Back Roads

by Tawni O'Dell

  “I know.”

  “She was at the mall. I saw her with my own eyes.”

  “I know. Mommy drove her there.”

  “Of course Mom drove her there. How else would she get there?”

  I walked over to the railing. I put my torn-up hands on it and squeezed. The pain affected me like being pinched out of a dream. I suddenly understood the other question I needed to ask.

  “When did Mom drive her there?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I can’t tell time yet.”

  “Was it before or after Mom and Dad had their fight?”

  “After.”

  “After,” I said.

  “After,” she said.

  “You’re saying Mom drove Misty to the mall after she shot Dad?”

  She nodded.

  FOUR seconds. TICK TOCK. Sweat beads popped out along my hairline and started sliding down my face.

  “You’re saying Mom shot Dad and left him lying dead in the kitchen, then loaded Misty in the truck and drove her to the mall?”

  “I guess so.”

  “You’re not making sense, Jody. You must be confused. You were only four years old when it happened. And you were in shock. You didn’t talk for six months. Do you remember that? Not talking to anybody?”

  “I remember.”

  I paced up and down, my boots making the same futile thuds that Dad’s used to make when he was contemplating a day full of cement.

  Three seconds. TICK TOCK.

  I knelt down on the porch beside her.

  “What did Mom do when she got back from the mall?”

  “She got a shovel out of the shed and went in the woods. I thought she was going to bury Daddy.”

  “Did she bury Misty’s shirt?”

  She looked at me, curiously. “Why would she do that?”

  “Did she have Misty’s shirt with her?” I persisted.

  “I don’t know. It was hard to see. I was in the doghouse.”

  “Did you see her come back?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’d she do?”

  “She put the shovel away and went in the house. Pretty soon the police cars came. Are you mad at me?”

  “Why didn’t you tell the police Misty was home when Mom shot Dad?”

  “They didn’t ask me.”

  Two seconds. TICK TOCK. Why would they? One of their troopers had just picked her up at the Orange Julius, and Mom had just turned herself in.

  “Are you okay, Harley? You look sick. You look like you did when we went to visit Mommy.”

  “I’m fine,” I said, taking a shaky breath, and smiling bravely.

  One second.

  I reached out suddenly and wrapped my arms around her in the nick of time. She hugged me back, and I closed my eyes in relief as I saw Donny on a flaming Zinger intercept Misty in a bloody sunflower shirt and blast her into a million pieces.

  chapter ( 14 )

  Amber didn’t come back until Saturday morning. I was out front sawing away at Dad’s piece of pipe when one of her girlfriends drove up and dropped her off. She trudged across the yard, lugging her suitcase with both hands, trying not to look at me.

  Elvis trotted over to her with his tail waving and gave her a good sniffing. I could smell her from where I was: Sex and Egg McMuffin.

  She looked tired and I noticed a small bruise where her jaw met her throat.

  “Where’s Prince Charming?” I shouted at her.

  “Fuck you,” she said on her way past.

  “I rented your room,” I told her. “You’re going to have to sleep in one of the doghouses.”

  She dropped her suitcase on the ground and tripped over it trying to charge at me.

  “This is temporary,” she yelled, getting up and rubbing at her knee through her torn jeans. “I’m getting out of here as soon as I can make arrangements.”

  “Jesus, Amber, what is with you?”

  I stood up and flexed my sore hands. I hadn’t been taking very good care of them. They were swollen and the splinter wounds were festering. I wondered if Callie would suck on them for me.

  “If you want to run away from home, I can’t stop you. But why now? Why are you so pissed at me?”

  “I don’t want to live with you anymore. That’s all. I want to live with Dylan.”

  “Dylan.” I spit out the name. “How the hell are you going to live with DYLAN? Won’t his parents notice an extra body in his bed?”

  “He’s graduating next week and he and a couple friends went in together and bought a trailer.”

  “Oh, great. That’s just great. You in a trailer with three guys. You going to gang-bang them or will they alternate nights?”

