Backseat Saints

CHAPTER


13
IRAN ON A GREEN FIELD, and the sun was so hot that I felt flesh melting off of me like wax. Saint Sebastian ran beside me, bleeding from a hundred arrow holes, the shafts tearing his skin as he ran. “Faster, please,” he said.
I looked over my shoulder. Thom was coming, bounding along at a quick and steady pace that ate up the ground I’d put between us. His face looked both cheerful and implacable, mouth smiling, but he had the eyes of a dead thing.
“Forget him,” Sebastian said, the quills in his arm bobbing as he pointed behind Thom. “Run. We’re going to win.”
I looked back. Behind Thom, I saw my kindergarten class, chasing me in their field day T-shirts. My mother cheered me on from behind them. She looked young and fresh, cool as a cucumber, but I blazed so hot that steam came off my skin.
“Those are little girls,” I said to Sebastian, angry he was worried about a field day race when Thom was coming. I ran on in a panicked scramble. Thom followed us, loping toward me on the balls of his toes, almost jaunty. He was the only thing cooler than my mother in the whole hellish landscape. He wasn’t even winded, and his arms ended in axes.
I ran and ran, until I was so tired that my run was half stagger. Thom kept coming. He would always be coming.
“He’s not after you,” Sebastian said as we broke through the tape and won the race. Sebastian pulled me to the side. Thom ran right past. I looked down and saw my flat chest in a sweaty field day T-shirt. Thom did not know me. Then my mother was there, lifting me up, swinging me and whooping, and a rush of air was a cool balm on my blazing skin.
Sebastian put a kindly hand on my shoulder when she set me down. Now his arrows were more like quills, growing out of him. He looked like Mrs. Tiggywiggle from the book my mother read to me at night, only with a halo instead of a mobcap. This was how he’d looked in my head the first time my mother called him for me. I had forgotten.
We turned and walked together across my elementary school campus to the edge of the woods. Thom was there, behind a temporary classroom trailer. He stared down into a hole, oblivious to us. It was a pit trap, and when I looked down into it, I saw he’d caught me. Crouched in the bottom, Rose Mae Lolley reached up to draw a vertical slash in the dirt wall with one finger, marking time. Like any prisoner might.
“You understand?” Sebastian asked. I did.
The trap here was not for Thom. Fruiton was a trap for Rose. I had come here to trap her and leave her in it. I nodded, and Sebastian smiled kindly down at me. “Let’s go find your mother. The sack races are starting.”
“You aren’t scary,” I said to him. He’d changed after my mother left. That was when I began remembering Saint Sebastian as an open wound, grinning a bloody, broad grin and chasing me.
“What’s that, Rosie?” Daddy asked me.
“He wasn’t scary,” I said, miffed at having to repeat myself when my throat was burned so dry.
“Her fever’s broken,” another man said. “We need to keep pushing fluids.” I knew the voice. Bill. Bill Mantles from my old house across the street.
I cracked an eye, and I was in my childhood bed, lying on the saggy, sprung mattress, clammy with my sweat. Bill propped me up, half-sitting, and Daddy held a cup of tepid water to my mouth. I drank what I could, eyes closing. Bill’s fingers poked a couple of pills into my mouth, dry and hard as perfect little pebbles, but Daddy flooded my mouth with more water and they went down.
“Sleep now,” Bill said.
I tried to say I couldn’t. Thom was coming. He was coming to kill Rose Mae Lolley. I had to get up and learn to kill her first. Saint Sebastian had showed me.
Bill pushed my shoulders, easing me back onto the mattress. I sank into it, and it parted under me like the waters of a river. The river swallowed me and pulled me under and moved me, past Thom, past Texas, all the way to lemon groves and cool air touched with brine. I slept, turning on my side to face the west. I heard my mother say, You are welcome, and I was.
When I woke up, the mellow sunlight coming in the window said late afternoon. Bill was gone, and Gretel was sprawled out against my side, snoring, all three of her paws twitching after dream rabbits. Daddy dozed in my old wicker chair. He had a piece of blue-lined notebook paper resting in his slack hand, crumpled up, with one corner ripped off. His feet rested on the edge of the bed. He was wearing grayed-out athletic socks with a big hole that showed me his heel, callused and cracked as rhino hide.
