That night, Misty’s mother came to deliver news. Martha Man Hands stood on the porch, shaking her giant fists, still furious over Misty’s latest misadventures. Krystal immediately sent Jake to his room. He stood in the hallway and tried to listen, but the baby was screaming, and then Martha was crying.
Krystal came into his bedroom after Martha left, and told him that Misty was being sent away. Misty had always saved him, escorted Jake through the streets of Quinn in the morning. Misty flashed a pocketknife at any assembly of boys more than three in number. Misty had been his protector, and Frank had been his friend. Losing them both was too much to bear. Something folded up inside him like a lawn chair.
He was more afraid than ever. He went to sleep holding Frank’s harmonica.
Waiting for the Flames
Rachel had now been in Quinn for six days, and she finally felt strong enough to venture out, lapped the town again and again, driving in circles, safe in the night. Nobody knew who the town of Quinn had been named after, although rumor had it that the original Quinn had been a railroad hobo, who in 1910 jumped a train, fell out drunkenly, and then decided to remain in the thick woods and found the town that would become his namesake. Wildfires completely decimated Quinn in 1939, and then again in 1946, just after people had finally rebuilt. As a result, the town was sloppily organized, streets named arbitrarily, or not at all, businesses only formed out of absolute necessity, no street signs or sidewalks or traffic lights. The whole town seemed to be waiting for the flames to return.
At night, the town was dark and still, no headlights from cars. The bars shut down at two o’clock, and the Sinclair had long since closed. She was thankful for the darkness when she pulled into her driveway. In the daylight, the sight of the trailer house filled her with dread.
She stepped through the gate, carefully navigating the narrow path, unlit and uneven, stepping-stones made of giant pieces of shale that were sunk at dangerous and unpredictable depths. What remained of the porch light was a jagged black hole, rimmed with papery gray clumps of hornets’ nests. Rachel hadn’t bothered to lock the door. Frank had left behind nothing worth stealing, and the trailer house already looked like it had been vandalized and squatted in. She turned on the living room light, and it glared off the plastic sheeting that covered the entire east corner, where the chimney had collapsed into the fireplace. The carpet was filthy, so Rachel sat on a cardboard box of unpacked clothes and reached for the cordless phone. She had been amazed to find that her father still had phone service, despite his dying. Maybe he had known she would return like a boomerang, and had paid in advance.
Seeing all those people at the Fireman’s Ball had reignited her shame. She had felt the fire in her cheeks as she leaned against the firehouse wall. She always thought that the people had been frozen in time when she left, but fatter and older versions carried on like they always had, only stopping to glare. Rachel thought she had moved past her shame, after it manifested itself in her first month of sobriety as spectacular crying jags and handwritten lists of the terrible things she had done, the things she could remember. Doing this inventory with her sponsor took two solid weeks, every evening spent unveiling yet another thing she thought unforgivable, while her sponsor made endless cups of tea. The sponsor massaged Rachel’s shaking hands and assured her that other drunks had done much worse things.
Rachel’s sponsor was called Athena. This was not her real name. Athena had ditched the name Louise after attending a sweat lodge where she received a vision in the teepee and decided that she was a warrior woman and not a tax accountant. Sobriety did strange things to people. Athena was hugely obese, a true warrior only when they went out to eat at restaurants that served food buffet-style.
“I feel shame again,” reported Rachel, when the phone was answered on the first ring.
“We got rid of that.” Athena sighed. “Come back to Missoula. I warned you this would happen. Don’t fuck it up. You’ve only got a year.”
“I have three hundred and eighty-four days,” responded Rachel. “That’s more than a year.”
She could hear Athena sigh again, and then the catch, the scratch of a lighter.
“Rachel . . .”
“What? I’ve done everything you have ever told me to do. You said no big changes during the first year. I didn’t even get a fucking haircut.”
“Did you go to that hootenanny?”
“It was a fund-raiser,” said Rachel. “For the fire department. I just wanted to make sure they know I support them. Trailers burn up quick around here.”
“Did you feel the urge to drink?”
