Backseat Saints

by Joshilyn Jackson

  I said, “I fell down someone else’s stairs,” in that same bored voice, shuddering my good arm out from under her palm. I almost would have preferred the cops. Cops didn’t get all moist and mothery.

  Phil blurted out another desperate meow, winding through my ankles like a furry serpent. “I’m working on it,” I told him, but I was staring at the outline of the gun chunks in the plastic bag.

  I needed a hiding place for Pawpy’s gun, and a damn good one. I couldn’t sneak it home, not with Thom and a herd of God only knew how many Grandees over there. I tried to think of a place Mrs. Fancy never used, but it also had to be someplace I could get to easily and retrieve it without notice. “Guest room closet,” I said, and I didn’t realize I’d spoken out loud until Phil answered me with a squeak of aggrieved sound that was too bitchy to be called a mew.

  “Wait your turn, Phil,” I said. I grabbed the bag and the book and went on through the archway to the living room. Phil ran on ahead of me, all the way to the hallway with the bedrooms on it. His sides joggled, giving chubby testimony that late breakfasts were a new injustice in his life.

  Mrs. Fancy’s house was laid out like ours inside, only exactly backwards. There were two bedrooms besides the master, one she kept made up in case of company and one she’d turned into a sewing room. I went into the guest room. My first thought was to jam the bag under the bed, but Mrs. Fancy kept her house spotless. I could imagine the clunk she would hear the next time she ran the vacuum under it.

  I slid open the closet door. Bingo. The bottom was lined with shoeboxes. I dropped to my knees and lifted the lid of a box on the top row. It held a pair of black suede peep-toe pumps that were a good two decades out of style. The box beside it had a pair of strappy red sandals with a high, jeweled heel. These must have belonged to her younger self, the one who looked like the dead sexy woman at the airport. It wasn’t likely Mrs. Fancy would come digging in here anytime soon. I closed the lids and got on all fours to choose a box from the bottom row. Phil came up behind me and butted my hip with his head, insistent. I couldn’t push him away; if I got cat dander on my hands, I’d spend the rest of my day sneezing.

  “Phil, you asshole, give me a sec,” I said. The shoeboxes were in nine stacks, each four or five boxes high, all the way across the bottom of the closet.

  I chose the lowest one in the farthest back corner and pulled it out. I didn’t register that it felt too unbalanced to hold a pair of shoes until I was already knocking the lid off.

  The box was full of baby things: a silver cup, handmade pink booties, a baby book. There was a spritz of dark hair, fine as silk, in a Ziploc bag. A folded piece of old paper rested on top.

  I’d gone looking for a hiding spot for me, but I’d discovered Mrs. Fancy’s. I rocked up to a kneel and picked the paper out and opened it. It was the birth certificate. In the first-name slot, I read the name Ivy. I glanced down it, looking for a date. The certificate had been issued in 1972, four years after I was born. Ivy’s father was listed as Harold James Wheeler, and her mother’s name was Janine Fancy Wheeler. Janine was the daughter Mrs. Fancy was visiting right now. The one who had supposedly had her first baby last week.

  I’d stumbled upon the secret flotsam of a sad time, and now I was digging in the private pieces of a grief that belonged solely to my friend. I put the birth certificate back. I put the box back, too, exactly as I found it, and then I moved to the opposite side of the closet.

  I pulled out two shoeboxes from the last row on that side and found some sleek red pumps. The other held cloth espadrilles. I wedged one of the pumps into the other box, and then I wrapped the Target bag tight around the pieces of my gun. I put that bundle in with the single shoe. Phil weaseled up beside me and poked his sniffy head into the box that held the gun. I herded him away with the lid so I could close both boxes up tight and slide them back into their places.

  I slid the Stephen King book behind all the boxes, resting on its spine with the cover pressed flat to the back wall. I got up and closed the closet door. Phil ran ahead of me down the hallway back to the kitchen, anxious and yelling. I took a minute to fill his bowl up—it was that or get Pawpy’s gun back out and shoot him—and at that thought my hands shook, scattering pellets that Phil hoovered up immediately. I wondered where Gretel was. If Gretel was.

