by David Joy
I wasn’t quite sure what to say. She’d opened herself up to me again and was standing in front of me with open arms and I didn’t have a clue how to get to her. I picked up a pack of Winstons from the table, lit a smoke, and let those next words ride out along the first drag. “How do we do that?”
“You could start by just talking to me.”
“About what?”
“You said you’ve been busy helping your dad, so what’ve you been helping him with?”
“Just helping him at the shop.”
“You don’t mince words, do you?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means getting you to talk is like pulling teeth. It always has been.”
“I don’t know what you want me to tell you.”
“What does he have you doing?”
“Oil changes.”
“What else?”
“Changing brakes and shit.”
“So do you like it?”
“Shit, Mags. This is pointless as hell. We’re talking, but we aren’t saying a goddamn thing.”
The phone line was filled with laughter. She knew how much I hated small talk and she’d led me along until I was riled just so she could listen to me snap. The men I grew up around were men of few words. She’d always picked on me about things like that, ragging me until I broke just for a laugh. “I’m just messing with you.”
“I know.”
“So don’t get your panties in a wad, okay?”
“Shut the hell up.”
“Hey, now!” Maggie laughed.
We’d always gone back and forth at each other and until that moment I hadn’t realized how much I missed it. The playfulness and lightness of it was something nonexistent in every other part of my life. It was a good sort of feeling. There was a long pause on the phone, and I didn’t want to be the one to break it. That feeling inside of me was an itch that needed scratching, and it was itching and itching, but that man part still wouldn’t let me tell her how much I’d missed her, how long I’d waited to kiss her again, how many times I thought I’d blow Avery Hooper’s brains out for the chance. Luckily she spoke first.
“Look, I’m not asking you to be an open book.”
“I know.”
“I’m asking you to make a spot for me in your life with all the other bullshit aside. When you left before, you had shut me out. Long before you left, you had shut me out, and looking back on it, I should’ve seen it coming. I don’t want it to be like that again.”
“I told you I’m sorry.”
“It’s not about that. I’m not ragging on you, Jacob. I’m not saying this to try and get pity or to try and make you feel bad.” There was warmth and kindness and compassion in her voice. “I’m telling you that I want to be with you and if I’m going to be with you then this is how it has to work.”
“I get it, Mags.”
There was time that passed between us then that seemed to make everything okay. All of that anger and hatred she’d built for me after what I’d done was gone, and as it lifted, so did my regret and shame. That was one less thing for me to carry, and she’d taken it off my back.
I asked to take her out Wednesday, and she said yes. I didn’t have a clue where we would go, but it didn’t matter right then. What mattered was that she wanted me back. What mattered was that there was excitement in her voice. It’s funny how it only takes one person taking the time to show you they care for all that bad shit to not seem so bad for a moment. It’s not like the demons go anywhere. What haunts you is still right there when you go back under, but that one gesture from one person can bring you to the surface for a second or two. And for a very long time, all I’d really needed was to come up for air.
I told her I’d pick her up at six, and when I heard her click off the phone, I found myself reared up in my seat with no clue how I’d gotten there. My feet tingled, my palms were sweaty as hell, and that cigarette I’d lit during our conversation had all but burnt out between my fingers. I lit a fresh smoke and sank into the couch to let the blood flow back into places needed for reasoning. I tried to replay that conversation, hoping I hadn’t sounded like a complete asshole. Then that nervousness settled into excitement, and for the first time in a long time, I was happy. I could feel a smile spreading across my face, and I just sat there awhile floating without a care in the world for where I was, who I was, or what I’d done. Maggie had always been the type of girl that could make a man forget all those things, or at least glaze it over awhile until it had a chance to settle. It was that forgetting and that settling that I needed more than anything in the world, and with her back beside me, it all felt within reach.
—
I WAS SITTING PRETTY and had even popped the top on one of Daddy’s Budweisers to celebrate when the cordless phone rang on my lap, and I caught it before it had a chance to ring again.
“Hello.”
“Charlie?”
“No, this is Jacob.”
“You sound just like your daddy, boy. He around?”
“No, he must’ve headed off somewhere. I haven’t seen him in a couple hours.”
“Well, that’s all right. Listen, this is Lieutenant Rogers.”
“Lieutenant Rogers?” Knowing I was talking to a bull, any bull, even a bull that I was supposed to be able to trust, put an uneasy feeling in my stomach like I had to answer everything he asked just right.
“Yeah, just had a message that I needed to get to him, but you can pass it along. Thing is, I just wanted to let him know that your mama’s been turned loose.”
“She’s home?”
“I reckon. They held her on a seventy-two-hour hold, but once that sleep eased things, there wasn’t a whole lot left that they wanted any part of. You know how that shit goes. If a person doesn’t have money, those doctors aren’t going to give them a bed, you know?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Just pass that along to him. All right?”
