Godshot

by Chelsea Bieker

  I wished Hazel was here to slap him for me. “Who else is here?” I asked.

  He looked at me some more, at my body, and I was freezing cold suddenly. I didn’t want Artichoke to have this memory in her cells.

  “I’m a good man,” he said, shoulders softening. His thumbs hooked into his pants pockets and he changed personalities, became timid. “Didja see that dog outside? I walk that thing every single night, midnight sharp, I take it out for my speed walk to get my exercise and let it pee and I care for it. And I love my girls as much as that dog.”

  I hadn’t remembered seeing any dog on my way in.

  “Maybe you can introduce me to the girls and I’ll feel better,” I said.

  “You girls like to stick together, don’t you? I don’t care as long as it don’t affect your work. And you’ll have a lot of work ahead of you, but I’ll let you meet ’em, sure. I’m a nice guy. All the girls are kept in here. Now some’s ain’t performers. Some’s retired and Rowena’s just my sister. Think of her as your talent manager.”

  “Where do the girls come from?” I said. I imagined twenty or thirty women behind the door in an orphanage situation sleeping in twin beds, wearing matching nightdresses.

  “Once they get here they can’t remember.” He let out a growl of a laugh.

  He unlocked the door at the back of the hall from the outside and threw it open. A small wash of sunlight came in under metal blinds, and the glow of the television shifted from dark to light. A rowdy talk show was playing where one woman was gripping another woman by the hair, screaming to show her the paternity test. My eyes focused on the room and at first I saw only a small child-sized woman in a high chair, beating her tray with a wooden spoon. She was elfin and seemed on the cusp of old age, grayish hair twisting out of loose pigtails. When Rick flipped the light on she went wild with the spoon. “It’s Lacey May! It’s Lacey May!”

  He looked at me and confusion spread over him. “You all running something against me?” he asked.

  “Oh, relax,” said a woman with large low breasts left loose in a bejeweled halter top. Juicy, it said across the front. I thought maybe this was her name. She spoke in a deep rasp from a beanbag chair in the corner. “We’ve seen her picture a hundred times.” I didn’t know my mother had taken a picture of me with her. I felt a small comfort in the fact that she did.

  Rick pushed me into the room and I fell hard to my knees. My stomach almost hit the floor. “Seen her? What do you mean seen her?” he barked.

  “That’s Lou’s daughter,” the Juicy woman said.

  But I didn’t hear the Turquoise Cowboy anymore because I saw her then, in too-big black carpenter’s pants and a ratty oversized T-shirt with a Tweety Bird across the front. She sat in a lawn chair, a cigarette simmering between her fingers. She squinted across the room at me. Her hair was lank with grease and her skin broken out, her cheeks ruddy, covered in a shade of blush that wasn’t made for her. Her frame was tiny, skeletal like I’d never seen, and the light in her face was out.

  “What are you wearing?” I marveled. I walked to her, and kneeled by the lawn chair. My mother, who would never have been caught dead in an ensemble like this, who even at her most hungover managed to get a dress on.

  Her hand went straight to my chopped hair. She looked at it sadly. “This is a terrible look on you.”

  “I know,” I said. “The worst.”

  “Of course Lou gets visitors,” the Juicy woman said, narrating her own misery. She lit a cigarette and scratched her head with long pointed nails, moving a crisp nest of hair around.

  I hadn’t factored an audience into my fantasy of begging. I gathered my strength and tried to focus only on my mother. “I’ve got a car out there and Daisy’s here and everything.”

  But she looked at Rick instead of me.

  “Mom,” I said. I took her hands and pressed them to my stomach. “Lyle did this, Mom. This is what’s happened since you’ve left. You left me and this is what happened.”

  “Now stop it,” Rick said. He stepped between us. “This is just what I was saying your family would try to do. Derail your chance at your dreams.”

  “You know you could have called first,” the Juicy woman said. “I would have cleaned up Rowena.” She pointed her cigarette toward the small woman in the high chair, who had quieted and narrowed her gaze at me.

  But something else caught my eye. There against the wall was a woman lying across a cot so thin it could be an ironing board, her flat gray hair streaming down both sides nearly brushing the floor. The woman wasn’t moving at all.

