Back Roads

by Tawni O'Dell

  “Sure,” I mumbled into my arm. “Will you get me a cup of coffee?”

  “I’m not allowed,” Jody said. “I can only get the cup.”

  Amber made a persecuted snort and got up from the table. A cupboard door banged open. A plastic mug slammed against the countertop. I heard the click of anOFF switch and theglug, glug of coffee being poured.

  The smell pulled my head up. I circled the mug with my hands. The heat felt good. I took the hand Misty had hurt, turned it upside down, and held the scratches over the steam. Across the table, Jody was working on her list. So far she had written:

  FEED DINUSORS

  EAT BREKFIST

  BRUSH TEETH

  Amber sat down with a box of Pop-Tarts. “You know, I was just thinking,” she said, ripping open one of the foil packets. “How did Misty know for sure Mom was going to leave Dad? Mom could have been saving that money for lots of reasons.”

  “We heard her talking about it,” Jody volunteered.

  “What?” Amber said.

  I put down my coffee cup.

  “You know about the money?” Amber asked slowly.

  “I think so,” Jody said, without pausing in her work. “You mean the money Mommy was saving so she could move away from Daddy. She said she had a whole bunch hid in the house somewhere. Misty said she was going to look for it after we heard Mommy talking about it, but she couldn’t find it.”

  Amber and I looked at each other.

  “Who was Mom talking to?” I asked.

  “Uncle Mike.”

  The pen in the little hand kept moving carefully across the paper.

  “He was going to help her out,” Jody went on. “He said she had to get Misty away from Daddy before it was too late.”

  “Too late for what?” I asked, feeling the skin on the back of my neck tighten.

  “I don’t know,” Jody answered.

  She finished writing PLAY WITH HARLEY and looked up.

  “Misty didn’t know either,” she said.

  chapter ( 12 )

  Skip and I were juniors in high school when that asteroid—1994 XL1—came within sixty thousand miles of hitting Earth. I remembered it happened around Christmas because we had a crappy old wreath Skip’s mom had thrown out hanging in the mining office.

  I heard about it on the news and before I could call Skip, he called me. We were both blown away by the thought of a 100,000- ton rock the size of a barn exploding above us and flattening the United States. An Earth-crosser, one of the scientists on the news called it: an asteroid that cruises through our orbit.

  The next day I got off the bus at Skip’s house and we grabbed a bottle of the rum his mom stockpiled so people could drink her homemade eggnog and we headed for the railroad tracks.

  We talked the whole way there about all the cool disaster movie facts: how scientists estimated there were one thousand Doomsday Earth-crossers out there that could end life on our planet as we know it; how the dust and smoke from impact would block out the sun for years and there’d be a “nuclear winter” and an ice age and giant tsunamis that would drown half the world; how the only safe way to get rid of one would be to explode a nuclear bomb in front of it and nudge it off course without shattering it, but scientists would need five months’ warning to do it. XL1 wasn’t spotted until it was fourteen hours away, and it was considered small. We’d see a Doomsday about six seconds before it hit.

  Then we built a fire in the snow and got trashed and philosophical.

  Why go to school if the whole planet could be destroyed tomorrow? Why get a job? Why take shit from your parents? Why take shit from anybody? The only thing we couldn’t rationalize away was trying to get laid. Neither one of us had had any luck yet, but we instinctively knew it wasn’t a pursuit we should give up just because we might only have six seconds left to live.

  We were sure we were the only people around who appreciated the magnitude of what had almost happened. Hardly anyone we knew seemed to care. Not our parents. Nobody at school. Even the science teachers didn’t get all that cranked up about it.

  The only person I knew who cared was Jody. She got excited when I explained that a giant asteroid was probably what wiped out the dinosaurs, even though I knew she was too little to really understand. And Skip said Donny got interested when the news showed a futuristic computer graphic of a comet being made into a steam-propelled rocket by melting its ice core with nuclear power. We howled over that one saying it was because the comet looked like a flaming Zinger.

