Back Roads (15 page)

They all stood there waiting: Dad with his hand resting on Mom’s shoulder; baby Misty on Mom’s hip; Amber grinning from ear to ear in her pink ballerina Halloween costume she had
insisted on wearing to my birthday dinner. I could see chocolate cake crumbs caught in the tutu netting.

They were expecting me to be thrilled even though they knew I wanted a Stretch Armstrong and the Graverobber, a remote control monster truck from Radio Shack.

My eyes filled with tears. It wasn’t that I didn’t want the room. I did. It’s that I thought the room was owed to me.

I was too stunned to speak at first, but I finally found my voice and shouted something about every kid in America getting the Graverobber for Christmas except for me, and how this was the worst birthday any kid ever had. I didn’t care that I was going to get the shit kicked out of me for doing it. I tore out of the house, ran across the road, through the clearing, and into the first belt of trees.

To my surprise, Dad followed hot on my heels. He wasn’t a chaser by nature. If he didn’t catch you on his first couple lunges, he settled back into the camouflage of his couch like a big cat lowering himself into the high grasses of a savanna, and he waited for you to forget.

And I wasn’t a runner. I always stayed and took my punishments because I liked getting them over with and because it was easier to withstand a beating when you weren’t winded. This time was different though and we both knew it. I wasn’t running away from Dad. I was running away from my life, and Dad was chasing me because I had felt the need to.

I did a good job of staying ahead of him until I suddenly conveniently tripped over my own feet like some idiot in a horror film. Dad caught me easily by the arm and threw a roundhouse punch which missed my face but hit me square in the chest and knocked me on my butt. I landed on a bed of black lick: what the natural salt licks are called around here because they’re tainted black by the coal in the ground.

I looked down and saw the dark salt showing through in a big patch like a dried-up scab on the hillside. I used to wonder if
the black licks were safe for the deer since there was so much coal in them. I used to feel sorry for them because they were dumb animals until I came to realize instinct would always drag them back even if they were smart enough to understand that what they were doing was slowly killing them.

Dad pulled me up and hit me once more. I knew he was going to have to do it. I knew he needed to hit me in the face successfully before he could relax since that had been his original intention. I didn’t take it personally. I wasn’t his son or even a person at that point; I was a task.

Then he grabbed me by the arm and escorted me home. He opened the door of the truck and pushed me inside. I sat perfectly still except for the violent shaking going on inside me.

Mom came out on the porch and started screaming at him. They yelled back and forth for a couple minutes. None of it was about me. Mom went on about how hard she had worked on my dresser, and Dad shouted back that he was the one who built the whole fucking room and if she wanted to live in a goddamned palace she should have never married him in the first place. Then Mom started screaming about how the ice cream was melting and the cake was drying out.

Amber was hiding somewhere because she didn’t have any courage left, but she would crawl into bed with me that night to make up for it. I didn’t like it when she slept with me because Dad had hit her, but I didn’t mind it when it was because Dad had hit me.

Dad ended his side of the argument suddenly and slammed into the truck. Mom looked scared as we drove away. I remembered calmly thinking, Dad’s going to drive me down a back road and kill me and bury me in the woods. The idea didn’t shock me, and the fact that it didn’t depressed me even more than my shitty birthday or the thought of dying.

He didn’t say a word during the drive. He didn’t seem to notice his surroundings at all until we rounded a bend in the road
and off to one side was a small city of rust-streaked, iron-gray buildings standing grim and empty in the middle of ten contaminated acres. A chain-link fence ran for a mile along the road posted with bright orange HAZARD signs and bright yellow NO TRESPASSING signs, all of them shot full of bullet holes.

“The Carbonville Mine Water Reclamation Plant,” he announced, his voice making me jump after the silence.

I knew about it, of course. Everybody did. It had been designed to treat the acid mine water coming from the abandoned #9 J&P complex nearby and make it safe for human consumption again. I knew all about #9 too. It was the first mine Grandpa worked in and he brought it up a lot, talking about its tunnels like they belonged to a woman.

