Back Roads (14 page)

She loved playing in the warehouse behind the store, where she made caves out of the empty refrigerator boxes and hid with her dinosaurs. Whenever Ray and I had to go on a delivery, she rode with us. Ray was okay with it—not because he was a swell guy, but because he loved the idea of pulling one over on the boss. We must have violated a hundred different insurance laws having her in the truck with us, he constantly reminded me, clutching the steering wheel and grinning at me like we were driving away from a bank robbery.

Even with me taking Jody to work now and then, Amber still ended up cutting a lot of school to stay with her the days I couldn’t. Eventually a truant lady came out and had a talk with us. She said it was a shame that Jody wasn’t Amber’s child because then we could have put her in the free day care school provided for teen mothers who could demonstrate need.

I asked her to define “need.”

She said financial need: girls who couldn’t afford real day care and would have to drop out of school to take care of their children instead.

I pointed out we couldn’t afford real day care and Amber was probably going to end up dropping out of school to take care of Jody.

She said we couldn’t participate in the program because Jody wasn’t Amber’s child.

I said she was my child. I had signed the papers making me the legal guardian of all my sisters. My mom had signed them too.

She said I wasn’t a student anymore. I had graduated. The school couldn’t do anything for me.

And I said, “So you mean if Amber did something stupid like get pregnant and have a baby, you guys would cut her a break and help her out, but we can’t get any help?”

The woman had stared back at me with flattened lips and a stony look in her eyes and I could tell she wanted to say, “You don’t deserve any.” Those people were out there. I had encountered them before. Ones who read the newspaper stories or saw the news reports and decided to not only condemn my mom but hate her guts as well. Some of them even seemed to think we should be punished too.

I kind of flipped out a little after that. I started ranting about how teenaged girls who have babies should be expelled from school. How anyone that stupid wasn’t ever going to be a productive member of society anyway. How the school shouldn’t be
wasting their time with day care; they should be tying down every girl in a halter top and stabbing that birth control implant under her skin. How I didn’t care if it was a violation of her civil rights; the ACLU could take a flying leap.

I meant all of it too. That’s what I hated most about what was happening to me. I couldn’t feel sympathy anymore.

The truant lady waited patiently until I finished. My behavior didn’t faze her at all. She dealt with much worse around here. At least we weren’t filthy or starving or lice-infested or drunk. We weren’t covered in bruises anymore either. And I wanted the girls to stay in school, and they did too.

She said she’d get back to us. Maybe Jody could be an exception. I stood at the front window and watched her walk across our yard in her wrinkled plaid skirt and gray blazer and thought about all the women I had dealt with recently wearing Wal-Mart workday separates from the Kathie Lee Collection and all the men in suits from JCPenney’s.

The first couple weeks after Mom’s arrest we were shuffled from one official-looking government building to the next. We talked to detectives, lawyers, shrinks, bill collectors, correctional facility personnel, undertakers, reporters, social workers, bankers. We buried Dad and said good-bye to Mom through Plexiglas.

The last place I went was Laurel Falls National Bank to talk to a guy who worked for Callie Mercer’s dad about getting a break on our mortgage payments for a month or two. He said the bank would like to be able to help—like the bank could think and feel—but if they gave an extension to one customer they would have to give extensions to everyone.

I argued that maybe they could only give extensions to kids who lost both their parents unexpectedly and simultaneously and had no money and no job. That would probably limit the amount of people who would qualify.

He smiled and made a very small laugh and said yes, it probably would.

Then I asked him if maybe I could talk to the bank instead of him. Maybe the bank knew our house socially.

The guy looked at me like I was certifiable. That was right after the shooting and the whole gory mess was still fresh in everyone’s mind.

I got up and walked over to the Pennsylvania Scenic Wonders calendar hanging on his office wall. The month of August was a bright red barn sitting in the bottom of a bright green valley surrounded by bright blue sky. I had lived in this southwestern corner of the Allegheny Mountains my entire life and I had never seen a barn or a day that color.

I motioned at the barn with my thumb and asked, “Any relation to the bank?”

