“I just wanna know you, Edie. Is that all right?”
Her heart picked up when he talked that way, making her acknowledge things she’d rather keep hidden. “You gonna leave your truck there in the street?”
“You gonna let me give you a ride?” he countered. “I’ll let you drive.”
“I like walking.”
“You don’t drive?” He stopped in front of her forcing her to go around.
“Nope,” she replied.
“I think it’s too far for you to walk at night. Let me give you a ride.”
“I can take care of myself, thanks. Besides, it’s really not that far.”
“Okay, I wasn’t a very good host and I am sorry for that, but could you please just let me take you home?”
When she didn’t respond, he said, “Could you just get in the damn truck?”
“No.”
He smiled. “Fine, then I’ll walk with you.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“My dad’s at home.”
“So? I don’t have to come in. Besides, wouldn’t he want me to walk you home?”
“He doesn’t exactly know that I went to your party.”
“You still have to ask permission to go out?”
“I’ll have to ask permission till I’m dead.”
“And you go along?”
“Yeah, well, can’t really afford to do anything else right now, so that leaves me going along with it.”
“So, what’s your story?”
“You mean like family or what?”
“Everything.” He stopped and looked at her as if she should have known. He said, “I wanna know everything.”
“Okay,” she said, uncomfortably looking at her feet. “Why don’t you tell me what you think so far?”
She told herself that would settle it right then and there. She was sure he had paid her no mind, not really, and was merely looking to get laid.
“I figure you feel trapped,” he said, popping his knuckles and entwining his fingers together. “I think you’re afraid to break away, though.”
She tried to hide her delight in his intuitiveness, but the flush of her cheeks would give her away, she knew.
“Where would you go, anyhow?” he asked.
“I’m not sure where I’d go. I just find myself not wanting to be here.”
“That was before I was around.”
They laughed. Somehow, she knew he wasn’t kidding. There was something deep and dark about Skylar, like a pool so blue it’s black. Though she couldn’t put her finger on it, his presence alone made everything more interesting.
“Sometimes I think I’ll be stuck here and never know what’s out there. There’s gotta be more.”
“If you’re looking to lead a rebellion against the folks, there are other ways to rebel. I mean, the possibilities are endless.”
“For instance?”
“Like you could fall madly in love with some crazy stranger and piss everybody off.”
“What else, Mr. Know It All?”
“I think you’re a good girl,” he said, laughing as she rolled her eyes, “who wants to be bad.” He tugged at the hem of her shirt, which was once again tucked into her skirt. “Maybe you just wanna shed a little of that naivete?”
“I want to make my own rules, that’s all,” she replied, daring a glance into his eyes, “for good or bad.”
“Careful what you wish for.”
When they turned the corner on the last stretch of road to her house, a motorcycle was shifting through gears too quickly and pealed down the pavement leaving a trail of smoke behind him. Edie recognized it as Billy Charlie immediately and figured that he and Randall must’ve worked on it that evening.
“Glad to see he got it running,” she said.
“That thing’s a monster.”
“That it is.”
“You know him?” Skylar watched as the tail lights disappeared along the highway.
“Yeah, he’s my best friend. And he was my alibi.”
“Ah, best friend slash boyfriend.”
“No, not like that. Like you and the girls.”
“Oh, is that it? Now, we get down to it. You’re jealous of them?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Didn’t have to. I can see the way your nostrils flare when I mentioned them.”
“Look, you better leave me here. I gotta sneak in the back.”
“All right, can I see you again?”
“I don’t know,” she replied, flashing him a grin. “For all I know, you could be some mentally deranged lunatic.”
“So could you. I could be wrong about you, entirely. I’ll admit I’m not exactly sane and I’m not at all stainless. Not like you.”
“Who says I’m innocent?’
“Edie, you are stubborn to a fault, but I don’t think you know what’s waiting out here for you. That innocence is not something to be thrown to the dogs on a whim. Then you’ll be corrupted like the rest of us sinners.”
“Who’s going to corrupt me? You?” She laughed, a hollow laugh that said she did not find it funny.
His expression turned and the darkness that had shuttered his eyes earlier returned. He stopped, grabbing her arm and spinning her round to meet him. His hands cupped her face as he whispered, “I don’t think I could stand it if it were anyone else.”
7
It was suddenly apparent to her how very fast the earth spun round and how fleeting the time we are given.
She left him standing beneath the lamplight on the corner of 5th and Main, desperation at the waste between them.
And then she was gone. Disappearing into next to nothingness, like some pale water droplet unfortunate enough to fall onto cooktop concrete. A hundred degrees in the shade. Whispers in the hot dark. Randall sick with the stain.
She slipped along the hallway in the black dark and felt along the wall to the light switch in the kitchen. Feeling the switch, her fingers nearly flipping the lever, she paused at the sound of whispering and sensed someone in the room.
When her eyes had adjusted, the slumped figure came more clearly into view like an image in the viewfinder of a camera being teased into focus. The figure came in and out in this way, then shuffled off toward the study.
