by Jim Johanson
Mary could still hear her mother screaming, but her mother's words became garbled in her ears, quashed by the sound of the blood pumping through her head.
Chapter Three
Jackie McCaully laughed, her black hair blowing in the wind.
“I wouldn’t worry about what he said. He’s a man-child.”
"I know, I just... I guess it's just nice for someone to notice me, you know?" replied Mary.
Mary and Jackie’s legs dangled from the lowest bar of the metal power line towers. Below them grew a dense field of overgrown vegetation. The plants had flourished all summer and reached their peak potential, soon to begin succumbing to the changes in weather at the beginning of autumn.
It had been difficult to find a way to the power lines through the patches of thorn bushes and poison ivy that grew rampant throughout the area. Directly beneath the two girls was a thicket of brush and weeds that rose nearly seven feet high.
Mary's legs were noticeably pale in the setting sunlight, not having tanned a bit the entire summer.
"I don't know Mary, maybe it's not so bad on your end. All the guys that want me just want to get their peckers wet. It’s not exactly a secret. They think I’m a slut."
The word "slut" stung Jackie unexpectedly as she said it. She regretted it immediately.
"I mean, I don’t really care, but it's exhausting. I've had the ‘slut’ label since seventh grade. Just doesn't ever stop," said Jackie.
Jackie cleared her throat and spit downward into the pile of weeds. Mary watched Jackie's ball of saliva drop. It faded into the brush.
Neither girl wanted to admit that in the back of their heads they were both wondering if the other would bring up the topic of Mary’s brother Billy and his recent accident. The night in the emergency room had not been pleasant for anyone.
Breaking an awkward silence, Jackie reached into her bag and pulled out a plastic bottle of 120-proof corn whiskey. She unscrewed the top and took a swig. She’d learned to enjoy the burn of high proof alcohol, even as it seeped into the cracks of her chapped lips.
The two girls had become friends in first grade, and despite glaring personality and lifestyle differences, had become as close-knit as sisters without all the inherent drama that sisters often endure.
The whiskey was acting too slowly, Jackie felt. She reached into her bag again to retrieve a pill bottle, opened it and landed a tiny, green, ovular pill in her hand. Jackie put her cupped hand over her mouth and downed the pill, chasing it with whiskey from the bottle.
"Are you sure you should that with alcohol?"
"Yeah, my doctor actually said 'take this with alcohol'. Totally weird, right?"
Mary raised an eyebrow. Jackie turned her head to make eye contact with Mary. The two girls tried to hold back smiles and laughter in the interest of not making jest at Jackie's self-destructive behavior. Jackie broke first, a smile creeping across her lips until she could no longer container herself. Mary joined Jackie in laughing. For a moment their troubles were forgotten.
Jackie belched loudly.
“So gross!" said Mary.
Jackie fanned the air by her mouth with her hand, then handed the bottle to Mary.
Jackie picked up immediately on Mary’s indecisiveness on whether to drink or not.
“Come on, I think after last night you earned it.”
Mary lifted the bottle up to her mouth and let a tiny drizzle fall onto her tongue. She coughed immediately. The vapors alone were enough to irritate her throat.
“This stuff’s easier after the get the first one down. Trust me.”
Images of Billy laying in the hospital bed at the emergency room came back into Mary’s head: blood soaking through the gauze on his leg; the smell of gasoline still present in the hospital room; the blank, emotionless expression on his face; his unintelligible mumbling that continued for hours while she wondered if her brother was truly brain-dead; the terror she felt at thinking that she might now be solely responsible for caring for two bed-ridden family members.
Mary tilted the bottle back again, this time letting the tidewaters loose. Three or four shots worth flowed down her throat. She didn’t cough.
She reopened her eyes and turned to Jackie to find her staring back in astonishment.
"Wow Mare, thought you were a lightweight."
Mary dragged her free hand across her lips, wiping away the sting of the high-proof whiskey. She handed the bottle back to Jackie.
