by Robert Gipe
June said, “You want something to eat?”
I said, “I wish I had my own car.”
“You can borrow mine,” June said. “Where are you going?”
“Alaska.”
“Oh. Well,” June said. “You want supper first?”
I had to smile at that. “I reckon.”
“If you can stay for dessert,” June said, “I got chess pie.”
***
That night, after pie, I lay under the covers in June’s guest bed, my drawing pad against my knees. June came in with an armload of magazines. She asked me was I still doing my collages. I said I was. June sat down on the edge of the bed, set the magazines beside me.
“Maybe you ought not be so quick to run,” she said.
“You did,” I said.
“I know,” June said.
“You had a scholarship,” I said.
June said, “You have things I never had. You can do things I never could.”
I said, “I aint got nothing.”
“I’m just saying,” June said, “it’s hard to go it alone.”
“I aint going back,” I said, and started flipping through a magazine. June picked one up too.
“Look here.” June pointed at a picture of a painting of a woman in red and blue floating amongst winged babies hung from the clouds. Below her a crowd of men reached for her, and above her was a white-bearded man. It was the painting I’d seen in the Canard library when Momma went missing. “I dreamed about this painting last night,” June said. “That’s Mary ascending into heaven. And these are Jesus’s apostles. I seen the painting when I was in Italy. It’s fourteen feet high.”
I said, “You saw that in person?”
“Mm-hm,” June said. “In my dream I had that painting tattooed across my back.”
“For real?” I said.
“In the dream,” June said, “I was looking at my back in the mirror. I was flexing my back muscles, and when I did Mary moved toward heaven. I would flex one way, and Mary would move up toward heaven. I would unflex and she would go back down.”
“Like she was on a trampoline,” I said.
“Like one of those 3D pictures where Jesus’s eyes open and close when you go past,” June said.
I said, “Mamaw has one of those in the hall in her house. Scares me.”
“Me too,” June said. She ran her hand across the page. “Day before I saw that painting, a sheriff’s deputy was in Momma’s kitchen trying to get us to tell where Tricia was. Next day I’m in Italy staring at Mary going up to heaven. I remember thinking how could a person take brush and paints and turn them into something as beautiful as that?”
“Are you religious?” I said.
June said no.
“Do you wish you got married?” I said.
June said she didn’t know.
I asked June if I should go out with Willett.
June said, “Maybe.”
I said, “He started on a lie.”
I sat there flipping through the magazine. I tore out a few pages. June said, “Maybe you should give him another chance. It’s just a picture.”
I didn’t think it was just a picture. I was needing something more than another liar.
Aunt June said, “Online, it’s not real life.”
I came to Kingsport to find somebody wasn’t all the time trying to run some game on me. All this felt like a hustle.
Aunt June said, “I know his family. They are good people. Willett has been raised a good boy.”
I was not looking for a boy. I was looking for something I could lean on, something deeper rooted. Aunt June picked up the scissors I had been using to cut out magazine pictures. She picked up the picture of Mary bouncing on God’s trampoline. She cut out the men, the disciples below Mary. June held the cutout men up below her eyes, like a veil across the bottom half of her face. Her eyes looked like two moons, rising up over them. The disciples marveled at my aunt June’s eyes.
“Aren’t you going to talk to me?” she said.
I took up the scissors and cut out Mary, cut her away from the absent men, away from the babies shoving her to heaven, away from the bearded daddy God waiting for her in the clouds above, cut her out until she wasn’t part of nothing else. And I took her, her pretty hands out, looking up at God knows what now, and rubbed the glue stick across her back. I stuck Mary on the lampshade, and she lit up with the words that were on the page behind her. And Mary was alone.
“You know what I wish?” I said.
“No,” said Aunt June.
“I wish I had a dog,” I said. “A dog with nothing to do but hang out with me.”
“Dogs are good,” said Aunt June.
The room Aunt June had me in was painted purple. I lay my head on the pillow and stared at the ceiling. “Why did he do that?” I said. “He knew I was weird, that I wouldn’t care what he looked like.”
June lay down beside me. “What is it you like about Willett?”
“He’s goofy,” I said.
“And you like that?” June said.
“I do.”
June said, “What else?”
I peeled the Virgin Mary off the lampshade. I held her up in the air above me. I closed one eye looking at her. “I like that he wrote me. Just to me he wrote that long letter. No way he sent that exact same letter to other girls.”
“What else?”
I wished my cutout Mary was bigger. “I thought I liked the way he was built.”
“So you have that in common,” June said.
“What?”
“Yall have the same idea of what looks good to you.”
I said, “Why are sticking up for him? You think he’s the best I can do?”
June didn’t say anything for a good while. I thought she might’ve gone to sleep. Then June said, “You can do what you want to, Dawn. But that boy is all right.”
June kissed my forehead and left. I cut out pictures. There was one of Chewbacca. I fished in my bag and took out the picture of phony Willett and Chewbacca. The printout was tinted pink, where it came from a computer printer missing an ink cartridge. Peeking out from behind Chewbacca’s shoulder in the pink picture was real Willett, fuzzy and smiling. I hadn’t noticed him before.