  I couldn’t walk across the yard and home and find out, though. Not while I stank of shooting and flop sweat and green woods. The truth was all over my skin.

  I went to Mrs. Fancy’s green-tiled guest bathroom and borrowed a washcloth. I didn’t have time for a shower, and damp hair would be suspicious in its own way, so I took a whore’s bath in the sink. I washed the gun smell off my hands with Mrs. Fancy’s apple-scented soap and then swabbed out under my arms and between my legs. The mirror told me I still looked like sweaty hell, but that was a good thing. That could work for me. I threw the wet washcloth into the hamper and headed back to the kitchen.

  Mrs. Fancy kept all her poisonous Comet and Pine-Sol in easy reach under the kitchen sink, like me. Neither one of us had babies to worry about. I opened the cabinet and grabbed the first thing that came to hand: Lemon Pledge. I sprayed a fine mist of it into the air like it was perfume and walked through. I grabbed the 409 and sprayed a jet directly on my hands and wiped them through my hair, hiding the smell of shooting as if it were a lover’s musk.

  I started to put the 409 back, but then I changed my mind and started pulling out all Mrs. Fancy’s cleaning supplies. I stood them up in a scattered line on the counter and then got her vacuum out of the hall closet and left it in the middle of the living room for good measure. Set dressing, in case Thom came over to check my story.

  Time to go home. My heart started banging against my ribs like it was fighting to get out. I paused to take deep breaths, ten of them, until I felt quieter inside. I set my face to its familiar sweet expression and walked out the front door, my steps steady and unhurried.

  Our aqua house glowed, fiercely cheerful, bouncing the morning sun at me hard. The low roof was mostly flat, but there was a sloping point that rose up over the front door. It struck me that it looked like our house was wearing a jaunty hat several sizes too small for it. It was silly looking, and the mint-fresh color made it sillier. It didn’t look like a house that would have a wolf inside. Today, it held at least two.

  Still, this was probably the first time in my marriage that I’d ever been pleased to have Thom’s parents over, especially his daddy. Joe had no trouble wrestling his boots off and thumping his bare feet up on our coffee table like he owned the place. In a way he did; the Grandees gave us nine thousand dollars for the down payment. It was a gift, not a loan, Joe said. Out loud, he said it. Frequently. In public. By now he had to have been repaid twice over out of Thom’s considerable store of banked pride. I didn’t think of it as a gift so much as another way to keep Thom feeling indebted. If Joe paid his eldest son what he was worth for running all three Grand Guns stores, we’d have been able to afford our own damn down payment, and on a house two steps up from Chez Crest.

  But today, I was glad to think of Joe Grandee filling up the house like packing peanuts, pouring into every bit of open space. There would be no room to breathe, but on the upside, Thom and I would be suspended and separated. He could not crash into me.

  I opened my front door. Just inside was a tiny square room with parquet flooring, a closet-size space that hoped to be a foyer when it grew up. Through the archway that led to the living room, I could hear Joe Grandee holding court. I’d come in midtrumpet, and I don’t think anyone heard the door swing open over him.

  “—married almost five years. What are you waiting for? I thought the one upside of you marrying a damn papist was we’d get a passel of grandkids. Your mother, she kept saying in the car, what if those shooters hadn’t missed? What would you have left behind you on this earth?”

  I waited in our wannabe foyer, caught by a silly hope that Thom would choose this moment to tell his father to pull hi
s head out of our business and stick it up his own back end where it belonged. But there was only the familiar silence that meant Thom was supping, spoonful by spoonful, on his daddy’s crap. It would surely go even sourer in his belly.

  “Your brother here, he’s bull’s-eyed twice on Margie, and they got married half a year after you. What’s wrong with you, boy?”

  A small, square piece of the parquet floor extended into the living room, surrounded by our oatmeal-colored carpet. I stepped onto that wooden island, directly into my living room. “I’m on the pill,” I said in the mildest tone I could muster, and immediately I had four sets of eyes on me.

  “That’s a little more information than I needed, missy,” Joe said. “And where the hell have you been?”

