We would wait until we heard one of her parents (usually Aunt Florence) give us a sleep-logged “okay” from their room at the end of the hall, and then we would go in to bed. My mother slept in a room that used to belong to Clarice’s brother, Wayne, directly in between our room and Aunt Florence’s. But most nights Mama was too medicated to hear us come in. She never answered us.
Aunt Florence and Uncle Bruster got used to hearing only one of us at random. That way one of us could stay out longer, and creep in later, after Flo had shifted from her nebulous my-daughter-is-out-in-the-night doze into real sleep.
Clarice was shaking her head at me. “Arlene, if this is some stupid thing like you got rid of Barry and now you want to climb off him and go meet still and yet some other boy, I am going to be—”
“No, it isn’t, I swear. I swear. I wouldn’t come over here and bother you and Bud like this if I didn’t please, please really need you. Please, Clarice, don’t ask me any questions, just help me. I so need you to help me now.” I was sobbing, tears blinding me as I begged her, and then my throat clogged up so I couldn’t speak.
Clarice reached out and touched my hair, soft and uncertain. “I don’t think I should, Arlene.”
I don’t think she’d seen me cry since that one awful night freshman year, when I was so hurt, and we lay in each other’s arms in my bed like someone’s broken toys. She’d taken care of me. She’d helped me then. But that night, I had made her swear, never happened. And Clarice, so serene all the time, universally beloved and calm and pretty, had somehow managed to make it so in her own brain. But I wasn’t like her.
She shrugged at me apologetically and started the car up. “I’m taking you home.” She couldn’t trust me, so I decided I had to trust her.
“Jim Beverly is up on top of Lipsmack with some freshman girl,” I said.
She went completely still, and then she said, “Why did you let Bud go? Oh, no, we need Bud.”
“No, we don’t. Bud can’t know anything. Just you do like I told you and cover for me with Aunt Florence.”
She swallowed, and her throat was so dry I heard it as a click. “What are you going to do?”
“I have a plan,” I lied. “I can either sit here and explain it to you, and then we can go home, because by the time I tell it to you, Jim Beverly will have gone off to college. Or you can just shut up and trust me.”
She stared at me for two more heartbeats and then did as I asked, driving away from the field at the foot of the hill, down the dirt road. Right before she hit paved road, she paused in the shadow of the trees, and I slipped out the door. “Thanks, Clarice.”
Her eyes were huge with worry. “This is the stupidest thing I have ever done in my life. Should I wait for you?”
I shook my head. “I’ll get home. You need to make curfew.” It was only about a four-mile walk. I could hoof it in under an hour. “If anyone asks, later on or tomorrow, not just our parents but anyone, you’ll say you took me home. Okay? And don’t worry. I have a plan, and he isn’t going to hurt me again.”
I waited until she nodded, uncertain but trusting, and then I stepped back from the car. I stood in the shadows and watched her drive away.
The truth is, I had no idea what I was planning to do. I knew that the freshman girl was up there. Maybe I just planned to spy on them. Maybe I wanted to go snatch that girl up and drag her stupid little patootie home. I swear I did not have a plan. But I’ll admit I didn’t want anyone to know I was heading up onto the hilltop after Jim Beverly.
I ghosted through the woods, circling the field. There were still about fifteen cars, although they wouldn’t be there long. A lot of people had an eleven or eleven-thirty curfew. I stayed out of the moonlight, slipping behind the trees. Even after I got to the path leading up Lipsmack, I stuck to the woods, taking a parallel course up through the bracken. I was going slowly, to be as quiet as possible, and because I kept getting caught in blackberry thorns, when I heard someone stomping down the path.
I froze. It was the freshman girl. She was marching down and muttering and cussing. “Who does he think he is, Mr. Big-Shot Jerk-Ass Quarterback, well, he can kiss my butt is what he can do.” Her ponytail quivered with righteous indignation. She had a pissy little death grip on her purse in one hand, and a key ring in the other. The keys clashed together angrily with every stomping step she took.
