Genevieve

by Eric Jerome Dickey

  “Like what?”

  “Like the year she thought that God was talking to her through the TV.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “But only if it was on Channel 11, so no one could change the channel. That black-and-white television stayed on Channel 11 a whole year, I kid you not. Grandpa Fred took her for some treatments when she thought God told her to collect dirty undergarments from the neighbors and wash them by hand in order to clean their souls and save them from hell.”

  “Get out.”

  “She was nasty. She smoked over food while she was cooking on the stove. All the counters had cigarette burns where she put them down for a minute to prepare the food.”

  “Can’t even imagine.”

  “We all grew up in a crazy house.”

  “I understand.”

  “No you don’t. She was really tough on me. If I did something she saw as wrong, something as simple as not running fast enough when she called my name, even if I didn’t hear her, she beat me. She beat me if my grades weren’t good enough. I’d get beat for having an A-minus. If I cried because of the pain, she beat me for crying. Maybe because I was older or something, I don’t know, but she did things to me that she didn’t do to the others.”

  “What… what did she do?”

  “She… I don’t want to say that. Not that.”

  Silence descends from the sky with the weight of a feather.

  She says, “I’d broken one of her favorite glasses. An ugly antique thing. I knew a beating was coming that would make them put me on the other side of the fence. I imagined her sitting there with the television on her soap operas, all the windows up, cigarette in the corner of her mouth, looking over that fence and yelling my name every day. Talking about me like I was nothing. So I stuffed clothes in a Piggly Wiggly bag and left. No money. Just ran away and…”

  After her voice fades I say, “You ran away?”

  “I was missing for six months.”

  “Six months? At thirteen?”

  “Yes.”

  “You came back or they found you?”

  “I came back. Never should have. But I came back. And the abuse got worse.”

  I’m trying not to shake my head, trying to not frown or show any body language that implies judgment. I digest her words then ask, “How did you get to Atlanta?”

  “All I knew was I had to get to the Interstate.”

  “That’s at least ten miles.”

  “Thirteen. From my momma’s tombstone to the Interstate, thirteen miles on the dot. One mile for each year I’d been on this earth.”

  “Prophetic.”

  “No, pathetic.”

  “Still, long way for a little girl to walk.”

  “It didn’t matter. I would’ve walked barefoot from Selma to Montgomery to get away from here. Nobody could stop me. My belief was strong and my purpose just, so no obstacle was going to stand in my way. And I was sweating, trying to get my nappy head, ashy elbows, and boney knees out of this hell. Made it down there and put my thumb out.”

  “Somebody picked you up when you were a little girl?”

  “Truckers don’t care how old you are. As long as you can walk, you’re legal.”

  “You could’ve been killed.”

  “Like my mother. Or I would’ve killed myself. Or killed Willie Esther.”

  “How did you… what did you do for six months?”

  “I. Survived.”

  Her husky voice splinters, tells me that I’m asking her to take me down an unpaved road that I may not want to travel. Asking me if I want to go that deep into the rabbit hole.

  Silence falls between us.

  Then she laughs. Husky voice gone. No flame in her eyes. Genevieve again.

  I ask, “You okay?”

  “Remembering something I had forgotten.”

  “What?”

  “There was a huge water mill along the road on the stretch of highway 1-65. Between Birmingham and Montgomery. It had a giant wooden Satan holding a pitchfork, bending up and down. There was a sign next to it that said ‘Go to Church or the Devil Will Get You.”’

  “That’s funny?”

  “I used to see that Satan and… it scared me because it looked like her. The shape of its head. The smile. You would think a sign like that would make you laugh, but it terrified me.”

  I rub my hands together and wait. Too many thoughts are going through my mind, imagination in overdrive, imagining what a thirteen-year-old girl could do to survive in Atlanta.

  Then Genevieve stops walking. “I feel sad. Have to do something.”

  She reaches into her purse and takes out a round Altoids can.

  I sigh and grit my teeth. This is one reason she wants to be alone.

  But I am here. She can’t make me go away.

  Genevieve opens the lid. No Altoids are inside. Two slim cigarettes rolled in dark brown paper are in her possession. Underneath flags that honor each branch of the military, she takes out a lighter and fires up her salvation, takes a hard pull, and ecstasy makes her sigh. The glow on her face is the one that I want to give her. I want to be her pleasure. I want to have the power to steal her sadness.

  I struggle with this moment, at how prepared she is. I tell her, “You lied.”

  “Wish the swings were clean.”

  “Can’t believe you smuggled drugs on the plane.”

  “Would love to swing.”

  I bite my bottom lip. Genevieve is a master at small deceptions, the kind that aggravate.

  She shakes her head, and looks at me dead on. “Kenya is such a liar.”

