Back Roads (13 page)

“I don’t love any of them,” she screamed at me. “I hate all of them. I want you to know that. I want you to think about it all the time.”

I staggered to my feet and took off at a run. Behind me in the dark front window, I saw a sparkle. Mom’s sheers danced and it was gone.

I didn’t slow my pace until I came to Black Lick Road. I walked down the very middle knowing if someone came around a blind curve at this hour they would have no choice but to kill me.

My lungs burned. My face throbbed. I checked my mouth with two fingers to make sure I still had all my teeth and found a dent on my bottom lip where the skin had been parted. I wiped my fingers on my jeans and left a long dark smear.

There was no light to guide me or lead me. I looked up at the black sky patched with cast-iron storm clouds. The moon was distant and milky gray like an old man’s sightless eye.

I kept walking. I didn’t know where I was going but I knew what I was leaving and that was enough motivation. When a house materialized out of the gloom, my first thought was to pass it by but instinct pulled me toward it. Not to use as a form of refuge but to use as a target for my building rage.

I stopped and filled my hands with roadside gravel. Dogs started barking, ruining my plan for a sneak attack on the house, but I was already halfway down the driveway so I started whipping rocks at them instead.

An outdoor light went on. The dogs barked louder. I threw harder. A door opened and Callie Mercer peered out.

“What . . . ?” she started to say.

She stepped outside barefoot and bare-legged in a short white nightshirt that said W
ORLD
’
S
G
REATEST
M
OM
.

“Harley, is that you? My God, what happened to your face?”

I looked down at the rocks still waiting in my hands and I wondered for a moment, Was it me? She started across the driveway, not feeling the sharp stones beneath her feet. I searched the horizon for an escape route, over the dark sloping yard, past the onyx glint of the pond, through the wall of hills, to a fierce black line with no end in sight.

I dropped the rocks and started running again, slipping on the dew-slick grass and swearing at the pain that flared from my lip each time my foot connected with the ground. When I got to the creek, I stopped. It was only five feet across but it stretched out before me as wide as any river.

My knees buckled and I collapsed on the muddy bank, beaten.

I was lying on my side staring at the rustling water when I heard her heavy breathing and the crack of a branch. She got down in front of me on her knees and put her arms around me. I thought about resisting out of pride but I couldn’t remember if I had any.

“I’m not going back there,” I said, and started to cry.

I circled her waist with my hands and buried my face in her lap.

“You don’t have to,” she said quietly, and held my head against her. “I never understood how you could stand to stay there in the first place.”

She didn’t make me feel better. I felt worse. I sobbed harder. Hoarse, ugly sounds like my grandpa’s cough.

“It’s okay,” she said.

“It’s not okay. It’s not ever going to be okay.”

“Not so hard, Harley. Don’t hold me so hard.”

I moaned.

“Shh,” she murmured.

I clutched her tighter, rubbing my face all over her like a blind pup. My cheek brushed across her nipples, and she took in a sharp breath. They felt too hard to be part of the rest of her.

“You’re right,” she said, her voice catching in her throat. “It’s not okay. I can’t make it okay. Do you understand that?”

I slipped my hands down over her hips, along her legs, up under her nightshirt. She was naked. The feel of her made me lose my mind. I couldn’t tell what parts I was touching and I didn’t care. They were all the same. They were her.

I pushed her down in the mud. I kissed her belly with my torn lips. I kissed her thighs. I kissed her everywhere. That’s all I wanted to do. Kiss her. I kissed her breasts. Her nipples weren’t hard at all. I felt like I could crush them with my lips. I tried and she cried out, and I jerked back, panting. She was smeared with my blood.

“It’s all right,” she said.

She reached beneath my shirt. Her fingers stroked my stomach and chest, then slid into the waistband of my jeans.

I made some kind of noise, a cross between a war whoop and a death rattle. She didn’t seem to understand that in about thirty seconds, I was either going to come or throw up.

“I can’t—” I groaned.

“What?”

“Wait,” I finished. “I can’t wait.”

She pulled her hand out and rushed to undo the button on my jeans and unzip my fly. I just watched. I was way past handling small manipulative skills.

