What Are You Doing to Me Now?

by Travis Flatt

“You still there, Sugar?” Candy says.

Davy sprawls on his bed, shirtless but wearing his jeans and sneakers. His freckled chest ebbs and flows, his mouth open, breath loud. He wraps the elastic, spiral phone cord around his fingers, rubs the receiver across his face, lays it over his eyes like a blindfold. Uses the blunt plastic to itch his chin. The poster of Kathy Ireland, hanging on his closet door, lends its dream body to the voice on the phone. Brandi, Mindy, Trixie–Candy, she calls herself today. He’s paying by the minute and loves to listen. Listen out of one ear, at the moment. If his mom comes home, he must hang up, tear the poster down, and cram it under his mattress. His mom only finds religion when it comes to that poster.

“Yeah, I’m here,” he says.

“Good,” Candy moans. “What are you doing to me now?”

Davy wants a cigarette, but the phone cord doesn’t reach the window. If his mom comes home to a house reeked out with fresh smoke, she’ll whip his ass. Or try. The clock reads 8:24AM, so school will call his mom at the Exxon any minute. Enraged, she’ll drive up, her freckles disappearing underneath hot blood. He’s been on the hotline for two hours, dialing when his mom left for work. With her drive time home, that makes two hours and twenty-four minutes.

Candy talks for three dollars a minute; his mom works for five dollars an hour.

He hears a busted-mufflered truck engine down the street. “Bye, Candy,” he says and hangs up, realizing what he actually said was: “Bye, Mom.”

He rushes out the back door. He left the poster up on the closet, but he’s not going back. His mom will rip it down and trash it. He can get another–just steal a Sports Illustrated from the Exxon. In the backyard, he lights a cigarette and uses the rusty patio table to hop the chain link fence.

It’s wet and warm as Candy’s voice outside. Today’s the last day of August. School has been back in for a couple of weeks. So far, Davy’s attended three days of eighth grade. Walking west for the trailer park, he grins, thinking how he’ll tell Gabe and Walker that he had sex with his girlfriend all morning.

********************

When Davy knocks on Gabe’s trailer door, it swings open. It’s unlocked, not even pushed closed.

“Hey, your door’s open, dipshit,” he shouts, peering into the dark living room. The bent blinds are drawn, and with the light from the open door, small things scurry across the walls, racing for the dark corners. Nothing to fear over barging into Gabe’s place at this hour. His dad won’t be home: he works the first shift at Toyota, cranking out engine blocks.

Davy has to piss but will later use the backyard. He’s never been here when the toilet wasn’t clogged. Hanging out with Gabe—which is a recent thing—does have its perks. He’s younger, in another grade, and attends a different school, which means he’s unknown to Davy’s mom. Davy and Walker recruited him to act as their hideout, someone they could use when they wanted to cut. Gabe’s temporary.

 From down the trailer hall blasts Megadeth, rattling a boombox’s overloaded speakers. Davy finds Gabe and Walker playing Sega, both sprawled belly down across Gabe’s tattered mattress. They stare at a tiny box TV on the floor and frantically mash bulky black controllers. Gabe’s still in his pajamas. Chris Walker, the largest boy in Davy’s eighth-grade class, dwarfs little Gabe. He wears too tight Gap brand jeans that bulge his flesh out around the waist. The way Walker leans forward, seal-like, pulls his red Tommy Hilfiger shirt up over his moon white belly.

“I’ve got a girlfriend,” Davy says. He must repeat himself until both boys glance back over their shoulders. They digest this information with quick, blank stares, then continue their Mortal Kombat match. Davy flops between them on the mattress and is poked by ancient springs. Although the window’s thrown open, the room is thick with armpit stench. “I talked to my girlfriend today. We had sex.”

“The hooker?” Gabe says. His teeth are tiny and he has extra canines on both sides.

“Fuck you.” Davy kicks out to tip the boombox off the cardboard box bedside table. Yanked from the wall, the roaring music dies.

Without looking away from the TV, Gabe says, “You’re paying for that if it’s broke.”

Davy stands. “It smells like shit in here—let’s shoot.”

The boys won’t back down from a challenge, though Walker grumbles, says he wasn’t finished with the match, wanted to show off a fatality. Through a netless rim nailed to a tree, they play a short game of pick-up with a leaky, turquoise, Charlotte Hornets branded basketball. The usual call is “first to thirty,” and Davy wins before Gabe and Walker can reach double digits, scores combined.

Afterward, they rest in broken lawn chairs under a tree to talk girls. Gabe bums a cigarette and announces, “I fucked Wendy Parks on Friday.”

