No…the reason Jessie wanted to check out the series was because she saw something in the cast and crew she desired. They were often at Charlie’s Club, where she occasionally hung out with her boyfriend of seven years, the bar’s owner and a well-known actor in his own right. It seemed those associated with the little Canadian western were a family, a phenomenon that happened on film sets but, especially, more long-term television projects. Jessie knew she couldn’t possibly belong the way they did. After all, most times people treated her very standoffishly, as if she weren’t human, and instead was an alien creature from another planet. But she was drawn to them, to that series, to those people.
Onscreen, colorful bolts of cotton went flying to the ground. That must have been a pain in the ass for continuity, Jessie caught herself thinking absently as a fight in the General Store occupied her vision. Not to mention for the props and set dec crew.
Jessie shook her head in wonder. She was about to hit the stop button on the remote when, onscreen, one of the guys in the cast threw open the door and the camera picked him up in a close-up. As she remembered the second reason she was intrigued by the show, Jessie put down the remote, leaned back in the chair, put her feet up on the desk, and settled in to watch.
Behind her and about five city blocks east, the firemen and women packed up their gear and trucks and prepared to head back to the station. It was a false alarm. There was no smoldering fire in the building on Robson, or in any other building in Vancouver that day. At the end of their shifts, they would go home to their families, eat dinner, and maybe just hang out at Stanley Park or take their kids to soccer. They would live normal lives. Above them, five blocks west on the thirty-first floor, one of their country’s biggest stars peered intently at her fifty-two inch screen and prayed that one day she, too, could do the same.
***
Her flight from home at age fourteen took Jessie in unexpected directions. Before she left, her mother either stayed in bed all day and smoked or got up to numb the pain of her husband’s death in the usual way, by drinking and watching television. She took advantage of social assistance while Jessie babysat the neighborhood children in an attempt to bridge the gap between the food on the table and the food that needed to be on the table. The day the television was shut off along with their power was the day Jessie and her mom had their biggest fight.
Jessie came home from school and tried to turn on the television. She was faced with a black screen, a void as empty as her mother’s heart had become, as if it too emptied its light into the Southwest River on that awful day. To a child whose father recently passed away, television was an escape, no matter how mindless. Jessie could feel panic rising in her belly in equal parts to the stale smoke that snaked a venomous trail down her nostrils and into her lungs.
She turned and glared at the woman who was supposed to take care of her. “What’s wrong with the television? Why won’t it come on?” Jessie spat the words out, her eyes narrowing into slits.
Her mother sat on an overstuffed chair in a dark corner staring at her daughter impassively. A tiny shard of grey lifeless daylight lit one side of her face perfectly, enhancing the shadows and dark lines around her eyes. Knees tucked underneath her, she sat as still as a statue in a flimsy pale pink bathrobe while the smoke trails from her freshly lit cigarette added an eerie dimension, encircling her before they faded suddenly away. It was an image the young Jessie would remember for the rest of her life, ingrained on her fragile mind forever, as if her mother had suddenly become one of the undead, living yet not alive. As if that day was a portent of things to come, of a life devoid of light.
Across from her mother on a matching couch the family bought at Sears two years earlier, but which was now stained with alcohol and food and pock-marked with cigarette burns, Jessie felt her mother’s stare bore deeply into her psyche. She watched her mother’s eyes narrow and then, quick as a snake with intent to sink its fangs into fresh skin, Jessie’s mom grabbed the full glass ashtray by her side and pitched it at her only daughter. It hit Jessie in the temple.
“Mom!” twelve-year-old Jessie cried as she leaned forward and squeezed her small fingers over the cut, which began to ooze blood instantly.
She was covered in ashes and used cigarette butts, which she later thought of as some kind of caul wrapping her soul one butt at a time with decay and distrust.
“You useless girl,” her mother said. “The power’s off in the whole house! What do you think this is, a place just to entertain the likes of Jessie Wheeler all day? Do you think life is just going to be handed to you on a silver platter?”
