Back Roads

by Tawni O'Dell

  Screaming would have made me a nervous wreck. I didn’t want a screamer. I didn’t want someone to talk dirty either. I wanted someone who would look at me.

  At least that’s what I always thought. Then when I got to be with a woman, I couldn’t look at her. Seeing her eyes, like saying her name, would have been unbearably human while I was pumping away at her like an animal.

  I didn’t know what I was going to do if it turned out she left because I wasn’t good enough. I wouldn’t be surprised. I wasn’t good at anything. But knowing there was something wrong with you didn’t make it any easier to accept even if you knew it your whole life. Fat people never grew fond of their fat. Poor people never felt good about their crappy houses.

  I went ahead and jerked off anyway.

  The TV was going full blast and Amber’s radio was blaring when I woke up. I spent as little time as possible in the kitchen finding something to eat. There were two pieces of leftover frozen pizza sitting on the stove. I scarfed them down and grabbed the last Mountain Dew.

  I slipped out the back door. The day had turned out as nice as the morning. Not too hot; not too cool. Blue sky and fluffy white clouds. Bank calendar weather.

  I walked around front and surveyed the place. It wasn’t a bad house as cheap little prefab vinyl-sided shitboxes went. The original house was kind of cute: gray with brick-red shutters and a front porch Dad had built for Mom as a first-anniversary present with white wooden railings and green shingles on the roof.

  When Mom got pregnant with Misty, they decided to build on another bedroom. Mom had been promising me one anyway because Amber and I were getting too old to share a room, and I was too young for them to already be thinking about kicking me into the basement.

  Dad and Uncle Mike and Uncle Jim decided to do it on their own. Between the three of them, they had the know-how and the tools. What they lacked was an attention span. They were like kids together. Shaking up their beer cans and squirting each other. Having belching contests. Quitting in the middle to go fishing or watch a Pirates game.

  It took them two years to finish it. The first winter they covered the insulation with plastic sheeting. The next winter with fiberglass. Dad finally got a deal on some used siding he couldn’t pass up. It was brown but he promised Mom he would paint the whole house the same color some day. He never did.

  My folks gave me the room on my ninth birthday. Mom stretched a big red ribbon across the doorway and had me cut it with a pair of scissors like it was the grand opening of a new county dump. My bed was already in it, made up with a new set of Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtle sheets. Dad had sacrificed the chest of drawers he used in the shed for his odds and ends crap, and Mom had fixed it up and painted it green to match the turtles. On top of it stood the pencil holder Amber had made for me out of a soup can, construction paper, and glitter.

  They all stood there waiting: Dad with his hand resting on Mom’s shoulder; baby Misty on Mom’s hip; Amber grinning from ear to ear in her pink ballerina Halloween costume she had insisted on wearing to my birthday dinner. I could see chocolate cake crumbs caught in the tutu netting.

  They were expecting me to be thrilled even though they knew I wanted a Stretch Armstrong and the Graverobber, a remote control monster truck from Radio Shack.

  My eyes filled with tears. It wasn’t that I didn’t want the room. I did. It’s that I thought the room was owed to me.

  I was too stunned to speak at first, but I finally found my voice and shouted something about every kid in America getting the Graverobber for Christmas except for me, and how this was the worst birthday any kid ever had. I didn’t care that I was going to get the shit kicked out of me for doing it. I tore out of the house, ran across the road, through the clearing, and into the first belt of trees.

  To my surprise, Dad followed hot on my heels. He wasn’t a chaser by nature. If he didn’t catch you on his first couple lunges, he settled back into the camouflage of his couch like a big cat lowering himself into the high grasses of a savanna, and he waited for you to forget.

  And I wasn’t a runner. I always stayed and took my punishments because I liked getting them over with and because it was easier to withstand a beating when you weren’t winded. This time was different though and we both knew it. I wasn’t running away from Dad. I was running away from my life, and Dad was chasing me because I had felt the need to.

