In the alleyway on Cota Street, the detective confiscated the bloody rock. In a dumpster behind the All Night Diner, a sixteen-year-old employee discovered a fired-off 1911. There were fingerprinted bullet casings scattered across more black rocks from the Sol Duc. And in a trailer on Preacher’s Slough Road, there was nothing left.
I picked up Jimmy James’s teeth while the detective put the rock in an evidence bag.
Jimmy James bled and waited in the backseat of the cop car. I saw him slump forward in handcuffs and hit his head on the hard plastic. The police finally took him away. The detective poked around the building alone.
Brady leaned his back against our truck. He slid down the side and bumped his head against the steel. I heard the thunk thunk of his shot nerves. He huddled under the open truck door as if it would protect him. He put his forehead on his knees. His shoulders shook. He didn’t see anything for a while.
I stared at the brown spots of decay on Jimmy James’s incisors. His teeth looked useless and alone in my palm—even after I wiped the blood off them. The red stained my hands. It dried in the rims of my cuticles. I didn’t wash it away.
I stuffed the teeth in my pocket and poked Fitz in the ribs. I told him we had to get out of there. He looked confused. I rifled through Brady’s jacket pocket for his keys. Brady looked up in bewilderment. “Come on!” I was angry and frantic. I tried pulling him up myself but was helpless against his dead weight. “Brady!” I screamed in his face. I tried to break through his dull mask of grief and head injury. He winced and closed his eyes.
The detective stopped what he was doing and assessed the situation calmly. I knew more policemen would come. There might be television cameras and microphones. Reporters and tape recorders.
“We have to go!” I jabbed Brady urgently. There was a block of ice in my chest that was melting. Each drop of cold water made my stomach clench in shock. Brady stumbled to his feet and leaned dizzily on Fitz. They trudged slowly to the Bronco. I jumped in and revved the engine.
There was only one place left to go. The O’Neel swampland waited.
29
JUNE IN ST. LOUIS
It was June in St. Louis. I listened to the Cracker song about cigarettes and carrot juice on my Walkman at the laundromat. It was warm and Sunday. I watched the television that was bolted to the wall. A stranger helped me fold my sheets. The news show talked of “drugstore cowboys.” I felt a chill crawl up from my belly and into my heart.
I bought a vanilla-and-sandalwood-scented candle at a discount store while my jeans finished drying. I bought crayons and paper. Acrylic and watercolor paints. I checked my pants. They were still damp.
There was a deep unrest in the wind that flitted in and out of the brick buildings. I watched a line of children dancing in the parking lot. The scattered trash that rabid dogs gnawed to pieces blew in front of them. The arms of the children sliced through the sky. Their feet cut jagged wedges into the humid, whipping breeze. They were bright and alive. My own arms and legs felt leaden and dead. I was standing on a piece of pavement that spun wildly.
The phone was shut off at Dad’s house. He hadn’t paid his bill. I listened to the recording. The computer voice left me stranded at the pay phone on a street corner.
I set the vanilla and sandalwood–scented candle on the cardboard box beside my camping mat when I got home. I opened my window. I lit the wick with a long, wooden match. I lay down on my mattress. I waited for the warm scent of vanilla and sandalwood to float over me. I looked at my library book about Robert Johnson. I thought about a rock tumbling down a hillside. A ball of fire that kept feeding. A sphere of hard-packed snow that rolled and gathered speed. It was hot and humid in Mississippi where Robert Johnson was born. I understood why he had so many women. The obsessive compulsiveness of new love. Trying to erase the aching pressure. I closed my eyes. The sun went down. I watched the empty eyes of Shenendoah next door grow dark. I listened to Mazzy Star with the lights off. I could not get comfortable. I was a forgotten dishrag in a washing machine—drenched in harsh detergents and spun until I was formless—icy and wrung out and waiting.
The memories—they would not leave: Jimmy James’s Honeyburst Les Paul. His hands on our old Ford truck. How his back was always straight. Eyes that were sad and diplomatic. Fighting a losing battle. The terribly large burden.
I moved through my apartment shuffling inside of the fourteen-eye oxblood boots. I folded everything. Scrubbed away my pencil drawings on the walls, put my clothing away in boxes, and gave my food to the few neighbors who remained.