“Wendy Parks wouldn’t fuck you for a billion dollars,” Walker says and laughs until he wheezes.

Gabe’s a sixth grader and attends the elementary school adjoining Davy’s junior high. He only knows of Wendy Parks by reputation, as she’s head of the eighth-grade cheerleading squad. Davy wonders why this kid can’t dream up a better lie?

Gabe doesn’t stop there. He hops up, dropkicks the basketball onto the trailer’s roof, and shouts at Walker, who’s turned crimson from coughing. “Walker, I told you how I made it with that girl at Helena Fair last summer? Well, she called me last night. She’s pregnant from going down on me behind the Rockin’ Rollacoster.”

At this, Walker howls, his lawn chair teetering under his weight. Tears run down his cheeks. “You can’t get pregnant like that, Gabe. Goddamn, you’re about stupid.”

Gabe doesn’t take this. He dives and lands on Walker, throwing wild, looping punches which glance off the larger boy’s shoulders. Untroubled, Walker stands and body slams Gabe, shouting, “Undertaker!” Soon, the two roll in the patchy, yellow yard, and Walker sits atop Gabe, pinning his arms down. He raises a dirty fist, taunting, and lets the smaller boy wait for the punch.

Now, Davy stands. He meets eyes with the furious and terrified Gabe, who squirms and squeals for help. Walker will mock Gabe for days. “The hooker?” he thinks. As Gabe’s eyes light with hope, Davy takes a step and kicks the pinned boy across the jaw.

Walker hops up, leaving Gabe crawling in the dirt, clasping his mouth, crying. Walker slaps Davy’s back and says, “Holy shit, Davy—what the fuck?” After a moment, he scornfully adds, “Get up, Gabe. You’re fine.”

Blood covers Gabe’s hands, chin, and neck. He wails about his tooth, or “toof,” he pronounces, as his mouth is already swelling. He crawls to his feet and runs inside, leaving a bloody handprint on the front door.

Now gone, Gabe is forgotten, and Davy and Walker resume sitting in the lawn chairs. After a moment, Davy recalls their previous conversation and asks Walker what exactly “going down” means? Walker explains with enthusiastic pantomime. Davy smiles but feels dizzy with wonder, and, for some reason, fear.

“Is it good?” Davy asks.

“It’s awesome.”

  Gabe appears in the front doorway, his lips purple and hugely swollen. His voice rises so shrill it rattles like his boombox. It breaks and loses syllables. “Fuck y’all. My toof’s broke.”
            Walker snorts, says, “It hot. I’m playing Mortal Kombat,” and steps up to the front door, pushing Gabe aside and disappearing into the dark.

Davy heads for the street.

********************

Because the train tracks run straight through town and beside the Exxon, Davy must be careful. If he hits the tracks wrong, his mother can easily see him from the service station’s window.

He heads south from Gabe’s trailer, pushing through the scrub and stickers encircling Dogwood Park. “Dogshit Park,” as Walker calls it. He tears his jeans but steers well clear of downtown, a clump of stores smooshed together at the intersection of Broad and Willow—Marion Antiques, the Pawn, Bobby Q’s Diner, and the Exxon.

Both Bobby Q’s and the Exxon are owned by Davy’s rich, paternal grandmother. When Davy was eight, his dad shipped to Iraq, served a tour, and didn’t bother to come home.

Three months ago, at school, Walker told him about the hotline he saw on cable, and that’s where Davy got the idea to call Candy. He stole his grandmother’s credit card, then used it until she found out and threatened to fire his mom, so he stopped. For a few days. The next weekend, Davy realized his mom had her own card, slipped it from her purse, and memorized the number. He loves Candy. He couldn’t bear the thought she might forget him. They hadn’t been together long enough.

Other than not getting caught, the virtue of heading south through the park is that he’ll pass by the Judson School, an all-girls college. His cousin goes to Judson, and whenever he’s around campus, he hopes to catch a glimpse of her walking between classes. Sometimes, he dreams about her being his girlfriend. That might be illegal, though maybe not in this piece of crap state. If anywhere you could be with your cousin, it would definitely be Alabama.

She wouldn’t agree, though. She’s stuck up. And in college. No matter what, she’s still pretty. Shit, she’s not even his real cousin. Everyone just calls them that. Her mom and his grandmother live together. Not only that, but they’re girlfriends, too. Everyone in town knows. Gabe, who’s trash, tries to tease him. Walker, whose dad is a lawyer, thinks it’s cool. So it’s okay.

