Backseat Saints

by Joshilyn Jackson

  All the girls were in a line. Rose squirmed away and trotted fast from Sebastian to join them.

  Instead of a starter pistol, there was Mrs. Peirson, the gym teacher, counting down. Three, two, one, go! Rose took off. There was no way she could win. She was the shortest girl in the whole class. But Sebastian came fast up behind her. From the corner of her eye, she could see his shafts bounce as he ran. He bristled and dripped.

  Adrenaline washed into Rose Mae’s blood, a push like a big red wave. She put her head down and tore forward. She could see him keeping leering pace as she ran her guts out and kept running, past the hundred-yard mark, past the booth where they sold Cokes and Popsicles, though she could hear she was being called. “Stop, Rose Mae. Stop! Stop, you silly.” The crowd around the broad jumpers rose up in her path to block her.

  Rose felt hands on her, lifting her, swinging her body high, and she almost screamed. It was only her mother, who had run on quick little feet to catch up. Sebastian was gone, but he had indeed wrought a miracle. Rose Mae placed second.

  My mother had called saints when she lost her keys, when we were late, when we were hungry or sad or tired or jubilant. These saints that I had called today were hers. Cadillac Ranch was hers. Shooting at my husband, the bullets in my dog, these were all hers. I was doing what she wanted, obedient and dumb as that five-year-old who got a red ribbon because her mother called a saint stuck through with a thousand arrows and scarier than Satan.

  Behind me, the trail of saints popped one by one, like soap bubbles, misting the air and then becoming nothing. I pulled off the baseball cap. I was too hot to stand it any longer, and Cadillac damn Ranch was the one place in Texas I felt certain I would not run into my husband. The wind caught my sweaty hair and slung it around, snarling it. I let go of the cap, and the wind took it and tumbled it away across the field. My hair whipped into my face, and I could smell the sulfur of gunshots in it. I lifted my hands to my nose and breathed in more sulfur and fruit sugar clinging to my palms.

  For the first time since I’d gotten up and cooked Thom’s butter-logged breakfast, I felt like I was living wholly in my body. I gathered my hair up and held it in a wad at the base of my neck with one hand, glaring at the gypsy’s message. I was surprised the layers of paint didn’t blister and bubble and flake off and disappear under my angry gaze. Those words should be burned away. They were insulting on so many levels. Not the lowest of which was, she had written, I did love you, in the past tense.

  “Smug,” I said, and turned my back on the Caddies. I was done looking at them. I walked toward Mrs. Fancy’s car, my feet smashing down hard into the soil, every step an angry stab at the earth itself.

  She’d said Thom Grandee would kill me if I didn’t get him first. I had failed, and yet the earth still turned and Thom and I were both still breathing, because the reading wasn’t about me. It was all her.

  I had reached the road. I stamped at the asphalt to get the soil off my shoes and because the stamping felt good.

  The first card was loss. That was hers. She had lost me. Her marriage had been the thing that was made of swords, and no one knew that better than the girl who had spent her first eight years growing up inside of it. My mother was the hanged man, the one who’d had to choose, and she had chosen herself.

  There was a phrase for what her child had been to her. I knew it from the black-and-white war movies Thom and I rented to watch on the weekends. An acceptable casualty; that was what they called those poor fellows that the generals decided they could spare ahead of time. I was the thing she left in her place when she saved herself, and I was still sitting in it, in a place so like hers, it was easy for both of us to mistake who owned those cards.

  I got in Mrs. Fancy’s Honda and slammed the door so hard behind me that the car’s frame shuddered. The most terrible part was, now that I had seen through all her layered gypsy scarves and figured her out, she wasn’t here for me to tell her. I couldn’t shove her nose down into the truth. All the Stephen King book had given me was a city and a state, and unless I wanted to hire a plane to sky-write a message over Berkeley, I couldn’t tell her a damn thing.

  What was left? What could I do?

  I could get home. I felt my mouth drop open in a perfect O and my eyes widened. “They shot at you?” I said. Better. “They shot at you?” I could act surprised. I could go see if my dog was going to live. If only Gretel was alive, then I could sleep bug cozy next to my husband tonight in our soft bed.

