Short Story

LURING A LOST GIRL

by

Angela Havel
 

What I'm trying to figure out is what gave me the urge to find the dark side. What demon came to live in me and when did it happen? I could blame it on lots of things. If I'd never let my father get to me. If I'd never let the assholes at school get to me. If I'd never hung around those guys that summer. But it had to happen sometime.

After struggling two years in San Jose, gritting my teeth at traffic jams and endless lines of people, going through a series of temp agency jobs I burned out on, finally getting to the pitiful stage of selling my furniture to pay rent, I came crawling back to live at my parent's farm in northern Kansas. I was full of gall at betraying myself. I thought by moving away I had escaped my shitty past and my ranting father forever. I forgot that your past follows you.

Getting ready for my first night as a cashier, graveyard shift, at a truck stop--a humiliating job that I took only to get me by until I could come up with a better plan, I stared at my face, then spit at it viciously, watching the saliva drip slowly down the mirror and into the chipped porcelain sink. The light bulb overhead cast deep shadows under my eyes. I drew a brush harshly through my hair, yanking at strands till my scalp ached, wanting to feel pain and look ugly. I looked closely at my face. At the age of 25 I had the beginnings of permanent furrow lines between my eyebrows. My cheeks were fleshy. I could see where they'd start sagging into jowls when I got older. My eyes had the look of a dog that knows it's going to get kicked. "You'd be pretty if you'd just smile," my mom told me. I smirked at her lack of understanding and kept frowning. I didn't bother covering my large-pored skin with makeup.

This job began like most of my crap jobs, dread in my heart for my coming lack of freedom. I hated the idea of working behind a counter in a place where the average IQ hovered in the double digits. The truck stop was in a hick town called Blenville that embodied all the ignorance I'd vowed to get away from, and here I was, submerged in it. What had gone wrong? I had studied hard in school, prepared myself for success, but success was just a tantalizing abstraction.

I had to borrow my mom's '84 Impala to drive the thirty-mile round trip to work, a further indignity. I had sold my car in California too.

The truck stop was redolent of diesel fuel; the counter where I sat by the cash register coated with a film of embedded dirt and grease, with an occasional cockroach crawling nonchalantly by. Nine long hours lay ahead, of listening to crickets and trying to stay awake. At least there was food: greasy salt-and-vinegar potato chips, lunchmeat sandwiches on poppy seed buns, Almond Joy candy bars, which I ate without paying for, and washed down with Cherry 7-Up. I turned up my cassette player loud on U2's Rattle and Hum to drown out my thoughts, hid my purse and knapsack that contained my notebook, calligraphy pens, and ink behind the counter, and started reading Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf.

The first three nights nothing unusual happened. Then, on a Friday night in late May, things changed. After an hour-long stretch of no customers, all of a sudden a crowd walked in--teenagers, all male, about eight or nine of them, tough-looking guys you could tell would turn wild-eyed if you started something with them.

A few of them looked my way. Their clothes announced them--faded jeans, T-shirts with beer or car racing logos plastered across the front and back. I noticed one that had Same Shit, Different Day emblazoned across his chest in day-glo orange. Swaggering purposefully in high-top sneakers, cowboy boots, or black Doc Martens, they surveyed the display racks of chips and candy, the cases of Budweiser stacked in the refrigerated section, fished out quarters and dimes from their pockets to buy Marlboros, Mountain Dew, Doritos.

I could guess their pasts from their jumped-up, frantic air. A legacy of runaway fathers and alcoholic mothers hung around their eyes, tainting their gazes with barely-suppressed animosity, making them look strangely desperate and haunted, like they always had to keep moving, not think too much about anything, or they would go crazy, realize the utter transparency of their lives.

One kid was the leader, you didn't need much time to figure that out, his blue eyes like glittering marbles, darting, forever looking for action, where he would quickly insinuate himself, make himself a part of it. And no one questioned it: no one else was as strong-willed as him and he knew it, the way he carried himself, medium height but he made it look taller, upright head cocked slightly, walking with his arms out from his side a little like an ape if you thought about it, but his broad shoulders gave him a look of inchoate authority.

