But there was nothing left of me in there, nothing to indicate I had ever slept there. My books were gone. Flo could have sent me my books. And the stupid stuffed panda I slept with as a child, she could have sent him, too. My old dollhouse where the Minkus family had lived was gone. My high school diploma in its Wal-Mart frame was gone. My clarinet. My stuffed animals. My yearbook, filled only with the hasty scrawls of embarrassed boys because every girl in the class except Clarice had refused to sign it. Gone. Florence’s scorched-earth policies had left my half of the room gutted and scraped so clean that not even the dust had been allowed to settle. I stared at Flo in shock, Clarice silent behind me.
Florence set the bags down and looked at me with her unfathomable eyes. “What?” she said. “It’s not like you were using it.”
CHAPTER 10
THE MORNING AFTER I killed Jim Beverly, I woke up in the gray hour just before dawn. I had passed out in my front yard. I was crammed between the hydrangea bushes and the front wall of the house. Clarice was kneeling beside me, prodding at me and hissing, “Arlene, Arlene.” It was warm out, but she was shivering in her baby-doll pajamas. I saw our bedroom window was open.
“I was up waiting for you forever,” she said. “I must have fallen asleep. I came out here to look up the road and saw your feet sticking out of the bushes. Oh Lordy Lord, Arlene, we have to get you inside before a neighbor sees you or, God forbid, that stupid paperboy comes. Oh Lordy, but you smell like drinking.”
My mouth felt sticky, as if spiders had sealed it with webbing as I slept in the dew. I felt something hard in my hand and realized I was still clutching the neck of the tequila bottle. I sat up, and the world spun, and my stomach flopped and heaved.
“Arlene, now,” said Clarice urgently. She stopped prodding me to scrub the sleep from her eyes, and then brushed at my cheek. I had been sleeping facedown in the loamy earth of the flower bed, and a shower of dirt fell into my lap as she brushed.
“If Mama gets one whiff of you, you are utterly doomed.” She dragged at my arm and I half walked, half crawled to the open window. We paused there while Clarice beat at me with her hands to get as much of the soil off my clothes as she could. Then, with Clarice boosting me from behind, I heaved half my body over the sill and tumbled inside, slithering sideways to land beside Clarice’s desk. I struggled upright and fought hard to keep from puking. Clarice stayed outside to shut the window and put the screen back on.
I sat on the floor, longing for death. I heard Clarice creeping through the house, and then she slipped into our room and shut the door tight.
“Don’t tell me that’s a liquor bottle,” she said. “Hard liquor? You couldn’t even go beer?” Clarice pried the murder weapon out of my fingers. I tried to cling to it, but my hands had no grip. I watched her hands holding it, but my brain was too fogged to understand why it bothered me so. It wasn’t until she stuffed it under my bed that I thought the word “fingerprints” and realized she shouldn’t be touching it.
“Go get in the shower as cold as you can stand it,” she whispered. “Go, go. And if you have to throw up, for the love of God, do it quietly.”
I did what she said. I stood in the icy spray, and then I had to go to my hands and knees and heave. When I could breathe again, I squatted on my haunches in the spray and let cool water beat down on my aching head. My tequila-soaked brain began to perk up and gibber at me. When you’ve just committed a murder, you shouldn’t immediately drink a third of a bottle of Mexican tequila. Especially if you aren’t used to drinking. Right after a murder, you need to be able to think clearly.
“You killed someone,” said my brain. I shook my head, hard, and it made the world spin just enough to drive that thought sideways and out. I couldn’t think about that now. I couldn’t think about it at all. “Okay, then,” said my brain, “what about this: Someone is going to find out.”
I had to think about that. Jim Beverly’s car was at the foot of Lipsmack Hill, and Jim Beverly himself was somewhere on the other side of the same hill. When they found the car, they would find the body.
I clung to the absurd notion that whoever found the body might think he fell down the hill drunk and smashed his head on some tequila-bottle-shaped natural root formation. I tilted my face up into the spray, hoping the cold water could clear my head.
The thought came back again, persistent. “You killed someone. Someone is very dead now.”
