Back Roads Read online

  “She must have really loved him.”

  Bud nodded. “Callie’s a little intense. When I worked with her I always felt like she was being pulled in a hundred different directions. Her grandpa was sort of her compass from what I could tell. Once he passed on—” he paused and tapped his temple with a finger, “her needle started spinning, if you know what I mean. I think she stayed on his land hoping to find some peace.”

  “Did he give her the land before she got married?”

  Bud stopped and gave me a searching look. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you talk so much. Getting all keyed up about your date, huh?”

  “Did he?” I asked again.

  “I think so.”

  “Why’d she get married then?”

  “Well, I can’t say for sure but I don’t think land ownership factored into it one way or the other.”

  “I’m just saying if she had all that land and a job, she wouldn’t have to get married.”

  “There you go again. Who said she had to get married? I imagine she loved the guy. You got something against Brad Mercer?”

  “I don’t even know him.”

  I lost interest in the conversation once her husband came back into it. I was going to be late for my date anyway.

  I said good night to everybody and started for the door. I was standing on the mat when I heard Church yell at the top of his lungs, “Harley, my mom says you won’t need any rubbers tonight.”

  The doors slid open and I got out of there as fast as I could, their laughter ringing in my ears.

  I was supposed to meet Ashlee at the fountain in the middle of the mall. I hadn’t given much thought to why she wanted to meet me instead of making me pick her up but as soon as I turned the corner past the fabric store and heard girls laughing, I knew. I would have left, but one of them spotted me and whispered to Ashlee. She looked over and waved and went back to her girlfriends. They whispered and laughed some more, then eyed me up and down with leering, smirking smiles.

  Ashlee had snagged herself an older guy, a real man who paid taxes and bought his own underwear. She didn’t like me. She didn’t want to know me any more than I wanted to know her. She just wanted to show me off to her friends.

  I deserved it considering the reason I was there. I couldn’t think of a more even exchange: my dignity for her pussy.

  She slid off the bricks surrounding the fountain and walked over to me. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. There were certain things you couldn’t tell from a yearbook picture.

  “Hi, Harley,” she said.

  “Hi,” I said back. “I hope I’m not late.”

  “I don’t care,” she said.

  She stepped up in front of me and stood perfectly still like an offering.

  “I mean, I don’t want us to be late for the movie,” I explained.

  “I don’t care,” she said again. “I’ve seen it.”

  “You want to see something else?”

  She waved her hand in the air, then slipped it into one of mine.

  “I’ve seen them all,” she said, and started leading me to the fountain to introduce me to her friends.

  There were four of them, but they were interchangeable. Same fluffy hair. Same doe-eyed makeup and berry brown lipstick. Same clingy halter tops and fringed cutoffs and stack-heeled sandals.

  I looked at them sprawled on the brick around the fountain, the bare legs and bellies and throats begging to be handled. It should have been a crime. Premeditated arousal. I should have been able to call Security and have them dragged off. All except Ashlee, who I wanted to keep for myself.

  It turned out she didn’t talk much. She flashed me a lot of adoring looks and kept reaching down to adjust her sandal buckle after we took our seats in the theater. Each time she did, her halter top pulled away from her shorts and I glimpsed the start of a shadow at the base of her spine. I wanted to kiss that spot more than I wanted to kiss her lips.

  The movie was lost on me. I couldn’t have cared less about a bunch of screaming teenagers getting ominous letters and finding dead bodies in the trunks of their cars. Ashlee had claimed she’d already seen it but that didn’t stop her from being terrified. She grabbed my arm whenever something scary happened. She had become permanently latched there by the time the credits rolled. I barely noticed her. I was thinking about how much money I had spent on a lame movie and popcorn and Cokes. Being the breadwinner took the joy out of a lot of things.

