Back Roads (24 page)

“I want to know about Dad and Misty,” I said, putting my face up to the fresh air coming in the window. “I want to know what you know.”

I wasn’t going to look at him. Nothing in the world could make me do that. I waited and slowly sipped at my beer and watched a goldfinch perch at the crystal-clear birdbath. The ones at our house were still straw-brown. This one had already turned brilliant yellow.

The garage got so quiet I could hear the refrigerator running and the sound of beer rolling down my throat and echoing inside my empty stomach. I was beginning to think he had left when he said, “I just didn’t think it was natural, that’s all. Him paying so much attention to her when he had a perfectly good son.”

“That’s it?” I said.

I turned around laughing, I was so relieved.

“That’s it?” I said again. “You’re going to accuse a guy of
messing around with his daughter based on that? Did you ever see him do anything?”

My relief swelled me with confidence. I walked back toward him, tripping over the star-shaped blades of a rototiller, but catching myself before I fell on the cement floor.

“Why are you asking me about this now?” he said, his expression hardening into something unreadable like a face carved into a mountain. “What do you know?”

“I know a lot of things,” I said importantly, wagging my finger at him. “I know you told Mom to leave Dad because you thought he was going to do something to Misty.”

“Your Aunt Jan was right. You are drunk. Too drunk to have this conversation anyway.”

He set his beer can down on his workbench and started to walk away.

“How can you be too drunk to have this conversation?” I cried out, stumbling after him.

I reached out and caught him by the sleeve. He stopped and grabbed me by the shoulder to help me keep my balance. He hadn’t touched me since my dad’s funeral. He was the closest blood relation I had to a dad now that my real one was dead, and he hadn’t touched me in two years. I remembered the way he had walked away from Mike Jr. at the funeral and put his arm around my shoulders. I remembered walking past the dead baby gravestones.

I started crying.

“Harley.”

He shook me to get my attention. I wouldn’t look at him.

“Listen to me. I did tell your mom to leave him. I told her some fifteen years ago. I told her the first time I saw him go after you and saw you stand there and take it like a grown man.”

“No,” I moaned, backing away from him and shaking my head.

The garage flew past me, back and forth, like I was watching its reflection in a shiny clock pendulum.

“Don’t blame it on me,” I cried.

“I’m not blaming anything on you. You said you wanted to know, Harley, so I’m telling you. I tried to get you kids out of there for a long time and she’d never go. By the time she finally decided to leave, I knew it was too late. I wasn’t trying to save anybody anymore. I was just trying to ease my own conscience.”

“What about Misty?”

“I had suspicions. That’s all they were. Suspicions.”

I broke free from him.

“Are you lying to me?” I yelled at him. “I’m sick of everybody lying to me about my own life.”

“I’m not lying.”

“You never saw him do anything to her?”

“Jesus, Harley. I would have shot him myself.”

“Mike? What’s going on out here?”

Aunt Jan appeared at the side doorway. I turned my back on her and wiped at my face with Dad’s coat sleeve.

“I heard shouting.”

“What the hell, Janet?” Uncle Mike bristled. “Can’t we have a private conversation?”

“Since when do you have private conversations? I’m always trying to get you to bring Mike Junior out here.”

“I think I better go,” I said.

“You don’t have to go,” Uncle Mike practically yelled at me.

“I want to. Can I use your bathroom?” I asked Aunt Jan.

“Well, yes,” she said, darting a funny look at Uncle Mike.

They were arguing with each other as I walked jerkily out the door. I kept thinking I was going too slow, then I’d speed up, the garage would start spinning, and I’d slow down again.

Halfway to the house, I thought for sure Aunt Jan had snuck up behind me and was spitting at me, but it turned out to be coming from the sky. I picked up the pace, passed through the shrine, and leaned back against the bathroom door breathing heavily once I closed it behind me.

I got down on my knees in front of the toilet and waited to see if I was going to throw up. I didn’t so I stood up and pissed again. The crocheted doll watched me unimpressed.

I grabbed her off the toilet paper and stuffed her in Dad’s pocket. She left a glistening smear of cum on the top of the roll. Knowing that eventually Aunt Jan would touch it—even if it was dried by then—made my whole trip worthwhile.

I was hoping I’d be able to get out of the house without running into either one of them, but it had definitely not been my lucky day. They were both waiting for me near the front door, Uncle Mike holding a grocery bag full of food and Aunt Jan holding a small black Bible no bigger than my hand. I suddenly knew what starving Africans felt when they saw us coming, and it wasn’t gratitude.

“This is your mother’s.” Aunt Jan held the Bible out to me.

HOLY BIBLE was stamped in gold across the cracked, black leather cover. I took it and ran my index finger down the outside of the shiny-edged pages the way I used to do as a kid. They still felt like a red satin ribbon. I didn’t have to open it to know it was hers.

