by John McManus
Hours must have passed. When she awoke, she stood at a rest area studying a map of Tennessee’s scenic highways. It was dark, her head ached, and Austin stood behind her, hands round her waist.
“I spaced out a minute,” she said, smelling sausage again, while Jimmy’s shadow fell and the body crashed.
“You was saying about the difference between Tennessee and Kentucky.”
She gestured to the map, shuddering to think she’d nearly used the skillet the way her ma had. “There’s Tennessee, and there’s Kentucky.”
“I’m named after Texas.”
“That’s a different map.”
“You think I’m a retard?”
“Well, Tennessee ain’t Kentucky.”
Austin went wandering into the night. Alone, Betsy measured thumb-lengths south from the middle until a shadow fell over the display. She swiveled to face a pretty woman whose straw-blond hair touched the collar of her dress.
“Hello, how are you?” the woman said.
“Okay,” she replied with a gulp.
“When you were pacing, your gait caught my eye.”
Betsy looked around in the dark. Unfamiliar with the word, she had heard its homonym, and she didn’t recall pacing.
“How you walk,” the woman explained. “Like you’re depressed.”
“I ain’t,” said Betsy, sheltering her hands in her coat pockets, which was when she realized she had Wendy’s gun.
“So you’re headed south? What’s your name?”
Betsy was mulling over an answer when Wendy charged out of the ladies’ room, Helen in tow, and said, “What’s yours, bitch?”
“I’m Claudia Quillen. My husband and I are Jehovah’s Witnesses.”
“My name’s piss off, and we worship Satan.”
“Is that why you wear black?” said Claudia, as a handsome man in a corduroy jacket came over, holding the hand of his tow-headed young son. Flanking the man’s other side was a pig-tailed girl who called out, “Mommy!”
“Sweetie,” Claudia said, “I’m talking to these young women.” To the Satanists she asked, “Do you know Jesus?”
“We ain’t been introduced,” said Wendy.
“In that case, I’ve got something to show you,” said Claudia Quillen, pointing to a minivan parked beyond a picnic shelter where Zacky and Austin were kicking a hacky-sack.
To Betsy’s surprise, Wendy followed Claudia into the night. Keeping pace, Betsy trailed a few lengths behind. Trucks were roaring past on the interstate, too distant for any driver to see them looking so shabby, even ugly, beside Claudia and her radiant family. At the van Claudia opened the hatchback, unzipped a suitcase. She took out a book. Austin caught up and held Betsy from behind.
“‘If any man come to me,’” Claudia read, “‘and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.’”
The strange verse seemed tailor-made for the Satanists. It was like she could see into their minds. “So you hate your husband?” said Wendy.
Claudia glanced at Mr. Quillen, who had stopped some distance away. He was smart to guard his children in the shadows, Betsy thought, fearing for those kids herself even as she envied them.
“Daniel and I were loathed by our families.”
“Why is that?”
“Honey, strap in the kids?”
“They don’t want our help,” said Mr. Quillen, but he came and opened the sliding door. As their daughter climbed in, he turned on the stereo. A chorus of children began to sing “Do Your Ears Hang Low,” and Claudia kept reading, or reciting, given the path of her eyes from Satanist to Satanist.
“‘If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you.’”
Yes, thought Betsy, it does, but what place was this where mild-mannered strangers gently said so? She was still scouring her mind for memories when Wendy said, “The world doesn’t hate you.”
“Child, who cares for you?”
“So now I’m a child?”
“You’re all children. You’ve been wounded.”
“Ma’am, we care for one another,” said Wendy, which was when Betsy knew that the Quillens were in danger. Wendy didn’t call people ma’am.
She opened her mouth to warn them, but found herself as mute as when she’d passed by the school. “There’s only five of you,” Claudia said. “A child needs more than four other people to love her.”
“How many people loving her does a child need?”
“That’s the wrong question to ask.”
“Because I’ve dealt with a lot.”
“Just come in the van for a bit.”
