Not a Sparrow Falls (2 page)

“Um-um.” He shook his head. “You don’t look old enough to be married, let alone have children.”

Mary was thinking of what to say, but then realized he wasn’t expecting an answer. He rang up the sale and loaded the bottles into a bag.

She just nodded and knew that once again her silky blond hair and wide blue eyes had done the trick. “Be twenty-five next birthday,” she said, the only truthful thing she’d told the poor man in the whole conversation.

“Um-um,” he repeated again. “Don’t look a day over seventeen.”

She held her breath until he had handed her the change from her hundred.

“I thank you,” she said, forcing herself to look up. He looked right at her now, as if he’d suddenly realized what she was up to. She didn’t let on, just flashed him another smile. She felt the familiar surge of relief as the bells on the door jingled behind her; then she aimed for the sidewalk and looked for the truck, which was there for a change. Usually she had to kill time waiting for Dwayne to get back from his
runs to the agricultural supply and hardware stores, but this time he was waiting for her. It was a good thing, for it was cold, even for Virginia in October. It would freeze again as soon as the sun set.

Dwayne flicked his cigarette out the window and started the engine as she put the sack of cold preparations in the back, along with the bottles of antifreeze and drain cleaner and the two big tanks of anhydrous ammonia. She tried not to think about what they would become. She’d seen a picture once in school of a fellow who’d been on methamphetamine. First picture was normal. Next picture looked to be about ten years later, the third one taken when he was an old man.

“These photos,” the DARE officer had said, “were taken six months apart. That’s what meth does to you.”

Mary put that thought out of her mind. Tried to, at least. She climbed into the passenger side, and thankfully, Dwayne didn’t speak, just grunted and shifted the truck into gear, pulled out onto the street, and then aimed for the bypass and home.
Home,
she thought with a shudder. A rusting singlewide where they ate and slept, and an old, falling-down smokehouse out back where Jonah made the candy, as Dwayne called it. She closed her eyes and tried to ignore the voice that asked her, louder and louder each day, what she was doing here.

It’s not my fault,
she argued with it.
I’m making out best I know how.
She certainly hadn’t graduated from high school, set down her cap and gown, and decided to begin her career in meth production. No. Like her grandmother used to say, it had been like boiling a frog, a gradual and easy turning up the heat until the water was rolling up all around her, and here she still sat. She reviewed the steps that had gotten her here. The good reasons she’d had to leave home with Jonah and take his offer of easy money. But as she justified her actions, she could hear her mama’s voice, gentle but stern, cautioning even from the grave that there was no right way to do a wrong thing.

If Mama were here, everything would still be right. Or at least not as bad wrong as it had become. But Mama was dead, and Papa was gone, her brother and sisters scattered. And she was here.

For the time being, anyway. Over the last five years she’d lived more places than she could count. They’d been like nomads, picking up and moving on every time the law got to sniffing around. Sometimes their timing was bad, and Jonah or Dwayne would get picked up. They’d do jail time, then get out and be back at it again. She’d never gotten caught. Just lucky, she guessed. She supposed she could have left during one of their jail sentences. She could leave now, for that matter.

She wasn’t a prisoner. Exactly. She could easily walk away any number of times during the course of a day, slip out the back door of one of the pharmacies or hardware stores while Dwayne waited out front in the pickup. Head for the bus station while he was making a sale. But where would she go? And what would she do once she got there? She couldn’t go home again, and even the thought of home—the word calling up the image of the old white clapboard house nestled in the hollow—brought a sharp stab of pain. She couldn’t go home. It wasn’t just an hour away, but a lifetime. No, after what she’d done and become, she couldn’t go there. And she had no money to start out anywhere else.

The promised profits had never been delivered. She asked for money now and then. Dwayne would say ask Jonah, and Jonah would dole it out a twenty at a time. That was not counting the hundred-dollar bill Dwayne handed her every time she went into a pharmacy to buy cold medicine or diet pills. They must know that if she ever got her hands on anything larger, she would be off and gone.

