Back Roads

by Tawni O'Dell

  “I want to get a tattoo.”

  “What?”

  “A tattoo.”

  “A tattoo?”

  “Yes.”

  Relief rushed through me. This revelation was disgusting in its own right, but it was something I was equipped to deal with.

  “No way,” I said.

  “Come on, Harley. Why not?”

  “You’re too young.”

  “I knew you were going to say that,” she said, her voice calm but irritated. “That’s such a cop-out. Lots of kids in my class have them. There’s a place out by the mall that does kids over twelve with parental consent. They do a really good job. Nobody’s ever got a disease from it.”

  “No.”

  She took a deep breath. “Come on.”

  It was the closest I had ever heard Misty come to pleading. The needy tone was unnerving.

  “Did Amber put you up to this?” I asked her.

  “Amber doesn’t even know I want one. I don’t want her to know.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t want her to think I’m copying her. I only wanted one because I like the way they look. I thought maybe you’d understand that, Mr. Art Institute of Chicago.”

  I didn’t have a chance to say anything else to her. Her face and eyes went blank, and the sociable part of her disappeared with the silent, single-minded menace of a mummy returning to his tomb. She went into her bedroom to be alone, but the act was more symbolic than necessary.

  The second her door closed behind her, I headed for my truck. The motor was idling when the front door opened and Amber stepped out on the porch, her face brick-red and her eyes ringed with wet mascara.

  “I know where you’re going,” she screamed.

  Then she stepped back inside and slammed the door shut.

  I didn’t get upset about it. I didn’t see how she could know. She hadn’t even been home yesterday when I made the call to Betty and asked her to help me get in to see Mom.

  chapter ( 15 )

  The prison waiting area looked like tryouts for a Little Miss Pedophilia pageant. The kids were mostly girls. I didn’t know why. Maybe women prone to criminal acts gave birth to more girls than boys. Maybe there was something viciously female about their hormones that enabled them to kill men in and out of the womb.

  Or maybe it was because the adults who brought them here were mostly women and thought the girls could learn something.

  I considered both reasons while I stood inside the doorway feeling like a chewed-up piece of gray meat someone had spit out on a plate full of Christmas cookies. I had never seen so many gold bows and pearl buttons and fake jewels together in one place except for the Wal-Mart crafts section where I took Jody every year to buy stuff to make valentines.

  Everybody stared at me. Adult conversations stopped. Magazines were lowered. Little ones stopped bouncing on laps. Older ones looked up from coloring last-minute pictures and playing with Game Boys or Polly Pocket sets.

  I glanced down at myself to make sure my fly wasn’t open or my boots weren’t untied. I had grass stains on my jeans and dirt under my fingernails. I couldn’t remember when I had shaved last or combed my hair. My days and nights had begun to bleed together into one big sticky puddle.

  All the chairs were taken. It was a Saturday. I moved around the perimeter of the room, trying to find a square foot of space that didn’t smell like crayons or bubble gum. I ended up standing behind two women who didn’t appear to have any children with them. One of them had on pencil-leg jeans, red cowboy boots, and a purple velvet tank top. The other one was dressed like a TV Realtor in a mustard-yellow blazer and sensible shoes. The only place in the world they could have looked okay sitting beside each other was a city bus or a prison waiting room.

  I leaned against the wall behind them and assured myself my own wait wouldn’t be long. Almost everyone here was in line for a Hug Room. I was going to be doing my visiting through Plexiglas.

  I wouldn’t have been able to get in at all if it hadn’t been for Betty. I had called her Thursday after my talk on the porch with Jody and before my hot dogs and macaroni and cheese.

  I didn’t give her any details. I told her I had to see my mom. That it was time for CLOSURE. Then I explained that I hadn’t been completely honest with her about my other visit with Mom: that I got kind of upset, nothing too weird, sort of the way I acted with her sometimes, and when I came to I was lying on a cot in an office like a school nurse’s and a man from Prisoner Relations and a woman shrink talked to me in golf commentator voices and tried to get me to tell them my mom had attacked me. I wouldn’t do it. I told them I hadn’t been feeling too well lately, but they still decided she shouldn’t have any visitors for six months.

  When I finished talking, there was a long silence. I thought Betty was going to be pissed at me, but she got pissed at the PRISON. The way she said it reminded me of the loan officer with his scenic wonders calendar talking to me about the BANK and how the BANK couldn’t make allowances for me and my sisters but how the BANK wished he could help.

  According to Betty, the PRISON should have been aware that I was a teenaged boy under psychiatric care who hadn’t seen my mother since the day I watched her leave a courthouse almost two years earlier to start serving a life sentence. The PRISON should have talked to Betty first. The PRISON might have caused me extensive emotional damage and should do everything possible to rectify the situation.

  She said she’d take care of it for me, but she made me promise to schedule an appointment with her as soon as possible afterward. She said she’d see me on a weekend or a lunch hour if I couldn’t get time off work. I promised to make the appointment. I did not promise to keep it.