"It felt good," she said.
"Yeah... It always does, going down."
Jackie, feeling challenged, took another big gulp out of the bottle. She lost her balance slightly with her head tilted back. Mary instinctively grabbed onto Jackie’s upper arm to prevent her from falling. Jackie laughed.
"I'm okay, you goofball. Here, take another swig. We should see how much of this bottle we can get through before one of us falls off. Bet I last longer than you."
"I know I’ll fall first," said Mary.
"You know," said Jackie, "There was a girl named Ally Carson, who used to come out here and drink by herself. Her dad was a convicted rapist, and her mom used to beat her with a broom, so she just left one night and decided to live out here in a tent, and she'd climb up here and get shit-faced looking up at the stars, by herself.
“One night she drank too much and fell off and broke both of her ankles when she landed, and she landed in a pricker-bush, so her arms and her face were all cut-up, so she bled all over the place. And she managed to crawl back to her tent, dragging her broken ankles, but she'd left a huge trail of blood. By then it was night and animals were roaming around. They could smell the blood.”
"This happened here?"
"Yeah, like right here, on these power lines, somewhere. So Ally crawled into her tent, and she was bandaging her cuts from the thorns, but she was so afraid to walk home to her mother that she stayed in the tent with her ankles broken. If she went home, her mother would do way worse to her than break her ankles.”
"The Jacobys don't live far from here, she would have tried to make it there."
"The Jacobys didn’t leave here then. But it didn’t matter because she knew how to survive in the woods. She knew how to make a splint and she tied it around her ankles. Stop interrupting."
“Ooohh, kay.”
Mary was feeling warm, and the slight slurring of her voice revealed just how strongly the whiskey was already affecting her.
"Anyway, after a while, Ally was in so much pain that she nearly passed out in the tent from exhaustion. She zipped up the tent zipper, knowing that she wasn't going to make it to town to get help that day. But just when she was about to fall asleep, she heard some sticks breaking near her tent. She was delirious with pain, so her first thought was that it was a farmer or a hiker who had come to help her. She pulled open the zipper of the tent and stuck her head outside, yelling 'help, help!', ‘I broke my legs!', and she turns her head and right next to her is a giant black bear.”
"What!"
"The bear stood up on its hind legs and swung its big bear paw right into her face. Then when she hit the ground it pounced on her."
"Oh my gosh!"
"The first bite it took was right on her ankle, and you know the bite of a black bear is like a hundred times as strong as a dog’s."
"Yeah!"
"Well, it snapped her ankle right back into place, and then the bear bit her other ankle, and snapped it back into place."
"What?"
"And then the black bear pulled out a bottle of whiskey from its fur, and it looked at her and said 'Hey, chill out and drink this fucking whiskey and get drunk with me, and maybe your life won't suck so much.'"
“You’ve got to be kidding me!” shouted Mary. “I believed you, about the girl!”
Mary jabbed Jackie lightly in the shoulder. Jackie lost her balance for a moment and had to grab onto the metal bar to keep from falling. She laughed.
“Hey, careful Mary. I’m gonna fall off like Ally… and… an
d then a bear is gonna have to get drunk with me. And then you don’t get to have any more whiskey because the bear is gonna drink it all.”
“No, I want it.”
Mary reached for the bottle and wrapped her fingers around the neck, playing tug-of-war with Jackie for who got to drink next.
Chapter Four
A tiny drop of blood seeped gently from a cut across Mary's forearm. She had stumbled into a patch of thorns on her walk back home. Bruises were beginning to form on her knees from tripping and falling in the dark over old, discarded railroad ties. She'd drank much more whiskey than she had intended, but she was enjoying the feeling of being numb emotionally. A welcome sensation of calmness and certainty was present in her, even as her view of the world twisted and spun around her like a chaotic vortex.
The girls had concluded their night by polishing off the last few drops of whiskey. Jackie let Mary finish the bottle, then took it from her, wound up like a baseball pitcher and flung it off sailing into the night. A few moments passed before they heard it smash on some distant rocks.
