Back Roads Page 8

“You think Amber’s feelings get hurt easier than yours?”

  I could barely keep my eyes open and my stomach kept growling. I was getting the egg roll for myself today. Screw Misty.

  “Amber doesn’t have any feelings,” I said.

  “Then you’re not making sense.”

  She waited for me to say something, and I didn’t. She started messing with her dress. It went all the way down to her knees, covering her thighs. I thought about complimenting her so she might start wearing longer ones all the time, but I had never said anything remotely nice to the woman and she probably would have thought I was having another breakthrough and run off to get me more water.

  “Let’s get back to your mother and what you were saying earlier about how comfortable she seemed in the Hug Room. You denied that this bothered you, but it seemed to me that it did bother you. Why? Shouldn’t you be happy that your mother is coping well?”

  I didn’t want to talk about Mom anymore but not talking about anything never worked at getting Betty off my back. I threw out a different topic, hoping to take her mind off Mom the same way the ketchup-stained end off a bun made Elvis forget about the hot dog he didn’t get.

  “Parents do worry more about daughters than sons just because they can get pregnant,” I insisted roughly.

  “That might be true in some cases,” she allowed. “Why don’t we talk about this some more after we finish talking about . . .”

  “It’s true in all cases,” I pushed.

  “Well, I don’t know about that.”

  “It is.”

  “It’s true a girl can get pregnant, but it takes a boy to get her that way. Don’t you think parents worry about their sons being sexually active too?”

  “It’s not the same thing.”

  “Why not?”

  “A guy can walk away from it.”

  “A girl can have an abortion.”

  “It’s not the same thing.”

  “What would you do if you got a girl pregnant?”

  I wiggled my toes around inside my boots. I was going to have to break down and start wearing gym shoes. My feet were roasting.

  “Marry her,” I said.

  “That’s interesting.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you answered so quickly and so confidently, yet you don’t know anything about the circumstances. For instance, what if you didn’t like the girl very much.”

  “I had sex with her, right?”

  “Yes. So you’re saying you would only have sex with a girl you liked.”

  “If she would have sex with me, I would like her.”

  “Harley.” She laughed and her nickel-plated hair shimmered a little.

  I turned back to the window, disgusted and embarrassed. I was serious.

  “All right,” she said. “What if you didn’t love her?”

  She was starting to piss me off. I wondered if I should take her low opinion of me personally or if it was only something else she had read in a book: “Teenagers have no morals and will fuck anyone.” Someday I wanted to visit her real office and go through those books. I was willing to bet I could find everything stupid and mean she had ever said to me written down in one of them. I bet she had hundreds.

  “What if a wife and child would interfere with your plans for the future?” she kept at me. “What if you had no source of income?”

  “If I got her pregnant,” I burst out angrily, “it would mean I was being stupid.”

  I snapped my mouth shut and went back to staring out the window but I could feel her staring at me. I knew she was going to ask me why. WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? Why would it mean you were being stupid? Why do you feel that way? Why do you think your mother shot your father? Why do you think your father didn’t like you?

  “There’s no excuse for it,” I answered her before she could ask me to explain. “You know it can happen unless you do something about it. I have no sympathy for people who get accidentally pregnant. They’re all idiots just like that idiot woman who sued McDonald’s because she burned herself with their coffee.”

  “Some people don’t think that woman was an idiot. She won a lot of money.”

  “Yeah, I know. And O.J.’s walking around. All that proves is the courts are fucked. What I’m talking about is people being responsible for their own fuck-ups.”

  I didn’t usually say the F-word around Betty. I could tell it bothered her, and she wasn’t sure what to do about it. Give me water? Offer me a Kleenex? Pat my hand? She had tried patting my hand once. I had been talking about getting rid of the dogs and started to cry. It was the only time I had ever cried around her.

  I remembered her old hand feeling cool and dry and I liked her touch for a split second but then I felt more hatred for her than I had ever felt for anyone in my life. I jerked my hand away and went running out. I stayed away for two appointments after that, even after I realized the reason I hated her was because I didn’t hate her.

  She made a fist and coughed into it.

  “So you would marry her out of responsibility?” she asked me.

  “I guess so.”

  “Could I go so far as to say you would marry her as a form of self-punishment?”

  “I guess.”

  “Do you hear what you’re saying, Harley? You would commit yourself to another human being for the rest of your life as a form of punishment. Do you think that’s what a marriage should be based on?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  She leaned back in her chair and glanced at the untouched Styrofoam cup of water sitting on the table next to the Kleenex and my Redi-Mix cap.

  “What about your parents?” she asked. “They were married because your mother got pregnant. And they were very young. Were they stupid?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yet despite feeling this way, you would intentionally do the same thing if you got a girl pregnant?”

  “Yes.”

  She looked at me with her young eyes in her old face, and I looked away. She was trying to figure me out. That always made me nervous as hell. I preferred it when she stuck to her job, which as far as I could tell was getting me to talk mindlessly about myself.

  “Did your parents have a good marriage in your opinion?”

  I had to hand it to her, not many people could ask that question with a straight face.

  “I thought so.”

  She nodded again. “What made you think that?”

