Cherry

by Mary Karr

  Doonie pulls over. The brakes take hold, and you feel your bodies start to fly forward through the car hull, then you snap back as if from rubber bands on your backs. Four or five flashlights beam in, bobbing like unfettered suns to obscure the dark cop shapes that hulk behind them, but on their shirt pockets and collars, brass stars and badges flicker and gleam.

  You’re rousted out into the night damp, all silent, all straining to give off the acquiescent affability of the law-abiding teen. IDs are asked for and agreeably proferred. A cop’s sausage-fingered hand is beaming a flashlight into the eyes of the photo on your driver’s license. Doonie’s talking so fast he must be concealing a random tab of acid in his pocket or something. But Lord he can talk. (Before he’s twenty-one, he’ll hawk for a strip club, then briefly open a car lot called S&M Motors with the unlikely motto, “If we can’t spank you, no thank you.”) How fast was I going, sir? Gosh, if I don’t get my geometry done tonight Mama’s gonna ground me. I know she’s making some of that good cream gravy right now. Does your mamma always cook a chicken after church?…

  Despite his repartee, you all get jacked up alongside the Torino. Somebody jokes about a body-cavity search, and the cops seem to consider this—a prospect that sets you alternately giggling like a fiend, then trying not to fall to your knees and beg mercy. While you’re spread-eagled alongside the car like this, limbs starting to shake, a few cops talking football sluggishly pat you all down.

  The mood shifts radically when—from thirty or so yards behind you—a patrol car hurtles fast to a dusty stop. Out leaps this scrawny uniformed guy, yelling something indecipherable. The dazzling headlights you look back into still swirl with hallucinated star galaxies, but there appears to be in his hand a raised pistol, held aloft like a talisman. Somebody in your lineup hollers, Hit the dirt (later nobody would ’fess to it), so you all dive down onto the sand-gritty road.

  It turns out this kind of massive synchronized movement from a line of prospective felons jogs the average small-town peace officer into unholstering his weapon. The noise of metal whipped fast from soft leather conjures the gunfight scene from some movie about the O.K. Corral. You can actually sense the blind muzzles fix on your skull and spinal column—dozens of empty little zero imprints. You squirm in the sandy shoulder like a slug, hands still pressed obediently to your head, eyes squeezed shut. (Some superstitious creature inside still believes if you can’t see them, you’re officially not there.) An interval ten thousand years long snails by, until the cops start reholstering their weapons, going, Aw hell, and Goddamn, Leon.

  Turns out this Leon held up nothing more explosive than a tiny whisk broom he’d been sent to Kmart for, the better to sweep up the Torino’s carpet nap. Which he does on his knees while everybody but you sits on the car hood devouring tiny square hamburgers from White Castle the cops ultimately fetch and pass around as compensation for how their pal scared you all sick. You say you’re vegetarian, but in truth, your hands have begun to shake as if palsied. You fear if you touch the bag it will rattle loud enough to reignite suspicion. You’re fighting to hold this tremble in check when some fellow ambles over and shoves his hat back with an index finger to ask, Aren’t you Pete Karr’s daughter? Baby, lemme bring you home. Your daddy’ll kick my ass if he thinks I let you sit around out here with these sorry old boys.

  Thus you walk away, not looking back at your compadres to give any it’s-okay-I’ll-get-bail sign. You’ve been differentiated from them and are glad for the patrol car ride home—a trip marked by your near constant uttering of the word sir. Your daddy isn’t home (thank God), but you promise the officer you’ll say hey and let’s get after them bass sometime soon.

  You retell Meredith this adventure on the phone or at lunch with amusement. But she’s not the audience she once was—absorbed partly by her extremely whacky boyfriend (whom you mostly ignore, perhaps hoping he’ll vanish so you can reclaim her full attention). Or she waits for disclosures and judge’s rulings, for lawyer’s vacations to end and calendars to clear so Michael can be exonerated and come home.

  Talk of his arrest seems to weave and circle through school via low whispers and pointed looks. The two times someone openly flings these mentions at her, the only shift in her stoical bearing is that she flushes crimson.

