Karen G. Berry - Mayhem 01 - Love and Mayhem (13 page)

The park was full of television-lit domestic tableaux, and Annie checked them all. She saw a woman made of stone watching Judge Judy on TV, quietly ripping her wedding photos into confetti. She saw a grown man sitting at a table holding his head in his hands, crying. She watched a man holding his girlfriend’s hair like he was tethering a dog, bending her over the back of the couch in front of him while he watched a dirty movie on the television. The woman stared absently into space, her eyes blank, her mouth closed. “He needs to go take him some lessons from Fossie,” she whispered to the case she stood on.

Strings hummed in agreement.

She gave up on that window and went back to the road, where she stooped to inspect an ugly red smear on the asphalt. It looked like something had been hit. She bent closer, sniffed. Yes, blood, for sure. She had an interest in road kill. She wanted to write a book about it. She had it all worked out in her head. It would be like a field guide her friend Melveena had for birds, but Annie’s book would be for the mashed stuff you see on highways. A picture of the mess and a picture of what it used to be, before a truck flattened it on the asphalt.

She couldn’t figure out what had died there, though. No fur at all to help her. Of course, the Bone Pilers took the best fur Frisbees for themselves, and maybe those men over in Space 13 had scooped it up. She wasn’t quite sure what they did with the road kill. Some of the Ochre Water kids said they ate them, but her mom said they made leather from the hides and used it to re-sole their boots.

She stopped by Space 13 for a few minutes. There was music in there, as always when the windows were lit. She leaned against the aluminum door, wishing they’d left it open, and soaked in as much of their rollicking Bone Pile melodies as she could. But other business called.

She went to the east edge of the park, where the gravel wasn’t well-raked and a dark trailer leaned toward the fence. A few nights back, she’d seen the old woman who lived there hunting through the Dumpsters. Her grandma said Mrs. Hayes wasn’t right in the head and couldn’t manage anymore. Annie Leigh peered in. The only light came from an old console television with a tree of coat hangers twisting off it, the screen full of black and white shapes of pure static. The old woman sat in front of the television, leaning in an attitude of starvation. Annie Leigh deposited the pillowcase full on her step and knocked at the door, knowing Mrs. Hayes might be too far gone to ever answer. But that was her prerogative. It was the right of the wild to starve to death.

Unburdened, Raven moved better. Two hands swung the case, which chimed rhythmically, bumped by her knees, strings jangling, calling. She needed quiet, and she needed privacy, and it was hard to find either in the Francie June Memorial Trailer Park.

Annie Leigh stopped at the highway and looked both ways. She walked though the parking lot of the Blue Moon Tap Room. She walked out into the desert night on the thin wire of her own foolishness.

That foolishness was her only protection.

TWO HOURS LATER,
shivering, barefoot, teeth clacking like castanets, Annie Leigh returned to her trailer. She heaved the case in first. It landed on the bed and purred like a cat. She jumped, caught the sill, arms like tensile steel, pulling herself up and in and back to the bed she hated.

And that’s where she was, standing on the mattress, leaving filthy footprints on the white sheets, holding her bare pillow and watching out the window when her uncle Memphis left Minah’s house. He was still up, and that meant he was being a lawman.

She thought about the red blotch in the road. “I wonder what died,” she whispered. She lay down, her arms around the case. She dreamed of blood on pavement and music, while the strings breathed along with her childish snores.

IN SPACE NINETEEN,
Asa leapt from his cot before dawn with the energy and determination of a young man ready to go to war. He threw open the door. The wind ruffled his greying dreadlocks so they shook like a jester’s motley. “Verily I say unto thee, Lord,” he whispered, “Satan and his minions ride these winds like sweaty whores ride drunk customers.” He smiled at his pretty phrase. The wind rippled the pages of his Bible and the pages of pornography, filling his trailer with a flickering peepshow of womanly parts. He was blind to it, though. It was time for his own ritual of observance.

It was Sunday, the Lord’s day, when he had more than just Postum and prayer to accomplish. He walked to a wall stacked high with sin. He stuck his hand in a hole. The hiss that escaped his lips might have meant a rat had bitten him, or it might have meant he’d successfully located his sock full of money. He stashed it in the bib pocket of his overalls, and found his shoes. Well, he found two shoes. They didn’t match, but he was shod after a fashion.

Asa slipped into the darkness and the wind, walking the highway miles to Ochre Water.

He entered the 7-11 like a prowler, loaded his arms with all of it he could carry, then heaved it on the counter like a pile of meat.

The clerk pulled back a bit. “You planning a party, here, Mr. Strug?”

Asa’s baleful eyes silenced him.

He went from convenience store to convenience store. The road home was a hard one, loaded as he was with all the pornography and Postum he could carry. Asa staggered into his door, kicked it shut behind him, threw the new pile on the old pile. He wouldn’t look at it again. He bought it so that others wouldn’t, a ministry of prophylactic purchasing. No one knew that, of course. Those neighbors who bothered to pay him any mind thought Asa Strug was a religious nut with a strange taste for multiple issues of
Gent
and
Hustler
. But Asa didn’t care. It was a hermit’s lot to toil in obscurity.

