Scottie wipes his eyes and gets up, grabbing his gun on his way to the door. Daddy follows him, yanks Cher up to his shoulder, and weaves a little. A few bullets hit the front screen door, at least it seems that way to me, what with the pinging sound of metal against metal. Me and Gonzo, we duck. We throw ourselves under the table like it will do any good and then, as Daddy and Uncle Scottie plunge out the door, it occurs to me that Benny might have made up that whole thing about Gonzo trashing me to the other teachers, that maybe most of what Benny’s told me since we became friends, well, started taking each other’s clothes off when he moved here after my mom left, is a lie. Like, “Renee Seaver, you’re special.” That one. And, “Renee Seaver, you’re the coolest girl in Collarsville,” and, of course, big, huge, fat duh, “I’ll take you away from here, Renee Seaver.”
Because it’s not Benny crouching next to me on the peeling linoleum with the bunny hair and dead ladybugs. It’s Gonzo, who, if he weren’t here tonight trying not to get killed, would probably be home with his crippled daughter doing something inspiring, like teaching her to kick a soccer ball with her wheelchair feet. So I do something crazy. I mean I do something totally schizo. I put my right hand over Gonzo’s to stop it from shaking. It’s a furry paw and damp like the rest of him and all of sudden I remember the night my mom left with the Irish guy and how I spent most of it with my fingers wrapped as far as they would go around that fake hand that fell out of the truck. It was hard and felt like my mother’s when I was little and she would grab hold of me to keep me from wandering into traffic. Like she cared. Like anyone ever really cares about anyone else.
And then I can’t help it, I’m thinking of Benny and our first time, and how the whole thing, the kisses, that feeling of his weight on me, just busted me wide open on a cool spring night like this one, the sound of spring peepers somewhere in the corner of the junkyard drowning out Benny’s sighs coming soft and fast in the back of a rusty red Buick with torn upholstery and a chopped-off top. Moon directly above us. Daddy back in the office nodding over a plastic 7UP bottle half-full of vodka. Emptiness like an entire sky spilling out of me when it was all over and Benny turning away to look across the hoods of all those dead cars. I’m that empty tonight, all alone with my bad grades and bad skin and bad love. And I’ll never get out of here, except in a body bag.
“Oh no, Chiggers!” I say, and peek out from under the table to make sure he’s okay and not some bloody mess of fur and guts. But Chiggers is fine. Chiggers is bored. Behind him, the world has gone black and white. All we’re dealing with here is a hailstorm.
I tug Gonzo out from under the table and we go to the sliding glass door and gawk. The spooky stuff falls from the sky and bounces off the ground like a plague of Ping-Pong balls while Daddy and Uncle Scottie run in circles, trying to save their targets, guns still clutched tight. It’s a lost cause. Most everything out there, including the sombreros, is shredded to soggy confetti.
“See, Mr. Gonzalez? It’s okay,” I say. “It’s just a storm.”
Gonzo doesn’t react at first. He mumbles something under his breath—a prayer, probably—and watches as tree branches whip like cheerleader hair around the house.
The wind’s dying down but the damage’s been done. The neighbor’s shed roof sits suspended in our elm tree like a lost kite. Uncle Scottie’s Bronco is pitted with dents. Scottie leans his cheek against the driver’s-side door and cries some more.
Me, I don’t let go of Gonzo’s hand. For a while it sends tremors up my arm, but, finally, when the hail slows and there’s a bright wave already melting against the door, I feel it relax and go still in mine.
Blood Curse
(May)
Josh didn’t understand why she didn’t just cut it already.
“It’s down to your knees,” he told her, pushing a handful of marijuana seeds and buds around on the kitchen counter. “It’s not even pretty anymore.”
Shannon tried to shrug off his casual criticism—Sticks and stones, she told herself—but it hurt more than she wanted to admit. She’d always assumed he loved her long hair. In bed in the early morning when he was sweetest he liked to grab a handful of it and say he felt like he was living with a princess in a fairytale.
“Rapunzel,” he’d whisper. “Let down your golden hair.”
Her hair wasn’t golden, it was dark brown, and she’d considered dyeing it, got so far as to call her best friend, Rhae Anne, at the Hair Barn to make an appointment, but Rhae Anne said hell no, she wasn’t going within a foot of that.
