by Don Noble
When Arnold finally made eye contact, she knew. His face loudly spoke his disappointment. The Voice had eluded them again. Damn!
Social media messages continued to flow in, all positives, all full of love.
We love you, Queen.
We'll catch him.
The fight for Xenia's soul was being fought over the Internet. Her mother and her grandmother texted, Be strong. Stay fierce. You're the girl.
Emboldened and determined, Xenia ended it all with five words: "I have spoken the truth." The simplicity reverberated in the Birmingham communities of Titusville and Woodlawn, in the suburbs of Vestavia, with fishermen in Maine, millennials in Japan, down below in Australia. #TruthMatters became the leading hashtag the world over.
The Voice did not return. The Queen relaxed. She reconciled herself to the life she had chosen. Could she handle it?
She played snaPz's "Neva That."
She signed off with, "Love, peace, and happiness to all." With emphasis she promised, "See you again tonight at midnight." Arnold grinned and nodded his approval. The show had been a big hit! She had made it all the way back. The Internet buzzed, people around the world expressing their joy.
* * *
Now she stood back, maybe ten feet from the front door. The Voice was all she could hear in her head. I know where you live. She wanted to move but couldn't. The uncharacteristic hesitancy upset her. Deal with it, she told herself. Was she afraid to go outside? No! Yes! She was. Would they all be waiting? Would he be waiting? Deal with it, she repeated in her head.
The old framed cover of Esquire dated December 1986 grabbed her attention. Ronnie had left it hanging by the door so she would see it when she entered and when she left. The cover title read, What Are You Doing with the Rest of Your Life? She smiled. At seventeen, she had asked her dad, "Were you ever afraid of working at night?"
"Most nights," he had answered. "It's some interesting cats out after midnight. Got some threats when I started dating your mom. But that motivated me. Fuck fear, I'd tell myself. Once I started spinning the records and talking with the people, it was on."
Her fear dissipated. Each step made her stronger. Arnold walked with her. You're the girl echoed within her.
Then she saw him, a dark silhouette in the sunshine. The fear shot through her like a .38-caliber bullet.
Justin! It was Justin! The fear left. The terror subsided. The tenseness exited her body. She relaxed. An uncontrollable smile raced across her face.
Fuck fear, she thought, and stepped out into the bright sunlight.
PART IV
The Angel of Death
LAUGHING BOY, CROOKED GIRL
by Brad Watson
Gulf Shores
Betty dangled the first chicken by a yellowed leg above Russell's head and waited till she saw his prehistoric eyes shift just a fraction up to see it. She'd worked the old wig onto it, poked a bobby pin through, and fastened it to the chicken skin as best she could. She waited only a second, let go, and marveled at how the fat old alligator snatched it out of the air. The wig had been made from Aunt Sip's own hair, cut off when it was long and young, when Aunt Sip had no need for a wig. And now that Aunt Sip was old and sick and her real hair was falling out, she never wore it, go figure, didn't even care if she was nearly bald and ugly as a troll.
The sky was clear and so bright blue you'd never know there was a hurricane coming into the gulf, supposing to hit land smack in the mouth of Mobile Bay. The tourists had already thinned out with the coming of September and the few remaining were packing up to leave before the storm. No one was taking time to visit the souvenir shop and museum, anyway. No one much stopped in anymore at all.
Betty climbed back down the little stepladder she'd set beside the pit. There were two chickens left in the sack. She'd taken them all out to thaw the night before. The butcher at Winn-Dixie saved and sold them to her for next to nothing after their color turned, which mattered not a whit to a gator. Russell was supposed to get one a day, but she'd held off feeding him the last two days and now was going to give him three at once. She thought he might like it that way better, more like in the wild, where some days he might catch something, and some days he might not.
Into the cavity of the second chicken she had tucked the reading glasses, gold watch, and stinking dental plate with two teeth snaggling down. Into the cavity of the third chicken she stuffed a handful of snot rags, a photo of Aunt Sip on the beach in Key West with maybe the man who was later half eaten by the shark, and a thimble Aunt Sip had stuck to her finger when she fell asleep that afternoon while sewing a patch of disintegrating calico back onto an old quilt. When Betty gently pried off the thimble, Aunt Sip had only murmured something she couldn't understand, something like Never, and Mmm-hmm, and Onions, that's what.
