Back Roads

by Tawni O'Dell

  Elvis met me at the door and went nuts trying to smell the groceries. I pushed him down and took loud clomping steps into the living room where I could hear the TV going. I left a trail of perfectly formed treads behind me and stopped to admire them for a moment like they were art.

  All three girls were sitting on the floor in a heap of pillows and dinosaurs, in nightshirts and ponytails, with cotton balls between their toes and bowls of ice cream covered in rainbow sprinkles sitting in their laps.

  They all looked up at me with identical, calmly curious expressions on their faces, like I was a bumbling intruder who had accidentally stumbled across their peaceful tribe.

  “Hi, Harley,” Jody said.

  Misty didn’t say anything. Amber’s face darkened. She was the tribe elder who knew outsiders were never to be trusted even if they came bearing food. Somehow they would eventually ruin your world whether it be with guns, or disease, or a religion whose God had no sense of justice.

  “We’re having a slumber party,” Jody said.

  “Isn’t it a little early?” I asked.

  “Amber said we could start already since it’s already dark outside. We had a big lightning bolt and the TV went out for a whole hour so we played Junior Monopoly and I won,” she said gleefully. “I even beat Misty.”

  Misty stared hypnotically at the TV, her blank black eyes reflecting the blue and white flashes, the cheap fake stones around her wrist sparkling fiercely. She glanced up at me dissatisfied but untroubled by my presence.

  I felt love and loathing for her at the same time. I wanted to rid my life of her permanently, burn all her belongings and erase all my memories, but I also wanted to hug her. I wanted to give her all the hugs she should have been getting from Mom for the past two years, all the understanding she should have been getting from us, all the counseling she should have been getting from strangers. But anything I could have given to her now would have been too little too late like the bag of groceries I was holding in my aching hands.

  She turned back to the TV, and I decided right then and there that I didn’t want to know any more TRUTH. I didn’t want any more CLOSURE. I wanted beer and blow jobs.

  “How was Lick n’ Putt?” I asked Jody.

  “Great.” She beamed at me and bounced on her butt, almost tipping her ice cream out of her lap. “We got to play our whole game before it started raining. Me and Esme did the best. We don’t know who won because Esme’s dad ate the scorecard at the end. He did!” she said, her eyes getting as big as golf balls. “He ate it because he was so embarrassed by his score. He played terrible. Even worse than Zack and he spent most of the time swinging his club in circles pretending to be a helicopter. Esme’s dad picked up the ball once and put it in the hole with his hand and asked us if that was a hole in one. He was serious too. I could tell. And then we went to Esme’s house and had potato soup with ham chunks in it.”

  “Was her mom home?”

  “Yeah.”

  Amber was staring at me furiously.

  “What’s your problem?” I said to her. “You look like you want to smell me again.”

  “Fuck you, Harley.”

  “No, really. If it would make you feel better. Come here. Smell me.”

  “Go to hell.”

  “Here, I’ll do it for you. I smell like . . .” I sniffed at a shoulder. “I smell pretty bad, actually.”

  “You smell like beer,” she said. “Once you turn twenty-one, you’re just going to spend every night for the rest of your life in a bar.”

  “I hope so,” I said, and went into the kitchen.

  I set the bag down on the crumb-coated counter and began to unpack it: Mom’s Bible, the loaf of bread, a box of elbow macaroni, three cans of soup, a can of green beans.

  My hands started shaking so bad, a jar of mayonnaise escaped and went rolling down the length of the counter. I watched it fall into the sink with a dull clang.

  I realized I couldn’t stay in the same house with Misty. I wasn’t afraid of her as much as I was afraid of thinking about her. If I distanced myself from the source, maybe I could avoid the thoughts like I could avoid catching a cold.

  I got the mayonnaise and finished unpacking the bag: a can of Crisco, Palmolive dishwashing soap, and a box of Little Debbie Fudge Rounds.

