Backseat Saints (29 page)

“You have marks on your wall that say my name?” I asked, and when she nodded I said, “Can I see them?”

She tilted her head the other way, considering. “You’d have to come in.”

“Yes,” I said. “Can I come in and see them?”

After a thinking pause, she shrugged and said, “I don’t mind it. It’s got your name, anyways.”

I stood up and met her at the front door. She swung it open for me, and there was a squeak of hinges at the end that was so
familiar, it made my teeth ache.

I stepped inside. The carpet had been changed. When I was growing up, it was a dark gold, so thin in places that I could see
the woven plastic matting glued to the floor. Now they had a mottled khaki Berber. The little girl pointed at the front wall,
where our sofa once sat. A crudely wrought chest stacked with three more moving boxes filled the space.

“Daddy painted when we first moved in, but they’re all floating
back up through,” she said, pointing at two words and a host of dark marks on the wall. “Like ghosts, Daddy said.”

The writing was all contained in an invisible square, exactly under the place where my mother’s big framed print of ships
in a harbor had once hung. The lines were thick, drawn on with a laundry marker. If the print had still been hanging, all
the writing would have been hidden perfectly behind it.

At the top, someone had written my name, “ROSE MAE,” in all caps. Underneath my name were long horizontal lines that ran from
one edge of where the frame had been to the other. The higher horizontals were covered end to end in tick marks, thousands
of them, all made of four vertical lines close together, then a diagonal slash drawn through to make five-packs.

Some were deep black, and some I could see only faintly as they worked their way up through the paint.

I said to the little girl, “This was done with a Sharpie, and that stuff will come up through paint every time. I’ve seen
it come through wallpaper, even. Your daddy needs to prime the wall with this stuff you can get at Home Depot. It’s called
Killz.”

“Killz,” the little girl repeated. “I’ll tell him.”

I reached out one hand and set it flat on the cool wall, cautious, as if the marks had been scorched on and were still smoking.
They were as mysterious and unreadable as flattened Braille. I slid my hand down, counting horizontal lines.

There were nineteen. The top line was about one-third covered in tick marks. I started counting across by fives, moving my
hand over them.

The kid said, “It’s a hundred and thirty-eight on that row. I counted before.”

I kept going. She was right: 138. There were even more ticks on the lines under. They filled every line, until they stopped
midway through the eighth line. The last ten lines had no ticks at all.

“I think my mother made these,” I said.

The little girl said, “Mine works in a doctor’s office,” as if we were trading facts about mothers. “And she’s in school to
be a nurse.”

“That’s a neat job,” I said absently.

My mother had kept my name and a strange count not five feet away from where my father’s recliner once sat, angled toward
the TV. The air was thickening around me, and it was harder and harder to breathe.

“I’m not going to be a nurse,” the little girl said, confident. “I’m going into space.”

“That’s a neat job, too,” I managed to say.

The little girl said, “My Skipper doll has on a nurse outfit. Want to see?”

“Sure,” I said, but the pit of my stomach had gone sour. My eyes burned, and the vision in the corner of my eyes had grayed
out farther. I was peering at the marks now through a tunnel of fog. The lines on the wall seemed to flicker, as if the lamp
was putting out candlelight.

The girl trotted over and held up Skipper-as-nurse, too flat-chested to fill up Barbie’s uniform.

“That’s awesome,” I said, already up and moving. “I have to go.” It was true. I couldn’t breathe the air inside this place
for one more second.

“Bye,” she said.

I hit the front door at a dead run, the squeaky hinge I remembered squealing at me like it was laughing. I bolted to the center
of the small yard, dizzy again, gagging, but I had nothing in my belly to throw up. I coughed instead, hacking so hard that
it bruised my throat. Gretel was standing in the passenger seat, her head thrust as far out the half-open window as it could
go. She loosed a long, houndy noise, halfway between a bark and a howl, worried.

“Hush, Gret,” I told her when I stopped coughing. I was still bent over, my hands on my knees. The grass was thin with spots
of black Alabama dirt showing, just as I remembered. Leprosy lawn,
my mother had called it. A decade had passed since my feet had walked off this browning patch of grass, yet it still hung
on in the same state of wretched decay. The grass, at least, hadn’t changed.