He headed outside. It was getting light, so he wasted no time in posting his verse.

He stood back and smiled, knowing he walked the path of righteousness.

He had God on his side, after all.

MELVEENA STRANGE AWOKE
and pressed her nails into her palms. Just outside her window, an old dog made a percussive bark. The air conditioner’s hum added a mechanical harmony. She lay there and knew she’d give all ten of her perfect ceramic nails to hear the slick-green croak of an Arkansas bullfrog. She was not in Arkansas, however. She was in her bed, breathing the bone-dry air-conditioned atmosphere of Ochre Water, early on a Sunday morning.

Sunday morning meant church at six and nine o’clock Coffee Klatch at Minah’s.

She rose and moved through her beauty regimen. Scented water, arched brows, plum-stained lips, lingerie pretty enough to wear over her clothes, and a visit to the closet that was one of her two great joys in life. Whatever she chose would fit her to perfection. Shoes, of course, a scarf tied round her handbag, not her neck.

She opened her jewelry box and sighed at the heap. Every bit of metal had the capacity to stir up an image, so she had to be careful how she touched it. Elbows and fingernails transmitted less than fingers, so with the tip of a pinky nail, she sorted through the promise rings that held the flintiest chips of diamonds, the strings of pearls, gold bangles, dainty pendants on chains, dress watches encrusted with more gems than a wedding set, seven gaudy cocktail rings, a small fortune of pavé.

The ring she sought gleamed red among the diamonds, a drop of pure, coagulated pain. She speared it out, held it tight it in her palm, closed her eyes and summoned the face of the woman who’d given it to her. That ring had belonged to a neighbor woman, the wife of the bank’s president, young and lovely and lonely. She was from Tennessee. She didn’t like Arkansas. She had haunted her own home like a ghost. She had only come to life when six-year-old Melveena had visited her, or when her young black gardener was there, singing and smiling and trimming her magnolias, coming into her kitchen for a cold drink with his shirt off, looking at her with dark eyes full of an entirely improper and intangible “something” that made Melveena feel alive, too.

One night, the neighbor had come to Melveena and pressed this ring into her seven-year-old palm, whispering,
This is to remember me by, Melveena
. Then she’d disappeared. So had the gardener. The town closed over this shameful escape like still, green river water closing over a thrown stone. But all Melveena had to do was hold the ring and she was there.

She returned the treasure to the box and closed the lid with an undertaker’s finality.

Melveena had to pass the greatest mistake of her life on the way to the kitchen. It was unfortunate but unavoidable. She turned up what little bit of a nose she had, perked herself a cup of coffee, added just one small splash of Kahlua and took a sip. Perfect. She leaned a hip against the kitchen counter and drank her breakfast.

Over on the couch, her greatest mistake shifted a little, snored, and emitted a gentle eructation. Then he raised his hands, sawed them from side-to-side, and let them drop. He was probably dreamed of filing down newly-installed brake pads with a rasp, because fingerprints would make a glaze. Melveena supposed that even a woman’s greatest mistake was capable of dreaming. She considered her own occasional dreams of friction, heat and glazing. She assumed hers were not quite the same as his.

He did have a name. It was stitched over the left-hand breast pocket of the Chevron uniform that he wore day and night.
Clyde
. In that same pocket, over his heart, he kept the one thing that mattered most to him in the world. That, of course, was the television remote control. He switched channels repeatedly, as if there were a contest to see how many times he could do it in a minute. It was the only thing he did ambitiously. In all other areas of his life, he was as torpid as a sunning possum.

Yes, they were married, though she retained her maiden name because Melveena Strange Groth was simply too hideous a name to bear. Clyde was her greatest mistake and her apparent penance, so she would never leave him.

As a teenager in Toad Suck, Arkansas, Melveena had a perfect smile, perfect legs and nearly perfect scores on her SATs. Between breaking male hearts, she busied herself as a cotillion deb, a pom-pom girl, and first runner up in the Miss Arkansas Pageant three years running. Her father grudgingly allowed her to take literature classes at the University of Little Rock. Melveena’s appetite for literature was ferocious. So was her appetite for a few other things.

Her family “got wind” of certain goings-on. Melveena was brought home until such time as she learned to comport herself like a groomed and pampered accessory for a man with a future. After all, one wife of an Arkansas lieutenant governor had risen to the position of first lady. Why not Melveena?

She tried to rein it in. She gave up her studies, returned to church, went to meetings of the Ladies Aid Society. She accepted and returned several engagement rings over the next few years. She seemed to have calmed down, so her father let her go back to school and finish her degree. Finally, Melveena seemed to settle on a man who pleased her father. He was a State’s District Attorney, a widower, and it seemed that the impeccably groomed and pedigreed Melveena Strange might be just the perfect life running mate for him. She accepted his proposal and his two-carat diamond ring, putting him off until her graduation (with honors) was accomplished.