Around the Judson campus, picket fences sprout up in yards. Picket fences make these neighborhoods look like the yards on Nick at Night TV shows like The Brady Bunch. Davy’s mom watches their black and white TV after work in the kitchen every night, drinking until she staggers to bed, bumping down the hall walls. Back in Davy’s neighborhood, the fences are chain-link, and a few even have barbed wire. They protect muddy yards that smell like dogshit and mostly restrain snarling Rottweilers and pit bulls. Some of them hold scruffy, red-haired curs like Davy.

When Davy went to school most last year, seventh grade, they wanted him to play basketball and baseball. Coaches saw him on the playground. Davy got his third suspension when a boy called him “Ginger Jordan.” Davy pushed the boy down on the blacktop and stomped three of his fingers sideways.

Despite what Gabe might say, one thing that actually happened at Helena Fair last summer was Davy winning stuffed animals. He used his athletic skills to win a whole crowd of kids—and adults—prizes at the throwing games. A girl around his cousin’s age called him “big boy.” She wore a thin, white, wife-beater tank top you could see her black bra through; tiny, cut-off jean shorts; and tattoos lined her arms. He won the girl stuffed animals until the carnies ran him off. When he didn’t tell Candy, he burned with guilt.

The train tracks sit atop a hill of white gravel, fat rocks the size of peach pits. He picks a round, smooth stone the size of an entire peach and sniffs it. It smells like charcoal. A train will come chugging by in a couple of minutes, blowing its loud, corny whistle. Davy finds a spot in the tall weeds a few yards from the bottom of the gravel hill and crouches. From probably a quarter mile, he can see the black train coming.

Today, he throws early. Usually, he’d ding a car or crack a caboose window. Does Candy like baseball? He’s never asked. His hand gets hot thinking about Candy and what he wants to do to her. He takes three steps up the gravel hill and launches the rock like a Greg Maddux 2-seam fastball. The rock shatters the engine window. Davy runs. He runs until he reaches Judson campus and walks circles around the library. After several minutes, he notices all the girls staring and knows he must move on.

From the steps of a building called Brown Hall, where he pauses for a cigarette, he can hear sirens on Broad. They’re heading toward the tracks. He’ll duck back home to pack a toothbrush and some shorts, then go stay over at Gabe’s for the night.

Walker’s parents won’t have him anymore: they say he’s a bad influence.

********************

When Davy gets home, the police are with his mom, who is melting with tears and chewing the ends of her tangerine hair. His grandmother’s there, too, stony and haggard, her long, black hair draping nearly to her lap. In the kitchen, it’s so hot with disappointment that Davy wants to take his shirt off. His grandmother smokes; his mom sniffles. The cops bull breathe through their nostrils.

Everyone in town knows his mom’s hair, and since she gifted it to him, they know his hair, too.

That’s how the cops knew it was Davy.

That’s always how.

With strangers inside, Davy notices the house’s smell: sour beer. There are cases of stolen Budweiser in his mom’s room and she leaves cans all over. Sometimes, she and her boyfriends use them for ashtrays. His grandmother knows that his mom drinks on the job and steals, but she gives her work to keep her from selling things.

“You put that conductor in the hospital, Davy,” his mom says.

“I didn’t do it.”

********************

The judge asks if he feels remorse.

What he feels is worried about Candy.

A shrug earns him three weeks.

As usual, they force classes upon him each weekday morning, and the misery ticks past minute by minute. Even though he tests at a fifth-grade level, the juvie instructor, a tall man with a red nose and acne, insists that Davy learns algebra and The Tell Tale Heart. X equals Candy and he only hears her heartbeat. The instructor’s resolve begins to crumble. He calls it, “teaching a jellyfish to bowl.”

Nine in ten inmates of Perry County Juvenile are black.

Back at school, Walker doesn’t talk to the black kids and gets pissed when Davy says “hey” to them in the hall.

At night, Davy learns how to play card games. Around the table, these boys talk about “popping cherries” and “eating pussy.” Davy laughs and tries to follow along. When he shares his own stories—Gabe’s lies, mostly—they call them “little kid shit.” The other boys are there for smoking weed or stealing Hershey bars and bags of Doritos, shopping carts, increasingly bigger stuff. Outside, they challenge each other to shoplift from Piggly Wiggly’s. Here, they laugh about it. Several of them were arrested together. A few picked up for walking late at night.

The table goes quiet when Davy tells the story of the train. It’s silent until a boy riffle-shuffles the cards.

