Jack has been sober for more than a decade, something Jo and I found increasingly hard to believe. Mama boasted of how proud she was of him. Her Jack didn’t go to AA or do any of those programs people talk about. Her Jack did it on his own.
“Those AA people—they ask forgiveness,” Jo said once. “They make amends.” She cackled at the idea, and I smiled. Jack asking forgiveness was about as hard to imagine as him staying sober. For years we teased each other, “You think it will last?” Then in unison, we would go, “Naaa!”
Neither of us can figure out how it has lasted, but Jack has stayed sober, never drinking. Of course, he also never made amends.
“For what?” he said. For what?
“I did the best I could with all those girls,” Jack told the doctor, the night Arlene was carried into the emergency room raving and kicking. It was the third and last time she mixed vodka and sleeping pills, and only a year or so after Jack first got sober, the same year I was working up in Atlanta and could fly down on short notice. Jo called me from the emergency room and said, “Get here fast, looks like she an’t gonna make it this time.”
Jo was wrong about that, though as it turned out we were both grateful she got me to come. Arlene came close to putting out the eye of the orderly who tried to help the nurses strap her down. She did break his nose, and chipped two teeth that belonged to the rent-a-cop who came over to play hero. The nurses fared better, getting away with only a few scratches and one moderately unpleasant bite mark.
“I’ll kill you,” Arlene kept screaming. “I’ll fucking kill you all!” Then after a while, “You’re killing me. You’re killing me!”
It was Jo who had found Arlene. Baby sister had barely been breathing, her face and hair sour with vomit. Jo called the ambulance, and then poured cold water all over Arlene’s head and shoulders until she became conscious enough to scream. For a day and a half, Jo told me, Arlene was finally who she should have been from the beginning. She cursed with outrage and flailed with wild conviction. “You should have seen it,” Jo told me.
By the time I got there, Arlene was going in and out—one minute sobbing and weak and the next minute rearing up to shout. The conviction was just about gone. When she was quiet for a little while, I looked in at her, but I couldn’t bring myself to speak. Every breath Arlene drew seemed to suck oxygen out of the room. Then Jack came in the door and it was as if she caught fire at the sight of him. For the first and only time in her life she called him a son of a bitch to his face.
“You, you,” she screamed. “You are killing me! Get out. Get out. I’ll rip your dick off if you don’t get the hell out of here.”
“She’s gone completely crazy,” Jack told everyone, but it sounded like sanity to me.
The psychiatric nurse kept pushing for sedation, but Jo and I fought them on that. Let her scream it out, we insisted. By some miracle they listened to us, and left her alone. We stayed in the hall outside the room, listening to Arlene as she slowly wound herself down.
“I did the best I could,” Jack kept saying to the doctor. “You can see what it was like. I just never knew what to do.”
Jo and I kept our distance. Neither of us said a word.
By the third morning, Arlene was gray-faced and repentant. When we went in to check on her, her eyes would not rise to meet ours.
“I’m all right,” she said in a thick hoarse whisper. “And I won’t ever let that happen again.”
“Damn pity,” Jo told me later. “That was just about the only time I’ve ever really liked her. Crazy out of her mind, she made sense. Sane, I don’t understand her at all.”
“What do you think happens after death?” Mama asked me.
She and I were sitting alone waiting for the doctor to come back. They were giving her IV fluids and oral medicines to help her with the nausea, but she was sick to her stomach all the time and trying hard not to show it. “Come on, tell me,” she said.
I looked at Mama’s temples where the skin had begun to sink in. A fine gray shadow was slowly widening and deepening. Her closed eyes were like marbles under a sheet. I rubbed my neck. I was too tired to lie to her.
“You close your eyes,” I said. “Then you open them, start over.”
“God!” Mama shuddered. “I hope not.”
Jo was a breeder, Ridgebacks and Rottweilers. A third of every litter had to be put down. Jo always had it done at the vet’s office, while she held them in her arms and sobbed. She kept their birth dates and names in lists under the glass top of her coffee table, christening them all for rock-and-rollers, even the ones she had to kill.
