Backseat Saints

by Joshilyn Jackson

  There is only one card missing from the reading that she gave me. I search through the deck and pull out the two of swords. That’s the card I hold up to show her.

  “No,” she says at once. “You have to stay.”

  But the reason I could not leave the house earlier is in the room with us. She has said it over and over. She has known it all along.

  I set the two of swords down in its place beside my other cards. I can tell my mother and myself that I am Ivy, but I cannot change myself to Ivy in Thom’s mind. He doesn’t even know I’m trying to change inside my own. That’s why my mother was so angry to learn that Thom was still alive. She’s seen enough bad men in her life and work to recognize the ruthlessness in my bad man. As long as Thom Grandee is alive, then he is coming. To Thom, I am always and forever his Ro, emphasis on his. I have betrayed him, and he cannot bear to leave me breathing.

  My mother is shaking her head at me, an emphatic denial. I say, “I can’t be anyplace or with anyone that has even a tenuous connection to my old life. I’ve left a trail. I found you with a library book, for the love of God. If I sit here and wait long enough, he’ll find me and come to me at his time, on his terms. He’ll kill me.”

  In the deck I find a picture of a girl with long dark hair in windswept loops. Gypsy hair. I pick it up. A strip of lace winds around her head, covering her eyes. She holds a slim sword in front of her, and she has an old-fashioned set of scales in her other hand.

  She is readying to weigh my tarnished dime against my mother’s reading, to weigh all the girls Claire Lolley saved against the one she left behind. Her scales will never come out even. Everyone in the room knows it, except perhaps my dog, watching me anxiously from the foot of the stairs.

  I lay the fourth card down above my cards, and then I turn away from the table. I come closer to my mother and sit down on the love seat. Gretel trots across the room and jumps up on the cushion beside me. She presses close to me, trying to fit the whole of her walrus body into my lap. I push her shoulder, make her settle for laying her head across my thighs.

  I scratch her ears, almost a reflex, and she nudges her shoulder up against my hip. The feel of the air in the room has her worried. It is still charged, but this is coming from my mother, not me. I came here with a thousand other questions, but almost none of them matter in the light of the one answer that I finally have.

  I am almost finished here. Only one thing is lacking. I feel it as pins and needles at the center of my back, like an itch in that one place I can never quite reach to scratch. Daddy. I promised I would tell him when his note had been delivered. Now it has.

  But it is more than that.

  Punch buggy green, I think. Thom is coming. My father’s car is one hell of a bread crumb, and it is parked a few blocks away. I hope the old Grandee Buick is already vivisected into untraceable parts, scattered over Alabama, but I need to know. Thom thinks my father is dead, but the name Eugene Lolley is printed plain in Fruiton’s slim phone book for anyone who thinks to look for it.

  I think I have always known that Daddy is my canary in the mine shaft. I have gotten what I came for here in California. Before I go, I need to know how far along Thom is on my trail, how much of a lead I have.

  I go to get the cordless phone from the kitchen, pausing as I pass to blow out the sage candles. The burned smoke smell of extinguishing them overpowers the herbs. My mother watches me, sitting in her ruined heap. I bring the cordless phone back to the love seat, but Gretel has flopped around and spread herself out to fill the space. I perch on the armchair and dial my old friend 411.

  The connection makes, and a woman asks in mechanical tones, “City and state, please?”

  I say, “Fruiton, Alabama. Home number for Eugene Lolley.” My mother’s spine straightens, her shoulders tensing as the same neutral-voiced operator—it may be a recording—recites my father’s number.

  It’s not quite four A.M. on the East Coast. Daddy should be home and sleeping. I dial.

  I let the phone ring ten times, but he doesn’t answer. I stand up and pace down to the store at the front of the room, my mother’s eyes set on me as unblinking and cold as snake eyes. She sways like a snake, too, her top half rising up from her coiled legs, her arms wrapped tight around herself.

  I let the phone ring on, twenty times, pacing back to my mother’s reading table. Daddy still doesn’t answer, and no machine picks up. I hit thirty rings. Then thirty-five. Forty.

  I press the disconnect button, my brow furrowing. I saw my father barely over a week ago, and where the hell can he be at this time of the morning?

