Ugly Girls Read online

  Beer. She had a shift at 5:00 the next morning, and more than that she wanted to show Jim that she could get through a night without that kind of help. So no. No more beer.

  The thing of it was, much as she tried to deny it, ignore it, she hated Jim working nights. She’d always had trouble getting through a night alone; even as a child one stray thought could keep her up for hours, staring at the ceiling, her heart like a mallet and her limbs so stiff, like they were cast in stone. The whole rest of the house at peace. The loneliness of that kind of exclusion. The only thing that helped was climbing into bed with her sister, or lying on the hard floor next to her momma’s bed, which she could only do if her momma wasn’t entertaining.

  So sleeping in a bed without Jim, that rarely happened. Unless beer.

  Myra tried to fill these nights with little tasks. Clean the kitchen, dust the furniture, look up recipes on the Internet. In the mornings she’d list what she’d done for Jim, like, See? I can do this. But reaching the end of her list always made her feel worse. What did it matter that the tablecloth got ironed, that the washers on the faucet got tightened? Jim would be gone the following night, and the night after, and the night after.

  So, beer.

  Before she could think twice Myra was outside, the door clicking behind her. When she sat on the steps she felt the trailer sag. The air greasy with the smell of onions and meat, the neighbor making burgers, or maybe meat loaf. Humming his ABCs. Did Myra recall that he had a grandchild staying with him?

  A man in a sleeveless shirt walked out from between two trailers across the way, stopped when he saw Myra. “Evening,” he called. In the light from her neighbors’ windows Myra could see that his shirt had a graphic of a swordfish bursting out of the water. Ain’t skeered, the shirt said.

  “Evening,” Myra called back.

  “Thought I heard raccoons,” the man said. “I hate ’em.”

  Only now could Myra see that he had a BB gun by his side. If she had a dime for every time she ran into someone carrying a gun in this clump of trailers, she’d be one rich woman.

  “No luck, huh?” Myra called.

  “No luck,” he answered.

  “Well, they’re harmless, really. Sometimes I appreciate how they eat trash, what with how many litterbugs we got around here.”

  “Harmless till you get bit,” the man said, walking closer. He had a baby face, if babies could get stubble. And something wrong with his lip. When he was right in front of her Myra saw he had one of them cleft palates, the scar a white trail through the stubble, made him look even more like a baby. He leaned the gun up against Myra’s trailer.

  “I’m Pete,” he said.

  “Myra Tipton,” she said, held out her hand for him to take. His was warm and a little moist, but not unpleasant. It was clear he wasn’t no hard laborer.

  “I only been living here the past couple months,” he said. “I live with my momma, been helping her out while she’s sick.”

  “Ain’t that nice,” Myra said. He put his thumbs through his belt loops, cocked a hip. It occurred to her that he might be wanting to sit, but the steps were only wide enough to seat one. Besides, what would she look like, scooting over to let this baby-faced man sit next to her, for all the world to see?

  “Why you out here all alone?” the man asked.

  Myra couldn’t put her finger on why—something about the way he asked it—but she decided to lie. “Oh, I’m not all alone,” she said. “My husband’s inside, taking a shower.”

  “But you still out here alone,” he said, cocking to the other hip.

  Myra stood up. “You’re right,” she said. “I better get inside where I won’t be all alone no more. Nice meeting you.” She turned quick, tried to jog up the steps like everything was no big deal. She was reaching out for the screen door handle when her foot got twisted up in her housedress. Grunted as she fell on her knees.

  The man was on her in a flash, pulling her up by her elbows, opening up her screen door and helping her to her own couch. Her knees throbbed, the steps were ribbed metal, she could feel the pain pounding in the palms of her hands, too.

  The man stood before her, hands out like he might need to catch her again. She had to peer up at him, the ceiling fan light making a halo around his head, his face darkened by it. It hurt her eyes. “Miss Tipton,” he said. “You all right? I was just joking with you, I ain’t really asking why you were out there on those steps all alone. I sit on my momma’s steps alone every night, for no reason at all.”

