back of her heels.

Oklahoma

Trying to make it look like we were going somewhere, we worked up and down the rows, holding keys in our hands, moving from one car to another in case the guy who monitors the security screens inside the store happened to glance up from his magazine, or his coffee, or his ball game, to catch sight of us. Anyway, no one has ever stopped me, Lester said, and the return policy is sweet because they’ll take anything back, no questions asked. You just get the receipt, go inside, find the goods, and then take the stuff to get your money back. In the parking lot that night we had three receipts, including one for a large load of groceries — three hundred dollars’ worth. I said, Jesus, this is a lot of food. Lester said, What do you think most people do, starve, you think they don’t go in and buy whatever they want? I said, No, I think most kind of save money and then go buy stuff. He said, No, no, they just go and pile it up like that. I said, Okay, okay. He said, You’re a dumb shit, for sure. I said, Shut up. He said, Talk more like that, you’re out. I said, Sorry. He said, Get looking. I looked, came up with a receipt for a Sony something, called him over, and he said, Bingo, that’s it, a bigticket item. Then, clutching his key, holding it out, he went back out to the edge for one last look along the curb where stuff might blow up. Augusta came hunching up, saying, Hey, Genevieve, we’ve got to try that Sony. I said, Keep looking.

Augusta was a horrible sight: hunchbacked, with pocks on her face, an Oklahoma harelip, Lester called it, and lithium teeth, all gone. The soles of her feet had calloused so thick Lester took his razor knife and whittled them out of boredom. Ugly enough to stop a clock, he said when we found her. Ugly enough to stop traffic. Yes, sir, a traffic-stopper indeed, he said, drawing her tight the same way he’d drawn me, making those soft kiss sounds, touching her cheeks, tracing the shape of her face. Oklahoma ugly, he added, lifting up one of her breasts. They’re gonna make a movie about this one, he said, taking a step back and boxing his thumbs and fingers to make a frame. Lester had his hopes pinned on being a film director. Post-cleanup, he was going to head to Hollywood. Nothing up in Red Carpet Country can match that for sheer ugliness, he said. I said, You’re getting redundant. He said, What? I said, The ugly thing, it’s getting old, fast. He said, What did you say? I said, Nothing. He said, I thought so, that’s what I thought you said, working a crick out of his neck, twisting it around and around. It was a cold wet October night, somewhere outside Tulsa.

An old farmhouse with a streetlamp attached to the back to ward off prowlers (like us), a huge orb of light casting itself into a mud-rutted backyard filled with whirligigs of all types attached to poles, heaving and rattling in the wind, creating a terrible shudder. Take out that light, Lester said. What? I said. He said, Get a rock and smash that out. I said, Okay, and went amid the whir of sound to find a rock, picking around for one, looking up at the seesawing figures, the whirling ducks, the swinging shapes. I found a nice round rock and heaved it up at the light and took pleasure in the loud pop and darkness. Get up here, get up here, Lester was yelling from around front. I stood for a minute in the dark and felt the wild ratcheting of the whirligigs in a burst of wind from the west. I knew how they felt. Stuck in eternal toil. I had to save at least one, so I gave a pole a hard kick: a small lumberjack boy in a little green hat, gripping a long saw, looked up at me from the ground and smiled. Get up here, Lester called again from around front. At the front door, working the gray rubber grips of a chrome walker, Augusta’s grandfather blinked into the darkness. As soon as he figured out what was going on, he lifted the walker up and used it as a battering ram to hold us back.