Rachel thought about this question and realized that she had not. She had been too preoccupied with her mission, distracted by the sloppy citizens of her hometown, all of those faces that were vaguely familiar. She wished they had been wearing name tags.
“No,” said Rachel. “I felt the urge to spray everybody with disinfectant.”
“Have you found a meeting yet?”
“Yes.” Rachel had found the only meeting in Quinn, but she was too frightened to go, was too afraid of who she would run into. Although it was an anonymous program, the gossip might be worth too much. There was certainly a value for the delicious secrets of a famous, thieving, murderous harlot.
“We’ve been through all of the steps,” asserted Athena. “I don’t understand why you keep coming back to steps eight and nine.” Rachel made a list of all persons she had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all. She made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others. Rachel no longer feared injuring herself, figured that she had it coming.
“I’m stuck,” said Rachel. “I’ve been able to forgive myself for everything else. I have to make things right.”
“That’s not how it works,” said Athena. “You know that. All you have to do is be willing, and if they can’t accept your amends, then forget every white-trash piece of shit in that town. Stop beating yourself up.”
“Okay,” said Rachel.
“I don’t think you need to atone for the rest of your life. Two weeks is plenty. Paint some benches, pick up some trash, buy some Girl Scout cookies, and get the fuck out of there. Go to meetings.”
“You told me pain is good,” said Rachel. “You told me that pain is growth.”
“I also told you that it was okay to make Debbie Harry your higher power. Just go to sleep,” said Athena. “Tomorrow is a whole new day.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” muttered Rachel.
Athena had been astounded at how quickly Rachel moved through the steps; she had never sponsored someone so determined to get right with God, even though Rachel really only believed in Debbie Harry. There were twelve steps, and Rachel clawed desperately through each one; she wrote letters of amends to her mother and Red Mabel, to her father and several of her classmates from high school. All but one of the letters had been returned.
Rachel threw the phone against a pile of clothes, all Quinn-inappropriate, especially her vintage Halston palazzo pants. She loved those pants, but feared that magpies or marmots would be attracted to the sparkle, drop down from the sky or emerge from the forest to gnaw at her legs.
She navigated the sinkhole in the middle of the living room. The carpet was softly cratered where the floor had given in. The list of repairs was enormous, daunting: the house seemed to be surrendering to gravity, with the left end sinking faster than the right. A tube of lipstick rolled when she placed it on the kitchen counter. Rachel felt seasick when she walked from one end of the house to the other.
Rachel made do with washcloth baths, as the tiny bathroom contained a bathtub that had fallen through the subflooring. It rested three feet down from the rest of the linoleum, in the dirt and gravel underneath the trailer. Rachel had thrown the rest of her city clothes into this pit, along with the strange clothes she had found in her father’s closet. Her father owned a collection of polyester-blend suit jackets and matchin
g pants, a pile of neckties. This was strange to her—in her few encounters with her father, it seemed that he only accessorized with sap from pine trees. She lowered herself to the toilet to pee, and it was cold and drafty in the bathroom, torturous to touch her buttocks to the icy toilet seat. At least the toilet worked. Her father had not completely descended into the depths of madness. He had just fallen into squalor, and sometimes through the floor.
The bedroom was where Rachel had spent most of her time since returning home, crying and making to-do lists. Her bed was the only thing she had brought with her, the only piece of furniture she had any kinship with.
Rachel had bought the bed after being sober for two months. It was a gift she had given herself. The last two years of her drinking, Rachel had become a bed wetter. She was a beer drunk, always had been, and it was unsurprising that she wet the bed, because during the last year of her drinking, she was consuming sixteen cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon per night.
