The Heart is Deceitful above All Things (16 page)

I stare at the shadow his huge head makes on the ceiling.

Okay, baby . . . just relax it, okay, baby . . . ? Relax . . .'

‘I am good, right?'

‘There, baby . . . open for Daddy . . . I know you done this before, so open for Daddy.'

His thing starts to press in on me. He exhales deeply and quickly so it's hard for me to get a breath.

‘I'm good, right?'

He bends down and kisses me, his beard scratching my face, covering my nose. His tongue gags me as I open my mouth for air. He pulls up onto his elbows, his head is tossed back.

I try to put my arms around him, but I can't move them.

He grunts and pushes himself into me. I feel the tearing and remember the feeling from the last time. He was a cowboy, she was passed out, and I had to get stitches from a local doctor he knew.

I swear I can hear the tearing, hear it filling my ears, covering his moans and gasps, and I'm losing him. It's
blurry and I can't see him, just a giant burning sun being smothered.

I try to tell him to not let me go, that I need to stay with him, to know what he knows, what my mom knows, what that cowboy knows, so after, I can lay in their arms, laugh, and curl up so peacefully I could die.

But I'm split apart inside, and it's all I know and all I can find.

I stand in the bathroom looking at the stain in the middle of her white ruffled panties, the ones he had special-ordered from Victoria's Secret.

Afterwards he pulled them back up my legs. He said nothing, I said nothing.

I wad up some toilet paper and wipe at the sore, throbbing wetness. I bring it back damp with blood and mucousy stuff.

‘I'm split apart, and she's gonna leave me,' I say out loud to myself, and try not to cry.

I hear him turning on the TV and snapping a beer open. I stare at the red stain on the panties again, just like the panties she hand-rinses and hangs over the shower door when it's her time. She bleeds because men are thinking evil thoughts about her, including, and especially, me. So I have to walk to the canteen and buy her Tampax with the plastic applicator to stop the bad thoughts. They sit on the back of the bamboo shelves above the toilet, pink and thin and ready to absorb all evil.

She came home from cocktailing.

She saw me, looking like her, wearing the white baby doll Jackson bought her from Victoria's Secret, standing on a red metal folding chair, washing the bloodstained white matching panties.

She went looking for Jackson and found him asleep on their bed, laying next to a wet, red splotch on the white nubbly bedspread we got from the Holiday Inn.

She screamed so loud that Jackson himself woke up yelling.

She screamed at him for cheating on her. She screamed at him for fucking that little fucking cunt behind her back. She screamed at him for letting me wear the special things he bought her from Victoria's Secret and which are now ruined.

She saw that I had ruined everything, and she's gonna fucking kill me!

But there are worse things than getting killed.

I shine my flashlight onto the red-haired, freckled-faced boy waving at me to come and eat peaches. Even though my thing is glued backwards and there's a Tampax stuck inside me, he's waving me into his treehouse, where we can hold each other as tightly as possible and be split apart together.

We practice like we usually do on the way to the clinic, driving in Jackson's fire red pickup truck. My mom's
not taking me to the local hospital; instead we're going on a long drive to the backwoods clinic in the Virginia mountains with all the retired doctors that don't like to do paperwork.

‘Now how'd this happen to you?' she asks, smoking a cigarette in one hand, driving with the other, and staring straight down the highway, occasionally turning her head to blow smoke out the window.

‘Did it to myself,' I mumble, my stomach feeling tight and sour. I swallow a gag.

‘Louder, gotta be louder! You look 'em right in the eye, too, understand?' She tucks a piece of loose hair into her French braid, her cigarette almost burning her ear.

I nod my head.

‘Now what happened?' she asks again.

‘Did it to myself,' I say louder, and look up at the squashed-bug-filled windshield like it's the evil face of the Inquisitor.

‘Anyone child abusin' you?' Her eyes are still a little swollen, but her fresh makeup covers it.

I watch her red, glossy lips clamp down hard on her cigarette.

She's wearing little Fairy Stone cross earrings. The tears of angels from when Jesus died. Jackson bought them for her at the Fairy Stone Park gift shop.

‘Well, did they?' She slaps my thigh.

