Backseat Saints

  “That Buick, Daddy, you need to get rid of it. You can drive it down the trail and leave it in the woods, or if you know someone who’ll take it under the table, you do that. Sell it for scrap. But no paperwork, you understand? That car has to disappear.”

  “I know someone who’ll take it for the parts, no questions,” he said. I nodded, unsurprised.

  I started the VW. It sounded like some fireworks were getting it on with a bag of asthma in the engine box, but it ran. I backed out and left him standing there, empty-handed in his driveway.

  I ran by Wal-Mart for underpants and a new toothbrush. I also got a good-size bag of Purina Dog Chow and some raisins and hard pretzels.

  I got back in the car, but I didn’t head to Daddy’s. I hadn’t come out for underpants. I was glad to have that off my mental to-do list, but I had really driven out to find a way to say good-bye to Rose Mae Lolley. It was time to peel her off me, same way Ro Grandee had been stripped away. Whatever she had been or loved or needed, it was time to run from it, fast, never looking back. The way my mother had walked away, in the shoes she was wearing, taking nothing from her past. Not even me.

  The Catholic in me needed something more than a simple resolution. The blessing in the water was meaningless unless I stepped into the river. Wine to blood meant nothing if I didn’t drink. I needed a ritual, a solemn act to start and seal the change.

  I drove first to my old elementary school, but I found the woods behind, my woods and Jim’s, had been shaved away to make room for a subdivision full of cramped, square houses in pastel colors. I pulled over to the side of the road.

  The remains of my childhood were buried here. See-through young Jims and Rose Mae Lolleys must disturb the people’s sleep, running through the walls to hide and show each other private things. The mortal remains of someone’s calico cat would appear at midnight to stalk ghost mice across the cheap carpeting, chasing as best she could with her head on backwards.

  The homes smelled as haunted as that neighborhood in Poltergeist, a movie Jim and I had watched on tape at his house maybe fifty times. “You moved the woods,” I whispered to the pink and aqua cracker boxes, “but you left the bodies, didn’t you?”

  The Rose I was had begun in these woods with Jim, but the woods were gone. Someone’s TV room rested on top of our clearing, and the blackberry bushes had been poisoned and dug out and dragged away for burning. I put the car in drive and passed the entrance, spine ashudder. I needed a place less changed.

  I drove on out to Lipsmack Hill, my hands steady on the wheel. I found the hard-to-see turnoff onto the dirt path through the woods, the way still clear enough for the Bug to pass without adding to its scratches. I stopped in the grassy clearing where, if this had been 1985, in a few hours couples would park to tangle up and get some steam on their windows. I wondered if this year’s crop of kids still came out here to get rowdy.

  I opened the glove compartment and rifled through the maps. I’d seen a flashlight in there, and when I clicked the button, it surprised me by working.

  I hiked the familiar path up through the trees, toward the clearing at the top of Lipsmack. I remembered the path so perfectly, I doubt I would have needed the light, even though the moon was only now on the rise. I’d been so aware of every inch, the first time I came up here with Jim Beverly. He’d been carrying that scratchy picnic blanket, both of us too shy and hopeful and nervous to talk much. My feet remembered how to walk it as my light swept the trail, searching for rocks and fallen branches.

  At the top of Lipsmack was a flat patch of lush grass, and it ended in a sharp cliff that jutted out above a valley full of kudzu. I sat on the lip and clicked off my light, swinging my boots back and forth like Bunny had in my mother’s desk chair. I waited while my eyes adjusted to the rising moonlight. The kudzu waved and swayed below me in the darkness like a deep green-black sea.

  My mother laid cards. Had they told her I was coming west? The three she’d turned at the airport said a lot about her life, but only because my life had been modeled in a thousand unseen ways on hers. They were my cards, too, and they’d said that either Thom or I must die.

  I’d played cowboys and Indians in the bushes out near Wildcat Bluff, but I hadn’t been able to shoot him. I’d gone to Chicago, fooling myself into looking for a lost love because it made it seem like I was doing something other than staying and staying and staying until the day he killed me. Then I’d come home to Daddy and found him wrecked. What a pair we were, Daddy and me. I’d followed my chain of bad men all the way back to my very first, but it was useless. Neither of us was up to battling sugar ants for control of his dirty kitchen, much less the man I’d married.