  I opened the cakes and left everything else sitting on the counter. When I went to put my own beers away, I found a couple dozen Red Dogs in the fridge. I helped myself to one along with a fudgie and sat down at the table with Mom’s Bible.

  When I was a kid, I never thought of Mom as religious since we didn’t go to church. She liked to tell Bible stories and liked to read from a Bible but as far as I knew, none of that counted with God if a person didn’t put on good clothes and go sit in a church for an hour every Sunday. I viewed the Good Book as nothing more than a book until she explained to me that everything in it was true.

  After that I wanted her to read from the Bible every night at bedtime instead of my regular books. Curious George’s fall from a fire escape and Ping the duck’s search for the wise-eyed boat on the Yangtze River no longer held my interest. I wanted plagues of bugs, rivers turning into blood, people turning into salt, God killing babies, floods killing everybody. I wanted giants, demons, and lepers. No matter how many times I asked her, Mom insisted it had all really happened. It was like finding out the Smurfs were real.

  I didn’t remember exactly when I stopped believing the stories. Sometime after I outgrew Santa Claus and before I stopped liking SpaghettiOs. The fact that Mom never stopped believing always made me feel a little superior to her.

  I picked up the Bible by its spine and shook it. A folded square of paper fell onto the tabletop. Relief swept through me. Opening the paper, smoothing it flat, and seeing the little faded yellow house was like a homecoming.

  I took my finger and traced the futile black line, gray now from age, and wondered where the intense crayon colors had gone. They weren’t rubbed off on the rest of the paper. It was like time had absorbed them.

  My hands folded the map without me telling them to and held it in front of my face for an instant before slipping it back in between the satin red pages.

  Mom had always believed her line was going to end at nothing, and she believed prison was that nothing. But the child who originally drew the map didn’t have a family; the woman sitting in a jail cell did.

  I had been wrong. She hadn’t ACCEPTED anything. She had FLED to a safe haven. Away from the TRUTH. Away from us. Now I understood why she didn’t want to come back here, but I didn’t care.

  The guard had said there was nothing I could do. If Mom stuck to her story and Misty stuck to hers, it sure seemed that way, but I had the bloody shirt and I had Jody.

  I was ready to take the Bible downstairs and put it in my drawer but something made me open the cover first. Inside was Mom’s maiden name written in a little girl’s handwriting at the top of the page and beneath it all of our names and birthdays written in a grown woman’s hand. I stared at my own birthday trying to figure out the significance.

  I got up from the chair and walked over to Jody’s school lunch menu hanging on the refrigerator. The first week of June had been tacked onto the bottom of May. It ended on Wednesday, June 3, with the words “NO LUNCH SERVED. EARLY DISMISSAL. HAVE A NICE SUMMER!” I counted back to Saturday, May 30. I double-checked it with the Bible.

  Today was my birthday. I was twenty years old.

  Twenty years old. I was a man.

  I didn’t get too excited because I knew I was only becoming a man in a certain sense. I had already become a man before in other ways.

  Legally I had become a man when I turned eighteen. Spiritually I had become a man the night Callie Mercer fucked me. Emotionally I had become a man the first time my dad belted me. Today I was becoming a man chronologically. There would be no more “teen” after my age.

  My first impulse was to go share this information with Amber. I was no longer a teenager. And for a
long eight months, I was going to be FOUR years older than her, not three. I was twenty; she was sixteen. FOUR.

  But if I told them, Jody would have wanted to have a party and I wasn’t in a party mood. I wouldn’t have minded one of her cards though.

  My birthday, I thought to myself. I downed part of my beer, ripped off half the fudgie in my mouth, and tossed the other half to Elvis. It had to be worth something.

  I took Mom’s Bible downstairs and grabbed the gun. I slipped out the back door and walked straight to the shed with the mud sucking at my boots and rain pelting my hat.

