Godshot

by Chelsea Bieker

  “You ever make my mom do this when she was young?” I asked. “Or was she too valuable to you? Too pretty to break a nail?”

  “She was supposed to win Miss California,” Cherry said. “We even sent her pictures to Playboy magazine. That was before we were believers of the highest order, of course, Vern forgive me, but they wrote her back. They said almost. We’d like to see more emphasis on the breasts. Oh, we did her hair up in a beehive and had her half naked at the stove cooking. She chanted, Eggs eggs eggs. Bacon bacon bacon. It gave it a realness.”

  I remembered the pictures perfectly, how before our conversion my mother had tacked them up in our bedroom with pushpins, a collage of her face and body, along with Polaroids she had taken of herself pouting and shellacked with body glitter. In one she was bent over in a thong, hands on her breasts and a whistle between her teeth. In another she was kissing a woman for show, both their eyes looking at the camera, tongues out and searching. My mother had come home with this woman after meeting her at the DMV. They had become very best friends in the waiting area. The woman drank Welch’s grape juice all day from a big plastic bag with a spigot she carried around in her purse and the whites of her eyes were tinged purple from it. She had a slew of children that seemed to be naked and breastfeeding all day, pulling her tit out at their whimsy and drinking from it like a hose—standing up and bending over, all kinds of gymnastics. I was entranced with them feeding from her in this way and stared openly until finally she asked if I wanted some. I was six years old and proud to be a big first grader. “That’s for babies,” I said, as her son who was my same age gulped from her nipple. “Oh yeah?” she said. She pulled the breast out of his mouth and squirted me in the face. The milk landed on my lips, some reached my tongue, and I froze. It was warm. I think I had expected that grape juice would come out of her, but no, it was dairy, sugar sweet. She cawed with laughter and slapped her knee. “Your face!” she kept squealing. “What, you never drank your mama’s titty before?” She stuffed her breasts back into her bikini top. I looked at her kids and felt sorry for them. They probably felt sorry for me.

  “What are you daydreaming about, you little weirdo?” Cherry asked. Her demeanor had shifted. She was suspicious of me now. She lit a raspberry Sweet Dream and blew smoke into my hair. “Wondering where that mama of yours is? I know I am. ’Bout time she came back to relieve me from housing the ungrateful.”

  My fingers ached. Ungrateful. How I wanted away from Cherry with such a deep desperation. How I’d do anything to get my mother back, to get out of there.

  “Where you think that cowboy took her?” she asked.

  “I know how to find out,” I said.

  Cherry tossed her head back. “Oh boy, she’s all full of ideas.”

  I didn’t really know, but I wanted Cherry to imagine me strong, smarter than her, smarter than she ever knew me to be. My mind raced with what to say.

  “Come on now,” she chided. “Tell your Cherry your secrets.”

  I closed my eyes. At first there was nothing, but then I saw it. The red house. The red house held all the answers. I let myself feel it fully. But I didn’t want Cherry to come with me. They would take one look at her and slam the door. She would ruin everything.

  “You don’t want to know,” I said.

  She cocked her head to the side, trying to figure me out. Clicked her tongue. I wondered if she was thinking of that red house too, and knew that it would have to be me and me alone to go there. Get what we needed. She turned away and put the Sweet Dream out in her full ashtray. She nodded at the wall. “Don’t tell your old Cherry the sin of your heart.”

  I wouldn’t, I decided. I wouldn’t tell anyone.

  BY THE TIME I arrived at the red house it was nearly dusk, not another soul for miles that I could see. The fields caught the last of the sun and shimmered back an odd orange. The smell of manure was gone. Most of the livestock had been shipped out but a few of the very sickly ones starved and died and their carcasses lay in the fields, sharp bones poking skywise. I remembered how before the drought, Lyle had been involved in Future Farmers of America, how he’d raised up a pig named Twanda in their backyard and how he loved the pig like a pet. It wore a red bandana around its neck and sniffed the dirt like a pup. He took her to competitions and showboated her around a tent in his Wrangler’s and Grampa Jackie’s tan suede cowboy hat. But then they slaughtered her and had us over for a pork feast and we all ate Twanda, and I remember watching Lyle, the pig grease glossing his lips, wondering how he’d done it, killed the thing he loved. Of course I’d been around it my whole life, the raising and the killing. I’d watched animal blood spill from hanging gut, splashing on the butcher’s boots. I’d smelled the metal of death, that was survival, that was country living. But I’d never known a boy to love a pig like that and then eat it.