  There wasn’t no shower running, no husband coming out to see what all the commotion was about. This man, this Pete, surely knew Myra had been lying. He’d left his gun outside, didn’t even seem all that concerned about some trailer kid coming along and taking it away. This boy could be just what the doctor ordered in terms of making the clock go go go.

  “Pete,” she said. She lowered her eyes finally, addressing her question to his gut. “You want a beer?”

  He sat down next to her with such force that the cushion she sat on jumped. She could see his face clearly now, and felt surprised all over again at the scar on his lip. “Well, heck yes!” he said. “I ain’t skeered!”

  Myra used her fists to push herself up from the couch. His momma hadn’t cared for that scar right. It bubbled up like a grub worm. She felt half sorry for him and half disgusted. She grabbed two beers, making sure the bottles bumped against each other, because it was her favorite sound. She pushed the disgust away. She had to. Drinking the night away was no biggie if it was a social occasion. And this surely counted.

  JIM GOT TO WORK feeling like he’d been wrung out. Before he left, Myra had seemed fidgety. Never a good sign. And Perry’s TV was still on, which meant she was still awake, hadn’t turned it off and rolled over to sleep. She’d be out the window quiet as a cat not an hour after he left, he knew.

  He wanted to leave the house with his family tucked in and safe, doors and windows locked snug, leaving a warm presence that never cooled. Wanted to return to a home filled with the yellow light of morning, have his coffee, crawl in next to his wife, fall to sleep without a care.

  That hadn’t happened in a long while. Instead, he knew he’d come home to Myra’s bottle still in her hand, the foamy bits dried to a film at the bottom, Perry’s door closed, her bed empty. The trailer dank and dark, the sky overcast, no yellow light. The neighbor playing her polka music loud enough for her to hear despite her broken hearing aid.

  And before that, a long shift at the prison, which always left him feeling like he hadn’t showered in days, like behind every piece of good news there was a shiv-sharp piece of bad news.

  Jim had a walker’s shift that night. Already, seated comfortably in his truck, he could feel his bones ache like he was driving home after a shift, not driving toward one. Kadoom, kadoom, he’d have to walk the lengths of the cell block over and over, the hard rubber soles in his shoes never giving, not ever; he’d asked to be allowed to wear black tennis shoes instead but had been denied. And in a way he felt reassured by that. In prison, order was key. Allow one crack—moving to less formal, more giving shoes—and the whole thing would fold in on itself.

  He pulled up to the small guard shack. The new guard leaned out, a young black man named Davie. He smiled and Jim saw he was missing the top right incisor. A child’s smile, and a child’s innocence in his eyes, too. Hadn’t seen shit yet. Jim handed over his own ID, attempted a smile in return, though he was sure it looked like he was simply brandishing his teeth.

  Or was it Davis? This was new—these blips in his mind where he wasn’t sure what was what. The stresses of a teenaged stepdaughter, of a wife giving in to the urges she’d been able to convince herself didn’t exist for a time. Not much room to store things like the gate man’s name. Did it even matter? Would he fold in on himself because he couldn’t remember Davie or Davis? The brim of the man’s hat was stiff, unworn. Jim waved, drove through.

  Every shift began the same: Sign in at one do
or, show your badge, ask after the man’s family, pretend to listen. Say Morning if it was Phil. Next door, same thing, only open up your lunch pail and let the man paw through it. How’s Sharon? And the kids? Good, good. Yep, cheese and mustard today, all out of cold cuts. Next door, hold out your arms for a pat down, ignore this man as he ain’t really the chatty type. Store your lunch pail and wallet and cell phone and keys and pen, if you were dumb enough to bring one in, in your locker. Badge up, gun up, nightstick loose in your hand. Walk through the final door. You’re in.

  He had about five minutes before the next shift began, so Jim joined Clapp, the other walker, where he stood just inside the final set of doors. They couldn’t go early; everything had to be timed just so, no cutting corners or schedule changes, or else why bother? From here they could see all the way to the other side; this part of the prison wasn’t nothing but one long rectangle with forty rooms on each side—twenty on top and twenty on bottom. Metal staircases on both walls, metal because it was sturdy and because, Jim had come to believe, nothing in this place could be quiet or peaceful. Footsteps rang off the stairs day in and day out, and the metal amplified all the other noise, too.

