Backseat Saints Part 21

I hear the rustle of bills, and then my mother says, "Rose Mae will call when she's ready. Shall I turn the cards for you while we wait?"

The tall, milky one laughs, high and nervous, as I come creeping down the stairs. Shovel Face says, "Why not."

Halfway down, I can peer between the ceiling and the banister and see the two men sitting at the far end of the room at her reading table. Their backs are to me. My mother is across from them, eyes on the cards, shuffling. She has not lit her white sage candles. She is pale, and I can tell from the set of her mouth that she is more afraid than I am.

My mother says, "What's your name?"

"John Smith," says the hard case.

At the same time, the one who doesn't matter says, "Jamie."

I am four steps from the bottom now. I train my sights on the back of the hard one's head. My mother looks up from the cards and sees me over his shoulder. Her face flashes relief. She flips a card and says, "Well, John Smith, I've turned the nine of syphilis." She flips another. "Now I've crossed it with the four of herpes. The cards suggest that you stop s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g wh.o.r.es."

"You b.i.t.c.h," Shovel Face says, and his chair sc.r.a.pes back as he stands.

"I'm ready for you, John Smith," I say, sweet-voiced, and he wheels around to face me. He sees the gun, and when he looks into its round, black eyehole, it becomes all he can see. I am colors and vague shapes behind it. I could take my s.h.i.+rt off, and he would not address my prescient nipples now. The gun is the whole of me, and it has his complete attention.

I hear my mother say in a steady, even voice, "Jamie, who is Gloria?"

Jamie is staring at the gun, too, mouth open, eyes completely round, sitting with his hands resting on the table where I can see them. When my mother speaks, he blinks like he is waking up and says, "What?"

"Gloria," my mother says, steady and so calm. "Who is she?"

"My little sister?" Jamie says, confused.

"Does your baby sister want you out with 'John Smith'? Would she like to know you are paying to use broken young women in such an ugly way, catching their sad diseases?" My mother's voice is the voice of every mother, and Jamie can't look at her or even me. Not even the gun can keep his gaze off the floor.

Jamie mumbles, "How do you know her name?"

"I'm psychic, you moron," my mother says, cool, and then, "Now her phone number is forming... I see a seven. I see... a six? No. A nine."

Jamie gasps, but I speak only to the hard one: "I think it's time for you boys to go."

John Smith is still staring at the gun, but his mouth sets and he says, "Fine. Give us our money back, you b.i.t.c.hes."

My mother starts to reach for it, but I smile and say, "She read the cards exactly right, honey. You got what you paid for."

My mother stills.

John Smith's initial fear is fading. Now he is calculating odds. He's measuring his brawn and his training against the s.p.a.ce between his body and mine, his body's speed against my steady hands, wrapped around the old revolver. He hasn't a prayer, but he may well be doing the math wrong. He does not know Rose Mae Lolley.

"Or stay," I say in Rose Mae's voice, and c.o.c.k the pistol. The s.h.i.+ft and click of the metal draws out her pleased and creamy smile. "Please stay. I'd love for you to stay."

I am fervent, sincere, and John Smith is suddenly all done here.

They head to the door, Mr. Smith first and Jamie shuffling shamefaced after. I keep the high ground on the stairs, Pawpy's gun trained steady on John Smith's whitewalled head until they pa.s.s me and file outside. The door closes behind them, and my mother runs across the room to draw the dead bolt. Then the gun gets heavy and points itself down, aiming at the floor between my socks. My mother leans her face against the door, sides heaving. I unc.o.c.k the revolver, and at the sound she whirls to face me.

"Are you stupid?" she says.

At the same time I say, "What was that?"

"That," she says, "is not uncommon. More than half the signs for readers are a front for wh.o.r.es. When I I answer the door, johns know this is not a cathouse. But you, three b.u.t.tons on your blouse open, your hair all mussed, you look like an ice cream. When I tell you to get upstairs before a reading, then Rose Mae, you get upstairs." answer the door, johns know this is not a cathouse. But you, three b.u.t.tons on your blouse open, your hair all mussed, you look like an ice cream. When I tell you to get upstairs before a reading, then Rose Mae, you get upstairs."

"Ivy," I say, but with no conviction.

