by J. L. Abramo
The train was half on and half off the track. Wrecked. It needed to be righted. Jolene was sitting in a cane-back chair, staring mutely at the calamity. She needed to be put away. And the garage door was already closing.
When Kent came inside the house, he would look for Mary Louise. Often, if he’d had a bad day, he grabbed a Coke from the fridge and headed straight for the basement.
There simply wasn’t time to put Jolene away and fix the train both. So she left everything as it was and ran upstairs to intercept Kent.
Running out of the basement like that would damn their already ruined lives.
But even if Mary Louise had noticed that the derailment left the metal train wheels touching both the center rail and the outside rail, she would have thought nothing of it. She would not have known that it could cause a short circuit in the electricity that ran through the track and powered the locomotive’s engine. And she certainly had no way of knowing that this short circuit would draw excessive current from the maxed-out transformer, or that the circuit breaker built into the transformer was faulty, that it would fail.
Upstairs, Mary Louise threw her arms around Kent, told him she loved him, and said she wanted to go out for dinner. Golden Corral. Kent said no, he was tired. But Mary Louise pouted and cajoled and produced a few tears until he finally relented. He didn’t want a repeat of the are you cheating on me? discussion.
Over dinner, Mary Louise decided that there was nothing to do but to let Kent find out that she knew everything. Let him walk downstairs when they got home and see for himself that his secret was out. That she knew about Jolene. She found peace in this. It was time. And there was a possibility that the shared knowledge could bring them closer together. That there could be a healing. And with this hope in mind, she tried to talk to her husband. Just little things. To reconnect with him. To be authentic. To be his friend.
“Did you know this means water?”
“Do you remember when I had that mole removed?”
“I was thinking about calling Ben. See how he is.”
“Remember when my daddy read that letter you sent me?”
“Maybe I can give you a massage tonight?”
“Kent, Kent, you never listen to me. What are thinking about?”
“I’m sorry. I just want to get home. I have an idea for a new route.”
And Mary Louise thought, fine. They would go home. And he would see Jolene sitting out in the open, gazing at the train disaster. Like a lone survivor. And then Kent would know.
They didn’t talk on the drive back. With the windows rolled up, the inside of the car a silent vacuum. And when they turned onto their street and saw the red staccato lights of the fire trucks, Mary Louise remembered the transformer. How hot it got. The ozone smell.
Their home was fully ablaze. They got out of the car and ran to it. The firefighters kept them back. The heat was an enormous wall.
Mary Louise imagined Jolene, the flames licking her silicone skin, the ivory flesh blistering and popping and charring. The real-human-hair singing. The eyes of emerald green going dark. All of Jolene reduced to a liquid pool, bubbling blackly away to nothingness.
Kent was telling her something, his voice rising over the chant of the flames, but Mary Louise was having trouble understanding. She thought he might have said something about his trains. But she couldn’t hear him. What she heard was Jolene’s feminine high-pitched cries, reedy and sharp with pain and terror. Calling out to Mary Louise in a voice that broke her heart. A voice that was all the more haunting because it was her own.
Kent was shouting now, trying to get Mary Louise’s attention. She focused on him and heard, “...fingers. What are you doing?”
She looked down and saw that she had thrust her arms out in front of herself, holding them stiff and rigid in a way that made her think about zombies in old-time monster movies, but she had her forefingers hooked together, forming a symbol, like something religious. And she said, “Friend. It means friend.”
Mary Louise looked up at her husband, searching his face for acceptance—or at least understanding—but what she saw was the red light from the emergency beacons and the yellow flickering of the flames had colored Kent’s face in way that made him look like a villager. A tribesman. And she understood that she and Kent were—in this exact moment—as close as they would ever be. Homeless primitives stripped of all artifice. Their primordial selves. Things might be better for a little while, but she knew in her heart that from this moment forward, they would begin filling their lives again. A new house would be secured, complete with carpeted man cave. Mary Louise’s Xanax prescription would get refilled—the dosage likely increased. Maybe Kent wouldn’t feel like starting from scratch with his model railroad hobby. But something else would take its place.
And maybe her husband would have need of her one cold night.
But before long, something else would take her place.
Back to TOC
I’M THE ONLY HELL MY MAMA EVER RAISED
Eryk Pruitt
The woman caught Donnie Ray off guard. She never so much as said her name, nor offered her hand to shake. No sooner had she laid eyes on him than she stomped across the asphalt in front of his momma’s house and threw wild a finger to his face.
“You can’t park there.” She pointed to his eighteen wheeler. It took the length of the yard where the Stringers used to live. Where she lived now. “If you park in front of my mailbox, then my mail won’t get delivered.”
“Ma’am...” Donnie Ray didn’t like how his voice creaked out of his throat. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d spoken to someone else. “Something tells me I’m not going to be long, so...”
Rather than finish what he was saying, he cut her a look from beneath the brim of his Stetson. Normally, that shut folks up. This woman, however, would not be deterred by something so simple as a pair of cold, road-weary eyes.