“Axl is getting kind of old,” she told me on the phone before I came last spring. “But you should see Bon Jovi the Third. We’re gonna get a dynasty out of her.”
After her daughter Beth was born, Jo had her own tubes tied. Still she hated to fix her bitches, and found homes for every dog born on her place. “Only humans should be stopped from breeding,” she told me once. “Dogs know when to eat their runts. Humans don’t know shit.”
Four years ago Jo was arrested for breaking into a greyhound puppy farm up near Apopka. Mama was healthy back then, but didn’t have a dime to spare. Jaybird called me to help them find a lawyer and get Jo out on bail. It was expensive. Jo had blown up the incinerator at the farm. The police insisted she had used stolen dynamite, but Jo refused to talk about that. What she wanted to talk about was what she had heard, that hundreds of dogs had been burned in that cinder-block firepit.
“Alive. Alive,” she told the judge. “Three different people told me. Those monsters get drunk, stoke up the fire, and throw in all the puppies they can’t sell. Alive, the sonsabitches! Don’t even care if anyone hears them scream.” From the back of the court-room, I could hear the hysteria in her voice.
“Imagine it. Little puppies, starved in cages and then caught up and tossed in the fire.” Jo shook her head. Gray streaks shone against the black. The judge grimaced. I wondered if she was getting to him.
“And then”—she glared across the courtroom—“they sell the ash and bone for fertilizer.” Beside me Jaybird wiggled uncomfortably.
Jo got a suspended sentence, but only after her lawyer proved the puppy farmers had a history of citations from Animal Protection. Jo had to pay the cost of the incinerator, which was made easier when people started writing her and sending checks. The newspaper had made her a Joan of Arc of dogs. It got so bad the farm closed up the dog business and shifted over to pigs.
“I don’t give a rat’s ass about pigs,” Jo promised the man when she wrote him his check.
“Well, I can appreciate that.” He grinned at us. “Almost nobody does.”
“How’d you get that dynamite?” I asked Jo when we were driving away in Jay’s truck. It was the one thing she had dodged throughout the trial.
“Didn’t use no dynamite.” She nudged Jaybird’s shoulder. “Old Bird here gave me a grenade he’d brought back from the army. Didn’t think it would work. I just promised I’d get rid of it for him. But it was a fuck-up.” She frowned. “It just blew the back wall out of that incinerator. They got all that money off me under false pretenses.”
Every time Jack came to the hospital, he brought food, greasy bags of hamburgers and fries from the Checker Inn, melted milk shakes from the diner on the highway, and half-eaten boxes of chocolate. Mama ate nothing, just watched him. The bones of her face stood out like the girders of a bridge.
Jo and I went down to the coffee shop. Arlene, who had come in with Jack, stayed up with them. “He wants her to get up and come home,” she reported to us when she came down an hour later.
Jo laughed and blew smoke over Arlene’s head in a long thin stream. “Right,” she barked, and offered Arlene one of her Marlboros.
“I can’t smoke that shit,” Arlene said. She pulled out her alligator case and lit a Salem with a little silver lighter. When Jo said nothing, Arlene relaxed a little and opened the bag of potato chips we had saved for her. “He’s los
t the checkbook again,” she said in my direction. “Says he wants to know where we put her box of Barr Dollars so he can buy gas for the Buick.”
“He’s gonna lose everything as soon as she’s gone.” Jo pushed her short boots off with her toes and put her feet up on another seat. “He’s sending the bills back marked ‘deceased.’ The mortgage payment, for God’s sake.” She shook her head and took a potato chip from Arlene’s bag.
“He’ll be living on the street in no time.” Her voice was awful with anticipation.
Arlene turned to me. “Where are the Barr Dollars?”
I shook my head. Last I knew, Mama had stashed in her wallet exactly five one-dollar bills signed by Joseph W. Barr—crisp dollar bills she was sure would be worth money someday, though I had no idea why she thought so.
