by David Nickle
“Oh no,” he said. “We’re not starting this again. Not now.” He looked up, and his eyes had a calm about them.
“I’m putting this in the basement,” he said. “You won’t have to smell it, or even look at it if you don’t want to. So it won’t be any trouble for you — all right?”
“Whatever you say, dear,” said Mom, then turned to address Shelly. “Lord, now, isn’t it good to have a man around here? See, I wouldn’t have any idea how to put a bucket of tar in the basement and not stink up my house with it. Stupid little me wouldn’t know how to keep those fumes out of the vents, and before you know it, all the sheets’d start stinking like a blacktop highway in July!”
She was looking at Shelly, but she was moving towards Dad, stumping sideways on her cane like some kind of crab. Shelly tried not to glare at her: it seemed like Mom just couldn’t give Dad a chance.
“And why, I’d never think to take my two children out to steal tar from a construction site! On a night just two days I’d been out of jail!”
Dad was grinning now. He held out the basin in front of him as Mom came nearer. The metal of it made a bonging sound as he lifted it an inch or so.
“Good thing,” she said, raising her free hand and touching the rim of the basin, “my husband’s come home to set things right!”
“Careful, Dornie,” Dad said. “Don’t want to get yourself into a state.”
Mom still wasn’t looking at Dad — she didn’t stop looking at Shelly, and Shelly could see by her narrow eyes that Mom was working herself into quite a state indeed. If that state had been directed at Shelly, she would have been frightened for herself — but tonight, Shelly was just a channel, a way for five years and a day of bottled-up rage to get to Dad.
So Shelly just watched as events unfolded.
Mom’s fist tightened around the edge of the basin, and she shifted her weight so she didn’t need the cane under her and could lift it into the air so as to swing it. “I’ll give you a fuckin’ state,” she said in a low and terrible voice, finally turning her angry eyes to focus right on Dad. The basin began to tip toward her under her weight. Dad smiled, and the metal bonged again.
There was a third bong, and it seemed as though Mom’s already-unsteady footing slipped, and the basin overturned. Mom yelped, and tried to yank her hand away. Dad’s grin opened up into a toothy smile, and he let the basin fall to the floor. Shelly shut her eyes as it hit — thinking about all the tar inside it, and how it’d be to clean up tar, how long it would take and what kinds of solvents she’d need to do the job to Mom’s standards.
But when she opened her eyes again, she saw there’d be no need — the old shag carpet didn’t have a drop of tar on it, because the tar baby was all over Mom.
It had taken hold of her hand first — two twig-boned fists grasped her fingers, and it must have used her fingers to swing on because all of a sudden its skinny tar-black legs were wrapped around her elbow. Mom was wearing a bright yellow tank-top, no sleeves, so it hadn’t gotten on her clothes right at first. But as Mom reached over with her free hand to try and yank the tar baby off, she pushed the thing’s back against her chest, and that did it. She was a mess.
Mom looked like a big bat as she lifted both arms away from her, strands of tar making a web between them and her chest — where the tar baby seemed to have fixed itself. “Get it off!” she hollered. “Get this fuckin’ thing off me!”
Dad was laughing so you could hear it now. He bent over and slapped his blue-jeaned knee, and fell down to his knees and laughed some more, shaking his head.
“Look at that,” he said. “Damn me if it’s not suckling off you, Mama!” And he howled.
Sure enough, thought Shelly, it did look like the tar baby was suckling. Somehow, it had managed to get turned around and now its face — or at least the front of its head; the tar baby didn’t really have a face — mashed into Mom’s left breast, like it was taking milk.
With nothing there to hold it up, the tar baby started to peel away from Mom’s tank-top; and for a second, as it turned first to face the ceiling and then forward, Shelly thought she could make out a little grinning face on the thing — mouth open, thin snot-strands of tar between upper and lower jaw, and tiny little button-eyes, staring up at Mom’s tit. But the face went away as the tar baby turned, and it was just a mound of hardening tar again. Mom’d stopped hollering, and she’d started to sob. Dad picked up the basin from where it’d fallen on the floor, and held it under the tar baby. It fell into it with a bong.
