Rose of No Man's Land (27 page)

I teetered like a suicide on the outside edge of the bridge.
Do it!
Rose goaded me from behind. We’d decided not to cast coin wishes into the water because really, that would just be giving money away to some giant restaurant that was so superrich they could afford to plant a swear-to-god river smack through the joint, so rich that they could wash everything in gold and have chandeliers the size of spaceships swaying over our heads. Is that who we wanted to give our spare change to? Absolutely not. We’d stared at the sparkling disks of pennies and quarters wavering under the water and figured there had to be at least a hundred dollars down there. I would jump in and get it. I would do it because I had stupidly left my flops in the bathroom and was conveniently barefoot. Rose’s crumpled sneakers were
held together with a scab of fibrous duct tape and if she took them off she feared they would disintegrate once and for all, so why didn’t I do it. Scavenge the money for us. We didn’t even need it, with Rose’s Clown cash we were loaded, but it just seemed like a real waste to let so much money sit there underwater. I looked down into the pool. Fat striped fish wiggled beneath the surface, orange and red and white. Their fins were as thin and gauzy as Rose’s nightgown, they blew around in some mysterious underwater breeze.

There’s Fish, I said. I was a little concerned.

Even better
, Rose said. Her voice had moved closer, was right in my ear.
Even more fantastic. I wish we could take them too.

I dropped off the bridge with a substantial splash. The fish darted like startled cats, but there wasn’t anywhere for them to go. The pool was dammed up with rocks, phony or real. The fish were stuck with me, they bumped softly against my calves as I stooped to scoop the spare change. We were stealing the wishes of bunches of people. Quickly I had two palmfuls of nothing but quarters. Why toss a quarter when a penny would do? These were rich-people wishes. I felt fine about taking them. Maybe they’d generously wished that poor people got more money and now I was helping their dreams come true. I brought the coins, dripping, over to the bridge, where Rose stood with the wide mouth of the backpack unzipped and ready. I dumped the money inside and went back for more. I reached down into the water and petted one of the fish as it glided past, its long fishy whiskers trailing from its face. I
don’t think the fish minded me in their space. The people who worked there, though, were pissed.

What are you doing?
a lady hollered at me. I figured she worked there because she was wearing a Chinese-style blouse, brilliant red with little loopy buttons angling up the side. It was really pretty. There were birds and tree branches printed across it. I smiled at her.
What are you doing?
she repeated. It was so obvious what I was doing. My hands were cupping a pile of silver, water streaming from between my fingers. This would be the last scavenge. The coins slid from my hands into the bag, which Rose had zipped before the angry lady strode up the bridge.
You can’t do that!
she hollered. Her whole face was collapsing toward the center in a massive earthquake of a frown. I was trapped in the pool. I’d been relying on Rose to help pull me back onto the bridge but now Rose was clutching the backpack to her chest and trying to angle past the lady. The lady was blocking her way and demanding she hand over the backpack. The lady was speaking into a little walkie-talkie thingie that had been clamped to the waist of her slacks. She honked into it and it sputtered back and soon there was another lady in an identical pretty red shirt emerging from the restroom hallway, the Yikes bottle we’d drained in the bathroom in one hand and my flops in the other. Shit. I hadn’t meant to be such a littering slob, I just didn’t have my head too together after what Rose had done to me. My downstairs parts still felt pretty crazy from it, actually. Central, cracked open, transmitting and receiving. It was now the satellite dish of my body.

Rose tried to slip past the angry lady and the angry
lady put her hand on Rose’s shoulder, stopping her. When Rose slapped the woman’s hand away I knew I had to figure a way out of the river, fast. Rose’s face slunk right up close to the woman’s face, Rose got all up in her face and started hollering all sorts of terrible words at the woman, the kind of words that boy was hollering at us earlier. Rose’s face was as close to this woman as it had been to mine in the bathroom. I knew that the woman was smelling the Yikes fumes on Rose’s breath, and the cigarettes like burnt peanuts under that. I could hide under the bridge and hope nobody noticed. I could hurl myself up and over the bridge but I was pretty sure I’d break something in the process, and if the women descended on me I’d have no chance. The second woman, holding our stuff, seemed scared to go to her coworker’s aid. That’s ’cause Rose was so scary. Her voice was loud; it rang through the extravagant restaurant. The diners were further down the river and couldn’t see the commotion. The river, where I stood, was fenced in with large faux rocks and shrubbery, but down where the people sat eating there was nothing hemming it in, and so I splashed in that direction, over the rocky miniature breakwater and into the stream, my feet trampling so much change it was hard not to bend down and sift a bit as I scrambled. I headed toward a table with a flaming centerpiece. It looked like a fake volcano, and there were piles of greasy fingerfoods heaped around its base. The man and the woman at the table stared at me, horrified. I lumbered toward them like the Swamp Thing. I was all splashed up, my raggy shorts soaked through and my T-shirt damp and clinging obscenely. My hair dripped into my eyes. The couple had
stopped snacking, the woman held a chicken wing at boob-level, her lipsticked mouth catching flies. She looked at the man desperately. The man looked confused. His tan looked like the result of some accidental poisoning, a too-bright orangey shade. The lady too. They both looked like the chicken wing trembling in the lady’s claw. I’m Real Sorry About This, I said as I approached. Other diners had noticed my arrival and were swiveling around in their seats. In order to get out I needed to steady myself on something and all there was was that table with its volcano of food. I put my wet hands beside it and felt it wobble as I leaned on it, up and out of the river. Thanks A Lot, I said.