  In the black-and-white movie Thom and I had watched not two weeks ago, they’d sent some French guy to have his head lopped off. He’d lifted his pointy nose and walked to the guillotine, calm and noble, saying, “The blood of kings flows in my veins.”

  Well, screw that. The blood of assholes flowed through Rose Mae Lolley’s. My mother had just proven that. She was not going to rescue me. She could take her empty You are welcome offer of a haven and stuff it directly up her ass. I’d sooner go to hell than go to California now. I didn’t need her, anyway. I’d forgotten, in the wake of seeing her, that I could damn well handle Thom Grandee. A woman who couldn’t would have been dead nine times over by now. I set off for home.

  My foot, heavy in its anger, had shoved the gas pedal down. I was going a good twenty miles over the speed limit. I made myself slow. The last thing I needed was to be pulled over now, with an unregistered gun in the car and no ID. And I was only speeding because I was angry with that gypsy. Surely Thom was off the road by now. He must be at the vet, please God, saving Gretel. Or he might be at the police station.

  Even now, this speeding, it was about the gypsy, too. I should have been home by now, unloading the dishwasher and practicing my surprised face. But instead I’d wasted an hour creeping around a wheat field looking for an empty love note she’d left with no way for me to write her back.

  “I’m going back there,” I told the blessedly empty car. “I’ll live through this and soothe Thom down, and then I’m going to take a rotisserie chicken and fruit salad and some paint and Gretel and Mrs. Fancy, and go out to Cadillac Ranch.” I would cover Sex, Drugs, Rock-n-Roll, Anna! and the silver remains of the gypsy’s message with graffiti of my own.

  I would be sure to bring red, so I could freshen up the hippie chick’s flowers. Beside the rose, I would write the word Jim, with a tiny heart for the i’s dot. Then a larger heart after his name, point up and humps down, so it looked like a pretty girl’s bottom. Jim upside down hearts Rose. Those words and pictures had been on the cover of every one of Rose Mae’s high school notebooks. It would feel good to write them again.

  Then when the gypsy returned, she’d see I’d left no answer. She wasn’t my loss. There would be nothing for her, and my doodle would stick in her throat, pointy as a fish bone.

  My loss was Jim Beverly. I’d thrown that fact at her at the airport like it was monkey poop, something to offend her as she’d gawked at my life like a tourist. Now it seemed like it was true. Rose Mae’d been soldered to Jim Beverly’s right hip bone from third grade on, through most of high school, for more years than Rose had had a mother.

  In grade school, after the boys were divvied up for kickball, Jim had picked her first from all the girls, every time. Rose Mae got free lunch in middle school, and Jim’s mother packed him one from home. He’d always shared his fresh fruit and eaten half her chalky brownie. In high school, she’d written his reports for civics, and he’d done her dissections. They’d traded virginities in tenth grade. He was the boy she first saw naked, too, though that was years earlier, when they were only nine. Rose had made him show first.

  They’d met in the woods behind the elementary school. He had turned his back, pulling down his shorts and underwear very quickly. His T-shirt hung down so only the lower half of his bottom showed. She saw two beige squares with a crease between them, flat and small, like the crimped edge of the Post toaster pastry she’d eaten for breakfast.

  “Now you,” he said.

  Rose turned her back. She was
so spindly that she barely had a butt at all, more like a little slice. She reached up under her dress, careful not to raise the hem, and pushed her cotton underpants down. Then she quickly flipped the skirt up and back down, yanking up her panties a scant second after. She turned around to face him. It was summer, and the Alabama woods were so lush that even the air seemed green as the sunlight filtered through all those trees.

  “Want to do fronts?” Jim asked.

  Rose shrugged and they stood there for half a minute, maybe longer. She said, “You first.”

  “I did butts first.”

  She waved that away. “Everyone has butts. You first.”

  He shrugged and pulled his shorts down again, this time using his other hand to raise his T-shirt, just a little. His thighs were pressed tight together, from nerves, she thought, and it pushed his testicles forward into a wad, so that the whole thing looked like an upside-down pansy. His pale, smooth penis was the rounded bud tuft at the center.