  But everyone else went on with their stupid little lives without even glancing at the sky that night. My dad even bitched at me to change the channel when I found a late-night special on asteroids.

  I tried making him see the terror but also the relief in knowing we were insignificant as a race; how it made the simplest acts more important and the monumental ones pointless.

  He sank deeper into the couch and told me I had a better chance of getting hit by a truck than an asteroid and to give him the goddamn remote.

  I waited until I was sure he wasn’t watching me, then I snuck a notebook out of my backpack and wrote down the definition of an Earth-crosser. It was probably the only educational thing I had ever done outside a classroom except for going to the library after Mom’s arrest and looking up the differences between homicide, murder, and manslaughter.

  I wrote: “Chance of a collision is small but if it did happen it would occur without warning and could cause total annihilation.”

  Just like the TRUTH about Dad and Misty. I knew it was out there. I also knew if I ever had to face it, my world wouldn’t survive. All I could do was ignore it and hope it passed right out of my orbit. In the meantime, I started living my life with a little bit more urgency.

  I gave Callie Mercer four days to call me. I didn’t plan on it being four. It was a random number. But after I made the decision to walk away from the Hotpoint dishwasher I was supposed to be loading onto the Barclay delivery truck, and I got in my own truck, studied another painting, and started driving to her house, I realized the number four had a lot of significance for me.

  There were four kids in my family. Jody was four years old when Mom killed Dad. Skip would be in college for four years. We only got four channels now that Dad’s satellite dish was gone. There used to be four basic food groups before the government switched to a Food Guide Pyramid much to Church’s relief; he hated having fruits and vegetables lumped together and it drove him crazy how eggs used to be with the cheese. Misty had left four scratches on my hand. There were four empty doghouses in my yard. I now had four artists I liked: Pierre Bonnard, Callie’s artichoke guy, Francis Bacon, and this abstract artist named Jackson Pollock.

  He was one of those guys who laid down canvases on the floor and squirted paint all over them. I always thought those guys were idiots until I saw “Greyed Rainbow.” I recognized it right away. The black mess with gobs of gray and squiggly white lines. The smears of rust and fleshy yellow like dried blood and snot. It was the same kind of stuff I used to see in my head when Dad hit me.

  I didn’t know what Jackson Pollock meant for it to be but if his own dad had hit him when he was a kid and that’s what he had been trying to show, then he was a genius. If the painting was really just supposed to be a defective rainbow, then he was an idiot. I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and hoped his dad had hit him.

  Callie’s dogs started barking when I turned in her drive. I was going to go pet them, but I didn’t get the chance. She was outside with Zack, playing in the sandbox near the house, and she saw me right away.

  She stood up and brushed sand off her legs and the back of her shorts. She was wearing the pink bikini top.

  I walked as far as her front door and waited for her, uninvited, in broad daylight, in front of her kid, without an excuse.

  She crossed her yard, giving me her concerned look, and I realized I was getting sick of that one. I knew it was the same way she looked at Zack and Esme. Probably her dogs
, too.

  My mind started racing through all the looks I thought would be better. The way Ashlee Brockway had looked at me when I threw her against my truck door. The way Mom had looked at me when I started screaming in the Hug Room. The way Church had looked at me when I went to put the bananas with the cereal. The way Amber looked at Dad that first time he hit her.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked. “Shouldn’t you be at work?”

  “You said you were going to call me.”

  “I haven’t had a chance,” she started to explain.

  “Bullshit,” I said.

  She opened her mouth to say something but stopped. I tried to figure out what was the same about all those other looks that made them better. It was fear. Fear that I might hurt her. Fear that I had lost my mind. Fear that I was going to tamper with the universal order of things. Fear that there can’t possibly be a God.

  “Does your husband listen in on all your phone calls or something?” I kept at her. “You could have called me anytime. You could have said you wanted to talk to me about Jody.”