Really!
the chicken woman huffed. She craned her neck around for someone who could
do something.
There was a waiter holding a tray he’d just unloaded, looking at me with the same bland bewilderment everyone else was. If I were Rose I’d have had some stylish, slightly shocking exit to make but I just hopped away from the water and ran back toward the entrance. Rose was still tangoing with the angry lady, but their fight had moved from the bridge and was now located directly under the dragons. I swooped in like something out of a movie, and knocked the mad woman back so hard she banged into its tail. I grabbed Rose. She still had the backpack, clutched to her chest so tight her fingers looked skinless, pure knobby bone.

Yeah! I hooted, steering Rose toward the door. She was off balance but I kept her moving and she got her footing and dashed ahead of me, swinging open the giant glass doors. We’re Sorry! I yelled back at the women. They were yelling at each other now and that one still had my flip flops.

It took us forever to make our way through the giant Chinese restaurant’s even more giant parking lot. The paved car platter seemed as big as the whole town of Mogsfield, stuffed with bulbous and turd-shaped SUVs, teensy compact thingies huddling close to the ground like spacebugs, an occasional beater with rusty corner and patchwork paint jobs, all gleaming under the lights hung from tall poles. I knew we weren’t safe from the angry women in the quilted ruby tops until we were seriously off their property, so we ran like crazy, not speaking, not even looking at each other. Rose was in front of me, moving fast in her shabby sneakers, our stolen treasure of quarters banging around inside the backpack. I could hear their jangle as loud as the smack of her worn rubber soles on the lot’s pebbly surface.
It wasn’t until we were out on the side of Route 1, catching our breath in the repetitive glare of the constant cars, that I realized I’d sliced up my foot. It felt wet, but I thought it was just from the river, from the streaming drips of my soggy outfit, but then it felt sore and when I looked down I could tell it was blood, darkly pooling out from my poor naked foot. Oh, Crap, I said. I leaned against the pole of a highway sign and pulled my foot up into my hands. It was too bloody to see what was going on in there, and the longer I stopped and breathed and observed the wound the more it hurt. It had its own living pulse, like my downstairs parts, only rotten. My foot was all smeary blood plus a good coating of grime from the parking lot.

We need a first aid kit
, Rose said.
We need water, a bathroom. Fuck. Sit down.
I did as she said. I came down hard on the pavement, my body suddenly shaky again. Rose was fiddling with her nightgown. She found the little tear one of the Yikes caps had put in the gauzy outer layer. She took it and gave it a hard rip, widening the hole, and kept tearing it in a long circle around her body. She was unraveling herself. With her teeth she tore the last stubborn bit free, and the ring of fabric drifted to the ground. Wispy hairs of shredded gauze undulated over the nylon.

Rose crouched before me. She lifted my sad foot onto her knobby knees and blotted at the blood with an edge of torn nightgown. She took the strip and wrapped it around the gash, pulling it snug around the ball of my foot and tying it in a bow above my toes. The tightness felt good, seemed to contain the raw pulse.
We still need help
, she said.
Let’s see where we can go next. Can you walk?

Yeah, Sure, I said. That’s Great, Thank You So Much. A dull breeze hit the bow and flopped it around. Rose had taken my battered foot and replaced it with this adorable gift-foot. I wished my other foot got banged up too. I wished I had another bleeding part of myself to offer to Rose, for her to hold in her clammy palms and return it to me blotted and unbroken and topped with a girly shred of her own self.

