I turned around to make sure the boots were still with me. I saw my backpack with a blanket strapped to it. My box of sketchbooks. Jimmy James’s camping mat, and my jacket. The smoke and the shadows softened them. My things made dark, lumpy hills like mima mounds at night. I didn’t see the boots in my swift glance, and my heart jumped recklessly. I stuck my hand through the open window behind my head and felt around. My fingertips found the warm leather. I sighed with relief.
My radio became quiet somewhere east of the Rocky Mountains. It had trouble picking up a signal. I viewed the miles of highway that I hadn’t driven yet. My fancies hummed and swam along Interstate 90. I tried not to become hypnotized by the white line at the edge of the interstate.
I thought about Jimmy James. If everything hadn’t happened, he would have been with me. I thought about how firmly he touched my skin. I remembered when he squeezed my arm for the last time. Even though it had been weeks, I still sensed it—each fingertip had left a message on my body. I wondered what he was doing—if the place he was sleeping was comfortable, if the food was making him sick. I hoped he could feel fresh air on his face. I hoped that he knew just what he was going to do and say and where we were going to go when it was all over. If I concentrated hard enough, I could feel his strong, beautiful soul far away and living in some distant space apart from the dim solitude of Montana at midnight.
But he was imprisoned in a cold, dark place with cement walls, and we both heard the sad sounds of our own hopeless thoughts. I inhaled sharply and crazily. I gripped the steering wheel madly.
I tried not to think about Timothy sleeping soundly with a round belly. His little coughs from the cold he was getting over. I tried not to think about his soft skin or his little limbs—the way he curled against my body when he slept. His toys were all packed up. Nadine’s strong arms had held him firmly. He’d left screaming for his father. He’d looked at me in terror over Nadine’s shoulder—wanting me to make it all better. Nadine was telling him that everything would be okay.
As I looked through my windshield my headlights illuminated the dry, smoky night air. I thought about how wrong Nadine was. I wished for unrealistic possibilities. I wanted everything back: dreams filled with loyalty, luck, and promises. My life was now complicated. Each thought of what came next was filled with the torment of long stretches of empty time and the fear of my hometown.
My body needed Jimmy James. His touch seared all the way through to my bones. Each touch after would pale in comparison. For the rest of my life.
I knew he was there with me in my strange, lonely, wakeful dreams that night. I carried him into the early, big-sky morning along with his boots. He was with me whether I liked it or not. It was beyond my control. I couldn’t change my connection to him any more than I could change who my father was or the street where I grew up. I coughed and didn’t know what was next.
I was getting farther and farther away. I would soon forget everything. I would be back when all the smoke cleared—when there was nothing but the ashes of what was—the words we held in and the sharp white of Annie’s bones in the sawdust-dirt. Jimmy James would be free then, and so would I.
He’d said to lay low for a while. He’d written me a note on a yellow piece of paper. So I was lying as low as I could. I would lay so low even my intentions would be lost. I would forget why I was alone. I would forget what his hands felt like. Jimmy James and all the confusion that came along with him would soon become a dream—a fantasy with a shaved head, black Levi’s, tattoos, and a vague recollection of muffled thumping noises—rib-cracking methodical violence. The insistent pull of his fingertips would have to stay in the background. I would temporarily lose the memory of how his boots sounded on concrete. The scream that I kept hearing would grow soft and then quiet. The fear would be in the background. I would keep driving shirtless through the fire in Montana—hauling my haphazardly packed bags. And a pair of fourteen-eye oxbloods.
5
ALL TEARS FLOW HOME
My grandparents waited for me at their apartment in Billings, Montana. They waited until they fell asleep on the couch with the television flashing blue lights across their faces. They turned the porch light on after they woke up, noticed I wasn’t there yet, and became worried. The light was glowing hopefully in the pink morning light when I finally arrived.
Grandpa came out in his sleeping clothes to greet me. His smile was too full of painful, unconditional love. He walked like Colin used to. His arms were open wide. His hands were rough calluses. His old truck sat in the parking lot with a 4-sale sign.