  For a while in civics class, the coarse, tobacco-spitting Mr. Wright makes daily cracks about her brother the jailbird, till a kind guidance counselor gets her transferred out. Then during some mock trial for another civics class, this born-again Christian girl playing prosecutor and thus interviewing Meredith as a possible juror says, It’s common knowledge you have a brother in prison. Do you think you could be an impartial juror? At which Meredith just returns to her seat in silence. No response. Nobody says a word, teacher included.

  Later that same week, this prosecutor girl is flouncing through the lunch line, when Meredith says—quietly but with great force—Bitch! And the aforementioned counselor, who overhears this exchange, leans in to whisper, Good for you, Meredith. I didn’t know you had it in you. (Only in Leechfield could this kind of frontal attack draw kudos from educational authorities.)

  Mostly you manage to believe Michael’s fine, for in every Texan’s mind there sleeps some genetically wired pathway that makes running afoul of the law okay. Justified in a lot of cases. In local parlance, some people just need shooting, and fistfighting to the point of arrest is an accepted sport with unofficial rankings known countywide. Everybody knows who all the badasses in town are, your daddy being one of them.

  What with the civil rights movement, certain arrests hit the moral high ground. Your mother had marched with Dr. King in Selma, Alabama and just missed going to jail. The Jesuit Berrigan Brothers destroyed federal draft records, and the paper carried daily drawings of the Chicago Seven (or was it Eight?), who’d prompted riots to disrupt the Democratic convention. You could buy T-shirts in Houston with pictures of Bobby Seale bound and gagged during the proceedings. For these activists, jail was a plausible if undesirable interruption in an implausible world.

  But as months drag by, some cloud of truth about Michael’s fate condenses inside you. The Brights remain stranded the way each family of an arrested boy seems to be. They’re entirely alone in watching Michael’s legal fate unfold. He warrants no audience, no potluck supper, no rally. No fiery lawyer will fly down to take up his cause pro bono, as Gregory Peck did in the movie of To Kill a Mockingbird.

  Even knowing this, you fail to go to the trial. You couldn’t, for part of you wants to disbelieve there is a trial, or a jail into which you and your pals might conceivably be thrown.

  Maybe that’s why the verdicts so deeply shock, leaving you in a state of cold, inadequate fury, because the boys who couldn’t make bail become those who pull prison terms. These are, of course, boys from the poorest families—those whose parents couldn’t pull off a second mortgage or sell the extra car. The direct correlation between income and jail seems so blatant and grotesque you can’t believe it doesn’t make headlines. Part of you keeps waiting to uncover some other mysterious variable to explain the discrepancy. But when Michael’s roommate walks with probation while Michael gets two four-year sentences—one for the bullshit conspiracy stuff, one for possession of a quantity of marijuana that, a few years later, wouldn’t constitute a felony—you knew it was all about what Doonie called the Dough-Re-Mi.

  Meredith tells you about the trial with less animation than one reporting live from the courthouse steps, though her cheeks flush in patches, and she speaks in a taut, breathless voice, as if she’s been slapped.

  Some short time after this, she leans over a peach-colored cafeteria tray saying, I think it’s time for you to corrupt me. Which delights you. A sleepover is scheduled, but first she wants to sacrifice her maidenhood—as you jokingly call it—to her now ever-present boyfriend, Dan (who ironically enough was busted with her brother but managed to make bail and thus probation).

  Dan’s possessed of a child’s abiding sweetnes
s in a tall and storklike frame. (John Cleese of Monty Python will later evoke Dan.) But his psychedelic antics, which can drive you into giggling fits when stoned, also strike you as bizarre—bizarre being a hard bell to ding in your current crowd. This especially worries you since he and Meredith plan to marry just one year hence, after she’s aced being a college freshman.

  Dan likes to grab the pet parakeet in his fist and kiss it. The frantic bird will wrench its head to escape while Meredith yells at Dan to leave it alone, the bird doesn’t like it. But Dan will just keep repeating in a falsetto Baby loves Daddy, Daddy loves baby. You’ve also seen him spend hours gluing empty paper towel rolls together so he can force the panicked parakeet to scuttle through as he coaxes from the far end saying Come to Daddy, my little tube turd.

