Beneath a Meth Moon (2 page)

the house

THE HOUSE WAS DARK
by the time I hitched and walked the four miles to it. Another four miles past it and I'd be at my own house—where maybe my daddy and Jesse Jr. were sitting down in front of the television, eating spaghetti with sauce from a jar. No green vegetables to speak of, like how it would be if I was still living with them. It had been weeks, maybe even months since I'd last seen them, and a part of me wanted to keep walking until I got to our door, opened it up and said,
Hey, Daddy, your baby girl is home.
But it'd been a long time since I'd been his baby girl. A long time since I'd helped Jesse Jr. hold the garlic press up high, letting the juice drip down over a bowl of hot spaghetti till the whole house smelled like the promise of something good coming.

I felt myself starting to shake and kicked at the broken-down door on the House, hollering loud for T-Boom to open it.

There was smoke coming out of the chimney, so I knew he was inside. The old gray boards nailed to the windows flapped where wind pushed up underneath them, and even from way off there was the smell of something bitter burning.

I kicked at the door again, calling T-Boom's name so loud my throat hurt.

You lost your mind, girl? You want the police all over me?

He'd gotten skinnier over the months, and his hair was long, coming almost to his shoulders. The plaid shirt he was wearing had a hole in the arm. I used to love the way he looked in that shirt, the red and black squares of it, the way he'd pull the collar up when he was cold. Now I just stared hard at the hole, trying to find somewhere besides him to put my eyes.

You heard me calling you the first time. I know you did.

He held out his hand, and I put the money in it. Mostly quarters but some dollar bills, too. My stomach hurt from missing lunch, but I knew the moon would fill that hunger up quick.

T-Boom shivered, shaking a little as he counted the money.
You still out by Donnersville?

I hugged myself, nodding. It'd become just this—me giving him the money, him giving me the moon and sometimes a few questions in between it all. No more T-Boom and Laurel. Cheerleader and Co-Captain. No more us together always.

Yeah, mostly. Still got that room back behind the hardware store. Nobody bother me there.

Nobody try to come in at night?

Uh-uh. Got something waiting for them if they do. My foot where they don't want it. No one's trying to get in there.

Donnersville meth heads cleaned it out a long time ago,
T-Boom said.
Steal the shoes off their own mothers' feet for some moon. They don't care. Don't you become like them, Laurel. You're better than that.

I just looked at him.

My mom said she saw your daddy at the Hy-Vee,
T-Boom said.
Food shopping with little Jesse. Said Jesse's getting tall, don't sit in the cart anymore but was riding on the side of it.

T-Boom put the money in his pocket and handed me two small bags—more than I had money for. He always gave me a little extra.

Long as I stay in Donnersville, he's not trying to get me. After the last time, Daddy said he's through with me. Jesse Jr. look like he eating? He never liked to eat. That's why I give him those vitamins.
I stopped talking quick as I'd started. Jesse Jr. was my heart, and whenever there was room in my brain, he came to it, quick and fast as a storm. I reached into one of the bags T-Boom had just handed me, put a tiny bit of the moon on my tongue. It burned melting, then the burning was gone and there was the light, the moonlight. And for a minute, there wasn't Jesse Jr. or Daddy somewhere.

T-Boom shrugged.
He told my mama they were thinking about packing up,
he said.
Thinking about heading back to Pass Christian.

He's been saying that since we left there. Always talking about going home. Like there's some “home” to go to.

I closed my hand tight around the bags and looked out over the land. Galilee was flat and cold. Real different from Pass Christian. When I was still living with Daddy and my brother, I'd put Vaseline on me and Jesse Jr.'s lips every morning, to keep them from chapping and bleeding. Now my own lips were too often cracking and bloodied. The moon soothed them, though. Soothed me. I tried not to wonder if Daddy was remembering about the Vaseline. Tried not to think about Jesse Jr.'s lips cracking in this cold. My hands shook as I put another little bit of it in my mouth, felt the burning. Then the light. I smiled because Galilee wasn't ugly and flat and cold anymore. It was somebody's promised land.

I pressed my hands together and held them to my chin, like I was praying, the tiny plastic bags of moon warm inside them. Closed my eyes against the voices and memories coming at me.
Hurricane Camille,
my daddy had said a long time ago.
Now, she was something to be afraid of. Came through the Pass in 1969 and just about took everything with her. But we came back,
my daddy said.

The Pass always comes back.
It was me and my daddy's voice saying it together. And for a minute, we were back in the Pass, sitting on the beach, the waves washing soft over our feet, the sun bright in our eyes. Daddy smiled, leaned back on his elbows and tilted his face toward the sun. Dark freckles spread across his nose and onto both cheeks. Angel kisses. So many angel kisses. He'd started growing a beard, and there was red in it. Gray too. I reached up and touched his face, amazed at how soft the hair was there. My daddy caught my hand in his and kissed it before letting go. He was telling me about the water, how it had always been there, bringing us everything we needed—food, jobs, hope.
It's never let us down, Laurel. The water's never let us down.

