Gods in Alabama

by Joshilyn Jackson

  “No,” I said pointedly. “I don’t.”

  Rose looked skeptical. “With your mother? Come on. Anyway, she’s wrong. I’ve been thinking through my romantic history, looking for a guy I picked who wasn’t an asshole. If I can find just one, then my shrink is wrong and it isn’t me, it’s the men. And there is one, I know it. I remember. But I need you to help me find him.”

  “Find him?” I said. While she was talking, I continued to edge backwards. Rose followed me, step for step but with a longer stride, so she was now much too close to me. I could smell fruit gum on her breath, and her eyes held the fervid light of a convert.

  “Yes. I have to find Jim Beverly,” she said.

  The last syllable had not cleared her lips before I was leaping wildly into my apartment. I slammed the door in her face and then shot the bolt and put the chain on. I couldn’t breathe. I had not heard his name spoken aloud in ten years.

  Outside, Rose Mae Lolley gave my door three sharp raps. “Arlene?” she called.

  I bolted across the room to the boom box that was sitting by the sofa. I dug around in the box of jumbled CDs next to it, looking for something, anything, loud. I came up with the Clash. I had not noticed until I tried to get the CD out of the jewel box and load it into the player how violently my hands were shaking. All of me was shaking. My teeth were banging together as if I were freezing.

  “Arlene? This is ridiculous. I need maybe five minutes of your time,” Rose Mae Lolley called, kicking my door once for emphasis. At last I got the CD tray to slide home. I pumped the volume up to about six.

  Rose gave the door a good pounding I could hear over “London Calling,” so I upped the dial to eight, neighbors be damned. Then I sat on the floor with my arms at my sides, pressing my palms down against the cool hardwood while the first song played out. I wanted to go and look through the peephole, but I was afraid I would see her giant lavender eyeball peering in at me.

  I cast about for something to distract myself. I had a stack of freshman world literature papers I needed to grade, but I wasn’t in any shape to face the grammar. I also had three books I was reading in tandem, research for my dissertation, but my heart was pounding and I doubted I could concentrate. I felt like going to bed, or maybe crawling under it and never coming back out.

  I noticed Burr had left his book behind, facedown on the arm of the sofa. The old cushion had a sinkhole in it where Burr had been. I wedged myself into his warmth and read, forcing myself to concentrate on the words, and not on whatever Alabama drama might be playing itself out in my hallway, or Aunt Florence’s demands, or the fact that my boyfriend had just walked out on me, maybe for good this time.

  It might have been easier if Burr had left a better book. He liked courtroom dramas, and he was the fastest reader I had ever seen. He ate text like pudding, no chewing, but he still managed to digest it. And these lawyer thrillers, he devoured two or three a weekend. In real life he was a tax attorney who wouldn’t touch criminal law, but he loved the books. They ran the gamut from literature to penny dreadfuls. Burr didn’t care about the quality. He ate them in bulk. If it had a lawyer protagonist, plot twists, and someone with big tits in jeopardy, he was all for it.

  This was one of the bad ones. The prologue alone had a body count of seven. The bad guy had killed five of them. Because he was bad, his reaction was to laugh gleefully and dance in the mayhem. The young DA, backed into a corner and in the wrong place at the wrong time, whacked two people. Self-defense, of course. Because he was good, his reaction was to vomit and think deep thoughts along the lines of “Oh the humanity.” Complete crap.

  I’ve personally committed only one murder, but the truth is, it’s not that simple. You can’t tell whether you’re the good guy or the bad guy based on whether you laugh or throw up. The truth is, I did both.

  I read for as long as I could stand it before I reached down beside me and hit the pause button on the boom box. My ears rang in the sudden silence. I did not hear anything from the hallway. I threw Burr’s book across the room. It smacked into the front door and bounced off to the floor. No reaction. Rose Mae Lolley was gone, for the moment.

  I was still shaking. I wanted to pray, but I was too angry with God to concentrate. Ten years, ten years I had been faithful, and now God was breaking the deal.

