by Mesha Maren
Of course, Jodi thought, she’s not only Lee Golden’s wife but also the heir to perfect teeth.
Miranda stopped at the base of the billboard and tilted her head back, staring at the ladder that ran up the side of the pole.
“I really have been looking at everything wrong,” she said. “I’ve been so weak. You know when you get so tired sometimes . . . it’s like every little thing can just make you wanna sleep. I haven’t legally lost them yet and already I’m acting like it’s over.” She reached up and grabbed onto the lowest rung of the ladder.
Don’t follow this one, Jodi told herself.
“I like the way you do things.” Miranda glanced back at Jodi. “You show up in town with nothing but conviction and an old address and I have no doubt you’ll find your friend.”
She hoisted herself, swinging her bare foot until it caught on the second rung. Her legs were smooth under the tent of her pink dress. The daughter of that smug smile. Jodi almost laughed out loud. Here she was, breaking all her own self-commandments and somehow it felt good. Maybe what the billboard was meant to say was something about second chances, new beginnings are not a world away.
Jodi stepped closer to where she could see the lace of Miranda’s panties and the plump curve of her ass. There was something different about this moment, she thought, from any lust she’d felt in Jaxton. Not that those times had not been real. Out here, though, on her own, Jodi felt the heat of her desire and her chest filled up with adrenaline. You can choose your sins, Effie reminded her, but you cannot choose the consequences.
“I got off track, that’s all,” Miranda said.
And evil comes to one who searches for it.
Jodi jumped and caught hold of the rusted ladder, the chipped paint and flaking metal sharp under her palms. A breeze blew past and she felt it all liquid across her skin. So much air, she thought, picturing the dead-grass square of the prison yard with the flat sky above. Here the wind moved loud in the trees and in her hair and she filled herself with it, with the whiskey and the height and the fact that she ought to be in bed right now, resting for tomorrow.
“I’m gonna get clean.” Miranda had poked her head up above the catwalk and only her legs were still visible.
“Other than getting drunk off your ass and climbing billboard signs, what kind of shit do you usually get into?”
“Oh, just some pills.”
Up close the Denture King was frightening, his smile big enough to bite off their heads.
“All right, we climbed up here,” Jodi said. “Now let’s get down before the cops see us.”
Miranda motioned her toward the end of the grated walkway, past the beaming bulbs. She tucked herself into the corner, legs dangling, and pointed out into the blue-black night. As her eyes adjusted, Jodi saw the sleeping carnival, the giant dormant rides, and beyond that, a sprinkle of streetlamps and yard lights. The outline of the Ferris wheel was visible above the other rides, and though completely dark, it still seemed to be turning.
“I’m gonna do it,” Miranda said. “I just got to find the right path again.”
Jodi looked down at the small blonde woman seated at her feet. Miranda smiled and pulled a pack of smokes from the pocket of her dress.
“This is your path,” Jodi said. She could feel the alcohol moving inside of her. It always seemed to come like this; after the drunken doubt and self-deprecation the whiskey brought on a loose-tongued philosophical stage.
“Like fate?” The flame of Miranda’s lighter pierced the air.
Jodi inhaled and tapped her cigarette on the railing. “If we’re here right now, it’s because we were always going to be here now.”
“Well, that’s real uplifting,” Miranda said. “So you’re saying we could just not do anything at all and everything will turn out the same?”
Jodi shook her head leaned out over the rail. “No.” She flicked her cherry and watched it dance in a shower of sparks on the concrete below.
“What about going to find your friend? You think it’s written in the stars for you to find your friend?”
Jodi glanced at Miranda and then lowered herself until she sat on the metal grating beside her, staring out over the empty parking lot, past the carnival and strip malls and streets to where a train wound its way south.
Though her own room was quiet and apparently empty, Miranda insisted it was not safe. She crouched on Jodi’s bed, finishing the last of the bottle of whiskey.
“I’ll drive you out to your friend’s place first thing.”
Jodi took the empty liquor bottle and carried it to the trash can. The room seemed softer now with someone else there but Miranda’s presence was sloppy too and Jodi kept her distance.
