Lisa thought it was funny, watching Punter scavenge. He had a thin face on a large round head, which was shaved, with grey eyes set far apart and thin, slack lips. He had a chipped front tooth, which happened from face planting into a rock after jumping from a moving boxcar, because a burly hopper told him the boxcar was his and his alone, and came after Punter with a box-cutter. Punter’s large head was atop his emaciated frame, and Lisa thought he looked kind of like an ant.
Still, Lisa was fine with Punter’s looks. She had a short, upturned nose and thin lips on a broad face with shoulder-length, dirty blonde, kinky hair. She never thought of herself as being anybody’s shiny, golden, jewel encrusted fuck trophy, and so was fine hanging on the gnarled dudes she hung on. Punter was the only real boyfriend she’d had, though, and she imagined she and Punter could make a bunch of ugly kids out of spite for everyone, FTW.
Jody, Punter and Lisa scrounged behind every retailer in Wichita
Jody told them to take wrappers and boxes, things with mailing addresses and proofs of purchase, and to leave everything else behind.
“Everything else is just more crap to lug around,” Jody said. “I don’t care if it looks like some spoiled asshole threw away a perfectly good laptop.”
“Well, if that’s just more crap to lug around,” Punter asked, “then why are we collecting all the trash and taking that home?”
“There is a method and there is a plan,” Jody said. “You’ll either do it or you won’t, but if you don’t somebody else will.”
Punter and Lisa looked at each other and rolled their eyes. Jody was always bringing up these “other people” who would do the things they resisted:
“You can nab the forty or not, but if you don’t, somebody else will.”
“Other people listen when I tell them how to procure weed, and so they procure weed.”
“If you don’t want to offer that old fellow a hand job, and lead him back to the men’s room, there are always people that do.”
All in Jody’s canon, just like there was always a “method” and a “plan.” Jody’s plans and methods always seemed to lead to more plans and methods- more hustling, more theft, more desperation.
However, they weren’t any more desperate or worse off than they were before they’d crossed Jody’s sightline. He’d been sitting on a wooden bench, with chipping red paint, in a pigeon-shit speckled courtyard off of Guadalupe, the main college drag in Austin
He didn’t look like the other crusty dragworms panhandling, getting drunk and shooting up along west campus, with their patched up knapsacks, their dirty black t-shirts, their dreadlocks, their primitive tattoos, their scabs, and their rope-leashed dogs with red bandannas around their furry necks fucking openly.
Jody wore a dusty black bowler hat, a green corduroy vest, skinny black tuxedo pants over a pair of work boots and a blue button up with a lime green tie. Everything was still dirty and rumpled, though, as if he still slept outdoors.
He wasn’t handsome by any means. He was as rail thin and sickly as the rest of the crusties, with a lumpy red nose on an acne-scarred, thin pink face sporting a scraggly red beard and brown, serrated teeth.
Upon first seeing him, Punter whispered “gutter dandy” in Lisa’s ear and she laughed.
“God, I know, right?” she said.
Jody said, “You guys should try this,” and hand rolled three weed laced, high end, vanilla and anise flavored tobacco cigarettes. The three of them lit up and smoked. Punter took a puff, took the cigarette out of his mouth and gazed at it, Lisa did the same. It tasted really good.
“Guy at the pipe shop,” Jody said, “he and I have an agreement.”
“What kind of agreement?” Punter asked.
“Kind that ain’t a disagreement,” Jody said.
Punter nodded and smirked. Lisa took Punter’s arm and led him away.
Punter said, “Thanks dude,” over his shoulder and Lisa said, “Freak” under her breath.
They’d run into him here and there in Austin
Jody also knew the train yards, the freight lines and their routes. He knew some of the workers, and knew which yards it was okay to get arrested in. “It’s just for a night,” Jody would say, “and they buy you pizza, they just have to know you’re not stealing or tagging, but you have to hitch out of town and hop down the route.”
And so the three of them travelled together. For all the supposed methods and plans, it was all pretty aimless. Because there were three of them, they didn’t get many rides while hitching, but the ones they got didn’t try anything.