  I call 411 and ask for Fruiton again, but this time the name I give is Bill Mantles, Daddy’s neighbor across the street.

  “Who is Bill Mantles?” my mother says. I ignore her, but Gret whines and sits up at the tension in her voice.

  A woman answers the phone, but it’s a grown-up, not Bunny. She sounds sleepy and displeased.

  I say, “Is Bill there?” and then there is a distinctly female silence that has no sleepiness left in it and even more displeasure.

  “Who is this?” the woman says.

  “I’m a friend of Bill’s. I—” I stop, because when I hear it out loud, I realize my father is also a “friend of Bill’s.”

  “What friend?” she demands.

  I try again. “I’m sorry to wake you, but this is important. Is Bill there?” It’s a testament to what I’ve learned earlier this evening that I try not to sound bitchy.

  “Do I know you, friend of Bill’s?” the woman asks, and she’s making no such effort.

  I say, “We haven’t met. Your neighbor across the street, Eugene Lolley? I’m his—” With my mother’s gaze on me, I find I can’t quite say what I am to him. I have not been his daughter for years now. I pause and inhale, and then I say, “My name is Rose Mae Lolley.”

  “Oh,” she says, and then again. By the second “Oh,” her voice has gone up an octave, high with urgency and nerves. “I’ll get Bill.” She sounds sorry for being sharp with me. Very sorry. Too sorry. I hear her saying, “Bill, honey, wake up… Bill?” Then she covers the phone with her hand or sets it down because all I can hear is a wordless murmur of anxious conversation.

  I wait for Bill to come on. But I know already. I know it in the pit of me, and I stop pacing. I turn to my mother. She sees my face and rises, coming across the room to me. I feel a hollow ball of nausea curdling in my stomach even before Bill’s voice says, “Rose Mae? I’m so sorry. I didn’t know how to get in touch with you.”

  “How,” I say. “Just tell me how.”

  “He got mugged,” Bill says.

  “Bullshit,” I say. “That’s not what you mean.”

  “Yes, it is, Rose Mae,” Bill says, and his voice is very gentle, with the sweet undertones I remember him using every time he spoke to Bunny.

  “What’s happened?” my mother hisses at me.

  I want to tell her, but I don’t want to say a mugging. That’s a lie, and the very word sounds silly. It is harmless words—giggle and clogging and pug dog—that are full of cheery g’s. I want to tell her truer than that.

  “My daddy got beat to death,” I say for her, correcting Bill at the same time. My mother’s body does a sudden half bend, sharp and shallow at the waist, but her face doesn’t change. It looks like an invisible fist has punched her and she has eaten the blow, as stoic as a spartan wife. “Someone beat him until he died.” I feel a scalding wetness on my cheeks, and I have to reach up with my free hand to feel that I am crying. Bill’s pause is an affirmation.

  Finally he says, “So you heard already. I’m so sorry. I couldn’t believe it either.” I don’t answer. I’m gulping, trying to get air in, trying so hard not to throw up. My mother turns away to face her table. She is staring down at the four cards I have left faceup. Her shoulders begin to shake, and Bill talks on, filling up the silence. “I saw him earlier that same night, drinking down at Chico’s.” I know the place, I can see it. Ten blocks
from his house, a one-room neighborhood bar with neon beer signs in the windows. “I tried to talk him into a ride home, but he was pretty drunk already and mad. I let him be. He had a good bit of cash on him, and I guess I wasn’t the only one that noticed. He tried to walk home a couple of hours after I left. Someone—maybe a couple of someones—followed him from the bar. They rolled him too hard, you know? He hit his head on the curb and cracked his skull. He was a tough old guy, but they rolled him too hard.”

  Behind every word he says, I see the big hands of my husband. Not someone, it was Thom. Thom found Daddy, and Daddy is over now. My fault. I knew Thom would search Fruiton. I knew he would find my daddy and question him, but I should have realized Thom was too angry to save murder just for me in the sickest kind of fidelity. Under the wash of guilt, an ugly self-preserving part of me wonders what-all Daddy spilled under the persuasion of Thom’s fists. What did he say before Tom helped the curb rise up and meet his head too hard? Punch buggy green.

