“Is anyone in there?” Steve asked.
“Her mother,” the girl said. “Her father lives in a different state with some other woman.”
The light went on in the second-floor window. Beyond the sheer curtains Ginger could see the edge of a double bed and a long, low chest with a portable TV on top. The curtain floated up and the round anxious face of a woman hovered there in the dark pane of glass.
“Shit,” Steve said. “Let's get the fuck out of here.”
Ted skidded up the road. The girl started to cry and said that Sandy was the nicest girl, that there was always something kind of sad about her, that sometimes she wore the same skirt all week and her tops and bottoms didn't always match and sometimes too, when she was nervous, she stuttered. “God,” the girl screamed, “I can't stand it!”
There was no fire, just glowing embers giving off a hazy orange light, though it was still easy to see the deer's head balanced on top of the TV. Ted had dragged the TV from the dump and set it up at the edge of the fire. All the knobs were missing and the screen was smashed out. Inside, a metal board with Japanese writing and a lattice of multicolored wires snaked this way and that. He carved a hole into the top of the deer's head with his jackknife and stuck in a red flare, kept for emergencies in the trunk of his car. The pink flame was low now, directly above the fur, like a Pentecostal fire. Ginger was thinking the deer was the last one left and there was no doubt it did have an apocalyptic look, the way wax spilled onto the fur and thickened blood dripped over the edges of the television. But the thought was crazy; there were thousands of deer, maybe millions.
While the others had taken the flashlight and gone to look for more firewood, Ginger went out to pee around back in the safe spot of feather moss and butter fern, where she'd never seen a snake and there was no poison ivy. She walked down the pressed-dirt path, past the sumac grove and the dead cat in the open box, its skeleton delicate as a chalk math problem. In the woods she lifted her skirt and squatted, listened to the sound of her urine hitting leaves, then walked to where a cushionless couch was set up around a cold campfire. Burnt Bud cans. Blackened angles of wood. The low-lying mist clung to the weeds, made her feel dreamy, and she threw herself down on a safe-looking patch of grass and thought of the deer, how it hovered above the hood in the sliver of sky between the dark tree line on either side of the road. It was the earth's spinning that made it seem to pause and float.
An airplane's red lights divided the splatter of stars and she could feel the bright eyes of angels in the icy constellations and sense a sort of second-place grace spreading over her. Wind rocked the leaves, made her shiver and curl up sideways with an ear to the earth. There was the rumbling of the highway, but then behind her what sounded like a footstep, a crackle of dry leaves; a twig snapped. She pushed herself up into a monkey squat, turned toward the barn, thought of yelling for Ted. But if she spoke the devil would come after her, fierce as a rabid bat. If he was watching her now, there were a hundred places he could hide. She felt the thick lips of her pussy still flushed and filled with blood.
Four: SANDY
A strip of light, radiant as a fluorescent tube, shone up from under the closed door, illuminating the edge of the bare mattress, her bound ankles, pale blood-starved feet, the toenails like lavender shells. Millions of dust particles swirled around, made her feel like a tiny figure inside a glass dome, where the miniature scene never changes and specks of white plastic careen around sublime as real snow.
The cat raised its sleepy head, looked with indifference toward the door, then, satisfied no one was coming down the hall, shifted its belly and walked over her, hip to rib to shoulder bone, as if these were raised rocks and her flesh a riverbed. Crouching, it tongued her ear, with sly little strokes that resounded roughly through the cartilage. Sometimes the cat chewed her hair, and at first, before she learned to keep her eyes shut, it had batted her lashes as if they were spiders.
She listened to the rain behind the boarded window, the TV downstairs, and for any sound of his presence among these. The laugh track rose and fell and she heard him hack, clear the petal of phlegm from his throat, shift his weight on the couch. She sensed his anticipation, obvious and uncomfortable as summertime humidity. It was nearly time, and she needed to let the seconds build to minutes, the minutes to hours, listening to the fly trapped inside the ceiling fixture buzz hysterically against the glass.