She climbed back up the ladder with the second chicken and held it with both hands, so the things in the cavity wouldn't fall out. She could see Russell's eyes looking up at it, wearing his smug, crooked alligator smile. She dropped it and Russell had it down in a snatch as if it were no more than a little leg or a thigh.
She took up the third chicken and wrapped it in a piece of the nightgown Aunt Sip had told her to throw away on Monday because it was rotten, saying it was rotten because she, Betty, hadn't washed it right, which wasn't true, it was just that Aunt Sip had worn it out and Aunt Sip was so nasty it didn't take any time to soil her clothes. It had been rose-colored but now had barely the tint of any color at all, like the color of a pan of water if you've cut your finger and washed it in there. She tucked the loose ends of the nightgown into the chicken's cavity, climbed back up the ladder, and dropped it in.
She put up the ladder and washed her hands in the tub sink outside and crept back into the apartment in the rear of the museum building, down the dim narrow hallway, past Aunt Sip's bedroom, through the living room, and had the door open to enter the museum when she heard Aunt Sip.
"Betty," Aunt Sip said, her voice a gravelly purr followed by a phlegm-racked cough.
"Yes'm."
"Where the hell you going?" A voice both plaintive and peeved.
"Just down to the beach awhile."
"Did you feed Russell?"
"Yes'm."
"Bring me some warm milk when you come back."
"Yes'm."
All this poised in the doorway with one foot just above the museum floor, frozen midstep and praying she wouldn't have to go back into the room, and when Aunt Sip didn't respond to the third "Yes'm" she quickly stepped through the door and closed it quietly, then moved past the Native American displays and basin racks of shells and starfish and seahorses, rubber toy sharks, snorkel masks, the standing racks of postcards and suntan lotions, then she was out onto the shell parking lot and across the deserted highway, through the little pass in the dunes, and down to the surf. Nobody was out just then at all. She could see the hazy shape of a shrimp boat on the horizon. The breeze flapped her lank black hair around her pale cheeks and thin, wide mouth. She was so thin and runty she looked like a little crooked, stunted sylph on longish skinny legs, her tiny torso twisted with scoliosis, a small face and large ears that stuck out through her hair like a bush baby's, and huge eyes that almost seemed to frighten people. She would stand in the middle of her tiny pantry bedroom looking down at her crooked chest with one healthy breast blossoming like a ripe nectarine and the other nothing but a discolored little prune. The scoliosis bent her to one side and down, so it was always surprising what strength she had in her skinny shoulders and arms. She was all too aware of her appearance, not that anyone ever let her forget. She had attended the high school up in Foley until her sophomore year, and then dropped out, tired of the snickers and jeers and the boys who would imitate her crooked hobble down the halls. Of course, the principal wouldn't let her out of gym, where the other girls barely tried to hide their horrified laughter, their oh my gods behind their palms, their cow eyes cutting over to stare. But it was the mimicking that hurt the most. Hearing la
ughter after she'd passed a group in the hallway and looking back to see Jimmy Teal humping along, face twisted into a grotesque freak's, one arm hanging down nearly to the floor, twisted that way, and loping along in a hobbled gait that, altogether, looking like someone doing Frankenstein's Igor a lot more than someone imitating Betty. It was after one of these incidents that she left school early, caught a ride to the beach in the bed of an orange grower's pickup, and never went back.
Up the shore where the state park pier jutted into the gulf she could see a scattering of people out on the beach. She thought to walk up there and get away for a little while but knew she'd better go back and get Aunt Sip her milk.
* * *
She listened to the sand ticking against the front windowpanes, a steady, irregular ticking and spattering when the wind gusted harder. Candlelight dawn crept into the room. She heard Aunt Sip calling in her harsh, crusty voice, "Betty. Betty."
Betty cut her eyes that way but did not move. She couldn't move, not now. Not thinking what she was thinking now. If she moved now she might not be able to think it anymore and she wanted to. She wanted to think it until she knew she could do it.
