The Used World Read online

  She realized where she was, at the stop sign on One Oak. Peter’s cabin was half a mile away, she had driven there automatically. Pulling away from the crossroads, she wondered what she would do if he was home. Would she try to reclaim him as she had tried yesterday, would she use the news of her condition as the final heartsick message left on his answering machine? The question was answered for her when she reached his driveway and saw that he was still not there.

  Rebekah parked, let her eyes linger on the windows, the porch, the chimney. Having a baby who shared the genes of another either meant everything in the world or it meant nothing at all, she thought. If it meant everything, then Peter was not only honor-bound to share in it with her, he would want to. The event would represent for him as well as for her a stepping off into the void of adulthood, nature’s penultimate cliff. If it meant nothing—Rebekah took a deep breath—then she was alone in a condition that might kill her, would certainly change her forever. If it meant nothing then the world’s talk about family was just static, and all those things her culture was so enamored of—the family photographs, the reunions, the romanticizing of children—they were nothing but shields against the truth; against a wider, graver emptiness. Rebekah’s eyes filled with tears. Her child, if it should actually arrive (and at this point she wasn’t sure there was really anything in there—the whole thing seemed less a baby and more an idea), would be denied those lies, and didn’t they all, didn’t each accidental, unwanted baby in the world deserve the same falsehoods as every other?

  Hazel tipped her box of malted milk balls into her palm, offered one to Claudia, who declined. Claudia drove out of town by way of a neighborhood of Section 8 housing called Westside Green. They passed the uniform brick apartment units, the grassless courtyards, and the squat blue house of a woman named Jinx, who was infamous for practicing voodoo and for kidnapping for sixty days a lover who’d tried to leave her.

  “You’re not a cat person,” Hazel said, chewing.

  “I never said that.” Claudia was not a cat person. There was no part of it she understood. Hazel’s house reeked of ammonia, and everything, every surface and article of clothing, was covered with fur. Five minutes in Hazel’s doorway, and Claudia’s pants would be plastered with hair. As soon as Hazel opened the door, Mao and Sprocket and Merlin had begun bumping against Claudia, circling her as if she were fresh tuna. And Sprocket, the retarded one, drooled. There was a wet spot the size of a dime on the top of Claudia’s boot.

  “You don’t need to say it.”

  “Will you tell me where we’re going?

  “You’re doing fine. I’ll tell you when you need to turn.”

  Hazel had left her house wearing her version of Barn Clothes: stretchy denim pants, a white turtleneck under a black sweatshirt advertising a casino in Las Vegas; red-and-white striped socks with bells on each ankle, and gold lamé tennis shoes.

  “Have you been to Las Vegas?” Claudia asked, unable to picture it.

  “God, no,” Hazel said, putting her box of chocolates in her unicorn bag. “I’m just a breath away from complete misanthropy. That would be the nail in the coffin.”

  “Would you like to tell me where we’re going?” They were heading west in Hopwood County, past the horse farms and big Nazarene churches. A few miles more and Claudia wouldn’t be familiar with the landscape.

  “Did I tell you Edie’s out of jail?”

  “Really. You bail her out?”

  “Not this time, no. The judge said sixty days, she served sixty days.”

  “So she called you? Where is she?”

  “She’s back out at the place on Cobb Creek. She stopped at Mother’s briefly and called me, then disappeared in the middle of the night. She’s gone back to where she came from because there’ll be no twelve-step geographical cure for our little Edna, absolutely not.” Hazel adjusted her feet around the plastic lawn-and-leaf bag on the floorboard, in which she was carrying what appeared to be clothes. “And why shouldn’t she lift up her life the way she might hold up—I don’t know, imagine something rotten, whatever suits you—and hand it to our elderly mother?”

  “Caroline seems capable of dealing with her.”

  “That isn’t the point. Edie believes she has the right to do whatever she wants. Sun in Aries, Venus in Scorpio, Mercury in Aries.” Hazel shook her head at the treachery of the stars. “Anything she wants.”

  “Would you like to listen to the radio?” Claudia reached for the dial.

