Backseat Saints (13 page)

He said, “I’ll try, too.” I watched him, wary-eyed, and he added, “I mean it, Ro.”

I nodded, and then we picked up our glasses and drank, watching each other over the rims, like we were solemnly sealing a
deal with sweet tea and cool water.

The next day, when he came home from work, he paused and stood silent in our cubicle of a foyer. I was sitting on the sofa,
waiting for a timer in the kitchen, and I heard him stamping and breathing in that tiny space, but he didn’t say anything.
When at last he stepped through the archway, it was as if he’d left his father and his job and the bills and his temper in
the cube behind him.

On this side of the archway, we holed up, honeymoon style, eating a quiet dinner and then watching a rented movie with a lot
of kissing in it. I sat wedged between Thom and Gretel on the sofa, snug and pleased. By morning, everything seemed fresh-made
between us.

It occurred to me I should have hidden in the bushes and taken a couple of potshots at his fool head years ago. It was turning
out to be downright good for both of us. I think he was pleased to be alive, and me, I was scared of the secret thing Rose
was planning next if he couldn’t join me in playing nice.

I kept the house so clean, even Thom’s mother couldn’t have found a dusty corner with white gloves and a microscope. Thom
and I ran together most mornings, going way too fast to bring Gretel, and at night we sat on the sofa, breathing in the orange
oil smell of our clean house. We watched a lot of college ball, and I rooted for his teams, even when Bama was playing. If
no one we liked had a game, we rented old movies or played gin rummy after dinner.

Four days a week, I cashiered at the gun store, and I didn’t let myself bitch to Thom about still making minimum wage, although
Joe Grandee was making that harder and harder.

A week into our truce, a salesman didn’t show, and Joe asked me to help customers as best I could until he could get in a
replacement. I’d been raised up with guns, and I sure as hell knew more about our stock than the missing fella. My best times
with my daddy had been when he took me out shooting. I’d ask a thousand questions about zeroing or muzzle velocity, then lure
him into musing about who made a better .45, Colt or Smith & Wesson, stretching our good hours into half a day. If Joe Grandee
had ever looked past my boobs up to where I kept my brains, he’d have had me on the sales floor years ago.

I’d been working the floor maybe half an hour when an obvious fat fish came in—midlife crisis fellow with a salt-and-pepper
comb-over and three-hundred-dollar pointy-toed cowboy boots. He was looking, he said, for a little home protection.

“Nothing flashy,” he said, meaning nothing expensive.

“Of course not,” I said. “Guy like you, you want something sleek and plain, with enough power for the job at hand. Not some
silly cowboy gun that’s all show.”

Ten minutes later, I had his fingers curling around a gorgeous black snub-nosed revolver that cost over a thousand bucks.

“I like how that looks in your hand,” I said, and I let myself sound breathless. I leaned over the counter to get a better
view, biting my bottom lip.

I sent him out the door with the revolver and ammo and a gun safe and a cleaning kit and a couple of packs of the overpriced
cinnamon gum we kept by the register. He swaggered out hips first like he was toting ten pounds of extra penis, swearing to
come back and take a look at our rifles before hunting season.

I didn’t realize Joe had come out from the office. He was standing in the doorway to the back, watching me run the endgame.
The next day, when I came in to relieve Janine, she stayed perched up on the stool, shaking her head at me. I thought I’d
misread my schedule, but Joe said, “Derek had an emergency, darlin’. Cover the floor for him until I can get a replacement?”

When I clocked out six hours later, Janine was still running the drawer and Derek’s “replacement” had yet to show. After that,
it seemed like some member of Joe’s sales team needed sick leave or vacation every other shift I worked. It didn’t take a
genius to figure Joe was cutting their time because I was better. Meanwhile, I got the same four bucks and change an hour
I would have gotten if I’d spent the time under the Golden Arches saying, “You want some special sauce on that?”

Still, I didn’t fight the Joe Grandee party line: Grand Guns was a family business, so I was building up our own future. It
was only
to myself that I added,
And helping Joe buy himself another big-ass Harley-Davidson.
After all, that big-ass Harley would be part mine on the merciful day the Lord got tired of Joe pooing up the earth and called
him home to heaven. Or wherever.

