Stink
Nell Hanley

Romy and Paula wore their hair long then, the summer they went bowling with the across the street neighbor, Mr. Hague. Romy in braids, and her mother letting it fall around her birch-bark face. They were versions of one another, apart from their man, father and husband, Gary Morgan, who was away.
Mr. Hague’s wife and two boys were out of town, so he, too, was alone. They’d been out of town for some time. Romy and Paula could see him, nights, sitting in a brown armchair by the living room window. He never drew the shades. The light seeped from the kitchen and touched the straight lines of one side of his face. His Chihuahua stayed curled up in the kitchen corner by the light of the fluorescents on the ceiling. The Chihuahua that had once chased Romy out of its yard and across the street. It was big for a Chihuahua, and her father had to get after it with a stick.
Romy was glad the Hague boys had gone away. They were pale-eyed and lean and wore their hair shorn, like their father. The older one, whose name was Seth, killed a bullfrog by slamming it onto the concrete driveway, and the younger, somewhat softer-hearted boy, J.R., toed it into a puddle beneath the elm tree, where it stayed, its belly rounding pale out of the water. That was the day of the Chihuahua.

The night Mr. Hague took them bowling, Romy had wanted rather to stay at home and toss small objects at the bats. Because it was summer, it was August, and at dusk out in the yard there were bats at which to throw things, such as tennis balls or watermelon rinds, to fool them into thinking it was food, and they would swoop after them every time.
But Paula didn’t like to be alone nights, not since the recent incident with the man at the door one night asking so strangely and loudly to borrow some sugar. He said his name was Damian, and when he said it, in a terrible, high pitch, he drew out both of the as in his name. “You’re on drugs!” she’d said through the door. Then she ran and locked up all possible points of entry to the house. “I’ll call the police!” she’d said, and she did, and the officer came. He had a small pad and jotted things down. Damian had long since gone away.

They went to the Southside Lanes. Mr. Hague insisted on lane five, as it was nearest the bar. The muscles in his jaw rolled while he waited for the shoe boy to fetch their shoes and spray clouds of disinfectant into them. Paula waved her hand in front of her face and smiled at Mr. Hague, who breathed in the disinfectant like it was regular air. Romy held her nose. The shoe boy had braces and curly hair, and he kept doing a thing with his top lip, lifting the lip and refitting it over the protrusion of his braces. The place was roaring with the sounds of video games and bowling. Cigarette smoke wafted out of the bar, where Mr. Hague bought Whiskey Sours for Paula and plain whiskey for himself while Romy set up scorekeeping at the lane.
“Delicious!” Paula said about the Whiskey Sour. “It’s my first!”
Romy hadn’t ever seen her drink anything but wine. Glasses of red or white wine, depending on the season of the year.
“Well it won’t be your last,” Mr. Hague said. “We’ll keep them coming.”
Romy started off the first game with only two pins and five, for seven, then Paula with two pins and a gutter ball. Mr. Hague shot the ball like a cannon down the aisle for a strike.
“It’s not whether you win or lose,” Paula said at the end of the game. “It’s how you play it.”
“I play to win,” Mr. Hague said.
“You certainly do,” Paula said.
“It’s all in the eye,” he said, and pointed a square finger at his right one. It was the color of a jungle gym. That steel. And bright after some trips to the bar.
Paula became jovial and bowled a good second game. “What fun!” she said. “Romy, sweetheart? What fun!”
Romy tried in earnest for a strike, making one and two spares over the course of three games, then she played video games outside the bar until first Mr. Hague came out, stuffing his wallet into his back pocket and walking fast. Then Paula came, holding herself very straight but not walking in a straight line.
“We’re going,” she said. “He’s waiting for us in the car.”

On the way home, with no stopping for ice cream, Mr. Hague took back roads to avoid the police on patrol. The sons of bitches, he called them. He kept checking the rearview mirror.
“They’ve got it out for me,” he said.
Paula leaned her head out the open window for air. She stayed that way all the way home and didn’t say anything until, just as he was slowing up to turn into his driveway, Mr. Hague ran over a skunk with the left front tire of his Fairlane.
“Oh!” Paula said. “What!”
Through the back window Romy could see the mess of it there on the road, the dark street momentarily lit up by the brake lights as Mr. Hague swung into his driveway.
“Should of looked before crossing,” he said. “Shoulda woulda coulda.” And he slammed the gear shift into park even before he’d come to a full stop.
“Jesus,” Paula said, getting out of the car. “That stink!”
“Son of a bitch,” Mr. Hague said, and he went into his house, keys rattling and the screen door falling shut behind him.
“Don’t step on the skunk,” Romy said when they got to the road. Across the street the lights in their house were all lit, as were the ones by the front, back, and side doors. The phone inside was ringing, and then it stopped.
“Oh God,” Paula said, and she covered her mouth and nose with her hands.
The stink there in the road was like oil in the air, thick like that. It would spread and linger for days, until its stain became a fragrance, just barely there.
“Hurry!” Paula said, and then she lurched to the edge of their yard and threw up into the bird-berry bushes, with their candy-red fruit that only birds can eat, smaller than green peas and with softer, wetter flesh.
“Don’t worry!” Paula said when she could. “I’m all right!” Then she made gathering motions with her mouth and spit and spit and spit. “It was just the skunk smell made me throw up! It’s okay! I’m all right!”
Like the time she bled through her skirt onto the kitchen chair, a dark-red blotch on the seat of the yellow bentwood after she got up and ran to the downstairs bathroom saying, “Don’t worry! It’s okay! I’m all right!” And there was the sound of her feet going across the heating grate in the hallway floor, a hollow, metal sound. That was on a Wednesday, because the swordfish man had come with steaks from a fresh catch, and the smell of it filled the downstairs rooms of the house.