“It’d take me eight hours,” she said. “And why would you want to be blond like everyone else?”
It was a question Shannon couldn’t answer. She’d spent a year of her life second-guessing almost everything she did, from how she brushed her teeth (“Too loud,” Josh said) to the way she walked (“Like a lesbian”) and the way she laughed when Josh’s brother was around (“Like you want to fuck him”). Self-doubt had become a habit with her, a reflex. She’d always been shy, but now it was as if there were a spotlight on her, its brightness always picking up a flaw she had no power to change.
She opened the door and stood for a moment, watching Josh and feeling the cool morning air on her cheeks. It was foggy now but it would be sunny later, warm, maybe even hot. From where she stood Shannon could just make out Hector Gonzalez’s back deck and busted-up gas grill. Squirrels in the trees dropped nuts down and scattered a spiderweb. That poor man. He’d banged on her door the night before, frantic, wondering if she’d seen his daughter—“Anywhere anywhere,” he kept repeating, eyes wild—but Shannon could only shake her head. She’d just gotten home from work herself and hadn’t seen Daisy in a couple weeks. Even then, it was a fleeting glimpse—Daisy being wheeled home by Hector or a high school girl, Daisy tossing a basketball in the Ranasack Apartments parking lot. At the time, Shannon thought, I should volunteer to watch her once in a while. But she hadn’t.
“Can you believe it about Daisy?” She fiddled with her braid, letting it drop against her side when Josh looked up. “I wish there was something we could do.”
Josh went to the closet, probably, Shannon thought, for rolling papers, which he kept in a large wire basket behind the sugar. “I’m sure she’ll pop up soon,” he said. “They always do.”
“They do?” Shannon was pretty sure that wasn’t true, that missing girls hardly ever “popped up” after they’d disappeared. Or little boys for that matter.
“Christ, who cares?” Josh’s back was still to her. While he hunted, a few cereal boxes hit the ground, followed by an open bag of flour. White powder made a cloud at his feet. “They’re Catholics, right? They breed like rabbits. One disappears, another’s born the next minute. Problem solved.”
Shannon’s hand went to her heart. “She’s an only child.”
“Whatever,” Josh said. “I’m guessing she wasn’t kidnapped at all. She probably just ran away to give her dad a scare. Kids these days, dying for attention. Bet she’s hiding out in the apartments as we speak.” He turned, stepping in the flour, and held something out to Shannon, a tidy gray box tied with pink ribbon. “Can we stop talking about her?”
Shannon nodded and took the box.
“Open it.” He glanced at her from behind two long locks of hair, and for one brief moment, he was the Josh Seaver she fell in love with—handsome, vulnerable, possibly running a fever.
She palmed his forehead. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he said, ducking away. “Open the box already.”
She thought of how it all began, their odd and quick courtship. It would have been a good story to tell their children, but there were no kids to tell it to and probably never would be now. Josh, who’d been living in Maple Leaf Mobile Home Park with a few buddies, had, on a beautiful April day, come into the Laundromat where Shannon worked, obviously sick. He’d shoved a load in one of the washers and slumped down in a chair by the front windows, shivering under a stained Duck Dynasty blanket and cu
rsing the perfect weather. Shannon ignored him just as she ignored all Seavers, but halfway through the spin cycle, Josh fell off his chair to the floor and didn’t get up. He just lay there, blinking up at the ceiling and sweating. Shannon ran over to him, worried about a seizure or an overdose or worse. “Are you okay?” she’d said then, just as she’d said today. But instead of shrugging her off, Josh reached up and touched her hair. He seemed to marvel at it.
Under normal circumstances, she hated it when strangers took such liberties—her hair was like a pregnant woman’s belly, inviting an intrusive touch, just asking to be manhandled—but these weren’t normal circumstances and Josh wasn’t really a stranger. She’d known him all her life. They’d grown up together in the Bottoms, playing cops and robbers and cowboys and Indians and staging epic, all-day snowball battles in and around the old Udall place. But she’d never known him to be gentle. “Sweet Shannon,” he’d said to her that day, his fingers still holding her hair. “Sweet Shannon Washburn.”
