The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  “Fine,” snapped Jude. “But where the hell are you?”

  As Molly’s face evaporated, Jude groped for another cigarette.

  PART ONE

  MOLLY

  CHAPTER

  2

  JUDE PEDALED NEXT DOOR on her purple tricycle to inspect the new cellar hole. Careening down the mound of orange clay, training wheels spinning, dark braids lashing like reins on a runaway horse, came a bare-chested girl in shorts. Her bicycle flipped halfway down, hurling her headfirst to the bottom. She jumped up, laughing, chest and cheek streaked with clay like Indian war paint. Righting her bicycle, she stroked its saddle, murmuring, “Easy, boy. It’s okay.”

  “Are you all right?” asked Jude. She had never met another girl who didn’t wear a shirt. Her chest was really tan, too, as though she never wore one. Whereas Jude had pale patches from the top her father made her wear at the golf club pool.

  “This is my stallion,” she replied. “I call him Stormy because he runs like the wind. What’s yours called?”

  Looking down at her tricycle, Jude said, “I don’t know really.” She felt embarrassed that she’d never thought of her tricycle as a horse. She could hear Ace Kilgore barking commands to the Commie Killers in the field across the street. They all rode bicycles, too, making them rear up on their hind wheels to mount curbs. Ace could even balance like that and then twirl around in midair and race off in the opposite direction. Jude was the only kid in the neighborhood who still rode a tricycle. But her father had promised her a bicycle with training wheels for her upcoming birthday.

  A blond woman in a sundress covered with flowers the color of tangerine peels appeared from behind the mound, long skirt swaying as she picked her way across the clay in high-heeled white sandals. “My gracious, Molly, what have you done to yourself now?” Taking a flimsy handkerchief with eyelet edges from her white handbag, she dabbed at the clay on Molly’s cheek. “Goodness gracious, what am I going to do with my wild child?”

  Molly shoved her hand away. “Momma, don’t be such a worrywart.”

  Molly’s mother smiled at Jude. “Well, hello there. You must be our new neighbor?”

  “What’s your name?” asked Molly, leaning over to pick at a scab on her kneecap.

  “Jude.” A screen door slammed down the block, and Jude could hear ice cubes clinking in glasses on someone’s back porch.

  “That’s a nice name,” said Molly’s mother. “I’m Mrs. Elkins and this is Molly.”

  “How do you do, Mrs. Elkins,” said Jude, as her father had just taught her.

  Molly was watching a white mare’s tail flick a far-off mountain-top. The rubber band had broken on one of her braids, which was slowly unplaiting like blacksnakes coming out of hibernation in the spring.

  Mrs. Elkins smiled. “Well, my goodness, Jude, aren’t you polite, now. I can see you’re going to be a good influence on Molly.”

  Molly’s blue eyes narrowed and shifted to gray.

  Back home, Jude stood on a chair before the bathroom mirror, wiping at her cheek with a Kleenex and saying in a sugary voice, “Goodness gracious, what am I going to do with my wild child?” Then she pushed the hand away with her other hand, saying, “Oh, Momma, don’t be such a worrywart.”

  “What you doing, Miss Judith?” called Clementine from the kitchen.

  “Nothing. Playing.” She wondered if Clementine could be persuaded to wipe her cheek with a Kleenex. Probably not. She skipped into the kitchen, where Clementine sat humming “Take Time to Be Holy” and snapping beans for supper. Jude tried to climb onto her aproned lap, but she straightened her legs so that Jude slid down them to the linoleum. She lay there tracing with a finger the grouting between the fake red bricks. “You love me best, don’t you, Clementine?”

  “I likes you, Miss Judith. But I got childrens all my own what needs me to love them best.”

  “But so do I.”

  Clementine had rolled her stockings to just below her knees. A ladder like a tiny cat’s cradle ran down one calf and disappeared into her giant white oxford. She said her mother had called her Clementine because of her feet, huge even when she was a baby. Sometimes she sang Jude the song for which she’d been named: “Light she was, and like a fairy/And her shoes were number nine./Wearing boxes without topses,/Sandals were for Clementine.”

  “You got your daddy to love you best.”