My mother looks from my feet to the gun I've aimed between them to my eyes to the fever I can feel on my cheeks. My heartbeat booms away inside me like the drums of war.

"Ivy," my mother scoffs. "Look at you. You are only what you are, Rose Mae."

I scoff right back, "Then there must be only Lolley women in the room here, Claire Claire."

"Don't miss my point," she says, her voice blade sharp. She stalks slowly toward me, coming up three stairs. She puts her hands over mine on the gun. I cling to it, and we freeze there. "Look at you," she says. "Look at you. Why is your husband still breathing, if you have all this fight in you?"

I shake my head. I have no answer. I tried to shoot him and I failed. Ro tried to live in peace with him and failed. Even now, if it was his head in the crosshairs instead of Mr. Smith's, my hands would not have been so steady. Even now, if he pulled his Thom-suit back on over the monster, showed up with flowers, said, "Ro, baby, come home..."

I would not go. But I would feel the tug.

My grip weakens as her hands get more insistent. I let her slide Pawpy's gun out of my fingers. She turns away, and I sink down to sit on the stairs.

"What the h.e.l.l is wrong with you?" she asks the gun. There's no safety, so she breaks it expertly into its separate pieces.

"The pin broke," I say.

"I mean what's wrong with you, all you young women." She is pacing up and down her parlor, one chunk of gun in each of her waving, angry hands. "My friend's daughter, she cuts open her own skin to let the bad out. She's a child, barely in high school. What bad can she have in her? Half her little friends are starving themselves, or puking up all their food. It's the same thing, but the starvers say, 'Oh, I could never cut myself like that,' and the cutters say, 'I'd never marry a man who hit me,' but it's all the same thing. You are all killing your stupid, stupid selves."

I stay slumped on the stairs with no answer for her. I am so tired now. She is still ranting, her voice shaking with anger, as righteous as Ezekiel.

"My ten o'clock today? Bette? You saw her. She can't be more than twenty-five, and she's wider than most walls. She brought cookies with her, for me, she says, and sets the plate between us. She never took a whole cookie, but she sat there pinching bits off one cookie till it was gone, then another, pinch by pinch, until half the plate had been moused away.

"Then she points through the window, to Lilah mooning on the fence outside, and says, 'I don't understand how she can go back to him when he beats her. She might as well put a gun to her own head.' Meanwhile, Bette is so trapped and hemmed by all the fat on her that she can't breathe. She's killing herself, same as my friend's daughter with her razors. Same as Lilah." She pauses to point at me with one accusing finger, the rest of her hand wrapped around the barrel. "Same as you."

I stand up, grabbing the banister and hauling myself to my feet. "You are no different."

She snorts in rude denial. "I earned my new name, Rose."

"Please," I say. "Then how come you can't keep your eyes-or your hands-off that crumpled bit of sc.r.a.p paper I brought over from Alabama?" I am gratified to see how immediately her eyes go to my daddy's note. "The one true princess of Zen, afraid to read a note."

"I am not afraid," she says, but now her righteous indignation has a crack in it.

The doorbell chimes again.

We freeze, then she makes a noise that's halfway between a laugh and a gasp and says, "That's just Lisa, my next appointment. I'll turn the sign off. You need to-"

"I know the drill," I say, and head upstairs to my room on shaking legs. I go inside, and the walls seem to have crept in closer to each other while I was downstairs. The furniture in its familiar configuration grates at me. I need to be someplace where there is more air. I turn around and around in my room, panting like Gretel.

I can't stay in here, because this room is full to the roof with the knowledge that my mother is right: I can say that I am Ivy, but I am only what I am. But I also cannot go outside. I feel it in the bones of me. Not because of her rules, or even because the two angry sailors may still be near; my mother's constant warnings must be getting to me. I can't go out, but I can't stand to be trapped in this room with myself just now.

There is a window over the writing desk. It looks out on a small piece of roof that hangs over the backyard. I go to it and flip the latch, and it rolls open easy at my touch. I s.n.a.t.c.h up Saint Lucy's candle and the rosary and the matches and step onto the chair. I get on my knees on top of the desk. There is no screen, and I crawl right out the open window onto the slope piece of roof that juts out under it.

