* * *
Hate Henry Road was dry now. As Shannon slowed down to steer Miss Scarlett around a series of potholes, she saw Irv Peoples out of the corner of her eye. He was walking through the patch of woods that mercifully divided the Bottoms from the concrete plant. He had on his miner’s hat and the bulb was shining shakily through the trees as he walked, ax in his fist making a scraping sound against the earth.
“Irv!” She pulled the emergency brake and jumped out to meet him where the oaks stopped and the pines started. He blinded her for a moment with the beam of his headlamp. Then he took the hat off and rested it in the crook of his arm.
“Can you do something for me?” She blushed. “Again?”
“You got blood on your shoes.”
Shannon crouched in the grass. There was a tree stump at her left shoulder. She slid up next to it and glanced at Irv, felt the weight of the whole day pulling her down. Bermuda. Effing. Triangle. She could just make out his dark eyes and thin-lipped mouth. “There’s a curse on Breeder’s Laundromat,” she said. “Could be Colliersville, too. The entire town.”
Irv nodded, adjusting the ax against his leg. “Sounds about what we deserve.”
Shannon threw her braid over the stump. “Cut it.”
She knew she was acting like a crazy person, but what did it matter? She was as good as dead anyway. Not that she believed any of what Rhae Anne said about the blood curse, the voodoo. It wasn’t an ugly thing, it was a beautiful thing and they’d done it, hadn’t they? Shown the world. Shown Colliersville, anyway, that they wouldn’t be ignored. Blood like a river in the center of town to rival the Ranasack. Blood like a heart beating. The stain would be there for years. Mr. Breeder’d have to get all new concrete or move out. Wondrous. Shannon wanted to be wondrous.
“Cut it all off,” she said. “Please.” But not for Josh. Not for him. For her.
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
Irv didn’t say anything more. He’d never talked much. It was, as Rita had said, just his way. He sighed and put his hat back on. Then he hoisted the ax over his right shoulder. When he was done with her hair, she’d ask him to chop up the bracelet, too. To splinter it, turn it to shavings. Or maybe she’d wrap it around the tattooed plastic arm now languishing in Hector’s driveway, the oddest offering in the “Come Home, Daisy” shrine. Either way, Shannon would be rid of it. Good riddance, bad rubbish. Irv’s blade flashed in the moonlight and Shannon knew everything was about to change. She closed her eyes and waited for the cut.
Natural Disasters
(May)
“It’s not the way I thought it would be,” said the young woman behind the blue curtain.
Birdy nodded. “I know.”
“Life, am I right?” the woman said. “Fucking life.”
“Yes, of course. Life.”
For once, Birdy was in complete agreement with the young woman and would not have minded the chance to expound on the subject of life as an exercise in disappointment, but the issue was, her feet were on fire. They were itching and burning and the skin felt stretched impossibly tight. She raised her covers and looked down, half expecting to see a five-alarm blaze and maybe a few hunky firemen doing their best, but her feet were just her feet—slightly swollen and in dire need of a pedicure—and they were all alone at the bottom of the bed. Nothing there for company save a pair of discarded hospital-issue socks with tread on the top and sole and no heel to speak of.
“When do the good times start?” the young woman asked. “Huh? Do you know what I mean?”
“I do.”
The young woman was Birdy’s roommate. From the shadow she cast on the curtain, she seemed to be pulling her hair into a ponytail. Good, Birdy thought. Straighten yourself up a bit. Birdy was often ashamed of the girl, whose slovenliness and stubborn vulgarity of speech struck Birdy as deliberate attempts to appear as common as possible. Birdy had been trying to transfer rooms since the day Helman committed her, but so far such efforts had gone nowhere and so she was forced to hear all about the young woman’s “difficult as fuck relationship” with her “sort of boyfriend,” who, when it came to choosing between Birdy’s roommate and his “lame long-term sig-oh,” was having a hard time knowing when to “shit” or “get off the pot.” Birdy couldn’t remember the woman’s name and she’d never even asked Birdy for hers, so the woman talked to Birdy like someone she’d known all her life, no preface, no preamble, no pleasantries, which made sense really, because there was nothing pleasant about the psych ward of a large county hospital.
“No one ever promised me a goddamned rose garden, but still,” the woman said.
