The Flood Girls (5 page)

“I'm trying,” said Jake. The metal piece was beyond repair. “I'm not good at this sort of thing.”

Thirty-Seven mocked Jake's high-pitched voice but added a lisp that Jake was certain did not exist. He had once asked Misty for confirmation of this.

“You're gonna make him cry,” said Sixty-Four.

“No,” said Jake. “This isn't anything to cry about.”

“Don't be a smart-ass,” Sixty-Four said, and pushed him. Jake absorbed the blow, but took a step backward.

“Sissy,” hissed Sixty-Four, and pushed Jake harder, this time against a wooden workbench, and he tripped over it, landing on the floor in a pile of dust from the band saw. Jake was upset, because he was wearing his favorite slacks—gray wool—and his favorite dress shirt—jet-black polyester and shiny—sure to pick up all of this mess on the floor. Before he could start brushing himself off, Sixty-Four stepped over him and pushed Jake's face down toward the bits of wood shaving.

“Eat it, faggot.” He bent down to Jake's level, his face was red from crouching. “I want you to eat it.”

“I won't,” said Jake, just before his head was turned, and his mouth filled with sawdust, and his teeth touched the cement floor. The football players laughed, and Sixty-Four planted a foot against his neck. Jake choked as he breathed in the fine dust of two-by-fours and whole sheets of plywood.

“Stop dressing like such a fucking pansy,” said Sixty-Four. “And maybe we'll leave you alone.”

Jake heard a door slam, and the foot lifted from his neck.

He pushed himself up from the floor. He stared through the legs of the football players at Misty, who was walking toward them, her hands clenched by her side.

“Motherfuckers,” she proclaimed. “You leave him alone.”

“Fuck you,” said Sixty-Four. “Mind your own business.”

“Leave him alone,” repeated Misty as she picked up a finished toolbox, perfect and gleaming, from the workbench.

“Hey!” protested Thirty-Seven. “I made that!”

“I don't give a shit,” said Misty. Sixty-Four spit down on Jake and kicked him once in the ribs. Jake yelped and rolled over on his side. He slid across the floor and pressed up against a metal cabinet.

He watched as Misty swung the toolbox and hit Sixty-Four in the side of the head. He collapsed, took down two benches as he fell to the floor. She held the toolbox in front of her, shoved it at the circle of football players, who all backed away. She jabbed it at them, until they backed out through the door, leaving their comrade lying on the floor.

When the door closed, Misty replaced the toolbox, now dented on one end, back on the workbench.

“Fuckers,” said Misty. “All of them.”

“Oh my god,” Jake said, and spit on the floor. He could taste the wood shavings on the roof of his mouth; his tongue was coated with sawdust.

Misty helped Jake to his feet. They stared down at Sixty-Four, a slick of blood on his forehead, shining in the fluorescent lights. He was still.

“Maybe he's dead,” said Jake.

“I doubt it,” Misty said, and shoved him with a push of her foot. “He's a goddamn football player. I knocked him out, that's all.”

They watched Sixty-Four's chest rise and fall, and Jake was relieved.

“Jesus,” said Jake. “How are we going to explain this?”

“We're not,” said Misty. “We're leaving.”

She grabbed his hand and pulled him out of the classroom and into the hallway. The corridors were completely empty, except for the two girls who were hanging up the pep rally poster with electrical tape. They paid no attention as Misty and Jake, still covered in sawdust, exited through a side door.

That night, Misty's mother came to deliver news. Martha Man Hands stood on the porch, shaking her giant fists, still furious over Misty's latest misadventures. Krystal immediately sent Jake to his room. He stood in the hallway and tried to listen, but the baby was screaming, and then Martha was crying.

Krystal came into his bedroom after Martha left, and told him that Misty was being sent away. Misty had always saved him, escorted Jake through the streets of Quinn in the morning. Misty flashed a pocketknife at any assembly of boys more than three in number. Misty had been his protector, and Frank had been his friend. Losing them both was too much to bear. Something folded up inside him like a lawn chair.

