Back Roads (12 page)

“He’s doing great,” Uncle Mike gushed. “They’re starting training already. He’s raring to get back out there. He was their third leading rusher last year. He’s hoping to be number one this year.”

“I’m sure he will be,” Amber said, smiling at me. “Mike’s the best.”

“He sure is,” I said, reaching for another beer.

The ground came rushing at me too fast, and I thought I was falling but I kept my balance. I straightened back up and heard Uncle Mike tell Amber we should try and make it up for one of the home games this year.

“Notice how he just said try and make it up,” I muttered to Amber. “It’s not like he’d want us inside the stadium with them.”

She started giggling.

“What’s so funny?” Uncle Mike asked, smiling too.

“I was just telling Amber how much I’d enjoy that.”

“Mike could show you around,” he said to Amber. “You could meet some of the players.”

“Maybe I could meet a cheerleader,” I added.

Amber grinned at me. She reached for my beer and took a sip off it.

“Mike’s dating a cheerleader,” Uncle Mike volunteered.

“Really?” I said.

Amber burst out laughing, and Uncle Mike’s smile faded.

“Well, I guess I’ll leave you two to your private joke,” he said.

“We’re sorry,” I said.

“No, it’s all right,” he replied angrily. “I’m used to it. A lot of people are jealous of Mike’s success. The only way they can handle it is to make fun of him.”

“Is that why they do it?” I whispered to Amber.

She collapsed against my arm, laughing.

“Okay. All right.” He shook his head and backed away. “I guess I’ll be going. I was only trying to help out a little.”

“As little as possible,” I whispered to Amber again, and we both started howling.

Uncle Mike got in his truck and slammed the door. The sound cut through my drunken fog and made me realize what I had done.

“Hey, we’re sorry, Uncle Mike,” I called out, running over to his truck.

He started backing out.

“Really. We’re sorry. We’re just kidding around.”

He raised his hand in a wave and shook his head at me disappointedly.

Uncle Mike had been the only person at Dad’s funeral who spent any time with me one-on-one. He took me for a walk after the burial, with his arm around my shoulders, the two of us strangers to ourselves and each other in our dark suits and stiff shoes with our heads bare and the dirt missing from beneath our fingernails.

He led me silently down row after row of polished headstones. Every once in a while, I’d notice a small flat gray stone engraved with the word BABY. I couldn’t figure out what they were supposed to mean. I thought parents always picked out a baby’s name before it was born, so how could a baby die nameless? The only answer I could come up with was after the baby died, the parents took the name back because they didn’t want to waste it.

Even my dad being lowered into the ground didn’t seem as big a betrayal as that. I imagined all these dead babies without names going up to heaven and being put in a big holding pen like livestock before slaughter while the angels tried to figure out who they were supposed to have been.

Suddenly, I couldn’t handle all the injustices in life and how a lot of them didn’t even seem to end with death.

I started shouting, in short explosive bursts, about what a joke Dad’s funeral had been. How he had lived here his whole life and knew a ton of people, but hardly anybody showed up.

Uncle Mike waited for me to get it out of my system. For me to kick a tombstone and hurt my foot because I was wearing shoes instead of my steel-toed work boots. For me to finally start crying and for me to finally stop crying.

I eventually took a seat with my back up against a big
speckled gray slab. Uncle Mike’s voice came to me from above and behind.

“From the moment people heard, they made a choice,” he instructed me. “You and your sisters are either the children of a murdered man or the children of a murderer. If you’re one you deserve sympathy. If you’re the other you deserve hatred. But you can’t be both because people can’t feel both.”

I let his words sink in while I thought about how Mom had asked Uncle Mike to buy Dad a new suit to be buried in even though we couldn’t afford it, and how Uncle Mike had done it but then the funeral was closed casket. I thought about how Mom had sent a condolence card from her prison cell to Aunt Diane. I thought about how even now—after seeing my dad in the ground and seeing my mom in handcuffs—I still couldn’t shake the feeling that he was the criminal and she was the victim.

“Awkwardness kept them away today, and it’s going to keep them away tomorrow,” Uncle Mike finished before he walked off. “You better get used to it.”

