Backseat Saints Part 14

I stood up, furious, just as Thom stepped back into the room, right between us, and a good thing, too. He glanced from his daddy, sitting splay-legged and relaxed on his stool, to me standing with my shoulders braced and my hands curling up into fists.

"What did I miss?" he asked.

I said, "Your daddy is a little too interested in the state of my Catholic v.a.g.i.n.a." I was breathing hard, eyes on Joe.

"Oh?" Thom said, the single syllable tolling low, like a warning bell. His wrongness, the not-Thom-ness of him, froze me in place and killed my temper with his daddy. Thom said to his dad, "Pop, you want to go take a look, see if we put things where you want 'em?" and that didn't sound like my Thom either.

Joe looked back and forth between us, puzzled, as if he sensed it, too. Finally he nodded and said to Thom, "Come on, then, I'll show you how I want to shift things around."

"Derek and James can help," Thom said. "I need a minute. I've yet to say a proper h.e.l.lo to my wife."

Joe pushed his lips into a down pout, but he went. Thom didn't come toward me, though. He leaned in the doorway and crossed one foot over the other. "So. What has has your Catholic v.a.g.i.n.a been up to while I was gone, Ro?" The words were right. It was a Thom-style line, and it should have made me grin, but the tone was all wrong. your Catholic v.a.g.i.n.a been up to while I was gone, Ro?" The words were right. It was a Thom-style line, and it should have made me grin, but the tone was all wrong.

I stared at him, wary. "Just hanging out in my underpants, like always."

"Is our home phone fixed?" he asked, and with such purpose behind the question that I felt myself go very, very still inside.

"The guy is coming tomorrow morning," I said.

"Mmm-hmm. Here's a funny thing, Ro. I already know what's wrong with it."

"You do?" I said. I swallowed, way too loud. I was suddenly pleased to have Joe and two sales guys in the store. I did not want to be alone with whoever the h.e.l.l this was.

He nodded. "I was worried about you, sugar. Alone in the night with no working telephone. I called Larry from Houston and had him go by the house, check on things. He said the phone line had been cut. Deliberate. Now, who would do that."

It didn't tilt up at the end like a question, but I answered it like one anyhow. My voice came out high and breathless. "Kids, maybe? Teenagers?"

"I don't think so," Thom said.

My fingers moved up to press my forehead, and I don't think I'd ever hated Larry Grandee more than I did at this moment. That chinless b.a.s.t.a.r.d must have been delighted to check up on his brother's wife.

"Larry said you weren't home," Thom went on.

"Oh," I said, faint. "I had some errands."

"Yeah," Thom said. "So I had him go back again, late."

"Oh," I said again. I couldn't look away.

"You never came home last night, Ro."

Who is he?

I felt my face flush, deep and hot, obvious, a confession. He was still and so controlled, but any second I felt that he could calmly put his clenched hand through my face, all the way into my brain. His eyes had never been so cold on me before, or so at peace.

This wasn't temper. This was a fundamental shift. He believed I'd stepped out. He'd added up my strangeness over the last ten days, my new wayward bedroom tactics, my overnight absence, and drawn an inevitable conclusion. He would end the game for good now, no winners.

Ro Grandee's husband had been peeled away, and I was seeing the thing that lived underneath. I stood in the middle of Grand Guns eye to eye with the hanged man, and his face was smooth and rested. A muscle jumped in his cheek, twice, and the rest of his face stayed as still as a corpse's. I could see my own death reflected there.

"I think you should drive me home now," he said. "This is something we should talk about alone. You and me."

"I have another two hours on my shift, baby," I said. I let my body shift into Ro's good-girl posture. No danger in being her now. Looking at him, I knew that there was no Thom left for Ro to go back to.

The new Thom had one thing in common with my husband: He did not know who he was looking at. He had sensed a difference in the hospital and while I looked for Jim, but he'd never understood his Ro was gone. It was the only advantage I had, and I smiled Ro's guileless smile at him, because I was d.a.m.n well keeping it.

"James and Derek can handle it," Thom said.

