vehicles.
She tested her father’s truck, but the doors were locked. Delilah thought about lying down in the back, but scrapped that as an easily-foiled plan. All Ginny had to do was walk up and look over the tailgate.
She climbed into the back anyway and tried to pry the rear cab window open, but it was latched shut.
Climbing back out again, the girl got on her knees and looked underneath the truck, hoping there was space to crawl under, but there was a patch of oil Delilah didn’t want to wallow around in. For a kid, she could be surprisingly meticulous—her stepmother Janele was always saying how proud she was that her baby always picked up after herself. Delilah didn’t do it out of some moral rectitude, she just hated being in a dirty house. Hated having crumbs on her bare feet, hated dipping her elbow in ketchup congealing on the kitchen table.
Delilah’s biological mother was quite the opposite. In her stale, dark house lived six skinny cats, two big stupid dogs, and a Plexiglas aquarium that allegedly held a hamster that Delilah had never seen.
She hated the cats. They were the worst.
She got down and peeked under the next car. There was considerably less of a mess underneath, but the undercarriage was so low there was no hope of being able to squeeze into it. She stood up and that’s when she saw it. On the other side of the strip of parking-spaces, at the end of a row of empty slots, was a pickup truck.
It was a Ford, a big one, old. Comparatively speaking, the red paint job was dull; it reflected the security lights about as well as an eggshell. A camper-shell covered the bed like a turtle, the same brick-red as the body.
But what grabbed Delilah’s attention was the bright green snake spray-painted up the side of the bed wall.
This was new. Surely she would have seen such a spectacular work of art around the complex before. This was without a doubt a new neighbor that she hoped her father would befriend in the near future, so she could see who would drive around town with this on his truck. And for certain, that person would have to be a man, because this emerald-skinned jungle dragon could only belong to a man.
An undulating hose of diamond-shaped scales uncoiled from the tail-light to the driver’s-side door. Each scale shone with its own sharp shine, reflecting some source of light beyond the ken of the canvas. At the leading end of the dragonesque body was a great gawping mouth full of teeth and writhing bifurcated tongue, dominated by a pair of white fangs the size and shape of bananas.
Honey-amber screwhead eyes gazed out at her, as big as fists and just as menacing. The eye seemed to be three-dimensional. Prying it out, she discovered that underneath was the gasoline receptacle. The gas cap was the snake’s eye! How clever.
It was a bit of a ratty truck to have such a gloriously cheesy picture painted on it, but then when you thought about it, the medium fit the subject well. She wondered who it belonged to, and what he was like, as the girl reached up and put her hand on its swollen metal belly, still warm with the day’s beating.
She imagined a man with a bushy brown mustache and a bald head, with a band of curly hair that started at one ear and went round the back of his head to the other. He would be wearing a stained white T-shirt and a pair of jeans that never quite managed to hide his butt-crack. He’d be covering his baldness with a ball cap, with some silly saying on it. “I Hunt Because My Wife Can’t Climb Trees” maybe, like what her father had hanging from the mounted buck-head in the apartment, along with his Duck Commander cap.
She noticed that the snake’s tail extended past the tail-light on this side. Delilah went around the back and found that the body stretched across the tailgate, went behind the passenger tail-light, and came out again on the passenger fender.
After that it coiled twice and clinging tightly to the very tip was a barechested woman in Viking
She tested her father’s truck, but the doors were locked. Delilah thought about lying down in the back, but scrapped that as an easily-foiled plan. All Ginny had to do was walk up and look over the tailgate.
She climbed into the back anyway and tried to pry the rear cab window open, but it was latched shut.
Climbing back out again, the girl got on her knees and looked underneath the truck, hoping there was space to crawl under, but there was a patch of oil Delilah didn’t want to wallow around in. For a kid, she could be surprisingly meticulous—her stepmother Janele was always saying how proud she was that her baby always picked up after herself. Delilah didn’t do it out of some moral rectitude, she just hated being in a dirty house. Hated having crumbs on her bare feet, hated dipping her elbow in ketchup congealing on the kitchen table.
Delilah’s biological mother was quite the opposite. In her stale, dark house lived six skinny cats, two big stupid dogs, and a Plexiglas aquarium that allegedly held a hamster that Delilah had never seen.
She hated the cats. They were the worst.
She got down and peeked under the next car. There was considerably less of a mess underneath, but the undercarriage was so low there was no hope of being able to squeeze into it. She stood up and that’s when she saw it. On the other side of the strip of parking-spaces, at the end of a row of empty slots, was a pickup truck.
It was a Ford, a big one, old. Comparatively speaking, the red paint job was dull; it reflected the security lights about as well as an eggshell. A camper-shell covered the bed like a turtle, the same brick-red as the body.
But what grabbed Delilah’s attention was the bright green snake spray-painted up the side of the bed wall.
This was new. Surely she would have seen such a spectacular work of art around the complex before. This was without a doubt a new neighbor that she hoped her father would befriend in the near future, so she could see who would drive around town with this on his truck. And for certain, that person would have to be a man, because this emerald-skinned jungle dragon could only belong to a man.
An undulating hose of diamond-shaped scales uncoiled from the tail-light to the driver’s-side door. Each scale shone with its own sharp shine, reflecting some source of light beyond the ken of the canvas. At the leading end of the dragonesque body was a great gawping mouth full of teeth and writhing bifurcated tongue, dominated by a pair of white fangs the size and shape of bananas.
Honey-amber screwhead eyes gazed out at her, as big as fists and just as menacing. The eye seemed to be three-dimensional. Prying it out, she discovered that underneath was the gasoline receptacle. The gas cap was the snake’s eye! How clever.
It was a bit of a ratty truck to have such a gloriously cheesy picture painted on it, but then when you thought about it, the medium fit the subject well. She wondered who it belonged to, and what he was like, as the girl reached up and put her hand on its swollen metal belly, still warm with the day’s beating.
She imagined a man with a bushy brown mustache and a bald head, with a band of curly hair that started at one ear and went round the back of his head to the other. He would be wearing a stained white T-shirt and a pair of jeans that never quite managed to hide his butt-crack. He’d be covering his baldness with a ball cap, with some silly saying on it. “I Hunt Because My Wife Can’t Climb Trees” maybe, like what her father had hanging from the mounted buck-head in the apartment, along with his Duck Commander cap.
She noticed that the snake’s tail extended past the tail-light on this side. Delilah went around the back and found that the body stretched across the tailgate, went behind the passenger tail-light, and came out again on the passenger fender.
After that it coiled twice and clinging tightly to the very tip was a barechested woman in Viking
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