I wasn’t afraid at first. I wasn’t afraid when I pushed inside her and felt my mind, body, and soul twist themselves into one raw nerve. I wasn’t afraid when she gasped and called out to God and I realized there were two people having sex here, not just me. I wasn’t even afraid when I realized I wasn’t going to last long enough to bring her anything but frustration.

The fear came when I realized my dad had been wrong. It was worth a lifetime of driving a cement truck.

It was worth a lifetime.

The end neared and my hands started trembling so hard I couldn’t hold onto her anymore. All my efforts to bring her to me were like grappling for a handhold in crumbling earth. I gave up and let go and let her hold onto me. I came with my fists clenched above her.

When I opened my eyes again, I felt like I had been asleep for a hundred years. I was so sure of it, I was afraid to look around. I thought I might find an alien world without trees and grass, where the houses were built in the sky and shiny silver people flew around with jet packs on their backs.

I didn’t want to look at my body either. I didn’t want to see a gray sunken chest and a withered old pecker. I didn’t want to see Bud’s brown-spotted hands or Betty’s white thighs with inky veins like windshield cracks.

I remembered my grandpa on his deathbed hooked up to a respirator cursing environmentalists. His skin had lost all its color by then, paling until I could see every pearl-blue vein beneath its surface. All I could think of was worms and how he looked like he was already being eaten by them from the inside out.

The last time we visited him in the hospital before he died, Dad told him he was looking better. I remembered glancing over at the two of them, wondering if they were seeing something I couldn’t see. Grandpa had nodded and his bony hand, sprouting with tubes, had jerked up like he meant to touch Dad but before he could, it fell crumpled onto the sheet like a bird shot from the sky. Dad explained later it had been a muscle spasm.

They didn’t talk after that. Dad sat in the chair next to him unable or unwilling to look anywhere but out the window.

I started getting mad at him. This was his big chance to pour out his soul without being afraid or embarrassed because Grandpa was dying and couldn’t hold anything over him anymore. I knew they had a lot to talk about because they never did. They communicated solely through pace and posture.

I knew Grandpa still hit Dad and that had to bother him. If a kid outgrew his dad’s piggyback rides, it seemed only fair he should outgrow his punches too. But I had witnessed it. I saw Grandpa cuff him once out in his backyard. He caught him in the side of the head and Dad took a few faltering steps backward before finding his balance and shaking off the blow like an athlete shaking out a cramp in his leg.

I had been shocked more by Grandpa’s nerve than what he did. Dad was bigger than him in height and weight, and in my mind they were equals since they were both adults. But Grandpa had a skinny fierceness about him and chipped eyes as black and blunt as the coal he missed mining.

While Dad had traded attitude for endurance. Except for when he was beating his kids, his personality was insignificant.

Back in the hospital room, remembering that day, I began wondering if the way Grandpa treated Dad explained a lot about the way he treated me. Maybe if Grandpa had never hit him, he would have never hit me. Maybe it was that simple. But it might not have been Grandpa’s fault either. Maybe his dad had hit him.

Then I started thinking about Mom and how different her life would have been if that trucker hadn’t dozed off on his way from Sheboygan to Chicago with a trailer full of bratwurst and wiped out her family. She would have never moved here. She would have never been looking for someone to save her from an old aunt and uncle who didn’t want her around. She would have never screwed my dad and got pregnant.

Was that how life worked? Was that nameless, faceless trucker from my mom’s past responsible for me getting smacked every night? Or was it the fault of a great-grandfather I never knew staring at me from a black and white family photo with eyes like my own? Or did I need to go back further, hundreds of years, tracing dozens of generations, back to the first guy who hit his kid, back to the first random act of God that made a child an orphan?

It got too complicated for an eight-year-old. All I knew for sure was Dad blew his chance to work things out with Grandpa.

It wasn’t fair he got the chance and I didn’t. I wouldn’t have wasted it. If I had known Mom was going to kill Dad that night as I went off to Skip’s house to drink contraband beers and bullshit about horny college chicks, I would’ve stopped first and cleared some things up. I would’ve asked him why he didn’t like me. I would’ve apologized for being a disappointment to him. And I would’ve told him I loved him—because I did—in some joyless, unsatisfying way that hurt instead of healed, but I knew it was still love.

