Backseat Saints

CHAPTER


9
I FOUND HIM.
It took ten long days. Every night, I played my own version of Scheherazade for Thom, 1,001 pieces of tail, taking the tension out of his broad shoulders when he came home from Grand Guns. It eased me, too, this endless, brutal sex that left us both as spent and wasted as a beating, but only an eighth as sore. He did hit me once, but only a glancing backhand. Another day, after a run-in with his daddy, he shoved me into the wall. These were squalls, though, over before they truly started.
He didn’t get angry enough to flip my mother’s final card and end me, and I didn’t get angry enough to pour Drano into his corn chowder and go stomping off, vindicated, to prison. When the sun went down, we took the day’s frustrations to our mattress and hurt each other just enough. The nights bought me the days, and every day, I stole time on Mrs. Fancy’s phone, hunting for Jim Beverly.
By sundown on the tenth day, I knew exactly where he was.
“You’re different,” Thom told me that night, in the dark. We lay side by side on our bed with four inches of cool air in between us. I could feel sweat, mine and his, drying on my skin. Gretel, with her usual impeccable timing, had hopped on the bed and flopped down between my calves two minutes after I’d come like a screaming eagle and thrown myself backwards off him. Her snores and the warmth of her had soothed me close to sleep, but when I heard how flat his voice had gone, my eyes popped open wide and my nerve endings tingled.
“It’s a haircut, Thom,” I said. “It’s a couple of new tops.”
“I mean you’re different here,” Thom said. His big hand thumped the slice of bed between us for emphasis.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said. It sounded like a lie even to me.
“Every night, Ro. That’s a lot, even for us.”
“Are you complaining?” I said, boosting myself up on my elbows, incredulous.
He made a short, hard, barking noise. It was a scoff or a laugh, hard to tell in the dark room. “No. But that thing, with your back to me…”
I lay back down and asked, “Reverse Cowgirl?”
“Yeah, that,” he said at the same time I said, “Giddy-up,” trying for levity.
He went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “You never used to like that. And you do that thing with your teeth now, and that scissoring thing. That’s all new.”
I could see where he was going. When a wife brings home new bedroom tricks, a certain kind of husband starts to wonder where she learned them. I turned on my side and looked at him. My eyes had adjusted, soaking in the moonlight coming through the sheers. I could see his profile etched against the windows, but it was too dark for me to get a good read of his expression. I didn’t need to see to recognize the thought behind the words. Who is he.
It had always been his most dangerous question. For him to ask it, even obliquely, was a harbinger. It was a more dangerous question now, because the answer was no longer Ro’s endless, true assurance of fidelity. Now the answer was, He is Jim Beverly, and in four days, when you head to Houston with your daddy for that gun show, I am going to Chicago to righteously screw him until he remembers his promises. I am going to reclaim him.
Reclaim was the right word, because Jim was living in sin with a girl from Fruiton High. Arlene Fleet was her name, and she hadn’t even made my call list, though I remembered that scrawny, dark-eyed weasel quite clearly. Jim had never dated her officially, but rumor had it she’d put out for every member of the football team and half the county besides. She’d stuck in my brain because she was the only person at Fruiton High to ever suspect me of stealing.
She saw me nab a chocolate cookie from her pretty cousin Clarice. Clarice was a leggy blonde with honey-colored skin, and Jim Beverly had dated her. I’d thought Clarice’s smile was both too dim and friendly and too wide and white, so that she looked to me like the love child of a cannibal and a Labrador retriever. Still, a lot of boys went for her, including mine.
Stealing her cookie was a victimless crime, as I’d never once seen Clarice Lukey eat dessert. I planned to slip the treat into the sad brown paper sack of this kid whose crunchy mama packed his lunch every day: spelt bread with nut butter and homemade yogurt that smelled like baby urp.
