by Alison Stine
I thought I had seen more tarps in the trees. Holding the child tightly, I spun around. I could see them now. They looked so obvious in the woods. How had I ever missed them? Bits of color, mounded with leaves. Snow piled on their peaks. There must have been half a dozen tarps scattered through the woods, like a field of bright mushrooms.
“How many spare parts do they need?” I asked.
Grayson was examining the vehicle under the blue tarp. He wrenched the door open—out spilled a tumble of leaves—and popped the hood.
Jamey would be back from the creek soon, wondering where we were. Grayson would be expected back with the wood.
“Wil,” he said. “This car looks new. It should run fine, except...” His head shot up from beneath the hood. “There’s no engine. They took it out.”
Grayson shut the hood. He walked a few paces, till he found another car. It didn’t take long. They were everywhere, amid the trees and the garbage from the compound—beer cans and plastic bags, the blackened ends of bottle rockets.
He uncovered the car, popped the hood, and leaned over the inside. “This one has lines cut.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. Maybe Dance would know? But there are cables, sliced in half. Look.” He shook something at me. “This should not be sliced in half. There is no reason they would do that.” He met my eyes over the hood.
“Unless they didn’t want someone to leave,” I said.
He slammed the hood. The sound reverberated in the trees. It was so loud I waited for someone to come. I couldn’t hear the sound of the creek anymore. I looked around, the baby on my hip. She stayed quiet, her hand twined in my hair.
Grayson said, “Where are all the people these cars belong to? Where did they go?”
“Starla!” a voice screamed out of the trees, so sharp I almost dropped the child. Her fingers laced around my neck in cold little hooks. “Starla, where are you?”
“Mama,” the girl said.
I shifted her in my arms. “We’ve got to go. Grayson. You’ve got to get out of here and go back to the kitchen before Jamey sees you.”
“What are we going to do?” Grayson said.
“You’re gonna do what you’re told.”
I turned and Jamey stood there, balancing a basket of laundry on her hip. She had a cigarette in her hand. Seeing her, the little girl, Starla, whimpered. Jamey set down the basket and sucked in the cigarette, her eyes closed as if this was her one free moment of peace. Then she opened her eyes and stamped the cigarette against a tree. She held out her arms, and I gave her back the child.
Grayson started to speak.
“I don’t care,” Jamey said. She smoothed the flyaway hair of the baby and kissed her dirty face. “You’re nothing to him. You’re nothing to Jake. Her, he can at least use.” She lifted her chin at me. “That’s all he cares about, how useful you are. So you do as he says. You watch yourself.” Starla buried her face in her neck. “And you take your first chance.”
Grayson looked at me.
“Our first chance to what?” I said.
“Escape. You might only get one.” Jamey nodded at the basket of wet sheets she had deposited at the foot of the tree. “Get the clothes, girl. You,” she said to Grayson, “get back to work.” She turned her back on us, trusting I would follow, and began to walk with Starla through the trees to the shed. Bouncing the baby, she started to sing.
“What the hell is her story?” Grayson said.
“I have no idea.”
“Well, when am I going to see you again? How are we going to do this?”
“I don’t know. We’ll figure it out.”
“Girl!” Jamey called over her shoulder.
“Tonight,” I said. “We’re leaving tonight. There’s no way I’m spending the night here.”
* * *
We hung up the wet laundry, Jamey and I, on a rope strung between a tree and the roof of the shed. We did the work without speaking, Starla playing at our feet with a handful of clothespins. The laundry was worn, the sheets so thin they were almost translucent. The clothes looked like they had come from a charity box, mismatched and shrunken: glitter-sticky leggings, a sweater with a hole the size of my fist. The clothespins clacked together.
When the last sheet was hung, Jamey said, “This’ll probably freeze, anyway.”
We could hear gunfire in the far-off woods; the hooting afterward let me know it was target practice. The men were shooting at something and hitting it, or celebrating like they were. I supposed there was nothing else to do. There were worse ways to keep warm.