The plant only served its original purpose for about a year before something went wrong and the DER shut it down, but its remains had lived on for another twenty-five as a monument to the folly of trying to clean up a region that was poisoned from the inside.

Dad pulled the truck off the road and parked by the fence. He got out and started walking. I automatically followed.

He stopped when we came within view of a couple dozen small, gray, Insul-brick houses scattered along the outside of the chain-link like the plant had shook and showered its perimeter with tiny replicas of failure.

Dad squatted down so he was lower than me and pointed at one or all of them.

“That’s where I grew up,” he said.

I glanced at him to make sure he was being serious. I had always assumed he grew up in the house where my grandparents lived now. It wasn’t anything to get excited about, but at least it was a decent size and completely nailed together.

I couldn’t read his expression at first. I expected him to be torn up or pissed. Or he could have been happy: one of those ass-backwards people like Grandpa who only felt fondness for
terrible places and bitched like hell if he had to go on a picnic. But I didn’t see bitterness or self-pity or some warped nostalgic wistfulness in his face. What I saw was something like pride but pride without ego, something like acceptance but acceptance without ever being allowed to consider any other options. I didn’t figure it out until I was back home lying on my sore butt on my new sheets in my new room, feeling the familiar ache spread through my chest and face where Dad had hit me, that what I had seen was a gracious loser.

That was the year birthdays stopped being about cake and presents for me and started being about survival.

Dad started another addition about four years ago after he got it into his head that he needed his own TV room away from us kids. He and Uncle Mike never finished that one at all. Eventually they built a new wall to replace the one they had ripped out and left the wood frame hanging off the side of the house and a couple rolls of pink insulation in the yard. I pulled the thing down about a month after Mom shot him and sold the lumber.

Uncle Mike was right. The eaves and the trim needed painting. The wood around the windows was starting to rot. I noticed two shingles missing from the roof. Even from the ground, I could see clumps of wet leaves sticking out of the gutters. And I had to do something about that piece of pipe.

I saw Jody sitting on the front porch steps writing in her notebook. Sparkle Three-Horn and Yellowie the yellow helmet-head I had bought her to keep her mouth shut sat on either side of her. She looked up at me looking at the house.

“What are you doing?” she asked me.

“Making a list,” I said. “What are you doing?”

“I’m making a list,” she answered emphatically. “You don’t have any paper.”

“I’m making one in my head,” I explained. “Can I see yours?”

She held it out to me.

I gave it back to her smiling. “I went to school with a Moe Yard,” I said.

“What?”

“Never mind. It was a joke.”

“ ‘Fangs a lot’ was a better one,” she said.

“I agree.” I sat down next to her on the steps.

“What happened to your lip? It’s all puffy.”

“Nothing.” I brushed her off. “Since when do you mow the yard?” I asked.

She drew a heart on her list. “Last night Amber told us you were upset because Uncle Mike said you need to mow the yard and do a bunch of other stuff and that’s why you drank beers and went for a walk with Elvis. I thought I could help out.” She paused and drew a couple more hearts. “Why do you and Amber fight all the time?”

“You heard us fighting?”

She nodded.

“What did you hear?”

“Amber screaming swear words mostly.”

“Yeah, well,” I started. “Just ignore that stuff.”

“I guess it’s not so bad,” she said. “Esme says it’s unhealthy to bottle up emotions. She says it’s good to get your feelings out in the open.”

“Is there anything Esme Mercer doesn’t know?”

“She doesn’t know who Confucius is.”

“Confucius?” I gave her a look out of the corner of my eye. “You know who he is?”

“He’s the guy who writes the fortunes,” she answered, nodding.

I laughed. “Who told you that?”

“Mommy.”

I swallowed my smile. She watched me patiently, waiting to see if I was going to dispute Mom’s facts. I flaked a couple pieces of paint off the step with a fingernail.

“Esme says her mom and dad fight all the time,” Jody went on, “and when she asks her mom about it, her mom tells her it’s better for parents to fight than keep it bottled up.”