  He was hulked upright and angry in Thom’s own easy chair, centered in the room. He was past fifty, and age had blunted the sharp edges of his athlete’s body, but he was still broad-shouldered and solid. He had his booted feet set wide apart and flat against the earth. He leveled the question as if he had a right to the answer, staring me down like he was King Shit of Poo-Paw Mountain, as my daddy would have said. I felt my eyes getting narrow above the fake smile I’d drummed up for him.

  Everything in the room seemed to turn inward to frame him, starting with his own wife. Charlotte was perched on the end of the sofa closest to him with her spine straight and her spiky knees pointed his way. Charlotte wasn’t at ease even at home in their own dry-aired mansion, and in my house she sat stiffer than a cardboard cutout of herself.

  Larry, the middle Grandee boy, stood on Joe’s left, angled toward his daddy as well. He had a broad forehead and a Roman nose like Thom, but under that, his face waffled away in a chinless slide. He was an accountant, and he kept the books for the stores. Joe must have folded him up like the luggage he was and brought him in the cramped backseat of the big black truck.

  “What brings alla y’all over here in the middle of the day,” I said politely to Joe, but my gaze shifted quickly, almost against my will, going right to Thom. He was at the opposite end of the sofa, sitting way too still. His eyes looked like two pans of something left too long on simmer on the stovetop, seconds away from smoking and going black.

  “I believe I asked where you’ve been, first,” Joe Grandee said, stern, like he was the wronged, shot-at husband in the room. I was surprised he wasn’t shirtless and barefoot, guzzling milk straight out of the carton while he questioned his son’s wife.

  It was all the more insulting because I understood what he was really asking. The only question that truly mattered, the one that only my husband had a right to ask. I could read its echo in the crackling air around Thom’s head, three words repeating in an endless loop:

  Who is he. Who is he. Who is he.

  “I was next door,” I said, jerking my thumb in the direction of Mrs. Fancy’s place. “Now what are y’all doing here?” I pulled my eyebrows together, trying to look puzzled. “Is Gretel out back?”

  Thom’s stony face did not change at the mention of my dog. Neither did the words he was thinking at me.

  Who is he was a refrain familiar enough for me to recognize it banging around his head. He started with Who is he and finished by putting me in the hospital. We’d had this conversation plenty, though there hadn’t ever been a he. I’d never stepped out on Thom Grandee. I’d never so much as pointed a toe in the direction of that doorway.

  “Next door?” Joe said, sounding so skeptical that I might as well have said I’d spent the morning skipping on down to hell to bring the devil some cool, sweet tea.

  I nodded and sent Mrs. Fancy a mental apology for the lie I was about to tell on her. “I’m cat sitting for our elderly neighbor. She comes home tomorrow, so I was giving her place a good cleaning. It was all over filth.”

  Charlotte’s spiky fingers flexed on her knees. She somehow managed to look down her short peck of a nose at me, even though she was seated. “You could have left a note,” she said in her needle-thin voice. Charlotte was made entirely of angles. Even her small boobies were pointy, so sharp that it was a mystery to me how none of her boys had lost an eye while trying to breast-feed.

  “I got Margie and me a set of them mobile phones, Thom. I can track her in a second,” Larry said. Mystery solved. Larry had clearly never been breast-fed.

  I had to squint to keep my eyes from rolling in their sockets. Track Margie, my butt. Larry lived chained to Margie’s leg in the few hours he wasn’t chained to his daddy’s. He seemed happy enough grazing on whatever scant grass he found around their ankles.

  The phone suggestion didn’t even register with Thom. He didn’t so much as spare his brother a grunt.

  Who is he.

  “I wasn’t expecting company,” I said. I plucked at my dirty T-shirt, then ran my palms down the sides of my ancient jeans. Exhibit A. “I must look a mess.” I picked my scraggled hair up off my neck and raised my eyebrows at Thom. Exhibit B, and I hoped he could read my answer in the air around me as clear as I could read his question: Do you think this is what a girl wears, how she does her hair, when she goes out to meet a lover?

  I couldn’t stop myself from thinking that if I ever did step out, this would be the way. I would go to and from his arms in a ponytail, wearing clam diggers, no makeup on. I’d look like I’d spent the day gardening instead of on my back. I blinked at the thought, and on the inside of my closed lids I saw Jim Beverly’s sweet and boyish monkey face again, his long upper lip and his flat nose, his eyebrows waggling as he made some joke and pulled me down to lie beside him.