I drifted by with my best underwater walk and palmed the cookie. When I looked up, Arlene Fleet’s big eyes were aimed my way across the table, glossy black and blank as an animal’s. After that, she seemed to be creeping around the edges of every room I was in, staring at me with that same fever-bright, accusing stare. Her name did not appear even once in my notepad, as I could see no possible connection between a scrub like Arlene Fleet and my quarterback boyfriend, but she had him now. Not for long. If I could soothe and feed and sex Thom through the next four days, he’d be off to Houston. I’d go to Chicago and take Jim back from her.
“Honey,” I said to Thom. “Sugar. Of course it’s different now. You know I’m off the pill.”
He turned on his side toward me, and now the moonlight was entirely behind him, making his hair into a faint gold halo. I could see nothing of his face, and my own was pointed directly into that scant light. My eyes must have glittered at him in the dark, hard and shiny as a feral cat’s, too reflective for him to read them.
“I thought about that. It seems like that would make a girl… mushier,” he said.
I laughed out loud, a harsher sound than I intended, and said, “Like they make babies on TV? Slow? With the covers up? You want to get all missionary, Thom? If you like, I can stare up at you all weepy and think about Pampers while you pump away. That sound fun?”
“No, thank you,” he said. “Don’t be like that. I thought you’d want baby making to be more romantic.”
“I don’t feel romantic,” I said. “I feel more like, I don’t know. Primal.”
“That’s pretty clear, Cowgirl,” he said, and I could tell by his voice that a little smile had snuck up on his face under cover of this darkness.
“That’s Reverse Cowgirl to you, bub,” I said, making my voice sound smiley back. “Mrs. Reverse Cowgirl.”
“So we’re having National Geographic sex,” he said. “Primal.”
“You bet,” I said, and that was true, because nothing was more primal than survival. Reproduction was absolutely not going to happen. Ivy Wheeler, proud new licensed driver in the great state of Texas, had driven her sweet ass directly to Planned Parenthood. I’d committed some identity fraud to get a supply of pills that would not show up on Thom Grandee’s insurance. Three wheels’ worth were hidden under the bathroom sink in my tampon box, uneasy roommates with a votive candle and the rosary beads I prayed through as a penance every time I took one. To Thom I said, “We are leopards making more leopards. We are sharks making more sharks.”
“If you want to do it like leopard sharks, I’m your boy,” Thom said, his tone light, but another thirty seconds passed before he lay back down.
Who is he had been pushed back, but it had not gone away. Thom was searching for his Ro, wanting her sugar-talk that could change on a dime to a sass-mouth, wanting her penchant for yielding to him and enraging him by turns. I would not be her for him, not for five minutes. I couldn’t afford to be her for thirty seconds, but Thom’s favorite question had surfaced, and that meant I was running low on time.
It had taken too long to find Jim. I’d had to rely on the information of the kids who’d been my kind, football boys, mostly. I’d learned early there was no point calling the girls, especially the ones that Jim had dated, when I tracked down Dawna Sutton.
She was now a social worker up in Boston, and she ended the conversation forty seconds in, saying, “Yes, I remember your piece-of-shit disappearing boyfriend. I hope he’s dead and frying deep, deep, deep in deepest hell. As for you, I don’t think you spoke more than nine words to me in school. Meanwhile, a live baby with a crack problem got pulled out of a Dumpster this morning, and I have to find a place for him. Your ‘good old days’ chat can go suck it.” She hung up.
None of the girls Jim had dated had cause to feel any more friendly than that toward me, so I stuck to folks that did.
After days of dead-end conversations with boys who had last seen Jim at Missy’s party, I got aholt of Bud Freeman, former linebacker, currently married to Clarice Lukey. Judging by the noise at their house, she’d pumped out about a thousand angry babies for him. No one else had even had an inkling of where Jim spent the blank hours between leaving Missy’s and wrecking his Jeep, but over the thunder of rioting toddlers, in the middle of a walk down memory lane, Bud told me. He said it off the cuff, almost in passing.
According to Bud, Jim Beverly was out at Lipsmack Hill with Arlene Fleet the night he disappeared. My breath stopped. Lip-smack Hill. With Arlene Fleet. I knew perfectly well there was only one reason to go up on top of Lipsmack. I’d traded my virginity for Jim’s on a scratchy picnic blanket atop that very spot.
