Backseat Saints

CHAPTER


3
I TRIED TO CHOOSE HIM, and I failed. What did that leave? That was all I could think as I tore through the woods, sprinting back to Mrs. Fancy’s Honda. The next thing I knew, I was zooming east down Highway 40 toward home, praying harder than I had ever prayed in my whole life. I called every saint it seemed might do a lick of good. I called them out loud, demanding intervention with the kind of flailing desperation that can rise when even hope has left.
Francis, patron of cars and drivers, answered first. He was in the car with me. I could hear him breathing easy in the seat behind me. Then Michael took the seat beside Francis. He’d come to close the eyes of his policemen, making their radar guns heavy in their hands, sending them for coffee at any Dunkin’ Donuts that took them off my path.
I should have been surprised. Hell, I should have been wetting myself. I’d been calling my saints my whole life, but I hadn’t had one show before. I must have wept out Mary’s name for comfort, because she was in the back as well, even though she had to squash into the narrow middle seat with her patient feet on the hump.
“I’m sorry,” I told her, but if saints were answering, then the place by me was only for Saint Roch, patron of both dogs and pestilence. I needed him for Gretel and for Rose Mae Lolley, in that order. As I thought his name, before I could call, he was already obliging me. He appeared beside me with his ankles crossed, one gentle arm’s length away.
I was driving fast enough to make the blowsy air outside sound like a great wind. I was sweating hard. I could feel it clotting in my hair, which was once again tucked up inside my baseball cap. I reached up to pull the cap off, but my hand U-turned on the way up, going to the dash to flip on the AC instead.
That was when the first shiver hit me: My body understood the danger long before my mind did. My hand had been right not to remove the hat. I needed it to shade my face and hide my hair.
I was driving down the very road Thom would be taking. My heart bounded up from my chest, lodging in my throat. Each beat banged against my gag reflex, choking me. I could pass him at any second. Het up as he must be right now, if he saw me tearing down the highway in a borrowed car, he’d run it off the road and yank me out of the wreckage, demanding answers. Then he’d find Pawpy’s gun in the Target bag, and he’d know in two heartbeats where I’d spent my morning. I hadn’t looked down into the gun’s black eye since I was little and my daddy and I stared down into it together. You must never, never point that hole at anything, at anything, ever, unless you want to see it utterly destroyed. If Thom caught me now, I had no doubt I would be looking it in the eye again.
My foot went weightless on the gas pedal, and the car slowed. Then I stomped down again. What if I had passed him already? I could have easily slipped by in Mrs. Fancy’s plain car while he was checking on Gretel, who I had to believe was absolutely still alive. Saint Roch nodded in comforting agreement.
Thom could already be behind me, or he might be two cars ahead. There was no way to know. I twisted my head this way and that, trying to see all around me, searching for his Bronco. The road got away from me, and I listed so far right that I ran up onto the bumpy shoulder. I wrestled the wheel and got mostly back in my lane. I saw the next exit, mercifully close. In two minutes, I was safe off the highway, panting as I pulled into a gas station.
I drove around to the back side of the building, letting the Honda idle by the restrooms while I tried to swallow my heart back down and breathe. Every piece of me hollered to keep moving, to run, to go far and fast. But where?
I knew three things: That I had to get home. That Thom was somewhere on the road between me and my house. That I must not be seen as I made my way. These were facts, true and unchangeable, and they bounced off each other in hopeless, tangled equations. I couldn’t go home, and I couldn’t be still. Maybe I should start driving and hope that the Honda and my saints would know a safe path. If Mary had her way, we’d head east, very quickly, putting state after state between us and Thom Grandee until we came home to Alabama, to hill country, with its thousand places to hide. This flat state gave me nothing.
