Backseat Saints

by Joshilyn Jackson

  The jeans were pale blue and baby soft from a thousand washings, and they sat easy against my bruises. My rib cage pinged as I shifted, and I could tell by how the jeans fit that I’d gone barn-cat scrawny. Still, I felt whole and ready for movement, but only from the neck down. My wet hair was a heavy reminder, pulling at my sore scalp. I dried it on cool, then I bundled it away into a low ponytail and braided it. It still felt like the braid had a barbell tied to the end. I pulled it over my shoulder, where it hung past my breast, heavy and hers.

  I didn’t want it touching me. I wanted none of Ro’s things touching me, and the long hair my husband loved felt like a most offensive bit of Ro-ness. I strode to the kitchen and yanked my meat shears out of the butcher-block knife rack on the counter. I thought I could lop that braid off in one fell swoop, but it was too thick. I had to squeeze the handles open and shut and saw at it with the blades to get it off of me. Finally the last connecting hairs yielded, and the braid slithered down my back to the floor. My head felt so suddenly light that it was like being dizzy.

  The braided cable of hair looked like a long, glossy pet that had coiled up at my feet. It was sleek and dark, more than a foot long, so thick that I doubted I could get my finger and thumb wrapped all the way around it. I looked down at it and felt no remorse. I felt no connection to it at all. It was nothing more than a brown black rope that Thom could damn well never hang me from again.

  I picked up the braid and walked back to the bathroom. I think I meant to put it in the trash, but I caught sight of myself in the mirror and stopped. I was ten pounds too thin and two shades paler than paper. My shorn hair hung around my face in a ragged tangle, longer on the right side than the left. I had kaleidoscope eyes, spinning with a hundred different colors of pure, naked crazy. For the first time in years, I was face-to-face with Rose Mae Lolley. Even my clothes were hers, faded and ill used enough to have been found in a church box. I was cold all over, predatory, and it showed in my face. Every line of my body said, Down to black business, up to absolutely nothing good.

  I’d been Rose Mae in accidental flashes over the years, most recently in the ditch at Wildcat Bluff. This was the face Jim Beverly had seen, I felt certain, that night we got drunk and ran through the woods, and the rustle of ferns and branches was the crack and snap of tiny bones. Thom knew this face, too. It had been reflected in the mirror of his gaze the first night I met him, back when I was slinging eggs and corned-beef hash at Duff’s Diner. Stirring spit into his date’s drink had been a stopgap measure to keep me from boiling half her face off with a pot of scalding coffee. He’d known what he was getting, same as I had. But those were forays, a creature taking peeks and darts out of its pretty, placid home.

  In the mirror I was as ugly and iridescent as a de-shelled hermit crab, fleshy and exposed. I hadn’t been this nakedly myself since the morning I left Fruiton, Alabama.

  When Jim left me, it was as if he’d ripped my skin off and toted it down the highway with him. The very air stung me. I wandered the halls of my school drugged with loss and rage. I stopped turning in my work. Tests were passed out, and I sat through them, not even lifting my pencil. It was all I could do to hold myself still with the air and sunshine touching the raw and blinking object that I was. Graduation came, and I sat home through it, knowing I had flunked and not caring. I sat through summer like it was a prison sentence.

  I thought I might hear from Jim on my birthday. I held myself afloat with the idea: He would call. He would tell me—and only me—where he was. He would say he’d only been waiting for me to turn eighteen, so that no one could come looking for us.

  The day came, and the phone stayed silent. Then my father clocked me a good one for the high crime of walking to the kitchen, my back to him, when he was thinking he might speak to me. Kidney shot. I lay on the floor where he had put me, and I understood that Jim would not rescue me. If I stayed in Fruiton, this was my life. This was all I could be. No dear and worthy girl could be rebuilt under my father’s fists.

  I packed a canvas duffel bag and slept a fitful few hours until the Greyhound station opened. Daddy was passed out on the sofa, dreaming like a dog with his bare feet hanging off the edge and twitching as he chased down rabbits or naughty daughters. I had a little money of my own, but I decided that final punch would cost him the nine dollars in his wallet as well as the sacred “whiskey twenty” he kept in his bedside table for emergencies.