  “Kenya?” That disrupts my anger. I open and close my hands. “What lie?”

  “I went down to her room.” She takes a pull. “She was fucking somebody.”

  I want to swallow, but I don’t. “You walked in on her?”

  “Didn’t have to. Could hear her out in the hallway.”

  She takes her final pull, holds it a while, then sets the smoke from the magical herb free, exhaling slowly. She puts what’s left back in the Altoids can, stuffs the can in her purse.

  “You feel better, Doc?” I ask with sarcasm. “Keep doing that until we get arrested.”

  “Kenya is addicted to drama, always in the middle of some drama.”

  “What are you addicted to?”

  “I could ask you the same.”

  “Just keep your demons on a chain.”

  “You do the same.”

  We cross a small stream, Beaver Creek. We’re moving at a decent pace, approaching Odenville Methodist Church. The marquee has made an acronym using the word Bible. “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.” Then we come up on the Bank of Odenville. Its windows are dirty. That institution long abandoned. Across the street wait Odenville Town Hall and the Jim Bailey Civic Center; both buildings combined are only about the size of our home in L.A.

  Genevieve stops in front of the Odenville Library, a building the size of our garage. A blue sign on the side of the building announces that Mary Banks is the librarian.

  Genevieve smiles. “They have a new library. The old library was inside the old bank building. And Mrs. Banks is still here. I bet they have computers and everything.”

  “Look at that smile. See, you do have good memories.”

  “The library was my escape from madness. I loved Mrs. Banks. Wonderful woman.”

  I hear a dog barking and I look to my right, down Third Avenue, a narrow one-way street with more old houses, maybe a few more trailer homes. Down that way a rottweiler is chained to a pole in the ground. In front of his home I see what he’s barking at. A U-Haul truck. It’s parked as if it were meant to be hidden from the rest of the world.

  Kenya is nearby. That means we are here. On the other side of the railroad tracks are two rows of trailer homes with rusted aluminum siding. Spaced out over the uneven land. There are two rows of those rectangular-shaped habitats; one row has eight, the other seven. All are in various states of disrepair. At least on
e looks as abandoned as the Bank of Odenville.

  We cross Alabama and turn on Ware, then head toward a dead end sign. We turn on Wellington Park Lane, I taste her in my mouth. Feel her skin on my fingers. Hear her sighs.

  Now as Genevieve takes another breath, I find it hard to breathe, hard to walk forward.

  Mental anguish shortens my breath. I need to burn a shrub.

  I ask, “Which trailer?”

  She motions with her head. “Last one. The purple trailer on the orange bricks.”

  We pass by neighbors riding bicycles. Across the way there is a man holding his daughter, both of them sharing a strawberry Yoo-hoo, looking over at us. Young boys with Skoal faces and 305 baseball caps stop working on a dirt bike and stare. Pasty-faced teenage girls stop smoking and gawk at us as they drive out of the cul-de-sac.

  I ask Genevieve, “The trailer next to the graveyard?”

  “Put your hand down. Bad luck to point at a graveyard.”

  Cars and pickup trucks are parked in that section. People are outside. Adults. Children. All look this way. Bubba Smith is there, hands in pockets, cigarette at the corner of his mouth.

  Kenya sashays into sight.

  She stands on that land like a Valkyrie; her gray eyes a blazing pyre. Fear and mythology intertwine, sailing around my skull like phantoms. A lone word clings to me: Gotterdammerung. A dusk of the gods. Collapse of civilization as I know it.

  My breathing roughens, consciousness disturbed by Kenya’s power. She is my Gotterdammerung, and with just a few words, my marriage, and my life, will forever be changed.

  Genevieve nods. “My mother’s grave is no more than five yards from the front door.”

  “You grew up with a graveyard right outside the front door?”

  “My mother was killed one Saturday night, that next Wednesday she was put in the ground right outside my bedroom window. From the front door to her tombstone, twenty steps.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “Right on the other side of the wooden fence, if you can call that a fence.”

  I repeat, “Other side of the fence.”

  “Yes. Death lives on the other side of the fence.”

  FOURTEEN

  GRANDPA FRED WAITS FOR US ON THE BLACKTOP ROAD LEADING TO THIS section of trailer homes. I know it is him because as we approach, he coughs. The rattle in his lungs resounds from thirty yards away, the emphysema trying to get a good grip on him to engage in its final battle.

  Genevieve’s paternal grandfather. A man whose son sits in prison as the outcome of a love gone bad. What he endures psychologically, I can only imagine. He waits underneath gray skies and the threat of rain. He sits on the edge of an unmarked road, cigarette in hand.

