Route 12 Page 7

  FIFTEEN

  LEAVING CLOVER LANE, he heads out of town and takes Route 12 east, past the strip Kathryn

  Prejean told him to avoid. The woods stand heavy and nearly on top of the road. Every five miles or so small, squalid motels crop up past the shoulder, harsh neon lights flicker on the cracked parking lots. Highway 12 drops into a county where men can spend most of their money on liquor and lose the rest in a game only the dealer is set to win. Here a boy can buy his first time or a man can pay to do mean things to a woman he doesn’t know. Percy already knew his way around this part of Belle Gap.

  They drive past the brightly lit places, heading into the dark. He turns on the radio hoping for some distraction. Reception gets worse as they drive away from town, away from the nearest tower. Giving up, he turns it off and lights a cigarette.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Not sure yet.” He puffs and opens his window a crack.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing bad.”

  Theresa sits in the front seat next to him, head hanging, hands folded in her lap. She presses against the door. The last of The Gap’s neon wanes in the rear view mirror. The mirror frames a memory—driving with her aunt and uncle, leaving her first home, her real home. Could they have learned to love her, if they had let her stay? Would she still be sleeping under the little crank window, safe and sound? She feels Cheryl’s hand on her shoulder.

  “Hey, you okay?” Cheryl asks.

  “I just don’t feel good,” Theresa says.

  “You wanna go home? We can, you know. We don’t have do this.”

  Percy is listening to their conversation, head back, chest puffed out. “I told you,” he says, “your first time always hurts. But I can take my time, we can go real slow.” He talks low and grins with a filthy look of satisfaction. He stretches across the seat and roughly slides his hand between Theresa’s legs. The car jerks to the side.

  “No. Please don’t.”

  “What? What is he talking about?” Cheryl asks.

  “You didn’t tell her. Thought you would have told your best friend. You are a shy one.”

  “Theresa?” Looking into the girl’s pale face, Cheryl doesn’t see girlish reserve or coyness. Theresa’s face is a mask of shame. He reaches for her again.

  “Keep your hands off her. I don’t know what happened but…” Cheryl leans over the front seat, grabs Percy’s hand, and pushes him away. He laughs her off, his eyes staring at the road.

  They pass scenic markers and several turnabouts. He turns down a walking trail just barely wide enough for the car. Branches and bushes scrape against the windows like knives. The darkness is heavy, a wall of black.

  “It’s nice back here. You’ll see. Promise.” He takes his last drag and flicks the cigarette out the window. A fallen tree blocks their way and he pulls parallel to it, shutting down the engine.

  “Come on.”

  “No. We’re taking her home.” Cheryl reaches down and grabs Theresa’s hand.

  He huffs, gets out, and rambles around the car, taking something from the back of his jeans and adjusting his clothes. He throws the passenger side door open and yanks Theresa out. She falls to the ground and he pulls her up by her hair. Reaching around her shoulder, he keeps her arms still. Spin it. Cock it. Hold it to your head. He breathes excitedly and puts the gun barrel to her cheek.

  “No!” Cheryl cries and throws her hands up, waving at him to stop.

  “Come on then.” He moves his hand to the girl’s face and covers her mouth and nose.

  “Don’t you do it.” Cheryl falls out of the car.

  “Up that hill.” He pushes them together and points the gun behind them.

  They pull themselves over an oak root breaching from the dirt and pick through sticky holly trees and dead brambles. Felled trees and stumps crack under their steps and catch their feet. This place feels a million miles away from anyplace. The girls cling to one another, helping each other when they fall. One girl tugs on the coat of the other.

  In a clearing carpeted with icy, brown grass the hunter’s moon throws light on a small, dilapidated cabin. A refrigerator sits open and empty on the leaning front porch. Dried forsythia pokes through the stairs. Their padded footsteps crunch toward the house. The trio stops in the yard and a coal train whistles mournfully from somewhere down the mountain.

  “Now, you walk over there.” Percy is a pace away, pointing his gun at Cheryl.

  Theresa grinds her teeth and groans, nervously pulling at her face. Cheryl grabs her hands and rubs them between her own.

  “Come on now. We’ll get outta here in a minute. Keep it together.” She walks several feet away, wanting to do whatever it will take to get home.

