by Tawni Waters
“This John Doe was found by a freeway,” says Mr. Farley. “In life, he was a bum, but in death, he made his first real contribution to his fellow man. He donated his body to science.”
I know I’ll puke again if I look at the slide too long, so instead I stare at the blue jays hopping on the benches outside. I let my thoughts wander. The way John Doe was found by a freeway reminds me of “The Highwayman.” It’s about a handsome robber who falls in love with Bess, the landlord’s black-eyed, red-lipped daughter. So strong is their devotion that they die beautiful, bloody deaths for each other. The poem’s words whirr over and over through my mind as the blue jays peck at bread crusts under the benches.
Bloodred were his spurs in the golden noon;
wine-red was his velvet coat,
When they shot him down on the highway,
Down like a dog on the highway,
And he lay in his blood on the highway
with the bunch of lace at his throat.
I can see him there on the dusty road, Bess’s fallen Highwayman, his hair matted around his white face. The buzzards begin to circle. I want to cry for the Highwayman, dying all alone like that, becoming a snack for the birds. I want to kiss his lacy throat and tell him that death isn’t forever, at least not according to my brother. I want to tell him that he’ll see his Bess again someday.
Something soggy bounces off my forehead, making me forget all about the Highwayman. I look up just in time to see Elijah aiming another spit wad at me.
“Do that again, and I’ll take out your spleen with a chain saw.”
He glares, but he puts the spit wad down. I lean back in my chair. The plastic edge of my seat digs into my back. My knees keep knocking against the bottom of my desk. I can’t concentrate. You can tell we had onions on our hamburgers at lunch because the whole school smells like them now.
Mr. Farley clears his throat. “And now, ladies and gentlemen, we move on to the workings of the circulatory system.” He says it with so much gusto, you’d think he was introducing Oprah Winfrey. He seems disappointed when nobody claps, then points his yardstick at a place inside Mr. Doe’s cut-open chest. “This is the heart.”
I can’t help but look up at the slide. A purple lump of veiny muscle rests in a nest of bloody ribs. So that’s where love comes from, I think, sickened by the discovery. Seems to me, a heart should be soft and round and pink, like a ball of cotton candy. But here I see it, this nasty mess of blood and meat. No wonder people are so rotten to each other. After seeing the human heart up close, I can’t help but wonder if anything good, let alone true love, could come from that thing. If that’s what Xylia has in her chest, she’ll never love me back, no matter what Henry says. It’s just too much. I race to the trash can and throw up.
Mr. Farley spins toward me. “Mara Stonebrook.” He says my name like a death sentence.
“Sorry,” I say, mopping my mouth with the back of my hand.
He gets all red around his neck. “I think it’s time you went to see Mr. Harris.”
“Seriously?” I ask. “You’re sending me to the office for puking?”
“I have had more than enough of your antics.”
Five minutes later I’m standing in front of Mr. Harris’s desk. He’s wearing that gray suit he always wears, his bald spot shining in the light that falls through his venetian blinds. He scribbles furiously on a yellow notepad. At the sound of my footsteps he looks up.
“Mara Stonebrook.” He’s not surprised to see me. He puts down his pencil and folds his fingers together. “To what do I owe this pleasure?”
“Apparently Mr. Farley viewed my spewing in the middle of biology as a deliberate act of rebellion.” I slump into the chair across from him, studying the poster on the wall behind him. Dare to dream. Above the white letters some guy is climbing a mountain.
“Why did you, er, ‘spew’ in biology?”
I continue to study the mountain climber. I wouldn’t mind having an ice ax like his, to gouge out Mr. Farley’s squinty pig eyes. I shrug. “I was sick. I couldn’t help it.”
“Couldn’t help it?” Mr. Harris is incredulous. “Ms. Stonebrook, this is not a public school. I hope you know that we have standards here. One of those standards, may I remind you, is that young ladies are expected to act like young ladies.”
That mountain climber has cool sunglasses.
“Ms. Stonebrook, are you listening?”
I nod.
“I hope you will take care to behave like a young lady. That means—in addition to vomiting in the toilet—dressing like a young lady. Would it be too much to ask you to purchase women’s clothing? And perhaps to comb your hair?”
