Backseat Saints (28 page)

I pulled off the highway only when my tugboat of a car needed another tank of gas. The Buick was a guzzler. I fueled up on
these stops, too, on black gas station coffee as fumy and potent as the brew the car was drinking. I bought Gretel some kibble
and got a jar of peanut butter and some crackers for myself, but I was scared too sick in the pit of me to eat much. I started
off driving as fast as the Buick would let me, but I made myself drop to eight above the speed limit. I wasn’t sure which
ID to use if a cop stopped me; I didn’t want to swap to Ivy so close to home, nor did I want a ticket in Rose Mae’s name,
pointing out my trail.

Gret sat up in the passenger seat beside me, snuffing my hair and jamming her wet nose against my ear, worried and vigilant
and driving me bat crap. Once we got out of Texas, I opened the passenger-side window for her. She poked her face out through
the narrow crack to huff the air of Arkansas, a mix of larch trees and armadillo poop that kept her attention all the way
to Tennessee. There she finally calmed enough to sleep with her big head in my lap, making a drool splotch on my jeans.

By the time I hit the Alabama State line, I hadn’t slept in close to thirty hours, and that had been some fitful dozing on
a library sofa in Chicago. My joints were aching, and I had a dry, rattling cough that hurt all the old cracks in my ribs
whenever it got away from me. All the caffeine I’d dumped into my empty stomach made me feel like my eyeballs were jittering
in their sockets; the road looked like a drunken state worker had painted the yellow lines in slightly wavy. My peripheral
vision was shrouded in fog.

In Arkansas, I’d decided that if I was running, Birmingham was my best bet. It was a big enough little city to get lost in.
I could sell the traceable Grandee Buick for some cash as Rose, then leave the city as Ivy to sully my trail. I could go anywhere
then, maybe down to the Florida Keys. I’d get a waitress job serving drinks made with key lime and coconut, invest in flip-flops
and a red bikini. If I was running.

By the time I crossed into Alabama, I didn’t think I was.

On our second date, I’d told Thom my father was dead. Daddy was so dead to me by then that it didn’t even feel like a lie.
Thom knew my mother had left me as a child, so Fruiton was the second or third place he would look for me. He’d certainly
comb Amarillo first, and it was a good-odds bet that Kingsville, the town where we met, might pull his attention next.

Going to Fruiton gave me solid lead time and the home field advantage. It was my best shot if I was going to lay a trap instead
of running.

The air grew warmer as I went east, and the Buick’s AC was for shit. I drove into my old hometown with all four windows mostly
down. Fruiton already smelled like a small-town Alabama summer: hot asphalt and secondhand fry grease, overlaid with deep
green pine. Pollen hung in the breathless air, giving every outdoor surface a thin yellow glaze. When I’d lived here, Fruiton’s
singular air had been so familiar that it was invisible. I’d forgotten the feel of it dusting up my nose.

I pointed the car toward my old house, Gretel awake and back to
sticking her boxy head out the window, her tongue collecting dust. My car hadn’t had a working tape player in years, so I
had the radio on a gospel station. In Fruiton, the only music choices were gospel or country music, or I could swap to AM
talk and get a bellyful of angry men hollering about politics or Jesus or both.

I was so tired, I needed both hands on the wheel now just to keep the car going straight. My route took me right past the
old Krispy Kreme that Jim and I had frequented. It was working hand in hand with the Church’s Chicken next door to oil the
air. Looking at it gave me déjà vu, which was stupid.

Of course I felt like I’d been here before. I had. A thousand times. But this was ten years later, and Bickel’s Drugstore
had turned into an Eckerd. The empty lot was now a Tom Thumb with three newfangled gas pumps. It was enough change to make
me feel like I was being reminded of a place instead of actually being in the place.

The last time I’d been down this road, I’d been walking to the bus station. I’d worn someone else’s shoes, like now, with
a hand-me-down blouse and Levi’s much like the ones I had on. I had probably been cleaner, though.

Another five minutes and I passed the entrance for Jim’s old subdivision, Lavalet. It had seemed right fancy to me back then,
with a pool and a clubhouse and the name spelled out in curly metal letters on a low brick wall beside the entry. I opted
not to turn in, heading instead for my own old neighborhood. I had no desire to ring the doorbell and say to his mother, “So,
Carol, you ever hear from your youngest again?… No? Not even at Christmas?”