In the morning, I went to work early with the extra paper and crayons and paint. I sat and recorded everything I saw at Meadows. I marked and measured colors and faces and all the shades of gray. Mrs. Halls corrected papers at her desk in the early morning light. She let me sit quietly and watch her at 7 a.m. The end of the school year loomed. My pencil moved assertively. She forgot about me—marked the children’s notebook paper with a red pen. She scowled, rubbed her temples. Wanted her children to be prepared for a hard life. Tried to push away the dreadful stress.
My eyes burned at my small table. I finished and started another drawing without thinking. My pencil revealed a hand covered in chicken blood reaching out of murky water. It was a flag of surrender. It pleaded for help.
I hung my head and choked on the smell of cut grass and burnt gunpowder. I stumbled out of the child-size desk. There was no more air. I kept thinking: Mima is coming with us.
Mrs. Halls’s long arms were around me. She held on as I fought for breath. She tried to comfort me. But I was beyond logic. I told her I had to go home. Even as I said the words, my childhood turned stormy and disappeared in a hail of buckshot.
30
SWAMP WATER
Colin was thinking about the smell of grass from Mima’s soccer cleats, thinking that maybe she’d been right to go. That David was a dark place. There were no streetlights. The new prison was built on land that had been clear-cut. And replanted. And clear-cut again. There were miles and miles of swamp and alder. And hungry cement walls.
David officials attempted to renovate downtown. They waited for the tourist money. There would be sculptures, a little museum, and antique stores that sold costume jewelry. Colin wanted to leave but he knew there wasn’t anywhere safe. The land pulled and pulled at him. The rich men in suits and uniforms wanted him out. The Cota kids were not part of their plans. The men wearing city shoes did their best.
Colin and Ratboy ran into Carrot, who was buying a tall can of malt liquor at the deli. Carrot, who had been around for a while. Carrot, who was tall and skinny with red hair. Who had stooped shoulders and a cowboy hat. Who still lived with his bad-tempered mother. Colin asked Carrot what he was up to. Carrot told them he was picking up painkillers from the pharmacy for his mother, and the tall can was for her. Colin remembered his mother as the cook at the grade school. How she had a mustache and a lip full of chew. Colin said he had a dollar, and Ratboy had seventy-three cents. He said that Carrot should buy them another tall can with the money and then come over and drink with them. Carrot wasn’t sure. He was supposed to go right home. But he didn’t have very many friends. And Colin was good-looking like our father. And since Monique left, girls had been hanging around him.
They all went to the pharmacy with Carrot. Colin stared and stared. He was grinning.
There were no girls at the house on Cota Street when they got back. Just our father, who was sleeping. Colin kept telling Ratboy and Carrot that he had to get enough money together so he could get out of town. He had to be with Monique and their baby. It was killing him. She was there. Waiting. And all alone. He stood on the back porch at the house on Cota Street and smoked a menthol cigarette. He faced away from Carrot who was nervous and Ratboy, who was thinking about video games. He stared at the stars and said, “Seven years out of state and they can’t do shit to me.” He made plans out loud. A brief lucidity provided a faultless plan with intricate details. “Write thi
s down!” he told Carrot, who fumbled with a pen and paper. Ratboy was good-natured and said he would help.
If Carrot and Ratboy hadn’t been so stoned on O’Neel weed, they would have known: Colin had lost his edge. His hands shook now. Ratboy had never been too smart himself. But it wasn’t his fault. His head had been bashed in one too many times. His daddy was a mean drunk.
Some girls showed up for Colin. They had mushrooms in a bag. They shared with Ratboy and Carrot. Colin said he didn’t want any. Some boys showed up. And then more girls. One of the girls was a cute brunette who was too young to be burned-out yet. She wanted Carrot to smoke meth with her. She was naïve and thought all rednecks had more money than white trash. Carrot would have done whatever the brunette wanted. His mother’s tall can and her pain pills were long gone. He wasn’t sure where his truck was. The girl had already talked him into buying meth from her. Carrot was getting confused. He had to work in the morning.