I asked Bud for Arlene’s number, but Bud snorted. “She won’t talk to you. She lit out of Alabama close to ten years ago, and we ain’t seen hide nor hair of the girl since.”
“No kidding,” I said, and another memory was surfacing. One time, when Jim and I were broken up, a pack of cheerleaders tried to get a rise out of me by saying they’d seen Arlene wearing his letterman jacket. They told me Jim had been walking Arlene down the hall with an arm around her shoulders. I’d said, “Charity work, clearly,” in a breezy voice, though I’d felt it like a fast, pointy elbow to the kidney. A few days later, Jim and I were back together, and I’d forgotten it. I asked Bud, “Do you know where she’s living?”
“Chicago, and she don’t truck with nothing or nobody from back home. She’s ass-rat crazy, Rose Mae.”
“Like, in an institution?” It was a fair question. Arlene’s mother had spent more than one “vacation” at the special hospital over in Deer Park.
He chuckled. “Well, I reckon not. But she’s crazy. She ain’t even been home to see her mama. Ain’t talked to Clarice for more than a minute on the phone for years now, and as kids Arlene was welded to her hip. I couldn’t hardly get my Clar alone for half a minute.”
I didn’t answer. I myself had zoomed out of Alabama like the state itself had lit my tail on fire. I had not spoken to my own father in more than a decade. For me, Arlene’s behavior lived next door to normal.
“She married?” I asked. I was remembering something else, too. I’d seen Arlene with Jim together once myself, at the movies.
Bud said she wasn’t married. She was teaching college English at a big state school in downtown Chicago. But she had a fellow, he said. One who was comfy enough to answer the phone at her place. They’d never heard a word about him from her. No name. Not even an admission he existed.
It was a lot to process. Arlene Fleet had been with Jim out at Lipsmack the night he disappeared. Arlene had followed me all over school for months, watching me like… like the other woman might. She’d had his jacket. I’d seen them out together. Arlene had fled Fruiton the same way Jim had, same way I had, the first red second she could. Now she was half a country away, living with a mysterious man. She wouldn’t visit home. She never told her family about her fella.
As I got off the phone with Bud, it struck me that she and I were of a type. The other girls Jim had dated had been as unlike me as he could find. Tall girls, redheads and blondes. Arlene had been a teeny, dark-haired, waxen thing. She was like my photocopy, but pale and fuzzy round the edges, made on a broken-down machine.
I tapped Mrs. Fancy’s phone button to get a dial tone, then punched in 411. “Chicago, Illinois,” I told the operator. “I need an address and a phone number for Arlene Fleet. Two e’s.”
It was that simple. She should have changed her name or ditched her family altogether, as I had done. And was about to do again. I tapped the disconnect button again and dialed Arlene’s number. Three rings, and she picked up.
“Hello?” she said. Almost a decade in Chicago, and her accent was still pure backwoods Alabama. “Hello?” she said again, sounding like me before some Texas got up inside my mouth.
Behind her I heard another voice, asking her something from across the room. It was deep, a man’s voice, not a boy’s. I strained to catch the tones. It could be Jim. Older, with a wider, deeper chest; I could imagine him sounding like that. But it wasn’t the voice that made me sure. What made me sure was the way Arlene Fleet shushed him, nervous and immediate. Her voice was worried, much louder, when she said, “Who is this?” into the phone. “Who is this?”
She had him. He was there, and she was hiding him still, all these years later. I made my voice husky and tried to talk like a Yankee. “Wrong number. Sorry.” It came out sounding like a Muppet with a cold, but it worked.
“That’s okay.” She sounded a little too relieved, and she hung up a little too quickly.
