Back Roads (7 page)

“Cruz wore shorts today to school,” Esme argued with an imperial tilt to her chin.

“Which Cruz?”

“Cruz Lewandowski.”

“Do I care what Cruz does?”

“His father’s an educator,” Esme pointed out.

Even Callie rolled her eyes. “His father’s a gym teacher. Now go get your shoes, and Zack, it’s time for you to come in.”

They all went tearing out again, their pounding feet on the wood floor sounding like a tiny fleeing army.

Callie sat down across from me and opened the beer for herself, sighing.

“There are five Cruzes in their class. Do you know what that’s all about?” she asked me. “The only Cruz I know is Santa Cruz
and I have a feeling that’s not what people around here are naming their kids after.”

“I think he’s some guy on a soap opera,” I answered.

“Oh. Okay. That would make sense.”

She took a swig from the beer and stared off into space. I finished the pork chop. I didn’t think she had noticed, but she reached out and pushed a bowl of potatoes in my direction without looking down at them. All mothers had that empty plate reflex.

“Funny how you can like a name and then find out the reason for it is stupid and then it’s ruined,” she said, kind of absentmindedly. “And vice versa. A name might seem really dumb and then you find out the reason for it is interesting or sentimental and then you like it.”

I wasn’t listening to her but I heard her. I was busy shoveling potatoes in my mouth and staring at her because she wasn’t looking at me so I didn’t have to worry about eye contact. She had one perfect black freckle in the hollow of her throat like a speck of pepper.

“I always wondered about Misty,” she said. “Did your mom just like that name, or was Misty born on a misty day?”

I swallowed the last spoonful of potatoes. They had a ton of garlic in them. They were great too.

“My dad picked out Misty,” I answered her. “She’s named after some chick on
Hee Haw
from when he was a kid. I think she was a centerfold too. Dad never got over her, I guess.”

Again, I was being serious but Callie laughed. She brought her beer bottle to her lips and giggled around the neck. I could see her tongue inside the brown glass.

I started feeling hot again but it was a slow melt this time, not incineration. I realized we were having a conversation.

“Where did you get Esme from?” I asked.

“It was the name of a model and mistress of one of my favorite artists. A French Impressionist.”

She held up a finger signaling for me to wait before slipping out of her chair and out of the room. She came back lugging a big, glossy book. She set it down in front of me and flipped it open to a sloppy picture of a vase of flowers, a bottle of wine, and an artichoke, then she sat down again and went back to her beer. I studied the page out of courtesy.

“He paints like Pierre Bonnard,” I said.

She gasped. It was the only time I had ever heard a real one outside of bad TV.

“You know who Pierre Bonnard is?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said.

“You must have a wonderful art teacher.”

“I don’t have any art teacher,” I told her. “I haven’t had art since third grade.”

She put her beer down, frowning. “I can’t believe it. Don’t tell me they’ve finally cut the art program,” she said angrily. “I know they’ve been threatening it for years. They’ve got some nerve saying there’s not enough funds when they just budgeted all that money for new football uniforms and a bunch of videos so kids can watch
Moby Dick
instead of reading it.”

I didn’t bother telling her the only movie about a whale in our school library was
Free Willy
. I couldn’t believe how mad she was getting over art and books. I knew she had gone to an out-of-state egghead college that no one around here had ever heard about because it didn’t have a good football team. I hoped she wasn’t the intellectual snob type who thought she could venture out into the real world and bring civilization back to the natives, and we were all supposed to crowd around her with our jaws hanging open while she dangled her enlightened views in front of us like shiny beads.

I wanted to tell her this and see if she would get madder. I thought about what it would be like to get her mad enough to try and take a swing at me. Then I would have to grab her and restrain her. I pictured her struggling and screaming for
help, and me clamping my hand over her mouth. She would open her mouth to try and bite me, and I would stick my fingers inside. She would start gagging, but I’d push them down deeper and deeper into her throat until she fell to her knees. Then I would turn her over and press her face against her favorite rock.