  This isn’t just some act, for comparable oddities go down even when Dan feels unwatched. At a birthday party once, he went back for a second cake helping to find only an empty cake stand. He snatched up the empty doily and wadded the whole paper into his mouth to suck the last icing from it. Noticing the sudden quiet, he spit the wad into his palm, shrieked as if it surprised him, and tossed it up where it stuck to the ceiling and held fast. Then he innocently looked around as if nothing untoward had happened.

  (By the end of Meredith’s illustrious grad school career, Dan will be fully schizophrenic, and they’ll divorce. Twenty years after that in Boston, he’ll appear at your university office wearing a deerstalker hat and trying to convince you that everyone who sports a stocking cap is in the CIA conspiring to arrest him for drugs he bought back in 1970. A few years after this encounter, he’ll die of the AIDS virus that’ll plague other friends in this circle.)

  Once Meredith’s deflowered (a private event), you set her guzzling Gallo wine stolen from your parents’ cupboard. Because you lack rolling papers, you wind up constructing a joint from a tampon wrapper, blowing smoke out the screen. You laugh yourself sick when she starts cussing, saying motherfucker and dickhead and shit-for-brains, because the words sound so foreign in her mouth.

  Still the evening lacks the flavor of triumph you’d envisioned for Meredith’s initial debauchery. For years, you’d tried to lure her into the illicit, perhaps believing it would bond you two more deeply somehow. (Maybe there was some unconscious desire to shave a few IQ points off that raging intellect so you might better keep up.)

  But once she passes out, her eyelids sealing her from you, a bleak loneliness settles, cold as a winding sheet. Though you’ve ingested enough pot and wine to set your brain waves sloping into sleep, you stay awake, for there’s some instinctual desire to guard her. The room revolves in such slow loops that her deep repose befuddles you, seems unnatural or wrong, like a sickness. Every now and then, she sighs like it’s her last breath. Anyway, this urge to go for help keeps running through you. You climb out of bed a few times to tap on your parents’ closed door but ultimately slide back under the covers, for what might you say is amiss? You’re the one who brought her here.

  Decades later, you’ll know there was no cavalry to call, no ready salvation to offer. Meredith needed a kind of simple care that eluded you. That fact will leave this carved-out sense of having failed her. Not intentionally, but from being blind.

  But no sooner does this rhetoric unhook you from blame than you remember the ragged-looking kid your son brought home about age eight. This kid also knew no better, but nonetheless drew for you on borrowed paper various cartoons as thank-yous for all the time spent at your house. One Christmas, you pulled from your icy mailbox his rendering of two Disney pals on red paper. It was folded four times and held the following note: God loves us because we loves you. Part of you knows that with sufficient heart, you might have marshaled some comfort for Meredith other than oblivion.

  Chapter Nineteen

  WITH THE AID OF HALLUCINOGENS, you set off like some pilgrim whose head teems with marvels and vistas, baptismal rivers from which you plan to emerge purified. But what’s longed for usually bears no resemblance to what you find.

  On Independence Day, you’re affably tripping your brains out at dawn in a public park when Clyde pulls up in a van painted red, white, and blue, with stars in a peace sign where the Volkswagen symbol should be. He’s twenty-one, and for your sixteenth birthday made you a fringed leather purse that you stupidly left at a Who concert. Leans out the window saying those dudes over there are from Colorado. Have this amazing dope.

  You turn to see three shirtless, not unlovely boys you don’t know (a rarity) playing Frisbee. A yellow dog with a red bandanna around its neck flies vertically through the air to catch an orange disc in its jaws.

  Clyde says, Gonna take them swimming down in Village Creek. (He gestures at various vans and vehicles.) Wanna come?

  Clyde has owlish blue eyes and chews the end of a safety match; his fluttering hair is long as yours. Your mild crush on him combines with the lure of strong dope, to get you off your skinny ass and into the van. (When you hear three years hence that he’s killed himself in a way and for a reason unknown, the shock of it will flare through you like lit solvent then evaporate, leaving only this day’s image of Clyde.)

