Back Roads (9 page)

“You’re just jealous because those are the shorts you wanted at Fashion Bug,” Misty said.

“Why was it embarrassing?” I asked, slowly chewing a mouthful of mac and cheese, and picturing Callie Mercer in low-rise pink denim shorts and a tie-dyed crop top.

“Because she’s old. Women like that are so pathetic. Do they really think guys want to look at them after they hit thirty?”

“Yeah, that poor Kim Basinger,” I said. “She’s a real eyesore.”

“Who’s Kim Basinger?” Jody asked.

“You know what I mean,” Amber said.

I finished eating. It took me about ten seconds. I went and got a Coke out of the fridge and walked back to the table but didn’t sit down again. I was running late now. I took a couple long gulps from the can and belched.

“I can’t wait to see you in your thirties, Amber,” I said.

“You won’t know me in my thirties. I’ll be so out of here.”

“You’ll be living down the road in a trailer with five kids and no husband.”

She fixed me with an acid stare. “You know what, Harley? I was going to do you a big favor and now you can go fuck yourself.”

“A favor?” I laughed. “The only favor you can do for me is get a job.”

“What if I knew someone who wanted to go out with you?”

My mind jerked back to the book and the recipes and the pink shorts. I turned away from the table. I was sure my face was red. “I’m not interested,” I said.

“You don’t even know who it is.”

“If it’s someone you know, I’m not interested.”

I started to walk away. I needed to change my clothes. I was going to be late for work. Amber jumped up from the table and ran around in front of me.

“What if I knew someone who wanted to—” she paused and touched her upper lip with the tip of her tongue, “fuck you,” she whispered.

“Get away from me.”

“I’m serious.”

“Get away.”

“Ashlee Brockway. Her brother Dusty was in your class. She has a thing for you. I don’t know why.”

“How old is she?”

“My age.”

“Sixteen? Forget it.”

“What’s the big deal? You’re only nineteen.”

“I’m almost twenty.”

“So? She’ll be seventeen someday.”

“Forget it.”

“Where do you get off being so high and mighty? It’s not like she’s a kid.”

“She is a kid.”

“And what are you?”

The phone rang. I asked Misty to get it.

“Do you want to hear my fortune?” Jody asked.

“Fine, Harley,” Amber said, moving so close to me, her nipples beneath my T-shirt were almost brushing against my chest. She wasn’t wearing a bra. If I hadn’t stopped her at the table when I did, she probably would have flashed me. That was a sight I desperately wanted to see and I desperately wanted to avoid seeing; like Dad inside his closed casket.

“Be that way,” she said, narrowing her eyes into bright blue creases in her face. “Just remember, beggars can’t be choosers.”

“That’s what my fortune says,” Jody squealed.

Amber turned and walked off to the shower with her butt twitching under my shirt.

“That was Mrs. Shank,” Misty said, coming back from the phone.

“Who?”

“The Shanks. They live out past the Malones. Before you get to the bridge. The people with the birdbath and the blue ball. Doug and Cruz ride our bus.”

“Who?”

“She said she saw you pull your truck off the road and just sit there for about an hour. She said she didn’t want to bother you because you looked like you didn’t want to be bothered, but she wanted to be sure you got home okay.”

“What?”

“You didn’t have to lie about something like that,” Misty said, sounding disappointed in me. “She would’ve understood.”

“What?” I said again. “Who?”

She walked out of the kitchen too. I looked over at Jody, who was writing again. Suddenly, I couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to do next.

Sounds bombarded me. My sense of hearing became painfully keen. I heard the scratch of Jody’s pencil on her list of things to do, and I knew she was writing PRAY FOR DADDY’S SOWL. I heard Misty punch a pillow as she settled down to watch TV, and I knew it was the flattened, musty, denim blue one that Dad used to take on overnight hunting trips. I heard Elvis outside nudging his nose around his food bowl, and I knew he was still hungry. I heard the driving water splash against Amber’s naked soapy skin, and I knew where she was touching herself.

I wished Betty could have had the same experience. Maybe then she would have understood why some questions should be left unanswered.

