Victims

One would think that there were something in my past, or my genetic make up, to indicate exactly what I’d do. But there was nothing. I was born a nobody, to a family that had no more respect for the Good Ones than most. Another white family that didn’t care about its Irish or Scottish roots, only that West Virginia voted right in the upcoming election. I lived hours away from city, and I use the term city loosely, because what city meant to us was that there was a movie theatre with more than two people working in it, and more than one Starbucks. Where I came from, people passed around stories about torrential rain blowing off roofs, or deer jumping tragically in front of bumpers, or having to chase goats away from the tractor innards on the lawn.

I came from dirt and I looked like it. My family is coloured like the land we live on, all brown and forgettable. I only thought West Virginia was beautiful when I got out of it. Up and took myself to Chicago, where the red brick buildings covered in so many fire escapes like parasites made me realize that you didn’t find that amount of green just anywhere outside of West Virginia. I didn’t regret it, and my family was proud to have me gone. I was always different, they started to tell me in letters and over the phone, only after I’d left. When I was in elementary school, bored waiting for the hot lunch program to fill me, I played games of checkers on a board made of salt and sugar packets, which I stuffed in my pockets for later. I never jumped at loud noises in the hedges, and whatever might have gotten caught in there, I gently hitched out of the brambles and set free. I was the only one to see what the crazy woman (Hilly- short for Hilda or Hillary, no one knew) saw, or to say I did, and steer her away from the strange creatures. I used to put out small ramekins of milk at night, for cats or ghosts I used to say. In return, mother said, nothing in the garden, and nothing in the fields, ever grew poorly or struggled, even through a particularly short season. I never lied, not even when a couple of short skirts in high school accused me of getting them drunk and figuring out for myself what was under those short skirts. I planted a mountain ash tree outside the house of a neighbour who had woken up with her hair in many knots, as deliberate as a sailor’s, as though someone had done it in the night. How grateful she was, my mother said, for the mountain ash, and how generous it was of her to gift me the money I used to buy my way to Chicago.

I bought the apartment, by the way. Not the ride. I rode in the back of the truck that came once a week to stock the convenience section of the gas station on the edge of our dust town.

Chicago wasn’t my first stop, actually. It was the last of many stops. I made stops in Columbus, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, down to Louisville, up to Milwaukee, and down again. I realized, over the trip, exactly how I related to people. It wasn’t something you always knew from living in a small town, but you got to know it fast when you moved around. Mostly, I got to know victims. I could pick them out in a crowd, whether I was trying to or not, and once I did, they flocked, like they sensed I could help them. It was like a buzzard’s love song, coming to me at once. I never wanted for a girlfriend.

I had a knack for picking them out, but they were really the ones that picked me.

In Columbus, Alina became sick to her stomach after drinking some sweet beer with a few boys in the park. She stuttered over her explanation, like I would be upset with her for spending time with other men. By the time she’d calmed down and had the tea I made for her from rose hips and salt, her stomach was right as rain, and she knew never to accept strange drinks from pretty boys again. She broke up with me two weeks later.

Gloria of Cincinnati loved to dance. She thought herself most beautiful when she was in the thrashing mass of people in a Latin club, and she had no reservations about who she danced with. We met and got together when she taught me how to meringue. We lasted as long as it took her to dance with someone else, which had happened before. She didn’t stop dancing, which hadn’t happened before. When I sprinkled some soil beneath her feet and took her one hand that wasn’t occupied by a man I refused to make eye contact with, and when I led her on a path of soil to the outdoors, and when I piggybacked her home because human legs aren’t meant to be used after four consecutive days of dancing, she learned that you can’t dance wherever you fancy. When I left Cincinnati, she was looking to open her own club on her family’s property. She had a steep learning curve.

There was one in every town, and not much variation: Elizabeth in Indianapolis who plucked an apple from a neighbour’s yard without asking dumped me three days after I plucked a poisoned splinter from the inside of her lip. Louisville Nuala jokingly traded her annoying baby sister for a face free from pimples, and found the crib empty and the window open when she went home that night. I gave her some SpectroGel, found her sister alive, unharmed, and only slightly dirty under a mound of soil in the ravine, and brought her back to her nursery, newly anointed at the windows and door with salt. The next weekend, Nuala and I were over. Milwaukee was no better. I didn’t mind teaching the lessons, though I could have done without the breakups. When I worked my way back up north, finally with a destination in mind, I swore off girlfriends, and swore instead on my talent.