I was in my old room, exactly as I remembered it, with my white quilted blanket pulled over me. The closet door was open, and I saw the clothes I’d left behind still hanging in a neat row. A matted lion doll lay on the closet floor. Growlfy, his name was. My old green-glass water cup stood on the bedside table, an amber bottle of pills beside it.
Daddy’s eyes opened as I propped myself up on my elbows.
“How long?” I asked.
“Couple days,” he said, and I nodded.
“That’s not so bad,” I said.
“You was real sick.” Daddy put his feet on the floor. I heard his old man’s knees crackle as he bent them. I was wearing a faded pink nightgown with a bow at the top. My mother’s. It had that musty, papery smell that gets into old cotton. I remembered her standing at the stove, making me eggs in this nightgown and her pretty housecoat. I sat all the way up and swung my legs out of bed. He said, “Girl child, are you crazy? Lie back down.”
“I have to get up, Daddy. I don’t have a lot of time.” He rustled his piece of paper at me. Cleared his throat. “Not now,” I said.
I stood up, and my legs were shaky and frail under me. I went down the hall toward the den, and Gretel got up and followed, tags jingling. I could hear Daddy coming behind her, an even sorrier dog, still toting his crumpled paper.
Daddy hadn’t bothered to hang the ship picture back up. The ticks and lines stood out starkly against the white wall. I climbed up onto the sofa and stared at the marks, then up at my name. My father came up to the arm of the sofa, staring at me with his saggy, basset hound eyes, clutching his paper close.
“It’s a calendar,” I said.
I counted the ticks on the second line. There were 365. I’d known there would be before I started. Each line was a year. Each tick was a finished day.
My mother had been counting off the days literally behind my father’s back. Marking time. Like any prisoner might. She hadn’t begun at the start of their marriage, though. She’d begun at the start of me. The first line counted the days after my birth until the New Year. Then there were eighteen lines, each standing for a year she’d have to serve to get me to adulthood.
I remembered how she’d sometimes stand and face this wall, staring at the ships. As a child, I’d wondered why she didn’t turn around and watch the TV on the opposite wall. Later, as a teenager, I remembered her ship staring as if it was clichéd foreshadowing, irritatingly symbolic. But now I wondered if she’d been looking at the print at all. Maybe she’d been staring through it, at all the days she’d marked off behind it, all the blank lines waiting to be filled. She’d planned to stay another ten years, looked like, but she’d let herself out early. Time off for good behavior?
I didn’t think so.
“What happened?” I said. “The day she left, Daddy, what did you do?”
He shook his head. “I came home and she was gone, same as you.”
I wheeled on him, staring down at him from the extra height standing on the sofa gave me. “Bullshit.”
“I swear, Rosie. I came home and you was sitting in the kitchen at the table waiting on your snack and had been for two hours, maybe more.”
That was how I remembered it, too. Daddy had come home expecting to see my mother making dinner, same as always.
“She didn’t plan to leave that day. Something happened.” I was sure of it.
I turned around and climbed down off the sofa. Daddy still had his crumpled paper in his hand. His big droopy eyes were fixed on me, pitiful and pleady.
“I’m not listening to that speech, Daddy,” I said in the kindest tone I’d used yet. “You want to say sorry? Say it by making me a sandwich. I’m starved.”
“I got white bread and bologna,” he said instantly, so eager that I felt a flash of something that was neither shame nor pity, but maybe kin to both. “I think there’s a yellow cheese slice left.”
“Whatever you have is fine,” I said.
He turned to go to the kitchen. Gret and I went the other way, back to the master bedroom. There I found my mother’s bedspread, covered in tea roses. It had a series of unfamiliar cigarette holes burned along the right side but was otherwise the same. Her garage sale lamp still sat on the bedside table. I bet if I opened the little drawer, I’d find her Day-Timer, circa 1977, cuddled up with a tube of ossified orange blossom lotion. The whole damn house was a shrine to the kind of family we had never been.
