Walking The Tightrope by Amanda Crum

                       arinn CC



Walking The Tightrope

1996

   Janie Cochran sat beside the swimming pool, empty save for a scattering of leaves and one used condom floating in an inch of rainwater. It was a cold, cloudy morning and she pulled her teal faux-fur jacket tighter around thin shoulders, her nose a mauve button on a pale face.  Everyone was still asleep inside, unfazed by the stink of unwashed dishes and dirty ashtrays and the coming of dawn. Janie couldn’t sleep, could never sleep these days even with the help of vodka or rum or whatever was available. Time didn’t mean much to her anymore. It was just a measure of when she could be finished with something so she could move on to the next thing. Fucking, drinking, smoking, painting. They all felt the same.
   When Justin’s parents had moved out of state and left him behind so he could finish high school, the house on Jackson Street became The Pit, a two-story den of drunken sex and unwashed sheets, empty beer cans filling the living room, bedrooms stuffed with air mattresses to accommodate whoever needed to crash. Janie had moved in--if you could call it that, a backpack full of clothes and one box of art supplies and books--determined not to allow herself to get lazy just because there were no parents around. She was a smart girl, but she had never cared much about making good grades or studying. Her attention was always, always divided, and if she couldn’t learn something in fifteen minutes it would lay abandoned soon enough. 
   Still, she wanted things for herself now, things that hadn’t seemed attainable a year ago. Her GPA wasn’t good enough to get her into university, but there was an art school two towns over that based acceptance on portfolios alone and she knew of some success stories, people who had graduated and come back to her little town to brag about how they’d gotten out. She’d hated them all, with their chunky shoes and black-framed glasses and smug expressions, but there was envy beneath it, like a layer of green beneath red paint. 
   The past few weeks had been bad. She hadn’t painted, couldn’t find the energy. She’d skipped more classes than she’d attended, allowing the senior mentality to wash over her when it suited her. Her job was extinct, left behind after her boss stuck his hand up her skirt during closing one night. She tried not to care; it was just a shitty movie theater job, stale as an old bag of popcorn, but the truth was it had kept her in cigarettes and art supplies, had allowed her to save a little back for a car, and now she had next to nothing. Fifteen dollars and assorted change inside the sparkly vintage purse she’d scored at the thrift shop. She could still feel his blunt fingers pushing, probing, quickly and efficiently. It wasn’t his first assault. 
   Janie shivered and fumbled a cigarette out of the pack on the scarred patio table, her fingers numb and disobedient, the cigarettes flying to the brick below. 
   “Why are you awake? Even the fuckin’ birds are still asleep.” Cole, eyes puffy beneath a shock of blue-black hair, pale, lean torso naked above the dirty black jeans she knew he’d pulled on over bare skin. She’d never seen him unclothed, but they had been friends for six years and she knew his habits as well as she knew her own. He collapsed with no grace into the chair beside hers and lit a cigarette, handing her one from his pack and offering the lighter. 
   “Aren’t you cold? It’s freezing out here. I can’t feel my fingers,” Janie said after the first drag. The smoke disappeared into the overcast light, cold-almost winter air that made breathing painful. Why do I stay in a city that makes it hurt to breathe? she thought. It was a dumb question. Anything could make it hard to breathe, life could make it hard. Living in a small town where you stuck out like a sore thumb.
    “I got tequila in my veins, nothin’s cold to me,” Cole replied, settling back in the chair. 