  I did a good job of staying ahead of him until I suddenly conveniently tripped over my own feet like some idiot in a horror film. Dad caught me easily by the arm and threw a roundhouse punch which missed my face but hit me square in the chest and knocked me on my butt. I landed on a bed of black lick: what the natural salt licks are called around here because they’re tainted black by the coal in the ground.

  I looked down and saw the dark salt showing through in a big patch like a dried-up scab on the hillside. I used to wonder if the black licks were safe for the deer since there was so much coal in them. I used to feel sorry for them because they were dumb animals until I came to realize instinct would always drag them back even if they were smart enough to understand that what they were doing was slowly killing them.

  Dad pulled me up and hit me once more. I knew he was going to have to do it. I knew he needed to hit me in the face successfully before he could relax since that had been his original intention. I didn’t take it personally. I wasn’t his son or even a person at that point; I was a task.

  Then he grabbed me by the arm and escorted me home. He opened the door of the truck and pushed me inside. I sat perfectly still except for the violent shaking going on inside me.

  Mom came out on the porch and started screaming at him. They yelled back and forth for a couple minutes. None of it was about me. Mom went on about how hard she had worked on my dresser, and Dad shouted back that he was the one who built the whole fucking room and if she wanted to live in a goddamned palace she should have never married him in the first place. Then Mom started screaming about how the ice cream was melting and the cake was drying out.

  Amber was hiding somewhere because she didn’t have any courage left, but she would crawl into bed with me that night to make up for it. I didn’t like it when she slept with me because Dad had hit her, but I didn’t mind it when it was because Dad had hit me.

  Dad ended his side of the argument suddenly and slammed into the truck. Mom looked scared as we drove away. I remembered calmly thinking, Dad’s going to drive me down a back road and kill me and bury me in the woods. The idea didn’t shock me, and the fact that it didn’t depressed me even more than my shitty birthday or the thought of dying.

  He didn’t say a word during the drive. He didn’t seem to notice his surroundings at all until we rounded a bend in the road and off to one side was a small city of rust-streaked, iron-gray buildings standing grim and empty in the middle of ten contaminated acres. A chain-link fence ran for a mile along the road posted with bright orange HAZARD signs and bright yellow NO TRESPASSING signs, all of them shot full of bullet holes.

  “The Carbonville Mine Water Reclamation Plant,” he announced, his voice making me jump after the silence.

  I knew about it, of course. Everybody did. It had been designed to treat the acid mine water coming from the abandoned #9 J&P complex nearby and make it safe for human consumption again. I knew all about #9 too. It was the first mine Grandpa worked in and he brought it up a lot, talking about its tunnels like they belonged to a woman.

  The plant only served its original purpose for about a year before something went wrong and the DER shut it down, but its remains had lived on for another twenty-five as a monument to the folly of trying to clean up a region that was poisoned from the inside.

  Dad pulled the truck off the road and parked by the fence. He got out and started walking. I automatically followed.

  He stopped when we came within view of a couple dozen small, gray, Insul-brick houses scattered along the outside of the chain-link like the plant had shook and showered its perimeter with tiny r
eplicas of failure.

  Dad squatted down so he was lower than me and pointed at one or all of them.

  “That’s where I grew up,” he said.

  I glanced at him to make sure he was being serious. I had always assumed he grew up in the house where my grandparents lived now. It wasn’t anything to get excited about, but at least it was a decent size and completely nailed together.

  I couldn’t read his expression at first. I expected him to be torn up or pissed. Or he could have been happy: one of those ass-backwards people like Grandpa who only felt fondness for terrible places and bitched like hell if he had to go on a picnic. But I didn’t see bitterness or self-pity or some warped nostalgic wistfulness in his face. What I saw was something like pride but pride without ego, something like acceptance but acceptance without ever being allowed to consider any other options. I didn’t figure it out until I was back home lying on my sore butt on my new sheets in my new room, feeling the familiar ache spread through my chest and face where Dad had hit me, that what I had seen was a gracious loser.

