Backseat Saints (24 page)

His eyes brightened and he leaned in to kiss me without thinking. I put a hand up over my mouth. “Yick, no, baby. I need some
gum,” I said, and he actually laughed.

Two hours after Thom and Joe’s flight left, I was on a plane of my own to Chicago, throwing up again, this time into a wax-lined
airplane sick bag. I’d lucked into having someone’s unflappable granny for a seatmate. She patted my back and said, “There
now, get it all out. You’ll feel better.” Then she made me drink a fizzy water.

I got off the train from the airport at a stop that was smack in the middle of downtown Chicago. I stepped out of the station
into a steel grid that seemed to grow straight up out of the concrete, towering all around me. The streets were dead straight,
cutting the buildings into orderly blocks. I had a map of the city, and I’d planned a route to Arlene Fleet’s apartment. I
walked quickly, swinging my outsize macramé purse. Along with all my regular purse things, it held a change of clothes, a
can of pepper spray from Grand Guns’ stock of lesser weaponry, and a ticket that said Ivy Rose Wheeler would be flying back
to Texas tomorrow.

Out of sheer habit, I smiled at the folks coming down the sidewalk toward me, but their gazes slid off sideways like my skin
was slicked in grease. They didn’t look back. Everyone who passed was doing busy things: a man barking into his mobile phone,
a gaunt woman who almost hit me with her swinging briefcase, a herd of pretty girls in jeans and clacky shoes. Everyone was
going to their own places, as orderly and single-minded as ants.

They were like the moving pieces of a beautiful machine, each a cog that churned and clicked its chilly teeth against the
teeth of other cogs, uncaring. It was nothing like small-town Alabama, where the local paper did a human interest story if
someone’s mama released a particularly loud fart in church.

Even in Amarillo, I was someone known and noticed. Hell, I was Joe Grandee’s daughter-in-law, and he was on three billboards,
five times larger than life and grinning like a possum, cradling a gorgeous shotgun. Over his head, black letters read, “You
know Joe!” And across his chest it said, “Grand Guns. For Amarillo’s Big Shots.” Joe’s outsize eyes seemed to track me anytime
I drove past one of those boogers.

Around town, especially with Thom, I felt watched by all the folks who did, indeed, know Joe. But this place had swallowed
Arlene Fleet up for more than a decade. I felt a twinge of something ugly in the deeps of me, and it shocked me to realize
it was envy. Back in high school, if anyone had told me I’d be marching past a fifty-story Chicago building one day, shivering
in a peasant blouse and envying Arlene Fleet, I’d have laughed until something busted.

She was such a skinny, creeping critter, twitchy as a rodent. As a child, I’d been capable of envy for orphans starving to
death in far-off darkest China, but never once had I felt a green yearn toward Arlene Fleet’s life. Her mama bounced in and
out of the nuthouse, and a bat-crap crazy mother seemed a flat step down, even from a willfully missing mother like my own.

Now she’d come to this foreign place and let it eat her up until
she was unseeable inside it. I realized I was, too, for the moment. No one on planet Earth had any idea where Mrs. Thom Grandee
was. If a car smashed into me and killed me, Ivy’s ID would lead nowhere. For this one day, a thousand miles from home, I’d
been swallowed, too.

My route led me out of Chicago’s skyscrapered center. The foot traffic was lighter here, and the sleek steel buildings gave
way to Greek restaurants and coffee shops. The walk to Arlene’s had looked much shorter on paper. I wished I had taken the
time to figure out a bus route. The held-over cold of the sidewalk came up through Ro Grandee’s trouser socks and thin-soled
flats, until each step felt like the sidewalk was stinging me.

I stopped in front of a video rental place to check my map. The store was about the size of a walk-in closet, and it had an
age-faded feature poster of
Flashdance
still in the front window. That movie had come out when I was a teenager. I found myself staring at the display, puzzled,
disoriented, as if moving toward Arlene had moved me back in time to high school and leg warmers and spiral perms.

A scroungy guy with about fifteen visible tattoos was sitting on the sidewalk. “It’s a front,” he said, as if I’d asked about
the poster out loud. “They have a huge back room full of porn.”

He had a blanket spread on the ground beside him, canted back a ways into an alley. He raised his eyebrows at me and gestured
at a jumble of objects on top. “See anything you like, doll?” It seemed the blanket was a store. Everything sitting out on
it was inventory.

