Godshot

  “I only tell you because I don’t want you to put so much pressure on this one life. Your mother’s on a journey all her own. If this one doesn’t work out, all I’m saying is that maybe the next one will.”

  “So I have to wait for the next lifetime to have a normal mom? Seems like a long wait.”

  “It means,” Florin said. “Don’t get super sad and desperate over your mom, ’cause your mom’s batshit crazy and you can’t fix batshit.”

  “Florin, manifest destiny,” Daisy said, as simply as if she was asking her to put on her seat belt. “No one needs your low vibes.” It seemed leaving the red house had invigorated Daisy into some new age version of a traveling preacher, enthusiastic and struck blind by potential miracles. Her usual sardonic tone had been replaced by this wellspring of hopeful talk and powers moving beyond awareness.

  I sat back in my seat. Closed my eyes. “No snow can defeat me! No wind, rain, or ice! Unshakable I am!”

  “She needs to hear it,” I heard Florin whisper.

  “No one needs to hear it,” Daisy snapped at her.

  I took myself away then, to swim in my unknown ocean, the water cool and biting with salt.

  IN THE DARK of a night that still wouldn’t show signs of morning for hours, we crossed into Reno and I rolled my window down to breathe my mother’s air and the chill choked me. There was a dust of white powder on the ground. Snow, my mind told me. I wanted to touch it. We stopped in front of a McDonald’s.

  “You have to eat, Mom,” Florin said. She held Daisy’s hand. “There’s no one in there. This is a good first practice. No one will hurt you.”

  I saw then that this trip was not so much about me for them as it was about Daisy finally changing course—leaving the house, then potentially leaving the life in Peaches that Florin so hated. I harbored a small dream that after collecting my mother we would just keep driving east. No more California, no more of this place called Nevada. Somewhere else entirely that none of my mother’s boyfriends had ruined yet, and we would live together and change our names. We could become new this way. I would never ask my mother about this past life of Peaches again.

  Daisy took a deep breath. “I’ll go in the bathroom first, and come out when I’m ready.”

  I had never been to a McDonald’s, let alone a 24-hour one. In the bathroom, I wiped myself clean with damp paper towels and I watched them in front of the mirror fixing each other, smoothing hair and cooing over Daisy’s dissipating fear. “It’s just McDonald’s,” Florin kept saying, like she was rehearsing the punch line of an inside joke, as Daisy tried to recite her affirmations but kept breaking out into nervous giggles halfway through. They didn’t notice me walk out. It would never be simple for me, watching a mother and daughter together. I suspected these days that I wore the jealousy like a brand.

  WE SAT IN the red plastic booth and ate oval hash browns so fast my tongue burned. Daisy produced two dollars from her cleavage and we bought three more cheeseburgers and ate those. It was the best thing I’d ever tasted. The extreme salt, the warm condiments, the sting of the chemical ketchup. Daisy sat shrunken down in the booth, eyes darting from side to side, paranoid. A toddler near the play area was shrieking at a young flustered mother who wore huge sweats and hoop earrings big as her face, for just the bun just the bun as her mother wiped bread on a napkin, unable to undo the ketchup of course, and the girl wailed on. I wanted to say, Knock it off. At least your mother is here wiping bread for you. My mother never did. If my mother had wiped ketchup from bread for me, if she had shushed me the way this mother was doing now, with a kindness that did not seem deserved by this child, I didn’t remember it.

  “What’s the plan?” I asked Daisy.

  “Thought you’d have one,” Daisy said, pointing a fry at me.

  “I guess we just show up,” I said.

  I looked at the go-phone and saw fourteen missed calls from Stringy. A text message that said Where r u? We need 2 talk. I turned the phone off and forgot him. We slept in the car for a while and when I woke a new country was delivered before me. But so far from the window, Reno didn’t look much different than Peaches. The parking lot was asphalt, clunker and low-rider cars mixed with lifted trucks with big wheels. Beyond the lot the land was the land, desert and dry. The highways and the trucks rolling past, the same.