He stood, took one step, then another. She pressed her ear to the mattress, felt the muscles in her neck harden and separate. The steps varied in cadence from carpet to wood to bathroom tiles, then stopped. She heard the stream of his pee, first hard, then softer until he flushed and the water swirled down the drain. He jiggled the handle until the tank started to fill up. Drops of urine flooded her vagina; pee trickled between her legs, puddling in the crack of her rear, then soaked through the fabric of her nightgown into the bare mattress. The smell of urine tightened her stomach muscles, stretched her nightgown up like a tent between her hip bones. She struggled to wiggle her butt off the damp spot. It was okay, she said to herself, it didn't really mean anything. I am still the same person. She tried to move again, but each time, the cord that ran under the mattress forced her back into the cold pee.
Somewhere downstairs a washing machine rattled to life, must be from the little room, off the kitchen, the one her mother called the mud room, where a table, covered with detergent granules and single socks, stood across from the Maytags. There was a shopping bag overflowing with puffs of blue dryer lint and a freezer filled with frozen hamburger meat. Her mother had put in a late load and she tried to separate the sound of the engine from the thumping cadence of wet clothes. She was lying in her bedroom half asleep, listening to the rotating water downstairs and to the music box on her nightstand, watching the ballerina twirl around slowly. She called her Elena, a name she thought Russian and sophisticated. The dancer was the size of her pinkie, with a tiny brown bun, pink toe shoes, and a little satin skirt that covered the top of her white legs. Her stuffed animals, that napped all day on the yellow gingham pillow, were displaced now, strewn into the alley-way between her bed and the wall. Each one had a name, a personality all its own, but in the dark it was only their eyes, toxic green or red, that shone up at her and made each seem like tiny sinister strangers.
She felt the blueprint of her house around her, a phantom sensation, hard to throw off because she wasn't in her own bedroom, but held hostage in this room with its wood-paneled walls, brown boxes stacked in one corner and a colonial chair. This room could be anywhere, maybe in one of the Main Street mansions downtown. She'd always thought of them, white or butter-colored with round turrets and generous front porches, as somewhat ominous. Most had turned into boardinghouses, the big rooms cheaply remodeled into drywall apartments, where dazed-looking people in sleeveless T-shirts and cheap vinyl shoes sat all day long looking out the window. Or maybe it was one of those ratty condominiums out by the airport. A boy at school told her prostitutes and drug dealers lived there. Once she heard the big globular sound of a water cooler and figured she was being held in one of the half-empty glass office buildings along the highway. Other times she thought she'd been pulled through a portal into another dimension, that this room was underground, that the man with the white beard was the devil and this her particular hell.
She turned her ear to the wall, heard the static snap of the television obeying the remote and turning itself off, the electricity slithering out of the TV, through the cord, and back into the wall. He threw his weight up, the couch springs adjusted, and he walked like a younger man, an altogether different man, into the kitchen. He broke the vacuum of the refrigerator and felt around inside. She heard glass jars clink, the rustle of aluminum foil against the wire shelf. A fat hum kicked in as the fridge spilled cold air into the kitchen and began to generate more. The door sucked shut and she heard his hip nudge a chair, the squeak of its legs on the linoleum. He opened the microwave, closed it, his fingers pushing butt
ons; the familair beeping sounds rang out, then the electric drone as water molecules heated up in whatever he'd decided to eat. He turned on the kitchen faucet; water rushed through the pipe in the wall next to her bed, gave off a slight aura of damp humidity. The heat released old smells trapped in the paint: hair spray and stale smoke. The microwave beeped its electronic alarm, and water pounded against the porcelain, until her ears rang and her throat dried out. Panic spread down her torso into her pelvis, snaked out through her limbs. Her fingers felt thick and numb and her mind folded back in half, into quarters, until it became tiny as an origami bird made from delicate silver paper. She thought of flesh flushed with moving blood, and then of dead flesh, blue-gray and puffy. When you had a sore throat or bumped yourself and got a bad bruise, that was what rotting would be like, but you wouldn't feel it happening because you'd be dead. And it wasn't until she said the word, put her tongue to the roof of her mouth, and forced the air up from her lungs, that she started to struggle.
