Crooked Hallelujah

by Kelli Jo Ford

  Before she got around to saying good night, she’d run rough hands over my face and kiss my head. Factory grease lined her nails, all moons and ridges of pink chewed into perfect half-circles. By the time she was sixteen, I was a baby in her lap. When I started pulling away that summer—doing what kids do—she’d lived exactly half her life doing all she could to make sure my life was better than hers. After taking stock of all the ways we matched and saying, “Good night my Tiny Teeny Reney,” she’d hold me close and whisper, “Don’t be like me. Don’t ever be like me.”

  Sunday morning I woke up to the sound of a hammer and knew Lula was standing over Mom, worrying a handkerchief in her hand, pointing out broken shit. That’s what they did. Mom tried to jam everything right with sweat and force of will and Lula pointed out what didn’t work and prayed. I’d been trying to stay out of their way more than usual since the daddy incident.

  The night before, I’d gone to Tulsa with my cousin Sheila, who’d been bound and determined to see some skeezeball called Ned the Head. She was almost twenty and separated from her Holy Roller husband, running wild in the way that only backslid Holiness kids can be.

  In Tulsa, we’d smoked dope in a boarded-up house that Ned said belonged to his friend’s aunt. Everything in there was in place but covered in a thick layer of dust, like the people had just walked out one day and never come back. There was a saucer with a coffee ring but no cup on the kitchen table next to an open newspaper and some reading glasses. One plate in the sink. Solidified milk and other god-awful things filled the fridge, which I didn’t dare open a second time. A can of hairspray, a comb, and a still clock sat on a bedside table next to an unmade bed.

  We huddled on the far side of the kitchen table from the paper and the saucer, out of respect or fear or something like both, and burned candles for light. I tried to roll joints from the bag of leaf Ned had sold us. Nobody was getting high, but for a while we pretended. We pulled beers from a twelve-pack of Budweiser and planned the wild times Sheila and I would have now that I was sort of back home and she was backslid and sort of single. But before long, the weirdness of it all—the creepy house, Sheila being single, me being back in Oklahoma—settled over us. The room got quiet except for the sound of Ned fiddling with a candle.

  “Maybe whoever lived here got raptured,” I said, licking another pregnant banana joint.

  “Don’t.” Sheila shot me a look. “You’ll get me paranoid.” Her eyes were heavy with shimmering green eye shadow and thick, black mascara, making up for all the years makeup had been a sin. The truth was, I’d been paranoid. I couldn’t get over the feeling that we were all on the verge of something terrible and somebody or something was watching it all happen.

  I guess Sheila and I were getting a little too heavy because Ned jumped up with the flashlight and started waving it under his chin making ghost sounds. Sheila must have found it charming because when he said, “Come on, girl, let me show you the other bedroom,” she let him take her hand and lead her down the hallway.

  I worked up my nerve to open the stiff Tulsa World, straining my eyes over old news and obituaries until I came to a review of The Outsiders. There was Tom Cruise from before Top Gun made all the guys in school want to play volleyball and be fighter pilots, Patrick Swayze before Dirty Dancing made him every girl’s dream, and a scared-looking Ralph Macchio. I loved the book but felt wronged somehow that they’d put movie star faces on those kids from the book. It seemed everywhere I looked there was something else taking me completely by fucking surprise. Like as soon as I figured out walking, someone threw me into a lake and said: Here, baby, learn how to swim.

  I put the paper back in place, tidied up our ashes and cans, and wandered out to the dark porch. Tulsa was filled with noise—music from three different directions, people laughing, kids squealing, crotch rockets racing down the neighborhood streets, what I hoped were fireworks in the distance. I gulped my beer and stayed in the shadows until it was gone. When I tapped on the bedroom door and said Mom was expecting me, I think Sheila was relieved.

