If only her father, Avon, could see her now, with his constant belittling, his you’re a piece of shit, father-of-the-year diatribes. How far she thinks she’s come from that backwater purgatory to this moneyed height, a place where she is wanted, where her skills, her worth are valued, where she is seen. Before too long she will learn what a fool she’s been, that Katie, born Bathsheba, is still food for a predator, that she has left the frying pan only to land in the fire. The only difference is the class of predator has risen, from mangy coyote to great white shark.
To be raised, if not poor, then hardscrabble on the American fringe is to mark time through trauma and scars. The broken finger that healed crooked because Avon taped it himself instead of taking Bathsheba to the emergency room. The dog bite on her leg that should have had stitches. Her brother Samson’s missing tooth, knocked out by a fence post. Fevers and infestations, overdoses and car wrecks. This is how she thinks about time. The year her father was knifed in prison, following directly the year her mother lost her hair and took to her bed from stress and worry. The year her great-grandmother drowned in the big flood. The year her best friend was killed on an icy road. Pets that came and went. Her one-eyed cat eviscerated on the porch. The dogs the coyotes didn’t eat, the alligators got. In rural Florida, no one lasted long.
The year her flow started, Bathsheba took an Ace bandage from her dad’s survival kit and wrapped it around her chest. She knew instinctually that if the boys at school saw her budding breasts they would whisper behind their hands and follow her home, car engines idling as they tried to lure her inside their dark backseats.
In her world you ate what you shot. They hunted deer in the fall, bobcat and otters in the winter. Wild hogs were year-round, raccoons, opossums, rabbit. By the time she was six, Bathsheba knew how to tear the head off a dove, to skin a rabbit and pull out its guts. They used every part of the animal in her house, curing the meat themselves. Out in the shed were a half dozen storm freezers daisy-chained together with extension cords. At night they made a sound like an elephant’s stomach rumbling. Bathsheba would lie in her room and listen, the plywood house shifting around her, snapping and creaking. Somewhere out there were cities where people talked about art, gleaming metropolises filled with stylish independent thinkers. She would go there one day. She would be one of those people, talking about Picasso and Margaret Atwood. She would own indoor shoes, lots of them. But now her days were filled with the acquisition of practical skills, survival drills, and subsistence farming. She longed for abstraction, for the deep human conceptual thinking that separated women from animals.
In her idle hours she experimented with colors you could find in the wild. Onionskins and sunflower petals, huckleberries and charcoal. She mixed her yellows and blues, her rusty browns, and painted pictures on old pieces of drywall she found in the junk pile out back. In autumn she liked to arrange the fallen leaves by color in the field behind her house. The trick was to not mind about the wind, to treat the wind as your partner, when it blew in and upended your designs, because isn’t that what the world does always, make a mess of the things you like just so?
The Ace bandage worked for about four months, but then she started getting hips. Her butt filled out and her breasts got heavy. When she ran, parts of her body moved with a mind of their own, pulling her off-balance. Sabotage. That’s what it felt like. Her own body was working against her, trying to get her killed. Like clockwork, the boys started circling with their carrion breath, hunting with their eyes, looking for weaknesses, openings. Middle-aged men watched her over the rims of their tallboys, shouting out the things they’d do to her, the places they’d hurt her teenage body. Acts of penetration, age-old demonstrations of ownership. Bathsheba started cutting through the woods on her way home from the store, pickup trucks with inky glass idling in the parking lot behind her. She knew from cop shows on TV that she had become that most endangered animal, a young woman of reproductive age.
At night she lay listening to the groan of the freezers. Her cell phone told her there were places where people wore sheer gowns and tuxedos without socks, where girls dyed their hair pink and wore crop top T-shirts that said #MeToo. If you wore a shirt like that where Bathsheba lived, the boys would take it as an invitation—like please sir, can I have some rape too, sir, like the kind you gave Melissa Barnes in the backseat of Billy Sanger’s car last winter, or what you did to the youngest Haskell girl when her parents were out of town for their anniversary? These weren’t thoughts as much as physical instincts, her survival brain on high alert at all hours of the day and night. If she stayed in Florida, she would be eaten alive. This was her anxiety. They would pick her bones clean and leave her with nothing but babies. At first her body would give her power. She would be the puppet master, Salome on a dais, and they would follow her with their eyes the way dogs will follow the food in your hand. But this power wouldn’t last. Five years, ten, and then she would be somebody’s mother, drinking too much gin on a Tuesday night. The animals that circled her then would be scavengers, jackals come to pick the leftover meat from her carcass.
If she stayed here she would be smoking by thirteen, drinking by fourteen, pregnant by fifteen. The practical skills she learned would be breastfeeding and changing diapers. One minute she would be the girl with her hands in the wind, driving through the Everglades at night with the radio up too loud and a bottle of tequila between her knees, and the next she would be the woman in the Walmart with the black eye buying frozen peas and carrots in bulk.