  I knocked on the door. Waited. No megaphone this time. It swung open and the girl was before me, earphones around her neck. Black coal smudged her cheek and fingers. Her eyes were rimmed in green eyeliner and her lips a ghost white. There was a notebook behind her on the desk where she’d been sketching a picture of a horse skeleton.

  “My mother and I took bets on if you’d come back,” she said. “I said never and she said absolutely. Guess she does know how to read people.”

  The smell in the house was deep and sweet, streams of smoke coming from long wands of wood cradled by porcelain dishes on the desk. A ceiling fan whirred above and the air was artificially cool like I hadn’t felt in so long. “Daisy here?”

  “Hasn’t left since we moved in three years ago.”

  “How is that possible?” I asked.

  The girl looked at me blank. “How is anything possible?”

  A laugh shot out of me and it startled her, but then she laughed too. How was anything possible? Yet so many things were. Suddenly I felt tired.

  Daisy came down the stairs, her black kimono trailing behind. She wore an emerald velvet long-sleeved leotard under it and knee-high black leather boots. The heat outside was nothing to her. It didn’t exist. Her scars were covered in a thick pancake of foundation, her cheekbones artfully contoured with bronzer. If I squinted it was almost like seeing her without the burns entirely but for her white iris. There was not a lick of dirt anywhere on her.

  “You’ve met Florin, my daughter,” Daisy said. She put her hand on Florin’s shoulder. “She feels she has a tragic life but I tell her it will only make her less simple, which of course is a good thing. No one wants to be simple.”

  “I’m here,” I said.

  Daisy nodded like she knew all about it, like she knew I had lain with a man unmarried, that I had read the pornography of the romances and craved them and I had touched myself so many times I couldn’t count. That I had lied to my mother about my first blood and now here I was, one sin leading to the next like a knotted rope I’d hang myself with when I reached the end of it.

  I would do anything to find my mother. I was here and I’d do anything.

  The phone rang. Florin looked at the caller ID. “It’s Forne,” she said. “Tractor supply guy out of Sanger. He likes to feel adored and then he likes you to detail how you’d tie him up and put him in the trunk of his own car and drive him around town past his wife’s salon and past his kid’s soccer practice. Then you untie him and tell him everything’s going to be okay while he weeps like a willow. That’s basically it. Then you pretend you have some insider knowledge of his wife coming up the drive and he’ll hang up on you in the world’s biggest rush.”

  “What’s the matter with him?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” Daisy said. “We all have fantasies. We’re just happy these men can unload the lifetime of shit they’ve been fed their whole lives and be vulnerable while keeping to themselves.”

  “Otherwise they get out of hand,” Florin added.

  They talked about men like they were dumb dogs that needed to be herded around but were still big and strong so you had to be careful with them. My moth
er always hated dogs—she said don’t ever trust someone with a dog who thinks it won’t eat their throat if it’s hungry.

  “So it’s a deal,” I said. “I work and you give me the number.”

  “I guess we’ll see how you do,” Daisy said.

  “What else do I need to know?”

  “Well, how’s your imagination?” She knocked on my head. “You read books?”

  Did I ever. I nodded.

  “You’ll be fine, then.”

  INSIDE MY MOTHER’S call room the air hung with her presence as if she’d only just stepped out moments before. I smelled her rosewater, saw her hairs clinging to the back of the chair. On her desk, a framed picture of the two of us. It was taken the year before outside the church. We wore matching dresses on an Easter Sunday when I couldn’t have imagined what was to come.

  “She was a beauty you don’t see every day, I have to say,” Daisy said.

  I set the frame on its face and put my mother’s headset on. Looked to Daisy, who was wringing her hands. Did she want to stop me? Her own daughter didn’t seem to take calls. But I wasn’t her daughter. “You’re in control here,” she said. “Not them. One of the few places in the world that’s true, far as I know.”

  I nodded, eyes on my knees. She backed away from me and stood in the doorway. I was in it now, fallen from ship into wild swelling seas. I would be different after the call just as I was different after Lyle, just as I was different after each of my mother’s boyfriends had swept our lives into their own and spat us back out. I thought of Vern’s sermons of purity, how the worst thing a girl could do was hand her godly husband a flower with all the petals plucked off. How each time you were touched it stripped you of something vital, of your very worth. I saw myself a trim stalk, colorless in the sun. I didn’t understand how women could be reduced to those petals. No, it didn’t seem right. But who could know what the real truth was? At one time the petal talk had seemed like the most logical, surest way to live I’d ever heard. A safe system of dividing girls good from bad. Something about that simplicity had felt good at the time. Order where before there had been none. Rules to keep a girl whole.

  I looked to Daisy. “Stay with me,” I said to her, and she nodded at the red blinking call button. I could have gotten up and walked away. I could have saved what was left of my flower, but instead I clicked that red flashing button my mother’s own finger had pushed many times. I’m doing this for you, I thought. This is who you’ve made me into.

  “Hello, darling,” I said, imitating her slow talk she liked to use on men. “Sunny on the line.”

  Forne was silent at first, then there was rustling like a squirrel in a sack. “I’m already in the plastic bag for you, Mistress.”

  “Good job,” I said, perhaps a little too enthusiastically.

  The rustling stopped. “Am I in a safe place?” he asked slowly. I imagined his eyes darting from side to side.

  I deepened my voice again. “Of course you are.” I thought to my romances, the steamiest scenes. It seemed often the men in them wanted to be belittled, made to feel like bad children. “But I see the bag isn’t tight enough. You have a hard time doing it right.”

  He gasped. “I’m sorry, I know you like the bag extra tight. It’s tight now.”

  This went on, me trying to describe how I would get his body into the trunk of his car, a Dodge Stratus, he had whispered when I struggled to come up with convincing details—“key in the ignition, now, here we go, in the Dodge Stratus.” I pretended to drive him all around neighborhoods of humiliation while he imagined himself secure in his plastic bag, bumping into the sides of the trunk when I went too fast. I wondered if he cared about my body or what I was really doing on the other side of the line. This wasn’t sex to me. This was stage play. Something about it felt easy. I felt similar to when I read the romances—I was on another planet. I was happy? Daisy slipped out and I was alone.

  “My foot is uncomfortable. I hate this,” he said.

  “Do you want to do something else?” I asked.

  He was silent.

  “Oh,” I said, back in character. “Well, that’s what you deserve for being bad.”

  “Tell me what I did,” he said.

  “You didn’t read your Bible.”

  “I’m sorry,” he whined.

  “You probably can’t even read.”

  “I can’t, I can’t,” he moaned. “I’m so stupid.”

  I spent time detailing how stupid he was. He told me about bad grades he’d received in school, his mean father, and how his mother liked to openly say he wasn’t very bright but was good with his hands. I felt sorry for the things he’d endured, so I had to imagine myself talking to my stupid father, the man with one short leg, in order to be mean enough. I pictured him and really let loose. I accused Forne of being a chicken shit, something my mother liked to call my father when she spoke of him, and I made fun of him freely in the way I would never have been able to do to anyone in real life. I was an actress in a movie. I was no longer Lacey. What a relief.

  “What’s that?” I said. “Is that your wife coming up the drive?”

  He moaned a little and I heard more rustling. I wondered where he actually was in his house. The closet floor maybe, the bathroom with the door locked. He clearly was not in the trunk of his car. That would be too risky. His breath got ragged and then he let out a little whoop like he’d just gone down an exhilarating slide. It felt like an adult game where we were both present but each having an entirely different experience. The whole thing was tolerable, fun even. He hung up and it was over.

