Gods in Alabama

  “You better exit and let us out right now. I mean it. Right now. You asshole. You total asshole.”

  Her color was high. I had never seen her so angry.

  “You want out?” he said. “Fine. Jump out.” The Jeep was doing over sixty.

  Clarice shut up and did not speak again for the rest of the long ride down the highway. Jim Beverly polished off the bottle.

  Finally we saw the exit to Route 19 coming up, and he took it smoothly, rocketing off the lit highway into the darkness of the access road. Nobody spoke until we had gone through Possett and were heading down the solitude of Route 19, soybean fields on either side of us.

  “Damn, but I have to pee,” Jim Beverly said.

  “You’re not coming in my house drunk like this to use the bathroom,” said Clarice. “My daddy would kill me for getting in a car with you, and my mama would kill you for making me.”

  “I don’t need no toilet,” said Jim Beverly, and he cut the lights on the Jeep. The road disappeared in front of us, and he banked hard right. I grabbed the sides of my seat, and Clarice let out a short, sharp scream. The Jeep ran off the road onto the shoulder, bumping us up hard and then landing us with a jarring crunch, leveling as we hit the plowed field.

  “Stop. Stop. What is wrong with you?” Clarice was almost screaming.

  “Gotta piss!” said Jim Beverly, in a voice that was a perfect marriage of cheerful and hateful.

  I clung to the seat as we thumped our way over the plowed rows, tearing a swath through some farmer’s crops with nothing but a thin patina of moonlight to guide us. About 250 feet into the field, Jim Beverly braked and we skidded sideways before coming to rest in the soft soil. He hopped out and walked a few feet away from the Jeep. We heard the metallic slide of his zipper going down and then a pattering noise as he urinated on a young soybean plant. He released a long, loud sigh of relief.

  “Get out of the car, Arlene,” said Clarice.

  I did not move. She kicked the back of my seat three times, hard, each kick punctuating a word as she said, “Get. Out. Now.”

  I unfastened my seat belt and hopped down. My feet sank in the loam, and I felt a trickle of dark soil entering my shoe. Clarice was climbing out after me, fast. She grabbed my arm and pulled me along in her wake.

  “We’re walking home. It’s not even a mile,” she said before I could get the question out.

  Jim Beverly had finished peeing and came after us before we had gotten even ten feet. He ran around us and loomed up in front of Clarice, surprising us in the near-dark.

  “Get your ass back in the Jeep, Clarice,” he said.

  “No,” she said. She tried to step around him, but he blocked her easily. I was behind her, uncertain what to do.

  “I said, get your little ass back in the car.”

  She tried to step around him again, and he put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her. She fell back a step, and so did I. “Now,” he said. She tried to move forward, and he shoved her again, this time placing his hands deliberately just above her breasts and pushing her.

  “Arlene, take off,” she said, suddenly uncertain.

  “Yeah, Arlene, why don’t you do that,” Jim Beverly said without looking away from Clarice.

  “Quit it, Jim,” I said. My breathing quickened and my pupils dilated as a trickle of adrenaline fed into my blood. It was as if the night was brightening around me, the thin moonlight bouncing silver and surreal off his teeth and his cheekbones as he flashed us a nasty grin.

  “Why don’t you run too, puppy,” Jim Beverly said to Clarice conversationally. “I want them to bounce.”

  He put his hands out, directly onto her breasts this time, pushing her backwards, and her hands came up trying to knock his away.

  “Arlene, go,” she said. Even as she was saying it, she was turning and running, propelled by the momentum from his latest shove, so I ran, too. We ran directly away from him, which meant we were heading for the Jeep.

  Clarice was very fast on her long legs. She caught up with me easily, and we ran side by side for three long strides. Then I saw his hand reaching for her head. He grabbed her by her long hair, catching a huge handful close to the scalp and jerking her off her feet. She screamed as she went over, and I stopped so fast I almost fell.

  Jim Beverly had her off balance, and he kept her that way, jerking her along towards the Jeep by her hair while she yelled and her hands scrabbled at his wrist. She couldn’t get her feet underneath her as she stumbled helplessly along behind him. They were almost to the Jeep.

