The Onion Girl

  “Either we clean up our act,” Pinky says, stubbing out her smoke, “or we take it right to the bone, badasses all the way.”

  I just look at her. She’s lounging there on the other side of the booth, all relaxed, smiling. Her black pedal pushers are back in style and her pink tube top’s never gone out, at least not anywheres we find ourselves. Pinky’s still always wearing something to match her name. It was going to be her trademark, she used to say when she first started up the habit. Like anybody was taking fashion notes. But it’s the reason I had that pink Caddy convertible waiting for her the day she got outta prison.

  “You leaning any particular way?” I ask.

  Pinky shrugs and gives her dyed-blonde bangs a fluff. She’d first gotten her that Farah Fawcett haircut back when the Angels was still running in prime-time and she’s stuck with it ever since. “You don’t change what works,” she told me when I asked once. Me, I used to be as fickle as an alley cat when it come to my hair. I’d wear it any which way it might happen to occur to me. But the last few years I just let it grow and tie it back.

  Pinky’s looking a sight better these days—pretty much like she did when she first started in on making them porn movies way back when. Her skin’s soft, she’s firm in all the right places, the lines are gone from her face. I’m looking pretty good, too, though I don’t spend near’ as much time in front of the mirror as she does. But sometimes I catch a glimpse a myself when I’m getting in or outta the shower, and it takes me by surprise. I ain’t sagging neither. The lines are gone from my face. I had some gray in my hair, but it’s all gone, too.

  I made mention of it to Pinky one day and she just looked at me for a long moment, then stripped down and went and stood in front a the full-length mirror in our room.

  “I’ll be damned,” she said. “It just never occurred to me.” She turned to look at me. “What’s going on here, Ray?”

  I felt pretty much the same way Pinky was feeling when the realization come to me. But I had me an answer and I gave it to her then.

  “It’s that unicorn blood,” I told her.

  “But we’re only killing them in our dreams.”

  “It’s like I been telling you,” I said. “Maybe we’re dreaming, but someplace that forest is real.”

  Pinky nodded, but she’d turned back to the mirror and was just standing there, running her hands on her stomach, hefting her breasts.

  “I’d like me some serious foldin’ green,” Pinky says to me now, “but I don’t much feel like earnin’ it.”

  I smile. Like that’s news.

  “But not here in Tyson,” I say.

  “Naw, I was thinkin’ of Newford.”

  “Think anybody’d remember us in the city?” I ask.

  It’s been a long run of years since we played out any of our scams in Newford.

  “We’re unforgettable,” Pinky tells me. “That’s just the cross that you and me, we got to bear. But it’s a big city.”

  I nod. I’ve been looking through the paper while we’re talking and something stops me dead. I have this moment when everything just goes cold and hot at the same time. I want to tear that paper up and scatter the pieces. I want to grab somebody by the hair and just ram their head against a wall until there ain’t nothing left of their face. But I force myself to breathe. To calm down.

  When I’m feeling more myself, I look up at Pinky, but she hasn’t noticed nothing.

  “Do you believe in fate?” I ask her, surprised at how calm my voice sounds.

  She shrugs, likes it’s no never mind to her, one way or the other.

  “Look at this,” I tell her.

  I turn around the entertainment section of The Tyson Times where it talks about a Newford artist being hit by a car and show it to her. Pinky studies the picture of the woman they’re talking about.

  “That’s your sister?” she asks.

  “There sure as hell ain’t two of her.”

  “She went and changed her name.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “She tried to change a lot a things, I guess, but she’s still gonna be Hillbilly Holler trash when it’s all said and done. How we all growed up, that’s something that never goes away, don’t matter how slick we try and make ourselves out to be.”

  It’s the reason that, in the end, I let everything pretty much ride. What’s the point of fighting who you are, or how the world’s going to look at you? I coulda had me a million dollars and people’d still know I was just a Carter from the other side of the tracks.

  “She looks a lot like you,” Pinky says. “I mean, give her some tits and you could be sisters.”

  I let out a sigh. “We are sisters.”

  “I meant twins.”

  “I guess we do share a resemblance.”

  It’s funny. I hear Del’s living in that Indiana Road trailer park and it touches me some, but only with curiosity and a scraping of my old fears. He could die tomorrow—hell, he could die this minute—and it wouldn’t worry me none. But that sister of mine, I just got to think on her and I’m in a rage.

  I guess it’s that Del was always bad, so anything he ever done to me never come as no surprise. But she, she betrayed me, and that cuts the heart deeper than anything I can imagine, and I can imagine plenty. It’s a hurt that just don’t go away.

  “I’m thinking maybe I should pay her a visit,” I say.

  Pinky gives me a look. “You ain’t thinkin’ of doin’ nothin’ foolish, now are you? ’Cause let me tell you from personal experience, prison ain’t worth it.”

  “That’s only if you get caught.”

  Pinky just keeps on a-studying me, then finally she nods.

  “I guess if there’s anyone can get away with it, it’d be you,” she says. “You always was too smart for your own good.”

