flynn_gillian_gone_girl (1) (858987), страница 58
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He never calls me by name, as if to acknowledgethat we both know I’ve lied. He says this lady or pretty woman or you. I wonder what hewould call me in bed. Baby, maybe.“Just thinking.”“Uh-oh,” he says, and smiles again.“You were thinking about a boy, I can tell,” Greta says.“Maybe.”“I thought we were steering clear of the assholes for a while,” she says.
“Tend to ourchickens.” Last night after Ellen Abbott, I was too excited to go home, so we shared a sixpack and imagined our recluse life as the token straight girls on Greta’s mother’s lesbiancompound, raising chickens and hanging laundry to dry in the sun.
The objects ofgentle, platonic courtship from older women with gnarled knuckles and indulgentlaughs. Denim and corduroy and clogs and never worrying about makeup or hair ornails, breast size or hip size, or having to pretend to be the understanding wifey, thesupportive girlfriend who loves everything her man does.“Not all guys are assholes,” Jeff says.
Greta makes a noncommittal noise.We return to our cabins liquid-limbed. I feel like a water balloon left in the sun. All Iwant to do is sit under my sputtering window air conditioner and blast my skin with thecool while watching TV. I’ve found a rerun channel that shows nothing but old ’70s and’80s shows, Quincy and The Love Boat and Eight Is Enough, but first comes Ellen Abbott, mynew favorite show!Nothing new, nothing new. Ellen doesn’t mind speculating, believe me, she’s hostedan array of strangers from my past who swear they are my friends, and they all havelovely things to say about me, even the ones who never much liked me.
Post-lifefondness.Knock on the door, and I know it will be Greta and Je . I switch o the TV, andthere they are on my doorstep, aimless.“Whatcha doing?” Jeff asks.“Reading,” I lie.He sets down a six-pack of beer on my counter, Greta padding in behind. “Oh, Ithought we heard the TV.”Three is literally a crowd in these small cabins. They are blocking the door for asecond, sending a pulse of nervousness through me—why are they blocking the door?—and then they keep moving and they are blocking my bedside table. Inside my bedsidetable is my money belt packed with eight thousand dollars in cash. Hundreds, fties,and twenty-dollar bills.
The money belt is hideous, esh-colored and bunchy. I can’tpossibly wear all my money at once—I leave some scattered around the cabin—but I tryto wear most, and when I do, I am as conscious of it as a girl at the beach with amaxipad. A perverse part of me enjoys spending money, because every time I pull o awad of twenties, that’s less money to hide, to worry about being stolen or lost.Je clicks on the TV, and Ellen Abbott—and Amy—buzz into focus. He nods, smilesto himself.“Want to watch … Amy?” Greta asks.I can’t tell if she used a comma: Want to watch, Amy? or Want to watch Amy?“Nah.
Jeff, why don’t you grab your guitar and we can sit on the porch?”Jeff and Greta exchange a look.“Awww … but that’s what you were watching, right?” Greta says. She points at thescreen, and it’s me and Nick at a bene t, me in a gown, my hair pulled back in achignon, and I look more like I look now, with my short hair.“It’s boring,” I say.“Oh, I don’t think it’s boring at all,” Greta says, and flops down on my bed.I think what a fool I am, to have let these two people inside.
To have assumed Icould control them, when they are feral creatures, people used to nding the angle,exploiting the weakness, always needing, whereas I am new to this. Needing. Thosepeople who keep backyard pumas and living-room chimps—this must be how they feelwhen their adorable pet rips them open.“You know what, would you guys mind … I feel kinda crummy. Too much sun, Ithink.”They look surprised and a little o ended, and I wonder if I’ve got it wrong—thatthey are harmless and I’m just paranoid. I’d like to believe that.“Sure, sure, of course,” Je says. They shu e out of my cabin, Je grabbing his beeron the way. A minute later, I hear Ellen Abbott snarling from Greta’s cabin.
Theaccusatory questions. Why did … Why didn’t … How can you explain …Why did I ever let myself get friendly with anyone here? Why didn’t I keep to myself?How can I explain my actions if I’m found out?I can’t be discovered. If I were ever found, I’d be the most hated woman on theplanet. I’d go from being the beautiful, kind, doomed, pregnant victim of a sel sh,cheating bastard to being the bitter bitch who exploited the good hearts of all America’scitizens.
