Unaware of the intrigues plaguing greater Hope, Clarissa noticed that her butterfly garden was holding up to the scorching weather with aplomb but that the yarrow she’d planted two days prior next to the house and studio needed water. The cilantro had gone to seed, and caterpillars were sucking the life out of much of her parsley, but that was okay. She’d planted extra just for that purpose—some parsley for her, some nutrition for the future butterflies. She wandered through the rose garden, not realizing that Olga Villada was also there, admiring a white rose named Moon Dance that smelled of raspberries.
Determined not to let the models’ presence linger in any way, Clarissa walked past each bush, subconsciously laying down scent (little wonder she couldn’t shake the image of a snail leaving a trail of glimmering dew), sometimes touching a leaf, a petal, a nascent bloom.
Clarissa, in her short six months on this gentleman’s farm, had planted an exuberant garden: hybrid teas, floribundas, David Austin English roses. And so many colors: reds, lilacs, peaches, pinks, creams, yellows. While she loved the roses, she abhorred most of their names. So as her scent settled amid the foliage, she decided to give them new ones. The pedestrian-named Outrageous Floribunda, an orange rose that smelled like cayenne, honey, and citrus? Clarissa pinched a fiery petal and said, “From here on out, you’re my Hell Hath No Fury Floribunda.” The Peace Rose could keep its name, as could Black Magic, Moon Dance, and Wildfire. But the Ronald Reagan Rose definitely needed to get out of politics. “I name you Red Hot Mama Rose.” Clarissa laughed and was amazed that she had not yet been mosquito bit. She did not know that aphids—glutinous monsters that resembled tiny woolen commas—were multiplying in alarming numbers on the cool, dark undersides of the leaves.
But Olga Villada did. She walked behind Clarissa, running her hand over each bush, the scent of sorrowful death killing the sap-sucking insects. And if Clarissa had looked closely at the ground, she would have seen hundreds of dead mosquitoes; the little bloodsuckers fell like Satan’s snowflakes when they flew within fifteen feet of Olga Villada.
Clarissa stepped out of the rose garden and into the clearing. She walked right past the snake’s shed skin, totally missing it, and stared up at the sky, studying the sun’s zenith. Olga Villada ventured near, smelling of swamp, stinkweed, verbena, and magnolia. Clarissa breathed in the scent and decided that this was a good day, despite her decaying marriage. She pushed her hair off her face, exposing it all—cheekbones, forehead, chin, and neck—to the full measure of the sun. Then she remembered what she had told her husband. Could she be lucky enough to have wandered outside at just the precise moment? She gazed at the thick grass carpeting the earth where she stood: green blades dotted here and there with tiny black mosquito carcasses. She looked to the sky and then again to the earth. She waved her hand, shook her foot. Nothing.
“Woohoo!” she said, flinging her arms. She possessed no shadow. None at all. The solstice sun was a shadow stealer. She spun—once, twice, three times. She wondered how many people on the planet were aware of their brief, shadowless existence. And, she wanted to know, was her body chemistry, her cellular road map, her blood pressure, altered by being, for only a few moments, relieved of the burden of carrying the weight of one’s own shadow?
Olga Villada watched her spin and thought that with a little training, she could be a fine flamenco dancer. She had the legs for it. If circumstances were different, she would teach her. Inside her self, which in death looked like an infinite hall of mirrors, Olga Villada heard her father playing alegrías. She danced one full bar; she swirled her foot, threw back her head, showed some calf. She still had it, by golly.
Clarissa spun once more, this time slowly, in an orbit all her own, marveling—degree by degree—over the fact that there were no shadows. Not even the sentinel oak cast a likeness. Its branches stretched from its central trunk for, Clarissa guessed, twenty or thirty feet. It was ancient, already hundreds of years old, by the time Olga Villada bought this property. Clarissa searched the canopy and spied where she thought the herons nested. Whole worlds, universes just out of her reach, thrived—in the roots that traveled underground like giant, twisting muscles; in the thick trunk that was the center of gravity for all that grew from it; and in the tender new shoots that fringed the tree’s crown. No way was she going to let Larry Dibble mess with this baby. She placed her hands on the trunk. The bark was rough and textured. An ant scurried across her hand and did not sting her. Life was cooler under the tree. She pressed her fingertips into the cobbled bark and, without knowing it, dug two nails on her left hand into the tree’s soft pulp. As the whitish insides of the tree’s flesh met the half-moon curves of her fingernails, a shot of pure terror flashed through her. Pain crackled her bones; she feared they were snapping. She crumpled to the earth; had she just been lightning struck? She turned her palms faceup, facedown. Her knees sank in the soft, mosquito-laden earth. Of course not. It was a cloudless sky.