“Her parents fight a lot?” I asked.

“I guess so. Her mom screams at her and Zack too and then she hugs them and cries and says she’s sorry. I’ve seen her do it.” She glanced up at me to make sure I was paying attention. “Esme’s mom is nice and pretty and she can still do cartwheels but . . .”

“You’ve seen her do a cartwheel?” I interrupted.

“Yeah.”

She kept studying my face. I tried to keep it composed.

“She’d do one for you I bet,” she said.

“That’s okay.”

“Anyway,” she went on, hunching up her little shoulders beneath her faded rodeo Minnie Mouse shirt. “I think she’s nuts.”

“She’s not nuts,” I explained. “All parents have to yell at their kids sometimes.”

“Why?”

“ ’Cause they do bad things and ’cause they drive them crazy.”

“Do we drive you crazy?”

“Yeah.”

“You hardly ever yell at us.”

“I’m one of those unhealthy people.”

“Oh. So why does she cry and say she’s sorry later?” she asked.

“She probably feels bad because she loves her kids and doesn’t like yelling at them so she apologizes.”

“Daddy never apologized to us for hitting us. Does that mean he didn’t love us?”

“Dad loved us.”

“Mommy never apologized for shooting him.”

“Jody,” I said quickly, and stood up to leave. “I got a lot of work to do today.”

“Does Mommy love us?”

I closed my eyes wishing with all my might that she’d disappear along with the house and the guilty joy I felt knowing Esme’s parents fought all the time.

“Doesn’t Mom tell you she loves you every time you see her?” I asked her slowly.

“Actions speak louder than words,” she announced. “I read that in one of my fortunes. I can go get it for you.”

“No,” I said. “I believe you.”

I walked away from her and our conversation and felt instant relief. Two years ago before I knew any better, if someone had given me a list of all the things I was going to have to do for Jody and asked me to pick the hardest one, I probably would have picked “Clean up her puke when she gets sick in the middle of the night.” If they had asked me to pick the most important one, I would have picked “Put food on the table.” Now I would answer both of them the same way: Talk to her.

I headed for Dad’s shed, trying to decide if I wanted to mow or scrape first, when I noticed Elvis off to the side of the yard with something clamped in his jaws, shaking his head wildly from side to side.

One of the girls had unchained him.

I ran across the yard to Rocky’s grave but before I even got there, I saw the empty hole.

“Shit,” I said, and took off after Elvis.

He saw me coming and thought we were playing a game. He went tearing into the woods. I gave him a good chase, but I had to stop and catch my breath after a while.

I sat down and leaned back against a tree trunk. Elvis suddenly burst from the undergrowth in front of me, his tail
wagging, wondering why I had given up so soon. Something dangled from his mouth but it wasn’t a groundhog. Up close, it looked like a crusty old rag.

“Come here, stupid,” I said, and made a soft whistle between my teeth. “You’re not in trouble.”

He watched me skeptically for a moment, the tail stopping in mid-wag.

“Come here,” I said again.

He made one more playful lunge. When I didn’t respond, he came trotting over and shoved his face in mine. He dropped the rag in my lap and gave me a couple licks.

I picked the thing up. It wasn’t a rag. It was a girl’s shirt: a red one with a big sunflower in the middle, covered with a big brown stain, stiff and mud-encrusted like it had been out here for a long time.

I scraped off some of the dirt and smoothed it out a little. It looked familiar, but it looked too big to be Jody’s and too small to be Misty’s. The stain was huge. It could have been chocolate or paint, but I knew blood when I saw it.

I waited a couple of days before asking anyone about the shirt. I didn’t know why. There wasn’t anything terrible about me finding a little girl’s bloodstained shirt in the woods as long as I didn’t find a bloodstained little girl too.

I asked Jody about it first since she wouldn’t ask me why I was asking. She told me she never had a sunflower shirt, but she used to have a pair of pink overalls with daisies on them.

