Skits and Batters
By G. K. Wuori

Skits told her then, told Batters the blind girl, they were in a place, Iowa, that was part of the middle of the west— specifically, “a town, maybe a village, not terribly excited about itself, although it is very pretty, and has a name undoubtedly derived from their indigenous peoples, and that very long ago.”

Batters said she’d never heard of a place called I-oh-uh, but of course there had never been any reason to study the American provinces all that much, maybe some music, that was always good, or one of those headlining crimes the Americans seemed to be so good at pulling off. Well, Batters continued, not touching Skits just then but hoping she was still by her side, there was always New York, of course, where the buildings had fallen down, blown to eternity by insurgents, and Colorado where the high school kids were shot, but all the places ran away when she called to them, so she asked Skits if this place where the bus tickets had run out, had nearly exploded with emptiness as if to say this journey is now with great dignity and bleak prospects concluded, if it looked like a good town where all the streets were hard and the rain looked like it had someplace to go.

“Skits?” she said.  “Are you still with me, my lovely?  I don’t sense this place as being grand, that it is a city with alleys and docks and places to hide.  Will we hide, Skits?  Are there trees, forests, crookedy rivers?”

Skits said nothing, concentrating instead on examining the town, knowing, too, that Batters sometimes fiercesome babble was only her way of triangulating certain geographic notions, of locating herself not so much on the planet as in her mind.

 They were both wearing long skirts and heavy shoes, good coats, too, and scarves over their heads, so Skits could see they looked wintry, and not as though they’d just been dropped from some southern ocean place wearing hula-hula skirts and having sand between their toes. Not normal wintry, from what Skits could feel (Fahrenheit still foreign to her so she had to rely on her body’s feeling)—almost all the men and women wore pants and knitted hats or no hats—and the one woman outside the bus station had made that clucking sound, not at all a complimentary sound, and had said something about “church people” which Skits couldn’t figure out.

Batters had heard it, too, and had started to say something but Skits had shushed her, had said, “she’ll think we have someplace to go, that we are not derelict wanderers.  Let her think it.”

As far as Skits knew (and sometimes she wished she’d studied harder, especially all the American things that had seemed so boring in school), everyone loved the religious things and religion was all over the place.  Even the Pope of Italy came here, to this country, and there were Jews fleeing all the things they always had to flee, and people who prayed with snakes and blessed their cars and their dogs and their football matches.

“They might think we’re missionaries if we stay away from the garlic,” Skits said.  “I think you can be reasonably holy as long as you stay away from eternity and whatever people are supposed to do about that.”

Then there were the boys that first afternoon, three of them about their own age who’d come into the McDonald’s where Skits and Batters were drinking tea and eating potato strips.  Batters liked the potatoes although she said the tea wasn’t very good.  “The cup, too,” she said to Skits, “are you supposed to eat the cup?  It seems very chewable.”

“Don’t eat the cup,” Skits said.  “It’s a blown poly-something, no doubt not very digestible.”

The boys sat down at the same row of tiny tables where the girls were sitting and one of them—Skits later described him to Batters as an ugly boy with pocks, and dry, crackly lips—heard them talking in their own language and asked to see their papers, something with photographic identification and clear statements as to their purposes in this country.

Skits knew about such things, knew all the prices that had to be paid for suspicion and safety, but she wasn’t, as she whispered to Batters, “just off the plane.”  She decided she could be just as stupid as this boy so she gave him the St. Louis newspaper she’d found on the bus that morning and the other boys laughed at him, at the ugly boy, who Skits could see was only trying to show that he was not ugly in being able to examine the disparities and dissonances in the world.

“Why would you want to see our papers?” Skits finally asked him, giving him at least some public acknowledgement that they had heard his words and could take him seriously if they chose to.  She knew he wanted to say he was only hoping she and her friend weren’t carrying bombs around, that sort of thing, bombings in restaurants not unusual worldwide, although it was something American boys hadn’t had a chance to think much about yet. 

“This isn’t Tel Aviv,” Skits whispered to Batters.

The boy, however, finally being a little more of what he really was, said to them, “We can give you a ride.  Do you need to go somewhere?”

Skits said no, they didn’t, they were only here to drink tea.  They hadn’t thought about the rest of the day or the week or the month yet. Conceivably, she said, they might stay here forever, or at least until the restaurant ran out of tea and potato strips.

“French fries,” he said to her.

“Of course,” Skits said.  Then she made another mistake, a tactical one by adding, “You’ve been to France?”

This was another humiliation for the boy and cause for some more laughter from his companions, France not being at all, as so many of these Americans said, “on the radar,” let alone a visit there. Skits was sad for his humiliation since he’d only, obviously, been trying to show he was worthy of consideration by someone, even frumpy ladies speaking weird.

True enough, they had no place to go, not yet. It had been Batters, though, instigating motion nearly every time they’d slowed down or stopped, Batters forcing them to leave the brick gymnasium a thousand miles away now, a place that had been filled with people smiling at them (Skits said), and giving them welcomes and then sorting them out like berries or fresh cookies.