I started praying again, calling Rita of Cascia now. She watched over shitty marriages and all things impossible. She appeared crunched up on Michael’s lap, the low roof making her bend her head to a miserable angle. I still had no idea where to go, but a picture of our arrival flashed into my head. They would pile out of the tiny Civic after me, wispy saint after wispy saint, like the Honda was a mystical clown car made up special for Catholics.
I got the giggles then. My own laugh scared me, it was so high-pitched and hysterical, and I tried to make it stop. The laugh turned into hiccuping, and the lady figure on the closest bathroom door got all bendy and rubbery. My vision went gray around the edges, and it was all I could do to keep my foot pressed down onto the brake so I didn’t rev slowly forward and have a five-mile-an-hour collision with the back of a Shell station. I thought, It’s bad to faint while the car is on.
I saw my bottle of Coke resting in the driver’s-side cup holder. I focused on it, and the rest of the landscape became a fuzzy backdrop that looked like it was being filmed through cheesecloth. I bought these small bottles instead of cans and allowed myself one a day; Thom, an ex-jock, liked my body tight beneath its curves. I’d grabbed it this morning on my way out the door, thinking about how the cap would pop off with a hiss of gas I would feel more than hear. I’d planned to have it when I had finished up my morning’s awful business, a working-class girl’s champagne. Now here it sat like a party favor left over from my real life. I picked it up. It still felt cool.
I held the bottle first to one eye, then the other, trying to clear my vision. More than that. It was the word version of that same impulse that had turned my hand when I went to take the hat off, but now it had a voice. I recognized Rose Mae, working to save my ass while Ro Grandee, professional nice girl and dedicated victim, hunched and writhed in a lathery panic. Rose knew to press the cool bottle to my eyes to take the swelling down and ease the red. When next I saw Thom Grandee, I could not look like I’d been crying.
As far as Thom knew, I was home right now, chirping a happy tune while I bleached his underpants back to white and waltzed the vacuum back and forth across the den. When I saw him, I couldn’t even ask how Gretel was, or even if she was alive, which she absolutely had to be and was. Roch nodded his agreement. I had to be like regular until Thom told me what had happened. I’d need to listen to him say all the things I had done to him in the woods as if the story was new and strange to me. I felt my eyes widening, practicing surprise.
“Oh, my God, Thom, are you okay? Is Gretel okay?” I said. It sounded fake. I tried letting my mouth drop open. “Are you kidding me? They shot at you?” That sounded worse. “I am completely f*cked,” I said, and that, at least, rang absolutely true.
I pressed the bottle against my other eye. It felt good, that cool smoothness holding my eyelid closed. My saints rustled around me, impatient for action but low on actual suggestions. Why should they help me, anyway? What kind of a low-rent Catholic shoots at her husband because of mystical tarot cards?
Something about that pinged around in my head like a false note. Not tarot cards. One card. The last card.
But the gypsy had turned three. Past, present, future. A loss, a marriage made of swords, a choice. I’d been running for days on the steam of the third card alone. I hadn’t thought about the rest of them. When a twenty-years missing mother pops up at a routine airport drop-off, a person can miss a few tricks. If the mother then drops a bomb like “Kill your husband,” the rest of the conversation tends to get shit-canned in the fallout. But we hadn’t started with change or death. We hadn’t even started with my marriage. We’d started with a loss. The gypsy acted like she was the thing I’d lost, but the card hadn’t been the four of mothers.
It was a tower on fire, and it could mean anything. I’d said it was Jim Beverly mostly to hurt her, but she’d insisted she was the thing I’d lost with all the things she didn’t say. She’d tucked messages all sneaky under her words. Under every word. Even her pauses seemed, in my memory, to be dripping secret meanings. I could see her in my mind’s eye, giving her lip a sly tap with that silver-stained finger.
Not fairy dust. Paint, I thought, and at once I understood where I had to go. My hands were still shaking, but my vision was clear. I put the Honda in reverse and pulled out, heading back to the highway.