    Janie fingered his silver Zippo, engraved with a cobra. So unlike him, to have an engraved lighter. He was the kind of guy who never wore underwear because he hated doing laundry, who had once cut his hand open on a broken glass in the kitchen sink and left the mess, blood and all, for weeks, until Janie had broken down and cleaned it to get rid of the smell. The teacups his mother had left behind, fragile rose-covered things, were at the very bottom of the sink, the first cups Cole had used after his parents moved to Ohio. None of the others who came and went in The Pit knew or cared that Cole still loved them despite the fact that they’d left him afloat, alone in a huge house with an allowance and dubious warnings about responsibility. She pictured him drinking tequila from one of his mother’s cups and couldn’t decide if he’d done it out of spite or just to catch a whiff of the soap she used. 
    “Was this your dad’s?” Janie asked, holding up the lighter.
    Cole wouldn’t look at her, kept his pale eyes on the horizon over her shoulder. “Still is, I guess.”
    She’d gone one too far. His wall was up, one she’d seen before. She tried changing the subject. 
    “I can’t sleep because I’m too tired.”
    He nodded, more at ease now. “I know that feeling. Your brain won’t shut off.”
    “Yes,” she sighed.
    “Don’t do that,” he said, exhaling, his chest and shoulders like pale marble in the cold. “Don’t let her get to you all the way from The Summit.”
    Her. The mother, sitting warm in her big house on the other side of town, probably envisioning all the things she could do with Janie’s old room. Their neighborhood, The Summit, the one Janie had grown up watching from the other side of the tracks, had never seemed like home. She was a trailer park girl and always would be, had only lived in the big house on the hill for a year before she left. It was the first thing her mother did after remarrying, so cliche, buy the biggest house in town and fill it with tacky curtains and $300 sheets. Her mother would always be a trailer park girl, too, she just didn’t own it the way Janie did. 
It had been the nexus of their last argument, but Janie hadn’t been able to find the right words and her frustration mounted until she was crying. For a moment there was a shift, as though her mother was teetering on the edge of softness, but it was gone as quickly as it came and her mouth became a tightrope Janie couldn’t walk across.
    “She’s not getting to me. I’m just sick of the struggle.”
    Cole watched her closely, his dark eyes seeing too much. “What struggle? Being beautiful? Living rent-free in someone else’s house? Being talented?”
    She repressed her first instinct, to throw his lighter at him and tell him to fuck off. It was predictable and she hated predictability. Instead she crushed out her cigarette on the heel of her boot and threw the butt into the empty pool.
    “I would expect you to understand that there is always more underneath what you can see with your own eyes,” she said coolly, thinking of her boss at the movie theater, how his eyes looked like two coins pushed into the soft flesh of his face. She shivered.
    He laughed softly, took a long drag off his cigarette. He enjoyed these little cat-and-mouse games, baiting her and then making her feel stupid, beneath him, no matter what her reply was.
    “You’re young,” he said, inclining his head. “Shit’s gonna get a lot worse before it gets better.”
    “And you’re an asshole,” she said, with no real animosity. It was what they did, how they circled one another like two lions in heat. She would never fuck him, though, not while they lived together. She wasn’t an idiot. “You’re an entire year older than me, what the fuck do you know?”
    He smiled and pushed a hank of hair out of his eyes with his forearm, exhaling a plume of breath. The sun was almost all the way up now but she couldn’t even see it, the clouds were scudding dense and low over the trees like a nursing mother’s tits. “I know your money’s almost gone. And I know about a job that pays good for not much work.”
    She considered that for a moment, let it hang in the silver air while he smoked and watched her. Cole’s idea of work differed vastly from hers; she wanted something that didn’t require much interaction with people, that allowed her to daydream a little. She didn’t want anyone depending on her too much. But he was right, the little cash she had wouldn’t get her much further. She picked up her pack of cigarettes from the bricks, counted them: eight. Eight to last her quite a while, and the way she was going lately, they wouldn’t get her through the day. 
    “Tell me,” she said.