  I settled back against the wall and closed my eyes. Four more days until I saw Callie again. FOUR. Unless I tried to see her during my lunch break on Monday. Or unless Jody played at their house after Lick n’ Putt and Callie drove her home and I casually walked out to the car to thank her and then begged her to meet me at the mining office tonight and to bring the stuff to make s’mores.

  FOUR. The number strobed like gunfire against the black in front of my eyes. Watching it made me feel sick to my stomach. Then it stopped and I saw Callie’s lips hovering over me, one perfect milky drop clinging to them. She kissed me and I tasted myself.

  I didn’t respond to her kiss and she drew away, disappointed. She rolled me off the blanket, folded it, and put it in her backpack. She closed up the cooler and stepped into her panties. I wanted to tell her to stay, but I was dead or asleep. She started walking away.

  I hadn’t done anything for her. Nothing at all. No wonder she had left. I thought about her smile the day we did it on the table. A smile that said, “I’m done.”

  I opened my eyes and saw the two women.

  “I don’t know,” the one in cowboy boots said. “I have a hard time telling if she’s being serious or not.”

  The one dressed like a Realtor nodded.

  “The last time I came to see her she told me prison isn’t all that different from married life except she has more free time now and the sex is better.”

  They both laughed. I watched the room spin and grow dark. My knees buckled, and I sat down on the floor. The women craned their necks over the backs of their chairs.

  “Are you okay?” the Realtor asked.

  “Yeah,” I said, swallowing a couple times.

  “You don’t look so good, hon,” the cowgirl said. “You here with anybody?”

  I shook my head.

  “Who are you visiting?”

  “My mom.”

  “You poor kid.”

  “You want my seat?” the Realtor asked, standing up.

  “No, thanks,” I said. “I better just stay here.”

  It turned out staying there was the worst thing I could have done because every little kid in the room came over to check me out, and they depressed the hell out me. Some of them walked right up to me, stared for a few silent seconds, and
left. Some peered timidly around the cowgirl’s chair, giggling or skeptical.

  Only one talked to me. She was about Jody’s age with brown hair that hadn’t been brushed in a while and a face that might have been cute if she ever smiled, but I had a feeling she never did. Her ears were pierced. Her eyelids were smeared with glittery lavender and her lips were neon pink. She had fake tattoos on the tops of her hands and one cheek. The one on her cheek had been a unicorn, but it was flaking off now and looked like a dirt smudge or a bruise. Her little-girl potbelly stuck out between white jeans and an orange shirt the color of a warning sign with the word GROOVY written across it in wavy green letters.

  “Why are you sitting on the floor?” she asked me.

  “There aren’t any chairs,” I replied. “Why are you wearing makeup?”

  “It makes me look good,” she answered immediately.

  “Why do you want to look good?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It doesn’t make you look good,” I told her.

  She watched me for a moment to see if I was being serious, then her face fell. She looked really hurt. I was glad. I wanted to hurt her. Making her mad would have just made her go home and put more crap on her face.

  “It does too,” she said not very convincingly.

  “It does not.”

  I noticed the cowgirl and Realtor were listening.

  “It’s going to get you in trouble. Do you know what birth control is?”

  Both women turned their heads and looked down at me.

  “No,” the girl said.

  “Well, you better learn.”

  “Excuse me,” the Realtor said. “What are you telling this little girl?”

  I ignored her.

  “What’s birth control?” the little girl asked.

  “It keeps you from getting pregnant. Do you know what that is?”

  “When you get a baby.”

  “Right. Do you know how you get pregnant?”

  The Realtor shot me a furious glare and told me to stop it. She got up from her chair and asked who belonged to this little girl.

  “I know you gotta have a boyfriend. Least that’s how my mom does it.”

  “You’re a smart kid,” I told her.

  I was right; she was cute when she smiled.

  “If you got a boyfriend, you’re bound to get pregnant,” I explained.

  “What’s bound mean?”

  “It’s going to happen. You can’t stop it.”

  “I thought it meant when you tied somebody up.”

  “You really are a smart kid,” I told her.

  She smiled again. “My teacher says I don’t use time wisely.”

  “Next time she tells you that, ask her how wisely she uses all that time she gets off from her job every summer.”

  “Huh?”

  “Jamie, what the hell are you doing?”

  A skinny, rat-faced woman with too much hair and too many inalienable rights came stalking toward us. She grabbed the little girl by the arm near her shoulder.

  “Get away from him.”

  “He was telling me how to get pregnant,” the girl explained, not even seeming to notice the hand clamped around her arm like a blood pressure cuff.

  “Get away from her, you pervert,” the woman snapped at me.

  “Are you her mom?” I asked.

  “It ain’t none of your business who I am.”

  “Are you the one who lets her wear makeup and dress like a slut?”

  Her mouth dropped open. She showed as much indignation as possible for a person wearing a Penns Ridge Speedway Demolition Derby T-shirt. This year’s slogan had beenWHAM !BAM !THANK YOU MAAM !

  “You’re the pervert,” I told her calmly, “for letting her look like that.”

  “I’m getting a guard,” she said.