It wasn’t enough love to keep his memory alive, though. Or maybe it was the wrong kind. It hadn’t even been two years yet, but I already had a hard time picturing Dad’s face. I found it easier to conjure up the cast of
The A-Team
.

Still, sometimes I could see him and sometimes I could hear his voice. I could replay certain events like the day in the hospital with Grandpa. I could recite facts about him the way I could about certain historical figures: he supported his family, he gave excellent piggyback rides; he remembered his anniversary, kept his yard mowed, and hunted and drank with his buddies. He wasn’t too smart, but he didn’t need to be. He wasn’t enlightened, but he didn’t want to be.

But I couldn’t remember his presence in my life.

A stick started digging into my back. I reached under my shoulder blade to pull it out. My arm moved slowly, heavy with
sleep or old age. I started thinking about the shiny silver people again and then an episode of
The Flintstones
popped into my head, the one where Fred takes a nap at the company picnic and when he wakes up he has a white beard down to his knees and Pebbles is off marrying Arnold the paper boy. The same panic he felt suddenly rushed over me along with the certainty that I had slept through my sisters’ lives.

Twenty years later and they were all still living at the top of the hill with the roof sliding off the house and the porch sagging badly to one side. The grass was three feet high, all four doghouse doors choked with goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace, the rusted frame of my old truck home to a family of possum. The couch was missing and I knew Misty had dragged it back inside, and I also knew she sat on it at night and thought about Dad.

She was the only one who had a job. I didn’t know what it was but it didn’t matter. She hated it the same way I hated my jobs because she knew she was worth more, but she also hated herself so there wasn’t much point in trying to do better. A lousy life for a lousy person; the punishment fit the crime.

Amber was pushing forty in stretch pants and too much makeup, bitter and scared, realizing too late that most of her life would be lived after thirty, but she never was good at math. At least she didn’t have a bunch of illegitimate kids running around. She had a scraped-out uterus instead, and her dreams were plagued by dead babies who always had names.

But Jody was the worst. She had returned to the red Jell-O days. I could see her, but I wasn’t with her. She sat at the kitchen table, mute and useless, the little-girl gold gone from her hair, the bottoms of her feet in bloody tatters from that piece of Dad’s satellite dish I never got around to ripping out of the ground.

I tried calling out to her, and I found myself in Bedrock with Fred running from one stone chapel to the next, chasing after Pebbles’s doomed giggle.

I came awake with a jolt. The storm clouds had scrubbed the night clean, leaving behind a fresh black sky pinpricked with stars. Night bugs chirped, and the creek made a sound like a snake gliding through grass. The air was chilly, but my skin itched and tingled. If flesh could simmer, this was how it would feel.

My body wasn’t old after all. My arms and legs weren’t feeble. I felt stronger than I ever had in my life yet nothing about me seemed solid anymore. I thought of pictures I had seen as a kid of swirling galaxies and how I used to wonder what held them together; refusing to believe in gravity, wanting to believe the planets all stuck around because they knew it was where they belonged.

Something big had happened. Maybe God had come looking for me again—appearing this time in the form of Fred Flintstone since the moon was too distant tonight to supply the silver light. It looked man-made: like a small ivory button.

I turned my head to one side and saw the Virgin Mary standing naked in the creek, more beautiful than I ever imagined. She bent down and splashed water over herself, then stood again and tilted her face toward the trees, wearing her shy waiting-for-God smile.

Her lines made me ache. I watched her hands rub her arms and throat and move in circles over her stomach and breasts, and enlightenment was mine. God made them that way on purpose. Getting kicked out of the Garden of Eden and being forced to earn our bread by the sweat of our brows wasn’t man’s punishment. We were damned the minute God decided to make women beautiful. And women were damned for the same reason.

She finished washing and walked to the water’s edge, where she stopped to pick something out of her hair. She glanced my way and I squeezed my eyes shut. It was a reflex reaction like she might possess the same powers as that mythology witch with the snakes on her head who could turn men to stone. God had
turned Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt. Who knew what He’d do to some guy spying on His girlfriend?

I waited to see if she’d come to me again. If I would feel her breath on my face and her fingers on my chest. If she would take my hand and lead me to a better place.