  I was tired of stalling. If the cards were right, if it was Thom or me, then let it be me. I wanted to leave Thom’s would-be killer and his victim both to rot in the kudzu. I wanted to be done with the violent, angry girl my mother had created with her leaving, and I’d long been done with Ro.

  I had come up here to say good-bye, but not to Jim Beverly. Not even to Daddy. I was finished here. Rose—and her trail— had to truly dead-end. I could never come back to Fruiton, Alabama. But I wasn’t sure how to leave her, how to start fresh, to be someone else. If I peeled Thom Grandee’s would-be murderer away, what the hell lived underneath?

  I’d been someone else, before my mother left. A regular girl, maybe like Bill’s Bunny. Jim Beverly and I had not been friends then. There was nothing in that girl to draw him. I didn’t remember her very well. My mother had left her, so I had left her, too, not wanting to be a thing whose own mother couldn’t love her. I didn’t know her, but my mother must remember her and could help me remember, too. If I could abandon Rose Mae Lolley here, the way I’d left Ro Grandee back in Texas, I could start fresh. And after all, I wouldn’t be the first asshole to try to find themselves in Cali-fucking-fornia.

  I took off my wedding band, and the interlocking engagement ring diamond that went with it. My small marquise-cut stone glimmered in the faint light. I stared down at the sea of kudzu below me. It seemed like it could hold a thousand secrets. I closed my hand around the rings and reared my arm back, prepping to throw. I’d seen this done before in movies, a diamond hurled off a bridge or a ship, tossed into the woods from an overpass, or flicked out a moving car’s window. It meant a permanent break.

  I couldn’t do it. I froze with my arm back, rings still fisted in my tight-closed hand. The pragmatist in me was totting up groceries and gas and even the cheapest hotels. I’d need to stop and sleep in real beds, to let my body heal. I’d been so sick. I’d need to eat good things, fresh fruit and soup, to get my strength back. I needed cash, fast and untraceable, and I could get it at any pawnshop with my ring set. I lowered my arm, even though without a sacrament, my resolution to start fresh as someone wholly new was weak. It couldn’t hold.

  I paused, torn, and then, like a gift, I heard voices down at the bottom of the hill. I cocked my head sideways to listen. I recognized them. Arlene Fleet and her angry fella.

  Was she here looking for me? I tried to remember what my note had said, back in Chicago. I might well have mentioned Fruiton. She had a story to tell, a story that was so ugly she’d run straight up a tree rather than remember it. Her history with Jim must be haunting her so hard. I knew what that felt like. Perhaps she’d tracked me all the way to Alabama to try to lay it to rest by telling me, by telling anyone, at last.

  I stood up and jammed the rings in my pocket. I could do this for her. I could play the part of a wounded Rose still hunting for her Jim. I would listen to her story, though I already knew it. It was my story, too. The details didn’t matter. I would listen and then carry as much of it away for her as I could and dump it, for both of us. I would never think of Jim Beverly or be his Rose Mae again. I’d go get my good dog and blast out of here. I had a handwritten apology from Daddy and a long overdue library book that needed to be delivered.

  The voices down the hill were getting louder; Arlene and her boyfriend
were getting into it. It occurred to me that if I wanted a symbolic gesture to seal my transformation, here it was on a platter. Arlene had found her own replacement bad man, and she’d brought him right to me.

  There was no more fitting final act for Rose Mae Lolley than this: I would go down the hill and kick Arlene Fleet’s piece-of-shit boyfriend as hard as I could, right in the nuts. Then she and I would run. I would listen to her, then be on my way. I felt my grin go wide and wolfy in the darkness. I started down the steep path in the moonlight, ready to begin.

  PART III:

  HANGING IVY

  Berkeley, California, 1997

  CHAPTER

  14

  MY MOTHER LIVES somewhere in this city, maybe even on the street I am driving down. It is lined with skinny stucco houses, set close, growing like bright, rectangular mushrooms out of the hills. She could be walking down one of these narrow sidewalks, making her way between the houses and the parked cars that line the street.

