Five Minutes in Heaven (6 page)

“We haven't decided yet, ma‘am. We may play crucifixion. Or we may leave y‘all here as supper for the mosquitoes.” After closing his knife and fastening it to his belt, he walked up to Molly and glared right into her eyes with his dead black ones. “Are you now or have you ever been an agent for any foreign power?” he demanded.

“Excuse me?” said Molly, screwing up her face with contempt.

“So you won't talk?”

“Talk about what?”

Slowly, he extracted a chicken feather from his warbonnet. Smiling, he stroked Molly's armpit with it.

“Please don't, Ace,” pleaded Molly in a wimpy voice Jude had never before heard from her. “I'm ticklish.” She began to struggle against her ropes.

Delighted, Ace continued. The other warriors plucked feathers from their bracelets and joined in on both girls' armpits.

Jude caught on quickly, and she and Molly writhed and grimaced, screaming for mercy as loudly as possible.

Jude was standing on the porch steps before her mother's mansion in heaven, white columns on either hand. Her mother was in the doorway in a low-cut emerald evening gown, smiling, arms outspread, wavy black hair stirring in the breeze.

“Momma, is it really you?” asked Jude.

A siren whined up the hill from town. The boys, feathers frozen, looked at one another.

“I told you my uncle would get you,” gasped Molly.

“Holy crow!” whispered Ace, seeing two flat-brimmed hats skimming along above the bushes. The Commie Killers took off through the undergrowth, feathers of torture spiraling to the forest floor.

B
Y THE CURB IN FRONT
of Sandy's house was a khaki-and-forest-green highway patrol car, red light flashing on its roof. Molly's uncle Clarence, holster on his hip, black boots to his knees, opened the back door for Sandy.

“Wait a minute, Uncle Clarence,” called Molly. “What are y‘all doing?”

“Arresting him, sweetheart.” He closed the door. Sandy looked through the window at Molly and Jude and shrugged helplessly.

“But Sandy saved us. You should arrest Ace Kilgore instead.”

“We come up here in the first place to pick up Sandy,” said Uncle Clarence as he circled the car to the driver's door, “and he told us about y‘all. But this son of a gun here tapped into the phone line. He's been calling free all over the world for pert near two year now. He owes the phone company two thousand dollars, plus fines. Your young friend here is in real big trouble, missy.”

CHAPTER
3

O
N
J
UDE'S FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL
, Molly, a second grader, walked her along the busy highway past the sign with the winged red horse in front of the Texaco station. As they approached the redbrick school building, which resembled the state mental hospital across town, with wire mesh in the window glass and a chain-link fence around the playground, Molly assured her that Noreen's report of a spanking machine in the principal's office was untrue.

“They always say that to frighten the first graders.”

In the tiled hallway outside her classroom door, Jude saw several children crying in the arms of distraught mothers, clutching their skirts, clinging to their legs, begging to be taken home, like the pictures at Sunday school of sinners in hell pleading with the Lord for salvation.

Struggling not to be a crybaby, Jude opened the door and marched into the room. She sat down at the desk pointed out by the teacher, whose chin when she smiled almost touched her nose, like the witch in
Hansel and Gretel.
A piece of manila paper and a box of new crayons with sharp tips sat on her blond wooden desktop, so Jude began to draw a puffy white cloud floating in a blue sky, with a woman in a white bathrobe standing on it, smiling with bright red lips. She made the hair yellow so no one would know it was her mother. As she colored, she began to feel less miserable. She liked the oily smell of the new crayons, the rough texture of the paper against her fingertips, and the bright colors she could spread in any pattern she liked.

“That's very nice, Jude,” said the witch, bending over her picture, smelling like flowers that had been left in a vase too long.

“Thank you.”

“Is it an angel?” She rested a bony hand on Jude's shoulder.

“Sort of.” Jude would never reveal that the angel was her mother. There was no telling what a witch might do with that information.

“So how do you like first grade?” asked Molly in the cafeteria at lunchtime. She had sneaked away from the second-grade table to eat the peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich from her Donald Duck lunch box with Jude.

