Backseat Saints

CHAPTER


5
GRETEL CAME HOME. Her empty shoulder was a white cone of bandages. The missing leg seemed to puzzle her more than it distressed her. She’d try to lay her head down on her front legs, then pop back up and make thinking eyebrows at the place where it used to be. Five seconds of brain work was enough to make her too tired to keep on; she’d cock her head at an angle that looked to me like the dog version of a shrug and lie back down to sleep.
She fast mastered a three-beat lazy canter, and she got around the house and yard just fine when she chose to heave herself up off her favorite snooze rug. I tried to drown my guilt in gratitude to God for the small mercies that had been afforded me. She had lived in spite of me, and though one leg down, she was exactly her same dim and lovely self.
For the rest of that week, in celebration, I made what I called manfood, the meaty dinners that Thom liked best. Pork roast with potatoes and baked apples. Turkey pot pie. Stuffed flank steak. The meals were too heavy for me, but if ever a man needed some comfort food, it was Thom. He stomped around with two creases between his eyebrows that pointed straight up like horns.
While I’d holed up in our bathroom drying my long hair and trying not to think, Thom’s daddy must have kept on force-feeding him all kinds of crap. One piece in particular had gotten way down wedged in Thom’s belly. He was grinding and churning at it, but it wasn’t breaking down. I could see how it chafed him from the inside out, this thing his daddy had stuffed down him. I’d seen this all before.
I’m not sure if Thom understood his daddy’s last visit was the reason he was so set on picking a fight with me, but I sure as hell did. I owed Joe Grandee thank-you notes for more than one prior bone crack; Thom may have delivered them, but they were presents Joe had bought and paid for. So I cooked soothing foods that made Thom logy and sleepy, and I tried to live quiet in the corners of our rooms until he’d worked it out.
On Wednesday, Thom looked down at the meat loaf on his plate with one lip curling, as if I’d served up possum sushi. It was a beautiful meat loaf, too, made with half ground pork and lots of sage like his mother’s, only I didn’t overcook mine until it tasted like a chunk of mummy. He didn’t so much as lift his fork.
“I was hoping for that sour cream chicken you do.”
He had his wrists resting on the edge of the table, and I watched his hands flex and unflex. He looked to me like a bad storm coming. Like a bad storm almost here.
“I’ve bought everything to make it at the grocery,” I said. “I’ll make that chicken tomorrow.”
“I wanted it tonight,” he said, mulish.
I thought, And that’s the battle cry of every spoiled toddler.
I didn’t say it. I knew this game. Hell, I had helped invent it. But I wouldn’t play. I couldn’t afford to anymore. Rose Mae was biding her time; she knew that I had glimpsed the path she’d set. It would not take much to get me walking down it.
So I showed him some teeth and kept my brow smooth and my tone mild. “Why don’t you go watch the news? I can throw that chicken together in maybe thirty minutes. I’ll use the meat loaf for sandwiches. That’ll be so much nicer for you this week than deli ham and cheese.”
His brows moved inward, puzzling up together, and he looked at me like he wasn’t sure whose table he’d sat down at. I wasn’t sure, either.
“That’s ridiculous,” he said.
“I know,” I said. “But if you really need that chicken for your day to go right, then I want you to have it.”
Now he looked almost forlorn, as if I’d abandoned him.
“Thom,” I said to him, “I’m trying.” It sounded to me like a plea. I didn’t want the gypsy’s cards to be for us. They fit her life just as well as they fit mine, and I was doing my damnedest to prove it had been her draw. I couldn’t do that alone. “I’m trying so hard.”
His gaze dropped to his plate, and he took a big sniff of air into his lungs. I watched his chest expand. I’d always loved the workings of his thick, sleek body. I loved to put my ear to his chest and feel the boom-thump of his heart, then slide lower to hear the gurgle and sigh of his belly hard at work on something I had made.
When he finally spoke, his voice came out so quiet that it was like he had a secret he was whispering to the mashed potatoes. “I see that,” he said. He started eating, so I did, too. A few minutes later, chewing, he said, “This is delicious.” He sounded surprised.
I said, “Good,” in a truly pleased way. I didn’t say, “No shit, Sherlock. My meat loaf tastes great and water is wet and your name is Thom.” I blocked those words in with a bite of salad and swallowed them with a gulp of sweet tea. He watched me struggle to get it all down. I managed it, barely. We found ourselves grinning at each other across the table like children, while under it, Gretel thumped her tail against the floor; usually when I said the word good, with such sincerity, I meant her.
He said, “I’ll try, too.” I watched him, wary-eyed, and he added, “I mean it, Ro.”
I nodded, and then we picked up our glasses and drank, watching each other over the rims, like we were solemnly sealing a deal with sweet tea and cool water.