"I better wait until Janine gets here. I was a couple minutes late and Derek was already being a d.i.c.k about it." I could not get in the car and leave with him. If I went off with this man alone, it was the last thing I would ever do.

He shrugged, but his expression did not change. He didn't even have one to change. He was blank and still with cold, black purpose. "Derek will get over it. Get your purse." He stepped forward and closed one hand around my wrist like a manacle.

"Thom!" Joe called from the back. I jumped, but Thom stayed still.

Thom didn't answer. We looked at each other. He was thinking snake and bird, but it was snake and snake, and I was not done yet.

"You better see what your daddy wants," I said. "Sugar."

Joe appeared in the doorway. "Thom, boy, get your a.s.s back here. I can't find that Mauser."

Slowly Thom's neck turned, his focus leaving me. Joe's influence held, even with this creature.

He said to his father, "Okay. I'll find it, but then I think I'm going to grab Ro and cut out early. I'm tired and I want to take my best girl out to dinner."

"Sure." Joe shrugged. "It's been slow, Derek said."

Thom looked at me, his lips curving into a smile. This was chess, and he'd just hemmed my king. His goal was to get me off alone, and I couldn't let that happen. I couldn't win in a straight-up fight. He was so much bigger. A gun could level the playing field, and guns were all around me, but Thom was as good with one as I was, maybe better. Him or me. If he took me off alone in the car, armed or not, it would be me.

"That sounds great," I said, working Ro's best perky. "We should go to Rollo's and have crab legs." They were Joe's favorite. "You want to come eat with us, Joe?"

Joe paused, tempted, but the ploy failed. "Too much to do. Plus you kids need to get working on that other project we've been discussing." He waggled his eyebrows at my belly in that same too interested, pervy way. "Come on, Thom."

"Just a sec," Thom said to his daddy. I smiled, trying to look sweet and clueless, but Thom had been hunting with his daddy since he was six. He lifted his head and breathed in a huff of air, smelling fear. If he walked out of this room now, he suspected I'd run like a deer. He was dead d.a.m.n right.

"Give me your keys," Thom said to me. "I'll grab my bags out of the truck and move 'em to your car after I find this gun." Check.

"Sure, baby," I said, no hesitation. I dug my keys out of my purse and handed them over. That threw him off balance. He wasn't expecting me to give up my escape route. I smiled as I handed them over, Ro's smile, pleased to be getting off work early and taken out for seafood.

His hand closed around my keys. He hesitated, not sure what he was missing.

"Thom," Joe said, impatient.

"All right, then," Thom said. He turned away.

Ro's expression dropped off my face and shattered on the floor. This was my one advantage: I knew what I was dealing with, and he did not. I was Rose Mae f.u.c.king Lolley, and I wouldn't go trotting off like a lambkin to my death.

He was barely out of sight before I was moving, grabbing Joe Grandee's jumbo-manly key ring out of the drawer by the register. The Buick had been Charlotte's before it was mine, so of course Joe still had a key. He had a key to our G.o.dd.a.m.n house, too. For once the fact that Joe's big sniffer was jammed hard into every crack of my life was working for me. I fisted my hand hard around the keys to keep them from jingling and ran, light and soundless, toward the front door.

I pushed it open and the bell chimed.

"Welcome to Grand Guns!" I cried out, loud and cheery to the empty store. "What can I help you find today?"

I slipped out the door and crossed the parking lot at a sprint, trying to find the Buick key on the overloaded ring as I fled. I barreled into the side of the car. My hands were so sweaty, shaking, I could hardly get the key in the lock.

I fumbled and twisted and got the car door open. I jumped in and started the engine. I risked a glance at the store. The front door was still closed. I threw the car into drive and floored it.

As I turned out of the parking lot, I saw Thom come out. He moved slow and deliberate, staring after me, implacable. He knew I had no place to go. I took the first turn I came to to get away from his gaze. Then I drove for home as fast as I dared.

I wasn't sure how big my lead would be. I had Joe's truck key on the ring, and that would buy me time. Joe would hold him back some, asking petulant questions about why his wife had taken off like a gazelle with his key ring. James lived close and usually didn't drive to work, and Derek was an a.s.shole. If Thom couldn't borrow one of their cars, he'd have to wait for Larry to come get him or for Charlotte to bring Joe's spare keys over.

