Backseat Saints Part 16

I put the book back and followed his howling call back to the kitchen, Gretel trotting close and anxious by my side.

Bill, still barefoot in his PJs, had my daddy bent over the sink. He was was.h.i.+ng Daddy's eyes out with what looked like a thin gruel of Maalox and water. He nodded to me, calm and firm, holding my daddy's face down in the sink with one solid arm. Daddy was struggling a little, but he stilled when I came in.

"There you are," Daddy said. "Oh, there you are. Don't go away. I have a speech I want to say for you. I have it on a paper. I been waiting so long."

I ignored my father entirely and made my eyes click dryly in their sockets to look at Bill and only Bill. "How'd you know to do that? With the Maalox?"

"I was a med tech. Army," he said.

"Thank G.o.d you didn't leave," Daddy said to me, bent over, his blue T-s.h.i.+rt riding up his back. I could see two sharp k.n.o.bs of spine in the s.p.a.ce between his s.h.i.+rt and his jeans. He was so thin, his very skin looked worn down and sheer, like any minute the bones would press up through it. Thom could break him in one hand. He was useless. "I been waiting here to say my speech. Can you go get my paper? I wrote it all down in a paper in the drawer over yonder. The drawer in the phone desk." He aimed his words down into the sink, and his voice still sounded thick with snot. I could hardly make him out.

"I'm Bill Mantles. I'd introduce you to Mr. Lolley here, but I take it you two know each other?" Bill asked me, all ironical.

"We've met," I said.

"Can I pet your dog?" Bunny asked. She was at the other end of the galley kitchen, sitting in front of the built-in desk, in my mother's old chair. She'd turned the chair around to watch her dad, and she was swinging her feet back and forth. They were too short to reach the floor.

"She's a little het up," I said to her. "Give her a sec."

Bill kept rinsing, and my father kept talking into the sink, asking me to go get the paper out of the desk drawer so he could read me his speech. Even his voice had aged and gone thin, and his ropy-looking arms had deep blue veins bulging up all over them. He looked like a photocopy, too, as bleached out and ruined as the print of the s.h.i.+ps hanging in the other room. I tried to let his voice run past me and go down the drain the same way the running water was going.

"The army gave you a cla.s.s on pepper spray?" I said to Bill. I spoke loud enough to drown my daddy out.

Bill nodded. "I had chemical weapons training."

"My daddy was in Desert Storm," Bunny said, proud. The chair's ladder back blocked the drawer my father was asking me to open. Her feet swung back and forth, back and forth.

My father saw where I was looking and said, "Yes! That drawer! That drawer!"

I stayed put. Daddy could go to h.e.l.l and read his speech to Satan. If I stayed here, Thom would come and give him the chance sooner than he might like. "You still work in the medical field?" I asked Bill, like I was making small talk at a church social, like I couldn't feel each heartbeat like a gunshot in my aching head.

Bill's cheeks flushed a faint pink, and he kept working on rinsing out my father's eyes, not looking at me. "I'm not working right now."

"Daddy's home with me," Bunny said, and the prideful tone had gone to defensive. Little tiger Little tiger, I thought, staring at me from the chair with her eyes gone fierce. "He takes care of me."

"You're lucky. I wish I'd had that kind of daddy, growing up," I told her, and she looked away, mollified. "I wish I had one like that now." It came out heartfelt, the truest thing in the room.

Daddy said, "Rose Mae? Ain't you gonna get my speech?"

I didn't answer. Bill let go of the scruff of my father's neck, but Daddy stayed bent over the sink, dripping. Bill said, "Okay, Gene, take a swig of this Maalox. Rinse it around and then spit it out. Do that a couple times. You might want to swallow some, too. How do your eyes feel? Are they- Wait a sec. Your name is Rose Mae?"

I nodded. "Rose Mae Lolley."

Bill said, "From my wall?"