“Still,” Birdy whispered. Her feet had stopped itching, but now the fire had somehow jumped her body and was burning near her hairline. Her follicles were tree trunks and her skin the wildfire raging out of control. Birdy could almost hear the roar of the wind and the flames. She reached her hand up, touched her head. Nothing there either. All systems normal, except for the sweat dripping down the side of her face. Birdy supposed it was withdrawal—the doctors and nurses warned her it might be like this—but the knowledge didn’t comfort her much. She wanted desperately for all of this to end, to go home where she could pretend young women like her roommate didn’t exist outside of reality television shows and Judge Judy. But she knew she was stuck where she was for another forty-eight hours at least, and in the meantime, she’d settle for the day nurse, who often called her “Betty,” coming in with a cool cloth, a sharp word, and a tranquilizer. She pressed the red call button beside her bed.
“She’s not going to like that,” the young woman said.
“Like what?” Birdy asked.
“The nurse was just in here. Don’t you remember? Like ten minutes ago. She said if you pressed that call button again in the next hour, she was going to eat you for breakfast. Also lunch. Maybe dinner, if there was anything left.”
“Oh, well.” The flames, the smoke, the burn. Birdy gritted her teeth. Who did this trashy woman think she was? “This is an emergency.”
“That’s what you said before.”
Birdy was in for alcohol abuse and prescription painkiller addiction. Helman told the admitting nurse—a man with a full sleeve of tattoos and dime-sized holes in his ears—he was worried that if she didn’t get help soon, his wife might end up hurting herself. Birdy tried to tell the nurse that she didn’t know how she could possibly hurt herself when she couldn’t feel a thing, not her bad back thank God, not her legs or arms or hands, not even her own nose, but there was such a faulty connection between her brain and her mouth that she had no choice but to sign whatever paper was put in front of her.
The woman behind the blue curtain was in for exhaustion.
“I’m so tired,” the woman said now. Her hair in a neat ponytail, she seemed to have moved on to her makeup. Birdy watched her apply what appeared to be mascara. Also eyeliner. So the boyfriend would be here soon. That was the only time the woman took any real care with her appearance.
“I thought I was tired before, but I didn’t really know tired until now. I want to sleep and sleep and sleep and never wake up.”
“But if you did, that boyfriend of yours would be sad.”
“Yeah, right. He doesn’t give a shit about me. All he cares about is his own skin.”
Birdy supposed that was true. She thought the same might be said of Helman. Just look at what he’d done to their family. Ruined them. He could blame the overzealous cops and the overreaching government all he liked, but neither the cops nor the government forced him to transform their respectable and reputable family business into something illegal and shameful. Did Randy Richardville insist that Helman go into deep debt purchasing more cows than their more than competent staff could possibly milk in a day? No. Did President Obama put a gun to Helman’s head and tell him he had to partner with that shady handlebar-mustached broker from Texas who, the night Helman invited him to their home for dinner, spilled two—not one, two—glasses
of red wine on Birdy’s best Oriental rug and, insult to injury, used the prettiest part as an ashtray? Most certainly not.
Couldn’t Helman and Mr. Mustache have done all their dirty work on the phone? Over the Internet? Perish the thought. Helman had this weird obsession with looking men in the eye. And shaking their hand. Mr. Mustache must have been very steady and firm, because, the dinner done and Birdy’s rug a clear goner, Helman declared that they’d be firing all their nice, English-speaking employees and swapping them for Mr. Mustache’s human cargo, scheduled to arrive in a week. Then Helman went and bought the crumbling Ranasack Apartments, putting poor Wally, who was not what you’d call handy, to work painting and sanding and scrubbing. Window dressing. That’s all that was. Birdy wouldn’t put a cow she liked to bed in that place, but Helman insisted on housing all their new workers there. He did all of this without consulting her, without asking her opinion on a single thing, and soon the dairy was buzzing all day and night with Spanish and the kind of behind-the-hand, sideways-glance laughter Birdy was sure was aimed at her. Even that laughter sounded like a foreign language. Exposing herself to the workers’ contempt even for a few minutes was painful. It stung like a sunburn.
