Desperation Road

by Michael Farris Smith

  A cricket hopped onto his arm and he watched it for a moment. Felt the tiny tentacles in the hairs of his arm. So gentle and unassuming. Like eyelashes batting against his skin. Then he tossed away the cigarette and smashed the cricket with the palm of his hand and he rubbed its guts up and down his forearm. Come on over, he thought and he felt the same rhythm in his pulse that he’d feel in the moments when there were three of them. Or four of them. A violent, pounding pulse that seemed to lift him up to some other level where he accepted the hurt and the pain. He wiped the bug guts on his jeans and he knelt down in the tall grass and he reared back his head and howled at the moon like some lunatic and he felt no end to it all.

  When the howling died away he walked back inside and picked up the Playboy from the living room floor. He opened to the blonde with the green eyes. She lay on her back with her legs spread open, only a slither of satin concealing what she knew they wanted. He touched his fingers to the glossy page, eased them across the hard nipples, along the curve of the hip, up the inside of the thighs. And then he dropped the magazine on the floor and he got in the truck and drove downtown. He moved slowly between the old buildings, hoping to find anything with a neon sign that looked like it might be alive. Hoping to find others who could not be still in the night.

  11

  SHE HAD WASHED ANNALEE’S FACE WITH A WASHCLOTH AND SAT next to her on the bed with her arms wrapped around her until the child stopped crying and calmed down, promising her over and over that she wasn’t going to leave her. I swear to God, Annalee. I swear it. The child eventually stopped huffing and sniffing and then they moved back on the bed and pulled the covers over them and Annalee rested her head on Maben’s chest and draped her arm across her mother’s waist and she was finally able to sleep again. Maben had slipped the pistol into the bottom drawer of the dresser and she stared at the drawer handle as she lay still until Annalee was thoroughly asleep and she could move out from under her. When the tension left the child’s body and her breathing was slow and heavy, Maben eased Annalee’s arm from across her waist and then she gently moved the child’s head from her chest onto the pillow. She waited to see if Annalee would wake and then Maben sat up in the bed. Swung her legs off and stood.

  She walked to the sink and took a plastic cup and filled it with water and she drank it in one take. She did this twice more and then took the wet cloth she had used to wipe the child’s face and she wiped her own. She sat down on top of the toilet and closed the door to the bathroom and was still in the darkness. Waiting for a knock on the door. Waiting for a siren. Waiting for something. Opening and closing her eyes. Unable to tell the difference. Listening and listening and listening.

  She finally opened the bathroom door and she drank another cup of water. She looked in the mirror at the small mound on the bed under the sheets and blanket. I swear to God, Annalee. I swear it. She turned and walked to the edge of the bed. The sheet had pushed down around Annalee’s waist and she lifted it and covered the child’s sunburned arms. And then she took a chair and she sat down next to the window and pushed the curtain back half a foot, enough to see the parking lot from one side to the other.

  This place, she thought. This road.

  In her mind she began to trace her steps, to calculate what had gotten her here, into this night, with this sleeping child that she couldn’t care for, with the wolves outside waiting to get her. But it was as if she were trying to fit together arbitrary pieces of different puzzles. No logical order or pattern or reason for one thing to fit together with the next. She had drifted for so long. Her mind was a cloud and her memories lost in the cloud and even if there were people and things worth remembering none of them would have done her any good right now. Would anyone or anything be able to save me from the shit I’ve fallen into?

  Across the way a man and woman in matching denim shirts climbed out of a truck cab and walked hand in hand across the parking lot to the café. He opened the door for her and she slid her hand across his shoulder as she crossed inside.

  Maben tried to think of someone else to blame but she couldn’t.

  There was that one time, she thought. She was in the hospital bed and almost Christmas and the nurses wore antlers and the doctor carried candy canes in his coat pocket. Annalee came in the early morning and the nurse handed Maben the tightly wrapped child and when Maben looked at her the expression in Annalee’s eyes made Maben think that the child already knew her and in the moment of that first exchange she swore to God and the angels and the nurses in antlers that things were going to be different. I’m not going to let anything happen to you, Annalee. Not a damn thing. We’ll be all right.

  And they had been for a while. There had been a three-room apartment on the back side of a sliced-up antebellum with the nocturnal sounds all around—rats or maybe bigger animals crawling around underneath the slanting wooden floors and the loud television of the apartment next door and the banging around of the two drunk old men upstairs and the pill dealer in the other place upstairs and the constant comings and goings of those in need of him. A waterstained clawfoot tub and a waterstained sink and a refrigerator that dripped and left a tiny pinkish trail. A twin mattress that kept Annalee close to her as they lay together and a chair in the corner that wasn’t meant to rock but Maben had cut holes in tin cans and slipped them onto the chair feet and then it rocked just right. The dropoff laundry three blocks away where Maben washed and folded clothes for people who didn’t have to do it themselves and Annalee lying in a basket filled with clean, warm towels from the dryer and falling asleep to the electric lullabies of the washing machines. Getting paid in cash every Friday by the owner, a bent, whitehaired man with countless grandchildren. He had given her a stroller and a box of dolls and rattles and plastic blocks. A car seat if she ever got a car. Walking with Annalee, back and forth to work or to the Dollar General or to the grocery store or wherever they needed to go, the spring turning into summer and their walks together maybe out of necessity but always welcome to Maben as she wanted to wrap up the sun and the warmth and the child and the days together and put them somewhere safe so that one day she could get them back out and look at them and remember.