At home, I sat on Thom’s lap and nibbled his edges and tempted him to bed early. I gave him cheerleader sex, bouncy, full
of gymnastics and genuine enthusiasm. In my head the words went like this:
Thom, Thom, he’s our man, if he can’t do it, no one can.
Rose would echo,
If not, I have another plan.
I cut her off right there, making damn sure I never thought a different man’s name while Thom Grandee’s hands were on my
body. I pushed away all memories of other hands from days long past, and I didn’t think about old promises made on Alabama
nights hot enough to be the sweetest kind of sticky.

Not when I was awake, anyway. Some nights, my sleeping self would see Rose Mae, no more than fourteen, haunting the woods
behind Fruiton’s old elementary school, waiting for Jim Beverly to shimmy down the oak tree outside his bedroom window and
come join her. She’d wake me up, too sleep-logged to stop myself from remembering how it went the night Rose Mae decided to
see for herself what manner of pleasure her daddy found in drinking.

The moon was near full that night, lighting the way even as it set. It was so late, the tree frogs had shut up and gone to
sleep. This was hours after every kid with a decent human mother had been called home and fed and tucked beneath a blanket.
Rose Mae waited in the clearing that she and Jim had made their own when they were nine, watching Jim Beverly come loping
through the trees to meet her.

He said, “Hey, Rose-Pop,” in a whisper, though they were far from any other ears. He kissed her mouth, then set about building
them a campfire. He was an ex–Boy Scout, so he knew to clear a hollow down to the bare dirt and bank it in stones. Rose gathered
twigs and sticks to feed it. When it was crackling and cheerful, they sat pressed together, side by side.

“Did you get something?” Rose asked.

Jim pulled a flat bottle out of his back pocket. Amber liquid glinted in the firelight. “Whiskey. I stole it off Lance,” he
said. Lance was his oldest brother. “I hope it makes you happy because when he notices, I’m a dead man.”

He was grinning that lopsided smile that got her every time, his thin upper lip showing too much gum. She couldn’t help but
grin back.

Rose Mae said, “Lance can’t fuss. If he starts to kill you even a little, you tell him you’ll rat him out for that fake ID.”

Jim cracked the seal and screwed off the cap, then sat, holding it. The fumes coming out of the lip smelled to her like someone
had bottled her daddy. Jim started to bring it to his lips, then stopped. Started to lift it again. Stopped.

It was Rose Mae who began. She wrapped her hand around Jim’s on the bottle and guided it to her mouth. She test-drove her
father’s method, drinking as if the liquor was shoes and toys left out on the floor and it was her tiresome job to put the
mess away. She swallowed, then coughed in hard barks that sounded like a circus seal she’d seen once on TV. Air in her mouth
brushed against the sour mash taste, reactivating it. She clamped her lips and breathed deep through her nose to keep the
cheap whiskey from coming right back up.

Jim watched her until she’d blinked away the water in her eyes and was breathing regular again. He took a big sip and rolled
it around his mouth before swallowing. He made a “bad medicine” face, but then he took another big sip and rolled that one
around his mouth, too. He made that same face after each of his turns, as if the harsh taste continued to surprise him. They
passed the bottle back and forth until it was empty, not talking much.

They set the empty bottle by the fire.

“This don’t do shit,” Rose said, but her voice sounded funny to her, and she started giggling.

He started laughing, too, and said, “What’s funny?”

Rose stood up and the ground tilted and swayed under her,
as if their private clearing had floated out to sea without them noticing.

“It does things,” Rose said. “Stand up.”

The night became snapshots and flashes. Rose would remember it only in bursts: Jim and Rose running the narrow trails. Jim
hollering and Rose shushing. They spun off each other into trees, then came back and grabbed each other and wrestled, practicing
a kind of making out that was more like fighting than kissing.

Then he had her on the ground, on her back, her jeans-clad legs around him, feeling the rigid line of his cock straining toward
her through the denim. She tried to turn her face from the whiskey smell on his breath, but he put his mouth on hers and sucked
her air out, and his hips ground into her. She bucked, close to panic, and he rolled over to let her on top for a breath.