  I gave the question a lot of thought. I didn’t know why. I usually said the first thing that came into my head. “They got along well,” I answered.

  “They liked each other?”

  “Yeah. I mean, they didn’t paw each other or write love letters or anything like that.”

  “How could you tell they liked each other?”

  “Well, Mom almost always went out to the truck to meet him when he came home even though she knew he was coming straight in the house anyway. And she would touch him all over. Not grope him or anything like that. It was more like the way moms touch their kids when they find them after they lose them in a store.”

  “What about your father? How did he act toward your mother that made you think he liked her?”

  I thought some more.

  “Well, when Mom talked about her day while she fixed dinner, Dad had this way of closing his eyes and making his whole face look peaceful. Kind of like he was listening to a poem. Except he would hate listening to a poem, but that’s the way it made me feel.”

  Betty smiled. “That’s one of the few things you’ve ever said about your father that makes him sound human to me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve always described him as if he were a cartoon villain. A type of person; not a person. It’s a very common way for abused children to describe their abusive parents. They see them as monsters or saints.”

  “He was a type,” I said, suspiciously.

  “You don’t think he was more complicated th
an he appeared on the surface?”

  “Define complicated.”

  “Having a variety of emotional and psychological factors influence a reaction to a situation, unlike a dumb animal who responds purely to physical stimuli and instinct.”

  “The second one,” I said, getting annoyed. “That was my dad.”

  “What about what you just described to me?”

  “Forget it.”

  “Did you like your father, Harley?”

  Every couple months she asked me this same question and I always answered it the same way.

  “I didn’t know him well enough to know if I liked him.”

  “Your gut reaction to him?”

  “He was a swell guy.”

  “You respected him though. Didn’t you?”

  I shrugged. “He did everything he was supposed to,” I said.

  She raised her eyebrows at me. “Including beating his children? Was he supposed to do that?”

  “He thought he was.”

  “Good,” she said firmly. “What makes you think that?”

  “I don’t want to talk about my dad,” I said flatly, and went back to staring out the window.

  She gave me a little time to stew, then got out of her chair and walked over to the old gray metal desk even principal offices had abandoned years ago. She opened her chocolaty leather-bound planner and touched her finger lightly to something and closed it again.

  I asked her once where she got the date book from because it looked a cut above what Hallmark sold at the mall. She had looked a little startled at my question, then explained she bought it out of town and that sometimes a person needed to splurge on herself.

  “Have you given any more thought to visiting your friend Skip?” she asked, still standing.

  “I just bought new underwear,” I said.

  “I’m afraid I don’t see the connection.”

  “I’m so strapped for cash, buying underwear is a big deal.”

  She still didn’t get it.

  “I can’t afford it,” I explained further. “I’d need gas money, and money for food and beer and shit. I don’t have it.”

  “I see,” she said, even though I knew she didn’t.

  Then I noticed her hand resting on the cover of the date book. She probably thought I should splurge.

  “I haven’t asked about your financial situation in a while. How are things going? Certainly your father’s estate is through probate by now.”

  My father’s estate. That cracked me up. I was wearing my father’s estate.

  “I told you before all he had was some life insurance through his job. The government took a third and the rest went to back taxes on the house, Mom’s lawyer, the funeral home . . .”

  My voice died before I could finish the list. The cost of funerals had been as big a shock to me as the cost of dog food.

  I decided I’d had enough. I reached for my cap sitting on the table and knocked over the water. I knew I was supposed to say I’m sorry and offer to help clean it up, but I couldn’t move. The water spread in a glossy puddle across the dark brown tabletop and started dripping onto the carpet reminding me of something that made my stomach heave, but I couldn’t focus on the right memory.

  A bunch of them rushed in and out of my mind. Every spill I had ever made and every punishment I had ever received. Smacks in the head. Swats across the face with the wooden spoon. Belt whippings and backhanded slaps. Dad responding spontaneously, without feeling. The beatings coming, violent but impersonal and necessary, like cloudbursts. If Betty had ever been a witness, she would have agreed they were instinctual.

  She jumped up from her chair and tried wiping up the water with Kleenex that kept falling apart in her hand. I heard her tell me not to worry and not to go, but I found my legs again and ran. I ran all the way to my truck and screeched out of the lot. She followed me outside and stood next to the building, a young-eyed old lady holding a handful of soggy white strands of my guts.

  I was so rattled I almost forgot to stop at Yee’s. I must have looked bad because Jack Yee’s grin faltered and he asked me if I wanted a glass of water. I laughed until I cried.

  For the first part of the drive home, I felt like puking. Everybody and his brother had a trash fire going in his yard since it was a nice night. The smell of burning plastic, grass clippings, and shitty diapers filled the truck along with the hot egg-roll grease.

  A lot of people still had their trees and shrubs hung with Easter eggs. Some would keep them there until Halloween. Some people had started bringing out their lawn ornaments and would keep them there until hunting season, when they would have to take them back in again so they wouldn’t get shot up.

  I saw a woman I didn’t know by name but had been driving by all my life, polishing a peacock-blue reflecting ball with a green rag. I waved and she waved back.

