A few feet from the bars, she stops and kneels down, then sits and crosses her legs and places her hands in her lap. Sometimes, when she looks on him, she even feels a little apprehensive. But she doesn't like that feeling; she doesn't like feeling that way about her child.
“Baby, it's Mama,” she says. “You know Mama, don't you?” But the child just looks. And despite a knotted feeling in the pit of her stomach, she's happy to have his attention.
Quiet hangs in the cold, and she holds her arms, remembering now the slowly drying red caked to her clothes and skin. She stands up. The child begins gurgling again and hits the bars of his cage with the palms of his hands.
“Shush,” she says, but he will not. “It's okay, baby, I'm not going anywhere.”
At the far wall is the washer and dryer and next to them, a washbasin. She walks toward them. “I'm here. Just hold on, okay?” she says, turning on the faucet. She rinses her hands under the warm water, splashes her face, and, placing her head under the faucet, wrings the grime from her hair. She bends down and unlatches her shoes, kicks them away. Then she pulls her stained dress off over her head and hangs it over the edge of the basin.
Standing wet in the chill air, the calloused pads of her feet numbing on the stone floor, she looks down at her nakedness and remembers how her mother’s funeral was on a rainy Wednesday morning four years ago today. Her mother had been sick with the cancer a long time, and when she finally went to her appointed glory, Martha’s father had given the most beautiful eulogy comparing the time they’d spent together to a green forest; though looking back, Martha can’t place what he meant by that metaphor. Regardless, the boy beneath the giant oak had spoken softly to her, had touched her face where she’d been crying and then tasted his fingers. She was new to this—she remembers his mouth tasting like snow and how he’d entered her body so smooth and tenderly that it didn’t even hurt but a little. But that’s probably just how she wants to remember it. The real truth is that after the echoing tremors of her first climax had passed, he left her lying there breathing deep and slow in the coarse grass and watching the sky darken, her panties around her left foot and a small red stain on her dress, and she knew she’d been cursed. But even that may not be true; maybe there was no boy; maybe, after the casket was lowered into earth and she and her father had returned home, she’d gone to her room to cry and think and pray. And maybe her father, with tears in his eyes too, had found her there on her bed and held her arms to the mattress, his grief surging into her body like a powerful waterfall into a gentle stream.
Either way, it didn’t matter; time has a way of making certain details irrelevant.
“Mrah!” she hears behind her. “Mmmraah!”
The child shrieks and beats his bars. She ignores him a moment and reaches into the dryer for a clean towel to cover herself with. She retrieves one and hurriedly rubs it against her skin, trying to sop up every bead of moisture and warm herself by the friction then wraps it around her bosom. She turns to the defective boy behind the metal bars who is gripping his cage tight and beating his head against it. He stops and stands still, quiet, and Martha walks toward him. And as she draws closer, it looks like he’s crying quietly, his small and weedy shoulders trembling and gently heaving up and down, and for the first time, he almost looks like a normal child. She sits again a few feet from his cell.
“It wasn’t always this way, living here,” she says partially to him but mostly to herself. “Daddy wasn’t always like this. He wasn’t always this heartless or this cruel.”
The boy looks up at her with dark and sunken eyes wet and droopy from crying, and she tries to see some semblance of humanity in them.
She tries very hard.
“You know, I remember, when I was little like you, me and him used to go out to the county fair with Mama, my Mama, and he’d take me to see the animals in their pens. I always liked the ducklings, but I always felt so bad that they were locked behind that chicken wire and away from their mothers.”
The boy cocks his head and bears his teeth. She can't tell if he's grinning or grimacing.
“I could take you too some day. I'd like that. I'd like that a lot. You like that idea, baby?”
He doesn't say anything. Just coos deeply and blows spit bubbles. And she realizes she hasn't touched him since he was growing inside her body. Since back when she'd hold her belly and feel him kick and thrust impatiently behind her skin as if trying to reach the wonders of the world he'd be born into.