  She stood from the chair and let the curtain fall across the motel room window. Shades of purple and gray across the bed. Across Annalee’s exhausted little body. Maben knelt at the end of the bed. Sleep, she whispered. Sleep.

  She moved her hand and turned and saw herself in the wide mirror covering the wall above the sink. She was draped in the dark. Faceless, almost shapeless. She stood still for a long moment and stared at her blank black figure. Then she slowly raised her arm to make certain she was real and the shadow in the mirror mimicked her movement and she knew that this was much more than a bad dream.

  She let down her arm and crossed the room and sat on the floor with her back to the wall.

  I didn’t have to go up those stairs, she thought. Stay way the hell over there, bad habits. Stay your ass over there. I got a baby now and you’re too sharp to play with.

  She had started to listen for the steps, the fifteen steps of the staircase that split the middle of the big house and led up to the door of the pill guy. Late at night she listened and counted as they went up and counted as they went down. Rickety, horror-story-sounding steps and she created a phrase to match the fifteen steps, five words she whispered to herself in the dark, a word for each step, repeated three times. Don’t go up the stairs. Don’t go up the stairs. Don’t go up the stairs.

  Then she began to peek through the blinds and out at the street to see what they looked like. There was the Hispanic girl with the eagle or hawk or something with fabulous wings tattooed on her calf. The handful of young black guys in muscle shirts and sweatpants who looked fast and strong. The high school boys who arrived in an SUV that was worth a small house. The usual ragtag and wornout stragglers who ambled to the house from all sidewalk directions at any time of day or night.

  During the day it wasn’t difficult. She worke
d and then changed diapers or took Annalee for a walk or fed her or rocked them both to sleep. It was during the night after Annalee had woken her and Maben had given her a bottle and gotten her back to sleep that she imagined going up the steps herself and knocking on the door and getting a little something. Just a little something.

  Stay way the hell over there. Back up. Keep going.

  So then she began to watch for him and that became more difficult because she never saw him. Never caught him coming or going, only heard the muffled sound of his voice when someone was at his door and he became this strange, faceless thing that lived up the stairs and provided the magic beans.

  Twice, both times in the middle of the night after Annalee was back asleep after a bottle, she had gone up. But both times she had won. Stopping at the door and her knuckles bending in preparation for a knock but she never raised her hand. The tension falling from her bent fingers. The voice inside backing her away and telling her you will not become what he wants you to become. She moved back down talking in rhythm with her steps. Don’t go up the stairs. Don’t go up the stairs. Don’t go up the stairs. The second time she returned she closed her door and leaned against it and she was breathing hard as if she had been running from the bad guys and had slipped inside only an instant before they got her. She caught her breath and went to the bathroom and looked at herself and it was unfamiliar—health. They were eating. Didn’t matter what or how much but they were eating. They were sleeping. She had stopped smoking two months before the baby was born and hadn’t started back but for one at lunch and one at night. No beer. Beer had always led to nastier and happier things.

  There is not one damn reason to go up there, she had said and pointed at herself in the mirror as if to add and I fucking mean it.

  Several nights later he knocked on her door. She opened it and he was holding a small Ziploc bag containing a handful of pills. Some blue and some white. He held the bag out to her and said welcome to the neighborhood. He was wiry with deepset eyes and the distant look of the sleepless. He wore faded jeans and was barefoot and his blond hair was cut tight on his head. He held his mouth halfopen and his teeth were badly stained from cigarettes.

  “I don’t want them,” she had said and she closed the door. She waited and listened for him to walk away and then the Ziploc bag slid under the door.

  “Then throw them away. I don’t give a shit what you do with them,” he said and then he was gone.

  Maben heard voices outside in the parking lot. Gruff voices and a couple of gruff laughs and then nothing. She slid her back along the wall and lay down on the floor with her arm folded under her head and she started to cry quietly. As she cried she could see the Ziploc bag sliding under the door. She could see the bad habits not listening to her demands to stay away. Not staying way the hell over there but inching closer and closer until they were right there with her and the child. The summer faded away and in early October the weather turned damp and cool and Annalee coughed and coughed and wouldn’t sleep and her fever went up and down and because she had kept the Ziploc bag underneath the kitchen sink and not thrown it away, taking it out and opening the bag and sticking her fingers into it and raising them to her mouth was an easy thing to do. And by Christmas she was no longer paying the rent and by February she and Annalee were locked out of the apartment and that was where the clarity of what she remembered from the last four years ended. The fog settled in.

  Maben sat up and wiped her eyes. She got off the floor and walked across the room and sat down again in the chair. She pulled back the curtain wide enough to see from one side of the parking lot to the other. Dawn was coming in a few hours and she knew that with the first light the world would begin to spin faster.