  “Take off your coat.” He points the gun at her hopeless, useless legs and stares into her face.

  “No. Not to her. Don’t do that,” Theresa begs.

  When the girl doesn’t do as he says, he smiles, turns from her, and fires. Theresa reels backward and hits the frozen ground, grabbing at her arm.

  Cheryl shrieks and stumbles forward, running to her friend.

  “Theresa. Shh. Shh.” Kneeling over, she holds her face in her hands. The girl thrashes on the ground, screeching like an animal.

  “What do we do?”

  Percy charges and kicks the gimp to the ground. She lies shocked, breathless for a moment. Pocketing the .38, he grabs her ankles and drags her hard, away from her friend. She is grasping, trying to reach for something, anything. Frantic, desperate, a child. Helpless and easy. Break her.

  He drops to his knees. Pulls her hips up and against his crotch, grabs her by the hair. Crack! He takes the gun from his pocket and smacks the side of her skull. She groans, mumbling incoherently. Again. He brings the gun down on her head twice more.

  When he hears the crush of cold grass, he looks up, wildly. Theresa rears back with a wooden board she must have found in the grass, a rusty two-inch nail poking from the top. She smashes it against his head. The nail drives into the soft of his temple. She pulls the board back, ready and excited to hit him again.

  He bends over and screams like a man on fire. He pulls Cheryl’s hair fiercely, tighter and harder, the gun in his other hand. A brutal thrust of pain shoots through him; he shudders and brings the gun down one last, horrible time, breaking her. He falls down and rolls over, whimpering.

  Theresa staggers over him, swinging the wood over her head, splitting his forehead and stabbing through his closed eyelid.

  Bleeding and blinded, Percy digs the heel of his boot into the mud and pushes himself away. As he edges toward the middle of the clearing, he holds onto the board still buried in his head. Just before reaching the front steps to the cabin, he curls up, holding himself, worn out.

  “Run home, Percy,” he mumbles before lying perfectly still.

  Theresa covers Cheryl with her body and listens for breath or sounds. The girl looks far from familiar; her wild brown hair tangled and matted to one side, her funny glasses gone. Her head looks hollow. Grass and dirt speckle the dark wet stains that paint her face.

  Teeth grinding, Theresa manages to drag her friend a few inches. Pull and rest, she makes it to the forest line. Her legs are shaking and her heart is bursting. Just a few feet into the woods and she finally has to stop. She can’t stand any longer, falls and sits.

  She draws soft leaves toward them, places them gently under the dead girl’s head. Like a blanket, she lays her warm body over top. Freezing rain begins to fall, sounding like pieces of tumbling glass. Exhaling, slow and deep, shapes turn to shadows, then to dark. Her heartbeat tempers but still thumps and she slides into a cold sleep.

  ***

  Back down the mountain, in a house with a broken window and a bright fire, a tired mother sits on the bed where her daughter should be sleeping. Wringing her hands, trying to remember her prayers, she wonders where her baby has gone.

  ***

  On rural Route 12, a black and white cruiser lig
hts its globe, heading east, responding to scattered calls about shots and cries in the night.

  BLOOD AND SIN

  Goshen and Coward, North Carolina, 1964

  PASTOR FRIEND

  “LIKE JOHN TO JESUS, I tell you. You are always such a help.” The reverend rubs his eyebrows while he speaks into the phone. His thin, manicured pinky traces over a scar etched above his brow. He sounds like he’s smiling, but his face is straight like death.

  “What would we do without you, Vernon?” Pastor Friend’s eyes close as he adds the confirmation. His deacons respond enthusiastically to kind gratitude. They work harder, jump higher. Hanging up, he feels satisfied with the arrangements. He hears the branch of a magnolia scratch the window as the wind kicks up.

  “Jennifer,” he calls through the open door of his office.

  “Yes, Pastor Friend?” Jennifer, head nurse at the church clinic for over two years, is efficient, quick, and, when necessary, callous. An older divorcee, she has nothing to distract from First Baptist’s mission. To be honest, Friend doesn’t mind her broad, soft curves either.

  “Call me Daniel.”

  He didn’t always go by Pastor Friend. His people used to call him Little Danny Friend.