The door swung open, a pillar of hall light spread against the wall, the cat jumped up and ran through his legs; then the light was gone and he flicked on the flashlight, waved it once across the room. It veined his beard orange, showed his fish-scale eyes, and made the yarns of the carpet look shiny and magical, as if you could wish on them for love or winning money. Squatting, he set the can of food on the carpet, leaned the flashlight against the wall, and moved over her, unlatched the metal hook from the cord around her wrists and the strap from her ankles. Sinking his fingers under her armpits, he yanked her up against the wall, unpeeled the tape from her mouth, and picked up the can, took the spoon—always the same tarnished silver one with the fancy filigree handle—from his shirt pocket, and dipped it into the beef stew. It was the same always, soft carrots, potatoes, translucent onions, bits of grayish meat in a room-temperature gravy.
Each spoonful was too big and he never gave enough time between them to chew. He never spoke either, just went about his duties like a good-natured but bored nurse. A lump of stew fell onto the smocking of her nightgown. He used the spoon to scrape the gravy and stringy meat up and put it back into her mouth. In the twin panes of his glasses, she saw the girl with the short black hair. She watched the shifting jaw, the mouth purse, wrinkle, then open up again like a baby bird’ s. And while she felt the chilled spoon on her lip and the food fragmenting around her teeth, still there had to be some sort of mistake.
When the can was empty he set it aside, slid one hand under her thigh and the other just below her shoulder, and carried her into the bathroom, placed her on the toilet seat. Stepping back, he waited to hear tinkles of urine or blobs of poop. She saw the tiny green dots of his big wristwatch, the glowing second hand twitching from one dot to the next like a tiny frantic bee. The textured shower stall picked up a little flashlight and sparkled like frosted glass. She made water noises, first a waterfall, then stream water over rocks, then the ‘piss piss piss’ her mother had made when she was being potty trained.
“Oh for Christ's sake,” he said, yanking her wrist and heaving her over his shoulder.
When she was scared at night her mother would come into her room and sit at the edge of her bed and say Think of something nice. She would always envision the violets that grew on the shady side of the house.
He laid her down, took the afghan from the bottom of the bed, and covered the line of light under the door. There were pink roses and arrogant red ones. She heard the tiny teeth of his zipper disconnecting one after another and then a sound like when skin hits water in a belly flop, and her elbows skidded forward, burned on the polyester mattress. Her forehead bumped the wall hard. Lilacs were beautiful, so beautiful, and she went right down into the center of that tiny flower, to the stamen, to the pistol, to where the yellow pollen brushed off on your eyelashes and the smell made you drunk with love.
* * *
He'd stripped off her nightgown, flipped the pee-soaked mattress and given her his shirt. The material reeked of aftershave and sweat and she felt like he'd swallowed her whole, that her body floated in his dark stomach along with lumps of chewed-up chicken in a lake full of beer.
The cat curled around her head like a voluptuous wig. She felt its damp breath in her ear, its wet nose snuggled under her earlobe. She'd lain here through a myriad of untenable days and nights, one distinguishable from the other, only in the slightest rise of light. The afternoon sun illuminated the wood grain of the boarded-over window and sent out a smell of chemically processed pine, so she could see the bug corpses lying prone in the light fixture and that the decals on the headboard were Power Rangers and Ninja Turtle Warriors.
At first she'd kept track of each day by assigning it to an object, the three brown boxes in the corner of the room, the chair, the light fixture, the mattress itself. After each object was invested with a day, she'd look to the ceiling and count off one swirl of textured paint after another. It worked for a while, but a string of dark rainy days confused her and she had to give it up; all she knew now was feeding time, feeling it in the hollow of her bones as she listened for his footsteps on the carpeted stairs.