  I left the door open a crack so I could see and hid the gun in a back corner behind some old two-by-fours, a hoe, and a snow shovel. The inside of the shed smelled like gas and rotting wood and leaves, then I detected something clean and perfumed.

  A plank of weak gray light fell across the wall in front of me. I turned around and saw Amber in the doorway, her bare feet and legs covered in mud, looking like she had just waded through an oil spill.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  I finished positioning a plastic sled in the corner too.

  “What are you doing? would be a better question,” I said, giving her a once-over.

  She had thrown on a jean jacket over her nightshirt. Ten freshly polished purple toenails stuck out from the ends of her mud-blackened feet like a line of grape jelly beans.

  “What are you doing with the gun?” she asked.

  “Hiding it.”

  “From who?”

  “The girls.”

  “Why?”

  A brief flicker of insanity sparked through my brain where I considered telling her what I had learned, but I knew I would only be doing it so I would have someone to share the burden with. Amber wouldn’t be any help.

  “It’s dangerous,” I told her.

  “Dangerous?” she exclaimed. “Misty knows how to handle a gun better than you do, and Jody’s too little to pick it up. We should be hiding it from you.”

  “Maybe,” I said, and brushed my hands on my jeans to get the dust and cobwebs off them. “Just don’t tell them where I hid it, okay?”

  She shrugged her agreement, then her expression turned sullen as she remembered why she had followed me.

  “That’s why you came out here?” she asked, skeptically.

  I paused inside the door, getting ready to run for my truck.

  “I’m going out,” I answered her.

  “I thought so,” she fumed at me.

  “Where do you get off getting mad at me for going out?” I said roughly, and gave her a sharp look. “Stop keeping tabs on me.”

  I made a break for it.

  “Her dad’s home too, you fuckhead,” she screamed after me.

  I threw open my truck door. I didn’t know what she meant but it pissed me off just the same. I gave her the finger. She gave me one back.

  Callie’s car and Brad’s Jeep were parked side by side. The rain had slowed down enough for the dogs to come out of their houses when I walked down the driveway. They ran around in circles, barking their lungs out, stopping every once in a while to shake.

  Brad opened the front door and yelled at them to quiet down. I put my hands in my pockets and took my time. I didn’t care about the rain.

  He was giving me a boyish smile. A scorecard-eating smile. But it faded as I got near. I didn’t know what he saw.

  “Harley,” he announced, and moved halfway out of the door, but he kept one foot planted firmly inside. “Where’s your truck? You didn’t walk down here?”

  They didn’t have a porch. They had an open wooden deck in front of the door with two steps leading up to it. He was getting wet.

  “I parked it up on the road. I was on my way home from prison and I thought I’d swing by and pick up Jody,” I said amiably.

  “Prison?” he asked, holding a hand up over his head and blinking water out of his eyes.

  “I was visiting my mom.”

  “Oh, right. I’m sorry. Are you okay?”

  “I’m great. Except I don’t smell too good.”

  He moved back inside the door a little bit. “Well, we already took Jody home.”

  I nodded at him. “Okay,” I said, blinking too at the water running off the bill of my cap. “As long as I’m here, could I see your wife?”

  “My wife?”

  “Yeah. I need to talk to her about something.”

  “Do you want to come in?”

  “You don’t want me in your house.”

  Callie came to the door in her chamois-soft jeans and a red T-shirt with satin trim around the neck.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked Brad, without even saying hi to me.

  “He says he needs to talk to you.”

  She flashed me a disbelieving look.

  “Could you come out here?” I asked.

  “It’s raining,” she said carefully.

  “We could talk in my truck.”

  Her expression grew more amazed.

  “Maybe you should go talk to him,” Brad said. “He says he just got back from visiting his mom in prison.”

  “Oh,” she said, suddenly sympathetic.

  “And it’s my birthday,” I added, quickly.

  I had her. Right there. That was the clincher. I saw it in her eyes.

  She peered into the rain. “Where is your truck?”

  “Up on the road.”

