Gods in Alabama

by Joshilyn Jackson

  Mrs. Weedy was nodding vigorously. “He sure is! Why, the whole town is in an uproar! And you’ll never guess what I found out.”

  Clarice moved towards the doorway, pulling me by the hand. Florence did not move or even notice us, standing in the doorway as a bastion against all chicken-kind.

  Clarice slipped past her and dragged me into the waning sunlight on the porch. She gestured to the rockers and said, “You sit down and tell us all about it, Mrs. Weedy. You want some tea?”

  “No, thanks, sweetie,” said Mrs. Weedy, sitting down, “I don’t have the bladder I used to, you know. Now it seems like the minute I have a drink of any little thing, I’m heading for the potty. Let me tell you, I have quite a tale.” Pippa went bobbing down the stairs and started scratching about in the lawn. Florence remained standing stock-still in the doorway, murderously watching Pippa eat up our grass seed.

  Clarice and I sat down on the hanging porch swing, our linked hands hidden between us. I did not dare look at her. I couldn’t look anywhere for long. I kept bouncing glances at Mrs. Weedy, the chicken, Aunt Florence turned to stone in the doorway, my own feet. Nothing seemed to move when I looked at it. It was like the world was a static slide show that changed only when I blinked. And every time I blinked, I saw another slide from a different show in my mind’s eye. The freshman girl, her ponytail jingling in rage as she stomped down Lipsmack Hill. Jim Beverly with his back to me, singing with his feet dangling over the small cliff. That sweet-spot moment, the bottle in my hands connecting perfectly. Jim Beverly, waxy and utterly unmoving.

  “Please, God,” I whispered, so soft it wasn’t any more than a shaped breath. “Did they find his Jeep?” I said out loud.

  “Oh, did someone already tell you this?” said Mrs. Weedy, disappointed. Aunt Florence and Clarice both turned their attention to me. I could feel their eyes like hot spots on my skin.

  “No, no,” I said, panicking. “No, I just was wondering if he disappeared alone or maybe with his Jeep.” Clarice squeezed my hand harder, and I managed to shut up before I could ask if they had found his body where I left it or if I still had time to flee town.

  “How funny you should ask that, because you know, they did find his Jeep!” Mrs. Weedy said. “But I better start at the beginning.” I died several hundred tiny internal deaths as Mrs. Weedy ever so slowly, and with many asides about what Pippa thought, told us about how Jim Beverly’s father called the sheriff’s office when Jim Beverly never came home last night. And how even though he was only a week or two away from eighteen, the sheriff agreed to start looking for him without waiting the usual forty-eight hours because, after all, this was Jim Beverly and there was a game on Saturday.

  She wound her way endlessly through a protracted search, while my internal slide show ran over and over. Enraged freshman, jingling down the hill. Jim singing. Bottle swinging. Jim dead. And then the freshman started jingling down the hill again. Finally Mrs. Weedy said, “And there was not hide nor hair of him at all, anywhere, until around noon today, you know they found his Jeep.”

  My heart stuttered, and I waited for her to say that search parties were even now beating the kudzu looking for his mortal remains, but she said, “It would have been found earlier, but you see, the state police found it first. They found it before anyone knew he was missing, and it was abandoned and smashed. So they towed it to the impound lot, and they checked on who owned it, but that never got coordinated with the sheriff, who was searching for Jim Beverly unofficially because of the football game, without waiting that forty-eight hours they have to wait.”

  “Impound lot?” said Clarice.

  “Smashed?” I said.

  “That chicken is eating the grass seed,” Aunt Florence said blackly. But at least she wasn’t looking at me anymore.

  “Let me back up,” said Mrs. Weedy. “What happened was Jim Beverly apparently was driving out of town, or towards the highway, anyway, because the Jeep was very near the highway on Route 19. It was very close to Fruiton, and it was full of beer cans. I mean, it was rattling with them! Coors. Coors beer cans. And you know I am not a mother in the traditional sense, but I do have Pippa, so I joined MADD. Pippa and I both think it’s a crying shame a young man like that was driving all drunken. He is the football quarterback, and all the young men are looking to him to see how to behave. So I think he has a responsibility, don’t you?

