by Lynn Pruett
Why did this happen to me? I’d been beautiful. Like a bride. No, prettier than a bride. The prom is the first step to the altar. They’d warned me, the old ladies at the beauty parlor, Darryl with his condoms. Now it seemed the condoms were an act of love. Sadness welled again and I thought of Kyle undressing himself. Truck-stop girl, he’d called me. And then I knew what he meant, what he’d expected. Kyle had invited me so his buddies would know he got laid. The church ladies’ march had tarred all of us. Mama should have taken them on directly, not with ice cream but with words. She should have smashed their signs and sued their lying butts. But she hadn’t. Around me, crickets sang, high-pitched and shrieky.
The road dipped and curved. The line turned yellow and doubled. The lines meant nothing. Any car, anytime, could and would cross it, no matter the curve, the hill, the darkness. On I walked in the middle of the road, beyond the crickets, shivering against the silence.
A car roared near, and when its headlights swept into view I hunkered down in a ditch of wet leaves. As the car passed, I hid in the earth-scented shadow, where it felt safe. I couldn’t trust anyone.
I rested awhile and thought about staying there until sunlight, but what would Mama think? She’d go out of her mind. I could see her slowly parting the lace curtain to peer at the truck stop, watching first for Kyle’s headlights and then, as the hours passed, hoping to see the car parked down below the honeysuckle hedge, hoping then at that hour that we were making out, giving that up in order to see me safe. I stayed a long time in the ditch, imagining Mama and her coffee and her soft blue gown. I sent her messages through the air. But still she sat by the window and cradled her coffee cup. Slowly my body cramped. I looked up through a clearing of loblolly pines at the starry sky. Oh, Darryl, I prayed, come and look for me. You know Pealiquor Ridge is the parking spot. I wished, wished, wished he’d come.
I walked a long time before I heard music. It pulled me like a lure to a long low building with a tin roof. A sign painted on the wall said THE GENTLEMEN’S CLUB. Between the road and the dirt parking lot, a strip of grass sparkled like an open treasure chest. The boys at school called this a jive dive and bragged about throwing empties into the parking lot after evenings on Pealiquor Ridge.
I didn’t dare go in.
I stood in the road looking at the building, wishing I could. I moved a half step forward and felt something crinkle under my foot. It was a pack of Marlboros, with four inside, one of them crushed. A book of matches advertising Dreamland in Tuscaloosa was jammed under the plastic wrapper. I should have been grateful, but I was in no mood for gratitude. I jabbed inside the pack. Bits of tobacco clung to my fingers and as I lit up, crumbs on my lips, I thought suddenly of Daddy. I remembered his yellow-tipped fingers teaching me how to lace my shoes, his rich scent of soil and beer and smoke and his patience as he retrieved again the black-and-white saddle shoe I’d kicked under the couch. I had not cried when Mama said he was dead. No, I had finished eating my jelly sandwich and cried only after Darla punched me for getting butter in the jelly jar.
Smoke curled from the cigarette. If Daddy were alive, he would come find me. Walking tall like a skinny tree, he would appear, his straw hat a little crooked. He’d sit on the log and take my hand in his yellow-tipped fingers. I would ask him about love and soak his shirt with tears. He would murmur songs into my hair because I was the youngest and always came in last.
He’d point out the animals made up of stars overhead and name the fat bugs scurrying over the log. And that odd tree over there, the one whose bark reminded me of a knight’s club, spiky and hard, Daddy would know its name. My tears were warm and slow as a summer river. If he were alive and with us, Mama would not have the truck stop and I would not be stranded right now. One by one I smoked the three cigarettes left in the pack. Their stubs, clustered together, white in the darkness, reminded me of a family of soft mice.
A car was coming but my legs stood still. As quick as that, my body turned to fear. Blinded by the headlights, I skittered across the strip of broken glass and tumbled under a fig bush, balled up tight to keep from screaming.
Blood branched across the arch of my writhing left foot. The flow would not stop. I scattered a small red rain on bobbing ferns, then hopped toward the smoky building. Fear couldn’t touch me now. Fear operated when you had options. The Gentlemen’s Club was fixing to see an entrance like they never had before. A drunk, dirty, insane white girl was coming to call.
