Backseat Saints Part 15

The first time he let me shoot a real gun, I was maybe five years old. It was a sunny afternoon, and the warm brown whiskey smell on his breath was light. His mood was good. He watched me taking careful aim with my pellet pistol, and he said, "Rosie-Red, I believe you're ready to try something a touch mightier."

He loaded a .22 for me and talked me through the kickback. He tucked in spongy orange earplugs for me, and I sighted on the Pepsi bottle. I squeezed steady, pressuring the trigger toward me until the gun bucked in my hands like a live thing. The shots rang louder when I could feel them. The .22 seemed powerful and sleek, yet it did what my hands said. I could feel the reverb of it in my whole body, and I squeezed again and again and again. I felt bullets moving out from the pit of me, down my arms, and then out the barrel. I held steady and shot till the gun was empty.

Daddy wove his way over to the Pepsi bottle and held it up. We watched water streaming out of several holes.

"s.h.i.t, baby. I think you nailed it. Three, maybe four times," he said, admiring. "If you wan't so pretty, I'd say it was a shame you wan't born a boy."

"Who would wanna be a boy," I said, and spit.

Daddy laughed and said, "Dead-Eye d.i.c.kless."

I laughed, too, though I didn't get the joke. I only got that this was a good, good day. My mother was at home, making us lasagna, and my daddy was pleased with me.

Here at the dead end of Pine Abbey, my red brick cube of an ex-house sat on the right, the last in the row. The house across the street was its mirror image, except the trim was cream instead of brown and they had an old VW Beetle rusting away in the carport.

The carport of my old house was empty. Maybe he'd wised up and left the haunted place where his two-person family had abandoned him one by one. Or maybe he really was dead.

Now that I was here, it seemed ridiculous to think that my actual father was sitting inside on the sofa. It was like expecting the copy of Watership Down Watership Down I'd set on my bedside table a decade ago to still be there, facedown and splayed open to the chapter where the rabbits first meet Woundwart. But at the same time, I couldn't imagine him making a checklist and packing boxes and renting a U-Haul. If he was alive, this was the only place I could imagine him existing. The empty carport might only mean he was off working or between cars. I'd set on my bedside table a decade ago to still be there, facedown and splayed open to the chapter where the rabbits first meet Woundwart. But at the same time, I couldn't imagine him making a checklist and packing boxes and renting a U-Haul. If he was alive, this was the only place I could imagine him existing. The empty carport might only mean he was off working or between cars.

I wondered if he would recognize me, and I felt my ab muscles go tight on the strength of memory and instinct, as if prepping for his welcome-home blow. A blast of hot red temper came steaming up my throat from my belly. If he was here, he f.u.c.king owed me.

"Sit tight," I told Gretel. I turned off the car and rolled up all the windows to half-mast to keep her in but leave a cross-breeze going.

I got out of the car and marched across the patchy lawn, chin up, shoulders set. My eyes burned, full of sleep-sand and dry from staying open way too long. Even so, I walked tough, like a kid going to touch the front door of the neighborhood's spooky house on a dare. I jumped up onto the concrete slab that served as a porch, out of breath from just this short burst of angry movement. I had to breathe in short pants to keep from activating the dry cough that was waiting in the bottom of my lungs. I bypa.s.sed the door, going instead to kneel by the living room's open window. I put my face against the screen and cupped my hand around my eyes to block the sunlight, so I could see into the living room.

A little girl, maybe eight or nine, sat on the floor with her dark hair hanging in strings around her face. She felt my gaze and looked up, staring back at me with her big, glossy eyes. She didn't seem surprised to see me, or particularly scared. She put a finger up to her lips and said, "Shhh. Daddy's sleeping."

For one crazy second, I thought I must be looking back into the past, seeing my young self, warning grown-up me away. I knew from science-fiction movies that if I touched her, we'd both melt or burn up or explode the world.

I blinked hard, twice, and put one hand up to my aching forehead. Looking around, I realized that the room was a right-now place, not something from my past. There was nothing in it that I recognized. A long, puffy green sofa sat against the wrong wall of the den. Ours had been brown with dark gold flowers, and it had been against the front wall, between the window I was looking through and an identical one farther down the porch. The coffee table was different, too, flanked by a vinyl wingback chair and a stack of cardboard moving boxes. There was a big TV in a hutch, showing a Bugs Bunny cartoon with the sound off. We'd had a smaller TV on a sanded plank table.

The little girl had a slew of Barbie outfits scattered across the floor. She was working a naked Barbie's long legs into a spangled tube dress.

"h.e.l.lo," I said, quiet through the screen.

The girl's hands were still working to clothe her doll, but the dress stuck at Barbie's flared hips. She said, "I'm not s'posed to talk to people I don't know."