“Your Aunt Diane gave it to us to return to you. She accidentally took it with her when she packed up your dad’s personal things,” Aunt Jan explained.

“His effects,” I said, nodding.

“Yes.”

“Two years ago?”

“I’m sorry but I put it in a drawer and forgot about it. I hope you haven’t been looking for it.”

“I guess I figured she had it with her in jail. They let you take Bibles in, don’t they?”

Uncle Mike shrugged. He had put a chew in and was working it around inside his lower lip. Aunt Jan said, “I wouldn’t know.”

“I’ll walk you out to your truck,” Uncle Mike offered, and held open the door.

“Give my best to the girls, Harley,” Aunt Jan said.

I thought of that expression, Here’s mud in your eye. I gave her my best imitation of a Mike Jr. smile.

Here’s cum on your hand, Aunt Jan.

“Sure,” I said.

Uncle Mike never gave a second thought to where he walked. He started down the clean white sidewalk, then tromped across the glorious green grass and even spit a stream of tobacco in it.

I walked around to my side of the truck, got in, and leaned over to open the passenger side door so he could slide in the bag of groceries. He closed the door but didn’t leave but didn’t look at me either. I leaned across the seat and rolled down the window.

“I know I haven’t been very good to you and the girls these past couple years,” he apologized to the sky, “and I’m sorry about it.”

I looked where he looked and saw a speck of a plane flying over. It left a white wispy line in the sky like a smoke signal with nothing left to say.

“Things aren’t going to change though, are they?” I said.

“I don’t think so,” he answered. “I hope you understand. It’s nothing personal.”

He gave the hood of my truck a thump and started back to his house. Once he disappeared behind the gleaming gold knocker, I took the doll out of Dad’s pocket. I stuck my finger inside her to see if she was still gooey, then I tossed her on the floor in the trash with Callie’s art book and my mom and dad’s wedding picture. Aunt Jan was going to accuse me of stealing her, and Uncle Mike was going to defend me. I took some pleasure in knowing that. I laid the Bible on the seat beside me. I didn’t open it to see if the map was still inside.

It poured the whole way home. The rain came down in solid metallic sheets. My wheels spun trying to climb our mud-slick road.

I parked next to a rut filled with water and stepped into it, soaking my jeans halfway up to the knees. I tromped across the yard carrying my case of beer minus a six-pack or so, and my brown bag of groceries with a carnival-striped loaf of Town Talk bread and a little black Bible sticking out of the top. I saw a pair of shiny eyes peering at me from inside the biggest rip in the back of the couch, and a pair of dark, empty ones peeking out between Mom’s sheers.

I stopped walking and the dark eyes disappeared. I stood there in the rain and thought about Misty standing on the porch shooting at the turkeys. It had looked like she was aiming at me.

I started shivering. It was the rain, I told myself. But the first thing I was going to do was hide the gun.

Before going inside, I shook on the porch like a wet Elvis. I didn’t wipe my mud-caked boots. I didn’t have to. It was my fucking house. I wished Mom could have been there to see it because it used to be her house, and I wished Aunt Jan could have been there because it would have given her nightmares.

Elvis met me at the door and went nuts trying to smell the groceries. I pushed him down and took loud clomping steps into the living room where I could hear the TV going. I left a trail of perfectly formed treads behind me and stopped to admire them for a moment like they were art.

All three girls were sitting on the floor in a heap of pillows and dinosaurs, in nightshirts and ponytails, with cotton balls between their toes and bowls of ice cream covered in rainbow sprinkles sitting in their laps.

They all looked up at me with identical, calmly curious expressions on their faces, like I was a bumbling intruder who had accidentally stumbled across their peaceful tribe.

“Hi, Harley,” Jody said.

Misty didn’t say anything. Amber’s face darkened. She was the tribe elder who knew outsiders were never to be trusted even if they came bearing food. Somehow they would eventually ruin your world whether it be with guns, or disease, or a religion whose God had no sense of justice.

“We’re having a slumber party,” Jody said.

“Isn’t it a little early?” I asked.

“Amber said we could start already since it’s already dark outside. We had a big lightning bolt and the TV went out for a whole hour so we played Junior Monopoly and I won,” she said gleefully. “I even beat Misty.”

Misty stared hypnotically at the TV, her blank black eyes reflecting the blue and white flashes, the cheap fake stones around her wrist sparkling fiercely. She glanced up at me dissatisfied but untroubled by my presence.

I felt love and loathing for her at the same time. I wanted to rid my life of her permanently, burn all her belongings and erase all my memories, but I also wanted to hug her. I wanted to give her all the hugs she should have been getting from Mom for the past two years, all the understanding she should have been getting from us, all the counseling she should have been getting
from strangers. But anything I could have given to her now would have been too little too late like the bag of groceries I was holding in my aching hands.