Breathing hard, uncertain whether her vision was true or had defected and was now not to be trusted, Edie followed.
He was there, hunkered over his desk, a scribe intent upon his marks. And his marks drew blood. There in the dim light of a desk lamp, she could make out the instrument of authorship, a white plastic pen which he assigned an alternate use.
The air was hot and damp and thick. She loomed just outside the doorway, too afraid that she would see what she half expected to see. Randall in the throes of the stain.
Turning from his bloody work, watery eyes, unfocused and vacant, sought the face of the intruder. Edie retreated into shadow and breathed a shallow, silent breath.
He was searching for her, she thought, sensing her presence just as she had sensed his in the kitchen. The stained hand, now black and shiny even in the dim light of the small lamp, slipped from beneath the hammering pen, falling down over the side of the desk into dark.
Footsteps in the dark, soft static steps that brushed against the floor, quicker and quicker till they were so fast she was sure they would run out of the house, instead coming, coming for her.
Something scuttled past her in the darkness, its breath and wind reeking of foul wickedness she did not at first recognize, but then dawning in her memory like a pale sun approaches the morning horizon. The door slammed to, closing Randall in with that reprehensible shadow, and she heard them whisper to one another, an eerie sing song ending with Randall’s quiet pleas.
8
Randall took the podium, grasping it as if to support some invisible weight upon his back like some wrung-out pack mule. His fingers clawed against the wooden podium, revealing bloody wounds on the backs of his hand
s.
The stain.
Whispers in the crowd.
“The marks of the spirit,” one said.
“Amen,” gasped another.
Edie closed her eyes and slid her hands up to her ears in a futile attempt at shutting it out. These ramblings had emerged at every meeting she could remember and were not discouraged by Randall or Shelly. All her life, she thought it a sham, a ruse to keep the sheep in check, but after what she’d seen in his study, she didn’t know what she believed anymore.
Randall lowered his gaze to the open bible. Wisdom from years of Sundays told her that his next move would be to raise his hands above his head, a marionette doll dancing for the crowd. Chewing on his lower lip, his lolling eyeballs glanced heavenward, searching for what he would deem to be a sign, but was really only the reflection of the sunlight off of the double paned forty-grand glass wall the ladies’ auxiliary dedicated to him last year, he pushed himself up from the podium. The next thing that spewed out of his mouth after he said the word “Amen” was, “Today, we address the untouchables.”
It was with the hushed swoosh of flowery skirts and crinoline dresses that the children were escorted from the sanctuary. Seemed that their parents thought the untouchables sermon to be a little too uncouth for their babies’ ears. A little harsh for the Sunday stories, unlike the watered down Jesus-lite they served for Sunday brunch.
No, this was Old Testament claw and tooth and stone.
“God’s word clearly states that paint of face, showing of skin, excessive jewelry or elaborate hairstyle is considered unlawful. A worldly abomination. And what do we do? We turn away. And little ones, I’d rather turn you out, run you out of town,” he slammed his fists down onto the podium, “than for you to infect my fold.”
The rolling eyeballs now came to rest on Edie. They slowly narrowed, accusatory. Brother Randall had passed his judgment, it seemed, and she wondered why she was there. Why was she staying? Hadn’t she had enough? She was eighteen, she could do whatever she pleased. And I should, she thought.
Thoughts of Sara Beth and Rosemary always kept her there. She worried that if she left, all voice of reason would be withheld from them and they might never know that it was all a ruse. Randall was no more touched by God than any of them. And there was a great big world out there to be seen and heard and explored.
Randall’s voice filled the auditorium.
Listening to it as she grew up had made her afraid that everything she did was a transgression and that there was no way she could live normally without sinning against her God. That was long before she knew the truth about the untouchables, who were really just people that had offended or questioned or otherwise threw a wrench in the machinery that her mother and father had so carefully constructed over the years. They could be anybody. Anyone who threatened their authority over the church was soon labeled as an untouchable and was shunned.
Randall leaned out over the podium, eyes roaming over them as if to pick the offenders out of the herd, said, “Come to the Lord. Confess, here and now, to all that you are guilty of. Be washed. Be clean.”
Half the assembly was shifting in their seats, whispers hissing through the sanctuary like a pit of vipers, watching one another and spying over their shoulders to see who would raise up. After a considerable silence, one or two slithered down the aisle toward the podium, fell onto the steps of the main stage, wept.
One poor bastard stood on the red-carpeted altar of the stage and slobbered and confessed everything he’d ever done to a church full of unsympathetic ears.
Randall removed the bandages from his hands, throwing them toward the first pew as if tossing alms to the poor. A collective gasp issued from the mass as he groaned from pain and the wounds, reopened and flowing, shimmered liquid red in the bright lights.
Rubbing his thumb into the moisture, he proceeded to baptize the fool’s head with a mark in its center and declared him clean.
Afterward, he would be hugged by each and every member, he would be told he was loved, and then he would go on about his business believing in God and mercy and the goodness of humanity. By Monday morning, he would believe himself a fool having passed half of them on the street without getting even so much as a smile.