“That’s what I was fixing to do,” said Wendy, reaching into Betsy’s pocket for the revolver, which she pointed to where the Quillen boy was squirming in the middle seat.
As hysteria broke out around her—Zacky chasing Claudia onto her luggage, Helen running for the driver’s door—Betsy counted the times her heart prodded her lungs. She’d picked up some ways to suffer through dread. While the kids were in panic, shouting along with their dad, she measured her pulse. Eighteen per breath. I don’t know how the gun got there, she thought in rehearsal, before she was pulled in the side door to crouch by the seat. “Drive,” Wendy commanded. Immediately they were bouncing into each other. The girl was shrieking. The tape segued to a chorus of children’s voices that sent Betsy to the verge of every lost memory as she heard Claudia beg, “Where are we going?”
“Your song,” Wendy said.
She could barely hear it over the engine, the girl, the whistling air, and the whirring of Helen’s swerves across the rumble strips. “You know this one?” asked Daniel Quillen, softly, distant, at the far end of a tunnel.
“I don’t know any songs,” Betsy said, which felt like the truth until the girl fell silent and she could make out the familiar upbeat ballad.
They soon reached the desert where Betsy gave out
And down in the sand she lay rolling about
While Ike in great tears looked on in surprise
Saying Betsy get up you’ll get sand in your eyes.
“She knows it,” Wendy said. “It’s about the county she comes from.”
“You’re from Missouri?” asked the girl, speaking for the first time.
“I’m from Pike County, Kentucky,” Betsy said, confused. It had to be a trick; Jimmy couldn’t have sold her song to the radio.
“Sweet Betsy comes from Pike County, Missouri.”
“It’s Olivia’s favorite song,” her father explained. “She researched it.”
“It’s about Pike County, Kentucky,” said Betsy, sensing that there might not be a song about her after all.
“It’s about the California Gold Rush. They leave Pike County to pan for gold but they never find it.”
“Kentucky didn’t have a gold rush,” said Austin, to whom Betsy might have snapped back, Do you even know what a gold rush is, except she felt even stupider than Austin. Because if the lover was called Ike, not Jimmy, how had she never realized?
They had left the interstate. On a two-lane road high above a moonlit valley, Betsy felt a touch, and turned to see Claudia Quillen balanced awkwardly on the luggage. “God put you at that rest area,” she said, echoing something Betsy had heard before.
It was Austin’s notion about the three-legged dog.
“He did it to wake us up. We may be giving our kids a good home, but so many kids are without parents at all.”
“We’ve got parents, fuckwad,” Wendy said, as if she too felt affronted by the idea of fate. The euthanasia shot, the fire, Irene, Jimmy, all of it meant to be.
“I don’t blame you for hating God. What do your parents do?”
“My dad’s on a construction crew,” Wendy said.
“And your mother?”
“Ain’t talking about Mom.”
&nbs
p; “Tell me about your mom.”
“Ain’t nothing worth telling.”
“If your parents don’t love you, that’s unfair,” said Claudia, louder, seeming to speak to everyone at once. “You can’t feel God’s love until you’ve felt normal love.”
“I didn’t say they don’t love me.”
“Sweetie, do you wonder what existed before time?”
“No,” said Wendy, as Betsy trembled again with the shock of déjà vu. It wasn’t a seizure this time, but a real memory of asking Austin the same question. How could nothing exist? How was forever possible? He had merely shrugged, but Claudia said, “Earth is a billion times bigger than Tennessee. The solar system’s a billion times bigger again. The galaxy’s a billion times bigger again, and the universe? It grew out of a single grain of sand.”
As if in awe at such enormity, Claudia gazed into the dark. The Satanists were silent. Maybe their minds were boggling like Betsy’s, sagging like slack ropes.
“Do you want to know how?”
“Yes,” said Betsy, as her song came to an end.
“Because God wanted it this way.”
“But what came before God?”
“What do you mean?”
“How did it all start?”