  Mom was sitting on the porch steps talking to Pitch on the cordless phone when we pulled up to Lula’s. I figured I was done for—she once smelled a baby rattler that got inside the house with a closed door and a whole set of stairs separating them. She’d probably smelled the weed and beer on us when we turned the corner. I pushed my hair out of my eyes and tried to close Sheila’s car door and wave goodbye like I would any other time. Suddenly I wasn’t sure how that looked or felt, so I chewed hard on my gum as I opened the gate and got indignant about Ralph fucking Macchio lying in Johnny’s hospital bed.

  “Be to bed in a minute, Tiny,” she said. She tried to smile. “Have fun?” She was bouncing her foot on a loose board that squeaked each time she let up.

  I nodded, kept going.

  “Love you.” She half turned toward the door, and I thought she might want to hug, but Pitch must have said something that drew her back into herself.

  I showered and got into the football jersey I slept in and brushed my teeth. I couldn’t find mouthwash, so I swallowed as much toothpaste as I could stomach. Then I crawled into the same bed I used to share with Granny. She died not long after we moved to Texas, but I still felt like she should be here. A part of my heart broke every time we came back and I walked into the house without her. A children’s choir had sung “I’ll Fly Away” in Cherokee at her funeral, and I kissed her on the forehead, not understanding how cold she would be. Mama’d had to carry me out after that when I cried so hard I couldn’t catch my breath and threw up in her hand. It hadn’t taken many run-ins with boys for me to realize that I’d met my soul mate as a girl, and she was my great-grandmother. Some people wait their whole lives.

  I was lying there feeling guilty for coming into Granny’s room half-wasted when Mom came in. I turned over, pretended to be asleep.

  She sat on the bed a long time before she said, “You better not be drunk.”

  I waited her out.

  “Listen,” she said. “I’m pretty sure I can go back to my job.”

  She wanted me to say something, but what was I supposed to say? Nothing felt okay. Not Lula and her religion, not boarded-up houses, not creepy dudes and beer buzzes, not Texas and all-day arguments about bills or somebody’s whereabouts or who drank how much, not the weird in-between we seemed to exist within. Not fathers and not not-fathers.

  “We’re going home Sunday afternoon, tomorrow I mean. Back to Texas, okay?”

  I was so tired of the back-and-forth I thought about just staying put no matter what Mom decided. When we’d left for Tennessee, I wrote a goodbye note to my sixth-grade teacher and made a big show of crying and hugging my best friend. When I showed back up in class two weeks later, I couldn’t look at either one of them. This time, I’d barely brought any of my stuff.

  By the time I traipsed onto the porch and collapsed onto the porch swing the next morning, the step was fixed. Mom was in the yard raking the red dirt, leaving dry grass hanging by the roots. She straightened her back and blew her nose with a bandana. “You hungry, Tiny?”

  “Would you like to take a ride to Tenkiller, Reney?” Lula said before I could say “starving.”

  “I told you there’s too much to do here,” Mom answered. She rolled her eyes but then softened. “Maybe we can go later, Mama.”

  “Reney could ride with me now,” Lula said.

  “Reney’s not riding with you anywhere.”

  Lula’s seizures had started right after Mom had me. They were terrifying. She wouldn’t take anything for them because the spells were the Lord’s will. The reinstatement of her driver’s license, which had been a surprise to Mom, was the Lord’s will too. Mom and her sisters were mad as hell.

  “If you want to kill yourself on the roads, so be it, but you’re not about to take Reney.”

  I picked dried hairspray from my bangs, imagining myself from any family except this one. When Lula got into her fear-of-God voice, I walked inside, pi
cked up the phone, and called Sheila at her mom’s house. She already had her mind on getting back to Ned the Head. I was pretty sure he had his mind on any piece of ass he could get, so I didn’t feel bad when I said, “Can you come get me first? There’s something I want to do.”

  When I got into her dented-up Caprice, Sheila pointed to the glove box where she had the bag of leaf.

  “Not me,” I said and offered to light her one of the joints I’d rolled the night before.

  “Uh-uh,” she said. She sounded different from our phone conversation, quieter.

  “Can we just ride around a little while?” I put the bag back in the glove box. I wasn’t feeling so gung ho either.

  “Last night was weird,” she said.

