‘Keep still, you moron,’ she says, like she’s talking to a jerk customer. ‘I’m trying to help. It’s not even that bad.’ She looks up at me, at Mike. ‘Anyone gonna call 911?’
‘It’s done, honey,’ Angel calls from the other room.
‘What did you say?’ the guy says hoarsely.
‘I said you shot yourself in the damn leg.’
Angel slams the door adjoining the rooms.
‘I’m gonna beat feet,’ Mike says.
The guy’s stopped writhing around. ‘I need a smoke,’ he says. I find his cigarettes and light one for him. I take it out of my mouth and nudge it between his grey, peeling lips. He squints up at me. ‘You been here all along?’
He’s still smoking when they put him on a gurney, hairy liver-spotted hands poking out from yellowed cuffs. Deenie and I stand outside Angel’s door in case someone needs to take a statement from us, but the EMTs come and go, and no police show up. It’s snowing again. We go back into the guy’s stinky room. Deenie washes her hands in the bathroom sink. The water drains away a brownish colour. I poke around his stuff and find a bottle of bourbon in his bedside drawer.
‘Finders keepers,’ Deenie says. There’s nothing to mix it with so we take it in turns to swig, gag, wipe our mouths and pass the bottle. I try to remember where Deenie’s parked. I realise we drove to the show and nowhere else since, and her car is still in the lot.
‘Fuck that,’ she says. ‘Why did you have to think of that now?’
‘How else are we going to get home.’
‘Can’t you call Carson to come get us?’
‘It’s 3 a.m. I’m not doing that.’
‘Maybe Angel will help us out,’ Deenie says, and we crack up.
In the bar fridge we find a couple cans of beer. We open one, stuff the rest in our jacket pockets and walk the four miles back into town. Most of it’s highway, and every time a car passes we have to jump out of the way of a storm of gravel and ice bullets. Deenie is remarkably uncomplaining, when you take into account the little heel on her boots and the fact she hates walking. Still, though, we don’t talk much. We pass the beer between us and drink it quickly because it’s too cold to have our hands out of pockets.
I’ve told Deenie a lot of things. How, after Katrina, when we were allowed back into our house, the first thing Mom did was pin the flag on the living room wall. The water was still ankle-deep and everything smelled damp, of shit and mould. She sat on one of the kitchen chairs and I knew not to ask how we were going to fix things. How I saw Mrs Gregory’s body by accident. Overheard one cop say to another that he never knew so many people couldn’t swim. How I stole all my mom’s emergency money just so I could leave her. How terrified I was when Deenie told me she’d got us a job at Virgil’s, ’cause I was fifteen and could barely use a can-opener, let alone carry three plates at once. I’ve told her stuff about Florida. Not the small stuff, though. The fruit rotting under the trees; how the smell used to stick in my nose. Playing hooky to buy weed with the older kids. Singing ‘Eternal Father’, my favourite, O hear us when we cry to thee / For those in peril on the sea, at St Patrick’s. People pulling into our drive at night to shoot up under the streetlight. The wall of the storage warehouse on NE 27th, where we used to write the names of people who died. The names of the neighbourhoods where we lived: Pine Park, Cedar Grove, Lamplighter. The confederate flag on Mom’s boyfriend’s car.
The bar’s long closed, and Deenie’s is the only car in the lot. We collapse in the front seat, clumsy with all our puffy layers and our frozen fingers. She starts the engine to blast the heater, and I tuck my knees to my chest. My ears are ringing.
‘You’re right about this tattoo,’ she says. Her voice is quiet. ‘Everyone and his bitch-ass brother is gonna ask what it means, and I’ll have to keep telling them.’
‘Does it hurt?’
‘A little.’ Her fingers skirt the square of bandage. The skin around it looks tender; the hair at the back of her neck is dark and downy.
‘You know what would help?’ she says. She reaches for the pocket behind the passenger seat and pulls out a sandwich baggie. It’s a pathetic bud, but we smoke it anyway. She fiddles around until she finds the lever to lay her seat back. She closes her eyes.
‘I don’t know,’ she says after a while. ‘It’s like it’s been cut with meth.’