I want to ask him if wearing boots like his mountain climber would be a good compromise, but it seems like a bad idea. Instead I shrug and say, “Sure.”
Lucky for me, Mr. Harris feels it’s unethical to expel a girl for getting sick and tells me to call my mother for a fresh shirt. The one I’m wearing is decorated with little blobs of half-digested hamburger. I figure if Mr. Farley had seen the pepperoni, he would have considered my presence in his class that day a gift from the good Lord and given the students a lesson on the wonders of the digestive system. But Mr. Farley’s glasses are too thick to see much of anything.
“School’s almost over anyway,” I say.
“You’re right.” Mr. Harris nods. “Just go back to class.”
As I get up to go, Mr. Harris adds, “Mara, let’s not see you back here anytime soon, you hear?” as if he, too, believes I deliberately barfed to make trouble.
I slouch out of Mr. Harris’s office, still queasy. The bell rings. Thank God. I almost stop to wait for Xylia. Then I remember that she’s in Taos with her mother for two weeks. She invited me to go along, but Daddy said no way was I going to miss two weeks of school to, and I quote, “run around a bunch of fairy museums and look at artsy-fartsy crap.”
I head toward the exit. I think about going to ride the bus with Iggy. I’ve been so busy with Xylia and Henry, I haven’t had much time for him lately. But my belly is still rumbling, and I think I could use some cool ice cream to settle it. I have ten dollars in my pocket. It’s half the money me and Iggy got helping Mrs. Walden with her laundry after she had her twins. Iggy didn’t do anything but laugh and throw baby blankets over my head, which drove me nuts, but I gave him his share anyway. He spent it the same day on candy. He got a stomachache and moaned all night.
I wander down the dirt road to town. The sun’s warm on my back and head, heating up my hair until I feel like a little furnace is burning on top of my scalp.
“Mara!” I hear Henry’s voice behind me. “Wait up!”
I stop and turn. “Hey, Henry.”
“Where’re you going?” He runs to catch up to me, his backpack thumping. He looks kinda like the Hunchback of Notre Dame with a movable hump.
“To Dairy Queen. I’ll buy you an ice cream too if you want one.”
“Sure!” Henry seems excited, like he just won a trip to New York. “I love ice cream!”
“Me too.” Around us the air is damp and alive with the clean scent of oncoming rain, but there aren’t any clouds in the sky.
“Smell that?” I ask.
“What?”
“Rain,” I say. “It’s gonna storm before nightfall.”
“Good.” Henry nods. “A good rain is more cleansing than any bath could be.”
“Yep,” I say. “Sometimes I think it’s God crying on my head.”
“That’s depressing,” Henry says.
“Nah. I like to think of God crying all over me. It makes me feel close to him somehow. Or her. Xylia says God’s a girl.”
“God is everything,” Henry says confidently. A crow squawks at us from its place on a branch. “That crow. That crow’s a piece of God. How do you think it walks around? How do you think it exists? Everything is a miracle. Everything is God.”
“Even me?” I ask.
“Even you. You are a piece of G
od.”
I beam and kiss Henry’s cheek. “You’re okay, kid,” I tell him. A car drives by, leaving us choking in a cloud of dust. “Slow down, asswipe!” I call, just like Daddy would. Then I start to laugh. “Some piece of God I am.”
Henry laughs too.
“Hey, you wanna know something else we have in common?” I ask.
“What?” Henry takes off his glasses and fogs them with his breath, then wipes them on his shirt.
“Barfing in public,” I say. “I threw up in the trash can during biology.”
“What happened?”
“Mr. Farley was showing us slides of this dead guy.”
Henry seems horrified.
I say, “Yeah. A cadaver. He showed us his guts, and I just couldn’t take it.”
“Is he crazy? Who shows a dead guy to high schoolers?”
“I know, right? There goes my hard-won popularity. Right down the toilet.”
“I guess you can kiss your bid for homecoming queen good-bye.”
I blow a kiss. “Sayonara, motherfucker.” I liked it when Xylia said it to the snowman, so I try it out. It feels good to say it.
