Back Roads

by Tawni O'Dell

  She had on a respectable skirt the color of toasted coconut, nylons and heels, and a sleeveless cream silk top with pearls. A pair of polished yellow-gold squares on her ears shone through her sterling hair whenever she moved her head.

  “It’s been almost two hours since you called. How are you?”

  “You don’t need that government job, do you?” I said.

  She followed my gaze around the room. “That depends on what you mean by need,” she answered me. “I don’t need it for financial reasons. No.”

  The chairs and the couch in this office were too nice for me to sit on so I stood. Even after she asked me to sit. Even after she said please.

  She sat in an overstuffed leather chair like a caramel-dipped marshmallow.

  “What happened, Harley? You mentioned a she. You never got back to me after your visit with your mother. How did that go?”

  I blinked sweat out of my eyes. Or maybe it wasn’t sweat. I remembered eyes are made out of water.

  “She . . .” I started up again.

  “Yes, Harley,” Betty said pleasantly. “She, who?”

  “She . . .” I said again. “She . . . she.”

  “Yes,” she urged me. “She.”

  I licked my lips, swallowed, took a deep breath.

  “She . . .”

  I shook my head in frustration.

  “I used to,” I tried.

  Betty leaned forward. “Used to what?”

  “We used to.”

  “Used to what?”

  I fell to my knees and covered my face with my hands.

  Betty joined me on the floor. I felt her hands on my back, I felt them through Dad’s coat.

  “Who?” she said.

  “Amber.”

  Her name finally left me like a tumor carved from my brain-stem. I could think and speak again.

  “Used to touch me. When we were kids. I remember. She used to touch me. In bed. She used to come to my bed and touch me.”

  “Where did she touch you?” Betty asked.

  “You know where,” I screamed at her.

  “You need to say it.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Yes, you do. You need to say it out loud in order to confront it so it can go away.”

  “It’s not ever going to go away.”

  “It can fade to almost nothing, Harley. It can. I promise you.”

  I put my face back in my hands.

  “She touched you where?”

  I thought about who I was talking to.

  “My penis,” I said hoarsely.

  “Did it give you an erection?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Did it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you ejaculate?”

  I buried my face deeper.

  “Yes,” I sobbed.

  “Did you touch her?”

  “No,” I moaned, and looked up at her. “No. No. I swear I didn’t. I never even looked at her. She was behind me. She came into my bed.”

  “Why did she come into your bed?”

  I started crying harder. I couldn’t stop shaking. Betty put her arms around me.

  “Think about it,” she said.

  “She was afraid of Dad,” I cried into her shoulder.

  “And you let her stay?”

  I nodded.

  “Why?” she asked, rocking me on the floor. “Think about it.”

  “I was afraid of him too.”

  “I want you to listen to me very carefully, Harley.”

  She let go of me and sat back on her heels. She waited for me to look at her.

  “You are not a bad person. You’re not a freak or a pervert. There’s nothing wrong with you or Amber. You were children reacting to debilitating emotional and physical abuse the only way you knew how. By turning to each other for comfort and pleasure.”

  I tried to cover my face again, but she grabbed my hands and held them in hers.

  “What made you remember? Do you know? Did something happen?”

  “I can’t,” I said, shaking my head.

  “Yes, you can. What happened?”

  She moved away for an instant and came back with a box of Kleenex. She pulled one out and handed it to me.

  “She was in bed with me,” I began, haltingly. “I was sleeping.”

  “When?”

  “Last night.”

  “Did she touch you?”

  “I don’t know. I was sleeping.”

  I wiped at my eyes and blew my nose.

  “She didn’t have any clothes on,” I volunteered.

  “Did you have an erection?”

  A shudder traveled from my toes to the top of my head and back again.

  “I didn’t look,” I said.

  She sighed again. A weary sigh. I glanced at her. She was sitting on the floor with her legs tucked behind her. I had left wet stains on her silk blouse. I wondered if I had ruined it.

  “How did you react?” she asked me.

  “What do you mean?” I shouted at her, getting up from the floor and scrambling away from her. “What kind of question is that? I’m not sick.”

  I backed into the bookshelves.

  “I’m not sick.”

  “I’m not implying that you are.”

  She stood up too but didn’t approach me.

  “I’m thinking about Amber now.”

  “Huh?”

  “Amber,” she said again. “I’m concerned about how she must be feeling right now.”

  “Amber?” I shouted. “It was all her idea. She wanted to do it.”

  “She didn’t want to do it, Harley. Try and understand. Your sister isn’t the villain here. She’s suffering as much as you are. Maybe more.”

  “More?” I cried out.

  “How did you react to her advances?”

  “I threw her off me. I screamed at her. I told her to get away. I ran away.”

  “Where is Amber right now?”

  I looked out the window. The sun had fallen halfway down the sky. I was supposed to be somewhere, but I couldn’t remember where.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I think she went to school. Today’s the last day. They got out early. What’s the matter? She can take care of herself.”

  Betty didn’t look convinced.

  “Right now you’re feeling repulsion, shame, guilt,” she instructed me. “Amber’s feeling all that too, but she’s also feeling rejection.”

  She started to the door.

