You Only Get Letters from Jail

by Jodi Angel

  “I got a job,” I said.

  She picked a piece of bacon out of the box and started eating it. “What am I gonna do while you’re working? Am I just going to sit here?” Her eyes were still puffy, but they shrunk down quick and sharp. “I can’t just sit here,” she said. “I want to do something, too.”

  I rubbed her leg underneath the sheet. “You can relax and take care of the baby and watch television and rest. You’re supposed to be resting anyway.”

  Leeanne started eating scrambled eggs with her fingers. “I wish we hadn’t left. I wish I was still home so I could go to school and see my friends. I miss my friends.”

  I wanted to tighten my hand around her leg and jerk her out of the bed, pull her onto the carpet so I could lie next to her, and hold her down and put my mouth right up to her ear and she’d have no choice but to listen to me. Instead I lifted my hand from her leg and held my tongue. “If we would’ve stayed, your dad would’ve made you give up the baby,” I said. “And he would’ve done something bad to me. Remember, Leeanne?” I had told her about what happened when I turned her daddy’s money down, what he had offered me next—something along the lines of how much do you think your life is worth, and after that it had been harder to get off with Leeanne when we were doing it on her daddy’s couch.

  “I had a dream last night that my father said that we could get married and we had a big church wedding and all my friends were there.”

  “We’ll have a wedding someday,” I said. I said it mechanically, with about as much hope as the second hand on a clock has of changing the pace of the next minute.

  Leeanne dropped the chunks of egg into her mouth like a bird. “I wasn’t pregnant in the dream,” she said. “And there wasn’t a baby at the wedding. Don’t you think that’s weird?”

  I thought about how her daddy had grabbed me by the arm and pulled me against his face so that little drops of spit flew off his lips when he spoke, and each word was harsh and forced and full of his bad breath. He had said things that I didn’t think a man would say about his pregnant daughter, and things I didn’t think anyone would say at all, but that hand biting into my arm and separating my bicep from bone was enough to convince me that he knew the meaning of his words. “Maybe you were pregnant in the dream, but you weren’t showing yet. Maybe this was earlier,” I said.

  She looked at me and licked her breakfast from her fingers. “Maybe,” she said, “but I don’t think so. I don’t think there was a baby at all.”

  I started picking up hours at the garage, and Chuck asked me questions while we worked, asked me about my life, and I told him a story that sounded good out loud—everything approved and honored and whole. The work was not hard, and I liked the feel of grease under my fingernails and the scratches on my hands and the cuts from stripped bolts and slipped tools.

  On Thursday I was welding a rust patch into the rocker panel of a ’66 Ford when Chuck yelled at me to turn the radio up, and I shut the iron off and did what he asked. I picked up the air hose to blast the dust off the piece I was working on, and Chuck grabbed my arm and his fingers tightened into my coveralls.

  “Hold off on that for a minute,” he said.

  We stood there in the silence, with nothing but the radio playing too loud and Chuck’s hand on my arm, and when the song was finished, Chuck walked over and snapped the radio off and the silence between us deepened an inch, and then he walked out to the gravel lot and pulled a cigarette from his pocket and smoked with his back to me. I didn’t know whether to work or stand still, so I cleared my throat and walked out to the sunlight and gravel, facing the road.

  “You want a cigarette?” Chuck asked.

  I shook my head. I could hear the cars on the highway, everybody accelerating to someplace farther than there.

  “It’s that one goddamn song that does it to me,” Chuck said suddenly. “I’ve gotten good about most things, but that’s the one I can’t get past.” He dropped ash from his cigarette and stared out toward the road. “Deacon used to play that song all the time—had the whole record, but only played that song. About drove me crazy. He knew all the words, used to sing it at the top of his lungs just to piss me off, I think.” Chuck smiled and spit onto the gravel, rubbed at it with the toe of his boot. “Deacon was my son. Only kid. Used to work out here with me—bitched about it a lot, but he did good work. He had the patience that I didn’t have, like you do.”