In time, girls come up again, but Davy keeps Candy to himself. Candy’s special, not a card game story, not something to make other boys laugh.

Outside of juvie, some of the kids fight in gangs, or imitations of gangs on TV, but you couldn’t tell from the way they act inside together. Almost no one fights inside because of Friday basketball games. For an hour on Friday, the guards let the kids who’ve earned it team up and play basketball in the gym. On the court, Davy never misses. He rebounds underneath boys who stand a head taller. Without thinking, without realizing he does it, he calls each shot aloud. Everywhere he shoots, he earns nicknames. Here, it’s “Freckles.”

Then, on Davy’s second Friday, something he’s never seen inside happens. Two boys fight. Over him. It happens picking teams. The two oldest boys, the captains, tangle and fall. Before the guards can break it up, an arm loudly snaps.

That’s it for basketball. No hard feelings. Davy’s made friends. They tell him to come to their neighborhood so they can teach him how to smoke weed and hotwire cars. One boy named Eric takes the opportunity to attach to Davy. Eric’s not an athlete, is shy, largely ignored.

Davy finds he’s valuable, smart about girls in a way Davy needs.

Eric’s got a girlfriend named Shauna. Her “oath,” Eric explains, he brought with him inside. Shauna’s oath means she’s his, and Eric doesn’t have to worry. To Davy, it seems like Eric has no problems.

Davy is jealous, but he can’t talk about Candy. It won’t come true if you share a secret—like a birthday candle. He makes up stories about his cousin instead, puts himself in the place of the boys his cousin likes—handsome boys who make good grades. He steals movie scenes to fill out what he can’t dream up, the missing beginnings, middles, and ends.

When Eric writes Shauna a letter, he even adds words from real books that he knows by heart. To learn how to make letters, Davy writes a long love mess for his cousin. Just for practice. Eric fixes all the mistakes; he doesn’t even laugh.

After he gets happy is when Davy decides he’ll write a real letter for Candy. He’ll read it to her on the phone. He can even use books from his grandmother’s house; she’s got hundreds of them.

Davy can’t bring himself to throw his fake letter away. Eric worked hard fixing it. And what if it succeeds? Wouldn’t that be hilarious? His cousin and him fall in love over a letter? On Sunday, they’re allowed to call home. Davy searches the phonebook to find Judson’s address. He figures Judson will redirect him to his cousin’s dorm.

Davy lies in bed and marvels at how Eric laid down facts so straight and clean about Shauna. It’s so simple. So many anxious evenings, waiting for the next morning with Candy, and Davy wondering what he needed to hear from her.

********************

After three weeks gone and wasted without Candy, Davy’s grandmother picks him up and takes him to his mom’s house. Save for the mattress, Davy’s room is empty—no phone. His mom cleaned out the rest of the house, too. She doesn’t speak to him, only sits at the kitchen table watching the little TV his grandmother gave them for Christmas, flipping channels, nodding, the sound too low to hear. When his mom starts selling things, it always smells the same—like Jack Daniels and nail polish remover. The first night, he keeps to his room. If bothered, his mom will wake up like a landmine.

In the morning, he tries Gabe’s trailer, hoping to use the phone. Gabe greets him in the yard as if expecting him, but he only offers curses and a smug, broken grin. Gabe warns that his dad plans to make Davy pay for the “toof,” as he still calls it. Davy leaves, wordless.

No point trying Walker. Walker never welcomes Davy after juvie, saying he “stinks like cocoa butter.”

It’s now his second day back home, and after wandering the streets, he’s met at home by the smell of cheap, greasy cologne. His mom is passed out at the kitchen table and a stove eye burns orange. On the floor lies a tin foil tube the length of a pencil. In the bathroom, a black and silver razor sits in the sink, blade tangled with dark, curly hairs. Atop the toilet tank rests a large box of condoms.

Davy spends dusk watching cars pass his window, as if one might deliver Candy to his door. Two days have passed without food.

 He sleeps on his bare mattress with a towel for a blanket, and when he wakes up, he’s unsure how much time has passed. He left his door open, hoping his mom might appear with dinner. A bald man walks through the front door without knocking, glances into Davy’s room, halts, mumbles, “Yo,” and stomps on, singing, “Hey, good lookin’!”

There’s no dinner that night, just thumps and whispers from his mom’s bedroom. Davy slips out the front door. He walks to his grandmother’s, dragging his sneakers on the sidewalk to enjoy the scrape sound. Tears live in his lashes. He asks his grandmother if he can stay with her? She says okay and doesn’t ask questions.

But she warns him to keep away from the phone.