Act 5: Silver Dagger
13: The Mouse
Willett Bilson told me to meet him at a Chinese restaurant on a wide street near the mall in Kingsport. When I opened the door, the smell of bleach and grease filled my nose. The belly of the waitress on the pay phone stretched her maroon kimono wrap blouse. When she closed her eyes, her red-and-blue eyeshadow made a pair of tiny perfect desert sunsets. “You have to let your Lord love you,” she said into the phone.
I sat down at a booth next to a window. The blinds were raised. It was cloudy out. When the waitress hung up, she asked did I want the buffet. I said I was waiting on somebody. She batted the menu against my shoulder and said, “Aren’t we all?” I sipped the pop she brought til Willett come sliding in the opposite side of the booth in a white-fringed green satin cowboy shirt not big enough for him. He also had on baggy black punk rock pants covered with buckles and chains.
Willett grinned, his frizzy hair flattened down dark and sticky-looking. The waitress brought him a tall red cup full of Mountain Dew. It flashed on my mind Willett Bilson met all kinds of women in that restaurant, not just me. It flashed on my mind he was a player, and dangerous, and he would slip me drugs and carry me off and I would live dirty and tattered in a basement until he chopped me up into tiny pieces and mailed me to every president and king in every country in the world in his mother’s tampon boxes wrapped in plain brown paper.
The waitress brought Willett a bowl of yellow soup without him asking. “Would you like some soup?” she said to me, “or maybe an egg roll?” Willett looked at me like I was about to tell some big buried treasure secret. The waitress poured more pop in my cup, and I said, “Egg roll.” I never stopped looking at Willett, and I couldn’t stop worrying about th
e brutal atrocities he was going to commit against me even though all he talked about was how great I was because of what me and Mamaw were doing to protect Blue Bear Mountain.
“You’re going to save the world,” Willett said. “You’re hero material.”
Willett slurped up noodles. “But you’re so good. You know exactly what to say. It just comes out of your mouth.”
“All that makes me sick to my stomach,” I said.
“I get sick to my stomach,” Willett said. “All the time.”
I asked him what made him sick. “Is it people?”
Willett said, “I think it’s more like food. Where I don’t stop eating until I get sick.”
“Why don’t you stop?” I said.
“I should,” he said.
I asked him was he really just eighteen.
He said he was.
“But,” I said, “you’ve already been to college and back.”
He said he graduated high school a year early.
“You must be smart,” I said.
“You don’t have to be that smart,” Willett said. “You just have to be smart enough. And hate high school.”
I pushed hot mustard with the butt of my egg roll. “I got the second part down.”
“People gave me a hard time at high school,” Willett said, “because I have poor saliva control.”
I asked him what that meant.
“I slobber a lot,” Willett said.
I nodded. “We have a kid like that at our school.”
Willett sucked at his cheeks. It made a sound like worn-out windshield wipers. “Boy or girl?” he said.
“Boy,” I said.
“Does he have a girlfriend?” Willett said.
“He doesn’t come to school much,” I said. “I think he switched to the Jesus Academy. I don’t know. I haven’t been going to school much lately.”
“Why not?” Willett said.
“I have poor fist control,” I said.
“You get in fights?” Willett said.
I nodded.
“Wow,” Willett said. “Like, you start fights?”
I nodded.
“Wow,” Willett said. “I’ve never started a fight.”
“You should try it,” I said. “It’s great.”
“Oh. O-OK,” Willett said, and looked down at his totally clean plate.
“I was joking,” I said.
“You seem real smart,” Willett said. “Way smarter than me about mining and stuff.”
“I’m just a parrot,” I said.
Willett scratched above his eye with his fork. “But you can read and stuff, right?”
I looked at him. His smile looked like a baby gets when it first gets a couple little teeth. He didn’t mean nothing by what he said.
We went back and forth for a while, and then Willett started talking about something I didn’t even understand what the topic was. And he kept talking. After while, my eyes wandered out the window. Across the restaurant parking lot, a man pushed a lawnmower down the sidewalk through the snow. I lost track of what Willett was saying, but was happy to be there with him. Willett got my attention back when he started choking on his yellow soup. I moved to the other side of the booth and hit him on the back with the flat of my hand, and when I did, I could see us together old. The vision surprised me, and when Willett stopped choking, I left my hand on his back.
Willett said, “You see what I’m saying? You see how something like that could happen if we don’t take steps to prevent it now?”
I patted him on the back and said, “I do.”
Willett wiped his nose on the back of his wrist. “What kind of ice cream do you like?” he said.
I said strawberry.
“Have you ever had lemon?”
I told him no. Willett said he liked lemon. I was still patting his back. “Is that right?” I said.
Willett nodded. “Daddy’s people made homemade lemon. That’s what they made on the farm.”
“That right?” I said again.
Willett nodded.
I said, “What do you want to do now, Willett Bilson?”
“We could look at Christmas lights if you like to do that. Do you like to do that?”
I nodded.
