Gods in Alabama

by Joshilyn Jackson

  “All right, baby,” said Burr. He put one arm over my shoulder and bundled me into the Blazer as if I were an overwrought toddler. The engine mercifully started, and he turned off the lights and let it run for a bit. We sat together in the darkness, looking at Lipsmack Hill.

  “I wish you would say something,” I said.

  “Like what?” said Burr.

  “Anything,” I said. “Like you should say if you still want to marry me. Or if you love me. I told you I killed someone. You have to say something.”

  Burr turned towards me in the darkness and looked at me for a long time. Then he said, “Of course I still love you. That’s not even an issue. But you didn’t kill anyone, Lena. I think you know that.”

  “I told you. I did,” I said.

  He was shaking his head. “You took on the idea that you killed him because you already felt guilty. You believed you’d stolen something from your cousin. But you have to know better. An underweight teenage girl can’t beat a man to death with a bottle. Especially not with one blow.”

  When I didn’t answer, he sighed and rubbed one hand over his eyes. I knew what he was doing. He was crafting a closing argument. He began laying out his case, point by point, fact by fact.

  “Drunken teenage girls don’t get away with murder. Period. But you weren’t caught. You know why. He must have been alive when you left him.”

  “Burr, I saw him, and his body was an absolutely dead body,” I said.

  “And as a teenager, exactly how much time had you spent with freshly dead corpses?” Burr asked, cocking an eyebrow at me. “Had you ever seen a dead body?”

  “I’d been to my aunt Niner’s funeral,” I said. Burr gave me a patient look, raising his eyebrows, waiting. I looked away and grudgingly added, “When I was ten.”

  “There you are,” he said and started laying out his case. Now, when it was too late, and I’d spilled the truth out onto the dead grass at his feet, he was doing what I had always wanted him to do. He was being my advocate, keeping me from lying by forging a truth of his own. He was defending me. And he spun a pretty good tale.

  The freshman girl, according to Burr, must have had her own keys out as a weapon, to fend off Jim Beverly. She didn’t steal his car. Jim Beverly, alive, dragged himself out of the kudzu and took it. He wrecked it himself, driving drunk and with a head injury.

  Then, in the aftermath of the crash, Jim Beverly must have stopped pushing heedlessly forward as truth came to him like a blinding light, painful as it illuminated his ugly, ugly life. His scholarship, his girlfriend, and his godhood were all gone. He’d served himself a pretty slice of consolation pie in the form of the freshman girl. He’d been expecting a rush, a surge of power, whatever payoff rape gave him. But this girl, no bigger than a napkin, fended him off with a set of house keys and stomped away huffily with no clue how dead serious he’d been about fucking her into the ground. He probably thought the angry freshman came back and brained him from behind and kicked his sorry ass down a hill. She might as well have clipped his balls with pink nail scissors and taken them with her. And then he had dead-drunk totaled his Jeep, and if he waited for the cops, they’d pop him for DUI on top of everything else. So, in Burr’s version, the police got it right. Jim Beverly left. He ran away.

  And the truth was, if Burr had said all this to me yesterday, I would have believed him. Ten years ago, when the weather got cold, I had gone up on Lipsmack Hill and stared down into the kudzu. It had gone to bones, become nothing but the brown lace frame of itself, and I could see the shapes of dead trees and ground cover clearly within its outlines. I could see all the way down through it to the ground. Jim Beverly wasn’t there.

  Half of me believed that maybe God had moved him, but of course a piece of me wondered if he hadn’t moved himself. It was easier, almost, to think of him as dead. The truth was, I would rather be Lena, his killer, than Arlene, a girl so desperate-hungry she had wanted to be his victim.

  Still, up until today, it might have been a huge relief for Burr to absolve me. I had put paid to the rape. I had given it back when I told the truth to Burr and Rose Mae. And in the middle of giving it back, I had realized it was easy because I did not need it anymore. If I could give up the murder, too, it would be like I was starting fresh. No deals with God, no desperation. I could learn to tell the whole truth when it was right, and to lie when a lie was needed. I could learn to make love with Burr. I could maybe come home. But Aunt Florence had tipped her hand in the kitchen, telling me how Jim Beverly’s body had been magicked out of the kudzu. He wasn’t anywhere in the world, and he hadn’t run away. I’d killed him.