“You know, I'm eighteen now,” she says. “I could take you away from here and there wouldn't be a thing nobody could do to stop me. To a faraway place to lay my bones and rest with you where we could both be happy and free and have each other always.”
She reaches for the small lock keeping the cage shut. She doesn't know the combination; her father never told her.
“I could take you and go away from here if I like. Nodody'd stop us, I bet.”
As her hand draws closer, the boy follows it with his eyes but doesn't move his head.
“I really do love you,” she says with tears in her eyes, “and I want to be a good Mama, like my Mama was—” She reaches through the bars and tries to caress his face. He snaps at her with his sharp and crowded teeth. She jerks her hand back quickly and wipes the wetness from her eyes and cheeks. “—but I just don't know how.”
The boy hoots and lunges wildly, reaching through the bars and clawing at the air in front of her face.
“I'm sorry,” she says. “I'm sorry.”
And as she stands up and moves away from the cage, the boy begins stretching his arms out through the bars and crying. Every night, he cries, but she's never heard him cry like this, and she has to cover her ears just to make the pressure deep inside her chest go away. She turns off the light and heads up the steps.
Back in the kitchen, she closes the door fast, but she can still hear him crying for her.
She sinks to the linoleum floor.
Later that night, just before sunrise, after changing out of her towel and into fresh pajamas, and after spending hours and hours cleaning the stain off the arm of the couch, she takes a paper plate from the pantry and places two Pop Tarts on it and pours a Sippy cup of milk. She slowly and quietly carries the small meal back down the steps into the dark basement and lays them in front of the cage. But by then the boy is asleep and has been for some time.
An hour later, she hears a bedroom door slam. Her father has woken early for work today. Sleepily she readies herself and steps out the front door and into the early morning dimness to finish her digging before he scolds her for laziness.
Outside, the smell of decay assaults her nose.
Then she sees the blackbirds in the distance pecking the trash bag she'd left there the nigh before.
Road
After her father leaves, she decides not to sleep.
The daylight hasn’t been up two hours. Her eyes heavy and sore with fatigue, Martha walks down the shoulder of the long two-lane nowhere road leading to Vivid Greene, and there are no cars, rarely are at this time of morning. Though there isn’t any reason for it, she kicks off her shoes, picks them up off the ground, and begins to run; she always runs faster without her shoes: the pads of her feet clapping against the gravely blacktop, stones lodging and dislodging between her calloused toes. The feeling of the world beneath her every step. Above her, power lines hum and dip and arch, stretching out into the bright infinity ahead.
She follows them.
After a while, she hears a motor revving behind her ears, and then a horn sounds and she jumps and lands hard on her hands and knees. Sweating and cold from it, panting and swallowing the thick spittle that occurs with dehydration, her lungs feeling frozen and dry. Moisture running from her eyes and down her cheeks. She feels awake now; alive for the moment, her insides washed with adrenaline, she feels her heart beat against her ribcage. She picks herself up, dusts herself off, and turns around. Behind her and creeping slowly closer on the far sid
e of the road is a Dodge Hodgepodge, apparently built from junkyard parts of various sun-faded hues, rattling and squeaking and coughing up a cloud of sour smelling exhaust behind its rear wheels.
She turns around, sees the car. Facing forward again, she continues on, her walking now slowed to a trot. She looks back as the car inches closer, and she picks up her pace, but the car accelerates just faster than her legs carry her until it's beside her, matching her speed. Then the passenger side window opens.
“Goddam, honey!” a young man's voice calls from inside the car. “What'n Christ's name are you doin' runnin' barefoot in this kinda cold?”
She stops and leans on her knees and breathes heavily, each inhale turning her lungs to paper. The car stops beside her. She pretends not to notice it.
“What’s the matter, can’t talk?”
She brushes her hair from her face and tucks it behind her ears then looks up. “Hey,” she says, squinting at the driver’s features, “I know you.”