    Janie stood in the dark, holding her hands to her mouth to warm them. The smell of gasoline hung in the air, heavy as a wool blanket, so thick and oily she could taste it in the back of her throat. 
    “Dress warm, you’ll be outside most of the night,” Cole had warned her when she asked for details about the job. “You’ll be working with a friend of mine, his dad owns the company. He pays Brian under the table so he doesn’t have to keep insurance on him, so he’ll probably do the same for you.”
    “But what will I be doing?” Janie asked, but Cole had only smiled. 
    “It’s easy work, you’ll see.”
    The job wasn’t as bad as it could be, but it wasn’t exactly what she would have chosen for herself if the situation wasn’t so dire. Only the promise of a fat, tax-free paycheck at the end of the week was keeping her in this empty shopping center, watching as a thin guy in a denim jacket and ridiculous ear-flap hat pressure-washed the graffiti off the side of a department store. The machine was beyond loud, reaching into deafening territory, and she only had one cigarette to get her through the next four hours.
    Denim Jacket turned off the hose and shut down the machine, sending the night crashing into a silence so deep it hurt Janie’s ears. His name was Brian Hensley, and he’d been in the class behind Janie’s before he dropped out. He was actually two years older than she; school was not his thing. He was cute in a stonerboy kind of way, pale blonde hair that he tucked behind his ears and a lean, rangy body that made her think of a ‘70s rocker. Robert Plant, maybe. Squeeze my lemon, baby…
    “Sorry you have to keep waiting,” Brian said as he made his way over to her. The machine was still winding down, she was glad he was giving it a rest. The ancient piece of shit was like a jackhammer in her brain. She wished he had something stronger than the joint he was pulling from his pocket. “The other machine is in the shop, so we have to share for now.”
    “That’s okay,” Janie said. She pulled Cole’s down jacket tighter around her and put her gloves back on, preparing to take her turn pressure-washing, but Brian held up his hand for her to stop.
    “Give it a minute,” he said, nodding to the machine. “Hey, how come you’re here, anyway? I thought you worked at the theater.”
    She reached for the joint and sparked it, taking a long, slow pull, closing her eyes briefly. She could feel him watching her, his eyes on her pastel pink hair and pale throat exposed in the dark, and understood that he wanted her but wouldn’t make a move because he thought she was with Cole. “It didn’t work out,” she said.
    “I’m not complaining,” Brian said. “It gets lonely, working nights by myself. This ain’t no job for a girl though, not in October. Too cold.”
    “I’m fine,” she said, resisting the urge to roll her eyes at his masculine posturing. He thought he was being sweet. Suddenly she remembered walking outside school during a fire drill and ending up next to Brian and his stoner buddies. It was March or early April, a cutting cold kind of day that sliced right through the thin t-shirt she was wearing and sent her shivering, and he offered her his grungy grandpa sweater. She’d thought him adorable at the time, a Kurt Cobain lookalike, and she had accepted his sweater even though it smelled like thrift store mothballs and skunk weed. “Smoke warms me up,” she added, softer.
    They smoked half the j and Brian pinched it out with his fingers, slipping it into the front pocket of his jacket. “For later,” he said with a little smile.
    The two of them took turns washing the building, scraping off FUCK YOU HANNAH and MICAH WUZ HERE with the power of hot water blasting at 5,000 PSI, Janie pleasantly floating from the weed and the residual stink of gasoline. She knew she’d have a headache tomorrow and hoped she’d get used to it. 
    Brian took over the last section of wall at the end of the night. It was 4 a.m. and as cold as it was going to get, but the weed had warmed Janie’s blood a bit. She took care to step back, out of the orbit of Brian’s spraying. At least the compressor gave off a bit of heat. She stood next to it and wished, for the millionth time, that she had one more cigarette, and watched as a black car, silky as a cat, pulled into the far end of the parking lot. Something about the tinted windows made her step forward a little, toward Brian, so she wouldn’t be visible around the corner of the building to whomever was inside. Tinted windows at four in the morning in a deserted parking lot never amounted to anything good. She wished Brian would hurry up and shut the machine down, but he was still stoned, taking his time on the last bit of spray paint sloshed upon the bricks. 
    Two loud pops made her jump and she looked down at the compressor, thinking for the barest second that it had backfired somehow, but in her heart and all the spaces in between she knew what it really was. Brian heard it, too, and turned to look at her in confusion as the black car sped past them, exhaust streaking white in the dark like a skunk’s tail. The passenger side window was down enough for Janie to see the driver hunched over the wheel, his mouth forming an “O” as he drove past and saw the girl with pink hair standing in a halo of mist. She locked eyes with him briefly and then he was gone, tail lights flashing as he tore up the hill and onto the highway. 
    The compressor was winding down slowly, like something dying. Janie walked backward, her legs stiff with cold and fear, and saw what she already knew was there. At the end of the parking lot, a man, angled heavily on the cold blacktop with one arm pinned beneath him in a spreading pool of blood. It reflected the orange sodium parking lot lights and became something almost pretty, a moth sparking inside a flame. 