I stayed there until Aunt Jan finally came looking for me talking about the glaze hardening on a baked ham and the perils of spoiled potato salad. I wasn’t sure which revelation had stunned me more: the fact that something as trivial as awkwardness could destroy something as powerful as decency, or the fact that Uncle Mike had been the guy who figured it out.

I waited until his truck disappeared, then I started pitching rocks at the empty dust cloud.

“Who needs him?” Amber said.

“He was my beer connection,” I moaned, and lay down in the middle of the dirt.

“Maybe Betty could start getting it for you,” Amber suggested.

That one killed me. I lay on the ground and laughed until every muscle in my gut hurt. I had tears in my eyes when I looked up and saw Misty standing over me, wearing oven mitts, and holding a smoking, black-bottomed pot. She dropped it.

“What the fuck?” I cried, rolling away just in time to keep it from hitting me square in the forehead.

“I’m not washing that,” she said, and went back inside.

The girls had frozen pizza for dinner. Around my sixth beer I started feeling antisocial and decided I didn’t want to eat with them. I took two more beers, a bag of chips, and Elvis, and went off down the road.

My plan was to hike to the railroad tracks and follow them to California like Skip and I used to fantasize about, but I had to stop about a quarter-mile down Potshot to take a leak. While I did, I stared into the black woods and they stared back.

Even drunk in the dark, I could find my way around them. They were my woods. I didn’t own them but they belonged to me because I had taken the time to get to know them. Ownership was about power. Belonging was submission. I wasn’t even sure who owned this land along the road. For all I knew, Callie Mercer did.

I wasn’t going to be able to pay the real estate taxes this year. They were due the first week of June, and I had nothing saved. If the bank took my house, I wondered if Callie would let me live on her hills. I could be one of those wild-eyed mountain hermits with mice nesting in my beard. I could pull down some of the boards from the mining office and build a lean-to in her clearing. I could hunt and fish and season my kill with sage stolen from her garden. One moonlit summer night she might appear with her book and her beer and her blanket and her mood swings.

The effort of pissing away a six-pack tired me out. I whistled for Elvis and staggered back up the hill. He came tearing over to me as I sat down next to my truck and gave me a couple rowdy licks on the face. I grabbed him by the ruff of his neck and pushed him to the ground. He let me lie on his softly thudding chest for about ten seconds before he jerked up with his
big paws flailing. But it had been enough comfort to put me to sleep.

I woke up a couple hours later cold and damp; my mind numb and blank. I didn’t dream anymore. I had told Betty this and she said I just wasn’t remembering any of them, but she was wrong.

I was sure something had been breathing in my ear but it turned out to be my own hair blowing against it. A breeze had kicked up. The air was heavy with an incoming storm. Across the yard the night grass shivered in ripples of silver and black.

It took me two tries to find my feet. I steadied myself against my truck with one hand and inched my way around it.

Elvis was at the side of the house, growling and shaking a limp gray body so hard it kept smacking him in his own head. I had to kick him to get him to drop it.

I knelt down over the torn, bloody body. It was a groundhog. A baby one.

“Git!” I hissed at him.

He jumped away like he’d been kicked again and sat down a couple paces away from me.

I went to the shed, casting glances over my shoulder, and pausing every couple steps to make threatening lunges back in his direction. The shovel was right inside the door, but he was at the body again by the time I found it. I chained him up.

I buried what was left of the groundhog near the tree line. After I was done, I stabbed a stick in his grave and slipped an upside-down beer can over it. I named him Rocky.

Elvis strained at the end of his chain and gave me a final hopeful bark as I walked past him to the porch. I ignored him. He looked first at me, then at the grave, then stretched and lay down in the dirt with the calm surrender of a creature who knows he will eventually be set free.

I only made it as far as the living room. The sight of a floor covered in pillows was too tempting. It called to me like a lake on a scorching hot day. I held my arms out to my sides and fell into them, face first, and drifted down to the bottom.

I woke up to the sound of breathing again. This time I was sure it was Mom. She had fallen asleep with me in my race-car bed, her arms wrapped around me and her hands clamped together like a padlock.