The most time she’d ever spent around any of her husband’s employees was a few hours one awful and unseasonably hot day in mid-March when everything went wrong—a bunch of sick cows, malfunctions in the milking machines, no vets or repairmen around for miles, and Helman stubbornly refusing to let the workers go home at the normal time. He hoped, it seemed, that they would be able to bring about some miraculous cure for both the cows and the machines. What happened instead was several women passed out from exhaustion. Birdy wanted to call an ambulance, but Helman vetoed that, opting to have a handful of men carry the sick women into the house, where Birdy did what she could, putting cold cloths on their heads and speaking soothingly. She imagined herself a Melanie Wilkes–type figure, weaving her graceful way through rows and rows of ailing soldiers, but then one of the workers, a butch sort of person in a Daytona Beach trucker hat, shattered Birdy’s fantasy, shooing her out of her own living room and wielding the cool cloths like whips. “¡Vayase!” the woman said, her voice full of contempt. Then, “Useless. You’re useless.”
So Birdy hid. She divided her days between long, drawn-out shopping trips to Fort Wayne and marathon viewings of Gone with the Wind, The King and I, and Lawrence of Arabia in her locked upstairs bedroom.
Helman had started sleeping downstairs in the guestroom when the illegals arrived in town anyway, swore it had to do with safety, with “protecting what was his,” and to that end he kept a shotgun under the bed and a crossbow in the closet. After dinner, he disappeared, checking on the apartments, he said, but Birdy wondered what else he was up to. It was as if she didn’t exist to him anymore. When she threw out her back doing toe touches to an old Richard Simmons video, her only comfort was a slim hope Helman might notice her, pay her some mind. But Helman had no time for her. It was Wally who took her to the doctor and got her first prescription filled. And it was Wally who fluffed her pillows and brought her trays of food, morning, noon, and night. Helman could hardly be troubled to ask her how she was feeling. He was too busy, Birdy supposed. Too preoccupied with “bringing the dairy into the twenty-first century” to acknowledge his wife of twenty-two years. His concern, his love for her, seemed to have evaporated, turned to thin air. So Birdy turned to thin air as well. She took her pain meds as ordered and drifted. Eventually, she didn’t bother to drive to Fort Wayne. She didn’t watch what Helman so dismissively called “her shows.” She lay on her numb back and dreamed about being a young girl, going to sleep in her big white four-poster bed, surrounded on all sides by stuffed animals her father had won for her at the Spencerville Fun Spot.
It wasn’t as though Helman never visited. He did. Twice. But he didn’t stay long. He sat in the plastic chair by her bed and played with his hat. That or he took his glasses off and cleaned them on his shirt repeatedly. The only things he seemed to have to say to her were about the looming court case with the county and what measures they’d have to take if he got jail time, but it was all a bit beyond Birdy at the moment and she stopped listening once he uttered the words plea bargain.
She’d tried unsuccessfully to get him to talk to her about their son, about Wally and how he’d changed—the dresses that had begun appearing in his closet, the tights and bras and high-heeled shoes—but Wally’s troubling transformation seemed the last thing Helman wanted to address. He kept changing the subject to something he referred to as “constitutional justice” and the help he hoped to get from Hank Seaver and his Bottoms ilk.
“Hey, babe.”
Birdy looked up. It was her roommate’s boyfriend. He’d paused at the edge of the blue curtain, not even bothering to greet Birdy or give her a smile. What a winner, she thought. Standing there, shaggy, unkempt, stinking of marijuana. At least he usually brought flowers. Cheap, wilted grocery store daisies and sunflowers with slimy stems, but it was more than Helman had done for her.
“Got you something,” the boyfriend said, thrusting the bouquet away from his body like it was a baby with a leaky diaper.
“I see that,” said the woman.
“Aren’t you gonna water them?”
“Water them yourself.”
“Wow. The gratitude. It’s blowing me away.”
“You want gratitude? Spring for roses next time.”
“I thought you liked carnations.”
“You don’t know me at all.”
The couple’s interactions oscillated between cold indifference and hot, weepy desperation. The visits often ended with an argument about when they were finally going to get the hell out of Colliersville.
“We’ve got to cut bait,” the boyfriend said now, and Birdy watched his shadow drop the flowers on the windowsill. “Why are we still here, for fuck’s sake?”
“Can I heal first?” the woman asked. “Huh? Would that be okay with you?”
“Sure.”
“Thank you very much.”
“So healing. How long does that take? Roughly?”
The woman did not answer.
“The longer we stay, the worse off we’ll be,” the boyfriend said. “The worse everything will be.”