  “I’m not planning on hurting her,” I say. At least not yet. “’Sides, read what it says. She’s in some goddamn coma.”

  Pinky nods. “Sure. Time we was doin’ somethin’ new. Tyson was gettin’ old anyways.”

  NEWFORD, APRIL

  So that’s how we find ourselves parking the pink Caddy just off of Yoors Street and walking back down the block to where my sister’s apartment is, one of them studio lofts across the street from a Chinese groceteria.. There’s three other apartments in her building and I guess there was some stores on the ground floor, but they’re all boarded up now, the windows papered up, and I can’t tell what they was selling. But there’s a coffee shop coming in on one side, according to the “Opening Soon!” sign, and something called Whispering, which could sell just about anything, having a name like that. The door to her place has a couple of bells with names beside them. Hers is number two.

  I gave the hospital a call afore we come out here, but my sister’s still flat out in her coma—two and a half days now and counting. As we turn down the alleyway beside her building, I’m trying to decide whether I want her to ever wake up again, or maybe go ahead and stay that way until she just kinda wastes away into nothing. I want to tell her to her face what I think about what she’s done, but one more funeral I’m not going to attend’d probably suit me just as well.

  “If her place is on the second floor,” Pinky says, pointing, “that window’s lookin’ into her place. The fire escape can take us right up to it.”

  I nod. “Here, put these on.”

  I pull out a couple a pairs of surgical gloves I picked up at a drugstore earlier in the day and hand one over to her. Pinky gives them a look.

  “What’re these for?” she asks.

  “We don’t want to leave no prints, what with the both of us being on record and all.”

  “I thought we wasn’t goin’ to do nothin’.”

  “We’re breaking in, ain’t we?”

  “There’s that.”

  I can tell she don’t know why we’re doing this and I’m not so sure I do neither. I guess I just have a need to be in this place where she’s been living all these years, see what was so important that she co
uld abandon me to Del and just take off on me like she did.

  It’s midafternoon as we go climbing up that fire escape, but I’m not worried. All I can see is the rear of buildings and maybe they’re gentrifying the front of the street, but back here it’s still catch-as-catch-can. Nobody going to be paying a whole lotta attention to a couple of women going up a fire escape. Still, I take a good look around afore I break the window. We wait a breath after the glass breaks, listening in the silence that follows the shards as they fall inside and drop to the asphalt below. No one appears to be paying us any attention, so we clear away the rest of the glass and step over the window frame, inside.

  And then I know why I’m here.

  It’s those damn paintings. All them fairies of hers, transplanted from the woods around the holler and put here in the city.

  “She’s kinda messy,” Pinky says, looking around.

  I suppose Pinky’s right. It’s one big room that’s a jumble of art gear and scattered clothes and things piled up in stacks every which way you happen to look, but I’m not really paying much attention to any of it and I hardly hear Pinky. I’m just focused on this dark place inside me, thinking of all them fairy tales my sister told me and how they come true for her, maybe, but she sure didn’t leave me living in no fairy tale. Where was my happy ending with Del coming into my room, night after night, and me just a little girl?

  “Ray?” Pinky says.

  I got no time for words. All I got is a red haze over my eyes making everything look like it’s got a film of blood covering it. I pull that switchblade outta my pocket and walk across the room to where this big painting’s sitting on the shelf in front of a half dozen others. I keep the blade of that knife honed sharp as a razor, just like Pinky taught me to all them years ago, and it cuts through the first painting like it was hot and the canvas is butter. The smiling fairy looking at me splits in two and then three and then I got the damn thing shredded and I’m on to the next one.

  It’s a long time later, after I’ve cut me every damn one of them fairy paintings, broken most of the frames, knocked over a few things, that I finally start to see normal again. I find Pinky sitting on a battered couch, just a-looking at me. There’s a sharp smell in the air—from one a them jars of turpentine I broke, I guess.

  “You about done now?” Pinky asks.

  I give her a slow nod.

  “Are you feeling any better?”

  I take a long slow breath. I look at the ruin surrounding me and slowly fold the blade of my knife into its handle and stick it back in my pocket.

  “Some,” I tell her.

  “Time we was goin’ then.”

  That night we take us a room at the Sleep Comfort Motel up on Highway 14 and once we get to sleep, we’re a-hunting, fierce and wild, full of piss and vinegar and just a-spoiling for a fight, but we don’t catch us one decent scent. I wake up in the early hours of the morning and stare at the ceiling of the motel room above our bed, feeling lost and hurt. The only thing that makes it bearable is the idea of my sister coming back to that apartment of hers and seeing all her dreams ripped to shreds the way mine was when she left me behind.

  Things is kinda funny after that, like what I did stirred up something inside me instead of easing it away. Turned me into a stalker. We got us some money left, but I can tell Pinky’s fretting about how I can’t concentrate on much of anything these days. I go back to my sister’s apartment pretty much every day, mostly looking the way I always do, sometimes playing with wigs and outfits and makeup, like we used to do when we run our scams, so that it’s a complete stranger going there.