  I said, “So you know what happened. You weren’t there or anything, but you have it all figured out because you’re a tax attorney who’s read enough John Grisham to get how these things work.”

  He straightened and looked down at me. “Yeah,” he said. “Pretty much. You didn’t kill anyone. Look at the facts. My version makes a hell of a lot more sense. Yours won’t play. His car was moved. A boy who matched his description was seen hitchhiking after you killed him. If you had killed him, you would have been caught.”

  I looked up at him, mute, because I had told Burr my secrets, but I could not tell him Florence’s. He was right when he said a teenage girl had no chance of covering up a murder. But Florence could have come in behind me and done it without breaking a sweat. I thought of Wayne’s dog, Buddy. Mrs. Weedy’s chicken. Florence was ruthless enough for anything.

  There were loose ends. I didn’t know, for example, how Florence had known to come after me, or how she had known where the body was. Had Clarice woken her up, spilled the beans, told her I had gone up the hill after Jim Beverly? Even if she had, how would Aunt Florence know he was dead? How would she have known to search for his corpse in the heaps? Staring mutely at Burr, I tried to do what he had done, to build a story that fit the facts. He was right when he said mine did not, but neither did his, mostly because he did not have them all.

  He was better at this sort of thing than I was. I had no doubt that if he knew everything, he could figure it out. He was talking again, and I half listened while I racked my brain, trying to see how Florence could have possibly known to come up Lipsmack.

  “It’s easy enough to check,” Burr said. “The guy was a serial rapist. You say he was a good guy. You say you were in love with the real him, but a monster got out when he drank. Okay. That lets you beat yourself up. But the good guy knew the monster was there. He chose to drink. He chose to let it out. He liked it. And I doubt he quit liking it. I am willing to bet he has a criminal record. You know his MO. A good private detective could find him by checking the prison systems. We can put the money in it and find him, if you need that to let it go. But you’re going to have to let it go. You didn’t kill Jim Beverly.”

  Burr was still talking after that, but I could not hear him, because all at once I saw how it must have happened. In a heartbeat I had it in front of me, adding up perfectly, and it all fit and it all made sense. Burr saw something in my face, an idea growing, and put his hand on my leg in its habitual place, just above my knee.

  “The girl sees reason,” he said.

  I looked up at him, clear-eyed, absolutely earnest, and I lied to him. The lie came tripping lightly off my tongue, and my gaze did not dim or waver. “You’re right. He has to be alive somewhere. He must have run away.” I smiled as I said it. I felt the lie as something giving in my chest, expanding and unfolding like a rosebud, blooming. “Jim Beverly is alive,” I said, lying through my teeth, and it felt utterly beautiful.

  He leaned over between the seats and kissed me then, and I kissed him back.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

  “Yeah. Let’s go home. I think I must have really freaked out my aunt Florence. And I am so tired.”

  Burr turned the lights back on and backed up the Blazer. We drove back to the white frame house quietly, Burr’s hand resting peacefully on my leg. We pulled up the gravel d
rive and parked, heading in the back door through the kitchen.

  My mother was sitting up in her chair in the den, looking alert and cheerful. She was wearing a cotton nightgown with sprigs of flowers, and her feet were bare. The den was covered with Mama’s scrapbooks. They were lying open and scattered all over the coffee table and the sofa and the floor. Mama had one in her lap and was looking down at it, bright-eyed. “It’s my wedding,” she said as I entered.

  “Mama, do you know what time it is?” I said.

  “Late?” she answered, and then her voice became petulant. “Bruster went to bed, but Florence won’t come and tuck me in.”

  At my feet was another scrapbook, opened to a picture of us all in Florida, on vacation. Mama was off to the side, staring vacantly at something that wasn’t in the frame. Clarice and I stood together in front of Aunt Flo and Uncle Bruster. We were grinning like monkeys, Clarice leaning back against her dad. Aunt Florence had one bony hand clamped on my shoulder.

