Gods in Alabama (30 page)

The box wall was six or eight rows deep. Behind it, a huge sheet of thick planking had been placed over the beams and insulation, and more boxes and fat black Hefty bags rested on it.

One of the boxes was open, and behind that box, in a folding chair, sat Aunt Florence.

An apple-green lamp was sitting on a box next to her, illuminating the cramped space. It was plugged into a fat orange extension cord that looped away across the planking. Aunt Florence had been unpacking the box, and bits and pieces were scattered all about. She glanced up at me as I came into the light, and then she looked back down at a toy person she had in her hands.

“I thought you’d gone back to Chicago and left your suitcases,” she said, staring down at the toy. “I wasn’t going to stuff them up here. I was going to ship them.”

With a jolt I realized she was holding Mr. Minkus, the daddy of my dollhouse family. The apple-green lamp on the box matched Clarice’s, except it had no daisy stickers. It was mine.

And now the things she had strewn out on the plank floor came into focus. My old Narnia books and my stuffed animals, the hot-pink throw pillows from my bed. My postcard of a kitten at the end of a rope beneath the words HANG IN THERE was still in its cheap frame, lying on the floor at her feet. Beside it was a cross-stitch sampler Aunt Niner had made for me. It had the

“Footprints” story of Jesus on the beach and had hung on the wall over my desk.

“These are all my things,” I said wonderingly. I walked around Florence, behind her to a stack of three large cardboard boxes that said ARLENE: CLOTHES and ARLENE: BOOKS/ALBUMS and ARLENE: GAMES/TOYS/MISC. The flaps of the top box were open, and I could see my old dollhouse in there buried among loose game pieces from Scrabble and Operation and Mouse Trap. Mrs. Minkus and the Minkus baby floated on top. Under a tilted Monopoly board, wedged sideways in the jumble, the glass mouth of a bottle glinted in the light. I reached into the box and pulled it out.

It was tall and clear, with the thick, bubbled base I remembered. I’d never looked for it, because I had assumed Clarice had sneaked it out of the house. It must have stayed where she shoved it, under my bed, getting pushed farther and farther back until it came to rest behind the storage boxes where my winter sweaters and shoes were kept.

By the time Aunt Florence had come across it while eradicat-ing my room, it would have been scentless, and it had never had a label. She’d packed it away with all my other things. It seemed smaller, so much lighter in my hands than I remembered. I dropped it back into the box and said, “I thought you threw my things out.”

“Why would I do that?” Aunt Florence said tonelessly.

Next to the boxes was a black Hefty bag, stuffed full and closed with a twist tie. I opened it up and looked in it. At first it seemed to be full of crumpled paper, trash, but when I touched it, the mass was crackly and stiff like papier-mâché. I tried to pull a piece of it out and realized it was all attached, congealed into a single huge lump. In the dim light, I could make out words or drawings on the paper, but it was so crumpled that I could not resolve it. Then I started picking out tiny recognizable bits: a cowboy hat, a coiled rope, the leg of a horse.

“This is Wayne’s wallpaper?” I said. “You peeled off all Wayne’s wallpaper and kept it?” There was another Hefty bag behind it, smaller, and when I touched it, I could feel more of the same crackly stuff in it. I was willing to bet that if I opened it up, I would find the leavings of the dinosaur paper she had put up in the bathroom when Wayne was a baby.

Aunt Florence, her back to me, hunched her shoulders up in a shrug. “I couldn’t look at it every day. Those grinning cowboys, and my boy dead. But I couldn’t throw it out, either.”

I walked back around the chair and shoved the box of my things out of the way. I sat down on the floor in front of her.

“Why are my things up here with Wayne’s things, and Aunt Niner’s, and Granny and Grampa’s? I’m not dead, Aunt Flo.”

“Same reason,” said Florence. “I couldn’t throw them out, but I couldn’t stand to look at them every day, either.” At last she stopped twisting Mr. Minkus’s head around and around and met my eyes. “You never came home, Arlene. Maybe I’m dumb like you think, and it took me a few years to get it, but once I did, I couldn’t look at your things, and you somewhere in the world judging me, and never coming home.”

I dropped to my knees and put my hands on her legs, one on either side. She was stiff and unyielding under my fingers, but that was how Florence always felt. “I never judged you,” I said.