  “I hate you.”

  She went back to her suitcase and picked it up, wincing. I realized she was having a hard time with it because she was hurt. I remembered how I used to feel after one of Dad’s beatings. I’d wake up with bruises on parts of my body I never knew he hit.

  “What did he do to you?” I shouted at her.

  “Nothing.”

  “Amber . . .”

  She stopped and turned around with an exhausted sigh. Even the hummingbird peeking over the back of her hiphugger jeans looked a shade less green today.

  “Why do you give yourself to assholes like that?” I said, lowering my voice a little. “You don’t even make them work for it.”

  “They want me,” she replied flatly.

  “Of course they want you. It doesn’t mean they should get you.”

  “You’re one to talk.”

  “What?”

  She went inside, too tired to slam for once. I had a mental flash of her standing naked under the shower, her bruised skin looking like an Impressionist had gone at her with loving strokes of gray-greens and yellows and rosy purples. I should have wanted to kill him, but I wanted to kill her. I wanted to break her pretty neck and end it now like a bad TV show turned off in the middle.

  The day was cool. I had worked up a great sweat sawing but now that I’d stopped, I was shivering. May had been beautiful which probably meant the first couple weeks of June were going to be cold and rainy. The sky beyond the hills was turning to pencil lead.

  I got back down on my knees and picked up the saw. Elvis went back to gnawing on a tree limb he had dragged in from the woods. It was twice as long as he was.

  I didn’t look up when I heard the front door open and shut again. I had a good, strong rhythm going. Once I had the pipe sawed off as close to the ground as I could get it, I was going to cover it with dirt and mark it with a rock slab like a grave.

  Jody’s pink canvas sneakers walked into my field of vision. She lowered a can of Red Dog down where I could see it.

  “Where’d you get this?” I asked after I grabbed it from her.

  “Amber has a whole bunch in her suitcase. She told me to bring you one. You were right,” she added, plopping down on the grass and crossing her legs Indian-style. “He just wanted her pillow.”

  I popped the top and gulped down half the can. “How many did she bring?”

  “I don’t know. Hundreds, maybe. We’re going to have a slumber party tonight. Me and Amber and Misty. Amber said so. We’re going to put sleeping bags on the floor and eat popcorn and watch TV and tell scary stories and paint our fingernails.”

  “Misty?” I wondered.

  “She’s glad Amber’s back. She told her running away from you wasn’t going to solve anything.”

  “What the hell? Did you tell Misty what we talked about the other night on the porch?”

  “What did we talk about?”

  “Did you tell her you told me she was home the night Mom and Dad had their big fight?”

  “She knows she was home.”

  “That’s not what I mean. Did you tell her you told me?”

  “No. Do you want me to?”

  “No. I don’t want you to.”

  “Why not?”

  “Just don’t.”

  “What if she asks me
?”

  “Why would she ask you?”

  “You asked me.”

  “Just don’t talk to her at all.”

  “Why not?”

  Elvis stopped gnawing and his ears perked up. An engine sounded from down the road. I stood up, wondering if DYLAN would have the nerve to come after her. Or maybe he was coming after his beer.

  “That’s Esme,” Jody announced excitedly. “We’re going to the Lick n’ Putt.”

  She ran across the yard, shrieking, waving her arm so hard her whole body jiggled.

  I wasn’t sure what I should do. I had gone over to Callie’s house the day before on my lunch hour and she wasn’t there. She hadn’t shown up at the Shop Rite either for her Friday night shopping. I was beginning to think she was avoiding me, but she couldn’t be if she was taking Jody to the Lick n’ Putt. I could go too. We couldn’t do anything on a miniature golf course, but she would have to bend over a lot.

  Her husband’s Grand Cherokee pulled into our driveway, and her husband was driving it.

