I boosted myself off the wall and came after her. She wasn’t running, exactly, but it was close. I trotted to keep up, relentless. With the whole green lawn of the quad in front of us, where could she go?
“Hold up, Arlene. I just need to ask you a couple of questions and then I swear I won’t bother you anymore.”
Then she did start running, actually running away from me, like I was some sort of vampirous animal that had crawled out from under her bed to make a God’s honest try for a daytime chew on her vitals. I broke into a lope, too, raising my voice.
“I called your cousin Clarice, but she wasn’t home and I ended up talking to Bud. He told me you talked to Jim Beverly, the night Jim wrecked his Jeep.”
Arlene stopped so fast that I barreled into her. His name had retained its magical effect on her. It was like she’d been hypnotized at a party once, and now the words Jim Beverly made her body jerk and panic. We stood facing each other, exactly eye to eye. She was breathing hard, as if we’d run a marathon together instead of dogtrotting halfway across a quad.
“I didn’t talk to him,” Arlene said, but she came down hard on the word talk, and I stepped in a little closer, pressing my advantage.
“But you saw him?” I asked. I grabbed her arm, trying to make her look at me. “Where was he? What was he doing?”
She pulled away so hard, I almost overbalanced. “I don’t know,” she said. “There’s nothing I can tell you about this.”
Then I did make her meet my eyes. I willed it fierce, and I thought his name like a talisman, thought it so hard that it was like she heard it and her mouth trembled and her unwilling eyes met mine. When I had her, I said, “I don’t believe you. I know you saw him.”
She wet her lips with her tongue, as if she was about to speak. Her gaze darted away and then back to me, away and then back. She made a throat-clearing noise, and then all at once she wheeled and bounded away again, tearing her arm out of my grasp. She went so quick that she ran right out of her shoes. She left them lying in the grass by a stand of four oak trees, and then she dropped her briefcase, too, like she was shedding.
I watched with my mouth hanging open as Arlene Fleet bounced and grabbed a low branch. She went shimmying up one of the trees, barefoot monkey style.
“Arlene?” I called. “What are you doing?”
She didn’t answer, picking her way from branch to branch, climbing so high that if she lost her balance and fell, her bones would snap and crackle against the earth like kiddie breakfast cereal.
“Arlene, this is ridiculous,” I yelled up at her. “Get down here.”
A crowd of students was gathering, smelling drama, but Arlene ignored us all. She crammed her tiny butt into a fork, sitting way up in the tree as stoic as Tiger Lily, her long dark hair blowing back from her face as she pointed her nose into the wind and stared out across campus.
I hollered, “You can’t stay up there in that tree forever. You have to come and talk to me.” No response. I cast about wildly for an idea, and my gaze landed on her loafers. “If you don’t get down here, I am going to take your shoes!”
One of the kids who was watching gave me a poisonous look and said, “You are not taking her shoes.” The kid snatched up the loafers before I could, and then her friend grabbed Arlene’s briefcase for good measure. They marched indignantly to the side with their prizes, standing over them like a pair of pimply avenging angels.
Arlene stayed where she was, as still and absent as a catatonic. She had somehow made the world go away and me with it.
“Oh, that’s so fucking Zen, Arlene,” I hollered. “You get your ass down here and you tell me where he is!”
Behind me, I heard one girl say to another in wise tones, “Oh! Boyfriend trouble.”
The other said, “Are they twins? Was he screwing twins?”
I wheeled around and snapped at them, “I don’t look like her.” I almost screamed it, really.
The two girls exchanged a nervous glance, then they turned away and started walking. The first one said to her friend, “Jeez, what did he do to them?”
“He didn’t do a single fucking thing to me,” I yelled after them. They sped up, the first one peeking back over her shoulder at me with wide eyes. I realized that if someone asked her to find the crazy lady in this picture, she’d have to flip a coin to choose between me and Arlene Fleet.
They were out of range, but I said it anyway. “He didn’t do a single thing to her, either.”
Even as I said it, I found that I did not believe it.