Sometimes rides might end early because of Jody, though. Sometimes Christian do-gooder types would pick the three of them up, and the driver might go on a spiel about Christ’s love and Christ’s plans. Punter and Lisa would’ve been content to humor the nerd, but Jody would start in with, “Yes, but unfortunately all organized religion is a corrupt, hypocritical beaurocracy. What’s especially crazy is you all believe some magical man in the sky is going to solve all the world’s problems. I’ll bet you molest boys, don’t you?”
Tires would screech, the driver would tell the three of them he’d pray for them, sometimes give them a few dollars out of fear, and speed off.
One day the tires screeched in Wichita , and Wichita
Between the three of them, they’d scraped together enough to rent out an 8X12 storage space for a month. The three of them took two twelve-hour shifts sleeping and hanging out. Jody had noon to midnight in the space; Punter and Lisa took midnight to noon.
They’d only lasted a month in the space. In the last week of that month, while they lay together in the closet, Lisa asked Punter, “How long are you planning on doing this?”
“Doing what?”
“Doing nothing.”
“It’s what we’d be doing anyway. It’s all everybody does.”
“You really think that?”
“Yeah, it’s all nothing. Same as getting a job, going to college, finishing high school. Then do what? Work? Then what? It’s all you’d do. Fuck it.”
Then Lisa told Punter that just because he was lazy and unskilled didn’t mean everybody was. Then Punter called Lisa a stupid bitch and told her to shut up. Then it escalated, then it got physical.
When Jody unlocked the space for his shift, Lisa had swelling coming from her jaw and a fat lip and Punter had scratch marks going down his cheek.
So, the two twelve hour shifts were split into three eight-hour shifts. However, neither Punter nor Lisa liked being alone with Jody.
Once, when Punter was locked in the space, Jody asked, “So, it really is the lack of vision, or ambition, that’s getting under your skin isn’t it?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Lisa said.
“That’s fine,” Jody said, “but I knew, when I first saw you, that you were destined for bigger things.”
Lisa’s skin crawled. The next time Jody brought up the “better life” Lisa was entitled to, she said, “If by better life you mean you, then you can forget it. There’s no way.”
Jody put his hands up and said, “Hey, okay. I was simply trying to show you your worth.
When Punter was alone with Jody, Jody said, “Yeah, you know, I know you’re an independent free-wheeler, you don’t need to be tied down by some chick.
Lisa had already told Punter about Jody’s creepy insinuations, and Jody said, “You better back the fuck off, or I’ll kill you.”
Jody put up his hands again and said, “Hey, okay, I was only trying to help.”
Still, they continued to hang around Jody after the month at the storage space. The day after that month, they followed him through the woods outside of Wichita
The morning after camping in the clearing, they followed Jody through the woods. They started hearing the hum of the highway and the swish of passing cars in the background. It was sunny but wet outside.
They stepped out of the woods and into a cul-de-sac. They looked around. They were in a neighborhood, a residential area that was surrounded by nothing.
Punter said, wide eyed, “Dude, we’re gonna get the cops called on us.”
Jody said, “Somehow I doubt that.”
“Why?”
“There’s nobody here.”
“How do you know?”
“Do you see anybody?”
Lisa saw Punter looking around at the houses, she did the same. There were no blinds or curtains in the windows. She could see through every empty house.
“Fuck dude,” Punter said, and laughed.
The three of them settled in a big white house, with pillars, which sat in the middle of the street, set a good twelve yards back.
“What the fuck, man,” Lisa said, “this looks like the Eight is Enough house or some shit.”
“Just try to stay low key,” Jody told her. “And don’t get too comfortable.”
Jody, Punter and Lisa brought back empty cookie boxes, empty minute-rice bags, labels from cans of soup, chili, beans, tomato sauce and tuna, empty Pop Tart boxes, empty pasta boxes, wrappers from razors, soap and detergent boxes, bread wrappers, razor wrappers, plastic flash-drive shells, and any other sort of empty thing with a price code that may have once contained something useful or at least consumable.
