Backseat Saints

by Joshilyn Jackson

  The noise was Fat Gretel’s noise, and I had shot my good, good dog. Time stuttered and slowed so abruptly that the next eight seconds was a series of Polaroid pictures. The first one was Gretel, kicking on the ground, and I understood that Thom had brought my dog with him, running. Gretel had been that huffing echo, and now she was the wretched howling, and all at once I was so angry that the tears stopped.

  He was supposed to drop her at the vet, but he must have waited there until she had her shots and then brought her along to make her run. He was always wanting me to run the fat off her, even though I said to leave her be. I got Gret from the pound soon after we married, and she’d lived a sinless life with me for five years now. I didn’t often cry, but when I did, she padded around and around me in worried circles, making houndy sorrow-groans in her throat, keeping vigil till I stopped. She had earned the right to spread out happy on the floor and be as fat as she wanted.

  We moved forward, all of us, one frame. The owl burst upwards in a panicked ball of feathers, like a flare marking my spot. Gretel howled. Thom, spooked by the owl, yelled, “You fucking moron, hold your fire. We are here!” My mouth gaped open and nothing came out but a thin whine of released air.

  He couldn’t possibly have heard my breath, but Thom started toward me. Gretel’s howl broke and wavered, becoming a long, betrayed yodel. This lower sound went on and on, as if she would never inhale again. I squatted in the ditch, inert.

  He reached the hairpin in two elongated lopes that ate up the ground between us. He was coming to drag me out and kill me. Now. For one frame, I was helpless skin half-filled with air, floppy and useless. In the next frame, I was Rose Mae again. The separation I’d felt earlier ended, and there was no girl inside a girl. I was Rose and here was Thom, coming toward me like always, this time to kill me. There was my dog, hurt on the ground, needing my help, and Thom stood between us. My hands lifted the gun, rock steady, one eye squinched shut, and I went for the head shot. Twice. I had no time for true aim; my bullets whined past his left ear. They came so close that he must have felt the heat of their whistling trail.

  Thom guttered to a halt, and I watched him understand that this was not someone shooting. This was someone shooting at. He wasn’t heading toward a stranger’s dumb mistake. He was heading into bullets, purposeful and aimed. He dove sideways as I tried to get a bead on him, his body an indignant line that disappeared into the trees on the left side of the trail.

  Gretel stopped yodeling. I listened hard, terrified she was gone, and then caught the sound of her ragged breathing. I could feel a scream building up inside me, swelling, pushing up into my throat. I turned the gun sideways and banged myself in the head with the flat side, hard enough to daze myself and stop it.

  Two bullets past Thom’s ear. Two in my dog. I had two left. I crouched low in the ditch, gun pointing at the lip. I listened for his creeping sounds to come at me from one side or another. Thom was smart. He would choose a route and come as quiet as he could to the spot the owl had marked. When he looked down into the ditch and saw that the face of the shooter was his Ro’s face, maybe there would be a pause in him, a small window where I could finish this. That close, I wouldn’t miss. I would have to shoot him if I wanted to live long enough to save Gretel.

  Fat Gretel moaned. I heard her feet scuffling against the dirt. I poked my head up just over the lip, alligator style, and there was Thom. He was back on the trail. Bent over her. My hands were steady. My eyes were clear. I lifted Pawpy’s gun and lined him up, tracking him. My finger tightened. Two bullets left, and I could feel how perfect the shots were, one in the spine as he bent over, one in the head.

  Then he scooped up Gretel. My breath caught and my mouth rounded into a surprised O. He was not creeping through the trees, seeking out the shooter. He was not turning tail and sprinting away as fast as his strong legs could carry him. He was risking himself to rescue my dog. The skin on his back shuddered like a horse’s skin, and I knew he felt my sights creeping across him like flies.

  He lifted fifty pounds of dog like she was nothing, adrenaline assisting the hours he’d spent lifting weights and running this trail. He started loping away, slow, hampered by my crying dog. He ran serpentine, trying not to be an easy target, but Gretel ruined his balance and his speed, so he was. I could have shot him with no effort. I tracked him, but my finger remained slack against the trigger. His courage and his weighed-down grace knocked me breathless. I watched him risk his hide for a dog he’d never had much use for, saving her because she was mine, because I loved her so. He zigzagged away as fast as he could, all the while feeling the black gaze of the gun on his back.