Of course you noticed him. Of course he knew it. About a week after he first made his appearance, I looked up from my book and there he stood, propping open the front door of the station, letting the moths fly in. Staring at me. Leveling a gaze my way that bored a hole straight through me. An expression of bemused arrogance wreathed his face. He had a goatish look of corruption about his mouth.

"Interesting book, is it?" he asked.

His voice seemed to come from nowhere but it shot right in me, inside my head. I felt warm, an uncomfortable warmth like electric wires through my face: a connection, indescribable, that made me flush with--what? Desire? Shame? The feeling was unclear, unreadable, yet maddeningly intense. My instinct was to suppress it.

I saw he wore black dress slacks and a red sweater. The clothes looked odd on him, as if he felt uncomfortable in them. His tarnished blond hair caught the outdoor fluorescent lights, and directly above his head June bugs and tiny winged insects flew in a mad orbit. The light cast an unhealthy bluish-green to his face.

The thought hit me that he was just like me--the sneer that twisted his smile looked assured and hesitant at the same time.

I said nothing.

With his arms folded against his chest, still looking straight at me, he leaned against the doorway like he had nowhere to go for a long time.

* * *

This kid and the friend he hung out with--who looked about the same, except he had brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses--they came in periodically to buy cigarettes and beer, but they never said much. It was like they didn't trust me, or didn't know what to make of me. I never said much to them either. I felt their eyes watching my every move when I'd ring up their purchases.

One night they came in with hyped-up, ecstatic looks in their eyes.

I was reading Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd. I twisted around in my seat and squinted suspiciously at them. They stood there at the counter, silent, waiting--for what?

They're going to rob me flashed quickly through my mind. But no--they just kept standing there, staring, silent. What the hell were they waiting for? For me to say something to save them?

I think maybe we all knew the same kind of secrets, but no one would start telling any of them.

Then I realized they'd come back just to see me--they weren't buying anything. The idea of this startled me. Having grown up on a farm in the middle of nowhere, I wasn't used to anyone just dropping by. Instead of basking in the attention, I found it disorientating. I squirmed under their gaze, scrambled for something to say.

"So what's going on tonight?" I asked, not quite looking at them, but at a stray sunflower shell someone had carelessly shucked on the counter. I felt less self-conscious if I didn't look at their faces while I talked.

"Nothing."

The guy with glasses said this; I could tell by the voice.

More silence.

"Where do you guys work?"

There was a slight pause, then the instigator answered "Right over there," and pointed out the window in the blackness, to the elongated red brick building across the highway.

"The rest home?"

He didn't answer, but I knew that was it.

The rest home. Astonishing. I couldn't picture him with old people, pushing their wheelchairs, cleaning spilled jello off their chests.

I asked if they'd ever seen anyone die.

"Last week I had to clean up an old man after he bit it," the one with glasses said. "A bunch of red gunk came out his mouth when they lifted him up."

"Ugh," the instigator grimaced.

"I've never seen anyone die," I said.

"What do you have in that thermos?" the instigator drawled, changing the subject as if to tell me he did not consider death much. "Liquor, I bet." There was a confidence in his voice, like he already knew he was getting inside me, inside my mind.

"It's water."

"Let me smell it."

He unscrewed the lid and sniffed. "I figured you had to do something sitting here all night," he said.

"I wouldn't drink on the job."

"I would," he smirked.

The other guy snorted.

"Pack of Marlboros," the instigator said, laying down two dollars.

That was the extent of our conversation that night.

The instigator wasn't what you'd call easy to get to know, but a lot of the other kids who came into the truck stop were friendly, and I talked to a lot of them. Dory, one of the easy-to-talk-to ones, would mop the floor for me in exchange for a free pack of Marlboros. He told me the instigator's name.

"You like Shannon Cullers?" he asked. I didn't answer.

He also told me the other one's name, the brown-haired one with glasses: Todd. He didn't know his last name for sure.

* * *

The void inside started shifting into a craving. Now I knew his name. I was startled at myself. I had always thought I was the responsible type, not easily swayed. But I was starved for something exciting--anything. My attraction for Shannon grew quickly, violently. Maybe it was just the endless loop of bad film that was my life. At least he was something different. He couldn't have been more than 19 or 20, too young for me. But really, that didn't matter. He meant change, the possibility of an adventure, and that's all I wanted. It didn't take long for this job, sitting behind a counter from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m., to start creating a strange hypnotizing effect on me. I existed in a miasma of half-formed thoughts about where I would rather be, what stroke of bad karma had led me to this dead end, and how I was going to get out of it. I could tell Shannon had the same ideas.

