by J. C. Sasser
Rain puddled in the pockets of her collarbone, and he dipped his mouth in and took a drink.
“I’m not a lot lizard if that’s what you’re thinking,” she said.
His finger fondled her earring’s long gold chain and continued down her neck where it picked up sweat and kept gliding down her chest and found the dip of her bellybutton. He hiked her dress, palmed her hipblades, and held her still so she couldn’t run.
“You look like a whore to me,” he said with his spoiled milk breath.
She spat the candy and Nicorette in his face.
He slung the groceries out of her arms, spat out his toothpick, and slapped her mouth with the backside of his hand. She felt her lip split, tasted metal, and saw a screen of bursting black dots. Blood dripped on the daisy he slapped from her ear. She checked for her earring and tightened its back, picked up the flower, and put it back.
“You ain’t got any titties, but you’re gonna be fun,” he said through his teeth.
Over the rain she heard his loafers coming fast, and saw Grandpa running toward them holding his bucket, with his tar-drenched corn broom cocked behind his shoulder. The broom whistled through the air and slapped the man’s ear. Specks of tar splattered against her cheek.
Grandpa whipped the broom against the man’s ribs and struck him until the flowers on his shirt were all shiny and black. The bucket fell over, spilling tar onto the walkway. Grandpa clipped the back of the man’s knees. The man fell to the ground where he wormed and rolled and coated the cement in tar. Grandpa threw down the broom and kicked his kidneys. With each blow the man winced less and less.
“That’s enough!” Gradle screamed, tearing Grandpa off.
“What’n the hell’s going on out here?” Duck yelled as he trotted their way. “Jesus Christ, Leonard.” He tiptoed around the beaten man, careful not to get tar on his shoes. “He breathing?”
Tar covered almost every inch of the man, yet his toothpick stuck to his temple unscathed. Whatever damage Grandpa had done would be impossible to assess.
“Pull down your dress,” Grandpa told Gradle. He stared at the man like he wanted to kick him again. He ran his hand down his mustache and flicked the rain and sweat away.
Gradle unknotted her skirt and hurried to collect the photograph, her flip-flops, and the groceries that had scattered in the fight.
“Who’s gonna clean this shit up?” Duck yelled.
She felt Grandpa’s breath against her back, panting as he walked behind her toward their room.
Gradle stared in the bathroom mirror at her swollen upper lip and squeezed out a bead of Super Glue Grandpa had left out for her on the counter. She pinched her lip together, dabbed the glue over the cut, and breathed through her mouth until the glue dried and the scent died down.
She held the photograph up to the mirror and mimicked her mother’s smile. She tried to keep the tears from coming, but she couldn’t hold back the hurt she felt, not because she’d been hit, but because her lip would scar and distort the expression she’d spent years trying to perfect.
Through the thin motel walls, she could hear the thunder traveling on and Grandpa clearing his throat. She wiped the tears from her face, punctured a can of SpaghettiOs three times with a church key, and poured half on Grandpa’s plate and the other half on hers. She watered down what was left in the jelly jar and spread it and some peanut butter on two slices of bread. The grape jelly syrup would last only a couple more sandwiches, and they would have to go without until she could clean enough rooms, or until Grandpa left money on the table for her to go buy more.
She balanced both plates in the crook of her elbow and practiced her mother’s smile once more. The glue’s seal split. She licked the blood with her tongue, put the photograph inside her bra, and entered the room she and Grandpa had split into halves.
On her side, a bookshelf Grandpa had made of scrap wood and cinder blocks, kept her things: a SpaghettiOs can full of ink pens and pencils at various states of decline; a dingy white sock half-full of lost-and-found jewelry she never wore; a bottle of red gooey fingernail polish; a cracked compact of eye shadow she used as paint to paint pictures in her notebooks and sometimes, privately, on her face. Most everything she owned she’d found left in rooms over the years, including her lineup of books, all of which she had memorized. The only thing never lost was the mobile made of birds that hung over her bed. It had been hers from the beginning, and on her birthdays Grandpa would make her a new bird out of copper wire and coathangers and use the lost-and-found jewelry she never wore to give it feathers and an eye. Today, July 10, 1992, she expected him to add her sixteenth bird.