  Before I left Possett, I had promised God I would stop fucking every boy who crossed my path. (Although when actively involved in prayer I used the word “fornicating,” as if this would spare God’s delicate ears.) Now I was losing Burr over it. The truth was, I had worried that I was losing him for months, but still I had stayed faithful.

  I had promised God I would never tell another lie, and I hadn’t. Even when lying would make everything easy with Aunt Florence and my family, I had never let a word of untruth cross my lips.

  Lastly, I had promised that if He would get me out safe, I would never go back to Possett, Alabama. Not for anything. I wouldn’t even look back, lest I turn to salt.

  And now God had allowed Possett, Alabama, to show up on my doorstep.

  As far as I was concerned, all bets were off.

  CHAPTER 2

  I WAS FIFTEEN YEARS old when I killed Jim Beverly, right at the end of my sophomore year. There was a dirt road that led to a ring of wooded hills just outside of Possett. It was where all the kids used to go to make out. There was a level place to park at the foot of the one we called Lipsmack Hill. Cars were lined up at the foot of that hill every weekend, full of kids playing feelio boobio and you-show-me-yours-and-I’ll-ejaculate-in-my-pants. There was a wooded path you could take up to the top of Lipsmack, away from the cars.

  If you saw a white T-shirt hanging on the lowest branch of the sycamore right by the path, you didn’t go up there. It was occupied. Traditionally you could claim the hilltop only if one of the people involved was a virgin. The white T-shirt was an announcement.

  I was familiar with that hilltop. I had 102 kids in my class at Fruiton High. Fifty-three of them were boys. During the course of my sophomore year, I fucked fifty-two of them, neatly, in order of their sixteenth birthdays. I would have given Bud, the last one, a go, too, if he hadn’t been Clarice’s boyfriend. Thirty-one of the boys, under the pressure of my hand in their jeans and the threat of hand-in-jeans removal, admitted they were virgins. All thirty-one had a white T-shirt tucked under the driver’s seat. Hope and dicks, springing eternal. At any rate, I visited that hilltop over thirty times, so I knew it probably better than anyone.

  The woods, mostly scrub and loblolly pine with a few sycamore and oak trees, ended on the hilltop. There was a little grassy clearing where you could spread a blanket and get on with it. The clearing ended in a track of gravel at the lip, and where the hill started its descent on the other side, the heaps began.

  “Heaps” was our name for kudzu, a fast-spreading vine that climbed anything it could find and turned it into a shaggy, amorphous mound. The heaps had eaten the woods in the pit at the center of the ring of hills, creeping over the ground, coating the trees. They had formed piles and climbed up themselves when nothing else was offered. In some places they loomed up higher than the hilltops. Roach Country, Clarice called it. Roaches love to nest in kudzu. Clarice would not have been caught dead on top of Lipsmack. The only place she ever went all the way with Bud was in his clean basement rec room, under the pool table. And she didn’t even do that until they were engaged, over halfway through senior year.

  The night I went up Lipsmack Hill after Jim Beverly, I was fucking a boy named Barry, the last of the fifty-two boys. Barry swore he wasn’t a virgin, so we did it in his car. He had a crabbed car, like a wadded-up version of a sedan. And he had endless pale legs, as skinny as a stork’s. There wasn’t room to get him anywhere near in me in the backseat, although we’d twisted around and jammed ourselves up pretty good trying. His knees kept popping up, and his long legs flexed and folded around me, entangling and hampering me.

  Finally I lost my temper. I swear, at that age
boys should all say they’re virgins, even the ones who aren’t, so girls won’t blame them when they are completely awful at sex. I told him to sit his butt down in the passenger seat, but first to button his shirt because the moon was full and high and we’d be visible once we sat up. Then I pulled my dress back on over my head and climbed into his lap facing him, and bingo, just like that, popped Tab A into Slot B.

  I felt like saying “How hard was that,” but I didn’t want to interfere with his concentration. Barry was going, “Um, um, um,” and making desperate lunges upward with his hips. Freakin’ liar, he had to be a virgin.

