Trash (28 page)

“You will, huh?” She snagged one of his belt loops and tugged it possessively.

“You know I will.”

“Uh huh.”

They kissed like I was not in the room, so I pretended I was not, folding sheets while the kiss turned to giggles and then pinches and another kiss. Jo and Jaybird have been together almost nine years. I liked Jay more than any other guy Jo ever brought around. He was older than the type she used to chase. Jo wouldn’t say, but Mama swore Pammy’s daddy was a kid barely out of junior high. “Your sister likes them young,” she complained. “Too young.”

Jay was a vet. He had an ugly scar under his chin and a gruff voice. Mostly, he didn’t talk. He worked at the garage, making do with hand gestures and a stern open face. Only with Jo did he let himself relax. He didn’t drink except for twice a year—each time he asked Jo to marry him, and every time she said no. Then Jay went and got seriously drunk. Jo didn’t let anyone say a word against him, but she also refused to admit he was little Beth’s daddy, though they were as alike as two puppies from the same litter.

“To hell with boots,” Jo joked at me over Jay’s shoulder. “Old Jaybird’s all I really need.” She gave him another kiss and a fast tug on his dark blond hair. He wiggled against her happily. I hugged the worn cotton sheet in my arms. I’d hate it if Jo ran Jay off, but maybe she wouldn’t. Sometimes Jo was as tender with Jay as if she intended to keep him around forever.

 

Arlene lived at Castle Estates, an apartment complex off Highway 50 on the way out to the airport. It looked to me like Kentucky Ridge where she was two years ago, and Dunbarton Gardens five years before that. Squat identical two-story structures, dotted with upstairs decks and imitation wood beams set in fields of parking spaces and low unrecognizable blue-green hedges. Castle Estates was known for its big corner turrets and ersatz iron gate decorated with mock silver horseheads. It gleamed like malachite in the Florida sunshine.

When I visited last spring, I went over for a day and joked that if I wanted to take a walk, I’d have to leave a trail of breadcrumbs to find my way back. Arlene didn’t think it was funny.

“What are you talking about? No one walks anywhere in central Florida. You want to drown in your own sweat?”

In Arlene’s apartments, the air conditioner was always set on high and all the windows sealed. The few times I stayed with her, I’d huddle in her spare room, tucked under her old
Bewitched
sleeping bag, my fingers clutching the fabric under Elizabeth Montgomery’s pink-and-cream chin. Out in the front room the television droned nondenominational rock and roll on the VH-1 music channel. Beneath the backbeat, I heard the steady thunk of the mechanical ratchets on the stair-stepper. Since she turned thirty, Arlene spends her insomniac nights climbing endlessly to music she hated when it was first released.

The night before we moved Mama into MacArthur, the thunking refrain went on too long. I made myself lie still as long as I could, but eventually I sneaked out to check on Arlene. The lights were dimmed way down and the television set provided most of the illumination. The stair-stepper was set up close to the TV, and my mouth went dry when I saw my little sister. She was braced between the side rails, arms extended rigidly and head hanging down between her arms. I watched her legs as they trembled and lifted steadily, up and up and up. A shiver went through me. I tried to think of something to say, some way to get her off those steps.

Arlene’s head lifted, and I saw her face. Cheeks flushed red; eyes squeezed shut. Her open mouth gasped at the cold filtered air. She was crying, but inaudibly, her features rigid with strain and tightened to a grotesque mask. She looked like some animal in a trap, tearing herself and going on—up and up and up. I watched her mouth working, curses visible on the dry cracked lips. With a low grunt, she picked up her speed and dropped her head again. I stepped back into the darkened doorway. I did not want to have to speak, did not want to have to excuse seeing her like that. It was bad enough to have seen. But I have never understood my little sister more than I did in that moment—never before realized how much alike we really were.

 

Jack has been sober for more than a decade, something Jo and I found increasingly hard to believe. Mama boasted of how proud she was of him. Her Jack didn’t go to AA or do any of those programs people talk about. Her Jack did it on his own.

“Those AA people—they ask forgiveness,” Jo said once. “They make amends.” She cackled at the idea, and I smiled. Jack asking forgiveness was about as hard to imagine as him staying sober. For years we teased each other, “You think it will last?” Then in unison, we would go, “Naaa!”