“That really upsets me,” she went on. “I feel like driving over to the superintendent’s house right now just to put him on the spot and hear him stammer through the ridiculous justification for this.”

I almost didn’t hear her over the blood pounding in my ears. My hands were killing me under the table, and I looked down at them. They were white-knuckled and clenched. I slowly, painfully unfolded my fingers and saw tiny new welts near the crescent scabs where I had broken the skin Friday night listening to Amber fuck a guy who was too stupid to run away from gunfire. I should have shot up his truck for that reason alone. That would have been my JUSTIFICATION.

I blinked. The word hung where Callie’s face had been. I blinked again and she was back.

She was looking right at me and for a moment I was sure she had read my thoughts. I swallowed and hoped sweat wasn’t pouring down my face.

“Nobody cut the art program,” I confessed. “Art’s an elective.”

“Oh.” She gave me a quick embarrassed smile. “Why don’t you have it?”

“It interfered with a study hall.”

She took another gulp of beer. “Then how do you know who Pierre Bonnard is?”

I pressed my throbbing hands together. Nothing hurt worse than a human scratch except for a human bite. My dad only bit me once, and it was because I bit him first. My mom said I was the only one of us kids who went through a biting phase.

“My mom had a set of note cards that used to belong to her
mom,” I explained. “She got them as a souvenir from the Art Institute of Chicago. Mom’s from around there originally. They had one of his paintings on the front. ‘Table Set in a Garden.’ ”

“So you’re familiar with his work?” she asked eagerly.

“I’m familiar with his note cards.”

I watched her throat pulse as more beer slid down it. I pulled my eyes away and dropped them back to the book.

At first glance, I hadn’t liked Callie’s artist nearly as much as I liked Mom’s. The painting on Mom’s cards had lots of warm green light and soft smudged colors and a tablecloth with a bright pink stripe: the kind of table I would have liked to sit at with Jody.

The painting in the book was set in a shadowy corner of a room. There was an open window and it was day outside, but no light was coming in. The flowers were a glaring white but looked waxy and dead. The bottle had been opened but was still filled to the top with a weak brown wine. But the thing that really bothered me was the artichoke. Its sharp leaves were outlined in blue-black and each tip had a dot of red so bright it looked wet.

Looking at it again I realized the reason I didn’t like it the first time was because it gave me the creeps, but that was exactly why it was a better painting. It was probably a lot harder to scare someone with an artichoke than it was to tempt someone with a sunny garden.

“I like Impressionists,” I said.

Right after I said it, I regretted it; realizing immediately that I had to add something to it.

I fumbled around inside my head, not trusting any of the observations I came up with. Until a couple minutes ago, I thought Impressionism was Dana Carvey doing Ross Perot.

“They don’t seem to care about what things really look like,” I tried. “It’s like they care more about how looking at something makes a person feel.”

She smiled at me. It was a beautiful smile: one she made with her eyes, not just her mouth; one that came from her heart, not just her head because I had touched something inside her that no one else ever did anymore. I didn’t know how I knew that but I did and even though I wanted to violate her a hundred different ways physically, I didn’t want to go anywhere near her soul.

“That’s the definition of Impressionism,” she said softly.

“Yeah, I know,” I lied.

I got up from the table.

“I’m going to be late for work,” I told her. “I’ve got to go.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, getting up too. “I didn’t realize you were on your way to work. Wait a minute.”

She left and came back with a sloshing Rubbermaid container.

“Hot and sour soup.” She held it out to me. “You said you liked Chinese.”

I stared at it but didn’t take it.

“Please,” she urged. “Esme and I are the only ones who like it. I have so much extra.”

I took it. I didn’t even say thank you. I never thanked her for the dinner either. I didn’t think about it until I was in the truck. I should have gone back and said it.

Driving away, I caught myself staring at her hills and wondering if her grandpa gave them to her before or after she got married.

“Where’s Esme’s dad?” I asked Jody.

She pulled some school papers out of her backpack. She wanted to show them to me now in the truck since she would be asleep by the time I got home from work.