She turned back to the TV, and I decided right then and there that I didn’t want to know any more TRUTH. I didn’t want any more CLOSURE. I wanted beer and blow jobs.

“How was Lick n’ Putt?” I asked Jody.

“Great.” She beamed at me and bounced on her butt, almost tipping her ice cream out of her lap. “We got to play our whole game before it started raining. Me and Esme did the best. We don’t know who won because Esme’s dad ate the scorecard at the end. He did!” she said, her eyes getting as big as golf balls. “He ate it because he was so embarrassed by his score. He played terrible. Even worse than Zack and he spent most of the time swinging his club in circles pretending to be a helicopter. Esme’s dad picked up the ball once and put it in the hole with his hand and asked us if that was a hole in one. He was serious too. I could tell. And then we went to Esme’s house and had potato soup with ham chunks in it.”

“Was her mom home?”

“Yeah.”

Amber was staring at me furiously.

“What’s your problem?” I said to her. “You look like you want to smell me again.”

“Fuck you, Harley.”

“No, really. If it would make you feel better. Come here. Smell me.”

“Go to hell.”

“Here, I’ll do it for you. I smell like . . .” I sniffed at a shoulder. “I smell pretty bad, actually.”

“You smell like beer,” she said. “Once you turn twenty-one, you’re just going to spend every night for the rest of your life in a bar.”

“I hope so,” I said, and went into the kitchen.

I set the bag down on the crumb-coated counter and began to unpack it: Mom’s Bible, the loaf of bread, a box of elbow macaroni, three cans of soup, a can of green beans.

My hands started shaking so bad, a jar of mayonnaise escaped and went rolling down the length of the counter. I watched it fall into the sink with a dull clang.

I realized I couldn’t stay in the same house with Misty. I wasn’t afraid of her as much as I was afraid of thinking about her. If I distanced myself from the source, maybe I could avoid the thoughts like I could avoid catching a cold.

I got the mayonnaise and finished unpacking the bag: a can of Crisco, Palmolive dishwashing soap, and a box of Little Debbie Fudge Rounds.

I opened the cakes and left everything else sitting on the counter. When I went to put my own beers away, I found a couple dozen Red Dogs in the fridge. I helped myself to one along with a fudgie and sat down at the table with Mom’s Bible.

When I was a kid, I never thought of Mom as religious since we didn’t go to church. She liked to tell Bible stories and liked to read from a Bible but as far as I knew, none of that counted with God if a person didn’t put on good clothes and go sit in a church for an hour every Sunday. I viewed the Good Book as nothing more than a book until she explained to me that everything in it was true.

After that I wanted her to read from the Bible every night at bedtime instead of my regular books. Curious George’s fall from a fire escape and Ping the duck’s search for the wise-eyed boat on the Yangtze River no longer held my interest. I wanted plagues of bugs, rivers turning into blood, people turning into salt, God killing babies, floods killing everybody. I wanted giants, demons, and lepers. No matter how many times I asked her, Mom insisted it had all really happened. It was like finding out the Smurfs were real.

I didn’t remember exactly when I stopped believing the
stories. Sometime after I outgrew Santa Claus and before I stopped liking SpaghettiOs. The fact that Mom never stopped believing always made me feel a little superior to her.

I picked up the Bible by its spine and shook it. A folded square of paper fell onto the tabletop. Relief swept through me. Opening the paper, smoothing it flat, and seeing the little faded yellow house was like a homecoming.

I took my finger and traced the futile black line, gray now from age, and wondered where the intense crayon colors had gone. They weren’t rubbed off on the rest of the paper. It was like time had absorbed them.

My hands folded the map without me telling them to and held it in front of my face for an instant before slipping it back in between the satin red pages.

Mom had always believed her line was going to end at nothing, and she believed prison was that nothing. But the child who originally drew the map didn’t have a family; the woman sitting in a jail cell did.

I had been wrong. She hadn’t ACCEPTED anything. She had FLED to a safe haven. Away from the TRUTH. Away from us. Now I understood why she didn’t want to come back here, but I didn’t care.

The guard had said there was nothing I could do. If Mom stuck to her story and Misty stuck to hers, it sure seemed that way, but I had the bloody shirt and I had Jody.

I was ready to take the Bible downstairs and put it in my drawer but something made me open the cover first. Inside was Mom’s maiden name written in a little girl’s handwriting at the top of the page and beneath it all of our names and birthdays written in a grown woman’s hand. I stared at my own birthday trying to figure out the significance.

I got up from the chair and walked over to Jody’s school lunch menu hanging on the refrigerator. The first week of June had been tacked onto the bottom of May. It ended on Wednesday,
June 3, with the words “NO LUNCH SERVED. EARLY DISMISSAL. HAVE A NICE SUMMER!” I counted back to Saturday, May 30. I double-checked it with the Bible.

