“Soon enough, Jimmy James caught wind that she was selling weed. And her sleeping out there all alone waiting to get robbed. He was pissed from head to foot. Drove her over here fast to give her a talking-to. He was shaking all over. The only other time I saw him that mad was when I had too much to drink and wanted to go for a ride in my Galaxie. He put me in a headlock and stole my keys that time.” Brady stared at his boots and thought.
Fitz and I let him talk. We let his words run out and connect to long, long silences. “She was the one I always thought would be able to get out. She stayed in school. She was always better than me—bigger than this town, too smart for a guy who don’t even got his GED. I thought she would be on the top somewhere, giving orders in the tallest building, at the front of her field. All her teachers thought it, too, always took extra interest in her assignments, gave her the best grades, the most attention. I couldn’t figure out why she would want to hang out with me except for the fact that Annie Kiss was as loyal as loyal could be.
“So when she ended up pregnant we were real mad. Because we knew who the father of her baby was. Because when she wasn’t with us, she was alone in her car or locked up in that trailer with her daddy.
“And neither of us had ever touched her.”
Brady stopped and took a drag of his fourth cigarette with a shaking hand. The alternator was back on the table. His heart was breaking, breaking. His eyes were wet. His voice far away. “She didn’t try to hide it like some girls would have. Didn’t start wearing baggy sweatshirts all of the sudden. She just quit smoking cigarettes and was more careful about eating vegetables. No more Dr Pepper. She started walking. Finally moved all her stuff into my bedroom. Just like that. Suddenly she wanted me to hold her. Be with her all night. I tell you I was in heaven and hell at the exact same time. I had some money saved up, and I took her on the only vacation she ever had. Went camping on the Sol Duc for a whole week. She didn’t stop smiling—not even in her sleep. We were so happy. That’s where those rocks come from.” He nodded toward the pile that was still stained with red.
The Sol Duc River was Brady’s promised land. He loved those banks and that water more than he could ever say.
“She was excited about it. She made it seem like a natural thing—to be carrying a baby like that. Usually girls got kicked out of high school for getting knocked up. But for once the school minded its business. She was real close to graduating. I tried to talk some sense into her. I wanted to marry her and raise her baby like it was mine. And I would have, too, would have loved her the whole rest of our lives and that baby, too. Would have loved every minute of it. Jimmy James told her to lie on the birth certificate and say that the baby was mine. We knew that turning her daddy in was out of the question. This town is too small. The newspaper would have printed it. People would have remembered forever. But they wouldn’t remember me and her having a shotgun wedding and a baby too young. We would have been just like everyone else.
“She left one morning and didn’t show up at school. When it got dark I started worrying, and we looked for her. Joey—and you, Fitz—and Jimmy James stood with me at the end of the driveway of her daddy’s house trying to see inside of that trailer. Her car was there but we couldn’t see her. We threw sticks and rocks at her bedroom window. I didn’t want her daddy to hear us and get mad and hurt her. We thought she might be locked inside. He’d done that before—locked her in her room. Finally, we went in there with baseball bats and chains and everything. We broke the door down and looked all through that place. Didn’t find nothin’—no clue as to what went on there. Nothing ’cept . . .” Brady’s shoulders trembled just a little bit. So slightly it was heartbreaking.
Fitz tilted his head to the right and helped Brady with his story. “Nothing ’cept that big ol’ bloodstain. And that little hole dug in the backyard.”
Brady put his head in his hands and stared at the floor. I pictured the boys standing around her Mercury under the wet fir trees outside the fence in the front yard. Looking devastated. Watching the sunrise over the whole sorry place. Golden light glinting off broken-down minivans. The Charger. The yellow grass. Standing there and none of them saying a goddamn word. Waiting. Knowing it was too late.