I stood breathless with triumph, my hand still curled around the phone. He was there, and he was with her because she looked like me. Arlene had been a fetal kind of pretty back in high school. If she put on a little weight, grew some boobs, learned to smile, we’d be even better matched. I felt my whole body flush. Jim Beverly remembered. He was hearing me every time she spoke in that thick accent, touching me every time his hands reached for her slight, pale body. I could go to Chicago, knock on Arlene’s door, and Jim Beverly would open it. He was living with the shadow, but I was his real thing. I could knock on her door and take him back. Easy as that.
The four days after I knew where Jim was were the hardest of all. Thom could smell it in me, a deep-set, bubbling purpose. He had no idea what it was, but he was dead sure he didn’t like it. I picked up every extra shift at the gun shop I could get and even instigated a dinner with Larry Grandee and Margie. I volunteered Thom and me both to clean out his mother’s garage. I kept us too busy to give him time to ponder, too public for him to tear me open and read the new name written on my heart and lungs and guts.
The morning of Thom’s Houston trip felt like the tail end of a countdown. While he was in the shower, I slipped outside with a razor-sharp fillet knife and cut our phone line. When he came out, rubbing his hair with a towel, I had the receiver in my hand and I was glaring down at the phone.
“Our phone’s gone out,” I said, my back to him, tapping and tapping at the button in a manufactured pout.
Thom had to come over and tap the button himself and hold up the receiver and shake it and hear no dial tone. He said a few choice words, and I laid a soothing hand on his damp shoulder.
“Never mind, you’ll miss your flight. I’ll call from a pay phone and get a repair guy.”
“When we land, I’ll call you at the store,” Thom said.
“I’m not working today,” I said, and he gave me a long, level stare, too many wheels set turning in his brain for my comfort.
Driving him to the airport, I had to work hard to keep my hands still on the wheel, to not jiggle or twitch. I put my gaze on the road, and the car ate the last miles between me and a brief window of freedom.
“Baby, your eyes look overbright. Are you sick?” Thom asked.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“You’re so quiet,” Thom said.
“I’m fine,” I repeated, and then I veered sideways into a gas station parking lot, opened my door and leaned out and threw up all my breakfast.
“Yeah, you look fine,” Thom said.
I flapped one hand back over my shoulder at him and puked some more.
When I finally sat up, he was looking at me with one eyebrow up, his expression a hybrid of concern and I-told-you-so. “Do you need me to stay home?”
It was mostly a courtesy, as it would take a disaster on a par with one of Egypt’s ten plagues for Joe to let his eldest off the hook for this trip. A delicate wifely puke out a car door wasn’t going to rate. Even so, I practically hollered, “Lord, no!” at him.
I said it way too fast, way too fervent. There was a pause between us, and in that space, Thom swallowed a whole bag of thunderclouds. They didn’t seem to be agreeing with him. “You seem pretty set on getting your husband out of town,” he said. His whole body flexed like a fist, closing and tightening beside me.
I gulped, pitiful, and added, “No woman wants her best fella watching her throw up. I can’t think of a thing more likely to kill the air of mystery.” I gulped again and tried to look wan. Wan should have been an easy sell, tense as I was, thick as the air in the car had become.
“But if you’re sick… ,” Thom said. Heavy emphasis on if. Who is he had climbed into the car with us, and that question had the power to keep Thom home, Joe or no Joe.
The hanged man card was coming, and there was no stopping it. I could only hope to put it off and get him on that plane. Then I’d go get Jim and set him like a wall between us.
“Maybe I’m not sick at all,” I said, desperate. “Maybe this is something else? We’ve been trying awful hard.”
He didn’t know what I meant for a second, and then his eyebrows came together. “This fast?”
“Why not?” I said. “Maybe we hit it right out of the gate.”
“You think?” Thom asked, and I saw a faint easing in the line of his arms and shoulders. I dropped wan and tried to look bloomy.
“Sure. According to Larry, the Grandee sperms are so ever-lovin’ mighty, he knocked up Margie by standing upwind and thinking about Cindy Crawford. Maybe it runs in the family.”
His eyes brightened and he leaned in to kiss me without thinking. I put a hand up over my mouth. “Yick, no, baby. I need some gum,” I said, and he actually laughed.