****

    Janie sat beside the swimming pool in weak October light. She couldn’t feel the cold anymore, it had fused with her bones beneath the layers she wore until she and it became one. 
    She had talked with the police until her voice felt raw and used, going over her statement again and again until she thought she would scream. They scratched what she said into their notebooks and stared at her tits while she drank stale coffee in a suffocating room. She’d had to take off Cole’s coat as soon as she sat down. The heat was blasting, creating little pools of sweat in the small of her back and in her cleavage. She told them about what she’d seen, the little black car and the body it left behind in a pool of matter, but she was firm about not having seen the driver even though she’d caught a glimpse (black hair, oval face). She did not have it in her to become a witness to a murder, to point out a man in a lineup and maybe ruin his life if she was wrong. Besides, she had experience with cops and she could tell by the way they were looking at her that they thought she was another stoner piece of trailer trash, a piece of ass not good for much else. 
    When they finally let her go she shrugged her coat back on and lit a cigarette beneath their disapproving frowns, walked past another room where she could see poor Brian sweating through his own interrogation. He was definitely not high enough to deal with it. She stopped at the bank of payphones beside the automatic doors and called Cole, doubting he would answer but hoping he was still awake. The sun was up, the day a cold sheaf of mist fingering the bare branches of trees and the smooth chrome of the cars in the parking lot. 
    “Yeah?” Cole answered on the fourth ring. His voice was raspy from chain-smoking and, she imagined, singing. Most nights were reserved for practicing with his band in the garage. 
    “It’s me. I’m at the police station. Can you come and pick me up?”
    “Fuck.” More awake, a note of concern in his voice. As concerned as Cole ever got. “You okay?”
    “I’m fine. I just need to get the fuck out of here.”
    “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
    And he was. By then, Brian had been released too and was sitting with her on the cold metal bench outside the police station, fielding looks from the officers and suits who were starting to file in now that the sun was all the way up. Neither of them felt like talking so they shared a smoke, passing it back and forth until Cole pulled up in his restored black Thunderbird. 
    “I could have run you home,” Brian said as he watched Cole unfold his legs from the muscle car. Brian had driven them to the station; his car smelled like the lemon soap they used at the carwash with a hint of weed beneath. He played an Alice In Chains tape and apologized for the sound quality, citing his need for a cd player. 
    “It’s okay, Cole doesn’t mind,” Janie said. Her throat felt parched and she wished she’d told Cole to bring some water.
    “Cole doesn’t mind what?” Cole asked as he stepped up onto the sidewalk. 
    “Hey man,” Brian said. There was an odd undercurrent running between them that Janie hadn’t noticed before. She imagined them both as wolves with their fur up, hackles raised that she couldn’t see. 
    “Doesn’t mind picking me up,” Janie answered, standing slowly and stretching. Beneath Cole’s oversized coat, her t-shirt rose up over the pale curve of her belly, exposing the jewel in her navel. She closed her eyes and felt both of them watching her intently, their gaze focused on the waistband of her jeans as they slid down a bit on her hips. It warmed her up. 
    “What happened?” Cole asked, pulling a cigarette out of the pack with his teeth. 
    “Oh, I’ll tell you on the way home,” Janie said, suddenly exhausted. She wondered if she might actually be able to sleep. On impulse, she threw her arms around Brian’s neck briefly, inhaled his lemony scent. “Take care, okay?”
    He nodded, seemingly taken aback by her touch, and they left everything else unsaid for now, whether she would report to work again. She couldn’t think about it right now. 
    The car was warm and she curled up in the front seat, resting her head against the window. Cole knew not to push her and played The Church quietly as the Thunderbird’s wheels floated on cold blacktop. She couldn’t wait to get into her bed, beneath cool sheets and a warm quilt, and take a few pulls from the bottle of rotgut she kept on the nightstand. 