I realized I had to come up with a plan, then Shannon would see I was something more than the usual girls he ran into. But I couldn't do much until I had more money saved. So I gritted my teeth while I rang up gas and cigarettes, beer and Playboy magazines.

Thinking about Shannon distracted me from the bitterness of my usual thoughts and my life away from the truck stop, which was unutterably mundane, an endless cycle of eating, reading or watching TV, and avoiding my father, who I didn't speak to unless absolutely necessary, and then in a voice of anger. I didn't have any friends I saw regularly, who I "hung out" with. You have to act happy to have friends, and the effort was too much. It was easier to keep to myself. I had figured that out a long time ago.

* * *

One quiet morning at 3 a.m., a semi truckload of cattle sat in front of the pumps while the driver ate at the restaurant next door. The cattle shifted miserably in the cold morning air, their large liquid eyes peering out from the slatted sides of the semi trailer. They were headed to their death. Did they know it? How intensely I hated the way the world was set up. It was all rotten. Tears came to my eyes, knowing those cattle were going to die cruelly, their guts spilled out steaming on the floor of the slaughterhouse, no dignity to it.

I would cry for them before I'd cry for any person.

That same morning, a half hour later, Shannon walked in. I hadn't noticed him until he was already through the door. All of a sudden I felt a prickling heat in my face and a jolt in my gut. The last of the tears in my eyes burned and I wiped them away quickly. I wondered what was keeping him up until 3:30 a.m. on a Thursday morning, but he looked like the kind of guy who stayed up all night a lot. This was the first time he'd come in at such an odd hour, though.

I could hear his quick breathing like a cat, see the excited glittering in his eyes. He strode behind the counter where I sat, stood beside me and looked over my shoulder. I turned my head to glance briefly at his profile. Dark blond uneven hairs shaded his upper lip, grizzled hair that wouldn't grow in thick enough to make a real mustache. I thought to myself it was a little gross. Feature by feature, he wasn't anything to look at. But there was definitely some kind of aura about him. I couldn't look him in the eye.

Pages of calligraphy I had been writing were spread out, heavy black Gothic letters.

"Wow," he whistled thinly through his teeth, "I tried to learn that once.

He stood right behind me now. I heard him draw in air sharply.

"It's just something to pass time," I murmured uncomfortably.

"I wanted to learn how to...couldn't get it," he admitted. He was so close I smelled the sweet lingering odor of whiskey on his breath. His voice floated to me low, ingratiating. It had lost its usual sleazy ring. My mind reeled, knowing how close he stood to me, his face in profile so near I could see the razor stubble dotting his cheek, an uneven shading of light brown hair.

"Look…" I began, and formed a few letters.

"Keep going," he said.

"Here, you try," I said, my head hunched over the writing in front of me. I had no courage to look at him when I spoke. But I felt him in my gut, a ticklish, queasy feeling.

He took the pen and slowly scrawled out a few spidery letter A's, his hand uncertain. I noticed his nails were whitish-pink and bitten down to the quick.

"That's not bad," I lied.

"Nah, can't do it. They tried to teach us this stuff back in school. Shit, I wanted to learn it...." He looked again at the lines of evenly spaced lettering in my notebook. "Man, if I could do this…." he sighed wistfully.

It was a revelation. In that moment I decided I loved him, with a pure kind of love, a poetic love. He wasn't a bad person. He wished he was someone he would never be, and for life to be what it never would be. It was sad; I wanted to touch him on the shoulder, tell him things would work out.

Then, quick as a cobra's strike, he leaned up to my ear and hissed, "You know how long it's been since I fucked?"

I sat frozen for several seconds. I thought maybe I'd heard him wrong--the last word came out so desperate, slurred. But I knew from the tone of his voice: low and conspiratorial, unnerving.

Irresistible.

No guy had ever talked to me quite that way. Guys in high school said things that repulsed me. College guys hadn't noticed me as a woman. It was as if I had become invisible from my shame.