‘No, no, ma'am or . . .' I stare back at the windshield.

‘Or sir . . .' I glance up at her. She nods halfway for me to continue.

‘Did it all myself, sir, or ma'am.'

‘Say it loud.'

‘All myself, ma'am . . .' I say louder.

‘Why'd you do such a goddamn stupid fuckin' thing?'

I turn to her, she's staring straight ahead, blowing smoke, not even out the window like she usually does so she doesn't smell like a barroom slut.

‘Well?'

‘Umm . . . I wanted to be a pretty girl,' I mumble.

‘No, no, no.' She hits the wheel after each no. ‘You want them to arrest you? Lock you up in a mental hospital like they did before?' She blows her smoke straight into the windshield. ‘Or put you in jail?'

‘No,' I whisper.

‘What?'

‘No, ma'am . . .'

‘You make sure you're not rude to them, you show them I raised you correctly.'

‘Yes'm.'

‘Now why you'd do such a goddamned stupid evil fucking thing?'

‘'Cause I wanted to know,' I say too loudly.

‘Know what?' she says louder, and hits the wheel again.

I don't answer.

‘Know what?!' She slaps it again, lighter.

‘What?!'

‘What it feels like to be good.'

‘What?'

‘Ma'am.'

‘What? I think you need to be locked up in a loony bin for quite some time.'

‘Stop!' I yell.

‘What?' But she pulls over to the side of the two-lane highway.

I jump out and dry-heave into the dark green ivy growing along the black tar road.

But there's nothing inside me to come out.

‘You about done?' she calls from the truck.

When everything was over and done, the white-haired nurse shook her finger at me and said, loudly enough for everyone else in the waiting room to hear, for me not to be doing fool things like I'd done. She gave us two orange bottles of pills. One was to keep my stitches from getting infected, the other for pain and discomfort. The nurse gave me one of the second ones, and when we got to the truck my mom swallowed two of them.

We say nothing on the ride home. I must have fallen asleep because I wake up in my bed, under the blankets. I wonder if my mom carried me in or if Jackson did. I wish I'd been awake but only faking sleep when someone held me in their arms and put me to bed. I rub my forehead and check my fingers to see if there are any lipstick marks from when I was tucked in. There aren't. They probably rubbed off already anyway.

My blankets are up around me, and a little pink stuffed
bear that Jackson won for me at a fair is next to me. A bigger bear he won for her sits on their bed, but it's too big to be held and is thrown on the floor at night anyway.

They're fighting.

‘Please, baby doll,' he says again and again.

‘I'm sick of you,' she tells him.

‘I'm so sorry, baby doll,' he keeps saying.

‘You make me sick.'

I reach over to the window ledge and pick up the perfect brown angel's tear stones I found in Fairy Stone Park.

‘Lookit what I bought ya, sugar, please, honey, it's real pretty.' He sounds like he's gonna cry. I know it's hopeless. I know she's going to leave. I hold my stone crosses and pray she takes me with her.

‘Please, baby, I'm sorry, please, baby.'

I didn't really find the stones in the forest.

‘You can't just leave me, baby!'

I stole them from the gift shop, where they sell the perfect ones that others had found. I pretended I found them, pretended that only I could find something so perfect, so blessed, and so special.

‘Please.' He's crying now.

I pull myself up with difficulty, like trying to run fast inside a dream. I lean out the small window over my bed.

‘Baby doll, it won't never happen again!'

I inhale the sweet decaying smell of autumn and look
at the yellows and reds spreading down the mountains, like wildfire infecting all the other trees surrounding our trailer.

‘I thought he was you, I really did, looked just like you, I swear . . .'

I reach out my balled-up fist and toss my crosses out through the window into the dirt.

‘He was all over me, talking like you, lookin' like you, baby doll . . .'

I will wait for them to grow, like Jack's magic beans, transformed into a beanstalk growing up to heaven. I'll climb it, even though the raindrop-shaped salt water cuts me.

‘You can't do this to me, baby girl! You can't!'

The sky will open like slit skin, and the rope will shatter like glass.

‘Something ain't right with him, baby, just not right.'

And millions and millions of angels' tears will shake and pound the earth and solidify into stone crosses.