  I shoved my hands into my coveralls and fingered the quarters I was saving to buy lunch with. “He move away?” I asked.

  Chuck laughed and pushed his greased and grooved hat back. “No, he went off and got himself killed. Coming home from drinking one night, and he was seeing this girl that I guess he was fighting with.” Chuck blew a double lung of smoke toward the blank sky. “So on his way home he rolled his car, for whatever reason, ass over teakettle on the road, took out about fifty feet of a neighbor’s fence.”

  I waited for him to finish, to say just a little bit more, because it seemed like something had to come next, a “but” or a “so,” except Chuck was quiet and just stood there with his cigarette pinched in his lips while the ash grew at the tip. “I’m sorry,” I said. I moved the quarters against each other, squeezed them because I did not know if I should pull my hand free and reach out and touch Chuck on the arm or the shoulder or the back, like I had seen people do in the movies. I had never touched a man who was older than me, other than my father, and those were times that I could count on one hand.

  “Yeah, well, it happens, right? Boys die all the time.” Chuck tossed his cigarette and we both watched the smoke rise from the dry rocks. “You gonna sand that piece flush, or are you gonna just leave it thick and hope that nobody notices?” He walked back into the garage and did not wait for me to answer.

  On Friday Chuck came to me and said that he and his wife had been talking and they had an extra room above the garage at their house, and maybe Leeanne and I wanted to move into it, save ourselves a few dollars. I had spun some lies to him, and I felt bad about it sometimes—told him we were married, told him she was pregnant and we were excited and had been heading to the ocean because her doctor said babies who live in the salt air thrive more than babies who don’t. He had asked about our families, but I had gone vague and quiet as if I hadn’t heard him ask at all.

  Leeanne was glad to be moving because moving gave the hope of change. She was restless most days, angry and sad, her moods shifting like wind. I never knew which way I might catch her when I came home from Chuck’s, smelling like lube and sweat and brake dust and gasoline. At the motel I didn’t pay for long distance in our room because I was afraid that she would get weak during a long afternoon when there was a lull between shows, and she might miss her mother because she saw a mother and daughter on TV, reunited or working through their troubles. I was afraid of telephones, kept my nickels and dimes hidden so she wouldn’t be tempted to walk to the pay phone by the road. Sometimes when I was running a dipstick into an oil pan or rotating a set of tires, I’d wonder if she was thinking about home, and if she was, how hard was she thinking?

  Chuck’s wife, Vivian, came out and met us in their driveway, and we all stood around for introductions. Behind her was a shaggy black-and-white dog that barked twice and then shut up at the sound of our voices. Vivian was a small woman, young-looking in a way that might have been influenced by the quality of the light. She had blond hair that she wore piled on her head, and her voice had all the flavor of the old country lyrics that poured out of the radio in the shop, and for a second I thought about Deacon and his favorite song. Something about long limousines and a shiny car. Her voice carried loss, and when she smiled at me and asked me if Tyler was my given name or was it just something I fell into, I almost told her the truth, that on paper my first name was Martin and the only thing I’d ever fallen into was bad luck. I almost told her about the line in my blood and that I was fairly sure I had crossed it, or was about to very soon, in a matter of months, but truth is ha
rd to rope in once it gets loose. I knew that it was much easier to breed lies, because they are like rabbits and multiply in the wild on their own.

  “You told them about the grange hall tonight, didn’t you, Chuck?” she said. “Did he tell you that we want to take you out tonight and buy you a good dinner?” She looked at Leeanne’s swollen stomach and winked at her. Leanne did not look at her in return.

  The room above the garage smelled like new paint and there were clean curtains on the rod. Chuck opened the window to air out the fumes, and he pointed out the dresser and the bed and the small bathroom with a toilet and a sink. I kept thanking him, and Leeanne sat down in the middle of the bed, and Vivian pulled her into conversation that I should’ve been paying close attention to so that I knew the lies being born, but mostly the talk stayed safe—How far along are you, and Is it a boy or a girl, and Do you have any names yet? Vivian did not ask us where we were from or where we were going or if our folks were anxious for the baby to come. When they were satisfied that we were settled, they went back down the narrow flight of stairs and left us to rest before dinner.

