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Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes

  Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.…

  Sure the passage was dark. But in my somewhat magical system of thought, pessimism served as a hedge against disaster. Think the worst, and you stave it off.

  I read and reread the passage, covering verses with my palm then checking a line at a time what I could remember. Next to me, my sister was sawing metaphorical toothpicks. In the far room my cowboy daddy was equally clean of thought. I was the only one awake, for I was growing into a worrier, a world-class insomniac, what one friend would later call a grief-seeking missile.

  Chapter Four

  I WANDERED FROM BED ALL sleep sodden and crusty eyed to find Mother sitting placidly at the plywood table over a sketch pad, the charcoal stick in her hand aslant over the paper’s rough field. She held out her arms to fold me into a warmth that stilled the body-thrumming worry I’d woken up with.

  Daddy shuffled around the kitchen fixing his mess kit and thermos for work while Mother told Lecia and me the truncated version of the night before—how a man on a thruway turnaround had attacked and abducted her in the car. I never understood quite why Daddy only heard certain stories in abridged form, but could predict the expanded version coming by the silence we sat in till he hugged us all and picked up his truck keys. Soon as the engine revved up, Mother reached for her smokes, and it all poured out.

  “He just popped up out of the ditch,” she said. She’d been idling on the turnaround while headlights passed when the car door yanked open, and he shoved her down. He put his fat knee in her middle, then socked her hard enough to leave a bruise the size of a serving spoon on her left cheekbone. Above it was a small moon-shaped cut that Mother claimed matched the horseshoe ring he wore. (Daddy would say a fella wearing a ring like that was all hat and no cattle.) Then the guy tore open her flower-print blouse before backhanding her again for good measure.

  All this was near impossible to picture, and Mother’s cool, indifferent tone didn’t add to the reality of it. She was flat-eyed as a reptile, as if some screen were lowered behind her irises. The whole deal came out with no more feeling than the average book report.

  I pulled my knees up inside my string T-shirt, and the stretched-out neckhole of that shirt showed my own titless chest. The untrammeled view went clear past where boobs should have been to the elastic top of my panties. I quick put my bare feet down on the cool linoleum.

  “He choked around my neck,” Mother said. Her square fingers went to her throat. Its necklace of red marks looked more like hickies than fingerprints.

  “That would’ve scared me big time,” Lecia said. It’s her confidential adult voice, intimate but nonchalant. (More and more now, Mother talks to her like she’s some sorority sister, and Lecia answers back that way.)

  “I fought him and wrestled around and clawed at his face,” she said. “He had a fat, wadded-up kind of face. Very German-looking. His big beer belly pressed down in my middle. He said, ‘I love it when they fight.’” Mother looked off sideways, as if for intervention from some unseen bystander.

  He shoved her over and got behind the wheel. He said his name was Dutch. On his right forearm was the tattoo of a great gear wheel with big square teeth. Dutch was a talker, it turned out. He couldn’t stop yakking about all the things he was fixing to do to my mother.

  “Like what?” I wanted to know. The back door was open to a noisy summer thunderstorm. All the plants danced and shimmied under the rain.

  “You know,” Lecia said. But I was a vulture for morbid detail, the result of reading by flashlight under my covers at night Sergeant Rock comics, where you could see soldiers flayed and dismembered and blown—as the Sarge said—to smithereens.

  “Don’t be a dipshit,” Lecia said again. A flash of lightning made the backyard surge up in its jungle colors before dimming down again under the gray rain. She stood on one leg like a crane with her other foot propped on the opposite knee.

  “He said he’d left women dead in ditches before,” Mother said. Thunder clapped, and I felt my forehead clamp onto that thought—women dead in ditches.

  “I would’ve just jumped out,” I said. “Jumped and rolled and hit the ground running.” It was a Batgirl move I could picture executing with catlike grace, cape flapping behind as I loped down the highway toward the cruiser I’d conjured there.

  “Never happen,” Lecia said. She pulled out a column of Saltines not yet torn into and did we want some. We didn’t.

  “He was in the fast lane, or I would’ve, “ Mother said.

