Back Roads

by Tawni O'Dell

  She got up from the floor and started toward me. She was still naked.

  “I know all about it! I know all about you and her in that shack!”

  I opened the Bible and shoved my face inside its red-tinged pages. The smell of my mother made me start crying.

  “Did you think I was her? Did you think it was tomorrow night already and you were fucking her?”

  “I wasn’t fucking you.” I sobbed. “I was sleeping.”

  “She doesn’t love you. She could never love you. You’re just a body part to her. You’re just a big dumb dick she can ride.”

  I was afraid to try and get past her. I was afraid she’d touch me. I was afraid I’d let her.

  “How could you do that to me?” she shrieked.

  I closed my eyes and plunged past her like I was running into a wall of fire. Our skin brushed, but I survived. I ran clumsily up the stairs and to the front door where Elvis was trying like crazy to scratch his way out. I made it to the porch railing before I threw up.

  I didn’t know where to go. For the first time in my life, the woods frightened me. The silhouette of my truck parked in a streak of moonlight didn’t strike me as a means of escape; it looked like a means of exile.

  I saw the four empty doghouses. I picked one and ran to it and scrambled inside on all fours. I curled up with Mom’s Bible and shook, breathing in the heavy scents of dirt and shit and old matted dog hair. I lay there, trying to control my chattering teeth, and listened in terror for her footfalls. They never came.

  chapter ( 19 )

  I never did sleep. I fell into a trance of sorts, clutching my bare legs to my chest, staring through a crack in the doghouse boards, watching the thin strip of sky go from black to rose to blue.

  Every sound made me jump. The scratch and skitter of a rodent’s feet. The too human call of a whippoorwill. The whisper of a snake’s belly. The underground shifting of the Earth’s plates. The blood-thump of my own heart.

  Then morning sounds. Jody’s voice in the kitchen. Cupboards opening and closing. Dishes clacking. Water running. Misty’s voice too. No Amber.

  The back door opening. Jody calling for Elvis. Jody calling for me. No Amber.

  I huddled tighter into a ball and waited. Soon I heard the front door open and close. A set of feet galloped across the porch and another set plodded after.

  “Stay, Elvis. Stay,” Jody commanded.

  In my mind I saw him cock his ears in her direction, then trot happily after her down the road to the bus stop.

  The door opened a final time. I pressed my eye against the slit in the doghouse. Amber stepped out on the porch, and I turned my face away fast. She had been fully clothed, but all I had seen was a damp dark triangle and two hard red nipples. She would never be a whole person to me again. She would never be a person.

  I bit down on Mom’s Bible to keep from laughing or screaming or breathing. I heard her big clunky sandals cross the porch. Amber was going to school. Amber was going on with her life. Amber was fine.

  I bit down harder on the Bible until tears squeezed from the corners of my eyes.

  I waited until the sound of her crunching down the road faded and I only heard birds. She had the right idea, I told myself. Hanging around the house would have been the worst thing to do. Unless you plan to turn yourself in, get away from the scene of the crime.

  I crawled out on all fours and let my eyes adjust to the light. It was going to be a hot, sunny day. I didn’t bother standing. I crawled all the way inside the house, and even crawled down the basement stairs which wasn’t easy.

  I put on some clothes, ran a comb through my hair, checked my bedsheets for nocturnal emissions, and went upstairs for a Pop-Tart.

  We only had the watermelon kind. Jody had begged me to buy them for her because of the pink and green frosting and then she hated the taste. So did I.

  I grabbed the Frosted Flakes and ate a couple handfuls out of the box, then washed them down with milk and two beers. Elvis started barking outside. I expected to panic. It could have been Amber coming back, but the Red Dogs had taken the edge off. Too much, maybe. I slammed into the corner of the kitchen table as I turned to get Dad’s coat off the back of a chair.

  I closed my eyes and swore. When I opened them again, Misty was standing inside the back door in baggy denim overalls with a black tube top underneath. Her hair was in a sloppy ponytail. A small purse made of see-through purple plastic hung off one shoulder. Inside it I could see a lipstick, a Little Debbie Zebra Cake, and a pocketknife.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Fine,” I answered, wincing.

  She didn’t say anything else or move a muscle. I limped around the table and thought about going out the back way, but it would have meant asking her to move.

  “What are you doing here?” I growled, sounding braver than I felt. “Did you miss the bus? Where’s Jody?”

  “It’s the last day of school,” she said. “All we’re going to do is clean out our lockers and watch a video.”

  “Something educational, I hope.”

  “It’s based on a book,” ’ she offered.

  “Moby-Dick?”

  She regarded me blankly. “Pet Sematary.”

  “My tax dollars hard at work,” I said under my breath as I slipped my arms into Dad’s coat.

  “I heard your fight with Amber last night.”

  “Yeah, well.”

  I swallowed hard. I looked all around the room. I emptied Jody’s cereal bowl into the sink. I crushed my beer cans and tossed them in the trash. I opened the refrigerator door.

  “What’d you hear?” I asked with my head inside.

  “You screaming at her to put her clothes on.”

  I laughed. I laughed a second time. I had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing for the rest of my life.