I got back on 40, going west this time. I drove one-eyed, with only one hand on the wheel. The other hand still held my Coke bottle to my face, letting the coolness do its good work. Amarillo grew smaller again in my rearview mirror. If I’d been Lot’s wife, I’d have been salt nine times over by now; I made myself quit stealing peeps at it.
I had to look sharp and purely forward and check oncoming traffic for Thom’s Bronco. Nothing passed me going the other way except a jewel bright VW Beetle. Back in Kingsville, when Thom and I were first dating, I’d have said, “Punch buggy blue!” and knuckled him in the shoulder. We’d graduated to harder hitting games since those days.
When 40 ran into the remains of the old Route 66, I knew I was close. I scanned the horizon, slowing. Over the years, Thom and I had driven past Cadillac Ranch a few times on the way to other places, but its graffiti greetings were for teenagers and tourists. We had never stopped.
The land was so flat, I saw the silhouette of the cars jutting up against the horizon from a long way off. Sunlight bounced off the metal. They were in the middle of a wheat field, ten Cadillacs buried butt-up in the soil, rusting out slowly in the dry air and covered in graffiti. I pulled off the road and eased down the shoulder until I came up even with them.
I turned off the engine, and the only sounds left were the outside wind and my own heart pounding. It hammered so strong that I could feel my pulse in my hands and in my ears. It banged at my ribs from the inside. I pictured the backside of those flat bones shivering into a lacy network of cracks that matched exactly the healed ones Thom had put on the other side. My heart was the only part of me that felt like moving. My eyelids felt cold and heavy, and my worthless legs were made of slag.
“What’s wrong with me?” I asked Saint Roch. He only shrugged. It was Rose Mae who knew the answer. You’re in shock, you moron. Eat some sugar.
I popped the cap off the Coke with the opener on my key chain and drank half of it off. I usually carried a granola bar, but I’d left my purse at home. It hadn’t seemed right to bring my driver’s license and a lip gloss along to shoot my husband. All I had was Pawpy’s gun, both pieces stuffed back inside the Target bag, and the gypsy’s Stephen King book, sitting on the passenger seat.
Then I thought to look in Mrs. Fancy’s glove box. She had three snack-size boxes of Sun-Maid raisins tucked away in there. I dumped one box out in my hand and started eating them, picking them up one by one with unsteady, pinching fingers, like a toddler. They had no taste, but I swallowed them dutifully, taking them like pills. When they were all gone, I got out of the car. The wind grabbed at me, stronger than it sounded from inside. There was nothing in these flat fields to slow it.
I pulled down the brim of my cap so the wind couldn’t take it. I walked across the field, my saints trailing behind me in a line. The only footfalls I heard were mine, but the heavy wind was saint’s breath on my neck, strong enough to move ships, yet sweet like a cow’s, warm and grassy.
There were no tourists, no one at all around right now. Just me and the cars. I stepped in between two of them to get out of the wind. The closest car looked ready to crumple in on itself. The looping net of spray-painted words over words over words might have been the only thing holding the back doors on. The graffiti overlapped, letters and pictures and colors canceling each other out, layered a hundred deep. I found I still had the Coke in my hand, and I finished it off, staring at the closest car over the tilted bottle.
The gypsy had told me to come here. She’d been insistent. She hadn’t wanted me to wait even an hour, and now I understood why she’d been so demanding. I knew what I would see. Somewhere on these cars, she’d left a message for me. Maybe she wasn’t sure if she even wanted me to see it, so she had hinted it was here and then left it up to fate. She’d seemed like she was big on leaving things to fate.
I could imagine her with a spray can, the wind in the wheat field blowing her scarves and layered skirts around as she covered over older words with silver, the paint staining her finger, making one car’s side into a blank, clear page so she could write to me. It was the safest way to tell me how to find her.
You are welcome, she had said, right at the end. Not like I had thanked her, which I most certainly had not. She’d said it like an invitation, but an empty one, to nowhere in particular. I’d been focused on stealing her book, looking for the information she’d already left here for me. It seemed so obvious now, and now was when I most needed it.