Then I was sure it was Jody back in the red Jell-O days. She used to have nightmares and Amber and I took turns lying with her while she tossed and turned and mumbled and wrung Sparkle Three-Horn like a wet washcloth. When she finally calmed down and fell into a deep sleep, I always did too even though I knew she was going to pee the bed.

Then I relaxed into the certainty that it was Amber. She had crawled into my bed again, sleeping behind me with her body pressed against my back and her arms and legs wrapped around me. Most nights I hated it but some nights I gave in and let the warmth and weight and smell and softness of her overwhelm me. I belonged to someone.

I took her hand and pulled her tighter against me. Her breath tickled my neck.

“Harley,” she whispered.

We were alone beneath my covers. We were alone beneath our card table fort listening to gunshots.

“Harley. Are you okay?”

“Huh?”

“Harley. Wake up.”

I was still on my stomach. I hadn’t moved a muscle from when I fell into the pillows. My eyes flew open and I lay perfectly still as reality sank in. I wasn’t a kid anymore.

Amber squeezed my hand and leaned over to see if I was awake. Her hair brushed my face like a spray of perfume.

“It’s not such a big deal what happened with Ashlee,” she whispered in my ear. “You could have talked to me about it instead of getting shitfaced.”

I rolled away from her and sat up. The motion made my head spin.

“Were you afraid? Is that it?” she asked.

“Huh?” I said, groggily.

“I was afraid my first time,” she told me. “That’s why I picked out Ashlee for you. I wanted you to be with someone who loves you. So she could help you.”

My eyes began to make her out in the dark. She knelt next to me in a stretch lace chemise. Victoria’s Secret had done wonders for my female undergarment vocabulary.

“Help me how?” I asked in a croak.

“I don’t know,” she said quietly, “but that’s what I always feel like I’m looking for when I fuck someone. Help.”

I couldn’t make out the expression on her face but I could make out the lace pattern against her skin and the absence of anything beneath it.

I started backing away from her in a crab crawl and bumped into a wall.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, and started toward me.

“Don’t,” I suddenly shouted.

“Don’t what?”

“Stay there.”

I got to my feet and held out my hands, praying for the power of a crossing guard.

“Are you freaking out again?” she asked.

She started to stand, and I dropped my head and squeezed my eyes shut.

“Jody told me what happened when you saw Mom.”

Great. Just great. I laughed out loud. A dinosaur and a Happy Meal. Ten bucks. Ten wasted bucks. Twenty wasted bucks on Ashlee.

“Why don’t you ever tell me anything?” She kept at me. “You could’ve told me that. I wouldn’t have made fun of you.”

She was coming. Getting closer and closer. I could feel her even though I couldn’t see her.

“You were afraid of her. Weren’t you? You were afraid to touch her,” she said in a trembling voice. “You can touch me.”

She took one of my hands in both of hers and started to raise it. Then she stopped suddenly, blocked by her own intentions.

I opened my eyes. She stared back at me without seeing, her jaw lifted in defiance but her face tranquil.

I ripped my hand out of hers. I whirled around and stumbled over my feet trying to get away.

“What’s wrong?” she said, frantically. “What are you doing?”

I didn’t waste time trying to stand. I scrambled across the floor on my hands and knees.

“You prick,” I heard her say. “You bastard. You fucker. You son of a bitch,” she chanted like a teacher calling roll.

“You prick,” she said again, coming up behind me.

Anger had returned to her voice. Once she was completely hidden behind it, I could usually be fooled into facing her again.

“You’re supposed to take care of me too.”

An unseen force yanked me to my feet, but it pushed me too fast. It was dark. I ran into a wall but I kept my balance. Amber’s breath seared my neck.

“What about me?” she screamed.

The front door was a dream door: an arm’s length away but impossible to reach. I gathered all my strength but it was more than I needed. The momentum threw me outside. I tripped down the porch steps and hit the ground face first. White light burst in front of my eyes and the salty-sweet taste of blood filled my mouth.

Amber came out on the porch crying harsh, bitter sobs.

I raised up on all fours. Beneath me was a round gray rock jutting from the grass like a wart. Tiny black splashes of blood
hit it with a steady raindrop rhythm. A sticky warmth crawled down my chin.