The phone call ended, and any high I was riding from Maggie was gone. There for a while I got caught up in dreaming, and dreaming’s an awfully good thing when you don’t have to wake up. But staring back at the light only to stumble further into darkness hurts worse than never dreaming at all. That phone call from Rogers brought me out of my dream and showed me what was real. I sat on that lonely couch in Daddy’s house and sipped on a beer that had gone warm. I drank it not to celebrate, but to fog that wicked world into something a little easier to swallow.
There was no escaping who I was or where I’d come from. I was shat out of a crank-head mother who’d just been cut loose from the loony bin. I was born to a father who’d slip a knife in my throat while I slept if the mood hit him right. Blood’s thicker than water, and I was drowning in it. I was sinking down in that blood, and once I hit bottom, no one would find me.
Some souls aren’t worth saving, I thought.
There’re some souls that even the devil wants no part of.
19.
By midday Tuesday, my arms hung loose as broken fan belts and my hands felt tight in places unfit for grease guns. Daddy had me taking off the exhaust on an old Chevy Nova, a car that looked meaner than hell even stripped down and primered. The Nova was a project car Daddy kept around the shop and tinkered with off and on when business slowed. Those times rarely came, so that car had been sitting for years without ever being restored.
I hadn’t told him about the phone call. Didn’t think I would. For the life of me I just couldn’t put my finger on why Lieutenant Rogers had felt the need to call and tell Daddy that Mama was home. Only thing it could have been was that she’d blabbed on that night the crystal drove her crazier than a shithouse rat. And if that was why he was calling, Daddy must’ve had plans to set things right. So that phone call and the fact she was home was something I kept to myself. Sure, he’d find out sooner or later, but ever
y minute I kept quiet was a minute she had for breathing. Truth was I’d never hated her like he did. I’d never blamed her for what she was.
Bologna sandwiches in a lunch bucket were the noontime staple of Daddy’s workday and always had been. But me, I took my lunch break as just that, a break, and left him sitting there in the office smacking white bread against the roof of his mouth. I didn’t like being around him any more than I had to, and two days into working side by side, I was already certain that I hated him more now than ever. I drove the few miles down Highway 107 to Mama’s house and pulled back into that dark cut just as the sun was peaking so straight overhead that shadows vanished.
The front door was propped open like always, though the rotten chinking between pine planks would have offered just as much for cross ventilation. There wasn’t a sound coming from inside, but the house held a noise all its own: creaking planks and the unrelenting chirps of spring peepers living out hot summer days in the cool damp mud beneath the porch. I walked up to the door and peeked inside. Mama was lying across the couch, her back pressed against the far armrest, and bare legs running the length of cushions. She was staring at the wall and didn’t seem to notice me standing there.
“Mama?”
Her stare pulled back from a picture that hung on the wall, a bright-colored picture of an Indian on the back of a horse, the type of artwork that’s sold in dirty filling stations and flea markets. She fixed her eyes on me, her stare brightened, and she smiled a bit, not full-on happiness but an I-ain’t-completely-alone-anymore kind of smile. “Jacob?”
“What you doing?”
“Oh, you know, just sitting here thinking, that’s all.” She pulled her legs up into her chest and tugged a loose-fitting T-shirt over them so that her whole body fit inside that shirt. She patted on the cushion next to her and gestured for me to sit down beside her. I could tell that she was sober, and I could tell that those few days off the shit had left her mind someplace else.
“What were you thinking about?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Just where he might’ve been headed, I guess.”
“Who?”
Mama turned back to the picture and nodded.
“The Indian?”
“Yeah, I guess I was just wondering where he was headed off to all dressed up like that. Might have been going to fetch him some lady or something. Might have been going off to die.”
“Might have been, I guess.” What she was saying didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but then again, I’d never heard her say much worth remembering. Regardless, she had more sense about her after a few days of sobriety than I was used to. Those times rarely came, but I’m pretty sure those times were also why I couldn’t hate her.
“Don’t really matter where he was headed just so much as he was going there, I guess. I think I’d kind of like to be headed with him, you know?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.” Mama kept those big bulbous eyes focused on that Indian and squinted a little to suck it all back inside of her and not let it out. She ran her tongue along the front of her teeth with closed lips, and that movement seemed to exaggerate her cheekbones and how her skin sunk in on her skull. Neither of us spoke for a minute or two. We just sat there, her staring at that Indian and me staring at her. I pulled a cigarette from a soft pack in my jeans and lit one of Daddy’s Winstons. That movement and that sound brought her back and she looked at me and smiled. “So, what are you doing?”
“Been helping Daddy over at the shop.”
“What in the world for? Got more business than those Cabe boys can handle?”
“No, they haven’t been around for a week or so.”
“What do you mean, they haven’t been around?”
“I mean they haven’t been around. Went missing.”
Mama cut her eyes hard at me. I don’t know if it was what I said or how I said it, or if it was just the fact that she knew how things worked, but she looked into me like she could see straight through me. She looked at me like she could go back behind those words and grab ahold of the truth no matter whether I was willing to say it or not. “Well, I guess it’s good you’re helping him. I’m sure he appreciates it.”