“Girls.”
Jack stood in the doorway. He looked uncomfortable with the three of us sitting together. “She’s looking better,” he said diffidently.
Arlene nodded. Jo let blue smoke trail slowly out of her nose. I said nothing. I could feel my cheeks go stiff. I looked at the way Jack’s hairline was receding, the gray bush of his military haircut thinning out and slowly exposing the bony structure of his head.
“Well.” Jack’s left hand gripped the doorframe. He let go and flexed his fingers in the air. When the hand came down again, it gripped so hard the fingertips went white. My eyes were drawn there, unable to look away from the knuckles standing out knobby and hard. Beside me Jo tore her empty potato chip bag in half, spilling crumbs on the linoleum tabletop. Arlene shifted in her chair. I heard the elevator gears grind out in the hall.
“I was gonna go home,” Jack said. He let go of the doorjamb.
“Good night, Daddy,” Arlene called after him. He waved a hand and walked away.
Jo twisted around in her chair. “You are such a suck-ass,” she said.
Arlene’s cheeks flushed. “You don’t have to be mean.”
“I can’t even say his name. You call him Daddy.” Jo shook her head. “Daddy.”
“He’s the only father I’ve ever known.” Arlene’s face was becoming a brighter and brighter pink. She fumbled with her cigarette case, then shoved it into her bag. “And I don’t see any reason to make this thing any worse.”
“Worse?” Jo twisted further in her chair. She leaned over and put her hand on Arlene’s forearm. “Tell me the truth,” she said. “Didn’t you ever just want to kill the son of a bitch?”
Arlene jerked her arm free, but Jo caught the belt of her dress. “He an’t got shit. He an’t gonna give you no money, and he can’t hurt you no more. You don’t have to suck up to him. You could tell him to go to hell.”
Arlene slapped Jo’s hand away and grabbed her bag. “Don’t you tell me what to do.” She looked over at me as if daring me to say something. “Don’t you tell me nothing.”
Jo dropped back in her seat and lifted her hands in mock surrender. “Me, you can say no to. Him, you run after like some little brokenhearted puppy.”
“Don’t, don’t . . .” For a moment it was as if Arlene were going to say something. The look on her face reminded me of the night she had screamed and kicked. Do it, I wanted to say. Do it. But whatever Arlene wanted to say, she swallowed.
“Just don’t!” She was out the door in a rush.
I took a drink of cold coffee and watched Jo. Her eyes were red-veined and her hair hung limp. She shook her head. “I hate her, I swear I do,” she said.
I looked away. “None of us have ever much liked each other,” I said.
Jo lit another cigarette and rubbed under her eyes. “You an’t that bad.” She pulled out a Kleenex, dampened it with a little of my black coffee, and wiped carefully under each eye. “Not now anyway. You were mean as a snake when you were little.”
“That was you.”
Jo’s hand stopped. An angry glare came into her eyes, but instead of shouting, she laughed. I hesitated and she pushed her hair back and laughed some more.
“Well,” she said, “I suppose it was. Yeah.” She nodded, the laughter softening to a smile. “You just stayed gone all the time.”
“Saved my life.” I laced my fingers together on the table, remembering all those interminable black nights, Jo pinching me awake and the two of us hauling Arlene into the backyard to hide behind the garage. Bleak days, shame omnipresent as fear, and by the time I was twelve, I stayed gone every minute I could.
“You were the smart one.” Jo looked toward the door. I watched how her eyes focused on the jamb where his hand had rested.
“You were smart, I was fast, and Arlene learned to suck ass so hard she swallowed her own soul.”
I kept quiet. There was nothing to say to that.
“I dreamed you killed him.” Mama’s voice was rough, shaped around the tube in her nose.
“How?” I kept my voice impartial, relaxed. This was not what I wanted to talk about, but it was easier when Mama talked. I hated the hours when she just lay there staring up at the ceiling with awful anticipation on her face.
