The Funhouse of God Charles Michael Henley

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2006 The Funhouse of God Charles Michael Henley

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COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

THE FUNHOUSE OF GOD

CHARLES MICHAEL HENLEY

A dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2006 The members of the Committee approve the Dissertation of Charles Michael Henley defended on February 27, 2006.

______Mark Winegardner Professor Directing Dissertation

______Roberto Fernández Outside Committee Member

______Ralph Berry Committee Member

______Elizabeth Stuckey-French Committee Member

______Sheila Ortiz-Taylor Committee Member

Approved:

______Hunt Hawkins, Chair, English Department

______Joseph Travis, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences

The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract Page iv PART I Page 1 PART II Page 137 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Page 269

iii

ABSTRACT

The Funhouse of God tells the story of a young woman’s return home to the fundamentalist central Mississippi world of her childhood in order to attend her brother’s funeral. Looking into the causes of his death, she learns secrets never before revealed about her family.

“Sing to Yahweh, for he is greatly triumphant; the horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea.” Exodus 15:21, The Song of Miriam

Part I

The wind on the Palouse is like a thousand voices. It slithers across the wheat; it whispers through the shed. That morning Rebecca and Tulane collected eggs from the hen house, carrying them bunched in the bowls of their dresses. Mother and daughter wore homespun dresses made from the same pattern, of the same gray flimsy cotton, trellised with fine purple ivy. The thick, black ropes of their braided hair swung down their backs as they walked across the yard. Mud sucked at Rebecca’s cowboy boots. To the east the sky glowed pale pink. Though the cool air rushed against her chapped lips, Rebecca knew the day would grow warmer with the sun. It was not quite August of 2003. Standing on the porch of the ranch house, she watched Daniel and his dogs drive the sheep from the barn to the field. He swung a long switch over his head, whistling commands. He smiled and waved when he saw her watching. She returned the gesture, standing a moment longer with her little girl on the porch. Through the fabric of her thin dress, she felt the warmth of the fresh eggs, still crusted with a few downy feathers. Smiling, she gazed into the horizon of this new life: the bleating sheep, the several dozen acres of rolling wheat, and Daniel, this new father to her fatherless child. They had been married for six months. In the afternoon Rebecca and Tulane walked the half-mile to the mailbox. The faded sign arching over the end of the long driveway read, 'Martin Farms. Wool Products.' Across the gravel road, through their neighbor’s wheat, like a horde of wading giants, marched a column of high-tension electrical pylons. Somewhere to the east lay Moscow

1 where she took sporadic classes at the University of Idaho. Before she met Daniel, they had lived in town, but she preferred the quiet of the Palouse, of the old farmers and the gravel roads, the sheep and the dogs. At the mailbox she put her hand above her eyebrows, getting a look at the land. Their neighbor’s wheat ran riot beneath the wind. To the west, clouds of iron gathered in the far off blue. She watched the dust from a pickup traveling along the gravel road from the highway. Waiting for the vehicle to pass, she took a stack of bills from the mailbox. In the course of a day, Rebecca saw very few people. This was by design mostly, though a part of her longed for other voices, beyond those of her child and husband. As she waited for the truck, she glanced through the bills, pausing at a thick letter from her little brother, Joe. His letters were epic. Bizarre. They were full of raw pain, though he seldom wrote the details of his actual life. Still Rebecca could see through the hazy surface of his letters to the drowning man below. She’d had roommates and boyfriends. She had traveled in the borderlands of lives built of needles and razor blades, bathroom stalls and twenty-dollar bills. That was behind her now, wiped clean by the presence of Daniel sleeping peaceful in the bed beside her, by the sound of the dogs barking in the first morning light, by the clacking black hooves at her feet in the barn, by the whisper of the rolling wheat sea. Rebecca knew she would leave Joe’s letter unopened on the dresser beside her jewelry box for many days to come. She’d have to harden herself for its contents. “Is it from Uncle Joe?” said Tulane, pulling at Rebecca’s dress. “Yes,” she said. “Uncle Joe.” “Is there a story in it for me?” “Maybe,” she said. In his letters Joe made up fairy tales for Tulane, which Rebecca distilled out of the miasma of his suffering. It had been a year since he’d last written. He was living in New Orleans then, but this one was postmarked from home: Lidell, Mississippi. In his last letter Joe said he was getting his life together. He was always getting his life together. Rebecca shuffled the letter back into the stack of bills. Behind her Tulane twisted her small fist in the hem of her mother's dress. The old farmer waved through the opened window of his pickup and Rebecca waved back to him. Tulane flapped her arms and jumped. They might’ve been castaways on a deserted island, signaling to the rescue plane as it circled overhead. The truck kicked up gravel from the