Her heart was touched, and when her shift ended and his load was dry, she took him back to her house, settled him on her couch with a better blanket and the remote, and told him to rest. He followed her orders, sleeping for twelve hours straight. Like a baby, she thought. She fed him chicken soup and Gatorade and tea and toast. One night, when she leaned over to put the thermometer under his tongue, he gave her hair a quick tug and kissed her. “Shannon Nightingale,” he whispered, his breath sugary from the Gatorade. “Mother Shannon Teresa.” Stay, she thought. Ditch that disgusting bachelor double-wide and move in with me and stay for as long as we both shall live. Or as long as we can stand it. He did. It was the one time Shannon could remember a wish of hers coming true.
The present was a silver bracelet. Three charms—a tiny heart, a rose, and a shiny, red-bowed box with her birthday carved on both sides—dangled from the links. Shannon smiled but the smile felt strange on her face. Josh wasn’t a gift giver. He hadn’t given her anything for Valentine’s Day or their anniversary. Touched as she was by this unexpected display of thoughtfulness, she couldn’t help wondering where the money had come from. At the same time, she didn’t dare ask. To bring up anything having to do with their finances was to step on a landmine. Suddenly this man whom she liked to think of as a gentle giant would explode with rage and threaten to join Hank Seaver’s militia. “But why?” she often asked. “To teach them a lesson,” he’d say.
Josh had been out of work for a month, ever since he’d lost his school janitor job to one of the Mexican immigrants living down the street in the Ranasack Apartments. Josh claimed his boss let him go because the man (who, according to Josh, “was borderline retarded and carried a basketball around everywhere because he thought he was Michael Jordan or some such shit”) agreed to work for practically nothing, but Shannon had heard from Rhae Anne that Josh actually got canned for failing his second of three drug tests.
“Do you like it?” he asked now.
“It’s beautiful. Thank you. But what’s the occasion?”
“Do I need an occasion to get my woman something nice?” Josh pulled the bracelet from the box and fastened it around her wrist. “That should take your mind off of missing Mexican girls.”
Shannon bit her lip. She felt a sudden need to cry. Not here, she told herself. And not now. “I might stop at Granny’s for a while after work. Is that all right? If I leave you on your own for dinner?”
“Sure.” Josh was back to searching through the closet. A line of white footprints trailed him. “I’ll have leftovers or something.”
“Okay. Well.”
Shannon looked down at the bracelet, gave it a shake, and listened to the charms tinkle. The links caught in her arm hair and she gasped. Josh didn’t hear her. He’d pulled his favorite papers from the basket and was busy rolling a clumsy joint. She stood for a moment longer in the kitchen, but there was nothing more to say, and she was going to be late for work if she didn’t hurry. The flour. She sighed. She’d clean it up later.
It had rained the previous night and the river was high. Hate Henry Road was a swamp and halfway out of the Bottoms she got stuck in the very same spot she had a foggy night a few weeks ago when Rhae Anne called her for a ride home from the Hair Barn. “Larry’s gone and picked up another shift,” Rhae Anne said, and Shannon told her she’d be right over, not letting on that she and pretty much everyone in town knew Larry wasn’t working overtime at all but was instead spending most evenings with a Mexican beauty, who, after Helman Yoder’s dairy farm got shut down, had turned to stripping and was now, rumor had it, doing her best to get knocked up with an anchor baby.
On that night, Shannon was sure she would just sink like a stone and never be heard from again—she imagined the headline in the Colliersville Record: QUICKSAND CLAIMS ONE OF OUR OWN—but then she closed her eyes, concentrated, pressed the gas, and somehow she was inching her way up the road, checking her rearview for a sign. She liked to think it was her mother who freed her. Maybe that was Rita’s ghost, right there, rustling the ditch grass, a breath of her. Memories of elegant feet making dents in the dirt.