It was five days before I found out she was stripping in Bremerton. Dancing topless for money under the overpass. I went there alone. The doorman wouldn’t let me in. Said I was too young. I told him my best friend was in there. That I needed to talk to her. I pictured her covered in bruises. Belly skin sagging. The men watching her dull-eyed and stoned. Giving her money. Watching that pretty golden-brown hair. Lost in their dreamworlds. The bouncer said tough luck. Asked when I would be eighteen. Said they were always looking for dancers. I glared at him. He said he would tell her I was here, and she could meet me out back. I said fine. I knew he was lying. He would let me wait there until I gave up. He knew that some people’s resolve dissipates with time. He didn’t know that mine boils over. I threw my cigarette on the pavement. Ground it into dust underneath my heel. When I called the Man from Angel Road I was already shaking. Anxiety pulled me from reality in long strides. I was floating somewhere high above the highway. Above Sinclair Inlet. The brackish water of a hazardous-waste site. The suspended organisms dying off in great numbers.
The boys showed up with a whole crew in three cars. Took the bouncer by surprise.
Annie was up there—the newest dancer. Brady talked her down from the stage as Fitz danced to the music himself and told the men to keep their dicks in their pockets.
“Nothing to see here, folks.” Joey waved his hands in front of Annie and Brady. The small strip club was suddenly swarming with bald, laughing teenaged boys eager for violence. Erections melted into shrinking testicles. Fitz propped the door open to let the sunlight in. Blue cigarette smoke found the sky and rose joyfully. The owner stormed out from the back room. Said he was gonna call the cops. Jimmy James stood before him. Got so close their chests touched.
“Please do,” he said as he looked down on the older man. “Because you should be ashamed of yourself.” Annie was underage, and he could prove it. He waved her driver’s license in front of the man’s eyes. It wasn’t long before the security guards mobbed them.
They wouldn’t have done that if they had known how much the Man from Angel Road loved to fight. That he perhaps loved it more than he should. That he was always up for a brawl. And would not back down. He was the last one standing every time. Jimmy James’s father beat the living shit out of him regularly until the day he realized his firstborn son was grown, and left. Nadine’s bruises finally healed. And Jimmy James worked like a dog ever since. His body had not forgotten these things.
At the strip club underneath the overpass, ashtrays flew through the air. Serving girls screamed. Annie beat a sailor off Brady’s back with a chair. The wood cracked and splintered. The black vinyl tore. The older men cringed. They scowled and walked to their cars. Annie finally made everyone stop. Standing there in her underwear. Seething.
She got dressed and followed them out the door, and we all left. She rode home in the front seat of Brady’s Galaxie with dead eyes. She had a coke habit and a chip on her shoulder. The next morning she sold her car and went straight back up Highway 3. Nobody heard a word from her for a month.
Then she called Brady, and he picked her up again. He told her he knew the whole story about who the daddy of her baby was and what happened. Wouldn’t blame her one bit or judge her if she would just clean up and start walking a straight line.
“She didn’t have much to say,” he said. “I wasn’t even sure what part of her was left. She’d moved on to heroin. I s’pose that stuff can eat up a girl pretty quick.” Brady tended Annie. She threw up in their bedroom. He went through days of hell: she screaming and he watching her body shake. He went through all that just to watch her walk away and shoot up again. Damn.
“I still would have married her,” he said. “She still had that strut—that hair. Funny how someone can be s
o beautiful and totally fucked up at the same time. But she was real depressed and left again. I let her go. You deserve someone better was the last thing she ever said to me. I had my job to think about. Thought maybe tough love would cure her. Heard bits and pieces of her here and there. I didn’t know what to do. Life moved on for everyone but me. I couldn’t keep driving around the country chasing after her when she was determined to destroy herself anyway. I thought she’d come back for good when she was ready. So, I just kept working. And Joey went to Alaska. And Fitz, you got that job at the gas station. I still thought about Annie, kept thinking I’d see glimpses of her everywhere. I drove to Bremerton at night when I couldn’t sleep. I looked around those neighborhoods and watched for her.
“Everyone stopped bringing her up whenever they saw me. The answers to everyone’s questions were written all over my face.”
He picked up the alternator again. “She didn’t leave nothing here but a journal with two photos stuck in it. A picture of her daddy, and that photograph you took of her sitting on the hood of that Mercury Cougar the day she bought it. All us boys standing around her and grinning. Haven’t had the heart to read her words yet. Guess I’m a little afraid of what’s in there.”