“You oughtta,” he says. “I only stand behind my pop and stare at you every goddamn Sunday at church.”
“Your dad’s the new reverend.”
“Ooh, good eyes.”
“Why you always standing behind him?”
“Learnin’ the trade.”
“You wanna be a preacher?”
“Hell no.” He pauses a moment to think. “Well, if the money’s good, since I’ll probably end up taking care of my sister.”
“Something wrong with your sister?”
“Don’t worry about it.” he says. “Ain’t your monkeys, ain’t your circus.”
She smiles and spits a wad of foam onto the road.
He smiles back.
“So why you barefoot exactly, naturegirl?”
“I gotta run an errand,” she says.
“Barefoot?”
“I run faster without my shoes.”
The boy reaches over his passenger seat and pops open the door. “Get in.”
“I'm fine. Don't you have anyplace else to be right now?”
He shakes his head and grins. “Nope.”
She doesn't say anything, just starts walking again.
The car rolls slow beside her.
“C'mon,” he says. “What're you afraid of?”
She doesn't look at him, instead studies her surroundings then the sky and sees both are empty.
“Maybe the real problem is you don't know me after all, “he says. “But I'd kinda like it if you'd get to know me. I’ve been wantin' to get to know you awhile now.”
He then smiles a scary smile.
She likes it; she doesn’t want to, but she does.
“Are you planning to kidnap me or something?”
His brow furrows and his mouth straightens. “Now, why the hell would I do that?”
“I dunno, she says. “You seem the type.”
He smiles wide at her again and laughs.
She stops.
So does the car, and it sputters beside her, the passenger door still slightly ajar. She looks at it, through the window, and at the boy. She stoops down and slips her shoes back over her numb and dirty feet then stands up again. Then she steps slowly across the street toward the car puttering louder and louder the closer she comes and opens the door and climbs inside. Once she is seated, the boy quickly leans over her lap and grabs the door handle, closing it with a metallic bang that reverberates throughout the entire car, throughout her body, like a cymbal crash. Still leaning over her, he looks up and smiles at her and says, “Are you in a rush?” and she says, “Kinda.”
There are no other cars, so the boy lets his idle in the road.
They idle a long time.
Town
Martha buttons her blouse, her trembling hands fumbling as the boy speeds along the uneven road, seeming to intentionally hit every bump and pothole along the way. Inside her, the warmth of his seed leaving slow, for where, she’s uncertain.
She ought to feel shameful.
She doesn’t.
The boy drives her half way, and then lets her out. Tells her not to tell anyone she’d been with him.
“Okay,” she says.
Immediately after she steps out from his car, he reaches across the passenger seat and shuts the door fast, then pops the emergency brake and cranks down the still-foggy window. He then looks her up and down. His eyes make her feel weird.
“Listen,” he says after a little while, “You’re not alone, okay?”
“Yeah,” she says. “I know.”
Martha watches as he opens his glove box. Religious pamphlets and cigarettes and a pocket knife drop out like vomit from an open mouth and disappear below the seat. His slender fingers spasmodically shuffle the glove box’s contents until they retrieve a small, square, dark-red object; she can’t tell what it is. He then takes a pen from his shirt pocket and writes on the little thing.
“Here,” he says and holds his fist out the window.
She reaches over and takes its contents: an empty Marlboro matchbook; inside, a phone number and th
name Clinton in a barely legible scrawl.
“Alright?” he asks.
“Yeah, alright.”
“Alright,” he answers, then revs the engine and speeds away leaving the air smelling gray and sour. Martha stands there barefoot a long time and breathes deep and slow until the smell goes away. When the car is just a small blob fading into the distance and its clinking and sputtering noises can no longer be heard, she starts walking again. After a few steps, she realizes she’s forgotten her shoes in his back seat.
She walks a while.
