Back Roads

by Tawni O'Dell

  Something big had happened. Maybe God had come looking for me again—appearing this time in the form of Fred Flintstone since the moon was too distant tonight to supply the silver light. It looked man-made: like a small ivory button.

  I turned my head to one side and saw the Virgin Mary standing naked in the creek, more beautiful than I ever imagined. She bent down and splashed water over herself, then stood again and tilted her face toward the trees, wearing her shy waiting-for-God smile.

  Her lines made me ache. I watched her hands rub her arms and throat and move in circles over her stomach and breasts, and enlightenment was mine. God made them that way on purpose. Getting kicked out of the Garden of Eden and being forced to earn our bread by the sweat of our brows wasn’t man’s punishment. We were damned the minute God decided to make women beautiful. And women were damned for the same reason.

  She finished washing and walked to the water’s edge, where she stopped to pick something out of her hair. She glanced my way and I squeezed my eyes shut. It was a reflex reaction like she might possess the same powers as that mythology witch with the snakes on her head who could turn men to stone. God had turned Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt. Who knew what He’d do to some guy spying on His girlfriend?

  I waited to see if she’d come to me again. If I would feel her breath on my face and her fingers on my chest. If she would take my hand and lead me to a better place.

  Instead I heard a very human “Shit!” and the sound of her sucking in her breath in pain. I looked over and saw her hopping around on one foot, all her grace and innocence gone; and I remembered everything. Who she was. Who I was. What we had done. What I had run away from. What she probably was running away from in order to fuck around with me. I understood perfectly that there was no way she could love me. Enlightenment sucked.

  She placed her foot gently back on the ground and reached down for her nightshirt. She had her back to me and the sight of her bending over brought me to a sitting position. She probably could have brought me to a floating position if she had stayed bent over long enough but she stood up and slipped into her shirt, checked the bottom of her foot once more, and went walking off into the grass without looking back.

  I wanted to yell after her, but I couldn’t figure out what to call her. Mrs. Mercer? Esme’s mom? She had never given me permission to call her Callie.

  My heart started beating too fast. I lay down and closed my eyes again and tried to sort out what had happened. I had always thought if a guy did a good job at sex the woman was left limp and breathless, purring maybe, gazing at him with dumb animal love the way Elvis looked at me while I scratched his chest.

  She had taken a bath in a freezing cold creek and left.

  A terrible sinking feeling came over me as I realized I might have already blown it. I couldn’t buy her nice things or take her places or provide her with witty conversation. All I could do was fuck her well. That was the only way I could keep her.

  It was cold now. I would’ve given anything for Dad’s coat. I didn’t know where my shirt was, but I could feel my jeans down around my ankles. I thought about wearing them that way for the rest of my life. “You show them, Harley,” Church would have said.

  I started to shiver, but my crotch stayed warm and sticky. There in the dark with my eyes closed, a woman’s pussy juice didn’t feel all that different from blood.

  Dawn was breaking when I finally started on my way up Potshot Road. The woods were noisy with birdcalls. A raccoon scurried across the road in front of me, hurrying back to his dark den with a vampire’s urgent need to avoid the coming light. His thick shaggy body and delicate black hands and feet looked like they belonged on different animals, like God had been in a hurry to finish him off and just slapped on the first set of paws He could find.

  I took my time walking the hill. A gray mist had settled over everything, absorbing the weak morning light, and giving the air substance. I stuck my bare arm out into it and brought it back covered in shimmer. I breathed it in deeply, letting its feather weight fill my lungs and roll over my tongue. It tasted sweet and empty like purity should.

  I approached the top and slowed down even more in case deer were grazing in the clearing. The biggest flock of wild turkeys I had ever seen were spread out over the grass eating, their dark darting bodies rippling with copper glints. There must of been thirty of them. Good-sized ones too. Instinct made me pause by the tree line waiting to see if a gun was going to pop.

  They didn’t notice me at all. I walked past them and sat down in our front yard where I had a good view of them and the green hills dropping away behind them like folds in a blanket.

  The sun had risen into a patch of clouds and turned them golden pink. Their color made me think of peaches, and how peaches would be in season soon and we’d be selling them at the Shop Rite for a dime apiece during our annual ten-cent produce sale, and Jody would be walking around, barefoot, with her face buried in one, juice dripping down her chin and wrists, and me yelling at her to go eat over the sink.

  School would be out in a month, and Amber would be saddled with the girls all day long again. This summer wouldn’t be as bad as last summer since Misty and Jody were more ADJUSTED now and older too.

  The first school year was the worst time we had been through so far. Jody only had a half day of kindergarten and no one could watch her in the afternoon. Amber and Misty were in school. Aunt Diane taught school and had three little kids of her own. Uncle Mike’s wife, Jan, never volunteered and none of us liked her anyway. We couldn’t afford a sitter or day care.

  For a while I dragged Jody around with me looking for a job. She was always good. That was back when she wasn’t talking. She would sit quietly staring at her fingers while I filled out job applications and talked politely to guys in Dockers with sticks up their asses because they were the almighty assistant managers of shoe stores and discount warehouses. One guy asked me if I had brought along my little sister to make him feel sorry for me so he’d give me the job. After that, I made Jody wait in the truck.