***
Willett pointed out the car window. “Look at that,” he said. We were pulled up in front of a house on a curving city street, not far from June’s, a house small and square like all the rest on its street. The yard was boxed in by a cyclone fence and packed with light. Thousands of tiny bulbs blinked and ran in corded paths. Some were red and some were blue, but most were golden-white. I had seen plenty of Christmas lights in my time, but there were more squeezed into less space than I’d ever seen, and the sight burned a cube of light into my head. Willett rolled down his window, and I could feel the heat coming off the lights, and there was a little red wiener dog walking among them, and Elvis Presley sang Christmas songs low and quiet. The yard throbbed and pulsed like a cut finger, and the wiener dog didn’t bark, a miracle if you know anything about wiener dogs.
“Hey boy!” a penny-headed woman said from the porch. Beside her smiled a man with a high forehead and hair in dark stripes across the top of his head. The woman, way shorter than the man, hopped like a bird down the steps into the yard. Power cords criss-crossed the walk. Willett got out and picked his way through the cords like a child crossing a creek. The old woman followed him up the porch steps. The man reached behind her, untied her apron strings, and she gouged him in the ribs. The man came to the car, opened my door, and said, “Kentucky” as he put his hand on my shoulder and laid the other palm up at the end of his straightened-out arm, showing me the way into the house.
The house inside was blue-green carpet, silver lamps, silver picture frames, silver pulls on the drawers of creamy white furniture, pearly-green and blue wallpaper. It reminded me of pictures of icebergs. But the house was hot, Willett’s face already glistening. The woman was bare-armed and in a blouse like I’d seen in pictures from when Cora and Houston moved to Florida for a little while with Momma and June. In one of those square little Florida pictures, Houston and Momma and June stood in an orange grove. A boy stood between squinting June and frowning Tricia. He was burrheaded and smiling, and in his five-year-old arms were at least a dozen beautiful oranges. And at that moment for the first time, I realized the little boy was Hubert.
The man laughed. Then he raised his eyebrows and laughed again, bigmouthed to where I could see silver fillings in his back teeth. He said,
They all three turned to look at me.
“Do what?” I said.
“What kind of pie do you want?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you do want pie,” the woman said.
“I guess,” I said.
She said, “I got blueberry and peanut butter, and key lime, and coconut cream, and two chess pies—that’s Paul’s favorite—and a little bit of chocolate.”
“There aint no chocolate left,” the man said.
“Paul,” she said, and smacked him with a dish towel.
***
“Here’s your pie,” Paul said, and put a dinner plate down with a pale green piece of key lime next to a piece of chess next to some mess of something with chocolate chips shot all through it. Then he turned a fork in the air in front of me. The fork caught the light from the yard through the sheer curtains. I took the fork from Paul’s hand, and the woman turned on the lamp.
“We knew you were coming,” she said.
Willett sat down beside me on the couch. He was warm as the beach. I used the side of the fork to cut a bite of pie. I looked at Willett as the pie went in my mouth, and he smiled, and the sweet beauty creaminess of the pie ran to the four corners of my mouth. It was good pie.
“You like that?” the woman said. When I nodded, she said, “Well, we got plenty.” I nodded and the man laughed.
He said, “I wasn’t much older than you when I first had one of them. Strawberry
rhubarb, the first one.”
I kept eating, and the woman patted my knee. She settled down into an armchair. The fat of her legs came circling out of her gardening shorts. “You want some ice cream with that?” she said.
“No, ma’am,” I said.
“Butter pecan,” Paul said. “Whole tub of butter pecan.”
Paul told us he was a man of science. He made bombs and explosives that never went bad. He smiled at me gentle. “Kentucky,” he said, and put his hands on the arms of his chair, tipped his feet up in the air, and a footrest rose to join them. He pointed at his wife. “Pretty as a picture,” Paul said, and her eyes softened. “Go look at the snakes,” Paul said, eyebrows arching.
Willett took my hand and led me down a hall filled with plaques and certificates and a dozen framed pictures of a boy who got younger as we walked up the hall. We went into a green-lit room. Willett reached behind a line of aquariums, and they lit up, gold against the green light. Willett’s face glowed like a child in front of a fire.
We stood holding hands in front of a glass box with a black snake in it. A mouse sat scared in the corner of the tank. The snake coiled around the mouse and squeezed it. Killed it in front of us, and then worked its jaw open and began swallowing the mouse.
“No shit,” I said.
Willett put his hands in his pants pockets. I lay my head against the top of his. I heard a laugh I thought was my mother’s. I turned around. The man was there holding a pie covered in foil. He held the pie out.
“Take it,” he said. “It’s apple.”
Willett took the pie. “I’m ready to go,” I whispered into his ear. We left the snake room, walked to the front door.
“Merry Christmas,” the man said.
“Yall be careful,” the woman said.
***
“Who is that?” I asked Willett when we got out on the sidewalk. “Are they kin to you?”
“His name’s Junior,” Willett said. “And everybody calls her Mrs. Junior. He works at the plant.”
We stood in the street, opposite sides of ourselves lit up by the pie-house Christmas lights. I asked Willett why we had to go in the pie house. He took my hands in his.