The Heart is Deceitful above All Things (20 page)

She knows and I know. There will be revenge. Even though Chester and everyone, even Buddy, got rid of the coal from the basement, the black stain memory of it is there on the gray concrete. Even scrubbing it with bleach, which my mom made Chester do, couldn't remove it.

My mom hardly goes down to the basement anymore. She paces and smokes, moving in jerky fast movements
like a marionette, talking quickly to herself. Chester often gives her special vitamins to ease her mind and calm her down.

She has Chester remove the stove. I feel relieved and keep meaning to get rid of my small pile under the house. It hangs over my head, the coal waiting for me, plotting how to burn me up alive. I keep the baby coal whose mother I had destroyed; I keep him with me at all times in my back pocket as a hostage.

I jump when the big explosion comes downstairs, but I can't say I'm surprised. Me and my mother have been waiting and expecting something. And it happens like we knew it would without knowing we did. She is standing in the kitchen on one side of the cellar stairs, I'm walking toward the kitchen to help her open a beer can, her hands are too shaky.

‘It's the crystal,' she says, and laughs too loudly. I ask her why would ashtrays do that, but she only says, ‘Huh?'

In a way I feel happy it has finally come. Lately I'd catch her watching me under a haze of sour smoke, staring at me while she paced; I'd turn the sound on the TV lower, but she never said anything, just watched me, hardly blinking. She'd ask me to do things like to bring her the wine bottle from the cabinet as she sat outside on the car tire porch swing. When I'd do something wrong like drop the wine bottle, smashing it all over the floor, she said nothing, did nothing, didn't even tell Chester. I took a piece of the glass from the shattered green bottle
and ran it lightly across my stomach till I bled, just to keep everything in balance.

When she screamed and hit, it was Chester that got it, not me. She'd take off her shoes and throw them at him and call him ‘stupid fucking cunt' because he didn't get enough for their crystal. He would cover his head and slink down to the basement. She didn't threaten to leave, though. She never said, ‘Fuck you, that's it.' And she left to go to town less and less. She stayed at home upstairs with me, pacing or rocking in the tire, figuring things out aloud I couldn't understand, and waited.

And I, like she, started eating only Pringles, drinking only Canada Dry ginger ale. When Buddy would bring out the boxes from under his shirt, I'd shake my head no, until he stopped bringing them. My mom and I watched Chester and the others take their cheeseburgers downstairs, trying to hide the bags past my mother's wide-eyed glare. ‘Poison,' she'd hiss.

We stand almost facing each other, ten feet on either side of the cellar stairs as the basement explodes. The floor below us jumps and bangs and roars like a river-flooded waterfall. It's followed by synchronized popping like a fireworks display. And it's Buddy that comes out first, fire running up and down his clothes like some fire-eater's trick. Then some other guy I didn't even know, on fire like Buddy, screaming, followed Buddy out the door, out of the house.

I look at my mom slowly and deliberately smiling, and I understand. She stares back at me as more glass
and miniexplosions break from down below us. A big tongue of flame leaps out of the basement toward us. I follow my mother out the door.

The man I don't know is rolling in the yellow dirt, screaming for help. I don't see Buddy. My mom walks to the car that had been our car and then became Chester's. He'd fixed up the broken-down Toyota Tercel a used-car salesman had given my mom, turned it into a ‘souped-up, super-JAP bitch, ready to outrun any sheriff's cruiser'. He'd even painted it demon red, his favorite color.

She gets in and opens the passenger's side for me. As I climb in, another man comes stumbling out. I slam and lock my door. He runs in circles, patches of fire sprouting like grass on his arms, back, and legs. My mother starts the car. Another small blast that makes the car shake breaks the upstairs windows; little red orange flames dance inside.

The man beats wildly at himself as if a swarm of bees is attacking him. My mother backs up the car and the man suddenly turns and lunges toward us, his skin a rusty, puckered brown, flaking off him like autumn leaves. His blue eyes stare out too wide from his blackened face; his lids seem to have melted away.

He waves his pink-and-black arms, chasing us as she accelerates backward. The wheels spin in the dirt and the car lurches forward, almost hitting him as we pull out of the driveway and ride past him. I turn and watch him try to run after the car. I don't need to tell him it isn't his and my mother's car anymore. It is my mom's
and mine again, the way it is supposed to be. I swivel more in my seat and watch Chester give up chasing our demon red Toyota and just stand still, howling.