  12

  HE FOUND THE ARMADILLO, A CORNER BAR ON THE BOTTOM FLOOR of a three-story building. He parked and went inside and sat down at the bar. Brick walls and a sticky wooden floor and a yellowstained ceiling. A dozen or so people sat at the tables and along the back wall was a small stage. Stacks of speakers were on each end of the stage and a drum kit set up in the middle. The chairs and tables were pushed back away from the stage, leaving room for dancing. A young man appeared from a door behind the bar. He carried a case of beer and he slid open the top of a cooler and stacked the bottles inside. His arms were covered with tattoos and his hair messed up in the right places. Russell sat alone at the bar and when he finished stacking the beers he gave Russell a nod and Russell asked for one of them. For the next hour or so this was the game. The bartender came and went in preparation for the night ahead and Russell sat quietly, smoking and watching, trying to decipher where one tattoo ended and another began. He occasionally asked for a beer and the bartender gave it to him.

  In the next hour the door to the Armadillo opened and closed more frequently as the tables began to fill up. Russell moved to the end of the bar where he could watch the door. Most everyone who came in looked either too young to be in there or too old. A burly, bearded man came in the door and stepped into the middle of the floor. He looked around. Stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled. Another bearded man wearing a black bandanna around his neck pushed open the door and then guitar cases and amps were walked in and through the maze of tables. Once the equipment was in place the band plugged in cords and tapped microphones and tuned guitars. It was the ugliest band Russell had ever seen.

  Another bartender showed up to help with the crowd. A young woman, equally tattooed. Her shirt bared her belly and a sun flared around her belly button and Russell happily watched it move behind the bar. Jesus or Elvis could have walked in the door and he wouldn’t have known or cared as he was magnetized by the black sun and the way its rays bent and twisted as she reached for bottles and poured strong drinks.

  The bar stools filled up next with those who had come without friends and after the burly band drank a few beers and smoked a few cigarettes the lights went down and a row of moody, yellowish bulbs illuminated the stage and dance area. A guitarist struck a wiry chord and then on the count of four the night jumped to a new level as the burly band played Skynyrd as tight and crisp as Skynyrd themselves. Heads began bouncing and shoulders began swaying and there was no more talking, only yelling, and the band never slowed between the first three or four songs and a couple made its way to the space in front of the stage. Clutching and clinging more than dancing but damn sure not caring what anyone thought about it. Russell’s knee bounced in rhythm and he noticed the tattooed bartenders pouring the drinks heavier than they had been pouring them before the music began. People kept coming in and it wasn’t long before it was hot inside and in another handful of songs there were more sweaty faces than dry faces. Russell had to go to the bathroom but knew if he left his bar stool he wouldn’t get it back so he tried to ignore it by watching the sun that was now glistening with sweat in the neon light of the beer signs hanging behind the bar.

  The band decided to take a break and the bodies returned to their seats and the crowd seemed to take a collective breath. The noise and the energy falling and the bartenders hustling to get everyone filled up before the second set. The bar stool next to Russell opened up but was quickly taken by a blond man. A man Russell thought was much too pretty to be in a place like this. He asked for a drink and when it was delivered he tried to pay with a hundred but the woman bartender shook her head and said no damn way. She picked up the drink and handed it to someone else who wanted the same thing. The man asked Russell if he had change and Russell shook his head and the man returned to his table and explained to the three women he sat with that his money was no good here. One of the women reached into her purse and gave him a twenty and he returned to the spot next to Russell. Russell noticed his smooth hands as he held them folded on the bar and waited for another chance. And he noticed the starch in his shirt and the watch on his wrist and if it wasn’t his first visit to the Armadillo Russell had a hunch it’d be his last. This time the man ordered two drinks and the exchange was made and Russell watched him walk
back to his table. The woman who gave him the money leaned over and whispered into his ear and then she licked it and he pulled away and looked around as if his name had been called. She laughed and the other two women laughed but he didn’t and he sipped his drink cautiously while the women continued to have a good time.

  Russell couldn’t hold it anymore so he had no choice but to vacate the stool. He left his beer on the bar hoping to mark his seat. Neither of the bathroom doors was marked but a line of women stood outside one of them. He was lucky to get in and out of the men’s room but when he returned to the bar stool it was taken. His beer had been pushed to the side and a woman sat in his place, her shoulders covered only by the shoestring straps of her dress, her hair reaching her sunfreckled shoulders. Russell walked up behind her and started to reach around for his beer but as he reached the stool next to her came free as a couple all wound up together made their way out of the bar and toward somewhere that offered more privacy. He sat down and with less of a reach he slid his beer in front of him.

  She looked at him and halfgrinned. “Was that yours?”

  He nodded.

  “And I bet this was your seat,” she said.

  “You’d win that bet.”

  She started to get up but he said, “Sit back down. We’re good.”

  She grinned again and held her drink with both hands. He didn’t recognize her and he hoped she didn’t recognize him. Her nails were long and pink like ten delicate daggers and bracelets dangled from each wrist. She sat with her legs crossed and sipped her drink as if she had all night.