But here in this replica of a room, I found I could more easily remember the good days, too. Dove hunting in season with my daddy, watching him line up his shots, sharing out snack bags of Cheerios and raisins with his bird dog, Leroy. Sunday mass with my mother, who handed me the long wooden matches and let me light the votives when she prayed. Good moments, but we hadn’t spent them as a family. I remembered me with Mother, me with him. I couldn’t call up any happy memories of the three of us together.
At night, I’d lie in bed and their angry voices would come through the thin walls, followed by the thump and clatter of his hands meeting her body in hard ways. I’d hear an open-handed slap crack like a distant rifle shot, hear my mother’s body banging into the walls. I’d roll out of bed and creep under it like Gretel in a thunderstorm, waiting it out.
Even so, they must have had some good times together, separate from me. After all, he’d kept the house the way she’d made it, as if still hoping any minute my mother would come strolling in and take off her flowered shoes and put them away in the closet. She’d fall down backwards on the bed with a tired sigh and say, “What a day. I’m glad to be home.”
I opened her closet. On the top shelf, her shoes still stood in a row. Just the same, Daddy had said. When he’d lost the house he must have moved over here piece by piece, room by room, re-creating it exactly. There was only one gap in the line of seven pairs of shoes, a slot for the flowered canvas shoes where she’d kept her stash of money. Her running shoes were still there, as were her short black all-weather boots. It seemed odd that she’d left these sturdy, neutral things in favor of a thin-soled pair of multicolored Keds.
The day my mother left, she’d sent me off to school, and Daddy was working that week. She’d had all day alone in the house to choose what shoes to take, so why these? She’d probably put her stash in flowered Keds to begin with because she seldom wore them.
I’d been eight years old when she left. It hadn’t occurred to me to inventory her closet. I flipped through her things now, and it seemed to me there wasn’t much missing. Very few empty hangers were mixed in with the clothes.
I stared at that single gap in the row of shoes, as bothersome as a missing tooth. I reached up and began squeezing the toes of the other shoes, one by one. When I came to the black boots, the right one had no give. I pulled it down and jammed my hand down in there. I pulled out her money, still held in a roll with a pink ponytail band, just as I remembered.
When I popped the band off and fanned the bills open, I found it was mostly ones and fives. I did a quick count: eighty-two dollars. Not a lot. Not a stash, saved out for years while planning to leave her child like a reptile leaves a dropped egg. This was pin money, and she’d blown town in such a rush, she had not even come back by the house to pick it up.
I’d had her wrong, all these years. She’d meant to stick, for me. The tick marks, the abandoned money, these things proved it. Something had happened, and it had sent her careening across the country in the shoes she stood up in. It hadn’t happened in our house, either, or she would have taken this pittance, at least.
Forget Florida and the Keys. Lime drinks and red bikinis had no charm for me now. I wanted to understand, and the answers were in California. I thought of her saying, You are welcome. She’d better have meant it, because she was sure as hell getting me now.
Or she was getting Ivy Wheeler, whoever that was.
In my dream Thom had come after Rose, bounding cool and determined over the blazing landscape, like a nightmare version of Pepé Le Pew. I’d read him rightly the last time I saw him, at Grand Guns. That had to be the last time I saw him, ever. I would not live through our next encounter, and he wanted that so badly, he’d never tire or waver. He would never stop hunting his Rose, so I had to leave her in Fruiton.
I locked my father out of his own bedroom and pulled my mother’s nightgown off and threw it on the floor. I got in Daddy’s shower and bathed, then got dressed in one of my mother’s cotton skirts with a long-sleeved fitted tee. My mother’s wardrobe, though twenty years out of date, favored lightweight fabrics and long sleeves, just as mine had back in Texas.
