Back Roads

by Tawni O'Dell

  chapter ( 18 )

  I made some calls on Monday. The district attorney’s office. The sheriff’s department. Mom’s attorney whose business card was still stuck to the freezer door with a Laurel Falls Bank magnet between a Halloween snapshot of Jody in a green stegosaurus costume and a school bulletin warning a case of pinkeye had been diagnosed in Misty’s classroom.

  Getting anyone to talk to me like I wasn’t a crackpot was the biggest challenge. The next biggest was getting someone to care. I expected moral outrage that an innocent woman was in jail. I expected them to feel a civic responsibility toward putting the real killer behind bars. Instead I got a lot of Double Jeopardy thrown in my face: once a case has been tried, it can’t be tried again. ADJUDICATED, Mom’s attorney’s paralegal called it. Dad’s murder had been ADJUDICATED to the satisfaction of the state of Pennsylvania and even to the satisfaction of the convicted murderer. The DA’s office suggested I might be delusional. The sheriff’s department told me I watched too much TV. But everyone offered to talk to me in person.

  That had been my plan when I started my day Tuesday, but I couldn’t get any time off from Barclay’s, and no one would see me on their lunch hour. People didn’t sacrifice their sandwiches and Cokes for delusional crackpots trying to free convicted murderers who insisted they were guilty. They would on TV. The deputy I talked to was right about that.

  As my day wore on, every time I thought about Mom I saw her the way I had seen her behind Plexiglas, drifting away from me into fathomless GROOVY. Then a surging current would bring her back but her features would be gone, her face a smooth, round, white surface permanently shocked clean of all emotion by what she had seen in the depths.

  Thinking about Misty was worse. She always disappeared into black and when her face started materializing again, I freaked out. I shook my head, and sang songs, and recited the names of the planets and the Seven Dwarfs and tried to remember the difference between Abstract Expressionism and Surrealism. I couldn’t let her come back. I didn’t want to see what she knew.

  But besides thinking about Mom and Misty, I did okay. They were weighing heaviest on my mind, but I had plenty of other things to distract me. I still had to do something about Dad’s piece of pipe.

  “I think you’d probably be best off just pouring more cement over it,” Bud suggested, reaching for a bunch of bananas while vigorously working a piece of gum on one side of his mouth. “You might stub your toe on it now and then, but you wouldn’t have to worry about anybody cutting themself on it.”

  “I’d feel better if it was completely out of there.”

  “How deep is the plug?”

  I finished with my customer and told her to have a nice night.

  “Pretty deep,” I told him. “I remember when he dug the hole I was probably about six or seven. He put me in it and all you could see was my head poking out. My mom took a picture of it.”

  Church looked up from the bench where he was picking at the bottoms of his gym shoes and flicking tiny pieces of rubber on the floor.

  “My mom took a picture of my head once,” he called out to us. “I’m not kidding. It’s in our house.”

  “That would be a sonofabitch to try and dig out,” Bud continued. “And you can’t blast it so close to your well. What about a winch? Find somebody who rips out tree stumps for a living.”

  He finished with his customer too but when he told his to have a nice night, they launched into a conversation about an estate sale over the weekend near Clarksburg. He went on Saturday. She went on Sunday hoping for better weather, but it rained on Sunday too.

  My hands started twitching at my sides. They were feeling a lot better. They no longer burned, just itched a little and they were stiff. The swelling had gone down and the gouges had scabbed over. They reminded me of Jody’s little naked back when she got the chicken pox the year before.

  “Good night, ladies,” I heard Rick say to the cashiers in his oily boss voice.

  He was going out with his wife for some special occasion he wouldn’t tell us about. Bud said it was to celebrate the zits on his ass finally evolving into calluses.

  His fat face stopped next to me. It was full of jiggles and shudders like the surface of a bumped boat of old gravy. There was a film of sweat on his upper lip.

  He took a big showy whiff of the air in front of me, then settled his head back into the pillow of flesh where his neck should have been.

  “Don’t come back to work until you take a bath, Altmyer,” he said loudly.

  The three cashiers watched me, a little amused and a little afraid, like I was a vicious, spittle-flinging dog on a strong chain that couldn’t quite get to them.

  They were expecting me to try and kill him. They had been biding their time for over a year now waiting for the time I finally lost it and the TV reporters showed up to make them famous. I wasn’t about to give them the satisfaction.

  I politely thanked Rick for his concern for my personal hygiene. I told him it reflected well on his managerial style.

  Before he could say anything else, I walked off muttering about stocking the Campbell’s soup section with more Chicken and Stars. I made sure he was gone before I came up front again. Church and Bud were busy bagging. My cashier was doing her own bagging, and she shot me a dirty look to rival one of Amber’s. I got back to work.

  “How ya doing, Harley?” Church asked me.

  “I’m good, Church.”

  “The boss didn’t know what he was saying,” he said.

  “Forget about it.”

  He shook his head and his eyes rattled around behind his thick glasses. “I told my mom what he said. I told her about the whole thing.”

  “When?”

  “I called her,” he explained, smiling big and glancing toward the pay phone. “She said saying that to a nice boy like you was criminal. That means it was a crime like parking in front of a fire hydrant.”