  In the phone call you make from the Fina station en route, your crotchety-sounding daddy just hears that you’re going swimming, which is truth enough though he may imagine you’re calling from the town pool two blocks away.

  Thus a caravan of hippie vehicles winds into the bowels of east Texas, the piney woods. After a tooth-bumping ride down a rutted logging road cut by long-gone wagon wheels in red clay, you reach the sandy-bottomed creek from which you drew catfish with a cane pole your daddy baited for you. By then the psychedelic rush kicks in, and the day’s episodes start to run together as if rained on. Things happen to you, and you mostly meander inside yourself, detached.

  The guys strip down for swimming right away while you sit on a warm red car hood too high to move. So many dicks dangling before you somehow look individually odd. Like space creatures. How long do you goggle at them, eyeballs popped out on hallucinated springs as you marvel at the diverse herd before you check yourself and retract your attention?

  An older girl in an orange halter assembles sandwiches from an economy-size packet of bologna. You want her to verify that the boys’ organs dangle in lengths and girths corresponding in no way to the size of the bearer. But her granny glasses make you flash that she’s not really a hippie, only some prim goodwife imported from The Scarlet Letter, which you should be at home reading. Though this makes no sense whatsoever, you hold your tongue and busy yourself helping with the sandwiches, scribbling peace signs or stars on slabs of Wonder bread with yellow mustard till you suspect all the boys have submerged their accompanying dicks underwater. Only then do you look up, trying to maintain the blasé air of someone who sees flagrant-dicked boys all the damn time and cannot be ruffled by one boy’s high, muscled ass or by another’s shiny auburn hair falling in a curtain across his broad shoulders.

  When the goodwife hands you a sandwich, it seems a gargantuan Dagwood sandwich, two feet high, and it seems rude to say that ingesting stuff while tripping makes you half nuts, for who can figure how many chews to take and when to swallow? Plus you so vividly picture the musculature of your throat and the secreted digestive acids—the mechanics of eating gross you out. Because you so don’t wish to offend her pinch-mouthed self, the sandwich stays gripped in hand the whole morning till all the iceberg lettuce and meat and tomato wheels have flopped out to be set upon by ants.

  Blank time gets spliced in. Next thing you know, one of the Colorado boys sits on the bank with his legs stretched out stiff before him like a doll. His feet are swollen up to twice their normal size as if snakebit, worse than the gout of an old lady in a nursing home forced into those tight, white socks. Everybody gathers around, addled over the bloated feet.

  You say, They kinda look like a pair of potatoes. It’s a voice so rusty you wonder if you’ve spoken all morning. The guy cuts you this wounded look. To reassure, you
say with the authority of the rabidly high that it’s probably just ant bites. But inside you recoil from the prospect of those bloated feet exploding. You even edge back a few paces as if to avoid any splatter, for you have imagined the blow-out—how his spirit will leak from ankle holes till he’s empty and flat as roadkill. It makes you want to make for the road and stick your thumb out or else to fall down giggling.

  What ant bite does this? the guy says, voice higher with panic.

  Clyde asks Cathy to look at it since her mom’s a nurse. But Cathy’s naked as a jaybird and, by being solo in this, seems aggressively, savagely naked. She has a great pelt of pubic thread and globular breasts perched high on what looks like a dwarf’s body. In fact, she seems so devolved and feral that Clyde’s speaking to her at all strikes you as perverse.

  All she says is, You might oughta stop scratching at that. Looks to be making it worse. You try not to gape at her talking, for words from the bandanna-wearing dog right then would seem no more strange.

  Do you think I need to go to the hospital? the dude says, his voice in another register now, like a record played too fast. You nonchalantly wonder what evolutionary purpose this might serve—the voice rising with fear. Then suddenly, the grim prospect of the hospital rears up—the even now revolving glass door that would scoop you up and spit you out into the emergency room’s atmosphere of Lysol woven through with its single fiber of death.

  You want to say, Exploding feet or no, buddy, kiss that hospital’s ass goodbye. To get this wagon train of sun-scorched freaks rolling toward western medicine would require something way more dire—car wreck, actual overdose with heart stoppage.