Back Roads (19 page)

I decided to add Confucius to my list of dead people I’d like to meet. It was up to FOUR now.

I kept my head full of pointless thoughts—like my dead list—to help keep my mind off the family shit constantly crossing my earth’s orbit, but sometimes I had too many pointless thoughts and they came too fast and I couldn’t get my brain to shut down at night so I could sleep. It got so bad I found myself longing for the good night’s sleep I’d get after getting fucked as much as I longed for the fuck.

We both decided to walk there. Callie didn’t have a choice. Driving off in the middle of the night would have been too hard to explain to her husband if she got caught. I didn’t want to have to explain to Amber either. She wasn’t buying into my “nowhere” excuse anymore.

We would be coming from opposite directions so we didn’t plan to meet and walk together. She assured me she’d be fine walking through the woods by herself even though I didn’t ask her. They were the same woods she used to hang out in with her grandpa and she knew them like the back of her hand, she told me. And once she hit the tracks, she couldn’t get lost.

I got there first and waited. I even started to worry about her. I knew there weren’t any animals around that could hurt her—Bud’s rabid skunk would be dead by now—but I couldn’t help thinking about Amber’s psychos.

I took a walk down the tracks looking for her. About a half-mile away from the office was the mine it serviced: a small single-shaft one with an entrance no bigger than an attic trap-door. Now it was almost completely blocked off by rocks and weeds and fallen metal support beams.

Across the tracks stood the tipple that used to sort and load the coal into the train cars. All I could see at night was the tallest section of the splintered wood skeleton, jutting out from the treetops thirty feet above me like the rotting head of a dinosaur. The rest of it—the hundred-pound gears, the massive iron funnel, the chutes and rollers and sorting screens—were all brittle with age and coated in blood-brown rust.

The companies never tore down the tipples or closed off the shafts when they bugged out. They just left them there the same way people threw garbage on the side of the road. Moms always told their kids to stay away from them and kids always ignored them but after a couple times crawling around one and getting your hands and knees full of splinters and rust flakes, the thrill was gone.

Skip tried to figure out a way to kill Donny on the tipple, but there were so many ways for him to accidentally get killed it took all the fun out of planning his death.

The mine was a different story. We came up with a plan to lure him inside it with snack cakes, then plant some cherry bombs around the shaft opening, explode them, and cause a cave-in. I didn’t think it would work because I couldn’t imagine anyone brave or stupid or hungry enough to allow himself to be swallowed up by a black hole in the ground but as I watched a grinning Skip toss individually wrapped Hostess fruit pies into the shaft and Donny obediently follow them, I realized those reasons didn’t have anything to do with it. I finally understood Donny. He endured the indignity and the fear because it made Skip happy.

We didn’t get to light the cherry bombs. I dropped the matches
in a ditch of standing water, and Skip bitched me out for days about what a fuck-up I was. I never bothered telling him I did it on purpose.

I gave up and walked back to the office. I was thinking about leaving even though I knew I wouldn’t, when I heard gravel crunching. I went to the door and she was coming up the tracks carrying a backpack and a Little Playmate cooler. She unpacked a blanket, a couple roast beef sandwiches, four beers, a flashlight, mosquito repellent, matches to start a fire, and stuff to make s’mores. There were some definite advantages to screwing a mom.

She asked me how my week went and I told her fine. I apologized for the condition of the place since I was the guy and I had asked her to meet me here. She said she didn’t mind. She said she loved the calm of decay and desertion that reigned there, and I told her she sounded like Shakespeare. She smiled and asked me what I had read of his and I said nothing but I knew how he talked.

“Stand over there,” she told me.

I could hardly see her in the dark, but I saw the blanket being snapped and floating down to the floor.

“Don’t you want me to sweep out the place?” I asked her. “There’s all kinds of shit on the floor. Even glass.”

“I don’t mind,” she said.

She didn’t waste any time. She came right at me and pushed Dad’s coat off my shoulders and down my arms. When she touched the coat, my instinct was to grab a handful of her hair and smash her head into a wall so hard, it would break her neck and crack open her skull. I could cover her shattered face with the blanket and if I fucked her fast enough, she would still be warm. But warm wasn’t good enough. I wanted to make her come again. Feeling her do that was almost as good as the rest of it.

