Backseat Saints (9 page)

I leaned in close to check the space below Anna’s message for more silver paint. There wasn’t any, so I searched the car’s
whole side, expecting to see more peeking out from under something fresh. There was none to be found. I kept going, on to
the next car and the next. I dropped to my knees to check each car’s belly, crawled to read the inside of the ones with no
doors.

There was nothing else for me.

I walked back to the car with the rose on it and stared through Anna’s message at the silver words. I tried to make the few
letters I had picked out say something else, but I couldn’t. Once the message filled in—
I did love you, Rose. Pray to Saint Cecilia!
—I couldn’t unsee it.

My body turned itself sideways, and my hands came up into the good batter’s stance I’d learned in Little League T-ball. I’d
played from the time I was five until I was eight. After that, no one was around to take me to practice, but my body still
remembered how to choke up. I gripped the narrow neck of my Coke bottle as if it were a miniature slugger. I swung it as hard
as I could at the car. The bottle hit the spray-painted rose where the petals met the edge of the car’s underside. The blow
shivered the thick glass so hard that it cracked into five or six pieces. I felt those shivers move all the way up through
me to become a buzz in my teeth as I watched the shards fall to the ground. I was left holding the neck with a single, jagged
slice of glass jutting out from it.

It looked like a weapon. Something a person would have in prison, wicked and curved and slim. I dropped it, fast, and it
jangled when it hit the other shards. I stared down at the green glass, glinting in the soil.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said, and my voice dripped acid. “I did love you, Coke bottle.”

She’d made me come out here. She told me I had to kill Thom Grandee if I wanted to live. I’d put bullets in my dog because
of her. Saint Roch tried to speak, and I said, “Shut the hell up,” to him. He didn’t know how Gretel was. None of them did,
this chain of saints bobbing in my wake, and these saints all came from her, too, didn’t they? She was the one who had always
called them. They’d answered her in ways they’d never answered me before today.

The wind that was their breath had smelled so sweet to me, like summer coming. A long time ago, on a day like this, she had
knelt with her arm around Rose Mae’s shoulders. Rose wore poppy-colored running shorts and pigtails. It was kindergarten field
day. They watched the other girls line up, all taller than Rose, with longer strides.

She was praying into Rose Mae’s ear, calling Saint Sebastian, patron to all athletes. The exact words were lost, but I remembered
the low burring of her voice, calling him and calling him, until Rose could see him. He stood on her other side, looking down,
shot through with a thousand arrows that bristled out of his body like bloody quills. His eyes were white hot and fervent.
One arrow had pierced his cheek and gone out the other side, and when he grinned, Rose Mae saw the post going across his mouth
like a horse’s bit, and his teeth were rimmed in blood.

All the girls were in a line. Rose squirmed away and trotted fast from Sebastian to join them.

Instead of a starter pistol, there was Mrs. Peirson, the gym teacher, counting down. Three, two, one, go! Rose took off. There
was no way she could win. She was the shortest girl in the whole class. But Sebastian came fast up behind her. From the corner
of her eye, she could see his shafts bounce as he ran. He bristled and dripped.

Adrenaline washed into Rose Mae’s blood, a push like a big red wave. She put her head down and tore forward. She could see
him keeping leering pace as she ran her guts out and kept running, past the hundred-yard mark, past the booth where they sold
Cokes and Popsicles, though she could hear she was being called. “Stop, Rose Mae. Stop! Stop, you silly.” The crowd around
the broad jumpers rose up in her path to block her.

Rose felt hands on her, lifting her, swinging her body high, and she almost screamed. It was only her mother, who had run
on quick little feet to catch up. Sebastian was gone, but he had indeed wrought a miracle. Rose Mae placed second.

My mother had called saints when she lost her keys, when we were late, when we were hungry or sad or tired or jubilant. These
saints that I had called today were hers. Cadillac Ranch was hers. Shooting at my husband, the bullets in my dog, these were
all hers. I was doing what she wanted, obedient and dumb as that five-year-old who got a red ribbon because her mother called
a saint stuck through with a thousand arrows and scarier than Satan.