I don't have much of a view. I can see a slice of Parker's backyard gra.s.s and the backside of the house behind this one. Still, I can breathe out here on the s.h.i.+ngled slope, bathed equally in cool salt air and warm suns.h.i.+ne. I tilt my head up and look at the bright blue sky. I need to pray, and here I've found as good a shrine as any.

I put Saint Lucy down and light the wick, placing her in the corner where the gable offers shelter from the wind. I close my eyes and take up the beads.

I work my way around the rosary, trying not to think too hard on what it means that my mother is so right. New name or no, I have brought Rose Mae Lolley and Ro Grandee with me. I do not want to believe that they are in me, always. That they are me, always. That's a path of thought that leads me close to Thom, so it has to be a problem for tomorrow. I need to still my heart and stop my mind from racing. I pray all the way around before the ritual calms me enough to let me open my eyes.

Parker has come into the piece of his yard that I can see. He is centered on the lawn facing my direction with his arms up, palms facing out, and he is standing very still. He is stiller than I have ever seen a human being stand. Even my daddy, laying in wait in a deer blind, would twitch more than Parker. He is still wearing those floppy black pants that look like pajama bottoms, but he has taken off the s.h.i.+rt. He has a sprinkling of dark red-brown hair on his chest. He's pale all over, and his skin fits tightly over wiry muscle.

Finally his arms move, slowly. Then his whole body moves into a series of weird, slow poses that look like what might happen if kung fu and ballet had themselves a baby. He is fighting nothing, in slow motion. It's completely unhurried, but so controlled that after only a few minutes he is sweating. He stills and holds, then moves again, deliberate and fierce.

The third time he pauses, he holds for several minutes. I'm exhausted with the adrenaline hangover, worn out from worry, and it is incredibly pleasant to blank my mind and watch a male body move with such deliberate grace. It doesn't hurt a bit that the body in question has taut coils of muscle in the shoulders and a six-pack.

The dogs come streaming through the backyard. The big mutts run past Parker, brus.h.i.+ng their friendly sides against his legs, but it is as if they do not exist. His gaze is turned inward, and his body moves, releasing measured and unhurried violence on monsters only he can see. Buck and Miss Moogle disappear from my line of sight, lapping the house, but Gretel pauses to watch Parker with her head tilted to a puzzled angle.

Cesar stops, too, but he's not interested in Parker. His ears perk up, going on yellow alert. He peers all around until he sees me on the roof. Then that tattling little s.h.i.+t goes right to red, cutting loose with a yappy string of warning barks.

Parker's concentration breaks. His hands drop and he follows Cesar's line of sight up to my rooftop perch. I lift one hand in a wave, busted. Parker shakes his head at me, chuckling, and I can see what he is thinking. He is trying to decide if I am rule breaking, if this counts as outside the house. Parker does not want me to end up another Lilah-at-the-gates. I want to explain, but I can't call down to him. Mirabelle will hear, and I do not want any more Mirabelle just now, thank you.

I turn and get on my hands and knees. I crawl my top half back through the window. I lie stomach down on the writing desk, b.u.t.t humped over the sill, legs outside, and open the desk's shallow top drawer. I dig out a piece of the blue stationery and a pen and scrawl, "I came out here to pray." As I back through the window to the roof again, clutching my note, I also grab up a stone cat paperweight from the desk's top. I wrap the note around the cat to weight it, then toss it gently down in the yard. It's a testament to my goodwill toward all things canine that I don't aim at Cesar.

Cesar and Gret run to my note first and snuff at it, and Parker follows, more slowly. He reaches between the questing dog noses and picks up the packet. He opens it, but he looks at the cat, as if the note is wrapping paper.

He looks back up at me, puzzled. I shake my head and glare, frustrated with the silence. I blow out my candle and hold it up. I point at the note with my other hand. In the yard below, my good, dim Gret wanders away after Buck and Miss Moogle, still clueless that I am present. Clever Cesar stares up at me, more affronted than alarmed that I am on his roof, a place he knows good and well that people do not belong.

Parker gets it. He reads the note, then looks back to me, impa.s.sive. He hefts the stone cat in his other hand, as if weighing it. He holds up one finger in a "wait a sec" gesture, then he walks toward the house until he disappears from my sight.