And then what?
she asked herself wearily. She had no education. No skills besides buying ingredients for meth, and she was afraid of what would happen if she lived on the streets. That pressure had already started. The men who came to
transact business with Dwayne were giving her looks, not to mention Dwayne himself.

Jonah, though, the one she’d run off with, hardly even noticed her anymore. The earth could open up and swallow her, for all he was concerned. He was always out in the shed cooking candy, and even when he was present physically, he was in a world of his own. But then, that was nothing new.

Jonah had always been different. He wasn’t like the other boys around home who lived for football and hunting. He’d never had any patience for their foolishness, their big cars, their silly social games, and he hadn’t minded saying so. When she remembered Jonah, the image that appeared was his back disappearing into the woods. That seemed to be how she’d most often glimpsed him—mysterious and slightly out of touch, like someone born in the wrong century. Jonah, silent and intense, roaming over the hills and hollows, coming back with pockets full of arrowheads, ginseng plants with roots neatly wrapped in his handkerchief, a handful of sparkling rocks carefully picked from the red dirt. His best friend had been that great-uncle of his who lived in the cabin up on the ridgetop. That old man’s hands had been thick as leather from all the stings he’d gotten through his years of keeping bees, but he’d made the best sourwood honey you could ever hope to taste. It was sweet and fragrant and a clear light amber. Jonah had gotten his solitary ways from him.

He looked like him, too, the shadow of the old man appearing in the young. Both had the same rough-hewn features, reminding her of the mountains they loved. Both had high, broad foreheads, sharp cheeks, and broad, sharp-angled jaws. Like his uncle’s, Jonah’s face was plain and straight, just as if it had been cut from stone. Even his eyes were like the mountain’s gray granite, and just like those rocks, they were flecked with little bits of white.

Jonah’s movements had alway been easy and fluid, amazingly graceful for such a tall, lanky man. He’d moved through the woods silently and quickly, or stood still, only his eyes
moving, watching some creature, taking note of whatever had changed since the last time he’d passed through. He knew the location of every beehive and squirrel’s nest. There was nothing on that mountain he didn’t see.

“He’s peculiar,” her father would say flatly, watching with narrowed eyes whenever Jonah passed by. She twisted her mouth into a bitter smile. If Papa had thought Jonah was peculiar then, she wondered what he would say about him now.

He probably wouldn’t even recognize him. Jonah’s skin had become pasty white, his face gaunt and haggard. And it wasn’t just his body that had changed. It was as if his personality, that indefinable thing that made Jonah himself, had been slowly eaten away, edged out an inch at a time by his bitterness and the steadily increasing diet of methamphetamine. She had a sudden vision of Jonah’s soul looking like a piece of Swiss cheese. Whoever lived in his body now was paranoid and wild in the head. He’d go off about nothing at all, typical of the hardcore meth user he’d become.

Dwayne prided himself that he only used occasionally, but Mary knew that’s how it had started with Jonah, too. She used some milder things from time to time, but nothing really touched that empty spot inside of her. Whenever she wondered why she bothered to restrain herself, a quick look at Jonah reminded her.

He went through the same cycle over and over again. Get high, higher, higher, using a little more each time, becoming crazier and crazier. He would yell and scream and see things, and that phase could go on for days, even weeks. Then he’d come down with a crash, sometimes having a few hours or minutes of sanity as he plummeted, finally sleeping for days, almost comatose. He would wake up hungry for more, and off he’d go again.

She’d heard about a man in New Mexico who’d been tweaking—at the peak of the cycle of highs. He’d become convinced his son was possessed and had cut off the boy’s head and tossed it out the window of his truck. Lately Jonah
had been having those kinds of paranoid fits, staring at her and Dwayne, then suddenly going silent, as if voices inside his head were saying things that scared even him. She was afraid of him and had gone to hiding the knives and razors, anything he could use to hurt himself or someone else. Last week he’d burst into the living room of the trailer, shotgun raised to his shoulder, talking about somebody stealing his brain.