I didn’t want them to call Mother. I could handle only one devastating thing at a time. Grandma gently told me about Mother’s new boyfriend. That I now looked just like her. It was my blond hair. I shook my head. I couldn’t swallow it all yet. Even though I was my mother’s daughter she had borne me an O’Neel. Tattooed it into my being the day she left.
I slept awkwardly and woke often to the sounds of traffic. The sunlight streamed through the curtains over the small window. My body was not ready for peaceful sleep. My troubles would follow me and destroy everyone I loved. I knew I was a fraud—an imposter with nervous energy. I tossed and turned. I was in trouble. I could gauge my spirit clearly—it had been roaming transparently in angry tempests. I was unable to hide my short fuse and anxiety. I was a wild mustang stabbing at the future with fierce forelegs. I was a bruised teenager who was all alone. I was a solitary fighter. Jimmy James was gone—the loss of him crippled me in ways I never wanted to know about. I tried not to think about it. I needed rest and sustenance. My body felt bent in half as if I were a blade of grass, and my pain was a strong wind. But I could not sleep. Not for the life of me.
I got up around dinnertime. Grandma’s quilts were folded against the wall. Her sewing machine with spools of thread and bits of fabric stood beside it. Grandma cooked dinner. The smell of her food made hot tears gather. She always cooked a lot. She was used to feeding more than one family during harvest—when all the farm people gathered together to help each other. All her favorite recipes were quadrupled in the margins of her cookbooks. It was Wednesday.
Jimmy James worked late on Wednesday. I should have been cooking dinner for Timothy—placing his tiny portions on his blue plastic plate, trying to get him to eat with a spoon, watching the mashed potatoes squeeze out of his small fists. Laughing in spite of myself. Picking him up and dancing to Ella Fitzgerald in our small apartment.
I told my grandparents I had to leave soon. I couldn’t sit at the table with them and chew my food. I couldn’t talk. I knew Grandma would try to coax me to call Mother. She wanted me to stay. But I couldn’t explain it all to them. I didn’t want to involve my family who had already been through so much. I had too many things I had to take care of—too much distance to travel. I would not be able to rest until there were wide-open spaces between my family and me—between Jimmy James and the cement walls. My burdens weighed heavily. Grandma nodded her head in a way that hurt worse. Her aging body had absorbed enough pain. She understood. There would be more troubles to come.
I stayed on I-90 as I drove through the warm manure odor of Wyoming and South Dakota. I slept uneasily in a rest stop near Sioux Falls. I was on the border of South Dakota and Iowa. It was a town with good energy and a bad smell. I ate hash browns and sunny-side up eggs at a greasy spoon where the waitress refilled my coffee cup habitually to soothe her nerves.
The temperature was rising. I spent two dollars on a pair of leather sandals in Kansas City. I used my pocketknife to cut a pair of jeans into shorts. I tried to relax my jaw. The first freeway sign I saw for St. Louis was broken in two. It read ST. LO. When I entered the city I looked around me with as much interest as I could muster. I listened to every sound. I smelled all that I could smell. It was late August, molten hot, the air like boiling oil on my rain-soaked Washington skin. My body resented the bright, humid summer. I was used to darkness and mildew.
In the city of David it could rai
n a hundred inches a year. It rained for weeks on end.
When I was a kid, Cota Street scoffed at our huddled figures. Squatters came in from the woods. The line at the homeless shelter grew longer. The liquor store was busier. Crowds gathered outside of the AA meetinghouse. Everything took longer in the rain. Us Cota kids laughed instead of crying. We looked up into the dark sky. We shouted curse words and threw punches in vicious fights.
I crossed the Mississippi and entered East St. Louis. The low-fuel warning light lit up in my truck. I parked and walked until the wind whipped my hair and the slow-moving dark water was before me. I’d barely slept in three days. I was Wesley Everest standing on the bank of the Skookumchuck. With blood on my hands. With mud on my boots. With nothing between death and a river. There was water and fear. My blood went cold. It turned to ice in my veins.
I walked to a pay phone and tried to think of who to call. Across the street, three older men holding large bottles of liquor hidden in brown paper bags were passing around a lumpy blunt. They stared at me from their street corner. The shock was wearing off. I didn’t have anywhere to go. I didn’t have any money.