Thom was out there, so angry that he had swollen up to be miles wide, filling up all the space between me and home. The sun was rising up and making full, bright morning, and every minute that passed made it more likely he would catch me out.
I wasn’t sure exactly what-all she would have written. An apology? She owed me a thousand of those. I wanted her note to say that I was a red hole dug out of the guts of her, a seeping wound that hadn’t healed a lick in the twenty-odd years since she had left me. More likely it would be more crystal-fueled dumb-assery, telling me which stars were sorry. She’d left a map or an address, that I was sure of. You are welcome, she’d said. It was an offer. There would be a place for me to come, to hide, if I failed and had to cut and run the same way she had done.
If I was like her.
I went to the end of the row and began searching the cars, working my way down, looking only for newer messages that had silver in them. I found quite a few on the first car. Neal + Wanda = 4ever. Tre is a manslut. Cowabunga! Metallic paint was popular.
The second car said that gay men were for peace, and they’d drawn silver hearts and stars and peace symbols all around the words to prove it. There was a tic-tac-toe game that the cat had won. My saints trailed me, mournful, offering no guidance as I moved to the next car. I found more silver paint, spelling out Karen has June Fever and Uncle Kulty was here!
On the fourth car down, on the side that faced away from the road, I saw the rosebud. It was the wrong colors: red with a long green stem and poinks of brown paint for thorns. But a rose is a rose, and my heart stuttered at the sight of it. I quickly scanned the words around it, regardless of color. To the right, someone had written, Sex, Drugs, Rock-n-Roll, Anna! in thick blue paint, and on the other side, there was only I am the Bringer of Blood in dark red. I looked down the row and saw the next car sported a red-and-green tulip drawn by the same sure hand. I walked down a few steps, and sure enough, the next car’s side had a red daisy. The rose was not for me. It was only some LSD-infested flower child in a belled ankle bracelet, getting all literal.
I went back to the fourth car. The only silver here was under the rose, and it said, The fun’s at RODEO! That had to be the gay men for peace again; Rodeo! was Amarillo’s most notorious drag bar. I saw some glints of older silver, but the newer messages were all in neons and primary colors.
I moved on to the next car, then the next, working my way down the row. I found a silver proposal, Marry me, Lia! and pictures of musical notes, boobs, and a pair of running horses that looked like cave drawings. Nothing for me.
I came to the last car, but it was entirely free of fresh silver paint. I searched it even more carefully. There was nothing.
I hit the final car’s back fin with the flat of my hand, as hard as I could. My palm stung. I pressed my hand against the hot metal, panting hard. It was here. It had to be. I must have missed it.
Or I was too late. Three days had passed since I’d seen her at the airport. She’d insisted that I come out here at once; she knew her message would be covered over sooner or later.
I walked down the row and started again at the first car, hunting more carefully this time, looking for my color under the newer words. On the third car, a glittery white paint caught my eye, fooling me, but it wasn’t silver.
The next car had the picture of the rose. It was drawn straight up and down, ignoring the tilt of the slanted car. The green stem ended where the car met the ground, and it grew straight up, so that some of the petals touched the undercarriage.
All three of the flower drawings looked weathered, as if the paint had been there awhile. The gypsy would have seen this rose, then, and she must have guessed it would catch my eye. The words Sex, Drugs, Rock-n-roll, Anna! looked fresh, written thick and dark, as if Anna had gone over each letter twice. I leaned in closer. Under those words, I could see that something had been written in metallic silver paint. The gypsy may have used the rose as a marker for me, but some girl named Anna had taken a can of blue paint, her name, and her unhealthy priorities and wiped the message out.