“That’s what the man said who drove that pickup right there.” She pointed to his uncle Ollie’s rusty red Chevy, which had been parked beneath the willow tree in Momma’s yard. “And the man driving that blue car, and the family in that station wagon.”
He knew some of the cars parked in the front yard, some he didn’t.
“And I don’t know for certain,” she said, “but I’m pretty sure you can’t drive that thing down a residential street. Maybe I ought to call somebody and find out.”
Donnie Ray pulled his Stetson off his head and held it at the waist. He’d stopped to change after taking his brother’s call. He was many things, sure, but a man who would stand at his momma’s deathbed wearing dirty work clothes was not one of them.
“Ma’am, maybe you heard my momma’s sick in there.” He felt his back teeth grind. “Has been for a while.”
“I hate to hear it, but—”
“I can’t tell you much except I’m told she’s not long.” Donnie Ray could see Darrell, his brother, watching them from the front screen door. He looked older...“They wouldn’t have called me if she weren’t pretty far gone.”
The woman had more to say, but something told her to keep it to herself. It sure wasn’t Donnie Ray, which didn’t make a lick of sense to him. Out there—in the real world—folks gave him a wide berth. Or, most did. The ones that didn’t cut him one had good cause not to, whether given or taken, which gave him good pause when dealing with the little housewife.
“Ma’am, if you don’t mind...”
“I’m real sorry to hear about your mom. Mine passed, oh, about eight, nine years now. Cancer. It was real horrible, especially at the end.”
Donnie Ray squinted.
“When finally she went, it was almost a relief,” said the woman. “Now, I don’t mean to sound like an ogre, but she was in so much pain. We’d done all we could do, so it was all over but the shouting. And there was plenty shouting, with all of her affairs to look after. Nearly drove our family apart, it got so bad.”
Donnie Ray promised he’d punch himself if
he offered her the slightest of condolences.
She did not need them: “I hate to see that happen to a family.” She leaned forward about an inch. “You all have discussed her affairs, haven’t you?”
He knew she imagined the place with a fresh sod and green grass. Without Momma’s flowers she grew out of coffee cans or clawfoots or TV sets...out of an old toilet or old barbecue grill or old what-have-you. Maybe a fresh coat of paint and a few new boards across the house or, hell, maybe with the place burned to the ground.
“She’s got people handling that,” Donnie Ray said. His fingernails dug into the brim of that Stetson. “Me, I’m just here to see my momma off. So, if you will kindly excuse me...”
He shouldered past her.
“You got an hour,” the woman called after him. “Then I call the city about that truck.”
The screen door slapped shut behind Darrell as he stepped onto the porch to greet his brother. Darrell was a big old boy and his good clothes liked to tug open at the seams. He drank from a can of beer and sucked on a plug of chaw. He side-eyed the neighbor woman, then spit tobacco into the brown grass between two of Momma’s coffee-can marigolds.
“That woman ain’t nothing but mean,” Darrell said. “I can’t believe some of the things she gets away with saying to Momma.”
Donnie Ray looked his brother up and down, from his tennis shoes to the fish hook in the bill of his seed store hat.
“Me neither,” was all he could say.
Momma wanted to know who else was out there, standing in her living room.
“Oh everybody, I reckon.” Donnie Ray held his Stetson at his belt. He kept a tidy distance between he and his momma.
“Is Tommy out there?”
Donnie Ray lowered his head. “Tommy died three years back, Momma.”
His momma laughing is what got him to look up. She’d lost nearly everything to her except for that grin. She laughed so hard, she fell to a fit of coughing.
“I know he’s dead,” she said with a wink. “I’m just funning with you.”
Donnie Ray did his best to smile. “They’re all out there, Momma. Uncle Dave, Barbara...Uncle Branch...”
“Those kids?”
“They’re out there.”
Momma rolled her eyes.
“You don’t like Branch’s kids?”
She spoke slow all her life, so folks wouldn’t miss anything. She spoke slower now. “Let me put it this way,” she said. “If those ones are the future of this family, it’s a good thing I’m headed for the door. I couldn’t stand to watch it.”
The skin tightened around Donnie Ray’s lips.
“It’s the morphine, son.”
Donnie Ray nodded.
“I’ve never took so much as a drink my whole life,” she said. “The only wine I ever drank was at church and I always felt like I’d need help back to my pew after. This morphine has me wishing I could go back and do things different.”
“Oh? Like what?”
“For one thing, I wouldn’t have waited to now to take morphine.”
It was Donnie Ray’s turn to laugh.
“I wouldn’t have wasted so much time trying to get your sister into a college.” His momma looked to the wall. “A lot of good that did me.”
“Her husband takes good care of her.”
“I reckon so.”
Donnie Ray took a knee alongside the bed. He felt thirteen years old again. It was the same bed she’d shared with his daddy. He could remember standing in that very spot on Christmas mornings, begging them both to wake up so he could open presents. He could remember hiding beneath it when he played games with his big brother and sister. Or how his head had caught the edge of the frame one day when he and Darrell were rough-housing, and needed six stitches. The bed seemed smaller now, as did his mother inside of it.
“Want to know what else I would do different?”
