Back Roads (11 page)

The movie was lost on me. I couldn’t have cared less about a bunch of screaming teenagers getting ominous letters and finding dead bodies in the trunks of their cars. Ashlee had claimed she’d already seen it but that didn’t stop her from being terrified. She grabbed my arm whenever something scary happened. She had become permanently latched there by the time the credits rolled. I barely noticed her. I was thinking about how much money I had spent on a lame movie and popcorn and Cokes. Being the breadwinner took the joy out of a lot of things.

We left the theater holding hands. Ashlee kept looking around for anyone she knew. In the parking lot, she headed straight for my truck. I couldn’t figure out how she recognized it. If she
had ever been over to our house, it was while I was at work. Then I remembered that sometimes the cars and trucks that dropped off Amber in the middle of the night were full of girls.

I got a strange feeling imagining Ashlee walking past my truck in the dark, slowly dragging her fingertips across the dirty hood, and thinking about me while I was asleep not thirty feet away in my ratty underwear. I liked her thinking about me as long as she didn’t know me, but I didn’t like her touching the truck. I opened the door for her and watched her crawl inside.

“You want to get some pizza or something?” I asked her after I got in too.

“You don’t have to do that,” she said.

What she meant was “I know you don’t have any money.” I must have let my anger show because she quickly added, “I’m not hungry is all I mean. It’s kind of late.”

“Do you have to get home?” I asked, almost hopeful.

“My mom don’t care what time I get home.”

“What about your dad?”

“My folks are divorced.”

She said it with a pinched dignity as if she admired the act but disagreed with the principles behind it.

“What about Dusty?”

“Dusty? Why would he care?”

She reached down into the trash on the floor of the truck. I had forgotten to clean it out. She brought back Mom and Dad’s wedding picture.

“This your folks?” she asked.

“It came with the frame,” I said.

She giggled. “You look like your dad,” she said, and gave me a hesitant smile. “I’m sorry about all that.”

ALL THAT. The letters floated in front of my eyes, soft and puffy, like the caterpillar in
Alice in Wonderland
had blown them from his hookah. I blinked them away.

“Yeah, ALL THAT really sucked,” I said.

“I know it’s been real hard on Amber. It really changed her a lot.”

“Yeah, she used to be human.”

She laughed again, letting it trail off into another giggle. “Amber says you’re real funny.”

She was still holding the picture. One of her purple polished thumbnails covered Mom’s face. I thought about grabbing the back of her neck and smashing her face into the glass.

“You don’t want to go home yet?” I said, looking away from her and the picture.

“Not really.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know. It’s such a hot night for this time of year. We could go over to the reservoir. You got a blanket in the truck?”

“I’ve got a coat.”

The glass shards embedded in her forehead would twinkle in the moonlight when I laid her down on it.

“Okay,” she said.

We weren’t the only couple out on a Friday night who had come up with the reservoir idea. The sight of all the cars and trucks—some of them solitary and rocking, others covered with kids sitting on the hoods and trunks smoking and drinking and laughing about shit they weren’t going to find at all funny in a couple more years—irritated me. I suggested to Ashlee we try the township park.

Except for a couple making out on the slide and another one on the swings, the place was empty. I parked my truck facing away from the playground and toward the softball field.

“You want to go there?” Ashlee asked, staring out the windshield at the pitcher’s mound.

I wanted to wash her face. She wore too much makeup. I knew she did it to look older but it had the opposite effect. She reminded me of all those child beauty queens that were on TV and the tabloid covers after that one was murdered. Little Miss
Lovely. Little Miss Physical Stimuli. Little Miss Pedophilia. That was Skip’s joke. And if she was from Philly, she’d be Little Miss Philadelphia Pedophilia. And we tried to say it ten times fast sitting in the mining office, all grown up now, with beers stolen from our dads instead of bologna sandwiches made by our moms.

“What are we going to do when we get there?” I asked her, glancing at the mound.