Behind me, the trail of saints popped one by one, like soap bubbles, misting the air and then becoming nothing. I pulled off
the baseball cap. I was too hot to stand it any longer, and Cadillac damn Ranch was the one place in Texas I felt certain
I would not run into my husband. The wind caught my sweaty hair and slung it around, snarling it. I let go of the cap, and
the wind took it and tumbled it away across the field. My hair whipped into my face, and I could smell the sulfur of gunshots
in it. I lifted my hands to my nose and breathed in more sulfur and fruit sugar clinging to my palms.

For the first time since I’d gotten up and cooked Thom’s butter-logged breakfast, I felt like I was living wholly in my body.
I gathered my hair up and held it in a wad at the base of my neck with one hand, glaring at the gypsy’s message. I was surprised
the layers of paint didn’t blister and bubble and flake off and disappear under my angry gaze. Those words should be burned
away. They were
insulting on so many levels. Not the lowest of which was, she had written,
I did love you,
in the past tense.

“Smug,” I said, and turned my back on the Caddies. I was done looking at them. I walked toward Mrs. Fancy’s car, my feet smashing
down hard into the soil, every step an angry stab at the earth itself.

She’d said Thom Grandee would kill me if I didn’t get him first. I had failed, and yet the earth still turned and Thom and
I were both still breathing, because the reading wasn’t about me. It was all her.

I had reached the road. I stamped at the asphalt to get the soil off my shoes and because the stamping felt good.

The first card was loss. That was hers. She had lost me. Her marriage had been the thing that was made of swords, and no one
knew that better than the girl who had spent her first eight years growing up inside of it. My mother was the hanged man,
the one who’d had to choose, and she had chosen herself.

There was a phrase for what her child had been to her. I knew it from the black-and-white war movies Thom and I rented to
watch on the weekends. An acceptable casualty; that was what they called those poor fellows that the generals decided they
could spare ahead of time. I was the thing she left in her place when she saved herself, and I was still sitting in it, in
a place so like hers, it was easy for both of us to mistake who owned those cards.

I got in Mrs. Fancy’s Honda and slammed the door so hard behind me that the car’s frame shuddered. The most terrible part
was, now that I had seen through all her layered gypsy scarves and figured her out, she wasn’t here for me to tell her. I
couldn’t shove her nose down into the truth. All the Stephen King book had given me was a city and a state, and unless I wanted
to hire a plane to sky-write a message over Berkeley, I couldn’t tell her a damn thing.

What was left? What could I do?

I could get home. I felt my mouth drop open in a perfect O and my eyes widened. “They shot at you?” I said. Better. “They
shot
at
you?” I could act surprised. I could go see if my dog was going to live. If only Gretel was alive, then I could sleep bug
cozy next to my husband tonight in our soft bed.

In the black-and-white movie Thom and I had watched not two weeks ago, they’d sent some French guy to have his head lopped
off. He’d lifted his pointy nose and walked to the guillotine, calm and noble, saying, “The blood of kings flows in my veins.”

Well, screw that. The blood of assholes flowed through Rose Mae Lolley’s. My mother had just proven that. She was not going
to rescue me. She could take her empty
You are welcome
offer of a haven and stuff it directly up her ass. I’d sooner go to hell than go to California now. I didn’t need her, anyway.
I’d forgotten, in the wake of seeing her, that I could damn well handle Thom Grandee. A woman who couldn’t would have been
dead nine times over by now. I set off for home.

My foot, heavy in its anger, had shoved the gas pedal down. I was going a good twenty miles over the speed limit. I made myself
slow. The last thing I needed was to be pulled over now, with an unregistered gun in the car and no ID. And I was only speeding
because I was angry with that gypsy. Surely Thom was off the road by now. He must be at the vet, please God, saving Gretel.
Or he might be at the police station.

Even now, this speeding, it was about the gypsy, too. I should have been home by now, unloading the dishwasher and practicing
my surprised face. But instead I’d wasted an hour creeping around a wheat field looking for an empty love note she’d left
with no way for me to write her back.