  When he was only five, he would sing “Down by the Riverside” to his mother Esther Rae and all her wide-hipped, big-bosomed friends during their weekly pinochle, bridge, and canasta games. They clucked so loud and heartily that she carried him to every church within a six county radius, charming her way to the reverend and aggressively perching her boy on steps or stage, nagging him to sing. She believed he must be special. He must be a gift, he only needed a great big bow, for people just loved to be near him.

  “Look at him in his tiny suit, such a good little man,” women of the congregations would coo and the men would chuckle, patting him on the back. Old people and grown-ups, always dressed in their Sunday best, wanted to eat him with a spoon.

  He would preach with uncommon energy. Testify. He was lightning striking. He was a tornado twisting. A force of nature.

  “I don’t know much. I am blind and I cannot hear. Not really. Not truly. Not as our father wants us to see, to hear.” He would stamp his feet.

  “I am only a child, see. But, aren’t we all?” he would ask sweetly into the microphone. “And the Lord is our father!”

  “I feel him here today. I do. I do. And, I think he wants us to sing.” Buzzing and electric, alive with the spirit, the congregation would stand and call out with joy, singing through the roof. Witnessing.

  Perfectly shined shoes would take him across the stage, floating. He would hold his hands to the heavens, cupped like baskets filling with manna. Even the meanest old man could not resist the halo of light surrounding the boy. He had the way of a grown man and the face of an angel. And, of course, there was the scar. Everyone in the flock nattered on about his scar.

  Rumors were thick about Daniel and his mother. He was so devoted, so dedicated to her he simply refused birth. Or, so folks said. Esther Rae suffered with the big, hungry baby inside her for nearly two weeks after his expected delivery. Even when her body prepared for labor, the boy never presented himself. No longer amused, her doctor rushed through a caesarean, using force and forceps to tug him from high in her belly. Because of the trauma, he bears a shiny bruise in the shape of a horseshoe over his right eye.

  Ever since, mother and son always lived close, so tight and in tune. They shared the same bed until he was a teen, huddled under her red rose comforter. Never thinking it odd, she took it as a loving commitment to his mother. Only a few times did he try to hold her the way a husband holds a wife. Of course, she rebuffed his eager mistakes. He made due keeping one hand on her hip and every now and then, after she was asleep, one hand on her breast.

  He sure could fill the pews at First Baptist of Goshen. Because of this, his idiosyncrasies were considered only relatively odd, only slightly concerning. He gave sermons on Sunday mornings and evenings and finally, with approval from church elders, he led services before the Wednesday dinner gathering as well. When the sitting reverend, long past sickly, passed away, Pastor Friend received his pulpit. First Baptist, sitting sweetly at the end of a long drive of oaks, became his church, his dominion.

  “Go ahead and get another bed set up, would ya dear,” he says to Jennifer and pauses, thinking. “And have Carrie get Deputy Duke on the line. Set up a visit for Monday.” The Dukes were a sweet married couple recently welcomed into the growing congregation. He was a deputy for the sheriff’s department. They were a real catch for the church. New blood.

  “Yes, sir.” He watches her leave, appreciating the sway and the slope of her plump backside. He thinks on how he misses his poor, dead mother. Halfheartedly, he returns to his sermon. Thunder claps high above the trees and lightning strikes in the distance. Another evening storm builds.

  NAOMI

  NAOMI HAS WORKED all day dusting and cleaning, busting her hump for the fussy, well-off people down on Palmetto Avenue. She is hungry, beat, and her dogs are barking. Halfway up the shady side of the street, she stops, staring at the Goshen Gazette. Sheriff Riddle’s picture looks at her from the newsstand. He seems stately and upstanding in his police uniform, wearing his sad, tired smile. Seeing his face, his hound dog, blood shot eyes, she remembers him as her deliverer, her savior. Though she cannot read, she can surmise the article’s sad meaning. The good Sheriff Riddle is dead.

  He had been the one to take eight-year-old Naomi from her mother’s derelict house so many years ago. She recalls sitting in the back of his police car as he drove to an aunt’s house on the other side of town. His white knuckles clutched the wheel in disgust.