I spied a blue canvas satchel bag in the bottom of her closet, behind her wicker laundry basket. I pulled it out and set it on the bed. I filled it from her closet, choosing more hippie-chick skirts and blouses and bell-bottom jeans, two pairs with bright embroidered flowers, another pair covered with fabric patches. I rummaged in my mother’s drawers and added socks and a couple of nightgowns. I drew the line at underpants. That was creepy, somehow. I’d pick up an eight-pack of cotton bikinis at Wal-Mart.
When I was packed, I grabbed the satchel and then walked fast to the bedroom door. Daddy was lurking right outside, holding a bologna sandwich on a paper towel. I took it and started wolfing at it. Daddy had his piece of notebook paper and the bottle of pills from the bedside table in his other hand. He rattled them both at me.
“Bill got these pills from his friend. He says you need to take them all the way down to the bottom,” Daddy said.
I nodded with my mouth overfull. I felt a little better with every bite. Gretel, called off the bed by the sound of chewing, came and sat at my feet, giving me and my luncheon meat equally rapt gazes. I tore her off a corner. I glanced at the label on the pill bottle. I didn’t recognize the name, but the drug ended in “-cillin,” so I pocketed it.
“Thank Bill for me,” I said with my mouth full. I pushed past Daddy and started for the door, my father’s voice following me, now with a slight whine.
“Rose? Rose Mae? Don’t you think of me at all?”
“Not really,” I said. I opened the front door and looked out at Pine Abbey. The sun was going down. The lights were on in the kitchen across the street, Bill and his Bunny presumably sitting down to dinner with Mrs. Bill.
My mother had walked out of that house one day, wearing her flowered shoes. No plan beyond the grocery store or a weekday mass. Something had happened, and she’d never come home.
“I think about you, alla time,” my daddy said.
I looked at him over my shoulder and nodded. “It’s harder on the left person.” He blinked at me, puzzled, and I added, “It’s better to be the one that leaves.” I walked out the door, heading for his carport where the VW Bug was parked. He followed me.
“I only want to apologize,” he said. “It’s step nine. Can’t you let me?” He rattled his note at me, Marley with a paper chain.
I shook my head and handed the last bit of my meal to Gret. Leaving everything of Rose behind meant ditching the Buick, but I couldn’t exactly go Greyhound with Gret along. I had a wild vision of myself in the bus station wearing black glasses, trying to pass her off as a three-legged service dog as she pulled me sideways off my feet and stood up to try to lick the ticket seller in the face through the glass of the booth.
Also, the tickets would get pricey. I’d have to go the long way across America. The quickest way to California was Highway 40, but it ran through Texas, right through Amarillo, and that was insanity. I would not place my fragile body back anywhere near Thom’s orbit. I’d have to go around, head north and then cross over through Kansas or Nebraska.
I said, “Your little rusty Bug here, does it run good?” When he nodded, I said, “Can I have it?”
He reached in his pants pocket and pulled out a jingly set of keys, tucking the apology into his armpit and working the car key off his ring.
“Rosey, if you listen to me read this, just once through, then my car is yours.” He held both things out to me, the key in one hand, his sad bit of paper back in the other.
I peeled his crumpled apology out of his hand. “I’ll take it, okay? You wrote it for me, and I have it now. You did your step.” I tucked it down into my handbag, then reached for the key. He hesitated, fingers closing on the key.
“What about Claire? I’d need it to read to Claire if she comes back.”
“She’s not coming back,” I said. “I’ll pass it on to her when I see her again.”
“Again? You seen Claire?” he asked.
“Yeah, Daddy,” I said.
“She ast about me?” he said.
There was no good answer to that, so I said, “She lives out west now, and she seems fine. She lays cards.”
“Vegas?” my father said. He must have heard “plays” for “lays.” “I sure can’t picture Claire in Vegas. You’ll give her my speech?” I nodded, and he handed me the key. “You’ll tell me when she reads it? So I can know I’m done.”
“I guess I could,” I said. “But listen, if anyone comes asking, don’t say anything about this car. Don’t even say I was here,” I said.
“Is someone going to come looking, Rose?” Daddy asked.
“I’m afraid so. You never saw me, okay?” He nodded, and I climbed in the Bug. “I have to run out and get a few things, but I’ll be back for Gretel, okay?”