  “But he doesn’t. He loves Momma best. But she doesn’t love him best, or else she wouldn’t have gone away.”

  Clementine paused in midsnap to look at Jude stretched out on the linoleum. “Sugar, I done told you that the good Lord took your momma home two years ago.”

  “But where is she? Where’s His house at?”

  “In heaven with the angels.”

  “Well, I wish He’d take me there, too.”

  “Hush now, honey. That ain’t for me and you to say. The good Lord takes us when He wants us and where He wants us.”

  “How come?” Jude stood up and draped her arm across Clementine’s shoulders, one skinny leg straight and the other bent, a flamingo in a red linoleum marsh. Sniffing, she picked up Clementine’s familiar scent of furniture polish, snuff, and the vanilla extract she dabbed behind her ears when her husband was about to pick her up.

  Clementine glanced at her. “Sugar, go put you on a shirt, why don’t you? Little girls wear shirts.”

  “I don’t want to be a girl.” With her fingertip, Jude touched a tiny silver curl, like a spring from a broken watch, which was peeking out from beneath the red bandanna Clementine tied around her head like a knitted winter cap.

  “But that’s what the good Lord made you. It ain’t no choice. Just like it ain’t no choice if your skin be brown or white.”

  ONCE JUDE PROVED THAT she could pee standing up, the Commie Killers were forced to accept her as a member, even though she was a girl and the youngest kid in the neighborhood. But fair was fair, and the Commie Killers’ mission was to spread justice throughout the land. They consoled themselves with her promise to hide them one at a time in her father’s office at her house as he examined patients. You had to lurk outside the door until he went into the bathroom between appointments. Then you slithered across the floor on your belly and slid beneath the huge maroon leather sofa. You could hear him discussing all kinds of interesting things with naked people you later saw walking around town fully clothed. From a certain angle, you could even catch a glimpse of the examining table.

  On the day of her initiation, Jude concealed her tricycle in the pine grove by the path to Ace Kilgore’s headquarters. Someone dug a cellar hole in the field across the street from Sandy Andrews’s house before going bankrupt. Ace and his gang had constructed a network of trenches, bunkers, and tunnels in the abandoned hills of red clay, like an ant colony. Parents tried to prevent their sons from playing with Ace. He threw snowballs with rocks in them at little children. And he tied twine with tin cans on one end to dogs’ tails. Once, he and his platoon pushed a junked refrigerator onto the train tracks in the valley, causing the engine to derail. Jude’s father said he might get sent to reform school. Every kid in the neighborhood tried to avoid meeting his eyes, which were a dull shoe polish black. If he caught you looking at him, you became the target of an interrogation regarding your secret espionage activities for the Russians.

  Nevertheless, every boy in Tidewater Estates sneaked away to Commie Killer meetings except Sandy Andrews, who was a sissy. They made their mothers rip the patches off their fathers’ old army uniforms and sew them on their jacket sleeves, and they pinned their fathers’ multicolored bars on their chest pockets. Ace had the most because his father had been a hero in the war. Jude made Clementine retrieve her father’s olive uniform jacket from the attic. It stank of mothballs, but it sported the requisite bars and patches, which Clementine agreed to stitch onto her jacket if her father gave his permission. Instead, he forbade her to have anything to do with Ace Kilgore.

  Jude used to play with the neighborhood
girls at Noreen Worth’s, but she was tired of diapering dolls with handkerchiefs and rolling around the playhouse floor speaking in tongues. Besides, Noreen, whose father was a Holiness preacher, claimed Jude was a bad

  Baptist because at Jude’s church people just sat in their pews and kept quiet. She had also played a few times with Clementine’s daughters in Riverbend. But all they ever did was jump rope, turning two ropes really fast and chanting things Jude couldn’t understand. Whenever Jude tried to jump in, she ended up on the ground, trussed like a calf for branding. She found it hard to believe that these were the children Clementine loved more than herself. So, despite her father’s stern injunction, Jude found herself irresistibly drawn to the Commie Killers.