“You misunderstood. You thought I knew stuff I didn’t. There was all this space between us, and you put whatever you wanted in there. But you got it wrong. I wasn’t judging you, and you are not the reason I didn’t come home. Up until yesterday, when you said what you said in the kitchen, I had no idea you even knew Jim Beverly was dead. And until this morning, when Burr pointed out a few things I had wrong, I had no idea that you killed him.”

There was a moment of silence, and we let that settle between us for a moment.

Aunt Florence shook her head at me, disbelieving. “But that day Mrs. Weedy came over. You asked about the car. You had to have known. I figured you had been in the car when he crashed it. I thought you’d hit him in the head while he was driving you off to somewhere, and that had run him off the road. I thought that’s how you got away.”

“No,” I said. “I was never in the car with him, Aunt Florence.

I thought there was a chance that he had run away. But mostly I thought I’d left him dead up on Lipsmack Hill, and that’s why I never came home. But now I need to know, Aunt Florence. What did you do?”

“This is how it happened,” Aunt Flo said. She began talking, and between what she knew and what I knew, I was able to put it all together. The truth this time, undiluted. As she spoke, as we talked it through, it was happening again. It was like time travel. It was like putting something ugly and exhausted to bed at last.

The night Jim Beverly dies, Aunt Florence hears Clarice come in the front door and pad, alone, down the hall. It’s just before midnight. Clarice has made curfew. Bruster is sleeping solid beside her. My mama is in Wayne’s old room, dead to the world.

“We’re home, Mama,” Clarice calls.

Aunt Florence is not fooled. She has known this trick ever since it began. She always stays awake until she hears the second girl come in safe. She knows better than to tip her hand. You squeeze girls too tight, they go wild. This is a harmless thing, she thinks. We are good girls. We are not out drinking or letting some boy get us pregnant. We are somewhere with our friends, giggling a little longer. Or maybe we are with a boy, whispering and kissing, feeling like hot stuff for getting away with it. The second girl always creeps in half an hour or at most an hour later.

We do not do it often. She gives us this room so we won’t rebel in bigger ways and get ourselves in trouble.

But this night she hears Clarice up in our room fluttering around. And I do not come in. An hour passes, and Florence’s blood is moving faster, heating as it speeds through her veins.

She is wide awake. Another half hour crawls by. She is about to go and confront Clarice when she hears her daughter creep down to the kitchen. After a moment, Florence stealthily lifts the receiver on her bedside phone, holding the button down until the phone is to her ear. She breathes silently and covers the mouthpiece with her hand in case Bruster stirs, and then she lifts the button.

“—went up on Lipsmack Hill. Jim Beverly was up there with some girl,” Clarice is saying.

That’s all Florence needs to hear, but she doesn’t hang up lest Clarice hear the click. Clarice wants Bud to go and find me. Bud reminds her that she has his car. He wants to know why I would be chasing after Jim Beverly, but Clarice blows him off. The main thing, she tells him, is that I have not come home and I was last seen heading up Lipsmack. They make a plan. If I am not home by dawn, Clarice will leave a note for her parents, something about a breakfast picnic and football practice, and she will go pick up Bud and they will find me. Aunt Florence waits until Clarice has hung up before she hangs up herself. She listens to Clarice sneak back to her room and take up her vigil by the window, watching for me.

By three, Clarice has fallen asleep with her head down on her desk. I am still not home. Aunt Florence gets out of bed, moving slowly so she doesn’t wake up Bruster. She is seriously worried now, angry and single-minded. She does not think. She acts.

She slips into yesterday’s clothes, leaving her nightgown by the bed. As she leaves the house, she peeks in on Clarice. Clarice is beautiful in the lamplight, ethereal and fragile. Clarice is alive; there is satisfaction in watching the breath move in and out of her, but it is not enough. Clarice is not enough. The world is not a safe place, and Wayne’s room down the hall is stark and ample proof. Aunt Florence marches out into the world to find me and bring me home. She wants me beside Clarice, filling and completing the room that is apple green and pink and the living heart of the house.

Florence heads first to Lipsmack. She knows the way. The make-out spots have not changed since she was a girl; she once walked up that hill holding hands with Bruster. It’s deserted. Jim Beverly’s red Jeep is gone. All the cars are gone. She walks up anyway. She has a flashlight in the trunk of her car and knows the path. The top is deserted.

