Free Amor and Psycho: Stories by Carolyn Cooke Page A

setting type, scissoring a chicken up its back, stirring up a pitcher of caipirinhas. Writing a list, Georgie held her pen in that protective way lefties do. Chopping an onion or writing a letter or deadheading her roses, Georgie switched the chemical sauna on and off.
    “What are you going to do?” Babe asked.
    “What else can I do? Raw foods, single-malt scotch, surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. I’m going to do it all.” Georgie laughed a gutsy, throaty laugh, like an old lounge singer. “Oh, but wait, do you want to hear the best part?”
    “Hit me,” said Babe.
    “They create the new one while you’re still on the operatingtable. They use your own love handles, can you believe it? The larger your love handles, the bigger the boobs.”
    Georgie sounded tough over the phone, and Babe, scared and horrified, laughed with her. She remembered later how hard and loudly they laughed at how tough they were going to be.

THE BOUNDARY
    Scarface was obnoxious, but he had charisma. The first time I met him, he showed me a coffee can with dead tadpoles in the bottom. He offered to sell them—with the coffee can—for ten dollars. I drove him home from Madrigal to the rez. He asked if, when I bought my car, it came with the engine. I said the car came with the engine. Then he asked whether it came with the key.
    I admired his directness. “Listen, you’re a hippie,” he said. “Can you get me some weed?”
    “You want me to get you some weed.”
    “If you get me some weed, I can get you commodities. Peanut butter, apple juice, powdered eggs—whatever you want.”
    “Dream on,” I said.
    “If you get me weed, I’ll make you
breakfast
, you know what I mean?” Scarface smiled benignly.
    I didn’t answer. How could I? He was only twelve. Just outside town, I turned up a stretch of road that ran through hills and gullies that bloomed with wild mustard and fennel and cow parsnip and the carcasses of American-made cars named after wild horses. One end of this road opened at the rez, with its HUD houses and rosebushes, where Scarface lived. On the other end stood the Assembly of God. In between, we passed a ranch where a wealthy couple from Los Angeles had brought hundreds of rare wild birds. Immediately the turkey farm across the road sued them for bringing in exotic bird diseases, and someone shot their dogs.
    “You saying I’m ugly?” Scarface shouted suddenly. “Huh? ’Cause I’m packing heat!” He pointed to his penis.
    This was a test. Sure, Scarface was ugly, as enormous and threatening as possible for a person his age, not yet full-grown. His face looked like a knife wound. But beautiful, too.
    “I have to keep my eyes on the road,” I lied.
    “If you get me some weed, I’ll forgive white people for all the injustices done to Indians,” he said.
    “Scarface,” I said, “how can you forgive white people?”
    He looked out the window at the dusty plain of the turkey farm and said, “If I didn’t know how to forgive people, I wouldn’t have no family or friends.”
    It was true. Scarface’s own father had shot and killed two men in a state of such profound drunkenness that at the trial he could not recall the crime, the men or his reasons. He lived in prison—the worst one. Scarface’s mother did odd jobs with men.
    Scarface couldn’t really read—he spelled his own name “Scrafac” on a piece of paper he gave me with his telephone number on it. I don’t know what they did with him in fifth grade; he still held the pencil in his fist. I would have liked to take Scarface away and make him mine—but you can’t do that. Whatever my reasons were for wanting Scarface, they were the wrong reasons. I bought him pickles and jerky and doughnut holes at the gas station, and loved him the way you might love someone for his money or his beauty.
    AROUND THE TIME I started my gig with Artists in the Schools and got to know Scarface—the year of my messy and depressing separation—my sister,