2 road, obscuring their view with a cloud of white dust; they stood by the mailbox listening until the sound of the tires was gone, and there was only the whisper of the wind in the wheat, like the scattered songs of elves. A week later, when Kias Williams called to tell her that Joe was dead, his letter still lay sealed beside her jewelry box. Rebecca had not heard Kias Williams’ voice since she saw him at the state fair in Little Rock, when Tulane was just a toddler. He did not see her that night, and they had not spoken since before the girl was born. At the state fair Kias had set up his ‘Travelin’ Revival’ tent next to one with a sideshow promising animal freaks. “The dark side of Darwin!” screamed the sign. “See the two-headed calf! See a real alien fetus!” Shocked at the sudden intrusion of the past into her present life, Rebecca had ducked through the flap with Tulane planted against her hip. It was just what she expected. The floor was covered in sawdust. A loudspeaker crackled from the tent post. Naturally, it was standing room only. This was a fact: Kias Williams could pack a revival tent. He was a force of nature. Always had been. Back in high school, he used to round up the freshman and haul them behind the field house for a lunch break full of worship and devotion. From the stage Kias had thrown his coat into the sawdust. His sleeves were rolled past the elbows. A big-eyed blonde woman in a flower print dress continued to sing into a microphone, while Kias prowled the stage, slapping a Bible against the palm of his hand. Profuse with sweat, he had the whole tent rocking. “You done violated,” Kias chanted. “And The Speed Cop’s coming.” He slicked his dripping black hair off his face. With his boot heel he kept time on the plank boards. “Who in here wants to pull over?” he shouted. The crowd cheered, clapping in rhythm. Heading back onto the midway, Rebecca let the tent flap fall behind her. “Who in here’s ready to get out and let the Speed Cop drive?” he shouted. Heading for the funnel cake stand, she thought that was the last she’d ever hear of Kias Williams. “Rebecca?” he said through the phone. Daniel stood with his back to her, leaning into the refrigerator, retrieving the raw materials of a tuna fish sandwich. In the back yard Tulane threw a tennis ball for their basset hound Coconut. Coconut wasn't a sheep dog. The sheep dogs weren’t pets, Daniel said. Lest they became useless as work dogs, neither mother nor child were permitted access to the border collies. Waddling after the ball, Coconut’s engorged teats dragged in the grass. Through the sliding glass door, Rebecca