When we get to town, I carefully make my way over the sidewalk.
“Why are you walking so slow?”
“Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. You ever hear that?”
“No.”
“When we were kids, Iggy and me used to do it. We thought that if we didn’t step on any cracks, our momma would stay safe. I guess old habits die hard.”
At the Dairy Queen a woman I don’t know is buying a small cone for her crying, half-naked toddler, who’s so dirty I wonder if he’s been washed since Christmas. He reaches for his mother’s skirt with a pudgy hand every few seconds, trying to get her to pick him up. She’s too busy talking to the counter girl, Alisa Perkins, to notice much of anything though.
We wander to the cooler. It’s hard to see inside. The glass doors need cleaning.
The phone rings, and Alisa answers it with a formal, “Dairy Queen, how can I help you?” But then her voice gets all relaxed. She kinda grunts at what the person on the other end is saying. I figure it’s probably her husband, Sheriff Perkins.
“I think I’m gonna have a Dilly Bar,” I tell Henry. “What about you?”
“You know what I really like? Those butterscotch dip cones. I haven’t had one in years, but I can still taste it.”
“Well, then let’s get you one.” I pull a Dilly Bar from the freezer and hide it behind my back. “Guess which flavor is my favorite,” I say.
“Chocolate?”
I show him. “Butterscotch.”
“No way.”
“Another thing we have in common,” I say.
We walk to the counter. Alisa hangs up the phone. I think she’s going to wait on us, but instead she starts talking to the lady with the baby. Alisa’s shrill voice drones on and on, and I wish to God she would shut up and sell me my ice cream.
I look at Henry and roll my eyes. He smiles, like he is embarrassed to be rude to Alisa, even though she’s being rude to us. I consider cracking open the Dilly Bar before paying, but with my luck I’d get hauled into the slammer. A Mr. Harris look-alike will be there to lecture me on which ice cream novelties are proper for young ladies.
I don’t pay much attention to anything Alisa says until I hear, “Yep, said the woman’s jaw was broken right in two.” My ears perk up. It must be my meaty, black heart that makes me so interested in violence.
“He didn’t know who it was?” the lady asks.
“He hadn’t gotten any names yet. Just got a call about what happened from one of the deputies.”
“Was it really an accident?” the woman asks, picking up her toddler, who has managed to smear ice cream all over his shirt.
Alisa shrugs. “Who knows? He said something about her husband finding a letter. Maybe she was whoring around or something? I’ll call you tonight as soon as I find out for sure.”
My hands clamp onto the edge of the counter, and my mouth gets dry. My brain starts buzzing like someone’s blowing a hair dryer inside my head. Alisa keeps talking, but my feet are talking louder than she is, telling me to run. So I do.
“Mara!” I hear Henry calling. “Mara, where are you going?”
The bell jingles as I shove open the door. I want to tell Henry where I’m going, but I can’t. My feet won’t let me. Feet can be very persuasive. When they want to get somewhere, they have ways of making you not care that you’re stepping on every crack in the sidewalk. They make you not care that your mother’s back is now broken in a hundred places. They make you forget your manners and your “excuse me”s, make you forget to say you’re sorry when you shove little kids into the dirt.
“Mara!” I hear Henry shout again. “Wait up!” But he can’t keep up with me. My feet are fast.
They take me to the river where Reverend Winchell does his baptizing. Then I cross it. Then I’m home.
There aren’t any red lights like I expected. Only the house, looking quiet and cool. Gasping, I climb the front steps.
“Momma,” I call as I step inside. I’m crying, but I don’t care if she sees me. I hear footsteps. “Momma?”
Daddy comes around the corner. His face is red, the way it gets when he’s sorry. “Momma had to go to the hospital,” he says, throwing his arms around me. “She fell, Rosebud. Fell right off the ladder while she was cleaning the windows.” He points to the ladder that’s leaned up outside the kitchen. “Broke her face right open. Don’t worry. She’s not alone. Iggy rode to the hospital with her in the ambulance. I was waiting for you.”
