Backseat Saints

by Joshilyn Jackson

  “How long ago did she die?” I ask.

  “A while,” my mother says, cagey.

  “A year?” No answer. “More than two years?” I ask. Nothing. “More than three?”

  Parker turns away from the fence and walks back toward me, spine straight, sure-footed and easy. Shaggy-Doo is a costume, so familiar and well used that he can pull it on and shake it off between heartbeats. I’m intrigued now for real, not only because it bothers her.

  “She died six years ago,” my mother says, begrudging me the information. “But it could be six months or six decades and it wouldn’t change your situation, Rose Mae.”

  “Ivy,” I say automatically.

  Parker is angling away from the porch stairs. It looks as if he’s heading around to the backyard, with the dogs surging around his feet in a cheerful four-pack. He disappears from my line of sight.

  “He wouldn’t do you much good anyway. He’s been celibate since Ginny died,” my mother says, changing tacks. I make a piffling noise, frankly disbelieving, and she adds, “It’s a euphemism, Rose Mae.”

  “Celibacy is a euphemism?” I ask, but then I get what she means. “You mean he’s impotent?” I take her silence as confirmation. “How interesting, Mother mine, that you would know that.”

  “He is my good friend,” she says, prim-voiced. “And he is not for you.”

  I turn away from the window and face her. “Who is he for, then, Mirabelle?” I ask. “Is he for you?”

  My mother draws back, affronted. She turns away and stamps back toward her table, saying, “Don’t be ridiculous,” over her shoulder.

  “I’m not. You two clearly get along, and he’s not at all bad-looking,” I say. “As for what’s not working, they have pills for that these days. You could—”

  “Rose Mae! Don’t be vile,” she says, hurling herself into her chair and glaring at me over the cards. “He’s young enough to be my—” And then she stops. I feel the word she hasn’t said like an X-Acto knife, slim and sharp, opening my gut.

  A heated silence stretches in between us. I change the subject. “What happens if I leave? If I break your rule and step outside?”

  “Don’t test me,” she says.

  “I could go out in the yard, play fetch with Gretel.”

  “Do it,” she says, the temper she’s been low-boiling for days finally roiling and foaming over. “Hell, go out the front. Run after Lilah and tell her you’re allowed outside though she was not. Hit her in the face with it, why don’t you? Dance and holler. Call attention. Make it easy for that man who is coming here. Help him find you, so he can snap your neck like an eating chicken’s.”

  She’s so angry, she’s shaking with it. I’m surprised at how much southern has come out in her speech. We stare at each other, and she’s panting. My breath speeds up to match hers, and in this tense and ugly silence, her mellow doorbell chimes.

  It’s a hugely inappropriate noise. It startles her. We both look automatically to the other window and see the red glow of the sign seeping through the slats. She’s left it on, and it has attracted a walk-in.

  “Shall I get that for you?” I ask, as sugar-voiced as a flight attendant offering a blankie. I am at the front of the room by the store’s display shelves, much closer than she is to the door. I step out and put my hand on the knob, mostly to prang her. But she draws herself upwards, setting her shoulders, saying, “No, Rose Mae,” in the “thou shalt not” commanding tones of some risen minor prophet.

  “For the love of Jesus Christ, Claire,” I say, “can you not get that my name is Ivy?”

  She takes a long stride toward me, not listening, intent on stopping me. I spin fast and swing open the door. Wide.

  A pair of servicemen stand on the porch. They aren’t in uniform, but they are young, with whitewalled hair. Navy or maybe marines. One is short and broad with a hard face shaped like a shovel, and when he sees me he whispers, “Hallelujah,” through his teeth.

  The other one is tall and skinny, and he hardly looks old enough to shave. He has milky skin and chocolate-colored puppy eyes that tilt down. He’s swaying, as if his sea legs are telling him the porch is moving. They are sweating, both of them, and the potent smell of hops and tequila rises off their skins.

  The shovel-faced one crowds the doorway, saying, “What’s your name, honey?”

  I lean back and say, “I think you have the wrong house.”

  The tall one smiles at me, too wide, his mouth shaping a leer that is almost comical. He crams in close behind his friend, filling the doorway. “We want to get our palms read.”