Afraid to move for fear the snake that possessed her mother would strike harder, Jessie spoke from a crouched position. “You should get a job. Then the power won’t be turned off on us!”
Her mother pulled herself up and towered over Jessie. “Why? So you can come home from school and watch television all day?”
“I don’t,” Jessie said. “I babysit when I can, and I do my homework, and…” She let her small voice trail off. She had been about to add I practice guitar, but she mostly only did that from the shadows of her bedroom, quietly, after her mother passed out. The new widow was not willing and able to hear her beloved husband’s tunes clumsily played by a child.
Blood was dripping down Jessie’s cheek and running into her eyes. Mixed with the ashes, it was thickening. In the dim light, from above, the young girl looked terribly scarred. Her mother shuddered – Jessie would never forget the way she was likely reflected in her mother’s eyes.
The cigarette almost burned the older woman’s fingers before she butted out. Cigarettes were expensive. One could not afford to waste the precious things.
“Stunned.” Jessie’s mom reached down and picked up the overturned ashtray. “Clean up this mess.”
Like a modern day Cruella de Ville she stalked off to her bedroom, shoulders back and head held high, trailing the pale pink bathrobe in her wake.
Jessie was afraid to leave the room to get a cloth for her face. As the house grew ever darker, she squatted on the floor and sobbed. She panicked when she could no longer see the cigarette butts she was picking up, in fear of what her mother would do when daylight came if she missed any. Soon, her mother’s sister arrived.
Evelyn was vivacious and lovely, a breath of spring in Jessie’s young life during those dark days. She must have received a call from Jessie’s mom, because she wasn’t surprised to see her niece on the floor covered in blood and ash. Gently, she took Jessie to the bathroom and cleaned her up as best she could, hollering at Jessie’s mom to get dressed, that they were going out.
She took Jessie to her own home, bandaged her cut and set her up in front of the television, and then she helped her sister dress up before they went out to a club. Later, they found Jessie asleep on the couch, and woke her up for the short drive home.
Jessie’s temporary respite didn’t last. Another degree was added to the pain in Jessie’s gut, for the man the ghost of her mother brought home from that club climbed into Jessie’s bed after leaving her mother’s. He threatened to kill both of them if Jessie disclosed his vicious deed.
Life continued that way for the next two years, for the man married Jessie’s mother, and moved them into an expensive home in their small city, Summerside. He provided the niceties of life Jessie’s dad could never have afforded – a BMW, granite countertops, a swimming pool. Essentially, Jessie’s mother whored herself out to give her and her daughter some security, never realizing that behind the wall of expense lay a dangerous, frightening alcoholic who preferred a twelve year old to a grown woman when it came to bedtime affairs.
Jessie grew up fast. As she retreated from the world around her, she expressed what she couldn’t understand through music on the guitar her father bought the year she was born, the Gibson on which he taught her to play. One day she’d had enough. She took babysitting money hidden in a jar underneath her bed and left without saying goodbye. She thought about going outsid
e and forcing open her screen to make it look like someone had snuck in and stolen her, like she’d read about in the newspaper, but she figured there wasn’t much point – her mother hardly knew she existed anymore. After all, Jessie was a carbon copy of the man her mom had loved – in appearance and in her aspirations and talents – and that was a life too painful to remember. Emily was always a little jealous of the closeness between father and daughter anyway. So she chose to look the other way, and let Jessie pretty much raise herself.
Jessie’s only regret was wondering where her stepfather would turn next in order to satisfy his twisted attraction to adolescents. Apart from sorrow for the man’s next victim, she considered herself a free spirit, and rarely looked back on that tumultuous, painful time in her short life.
***
The last of her teen years, too, were truths she pushed aside and buried, truths that took her breath away with each remembrance, with blisters that scorched her insides with such intensity that they burned her from the inside out.