  I came out to the front desk, where Daisy was perched and Florin was typing.

  “Well?” Florin said.

  “Was it supposed to be hard?” I said, but I felt my hands shaking. A weird high had taken me over like I’d gotten away with something.

  “You did pretty good,” Daisy said, ascending the stairs. “Give me a week. Prove you’re serious.”

  I waited for Florin to direct me somehow, but instead she went to the bathroom. I heard her through the door talking quickly into her cell phone to one of her friends, not concerned with me at all. I felt tricked. I had worked and expected the Turquoise Cowboy’s number in return. I looked at the leather-bound call log on the desk where Florin had been sitting moments ago. I put my hand on it. I felt that a clue to my mother’s whereabouts was bound to be inside.

  “It’s hard, isn’t it?” Daisy said, suddenly, somehow, back at the foot of the stairs. “To finally find what we’re searching for?”

  “I like it here,” I said. The truth.

  “You don’t really want that number,” Daisy said. “You don’t really want to know about the life she chose.”

  I took my hand off the call log. I remembered once finding my mother’s journal and reading the notes she’d made of our days. Lacey is whiny today, getting on my last nerve. I hope it’s a stage. He hit me again last night after she was asleep. Told me I was the worst names in the book. Sometimes I look at Lacey and I think I won’t be around to see her grow up. I don’t know why I think that but I just can’t see it. I don’t know why I can’t ever feel good.

  “Steer clear of men like him and you’ll do just fine,” Daisy said. “I learned my lesson but some women never do. If you come back here let it be because you want to, not because you want anything to do with that disgusting man. She was weak to him, and why be around weakness if you don’t have to?”

  I wanted to please her, to show her I could be satisfied in this new life without my mother, agree with Daisy’s logic of good and bad. That I was above all that had happened. I settled into the fainting couch and pretended to doodle on some of Florin’s paper. I waited until I heard Daisy’s door click shut from upstairs. I was not above anything.

  It wasn’t hard to find my mother’s name on the call log, or to see the name written next to it multiple times a day every day—Rick Walden Rick Walden Rick Walden—until he had come through the phone and taken h
er.

  THAT NIGHT I slept the deepest I had in months, my heart quiet, my mind a dreamless scape.

  When morning came, I dialed the Turquoise Cowboy’s number—or Rick Walden’s number, actually, a name so simple it seemed it couldn’t possibly be right—on the go-phone. I remembered how Vern spoke of faith, how faith lived not in the mind, contrary to what everyone thought. It lived in the body. It was an action. You had to throw yourself into action without thinking. Thinking could come later, would come later, as a divine happening if you just put the body in motion. I rocked back and forth on the mattress. I needed to pee but everything could wait. I pressed the call button. It rang and rang. Finally a rasp of a woman answered.

  “Rick’s Angels,” she said. “How can I direct your pleasure?”

  “I’ll need to speak to Louise Herd, please and thank you,” I said in a deep voice.

  The woman paused. “You talking about Little Lou?”

  “Sure,” I said. “That’s the one.”

  The line was quiet, then I heard breathing.

  “Hello,” a voice said on the other end. It sounded strange. I realized I never talked to my mother on the phone much. She had always been right there.

  “Where are you?” I said.

  A long pause, so long I feared she’d hung up on me.

  “You’re different,” she said finally. I detected a hint of the slanted drunk voice I hated. The voice that told me she wasn’t there anymore.

  I felt a lump threaten my throat. “I’m sorry.” How I’d wanted to say those words to her. “I’m sorry for not standing up for you.”

  I had imagined spending the first ten minutes of the call telling her she was forgiven, listening as she cried and begged for me to love her again. But she hadn’t even told me she missed me. That she was sorry, too. That the whole thing was wrong, but could be fixed. I wanted her to fear losing me, tell me with desperation that I was hers. But I hadn’t ever needed to squirm away from her grasp. It seemed her hands never held me tight enough.