‘I won't let him get me like that again, baby doll, I swear!'

And they will wait hundreds of years for me to return and reclaim them.

‘We'll go away, baby, just you and me, somewheres nice and fancy.'

I will reclaim my tears petrified by the terror of loss.

I
'
VE
SPENT
A
lot of time searching for Canada Dry ginger ale. Many stores don't carry it. Canada Dry doesn't have poison in it. I'm not sure about other sodas. Pringles potato chips with ridges don't have poison, either. You need a big chain, like Safeway or Piggly Wiggly, that sells fancier items. Whenever things feel out of control I know the black coal is doing it, and I know what to do, my mom taught me.

I watch all the walls in the supermarket and tell her as soon as I think they move. One time we leave the cart half-full of Pringles and Canada Dry at the checkout. I tug on her black raincoat, lightly; you don't want to be obvious or they'll see. She doesn't notice my tug the first time. I look up at her face hidden in a shadow of tangled dyed black hair. The pale blue whites of her eyes dart round and round, watching the suspicious faces, mostly at the couple in pink sportswear laughing ahead of us.

They're buying a lot of poisoned foods: Land O' Lakes butter, Mr Paul Newman's salad dressing, Sprite, Burgers 'n' Buns, and way too orange carrots and Chee-tos. I try not to stare, unlike my mom, who's trying to figure
out what they are. If they're secret agents of the coal, trying to tempt and trick us. They might be innocent victims hypnotized by the forces of black coal about to be poisoned accidentally, but their pastel pink outfits match too exactly, so my guess is they are forces of evil.

I tug again at her sleeve, so long her hand is buried in its protective sheathing. It was $15 at the Salvation Army, just bought today soon after we discovered the black coal was active. We tried to find a black raincoat for me, but in my size they were all yellows and greens covered in bunnies and turtles. She said after the dye I'd be safe even without a raincoat.

The dye is in our cart, buried under six-packs of Canada Dry and the red Pringles cardboard canister with the vacuum seal, and I wish it weren't. I could slip it in the waist of my jeans, even though stealing only fuels the judgment of the coal.

I hear the
swoosh swoosh
of my mother's nails scratching up the inside of her vinyl raincoat sleeves. Her barefoot heels bounce inside her black rubber boots. I'm still in civilian clothes. My T-shirt is dirty white, as are my Keds, even my socks. My jeans are dark blue, not black. The Laundromat is next.

I'll lie naked in the backseat, staring up at the stained cheeseclothlike interior of our Toyota while she dyes my clothes in the washer.

The pink sportswear spy couple is next in line. She keeps grinning down at me, catching me staring at their Chee-tos. It's poison, all poison, I chant silently to myself,
louder than my rumbling stomach. Then, like a true demon, the woman reaches for a Hershey's bar from the rack above the conveyer belt, opens and bites into it. Hershey's can be safe sometimes, but now I know it's a trick because the chocolate smell sinks into me.

I look up at my mom to see if she's noticed, but her eyes are switching to the walls, judging their distances, measuring the inches of movement; she doesn't trust me to that job completely. I tug lightly again at the frayed sleeve.

The woman catches my eye and smiles hugely, her lipstick lines extending way beyond her actual lips, her eyes narrowing to Chinese slits with wrinkles like cat whiskers racing from the outer edges.

I hold on to my mother's sleeve; the woman leans over so her face is near mine. I smell the sugary chocolate on her breath and look up into the dark patch of nose hairs with snot strands caught inside.

‘Would you like a piece of chocolate?' she asks.

My mother shakes herself as if trying to pull her body from a trap. The woman looks up toward my mother, her smile disappearing as she speaks. ‘He's standing so quiet and good . . . I thought he might like . . .'

My mother's head sways like a caged horse's, long swoops back and forth: no. Her eyes are focused on the checkered floor.

‘Sorry . . .' the woman starts, her face contorting into a grimace. She steps back. ‘I just thought . . .'

The hand clamping my wrist makes me jump. My
mother says nothing to me or to the lady in pink still holding out a Hershey's bar; she jerks my arm as we hurry down the aisle, trying to find the way out. I can hear her panting, and my heart's booming.