I turned back and stared up at Arlene on her perch. I’d thought to ambush her at work and threaten to make a crazy scene, but she’d out-crazy-scened me. Her reaction to his very name was immediate, and the only word for it was terrified. She knew about Jim Beverly all right, more than I did.
Something had happened between Jim and Arlene, and now his very name put Arlene three baby steps from prancing naked off a building singing the “Gloria.” Only now, with her body trembling up in the treetops and her mind gone to a happy place, with me baying up at her like a foaming mad hound dog, was it occurring to me that those two things had to be related.
“What did he do to you?” I asked, too quiet for Arlene to hear me, even if she had chosen that moment to come back inside her body. All at once, I felt so light-headed that I had to put out a hand and steady myself on the oak’s broad trunk. I’d puked up everything I’d eaten in the last two days. I was exhausted, too. I hadn’t gotten much sleep last night. This close to finals, the school’s library was open twenty-four hours. I’d camped out there, sharing a crackly vinyl sofa with a blond girl who was trying to absorb her engineering text by pillowing her head upon its cover.
I pushed off the tree and started walking, leaving Arlene Fleet to sit up there until the Second Coming if she wanted. I could stay in Chicago and pop out at her from under bushes and out of dark alleys, but she wasn’t going to tell me where Jim was or what ugly thing had happened between them.
I left the campus, retracing my path down the same indifferent Chicago streets I’d walked yesterday. Then it had felt as free as swimming naked. Now, being so unknown and unmoored was frightening enough to put me close to tears. These were not my streets. The only person I knew in this city was building herself a marriage much like mine, and she hated me.
Whatever Jim had done to her, it was very, very bad. I knew he was capable of very, very badness. He was capable of anything. There had been something in Jim that had spoken to me, monster to monster. The reverent way he’d touched my bruised belly. The calico cat with her head on backwards. I’d only seen glimpses, had guesses, but it was real and there, or else I would not have come to Chicago to retrieve him. I’d been looking for a weapon, and I’d thought of guns first and then Jim Beverly. That should have told me something.
My body was too achy with tired to keep on walking. I crossed the street and caught a bus that was heading east, back toward Arlene’s crappy neighborhood. I sat up front, in the handicapped seats that faced sideways, resting my face against the cool silver pole.
Jim had always been so sweet with me. But I’d known then and I knew now that I’d been held separate from the darker pieces of his life. Hell, I’d been held separate from most of his life. On Friday nights, after the football game, we’d go off alone. The “Hot Donuts Now” sign would be flashing at the Krispy Kreme. I’d have coffee and a doughnut, and he’d have coffee and six doughnuts, just the two of us. His hair would still be damp from the showers, and I’d put one hand on his neck and run it up and down the back of his head. The velveteen and springy wheatgrass feel of his buzz cut was a pleasure.
No other football boys would be there. None of their steady girls came, ever. It was a rathole in Fruiton’s small and seedy downtown, with bright blue-green Formica counters and pumpkin-colored vinyl on all the stools and booths. It looked like a demented and slightly color-blind Auburn fan had been cut loose in there to decorate. Our fellow customers were bums, drifters from the Greyhou
nd station, and Fruiton High’s small population of stoner kids. The stoners liked to stare through the huge plateglass window behind the counter, watching the big doughnut machine crank out the good stuff. We sat, a closed unit of two, and watched them watching. We were the only two sober kids in the building, on the block, maybe in the whole damn town. Everyone we knew was grunt pumping cheap beer over at Missy Carver’s house.
Friday night, off-season, meant Jim’s parents would be sitting across from each other at the brand spankin’ new Olive Garden, silently eating chicken Parm with endless breadsticks. I remember one Friday when we sat at that counter for over an hour, waiting his parents out. At nine, we drove by Jim’s house to check for his dad’s car. His folks were still gone, and that meant they’d decided to catch the second show at the movies. The caffeine, the sugar, they had been warm-ups. The house was ours for the next ninety minutes, and we went inside to get our real fix.