  That was bad enough. My day was shot right there. I had been able to force Callie out of my mind so far today since I knew I couldn’t see her until Monday—I was planning on making another lunch hour visit—but now I was thinking about her again. Now I was all keyed up imagining her bending over to help Zack line up a putt. Imagining her licking an ice cream cone. I probably could have handled it though. I probably could have just gone back to what I was doing and sawed through the pipe with a newfound vengeance, but the guy parked his Jeep and opened his door.

  My stomach clenched into a knot, and I chugged the rest of my beer. I hoped he knew about us. I could have handled a fistfight, but I didn’t think I could handle discussing the weather with him.

  I stayed in the middle of the yard waiting to see if trumpets sounded when he got out, if he was built like Schwarzenegger or had cherubs flying around him like Zeus. He was the man who possessed Callie Mercer. The man who slept in the same bed with her naked body every night. The man who ate her pork chops. In a sense, he was my idol. I expected him to be larger than life.

  I took in every detail: the regular features, the short dark hair, the average build. He wasn’t tall. He wasn’t short. He wasn’t old or young. He could have been a dressed-down banker or a dressed-up RED Neck in a pair of palomino-gold hiking boots, new jeans, and a faded red work shirt over a gray T-shirt.

  He opened the back door of the Jeep for Jody, and she bounded inside. Then he turned and called to me, “How ya doing?” before giving Elvis a scratch between the ears and a couple thumps on his side.

  My feet moved across the grass. I watched them go and felt the rest of my body follow.

  He extended a hand.

  “You must be Harley,” he said, friendly as hell. “I’m Brad Mercer.”

  I started to reach out my hand, then remembered I had an excuse not to shake. I showed it to him instead.

  “Wow. What’d you do? Stick it in a hornet’s nest?”

  “Splinters,” I said.

  “Wow.” He shook his head. “You might want to get a doctor to look at that.”

  “No health insurance,” I told him. I didn’t know why.

  “Neither of your jobs give you benefits?”

  “One does but it wouldn’t leave me with any paycheck.”

  He shook his head. “That’s terrible.”

  “We can’t all be bankers,” I said.

  He laughed. I was being serious.

  “Thank God for that,” he said. “Imagine a world full of nothing but bankers.”

  “Don’t you like them?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “But you are one.”

  “I know.”

  “You don’t like your job?”

  I didn’t expect him to answer. I was being an asshole. I was trying to get him to say something bitchy about his wife so I could remind him he owed everything to her.

  “I wanted to go into teaching,” he explained, “but everybody I knew shot down that idea. I added a business minor in school to be safe. Worked in a bank for a couple of years. I was ready to quit and try something else, then I met the boss’s daughter coming out of his office, and banking didn’t seem so bad anymore.”

  He had a good smile. What people called a genuine smile. A boyish smile. Women liked those. That was probably what Callie liked about him. And he wanted to be a teacher. That probably meant he was smart and liked books and art. I couldn’t tell yet if he had the almighty good sense of humor every beautiful woman in the world said was so damn important even though they all married rich guys with no sense of humor at all.

  “You’ve got a great view up here,” he commented.

  “We don’t own it,” I replied immediately.

  “Why would you want to?” he said. “Just means you’d have to pay taxes on it. Nobody’s going to threaten that land. The coal companies have all pulled out. Who’d want to build on it way out here in the middle of nowhere? You’ve got a great situation here.”

  “I thought maybe you owned it. I mean, your wife owned it.”

  He shook his head. “Callie owns about fifty acres her grandfather willed to her but it’s all north of here, on the other side of Black Lick Road.”

  “She owns it? By herself?”

  He nodded, smiling boyishly and genuinely. “I’m just a tenant.”

  One of the back windows on the Jeep glided down.

  “Dad, come on,” Esme demanded.

  “Come on, come on, come on,” Jody and Zack chanted behind her.

  “Is it okay with you if we take Jody to the Lick n’ Putt?” he asked. “I talked to your sister on the phone this morning. She said you were still asleep but she was sure you wouldn’t mind.”