  The hideout was dark inside, apart from the light from a white candle stuck in the clay floor. The boys were wearing only Jockey briefs, so Jude hurriedly stripped down to her white cotton panties. Ace passed out several round Quaker Oats boxes and wooden spoons. As some drummed, others danced. Watching from the corner of her eye, Jude copied their writhing, hopping movements, like an Indian war dance. Ace’s father’s colonel hat with the golden eagle above the brim kept slipping down over his eyes. So excited was Jude finally to be a full-fledged defender of the American Way that she had goose bumps all over her flesh. She thought she could hear a cat yowling from the corner of the cave.

  The boys were kneeling in the dirt as Ace leapt from one to another, thrusting his hips against their briefs with sharp jabs while the drummers pounded a syncopated beat. His face was dripping sweat in the candlelight and his licorice eyes gaped like the sockets in the skull on her father’s office counter.

  Jude got down on her knees, but Ace pushed her over with his foot. “Girls can’t do this,” he growled in a strange voice. “Men do this.”

  Then they crouched in a circle around the candle and Ace placed a cherry bomb in his palm. Gravely, he extended it to Jude. She took it. His lieutenant Jerry Crawford, a tall, gawky boy who had smiled shyly at Jude when no one else was looking, carried a cage over from the shadows. Inside was a matted barn cat Jude had seen lurking around the neighborhood. Her eyes were flashing chartreuse. One of her ears had been ripped off during a fight and the tip of her tail bent at a right angle. Several boys put on work gloves, dragged her from the cage, and pinned her against the dirt floor. Jude stroked her forehead with an index finger.

  “Don’t pet Hiroshima,” said Ace. “She’s been very bad.”

  “Why do you call her Hiroshima?” asked Jude.

  Ace grinned, white teeth flashing like Chiclets in the shadow cast by the visor of his colonel hat.

  “Why has she been bad?”

  “She’s been stealing my dog’s food. But you ask too many questions, little girl. Just shut up and shove that thing up her hole.”

  Jude looked at the red cherry bomb with the green wick, then at the snarling, struggling cat.

  “If you want to be a Commie Killer,” said Ace as he struck a match, “you have to do it. And you have to do it now.”

  As eerie shadows danced on the walls of clay like the flames of Hades, Jude looked at him with horrified comprehension. “No,” she whispered. “Don’t, Ace. Let her go. Please.” She looked to Jerry, who was staring hard at the floor.

  “Hurry up! Do it!” ordered the boys as the cat hissed and howled.

  Jude scrambled to her feet and ran toward the doorway, clutching the cherry bomb.

  “Go bake cookies with that faggot Sandy Andrews!” someone yelled.

  “If you tell,” called Ace, “we’ll hunt you down and do this to you.

  Jude stumbled through the maze of trenches, sliding on the slick orange clay. She’d get Clementine. Clementine would make them stop.

  She heard a bang. Slipping and falling, she lay for a moment in the sticky mud in her underpants, too stunned to get up.

  Pedaling her tricycle fast toward home, she could hardly see the sidewalk through her angry tears. She had saved herself and left the cat to die. She was not a Commie Killer, she was a coward. And if she told, Ace would do that to her next. She couldn’t jump rope, and she couldn’t speak in tongues. The Commie Killers were not champions of democracy, they were murderers. She would always be alone forever and ever in this horrible place where bullies tortured the weak just for fun. If only she could be safe in heaven with her mother. She stopped pedaling to wipe her wet cheeks with a muddy forearm.

  “Don’t cry, Jude,” said a husky voice beside her. “I’ll be your friend.”

  Jude opened her eyes. Molly was standing there, barefoot, shirtless, smoky eyes troubled, hand on Jude’s handlebars.

  “You better not,” said Jude. “I’m in big trouble. I may be killed.”

  “I don’t care. I’ll help you.”

  AS JUDE STOOD IN the aisle leading to the altar, the adult choir in their white robes and red cowls were singing “Jesus Loves the Little Children.” The dreaded Ace Kilgore was directly in front of her. His brown hair had been furrowed like a plowed field by the teeth of a comb, and he was wearing a red polka-dot necktie. It matched that of his father, who was the usher assigned that morning to lead the children to the Sunday school building.

