A Stranger in This World by Kevin Canty Read Free Book Online Page B

like a photograph printed on her retina, the bright silvery outline of the little gun she saw, or thought she saw, she can’t be sure, next to the cigarettes in Lyle’s glove compartment. “This is our turn here,” Lyle announces. “Down this dirt road here. We’re almost home.”
SAFETY
    Sometime in high school, Tina decided that her mother lived a life of fear, a search for protection from a dangerous world.
    What she called “love” was only an inability to take care of herself. When she said to Tina “I love you, sweetheart,” what Tina heard was “Help me, help me, help me.”
    Tina will never be like her; she’s promised herself. But as they turn off the main road, down a series of twisting sandy tracks (turning with no plain design, again and again, through stickweeds and copses of damp black trees, the ocean always near, as if they were following a vein into some obscure part of the human body), she catches herself stealing glances at the rear-view mirror and thinking sentimentally of how much she loves Bobby. She might turn a corner and he would be gone, without her ever having said good-bye. Sentimental, like a black-and-white movie on late-night TV.
    At the end of the end of the road is a house trailer lying on its side in the mud.
THE SUDDEN SILENCE WHEN THE ENGINES ARE SHUT OFF
    “This is it,” Lyle says. Tina looks around; there’s no place else. She kills the engine. As Lyle gets out he turns to Bobby and yells, “Leave your lights on.”
    No business with the glove compartment, though, Tina notices; at least he doesn’t have the gun. In the headlights of the Volvo she watches him clamber up a wooden staircase alongside the greasy bottom of the trailer, then drag himself on top—what was once the front. He opens the screen door up and the front door down and lowers himself into the hole. In a moment the porch light burns to life up on top; lights shine out the sideways windows and Lyle’s head reappears through thedoor, like a tank captain peering out his turret. He yells, “You coming or not?”
    Standing next to Bobby in the damp sand and rank salt-grass, Tina whispers, “I don’t want to, Bobby. This is weird.”
    “We don’t have to,” Bobby says; then, after a minute, “I could use the money, though. He’s just drunk.”
    “He tried to feel me up in the car.”
    “We’ll just go,” Bobby says. “We’ll just get the money and go.”
    Neither of them moves for a few seconds. Clouds have moved in and covered the moon, a low, soft ceiling. Tina gets the feeling that the world ends at the farthest reach of the yellow porch light, an eternity of soft black nothing beyond. But then she hears, as her ears adjust to the quiet, the muffled rhythm of the surf, not far away. The yellow robs the colors, converts them to shades of gray, and again she gets the black-and-white movie feeling, the last look at a place where something happened. The wind blows through the autumn-dead leaves with a sharp, malignant rustle.
    “We’ll just get the money and go,” Bobby says.
SIDEWAYS
    Inside, the built-in furniture is all sideways, sideways sofas, sideways sinks, carpet on one wall and acoustic tile on the other, where a chandelier sags flat. A stove dangles from the ceiling. Lyle motions them to sit, a couch at right angles to the floor, so they sit on the back and rest against the seat. One of the legs of the stepladder that leads to the overhead door isresting on a poster of two nude girls in the surf at sunset, a splashing horse galloping through the shallows behind them.
    Lyle reaches into the refrigerator, lying on its back on the floor, and pulls out a six-pack of midget cans.
    “Instant martini,” he says loudly. “Martini-in-a-can. Can I interest you?”
    Before they can reply he starts throwing cans at them. One of them nearly hits Tina in the head but Bobby catches it. “Shit,” Bobby says softly.
    “We’ve got to go,” Tina announces, to the room in general. She’s losing