  “It’s nice,” Rose said, surprised.

  “Now you,” he said, yanking up his shorts.

  Rose scuffed one foot at the dirt, not looking at him.

  “Now you,” he said again, more insistent because she had one over on him; it wasn’t equal anymore.

  “Rose Mae!” he said, but it seemed to Rose there was no way to make it equal. She was only a little pad of fat there where he would see. All her interesting pieces were tucked under.

  “I want to be fair,” she said, eyebrows coming together. He nodded, uncertain.

  She left her panties on and began lifting her dress. She crumpled the hem of it in her fists as she went, pulling it high so that he could see her belly and her skinny rib cage. Her trunk was a mess of dark, welted flesh that began at the panty line and went up, swelling her flat chest where her breasts would one day be. The bruises were all fresh. Her mother had been gone almost a year now, and her daddy had only just started.

  Jim’s eyes widened. She thought they got darker, too, but it was only his pupils expanding. The black ate up the blue to a little rim.

  “Can I touch?”

  Rose shrugged. He stepped forward and reached out one dirty brown boy’s hand to cover her belly, tracing the mottled black and purple in a soft pet that ended at her nipple. Then he pulled back his hand as if her skin was hot.

  “We’re even,” Rose said, and let her dress go, the hem falling back down around her knees. He didn’t bother to nod or say yes. It was obvious that they were.

  Instead he said, “I won’t tell,” and Rose nodded, solemn.

  We neither of us told, not ever.

  “He was the loss,” I told the gypsy. I hated her for not being present to hear.

  I was exiting 40 now, in Amarillo proper, three minutes from home. I should have kept that baseball cap. I was too recognizable with my hair down. My cheeks felt flushed and I had a familiar coiled feeling winding itself up inside my belly. I hadn’t noticed it happening under the anger, but I could trace it back. It had started when I thought of Jim Beverly and his brown, square bottom, how it looked like toaster pastry tabs.

  That ass never changed as he got older. It hardly got bigger, and as he grew up, it stayed his narrowest point. By high school, his short, muscular thighs had been wider. Above that tight ass, his spine had dipped into a smooth slope of ribs and ropy muscle that led up to his broad shoulders. The thing in my belly coiled tighter.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” I said aloud. I’d spent the morning shooting at my husband, and now my body was readying for sex. After a moment, I nodded. My body was wise. It knew how to handle Thom Grandee.

  I was turning onto my own street now, heading for our squatty ranch house in the middle of the block. I was almost to Mrs. Fancy’s when I saw Thom’s familiar blue Bronco with its wide white stripe was parked in the middle of our driveway. Worse, there was a Chevy truck pulled in behind, huge and black and gleaming like a custom job for the devil himself, if the devil bought domestic. It belonged to Thom’s parents.

  The Grandee clan was gathering, and Thom had beaten me home.

  CHAPTER

  4

  TIME KEPT ROLLING FORWARD, and Mrs. Fancy’s car kept right on rolling with it. I sat helpless on my butt inside of both, toted forward in a horrified, slow-motion promenade down my own street. I was almost to Mrs. Fancy’s drive now, with my own driveway up next. Tom’s Bronco and the black truck stood out in my vision, crisp and sharp-edged. Our house looked brighter, too, more real than the rest of the neighborhood. It was a fifties ranch house, built flat, but even so, it was doing its damnedest to loom at me.

  The previous owner had ruined our brick by coating it in sickly pastel paint. It was like Crest toothpaste, a matte, grained aqua that looked pure icy with mint. Now that color stung at my eyes, and I felt them watering up. I forced my head to turn away and found myself looking up Mrs. Fancy’s drive. My hands followed the way I was looking, and the car turned and started up the slope.

  My left hand reached up to the sun visor, and I pushed the button on the automatic garage door opener. I rolled smoothly into the garage, snaking under the rising door. I didn’t wait. I double-punched the button and had the door heading back the way it had come the second the Honda’s back end was through the opening. It took that garage door a solid year to grind its way closed, but finally it touched down, blocking out the sunlight.