"I'm not a stranger," I said. "I used to live here when I was your age. This is the house where I grew up."

She got curious then, tilting her head sideways. She set Barbie down topless and stood up and came over to peer at me through the screen. "Then what's your name?"

"Rose," I said. "Rose Mae."

She nodded like I'd pa.s.sed some test and said, "You made the marks."

"Marks?" I repeated.

"On the wall," she said. "Daddy's mad about it. I know you made them because it says your name."

"You have marks on your wall that say my name?" I asked, and when she nodded I said, "Can I see them?"

She tilted her head the other way, considering. "You'd have to come in."

"Yes," I said. "Can I come in and see them?"

After a thinking pause, she shrugged and said, "I don't mind it. It's got your name, anyways."

I stood up and met her at the front door. She swung it open for me, and there was a squeak of hinges at the end that was so familiar, it made my teeth ache.

I stepped inside. The carpet had been changed. When I was growing up, it was a dark gold, so thin in places that I could see the woven plastic matting glued to the floor. Now they had a mottled khaki Berber. The little girl pointed at the front wall, where our sofa once sat. A crudely wrought chest stacked with three more moving boxes filled the s.p.a.ce.

"Daddy painted when we first moved in, but they're all floating back up through," she said, pointing at two words and a host of dark marks on the wall. "Like ghosts, Daddy said."

The writing was all contained in an invisible square, exactly under the place where my mother's big framed print of ships in a harbor had once hung. The lines were thick, drawn on with a laundry marker. If the print had still been hanging, all the writing would have been hidden perfectly behind it.

At the top, someone had written my name, "ROSE MAE," in all caps. Underneath my name were long horizontal lines that ran from one edge of where the frame had been to the other. The higher horizontals were covered end to end in tick marks, thousands of them, all made of four vertical lines close together, then a diagonal slash drawn through to make five-packs.

Some were deep black, and some I could see only faintly as they worked their way up through the paint.

I said to the little girl, "This was done with a Sharpie, and that stuff will come up through paint every time. I've seen it come through wallpaper, even. Your daddy needs to prime the wall with this stuff you can get at Home Depot. It's called Killz."

"Killz," the little girl repeated. "I'll tell him."

I reached out one hand and set it flat on the cool wall, cautious, as if the marks had been scorched on and were still smoking. They were as mysterious and unreadable as flattened Braille. I slid my hand down, counting horizontal lines.

There were nineteen. The top line was about one-third covered in tick marks. I started counting across by fives, moving my hand over them.

The kid said, "It's a hundred and thirty-eight on that row. I counted before."

I kept going. She was right: 138. There were even more ticks on the lines under. They filled every line, until they stopped midway through the eighth line. The last ten lines had no ticks at all.

"I think my mother made these," I said.

The little girl said, "Mine works in a doctor's office," as if we were trading facts about mothers. "And she's in school to be a nurse."

"That's a neat job," I said absently.

My mother had kept my name and a strange count not five feet away from where my father's recliner once sat, angled toward the TV. The air was thickening around me, and it was harder and harder to breathe.

"I'm not going to be a nurse," the little girl said, confident. "I'm going into s.p.a.ce."

"That's a neat job, too," I managed to say.

The little girl said, "My Skipper doll has on a nurse outfit. Want to see?"

"Sure," I said, but the pit of my stomach had gone sour. My eyes burned, and the vision in the corner of my eyes had grayed out farther. I was peering at the marks now through a tunnel of fog. The lines on the wall seemed to flicker, as if the lamp was putting out candlelight.

The girl trotted over and held up Skipper-as-nurse, too flat-chested to fill up Barbie's uniform.

"That's awesome," I said, already up and moving. "I have to go." It was true. I couldn't breathe the air inside this place for one more second.

"Bye," she said.

I hit the front door at a dead run, the squeaky hinge I remembered squealing at me like it was laughing. I bolted to the center of the small yard, dizzy again, gagging, but I had nothing in my belly to throw up. I coughed instead, hacking so hard that it bruised my throat. Gretel was standing in the pa.s.senger seat, her head thrust as far out the half-open window as it could go. She loosed a long, houndy noise, halfway between a bark and a howl, worried.

"Hush, Gret," I told her when I stopped coughing. I was still bent over, my hands on my knees. The gra.s.s was thin with spots of black Alabama dirt showing, just as I remembered. Leprosy lawn, my mother had called it. A decade had pa.s.sed since my feet had walked off this browning patch of gra.s.s, yet it still hung on in the same state of wretched decay. The gra.s.s, at least, hadn't changed.