  My hours at Shop Rite were pretty flexible. I was able to work a lot of nights and weekends and still watch Jody, but the money wasn’t enough. I had to get another job—the one at Barclay’s Appliances—but I was able to sneak Jody along with me some days.

  She loved playing in the warehouse behind the store, where she made caves out of the empty refrigerator boxes and hid with her dinosaurs. Whenever Ray and I had to go on a delivery, she rode with us. Ray was okay with it—not because he was a swell guy, but because he loved the idea of pulling one over on the boss. We must have violated a hundred different insurance laws having her in the truck with us, he constantly reminded me, clutching the steering wheel and grinning at me like we were driving away from a bank robbery.

  Even with me taking Jody to work now and then, Amber still ended up cutting a lot of school to stay with her the days I couldn’t. Eventually a truant lady came out and had a talk with us. She said it was a shame that Jody wasn’t Amber’s child because then we could have put her in the free day care school provided for teen mothers who could demonstrate need.

  I asked her to define “need.”

  She said financial need: girls who couldn’t afford real day care and would have to drop out of school to take care of their children instead.

  I pointed out we couldn’t afford real day care and Amber was probably going to end up dropping out of school to take care of Jody.

  She said we couldn’t participate in the program because Jody wasn’t Amber’s child.

  I said she was my child. I had signed the papers making me the legal guardian of all my sisters. My mom had signed them too.

  She said I wasn’t a student anymore. I had graduated. The school couldn’t do anything for me.

  And I said, “So you mean if Amber did something stupid like get pregnant and have a baby, you guys would cut her a break and help her out, but we can’t get any help?”

  The woman had stared back a
t me with flattened lips and a stony look in her eyes and I could tell she wanted to say, “You don’t deserve any.” Those people were out there. I had encountered them before. Ones who read the newspaper stories or saw the news reports and decided to not only condemn my mom but hate her guts as well. Some of them even seemed to think we should be punished too.

  I kind of flipped out a little after that. I started ranting about how teenaged girls who have babies should be expelled from school. How anyone that stupid wasn’t ever going to be a productive member of society anyway. How the school shouldn’t be wasting their time with day care; they should be tying down every girl in a halter top and stabbing that birth control implant under her skin. How I didn’t care if it was a violation of her civil rights; the ACLU could take a flying leap.

  I meant all of it too. That’s what I hated most about what was happening to me. I couldn’t feel sympathy anymore.

  The truant lady waited patiently until I finished. My behavior didn’t faze her at all. She dealt with much worse around here. At least we weren’t filthy or starving or lice-infested or drunk. We weren’t covered in bruises anymore either. And I wanted the girls to stay in school, and they did too.

  She said she’d get back to us. Maybe Jody could be an exception. I stood at the front window and watched her walk across our yard in her wrinkled plaid skirt and gray blazer and thought about all the women I had dealt with recently wearing Wal-Mart workday separates from the Kathie Lee Collection and all the men in suits from JCPenney’s.

  The first couple weeks after Mom’s arrest we were shuffled from one official-looking government building to the next. We talked to detectives, lawyers, shrinks, bill collectors, correctional facility personnel, undertakers, reporters, social workers, bankers. We buried Dad and said good-bye to Mom through Plexiglas.

  The last place I went was Laurel Falls National Bank to talk to a guy who worked for Callie Mercer’s dad about getting a break on our mortgage payments for a month or two. He said the bank would like to be able to help—like the bank could think and feel—but if they gave an extension to one customer they would have to give extensions to everyone.

  I argued that maybe they could only give extensions to kids who lost both their parents unexpectedly and simultaneously and had no money and no job. That would probably limit the amount of people who would qualify.

  He smiled and made a very small laugh and said yes, it probably would.

  Then I asked him if maybe I could talk to the bank instead of him. Maybe the bank knew our house socially.

  The guy looked at me like I was certifiable. That was right after the shooting and the whole gory mess was still fresh in everyone’s mind.

  I got up and walked over to the Pennsylvania Scenic Wonders calendar hanging on his office wall. The month of August was a bright red barn sitting in the bottom of a bright green valley surrounded by bright blue sky. I had lived in this southwestern corner of the Allegheny Mountains my entire life and I had never seen a barn or a day that color.

  I motioned at the barn with my thumb and asked, “Any relation to the bank?”

  I swore I saw him reach under his desk and press a silent alarm. He had me figured for a definite TYPE.

  When I got home, all three girls were sitting on the porch waiting for the verdict. Looking at them, I had one of my flashes of enlightenment and it was this: nobody knows we are here.

  I had the same thought watching the truant lady leave. She did get back to us though, and Jody was allowed to go to the school day care but I wouldn’t let her. We were not going to be EXCEPTIONS.

  We survived that year without anybody’s help, and I was proud of us. Amber passed ninth grade. Jody started talking again. I paid our bills. At our lowest moments, I got my strength from concentrating on the anger and terror I had felt coming back from the bank when I realized we had been forgotten.