I sit another minute, and he comes back out. He holds up a blue sphere about the size of a tennis ball. I spread my hands and he throws it lightly up in an arc toward the roof. It comes right to my hands as if I'd called it.

It is is a tennis ball, dog-chewed into a disreputable state, wrapped up inside my rumpled piece of pale blue stationery. Under my note he has scribbled two words. a tennis ball, dog-chewed into a disreputable state, wrapped up inside my rumpled piece of pale blue stationery. Under my note he has scribbled two words.

"Me too."

I find I am smiling at him, a wide and foolish smile. Parker raises his eyebrows at me, asking a question. I understand what he is asking, and I feel suddenly shy. This is not something I have ever done with a man. With anyone, really, except my mother when I was very small. Even so, I nod, a shallow head bob that he clocks. Parker walks to his place, and I take up my beads again. His gaze turns inward, and his arms come up and he turns slowly, punching deliberately out at nothing. I watch him as I click through the beads, the familiar words shaping themselves silently in my mouth.

We are praying together, each in our own way. His movements are still focused, but he is aware of me now. I am included. He is inside my circle, too, as I pray through the beads with every nerve I have attuned to him. Something like longing happens in my belly, and I am not sure what I am praying for now. Some freshness, maybe, a new start, a chance to go back in time, before Thom, and make some better choices.

This is the strangest date that I have ever been on.

When I finish my second circuit of the beads, the sun is going down. The temperature is dropping, drying Parker's sweat. He stops, replete, his arms hanging by his sides. I lift my hand and he lifts his in a silent good night. We hold there for a minute, looking at each other.

Nothing is solved. I don't know how to get free enough to be someone different. Even so, I feel comforted.

I turn and creep back inside, my mind blank. My mother has been in my room. She has seen me praying on my perch and gone away again. A plate is resting on the bedside table, and Gret lies on the foot of my bed with her ears c.o.c.ked, all her attention on the food. Meat loaf, whipped potatoes, carrots, and a very large gla.s.s of red wine. I change for bed and share out bites of cooling supper with my dog. I do not share the wine. I drink the gla.s.s down to the dregs. It's early still, but I'm exhausted and the wine makes me warm and sluggish.

I climb in between the covers and I fall asleep. I sleep dreamlessly, sated, for hours, before I hear the sound. When it begins, I am dreaming of a sweet-faced, small brown cow. She is being led up a hill to a shed, and I cannot see the face of the man leading her. The noise she makes is fearful but resigned, a mourning noise, and her eyes are huge and brown with long lashes, very human. She knows where she is being led. She knows why the man's arms end in axes. She goes up the hill with him, lowing out her sorrow at her dreadful coming loss. Her feet thump into the earth, giving tempo as she moans a sound so grievous that it wakes me.

They are true sounds, the thump and wail, and they are coming from the parlor. The noise climbs up the stairs and gets into my bed with me as if the sound itself is sentient, a messenger to me, but speaking in a tongue I do not know. I sit up and blink, scrubbing at my face, disoriented. Gret lies tense beside my feet with her head lifted and her nose pointing toward the door.

The noise is so inhuman and unending that it takes me a solid ten seconds before I understand. There is no little cow. There is only one other living creature in this house.

This noise is pouring from my mother.

CHAPTER 16.

I TURN ON the landing light outside my room and head down the stairs, an anxious Gret on my heels. My mother's sage candles are the only light in the room, except what pours down the stairs from the landing behind me. It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust to let me see my mother. She kneels beside her bookshelves, rocking herself to some inside rhythm as the terrible noise comes out of her. As she rocks forward, she dips her head so far between her knees that her forehead bangs the hardwood floor. TURN ON the landing light outside my room and head down the stairs, an anxious Gret on my heels. My mother's sage candles are the only light in the room, except what pours down the stairs from the landing behind me. It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust to let me see my mother. She kneels beside her bookshelves, rocking herself to some inside rhythm as the terrible noise comes out of her. As she rocks forward, she dips her head so far between her knees that her forehead bangs the hardwood floor.

My mother's sound is awful and ongoing, as if she plans to push out every bit of moaning air she's ever swallowed and then not inhale, not ever again. I haven't heard a sound like this, so pained and betrayed, since I shot poor Gret up at Wildcat Bluff.