“So you’ve finally dumped what’s her ass?”
“I thought we agreed not to talk about her.”
“I never agreed to that. You agreed to that. You agreed with yourself about that particular situation.”
The pretty day nurse came in then, dragging a computer and a cart of Dixie Cups filled with pills. Birdy sat up straighter and patted her hair. The nurse looked annoyed and slightly harassed, but not as if she wanted to eat Birdy for breakfast.
“What is it, Betty?” the nurse asked.
“It’s Birdy.”
“That’s why you called me in here? To tell me there’s birds outside y’all’s window? Most people would be happy about that, but, as you’re so fond of reminding us, you’re not most people, are you, Mrs. Yoder?”
Birdy sat up even straighter and raised her voice so the nurse could hear her over the young woman and her boyfriend arguing about how he probably bought his live-in “for reals roses like every single goddamn day.” “My name isn’t Betty. It’s Birdy.”
“And you white people say our names are weird.” The nurse crossed her arms over her chest. “What is it you need, Birdy?”
“Is one of those cups for me?”
“Afraid not. These are for the second floor.”
The young woman behind the curtain had told Birdy stories about the “poor fucks” on the second floor. Lots of lost causes up there, apparently. Schizos, the woman said. Catatonics. Seriously clinical cases roaming the halls with towels draped over their heads and drool running down their chests. A barren sadscape.
“I feel like my skin is burning,” Birdy told the nurse. “Like it’s on fire. Can I have something for the pain?”
“I gave you
something for the pain”—the nurse paused and glanced at the computer screen—“thirteen minutes ago.”
The fire was in Birdy’s belly button now. It radiated out from her inny in waves of heat and agony. Birdy glanced down at her hospital gown. No scorch marks. No plumes of smoke. She folded her hands over the blaze. “Whatever you gave me isn’t working. Maybe the dose wasn’t strong enough.”
The nurse sighed and craned her neck. She was clearly more interested in the fight behind the curtain than in Birdy’s dosage. The young woman and her boyfriend had moved on from his “pussified” inability to break it off with “that bitch” to his unlicensed gun collection and lack of gainful employment. Birdy thought she heard something about a roadkill dog and lost or squandered milk money but couldn’t be sure. None of it made much sense.
“While you’re here,” Birdy said to the nurse in a tone she hoped was reminiscent of the one her own mother used when demanding what was her due, “I would like again to request a room transfer. The constant arguing and cursing I’ve been subjected to since I came here is a detriment to my health. I’ll never get better with all this negativity swirling around.”
“You’re in the psych ward, Mrs. Yoder.”
“Your point being?”
“There’s not much but negativity swirling around.”
“I’m accustomed to a more civilized environment.”
“That’s not what I heard.”
“Excuse me?”
“Doesn’t your husband run a dairy?”
“Well, yes. He used to.”
“Lots of mud involved? Cow shit, too?”
“Yes, but…” Birdy could feel the tears welling up. “I was born to better.”
She touched her naked throat and thought longingly of her mother’s strand of Akoya pearls, which, unless one of Helman’s new workers had stolen them or Wally borrowed them for a day at the Hair Barn, would be resting in a tortoiseshell jewelry box on her dresser next to her bottle of Chanel No. 5 and her silver-plated hairbrush and hand mirror. Yes, Birdy Yoder, née Rodgers, had married a dairy farmer—for love and when he was still the handsomest man in town—and yes, there was bound to be mud on her kitchen floor as she spoke and burned, but that did not mean she’d forgotten where she came from. She had grown up in a beautiful brick home on Peach Street complete with a walled garden and a solarium. Her father, Colliersville’s most beloved family physician, had made a name for himself and his hometown by pioneering a procedure that eased the pain of IUD insertion, which had proved controversial but not terribly so; and her mother, Eileen, was the daughter of Colliersville’s most long-standing mayor. Now Birdy’s brother, Rupert, seemed poised to break his grandfather’s record. Birdy had even gone to finishing school in Massachusetts, where she learned art appreciation and how to enter and exit political discussions, not to mention crowded rooms, with grace and poise. She spoke French and was an accomplished dressage equestrian. The Rodgerses were good stock, the right sort of people. None of that was canceled out by a little back pain or problem with the pills. Or manure, for that matter.
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