  Hazel sighed. “Only if you can find a station that doesn’t broadcast the hillbilly circus.”

  They rode in silence for a mile, then Hazel took a deep breath and said, “Here is what you must do.”

  Claudia took her right hand off the wheel and held it up like a crossing guard. “Don’t tell me, don’t tell me. Whatever it is, no.”

  “It’s time for you to get another dog.”

  Claudia lowered her hand, squared her shoulders. “No, thank you.”

  “There are litters being born, and I mean perpetually, at the place at Cobb Creek, and I want you to go out there with me today to pick one out. I need to look in on Edie. You need a dog. The breeds there are primarily of the man-eating variety, meaning they are noble and in servitude to monsters.” Hazel sat back, as if all had been decided.

  The Jeep swerved into the packed snow at the edge of someone’s driveway, shuddered to a stop. “Let me—am I correct in thinking you want me to go to the camp of a—Hazel, a motorcycle gang? In order to look at pit bull puppies when I don’t want another dog, and when going there is like both of us begging to be killed? Is that what you’re saying?”

  Hazel met Claudia’s eye without blinking. “Yes,” she said. “I’m asking you to go with me because that’s what you must do. You won’t be killed.”

  “No! Hazel, we can’t do this.” Claudia felt tears pressing at her throat. Again and again this had happened in the year she’d known Hazel, and Claudia couldn’t seem to fight back; she’d arrived at the Used World already weakened. What she really wanted to say was, You think I don’t understand astrology but I do, Sun in Control Freak, Moon in Control Freak, Ascendant in Bully.

  “But we must.” Hazel raised her arm to pull down the sun visor, and Claudia caught a flash of silver at the elastic waistband of Hazel’s pants, which were not blue jeans regardless of how many times Hazel tried to call them that.

  “Hazel, are you carrying a gun?”

  “Of course I am. I always carry it when I visit Edie, wherever she’s living.”

  Claudia pressed her thumbs against her temples. “Do you have a permit? A license to carry? A license to conceal it?”

  “Well, yes, Claudia. I do. But if I didn’t that wouldn’t stop me.”

  The road ahead of them looked exactly like the road behind. Claudia let her head rest against the cold window, suddenly so tired she thought she could sleep right there, parked at the side of the road, filling the sharp winter air with the Jeep’s exhaust. What difference did it make whether she went forward, or turned around? “What kind of gun is it?”

  Hazel unsnapped the holster. “It’s a Derringer.”

  The gun was no bigger than a deck of cards. Claudia reached out and took it, admired the mother-of-pearl handle. “Forgive me, Hazel, but if we find ourselves in danger, are you going to ask one of those fat, tattooed psychopaths to lift his shirt and point to his kidneys? Are you going to say, ‘This barrel might feel a little cold, Porky, but I need you to stand still’?”

  Hazel took the gun back, narrowed her eyes at Claudia. “You’re right. Good thing I have the nine-millimeter in my coat pocket.”

  The compound at Cobb Creek had been there a long time, fifty years or more. It had started out as a migrant camp, with fifteen houses on the ten acres of land, and it had been marked by trouble for as long as anyone could remember: blood feuds between the farmworkers, a fire that took four houses and killed nine people.

  After the camp was abandoned in the late sixties, it be
came a magnet for disaffected teenagers and later for veterans back from Southeast Asia. Now there were only four houses left standing, and in what state of repair Claudia couldn’t imagine. The place had been raided eight times in the past year, three times under suspicion of the manufacture and distribution of methamphetamine. Last month it was dog fighting. The group of men who lived there now, and who were bound together by loyalty to a particular motorcycle, called themselves Legion.

  Legend had it that the lane leading back to the compound was booby-trapped; some had it laced with mines brought back from Vietnam, as if ordnance were as easy to smuggle as hashish. The Cronies said the men set beaver traps, which was indicative only of their latent ability to dream in metaphor, according to Hazel. But when Claudia actually made the turn down the lane, all she found were potholes, and trees and brush so long unattended that small, bare branches scraped both sides of the Cherokee. At the end of the drive, squatting around a large open space, was the estate of Legion.

