Gods in Alabama (11 page)

trance broken. There, in glorious Technicolor, glossy and thick, clinging to the ceiling by his six hairy feet, was the grandfather of all Alabama roaches.

In Chicago, when someone says, “Eeek, a roach!” they mean a prim little buglet is mincing its way up the wainscoting. In Alabama those same words mean something completely different.

I had never seen an Alabama roach when my mother and I moved back down to live with Aunt Florence, Uncle Bruster, and Clarice. I was just a kid. My second night in their house, I went into the hall bathroom to brush my teeth. Before, I remembered it had had kid wallpaper with fat baby dinosaurs scrubbing themselves in bubbly bathtubs. I guessed Aunt Florence had put the wallpaper up after she had Wayne. It had been primary colors, very boyish. But like his bedroom, the whole bathroom had been purged of anything remotely Wayne-like. The walls were now a soothing mental-institution pink, and the dinosaur shower cur-tain had been replaced by a pink plastic liner. On the floor was a loopy throw rug. It was striped in bright pink and blue and yellow and shaped like a tropical fish. The floor was made of tiny white tiles, like rows and rows of square teeth, scrubbed so aggressively that the grout between was almost as white as the tiles.

I opened the drawer by the sink and saw that Clarice had Angel Gel toothpaste. This was a kid toothpaste, new on the market. My mother, back in the days when she bought toothpaste, always bought regular old Crest. Angel Gel was pale pink and opalescent, and I squirted a generous measure onto my brush.

Something caught my eye, a large black spot on the Pepto-Bismol hand towel. Just as I looked towards it, the spot launched itself, spreading, shooting towards me with a buzzing, mechani-cal hiss. It landed on my toothbrush. Its mouth unfolded, separating into four parts, and it clipped a neat slice out of my pink toothpaste.

I threw the toothbrush away from me, hard, and then the whole world went into slo-mo. I watched the toothbrush spinning through the air, and as it fell, the creature clinging to its tip launched itself off the bristles, spreading its wings again and zooming in agonizing detail towards my head.

I fled shrieking down the hall, and that was my introduction to the Alabama roach, also known as a palmetto bug. Ever since that moment I have hated them with a black passion. The thought that one might touch me while I was sleeping, or run over my foot as I walked upstairs, haunted my summers.

This one, now on the den ceiling, was close to four inches long. He was hanging upside down right over my face.

I rolled quickly away and ran for the kitchen. I had the house to myself. Uncle Bruster was on his mail route. Aunt Florence was out working in her huge vegetable garden, where she spent most of her mornings. This was before she thought to put a lock on the cabinet where Mama’s meds were kept, so she had dragged Mama down to the garden to keep an eye on her.

Clarice was sunbathing in the yard. She had wanted me to lie out with her, but I had chosen to mope inside, pale and sweating in three layers of black clothes.

On top of the refrigerator, Aunt Florence kept a noxious green spray bottle full of a solution called Dead Roach. It’s always been my theory that Alabama roaches are organized. The poisoned ones run home so their families can eat them while they’re dying.

The babies take tiny bites, ingesting enough to get a resistance to whatever killed Daddy. But they couldn’t resist Dead Roach. It was vicious. Warnings all over the back label advised that its fumes alone could blind you and the actual liquid could melt human flesh. If a pregnant woman came within fifty feet of it, she would probably bear a child with fangs and chitinous wings.

I ran back into the den with it and sprayed up, coating the monster. He shivered and clung and then fell to the floor. I kept spraying him as he ran in ever decreasing circles. I saturated the rug. The cloying burnt-sugar smell of poison clouded the entire room. But still he kept crawling, around and around, his movements disjointed, like the lurching of a cheaply made windup toy.

He was dying by inches, and it seemed to go on for a long time.

I took off my shoe, intending to finish the job manually, but I couldn’t seem to bring myself to smash him. He was pitiful, and I started to feel sorry for what I had done to him. He was so strong-willed, so determined to live, and he had no chance. He was like me, poisoned inside and out, only he was doing a better job of staggering on. I sank into teen melancholia and lay on the floor beside him, keeping him company until he inevitably lost his battle.

That’s where Clarice found me. Lying on the floor next to his corpse, clutching my shoe to my chest, rocking myself and snivel-ing. Clarice smelled like baby oil and exasperation. She prodded me gently with one pink-tipped toe.