Instead I heard a very human “Shit!” and the sound of her sucking in her breath in pain. I looked over and saw her hopping around on one foot, all her grace and innocence gone; and I remembered everything. Who she was. Who I was. What we had done. What I had run away from. What she probably was running away from in order to fuck around with me. I understood perfectly that there was no way she could love me. Enlightenment sucked.

She placed her foot gently back on the ground and reached down for her nightshirt. She had her back to me and the sight of her bending over brought me to a sitting position. She probably could have brought me to a floating position if she had stayed bent over long enough but she stood up and slipped into her shirt, checked the bottom of her foot once more, and went walking off into the grass without looking back.

I wanted to yell after her, but I couldn’t figure out what to call her. Mrs. Mercer? Esme’s mom? She had never given me permission to call her Callie.

My heart started beating too fast. I lay down and closed my eyes again and tried to sort out what had happened. I had always thought if a guy did a good job at sex the woman was left limp and breathless, purring maybe, gazing at him with dumb animal love the way Elvis looked at me while I scratched his chest.

She had taken a bath in a freezing cold creek and left.

A terrible sinking feeling came over me as I realized I might have already blown it. I couldn’t buy her nice things or take her places or provide her with witty conversation. All I could do was fuck her well. That was the only way I could keep her.

It was cold now. I would’ve given anything for Dad’s coat. I didn’t know where my shirt was, but I could feel my jeans down around my ankles. I thought about wearing them that way for the rest of my life. “You show them, Harley,” Church would have said.

I started to shiver, but my crotch stayed warm and sticky. There in the dark with my eyes closed, a woman’s pussy juice didn’t feel all that different from blood.

Dawn was breaking when I finally started on my way up Potshot Road. The woods were noisy with birdcalls. A raccoon scurried across the road in front of me, hurrying back to his dark den with a vampire’s urgent need to avoid the coming light. His thick shaggy body and delicate black hands and feet looked like they belonged on different animals, like God had been in a hurry to finish him off and just slapped on the first set of paws He could find.

I took my time walking the hill. A gray mist had settled over everything, absorbing the weak morning light, and giving the air substance. I stuck my bare arm out into it and brought it back covered in shimmer. I breathed it in deeply, letting its feather weight fill my lungs and roll over my tongue. It tasted sweet and empty like purity should.

I approached the top and slowed down even more in case deer were grazing in the clearing. The biggest flock of wild turkeys I had ever seen were spread out over the grass eating, their dark darting bodies rippling with copper glints. There must of been thirty of them. Good-sized ones too. Instinct made me pause by the tree line waiting to see if a gun was going to pop.

They didn’t notice me at all. I walked past them and sat down in our front yard where I had a good view of them and the green hills dropping away behind them like folds in a blanket.

The sun had risen into a patch of clouds and turned them golden pink. Their color made me think of peaches, and how peaches would be in season soon and we’d be selling them at the Shop Rite for a dime apiece during our annual ten-cent
produce sale, and Jody would be walking around, barefoot, with her face buried in one, juice dripping down her chin and wrists, and me yelling at her to go eat over the sink.

School would be out in a month, and Amber would be saddled with the girls all day long again. This summer wouldn’t be as bad as last summer since Misty and Jody were more ADJUSTED now and older too.

The first school year was the worst time we had been through so far. Jody only had a half day of kindergarten and no one could watch her in the afternoon. Amber and Misty were in school. Aunt Diane taught school and had three little kids of her own. Uncle Mike’s wife, Jan, never volunteered and none of us liked her anyway. We couldn’t afford a sitter or day care.

For a while I dragged Jody around with me looking for a job. She was always good. That was back when she wasn’t talking. She would sit quietly staring at her fingers while I filled out job applications and talked politely to guys in Dockers with sticks up their asses because they were the almighty assistant managers of shoe stores and discount warehouses. One guy asked me if I had brought along my little sister to make him feel sorry for me so he’d give me the job. After that, I made Jody wait in the truck.

My hours at Shop Rite were pretty flexible. I was able to work a lot of nights and weekends and still watch Jody, but the money wasn’t enough. I had to get another job—the one at Barclay’s Appliances—but I was able to sneak Jody along with me some days.