I went backwards, moving right to left away from the rose until I found the place where the silver paint began, under the e in Sex. The writing was small, and two lines of text were buried under Anna’s message. I could make out a capital letter I, then a d, and what I thought might be the top and the dot of a lowercase i that was framed by the capital D in Drugs. I could see the top half of the letter after that. It was a vertical line, so it could be a lot of things. Another d, maybe, or b, k, h, or l. Maybe even a t with a low crossbar; spray paint didn’t lend itself to good handwriting. Anna had written her important philosophy in thick, broad strokes, covering the gypsy’s smaller words at random, but I found an o, a v, another possible o, and an obvious u with a low, curved line after, like a comma.
The second line had more visible pieces. It started with an ay, and I could make out three letter bursts of longer words, Sai and Cec. It ended with a lowercase a and a smeared exclamation point.
I stepped back from the car, into the full force of the wind, trying to gauge the spacing of the letters. I put my free hand up to hold my hat on.
I di ov u, butting up to the picture of the rose.
Under that, -ay t Sai Cec a!
“I’d like to buy a vowel,” I said, squinting at it, hating Anna and drugs and rock-n-roll and sex so hard in that blank second. She couldn’t have painted over the tic-tac-toe game? I couldn’t make the letters say Berkeley. Perhaps my mother was in a suburb or a smaller town nearby. Saint something? Santa Cruz didn’t fit, and I didn’t know California well enough to make a better guess. I shifted from one foot to the other, trying to remember the names of cities in California. I stared and stared, and then, almost involuntarily, I understood the first line of the gypsy’s message:
I did love you. And then a comma and my name in picture form. I was already shaking my head in flat negation when the rest of the missing letters filled themselves in for me, and now I could see the whole thing.
I did love you, Rose. Pray to Saint Cecilia!
I shook my head. That couldn’t be it. Pray to Saint Cecilia? If she was going to tell me to pray, why not to Monica, a beaten wife herself, or a hard-ass like Saint Paul? Saint Paul and the gypsy both knew all about abandoning a life in midstride. Cecilia was the patron saint of music, and there was no way praying to that pious warbler could ever make me safe.
I leaned in close to check the space below Anna’s message for more silver paint. There wasn’t any, so I searched the car’s whole side, expecting to see more peeking out from under something fresh. There was none to be found. I kept going, on to the next car and the next. I dropped to my knees to check each car’s belly, crawled to read the inside of the ones with no doors.
There was nothing else for me.
I walked back to the car with the rose on it and stared through Anna’s message at the silver words. I tried to make the few letters I had picked out say something else, but I couldn’t. Once the message filled in—I did love you, Rose. Pray to Saint Cecilia!—I couldn’t unsee it.
My body turned itself sideways, and my hands came up into the good batter’s stance I’d learned in Little League T-ball. I’d played from the time I was five until I was eight. After that, no one was around to take me to practice, but my body still remembered how to choke up. I gripped the narrow neck of my Coke bottle as if it were a miniature slugger. I swung it as hard as I could at the car. The bottle hit the spray-painted rose where the petals met the edge of the car’s underside. The blow shivered the thick glass so hard that it cracked into five or six pieces. I felt those shivers move all the way up through me to become a buzz in my teeth as I watched the shards fall to the ground. I was left holding the neck with a single, jagged slice of glass jutting out from it.
It looked like a weapon. Something a person would have in prison, wicked and curved and slim. I dropped it, fast, and it jangled when it hit the other shards. I stared down at the green glass, glinting in the soil.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said, and my voice dripped acid. “I did love you, Coke bottle.”
She’d made me come out here. She told me I had to kill Thom Grandee if I wanted to live. I’d put bullets in my dog because of her. Saint Roch tried to speak, and I said, “Shut the hell up,” to him. He didn’t know how Gretel was. None of them did, this chain of saints bobbing in my wake, and these saints all came from her, too, didn’t they? She was the one who had always called them. They’d answered her in ways they’d never answered me before today.