  “When?” I ask. My mother turns to look over her shoulder at me. Her body is still shaking, but her red eyes are desert dry.

  “Two days ago,” Bill says. “I identified the body, but you’ll probably want to come here. There’s things need doing—”

  “Two days,” I interrupt for my mother’s benefit. She nods. “Bill, I can’t talk anymore right now. Sorry.” I hang up, and then I drop the phone and run ten steps into my mother’s store and drop to my knees to throw up into a big bowl full of worry beads. When my stomach is empty, I turn and sit flat on my butt facing my mother, wiping at my mouth.

  Thom Grandee was in Fruiton two days ago. He is close behind, much closer, much faster than I ever would have thought.

  “We should call the police,” I say, and my mother stares back at me, impassive. She has picked up the cards I laid out and is holding them in a fan. But which police? The ones in Amarillo? I could tell them they can help close a mugging case several states away, and all they have to do is take on one of the most influential families in the city. Call the cops in Fruiton? I’m not sure how to explain to them who I am and how I know an angry man in Texas rolled their drunk. Thom is no doubt already home and alibied five ways from Sunday by Joe and Charlotte and his middle brother, as loyal and ball-free as a neutered dog. I may only succeed in giving Thom a better bead on my location. “Should we call the police?” I ask.

  “They never did me much good,” my mother says. “I need to think.” I look at her hand, pinching those cards so tight that her fingers are as white as fine china.

  Upstairs, I hear my mother’s bedroom clock chime one. We have come to the end of the witching hour, and I am wasting time. I have to go, and quickly.

  But my mother moves first, walking quickly past me to the front door. Gret starts to climb down off the love seat, but I tell her, “Stay.” I don’t want my dog out in this dark night when Thom is coming. It’s foggy out, and the wind pushes its way across the floor to touch me, misty and cold. It lifts my mother’s layered skirts, swirling them around her calves. She looks more gyspy now than she ever did at the airport. More gypsy and less my mother.

  “I’m sure we can fix this,” she says, firm voiced, stuffing the cards into her skirt pocket. But my daddy is dead, and there is no we. Thom is coming, and there is no fixing.

  She turns away from me and takes a deep breath, poised on her toes at the edge of the doorway like it is a diving board. Then she steps off, and she pulls the door closed behind her.

  I stand up. I have to pack. I need to be a hundred miles up the coast of California and ready to swap cars by morning. I am at the foot of the stairs before it occurs to me to wonder what other trails of mine Thom might be tracking.

  All at once, my heart skips a beat and I run back to the phone I abandoned on the floor and dive down to grab it, dialing a number that I know by heart.

  Mrs. Fancy’s machine picks up, and her soft voice says, “I can’t get to the phone right now—”

  I hang up. Mrs. Fancy has even less reason than my father to be out at this hour; book clubs and church committees do not meet pre-dawn.

  I find I’m rocking back and forth. This is my fault. My father has taken a beating meant for me, and it killed him. If Thom has given another, mine by rights, to frail Mrs. Fancy… The thought does not bear finishing.

  I dial Information again, thinking that my mother is going to have twenty bucks in 411 charges by the time I’m done. Then I almost laugh at the absurdity of worrying about my mother’s phone bill, when Mrs. Fancy is not answering her phone and Thom Grandee is snaking his fast way up my still-warm trail, my father’s blood on his fists, hungry to kill me.

  Information gives me the number of her one son who lives locally. I dial Daren Fancy, and he picks up on ring four.

  “Hello?” he says. One word, pointed into a sleepy, angry question.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, “this is Mrs. Fancy’s friend. I haven’t been able to get ahold of her, and I am very worried—”

  He interrupts me, “No, no it’s fine. She’s fine. She’s here.”

  I can breathe again. “She’s there, with you?”

  “Yes. Her house was broken into,” he says. “She didn’t feel safe staying there alone.”

  “Oh, that’s wonderful,” I say, and there is an awkward silence. “Not about the break-in, but that you have her, I mean.” When I broke Mrs. Fancy’s window to get my Pawpy’s gun back, I may well have saved her life. I am babbling now. “That neighborhood is going to hell.”