Brady Robbins stopped talking. All the life went out of him. His free arm lay like spaghetti at his side. His face was blank. His cigarette had burned out a long time ago. The sour smell of it wafted up with the wind. It blew raindrops on us. I drank another beer. Brady’s worry lines crawled toward his hairline. I tried not to let the guilt eat at me. But I kept feeling like I did something wrong—like I deserved to be sitting there staring at the reddish-black rocks. I slid three of Fitz’s cigarettes out of his pack, lit them one by one, and handed two over. Our shoulders stooped forward in a line. I studied our misery—became a student of it and the exhaled smoke.
I thought of lost chances. My life stretched before me—empty. Jimmy James burned up in the fire of his own anger. An easy target. A loaded pistol that backfired. Strong and weak. Dangerously brilliant and fatally alive. I looked at Brady. We hadn’t saved our lovers from themselves. We should have held on for dear life. Dropped everything. Died trying.
I kept Annie’s secrets for her. I kept them long after the stretched summer night she spilled them to me in the dark of Brady’s living room—after the boys went to sleep. When she was still pregnant with her baby. The day that Kat came. After Jimmy James made Kat so angry she became a person. When I drank the rest of my bottle of wine and talked lowly with my best friend. Annie told me about her daddy.
“He doesn’t mean it,” she said. “He’s usually so drunk I don’t think he remembers. He misses my mom so much . . . it makes him crazy.” After a moment her eyes creased happily at the edges. “But Brady loves me anyway.”
Her lips were softly pursed—her eyebrows made diagonal lines across her forehead that pointed toward her nose. She bloomed with love and motherhood. She was ready to let the past be the past. She was strong. I was glad. She smoothed the quilt lying over her knees. She’d been straightening pictures and folding things. The living room behind us was neat and tidy. There were potted flowers in the windowsill. Herbs grew from small terra-cotta planters in special corners that received sunlight. The kitchen didn’t smell so much like deep-fried things since she moved in.
She told me she was going to her daddy’s place to lay it all down in the morning. She was going to tell him her plans. Say that she was marrying Brady Robbins—raising her baby with him. She felt she needed to say this to her daddy so he would know. And that that’s why she left.
Fitz didn’t ride along with Brady as he took me back to Cota Street. Brady looked through the windshield steadily. His old laugh lines showed up in the early pink light. He parked in front of my dad’s house and held on to the steering wheel with closed eyes. His body was suddenly foreign—it belonged to a stranger. He was morbid and bitter and worn. He was suddenly a terrifying man with weaknesses and vulnerabilities and things he could not control. I clenched the awful seat. That’s when I knew: There is a certain peace when the blood dries and hardens. And scar tissue in knuckles builds in circles, swelling. Skin always grows back when the violence is over. You have only yellow bruises and a metallic reminder in your teeth. You will never be the same. Brady was weak and rambling as his wounds healed. His shaved head bowed as he told me, “They’ll take it all away.” We watched the work-release truck on Cota Street flash red with swaying tools. I stepped down to the curb and slammed the door. I kicked the speckled pavement as bodies in orange suits pressed desperate against the bars.
I stood there and watched the prisoners and the cold sun. Brady drove away. My brain was ground hamburger meat. I leaned against my truck in the driveway—it was a cold cement wall. My anger gathered like bubbles rising.
I didn’t sleep that day. I cleaned the house on Cota Street. Colin followed me from room to room. I told him, instead of Brady, about Annie’s notebook. How it had disappeared and then shown up again. How Annie had noticed it missing just as I swallowed my last drop of wine the day before she went to her daddy’s trailer. Colin scratched the back of his neck. “Annie still got that Mercury?” he asked.
I tossed and turned in my bed that night. I woke up wanting something I wasn’t sure of. My arms and legs slid through cold sheets. I flailed in frosty seawater. Annie wrote poems on the banks of the Sol Duc. River rocks glistened with water that was alive. My arms searched my pillows. They reached for a man who wasn’t there.