Daddy finally stood upright. He took the bottle and tilted it back, mercifully plugging up his word hole with it. He swished the Maalox around a couple times and spit it out, then said to me, "The bank called my loan on the house. Bill and them have had it, what, six months now, Bill? It was empty a long time. This place is a rental. I took it so I could watch out the wind-er for you and Claire."

I'd forgotten that, how he always said "wind-er" for window. It was strange because he said words like meadow meadow and and follow follow properly, but window had always ended in his mouth with an -er. properly, but window had always ended in his mouth with an -er.

"Wait a minute," said Bill. "What?"

"Bill wants to know how your eyes feel," I said.

"Good," my daddy said. He turned to Bill. "Good." His nose was still running. Bill handed him a paper towel to wipe it, but his eyebrows had puzzled up and his brow had creased.

"You should thank Bill," I told Daddy.

"Thank you, Bill," Daddy said, obedient, then he turned back to me and added, "Look, Rose Mae, everything is the same."

"You used to own my house, is that what you meant?" Bill asked, putting it together.

Daddy was looking at me, though, speaking only to me. "I knew you'd come. I watch our old house alla time, when I'm home. I put the TV on for noise, and what I do is I watch for you and Claire right through that front wind-er."

"That's kinda creepy, Gene," Bill said. The kitchen seemed crowded now that Daddy was standing up. Too many hearts beating in the room, too much carbon dioxide. My vision was down to a pinhole now. My lungs rustled in my chest like dried-up leaves. I kept my eyes on Bill, and Daddy was a thin wraith in the fog beside him.

"I watch for you when I'm not working," Daddy said to me. "I have a good job now, Rose Mae. At the Home Depot."

"I hear they have good benefits," I said. Someone had told me that recently. I turned to the girl. "Your name's Bunny?"

She was still sitting in the chair, pulling my gaze with the tick-tock swing of her pendulum feet. She giggled like I was the silliest thing she'd ever seen.

"My name's Sharon."

I blinked, confused and swaying.

"Hand me my speech out that drawer, won't you, Sharon?" Daddy said, and then to me, "I'm not good at talking things, so I wrote it down exactly, what I need to say."

Someone said, "I do not want to f.u.c.king hear it," really loud, gunshot loud, in the quiet kitchen. The someone was me.

"I think we should head on home, Bunny," Bill said.

Sharon hopped out of the chair and threaded her way past Daddy, to her father.

"Nice to meet you," Bill was saying. "Sort of." He put one arm around Sharon and they went past me, out of the kitchen.

Now there was nothing in front of me to look at but my father. I said to him, "What do you mean, everything the same?"

"I'm in the program, Rose. I got my five-year pin in January, but I been stuck on step nine, waiting for you and Claire. Please won't you let me read it to you?"

"Every little thing? Exactly the same?" I said. The air was thin and hot in my dry lungs. I was panting louder than Gretel. I followed Bill and Sharon into the living room, listing hard starboard as if my feet were borrowed or brand new. My father came after me. My body felt as unwieldy as a bag of sand, but I went straight to the sofa and made my heavy body climb up onto the cus.h.i.+ons. I grabbed my mother's faded s.h.i.+p print and jerked it off the nail. I slid it down behind the sofa, leaning it against the wall.

Bill and Sharon were at the front door. I heard Bill's sharp intake of breath, and then he said, "Holy c.r.a.p. You did that to the wall? At my house, too?"

He meant my name and the black tick marks. My father had reproduced them here exactly, only fresher and darker. These had never been painted over.

I said, "My mother did the ones at your house."

At the same time, my father said, "Claire made them ones at your place."

"You ruined my d.a.m.n wall," Bill said, more aggrieved than angry.

"It was Claire," my father said, and then added, surprised, to me, "You knew these were over there? You knew she wrote your name?"

I was trying to count the marks on the first line, to see if he got it right. There should be 138. But the lines kept waving and changing places with each other. I had to start over before I got to 50.