Ellen Abbott would devote show after show to me, angry callers venting theirhate: “This is just another example of a spoiled rich girl doing what she wants, when shewants, and not thinking of anyone else’s feelings, Ellen. I think she should disappear forlife—in prison!” Like that, it would go like that. I’ve read con icting Internetinformation on the penalties for faking a death, or framing a spouse for said death, butI know the public opinion would be brutal. No matter what I do after that—feedorphans, cuddle lepers—when I died, I’d be known as That Woman Who Faked HerDeath and Framed Her Husband, You Remember.I can’t allow it.Hours later, I am still awake, thinking in the dark, when my door rattles, a gentlebang, Jeff’s bang.
I debate, then open it, ready to apologize for my rudeness before. He’stugging on his beard, staring at my doormat, then looks up with amber eyes.“Dorothy said you were looking for work,” he said.“Yeah. I guess. I am.”“I got something tonight, pay you fifty bucks.”Amy Elliott Dunne wouldn’t leave her cabin for fty bucks, but Lydia and/or Nancyneeds work. I have to say yes.“Coupla hours, fty dollars.” He shrugs. “Doesn’t make any di erence to me, justthought I’d offer.”“What is it?”“Fishing.”I was positive Je would drive a pickup, but he guides me to a shiny Ford hatchback,a heartbreaking car, the car of the new college grad with big plans and a modestbudget, not the car a grown man should be driving.
I am wearing my swimsuit undermy sundress, as instructed. (“Not the bikini, the full one, the one you can really swimin,” Je intoned; I’d never noticed him anywhere near the pool, but he knew myswimwear cold, which was flattering and alarming at the same time.)He leaves the windows down as we drive through the forested hills, the gravel dustcoating my stubby hair. It feels like something from a country-music video: the girl inthe sundress leaning out to catch the breeze of a red-state summer night.
I can see stars.Jeff hums off and on.He parks down the road from a restaurant that hangs out on stilts over the lake, abarbecue place known for its giant souvenir cups of boozy drinks with bad names: GatorJuice and Bassmouth Blitz. I know this from the discarded cups that oat along all theshores of the lake, cracked and neon-colored with the restaurant’s logo: Cat sh Carl’s.Cat sh Carl’s has a deck that overhangs the water—diners can load up on handfuls ofkitty kibble from the crank machines and drop them into the gaping mouths of hundredsof giant catfish that wait below.“What exactly are we going to do, Jeff?”“You net ’em, I kill ’em.” He gets out of the car, and I follow him around to thehatchback, which is filled with coolers.
“We put ’em in here, on ice, resell them.”“Resell them. Who buys stolen fish?”Jeff smiles that lazy-cat smile. “I got a clientele of sorts.”And then I realize: He isn’t a Grizzly Adams, guitar-playing, peace-loving granolaguy at all. He is a redneck thief who wants to believe that he’s more complicated thanthat.He pulls out a net, a box of Nine Lives, and a stained plastic bucket.I have absolutely no intention of being part of this illicit piscine economy, but “I” amfairly interested. How many women can say they were part of a sh-smuggling ring? “I”am game.
I have become game again since I died. All the things I disliked or feared, allthe limits I had, they’ve slid o me. “I” can do pretty much anything. A ghost has thatfreedom.We walk down the hill, under the deck of Cat sh Carl’s, and onto the docks, whichfloat slurpily on the wakes of a passing motorboat, Jimmy Buffett blaring.Jeff hands me a net. “We need this to be quick—you just jump in the water, scoop thenet in, nab the sh, then tilt the net up to me. It’ll be heavy, though, and squirmy, so beprepared. And don’t scream or nothing.”“I won’t scream.
But I don’t want to go in the water. I can do it from the deck.”“You should take off your dress, at least, you’ll ruin it.”“I’m okay.”He looks annoyed for a moment—he’s the boss, I’m the employee, and so far I’m notlistening to him—but then he turns around modestly and tugs o his shirt and hands methe box of cat food without fully facing me, as if he’s shy. I hold the box with its narrowmouth over the water, and immediately, a hundred shiny arched backs roll toward me, amob of serpents, the tails cutting across the surface furiously, and then the mouths arebelow me, the sh roiling over each other to swallow the pellets and then, like trainedpets, aiming their faces up toward me for more.I scoop the net into the middle of the pack and sit down hard on the dock to getleverage to pull the harvest up.
When I yank, the net is full of half a dozen whiskery,slick cat sh, all frantically trying to get back in the water, their gaping lips openingand shutting between the squares of nylon, their collective tugging making the netwobble up and down.“Lift it up, lift it up, girl!”I push a knee below the net’s handle and let it dangle there, Je reaching in,grabbing a sh with two hands, each encased in terry-cloth manicure gloves for a bettergrip. He moves his hands down around the tail, then swings the sh like a cudgel,smashing its head on the side of the dock.
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