  I had imagined that old man with his back bent, his skin leathery and wrinkled, the etchings in his face a road map to days gone by, sitting in a worn and frayed chair, cane at his side, thick glasses on, his free hand dragging back and forth over the stubbles and rough texture in his pockmarked face, maybe shifting his stained false teeth side to side.

  Grandpa Fred is a portly man, double-chinned, a round face and a body that looks like one huge round ball resting on top of a larger round ball. He has gray sideburns that remind me of Elvis Presley. He has a thick gray handlebar moustache, wider than his face and curled up at its ends. He wears oversized tan pants and a red, white, and blue plaid shirt that he can barely button up, the right sleeve rolled up to his elbow, and a thin black tie, loose around his neck.

  He sits like a general monitoring his troops, an army cap resting on his head.

  I keep an eye on Genevieve as we get closer. She seems okay. Easy steps, breathing under control, back straight, purse hanging from her right hand, eyes are on her destination.

  Moments ago, when Genevieve told me about her past, about Willie Esther, part of me wondered why she didn’t go live with her paternal grandparents, why they did not intervene.

  As we pass by an abandoned trailer home and get closer, I think I understand why.

  Grandpa Fred does not come down the gentle slope to meet Genevieve, does not get up from his seat as she approaches. He sits because he cannot stand. His wheelchair is his home.

  His pants are rolled up and pinned. His legs are gone up above his knees. Nothing left but nubs. The army hat he wears announces that he has given this country part of his body as a testament of his loyalty to the red, white, and blue. In the end he lives in an old trailer home and rests in an antiquated wheel chair. God bless Uncle Sam. Now I see why his right sleeve is rolled up as well, nothing there but a nub extending from his shoulder to where his biceps used to be.

  The closer I get, the less of him I see. There are no false teeth for him to shift side-to-side as I have imagined. He has four teeth in his mouth. Four long teeth. There is not much left of the man, only a head of dyed black hair and round torso resting in an old-fashioned wheelchair, a military head and bloated torso with a left arm that holds a cigarette. The sight of him almost scares me back the other way. Come one, come all, step right up, hurry, hurry before the sideshow begins. He waves his only hand and it surprises me that it is a perfect hand, all fingers present. Then he coughs hard and long, as if raising his hand upset the delicate balance in his body, coughs away parts of what is left of his decaying insides. He catches his breath and spits on the ground, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, and puts the cigarette back up to his thin lips. The move is done in a way that says he has done that thousands of times. He smiles his four-tooth smile, then inhales as if he is turning his nose up at both death and dentistry.

  He puts the cigarette at the corner of his thin lips, leaves it there for safekeeping, and extends his pasty hand to mine, the same pasty hand he just used to wipe his mouth.

  A man with one hand does not have a lot of options.

  I have no choice. I extend my right hand to his left, and we do an awkward handshake.

  Grandpa Fred says, “You must be that research man from Fresno.”

  “Yes. I’m that research man from Fresno.”

  “The one Jenny Vee done married.”

  “Yes. I am the man Jenny Vee done married.”

  His grip is strong and clinging, that sun-deprived hand coarse as sandpaper, fingernails uneven and stained from years of holding cigarettes. In the back of my mind I wonder how a one-handed man cleans his only hand after he uses the bathroom. After he urinates. Or takes a shit.

  He evaluates me with his eyes, as if he were reading my mind, trying to see what I know about this world, if I am friend or foe, before he nods and grumbles, “Pleasure to meet you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You got soft hands. Like a thinking man.”

  My lips rise to hide my offense. I answer him, “Yessir. I’m a thinking man.”

  He lets my hand go, then scratches an itch on the other side of his face with his nub. The tobacco stench he left on my hand seeps inside my flesh. I keep my hand and its unpleasant smell away from my body, afraid of soiling my clothes.

  Grandpa Fred’s eyes go to Genevieve; his pot-smuggling, weed-smoking granddaughter.

  My adulterous eyes go up the road. Toward Kenya. She leans against that wretched fence as if she has done no wrong. As if she were the master of this game we’re in. Seeing her makes me feel as if a blood vessel is about to rupture and cause me to suffer a stroke.

  Genevieve puts her hand on top of Grandpa Fred’s hand, says, “Hello, Grandpa.”

  “My, my, my.” He pulls his lips in and nods his head. I expect the tears to come, but there are none, just internal grief. “Last time I saw you… last time I saw you… look at you now.”

  “I was a skinny little girl with long, unruly hair last time you saw me.”

  “All that gray in your hair.”

  “I know. Yes.”

  “Ain’t you beautiful. Like a movie star.”

  “Why, thank you, Grandpa Fred. Last time you saw me I was a brown-eyed ugly duckling in hand-me-downs. That’s what
you told me I looked like the last time I saw you.”

  “My Lord. If I did say something like that, I’m sorry.”