  We left the theater holding hands. Ashlee kept looking around for anyone she knew. In the parking lot, she headed straight for my truck. I couldn’t figure out how she recognized it. If she had ever been over to our house, it was while I was at work. Then I remembered that sometimes the cars and trucks that dropped off Amber in the middle of the night were full of girls.

  I got a strange feeling imagining Ashlee walking past my truck in the dark, slowly dragging her fingertips across the dirty hood, and thinking about me while I was asleep not thirty feet away in my ratty underwear. I liked her thinking about me as long as she didn’t know me, but I didn’t like her touching the truck. I opened the door for her and watched her crawl inside.

  “You want to get some pizza or something?” I asked her after I got in too.

  “You don’t have to do that,” she said.

  What she meant was “I know you don’t have any money.” I must have let my anger show because she quickly added, “I’m not hungry is all I mean. It’s kind of late.”

  “Do you have to get home?” I asked, almost hopeful.

  “My mom don’t care what time I get home.”

  “What about your dad?”

  “My folks are divorced.”

  She said it with a pinched dignity as if she admired the act but disagreed with the principles behind it.

  “What about Dusty?”

  “Dusty? Why would he care?”

  She reached down into the trash on the floor of the truck. I had forgotten to clean it out. She brought back Mom and Dad’s wedding picture.

  “This your folks?” she asked.

  “It came with the frame,” I said.

  She giggled. “You look like your dad,” she said, and gave me a hesitant smile. “I’m sorry about all that.”

  ALL THAT. The letters floated in front of my eyes, soft and puffy, like the caterpillar inAlice in Wonderland had blown them from his hookah. I blinked them away.

  “Yeah, ALL THAT really sucked,” I said.

  “I know it’s been real hard on Amber. It really changed her a lot.”

  “Yeah, she used to be human.”

  She laughed again, letting it trail off into another giggle. “Amber says you’re real funny.”

  She was still holding the picture. One of her purple polished thumbnails covered Mom’s face. I thought about grabbing the back of her neck and smashing her face into the glass.

  “You don’t want to go home yet?” I said, looking away from her and the picture.

  “Not really.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know. It’s such a hot night for this time of year. We could go over to the reservoir. You got a blanket in the truck?”

  “I’ve got a coat.”

  The glass shards embedded in her forehead would twinkle in the moonlight when I laid her down on it.

  “Okay,” she said.

  We weren’t the only couple out on a Friday night who had come up with the reservoir idea. The sight of all the cars and trucks—some of them solitary and rocking, others covered with kids sitting on the hoods and trunks smoking and drinking and laughing about shit they weren’t going to find at all funny in a couple more years—irritated me. I suggested to Ashlee we try the township park.

  Except for a couple making out on the slide and another one on the swings, the place was empty. I parked my truck facing away from the playground and toward the softball field.

  “You want to go there?” Ashlee asked, staring out the windshield at the pitcher’s mound.


  I wanted to wash her face. She wore too much makeup. I knew she did it to look older but it had the opposite effect. She reminded me of all those child beauty queens that were on TV and the tabloid covers after that one was murdered. Little Miss Lovely. Little Miss Physical Stimuli. Little Miss Pedophilia. That was Skip’s joke. And if she was from Philly, she’d be Little Miss Philadelphia Pedophilia. And we tried to say it ten times fast sitting in the mining office, all grown up now, with beers stolen from our dads instead of bologna sandwiches made by our moms.

  “What are we going to do when we get there?” I asked her, glancing at the mound.

  “What?”

  “What are we going to do when we get there?” I asked again, slower and louder, like I was talking to a dim-witted Girl Scout.

  “Whatever you want,” she said.

  “Whatever I want.”

  Maybe she had misunderstood. Maybe she thought I was talking about a choice between tag or hide-and-go-seek. Maybe this was all a big joke. Why had Amber set me up on a date in the first place? Since when did she do me favors? Was Ashlee going to turn me down? Was that it? Or was she going to make it with me and tell Amber all about it? Were they going to sit around with the Interchangeables and crucify me?