3 could hear the clear laughter of the child, as she ran after the dog in the bright light of the noonday sun. “Kias?” she said. “Kias Williams?” Rebecca carried the phone into the living room, not away from Daniel, but away from the sliding glass doors through which Tulane might’ve wandered. Without thinking about it, Rebecca was putting another layer of distance between the child and the voice on the receiver. Such layers were in fact the great accomplishment of these last seven years. Kias Williams had no idea he was a father to any child on the face of the earth. “Oh, Rebecca,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I have such terrible news.” “How…did you find me?” she said. “It’s Joe,” he said. “Rebecca, Joe’s dead.” “He—” When she thought of Joe, Rebecca saw him as a boy in short pants and a sailor suit, drawing pictures from the Bible. She sat on the sofa, curling into the armrest. “He’s what?” she said. “Killed,” said Kias. “I know you haven’t spoken, but I thought you’d want to call you mother.” “Killed?” she said. “He was killed?” “He had a hard life, your brother,” said Kias. “But he was getting cleaned up. I thought he was, anyway. He came back to town with his—well, I guess they weren’t really married—but she’s pregnant. Ivy. This woman he’d met. They were trying to get cleaned up. The both of them. I really thought Joe was going to make it. We have this project we’re working on, Joe and I. It—” “What happened?” she said, closing her eyes. Rebecca held the phone away from her ear, making his voice little more than a whisper. That way she could hear the signal, the words, without the depth, the inflection. All she wanted was the information. “He had a job at the Waffle House here in Lidell—it’s new, the Waffle House. Well, the other day he went in there with a pistol to rob the place. He—they shot him in the parking lot. The sheriff’s deputies shot him. It—he was—you know—” “On drugs,” she said. “Yes,” said Kias. “He was on drugs.”

She let the dead air of the phone flow through her ear, into her head, and around her brain. Kias breathed. Neither spoke. “How did you find me?” she said, after a long stretch of silence. “I hired a private investigator,” he said. “Took him ten minutes… Rebecca, I wouldn’t have bothered you, but, I thought you’d want to know. You ought to call your momma.” “Why doesn’t she call me?” “Don’t you think it’s been long enough?” Rebecca pressed the disconnect button on the phone. With her feet curled beneath her, she looked at the glowing display of LCD digits in the call-back panel. It was his uncle’s old number. Just like in high school, Kias was living with his uncle.

“A private investigator?” said Daniel, wiping the crumbs of his tuna fish sandwich on the back of his shirtsleeve. He pulled the tab on a fresh can of tuna and drained the juice into the sink. Rebecca sat at the kitchen table with her face laid flat against the cool plastic place mat. She had been crying, but now she had stopped. It was all so sudden. Only a week had passed since his letter—still unopened on the dresser—had arrived in the mail. Daniel spooned a glop of mayonnaise into the bowl. “That’s pretty weird getting tracked down by a private investigator,” he said. “I suppose so,” she said. Daniel slapped his sandwich together. Typically he ate lunch standing over the sink, though she had managed to have their other meals eaten at the table. He took a large bite from his sandwich while he thought. “With the barn like it is,” he said, when he had swallowed his bite. “We’ve got a lot of work before harvest.” “Put it on a plate,” she said. He shook his head, biting into the sandwich. “I've got to get back out.” He pointed with the half-eaten sandwich through the sliding glass door toward the barn. In the yard Tulane played fetch with Coconut. “Also, those puppies,” he said. “I'll put the ad in the paper,” she said. He finished the sandwich and wiped his fingers on his jeans. “Good. We need to get that done.” “You heard me, right? My brother died.” “Yes,” he said. “I heard you.” He walked behind her, resting his hands on her shoulders. “But you never have anything good to say about your family.” “My brother,” she said. “I love my brother. I feel so bad for him. He had a tough life, and I should've been a better big sister. I should’ve been there for him. But I wasn’t. I wanted to be. I just couldn’t.” She put her face into her palms. The blood in her head pounded. “I'd better get back to work,” he said. “I know,” she said, patting his hand on her shoulder. She could feel his calloused palms through the fabric of her dress sleeves. She had married those palms. She had married the strength within them. She turned, looking up at him, smiling as best she