  The yard was a sorry place where the men could get some quiet, the yard like a clay baseball diamond pocked with weeds and cigarette butts. When it rained, the yard became a swamp; when it was hot the dirt felt like it had been cooked in the oven. The infirmary was off the cafeteria, and the hole was underneath the cafeteria, in the basement of the basement, or so the warden called it. When he first started, Jim wondered if the men in the hole could smell things cooking in the cafeteria above. He’d soon found out that all you could smell down there was what the men brought with them: sweat, breath, fear. Working the hole was just as much a punishment as having to live down there. You patrolled it in mostly dark; you listened to the men crying or yelling or, worse, not making any sound at all.

  Jim nodded at Clapp. He was a scrawny man, jumpy. Myra would say he looked rode hard and put up wet. He loved inmate gossip, and it seemed like every time Jim worked with the man he had a story.

  “Hey,” Clapp said. He was fiddling with a button on his cuff, couldn’t quite get it to go through the eyehole. He stopped suddenly, put his hands on his hips, and Jim knew he was in for another story. “You hear Carver pulled a balloon of coke out an inmate’s anus?” He peered at Jim, like Jim was the warden and could do something about it.

  “You don’t say,” Jim said.

  “Mm-hmm. Says he heard some talk so he did a strip search. Said it was bright green. The balloon was, I mean.”

  Jim waited. More and more, these kinds of exchanges felt like torture. He just wanted them to be over so he could get started on his shift, one second closer to it ending.

  “Well, what do you have to say about that?” Clapp asked.

  “I guess I’m not all that surprised,” Jim said. Every day it was something. Stories abounded. O’Toole ate a prisoner’s dinner every night for a month, right there in front of him, because the prisoner called his wife a whore.

  “Right out the man’s asshole,” Clapp said, smacking his hands together, as if to wake Jim up. Now Jim wondered if the meaningful part to Clapp wasn’t the smuggling of cocaine, but the fact that Carver had fiddled with another man’s area.

  “Good for Carver,” Jim said. “I hope he wore gloves.”

  “Haw,” Clapp howled, and some of the inmates in their cells mimicked him. Clapp wheeled, yelled, “Shut the FUCK UP.” He put a hand to his ribs, shook his head. Six months ago Clapp had slipped on a tooth and fell down the stairs, right onto his nightstick. Broke two ribs. Whose tooth? Jim had asked when O’Toole told him the story. Does it matter? came the answer. Clapp went back to fiddling with his button, nodded at Jim, and walked toward the metal staircase on the right. They’d switch sides halfway through, take their breaks separately. This was all the human interaction there’d be, aside from whatever the inmates had in store.

  O’Toole was known as a hardass. Clapp had a hair trigger. Jim wasn’t sure what the other guards, or the inmates for that matter, said about him. Maybe, Jim Tipton once broke up a fight by throwing a hot pot of gravy onto the prisoners. Or, Tipton brought in his guitar and sang on Easter. Or, Tipton’s wife used to call the front desk drunk and ask to talk to Jim, which wasn’t possible during a shift, or asked when was Jim coming home.

  Jim clanged up the steps. Men pretended to busy themselves, watching him from the sides of their eyes. Walk from one end to the other, turn, walk back toward the other end. Go down the stairs, walk that end to end, too. He knew whatever floor he wasn’t on, the men in their cells were up to something. Making dice out of soap, sharpening toothbrushes, coughing or howling in one cell so the guard would be distracted from what was happening in another cell, whispering plans so low it was a miracle anyone heard. Even if they were just lying there thinking, they were up to something.

  “Hey,” he heard a man say. “Hey, Tipton?”

  It was a newer prisoner, only been inside eight months or so, a child-toucher named Herman. Some guards made it a point to ignore any names, to refer to the prisoners only by their numbers, but Jim wasn’t like that.

  Jim walked over to his cell. Herman had one blind eye that tended to roll around, making it hard to take him serious. Child-touchers had it rough in prison. Jim expected him to ask for more protection, or to see the warden, or even just to shoot the shit a little, make himself feel human for a while. “Speak,” Jim told him.