"You have flat ruined that wall," Bill said. "Bunny, we need to get out of here before Daddy loses his temper."

"Killz," the little girl said to him, seizing the moment to pa.s.s on my message about the paint primer.

Bill misunderstood her. "Not that that mad, silly," he said. mad, silly," he said.

I only got to 35 this time before the lines s.h.i.+fted sideways and tricked me and made me lose my place again. I started over, but now the lines were broadening in front of me, each black mark spreading into a puddle and blending into the next.

"Rose Mae," Daddy said, clambering up onto the sofa beside me, "you don't look so good. Bill, hold up."

The lines met, and the whole wall was black. A rich darkness, thick like velvet, spread and unfolded over everything around me. I fell down into all that darkness and was lost.

CHAPTER 13.

IRAN ON A GREEN FIELD, and the sun was so hot that I felt flesh melting off of me like wax. Saint Sebastian ran beside me, bleeding from a hundred arrow holes, the shafts tearing his skin as he ran. "Faster, please," he said.

I looked over my shoulder. Thom was coming, bounding along at a quick and steady pace that ate up the ground I'd put between us. His face looked both cheerful and implacable, mouth smiling, but he had the eyes of a dead thing.

"Forget him," Sebastian said, the quills in his arm bobbing as he pointed behind Thom. "Run. We're going to win."

I looked back. Behind Thom, I saw my kindergarten cla.s.s, chasing me in their field day T-s.h.i.+rts. My mother cheered me on from behind them. She looked young and fresh, cool as a cuc.u.mber, but I blazed so hot that steam came off my skin.

"Those are little girls," I said to Sebastian, angry he was worried about a field day race when Thom was coming. I ran on in a panicked scramble. Thom followed us, loping toward me on the b.a.l.l.s of his toes, almost jaunty. He was the only thing cooler than my mother in the whole h.e.l.lish landscape. He wasn't even winded, and his arms ended in axes.

I ran and ran, until I was so tired that my run was half stagger. Thom kept coming. He would always be coming.

"He's not after you you," Sebastian said as we broke through the tape and won the race. Sebastian pulled me to the side. Thom ran right past. I looked down and saw my flat chest in a sweaty field day T-s.h.i.+rt. Thom did not know me. Then my mother was there, lifting me up, swinging me and whooping, and a rush of air was a cool balm on my blazing skin.

Sebastian put a kindly hand on my shoulder when she set me down. Now his arrows were more like quills, growing out of him. He looked like Mrs. Tiggywiggle from the book my mother read to me at night, only with a halo instead of a mobcap. This was how he'd looked in my head the first time my mother called him for me. I had forgotten.

We turned and walked together across my elementary school campus to the edge of the woods. Thom was there, behind a temporary cla.s.sroom trailer. He stared down into a hole, oblivious to us. It was a pit trap, and when I looked down into it, I saw he'd caught me. Crouched in the bottom, Rose Mae Lolley reached up to draw a vertical slash in the dirt wall with one finger, marking time. Like any prisoner might.

"You understand?" Sebastian asked. I did.

The trap here was not for Thom. Fruiton was a trap for Rose. I had come here to trap her and leave her in it. I nodded, and Sebastian smiled kindly down at me. "Let's go find your mother. The sack races are starting."

"You aren't scary," I said to him. He'd changed after my mother left. That was when I began remembering Saint Sebastian as an open wound, grinning a b.l.o.o.d.y, broad grin and chasing me.

"What's that, Rosie?" Daddy asked me.

"He wasn't scary," I said, miffed at having to repeat myself when my throat was burned so dry.

"Her fever's broken," another man said. "We need to keep pus.h.i.+ng fluids." I knew the voice. Bill. Bill Mantles from my old house across the street.