I took a deep breath and let the coat fall off my arms onto
the floor with a dead thud. She pulled my T-shirt out of my jeans and over my head and kissed me on my mouth and my neck. Then she stepped back and stripped.

I still could hardly see her. She was just a pale form without details like someone had cut the shape of a perfect woman out of a piece of black fabric. I went for her and knocked her down.

We hit the floor kind of hard. I should have asked her if she was okay, but I already had my hands on her ass and a nipple in my mouth. She made a groan that could have meant she was hurt but then I felt her hands in my jeans and knew she was functioning.

“Lie on your back,” she told me.

“Huh?”

“Roll over.”

I did and she straddled my chest.

“I want to ask you something, and I want you to be honest with me. I don’t care what you say. There’s no right or wrong answer.”

Jesus Christ, I thought to myself. She was talking in complete sentences.

“Sure,” I panted.

“Was I your first?”

“Huh?”

“Was I your first?”

“First what?”

“Woman.”

“Huh?”

She slid a little lower and leaned over until her breasts were in my face. She stuck her tongue in my ear, then whispered, “Was I the first woman you ever had sex with?”

I wasn’t in any condition to try and figure out what I should have told her. All I heard was a question and I answered it.

She sat up on my chest again. I couldn’t see her face in the dark. I ran my hands all over her body while she talked some more.

“I wasn’t sure. I thought maybe I was, but you are nineteen. I didn’t think about it until after it happened. I’m sorry your first time was in the mud. I hope it was still memorable. Was it?”

“I remember it,” I said.

I felt her get off me. She kissed my mouth and neck again and my chest and stomach. Each time she kissed my stomach, I felt her breath near my dick. I dug my fingers into the rotting floorboards and prayed to God to let it happen. I didn’t even care that I was praying for something perverted, that I was breaking Commandments, that He was probably pissed at me because I never prayed for Daddy’s SOWL or Mommy’s SOWL or any of our SOWLS anymore but now I was praying for this. I prayed harder than I did to shut up Brandy Crowe. I prayed harder than I used to pray every night for my dad to love me.

She stopped kissing.

“Harley.” I heard her voice come from the darkness. “Has anyone ever given you head?”

The question alone almost made me lose it. I tried thinking about disgusting things to help me hang on. Rick’s fat ass waddling out of Shop Rite. Mike Jr. running for a touchdown. Betty’s thighs in a short skirt.

“No,” I answered.

“Would you like me to?”

“Sure.”

She took me in her mouth and at that instant I believed in God again. I had been doubting His existence ever since my mom killed my dad, not because of what it did to me but what it did to the girls. I couldn’t believe He would hurt innocents. I knew God wasn’t merciful. I knew He wasn’t reasonable or far-sighted. But I never thought He was a bully. I decided I’d rather not believe in Him at all than believe in that.

But now I knew He was out there and He was good and kind. He had given me her and she was the answer. If every man had her, there would be no wars, no crime, no contact sports.

I was still in her mouth when I fell asleep.

She was gone when I woke up. I probably should have expected it. She left me a note this time, two beers and a sandwich. She said I was sleeping so soundly she didn’t want to wake me, but she had to get home and it was a long walk. She’d meet me here next Wednesday.

Every bone in my body ached from lying on the wood floor, and my hands were on fire from digging them into the splintered boards. Everything bothered me all of a sudden. The night was too cool. The night was too dark. I had a three-mile walk ahead of me, a lot of it through the woods. But she bothered me most of all. I wanted her to suck me again. I wanted to make s’mores. I wanted a Rolling Rock, and she had brought me Miller in a can.

I put my clothes on and took my beers and sandwich outside to eat. She had left me the flashlight too. I sat in the middle of the rusted tracks and stared down the length of them wondering where they really did end up. It wasn’t California. I bet they just stopped somewhere in a field of junk metal.

A noise cracked in the woods behind me. I jerked my head around.

“Callie?” I called softly.

I flicked on the flashlight and swept the trees, hoping to catch a velvet-eyed deer in the beam. Nothing.

I turned it off. Then I heard a rustle. It sounded too big to be a skunk. Too clumsy to be a deer. Too hurried to be a coon. Too decisive to be a dog.