“That’s why we pray,” said Claudia, and Betsy’s mind quit boggling, because Claudia was no more curious than the Satanists.
She was paging through her Bible again. That fire was God’s blessing, Betsy recalled the milkman saying. Claudia’s reason wasn’t a reason. Betsy imagined Jimmy in church thanking the Lord. “I’m grateful for my life,” Jimmy had told the Lord, when his life was Betsy. An infinite universe, while she’d spent years in a trailer, seeing none of it. Now the Satanists were listening to this drivel without any argument. Had Claudia worn them down? Betsy saw them in happy worship together, the Satanists and Quillens, singing hymns. Only she shivered alone in the dark outside the Kingdom Hall. The tables had turned against her, unbearably against her, it seemed, until Wendy drew the revolver.
A sweet thrill brimmed inside Betsy. It wasn’t because she wanted to cause harm. For Claudia Quillen to live a thousand years would have been fine with Betsy. The gun meant she wasn’t alone. Like Betsy, Wendy was balking at a doctrine that called their misery God’s desire. To the two of them, nothing was a blessing. As if to confirm it, Wendy glanced at her. For a moment, even after Wendy pulled the trigger and shot Claudia in the heart, Betsy thought she was learning that she and Wendy loved each other.
Blood poured out of Claudia, soaking her shirt. Betsy saw it in the periphery as she held Wendy’s gaze. She heard Olivia scream and Daniel moan. The van coasted to a halt. Through the whole spate of violence—Zacky seizing the gun and shooting Daniel, then drawing it on Olivia, finally forcing the cocked weapon into Helen’s hands and commanding, “Your turn”—neither Wendy nor Betsy blinked.
The shot blasted the girl halfway out of her seat. “Now give it to Betsy,” Zacky said, as the boy choked.
“No,” Austin said, blocking her from Helen’s reach.
“We’ve all got to, to make it equal.”
“She done killed her dog,” said Austin, who must have thought he was saving her life. Betsy didn’t want her life saved. What she wanted was Wendy’s love. She hadn’t understood that until now. If it meant worshiping Satan, so be it. “Give it,” she said, taking the gun from Helen. Aiming it at the Quillen boy, she looked at Wendy again. I love you, she thought, before realizing her error.
The mistake wasn’t to love, but to admit to the love in her mind. She’d chased Floyd off that way, and Turnip too. Even her ma. She was repulsive to them all, and sure enough, even Wendy blinked and turned away.
Austin squeezed Betsy’s thigh. They were coming to a truss bridge. He only liked her because she didn’t want him—and why not, now that she knew she was stupid too? She couldn’t remember an hour ago. For all she knew, they could be crossing back into Pike County again. Driving to Florida with a truck of milk. How often did she think? Of course Jimmy hadn’t written that song. She pictured his smirks after he came, as if he wished she would shrivel to nothing. Déjà vu was when she lived out the things that had happened to her ma. Before long she would get pregnant, turn mean, go to bed, and a neighbor would commit her to the state hospital.
High above a river, Austin said, “Let me,” offering his life for hers, which struck Betsy as his dumbest move yet.
There was a hiss as the cassette switched sides. “Oh, my darling, oh, my darling,” sang the children as Claudia let out a few last sputters. That’s just agonal breaths, Betsy thought. It began to dawn on her what they had done. She wasn’t fully a part of it yet, nor was Austin, who stared with dumb, adoring eyes. Hope dwindling, she watched for a similar sign from Wendy. None came. Figuring she had one last chance for it, she fired, which jerked her with enough force that the Quillen boy took his bullet off-center and lived through to the trial that would rivet both Kentucky and Tennessee the next spring.
For years after the journalists gave up, the chaplain at the Tennessee Prison for Women kept probing: Do you hate Austin for what he testified? Will he never come visit you? Do you still love him? Did you kill for love? Why’d you think killing would make somebody love you? And how did it feel when Jimmy sent your ma away? It must have burned you up. You must have dreamed of murder, even way back then.