She gets in her car and heads for the highway. Jim Beverly, she knows, lives in Fruiton. On the access road, she sees his red Jeep, crumpled against the pole. She slows down and pulls off. She rolls down her window to look, but the driver’s-side door is open, and the Jeep is empty. She calls for me, yelling my name into the night, but I do not come. She takes her foot off the brake and leaves the Jeep behind, continuing on to the highway.

She thinks perhaps I have gone there to flag down help.

She heads for the on-ramp, but as she gets on to drive to Fruiton, she sees a hitchhiker on the other side, heading the other way. He is illuminated briefly in the lights of a passing car.

He is blond, the right size. He has his thumb out.

She exits as soon as she can and loops around, getting back on the highway heading the other way. She is relieved to see that no one has picked up the hitchhiker. She slows beside him, pulls over. It’s Jim Beverly. He is alone. When she stops her car, he climbs in without looking at her.

“Hey, thanks,” he says. “I wrecked my Jeep, and I need to get home.” She doesn’t answer.

He seems disoriented. His clothes are dirty, and his speech is slurred. She pulls back onto the highway and gets her speed up before she speaks to him, and then she says, “Where is she?

Where’s my girl?”

Jim Beverly has no recollection who Aunt Florence is. “What girl?” he says. “Girl?”

“She was up on Lipsmack Hill with you. You tell me, where is she.”

“The little bitch?” he says. “Little bitch hit me.” He is probably talking about the freshman, but Aunt Florence thinks he is talking about me.

“Good,” she says viciously. “Then what. What did you do with her?”

Jim Beverly shrugs at her, insolent, uncaring. “Take me home,” he slurs. “I don’t care where your bitch is.”

Florence steers hard right, taking the first exit she sees. It shunts them out of the streetlights, leading them into the wilds of Alabama. They pass a gas station and a fireworks stand, both closed. Then they are alone, speeding down a dark country road, with heaps on either side of them rising up black and mountainous in the moonlight.

“This isn’t right,” says Jim Beverly. “I said take me home.” He sounds petulant, and his words are so slurred that it is hard for Florence to understand him. He stinks of tequila. He keeps rubbing the back of his head. Florence brakes and pulls onto the shoulder, killing her headlights. “Where are we,” says Jim Beverly. He is utterly unafraid. He is at most peeved.

He faces Florence in the moonlight, and she can see one of his pupils is huge and the other is a pinpoint. “She hit you hard,”

Florence says. “What did you do?”

He shrugs at her again, that insolent roll of his shoulders, and she knows in her heart that I am dead somewhere. She has no illusions about what this boy is capable of. I am dead somewhere and the world is a black place, and in that moment she believes, bleakly, that everything will eventually be taken from her. Her blood surges, and she hates God and this wild boy He has let run loose upon the earth. It is pounding through her, hot and un-forgiving. Her vision narrows to a tunnel, and all she can see is this floppy boy with his careless shrugs and his insolent smile. In this moment she is stronger than he is. She is stronger than anyone alive. The adrenaline rush is a black high wave surging upward, lifting her. She rides with it, her blood on fire, rising, and as it crests, she moves.

She reaches out with her big hands. It seems a calm slow movement to her, endless, because here at the peak, time has slowed. She is in a place that I know. I have been there, too, earlier this same night, when I was standing behind Jim Beverly with a bottle. She has a moment to choose, and she chooses. She takes his neck in her huge hands, and he is so surprised or drunk or hurt that in the endless fraction of a second it takes her to grasp him, he is yielding in her hands. He does not fight her at first, as she tightens her massive grip.

At first he cannot process what is happening. Then he begins to struggle, weakly, or it seems weak to her. She is in a place where she could move a mountain with her bare hands. His fists beat at her chest harmlessly. Later, her chest will be black-and-blue from his blows, but now his fists feel as insubstantial as trapped birds, fluttering weightlessly against her.

The blood is coursing through her strong arms like liquid fire, and she feels him yielding to her. His feet drum against the floorboards of the car, a desperate lunging tattoo. The drum-ming slows and stops, and she remains where she is, holding his throat closed in her grip. Making sure. When she is sure, she releases him and turns his head, so she cannot see his eyes, but she knows the light has gone out of them and he can’t see anything and he never will again. And then she sits quiet. There is nothing else to do.