My stomach flopped inside me like an air-drowning trout. I hung my head down low to get in a good breath. The little girl
might have come after me, but when I looked up, I saw her across-the-street neighbor had come outside. He’d already left his
porch and was standing on his own tiny leprosy lawn, facing us.

He was a skinny old man with big, down-tilted eyeballs. His lower lids had sagged down so much that they’d bagged and gapped
open. It seemed to me that if he bent down to get his paper, his eyes would roll right out of his head, dangling down on their
stalks. He was bald on top, with strings of grayed-out hair in a straggled ring around his head.

He looked at me and his mouth dropped open.

“Holy shit!” he yelped.

I glanced behind me. No one. He pointed at me. His mouth stayed open. A thin string of drool came out of it, running down
his chin and hanging free with a droplet of weighty water on the end. My stomach lurched again.

He came at me, moving across his lawn in a galumphing lope. He sped up as he came, arms spreading wide. His fingers splayed,
and he staggered toward me like the mortal remains of some long-dead former love, reanimated. He hollered again, but his words
were drowned out by Gretel’s sudden chain of warning barks.

I was already dancing backwards, scrabbling in my purse, my fingers closing first around my lipstick, then my keys. He was
still coming at me, drooling, a zombie crossing the asphalt to embrace me, maybe get a bite. Gretel was thrusting at the window,
trying to shove her too-big shoulders through and get between him and me.

The man passed my car, coming onto the lawn in a herky bound, and at that moment, as if I knew desperation magic, my hand
closed perfectly around the cool metal cylinder I’d been
seeking. This time, I remembered to flick aside the safety with my thumb. Just before he touched me with those big, splayed
hands, I lifted the pepper spray and blasted him right in the face.

I sidestepped and kept moving backwards, almost falling, avoiding blowback the way Thom had taught me when he gave me the
spray. The neighbor stopped abruptly and blinked, and then he screamed. He screamed like a woman, high and shrill. He dropped
as if all his bones had suddenly been teleported out of his body. His hands came up to scrub and scrub at his face. He flopped
onto his back, and his heels drummed the lawn. Gretel barked and barked in a deep-chested flurry of angry sound.

I stood over him, no idea what to do next, as he screamed again and then again. I looked at the teeny can, impressed.

“Are you okay?” I asked him, loud, so he could hear me over my dog. The question seemed inadequate.

He ignored me, kicking his legs like a shot deer. His scream changed, going longer, until it was an endless keening. I took
that for a no.

“Stay put,” I told him, then put my hand on my pounding head. The guy was obviously not going to pop up and trot to Hardee’s
for a chicken sandwich. “I mean, hang on. I’ll go on in your place and call for 911.”

I went first to the car and put my hand on Gret’s head to calm her. “I’m fine,” I told her. “I’m fine.” She panted and chuffed,
staring at the man, her back fur standing straight up. I was pretty damn impressed. When Thom and I fought, she went under
the bed till it was over, same as she did in thunderstorms, the coward. I’d never had occasion to see her react when I was
threatened by a man outside her pack.

“What the fuck?” another man’s voice said behind me. I looked over my shoulder and saw a bare-chested fellow in stripy pajama
bottoms standing up on my old porch. Behind him, the little girl stood in the doorway. “What the fuck?” he repeated.

“Daddy said a Word,” the little girl said to me, awed.

“He came at me,” I said. Gretel was bristling at the new guy now, and I said, “Easy, girl,” in the most soothing voice I could
muster.

I looked down at the neighbor. He’d stopped kicking, and his keening had thinned to a whine. He was just about out of air.
He took a long, choked inhale. He tried to sit up, peering at me through his fingers.

“Got-dammit, girl,” he said.

I knew him then.

He took his hands down from his egglike eyes. The whites had gone hot pink, bright as Barbie’s tube dress, and tears streamed
out of the corners. His nose had two lines of clear snot running out of it, and his body was thin and frail, an old man’s
form. He didn’t look much like his old self. But I knew him.

“Hi, Daddy,” I said.

“I mean, got-damn,” my father repeated. He put his palms against his eyes, pressing and snuffling. “I thought you was your
mother. I thought you was Claire.”

The guy in the pajama bottoms came down the step, barefoot, picking a careful path across the lawn.

“Mace or pepper spray?” he asked me, tilting his head toward the can.

“Pepper spray,” I said. I looked at the can still clutched in my fingers as if I was surprised to find it there. I flicked
the safety back on and dropped it into my purse.