  Gret and I took the drive here in four easy days, going first north to St. Louis, then west through cowboy country. I drove with the windows down all the way. Desert air whirled through the car in a constant cyclone, catching up our hair and rifling through it, blowing all the Alabama off our skins. I wasn’t halfway through Nebraska before even my regrets had been blown clean away. I may have kept a small one for Arlene Fleet’s poor boyfriend. He’d turned out to be a decent fella, but I hadn’t known that until well after I’d kicked his family jewels so hard that I was surprised they didn’t shoot straight out his nose. Arlene had defended him like a miniature tigress, but after she’d calmed down, she’d confirmed everything I’d come to believe about Jim Beverly. Everything and more. I’d seen no point in dwelling, though, as I drove away. I was heading toward my lost mother and the answer to a question I’d been carrying for more than twenty years. I’d had no room for other thoughts inside the little car. I still don’t.

  I coast another slow mile through Berkeley, and the houses give way to neighborhood stores; my mother could be one of the shoppers meandering from coffee house to stationery shop to the futon store. It should be easy to spot her, given her penchant for bright and mismatched layers, but her strangeness is eclipsed by a white boy with blond dreadlocks, a six-foot black guy in a red dress, a turbaned girl dancing on a corner to music only she can hear.

  Most of the couples I see don’t match up in the usual ways. My gaze is pulled to a tiny Asian girl, straining up on tiptoe to kiss a tall, stooping black man, then a pair of Swedish-looking blond ladies holding hands, then a slim, attractive fifty-year-old Hispanic woman who is walking arm in decidedly unmotherly arm with a bulky guy, his pale head shaved clean and gleaming. He must be twenty years her junior.

  My mother is close, perhaps even present, but strange works here as camouflage. I begin to understand how much little ol’ Claire Lolley from Alabama must have changed in order to belong. She has done it, though. It is as if I can feel her heart beating, and it is the same heartbeat that the city has, a thready, strange arrhythmia that shouldn’t work as well as it does.

  I will find her. I am obeying the most basic drive there is. New lambs, blind and soaked in afterbirth, go immediately to their mothers. They know, and I know. She can blend into the landscape all she likes. I will find her. Watching for her, I drive right past the turn for the Berkeley branch library and have to go back.

  The VW is used to the gentler hills of Alabama. It struggles to crest a slope so steep that I have to pump the brakes to keep the bald tires from playing sled on the downside. The library is a squatty brick building wedged in between an organic food mart and a gas station. It has slitty 1960s windows like my library back home—a little slice of familiarity in a city so strange, I feel like I have left my home planet—but it has no parking lot. The street is lined with meters with a two-hour limit.

  I backtrack until I find a tiny half slot open on a residential side street with no parking limit posted. This space would defeat the smallest Honda, but I squeak the Bug back and forth, like I am sawing it into place. I make it.

  Gretel and I get out and start walking back to the branch. It’s the best place to start. Claire Lolley may have changed, but I can’t believe she’s changed so much that they won’t know her at her local library. Back in Fruiton, she and I went to the library two, sometimes three times a week.

  We are passing an Indian restaurant, and the air has a tangy, sharp smell. My mother had a similar scent, like ginger and other unfamiliar spices. Gretel lifts her nose to snuff. I do the same thing, just as a homeless fella comes up even with me. He is gusty and overripe, and I get a noseful.

  He grins, showing me less than ten teeth, and falls into step beside me. He has a ragged swath of braided hair poking up out of the rag he has wound around his head, and his eyes roll around in separate ways. Gretel mutters low in her throat, a warning noise, as he leans in and says into my face, “You a bull daggahhhh!” with cheery relish. I stop, startled, but his message has been delivered, and he keeps walking.

  “Just a harmless weirdo,” I tell Gret, who has her hackles up. My voice calms her but not me.

  The homeless fella catches up to an older lady in a peacoat who is walking along in front of me. He delivers the same message to her. She smiles at him and digs in a brown paper sack she is holding, then pulls out a sandwich and hands it to him. He takes it and hurries on, eager to tell all the women ahead of us that they, too, have been identified as bull daggahhhhs.

