Backseat Saints

by Joshilyn Jackson

  The man passed my car, coming onto the lawn in a herky bound, and at that moment, as if I knew desperation magic, my hand closed perfectly around the cool metal cylinder I’d been seeking. This time, I remembered to flick aside the safety with my thumb. Just before he touched me with those big, splayed hands, I lifted the pepper spray and blasted him right in the face.

  I sidestepped and kept moving backwards, almost falling, avoiding blowback the way Thom had taught me when he gave me the spray. The neighbor stopped abruptly and blinked, and then he screamed. He screamed like a woman, high and shrill. He dropped as if all his bones had suddenly been teleported out of his body. His hands came up to scrub and scrub at his face. He flopped onto his back, and his heels drummed the lawn. Gretel barked and barked in a deep-chested flurry of angry sound.

  I stood over him, no idea what to do next, as he screamed again and then again. I looked at the teeny can, impressed.

  “Are you okay?” I asked him, loud, so he could hear me over my dog. The question seemed inadequate.

  He ignored me, kicking his legs like a shot deer. His scream changed, going longer, until it was an endless keening. I took that for a no.

  “Stay put,” I told him, then put my hand on my pounding head. The guy was obviously not going to pop up and trot to Hardee’s for a chicken sandwich. “I mean, hang on. I’ll go on in your place and call for 911.”

  I went first to the car and put my hand on Gret’s head to calm her. “I’m fine,” I told her. “I’m fine.” She panted and chuffed, staring at the man, her back fur standing straight up. I was pretty damn impressed. When Thom and I fought, she went under the bed till it was over, same as she did in thunderstorms, the coward. I’d never had occasion to see her react when I was threatened by a man outside her pack.

  “What the fuck?” another man’s voice said behind me. I looked over my shoulder and saw a bare-chested fellow in stripy pajama bottoms standing up on my old porch. Behind him, the little girl stood in the doorway. “What the fuck?” he repeated.

  “Daddy said a Word,” the little girl said to me, awed.

  “He came at me,” I said. Gretel was bristling at the new guy now, and I said, “Easy, girl,” in the most soothing voice I could muster.

  I looked down at the neighbor. He’d stopped kicking, and his keening had thinned to a whine. He was just about out of air. He took a long, choked inhale. He tried to sit up, peering at me through his fingers.

  “Got-dammit, girl,” he said.

  I knew him then.

  He took his hands down from his egglike eyes. The whites had gone hot pink, bright as Barbie’s tube dress, and tears streamed out of the corners. His nose had two lines of clear snot running out of it, and his body was thin and frail, an old man’s form. He didn’t look much like his old self. But I knew him.

  “Hi, Daddy,” I said.

  “I mean, got-damn,” my father repeated. He put his palms against his eyes, pressing and snuffling. “I thought you was your mother. I thought you was Claire.”

  The guy in the pajama bottoms came down the step, barefoot, picking a careful path across the lawn.

  “Mace or pepper spray?” he asked me, tilting his head toward the can.

  “Pepper spray,” I said. I looked at the can still clutched in my fingers as if I was surprised to find it there. I flicked the safety back on and dropped it into my purse.

  “That’s a mercy,” the guy said, then added to my father, “You got any Maalox?”

  “Naw, Bill, I don’t,” the skinny shadow of my daddy said, sitting flat on his butt in the grass. “I got Tums. You can go get you some if your got-dammed pizza lunch is bothering you while I sit here going blind.”

  Bill ignored that and said to me, “Help me get him up and to his house, will you?”

  “I am not fucking touching him,” I said, my tone very mild. My daddy was a wreck. He’d gone and withered himself up, and the hands he used to claw at his face trembled and were thin and wasted. He was no match for Thom Grandee. Hell, at this point he’d been no match for me. I wanted to kick him for it while he was good and down. I said, “Why don’t you go blind. We’ll see how you like that,” directly to him in that same mild tone. I was panting, and each breath felt like something sharp, poking me low in my lungs.

  My father said, “That don’t even make sense.”

  “Well, good, then,” I said, and that didn’t make sense, either.