  “How long are we gonna stay here?” Leeanne asked.

  “I haven’t thought about it,” I said. “He isn’t asking us to pay anything, so why do you already want to think about leaving?”

  Leeanne started crying, and even though I was looking out the window at the green hills and the scrub oak and the rows of wire fences that disappeared into nothingness, I knew that she was crying sitting up, crying without wiping at her cheeks, crying openly and without shame so that I would turn around and do something. My shoulders were tired from carrying her weight. I watched buzzards dip in the distance, black birds that carried their wings in sharp Vs.

  Leeanne picked up a book from the shelf against the wall and leaned back against the pillows. I stretched out next to her and closed my eyes. She was quiet for a while and I listened to her turn pages, the dry rustle and scrape as they caught on her shirt. I concentrated on the darkness behind my eyelids and tried not to think about things that were familiar to me.

  “There’s a mark in this book. I can’t read it,” Leeanne said.

  “You can’t read the mark or the book?”

  “The book, Tyler. I can’t read a book that somebody has marked in. It’s weird. I don’t like using things that aren’t mine.”

  I rolled over onto my side and looked at the open book that Leeanne had balanced on her stomach. In the middle of the page there was a red ink stamp that said EXIT. There were no other marks, just the stamp on the page, and I took the book from Leeanne and flipped through a few pages, and then turned back to the beginning. Inside the front cover there was a name printed in the corner. Deacon. I handed the book back to Leeanne and she looked at it for a second before she dropped it to the floor beside the bed. “It seemed like it was gonna be a good story, too.” She let out a long sigh and tapped her fingers against her chest. “I don’t know how long I can stand to be this bored,” she said. “I can’t wait until the baby comes so I can have something to do.”

  The grange hall was on a narrow strip of blacktop that ran between rows of farmhouses and acreage. The parking lot was half full, and Vivian said that because it was a Friday night, most people would skip the dinner and come after nine for the band. Inside there were tables along one wall, and then a dance floor that led to a small wooden stage at the far end of the building. The tables were covered with checkered cloths and we ordered steaks and beers and Leeanne asked for a Coke and then Vivian said that Leeanne should live it up and ordered her a Shirley Temple instead.

  Chuck wanted to talk cars, but Vivian told him that there couldn’t be any shop talk at the table, so he switched to hunting and fishing, which I knew nothing about other than the fact that I had once outfished my father when I was very young, and somewhere there was a picture of me holding up my first—and last—full stringer of trout. They were dull gray in the picture, but I remembered that when I held them up for the camera they had been beautiful with color, like the sheen of oil floating on the top of a mud puddle. Vivian went back to baby questions, and this entertained Leeanne, who had read a book and had never had the opportunity to show just how much she knew.

  Chuck excused himself from the table and came back with three glasses of whiskey from a bar that I had not seen. “You don’t mind driving, do you?” Chuck said to Leeanne, and he winked at her but I didn’t know if the wink was meant to turn his question into a joke or give her thanks in advance. Leeanne was six months away from being legal age for her driver’s license, but that was in our other life that we no longer lived.

  When the band started playing, we turned our chairs to face the dance floor, and the volume went up suddenly, so that we had to lean in close to each other in order to hear. I held Leeanne’s hand, and every so often Chuck would get up from the table and there would be drinks again, and Vivian was always the first to put down an empty glass.

  After a while, Chuck took Vivian out on the floor, and they danced to a fast song, and then a slow song, and then half of another fast song before Vivian stopped him and pulled him back in our direction. Her face was pink and there was something about the color high up in her cheeks that made me have to look away from her. Leeanne was smiling, but I could tell that she was using the last of her strength to hold it there.

  “You like to dance?” Vivian asked me. She had to lean in close to my ear so that I could hear her, and when she spoke her breath was warm on my skin and she held her mouth close even when I turned toward her and it was as though I could feel her breath in other places on my body so that my hands started sweating and I had to nod instead of answer.