I went to Amber’s room and got out her yearbook. I looked up Ashlee Brockway. She was not repulsive.

I couldn’t remember the first time my dad hit me, but I remembered the first time he hit Amber. She was three years old and a major cramp in my lifestyle. I couldn’t watch my
He-Man
cartoons around her because Mom said Skeletor was too scary. I got yelled at for leaving my Legos out because they were a choking hazard. I had to let her play with my Hot Wheels but if I went anywhere near her kitchen set, I got my head smacked. There were plenty of times when I wanted to hit her myself, but I didn’t because I didn’t want to get hit and the punishment for hitting was hitting.

Dad hit her for knocking over his beer. One minute he was calmly watching TV on the couch; the next minute his big hand shot out and clamped around her little arm, easy and familiar, like he was reaching for the can. He yanked her toward him, making her head snap back, and he hauled off and slapped her.

The crack of his hard grown-up hand meeting her soft baby cheek was the loudest sound I had ever heard. Even louder than her screams.

I watched the bewildered terror cloud her eyes, and I saw myself in them. Not my reflection but proof of my existence, just the same. I knew Dad had destroyed her courage.

Mom came rushing from the other room and stopped in the doorway to take in the scene. Then she stared at me, begging me for an answer I was too little to give her. I wanted her to leave him because he hurt us, but I needed for us to stay because we belonged to him. I was a kid and nothing seemed more unjust to me than somebody taking your stuff.

Finally she grabbed up Amber and left, murmuring things in her hair.

That night Amber had a bad dream. She came and crawled into bed with me instead of Mom and Dad. I couldn’t get back to sleep with her snuggled up next to me. I lay there until dawn, thinking about Dad, and feeling the same useless frustration I had felt the first time I had seen him piss on a sparkling white drift of pure new snow.

Amber set up the date for me. I never talked to Ashlee, and I never wanted to. I did want to put a part of my body inside her body and I was willing to go hungry for a week so I could scrape together enough money to take her out and try and convince her to let me, but I didn’t want to know anything about her. I didn’t care what kind of music she liked or if she loved her parents or what she wanted to be when she grew up. Common sense should have told me that was a bad sign.

I stayed awake the night before staring at my lightbulb in the dark wondering if it was the last night I would lie there as a virgin. I tried not to think about it too much because it was the exact same thing I had thought about the night before I screwed up with Brandy Crowe, but I couldn’t stop myself.

Excitement. Dread. Desire. Disgust. I made myself sick with confusion. How could I feel opposite emotions for the same act? How could I feel so strongly about a girl I had never met? How could I want to love someone without getting personally involved? There was something evil about feeling that way. Something too arrogant. Even for humans.

Eventually, I cleared my mind enough to sleep. My main concern was my sanity. I had begun to secretly cherish it lately the way most guys did their hard-ons. I sorted out my feelings for Ashlee a final time and strung them out in a nice, neat mental line.

I didn’t want her to talk. I didn’t want her to judge or feel. But I did want her alive. I wanted her warm.

Rick wouldn’t give me Friday night off, but he said I could leave early. He asked me if I had a date. I said no, but that didn’t stop him from telling the cashiers and Bud and Church that I did.

On his way out the door at the beginning of our shift, he announced very loudly that I could help myself to a box of rubbers in the pharmacy section, free of charge, because that was the kind of guy he was. And he was right. That was exactly the kind of guy he was.

“Ignore him,” Bud said to me. “He’s just jealous ’cause even his own wife won’t go near that fat ass.”

The cashiers laughed. One of them said it was true. What else could explain their lack of children? Everyone knew his wife didn’t have fertility problems ever since she had that abdominal pain checked out last year.

“Didn’t she have one of those laparoscope operations?” another one asked.

The other one nodded. “They make a cut in your belly button and snake this tube down inside you with a laser and a little telescope on the end of it so they can see your ovaries.”

“That’s what my sister-in-law had done when she had her miscarriage.”

“They wouldn’t do that for a miscarriage,” the third one broke in. “She would have had a D and C to clean out her uterus.”

“Is that the one where they suck out the stuff with the little vacuum or the one where they scrape it out with a knife?”