The reporters had hoped she would reply, “Yes,” whereas the chaplain wanted, “I was just a kid, and Jimmy ruined me,” so he could go, “Christ forgives!” She said nothing. The other Satanists had blurted whatever they could think of, but Betsy talked only in her head. To both Satan and Jehovah, she prayed for mental illness to set in. When it didn’t, she began to research other faiths’ devils and gods. The books she read led her to studies further and further afield. After a few years, she had given herself the equivalent of a high school education. Still, she never could seem to pray right. She would stroke the place between her eyes that some religions called the third eye, petting it with a finger, begging for a spirit to push through. None did. For her ma never to have taken her to church, not once, came to seem like child abuse. Even Floyd, a Methodist, had attended service alone. She discussed that with no one, but she touched herself often, until one bright day in the courtyard when the chaplain said, “What’s with your head?”
“I’m trying to go crazy like my ma.”
“By rubbing your head?”
“Spirits enter through your third eye.”
The chaplain touched Betsy’s forehead. “I see what’s wrong.”
“What?” said Betsy.
“There’s a hymen over your third eye.”
“Oh, can you fix it?”
Frowning, he flicked that spot with a finger. “One way to find out,” he said, and jabbed Betsy so hard there that she fell over backward.
Before she could take in enough air to yell for help, he was on top of her. “Witch! Devil!” he cried out, hammering into her third eye with five joined fingers until a guard came and said she’d had enough.
The two men walked away. Pain radiated through Betsy. “All right?” asked an inmate. Lying there on the lawn, she shook her head. Something was happening. It was as though spirits were pouring in, guiding her toward a vision of the future. She could see a van crossing a river. Bloody Jimmy with his bunny. The house fire, the soap operas. A vet’s office. A swing. It overwhelmed her like the sunlight, until she understood: in prison the future was just memories. She barely had any. All her life she’d been forgetting so much. Look how little she recalled of Jimmy’s years. In her mind they hardly comprised a week. A gnaw of dread; a few verses of a song. What a fool she’d been, praying for oblivion when it was already hers. The future was the past in mirror image, nothing else to it. You’ve always been providing, she thought, rolling over onto her belly to shade her eyes.
BUGABOO
I FIRST MET MAX ON my way home from the Gulp, a bottomless whirlpool in the Everglades where peop
le go to commit suicide. This was in 2005. You have to hike six miles along a blackwater canal dug by Andrew Jackson’s slaves to a remote lake where you wade out until you’re sucked under to drown. Your body turns up in the Intracoastal Waterway. I don’t know the physics of it.
For hours I stood on the pier girding myself, even threw my phone into the water, but then I chickened out and didn’t squeeze between the rails. I walked back along Jackson Ditch. Twilight was fading when I reached my truck again, miles into the swamp on a road I hadn’t known was gated until I found myself locked in.
To the left the grade dropped off into the canal ditch. To the right stood a tarpaper shack whose fence blocked the path I might have driven across.
My only choice was to kill the engine, walk to the porch, and ring the bell. Almost immediately a middle-aged obese man opened the door holding a bottle of Johnnie Walker.
“I’m locked in,” I said to him.
“They shut that gate,” he replied, gesturing not toward it but to the night itself, which had closed in on the horizon.
“What can I do?”
“I’ll fetch the number.”
“My phone’s dead.”
“Use mine,” he said, beckoning me into his home. I followed him into a dim room where some hard drives blinked green under a long table full of computer monitors.
“You a programmer?”
“Work for the government. Name’s Max.”
“That’s my name too,” I said. “What branch?”
“Guess. And sit.”
After I lowered myself into a chair, his screens came alive with satellite feeds of cities, plains, and, in the far right, a pier poking into water. On it stood a guy who looked like a skillet from overhead, his arm stretching out from a circle of black hair.
It was me, right after I’d thrown my phone into the lake.
“Care to see a movie I did?” said the other Max, hitting play already as he spoke.