24
HONEY BURST
The Man from Angel Road came home early from Bremerton. He told me what happened—was glad I was awake when he got there—thankful for my warm body to hold on to. He turned the stereo up while he showered, brushed his teeth. I listened to his bathroom noises and fell back asleep.
He woke me with his clean mouth. Led Zeppelin floated to us over the earth-toned throw rugs in front of the record player. I curled into his body. I had it memorized. We fit together perfectly. Our skin touched, our hearts beat, our lips and hands couldn’t stop. We searched each other quietly, asking and saying: Are you still you? I miss this. We moved against one another—clothing, sheets, distractions fell to the side. We rose above it all. A vanilla candle burned. We were alive: muscular, naked, sweaty, young. We found the strings that held us together. Our worries waited—the rent was still late—the electric bill too high. But we didn’t think about any of it.
I hovered over his body. I listened to him breathe. I felt his body tense and then soften and then become mine. All mine. His boots lay in a tumbled heap at the door. A shaved head was pressed against the pillowcase. There were faded orange flowers printed on the secondhand cloth. The bright pallor of his skin made all other colors vague and muted. I missed him even as he was pressed against me—kissing my earlobe. I watched his chest. Where his heart beat so sincerely. I loved his nose, his fingers, the space where his neck met his shoulder blades. He began where I left off. He set one foot in front of the other. He walked beside me.
It hurt for some reason—was too simple and beautiful to last. Our path was painful. My heart expanded. And then exploded. This moment was only temporary. Everything would fade fast. I wondered what I would do when he was gone. When I had only my memories: clean skin, musky scents, and firm calloused hands.
Afterward, we lay still and spoke little. He sensed my thoughts. Turned onto his back and strummed his guitar—waiting for me. I finally kissed his kneecaps. He put his Les Paul down. There was a smile on his face that did not show teeth. He opened his arms, and I came to meet him. I spread myself over his skin and flesh and bones and beating heart. His body was wider and longer than mine. His arms squeezed the breath out of me. I knew for sure he was really there. He held on for that extra moment that meant everything. He didn’t want to be anywhere but holding me. There was no hurry in his touch. I rested my cheek on his chest. Breathed into his tattoos. Timothy slept in his big-boy bed in the bedroom. Jimmy James checked on him. Left the
bedroom door open a crack. I closed my eyes. The Man from Angel Road came back and crawled under the covers. I felt his breathing deepen into the heavy drone of final rest. I drifted off.
But my sleep was not silent—it wavered in and out of different worlds. A scream bubbled up from a rotten abyss—a scream that never reached my mouth, that stayed growling in my throat. I dreamed of grass blades, earthy brown gelatin, and shame. I woke up lonely. I felt Jimmy James leaving me. He would more and more often be the Man from Angel Road. Something was horrible and wrong. It would change us.
I watched him in the dark—his face relaxed and vulnerable. He was doomed by his anger, violence, and charisma. His beliefs he would never surrender. A heart that loved enough for all of us and more. But complicated, I knew. I wondered sadly what had gone wrong—what could possibly destroy the boy and the girl and the sleeping baby held together purely by spirit and love. I washed myself quietly in wavery candlelight. I left a note for him that said I would be back—that explained nothing. My sketchbook nestled under my arm. My drawing pencils fit snuggly in my pocket. I blew out the candle and walked to the All Night Diner. I drank coffee and thought. I sat in a booth alone. I tried to sketch the salt and pepper shakers. I stared at the rain soaking the black pavement of the parking lot. I watched the water gather into puddles. I watched it dribble onto the black rocks. I stared at the curb.
Three kids stole a bottle of ketchup from the struggling restaurant. They laughed outside in the rain. A boy with clean shoes tried to squirt the girls with ketchup. The plastic cap came off. The stolen ketchup plopped onto the ground. It missed the boy’s shoes. It did not splatter on the girls’ name-brand clothing. They screamed and got into their car. They all drove away laughing. The plastic bottle littered the parking lot. A minimum-wage worker picked it up and took it back inside.
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