After leaving Prince Edward Island she made her way to Charleston, South Carolina, crossing the border with a twenty-something who hid her underneath his removable back seat in return for sex. Once across, she outwitted him at a truck stop by taking off through a ladies’ room window and, with her dad’s cherished J-45, busked her way south in small towns along the route. Her dad always talked about going to Charleston – a history fanatic, he’d studied the American Civil War at University. So, to a lonely fourteen year old it seemed logical she might find her dad there, somehow. Plus, she’d heard it was warm in Charleston…and freezing, unremorseful Canada wasn’t an option to a kid with very little money and no idea how to make any, besides busking. She was like The Beatles, only instead of honing her music hour after hour in a German nightclub, she did it on the road, and she developed a style and sound all her own.
When she arrived in Charleston, Jessie made her way to Folly Beach. She was sitting near a fishing pier picking out a new ballad and watching the surfers try to stay balanced on their colorful boards, when an average sized boy about sixteen plunked himself down about ten feet away. Jessie glanced over and made eye contact with him in the pink light of early evening, and that was it – they were friends and, eventually, each other’s first true love. He scooted over beside her with a smile as wide as a puppy’s wagging tail, and asked about the guitar. He recognized its smooth, deep tone as something special, and although initially she held it closer to her body when his soulful hazel eyes coveted it, eventually Jessie loosened up.
“It was my dad’s,” she said. “It’s a Gibson J-45.”
At his nod, she realized he was acknowledging more than just her admission about the guitar. He recognized that her father was no longer in her life, as well.
“Do you play?” she asked him.
The sandy haired boy shook his head. He looked at Jessie with gentle eyes and somehow in that brief moment his steady gaze captured her and never let go from that moment on.
“I’m just a fan,” he said. He added, “Of the music,” in case the pretty girl playing a lonesome tune on this sun kissed southern beach didn’t get that part. He smiled. “I like your sound.”
Jessie wasn’t yet ready to grin back at him, but she nodded and looked down and picked away at a few more solemn notes. She hummed a little, quietly. It was a habit she picked up as a younger child and kept to for all her life. When she was nervous and had a guitar in front of her, she would quietly pick and strum and hum and somehow it made things go easier. Music – her dad’s guitar – was her barrier to the world, now and forevermore.
The boy stuck out his hand.
“Sandy!” he said with punctuation, as if he wanted to be sure she got his name right on the first try. As if he instinctively knew he would always have to fight over the music to really get her to hear him. It worked.
She glanced down at his outstretched fingers. Reaching over, Jessie gently grasped Sandy’s hand.
“Jessie,” she whispered, but didn’t smile. It was then that Sandy saw how emotionally haunted this girl was – not just her music, but her voice and soul as well. But he was haunted too. Soon another new friend joined them, one of Sandy’s pals from the beach - freckle faced, skinny, stringy-haired Rachel, who was also a victim of a haunting.
The three of them sat together until the sun encircled their young bodies in its tender pink hue. Jessie played her dad’s guitar and they sang with all their troubled voices until Sandy’s belly growled, then they skipped off together to a nearby diner for breakfast. They were homeless friends who made a plan for survival by the time the eggs and bacon filled their tummies. They became inseparable, and were smart, and street smart too. The kids had made it this far in their tumultuous teenage lives so, on top of everything, they were survivors, until the world took back its well-earned respite and said ah-ha and, like an ocean riptide stealing a child’s plastic bucket, taunted and tortured them yet again.
***
South Carolina, the palmetto state, was kind to Jessie, Sandy and Rachel for a good few years. They did what they had to in order to raise enough money to secure a small apartment, and they worked hard while most kids were safe in their homes playing video games and staring at television like sleepy doe-eyed zombies. Sandy found employment as a laborer with a landscaping company, Jessie busked on the streets, and Rachel waitressed. Together they were able to pay their rent each month, and all made time to attend school as well. At that first sunrise breakfast, they’d made a pact for survival that included education, because they knew that would be the key to any future security. None of them talked about their lives before converging on Charleston, because they preferred to think about the present and the future, and saw no need to share their morbid stories about the kids they ‘used to be.’ Instead, Jessie and Sandy shared a bed and learned to laugh again, while Rachel – ever the flirt in need of affection – went through a steady succession of boyfriends and lovers, often crying on her friends’ shoulders when things didn’t turn out the way she hoped.