Colin’s eyes were glazed over. Every night was the same on Cota Street. Two girls were making out loudly—the triangles of their thong underwear peeking out of their low-cut jeans. He shivered. Called to Ratboy. Told him to get one of the girls to drop them off a block from the pharmacy.
At 1 a.m. Colin used a bolt cutter on the lock at the back door. Ratboy waited in the bushes. The man in the house next door heard his dogs barking and Colin rattling the chain. He yelled out to him. Colin ran away—the pharmacist, who lived next door, fired his shotgun.
Colin crawled into a ditch where rainwater gathered. His wounds bled slowly. Ratboy couldn’t find him. The man heard him clumsily searching and shot blindly into the bushes once again. Ratboy had to leave. The girl who had driven them was long gone. Adrenaline pumped through Colin’s body. It was three hours before the police came.
A wheelbarrow full of dead weeds and grass clippings had been dumped into the ditch. The smell entered Colin’s foggy hallucinations. He thought he was smoking cigarettes with Ratboy and cheering for Mima’s goal. Walking next to me down the hill. He tried to call out. He thought about driving to Montana to get Monique—taking her up to the O’Neel property. They could live off the land for a while—raise their son together. He kept his head up for longer than most would have. His hands pulled at the loose dirt. He had meant to tell me something. He had meant to tell me Mima was coming with us. Walking next to us down the hill. But slowly, slowly he slipped back in the ditch—gulped swamp water and green algae. Mosquitoes buzzed around his head. The rain—it poured down.
Colin O’Neel died next to an aluminum drainpipe. He was twenty years old.
31
OILY SNAKES, SCARED HAMSTERS, AND NIGHTMARE SPIDERS
The ride back to David from St. Louis was long. I left the truck with a blown head gasket in Shelton, Nebraska. I got on a Greyhound. I slept and cried and slept and cried. I dreamed of oily snakes and spiders that lived inside my skull and stood up on high, spindly legs. The spiders spit out black-ink poison. They were terrified. Mother, check my bed for spiders, I used to ask her, Please. When I was little. So they wouldn’t crawl inside my head while I was sleeping. So they wouldn’t make a nest there and be afraid to come out. They would hurt me while trying to escape. I was sure of it. Animals scratched and bit when they were frightened and cornered. I’d seen Mima’s hamster run up inside the couch. She grasped after him blindly with her fingers outstretched. He was backed into a corner. A dangerous place for a hamster. He bit her. He bit her hard. His sharp incisors connected underneath her skin. Because the animal was panicked.
I remembered catching a black garter snake with a red stripe down his back. I remembered playing with him until his good nature wore thin. He did not like to be put into a shoebox with no out-hole. I held on to him for too long. I looked down and he was biting me without teeth. I felt sorry. The bite did not hurt. I flung him away. I was left with a guilty feeling and a swipe of snake slobber on my arm. He slithered under a rhododendron bush and glared. My hands were left covered in stinky snake oil. He was a good snake, but I had pushed him too far.
Brady met me at the Greyhound station with lonely eyes. But he was getting stronger. I watched the gray skies and green trees from inside his truck. In Washington, everything was foreign and strange and wet-looking. The weather shocked me. It should have been hot. Hot enough to melt my breath away. But the air was dry and not weighed down with a sodden feeling. There were damp chills. And cool, fresh air. I remembered casual clothes and the way that David girls stripped down to the bare essentials at the first sign of spring. Midriffs smiled. Thighs were encased in short denim cutoffs. Pregnant teenagers sweated. The mud softened. It stuck on every truck. Fans of dirt spread out behind each tire. Nomads escaped to the hills. Daffodils bloomed in cow pastures.
I shivered and watched all the tourists move around the big, new store that would squash all the little, old ones. Brady disappeared inside the sprawling building to find Fitz. I waited in the truck where I couldn’t get my blood going. The cold wind laughed. It blew the evergreens around like little sticks. The storm continued. I heard the screeching of the machinery. Nobody flinched but me.
My insides were ice, and my teeth chattered. The metal gears were tired. I could hear them grinding against one another. They needed oil. They sped up anyway. They reached the type of speed and madness that does not look back. That must consume voraciously. The sound of metal clanking on metal droned on and on in my ears. The engine labored. It leached the energy from my body. It could not go on like this. Something had to give. Purple circles dug out homes underneath my eyes.