When the sun is nearly an hour higher in the sky, she reaches town. A runners pace away, the road becomes a series of intersections surrounded by green and browning grass and tall tall oaks dripping their Autumn-kissed leaves like paint from an artist’s brush: a wall of warm colors inviting her like an opening gate. And just beyond that, a landscape of burgundy houses and small colorful shops parting like the Jordan, revealing a tall church steeple jutting from the town’s center.
The sign at the border reads, Vivid Green: Home of the Famous Whistleblower Family Cafe.
Stepping over the invisible boarder line separating it from the outside world, Martha enters the town. Inside, people are shuffling to and fro with the dry leaves the wind carries across the streets and sidewalks. She walks, mesmerized by the colors of everything. At the first intersection, she stands at it’s center and looks at the sky a long time until a car swerves slow around her and moseys away, so she turns left and follows it down the street until she reaches a collection of squat brick buildings—four on each side, and all with porches painted a different pastel shade. Something darts across the street a little ways in front of her, something large and moving quick yet clumsy, like an injured dog, and crashes through a thick hedgerow of evergreen bushes and vanishes. She moves closer, watches the hedge for movement, keeping her eyes on the bald spot where the whatever-the-hell-it-was knocked away branches and leaves as it dove into obscurity, but nothing.
She passes it and sprints away toward the third row home down, the one on the right hand side so she has to cross the street to get to it, with the chipping-blue-painted railings and the rusty-white-painted aluminum screen door with Gothic shapes curling around the borders and smudged-yellow-painted plywood sign resting in the porch swing that read, Whistleblower Family Cafe and Corner Market, and below that, Come On In We're Open, and she steps up the stoop steps and across the porchwood and pushes the door open, walks inside as a cowbell clunkles over her head. Inside, the air smells damp and sweet, and the light is a burnt-yellow dimness.
Store
“Well, hello,” the man behind the register says and tips his fishing cap with his thumb and grins through his thick gray mustache. As he does, his jaw juts forward and opens, his upper lip retreating slightly, and Martha sees either all his upper teeth are missing or the few remaining are rotted black.
Martha nods at him.
&nb
sp; “Where’re your shoes, honey?”
She looks down at her feet, then shrugs at him without lifting her eyes.
“Got Crocs hanging near the back. Not the real ones, but they’ll do just as good.
“Okay.”
“Can I do you for something?”
“Baby food, I guess,” she says. “But what do you give an almost-three-year-old?”
The man looks her up and down. “He yours?” he asks after a pause.
Martha hesitates before answering, “Uh-huh.”
“Who did it to you, young lady?” he asked, his voice now firm.
She doesn’t say anything.
“Then I take it you got one of those things, then. Want to know what to feed it? Wild clover honey, the rawer the better. Straight out a bees asshole, if you can find it. Then pray the kid gets the botulism. You’ll be better off, take my word.”
She doesn’t say anything after that but looks down again and walks toward where he told her the shoes are. He doesn’t say anything else either but keeps eying her up and down as she passes. Martha steps toward the sandal rack, lifts off a yellow pair held together with a cardboard backing. There are a few other people in the store too. Three by Martha’s count, two middle-aged men in tee shirts and khakis and an older, obese woman in a sundress and riding a red power scooter, all in a circle and chittering a faint conversation:
“But what of your grandbaby?” one man asks.
“I ain’t got any grandbaby,” says the other.
“But your daughter—”
“What of her?”
“She was big with child last time I seen her at—”
“She just got fat is all.”
“But I’d seen her with a stroller just last week,” the woman says. “Must’ve been a baby in it, lest she’d up and gone loony or something.”
“Ain’t no baby,” the other man says. “She did found that animal down by the riverside.”
“You can’t find babies by the river. What, do you think she got a Moses or something?” says the woman.
“I told you once, and I’ll tell you again: That animal ain’t no baby. And sure as shit it ain’t no Moses, neither. Shame of the Lord, what it is.”
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