“What’re you lookin’ at,” Hilda Farmer snapped.
“Nothing,” Polly said. No blood, no swelling: Tom hadn’t hit her. Tom wasn’t so bad. He yelled a lot but he kept his hands to himself and never hit unless Hilda stayed in his face too long. Two of Hilda’s front teeth were missing, but that wasn’t Tom’s fault. It was nobody’s fault. They’d just rotted and the dentist had to pull them. The bridge with the false teeth was on the counter near the toaster. When Hilda started into fighting mode, she always took them out so they wouldn’t get broken.
“What’re you doin’ home?” Hilda demanded, slurring her words.
Drunker than a skunk. Hilda didn’t slur until she’d gone through at least a couple of six-packs.
“School’s out. It’s nearly four.”
“Big deal high school girl,” Hilda sneered. “You think you’re so damned smart.”
Polly’s mother never made it to high school. At thirteen, she’d gotten knocked up. When she was on a toot, she’d tell this to whoever would listen, as if Polly had intentionally interfered with the higher education of Miss Hilda Farmer by intruding in a womb that did not want her.
“So damn smart.”
“That’s right, Momma,” Polly said.
“None of your lip.”
Hilda forgot she was crying. Reaching out blindly, she felt around until her hand closed on a beer can on the end table.
Drinking deeply, she stared at the television. “They think that’s dancing,” she said sullenly. “Wiggling their behinds and shaking their topsides. When I was young we
danced.
”
When I was young.
Hilda was twenty-eight. When she was Polly’s age she’d had a two-year-old daughter.
“Miss High and Mighty Sophomore, just you wait,” Hilda said, never taking her eyes from the television. “One day it’ll be you sitting here, and some snot-nosed kid looking down on you, and there ain’t one thing you can do about it, not one damn thing. No high school
dip-low-maaah
is going to get you there.” She pointed at the black-and-white figures frugging on the screen. TV-land was akin to heaven in Hilda’s mind.
“Dancing!” she snarled. “What a load of crap.”
Polly left her to her beer and bellyaching and went to her room. It was so small, if she lay crosswise on the bed, she could put the soles of her feet on one wall and the palms of her hands on the other.
She hung her school clothes carefully in the closet, then pulled on her dungarees and an old sweater left behind by the truck driver her mom had taken up with before Tom. Sitting on the edge of the unmade bed, she stared at the wall between her room and the master bedroom. The wood was so thin she could hear Tom snoring. If she squinted she could imagine the wall sucking and puffing out.
“One day it’ll be you . . . ”
The wall sucked in.
“ . . . a snot-nosed kid looking down . . . ”
The wall puffed out.
Polly rose, slid open the pocket door, and stepped into the narrow hallway. The door to the master bedroom was open. Flat on his back, spread-eagle on the mess of sheets and blankets, Tom snored, his whole throat collapsing between breaths. His pants were unbuttoned; he’d gotten them half off before he’d passed out.
Polly looked over her shoulder. Hilda was still absorbed in abusing Dick Clark. She tiptoed into the bedroom, though, given Tom’s condition, she could probably have roared in on a Harley and he wouldn’t have stirred.
Slipping her hand under his half-exposed buttock, she massaged gently until his wallet poked out of the pocket, then lifted it with the dexterity of long practice.
“Baby,” Tom muttered, and a fist hit her smack in the eye. Blinded and shocked, Polly fell back. He hadn’t struck out at her. He’d been reaching for Hilda in some drunken place they were together. The eye watered copiously. She’d get a shiner out of this for sure. After all the times she’d made up stupid stories at school to explain away bruises, this time the story was so stupid it was true. With the back of her hand, she smeared the tears away and opened his wallet. Twelve bucks. She took all but one. She also took the condom he carried.
Maybe he’d think he spent the eleven dollars on a whore.
Nobody’d bother to use a condom with Hilda. She’d had female troubles. No more kids.