My stomach flopped inside me like an air-drowning trout. I hung my head down low to get in a good breath. The little girl might have come after me, but when I looked up, I saw her across-the-street neighbor had come outside. He'd already left his porch and was standing on his own tiny leprosy lawn, facing us.

He was a skinny old man with big, down-tilted eyeb.a.l.l.s. His lower lids had sagged down so much that they'd bagged and gapped open. It seemed to me that if he bent down to get his paper, his eyes would roll right out of his head, dangling down on their stalks. He was bald on top, with strings of grayed-out hair in a straggled ring around his head.

He looked at me and his mouth dropped open.

"Holy s.h.i.t!" he yelped.

I glanced behind me. No one. He pointed at me. His mouth stayed open. A thin string of drool came out of it, running down his chin and hanging free with a droplet of weighty water on the end. My stomach lurched again.

He came at me, moving across his lawn in a galumphing lope. He sped up as he came, arms spreading wide. His fingers splayed, and he staggered toward me like the mortal remains of some long-dead former love, reanimated. He hollered again, but his words were drowned out by Gretel's sudden chain of warning barks.

I was already dancing backwards, scrabbling in my purse, my fingers closing first around my lipstick, then my keys. He was still coming at me, drooling, a zombie crossing the asphalt to embrace me, maybe get a bite. Gretel was thrusting at the window, trying to shove her too-big shoulders through and get between him and me.

The man pa.s.sed my car, coming onto the lawn in a herky bound, and at that moment, as if I knew desperation magic, my hand closed perfectly around the cool metal cylinder I'd been seeking. This time, I remembered to flick aside the safety with my thumb. Just before he touched me with those big, splayed hands, I lifted the pepper spray and blasted him right in the face.

I sidestepped and kept moving backwards, almost falling, avoiding blowback the way Thom had taught me when he gave me the spray. The neighbor stopped abruptly and blinked, and then he screamed. He screamed like a woman, high and shrill. He dropped as if all his bones had suddenly been teleported out of his body. His hands came up to scrub and scrub at his face. He flopped onto his back, and his heels drummed the lawn. Gretel barked and barked in a deep-chested flurry of angry sound.

I stood over him, no idea what to do next, as he screamed again and then again. I looked at the teeny can, impressed.

"Are you okay?" I asked him, loud, so he could hear me over my dog. The question seemed inadequate.

He ignored me, kicking his legs like a shot deer. His scream changed, going longer, until it was an endless keening. I took that for a no.

"Stay put," I told him, then put my hand on my pounding head. The guy was obviously not going to pop up and trot to Hardee's for a chicken sandwich. "I mean, hang on. I'll go on in your place and call for 911."

I went first to the car and put my hand on Gret's head to calm her. "I'm fine," I told her. "I'm fine." She panted and chuffed, staring at the man, her back fur standing straight up. I was pretty d.a.m.n impressed. When Thom and I fought, she went under the bed till it was over, same as she did in thunderstorms, the coward. I'd never had occasion to see her react when I was threatened by a man outside her pack.

"What the f.u.c.k?" another man's voice said behind me. I looked over my shoulder and saw a bare-chested fellow in stripy pajama bottoms standing up on my old porch. Behind him, the little girl stood in the doorway. "What the f.u.c.k?" he repeated.

"Daddy said a Word," the little girl said to me, awed.

"He came at me," I said. Gretel was bristling at the new guy now, and I said, "Easy, girl," in the most soothing voice I could muster.

I looked down at the neighbor. He'd stopped kicking, and his keening had thinned to a whine. He was just about out of air. He took a long, choked inhale. He tried to sit up, peering at me through his fingers.

"Got-dammit, girl," he said.

I knew him then.

He took his hands down from his egglike eyes. The whites had gone hot pink, bright as Barbie's tube dress, and tears streamed out of the corners. His nose had two lines of clear snot running out of it, and his body was thin and frail, an old man's form. He didn't look much like his old self. But I knew him.

"Hi, Daddy," I said.

"I mean, got-d.a.m.n," my father repeated. He put his palms against his eyes, pressing and snuffling. "I thought you was your mother. I thought you was Claire."

The guy in the pajama bottoms came down the step, barefoot, picking a careful path across the lawn.

"Mace or pepper spray?" he asked me, tilting his head toward the can.

"Pepper spray," I said. I looked at the can still clutched in my fingers as if I was surprised to find it there. I flicked the safety back on and dropped it into my purse.

"That's a mercy," the guy said, then added to my father, "You got any Maalox?"

"Naw, Bill, I don't," the skinny shadow of my daddy said, sitting flat on his b.u.t.t in the gra.s.s. "I got Tums. You can go get you some if your got-dammed pizza lunch is bothering you while I sit here going blind."

Bill ignored that and said to me, "Help me get him up and to his house, will you?"