  There was leftover Tuna Helper in the fridge and half a pan of mac ’n’ cheese, too. It could be days before he ran out of things to microwave and realized I was gone. I wanted him to realize sooner.

  There was a big print of ships in a harbor hanging above the sofa, over Daddy. It had been my mother’s. As a girl, I used to pretend she’d stepped into it and gotten on a ship and gone someplace that I could follow, the way Lucy and Edmund had floated across a painted ocean back to Narnia. I was grown up now, and I understood she left on purpose, through the front door. I was about to follow her lead.

  I looked at the print, all that deep blue water hanging over Daddy’s head. I thought about the gas can in the carport, how it would slosh, unwieldy, if I lifted it and carried it back here. It was more than half-full because Daddy never fed the mower. It was cool inside our small brick house in the hour before dawn. A fire sounded nice.

  Instead I turned myself, went to his room, and I stole his pistols. I took Pawpy’s both for protection and as a punishment; it was just about the only thing of Pawpy’s Daddy had. I took both his newer ones to hock, as if they were my rightful dowry. I’d have taken his deer gun, too, but it didn’t fit down in my duffel.

  My last act was to dig a shedding Crayola paintbrush out of my childhood toy box. I took a coffee mug to the neighbor’s yard and scooped up a generous cupful of the dog crap that had leaked out from their dyspeptic standard poodle. I took these tools back to the sofa and used them to write, “Later, Gater,” onto the hanging print of ships at harbor. The ships and the docks were brown, and the sea was a storm dark blue. The words were hard to see, and I wondered how long he would stagger around the house, hung over and gagging, checking his shoes and sniffing and cussing, before he found my billet-doodoo.

  Considering he was passed out helpless, considering that I had a swollen kidney and two loaded guns, considering how raw I was, he was damn lucky that was all I did. If he had stirred, if he had so much as cracked an eye, he would have seen the face that I was seeing in the mirror now. If he’d said the wrong word to me in that moment, then as sure as God made all the pretty fishes, I’d have put a hole in him.

  I reached out and touched the mirror, disbelieving. The girl inside the glass reached at the exact same time, raising her hand on her side to meet mine, fingertip to fingertip. The glass was showing me an accurate reflection, showing me that she—I—was way too easy to read. I had to camouflage myself.

  I rummaged through Ro’s flowered handbag to find the keys to my hand-me-down Buick. I drove downtown, still clutching the coil of my hair, to a place called Artisan Salon and Day Spa. I knew Charlotte Grandee paid this place a small fortune to keep her hooves sanded down and her gray covered. I had never so much as stepped inside. Thrifty Ro got her split ends trimmed at a place called Mister Clips for eight meager dollars. I did my pedicures at home. Artisan wasn’t a place we could afford, but that one glimpse in the mirror had told me a faked smile and some Maybelline blusher wouldn’t cover half my sins. Damn the cost; Thom owed me this, and more. Hell, all the Grandees owed me. I circled Amarillo’s small blocks until I found a parking space that would hold my ancient tank of a car.

  I walked into the ultramod reception room, and the lone blonde waiting to have her frosty tips refreshed gasped at the sight of me and looked away fast. One manicured hand raised itself involuntarily to touch her own thick curls, like she was scared whatever had happened to me might be catching.

  I looked past her to the young man behind the apple green check-in station and said, “Do you take walk-ins?�
�

  He looked up, his mouth already shaping the word no, but when he saw me, his lips froze into a kissing shape around the unsaid word. I had the long rope of my former hair coiled around one wrist, and I lifted it and let it unfurl and dangle.

  The air came out of him so fast that it made a woofing noise, and he said, “What did you do?” He sounded slightly awed.

  “I had a bad idea,” I said.

  “I’ll say,” he agreed, fervent.

  I was used to men looking at me, but not like this. I felt my eyebrows come together, and I blinked hard. “I’m not getting out of the house much, these days. I haven’t…” I swallowed so loud that it sounded like gulping, and then I felt my mouth opening up again. “My husband died. Quite recently.” Instantly I had to fight to keep an inappropriate grin from spreading across my face.