“Her mom said it’s his night out with the boys,” she answered me. “She said her night out is going grocery shopping. She said that’s marriage for you.”

I looked at the star at the top of Jody’s addition and subtraction work sheet and nodded.

If I had a pretty wife who could cook, I would never leave the house except to go to work so I could keep her. The rest of the time I would spend having sex and eating, and I would be deliriously happy.

I didn’t know how happy she’d be, though. I wondered if I would care.

I went ahead and told Betty about my visit with Mom at our next appointment a month later. At first I wasn’t going to because I didn’t want to talk about it, but Betty wasn’t all bad so I did it for her sake. Sort of a personal favor. Boy talks to mother for the first time since she killed his father: it was a shrink’s wet dream.

She almost fell out of her chair when I told her. It got her more excited than the time I told her about how Dad used to take Misty hunting with him instead of me and every time he’d say to me, “She’s more of a man than you’ll ever be.”

Shrinks loved it when dads cut down their sons. Verbal emasculation, she called it. I didn’t care what it was. He was right.

It wasn’t that Misty was butch. She was slight and freckled and had a glossy ponytail the color of an acorn and long, thick eyelashes like tiny feathers from a baby bird’s wing. But she was definitely a tomboy. Especially around Dad. They watched pro wrestling together and worked on the tractor mower together, and he took her to the Penns Ridge Speedway to see the stock car races. And she was definitely more of a hunter.

Betty got up and left her office and came back with a glass of water for me when I started talking about Mom. She had
done the same thing when I told her about Dad and Misty. I figured it was something she had read in one of the psychology textbooks she kept at her other office where she saw real patients instead of charity cases. There was probably a whole chapter in one of them about water and Kleenex and when it was appropriate to offer them.

I left some things out of my description of my prison visit, but I didn’t make up anything. I was beginning to think I should because Betty was looking pretty disappointed. She kept tapping her forehead with the eraser on her pen and saying, “So you didn’t really discuss anything of substance,” and she kept asking me why I thought the sunflower fields outside the prison bothered me and I kept saying, “I don’t know.”

“When are you planning on seeing her again?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You are planning on it, aren’t you? This was a very big step for you, Harley. You need to keep moving forward.”

I needed to keep looking out the window. I was glad Betty’s office was at the back of the building instead of the front where the view would have been the Eat N’ Park. The parking lot wasn’t much to look at, but the maples bordering it were nice. They were covered with bright, new leaves now and drooping with seed helicopters.

“Are you sure you don’t want to take off your coat?” she asked me.

“I’m sure,” I said.

She sighed and crossed her legs and looked at her notes. She started tapping her forehead while tapping one toe in the air. I noticed her shoes. They weren’t her usual scuffed black pumps that gapped at the sides when she walked. These were a soft silver-green like the wrong side of a leaf. Not a mark on them. Not even on the soles.

They didn’t go at all with the coarse, putty-colored dress she was wearing. It wasn’t just the color that was wrong. I thought
of Cinderella finding herself in rags again with one glass slipper still sparkling on her foot.

Betty saw me looking at her shoes, uncrossed her legs, and tucked her feet under her chair like she was concealing an accident.

“Let’s go back to the comment you made about feeling that your mother is more concerned about the girls than she is about you. Why do you think that’s true?”

“I know it’s true,” I corrected her.

“Then why is that? Why is she more concerned about them?”

“Because they’re girls.”

“Why should that matter?”

“Parents are always more concerned about daughters than sons.”

“Let’s not generalize. Why is your mother more concerned about your sisters than she is about you?”

“There’s more to be concerned about,” I said.

“Such as?”

“They can get pregnant.”

She raised her eyebrows at me.

“Not all of them right now,” I added, frustrated.

“Your sisters getting pregnant is something you worry about?”

“No.”

“It’s something you think your mother worries about?”

I slumped down on the couch while trying to think of an answer I could give her that she couldn’t respond to with another question. I finally gave up.