  “I’m really glad you two wanted to come out with us,” Chuck shouted into my other ear. “I’m really happy.”

  I smiled and nodded and he gripped my shoulder and pulled me toward him. “I hope you two will stay around awhile. You know? We wouldn’t mind that.” Tiny drops of spit landed on my cheeks while he talked to me, but I kept my hands in my lap. His teeth were stained from tobacco, but his eyes were shiny and his hand was tight against me. “Maybe we could rebuild that 406 V8,” he said.

  Vivian grabbed my hands out of my lap and pulled me to my feet. I didn’t realize I was drunk until I stood up, and then I had to wait for the floor to settle underneath me before I could walk away from the table. Vivian led me out to dance, and I tried to say no and smile, but she wouldn’t let go of my hands, and once we were out on the floor, we were swallowed by the other people dancing around us, and I realized that the only way out was through.

  “You know how to two-step?” she asked.

  I shook my head. Vivian put her cheek against my shoulder and we shuffled around together. I felt her mouth on my ear. “How old is she?”

  I thought I recognized the words to the song. The band was covering something that I’d heard before but I couldn’t remember the name. “I know this song,” I said.

  Vivian pulled her cheek away from my shoulder so that she could look at me, and even though she was smiling, there was something about the set of her jaw that didn’t let her lips slide all the way off her teeth.

  “How old is she?” she said again.

  I looked over Vivian’s shoulder toward our table, but the lights were too low and there were too many people between us and them. “She’s nineteen,” I said. “She’ll be twenty in August.”

  Vivian’s mouth was back against my ear. “Bullshit,” she said.

  I felt something stir in my stomach and I thought it might be the combination of dancing and whiskey and steak and beer, but the buzz in my head went quiet and I kept moving my feet. “Yeah,” I said, “she is. People always think she’s younger.”

  “It really isn’t any of my business,” Vivian said. “I just know what I see, that’s all, and I’m not usually wrong.” She shifted her weight against me and we turned toward the band. “I just see that you haven’t got rings on your fingers and I don’t think it’ll be too much
longer before she busts and you have another mouth to feed. It doesn’t seem to me like either of you should be wandering too far from home.”

  Part of me wanted to give in to her arms, drop my shoulders, and rest my head against her chest so she could hold me until all of the weight lifted and the lies evaporated from my skin like sweat. “I love her,” I said.

  A steel guitar started up and it was one of those songs that was either fast or slow, depending on the dancer, and Vivian held me in my place and we stayed locked on the floor. She pulled me around in a tight circle and she was strong.

  A man in a wide hat danced close to us, and he leaned in and said something to Vivian that looked like “black car,” but I couldn’t hear and wasn’t sure. She laughed and pushed him away.

  “He’s got a dirty mind,” she said to me. Her hands were tight around the tops of my shoulders, and I could smell her against me, her drinks and her perfume. The skin on her neck was white and blank and tight. “I want you to come over to the house and go through Deacon’s things. There’s a whole lot in there I think you could use—shirts and pants, and a couple coats. Some of that expensive cologne he just had to have,” she said. I opened my mouth to refuse her, but she put a finger to my lips. Her hand was dry even though the room was hot as an exhaust pipe and I was sweating through my shirt. “I’ve been wanting to get rid of it all, but you know how fathers are—they can’t give up what belongs to them.”

  The dancing had become a habit, like Leeanne’s hand across her belly, and I wasn’t aware that my feet were still moving until I looked down at the floor. “I’m sorry for your loss,” I said, but I felt like saying it quiet was the only way to say it, and when I could tell that she hadn’t heard me, I didn’t feel like saying it again loud.

  Her fingers were playing with my hair where it rubbed the collar of my shirt. “You oughta get this cut,” Vivian said.

  We turned one more rotation and then the lights went up and the drums rolled the music to a stop. The band announced its break and the floor cleared so the crowd could shift to the bar.