Today was my birthday. I was twenty years old.

Twenty years old. I was a man.

I didn’t get too excited because I knew I was only becoming a man in a certain sense. I had already become a man before in other ways.

Legally I had become a man when I turned eighteen. Spiritually I had become a man the night Callie Mercer fucked me. Emotionally I had become a man the first time my dad belted me. Today I was becoming a man chronologically. There would be no more “teen” after my age.

My first impulse was to go share this information with Amber. I was no longer a teenager. And for a long eight months, I was going to be FOUR years older than her, not three. I was twenty; she was sixteen. FOUR.

But if I told them, Jody would have wanted to have a party and I wasn’t in a party mood. I wouldn’t have minded one of her cards though.

My birthday, I thought to myself. I downed part of my beer, ripped off half the fudgie in my mouth, and tossed the other half to Elvis. It had to be worth something.

I took Mom’s Bible downstairs and grabbed the gun. I slipped out the back door and walked straight to the shed with the mud sucking at my boots and rain pelting my hat.

I left the door open a crack so I could see and hid the gun in a back corner behind some old two-by-fours, a hoe, and a snow shovel. The inside of the shed smelled like gas and rotting wood and leaves, then I detected something clean and perfumed.

A plank of weak gray light fell across the wall in front of me. I turned around and saw Amber in the doorway, her bare feet and legs covered in mud, looking like she had just waded through an oil spill.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

I finished positioning a plastic sled in the corner too.

“What are you doing? would be a better question,” I said, giving her a once-over.

She had thrown on a jean jacket over her nightshirt. Ten freshly polished purple toenails stuck out from the ends of her mud-blackened feet like a line of grape jelly beans.

“What are you doing with the gun?” she asked.

“Hiding it.”

“From who?”

“The girls.”

“Why?”

A brief flicker of insanity sparked through my brain where I considered telling her what I had learned, but I knew I would only be doing it so I would have someone to share the burden with. Amber wouldn’t be any help.

“It’s dangerous,” I told her.

“Dangerous?” she exclaimed. “Misty knows how to handle a gun better than you do, and Jody’s too little to pick it up. We should be hiding it from you.”

“Maybe,” I said, and brushed my hands on my jeans to get the dust and cobwebs off them. “Just don’t tell them where I hid it, okay?”

She shrugged her agreement, then her expression turned sullen as she remembered why she had followed me.

“That’s why you came out here?” she asked, skeptically.

I paused inside the door, getting ready to run for my truck.

“I’m going out,” I answered her.

“I thought so,” she fumed at me.

“Where do you get off getting mad at me for going out?” I said roughly, and gave her a sharp look. “Stop keeping tabs on me.”

I made a break for it.

“Her dad’s home too, you fuckhead,” she screamed after me.

I threw open my truck door. I didn’t know what she meant but it pissed me off just the same. I gave her the finger. She gave me one back.

Callie’s car and Brad’s Jeep were parked side by side. The rain had slowed down enough for the dogs to come out of their houses when I walked down the driveway. They ran around in circles, barking their lungs out, stopping every once in a while to shake.

Brad opened the front door and yelled at them to quiet down. I put my hands in my pockets and took my time. I didn’t care about the rain.

He was giving me a boyish smile. A scorecard-eating smile. But it faded as I got near. I didn’t know what he saw.

“Harley,” he announced, and moved halfway out of the door, but he kept one foot planted firmly inside. “Where’s your truck? You didn’t walk down here?”

They didn’t have a porch. They had an open wooden deck in front of the door with two steps leading up to it. He was getting wet.

“I parked it up on the road. I was on my way home from prison and I thought I’d swing by and pick up Jody,” I said amiably.

“Prison?” he asked, holding a hand up over his head and blinking water out of his eyes.

“I was visiting my mom.”

“Oh, right. I’m sorry. Are you okay?”

“I’m great. Except I don’t smell too good.”

He moved back inside the door a little bit. “Well, we already took Jody home.”

I nodded at him. “Okay,” I said, blinking too at the water running off the bill of my cap. “As long as I’m here, could I see your wife?”

“My wife?”

“Yeah. I need to talk to her about something.”

“Do you want to come in?”

“You don’t want me in your house.”

Callie came to the door in her chamois-soft jeans and a red T-shirt with satin trim around the neck.

“Is something wrong?” she asked Brad, without even saying hi to me.

“He says he needs to talk to you.”

She flashed me a disbelieving look.

“Could you come out here?” I asked.

“It’s raining,” she said carefully.

“We could talk in my truck.”

Her expression grew more amazed.

“Maybe you should go talk to him,” Brad said. “He says he just got back from visiting his mom in prison.”

“Oh,” she said, suddenly sympathetic.

“And it’s my birthday,” I added, quickly.