After she was safely past and down, I probably should have come to my senses and followed her. I should have gone home. But maybe I wanted to see how he could have let her walk away, something completely out of character for the Jim Beverly I knew. Up the hill I could hear him calling, “Miss Sally? Come on back, Miss Sally. Miss Sally?”
I got onto the path and walked up. I came out of the woods, and there was Jim Beverly, sitting with his back to me, facing the heaps. The other side of the hill was so steep you could have almost called it a cliff. It dropped off for a few feet, and then leveled into a long, steep slope, all of the slope now eaten by the heaps that reached up in humps, each trying to be the first to get a claw hooked onto the cliff.
On the edge of the small cliff, Jim Beverly was sitting in the gravel, swinging his feet over the lip. I could see how the freshman girl had gotten away. He was so drunk I doubt he could have stood and walked after her without help. The soles of his sneakers lightly brushed the top of the highest heap. He was leaning unsteadily back on his hands, swaying. Just behind one of his hands, sitting upright in the grass, was the liquor bottle. It was tequila. I could smell it on him from where I stood. The bottle seemed outsized, and the golden liquid inside came down to a point, but the bottom of the bottle was square, with a thick glass base.
Jim Beverly had heard me coming. He was talking, slurring his words so badly I could barely understand him. He never turned around. He said, “Now, Miss Sally, be a sweetie and give it a little suck, hey? I swear I’m too damn drunk to fuck. C’mon, Sally, least you can do is give it a little suck, hey? You know I’m feeling melancholy.”
He’d lost homecoming for us in the last week. His playing had been off ever since the news of his scholarship came through. He was headed to UNA in the fall, solid, so he could afford to slack off.
The tequila bottle was open, the cap lying beside it. The moonlight on the bottle was mesmerizing.
“Mustang Sally,” sang Jim Beverly. “Guess you better blow . . . me, suck my dick.”
I walked towards that pretty bottle, getting closer to him, and still, and still, he did not turn around. I kept expecting him to turn, and then maybe our eyes would meet and somehow this moon-washed hill would be like a real place to me and I would yell something at him, call him an asshole or a drunk, and then turn and run home as fast as I could go. But he didn’t turn, and I felt like I was swimming towards the bottle, moved by currents, not my own power. It was so pretty and solid and whole.
“Mustang Sally, now, baby,” wailed Jim, covering the sound of me carefully screwing the cap back on. From where I stood, staring down at his broad shoulders, his head looked out of place, covered in blond fuzz like a baby’s. The back of his neck looked pale and downy, innocent and somehow vulnerable.
It was such a sweet-looking bit of flesh, I thought I might lean down and place a kiss there, closed-mouthed and chaste. The kind of kiss Clarice might give an ugly boy she felt sorry for. I waited for a moment, holding the bottle loosely in one hand, feeling the solid weight of the heavy glass. It was thick, grainy. The glass was bubbled and the bottle had no label. He did not turn. I waited and waited, and when he still did not turn, I took the bottle carefully in both hands, and, going into the good batter’s stance I had learned in Little League, I swung it as hard as I could at his head.
People who play baseball, they talk about a sweet spot, and in a way I know what they mean. I am not sure exactly what it is—a place on the bat? something to do with where you hit the ball?—but I know the feeling of the sweet spot. I know when the bottle hit the back of his head, just above the neck; I felt the co
nnection run through me like electric current. I felt the bone of his skull give, and that giving reverberated up into my hands and spread through my whole body. It was all but silent, but I felt the crunch of it, felt him splintering and the shards of bone entering the thick meat of his brain. He slumped sideways from the force of the blow and was completely still.
And somehow nothing had changed, except the singing had stopped. There was no blood. His skin was unbroken. The bottle was unbroken. Nothing seemed broken at all. I stood there until I got the giggles. I stood there giggling and giggling, unable to stop. It struck me that this was inappropriate, and then I realized the word “inappropriate” was a hilarious word to think while standing over an utterly dead body. It sounded like something Clarice would say, pursing her lips with disapproval over my laughter coming right after I smashed a boy’s head in, and I dissolved into more helpless giggles.