You should go with them, Laur. You should go home.

I opened my eyes to T-Boom standing in front of me, the water gone. I didn't look at him, just stared hard at the House, trying to snatch those voices and that memory of me and Daddy from my head.

The Pass is gone, T-Boom. No place to go back to. My daddy's just talking. Just saying words to say them.

Inside, T-Boom had a whole lot of candles burning, and the house seemed to be breathing with the light. I wondered again who lived here once. Whose old house this was before the boards got nailed to it and the lights got turned off. I'd found a deserted place too—a tiny back room in J. Turner's old hardware store. Had been staying there awhile. J. Turner died two years before, and his family was fighting over who inherited what. Either everybody wanted it or nobody wanted it, but in the meantime, they left it to collect dust. Water still flowed in the toilet, but no lights worked. No heat came on. Mostly it was dark and cold back there. Quiet as anything. Easy to get to by a small cellar door that had a broken lock on it. I'd gotten some police line tape and strung that across. Nobody tried to come in, and my guess is most people feared finding a body in there. Whatever the reason, I'd never woken up to find anybody standing over me.

This kid out in Donnersville said it's not good to have all those flames in the house with the moon cooking,
I said.

T-Boom shrugged.
Those Donnersville meth heads don't know. Unless that kid's gonna come get the electric turned on, he needs to shut up. I know what I'm doing. Keep everything separate.
T-Boom cursed and looked hard at me.

Sometimes the evil came fast to him—one minute smiling and the next, his face twisting into some kind of rage nobody saw coming. Once, on the basketball court, he knocked a kid from the other team clear across the gym. He was suspended for two games after that.

But most days, T-Boom was all sweetness, and it was hard not to remember that first time he walked over to me . . . I felt the sadness creeping up quick, put another small taste of moon in my mouth and told T-Boom I had to go, that I'd see him next time.

You should think about going home, Laurel. I bet your daddy would take you back again. You just gotta leave the moon alone. Me and you, we're not like those meth heads—we could leave this stuff alone if we wanted to.

Yeah,
I said.
I know that.

But I knew all I was thinking about was how the moon was washing over me, disappearing all the sadness.

T-Boom wiped his nose and sniffed hard.

I'm just about through with this, Laurel,
he said
.
There's a place up in Summitville I been hearing about, thinking about. Say they can clean you up real good, all the way so you don't slip back to wanting it. I know we don't need some program, but Coach said if I show him I could do it, I'd be back on the team come next season. Get two more years of playing in.

He leaned against the doorway, swatting at some invisible something near his head. The moon did that, made you feel things that weren't there.
There's a place in Summitville,
he said again.
I'm gonna go there.

Yeah,
I said.
That sounds nice. That sounds real good. Summitville.

They say it's easier if people do it together,
T-Boom said.
Me and you could do it together. Then you could go back to cheering, and I could play ball again. Be like it used to be.

I put my hands in my pockets and fingered the moon. The tiny plastic bags felt warm and good and right. Before I headed back out of town, I'd do a little bit more behind the 7-Eleven. Then walk for a while before trying to hitch back to Donnersville. With the moon inside of me, the walk wouldn't be cold, the night wouldn't be dark. I smiled at T-Boom. He was over six feet tall, but he looked small standing there twitching and swatting. He looked like something a little bit broken. Looked like some little kid's electric toy that was short-circuiting out.

It's all gonna be all right, T-Boom. We're all gonna be all right.
I started walking backwards away from him.
No worries, T-Boom. We don't have any worries.

T-Boom watched me. He said something, but I couldn't hear it. Then he stepped back, gave me a long, broken-faced look—like everything in the world that was wrong was his own fault—and closed the door.

other houses

AFTER I LEFT
the House that night, snow started falling. It was early April, but snow was coming down. Not hard, just flakes of it, like tiny lights in the darkness. As I passed by window after window, I saw smiling families around dinner tables. It wasn't until I walked past the last window that I saw a woman carrying a ham to a table decorated with colored eggs and green plastic grass. I stopped then and stood there in the darkness watching the family bow their heads. It was Easter Sunday. A little boy turned in his chair and seemed to look straight at me. We stayed like that for I don't know how long—me looking into his life, him looking out at mine. Then the others raised their heads and he turned back toward the dinner. The moon was floating through me, and I smiled, thinking about Jesse Jr.—his face pressed against the car window, his eyes begging. Something warm and wet was surrounding me, and I laughed at the heat inside the snow. The hurt of wanting the moon was gone now, replaced by something heavy. Not heavy. Light. Free. I was free. Tears. The warm thing wasn't snow. Where were the tears coming from? Who was crying on me? I stopped walking and wiped at my eyes, but whoever was crying on me kept on crying. I laughed, and the tears came harder. Jesse Jr.'s face faded away, and Mama was there, laughing. Behind her, my grandmother, M'lady, sat on a porch, rocking slowly, looking at me like she couldn't quite see me.
Laurel?
She leaned forward and squinted into the darkness.
Is that you? Laurel . . . ?

