Free A Stranger in This World by Kevin Canty Page B

it was somebody else’s hand. “What’s the matter, baby?” I asked.
    “I’m not your baby.”
    “Whatever you are.”
    “I’m not kidding about being in trouble,” she said. “Your buddy Coy, up here, he’s in with a rough crowd.”
    “How long have you been in town?”
    “I’ve been in and out, the last few months.”
    I sat on the edge of the bed wondering how I missed her in a town this small, while she went on looking at her hands. I was thinking about Coy, my high school buddy, old junkie friend. I hadn’t seen Coy in a while, imagined him fucking Dorothy. I asked her, “What does Coy have to do with it?”
    “Oh, fuck you,” she said. “I didn’t come here to explain myself, I came because I was in trouble and I was hoping you could help me out. I guess I was wrong.”
    She started to fold the powder back into the little paper envelope and I didn’t want her to go. I don’t know why, I just have to try to put it together, looking back. I could have let her go and none of the rest of it would have happened, and my reasons, when I try to put them together, are not all that good. Part of it was that I expected to fuck her, not exactly that I wanted to, although I did. But every time since high school there was always that charge, the one constant. Our bodies fit each other and I knew that if I touched her, if she let me inside, we would be the same as we ever were. If she left, the chain was broken, that part of my life was over and I’d be left behindwith the others—the good students, churchgoers, bookkeepers. I didn’t want to be ditched, maybe it was simple as that.
    Nobody to blame but myself.
    “What do you need?” I asked her.
    That next day, Margaret took me along with the kids out to the big swap meet at the Go West drive-in, four hundred cars packed in backwards on the humps, card tables and milk crates, an old turkey-necked buzzard with one cardboard box only, a hole cut in the top: XXX VIDEOS U-PICK $5.00. I was tired and spaced and it was a lie for me to be there. Setting up the folding tables, setting out the popcorn makers and blenders that Margaret brought to sell, I remembered the tangle of Dorothy’s legs and mine and the taste of her neck and the burn of the crank as it went down, the old pain and then the rush. But it was a cool clear day with a breeze and after a while my blood started to move. Actually I started to like it.
    My job was to hold down the fort, along with Alicia, while Shane and Margaret scoured the back rows for fixable junk. There wasn’t any clear line between buyers and sellers at the Go West. Half the business was trades, my junk for your junk, but there was quite a bit of movement here, quite a bit of life. This was hope of a practical kind, people trying to get somewhere. I was a spy in their house, a double agent. I was sitting in my chair watching them and keeping my secrets: Dorothy’s laughter and her voice,
Book
keeping
? Book
keeping
?
Jesus, Parker, that’s funny … There is no other life, I wanted to tell them, the person that you are is the person you’re goingto be. Though it was tempting to pretend. Something beautiful in all the movement, all the scurrying around in the clear light, buying and selling, moving forward.
    But it was stupid, too, and it wasn’t hard to make fun of them: the rusty mag wheels and broken bicycles and cassette tapes in Mexican, the sharp eyes of the bargainers. “This thing work?” they ask, holding up a ten-dollar blender, shaking it, listening for rattles.
    “Works fine.”
    “Mind if I plug it in?”
    “I’ll get it for you.” Then Sherlock Holmes investigates, listening for rattles, trying all twelve speeds: LIQUEFY, PUREE, FRAPPÉ .
    “I guess I could go seven and a half,” Sherlock says.
    “This isn’t my booth,” I tell him, as instructed. “I can’t go lower than nine on my own, but if you want to come back later …” He shakes his head, doubtfully. “You could give it a