“It seems like there ought to be a law,” Miranda said. “Like a law that nobody could ever take away something that you made with your own blood and cells, something you carried inside for nine months.”
Jodi caught herself in the mirror, face framed in the unexpected haircut, skin milk white and eyes too big, too sad. Looking like a bad joke, like a scapegoat, she thought, just waiting for somebody to use me.
“Please? I can’t sleep by myself.”
“You can have the bed, I’ll take the floor,” Jodi said.
“No, come up here with me, I can’t sleep,” Miranda pleaded, but already her eyes were softening. Jodi sat down on the end of the mattress, back stiff against the wall. Miranda took hold of her hand and Jodi looked away.
Headlights tracked paths across the peeling wallpaper, and through the open window came the rush and whir of traffic on the highway. At Jaxton it had never been totally dark. Darkness was too dangerous and fluorescent bulbs buzzed in the cells even in the middle of the night. Some women tried to dim the lights by covering them in sheets of toilet paper stuck on with chewing gum or even smeared layers of their own shit. Jodie had closed her eyes and tried to will a darkness, deep and clean, a velvet closeness she remembered from the way-back corners of caves.
There had been three linked caves down below Effie’s land, and Effie had loved to tell Jodi stories about them. Tell how her uncle’s sow wandered down over the cliff one fall, hunting for horse chestnuts, and when a freak storm dropped three feet of snow the pig got stuck. Stayed the whole winter down in those caves. Effie and her uncle came out to the cliff every few days, wading through waist-deep snow with a pail of slops. They lowered the bucket over the edge on a long rope, fed the sow that way till spring, when she come back up over the ridge with six new babies. It was a wonder she wasn’t killed, because come winter, all the good-size caves were claimed by bears, Effie said, and Jodi had loved to picture that, all the crooks and crannies of the land under her feet filled with sleeping bears.
The Lady Cake Caves, Effie called them, for the formation in the middle of the biggest cavern, a mineral deposit shaped just like a big white cake. The mouth of the cave was shallow, not much more than a shale overhang, but if you followed it back, you’d see it kept going. Lying as flat as a dog, you could wriggle through and out into the first chamber. Effie claimed that if you looked closely enough, you could see cave paintings. Jodi never did see them but she liked to hear the stories. Effie told her how the land was precious, older than old, but with every generation they lost a little of its essence, even when they were right there in the middle of it. Every generation, she said, grew more and more distant until the land itself was nothing but an encumbrance, nothing more than the thing in the way between your trailer and the nearest shopping mall.
When Jodi first brings Paula up to the caves they have known each other for only four days. Paula doesn’t believe Jodi, says she must be pulling her leg, telling her they can push through that split mouth into a room big enough to stand up in. Jodi goes on ahead, burrowing in between the muddy rocks. Paula is hesitant but stubborn too, and though Jodi has known her only briefly, she can already see how she hates to be left behind.
The cold air laps up against her, a heavy black, darker than the dark behin
d her, an air full and wet with shifting invisible proportions. She can feel the space in that circle-room adjusting to her, the hole her body makes in that mineral thickness, and it feels safe. The rest of the world out there is far away.
“Jodi?” Paula calls, her voice small.
Jodi stretches her fingers in front of her face, feeling without seeing, eyes frantic at first but soon settling. “Come on,” she hollers.
When Paula tumbles, finally, into the cavern, she sucks up half the air and Jodi feels everything flip. The room loud now with the jumble of both bodies.
“I’ve got a lighter here somewhere,” Paula says, but Jodi silences her.
“Shshsh, no. You’ll ruin it. You turn on a light and our eyes’ll never adjust.”
Adjust, just, just, ust, us, the rocks whisper.
Jodi can see without seeing that all Paula’s cocksureness is gone. She is scared and it tastes to Jodi like an ice-cold sweetness. She drinks it in, keeps it there on the back of her tongue.
“This way,” she says, inching forward toward the arch into the next room.