This time it was different. In a sick way, I could tell he wanted me. Or, what was bad in him wanted what was bad in me. I still wanted to think of him in a poetic way but his directness was overwhelmingly potent. It was only disgusting for a second, then I felt intoxicated, weak with desire, a blinding melting flash of desire. I wanted to know this feeling, eat it to the core, drink it down.

His voice, snaking into my head, coiling around my brain, making everything that mattered before seem laughable, worthless. The pocket of utter emptiness in me filled languidly with a new poison that was like balm.

He wanted me.

He knew.

Then the spell broke.

"Can you sell me some beer?" he asked suddenly, in a normal voice.

It was as if nothing had happened.

I rang up the purchase and Shannon left quickly, now that he had what he wanted. I watched him hop into his car and drive off. A whiff of aftershave, a fresh scent like cut grass, hung in the air after he left.

I sat for a long time in a daze of love. I didn't really believe in it but there was nothing else to call it. I stared out the window at the night sky. I'd never seen it before, I suddenly realized. It was like I could see through it, into it, into the eerie secrets of life.

* * *

Thinking about him when he was gone became a drug. Life became mysterious, possessing a force I thought I'd lost years earlier. Before, driving to my shift at the truck stop, the town lights coming into view in the distance had brought hot bitter tears to my eyes; the futility of ending up in place I hated was soul-killing. Now it was like some fairy-tale town where unimaginable things happened to me, a new person who had connected with a new world, dark and limitless.

Shannon was drawing me irrevocably to his underworld of cheap fleshy sensation, boosted by alcohol and drugs, a feeling you hate yourself for having but can't do anything about. A world once entered, you cannot escape. He was there already, and wanted me to come too. He had hissed something obscene in my ear and I had accepted it, like it was nothing. Like it was everything.

We were connected now. A strange kind of understanding floated between our bodies.

* * *

He had secrets he wouldn't tell. But eventually I'd find them out: Find him out, what made him tick.

A rational voice, buried deep, said: You know it's futile, means nothing, you mean nothing to him. He never thinks about you unless you're in front of him. I knew I was stupid for clutching to the thought of him. It disquieted my rational mind while nudging my fantasy into still more tangents, outrageous and yet not impossible--didn't strange things happen every day to regular people? Most people in this town had closed-in fetid lives, shuffling around in an endless cycle of grocery shopping, visiting relatives, going to a movie on Friday, buying a lottery ticket with a foolish hope that something extraordinary would happen to them. They didn't realize that nothing great was ever going to happen, that they would die in the midst of their foolish, foolish hope.

All of us are dying, I told myself. May as well do something exciting before I go.

* * *

He was messed up, maybe, but so was everyone. Inside everyone there's a part that's rotten.

You know how long it's been? How long? Since I….

He was drunk when he said it, probably on crank too. I'd heard he snorted it. But he knew what he was saying. He wasn't that messed up.

Why did he say it to me? So forward leering snakelike, he assumed I knew all about sex but he was wrong; I knew nothing except what I'd read in books and saw in magazines. I didn't count the few distasteful kisses in junior high and high school with boys I didn't like but was curious and drunk enough to experiment with. I had never had a man inside me.

* * * It was now July, miserably hot, but I hardly noticed. Two months passed since I'd first seen Shannon. What I said and did in those two months would have shocked the old me. I lost weight and started wearing makeup. I started hanging out at the truck stop on my nights off, smoking cigarettes, getting drunk at parties with some of the other kids I'd met. I smoked pot every chance I got. I felt horny. I stole more than just chips and candy from the truck stop. One night Dory and I found an old rack of cassettes in the back storeroom and I grabbed five of them, including a Fleetwood Mac and an R.E.M. I took four quarts of Pennzoil one night, because Dory said he'd change the oil in my car the next day. I never stole enough to feel really guilty, but enough so I felt a thrill. I had never lived this way before. I was relating with the tough crowd like they were my people--like their group, if I'd chosen to join one, was where I'd always belonged. In my mind, I was being a libertine.

In the back of my mind Shannon always loomed. He wasn't ever at the parties I went to. But I was content with just seeing him around. I had no guts to push it any further, although I imagined all kinds of scenarios. He'd been the one to plant the seed of lust in my heart, but now I was scared of him. I couldn't picture myself touching him, touching his face.