  “What do you think happened in that house?”

  “Ned said they were just there one day and gone the next. He said his friend’s mom didn’t even know.” She turned toward the lake. “Witness protection?”

  “Maybe it was aliens.” She didn’t laugh, and I wasn’t positive I was joking.

  “Daddy always preached against the rapture. Trials and tribulations and all, but we are all here together until the end.”

  I could still hear my great-uncle Thorpe’s voice, big and booming over all of us at the peak of his sermons or even more scary: soft when he cried and pleaded with somebody to get their soul right or risk eternal damnation. It was no wonder Mom couldn’t pray at all anymore.

  “I wish he was still here,” she said.

  Mom always said he reminded her of Indian Superman before he got sick and withered away. People used to ask him before they took vacations and all kinds of stuff. Mom said they went out and bought a coffeemaker after he decided caffeine was okay.

  “You thinking about going back to church?” I asked.

  “All I do is try not to think about it.”

  “You don’t think you’re going to hell for cutting your hair and wearing jeans, do you?” I knew from Mom that shit could really mess you up.

  “It’s what the Bible says. And, hello!” she said, waving a hand in the air. “Adultery.”

  “You’re a good person.” I thought we agreed about the bullshit restrictions now that she’d left the church, even if in spirit she was still a believer.

  “Was I a good person last night?” She shook her head, kept driving.

  “Well, maybe you are a good person with shitty judgment sometimes. Besides, you didn’t do anything.”

  “I cried all the way home. Then I woke up thinking about that nasty Ned all over again, like some kind of addict. Mama came into my room after you called this morning. Said she had a dream there was a cloud over me, and she could see two angels and a devil fighting for my soul. She tried to get me to pray through.”

  She started really crying, and I just sat there, dumb. I didn’t like thinking about a soul in terms of right or wrong, heaven or hell. I was starting to think maybe she should go back to her husband, but what did I know.

  “I got so tired of the same thing every day. Washing Samuel’s clothes, starching and ironing his pants stiff, cooking breakfast, making lunch, cooking dinner, washing dishes. Making love. Every night!”

  “Girl!” I said, and we fell into a laughing fit. I’d gotten close two different times with different guys, neither of which bothered to pay me any mind afterward. Sheila and I were three years apart, but it might as well have been ten. Because she had grown up in the church, though, there were ways I was the older one. We started down a hill, and I caught my first glimpse of the lake between the trees as she started up again.

  “Eventually I didn’t feel nothing at all, not even during altar call. I kept going up when I was called to sing, until I just turned around and walked out the doors. Didn’t feel right to pretend.”

  At the Snake Creek Marina sign, she slowed and put her back into turning the big steering wheel. “Reney, thank you for coming to get me last night.” She wiped away the last of her tears and took a deep breath as she put the car in park. Lake Tenkiller opened up before us, emerald green as big as the sky. “I don’t want that pot. I don’t even want it in here anymore, unless you want to keep it.”

  I couldn’t take it. Mom and her nose would be all over it from a mile away. Besides, despite trying to play it cool the night before, I’d never had weed of my own. I was scared to death to have it on me. And if I did end up going back to Texas, the coaches were threatening to start drug testing us after summer. We walked out onto the dock and let it all go into the wind. Then we tore the baggie up into a thousand little pieces and let those fly too.

  “Hey,” I said. “Do you know my father? Like my real father?”

  “You mean Russell Gibson?”

  “Yeah, that’s his name.” I’d never talked to any of my Oklahoma family about him. Never asked, never told.

  “Sort of,” she said. Then she turned around and walked down the dock toward the car.

  “What do you mean ‘sort of’?” I yelled, nudging a piece of plastic that had blown back onto the dock into the water. By the time I caught up, she was already starting the car.

  “So?” I slammed the heavy door.

  “It’s a small town.” Our tailpipe scraped rock as we started up the hill.

  “What do you know about him?”

  “Just hearsay,” she said and turned back toward town. “He moved back to his homeplace after he got out of the army.”