Two hours after Thom and Joe’s flight left, I was on a plane of my own to Chicago, throwing up again, this time into a wax-lined airplane sick bag. I’d lucked into having someone’s unflappable granny for a seatmate. She patted my back and said, “There now, get it all out. You’ll feel better.” Then she made me drink a fizzy water.
I got off the train from the airport at a stop that was smack in the middle of downtown Chicago. I stepped out of the station into a steel grid that seemed to grow straight up out of the concrete, towering all around me. The streets were dead straight, cutting the buildings into orderly blocks. I had a map of the city, and I’d planned a route to Arlene Fleet’s apartment. I walked quickly, swinging my outsize macramé purse. Along with all my regular purse things, it held a change of clothes, a can of pepper spray from Grand Guns’ stock of lesser weaponry, and a ticket that said Ivy Rose Wheeler would be flying back to Texas tomorrow.
Out of sheer habit, I smiled at the folks coming down the sidewalk toward me, but their gazes slid off sideways like my skin was slicked in grease. They didn’t look back. Everyone who passed was doing busy things: a man barking into his mobile phone, a gaunt woman who almost hit me with her swinging briefcase, a herd of pretty girls in jeans and clacky shoes. Everyone was going to their own places, as orderly and single-minded as ants.
They were like the moving pieces of a beautiful machine, each a cog that churned and clicked its chilly teeth against the teeth of other cogs, uncaring. It was nothing like small-town Alabama, where the local paper did a human interest story if someone’s mama released a particularly loud fart in church.
Even in Amarillo, I was someone known and noticed. Hell, I was Joe Grandee’s daughter-in-law, and he was on three billboards, five times larger than life and grinning like a possum, cradling a gorgeous shotgun. Over his head, black letters read, “You know Joe!” And across his chest it said, “Grand Guns. For Amarillo’s Big Shots.” Joe’s outsize eyes seemed to track me anytime I drove past one of those boogers.
Around town, especially with Thom, I felt watched by all the folks who did, indeed, know Joe. But this place had swallowed Arlene Fleet up for more than a decade. I felt a twinge of something ugly in the deeps of me, and it shocked me to realize it was envy. Back in high school, if anyone had told me I’d be marching past a fifty-story Chicago building one day, shivering in a peasant blouse and envying Arlene Fleet, I’d have laughed until something busted.
She was such a skinny, creeping critter, twitchy as a rodent. As a child, I’d been capable of envy for orphans starving to death in far-off darkest China, but never once had I felt a green yearn toward Arlene Fleet’s life. Her mama bounced in and out of the nuthouse, and a bat-crap crazy mother seemed a flat step down, even from a willfully missing mother like my own.
Now she’d come to this foreign place and let it eat her up until she was unseeable inside it. I realized I was, too, for the moment. No one on planet Earth had any idea where Mrs. Thom Grandee was. If a car smashed into me and killed me, Ivy’s ID would lead nowhere. For this one day, a thousand miles from home, I’d been swallowed, too.
My route led me out of Chicago’s skyscrapered center. The foot traffic was lighter here, and the sleek steel buildings gave way to Greek restaurants and coffee shops. The walk to Arlene’s had looked much shorter on paper. I wished I had taken the time to figure out a bus route. The held-over cold of the sidewalk came up through Ro Grandee’s trouser socks and thin-soled flats, until each step felt like the sidewalk was stinging me.
I stopped in front of a video rental place to check my map. The store was about the size of a walk-in closet, and it had an age-faded feature poster of Flashdance still in the front window. That movie had come out when I was a teenager. I found myself staring at the display, puzzled, disoriented, as if moving toward Arlene had moved me back in time to high school and leg warmers and spiral perms.
A scroungy guy with about fifteen visible tattoos was sitting on the sidewalk. “It’s a front,” he said, as if I’d asked about the poster out loud. “They have a huge back room full of porn.”
He had a blanket spread on the ground beside him, canted back a ways into an alley. He raised his eyebrows at me and gestured at a jumble of objects on top. “See anything you like, doll?” It seemed the blanket was a store. Everything sitting out on it was inventory.