  “What makes your mom think I’m a nice boy?”

  “I told her before. I talk about you, Harley. I’m not kidding. You and Bud. My mom says one of these days she’s going to invite you over for dinner because you’re so nice to her baby. That’s what she calls me sometimes. Her baby. I guess because I still cry at night. She says she’s going to do it some night when she’s not so tired from her job and she’s got time to cook a roast. Would you come?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Great,” he exclaimed. “I’m going to tell her. Do you like applesauce or pudding?”

  “Both.”

  “Both.” He started laughing. “Wow. Both. I never get both. Wait’ll I tell Mom you want both.”

  He put down the two-liter bottle of root beer in his hand and walked off.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going to call her again,” he said, heading toward the phone, “and tell her you want both.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” I started to explain, then figured what the hell. I’d eat both.

  I finished bagging for him. Once things slowed down again I went and took a seat on the bench, placed my hands on my knees, and watched them jitter. They had been fine earlier while I stocked blocks of mozzarella, and stacked cans of Hungry Jack biscuits, and set up a new display at the end of the snack aisle with cans of Nabisco Easy Cheese and Premium saltine crackers. Another one of Rick’s brainstorms: people who eat cheese in a can sometimes eat it on crackers.

  I clenched them. They still shook. I laid them out flat across my thighs. They jerked like live wire. I sat on them. I felt vibrations travel up my spine.

  I heard the motorized swish of the automatic doors sliding open. I looked over and saw Amber come through. I double-checked because as far as I knew, she hadn’t set foot in Shop Rite a single time since I had started working here even though she used to love coming here with Mom when she was little.

  The cashiers spotted her immediately and flung dirty looks in her direction. She was wearing cutoffs, and tan cowboy boots, and a guy’s long
-sleeved shirt that wasn’t mine tied in a knot above her belly button. She walked slowly, accentuating every step with a lazy hip thrust, which meant something male was watching her from behind.

  She gave me a condescending smirk when she noticed me sitting on a bench as if she had always suspected I did nothing at my job but sit on my ass.

  She stopped directly in front of me with her legs slightly apart, boots planted, and her hands on her hips.

  “I was going to leave you a note but I decided this was a big enough deal that I should say good-bye to you in person.”

  “Who’s watching Jody?” I said.

  “You fucker,” she hissed loud enough for the cashiers to hear.

  They didn’t even pretend to not be listening.

  “I’m standing here telling you I’m never going to see you again for the rest of our lives and you want to know who’s watching Jody. Misty’s watching her, you fuckhead.”

  “I don’t like Misty watching her.”

  “Well, get used to it ’cause she’s all you got anymore.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I told you. I’m moving in with Dylan.”

  “DYLAN.” I stood up, and made a face at her. “Who the hell is this guy anyway? Where’d you even find him?”

  “At school where I find all of them.”

  “How long have you known him?”

  “All my life.”

  I took the pads of my fingers and rubbed at my eyes. I rubbed so hard, when I took them away I saw nothing but blobs of light.

  I revised my question.

  “How long have you known him well enough to say hi to him in the halls?”

  “I’m serious about him,” she snapped at me. “He’s different from the other guys.”

  “Why? Because he hits you?”

  She glanced down at me, startled.

  “Is that what you want?” I asked.

  “He doesn’t hit me.”

  “I know he hits you. I saw the way you were walking. The only time I ever saw someone walk that way who hadn’t been beaten up was Mom in the hospital after Jody was born.”

  “You were watching me walk?”

  I took a frustrated breath and rubbed at my eyes again until she disappeared behind mottled white light and gray nothingness.

  “Is that what you want?” I tried again. “You want someone to hit you?”

  She stared down at the tips of her boots. They were badly scuffed. If you’re going to shack up with someone at least do it with someone who’ll buy you new boots, I wanted to tell her, but I knew that wasn’t the reason she wanted to move out. I wasn’t sure what the reason was. I knew it had something to do with me but I didn’t know how.

  All I had done these past two years was take care of her, and it wasn’t enough. It didn’t count. She wanted something more or something else.

  “Then what was all that crap over Dad hitting you?” I asked roughly. “You didn’t like getting hit back then. Or did you? Were you faking?” I tried to remember exactly what Betty had said about it. “Do you think it’s love?”

  “You’re sick,” she said, still staring at her boots.

  “Would you stay if I hit you?”

  She considered my question. She considered it for a while. I couldn’t believe she might actually say yes. I had never felt so let down in my life. Not even when I had to face the price of dog food and funerals.

  “Do you want me to hit you?” I tried a different route.

  She looked up at me, suddenly defiant. “Only if you want to.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Fine.” She whirled away, her hair breezing past my face.

  I grabbed for her arm. “You didn’t answer my first question. Would you stay if I hit you?”

  Everyone stared at us except for Church, who was huddled over the phone receiver talking in conspiratorial whispers.

  Amber glanced at my hand on her arm but for once she didn’t rip her arm away.

  “Do you want me to stay?” she asked.

  “Would you stay if I hit you?”