At last I unscrewed the cap and took three long, searing gulps. The pain of them burning down into my throat shut me up, and there was Jim Beverly, and he was dead, and I had killed him. I looked stupidly at the bottle. Although I had been staring at it, fascinated, before I ever picked it up, somehow I had not registered the fact that this was real Mexican tequila. A dead worm floated disconsolately near the bottom.
I was so surprised that I opened my mouth and the tequila I had swallowed came shooting back up. It fell in a wash down the front of my dress, the fumes of it burning my eyes. Then it struck me that I had calmly puked on myself, and that was the funniest thing yet. I laughed so hard I had to either sit down or wet myself.
When I wound down, I sat there for a minute, hitching and gulping. I must have been laughing so hard it was like crying. I looked over next to me, where Jim Beverly was lying slumped in a pile. He was absolutely and completely still. I didn’t know what to do with him. Even though he was a short skinny guy, maybe five-nine, with an overdeveloped chest and stringy, muscular limbs, he was a lot bigger than me. I was barely five feet tall in shoes, weighed maybe ninety-five pounds. And I was shaking like I had the ague. As I stared at the body in front of me, I was surprised to find that my situation didn’t seem terrible or even real. It didn’t seem like anything had actually happened. But even so, I knew better than to sit around giggling and puking on my boobs, keeping company with a dead boy until a nice policeman came to cart me away.
I scooted up behind him on my butt and began shoving at the weighty mass of him with my feet. I shoved at him and pushed, and slowly he slid forward and toppled over the edge of the cliff. He landed with a meaty, slapping bounce, rustling the kudzu, a noise so clearly theatrical and fake that I had to pinch myself, hard, to stop myself from giggling again. Then he was rolling down the steep slope.
It seemed that as he rolled, the heaps were rolling, too, rolling in waves like the ocean. It was as if they were alive, grabbing at bits of him, reaching up like they had hands, pulling him in and under, down to Roach Country.
I took the tequila with me and drank it as I made the long hike home. Worm and all.
CHAPTER 3
I GOT TO my office on campus at around six A.M. on Thursday. I knew Rose Mae Lolley would be back, and I didn’t want to be home when she turned up. I would have to lie to her, and I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t even sure I remembered how.
I passed the morning grading papers and fretting. My office was a windowless cube I shared with two other Ph.D. candidates, but this early in the day I had it all to myself. I called Burr twice at home, but he didn’t pick up. At nine I tried his direct line at work but landed in voice mail.
I had been born and mostly raised in the South, so I ought to have been able to find a way to reach him. Southern girls are trained from birth up that the way to a man’s heart is never through the front door. They may leave a basket of cookies there, and while he’s busy picking them up, they’re squirming in through a back window. My cousin Clarice would have had him on his knees by now, trying to peel her a grape. But somehow I missed those classes in girl school, or I didn’t get the gene.
I had to leave for my Joyce seminar, but as soon as I got back to my office, I tried to get Burr on his cell. More voice mail. I gave up on talking to him directly and decided to call his mama.
I met Burr’s mother long before I met him. He was living eleven hours away in Ithaca when I moved up north. I didn’t know a soul, having picked Chicago because it was the farthest place from Possett that had offered me a full scholarship.
I really don’t recommend moving from rural Alabama to a major Yankee city in one great bounding leap. It’s like picking up a prairie dog and dropping him into the Pacific. Welcome to your new environment. I had nothing in common with my fellow students. They were interested in getting fake IDs and laid. I was interested in a 4.0 GPA and a job.
And it wasn’t only that I didn’t make friends. Everything was so radically different. The looming buildings, the cars in orderly lines on both sides of every street, the streets laid out like a grid. Everything marched in straight lines, all sharp corners and hard edges. There were no curves or hills, no restful place to put your eye for even a moment. Even the people seemed linear. Walking the downtown streets, they all moved as if they were carrying a donor heart in their lunch box. No one smiled at me, and no one made eye contact. If I smiled at them, they sped up and raced past as if I were mentally ill. They spoke in hard staccato voices that shot words like bullets.
I told myself Chicago was exciting and fast-paced. I told myself it had a stark urban beauty. I told myself that before I broke my word to God and went back to Alabama with my tail between my legs, I would drink a Clorox cocktail while leaping off the Sears Tower.