Chicago is much better than it once was, but there are neighbourhoods still where it’s unwise to walk with earphones in, with your eyes down, with your head up, with your heels on and your brain still stewing in alcohol. Because those are the easiest to get, and mostly, it’s girls. The girls who aren’t in school, aren’t sober, aren’t at home every night, aren’t at home any nights, aren’t sure how to make a fist, aren’t above accepting a handout. It’s hard to turn some of them away, but I feel that, in the interest of keeping my life the way it is, I’d best skirt any police interference, or neighbourly interference, that comes with dating anyone below the age of consent. All the young ones just better wait a while before they make a hot and vulnerable mess of themselves.

We date. There are actual dates, with romance and everything. Then the work starts, because inevitably they all make Little Red Riding Hoods of themselves, talking to people and walking places they shouldn’t. Some of them are street smart, and even them, you can hardly imagine what stupid things they do. They accept strange gifts, strange invitations, take detours, hold hands, make promises. But they all come to me when they make a mistake. Unlike the maniac with the ax, I don’t command their eternal gratitude, or their loyalty. Once they’ve been freed of their own consequences and their lessons learned, they cast themselves off, hardly ever lasting more than a couple weeks. It isn’t the girls that are thankful, but I do get the occasional client that I haven’t dated, in need of a handful of salt, or to take a walk over running water, and they’re always pleased with my services.

I was visited by a police officer that had apparently seen two young women, and a young boy with his distraught mother and a black river tracing of veins in his neck, enter my apartment all in one week. The officer – a lethargic lump of a man with more hairs in his moustache than working neurons in his brain- asked to see the inside of my apartment, then asked some questions about what I was doing in Chicago (living), and where I worked (here, on my laptop) and who those girls were (friends), before he seemed to realize that there wasn’t much else to discover. He couldn’t see what I was doing in a day beside making lunch on the stove and listening to the radio quietly and being generally happy alone. He met my newest girlfriend on the way out, and because she hadn’t been victimized yet, and smiled, the officer didn’t come back.

Not yet, anyway. There’s always time for mistakes, the sort only I know how to fix.

That girlfriend lasted three more weeks. I haven’t dated anyone since, though there have been girls.

There have been girls and now there is Tate Shuter. In her face I can see that she has all kinds of street smarts. She has the accumulated street smarts of possibly every girl I’ve ever dated, and she’s never once considered putting any of that intellectual energy into school. She works at one of the bars I frequent, where Ava, who works with her, tells me she’s capricious and unfriendly. Tate walks home late, alone, and gets into shouting arguments with strangers on the street. She mouths off to anyone before she knows them. If someone leaves their wallet behind, there’s a good chance Tate will rummage through it before they’ve even had the chance to notice it’s missing and call the bar. She takes stupid risks, is what a lot of this amounts to, but I’ve known girls who take stupid risks smartly, and that’s Tate. It isn’t a problem, except that she’s now met me.

I knew the moment I first saw her that she would need my help eventually. Not for the fighting or the raising a fist, but when she finally ticks off the wrong person. They won’t get her with a backhand or a broken bottle, and she doesn’t know how to fix an argument she can’t fight her way out of. Ava keeps telling me what she knows about Tate, and I can see she thinks that I’ve chosen Tate, already. Tate never lies, because she never thinks she’s done anything wrong. That’s a cry for help, but she’s not really asking for it. Tate puts out milk for some cats she thinks lives in the alley, even though no one’s ever seen one. Tate climbed into the bushes beside the turnpike outside of the city proper because she heard a sound like an animal fighting, even though it could have been two hobos fighting or doing something else. Tate will get herself into trouble, I think, but I don’t quite want to help her. I want to prevent whatever it is I’ll treat her for, and we can live in my apartment with salt on the windowsills and we can buy an obnoxiously loud motorcycle, because I can tell that must be an aspiration for her. And we can put out milk at night and never try to figure out what drinks it, and watch the strawberries in our garden grow and blossom no matter the weather, because I can tell it’s something that would please both of us.

Tate catches me watching her stack glasses and says, “Don’t tell me it’s dangerous. I already know that.”

I say, “I wasn’t about to tell you that.” Though I want to say “here are all the other ways you can be careful, so I never have to help you.”

But I know I will, so I let it slide.

Art by Frederico Infante

Text by Lucie MacAulay