  Barry had backed up to the hill, so I had a pretty good view of the path leading to the top of Lipsmack over his shoulder. I saw a freshman girl I did not know to speak to heading up. A few steps behind her, Jim Beverly unfurled a grimy white T-shirt like a flag, and as he passed the low tree branch, he flung it over one-handed. He half jogged to catch his date, stumbling a little, and slung an arm over the girl’s shoulder to steady himself. He had a bottle swinging in his other hand. The moon was so high and bright, I could see moonlight glinting off the golden liquid sloshing inside.

  Something about watching him drifting drunk up the hill with that girl—it got to me. There I was crouched in the car on top of a moaning boy, a boy who was delirious and lost in me, and up until I saw Jim Beverly, I’d been so relaxed, so in charge of it all. Now I could see myself reaching down to Barry’s face with my hands, using my thumbs and calmly digging out his eyes. I could see myself tearing my own face off with my nails. Something, anything, to stop this insane juxtaposition of me, doing this bloodless deed with Barry Watkins, while Jim Beverly walked up Lipsmack Hill with yet another girl.

  I must have jerked or tensed, because Barry looked up at me with his mouth open, and came, shocked and blinking. I was barely present, but somehow I managed to be polite. I patted his hair and said something nice to him, kissed him on the mouth. He was a sweet boy, really, the kind with a mother who still gave him home haircuts. His milky skin was as soft as a girl’s. I said to him, “You dating someone, Barry?” I knew he wasn’t. He shook his head at me. I said, “Well, you will, but you already fucked me, so you don’t have a thing to prove with her, do you?”

  He looked at me, uncertain of the correct answer but willing to give it. Finally he shook his head. I gave him another quick kiss and did a scan out the window. I saw Bud’s old VW Rabbit. Thank God for reliable couples—I knew Clarice would be in it with Bud. I leaned over into the backseat and snatched up my panties and shoved them into my purse. I was running blind now, on complete instinct. I had to get to Jim Beverly and his stupid ass of a date.

  I told Barry that Clarice and Bud would give me a ride home. He was too dazed or relieved to stop me, just said, “Okay,” and sat there in his buttoned shirt with his pants around his ankles, blinking at me. I clambered off him and hopped out the door.

  I’ll tell you how sweet he was, though I barely clocked it at the time. I had no intention of going over there and interrupting Bud. Clarice and I were barely speaking at that point, and climbing in the car where she was trying to have a decorous make-out session would definitely not improve my standing in the ratings.

  But Barry didn’t drive off. I saw him struggling to get his pants up, and then he sat there in the passenger seat of his car watching me. He was watching to make sure I made it safe to Bud’s car, the way a boy will watch a girl run up the stairs of her front porch and disappear inside the house. It was almost like he thought this was some sort of real date, instead of the natural result of me walking up behind him as he was playing Centipede in the empty game room at Pizza Hut, cupping his balls, and whispering, “Got a car?” in his ear.

  His eyes stayed on me, so I didn’t have a choice. I went over to Bud’s dirty Rabbit and opened the passenger door and climbed in. As soon as I was in, I saw Barry driving off. Bud and Clarice were wound around each other in the backseat, but completely dressed and sitting up. They broke apart when the door opened. Clarice stared at me wax-eyed for a moment, as if she had been sleeping some sort of sweet, untroubled sleep and I had woken her.

  “Arlene?” she said, just surprised, but it took only two more breaths till she was irritated.

  Bud gave me his usual bland and brotherly grin and said, “Hey, Arlene.”

  “What on earth?” said Clarice.

  I wasn’t thinking right. I said the first thing that came into my head, which happened to accidentally be the truth. “Oh, well, I was fucking Barry Watkins, but I got finished up and came over here.”

  Bud let out a startled laugh, but Clarice said, “Good Lord, Arlene.” She shook her head at me and turned away to stare out the side window.

  Clarice was not aware I had a plan to fuck the entire male half of our sophomore class, much less that I fucked them mostly for her sake. But she knew I was pretty loose and had a locker-room reputation beyond the wildest dreams of most Alabama small-town sluts. I had become legend, at least to the sophomore males. The girls didn’t care for me much—now there is a huge understatement—but they didn’t make my life a living hell because I was still at least partially sheltered under the golden umbrella of Clarice’s blond goodness and monstrous popularity. In other words, Clarice wouldn’t let them outright torture me. She protected me even though sometimes I thought she plain hated me, for reminding her of mess and complications when she liked everything so neat and clean and swept away. But we’d been so close growing up that she couldn’t bring herself to cut me dead or ditch me. Then, too, on some level, perhaps she knew she owed me. And after all, how far away from me could she get? We lived in the same room.