“No. It’s just a fact.”

“Okay.” She nodded. “And what else is there to be concerned about?”

“They can get hurt easier.”

“Do you mean physically? Or emotionally?”

“Both, I guess.”

“You think Amber’s feelings get hurt easier than yours?”

I could barely keep my eyes open and my stomach kept growling. I was getting the egg roll for myself today. Screw Misty.

“Amber doesn’t have any feelings,” I said.

“Then you’re not making sense.”

She waited for me to say something, and I didn’t. She started messing with her dress. It went all the way down to her knees, covering her thighs. I thought about complimenting her so she might start wearing longer ones all the time, but I had never said anything remotely nice to the woman and she probably would have thought I was having another breakthrough and run off to get me more water.

“Let’s get back to your mother and what you were saying earlier about how comfortable she seemed in the Hug Room. You denied that this bothered you, but it seemed to me that it did bother you. Why? Shouldn’t you be happy that your mother is coping well?”

I didn’t want to talk about Mom anymore but not talking about anything never worked at getting Betty off my back. I threw out a different topic, hoping to take her mind off Mom the same way the ketchup-stained end off a bun made Elvis forget about the hot dog he didn’t get.

“Parents do worry more about daughters than sons just because they can get pregnant,” I insisted roughly.

“That might be true in some cases,” she allowed. “Why don’t we talk about this some more after we finish talking about . . .”

“It’s true in all cases,” I pushed.

“Well, I don’t know about that.”

“It is.”

“It’s true a girl can get pregnant, but it takes a boy to get her that way. Don’t you think parents worry about their sons being sexually active too?”

“It’s not the same thing.”

“Why not?”

“A guy can walk away from it.”

“A girl can have an abortion.”

“It’s not the same thing.”

“What would you do if you got a girl pregnant?”

I wiggled my toes around inside my boots. I was going to have to break down and start wearing gym shoes. My feet were roasting.

“Marry her,” I said.

“That’s interesting.”

“Why?”

“Because you answered so quickly and so confidently, yet you don’t know anything about the circumstances. For instance, what if you didn’t like the girl very much.”

“I had sex with her, right?”

“Yes. So you’re saying you would only have sex with a girl you liked.”

“If she would have sex with me, I would like her.”

“Harley.” She laughed and her nickel-plated hair shimmered a little.

I turned back to the window, disgusted and embarrassed. I was serious.

“All right,” she said. “What if you didn’t love her?”

She was starting to piss me off. I wondered if I should take her low opinion of me personally or if it was only something else she had read in a book: “Teenagers have no morals and will fuck anyone.” Someday I wanted to visit her real office and go through those books. I was willing to bet I could find everything stupid and mean she had ever said to me written down in one of them. I bet she had hundreds.

“What if a wife and child would interfere with your plans for the future?” she kept at me. “What if you had no source of income?”

“If I got her pregnant,” I burst out angrily, “it would mean I was being stupid.”

I snapped my mouth shut and went back to staring out the
window but I could feel her staring at me. I knew she was going to ask me why. WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? Why would it mean you were being stupid? Why do you feel that way? Why do you think your mother shot your father? Why do you think your father didn’t like you?

“There’s no excuse for it,” I answered her before she could ask me to explain. “You know it can happen unless you do something about it. I have no sympathy for people who get accidentally pregnant. They’re all idiots just like that idiot woman who sued McDonald’s because she burned herself with their coffee.”

“Some people don’t think that woman was an idiot. She won a lot of money.”

“Yeah, I know. And O.J.’s walking around. All that proves is the courts are fucked. What I’m talking about is people being responsible for their own fuck-ups.”

I didn’t usually say the F-word around Betty. I could tell it bothered her, and she wasn’t sure what to do about it. Give me water? Offer me a Kleenex? Pat my hand? She had tried patting my hand once. I had been talking about getting rid of the dogs and started to cry. It was the only time I had ever cried around her.