I cracked an eye, and I was in my childhood bed, lying on the saggy, sprung mattress, clammy with my sweat. Bill propped me up, half-sitting, and Daddy held a cup of tepid water to my mouth. I drank what I could, eyes closing. Bill's fingers poked a couple of pills into my mouth, dry and hard as perfect little pebbles, but Daddy flooded my mouth with more water and they went down.

"Sleep now," Bill said.

I tried to say I couldn't. Thom was coming. He was coming to kill Rose Mae Lolley. I had to get up and learn to kill her first. Saint Sebastian had showed me.

Bill pushed my shoulders, easing me back onto the mattress. I sank into it, and it parted under me like the waters of a river. The river swallowed me and pulled me under and moved me, past Thom, past Texas, all the way to lemon groves and cool air touched with brine. I slept, turning on my side to face the west. I heard my mother say, You are welcome You are welcome, and I was.

When I woke up, the mellow sunlight coming in the window said late afternoon. Bill was gone, and Gretel was sprawled out against my side, snoring, all three of her paws twitching after dream rabbits. Daddy dozed in my old wicker chair. He had a piece of blue-lined notebook paper resting in his slack hand, crumpled up, with one corner ripped off. His feet rested on the edge of the bed. He was wearing grayed-out athletic socks with a big hole that showed me his heel, callused and cracked as rhino hide.

I was in my old room, exactly as I remembered it, with my white quilted blanket pulled over me. The closet door was open, and I saw the clothes I'd left behind still hanging in a neat row. A matted lion doll lay on the closet floor. Growlfy, his name was. My old green-gla.s.s water cup stood on the bedside table, an amber bottle of pills beside it.

Daddy's eyes opened as I propped myself up on my elbows.

"How long?" I asked.

"Couple days," he said, and I nodded.

"That's not so bad," I said.

"You was real sick." Daddy put his feet on the floor. I heard his old man's knees crackle as he bent them. I was wearing a faded pink nightgown with a bow at the top. My mother's. It had that musty, papery smell that gets into old cotton. I remembered her standing at the stove, making me eggs in this nightgown and her pretty housecoat. I sat all the way up and swung my legs out of bed. He said, "Girl child, are you crazy? Lie back down."

"I have to get up, Daddy. I don't have a lot of time." He rustled his piece of paper at me. Cleared his throat. "Not now," I said.

I stood up, and my legs were shaky and frail under me. I went down the hall toward the den, and Gretel got up and followed, tags jingling. I could hear Daddy coming behind her, an even sorrier dog, still toting his crumpled paper.

Daddy hadn't bothered to hang the s.h.i.+p picture back up. The ticks and lines stood out starkly against the white wall. I climbed up onto the sofa and stared at the marks, then up at my name. My father came up to the arm of the sofa, staring at me with his saggy, ba.s.set hound eyes, clutching his paper close.

"It's a calendar," I said.

I counted the ticks on the second line. There were 365. I'd known there would be before I started. Each line was a year. Each tick was a finished day.

My mother had been counting off the days literally behind my father's back. Marking time. Like any prisoner might. She hadn't begun at the start of their marriage, though. She'd begun at the start of me. The first line counted the days after my birth until the New Year. Then there were eighteen lines, each standing for a year she'd have to serve to get me to adulthood.

I remembered how she'd sometimes stand and face this wall, staring at the s.h.i.+ps. As a child, I'd wondered why she didn't turn around and watch the TV on the opposite wall. Later, as a teenager, I remembered her s.h.i.+p staring as if it was cliched foreshadowing, irritatingly symbolic. But now I wondered if she'd been looking at the print at all. Maybe she'd been staring through it, at all the days she'd marked off behind it, all the blank lines waiting to be filled. She'd planned to stay another ten years, looked like, but she'd let herself out early. Time off for good behavior?

I didn't think so.

"What happened?" I said. "The day she left, Daddy, what did you do?"

He shook his head. "I came home and she was gone, same as you."

I wheeled on him, staring down at him from the extra height standing on the sofa gave me. "Bulls.h.i.+t."