In the middle, I saw a pair of scuffed-up yellow boots. They stood up tall among fake Coach purses and scraps of silk fronting like Hermès scarves, and they were the only things that looked comfortable with themselves. Even their dings had a mellow buttercream glow, and they were my size. I could see the number in faded print inside the lip.
I found myself pausing, drawn, my cold feet aching. The only pair of boots I owned had kitten heels. They rested in my closet with strappy sandals and flats with bows, all the dainty accompaniments to Ro Grandee’s ruined wardrobe.
Ivy Wheeler is a woman who wears cowboy boots, I decided. And I would know. After all, I’d just had a taste of what it might be like to be Ivy Wheeler, unmoored and unknown, eaten by a city.
I squatted by the blanket. A dollar sign and the number 40 had been scrawled across an index card leaned up against the pointy right toe. Too much. I touched the card with one finger and said, “If they fit, I’ll give you half that,” to the tattoo boy.
He sized me up, taking in my macramé bag, my ancient jeans, trying to read my money. I lowered my head, looking down at Ivy’s boots.
He didn’t say anything, so I started to rise. Then he spoke up. “Gimme the twenty. Whether they fit ain’t my problem.”
Most of my remaining wad was in a Ziploc bag in my underpants, but I had three twenties and some smaller bills tucked in different spots, each miniroll trying to look like all the cash I had. I chose the twenty in my bra, just to mess with him. Pulled it out slow.
He cool-boyed it right to the end, and then his eyes shifted, taking an involuntary glance south. His gaze flicked back almost instantly, but I had one eyebrow up, waiting for him. He grinned at me, caught, the smile crinkling the blue star he’d inked on his cheek, and we liked each other for a second.
I kicked off my flats and left them on the sidewalk like bits of shed skin. The boots slid on so easy, it was as if some other girl with feet shaped like mine had walked in them for a year, breaking them in for me, readying them for this moment. As I walked away, tattoo boy was already putting my flats on the blanket to sell to someone else who needed a change.
My pace quickened. The porn place had clued me in: Arlene wasn’t living in the world’s best neighborhood. It was getting dark, but I didn’t have far to go. Jim Beverly was less than a mile away from me right now, maybe sitting down to dinner with her. I could picture him touching her dark hair, remembering the silkier feel of mine.
The sun was gone by the time I found her apartment building. I saw her listed on the row of call buttons: Fleet—4B. I hit a button on the intercom, two numbers under hers. Nothing happened, so I went down one more and tried again.
This time a male voice came through the speaker. “Yeah?”
Arlene had failed to rinse the long taste of Alabama vowels out of her mouth, and I could sound like her, easy. “It’s Arlene Fleet, from 4B. I locked myself out.”
A second later the door buzzed, and I pushed my way in. Her building had no elevator, and the door by the stairs said 1B. I was breathing hard by the time I got to Arlene’s floor, and my heart was banging itself against my rib cage, both from the stairs and from being this close to seeing Jim again. I paused, listening.
Arlene was home. I could hear her rattling around inside 4B, her voice raised. She wasn’t alone. Her shrill yaps were punctuated by the sound of the deeper, male voice I’d heard behind her on the phone. I couldn’t make out any of the words through the old building’s well-made walls, but they both sounded angry. I pressed my ear against the door and a second later felt the wood shudder as something on the other side hit it hard and bounced off it. Arlene? In my mind’s eye I saw her slight body ponging off of mine, only an inch or two of wood between us.
Was Jim hitting her? My Jim had laid heavy hands on me only once, when we were blind drunk together on that long, wrestling night in our green woods. If he was hitting her, then he was drinking.
The male voice dropped in volume, going almost inaudible, and Arlene’s raised up, so strident and high that she sounded like an angry budgie. I pressed closer, as if yearning alone could melt oak and push me through it, trying to hear him. His words sounded clipped, sharp and fast like drumbeats, but he was very angry, and Chicago could have whittled down his accent.