I met Burr’s mother in the Wal-Mart. Back in Possett, going to the Wal-Mart over in Fruiton was a huge expedition. The whole family went. You stayed for hours. You knew half the people there and stopped every other aisle to have a long chat about Fat Agnes’s festering leg wound or Mrs. Mott’s squirrel infestation.
In Chicago, I was living for my Sunday and Wednesday phone conversations with my family. But in between the calls, when I became unbearably lonely, I would head to a nearby Wal-Mart. I would wander the aisles, touching things, having imaginary conversations with people from home, relatives or family friends. I talked to everyone, especially Clarice. I even manufactured arguments with people I had never liked much or at all—even my dead asshole grampa seemed like a touchstone.
I was standing in the ladies’ department with my imaginary aunt Florence. As I debated between a blue sweater and a green one, Aunt Florence spoke up: “Honey, you want the blue. That green’ll make you look bilious.”
I stood blinking stupidly. I had said plenty of things to my imaginary aunt Florence, but she had never answered me aloud before. And I had never in my life heard Flo speak in such a sweet, cozy tone.
I looked up and saw Burr’s mother smiling kindly at me. She had full cheeks, motherly-looking cheeks, like downy brown pillows. Her eyes were a warm golden brown, about two shades lighter than her skin. Her face was unlined, but her features had that soft, blurred look some women get as they age, and her bun was streaked with white. She had on a floral-print dress. A church-lady dress. Her voice had a mild, almost Southern slur to it.
I burst into tears.
“Oh, honey,” she said, but I just shook my head at her. I dropped the sweaters on the floor and put my hands over my face and sobbed into them. I realized this was not sane behavior, and tried my best to tamp it back down, but braying sobs kept welling up and bursting out of my mouth. She came over and put an arm around me; I pulled away from her immediately, then gulped and tried again to squelch myself.
“Do you know why folks cry?” she said to me conversationally while I scrubbed violently at my streaming eyes. I shrugged. I didn’t much care.
“God gave us crying so other folks could see when we needed help, and help us.” She put her arm around me again. I let it stay there, and then I threw my arms around her soft middle and wailed and snu
ffled on her sloping shoulder. I gave myself up to it, letting a huge hurricane of pent-up weeping come storming out into the Wal-Mart ladies’ department.
“Oh, honey,” she said again. “You’re going to be just fine. And you go ahead and get that green if that’s what you want.”
She was a minister’s widow and a good Baptist. That day she dragged me home with her and fed me on real cherry cobbler, the kind with the pastry you make by cutting butter into flour for half an hour. She talked to me about pastry recipes and the Lord and invited me to visit her church on Sunday. I felt like I owed her for the cobbler and the kindness, so I went.
It was an all-black Baptist church in a decent blue-collar neighborhood. Everyone at that church was so familiar. It was like visiting home. Sure, I got odd looks the first time I showed up. I felt like my skin was glowing with an incandescent white otherness. I could feel the congregation peppering me with sideways glances. But I didn’t feel any malice in their gazes. Every person I met and spoke with was soon relaxed and chatting with me about the weather or their children or Jesus. I was just as easy with them. It didn’t hurt that I was firmly wedged under the sheltering wing of Mrs. Burroughs. Her husband had been the minister at that church up until his death, and she was universally beloved there.
Later, sitting in American History 101, I realized why I felt so at home at the church. After the industrial revolution came the great migration, as black sharecroppers traveled up to Chicago for better-paying factory jobs and a shot at a new life. But they were all southerners. They formed their own communities, and the culture survived. The people at Mrs. Burroughs’s church spoke with long liquid vowels and blurred consonants, cooked everything in lard, moved with a languorous grace that implied it was 100 degrees outside. They could have been my relatives. Without them, especially Burr’s mother, I never would have survived my first year up north.
I met Burr when he moved back to Chicago. Mrs. Burroughs had two older girls, both married to military men and gone. Burr was her baby, the first in his family to go to college, much less law school, although his father had been to a two-year Baptist seminary.