I remembered her old hand feeling cool and dry and I liked her touch for a split second but then I felt more hatred for her than I had ever felt for anyone in my life. I jerked my hand away and went running out. I stayed away for two appointments after that, even after I realized the reason I hated her was because I didn’t hate her.

She made a fist and coughed into it.

“So you would marry her out of responsibility?” she asked me.

“I guess so.”

“Could I go so far as to say you would marry her as a form of self-punishment?”

“I guess.”

“Do you hear what you’re saying, Harley? You would commit
yourself to another human being for the rest of your life as a form of punishment. Do you think that’s what a marriage should be based on?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

She leaned back in her chair and glanced at the untouched Styrofoam cup of water sitting on the table next to the Kleenex and my Redi-Mix cap.

“What about your parents?” she asked. “They were married because your mother got pregnant. And they were very young. Were they stupid?”

“Yes.”

“Yet despite feeling this way, you would intentionally do the same thing if you got a girl pregnant?”

“Yes.”

She looked at me with her young eyes in her old face, and I looked away. She was trying to figure me out. That always made me nervous as hell. I preferred it when she stuck to her job, which as far as I could tell was getting me to talk mindlessly about myself.

“Did your parents have a good marriage in your opinion?”

I had to hand it to her, not many people could ask that question with a straight face.

“I thought so.”

She nodded again. “What made you think that?”

I gave the question a lot of thought. I didn’t know why. I usually said the first thing that came into my head. “They got along well,” I answered.

“They liked each other?”

“Yeah. I mean, they didn’t paw each other or write love letters or anything like that.”

“How could you tell they liked each other?”

“Well, Mom almost always went out to the truck to meet him when he came home even though she knew he was coming
straight in the house anyway. And she would touch him all over. Not grope him or anything like that. It was more like the way moms touch their kids when they find them after they lose them in a store.”

“What about your father? How did he act toward your mother that made you think he liked her?”

I thought some more.

“Well, when Mom talked about her day while she fixed dinner, Dad had this way of closing his eyes and making his whole face look peaceful. Kind of like he was listening to a poem. Except he would hate listening to a poem, but that’s the way it made me feel.”

Betty smiled. “That’s one of the few things you’ve ever said about your father that makes him sound human to me.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve always described him as if he were a cartoon villain. A type of person; not a person. It’s a very common way for abused children to describe their abusive parents. They see them as monsters or saints.”

“He was a type,” I said, suspiciously.

“You don’t think he was more complicated than he appeared on the surface?”

“Define complicated.”

“Having a variety of emotional and psychological factors influence a reaction to a situation, unlike a dumb animal who responds purely to physical stimuli and instinct.”

“The second one,” I said, getting annoyed. “That was my dad.”

“What about what you just described to me?”

“Forget it.”

“Did you like your father, Harley?”

Every couple months she asked me this same question and I always answered it the same way.

“I didn’t know him well enough to know if I liked him.”

“Your gut reaction to him?”

“He was a swell guy.”

“You respected him though. Didn’t you?”

I shrugged. “He did everything he was supposed to,” I said.

She raised her eyebrows at me. “Including beating his children? Was he supposed to do that?”

“He thought he was.”

“Good,” she said firmly. “What makes you think that?”

“I don’t want to talk about my dad,” I said flatly, and went back to staring out the window.

She gave me a little time to stew, then got out of her chair and walked over to the old gray metal desk even principal offices had abandoned years ago. She opened her chocolaty leather-bound planner and touched her finger lightly to something and closed it again.

I asked her once where she got the date book from because it looked a cut above what Hallmark sold at the mall. She had looked a little startled at my question, then explained she bought it out of town and that sometimes a person needed to splurge on herself.

“Have you given any more thought to visiting your friend Skip?” she asked, still standing.

“I just bought new underwear,” I said.

“I’m afraid I don’t see the connection.”

“I’m so strapped for cash, buying underwear is a big deal.”

She still didn’t get it.

“I can’t afford it,” I explained further. “I’d need gas money, and money for food and beer and shit. I don’t have it.”