  “You must have heard wrong.”

  “Why’d you sleep in a doghouse?”

  “Purely for kicks.”

  I pulled out of the refrigerator.

  “I don’t care what you and Amber do,” she said.

  It took all my strength not to look at her, but the effort was wasted. I felt the dark, unblinking eyes on me. I felt them reduce me to a boy again and drag me inside with the irresistible lure of black blasted holes in the ground and gutted houses. She meant what she said. Not because she was depraved or forgiving or a victim herself. But because she had lost the ability to be moved, if she had ever possessed it in the first place. She could still care though. She cared by not caring. It was her highest compliment.

  “I’ve gotta get to work,” I said.

  “How about taking me to get a tattoo?” she suggested. “Since I’ve already missed the bus and all.”

  “Forget it. I already told you, you can’t get one.”

  “I thought maybe you’d change your mind.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  She shrugged. Her shrugs conveyed more meaning than most sermons. I thought I knew what she was trying to tell me. I stared back at her in disbelief. Was she trying to blackmail me into letting her get a tattoo because of what she thought she heard going on between me and Amber?

  Or maybe she was implying that she’d shoot me?

  Another bout of laughter rose to my lips, and I swallowed it back. I had hidden the gun.

  “No way.”

  “Why?”

  “It won’t ever come off,” I said, but even before the words were out of my mouth, I realized how stupid it was to care about a scar on her surface.

  I tried again. “You’re too young to make a decision that you’ll have to live with for the rest of your life, and I don’t feel comfortable making it for you.”

  “Okay.”

  She walked over to the cupboard and took out a glass.

  “Okay?” I echoed.

  “I can respect that,” she explained, crossing the kitchen to the fridge. “I thought you were going to lecture me on how sleazy it is or maybe try and stop me because you�
�re on a parental power trip, but if that’s your reason”—she pulled out a pitcher of blue Kool-Aid—“I guess I understand.”

  She poured and took a long drink. The band of pink stones around her wrist looked dull and cloudy in sunlight. Only artificial light in a dark room seemed to be able to make them glitter anymore.

  “We’re not that different, you know,” she said to me over the top of her glass. “The way we think.”

  “Huh?”

  “We’re both sort of weird. I’m not the way a girl’s supposed to be. You’re not the way a guy’s supposed to be.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You don’t like football. You don’t like to mow. You keep that art book in your truck,” she said flatly, taking a loud slurp between each observation.

  “Big fucking deal,” I said. “Almost all the artists in that book are men. There’s nothing wrong with a guy liking art.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with a girl liking to hunt.”

  “Who said there was?”

  “Dad thought there was.”

  She finished her drink. It left a slight blue tinge to her lips, reminding me of this tiny purple-faced infant hooked to a respirator I had seen in a magazine in Betty’s waiting room. The caption warned smokers not to reproduce.

  “Dad loved taking you hunting,” I reminded her.

  “No, he didn’t,” she said without emotion. “He took me because I wanted to go, but he always wished I was you.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “You’re saying he didn’t like me because I didn’t want to go hunting with him, and he didn’t like you because you did?”

  “Something like that.”

  Her sullen brown stare fixed vacantly on the bottom of her empty glass. A significant silence passed.

  “I tried to make him love me,” she said.

  The words clanged in my ears like a sprung trap. I wanted to run, but she looked up and her stare stamped down on me like heavy, metal, dull-edged teeth that would only tear if I tried to get away.

  “He did love you.”

  “Not like he loved Mom.”

  A clammy feeling started in my crotch and climbed up my spine to settle on the top of my crusty scalp.

  “That’s a different kind of love,” I said, trying to keep the rising revulsion out of my voice.

  “He never hit her. Did you ever wonder about that? He never hit her. Not a single time. That’s probably why she didn’t care that he hit us.”

  And there it was. The final answer. I saw it buried in my sister’s muddy eyes: the pain, and confusion, and hatred of someone forsaken.

  There had never been any incestuous love she had been willing to kill for. There had never been any deadly loyalty for a daddy who spent quality time with her when he wasn’t beating her. Dad had nothing to do with it. The betrayal had occurred between mother and child.

  Misty’s years of watching animals in the wild had taught her what she could expect and what she was owed. Her own mother had violated the simplest, most fundamental, instinctual law of nature. She had failed to protect her young.

  I licked my lips.

  And Mom had known that Misty knew her crime. She had known since the day Misty dropped the murdered kitten at her feet and started wearing its collar like a Purple Heart.

  The pale speckled face with its Maybelline war paint turned toward the window.

  “It’s a nice day. I can’t believe Amber didn’t skip so she could lay out. I bet you’re disappointed.”

  My stomach lurched, and I tasted milky beer in the back of my throat. I swallowed it down. It came up again. I reached for one of the kitchen chairs to steady myself.

  Misty was going to terrorize me. Not with the threat of revealing what was going on between Amber and me but with the threat of encouraging it.

  I thought about Jody’s notes, and I wanted to cry. Misty was teaching her it was okay. They were all going to be on Amber’s side.

  My teeth started chattering, and I clenched my jaw shut.

