Wire Mesh Mothers (20 page)

When the family moved to MeadowView, they got cable. Daddy hooked up something he said he wasn’t supposed to do, but damn it, he swore, communication was supposed to be free, the Constitution said so, so cable was supposed to be free, too. Mama said Daddy probably was right. Mistie liked T.V. even better in Pippins than in Kentucky. Fifty-five channels, not counting the ones where they sold jewelry all the time and where the guys just stood in front of a bunch of people and talked about books.

She missed T.V. She wanted to go home and watch “Princess
Silverlace
” and “Cat Dog” and “Sesame Street” and “Power Puff Girls.”

The girl and teacher had used a rock to break a window out of one of the cabins. The girl had said, “This is the Camp Director’s cabin, it’s gotta have something we can use in there!” And wham! She threw a rock in the window and the teacher threw a rock in the window. Then the girl had said to Mistie, “Climb in there and unlock the door, Baby Doll.”

Baby Doll. The mean girl called her Baby Doll. That was a nice name. Mistie climbed inside with help from the teacher and found a light switch. She turned it on and looked around. There was a bed, a dresser, a closet, a television. She turned the television on but there was nothing but
squiggley
lines.

“Hey!” The shout came from outside, through the broken window glass. “Open the goddamned door!”

Mistie looked at the window glass on the floor. It was sharp but pretty, like gems on a crown. She looked at the bed. It looked a lot like Mama and Daddy’s bed except the cover was smoothed out and made up. Daddy and Mama slept together in a bed back in the trailer. Mistie slept in a room by herself. Sometimes when Mama was out of the trailer and Mistie was home, Daddy would come to Mistie’s room and put her on her bed and say, “C’mon, honey, give me some sugar ‘cause your Mama don’t love me no more.” He would rub her between her legs and kiss her on the mouth. He tasted like tobacco juice. One time when she gagged he got mad and spit into her mouth and made her swallow it down.

“Now!” said the girl outside the window. “Or I’ll crawl in there after you, don’t think I can’t squeeze through this little hole!”

Mistie rubbed herself and looked at the bed
. Little hole.
Sometimes Daddy said something like that; when Mama was gone he liked to pull Mistie into his own bedroom and put her on the bed. He’d pull up her nightie and say, “I can get in that little, sweet hole! It’s much better than your Mama’s. She’s a frigid old bat.” If Mistie was good and let him stick her and kiss her, then Daddy would let her watch whatever she wanted on T.V. for the rest of the night. He wouldn’t even cuss over Princess
Silverlace
.

The girl had her head in the window hole, and her shoulders were nearly through. She was grunting. Mistie went out of the bedroom and into a dark, pine-paneled living room. There was a front door with a latch. She stared at the latch, not sure what to do with it. She pawed it, and tugged it. Then she turned the steel button and heard a
clack
. A second later, the door was thrown open by the girl. Mistie stumbled back several steps.

“This place got food and clothes?” the girl asked Mistie, then shook her head. “Why would I ask you?” The gun was in her hand. She waved it out the door and the teacher came in. The teacher hadn’t said anything for a long time. She looked like she was sleeping, but with her eyes open and standing up.

“Baby Doll, sit on that sofa there,” said the girl. Mistie dropped to the seat. It was soft and she rolled to the middle between the cushions. There was a clock on the wall near a fireplace. It was a black cat with eyes that went back and forth and a tail that did the same.

The teacher and the girl went into the bedroom. Mistie heard the girl say, “Oh, yeah, this works.” They came out with an armload of clothes. The girl threw some at Mistie. They fell short and hit the floor.

“Figured the director would have a few things here. Wouldn’t carry everything back and forth each time. Put those on.”

Mistie picked the clothes off the floor. There was a pair of sweatpants with a drawstring at the waist. There was a sweatshirt with
Tweety
Bird on the front. There was a denim jacket. All of them were too big for her.
 

Mistie looked at the girl. What about her nightie?

The girl had kicked off her shoes and socks and was pulling on a pair of white socks. The teacher wasn’t doing anything but looking at the floor, clothes over her own arm.

“Change!” said the girl. “You want to go in the lake again?”