  Concern vanished but it wasn’t replaced with any kind of fear. Her face paled with anger.

  “When are you home, Harley?”

  “Huh?”

  “When are you home?”

  I didn’t answer. It felt like a trick question.

  “Don’t you work two full-time jobs?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  My answer enraged her. She fought to keep her anger in check, but I could sense her helplessness. She didn’t have much control over her emotions. They seemed to control her like a puppet at the mercy of a hidden hand. My own mom had been more of a bare hand.

  “The problem is not when can I call you,” she said, and took a troubled breath. “It’s when can you be there to talk to me.”

  “I usually come home for dinner.”

  “Well, that’s just great,” she said in a brittle voice.

  She took a step back and put her hands on her hips.

  “Dinnertime is when I’m cooking and dealing with two hungry, whining kids while my husband sits in the middle of it all having a drink and bitching about his day. Should I just interrupt him at some point and say, ‘Excuse me, dear. I need to call the nineteen-year-old neighbor boy and see if he’d like to come over later so I can fuck his ears off.’ Is that what I should do?”

  She was yelling at me by the time she finished. She was breathing hard too. I stared at her breasts moving up and down. There were sweat beads between them. Her nipples were hard. When I looked up again, she was watching me.

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s what you should do.”

  She shook her head and made a harsh laugh. “Do you know what would happen if I did that?”

  “Your husband would divorce you and you wouldn’t have to be married to a guy you can’t stand?”

  A menacing stillness came over her. Even her breathing seemed to stop. She was going to explode or she was going to transform again. I wondered what it would be like to be inside her when she had one of her sudden changes of heart.

  My hand shot out the way it had done with Misty, without my consent, and hooked into the top of her shorts. It yanked her hard and she stumbled into me. I smashed my mouth against hers. She didn’t want me doing it. It wasn’t the kind of kiss she liked. It was more like a tongue fuck.

  She got loose and pushed me away.

  “What are you doing?” she gasped, darting a frantic look at Zack in the sandbox.

  He was busy pouring a shovel full of sand into a dump truck.

  I grabbed her again. This time around the hips. She held out her hands and braced herself against my chest, but I could still reach her throat with my mouth. I chewed on her thinking about Elvis chewing on dead baby groundhogs, and I felt her give a little. I went lower until I was sucking her nipples right through the bikini top. She made one of those shrieking, gasping, moaning noises I thought only little girls made.

  “Zack,” she breathed, and tried wiggling away. “He might see us.”

  “Let’s go inside.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Hey, Zack,” I yelled over to him. “I’m going to go inside with your mommy and get a drink. That okay with you?”

  “I want Kool-Aid,” he shouted back.

  “You got it, buddy.”

  I caught her wrist tightly and pulled her along behind me the way Dad used to drag Misty to her room to be punished. I untied her top as soon as we closed the door behind us, and she had her shorts off by the time we reached the kitchen. I laid her out on her glasstopped table and dropped my pants around my ankles. When I pushed inside her, she made that little girl sound again.

  I pumped away at her. That’s all I could do until she started screaming things and gripping me tighter with her legs and her hands. I wasn’t sure what to do then so I pumped harder. I wasn’t creative or skilled, but I was diligent.

  I was pretty sure I made her come. It felt like a bunch of explosions going off inside her flesh. When it was over, I sat down in a chair and left her smiling, with her eyes closed, spread-eagled on the glass.

  I was drenched with sweat, but I couldn’t stop shivering. I pulled Dad’s coat tighter. I was glad she hadn’t asked me to take it off.

  Afterward, she was calm as a puddle. She took Zack a sippy cup of Kool-Aid and walked me to my truck. As we were about to say good-bye, she remembered something and went back into the house.

  She brought me a folded piece of notebook paper. I knew it was a note from Jody before I opened it.

  “I found this in Esme’s backpack,” she explained. “She and Jody write notes back and forth all the time but this one concerned me a little. I thought maybe you should know about it.”