He was more afraid than ever. He went to sleep holding Frank's harmonica.

R
achel had now been in Quinn for six days, and she finally felt strong enough to venture out, lapped the town again and again, driving in circles, safe in the night. Nobody knew who the town of Quinn had been named after, although rumor had it that the original Quinn had been a railroad hobo, who in 1910 jumped a train, fell out drunkenly, and then decided to remain in the thick woods and found the town that would become his namesake. Wildfires completely decimated Quinn in 1939, and then again in 1946, just after people had finally rebuilt. As a result, the town was sloppily organized, streets named arbitrarily, or not at all, businesses only formed out of absolute necessity, no street signs or sidewalks or traffic lights.
The whole town seemed to be waiting for the flames to return.

At night, the town was dark and still, no headlights from cars. The bars shut down at two o'clock, and the Sinclair had long since closed. She was thankful for the darkness when she pulled into her driveway. In the daylight, the sight of the trailer house filled her with dread.

She stepped through the gate, carefully navigating the narrow path, unlit and uneven, stepping-stones made of giant pieces of shale that were sunk at dangerous and unpredictable depths. What remained of the porch light was a jagged black hole, rimmed with papery gray clumps of hornets' nests. Rachel hadn't bothered to lock the door. Frank had left behind nothing worth stealing, and the trailer house already looked like it had been vandalized and squatted in. She turned on the living room light, and it glared off the plastic sheeting that covered the entire east corner, where the chimney had collapsed into the fireplace. The carpet was filthy, so Rachel sat on a cardboard box of unpacked clothes and reached for the cordless phone. She had been amazed to find that her father still had phone service, despite his dying. Maybe he had known she would return like a boomerang, and had paid in advance.

Seeing all those people at the Fireman's Ball had reignited her shame. She had felt the fire in her cheeks as she leaned against the firehouse wall. She always thought that the people had been frozen in time when she left, but fatter and older versions carried on like they always had, only stopping to glare. Rachel thought she had moved past her shame, after it manifested itself in her first month of sobriety as spectacular crying jags and handwritten lists of the terrible things she had done, the things she could remember. Doing this inventory with her sponsor took two solid weeks, every evening spent unveiling yet another thing she thought unforgivable, while her sponsor made endless cups of tea. The sponsor massaged Rachel's shaking hands and assured her that other drunks had done much worse things.

Rachel's sponsor was called Athena. This was not her real name. Athena had ditched the name Louise after attending a sweat lodge where she received a vision in the teepee and decided that she was a warrior woman and not a tax accountant. Sobriety did strange things to people. Athena was hugely obese, a true warrior only when they went out to eat at restaurants that served food buffet-style.

“I feel shame again,” reported Rachel, when the phone was answered on the first ring.

“We got rid of that.” Athena sighed. “Come back to Missoula. I warned you this would happen. Don't fuck it up. You've only got a year.”

“I have three hundred and eighty-four days,” responded Rachel. “That's more than a year.”

She could hear Athena sigh again, and then the catch, the scratch of a lighter.

“Rachel . . .”

“What? I've done everything you have ever told me to do. You said no big changes during the first year. I didn't even get a fucking haircut.”

“Did you go to that hootenanny?”

“It was a fund-raiser,” said Rachel. “For the fire department. I just wanted to make sure they know I support them. Trailers burn up quick around here.”

“Did you feel the urge to drink?”

Rachel thought about this question and realized that she had not. She had been too preoccupied with her mission, distracted by the sloppy citizens of her hometown, all of those faces that were vaguely familiar. She wished they had been wearing name tags.

“No,” said Rachel. “I felt the urge to spray everybody with disinfectant.”

“Have you found a meeting yet?”

“Yes.” Rachel had found the only meeting in Quinn, but she was too frightened to go, was too afraid of who she would run into. Although it was an anonymous program, the gossip might be worth too much. There was certainly a value for the delicious secrets of a famous, thieving, murderous harlot.

