By the time I crossed into Alabama, I didn’t think I was.
On our second date, I’d told Thom my father was dead. Daddy was so dead to me by then that it didn’t even feel like a lie. Thom knew my mother had left me as a child, so Fruiton was the second or third place he would look for me. He’d certainly comb Amarillo first, and it was a good-odds bet that Kingsville, the town where we met, might pull his attention next.
Going to Fruiton gave me solid lead time and the home field advantage. It was my best shot if I was going to lay a trap instead of running.
The air grew warmer as I went east, and the Buick’s AC was for shit. I drove into my old hometown with all four windows mostly down. Fruiton already smelled like a small-town Alabama summer: hot asphalt and secondhand fry grease, overlaid with deep green pine. Pollen hung in the breathless air, giving every outdoor surface a thin yellow glaze. When I’d lived here, Fruiton’s singular air had been so familiar that it was invisible. I’d forgotten the feel of it dusting up my nose.
I pointed the car toward my old house, Gretel awake and back to sticking her boxy head out the window, her tongue collecting dust. My car hadn’t had a working tape player in years, so I had the radio on a gospel station. In Fruiton, the only music choices were gospel or country music, or I could swap to AM talk and get a bellyful of angry men hollering about politics or Jesus or both.
I was so tired, I needed both hands on the wheel now just to keep the car going straight. My route took me right past the old Krispy Kreme that Jim and I had frequented. It was working hand in hand with the Church’s Chicken next door to oil the air. Looking at it gave me déjà vu, which was stupid.
Of course I felt like I’d been here before. I had. A thousand times. But this was ten years later, and Bickel’s Drugstore had turned into an Eckerd. The empty lot was now a Tom Thumb with three newfangled gas pumps. It was enough change to make me feel like I was being reminded of a place instead of actually being in the place.
The last time I’d been down this road, I’d been walking to the bus station. I’d worn someone else’s shoes, like now, with a hand-me-down blouse and Levi’s much like the ones I had on. I had probably been cleaner, though.
Another five minutes and I passed the entrance for Jim’s old subdivision, Lavalet. It had seemed right fancy to me back then, with a pool and a clubhouse and the name spelled out in curly metal letters on a low brick wall beside the entry. I opted not to turn in, heading instead for my own old neighborhood. I had no desire to ring the doorbell and say to his mother, “So, Carol, you ever hear from your youngest again?… No? Not even at Christmas?”
I doubted they still lived there, anyway. No sane person would choose to stay in a house that reminded them every minute of someone who’d left and not ever once looked back. Normal people moved away from sorrow as soon as they could. Folks less whole, sanitywise, took my daddy’s route. Daddy had raised me in the house my mother had abandoned, drinking until his vision blurred too much to focus on all the bare spaces where my mother wasn’t standing. He drank so much, some days he had to furrow up his brow and squint to aim his fists proper at me.
There was a chance, small but real, that if he hadn’t drunk himself to death, he would have stayed on in that house after I left, too. Now that I was heading toward him, I was surprised at how vague my visual memories of him were. It seemed the people that I remembered most clearly, every tick of expression and cadence of speech—Jim Beverly, my mother—were the ones who had left me.
My father was mostly a shape in my memory, short and broad with wide hands. I remembered his craggy Irish face and angry eyebrows from pictures, not from real life. The clearest things were the sour mash smell of him, the hard, fast feel of his fists, and his low and burring voice.
Still, Thom had no idea my daddy was alive, much less that he was meaner than a snake, tougher than boot leather, and better with a gun than any man I’d ever seen, Thom included. My daddy was as bad as Thom, and he owed me. And there was no danger I would stay on with him, the way I would with Jim Beverly. My nicer memories—shooting with him, piggyback rides, pushes on the tire swing—were buried under the ten years after my mother left us. He’d beaten any chance at auld lang syne right out of me. If he was still around, I was the bait, and he was nothing more to me than the steel jaws of a trap. Thom would surely look for Lolleys in the Fruiton phone book as a way to find me, but he would not expect to find his way to me blocked by a no-longer-dead daddy, much less my daddy’s arsenal.