  “He says my makeup don’t look good,” Jamie mentioned while standing perfectly still. She seemed to know any movement would make the hand grip tighter.

  “Your mom probably wouldn’t be in jail right now if she had never worn makeup,” I further explained to her.

  “Don’t listen to him, Jamie. He don’t know nothing about you or your mom.”

  “I know everything about you, Jamie.”

  When I said her name, she looked at me like I had produced an egg from behind her ear.

  “You’re going to get pregnant because you think if you fuck guys they’ll love you and you want somebody to love you because you think nobody does.”

  “Shut up,” the woman shouted.

  “I’ll go get a guard for you,” the Realtor said.

  “The guy who does it to you isn’t going to love you either because he’s going to be too stupid to realize what you’re worth, but you’re going to think it’s because you’re not pretty enough.”

  “What’s he mean, Aunt Kathy?” Jamie asked, looking up at her.

  Aunt Kathy gave her arm a yank and started dragging her away.

  “The worst thing you can do is marry him,” I continued, raising my voice enough so she could still hear me, “but no matter what you do, your life will be over. It’s already over if you keep looking like that.”

  “You mean I’ll be dead?” she called, never taking her eyes off me.

  “Stop talking to him,” Aunt Kathy said with another yank.

  “You’ll be alive on the outside.” I put two fingers beneath my eyes and pulled down so she could see the gross red inside part of the sockets. “And dead on the inside,” I finished.

  “Like a zombie?”

  “Right.”

  “I don’t want to be a zombie.”

  Aunt Kathy gave her a final hard yank and swatted her behind. “I said stop talking to him.”

  The door opened and the Realtor walked in, followed by a guard carrying a clipboard. He didn’t look much older than me. He had a buzz cut and was wearing reflective black sunglasses indoors. That was always a bad sign.

  I stood up. I didn’t want to give him any valid reason to put his hands on me.

  “Get yourself one of those implants.” I kept talking to Jamie. “Get it when you’re ten.”

  The guard positioned himself inside the room. He didn’t come after me. He motioned with his hand for me to get my ass out the door.

  “My sister got her period when she was eleven,” I said walking past her.

  Some of the women hugged their girls protectively as I went by but others were unconsciously nodding at my remarks the way they did at Oprah when her show really hit home.

  “Move it outside,” the guard said.

  “You should be locked up for letting her look like that.” I made a final announcement to Aunt Kathy at the door. “I mean it. Locked up. The ACLU can take a fucking leap.”

  “Out,” the guard barked.

  Once I got out of the room, I started shaking. I folded my arms across my chest and buried my hands under them. They always seemed to shake more than the rest of me, and I didn’t want the guard to notice. I took a couple of deep breaths.

  He looked me up and down and cleared his throat. “Who are you here to see?” he asked.

  “My mom.”

  He flipped a page over on his clipboard. “What’s the prisoner’s name?”

  “Bonnie Altmyer.”

  “And you are?”

  “Harley.”

  “I should send your ass packing for that little display in there, Harley.”

  “I was just trying to be helpful.”

  He put the clipboard under his arm. “You think telling a little girl to get on birth control when she’s ten is helpful?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He studied me again, but I couldn’t tell what he was thinking because of the glasses.

  “Come with me,” he said finally. “You’ve got ten minutes.”

  He led me to a room of gray stalls made of filing cabinet metal. Inside each one, a visitor sat on the edge of a straight-backed chair made of hard gray vinyl. Most of these visitors were men
. I couldn’t see their expressions, but they were all intently hunched forward and talking in low tones.

  I was surprised to find Mom already sitting at my stall. Seeing her behind Plexiglas in her faded yellow uniform waiting expectantly with her hands folded on the counter in front of her, I felt like I should ask for tickets to a matinee.

  “Is everything all right at home?” she asked before I could even sit, her voice sounding like she was talking to me from inside a cocoon.

  “No one’s shot anybody if that’s what you mean.”

  My comment caught her off guard. She looked surprised, then arched her eyebrows as if she meant to scold me. I was her son and her first instinct was to discipline, but I was also the grown man who was raising her children and running her household which put her in my debt.

  “Was that supposed to be funny?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “Well, it wasn’t.”

  “Well, I’m sorry. I guess I should have worked on my prison small talk before I got here.”

  “Harley. Please. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Why are you here?”

  I banged out of my seat. “Excuse me for coming.”

  “Sit down,” she said with maternal firmness.

  My body instinctively resisted, then instinctively obeyed.

  She watched me for a moment, her expression alternating between worry and exasperation.

  “I don’t want to fight with you,” she said finally.

  I suddenly realized that I did want to fight. All the secrets and lies came rushing at me. All the abandonment and betrayal. What had been going on between Dad and Misty? What really happened the night he got shot? I had so many questions, big and little, I didn’t know where to start.

  “You look sick, baby,” I heard her say.

  She raised her hand without thinking to check my forehead for a fever and hit the glass wall with the startling death thump of a bird flying into a window. We both jerked back at the sound.

  “I’m fine,” I told her.

  “You look like you haven’t slept in days. When’s the last time you took a shower or even changed your clothes?”