“Arlene,” she said. “When’s this going to stop?”

She helped me up and dragged me off to our room. She left me to get a cool washrag from the bathroom, then bathed my face.

She gently pried my shoe out of my hands and played at Prince Charming, unlacing it and shoving it back on my foot. Clarice, taking care of me once again, remained serene and smooth while I sweated and snuffled, excreting vile fluids from every pore and orifice.

I let her minister to me, but half of me wanted to crawl under the bed, and the other half wanted to bite her. I was like the man who almost burns up in a fire. Months later, he’s still jumping at the sight of matches, and everyone else is bored with it. They want to be able to have a smoke in peace, but oh, can’t light up here. Mr. Trauma won’t like it.

“I don’t know how I’m going to go to school on Monday,” I said. “Clarice, he’s going to be there.”

She busied herself tightening and retying my laces. “You’re not going to think about that, we decided.” Her voice was steady, matter-of-fact. “That didn’t happen. And he’s a senior. You get through this one year, and then he’ll be gone.”

“He’ll see me. He’ll look at us, and he knows everything about me,” I said.

She looked up from my shoe, and her eyes narrowed. “He doesn’t know . . . he doesn’t know”—she dropped her voice to an outraged whisper—“shit! Not about you or me.” I was so shocked to hear that word come out of her pretty pink mouth that I stopped puling and actually listened to her.

“This was your decision, Arlene,” she said, her voice cool and level. “You are the one who said it never happened, and I said okay because I didn’t know what else there was to do. And that’s good, it was a good idea, but now you have to make it be true.

You can’t say it never happened and then creep around everywhere looking like, well, looking like it sure as heck did. Are you saying now it did happen and I have to try and unerase my whole brain or whatever and lie around the house with you and help you be all smelly and traumatized?”

“No,” I whispered. “It never happened. We weren’t even there when it didn’t happen. We agreed.”

“Then get off your butt. Now. Get in the shower. You smell like mold. Put on some clean clothes. Ones with, like, a color.

And then let’s grab a ride to the mall and spend every penny my mama gave us for school clothes.”

“On what?” I said.

“School clothes, dummy,” she said. “Pretty things, not my daddy’s old work shirts dyed black and stacked three deep. If I didn’t know better, I might think you were enjoying all this drama. It stops now. We are going to eat pretzels with cheese and see all our friends, and you are going to smile and act like a human. If you can’t do it, if you walk around the mall like a ghost, then everything changes. Because I won’t go to school tomorrow and pretend everything is fine unless everything really
is
fine.” Her voice was rising in volume and pitch. “So you make it fine. Now. Or admit it isn’t. But you can’t make me keep making it fine for both of us while you wallow around and suffer. You have to help me. You have to help me make it fine. I have to be this perfect shiny girl, happy-happy every minute, and I can’t do it by myself, Arlene.”

She was shaking. For the first time I saw the crack in her smooth facade, and I realized I’d misjudged her terribly. She was doing this because we had agreed that it had never happened, and the cool and constant sunshine she exuded was nothing more than an act of will.

“I’ll get in the shower,” I agreed. “I’ll make it fine.”

And I did. I did exactly what she said. By the time Aunt Flo and Mama came in with a basket of tomatoes, I was dressed in a long peach-colored flowered skirt with a matching crop top and sandals. I had clean hair, brushed and everything. I had on lip gloss and mascara. Clarice was dressed, too, and we were sitting at the kitchen table.

“Hey, y’all,” I said. “Can we maybe get a ride to the mall?”

Mama didn’t look up from setting the tomatoes in a row on the kitchen windowsill, but Aunt Florence stared at me with a faint and wary hope dawning in her eyes.

I curled my lips upward and showed her my teeth. Florence ripped off her sun hat and hurled it onto the kitchen counter, stumbling over Mama in her haste to get to her keys.

At the mall, safely out of her mother’s earshot, Clarice said,

“You don’t know what I’ve had to do to keep Mama off you all summer. I have told my nice mama so many lies! I said you were mooning over a boy, the boy liked another girl, the other girl was being mean to you about it whenever you left the house . . . I’m surprised my tongue hasn’t caught fire and burned itself right out of my head.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t help you more,” I said.

