Can’t All Be Bruce Willis
J Saler Drees
Cripes, what do you know? We, my family and me—Fat Chance at your service—got it again. Ma’s pulling out the sheers, and Mini, the pretty sister, cries up a storm, Not my hair, not my hair. She claims there’s better ways to go about it, like shampooing with mayonnaise or peanut butter.
But Ma hoots at this, says, That’s food, ding-bat. You eat food, not put it in your damn hair.
And Greg, Ma’s latest, agrees, Ain’t nothing better than peanut butter or mayonnaise eaten out of a jar.
So that settles it. Our hair is to be shaved off, giving the lice nothing to cling to.
At school, Nurse Peggy sometimes gives us students lice checks while we sit at our desks. Doesn’t mean you’re dirty. Only means the lice jump from head to head, or wait for the sharing of combs and clothes, slumber parties, sports. That’s what Nurse Peggy says. She says, if you have lice you gotta bag all your clothes and bed sheets, and pillows, and stuffed animals into garbage bags for at least six weeks, while the lice suffocate and die. But Ma, she never does this. Instead, she orders us to throw everything out, down the gully. To the bears, as she likes to joke.
Plus, this gives me an idea on how to get even with Hunter Berling, that punk.
Ma’s got the scissors ready, and Bic razors she picked up at Triple D’s Sports and Spirits. She lights a hand-rolled, says, Who’s first?
Mini howls, You ain’t touching my hair.
Then get the hell outta my trailer, Ma says, but Mini won’t. No way, not with headlice ‘cause she knows none of the boys will go near her, just like I know Dehlia Sinche, the coolest girl in junior high, will run from me, like I got the plague.
I say, I’m going first, and unfold a black garbage bag and sit on it. Earlier that day, when Nurse Peggy sent me home with nits in my hair, I’d been the only one. Not even Hunter Berling got called out, which meant he was clean and I wasn’t. And worse, you know what that punk did last week? He stole Chip the Cat, my beanie baby. I’d had to memorize Bible verses—for the wages of sin is death—and the ten commandments—thou shalt not steal—in Sunday school in order to receive that prize. I chose it for Dehlia Sinche, who during recess told me she collected them. But on Monday, Hunter Berling snatched it from my desk, and I spotted him giving the beanie baby to her himself. I ran over and socked him all right, made his nose bleed good, but all that did was get me after school clean-up. Meanwhile, Hunter and Dehlia hung out smoking cigarettes under the bleachers while I scraped gum off the metal seat bottoms. Talk about a punch to the gonads. I told myself, I’m going to get even with that punk, Hunter Berling, no matter what the wages of sin cost.
Ma sprays my head with water, begins snipping off hunks, the sound of the scissors crisp and satisfying. Locks fall onto the garbage bag like tickly moist kisses, and cripes, there’s something, well, sexual about it, though lately lots of things seem so. I mean, a bus drives by and it’s like, bam. But on overload when I spy Dehlia playing volleyball in PE. The way her boobs bounce when she hits the ball, those powerful legs and hearty laugh, and how she could care less if you ask about stuff, like what’s a clitoris? She’d said the word and truth told, I had no idea, zilch, what it meant. Yet Dehlia, rather than make fun of me, she said, A woman’s penis.
She’s matter-of-fact and never giggles, or acts all stupid, or makes me feel like an idiot, but best I stop dwelling on all this, especially with Ma lathering my skull in shaving cream. It smells fatherly, and I can’t wait to grow a beard instead of this fuzz on my upper lip. My dad, he had the bushiest beard. He’s also the one called me Fat Chance. He’d say, Chance, you always hungry, always asking, can I have a snack, can I have dessert? Can I eat now? Fat Chance. That’s you.
I guess I sometimes miss him, how he liked to joke. But he wasn’t around much back then, and now Ma, she’s got Greg, a man who brings in decent disability checks.
She nicks me in a couple of places, blaming it on my lumpy melon, and the blood oozes out. No matter, my skull emerging bare to the oncoming evening is worth it all. I’m born anew and feel like Bruce Willis, tough, manly, ready to take on the world.