  Lecia tore open the wax paper. She started crumbling that whole tube of crackers into a crockery bowl.

  “I knew what he was after,” Mother said. “Said he was ‘a high octane sex fiend.’ That was his phrase.” Lecia was pouring buttermilk on her cracker crumblings, mushing them up with a spoon.

  Till that moment, my mind had blurred past the sexual nature of the attack. I’d heard the tale as one of a deranged killer. The urge to choke the life out of my mother was somehow more palatable than some oaf wanting to rape her.

  Lightning flashed again. “That was close,” Lecia said. She started counting out loud to see if the storm was moving toward us or away. One Mississippi, two Mississippi…

  I asked Mother couldn’t she just have kicked this guy in the nuts? This was the recommended wisdom when facing rape. Knee him in the cojones. Though I’d never actually witnessed anybody doing it, I’d seen a fastball landing in a little league catcher’s crotch bow the fellow up like a cut worm.

  “I couldn’t get to his balls,” Mother said. “I was scared shitless. He was gonna this, he was gonna that,” Finally she told him she wanted to go with him, got him convinced.

  This was maybe the most boggling fact in the whole story. How would you convince a man with a gear wheel tattooed on his forearm of your ardor for him, especially when your shirt was torn half off and your face bleeding where he’d popped you? Mother waved her hand as if to shoo something off. “He wasn’t exactly the brightest bulb on the tree,” she said. She told him she had money for a bottle if he’d just pull over at the package store. When he did, she jumped out and started yelling, and he took off the other way, toward the rice fields. The guy in the liquor store grabbed his shotgun and went after him. Mother got behind the counter with the guy’s wife, who called the law.

  It turned out Dutch was fast for a fat man. Before the liquor store guy could get his weapon shouldered, he made out Dutch’s figure on the other side of the barb wire, scrambling over the top of one of those rice levees. Like a cockroach, the guy said. He’d got that far.

  Through the window I watched the knotted honeysuckle and the broad leaf of the banana plant pelleted with fat rain. A hard rain blown in from the Gulf could set all the leaves in the world adance. It was worrisome. Our house lacked real foundations. Like all the houses I knew, it had only squat stacks of brick to prop us a few feet off the spongy ground and keep us dry when water rose. Probably the support beams didn’t actually shake with thunder, but I remember it so—the rattle of windows coming unputtied in their panes and the asbestos siding that held us together starting to shiver.

  “Thank God they caught him,” Mother said. “Sheesh.” She wore the abstract half smile of somebody who’d just checked out. (Looking back, I’d wonder if Mother wasn’t in some state of shock, though this kind of blunt affect was part of her standard repertoire.)

  “Now little titless can sleep at night,” Lecia said. She never missed a shot at my sissydom, or the chickenlike nature of my chest. I told her to shut up. “Could he see you in the lineup?” she asked, for we’d watched many an episode of Dragnet where the suspects line up before blinding lights while the tearful victim, slouched low in a puddle of dark, lifts a finger at the guilty party.

  “It wasn’t like on TV,” Mother said. “They didn’t hold what you’d call a proper lineup.” She was just sitting around some guy’s spearmint-colored office drinking instant coffee out of styrofoam
cups. A deputy led Dutch in uncuffed.

  “He was awful beat up,” Mother said. “They must have worked him over with a tire iron. Weird thing was him trying the whole time to look bored. Like he was somewhere else.” Her mouth winced down, a pair of parentheses at the corners. “I swear to God, he looked embarrassed,” Mother said, “like a kid somebody just asked to dance.”

  “Daddy would have done him way worse,” Lecia said. And it’s true that I’ve never seen Daddy walk out of a barroom fight with worse damage than knuckles he cut on some poor fellow’s busted dentures.

  “God, if Pete had gotten a hold of him,” Mother said. Her head wagged, then cocked at an angle like a new thought tumbling inside her skull had rolled it over. She said, “If it had been one of you girls, even the law couldn’t have saved him.”