Neither of us can figure out how it has lasted, but Jack has stayed sober, never drinking. Of course, he also never made amends.

“For what?” he said. For what?

“I did the best I could with all those girls,” Jack told the doctor, the night Arlene was carried into the emergency room raving and kicking. It was the third and last time she mixed vodka and sleeping pills, and only a year or so after Jack first got sober, the same year I was working up in Atlanta and could fly down on short notice. Jo called me from the emergency room and said, “Get here fast, looks like she an’t gonna make it this time.”

Jo was wrong about that, though as it turned out we were both grateful she got me to come. Arlene came close to putting out the eye of the orderly who tried to help the nurses strap her down. She did break his nose, and chipped two teeth that belonged to the rent-a-cop who came over to play hero. The nurses fared better, getting away with only a few scratches and one moderately unpleasant bite mark.

“I’ll kill you,” Arlene kept screaming. “I’ll fucking kill you all!” Then after a while, “You’re killing me. You’re killing me!”

It was Jo who had found Arlene. Baby sister had barely been breathing, her face and hair sour with vomit. Jo called the ambulance, and then poured cold water all over Arlene’s head and shoulders until she became conscious enough to scream. For a day and a half, Jo told me, Arlene was finally who she should have been from the beginning. She cursed with outrage and flailed with wild conviction. “You should have seen it,” Jo told me.

By the time I got there, Arlene was going in and out—one minute sobbing and weak and the next minute rearing up to shout. The conviction was just about gone. When she was quiet for a little while, I looked in at her, but I couldn’t bring myself to speak. Every breath Arlene drew seemed to suck oxygen out of the room. Then Jack came in the door and it was as if she caught fire at the sight of him. For the first and only time in her life she called him a son of a bitch to his face.

“You, you,” she screamed. “You are killing me! Get out. Get out. I’ll rip your dick off if you don’t get the hell out of here.”

“She’s gone completely crazy,” Jack told everyone, but it sounded like sanity to me.

The psychiatric nurse kept pushing for sedation, but Jo and I fought them on that. Let her scream it out, we insisted. By some miracle they listened to us, and left her alone. We stayed in the hall outside the room, listening to Arlene as she slowly wound herself down.

“I did the best I could,” Jack kept saying to the doctor. “You can see what it was like. I just never knew what to do.”

Jo and I kept our distance. Neither of us said a word.

By the third morning, Arlene was gray-faced and repentant. When we went in to check on her, her eyes would not rise to meet ours.

“I’m all right,” she said in a thick hoarse whisper. “And I won’t ever let that happen again.”

“Damn pity,” Jo told me later. “That was just about the only time I’ve ever really liked her. Crazy out of her mind, she made sense. Sane, I don’t understand her at all.”

 

“What do you think happens after death?” Mama asked me.

She and I were sitting alone waiting for the doctor to come back. They were giving her IV fluids and oral medicines to help her with the nausea, but she was sick to her stomach all the time and trying hard not to show it. “Come on, tell me,” she said.

I looked at Mama’s temples where the skin had begun to sink in. A fine gray shadow was slowly widening and deepening. Her closed eyes were like marbles under a sheet. I rubbed my neck. I was too tired to lie to her.

“You close your eyes,” I said. “Then you open them, start over.”

“God!” Mama shuddered. “I hope not.”

 

Jo was a breeder, Ridgebacks and Rottweilers. A third of every litter had to be put down. Jo always had it done at the vet’s office, while she held them in her arms and sobbed. She kept their birth dates and names in lists under the glass top of her coffee table, christening them all for rock-and-rollers, even the ones she had to kill.

“Axl is getting kind of old,” she told me on the phone before I came last spring. “But you should see Bon Jovi the Third. We’re gonna get a dynasty out of her.”

After her daughter Beth was born, Jo had her own tubes tied. Still she hated to fix her bitches, and found homes for every dog born on her place. “Only humans should be stopped from breeding,” she told me once. “Dogs know when to eat their runts. Humans don’t know shit.”