  “Arlene, run for home,” she yelled. “Get Daddy, get my mama.”

  “Shut up, puppy,” said Jim Beverly, and he jerked her so hard she fell to her knees. Before I knew what I was doing, I was running at him with my hands out in front of me like claws and my teeth bared. He watched me coming with cool eyes. He had one hand tangled deep in Clarice’s hair, pulling her along, but one arm was free. He sidestepped as I came, bringing his free arm up to meet me, shoving at me. He used my own momentum against me, and I went hurtling sideways. I felt both my feet leave the soil. Then the back of my head slammed into the side of the Jeep, and I was falling.

  I fell for a long time. I fell for so long that I realized I wasn’t falling at all. I was floating. I was floating down in a black sea that smelled like the sad sunbaked worms you always find right after a summer rain.

  I heard someone singing, but I couldn’t move my head. I seemed frozen in a single position, floating endlessly down through the warm black waters. My mother floated into my view, shiny and pale in the dark water. She had on a bathing suit like Esther Williams always wore in those old movies, and a flowery rubber swim cap. Mama held out one hand, and I could see she had a little black starfish sitting in the middle of her palm.

  She said something, but it was hard to understand her around the bubbles that came out of her mouth. She sounded a little bit like Clarice. Every summer Uncle Bruster took us to Pensacola Beach for vacation, and when we were small, we used to play mermaids in the hotel pool. We would sink to the bottom and scream things, trying to make the other understand. The water would dampen the sound and distort our words, but if I watched her lips and listened close, I could sometimes understand what she was saying.

  I tried it now, listening hard to my mother. She seemed to be saying my name. “Arlene,” she said. “Arlene, don’t be dead.”

  “Okay,” I agreed. “I won’t, then.” But I could not hear myself.

  I noticed my mother had no legs. She had traded them in for a long white tail, and it was churning powerfully around in the black water, sending bubbles up.

  “You killed her,” my mother said through the rising bubbles. “Arlene, Arlene.”

  “I didn’t kill anyone,” I tried to tell her, but I still couldn’t hear myself. I wondered, with no heat or rancor, why I should bother trying to explain. It seemed complicated, and why shouldn’t she just think whatever it was she needed to be thinking? The dead white churning of her tail, all that motion in the middle of this black floating sea, was making me sick. I thought with mild irritation that if she would stop churning that tail, I wouldn’t feel so sick. But I couldn’t stop looking at it.

  I tried to close my eyes, but they wouldn’t close. They were stuck. So I tried to look up at her face, and she had no face. She wasn’t my mother at all. She wasn’t anything but a long paleness grinding around in the darkness of the moving black sea. I was sick from the motion and wishing that I could stop falling, and then once I had stopped falling, I could perhaps ask the tail to stop its winding around. If everything would only be still and quiet, I could sleep.

  One by one, other colors began to paint themselves into the moving picture. The tail grew two pink bands, one dark, one light. I came to rest on the black-sanded bottom of the sea, and once I had stopped moving, the things around me came slowly into focus. I realized that the tail was actually Clarice.

  The dark pink band was her top, shoved up around her shoulders.
Her arms were over her head, and Jim Beverly was holding then down with one of his big hands. I was surprised to see both her breasts were out of their bra. Jim Beverly’s other hand was clutching at one of them.

  Clarice and Jim together made a shape like a capital Y lying on its side. Her pale leg was the white stalk of the Y; his legs, still in blue jeans, were camouflaged against the black earth. His white ass was in the juncture where I thought the mermaid’s tail had forked, and it was from this point that the movement, the rhythmic churning, had come. Her skirt was rucked around her waist. His belly slapped into hers with a meaty bounce as he churned against her, and that was where the Y forked, as his torso arched up away from hers. The dark sea was the waves of plowed earth that stretched around us in all directions.

