Alphabetic Karma, Part 3

Over the next few weeks, we're going to serialize Alphabetic Karma, a short story originally published by Hawkshaw Press. Sign in every Wednesday and Sunday to get the next paragraphs. When we left Kimmie last, she'd just avoided being shopped for 4 days of smack.

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I hitched back across town. For a half hour, I begged my father to forgive and forget, there on the front stepʼs Italian stones. Gave it my best shot. “My best friend out here is an addict. Do you want me to end up like her?” Trouble is, itʼs true, I could end up that way.

They let me back into the house. And they laid down the law. Rules on attending school. Rules on staying in at night. Requirements for my grades.

Returning home gave me an uneasy grace period. I liked the therapy and the circle sessions. I held power—I could shock. I would sum up the mishmash of patients in my circle as pathetic in their own ways. They thought they had problems working through grief, anxiety, alcoholism. Booze isnʼt even a good high.

I could see myself reflected in the glass window of the group session room, my own stage. I propped an elbow over my thigh and leaned forward in my best butch pose. Like Alia Shawkat. A pale white face, hair cut flat on one side, spiked on top, dyed pink on the other side. That mirror of me opened her mouth. “What the crap do you know?”

The woman speaking, Doreen, stopped with a jerk. Her face folded up like a small cereal box. She began to cry.

I said, “Thatʼs right. Cry. Youʼve been sober, what, two months? You have a house, a family. You got it easy.”

Doreenʼs therapy bond-mate Chris stabbed a finger at me and said, “Shut up. Leave her alone.”

“Iʼll tell you what tough is. Tough is when they lock you up in a shrink ward for four days because they say you pose a danger to yourself. Tough is eating out of dumpsters and getting used to the smell.”

Doreen continued to sniffle. Chris draped an arm across Doreenʼs shoulder. He pivoted to authority—turning to the counselor, he said, “Weʼre all of us here as patients, not just her.”

Dressed in his blue leadership blazer, the counselor grinned faintly and leaned back. I stared at him, my best hard-slitted eyes measuring him up. Maybe he thought it good to let the confrontation play out. Maybe he was bored. Maybe he was incompetent.

I twitched up my sleeve, showed the tattoo, a spray of lilies that ran up my left forearm. “See this? I picked up this tattoo to remind me every day. Every day, of how they raped me in the park.”

This was total fabrication. My joy in life had narrowed down to hard-core bone-bruise lying.

# # #

Family re-entry didnʼt work well—I iced my way through the escalation, the shouting, the ultimatums, my mother Margyʼs guilt. She acted like some bird that had torn its wing, thin and crumpled. Her perfect face dissolved and ran under leaky tears. They actually dripped onto the coffee bar, puddles of high-priced makeup. I had carried her for two years after Dad went all pervy. I even got her to quit drinking—ironic, right?

Why should I do what they want? Because Dad threw me away like an old snotty tissue?

My father had made things really complicated in the family, if complicated meant poisonous. He had betrayed my basket-case mother when he slept with a flesh accessory named Benjy. Dear old Dad betrayed me when he let Benjy feel me up, and the Benjy after him. Dad liked to watch, but he didnʼt like my mouth much by the time I turned fourteen. Go to the cops? Who believes a kid?

When he threw me out again, I had twenty bucks and a one-month metro bus pass. I knew my best option was Uncle Zach.

I journeyed out of suburbia into the city, to a trailer park that overlooked what had once been the stock yards and slaughter house and was now a wasteland. The park was packed as tight as I imagined the cows had been in the chutes a hundred years before. The trailers six feet apart, the narrow lane clogged with cars. I marched through, stared left and right at the Chicano families, at the sad old women who had outlived everyone, at the slackers who had given up on having jobs. Uncle Zachʼs trailer squatted in the back, close to the fence. On the other side, the freeway sprawled in all its noisy glory.

Zachʼs trailer dated back decades. As a younger man, heʼd strewn a dozen tires across its roof to hold it down, proof of the power of our winter storms. The trailerʼs metal sheeting had surrendered most of its color, leaving turquoise smudges like an old ladyʼs eyeshadow. A wooden ramp gave access from the street to the door—as I climbed up it, my hand caused the rail to quiver with a promise of collapse. A small manufacturerʼs ornament riveted by the door told me this trailer was a Valkyrie.

I leaned in and heard the coughing inside. On the fourth knock, I picked up on the voice, “Coming, coming. Iʼm putting on my goddamn pants.”

He threw the door open—worse than I remembered. Uncle Zach must have gained another fifty pounds. He overflowed the wheelchair like an abundance of pudding. His jowls had developed new wrinkles; his chin couldnʼt decide if it was a double or a triple. The beard had coarse hairs like porcupine quills, set apart far enough to display Zachʼs pink-flushed skin.

“Uncle Zach, itʼs me.”

“Me? Me who? Wait a minute, I canʼt see a thing without my glasses.” He donned a pair of aviator-type glasses, with a light-brown tint. “Jesus, Kimmie, what are you doing here? Does your old lady know youʼre out here?”

“All I can say is, both me and Dad know Iʼm not at home. Theyʼre probably having the locks changed right now.”

Zach peered at my face, dropped his gaze and brought it back up. “Huh. So thatʼs how it is. You better come in.” He rolled backwards into the scant living room and gave me the space to slip past him into the kitchen.