Feeling my way like a blind woman through a sea of metal dinosaurs, I lurched from car to car. I limped to the door and then, not knowing if I should push right in, knocked, which seemed silly. Knocking on the door of a bar. Who could hear me?
A man bathed in the red of the exit sign peered out. He thrust his face into mine, his eyes deep, black, and pointed. It was like I was staring into a double-barreled shotgun. He said, “Who you know in here? This a private club.”
“I’m bleeding. I need to call an ambulance.”
The man just stared. “Why don’t you white kids leave us alone? All the time coming up here and causing trouble. Daring somebody to ask for a drink. You ain’t going to get the law up here, ambulance or no.” The door swung at me.
I thrust my foot into the disappearing slice of the Gentlemen’s Club.
“You are bleeding.” His voice softened. “Go around to the back. We only got one toilet so you can’t come in.”
I must have looked really desperate because he sighed, then half smiled. “I’ll send somebody back there what can help you.”
I hopped around the building, my foot gone numb, and sat on a stump. Minutes later, the blackest man I’d ever seen appeared, carrying a glass of whiskey, a cloth, and a pan of water. His head was smooth and bald and sat like a gigantic egg in a nest of wrinkled neck skin. “This gonna hurt.” He poured whiskey on the cut.
I gritted my teeth and felt my spine collapse. In a moment I was sturdy again, sitting up, reaching for the glass.
“Here.” He put it to my lips. “For medicinal purposes.”
The whiskey rolled down my throat, whetting my lying voice. “I killed a man.”
He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. He took in the blood and dirt on my dress and the smell of Rebel Yell.
“Up there on the ridge.” I shifted. “We were supposed to go to the prom but he tried to get me drunk and took me up there. He just wanted… . He didn’t want to take me to the prom.” My voice rose and fell and in an odd way caught the melody of the music. “So I broke his head open with the car door.”
“Pipe dreams,” said the man.
“It’s true. I cut my foot running away from him.”
“A girl out alone at a club for gentlemen only.” He shook his head. “Mighty peculiar.”
“I just killed a man. What could scare me?” My voice wobbled.
The man cut away the stocking and put the strip in his pocket. He swabbed my foot with the cloth. “We can’t keep you here if you’re running from the law.”
“I’m not running from the law. I just need to call home.”
He shrugged. “You got to take care of the feet.” He began to rub my foot, to probe little bones I didn’t know I had. Starting at my heel, he rubbed small circles on my skin, his touch soft but firm, stronger in some places but never painful. I sank into the music. I saw it dance across the starry sky in colors. Peach melba drifting lazily along like a river. Large magenta stones tippling into the water, dissolving, spreading magenta ripples. Then the yellows, sharp bars of lemonade ice, marching like piano keys, leaping high and turning translucent before slipping below the surface without a splash. The tinkle of purple fish as they swam upstream.
The man sank sharp fingernails into my left ankle. With a pocketknife he made two quick swipes across my foot and with a pair of nail clippers pulled a sliver of metal, half a beer tab, from the gash. He sewed up the cuts with fish line.
“Tender feet.” He said it as if it were a disease he’d diagnosed. H
e guided my foot until it pointed straight at the moon. “I’ll be back.”
I felt indecent, leaning back on the stump, my foot aimed at the moon. I gathered the long skirt between my thighs. A couple of men poked their faces out the back door of the Gentlemen’s Club.
“Whoo. Check this, Joe. We got a statue in the woodpile.”
“Damn, that’s powerful whiskey. I mean, damn,” said the second man, rubbing his eyes. “Give me some more of that shit.”
“Shut up,” I said, wanting to drop my foot but unsure if it was good health or not. “I’m waiting on the foot doctor.”
“Hey, Joe, she can talk.”
“Never mind,” said Joe. “I got plenty of women that run their mouths.”
The men came out into the yard. They each had a small bottle of liquor, which they raised and clinked. “To you, princess of the stump,” said the squatty one.
I laughed, woozy, near tears.
“Cheers,” said Joe, and they clinked bottles again.
The men lurched along the back wall and urinated, hiding nothing from me. The foot doctor returned.