  “Okay!” Bill said, businesslike, and the little girl and my daddy and I all turned our faces toward him, as if he’d called everyone on the eternally dying lawn to order. He had a rounded chin and full cheeks that made him look younger than he probably was. He had good, broad shoulders and a sprinkle of dark hair on his chest. The beginnings of a beer belly lapped the top of his pajama bottoms. He walked past me and helped my father to his feet, calling to his daughter, “Hey, Bunny? Go get the Maalox out of the medicine cabinet, can you? Bring it across the street to Mr. Lolley’s house?”

  “Umkay,” Bunny said, and disappeared from the doorway.

  Bill drew one of the sticks that used to be my father’s meaty arms over his shoulder and walked him back toward the other house.

  “Don’t you go nowhere,” my daddy yelled at me as they walked away. His voice came out burbled and thick, as if more snot was filling up his throat, getting behind a host of other snots that were lining up to head on out his nostrils. Bill wrestled him across his lawn and onto the porch. As they went in the door, my father was still hollering over his shoulder, “Don’t you disappear! Don’t you go!”

  I paused, shaky and panting, my hand on Gretel’s head and my heart pounding away in my chest like it was trying to get out and follow him. I stood like tacky lawn art and the Alabama sun blazed down and it seemed to me like I was hotter than that sun. My eyes burned as if I’d pepper-sprayed myself. I pressed my hands to my forehead, and they felt like lovely blocks of ice.

  Bunny trotted back out with an economy-size bottle of Maalox. I opened the car door for Gretel, who positioned herself at my ankle and walked in time with me like a sergeant, hackles at half-mast. The two of us followed Bunny across the street. The front door floated open, wavery, and my cheeks were so hot.

  Gret and I stepped inside, and when I crossed the threshold I passed back in time, ten years or more. I got instant vertigo. I put one hand out to steady myself, and it landed on the key table beside my mother’s old blue vase, still filled with her dusty, plastic tulips. I pulled my hand away like the table was made of human bones, gaping all around me. It wasn’t our old house, but the floor plan here was the same, and my father had laid all our things out exactly as I remembered.

  “Where are you?” my father bellowed from the kitchen. “Where’d you go?” He sounded desperate, almost plaintive.

  I couldn’t answer, goggling through fog at all the furniture and knickknacks of my childhood. Everything in the room was ten years older than the last time I had seen it, and looked it. The center of the brown and gold sofa sagged, as if it had been used for such an endless string of disreputable purposes that it had given up and bent beneath them.

  “Bunny? Bring the Maalox to the kitchen,” I heard Bill calling over my daddy’s yowling. Bunny trotted obediently toward his voice.

  My mother’s ship print, so sun-faded that it looked like a photocopy of itself, was hanging in its designated space above the sofa. It had a ruined patch in the bottom corner. Daddy must have used the wrong kind of cleaner to take off my dog-shit good-bye note. Daddy’s recliner was still angled toward the TV, looking as lumpy and ill used as the sofa. The plank table was there at the other end of the room, and on either side stood my mother’s bookshelves. My father had made them for her back when they first got married, and she’d filled them top to bottom with her favorites. Less beloved books rotated in and out of a box in the coat closet. I turned, helplessly drawn, and opened the closet. I smelled mothballs and old paper. Sure enough, there was the same wooden liquor store crate, old books s
tacked three deep under the hanging coats.

  I walked across to the shelves, and the carpet felt like the floor of one of the ships in the picture, pitching and roiling under me. I grabbed the side of the shelf to stay upright. My mother had kept her books arranged by author, hardbacks and paperbacks jumbled in together. The top of each row humped up and down in uneven squares, like a row of poorly carved jack-o’-lantern teeth.

  I trailed my hand along the fourth shelf down. Nine books in, my fingers came, as I knew they would, to Rudyard Kipling. I pulled out the book club edition of Just So Stories with the plain black cover I remembered, the title embossed in gold leaf on the front.

  My father hollered from the kitchen. “Hello?… Hello? Don’t you disappear!”

  I put the book back and followed his howling call back to the kitchen, Gretel trotting close and anxious by my side.