“Date night for the grown folk,” I said to Jim, pulling off my hand-me-down dress and dropping it to the floor. I’d worn someone’s pretty lace cami instead of a bra. It had a stain on the back, but Jim was focused on my front. “After dinner, I bet your dad says, ‘Hey, Laura, you want to see a movie? Or go home and do it?’”
“Shut up,” Jim said, laughing, reaching for me, sweet like always.
I imitated his mom’s prim, high voice. “Movie, please! I like to gander at that Clint Eastwood for a couple hours, before.”
“This is so not the time to talk like my mom,” Jim said, hands on my cami. “Don’t you ever pick the movie, Rose-Pop.”
He pushed the cami up and stepped in closer, fingers moving careful and reverent down the chain of boot-print bruises that ran from my rib cage to my hip and down my thigh. The darkened flesh felt hot to him, he’d told me once, like it had fever. I pretended he was rubbing them away, but I knew better. He liked it.
We were seniors. That was the year sex changed for me. It stopped being something I did for him because I loved him, loved the kissing parts and closeness and the smell of him. Something opened up for me that year, my body finally catching up to my choices, coming to understand all the things he was learning to do to me on his squeaky brown bunk bed, top and bottom. He knew exactly how to touch me, how to move between my legs to please me, but always, always, his lips and fingers came back to haunt the spots where I was blackened and punctured and ruined.
He never hurt me himself. In fact, he’d once gotten in a fistfight with my daddy on the lawn, telling him to keep his hands off me. I needed sweetness, and Jim gave me that. The other thing I needed, I got plenty of at home. I took hard roundhouse rights on the sly from Daddy, separate from Jim. What had Jim Beverly been getting on the sly?
He’d gotten it from Arlene Fleet. And Dawna Sutton, too, I realized. On the phone she’d said she hoped Jim was burning deep, deep, deep in deepest hell, an extreme consequence for a three-date relationship in high school, unless something truly ugly had happened between them.
I dug around in my bag for my notepad and a pen. I started writing Arlene a letter. I tried to remember everything I’d said to her, to keep it in character. It was part apology, but mostly, its purpose was to let her know I could find out what I needed elsewhere. I assured her I would not be troubling her again, because I owed her that much. I folded it up and wrote her name on the outside of it. I would leave it on her door, and then I would be out of time, in more ways than one.
I hadn’t let Mrs. Fancy take me to her church’s shelter. I couldn’t. Ro Grandee was harder to peel off myself than leprosy. I knew if I got scared and cold and lonely enough, Ro would bring me back to Thom. I’d wanted to remove that option, remove Thom from the earth. In the hospital, then at home ruining my ex-wardrobe, even yesterday as I puked my way across the country, I’d been so careful not to think of how things would be after, when Thom was gone and I was left alone with Jim.
I hadn’t wanted to think of it, because I knew already. It would be the same thing. Before I got rid of my last bad man, I was making damn sure I had another man just like him already lined up. Jim was every boy who had ever belonged to me, from my daddy on down, and I hadn’t understood what that meant until Arlene Fleet had scrambled up a tree and made me understand: Thom was suicide, and Jim was Thom in a different body. A permanent end to Thom did not end my need for him.
I took inventory. I was almost out of money. I didn’t know this city, and I didn’t have a single friend here. The most valuable objects in my purse were a fake ID, a can of pepper spray, and a plane ticket back to Amarillo. If I was running, the start line could not be Chicago.
I had too much I couldn’t leave in Amarillo. My dog. My Pawpy’s gun. Rose Mae Lolley’s ID and bank card, which would let me clean out our checking account. But at four this afternoon, my shift at Grand Guns started, and if I wasn’t there, some overhelpful Grandee or another would alert my husband that his Ro had gone AWOL.
After I left the note for Arlene, I went back to the airport, and I caught my flight home.
What the hell else could I do?
CHAPTER
11
I WAS FIFTEEN MINUTES LATE, but I made my shift at Grand Guns. Two sales guys, Derek and James, were holding down the fort.
Derek said, “There’s the princess now,” when I came in, and looked meaningfully at the clock. Derek was kind of an asshole.
