Inappropriate Behavior: Stories (15 page)

I'm not paying attention and almost miss the turn to Sandy's house. When she says, “Here it is,” it makes me jump a bit in my seat and put the brakes on a little too hard. I've been zoning out like this more and more lately. Royce drives ninety miles an hour down residential streets. I never exceed the speed limit, but I'll be the one who ends up running over someone's kid.

“Night, Ms. Willet,” Sandy says, then, “Thanks,” like she always does. I'd like to be able to tell her things. I'd like to tell her to go away, farther than Auburn. Go states away, countries away. Go and don't come back.

I watch until she's in the house, and then I light my first cigarette since coming on to work that afternoon. The menthol hits the back of my throat like ice and I feel the nicotine trickling through me. I pull back out into the street, watchful, careful, and slowly drive toward my house on Argyle Road.

When I get to the house, I slow down to turn in the drive. From the street I can see the glow of the television washing through the windows in the dark front room. Buck's asleep on the couch, surrounded by beer cans and dirty dishes. His mouth is open, and his gut hangs out the bottom of his T-shirt. He smells like rotten cheese and drunk sweat. Some nights I'll clean up and drag him to the bedroom. Some nights I don't, and he wakes up in the morning so stiff and sore he can hardly get out of the chair except to get another beer. Not that it matters, anyway. Buck tried to hang on for a while there after Ford died, but now he never leaves the house. A couple years ago, he took all
our savings and hired a Birmingham lawyer to get him declared
non compos mentis
over his depression and his panic attacks, and now he gets a disability check every month. He's trying to drink himself to death, and I don't guess I'll try to stop him.

Some nights, like this one, while I watch him sleep in the reflection of some shark show on the TV, I think, why wait? Why not go into the knives and stab him right in the heart while he sleeps? Or poison him, probably better. We aren't New York City or anything, but we've got some chaos around here. A couple years ago, a guy I went to high school with, Walker Mills, he went crazy and blew his whole family up in their rented house out on the rural route. He'd been cooking meth for years, and they said it was a lab accident, but I don't believe it. Walker knew what he was doing.

People around the café talked about it, the Mills case, all their useless opinions. It made me sick, made me wonder how they talked about Ronnie and Ford and Buck and me when I wasn't around. Sometimes I come in to work, and everyone at the counter gets real quiet. Like last year when that kid went crazy and shot up the college in Virginia, Bing's was probably the only diner counter in America where the old coots weren't lined up with their useless opinions about the deterioration of the culture. I wish they'd just keep on talking. The silence, like the silence in my house, is worse than all the wrongness there could be.

I sit and stare at Buck for a long time. My bed is only twelve steps from where I sit, but even though I've got to get up and work in the morning, I can't take it tonight. I grab my keys, slam the back door, start my car. I light another cigarette, and pretty soon I'm pulling into Cherry Street Park, where the kids still fuck in their parents' backseats. Three or four dark cars are parked out behind the ball field now. If I was to sit here and watch long enough, I'd eventually see shapes moving around inside the cars like shadowy fish in the bottom of a dark pond, see the tip of a cigarette or the glow of dashboard lights through the fogged-up windows.

One day, about a year after Ford died, I came to this park and sat on a swing where I brought him to play as a child. It was a sunny, cool morning in November, and I sat on that swing and cried for a solid hour. It wasn't the only time I'd cried since it happened. When I got the call at the café from Acie Boujean, I was hysterical. And I cried at the funeral, and I cried when Ronnie told me he was sorry. I cried when Acie came and told me he'd have to question Ronnie again. About a week after it happened, I really lost it at the café. I'd shown up to work, but Bing gave me a couple hundred dollars and told me to take some time off.

But that day in the park, when I cried for an hour in the warm sun and cool air, I knew it was different, and I still know it was different. I knew that day, and know even better now, that I wasn't crying for Ford and what happened to him. I was crying for me, and what had happened to
me
, and I've never quite been able to let myself off the hook for that.