“Why do you live out here?” I asked Jamey.
I wondered how old she was. I tried to imagine passing her in the hallway of a high school. Tried to picture her slamming her locker, exchanging notes with her friends, laughing.
I couldn’t see it.
“I don’t have anywhere else to go,” she said.
I couldn’t see her face without the bags under her eyes, couldn’t see her arms without a baby in them. “But your daughter—” I said.
“Nobody else would take us.”
“We would take you.”
Jamey stared at me. I had spoken without thinking, surprising both of us. And as we stood there, the only sound the clack of the baby hitting clothespins and the distant retorts of the guns, I began to run through in my mind all the reasons that was a really bad idea.
But Jamey said, “No.”
No explanation, just no.
I felt relief. I didn’t want her or Starla tagging along, as much as I felt sorry for them. I couldn’t see any way bringing them with me would be helpful for any of us. I didn’t push it.
Jamey was looking at me. “What’s that thing around your neck?”
I pulled the leather pouch out. “This?”
“What you got in there? Pills?”
“Seeds,” I said.
“Like vegetable seeds?”
“Why are you helping us?” I asked. “You don’t even know us.”
“I’m not helping you.”
“You’re not turning us in. You told us to escape. Why do you care what happens to us?”
Jamey reached down for the baby. “Nobody helped me.”
* * *
I didn’t see the boys again until dinner, when night came to the compound, creeping through the trees.
The day had passed in drudgery and boredom. Most of the men seemed stupid with sleepiness—or hunger—slowed by the beer they drained, throwing the cans anywhere, into the woods. Numb or buzzed, they napped in the open, with a bravery that astonished me. I had never felt that free. I saw men asleep on the lip of the skate park, in the trees, lying where they fell like the war dead, their heads cushioned by cardboard or T-shirts or nothing at all. Were they too drunk to feel cold?
I saw a naked man in the woods by the shed. He was lying on his back, on a collapsed tent, not five feet from the shed window. I noticed the bottom of his feet first, dirt-blackened as though he had held them to a fire, his skinny pale legs, then his cock, slick and pink. The naked men I had seen had been in the dark, in the neon of bar signs, fumbling at me in the truck. Shadows made their bodies manageable, made us both just a collection of angles. The red-bearded man hadn’t understood. “Don’t you want to see the person you’re making love to?” he had asked, kneeling in my loft, his head only inches from the ceiling. The hair on his chest spread erratically, like a rash.
I thought I should take Starla away from the naked man, but she was occupied, not looking, grinding baked beans into the floor of the shed with her fat, grimy palm. Kaylee moaned in her sleep. Jamey was off somewhere, smoking a second cigarette. She said she didn’t like the baby to see her smoke.
I stood watch near the window. I kept my hand in my pocket, on Dance’s knife.
* * *
Jake picked up Starla after the laundry had been hung. When he came shuffling up to the shed in his flip-flops, I looked to Jamey but she only folded her arms and watched his approach.
I felt sure he was coming for me.
But then Starla raised her hands in expectation. He picked her up like a duffel bag, swinging her over his shoulders, holding on to her with only one hand. Not enough, I thought. Not safe. She was squirming, crawling over his neck, but laughing. It was familiar to her, this game.
I never knew a man to be silly with children; no one was with me. My daddy left when I was too young, and Mama had found Lobo when I was already too old, too suspicious to be loved. Or loving. I had been wary of a stepdaddy, but we both kept our distance from each other. Besides, he wanted Mama, to spend time with her, to work alongside of her, to love her. I was a scrawny tadpole, a beanstalk. Runt. I was the extra that came after.
He had other things to teach me.
“Keep her warm,” Jamey called.
“Ain’t none of us warm,” Jake said, and carried the baby down the hill.
“Where’s he taking her?” I asked.
Jamey exhaled, bent, and swooped the clothespins Starla had been playing with into a pile, dumping them into the laundry basket. “Skateboard lessons.”