Everyone stood silent. Mom was covered in tar — somehow, it’d gotten on her face and into her hair; it smeared down her shoulders and onto her hands like lines of thick, black finger-paint. Mom looked up at Blaine, and cleared her throat.
“Blaine honey,” she said, voice calm and reasonable. “Fetch your Mom her cane.”
Blaine did as he was told, but when it came time to hand the cane over, he didn’t get too close to Mom. Shelly didn’t blame him. Mom took the cane, propped it against the floor and pushed herself to her feet.
“I’ll just put the baby in the basement then,” said Dad, to no one in particular. He whistled as he carried the basin into the kitchen and down the stairs.
“You mean the tar baby,” said Shelly, but Dad was beyond hearing.
Dad drank beer from a bottle at the kitchen table, and Shelly sat with him, sipping her Coke from the can. They didn’t speak at all while the shower ran; Dad had just stared out the window into the dark yard, drank his beer, and occasionally reached over to pat Shelly on the hand.
For her part, Shelly just watched him. She hadn’t seen Dad since she was just five — not properly anyway, not outside of a prison visitation — and he was for all practical purposes a complete mystery to her. He had last gone to jail for armed robbery — he’d used a hunting rifle to rob a grocery store in Huntsville with his buddy Mark Hollins, who’d gotten off as an accomplice and did hardly any time in jail at all. Shelly tried to imagine her father doing such a thing, and found again that she couldn’t. When she’d gone to see him with Mom and Blaine, he was always laughing and gentle — even when Mom egged him on. It wasn’t that there was any doubt he’d done the robbery; Dad had confessed to it and pleaded guilty when it came time to go to court. It was just that Shelly couldn’t see how he’d done it, pulling out a gun and telling someone to hand over their money or they’d get it. Dad just seemed . . . too nice. Compared to the rest of the family, that was.
Finally, the shower shut off, and Dad squinted at the ceiling, like he was gauging something there.
“Out of hot water,” he said.
“Maybe she’s clean now,” said Shelly.
Dad just shook his head. “Soap and water won’t do a thing to tar. Your mother should know better.”
Shelly nodded as though she understood, and swallowed the last of her Coke.
“She’ll know better now,” said Dad, staring back out the window.
They sat quiet again, as Mom stomped wet-footed on the floor upstairs and the vestiges of water drained from the bathtub through the old pipes under her feet, over their heads. Shelly squeezed her Coke can as if to crush it, but she didn’t have the strength and the side just popped. Dad started at the sound, then smiled, and reached over to put his big hand over Shelly’s. “Let’s both squeeze,” he said. Dad’s thick fingers pushed on Shelly’s, and for a minute she felt like he was crushing her against the can. But the metal crumpled easily under their combined grip, and Shelly laughed when Dad let go of her.
“Teamwork,” said Dad. “That’s what this family’s going to be about, from now on, little girl.”
“Teamwork?”
Dad nodded sagely. “Most families do it, you know — ours is just peculiar that way. Or it has been. We’ve been like a bad cell block in a bad jail; we’re always fighting and squabbling and hurting each other. Won’t be the case any more.”
Shelly looked up at her father, who was staring back out the window. It was tr
ue what he said; they were like a bad cell block in a bad jail, or at least they were always hurting each other. Dad had a point.
“Mom’s wrong about you,” she whispered.
Dad blinked, and smiled down into the dregs of his beer. He gave Shelly a squeeze around the shoulders.
“You better go to bed, little girl,” said Dad. “It’s late.”
The bathroom door opened upstairs, and Mom made her way noisily to her own bedroom. A minute later, the mist of her shower wafted down — carrying with it the combined scent of perfumed soaps, old angry sweat, and tar-fume.
It was, Shelly realized, the first time she’d smelled tar since Dad had shut the basement door and Mom had gotten in the shower. For whatever reason, the tar baby’s smell had just stayed put. Shelly laughed to herself: Mom had been wrong on that score too.