I drove like the very devil back to our house. It would cut my lead to stop at home, but I didn't have a choice. Gretel was there, and the first thing he would do would be to snap her neck for the crime of being something I loved.

The weather had been fine, so I'd left her in the backyard with triple rations by her doghouse for the thirty hours I'd been in Chicago. That made it go faster. I left the Buick running on the curb with the door open and ran across the yard to the back gate. I called her and she came slow-trotting over, wagging, pleased to see me. When she reached the fence, she stopped, puzzled, sensing my agitation.

I flung open the gate.

"Take a walk? Take a walk?" I said, trying to sound cheery. I failed, and her eyebrows stayed worried, but the words were familiar. She came through the gate and stood panting up at me as I peeled the Buick key off Joe's ring and dropped the rest of them onto the lawn.

I didn't dare take time to pack. I didn't even go inside my mint green house. Instead I ran fast to Mrs. Fancy's, Gretel trotting close on my heels, and pounded on her door. No answer.

She was not home, and Thom had my keys, including the one that unlocked her front door. I paced the porch, twice. I should leave. Who knew when she'd come back? I couldn't afford to wait. I started down the stairs, then paused. Gretel whined, nervous.

"Let's take a ride? Take a ride? Let's go!" I said. Gretel knew these words, too. She turned and ran to the Buick and hopped into the open door, taking up her rightful spot on the pa.s.senger seat.

Meanwhile, I peeled a paving stone out of Mrs. Fancy's front flower bed and toted it back to the porch. I lifted it, shoulder high, and smashed it through the narrow window by her front door. It shattered the gla.s.s and fell through, landing on the square of parquet flooring with a clap. I saw a yellow streak as Phil ran to hide. I reached through the hole and unlocked the door.

It cost me two precious minutes to run to the guest room closet and s.n.a.t.c.h Pawpy's gun and my real wallet out of the s...o...b..x, but I felt better once I had the gun. I grabbed my mother's library book, too.

Mrs. Fancy had a place for Gretel at her son's, she'd said. She knew a shelter that could hide me. But I couldn't wait for her, and anyway, everything in me said it was too d.a.m.n close. There was no place in this city, in this state, where Thom Grandee couldn't find me. He was coming toward me now. He'd keep coming. He always had, since the day I'd seen him through the window at Duff's Diner, walking jaunty and confident back to claim me. The only thing that had changed was his purpose.

I got in the car and started driving, away from my Crest-colored house and from all the roads Thom might be driving down if he was coming toward me from the gun store. Gretel whined, wanting me to open the pa.s.senger-side window, but my car was easy enough to spot without her big head hanging out, licking wind.

"Shush now, Gretel-fat," I said.

I drove as quickly as I dared for Highway 40. A red light paused me at the turn. Highway 40 stretched all the way across the country. If I turned west, it would take me to California, where my mother waited for her book.

At the airport, she had told me I was welcome. Ever since, I'd been flat haunted by images of Ivy Wheeler in a lemon grove, of living in a cool and hilly place. Ivy would be safe and new, just born, a creature with no husband and no history.

I found myself staring down the highway to the west. My mother had been offering me a place, but it was not a place she'd made for me. She'd saved money in her flowered shoe, planning all the while to leave me behind. She'd made plans that did not include me. She'd packed my regular brown bag lunch and sent me off to school with her regular quick kiss on my cheek. Then she'd left, and I'd come home to find the world had changed.

She'd remade herself, rebirthed herself as a gypsy, but she hadn't brought me with her and showed me how. Ivy Wheeler was only a haircut, some borrowed clothes, and a pair of steel-toed boots. I faced west and said, "f.u.c.k you," to my mother. "You aren't welcome." aren't welcome."

The light went green and my hands were on the wheel, turning it. My foot jammed the gas pedal down. The car lurched forward with a screech, turning away from her, leaving two lines of burnt rubber, curving toward the east. I knew the South. I could go to ground there. Scared, yes. But too d.a.m.n mad to lie down like Thom's good girl and die.

