“Thum-thum-thum-thum-thum-thum thum-thum. Thum-thum-thum-thum-thum-thum thum-thum. Wonder Womaaaaan!”
Kyle didn’t look right when he came back from that house. His eyes looked funny. There were dark circles under them and he just looked empty somehow. He used to talk and play and cut up with Grace, but not anymore. Sometimes he would just lie in the bed and do nothing. Just stare at the ceiling. He could pretend in front of Mama and Daddy pretty good, but Grace could tell that that was all it was—pretending. He just wasn’t Kyle anymore. She didn’t understand how Mama and Daddy couldn’t see that he wasn’t Kyle anymore, that he was just pretending to be Kyle. But a part of Grace realized that Mama and Daddy weren’t really Mama and Daddy anymore, either. They were just pretending too. Mama still cooked dinner and gave Grace her bath, and made sure she brushed her teeth, but it was like a robot had replaced her mother. She was just doing those things out of habit. To Grace, it felt like her whole family had been replaced with robots that looked the same, but had no emotion.
Grace lay across her bed and sang softly now. She had made herself sad. What would Diana Prince do? What would Wonder Woman do to save her brother? Grace stood up, extended her arms, and began to spin. She imagined thunderbolts and a halo of ethereal light engulfing her body, transforming her. Grace imagined that she was beautiful like Diana Prince, with lustrous black hair and straight white teeth. And a big swollen chest like Diana had. She saw the way her older brothers looked at Diana Prince on the TV when she transformed into Wonder Woman. The way they stared at her bosom. Daddy stared at Mama like that too. Or he used to. Grace wanted men to look at her like that one day.
She went out to the laundry room, climbed on top of the humming dryer (it seemed like Mama did clothes every day), and found a roll of duct tape on the utility shelf. It was hard, but Grace used her teeth to tear off two small lengths of the shiny silver tape, and wrapped a piece around each of her wrists. Grace decided that the silver tape was made from Amazonium. Amazonium straight from Paradise Island. These bracelets would protect her from any force, no matter how great. They could even deflect bullets.
She returned the roll of tape and rummaged through the crowded shelf until she found a length of clothesline. Grace gathered the rope into coils. This would be her Golden Lasso. Her Lasso of Truth. She would throw it around the paralyzed man and make him tell her what he had done with Kyle.
IT USED TO BE, SHE COULDN’T HAVE EVER
tracked Kyle like this. He wouldn’t have let her. But she spied on Kyle as he rummaged through Daddy’s tool chest in the garage. She saw him take a little metal saw blade, tuck it into his sock, and cover it back with his jeans leg.
The sky was a blue true dream overhead as Grace followed Kyle into the cornfield, under the barbed wire, and to the green pond. He just sat at the green pond, throwing a rock into it every once in a while. Then it was back through the corn and emerging onto Eden Road directly in front of the paralyzed man’s house. Kyle sat with the paralyzed man on his front porch, swinging softly on the porch swing. It looked like a boy spending a quiet summer morning with his grandfather. After a while, the paralyzed man drove his wheelchair through the door, and Kyle followed him into the house.
Grace wanted to see what they were doing inside the house. She looked at her duct tape bracelets, slammed the bracelets together, and believed the action formed a protective force field around her. She cut back up through the corn and emerged again in front of the Sewell house just as she had seen Kyle do last week. From the Sewells’, Grace snuck through the remnants of the pole beans, over the muddy patch where the county had run the waterline, and up to the side window of the house. The window looked into the kitchen. The blinds were drawn, but they were cracked and in disrepair with plenty of gaps to peek through.
Inside, Kyle pulled something out of the refrigerator. It was a shot—like the kind they gave at the doctor’s office. Kyle poked the needle high up on the paralyzed man’s leg, and squirted whatever was in the shot inside the paralyzed man’s thigh. Grace winced in empathy. She hated shots. After that, Kyle took a little glass bottle out of the refrigerator and filled up nine or ten of the little needles with the stuff from inside the bottle. He laid the needles out on a towel inside the refrigerator. Then Kyle took a Coca-Cola out of the refrigerator and reached down a pack of crackers from one of the cabinets. The paralyzed man said something to Kyle and pointed his finger at him while he said it. Kyle disappeared through an arched doorway, carrying the soda and crackers with him.
