by Sara Taylor
We hit the road again early the next morning, and for a few dozen miles I held the irrational half-hope that we were going back to my father, even though I knew from the map that our path passed home and continued towards the Great Lakes and the unknown. I used to have the same hope when we passed the strip mall with my favorite ice-cream parlor on the way to do the weekly grocery shopping; even though we never turned into the parking lot, there was always the possibility that we would, up until its neon sign whipped past and I needed to stretch to see it out the back windshield.
She was in a hurry now, not an excited hurry but the deadly dogged kind, the get-this-over-with-before-her-nerve-failed kind. We drove through the afternoon and past dark with no stops except for gas, and even then Ma threatened to leave me behind if I wasn’t back from the bathroom by the time she put the gas cap back on. She didn’t tell me where we were going, or any stories that would let me know what to expect when we got there, but drove hands gripped tight on the wheel, eyes fixed ahead, a muscle in her jaw dancing. This, I guessed, was a destination for unfinished business.
When her eyes began to droop she pulled off the highway and catnapped in rest-stop parking lots, and I woke up through the night as she stopped and started and stopped again. It was early afternoon when we crossed the border into Michigan, and I could have killed to get out of the goddamned car. My body felt like a stale pretzel. We had driven nearly twenty-two hours, and my stomach knew it. I remembered still the notation that Michigan had on her map—“Cocksucking motherfucking son of a syphilitic whore”—wondered if it was there because that was where we were going, or because it was a place to be avoided.
It was full-blown summer, even though to me, coming as I was from Florida, the air was as mild as lemonade. There were people on the sidewalks and smoking outside of the bars that we passed, legs showing under the ragged hems of cutoffs.
“Isn’t it a Tuesday?” I asked quietly, my eyes fixed on a laughing woman, skin the pink of new sunburn, about to spill the bottled beer that no one seemed to care she’d brought outside.
“Every night’s a Friday night here,” Ma said back just as quietly. “There’s fuck all else to do of an evening.”
She turned off suddenly down a side street, making me slide in my seat, pulled into an empty lot sandwiched between tall buildings where the raw grass burst up through the blacktop like a rash and the Violators will be towed sign swung upside down on one rusted bolt. She snapped the ignition off and tossed the keys into my lap, then reached between her feet for the plastic bag and began counting out bills.
“Whatcha doing that for?” I asked.
“I owe this guy some money, that’s all. You wait here, this shouldn’t take me long.”
“That looks like a little more than ‘some money,’” I said. Her fingers flashed too fast for me to keep count, but I knew she was past one thousand.
“Never you mind, just keep your ass in this car. We might need to leave quick.”
I waited as Ma stalked across the parking lot and down an alley, then I slipped out of my seat as quietly as I could, pocketed the keys, locked the car, and followed her at a distance back onto the main street. She was tense, preoccupied, and I’m certain she had no idea that I was trailing behind. We swam through the milling crowd of people, half of them drunk and most of them smoking, so that I lost and found her a dozen or more times before she ducked into a tattoo shop. I hesitated outside the door as she strode right past the kid—gauged ears, pierced face, bad hair, maybe twenty years old—at the front desk, who wasn’t fast enough to stop her.
There was a middle-aged white guy laid out on a padded table in the back half of the room, getting something big and bloody drawn on his upper thigh, and the tattooist with a face mask and blue gloves on a stool beside him, the gun buzzing in her hand. Ma ignored them; her attention was on guy number three, who half sat, half leaned—in the too-cool-for-my-own-skin way I’d only ever seen in movies and high schoolers—on a table against the wall. He was leggy and charming looking, his long but neat hair and goatee frosted with grey. When we walked in he had been flicking through one of the design books that littered the table; he saw Ma and marked his place with a finger.
“Hey, Fletcher. Remember me?” Ma asked.
“You’re going to have to help me out a bit there,” he said, and his tone made it clear that he was only talking to her because she hadn’t given him a clear reason to throw her out yet.
“Maybe it’d be easier if I took my clothes off and busted my face up a bit,” she snapped. “Unpaid bookkeeper extraordinaire and 1984’s sidepiece of the year. Remember me now?”
It took him a moment, but when he did you could see it on his face.
“I wasn’t expecting to see your ass around here again, princess,” he said.
“That’s not my name, you motherfucker.”
“And that’s no way for a lady to talk. Did you return to my place of business after all these years just to cuss at me, or is there something else you wanted?”
“I’m here to give back what I owe you.”
He was looking at her with an amused expression on his face, like she was a cat that had done something cute. Even though he was slouching, she had to tilt her head back to look him in the eye.
“Here’s the cash you think I took.” She smacked the money on the floor at his feet. “And here’s what I owe you for thinking I took it.”
And she punched him, clean and hard, in the face.
The tattooist and the bare-assed man on the table didn’t move, but the front-desk kid flinched as Fletcher’s head snapped back, blood spurting from his nose.
