Ohio

by Stephen Markley

  “He drinks before work?”

  “Ha, just a couple. Then ran into Hansen at the Lincoln and a couple of dudes from around your year. Like they were having a reunion thing. Of course it led to trouble.” He snorted. “Always does, I guess.”

  Now that she was sitting beside him, hearing the smooth boom of his voice, breathing his tangy musk of sweat and dirt, she sensed something different about him that she’d never been able to put her finger on while watching him from afar. He sounded exhausted and much older than his twenty-nine years. She knew things hadn’t worked out the way he’d hoped. He’d gotten into some kind of trouble and lost his scholarship to OSU before he even took a class. After signing on at Mount Union, he’d redshirted, had a lackluster two seasons where he had to keep sitting out due to injury, and then tore his meniscus his junior year. Each time she heard of yet another one of his setbacks, she thought of him after he bombed the SATs or after the one time she’d asked where his father was: that hideous, hurt scowl. His certainty that he’d get to the NFL (which became her certainty) was matched only by the panic that he’d never get out of New Canaan.

  He was laughing about how Jonah Hansen had gotten in a fight. “Not much of a fight. Jonah got his nose busted and ran off. But Jonah’s got that coming to him and then some. Acts like he owns the town ’cause of his last name, but I’ll tell you— Wanna hear a secret?”

  “Sure.”

  “The Hansens—Burt and Jonah and all of them—they near about lost it all in the crash. The reason they’re still making money is they’re cooking crank and running pills in some of their properties.”

  “Really?” The Jonah she’d known in high school was self-assured but bland. Preppy and swagger-loaded. The idea of his straitlaced father cooking meth sounded ludicrous, and yet it had been a rough few years. People hung on any way they could.

  He gave her a knowing look. “From what I hear they got two or three houses—send it all over the state. Then Jonah acts like he’s some whiz kid with money. Like what? You think what you’re doing’s any better than the Mexicans selling black tar? Prick.”

  “That’s nuts.”

  “Yep.”

  She took a left onto Stillwater Road. The gaps between the houses grew. The lights of New Canaan receded. The dark country spread before them, lush farmland and summer-green forest awash in night.

  “You still see a lot of people from school?”

  “Not really. I guess anyone who stayed around. Strow and Jonah. Jess and . . . and Kaylyn. This place—man, what a shithole it’s got to being. Jess’s mom works for a dentist, and she says people come in and get teeth pulled just to get the Oxy scrip. If they can’t get that they’ll buy heroin. Nigger bullshit you can’t get away from. I was hanging out at Fallen Farms for a while, but had to cut that out.”

  “Fallen what?”

  “Amos and Frankie and their cousin Kirk and all them? Their grandma owns the place, and she’s totally deaf and blind, so they have parties and we go shooting sometimes. Those guys are turning into friggin psychopaths. Getting loaded and stocking up for World War III out there. And this one time, we were shooting at bottles and Amos missed with a whole clip, didn’t land a single round, and so he tosses the gun down and Kirk just—” He made a quick motion with his hand, drawing a two-fingered pistol and using his other hand to mime chambering a round. “He just puts his Glock right to Amos’s forehead, screaming at him about throwing a gun.”

  “Oh my god.”

  “I ain’t been back since that little incident. Don’t even like seeing those guys at the bars anymore.”

  He looked at his thumbnails, one of which had an enormous blood blister, like the surface of a deep purple marble. Tina interrupted him. “Can I ask . . .” All that time on her drive to think about what she’d say and here she was, mouth as dry as the drought that summer. He looked at her expectantly, tenderly. She thought of sitting in the stands wearing the T-shirt with his name and number. Decorated with glitter glue and stars you could iron on. “Do you ever think of me?”

  He snorted a laugh, and the sound made her ache.

  “We had fun. It was high school, though. You were what? Fifteen when we started? That’s not, like, true love, Tina. That’s high school.”

  “I was fourteen,” she whispered.

  “How come . . .” Whatever tenderness she thought she’d seen was gone. His eyelids had fallen. They hovered halfway open, fluttering. “I’m sorry, but high school was high school, Tina. Nothing more.”