The Grandees’ main store had tables of accessories and sales items in the center, but most of the serious inventory was locked inside cases that ran all the way around the three back walls. The rifles were on vertical display in glass-front cabinets. In front of them, glass-top display tables holding the pistols were connected in a U-shape. There was an aisle running all the way around between the rifles and the pistols where the sales guys worked. On the right side, near the doorway to Joe Grandee’s office and the storage area, there was a table for the register. It had a butcher-block top instead of glass, and James was sitting behind it on what was usually my stool, minding the till. He didn’t give me any crap, though, just did a drawer check and signed out to go work the floor.
I slid into my place and tried to look like I was working, but my gaze kept stealing to the phone. Any moment, Thom would call to check up on me. I’d practiced lines in my head on the flight home. I wanted to sound bored and a little lonely for him, completely regular. After my shift, I could swing by the bank and clean out our money, then I was smoke. I’d have a twenty-hour lead time before Thom’s flight landed tomorrow.
An hour later, I still hadn’t heard from him, and that wasn’t right. He knew my schedule. Another half hour passed, and I was considering calling his hotel when I heard the door that led from the alley behind the store into the storage area crash open. Joe Grandee called, “Grab that other box.” Then I heard the unmistakable sound of Thom’s voice calling back, “I got it.”
The air left my lungs in a whoosh, and I couldn’t get more in. They weren’t supposed to be back until tomorrow. I took three desperate panting breaths and tried to make my spine unstiffen. Thom came out of the door that led to the offices. I felt him behind me, felt the push his big body gave the air. He came up right behind me and said, “Hey, baby.”
I turned on the stool toward him, trying to look pleased and surprised, but as soon as I saw him, my face froze. Thom was different. I could see it in every line of his tall body. I could smell it on him. I gave him a smile close to one of Ro’s, and he curved his lips up at me, but his eyes stayed dry and flat as matte wall paint.
“I thought you were coming back tomorrow,” I said. He didn’t make a move toward me, didn’t touch me or lean in to kiss me, and that was wrong, too.
“I couldn’t wait to see you,” he said, but he didn’t sound eager. He was in the doorway behind the low glass-top display cases, nothing between us but three feet of cool air, quickly growing cooler. I got up off the stool and went to him and lifted my face. He leaned down and put a kiss on my mouth. His lips were hard and tasted foreign, no
t like Thom, as if he’d been eating tamarind and cumin on the sly. As I turned to go back to my stool, he gave my ass a slap, hard enough to sting.
“There’s my girl,” he said.
Joe appeared in the doorway behind Thom and said, “Help me get this crap out of the truck.”
Thom nodded once. He was rubbing at his lips with the hand that had slapped my ass, as if he was balming them up with what that had felt like. He turned and went into the back room.
“Help me” in Joe Grandee language apparently meant, You go get the crap out of the truck while I throw my jumbo-manly key ring in the drawer by the register, grazing your wife’s titty in passing, and then plop down on my stool.
“Go give Thom a hand unloading,” Joe called to the two salesmen. “Ro and I got things under control out here.”
James and Derek went on in the back, and Joe and I sat on our stools, his by the door, mine behind the register.
“What are y’all doing back?” I asked, trying to look anything but panicked.
“Hell if I know,” Joe said. “Thom worked the show like a whirly-dervish all morning. Then he said he was done and flying home. I could come or not.” Joe was different, too. Not to such an extreme, but something had changed. I’d long wished he would keep his greasy eyeballs off my ass, but now his gaze kept drifting to my belly. He made significant eyebrows at my abdomen and added, “Why don’t you tell me why we came back early?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
He waggled his eyebrows at my belly again and said, “I figured we came home to get us some good news?”
“That’s nice. What happened?” I said.
That surprised him enough to make him drag his gaze up off my body to my face. I was surprised they knew the route. “Thom said on the way to Houston you’d have some good news to tell me, once we were home.”
He shifted his eyes right back to my stomach, a gloaty smile spreading across his face, and all at once I remembered puking on the way to the airport. I’d implied to Thom I might be pregnant, to get him on the plane.
Backseat Saints Page 19