"I am not f.u.c.king touching him," I said, my tone very mild. My daddy was a wreck. He'd gone and withered himself up, and the hands he used to claw at his face trembled and were thin and wasted. He was no match for Thom Grandee. h.e.l.l, at this point he'd been no match for me. I wanted to kick him for it while he was good and down. I said, "Why don't you go blind. We'll see how you like that," directly to him in that same mild tone. I was panting, and each breath felt like something sharp, poking me low in my lungs.

My father said, "That don't even make sense."

"Well, good, then," I said, and that didn't make sense, either.

"Okay!" Bill said, businesslike, and the little girl and my daddy and I all turned our faces toward him, as if he'd called everyone on the eternally dying lawn to order. He had a rounded chin and full cheeks that made him look younger than he probably was. He had good, broad shoulders and a sprinkle of dark hair on his chest. The beginnings of a beer belly lapped the top of his pajama bottoms. He walked past me and helped my father to his feet, calling to his daughter, "Hey, Bunny? Go get the Maalox out of the medicine cabinet, can you? Bring it across the street to Mr. Lolley's house?"

"Umkay," Bunny said, and disappeared from the doorway.

Bill drew one of the sticks that used to be my father's meaty arms over his shoulder and walked him back toward the other house.

"Don't you go nowhere," my daddy yelled at me as they walked away. His voice came out burbled and thick, as if more snot was filling up his throat, getting behind a host of other snots that were lining up to head on out his nostrils. Bill wrestled him across his lawn and onto the porch. As they went in the door, my father was still hollering over his shoulder, "Don't you disappear! Don't you go!"

I paused, shaky and panting, my hand on Gretel's head and my heart pounding away in my chest like it was trying to get out and follow him. I stood like tacky lawn art and the Alabama sun blazed down and it seemed to me like I was hotter than that sun. My eyes burned as if I'd pepper-sprayed myself. I pressed my hands to my forehead, and they felt like lovely blocks of ice.

Bunny trotted back out with an economy-size bottle of Maalox. I opened the car door for Gretel, who positioned herself at my ankle and walked in time with me like a sergeant, hackles at half-mast. The two of us followed Bunny across the street. The front door floated open, wavery, and my cheeks were so hot.

Gret and I stepped inside, and when I crossed the threshold I pa.s.sed back in time, ten years or more. I got instant vertigo. I put one hand out to steady myself, and it landed on the key table beside my mother's old blue vase, still filled with her dusty, plastic tulips. I pulled my hand away like the table was made of human bones, gaping all around me. It wasn't our old house, but the floor plan here was the same, and my father had laid all our things out exactly as I remembered.

"Where are you?" my father bellowed from the kitchen. "Where'd you go?" He sounded desperate, almost plaintive.

I couldn't answer, goggling through fog at all the furniture and knickknacks of my childhood. Everything in the room was ten years older than the last time I had seen it, and looked it. The center of the brown and gold sofa sagged, as if it had been used for such an endless string of disreputable purposes that it had given up and bent beneath them.

"Bunny? Bring the Maalox to the kitchen," I heard Bill calling over my daddy's yowling. Bunny trotted obediently toward his voice.

My mother's ship print, so sun-faded that it looked like a photocopy of itself, was hanging in its designated s.p.a.ce above the sofa. It had a ruined patch in the bottom corner. Daddy must have used the wrong kind of cleaner to take off my dog-s.h.i.t good-bye note. Daddy's recliner was still angled toward the TV, looking as lumpy and ill used as the sofa. The plank table was there at the other end of the room, and on either side stood my mother's bookshelves. My father had made them for her back when they first got married, and she'd filled them top to bottom with her favorites. Less beloved books rotated in and out of a box in the coat closet. I turned, helplessly drawn, and opened the closet. I smelled mothb.a.l.l.s and old paper. Sure enough, there was the same wooden liquor store crate, old books stacked three deep under the hanging coats.

I walked across to the shelves, and the carpet felt like the floor of one of the ships in the picture, pitching and roiling under me. I grabbed the side of the shelf to stay upright. My mother had kept her books arranged by author, hardbacks and paperbacks jumbled in together. The top of each row humped up and down in uneven squares, like a row of poorly carved jack-o'-lantern teeth.

I trailed my hand along the fourth shelf down. Nine books in, my fingers came, as I knew they would, to Rudyard Kipling. I pulled out the book club edition of Just So Stories Just So Stories with the plain black cover I remembered, the t.i.tle embossed in gold leaf on the front. with the plain black cover I remembered, the t.i.tle embossed in gold leaf on the front.

My father hollered from the kitchen. "h.e.l.lo?... h.e.l.lo? Don't you disappear!"