“Oh, yeah, he’s a real appreciative son of a bitch all right.”
Mama laughed a scratchy, wet-sounding laugh until the phlegm caught in her throat. She pushed her hair back out of her face. Her dark hair didn’t seem so stringy and greasy as before, like maybe they’d washed it while she was in the hospital, and that seemed to make all the difference in the world. She looked better than I’d seen her in a long time.
“I’m sure he appreciates the hell out of it,” I said.
“Well, what’s new with you?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t ever get the chance to really talk to you, you know?”
“There’s a reason for that.”
“Goddamn it, I know. I know there’s a reason for it.” Mama reached out and took the cigarette from my hand, put it to her mouth and took a long drag, her cheeks sucking into dark shadowy depressions. “I’m about as clearheaded as I remember being in a long time, and I guess I just want to use it.”
“You could just stay that way.”
Mama took another drag off of the Winston and held it back out to me. She looked up at that Indian picture again and stared way back into it like she was thinking about what I said, thinking about where that Indian might have been headed and how she might get there. Then she turned to me and grinned with teeth half eaten by dope. “But what are the odds of that, right?”
I wasn’t really sure what to say, but I knew she was giving me the closest thing to truth that she had for giving. She had a fate she was trapped to just the same as I did, just the same as Daddy. Wasn’t any use in sugarcoating that type of shit.
“So, what’s new?”
“I don’t know. Not a whole lot. I do have a date with Maggie Jennings tomorrow night.”
“Maggie Jennings? I don’t know her, do I?”
“You ought to. Me and her dated for a few years, and, hell, she grew up right by the house.”
“That little girl that used to live right down the road, the one you used to play with so much when you were little?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, Jacob. She’s cute.” Mama smiled at me and wriggled her legs beneath that T-shirt. The thought seemed to make her happy. “At least she used to be really cute from what I remember.”
“She’s fucking hot now.”
Mama laughed. “You sound like your daddy.”
That “sound like your daddy” didn’t sit too well with me. “Well, she turned out really pretty. A really good girl too, you know?”
“That’s good, Jacob. That’s good.” Mama pushed her bony legs out from under the T-shirt and stood up from the couch. “Well, listen. I’m going to get in there and try to scrounge up something to eat, and I know you’ve got to be headed back to the shop soon anyhow, but why don’t you stop by later in the week and tell me how that date went, all right?”
“You still going to be worth talking to?”
Mama smiled really big, and for a minute, I could almost picture her how she’d been in those old-time photos before some of those teeth got missing and those holes checkered her smile. “Aw, I’m always worth talking to, Jacob.” She stretched her arms back behind her and popped a few cricks out of her spine. “Besides, I ain’t got no money.”
It was the closest thing to a normal conversation I’d ever had with her. It was the closest thing to a mother she’d ever been. And if we’d have been normal, I reckon that would have been the time we’d have hugged each other and she’d have kissed me on top of my head. I reckon that would have been the time that we looked each other square and said we loved each other. But we were a far cry from normal. There never had been any room for
that sappy shit. There was a part of me that was happy for that, a part of me that thought the hardness that came with it helped to protect us from all the other bad that was in this world. But there was a part of me that knew the downfall. There was a part of me that understood that with that hardness came an inability to ever let anyone worth having get close enough to love.
20.
When I caught sight of Maggie walking down Breedlove Road in a white sundress that hung to mid-thigh and clung tight in the bodice, I knew I was underdressed. Then again, a girl like her with a guy like me, I couldn’t have pulled it off in a Jos. A. Bank’s. She had her hair down, blond curls draping her shoulders and leaving just enough of her collarbones exposed to hold my eyes. Tan skin seemed to glisten in that golden hour of early evening, but it was her eyes that always had me.
I pulled up beside her in my ratty pickup, stepped out of the truck, and walked around to get the door for her, her pursed lips widening into a smile as she came toward me. Those big silver eyes had a way of taking my breath, wouldn’t let any words out, like I was drowning in them or something.
“Well, aren’t you a gentleman,” Maggie said as she got into the truck.
I watched that sundress slide up her thigh as she climbed onto the seat, me thinking all along that she couldn’t be more wrong, but knowing I’d never tell her. For a life with her I could be all sorts of things. “What time you have to be home?”
“It doesn’t really matter.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean they were in the middle of fighting about money. They never even saw me leave.”
“I might just keep you then.” I looked over to Maggie and smiled. She grinned back, but there was uneasiness in her smile, an uneasiness in how she spoke of her parents. “Shit, Mags, we don’t have to go anywhere if you’re not feeling up to it.”
“No. It’s not that. I needed to get out of there. You’re the highlight of my day.”
“Then what is it?”
“I just don’t want to talk about my parents right now. You understand?”