The next day, when he came home from work, he paused and stood silent in our cubicle of a foyer. I was sitting on the sofa, waiting for a timer in the kitchen, and I heard him stamping and breathing in that tiny space, but he didn’t say anything. When at last he stepped through the archway, it was as if he’d left his father and his job and the bills and his temper in the cube behind him.
On this side of the archway, we holed up, honeymoon style, eating a quiet dinner and then watching a rented movie with a lot of kissing in it. I sat wedged between Thom and Gretel on the sofa, snug and pleased. By morning, everything seemed fresh-made between us.
It occurred to me I should have hidden in the bushes and taken a couple of potshots at his fool head years ago. It was turning out to be downright good for both of us. I think he was pleased to be alive, and me, I was scared of the secret thing Rose was planning next if he couldn’t join me in playing nice.
I kept the house so clean, even Thom’s mother couldn’t have found a dusty corner with white gloves and a microscope. Thom and I ran together most mornings, going way too fast to bring Gretel, and at night we sat on the sofa, breathing in the orange oil smell of our clean house. We watched a lot of college ball, and I rooted for his teams, even when Bama was playing. If no one we liked had a game, we rented old movies or played gin rummy after dinner.
Four days a week, I cashiered at the gun store, and I didn’t let myself bitch to Thom about still making minimum wage, although Joe Grandee was making that harder and harder.
A week into our truce, a salesman didn’t show, and Joe asked me to help customers as best I could until he could get in a replacement. I’d been raised up with guns, and I sure as hell knew more about our stock than the missing fella. My best times with my daddy had been when he took me out shooting. I’d ask a thousand questions about zeroing or muzzle velocity, then lure him into musing about who made a better .45, Colt or Smith & Wesson, stretching our good hours into half a day. If Joe Grandee had ever looked past my boobs up to where I kept my brains, he’d have had me on the sales floor years ago.
I’d been working the floor maybe half an hour when an obvious fat fish came in—midlife crisis fellow with a salt-and-pepper comb-over and three-hundred-dollar pointy-toed cowboy boots. He was looking, he said, for a little home protection.
“Nothing flashy,” he said, meaning nothing expensive.
“Of course not,” I said. “Guy like you, you want something sleek and plain, with enough power for the job at hand. Not some silly cowboy gun that’s all show.”
Ten minutes later, I had his fingers curling around a gorgeous black snub-nosed revolver that cost over a thousand bucks.
“I like how that looks in your hand,” I said, and I let myself sound breathless. I leaned over the counter to get a better view, biting my bottom lip.
I sent him out the door with the revolver and ammo and a gun safe and a cleaning kit and a couple of packs of the overpriced cinnamon gum we kept by the register. He swaggered out hips first like he was toting ten pounds of extra penis, swearing to come back and take a look at our rifles before hunting season.
I didn’t realize Joe had come out from the office. He was standing in the doorway to the back, watching me run the endgame. The next day, when I came in to relieve Janine, she stayed perched up on the stool, shaking her head at me. I thought I’d misread my schedule, but Joe said, “Derek had an emergency, darlin’. Cover the floor for him until I can get a replacement?”
When I clocked out six hours later, Janine was still running the drawer and Derek’s “replacement” had yet to show. After that, it seemed like some member of Joe’s sales team needed sick leave or vacation every other shift I worked. It didn’t take a genius to figure Joe was cutting their time because I was better. Meanwhile, I got the same four bucks and change an hour I would have gotten if I’d spent the time under the Golden Arches saying, “You want some special sauce on that?”
Still, I didn’t fight the Joe Grandee party line: Grand Guns was a family business, so I was building up our own future. It was only to myself that I added, And helping Joe buy himself another big-ass Harley-Davidson. After all, that big-ass Harley would be part mine on the merciful day the Lord got tired of Joe pooing up the earth and called him home to heaven. Or wherever.
At home, I sat on Thom’s lap and nibbled his edges and tempted him to bed early. I gave him cheerleader sex, bouncy, full of gymnastics and genuine enthusiasm. In my head the words went like this: Thom, Thom, he’s our man, if he can’t do it, no one can. Rose would echo, If not, I have another plan. I cut her off right there, making damn sure I never thought a different man’s name while Thom Grandee’s hands were on my body. I pushed away all memories of other hands from days long past, and I didn’t think about old promises made on Alabama nights hot enough to be the sweetest kind of sticky.
Not when I was awake, anyway. Some nights, my sleeping self would see Rose Mae, no more than fourteen, haunting the woods behind Fruiton’s old elementary school, waiting for Jim Beverly to shimmy down the oak tree outside his bedroom window and come join her. She’d wake me up, too sleep-logged to stop myself from remembering how it went the night Rose Mae decided to see for herself what manner of pleasure her daddy found in drinking.