  “But anyhow, he drove right off the road and into a telephone pole and smashed his front end all up, but luckily they said he was wearing his seat belt. And that’s good! I mean, he was drunk, and that is terrible, but some of these young men, they don’t wear a seat belt. I have a special car seat I can strap Pippa’s carry case to, that’s how serious I am about seat belts, and in this case, they think it saved his life.”

  “Saved his life?” I said. In my head I saw him lying dead, unsaved by seat belts, and then the slide flipped and got stuck on the freshman. Her enraged ponytail.

  “Yes, saved his life! Because a few hours later, the state police found his Jeep and towed it away to the impound. And he wasn’t in it. So he must have gotten out of it and walked away just fine. There was no blood in it, and the door was hanging open like a drunken person got out and walked away and didn’t bother to close the door.”

  Clarice’s nails were digging into my palm, but I felt oddly at peace as understanding washed through me. Ponytails don’t jingle. I had heard keys jingling as the freshman marched resolutely down the hill. I could now see the keys in her hand perfectly in the slide show. She had been angry enough to take his truck, certainly. Better to take his truck than shamefacedly ask a friend for a ride home after Jim Beverly had humiliated her. Better by far than saying to her friend, “He told me to suck him, like I was some sort of prostitute.”

  The beer cans were his. She hadn’t been drunk, I bet, but she was a freshman, so how much driving had she done? She lived in Fruiton, so the place the Jeep was found made sense. She must have run off the road and smashed his Jeep. She had no license, and she’d taken his Jeep without permission, so maybe she panicked. Maybe she went to a gas station and had a friend come and get her. Or her mom. Or maybe she hoofed it all the way home, like me.

  “Hitchhiking?” said Clarice. I had been thinking so hard I had missed part of Mrs. Weedy’s endless story.

  “I know, it doesn’t make any sense,” Mrs. Weedy went on. “I mean, he’s the last boy in the world to run away! Especially with a game today. He’s already missing it because it started at four, and they’ll use that second-string Bob Duffy, and we can’t win with him. Everdale is tough.

  “But the sheriff is thinking he must have run away because of the hitchhiking report. The man who saw the hitchhiker didn’t say it was Jim, but it was a young man who could have been Jim. The man did not stop, just noticed him. The odd thing is, the young man was not hitching towards Fruiton. You would think if Jim Beverly was trying to hitch a ride after he wrecked his Jeep, he would have been heading home. But he was hitching the other way! At any rate, no one believes Jim Beverly would run away over having some beers, as young men do, and yes, he crashed, but he only wrecked his own Jeep. He didn’t hurt anyone, not even himself, so why would he run away? He’s not going to lose his scholarship over that sort of thing, a few beers and a wrecked Jeep. Especially with him still only seventeen. And with a game today! But still, the sheriff is thinking now he is a runaway instead of missing.”

  I sat in the rocker, and my prayers began to change from please to thank you. This could only be the direct hand of God.

  And God continued to do what I had asked of Him. At Sunday school, people gave me reassuring updates. Jim Beverly had not been found. Everyone, the police included, continued to assume that the person who had taken the Jeep to Route 19 and run it into a telephone pole was actually Jim Beverly. He, of course, hadn’t been able to do that, being dead. But no one else possessed this contradictory evidence. No one could find him or figure out where he had gone, but then they were look
ing in places where one might reasonably expect to find an alive boy with a bad hangover.

  By evening services, the gossip mills had ground out fresh information. Jim Beverly, it turned out, was failing two classes. He wouldn’t be going to UNA. He’d lost his scholarship. His case was reclassified. He was no longer missing. He was officially a runaway.

  The prevailing theory was that Jim Beverly, humiliated, in a haze of drunken despair, had run off the road drunk, then staggered down the highway hitching a ride to anywhere but here. The freshman, without ever mentioning her grand theft auto, had confirmed his extreme drunken state and vile mood.