I doubted they still lived there, anyway. No sane person would choose to stay in a house that reminded them every minute of
someone who’d left and not ever once looked back. Normal people moved away from sorrow as soon as they could. Folks less whole,
sanitywise, took my daddy’s route. Daddy had raised me in the house my mother had abandoned, drinking until his vision blurred
too much to focus on all the bare spaces where my mother wasn’t
standing. He drank so much, some days he had to furrow up his brow and squint to aim his fists proper at me.

There was a chance, small but real, that if he hadn’t drunk himself to death, he would have stayed on in that house after
I left, too. Now that I was heading toward him, I was surprised at how vague my visual memories of him were. It seemed the
people that I remembered most clearly, every tick of expression and cadence of speech—Jim Beverly, my mother—were the ones
who had left me.

My father was mostly a shape in my memory, short and broad with wide hands. I remembered his craggy Irish face and angry eyebrows
from pictures, not from real life. The clearest things were the sour mash smell of him, the hard, fast feel of his fists,
and his low and burring voice.

Still, Thom had no idea my daddy was alive, much less that he was meaner than a snake, tougher than boot leather, and better
with a gun than any man I’d ever seen, Thom included. My daddy was as bad as Thom, and he owed me. And there was no danger
I would stay on with him, the way I would with Jim Beverly. My nicer memories—shooting with him, piggyback rides, pushes on
the tire swing—were buried under the ten years after my mother left us. He’d beaten any chance at auld lang syne right out
of me. If he was still around, I was the bait, and he was nothing more to me than the steel jaws of a trap. Thom would surely
look for Lolleys in the Fruiton phone book as a way to find me, but he would not expect to find his way to me blocked by a
no-longer-dead daddy, much less my daddy’s arsenal.

A mile past Lavalet, I crossed Bandeer Street and left the mall-and-Olive-Garden side of town. Fruiton had no railroad, but
even so, this side of Bandeer was the wrong side of the tracks. I turned left at a run-down strip mall that still held a Salvation
Army thrift store and a Dollar General. Another left put me onto my old street.

All the houses on Pine Abbey had been built in the sixties: low ceilings, one central bath, a harvest gold or avocado stove
and
fridge set in every galley kitchen. The houses squatted low, as if they thought they were down on Mobile Bay, in hurricane
country. I went a mile down the road, to what in a nicer neighborhood would have been a cul-de-sac.

Not here. Pine Abbey simply ended, blunt as the eraser end of a pencil, with a dirt track cutting through the middle of the
wild back lot. The track began just over the curb and disappeared into the woods. Daddy used to drive me down through on Saturday
afternoons to do some shooting.

The branches would scrape the car’s paint when we shoved our way down that track. It didn’t matter. Daddy bought beater cars
and applied duct tape, spit, and cussing till they ran for him. He would drive one until the engine fell out, then sell it
for scrap and get another. The track ended in a sloping meadow. We would stand at the lowest point to shoot, setting up our
targets so they had the hill behind them. We shot at two-liter soda bottles rifled from the trash of our Pepsi-drinking neighbors.
We drank only Coke, and Daddy wouldn’t shoot a Coke bottle. He said that for a southerner, blasting away at a Coke bottle
was close to sacrilegious.

Daddy filled the bottles with water to weight them. Our bullets tore through them and then spent themselves safely in the
dirt of the hill behind. We’d take turns shooting until they fell into plastic rags.

The first time he let me shoot a real gun, I was maybe five years old. It was a sunny afternoon, and the warm brown whiskey
smell on his breath was light. His mood was good. He watched me taking careful aim with my pellet pistol, and he said, “Rosie-Red,
I believe you’re ready to try something a touch mightier.”

He loaded a .22 for me and talked me through the kickback. He tucked in spongy orange earplugs for me, and I sighted on the
Pepsi bottle. I squeezed steady, pressuring the trigger toward me until the gun bucked in my hands like a live thing. The
shots rang louder when I could feel them. The .22 seemed powerful and sleek, yet it did what my hands said. I could feel the
reverb of it in my
whole body, and I squeezed again and again and again. I felt bullets moving out from the pit of me, down my arms, and then
out the barrel. I held steady and shot till the gun was empty.