  “Could you live here?” Daisy said. She was already set to work applying thick pancake makeup in the mirror of a small compact. “What do you think, little baby? Born in Reno, Nevada?”

  “She can do better than this,” Florin said.

  I looked around, and wondered how a place made and remade you. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I’ll like the beach more.”

  DAISY DROVE DOWN what seemed like a main street until we made it to another parking lot. We were in front of a building with a moving sign coming out the top of it, a neon girl riding a bucking horse, and the horse’s butt and hind legs went up and down, up and down, and the girl’s body shifted and her cowgirl hat fell off then returned to her head. PONY CLUB. The window bore the words Live Girls. Fantasy! The saddest man in the world sat slumped against the side of the building, teeth knocked out or in, I couldn’t tell, and his hands lay dead and open next to him on the concrete like he hoped someone would fill them.

  There was a sign that said 18 AND OLDER on the side of the building but with Daisy I felt confident to go in. It was dim and there was a long bar in the corner with a stout older woman behind the counter, hair piled on top of her head, breasts stuck out, and her shirt said Ride ’Em! She eyed us and decided we were no threat to her day and went back to tapping long nails on her sparkly phone. On the stage across the room a chubby younger girl swayed her hips while two middle-aged men in trucker hats sat with their elbows on the stage fanning themselves with one-dollar bills, never placing them on the stage for her to collect. They didn’t turn when we walked in. No one in the place cared what anyone else was doing, not the dancer, who was barely dancing, her boobs sort of bobbing around to no one beat in particular, and the men could have been asleep as far as I could see, and might have actually been. The girl’s eyes were far off to nowhere, and I wondered if this was how my mother danced, just like this, dead in the eyes, for it seemed certain now that she danced on a stage, this one in fact. The girl looked at us and sort of showed her teeth in a smile but her eyes didn’t change. It looked like she was wearing braces.

  When she got off the stage no one clapped and no one came to replace her, but a poppy song was turned up louder and made the depression of the air even heavier.

  The girl walked past us, a puffy coat thrown over her shoulders, boobs free, and went outside. Daisy and Florin went to the bar to talk to the woman, Daisy clutching her daughter’s arm. I followed the girl into the cold.

  “Let me guess,” the girl said, “you’re really eighteen and someone told you the pregnant thing was a big hit.” She talked funny, lips twitching over teeth, her words garbled and spit-soaked. She shielded her mouth with her hand, sensing my stare. “And I ain’t connecting you to my guy so you can sell twat either. He don’t need no other girls right now.”

  “Do you know Louise?” I said.

  “Who knows who I know.”

  I came closer to her. “I’m her daughter.”

  She looked at my stomach. “You got it bad.” She spoke without her hand covering her mouth and I saw then that her jaw was wired shut. She ground her teeth together and sucked her spit back. She was maybe a little older than me. She had two belly piercings. Her legs were in bruises.

  “What happened?” I asked, touching my own jaw.

  “You ever had a man make you tie his shoes and you don’t do a good nuff job and he kicks you just right?”

  I didn’t know what to say. It seemed she wanted me to know that in the pissing match of suffering, she was winning. “I think my mother works here. Or for Rick’s Angels. This is the address they gave me.”

  “Little Lou. I seent her. I seent her but she don�
�t talk to none of us much. She scribbles in a notebook, copying down lines from TV and shit. Then she tries to make us listen to her remember them. Comes and goes like some white trash princess.”

  “Can you tell me where she lives?”

  She laughed and slapped her knee. “She was always on about how she was some beauty queen. Well, they’re all beauty queens when they get here, ain’t they? Not me. I know what’s what. I always have. My momma didn’t spare me nothing.”

  I wanted to ask her questions. Where was her mother now? What did she mean she always had? There was something irretrievable about her. Something I felt sorry for but didn’t trust. Had my mother ever looked at this girl and thought of me? Had she imagined how I filled my motherless hours?

  Instead I said, “Is she coming in later?”

  She flicked her cigarette and scratched up her shirt where I saw a smattering of small red fleabites. “If a woman wants someone to find her she’ll tell you how. Oldest truth there is.”