Then one of the trees shook with a hiss and a human scream. I fumbled with the light but before I could turn it on again, a ghostly figure escaped from its branches and took off flying. It
let out one more scream and turned its pale, heart-shaped face downward as it passed overhead.

A barn owl, I thought with relief. An owl that doesn’t hoot.

I went back to eating, forgetting for the moment that there was something out there. It hadn’t been the owl. Whatever surprised me the first time had been tragically earthbound.

Betty was very friendly when I got there, probably because our last appointment had ended with me freaking out and she didn’t expect to see me for a while.

I slumped onto the end of the couch, stared out the window, and only gave her grunts and shrugs for the first half-hour.

The parking lot was busy with people going in and out of the DMV. A lot of people were going in and out of Behavioral Services too. Most of them women. Must have been the summer rush. They were all psychologically traumatized by the thought of putting on their bathing suits. They should have been too. They were cows. Except for one. She was good-looking. Wearing white shorts and a black T-shirt. She had nice legs and shiny gold hair like Jody. She already had a tan.

I watched her come out of the building and walk to her car. A brand-new dark-green Camaro. I wondered what her problem was. Fear of heights? Fear of breaking a nail? Fear of Wal-Mart? Maybe she was getting fed up with the characters on her favorite soap opera.

I didn’t know her, but I hated her. I didn’t even care that she was hot. If she had come on to me, I would have thrown up. I only wanted Callie.

I couldn’t figure out if I loved Callie though. I thought about her all the time. Most of it was about fucking her, but some of it was about how she made me feel just talking to me or looking at me: not special or impressive or needed; accepted, maybe. She was one more thing that was wrong with me that I liked about me anyway.

I watched the woman stop at her car door and fish for her keys in her purse. She had a nice rear end, but it was nothing compared to Callie’s. Hers could have been an altar.

“Harley, did you hear what I said?”

Lately, I had started thinking about marrying her. What that kind of life would be like. Sex every day. Blow jobs on my lunch hour. Someone to cook and clean and care for me.

It didn’t matter if I loved her. From what I had seen of marriage, the woman had to love the man but the man only had to love what the woman did for him.

“Harley?”

I wasn’t going to make it until Wednesday. Maybe I didn’t have to. I didn’t have to be married to her to go visit her on my lunch break. I could do it tomorrow.

“Harley, are you in there?”

She could blow me in my truck.

Fingers snapped in front of my face. I swiped at them before I realized what they were. Betty drew her hand back.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“I’m not upset.”

She edged back in her chair, uncrossed her legs and recrossed them the other way, then fixed her skirt. It was a short one today. Just my luck. Mint green with white flowers on it. All pleated like a window blind.

“Did you find that woman attractive?” she asked me.

“What woman?”

“The one you were staring at so intently.”

“I wasn’t staring at her.”

The veins on Betty’s legs looked like scribbling to me. They could have come in handy being a shrink. Her patients could have read her thighs instead of ink blots.

“All right. You weren’t staring at her,” she said to humor me. “But you did notice her. Did you find her attractive?”

I pulled the brim of my cap down over my eyes. “No.”

“Why not?”

“I just didn’t.”

“I thought she was attractive.”

“Then I guess you’re sorry she left.”

She had a big purple twist on her right thigh that the hem of her skirt didn’t cover. I studied it. I saw spaghetti. I saw a pile of night crawlers. I saw a baby strangling in its umbilical cord.

“Come on, Harley,” she urged. “Treat me like I’m a person, not your therapist. We’re just two people hanging out talking. I thought she was attractive. You didn’t. Why not?”

“She had a tan.”

“You don’t like tans?”

“It’s only the last week of May. A tan that good means she just got back from a vacation or she goes to a tanning place.”

“And I take it you don’t approve of either.”

“It means she’s rich or stuck on herself.”

“I see. And you don’t feel you’re making broad assumptions and generalizations?”

“Yeah, I am.”

I saw the Monongahela, Susquehanna, and Allegheny rivers meeting on a road map.

“Do you think that’s fair to her?”

I shrugged.

“Would it be fair to you for someone to look at the way you’re dressed and assume you’re a redneck?”