The moon was near full that night, lighting the way even as it set. It was so late, the tree frogs had shut up and gone to sleep. This was hours after every kid with a decent human mother had been called home and fed and tucked beneath a blanket. Rose Mae waited in the clearing that she and Jim had made their own when they were nine, watching Jim Beverly come loping through the trees to meet her.
He said, “Hey, Rose-Pop,” in a whisper, though they were far from any other ears. He kissed her mouth, then set about building them a campfire. He was an ex–Boy Scout, so he knew to clear a hollow down to the bare dirt and bank it in stones. Rose gathered twigs and sticks to feed it. When it was crackling and cheerful, they sat pressed together, side by side.
“Did you get something?” Rose asked.
Jim pulled a flat bottle out of his back pocket. Amber liquid glinted in the firelight. “Whiskey. I stole it off Lance,” he said. Lance was his oldest brother. “I hope it makes you happy because when he notices, I’m a dead man.”
He was grinning that lopsided smile that got her every time, his thin upper lip showing too much gum. She couldn’t help but grin back.
Rose Mae said, “Lance can’t fuss. If he starts to kill you even a little, you tell him you’ll rat him out for that fake ID.”
Jim cracked the seal and screwed off the cap, then sat, holding it. The fumes coming out of the lip smelled to her like someone had bottled her daddy. Jim started to bring it to his lips, then stopped. Started to lift it again. Stopped.
It was Rose Mae who began. She wrapped her hand around Jim’s on the bottle and guided it to her mouth. She test-drove her father’s method, drinking as if the liquor was shoes and toys left out on the floor and it was her tiresome job to put the mess away. She swallowed, then coughed in hard barks that sounded like a circus seal she’d seen once on TV. Air in her mouth brushed against the sour mash taste, reactivating it. She clamped her lips and breathed deep through her nose to keep the cheap whiskey from coming right back up.
Jim watched her until she’d blinked away the water in her eyes and was breathing regular again. He took a big sip and rolled it around his mouth before swallowing. He made a “bad medicine” face, but then he took another big sip and rolled that one around his mouth, too. He made that same face after each of his turns, as if the harsh taste continued to surprise him. They passed the bottle back and forth until it was empty, not talking much.
They set the empty bottle by the fire.
“This don’t do shit,” Rose said, but her voice sounded funny to her, and she started giggling.
He started laughing, too, and said, “What’s funny?”
Rose stood up and the ground tilted and swayed under her, as if their private clearing had floated out to sea without them noticing.
“It does things,” Rose said. “Stand up.”
The night became snapshots and flashes. Rose would remember it only in bursts: Jim and Rose running the narrow trails. Jim hollering and Rose shushing. They spun off each other into trees, then came back and grabbed each other and wrestled, practicing a kind of making out that was more like fighting than kissing.
Then he had her on the ground, on her back, her jeans-clad legs around him, feeling the rigid line of his cock straining toward her through the denim. She tried to turn her face from the whiskey smell on his breath, but he put his mouth on hers and sucked her air out, and his hips ground into her. She bucked, close to panic, and he rolled over to let her on top for a breath.
He flipped her again, and her back landed on a short slope. They rolled together into blackberries that clutched and hurt and broke them apart. He thrashed free, pricked and bloodied. When he grabbed her hand to pull her to her feet, she saw the face of some other Jim, a secret face the whiskey had loosed. He grinned, big teeth gleaming, and Rose understood that both of his faces belonged to her. He helped her out of the blackberries carefully, the two of them peeling away the thorny vines. He drew her close again, sweet now, and she could smell the liquor on him, and the whites of his eyes looked as hard and shiny as the skin of a boiled egg.
That was the first time he put his mouth against her ear and whispered, “We could go to your house and make your daddy stop.”
“Stop what?” she said, because the hitting wasn’t something anyone talked about, though surely people knew. Fruiton had a mall, three high schools, and too many churches to count, but it was at its heart a small town. Of course they knew, even though Rose Mae was a pro at covering for her daddy, and Daddy did his part, too. He never hit her in the face. But things like this were always known, tittle-tattled by women over back fences, whispered in the hollows between teachers and preachers: All is not right at the Lolley house. But it wasn’t a thing that got said loud and plain in front of folks that would work to stop it. It wasn’t said plain even between Rose Mae and Jim. Sometimes, making out, he’d push her clothing around until he found hurt skin, and then he’d put his fingers, reverent, on her bruises. It felt so good to have him know her in this way, but they didn’t talk about it.
“Stop what?” she said again, to make him say it out loud at last.
But he answered, “Stop everything. Stop breathing.”
She laughed, an uncertain sound.
He was still whispering, face-to-face now, so close their noses almost touched. The whiskey on his breath made her eyes water. “Drunks like him, they must smother in their sleep alla time. I could finish him for you. Do you want me to, Rose-Pop? Do you want me to make him quit?”