Four years ago Jo was arrested for breaking into a greyhound puppy farm up near Apopka. Mama was healthy back then, but didn’t have a dime to spare. Jaybird called me to help them find a lawyer and get Jo out on bail. It was expensive. Jo had blown up the incinerator at the farm. The police insisted she had used stolen dynamite, but Jo refused to talk about that. What she wanted to talk about was what she had heard, that hundreds of dogs had been burned in that cinder-block firepit.

“Alive. Alive,” she told the judge. “Three different people told me. Those monsters get drunk, stoke up the fire, and throw in all the puppies they can’t sell. Alive, the sonsabitches! Don’t even care if anyone hears them scream.” From the back of the court-room, I could hear the hysteria in her voice.

“Imagine it. Little puppies, starved in cages and then caught up and tossed in the fire.” Jo shook her head. Gray streaks shone against the black. The judge grimaced. I wondered if she was getting to him.

“And then”—she glared across the courtroom—“they sell the ash and bone for fertilizer.” Beside me Jaybird wiggled uncomfortably.

Jo got a suspended sentence, but only after her lawyer proved the puppy farmers had a history of citations from Animal Protection. Jo had to pay the cost of the incinerator, which was made easier when people started writing her and sending checks. The newspaper had made her a Joan of Arc of dogs. It got so bad the farm closed up the dog business and shifted over to pigs.

“I don’t give a rat’s ass about pigs,” Jo promised the man when she wrote him his check.

“Well, I can appreciate that.” He grinned at us. “Almost nobody does.”

“How’d you get that dynamite?” I asked Jo when we were driving away in Jay’s truck. It was the one thing she had dodged throughout the trial.

“Didn’t use no dynamite.” She nudged Jaybird’s shoulder. “Old Bird here gave me a grenade he’d brought back from the army. Didn’t think it would work. I just promised I’d get rid of it for him. But it was a fuck-up.” She frowned. “It just blew the back wall out of that incinerator. They got all that money off me under false pretenses.”

 

Every time Jack came to the hospital, he brought food, greasy bags of hamburgers and fries from the Checker Inn, melted milk shakes from the diner on the highway, and half-eaten boxes of chocolate. Mama ate nothing, just watched him. The bones of her face stood out like the girders of a bridge.

Jo and I went down to the coffee shop. Arlene, who had come in with Jack, stayed up with them. “He wants her to get up and come home,” she reported to us when she came down an hour later.

Jo laughed and blew smoke over Arlene’s head in a long thin stream. “Right,” she barked, and offered Arlene one of her Marlboros.

“I can’t smoke that shit,” Arlene said. She pulled out her alligator case and lit a Salem with a little silver lighter. When Jo said nothing, Arlene relaxed a little and opened the bag of potato chips we had saved for her. “He’s lost the checkbook again,” she said in my direction. “Says he wants to know where we put her box of Barr Dollars so he can buy gas for the Buick.”

“He’s gonna lose everything as soon as she’s gone.” Jo pushed her short boots off with her toes and put her feet up on another seat. “He’s sending the bills back marked ‘deceased.’ The mortgage payment, for God’s sake.” She shook her head and took a potato chip from Arlene’s bag.

“He’ll be living on the street in no time.” Her voice was awful with anticipation.

Arlene turned to me. “Where are the Barr Dollars?”

I shook my head. Last I knew, Mama had stashed in her wallet exactly five one-dollar bills signed by Joseph W. Barr—crisp dollar bills she was sure would be worth money someday, though I had no idea why she thought so.

“Girls.”

Jack stood in the doorway. He looked uncomfortable with the three of us sitting together. “She’s looking better,” he said diffidently.

Arlene nodded. Jo let blue smoke trail slowly out of her nose. I said nothing. I could feel my cheeks go stiff. I looked at the way Jack’s hairline was receding, the gray bush of his military haircut thinning out and slowly exposing the bony structure of his head.

“Well.” Jack’s left hand gripped the doorframe. He let go and flexed his fingers in the air. When the hand came down again, it gripped so hard the fingertips went white. My eyes were drawn there, unable to look away from the knuckles standing out knobby and hard. Beside me Jo tore her empty potato chip bag in half, spilling crumbs on the linoleum tabletop. Arlene shifted in her chair. I heard the elevator gears grind out in the hall.

“I was gonna go home,” Jack said. He let go of the doorjamb.

“Good night, Daddy,” Arlene called after him. He waved a hand and walked away.