“I’m going back there,” I told the blessedly empty car. “I’ll live through this and soothe Thom down, and then I’m going to
take a rotisserie chicken and fruit salad and some paint and Gretel and Mrs. Fancy, and go out to Cadillac Ranch.” I would
cover
Sex, Drugs, Rock-n-Roll, Anna!
and the silver remains of the gypsy’s message with graffiti of my own.

I would be sure to bring red, so I could freshen up the hippie
chick’s flowers. Beside the rose, I would write the word
Jim
, with a tiny heart for the
i
’s dot. Then a larger heart after his name, point up and humps down, so it looked like a pretty girl’s bottom. Jim upside
down hearts Rose. Those words and pictures had been on the cover of every one of Rose Mae’s high school notebooks. It would
feel good to write them again.

Then when the gypsy returned, she’d see I’d left no answer. She wasn’t my loss. There would be nothing for her, and my doodle
would stick in her throat, pointy as a fish bone.

My loss was Jim Beverly. I’d thrown that fact at her at the airport like it was monkey poop, something to offend her as she’d
gawked at my life like a tourist. Now it seemed like it was true. Rose Mae’d been soldered to Jim Beverly’s right hip bone
from third grade on, through most of high school, for more years than Rose had had a mother.

In grade school, after the boys were divvied up for kickball, Jim had picked her first from all the girls, every time. Rose
Mae got free lunch in middle school, and Jim’s mother packed him one from home. He’d always shared his fresh fruit and eaten
half her chalky brownie. In high school, she’d written his reports for civics, and he’d done her dissections. They’d traded
virginities in tenth grade. He was the boy she first saw naked, too, though that was years earlier, when they were only nine.
Rose had made him show first.

They’d met in the woods behind the elementary school. He had turned his back, pulling down his shorts and underwear very quickly.
His T-shirt hung down so only the lower half of his bottom showed. She saw two beige squares with a crease between them, flat
and small, like the crimped edge of the Post toaster pastry she’d eaten for breakfast.

“Now you,” he said.

Rose turned her back. She was so spindly that she barely had a butt at all, more like a little slice. She reached up under
her dress, careful not to raise the hem, and pushed her cotton underpants
down. Then she quickly flipped the skirt up and back down, yanking up her panties a scant second after. She turned around
to face him. It was summer, and the Alabama woods were so lush that even the air seemed green as the sunlight filtered through
all those trees.

“Want to do fronts?” Jim asked.

Rose shrugged and they stood there for half a minute, maybe longer. She said, “You first.”

“I did butts first.”

She waved that away. “Everyone has butts. You first.”

He shrugged and pulled his shorts down again, this time using his other hand to raise his T-shirt, just a little. His thighs
were pressed tight together, from nerves, she thought, and it pushed his testicles forward into a wad, so that the whole thing
looked like an upside-down pansy. His pale, smooth penis was the rounded bud tuft at the center.

“It’s nice,” Rose said, surprised.

“Now you,” he said, yanking up his shorts.

Rose scuffed one foot at the dirt, not looking at him.

“Now you,” he said again, more insistent because she had one over on him; it wasn’t equal anymore.

“Rose Mae!” he said, but it seemed to Rose there was no way to make it equal. She was only a little pad of fat there where
he would see. All her interesting pieces were tucked under.

“I want to be fair,” she said, eyebrows coming together. He nodded, uncertain.

She left her panties on and began lifting her dress. She crumpled the hem of it in her fists as she went, pulling it high
so that he could see her belly and her skinny rib cage. Her trunk was a mess of dark, welted flesh that began at the panty
line and went up, swelling her flat chest where her breasts would one day be. The bruises were all fresh. Her mother had been
gone almost a year now, and her daddy had only just started.

Jim’s eyes widened. She thought they got darker, too, but it
was only his pupils expanding. The black ate up the blue to a little rim.

“Can I touch?”

Rose shrugged. He stepped forward and reached out one dirty brown boy’s hand to cover her belly, tracing the mottled black
and purple in a soft pet that ended at her nipple. Then he pulled back his hand as if her skin was hot.

“We’re even,” Rose said, and let her dress go, the hem falling back down around her knees. He didn’t bother to nod or say
yes. It was obvious that they were.

Instead he said, “I won’t tell,” and Rose nodded, solemn.