On Grandpa’s side, a shotgun rested by the door and an artistic clutter of tools decorated his pegboarded walls.
Grandpa sat at the table in a wife-beater, facing the curtain-drawn window and twisting copper wire around a piece of her lost-and-found jewelry. His hair was slicked back wet, and his skin was red from scrubbing the tar off with gasoline from the tank of his weed-wacker. The tiny room still reeked from the fumes.
Grandpa pushed the wire and jewelry aside as Gradle set down the plates. He cleared his throat and stared at his SpaghettiOs swimming in a red pool of sauce.
She sat across from him, took a bite of sandwich, and stared at his bowed head. “You gonna say the blessing or you want me to say it?” she asked, as she took another bite.
His hand began to tremble, and his fork tapped against his plate, and one by one he looped his SpaghettiOs on the tines of his fork until there was no space left. He took a bite and started over again.
“I should’ve kicked that guy in the nuts,” she said.
A lock of hair fell in Grandpa’s face and got caught in his brow, which reminded her of the black caterpillar of the Giant Leopard Moth. His brows were the only patches of hair on his body that were immune to his old age and hadn’t turned grey. If it weren’t for these little miracles she would have given up on him long ago.
“Cat got your tongue?” she asked. She looped the SpaghettiOs on the tines of her fork, mimicking him for attention. “You gonna say the blessing?”
“Pardon our sins, Amen.” He finally got his four words of the day out, but he kept his head down and focused on nothing but stacking his Os.
“I’m gonna go clean room nine before you run out of SpaghettiOs.” She removed her plate from the table, washed it in the bathroom sink, and grabbed the vacuum and her bucket of cleaning supplies from the closet.
“This came in the mail today.” She threw the letter by his plate. SpaghettiOs sauce bled over the corners. “You’ve got forty-five days to do something about it or they’re gonna tear it down,” she said, slamming the door behind her.
The sweaty night hummed with locusts and idling trucks as Gradle rolled the vacuum down the breezeway. The lot was half full, and all the rigs were lit up like Christmas trees. In the back of the lot, Gradle watched Loretta climb down from a cab in hooker shorts and one high-heeled shoe. She clasped her bra in the back, shuffled through a few dollar bills, and limped off into the dark.
Gradle slid room number nine’s key in the knob and had to jiggle it before the door would open. She switched on the light and was hit with the stench of stale beer and vomit. Cigarette butts and Budweiser cans littered the room. The bed’s fern-patterned comforter was wadded up in the corner, and the lampshades were askew. She put her forearm to her nose, picked the cigarette butts up from the floor, and dumped all the ashtrays. She collected the Budweiser cans, found one that was unopened, and set it on top of the Magnavox for later. She flipped the pillow over to hide the lipstick stain and made the rest of the bed. In the bathroom, she flushed the toilet of vomit and sprayed down all of the surfaces with watered-down Clorox. She shoved the shower curtain aside and found the other one of Loretta’s high-heeled shoes taking a bath in the tub. She fished it out, set it beside the Budweiser atop the TV, and ran the vacuum over the room.
After the room was reasonably clean, Gradle sat o
n the edge of the bed, popped open the warm Budweiser, and took a swig. She slipped Loretta’s high-heel on her foot and stared in the mirror at how long it made her leg. She imagined what it must feel like to be a woman, wondered what kind she would grow up to be, and if she’d still be cleaning rooms rented out by the hour at the Fireside Motel ten years from now. She’d always dreamed about stealing an eighteen-wheeler and driving to California, visiting the Petrified Forest in Arizona on the way. She was driving age now and could get her license, and at least that would make her dream somewhat legal.
Footsteps and laughter magnified outside on the breezeway. A key slid into the knob, jiggled around, and the door opened. Loretta wobbled in, leaning on the man Grandpa had beat up earlier with his broom. A Band-Aid striped his forehead, and a purple bruise puddled underneath his eye. He stunk of tar, and when his eyes met Gradle they immediately hid on his boots.