The TV talked in hushed tones of love and betrayal, of suspicion and remorse. Heat pushed up from a vent in the corner, made her sleepy, and she thought, as she often did in an effort to figure out how she got here, of all the things she'd ever done wrong. Her mother was upstairs making the beds and her little brother sat on the couch in the living room looking at his picture books. She felt reckless, threw herself against the cushions, and began to brood. She'd overheard her parents arguing and this gave her an uneasy and forbidding feeling; everything seemed impermanent and annoying. Clear snot ran under her brother's nose and drool stuck to his chin. He read his book in baby talk, his voice rising and falling, and when he turned the pages to a picture of a silly-looking rabbit with long ears, he looked at her and said, “Cat.”
“It's a rabbit, stupid,” she'd said, pushing him off the couch so he banged against the sharp edge of the coffee table and then fell onto the floor. As he got up she'd noticed how his arm hung funny, how he pressed it to his side. And while that was probably the worst, it wasn't the only mean thing she'd ever done to him. He was so gullible. She'd give him an olive and say it was a sweet grape or tell him about the Christmas before he was born, when she'd gotten a unicorn and a baby bear.
He was older now and she couldn't fool him, so she'd get the upper hand by making fun of his friends, saying they were stupid, that a girl would be crazy to go out with them, that they were ugly, greasy-haired nerds who picked boogers from their noses and ate them. Once she'd gone on for so long his face got red, his eyes teared, and he ran from the room, though he usually just tried to joke it off. He was nice to look at, with his pink skin and somber black eyes, his hair always cut a little too short. He had a smell too, tennis shoe rubber and grass.
Her eyes got warm, then wet, and she felt tears dribble out the sides, down into her hair. If she could see him now, she'd put one hand on each of his shoulders, look directly into his eyes, and confess all of her sins, say she loved him too, though it was risky; she'd never said it before and he might get embarrassed and run out of the house, jump on his bike. Come lie on my bed, she'd say to him. He liked science fiction books and she'd read out loud, like she used to when they were little and it was raining or snowing and she had nothing else to do.
Her father played his bluegrass records two states over, but she could hear the melody if the wind was right. Her brother talked nonsense on the cordless phone and Mrs. Bailey, the English teacher, told her no one would ever take her seriously if she didn't learn to spell. A burglar came up through the toilet and she heard the Gestapo banging on the door. Her flesh covered his ottoman, so his feet could be cozy by the fire. He untied her, wrapped her in the afghan, and carried her down the hall, through one dark room after another. The furniture stood around like bad ideas. The metal mesh of a screen door pressed against her thigh, then flapped behind her. She saw her pale hand
dangling down against the blue and sparkly asphalt; it seemed so far away how would she ever get it back. The cool night air brushed against the bottom of her feet and she realized with a shock that she was outside.
The cat was not with her, probably prowling for deaf birds and blind mice out in the world. Many times she'd tried to push her own soul into the cat, so that when the man came in, she could run past him and squeeze out the kitchen window. The TV was on downstairs and hot air blew up through the floor vent. But then the mattress tipped and the floor pitched sideways, and she recognized the hum of an engine and the sound of wheels bumping up out of a pothole. She tipped her head back, saw stars beyond the front seat glimmering through the windshield, the Big Dipper to be exact, huge and glamorous like the movie version of a geometry problem. She looked at his neck, found the red birthmark at the base of his skull, and knew he was driving her somewhere else in the van again. The radio played a song so soft and incomprehensible it seemed like a ballad sung from the bottom of the sea.
Heat flowed over her, strong as smoke. Rolling up on her side, she wiggled her shoulder so the ratty afghan fell away, and she saw that her chest was bare and that she had on a diaper, the disposable kind, and that the odd sensation of wadded paper and moisture meant that the crotch was already wet. She looked down at her bare chest; except for the slightest swelling around her nipples she was, as the boys said, flat.
He glanced at her in the rearview mirror, in a perfunctory sort of way that made Sandy think she'd been sleeping for a long time, that he thought of her as any other cargo, boxed televisions, or field-grown potatoes. The sky outside the windshield was turning from black to electric blue. Dawn was her favorite time. Even at home after a long night of hearing strange sounds and linking each to an intruder, it was only with the first hint of light that she could go down deeply into the smoky kingdom of sleep.
Jesus Saves Page 5