6 could. The lines on his sun-worn face showed his age—almost twice her own. Daniel had worked these same fields since before she was born. His life was built from the interplay between dogs and sheep, earth and sky. She doubted he had been out of the state of Idaho more than half a dozen times in his life. He meant well, but he was uncomplicated. To Daniel pain was of no consequence if it did not involve the spilling of actual blood. “I need to get started on the laundry, myself,” she said. “Still, pretty weird about the PI and all. Just like you thought it would happen,” he said. He downed the last of his sandwich, heading for the glass door. Before she married Daniel, Rebecca had indulged a variety of paranoid delusions. They leapt from her mind and ran wild through the streets. For several years she imagined private investigators wherever she looked. She saw them in line at the grocery store. They jotted furtive notes in their little black books. Phantom detectives trailed her in rental cars. Nondescript Fords. Invisible Chryslers. She knew them by their aviator shades, their Burt Reynolds mustaches. She made sudden erratic turns attempting to ditch them; she jerked across traffic; she drove past her exits. In New Orleans she saw them on buses, on streetcars and corners. They leaned against light posts; they twirled their watch chains. Bartending in Little Rock, she saw their old vans, those auctioned off postal trucks and primered Econolines. In Tulsa one time they came to her trailer in the guise of Mormon missionaries. All starch and white collars, with their Bibles and teeth, their perfect blond hair. The worst had been Reno. Aqua Velva poured through the streets of Reno. A logjam of detectives rolled in the spill. They wore topaz pinky rings and snakeskin ties. They smoked More 180s and Tampa Nuggets. At the Baccarat tables they smelled of pomade and cheeseburgers. They said they were surgeons. They claimed to be mortgage brokers. Even in Moscow, Daddy’s PIs were everywhere. They were phantoms he had sent to drag her back to Lidell. Back to church and to Kias. To the life they had planned for her. Though klutzy with emotions and certainly no scholar, Daniel was quite a comfort in her life. She’d met him around the pool tables at Mingles in Moscow, where she worked weekends to supplement her student loans. She had laughed at him the first two times he asked her to marry him. The third time he said, “Come out and see my place. There’s chickens your little girl can chase. I bet you’ve never seen the sky so blue.”

It was true, she hadn’t. “All right,” she said. “I’ll marry you.” Perhaps it was the Palouse she had married. No matter. Had she come to love Daniel as well? She had come to rely upon him. With his callused palms and uncomplicated life, his dogs and his wool, a few dozen acres of wheat and all that blue sky, Daniel had gathered up those investigators and delusions. He had cast them into Hell, where they troubled her no more. “We’re given to paranoia,” she said. “My family and I. It’s a good thing he only called. If he’d found me in Moscow, before you and I were married, I’d probably have tried to kill him.” He paused at the glass door, and turned to look at her, puzzled by this strange creature he had brought into the midst of his life. It was the sort of statement he didn’t know how to respond to. Any talk of that variety tended to trouble his face. His voice would grow queasy. Rebecca forced a smile. She waved him away. “To work,” she said. “To work. We’ve miles to go before we sleep.”

That evening after dinner Rebecca left Tulane and Daniel on the sofa with a bowl of popcorn between them and a couple of episodes of Sponge-Bob on DVD. She sat on the bed holding Joe’s letter, turning it over in her fingers and thinking of Joe. She thought of him in there, in the letter, like he was folded up in those pages. When she and Daniel were married, six months before, she had sent a letter with the new address. She told him about the sheep and the dogs. She talked about the sky and the quiet, quiet, quiet of the whispering wheat. It was so smooth as it rustled, like sand draining through your fingers. Elves, she had written. The wheat sounds like the scurry of elfin feet. They tended to write to one another in this old childish manner, as if they were still six and ten, playing forest games in the swampy woodlands out back of Daddy’s church. But Joe didn’t write back. He often did not. He went through cycles of writing, where letters would stagger one on top of the other for several months, followed by a dry spell of half a year or more. She was used to not hearing from Joe, and it was only Joe that she ever heard from. She hadn’t spoken to her parents in seven years. Not since they found out about Tulane. She traced her fingers over the postmark on the letter. Lidell, Mississippi. Home. Joe had gone home. Perhaps he'd been reabsorbed. She tore down the end of the envelope, dumping the folded pages onto the bed. Seven months had passed since Joe had returned to Lidell, when his girlfriend Ivy was just beginning to show. He rambled on through several pages about Ivy’s beauty, her deep sorrow, how wonderful it would be when their baby came. But as happened with Joe, somewhere down the page he lost track of his mind. He had always had trouble getting his thoughts to marshal. Sometimes one would tear off down a foxhole, and he’d have to send another in after it. His pen grew shaky, sliding and jerking over the paper. Slowly, as if aligned to the contours of a labored breathing, the size of his handwriting began to expand and contract as he wrote. Soon his words left the state of Mississippi all together, and reading them Rebecca fell through the lurid hues of dime store sci-fi novel covers. She was used to this. It was here that the fairy tales he wrote for Tulane took over his letters. Rebecca had sent a photo of Tulane not long after she was born. In response Joe’s letters had taken up the story of Tulane’s adventures. His last letter contained a