  “Rick’s first wife, Sally,” my mother explained. “Fell down the stairs ten years ago. Certified quadriplegic.”

  I thought he said Sally had lived with him only six months. My head swam. “Is she dead?” I asked.

  “Not yet,” my mother said, and I thought I saw a flash of her old energy, which could sometimes be biting and awful, but always a little funny to me, especially when nothing was actually funny. She looked at me and smiled in this relaxed way, like nothing was out of the ordinary.

  “No more feeding,” Rowena said. “Not even a cracker, no, but I slip her some, I do, and I don’t tell him, no I don’t.” Littered on the ground were boxes and boxes of Chicken in a Biskit crackers. He hadn’t made that up.

  “Women are all liars,” Rick said. “You just stay in here until I figure this out.” He slammed the door behind him and I heard a heavy lock shift into place.

  “Mom, feed her,” I said.

  My mother rubbed her eyes. “Rick wants us to let her phase out. He said he’ll still collect the social security on her.”

  “Rowena can see into the souls of people,” Juicy went on, shoving a chicken cracker into the deadish woman’s mouth. “There.” She looked at me. “We ain’t completely fucked up.”

  Rowena pointed to my stomach. “She been a bad little kitty,” she said. “Oh, she, oh she bad. She been a bad little kitty.”

  “Sees into souls, my foot,” my mother said. “I’ve seen the blessed and she ain’t it.”

  I remembered Daisy’s past-life idea from the drive, how my mother and I had traveled for a long time together, and this life was a mere chapter in a much longer history. I thought of my mother as a girl, what I’d seen in pictures. How happy she looked, her sunburned nose, the sort of wild freeness that seemed to jump off the print—always just out of the frame like she was off to someplace else. I imagined that girl by my side now, showing her this room with these women. Saying, someday, this will be your life. I could see the girl’s face, the glimmer of terror, but then disbelief. How she would never be able to imagine a life could come to this, especially not her own. The idea of this girlmother made it difficult for me to accept that my mother was in this room, with this man, one of these women. But at the same time, I knew this room to be the most absolute truth I had ever seen. I knew I would never be able to explain it to another person, and it would haunt me the rest of my days.

  “Regular Judas Priest expert she is,” Juicy said, looking at my mother. “Got all kinds of stories about church and speaking holy rolls and glitter falling from the goddamn heavens. Your mother here trying to tell me I’m going to hell and in the same breath telling me her pastor set her up into regular sex work.”

  “We’re all going to hell,” my mother said. She looked at me. Shrugged as if to say, Even you, Lacey May. “Everything’s a lie. I figured it out. I ain’t dumb. Vern wanted me to be his other wife, Lacey. You know, be with him. I could have told you that straight to your face and you wouldn’t have believed me. I tried to tell Cherry and she sure didn’t.”

  “You told Cherry?” I said. This was new. Cherry seemed completely unaware of how or why my mother had distanced, started drinking again. Had my mother been asking for her help all along? Trying hard to do the right thing? I wanted to beat the walls. I wanted to scream. I was so mad at Cherry, so mad at Vern. But being so mad doesn’t do anything. I knew deep down that I would never be abl
e to fully blame anyone else for any of this. My mother had made choices all along to lead us here. She had said yes when she should have said no. She had gotten in the car with the Turquoise Cowboy. She had lifted each drink to her very own mouth. Most of all, she had never, not once, asked me what I needed. Taken me into consideration. The cup of my anger would never empty no matter how many times I poured it all out. She was always refilling it.

  My mother put out her cigarette. I hadn’t seen her smoke in a long while, not since I was a little girl and she’d sit on the lap of Sapphire Earrings and cackle in his ear. “Cherry told me to do what the pastor said. She said, ‘Ain’t that life better than the alternative?’ But I didn’t feel it was right in my gut.” She poked her concave stomach. The veins on her arms crossed one another and bulged. I couldn’t bring myself to ask the next inevitable question: How was she able to leave me?

  “Is she on drugs?” I asked Juicy, who seemed the most coherent of them all.