Everyone had been well-intentioned, if confused by the two young women, officially granted refugee status, yet presenting to the world with black toenails and fingernails, piercings in both public as well as nether parts – the explanation, the girls said, being that these body manipulatings had infuriated their parents, who were dead now, all four of them, and they’d worn black lipstick, combat shoes, and the American camo slacks because that was where they were (Batters had interrupted that conversation by saying, “metaphysically speaking”), nineteen, for God’s sakes, and thoroughly rebellious as expected.  Even if the homeland, the glorious homeland which ninety-seven-point-six percent of the world couldn’t even pronounce, was falling apart, had fallen – all those phone books now stove fodder and nothing more—Well, could it be considered a rebellion within the rebellion?  Could it be that we still had to prove ourselves, to assert by full rejection that we will never allow this to happen in the world? 

“We were a bit outré,” Skits had said, adding finally, “a kind of fuck-me cool,” though the woman interviewer, wearing both a Red Cross and a UN nametag (and a marvelous Florida tan), seemed not fully capable of handling any more of the mechanics of conflict.

Nor did Skits say how much she’d loved laying things on her mother like, “Happiness is a truly fresh vaginal smell,” or “Is it true that oral sex can cause gum disease?”  There was Batters, too, “acid blind,” as they always said, though she’d simply been blind since birth.  Anyway, Batters, whose father had been a banker before his throat was cut, would spend hours sitting on a small step stool on a street corner, caressing her bare legs so as to urge contributions to the enameled porcelain dish in front of her with the little note that read, I’m Blind. Batters’ father had even had Batters arrested once (because of the embarrassment to his position), but the Commander of Local Control said he understood these things, how these young people sometimes felt their family was like a stout rope wrapped around the heart. “They’ll break it.  They’ll unwind it.  They’ll burn it if they have to,” he’d said.

He had, the man told Batters’ father, two daughters himself and they needed these moments of fecklessness if they were ever to be good wives.  For a moment, Skits wondered if this poor boy here knew what it took to be a good American wife.  All she knew was that a driving license was required before you could get a wedding license.

Skits had no idea what the fate of the Commander of Local Control had been, but she did know the Commander’s wife and Skits’ own mother had been cruelly murdered in the name of civil coherence. Together, all of these things, these events, having come over them like cascading waters, a hurricane of tears and splenetic wonder, had muted the rebellion she and Batters had been planning on.

She remembered wishing her mother would break her leg one day.  It had all been that serious.  When that didn’t happen, Skits confessed it to Batters as yet another egregious failure in a life headed swiftly toward such things as taking a degree in accounting or finding someone with a true fondness for reciprocal sex, a good boy who might find in you not a vessel for the receipt of fluids, but an instrument that needed to be polished and tuned and played properly.  Yet who could think of such things when your own mother had tied your wrists to the bathroom sink so that you could not move while she read holy verses to you and laid out her detailed concerns over certain matters of hygiene and speech and respect?  Skits had thought herself tough, because her father had taken over when her mother grew weary.  He had explained to her that every day was like a brick being placed on the wall of an elegant home.  It had to be placed carefully and with optimistic thought toward the future.  A misstep, a moment’s carelessness, a certain way of not caring, and you lived with that forever.  Undeterred, Skits had said her experience was that most of those elegant bricks had been rolled by the world into fine gravel, an irritating dust.  Her father had ripped an earring from her ear at that, and Skits, her hands still bound to the sink, had bled all over her shoulder, a shoulder she refused to wash for weeks and weeks afterwards.

The fights, though, the screaming, the oratorios to injustice sung nearly nightly, had all ended quickly, ended in a blur of soldiers, of war machines fearsome and dangerous, and of women carrying around half-filled boxes of cereal for children who had disappeared.  Swiftly, too, Skits remembered.  The whole world had changed in a single afternoon, a Sunday.

Twice, she and Batters had escaped rescue, ending up dirty and terrified finally at Batters’ home one afternoon.  All the burners on the stove were glowing red, and all four of their parents, along with the wife of the Commander of Local Control, were sitting at the kitchen table wretchedly dead and wretchedly signaling victory for causes neither Skits nor Batters could remember as being important. True, they, the two girls, had been wrapped pretty tightly into being nasty pricks for quite some time, but you would have thought the world would have blessed them with some indication, some warning that all the imperfections were about to be demolished so that perfection could be installed.

Skits had vomited right there in the kitchen and had tried to lie to Batters by saying, “They’ve killed kitty,” but not only was Batters’ nose working quite fine, she said she could hear what had happened, that the sounds of disappointment and agony were all over the place like the sounds of old rosaries and trembled-out confessions in an abandoned church.

“I feel more like a widow right now,” Batters had said, “than an orphan.”

Skits had no time to work out the meaning of that as she emptied the pockets and purses and wallets of money, a “desperate currency” she said to Batters, and then added how she’d heard that people were being taken to Stockholm and Helsinki and Dublin, and she thought she knew how to arrange that.  Some were going to America, too, and maybe they could do that, though Batters mumbled something about its not being cool, this refugee thing, not at all, “totally shiftless and morose, if you ask me, and you better ask me if we’re going to vault ourselves around the world seeking new lives in place of these ones that have just imploded.”