voyage to the center of the earth, where mindless gnomes tended gardens of fernlike circuitry and trees of shimmering diodes, in a land fed by streams of running liquid light. This time it was outer space running wild as prairie fire through the veins of his thought. Shake-and-bake mining machines farmed Helium-3 from the lunar regolith, for use by the tubular L-5 colonies, as they took flight like a flock of gulls from the pages of Joe’s letter. Geodesic dome settlements sprouted like mushroom rings from the Martian sands, and an anthill city of a thousand generations, built in the bored-out core of an asteroid, hurtled through the deep of deep space, passing among a phantasmagoria of ring-worlds and Dyson spheres, whole solar systems disassembled and reformed into shells, enclosing massive suns with the surface of six-hundred million earths and room for a three quintillion souls. “The future’s out there,” Joe wrote. “They asked Frank Lloyd Wright what he’d do with DC and he said to leave it alone. He said, ‘in a thousand years it’ll make a great ruin.’ Imagine it, Tulane. Thirty thousand years from now. Your distant descendant from a thousand generations hence, Tulane-1000. She stands in her silver space suit and spheroid helmet. A little astro-archaeologist in the year 30,000. Not that anyone still reckons time in that fashion. Far from the Imperial Border-Worlds, she explores planets unnoticed on all but the most ancient and crumbling of star charts. Hacking her way through swampy vines and cypress trees, past alligators and water moccasins, she reports, in the evening we stumbled upon the ruin of an ancient capitol. Amid the shafts of jungle light, beneath moss-encrusted chambers, she stands among the toppled monoliths. What seated god is this, she wonders, now home to wild turkeys? Or perhaps the desert wastes consumed it all? The shifting sands of a desert world sweep round the capitol, with its silent gods and monuments. Does she stand at the gangplank puzzling over that blank spot on the galactic chart? She takes the spheroid helmet from her head, feeling the wind against her face. Maybe a piece of the sun glints in the distant sand. Maybe a jagged shard of glass catches her eye. But there’s a thousand and one worlds like this one blasted into ruin. The whole damned galaxy’s full of crap like this. The records at the Institute of the Nanometric Sun claim—but Rebecca, I haven’t told you about the INS.” And with that he returned to earth in the present, though he did not return to reality. “They're big. Worldwide. I tried everything, you know? Here I am giving the