  “Look at me,” I said again, quieter, to Thom, only to Thom. “I’m all over dirt and cobwebs.”

  Thom passed his big palm down over his face, slow, as if he’d been born with a caul and was only now rolling it away. He looked me up and down with fresh eyes. I prattled on. “You should have seen under her beds. I’m surprised I didn’t find Jimmy Hoffa buried there in all that filth. I should run grab a quick shower.”

  I started to turn away, but Thom surged to his feet. My breath caught. He was so fast. His long strides carried him around our coffee table, eating up all the room between us. I took two panicked steps backwards, until the wall stopped me. My hands came up.

  Thom steamrollered straight toward me with his bright eyes blind. He was seeing only the shape of me, as a thing to break, as if his parents and his liverless brother weren’t clotting up our home. He pushed through my hands like they weren’t there, but then his arms folded around me instead of rising up against me. I found myself pressed hard against him, my nose smashed flat against the broad slab of his chest. He buried his face in my hair and inhaled, drawing in sweat and ammonia like he was sniffing daisies.

  I smelled him, too, the dark clove scent of my husband, and my eyes closed all on their own. My arms snaked their familiar way around him, and all at once it felt like we were alone in our house.

  “They fucking shot at me, Ro,” he said into my hair.

  “They what?” I said, glad he couldn’t see my face. “Who? What?”

  “On my running trail,” he said. “They took a couple of shots at me.”

  “Oh, my Lord,” I said. I fake struggled, as if trying to get back to see him, but he held me tight. I turned my head sideways and pressed my ear against him, my face hidden against his arm. The thump and rumble of his heart struck me as beautiful, and I felt my eyes tear up, as if I hadn’t caused this mess.

  “They shot at me, Ro. Like they meant business.”

  “Who were they?” I asked, embracing his use of the plural.

  “I don’t know,” he said, pulling me closer, too, hard enough to squeeze out half my breath. “I have to tell you something, Ro. She’s fine. Okay? She will be mostly fine. But one shot hit Gretel.”

  “Gretel?” I said. We were finally to the place in the conversation that I cared about, and I couldn’t seem to process the word mostly. This time I struggled for real, trying to lean back away from him and see his face, but he clamped
me even harder. When he spoke, his voice was flinty, close enough to losing control that it scared me into stillness: “Ro. Please don’t give me any crap about running your fat-ass dog right now.”

  “No, baby,” I said. “Only what does that mean? Mostly fine?”

  Tom sighed and shifted, easing his controlling grasp. “She got hit high in the shoulder. The vet had to take the leg. But she came through fine. She’s sleeping.”

  My knees were glad for Thom’s solid body. I trembled and leaned. “Take the leg?” I said. Those words made no more sense to me than “mostly” had.

  “Shoot, she won’t even know.” Joe bulled his way back to the middle of the conversation from the easy chair. I started and felt Thom’s reflexive jerk, too, as we remembered together that the room was full of all the wrong Grandees. I wished Margie were here or Thom’s youngest brother, Peter. Margie taught middle school science, and that’s a job that trains a woman to brook no crap. Nothing Joe said ever fazed Teflon Peter, either. He was a beautiful pothead who dropped in and out of jobs and colleges and the beds of pretty young women with good-natured, unshakable ease. But when Joe spoke, Thom turned away from me, one arm still across my shoulder, so the single thing we’d been split and opened to face Joe.

  “I had a hunting dog lost a leg when I was growing up,” Joe went on. “Trip, I called him. Get it? Trip? After he got used to it, he didn’t remember he’d ever had four. He didn’t remember his name used to be Blue, either. They aren’t the brightest things, dogs.”

  Larry and Charlotte nodded in unison, like this was wise enough to be engraved on tablets and handed down the mountain. Commandment Eleven, Thy dog shalt have three legs and like it.

  I looked up at Thom, trying to call him back, and asked, “What did the cops say?”

  He made a scoffing noise, and he stayed facing his daddy. “Kids, maybe? Poachers? They didn’t take it too serious.”

  Joe shook his head, disgusted. “Damn cops, checking boxes. They aren’t going to do a damn thing.”