I almost laughed at her saying the word “redneck.” She said it like it was two words, like she could have replaced red with blue or green and it would have meant the same thing to her.

“Would that bother you?”

“No.”

“But is that a fair summation of your character? Are you a RED Neck?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I told her. “People have to judge other people by the way they look. We don’t have a choice. We can’t smell personalities the way dogs can.”

She smiled at me. I dropped my gaze from her face and fixed it back on her leg. I saw groundhog guts.

“True. But we can talk to each other,” she said. “Wouldn’t that be a better way to judge someone?”

I turned back to the window, scowling. Her pen eraser started tapping on her notepad. I wished I had the balls to take it and stab it in her eye.

“What do you find physically attractive in a woman?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“Just a question.”

“Her body,” I answered.

“What about her body?”

“That it’s a woman’s body.”

“No, I mean specifically.”

“That’s it.”

“So you like any female body. You don’t care if it’s overweight or elderly or . . .”

“No, no,” I interrupted, shaking my head at a mental picture of all the Shop Rite customers shopping naked. “I mean if she’s got a good body, I don’t care about one part more than the others.”

“What if you had to choose one part? What would it be?”

I looked over at her. She was leaning forward waiting for my response. I thought she might be turning kinky on me but then I remembered an article I had read once in a woman’s magazine in the waiting room at Mom’s prison about how men revealed a lot about themselves by what body part they liked best.

The article used nicer words but basically it said men who were obsessed with asses—even female ones—were closet fags. Men who were obsessed with breasts lusted for their mothers. Men who were obsessed with women’s legs wished they could be women themselves. No men were obsessed with pussies because we were actually afraid of them.

Betty had probably read the same article. It was probably a chapter in one of the books at her real office.

“Her mouth,” I said.

“Her mouth,” she repeated, surprised.

“Can we stop talking about this crap?” I blurted out. “I don’t want to talk about crap.”

“Fine, Harley. What do you want to talk about?”

“I knew you were going to say that.”

“It’s your session, not mine.”

“It’s the state of Pennsylvania’s session,” I said angrily. “Don’t they give you guidelines about what we’re supposed to talk about?”

She leaned back in her chair and contemplated me. “In a sense, they do. But I’m willing to bet you don’t want to talk about any of that either.”

My scalp was sweating. I took off my hat and set it on the table next to the box of Kleenex. It was the first time I had taken my hands out of my coat pockets.

“What happened to your hands?” Betty gasped. “They look like you put them through glass.”

I glanced down at them. Misty’s scratches had faded, but the palms were a mess.

“I got a bunch of splinters,” I explained. “I guess I didn’t do a very good job digging them out.”

“Splinters? What were you doing?”

I thought about it. “Ripping up floorboards,” I answered.

“Did you put something on them so they won’t get infected?”

“They’re okay,” I said.

She couldn’t stop looking at them so I put them back in Dad’s pockets. Then she kept glancing at my pockets. She was making me nervous. I was ready for her to go to the desk and whip out a first-aid kit. Would it be a cheap plastic one like the one my mom kept in the medicine cabinet? Or would it be a chocolate leather doctor’s bag to match her datebook?

“Okay, there’s something I want to talk about,” I said to get her mind off my hands.

She gave me a pleased look of surprise like she had discovered a bud on a plant she expected to die. “Go on,” she said.

“How can a kid like someone who beats them up? You know. How can they like hanging out with them?”

“Did you like hanging out with your father?” she asked.

“I never hung out with my dad. He didn’t like ME.”

A big flock of ME exploded in front of my eyes. They rose up from Betty’s lap and fluttered around the room like butterflies. I tried keeping track of them, bobbing my head and blinking, but there were too many.

“This isn’t about ME,” I went on, watching them zip around the room. “I just want to know as a broad assumption or generalization how it can happen.”

“Well,” she began, tapping her pen on her forehead twice, “every child reacts to abuse differently. Some become withdrawn. Some openly hostile. Some self-destructive. But some embrace the abuse. They thrive on it. It’s what they get from their abusive parent instead of love and they come to need it.”

“So you’re saying a kid can actually want to get hit?”

“In a sense.”

“Can they start to think that it’s okay? Morally okay?”

“Did you think it was okay for your father to hit you?”