“Shush,” I said out loud.
I had to move him. No, not “him.” It was better not to think of it as him. The pronoun made me want to weep, immobilized me on the floor of the tub. I had to move the body. I had to get back out to Lipsmack in the dead of night and drag it out of there and take it somewhere. I had to bury it, or no, I could drop it in a quarry. There were quarries in Alabama somewhere. I had to find a quarry and steal a car and tie rocks to it and drop it down a quarry.
The thought came back again. “Hello. Dead person. Killed by you.”
“Good,” I said aloud. “And I am glad, so there, so shut up.” I sat still again, shocked to hear my voice say these things so strongly, with such truth. On some level I was glad, and that was almost worse than having done it. But at the same time, it was distant enough from me that I could think about which shampoo to use to wash my hair.
Ugly joy and horror were at war far away from me, on the other side of a huge wall of tequila and fear. “I’m sorry?” I said, testing, and was relieved to find that somewhere in the sick numbness that ruled me, I was sorry. I did not know if sorry or glad would win, but I also knew, listening to myself, I wasn’t sorry enough to spend my life in jail if I could help it. The problem was, I did not think I could help it.
Rationally, I knew I couldn’t move it. I simply didn’t have the strength to drag 160 or so pounds of dead, dead weight out of Roach Country. The vines would cling to it and hold it. It was uphill. I couldn’t have moved it last night without sitting down and shoving at it with my feet. And that was on open ground. I certainly couldn’t go down into the heart of the heaps and drag it uphill. Someone would have to help me.
Bud could get it out of there easily, but I didn’t think his boyfriend-in-law loyalty would extend to dragging around dead bodies. Maybe even Clarice could do it, if the two of us worked together. She was tall and strong from gymnastics and cheerleading. But Clarice, my aching brain countered smugly, was firmly against any sort of crime.
The truth was, I thought, standing up and adjusting the water to warm, there was nothing I could do but hope that if they found him, they wouldn’t find anything that led them to me. I tried to think it through. Barry had watched me go all the way to Bud’s car. Bud had left me with Clarice. Clarice had covered for me with our parents. As long as Clarice kept her mouth shut, and no one had seen me creeping up Lipsmack Hill, or after, staggering home in a dead drunk, or after that, passed out in the hydrangea bushes for God only knew how many hours . . . no sense following that train of thought. I had to sit tight and hope they didn’t find him. When they found him, everything would unravel, and it would be only a matter of time until they found me.
I began to pray, desperate and in earnest. “Please Lord, I know You probably don’t approve of all this, and it’s a bad, bad sin, well, actually, probably, okay, the worst sin there is, but please, Lord, please, don’t let them find him.”
I stood up and began to wash, getting the cloying smell of tequila off me and praying hard. I scrubbed viciously at my skin with Clarice’s loofah until I felt peeled and raw. I washed my hair with Clarice’s sacred Raspberry Essence shampoo instead of my almost scent-free Johnson & Johnson. All the while I made extravagant promises to God, silently, but so fervently my lips were moving. “Oh God, dear God, I will stop all that nastiness with the boys. I won’t ever fornicate again, and if you help me, Lord, I will never tell another lie. I will get straight A’s and get out of this town and never come back, won’t even look back, just please, Lord, don’t let them find him.”
I got
out of the shower and dried off. Clarice had crept in at some point while I was bathing. My dirt-covered, stinking clothes had been taken away, and there were a clean pair of panties and fresh PJs sitting on the toilet lid.
I was beginning to understand what Paul meant when he told the Thessalonians to “pray without ceasing.” As I dressed, as my head pounded, as my stomach twirled and my intestines looped and writhed, underneath it all was a constant stream of imploring promises going up to God.
I paused at the bathroom door, listening. Mama, I wasn’t worried about. She didn’t care what I did. Uncle Bruster slept so heavy, I could run a truck through the wall, and if he was sleeping especially light, he might turn over. But Aunt Florence was unpredictable. I didn’t hear any movement coming from their room. I walked as quickly and quietly as I could back down to our room.