  I shake my head and say in quelling tones, “You boys do not want to get your palms read.”

  The one with the hard face thinks I’m being funny. He crowds in even closer and says, “You can tell my fortune, honey.” He speaks directly to my breasts, as if he believes my nipples know the future.

  The tall one smiles even wider, goofy drunk and harmless, but his friend muscles forward again, coming so close to me that I move back. He closes the space I make between us immediately, like it’s a dance step, and now he is across the threshold. His friend follows, but it is not the friend who matters in this room. It is this short, broad fellow with his bull shoulders and thick neck, one hand reaching to cup his own crotch and give himself a squeeze, hot eyes on my waist and hips and breasts. I step back again, fast, almost stumbling as my heels hit the lowest stair. I step up on it to keep from landing on my back in front of him. The tall one pulls the front door shut.

  My mother glides quickly across the room, inserting her small body into the space between me and the sailors. “Rose Mae. Go upstairs.”

  I back up another step, instantly obedient. I don’t even correct her. I want to go. I’m afraid. It would be stupid not to be, but at the same time my fingers are tingling and adrenaline has been dumped into my veins and I am not bored now, oh no. Rose Mae Lolley only needs a little lead time. I keep backing up the stairs, and my eyes feel hot and gritty and alight, as if I have come on with a sudden fever. I keep my gaze and my feral smile on the short fella, promising him things, but maybe not the things he is expecting.

  My mother is still between us, blocking the base of the stairs. She is small, like me. He looms over her and around her, but her words hold him more than her small presence. “Not so fast, sailor man. You have to pay to play. Come sit down.” She glances over her shoulder to see I am not quite to the landing. “Rose. Go. Up.”

  I turn and run lightly the rest of the way into my room. Pawpy’s gun is in the drawer of my bedside table. I snatch it up, the weight of it familiar and sweet in my hand. I slot bullets into the barrel, fast and slick, and then fit the barrel into its cradle with a satisfying snap.

  I set the gun down long enough to pull off my boots. My sock feet whisper against the hardwood floor as I slip fast and quiet back to the landing.

  I can hear my mother saying, “… two hundred dollars for the full read.” It’s a lot more than the price she quoted in the airport, but no one at the table is thinking about tarot readings. She is pretending to sell my sweet ass, while truly she is buying time. I know it’s only a ploy, but I’m still offended that she doesn’t charge more.

  As I cross the landing, I hear the shovel-faced one say, “Me first, mama.”

  I hear the rustle of bills, and then my mother says, “Rose Mae will call when she’s ready. Shall I turn the cards for you while we wait?”

  The tall, milky one laughs, high and nervous, as I come creeping down the stairs. Shovel Face says, “Why not.”

  Halfway down, I can peer between the ceiling and the banister and see the two men sitting at the far end of the room at her reading table. Their backs are to me. My mother is across from them, eyes on the cards, shuffling. She has not lit her white sage candles. She is pale, and I can tell from the set of her mouth that she is more afraid than I am.

  My mother says, “What’s your name?”

  “John Smith,” says the hard case.


  At the same time, the one who doesn’t matter says, “Jamie.”

  I am four steps from the bottom now. I train my sights on the back of the hard one’s head. My mother looks up from the cards and sees me over his shoulder. Her face flashes relief. She flips a card and says, “Well, John Smith, I’ve turned the nine of syphilis.” She flips another. “Now I’ve crossed it with the four of herpes. The cards suggest that you stop screwing whores.”

  “You bitch,” Shovel Face says, and his chair scrapes back as he stands.

  “I’m ready for you, John Smith,” I say, sweet-voiced, and he wheels around to face me. He sees the gun, and when he looks into its round, black eyehole, it becomes all he can see. I am colors and vague shapes behind it. I could take my shirt off, and he would not address my prescient nipples now. The gun is the whole of me, and it has his complete attention.

  I hear my mother say in a steady, even voice, “Jamie, who is Gloria?”

  Jamie is staring at the gun, too, mouth open, eyes completely round, sitting with his hands resting on the table where I can see them. When my mother speaks, he blinks like he is waking up and says, “What?”