“The pink slip is in the glove box,” he said. I opened the box and found it under a stack of old maps. I had a pen in my purse, and he signed the car over to me, using its own roof as a desk, then handed me back the slip.
“That Buick, Daddy, you need to get rid of it. You can drive it down the trail and leave it in the woods, or if you know someone who’ll take it under the table, you do that. Sell it for scrap. But no paperwork, you understand? That car has to disappear.”
“I know someone who’ll take it for the parts, no questions,” he said. I nodded, unsurprised.
I started the VW. It sounded like some fireworks were getting it on with a bag of asthma in the engine box, but it ran. I backed out and left him standing there, empty-handed in his driveway.
I ran by Wal-Mart for underpants and a new toothbrush. I also got a good-size bag of Purina Dog Chow and some raisins and hard pretzels.
I got back in the car, but I didn’t head to Daddy’s. I hadn’t come out for underpants. I was glad to have that off my mental to-do list, but I had really driven out to find a way to say good-bye to Rose Mae Lolley. It was time to peel her off me, same way Ro Grandee had been stripped away. Whatever she had been or loved or needed, it was time to run from it, fast, never looking back. The way my mother had walked away, in the shoes she was wearing, taking nothing from her past. Not even me.
The Catholic in me needed something more than a simple resolution. The blessing in the water was meaningless unless I stepped into the river. Wine to blood meant nothing if I didn’t drink. I needed a ritual, a solemn act to start and seal the change.
I drove first to my old elementary school, but I found the woods behind, my woods and Jim’s, had been shaved away to make room for a subdivision full of cramped, square houses in pastel colors. I pulled over to the side of the road.
The remains of my childhood were buried here. See-through young Jims and Rose Mae Lolleys must disturb the people’s sleep, running through the walls to hide and show each other private things. The mortal remains of someone’s calico cat would appear at midnight to stalk ghost mice across the cheap carpeting, chasing as best she could with her head on backwards.
The homes smelled as haunted as that neighborhood in Poltergeist, a movie Jim and I had watched on tape at his house maybe fifty times. “You moved the woods,” I whispered to the pink and aqua cracker boxes, “but you left the bodies, didn’t you?”
The Rose I was had begun in these woods with Jim, but the woods were gone. Someone’s TV room rested on top of our clearing, and the blackberry bushes had been poisoned and dug out and dragged away for burning. I put the car in drive and passed the entrance, spine ashudder. I needed a place less changed.
I drove on out to Lipsmack Hill, my hands steady on the wheel. I found the hard-to-see turnoff onto the dirt path through the woods, the way still clear enough for the Bug to pass without adding to its scratches. I stopped in the grassy clearing where, if this had been 1985, in a few hours couples would park to tangle up and get some steam on their windows. I wondered if this year’s crop of kids still came out here to get rowdy.
I opened the glove compartment and rifled through the maps. I’d seen a flashlight in there, and when I clicked the button, it surprised me by working.
I hiked the familiar path up through the trees, toward the clearing at the top of Lipsmack. I remembered the path so perfectly, I doubt I would have needed the light, even though the moon was only now on the rise. I’d been so aware of every inch, the first time I came up here with Jim Beverly. He’d been carrying that scratchy picnic blanket, both of us too shy and hopeful and nervous to talk much. My feet remembered how to walk it as my light swept the trail, searching for rocks and fallen branches.
At the top of Lipsmack was a flat patch of lush grass, and it ended in a sharp cliff that jutted out above a valley full of kudzu. I sat on the lip and clicked off my light, swinging my boots back and forth like Bunny had in my mother’s desk chair. I waited while my eyes adjusted to the rising moonlight. The kudzu waved and swayed below me in the darkness like a deep green-black sea.
My mother laid cards. Had they told her I was coming west? The three she’d turned at the airport said a lot about her life, but only because my life had been modeled in a thousand unseen ways on hers. They were my cards, too, and they’d said that either Thom or I must die.