“That’s a mercy,” the guy said, then added to my father, “You got any Maalox?”

“Naw, Bill, I don’t,” the skinny shadow of my daddy said, sitting flat on his butt in the grass. “I got Tums. You can go get
you some if your got-dammed pizza lunch is bothering you while I sit here going blind.”

Bill ignored that and said to me, “Help me get him up and to his house, will you?”

“I am not fucking touching him,” I said, my tone very mild.
My daddy was a wreck. He’d gone and withered himself up, and the hands he used to claw at his face trembled and were thin
and wasted. He was no match for Thom Grandee. Hell, at this point he’d been no match for me. I wanted to kick him for it while
he was good and down. I said, “Why don’t you go blind. We’ll see how you like that,” directly to him in that same mild tone.
I was panting, and each breath felt like something sharp, poking me low in my lungs.

My father said, “That don’t even make sense.”

“Well, good, then,” I said, and that didn’t make sense, either.

“Okay!” Bill said, businesslike, and the little girl and my daddy and I all turned our faces toward him, as if he’d called
everyone on the eternally dying lawn to order. He had a rounded chin and full cheeks that made him look younger than he probably
was. He had good, broad shoulders and a sprinkle of dark hair on his chest. The beginnings of a beer belly lapped the top
of his pajama bottoms. He walked past me and helped my father to his feet, calling to his daughter, “Hey, Bunny? Go get the
Maalox out of the medicine cabinet, can you? Bring it across the street to Mr. Lolley’s house?”

“Umkay,” Bunny said, and disappeared from the doorway.

Bill drew one of the sticks that used to be my father’s meaty arms over his shoulder and walked him back toward the other
house.

“Don’t you go nowhere,” my daddy yelled at me as they walked away. His voice came out burbled and thick, as if more snot was
filling up his throat, getting behind a host of other snots that were lining up to head on out his nostrils. Bill wrestled
him across his lawn and onto the porch. As they went in the door, my father was still hollering over his shoulder, “Don’t
you disappear! Don’t you go!”

I paused, shaky and panting, my hand on Gretel’s head and my heart pounding away in my chest like it was trying to get out
and follow him. I stood like tacky lawn art and the Alabama sun blazed down and it seemed to me like I was hotter than that
sun. My eyes burned as if I’d pepper-sprayed myself. I pressed my hands to my forehead, and they felt like lovely blocks of
ice.

Bunny trotted back out with an economy-size bottle of Maalox. I opened the car door for Gretel, who positioned herself at
my ankle and walked in time with me like a sergeant, hackles at half-mast. The two of us followed Bunny across the street.
The front door floated open, wavery, and my cheeks were so hot.

Gret and I stepped inside, and when I crossed the threshold I passed back in time, ten years or more. I got instant vertigo.
I put one hand out to steady myself, and it landed on the key table beside my mother’s old blue vase, still filled with her
dusty, plastic tulips. I pulled my hand away like the table was made of human bones, gaping all around me. It wasn’t our old
house, but the floor plan here was the same, and my father had laid all our things out exactly as I remembered.

“Where are you?” my father bellowed from the kitchen. “Where’d you go?” He sounded desperate, almost plaintive.

I couldn’t answer, goggling through fog at all the furniture and knickknacks of my childhood. Everything in the room was ten
years older than the last time I had seen it, and looked it. The center of the brown and gold sofa sagged, as if it had been
used for such an endless string of disreputable purposes that it had given up and bent beneath them.

“Bunny? Bring the Maalox to the kitchen,” I heard Bill calling over my daddy’s yowling. Bunny trotted obediently toward his
voice.

My mother’s ship print, so sun-faded that it looked like a photocopy of itself, was hanging in its designated space above
the sofa. It had a ruined patch in the bottom corner. Daddy must have used the wrong kind of cleaner to take off my dog-shit
good-bye note. Daddy’s recliner was still angled toward the TV, looking as lumpy and ill used as the sofa. The plank table
was there at the other end of the room, and on either side stood my mother’s bookshelves. My father had made them for her
back when they first got married, and she’d filled them top to bottom with her favorites. Less beloved books rotated in and
out of a box in the coat closet. I turned, helplessly drawn, and opened the closet. I smelled mothballs and old
paper. Sure enough, there was the same wooden liquor store crate, old books stacked three deep under the hanging coats.