This morning there were no ghosts, no Ritas, and, no matter how many times Shannon hit the gas, no going anywhere. The streets of the Bottoms were deserted. To her left Shannon saw a makeshift “Come home soon, Daisy” shrine that had quickly taken shape on Hector Gonzalez’s lawn. It spilled over Hector’s driveway like a small but bulging baseball diamond in a motley pile of offerings, much of it—namely the posters and paper lanterns and stuffed animals clutching tiny felt bouquets—soggy and drooping. There were toy-sized plastic wheelchairs topped with random objects: skateboards and peacock feathers and baby bottles. Also, strangely, a tattooed fake arm propped up next to some wax fruit, a clutch of dog whistles, and a few Disney DVDs. Boxes of chocolate still in their cellophane wrapping leaned on large baskets of flowers, and a stack of Bibles towered over a garden gnome out of whose mouth came a dialogue balloon reading, “We love you, Daisy!” Candles of all shapes and sizes, most nearly melted, others with wicks totally intact, formed the shrine’s sloppy spine. Someone had tied a wooden cutout of Jesus to Hector’s dying ash tree and taped Jesus’s hand to a laminated picture of Daisy. Her smile tilted up at him.
“I hate you, Hate Henry Road!” Shannon shouted out her window. Her voice echoed back, mocked her.
Hate Henry Road had gotten its name from some long-dead, tarred-and-feathered white politician, who, according to local lore, dared to marry an ex-slave. Shannon pitied the man, pitied his wife even more, but still, the name was perfect. She’d gotten stuck in the snow and mud so often that her boss at the Laundromat, Mr. Breeder, joked that he should invest in a tow truck just so he could bail out “my little damsel in distress” and get her to work where she belonged. Of course, Chuck Breeder would never think of driving the five miles from his new house in Wyndham-on-the-River to pick up any Bottoms damsel.
“He might get his wingtips wet,” she mumbled to herself.
She glanced down at her cell phone. She could call Josh, but there was a good chance his Jeep wouldn’t start, it’d been so long since he’d driven it, and anyway she hated his method of freeing her, which basically consisted of pulling his Jeep right up on her bumper and hitting the gas. It worked more often than not, but it’d made her beaten-up Accord look even more destined for the junkyard than it had before.
Shannon’s mother would have cried if she could see the state of the car’s rear end, scratched as a skating pond and pulling away from the rest of the body like rock from an old hill. She’d loved that car, loved it enough to name it Miss Scarlett because of the paint job, which over the years had faded to an uneven and watery tomato red, and when Shannon thought of her mother, which was at least every day since she’d died of what Shannon’s granny called “the galloping girly part cancer,” she often thought of her behind the wheel of Miss Scarlett, mannish sunglasses over her brown eyes, a travel coffee mug from the Flying J Truck Stop in her hand. Rita Washbur
n had worked at the Flying J for twenty-five years and even into her fifties was the most popular waitress there, pocketing the best tips on account of her sweet voice and pretty legs. That’s how she was able to pay cash for Miss Scarlett and finally burn the mortgage on the Bottoms house Shannon had grown up in, the house that was now Shannon’s, although she couldn’t bring herself to change anything her mother had done to the place, even the pink, iridescent rose wallpaper in the guest bathroom that Josh said made him want to puke or go gay.
Rita had been that kind of woman, persuasive. She was beautiful and smart and sometimes mean and Shannon never questioned her judgment about anything, even when she was sixteen and punk was in and Rita made her promise she wouldn’t get “one of those stupid dyke haircuts” like the rest of the girls at school. Shannon could still see her mother at the breakfast table, Flying J nametag already affixed, saying, “Tell me you’ll never cut your hair,” and for a while Shannon was just careful to make sure Rhae Anne, who went straight to beauty school after graduation, never cut it above her shoulders. When Rita died, though, Shannon just started skipping haircut after haircut. She’d made a promise and she wasn’t about to break it, even though it got her more attention than she wanted.
Shannon put the car in gear and revved the engine once more, thinking as she always did that maybe this time would be different, that there’d be a sufficient shift in the car’s position, in the road’s surface chemistry, to send her on her way. She leaned forward and held her breath. “Mom,” Shannon whispered. “You there?”
“Shannon?”
It wasn’t Rita. It was Irv Peoples, her neighbor from two doors down. Shannon had probably talked to him only about five times in her life, despite the fact that they’d known each other since Shannon was a little girl. Irv had a beer gut and a small head and a way of not looking at you when he talked. Rhae Anne once told Shannon that Irv had killed a man over a fish, but Shannon didn’t buy it. With his sloping shoulders and slack middle, he reminded her of a broken horse. Lately he’d been out a lot, clearing trails in the woods between the Bottoms and town, a red-handled ax in his hand and a miner’s hat on his head.
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