  “Do you think I’m ugly or something?” she said in a low personal tone like she was discussing the possibility with herself.

  “No.”

  “I’m on the pill,” she added with holiday eagerness. “Most guys get real excited over that.”

  A sharp pain stabbed me above the eyes.

  “You know what that means?” she said, lowering her voice to a whisper. “No rubbers.”

  My hands started shaking, but I smiled anyway. I was torn in two by a violent desire to be like MOST GUYS and a helpless need to be me.

  “Aren’t you kind of young to be on the pill?” I asked her.

  “My mom put me on it. She says she doesn’t want me ending up like her.”

  She put one of her hands on my leg and moved toward me. I let her kiss me. It wasn’t much of one on my part. She pulled away, mildly stunned, and fixed me with the straining, empty eyes of someone who had been recently blinded.

  I pushed her away. Maybe too hard. She crashed into the passenger side door and gave a small wounded cry when her naked shoulder hit the window handle. She stayed perfectly still in the corner, staring at me, frozen not by fright but by glaring disbelief.

  I started the truck. At the first cough of the engine, she tried to kiss me again. I saw her lips coming at me with the deadly intent of a charging bull. The back of my hand met the side of her face and I heard her head make a hollow clunk against the window glass. She broke into sobs.

  “I lied,” I said. “I think you’re ugly.”

  It was for her own good.

  I didn’t know how I ended up at Callie Mercer’s house. I couldn’t remember where I had left my truck. If I had gone home first. If I had left it parked on the side of the road somewhere. Mrs. Shank had told Misty I sat in front of their house for an hour. I didn’t believe it then but now I wasn’t so sure.

  I had taken a roundabout way, following the railroad tracks, crossing her creek, approaching the house from an angle where the dogs couldn’t see me. A light burned in the jungle room.

  The worst part about tonight was not having anyone to talk to. No Skip. No Dad. I was old enough now I could have talked to Dad about sex. We had come close once. The first time I went out with Brandy he had been home and as I was leaving he told me to remember, a few seconds of ecstasy wasn’t worth a lifetime of driving a cement truck. He had said it laughing and my mom had called out, “Thanks a lot,” from the kitchen. All I heard was “a few seconds of ecstasy.”

  Callie was sitting sideways on a white wicker couch, wearing a big T-shirt and nothing else, with a mile of bare leg draped over one of the armrests. She was reading a book and had a beer sitting on the floor next to her.

  I changed my mind. The worst part about tonight had been finding out I didn’t want the one thing I was counting on to make me feel good. There would be no relief from living.

  Her husband came into the room. He walked over to her and his lips moved. She looked up from her book and I thought to myself, If he touches her, I will die.

  chapter ( 8 )

  All those times me and Skip tried to kill Donny were just for fun. At least they were for me. I never wanted to kill Donny. The truth be told, I kind of liked him although I would have never told Skip that.

  Donny radiated contentment, a sleepy lying-in-the-sun kind of mental bliss I had never known. Even when Skip yelled at him or pushed him around, he seemed okay with it. One time we barricaded him in a closet for a whole day trying to suffocate him. I broke into a cold sweat when we went back and knocked on the door and didn’t get an answer, but Skip didn’t get scared at all. We moved the chairs away, opened the door, and a couple seconds later Donny slid out on his belly, blinking, saying he was a night crawler.

  I was sure my fondness for him was nothing more than little brother envy since I only had Amber: a chattering shadow who turned cartwheels for no reason and left every room smelling like watermelon Lip Smacker. I thought the best thing about having a little brother would have been the luxury of occasionally forgetting he existed.

  I was thinking about Donny because I had noticed Skip didn’t mention him in his letter. I had it sitting on the counter next to Callie Mercer’s recipe for bean and macaroni soup. I couldn’t imagine writing anyone a letter without mentioning the girls even if I was living away from them. They would have been there in my thoughts whether I wanted them to be or not.