Daddy wove his way over to the Pepsi bottle and held it up. We watched water streaming out of several holes.

“Shit, baby. I think you nailed it. Three, maybe four times,” he said, admiring. “If you wan’t so pretty, I’d say it was a
shame you wan’t born a boy.”

“Who would wanna be a boy,” I said, and spit.

Daddy laughed and said, “Dead-Eye Dickless.”

I laughed, too, though I didn’t get the joke. I only got that this was a good, good day. My mother was at home, making us
lasagna, and my daddy was pleased with me.

Here at the dead end of Pine Abbey, my red brick cube of an ex-house sat on the right, the last in the row. The house across
the street was its mirror image, except the trim was cream instead of brown and they had an old VW Beetle rusting away in
the carport.

The carport of my old house was empty. Maybe he’d wised up and left the haunted place where his two-person family had abandoned
him one by one. Or maybe he really was dead.

Now that I was here, it seemed ridiculous to think that my actual father was sitting inside on the sofa. It was like expecting
the copy of
Watership Down
I’d set on my bedside table a decade ago to still be there, facedown and splayed open to the chapter where the rabbits first
meet Woundwart. But at the same time, I couldn’t imagine him making a checklist and packing boxes and renting a U-Haul. If
he was alive, this was the only place I could imagine him existing. The empty carport might only mean he was off working or
between cars.

I wondered if he would recognize me, and I felt my ab muscles go tight on the strength of memory and instinct, as if prepping
for his welcome-home blow. A blast of hot red temper came steaming up my throat from my belly. If he was here, he fucking
owed me.

“Sit tight,” I told Gretel. I turned off the car and rolled up all
the windows to half-mast to keep her in but leave a cross-breeze going.

I got out of the car and marched across the patchy lawn, chin up, shoulders set. My eyes burned, full of sleep-sand and dry
from staying open way too long. Even so, I walked tough, like a kid going to touch the front door of the neighborhood’s spooky
house on a dare. I jumped up onto the concrete slab that served as a porch, out of breath from just this short burst of angry
movement. I had to breathe in short pants to keep from activating the dry cough that was waiting in the bottom of my lungs.
I bypassed the door, going instead to kneel by the living room’s open window. I put my face against the screen and cupped
my hand around my eyes to block the sunlight, so I could see into the living room.

A little girl, maybe eight or nine, sat on the floor with her dark hair hanging in strings around her face. She felt my gaze
and looked up, staring back at me with her big, glossy eyes. She didn’t seem surprised to see me, or particularly scared.
She put a finger up to her lips and said, “Shhh. Daddy’s sleeping.”

For one crazy second, I thought I must be looking back into the past, seeing my young self, warning grown-up me away. I knew
from science-fiction movies that if I touched her, we’d both melt or burn up or explode the world.

I blinked hard, twice, and put one hand up to my aching forehead. Looking around, I realized that the room was a right-now
place, not something from my past. There was nothing in it that I recognized. A long, puffy green sofa sat against the wrong
wall of the den. Ours had been brown with dark gold flowers, and it had been against the front wall, between the window I
was looking through and an identical one farther down the porch. The coffee table was different, too, flanked by a vinyl wingback
chair and a stack of cardboard moving boxes. There was a big TV in a hutch, showing a Bugs Bunny cartoon with the sound off.
We’d had a smaller TV on a sanded plank table.

The little girl had a slew of Barbie outfits scattered across the
floor. She was working a naked Barbie’s long legs into a spangled tube dress.

“Hello,” I said, quiet through the screen.

The girl’s hands were still working to clothe her doll, but the dress stuck at Barbie’s flared hips. She said, “I’m not s’posed
to talk to people I don’t know.”

“I’m not a stranger,” I said. “I used to live here when I was your age. This is the house where I grew up.”

She got curious then, tilting her head sideways. She set Barbie down topless and stood up and came over to peer at me through
the screen. “Then what’s your name?”

“Rose,” I said. “Rose Mae.”

She nodded like I’d passed some test and said, “You made the marks.”

“Marks?” I repeated.

“On the wall,” she said. “Daddy’s mad about it. I know you made them because it says your name.”