  “My own mother was a bad alcoholic,” Juicy said. “You know what happens to them at the end? Skin turns soft as a rotten plum. Can poke your finger right through. They empty all out, piss and shit everywhere.”

  “Rick’s been giving me pills to keep me awake and some to sleep,” my mother said. “I’m still adjusting. The air’s thinner at this high elevation. That’s why I can barely breathe.”

  “Come home,” I said. “There’s a God you don’t know. You can be forgiven. We can go on like this never happened and you can help me with the baby. We can work with Daisy together. Whatever you want.”

  “We’re in hell right now,” Rowena said, and then repeated the line again, chirping it over and over like a parrot. “Hell right now. Hell right now.”

  I tried to make my mother focus on me. The television was screaming and Rowena was so loud and my mother was lifeless. Finally I said something that surprised me. “Choose me,” I said. My words cut over the noise.

  My mother recoiled as if I’d pushed her. She closed her eyes.

  “Your mother’s just plumb crazy on her very own accord,” Juicy said. “Talking about how some pastor got her all screwed up. I said, honey, ain’t you ever hear of saying no?”

  “I did say no,” my mother said, suddenly clear. “Look where it got me. You know he used to call in to the phone lines and pretend to be other people just to talk to me? I could tell it was him.”

  “Mom,” I said, “I believe you.” I did. I believed her.

  “All I wanted was a good life for you. A church life. Safe.”

  I felt myself turning to dust. I could not withstand this sadness. The thought that safety and a good life was all she wanted and how far away we had landed from that goal was too much. I let myself harden. I had to. She had known Vern had twisted ideas, had a bad feeling about what was to come. And she’d left me alone in the rough waters of it as if I knew how to swim.

  My mother held my wrists and I could smell that she hadn’t showered in a long time. “The girls at the Pony Club don’t know about being famous,” she said. “He said I’d meet major producers working there and I haven’t met a one.”

  “Mom, please. Please come with me.”

  She glanced at the locked door. “I don’t have my things ready.”

  “It doesn’t matter, we have everything for you. We’ll get new stuff. We’ll go shopping. We can forget this.”

  She leaned into me and I wrapped my arms around her. She was so small against my fullness. The three of us together. Me, Artichoke, my mother. For a moment I closed my eyes and relaxed into it. It was what I’d wanted. She whimpered softly, like she didn’t have the energy to cry, like an animal dying and letting go.

  “You need to leave,” she said finally. “I’ll get him to let you go, and you can’t come back.”

  “Please come,” I said.

  Then she leaned in. Whispered into my ear so no one else could hear. “Give me until tomorrow. Let me talk to him and calm him down. I’ll get my stuff and I’ll meet you.”

  “Where? When?”

  “Outside the Pony Club. Ten. Like I’m just going to work.”

  “Okay, in the morning,” I said. “Ten.”

  I watched my mother pull up the half-broken blinds. She looked out through the glass at cracked asphalt. “Lyle did that you?” she asked, reaching out to brush her fingers against my belly again. “That baby gonna bring the rain?”

  “I married a man so Vern won’t take it,” I said.

  Disgust fell across her face. “A man? What do you mean, a man?”

  “Cherry married us in the front yard.”

  “How old?”

  “I don’t know really,” I said. I let her simmer. I had to admit I liked that for once she got to be worried about me.

  “I told you not to tell Vern about your blood,” she said.

  I kept waiting for my mother to make her offer. For her to tell me to stay with her, or figure out another place for us to go. Knowing everything now, she would have an answer. But the answer didn’t come. “God, Mom, seriously?”

  She looked again at the thick slab window, no openings, no latch. No screen, no air. I wanted her to break it for me. For her to save me and bloody her hand. “Whatever happens, you’ll do better than me,” she said.

  The lock undid and Juicy sat quickly in her chair, trained her eyes to the television. I stared at the door as Rick walked in.

  “Visitation hours is over,” he said. He calmly walked up to Rowena and patted her head, looked at me. “Don’t come back unless you’re ready to work. Can’t have my best girl distracted.” He patted my mother’s head. I sent her a message with my mind: tomorrow at ten, tomorrow at ten. I could tell she heard me because she blinked long and hard. “Don’t give Vern that baby,” she said.