Maybe it’s only because she said it, but I start feeling bad in the heart then. ‘We have to get home,’ I say.
‘Let’s just hang out here for a while.’
‘It’s fucking freezing. We can’t stay here.’
‘I don’t mean all night. I’m not in a state to drive right now, okay?’ She opens her eyes again, looks at me. ‘Are you in a real bad place right now?’
I say nothing.
‘We just have to ride this out,’ she says.
My breath is coming faster and faster, but I can’t get enough air in. The heater’s too hot; there’s too much touching me. I claw at the door handle but it won’t open.
‘What’s wrong,’ Deenie says. ‘Calm down.’
I’m yanking at the door but my fingers won’t work. They’re frozen, they’ve turned to cement.
‘It’s broken. The lock is stuck,’ she says. She opens her door and gets out, and I scramble across the console and fall to my knees gagging for the fresh air. Deenie’s saying my name. Her face is everywhere. She takes off her puffy jacket and wraps it around me. It seems demented. Deenie’s tiny and I’m not, and anyway I’m already bundled into my own coat. The extra layer is suffocating. But Deenie’s arms are right around me, strong as any woman or machine, and she’s saying, We are here, we are here, we are here like a prayer. I’m on all fours, my hands pressed to the icy gravel, and she’s holding me together. I stop fighting her. I try to breathe in time with her words. My body slows down. I can see Deenie again. Just her face, just one of her. She’s crouched, shivering. She’s shivering because her jacket’s still wrapped around me. Pieces of hair have frozen to the snot on my face. I sit back on my heels. The knees of my jeans are soaked through. My nails are all torn and bloodied. I shrug off her jacket and pass it back to her.
‘You’re meant to do that with dogs,’ Deenie says. Breathless, smiling. ‘Like, wrap them up real tight when they’re scared. I read it one time.’
She is a good friend.
She presses her keys into my hand.
I don’t know how long the drive home takes, but I sit on about ten miles most of the way. Deenie falls asleep and somehow that’s better. It leaves me to concentrate on the road, not what she might be thinking about me. Once, on Roan Mountain Road, I have to stop altogether. I mean to pull over to the shoulder, but I can’t bring myself to get any closer to the edge, the place where the earth falls away, so I just stop in the middle of the road. It’s black ice, snow like a locust swarm on the windscreen. I hug myself and pretend it’s Deenie’s arms, like before; that I’m held real tight and safe. I count while I breathe. Then I can start again.
When we pull into my driveway at last, I jump out of the car to open the gate and leave the door open. It’s the cold air that wakes her.
‘Oh my lord,’ she says. ‘It’s fucking frigid.’ She yawns and looks at me. ‘Hey. You did it. We’re here.’
It feels like something’s drained out of me. We stagger up the porch and through to the kitchen. My breath comes out in grey clouds. Deenie roots around in my cupboards, refrigerator, freezer, settles for a Pop-Tart. She doesn’t even toast it, just eats it straight from the foil package. She squats on the floor like she’s taking a shit. One hand holds the Pop-Tart, the other tucked under her armpit.
‘You’ve got almost nothing,’ she says.
‘I have everything I need.’
‘You don’t got a bed.’
‘I do. I have a mattress.’
The hot water bottle has cooled. I kick it on to the floor and pile on an extra quilt instead.
‘Flannel sheets,’ Deenie sighs.
>
When it gets light again I will get up and fix us scrambled eggs. Deenie won’t eat any; she’ll vomit watery yellow barf and lie in my bed all day. I will drive to Grandfather Mountain and do a walk—just long enough to sweat out the bad stuff—and stop for a coffee on my way home. Later in the afternoon I’ll go to work, and JJ will tell me about something smart his granddaughter said, and Deenie will show up but she’ll be useless and I’ll have to do twice my own work. But for now, we’re under the weight of so many blankets it’s hard to move.
Too tired for sleep.
We play this game with hypotheticals. What would you do if you got a thousand dollars tomorrow? We mostly ask the same questions. We know each other’s answers.
‘If you could move anywhere,’ Deenie says, ‘where would you go?’
‘Maybe Mexico. What about you?’