"Coming," she said. "In a minute."
Je'sus stood at his post in the corner behind the glass diorama case, face and hands the color of smoked ham skin. Leathery lips sewn shut with cat gut. Arms crossed over his chest. He was said to be a Creek Indian, and she liked to imagine how it was he got the wounds in his hands that were the reason they'd named him as they did. A shop joke. Aunt Sip made her pronounce it in the Spanish way so as not to offend any Christian customers. Betty went to the library one day and looked up some traditional Creek names, and decided she would secretly call the mummy Chebona Bula: Laughing Boy. It was why they had stitched his mouth shut, to stop him from laughing, make him shut up.
Aunt Sip coughed.
"Betty."
The cases filled with conch shells, flint arrowheads, little dried dead seahorses, augers, sand dollars, starfish, and sharks' teeth—in such moments the small dried creatures and angular artifacts seemed still alive, trembling in a stasis barely contained within their dried skins, the polished surfaces of their shells, their coiled and chambered passages. Each glassed-in scene—of a Typical Dinner Preparation Among the Creek Indians of the East Gulf Coastal Plain, of ichthyosaurs-eating plesiosaurs, of sea crocs and prehistoric sharks, of Je'sus the Creek mummy, of Typical Wildlife of the East Gulf Coastal Plain and the Gulf Shore—watched her in reverence of the moment when she would either act or not.
She rose from the stool behind the counter and went back to the door to the apartment. She hadn't emptied Aunt Sip's ashtray and maybe that was what Aunt Sip was calling about. Would say, Betty, be a dear and haul your worthless little hyena ass here to dump that goddamn ashtray. She practiced not flinching and blinking but she always did, stood there like someone had just brained her with the blunt tomahawk at Je'sus's waist, waiting for Aunt Sip to start laughing in her raspy coughing way, falling back into the bedcovers and trying to reach for a Pall Mall, knocking everything to the floor. She was tired of smelling like Aunt Sip's cigarettes all the time too. She could smell it on her clothes when she'd wear them over her swimsuit down to the beach, where she'd swim if there was no one around. And when she came out of the water and lay down on the sand her towel stank of it, and when she pulled her oversized shirt on over her shoulders again later, the shirt stank of it. It all stank of Aunt Sip.
Her whole life stank of Aunt Sip. The cruelest thing Aunt Sip had ever done was agree to raise her so her mother could go away to Hollywood and be a movie star, then tell her she'd never made it that far, was a prostitute in Las Vegas. She didn't believe that for the longest time. But when you never hear otherwise, well. So maybe she would do the same. Maybe she would take some man's money for whatever nasty he wanted to do, and then she would do the nasty all the way to Las Vegas and one night she would take a man away from some old lady who would turn out to be, once she looked hard through all the makeup, her mother, and she would laugh and maybe spit at her and say, Well all right now, how does it feel to be left behind, you old whore?
I don't know you, she would say. I don't care a thing about you at all. You can just shift for yourself.
She said these things, whispered them, to her image in the mirror in the bathroom, practiced the tough-looking sneer on her face when she said them.
She straightened one of the embroidered silk pillows Aunt Sip claimed she'd gotten in Shanghai. Said she'd been there buying whores, in the good old days, before the barrier island casinos in Mississippi closed down. Well, she guessed that could be something close to the truth, if you figure Aunt Sip was the head whore. The pillow's material was smooth and almost slippery between her fingers. The pillow itself was very light, as if filled with the finest of down. She balanced it on one palm at arm's length.
"What in the name of holy hell are you doing?"
The voice had gargled up from the covers.
"Nothing but fluffing your Chinese pillow, Aunt Sip."
Aunt Sip's face was a doughy gray, her eyes like old, dry, blackened wounds, punctured slits that somehow imparted derision. Hands atop the covers like large bloated frogs at the ends of her arms atop the tattered comforter.
"Well, would you kindly," Aunt Sip started in, gathering her breath like someone trying to yank a stubborn lawnmower to life, "just light me—a cigarette—and get me a—cup of coffee? And I'm hungry, for god's sake, don't we even eat breakfast in this godforsaken shithole anymore? You might want to starve yourself to death, I wouldn't blame you, but I don't."