Dad stood up, and patted Shelly on the back. “Come on, little girl,” he said. “Daddy’s going out for a walk — you get on up to bed.” Blaine was already in the top bunk when she came into the bedroom. He had his reading light on, and was propped up on an elbow over some kind of magazine — Shelly couldn’t see what because of the angle, but she suspected it was one of his mountain biking magazines.
“I’m not turning out the light,” said Blaine.
“Who said I want you to?”
“You always want to go to sleep early.”
“I’m not the one in bed already.”
Blaine glared at her, picked up his magazine, and rolled over so he was facing the wall. Paper rustled angrily as he positioned the magazine out of his own shadow.
“You’re lucky,” he muttered.
Shelly supposed he was right. Normally, after a little exchange like that one, Blaine would swing down from the bunk, grab Shelly in a headlock and take the last word in the argument by sheer might. Shelly would have to apologize — no, she would have to beg, and if she were lucky, that would be all it took.
Tonight, Shelly guessed she was really lucky.
She sat down on the bottom bunk and pulled off her T-shirt. The springs over her head creaked as Blaine shifted his weight.
“Lucky,” he said again, his voice low and kind of scary. “I could come down and pound you right now. You know I’d do it.”
Shelly unbuttoned her jeans, pulled them off and slid under the covers.
“You know that — don’t you, shitty Shelly?”
“Stop it, Blaine.”
“Shitty Shelly,” said Blaine, and he started to sing it: “Shitty Shelly shitty Shelly.”
“Stop it,” she repeated, but of course he wouldn’t.
“Shitty Shelly shitty Shelly. What are you gonna do, shitty Shelly? Get mad like Mom did?”
“This is stupid,” she said. “This is what Dad was talking about.”
She rolled back on her haunches, and lifted her feet to the mattress of the top bunk. Part of her screamed a warning: Suicide! Don’t even try it! But the taunt was getting under her skin — Blaine knew how to get under her skin better than almost anyone — and she couldn’t help herself. She bucked back on her shoulders, and pushed hard against the mattress with her feet — not too hard, just enough to send him a message.
She felt Blaine’s weight roll to one side, and heard a crack! sound like snapping wood, and she felt the bed-frame tremble even as Blaine shouted. If she’d been even a little angry a second ago, it was all gone now; Shelly was just scared.
“You dumb bitch!” Blaine sounded an inch from tears. “You dumb goddamn bitch! That was my head!”
Before she could even answer, Blaine was half-way down the ladder from the top bunk. His head. She guessed she’d rolled him against one of the bed-posts, given him a good bang on the skull. Blaine was going to pound her all right. Shelly screwed her eyes shut and curled herself into a ball — waiting for the rain of fists that would follow, and hoping they’d just fall on her back and shoulders. She knew from bitter experience that if she let Blaine get to her stomach and face, there’d be no end to the pain . . .
But the punching didn’t come.
Blaine made a strangling sound, and she heard the sound of his bare feet moving across the floor — and then she heard the door open and close.
“You’re dead!” He yelled it from the hall, like he was chasing her, then repeated it from the bottom of the stairs:
“You’re dead!”
Cautiously, Shelly opened her eyes.
“B-Blaine?” she whispered.
But of course he didn’t answer: she was alone in the bedroom. Distantly, she heard the sound of a door downstairs opening and closing again. Shelly wasn’t sure, but it might have been the basement door in the kitchen. She curled more tightly around herself, and shut her eyes again.
Shelly didn’t sleep. Part of it was the Coke she’d had with Dad, but mostly she stayed awake thinking about the tar baby, and what it’d done to Mom. This, she guessed, was how it was when Mr. Baldwin got in trouble with the other men in prison back in the early days. She tried to imagine how it would have been — Mr. Baldwin’s first night with the tar baby. Maybe the guy who had the top bunk there was looking for some trouble like Blaine had been, holding it and stoking it and building his meanness through the evening until it was something he could use, in the small hours of the night.
Behind her closed eyes, she could almost see the two of them, skinny little Mr. Baldwin lying still like a rabbit underneath his blanket, and the other prisoner — probably he was a lot bigger, and had been in a lot of fights, just like Blaine — him jumping down like he wants a piece, saying “Shitty Baldwin, shitty Baldwin, shitty Baldwin” over and over again. And because Mr. Baldwin wouldn’t answer him, and wouldn’t do what he said, and maybe earlier that day lipped off to him like Shelly had lipped off to Blaine, that other prisoner reached down to grab onto his shoulder, and give him a beating.
