Some Kind of Animal

by Maria Romasco-Moore

  * * *

  —

  “This is a pretty special weekend, you know,” the pastor tells me on our way back to the bar after Bible study. I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about and I don’t much care. Jack came this close to punching me in the face and Savannah just stood there. That’s almost as bad as not talking to me for two weeks. Whose side is she on?

  “Sheila is going to be baptized tomorrow,” the pastor says. I glance at Sheila, who’s walking with us. She’s beaming.

  “I thought that was for babies,” I say, half-heartedly.

  “In some churches,” says the pastor. “But in mine, we believe people need to choose.”

  A group of kids is hanging out on the steps of the old town hall down the street from Joe’s Bar: Tanner, a girl named Lisa from the tenth grade, her little sister Katie, and a few others. Tanner’s messing with a skateboard. Katie’s kicking a rock around.

  I would not describe myself as particularly well liked among people my own age. The opposite, actually. It’s funny, when I’m with my sister I’m the talkative one, but the kids at school consider me almost freakishly quiet. A daydreamer. Sometimes they think I’m being rude. They think me being quiet means I don’t like them, means I think I’m better than them. That’s what Savannah tells me, anyway. She thinks I should make more of an effort.

  But I can’t relate to most of them and I don’t want to pretend to care about the stupid stuff they care about. Who’s dating or flirting with or cheating on who else. What some celebrity just did. It’s not that I’m smarter or anything. I’m not that smart. Savannah’s the smart one. Or she used to be. Before she got dumb on purpose. Now she is always having to pretend to be interested in idiotic stuff to please boys.

  Having to pretend like I’m not her best friend.

  I hope she was only pretending.

  I try to keep my head down, but the group on the steps notice me. The noise of the skateboard and the rock stop abruptly. Have they heard about last night? How much have they heard? Are they staring? I look anywhere but at them. At the lone pickup truck trundling past. At the faded mural on the side of a brick building half choked by ivy. At the distant ridges that rise like great green walls all around us.

  That’s the one thing we do all have in common. Pretty much every kid I know is looking forward to the day when they can escape this place. Savannah dreams about moving to a city. She’s always going on about her second cousin in Cincinnati. Other kids talk about heading up to Columbus or down to Delphi.

  Me, though, I already escape every single night.

  I walk faster, pushing ahead, leaving the pastor and Sheila behind, going as quickly as I can without actually running. Aggie must have seen us out the window, because she’s waiting in the doorway of the bar. I’m nearly there when I hear a weird flapping sound behind me. I turn, tensing, half expecting to see Jack again, but it’s just little Katie, her too-big flip-flops slapping the pavement as she runs. She stops a few feet away from me and stares.

  “What?” I say, hoping against hope that she’s just going to ask me to hang out or start rambling about some dumb little-kid stuff.

  She’s got on a dirty white T-shirt with a glittery pink heart in the middle, but big patches of glitter have rubbed off, so the heart looks like it has mange. She keeps staring.

  “What?” I say again, heart sinking.

  “Lisa says you’re a crazy slut!” she shouts, and then her eyes go huge as if she can’t believe what she just said and she turns and runs back down the sidewalk, flip-flops beating like wings.

  The group down the street is watching, waiting to see how I’ll react. Does Lisa know that Henry and I kissed? Only Savannah could have told her that. Or Henry. I need to know who told them, what people are saying about me. How much they know.

  This is a terrible idea. I know it’s a terrible idea and some part of my brain is shouting at my feet to stop, but it’s too late, I’m already walking over there, anger overruling reason. I walk with long strides, but not stomping, not with clenched fists. I try to appear cool and collected.

  Katie hides behind Lisa as I approach.

  “Fuck you,” I say to Lisa, which is a great start. Really beginning from a position of power there, Jo. Fantastic job.

  Lisa laughs. “You going to bite me?”