  The four remaining houses were shotgun style and long devoid of paint. The porches were held up by two-by-fours, far enough off the ground that the spaces under them were used for storage. On each porch there was at least a sofa, and in some cases there was also a refrigerator and a recliner. Bedsheets hung in some of the windows, but a few were covered with Visqueen stapled right into the brittle siding. And everywhere, between the houses and back into the trees, were vehicles, most buried under snow.

  Claudia took a deep breath, turned off the Jeep. As soon as the engine died she could hear it, the barking of countless dogs, coming from somewhere behind the houses. Some of the barks were deep and threatening, as she would have expected, but the majority were high-pitched, not like the yapping of small dogs, but something more frantic.

  Edie’s remaining front teeth were ridged, and nicotine had stained them in pale brown lines. The three she was missing had crumbled, according to Hazel. Edie was ten years younger than Hazel, which would have made her around fifty, but she looked much older. There were deep grooves dug around her mouth, and a series of creases that pointed toward her lips, the hallmark of a smoker. Nothing short of radical surgery could have repaired the lines around her eyes, or the ruin of her hair, which was a weak brown at the inch-long roots and white-blond down to the crispy tips.

  “Hazel,” she said, opening the front door to let them in. “Wow. You got here fast.”

  “Can we come in?” Hazel asked, walking in.

  Claudia followed, but reluctantly, ducking to get through the low doorway. The smell of kerosene was so dense she recoiled; two heaters were burning, one in the middle of the room and one in the doorway to the rest of the house. The living room was dim, lit only by the football game flickering from the old console television. There were people sitting on every available surface—on the two sofas, on two recliners, on an end table being propped up by phone books, and on plastic milk crates. Most barely registered their presence, but from one of the recliners a man said, “’T’sup, Hazel.”

  “Hello, Charlie,” Hazel said, and as Claudia’s eyes adjusted, she saw it was Edie’s boyfriend, who was himself only intermittently out of prison. He’d once spent an afternoon—well, forty minutes of an afternoon—helping Claudia rearrange the store. They’d carried in a sideboard from Jim Hank’s truck, stood around and looked at it a minute, and that was enough for Charlie, who disappeared, never to be in Hazel’s employ again. Claudia hadn’t realized he would be here. He was beefy and soft, and wore a long, thin ponytail and a beard. He looked violent, but the only person he had ever really hurt, as far as Claudia knew, was Edie.

  “Hey, Claude,” he said. She nodded in greeting.

  Edie was wearing a small scooped-neck T-shirt and a pair of white jeans gone gray. She rubbed her arms, said, “You didn’t have to rush right out here.”

  Hazel looked around at the cracked plaster walls, the curled and yellowing rock star and motorcycle rally posters stuck up with thumbtacks. “We took our time, actually.” She reached in the garbage bag and pulled out a blue sweatshirt. Edie took it and slipped it on but said nothing.

  “Come in the kitchen, I guess,” Edie said, leading the way.

  They went through a cold, damp bedroom with a set of bunk beds, a double bed without a frame, and another mattress on the floor; they passed the doorway to a dark bathroom Claudia didn’t even want to consider. A second bedroom was remarkably like the first, and then they were in the kitchen.

  There was much more light in this large, south-facing room, which struck Claudia as unfortunate; there was no place safe to look. Dishes and garbage were stacked so high they surely had anthropological value, and the smell in the room was overwhelming—layers of organic decay underlined by more kerosene fumes, these radiating from five-gallon containers scattered around the room. Above the doorway to a collapsed back porch, someone had painted the name Legion inside a circle in black enamel.

  Hazel pulled out a rusty metal folding chair, slid a stack of dirty dishes and newspapers from a place at the table, and sat down. She did so without a flicker of distaste, as if she’d made this gesture many times before. “So I see that your friends have discovered the womblike joys of OxyContin. This would be why my garage was robbed two weeks ago, I assume.”