“What?”

“What are we going to do when we get there?” I asked again, slower and louder, like I was talking to a dim-witted Girl Scout.

“Whatever you want,” she said.

“Whatever I want.”

Maybe she had misunderstood. Maybe she thought I was talking about a choice between tag or hide-and-go-seek. Maybe this was all a big joke. Why had Amber set me up on a date in the first place? Since when did she do me favors? Was Ashlee going to turn me down? Was that it? Or was she going to make it with me and tell Amber all about it? Were they going to sit around with the Interchangeables and crucify me?

“Do you think I’m ugly or something?” she said in a low personal tone like she was discussing the possibility with herself.

“No.”

“I’m on the pill,” she added with holiday eagerness. “Most guys get real excited over that.”

A sharp pain stabbed me above the eyes.

“You know what that means?” she said, lowering her voice to a whisper. “No rubbers.”

My hands started shaking, but I smiled anyway. I was torn in two by a violent desire to be like MOST GUYS and a helpless need to be me.

“Aren’t you kind of young to be on the pill?” I asked her.

“My mom put me on it. She says she doesn’t want me ending up like her.”

She put one of her hands on my leg and moved toward me.
I let her kiss me. It wasn’t much of one on my part. She pulled away, mildly stunned, and fixed me with the straining, empty eyes of someone who had been recently blinded.

I pushed her away. Maybe too hard. She crashed into the passenger side door and gave a small wounded cry when her naked shoulder hit the window handle. She stayed perfectly still in the corner, staring at me, frozen not by fright but by glaring disbelief.

I started the truck. At the first cough of the engine, she tried to kiss me again. I saw her lips coming at me with the deadly intent of a charging bull. The back of my hand met the side of her face and I heard her head make a hollow clunk against the window glass. She broke into sobs.

“I lied,” I said. “I think you’re ugly.”

It was for her own good.

I didn’t know how I ended up at Callie Mercer’s house. I couldn’t remember where I had left my truck. If I had gone home first. If I had left it parked on the side of the road somewhere. Mrs. Shank had told Misty I sat in front of their house for an hour. I didn’t believe it then but now I wasn’t so sure.

I had taken a roundabout way, following the railroad tracks, crossing her creek, approaching the house from an angle where the dogs couldn’t see me. A light burned in the jungle room.

The worst part about tonight was not having anyone to talk to. No Skip. No Dad. I was old enough now I could have talked to Dad about sex. We had come close once. The first time I went out with Brandy he had been home and as I was leaving he told me to remember, a few seconds of ecstasy wasn’t worth a lifetime of driving a cement truck. He had said it laughing and my mom had called out, “Thanks a lot,” from the kitchen. All I heard was “a few seconds of ecstasy.”

Callie was sitting sideways on a white wicker couch, wearing a big T-shirt and nothing else, with a mile of bare leg draped
over one of the armrests. She was reading a book and had a beer sitting on the floor next to her.

I changed my mind. The worst part about tonight had been finding out I didn’t want the one thing I was counting on to make me feel good. There would be no relief from living.

Her husband came into the room. He walked over to her and his lips moved. She looked up from her book and I thought to myself, If he touches her, I will die.

All those times me and Skip tried to kill Donny were just for fun. At least they were for me. I never wanted to kill Donny. The truth be told, I kind of liked him although I would have never told Skip that.

Donny radiated contentment, a sleepy lying-in-the-sun kind of mental bliss I had never known. Even when Skip yelled at him or pushed him around, he seemed okay with it. One time we barricaded him in a closet for a whole day trying to suffocate him. I broke into a cold sweat when we went back and knocked on the door and didn’t get an answer, but Skip didn’t get scared at all. We moved the chairs away, opened the door, and a couple seconds later Donny slid out on his belly, blinking, saying he was a night crawler.

