Flowering Judas(78)

Althy banged on the wall. It rattled a little, but Haydee must have heard her coming. She didn’t turn around.

“You want to let me in on what the fuck is going on?” Althy said.

This time, Haydee did turn. “The police are over at the empty trailer. The police and Mrs. Morton and that guy they’ve got here helping to investigate.”

“Yeah?” Althy said. “Well, so what? What’s that got to do with us?”

“I don’t know so what. I don’t know what’s going on. There are a lot of police cars over there. They’ve got that mobile crime unit, you know, that they bought last year. It was on the news.”

“I don’t watch the fucking news.”

“I know you don’t,” Haydee said.

Althy wondered where Mike had gone—but then again, it was just as well. The last thing she wanted was Mike around when the police were here. She wondered if Mike had come home with her the night before, but she didn’t remember that, either. All she really remembered was Dickie Klemm with his ass on fire.

There was a little table built into the floor with a curving bench built around it. Althy sat down on the bench, got a pack of cigarettes, and lit up. Haydee turned around at the sound of the match and wrinkled her nose.

“Dickie Klemm got his ass on fire last night,” Althy said. “He had to jump in the reservoir to put himself out. I laughed so hard I pissed my pants.”

Haydee didn’t respond. She was still watching what was going on outside. Then she turned away from the window and went back to what she had been doing before. She was packing up her backpack with her school stuff.

Althy took a deep, sucking draw on the cigarette, as if it were a joint. She wished she had a joint. She wished she had something.

“Aren’t you supposed to be at work right now? You’re always at work in the middle of the day. Fucking idiot.”

“I worked a bit and then they sent me home,” Haydee said. “I’ve got class now. Then I’m going to work again tonight. They took me on the dinner shift to waitress over at Pat and Carol’s.”

“Shit,” Althy said.

“It’s a good waitressing place,” Haydee said. “I talked to one of the girls who already works there. You get a lot of people for dinner and they’re good with tips. The woman who’s place I’m taking worked there for forty years and raised a whole family on what she got, and raised them right, too. They all of them went to college. Now she’s retired and they’re taking care of her.”

“Pat Nickerby went to high school with me,” Althy said. “He grew up right here in this trailer park. He’s a little shit.”

“Well, it just goes to prove it.”

“To prove what, for fuck’s sake?”

“To prove that you don’t have to stay in a place like this, just because you were born in it,” Haydee said. “If you work hard, and you do right, and you don’t stop, you can end up in a ranch house in Sherwood Forest.”

“Go fuck yourself,” Althy said.

“You shouldn’t cuss all the time,” Haydee said. “People who don’t live in places like this don’t cuss all the time. Did you know I didn’t know that? I didn’t know it until I went to college. When you cuss all the time, you sound like an absolute idiot.”

“You sound like a prissy little fuck,” Althy said. “That’s what you are. Won’t even support your family. Just as happy to let your mother starve if it means you can keep a fucking dime for yourself. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Do you hear me? You’d let me fucking starve.”

Haydee zipped her backpack closed and threw it over her shoulder. “You’re not starving. You’re just short the money for another drink. You know it, and I know it, and the only thing new about today is that Mike isn’t around. Maybe he got arrested. He’s not even a good thief.”

“Oh, well,” Althy said. “Look the fuck at you.”

Haydee turned away and left the living room, went out to the little vestibule, and down the stairs to the door. Althy wouldn’t usually let herself go wandering around when there was a fucking police convention going on outside, but she couldn’t help herself. Sometimes Haydee made her fucking head want to explode.

“Fucking A,” Althy said, going out of the door herself.

It really was a police convention out here. There had to be six police cars, plus the mobile crime unit, plus Charlene “Fucking” Morton, and that crime consultant person, plus a wagon from Feldman’s. The sirens were off, but the police cars all had their top lights pulsing in that way that made Althy feel dizzy. Maybe she ought to fall down right here and have a fit and see what happened with it. You could get some money that way if people thought they’d given you a seizure. She looked around. It probably wouldn’t work, not right here, right now. There were too many professional people around. There might even be a doctor. When you pulled the thing with the seizure, you wanted to be one on one with some idiot who was scared of his own shadow and didn’t want anybody to know he was in that particular parking lot at that time of night.