  That was the year birthdays stopped being about cake and presents for me and started being about survival.

  Dad started another addition about four years ago after he got it into his head that he needed his own TV room away from us kids. He and Uncle Mike never finished that one at all. Eventually they built a new wall to replace the one they had ripped out and left the wood frame hanging off the side of the house and a couple rolls of pink insulation in the yard. I pulled the thing down about a month after Mom shot him and sold the lumber.

  Uncle Mike was right. The eaves and the trim needed painting. The wood around the windows was starting to rot. I noticed two shingles missing from the roof. Even from the ground, I could see clumps of wet leaves sticking out of the gutters. And I had to do something about that piece of pipe.

  I saw Jody sitting on the front porch steps writing in her notebook. Sparkle Three-Horn and Yellowie the yellow helmet-head I had bought her to keep her mouth shut sat on either side of her. She looked up at me looking at the house.

  “What are you doing?” she asked me.

  “Making a list,” I said. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m making a list,” she answered emphatically. “You don’t have any paper.”

  “I’m making one in my head,” I explained. “Can I see yours?”

  She held it out to me.

  FEED DINUSORS

  CLEEN MY SIDE OF ROOM

  FOLD LONDREE

  MOE YARD

  I gave it back to her smiling. “I went to school with a Moe Yard,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Never mind. It was a joke.”

  “ ‘Fangs a lot’ was a better one,” she said.

  “I agree.” I sat down next to her on the steps.

  “What happened to your lip? It’s all puffy.”

  “Nothing.” I brushed her off. “Since when do you mow the yard?” I asked.

  She drew a heart on her list. “Last night Amber told us you were upset because Uncle Mike said you need to mow the yard and do a bunch of other stuff and that’s why you drank beers and went for a walk with Elvis. I thought I could help out.” She paused and drew a couple more hearts. “Why do you and Amber fight all the time?”

  “You heard us fighting?”

  She nodded.

  “What did you hear?”

  “Amber screaming swear words mostly.”

  “Yeah, well,” I started. “Just ignore that stuff.”

  “I guess it’s not so bad,” she said. “Esme says it’s unhealthy to bottle up emotions. She says it’s good to get your feelings out in the open.”

  “Is there anything Esme Mercer doesn’t know?”

  “She doesn’t know who Confucius is.”

  “Confucius?” I gave her a look out of the corner of my eye. “You know who he is?”

  “He’s the guy who writes the fortunes,” she answered, nodding.

  I laughed. “Who told you that?”

  “Mommy.”

  I swallowed my smile. She watched me patiently, waiting to see if I was going to dispute Mom’s facts. I flaked a couple pieces of paint off the step with a fingernail.

  “Esme says her mom and dad fight all the time,” Jody went on, “and when she asks her mom about it, her mom tells her it’s better for parents to fight than keep it bottled up.”

  “Her parents fight a lot?” I asked.

  “I guess so. Her mom screams at her and Zack too and then she hugs them and cries and says she’s sorry. I’ve seen her do it.” She glanced up at me to make sure I was paying attention. “Esme’s mom is nice and pretty and she can still do cartwheels but . . .”

  “You’ve seen her do a cartwheel?” I interrupted.

  “Yeah.”

  She kept studying my face. I tried to keep it composed.

  “She’d do one for you I bet,” she said.

  “That’s okay.”

  “Anyway,” she went on, hunching up her little shoulders beneath her faded rodeo Minnie Mouse shirt. “I think she’s nuts.”

  “She’s not nuts,” I explained. “All parents have to yell at their kids sometimes.”

  “Why?”

  “ ’Cause they do bad things and ’cause they drive them crazy.”

  “Do we drive you crazy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You hardly ever yell at us.”

  “I’m one of those unhealthy people.”

  “Oh. So why does she cry and say she’s sorry later?” she asked.

  “She probably feels bad because she loves her kids and doesn’t like yelling at them so she apologizes.”

  “Daddy never apologized to us for hitting us. Does that mean he didn’t love us?”