  So he’d effectively vanished. Well, a lot of kids do. And the priority on runaways, especially male ones who are seconds away from their eighteenth birthday, and especially when they suddenly aren’t going to be big college football stars on TV, is very, very, very low.

  Within a few weeks of his fall from godhood, he was old news, and there were many other things to talk about. But Clarice watched me more than she used to, and her eyes were cool and serious. Neither of us seemed to be sleeping well.

  For my part, I was waiting for someone to find his body. I knew someone would have to find it. All I could do was pray. I prayed for two things, first for time and rain and animals and bugs to erase all traces of my presence. And secondly I prayed for some sort of forgiveness, because I was beginning to understand what I had done.

  I couldn’t help but be glad the rapist was dead. I had a secret, fierce joy that I’d erased him from the earth, and I felt the earth was better with one less rapist on it. But I had also killed someone’s son. His father’s picture in the paper, worried and earnest, haunted me. I had killed the boy who’d fought for Rose Mae Lolley, and at school she wafted through the halls, tiny and lost with black circles under her luminous eyes. The rapist and the boy who gave me his jacket to cover the blood on my pants and made me laugh my way out of shame were the same boy.

  No one but me knew he was dead, so no one could mourn him, and in my imagination, the rain dripped through the thick leaves of the kudzu onto his face. He would stay there until someone found him or until God gave me up.

  One night a week into my vigil, Clarice slipped out of bed. “Shove over,” she whispered. I turned onto my side and pressed my back to the wall to face her as she climbed in beside me. When we were children, she had slipped into my bed all the time, and we had whispered endlessly to each other until we fell asleep. But she had not come over to my side since I had morphed into a slut. The last time I could remember her joining me like this had also been about Jim Beverly, and she had held me as we’d whispered back and forth, “It never happened. It never, never did.”

  “Don’t you talk,” she said. “Just listen. You don’t have to talk. I figured it out.”

  I felt her arm reach for me under the covers, and I took her hand. “That night, out at Lipsmack Hill, the night you got in Bud’s car and asked me to cover for you and then came home so late, drunk. I know what happened.

  “I put it together. Because I remembered you were with that boy before you came over and got in Bud’s car.”

  “Yes, I was with Barry,” I said. “But Clarice, I am done with running around with those boys.”

  “I remembered that Barry works in the front office at school. He sometimes does the morning announcements. He told you, didn’t he? He told you about Jim Beverly’s failing grades. That’s why you felt like you could go up on Lipsmack after that freshman. That’s why you sent Bud away and asked me to cover for you. That was the plan you said you had. You knew Jim Beverly was not going to college and that he had ruined everything and that he wasn’t going to be so special anymore. And you thought, if he wasn’t so special anymore, if he wasn’t Mr. Big Quarterback, then maybe, if you told, maybe someone would believe you. If both of us told, someone would believe us.

  “But I know you would never really tell, Arlene. We never even talk about it between us. But Jim Beverly didn’t know that.

  “You didn’t just take his bottle, did you? Barry told you he was flunking out, so you went to talk to Jim Beverly, and you bluffed him. You told him you knew about his grades, and that no one would cover for him anymore, and you told him you were going to tell. And that’s the real reason he left town. You drove him out.

  “Everyone thinks he ran away because he was ashamed of failing out and losing his scholarship. But you and I know better. He hasn’t got any shame in him. You threatened him, and you made him go. Oh, Arlene, how could you be so brave and stupid? He could have done anything.”

  I pressed her hand in the dark. I said, “I was serious, Clarice, when I said I was not going to run around anymore. And I am going to be an honest person and a better person. I promised God. And I hope you can forgive me.”

  She hugged me tight then, and she said, “It’s all done, and we will never talk about it anymore. It’s finished.”

  We lay in the dark together for a while longer, and the peace that settled between us was the only peace I had. I clung to it, knowing it was only for a little while. By winter, maybe sooner, Clarice, who had filled in everything I had left blank with a story of her own, would know the truth. It was inevitable, unless God came through with the miracle I still prayed for fervently.

  I was safe only until someone smelled something rotten up on Lipsmack Hill. Even then they would probably think skunk or maybe dead deer. The smell might work for me, keeping kids off the top of Lipsmack, and no one ever went up there but kids.