  “Well, we were kissing, actually,” said Clarice primly. “And it was going very well. So thanks for checking on us and all, but you can go now.” Even back then Clarice would have been able to talk like she was at a Junior League meeting if a total stranger had walked into the house and taken a crap on the rug.

  “Clarice, I need a little help,” I said. I couldn’t believe how calm I sounded.

  Bud was instantly on the alert. “That Barry get cute with you? That Barry hurt you?” Bud took the stance that I was Clarice’s cousin, practically a sister. This meant that even though I was a slut and he knew I was a slut, if anyone treated me like a slut in his presence, Bud would beat the living crap out of that person. And Bud was a linebacker who made varsity in his sophomore year. He could beat the crap out of pretty much anyone.

  “No, Barry is fine, but . . . Clarice, I need you to take me home. I’m sick or something.”

  Clarice turned back to look at me. “You don’t look sick.”

  Bud said, “Hey, if Arlene’s sick, I’ll just run y’all both home. You got curfew in a hour anyway. We can let Arlene go on up to bed and maybe sit out on your porch swing until you got to go in.”

  Clarice was already nodding in a resigned way when I said, “No, Bud, that’s sweet and all, but I need Clarice to take me home. Just Clarice. I need to talk to her.”

  Now they were both staring at me, but it was Bud who said it. “Arlene, are you, like, in trouble?” Meaning, of course, was I pregnant.

  “No, no,” I said. “I’m not in trouble, I just have a female girl-thing problem. I’m not in trouble, though. I just need to talk to Clarice.”

  Bud nodded, satisfied. I don’t know what he took that to mean. Some mysterious menstrual thing he didn’t want to know about, or maybe he thought I had given crabs to Barry Watkins.

  Clarice narrowed her eyes at me but didn’t object. Bud looked around and said, “There’s Clint’s car. I’ll go roust him and Jeannie. Just about her curfew anyway. I’ll see if old Clint wants to shoot some pool at my house. But I need my car back early. Remember, I got Saturday practice.”

  Clarice said, “I’ll pick you up in the morning and stay to watch. I’ll pack us a lunch, too, for after. We can picnic.”

  “’Kay, sugar,” said Bud, untroubled about walking off and leaving her in charge of his car. He
was so easygoing and sweet with her. Maybe a tiny part of me was sad he was the one boy in the class I wouldn’t go with. He got out and ambled off to ruin the rest of Clint’s date.

  “I swear to God, Arlene,” said Clarice bitterly. “Every time I think you have gone about as stupid-crazy as a person can possibly go, you come up with a way to get worse. And this wasn’t just crazy, it was also mean. And rude. And a bunch of other stuff I am too mad to even think of right now.” She clambered out of the backseat into the driver’s seat. Bud’s keys were hanging in the ignition. She started the car.

  “Clarice, wait a second, we can’t go home yet. I need your help.”

  Something in my voice stopped her, and she paused with her hand on the gearshift. “This better not be some more of your crap, Arlene. I am so, so sick of your crap.”

  “It isn’t, I swear it, I really do need your help right now. Really bad. But I need you to do what I say and not ask me a bunch of questions. Please help me now, and tomorrow you can ask all the questions you want.”

  She looked at me for a long moment, suspicious and maybe worried. “What do you need?”

  “I need you to drive off now like you’re taking me home, but as soon as we get around the corner, away from these people, you slow down and let me hop out—”

  “Arlene—”

  I talked louder to shut her up. “Then I need you to drive home and tell your mama I’m home, too.” In our freshman year, Aunt Florence had agreed to let us start dating, as long as we doubled with each other. Clarice and I had immediately started training her parents. We had the same curfew (even though I was technically a year younger, I was in the same grade), so when we got home, one of us would call down the hall, “We’re home! Good night!”