A bite of the hamburger I ate for lunch jumps back up into my mouth. My feet tell me to back away from my daddy. I try to argue, but they are not to be argued with. So I take a step, trying to keep from throwing up the rest of my lunch.
“I’m sorry, Rosebud,” Daddy says, and I believe that he is. His face is scrunched up like a washrag, and his fists are clenched tight, so tight I almost don’t notice the pink paper in one of them. But I do. I know it’s Momma’s stationery, and even though I can’t read any of the writing, I know what it says.
I turn and run. Out the door. Back through the fields to the river. I fall on my knees in the cattails and claw the ground, looking for something to hold on to as the world spins like a Ferris wheel.
Inside my head I’m saying things like, “Oh, God, Momma’s in the hospital.” Logical things: “My daddy did this.” But also: “I did this.” I did this by throwing that letter into the plant. I did this by not burning it when I had the chance. A water bug skips over the surface of the river. I watch his progress. He moves in slow motion. Jump. Jump. Jump. His little insect knees fold and expand with every hop.
“That bug’s knees are a piece of God,” I imagine Henry saying. I think about my knees and the rocks that are digging into them. I want to get up, but my legs feel like they’re made of rubber. I shriek inside my head. The noise echoes over and over in my brain as I crawl to a nearby tree and rest my back against its scratchy bark.
This bark is scratchy, I think. That’s the kind of thing you think when you’re going crazy.
Your hands still look the way they always have—dirty under the fingernails. The birds still sing. The river still roars. Nothing changes, and it bothers you, all the sameness going on around you. And it makes you insane. You want to scream, but you can’t. Something inside you tells you to keep your wits about you. Something tells you that man back there is pure evil, and that it’s only a matter of time before he kills someone: your momma or Iggy or maybe even you, if he finds out what you really are.
You sit with your back against the tree for what seems like hours. You stare up at the sky, at the swirling gray clouds painting pictures overhead. You can’t believe this is real. A wet spot appears on your cheek, just a drip, so small you wonder if you’re imagining it. Then another comes, and another.
The sky begins to weep, and at last you let out that screa
m that has been ricocheting around in your head. It echoes off the bank of the river where Reverend Winchell does his baptizing as God’s teardrops christen you.
You bury your face in your hands and start to shout for God to help you. A raindrop falls in your mouth, like magic. I am tasting God, you think.
You feel close to her now, closer than you ever have before, because she’s crying with you over your batshit-crazy daddy and your momma’s pretty, broken face.
CHAPTER 15
DINNERS ARE QUIET WITH MOMMA gone. She’ll be in the hospital for two weeks, maybe more. With her jaw wired shut the way it is, she sucks her dinners through a straw.
Some afternoons I visit her with gifts. Peanut butter shakes. Pureed vegetables. Even baby food. Daddy brings flowers. Iggy brings shiny rocks. When we give them to her, Momma tries to smile at us, but she can’t.
Still, she looks better than she did. At first she was so ugly, so broken and bloody and blue, I could barely look. Now her face is more normal, except for the wire and the fading bruises.
When she was well enough, I asked her what happened. She looked away and said, “I fell off a ladder.” She could talk, but it was hard to understand her.
“I heard Alisa Perkins on the phone,” I whispered. “I heard her say Daddy found a letter.”
Momma’s eyes were wet. “I must have told the police that after I fell. I hit my head pretty hard. I wasn’t in my right mind.”
I squeezed her hand. “It’s okay to tell me, Momma.”
In the hallway some old lady walked by wheeling an IV behind her. “I fell off a ladder,” Momma said again, sounding like a bad actor in a school play. “Now give me some of that shake.” She nodded at the Dairy Queen shake sitting on the table beside her. I grabbed it and put the straw up to her broken mouth. I could tell it was hard for her to suck on the straw. I felt sick for Momma, lying in that bed all shriveled, unable even to eat.
Honestly, our dinners at home aren’t real dinners either. The first few days people from church brought over casseroles. When people asked what happened to Momma, Daddy told them about the ladder and no one batted an eye. It seems to me someone in this town should start to wonder how Momma and Iggy get in so many scrapes, but no one ever does.