Was he drinking? I wasn’t sure that I should knock if he was. Jim drinking was not the Jim I wanted. I was surprised my banging heart didn’t do the knocking for me, an endless thudding gallop against the wood. Perhaps they did hear me, because the door flew open, spilling me all the way onto my ass. I landed face to crotch with a pair of knife-creased khakis.
I went scuttling backwards crab style. When I saw the coffee dark skin of his hands, I knew he wasn’t Jim. I looked up at him. He was a tall black man with a trim waist and broad shoulders. He was better looking than Jim had ever thought of being, too, with a long, straight nose and sharp cheekbones and a full mouth. He was too good-looking for Arlene f*cking Fleet, that was sure. I scrambled to stand up. He must have been a foot taller than me, but I wanted to take him on, punch his face in, for the crime of not being the right man.
“What the—,” he said, and he stepped toward me. He was so big. I scrabbled in my purse for my pepper spray. I whipped it out and aimed it at him, pushing down hard on the trigger, but nothing happened. He stopped in his tracks, boggling at me. I pressed and pressed, and nothing came out, while he dared to keep on standing there, existing, and not being Jim. Not being a single thing like Jim, even. I’d come halfway across the country, spent most of my cash, only to be wrong. I pushed harder, wanting to watch him claw at his eyes while Arlene and I kicked the shit out of him. My new boots had steel toes.
“I heard you yelling,” I said to Arlene. I sounded breathless.
“Whoa,” the guy said. He put up his hands. “Calm down.”
I said to Arlene, “You go for the soft parts. And then we run while he’s down.” I pressed again, and still no spray came out. I gave the can a fast, angry shake.
Arlene Fleet wasn’t even looking at me. Her focus was all on her fella. She was talking to him now, continuing their fuss like I wasn’t standing pumping my finger up and down on the unresponsive pepper spray trigger, trying to blast him into blindness. He kept his hands up but turned to talk to her as if I wasn’t hardly there.
As I watched their body language, my adrenaline began to leak away. This was Arlene’s mystery man, and she was serious about him. She didn’t have Jim in there, too. This was her guy, and he was hidden away from her family for the high crime of not being a white boy. That was all. He also threw her into doors, but, hey, with her family, I’d bet that was less of an objection than his skin color.
Jim wasn’t here. He never had been.
At last he turned to me and said, “I was just leaving.”
“Bet your ass you are,” I told him. I had stopped trying to press the trigger down, but I still had the pepper spray’s round, plastic eye trained on his face. Now I could see the problem. I hadn’t flicked the safety off.
“He was only trying to help you up,” Arlene said.
He skirted me, careful, hands still up, then turned and went on down the stairs. Arlene started to go after him, but I blocked her path. Even if Jim wasn’t here, had never been here, Bud had told me that Arlene had been the last set of eyes alive in Fruiton to see him on the night he disappeared. I wasn’t finished with her. Not by a long shot. I stayed in her way and said, “They’re almost all sonsabitches.”
When I couldn’t hear her fella’s big, angry feet stamping down the stairs, I lowered the spray. She wheeled on me, black eyes snapping, and I got my first clear look at Arlene Fleet. Maybe he wasn’t too good-looking for her, after all. Her skinniness had shifted into something sleek and trim. She looked as flexible as a bendy straw. Her face had lost that feral look, and anger brought a flush to her pale, high cheeks. Her skin was perfect, except she had a crease, what my mother had always called a temper line, running vertically between her eyebrows.
That line deepened, and she said, “Rose?”
She hadn’t even recognized me. If she’d run off to Chicago to be with Jim, even if she’d swapped him for the black guy later, she would have recognized me right off. Women don’t forget their rivals. Still, something had happened between them back in Alabama. There was only one reason Fruiton High kids went up on top of Lipsmack. I tried to ask her, but she’d turned her temper from her fella to me, and she overrode me.