“We've been through all of the steps,” asserted Athena. “I don't understand why you keep coming back to steps eight and nine.” Rachel made a list of all persons she had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all. She made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others. Rachel no longer feared injuring herself, figured that she had it coming.

“I'm stuck,” said Rachel. “I've been able to forgive myself for everything else. I have to make things right.”

“That's not how it works,” said Athena. “You know that. All you have to do is be willing, and if they can't accept your amends, then forget every white-trash piece of shit in that town. Stop beating yourself up.”

“Okay,” said Rachel.

“I don't think you need to atone for the rest of your life. Two weeks is plenty. Paint some benches, pick up some trash, buy some Girl Scout cookies, and get the fuck out of there. Go to meetings.”

“You told me pain is good,” said Rachel. “You told me that pain is growth.”

“I also told you that it was okay to make Debbie Harry your higher power. Just go to sleep,” said Athena. “Tomorrow is a whole new day.”

“That's what I'm afraid of,” muttered Rachel.

Athena had been astounded at how quickly Rachel moved through the steps; she had never sponsored someone so determined to get right with God, even though Rachel really only believed in Debbie Harry. There were twelve steps, and Rachel clawed desperately through each one; she wrote letters of amends to her mother and Red Mabel, to her father and several of her classmates from high school. All but one of the letters had been returned.

Rachel threw the phone against a pile of clothes, all Quinn-­inappropriate, especially her vintage Halston palazzo pants. She loved those pants, but feared that magpies or marmots would be attracted to the sparkle, drop down from the sky or emerge from the forest to gnaw at her legs.

She navigated the sinkhole in the middle of the living room. The carpet was softly cratered where the floor had given in. The list of repairs was enormous, daunting: the house seemed to be surrendering to gravity, with the left end sinking faster than the right. A tube of lipstick rolled when she placed it on the kitchen counter. Rachel felt seasick when she walked from one end of the house to the other.

Rachel made do with washcloth baths, as the tiny bathroom contained a bathtub that had fallen through the subflooring. It rested three feet down from the rest of the linoleum, in the dirt and gravel underneath the trailer. Rachel had thrown the rest of her city clothes into this pit, along with the strange clothes she had found in her father's closet. Her father owned a collection of polyester-blend suit jackets and matching pants, a pile of neckties. This was strange to her—in her few encounters with her father, it seemed that he only accessorized with sap from pine trees. She lowered herself to the toilet to pee, and it was cold and drafty in the bathroom, torturous to touch her buttocks to the icy toilet seat. At least the toilet worked. Her father had not completely descended into the depths of madness. He had just fallen into squalor, and sometimes through the floor.

The bedroom was where Rachel had spent most of her time since returning home, crying and making to-do lists. Her bed was the only thing she had brought with her, the only piece of furniture she had any kinship with.

Rachel had bought the bed after being sober for two months. It was a gift she had given herself. The last two years of her drinking, Rachel had become a bed wetter. She was a beer drunk, always had been, and it was unsurprising that she wet the bed, because during the last year of her drinking, she was consuming sixteen cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon per night.

Eventually, she bought a stack of blue tarps to sleep on. She wasn't a complete degenerate—every morning, she would remove the tarp and put it in the bathtub, turn on the shower to rinse away the urine, and drape it over the couch in her living room to dry. She threw the used tarp in the Dumpster every Sunday night, before the garbagemen came, replaced it with a new one. Rachel could still recall the crackle of waking up in the morning, the sound of her naked body on the tarp, the suction and the stickiness as she pulled herself free. It was this crackle that got her sober, made her realize that this was not normal behavior, that most people didn't piss the bed every night. Her moment of clarity about the tarps came on a Monday morning, and she called the AA number, her hands shaking so badly she had to redial several times. She had not realized that her entire back and buttocks had become slightly stained, bluish, until Athena pointed it out on a day trip to the natural hot springs, two weeks into her sobriety.