  “Please, sit, Harley. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone look so tired in my entire life.”

  She walked out. I stared at the couch. It was the same color as the chair but it was velvety instead of glossy. I went over to it and checked the back of my jeans for filth and sweat. I sat down on the very edge, then stood up to see if my soul had left a stain.

  She returned with a Styrofoam cup of water. “Sit,” she said, stern this time.

  I sat. She handed me the water and I drank it.

  “I want you to lie down here and rest,” she said.

  “I have to be somewhere but I can’t remember.”

  “Work?” she asked.

  “Shit,” I said, closing my eyes, and falling back against the couch. Its cushions felt like they were stuffed with mist.

  “I’m going to get fired from Shop Rite. I’m going to get fired from Barclay’s too.”

  “Don’t worry about that. I can talk to your bosses.”

  “Oh, yeah.” I laughed. “That always helps getting a job back. Having your shrink call to say you were too fucked up to come to work today.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she told me again. “Lie down.”

  “I can’t sleep anymore.”

  “Just a minute.”

  She left again. I didn’t want to listen to her but the couch called to me to throw myself into it the same way fresh snow-banks did when I was a kid. I stretched out on it.

  I thought about my dirty boots too late. I had been here ten minutes a
nd already messed up her couch and her blouse. This was why she saw people like me in her other office wearing crappy clothes.

  She came back in with a refill on the water.

  “Here,” she said, handing me a pill too. “It will help you sleep. It’s one of my own.”

  “You take pills?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “I thought you were well adjusted.”

  A small smile passed over her lips. They had red lipstick on them. She never wore lipstick at the other office.

  “Define well adjusted,” she said.

  I didn’t like it. It bled into the old-lady cracks around her lips.

  She stood up and walked to the door, where she clicked off the light. “Try and get some rest,” she said. “I’ll be doing some work in another room.”

  I swallowed the pill. I didn’t even think about it.

  Enough light came through the window that I could still look around. I had been right about the books. Hundreds of them. A lot of psychology stuff but weird stuff too stuck in between the academic-sounding titles.

  The Thousand Recipe Chinese Cookbook. The Art of Walt Disney. What to Expect When You’re Expecting. Mass Media Law. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The 185th Anniversary History of Laurel Falls. Ulysses.Peterson’sField Guide to Wildflowers. Black Beauty. In Cold Blood.

  I felt myself dozing off. I threw myself backward into the couch snowdrift and started flapping my arms and legs to make an angel. I kept falling and falling. The snow had no substance then I realized it was a cloud, and the angel I was making was a real one floating along behind me.

  She took my hand and we flew to a poor village, tranquil in an endless sea of sand beneath a bright white moon like one of Betty’s pearls. We went from home to home, following a stream of crystal light that flew in and out of windows and went from bed to bed.

  It took me awhile but I finally figured out it was God cruising for chicks.

  I didn’t understand. He was God. He knew what lurked in the hearts of men and women too. He didn’t have to search and test for someone willing; He knew.

  I asked the angel and she explained that carnal love was the one emotion God couldn’t read, an emotion too human for anyone to understand but Man. She left me then at a window where a darkhaired girl lay sleeping naked on a bare cloth mattress with her lips and legs parted and her slender arms extended in a welcome. The moonlight spilled over her, seeping and gushing into every opening, every pore.

  Then I was back floating alone in my cloud drift. I couldn’t get the girl out of my mind. I felt her fear and her bliss. I felt her regret at lost innocence, but I also felt her need to be ruined.

  She was a woman. He was God. He could have blinked and made a son, but He had gone to her instead.

  I bet it made her glow from the inside out. I bet it lifted her from the bed, writhing and smiling. I bet threads of silver light shot from her fingertips and toes and every strand of her hair.

  I hoped so. I hoped and prayed that it was so. It was her one lousy shot at ecstasy before she became the eternal Virgin, and I hoped she got there.

  Betty’s office was completely dark when I opened my eyes. It was like waking up inside ink. I rolled off the couch with a thud, then sat frozen on the floor with my heart pounding in my throat. I didn’t want her to come back.

  She didn’t. I stood up slowly and got my bearings. A dim sliver of light came from the hallway behind the cracked door. I went for the window instead. It unlocked easily and quietly.

  The moon was high overhead, shining brightly but giving off no light. I stared up at it and knew Callie was staring up at it too thinking it was violent in its perfection like a strong, quick stab with a sharpened stick. She was wondering where I was.

  The dream had cleared my head. It was good to dream again. I started walking feeling a slapping rhythmic calm beneath my feet like the tiny waves that finally lap the shore after a distant motorboat has passed by. Betty’s rich neighborhood dissolved around me and I found myself walking a gray town sidewalk past uniform shabby houses pushed together in hedgerows of defeat.

  I knew where I was. My dad used to point out these houses whenever we drove by them. He always said how glad he was we had our own little spot in the country and didn’t have to live like this. I agreed. Isolated failure was easier to bear.

  It didn’t take me long to get to Barclay’s or maybe it did. I had lost my sense of time. I got in my truck and drove away.