Mistie took off her wet coat and the wet cardigan. She wriggled out of the wet underpants Mr. Angelone had given her at school. She didn’t want to take off her wet nightie. She pulled on the sweatpants underneath the gown and drew it up as tightly as she could around her waist. She tried to tie the strings together but they wouldn’t stay. Then she rolled up the legs so she could walk.

The teacher hadn’t moved. “What’s wrong,” asked the girl. “Afraid to let me see your body? Think it’s disgusting? It is. But you better change or you can just freeze to death out there. Your choice. We’ve got some walking to do.”

The teacher put the clothes she was holding on the back of the sofa. She took off her coat and dropped it to the floor. She pulled on a pair of red knee socks. Then, she picked up the jeans and stepped into them like she thought they, or she, might break if she moved too quickly. She pulled them up to her waist and snapped them closed. They were large, but not so big they fell off. She unzipped her skirt down the back, stepped out of it, then pulled her sweater off over her head and added it to the wet pile on the floor. She was wearing a white bra. It had streaks of brown-green on it. Lake water.

Mistie’s Mama had big titties. The teacher did, too, all round and poking out from her chest. Mistie stared. She didn’t think teachers had titties. Titties were things Daddy’s liked to suck and play with. Why would a teacher have titties?

Mistie looked at the girl. She had taken off her wet trousers and was already in a pair of loose, tan corduroy pants. She was trying to put on a “WWJD” sweatshirt underneath the striped shirt without taking off the striped shirt or putting down the gun. Mistie tugged the
Tweety
sweatshirt on over the nightie. It was clinging and damp on her skin, but it still felt good. She put on the denim jacket, and then her socks and shoes.

The girl struggled with the sweatshirt and gun. She got her arms out of the shirt sleeves, one at a time, and unbutton the top few buttons so she could slip the sweatshirt on over her head and down through the shirt. It looked like a magic guy Mistie had seen on T.V. trying to get out of a straightjacket. For a brief second the girl’s arms went up as she threaded the sweatshirt through the neck hole, and Mistie could see that the girl didn’t have a bra on, but some sort of bandage wrapped around her chest. Maybe she had shot herself when Mistie was asleep?

The teacher was now dressed, with a vinyl zipper jacket over her own “Camp Lakeview” sweatshirt. She had sandals on over her knee socks. The girl had a long, green slippery raincoat and hiking boots.

Off the living room was a small kitchen with an empty refrigerator but stocked pantry. The girl instructed Mistie and the teacher to fill a canvas duffel bag with as many cans of food as they could. A can opener from a splintery kitchen drawer was tossed in with it all. With one last inspection, the girl found the T.V. buzzing in the bedroom and drove her foot through the screen. It sputtered and sparked then died. They left the camp for the road.

Mistie couldn’t keep up at first. The clothes were big and bulky, and the string around her waist kept coming untied and the pants kept riding down about her hips. This wasn’t fun like playing dress-up in Mama’s slip.

The girl walked in the back, behind Mistie and the teacher. Mistie could hear her breathing and sometimes scratching her head and playing with the gun. Mistie wondered where they were walking to. Mistie wondered if Mama was home and if she was watching T.V. Mistie wondered when she would go home.

Mistie tripped over a stone in the road and kept on walking.
 

T
he cab of the truck was crowded and hot, the seat lumpy, the floor gooey with spilled coffee. Tony sat by the door. Mistie was in the teacher’s lap in the middle. The driver, Bobby “Blessing” Sanford, was at the wheel. His radio was turned on to a gospel station, and it was all Tony could do to keep from reaching over and twisting the knob to shut it off. Blessing liked to sing, and he liked to sing about Jesus.

“And he walks with me and he talks with me,” he sang, a half-note above the key on the radio, “
an
he tells me I am his
oooown
. And the joy we share as we tarry
therrrrrrrre
. No one has…ever…known.”

The old man took his Styrofoam coffee cup from the dash-mounted drink holder and slurped down a few swigs. He had dentures, and they popped audibly as he smacked his lips in caffeine-laced pleasure.

The organ on the radio ground out the interlude between verses. Tony looked out at the road ahead, pitch black, studded with headlights from on-coming traffic, and said, “Hey, man. Could you turn that music off? I’m not feeling so good.”

Blessing wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his jacket and said, “
Listenin
’ to the Lord’s music should make you feel better.”

“Yeah, well,” said Tony. She wanted to play the man’s game as long as she could, as far southwest as she could. Blessing thought Tony, the teacher, and Baby Doll were a family of Pentecostals catching a ride to a Christmas revival in San Antonio. Their car had broken down, so Tony had told him, and they were hitching as far as they could get.

Tony had spotted Blessing’s rig in Pinewood, a small town past northwest of Lake Marion. At the center of the town two roads intersected, the larger of the two an east-west stretch on which several logging and milk trucks rumbled back and forth. Tony had imagined stealing a car - she’d taught herself to hot wire when Leroy’s dad’s car wouldn’t start last June - but then the sight of Blessing’s truck parked in front of the Pinewood Bar and Grill changed her mind.

The cab was silver with a hand-painted montage of Christian symbols and scenes from the Bible. On the right side of the hood stood Adam, fig leaf intact; on the left stood Eve, fig leaf likewise tastefully in place. In between them a huge, wall-eyed snake coiled up a spindly apple tree and flashed his tongue at the woman. In a cloud over Adam, the eye of God in a triangle glared down at the couple. In a cloud over Eve, a disembodied Jesus arm was extended, complete with bloody, nailed palm. The door on the driver’s side had Jesus on the cross and Jacob on the ladder, with the name “Bobby ‘Blessing’ Sanford, Saved Soul” painted in purple bubble letters at a jaunty angle. A collection of bumper stickers lined the base of the cab. “Honk for Jesus.” “No God. No Peace. Know God.
Know
Peace.” “Golgotha Mini-Golf, Cave City, KY.”

Tony knew instantly how to work this one. She herded the teacher and kid across the road to the bar and grill, and instructed them to sit on the bench outside the door. There was no hesitation; they’d walked nearly five miles that afternoon, and even Tony’s feet were stinging inside the hiking boots. Tony poised herself under the corner light, which was just now humming into life in the twilight. She could see the passenger’s door from this vantage point. Jesus walking on water and a flock of angels whirling about his head like a halo of lopsided hummingbirds.
  

Within a half-hour, a lumpy old man with a pox-scarred face came out of the restaurant, Styrofoam coffee cup and truck keys in hand.

“Excuse me, sir,” Tony said.

The man paused at the front of the cab and turned to face Tony. “Who, me?”

“Yes, sir, sorry if I startled you. I see you’re a God-fearing man.”

The man nodded, looking uncertain. He might have been mugged in the past, Tony suspected. But three females, how bad could that be?

“Me, my mom and sister need a ride,” she said, moving away from the light and closer to the cab. “Our car broke down back up the road
aways
. Blew a rod. Scared us nearly to death. All that smoke.” Tony forced her lips up into a wide grin.

“That’s terrible. Thank the Lord you didn’t get hurt. Did you get hurt?”

“Oh, no sir, the Lord was watching, that’s for sure.”

“You wanting a ride to a shop for a tow?”

“No, thank you. The car’s a goner. Not worth fixing. But we’re heading to Texas, if you’re going anywhere near there.”

“Texas!” The man’s face opened up and, at last, he smiled. “That’s a far piece, child. I always liked Texas, myself. What’s in Texas?”

“Holiness Christmas revival.”

“I thought Holiness didn’t celebrate Christmas.”

“That’s Witnesses, sir.”

“
Mmm
. You’re right. I’m a Primitive Baptist, myself.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m heading up to Columbia, then getting on 20 to Atlanta, down 85 and then 65 to Mobile. Far as I go, I’m afraid.”

Tony moved a few steps closer, sizing him up. He had no money on him, except for change from his coffee. But maybe there was a stash in the truck. One big mistake she’d made was letting the car go down in the lake with the teacher’s cash card. “Do you have room for three extra folks? We don’t take up much room. We’ll squeeze up real tight. We’ll be real quiet, too, if you like.”