He held up a jar of cobwebs. He reached inside and wrapped the sticky silver strands around my foot. “Took me awhile to find these. Housekeeper come yesterday.”
My white foot draped in a sandal of cobwebs gleamed in the moonlight. “You have beautiful midnight color up here,” I said, as a flush of well-being returned. “I wish I could put it in a bottle.”
He continued to wrap my foot as if he hadn’t heard me.
“And the music,” I said. “The music would be like an egg, all beautiful sad blue on the outside but on the inside veins of Emperor’s Gold and Peach Melba and Burgundy Rust. What glorious colors this place has.”
“Dr. Feets, this girl done lost it,” said one of the urinators, shaking himself.
“She just been through surgery,” Dr. Feets said.
I rode with Dr. Feets in his old van and relished the dingy, dusty smell of hunting dogs it carried. Inside I was bursting like a sunbeam, because the world wasn’t mean and ugly but had good people in it, strangers even. The prom seemed like a dress-up game for kids compared to my visit to the Gentlemen’s Club. I wanted to tell this to Dr. Feets, whose neck shook with every bump, but he’d ignored everything I’d said so I simply grinned at him. We drove pretty fast for the curves and hills yet I trusted him completely.
“About that dead boy, if there is a dead boy: if he died up to the ridge, we’re going to get the blame,” Dr. Feets said, as he barreled up the spur toward Pealiquor Ridge.
Kyle couldn’t be dead. I’d seen him breathe. As we drove up the hill, the odor of persimmons crowded the van. My stomach tightened as if I’d eaten every unripe fruit in the forest. What if Kyle demanded that Dr. Feets hand me over? Never, never would I get out of this truck. I hoped Kyle was dead. I prayed that Kyle was dead. I even skipped over all the things I had to be forgiven for first and prayed mightily for that burning love God kept in his fingertips ready to zap the most undeserving of us all.
I wanted to appeal to Dr. Feets, to say, Please don’t make me go with Kyle. Light spread across his bald head. He looked as cold as the moon. The truck churned up the gravel of Pealiquor Ridge.
Dr. Feets strolled to the Gran Torino and peered in the side window. A bright star, alone at the edge of the sky, blinked. Alive or dead, what was my wish? I wished I was at the prom.
I heard a grunt as Dr. Feets prodded Kyle. “Hey. What the hell?” Kyle’s speech was loud, too loud, and the words slurred together: whatthehell.
“I’m calling the cops,” Kyle shouted, and slipped when he tried to stand up.
“You out of luck. The cops don’t have this address on their radar screen,” Dr. Feets called over his shoulder as he came back to the van. He climbed into the driver’s seat and glanced at me. I’d prepared myself for any news, my hands folded, my eyes on the shining star.
“That boy has a head like a rock.”
I laughed, silly and ridiculous and relieved and crazy, all at once. “Oh, Dr. Feets, I was safer at the Gentlemen’s Club than I was with Kyle.”
“It’s a club for gentlemen. Why are you surprised?” His voice was sharp and his pen jabbed the pad he wrote on. He tore off the top sheet and said, “Fifty dollars for the surgery. You can pay on the installment plan.” He turned the key. “Your boy ain’t dead. Run along as best you can.”
“You can’t leave me here. You can’t.” I thrust my face up to his. I was right under his nose, his smoky mouth above mine. “Don’t leave me.”
He turned his head away. “You’re a pretty woman. You probably think your nose is too big but it ain’t.”
I let myself out. God! I wanted to scream. I crumpled his bill and threw it over the railing.
Kyle was propped up on the hood of his car. I stood like a statue where I was. Dr. Feets drove away, his engine fading like my last hope.
Kyle came toward me, letting each foot drag through the gravel. “Look at you,” he said. “Look at you. Stockings ripped to shreds. I saw you kiss that jig in the truck.”
He didn’t hit me. I guess he didn’t know me well enough for that. I couldn’t even run now. I shook as I felt him circle and kick gravel at my bare feet.
“You are the only girl who would go to the prom with me. You are the first one who ever said yes. And look how it turned out.”
Part of me started to say, I’m sorry, but Mama’s voice rang out clearly in my head: Never apologize for something you did not do. So I said nothing and shivered at the memory of his strength.
