Upside Down

75

Marta put the batteries in the cassette recorder she had bought at an electronics place on Canal Street. She rewound the tape while Arturo blew smoke rings out of the open window of her Lincoln. The cassette was a ninety-minute version, forty-five to a side.

The tape player made a loud snap to alert Marta that the tape had rewound. Holding her breath, Marta pushed the Play button.

“I'm recording,” a woman's voice said. Marta turned up the volume to hear better.

“And you fixing to die in a minute, bitch,” Arturo muttered.

Marta punched him hard in the shoulder. “Shhhhhh!” she hissed.

“It's her. The lawyer,” he told her.

“You ready?” the lawyer asked somebody. “And, let's be serious. This is serious material.”

“ It is not! Why do you say that, Mother? ” Marta, who had been anticipating another adult's voice, was surprised to hear the voice of the young girl reply.

“Because these are your thoughts, Faith Ann. And they are important.”

“Im-por-tant? Oh, Mother, please.”

“Important because you wrote them. They reflect your life, your world. Someday they might be valuable because they are your words.”

“Yeah, right,” Faith Ann's voice said. “This is so gay.”

“It is not,” her mother countered. “It's precious.”

“That's the lawyer bitch,” Arturo said. “And that's her kid.”

“Just shut up, Arturo!” Marta snapped.

He shrugged. “Kid was in the office.”

“Someday you'll be so glad to have this tape,” the lawyer said.

“And you'll use it to humiliate me,” her daughter shot back.

“No, I won't. Cross my heart. Ready? First poem…”

“Okay, you'll start the music again when I wave my hand. Okay? Okay. The name of this poem is ‘A Penny for Your Thoughts.' I wrote it about everybody having opinions about everything, even stuff they know absolutely nothing about.” The soft strains of chamber music came up in the background.

“A penny for your thoughts, by me, Faith Ann Porter.

I think without stopping. all Spring through to Fall

If you get them for a penny they're worth nothing at all.”

Marta snapped the Stop button and hit fast forward.

“I want to hear the poem,” Arturo protested.

Marta let it run for several seconds, then she punched the Stop button. “You can listen to the poem after I hear the hits.” She pressed the Play button.

“-or maybe it's the fact that your breath is bad or your feet stink sometimes-”

Arturo laughed. “She's talking about her mother!”

Stop.

FF.

Stop.

Play.

“… but I never knew him, or if he really wanted a son, or if he liked baseball or basketball more…”

Stop.

Marta stared at the tape player, unable to speak. Anger enveloped her. Or maybe it was that she wasn't accustomed to being outsmarted, outstreeted by a kid.

“This is bullshit!” Marta snapped.

“This is maybe just stuff before Amber got there, that's all,” Arturo said.

FF.

Stop.

Play.

“-because like maybe you meant to fly a kite, but never had the right string for it. And-”

Stop.

FF.

“Her poems suck,” Arturo said.

Stop.

Play.

That fucking string music. Those stupid verses.

And so it went for almost the entire side of the tape.

“Turn it over,” Arturo said.

The other side was blank.

“That little monster!” Marta raged.

“There was no tape of me,” Arturo said. “Don't you see? This was what she took from the machine. This was the last tape in the machine. Her mother didn't turn it on for her.” He sniggered. “A bunch of silly girl-shit poems about stinky feet.”

Marta burned him with her best “of all the dumb shit I ever heard” glare. “The little bitch! I can't believe this.”

“Well. If there is one, where is it? I say there's no tape.”

“That little conniving shit!” Marta yelled. She shoved the cassette player off the console onto the floor at Arturo's feet, startling him. The cigarette fell from his open mouth. Marta's hand shot out. She snatched the butt in midfall, clenched it in her fist, and squeezed hard, extinguishing it. That done, she flung it through Arturo's open window. “She handed us a dummy tape! Damn her. Goddamn her!”

“How can you know that?”

“Because I know is how I know. She left this shit in that player, and she took the earphones because she knew it would take time to hear what was on it. She was playing for time. She knew that if we had the tape, we would be satisfied enough to lose our focus for a few minutes. And it worked!”

“She's just a little kid,” Arturo said. “No way she put that together. There is no tape, Marta.”

“She has it, Turo. I am telling you she does. I would bet my life on it. And she has those negatives too. This is not a child. This is a demon. She isn't running scared at all. And she is going to give them over to someone who will use them. And, when that happens, you are going to die. Bennett will kill you, or Suggs will kill you, or the state of Louisiana will kill you. I am going to find her and I am going to cut out her little black heart and feed it to a pig.”

“Take some deep breaths,” Arturo said.

Marta stared at him, just daring him to say another word. He shrank against the door.

She closed her eyes for fifteen, maybe twenty seconds.

“I only have one question,” he said finally.

She opened her eyes slowly, pinning him with her glare. “What?”

“Where you gonna get a pig from?”