A mile past Lavalet, I crossed Bandeer Street and left the mall-and-Olive-Garden side of town. Fruiton had no railroad, but even so, this side of Bandeer was the wrong side of the tracks. I turned left at a run-down strip mall that still held a Salvation Army thrift store and a Dollar General. Another left put me onto my old street.
All the houses on Pine Abbey had been built in the sixties: low ceilings, one central bath, a harvest gold or avocado stove and fridge set in every galley kitchen. The houses squatted low, as if they thought they were down on Mobile Bay, in hurricane country. I went a mile down the road, to what in a nicer neighborhood would have been a cul-de-sac.
Not here. Pine Abbey simply ended, blunt as the eraser end of a pencil, with a dirt track cutting through the middle of the wild back lot. The track began just over the curb and disappeared into the woods. Daddy used to drive me down through on Saturday afternoons to do some shooting.
The branches would scrape the car’s paint when we shoved our way down that track. It didn’t matter. Daddy bought beater cars and applied duct tape, spit, and cussing till they ran for him. He would drive one until the engine fell out, then sell it for scrap and get another. The track ended in a sloping meadow. We would stand at the lowest point to shoot, setting up our targets so they had the hill behind them. We shot at two-liter soda bottles rifled from the trash of our Pepsi-drinking neighbors. We drank only Coke, and Daddy wouldn’t shoot a Coke bottle. He said that for a southerner, blasting away at a Coke bottle was close to sacrilegious.
Daddy filled the bottles with water to weight them. Our bullets tore through them and then spent themselves safely in the dirt of the hill behind. We’d take turns shooting until they fell into plastic rags.
The first time he let me shoot a real gun, I was maybe five years old. It was a sunny afternoon, and the warm brown whiskey smell on his breath was light. His mood was good. He watched me taking careful aim with my pellet pistol, and he said, “Rosie-Red, I believe you’re ready to try something a touch mightier.”
He loaded a .22 for me and talked me through the kickback. He tucked in spongy orange earplugs for me, and I sighted on the Pepsi bottle. I squeezed steady, pressuring the trigger toward me until the gun bucked in my hands like a live thing. The shots rang louder when I could feel them. The .22 seemed powerful and sleek, yet it did what my hands said. I could feel the reverb of it in my whole body, and I squeezed again and again and again. I felt bullets moving out from the pit of me, down my arms, and then out the barrel. I held steady and shot till the gun was empty.
Daddy wove his way over to the Pepsi bottle and held it up. We watched water streaming out of several holes.
“Shit, baby. I think you nailed it. Three, maybe four times,” he said, admiring. “If you wan’t so pretty, I’d say it was a shame you wan’t born a boy.”
“Who would wanna be a boy,” I said, and spit.
Daddy laughed and said, “Dead-Eye Dickless.”
I laughed, too, though I didn’t get the joke. I only got that this was a good, good day. My mother was at home, making us lasagna, and my daddy was pleased with me.
Here at the dead end of Pine Abbey, my red brick cube of an ex-house sat on the right, the last in the row. The house across the street was its mirror image, except the trim was cream instead of brown and they had an old VW Beetle rusting away in the carport.
The carport of my old house was empty. Maybe he’d wised up and left the haunted place where his two-person family had abandoned him o
ne by one. Or maybe he really was dead.
Now that I was here, it seemed ridiculous to think that my actual father was sitting inside on the sofa. It was like expecting the copy of Watership Down I’d set on my bedside table a decade ago to still be there, facedown and splayed open to the chapter where the rabbits first meet Woundwart. But at the same time, I couldn’t imagine him making a checklist and packing boxes and renting a U-Haul. If he was alive, this was the only place I could imagine him existing. The empty carport might only mean he was off working or between cars.
I wondered if he would recognize me, and I felt my ab muscles go tight on the strength of memory and instinct, as if prepping for his welcome-home blow. A blast of hot red temper came steaming up my throat from my belly. If he was here, he fucking owed me.