  But even if no one went looking for the source of the smell, I knew my days of safety were numbered. The heaps covering Jim Beverly would find him just another thing to climb. They would wrap threads of themselves around his limbs, lift him, and pose him to their liking. As winter came, the heaps would begin to lose their thick shield of waxy leaves. By November they would all have gone to bones. The heaps hiding him would become nothing more than a net of brown lace, holding up what was left of him for anyone to see.

  CHAPTER 13

  AFTER WE bought the camera, Burr and I headed back to Aunt Florence’s house. I was still steaming. Burr parked in the gravel drive.

  “Maybe you should go gas up the car. Or something,” I said.

  “So you can attempt to kick your aunt’s ass? Because frankly, baby, if you and Florence get into it, it’s an even-odds bet.”

  I said, “She wanted to talk to me alone, fine. She’s going to get her conversation.”

  We sat looking at the little white frame house with the green shutters. It looked very cheerful and bright in the afternoon sunlight. I couldn’t quite force myself to get out of the car and go in yet.

  “Who said that he couldn’t go home again? Maybe he was lucky,” said Burr.

  “It was Thomas Wolfe,” I said. “And he died of brain tuberculosis.”

  “Sometimes you scare me,” Burr said.

  I unfastened my seat belt. “Aunt Flo has left me no choice. She called around to every one of my relatives and warned them that I had Oh-God-No married a black man. You know she did. And I bet you anything several of my relatives have threatened to pitch all manner of ugly fits if I dare show my face with you at this party. That’s fine, and I could walk away from that, but Florence took their side. No matter what she thinks to herself, she should have backed me.”

  Burr ran his hand over his buzz cut and shook his head. Up at the house, Aunt Florence came out on the porch and stood, shielding her eyes against the sun, looking down the drive at us. She waved.

  I waved back through the windshield, feeling silly because I wasn’t sure if she could see us through the glass with the sun setting behind us. Burr lifted his hand, too, and said, “There’s another way to look at it. If we go, a bunch of ignorant racists may ruin your uncle’s retirement party. That would be our fault. We know what they are.”

  “Yeah, there’s that,” I said. “But she still should have backed me.” Aunt Florence came down the steps and stood on the sidewalk, still looking down th
e drive at us. She waved her hand again, this time impatiently, in a “come up here” motion. I said, “Let me go talk to her.”

  I hopped out and headed up the gravel drive, and Burr backed up and headed down Route 19 towards Possett.

  “Where’s he going?” called Florence, but she didn’t wait for an answer. “Could you get a fire under your butt there, Arlene? I need you inside.”

  “Oh no,” I said. “Mama?”

  “Yes. I was glad to see you pull up. I can’t tell if she’s breathing.”

  I was swamped with a rush of mingled nerves and the ghost of an old anger. I picked up the pace and jogged to the porch. “You don’t know what she took?”

  “No,” said Florence. “Who knows what all she squirreled away yesterday.”

  “Where is she?”

  Florence led me through the house to the den, where Mama was lying still and waxy in her favorite chair. She did not look like she was breathing. I put my hand on her cold arm but could not find a pulse.

  “Mama?” I said. I could feel a curl of panic beginning to rise low in my belly.

  “Is she breathing?” asked Florence. “I can’t tell.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe you better call 911.”

  “Arlene, if I called 911 every time your mama looked dead, Bruster and I would be in the poorhouse by Tuesday. It’s five hundred dollars for an ambulance ride if they don’t admit.”

  “Mama?” I said again. No response. Her arm was cold but pliant. This seemed to me like a good sign. I put my hand to her throat and, after a moment, felt the lazy thump of blood moving through her pulse point.

  “Her heart is working,” I told Florence.

  “But is she breathing?”

  “How would I know?” I asked irritably. I couldn’t see any discernible movement of her chest.

  “Gladys,” Florence said, pinching Mama’s arm hard. “Gladys, you answer me.”

  I rummaged in my purse for my compact and then flipped it open and held the mirror up to Mama’s lips. A faint fog clouded it.