At the end of Cherry Street, I turn back onto Rainbow Drive. I don't know where I'm going, just driving around. I turn at Sandy's street and drive slowly by her house. All the lights are out, the whole street's dark. It's late, and no matter how badly I don't want to do it, I have to go home and get some sleep. I pull down to the end of Sandy's street, a bank of grass and wildflowers that cover the barbed wire around Hank Fletcher's farm, and slowly turn my car around. I'll sit here and smoke one more cigarette. I turn the car off, the headlights too, and roll down the window, letting in the June heat. I can hear the mayflies humming in the quiet night, all the way from the river.

I smoke another cigarette, then another, sitting here in the dark, listening to the mayflies. There are other, closer sounds. The crickets in the weeds behind my car. The ticking of the engine cooling down. The sound of the cigarette when I inhale is like a tiny fuse. But it's the mayflies I hear more than anything else. I go to light another cigarette but the pack is empty, so I open the glove box for a new one. I feel my bra cutting creases
under my shoulder blades—I've put on a couple of pounds. I reach around under my shirt to unhook it, leave the loops on over my shoulders. My breasts sag heavy down onto what is not quite yet a gut. I can still feel Royce's hands on them. I shouldn't encourage him that much.

I light another cigarette and blow the cool menthol smoke over my face. My other hand is back on the steering wheel now, the noise of the mayflies growing louder like the engine of a fast car, a better car than my ten-year-old Chevy. We bought this car new when Ford was five. He and Ronnie used to ride in the back when we'd go places. Ronnie was big enough to sit in the front, but Ford was still in his car seat, and Ronnie didn't want him to feel lonely. I could only see the tops of their heads in the rearview mirror as I drove, Ronnie's crew-cut black hair as black as Buck's, Ford's still baby-blond but starting to darken. Maybe Ford would have been his high school's valedictorian, maybe he could have gone to vet school. Ronnie was always a Marine—he knew he wanted to be one when he was six years old. A few good men and all that shit. Tonight, all I see is the bank of weeds and a dark, empty field like a lake beyond.

But I can still hear the engine noise, the noise of the faster car, and it takes me a moment to realize that's what it is.

Royce's black Dodge Charger, headlights off, turns the corner and parks in front of Sandy's house. He puts the car in neutral, and in the darkness of the street I can barely see, barely hear the passenger door open, barely see Sandy's dark figure get out, stand there for a moment, then lean back in for a kiss.

Then she shuts the door carefully and half-runs into the darkened carport, where the light was on when I dropped her off earlier. Royce puts his car in reverse and slowly backs up toward the corner, lights still out, then turns, puts on his headlights, opens and slams the passenger door, and peels out up Rainbow Drive.

I start my car and follow with the headlights off. There's no one else on the road except Royce a few hundred yards ahead.
The mayflies, which had been clear silver in my headlights, now look like a huge gray ghost in the darkness ahead of me. I roll up the window so they don't fly right in my car. I can hardly see but I know this road. The mayflies pock against the windshield. For some reason—drunkenness, fatigue, sexual satisfaction—Royce isn't speeding. I'm gunning it now, and I've nearly got him.

At the crest of the hill where Rainbow opens up to Highway 59, I'm right on his back. I pull the switch for the high beams and the road explodes into moving light. Royce's brake lights swerve some, his chrome bumper a blur, mayflies everywhere. Royce slows down, turns into the old Shell station parking lot.

He stops his car there. I stop mine on the road. He's getting out of his car with that tough, mean look he thinks he has, his arms all bowed out from his sides. I put my car in reverse, back up turning, and aim my headlights right at the driver's side door, right at Royce.

His eyes go from that tough slant to wide open, and he's back behind the wheel, putting the Dodge in gear when I bounce the curb, heading right at him. He floors it, and his tires spin and catch just before I get there, and all I do is clip the back end a little, send him fishtailing out onto the road. I stop just short of the abandoned gas pumps, back up, and follow him.