Jody had a book of stamps. The three of them sat down at a park playground structure made entirely of tires and wrote varied complaint letters to the varied companies they’d collected proofs for. They wrote to commercial kitchens and bakeries, they wrote to soap makers, they wrote to software companies. Lisa wrote that a family of roaches crawled out of her cake mix, Punter found a big toe in his can of beef ravioli, Jody found a mouse in his loaf of rye bread. The PO Box Jody rented soon became stuffed with freebie coupons, refunds and cash vouchers.
Jody rented a PO Box because they couldn’t get mail at the squat, even if it was a big house that looked like it should be filled up with a normal family.
Punter and Lisa already knew it was a fluke, and that it couldn’t last, but they had to wonder what happened, how did this whole quarter get so empty? The rooms were all off-white and there was a bluish tint cast throughout the house. The smell of paint and drywall hung in the air with the dust. The place looked and smelled clean but stale. While poking around the place and selecting whose room was whose, Punter found a single navy blue suit in one of the closets, still covered in plastic from Sun Cleaners. There was nothing else in the house except that.
As far as the three were concerned, the house was more of a shell of comfort than comfortable, anyway. They knew they couldn’t furnish the place. While it was only mid-September, they knew they couldn’t heat the place when it started getting cold. So they slept on the carpeted floors in their rooms and thought their thoughts and planned their plans.
To Lisa, their current squat was like the home she’d left behind, at fifteen, when she ran away. It wasn’t that unusual a story, especially once she got on the street and got to know some of the other young urchins. Raped by her stepfather, she tried to tell her mother about it. Her mother just said, “Well, what do you want me to do about it?” Her stepfather, Raymond, had taken on the family home’s mortgage and the brunt of the bills, so Lisa and her mother were, more or less, locked in with him.
Besides that, ever since her father died, even before Ray came into her life, Lisa had already developed a taste for the brash, loud, snotty and angry. She’d cultivated her punk rock delinquent aura enough to be a willing outcast at her school, and to piss off her mom, who told Lisa she was killing her father all over again, over and over again.
Ray had started trying to assert his “man of the house” role, and started trying to institute such practices as dress codes and curfews.
He’d had her clothes for the week picked out: short plaid skirts, white button-up blouse, knee socks with buckle shoes. Even though she went to a public school, ray wanted her to dress like a Catholic schoolgirl.
Adding to the hurt was that, at school, she knew she’d catch all hell because she didn’t have the Catholic schoolgirl fetishist’s model face and tight body. Adding to queasiness was that she knew Ray licked his greasy teeth and lips while thinking her ass was all his. Adding to the horror was the curfew, which stipulated, basically, that she could have no friends or life outside of home and school.
“Why not just hang a chore list on the fridge?” Lisa asked. “And don’t forget to include your cock on it.”
“Lisa!” Lisa’s mom cried.
“That mouth of yours is another thing that’s going to change around here,” Ray said.
“Oh yeah?” Lisa said. “Maybe my mouth’ll get a little toothier.”
Ray smacked her, and sent her to her room.
Lisa just wanted to laugh. Her peers at school had been calling her crazy, and if that was true, and if this was sanity, she wanted to get as far away from it as possible.
That night Ray went to Lisa’s room, put his hand over her mouth, and fucked her harder than he ever had before. She could feel his hairy torso on her back, smell the Irish Spring he’d just showered with, and would shower with again when he was done, feel his short, thick cock ramming the gates. It felt like he was literally trying to fuck her in half, he never let up. She fixed her gaze on the photo of Bauhaus she had taped over her headboard. While fucking her, Ray tore it down.
The next day she had a hard time walking or even sitting down. She was sore all over. She felt broken, defeated, like a heap of bones and soft bloody flesh bits in a sack of skin anybody could cut into. Maybe she didn’t have a choice. Maybe she’d have to give into Ray’s whim, be his perfect little fuck-pet.
Then she decided, well…fuck that.