Goddamned Jesus thing another go-round if you can believe it, but I’ve tried everything to get straight. Dianetics, Temple of Set. Dr. Miller of The Institute of the Nanometric Sun, back in the seventies he used to run LSD doping operations for the Trilateral Commission. He got to senators: Bob Dole, Kennedy. Heads-of-state: Castro, Baby Doc. You name it. Hollywood types. Sonny and Cher? Dr. Miller put the zap on Sonny. Got to Bill Buckner’s glove in the ’86 World Series. I hooked up with the INS about a year ago. That’s where I met Ivy. Outer space, Sis! Dr. Miller! He’s dead now actually, but you see, he cloned himself. It wasn’t even him I met. It was a fucking clone! The real Dr. Miller is one of these head-in-a-jar deals the government keeps locked in a vault under the Greenbrier in Virginia. You know that complex where the elite all get to go in case of alien invasion or the Apocalypse? Walt Disney’s down there and Barry Goldwater, too. They keep them alive in cerebral fluid, like the Russians did that dog brain back in the sixties. They live forever down there, dreaming the whole world up new for us each and every day. Can you believe it? “But I just couldn’t take it anymore. I had to get out. The thing is Dr. Miller’s head needs cerebral fluid, you see? Every year the INS sends a fresh kilo of cerebral fluid to the Greenbrier to keep his brain alive. Now, I don’t know where the Goldwater people get theirs. And with the Disney folks, you know tourists disappear from the Magic Kingdom all the time. But at the INS, we tapped it ourselves. We're peaceful. The INS is totally peaceful, Sis. We used to collect it up over the course of the year. But I just had to get out. It wasn’t the brain taps that bugged me. I didn’t mind that. But it got weird in other ways, you know? So I came home, only now Momma won’t see me. Daddy’s got these pills, you see? Sublimaze. Dilaudid. Good stuff, let me tell you. I didn’t use them, mind you. I sold them. We don’t have any money, me and Ivy. But I'm getting paid to paint! Can you believe it? Not much. But it’s exciting. It’s big. Plus I got a job at the Waffle House, too. But the Funhouse of God! That's what it’s all about for your little brother Joe these days. I can't write much about it right now. Hush. Hush. But you ought to come home and see me and Ivy some time. Love, Joe. “P.S. It's gonna have a train!” The pages of the letter lay scattered around the floor, where she had dropped them as she finished them. She hopped off the bed and gathered them into her hands. Then she

11 returned to the bed, re-reading the letter, looking for more, but there was nothing more to be found. It was like most letters from her little brother Joe. Standing, she squared the pages against her thighs. In the living room she heard the sound of cartoon smashing and ridiculous chatter. Folding the letter back into the envelope, she walked out of the bedroom and down the hall. She positioned herself next to the sofa. Daniel and Tulane stared at the television. She doubted they had noticed her presence. Pursing her lips and planting her feet, she said, “I’m going.” He looked at her. There was a kind of terror in his face. “The barn—” “It’ll only be for a few days,” she said, rolling her eyes. He was afraid to watch Tulane by himself. He was good with Tulane, there was no doubt about that, but Daniel and his first wife had never had children. They couldn’t. He was getting better at parenting all the time, and he certainly wanted to be good at it. He said he did, anyway. He had learned to tolerate the cartoons and the mess, and he was beginning to come to grips with the irrationality, but beyond sitting on the sofa watching Sponge-Bob, he didn’t really know the first thing about children. Rebecca had had to remind him on a number of occasions that Tulane wasn’t a border collie. “It’s just that if I don’t get that barn fixed. I mean, if it was a month ago, I could take some time off and watch her.” Rebecca gripped the bridge of her nose. “It's not just that we're busy,” he continued. “But you never have anything good to say about them.” “About who?” said Tulane. Rebecca knelt by the sofa. She took Tulane’s face in her hands. “I need to go somewhere for a few days,” she said. “Where?” said Tulane. “Home,” she said. “To my mom and dad’s. But you can stay here with Daniel.” “No,” said Tulane. “I want to go, too.” “But why go?” he said. “Because he’s my little brother,” she said. She frowned, smoothing the hair along the sides of Tulane’s head. “I really have to get that barn fixed,” he said. “Fine,” she said. “Alright pumpkin, you can come. I need to see about flights.”