The paralyzed man sat there by himself in the kitchen. After a minute, he reached down into the little side satchel on his wheelchair. Grace saw something peeking out of the satchel that shocked her. It filled her with delight. Peeking out of the top, Grace saw the rich, glowing black hair of Diana Prince. Wonder Woman was in the satchel! She was right there! Grace was literally only a few feet away from her doll. But she might as well have been in another state. There was simply no way for her to walk in that house, reach into that satchel, and retrieve her doll. Not without being caught. But then something happened.
Fate, or maybe something more sinister, intervened. What happened next would set forth a sequence that would alter the course of Grace’s life.
The paralyzed man pulled out and placed in his lap a dog-eared Bible, a very small pistol, even a pair of yellowed partials, before his hand found what it had been rooting around for: a small, sloping plastic jug with a wide mouth on top. When he pulled the jug out of the satchel, the wide mouth caught on Wonder Woman’s leg and the doll tumbled out of the satchel and onto the floor. Grace’s heart skipped a stitch. The paralyzed man hadn’t noticed the doll. She was sure of it.
He pulled down the zipper on his pants and stuck his hand in and pulled out his wee-wee. It was wrinkly and white hairs sprouted out around it. He pushed his wee-wee inside the sloping jug. Grace saw that the mouth of the little plastic jug was made wide for this very purpose as it filled with the paralyzed man’s dark urine. Grace had never before seen pee that dark. When he was finished, he held up the jug and inspected it before pouring it into the sink. One-handed, he rinsed out the jug and put it back in the satchel. He smoothed down the sparse strands of white hair on his head, and then he drove his wheelchair through the arched doorway toward the rear of the house. Wonder Woman lay unnoticed, faceup on the dirty linoleum floor, staring blankly at the ceiling.
ALTHOUGH GRACE CERTAINLY HAD A WARY
respect for the paralyzed man, she was a girl, who, unlike her older brother Kyle, had no real fears. Sometimes she acted like a scared little girl, but that was mostly and usually an act for Kyle’s benefit or to gain her daddy’s attention. Ultimately, she was not prone to needless worry and agonizing indecision. Even at this young age, she was already growing toward a maturity that would have been marked by a tendency to action rather than planning. To her, the paralyzed man was like a snake or a spider—something best avoided, but she did not lie awake at night worrying about snakes and spiders.
Grace did, however, believe in hedging her bets. She banged together her duct tape bracelets—three times in rapid succession. And then she stole onto the front porch and carefully opened the door to the kitchen.
HE HAD HIT HER. AFTER ALL THESE MONTHS
of worrying herself to death about it, Louise had finally got up her nerve to ask Boyd for a divorce. And he had hit her. In seventeen years of marriage, Boyd had barely ever raised his voice, and now this. She still couldn’t believe it. He had actually hit her.
Louise looked at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. The eye was swollen about as much as it was going to, but the bruising had just set in. She had raised three boys, so she knew that it was the second and third day when a black eye looked its worst. She took out a tube of concealer and dabbed little blobs of it under her eye. She worked it in carefully and followed up with some foundation. She noticed that her hand was shaking. She realized that she wasn’t sure if she was shaking out of fear or anger. The makeup wor
ked—for now. When the bruising really set in, there would be no hiding it. But she just needed to get through tonight. She just needed to feed the kids their dinner and get them in bed. Without them realizing that something was wrong. She didn’t want this affecting the children any more than necessary. But in the morning, after Boyd left for work, she was taking Grace and Kyle and she was leaving. Five minutes ago she had got off the phone with the apartment complex manager. If she brought cash with her, he had a unit she could have on the spot, no waiting. Louise had the cash. The phone service couldn’t be turned on until next week, but the electric company could have a man out there tomorrow, and as long as Louise could pay the deposit on the spot, they’d get her power turned on. She assured them she could pay on the spot. She’d been saving for this moment well over six months. She had never imagined that it would happen like this. She had hoped that it would be more civilized, like it happened on All My Children or As the World Turns. It was always a sad situation, fraught with emotions running high, but it always ended in civilized acceptance. A scandal, not a crime.