  The words didn’t mean anything to me at first. Then they did.

  “I asked Esme about it and she said it was just Jody trying to gross her out,” I heard Callie go on. “Jody comes up with some wild ones. A month or so ago, she and Esme were writing back and forth about brothers and sisters getting married and having babies. I had a little talk with the two of them about that. Jody told me Misty said it was okay. I’m sure Misty was just messing with her mind. Big sisters do that, you know.”

  I kept staring at the note.

  MISTY KILLD A KITTIN WUNS.

  “I suppose this makes me a snitch, but I care about Jody. And Misty too. If this kitten thing is true, it’s kind of disturbing.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” I said, crumpling up the note and shoving it in my pocket.

  “When can I see you again?” I asked.

  We made plans to meet a week later at the mining office. She liked the idea, especially after I told her how it had been my hangout since I was a kid.

  She knew all about the place. It had already been abandoned when she was a kid but there were still cool things in it back then like ledgers noting tons of coal shipped, and yellowed receipts for mining equipment, and old Mountain Dew bottles with a barefoot hillbilly on them and the slogan, “It’ll tickle yore innards!” Even a pair of work gloves and an old metal lunch bucket like my grandpa used to have. They had to use metal because the tunnels were so damp, a lunch in a paper bag would be soaked by the time they sat down to eat it.

  I asked him once what was the worst thing about the mines: the dark, the cold and damp, the claustrophobia, the poison gases, the dust from blasting, the fear of explosions or cave-ins or flooding? He said Management.

  I didn’t take care of Misty right away like I said I would. I had to avoid thinking about her for a while the same way the wife of a wounded soldier had to shut out the first time she witnessed him strap a fake leg onto his stump.

  I took care of the real estate taxes instead. I paid them early. In person. In cash. The courthouse clerk who gave me my receipt said she wished her son was more like me.

  I had to drive past Yee’s on my way home so I stopped and got Jody a surprise umbrella and fortune cookie even though I would be having my appointment
with Betty the next day. My intentions were good, but my hunger was stronger and I ended up eating the cookie.

  The fortune said, “The bold man is free from fear, but the virtuous man is free from anxieties.”

  I decided to add Confucius to my list of dead people I’d like to meet. It was up to FOUR now.

  I kept my head full of pointless thoughts—like my dead list—to help keep my mind off the family shit constantly crossing my earth’s orbit, but sometimes I had too many pointless thoughts and they came too fast and I couldn’t get my brain to shut down at night so I could sleep. It got so bad I found myself longing for the good night’s sleep I’d get after getting fucked as much as I longed for the fuck.

  We both decided to walk there. Callie didn’t have a choice. Driving off in the middle of the night would have been too hard to explain to her husband if she got caught. I didn’t want to have to explain to Amber either. She wasn’t buying into my “nowhere” excuse anymore.

  We would be coming from opposite directions so we didn’t plan to meet and walk together. She assured me she’d be fine walking through the woods by herself even though I didn’t ask her. They were the same woods she used to hang out in with her grandpa and she knew them like the back of her hand, she told me. And once she hit the tracks, she couldn’t get lost.

  I got there first and waited. I even started to worry about her. I knew there weren’t any animals around that could hurt her—Bud’s rabid skunk would be dead by now—but I couldn’t help thinking about Amber’s psychos.

  I took a walk down the tracks looking for her. About a half-mile away from the office was the mine it serviced: a small single-shaft one with an entrance no bigger than an attic trap-door. Now it was almost completely blocked off by rocks and weeds and fallen metal support beams.

  Across the tracks stood the tipple that used to sort and load the coal into the train cars. All I could see at night was the tallest section of the splintered wood skeleton, jutting out from the treetops thirty feet above me like the rotting head of a dinosaur. The rest of it—the hundred-pound gears, the massive iron funnel, the chutes and rollers and sorting screens—were all brittle with age and coated in blood-brown rust.