“But you don’t fly,” said Daniel. “I guess it’s time I started.” “But—” “Daniel,” she said, pushing her fingertips into her temples. “Will you just be helpful? I'll be back Monday evening. Yes, they drive me crazy. No, I don't want to go. Yes, I'm going anyway. Yes, it’s stupid. Joe's dead. And no, I don’t like to fly.” “Joe—Joe—Joe’s dead?” said Tulane. “Uncle Joe?” She exploded in tears, the kind of totally devoted wailing that only a child can muster. Rebecca closed her eyes. She bit the inside of her lip, and pulled Tulane into her arms. “I’m so sorry,” she said, over and over as she carried her to her room. “I shouldn’t have said it like that. Oh, I’m so sorry.” §§§ That night they built a fire in the back yard. She and Tulane roasted marshmallows for s’mores. Daniel sat quietly, listening along with Tulane, as Rebecca told them the fairy tale Joe had written in his letter. As she spun out the story of Tulane the astro- archeologist with her spacecraft and ancient charts, she pointed into the night sky to the stars the child visited. Those Palouse stars so bright and clear, like distant jewels. There was a month of summer yet before Tulane started first grade. That fall Rebecca hoped to get back to her studies at the university. With her new marriage she had skipped the last semester, but this was still summer. There was time enough for a trip home. Above them the sky hung like a screen, pounded flat, distant and cold. On such July nights in Mississippi, the sky was thick and viscous. The stars were near. They hung down so close a girl could take one in the palm of her hand. It had been seven years since she left Daddy sitting on the lawn in front of the dorm at Ole Miss. She could remember creeping to her room to pack her things like he demanded. But then on the way back down she instead slipped through the side door, running with her backpack bouncing against her chest. She ran and ran, until she couldn't run any more. Then she walked, darting her eyes over her shoulder. She expected to see his old Gremlin pull around the corner at any minute. She made her way downtown to the bus station, feeling the sudden vertigo of this terrible freedom. In the bathroom at the bus station she stood in front of the mirror. She unbuttoned the buttons around the stomach of her dress, making an oval with her navel at the center. It was like the skin around any

other girl’s navel. She had not yet begun to show. She pulled her hip around, tugging at the corner of her panties to see the pixie tattooed above her pelvic bone. Watching herself in the mirror, she swished the pixie back and forth. Behind her the door opened. Quickly—though not quick enough—she buttoned her dress. “You’d best learn to keep that closed in New Orleans,” the woman cackled. “I’m not going to New Orleans,” she said. “Well, where you headed then?” “I don’t know,” said Rebecca. “Bus out there now’s boarding for New Orleans.” She had veered off course. Suddenly she was heading into a life beyond Kias and Daddy, beyond their church, and all the BIG PLANS they had for her. In seven years she had come two thousand miles. They had come. She and Tulane. This was their home. Their life. She tried not to think of that old home, that old life, with all its hymns and prayers, screaming fits, and shifting rules. She still thought about Joe. She felt bad for him. She had left him behind. What else could she have done? She was only nineteen when she ran away from school. Whenever she got one of his letters she’d grow sad with missing him. Or perhaps it was guilt. Perhaps she felt the guilt of her leaving him. When she felt this way she would sit in the window, listening to Billie Holiday and drinking red wine. Sometimes she cried in an aimless sort of way. She never let Tulane see her like that; she didn’t want Daniel to see it either. Sitting in the back yard, telling Joe’s fairy tales, she sat with her face turned into the far off sky. Speaking of the stars, her mind wandered back through time to that old house in the swampy jungles of Mississippi. There was Joe with his crayons, drawing pictures of Jesus. Momma shuffled through the afternoon in a gray, mottled nightgown. Daddy marked passages for her to memorize from the Bible. She saw him at the pulpit of his white clapboard church, while she and Kias stood together in the pews, not daring to let their fingers drift across the backs of each others hands, yet knowing than in their minds their fingers so drifted. "Why haven’t I met Grandpa Jack?" asked Tulane, when the fairy tales were over. They roasted marshmallows. The heat of the fire felt good on Rebecca’s skin. She turned the stick upon which her marshmallow burned, letting it flame over and char to a crisp.