  “You got the taste for blood?” asks another girl. Nicole. She’s in my math class, but we never talk. She isn’t rich. Nobody in Lester is or they would live somewhere else. But she must have more money than me or Savannah because she always has nice clothes (Savannah only ever gets hand-me-downs, the bane of her existence) and a nice manicure. If I tried to wear nail polish it wouldn’t last more than a day, I imagine, between doing dishes at the bar and climbing trees at night. Being around Nicole always makes me feel dirty and poor.

  “You’re a bunch of petty, gossiping bitches,” I say. I’m not proud of that, but I’m too angry to stop. “Where are you getting this shit?”

  “Everybody knows it,” says Nicole. “You went out with Henry Bickle and you attacked him.”

  “It could have been me,” says Tanner seriously, putting a protective hand to his neck.

  “Oh, fuck you too,” I say. “Your face looks like a shovel.” Accurate, though not helpful.

  “I never knew you were into such kinky shit,” says Lisa.

  It’s a new experience to be called a slut—historically I’ve only ever been labeled a frigid nun or a struck-up prude—but it doesn’t feel any better. In eighth grade, someone started a rumor that Savannah and I were lesbians. She stopped hanging out with me for two whole weeks. I was devastated. She apologized, eventually. We never talk about that time, though I still think about it sometimes and get sad.

  “Always knew you were a freak, though,” Lisa adds. Nicole nods in agreement.

  They all think I’m weird, but their definition of normal is too narrow. They have no idea what weird truly is.

  I picture Lee stalking the halls of the high school, throwing her dress off in the middle of class. Slut, they’d all cry. My sister would bare her teeth. Stand on a desk and rip out the beating heart of some baby animal with her teeth. Spit the blood in Lisa’s face.

  It was a mistake coming over here. A big one. Lisa is looking so smug I can’t stand it.

  So I don’t try to. I launch myself forward. Little Katie bolts, a few of the others jump clear. I barrel into Lisa, knock her backward against the steps, hit indiscriminately. Slapping, punching, wrestling like I do with my sister. Tanner whistles. Another boy says something idiotic about a cat fight. I am sick with regret, sicker with rage. Lisa’s flailing hand hits my wrist and pain shoots up my arm. I manage to grab a handful of her hair and yank. She shrieks.

  And then the pastor is there, right on fucking time, once again, to pull me away.

  * * *

  —

  Aggie, newly furious about the spectacle I made of myself right down the street, forces me to clean the whole bar from top to bottom. Neon-filled windows, scratched wooden tables, rickety chairs, sticky black floor. Scrubbed and polished to a shine, she says. Everything takes me longer than usual because my left wrist throbs if I move it too much and I keep stopping to yank my sleeve back down over the wound. At least the pastor didn’t tell Aggie about the fight with Jack, or I’d probably have to clean it all twice.

  The bar is mostly empty. Just a few regulars. Old men who used to work in the mines. Gerald who is only sixty but looks eighty. Roscoe who carries an actual handkerchief in the pocket of his Carhartt jacket and coughs like a jackhammer. Carl who ran a secondhand shop down the street until it went out of business last year. My version of uncles. I suspect they must have been here last night when the police dropped me off, but they don’t mention it, for which I am grateful.

  The pastor and Sheila are playing pool over in the corner. I catch A
ggie shooting glances at them while she polishes glasses. Maybe she’s jealous. Good. Hopefully she and the pastor will fight and break up and everything can go back to normal.

  I’m watching her watch them when the bell over the door chimes. Aggie looks to see who it is. The glass slips out of her hands. Clanks onto the counter. Rolls.

  Only one person could make her react like that. I wonder if it’s too late to duck under a table and hide.

  “Little girl,” says Grandma Margaret from behind me.

  It’s too late.

  I turn, steeling myself. She’s still in the doorway. The inside of the bar is dim even in the daytime, artificial evening, so she’s backlit dramatically.

  Everyone is staring at her. It’s funny. She’s almost like Lee, up to a point. They both dislike most people. Both keep to themselves, far away from people, deep in the woods.

  When Grandma Margaret deigns to come to town, though, she doesn’t mind attention. She demands it, in fact.