Clarice was in her bed, sitting up with the covers bunched around her waist. Our light was off, but I could see her clearly in the dawn light coming through our windows. I closed the blinds.
Clarice had unmade my bed. She had taken the trouble to try and put a hump in it with our shams, so if Florence had glanced in during the night, there was a tiny chance I might not get busted. I pulled the shams out and piled them on the floor and crept gratefully in and lay down. In the back of my mind, I was still churning out a long repetitive stream of terrified prayer, but my body was too ruined to allow me to feel as frightened as I should have.
I could hear Clarice breathing, fast and shaky. She was almost panting.
“I’m sorry,” I said, knowing it wasn’t enough.
“Where have you been?” Clarice whispered fiercely. “I have been going crazy, and you are off getting drunk on hard liquor? What happened? Did you see him? Did your plan work? What happened?”
My throat filled up with fifty good lies, and I opened my mouth to release them, and then closed it again fast before any could escape. I had promised God not ten minutes ago in the shower that I would never lie again if He would help me.
“Arlene,” Clarice hissed. “I know you are sick and tired, but you are not going to sleep until you tell me what happened.”
I spoke slowly, checking every word for truth before releasing it. “I got about halfway up Lipsmack, and that girl, that freshman, was coming down already.” True.
“Was she okay?” whispered Clarice.
“She seemed fine. She was mad, though. He’d been rude to her. So anyway, I went on up.”
“Why on earth!” said Clarice.
“I don’t know.” True. “Anyway, he was sitting with his back to me, up by the cliff, and he was so drunk I didn’t think he could stand up. And his tequila bottle was behind him.” I paused to edit bits out of the next part of the story, and to offer an explanatory prayer to God. I told Him that not saying something was not the same as telling a lie. Lightning did not come through the window and strike me, so I assumed God agreed. I went on, “I snuck up behind him, and he didn’t hear me. I put the cap on his tequila bottle, and I picked it up. When I went back down, I took the bottle with me, and I drank tequila all the way home.” All true.
“He never knew you were there?”
“No,” I said. “He was very drunk, Clarice, and he was singing really loud.”
In the dim light, I saw the white flash of her teeth. Clarice was smiling at me the way she used to before I started up with all the boys and she got so angry with me. “Good for you,” she said. “I bet he reached around looking for that tequila and could not figure out what was going on. I bet he crawled around looking for half an hour with no clue. You really got him, Arlene. You really played a good one on him.” Somewhere in the middle of speaking, her grin had faded and her voice had gotten louder. It cracked, and she said, “That stupid bastard. That stupid, stupid bastard.” She was crying. “I was so scared for you.”
I slipped out of my bed and took five wobbly, world-spinning steps to hers, saying, “Shove over,” and slipping in beside her.
“Don’t cry, Clarice,” I said. I had to go slow and careful, to make sure I wasn’t lying. “I know taking his tequila doesn’t pay him back. He is—he was a bastard. I remember. We say it didn’t happen, but we both remember. He almost killed me. Forget the bottle. The only thing that matters is that freshman girl. She came down safe.”
She nodded, snuffling.
“Also you have to keep it down or Aunt Florence will come in here like the wrath of God, wanting to know what’s going on,” I said.
“I think Mama must already be out in her garden. It’s Saturday. She must have been going out the back door as you were going in the window and I came up the front. Otherwise she’d already have busted us.”
I was starting to lose consciousness, so I slipped back into my own bed. My eyes were closing, but I had enough presence of mind to say, “Clarice? One thing? Please don’t tell. I don’t mean just your mama, I mean anyone. I don’t want anyone to know I went up there and took his bottle and got drunk and all, okay? Let’s pretend like I came home with you.” I was sick and sleepy, and my heartbeat was thundering in my head.
“I wouldn’t tell anyone,” said Clarice. “Oh, except I already told Bud.”
I sat up so abruptly that the room tilted around me and I almost threw up in my lap. “What, why?” I said, when I had enough breath back to speak.
“You didn’t come home. I wanted Bud to go look for you, so I called him on his phone. You know his mama lets him have a private line in his room, so I didn’t wake his folks up. He reminded me I still have his car so he couldn’t go out looking. We were going to go look for you this morning if you hadn’t turned up.”