I ran home.

CHAPTER 12.

I POINTED THE BUICK EAST, and I took all fifteen hours of driving straight up, neat, like a shot of Jack. The wind was behind me, and I felt it as wolf breath, hot and stinking of old meat, raising the hairs on the back of my neck. POINTED THE BUICK EAST, and I took all fifteen hours of driving straight up, neat, like a shot of Jack. The wind was behind me, and I felt it as wolf breath, hot and stinking of old meat, raising the hairs on the back of my neck.

I pulled off the highway only when my tugboat of a car needed another tank of gas. The Buick was a guzzler. I fueled up on these stops, too, on black gas station coffee as fumy and potent as the brew the car was drinking. I bought Gretel some kibble and got a jar of peanut b.u.t.ter and some crackers for myself, but I was scared too sick in the pit of me to eat much. I started off driving as fast as the Buick would let me, but I made myself drop to eight above the speed limit. I wasn't sure which ID to use if a cop stopped me; I didn't want to swap to Ivy so close to home, nor did I want a ticket in Rose Mae's name, pointing out my trail.

Gret sat up in the pa.s.senger seat beside me, snuffing my hair and jamming her wet nose against my ear, worried and vigilant and driving me bat c.r.a.p. Once we got out of Texas, I opened the pa.s.senger-side window for her. She poked her face out through the narrow crack to huff the air of Arkansas, a mix of larch trees and armadillo p.o.o.p that kept her attention all the way to Tennessee. There she finally calmed enough to sleep with her big head in my lap, making a drool splotch on my jeans.

By the time I hit the Alabama State line, I hadn't slept in close to thirty hours, and that had been some fitful dozing on a library sofa in Chicago. My joints were aching, and I had a dry, rattling cough that hurt all the old cracks in my ribs whenever it got away from me. All the caffeine I'd dumped into my empty stomach made me feel like my eyeb.a.l.l.s were jittering in their sockets; the road looked like a drunken state worker had painted the yellow lines in slightly wavy. My peripheral vision was shrouded in fog.

In Arkansas, I'd decided that if I was running, Birmingham was my best bet. It was a big enough little city to get lost in. I could sell the traceable Grandee Buick for some cash as Rose, then leave the city as Ivy to sully my trail. I could go anywhere then, maybe down to the Florida Keys. I'd get a waitress job serving drinks made with key lime and coconut, invest in flip-flops and a red bikini. If I was running.

By the time I crossed into Alabama, I didn't think I was.

On our second date, I'd told Thom my father was dead. Daddy was so dead to me by then that it didn't even feel like a lie. Thom knew my mother had left me as a child, so Fruiton was the second or third place he would look for me. He'd certainly comb Amarillo first, and it was a good-odds bet that Kingsville, the town where we met, might pull his attention next.

Going to Fruiton gave me solid lead time and the home field advantage. It was my best shot if I was going to lay a trap instead of running.

The air grew warmer as I went east, and the Buick's AC was for s.h.i.t. I drove into my old hometown with all four windows mostly down. Fruiton already smelled like a small-town Alabama summer: hot asphalt and secondhand fry grease, overlaid with deep green pine. Pollen hung in the breathless air, giving every outdoor surface a thin yellow glaze. When I'd lived here, Fruiton's singular air had been so familiar that it was invisible. I'd forgotten the feel of it dusting up my nose.

I pointed the car toward my old house, Gretel awake and back to sticking her boxy head out the window, her tongue collecting dust. My car hadn't had a working tape player in years, so I had the radio on a gospel station. In Fruiton, the only music choices were gospel or country music, or I could swap to AM talk and get a bellyful of angry men hollering about politics or Jesus or both.

I was so tired, I needed both hands on the wheel now just to keep the car going straight. My route took me right past the old Krispy Kreme that Jim and I had frequented. It was working hand in hand with the Church's Chicken next door to oil the air. Looking at it gave me deja vu, which was stupid.

Of course I felt like I'd been here before. I had. A thousand times. But this was ten years later, and Bickel's Drugstore had turned into an Eckerd. The empty lot was now a Tom Thumb with three newfangled gas pumps. It was enough change to make me feel like I was being reminded of a place instead of actually being in the place.