“She can barely walk.”
“I know. But that’s, like, the age he learned, so.” She straightened, rubbed her nose, which had turned pink in the cold. “It’s better if kids can hold their own, you know? Especially girls.”
We watched them reach the patch in front of the farmhouse, what passed for a yard with the tractor tire and the big TV. Jake produced a small plastic skateboard and balanced the child on it as he stood to the side. Holding her hands, he began to run.
I was afraid of what would happen at night.
Jamey said the night meant dinner, partying, music if there was enough juice in the generator, which there probably wasn’t. Maybe Jake or one of the other men would take the mic hooked up to the PA system and freestyle, until they tripped over the extension cord or hit their heads on an amp. That had happened before. There might be dancing, she said.
At least one person would attempt to skate, though the half pipe was furred with ice. There were standing puddles in the bottom of the swimming pool, what she called the bowl, and the cement at the top had started to crack. Jamey said the men might joyride my truck, or light Grayson’s hair on fire. Maybe somebody would pass around weed. I didn’t let my face move when she said this. I had learned not to react.
Jamey told me not to be alone with anyone.
Jake brought Starla back, riding on his shoulders, and Jamey went off to smoke. Twilight passed as I thought it would. The men began to wake up, the naked man taking his damn time about it. The crackle of fireworks and the pop-pop-pop of guns echoed through the trees. I heard the squeal of a belt, as a truck got stuck. I heard wheels spinning out and shouts.
The air smelled of gunpowder and ditch weed. Kaylee woke and spent a long time combing her hair. She had a tattoo on her neck of a palm tree. Jamey came back to the shed and did a surprising thing. She sat on the mattress and unbuttoned her top. Starla crawled across the bed and began to nurse. Jamey had a round, soft stomach; it hung over the lip of her jeans. Her breasts were afterthoughts where Starla opened and closed her fists, her eyes drifting shut. I turned away.
There was a knock at the shed door.
“What the fuck?” Kaylee said. “Who the fuck knocks?”
It was strange to hear her talk, after she had been sick or sleeping all day. Jamey’s face gave me nothing, no clue as to what to do. So I opened the door.
Jake stood there.
I went outside and closed the door quickly behind me to shield Jamey, naked from the waist. Out in the cold, Jake coughed into his hands. It was hard to look him in the eye, to be that close to him. Energy poured off Jake, a mania I could feel, like sparks. It was that I had seen when we had first pulled up to the farmhouse.
Jake hopped from foot to foot, his skin red in his flip-flops. His hands were red, too. He had lost his hat, and I saw a bald patch in his hair, a hole in the thatch on the side of his head. Someone had shaved him, or maybe he had been burned. I had seen a scar on Jamey, too.
Jake smelled of beer. His tattoos were everywhere and undistinguishable. They looked like lesions, old and green and formless. “Hey there,” he said. “Sarah.” The name looked strange on his lips. “Wanted to talk to you.”
“What’s up?” I said. I tried not to act surprised at my fake name. “When are we getting back on the road?”
“Well, here’s the thing, Sarah. Your boys have been working hard, but you? You haven’t done shit for me. And I know that’s not who you are. I know you’re special. I can tell. I have a sense for talented people. So here’s what we’re going to do. Sarah. We’re going to have dinner, like a family, real nice. And then you’re going to work for me. Then we’ll see what you can do.”
He pointed his finger at me when he spoke. It seemed like any word, any protest, any answer at all, might enflame him. I concentrated on that finger, red and chapped. I imagined it burning, the skin falling off, the bone breaking. I pictured breaking it myself.
I went back in the shed and closed the door. There was no way to lock it. I kept my hand on the flimsy handle and watched Jake’s shape in the window. He hesitated, maybe listening, maybe watching for me, too. Then he walked away, crunching through the snowy leaves around the shed. I pictured ice clinging to his bare ankles. I hoped it hurt.