At first I thought it was my mother's voice floating in the air around me.

‘He's finally coming to.' I force my eyes open to try to find her, but the bright lights only make a blurry halo of the woman standing at the foot of my bed. I open my mouth to speak, but my throat is swollen and sore.

‘Just you lay still,' she says, sounding half like my mom and half not. ‘You go drinking down poison, now you want to go jumping out of bed.' Her tongue makes clucking noises. A different woman with a soothing voice leans over me.

‘You're in the hospital,' she tells me. ‘There's an IV in your arm and a little tube in your nose to help you breathe. Just relax and let them be.' Her hand rests on my forehead. ‘OK, sweetie?' I nod, my head stiff and ill fitting on my neck.

‘Your grandma's here,' she says, petting my head softly.

‘Momma?' I whisper in a croak.

‘In a hospital, same as you. Fitting, isn't it? Gone from us not six months.' I strain my head to see my grandmother turn to the nurse. The nurse takes her hand from my head and turns toward my grandmother. ‘Not six months and he ends up half-dead here, and she half-crazed in the mental ward.'

I drop my head back down and run my tongue over my parched, cracked lips. I suddenly feel very thirsty.

‘They hauled her off middle of the Memorial intersection, stark raving naked, preaching the doomsday.' I hear the nurse make ‘mmm, mmm, mmm' sounds.

‘Well, she didn't learn that false preaching from her father, that's for sure!'

‘You never can tell,' the nurse says, and I drift under the hum of machines buzzing like prayers.

We drive on in silence, saying nothing, as if nothing happened––it felt as if nothing ever had. We had passed Buddy running halfway to town, not on fire anymore and not black like Chester, but sooty and red, his hair on his head seeming about gone. We hadn't even slowed.

We drive, stopping once for gas, my mom paying from a small bill roll tucked inside her bra under her T-shirt.

We drive till we get to some bigger town I don't recognize. I'd fallen asleep with no dreams. I wake up as she stops the car outside a Salvation Army usedclothing store.

‘Wait here,' she says flatly. And as she gets out, ‘Keep the windows shut and your thoughts pure.' Then she disappears into the paper-mirrored doors of the Salvation Army.

The mothball smell of the clothes fills the car when she returns. I look in the bag, all the clothes are black.

‘Nothing for you, didn't have your size, we'll have to
dye your clothes so the coal can't recognize you,' she says in monotone, and drives on.

We stop at a pharmacy. She buys black hair dye and antidote. She reads from the label. ‘For accidental poisonings . . . antidote,' she says, tapping the plastic brown bottle, then pushing it under her seat. We pull into a Mobil and go into the ladies' and lock the door. She pours solution and covers our heads with the cold wet dye. Someone knocks on the door. ‘It's broken,' she shouts. ‘Go away!'

We sit on the bathroom floor while she counts the time till we wash it off. ‘One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four . . .'

We leave the Mobil bathroom with black-ringed sinks and black dyed hair. She leaves her pink T-shirt, jeans, white sneakers, and white bra and panties in the Salvation Army paper bag under a toilet stall. She puts on the black shiny raincoat and black rubber boots.

‘Now we'll get supplies, dye your clothes, and the coal won't recognize us.' She smiles and we walk toward the car.

‘Maybe we can paint it black,' she says, pointing at it.

After a few days I was released from the hospital. One of the alternate preachers from my grandfather's church drives me home, his peach-colored hair glued tight to his skull like a swim cap. He preaches psalms to me during the long three-hour drive, taking a break to tune in my grandfather's radio sermon. ‘Why we
will burn in eternal hellfire unless we are truly saved' is the topic.

I stare at the white plastic band stapled around my wrist, my name printed in purple. When I first woke up it said John Doe, but a hospital worker knew my grandfather, recognized me from services, so now I was another me again, my hair oiled, combed back, and parted, wearing blue slacks, a button-down white starched shirt, and a blazer.

Before we get out of the car to go into Piggly Wiggly to get our supplies of clothing dye, Canada Dry, and Pringles, the only food not poisoned by the coming black plague, I reach into my back pocket and enclose the baby coal in my sweaty palm.