In the middle, I saw a pair of scuffed-up yellow boots. They stood up tall among fake Coach purses and scraps of silk fronting
like Hermès scarves, and they were the only things that looked comfortable with themselves. Even their dings had a mellow
buttercream glow, and they were my size. I could see the number in faded print inside the lip.

I found myself pausing, drawn, my cold feet aching. The only pair of boots I owned had kitten heels. They rested in my closet
with strappy sandals and flats with bows, all the dainty accompaniments to Ro Grandee’s ruined wardrobe.

Ivy Wheeler is a woman who wears cowboy boots,
I decided. And I would know. After all, I’d just had a taste of what it might be like to be Ivy Wheeler, unmoored and unknown,
eaten by a city.

I squatted by the blanket. A dollar sign and the number 40 had been scrawled across an index card leaned up against the pointy
right toe. Too much. I touched the card with one finger and said, “If they fit, I’ll give you half that,” to the tattoo boy.

He sized me up, taking in my macramé bag, my ancient jeans, trying to read my money. I lowered my head, looking down at Ivy’s
boots.

He didn’t say anything, so I started to rise. Then he spoke up. “Gimme the twenty. Whether they fit ain’t my problem.”

Most of my remaining wad was in a Ziploc bag in my underpants, but I had three twenties and some smaller bills tucked in different
spots, each miniroll trying to look like all the cash I had. I chose the twenty in my bra, just to mess with him. Pulled it
out slow.

He cool-boyed it right to the end, and then his eyes shifted, taking an involuntary glance south. His gaze flicked back almost
instantly, but I had one eyebrow up, waiting for him. He grinned at me, caught, the smile crinkling the blue star he’d inked
on his cheek, and we liked each other for a second.

I kicked off my flats and left them on the sidewalk like bits of shed skin. The boots slid on so easy, it was as if some other
girl with feet shaped like mine had walked in them for a year, breaking them in for me, readying them for this moment. As
I walked away, tattoo boy was already putting my flats on the blanket to sell to someone else who needed a change.

My pace quickened. The porn place had clued me in: Arlene wasn’t living in the world’s best neighborhood. It was getting dark,
but I didn’t have far to go. Jim Beverly was less than a mile away from me right now, maybe sitting down to dinner with her.
I could
picture him touching her dark hair, remembering the silkier feel of mine.

The sun was gone by the time I found her apartment building. I saw her listed on the row of call buttons: Fleet—4B. I hit
a button on the intercom, two numbers under hers. Nothing happened, so I went down one more and tried again.

This time a male voice came through the speaker. “Yeah?”

Arlene had failed to rinse the long taste of Alabama vowels out of her mouth, and I could sound like her, easy. “It’s Arlene
Fleet, from 4B. I locked myself out.”

A second later the door buzzed, and I pushed my way in. Her building had no elevator, and the door by the stairs said 1B.
I was breathing hard by the time I got to Arlene’s floor, and my heart was banging itself against my rib cage, both from the
stairs and from being this close to seeing Jim again. I paused, listening.

Arlene was home. I could hear her rattling around inside 4B, her voice raised. She wasn’t alone. Her shrill yaps were punctuated
by the sound of the deeper, male voice I’d heard behind her on the phone. I couldn’t make out any of the words through the
old building’s well-made walls, but they both sounded angry. I pressed my ear against the door and a second later felt the
wood shudder as something on the other side hit it hard and bounced off it. Arlene? In my mind’s eye I saw her slight body
ponging off of mine, only an inch or two of wood between us.

Was Jim hitting her? My Jim had laid heavy hands on me only once, when we were blind drunk together on that long, wrestling
night in our green woods. If he was hitting her, then he was drinking.

The male voice dropped in volume, going almost inaudible, and Arlene’s raised up, so strident and high that she sounded like
an angry budgie. I pressed closer, as if yearning alone could melt oak and push me through it, trying to hear him. His words
sounded clipped, sharp and fast like drumbeats, but he was very angry, and Chicago could have whittled down his accent.

Was he drinking? I wasn’t sure that I should knock if he was. Jim drinking was not the Jim I wanted. I was surprised my banging
heart didn’t do the knocking for me, an endless thudding gallop against the wood. Perhaps they did hear me, because the door
flew open, spilling me all the way onto my ass. I landed face to crotch with a pair of knife-creased khakis.