“All kinds of ways.” Mama waved the hand that wasn’t strapped down for the IV. She looked over at me slyly.
“You know I used to dream about it all the time. Dreamed it for years. Mostly it was you, but sometimes Jo would do it. Every once in a while it would be Arlene.”
She paused, closed her eyes, and breathed for a while.
“I’d wake up just terrified, but sometimes almost glad. Relieved to have it over and done, I think. Bad times I would get up and walk around awhile, remind myself what was real, what wasn’t. Listen to him snore awhile, then go make sure you girls were all right.”
She looked at me with dulled eyes. I couldn’t think what to say.
“Don’t do it,” she whispered.
I wanted to laugh, but didn’t. I watched Mama’s shadowy face. Her expression stunned me. Her mouth was drawn up in a big painful smile, not at all sincere.
“Did you want to kill him?”
I turned away from the black window, expecting Jo. But it was Arlene, her eyes huge with smeared mascara.
“Sure,” I told her. “Still do.”
She nodded and wiped her nose with the back of her hand.
“But you won’t.”
“Probably not.”
We stood still. I waited.
“I didn’t think like that.” She spoke slowly. “Like you and Jo. You two were always fighting. I felt like I had to be the peace-maker. And I . . .” She paused, bringing her hands up in the air as if she were lifting something.
“I just didn’t want to be a hateful person. I wanted it to be all right. I wanted us all to love each other.” She dropped her hands. “Now you just hate me. You and Jo, you hate me worse than him.”
“No.” I spoke in a whisper. “Never. It’s hard sometimes to believe, I know. But I love you. Always have. Even when you made me so mad.”
She looked at me. When she spoke, her voice was tiny. “I used to dream about it,” she whispered. “Not killing him, but him dying. Him being dead.”
I smiled at her. “Easier that way,” I said.
Arlene nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah.”
That evening Mavis stopped me in the hall. She had a stack of papers in one hand and an expression that bordered on outrage. “This an’t been signed,” she said. Her hand shook the papers. I looked at them as she stepped in close to me. She pulled one off the bottom.
“This is from Mrs. Crawford, that woman was in the room next to your mama. Look at this. Look at it close.”
The printing was dark and bold. “Do not resuscitate.” “No extraordinary measures to be taken.”
I looked up at Mavis, and she shook her head at me. “Don’t tell me you don’t know what I mean. You been on this road a long time. You know what’s coming, and your mother needs you to take care of it.”
She pressed a sheaf of forms into my hand. “You go in there and take another good long look at your mother, and then you get t
hese papers done right.”
Later that evening I was holding a damp washrag to my eyes over the little sink in the entry to Mama’s room. I could hear Mama whispering to Jo on the other side of the curtain around the bed.
“What do you think happens after death?” Mama asked. Her voice was hoarse.
I brought the rag down to cover my mouth.
“Oh hell, Mama,” Jo said. “I don’t know.”
“No, tell me.”
There was a long pause. Then Jo gave a harsh sigh and said it again. “Oh hell.” Her chair slid forward on the linoleum floor. “You know what I really think?” Her voice was a careful whisper. “I’ll tell you the truth, Mama. But don’t you laugh. I think you come back as a dog.”
I heard Mama’s indrawn breath.
“I said don’t laugh. I’m telling you what I really believe.”
I lifted my head. Jo sounded so sincere. I could almost feel Mama leaning toward her.
“What I think is, if you were good to the people in your life, well then, you come back as a big dog. And . . .” Jo paused and tapped a finger on the bedframe. “If you were some evil son of a bitch, then you gonna come back some nasty little Pekingese.”
Jo laughed then, a quick bark of a laugh. Mama joined in weakly. Then they were giggling together. “A Pekingese,” Mama said. “Oh yes.”
I put my forehead against the mirror over the sink and listened. It was good to hear. When they settled down, I started to step past the curtain. But then Mama spoke and I paused. Her voice was soft, but firm.
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