  “I hear you been running wild.” Margaret steps forward. The door bangs shut behind her. If it weren’t for her wild gray hair, you could squint and mistake her for Aggie.

  A hush has fallen over the bar. Roscoe coughs and I flinch at the sound.

  Since moving out, we only go to Margaret’s house three times a year. Christmas. Easter. Her birthday in June. Aggie fumes on the drive there, fumes on the way back. These visits are obligations, like paying tribute to a tyrant. If we are late, if we don’t bring a gift, if she doesn’t like the way we say hello, she’ll punish us with icy looks, thinly veiled insults.

  Margaret, meanwhile, stops by the bar once a month or so. She never gives advance warning, just appears, always at a different time or a different day from her last visit, as if she wants to catch us off guard. She treats these visits like an inspection. Of both the property itself, and of her other property: us.

  She’ll criticize my posture, my clothes, threaten to take me back home with her and raise me right. It’s an empty threat. At least I hope it is. I believe she was glad to be rid of me, glad she didn’t have to look at my face every day, didn’t have to be reminded of where I came from, who I came from. She usually has some complaint about how Aggie runs the bar, too. She’ll threaten to start running the place herself, but that’s equally unlikely. Margaret prefers to spend most of her time alone, up in her big house on the ridge, with nobody but the trees to know her business. She doesn’t come into town more than once a week if she can help it. Nothing but trash down there, she always says.

  “I come down for the milk this morning,” Margaret says, talking loudly, as though she were on a stage, rather than in the doorway of a small bar, “not expecting no trouble and what do I find out nearly the minute I walk through the doors of the Kroger? My own granddaughter has been out there biting boys in the neck. Whole damn town is talking about it.”

  “Mother,” says Aggie, icy. “Can we discuss this privately?”

  “I’m thinking it’s about time I stepped in,” says Margaret, not lowering her voice.

  The last time we saw her was nearly a month ago, when she stopped by the bar on a Saturday night to help herself to our priciest scotch and glare daggers at the pastor. I was wearing jean shorts that day and as soon as she saw me she looked me up and down and said I was showing too much skin. Said, You don’t want people getting the wrong idea about what kind of girl you are, now, do you?

  “I’m handling it,” says Aggie. She grabs a bottle of scotch from the top shelf, pours some into a glass, sets it firmly onto the bar.

  “Seems she needs a firmer hand,” Margaret says, though she goes over to the bar, takes a seat and a long sip of the scotch.

  Some low conversation has resumed between the other patrons and I miss the next thing Aggie says, but then to my dismay Margaret is waving me over.

  “Go right upstairs and pack your things, Jo,” she says when I approach. “You’re coming home with me today.”

  My stomach drops. No. She wouldn’t. Would she? She’s threatened before, but always in a vague way. She’s never gone this far.

  I look desperately at Aggie. She’s staring fixedly at her mother, hands clutching the edge of the bar.

  “There’ll be no more of this running off,” Margaret says coolly. “I know how to deal with that kind of nonsense.”

  “Right,” says Aggie. “Like you dealt with it before. Like you dealt with her. That worked out just great, didn’t it?”

  Margaret, usually implacable, bristles. “How dare you,” she hisses, voice low for the first time since she walked in. “You have no idea what it was like, dealing with that girl.”

  “You gave up on her,” says Aggie. She is angry, face going red, muscles straining, fingers gripping the edge of the bar harder and harder.

  “So help me God,” says Margaret. She’s angry, too, but icy.

  I glance around to see if everyone is staring. They are. The pastor is actually coming over. Great. Just what this situation needs. He stops beside me, puts a hand on my shoulder. I only flinch a little.

  “What man,” he intones, addressing Margaret, “having a hundred sheep, if he loses one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness, and go after the one that is lost, until he finds it? Luke fifteen, four.”

  “Mr. Jones,” Margaret says. I note she does not call him pastor. “This is a family conversation.”

  “I believe, ma’am,” he fires back, “that the whole bar can hear it.”