********************

When his cousin comes to visit for Sunday dinner, she sees Davy, turns, and leaves. He realizes she told no one about his letter, otherwise, they wouldn’t have let him stay. Encouraged she kept it to herself, he darts out after her, catches her ducking into her Honda. “Hey, come eat with us. Please?”

Looking at her car door, she freezes, face stuck like a paused videotape. Barely moving her lips, she says, “If you come any closer, I’ll scream.”

Davy searches for words to fix this. “I think you’re really beautiful.”

She flinches. “Everyone thinks…you understand that you’re crazy, David?” And again, louder, as if she’s scaring away a raccoon at the trash cans, “You’re crazy, David.” Fumbling, she opens the car door. She drops her keys and curses. After several attempts, she scoops them up.

“I love you,” Davy says. She blinks and gives him a look he hopes to never see again, her eyes wide and confused as if he’s shown her a knife instead of a bouquet of flowers. He wants to turn this into a joke, a game. He grins, shouts, “I love you, baby. Let’s get married.”

She ignores this and manages to climb into the car. Pulls out into the street without looking and narrowly avoids a truck who stops and lays on the horn.

Davy, smiles, remembers Candy, his ace left to play.

********************

That night, Davy waits and listens for his grandmother to go upstairs to bed. She often stays up until three or four, drinking black coffee and playing solitaire. Finally, he hears her creak up the enormous spiral staircase in center of the house. When he’s satisfied she’s gone, he creeps to the kitchen.

His cousin’s mom left her purse dangling from a chair. He takes her credit card and, mindful of the treacherous floorboards, tiptoes through the foyer, squeezes out into the warm night air, and leaves the door cracked. Can’t risk the sound. He dashes down to a pay phone he knows on East Broad. You can call the hotline from anywhere, even pay phones, and he repeatedly attempts until he recognizes Candy’s voice. “Hello,” she purrs, “this is Stacy. What’s your name, baby?”

“It’s Davy. I missed you, Candy. Do you remember me?”

There’s no hesitation. “Oh, I remember you, baby.”

Davy scratches his pale, freckled forehead with the still sun-warm receiver and says, “Sugar. You always call me Sugar. You remember me, right?”

“Of course I do, Sugar. So, what are you doing to me now, Sugar?”

Davy leans against a wall of the booth. It’s close and smells like hot metal, like pocket change. “Candy, I was in juvie. My mom has a new boyfriend—”

“Everything’s going to be fine, Sugar. You tell me what you’re doing to me now.”

Davy presses his cheek against the glass, squeezes his eyes closed against headlights as a car passes, hoping it’s not a police cruiser. “Candy—will you be my girlfriend?”

“Of course, bay—Sugar.”

And then he remembers, “Will you give me your oath?”

A light switches on, on the first floor of the big house across the street. Probably nothing, but he drops down in the booth, as far as the phone cord will allow, and ends up kneeling. “Candy, can I call you? What’s your number?”

There’s a short pause. “You know my number, Sugar. You can call me anytime.”

“You’re my girlfriend. I want to call your real number.”

Davy thinks he hears a quick cough or snort, but it comes at a distance, as if Candy’s held the receiver away from her face, then: “Sugar, why don’t you tell me what you want to do to me.”

Davy grasps the hard phone cord in his fingers. It’s thin, plastic-sheathed metal attached to a purring hunk of plastic. He shouts, “What’s your number? You’re my girlfriend. Tell me your number.”

 Another light comes on across the street, this time definitely for him.

“Tell me how you like to touch—”

“You’re not my girlfriend,” Davy shouts again. He slams the receiver against the metal of the phone box. Over and over and over again. Each time, he hears Candy purring. He pounds the booth’s invincible, plastic glass with the receiver and demands Candy’s phone number, her oath. Lights pop on, up and down both sides of the street. Dogs bark between his shouts. He bloodies his knuckles. He loosens a fingernail on the phone box and jams his torn finger into his mouth, sucking.

Blood drips onto the floor and the receiver hangs limp from the cord. Window lights flick on and off. On the corner, a bath-robed man steps out into his porch light, scowling, his hair standing every which way. From the dangling receiver, Candy goes on purring, “What are you doing to me now?” She sounds bored, tired, old.

About the Author

Travis Flatt (he/him) is an epileptic teacher and actor living in Cookeville, Tennessee. His stories appear in New Flash Fiction Review, Gone Lawn, HAD, JMWW, Tiny Molecules, Bull, Bridge Eight, and elsewhere. He enjoys theater, dogs, and theatrical dogs.