  “The weird go west,” I tell my dog. Anyone too strange for Berkeley must walk straight into the sea like a lemming to drown. Or possibly grow gills. If they are too odd for this city, there can be no place for them above sea level.

  I hook Gretel’s leash to the bike rack by the library’s front steps and tell her I’ll be right back. Inside, I am greeted by the familiar smell of musty books. There’s a counter with two librarians behind it, and to their right, I see the low shelves and the outdated computers of a typical reference section. The furniture is covered in crackly blue vinyl. They are obviously underfunded, the furniture and technology years out of date, just like back home. The whole building could be swapped out for the library in Amarillo and no one would notice. Not until they looked at the librarians, anyway.

  The closest librarian is a young woman, and I automatically skip over her to look at the man at the other end of the counter. He has a sheaf of dark hair falling over his forehead and a pierced nose. His eyes are as black and shiny as oil slicks.

  He looks up at me as I pause a few feet back from the counter with my mother’s book clutched close in one arm. He sees me, and his shoulders tuck in and his spine bows slightly, as if a little bit of breath has been pressed out of him by an unseen hand.

  A pretty woman is a Christmas tree, my mother told me in the airport. This fella is hanging things on my branches as his gaze sweeps from my face all the way down my body to my hips and then back to my face. Ideas fly from his widened eyes and land on me like teeny, decorative burdens. He is giving me shyness, maybe, some book smarts, and a certain yielding sweetness in the bed. The oil-slick eyes get me, and I find myself hanging a few ornaments myself, giving him deft hands and a sense of humor.

  Ro Grandee would go lean over the counter and touch her hair a lot of times, maybe touch his. She’d pinch and wheedle information out by turns. Rose Mae Lolley would simply hop over to his side, get herself a fist full of testicle, and twist until he spilled. I pause, uncertain, and then do the one thing that comes least naturally: I step straight toward the female librarian.

  She looks soft, as if she’s been raised in a box and purely milk-fed, like veal. A line of teeny blue butterfly tattoos flutter out from behind her ear, cross her collarbone, and disappear into her blouse. I give her the most friendly, open smile that I can muster, put my hand out, and say, “Hi, I’m Ivy. Ivy Rose Wheeler.”

  She takes my hand and says, “All Swan.”

  I blink. “All what?”

  “
All swan,” she says, smiling, then explains, “that’s my name.” She spells it for me, Alswan, then cranes her long neck at me, trying to look like she’s at least some swan. She’s got a good yard of extremely rumpled golden brown hair, wild, like she’s spent the afternoon having cheerful jungle sex with Tarzan in the stacks. Tarzan kept her bra, looks like.

  She’s for sure younger than me and maybe prettier than me, which makes her about the last creature alive any of my former selves would go to for help; score one for the new girl. I plant myself in front of her and I say, “I found this book of y’all’s. In an airport.”

  I hand over the Stephen King book, and Alswan flips open the cover to read the stamp. “This is ours all right. Thank you.”

  “The woman who left it, she also left something in it. Inside it. Something important. Or valuable, I mean.” I’m practically stuttering. I’m not sure what kind of person Ivy Rose will turn out to be, but sadly, she’s a terrible liar. At least to women. Perhaps, I think, this is because I weathered adolescence without a mother to practice on. Something else to put on Claire Lolley’s long, long tab. “I need to get in touch with the woman who checked it out.”

  Alswan’s eyebrows come together. “I can’t give out information about our patrons. That’s not… We don’t do that.”

  “I understand,” I say, nodding. “But I was hoping you could contact the person and tell her I’m here with the book.” Alswan regards me with a healthy skepticism. I soldier on. “The thing I found, it’s not something she can easily replace. She must want it.”

  Alswan’s mouth purses up into a prim wad, as if, under the sex hair and the tats, the spirit of my hometown librarian is rising up inside her. Mrs. Blount once gave me this exact face back in Fruiton, when she caught me reading D. H. Lawrence at thirteen. Alswan clearly has not bought what I am selling, but she humors me and says, “I’ll take a look.”