Until this point Tiffany had assumed that abusers—people like her cousin Truman—must live in denial. If not, how could they go on? How could you hurt or degrade a person when you were fully cognizant of what you were doing? Well, it turned out you could—and men like the pig of a security guard did. It had been a real shock, this realization that abruptly explained so much of her entire shitty life. Tiffany was not sure she had ever gotten over it.
Three or four moths rattled around inside the bubble of the light fixture set above the counter. The bulb was burned out. It didn’t matter; there was plenty of morning light in the trailer. The moths binged and fluttered, their little shadows bickering. How did they get in there? And by the way, how did she get here? For awhile, after some rough times in her late teens, Tiffany had managed to build a life. She had been waiting tables at a bistro in 2006, and making good tips. She had a two-room apartment in Charlottesville and grew ferns on the balcony. Doing pretty good for a high school drop out. On the weekends she had liked to rent a big bay horse named Moline who had a sweet disposition and an easy canter, and go riding at Shenandoah. Now she was in a trailer in East Shitballs, Appalachia, and she was no longer just headed for trouble; she was there. At least the trouble was wrapped in cotton, though. It didn’t sting the way you expected trouble to sting, which was maybe the worst thing about it, because you were so far inside, trapped all the way back in the last row of yourself, where you couldn’t even—
Tiffany heard a thump and all at once she was on the floor. Her hip throbbed where it had banged against the edge of the counter.
Cigarette dangling off his lip, Truman stared down at her.
“Earth to crack whore.” He was in his cowboy boots and boxer shorts and nothing else. The flesh of his torso was as tight as plastic wrap over his ribs. “Earth to crack whore,” Truman repeated and clapped his hands in front of her face like she was a bad dog. “Can’t you hear? Someone’s knocking on the door.”
Tru was such an asshole that, in the part of Tiffany where she was still alive—the part where she occasionally felt the urge to brush her hair or call that Elaine woman from the Planned Parenthood clinic who wanted her to agree to sign up on a list for a lockdown detox—she sometimes regarded him with scientific amazement. Tru was an asshole standard. Tiffany would ask herself, “Is so-and-so a bigger asshole than Truman?” Few could compare—in fact, so far, officially, there was only Donald Trump and cannibals. Truman’s record of malfeasance was lengthy. As a boy he had stuck his finger up his butt and jammed it into the nostrils of smaller kids. Later, he had stolen from his mother, pawned her jewelry and her antiques. He had turned Tiffany on to meth that afternoon he’d swung by to see her at the nice apartment in Charlottesville. His idea of a prank was to poke you in the bare flesh of your shoulder with a lit cigarette while you were sleeping. Truman was a rapist, but had never done time for it. Some assholes just struck lucky. His face was patterned with an uneven growth of red-gold beard, and his eyes were enormous with pupil, but the sneering, unapologetic boy he’d always been was there in the jut of his jaw.
“Crack whore, come in.”
“What?” Tiffany managed to ask.
“I told you to answer the door! Jesus Christ!” Truman feinted a punch and she covered her head with her hands. She blinked tears.
“Fuck you,” she said half-heartedly. She hoped Dr. Flickinger didn’t hear. He was in the bathroom. Tiffany liked the doctor. The doc was a trip. He always called her Madame and threw a wink to let her know he wasn’t making fun.
“You are a toothless deaf crack whore,” Truman announced, overlooking the fact that he was himself in need of cosmetic dental surgery.
Truman’s friend came out of the trailer’s bedroom, sat down at the foldout table, and said, “Crack whore phone home.” He giggled at his joke and did an elbow jig. Tiffany couldn’t remember his name, but she hoped his mother was super proud of her son who had the South Park poop tattooed on his Adam’s apple.
A knock at the door. This time Tiffany did register it, a firm double-rap.
“Never mind! Wouldn’t want to trouble you, Tiff. Just sit right there on your dumb ass.” Truman yanked open the door.
A woman was standing there in one of Truman’s checked shirts, a length of olive-toned leg visible beneath.
“What’s this?” Truman asked her. “What you want?”
The voice that answered him was faint. “Hello, man.”
From his seat at the table Truman’s friend called out, “Are you the Avon Lady, or what?”
“Listen, honey,” Truman said to her. “You’re welcome to come in—but I believe I’m going to need that shirt back.”
That made Truman’s friend laugh. “This is amazing! I mean, this your birthday or what, Tru?”
From the bathroom, Tiffany heard the flush of the toilet. Dr. Flickinger had finished his business.
The woman at the door shot a hand out and grabbed Truman’s neck. He made a little wheezing noise; his cigarette popped from his mouth. He reached up and dug his fingers into the visitor’s wrist. Tiffany saw the flesh of the woman’s hand whiten under the pressure, but she didn’t let go.
Red spots appeared on Truman’s cheekbones. Blood trickled from the gashes his fingernails were making in the woman’s wrist. She still didn’t let go. The wheezing noise narrowed to a whistle. Truman’s free hand found the grip of the Bowie knife tucked into his belt and pulled it loose.
The woman stepped into the room, her other hand catching the forearm of Truman’s knife hand in mid-stab. She backed him up, slamming him against the opposite wall of the trailer. It happened so quickly that Tiffany was never able to capture the stranger’s face, only the screen of her tangled, shoulder-length hair, which was so dark it seemed to have a green tint.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” said Truman’s friend, scrabbling for the pistol behind a roll of paper towels and rising up from his chair.
On Truman’s cheeks the red spots had expanded into purple clouds. He was making a noise like sneakers squeaking on hardwood, his grimace slipping into a sad clown droop. His eyes rolled. Tiffany could see his heartbeat pulsing in the taut skin to the left of his breastbone. The woman’s strength was astonishing.
“Whoa,” Truman’s friend said yet again, as the woman head-butted Truman. Tru’s nose broke with a firecracker snap.
A thread of blood lashed across the ceiling, a few droplets splashing on the bubble of the light fixture. The moths were going crazy, battering themselves against the fixture, the sound like an ice cube being shaken around in a glass.