Wire Mesh Mothers (30 page)

Tony hesitated. “Truth again.”

“What happened to you last night?”

“I meant to say dare.”

“No, you didn’t. You said truth.”

Tony shook her head.

“Okay, dare, then,” said the teacher. “Go to the farmhouse at the edge of this field. Sneak in, get yourself invited in, whatever. I need some Tylenol, some rubbing alcohol. A thermometer if they have one.”

A gray tabby cat appeared near the wheelbarrow, it’s glassy eyes reflecting yellow. It sniffed at the straw on the floor near Tony’s feet. “Get out of here,” Tony said. “You got no idea what I do to cats.
Psssh
!”

The cat scurried off to where it could not be seen.

“Well? Are you going?” asked the teacher.

“I didn’t hear what you said,” said Tony. “Now just shut up for a while.”

“Mistie is really sick. You said dare.”

“Maybe I did and maybe I didn’t. So just shut up.”

She scooted off the straw bale to the floor and leaned against the scratchy surface behind her. Little bits of straw bit into her arms and through the Jesus sweatshirt.
Jesus, the great protector,
she thought.
Oh, yeah.

“If you won’t go for the things I need for Mistie, then let me go,” said the teacher.

Tony leapt up, grabbed the ax and slammed the blade into the floor inches from the teacher’s foot. “Shut up!”

The teacher shut up. Tony bound the woman’s hand behind her back with another length of bale string, but left the kid untied. Tony took off her own sweatshirt – screw the teacher, she could do what the teacher did and not care –and rolled it into a pillow-ball, then eased Baby Doll down so her head rested there.

“You ain’t gonna run off, now are you?” Tony asked the child. Baby Doll didn’t seem to hear or understand. She just sighed heavily and whispered something that sounded like, “Bad liver.” She was dreaming. That was good, Tony thought. If you were really, really sick, you didn’t dream. She knew she’d heard that somewhere. If not, she should have because it made sense.

Back against the straw bale, Tony tossed another few blocks of wood into the wheelbarrow. The fire blazed, crackled, and leveled off. Tony kept her gaze on the woman and the kid. She didn’t want to see what might be in those dark corners.
Pussy,
she told herself, but it didn’t matter. Dark corners could hold things that weren’t good. And she had enough that wasn’t good without adding to the mix.

She heard a cat’s guttural and distant snarl, then only the secret whispers of the dreaming kid and the casual popping of the straw bits in the fire. She scratched her head slowly, as if one wrong move might bring out the devils in the barn.

S
he dreamed.

She was in a tobacco barn. Leroy and
DeeWee
were there, hanging like tobacco leaves from the rafters, laughing and swinging and pointing at Tony. Tony lay in the straw, unable to move from the tormenting prickles on her naked body. She tipped her chin up; Mam was holding her arms over her head. She looked down; Burton was holding her legs apart. Something wet and hot was leaking from her privates, trickling along the flesh of her inner thighs like hideous slugs.

“What is happening?” she tried to cry out, but it was a baby’s voice that she heard, a babbling garble issuing from her throat.

Mam said, “We’ll have this done, don’t you worry, Angela.”

Burton, who now had a ten-gallon hat perched jauntily atop his dark hair, said, “Got an elm branch for digging. Knife handle just won’t grab good. Gonna get those bastards out, hold still.”

A searing pain. Tony screamed. Above, in the rafters, Leroy and
DeeWee
, and now Little Joe and Whitey, flicked dried bird poop at each other and said, “Eat this! Dare, dare!”

Tony tried to sit up, to pull her legs together, but Burton said, “No, don’t be such a cow. Hold still.”

Mam said, “Honey, I need a beer. When we’re done here, would you please get me a beer? My throat’s so dry.”

Burton tugged at Tony’s insides. Tony tried to move with the tug, trying to keep her guts from coming out with the dreadful, powerful suction.

“Hold still!” said Burton. Something in Tony popped and gave way. Burton clucked, and smiled, and held up two wet, writhing earthworms the size of pythons. “Look at this,” he said. “Don’t take after you at all. Must be their daddy.”

She bolted awake.

Fuck!

Breaths.
Huh, huh, huh, huh
.

Blurry eyes. She wiped them with the heel of her hand. Fucking dream. Who invented fucking dreams?

Who the hell thought us such a damn thing?

And she saw the teacher, standing before her with the ax raised above her head, her teeth barred, her lips peeled back, the eyes of Satan himself staring out from the sockets.

M
istie heard something, someone, scream, and she tried to open her eyes but they were glued shut. It sounded a little like Mama screaming.

“Valerie!” Mama had screamed and Daddy had said, “Shut your face, you wanna be thrown in prison?”

“Valerie!” Mama had screamed, and Mistie had cried, a higher sound that blended with Mama’s into something like a song. But the screams and the cries were all Mistie recalled, the wailing voices in the kitchen in the apartment in Kentucky.

Daddy had said, “It was a bad liver. We can’t help she had a bad liver.” And he had buried her somewhere where no one could find out it wasn’t a bad liver.

That was all Mistie knew. It was too far away, Kentucky. It was too long ago, Valerie.

The scream came again. Mistie scratched the glue from one eye and looked out in the fire-lit barn where the teacher was standing over the girl, and it was the girl who was screaming.

T
he teacher arced the ax over and down with a grunt, and as the whistling of the dull blade reached Tony’s ears, Tony threw herself backward in a violent tumble, over the sagging straw bale and to the shadowed floor behind. The ax-head bit into the straw, a solid whack that split the top half in two.

“Shit!” Tony rolled to her side, scrambled to her feet. The teacher shook the ax like a rabid dog with a groundhog, and pulled it out of the straw. She lifted it up again, both her sweating torso and the old blade catching firelight briefly. The eyes again, cold and terrible.