A woman wheeled her cart up to one of the registers and the
conversation ended, but the damage had already been done. Ashlee’s female parts had temporarily lost their mystical appeal. This wasn’t the first time the cashiers had ruined women for me. They were like English teachers taking all the pleasure out of a perfectly good book by breaking it down into themes and sentence structure.

Church got up from the bench to go bag but paused, looking puzzled, and said, “If it was going to rain my mom would’ve told me. She always makes me wear my slicker.”

I glanced up at him but only for a second. Eye contact with Church was like seeing his soul through the wrong end of a telescope.

“She doesn’t want me getting wet,” he said.

“Right,” I said.

“One time I got sick from getting wet. I’m not kidding you.”

“I believe you.”

“It’s a red slicker. You’ve seen it.”

“Right.”

“Yellow’s for girls.” He suddenly barked a laugh and turned in Bud’s direction. “I don’t care what you say, Bud,” he cried, pointing at him. “Yellow’s for girls. I don’t care what you say.”

Bud winked at me. “But I always thought yellow was for girls, Church.”

That sent Church into lurching hysterics. “Shoot, you’re funny, Bud,” he said once he calmed down. He took off his glasses and pulled out a handkerchief from his baggy black pants to wipe at the tears in his eyes. “You and Harley,” he said, shaking his head. “You’re funny.”

He finished, carefully positioned his glasses back on his nose, and folded his handkerchief into a perfect square before cramming it back in his pocket.

“I better call my mom and tell her to bring my slicker. And my rubbers too. I got sick once from getting wet. I’m not kidding.”

He walked off to the pay phone by the ATM machine. Bud held his breath until he got out of earshot, then busted a gut laughing.

My shift went smoothly, and my thoughts gradually improved from the night before. Stocking shelves and fluorescent lighting usually had that effect on me. I tried looking on the bright side. I might actually like Ashlee Brockway. Maybe she was mature for her age. And I had to keep reminding myself: she liked me—or thought she did—and for girls, thinking they liked a guy was just as important as actually liking him.

I finished unpacking eight boxes of Toaster Strudels, closed the freezer door, and stepped back to take a look at myself in the glass. There was nothing wrong with me. No glaring errors. But there was nothing incredibly right about me either.

My hair wasn’t any definable color. People called it brown and strawberry blond and even auburn. Jody once told me it was the color of a pile of raked-up leaves.

My eyes were blue but not a startling gas-flame blue like Amber’s. When I was a kid, I used to think they looked like blue construction paper when it got wet, and I used to think that was good.

I had an okay body. I didn’t pump iron, and except for some amazing midlife crisis I never would; but heavy lifting was one of my vocations so I had strong arms and a good chest. Dad probably knew what he was doing, thinking I could have been a football player.

Admiring my adequateness got me all fired up. I went straight from the freezer section to the pharmacy. The prescription counter had closed at eight and no one was around. I grabbed a box of condoms. The sight of it in my hand made all my concerns about Ashlee fly right out of my head. She could still have her baby teeth for all I cared.

I stuck the box in my pants pocket. I only had fifteen minutes left on my shift. Rick wasn’t around to make me work them
so I decided to go change out of my Shop Rite clothes early. I headed for the storeroom, dragging my dolly behind me, and had to pass by the produce section. I stopped in front of the bananas.

I had practiced putting rubbers on countless bananas ever since the night with Brandy Crowe when I had unrolled one before trying to put it on. And I did try to put it on. A little thing like that wasn’t going to stop me.

Unfortunately, Brandy didn’t try to stop me either. At the time I thought that meant she was as inexperienced as I was, but it turned out she was just stupid and horny and cruel. She told me I could go ahead and do it anyway even though the thing was barely on and so full of air it looked like a balloon some clown might twist into a wiener dog at a kid’s birthday party. I tried, and I think I achieved about a half-inch of penetration with my dick feeling nothing but inflated latex, then the rubber fell off. At that point I was willing to risk pregnancy, disease, and even death but Brandy put a stop to everything including the alternatives I suggested that couldn’t result in pregnancy. I knew right then she didn’t love me like she had been saying ever since she let me unfasten her bra. If she had loved me she would have wanted to put me out of my misery the way a tortured wife gives a cancer-racked husband a suicide dose of pills. A mercy hand job—that’s all I was looking for.