  “Oh, hey, Tipton.” He aimed his good eye at Jim. “You got a daughter?”

  Jim knew that prisoners were the most bored human beings on earth. Aside from forming gangs and working out and smuggling drugs and carving paraphernalia out of soap and having sex with each other and themselves, they loved to find ways to fuck with a person. It’s about control, triumph. This was something Jim understood. A man wearing a jumpsuit and shuffling around in plastic shoes and getting bent over if he ain’t watching close needs to find a way to stay a man. It was a truth that rang clear as a bell across the countryside.

  Still, Jim stabbed his nightstick through the little slot in the door, right into Herman’s good eye. The prisoner lurched back, fell to the floor with his hands cupped over his face, sobbing like he was a boy after his first punch.

  “Don’t you fucking ask me that again,” Jim said. He’d make sure the man saw a doctor, it’s what separated him from some of the other guards, and he didn’t often hit the prisoners. It’s just that from time to time that bell rung true for him, too.

  WHEN SHE WAS YOUNGER, about Perry’s age, drinking with her friends made the nights feel plump with possibility. The way the streetlights could blur, the way music was never loud enough, the highway going east forever in one way and west forever in another. Even sitting in someone’s garage waiting around for something to happen—there was always the guarantee that something would happen. What could the future hold? It didn’t matter, as long as there was that feeling.

  Myra felt that way now. Her body warm and relaxed, the pleasant yellow light of the living room, the whole world outside the trailer for her to join or ignore. A new friend two cushions over, the sting in her hands and knees just a dull throb. What could be wrong with trying to preserve that feeling?

  “You should put up some twinkle lights,” Pete said.

  “You think?” Myra was tickled. Such a young-person thing to say, and he was saying it to her like nothing. “Where, up around the television?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “Or lining your windows. White ones, though, not them multicolored ones. Those are tacky.”

  “You’re right.” Myra held her beer to her knee. It’d be swollen but the beer was cold enough to help that a little. If Jim didn’t want her to drink, why didn’t he pour it out, get rid of it, yell at her some? Jim just wanted her to be happy, that’s why. The thought made her feel safe. Loved. Maybe she’d do a little something for him. Make him a pot roast. A sandwich, at least.

 
; Pete took a swig from his bottle. Myra loved that sound, that clean sound of the beer coming down the neck. He held his fist to his mouth, belched. But a quiet belch. Polite.

  “You know,” he said, “I’ve seen you before.”

  “Oh?” Myra didn’t like this. When had he seen her? When she was dressed for work? That’d be okay. Or when she was passing by her windows in her robe, red-eyed, hair all messed up, hungover? That would not be okay.

  “Yep. I seen you and your daughter one day. Coming home from somewhere. You both looked pissed off.” At this he laughed a little, into his fist again.

  “Yeah, that’s us all right,” Myra said. She took a drink, held the bottle to her other knee. “She’s a handful. You remember being a teenager?”

  “Course I do. Wasn’t that long ago for me.”

  He finished off his beer, his throat moving with each pull. Myra had said something wrong, had passed him an oar in the “Ain’t we old?” boat.

  “No, no, that ain’t what I meant,” she said. “I know you’re still a young man. I just meant there’s a difference between your teenage years and your adulthood.”

  “I get you,” he said.

  Myra pushed herself up, limped into the kitchen to get more beer. “Of course,” she said, “it’s important to maintain some stuff from your teenage years.” She spoke to him across the tiny bar in between the kitchen and the living room. He didn’t turn his head toward her. What was she doing, talking to this strange person about being a teenager? “That excitement,” she added, “you know what I mean?”

  He grunted, grunted again when she handed him a fresh beer. Myra lowered herself back onto the couch. After a while he said, “I didn’t have the most fun teenage years.”

  Myra waited for him to go on, but he just took a swig and sat there. “Well,” Myra said, “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Nice of you to say.”

  “Me, I had a great time in high school. Back then everybody hung out with everybody. There wasn’t no cliques. Football players wouldn’t just go for the cheerleaders, if you get me. And I wasn’t no cheerleader.”