I was sure my fondness for him was nothing more than little brother envy since I only had Amber: a chattering shadow who turned cartwheels for no reason and left every room smelling like watermelon Lip Smacker. I thought the best thing about having a little brother would have been the luxury of occasionally forgetting he existed.

I was thinking about Donny because I had noticed Skip didn’t mention him in his letter. I had it sitting on the counter next to
Callie Mercer’s recipe for bean and macaroni soup. I couldn’t imagine writing anyone a letter without mentioning the girls even if I was living away from them. They would have been there in my thoughts whether I wanted them to be or not.

Skip’s letter had seen better days. Some of the words were beginning to rub off and the creases were gray and shiny from being folded and unfolded too much. I would have gone to visit him that very minute if I had the money. I thought about my schedule, searching for an extra chunk of time where I could stick in a part-time job. The ice cream places, the drive-in, the miniature golf courses would all be hiring soon. Some already were.

Weekdays I worked nine to five and seven to midnight. Weekends I sometimes worked the same, but every once in a while I had a day off like today. I could be handing ice cream cones to Ashlee and MOST GUYS and getting paid for it instead of making soup and getting abuse for it.

The bacon in the pot sizzled and popped. I was supposed to be sautéing it with a finely chopped onion and two minced garlic cloves in olive oil which we didn’t have. I wasn’t sure what sauté meant, but I was pretty sure it didn’t mean burn the crap out of it.

I gave the brown mess a stir with Mom’s wooden spoon. Most of it stuck to the bottom of the pan. I turned down the heat and added the can of whole tomatoes. The recipe said to chop them up so I started ripping at them with the spoon, thinking about Ashlee again.

I sensed Jody standing behind me.

“You’re not supposed to burn it,” she said.

“Are you sure about that?” I replied without turning around to look at her. “It says right here in the recipe, ‘be sure to burn it.’ ”

She darted up next to me and left a note on the counter.

I hadn’t been in a very good mood when I finally rolled out of bed that afternoon. I didn’t look too good either.

I knew Jody was still in the room with me.

“What?” I shouted.

“You’re supposed to put little leaves in with the tomatoes.”

“Sorry. We’re fresh out of sage.”

“Esme’s mom grows it in her garden.”

“Good for her.”

I kept stirring. Misty joined Jody. They lurked in the doorway and talked in whispers.

“Did you get my note?” Jody asked me.

“Yes,” I said.

“I really meant it.”

“Thanks.”

“Can we go to the Lick n’ Putt?”

“Can you get a job?”

“Told you,” Misty grunted as Jody slumped back to her.

Add salt and freshly ground pepper to taste. Simmer for ten to twelve minutes.

“Freshly ground pepper,” I muttered to myself.

I grabbed Mom’s pepper shaker shaped like an Amish guy and dumped a ton in. I set him back down next to his wife in a black bonnet carrying a basket of apples. Men were always pepper; women always salt. Black. White. Evil. Virtuous.

“You prick,” Amber seethed.

I heard her bare feet pad across the kitchen tile. She sounded naked. I glanced at the front of the microwave to catch her reflection in it. She had on a crocheted bikini top and a pair of cutoffs decorated with lace. I didn’t know how I was going to
survive another summer of her lounging around in a bathing suit. The one she wore last year was chiseled into my brain with the cosmic permanence of the Ten Commandments on stone.

“I figured something might go wrong like you wouldn’t be able to get it up or you wouldn’t know where to put it,” she said, “but I never expected you to hit her. You never hit me.”

“What are you talking about?”

I whirled around and spattered tomato juice all over her bare belly. She flinched at the sight of it and at the sight of the spoon, her blue eyes showing a moment of pure depthless fear before she came splashing back to the surface to find her rage floating reliably above her like a life preserver.

She took hold of the bottom of my shirt with a yank and wiped off her belly with it.

“I just got off the phone with Tracy. She said Ashlee said you hit her.”

“Who the hell is Tracy?”