  Bill, still barefoot in his PJs, had my daddy bent over the sink. He was washing Daddy’s eyes out with what looked like a thin gruel of Maalox and water. He nodded to me, calm and firm, holding my daddy’s face down in the sink with one solid arm. Daddy was struggling a little, but he stilled when I came in.

  “There you are,” Daddy said. “Oh, there you are. Don’t go away. I have a speech I want to say for you. I have it on a paper. I been waiting so long.”

  I ignored my father entirely and made my eyes click dryly in their sockets to look at Bill and only Bill. “How’d you know to do that? With the Maalox?”

  “I was a med tech. Army,” he said.

  “Thank God you didn’t leave,” Daddy said to me, bent over, his blue T-shirt riding up his back. I could see two sharp knobs of spine in the space between his shirt and his jeans. He was so thin, his very skin looked worn down and sheer, like any minute the bones would press up through it. Thom could break him in one hand. He was useless. “I been waiting here to say my speech. Can you go get my paper? I wrote it all down in a paper in the drawer over yonder. The drawer in the phone desk.” He aimed his words down into the sink, and his voice still sounded thick with snot. I could hardly make him out.

  “I’m Bill Mantles. I’d introduce you to Mr. Lolley here, but I take it you two know each other?” Bill asked me, all ironical.

  “We’ve met,” I said.

  “Can I pet your dog?” Bunny asked. She was at the other end of the galley kitchen, sitting in front of the built-in desk, in my mother’s old chair. She’d turned the chair around to watch her dad, and she was swinging her feet back and forth. They were too short to reach the floor.

  “She’s a little het up,” I said to her. “Give her a sec.”

  Bill kept rinsing, and my father kept talking into the sink, asking me to go get the paper out of the desk drawer so he could read me his speech. Even his voice had aged and gone thin, and his ropy-looking arms had deep blue veins bulging up all over them. He looked like a photocopy, too, as bleached out and ruined as the print of the ships hanging in the other room. I tried to let his voice run past me and go down the drain the same way the running water was going.

  “The army gave you a class on pepper spray?” I said to Bill. I spoke loud enough to drown my daddy out.

  Bill nodded. “I had chemical weapons training.”

  “My daddy was in Desert Storm,” Bunny said, proud. The chair’s ladder back blocked the drawer my father was asking me to open. Her feet swung back and forth, back and forth.

  My father saw where I was looking and said, “Yes! That drawer! That drawer!”

  I stayed put. Daddy could go to hell and read his speech to Satan. If I stayed here, Thom would come and give him the chance sooner than he might like. “You still work in the medical field?” I asked Bill, like I was making small talk at a church social, like I couldn’t feel each heartbeat like a gunshot in my aching head.

  Bill’s cheeks flushed a faint pink, and he kept working on rinsing out my father’s eyes, not looking at me. “I’m not working right now.”

  “Daddy’s home with me,” Bunny said, and the prideful tone had gone to defensive. Little tiger, I thought, staring at me from the chair with her eyes gone fierce. “He takes care of me.”

  “You’re lucky. I wish I’d had that kind of daddy, growing up,” I told her, and she looked away, mollified. “I wish I had one like that now.” It came out heartfelt, the truest thing in the room.

  Daddy said, “Rose Mae? Ain’t you gonna get my speech?”

  I didn’t answer. Bill let go of the scruff of my father’s neck, but Daddy stayed bent over the sink, dripping. Bill said, “Okay, Gene, take a swig of this Maalox. Rinse it around and then spit it out. Do that a couple times. You might want to swallow some, too. How do your eyes feel? Are they— Wait a sec. Your name is Rose Mae?”

  I nodded. “Rose Mae Lolley.”

  Bill said, “From my wall?”

  Daddy finally stood upright. He took the bottle and tilted it back, mercifully plugging up his word hole with it. He swished the Maalox around a couple times and spit it out, then said to me, “The bank called my loan on the house. Bill and them have had it, what, six months now, Bill? It was empty a long time. This place is a rental. I took it so I could watch out the wind-er for you and Claire.”

  I’d forgotten that, how he always said “wind-er” for window. It was strange because he said words like meadow and follow properly, but window had always ended in his mouth with an -er.

  “Wait a minute,” said Bill. “What?”