“Back off!” screamed Tony.

The teacher walked around the straw bale, her footsteps rhythmic, robot-like. The ax held position over her head. Tony scrabbled back, slipping in the loose straw, her hands going before her face. “No!”

The teacher’s lips opened and closed, speaking something Tony couldn’t hear, and then the ax came down again. Tony flopped to the right and the ax struck dead center of the straw where she’d been. Tony scooted away on her knees, panting, snatching for the ax handle before the teacher could wrench it free of the floor.

“Bitch! You fucking shit-brain!” Tony caught the slick wood of the handle, the sporadic splinters, but the teacher threw out her foot and caught Tony in the shoulder, knocking her away. Tony lost her breath, caught it, skidding in the needle-sharp straw. The teacher grinned, the flickering fire-glow twisting her face into myriad subhuman shapes. She raised the ax and stepped forward.

Tony scooted back on the floor, head reeling. “Don’t kill me, you goddamn bitch! Teachers don’t kill kids!” The teacher smiled. Tony shoved herself to her feet, ducking just in time to miss the blade as it swung at her head.

The teacher stumbled then, the blow connecting with nothing but air, and she took several weird, skipping steps forward. Air hissed through her teeth with the sound of a car radiator about to blow. Tony shouted, “Ha!” and threw the whole of her weight against the woman. Tony and the teacher sprawled to the floor, Tony on top of the woman, the woman cracking into a stall door. Tony dove for the ax handle, her fingers catching it and locking tightly. She yanked with all her strength, knees bearing down in the straw, body throwing itself back. But the teacher’s grasp didn’t loosen. She yelped, planted her foot on Tony’s chest, and kicked her away. She then sat up and waved the ax.

“Stop it!” Tony cried. “Crazy ass shit!”

Still seated, the teacher swung the ax in evenly measured side sweeps, like a farmer wielding a scythe. Back and forth,
swoosh, swoosh
, daring Tony to step up and loose her feet from the rest of her body. As the ax kept up its steady sweeps, the teacher braced herself against the stall door and pushed herself, slowly and steadily, to her feet.

“Back off!” screamed Tony. She looked behind her, her eyes probing the darkness for the pitchfork, the saw, something. Something to kill the teacher. Something to save herself.

Baby Doll. Tony saw the little girl lying on the floor, her head cradled in the balled-up sweatshirt.
Baby Doll!

Tony scooted around the fire-bearing wheelbarrow and dropped down by the child. She picked her up and held her to her chest.
So I catch what she’s got,
Tony thought.
Small price.

The teacher was fully on her feet now, turning like a Disney
animatron
toward Tony and Baby Doll. She strode forward, and stopped. The ax held position over her head.

“Kill me, kill us both,” said Tony simply.

“Let her go,” the teacher growled.

“Kill me, kill us both.”

Baby Doll opened her eyes. She squinted at Tony, then into the shadows beyond the teacher. “Mama had a baby,” she whispered.

The teacher stared.

“Put it the fuck down,” said Tony.

“I – ” began the teacher.

“I ain’t letting her go, bitch.”

The teacher tilted her head, shut her eyes, opened them, and said, “What?”

“Huh?” echoed Baby Doll.

Tony said nothing. She counted. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven….

The teacher looked at Baby Doll, then Tony, then her own upraised arms and the ax handle she clutched. “I…?”

Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen….

A strange gasping sound from the teacher. Her mouth opening, snapping shut. The body wavering slightly, the muscles of the arms twitching within the flesh.

Twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven….

“Ah,” said the teacher. Her tongue appearing briefly at the front of her mouth, disappearing. The ax, still in place overhead, a deadly torch in the hands of a mad Lady Liberty.

There was a rustling sound to Tony’s right. She glanced over the same moment the teacher did. There were wide, iridescent eyes in the dark, a crouched body in the straw.

The teacher whooped, spun on her toe, and brought the ax down in a powerful strike. The blade connected, cut through, slammed to a stop in the floor.

The cat’s head rolled lazily through the straw and came to stop against Tony’s boot.

Baby Doll stared at it. She reached out one clammy hand to touch the furry ears, the glistening eyes.

And for the first time on the entire, nightmarish trip, the little girl screamed.

S
he remembered.

There was a train track running behind the brick apartment building they lived in when they were in Kentucky. It passed behind the apartment’s playground, separated from the children by a tall, chain link fence and a steep embankment. The train didn’t come by often, several times a week, and it was a slow-moving thing most of the time. Once, when Mistie had been in the playground with Mama and Valerie, Mama had watched the train go by and said, “That thing moves like a old man who crapped his drawers!” She’d laughed. Mistie, who had been five at the time, had laughed. Little Valerie, who was two and a half, had giggled shrill and loud.

There were a lot of children at the apartment building, three stories’ worth of them, and in the summer time the playground was crawling with them because nobody had air-conditioning in their apartments. Mistie didn’t remember the names of any of the children who were there, but she remembered the faces, dark and light, chubby and thin, smiling and somber. Every morning of the summer they were there, clustering on the sliding board and cluttered atop the spin-around like Japanese beetles on a rose. They played in the baking-hot sandbox and threw balls at each other until someone finally cried and the mothers told them to be good or they’d have to go inside.

Nobody had any money, much. The mothers and older sisters who sat in the shade of the single tree in the playground were always saying something like that to each other.

“Wish I could get a new car. Not a new one, but a different one. Got a busted transmission in mine and I can’t afford a cab to work.”

“School’s comin’ up next month. You ever see a kid with bigger feet than Justin’s? Bought him new shoes in June and now he’s
needin
’ ‘em again for school.”