Other than Jeannie, nobody she knew had ever gone through one, so Louise could only relate to divorce through books, movies, and soap operas. And country songs. She remembered Joan Crawford in the movie Mildred Pierce, and how Joan Crawford had divorced her husband and became rich by opening a chain of restaurants. And Mildred had affairs with rich handsome men. Men who wore suits and smoked cigarettes. Not men who worked for the post office and shoved a glob of Vaseline between their wives’ legs on Saturday night after taking them out to eat at McDonald’s.
Louise worked the foundation outward from her eye, blending it, wincing as she worked it outward in larger and larger circles. Then she remembered that everything hadn’t come up roses for Mildred Pierce. The children. Mildred’s daughters. The youngest had died of pneumonia. And the older girl, what was her name? Veda. Her name had been Veda. A sweet, cute girl. Loving and devoted—until after the divorce. Then Veda had become ugly and mean natured. Running wild with boys. Faking a pregnancy to blackmail one boy. Then Veda ended up sleeping with her stepfather. Louise could not imagine a future in which it was possible for her sweet little Grace, her sweet little Wonder Woman, to end up in such a way.
Just get through tonight, Louise told herself. Just get through tonight, and tomorrow your life starts over. Tomorrow you’ll leave Eden Road in the dust. Just get through tonight.
WITH THE DOOR AJAR, SHE COULD SEE
that the kitchen was deserted. Her feet still planted squarely on the porch, Grace poked her head through the opening and listened. No sound came from any part of the house. She lifted her right foot over the threshold and planted it on the first square of soiled and foxed linoleum. There was a loud creak as the warped floorboards underneath announced her presence. With the utmost care, she brought her left foot forward to rest on the same square with her right. She stood there and listened—the coiled Lasso of Truth dangling from her left hand. No sounds. She advanced two more squares into the room; loud groans came from the floor both when she took her weight off the first spot and when she stepped onto the next. She stopped. Listened. Advanced. Wonder Woman lay isolated near the kitchen sink, just a yard-and-a-half away. Three more steps, six more squares to cross. The floor was less squeaky the farther she ventured into the kitchen, so she crossed quickly. Grace squatted down and snatched Diana Prince from the dirty floor. In her heightened state of perception, Grace noted immediately that Diana’s beautiful brown hair was knotted and tangled. This disturbed her, that in her absence, Diana Prince had been treated with such disregard. Grace took a second to pick at the tangles.
If Grace had simply scooped up her doll and run out the door, things might have turned out differently for her; but by the time she heard the hum of the electric motor, it was already too late. By the time she stood up, Kenny Ahearn was halfway across the kitchen. And before she could take her first step toward the door, the paralyzed man was there, his cumbersome metal wheelchair blocking her passage.
Grace stared up at him, her mouth slack, the pupils of her eyes dilated as though from drops of belladonna.
“IT’S OKAY, SWEET-GIRL,” THE PARALYZED
man said. “I wanted you to have that back.”
Grace took a step backward.
“You want something to drink? Co-cola? I’ve got some MoonPies in the pantry there.”
Grace shook her head.
“Why just look at you. Your eyes are big as dinner plates. You don’t have to be scared of me, sweet-girl. I’m just Kenny Ahearn from across the road.”
Grace wanted to believe him, but her mind returned to the day he had lured her up on his porch with this very same doll and grabbed her and wouldn’t let her go until Kyle hit him in the head with a dirt clod.
“You’re thinking about that time I held you in my lap, ain’t you?”
Grace nodded.
“Sweetie, I am so sorry for doing that. I can’t tell you. I didn’t mean a thing by it. I was just mad at your brother, that’s all that was. We’ve done got over that. We’re friends now. Friends. Why, he comes over to visit with me just about every day. You can come over too. Any old time you want.”