  Her friends have cleaned the place up, but I got back in easy enough. The first time I go up the front stairs and use me a couple a wires, kinda brushing up on my old lock-picking skills, though the lock on her door’s not much of a challenge. Poking around in her things, I find a junk drawer with keys in it and try ’em all until I got me one that works and after that I don’t need to play the cat burglar no more.

  Twice I hear someone at the door while I’m still inside and I have to scoot under the Murphy bed and wait there while whoever it is dumps off some mail, does a slow walk around the apartment. I can tell by the feet it’s a woman. The second time she sits on the sofa a whiles and I hear her crying.

  I been by the hospital, too, and later the rehab, all dressed up like I’m someone else. I walk by her room, pause in the doorway sometimes, get me a good look. I don’t know what I’m thinking, what I want to do. I just know that there’s still a world of unfinished business lying there between us.

  Then one night we have us an encounter in the dreamlands like we never had before, something that changes everything. We take us down another of them unicorns—the first one in a long time—and hardly get a decent wallow in its blood afore we’re chased off.

  Pinky and me, we wake up at the same time in that big king-size bed we’re sharing in the Sleep Comfort Motel.

  “That can’t have been real,” Pinky says. “I mean, what the hell were them things?”

  I’m still reeling myself. They had the bodies of men, but the heads of wolves or coyotes or something. A couple of dog boys, dressed up casual in jeans and all.

  “Some kinda … animal people,” I say.

  And then it hits me. The clothes they were wearing, the way they talked …

  “You notice anything unusual about them?” I ask Pinky.

  She gives me this look like all my brains done gone and drained outta my head. “Well, yeah. You mean like how they had dog heads on the bodies of men?”

  “No,” I say. “That one guy was wearing a T-shirt with ‘Don’t! Buy! Thai!’ written on it. Who the hell’s going to advertise a boycott in the dreamlands?”

  “What’re you talkin’ about?”

  “And he knew we weren’t real wolves.”

  “You didn’t need to be no brain scientist to pick up on that,” Pinky says. “But I still don’t get the deal.”

  “They come from this world,” I tell her, slapping my hand on the bedspread. “Just like you and me, ’cept I got the sense they was solid. That they can cross over without the need to go to sleep and dream first.”

  Pinky takes the time to light a cigarette and gives a slow nod. “You think?”

  “Oh, yeah. I ain’t got no question in my mind.”

  “But you’d think we’d’ve heard about guys walking around with dog heads—if they come from here, I mean.”

  “They’re not going to look like that here,” I say, wishing that just for once Pinky’d try and exercise them few brains god give her. “I’ll bet they can decide how they want to look any old time they please.”

  “Well, they scared the crap right outta me,” Pinky says.

  I know what she means. It’s the reason I backed off sudden as I done. There was some powerful mojo working in them dog boys. I got the feeling, real quick, that they coulda just shut us down without no more’n a word or two.

  “You know what this means?” I say.

  “That we ain’t goin’ to have us our fun no more.”

  I shake my head. “Not a chance.”

  “Then what does it mean?”

  “That we got the chance of going over there our own selves. For real. Think about it. If we can figure it out, we don’t got to worry about nothing in this world no more ’cause we’ll be able to just walk us back and forth between the two like that pair can.”

  “We don’t know that they can,” Pinky says.

  But I do. I can’t even explain how I know. I just do. And if they can do it, then we should be able to figure out a way to do it, too.

  “And why would we even want to?” Pinky adds.

  “Well, for one thing, we’d never have to work again.”

  “Like we ever did.”

  “I did.”

  Pinky nods. “I forgot about all them years you was in that copy shop.”

  “But this works out, we won’t have to work, and we won’t have to risk our asses
running no scams no more, neither.”

  Pinky leans back against the headboard. “So how you figure that?”

  “Say we need us a little money,” I tell her. “We just slip outta the dreamlands into a bank vault, say. Help ourselves to whatever we need, and then slip back out the way we come.” I grin. “Hell, even if we ever got caught, how’re they going to hold us? They put us in a cell and we just up and disappear ourselves back into the dreamlands.” I snap my fingers. “Just like that.”

  In the neon light coming from the sign outside, I can see the understanding dawn on Pinky and she gives me that big old grin of hers.

  “How’re we gonna learn how to do that?” she asks.

  “I dunno. Let me think on it a spell.”

  Come morning, I get me an idea.

  “You remember that old woman, used to live at the head of Copper Creek?” I ask Pinky. “Had that bottle tree in front of her house.”

  Pinky turns from the mirror above the vanity where she’s been putting on her makeup. It’s pretty clear from the look on her face that she don’t like where this is going.

  “You think she’s still living there?” I go on. “She had to be a thousand years old, that time we saw her.”

  We was still in school back then, sneaking out into the woods to have us our little parties. That day there was only the three of us-me, Pinky, and Rolly LeGrand, this fella Pinky had taken a liking to that week. We was smoking cigarettes and drinking beer, wandering off from where we’d parked Rolly’s Duster by the rickety little bridge on Early Road where it crosses over Copper Creek, when suddenly we come upon this old log cabin, the bottle tree out front and the old woman just a-setting on the porch.