  This last comment seemed odd, for while Lecia’s body always garnered looks in public, the thought that I might warrant sexual attention—even in the warped form Dutch’s took—was new. That possibility invited me deeper into the mysterious fellowship between Lecia and Mother. In that way, being worth raping came as a deformed sort of flattery and an actual promotion to womanhood. It carried a twisted kind of thrill.

  But something else followed in a backwash. My scary long-dead grandma had once dropped me off at the Saturday movie matinee with a warning not to let any strange man feel under my dress. Now why would anybody do that? I’d wondered. I was just six or seven at the time. The idea of some scruffy-handed grown-up taking that liberty in the region of my underpants scared me. I watched all of The Tingler with my skirt tucked in hard under my butt. I did not get up once, even to pee, even when the popcorn hitting the back of my head came regular.

  Mother picked up her pack of Salems. Thunder hit again, and the lights fluttered. She stood for a moment in that flickering then said we needed to be more careful running around town. Then she walked away from the episode, down her hallway toward her bed, where, I figured, she’d lay up all day washing down valium with Fresca. That was okay by me. So long as I could plot her location within the vectors of our house, I was fine.

  PART TWO Midway

  Was it possible they were there and not haunted? No,

  not possible, not a chance, I know I wasn’t the only one.

  Where are they now? (Where am I now?) I stood as

  close to them as I could without being one of them, and

  then I stood as far back as I could without leaving

  the planet.

  —Michael Herr Dispatches

  You only love

  when you love in vain.

  Try another radio probe

  when ten have failed,

  take two hundred rabbits

  when a hundred have died:

  only this is science.

  You ask the secret.

  It has just one name:

  again.

  —Miroslav Holub Ode to Joy

  Translated by George Theiner

  Chapter Five

  I’VE BEEN SITTING IN THE crotch of this itchy damn tree with my feet dangling down so long they both feel like concrete. I shinnied up here to find John Cleary in the park’s spread out fireworks crowd where folks have been gathering since dusk. They’ve come on foot toting stripey lawn chairs and knitting bags and metal coolers. There are quilts spread out over the stiff grass so babies can lay down without taking in cockleburrs and starting to bellow. My eyes glide over the mess and seem to latch down on everybody in town who’s not John Cleary.

  Eventually from the swarm of bobbing heads, I find his crew-cut stubble, bleached white into a jagged, low-flying halo. He’s astride his banana-seat bike, one foot on the ground while he waits for the mosquito truck to show up so he can pedal behind it with his buddies. There’s a cowboy song about ghost riders galloping across the clouds with their faces blurred by dust. That’s what I think when I see the truck and John Cleary riding off behind it, leaned over his motorcycle handlebars, his thighs pumping.

  John Cleary is what Daddy would call my huckleberry (not that John’s agreed to that position yet). So sometimes I get so engrossed watching him, I forget myself entirely. That’s how it got dark around me. That’s how I wound up with these heavy throbbing feet hung out of the tree, like the elephant feet in the Textbook of Medical Anomalies I like to sneak peeks at in the library section marked ADULTS ONLY when the librarian goes onto the steps to smoke.

  Meanwhile, John Cleary managed to vanish into the crowd, as did Clarice, who’s sleeping over tonight.

  Not until the last sparks go out when folks start folding their blankets and collapsing their beach chairs do I finally make them out over by the tilted merry-go-round with Bobbie Stuart and Davie Ray Hawks. They’re all squatting over a patch of dirt with their arms dangling inside their knees like something out of National Geographic. Maybe somebody’s lit one of those caterpillars of ash you can buy at Moak’s fireworks stand out on Hogaboom Road. I never purchase fireworks myself, but I often find myself repeating the phrase Hogaboom Road at night to see how fast I can say it without slipping up: hogaboom road hogaboom road hogaboom road.

  Clarice never does anything like this, and if she’s spending the night and hears me prattling like this, she’ll roll over and prop up on one elbow and tell me flat out that’s why everybody thinks you’re weird. It’s not your mother or Pete, or the neked ladies painted on your walls or the fact that your parents divorced then got back later. It’s you chattering to yourself like a gerbil instead of just going to sleep. But Clarice doesn’t give a big rat’s ass if I say Hogaboom Road till the kitchen kettle whistles for coffee. “You are a marvel,” she likes to say, shaking her head and drawing one side of her mouth down in a half frown. But she watches me as if I warrant pondering, and she never doesn’t laugh at my jokes.