I asked Amber next. She did most of the laundry and all of the patching, mending, hemming, and unhemming. A lot of Misty’s and Jody’s clothes were hand-me-downs from her, and she never forgot an outfit and how it made someone look. Too fat. Too geeky. Too seventies. Too eighties. Too obvious.

The moment I mentioned a sunflower shirt, she perked up. Things had been pretty tense between us since Saturday night. We hadn’t talked much, but clothing was a topic she couldn’t resist.

Of course we had a sunflower shirt, she told me. How could I forget it? It was hers. It came with red-and-white checked bike shorts. She never wore it much. Too hillbilly. But she gave it to Misty, and Misty wore it for a while. Not the shorts. She thought they made her look fat.

Come to think of it, she hadn’t seen that shirt in years. Misty would have outgrown it by now, but Jody might want it. Did I know where it was? What did I care about a sunflower shirt anyway?

I started to tell her the truth—that Elvis had dug it up in the woods and it had blood all over it—but I changed my mind. Amber didn’t deal well with blood. She used to faint at nosebleeds. I told her I had a dream about it instead.

She narrowed her eyes at me in disgust, but she bought the explanation. It was easy to accept coming from her brother the loser headcase.

My next step should have been talking to Misty, but I never got around to it.

The shirt bothered me though. I wasn’t sure why. During Amber’s Wednesday night dinner, I finally came up with an explanation. A bunch of Misty’s sloppy joe fell out of the bun and got all over her shirt. Amber freaked and started ranting about how hard it was to get greasy ketchup out of clothes and how Misty couldn’t afford to ruin a perfectly good shirt because God only knew when she’d be able to get any new clothes. She sounded just like Mom except Mom would have said it calmly.

Dad would have smacked her. Not hard. He never smacked hard in front of Mom or at the dinner table. He would have reached out and cuffed her on the side of the head just enough to make her teeth click together and her ears ring for a second or two.

I remembered Dad popping her in the mouth once, and Misty watching silently as penny-sized drops of black blood fell from her split lip and soaked into her new jeans. She hid those jeans from Mom to protect him. She threw them in the garbage can, not the best of hiding places but she was only five or six. Mom found them, of course, and she and Dad had a big fight.

Misty had probably hidden the sunflower shirt too. The
explanation made sense, but it gave me the creeps thinking about what he must have done to her to make her bleed that much.

Betty would have told me to ask her. She would have told me to ask Jody what she saw the night Mom shot Dad and to ask Amber why she hated me so much. She would have told me to drive over to Callie Mercer’s house and burst in on the amazing dinner she’d be serving to her banker husband and her perfect kids on her glasstopped table on her polished stone floor and ask her why she fucked me. She was always telling me to ask Mom why she did it.

I could never have CLOSURE until I got the answers.

All week long I worked eight-hour days at Barclay’s, came home, asked if I got any phone calls, ate dinner, scraped trim for a half hour, asked if I got any phone calls, drove to Shop Rite, worked till midnight, came home, and woke Jody to see if I got any phone calls.

I told myself I wasn’t being unreasonable. Callie could’ve called me if she wanted to. We knew each other. We were neighbors. Our kids played together. They rode the same bus. There were all sorts of excuses she could make. She could have come up to the house with another book or a recipe.

I wasn’t completely without an ego though. Once I got through the first five or six hours Saturday and I hadn’t heard from her, I started to worry maybe someone or something was keeping her from me. Maybe her husband had found out. Maybe their house had burned down. Maybe she had hit her head and had amnesia. Maybe there had been a family emergency. Maybe she had been attacked by a rabid skunk.

But as the week dragged on, I knew none of those things had happened because I questioned Jody every night at dinner and found out that Esme’s mom put Esme on the bus every morning and met her at the bus every afternoon, and she looked happy and healthy.

I did my best to get Jody to go play at Esme’s house or invite Esme to ours but for the first time in the history of their friendship, Esme was booked solid for a whole week. She had a dentist appointment on Monday, her dance class on Tuesday, a Brownie meeting on Wednesday, and plans to play at Cruz Battalini’s house on Thursday.