Here, wait
, she said and unzipped the backpack. She futzed around inside and came back out with a sugar-coated key. I inserted it into my nose. It made me laugh.

It’s Like My Ignition, I said. I turned the key up inside my drug-crusted nose. I made revved-up motorcycle noises. My inner nose felt crystalized, like it was hung with plastic icicles, maybe sprayed with a can of that fake snow they bust out around Christmastime. It was coated in a synthetic crust. Rose cracked up at my nose-ignition gag, took the key away. I had begun to enjoy the dull sting in my sinus, same as I had begun to enjoy the accordion-throb in my downstairs, a grabby feeling, part painful, part itchy, part deeply nice. My body was teeming with sensations. Rose had inserted the key of her hand into the ignition of my downstairs and brought me to life. Even the new opening in my foot. It was like my foot had bloomed open to get closer with the world, I thought. My whole body was craving entry, it wanted to swallow the world, it wanted the world to invade my everything. Maybe I should take off the bandage and let my foot eat the concrete, swallow the pebbles, and ingest the roadside dirt. Maybe it would make me immune to urban poison. My mind was flooded with
thought. The drugs had gashed open my mind, had torn it like a split foot so that all the ideas of the universe could be mashed into my head.

I Love This, I said to Rose. I Love This. My downstairs felt wild and whirling and I reached out for Rose’s head, pulled it down onto mine and kissed her. I split her mouth with my tongue like a shard of glass. I ate her mouth like I was starving. I had an urge to crush her to bits, to chomp her to pulp. I pulled away. I Feel Crazy, I said, and she smiled, she looked crazy, she said,
I feel crazy too
, and she fell into me on the sidewalk. We lay there all balled up like a single throbbing monster making out with itself, the roar of the cars and the parade of their headlights like disco strobes, occasionally beeping at us. We made out forever and tasted the gritty bitter granules at the back of each other’s throats, we got higher, got more fucked-up just kissing each other. I breathed the air that streamed out of her nose and she breathed the air I pushed into her lungs — we were keeping each other alive or killing each other, a suffocation machine. Eventually we sat up, pulled away. Spaced out, catching our breath, and following the whiz of vehicles before us.

Your foot
, Rose said.
We have to take care of it. It can’t get infected.
She popped up with a wobble and held out her hand to help me stand. I didn’t take it. Rose was a stunted wisp and I’d only tumble her back onto me and then I would only kiss her again and we’d spend the next forever rolling on the side of the road, my foot getting gangrene. I shimmied upward with the help of the pole. We began our trudge down Route 1, my foot spazzing now, alive with
hurt. I limped behind Rose who sometimes trotted ahead, then, remembering I was wounded, galloped back and slowed her pace, only to ramble into a sprint again. She was like one of those tiny, bouncy, Frisbee-catching dogs. I was happy to see her face every time she turned back toward me.

We heard the roar of Seamus O’Maniac’s before we reached it. Seamus O’Maniac’s is a fake Irish bar, pretending to be like the true Irish bars that are all over Mogsfield and probably all over Massachusetts. Seamus O’Maniac’s is all olden on the outside, with weird knotted shapes etched onto the glass and a drapey awning and four-leafed everything. A little leprechaun man leaned into the big curling
S
of the
Seamus
, little bubbles floating up and bursting around his balding red head, to convey drunkeness. W
HERE EVERY DAY IS ST. PATRICK’S DAY
ran beneath it, in quotes. As if Seamus O’Maniac himself had said it. I had once thought Seamus O’Maniac’s was just another Irish bar, but then on drives with Kristy or Donnie I spotted two or three more so I know it’s a fake. People love it anyway. The place is crammed with drunk people who are proud to be Irish. They fall out the front door and stand smoking and belligerent out front. Occasionally a dude will lift both fists in the air and go
Wooo! Woooo!
for no apparent reason. I was watching one dude with curly blond hair do this exact maneuver. His cigarette was bunched in the knuckles of his fist.
Wooo! Woooo!
Another blond guy came out the green front door and clapped him on the back.
Bra!
he honked. I looked at Rose. Rose was brave, Rose was an explorer, but this was pushing it. I did not want to go inside Seamus O’Maniac’s. I would hitchhike and snort strange glittering
drugs and I would follow her into the cruddy skyscrapers of bloated monster drug dealers but I did not want to go inside Seamus O’Maniac’s. I imagined us being grabbed by muscly white dudes, lifted onto the bar and made to dance jigs for the amusement of the date-raping clientele.