“I see you like my shoe, Gradle Bird.” Loretta’s grin flashed a fleet of silver teeth. “I’ll let you borrow it if you want, girl.”
Gradle downed the rest of the beer and shot it at the trashcan. She removed Loretta’s heel from her foot and dangled it on her finger for Loretta to take.
“It’s too small,” she said, grabbed her cleaning supplies and the vacuum, and pushed on past.
The vacuum’s wheels squealed as they rolled down the breezeway toward her room and scared up a cockroach that skittered in her path and slipped through their cracked door. An orange extension cord snaked from the crack all the way out into the parking lot where Grandpa worked under the hood of the old Chrysler New Yorker Deluxe that lived most of its life under a tarp. Rain danced like little winged bugs around the hook lamp above his head, and a sheet covered with car guts sat on the ground beside him.
She walked in their room, put the vacuum and cleaning supplies in the closet, and plopped face up on the bed. Her mobile spun above her in the air conditioner’s cool wind. The bird Grandpa was working with before supper hung on its end. She stood on the bed and touched its red rhinestone eye and its silver-chained feathers. Another tiny miracle.
She cut off the lights, sat at the table by the window, and parted the curtains wide enough to watch Grandpa working on the car. She didn’t know why he was the way he was, where his smile had gone, what had dampened his light. She couldn’t remember a specific moment or a particular event. She only knew that it had been gradual, like his growing old, gradually painful, gradually deficient.
She wondered how long he would be out there working, how waterlogged he would have to get, how many parts he would have to clean and fix before he could settle down and rest. He rarely slept, rarely stayed still. He was a work junkie. If he could snort it up his nose he would. She closed the curtains, crawled under the covers, and held tight the gold cross of her earring as she said her prayers. The rain picked up, drummed her to sleep, and held her down through morning.
Light seeped through the curtain’s crack and warmed the skin on her lids. Doves that fed on the breezeway each morning sprung to flight, their wings a soft rattle, when a car engine turned over outside. Her eyes didn’t want to open, but just as they did Grandpa nudged her with the butt of his shotgun.
She sat up in bed, rubbed the sting out of her eyes, and saw their room was vacant, cleaned out of all their things, even her mobile. She checked her ear for her earring and found comfort it was still there.
“Time to go,” Grandpa said, and he nodded her out the door.
THEY CAME IN the rain, when the moonflowers were in bloom. When they arrived, Ms. Annalee Spivey was staring through the attic window at the pall that forever loomed about her house. She watched them wheel into the drive in a vintage New Yorker Deluxe. Black. A ‘54 perhaps. Annalee lifted her grey, decrepit finger and hooked the dingy lace curtains back. They disintegrated in her touch, falling like ash on the paint-cracked windowsill.
There were two of them. An old man and a girl. She didn’t know who they were or who they were some of, and couldn’t remember for the life of her if they had telephoned in advance. A bad omen, she thought, company arriving in rain.
Regardless, she didn’t possess the spirit or know-how to go down to the kitchen and make sweet tea and cucumber sandwiches, nor was she inclined to run out and greet them as a good hostess should. The saccharin had long ago dissolved in the bottle, the cucumbers had shriveled to weeds, and it had been decades since Ms. Annalee Spivey had put on a smile.
They were foreigners, lost, she gathered, after striking the possibility they could be kin. She had no kin left, and besides, anybody brave enough to come to the old Spivey house would sleep with snakes and walk on graves. They must not know its history.
The house was built in 1910, and at the time, it was a big, beautiful two-story home. Forty-eight windows. Six pocket-doors. A porch that wrapped all the way around. Today, the house was still big, but all of its beauty had flaked and fallen to pieces. The wraparound porch was water-warped. The windows were broken and their shutters were either missing or dangled like snagged teeth. There were no red geraniums to brighten the place, no wandering purple Jew or yellow roses to grace the lattice. Only the moon vine thrived here. It climbed all over the front porch and spiraled up the columns, peeling the paint along its way. It invaded the cracks and breaks, tangled up the roof, and surrounded the chimney, trapping the home in a sweet-smelling web.