He's missing his left taillight, but he's moving pretty good back up Rainbow Drive, the river on our left now, the mayflies. I've got a headlight out and there's smoke coming from beneath the hood, but I'm gaining on him as we pass the mini-mall, pass the Hardee's, pass the turn into Cherry Street Park, and the smoke is coming heavier now. I push the pedal to the floor, pass the café, and I'm getting closer now, pass back by Sandy's street, where she's brushing her teeth or her hair, or she's in her pajamas or in bed or dreaming, and there's more steam, and a smell like rubber burning, and we're coming up on the turn onto the rural route where he has to slow down to make the turn and I know I'm not going to. I'm not going to slow down one bit.

When I hit the back end of Royce's black Dodge at the bend
into the rural route, the front end of his car comes flipping up past my passenger side. I swear in that instant, I look through the window, and Royce, upside down, is looking in at me, and he sees that it's me, and the look on his face is all I need. I'm ready myself now to go flipping upside down and spinning into the river or out into Fletcher's back forty or into the pines that line the road. I have my eyes closed now, and I've taken my hands off the wheel and my feet off the pedals, and I'm just waiting for the end.

But it doesn't happen. At some point I open my eyes, and I'm going a responsible thirty miles an hour right down the center of the rural route. The front end of my car is accordioned up into itself, and the smoke coming from the engine is black and thick, but somehow the car still runs. I put my foot on the brake, and I have to push hard, but the car eventually stops, and I get out and walk back down the road. I'm completely unhurt, as far as I can tell, unless I'm in shock, but then it occurs to me that a person in shock wouldn't know she was in shock, so I must have survived the whole thing.

Royce's car is wedged between two pine trees and face down in some Coosa backwater that spilled over the roadway back during the spring. There's fire glowing in the undercarriage, and both his back wheels are still spinning. This is when the car should explode, but I don't know if that's just in the movies.

When I get to Royce's driver's window, he's pinned in there something awful. He's bleeding heavily from his face, which is stove in against the steering wheel, and his upper body's not going the same direction as his lower body, and I can't see his arms at all. The car itself is bent in a V-shape, and there's no glass left in any of the windows. Royce can't talk, but his eyes meet mine as I lean in where he can see me.

“Looks bad for you in there, Royce,” I say. “I'm pretty sure you're gonna die here.”

I can think in this moment, but I cannot seem to feel, so I think about what I should feel, and I don't know. I think I should
go get help. I think about the times I let Royce sleep with me, usually at his house, once in my bed while Buck slept in the living room. I think about Buck, and how we stayed together all those years even though we only got married because of Ronnie, and then how, years later, here comes little Ford, the boy I wanted, the boy we actually made love to make. I think, Royce is someone's child too—but she's dead. I think I know why I did this to him, and I think it's almost a good enough reason.

I say, “If you don't die, you'd better by God stay away from that girl.”

With that I turn and walk the other way down the rural route, away from my car and away from Royce, away from Buck and all of it, and it suddenly seems I may walk all night. The air in my lungs is good and cool, like I've just started to breathe again after being underwater for a very long time.

I M
ARRIED AN
O
PTIMIST

Which is a hell of a thing to just find out, admittedly, after nearly two years of marriage, not to mention that Heather and I had known each other, off and on, for the better part of ten years. Ours was no whirlwind romance, no Vegas job, no love at first sight. We spent time, much of it alone, living in this dreadful town with few friends save each other, night after night, talking and talking. We ate our meals together, we drank our drink together, we shared our beds and our minds. Both of us wary—or so I thought—we got to know each other—or so I thought. But now it appears that the facts are uncontestable, the truth as plain as rice: my wife is an optimist.

And I want to point out that it's not merely a few good thoughts about the world, some half-assed, Christmas- and Easter-type optimism. We all fall victim to that sometimes, lose our bearings, briefly apostatize: when the worst possible scenario doesn't play out; when someone belies our initial underestimation; when we—rarely—make it to the end of a day without seriously contemplating murder. We can all get a little soft now and then.