  “It was more than that to me.”

  “Jesus.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry if you thought that.”

  A lump formed in her throat. “For a year I did whatever you wanted. Everything you asked.”

  “What you want me to say?” His eyes, red and engorged, shimmered. “Lotta shit didn’t go as planned. Or didn’t you notice?” His speech slurred. Din you.

  “I loved you. Really. I still do.”

  “Girl, you got no idea. You got no clue.” She wasn’t sure what she heard in his voice, but it sounded almost like loathing—the way he’d hissed at her the one time he spoke about never wanting to meet his father. “You’re lucky to have gotten as far the fuck away from me as possible. Everything I ever done, everything I ever touched. It’s just led to the next worst thing.”

  He pulled at the purple nail, looking like it was held on only by the slime.

  “ ’Bout to have a kid, you know. A son.”

  She tensed at this, all her muscles twitching at once.

  “Not sure how the hell I’m gonna do it. I get . . . headaches. Like so bad I can’t see or think. Tressel, back when he was recruiting for the Bucks, told me I was the hardest hitter he’d ever seen, and guess I’m paying for it now. I was a headhunter. I brought the violence. And I wouldn’t give it back for anything. It’s what I loved. But now every few months I’ll go through these times where I just feel like I’m losing my goddamn mind. Like my whole life’s been a bad dream.”

  The road carried them on. Fifty-six slumped farther into his seat, his voice drifting.

  “I did . . . bad things, I know. It ain’t like you know what you’re doing when you’re that age. You just do stuff. And no one’s ever told you what it means, so why do you care? You don’t. You just do it.”

  His eyelids slipped closed, opened, fluttered, and his words turned to scrap and debris. He ended by muttering something about “All the blackmailers coming after me”—nothing but nonsense trailing to sleep. Then his eyes slipped closed and his chin slumped to his chest.

  Tina let the tears come then. She rolled down her window so the sobs wouldn’t echo in the confines of the car.

  * * *

  At the edge of the city limits, there was a stretch of woods that ran all the way to the end of the county and a town called Morova (which itself was little more than a string of houses, a gas station, and a few churches). This was what Tina always thought of as Deep Ohio. These were the places where you got some hunters during the season, some kids playing war in the summer, and occasionally teenagers sneaking off to play with each other. But those cases were rare. Mostly it was the earthen depths of comingled tree species, a loamy scent, and floodplain grasses dotted with the inky purple of great blue lobelias. She remembered it because 56 had taken her here when the Brew was crowded. There was a turnoff for a dirt road about ten miles out on Stillwater. This road had a fence with a NO TRESPASSING sign fixed to the gate. Rather than a padlock, whoever owned the road simply left a metal spike in the latch to keep the gate closed. Fifty-six had shown her this. Tina left the car running, hopped out, and pulled the bolt. She noticed someone had spray-painted THE LORD LIVES over the sign.

  He snored softly from the passenger seat, breath whispering in and out of his nostrils. Her fingers slipped beneath her shirt and found the scar on her stomach, palpated it the way she did when she felt like screaming. The ridge of flesh a reminder, a relic, of the prick that went too far.

  Her senior
year, she’d been in her room carving into her belly. Cutting into the fat forming the spare tire around her waist that never went away no matter how much she starved the creature. She was in her bed, under the covers with a flashlight, the way she liked to do it: holding the light with her left hand and cutting with her right. She’d made a pretty good gouge into this spot on her abdomen just above and to the left of her belly button. She hated looking at this flesh, this pudge. She hated the way it amassed around her torso. Hated the way she could pinch it. She began digging the blade of the box cutter deeper. The fat swallowed the steel. Then she felt a pop as it pierced the muscle beneath. The pain was unbelievable. She nearly cried out, hissing the sound into her hot bed tent. Clenching her jaw, she pushed in deeper. Then she began sawing. But the blade kept getting stuck and she had to start over. Blood bubbled up, flowing over her stomach and staining her hand. The pale yellow sheets caught the blood running down her torso. That stain grew and grew. She kept cutting. It seemed the more she cut, the more her ruined stomach looked irredeemable to her. The scar would be hideous, so why not keep going? Why not take out this entire part of herself? And anyway, she knew about pain. She knew about bleeding. She managed to cut half her stomach apart before the agony wailed and she along with it. Which brought her mother running. She woke up in the hospital.