Betty stood there, a bit lost in her thoughts, until Aunt Sip noticed and shouted, "DID YOU EVEN HEAR WHAT I SAID?"
Betty flinched. She couldn't help it. But now Aunt Sip lay there purply and gasping. Betty gathered the silk pillow to her chest and walked over beside the bed. The blackened eyes followed her.
"You're up to something." Aunt Sip's cracked lips worked at forming some other cruelty. Betty's fingers tightened on the pillow's silken fringe that brushed the backs of her hands like water.
She knew that, even with her bent-up body, and maybe because of compensating for it, she had the physical strength to do it. She tried to will it into her mind. She pictured herself pressing the silken pillow down hard on the face and holding it there, her knees on the covers on either side of Aunt Sip's arms, pinning them. Aunt Sip like a little dog wriggling under her, playing a game. Then like her rocking horse, bucking, she could just barely remember that, from when she was about three, before her mama brought herself and Betty down here in the first place. She remembered how she loved to hold on tight to the handles beside the horse's head and buck away, the way she wanted to hold on to the pillows and grip Aunt Sip's big flappy ears too, and hold on.
"You always were a strange child," Aunt Sip muttered. But there was something different in her eyes, and for the first time Betty thought there might be a little of the something there that Aunt Sip had always made her feel, in this house. She thought Aunt Sip might be just a little bit afraid.
She went into the kitchen and fried up some chopped onions until they were good and soft. She broke three eggs into a bowl and dashed in a little milk, sprinkled in some salt and pepper, and beat it all with a fork. She had a little thought that paused her, and without really carrying the thought to the front of her mind, she opened the cabinet beneath the range and peered into it. There was an old, crumbling box of rat poison back behind the pots and pans, some of it spilled out. She took the box out and sniffed at it. It didn't smell like anything much. She sprinkled a little into the pan with the eggs and onions, stirred it in. Then shook in a good bit more. She put the box back into the cabinet, straightened up, and stirred it all together. The color was a little funny. She poured Worcestershire on them as sometimes Aunt Sip liked her eggs Western style and the sauce would stain the eggs dark brown. She cooked them harder than the way Aunt Sip liked, then took the plate in to her, saying, "
Here, Aunt Sip, maybe you can eat these eggs while I try to find your dentures. I thought you might be wanting some onions in there too, so I chopped them good."
Aunt Sip looked up at her from her silk pillow with eyes that reminded her of nothing so much as when Russell's eyes would shift just so slightly up to her and make her blood chill in her veins. Aunt Sip took the plate, set it on her big stomach, and took a little bite, still looking at her.
"I made them Western style, how you like," Betty said.
Aunt Sip sniffed at the plate and stared at Betty a long moment.
"Get your evil little witch's tit out of my bedroom while I eat."
Betty backed her way out of the room, never once taking her eyes from Aunt Sip's, bobbing her head like a bobble toy, her mouth cocked just slightly open in the only way she could hold it to keep herself from smiling, just a little.
* * *
The sounds when they came were a little disturbing, so Betty put her hands over her ears and hummed a tuneless song to fill up her head between her blocked-off ears and let her eyes roam swiftly around the museum to distract herself from any one thought, and when that didn't work she hurried out the front door barefoot and ran in a ragged circle around the shell parking lot above which darkening clouds scudded fast to the north, blindly following the bend of her frame, shouting out as loud as she could, "A, B, C, D, E, F, G! H, I, J, K, LMNOP! Q-R-S! T-U-V! DOUBLE-U! EX! WHY AND Z!"
* * *
Aunt Sip was heavy, but Betty had been lugging her around for a couple of years now. Lugging her to the bathroom for a bath, lugging her to the jeep to drive her to the doctor. Aunt Sip was too cheap to buy a wheelchair, and her arms had gotten weak from not using her walker, and she'd got heavier from not moving around, so Betty would lug her around with her heels dragging on the floor and through the bleached, crushed shell in the parking lot, where she would lay her down until she could get their old army jeep's door open, hoist her again, and pull her up into the passenger seat. Aunt Sip cussing the whole time.