“And I owe you a fuck-ton more of the same, but let’s call it even.” Ma shook her hand like she was shaking water off of it, blew on the splits in her knuckles, then turned to leave. When she saw me standing in the doorway an expression passed across her face, fear and fury together, but she didn’t do anything more than grab me by the front of the shirt and pull me after her as she went by.
CHAPTER X
There was a fourth Laura, who wasn’t mentioned until after we’d left the east coast behind. Ma was on the move at the time, so that even when she had just slept she looked tired and when she had just showered and changed she looked travel-creased, but she was seventeen and still springy-souled, still believed in the goodness of things.
This Laura found my mother sleeping rough, waiting for the energy to push onwards. She saw this Laura as an old woman, but when she looked back to tell me the story she realized that Laura hadn’t been that old at all, had just seemed old to the girl that she was then. She was too tired to be suspicious of the platinum-haired woman who offered her food and a place to sleep.
Laura drank absinthe out of red crystal glasses, and spent three-quarters of her time in the conservatory at the back of her house, painting. Not sipping and daubing like a rich lady, though; she went wild with a palette knife, stiff brushes, bits of card, her fingers, then became perfectly still for a moment or two, assessing, then continued, her pace gradually slowing as the work became more detailed. Her paintings were a marriage of photo realism and surrealism, the colors she used shocking and vibrant up close but blending to mundanity when you drew back enough to see the figures. They even sold, though she didn’t need the money: she’d romanced oil barons and arms dealers as a young woman, if ‘romanced’ was the right word for what sounded like an opportunistic blend of good old-fashioned gold digging and even older-fashioned prostitution, and had the lucre of two dead husbands in the bank. My mother didn’t believe her, entirely, when it came to the more fantastic details, but that didn’t change the fact that Laura had Money.
Ma lounged around the house in patches of sun reading books and regaining her strength, or posed naked to be painted with wasp’s wings sprouting from her back and briar thorns growing from her arms. Artists and people who wanted to be artists and people who were willing to settle for being around artists came to dinner, and there were séances an
d more strange liquors and sometimes acid and my mother would wake up just as the sky was fading from black to blue naked but covered in a woven rug with the edges tucked around her to keep her bare skin from touching the cold stone of the conservatory floor, curled around the legs of the stool where Laura perched and scraped madly at her canvas, one last drink still in her hand.
The parties and the wild permissiveness appealed to her, the strange things she tried were alluring, but as her energy returned so too did her minute sense of responsibility. She wouldn’t go back home for its own sake, but she had two years of high school to finish, and she was sensible enough to know that her chances of getting along in the adult world were greater if she dragged herself through them.
Laura didn’t argue, let her pack her few things and put on her own clothes, but as my mother turned to walk out the front door she got up from her canvas and fished her keys out of a kitchen drawer, led my mother to the garage and unlocked a periwinkle Cadillac that had not once been resurrected or alluded to during the course of my mother’s stay, pulled out the registration and the title.
When my grandparents came home the next day they found my mother sitting on the kitchen counter of their apartment in New Jersey, forking up cold green beans from a cereal bowl and listening to the radio. They weren’t as upset as they could have been because she’d gotten back before school started, so no one of an official nature had come looking for her and found that her parents had lost her, again. When they asked, she said that she’d been doing drugs with artists in Middletown, Connecticut, so they didn’t believe her. They also didn’t believe her when she said that the strange car parked out front was hers, but their not believing it didn’t make it any less true.
We found a low wall outside of some ugly municipal building to sit on. Ma was shaking still but her steps were long and purposeful, so that I had to skip to keep up as she dragged me after her through the crowds. She may have remembered the place, or led us there by chance, but when she stopped she let go of my shirt so I could fold down onto the sidewalk with my back against the wall. She snapped out a cigarette, ignited it with a loud, ragged breath, then spit on the sidewalk.
“Damn, that felt good,” she finally said, and there was a raspy little chuckle in her voice. “Gotta quit this, though.” She flicked at her cigarette, inhaled and made the cherry glow. “Maybe when we’re settled in again.”
“What just happened?” I asked as I handed over her keys.
“Cleared an old debt, was all.”
“Well, I got that much from the conversation.”
“When you’re older.”
“I am older!”
She dragged deep.
“Fletcher owns the tattoo parlor. He also owns the club upstairs. The second floor is just a nightclub, but on the top floor there’s table dancing. And it’s the kind of place where if the guests are rolling or the dancers want to take someone in the back for a little special treatment, he doesn’t make a thing of it because he’s making extra money in either situation, if you know what I mean.”
She paused to drag again, fracturing her narrative, but I waited, worried that she wouldn’t go on if I pressed her. “I came up here when I was twenty to spend the summer after my second year of college rooming with a girl I knew from school and working for her uncle, but two weeks into it she kicked me out and moved her boyfriend in, and a week after that her uncle fired me because seeing me every day at work made her feel awkward. I didn’t have the money to leave, and the first thing I could find that paid was working at Fletcher’s. I started off washing floors and collecting empties, but after a while he got me dancing. He was letting me crash for free, so I didn’t want to tell him no. And then, since I was there all the time anyway and knew what I was doing, he got me to start helping on the office shit, doing paperwork and balancing the books and stuff like that.” She settled on the wall, ashed her cigarette. I squinted up at her, watching her mouth shape the words.