Funny I didn’t take into account all the scratching from earlier this week, being a veteran of lice and all. Maybe it’s that I’m used to bugs: fleas, mosquitos, spiders, how they’re always biting me and leaving these welts and rashes all over my arms, and legs, and sides. But s something about lice laying eggs in your hair, now that delivers a strange disgust, like you just want to slip right out of your own skull.
Fat Chance, Greg says. Help me bag up these clothes.
He says it as he sits smoking in his favorite recliner, the one Pastor Dan donated to us. I know it’s gonna be just me, Fat Chance at your service, cleaning up all the infested attire and whatever other shit this family’s collected out of dumpsters, yard sales, lost-and-found bins, and the corners of human hearts that feed on generosity.
I know the drill and yell at the twins to knock off their wrestling match and start picking up shit. They bitch and kick, whine, and whine about wanting a Gameboy, or a Nintendo, as if such marvels hatch out of nits like lice.
Fine, I tell them. I’m throwing out your favorite t-shirts: ACDC and Harley Davidson.
The twins quiet and then get to work, and cripes, more bugs scuttle from under these clothes. It’s amazing: the trailer, one piece of clothing at a time, is showing its own revenge.
Hair clippings flutter about the floor. Mini’s crying, and I hurry up cleaning ‘cause a girl losing her hair is more than just embarrassing.
That evening, Fat Chance again at your service, is throwing a lice party down into the gully’s blackberry bushes. It’s a nice warm October evening, the mosquitos lingering as the bats come out to swoop them up.
Look who’s gone skinhead, a voice, real sarcastic-like, behind me says, and suddenly my dome itches again, though more in a shamed way than a lice way.
Like Bruce Willis, I say, and turn to see—lo and behold—Hunter Berling, who lives two trailers down and is in my seventh-grade class, so there’s no avoiding him.
Keep tellin’ yourself that. He laughs, brushing back his golden mop from his eyes. Yeah, well, wait ‘til he’s got to razor all that off like Sampson from that Bible story. Just wait ‘til Dehlia finds out he’s grimy, and bug-ridden, and a goddamn thief to top it off.
I continue tossing knitted sweaters, torn jeans, ripped sheets, stained pillows down the gully, but he goes, Hey, that ain’t no dump. How’s that shit supposed to biodegrade?
Right, as if he’s some environmentalist, like the guy who visited our science class last week and told us about waste and recycling. I shrug and stretch a bra out by the straps like a sling-shot, my left arm pulled back, my right one forward, and aim it at him. He lights a smoke, shakes out the match, takes a drag all casual-like, as if a lice-infested bra means nothing, not even something funny.
You ever memorize a Bible verse? I ask.
He blows out smoke, says, Ain’t following.
I let go of the bra, which flutters slow-motion-like toward Hunter and flops to the ground at his feet.
He toes it back towards me, saying, You know, I could use someone like you.
I squint at him, snap, What?
You ain’t heard ‘bout them farms?
I take it he’s still in environmentalist mode, and I remember up near the Klamath River Basin that the Tully Lake farms are irrigating more water from the river than is healthy for the fish and such, so I say, Yeah, they’re draining the Klamath.
No, dumbass, he says and shakes his head, his hair falling over his forehead like some wannabe Leonardo DiCaprio in Romeo and Juliet, a movie Dehlia loved ever since some uncle took her to see it in the theater up in Medford.
Hunter keeps talking, Not those farms. Other farms, farms that grow money.
Once he mentions the word money, I’m reluctantly interested, but I can’t show him that. I need to stay on task, and the garbage bag full of lice isn’t going to stay alive forever.
Like, you know, Hunter continues. Farms where someone be growing green. But they don’t want no one to see. That’s why we’ll go at night. And all you gotta do is be the lookout and make money.
Make money, I repeat, but then remember how he stole Chip the Cat, and if he had so much hot-damn money from these so-called farms, then why couldn’t he buy his own beanie baby for Dehlia? Or, for all I care, memorize his own righteous Bible verses.
Piss off, I tell him. I don’t deal with thieves.
For a minute his cool flickers, the change blinking across his face like a silent scream before the real scream, and I feel uneasy, like I hit a place I shouldn’t’ve.
He takes a quick drag from his smoke, then asks, What’d you call me?
I pick up an I-Heart-New-York t-shirt, pitch it down the gully, shout, Thief, you’re a lousy thief.