  “Dad loved us.”

  “Mommy never apologized for shooting him.”

  “Jody,” I said quickly, and stood up to leave. “I got a lot of work to do today.”

  “Does Mommy love us?”

  I closed my eyes wishing with all my might that she’d disappear along with the house and the guilty joy I felt knowing Esme’s parents fought all the time.

  “Doesn’t Mom tell you she loves you every time you see her?” I asked her slowly.

  “Actions speak louder than words,” she announced. “I read that in one of my fortunes. I can go get it for you.”

  “No,” I said. “I believe you.”

  I walked away from her and our conversation and felt instant relief. Two years ago before I knew any better, if someone had given me a list of all the things I was going to have to do for Jody and asked me to pick the hardest one, I probably would have picked “Clean up her puke when she gets sick in the middle of the night.” If they had asked me to pick the most important one, I would have picked “Put food on the table.” Now I would answer both of them the same way: Talk to her.

  I headed for Dad’s shed, trying to decide if I wanted to mow or scrape first, when I noticed Elvis off to the side of the yard with something clamped in his jaws, shaking his head wildly from side to side.

  One of the girls had unchained him.

  I ran across the yard to Rocky’s grave but before I even got there, I saw the empty hole.

  “Shit,” I said, and took off after Elvis.

  He saw me coming and thought we were playing a game. He went tearing into the woods. I gave him a good chase, but I had to stop and catch my breath after a while.

  I sat down and leaned back against a tree trunk. Elvis suddenly burst from the undergrowth in front of me, his tail wagging, wondering why I had given up so soon. Something dangled from his mouth but it wasn’t a groundhog. Up close, it looked like a crusty old rag.

  “Come here, stupid,” I said, and made a soft whistle between my teeth. “You’re not in trouble.”

  He watched me skeptically for a moment, the tail stopping in mid-wag.

  “Come here,” I said again.

  He made one more playful lunge. When I didn’t respond, he came t
rotting over and shoved his face in mine. He dropped the rag in my lap and gave me a couple licks.

  I picked the thing up. It wasn’t a rag. It was a girl’s shirt: a red one with a big sunflower in the middle, covered with a big brown stain, stiff and mud-encrusted like it had been out here for a long time.

  I scraped off some of the dirt and smoothed it out a little. It looked familiar, but it looked too big to be Jody’s and too small to be Misty’s. The stain was huge. It could have been chocolate or paint, but I knew blood when I saw it.

  chapter ( 10 )

  I waited a couple of days before asking anyone about the shirt. I didn’t know why. There wasn’t anything terrible about me finding a little girl’s bloodstained shirt in the woods as long as I didn’t find a bloodstained little girl too.

  I asked Jody about it first since she wouldn’t ask me why I was asking. She told me she never had a sunflower shirt, but she used to have a pair of pink overalls with daisies on them.

  I asked Amber next. She did most of the laundry and all of the patching, mending, hemming, and unhemming. A lot of Misty’s and Jody’s clothes were hand-me-downs from her, and she never forgot an outfit and how it made someone look. Too fat. Too geeky. Too seventies. Too eighties. Too obvious.

  The moment I mentioned a sunflower shirt, she perked up. Things had been pretty tense between us since Saturday night. We hadn’t talked much, but clothing was a topic she couldn’t resist.

  Of course we had a sunflower shirt, she told me. How could I forget it? It was hers. It came with red-and-white checked bike shorts. She never wore it much. Too hillbilly. But she gave it to Misty, and Misty wore it for a while. Not the shorts. She thought they made her look fat.

  Come to think of it, she hadn’t seen that shirt in years. Misty would have outgrown it by now, but Jody might want it. Did I know where it was? What did I care about a sunflower shirt anyway?

  I started to tell her the truth—that Elvis had dug it up in the woods and it had blood all over it—but I changed my mind. Amber didn’t deal well with blood. She used to faint at nosebleeds. I told her I had a dream about it instead.