“You met her last night at the mall.”

“Right. Was she the slutty-looking one? Or the slutty-looking one?”

She eyed me with weary disgust. “Where do you get off with that attitude? Everyone’s too stupid or slutty or lazy for you. Who do you think you are?”

“God.”

“You do.” She laughed drily. “You probably think you’re better than God. If you ever met Him, you’d probably tell Him to get a job.”

She walked over to the kitchen table still covered with last night’s dinner dishes and straddled a chair.

“You’re so fucking stupid, Harley. Ashlee really likes you.”

“She doesn’t even know me.”

“She’s known you her whole life.”

“I’m not talking about riding the same bus.”

I heard the chair legs drag across the tile. She came up beside me again and I automatically stepped away. Her body had the power to repel mine without touching it. We were like the wrong ends of magnets.

Add chicken broth and cannellini beans, I read off Callie’s recipe card. Be sure to rinse and drain beans first.

“How do you think people get to know each other?” Amber asked me, her voice sounding almost pleading. “You think God’s just going to drop a woman in your lap? You’re going to wake up one day and there’s going to be some smart, beautiful virgin living down the road who works five jobs and has a thing for loser headcases?”

“What are cannellini beans?”

“That’s probably what you’re always mumbling about in your sleep,” she murmured.

“What?” I said.

Her eyes darted in my direction, then she walked back to the table and started clearing it with a determination she usually reserved for channel surfing.

She clattered the two plates into the sink. Neither one of us had been home for dinner the night before. I spotted a piece of crumpled notebook paper on the top plate. It had to be Misty’s. It was licked clean.

I opened up the note and showed it to Amber.

ESME SES THE BABYS WILL BE DEFEKTIV.

Amber crinkled her nose. “What is that supposed to mean?”

I shrugged.

“That little Esme gets on my nerves,” Amber said, crushing the paper back up and throwing it in the garbage can under the sink. “She thinks she knows everything. She’s so promiscuous.”

I felt a sudden surge of big brother protectiveness when I heard her mistake. Like I wanted to kill a spider or carry a heavy box for her.

“Precocious,” I corrected her.

“Right,” she answered, curling her lip skeptically. “You’re just telling me that so I’ll use it sometime and sound stupid.”

I wondered if she even remembered that she used to trust me. My mind flashed back to a time we were fighting over my crayons. I wouldn’t let her have any of them, and she went and tattled to Mom. Mom said I had to give her at least one so I gave her white.

I waited for her to figure out what I had done while I silently busted a gut and applauded my evil genius. But she had walked off contentedly and sat down at her white piece of paper to draw me a picture of sugar, salt, and snow.

Outside, Elvis started barking up a storm. I heard a truck coming up the drive and from the other room Jody squealed, “It’s Uncle Mike.” Amber ran out of the kitchen to go put some clothes on.

Jody and Elvis were already bouncing around the truck before he put it in park. He got out, resting a case of beer against one hip, and surveyed the place. He hadn’t been out since February and everything had been covered with snow then. The only thing he could find to criticize was the lack of firewood stacked next to the house. Fortunately, he never went inside.

He and Dad had been close.

He reached down and gave Elvis a scratch between the ears and handed Jody a Butterfinger. She hugged his legs and skipped back to the house. I knew Misty wouldn’t put in an appearance. She didn’t like Uncle Mike because one time he told Dad he should spend more time with me and less with her.

“Those for me?” I asked about the beer.

They were Rolling Rocks. Not the piss water he usually brought.

“Well, they’re not for Elvis. Here, take them. You look like you’re going to kiss me for Chrissakes.”

I took the case from him. He spit a bullet of tobacco in the
yard and helped himself to one of the beers. I set the case down and opened one too.

“You get a new couch?” he asked me, looking at the carcass.

Elvis had ripped open one of the cushions and little pieces of blackened upholstery and yellow foam were spread everywhere. He had pulled off the bedspread too and dragged it to his doghouse.