I’d played cowboys and Indians in the bushes out near Wildcat Bluff, but I hadn’t been able to shoot him. I’d gone to Chicago, fooling myself into looking for a lost love because it made it seem like I was doing something other than staying and staying and staying until the day he killed me. Then I’d come home to Daddy and found him wrecked. What a pair we were, Daddy and me. I’d followed my chain of bad men all the way back to my very first, but it was useless. Neither of us was up to battling sugar ants for control of his dirty kitchen, much less the man I’d married.
I was tired of stalling. If the cards were right, if it was Thom or me, then let it be me. I wanted to leave Thom’s would-be killer and his victim both to rot in the kudzu. I wanted to be done with the violent, angry girl my mother had created with her leaving, and I’d long been done with Ro.
I had come up here to say good-bye, but not to Jim Beverly. Not even to Daddy. I was finished here. Rose—and her trail— had to truly dead-end. I could never come back to Fruiton, Alabama. But I wasn’t sure how to leave her, how to start fresh, to be someone else. If I peeled Thom Grandee’s would-be murderer away, what the hell lived underneath?
I’d been someone else, before my mother left. A regular girl, maybe like Bill’s Bunny. Jim Beverly and I had not been friends then. There was nothing in that girl to draw him. I didn’t remember her very well. My mother had left her, so I had left her, too, not wanting to be a thing whose own mother couldn’t love her. I didn’t know her, but my mother must remember her and could help me remember, too. If I could abandon Rose Mae Lolley here, the way I’d left Ro Grandee back in Texas, I could start fresh. And after all, I wouldn’t be the first a*shole to try to find themselves in Cali-f*cking-fornia.
I took off my wedding band, and the interlocking engagement ring diamond that went with it. My small marquise-cut stone glimmered in the faint light. I stared down at the sea of kudzu below me. It seemed like it could hold a thousand secrets. I closed my hand around the rings and reared my arm back, prepping to throw. I’d seen this done before in movies, a diamond hurled off a bridge or a ship, tossed into the woods from an overpass, or flicked out a moving car’s window. It meant a permanent break.
I couldn’t do it. I froze with my arm back, rings still fisted in my tight-closed hand. The pragmatist in me was totting up groceries and gas and even the cheapest hotels. I’d need to stop and sleep in real beds, to let my body heal. I’d been so sick. I’d need to eat good things, fresh fruit and soup, to get my strength back. I needed cash, fast and untraceable, and I could get it at any pawnshop with my ring set. I lowered my arm, even though without a sacrament, my resolution to start fresh as someone wholly new was weak. It couldn’t hold.
I paused, torn, and then, like a gift, I heard voices down at the bottom of the hill. I cocked my head sideways to listen. I recognized them. Arlene Fleet and her angry fella.
Was she here looking for me? I tried to remember what my note had said, back in Chicago. I might well have mentioned Fruiton. She had a story to tell, a story that was so ugly she’d run straight up a tree rather than remember it. Her history with Jim must be haunting her so hard. I knew what that felt like. Perhaps she’d tracked me all the way to Alabama to try to lay it to rest by telling me, by telling anyone, at last.
I stood up and jammed the rings in my pocket. I could do this for her. I could play the part of a wounded Rose still hunting for her Jim. I would listen to her story, though I already knew it. It was my story, too. The details didn’t matter. I would listen and then carry as much of it away for her as I could and dump it, for both of us. I would never think of Jim Beverly or be his Rose Mae again. I’d go get my good dog and blast out of here. I had a handwritten apology from Daddy and a long overdue library book that needed to be delivered.
The voices down the hill were getting louder; Arlene and her boyfriend were getting into it. It occurred to me that if I wanted a symbolic gesture to seal my transformation, here it was on a platter. Arlene had found her own replacement bad man, and she’d brought him right to me.
There was no more fitting final act for Rose Mae Lolley than this: I would go down the hill and kick Arlene Fleet’s piece-of-shit boyfriend as hard as I could, right in the nuts. Then she and I would run. I would listen to her, then be on my way. I felt my grin go wide and wolfy in the darkness. I started down the steep path in the moonlight, ready to begin.