  They called it a suicide attempt even though that was not what had happened. She hadn’t been trying to kill herself. Nevertheless she stayed in the hospital for a week, and a woman came and talked to her for an hour every day.

  This woman, Dr. Marsha, had an ugly bob of red hair, that kind of old-lady red that looks nearly purple. She had a withered face and wore bright red lipstick that sometimes got on her teeth. She sat by the hospital bed and badgered Tina about everything. Her mom, dad, school, boys. Once she hit on 56, she never let up, made Tina tell her everything. Every last detail.

  Tina eventually asked, “This can’t get him in trouble, right?”

  Dr. Marsha stared at her. She had this annoying habit of not answering questions. She’d sit and stare at you until you said something else.

  “What I’m telling you can’t get him in trouble?” Tina repeated. She hadn’t told Dr. Marsha Five-Six’s real name, but it wouldn’t be difficult at all for her to figure out. The New Canaan hospital was the tallest building in the county but ultimately just as small a community as the rest of the town. She could probably ask any nurse with a kid in the high school who Tina Ross had dated her freshman and sophomore years.

  “This won’t go beyond anyone but us,” Dr. Marsha said carefully. “But let me make something clear to you, Tina. And I’d like you to really listen to this, okay? You’re eighteen, you’re an adult, but hear what I’m saying.” She tented her fingers, flexed them against one another. “What you’re describing to me . . . This boy and his friends raped you. Even if you think some of the encounters were later consensual, what you’re telling me is that you were drugged and raped.”

  How she hated this woman.

  “You don’t know. This isn’t— It’s not the way you’re making it sound.”

  “Tina. Honey. Listen to me. What happened to you—at least the way you’re telling me this happened—is not acceptable. In your heart you must know that.”

  She’d nodded only because she had wanted Dr. Marsha to leave her alone. She promised she’d tell her parents, but she never did. After she went home, her mom reverted to the parent she’d been years earlier, doting, nervous, terrified of the fragility of the only child God had given her. Her dad wouldn’t let her drive anywhere alone and gave her rides where they both sat in silence. She saw Dr. Marsha twice more before they found out her dad’s insurance wouldn’t pay for the visits.

  * * *

  When she thought of God she thought of him not as the risen savior but as a man. In the guise of Santa, her parents had given her a picture book as a child, the story of Christ’s sacrifice. Beautiful illustrations of the garden of Gethsemane with violet and green vines twisting into a coal-black sky and tears of blood crawling down Jesus’s brow from where the thorns bit. The picture she studied the most, though, was of Jesus in the moment before the Crucifixion, after he’d laid down the cross and stood at the crest of Golgotha, Roman soldiers and a swimming blue sky at his back. The illustrator had rendered this moment with such care, but most surprising was the expression on the young man’s face. It wasn’t determination or anger or love or any of the other likely candidates she would expect from the immortal, stirring tale of his last long walk. It was fear. It was an unsettling realization when it dawned on her that the Son of God could feel fear. Could feel alone.

  While she dated 56, all her friends from church and school became afterthoughts at best, strangers at worst. Senior year, she’d tried reconciling with Stacey. They spent an afternoon after church walking through town, talking about why they’d stopped speaking.

  “You got to being his groupie.” Stacey reached out and tucked a strand of Tina’s hair behind her ear. Her fingers felt so pleasant as they drew down the back of her earlobe. “You became somebody else, and I didn’t care for that girl at all.”