  Burr knelt down and closed it. Underneath, another scrapbook was open to a picture of a pretty blonde. At first glance I thought it was Clarice. The girl in the picture was leaning on a rail fence by a pasture, wearing a pair of shorts and a cutoff T-shirt that said I ♥ THE BRAVES. She was a pretty girl, with the Lukey blue eyes and the same kind of tall, willowy figure as Clarice, but the smile was different, and this girl had a longer nose.

  “Who is this, Mama?” I said, holding the book up.

  “It’s your cousin Fat Agnes,” said Mama. “That was last year, at the family reunion up at Swit Bee Park.”

  “Holy God!” I said.

  Mama said, “Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain, sugar.”

  “That’s Fat Agnes?” said Burr, taking the album for a closer look.

  I said, “She must have dropped two hundred pounds.”

  “Oh yes, she did that Weight Watchers,” Mama said, yawning.

  “I never would have recognized her,” I said. “Mama, where is Aunt Florence?”

  “Florence went on up to the attic, I think,” Mama said.

  “Are you sure?” I said. The clock in the den said it was after midnight. The attic was a low cramped space under the eaves of the house. The only entrance was a trapdoor that pulled out of the ceiling in the hallway. It had a rickety folding ladder attached. I went through the den and stuck my head into the hallway, and sure enough, the ladder was down.

  “Hey, Burr?” I said. “I need to go apologize to Flo. We had that blowout while you were getting gas. Do you think you can walk Mama back to her bed? And then you can hit the sack if you’re tired. I’ll join you as soon as I get Florence down.”

  “Sure, baby,” he said, looking at me carefully. “Are you okay?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Are we okay?”

  “Of course we are,” he said.

  “Then I am, too.”

  Burr set the scrapbook down atop a pile on the sofa. He held his hand out to Mama and said, “Mrs. Fleet? You want to go to bed?”

  Mama nodded and boosted herself up. He walked her down the hall. They negotiated their way around the ladder, Mama squeezing against the wall. I followed them that far, and then as they continued down the hall to Mama’s room, I climbed up the spindly ladder to the attic. I could feel the heat oozing out of the trapdoor and pushing at me.

  I poked my head through the rectangular hole in the ceiling. The attic was exactly as I remembered it. The floor was nothing but beams with heaps of pink insulation between them. Many pieces of plywood in various sizes had been placed from beam to beam, and bits of insulation tufted up between the plywood scraps. All around the entry hole was a veritable wall of boxes sitting on the plywood slats. Some were labeled with the names of family members who had died. I saw a few with Aunt Niner’s name, and others with my asshole grampa and Saint Granny’s names. Some were just labeled CLOTHES or KITCHEN, and some were not labeled at all.

  Behind the boxes was a light source, and I could see by that light a narrow path made of two-by-fours leading through the wall of boxes. I boosted myself up through the hole into the oppressive heat of the attic, resting my butt gingerly on a bit of plywood. I got to my feet and followed the path around the boxes, touching the wall to balance myself on the narrow boards.

  The box wall was six or eight rows deep. Behind it, a huge sheet of thick planking had been placed over the beams and insulation, and more boxes and fat black Hefty bags rested on it. One of the boxes was open, and behind that box, in a folding chair, sat Aunt Florence.

  An apple-green lamp was sitting on a box next to her, illuminating the cramped space. It was plugged into a fat orange extension cord that looped away across the planking. Aunt Florence had been unpacking the box, and bits and pieces were scattered all about. She glanced up at me as I came into the light, and then she looked back down at a toy person she had in her hands.

  “I thought you’d gone back to Chicago and left your suitcases,” she said, staring down at the toy. “I wasn’t going to stuff them up here. I was going to ship them.”

  With a jolt I realized she was holding Mr. Minkus, the daddy of my dollhouse family. The apple-green lamp on the box matched Clarice’s, except it had no daisy stickers. It was mine. And now the things she had strewn out on the plank floor came into focus. My old Narnia books and my stuffed animals, the hot-pink throw pillows from my bed. My postcard of a kitten at the end of a rope beneath the words HANG IN THERE was still in its cheap frame, lying on the floor at her feet. Beside it was a cross-stitch sampler Aunt Niner had made for me. It had the “Footprints” story of Jesus on the beach and had hung on the wall over my desk.