As she scanned the field and distant tree line, images of a crime she did not yet know about flashed through her mind: ropes, torches, bullwhip, one wild eye, a man’s forearm rippled in violence, a black man’s hands reaching through a space empty but for smoke, a little boy clinging to a woman’s long skirts, a clay marble clutched in his tiny hand.
Clarissa turned again to the tree, struggling to gain her footing. She rose first to all fours, animal-like and grunting. Something yanked her by the hair. She stumbled backward and felt the sinewy, rough braid of a noose tighten around her neck. She twisted away and ran. Gruff, mocking laughter—not a child’s laughter—trailed her. As the distance between her and the tree grew, her shadow re-formed—gathering its weight in darkness—inch by wavering inch.
Olga Villada stood twenty yards out. In the far distance, where the dogwoods gave way to pine and hickory, she saw her husband walk toward her, an exquisite fiddle in his left hand, a horsetail bow in his right. She hurried to greet him. There was nothing she could do about Clarissa, especially not with Amaziah watching. The young woman had, through an act all her own (or perhaps it was simply a function of her heart’s long desire to be of the world again), opened herself to a fissure in time’s wide scrim, unwittingly making contact with men of evil intent, men Olga Villada hated with every invisible drop of her gossamer soul.
By the time Clarissa made it to the house, her shadow was back and her husband was gone.
Son of a bitch, thought Clarissa, anger subsuming fear. She grabbed the hose by the back porch and twisted the faucet. Water gushed out in a hot torrent, but she drank from it anyway. He hadn’t even the decency to say good-bye. Furthermore, he was fully assuming that she’d be waiting for him—dutiful and obedient—when he returned. She had no idea what had happened out there on the swamp’s edge with the sentinel oak; must have been heatstroke. She bent over and let the water cool her neck; she could still feel the sting of that imaginary noose. She splashed water on her face and thought about the engraving of Olga Villada—a woman equipped with a bullwhip and map. Hell, yes. That’s what she needed. Clarissa “Bullwhip and a Map” Burden. Symbols were powerful tools in times of crisis. She turned off the faucet and looked to the western end of her property, where the red Dodge truck sat, moldering. It was probably full of roaches, rats, snakes, not to mention new life-forms. A mockingbird flew directly over the truck bed and pooped. Great.
Clarissa imagined it was she, not Olga Villada, in that engraving: powerful, no-nonsense, a get-’er-done kind of gal. What could stop her from seizing this day?
“Nothing,” chirped the ovarian shadow women (if Clarissa could have seen them, she would have been struck by how much, at this moment, they resembled the joyous figures in Matisse’s The Dance). “Absolutely nothing.”
“Damn straight,” she said, clarity blooming. Bullwhip and map indeed. She wiped her face with what was left of Iggy’s shirt and headed back into the house. She grabbed her gardening gloves off the kitchen counter and went into her laundry room (the one room in the house h
er husband never went into) and nabbed a pink bandanna from the laundry basket. She shoved them into her back pocket. She fished out her purse—the one she used most every day—from behind a box of tools her husband didn’t know she had and which she kept stashed in the bottom cabinet so that her husband wouldn’t rifle through it (Clarissa had a few secrets of her own). She shook her purse, heard the keys jangle, and thought, I can do this.
She left the way she came in: through the back porch. Once she was within ten yards of the truck, she caught a whiff of the stench. They lived so far out in the country that they did not have trash pickup. But instead of hauling their garbage to the county dump weekly, her husband had decided that the best thing to do was let it accumulate. In her vehicle. She eyed the baking, fermenting heap. Rotted garbage wine: Now that was a million-dollar idea.