Grace took a step forward. “Can I go home now?”
“Why, I’m blocking your way, ain’t I? ’Course you can go home.” The wheelchair hummed and rolled forward just enough for Grace to pass. “Now you just remember that you’re welcome here anytime.” Grace slid past the paralyzed man like a climber traversing a vertical drop on Mt. Everest. She squeezed past him and emerged back out onto the porch. The paralyzed man followed.
“Oh yes, me and Kyle have us a good old time. Are you sure you don’t want to stay a while and play with us?”
Grace conveniently forgot how Kyle had turned into something-other-than-Kyle since he had become friends with the paralyzed man, and instead she latched on to the thought of spending time with her brother again—through a shared friendship with Mr. Ahearn. She looked at the paralyzed man and realized that maybe that day he had grabbed her wasn’t such a horrible thing. He’d let her go after a minute. And he wasn’t stopping her now. Plus, he called her sweet-girl the way her paw-paw did before he went to live in the sky with Jesus. In fact, he looked like he could be somebody’s paw-paw. Grace (not afraid, but pragmatic) decided that she should go on home for now, but also decided that she would come back. That she wanted to be a part of whatever was going on here.
“Bye-bye, sir.”
“Sir? Sir? Why you can just call me Kenny.”
Grace giggled. She had never called an adult by their first name. “Bye-bye, Kenny.”
“Bye-bye, sweet-girl.”
Grace took off down the steps and Kenny called out after her. “Sugar, what’s your name?”
Grace turned around on the bottom step. “Grace.”
“Grace, that rope you’re holding there, that wouldn’t happen to be a Golden Lasso, now would it? A Lasso of Truth?”
Grace beamed up at Kenny (for she had already forgotten her other name for him), her smile as wide open as her eyes had been earlier. She nodded with pride.
“You know what I bet? I bet you was gonna put that lasso around me and make me tell the truth. You were, weren’t you?”
Grace nodded with a shy smile.
“You can if you want. I don’t mind. Come on up here and I’ll let you do it. Let’s see if that lasso works.”
Excited, Grace bound up the steps and followed Kenny back into the kitchen.
“ALRIGHT, NOW, I’M READY. YOU JUST GO
ahead. Now don’t be shy. I’m not.”
Grace let Kenny hold one end of the clothesline in his hand while she walked around him, wrapping him.
“Alright, you just ask me anything.”
On the spot, Grace couldn’t think of anything to ask. She giggled and stared at the floor.
“It’s hard to think of something sometimes. I know how it is. Tell you what,” Kenny said, “why don’t we put
the lasso around you and I’ll ask you some questions? How about that?”
That sounded like a fine idea to Grace. She unwrapped Kenny, and then wrapped herself in the rope.
“Now hold on a minute. I see you’re wearing metal bracelets. Is that Amazonium?”
Grace nodded, again smiling with pride.
“It don’t seem rightly fair that you should be wearing those. The lasso might not work against Amazonium. Maybe you better take them off.”
It took Grace a minute to work the duct tape off her wrists.
“That’s right. Just stick them right there on the Frigidaire. Now, what we’ll do, what we’ll do is this. Let’s see. I know. Tie one end of that rope to the doorknob there. Uh-huh. Good and tight. That’s it. That’s it. Now what can we do to make this more special? Let me think a minute. Just let me think. Oh, I know. I’ve got an idea.”
KYLE HAD BROUGHT HER AN APPLE AND
some Slim Jims from Mama’s pantry. The paralyzed man never gave her anything but peanut butter crackers and Coca-Cola. She was busy eating what Kyle had brought while he worked at the chain.
He could see right away that it wasn’t the right kind of saw. It was a hacksaw blade. Just the blade. About a foot long. He wasn’t able to find the frame it was supposed to attach to. It was hard to hold the thin metal tight enough to get it to bite into the metal chain. But it was all he had, so he set to work.
At the End of the Road Page 15