  She gave the question more thought, and a sick knot of grief tightened in the pit of my stomach.

  “No,” Amber finally answered. “Do you want me to stay?”

  My grip on her arm dissolved with relief. “Only if you want to,” I replied.

  “I don’t know if I want to.”

  “Why don’t you stay until you figure it out?”

  “Are you asking me to stay?”

  “Until you figure it out.”

  “So you’re asking me to stay?”

  “Until you figure it out.”

  “Dylan will be mad if I stay.”

  “For Chrissake, Amber,” I growled. “Tell him I won’t let you move out.”

  “Really?” She smiled like a kid. “I can tell him that?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Just don’t tell him here. Tell him you need to get something from home and then tell him once you get there. Otherwise, he might dump you here and I don’t get off work for three more hours.”

  “He’s not like that,” she assured me, turning to go. She wiggled her fingers at me. “See you at home.”

  I was trying to figure out what had just happened when Church came up beside me.

  “Your girlfriend’s pretty,” he said. “She’s got hair like a new penny.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend. She’s my sister.”

  He laughed and winked. “Right. Right. Your sister.”

  I looked past him out the store windows and saw Amber standing with her suitcase watching a pickup roar away from her. She turned and gave me a defeated scowl but then she smiled a little. I guessed I must have been smiling at her. I noticed she had got her pillow back.

  She hung out for the rest of my shift. We didn’t talk in the truck on the way home but for the first time in a long time, the silence between us didn’t burn. When we got on Black Lick Road, I let her drive.

  Amber went to bed right away. I asked her to check on Jody and Misty first. While she was doing that, I went to the shed to make sure the gun was still hidden. I tightened the lid on the garbage can too.

  Amber never came back to report on the girls so I figured they were both still alive. I dug through the refrigerator looking for a snack. I found an open pack of bologna and ate a couple slices.

  Jody had left her final report card on the table for me to sign. All pluses except for a section under Gym called Effort. There were a couple work sheets too, a notice to return all library books, a crayon picture of Mickey Mouse beside a blue castle with the words MY VACASHUN DREM written at the top, and a neon orange piece of paper folded into quarters.

  I opened the note and recognized Misty’s stationery. Amber had bought it for her for her last birthday. It had a border of purple, red, and black prancing unicorns. The first time I saw a sheet of it, I thought they were demons.

  Misty had written in the middle of it in small precise letters:

  It makes more sense for them to be with each other than to be with strangers. They love each other. Harley will come around.

  P.S. There’s nothing wrong with their blood mixing. They’ve got the same blood. Esme’s an idiot.

  I folded the note. Everything went black. Misty’s face came rushing toward me, and I cried out.

  I came to in the kitchen with my hands clenched around the back of a chair, feeling like I had traveled hundreds of miles and been gone for years. But Jody’s report card was still sitting there and it still said Grade 1.

  The note was still there too. Now it had bologna grease fingerprints on it. What would happen if I got caught?

  I took Mom’s Bible to bed with me, but I never opened it. I figured I’d have a tortured time falling asleep but I only had to stare at my lightbulb for about two minutes before I did. The last thing I remembered was a soft, pale object floating above me and the contented sigh of Elvis lying down next to me. He hadn’t slept in my room for a while but tonight he had followe
d me down the basement stairs, his nails clicking on the cement before he found the square of shag carpet next to my bed.

  I didn’t dream anymore but I knew the sweet bliss I felt couldn’t be real. She was with me. Nurturing me, comforting me, protecting me, feeding me, teaching me, touching me, licking me, creating me. I didn’t need to see her to get aroused. Her beauty didn’t come from physical form, it came from her loss of self to me. She had not been put here as a helpmate or an equal. She had been sacrificed so we could exist.

  I melted into her. Her body was the liquid I breathed. Her fingers were flickers of underwater flame, scorching and soothing my unborn skin. She moaned into my ear. Once. Softly. A silver-pitched gasp. A sound that thrilled and saddened like the bittersweet howling of a penned dog.

  I rolled over and took her from Him. She was my gift. Mine. And I was her penance.

  Then I remembered, I didn’t dream anymore.

  Before I could define the horror, I simply felt it. It lifted me up off my bed and smashed me into a wall. My sense of self-preservation told me to run, told me to scrape off my skin, told me to cut off my hands, but I opened my eyes instead.

  Amber sat on the floor next to my bed. She was rubbing the back of her head like it hurt. She was naked.

  “Oh, God,” I moaned.

  “You said you wanted me to stay,” she said.

  I saw Mom’s Bible at the foot of my bed. I snatched it up and held it in front of me like a crucifix.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked groggily. “You were liking it.”

  I thought I screamed but I couldn’t be sure. My brain was suddenly picking up TV static, and domestic squabbles, and radio transmissions from newly formed galaxies. Every word from every language ever written or spoken flashed past my eyes.

  I held the Bible up in front of my face.

  “Put on some clothes,” I screamed.

  “What’s wrong with you?” I heard her say again.

  “Go away,” I screamed.

  “You thought I was her.” Her voice turned savage. “You thought I was her. That’s why you were liking it. You thought I was that slut.”