What a mess, she thought, meaning both her life and the transportation situation. Here she was, stuck in the middle of the swamp, with no way out except for a truck that was itself a hazardous material. But she aimed to change that. She peered in the driver’s-side window, checking to see if, say, a rat or squirrel was feasting on the upholstery or a snake was sunning itself on the dash. She took a mental inventory of the scattered trash: candy wrappers, tollbooth stubs, a half-eaten and hopefully petrified package of Twinkies, old coffee cups from Dunkin’ Donuts, a six-pack holder, a stained edition of the South African, Budweiser cans, pop-tops, a torn and wadded-up photograph of de Klerk, a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket, bleached bones that were hopefully from said bucket, a stone. The good news was nothing moved.
Just get in and don’t think about it, she told herself. She opened the door, made sure there weren’t any critters sleeping under the front seat or curled around the pedals, and hopped in. This became her mantra: Roaches can’t kill you, roaches can’t kill you, roaches can’t kill you. She jammed the key in the ignition. After three chugging, gas-belching tries, the truck sputtered to life. Out of habit, Clarissa looked in the rearview mirror. There wasn’t one. She checked the passenger-side mirror. Gone. Driver’s-side mirror? Gone. She checked the gas gauge. Empty, but that didn’t mean anything. The gauge had quit working two years ago.
She couldn’t risk running out of gas, especially on these country roads. Her first stop would have to be the filling station, which was five miles away. Even on fumes, she might be able to make it that far. Then it was on to the dump and finally the car wash by the interstate near Dead Oak. Clarissa gripped the sticky wheel. She wanted to cry, to break down and have an I-can’t-do-this tantrum. But an old kernel of strength, one that if the truth be told she was born with, still had a pulse. She put the truck in gear. Luckily, she had no idea that as the truck groaned forward, a nest of cockroaches that lived under the passenger seat scurried over and under and around one another, teeming like a boiling clump of winged evil. Unaccustomed to this sudden movement, the spider in the glove compartment lifted one of its eight legs and repositioned itself for the ride.
Clarissa worked hard at focusing on the positive. At least she had transportation, as meager as it might be. And by the time she was done cleaning this piece of junk, maybe, amid the rubble, she would find the courage to defy her husband, put on some pretty clothes, and take herself to town. She turned out of her driveway, onto Mosquito Swamp, and saw that the mail lady had pulled off the road in front of Chet Lewis’s house and that the tree cutter was leaning into her window, using his one arm as support, chatting her up. Clarissa’s hackles flared immediately; she felt a need to warn the mail lady about this Dibble fellow, but the woman was gazing at him starry-eyed and did not give Clarissa so much as a glance.
Surely the guy didn’t fool her. Although Clarissa had to admit, there was something faintly sexy about him. She pressed the gas, tapped her brakes at the intersection, sailed on through, sped past the empty green and its empty fire tower, and took a left onto Tremble and Shout.
Though not a religious woman, Clarissa prayed the entire way to Dirty Dick’s Interstate Stop, Shop, and Fuel. Dear God, don’t let me run out of gas on this godforsaken road. Dear God, I have no idea how fast I’m going because the goddamn speedometer doesn’t work. Dear God, what a piece-of-shit mess my life is. When she spied Dirty Dick’s humongous sign that advertised cigarettes, gas, Skoal, and beer, she said, “Thank God, it’s about time.”
Considering the fact that she spoke good English, could read without stumbling over big words, and had all thirty-two of her teeth (a feat given what she had gone through to attain that lovely smile), it was ironic that a rush of embarrassment swept through her as she pulled up to the pump.
At the island ahead of hers, a woman who appeared to be in her fifties but was probably not a day over thirty-three looked at the truck, caught a whiff of the rotting cargo, cast a glance at Clarissa that was part horror/part curse, said, “Quick, get in the car. Jesse ain’t had all his shots,” and hurried her five children and one hound into a rusted, shock-absorber-needing, torn-landau-roof 1999 Buick LeSabre. Clarissa took note: It had both its side mirrors and a rearview; it did not stink.
I sure hope Jesse’s the dog, Clarissa thought, turning off the engine and fishing a ten from her wallet. As she slid out of the truck, reeking (her skin and clothes were absorbing the stench), a man who appeared to be in his sixties, with a head of hair so wavy that it reminded Clarissa of ocean swells, leaned on the side of his 1969 candy apple red Corvette, laughed, and said, “Damn, girl, I’d take you for a ride, but I’m afraid you’d make me stop at every corner and pick up trash.”