  Skip’s letter had seen better days. Some of the words were beginning to rub off and the creases were gray and shiny from being folded and unfolded too much. I would have gone to visit him that very minute if I had the money. I thought about my schedule, searching for an extra chunk of time where I could stick in a part-time job. The ice cream places, the drive-in, the miniature golf courses would all be hiring soon. Some already were.

  Weekdays I worked nine to five and seven to midnight. Weekends I sometimes worked the same, but every once in a while I had a day off like today. I could be handing ice cream cones to Ashlee and MOST GUYS and getting paid for it instead of making soup and getting abuse for it.

  The bacon in the pot sizzled and popped. I was supposed to be sautéing it with a finely chopped onion and two minced garlic cloves in olive oil which we didn’t have. I wasn’t sure what sauté meant, but I was pretty sure it didn’t mean burn the crap out of it.

  I gave the brown mess a stir with Mom’s wooden spoon. Most of it stuck to the bottom of the pan. I turned down the heat and added the can of whole tomatoes. The recipe said to chop them up so I started ripping at them with the spoon, thinking about Ashlee again.

  I sensed Jody standing behind me.

  “You’re not supposed to burn it,” she said.

  “Are you sure about that?” I replied without turning around to look at her. “It says right here in the recipe, ‘be sure to burn it.’ ”

  She darted up next to me and left a note on the counter.

  DEAR HARLEY,

  I HOP YOU FILL BEDER.

  YUR SISTER,

  JODY

  I hadn’t been in a very good mood when I finally rolled out of bed that afternoon. I didn’t look too good either.

  I knew Jody was still in the room with me.

  “What?” I shouted.

  “You’re supposed to put little leaves in with the tomatoes.”

  “Sorry. We’re fresh out of sage.”

  “Esme’s mom grows it in her garden.”

  “Good for her.”

  I kept stirring. Misty joined Jody. They lurked in the doorway and talked in whispers.

  “Did you get my note?” Jody asked me.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I really meant it.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Can we go to the Lick n’ Putt?”
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  “Can you get a job?”

  “Told you,” Misty grunted as Jody slumped back to her.

  Add salt and freshly ground pepper to taste. Simmer for ten to twelve minutes.

  “Freshly ground pepper,” I muttered to myself.

  I grabbed Mom’s pepper shaker shaped like an Amish guy and dumped a ton in. I set him back down next to his wife in a black bonnet carrying a basket of apples. Men were always pepper; women always salt. Black. White. Evil. Virtuous.

  “You prick,” Amber seethed.

  I heard her bare feet pad across the kitchen tile. She sounded naked. I glanced at the front of the microwave to catch her reflection in it. She had on a crocheted bikini top and a pair of cutoffs decorated with lace. I didn’t know how I was going to survive another summer of her lounging around in a bathing suit. The one she wore last year was chiseled into my brain with the cosmic permanence of the Ten Commandments on stone.

  “I figured something might go wrong like you wouldn’t be able to get it up or you wouldn’t know where to put it,” she said, “but I never expected you to hit her. You never hit me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  I whirled around and spattered tomato juice all over her bare belly. She flinched at the sight of it and at the sight of the spoon, her blue eyes showing a moment of pure depthless fear before she came splashing back to the surface to find her rage floating reliably above her like a life preserver.

  She took hold of the bottom of my shirt with a yank and wiped off her belly with it.

  “I just got off the phone with Tracy. She said Ashlee said you hit her.”

  “Who the hell is Tracy?”

  “You met her last night at the mall.”

  “Right. Was she the slutty-looking one? Or the slutty-looking one?”

  She eyed me with weary disgust. “Where do you get off with that attitude? Everyone’s too stupid or slutty or lazy for you. Who do you think you are?”

  “God.”

  “You do.” She laughed drily. “You probably think you’re better than God. If you ever met Him, you’d probably tell Him to get a job.”