Eventually, she bought a stack of blue tarps to sleep on. She wasn’t a complete degenerate—every morning, she would remove the tarp and put it in the bathtub, turn on the shower to rinse away the urine, and drape it over the couch in her living room to dry. She threw the used tarp in the Dumpster every Sunday night, before the garbagemen came, replaced it with a new one. Rachel could still recall the crackle of waking up in the morning, the sound of her naked body on the tarp, the suction and the stickiness as she pulled herself free. It was this crackle that got her sober, made her realize that this was not normal behavior, that most people didn’t piss the bed every night. Her moment of clarity about the tarps came on a Monday morning, and she called the AA number, her hands shaking so badly she had to redial several times. She had not realized that her entire back and buttocks had become slightly stained, bluish, until Athena pointed it out on a day trip to the natural hot springs, two weeks into her sobriety.
Rachel deserved this bed. She had earned this bed, and now she owned fitted sheets and a duvet. She clung to this bed like she clung to her sobriety—it was a white-knuckled sort of ownership. Now, overwhelmed, Rachel turned on the bedroom light and threw herself onto the bed. There would never be enough paper for her new to-do list. The town was a creature unto itself, wild and woolly. The people who lived there were unpredictable and could never be crossed off, conquered. Rachel could not organize and proceed methodically—she had learned in sobriety that people, places, and things were impossible to control. The world never did what you wanted. She buried her face in the pillow and recited every prayer she had learned over the past year, silently and desperately. The Fourth-Step Prayer, the Seventh-Step Prayer, the Serenity Prayer. She asked for strength to continue, and for a new bathtub. Then she felt bad for asking for things, so she tried to name all the things she was grateful for, and it was a short list, so she repeated it over and over until she finally fell asleep.
* * *
The next morning, Rachel sat on the front porch and drank her coffee. She did not notice the rosary at first, only spotted it hanging from her doorknob when she returned indoors for a refill. She wasn’t sure who had left it—probably a religious fanatic determined to ward off her bad energy. She left it hanging, because it was a beautiful thing, the only decorative object on the entire property. Rachel fingered the yellow glass beads and drank more coffee.
It was a strangely warm day for February, and it revealed the swamp of a backyard. Lacy crusts of ice collected in the corners of the fence, and Rachel’s feet sunk in the muck as she examined her property. There was no lawn here. The mud was studded with blackened clumps of dandelions, frostbitten patches of clover, and skeletal stalks of tiny aspen trees, saplings taken root.
These were a new set of problems, these things she owned. In Missoula, she left behind Athena, her home group, credit card debt, the paycheck from cleaning hotel rooms, a house that smelled like urine even though it had been bleached and all the carpet pulled. She had left behind a weekly poker game on Sunday nights with a group of middle-aged women, a sober bowling league for which she had finally paid off her shoes, the keys to three different church basements—two Lutheran and one Methodist. Now she owned a trailer house, and guilt and shame. It had been her choice, and she had felt it necessary.
She looked up at the sky and was going to offer up a prayer, but she heard dim music and realized that she was not alone.
A boy was sitting on the roof of Bert’s house, squeezed into a tiny lawn chair. Rachel wasn’t sure what Bert’s disability was, but it had not stopped him from breeding. The boy wore an unzipped silver snowsuit, bright red moon boots, and a white kerchief tied loosely around his neck. He was so close to her that she could see the book he was reading: Lady Boss by Jackie Collins. She approved.
He was oblivious to her, his headphones blaring out tinny beats, pop music. His hair was so blond that it seemed silver, his face so delicate and his expression so dreamy that he could have been mistaken for a girl.
She watched him. He was a ferocious reader, and turned the pages so quickly that she briefly wondered if he was faking it. He clutched at the book as if it might be ripped out of his hands at any moment.
Rachel understood how it was to cling to things so desperately. She knew that she must cling to her sobriety, even if the pain rose over the banks, even if there was a deluge. She would find a way to float, find something to hold on to.
Hearts
The last week of February, and the nights were frigid, the air tight as a closed fist. The gales punched sideways, launching last week’s powder, made it sting like slivers of glass.
This was how all of Laverna’s weeknight shifts ended, playing hearts with the regulars as the washer whirred. The Applehaus brothers were drunker than usual, probably because she had offered shots at one o’clock, out of dirty shot glasses, because she wanted to start the dishwasher. Their fourth was Rocky Bailey, who didn’t drink but was retarded, so the playing field was level in her estimation. Rocky drank Mountain Dew out of a can and chewed great wads of grape Bubblicious at the same time. How he wanted to spend his grocery store wages was his business, but she feared he would develop diabetes.