  Forgotten but not alone. I knew there were a ton of kids like us out there who had gone through the same thing. Eighty percent of the women serving time for murder in Mom’s prison had killed a husband or live-in boyfriend. I mentioned that statistic to Betty once. I said that really told you something about women and she said no, it told you something about men.

  Watching the turkeys and the sky made me drowsy. I couldn’t remember what day it was or if I had to work but I didn’t care. I had to get some sleep.

  I got up from the grass and turned toward the house and froze in my tracks. Misty was on the front porch with the Ruger aimed at my head.

  I screamed and dove for the ground. Thirty turkeys broke and ran for cover, gobbling and clucking.

  “Why’d you do that?” Misty shouted.

  “What are you doing with my gun?” I cried.

  “I was going to shoot a couple turkeys.”

  “Jesus.”

  I got shakily to my feet. My forehead had broken out in a sweat. I walked over to her. “Don’t ever do that,” I said, taking the gun roughly from her hands.

  “I figured you’d be happy about it,” she said. “Free food.”

  She had already attacked her young freckles with two bold strokes of purple shadow like a slash-and-burn farmer.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked.

  “Like what?”

  “Like you’re surprised to see me.”

  “Sometimes I forget you’re just a kid.”

  “No, I’m not,” she replied. “I started my period.”

  “Don’t tell me that.” I winced.

  I followed her eyes. They were looking at the rock I must have hit the night before. It had four perfectly round blood-brown spots on it.

  “Don’t call me a kid,” she said.

  I gingerly touched my lower lip. I had washed my face off in Callie’s creek, but I hadn’t been able to find my reflection. The lip was probably cracked and swollen. It still hurt like hell.

  “I was just thinking I want you to go to college and get a good job when you grow up,” I said without knowing where the thought had come from.

  “College?” She laughed. “I can’t even go to the Lick n’ Putt.”

  “I just mean, I don’t want you to work at Shop Rite. You can do whatever you want.”

  She gave me a quick dark glance. “No, I can’t.”

  “Yes, you can.”

  “You have to be smart to go to college.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “You have to be rich.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “You have to be something,” she persisted, in her determinedly empty voice. “I’m not anything,” she added so low I had to lean over to hear it.

  “That’s not true,” I said.

  “Okay.” She sighed, openly appeasing me. “You know what I am?”

  “What?”

  “A good shot.”

  I looked down at her. She looked back with a challenge in her eyes.

  “That’s something,” I said.

  “That doesn’t count with anyone. Except Dad.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Misty never talked about Dad even though we all knew his death had left a bigger hole in her life than it had in any of ours.

  “It’s kind of like the way you don’t count with anyone except Amber,” she further explained when I didn’t respond.

  “Huh?”

  Her lips twitched into something like a smile, then went back to normal again. She turned her back on me and walked away. She was done talking. Getting her to start again would be like prying open ancient cathedral doors.

  I left her there on the porch fiddling absentmindedly with her collar. She stared across the yard that had become sprinkled with small yellow flowers overnight, past the ginger-brown road and the green hump of a clearing to the blue-gray smudge of hills against a pink sky, but I knew all she saw was a failed kill.

  I went straight to the basement hoping for sleep. I set my gun back in its corner and walked over to my bed, took off my clothes, and lay down. I didn’t want to get under
the covers, but the room was about ten degrees cooler than outside. I went and got Dad’s coat off the back of my desk chair.

  Skip’s letter was sitting on the desk. I finally had something to write back to him about. Dear Skip. What’s new with you? I nailed Mrs. Mercer.

  He would have shit reading that. He wouldn’t have believed me though, and I couldn’t blame him. But I did. Nail her. With all my might. If she had been a board, she would have cracked down the middle.

  I got an instant hard-on thinking about it. Not a nice one I could dispose of at my leisure with the ladies of Victoria’s Secret. An urgent one. A maddening one like a bad itch.

  I had never been good at not scratching. I used to scratch mosquito bites until they bled. Sometimes Mom would see me and blame the blood on Dad and I would let her not because I wanted her sympathy or because I wanted Dad to get in trouble but because when they figured out I had been lying, they were united in their anger toward me.

  I wanted to beat off until I bled but even then I knew I wouldn’t get the relief I craved. A hand wasn’t going to do it for me anymore. Friction wasn’t going to be enough. My dick had been enlightened too.

  Peaches again. An overripe peach before it started to rot. That’s what she felt like inside.

  I went back to bed and stared at the white circle of my lightbulb and thought about her ass in a white T-shirt growing dimmer and dimmer in the black night as she walked away from me.

  I didn’t know if she had enjoyed it. I had been too preoccupied with what was in my hands and between my lips to pay much attention to her as a whole. Even if I had paid attention, I’m not sure I would have known what to look for.

  I once overheard my cousin Mike talking to a buddy about his latest girlfriend. He said they had to be real careful fooling around if there was anyone else in the house because she was a screamer. The way they both grinned when he said it, I could tell they thought this was great. I supposed it was if while you were having sex with someone you wanted to think you were killing her too.