  Claudia continued to stand, not at all sure she could touch the debris on the battered Formica table, as Hazel had.

  Edie rubbed her nose, pulled out a chair of her own. “Yeah, I guess.”

  Hazel straightened her coat, continued to look directly at her sister. “Oh, I expected them. I left an old VCR, a space heater, a couple pieces of estate jewelry out there so they wouldn’t come in my house.”

  Edie dug a pack of cigarettes and a lighter out from one of the stacks on the table. “Big of you.”

  “Not particularly. Explain to them, please, that it was a one-time gesture, and the next time they show up at my house I’ll end their tenure on the planet.”

  Edie sat back in her chair, crossed her arms over her chest like a sullen teenager. Like Millie as a teenager, Claudia realized.

  “How about you?” Hazel asked. “Is synthetic heroin your rabbit hole these days?”

  Her sister shook her head. “Nah, I’m not using. Just a little something to keep my weight down.”

  Claudia heard it, a squeak and scrabble that she assumed to be a rodent. She glanced at the dishes on the sink, but nothing moved there.

  “So how did this happen?” Hazel asked. “I mean beyond the obvious.”

  “I don’t know, Hazel. Jesus.” Edie blew a stream of smoke toward the ceiling. “What difference does it make?”

  Claudia’s eyes scanned the room, and when she finally discovered the source of the sound, she took a step backward. In the corner, next to a gold gas stove, was a large cardboard box, partly in shadow. But plainly visible were the head, shoulders, and chest of a pit bull, solid red with a red nose. Her green eyes were so pale they seemed ghostly. A group of puppies, five or six that Claudia could see, were waking as a group and scrambling toward their mother. The dog stared directly at Claudia without moving or blinking. The dog’s forehead was wrinkled, her ears cropped close to her head. Claudia could just make out a constellation of pale scars along the dog’s jawline.

  “Do you know the age?” Hazel asked.

  Edie drew on her cigarette as if trying not to scream. “I was in jail, Hazel, if you recall.”

  Claudia’s heart pounded, and she felt a line of sweat break out over her upper lip. She wanted to take off her parka, but was afraid to move. The dog continued to stare at her, even as the pups nipped at their mother, clawed at her soft belly.

  “What about shots, what about food?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.” Edie was speaking now through a clenched jaw.

  “Claudia?” Hazel said. “Would you like to sit down?”

  Claudia didn’t answer, but took a step toward the sink, away from the dog and her pups. Through the window above the sink
Claudia could see the other dogs, the ones behind the house. There were at least twenty, each one chained to a metal stake planted next to a blue plastic igloo-shaped doghouse. The dogs had run half-circles in the snow, back and forth, down to the frozen dirt. Metal pans were scattered around them, and most were barking so hard they were rising up onto their hind legs, the sound punctuated with small explosions of white breath.

  “—the reason you give,” Hazel was saying.

  “No, it’s the truth. Really, Hazel.”

  To Claudia’s left was a small dark room, probably a pantry of some kind. Next to that doorway was an old refrigerator, its door held closed with bungee cords; taped low on the wall next to the refrigerator was a poster saturated with bright, swirling colors. It said, in the center, RELAX, MAN. Propped on the floor in front of the poster was a dirty plastic baby chair.

  “Will anyone even notice?” Hazel asked, in a quieter, less provocative tone.

  “No. Nobody cares. If there was somebody who did, they’re gone.”

  Claudia took a step forward, praying that she was mistaken, that the chair was just another castoff.

  “Charlie and me’s got plans, we’re thinking of heading out west for the big New Mexico rally and then staying out there. So you can see I need this took care—”

  Claudia took one silent step, then another. She knelt down behind the chair, and slowly turned it to face her. The baby was wide awake, thin, blue-eyed. Claudia was no expert on the ages of infants, but she guessed this child was less than six months old. He (if it was a he) was wearing a one-piece suit, blue pants and a white shirt with blue stripes. The sleeves hit him in the middle of his forearm, the pants halfway up his calf. Tucked beside the baby’s leg was an empty bottle; the streaks inside it were gray and grainy.