  “Everything interesting always happens to Clarice,” I thought idly. I wanted to look away, but I couldn’t seem to move my eyes or even close them. I noticed then that Clarice’s face was filthy, and she’d cried silver tracks through the dirt on her face. Her eyes were red and swollen, and her mouth was bent into an ugly braying shape, and she was yelling something. She was calling my name, and she wouldn’t leave me alone, and together they were making the churning motion that was making me so sick when what I needed was for everything to be only still and quiet so I could sleep.

  But they did not stop, and I watched them, seeing how they were joined into the shape of the letter Y. A dull red anger began to spread slowly through me. I could see what was happening now. He was picking Clarice. Everyone always picked Clarice. And she was yelling at me about it, yelling my name, “Arlene, Arlene, don’t be dead.” She wanted me to be alive so I would be forced to see that it was always her he liked. Like I had not known that.

  Clarice pulled one of her hands out from under his, and then her hand was moving so fast it made me dizzy to see it. She was flailing at him with it. He reared back, higher than she was, and took his hand off her breast to slam his fist into her stomach. I heard her breath whoosh out in a rush, and her hand fell back, down beside her. She was fighting hard to breathe, and when she caught a breath, it came back out again as a sob. She said, “You’re hurting me, please, please no.” She said my name again and turned her face away from him, back to me.

  She sounded so pitiful that some of my anger went washing away. I blinked, and Clarice must have seen the movement. She said, “Arlene? Arlene? Are you alive?” Her limp hand came back up again to shove at him. He reared back, hitting her stomach to make her stop.

  I was lying on my side by the Jeep. I pushed myself on my arms, and the effort made pain bloom in searing waves inside my head. As I raised myself up, my long hair swung down, strands covering my face, so it was like I was seeing the two of them churning together from behind black bars.

  He drove his fist into the soft part of her belly again, and I said, “You don’t hit girls.”

  He looked over at me and froze, staring at me, tiny and slim in my black and red outfit, with the long dark strands of my hair covering my face. He was completely still, and then he said, “Rose?”

  I got onto my hands and knees somehow and said, “You don’t ever hit girls.”

  “Shit, fuck,” said Jim Beverly, and he propelled himself backwards, coming up off of my cousin and rising to his feet in the moonlight. He jerked up his jeans, stuffing his bloodied cock back into his underwear. It was still hard. He took two steps towards me but lost his balance and staggered sideways away. Clarice rolled onto her side and curled into a ball.

  “Fuck,” yelled Jim Beverly. He caught himself on the hood of his Jeep and then bent, draping the top half of his body over it.

  Clarice was sitting up, pulling her sweater down, and already crawling towards me. I was resting, up on my hands and knees, before trying to stand. “Arlene, we have to go, we have to go. Get up, Arlene,” she was whispering.

  Bracing against each other, we somehow got to our feet. Clarice slung one arm around me, holding me up, and together we began limping away, slipping on the soft earth, clinging to each other. Every step drove a serrated blade of pain into the back of my head while we crept away from him as fast as we could go. Behind us, I heard the unmistakable sound of Jim Beverly puking his guts out.

  I couldn’t turn my head without almost passing out from the pain, so Clarice kept looking over her shoulder. Any second we expected him to come after us, but he didn’t. Long after the darkness had swallowed him, and Clarice said she could no longer see him when she looked over her shoulder, we could hear him hacking and puking in the black behind us.

  I barely remember the long hike home through the soybean fields. When the fields ended, Clarice led us through the large back gardens and pastures of our neighbors. It was all gray to me, a death march in a haze of pain. Clarice kept asking me questions. What my name was. The date. About what time I thought it was. It was getting on my nerves.

  At last we reached our own backyard, and Clarice leaned me against the back wall of Aunt Florence’s gardening shed. She let go of me and squatted down on the ground and burst into a flurry of short, racking sobs, her head cradled in her hands.

  I leaned on the wall. After a few minutes she stopped. The back wall of the shed had a spigot with a garden hose on it. Clarice turned on the water and began washing, scrubbing hard at herself in the icy spray.