I wasn’t going to let any of that happen again. Practice made perfect and I had some time. I eyed the bananas but grabbed a good-sized cucumber instead. My optimism was running at an all-time high.

I put it in my pocket along with the box of rubbers, made a wide berth around the artichokes, and wandered toward the meat and seafood counters.

We were having a sale on salmon fillets. $4.99 a pound. Jody loved salmon. Not the taste. None of us had ever eaten it. She loved the shiny silver scales.

I remembered her when she was real little sitting in the front of the cart pointing at the bright pinkish-orange and silver layers stacked on ice chips in the display case and babbling baby talk. Mom would smile and tell her it was too rich for our blood and try and get her interested in a slab of something colorless or the trout and catfish with their eyes still in their heads. It never worked, and Mom would end up laughing and telling Jody how she hoped she would always stick to her convictions like that. How she might grow up to be a Supreme Court judge.

I could see it now. A copy of Jody’s first decision from the bench stuck to a prison cafeteria wall with tapioca.

Sometimes I wished Mom would get that lethal injection. She’d make a better ghost than a spectator.

“Hi, Harley,” a female voice said.

My heart jumped. My head was crammed full of women: Mom, Jody, Ashlee, Brandy, the cashier’s sister-in-law with her scraped-out uterus; it could have been any one of them and I wasn’t prepared.

Callie Mercer came up beside me. She was wearing the pink shorts but not the crop top. She had on a T-shirt instructing the world to save the tigers.

“Hi,” she said again.

“Hi,” I said back.

She gave me a funny look, then a smile crept onto her lips. She tilted her head and glanced at me from the corner of her eyes. “Is that a cucumber in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?”

“Huh?”

“I’m sorry.” She laughed. “I had to say that. There’s a cucumber in your pocket.”

I looked down, panicked, forgetting if I had put the rubber on it or not.

“I found it on a shelf,” I explained in a hurry. “I was just putting it back.”

“What else would you be doing with it?” she said.

“Right,” I said.

“So how are you?” she asked with a throaty hopefulness that made me think of random destinations on long, lean, gray highways.

“Fine.”

“I stopped up at your house last week. Did Amber tell you?”

“Yeah.”

“I wasn’t sure she would. I don’t think she likes me very much.”

“Why?” I asked. “Did she say something to you?”

“Let’s just say she wasn’t very hospitable. It’s not a big deal. I don’t blame her for thinking I was snooping around.”

“Snooping around? Is that what she said?”

“Don’t worry about it, Harley.”

She started to reach out her hand to touch me but stopped. “It’s okay. I understand. It must be very hard to deal with people sometimes after . . .” she struggled to find the least alarming words, “after what happened.”

“No, you’re wrong,” I answered sharply. “What happened doesn’t give us an excuse to act any way we want. It’s not an excuse for anything.”

“Well, let’s just forget about it.”

She stared into the display case, checking out the salmon. They probably had it once a week, sale or no sale. She probably had some remarkable marinade she would write down for me if I asked. I could smell that night’s dinner in her hair and on her hands: ginger, garlic, and brown sugar.

Then I realized she was staring at her reflection in the glass. She studied it, confused and irritated, like she had been handed a bunch of parts and instructions in a foreign language.

“Thanks,” I thought to tell her. “For the stuff you brought.”

She turned back around. “Did you look through the book at all?”

“Yeah. I checked out that Pierre Bonnard painting. ‘Earthly Paradise.’ They were supposed to be Adam and Eve, right?”

“Right. What did you think?”

“It was pretty accurate, I thought. Eve stretched out sleeping in the woods like she wasn’t worried about anything. Adam standing at the edge of the woods looking like he’s trying to figure out where to build a house.”

“Why do you say that’s accurate?” She laughed.

“I don’t know. I guess because women seem better at accepting things the way they are and dealing with shit while men are always trying to figure out ways to change things and when they can’t they get pissed.”