Bait Dog An Atlanta Burns Novel - By Chuck Wendig Page 0,8
a pumpkin or gourd that sat too long on someone’s porch past Halloween—mushy and rotten, the skin puckered with the pock-marks of decay.
“Okay. Hold on then.” He disappears down the hall of the trailer. She hears one of the accordion doors slide open, slide back, and then he’s back. The pill bottle rattles as he plunks it down in front of her.
She picks it up. The pill bottle’s unlabeled.
“Adderall,” he says. “You know, for like, hyperactive kids. I don’t know why the fuck anybody would want to give an upper to a kid who’s already acting like he just ate ten bowls of Sugar Smacks, but shit, once upon a time people thought the sun traveled around the earth.”
“Some of them still do,” she says.
“I know, right? Anyway. You take that. It’ll focus you up real good. You know you gotta sleep at some point though, right?”
“Of course,” she lies. Her fingers work to peel the wet beer bottle label off the glass. Like peeling a sunburn, she thinks. “Yeah. Duh. I know that.”
“Just in case,” he reaches in his pocket, tosses her another pill bottle. “Ambien. If you decide to go the other way with it.”
“Thanks.”
“I normally get seven bucks a pill. You got ten Ambien there and twice that of the ADD meds, but let’s call it an even hundred for the Adderall, and the Ambien can be my gift to you. For being such a bad-ass chick and all that.”
She pockets the drugs. “I’m not bad-ass.”
“From where I’m sitting, you’re one I wouldn’t mess with.”
“I don’t have money right now. Soon.”
“You can owe me. It’s no thing.”
“You’re a god among mere mortals, Guy. Thanks.”
Atlanta finishes her beer in one long pull, then gets up. She thinks to move in to give Guy a hug but again the hairs on her neck and arms raise and it’s like she hears this keening frequency in her ears and for a moment she thinks, oh, fuck, I’m gonna pass out right here, right now—
But then the sound goes away and she’s left feeling wobbly, but stable.
Instead she just fake-punches him in the arm. He nods like he gets it. She leaves.
* * *
It’s gone dim by the time Atlanta gets home. Sky the color of a bruised cheek.
Mom’s in the garage, face lit by the little TV she’s got sitting on a cooler. The cigarette between her two fingers has a long, crumbly ash hanging there, smoldering like a snake made of cinders.
When she sees her daughter her face lights up. “We got our check today.” She fishes underneath her butt sitting there on the cot and pulls out an envelope and waggles it around. Then she notices: “Oh, shoot, this is the power bill. Gosh-dang PP&L, they didn’t even read the meter last month. They just estimated a bunch of nonsense. Thieves, I’m telling you. And it’s legal. But we did get our check.”
“Super,” Atlanta says, not meaning it. She moves to head inside.
“It’s funny,” Mom says a little too loudly. “I remember we’d go to the bank, you and I, and you were obsessed with the lollipops they had in a fishbowl by the counter. You wanted the blue ones, always the blue ones. I don’t even know what they tastes like. Wasn’t blueberry. I don’t think anything in nature tastes like that so I called ‘em ‘Windex Pops,’ but Lords-a-mercy, if they didn’t have any Windex Pops in the bowl you would go unhinged, so one time—“
“Great story but I don’t care,” Atlanta says.
Her mother’s face falls like a ruined soufflé. “I’m just saying, I need to go to the bank to cash this. I thought you and me could hop in the Oldsmobile and go into town. Maybe checkout the consignment store. Been wantin’ a new mixer.”
“Here’s an idea. Get a job instead and then we don’t need to rely on you getting money from the state for doing nothing at all. What a crazy idea.”
Then Atlanta goes inside, ignoring her mother’s stunned, stung face.
She slams the door and goes and pops two Adderall soon as she’s inside.
* * *
The Adderall is good. Real good. The high has no jagged edges. And it does the opposite of those anti-whatevers they gave her at Emerald Lakes. Those little pills, each the shape of a baseball home plate, each the color of Pepto Bismol, softened everything. Life through a Vaseline-smeared lens. It took the pain and smothered it under a downy mattress.