  I wanted to tell her how sorry I was, so awfully sorry. Both for what had happened to her and for what I had thought. The worst part was that disinterested jealousy was still there. An ugly small piece at the very core of me still wanted him to have picked me. In my heart, the moment was mine. I couldn’t hate myself enough for feeling it, and I couldn’t stop feeling it.

  “How did I let this happen?” Clarice cried, scrubbing and scrubbing at herself with her hands. “My brother is dead, Arlene. Wayne’s dead. I shouldn’t have let this happen.”

  I slid down the wall of the shed and sat, leaning my aching head back. I wanted to be asleep somewhere quiet, somewhere where none of this was true.

  “I can’t get hurt like this,” she said. “This will kill my mama. I have to be all right. I have to be all right all the time.”

  “I wish it never happened,” I said, meaning everything, meaning Jim Beverly and my need.

  She stared at me, her eyes wide and gleaming in her filthy face, and then she nodded. “That’s what I want, too. Let’s make that true. We can’t let it have happened. We’ll just get as clean as we can out here. And we’ll wait here until it’s at least eleven-fifteen, so they won’t think anything, and so they’re sure to be in bed. And then we’ll go on in like normal. We’ll do everything like normal. We’ll get in our pajamas. And in the morning, it will be just like you said. Mama can’t know it ever happened. Can we do that?”

  “Sure,” I said. “We can do that.” Later, when I failed, and flopped around the house in my tragic black layers, palpably suffering, it was a punishment. I was flogging myself for those moments when he was hurting her so badly and all I could do was wish it was me—not to spare her, but because I wanted so badly to be picked, to be chosen. I had stolen something from her then, in my bitter thoughts, and I never knew how to give it back.

  That night Clarice was the one who washed us both down. She was the one who lay awake all night in my bed, waking me every few minutes to ask me my name and what year it was, until dawn came in the window and showed her both my pupils were the same size again. And she was the one who, when we came in the house, called in her normal voice down the hall to her parents, “Mama? We’re home.”

  After a pause I heard Florence answer, her rough voice blurred by sleep, “All right, then, Clarice. Did you girls have a nice time?”

  “Sure we did, Mama,” Clarice said. “Sure we did.”

  CHAPTER 15

  MAN, CAN I pick them,” said Rose Mae Lolley. She stood up and brushed at the seat of her pants.

  I stayed where I was, a few feet away from both of them in the darkness. My throat hurt from talking, and I was exhausted.
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  Rose said, “No wonder you didn’t want me talking to your cousin.” She walked along the side of the Blazer. “You know what gets me? You know what really gets me in all this? My fucking therapist was right.” She kicked the Blazer’s front tire savagely with her scuffed yellow boot.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I wanted her gone. Burr was quiet, and I didn’t know what he was thinking.

  “He was always nice to me,” Rose said. She tucked the sharp points of her bob behind her ears. “Maybe he’s changed.”

  “He hasn’t changed,” I said. “People don’t change.”

  Burr got up abruptly and said, “Yes, they do. I’m tired of that.”

  “Fuck it,” said Rose. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is what he was when I picked him. Man, can I pick them.” She stood tense by the Blazer, vibrating with energy and anger. Maybe Burr had a point. I couldn’t see a trace of the languid, passive Rose who had drifted carefully down the halls ten years ago. She fished around in her pocket and pulled out her keys and headed for the VW Bug.

  Burr put a hand out and I took it, moving in close beside him.

  “I hope your car starts. You’ve left the headlights on forever,” said Rose. But she didn’t wait for us to check. She scrunched down in her car, and the engine roared to life. It sounded like she’d left her muffler back in Texas. She reversed violently and swung the car around. Her lights came on, and she drove away from us, disappearing down the dirt road.

  “What do you think she’ll do?” I said.

  “I have no idea,” said Burr. “But I don’t think she’ll bother Clarice.”

  I nodded. “You don’t think she heard us, do you? I mean the earlier parts. She can’t have heard me say I killed him. She was all the way up the hill.” Burr shook his head, and I swayed where I stood. “I’m so tired,” I said.