Dropping the wallet on the floor where it might have fallen by accident, Polly stuffed the cash into the pocket of her jeans.
Hilda was still instructing the dance contestants. Her purse was on the counter next to her teeth. Polly felt through Hilda’s ratty faux-leather clutch until her fingers closed on the car keys.
“I’m walking down to the little store. Want anything?”
“Shaking their heinies like niggers,” Hilda said. The rain had started. Polly ran for the car. She wasn’t old enough to have a license but she knew how to drive. It was an important skill to a mother who needed somebody to run to the liquor store when she was “too tired” to go herself. As long as Polly said the beer was for Hilda, Mr. Cranbee had no trouble letting her buy it.
When she’d taken the keys she’d only meant to drive around, air herself off without getting as wet as a drowned rat, listen to the radio—rock and roll out of Jackson if she could get a signal, gospel if she couldn’t. There was a gospel station in Natchez that always came in clear. If there was enough gas in the tank she might drive toward Jackson. There was an Arctic Circle in Crystal Springs and, with Tom’s money, she could get a burger or something for dinner.
At the junction with Highway 61 she didn’t do either; she just stopped in the middle of the road and turned the ignition off. The windshield wipers froze halfway through their arc. Rain poured down. It was as if the dusk were melting into night. Polly turned off the car’s lights. Maybe a semi would smash into her sitting there in the dark.
To her right was the sign for New Orleans: 168 miles. She’d never been to New Orleans. Neither had Hilda. For the good people of Prentiss, New Orleans was the New World’s answer to both Sodom and Gomorrah.
Across the highway was a sign reading “Jackson 73 miles.” This time of day, in the rain, there wasn’t any traffic. Any time of the day, in any weather, there wasn’t much. The old Fairlane creaking as the engine cooled, Polly sat, unable to go forward or turn back. There wasn’t any place in Mississippi a girl like her could go where a trailer didn’t wait.
. . . and there’s not one thing you can do about it. Not one damn thing.
In the pouring dark of the rain Polly could see the path of her life clearly: a long tunnel growing narrower and narrower until, in the last tiny circle of light, there was a trailer park and, in a line of a dozen or more at the front gate, a mailbox with her name on it. That was death—death after murder is committed and final absolution not obtained. Hell.
Macbeth,
another play they’d read in English, came to mind. Everybody hated it. Everybody but the teacher and Polly.
If ’twere done, best ’twere done quickly.
She turned the ignition key and headed for New Orleans in a stolen car. At La Place, she ran out of gas. Polly didn’t want to spend her precious eleven dollars. She put the ignition keys in the glove box and got out of the car. Maybe the cops would find it and take it back to Hilda. Polly liked that idea. If she didn’t have the Fairlane Hilda wouldn’t try to find her.
She walked to the side of the road and stuck out her thumb.
The man who picked her up was going to Bourbon Street. “Bourbon ain’t no place for a kid,” was about all he said in the two hours they rode together. The rain had stopped but, with the darkness and the trees, there wasn’t anything to look at but the furrow cut by the pickup’s headlights. Polly stared at it and felt as if she were falling down a long tunnel, and she wondered if there were worse places to end up than a trailer park in Mississippi.
When the lights of New Orleans lifted the night something akin to hope—but not so grand—lifted Polly’s spirits. The man stopped at the corner of St. Ann’s and Chartres, or so said the street signs. “Jackson Square,” he said. “There’s a pay phone on the corner. Call your folks,” he said. “Go home.”
Polly got out of the truck. “I don’t have any folks,” she said.
“Suit yourself.”
Polly didn’t watch him drive away.
Except in a picture book she’d had once of a little girl getting her tonsils out, she’d never seen anything like Jackson Square. The square in the book had been somewhere in England and clean and friendly. Jackson Square was like that place had been stomped until it looked like the fairgrounds after the fair moved on: the dirt full of ground-in sno-cones, cotton candy, and cigarette butts.