Bert was the only other patron, silent and sullen as always. Laverna slid a pitcher and a pint glass in front of him whenever she felt like it. He sat far away from the others, in his usual spot, under the air conditioner. He never said a word, but tipped well, especially for an unemployed asshole.
Laverna had forgiven the Applehaus boys for their indiscretions with Rachel, all those years ago. The town was too small, and patrons were too important. Anything the Applehaus boys had done with her daughter would always be dwarfed by Rachel’s own betrayal. However, Laverna still held a tiny grudge and would mention her revulsion from time to time, especially when an Applehaus unloaded the queen of spades.
Talk turned to the completion of the new church. Last summer, Reverend Foote and his family had relocated from Kansas, and he had built the church by himself. He contracted out the plumbing and the electricity, so the citizens of Quinn took comfort in the fact that he wasn’t totally self-reliant. He had named his church New Life Evangelical—a denomination new to Quinn. Laverna loved the Catholic church in town—even though it was a small congregation, they drank heavily, and often. They already had Lutherans, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Methodists. The Methodists were a bunch of backsliders, vaguely pious. Black Mabel sold the Methodist wives diet pills, so they were also vaguely wicked.
Reverend Foote slowly but steadily poached his parishioners from each of the other churches, proving Laverna’s long-held theory that nothing stuck in Quinn, except for the snow.
The new church was a perfect square, plain, slung low to the ground, much like Reverend Foote himself, whom Laverna had chanced upon at the post office. He was a short man with thick auburn hair carefully parted. He wore brown pleated slacks and a tucked-in button-down shirt that was the worst shade of yellow, faint, like a white shirt completely stained with the sweat of a chain-smoker. She hate
d him on sight.
Laverna shot the moon for the final time of the night, and the game was over, because she declared it so. She pointed to the Budweiser clock mounted above the door, set fifteen minutes fast.
The Applehaus boys began gulping what was left in their glasses; Laverna had eighty-sixed people in the past for not honoring closing time, or even those who dared to argue, who pointed at their watches to compare them to the Budweiser clock.
Rocky Bailey pushed back his stool and swept up peanut shells. Bert poured the inch and a half left in his pitcher into the glass and considered it carefully; Laverna knew it was warm but didn’t care. Bert was a slow drinker. He was determined to get drunk, but did so at a methodical pace. This was how the unemployed drank at the Dirty Shame. On slow nights, Laverna longed for the distraction of Red Mabel, even though she was partially to blame for the very existence of the insidious Rachel. Red Mabel was her right-hand man, and Laverna always described her as such, and nobody dared argue about the genitalia.
Twenty-seven years ago, it was Red Mabel who drove a crazed Laverna into the mountains, directions to Frank’s cabin gleaned from bar patrons, nebulous and contradictory. Laverna and Red Mabel prided themselves on being adventurous, and pieced together the directions, written on the back of a receipt from the grocery store, a cocktail napkin, and the back of Red Mabel’s hand. They navigated the fire roads and one-lane bridges until they found his cabin. Though the roads had thawed to muddy ruts, the snow still fell lightly. Red Mabel was used to driving in the mountains—she considered herself a huntress, although the local authorities considered her a poacher. When they found the cabin, Frank was outside, stacking firewood. When he heard the truck, he looked up at the arrival, as if he had been expecting them all along, but didn’t stop stacking wood. Laverna made Red Mabel wait in the truck, and she stepped out into the mud, bearing a brand-new boot warmer and a bottle of Black Velvet. She talked her way into his cabin, by pretending she was cold, which was untrue, because she and Red Mabel had drunk nearly a third of the bottle on their journey. Frank and Laverna sat across from each other; the rough pine floor seemed an impossible distance. At least he offered her the couch. He stared at her silently.
The Flood Girls Page 4