Oh, but that's a lie, isn't it? a voice whispered to me. The truth is, you want him inside you the way his mind is already inside you.

I saw him with other females, but never the same one twice.

Whenever he walked into the truck stop with a girl, I'd notice that they looked like they'd been arguing. I was pleased by this. Oddly, these girls didn't make me jealous. I knew they were just warm bodies. He and I had connected. We didn't have to occupy the same space to prove it. I told myself he was waiting for me, for an encounter that was more than hastily spoken words at the truck stop. I told myself if we had such an encounter, then he would see how I was the woman he'd always dreamed of, and he'd never want to see another.

* * *

One night as I was sitting in my usual spot behind the counter, he walked over to my chair and leaned over my shoulder to see what I was reading: Sartre's Being and Nothingness. He had noticed my books before but never commented on my selections.

Touch me, I thought.

His hand reached out to pick up a cassette cover; he looked at it without comment and set it back down. I got the feeling he was waiting for something.

"Your hair's getting longer," he said quietly, laying his hand on the back of my head, only for a second.

I sat there immobilized. He drew away quickly, like he knew I was afraid. Like he was afraid.

He didn't know me; we'd never spoken more than fifty words to each other. He didn't know he made my stomach jump; how I wished I could ask everything I'd wondered about him. I never would, though. Everything with him was gesture, body language.

And those hissed words in my ear that had started it.

* * *

Alone in my bedroom in the dark, my head still felt the imprint of where his hand had touched it, my brain snapped with electricity, silken currents that made the room lose its shape, disappear until I was floating in pure formless ecstasy.

Where are you? I thought to myself.

Who are you?

The silence was unholy. I thought I saw shapes of animals move in the darkness.

This was what it would feel like to lie next to him.

* * *

I marked the days by when Shannon appeared in the truck stop, and by books. By the time I'd started Kafka's Metamorphosis in early August, I had my plan: I was going to drive my recently-purchased $500 Ventura back to California at the end of the summer. I had given up too easily the first time, I told myself. I had to try again. And my brother in San Jose said he would put me up until I got my own place.

One night when Shannon came in alone, I told him about it, how I was going to stay at the rock rehearsal studio my brother managed, buy a keyboard, maybe join a band.

His face seemed to light up, and I don't know how I got the nerve to say it, but it came out: "Maybe you and Todd could ride along. There's all kinds of jobs out there, if you're willing to take anything."

He got quiet, like he was mulling it over in his mind. I thought I could feel his nerves thrilling.

"When are you leaving?"

I told him the end of September.

"I'll think about it," he said.

Had it really been me, depressed to the point of giving up on life only a few months before? Shannon and Todd and I, in my car, headed to California. Why not? I admired free spirits who did such things. I wanted desperately to fight my parent's stolid conservatism and forge my own "what the hell" persona. Driving to California after college had been a mere baby step. My mom rode along on that trip, and I had resented her worried nagging the whole time. This time the whole thing would be my deal.

* * *

Two weeks later, on my Friday off, Dory, the little-brother type who'd mopped the floor for cigarettes, saw me buying a pop at the truck stop and pulled up in his '65 Chevy pickup.

"Shannon wants to talk to you!" he yelled.

"Why?"

"I don't know--there's a party at his place. Follow me!" He spun his truck in a U-turn and sputtered down the street, backfiring once and shooting sparks out his exhaust pipe.

I hesitated. Don't go, I told myself.

But there was no way I could keep myself from going. All summer long I had waited for a chance like this. I followed Dory.

I had often wondered what Shannon's room looked like. It wasn't as interesting as I'd expected. Cinder-block walls gave the place the look of a prison, and faded avocado-green shag carpet, ripped and stained in the corners, made it look out-of-date and squalid. A few hastily-hung car and motorcycle posters were scattered on the walls, some of them hanging by one corner. A wooden plaque with painted letters reading "Hi Gorgeous" hung over the sunken-in plaid couch where I guessed he slept. The low ceiling vibrated from the bass notes blaring from an old stereo, the usual heavy metal music I had always heard in his friend's car. Beer cans littered the floor. A few kids lay in their midst, passing a bottle of Mad Dog.