None of the women in the shed had moved. Starla pulled off Jamey’s nipple with a pop, and a tear of yellow milk slid down Jamey’s stomach. She brushed it away like a bug.
“I have to get out of here before dinner’s over,” I said.
Jamey started buttoning up her shirt. “They wanted me to siphon the gas from your truck earlier.” Her eyes flicked up. “I just pretended.”
* * *
“Don’t you ever want to get high?” Lisbeth asked me.
Behind the Church was a parking lot, an old loading dock with Dumpsters and pallets, and behind that, a hill sloped to a ditch. A field stretched on the other side before the river, brown and unchanging. Later, it would change: white, and white, and white again.
We used to sit on that hill after services. Lisbeth hiked her skirt to her knees. Her leggings beneath were white, the knees already kissed green. Grass was green then.
“No,” I said.
“Not even a little? Not even sometimes?”
“It’s not really my thing. I’ve seen a lot. It can make people stupid. It can make them forget and get paranoid. It can do good things. It’s medicine—I do believe that, and I believe it should be legal, available. But if you smoke every day, every day multiple times...” Every day since you were ten, as Lobo had.
“Well, I wouldn’t do that,” Lisbeth said. “You wouldn’t do that.”
“I don’t know what I would do,” I said.
Lisbeth believed in God and her parents, and that kissing me didn’t count. She also thought she should know, at least a little bit, what she was giving up, what she was sacrificing for the kingdom of forever.
She met me regularly at Crossroads for Coke or coffee. We had gone to the roller rink once after it was outlawed, and one of the girls had passed her a cigarette. She inhaled greedily as if it were food, the red tip lighting up our dim corner like neon. One moment of sin. Then she folded over in a fit of coughing. Everybody laughed. It was fun to see the church girl fall.
There was another night I had gone with her to the biker bar in town. It was karaoke night—eighteen and up, ladies always free—and Lisbeth said she had her eye on the prize, two hundred dollars in cash. I think she just had her eye on the stage, a small raised platform in the back by the bathrooms. The stage lights shone out sickly green from the rims of old coffee cans
. The host was an old man who had been to our farm. We nodded at each other, in the way of those who know not to say more. Nobody checked IDs.
Lisbeth liked the attention. That wasn’t godly, but I knew that about her. There was no way I was going to remember the songs she picked, not that night. I could barely watch her for watching the men, keeping tabs on them, keeping them away from her. They lined up at the foot of the stage, staring up at her. Their faces blurred, glazed with drinks. There were so many plastic cups. The bass was too loud, the floor sticky. Smoke and weed smoke threaded the air. The lights made Lisbeth’s pale dress translucent; I could see the lines of her sensible bra. Sweat stood out on her forehead like pearls. Any one of the men could have reached out, grabbed her ankle. Reached up, felt her breast. By the end of the song, she was flushed and gasping.
One of the men did reach up then, through the applause, and handed her a cup. She grabbed it and drained it before I could push through the crowd to the stage.
“It was sweet,” she said. “It was sweet, just Coke.”
“It wasn’t just Coke.”
It was sweet, she kept repeating, when she fell into my arms after her next song, when she tripped trying to get off the stage. Her skirt flipped up and some of the men hooted. She was loose-limbed and friendly, running her hand down the prickled face of a stranger who stooped to help me, gazing at him like he was God.
“Don’t touch him, you don’t know him,” I said.
“Does it make a difference?” she said dreamily.
“I like that girl,” the man said.
I kicked open the door to the bar, but the cool night air did nothing. There was a drunk vomiting into the road. I thought of my mama.
I had never told Lisbeth about the night I came home to find her asleep on the kitchen floor. She lay in a heap under the cabinets, like she had crumpled where she stood. Her skin was too white, almost purple. Drool glittered in the corners of her mouth. Her limbs looked odd, uncomfortable.
Lobo came up from the grow room, dirt on his hands.