Sister Golden Hair: A Novel (11 page)

Jill felt all the people in Bent Tree had known each other in earlier lives. All the souls gathered together in the duplexes had always been linked, first in the same Indian tribe and, before that, as members of a royal French family and, before that, as slaves owned by the same Pharaoh. Each time it was different; I could have been her mother in one life and in another we might have been married. My father might have been my son or even my boyfriend! She was hoping to be able to see back into some of the lives, or maybe even get some information that would help us free ourselves from Bent Tree and go into what she called another dimension.

“Are you sure the door is locked?” Jill asked.

I checked again and nodded.

“OK then,” she said, holding the first pod to the candle’s flame. The tip caught, glowed orange, and, when Jill held it to her lips, a single tendril of lavender smoke rose up in the dark air between us. She passed the pod to me. The wet tip tasted like a dried leaf and the smoke was grainy against my lungs.

“I’m feeling something,” Jill said, closing her eyes. “Something like I’m an Indian in the olden times. I can see a bowl of dry corn in front of me and two naked children playing with a hoop.”

The scene she described was directly from an illustration in our social studies textbook.

“What about the future?” I asked.

Jill clenched her eyes tighter, and the candle sent an angle of underwater light over her face.

“I see a fish,” she said. “It’s staring right at me!”

Jill opened her eyes.

“Go on, take another puff,” she said. “Maybe you’ll see something.”

I sucked on the end of the pod and held the smoke down in my lungs. I expected to feel light-headed and see a lava-light show, but instead I saw a ranch house made of red brick with green shutters. There was nothing remarkable about the house, but something about its very normalness bothered me. When I opened my eyes, Jill was staring at me, her eyes wide and sad in the dark.

“I see myself sitting at a desk,” I said.

“Are you writing?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Try to see,” she said. “It’s important.”

I closed my eyes and imagined black letters against white paper.

“It’s a story about a walrus.”

“A walrus?” she said.

I laughed a little and I saw Jill’s face pinch up. Her features rearranged themselves and her cheeks got red.

“If you’re not going to take this seriously,” she said, “then we should just forget it.”

“What?” I said, trying to hold back my laughter. “You don’t like my story?”

“You’re making fun of me!”

“You saw a fish!”

“It was a catfish with whiskers.” Jill shuddered. “And it looked a little like my daddy.”

“Black fish are often the bearers of terrible news,” I said. “Sometimes they even come to warn sinners about the apocalypse.”

Jill stood up and threw the bean pod into the toilet, where it sunk with a sharp hiss. She jammed the unlit bean pods into the trash can. Then she unlocked the door and ran out into the French Quarter.

I searched the mall for an hour. I looked in the arcade, Orange Julius, even the girls’ section of J. C. Penney, before I finally found her downstairs in the back of Spencer’s Gifts looking up at an oscillating black-light poster, green and orange diamonds shifting round and round. The colors were not comforting like the golden images of my View-Master or the emerald and sapphire hues of the church’s stained-glass windows. Neon-pink daisies grew out of a skull’s empty eye sockets. Above us, the speaker blasted “Free Bird” so loud it seemed we had fallen into a pocket of stillness between the notes of the song.

“My mom says God hates our family.”

“That’s not true,” I said.

“How do you know that God doesn’t hate us?”

I just knew, but I couldn’t prove or explain. My dad thought God, if he existed at all, was powerless. But Jill felt God was strange, terrifying, and real. Her face in the strobe was pale and eerie. Her eyes were sunken, and all I could think of was how in health
class Sheila had told us that if you went to the edge of Tilden Lake at night, threw in three stones, and said the Hail Mary backward, a satanic Mary appeared and threw a dead baby at you. I could see the black lake water and the top of Mary’s head breaking the surface, her neon-blue face sliding up out of the dark.

The night before Halloween, I lay in my bed, imagining spirits seeping out of the earth, swirling in the air over Bent Tree. I finally drifted off but I didn’t sleep long. It was still dark when I awoke to the sound of a voice calling my name. I wasn’t really surprised; I knew it was just a matter of time before creatures from the netherworld tried to contact me.
I . . . hear . . . you
, I whispered slowly. But the voice just kept on saying my name until I realized the voice was outside, and that Jill was standing in the street in front of our duplex, her ski jacket pulled over her nightgown, her feet stuck into her brother’s huge tennis shoes.

When she saw me at the window, her face lit up and she motioned wildly for me to meet her down at the front door. I pulled the knob and she shoved her social studies notebook at me, showing me the list she’d written out in pencil. As I read, she leaned over me, her face pale and anxious. Under the heading
Haunted House
, she had written
Dracula’s Cave? Mad Scientist Laboratory? Dr. Frankenstein Workshop?
Under the heading
Games
, she had written
Bobbing for Apples, Musical Chairs, Drop the Clothespin in the Milk Bottle, The Limbo
.

Jill looked at me, her black pupils huge even in the near-dark.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “In the night I started thinking about sickos that stick razor blades in candy apples.”

I was familiar, through my mother’s stories, with how hippie drug culture had collided with freaky homeowners to create lunatics who seemed to enjoy poisoning candy in an effort to kill off neighborhood kids. I’d heard about the heroin-sprinkled chocolate-covered raisins, needles stuck into Snickers bars, cyanide in Pixy Stix.