Their eyes do adjust and they quit falling, eventually, over every bump and start seeing the outlines of the stalagmites under their feet, the long white drips of icicle rocks, and green lichen glowing on fallen slabs of stone. They leave the second chamber and bend again, bowing to their knees as they make their way into the throne room.
The cake sits in the very center, as tall as Jodi’s waist and perfectly white. Paula’s breath sucks in. Stepping up, Jodi pulls her close, the warmth of their bare skin tingling against all that wet air. And just above them, in the arched dome of limestone, a small hole lets in two pin beams of light, bright at the surface but bluer below as they fall and spill across that slick mineral.
When they emerge everything is fuzzed up with the soft mauve of evening and lightning bugs just beginning to glint along the edges of the trees. Jodi can feel Paula beside her, taking it all in, and she wonders if the heart of this place is visible to her, if anyone else can ever love it like Jodi does.
Out of the dense grass, a few feet in front of them, a whorl of dark motion streams up, flapping and chittering. Paula falls back—What the fuck?—stumbling into Jodi. Jodi is stunned but laughing too.
“Bats,” she says. “They come up this time of night, out of the crevices and caves.”
The mattress shifted and there was a rustling in the blankets. Jodi twisted up out of her dreams and drew back instinctively, blinking, confused and then slowly remembering. Miranda was huddled in the bed beside her, sniffling.
“Hey.” Jodi touched her pale shoulder.
“I’m a fuckup.”
Jodi bent over her and in the dark she could just barely see the tears on Miranda’s freckled cheeks and her eyes swollen with crying, droplets caught in the long curl of her white lashes. As a child Jodi had never been much interested in playing with dolls but she could see now the joy it could bring. All the whirling, purring energy Miranda had carried with her earlier seemed to have leaked out and now she looked to Jodi like a small fragile jewel, something to be kept in a little velvet box, something worthy of adoring.
“You’ll be fine,” Jodi whispered.
“I’m such a fuckup,” Miranda repeated. “I can’t believe I let this all happen to me.”
“It’s gonna be okay.” Jodi brushed a strand of hair off her cheek and Miranda opened her eyes. They were wet but steady. She gripped one small surprisingly strong hand behind Jodi’s neck. Her lips were salty and insistent. Hungry, Jodi thought, as Miranda pulled up Jodi’s shirt and pinned her against the bed.
August 1988
“Check,” a voice calls out through the swarm of smoke and ping of slot machines. The voice is distinctly female in a room full of the deep vibrations of men.
Jodi glances over her shoulder, past the Triple Rose, Crazy Eights, and penny arcades, to the far corner where a poker game is under way. In a cocoon of smoke at a green table sit a trucker, a bearded dude in a hunting cap, one thin, pale-suited man, and a woman dressed like a redneck boy. The woman leans forward, elbows on the table and black hair slicked back under a cap. She’s been there for three days, winning more than half the hands she plays, and her presence carves a space in the room disproportionate to her size.
“Here you go, sweetheart.” The bartender pours a long stream of reddish-orange liquid into a frosted glass, lifting the shaker high and dripping in the last drops with a flourish. Jodi nods and swivels toward Jimmy Lauder on the stool beside her. His eyes jump to her face and she can feel his pride swell over the fact that she is sitting here with him. Jimmy was hired on at Render High only months before, taking over the junior- and senior-year chemistry classes. He has not started balding yet, though his body is softening into middle age. He is grateful, nearly pious in his appreciation of Jodi’s tight flesh, and his chemical-stained fingers move electric when they touch her.
In the weeks after Effie’s death, while the bank men and lawyers stalked her grandmother’s land, Jodi had escaped her parents’ house and lost herself in the pulse of Jimmy’s fingers and those long chalk-dusted afternoons. She is enamored with his need for her, the lost-dog look he gets in his eyes, and the way she can, simply by removing her shirt, cause him to tremble and beg. She is secretly astounded that this body of hers, with its bony angles and pale, chigger-bit skin, can have such power. She carries this knowledge around with her throughout her days and it makes her feel colossally tall.