“You’re helping me now. That counts for a lot.”

We linked arms and went to spend Aunt Florence’s money. I found out the more I played at being fine, the easier it was. I could sit up in the driver’s seat of my brain and watch myself pretend to be Arlene. Well, not really Arlene, more like Clarice Junior. I sparkled and said, “Well, hey!” to all her friends.

We bought the clothes she picked and tried on trampy things her mother wouldn’t let us bring in the house, much less wear, and we giggled like real girls. By the time we were ready to call Uncle Bruster to come get us, I was able to smile like a well-trained monkey and answer questions about my summer on complete autopilot. I was shocked by how easy it was. The surprising thing was that Clarice had figured out how to do it before I had. Historically, I had always been the better liar.

We were walking back to the food court to hit the pay phones when we saw him. Jim Beverly was sitting with some of the other football players, all of them scarfing down tacos and acting rowdy. They were just being boys, I suppose, but the whole scene felt sinister and larger than life. Their gestures seemed slow and exaggerated, their voices strident but indistinct. I had the impression of loud talk, raucous laughter, but no idea what was being said. I slowed, but Clarice clamped an iron hand on my arm and kept me marching.

We had to pass by them to get to the phones. We could have circled out, but I suppose Clarice thought that was too obvious.

So we headed past them. Clarice’s jaw was set, her chin lifted. To a stranger, it would seem as if she were totally unaware of them, but her eyes were glossy and bright. They looked plastic. They were dead things in her pretty, proud face. I was a skeleton beside her. It was as if I had no skin to soften the stark grin of my skull, no tendons or muscles to keep my bones from clashing and jan-gling together, chipping and splintering as I walked.

We came abreast of the rowdy group when one of them, it was Bud, lifted his hand and said, “Hey there, Clarice.” Several of the other boys lifted their hands, too, Jim Beverly among them.

“Clariiiiiiiice,” one of them hooted.

We both nodded and smiled, jerky as puppets, and continued the death march. The food court darkened. If there were any other girls present, I couldn’t see them. Among the chairs and tables, the eyes of boys shone like hot lamps, all of them fastening on Clarice, who walked by plastic and proud, unknowing. And then they were behind us. I sensed those eyes following my cousin, inching out into the air on stalks to stay close to her. I felt, more than thought, a sudden promise. I knew how to make up for it, this whole summer. I knew how to make up for everything. I would protect Clarice. I would be her secret knight.

We entered the hallway where the bank of pay phones stood.

And I was fine. I was back in the driver’s seat, watching Arlene and Clarice dig in their purses for change, and the worst was over.

I had seen Jim Beverly, and I had neither spontaneously combusted nor used his plastic Taco Bell spork to pop out one of his eyes and dig deep into his brain.

Only a single school year separated me from the moment I would smash his head in with a bottle, so it was more like a re-prieve than a cure. But at the time it felt like a small flavor of miracle.

Bud had left the football boys to follow Clarice. He came into the hallway before either of us had dug up phone change. “You calling for a ride?” Bud said.

“Yes, we’re done here,” Clarice replied, smiling at him. Jim Beverly and most of his crowd were from Fruiton, but Bud was one of us. A Possett kid. We’d known him since grade school.

Clarice indicated the host of bags at our feet. “We are flat broke and happy as clams.”

“I’d take you, but I only still have my learner’s for four more months. My dad is coming by at five or so to get me. We could take you on home and save your folks the drive.”

I was smiling my big fake-ass smile, already shaking my head, but Bud was looking at Clarice. And Clarice was nodding.

“That’d be sweet, Bud. Just let me call my folks and tell them.”

She went back to digging in her purse, but Bud whipped out a handful of change and extended it to her on the palm of his hand.

Clarice picked out enough for the phone and simpered, I swear to God, she simpered at him.

“Clarice, it’s not even four-fifteen yet,” I said, nudging her foot with mine, but she ignored me and made the call.

“Hey, Arlene,” said Bud, as if he had only at that moment noticed me.

Clarice hung up the phone and said, “All set,” smiling up at Bud. Way up at Bud. He’d been junior varsity as a freshman and looked like he’d shot up another four inches over the summer. He spent his summers in Mississippi with his grandparents and then went to a sports camp, so we hadn’t seen him at church.