  “And?”

  “Well, he put roofing nails on his neighbor’s drive, and he cuts people’s fences. The Littledeers say he poisoned their dogs.”

  “Fuuuuuck.”

  “Sorry, Reney.”

  “We saw him getting gas the other day. He took off before I could get a good look.”

  “About right.”

  “But, like, I never did anything to him. Mom never asked him for a dime.”

  “You’re better off,” she said.

  “Do you know where he works?”

  “He might get a crazy check. Think he had a crazy uncle too.”

  “Great,” I said. If my outside was all Mom, I was starting to worry what my insides might be made of.

  “We see him every time we go to the donut shop,” she said. “I mean I do now.”

  “Let’s go,” I said. She shook her head, but I guess she was still used to doing what other people said she ought to.

  This is what I knew about Russell Gibson before that day: Mom was fifteen. She said no. He was closer to thirty than fifteen. He waited down the road until she could sneak out that night. She didn’t want to wear her long Holy Roller dress, so she’d stashed a change of regular-person clothes in the bushes. They pushed the car down the hill, coasted until they could start it away from Lula’s earshot. He wore a white cowboy hat with a turkey feather. And drove a green Ford truck. His mom was Choctaw, full-blood. She brought over fifty dollars and a coat when I was a baby. When I asked what it looked like, Mom said, “I don’t know. It was just a coat.”

  DoRight Donuts was in a lopsided old house that needed painting, just three blocks from Lula’s. Sure enough, the green Ford sat cockeyed in the gravel lot. All that time, he’d been right around the corner and down the road.

  “You sure you want to go in there?” Sheila said.

  I was already stepping out of the car.

  When we pushed in, the sweet, yeasty smell of donuts turned my stomach. I stopped in the doorway, and Sheila had to nudge me forward to get through the door.

  There he was at a back booth, napkins wadded up all around him, a newspaper spread out on the orange Formica table. He was wearing the same cutoff shirt. I could see now that his black hair was buzzed close to his scalp. The cowboy hat sat on the table beside him. His nose was long and straight.

  He glanced in our direction but didn’t seem to recognize me this time. Or maybe I only imagined that he glanced at us. Sheila pulled me to the glass counter where a dark-skinned guy with a big white Frank Zappa mustache rested on his elbows next to a little kid wh
o had his legs dangling down.

  “Can I help you?”

  “A half dozen éclairs and a skim milk, please,” Sheila said. “Want anything?”

  “You’re getting six éclairs.”

  “Day-olds are good heated up. I ain’t been cooking.”

  “Just a Dr Pepper,” I said.

  As we sat down at a clean table, the little kid came from behind the counter with a coloring book and a box of crayons. The Zappa guy followed behind him with a glazed donut on a paper plate and a carton of chocolate milk. The guy tucked a napkin in the boy’s shirt, then opened the milk.

  “I do straw myself!” the kid shouted, and the guy guided the kid’s little hand so he could tap the straw on the table to push it out of the paper without breaking it.

  “Grammy’ll be back in a minute,” the Zappa guy said. He glanced toward the back where Russell Gibson was huddled over the paper with an ink pen. “Be good.” He tousled the kid’s hair, went behind the counter, and started running water.

  Sheila pushed the box of éclairs at me, but I was shaking all over. I didn’t know why I was there, what I expected to happen next. This all felt so stupid and pointless all the sudden. And most of all, wrong. What did I care what this guy looked like or who he was?

  “Let’s go,” I said and stood up. Sheila was shoving éclair into her mouth and tucking the donut box closed when the little kid dropped a crayon. It rolled down the aisle—real slow like we were in a movie and the crayon rolling was the last thing to happen before the place got shot up. It stopped right in front of Russell Gibson.

  The little boy jumped down from his chair but pulled up when he saw where it landed. Russell Gibson leaned down for the crayon. He didn’t smile or hand it to the kid. Instead, he set it there on his own table next to his paper. Then he saw me. Or he saw my mom in me because he jumped up and took off out the door, leaving all of his stuff.