East St. Louis stared me down.
The receiver demanded that I make a decision. It clicked. I looked at the pay phone with no shelter—all by itself out on the dirty corner with nothing but two teenagers examining a broken radio, arguing about how to fix it. The broken glass from beer and liquor bottles reflected the sun that was getting lower in the sky. The heat seemed to fluctuate; it gathered around my head.
I wanted a place to stay: a private place to sleep, a stove to cook a meal on. I felt the parking lot spinning loosely and crazily. It was hot. I felt sick and dizzy and young and stupid.
I yelled, “Goddamnit!” at no one. The teenagers took off running down an alley where the garbage was cooking in blue metal bins. I slammed the receiver down angrily. The broken radio skidded into the street and rested in the indentation of a sewer drain. I got in my truck and sat there, thinking. I sighed and got out. I dialed the phone number of the only one who was in as deeply as me.
“Where the hell have you been?” Brady Robbins demanded when he heard my voice. “Your dad said you left! Nobody’s seen you!” His voice rose in searing pain. The girl he loved was gone. Three weeks ago, he’d seen his best friend handcuffed and wavering in and out of consciousness. Three weeks ago, he’d leaned against me in stricken silence as the rain drowned us, and we said nothing.
Brady gave me five hundred dollars. He deposited the money into my bank account. It was half a month’s pay for him. He shushed me when I worried out loud. “My best friend will pay me back when he’s out and can get work.” I inhaled sharply. Brady was delusional. He floated in cloudy, marginalized pain. Annie was gone. There had been no funeral. Everyone was broke. Her soul was stuck in purgatory.
I drove until I found a quiet parking lot to sleep in. I sang Dead Boys songs to myself.
Dark clouds moved in overhead. The sky growled with thunder. I watched as lightning lit up the sky. The summer night was murky and the land was flat. I could see far into the distance. There were no mountains with forests of Sitka spruce around their bases. There were no jagged peaks covered in glistening white ice. There were no clear-cuts where small, new-green Douglas fir hurried to populate the naked brown earth. I did not hear logging trucks. There were no sharp cliffs where angry restless seawater hammered rocks relentlessly. The narrow, fast rivers that swallowed and gulped and raged were a memory that was leaving me. I was surrounded by old land that was once on the edge of an ancient glacier. The hemlock and western red cedar did not crouch here. There was no fog—no steam from the tidewater mill. There was flat, baked, brown land. There were buildings much older and wiser than me. Fat, warm droplets of water splattered my skin. I watched the rain fill up the parking lot and drain the dust from my dented, white Ford. Warm Illinois rain—I had never touched or seen or tasted warm rain.
I remembered how Colin and I used to watch storms. We’d stop what we were doing, tell the Cota kids to shut up or get out. Our sentences would hang in the air—unfinished. We would watch the forks of light explode in the sky and forget everything else.
Colin would have been impressed by the storm in Illinois. He would have raised his arms to the sky and encouraged me to run out into the rain with him. He would have stomped, splashed, and grinned in the swirling rivers of dirty, agitated water.
But he was back in David—strung out.
And I was alone in East St. Louis sleeping in a parking lot. I didn’t get out of my truck. I was afraid. I didn’t feel eighteen. I felt like a very old woman with a body that remembered strain. All I could offer the murky evening was a blandly wistful stare. They’d taken Jimmy James away. He’d been stumbling blindly and covered in blood. He couldn’t hold me in the warm rain. I couldn’t watch his biceps flex underneath his tattoos. I slept fitfully and warily.
In the morning I ate a salty breakfast at a diner. I brushed my teeth in the bathroom. I tipped the waitress in change. “It’s all I got,” I apologized. She pushed the coins back at me firmly.
“Chile’, you keep them coins fo’ y’self!” she told me. “You look like you need ’em a whole lot more ’n me.”
I realized that my eyes must have looked hungry, that she could see my yellowing bruises. She shook her head and said something about me being in a heap o’ trouble as she walked away. She said her words gently and lowly. She made the cook give me extra hash browns in a white, Styrofoam to-go container. She squeezed my shoulder like a strong grandmother. My muscles relaxed where she touched me. She swept the floor and sang hymns to herself.