  I had not spent my week on bed rest making up drug-induced, cheerful Disney-rip-off songs about a world with no Thom Grandee in it. My only thought had been how to find Jim. Test-driving widowhood with the salon’s tanned godlet-style receptionist as my witness was my way of saying exactly and out loud why I was looking for my lost love. The boldness of it, the truth of it, moved through my body like a wave of black pleasure. It was the confirmation of a thing that had already been decided, a long time ago, in an airport. Maybe even by someone else.

  The receptionist said, “This is clearly an emergency.” He had big hazel eyes, shaped very round, with a down tilt to them that made them seem sadder for me than he probably was. “Let me see what I can do.”

  The blonde said, “Rexy, I am in a hurry today…,” giving me a sidelong glance. It was the look a well-fed person who was enjoying an excellent cold lamb sandwich might give a homeless fellow or a hungry dog.

  “Faye will be ready for you in five,” Rexy told her. “Maybe four.” He turned back to me and said, mostly for her benefit, “You, my dear, you are past what Faye can do. Miles past. I suspect you’ve crossed the border and left Faye-country altogether. You require Peter.”

  The blonde’s eyebrows lifted and she looked me up and down, clearly wondering what made Rexy think I rated. I looked back, bottom lip atremble, and I made my eyes go big and soulful, like those single-teared orphans that get painted onto black velvet. Her gaze broke first. She picked up a glossy magazine and put it up in front of her face, a wall I couldn’t climb over. It was Architectural Digest, and Charlotte Grandee got that chichi rag every month. I realized this blond thing probably knew Charlotte. They certainly looked of a set, and this was Charlotte’s spa.

  I wasn’t worried, though. I currently looked nothing like the pretty Ro Grandee in the wedding photo at Charlotte’s house, and the godlet hadn’t asked my name. If I so much as whispered the word Grandee, though, I had no doubt this blond creature would be on the phone with Charlotte before the door had closed entirely behind me. She’d be delighted to reveal that Charlotte’s low-rent Alabama daughter-in-law had been seen poor me–ing her way into Artisan via the fictional death of her eldest boy. I might enjoy that, actually. But it would be tempting fate to let Thom’s mother hear this fiction right before I made it fact.

  Rexy came back and said to me, “Follow me now, hon.” The blonde made a huffy throat noise, and Rexy gave her a shit-eating grin, his teeth as white and square as peppermint Chiclets. “Faye will come for you in bare seconds, Sheila. She has sworn.”

  I followed him through the archway down a long moss green hallway lit by wall sconces. There were doorways on both sides, some closed with signs on them that said things like “Shhh… Massage in process!” and “Aromatherapy Room.”

  I whispered, “I’m sorry about…”

  “Pish, Sheila? Bottle blondes on the wrong side of forty need us more than we need them, believe it. She’s about sixty percent spackle as it stands.”

  I chuckled, but now I was thinking about how much folks like to bond over a bit of gossip, how nasty good it could feel to talk ugly about outsiders with your own kind. That must be how my mother had found me. She’d asked her own kind.

  Fruiton was a small town, and if a single person had seen me toting my gun-stuffed duffel bag to the Greyhound station at dawn, stomping away from the remains of my life, then the whole town as good as knew. The right people, if asked, would have been happy to relay this information to her.

  I followed Rexy all the way to the back, to a more brightly lit, deeper green room with a gleaming sink and a sleek black stylist’s chair. He presented me to a short, slim man beside it who looked way too young to be cutting hair.

  “This is Peter. I leave you in his capable hands,” Rexy said.

  Peter’s hair was an artful tousle of multishaded gold. Up close, I could see fine lines mapped around his eyes and two deep creases framing his full lips, so he had to be at least into his thirties.

  He looked at me and tsked, then said to Rexy’s back, “You weren’t exaggerating.” He walked forward and circled me, then reached down and grabbed the braid I was still holding in the middle. He lifted it without taking it out of my hand, feeling the weight. Then he let the hair go and touched the ragged ends where I’d cut it off, his soft fingers brushing my cheek. I found myself leaning into the touch like a petting-hungry stray cat.