“But what can we do?” I said. I ran my hands up and down over my goose-pimpled arms. The sky was gray and low and branches blew around all over the side of the mountain.

“We’ll have a party,” she said, “a safe place so the creeps can’t kill them.”

I was learning that Jill had the spark and intensity of a downed electrical wire. Her notebooks were filled with lists.
Ten Qualities of a Friend. Why Dogs Are Better than Cats. How to Survive in a Blizzard
. She was always the first to raise her hand in class, and even though she’d ended up getting only eleven votes, she’d run for class president, telling us during her speech that she would make chocolate milkshakes available
for sale in the cafeteria and that for the winter dance, she and her team would build a Transylvanian castle, transforming the gym into a Gothic wonderland.

During the physical fitness tests in gym, I’d watched her hold on to the metal bar. The narrow muscles of her neck stood out like hot-dog meat, and as she grimaced I saw her skull and collarbone, her skeleton gripping the bar for dear life.

She was determined to educate me about the ways of Bent Tree, as if the place were a country of its own with history and ritual that only she could impart.

First, practical danger. The guy who lived with his mother in 3B might offer to take my picture. He’d say I had a certain look and imply he had contacts in Hollywood.
NEVER EVER EVER
go into his duplex under any circumstance.

There was an older lady who lived with her sister in 9A. They might seem friendly but it was important never to be seen speaking with them.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because they’re Eldridges!”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“You don’t know?” Jill was incredulous.

I shook my head.

“Their ancestors took in Union soldiers during the Civil War.”

“That was a long time ago,” I said.

“Not really,” Jill said. “Once a traitor, always a traitor.”

She told me to watch out for the
Christers
in 2B, 7A, and 20B.

“They have big smiles and they act all friendly,” she said, “but the next thing you know they’re offering to drive you to their prayer group.”

People moved out at the end of every month; August and January saw the biggest loss of occupants. She’d watched and written down lists of the things she saw floating out duplex doorways: a taxidermied cat curled up on its satin cat bed; a giant Styrofoam strawberry; a red, white, and blue life-size cutout of Evel Knievel. In the boxes left behind, you could find treasures: zodiac medallions, Mexican handbags, ponchos covered with dog hair.

She believed that Mr. Ananais had a secret yin-yang method of pairing people in adjacent duplexes so that they balanced each other out. Next door to her family lived an out-of-work brakeman for the railroad, a sweet chubby guy who ate hamburger patties and heated up Tater Tots for dinner every night and who told Jill and her brother stories of ghost trains and haunted railroad stations. Without him living in the building, Jill was convinced the place would rip free of its foundation and float into the sky. And beside Sheila was a lady who was so annoyingly friendly that she balanced out Sheila’s bitchiness. I could see Jill was right. Mrs. Smith, who lived next to us in 12B, loved Nixon and was still sad because the South had lost the Civil War. Her duplex was filled with
teddy bears and Civil War memorabilia. The year before, she’d been chairwoman of the Daughters of the Confederacy’s Civil War Ball. According to Jill, Mrs. Smith balanced out my dad’s hippie tendencies. (He now believed Jesus was a real person, a rebel like Che Guevara or Cesar Chavez. God, he was convinced, was as much in the rushing Roanoke River as inside any church.)

The thing that haunted Jill was how once people moved out of Bent Tree they seemed to disappear completely. People claimed they were moving to cheaper apartments like Sans Souci over on Garst Mill Road or Guilford Manor out by the airport. But Jill had never seen anyone after they left. It was as if, after pulling out of the entrance, they entered another dimension completely.

I was learning that when Jill got an idea in her head, it was hard for me to resist joining her. I put on my clothes and we walked to Kroger, where we used our babysitting money to buy mini candy bars, pretzels, potato chips, and a turnip. Jill said her Grandmother Brendy told her that turnips would protect us from evil spirits. Back at Bent Tree, we went to work cleaning up her family’s duplex. All afternoon we worked, wiping down the bathroom and the kitchen, vacuuming the shag, and trying to air out the living room.

We let Ronnie choose from Jill’s list of party themes. He opted for
Mad Scientist Laboratory
. He boiled spaghetti for guts and twisted apart a few of Beth’s dolls
for body parts. He wasn’t all that interested in looking like a mad scientist with crazy hair and a white lab coat. Instead, he wrapped his mother’s boa around his neck, outlined his eyes with black liner, and played his Bowie record on 78 so the music elongated. I had noticed Ronnie’s fondness for eyeliner and that around the house he sometimes wore Jill’s skinny turtlenecks. As we cleaned, we heard him laughing maniacally into his cassette player.

Beth mixed Kool-Aid in a plastic pitcher and set out Dixie cups. She poured snacks into bowls and arranged them on the table, then retreated to the bathroom to draw dots on her cheeks in imitation of Pippi Longstocking.

Once we finished cleaning, Jill and I lay on her bed making a schedule for the party; our legs were touching and she pressed her shoulder into mine. Jill smelled like muddy rainwater and her breath still had the afterburn from the bag of barbecue potato chips we’d split on our walk back from the grocery store.

Was I a lezzbo? This I considered a very good question. I didn’t really know what lezzbos did. When I closed my eyes at night, I never imagined our naked bodies twined together. I envisioned the two of us walking up the side of the mountain holding hands. I thought of myself like a tree or a flower. I had longing, but it was not explicitly aimed at anything.