  “Bill wants to know how your eyes feel,” I said.

  “Good,” my daddy said. He turned to Bill. “Good.” His nose was still running. Bill handed him a paper towel to wipe it, but his eyebrows had puzzled up and his brow had creased.

  “You should thank Bill,” I told Daddy.

  “Thank you, Bill,” Daddy said, obedient, then he turned back to me and added, “Look, Rose Mae, everything is the same.”

  “You used to own my house, is that what you meant?” Bill asked, putting it together.

  Daddy was looking at me, though, speaking only to me. “I knew you’d come. I watch our old house alla time, when I’m home. I put the TV on for noise, and what I do is I watch for you and Claire right through that front wind-er.”

  “That’s kinda creepy, Gene,” Bill said. The kitchen seemed crowded now that Daddy was standing up. Too many hearts beating in the room, too much carbon dioxide. My vision was down to a pinhole now. My lungs rustled in my chest like dried-up leaves. I kept my eyes on Bill, and Daddy was a thin wraith in the fog beside him.

  “I watch for you when I’m not working,” Daddy said to me. “I have a good job now, Rose Mae. At the Home Depot.”

  “I hear they have good benefits,” I said. Someone had told me that recently. I turned to the girl. “Your name’s Bunny?”

  She was still sitting in the chair, pulling my gaze with the tick-tock swing of her pendulum feet. She giggled like I was the silliest thing she’d ever seen.

  “My name’s Sharon.”

  I blinked, confused and swaying.

  “Hand me my speech out that drawer, won’t you, Sharon?” Daddy said, and then to me, “I’m not good at talking things, so I wrote it down exactly, what I need to say.”

  Someone said, “I do not want to fucking hear it,” really loud, gunshot loud, in the quiet kitchen. The someone was me.

  “I think we should head on home, Bunny,” Bill said.

  Sharon hopped out of the chair and threaded her way past Daddy, to her father.

  “Nice to meet you,” Bill was saying. “Sort of.” He put one arm around Sharon and they went past me, out of the kitchen.

  Now there was nothing in front of me to look at but my father. I said to him, “What do you mean, everything the same?”

  “I’m in the program, Rose. I got my five-year pin in January, but I been stuck on step nine, waiting for you and Claire. Please won’t you let me read it to you?”

  “Every little thing? Exactly the same?” I said. The air was thin and hot in my dry lungs. I was pa
nting louder than Gretel. I followed Bill and Sharon into the living room, listing hard starboard as if my feet were borrowed or brand new. My father came after me. My body felt as unwieldy as a bag of sand, but I went straight to the sofa and made my heavy body climb up onto the cushions. I grabbed my mother’s faded ship print and jerked it off the nail. I slid it down behind the sofa, leaning it against the wall.

  Bill and Sharon were at the front door. I heard Bill’s sharp intake of breath, and then he said, “Holy crap. You did that to the wall? At my house, too?”

  He meant my name and the black tick marks. My father had reproduced them here exactly, only fresher and darker. These had never been painted over.

  I said, “My mother did the ones at your house.”

  At the same time, my father said, “Claire made them ones at your place.”

  “You ruined my damn wall,” Bill said, more aggrieved than angry.

  “It was Claire,” my father said, and then added, surprised, to me, “You knew these were over there? You knew she wrote your name?”

  I was trying to count the marks on the first line, to see if he got it right. There should be 138. But the lines kept waving and changing places with each other. I had to start over before I got to 50.

  “You have flat ruined that wall,” Bill said. “Bunny, we need to get out of here before Daddy loses his temper.”

  “Killz,” the little girl said to him, seizing the moment to pass on my message about the paint primer.

  Bill misunderstood her. “Not that mad, silly,” he said.

  I only got to 35 this time before the lines shifted sideways and tricked me and made me lose my place again. I started over, but now the lines were broadening in front of me, each black mark spreading into a puddle and blending into the next.

  “Rose Mae,” Daddy said, clambering up onto the sofa beside me, “you don’t look so good. Bill, hold up.”

  The lines met, and the whole wall was black. A rich darkness, thick like velvet, spread and unfolded over everything around me. I fell down into all that darkness and was lost.