Jackie went her separate way home after a plethora of hugs and drunken affirmations of friendship, though it took much convincing for Jackie to let Mary walk home by herself. Whether she was consciously aware of it or not, Mary had something to prove. She needed to walk home alone, to make her feel as though her life was at least somewhat under her own control.
Mary immediately felt much drunker after parting ways with Jackie. She stumbled as she continued her walk home along the defunct, overgrown railroad tracks.
The alcohol coursing through Mary’s veins gave her a false sense of confidence. If not for that, she might have felt a growing sense of fright as she navigated the dark pathways of the woods by herself. Jackie's story of the black bear flashed back into her mind. Mary knew it was rare to find bears in the area, but there was certainly no shortage of coyotes. No shortage of shadowy animal figures, ones that only leave their burrows at night. No shortage of amber glowing eyes, unearthly howls, shrieks and cackles of nocturnal creatures.
Tinnitus and buzzing in Mary’s ears began to drown out the chirping of insects and the croaks of bullfrogs. Seemingly even louder than the buzzing was her internal monologue. She became locked into a conversation with herself, as if having tapped into another version of her own persona, beseeching it for advice and forgiveness.
Mary mumbled incoherently, thinking intensely about her brother and his accident, and all of the ramifications of his newly formed mental disability. A sense of overwhelming despair attempted to come over her, but with the help of the alcohol, she managed to shake it off.
Just make it home. Deal with everything tomorrow.
She wanted to pray for Billy, to ask God to heal him, to make him normal again, but she'd prayed incessantly for her mother in the same way, and her mother had only gotten sicker as time went on. It all seemed so futile.
To Mary's left in the distance, she spotted the vague blur of the porch light of her family's house. She could see the boards of the railroad tracks in the light of the moon, her eyes now having adjusted to the darkness. She stopped walking abruptly when she spotted an object in front of her on the tracks. Making sure to check her balance, she stooped down to pick it up. The smell of the object made it clear what she was holding. In her hand was a mostly empty gasoline container. The lid was missing. It was the same container that Billy had used the day before to get himself high, before accidentally asphyxiating himself on an overdose of the fumes.
Mary wiped her face with her free hand. Sweat dripped from her forehead. She was drawing scores of mosquitoes, but never once did she feel them drinking from the river of her bloodstream, her senses dulled by inebriation.
Whether it was curiosity, self-loathing, desperation or just simple drunkenness, something inside Mary compelled her to lift the container of gasoline to her nose. She took a whiff from the opening. Her nostrils burned immediately. She began having a coughing fit. The smell was horrendous and seemed to linger in her mouth even as she took giant breaths of fresh air. Immediately regretful over her decision, she dropped the container to the ground and kicked it as hard as she could. It tumbled down the tracks then bounced off down an embankment.
Mary didn’t inhale enough to get high the way that Billy did, but it affected her coordination for the worse. She realized that she needed to get to the sanctuary of her bedroom as quickly as possible. If she passed out in the woods, the mosquitoes might feast on her all night, injecting bacteria or viruses with their hypodermic needle mouths, infecting her with all manner of strange sicknesses. There was no safe place for her to be but home, even if home was not the greatest place to be.
Mary pushed forward, edging her way one step at a time toward the beacon of the porch light. Tall weeds bent back and forth as she pushed through. A plant snapped forward and slashed her across the cheek. Mary swung back at the plants, pushing her way through the brush. Briars and seedpods hooked themselves into her jeans. By the time she made it into her yard, she was covered from head to toe with spiny bits of nature, bleeding from shallow cuts and slices on her arms and legs.
The backdoor creaked as she opened it. It reminded her eerily of the last time she’d seen Billy in the doorway, delirious, brain-damaged and burnt black like a marshmallow held too closely to a campfire.