“All right.” Jude took the wax paper off a stack of Oreos Clementine had packed for her. “Except my teacher was making fun of how this boy was holding his pencil, so he threw it at her. And then she spanked him in the cloakroom.” Jude separated an Oreo to lick off the sugary white filling. “School is really scary, isn't it?”

“Yeah. But girls hardly ever get in trouble,” said Molly. “Just boys, ‘cause they always say what they think. They don't understand that nobody cares.”

After lunch, Jude and Molly stood beside
the
high fence around the playground, the only girls in blue jeans, holding hands and watching the Commie Killers play softball. After the Commie Killers' run-in with Uncle Clarence, Jude's father had hired a bulldozer to destroy their trenches. So when they passed Jude on the sidewalk now, they called her “Public Enemy Number One.”

Noreen's gang was in a grassy corner, hurting one another's feelings, then making up via networks of earnest intermediaries. Spotting Jude and Molly, Noreen sauntered over in her plaid dress, which had a black patent-leather belt to match her Mary Janes. Her stomach bulged out beneath the belt like a beach ball.

“Why do you spend all your time with that baby first grader?” she asked Molly.

“Because she's my friend.” She let go of Jude's hand.

“When you get sick of her, you can come play with us.”

“I'm not going to get sick of her, Noreen.”

Jude was grinding a pebble into the dirt with the toe of her oxford. She glanced at Molly, aware of her sacrifice in being best friends with a first grader. Even though Molly's voice was calm, her eyes were icy cold.

“You two look like boys in those blue jeans,” said Noreen. “Wouldn't your mothers buy you new dresses for the first day of school?”

There was a horrified silence as Noreen remembered that Jude's mother was dead. She whirled around and stalked away, dust coating her glossy Mary Janes.

“Look. There's Sandy.” Touching Jude's shoulder, Molly pointed across the playground. He was sitting with his back to the brick wall of the building, playing chess against himself on a tiny portable set. The teacher on duty, a hunched old woman in a navy blue Brooklyn Dodgers cap, was standing over him gesticulating wildly. Sandy folded up his chess set and slipped it into his shorts pocket. Teacher hobbling at his heels, he marched to the softball diamond.

When the Commie Killers saw him coming, they groaned as though they had stomachaches. One yelled, “Oh, no, here comes the convict!” Although Jude's father, who had gone to high school with the president of the phone company, had gotten Sandy excused from the wiretap charges, the Commie Killers wouldn't let him put his criminal past behind him.

The teacher handed him a glove and directed him to right field. He stood there with one hand on his hip, the other holding out the leather glove like a skillet waiting for a flapjack. When Ace hit a fly ball, Sandy's expression as he watched it arc and fall in his direction was one of pure terror. He missed it, and Ace converted his error into a grand-slam home run.

During the next inning, Sandy walked up to the plate, optimistically hefting a black Louisville Slugger. Ace motioned the outfield closer, yelling, “Easy out!” Which it unfortunately was.

After school, Jude and Molly stood toe-to-toe at the crack in the sidewalk marking the boundary between their yards. Each crossed her arms and placed her hands on the other's shoulders. For a long time, they looked into each other's eyes. Jude could see herself and the maple tree behind her reflected in Molly's irises. The bright blue disks were scored with lines, like miniature blueberry pies sliced into a hundred pieces. Around each pupil was a tiny translucent golden ring like a butter rum Life Saver after you'd sucked it for a long time. Gazing into the black pupils, Jude felt suddenly dizzy, as though she were spiraling down the funnel of a whirlpool.

They smiled gravely and patted each other's shoulders, chanting in unison, “Best friend. Buddy of mine. Pal of pals.”

After changing from school jeans to play jeans, Jude sat at Molly's kitchen table, spinning a marble around the lazy Susan, pretending it was a Las Vegas roulette wheel. Molly had been mixing them cocktails from several liquids they both liked to smell—vanilla extract, Pine Sol, cherry cough syrup. But each had tasted worse than the last. Now Molly was telling a story her teacher had read that afternoon about an orphan boy who was raised by wolves and had never learned to speak. He was discovered by hunters and taken to live in a cottage on the edge of the forest.