“We were all supposed to meet here but none of them came. My buddies, all supposed to come up here to show off the chicks.”
They’d probably seen the car and thought what they wanted to. I knew then that Darryl’s condoms weren’t enough of a show of love. He had to do better than that. “You are not my love life,” I said to Kyle.
“I hate this damned monkey suit,” he said, ripping open the vest and clawing off the tie.
We heard a car coming up the road. It was Sheriff Dodd. When I didn’t get home by curfew, Mama had swallowed her pride and called him up in tears, insisting something bad had happened to me and she was not about to hush anything up.
We looked like we’d been attacked. Kyle’s forehead had developed a large purple bump and blood had dried on his upper lip. With my ripped stockings and falling-down hair, mascara smudged on my cheeks, I was a mess.
I was so numb I stayed silent while Kyle tried to answer questions he didn’t know the answer to. Me, who could lie to my mother’s face about Darryl and to Dr. Feets about murder, and me, who could scream at the principal, I said nothing.
Sheriff Dodd left us in the patrol car while he investigated the Gran Torino. He picked up one of my shoes and hooked the heel over his belt. When he slipped into the shadows, I could see a bobbing cluster of stars, the paste emeralds shining for all they were worth.
“Connie, I’m sorry what happened to you,” Kyle said.
“Sorry? Are you apologizing?”
“Yeah.”
“For what?” I wondered how far he’d go.
“For that black guy.”
“You’re apologizing for him?”
“Why you keep asking me questions? Aren’t you right in the head?”
“We both wanted something different, Kyle, and neither of us got it.”
“Ain’t no girl would go with me,” said Kyle. “Why did you?”
I didn’t answer.
“If I didn’t have football, nobody would like me,” he said.
“Football doesn’t mean you can rape girls,” I said, not in an angry way. It just popped out of my mouth like a solemn truth.
“I didn’t rape nobody.”
“You tried.”
“But you aren’t a virgin.”
“So?” I said. “Are you?”
Kyle studied his hands. He looked like a fat kid alone at a swimming pool with his stomach drooping over his tr
unks, pretending his body was okay to him. It was like I was seeing what he thought without any words being spoken. And then I thought of Darryl at the creek, and the smooth line of his belly and the curves of his shoulder blades, those nice triangles like small wings. I wanted to get my dress back perfect and go to his window and call him out and lead him to the cliff and let the moon be our crystal ball and let him and me dance and dance forever.
DARLA BOHANNON
Everything I eat tastes burnt. My father is in my mouth and on my tongue. Every day I retch and retch, but the big bar in my stomach does not come out. It is like living with a brick inside me; it blocks everything. My breath is short. I feel constipated. Cleaning a bathroom is impossible with its associations. I cannot eat or breathe or move. Mama tries to have me drink broth, every day thicker and thicker, and I try for her sake, but she does not ask me what is wrong. She feels my head and puts a thermometer in my mouth and says if I want to join the Army we must talk about it. Maybe it is not a bad thing for me, after all. She brings me apple juice and even the newest blueberries, which I love, but they just wither and die.
CONNIE BOHANNON
Sitting in Sheriff Dodd’s office, surrounded by paneled walls reeking disinfectant, the yellow sun baking her bare shoulders, Connie felt like a Lysol can under pressure. Her stomach threatened to flee toward her mouth every other minute. So this is the after-prom, she thought. She was hung over and the damned chair was metal and one leg rickety, which made her seasick if she shifted an inch. Behind his desk sat his empty wooden chair, carved to fit a flattened-out behind. At least she didn’t have a ridge of wood poking up her ass.
She craved a cigarette. It would settle her stomach and help her figure out why Mama had hauled her out of bed so fast this morning, practically slammed her into the car, and rode hell-bent-for-leather down to this hotbox. Actually, Connie hadn’t minded the ride. She’d stretched across the backseat and lifted her injured foot to the open window and enjoyed the dancing wind. Mama kept twisting to stare at her, as if she were a werewolf ready to sink teeth into Mama’s neck. At least Jessamine, who was driving, had her sense about her. She pointed out that Mama’s rear end mashed against the front window was getting a lot of honks from passing cars.