“I haven’t seen you in ten years. I didn’t even know if you were alive or dead, and quite frankly, I didn’t much care. And now you are standing out in my stairwell, apparently eavesdropping on me and my boyfriend?” She seemed to have it in her head that I was there on some crazy-ass mission from her family, to get her back to Alabama. “How the hell did you even find me? What are you doing here? What do you want from me?”
I plastered the nicest smile I could muster up onto my face. I needed an in, something that would make her talk to me, the way mentioning my pastor had eased Mrs. Fancy. All I really knew about Arlene Fleet was that she’d been kind of a whore and her mother was a nut job. I wasn’t sure how whores bonded, but I doubted I could get her on my team by sprinkling some Jesus. Maybe Oprah and therapy, a wash with Mrs. Fancy, would work on the child of a crazy woman.
“Okay, Arlene. I guess you never were one for social graces. That’s fine,” I said. “It’s kind of a long story, but if you want the short, standing-in-a-stairwell version, I can do that. I got in a fight with my therapist, and now I’m on a spiritual journey. Congratulations, you’re my next stop.”
She didn’t rise to my shrink bait. She held up one hand to stop me talking and said, “If this is some sort of Twelve Step thing, making amends or whatever, fine. I forgive you. Now I need to go catch Burr.”
“Forgive me for what?” I said, dumbfounded. I wasn’t the one who’d stalked her all over school. I hadn’t gone up on Lipsmack to have a mysterious and likely horizontal powwow with her boyfriend. We did a three-step dance in the hallway as she tried to get around me again.
I altered my tack slightly. I’d heard her fella pitch her into a door, so maybe she was a romantic now, Ro Grandee style. “Wait, Arlene, one minute. I’m sorry I sounded snippy. I really do need your help. I’m only doing what you’re trying to do, too. Going after the one that got away.”
She paused then, and her eyes got cagey. “Whatever this is, it can’t have anything to do with me.”
This was the first time she’d stood still and truly listened to me since the door flew open. I kept going, winging it. “But it does, indirectly. See, my therapist said I get crappy men because I go looking for them, not because men are mostly crappy. She thinks I choose a*sholes because that’s what I think I deserve, blah blah, masochism, blah blah, low self-esteem. You know how shrinks talk.”
“No,” Arlene said pointedly. “I don’t.”
“With your mother? Come on.” That hit her low, and she took a step back. I followed. “Anyway, she’s wrong. I’ve been thinking through my romantic history, looking for a guy I picked who wasn’t an a*shole. If I can find just one, then my shrink is wrong and it isn’t me, it’s the men. And there is one, I know it. I remember. But I need you to help me find him.”
“Find him?” she said. Now she was truly edging backwards, and I followed her, because that caginess in her eyes had deepened, and she knew where this conversation was going. I hadn’t been all wrong. She knew something. I followed her step for step in a backwards dance that I was leading, even though her feet shuffled first. I got in close, kissing close, predator close, nailing her down and holding her with sheer animal will.
“I have to find Jim Beverly,” I said.
His name rolled out into the stairwell, and its presence changed her. She became in the space between those two words the ugly weasel I’d known, the one who had followed me all over Fruiton High, scrutinizing my every sneeze and shuffle as she tried to catch me stealing. Her shoulders folded in and her face went white as poached chicken. Her throat clicked, like she was trying to dry-swallow a mouthful of mini-ball shot. Her eyes went wide. She was afraid, as if she was so allergic to his name, its very syllables could swell her throat closed and stop her breathing.
Two seconds at most passed, then she went leaping wildly backwards into her apartment and slammed the door. I heard the bolt slam home and the rattle of a chain.
I stood panting in her stairwell. “Arlene?” I called. I tapped at the door.
Nothing. I knocked again, harder.
“Arlene? This is ridiculous. I need maybe five minutes of your time,” I called. My new steel toe shot out and kicked the door as hard as I could. It made a satisfying clap of angry sound.
The only response I got was a barrage of obnoxious music coming through the wood.
Arlene Fleet knew. She knew where Jim had gone and why, but that information was locked up inside with her.
I was powerless to get it out.