  “Gloria,” my mother says, steady and so calm. “Who is she?”

  “My little sister?” Jamie says, confused.

  “Does your baby sister want you out with ‘John Smith’? Would she like to know you are paying to use broken young women in such an ugly way, catching their sad diseases?” My mother’s voice is the voice of every mother, and Jamie can’t look at her or even me. Not even the gun can keep his gaze off the floor.

  Jamie mumbles, “How do you know her name?”

  “I’m psychic, you moron,” my mother says, cool, and then, “Now her phone number is forming… I see a seven. I see… a six? No. A nine.”

  Jamie gasps, but I speak only to the hard one: “I think it’s time for you boys to go.”

  John Smith is still staring at the gun, but his mouth sets and he says, “Fine. Give us our money back, you bitches.”

  My mother starts to reach for it, but I smile and say, “She read the cards exactly right, honey. You got what you paid for.”

  My mother stills.

  John Smith’s initial fear is fading. Now he is calculating odds. He’s measuring his brawn and his training against the space between his body and mine, his body’s speed against my steady hands, wrapped around the old revolver. He hasn’t a prayer, but he may well be doing the math wrong. He does not know Rose Mae Lolley.

  “Or stay,” I say in Rose Mae’s voice, and cock the pistol. The shift and click of the metal draws out her pleased and creamy smile. “Please stay. I’d love for you to stay.”

  I am fervent, sincere, and John Smith is suddenly all done here.

  They head to the door, Mr. Smith first and Jamie shuffling shamefaced after. I keep the high ground on the stairs, Pawpy’s gun trained steady on John Smith’s whitewalled head until they pass me and file outside. The door closes behind them, and my mother runs across the room to draw the dead bolt. Then the gun gets heavy and points itself down, aiming at the floor between my socks. My mother leans her face against the door, sides heaving. I uncock the revolver, and at the sound she whirls to face me.

  “Are you stupid?” she says.

  At the same time I say, “What was that?”

  “That,” she says, “is not uncommon. More than half the signs for readers are a front for whores. When I answer the door, johns know this is not a cathouse. But you, three buttons on your blouse open, your hair all mussed, you look like an ice cream. When I tell you to get upstairs before a reading, then Rose Mae, you get upstairs.”

  “Ivy,” I say, but with no conviction.

  My mother looks from my feet to the gun I’ve aimed between them to my eyes to the fever I can feel on my cheeks. My heartbeat booms away inside me like the drums of war.

  “Ivy,” my mother scoffs. “Look at you. You are only what you are, Rose Mae.”

  I scoff right back, “Then there must be only Lolley women in the room here, Claire.”

  “Don’t miss my point,” she says, her voice blade sharp. She stalks slowly toward me, coming up three stairs. She puts her hands over mine on the gun. I cling to it, and we freeze there. “Look at you,” she says. “Look at you. Why is your husband still breathing, if you have all this fight in you?”

  I shake my head. I have no answer. I tried to shoot him and I failed. Ro tried to live in peace with him and failed. Even now, if it was his head in the crosshairs instead of Mr. Smith’s, my hands would not have been so steady. Even now, if he pulled his Thom-suit back on over the monster, showed up with flowers, said, “Ro, baby, come home…”

  I would not go. But I would feel the tug.

  My grip weakens as her hands get more insistent. I let her slide Pawpy’s gun out of my fingers. She turns away, and I sink down to sit on the stairs.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” she asks the gun. There’s no safety, so she breaks it expertly into its separate pieces.

  “The pin broke,” I say.

  “I mean what’s wrong with you, all you young women.” She is pacing up and down her parlor, one chunk of gun in each of her waving, angry hands. “My friend’s daughter, she cuts open her own skin to let the bad out. She’s a child, barely in high school. What bad can she have in her? Half her little friends are starving themselves, or puking up all their food. It’s the same thing, but the starvers say, ‘Oh, I could never cut myself like that,’ and the cutters say, ‘I’d never marry a man who hit me,’ but it’s all the same thing. You are all killing your stupid, stupid selves.”