  It was difficult for her eighteen-year-old self to hear that and not grow defensive. Her best friend from childhood, whose house she’d once practically lived at on the weekends, who had the revolting and incredible ability to fart whenever she wanted, which she deployed to hilarious effect, whose brothers she coveted because she had none of her own—Tina simply couldn’t love her anymore. She’d become extremely close with Lisa Han, Tina’s least favorite person in high school. Vulgar, know-it-all, and cruel, Lisa stalked the halls with an unmistakable arrogance and swagger. Maybe Tina had dropped her friend for 56, but in turn Stacey had chosen such an odious replacement, there was no chance of repairing the friendship.

  “Are those rumors true?” Stacey asked her abruptly. “About you and him and the guys on the team?”

  It was the same panic she’d felt with Dr. Marsha. The same fear. She glared at the ground, hating that she could not meet Stacey’s eye, and therefore hating Stacey.

  “Of course not,” she said. “It’s dumb rumors he started just to hurt me. So no one else would date me.”

  Of all the things she regretted, lying to Stacey was close to the top. It was impossible to not wonder if things would’ve turned out differently if she’d had courage in that moment.

  Six years later when she met Beauty, it was like coming up for air. Her first real best friend since she was a ninth grader. Beauty spotted her reading a book about Lizzie Borden at lunch on her second day of work and said, “You’ve gotta let me borrow that.”

  “You’ll have to ask the library. It’s theirs.”

  “Then let me know when you turn it in. I can’t get enough of that stuff—it scares the crap outta me.”

  Beauty had a funky sense of humor, an ability to leave Tina gasping for breath over some absurdity. She called the Walmart regulars “the village bizarre.” It meant the people who came in frequently but only to push a cart, gab, blab, and gossip with whoever they could manage to run into, and who left after only buying a six-pack of pop. (In their dullest moments at work, Beauty did an impression of a character she called “Mr. Raithenth,” which was just her crossing her eyes and asking Tina for some raisins with a lisp. “Uh, excuthe me, Mith. Where can I find the raithenth?” It never failed to bust her gut and occasionally have her in tears.)

  And maybe it had been Beauty, a few years earlier, who first laid the kindling for an idea. Tina had been complaining about sleeplessness. She was working sixty-, sometimes seventy-hour weeks, her dad had just broken his hip, and she was so anxious trying to fall asleep, fearing the exhaustion she’d feel the next day if she didn’t, that she’d stare at the ceiling for hours in a self-fulfilling loop.

  “I can get you something to help,” Beauty told her. “My cousin in Dayton makes G.”

  “What’s that?”

  “G. Liquid G. People take it at raves and
stuff. The right amount’s like a really good sleeping pill and too much is like a date rape drug, so just be careful.”

  Tina turned these words over in her mind for a long time before giving Beauty the go-ahead. She experimented on herself at first, and the stuff did help her sleep. Then later, she tried it on Cole. It came in mini Ziploc bags of white powder. She was trying to think of a place to hide it where her mother would never clean and went rummaging through her closet. There was a box, still untouched from when they’d moved to Van Wert. Among the junk, she found the four copies of the Jaguar Journal she’d saved from freshman year. Beneath those was the picture book story of Jesus. Creased with wear, the covers fell open automatically to the page she’d spent so much time studying as a child, the one that began to teach her what kind of courage it takes to overcome true fear. What kind of love. She placed the baggie in the page and returned the book to the box.

  * * *

  Two miles down the dirt road, there was a turnoff into the woods. This wasn’t where 56 had taken her, but she’d noticed the road from the occasions they’d parked in the field. About a year ago, on one of her increasing number of visits back, she’d taken a drive to see where it went. She followed it now. After creeping through the woods for about five miles over leaves, branches, and the crunch of caked mud, fried crisp by the summer drought, the path finally terminated in a small clearing carved out of the forest like a bowl. The woods fell away, and she cruised across the tall grass to the opposite edge of the clearing. She parked the car and shut off the lights. Then the engine. Outside, the crickets chattered, and the fireflies made the night sizzle. She took a moment to breathe in the air, to watch the stars, so bright out here in the country, an indecipherable map to somewhere better.

  There’d been stars like this on the night it all began, the same stark, clear, cloudless sky. Maybe that was wrong, but it helped her remember why she was here now. Because she owed it to herself to return to all the corners of her memory where she rarely ventured.