Billy sat in the back pew, head down. If Randall knew he was placing a millstone around her friend’s neck, she wondered if he would have continued. Billy Charlie’s arms were already covered with the scars of his teens and from the struggle to come to terms with who he was in a town like theirs. In a place where millstones swung like pendulums round the necks of the young and out of step.
Randall, drunk on power, looked out over them, a satisfied grin sliding across his face, before going down to grant them the forgiveness they sought. She said her own prayer when he was finished, a prayer for the washing away of the stain.
9
Edie grabbed a short denim skirt she had hidden inside a sleeping bag and a t-shirt from the closet. Sara Beth was lying on the bed, ratting up the ends of her hair.
“You think dad knows about Billy?” she said, staring at the ceiling as if it had the answer. She flashed green cat eyes onto Edie, waiting.
“God, no, why? You shouldn’t even know except you’re a snoop.”
“Sometimes, I think he’s looking right at him when he’s preaching, don’t you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” Edie knew what her sister meant. Randall made a point to single Billy out with accusatory stares every time he gave the untouchables sermon. For a long time, Edie had struggled to reconcile what she was taught and what her heart told her was right. Turned out, her heart had been right all along, and it had given her a little more faith in herself.
“Why do they do it? Why do they make everybody hate each other? I thought we were supposed to love everybody and try to help people.”
“Doesn’t seem like it works the way they say it does.”
Across the street, one Mrs. Larramie had been fucking one Mr. Johnson for years and nobody was pointing them out and telling them they were going to hell, beating them down till they took their father’s razorblades to the undersides of their arms, praying the rush would silence the screams inside their heads. Then again, they weren’t part of the flock, one of the dead sheep that wandered to and fro without a fold.
After what she’d witnessed that night in Randall’s study, the shadow and the stabbing of his own hands in order to deceive them, some veil had lifted, allowing her the full view of the reality of things. The weight that came with that knowledge was unbearable and made her wish for the covering and the naivete of her childhood, even if she was deceived.
“So, what about Skylar?”
“What about him?”
“You two going out again or what?” she rolled onto her side, propping her head on her hand.
“I just stopped by to say hello. It was not a date. Besides, he’s all over the place one minute and then hardly speaks the next. I’m not sure he even likes me.”
Sara Beth started giggling so hard the twin bed beneath her began to shake. “The boy invited you to his house, dumbo.”
“Yeah, but how do I know what for? How do you know, Sara Beth?”
“What are you talking about? Sex? They all want that. Don’t you?”
Truth be told, she was afraid that Skylar would turn out to be more than she could handle. The way he had come unwound like some too tight spring had spooked her a little, but it also made her breathless and loose in the hips thinking about his strong arms around her, hands all over her, making her pant and sweat.
“I gotta run,” she said, looking back as Sara Beth slumped back onto the bed. She looked much like she did when she was five lying there looking up at the ceiling that way. “Love ya.”
She grinned and blew a kiss and said, “Kiss him once for me.”
Garbled voices issued from the living room, where it wasn’t unusual for her father to have company on Sunday afternoon, but whoever was with him was on and on, sloppy sobbing and
gibbering. It was a woman’s voice and a familiar one.
Edie slipped up the hall and pressed herself against the wall. It was Charlotte.
Billy’s mother gushed and spoke quickly as if she were afraid she wouldn’t be able to get all the words out. Edie knew what happened before she heard the words. “After church, we went home. Billy Charlie wanted to get his bike because he was going to meet Edie for lunch and then go up to the lake for a ride.” Her words trailed off into incoherent moans and it took her a moment to regather herself, finally gasping and blurting it all out at once. “He told me that there was something I needed to know about him. Oh, God, my baby’s gay. He’s going to hell, Brother Randall. What am I going to do? What will people say?”
“There, now, Charlotte,” Shelly consoled her, sweeping her hand across the back of Charlotte’s shoulders as if to brush it away. “We’re here for you. We’re gonna get through this. Mary Grenson’s son came out and then wound up marrying a woman a few years later. I think we should pray on it.”
“No, it’s not like that,” Charlotte argued, “he’s not confused. He says he knows. That he’s always known. And I think he’s seeing someone. He said he was in love, but that they couldn’t be together and so he’s thinking of moving to Goodlettsville.”
Goodlettsville? She wished he wouldn’t move away, but she knew why. The entire time they had been friends, she and Billy had dreamed of what life outside Barrett was like. If the people everywhere were so quick with the knife and dead inside. Sometimes, she suspected that the infection ran much deeper than the stain in their small town. Sometimes, she suspected it was fatal and had spread throughout whatever you call this space we live in like a cankerous, festering plague.
Edie slipped out the kitchen, holding the screen door and laying it softly onto its frame and crushed the grass beneath the soles of her white canvas sneakers.
Her mother didn’t approve of her riding the bike, saying she was going to end up part of the pavement, so she had already made arrangements to meet Billy at the corner. She was glad to see that he was there and hadn’t left her hanging, especially after some of the things she’d heard his mother say, and especially what she didn’t.
The Color of My Native Sky Page 4