I walked faster, away from her. I didn't want her to see me with all of this water coming out of me. Didn't want her to be reminded.

Laurel.

I tried to run, but the hurting was back, and the cold was like a wall pushing against me.

Laurel!

I stopped—my breath coming heavy—and turned, ready to tell M'lady and Mama to go to Jackson.
It's dry in Jackson.

Laurel, is that you?

Slowly, Mama faded, and M'lady turned into my friend Kaylee, shivering on her front porch. I looked around—how had I gotten on her street when Donnersville was in the other direction?

We stared at each other a long time. I could tell she was looking me over, taking in my ragged coat and bloody lips.

Laurel,
she said,
look at you. Look at yourself! Who did you turn into?!

pass christian, mississippi

THE CITY OF PASS CHRISTIAN
sits right there on the Gulf of Mexico—blue-gray water and white sand so pretty my daddy used to say it reminded him of my mama's hair. Go down to the water, and the peace comes over you so deep you'd think it was the true ocean even if you'd never seen the sea. Hot wind damp with salt all day long until your skin freckled all over. If somebody would've told me that water and that sand and the way that wind blew my hair into my face wasn't always gonna be there, I would have looked at them and laughed and said what my daddy always used to say:
You ever met a person from the Pass that gave up when times got hard?

In 2005 I was eleven years old, and I'd been in Pass Christian, right close to Long Beach, Mississippi, all my life. Since third grade, all I ever wanted to do was tell stories. I'd tell them to whoever was listening, and most times that person was the Grandlady of the House—my mama's mama. From the time I could talk, she'd said that's what I had to call her, not Grandma or Nana or even her name—Helene. The Grandlady of the House—or M'lady.

M'lady was tall and, as she always said,
thick boned, not fat. There's a difference, Laurel.
She had blue hair hanging long down her back, and I thought that blue was the prettiest color hair I'd ever seen
. It's the rinse
I use,
she'd say to me.
This shade's hard to come by. You see people trying for it all the time, but most times, theirs is off-color, like dank water.

Some days, I'd just climb up onto the couch and sit running my fingers through her hair. Felt like hours I could do that, us just sitting quiet, me running my fingers through her long blue hair.

She could make just about anything—pretty crocheted doll dresses, grits and boiled shrimp, sweet potato pie with a Louisiana praline crust. She'd been born in Louisiana, and there was French in her blood. And that's how she learned to make gumbo.
I don't just make any old gumbo,
M'lady would say, stirring so many things into the big pot so fast that I got dizzy from watching.
I make a gourmet gumbo. Not everybody can cook gourmet. They might say they can, but their cooking's just regular. Watch here, Laurel. Learn yourself some gourmet.
On the days she made gumbo, people always found a way to just drop by our house to talk about church or the weather or how fish didn't seem to be biting.

Anyone could be a grandma, Laurel,
M'lady said to me one morning.
All you do is have yourself some children and wait for those children to have themselves some children and then it's done. But it takes more than that to be a Lady.

We were sitting on her couch. The small hole I'd dug in it had some filling sticking out, and I pulled at it until M'lady slapped my hand away.

Not anybody, M'lady,
I said.
Not daddies.

Not men, I guess.
M'lady was working the hem out of a pair of my pants. I'd grown over the winter, and it was springtime. When I pulled the pants on, they stopped just above my ankles, and M'lady bent down and raised up the hem, saying,
There's some fabric here. We could get another good inch out of these.

I watched her work the seam ripper underneath the material, then gently slide it along until it hitched on something, making her slow down a bit to work through the thicker stitches.

And you can't be a grandma if you don't get old,
I said, my fingers slowly finding their way back to the hole in the couch.

M'lady stopped working the pants and looked at me, her pale eyes almost the same color as her hair.

You planning not to get old?

Just last week you told me that some people just don't get old. Said some people die before they even get one baby going.

M'lady went back to the pants and made a
tsk
sound.
Since when do you listen to everything I say? And remember it, too.

You told me I have to listen if I want to tell stories. Told me the best stories come from other people's stories. You don't remember saying that, M'lady?

Hmph,
M'lady said. But she was smiling to herself.

She finished one leg and moved over to the other, gathering the cuff around her hand.

My plan is this—you gonna get old, Laurel. You gonna grow up first, though, find your husband—somebody you love a lot and loves you more—

I started to huff about not wanting a husband, but M'lady shushed me.

Just listen to me, girl. Just listen.

I folded my arms and threw myself back against her couch, but I didn't say anything more.

You gonna start writing down your stories. He's gonna listen to you read them, and he'll tell you everything he loves about them—just like I do now.

M'lady looked at me and smiled. I tried not to smile back, but I did a little bit.

Then you and your husband gonna have some babies. My great-grandbabies. I plan to be here to see at least one or two get born. And one day, they'll have some babies and you'll be old like me and you'll remember this talk. And you'll smile . . . remembering me.

I laid my head against M'lady's arm and didn't say anything. My mind on the future she'd already put down for me.