When she was seventeen, Rachel bounced in the door with a Cheshire grin on her perky little freckled face, and with a spring in her step. She went about the kitchen humming happily while assembling items for a homemade pizza as Jessie did homework at the table. Tapping her pencil against her upper lip, Jessie’s eyes narrowed at Rachel’s lighthearted step.
“Hmmm,” she said quietly. “Are you going to tell me his name, or do I have to guess?”
Rachel grinned and tore open the pizza box. “I think I’ll just keep this one to myself for a while. You and Sandy will just rip him apart.”
Across the room, reclining lazily on a tattered diarrhea-green easy chair, Sandy couldn’t let that one go past without a rebuttal. “D’ya ever think there might be a reason for that, sunshine?”
Pouring warm water into the bowl and following with the pre-packaged dough mix, Rachel retorted shortly, “Well, I’m just going to hold onto this one alone for a little while, if you two lovebirds don’t mind.”
She stirred the dough with a fork, and then placed the bowl in a warm water bath so the yeast could do its thing, while Jessie and Sandy exchanged concerned looks. Rachel did not have a habit of choosing good men – she was too desperate for love and attention, no matter how messed up its package was. The fact that she was keeping this one secret was just cause for worry – she never held out. Traditionally, Rachel was always anxious to share.
Jessie closed her book and got up to cut the pepperoni slices. The three of them never fought over household chores, or their group apartment fund, or even the muffled lovemaking that often emanated from Jessie and Sandy’s tiny room. Rachel was thrilled her roommates loved one another, and although she was melancholy and blue at times, she genuinely adored the two of them, and they adored her in turn. But she was the most fragile of the three, the one most prone to falling for street drugs or alcohol, or the wrong sorts of men friends, so she required the most protection. This time she
didn’t budge, though. Wordlessly, Rachel and Jessie cut up the onions, green peppers and mushrooms, and Jessie did the tidying up while Rachel dreamily spread the mozzarella cheese. The pizza was quick to cook, and the three ate studiously in front of their schoolbooks. Exams were around the corner. In grade twelve, their senior year, they had to stay focused if they were to succeed in life.
Two days later Jessie met Deuce McCall for the first time. At forty-five-years-old, the man was more than twice Rachel’s age. Five foot nine, with piercing green eyes, the sinister way he moved his thick build was menacing. The discrepancy in his and Rachel’s ages was made even more apparent by McCall’s already balding dark hair.
Jessie arrived home to find the man lounging against a cabinet in her kitchen, draped only in a Henley shirt and a scratchy towel he’d wrapped around his waist. She’d been busking until six o’clock so she could bring in some extra money for Sandy and Rachel’s graduation gifts. Sandy was still at work doing overtime to help landscape a new subdivision so he could buy gifts for Jessie and Rachel.
Startled to find Deuce comfortably ensconced in their apartment, Jessie almost dropped her guitar. Leaning smugly against the counter, sipping from a chipped mug, his eyes snakelike and sinister, he was watching the teenager remove her boots and coat. Jessie had taken a sudden step back when she first spotted him, as if her mind already knew what she would later discover about McCall, and was trying to protect her. For his part, the older man immediately perked up when he spied Jessie, the way men do when they first see a beautiful woman walk into a room. To him, skinny Rachel was a tool for free sex, and nothing more. But, like everyone else who came into contact with Jessie, he immediately detected that here was someone who, for some unknown reason, was special.
A Song For Josh, Drifters Book One Page 2