  It was the most romantic thing that I had ever seen.

  I’d stopped the Hail Mary a while back, I realized. Now a rhyme was running in my head, from the Grimm’s fairy-tale book my mother used to read me when I was too small to shoot anything but a BB gun. Oh Snowy-white, Oh Rosy-red, Will you beat your lover dead? It was a poem from a prince, trapped in bear form. He slept on Snow White’s hearth, and she and her sister, Rose Red, would beat the snow out of his fur and roll him back and forth between them with their naked feet. He’d say the rhyme to make those rowdy girls be gentle with him.

  The bear’s poem looped around and around, catching and matching the weaving bob of Thom’s head as he ran serpentine away down the trail, ungainly but whole.

  My finger stayed lax. Only that morning, I’d lifted my face, open like a posy, for him to lean down and kiss. Only that morning, I’d gotten up early to fix his eggs. Then I’d come out here ahead of him to drop the body I had fed, leave it to keep the ants company in these green woods. Thom’s blond head set behind the slope. He was gone. I pulled the gun back into two pieces and dropped them in the bag.

  I leaned forward in the ditch and put my face into the earth. I felt roots poking me. I’d starting crying again without noticing. I was crying for Gretel and for my own spineless love. I wept until my bones went liquid, and then I wept them out. I lay against the ditch like a tired piece of rag.

  An idle part of me began to wonder where Thom was. I felt like I’d been lying in the dirt and crying for hours, but when I looked at my watch, I saw less than ten minutes had passed. There was a Shell gas not two miles away, and they’d have a pay phone. I wanted to call Thom and ask how Gretel was, where he was taking her, if she was still breathing, but I didn’t know where to reach him. Thom’s skinflint daddy had yet to join the rest of the world and replace Thom’s pager with a mobile phone.

  He’d take Gretel to the vet, I thought, and then what? Home? The police station? I sat up straight, pulled up in the sudden understanding that I didn’t have to track him down. He would be tracking me, and soon. Men who got shot at called their wives, the very first minute they could.

  I scrambled up out of the ditch, clutching my bag. I could not have Thom wondering where his wife had been. Not today, of all days. When his call came, Ro Grandee had to be at home in a daisy yellow skirt and ballet flats, tenderly hand-washing the sticky yolk off Thom’s breakfast dishes. I took off for the car at a dead run.

  CHAPTER

  2

  I BLAMED THAT AIRPORT gypsy. I tried to kill Thom Grandee because she’d told me it was him or me. She’d urged me to choose him. I don’t know how long she’d been lurking around in Amarillo; I caught her just as she was leaving. If Mrs. Fancy hadn’t asked me to drive her to the airport, the gypsy would have left town without me ever knowing she was here, alive and chock-full of dire pronouncements. The airport trip was like that nail that dropped the shoe that lamed the horse that lost the battle. If I hadn’t taken Mrs. Fancy, I never would have been laying for my husband in the woods.

  Mrs. Fancy was my next-door neighbor, and her baking pans had been on a mission to make me go up a dress size since the day Thom and I had moved into the house. She’d come by with a muffin basket, and when she’d handed it to me, she’d taken aholt of a piece of my arm and breathed up in my face, saying, “It’s so nice
to see young folks moving back into the neighborhood!” She had puppy breath and a pincery grip. Thom had gotten rid of her as fast as possible, and then I’d leaned against our closed front door, laughing while Thom pretended to nail it shut.

  But that didn’t stop her from tottering back across the narrow strip of lawn, bringing me baked goods and small talk. She showed me how to feed my sick forsythia bush, and it came back the next spring blooming brighter than ever. She seemed to understand immediately that she shouldn’t come by when Thom was home. The first time she saw my arm in a sling, she asked, but only the first time. She accepted my explanation that I’d tripped in the dark with a long blink and a tutting noise. Then she’d made the chewy brownies she’d discovered were my favorite, and she never asked again. Before we’d lived there a year, I’d grown a taste for both her pastries and her undemanding friendship. I found myself crossing that strip of lawn almost as often as she did, carrying homemade lemonade or a pot of flavored coffee. She was my little secret.