Hunter Berling nods, walks away without throwing a single punch, a thief and a wuss. And by tonight he’ll be infected with lice. And Dehlia will be mine again.
It isn’t until a week after my little stint of dusting Hunter’s Gram’s trailer with the clippings of lice hair—shoving it through vents and windows and cracks in the tin walls and through the doggie door, all by the lucky light of a full moon, and with a pride that made me want to yodel—that I begin to regret my act. Not because Hunter missed several days of school and came back looking severely beat up, telling everyone he was in a car accident. Nor because I ratted to my classmates that he was stealing from a pot farm and they caught him, but because Dehlia, when I told her, said, Shame on you, Fat Chance.
She’s swinging during lunch, and I’m leaning on the metal swing set post. I like the way Dehlia’s brown legs flex as she thrusts them forward then back, and how her breasts point skyward when she dips back, and how her black hair swooshes down and then flings across her shoulders toward her cleavage. Jiminy Cricket, it’s growing below, and I don’t want Dehlia to spot the bulge in my pants, which are too small and tight. I jerk sideways to block the view, wondering if Dehlia’s, umm, clitoris ever does this sort of thing too.
She acts oblivious and stand-offish these past couple days. Keeping to herself, shooing away her girl pals, and not even giving Hunter Berling the time of day after he arrived back from the dead, all black and blue and quiet, and sneaking his ritual cigarette behind the mobile library. Usually she’d sneak off with him, but not this time, thus my opening, and me looking for all the damned world like Bruce Willis, bald head, knitted glare, arms folded across my chest.
Shame on you, Fat Chance, she says again, whooshing by me on the swing.
What for? I shout.
They could’ve killed him, she says. And here you are talking gossip like a girl from Beverly Hills. Acting all high and mighty ‘cause you didn’t go with him. Shame on you.
I blurt out, You got headlice.
What? she spits and stops pumping, the swing slowing down.
You’ve got Chip the Cat, don’t you? The beanie baby Hunter gave you?
She merely stares with her big black eyes; to look at them is like looking into lost years.
Cripes, Dehlia, I say, and point to my head. Where you think he got it?
Oh, God, she gasps, slams her feet flat on the ground, the swing jerking to a halt. She presses a fist to her mouth, perhaps believing that she might, in fact, be infected? Or that I might like her, or rather than help Hunter sneak into the pot farm, I let him go it alone, only to get caught.
She hops off the swing and, without another word, walks away. And it’s the silence of it, she who never holds her tongue to say what’s what, that makes me see.
As much as I want to rush after her, I don’t. It’s clear who she chose, and it isn’t me. I find him behind the mobile library, leaning against the wall, smoking alone, his eye purple, nose bandaged, lip swollen, his DiCaprio hair limp and greasy.
You stole the beanie baby, didn’t you? I say.
I’ve stolen a lot of things, he says.
They caught you, right?
He inhales on his cig, doesn’t answer.
You’ve got head lice, I tell him.
He laughs, though it sounds choked and pathetic, and then he coughs, wipes his mouth.
I can’t think what to say next. I’m tired, and suddenly no longer pissed, the urge to make him sorry already long vanished.
After school, I come home as always, except that I look like Bruce Willis. Mini, the pretty sister, looks like Bruce Willis too, and so do the twins, and the baby girls, and even Ma. Guess we all look like action heroes, but which one of us actually is? That evening, in a semi-clean trailer on a mattress void of bugs and dirty laundry, I read the Bible, ready to memorize more verses: If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us.
Come Sunday, I can get another prize. Yet, the words of the Bible seem to be yelling at me. And much as I’d rather not think about Hunter, I suspect he’s back at his Gram’s trailer with the TV blaring, that he’s alone. And Dehlia is walking by herself into Triple D’s to buy mayonnaise. In my mind they aren’t together.
Although they could be sitting side by side on the bleachers, smoking, laughing, the evening lamplights blinking on and glinting off their hair.
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J Saler Drees lives in San Diego, California, and has an MFA from Pacific University. Previous works can be found in Bitterzoet, Bridge Eight, Broken Skyline, Change Seven, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, Spark: A Creative Anthology, and West Trade Review.