I went scuttling backwards crab style. When I saw the coffee dark skin of his hands, I knew he wasn’t Jim. I looked up at
him. He was a tall black man with a trim waist and broad shoulders. He was better looking than Jim had ever thought of being,
too, with a long, straight nose and sharp cheekbones and a full mouth. He was too good-looking for Arlene fucking Fleet, that
was sure. I scrambled to stand up. He must have been a foot taller than me, but I wanted to take him on, punch his face in,
for the crime of not being the right man.

“What the—,” he said, and he stepped toward me. He was so big. I scrabbled in my purse for my pepper spray. I whipped it out
and aimed it at him, pushing down hard on the trigger, but nothing happened. He stopped in his tracks, boggling at me. I pressed
and pressed, and nothing came out, while he dared to keep on standing there, existing, and not being Jim. Not being a single
thing like Jim, even. I’d come halfway across the country, spent most of my cash, only to be wrong. I pushed harder, wanting
to watch him claw at his eyes while Arlene and I kicked the shit out of him. My new boots had steel toes.

“I heard you yelling,” I said to Arlene. I sounded breathless.

“Whoa,” the guy said. He put up his hands. “Calm down.”

I said to Arlene, “You go for the soft parts. And then we run while he’s down.” I pressed again, and still no spray came out.
I gave the can a fast, angry shake.

Arlene Fleet wasn’t even looking at me. Her focus was all on her fella. She was talking to him now, continuing their fuss
like I wasn’t standing pumping my finger up and down on the unresponsive pepper spray trigger, trying to blast him into blindness.
He kept his hands up but turned to talk to her as if I wasn’t hardly there.

As I watched their body language, my adrenaline began to leak away. This was Arlene’s mystery man, and she was serious about
him. She didn’t have Jim in there, too. This was her guy, and he was hidden away from her family for the high crime of not
being a white boy. That was all. He also threw her into doors, but, hey, with her family, I’d bet that was less of an objection
than his skin color.

Jim wasn’t here. He never had been.

At last he turned to me and said, “I was just leaving.”

“Bet your ass you are,” I told him. I had stopped trying to press the trigger down, but I still had the pepper spray’s round,
plastic eye trained on his face. Now I could see the problem. I hadn’t flicked the safety off.

“He was only trying to help you up,” Arlene said.

He skirted me, careful, hands still up, then turned and went on down the stairs. Arlene started to go after him, but I blocked
her path. Even if Jim wasn’t here, had never been here, Bud had told me that Arlene had been the last set of eyes alive in
Fruiton to see him on the night he disappeared. I wasn’t finished with her. Not by a long shot. I stayed in her way and said,
“They’re almost all sonsabitches.”

When I couldn’t hear her fella’s big, angry feet stamping down the stairs, I lowered the spray. She wheeled on me, black eyes
snapping, and I got my first clear look at Arlene Fleet. Maybe he wasn’t too good-looking for her, after all. Her skinniness
had shifted into something sleek and trim. She looked as flexible as a bendy straw. Her face had lost that feral look, and
anger brought a flush to her pale, high cheeks. Her skin was perfect, except she had a crease, what my mother had always called
a temper line, running vertically between her eyebrows.

That line deepened, and she said, “Rose?”

She hadn’t even recognized me. If she’d run off to Chicago to be with Jim, even if she’d swapped him for the black guy later,
she would have recognized me right off. Women don’t forget their rivals. Still, something had happened between them back in
Alabama. There was only one reason Fruiton High kids went up on top of Lipsmack. I tried to ask her, but she’d turned her
temper from her fella to me, and she overrode me.

“I haven’t seen you in ten years. I didn’t even know if you were alive or dead, and quite frankly, I didn’t much care. And
now you are standing out in my stairwell, apparently eavesdropping on me and my boyfriend?” She seemed to have it in her head
that I was there on some crazy-ass mission from her family, to get her back to Alabama. “How the hell did you even find me?
What are you doing here? What do you want from me?”

I plastered the nicest smile I could muster up onto my face. I needed an in, something that would make her talk to me, the
way mentioning my pastor had eased Mrs. Fancy. All I really knew about Arlene Fleet was that she’d been kind of a whore and
her mother was a nut job. I wasn’t sure how whores bonded, but I doubted I could get her on my team by sprinkling some Jesus.
Maybe
Oprah
and therapy, a wash with Mrs. Fancy, would work on the child of a crazy woman.