  “Is your wife at home by herself?”

  “No. She’s off somewhere. I don’t know where. She needs a break from the house and the kids now and then. But I don’t get to spend enough time with the kids. I work a lot of late nights. Do a lot of traveling.”

  “You doing any traveling in the near future?”

  “I’ve got a golf weekend coming up. The last weekend in June, I think it is.”

  “Daddy!”

  “I better get going.” He smiled again. “It was good to finally meet you, Harley.”

  He stuck out his hand again. My instinct was to shake it. I felt an awkward locker room closeness with him. We had been inside the same woman, which was kind of like sharing a wet towel.

  “Sorry,” he said, lowering his hand and glancing at mine. “Take care of yourself.”

  “Sure.”

  He walked to his Jeep.

  “Looks like you might get rained out,” I called after him.

  “If it starts raining we’ll just lick instead of putt.”

  He closed his door, started the engine, and lowered his window.

  “You sure you don’t know where your wife is?” I asked.

  “No. Why? You need her for something?”

  “That’s okay,” I said.

  He waved. The kids waved too. Elvis chased after them, and they all went nuts over it. I knew exactly what the inside of the Jeep sounded like, and I was glad I was on the outside because I had a headache from drinking my beer too fast. All of a sudden, they stopped bouncing around and settled into their seats. I was sure Brad Mercer had made them put on their seatbelts. I had a feeling he was one of those caring dads.

  My prediction about the sawing came true. I finished in half the time now that I had Callie back in my head and a beer in my bloodstream.

  I went to the shed and got the shovel my mom had buried Misty’s shirt with and covered what was left of the pipe’s ragged rim with dirt. Then I moved the couch back over the spot before going inside.

  Amber had her radio on full blast. She had her door closed, but the whole house throbbed to the bass. Misty’s door was closed too.

  I stopped at Amber’s and pounded. I shouted at her to open up. The volume went down, but the door st
ayed shut.

  “I’m going somewhere,” I yelled through it, “so make sure you’re here when Jody gets back.”

  Silence. Then the radio turning off completely. Then angry footsteps. Then the door flying open.

  She had changed out of her jeans into a big T-shirt and flannel boxers. Her hair was pulled up to the very top of her head in a coppery fountain.

  “You sure as hell don’t waste any time,” she snapped furiously.

  I took a step back. “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s sick and perverted and disgusting and sinful.”

  “What is?”

  “I can’t even look at you. You make me want to throw up.”

  The door slammed shut. I waited a second to see if she was going to add anything. Amber’s fits were the closest I would probably ever come to seeing live entertainment. She turned the radio back up, and I turned to leave.

  Misty was there in the hall drinking a Mountain Dew; a perfectly normal-looking girl doing nothing out of the ordinary, but she gave me a start. I took a backward step away from her without thinking about it.

  “I need to talk to you,” she said.

  “Huh?”

  She stood planted in the hall. “Is this a bad time?” she asked.

  I felt funny. I got a bad taste in my mouth. I realized I was afraid, but I didn’t know what I was afraid of.

  “I was going somewhere but I can talk for a minute,” I said.

  She raised the metallic green can to her lips and lowered it again. “Are you still mad about the money?” she asked me.

  “No.”

  The can went up and down again and again with excruciating slowness. Her fingernails were painted purple today. In the dim hallway light, they looked like she had caught all ten of them in a slammed door and now they were dead and about to fall off. The stones in the collar around her wrist were clear but dull like dirty ice. I had no more reason to fear her than an artichoke.

  “There’s something I want to ask you,” she continued, “but before I do, I want you to promise you’re going to keep an open mind.”

  “I don’t have an open mind.”

  “Try,” she said, and her dark eyes fixed themselves on mine.

  Her words were a soothing threat. Maybe she was going to tell me what really happened the night Mom shot Dad. Maybe she was going to tell me what really happened between her and Dad. Maybe she was going to tell me what was going on with Amber.