The wind that was their breath had smelled so sweet to me, like summer coming. A long time ago, on a day like this, she had knelt with her arm around Rose Mae’s shoulders. Rose wore poppy-colored running shorts and pigtails. It was kindergarten field day. They watched the other girls line up, all taller than Rose, with longer strides.
She was praying into Rose Mae’s ear, calling Saint Sebastian, patron to all athletes. The exact words were lost, but I remembered the low burring of her voice, calling him and calling him, until Rose could see him. He stood on her other side, looking down, shot through with a thousand arrows that bristled out of his body like bloody quills. His eyes were white hot and fervent. One arrow had pierced his cheek and gone out the other side, and when he grinned, Rose Mae saw the post going across his mouth like a horse’s bit, and his teeth were rimmed in blood.
All the girls were in a line. Rose squirmed away and trotted fast from Sebastian to join them.
Instead of a starter pistol, there was Mrs. Peirson, the gym teacher, counting down. Three, two, one, go! Rose took off. There was no way she could win. She was the shortest girl in the whole class. But Sebastian came fast up behind her. From the corner of her eye, she could see his shafts bounce as he ran. He bristled and dripped.
Adrenaline washed into Rose Mae’s blood, a push like a big red wave. She put her head down and tore forward. She could see him keeping leering pace as she ran her guts out and kept running, past the hundred-yard mark, past the booth where they sold Cokes and Popsicles, though she could hear she was being called. “Stop, Rose Mae. Stop! Stop, you silly.” The crowd around the broad jumpers rose up in her path to block her.
Rose felt hands on her, lifting her, swinging her body high, and she almost screamed. It was only her mother, who had run on quick little feet to catch up. Sebastian was gone, but he had indeed wrought a miracle. Rose Mae placed second.
My mother had called saints when she lost her keys, when we were late, when we were hungry or sad or tired or jubilant. These saints that I had called today were hers. Cadillac Ranch was hers. Shooting at my husband, the bullets in my dog, these were all hers. I was doing what she wanted, obedient and dumb as that five-year-old who got a red ribbon because her mother called a saint stuck through with a thousand arrows and scarier than Satan.
Behind me, the trail of saints popped one by one, like soap bubbles, misting the air and then becoming nothing. I pulled off the baseball cap. I was too hot to stand it any longer, and Cadillac damn Ranch was the one place in Texas I felt certain I would not run into my husband. The wind caught my sweaty hair and slung it around, snarling it. I let go of the cap, and the wind took it and tumbled it away across the field. My hair whipped into my face, and I could smell the sulfur of gunshots in it. I lifted my hands to my nose and breathed in more sulfur and fruit sugar clinging to my palms.
For the first time since I’d gotten up and cooked Thom’s butter-logged breakfast, I felt like I was living wholly in my body. I gathered my hair up and held it in a wad at the base of my neck with one hand, glaring at the gypsy’s message. I was surprised the layers of paint didn’t blister and bubble and flake off and disappear under my angry gaze. Those words should be burned away. They were insulting on so many levels. Not the lowest of which was, she had written, I did love you, in the past tense.
“Smug,” I said, and turned my back on the Caddies. I was done looking at them. I walked toward Mrs. Fancy’s car, my feet smashing down hard into the soil, every step an angry stab at the earth itself.
She’d said Thom Grandee would kill me if I didn’t get him first. I had failed, and yet the earth still turned and Thom and I were both still breathing, because the reading wasn’t about me. It was all her.
I had reached the road. I stamped at the asphalt to get the soil off my shoes and because the stamping felt good.
The first card was loss. That was hers. She had lost me. Her marriage had been the thing that was made of swords, and no one knew that better than the girl who had spent her first eight years growing up inside of it. My mother was the hanged man, the one who’d had to choose, and she had chosen herself.