He did. More than anything.
She licked her lips with a pale, purple tongue.
“Do you remember the night your daddy died?” she asked him.
“I never forgot it,” said Donnie Ray. Were he the kind of guy to expound on things, he’d have told her he spent more than his fair share of time remembering it. How if he had three wishes, he’d go back to that sticky summer to wait behind the feed store where his daddy worked. He’d wait to catch those bastards that stuck him and left him to bleed out. He’d make them pay.
“I tried so hard to be a good woman,” said Momma. “The way I was raised...They’d look down on us, much like I reckon they do now. Your grandfather was a rough-and-tumble sort and my mother, she...I worked so hard to make sure we didn’t turn out like that. That’s what everybody expected.”
It took all he had for Donnie Ray to reach other that blanket and take his mother’s bony wrist. There was very little warmth to her.
“But when I saw your father that night...”
Again, she fell to coughing. She’d worked herself up something fierce and Donnie Ray wondered if this was it.
“Momma, settle down. I’ll run fetch Aunt—”
“You’ll do no such thing,” she said. “You’ll sit right there and let me finish my story.”
Donnie Ray returned to his knees. “Yes, ma’am.”
“I’d had my suspicions.” She looked to the ceiling. “I’d seen the way he smiled at her in church. I’d catch him whispering into the telephone late at night. Or taking the dog for extra-long walks.”
“Momma—”
“And I knew when all of a sudden he was coming home an hour later from work...”
Donnie Ray thought his chest would explode. His jaw hung on a loose hinge.
“When I pulled into the parking lot,” said his momma, “I found them parked in his pickup truck. She had her face in his lap and I don’t reckon I could stand the look on his face. His stupid, stupid face.”
His momma opened her mouth wide and made a face like a fish on the riverbank, sucking air. It took more than a moment for Donnie Ray to realize she was mocking his father’s orgasm.
“I didn’t realize I was holding a steak knife until I’d already stuck him with it.”
She let that sit a bit before she started up again.
“I got him a couple more times for good measure. That woman didn’t know what was going on, she kept working his crank. Maybe she thought he bucked and hollered because she was that good, I don’t know. I guess she got to wondering why all this blood was washing down over her, because she looked up to see me sticking him with the dinner knife and she wasted no time climbing out of that pickup.”
Donnie’s grip tightened around his mother’s wrist. For years, he’d imagined the faces of the men who had killed his father. He’d seen them every time he’d gotten into a bar fight, or needed to defend himself from another inmate in the Yard. One night, he’d taken so many pills, he’d seen them in a girl he’d picked up at a truck stop and taken down an old service road.
Now, all he could think of was the sad look on his momma’s face.
“Why are you telling me this, Momma?”
“I told you there was things I would have done different.”
“You don’t need to worry about that now,” he said. “None of that matters.”
“But it does, son.”
Donnie Ray waited for her to catch her breath.
“I ain’t sorry I killed him,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’m more sorry I didn’t kill her.”
Donnie Ray looked into his mother’s eyes. The lights were on, sure, but not for much longer. She drew herself upright.
“For months, I sat by that window in the living room. You know what they’d say about me?”
“That you were waiting for Daddy.”
She nodded. “They said I’d lost my mind.”
Donnie Ray remembered. She’d sit by the window, rub her fretting cloth between thumb and forefinger, and study the horizon. Once a kid in school said something abo
ut it and they’d had to peel Donnie Ray off him. Kid ate through a straw, but didn’t talk shit about his momma any more.
“I wasn’t waiting for your daddy,” she said. “I was waiting for the police. I thought any day that woman would break down and tell her husband what happened and soon they’d come to fetch me.”
Donnie Ray dropped his head into his hands. He’d withstood some torture in his time, but nothing like his mother’s deathbed.
“But that woman never broke down. She never told her husband, and they never came to arrest me. After a while, I started to wonder what kind of woman couldn’t be bothered by what happened, and what your father saw in her.”
She shuddered and fell quiet. Donnie Ray held his breath. He would have held it longer, had she not started up again.
“It got to where it was all I thought about, and here I lay.” She looked her boy dead in the eye. “I want not to think about it ever again.”
“There, there.” He pat her wrist. “It’s okay, Momma.”
“It’s not okay,” she said. “Not in the slightest. I can’t lay here dying knowing she still draws air. It will eat at me all the way to heaven.”
“For all you know, she’s long gone, Momma. How do you even know she is still alive?”
His momma pulled a scrap of paper from beneath her blanket. It had been written with a shaky hand.
“This is her name and where she lives,” said his momma. “And where you’ll find her tonight.”
Her arm felt warmer, and Donnie Ray had no idea if it was because his own blood had run cold.
“I can’t ask your brother,” she said. “He’s a big old boy, sure, but he’s sweet and simple.”
“No...Momma—”
“Him and your sister...But you...You’ve carried with you a darkness I ain’t seen in my other ones.”
Donnie Ray wiped his face with a flat, sweaty palm.
“More than Darrell, more than Barbara...” It took all she had to manage the rest of her words. “You can see me to the door in peace.”