She wasn’t alone but the people, mostly men, were what her mother would call “white trash.” Most of them were smoking and looking around like they were waiting for somebody. There were a few women. Even green from Mississippi, Polly knew they were hookers.
One wasn’t. She was sitting at a table with candles on it. She looked as if she’d stepped right out of a storybook: turban, many-colored skirt, hoop earrings. On the rickety table were a crystal ball and a deck of cards. The good churchgoing folks in Prentiss, Mississippi, preached that foretelling the future, playing with the Ouija board, or dressing up as an Indian princess instead of a favorite apostle on the thirty-first of October begged Satan and his minions to stampede in and snatch up the soul. The desperation that had given her the courage to run from Prentiss had dulled. Polly could feel fear trying to break through. On the long drive she’d had to work hard not to think about scary things: food, shelter, money. Now, Satan.
People could tell the future; Polly knew that. Men in the Bible did it all the time. It was okay when they did it, but not okay when a regular person did it. Not that her mom was a big churchgoer but a girl didn’t grow up in Prentiss without knowing there were about a zillion ways to go to hell and dabbling in black magic was a big one.
The gypsy woman looked up as if she’d felt Polly’s eyes on her and smiled. “Come on, honey. Let me read your cards,” she called. “I’ll tell you your fortune.”
If ever somebody needed to know what was going to happen to her, Polly was that somebody.
Satan’s hell couldn’t be all that much worse than Hilda’s.
MINNESOTA, 1968
John List. Killed wife, mother, and three kids. Sure. I can see killing like this. This List guy had God on his side. That makes it work for him. He wants out of this family thing. He’s pussy-whipped, and his mother’s a nag, and he doesn’t have the balls to leave—that or he thinks a godly guy like him can’t leave the kiddies—he figures all these folks he’s responsible for are going to go to hell if they keep on sinning the way they have. So, he figures he’ll just send them up to heaven quick and save their souls. Like a good daddy. He throws in mom and wife for good measure. It makes sense to me. What kind of louses it up is John takes a powder. If he’s Mr. Godly, why doesn’t he stay and take the hit? Maybe he thinks, God’s got to love me for shipping him five nice angels. Maybe he has other jobs for his good buddy John, so I better keep my ass out of prison.
Yeah, I can see doing the List list. Is that what you wanted to hear?
1
Richard was hurt bad. He knew it with the awful certainty one feels in that second when he steps back off a cliff and realizes it will be the last mistake he makes on this earth; that eternity of horror before his body smashes on the rocks.
Freakish light filtered through the snowstorm, the bright orange of sodium arc lamps picked up and tossed back by ten billion ice facets: sky, ground, tree limbs, air. Rooms in the house were orange, the whole world the inside of a Halloween pumpkin.
In light the color of fire, Richard couldn’t tell how much blood he was losing. A lot. Too much. He could feel it pumping, little squirts against the palm of his hand. For a giddy second he believed the blood flowed into him from the night and out of him from his veins, a pool, a lake, rising.
His little brother lay across the bed where he had fallen. On Dylan’s pajamas cowboys and Indians were drenched in red, a war on flannel. Blood ran in a sheet down the right side of Dylan’s face.
Dylan looked dead.
“Dyl?” Richard tried to call out but he hadn’t strength for more than a whisper. “Dylan, don’t you die on me.” Richard started to cry, then stopped himself. Taking a deep breath, he tried again. “Dylan, if you’re awake, call the operator, the police.”
His brother didn’t move.
From boy scouts and television, Richard knew if he took his hand away from the gaping wound on his inner thigh, he would bleed out. For a heartbeat or two he considered letting go, lifting his hand, and watching his life pump out of his body. It seemed so eager to leave him, and there’d been so much carnage, why not give in? Drift into the abyss?
Dylan moaned softly. Despite the muffling effect of death dreams, in the absolute stillness of a snowy midnight it grated loud in Richard’s ears. He hadn’t killed him—his brother was alive.