I used the coins to make a few phone calls, and got an apartment in the Southside of St. Louis. I hoped it would have a place to sit in the shade. I drove and then climbed the musty stairs to the very top of the brick building called Ivanhoe. The steps were wooden and built to last. The walls were tiled. I fumbled to unlock the door. The apartment had no refrigerator or air conditioning. It smelled like dogs. I had never felt so tired. There was an oak tree in front. The cicadas lost in its branches screamed out their indignation of the heat. I opened up every window that wasn’t painted shut. I felt very lucky.
The front door had four locks. I slid and clicked them into place when I stepped inside. They made me feel four times as safe. There was a wilted marijuana plant in a pot outside the kitchen door. I sat beside it on the fire escape with a sketchbook. I drew the different things I saw. I examined the backs of the buildings. The parked cars looked strange and my neighbors sullen. Hot breezes swept my hair across my sweating forehead.
I slept on Jimmy James’s camping mattress that night. It smelled of wood smoke and sweat. I tried to dream of him but the heat closed in on me. Hot moisture filled every movement and breath. I wet towels in the sink and covered my body. I listened to the street noises. Dogs barked. People yelled at one another. Sirens screamed unmercifully.
I tried to muffle my sobs into the folded sweatshirt I was using as a pillow. But the safety of the four walls let the tears come out. It was too much. I added to the noises outside. I cried and beat my fists against the hardwood floor. My skin cracked open over my bones. Blood dried on my knuckles. My movement left streaks in the dust.
I was left with a shaky, wrung-out feeling. And shame.
I put clothes on and walked down Lafayette until I found a gas station. I bought a pack of cigarettes with four crumpled dollar bills. The girl working slid them to me in a metal tray. She watched me listlessly through the bulletproof glass. She scolded the drunk man behind me to stop crowding my space. He stopped leaning against me. He stopped asking for my number.
I smoked in the dark in my new apartment. My mind drew shapes on the blank walls. They were colored with the hues of my memory.
I tried to be stronger than I had been before. I tried to believe that inside those cement walls, Jimmy James was still proud. And that soon I would feel his chest under my cheek. I remembered simple thing
s: Like Timothy playing in the bedroom after dinner while Jimmy James washed the dishes and talked animatedly. And how I sat at the table and drew wildflowers. And how every so often Timothy would miss us and run into the kitchen to earnestly show us his toys. Things like that.
I tried to dry the new flow of hot saltwater down my cheeks. Because I knew that all my tears would flow back home. I knew Colin wouldn’t speak to me if I called. He would hide in a deep, undisturbed silence. He wouldn’t want to hear my voice. During my last days home, Colin felt the pain coming out of my body. He knew about my bruises without me telling him. I couldn’t hide from my brother—my worries filled the space in between us.
We were white trash, and white trash are wrong a lot.
It was bigger than us now. Jimmy James was locked up downtown. The Cota kids had stopped believing. Colin knew the whole story without me telling him. New bruises appeared where the old ones yellowed. He threw rocks at parked cop cars. He stayed out late drinking. He avoided looking me in the eye. He slept on the couch.
I took good care of the fourteen-eye oxblood boots in my new apartment. I oiled them with black polish on Sunday. I stared at the ceiling and let my bruises heal. I drew pictures on my walls with a pencil. The shapes kept developing scary shadows. There were faces with eyes swollen shut, bloody teeth, and a recently fired .45—a 1911 with a pearl pistol grip. Scattered across the images were bullet casings—each one of them with invisible, devastating fingerprints.
6
WHEN MOTHER LEFT
The Cota Street house was next to the railroad tracks. We could hear the rumbling and the sound of the long, lonely whistles all night. The trains carried the big logs into the mill. We watched the loads of cut lumber come out. Sometimes, Colin and I sat on the back porch and snuck cigarettes with our cousin Daemon. We strained our ears to listen to the music from the taverns—varied forms of off-tune karaoke singing—drums and bass from live bands.
Vera Violet Page 3