  “No kidding,” he says. “Two break-ins in a week.”

  My mouth is already shaping a fast good-bye, but at that I pause. “Two break-ins?”

  “The first time they only broke a window. I suspect they got interrupted,” he says, telling me about my own small crime. “But when they came back, they tore her whole house up. I guess her sugar bowl money wasn’t enough. What did they expect, I wonder, a little old lady living on her husband’s pension? They took up her knives and gutted her mattress, stabbed open every chair and sofa cushion, smashed her dishes, shredded all her clothes. She couldn’t have stayed there even if I woulda let her.”

  Thom again, this time beating a house to death. I have to assume he has my notebook, all my notes. He has a name for the phantom other man, now. Jim Beverly. I am trying frantically to remember if I wrote down anything that would point him west, toward California. Into my shocked silence, Daren says, “Could you call back later? My mother is sleeping. We all are.”

  “Of course,” I say, “I am so sorry. I am so sorry.” I am apologizing for more than waking him, but he takes it at face value and hangs up.

  I leave the phone on the floor and get up. I have to go. I have to go now.

  I run upstairs and begin pulling my underthings out of the dresser drawers and stuffing them pell-mell into my mother’s old cloth bag. I am working quickly, both so I can go and to keep my brain from thinking about how my independent friend has lost her home and how I’ve helped kill my own daddy. I’ve killed the pony ride man I do not much remember, the son of a bitch who raised me hard, and that sad old sorry man I met a little more than a week ago. I’ve led Thom to them all.

  I go to the closet and start tearing my clothes down off the hangers, but it is hard to see to pack; I must have started crying again without noticing. Gret is following me back and forth across the room, worried by the noises I am making.

  As soon as I have most of my things stuffed inside the bag, I grab it up by the straps and go running downstairs. Gretel follows. Her leash is by the door, and I snatch it. Gretel’s tail wags uncertainly. She knows something is bad wrong, but still, in her mind a walk is always a good thing.

  I’m about to click the leash to her collar when I notice that the bag slung over my shoulder feels light. Too light.

  It is missing Pawpy’s gun. I cannot leave without that. Not with Thom’s hot breath coming up behind me.

  I shake my head, unable to remember where I put it. It was in my be
dside table… I remember my mother peeling it out of my hands after the sailors left. I have no idea what she has done with it. I drop the bag to the floor with a thump and let the leash jangle down beside it.

  I could tear her house down to its very foundations and not find it. I do not know my mother well enough to know her hiding places.

  “Stay,” I tell Gretel again.

  I open the front door and stare out into the blackness beyond Parker’s porch light. I can’t sit here and wait like my good dog for her return. I step out onto the porch and close the door behind me.

  I slip through the front gate and close and latch it behind me. My mother can’t be that far, but I have no idea what direction she may have taken. Perhaps she is only wandering her neighborhood, walking to clear her head. I head up the street, going from streetlight to streetlight at a fast walk. I have the sidewalk to myself at this hour.

  “Mirabelle,” I call, walking. Then louder, “Mirabelle?” My pace picks up. “Mirabelle!”

  Somewhere a window bangs open and a man yells, “Shut up!” I do not care. I call her name again and again, louder and louder. I am running now. I run all the way up one street, then turn and tear back down another. Somehow without noticing, I have changed words. Now I am yelling for my momma.

  I have made this pilgrimage before. The first night she was gone, my daddy came home to find me at the kitchen table, waiting for my snack. We waited there for dinner, which never came.

  I said, “Should we call the police?”

  “She ain’t missing,” he said, “She’s just gone.”

  Then my daddy quit waiting and started drinking instead. I waited, though, hours more, sitting in that ladder-back chair, waiting for my mother to come and put me to bed. I believed that if I got up and put myself to bed, then she would not come to do it, but if I waited, she would have to. The chair was hard, and I got so tired, and my daddy passed out on the sofa. I left the house and went looking for her, wandering up and down our street, calling her quietly so as not to wake my daddy. I called until I was crying so desperately that I could only call by vowel, and “Momma” became long, shuddering o’s and a’s that sounded more like mourning than hope.