The place called Ft. Law-der-dale was very hot, Skits remembered, the air wet and smelling of old perfumes and the aftershaves of men it was not necessary to know very well.  Someone drew a number right on Skits’ arm and, when Skits was asked if Batters was truly blind and she said, yes, she was, he drew a number across Batters’ forehead.  All of that was profoundly annoying, especially the number on Batters which made her look stupid.  Had it been a permanent number, some sort of The Hague number or a holocaust number, something retrievable from within whole volumes of testimony that might be given at a later date—fair enough.  A numbered grave might not be very personal, but at least it was your own.

This, however, these drawings, were barn numbers, whore’s numbers, quick chits for the lining up of injectees concerned about numerous communicable diseases.

“Jesus Christ,” Skits said, “it’s time to get the ovaries pierced, maybe something in a sterile barbed wire.  We’re being processed, Batters, turned into American cheese.  I do believe it may be time to leave.”

Batters said she’d heard the universities here were hungry for foreign girls, refugees especially, girl refugees most certainly being looked upon like some prized soccer boy.

“Wherever did you hear that?” Skits asked.

“On the internet,” Batters said.  “It was a live radio report on a rape conference.  They’re all sure we’ve been raped and that we’re carrying Mongol babies, maybe Irish ones.”

“Irish ones?”

“Something tribal, but they’re pretty sure an American education will make everything all right again.  For us.”

“You weren’t raped, Batters,” Skits said.

“Not in my body.”

After the boys left the McDonald’s Skits bought more tea.  She told Batters she wanted to sit by the window.  There was some kind of empty field out there and the sky seemed to run from side to side and up to down like a madman who never finds his home.  Somebody had said that to her once, that Americans never really had homes, only locations, which didn’t seem all that bad to Skits just then, since she and Batters didn’t even have much of a location.

“Very heavy,” Skits said, “all gray, like your underclothes, and it’s starting to snow.”

“You let me wear gray underthings?” Batters said.

“There was danger of your being taken into some foreign army, and I didn’t think your attitude would be enough to keep you safe.”

“You already sound like an American,” Batters said.

“That’s only because we’re not speaking English. In English I sound like someone to be considered for a psychotic sanitarium.”

“Skits?”

“Yes?”

“Does there seem to be any lodging around?”

“Not obviously.  Maybe we should take a walk. There must be houses with rooms to let.”

As they walked, Skits told Batters about the shops they passed, what merchandise was available.  There were prices that didn’t mean a great deal yet, though Skits translated a few things into their old currency, a non-existent money now. Batters said she was getting cold so they went into one shop that said it sold everything for a dollar.  Skits wanted to ask the woman if she knew anything about rooms to let, but the woman smiled at them and said, “Are you gypsies?” 

Skits said to her, “We’re only girls,” but she didn’t like the exchange anyway so they left the shop, stepping carefully in the accumulating snow.

They went past the bus station, which was closed, an odd thing they both thought, since having transit available was even more important than keeping the hospitals open or the movie theaters (about which Skits said she didn’t see one, but it might be on another street). Finally, Skits said they had to leave the area of the shops and look at houses.  There seemed to be many streets, she said, and they had big trees, all leaveless now, of course, grand lawnways, and there were post boxes for public collection.  No phone cabinets that she could see, though who would they call? 

“Now listen to this one,” Skits said, and then she described the monster snowplow eating the streets, golden lights flashing, and there it is again, what I told you about, the driver has raised his thumb to us in that peculiar manner.  He looked friendly, she said, so I don’t think it is a scandalous gesture, “not obscene, Batters darling, only a thumb pointing toward the sky.”

It was dark by then, and with the snowplow gone very quiet, the tiniest of white leaves falling from the sky. Then Skits said they had come to a small park, a square surrounded by lovely houses with big blankets of snow all over them, the windows of the homes here and there casting out a warm glow.

“Very charming,” she said, running away from Batters for a moment to a sign embedded in a rock.  “It says Freedom Park,” she said, and she said there was a small house in the center of it, a house of stone with a sloping roof and no walls, and another sign she read for Batters, the second word troublesome, Freedom Gazebo.

“Something of an excellent design, I think,” Skits said as she helped Batters sit down and then sat next to her.  She pulled a blanket from one of their satchels and placed it behind them and over their shoulders, then took another blanket and arranged it across their laps.  The blankets had come from the bus and Skits was sure they’d been part of the ticket price; at least she hoped so since she sincerely hadn’t wanted to start her life here as some sort of thief, a bus thief.

Overall, though, she thought she was pretty comfortable.  She asked Batters if she was comfortable and Batters said she thought she was.  Skits decided this was an unusual way to begin their freedom from all the redemptive people, as she called them, the saving people, the helping people.

“We’re rugged now,” she said to Batters, “independent, possibly wacky.  I think this is how it’s done.”

Skits took Batters’ hands then and held them between her own, satisfied that the night, with its gentle ownership, would hold them no longer than necessary.

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