“I did what he told me to because I was too tired to figure life out for myself. I wanted to feel safe for a while, wanted to know that I’d have a bed to come home to, and I hadn’t been able to do that on my own, yet. And he let me into his stash when he was feeling generous, and we hooked up off and on. Don’t tell your dad—he says he doesn’t want to know that part.”
“You told him about all this?”
She nodded, blew out gusts of white. “He wanted to know, but he got so upset that I never got around to filling in all the details. No sense in making both of us feel sick about it.”
“But you’re telling me.”
A cop car turned into the parking lot behind us, then a second later two of them turned out of it onto the road, the sleek, fast ones that get used for car chases, and I wondered if they were looking for us, if they might not stop and talk to us even if they weren’t looking for us, since we looked just as shady as we always did.
“You asked. And you watched me punch the bastard. If I don’t tell you, you’ll fill in for yourself. Or go digging through my private shit again.
“Anyway. One night I fell asleep in the office, the way I usually did. I’d either been smoking or drinking, I don’t remember, but I passed out pretty hard, and when I woke up an entire weekend’s take was missing from the desk drawer.
“For a day or so I thought I’d just moved it, put it down somewhere in the room and then couldn’t remember where that was. It was in one of those blue zippered wallets, waiting to go to the bank, with a deposit slip and everything in it. I tore the room apart, and then I tore the rest of the building apart, and then Fletch wanted to know what I was looking for.”
Another police cruiser rolled by, but the man at the wheel had his eyes on the road, didn’t even glance at us as he passed. It made me nervous.
“His brother had been staying with him for a few weeks, and that night he’d hung out with me, brought me drinks and kept me company while I worked on the books, but I didn’t guess that he might be responsible until after I’d given up on finding the cash. There were other people in the building, but no one else who could have gotten into the office without someone saying something or me noticing them, no one else who knew where the money was kept. The guy was a deadbeat—more so than the rest of us, I mean—fresh out of jail on a robbery charge. Except family is family. So Fletch decided that it was my fault.” She flicked away the cigarette butt, pulled out and lit a fresh one.
“I thought he was going to kill me for a little while. When he got done expressing his dismay I almost wished he had. He made it pretty clear that I could work it off or face the consequences. Then I found out that I was already in his debt, for the space to crash and everything he’d done for me before—he’d just been keeping the balance sheet to himself. And, not that I’m in favor of perpetuating the misconception that women’s sexual behavior exists primarily as a form of currency, it did piss me off that none of our hooking up seemed to be factored into how much I owed.
“So I danced more, and worked longer hours, and I tried to pay him back, but I kept getting deeper into the red. And we went from being buddies and sometimes lovers to me being his punching bag, and I didn’t punch back because I was too scared. But I didn’t wise up until he suggested that I start making back-room offers to the guys that bought dances. Then I realized, fuck him, this was just as much his fault as mine. So I packed up, wrote him a letter swearing that I’d pay him back when I had the money. Whenever I earned anything I sent him a bit, but the worry that one day he’d come after me never completely went away. So when I found myself with the cash and the time and the backbone . . .” She dragged deep. “I paid him back.”
She stubbed out the end of the cigarette and jumped down from the wall. “Now, I’m bushed as shit, so why don’t we find someplace cheap to bed down for the night, and somewhere else cheap to food up first, eh?”
She pulled me up, wrapped her arm around my shoulders, and for the first time I realized that we stood eye to eye.
; “There more stories like this that you haven’t told me yet?” I asked.
“Plenty. They’ll come up when they come up.”
“I dunno what to say about this one.”
“‘Nothing’ works just fine. It’s over and done with now. We’re just giving it an epilogue.”
We began to stroll towards the center of town, the throbbing beat of bass. The sky was a pure, eternal dark blue over our heads, paler at the western horizon.
“We sticking around this place a while?”
“Here? Naw. If I had the juice to leave tonight we would.”
“Where we going next then?”
“Harrison County, Mississippi.”
Back the way we’d come. I groaned. “Can’t we just go straight to wherever it is that we’re going?”
“Alex, you seem to have some fundamental confusion about the nature of the Quest. What if Sir Gawain and all them had just . . .” She trailed off there. We’d gone down the alley and popped out in the lot where we’d left the car. A tall, square-shouldered figure was fast-walking towards us from the entry we’d driven in by; he could have been in a hurry to get to his own car but I knew that wasn’t the case even before I recognized his clothes and the goatee. Ma grabbed my arm, wheeled around, but the front-desk kid from the tattoo shop was already coming towards us down the alley.