The whiskey in her stomach and the lingering taste of gasoline in her mouth became too much to bare. Mary found herself doubling over onto the carpet of the living room, vomiting up a mixture of green beans and bourbon. Her high-proof vomit burned her throat and her sinuses. She gagged as the fluid filled her mouth and nose. Exhausted, she let herself fall onto the carpet next to the pile of partially digested mush.
Mary rolled over twice, placed her knees on the ground and used them for support to lift herself up. She stumbled to her feet but couldn't find her balance and fell leftward into the wall. Determined to fall asleep in her bed, she used the wall as a guideline and a support to find her way back to her bedroom, where she quickly fell into her bed and passed out.
There was no spirit to watch over her, no great guiding light to keep her well-kept and safe, but a presence did appear in her doorway: a young man, wrapped in a hooded sweatshirt, the hood draped up over his head. He breathed deep and slowly like a tiger prowling. His eyes held a pale glaze and an insidious stupor, focused directly on Mary's motionless body.
He left her door open behind him as he exited. Mary’s mouth hung open, face down as if whispering to her pillow as she breathed, left unaware that her brother had been watching.
Chapter Five
"You've been missing my sermons," said Principal Albert Northcote.
Mary's head throbbed with a horrible headache and the aftereffects of her night of drinking with Jackie. She'd barely been awake long enough to try to remember everything that happened the night prior, before being called unexpectedly to the principal's office.
"Are you listening? You look tired. Are you having trouble sleeping?" said Northcote.
An awkward silence followed everything Northcote said, serving as punctuation at the end of his sentences. His gristly voice and brooding tone was enough to invoke uncertainly even in the most self-confident listeners. The words he spoke sounded like nails shaking around in a rusty tin, rattling off his yellowed teeth until they shot out across his lips like spurts of molten lead. Northcote's disposition was such that it seemed to behoove people not to upset him, for an instilled fear of the wrath he might lay upon them in spite of his sixty-five years of age.
"Yes, sorry, I'm---"
Mary nervously darted her eyes back and forth between Northcote and the floor. She was afraid to make eye contact with him, but almost equally afraid not to. A tuft of her auburn hair hung down across her face.
"Your mother missed a lot of my sermons too, as I am sure that you are aware. Though I suppose that it is hard for drunks and lunatics to wake up before noon on Sunday to make it to church. If she had spent more time in ch
urch we might have stopped the devil before his curse came to fruition."
Mary dared not utter a word, though inside she felt profoundly stung by Northcote's crass remarks about her mother. Seeing no other options, Mary repressed her feelings, buried them deep down inside her. They hung like a weighted pendulum from her sternum.
"In a way, Mary, I feel somewhat responsible. Your mother's failure to maintain her devotion to Christ, and her devotion to her husband, is my failure as well. As a shepherd, I failed to protect my flock from the wolves. I underestimated the power of the lecherous black wolf. The great negro wolf. The one that corrupted your mother's body and gave to her the disease of Sodom, the disease that rotted her brain and crippled her, and now no longer can she bow before the eyes of our Lord. She's been made unable to care for her children, in a time when they need so much care.
“Mary, I know of your burden. Though you've strayed from the flock, I want you to know that I am still your shepherd. I will guide you through the darkness and back into the arms of our Lord. And your brother..."
Albert Northcote lifted one hand up to his forehead. He tapped on his old wooden desk with the other. His demeanor underwent an unexpected change. His voice deepened and slowed, becoming a guttural growl. He closed his eyes. The winkles in his forehead tightened and became like weights over his eye sockets.
"I feel wet, Mary, like I've been soaked in a river, like I've been baptized again, drowned and brought back to life by the hand of our Father. I feel a fiery blaze beneath the river, it boils, and... and on my neck, the sweat, it becomes blood, and it is given up as a sacrifice. My flock goes so willingly toward their demise, toward the grasp of the beast... with their... their adultery, their avarice, and their gluttony! All sin! All is sinful and unrepentant! It sickens me!