‘Nueva York.’
‘If you could do any job, what would you do?’ I ask.
‘I’d be an actress. You?’
‘What’s that job where you cut open bodies to work out how they died.’
‘Oh, shit! Like that show Autopsy?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I wouldn’t want to hang out with no dead people,’ Deenie says.
‘It’d be sort of like a puzzle.’
‘What happened to being a nature photographer?’ she asks, and we start to laugh. We’re tired and maybe still high. It overwhelms us. My face aches with it, the absurdity of these new bright lives we invent for ourselves.
When we’re quiet at last, she tucks her arms behind her head. ‘I saw this French movie once,’ she says, ‘and the man’s smoking, and the woman takes the cigarette out of his mouth, kisses him, then puts the cigarette back. I’ve always wanted to do that.’
She rolls over to face me, drapes her legs over mine.
‘You have to go back to school to cut people open,’ she says seriously.
‘I know that. I only said it for the game.’
‘Well, maybe you should go back to school for something.’
‘I’m too tall for ninth grade now.’
She holds my face in her hands. I don’t like her looking at me so close. She says, Can’t you think of one thing you want to do? I try, but nothing comes into my head. I don’t imagine working for Virgil forever, but there’d be worse things. He’s been kind to me.
‘Maybe you should have a baby,’ Deenie says. ‘Then you’d have something to focus on.’
A truck passes by outside. The headlights flash against the curtain.
‘You’re so weird,’ she says. ‘You’d rather spend a week on a mountain by yourself than talk to a stranger in a bar for five minutes.’
When the noise of the truck engine fades, the world is so quiet. I can hear Deenie’s breathing, the catch of my toenail on the bedsheet, the tick of my eyelashes when I blink.
‘I feel like I’m talking to myself,’ Deenie says.
My blood beats. By the time we’re warm, we’ll be asleep, I think.
ALPINE ROAD
Mornings were when they were most forgiving of each other. When they fucked now it was first thing, while they were still kind.
Before Clive got sick, he was always up early. He worked at the power plant in Hazelwood. Even when he’d been on night shift, he’d get up and make the coffee.
These days he might not get out of bed at all. Mostly Franca woke when Billy wormed his way between their bodies, smelling of sleepy toddler. She’d lie there feeling his hot belly pressed against her back, his fingers in her hair. She’d go to the kitchen and do the kids’ lunches, make the coffee. Clive’d be where she left him. Sometimes the blanket was too much for him to lift. He’d stopped saying sorry a long time ago.
He was having a good week. Franca heard him moving around the kitchen. The front door slapped shut. She sat up and looked through the blinds. There was frost on the lawn. Clive was barefoot, shirtless, carrying two plates of toast across the yard to the caravan, propped up on its bricks, where the older two slept. He banged on the metal with his fist. He shouted Gendarmes! It was a joke the kids wouldn’t understand. The door swung open. Emily stood with a half-smile, wiping sleep from her face. Her mouth moved. Franca couldn’t hear what she said, but it might have been I knew it wasn’t Mum. Franca never brought them toast with jam in the mornings.
‘There was a spider the size of a five-cent coin in the caravan,’ Clive reported. He sat on the end of the bed. ‘Kurt was carrying on the worst.’
‘Thanks for getting them breakfast.’
Her shoulders were wet from the shower. The house was so cold she could see her breath.
‘Listen, I’m getting Cate to pick up the kids from school today,’ she said. ‘There’s a meeting about the bargaining agreement after work.’
‘I can get them.’
She bunched her stockings at the ankles. ‘It’s okay. It’s probably best to ask Cate. So we know for sure. You know. If you start to fade by then.’
He was gracious. He said nothing.
‘I’ll pick them up after five,’ Franca said, ‘then come and get you and Billy.’
‘We still going to your parents’ for tea?’
‘Only if you’re up to it. Otherwise I can just go with the kids.’
‘I’ll be right.’ Clive scratched his ear. ‘What’d you say it was at work?’
‘The meeting for the bargaining agreement. I haven’t been able to get to the others.’
‘What’s the go?’
‘It’s all still a bit over my head. I know they’re talking about changing our pay from fortnightly to monthly.’