Molly and Jude spent the rest of the afternoon prowling through Molly's house. Their vocabulary consisted of hand gestures and facial expressions. In the bathroom, Jude seized a comb and displayed it to a mystified Molly, who manipulated it in various ways, trying to discover its function.

“What are you two up to now?” asked Molly's aproned mother, lounging in the doorway in her neat blond pageboy, arms folded across her stomach. Startled, the girls stared at her with wide-open eyes.

“What's going on?” She gave a perplexed laugh. They dashed from the bathroom to seek shelter behind the sofa in the knotty pine den, which enclosed them much as the wolves' lair had.

Jude was so enchanted with this game that she continued it at supper that night, marveling over the unknown delicacies served her on a round disk by a black creature in a white uniform with a red scarf wound around her head. It was wonderful to be handed food after a lifetime of chasing moles in the forest.

“So how was your first day of school?” asked a large, pale, hairless one at the head of the gleaming wooden table.

Jude gazed at him as she ate with a bizarre silver twig, unable to comprehend the howls coming from his mouth.

“What's wrong, baby? Cat got your tongue?”

The dark one led Jude up some steps to a pool of water and removed her soiled fur. Jude dipped her toe into the pool. The water was hot! She had known only icy forest ponds and streams. She climbed in. How delicious to float in the warm liquid while the friendly black one rubbed a small slippery stone that smelled like dried rose petals across her coat.

“How you like school, Miss Judith?”

Jude looked quickly at the dark one, whose mouth was making strange sounds.

“You ain't telling, huh?”

“W
HAT A NICE DOG
,” said Mrs. Murdoch as she strolled down the aisle and peered at the picture Jude had just drawn. “I think we need to hang this one on our bulletin board up front, Jude.”

“It's not a dog,” said Jude, not looking up. “It's a wolf.” The wolf was sitting in its cave in the forest, sniffing the morning air.

“Speak up, young lady. I can't hear you.”

“I said it's not a dog; it's a wolf.”

“A wolf? What an idea! Why is it a wolf?”

“'Cause I like wolves. I think they're nice.” Jude finally looked up. Mrs. Murdoch's bright red lipstick covered an area much larger than her actual lips, and her eyebrows had been plucked out and redrawn as crooked black arches. She looked like a messy clown.

Mrs. Murdoch laughed, chin nearly touching her nose. “You may like wolves, young lady, but they are definitely
not
nice. They are vicious wild animals. Think about the wolf in
Little Red Riding Hood
for just a moment.”

Jude said nothing. She was thinking about the boy who got spanked in the cloakroom.

“Well, Jude?” “Yessum.”

“So you agree that wolves are vicious wild animals?”

“Yessum.”

“Now, we would not want a vicious wild animal on our bulletin board, would we? Because it would scare us all half to death and give us bad dreams at night. But your wolf could just as well be a dog, couldn't it? And then we could hang it up and look at it without fear.”

“Yessum.”

“So you can practice your letters by writing D-O-G here along the bottom.”

“Yessum,” said Jude miserably, printing D-O-G beneath her wolf. Maybe she wouldn't be an artist when she grew up after all.

Mrs. Murdoch sat down at her portable organ in the front of the room and began furiously pumping the foot pedals. “Rise, children!” she shrieked, gesturing upward with her palms. “And lift up your voices to the Lord!”

“B
ABY, I HAVE TO GO
back to the hospital after supper,” said Jude's father as he laid a slice of Mrs. Starnes's German chocolate cake on a dessert plate painted with grape clusters and cantaloupe slices. He passed it to Jude. “To work on some reports. Molly's mother said you could spend the night there. Would you mind?” He picked up his fork and studied it.

Jude inspected his lowered face, which was turning bright red beneath his five o'clock shadow as he flicked and stroked his fork prongs. Why was he so embarrassed? He often went back to the hospital after supper if Clementine could stay late. It was no big deal. “Sure. That's fine, Dad.”

The next morning, Jude and Molly raced down the hall from Molly's bedroom and into the bathroom to brush their teeth before school. Molly's father was standing in front of the sink shaving. He was entirely covered with curly black hair, except for his white buttocks and a pale little slug that nestled in a mat of fur between his legs.