  I stay slumped on the stairs with no answer for her. I am so tired now. She is still ranting, her voice shaking with anger, as righteous as Ezekiel.

  “My ten o’clock today? Bette? You saw her. She can’t be more than twenty-five, and she’s wider than most walls. She brought cookies with her, for me, she says, and sets the plate between us. She never took a whole cookie, but she sat there pinching bits off one cookie till it was gone, then another, pinch by pinch, until half the plate had been moused away.

  “Then she points through the window, to Lilah mooning on the fence outside, and says, ‘I don’t understand how she can go back to him when he beats her. She might as well put a gun to her own head.’ Meanwhile, Bette is so trapped and hemmed by all the fat on her that she can’t breathe. She’s killing herself, same as my friend’s daughter with her razors. Same as Lilah.” She pauses to point at me with one accusing finger, the rest of her hand wrapped around the barrel. “Same as you.”

  I stand up, grabbing the banister and hauling myself to my feet. “You are no different.”

  She snorts in rude denial. “I earned my new name, Rose.”

  “Please,” I say. “Then how come you can’t keep your eyes—or your hands—off that crumpled bit of scrap paper I brought over from Alabama?” I am gratified to see how immediately her eyes go to my daddy’s note. “The one true princess of Zen, afraid to read a note.”

  “I am not afraid,” she says, but now her righteous indignation has a crack in it.

  The doorbell chimes again.

  We freeze, then she makes a noise that’s halfway between a laugh and a gasp and says, “That’s just Lisa, my next appointment. I’ll turn the sign off. You need to—”

  “I know the drill,” I say, and head upstairs to my room on shaking legs. I go inside, and the walls seem to have crept in closer to each other while I was downstairs. The furniture in its familiar configuration grates at me. I need to be someplace where there is more air. I turn around and around in my room, panting like Gretel.

  I can’t stay in here, because this room is full to the roof with the knowledge that my mother is right: I can say that I am Ivy, but I am only what I am. But I also cannot go outside. I feel it in the bones of me. Not because of her rules, or even because the two angry sailors may still be near; my mother’s constant warnings must be getting to me. I can’t go out, but I can’t stand to b
e trapped in this room with myself just now.

  There is a window over the writing desk. It looks out on a small piece of roof that hangs over the backyard. I go to it and flip the latch, and it rolls open easy at my touch. I snatch up Saint Lucy’s candle and the rosary and the matches and step onto the chair. I get on my knees on top of the desk. There is no screen, and I crawl right out the open window onto the slope piece of roof that juts out under it.

  I don’t have much of a view. I can see a slice of Parker’s backyard grass and the backside of the house behind this one. Still, I can breathe out here on the shingled slope, bathed equally in cool salt air and warm sunshine. I tilt my head up and look at the bright blue sky. I need to pray, and here I’ve found as good a shrine as any.

  I put Saint Lucy down and light the wick, placing her in the corner where the gable offers shelter from the wind. I close my eyes and take up the beads.

  I work my way around the rosary, trying not to think too hard on what it means that my mother is so right. New name or no, I have brought Rose Mae Lolley and Ro Grandee with me. I do not want to believe that they are in me, always. That they are me, always. That’s a path of thought that leads me close to Thom, so it has to be a problem for tomorrow. I need to still my heart and stop my mind from racing. I pray all the way around before the ritual calms me enough to let me open my eyes.

  Parker has come into the piece of his yard that I can see. He is centered on the lawn facing my direction with his arms up, palms facing out, and he is standing very still. He is stiller than I have ever seen a human being stand. Even my daddy, laying in wait in a deer blind, would twitch more than Parker. He is still wearing those floppy black pants that look like pajama bottoms, but he has taken off the shirt. He has a sprinkling of dark red-brown hair on his chest. He’s pale all over, and his skin fits tightly over wiry muscle.

  Finally his arms move, slowly. Then his whole body moves into a series of weird, slow poses that look like what might happen if kung fu and ballet had themselves a baby. He is fighting nothing, in slow motion. It’s completely unhurried, but so controlled that after only a few minutes he is sweating. He stills and holds, then moves again, deliberate and fierce.