  Ace and his father also had matching black eyes that seemed just to absorb the rainbow light through the stained-glass windows rather than to reflect it as everyone else’s eyes did. The other adults tried to avoid Mr. Kilgore’s stare just as the kids avoided Ace’s. He was always buttonholing Jude’s father outside the church, trying to argue about Senator McCarthy. Mr. Kilgore’s voice would grow louder and louder and his face more and more red as he described the agents of evil who were infesting the country like vermin.

  Spotting Jude in line behind him, Ace leaned back to whisper, “We gonna get you, Goody Two-shoes.”

  Jude flinched, picturing the cat cowering in the dirt.

  Molly, standing beside her, said, “Just shut up, goofball.”

  Ace looked at her, startled. “Who are you?”

  “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

  “Well, we’ll get you, too, ugly. And lynch you with those long black braids of yours.”

  The choir was singing: “…red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight.…”

  “You and what army, cat killer?” asked Molly, whose irises had shifted to a dangerous battle gray.

  Ace narrowed his eyes and glared at Jude. “Don’t you worry, little lady. The Commie Killers know how to take care of rats, and friends of rats.” Grabbing his tie, he pulled it upward, nooselike, mouth lolling open and tongue hanging out.

  “Why don’t you go eat a vomit sandwich?” suggested Molly as their lines parted before the carpeted steps leading to the altar, on which stood a golden cross with Christ writhing in agony. Jude was impressed by her new friend’s courage. No one ever talked like that to the Kilgores.

  “MAYBE THERE’S SOME WAY to make a tunnel fall down with the Commie Killers inside it,” mused Molly as they sat at a long table coloring pictures of Jesus tending baby lambs.

  “I think we should ask Sandy Andrews to help us,” said Jude. “He’s a child progeny.” She selected a fat ocher crayon for Jesus’ hair and beard.

  “What’s that?”

  “He taught himself to read and write when he was four, so they let him skip first and second grade. My dad says he’s so smart that they may have to send him away to school. I’m glad I’m not that smart.”

  “Do you think he’d help girls?”

  “Maybe. He doesn’t have any friends. He doesn’t like to kill things.”

  “WHY ARE SOME PEOPLE SO mean?” Jude asked Clementine, licking chocolate frosting off a beater while the morning sun through the kitchen window turned the red linoleum to orange. When she woke up that morning, her stomach had clenched with dread. The Commie Killers were going to get her. They were going to do to her what they’d done to that cat. Then she remembered her new friend, Molly, who had promised to help her, and she began to feel a fa
int flicker of hope.

  “The good Lord made them that way so the righteous could be tested.”

  “Like a test at the hospital?”

  “Like a test ever day of the year. You gots to be kind to them what treats you cruel.” Clementine was spreading the frosting with swirling strokes of her spatula, making chocolate waves.

  “How come?”

  “Cause one fine day they gets ashamed of acting so ugly and they turns to Jesus. And then you wins yourself a golden crown.”

  Jude studied Clementine, picturing a golden crown atop her red bandanna head cloth. “But what if it’s not you they’re ugly to? What if they’re ugly to something else?”

  “What ugliness you seen, Miss Judith?” She paused to study Jude, who was winding her tongue around a beater blade to get at the frosting in back, which was still gritty with sugar.

  “Nothing. I’m just wondering.”

  “A good person will put up with ugliness coming at themselves. But you gots to fight for them what’s small and weak.” She narrowed her eyes suspiciously at Jude.

  To escape her X-ray vision, Jude dropped the beater in the sink and dashed out the kitchen door. Molly was riding Stormy down the sidewalk. She had attached playing cards to the spokes with clothespins to make a whirring sound, and she was wearing sunglasses and a winter cap with earflaps. She landed her airplane on the sidewalk in front of Sandy Andrews’s house, elaborate whooshing and sputtering sounds emitting from her mouth.

  Sandy was watering the foundation shrubs with a hose. Jude noticed that he was wearing socks and sandals instead of the black high-tops required by the Commie Killers. The shrubs had been clipped into triangles and cubes, like dark green building blocks.

  “Hey, Sandy,” called Jude from her tricycle, which she’d decided to name Lightning. “This is Molly. She’s moved into that new house next door to mine.” Molly was hanging her cap by its chin strap from her handlebars.