  Last week she’d come to my porch with a covered plate in one powder-dry paw, asking for a lift to the airport so she could go see her new grandbaby. “My last grandbaby,” she called him. She’d smiled at me, and the skin around her eyes had looked like ancient paper, so folded and creased that it might have been used to make a hundred different origami cranes.

  “I’d love to drive you,” I’d said, and she’d smoothed a strand of hair out of my eyes and gone home, leaving me with five thousand pepper-jacked calories and a Tuesday so overbooked that I was going to have to hire a neighborhood girl to go pee for me.

  My plan was to go on my run, grab Mrs. Fancy, drive like a cocaine-addled hell bat to the airport, hurl her and her bags out as I slowed down in the drop-off lane, then do an Olympic-speed grocery store sprint and get a dinner going in the Crock-Pot before I jumped in the shower and headed in to work a shift for Thom’s daddy. I ran the cash register at his main store most weekday afternoons, while Joe Grandee sat on his stool by the door to the offices and watched me with his gaze set low, a smolder on my hips.

  Last week he’d said to me, “It wouldn’t hurt business any if you took that blouse down a button, sugar,” just as if my husband wasn’t on the phone with a vendor not five feet away.

  Even when Thom came over, Joe didn’t stop looking at me like I was hot cornbread, buttered up and dripping honey. He elbowed Thom and said, “Knowing guns like she does, I bet your wife could outsell my best floor man if she got out from behind the counter in that tight blue skirt.”

  A muscle jumped in Thom’s cheek, but Joe was too busy ogling me to notice. He lumbered off to the back to get a Coke. I smiled at Thom and said, “Sales out the ass, he means,” to lighten up the mood.

  Thom only grunted and said, “Watch your mouth.” He didn’t have much of a sense of humor when it came to his daddy.

  Tuesday morning, I ended my run at Mrs. Fancy’s house and rang her doorbell, panting like an animal, my hair scraped back in a sweat-slick tail. She was packed up and ready to go, with three enormous suitcases waiting by her front door. I dragged one in each hand out to the car while Mrs. Fancy followed, carrying the third bag. As I stuffed my two in her Honda’s trunk, she set the last bag flat in the driveway and popped it open to show me.

  That suitcase paused me. I stared down into a swamp of rabbit-covered receiving blankets and stuffed animals and those weird onesie T-shirts with the snaps in the crotch and a whole stack of blue and yellow baby gowns, the kind that look like pastel lunch bags with drawstrings at the feet.

  My gut went soft as taffy. Mrs. Fancy was a widow lady on a fixed income, and she’d bought a whole suitcase full of presents for this grandbaby, even though it was her ninth. She would have to lay out plenty more to take the extra bag on the plane. She could probably have sent the presents FedEx for cheaper, but I could see how it was. She wanted to be there when her daughter opened up that bag. I bent my head and picked up a floppy giraffe doll so she wouldn’t see my eyes had glistened up. As soon as I could blink myself back right, I helped her tuck all the gifts back in and loaded that last case.

  Digging through those presents cost me time I didn’t have to spare. I wove us in and out of traffic in a way that irked the hell out of me when other people did it. Mrs. Fancy sat in the passenger seat, too excited to notice her sweet friend was driving like the very devil. She smiled at me as I got on the highway, and I glimpsed a streak of hot pink lipstick on her teeth.

  “Janine only just got married last year,” she said, turning to face forward again. She wasn’t watching the road, though. Her eyes focused on the horizon like she was already airborne. “She’s forty-two. The babiest of all my babies, in her forties. Can you imagine?” I nodded and slipped in between two enormous trucks like one of those crazy little remora fish that lives its whole life darting from shark to shark. “I never thought she’d have children.”