  “Sweet Jesus on the cross.” Under the vehicle’s dome light, he had caught a good look at a damaged Naomi and it turned his stomach. In all his twenty years, he had never seen a mother do what that woman had done to her own child. Sherriff Riddle tightened his jaw and hoped that when he got home his bottle of whiskey had enough remaining to help him forget.

  Ignorant and lost, Naomi had simply bounced her feet off the base of her seat, watching the back of his almost bald head and listening to the wipers work on the glass. Even then, she knew the rain would always follow her and he had been her only ray of light.

  ***

  She stands gaping at the newsstand in front of Woolworth, and her little braided bag, filled with groceries from the market next door, feels like concrete. Naomi senses sweat dripping down her back. In the distance, the main street trolley clangs into service. Her throat tightens and she is afraid she might cry.

  A strong wind from a black cloud sweeps through Goshen. Storms have always terrified her. Her heart races as she grabs the paper, pays the man behind the counter, and folds it into her bag. With her stomach churning, fear and sadness run along her spine. She focuses on the sidewalk while she marches home. Like every day, she counts the cracks and quietly hums.

  Not one for rushing, and always cursing her extra weight, she awkwardly hurries up the block, passing her reflection in shiny windows. She knows every nook and cranny of this avenue. She knows every shop owner’s name and their lot, yet somehow they never seem to remember her. A breeze cools her face.

  She tramps past Our Savior’s Second Hand Shop. Typically she would spend an hour or so in the store. She didn’t have a watch but she kept time by the bells at Our Savior’s Church next door. Inside, the smell of used clothes, books, and everything such would stick in her nose. Here she had found a pair of little boy’s patent leather church shoes, size 12M, and only a little wear on the bottom. The shop girl wrapped them in light blue tissue paper. Keeping the paper tucked and taped, Naomi put them in a box, under her bed, next to a soft blue blanket from the Sears catalog and a brand new onesie with navy blue anchors on the front. No time today.

  She clears the shop area and moves into her neighborhood. She passes white house after white house. Her wild, ashen hair tucked under a tight scarf, black freckles dot her nose, and
her grey eyes are red and filling with tears. Hysterical tears for a man she barely remembers. Her roomy blue dress flaps around her like wings in the angry, gathering wind.

  “Miss Naomi, pleeeeease wait.”

  A tiny man with jumpy energy runs from the house next to hers. A giant American flag waves from his porch. His neat yard bursts with impatiens and petunias. Mr. Baldacci had moved from New York City over a year ago and Naomi has yet to warm to him or his persnickety wife.

  “Miss Lee, have you thought about moving the cat bowls away from our fence?” He stops in front of her, standing between her and the shelter of her apartment. Hiding her bag, not wanting him to notice the cans of tuna and shrimp, she stares at his shoes and hunches her shoulders. I can’t hear you. I won’t hear you.

  “You know, they got into our garden again last night. They don’t even eat anything; they just rip up the tomatoes. And the smell, they urinate everywhere. They really are filthy creatures, Miss Naomi.” He looks at her as if she is the one using his yard as a toilet.

  “Now. Make sure you take care of this immediately. Yes? Good.” He sternly pats her shoulder and hurries away.

  No. No. No. I don’t like you.

  Taking his leave, he steps into his neat garden shed. Naomi leans over his short, perfect white fence, reaches into his garden, and grabs a fair-sized rock. Holding onto it with both hands, she hurries to her house. Serves him right.

  Backing in and holding the door with her hips, she sets foot into the yellow duplex, stopping in the foyer, listening for her neighbors, Patsy Mimms, and her skinny little boy Oggie. Other than the Mimms, she is the only renter in the house. There is always a lazy quiet about the place during the day, but the nights are loud and seem to take forever for poor Naomi.

  She closes the door behind her, letting out a long, end-of-the-day sigh. She sets the stone next to a basket by the door. The basket overflows with used, dusty, grungy things; a woman’s coupon circular filched from her neighbor’s dented mailbox, a small decorative terracotta pot from the porch of the young couple next door. There is an evil-looking garden gnome, from Mrs. Beaufort’s backyard, on the bottom of the basket. Naomi had pilfered the ugly statue some two years ago, on the morning the old woman refused to wave hello.