  Rick pulled me by the arm down the hall.

  “Don’t touch me,” I yelled. I shook free.

  He seemed startled by my voice and held up both hands. Then he spat on my shoes, the duck boots I’d found in Daisy’s attic. I willed myself not to react. I had won. My mother was meeting me and leaving him. He spat again. I remembered my father spitting on my mother this way. Did they all have a club where they traded these ideas with one another? I imagined a low-down shitty man meeting, all of them sitting in a circle, scrawling into notepads. If you spit on them it really shuts them up.

  Rick opened the door and I stepped out into real air. “Don’t come back, you little slut,” he said. The door slammed and the portal to their universe was gone.

  Florin ran to me, holding the tiny gun out from her body wild and scared of it. “Where is she?”

  “She can’t come now.” It sounded so stupid when I said it out loud in broad daylight. I told her the whole story.

  WE STAYED AT a motel called the Genie’s Wish a few blocks away. Daisy hadn’t seemed sold on my plan to meet my mother in the morning, but she got the motel room anyhow and tried to be nice to me, ordering pizza and watching whatever I wanted to watch on the yellow TV. She and Florin slept in the same bed. I fixated on them whispering together in the cruel impenetrable chatter of mothers and daughters.

  I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about the pills my mother had been eating, the red room. I felt ashamed of who she was and her shame coursed in my blood until it felt like a shame of my own. How could I be better than her when I was from her? I got up and looked out the window at the chilled stillness of Reno. What town was keeping the rain from us? Why couldn’t Peaches be good enough for just a day of rain?

  Hours passed and the light of the rising sun appeared in the window and the world revealed itself to me. I would never have a mother, I finally knew. Yet somehow I would have to be one. This seemed absurd, impossible. I was tired already.

  I decided then I’d tell Artichoke to be ugly. To make herself as ugly as possible and not worry too much about beauty or what anyone thought of her. To be unpainted, to live in the breeze and stand under waterfalls and not be worried over the height of mountains, of quiet trails
deep in the woods. To not be scared of roads slick with rain, of valleys dry in drought. I’d tell her no fear and she’d know it as the deepest truth and she would be everything I was not. She would be wild and free. And I wouldn’t worry because I alone knew the secret. That through all of her ugliness, all her hiking and running and jumping and falling and getting back up and saying no and saying what she wanted, her scraped hands, her freckled skin, her smart brain, she would of course be beautiful.

  MY MOTHER DIDN’T come. And when she didn’t, Daisy was infuriated. “Did she know I was with you?” she kept asking. “If she knows I’m with you and she doesn’t even care, I swear. How dare she make us wait out here like idiots.”

  We squealed out of the Pony Club parking lot and soon we were back in front of Rick’s. Daisy took the gun from the glove compartment. “I’ve had it,” she said. There was no trace of the zen-energy past-life-affirmation reciter now. Florin and I watched as Daisy got out of the car and held the gun to the sky, smacked her hand against Rick’s door. The door opened and the gun went off.

  I’d seen an animal be shot and gutted. I’d smelled the hot blood and I’d heard saw against bone. But it was different to see a man shot. Rick fell down in the doorway and clutched his leg and Daisy simply stepped over him. I stopped before his body and stared. He might spit on me if I were down like this. But I was better. “Excuse me,” I said as I stepped over him and into the apartment.

  Inside Daisy waved the gun around, ordering my mother to the car.

  But my mother ran to Rick, held him, and screamed. Juicy took Rick’s shoe off and wrapped the blooming redness on his calf in brown towels. They fluttered around him like nursemaids. Grampa Jackie had loved to tell the tale of his teenage years when his alcoholic uncle had shot him in the foot. It had always sounded so entertaining, adventurous even. This was nothing like that. No gunshot wound could be. I understood now Grampa Jackie had created a version of his own story he could live with.

  “How could you do this?” my mother said over and over. I watched her grasp him, I watched her feel sad for him, and I hated her. This was our chance and she was squandering it. She had never planned to come meet me. I pulled her arm. I tugged at her like a little child.