“Give me that thing before you kill somebody,” Dwayne had said, wrenching the gun away from Jonah, who’d stared at him, wild-eyed and panting, his sharp features even more pronounced since he’d lost weight. “Here.” Dwayne had handed the gun to her. “You better keep ahold of that. Jonah’s been sampling too much of the product. Getting into the candy a little too often.”

She’d taken the gun, and as soon as she felt the smooth stock under her hand, the realization had come to her like a long awaited dawn. Dwayne trusted her. But then, just as if he’d read her mind, he settled himself onto the broken-down couch beside her, lifted one of those tattooed hams of his, and rested it around her shoulders. She’d done her best not to flinch.

“There was an old boy down in Boone’s Mill tried to cheat us out of some money a while back,” he said conversationally. “Know what happened to him?”

She shook her head and pretended to be uninterested.

“Somebody doused him with gasoline and set him afire while he was sleeping.”

She hadn’t responded. It was probably just more of his foolishness. That was just Dwayne. Always bragging. But Jonah. Well, these days there was no telling what Jonah might do. She hadn’t said anything after that, just pointed her eyes toward the television, but the little spark of hope had died out just the same.

She’d gone to her room after a while, when all the traffic started coming in and out, when the music started pounding
the walls. She’d read a magazine for a while and then finally fallen asleep. Around five in the morning she’d gotten up to go to the bathroom. Everyone had finally gone home, and someone had turned off the stereo. She could hear Dwayne snoring from the couch. She headed back to her room, but Dwayne roused himself, got up, and followed her down the hall. She hurried into her bedroom, pressed the door quietly until it latched, then hooked the pitiful lock. Not that it would do much good if he decided to come in. He lumbered closer, and she heard him pause outside the door. She had held her breath, and after a few minutes the floor creaked, and she heard his bedroom door open and shut. But it wouldn’t be long. She had rested her forehead against the bedroom door that night and tried to pray, but no words would come.

Now she turned her face toward the truck window, barely taking note of the beauty of the mountains, the flaming leaves on the trees. How was it that her life had become such a dry, hot desert? A canyon of stone and dust where every turn just led her farther in instead of out into grassy valleys with shady trees and quiet ponds. She felt weary all the way to her bones. She leaned her head against the window glass.

Who was she, really? Surely not this person she’d become. She tried to remember the last time she’d caught a glimpse of her real self. She focused her thoughts, not playing with the idea, but really wanting to remember, and her mind went to a place she’d tried hard not to visit. She was twelve years old. Her little-girl face beamed back at her from memory’s hiding place. Her teeth were a shade too big for her features, her hair silky white, spilling down around her shoulders. Her legs were thin and still bruised from play, her shining eyes lit with a light that hadn’t yet gone out. Mary Bridget smiled, remembering the high point of that year. She had memorized one hundred verses in Sunday school and won a brand-new white leather Bible with her name embossed on the front in curly golden letters.

The scene shifted. Another tableau came into focus, and
she was with her mama at Grandma’s, snapping beans and going over those verses. She could almost smell the fragrance of Grandma’s kitchen—a mix of coffee and biscuits and apples and woodsmoke and whatever she was cooking for supper. She could almost hear the energetic hissing of the pressure cooker, the murmur of their conversation, the creaking of their chairs, the strains of Grandma’s gospel music in the background.

Mama and Grandma had both come to the church the night she’d been awarded her Bible. She stared straight ahead, and instead of the dusty dash of the truck she saw the two of them, starched and pressed, sitting in the front row, their pride beaming toward her so strongly she could still feel its warmth. She held on to the bittersweet picture as long as she could, but after a few moments it faded.

She stared bleakly out the smudged window of the truck. Where had that girl gone? What had happened to change her? It was a question she never allowed herself to ask. And the only reason she was asking now was the gnawing, growling torment that had come upon her lately. Something in her that she’d managed to keep sleeping all these years was coming awake, twisting and struggling to be free. And it hurt. She hadn’t felt such misery since the first days, since that first morning when she’d awakened next to Jonah and realized what she’d done. Shame had spread through her chest and stomach, like something cold and poisonous. It had felt so bad she hadn’t thought she could live. So she had learned how to make it go away.