He looked cold and capable, laying out murder for her like wares on a blanket. All she had to do was nod. It dizzied her, made her small. She could feel how the whole great world heaved and spun and dangled itself in space. She shoved him away and managed four steps before she found herself on her knees, throwing up.
She threw up for a long time, it seemed, and then she crept sideways away from her vomit. She came to some clear ground, under a loblolly pine, far enough away so all she could smell was the tang of its dropped needles. She lay down on her belly, pressing her cheek into the cool, firm ground, and her eyes closed and that was all she knew.
A few hours later, walking home with Jim through the woods with the morning sun an overbright punishment, she didn’t know if she would get home and find her daddy dead or not. She hadn’t said yes, but she knew she hadn’t said no, either. The idea of her daddy being dead was like something from television. She could see herself in a slim black dress at his funeral. It was distant, and she didn’t truly believe in it.
On the path ahead she saw matted fur, an animal, stretched out like a sleeping thing, but too still. It was a calico cat, someone’s little pet, lying on its side with its legs stretched out long and crossed at the ankles like a sleeping lamb’s feet. Its head had been turned around backwards.
She stopped. She had this crazed moment of absolute conviction: Jim had done this. His arms were allover scratches. He had picked up the cat and turned its head around and her father was dead and she had let Jim do it and she did mind, after all.
It came back to her, how strongly Jim had meant his offer, how she had seen him wearing the face of a thing that was capable of it. All at once she didn’t want to go home. Jim was a weapon with a hair trigger, and the simple act of not saying no, of saying nothing, had been enough of a breeze to pull it. The little cat was actually and really dead, and Jim had made it so, and it was permanent and serious and awful. She did not want to go home and see what else Jim had left for her.
Then Jim said, “Poor thing. You think a fox got him?” in such sorrowing tones that the idea stopped feeling true. The Beverlys had a fat white cat named Moses that would sit in Jim’s lap and purr as he rumpled it. How could she have thought this boy could ever kill a cat?
Jim said, “Rose-Pop, don’t look.” She closed her eyes and felt him walk her past. She wanted to look back over her shoulder at it, but he put an arm around her, stopping her, and said, “Poor little thing. I’ll get you home, and I’ll come back and bury her.”
She looked down at her own hands, and they were as scratched as his arms. The blackberries, she remembered. She was better protected, was all, in long sleeves that hid the bruises her daddy had put on her. It was from the blackberries, and she knew her father would be passed out safe and whole when she got home, ready to wake up even more hung over than she was, ready to start another got-damn ugly day.
Something in the woods had gotten the little cat, had picked it up and turned its head backwards and put it back. It was sad, and that was all. Nothing to do with them.
But Rose Mae and I both knew that the story would have been different if she had only said yes. If she had had one less drink or one more, whichever would have made her head nod, even slightly. If she’d said yes, she knew where Jim’s feet would have taken him once she was passed out safe in the needles.
When they came to the fork where they split to go their own ways home, she said to him, “We’re not doing that again.”
“No,” he agreed.
“I don’t like you like that,” she said. “I won’t be with you like that.”
He said, “I don’t like me like that, either,” with such a ring of trueness in it that she reached for him, but he was already turning and walking away.
Not even a year later, after they’d taken a blanket to the top of Lipsmack Hill to become lovers for real, this offer to kill her daddy would come back. It was something he would whisper to her, his mouth warm and wet against her hurt places. He lapped them like a cat. It would not sound true. Sometimes it sounded like comfort, and other times it was young and angry, blustery even. But she never forgot seeing the Jim who had meant it, that capable thing the whiskey had let loose, and these nights, I was dreaming of that capable thing, too. I woke up smelling the green woods where I had waited for him.
Whenever the dream woke me, I would stand up and get a drink of water. I would pace the hall and plan the next night’s dinner, maybe make a shopping list, until the last lingering smells of those long-ago woods were gone from me. I had to fill my head up with right-now things.
A clean home, good gun sales, better meat loaf, best sex. These things let me stay inside each minute as it happened. I trained my thoughts away from the future, and I didn’t dwell on gypsies or cards, especially not the hanged man with his snarling wolf hat, his bound hands. “Those were for the gypsy,” I whispered when my imagination tried to make me be the girl inside that burning tower. If I had a marriage made of swords, then we were both trying our damnedest to stand shoulder to shoulder only, weapons pointed outward, watching each other’s back.
Spring waned, the blooms full-blown and readying for summer, until one day I barked my shin on an end table. It hurt like a son of a bitch. I sat down to rub it, watching my skin swell, the flesh already darkening. Pale skin bruises easy, and I knew it would be purple by tomorrow. I nursed my rising lump, and out of habit, I found myself checking all over for other parts that might need ice or attention. I couldn’t find so much as a twinge. I realized I was milk-colored and smooth all over.
We’d never gone so long before.