‘Well, that wouldn’t be the end of the world,’ Clive said. ‘We always work something out.’
Franca felt that sudden rage rolling in. ‘Who does?’
‘What?’
‘Who works it out, I said.’
Clive looked at her steadily. Franca dropped her head.
She went to Billy’s room. He was awake, one fist clenched at the corner of his sheepskin rug. He was two and a half and he’d had a name all along, but they still called him the baby. He sat up, beamed at her.
She made the lunches. She wiped the crumbs from the bench. The house needed restumping so badly that when she’d dropped the frozen peas last night, they’d rolled and collected in the corner of the kitchen by the door. The kids had crouched, pinching them between their fingers. Kurt said, See, Mum, woulda been worse if the house wasn’t falling down. At least they’re all in the one spot. He and Emily slept in the caravan because it was warmer than their bedroom with its rotted weatherboards, the hole under the window spewing damp Insulwool. They were good at making adventures of things.
Franca took the scraps out to the chooks. She stood by the caravan and tried to decode the conversation inside.
‘Look! The sun fell!’
‘Can you stop putting it in my face?’
She tapped on the door. ‘Are you two showered? We’re leaving in ten. Get a wriggle on.’
When she went back to the bedroom, the baby was in bed with Clive, in the curl of his arm. They had the same face.
‘It’s a real sickness,’ Clive said. ‘I’m really crook.’
Franca was helpless. She stood holding her coat. ‘I never said you weren’t.’
In the drawer beside his bed was a bible, a broken watch, his prescriptions and some foreign coins he kept to prove to himself he’d left the country. There were photos, too—mostly of the kids, but there was one picture of Franca from before they were married. She was naked, standing in front of a curtain. Shy pubic bone, one arm tucked behind her back politely. Franca didn’t like the photo, or didn’t see herself in it. She looked too much of a child. After the second baby she’d gone away, left him with the kids. When she came back Emily was eleven months old and didn’t recognise her. Clive knew nothing about where she’d been or what she’d done that year. She didn’t know if he’d ever trust her again.
Franca worked four days a week at the Latrobe
Valley Magistrates’ Court, all pale blue glass and clean angles. It had been built ten years ago, but she still thought of it as new. She was a stenographer. She liked the solemnity of the courts. She liked the drive to and from work. There was comfort in the skinny poplars, the long driveways, the husks of burnt-out cars in front yards, the gutted petrol station, the paddocks, the roadside signs to tiny cemeteries. This time of year, canola; fields of sunshine, the mountains. On Fridays she worked at Bairnsdale, closer to home. It was a smaller courthouse, set down by the brown river, two streets back from the grand brick building and the motels.
Clive hadn’t worked in two years, but before, they could coordinate their lunch breaks some days. It was about ten minutes from the court to the power station. She’d meet him in the car park and they’d eat their sandwiches in the station wagon beneath the brutal concrete building, like something from the pages on the Eastern Bloc in her high school atlas. It had eight towers, set in pairs, and red capital letters spelling out HAZELWOOD. When she’d been on mat leave, she’d sometimes taken the kids to the lake next door. Its water was used to cool the station.
It seemed like all the men in the valley worked there, or at the Yallourn plant, or else in the coalmine. Franca used to be reassured by its hulking brown shape on the horizon. You could see it from the highway for miles. In the right weather, you could see the plumes of shit it belched out into the atmosphere. Now when she saw it, it meant other people’s husbands.
The end of the day was the wrong time for the meeting. Franca could barely follow. She’d been concentrating on voices and words all day. The union rep was a young man, impossibly articulate. He said things like, There has not been a pay rise commensurate with the cost of living in five years. Waiting an additional year for that increase is problematic. I’m sure you understand.
Franca wanted to ask the right questions but she was giddy. Plenty of employers are going with monthly pays, the IR lawyer was saying. It’s to do with compliance costs. Workers can adapt. It’s the same amount of money.
It’s not the same, Franca thought, but the union guy was already saying it for her. It seems punitive to move from two weeks to four when you know you’re working with people already in a low-wage bracket, who already have to budget very carefully—
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