There was a phrase for what her child had been to her. I knew it from the black-and-white war movies Thom and I rented to watch on the weekends. An acceptable casualty; that was what they called those poor fellows that the generals decided they could spare ahead of time. I was the thing she left in her place when she saved herself, and I was still sitting in it, in a place so like hers, it was easy for both of us to mistake who owned those cards.
I got in Mrs. Fancy’s Honda and slammed the door so hard behind me that the car’s frame shuddered. The most terrible part was, now that I had seen through all her layered gypsy scarves and figured her out, she wasn’t here for me to tell her. I couldn’t shove her nose down into the truth. All the Stephen King book had given me was a city and a state, and unless I wanted to hire a plane to sky-write a message over Berkeley, I couldn’t tell her a damn thing.
What was left? What could I do?
I could get home. I felt my mouth drop open in a perfect O and my eyes widened. “They shot at you?” I said. Better. “They shot at you?” I could act surprised. I could go see if my dog was going to live. If only Gretel was alive, then I could sleep bug cozy next to my husband tonight in our soft bed.
In the black-and-white movie Thom and I had watched not two weeks ago, they’d sent some French guy to have his head lopped off. He’d lifted his pointy nose and walked to the guillotine, calm and noble, saying, “The blood of kings flows in my veins.”
Well, screw that. The blood of a*sholes flowed through Rose Mae Lolley’s. My mother had just proven that. She was not going to rescue me. She could take her empty You are welcome offer of a haven and stuff it directly up her ass. I’d sooner go to hell than go to California now. I didn’t need her, anyway. I’d forgotten, in the wake of seeing her, that I could damn well handle Thom Grandee. A woman who couldn’t would have been dead nine times over by now. I set off for home.
My foot, heavy in its anger, had shoved the gas pedal down. I was going a good twenty miles over the speed limit. I made myself slow. The last thing I needed was to be pulled over now, with an unregistered gun in the car and no ID. And I was only speeding because I was angry with that gypsy. Surely Thom was off the road by now. He must be at the vet, please God, saving Gretel. Or he might be at the police station.
Even now, this speeding, it was about the gypsy, too. I should have been home by now, unloading the dishwasher and practicing my surprised face. But instead I’d wasted an hour creeping around a wheat field looking for an empty love note she’d left with no way for me to write her back.
“I’m going back there,” I told the blessedly empty car. “I’ll live through this and soothe Thom down, and then I’m going to take a rotisserie chicken and fruit salad and some paint and Gretel and Mrs. Fancy, and go out to Cadillac Ranch.” I would cover Sex, Drugs, Rock-n-Roll, Anna! and the silver remains of the gypsy’s message with graffiti of my own.
I would be sure to bring red, so I could freshen up the hippie chick’s flowers. Beside the rose, I would write the word Jim, with a tiny heart for the i’s dot. Then a larger heart after his name, point up and humps down, so it looked like a pretty girl’s bottom. Jim upside down hearts Rose. Those words and pictures had been on the cover of every one of Rose Mae’s high school notebooks. It would feel good to write them again.
Then when the gypsy returned, she’d see I’d left no answer. She wasn’t my loss. There would be nothing for her, and my doodle would stick in her throat, pointy as a fish bone.
My loss was Jim Beverly. I’d thrown that fact at her at the airport like it was monkey poop, something to offend her as she’d gawked at my life like a tourist. Now it seemed like it was true. Rose Mae’d been soldered to Jim Beverly’s right hip bone from third grade on, through most of high school, for more years than Rose had had a mother.
In grade school, after the boys were divvied up for kickball, Jim had picked her first from all the girls, every time. Rose Mae got free lunch in middle school, and Jim’s mother packed him one from home. He’d always shared his fresh fruit and eaten half her chalky brownie. In high school, she’d written his reports for civics, and he’d done her dissections. They’d traded virginities in tenth grade. He was the boy she first saw naked, too, though that was years earlier, when they were only nine. Rose had made him show first.