  I saw my future. I saw Jody’s. I had to do something. Then I remembered Misty had her own terrible secret.

  “I know what you did,” I told her.

  She kept staring out the window.

  “Did you hear me?”

  Nothing.

  “Don’t you have anything to say to that?”

  She slowly pulled her stare away from the window and aimed it at me, pitying my dumb animal fate but savoring my dumb animal fear.

  “You’re the one who should have done it,” she said.

  This time when the milk and beer came up, I couldn’t hold it back. I lunged for the sink. Misty stepped aside.

  Once I started throwing up, I couldn’t stop. It was like my body had finally found something it was good at. I stopped to rest at one point and laid my cheek against the cool steel faucet.

  In the other room, I heard the TV go on.

  I was fine once I got to work. I did well. I calmly took the abuse from my boss at Barclay’s. I agreed with him that jobs were hard to come by around here and I was a dumb-ass for risking this one. I told him I understood that I was going to be fired if I was ever late again.

  On the road, I was the friendliest son of a bitch who had ever delivered a refrigerator anywhere in the tristate area. I made small talk and chitchat with every housewife and toddler we came across. I even participated in tits-and-ass commentary with Ray. I didn’t get upset when various people throughout the day told me I smelled like a barn or asked me why I was wearing a coat.

  We were coming back from our last delivery when the big one hit, the one I did not survive. Six seconds was a liberal estimate; I didn’t even get two. I didn’t get a chance to look up and see the sky explode into a thousand suns. My explosion happened on the inside.

  Ray was driving. I wasn’t conscious of the way I reacted but it must have been bad because he made me get out of the truck on a busy road on the outskirts of town a good five miles from the store. Once the pain in my head dulled enough for me to catch my breath and my limbs stopped shaking enough for me to move with purpose, I started walking.

  I didn’t look at the cars and trucks that sped by me. I didn’t look at the soft blue sky above me or the long gray line stretching out endlessly at my feet. I found a star in the distance—a green and orange 7-Eleven sign—and set my sights on it.

  I went straight to the pay phones attached to the side of the store and called Betty. Her answering machine picked up and said she was at her other office. I could leave a message or call her there. I repeated the number it gave. I started to dial and forgot it. I called her county office again. I repeated the number. I started to dial and forgot it. I called again. I ran out of quarters. I had a dollar in my pocket. I went inside and got quarters. I counted them. FOUR. Four quarters. Good, I told the cashier.

  I went outside and called her county office again. I got the number. I hit seven buttons and closed my eyes.

  Another answering machine picked up, and I started to cry. Even after the beep, I kept crying. I couldn’t think of a better message.

  “Hello? Hello?” Betty’s real voice came on the other end. “Hello. Who is this? Is something wrong?”

  “I need help,” I sobbed.

  “Who is this?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Harley?”

  “Yeah.” I stopped, and sniffed, and wiped my nose with the sleeve of Dad’s coat. “That sounds right.”

  “Harley, where are you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What’s wrong? What’s happened?”

  “I need help.”

  “What happened?”

  “She . . .”

  “Who?”

  “She . . .”

  “She, who?”

  A savage pain ripped through my head, obliterating my thoughts, leaving me mute and stupid.

  “Harley, where are you?”

  I
could only cry.

  “Are you at home?”

  I shook my head at the phone.

  “At work?”

  “Seven, eleven,” I whispered.

  “Seven, eleven,” she repeated. “You mean the store?”

  I nodded at the phone.

  “The old one or the new one?”

  “The green one.” I sniffed.

  “Harley.” She sounded frustrated. “I’m with a patient right now.”

  “A real patient,” I said.

  “Can you get to me? I’m at my office.”

  “Your real office,” I said.

  “It’s less real than the one I see you at. It’s 475 Saltwork Street. Between Maple and Grant. It’s a big white house with a bright red door. Do you think you can find it?”

  I hung up the phone and started walking again.

  I was sweating like a pig by the time I got there. The house wasn’t big. It was huge. The ones around it were big.

  The floor inside was a dark fathomless wood polished until it looked liquid. A banister of the same wood wound its way up a staircase in front of me. Paintings of pale pink ballerinas and gem-colored gardens hung on the walls papered in cream. Two old-fashioned chairs with striped velvet cushions sat on either side of a doorway I couldn’t see into.

  Holy shit, I thought to myself.

  “Hello,” a female voice called. Not Betty’s.

  I was afraid to step off the plush throw rug onto the floor for fear of drowning.

  “Is somebody there?”

  A woman came out of the room I couldn’t see into. She was smiling politely but then her mouth gaped open a little and her eyes grew wide with concern. “Are you Harley?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Come in,” she said. “Dr. Parks is going to be so relieved to see you.”

  “Dr. Parks?” I wondered.

  “Betty,” she explained.

  She made a move to touch me, then thought better of it. “Do you want to take off your coat?”

  “No, thanks.”

  She told me to follow her and I did to a room at the end of the hallway. Betty was sitting in it behind a bed-sized Heads of State kind of desk, surrounded by shelves and shelves of books. She was on the phone. She hung up immediately.

  “Harley, thank God,” she said, and came out from behind the desk.