  Mrs. Fancy had raised her voice to talk over the enraged blast of honking from the trucker I’d cut off, but there was something in her tone that made my ears prick up. She sounded sly, and sly wasn’t like her. “A long time ago, she got herself married to a very bad man. Never even finished high school. When she finally got shut of him, she was done with men and all drove to get careered. Never thought this day would come.” Mrs. Fancy started rooting in her bag, trying to look anything but crafty, but I could smell crafty coming off her in waves.

  “Don’t,” I said, but she ignored me, or maybe she thought I was talking to the guy in a red Nissan who was trying to slip into my lane.

  “She traded that bad husband in for a spine and started her own business. Spring Cleaners, it’s called, and she had to hire her own ladies to scrub out her toilet. She got so busy getting other people’s houses clean that hers was about to get carried off by the bugs. Seemed to me like she hardly noticed she was getting older, but I kept thinking about this Newsweek article I read, something about how a woman her age was more likely to get shot by a terrorist than get a husband.

  “Then last year, every time she got on the phone, the name Charles would find itself in my ear. Charles this and Charles that and Charles says. I kept casual because I liked the sound of this Charles. I didn’t want to spook her. He seemed like a door opener, you know? The kind who helps you on with your jacket. Sure enough, now my Janine’s married, living regular and peaceful, with a sweet little baby. That’s all I ever wanted for any of my kids.” She was still rooting around in her bag, being careful not to look at me, because her story damn well did have a point, and she was poking Rose Mae’s craw with it. “Oh dear, I hope I have my ticket with me. Did you see me get my ticket?”

  I glanced down, and I could see that ticket right in the middle. She was digging all around it, though it was one of the three biggest things in her jam-packed handbag. I reached over and jerked it out of her bag and threw it into her lap. I toted her big trash can down to the curb every Tuesday. I fed her cat when she was out of town. In return, she talked to me about her knitting club and her reader’s circle at her church, and she made it a point to never ask me why I wore long sleeves all summer. She was deal breaking, I felt like. She was ruining something.

  “Thanks, honey,” she said, so warm, showing me her lipstick teeth again. I looked at her frail shoulders, her soft lady belly setting on her lap, and mad as I was, I knew I had to help my friend. There was no way she could manage those three suitcases alone, even across Amarillo’s teeny airport.

  I could feel my tightly scheduled Tuesday start to pull ahead and leave me behind, and that made me madder. I put my blinker on and swapped lanes again, taking the fork that led to hourly parking.

  “I’ll walk you in,” I said, snappish.

  “Oh, no, honey. You can just drop me,” she said.

  “I want to take you in. Really. I like airports,” I said, like I’d been born stupid. No one likes airports.

  But she brightened and said, “I like them, too! I love to see folks so busy and going places.”


  I parked and got the trunk unloaded in one-sided silence while Mrs. Fancy hummed and peered about, blind to the smoke leaking out of my ears. I got a cart and trundled all her luggage in. Once inside, she stood blinking, round-eyed as an owl, then started digging in her bag for her ticket again.

  “You need to be in this line,” I said, impatient. I’d already given up groceries. I could feel dinner and the shower escaping, and I wondered if Joe would still think I could outsell his best floor man if I smelled like a walking armpit. On the other hand, it might get me out of doing the damn shift. “Come with me.”

  I got her into the right line, but then she couldn’t find her ID. I decided I better stay and make sure she got properly checked in. I dug her wallet out from under her travel-size tissue and a herd of Trident gum packs and handed it to her.

  She took it absently, peering all around her, and then she poked me with her elbow and whispered, “Look, that’s me! That’s me at thirty!” She nodded sideways at a slinky brunette who was standing two lines over.

  I looked at the brunette, mystified, and then back to Mrs. Fancy.

  She said, “It’s a game, silly. Mr. Fancy and I used to play it all the time, in airports. We would try to find us, how we would be in twenty years, or thirty, and maybe eavesdrop and see if we were going anyplace interesting. He liked to tease me with his picks! He’d find old crabby couples bickering, and he’d say, ‘There we are in fifty years!’ Or he’d play sweet, and find the prettiest girl you ever saw and say, ‘Now that one is almost you, only not so cute, not so cute.’ These days I don’t travel much, but when I do, I try to find me when I was a young mother or a newly married lady. I can’t hope to find me older, unless someone is being flown home in a box!”