I swore I saw him reach under his desk and press a silent alarm. He had me figured for a definite TYPE.

When I got home, all three girls were sitting on the porch waiting for the verdict. Looking at them, I had one of my flashes of enlightenment and it was this: nobody knows we are here.

I had the same thought watching the truant lady leave. She did get back to us though, and Jody was allowed to go to the school day care but I wouldn’t let her. We were not going to be EXCEPTIONS.

We survived that year without anybody’s help, and I was proud of us. Amber passed ninth grade. Jody started talking again. I paid our bills. At our lowest moments, I got my strength from concentrating on the anger and terror I had felt coming back from the bank when I realized we had been forgotten.

Forgotten but not alone. I knew there were a ton of kids like us out there who had gone through the same thing. Eighty percent of the women serving time for murder in Mom’s prison had killed a husband or live-in boyfriend. I mentioned that statistic to Betty once. I said that really told you something about women and she said no, it told you something about men.

Watching the turkeys and the sky made me drowsy. I couldn’t
remember what day it was or if I had to work but I didn’t care. I had to get some sleep.

I got up from the grass and turned toward the house and froze in my tracks. Misty was on the front porch with the Ruger aimed at my head.

I screamed and dove for the ground. Thirty turkeys broke and ran for cover, gobbling and clucking.

“Why’d you do that?” Misty shouted.

“What are you doing with my gun?” I cried.

“I was going to shoot a couple turkeys.”

“Jesus.”

I got shakily to my feet. My forehead had broken out in a sweat. I walked over to her. “Don’t ever do that,” I said, taking the gun roughly from her hands.

“I figured you’d be happy about it,” she said. “Free food.”

She had already attacked her young freckles with two bold strokes of purple shadow like a slash-and-burn farmer.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked.

“Like what?”

“Like you’re surprised to see me.”

“Sometimes I forget you’re just a kid.”

“No, I’m not,” she replied. “I started my period.”

“Don’t tell me that.” I winced.

I followed her eyes. They were looking at the rock I must have hit the night before. It had four perfectly round blood-brown spots on it.

“Don’t call me a kid,” she said.

I gingerly touched my lower lip. I had washed my face off in Callie’s creek, but I hadn’t been able to find my reflection. The lip was probably cracked and swollen. It still hurt like hell.

“I was just thinking I want you to go to college and get a good job when you grow up,” I said without knowing where the thought had come from.

“College?” She laughed. “I can’t even go to the Lick n’ Putt.”

“I just mean, I don’t want you to work at Shop Rite. You can do whatever you want.”

She gave me a quick dark glance. “No, I can’t.”

“Yes, you can.”

“You have to be smart to go to college.”

“No, you don’t.”

“You have to be rich.”

“No, you don’t.”

“You have to be something,” she persisted, in her determinedly empty voice. “I’m not anything,” she added so low I had to lean over to hear it.

“That’s not true,” I said.

“Okay.” She sighed, openly appeasing me. “You know what I am?”

“What?”

“A good shot.”

I looked down at her. She looked back with a challenge in her eyes.

“That’s something,” I said.

“That doesn’t count with anyone. Except Dad.”

I didn’t know what to say. Misty never talked about Dad even though we all knew his death had left a bigger hole in her life than it had in any of ours.

“It’s kind of like the way you don’t count with anyone except Amber,” she further explained when I didn’t respond.

“Huh?”

Her lips twitched into something like a smile, then went back to normal again. She turned her back on me and walked away. She was done talking. Getting her to start again would be like prying open ancient cathedral doors.

I left her there on the porch fiddling absentmindedly with her collar. She stared across the yard that had become sprinkled with small yellow flowers overnight, past the ginger-brown road and
the green hump of a clearing to the blue-gray smudge of hills against a pink sky, but I knew all she saw was a failed kill.

I went straight to the basement hoping for sleep. I set my gun back in its corner and walked over to my bed, took off my clothes, and lay down. I didn’t want to get under the covers, but the room was about ten degrees cooler than outside. I went and got Dad’s coat off the back of my desk chair.

