Dime Bag Girl by Andrew Pyper

Author:Andrew Pyper [Pyper, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781443422215
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2012-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

When we dry off and can’t smoke any more, we climb into the Duster and creep back into town, the tires whispering past the dark windows of closed laundromats, the beer store, naked and dismembered mannequins gaping in a fabric shop. We don’t talk much. Coming down for us is always a time of disembodied silence, not quite peaceful but something like that.

We go back to her house, where she parks under the broad limbs of an old maple tree. “I’m tired,” she says, and with her words I realize that I am as well. The weed and the cold lake water have made my body heavy and thick. The fifteen minute walk to my house seems like a desert crossing.

“I’m just gonna sit here for a while,” I say, slouching down in the seat.

“Whatever. Just don’t let my dad find you here in the morning. He’ll have you arrested or something.”

She gets out and I watch her go in the side door of the house. My eyes linger on the path she’s followed until they close. I sleep dreamlessly for what feels like a few hours until awakened by the muffled but persistent sounds of shouting, an argument. But it is only one voice. The judge, his voice vibrating outside the walls and windows of the house and into the leaf-breeze night outside. For a while I just sit and listen to it, strain to hear the words, to see the person who could make those sounds. The voice conveys anger but frailty also, something cut wide open.

After a while I get out of the car and crouch closer to the house. I linger beside the judge’s professionally pruned rose bushes, listening to the voice trembling out of the curtained front window. I can see him only as a backlit shadow through the closed French doors at the far end of the dining room. He has stopped shouting and speaks in a held-back tone, standing still with his hands placed against the doors. I watch him across the dining-room table made of dark, expensive-looking wood. At one end is a ceramic ashtray painted in sickly yellows arched with cigarette butts, their orange heads huddled together in dunes of grey dust. The other end is blocked off by a fortress of serious magazines and Globe and Mails. Behind the table is a glass cabinet full of Canadian Club and Gibson’s, and on the wall paintings of ships crossing rough seas.

His voice is down to a normal level now, lower than normal, and it’s impossible to tell what he’s saying in complete sentences, but some of the words travel better than others. I hear “never,” “bitch,” “tired,” and “mine.” Then the light goes out with him still standing there and there’s nothing.

I want to go home but my feet sink further into the flower bed’s soil. Then the sound of the back screen door closing with a careful latch. She comes from around the corner with her shoulders and head lowered in a half-attempt at hiding.

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