I knew it wasn’t smart for me to come back to David. But I couldn’t leave Dad all alone.
I hoped everything had blown over. Brady dropped me off on Cota Street and told me he’d be back. The note Jimmy James had sent me was still in my chipped, blue dresser drawer. Piled on top of musty-smelling clothes. I’d left it there in my hurry to leave. The folded yellow paper a boy had given to me at a bus stop. I recognized Jimmy James’s handwriting. The note was written in pencil. I heard his strong voice echo back at me while I read the words: You’ve gotta lay low for a while. I’ll be back.
It wasn’t a dream. I had really left David. St. Louis had not been a lonely vision. Jimmy James was not waiting for me. The machine was still up and running one thousand miles a minute. But this time I was one hundred years older. The things that should have made me scream backed up in my head. I couldn’t let them come out of my mouth. They curled inward.
They coiled around my brain like oily snakes. They ran inside my skull like scared hamsters—nightmare spiders. They wouldn’t go away.
BACK TO THE HILLS
Dad wanted to go up high where the fossils lay imbedded in silt. Brady, Fitz, and I went with him. My father was a man of few words. He gestured hesitantly through the screen of trees at a doe and her yearling. He didn’t feel his legs as he climbed. He tried to walk out of his misery in the timber company land. We all wondered if a stranger from overseas would buy it. We knew we were living on borrowed time. We knew that soon lawn mowers and fertilizers and BMWs would crowd the forested floodplain. We searched for small, hidden meadows where deer ate grass. We found still ponds where temporarily landlocked sea-run cutthroat got fat. The sunshine settled into our bones—it loosened a few tears. They fell without our noticing. We forgot about the crammed church and the small, hasty funeral. The people who didn’t know. We tried to eat our bread and meat and look down the sides of the canyon—hear the Skokomish River—watch for La Llorona. My molars throbbed. I threw my food down angrily. I sat across from Brady at a boulder. Some part of our grief was shameful—because of how my brother lived. And then how he died. Because we were not only mourning the loss of my only brother. We were also, in a sense, grieving for the great damage of a life wasted.
I lay down on the rocks. I couldn’t look at the men around me. I missed Annie and Monique and Mima and finally, earth shatteringly: Mother. A stick dug into my side. I didn’t move. We were quiet as t
he sunshine warmed us. Calm and sad and muted—afraid that the sound of our voices would take the light away. We would ruin it somehow. I tried to think of Granny—how her leathery face had howled about the family name—the loss of the grandson whom she had carried such desperate hopes for.
A bleak emptiness lay where all the screaming had been—the engine with its fan belt off, the transmission knocking. All the anger subsided into shaky, frantic fear that paralyzed my body as I twisted on the rocks. I felt injured and angry. My mind swirled with David and my memories. The good and the bad—the complex warehouse of unrecorded facts. I was an immigrant who could never go back. I did not belong anywhere. I wanted a sacred place to hold my head high. The ancient Chinook salmon fossils watched. The king salmon had been caught in the midst of spawning. Their images stayed encased in the crumbling rock. They had been there a million years. Dad kept staring at the swallows diving in and out of their holes in an embankment. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. He cleared his throat as if to speak. But nothing came out.
I thought about Brady getting fired. How they’d asked him a lot of questions and saw Fitz’s shaved head when he came to tell him about Colin, and that I was back in town. His supervisors looked closely at his tattoos—the patches on his jacket. They remembered reading about Jimmy James in the newspaper. They told Brady not to come back.
I’d been packing his Bronco with my things.
Fitz had enlisted. He was going to be an army ranger—a ground troop. He would be dead soon. Or like the others who came back wary and broken. He knew there was no oil left. And they would use his blood to get more. The two would mix together in a black-and-red oxblood lake.
I thought about that color—how it meant good and bad things at the same time. Like the blood at birth. But how birth sometimes meant death. And how the man at the library so long ago described crude oil spilled out over water on a river delta in Nigeria. And the sunset over it while it burned. And the low beams turned the polluted water into a churning red with dark shadows.
Vera Violet Page 17