Golden States Read Free Page B

middle of the housewares aisle with his arms pressed in close to his body, huddled into himself as if he was trying to shrink.
    “I believe I’ve found a woman in a bad predicament,” David said. He couldn’t help talking in the accent. Any other way of speaking to Billy felt puny and wrong.
    “So?”
    “She is plainly suicidal. I’d suggest we put a tail on her.” “Hey, forget about that shit.”
    “What?”
    Billy glanced behind, and then leaned in toward David, exhaling a waft of his own odor. His eyes trembled, seemed to be filling with tears. “I’ve got an Imperial yo-yo in my pocket,” he whispered.
    “Come on,” David said in a lowered voice. “Let’s not steal.” “The hell you say. I’m going back for another yo-yo.”
    “What do you need two of them for?”
    “It’s easy. There’s nobody around.”
    “I don’t want to steal.”
    “Then don’t. Faggot.”
    “Okay, I won’t.”
    “Okay. See you, faggot.”
    David turned and walked away, back down the aisle. As he went his hair flopped down over his eyes and he tossed it back automatically, with the same questionable flip of his head. His face burned, and for the remainder of the distance he had some trouble walking. Suddenly his walk felt wrong, and he tried to change it, putting more flex into his knees and turning his toes farther out. It had a certain cowboy quality and struck him as a success.
    He checked for the woman at the display of rat poison, but she was no longer there. The shelf before which she’d stood was lined with small yellow boxes, and on each box was a cartoon of a rat laid out on his back, with X’s for eyes, and a lily clutched between its claws. He picked up a box and turned it over. On the back side was a black skull and crossbones, with a warning against human consumption. He returned the box to the shelf and set off looking for the woman.
    He found her two aisles farther down, contemplating the bath salts. This time, he could get a better look at her face. She had once been pretty. She had the high expectant forehead and shallow chin of a cheerleader. Her face was pitted and ravaged, though, the eyes outlined in black, her bleached hair pulled down in jagged bangs to her brows. She checked over the bath salts with sour efficiency, and held a box of the poison in her hand. As David passed he saw part of the black skull, grinning, from between her glossy red fingernails.
    He went and stood by the check-out counter, waiting for her. He took a True Detective from the rack and leafed through it. “Woman Held Prisoner Seven Weeks in Bedroom.” The grainy photograph showed a puffy-faced woman with a trench coat thrown over her shoulders, weeping in the arms of a rescuing officer, being led from a cottage as cheerful looking as the yellow box of rat poison, with flowered curtains visible in one window.
    The girl at the cash register was called Wendy, according to the badge she wore on her blue Rexall smock. David sawher there nearly every day. She might have been fifteen, sixteen at most, and he could tell from the way her thin pale hands darted and trembled that she was in some kind of trouble. Something in the way her fingers hovered over the buttons of the register, nervous as hummingbirds, and in the quick practiced smile that faded the instant a customer’s back was turned. She had a helmet of perfect hair that came to two hooklike curls, one on each cheek. Every day David came to the Plaza, he bought a pack of Teaberry gum, and every day she rang up his purchase, handed over the change, and dropped a length of cash-register receipt on the counter.
    He stood by the register waiting for the woman with the poison, his eyes skating back and forth between Wendy and the story of the woman who’d been kept prisoner (by her husband, a fat hairless man in a Hawaiian shirt, handcuffed, flanked by detectives). Wendy rang up a pair of tweezers for an old man, slipped them into a waxed paper bag, smiled cheerlessly.