The last time I'd been down this road, I'd been walking to the bus station. I'd worn someone else's shoes, like now, with a hand-me-down blouse and Levi's much like the ones I had on. I had probably been cleaner, though.

Another five minutes and I pa.s.sed the entrance for Jim's old subdivision, Lavalet. It had seemed right fancy to me back then, with a pool and a clubhouse and the name spelled out in curly metal letters on a low brick wall beside the entry. I opted not to turn in, heading instead for my own old neighborhood. I had no desire to ring the doorbell and say to his mother, "So, Carol, you ever hear from your youngest again?... No? Not even at Christmas?"

I doubted they still lived there, anyway. No sane person would choose to stay in a house that reminded them every minute of someone who'd left and not ever once looked back. Normal people moved away from sorrow as soon as they could. Folks less whole, sanitywise, took my daddy's route. Daddy had raised me in the house my mother had abandoned, drinking until his vision blurred too much to focus on all the bare s.p.a.ces where my mother wasn't standing. He drank so much, some days he had to furrow up his brow and squint to aim his fists proper at me.

There was a chance, small but real, that if he hadn't drunk himself to death, he would have stayed on in that house after I left, too. Now that I was heading toward him, I was surprised at how vague my visual memories of him were. It seemed the people that I remembered most clearly, every tick of expression and cadence of speech-Jim Beverly, my mother-were the ones who had left me.

My father was mostly a shape in my memory, short and broad with wide hands. I remembered his craggy Irish face and angry eyebrows from pictures, not from real life. The clearest things were the sour mash smell of him, the hard, fast feel of his fists, and his low and burring voice.

Still, Thom had no idea my daddy was alive, much less that he was meaner than a snake, tougher than boot leather, and better with a gun than any man I'd ever seen, Thom included. My daddy was as bad as Thom, and he owed me. And there was no danger I would stay on with him, the way I would with Jim Beverly. My nicer memories-shooting with him, piggyback rides, pushes on the tire swing-were buried under the ten years after my mother left us. He'd beaten any chance at auld lang syne right out of me. If he was still around, I was the bait, and he was nothing more to me than the steel jaws of a trap. Thom would surely look for Lolleys in the Fruiton phone book as a way to find me, but he would not expect to find his way to me blocked by a no-longer-dead daddy, much less my daddy's a.r.s.enal.

A mile past Lavalet, I crossed Bandeer Street and left the mall-and-Olive-Garden side of town. Fruiton had no railroad, but even so, this side of Bandeer was the wrong side of the tracks. I turned left at a run-down strip mall that still held a Salvation Army thrift store and a Dollar General. Another left put me onto my old street.

All the houses on Pine Abbey had been built in the sixties: low ceilings, one central bath, a harvest gold or avocado stove and fridge set in every galley kitchen. The houses squatted low, as if they thought they were down on Mobile Bay, in hurricane country. I went a mile down the road, to what in a nicer neighborhood would have been a cul-de-sac.

Not here. Pine Abbey simply ended, blunt as the eraser end of a pencil, with a dirt track cutting through the middle of the wild back lot. The track began just over the curb and disappeared into the woods. Daddy used to drive me down through on Sat.u.r.day afternoons to do some shooting.

The branches would sc.r.a.pe the car's paint when we shoved our way down that track. It didn't matter. Daddy bought beater cars and applied duct tape, spit, and cussing till they ran for him. He would drive one until the engine fell out, then sell it for sc.r.a.p and get another. The track ended in a sloping meadow. We would stand at the lowest point to shoot, setting up our targets so they had the hill behind them. We shot at two-liter soda bottles rifled from the trash of our Pepsi-drinking neighbors. We drank only c.o.ke, and Daddy wouldn't shoot a c.o.ke bottle. He said that for a southerner, blasting away at a c.o.ke bottle was close to sacrilegious.

Daddy filled the bottles with water to weight them. Our bullets tore through them and then spent themselves safely in the dirt of the hill behind. We'd take turns shooting until they fell into plastic rags.