“Thinking about it,” I said.

“Most people wait until they get the new one before they burn the old one.”

“I guess I was overeager.”

He gave me a sideways glance. His eyes were hard to read hidden in shadow beneath the brim of a brown and gold PennDOT cap.

“You being smart with me?”

“No.”

“That was your grandma’s couch.”

“That had nothing to do with my decision to burn it.”

“You are being smart with me.”

Dad’s mom had always been a sensitive topic with the kids. There were three of them: Mike, Diane, and Dad. None of them could stand to be around her and behind her back they called her a drunk and groaned about visiting her but in person they waited on her like she was the Queen of England. When she died, they acted like they were going to crawl in the grave with her. Then the next day they were whistling and joking around while they boxed all her earthly belongings and drove them off to the nearest dump.

I never felt like I knew her well enough to form an opinion on her. She was either very nice or very mean and neither side of her personality seemed to be her real self.

Grandpa, on the other hand, was always mean. He did nothing but sit in his recliner and rant about the environmentalists in Congress who had shut down all the mines. He had already
been retired before his mine closed but apparently he resented that his sons and grandsons didn’t have a job waiting to kill them too.

His cough terrified me. A harsh, wheezing hack that always made me think he was going to spit up one of the black lungs his disease was named for. He kept an empty coffee can with him all the time half-filled with his tarry phlegm.

They were a pair, Dad’s folks, but they were the only grandparents I ever had since Mom’s folks were killed when she was a kid. She hadn’t been close to the great-aunt and -uncle who took her in. She never said anything bad about them but sometimes when she talked about marrying Dad, she said he had saved her from them.

I chugged my beer, crushed the can, and dropped it on the grass. It gave me a nice buzz. I hadn’t eaten anything since my popcorn with Ashlee.

“I’m sorry,” I apologized to Uncle Mike. “I’m not feeling so hot today.”

“Now that you mention it, you look like hell.” He dropped his gaze to my shirt. “Were you gutting something?”

“I was making dinner.”

“Why don’t the girls do that?”

“They do. We take turns.”

“You bring home the paycheck. You shouldn’t have to go anywhere near a kitchen.”

“They shouldn’t either. They’re just kids.”

“Amber’s not a kid. Where is she anyway? Out running around with a boy, I suppose.”

“She’s inside,” I told him. “Scrubbing floors and doing laundry. She doesn’t have much time for a social life. She’s so busy helping out around the house.”

“Amber?”

“Mm Hmm.” I nodded over my beer can.

He finished his beer and reached for another. I had noticed
a rattle in my truck earlier I would have liked to ask him about but if he stayed to fix it, he would drink all my beer.

“When are you going to mow?”

“Today,” I said emphatically.

“You’re going to need to get to that soffit and fascia this year. And the trim on those windows. That wood’s going to rot right off there if you don’t put a fresh coat of paint on. Did you ever clean out your gutters?”

“Today,” I said. “I’m going to do it today.”

Amber came out of the house in a prim pale-yellow T-shirt dress sprinkled with little blue flowers and her hair pulled back in a ponytail with a ribbon. She still managed to look like a slut.

She said hi to Uncle Mike and gave him a hug. He told her she got better looking every time he saw her, and she acted like she didn’t know what he was talking about, like she had never seen a mirror. I knocked off my second beer and belched.

Amber looked over at me.

“How’s Mike Junior doing?” she asked Uncle Mike, slyly, and watched for my reaction.

Amber and I didn’t agree on much, but we both hated our cousin Mike. I didn’t know why she hated him so much but my feelings were fairly straightforward. My whole life I had been forced together with him at every family gathering, and he had used every opportunity to out-throw me, outrun me, out-eat me. He never showed up anywhere without a football trophy, or a Polaroid of his latest buck stretched out dead across the hood of his truck or his latest girlfriend stretched out drunk across a friend’s couch.