  The whole way to Black Lick Road, I was only thinking about the release. Not the sex. Sex was too complicated and mental. I was thinking in vague swirling grays of the mindlessness of INSTINCT and the simple glories of PHYSICAL STIMULI.

  I suddenly understood how farm boys could do it with their sheep and daddies could do it with their daughters. They shrugged off their humanness like the shedding of a skin and became something new and raw and beautiful in their own ugly eyes. The only thing separating me from them was the fear that I would find something hideous and mangled under my skin.

  I didn’t go home first. I left my truck on the side of the road after calculating the straightest shot through the woods to the mining office. I took a couple swats in the face with tree branches and twisted my ankle in a groundhog hole, but I knew she was waiting for me. Worrying about me. I wondered if she had brought the stuff for s’mores.

  The light from the useless moon was enough to give a faint glimmer to the rocks around the train tracks. They stretched out like a sill of metal filings.

  I thought she might be sitting outside. I expected a flashlight beam or even a fire. I didn’t know what time it was. Maybe I was way too late. Maybe she was back home already.

  I started walking faster. I broke into a jog. As I neared the office, I saw her backpack and her cooler.

  “Callie,” I said.

  I was breathing a lot heavier than I needed to be.

  “Callie,” I said again, and stepped up to the door.

  The crunch of the gravel crackled inside my head like electrical pops. I peered into the gloom and saw a bare ankle ending in a foot in a woman’s white tennis shoe. It lay flat on its side, toe pointed outward, at an angle too uncomfortable for sleep and too unnatural for the living.

  I moved an inch farther and saw the tips of her fingers curled up like a bird claw.

  INSTINCT dropped me to my knees. Self-preservation kept me from looking any further. Amber’s psychos reared their heads all around me. Misty’s demonic prancing unicorns filled the sky. Boyish banker Brad: did he do it? What if he had found out about us?

  I wasn’t there when Mom shot Dad. I had never seen a dead person except for my grandparents who didn’t count because they were old and unlovable. Dad’s funeral had been closed casket. I never understood why but now that I knew what Uncle Mike thought about him and Misty, I knew he had requested it because he couldn’t stand to look at Dad again. It was a shame because Dad had been innocent, and Uncle Mike had lost his brother a second time.

  I took a couple deep breathless breaths. She might only be hurt, I told myself.

  I couldn’t walk in. I stayed on my knees. My closeness to the ground gave me the confidence of a child covering his face with his hands and peeking through his fingers.

  “Callie,” I whispered. “Please.”

  I passed through the doorway and waited on all fours, staring at her dead feet. The vomit had already risen to my throat before I looked at the rest of her. I tried to make it outside but threw up next to her. I felt bad about that.

  Her face was gone. She didn’t have a face. There was part of a jawbone with a couple teeth left and a shattered section of forehead.

  My retching turned into dry heaves that I didn’t think were going to stop until they turned me inside out. It was dark but I saw bone and flesh and brain and hair. I fixed my stare back on her feet, afraid to see any more, afraid I might see her eyes, whole and unharmed, staring at me from a corner.

  I reached out and touched her ankle. It
was freezing cold. I moved my hand over to her hand and tried to hold it.

  I started to cry then not only out of grief but out of relief too. Now I knew for sure that people had souls. What I felt in her dead hand was much more than a loss of heat and blood. She was gone. She had been more than words and thoughts and feelings. She had been an essence.

  She was somewhere else. That was all. And so was Dad. He wasn’t over. Maybe there was still a chance for us. I decided to add him to my list of dead people I’d like to meet.

  I picked up her hand and held it to my face and cried into it. It smelled like salami and mustard. She had made us sandwiches.

  The footsteps outside didn’t startle me. I knew they would come eventually. I didn’t stop crying or holding Callie’s hand.

  I knew she would wait for me.

  I put the hand down, stood up, and walked to the open door.

  Her calm blasted stare settled over me, but she was shivering violently.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and began a hacking, tearless sobbing. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

  I made a move like I meant to run at her but nothing happened. My feet started inching forward. I urged them to go faster but they were submerged in a dream or a sea.

  I finally arrived and took Uncle Mike’s gun from her.

  “What about me?” she asked in a broken whisper.

  I wanted to tell her she was everything good about me and everything bad. She was my best intentions mixed with the reality of who I was. She was every promise I couldn’t keep. But I couldn’t explain it to her. All I could say was “Amber,” and nothing else would come.

  Her eyes were a bruised violet in the dark. A tranquil fear like the realization of painless death spread through me. All I could give her was what I had left. What I had left was under my skin.

  chapter ( 20 )

  I stop talking to the cops just because I’m tired. I’m pretty sure I’m done anyway. I don’t know what time it is. I always thought a police station would be covered with clocks. Time is very important to these guys. They begin all their reports with the TIME. They’re always telling hysterical victims to take their TIME. They send criminals off to prison to do TIME. But I can’t find a lousy clock anywhere.

  I think about asking the sheriff what time it is. He’s wearing a nice watch. Not as nice as a banker’s watch or a psychiatrist’s watch though, and that probably bugs the hell out of him because he knows what he does is more important. More dangerous too. Bankers rarely get their brains blown out. Although sometimes their wives do.