  “Mom!” Esme caroled from inside the house. “Zack wrecked my doctor’s office. I had it all set up.”

  “She threw my ABC bus,” Zack yelled too.

  “He keeps putting his foot on me.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Brad said to Callie with a sigh. “See you around, Harley,” he said to me.

  “Right.”

  “What do you think you’re doing?” she asked angrily, the moment he disappeared.

  I turned around and started walking to my truck. She splashed after me in her bare feet.

  “Harley,” she called.

  I jogged the rest of the way and got inside and waited for her. She slammed the door behind her and started ripping into me.

  “Let’s get something straight, Harley. Don’t ever come to my house when Brad’s around.”

  “I came to pick up Jody,” I said.

  “You didn’t come here to pick up Jody,” she scolded me. “Brad took Jody home hours ago. You came here to make a scene.”

  She threw herself back against the seat and folded her arms over her breasts. Her shirt was a short one and it rode up enough to show her navel.

  “What am I going to tell Brad when he asks me what you wanted to see me about? What could be so urgent that I needed to walk through a downpour and sit in your truck with you? And don’t tell me I should tell him the truth.”

  “Where’d you go today?” I asked, pulling my stare away from her and fixing it on the water rolling down the windshield.

  “I did some shopping,” she said, “and went to the library. Why?”

  “Where’d you go Thursday?”

  “Esme’s school to help out with a pizza party. What are you doing, Harley? Checking up on me? It’s none of your business where I go.”

  “I wanted to make sure you weren’t mad at me.”

  I felt her looking at me.

  “Mad at you for what?”

  “You left.”

  “When? Wednesday night? You know why I had to leave.”

  “Do you think we could do it sometime when you don’t have to leave?”

  She was silent.

  “Why would I be mad at you?” she asked.

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I just laid there.”

  More silence.

  She propped her wet, muddy feet up on my dashboard. I glanced over at her. Her knees were back near her head and she had her hands resting on the insides of her thighs.

  The transformation had occurred. She was giving me a smile that reminded me
of some dark chocolates my mom gave my dad one Christmas. They had a candy-sweet cherry in the center soaked in a boozy syrup.

  I got an instant boner.

  “Happy birthday,” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  “You don’t mind my feet up here, do you?”

  “Nope.”

  “How’s your mom?”

  “Great.”

  “How often do you go see her?”

  “Twice every life sentence.”

  She dropped her feet and moved toward me. “Are you okay?”

  I nodded.

  “I suppose you want a birthday kiss,” she said playfully.

  “Something like that.”

  She leaned against me and put her parted lips up to mine. I didn’t kiss her right away. I waited until I couldn’t tell her breath from mine.

  I took my hands out of Dad’s pockets and put them around her. We made out for a little bit. It wasn’t that long but I didn’t have to grope, and I didn’t have to stop in the middle and beg. I was making progress.

  She was the one who stopped. I could tell she was getting nervous. The rain had slowed down to a comfortable patter. She was going to leave again.

  “So, it’s your birthday,” she remarked, running her finger up and down my leg, while I strained painfully against my jeans. “Have you decided what you want to be when you grow up?”

  “Nothing,” I answered her. “There’s nothing I’m good at,” I added.

  She lifted her hand and ran her thumb over my lips. “You’re good at surviving. That takes talent.”

  “I’m not good at that either.”

  Her thumb slipped between my lips when I spoke. She left it there and asked, “Why did you really come here?”

  I wouldn’t look at her.

  “Never mind.” She laughed. “Don’t tell me.”

  She got down off the seat into the trash and motioned with her hand for me to move away from the steering wheel. I slid over and she pushed my legs apart and got between them.

  “Consider this your present,” she said, unzipping my fly.

  I laid my head back on the seat and stared out the window at the thick ragged-topped storm clouds spread over her hills like pewter meringue. I didn’t bother telling her I considered everything she had ever done for me to be a gift.