The grounds were no better off. Thorns and thistles and nettles that sting flourished with absolute rage. Plant a petunia here and watch it wither. Of all the stock planted years ago, the camellias had put up the best fight. Spaced along the iron fence, they grew with great aspiration, as if their view of the other side might change their lives. Yet, still, they were too leggy and too old to bloom. The birdbaths and garden statues, once full of whimsy and charm were now blanketed with the vine, and had morphed into strange-looking lumps, as had the courtyard fountain whose faint, delicate trickle anyone with the courage to come close enough could still hear.
But the place wasn’t entirely hopeless. The attic had a window. The porch had a swing.
Annalee looked down on this strange pair still parked in her drive. They weren’t like the rest of the people who swerved or slowly rode by the place like it was some unfortunate stray they were too scared to rescue. These people were different. They had courage. They had actually pulled into the drive as if this old decaying tomb was a destination they purposely sought.
But did they know? Or were they out there wondering why somebody could let a place so beautiful go to seed? A lack of money? A lack of care? Both sides of the family couldn’t come to terms? The superstitious crowd, which included the entire town, believed it was Ms. Annalee Spivey herself who had accelerated the home’s fatal decline. She was born inside and had died inside, rotted away in the attic.
It was the postman who finally found her. He had a hunch when the mail started piling by the door but didn’t investigate even after it started spilling down the front porch steps. It was a well-known fact Annalee shied from society. The maggoty stench of dead animal gave him the clue. He kicked in the door and followed the scent to the attic. When he pulled the attic flap down, the entrance was blocked with furniture, but after muscling through it, he found her stiff on the fainting couch shoved against the wall. Her arms were crossed over her heart as if she had hoped to die, and in her sparrowlike claws was a portrait that captured the beauty she once was. Her eyes were hard as marbles, her mouth was frozen agape, and sitting on her dried-out tongue was a sparkling diamond ring.
It had shocked him so that he fainted to the floor and woke ten minutes later in the split-pea soup he had for lunch. Once he collected his wits, he fetched the sheriff and didn’t deliver the rest of the day’s mail. When they came back to the house, the corpse was still there, her jaw still agape, but the portrait and the diamond ring were gone.
In small Southern towns such as this, the ghost stories are scarier than the ghost. Anybody who rots in the attic certainly has a ghost. Wh
en the gravediggers lowered her into the ground and the courthouse clock struck two, the Beasley house next door on the left caught fire and burned to the ground. The stove was off. The chimney was swept. The wiring was sound. Yet poof! Today a clan of wild cats lives in its lot, and the front porch steps are the only proof it was ever there.
The young Franklin couple who lived next door on the right packed up their belongings and walked out two days after the Beasley house burned. They claimed they smelled fire every day when their clock struck two and figured they could save a few of grandma’s heirlooms if they got out now. That was decades ago, and the house had been vacant ever since. Its roof was sinking, and the FOR SALE sign had faded pink in the sun.
So why these people were still parked in her drive presented her with an impossible puzzle. They hadn’t opened up a map or reversed to head in another direction. Through the gray and the rain and the dingy lace curtains, Annalee kept her eyes on the pair. The old man stared straight ahead through the windshield at nothing. His knuckles stretched white across the wheel, but his hold was not strong enough to hide the severe tremble in his arms. The girl was in the backseat. She stared at him, waiting and woebegone.
He put the car in park and turned off the engine. Annalee felt a sudden numbing dread. Should she change into her welcoming gown? Rush down and lock the doors?
Someone must have warned them. Surely, they feared catching fire. Surely, they were lost. Surely, they would leave.
But the girl got out of the car, and when she stood upright, Annalee swallowed a shot of cold breath, for it wasn’t until then that her hard-as-marble eyes had seen the girl complete. She had a familiar and unusual pulchritude. She was beautiful like an insect, a green lacewing. Her appendages stretched long and balletic and had distinct segments, hinged with sharp balls and sockets. Her eyes were large and compound and possessed an infinite blue dimension that Annalee found startling she could see. If the girl had a pair of wings, surely, she would fly away.