  Florin and Daisy breezed out and Daisy took stock of the girl and held her head up higher. “Come on, Lacey.” We got in the car and she drove away, the tires squealing, and I watched the girl until I could barely see her and she watched us back, smiling kindly sort of, like I was a friend leaving her behind. Finally her hand went up in a wave.

  “I used to feel bad for people, too,” Daisy said. She put a piece of paper on the dash and handed Florin her phone. “Look up that address, hon.”

  “You got it?” I said.

  “You could kill a man in front of that bartender woman and she wouldn’t blink. ’Course she gave it to me.”

  WE DROVE PAST casino after casino, and then smaller bars and clubs, and then those ran out and gave way to apartments, gray and grayer, the same two-decker stout buildings with small windows, abandoned plastic toys on concrete walkways, people shuffling around, heads down, and then a cement one-story low and long with numbers stenciled on the side. Nature nowhere. Not a single tree, or blade of grass, not even patches of dirt and deadness. Just concrete on concrete, the sky above the same color, the old dirty snow in patches. I knew this was where my mother was, in this in-between.

  I felt heavy in the car seat. All the times I had imagined coming to her, it wasn’t like this. It wasn’t the stillness of a cold gray afternoon, the air flat. How would I have wanted it? I guess I wanted a night sky blazing jewels across it, the cityscape romantic, the Turquoise Cowboy somehow romantic. I wanted to find her happier than I could imagine, and then I wanted to find my place within her happiness.

  Florin checked the address again. “There,” she said. “Number four-forty-four.”

  I closed my eyes and I was back: my mother holding my hand, walking home from church after that first big rain. As if by magic, snowy mountains had sprung up all around us in the far-off distance. I had never seen them before. What are those? I had asked her. She laughed. The rain cleaned the air! Vern brought the mountains back! The plain felt lush and moist, the air crisp and mountains so perfect they looked drawn into the sky. We twirled and laughed. Who knows why the sky is blue, she sang, who knows how I could love you this much? I hadn’t made that up. That had been real, the way she had looked at me that day. The time she went to one of my teachers and raised her voice about a boy who had been making fun of me, calling me names. When I’d sprained my ankle outside the ice cream shop and she’d carried me to the car, whispering prayers. When I’d been baptized the first time and she put flowers in my hair. Everything is good now, she’d promised. She would have wiped the ketchup off my bread. It just had to be the right day, the right mood, and she could pull it together and that was why I loved her this much.

  “Well,” Daisy said. She popped the glove compartment and took out a small handgun. “You never know.”

  I had never seen a gun so small. It looked like a toy. “Do we need that?” I asked. “What if it goes off?”

  “Ask a woman with half a face again if you need a gun around a mind-loose man.”

  I took a deep breath. I was light-headed and nauseated, the McDonald’s coming back to me. When I didn’t move, Daisy turned back and patted my knee. “Whatever happens I want you to know I think you’re brave as they come.”

  “I’m not brave,” I said.

  “Braver than I was at your age.”

  “You said you would have gone after your mom and dragged her back by the hair if she had left you.”

  “I say a lot of things.”

  Florin stood outside the car and waited as I slowly got out, hitched the maternity jeans up over my belly. My mother would see me and know. She would see me and want to come home. There could be nothing to distract her from me. “I have to go in alone,” I said to Florin, who nodded, like she had always known this to be true.

  I BARELY KNOCKED on the door before it opened and a tall someone’s arms pulled me inside and locked us in. It was the Turquoise Cowboy, yes, but I didn’t recognize him exactly. He looked older and slimmer than before. There were wires and antennas swooping down from the ceiling, crisscrossing over a small aisle kitchen. The whole place smelled like the musk of a skunk. Ganga King was written in marker above a computer like a banner.

  “Now whichin’ are you?” he asked, sticking his bottom lip out and jutting his chin at me. The place was dark, but there was a green plant under some kind of fluorescent light in the corner, glowing. He wore thick-cut glasses, and his eyes seemed to roll around behind them, looking every way but at me. “You’re either late or early. I ain’t got no auditions right now.”

  I looked at the pearled buttons on his shirt, how only one was fastened right over his paunch belly and the rest gaped open to reveal a hairy chest with a small gold shark’s tooth necklace swimming in it. “It’s me, darling,” I whispered.

  He centered his narrow face with mine and bent closer. He was completely toothless, I realized. “Well, I’ll be. All the way from Cali-forn-i-ay. I didn’t think you was coming, darling. Guess you were nervous to tell me you was already knocked up. What, your trigger-happy daddy do that to you? I seen worse.”

  I looked down and before I could answer he cut in and said, “It’s fine. That kind of thing does well. Something for everybody. ’Course you can’t be having no baby here. I can’t be up half the night. But you can stay and work till the thing’s borned.”

  He plucked teeth from a murky glass and popped them in his mouth over the kitchen sink. I had thought him charming in my mind, or somehow good-looking, something I wasn’t remembering from the shadow man who had taken her away. But I could not find the redeeming thing. His head was peanut shell in shape, he wore no cowboy hat now, and there was a joke of stripy black hair on top of the bulb. My mother had kissed this man, I considered. She had done everything with this man, no doubt. I didn’t have the words or sense to understand how. My mother had left me for this man.

  He gestured to the wires surrounding an old-looking computer. “I have quite the following tuning in to my live broadcasts.” Each word was slow and boxed alone, long pauses between. “People like girls live. I call it improv. Strip ’em naked and throw them in front of a camera. You’d be surprised what happens. But you ladies aren’t the only stars. I like to share my stories from my bar-bouncer days. Once met a woman named Sally Fryer after she was abandoned by her no-good boyfriend in the parking lot and she lived with me six months. I got things to say. I mean, ’course I promote what I need to promote, I ain’t stupid. Don’t worry, we’ll get you famous real soon. Now, your face has some kind of sour thing to it, you ain’t real angel pretty like I thought but it’s okay, we can train you. What you looking around for like a lost pup?” he said, stepping in closer. “The future is now.”

  He was a crazy person. We were not in the same mindplace. Something seemed to be emanating from him, an electric current of evil, or the lack of God, maybe, which was evil after all. It felt like each of my nerve endings was screaming run. I looked behind me at the door. It stood tall and heavy, locked in a complicated
system of dead bolts and sliders.

  “I can make a real movie out of you,” he said. “I’ve got plenty of gals that can be real good in it, too. Maybe we can do a whole doctor’s check-up thing. Boy, people still go whackjob for a nurse’s outfit. Don’t ask me why. Hospitals always got me soft, personally. Spent seven years in the silly house droolin’ on a deck of cards while they spooned me applesauce, but I been on the right meds for years, thank you, pharmaceuticals!” He bowed to no one. “Thank you, mary-juana!” He bowed again. “In any case, I’m gonna make you a star.”

  He brushed the hair from my face and I felt a nausea roll up in me, tasted acid on my tongue. This was the bad energy that Daisy always talked about. I felt it. Evil, bad energy. Whatever. He had it. When my mother had stood here like me did she realize her mistake? Or had she realized it in the car ride up, perhaps when he’d driven her over the Peaches county line and the breeze had blown his cowboy hat back and she saw him at last. I must have some of my daddy in me after all, I knew then, because unlike my mother, my intuition button was lit up and working.

  I followed him down the dark hall, turning back to the front door every step as if to mark my place. Brave, brave, I chanted in my mind. I heard the murmur of a television playing. My mother might be somewhere watching TV. I felt her close.

  He opened a door to a small bedroom and inside it was painted completely red. The walls bled down to a maroon rug and the large bed was slanted to one side, covered in red satin and stained in dark blooms. The window was foiled. My idea of hell melted and changed. Hell was this room.

  He patted the bed with a childish glee. “Nice, huh?” He took a white cowboy hat from a stand of costumes and his face was swallowed by it, the high forehead of sun-spotted skin gone. “I told you you had to be sixteen. You don’t look sixteen to me. But childbirth’ll age you right up. Soon you’ll look all dragged through the mud like every other Bessie out there who goes and pushes a bowling ball out of herself.”