  I sat listening to the Honda’s engine tick its way toward cool, watching the digital clock on the dash: 10:37. Thom and his parents were probably powwowing in the living room, smack in the middle of the house. That room had a huge picture window that faced the street, and if one of them had happened to be peering out from between the curtains, I wouldn’t have to wait long. Even if they hadn’t been watching, the garage door’s noises might catch Thom’s attention; he knew Mrs. Fancy was out of town. To my ears, the damn door had roared and growled like a bear on fire, hollering to get word about his predicament to his relations in Alaska.

  The clock’s last number changed: 10:38.

  I didn’t hear Thom’s big feet lowering the sea level of Mrs. Fancy’s yard as he stamped across to kill me. I didn’t hear him bellowing my name. It was quiet and dim in the tidy garage. I waited to be sure. If any of them had seen me driving Mrs. Fancy’s car, the best place for me was behind the wheel, ready to drive like hell. There was no way to explain Pawpy’s gun or where I’d been while someone was shooting at the Grandees’ eldest boy.

  The clock numbers rolled over again. Still no Thom. No rumble of Joe Grandee or Charlotte, his shrill, piping wife. Clear, I thought, and felt my body break out in a wash of fresh sweat, as if my skin had been holding it in like breath.

  I was already moving, snatching Mrs. Fancy’s keys out of the ignition and grabbing up my book and the bag of gun chunks. I fumbled and almost dropped the whole armload as I scrambled out the car door. I clutched my things to my chest and struggled upright. Every minute counted now, as each was one more minute’s absence I had to explain.

  What the hell was Thom doing home? And with his parents? I had thought he’d be at the vet, unless Gretel was— I couldn’t bear to finish the thought.

  The garage had a door that opened into the peachy-colored kitchen. I went inside and spilled my things across Mrs. Fancy’s countertop. Thom had been shot at, for the love of holy God, didn’t he have some things he needed to do? But no, he’d come home and holed up with Joe and Charlotte, and he must be wondering where the hell his Ro was, especially since the ancient Park Avenue I drove—monkey-shit brown and wide as a tugboat—was still parked in our garage. That car was a hand-me-down from Thom’s mother. Joe called it a courtesy car, because we’d gotten it for free. Considering the gas it ate and the sheer number of abrasive Fifth Amendment bumper stickers Joe had plastered across the back of it, I thought it might have been more of a courtesy to simply tell me that walking everywhere would keep my ass toned.

  Mrs. Fancy’s yellow cat, Phil, came barreling up and starte
d hollering at me. I blinked stupidly. I’d forgotten to feed him this morning when I was over here stealing Mrs. Fancy’s car. He spat out a row of short, urgent mews, like his stomach was a bomb that needed to be defused and we had to get to the Purina bag. Now.

  Thom should be at the police station. He would have called the police, no doubt. He had to have. I had seen it on his face, that moment when he realized this wasn’t someone shooting, it was someone shooting at.

  Also, I’d hit Gretel at least once. Wasn’t the vet obliged to call the cops? Or was that only people doctors? I’d logged enough time at the ER to learn that they had to call the cops for any gunshot wound. Hell, they wanted to call the cops for me every time, and that was only bruises and cracked bones, not bullets. By now they knew me so well, I figured I could show up with a sinus infection and the charge nurse would ask if I wanted the police out of sheer habit.

  There was this one poky-nosed nurse in particular who always pushed me to “notify the authorities.” She was a skinny, pale thing with permanent yogurt breath, as if she herself might be fermenting. Last time, she’d laid one of her hands, pink and soft as a mouse paw, on the wrist that wasn’t broken and said, “You don’t have to live like this,” while my very flesh tried to creep off me to get out from under her touch.

  “I fell downstairs,” I said in my best bored voice, staring through her.

  “Last time you said you had a ranch house, Mrs. Grandee,” she said, and I was so surprised she’d remembered that I almost met her eyes. But I didn’t. I’d come to this ER two or three times a year since my marriage. Our third year had been hard; I’d been in five times. I was a pro by now, and I kept my stare aimed at the wall over her left shoulder.