Only it wasn’t Mr. Baldwin’s shoulder he grabbed. He reached down to the bucket by his bunk, and that prisoner had his hand stuck deep in the tar baby’s shoulder. Before he could think, he hit that tar baby again, and one more time, and that was it — he was stuck. Just like Bre’r Rabbit in the movie. Just like Mom tonight.
Shelly wondered if Mr. Baldwin laughed that first time, the way Dad had laughed when Mom had gotten herself tangled up in their tar baby.
Or, she thought with a shiver, maybe Mr. Baldwin just lay in his bunk, all curled up trying to go to sleep, while his cell mate choked on tar on the floor beside him.
Blaine had been downstairs a long time. And Dad was still out walking, and Mom hadn’t budged from her bedroom.
And hadn’t Dad said something about teamwork?
Shelly got out of bed and pulled on her T-shirt. “Mom!” she shouted, pushing her feet through the legs of her jeans. “Hey, Mom!”
She walked barefoot across the floor of the bedroom and opened the door to the hallway. She took a breath to yell —
— and coughed.
The air in the hallway was sticky with the stink of tar, and she had a lungful of it. Shelly reeled back, covering her face with her hand, but of course her fingers were no filter and the damage had already been done. She coughed again, and gasped, and managed, finally, to yell — “Mom!”
Shelly stumbled forward, holding onto the banister around the stairwell as she did. The air seemed to get worse the further she went, and by the time she pushed Mom’s bedroom door open, she was barely taking half-breaths. The door swung open, and Shelly ran past the bed — not even looking to see if Mom was there — and fell against the windowsill. Her lungs had hitched a final time, and now she couldn’t breathe at all. With the last of her strength, she grabbed onto the base of the window and hefted it up.
Shelly pressed her face against the screen, coughed one more time, and sucked deep of the clean summer night air, looked at the empty driveway, the dark land around the house. In the distance, over the low treetops, she could see the lights from the highway.
“Mom,” she said, not turning back, “we
got to go downstairs and help out Blaine. I think he got messed up with the tar baby. He — he was picking on me, and he turned around and went downstairs, and I think he’s in the basement . . .”
Shelly paused. In the distance, she could hear a car engine straining up a hill; crickets rubbed their legs together in the long grass of their front yard, and the thin breeze made the leaves of the birch-tree around the side rustle like paper. From inside the house, she heard a sound that must have been the refrigerator, a rattling whine as the compressors got going.
From Mom, she didn’t hear a thing.
Shelly took another breath, turned around to face the bed and made her way slowly to the still, dark form laying atop the sheets. Shelly swallowed hard. The tar smell was pretty awful as she got closer, but she was expecting it now and she knew better than to breathe too deep.
Shelly stopped by her bedside, and looked down at her mother, Mom lay flat on her back, buck-naked, on top of the bedspread still wet with shower-water. Her feet were apart, and her hands were spread from her torso so no limb touched another. The tar had tinted her flesh from head to foot; it matted her hair, and gathered in globs around her shoulders and across her wide breasts, like tiny birthmarks. Mom’s eyes were open, and they looked at Shelly steadily. Her chest swelled as she drew a breath to speak.
“Mom’s not — ” she paused, shut her eyes, and continued, her voice rough and deep, like she had a cold “ — not feeling good now, honey. You go to bed.”
Shelly shook her head. “No, Mom, I was telling you: Blaine’s gone to the basement, I think.” She stomped her foot, and heard her voice go whiny. “You got to come!”
“No good,” said Mom. “Knee’s acting up again.”
“I think Blaine’s in trouble, Mom. You got to come help him.”
Mom licked her lips, then made a face like she’d bit a lemon.
“Tar’s everywhere,” she said. “Even on m’ mouth.”
“Mom — ”
“Hey!” Mom’s voice took some energy. “Don’t you take that tone with me! This is my house, Missy!”