  He said, “Poor sugar. What do you want?”

  That stopped me, because I hadn’t a clue. I only knew what I did not want.

  “I can’t look like this,” I said.

  “No. It isn’t good for America,” he agreed, so overly grave that it made me laugh. He led me over to the sink and settled me in the chair. I leaned back and rested my head in the sink while Peter washed what was left on my head. His fingers moved in a vigorous, painful rumple across my sore scalp.

  “So, you want to look ‘not like this.’ That’s not terribly specific, is it?” Peter said, rinsing the shampoo and reaching for a bottle of conditioner. “Why don’t you tell me how you think you look, and I’ll go the other way.”

  “Skinless,” I said.

  He laughed out loud. “I meant your hair, sugar.”

  “Ruined. It looks like angry hair.”

  “It does look a little… fraught,” he said, smiling down at me, then he shrugged and said with perfect confidence, “Whatever you did, I can fix it.”

  I believed him. With his low-down, slinky voice, he could say anything and most people would believe him. I let my eyes drift closed as he worked a thick cream that smelled like gardenias through my hair.

  My mother was in California. I thought of it as her place now, like she’d walked all the way around the state, peeing endlessly to seal the borders so that nothing from the life she’d left could follow. She couldn’t have gone all the way back to Fruiton to track me. Coming halfway, just to Amarillo, must have nearly killed her. No. She would have called folks in Fruiton who were her kind. This would be both the admittedly sparse ranks of southern Catholics and shitty mothers, of which there was no shortage.

  One of them must have tattled, told her I’d gone to the bus station. I’d had a crap waitress job near the bus station in every town I’d paused in. She’d simply tracked me from Greyhound to Greyhound across the country, all the way to Amarillo, without ever leaving her new territory.

  This was how I could find Jim. I could call the kids I had gone to high school with, and they would talk to me, because I’d been one of them. They would tell me, their peer, more than they would have told the cops or their parents back then. Telling cops or parents would have been ratting him out; it was obvious Jim had not wanted to be found.

  “Let’s promenade,” Peter said, and I started, my eyes popping open. I stood up and let him drape me in towels and a slick black poncho. As he led me across the room, I hung my braid over one arm and rummaged in my purse for a pen and a piece of scrap paper. I needed a list of people back in Fruiton who were my kind, who would talk and tattle to me.

  Peter took me straight to the chair and sat me down. The leather was butter soft and the seat gave under my weight, cu
pping my ass like a lover and supporting my sore back better than my own bed at home. Charlotte Grandee was used to sinking her pointy back end into chairs like this. Artisan was giving me a taste of the life she took for granted. I settled myself down in the seat, acting like it was rightfully mine, as if my mother had given birth to me while sitting comfy in this very chair and I’d never yet moved off it.

  Peter picked up a pair of slim silver scissors and then paused, considering me. He walked around me, looking at me from every angle.

  I braced my paper on my purse and wrote, “THE LAST PARTY,” at the top. I wrote Missy Carver’s name first, because the party had been at her house. Missy had a divorced mother who went on lots of dates, so the party had almost always been at her house.

  “I’m ready. Are you ready?” Peter asked. He made it sound the right kind of dirty. Like I was beautiful enough to tempt him, but he was much too gay to be a real threat.

  “Hell, yeah,” I said. This was part of what rich wives like Charlotte and the blonde outside paid for, this safe, flirty assurance that they still had it.

  “No input? I’m taking blades to your head, sugar-pie. Are you comfortable saying, ‘Go mad, Peter, and make me a goddess’?”

  “That sounds great,” I agreed. “Let’s go with that goddess thing.”

  Peter went to work with the scissors, the blades rubbing up against each other like cricket legs. I didn’t watch him cut. I didn’t look at him at all, and he seemed to feel me being finished with the conversation, because he dropped the flirt and went quiet.

  Under Missy’s name, I wrote down all the varsity football players that had been in our grade. They would have been at that party, certain. Those names came easy: Rob Shay. Chuck Presley. Benny Garrison. Car Kaylor. Lawly Price. Back then, we always called the football boys by their first and last names, as if they were rock stars instead of boys we’d known since grade school.