I scanned the room for Shannon. As usual, he was the center of attention. He stood at a formica table in the kitchenette, intent on flipping a quarter into a cup. A ring of people hovered around him. He wore a black tank top with XCESS in white letters across the front. I found a place to sit at a distance and waited for him to notice me. He wasn't drinking, although everyone around him had a bottle or can of beer in their hand.

After a few minutes, I joined the circle playing quarters. It was noisy. He still hadn't acknowledged me.

"You're not drinking," I shouted to him, touching the tip of my index finger to his bare upper arm.

He looked around at me, startled.

"No--I'm on the wagon," he yelled back. He was distracted, trying to maintain his position as the leader, trying to sound cool. I wondered what had made him decide to quit drinking all of a sudden, when he had drank so much the entire summer.

"I've been on the wagon my whole life," he yelled over the blaring music.

The rest of the night I watched him, but he never once looked at me. Whatever it was he wanted to talk about, it must not have been that important. I wished I hadn't come, but didn't want to leave either. I decided to drown my disappointment in Mad Dog. Once I started drinking, I didn't quit until the room started spinning.

Hours later I roused myself from the musty-smelling carpet. The room was dimly lit by one lamp in the corner; sleeping bodies lay strewn on the floor like bundles of rags. I accidentally knocked over a half-empty beer, which puddled out like warm yellow urine. A rush of saliva flooded my mouth; I knew I was going to be sick, and stumbled drunkenly into a dark doorway where I remembered seeing a bathroom earlier, flipped on the light switch. Two bodies were moving on the bed. It was Shannon and some scarecrow-like dark-haired girl. They silently separated, covering their heads with a stained blanket. I noticed the bed didn't have sheets; they were sprawled naked on the grimy blood-spotted mattress. I heard Shannon groan as I turned and snapped off the light. He never saw me.

I found the bathroom and knelt down before the toilet; a strange barking belch issued spontaneously from my mouth. It struck me as a demonic sound, the reverse of a prayer.

* * *

Mid-September, the end of the summer, my final shift at the truck stop. The place already looked different, the light was paler with the approach of autumn. In my head, I was already miles away.

As I was sweeping the floor, Shannon walked in. I hadn't seen him since the party. "I thought you were gone," he said.

"I'm leaving this weekend." I looked down when I said it.

He stood there, quiet.

I tried to act like I didn't care. My desire for him was mostly gone. I had only wanted him when he was a dream lover, a dark side of my sexual self I was forced to see for the first time. Still, if he had asked to ride along to California I would have forgiven everything and said yes. But he didn't ask.

The truth was, there had never been any connection between us. I had imagined it all.

The truth was, there had been a profound connection.

I felt my old guarded self creeping back, afraid of people, of their strangeness. Of linking my own strangeness with someone else's. How does anyone take that leap? How does anyone overcome the fear of our own unpredictability, of living every day and not knowing?

Then he did the oddest thing. He blurted "I'll miss you," in a choked mumble, and quickly turned and walked out. He got into a pocked tan VW and drove away.

I would never see him again. This only bothered me for a moment before I began to slowly dismiss him from my mind.

But I could not dismiss his influence. I recalled again the first night I'd seen him, how he'd stood in the doorway, staring at me. It occurred to me now he had stared at me like I was prey.

A world once entered, you cannot escape: Love for me would forever be a dark and dingy thing.

* * *

All during that summer, while feeling more alive than I'd felt in years, I dreamt the dreams of one who has made a covenant with death. One in particular I remember: I'm in a car on a blacktop road, tall trees overhanging both sides, creating a tunnel of skeletal branches and leaves. Flying way past the speed limit, the car is holding the road but it feels like any minute it will careen wildly, crash and go up in flames. I know I will die a horrible violent death. There's nothing I can do: I'm in the back seat, paralyzed.

When I look to the driver's seat I see with a sickening helpless jolt there is no one at the wheel.



§ § §

Angela Havel lives with her dog and two cats and raises organic vegetables in north central Kansas. The highlight of her life is trips to the grocery store, where she stocks up on Nacho cheese Doritos and the latest "Limited Edition" ice cream flavors. She teaches college English courses online and tries not to obsess over the preponderance of students with poor grammar, and whether or not this is one of the signals that the Apocalypse cannot be too far away. Angela may be contacted at anghave@yahoo.com

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