Gretel's ears c.o.c.k forward, anxious and alert. She makes a houndy grumble, a sorrowing harmony weaving in and out of my mother's keening. My mother's head comes back down to the floor and she bangs it, hard enough to make that drumbeat noise.

"Momma?" I say.

Her sound cuts out abruptly, and she sits up, pulling in a gobbling breath. Gret goes quiet, too. My mother turns her head and looks up at me, and in the stairwell's light her eyes s.h.i.+ne blood red. She's wept so hard that she's burst the tiny veins that lace her eyes. Then her face crumples into fury, lids s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g shut, her mouth pulling open and down in a wide, stiff frown.

"Your first word was Daddy, Rose Mae," she says in a strangled voice. It sounds like my very name is choking her. I stop at the foot of the stairs, all the way across the room from where she kneels. My mother looks ready to bite. "Dada, more like. You couldn't say the y. You said it a thousand times a day. Even before you could talk, when you were a colicky, awful piece of screaming luggage, even then, he'd hang you over his forearm and walk and talk, and his very voice would soothe you." She's somewhere far ahead of me down a path of thought. I pa.s.s my hand over my face, trying to catch up. She asks, accusing, "Do you know what your second word was?"

My eyes are adjusting to the dimness in the center of the room. I see she is kneeling in a shower of white speckles, as if she has sprinkled herself with bridal rice.

"No," I say.

She brings her head down to the floor again, fast, bang. Then she sits back up and says, "Dog. Dog, dog, dog, dog, dog, every minute your father's f.u.c.khead hound was in the room. I'm a cat person, did you know? I like cats cats. You You were allergic." It's an accusation, irrational and furious. "You learned that f.u.c.king dog's name. Leroy. And cookie. And bird." Her voice goes up an octave, into a high-pitched, screaming parody of baby talk: "Birt! Birt! Then you learned to say no. That was your favorite word forever. That's still your f.u.c.king favorite word, I bet." were allergic." It's an accusation, irrational and furious. "You learned that f.u.c.king dog's name. Leroy. And cookie. And bird." Her voice goes up an octave, into a high-pitched, screaming parody of baby talk: "Birt! Birt! Then you learned to say no. That was your favorite word forever. That's still your f.u.c.king favorite word, I bet."

Her voice is raspy from the weeping, hard to understand, but now I've finally caught up to the conversation. "When did I learn to say Mama?"

"After no. After cookie cookie, Rose Mae," she says, and the words are so bitter in her mouth that she rushes through to spit them all out. "After the G.o.dd.a.m.n dog's name." She scrubs at her eyes like an exhausted toddler. "Daddy's girl, always. You wanted him him, riding around the house on his shoulders. Him dead drunk. I thought, He'll fall and crack her little skull open, see how much she likes him then. You'd just laugh and laugh. Him reeling around in circles. He gave you a BB gun. You were three. Who gives a gun to a baby? Your daddy, that's who, and he never, never, never hit you. Never. He never did."

I stare at her, impa.s.sive. I am not going to lie to her.

"Tell me he never hit you," she demands. I say nothing. "He didn't," she insists. "Jack Daniel's had a good hold on him even before I fetched up pregnant, but it wasn't till after you came that I always, always got the s.h.i.+tty end of his stick. The hitting was my share."

"When you lived with us-," I start to say, but she interrupts.

"You got horsey rides."

I change tack but speak as if I am finis.h.i.+ng the same thought. In fact, I am. "But then again you didn't live with us for very long."

The specks around her are not bridal rice. They are bits of shredded notepaper. The shelf s.p.a.ce in front of Austen's books is empty. My mother has been kneeling and weeping and lowing like a thousand dying cattle in the remains of Daddy's note.

"Before I left-," she says, and stops.

I cross the room and squat down in the speckles, a good three feet away from her, out of her reach but where I can see her face. I say, calm and cold-voiced, "I don't remember a lot of that time, Claire. You talk like it was a family picnic for me. Suns.h.i.+ne days. I'll tell you what I do remember. I remember creeping under my bed, all the way to the back so I could press my spine against the wall. I could hear him going after you. I could hear you crying."

My mother is nodding. "Yes. Yes. He was a terrible husband. Terrible. But you loved your daddy."