  “These are all my things,” I said wonderingly. I walked around Florence, behind her to a stack of three large cardboard boxes that said ARLENE: CLOTHES and ARLENE: BOOKS/ALBUMS and ARLENE: GAMES/TOYS/MISC. The flaps of the top box were open, and I could see my old dollhouse in there buried among loose game pieces from Scrabble and Operation and Mouse Trap. Mrs. Minkus and the Minkus baby floated on top. Under a tilted Monopoly board, wedged sideways in the jumble, the glass mouth of a bottle glinted in the light. I reached into the box and pulled it out.

  It was tall and clear, with the thick, bubbled base I remembered. I’d never looked for it, because I had assumed Clarice had sneaked it out of the house. It must have stayed where she shoved it, under my bed, getting pushed farther and farther back until it came to rest behind the storage boxes where my winter sweaters and shoes were kept.

  By the time Aunt Florence had come across it while eradicating my room, it would have been scentless, and it had never had a label. She’d packed it away with all my other things. It seemed smaller, so much lighter in my hands than I remembered. I dropped it back into the box and said, “I thought you threw my things out.”

  “Why would I do that?” Aunt Florence said tonelessly.

  Next to the boxes was a black Hefty bag, stuffed full and closed with a twist tie. I opened it up and looked in it. At first it seemed to be full of crumpled paper, trash, but when I touched it, the mass was crackly and stiff like papier-mâché. I tried to pull a piece of it out and realized it was all attached, congealed into a single huge lump. In the dim light, I could make out words or drawings on the paper, but it was so crumpled that I could not resolve it. Then I started picking out tiny recognizable bits: a cowboy hat, a coiled rope, the leg of a horse.

  “This is Wayne’s wallpaper?” I said. “You peeled off all Wayne’s wallpaper and kept it?” There was another Hefty bag behind it, smaller, and when I touched it, I could feel more of the same crackly stuff in it. I was willing to bet that if I opened it up, I would find the leavings of the dinosaur paper she had put up in the bathroom when Wayne was a baby.

  Aunt Florence, her back to me, hunched her shoulders up in a shrug. “I couldn’t look at it every day. Those grinning cowboys, and my boy dead. But I couldn’t throw it out, either.”

  I walked back around the chair and shoved the box of my things out of the way. I
sat down on the floor in front of her. “Why are my things up here with Wayne’s things, and Aunt Niner’s, and Granny and Grampa’s? I’m not dead, Aunt Flo.”

  “Same reason,” said Florence. “I couldn’t throw them out, but I couldn’t stand to look at them every day, either.” At last she stopped twisting Mr. Minkus’s head around and around and met my eyes. “You never came home, Arlene. Maybe I’m dumb like you think, and it took me a few years to get it, but once I did, I couldn’t look at your things, and you somewhere in the world judging me, and never coming home.”

  I dropped to my knees and put my hands on her legs, one on either side. She was stiff and unyielding under my fingers, but that was how Florence always felt. “I never judged you,” I said. “You misunderstood. You thought I knew stuff I didn’t. There was all this space between us, and you put whatever you wanted in there. But you got it wrong. I wasn’t judging you, and you are not the reason I didn’t come home. Up until yesterday, when you said what you said in the kitchen, I had no idea you even knew Jim Beverly was dead. And until this morning, when Burr pointed out a few things I had wrong, I had no idea that you killed him.”

  There was a moment of silence, and we let that settle between us for a moment.

  Aunt Florence shook her head at me, disbelieving. “But that day Mrs. Weedy came over. You asked about the car. You had to have known. I figured you had been in the car when he crashed it. I thought you’d hit him in the head while he was driving you off to somewhere, and that had run him off the road. I thought that’s how you got away.”

  “No,” I said. “I was never in the car with him, Aunt Florence. I thought there was a chance that he had run away. But mostly I thought I’d left him dead up on Lipsmack Hill, and that’s why I never came home. But now I need to know, Aunt Florence. What did you do?”

  “This is how it happened,” Aunt Flo said. She began talking, and between what she knew and what I knew, I was able to put it all together. The truth this time, undiluted. As she spoke, as we talked it through, it was happening again. It was like time travel. It was like putting something ugly and exhausted to bed at last.