They’d met in the woods behind the elementary school. He had turned his back, pulling down his shorts and underwear very quickly. His T-shirt hung down so only the lower half of his bottom showed. She saw two beige squares with a crease between them, flat and small, like the crimped edge of the Post toaster pastry she’d eaten for breakfast.
“Now you,” he said.
Rose turned her back. She was so spindly that she barely had a butt at all, more like a little slice. She reached up under her dress, careful not to raise the hem, and pushed her cotton underpants down. Then she quickly flipped the skirt up and back down, yanking up her panties a scant second after. She turned around to face him. It was summer, and the Alabama woods were so lush that even the air seemed green as the sunlight filtered through all those trees.
“Want to do fronts?” Jim asked.
Rose shrugged and they stood there for half a minute, maybe longer. She said, “You first.”
“I did butts first.”
She waved that away. “Everyone has butts. You first.”
He shrugged and pulled his shorts down again, this time using his other hand to raise his T-shirt, just a little. His thighs were pressed tight together, from nerves, she thought, and it pushed his testicles forward into a wad, so that the whole thing looked like an upside-down pansy. His pale, smooth penis was the rounded bud tuft at the center.
“It’s nice,” Rose said, surprised.
“Now you,” he said, yanking up his shorts.
Rose scuffed one foot at the dirt, not looking at him.
“Now you,” he said again, more insistent because she had one over on him; it wasn’t equal anymore.
“Rose Mae!” he said, but it seemed to Rose there was no way to make it equal. She was only a little pad of fat there where he would see. All her interesting pieces were tucked under.
“I want to be fair,” she said, eyebrows coming together. He nodded, uncertain.
She left her panties on and began lifting her dress. She crumpled the hem of it in her fists as she went, pulling it high so that he could see her belly and her skinny rib cage. Her trunk was a mess of dark, welted flesh that began at the panty line and went up, swelling her flat chest where her breasts would one day be. The bruises were all fresh. Her mother had been gone almost a year now, and her daddy had only just started.
Jim’s eyes widened. She thought they got darker, too, but it was only his pupils expanding. The black ate up the blue to a little rim.
“Can I touch?”
Rose shrugged. He stepped forward and reached out one dirty brown boy’s hand to cover her belly, tracing the mottled black and purple in a soft pet that ended at her nipple. Then he pulled back his hand as if her skin was hot.
“We’re even,” Rose said, and let her dress go, the hem falling back down around her knees. He didn’t bother to nod or say yes. It was obvious that they were.
Instead he said, “I won’t tell,” and Rose nodded, solemn.
We neither of us told, not ever.
“He was the loss,” I told the gypsy. I hated her for not being present to hear.
I was exiting 40 now, in Amarillo proper, three minutes from home. I should have kept that baseball cap. I was too recognizable with my hair down. My cheeks felt flushed and I had a familiar coiled feeling winding itself up inside my belly. I hadn’t noticed it happening under the anger, but I could trace it back. It had started when I thought of Jim Beverly and his brown, square bottom, how it looked like toaster pastry tabs.
That ass never changed as he got older. It hardly got bigger, and as he grew up, it stayed his narrowest point. By high school, his short, muscular thighs had been wider. Above that tight ass, his spine had dipped into a smooth slope of ribs and ropy muscle that led up to his broad shoulders. The thing in my belly coiled tighter.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” I said aloud. I’d spent the morning shooting at my husband, and now my body was readying for sex. After a moment, I nodded. My body was wise. It knew how to handle Thom Grandee.
I was turning onto my own street now, heading for our squatty ranch house in the middle of the block. I was almost to Mrs. Fancy’s when I saw Thom’s familiar blue Bronco with its wide white stripe was parked in the middle of our driveway. Worse, there was a Chevy truck pulled in behind, huge and black and gleaming like a custom job for the devil himself, if the devil bought domestic. It belonged to Thom’s parents.
The Grandee clan was gathering, and Thom had beaten me home.