I flopped back down in the bed, my stomach churning. “Did you tell him where I was? Or what I was doing?”
“Not really,” she said. “He doesn’t know. I mean, he doesn’t know about Jim Beverly or last year. But I told him you were going up Lipsmack, and I may have said who was up there or . . . I don’t remember, exactly. I was so afraid. But I will tell him not to tell anyone. If it ever comes up, we’ll say that I borrowed Bud’s car and took you home from your date with Barry because you got sick. And I’ll tell Bud you got drunk and are embarrassed about it, and that he has to keep his mouth shut or you’ll be grounded forever.”
“Don’t forget,” I said. “Don’t forget to tell Bud to stick with that story.” Then it seemed I closed my eyes for less than a minute before a horrible banging clatter was invading my ruined head.
“Up, up, up, girlie,” Uncle Bruster was bellowing outside the door. “Your aunt Flo has breakfast almost ready, and everyone is waiting on you.”
I groaned. Clarice’s bed was already made. The clock said it was eight-thirty, and that meant Aunt Florence would have paused in her gardening to make our traditional Saturday-morning family breakfast. After we ate, there would be family chores, and I would probably die, hopefully before the police arrived to arrest me.
Unless we had company, we always ate in the kitchen. Uncle Bruster was ensconced behind the paper, and next to him, my mama was peeling the white parts away from her fried egg and hiding them in her napkin. She had ringed the unbroken yolk with petals made of torn pieces of biscuit. Clarice, across from Mama, shot me a quick look as I entered, and from her expression I could tell I looked as green as I felt. I sat by Clarice, my back to Aunt Flo, who was frying up more eggs in the bacon grease.
A platter of glistening pink bacon was emitting vile fumes, and I watched in horror as Uncle Bruster reached out blindly and picked up a piece, taking it behind his paper to devour it. I heard his thunderous crunching and longed to crawl under the table and heave and hopefully choke to death on my own vomit. Aunt Florence came to the table and slid two eggs onto my plate, cooked over hard till they were almost crunchy. They glared up at me balefully, moist and glistening with droplets of fat. I glared back.
I looked up, and Aunt Florence was still standing over me, regarding me with a jaundiced and suspicious eye. I hastily picked up a fork and began chok
ing down the eggs. Aunt Florence remained, looming over me, watching me eat. She’d seen hangovers before, but not in me or her daughter. She was probably trying to talk herself out of identifying my malady.
“Mama?” said Clarice. “Are me and Arlene supposed to weed the strawberry patch today? Or what else needs to get done? Because I want to go on and get started. I’m supposed to meet Bud at his football practice.”
Florence was not deterred. “Arlene, are you sick?” she said.
I did not answer. I had just promised God for the seven hundredth time that I would not lie ever again.
“Yes,” said Clarice quickly. “She is totally sick. Bud went to shoot pool with Clint, and I brought her home in his car last night. There is definitely a very bad stomach flu going on at school, and I definitely think she has it.”
Bruster looked out from behind his paper. “You’re looking a little peaked, girlie.”
I kept my head down, forking up another bit of egg and praying.
Aunt Florence stepped away, and it was like a weight being hefted off my stomach. I gratefully set my fork down, and then started as Aunt Florence reappeared beside me. She set an icy-cold can of Coke down beside my juice and said, “Drink that, it will settle your stomach. Let me make you some dry toast. And then you go back to bed. Bruster has to run some errands for me, and I have a lot to do in the garden. Are you going to be all right by yourself, or do you need someone sitting with you?”
“I’ll be fine,” I said.
“All right, then,” Florence said. “Clarice, you can go on over and meet Bud after breakfast. You girls can weed the strawberries one afternoon this week, when Arlene feels better.”
“Poor baby,” said my mother, taking a piece of bacon to give her egg daisy a stem. “Did you get it from a boy?”
I stared blankly at her, and then Clarice launched mercifully into a stream of mindless prattle. I took sips of the wonderful, bracing Coke and had to fight the urge to hold the icy can up to my aching head.
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