“This isn’t about ME,” I stressed again.

“You can still answer the question.”

I let out a shaky breath. I didn’t want to lose it. I didn’t want Betty running off to get me a Styrofoam cup of water. I didn’t
want to have a BREAKTHROUGH. I wanted it to be lunchtime tomorrow.

“I didn’t think it was okay,” I said bluntly, “but I thought it was normal.”

I could tell she was going to ask me to explain my comment further so I rushed ahead with another question. It was a hard one to ask. I had to concentrate on something else and let my voice say the words without me understanding them.

“What about sexually abused kids?”

I watched one ME after another land on the windowsill, all packed together, making a colorful cluster like feathers in an Indian headdress.

“Can they think that it’s okay?”

“Okay but not normal?” Betty asked.

“No.” I shook my head in frustration. “Can they think it’s normal? Can they think it’s right?”

“Are you talking about Misty?”

Her question hit me like a sucker punch. I struggled to find my voice and then control it. “What do you know about Misty?”

“Very little since I treated her for such a short time,” she replied, frowning.

Misty and Jody dropping out of therapy was a sore spot with Betty; but it got too hard. I couldn’t get time off work to drive them to their appointments plus they both hated going. Misty used to disappear into the woods, and I used to have to carry Jody kicking and screaming to the truck.

Amber wanted to go to her sessions. She even made arrangements with friends to drive her and pick her up afterward.

Betty went on, “But in the few sessions we had, I did get the feeling Misty believed your father’s abuse toward all of you was warranted. She felt it was right, if you want to call it that.”

I fell silent, and Betty tapped her pen on her notepad.

“Who was sexually abused, Harley?” she asked with the detachment of a person filling out a form.

“None of us,” I answered, startled.

“What about Amber?”

“Amber?”

My throat clamped shut the way it used to when I saw Dad listening to Mom’s day.

“They were never alone,” I protested. “When she was home, she made sure someone else was always in the room with her. She was terrified of Dad. She hated him.”

“What about at night?”

“Amber hated him,” I said again, ignoring her question.

“Did she?”

“Yeah,” I answered, amazed she could even ask.

“How do you know? Have you ever talked to her about it?”

“I don’t have to talk to her. I was always there when he hit her. I saw.”

“How did you feel toward your father when he hit Amber?”

Tears filled my eyes. I couldn’t figure out where they had come from. “I felt sorry for him.”

Betty moved forward in her chair. “You felt sorry for your father, not Amber?”

I nodded.

“How did you feel toward Amber?”

“What do you mean?”

“Did you get mad at her? Did you think she deserved it? Did you want to help her?”

“I wanted to make her feel better.”

“How do you think she felt when she saw your father hit you?”

“I don’t know.”

Her questions felt like rocks being thrown at my head. I covered my face with my mangled hands. The salt from my tears stung the gouges I’d made with my pocket knife.

“She probably didn’t like it,” I cried into them.

“Do you think she wanted to make you feel better?”

Six seconds. The scientist on TV had said the sky would light
up like a thousand suns and by the time we turned to look at it, it would have hit with the power of ten thousand Hiroshima bombs.

I saw it coming, rushing at me. My head filled with a harsh white light obliterating the image behind it. I didn’t have a chance to recognize it. To know if it was a memory or a dream. I was blind but I could feel. Amber. Her soft weight against me. Her surrender. The smell of watermelon Lip Smacker.

It hit before I could figure it all out. I came to huddled on the floor, trembling and sobbing, but I had survived, and like any survivor of a Doomsday strike I thought I was lucky. No one could have convinced me that I would have been better off dying instantly.

Betty was kneeling in front of me. I couldn’t make out her face through my tears, but I saw her young eyes. I saw her whole young life in them. She was glad she was old now. She was relieved.

I felt her hands on my arm.

“It’s all right, Harley.”

Did Dad have six seconds? He didn’t know it was coming. Mom snuck up behind him and let him have it. She didn’t have a choice. It was a big gun. She couldn’t have whipped it out and surprised him. She couldn’t have faced him down either. If she had tried, she would have stood there with the gun shaking in her hands, and he would have walked right up to her and taken it from her like it was one more bill they couldn’t pay.