I finally decided Callie Mercer thought I was a joke.

I couldn’t sleep at all Thursday night. I gave up and went upstairs around 5
A
.
M
. and sat at the kitchen table, staring at the phone. I knew she would still be asleep. I closed my eyes and made myself dizzy thinking about her stretched out naked in bed and me lying beside her. I knew what she felt like now. That was the worst part. Even if I could get her out of my mind, I couldn’t get her off my fingers.

I sat there for about an hour, until I heard the girls opening and closing dresser drawers and the bathroom sink running. I went out the back door with Elvis at my heels and started walking.

I stayed on Potshot Road for a while, then turned off into the woods. The morning was cool and misty and the woods were thick with wet spring undergrowth. Briars tore at my jeans and low branches swatted at my face, but I still went at a pretty good pace.

It took me longer than I thought to cover the three miles to the Mercer house. I came out on the bank across the road just as Brad Mercer’s Jeep pulled out of their driveway.

The bank was a steep one. More of a hill. Elvis and I took a seat on the damp ground back in the trees. We were about twenty feet above the road with a good view of the back of the Mercer house and their driveway curving around to the front. The bus stopped at the end of it to pick up Esme before going on to pick up Jody at the bottom of our road.

I waited and watched, holding tightly to Elvis’s collar so he couldn’t bolt and give away our position.

Esme came down the drive first, slipping her arms into her backpack. Zack ran after her, clutching a juice box in one hand.

Callie came next, walking slowly so she could sip at the steaming mug of coffee she had cupped in both hands. She was wearing shorts even though it was still chilly, and she had on a big gray sweatshirt. She called out to the kids to stay away from the road. I heard her voice clear as a bell.

She didn’t look or act any different. Esme lectured her about something and she shook her head at her. She smiled at Zack when he brought her a handful of gravel. She turned her back on them for a moment and looked at her hills while she drank her coffee.

The bus came rumbling up the road and groaned to a stop below me, temporarily blocking my view. When it pulled away again, Esme was gone and Callie and Zack were waving.

She reached down a hand for Zack. He took it and they walked back down the drive.

I stood up. My jeans were soaked from sitting on the ground for so long and from tromping through the wet woods. I stared at her, willing her to turn around and see me, to look at me with pity or ridicule or indifference but to at least look at me. I was beginning to think I had imagined everything.

I ended up getting to Barclay’s an hour and a half late and got chewed out royally for it. I had to stay and work an extra hour to make up for it so I didn’t have time to drive home for dinner. Friday night was Jody’s other night: scrambled eggs and Bac-O’s.

I got to Shop Rite starving and dead tired. I bought two Milky Ways and popped a couple of NoDoz tablets from the box I had ripped off the other night. It was the first thing I had ever stolen. I was planning on buying them until I saw the price.

Rick was usually long gone by the time my shift started, but tonight I saw his fat face behind the glass of his manager’s cubicle. He always stayed inside when he talked to one of us. Up
there no one could tell he was short and fat and useless. He was an all-powerful head like the Wizard of Oz.

He motioned me over. I was sure he had found out about the pills, and he was going to fire me.

I didn’t get upset. I felt kind of relieved. We couldn’t survive on the shit wages I made at Barclay’s. I wouldn’t be able to get another job because Rick would tell everyone I was a shoplifter. We would have to go on welfare. I could sit back and let the government take care of us. Or the girls would go to foster homes and I would only have to take care of myself.

“I had a complaint about you,” he said, without looking up from the papers he was pointlessly shuffling.

Here it comes, I thought.

As soon as the girls found homes, I was going to hit the road with Elvis. We could go anywhere. I’d start by visiting Skip. Then maybe my cousin Mike. That would be worth it just to see the look on his face when I showed up at his jock fraternity.

“A customer complained you packed a hair care product in the same bag with produce.”

“Huh?”

“You heard me. And you didn’t put it in a separate plastic bag before you put it in a regular bag.”

“Am I fired?” I said.