“You want more vodka in there, you just tell me.” The bartender, Jimmy’s older brother, is pathetically proud to be serving Sex on the Beach to a sixteen-year-old. It is in his pickle-green trailer, in Wheeling, that Jodi and Jimmy are staying, blinding themselves all day with alcohol and the jittery screens of slot machines. Four days at the Wild ’N Wonderful Casino but this woman at the card table is the only interesting thing Jodi has seen.
“Raise twelve hundred,” the woman says.
She could be beautiful if she didn’t look so strange, dressed in the same worn flannel and work boots that all the men in Jodi’s family wear, a web of blue-black tattoos sleeving the skin of both arms. She is softly familiar but altogether different, a mixture of beautiful and ugly that wavers, like a hologram. Sharp cheekbones and a full pout of a mouth. She’s built like a country boy too, broad in the shoulders, thick biceps, and narrow hips.
“Hey, baby, what do you want to eat?” Jimmy leans in close, his hand against Jodi’s back.
Jodi shakes her head and takes a sip of her drink, the cold crystals catching in her throat.
At the poker table the suit flicks four orange chips from his stack. Beside him the trucker looks at his hand, then sends his cards sailing in the general direction of the dealer, who collects them swiftly and points at the woman. She adds orange chips to her purples and pushes them forward.
The bearded hunter folds, slides his cards to the dealer, and sits small in his chair as if losing to a woman has made him physically shrink.
On the stool beside Jodi, Jimmy spins, turning his attention to the game. His fingers find the clasp of Jodi’s bra under her shirt and he plucks it in a rhythm of one-two-three.
The suit matches the woman’s stack.
“Showdown,” the dealer barks.
For a moment, neither the woman nor the suit move.
“Gentlemen,” the dealer says, then glances at the woman and starts to correct himself.
She lays her cards on the felt and the dealer then pivots to the suit who throws his hand facedown. The dealer nods and rakes the pot toward the woman, chips jumping and clattering. She gathers them and then stands, mouth set hard, staring straight at Jodi.
“What a game.” Jimmy laughs a laugh-track laugh and brings his hand down to Jodi’s waist. His sweat hangs between them, smelling of fast food and anxiety.
In the bathroom mirror under the sharp overhead lights, Jodi is too skinny, with too many freckles and all that stringy black hair. She smoothes her tank top a
nd pulls it low across her tits. The light flickers and the door swings in. Jodi freezes. Behind her the woman stands so close she could stretch her fingers out and touch her, so close she can smell her. Bourbon and cigarettes and something sweet. Jodi looks up and meets the woman’s eyes in the flecked glass, and her breath jackknifes, a sharp heat forming between her legs.
“How much is he paying you?” the woman asks.
Jodi blinks and shakes her head, a line of sweat trickling down her chest. “We’re just friends.”
The woman’s lips break into a wide smile. Jodi stares down at her feet. She can’t really explain, even to her own self, the hunger inside her and the way that Jimmy’s lust can make it temporarily evaporate.
“You like those fruity drinks he buys you?”
Jodi moves away, scuffing her sneaker along the tile floor.
“You don’t even know what you like, do you?” the woman calls, and then, as Jodi opens the door and the flush of casino music filters in, “My name’s Paula,” she says.
By the time she has resumed her place at the poker table Paula has attracted a flotsam-jetsam audience: the bartender, a silver-haired businessman, the hunter, who is sitting out a round—everyone but Jimmy, who rests heavily in the low-slung seat at the Triple Rose machine, feeding it quarters. Jodi watches from the bar and every time she looks at Paula her breath goes all funny in her chest.
“Bet.” The suit flicks his orange chips. “Five thousand.”
Paula matches him, and the game rolls out in a repeating shuffle and snap. All Jodi understands of poker is the tight, angry wrestling of egos. The games she’s used to are a jumble of dog-eared cards and sweaty bills on oil drums out back of the Gas ’N Go, insults and compliments traded between neighbors and cousins while the girls nurse beers and stretch out on the hoods of rusted Chevys, showing off their newly shaved legs.
“Jesus fucking Mary.” The trucker sends his cards up into the air in a bright flurry. “The way she’s watching the dealer, she knows what’s coming her way.”