“Sit tight,” I told Gretel. I turned off the car and rolled up all the windows to half-mast to keep her in but leave a cross-breeze going.
I got out of the car and marched across the patchy lawn, chin up, shoulders set. My eyes burned, full of sleep-sand and dry from staying open way too long. Even so, I walked tough, like a kid going to touch the front door of the neighborhood’s spooky house on a dare. I jumped up onto the concrete slab that served as a porch, out of breath from just this short burst of angry movement. I had to breathe in short pants to keep from activating the dry cough that was waiting in the bottom of my lungs. I bypassed the door, going instead to kneel by the living room’s open window. I put my face against the screen and cupped my hand around my eyes to block the sunlight, so I could see into the living room.
A little girl, maybe eight or nine, sat on the floor with her dark hair hanging in strings around her face. She felt my gaze and looked up, staring back at me with her big, glossy eyes. She didn’t seem surprised to see me, or particularly scared. She put a finger up to her lips and said, “Shhh. Daddy’s sleeping.”
For one crazy second, I thought I must be looking back into the past, seeing my young self, warning grown-up me away. I knew from science-fiction movies that if I touched her, we’d both melt or burn up or explode the world.
I blinked hard, twice, and put one hand up to my aching forehead. Looking around, I realized that the room was a right-now place, not something from my past. There was nothing in it that I recognized. A long, puffy green sofa sat against the wrong wall of the den. Ours had been brown with dark gold flowers, and it had been against the front wall, between the window I was looking through and an identical one farther down the porch. The coffee table was different, too, flanked by a vinyl wingback chair and a stack of cardboard moving boxes. There was a big TV in a hutch, showing a Bugs Bunny cartoon with the sound off. We’d had a smaller TV on a sanded plank table.
The little girl had a slew of Barbie outfits scattered across the floor. She was working a naked Barbie’s long legs into a spangled tube dress.
“Hello,” I said, quiet through the screen.
The girl’s hands were still working to clothe her doll, but the dress stuck at Barbie’s flared hips. She said, “I’m not s’posed to talk to people I don’t know.”
“I’m not a stranger,” I said. “I used to live here when I was your age. This is the house where I grew up.”
She got curious then, tilting her head sideways. She set Barbie down topless and stood up and came over to peer at me through the screen. “Then what’s your name?”
“Rose,” I said. “Rose Mae.”
She nodded like I’d passed some test and said, “You made the marks.”
“Marks?” I repeated.
“On the wall,” she said. “Daddy’s mad about it. I know you made them because it says your name.”
“You have marks on your wall that say my name?” I asked, and when she nodded I said, “Can I see them?”
She tilted her head the other way, considering. “You’d have to come in.”
“Yes,” I said. “Can I come in and see them?”
After a thinking pause, she shrugged and said, “I don’t mind it. It’s got your name, anyways.”
I stood up and met her at the front door. She swung it open for me, and there was a squeak of hinges at the end that was so familiar, it made my teeth ache.
I stepped inside. The carpet had been changed. When I was growing up, it was a dark gold, so thin in places that I could see the woven plastic matting glued to the floor. Now they had a mottled khaki Berber. The little girl pointed at the front wall, where our sofa once sat. A crudely wrought chest stacked with three more moving boxes filled the space.
“Daddy painted when we first moved in, but they’re all floating back up through,” she said, pointing at two words and a host of dark marks on the wall. “Like ghosts, Daddy said.”
The writing was all contained in an invisible square, exactly under the place where my mother’s big framed print of ships in a harbor had once hung. The lines were thick, drawn on with a laundry marker. If the print had still been hanging, all the writing would have been hidden perfectly behind it.
At the top, someone had written my name, “ROSE MAE,” in all caps. Underneath my name were long horizontal lines that ran from one edge of where the frame had been to the other. The higher horizontals were covered end to end in tick marks, thousands of them, all made of four vertical lines close together, then a diagonal slash drawn through to make five-packs.
Some were deep black, and some I could see only faintly as they worked their way up through the paint.