“Christ, Altmyer. Could you be any stupider?” He sneered. “No, you’re not fired. Just don’t do it again. And one other thing.” He stopped me before I could walk away. “There’s some shelving sitting on the left-hand side when you walk in the storeroom door. I want you to set it up at the end of the cereal aisle and stock it with bananas.”

“Bananas?”

He blew out his nose in annoyance. “Some people want bananas to go with their cereal and this way they don’t have to walk the whole way to Produce if that’s the only item from Produce they want. Or maybe they weren’t planning on buying
bananas at all but seeing them next to the cereal reminds them they like them sliced up on their cornflakes. So they buy them. Understand?”

“Should I set up a shelf of celery next to the peanut butter too?”

He gave me a flat stare. “They do it at the Bi-Lo and they sell a lot of bananas.”

“Okay,” I said.

I walked back to the cashiers. Church was busy bagging and talking to a woman about the superiority of Heinz pickles over Claussen. Not only were they cheaper but you didn’t have to rush them home to the refrigerator. You could put them in a cupboard and keep them there for months. He knew because his mom did it all the time. They had jars of pickles in their cupboards from last Thanksgiving. He wasn’t kidding.

When I passed by him, he fixed me with a serious look.

“Something wrong, Church?”

“What did the boss want?” he asked.

“He wants me to put bananas in the cereal aisle.”

Before the words were out of my mouth, I regretted them. Church’s jaw dropped open. He set down the jar of spaghetti sauce he was about to bag and started shaking his head. “Why would he do something like that?”

“People like to eat them on their cereal,” I answered him. “Rick thinks it’ll make money.”

Church dropped his stare to his hands and concentrated. “It’s wrong,” he said. “Bananas can’t go with cereal.”

“Don’t let it bother you,” Bud said from his register. “Sometimes it makes more sense to think about what something’s used for instead of what it is.”

“No,” Church insisted.

“Think about people for instance,” Bud continued. “If we divided up people by what they were instead of what they did, none of us would be working together. I’d be stuck with a bunch
of old fogies and Harley’d be working with the other boys. He’d have to get his head shaved and start wearing an earring.”

He winked at me.

“No,” Church said again. “There’s nice people and mean people and that’s all. Right, Harley?”

“Sure. I guess so.”

He wandered slowly away from his station, with his skinny arms pressed to his sides and his skinny shoulders hunched forward looking like a closed umbrella, and sat down on his bench. Bud finished with his customer and started bagging for him. He didn’t look like he was ever coming back.

I tried to slip away unnoticed but Church spotted me.

“Don’t do it, Harley,” he shouted after me. “It’s wrong. I’m telling you.”

I took my good old time putting the shelves up. They were cheap metal crap with about a hundred screws. I kept getting distracted thinking about Church and how I was violating his world order, and Rick and how I was doing his bidding, and all the boxes of PopTarts and granola bars sitting a few feet away from me and how I’d kill for just one. When I finished, I wanted to tear the whole thing down.

I crouched down to pick up my screwdriver off the floor and heard a female voice from the next aisle over.

“I said if you were good, you could pick out one snack.”

“But Mom, that’s not fair,” Esme explained. “Every snack I pick Zack likes too so he actually gets two snacks. But he always picks Doritos and I hate Doritos so I only get one.”

“Life isn’t always fair,” Callie growled.

I couldn’t believe I had forgotten she did her grocery shopping on Friday nights.

This was a perfect opportunity. I could see her but she had her kids with her so it would be safe. I could make polite small talk with her. I’d be obligated. She was a customer. And if she gave me one of her honey-dipped smiles, I’d know I might still
have a chance. But if she looked at me like a school budget cut, I wouldn’t know what to do.

I stood up and turned around so fast, I fell into the Wheaties and knocked a couple boxes on the floor. I put them back and raced to the opposite end of the aisle and waited there until I was sure she wasn’t coming toward me. Then I jogged to the front of the store, grabbed the orange reflective vest off its hook near the magazines, and headed for the door.