  John and Bobbie sword-fight with sparklers, joist and parry, while dumbass Davie Ray Hawks tries to get his sparkler going with what they call a punk—a little brown straw with a coal on the end that’ll light a cherry bomb fuse but is useless on a sparkler. Finally, I get so tired of holding back unspoken opinions like this that I holler over to her, and they all come running from the edge of the field in a quick herd.

  Clarice looks up at me with her hands on her hips like I’m in trouble. “That’s where you’ve been hiding,” she says.

  “Ya’ll get me down from here,” I say. “My feet fell asleep hanging.”

  “Why should we?” Davie Ray Hawks says.

  “Because we’ll let you in our club if you do,” I say.

  “What kind of club?” Bobbie wants to know. His sparkler’s hit a wet spot and sizzled out, so he’s holding a bent silver wire in a way that seems forlorn, like a flower with all its petals stripped off.

  Clarice pops out with, “A sex club.” Which sends the boys into a fit of giggling and punching each other on the shoulder.

  Only Davie Ray Hawks is unconvinced. “Y’all don’t have any sex club.”

  “We didn’t start it,” Clarice says, “but we’re in it. It’s a junior high thing.” To me, she seems to be holding down laughs, but the boys doubtless think she’s serious as a heart attack.

  John fakes being wholly engrossed in his sparkler, but if he were a dog, his ears would be pricked forward. He says, “Who all’s in this club?”

  Clarice names Larry Miller, the lifeguard at the pool, whose bathing suit we spend a lot of time trying to look up the leghole of. I shush her, for I spend whole hours hung on the side of his lifeguard stand and don’t want these peckerheads to shoo him off talking to me by dragging his name through the mud.

  “Uh-uh!” Davie Ray says, with more force than seems necessary. “He’s in a fraternity in college. My cousin Janie’s gone to dances with him.”

  “He’s not having sex with y’all,” Bobbie says.

  “We never said he was,” Clarice says. “It’s all broken up by grade.”

  “Get me down outa here,” I finally say, for Clarice is leading us down a path I no way
want to miss by being stuck up a tree. John and Bobbie come to the tree’s base and hold up their arms. I put the heels of my hands where my butt’s been in the tree crotch and lower myself till they can each grab a leg. First, it’s like a princess being helped down from a carriage by two pages. But when their hands clamp on my thighs, I get a powerful jolt from them grabbing hold. The feeling slides clear up to my middle and lodges just under my rib cage where it presses against my hard-thumping heart.

  It’s strange. We’ve known each other our whole entire lives, since we were babies splashing bare assed in the same wading pool. We have hauled each other up on tree house ropes and built human pyramids on each other’s backs and red-rovered through each other’s joined arms. But this touch is different. Feeling those strong hands on my legs suddenly startles me. Suddenly and deeply, these two boys are not like me.

  They must feel it too, because they practically let go at the same time like they grabbed an electric wire or something. They back off and start looking in opposite directions like nothing happened.

  Clarice goes into detail about the different levels of the sex club. How at our level you get to practice French kissing and slow dancing. Davie Ray Hawks claims he already knows how to tongue-kiss, a phrase I’ve never heard that makes the whole thing way too overt sounding. In my head flashes a drawing I had to label and fill in with map colors—the esophagus and sinuses and tonsils floating in some hollow man, whose whole existence is devoted to demonstrating body parts to kids who want to hork looking at them. That said, I lately like watching Clarice’s brother French-kiss his girlfriend Peg on the couch when they think we’re asleep. By TV sign-off time, it’s fairly clear their mouths are open. What I can’t figure is if their tongues are slipping around in there the whole time, lapping on each other, or if they just lip-lock and every now and again touch tongues.

  The sex club notion causes initiation rites to pop up, and it’s an idea we all glom onto. Me and Clarice put our heads together and conjure some pretty good ones too, tests that if you pass, you get to practice kissing with me and Clarice. Here’s what we gin up: