Wire Mesh Mothers (21 page)

Bobby “Blessing” Sanford looked cautious again, until Tony opened her raincoat and showed him the “WWJD” sweatshirt. Then he nodded and said, “Hop in, sisters. Happy to help out.”

As Blessing clambered into the driver’s seat, Tony hurried to the bench and directed the teacher and Baby Doll to the passenger door. “Get in,” she told them in a whisper. “Don’t say a fucking word unless I tell you to.”

She reached up over Jesus’ ecstatic, smug, “I-can-walk-on-water-and-you-can’t” face and yanked the door open. The teacher went in first, then the kid. Tony climbed in last and shoved the kid onto the teacher’s lap.

Blessing started up the engine then frowned at the teacher. “Ma’am, your daughter says ya’ll weren’t hurt in that blow out, but you look right banged up.”

“Oh,” said Tony, shifting her butt around, trying to find a spot on the cushion that didn’t feel like a spring was ready to chew through the vinyl, “well, a little banged up but I meant nothing serious. Like brain damage or broken bones or anything. Right, Mom?”

The teacher blinked slowly, and Tony said, “Right, Mom?” and touched her pocket where the gun was, and the teacher saw it because she nodded and said quietly, “Yes.”

“My,” said Blessing. “Want me to pray for you, ma’am?”

“Yeah,” said Tony, “but can we do it on the road?”

She scratched at the itch on her scalp then folded her hands primly in her lap. And smiled. Damn, did she smile. It pissed her off, hard as she had to smile to get the old geezer to steer his rig out to the road.

“Sure thing,” said Blessing. Gears grated, the cab jerked, and a plastic cross hanging from the rearview swung back and struck Baby Doll in the forehead. She looked at it as if she’d never seen such a thing.

Once straightened out and at a decent clip on the highway, Blessing said, “Let us pray! Dear Lord! Put your hands on this woman and heal
them
wounds on her face! Help this family get to Texas safely and soundly.”

“Thank you…,” said Tony.

“And bring your angels to watch over them and keep them. And the cherubim and the seraphim! All those heavenly bodies what work for you, Lord! Glory, hallelujah.”

“Glory,” said Tony.

“In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ we pray, He who shed His blood for the salvation of the world!”

Shut up!

“Amen.”

“Thank you, sir.”

They rode in silence for a short distance, then Blessing turned on the radio and spun the dial past everything tolerable to a religious station.

Tony grit her teeth to keep her mind off Blessing and his off-tune renditions of every church tune that God’s disc jockey felt moved to play.

She thought about Burton. He lived in
Lamesa
, though she wasn’t sure where. The birthday card had a post office address. Of course, ranchers would have hired hands go into town for their mail. They couldn’t take chances that their mail would sit by a roadside in a box where gangs of local kids could drive by and steal it and then shoot the box up with a bb gun.

She thought about Leroy and his bb gun. What was Leroy doing now? Was he arrested? Was Little Joe? Mrs. Martin would have called the cops as soon as she could get her act together. Two, three minutes, tops. The police would arrive for the statement five minutes later. Was that enough time for the Hot Heads to escape in the Chevelle? Would Mrs. Martin be clear-headed enough to know what she was supposed to tell the cops?

Tony’s mind circled back around to Whitey. His expression as he stood in the middle of the pile of shit that had been the Exxon convenience store, holding the revolver that wasn’t supposed to have any bullets in it. She must have left one bullet in the chamber last time she’d shot groundhogs behind Rainbow Lane. She hadn’t checked inside. Stupid. Whitey was the one who had shot the gasoline man.

What was that like, a dead man down your barrel? Was it like watching a white car bobbing in lake water while two people screamed inside? One way no. The gun was fast and the lake was slow. But Tony’s skin had broken out in little bumps as she’d watched. Tony had imagined the teacher tying to kick her way to freedom, trying to hold her breath and sucking in water over and over again. She had counted to see how long she, herself, could hold her breath. It wasn’t very long, but maybe the teacher had better lungs. The woman didn’t smoke or anything, Tony didn’t think. She might smell like Mam in some ways but not like smoking.

How long until the teacher would have drowned?

Tony had gotten to forty-two holding her breath. She’d stood on the slope by the lake and took another breath as the car up-ended and the front began to dive. This time she got to forty-seven. She could hear the screams of the teacher and then the muffled prayer of the kid. The kid’s voice was higher in pitch and more piercing to Tony’s ear. And, well, sad.

That had shocked Tony the most. The sadness of the prayer. It wasn’t so much the words as the sound of the words. Tony had heard a sound like that long ago. Not a dying groundhog. Not a tortured cat. Something else.

Someone else long ago, though she didn’t recall when, or who.

It was the prayer that had changed Tony’s mind. She’d rolled the windows down to let the water fill up the car more quickly so the drowning would be faster. At least that was what she’d thought she’d done it for. But then, the open windows where what allowed her to open the car doors at the last moment. Water inside, water outside. She’d learned about that in driver’s education at the middle school on one of the days she had attended. Once a car fills with water, the pressure is equalized and the doors will open.

Back in Pippins, the Hot Heads were either basking in the glow of an armed robbery well-done, or had been arrested and were sitting in the jail in Emporia waiting to see what would happen to them. Armed robbery and murder. In Virginia that meant a charge of capital murder. A capital murder conviction meant the death penalty. What was the age somebody could fry or get poisoned over at the prison in
Jarratt
? It was less than eighteen, she knew that much. A boy who’d killed a car dealer up in Richmond had been seventeen at the time and they’d strapped him down and shot his veins full of acid.

Whitey was, what, sixteen? Or was he fifteen? Tony couldn’t quite remember. But maybe old enough to execute. Leroy, Little Joe, and Buddy were accomplices. They could get the death penalty, too, especially Leroy who was the oldest of them all. They would have squealed on Tony if they’d been arrested, too.

“…how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me,” sang Blessing at the wheel. Lights from an approaching car swept over his features, etching them with glow and shadow, making him look at once like Jesus and then Satan himself. “I once was lost, but now am found, was blind but now I
seeeeeeee
.”

They might just tell the police I was the one shot the gasoline man, thought Tony. The gun was my dad’s. My prints are all over it. They could say I killed him then ran off for doing it.

The plan had been to stir up trouble and make a name for the mysterious gang of Pippins outlaws. So what had happened?

Tony was going to make a phone call to Pippins as soon as she could. The only phone number she knew by heart was Leroy’s. He would tell her what had gone down. If he was still at home.

“When we’ve been there ten-thousand years, bright shining as the sun,” sang Blessing, “we’ve no less days to sing his praise as when we first begun.” The organ accompaniment on the radio swelled, ebbed, flourished, went silent.

Tony felt sleep tug at her eyes like an insistent hand pulling on a window shade. She touched the pistol through her coat pocket, caressed it. Truck driving. That would be a good job. She would be sixteen soon, and could get her permit. She could drive for Burton’s ranch. She could haul hay. Straw. Feed. She could haul cows sometimes, stupid, obedient and mindless cows. Maybe even a bull on occasion. Now that would be good. That would be a challenge.
 

That would be good.

She slept.

T
he teacher’s arms, which had been wrapped around Mistie’s waist, had loosened and fallen to the sides. The lap was not comfortable; the teacher’s legs were bony and sharp, the knees cutting beneath Mistie’s knees whenever Mistie tried to move around. Daddy’s lap was bigger and softer than the teacher’s lap, but Mistie didn’t like anybody’s lap. She wanted to sit on the truck seat.

The girl with the gun was sleeping and snoring softly. The truck driver had turned down the radio and only spoke to himself on occasion when a car darted out in front or somebody in the same
lane
slammed on the brakes.

They were on a really big road now, with two lanes on each side divided by a strip of grass and sometimes trees. Everybody on their side drove in the same direction. Mistie remembered a road like this, when they had moved from Kentucky. They drove, drove, drove. She hated that road because it seemed like they were never going to stop. There wasn’t anything to look at outside the window except trees and distant farms and huge signs. Daddy drove the car. Mama rode in the front and Mistie rode in the back between the boxes they’d packed the week before. Daddy said they had to make tracks since they were breaking their lease. Mistie didn’t remember Daddy breaking anything except maybe he meant the door on the stove that night he got mad that the heat-n-serve rolls came out black on the bottom.

During part of the drive Daddy had put his hand on Mama’s shoulder, than in her blouse, and she had slapped his hand away and cussed him out. “Yeah?” she had screeched. “Yeah? You think I’m gonna let you get all hot up over me anymore? You think I’m gonna let you get yourself in a knot, and let you work it out on me later tonight? You can go to hell you think that. I ain’t never
havin
’ no more of your babies. You see what happens to my babies?” Then she’d cried and held on to the door handle and Daddy had swore he didn’t want her flabby-ass body anyway, and they had driven on and on and on.

Mistie rubbed her eyes and then her crotch, making it warm. She took off the denim jacket, which had crumpled up behind her, and threw it on the floor over the girl’s feet. She wriggled her shoulders and her neck. They were tired and they hurt. So did her feet. Part of the way from the camp the teacher had carried her, but most of the way Mistie had had to walk. The girl with the gun cussed at her when she walked too slowly, but her legs would only do what they wanted to do. And that wasn’t walk real fast. The three of them had stopped a few times, once to eat some pork and beans and canned corn and another time to poop behind some tall grass, but Mistie wanted to stop and go home.

It was hard to sit up straight on the teacher’s lap. Mistie stretched her legs out, trying not to bump the truck driver with her left foot. Then, slowly, she lay over against the girl. Her head came down on the girl’s folded arms. The girl didn’t move. Mistie waited to see if the girl would wake up and hit her. But she didn’t.

Mistie closed her eyes and was dreaming before the sounds of the truck had faded. Princess
Silverlace
was there, and the two went to play on a sliding board behind the golden castle.

S
he dreamed.

The room was dim, small, and much too warm. There were rows of flat, black-topped tables with four chairs each, a classroom. On the walls were charts and posters of old men with beards and probing eyes. In the back of the classroom, cages filled with animals – birds, hamsters, mice, rats. Baby rhesus monkeys.

It was Old
Cabel
Hall at the University of Virginia on the far side of the lawn from the Rotunda, a building with small, stuffy halls and small, stuffy stairwells. The place smelled old, like students from two hundred years ago were still agonizing over exams and research papers.

Kate was at a table near the rear of the room, next to a small, closed window. She had forgotten to complete the reading for the day, and there was to be a quiz. The professor, a skeletal man in gray, stood in front discussing a brain diagram he had nailed to the wall. Kate couldn’t hear him, but she could see his mouth opening and closing, and could see the other students around her taking furious notes.

Donald was on the other side of the room, nearest the door. He was reading a book. Kate wanted to call out to him but knew the professor would fail her if she did.

“You have to get this class right,” said someone next to Kate, and she looked to her left to see Alice. “Psychology 101,” Alice continued. “Blow this, blow everything. That’s what Freud said.”

“It was Jung who said that, not Freud.” This was Bill. Alice was sitting in his lap. He had one arm around her waist, the other hand down the front of her embroidered jeans.

Kate said, “I didn’t study last night.”

“Too bad,” said Alice. “To the cage with you.”

Everyone in the class turned in their seats, mechanically, at the same moment and the same speed, like wind-up toys whirling about on stands.

“She didn’t study,” Alice repeated.

Then Kate saw she was indeed in a cage. It was a huge, filling nearly the entire classroom, the floor wet and soiled and scattered with bits of cotton and feces. Students stood outside the bars, looking in and whispering.