He flipped her again, and her back landed on a short slope. They rolled together into blackberries that clutched and hurt
and broke them apart. He thrashed free, pricked and bloodied. When he grabbed her hand to pull her to her feet, she saw the
face of some other Jim, a secret face the whiskey had loosed. He grinned, big teeth gleaming, and Rose understood that both
of his faces belonged to her. He helped her out of the blackberries carefully, the two of them peeling away the thorny vines.
He drew her close again, sweet now, and she could smell the liquor on him, and the whites of his eyes looked as hard and shiny
as the skin of a boiled egg.

That was the first time he put his mouth against her ear and whispered, “We could go to your house and make your daddy stop.”

“Stop what?” she said, because the hitting wasn’t something anyone talked about, though surely people knew. Fruiton had a
mall, three high schools, and too many churches to count, but it was at its heart a small town. Of course they knew, even
though Rose Mae was a pro at covering for her daddy, and Daddy did his part, too. He never hit her in the face. But things
like this were always known, tittle-tattled by women over back fences, whispered in the hollows between teachers and preachers:
All is not right at the
Lolley house.
But it wasn’t a thing that got said loud and plain in front of folks that would work to stop it. It wasn’t said plain even
between Rose Mae and Jim. Sometimes, making out, he’d push her clothing around until he found hurt skin, and then he’d put
his fingers, reverent, on her bruises. It felt so good to have him know her in this way, but they didn’t talk about it.

“Stop what?” she said again, to make him say it out loud at last.

But he answered, “Stop everything. Stop breathing.”

She laughed, an uncertain sound.

He was still whispering, face-to-face now, so close their noses almost touched. The whiskey on his breath made her eyes water.
“Drunks like him, they must smother in their sleep alla time. I could finish him for you. Do you want me to, Rose-Pop? Do
you want me to make him quit?”

He looked cold and capable, laying out murder for her like wares on a blanket. All she had to do was nod. It dizzied her,
made her small. She could feel how the whole great world heaved and spun and dangled itself in space. She shoved him away
and managed four steps before she found herself on her knees, throwing up.

She threw up for a long time, it seemed, and then she crept sideways away from her vomit. She came to some clear ground, under
a loblolly pine, far enough away so all she could smell was the tang of its dropped needles. She lay down on her belly, pressing
her cheek into the cool, firm ground, and her eyes closed and that was all she knew.

A few hours later, walking home with Jim through the woods with the morning sun an overbright punishment, she didn’t know
if she would get home and find her daddy dead or not. She hadn’t said yes, but she knew she hadn’t said no, either. The idea
of her daddy being dead was like something from television. She could see herself in a slim black dress at his funeral. It
was distant, and she didn’t truly believe in it.

On the path ahead she saw matted fur, an animal, stretched
out like a sleeping thing, but too still. It was a calico cat, someone’s little pet, lying on its side with its legs stretched
out long and crossed at the ankles like a sleeping lamb’s feet. Its head had been turned around backwards.

She stopped. She had this crazed moment of absolute conviction: Jim had done this. His arms were allover scratches. He had
picked up the cat and turned its head around and her father was dead and she had let Jim do it and she did mind, after all.

It came back to her, how strongly Jim had meant his offer, how she had seen him wearing the face of a thing that was capable
of it. All at once she didn’t want to go home. Jim was a weapon with a hair trigger, and the simple act of not saying no,
of saying nothing, had been enough of a breeze to pull it. The little cat was actually and really dead, and Jim had made it
so, and it was permanent and serious and awful. She did not want to go home and see what else Jim had left for her.

Then Jim said, “Poor thing. You think a fox got him?” in such sorrowing tones that the idea stopped feeling true. The Beverlys
had a fat white cat named Moses that would sit in Jim’s lap and purr as he rumpled it. How could she have thought this boy
could ever kill a cat?

Jim said, “Rose-Pop, don’t look.” She closed her eyes and felt him walk her past. She wanted to look back over her shoulder
at it, but he put an arm around her, stopping her, and said, “Poor little thing. I’ll get you home, and I’ll come back and
bury her.”