I said to the little girl, “This was done with a Sharpie, and that stuff will come up through paint every time. I’ve seen it come through wallpaper, even. Your daddy needs to prime the wall with this stuff you can get at Home Depot. It’s called Killz.”
“Killz,” the little girl repeated. “I’ll tell him.”
I reached out one hand and set it flat on the cool wall, cautious, as if the marks had been scorched on and were still smoking. They were as mysterious and unreadable as flattened Braille. I slid my hand down, counting horizontal lines.
There were nineteen. The top line was about one-third covered in tick marks. I started counting across by fives, moving my hand over them.
The kid said, “It’s a hundred and thirty-eight on that row. I counted before.”
I kept going. She was right: 138. There were even more ticks on the lines under. They filled every line, until they stopped midway through the eighth line. The last ten lines had no ticks at all.
“I think my mother made these,” I said.
The little girl said, “Mine works in a doctor’s office,” as if we were trading facts about mothers. “And she’s in school to be a nurse.”
“That’s a neat job,” I said absently.
My mother had kept my name and a strange count not five feet away from where my father’s recliner once sat, angled toward the TV. The air was thickening around me, and it was harder and harder to breathe.
“I’m not going to be a nurse,” the little girl said, confident. “I’m going into space.”
“That’s a neat job, too,” I managed to say.
The little girl said, “My Skipper doll has on a nurse outfit. Want to see?”
“Sure,” I said, but the pit of my stomach had gone sour. My eyes burned, and the vision in the corner of my eyes had grayed out farther. I was peering at the marks now through a tunnel of fog. The lines on the wall seemed to flicker, as if the lamp was putting out candlelight.
The girl trotted over and held up Skipper-as-nurse, too flat-chested to fill up Barbie’s uniform.
“That’s awesome,” I said, already up and moving. “I have to go.” It was true. I couldn’t breathe the air inside this place for one more second.
“Bye,” she said.
I hit the front door at a dead run, the squeaky hinge I remembered squealing at me like it was laughing. I bolted to the center of the small yard, dizzy again, gagging, but I had nothing in my belly to throw up. I coughed instead, hacking so hard that it bruised my throat. Gretel was standing in the passenger seat, h
er head thrust as far out the half-open window as it could go. She loosed a long, houndy noise, halfway between a bark and a howl, worried.
“Hush, Gret,” I told her when I stopped coughing. I was still bent over, my hands on my knees. The grass was thin with spots of black Alabama dirt showing, just as I remembered. Leprosy lawn, my mother had called it. A decade had passed since my feet had walked off this browning patch of grass, yet it still hung on in the same state of wretched decay. The grass, at least, hadn’t changed.
My stomach flopped inside me like an air-drowning trout. I hung my head down low to get in a good breath. The little girl might have come after me, but when I looked up, I saw her across-the-street neighbor had come outside. He’d already left his porch and was standing on his own tiny leprosy lawn, facing us.
He was a skinny old man with big, down-tilted eyeballs. His lower lids had sagged down so much that they’d bagged and gapped open. It seemed to me that if he bent down to get his paper, his eyes would roll right out of his head, dangling down on their stalks. He was bald on top, with strings of grayed-out hair in a straggled ring around his head.
He looked at me and his mouth dropped open.
“Holy shit!” he yelped.
I glanced behind me. No one. He pointed at me. His mouth stayed open. A thin string of drool came out of it, running down his chin and hanging free with a droplet of weighty water on the end. My stomach lurched again.
He came at me, moving across his lawn in a galumphing lope. He sped up as he came, arms spreading wide. His fingers splayed, and he staggered toward me like the mortal remains of some long-dead former love, reanimated. He hollered again, but his words were drowned out by Gretel’s sudden chain of warning barks.
I was already dancing backwards, scrabbling in my purse, my fingers closing first around my lipstick, then my keys. He was still coming at me, drooling, a zombie crossing the asphalt to embrace me, maybe get a bite. Gretel was thrusting at the window, trying to shove her too-big shoulders through and get between him and me.