I pull it out and place it on the dash in front of my mother. She says nothing for a long time, just stares. I want to confess about the coal under the house, how it was my fault, but all I can say is, ‘It's the baby,' and she nods and closes it inside her hand. Her eyelids closed but flickering, she presses it to her heart and then buries it in her pocket, still clutched in her hand.

‘Thank you,' she says in a whisper.

I stand still in my grandfather's antique-filled study as if in a dream, remembering again the smells of lemony wax and baking bread, the sounds of oxfords clicking on hard wood, clocks ticking off seconds, and the rules of felt-covered Bibles and leather straps hanging on hooks.

I listen to hear if he's coming, and in the absence of his footsteps I walk slowly across the wood floor to the small black coal stove, its opening like a barred jail cell or blackened teeth. Its mouth would glow behind, a demon Day-Glo red when lit.

I place my hand lightly on the smooth coal stove like I had on ours when it was hot; my mother's hand had covered mine, pressing it down.

In the car she turns to me and speaks very solemnly, her hair slicked back and hanging like a worn leather shoe tongue.

‘You and I will be the only survivors. Everyone and everything else will be burned, crushed, or poisoned.'

From the corner of my eye I see people chatting and laughing, pushing their shopping carts, unaware of their coming fate.

When she tells me the story it's always around Christmastime, after she comes home early in the morning smelling like beer, lipstick, and smoke. She flicks on the light, pushes me over to sit down, and tells me what used to happen at Christmas.

It's a German custom, German like my grandfather's father, like the throat-spitting words he shouts at my grandmother late at night.

The stockings are hung over the fireplace for all ten children, their empty shoes under the tree. On Christmas morning they line up fully dressed, excited and silent in
the hall, until my grandmother allows them in. They walk to the fireplace, and from the weight of how their stockings hang their faces fall or lighten.

‘I knew what was inside, I heard my brothers whispering what they found in theirs,' she slurs, and slaps her leg. ‘They'd gotten theirs filled bad before, but not me, I'd always . . .' She raises her hand up and lets it fall sloppily onto me. ‘Always was a good girl.' She shakes her head too widely, her hair flapping and sticking in her eyes. ‘I was a good girl,' she whispers.

‘My sisters all had treats in their stockings, only me . . .' Her fingers run through her smoke-filled hair. ‘Everyone went to their shoes next: treats or a switch, or more black . . . Jason and Joseph got switches, Noah and Job and me, just like in our stockings: coal lumps.' Her voice rises in a half shout. ‘Fuckin' coal!

‘Now . . .' She gets up and paces drunkenly beside my bed. ‘I'd learnt my verses, my psalms, my chapters, I'd done my sidewalk preaching, Bible studies, done it all . . .' Her hands wave out like she's smoothing a tablecloth.

‘My sisters stuffed down their cakes and counted their Christmas money from inside their stockings and shoes while Jason and Joseph went in to the preacher to get their whippings . . . I went, too, bold as lightning!' She wobbles into a wall. ‘I carried my stocking in my left, my shoe in my right.' She holds out each empty hand.

‘“What's this for?” I asked him before he'd even turned around, old fuck!' She snorts a laugh. ‘He says nothing,
right? Tells me to leave his study at once!' Her voice imitates his.

‘“What's this for?” I yelled again. And know what, know what?!' She slaps a wall, laughing. ‘He didn't answer me none, so I dumped it all out, the stocking and the shoe. That coal all over his fancy antique Persian motherfuckin' ugly rug. And I stomped on it, too, ground it right in, crushed it all in the rug!' she says between laughs.

She holds on to the wall and slowly slides down it, laughing. ‘And you know what he'd said I'd done? You know?' She slaps the floor, tears rolling down her face from laughter.

‘“You have evil and sin in your heart,” he told me!' She snorts, then starts to choke.

‘You were born less than a year later, so he knew what he was talkin' 'bout!' She lies there laughing until she falls asleep.

Sometimes, though, she'd have a needle still hanging in her arm and I'd slide it out, wipe it dry with toilet paper, and she'd mumble the rest: how he had her gather the coal up off the rug, place it in the stove, and light it. She stood, still seething, waiting for his apology. Waiting while he whipped her brothers. Stood and waited hours while the family went to services, her hands rolled into fists, watching the red coals burn and pop like her rage, while her father preached in his church. Waited till he returned, took off his jacket, hung and smoothed it. She
would take her whipping and not cry. She would still ask what she had done.