    But she hadn’t been able to sleep, once again, and now she sat watching the weak late-morning sunlight cast ellipses onto the dirty water at the bottom of the pool. Cole had given her a pack of his cigarettes but they were stronger than hers and made her head spin, so she nursed a whiskey on the rocks instead. It was ten a.m.
    “Are you going to tell me?” Cole sat down beside her and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, a listening posture that she’d only seen from him a few times. 
    “I saw a dead man this morning,” she said softly, twirling her pink hair around one finger. “And I’ve been awake for something like four days straight, so I’m not sure what’s real and what’s not.”
    Cole frowned. “A dead man.”
    “Someone shot him in the parking lot where we were working and shoved him out of the car.”
    “Jesus.”
    “You sound scandalized.” She giggled. Reality was flying away from her.
    “Janie, did the killer see you?”
    “I think so. When he drove by. He didn’t stop though. Isn’t the first rule of being a murderer that you have to get rid of the witnesses?”
    “Fuck, Janie, this isn’t a joke. It’s not like we live in a big city, it wouldn’t be that hard to track down a girl with pink hair.”
    She frowned magnificently and pulled her legs up to her chest, resting her booted feet on the seat of the chair. “Are you trying to freak me out?”
    “I just want you to think clearly. When’s the last time you ate something? You’ve been drinking on an empty stomach like an idiot.”
    “I’m not hungry,” she said quietly. 
    Cole sighed. “You just haven’t had real food in a while. Come on.”
    He reached for her hand and pulled her up, led her inside, where it was dark and strangely quiet. She didn’t know if everyone had somewhere else to be at the same time or if Cole had told them to get lost. She suspected it was the latter. 
    In the kitchen, he pulled eggs and tomatoes and cheese from the refrigerator, slapped butter on the counter, added frozen hashbrowns. In a skillet he melted butter; into a bowl went the eggs. He added milk and salt and whipped them efficiently, pausing now and then to flip his hair out of his eyes. 
    “I didn’t know you could cook,” Janie said from her spot at the kitchen table. She was in awe. She hadn’t even known there was edible food in the fridge, had stopped looking inside it because all it ever seemed to contain was beer and old pizza. 
    “I’m not totally useless,” Cole said evenly, pouring the egg mixture into the heated pan. Oil and hashbrowns popped and bubbled in another pan and Janie felt her stomach begin to curl up in hunger, something she hadn’t experienced in a long time. She wrapped an arm around her abdomen and watched Cole move around in the kitchen like he belonged there. 
    She must have dozed off; when her chin hit her chest she snapped her head up and found Cole laying a plate heaped with food in front of her. She sat up and surveyed the feast: scrambled eggs with cheddar and cherry tomatoes and a massive pile of hashbrowns with onions smothered in ketchup. Buttery toast with jam. It was the first non-fast-food meal that she’d had in weeks and she dug in greedily, not caring that he was sitting across the table watching her with interest. Ten minutes later the plate was done for, and she sat back in her chair and lit a smoke from his pack. 
    “Thank you so much,” she said. Her head felt a little clearer now. “I had no idea you could do that.”
    “I try not to let people see me being domestic. Ruins my street cred,” he said with a little smile. She suddenly got the feeling that he was much older than he really was, as though he’d seen more than she had. Maybe that was the price of living on your own. 
    Janie leaned forward on her elbows and looked into his eyes, searching. “Do you still have the teacups?”
    Cole frowned. “Teacups?”
    “With the flowers.”
    He stared at her for a long beat, then stood up and walked to the cabinet over the stove. The delicate cups were pushed all the way to the back, roses blooming in the dark.
    Cole slid one in front of her and she picked it up carefully, put the eggshell porcelain to her lips. 
    It was like tasting home.

​

Amanda Crum is a writer and artist whose work can be found in publications such as The Hellebore, Eastern Iowa Review, and Barren Magazine. Amanda's short fiction has won awards from The Molotov Cocktail and Writing Room; she is also a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee.  Her novel The Darkened Mirror was published in  2019; her work of middle-grade fiction, Where Wild Beasts Grow, will be released in 2022 with Fitzroy Books. 

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