She’d known Punter from a few mutual friends. Goofy kids at shows who always seemed to have drugs when she wanted them. She’d tripped acid with him a few times and they talked about their fucked up families, the assholes they went to school with, and how everything felt like bullshit all the time. They’d made out a few times and laughed about it later. He’d become one of her good, fucked up friends. Also, she knew, he’d have a place to stash her, just as he’d always had a place to stash himself.
When she ran away she took her mom’s and Ray’s credit cards. She bought a TV, a stereo, a laptop, a pearl brooch and a pair of emerald earrings, all of which she sold to a couple of pawn shops for some cash to get around with. She then gave the cards to some crackhead.
Lisa knew Punter’s story was a little simpler. Punter told her: His dad was a drunk and a pillhead who used to slap Punter around. Punter learned how to hold his own, and knew the day would come that he’d better his old man.
That day came when he was sixteen. Punter had been stealing, using and selling his dad’s medicine, and got careless about trying to hide the fact from him. Punter’s dad confronted him, and Punter said, “Yeah, I take your pills, what the fuck of it?” His dad raised his hand to him, and Punter beat the crap out of him. His dad was crumpled into a bloody, whimpering heap in the corner. Punter, who was buzzing on a combination of whisky and Demerol, slurred, “I’m in charge now, old man,” and staggered to bed.
When he woke up, his dad was standing over him with a shotgun aimed at his face. His dad said, “See, this here’s my castle, and you don’t hit back in my castle. You have to the count of five because, I’ll tell you what son, I don’t go to the cops.”
Punter grabbed a pair of jeans and his Man is the Bastard t-shirt, both of which were wadded up on the floor, and clumsily dressed as he hauled ass out of there.
Punter and Lisa were both dirty, scabby, feral and ratty. Punter described them as being “country.” He meant that, in their lives, anything goes because everything went. They both assumed they were sick, that something was rotting inside of them, but they weren’t going to find out exactly what.
When they were sober and lucid, they recognized themselves as living ghosts, as literal pieces of shit, as having literally no home, no lives and no futures. Whenever they felt anything, they felt too low, they felt like death. So, their only goal was to stay alive another twenty minutes and stay numb doing it. They did whatever they could get a hold of in the process. They fucked in alleys and fought in the streets, drunkenly and blindly slapping and scratching each other.
Neither Punter nor Lisa really knew Jody’s story. They assumed he had a trust fund, because he always had at least a little money and they never saw him begging. They saw him as a tourist through what their whole lives would be like. When he was bored he’d up and domesticate himself. In the meantime, he had a few things they could use, so they might as well hang out with him. If they didn’t…yeah, they knew.
Lisa was asleep, and Punter was pretty sure Jody was as well. Punter wanted to poke around the house a little, and went into an unoccupied room at the end of the hall. He opened a closet and, in the ceiling, there was a small square door covered with plywood. It had to be an attic.
He woke Lisa, and Lisa followed him back to the room, where he hoisted her up to the portal. She pushed the plywood out of the way and pulled herself up. Jody watched as her legs disappeared into the darkness, it looked like the attic had sucked her up
Soon, she poked her head out and whispered, “Punter! Oh my god, you have to see this!”
“Can you pull me up?”
Lisa put her arms out. She and Punter grabbed each other’s wrists and pulled. Both grunted as Punter stepped up the walls. Punter was able to grab the square’s edge and pull himself in.
Christmas lights were strung all along the roof’s interior, though they were off. Candleholders with melting candles had been screwed along the roof’s support planks. There were photos embedded in a mural, and the mural consisted of a number of scenarios involving Punter, Lisa and Jody. Punter was beating down his old man, Lisa was bent over her bed by her stepfather. Jody was in the background, watching everything.
Jody’s voice came from the room below.
“What are you guys doing?” Jody called.
Punter and Lisa looked at each other. Then Punter poked his head out and said, “Jody, you should really check this shit out.
“I know what’s up there, Punter.”
“Yeah? Have you already been up here?”
“Yeah,” Jody said. “I’ve been up there.”