Skip’s letter was sitting on the desk. I finally had something to write back to him about. Dear Skip. What’s new with you? I nailed Mrs. Mercer.

He would have shit reading that. He wouldn’t have believed me though, and I couldn’t blame him. But I did. Nail her. With all my might. If she had been a board, she would have cracked down the middle.

I got an instant hard-on thinking about it. Not a nice one I could dispose of at my leisure with the ladies of Victoria’s Secret. An urgent one. A maddening one like a bad itch.

I had never been good at not scratching. I used to scratch mosquito bites until they bled. Sometimes Mom would see me and blame the blood on Dad and I would let her not because I wanted her sympathy or because I wanted Dad to get in trouble but because when they figured out I had been lying, they were united in their anger toward me.

I wanted to beat off until I bled but even then I knew I wouldn’t get the relief I craved. A hand wasn’t going to do it for me anymore. Friction wasn’t going to be enough. My dick had been enlightened too.

Peaches again. An overripe peach before it started to rot. That’s what she felt like inside.

I went back to bed and stared at the white circle of my lightbulb and thought about her ass in a white T-shirt growing dimmer and dimmer in the black night as she walked away from me.

I didn’t know if she had enjoyed it. I had been too
preoccupied with what was in my hands and between my lips to pay much attention to her as a whole. Even if I had paid attention, I’m not sure I would have known what to look for.

I once overheard my cousin Mike talking to a buddy about his latest girlfriend. He said they had to be real careful fooling around if there was anyone else in the house because she was a screamer. The way they both grinned when he said it, I could tell they thought this was great. I supposed it was if while you were having sex with someone you wanted to think you were killing her too.

Screaming would have made me a nervous wreck. I didn’t want a screamer. I didn’t want someone to talk dirty either. I wanted someone who would look at me.

At least that’s what I always thought. Then when I got to be with a woman, I couldn’t look at her. Seeing her eyes, like saying her name, would have been unbearably human while I was pumping away at her like an animal.

I didn’t know what I was going to do if it turned out she left because I wasn’t good enough. I wouldn’t be surprised. I wasn’t good at anything. But knowing there was something wrong with you didn’t make it any easier to accept even if you knew it your whole life. Fat people never grew fond of their fat. Poor people never felt good about their crappy houses.

I went ahead and jerked off anyway.

The TV was going full blast and Amber’s radio was blaring when I woke up. I spent as little time as possible in the kitchen finding something to eat. There were two pieces of leftover frozen pizza sitting on the stove. I scarfed them down and grabbed the last Mountain Dew.

I slipped out the back door. The day had turned out as nice as the morning. Not too hot; not too cool. Blue sky and fluffy white clouds. Bank calendar weather.

I walked around front and surveyed the place. It wasn’t a bad
house as cheap little prefab vinyl-sided shitboxes went. The original house was kind of cute: gray with brick-red shutters and a front porch Dad had built for Mom as a first-anniversary present with white wooden railings and green shingles on the roof.

When Mom got pregnant with Misty, they decided to build on another bedroom. Mom had been promising me one anyway because Amber and I were getting too old to share a room, and I was too young for them to already be thinking about kicking me into the basement.

Dad and Uncle Mike and Uncle Jim decided to do it on their own. Between the three of them, they had the know-how and the tools. What they lacked was an attention span. They were like kids together. Shaking up their beer cans and squirting each other. Having belching contests. Quitting in the middle to go fishing or watch a Pirates game.

It took them two years to finish it. The first winter they covered the insulation with plastic sheeting. The next winter with fiberglass. Dad finally got a deal on some used siding he couldn’t pass up. It was brown but he promised Mom he would paint the whole house the same color some day. He never did.

My folks gave me the room on my ninth birthday. Mom stretched a big red ribbon across the doorway and had me cut it with a pair of scissors like it was the grand opening of a new county dump. My bed was already in it, made up with a new set of Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtle sheets. Dad had sacrificed the chest of drawers he used in the shed for his odds and ends crap, and Mom had fixed it up and painted it green to match the turtles. On top of it stood the pencil holder Amber had made for me out of a soup can, construction paper, and glitter.