Clarissa wanted to smack that smirk right off his face; she wanted the gas he was pumping into his over-the-hill crisis to be so unstable that it blew him and his car to smithereens.
“Old man, even with that bulge of Viagra in your pants you couldn’t keep up with me, trash or no trash.” Clarissa didn’t really say that. But she wanted to, and it felt good even to think it. In lieu of mouthing off, she pretended to be deeply involved in the gas-pumping procedure, as if it were as complicated as excising—under emergency circumstances—her husband’s medulla oblongata.
Dirty Dick’s did not take cards at the pump, so she’d have to go in and pay. She hated that. Human interaction: For reasons she could not identify, as her marriage wore on, she had grown fearful of it. But she’d rather have to interact with the station attendant than trust that perhaps her husband had been thoughtful enough to leave any gas in the tank. If she didn’t have to wait for change, she could just slide the ten-dollar bill on the counter and slide on out, but she’d need to hit it on the zeros. She coached herself: When you hit nine bucks, pulse the gas in—one, two, three, like that.
The man with the Corvette shot her an Elvis sneer. “You need a man in your life, honey. What is somebody as gorgeous as you doing hauling trash?” He winked.
Her superhero self had an urge to stick the nozzle in a part of his anatomy that was unspeakable, but instead she put it in her tank, squeezed the trigger (the pungent scent of gas mixed with the stagnant aroma of rotting meat and vegetable pustulence), and tried to look as if she were not experiencing a total meltdown and that her toxic waste dump of a truck weren’t emitting a noxious cloud of fumes that wafted over the entire station.
Two little girls in the backseat of a late-model something-or-other said in unison, “Pew!” and held their noses.
In less than four seconds the nozzle clicked, signaling the tank was full. Worried that she’d done something wrong (how hard could pumping gas be?), she tried the trigger again, and again it clicked. The gas pump total read thirty-five cents.
The wavy-haired man guffawed and slapped the top of his Corvette, apparently delighted by Clarissa’s woes. “You sure you got yourself a full tank there, little lady? Wanna try for a whole forty-two cents?”
“Are you sure you have half a dick for a brain?” Clarissa reached in the cab and found thirty-five cents and a dead cricket in the beverage holder. She tossed back her hair and walked into the station, not knowing if she o
r her superhero had mouthed off. But one thing was certain: She liked the tap, tap, tap of those cerulean boots.
Inside, a long line of folks waited to get lotto tickets with their cold beers and Slim Jims. She wasn’t going to wait; no back of the line for thirty-five cents of fuel. If you pump less than a dollar, the gas should be free. She slapped the coins on the counter. “Pump number three,” she said, ignoring the stares. She turned on her heel and walked right out. Click, click, click went those boots.
As she waded through the blistering heat, feeling oddly more confident, she surveyed the scene. Mr. Wavy Hair Viagra Pants was gone. He must have prepaid. Six or seven men were standing around gaping at her truck, laughing. The asshole sifting through the trash in her bed backed off, pretending he was just walking by. The others looked away. In her soul, she dared the whole bunch of them to say one smart-mouthed word. She got in her truck and turned the key, grateful that it started on the first try. When she rolled onto the highway, she gunned the engine so hard, her tires spun. She cranked down the window, not believing herself. To hell with the heat. The wind felt good.
She barreled south on Tremble and Shout. Two miles or so from the interstate, it became a skinny two-lane blacktop that, if you followed it far enough, intersected with Poor Spot Cemetery Road, where, she presumed, one would find an actual graveyard. Or at least the remnants of one, even if all that was left were a few cracked headstones mostly swallowed up by leaf litter and loam. She passed a tractor-trailer that was moving too slowly and flipped on the stereo. Nothing. Not even the radio worked. Why hadn’t he told her? Clarissa shook her head and tried not to care. But the litany kicked in: She provided the sole financial support in her household, and look at what she was driving. But whose fault was that? Sweat trickled down her face, her spine, the hollow of her breasts. The world shimmered in the solstice heat. She drove a little faster, uncertain if she was within the speed limit.
How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly Page 9