  I noticed she had put her Virgin Mary out next to the birdbath and behind some oversized yellow-polka-dotted red mushrooms with two elves perched on top. Her Mary wasn’t one of the gray stone statues everybody bought nowadays, the one where she’s staring at the ground like she’s not worthy. This Mary was one of the old-fashioned plastic kind, dressed in sky blue, looking toward heaven, a slight smile on her painted pink lips. Those were Mom’s favorites. She loved the colored robes and serene white faces. She had never seen one until the drive from Illinois after she lost her family, and she thought they were a sign from God that this was going to be a good place to live. She spent the whole drive through our valley counting Madonnas.

  I was completely calm again by the time I bounced over the final ruts in our road. My heartbeat had returned to normal. My hands were behaving. I could pick a thought and stick to it. I wasn’t even bothered when I glanced down at the floor of the truck and noticed Mom and Dad’s wedding picture had surfaced again through the latest layer of trash. I just put my boot on it and pushed it back under.

  When I pulled in the driveway, Elvis raised his head from where he was lying on the char-broiled couch. Once the worst of the burnt smell had disappeared, he had claimed it for his own.

  The girls hadn’t made any mention of replacing the couch indoors. They had covered the living room floor with pillows and sat on those when they watched TV. Every once in a while, I got a point across.

  Misty didn’t appear wordlessly on the porch waiting for her egg roll. Jody didn’t come rushing out begging for her cookie and umbrella. I didn’t think much of it until I had my hand on the front door handle, then all of a sudden I was absolutely certain they were all dead. Someone had gunned them down and put them in a pile in the middle of the living room where the couch had been. I couldn’t tell one from the other until I noticed the eyes, open and vacant, staring out of surprised bloody faces. Jody’s gray eyes like Mom’s. Misty’s dark eyes like Dad’s. Amber’s blue eyes like mine. Then I knew who they were. Who they had been. They weren’t anybody anymore. They were a tangled heap of sticky red arms and legs and hair. Lots of hair. Gold and rust and brown.

  Elvis started growling. I hadn’t seen him there. He had his muzzle low to the ground and his haunches in the air, his ears flattened against his head and his lips drawn back over his teeth. The black fur on his back stood straight up like the bristles on the brushes that used to brush all that hair. There was blood in his fur. Somehow I knew that he hadn’t been shot. It was the girls’ blood. He had been standing too close when the shooting started. So had I. He was growling at me. I looked down and saw blood spattered on my boots, on my jeans. In my hands I saw Uncle Mike’s gun.

  I dropped it and the crash from it hitting the floor made me jump. I looked down again and saw the bag from Yee’s sitting on the porch floor outside our front door. Elvis was growling at me. For real.

  “What’s the matter, boy?” I asked shakily.

  He stopped growling immediately at the sound of my voice. He perked up his ears, cocked his head at me, and went trotting off with his tail waving.

  I bent down slowly and
retrieved the bag and checked to make sure Jody’s cookie hadn’t cracked.

  Maybe one of these days I would ask Betty about these scenes that played out in my head. They were probably nothing but sometimes they bothered me because they seemed real. Not the way dreams seemed real but the way life seemed real. The only reason I’d bring them up to her would be on the chance there might be a cure for them—a pill I could take—because, like I said, sometimes they bothered me.

  I opened the door. Normally I never announced my presence but tonight I shouted, “Where is everyone?”

  Jody came running out of the kitchen, her eyes huge with excitement.

  “Where have you been?” she asked me. “Why are you so late? We couldn’t wait any longer. We got too hungry.”

  She paused to make a sound I had only ever heard little girls make; it was a sort of a cross between a shriek, a gasp, and a moan.

  “You didn’t forget. Amber said you would forget. She said whatever it was that made you late would make you forget.”

  She ran up to me, snatched the bag, and hugged my legs. I touched the top of her silky head.

  “You seem happy,” she said, and took my hand.

  “I’m not,” I assured her, and let her lead me into the kitchen.

  “Where have you been?” Amber bitched at me. “You could have called.”

  “I haven’t been anywhere,” I said.

  “And why are you wearing a coat? Every guy I know is wearing shorts today and you’re stomping around in Sears work boots and a hunting jacket. I swear to God, you’re a headcase. I hope you’re a headcase. ‘Cause if you’re not then you’re just the biggest dork on the face of the earth.”

  I took off Dad’s coat and hung it over the back of my chair, not to please Amber but because the kitchen was too warm.

  “It’s better to be insane than unfashionable, is that what you’re saying?” I asked, and reached for the buns.

  “You’re so funny,” she huffed.

  “You’re wearing my shirt,” I said.

  All three of them wore my T-shirts to sleep in. Half the time I got dressed by going through my sisters’ drawers.

  “Take it off,” I finished, forgetting who I was talking to.

  She gave me a terrible grin and before I could tell her to stop she had stood up and was starting to pull it over her head. She had on only panties underneath. String bikini ones with butterflies on them. She had the shirt pulled up far enough that I couldn’t see her face anymore and for one guilt-free moment, I stared dumbly at the tiny triangle of fabric where her thighs met, then the hips, the tummy, the curve of her rib cage before the welcomed repulsion overtook me.