  Margaret huffs, taken aback. She’s used to people being intimidated by her. If I didn’t hate the pastor, I would almost have to admire him.

  “Aggie here,” the pastor continues, “has asked me to assist in the religious education of young Jolene.”

  “Jo,” I say automatically, correcting him, but regret it immediately, since they all three look at me. I shrink under their gaze. If only I could run.

  “What Jo needs,” says the pastor, “is a close personal relationship with our savior Jesus.”

  I catch Aggie rolling her eyes, but the tension between mother and daughter has been broken.

  “Charlatan,” Margaret says, her ire redirected fully at the pastor. “I remember you. You were a good-for-nothing punk.”

  “Oh certainly,” says the pastor. “I myself was, it could be said, conflicted when I was young Jo’s age. But then, by the grace of the Lord, I saw the light.”

  “You saw the light at the end of a bottle,” says Margaret.

  Aggie, who has come out from behind the bar, takes me by the arm.

  “Come on,” she whispers.

  “Let beer be for those who are perishing,” I hear the pastor declare as Aggie drags me back to the kitchen, “wine for those who are in anguish.”

  Aggie directs me to the stovetop, shoves a grimy steel wool scrubber into my hands.

  “Scour it,” she says, “and when you’re done find something else.” She gestures around the kitchen, which admittedly is rife with grease-caked implements and surfaces.

  “I don’t want to go to Margaret’s,” I say, gripping the steel wool. The thought, now that it’s had more time to sink in, is truly chilling. I’d be there alone, without even Aggie for company, isolated from the rest of town, totally reliant on Margaret. She’d be stricter than she’d ever been before. Meaner, I bet, now that I’m the same age Mama was when she died. A painful reminder every time she looks at me. “You won’t let her take me, will you?”

  Aggie hesitates. I can see her warring with herself, wanting to say she’d never let me go back to that woman, but still too mad at me to offer such easy reassurance.

  “You just stay out of sight and out of trouble,” she says finally, with a sigh, “and we’ll see.”

  * * *

  —

  Margaret leaves, empty-handed, after about an hour of arguing with the pastor
over scripture. I can hear snatches of it from the kitchen. I don’t even try to stick my head out and nobody but Aggie, and Jessi when she arrives for her shift, comes back to the kitchen.

  Business picks up around five and Aggie has me switch to bussing empties. People shoot me sidelong glances and some just full-on stare, but I make a point of never meeting anyone’s eyes, never standing still long enough for them to speak to me. I catch snatches of whispers though. Do you think she—what was she—I heard she—with her teeth!—the poor boy—Rob Bickle’s son, no, not the bad one, the younger one—like her mother—must be crazy.

  After about an hour of this, I start draining the dregs. Whenever somebody leaves a little bit of hard-to-get-to alcohol in the bottom of their bottle or glass, I hustle back to the kitchen and get shameless, hold the bottles upside down with my mouth open like a kid catching snowflakes, lick the shot glasses, suck on the ice from the bottom of mixed drinks.

  I’ve done this a million times, and I know it’s probably not worth the trouble. If I really wanted to get drunk I’d steal a bottle from behind the bar. But I’d be more likely to get caught that way. And besides, it’s more the sport of the thing.

  About an hour into my spree, I luck out. Somebody leaves half a beer sitting on a table. I watch the guy get up and walk outside. He probably just went out for a smoke or a phone call, but he left his beer and there’s no one else at the table. It’s fair game. I snatch it quick, slide it to the middle of the tray between the other glasses and bottles.

  Back in the kitchen, I chug the beer. It’s warm. Guy must have been nursing it.

  It hits me quick. I’m not drunk like the other night. But I’m feeling good. My body feels kind of cottony, the throbbing in my left wrist muted.

  When I head back out, I see that the pastor’s sitting alone at a table, paging through the gold Bible again. His glass is nearly empty. Just a thin layer of whiskey at the bottom. It’s risky, but he seems pretty absorbed.