Daniel had gone to bed. They were alone in the back yard. Even Coconut had gone off to be with her puppies for the night. “We just haven’t gotten down that way,” said Rebecca, reaching into a box of graham crackers. They were silent for a while, each staring into the fire. "Momma?" said Tulane. “Yes,” said Rebecca. "Where's my daddy?" she said. The light of the flames jumped across the little girl’s cheeks. The shadows danced around her face. “Daniel's your daddy,” said Rebecca. “I know,” said Tulane. “But I mean my real daddy.” “I’ve told you, your daddy died before you were born,” she said, smearing marshmallow on a piece of graham cracker. Tulane frowned. She stared into the fire and the flames jumped in the pupils of her eyes. “I mean where’s he buried?” “Buried?” she said. “Oh…Oh—I—We scattered his ashes in the field,” she said.

Tulane caught fragments of conversations, the way a six-year-old will. She clung to the echoes of adult thought bouncing through her small life. As she lay in bed that night all the fragments roared through her, like a carnival of ghoulish clowns and octopi. It coursed out of the deep well of her dreams, dreams she could never completely distinguish from waking life. Like the surface of a still pond into which she gazed at that other world where she peers from beneath the water at herself kneeling by the shore, sleep was a thin membrane between two states of nothingness. Tulane never sleep well. It took her hours of fiddling through the bits of mental detritus she'd accumulated in a day's adventures before, finally, a sort of brownout prevailed. Then she would plunge through the surface, running across a meadow, among the monstrous Technicolor fishes of her mind, slimy things fluttering in the vast caverns of her sleep. Then again, on occasions when she could not sleep, Tulane was in the habit of rising to wander in the night. She would pad about the house in her bunny-footed pajama-feet, exploring the darkness and the solitude. For as long as she could remember Tulane had been a night wanderer. A creeper in the dark. At their apartment in Moscow—before Daniel—she would sometimes walk down to the bathroom, a teddy bear trailing on the floor behind her. She would lay for hours with her cheek pressed against the cool checkerboard tiles, listening to the drip of the faucet in the sink above. Once when she was four and they lived in Tulsa, where Momma waited tables at the truck stop by the interstate, Tulane had gotten out of the trailer. Late one night she twisted the doorknob until the door came loose. She walked onto the steps; she dropped to the ground, wandering among the snarling semi-trailers and the cackling ogres. Since then she had usually confined her late night wandering to the world indoors. But now she was six, soon to be seven. She was venturing more and more onto the porch these days. Sometimes she would sit by the fire scar for hours watching the schools of star-fish lumber through the dark dome of the night sky. But tonight she wanted to see the puppies.

She let herself out the sliding glass door into the yard between the house and the barn. She walked quietly, dragging her blanket Linus-style. She made her way into the cool night air. She looked up at the stars. The stories Momma told her rolled past in that ocean of fire. She thought of herself as that astro-archeologist out there crawling her way to the heart of the earth where the mindless gnomes lived in their canyons of glass. Those border collies would cause such a ruckus in the barn if they sensed her presence in the yard. She had never been caught wandering. Not even that night in Tulsa, though she had run screaming among the trucks. Only luck had brought her crying back to the trailer behind the truck stop where they lived with the man who smelled of diesel and cigarettes. True, sometimes Momma found her curled on the bathroom floor, or asleep on the sofa. In such cases Momma sent her back to bed with a kiss on the forehead and a pat to the rump. Slipping out of the house would land her in serious trouble, though. Of this Tulane was certain. Still she had to see the puppies. Those fragments of conversation rolling through her days, they all added up to the disappearance of the puppies. Daniel had puppies. He had two of them. He had bought them from another man down the road, yet here was Coconut with five little puppies all her own. It was around midnight when Tulane slipped down beside the back steps. A hole in the vinyl siding led to the spidery caverns beneath the house. In a dusty blanket Coconut had had her puppies. Tulane curled beside the dogs. She drew her own blanket over their warm squiggling bodies. She lay her head on Coconut's haunch. She had been thinking about fathers. Fathers and dogs. Momma and Daniel had talked about fathers, Momma's father. Tulane's grandfather. Grandpa Jack. She formed images of the relationships in that slow and deliberate calculus with which a child takes her first struggling steps through the jungles of human category. Fathers. Daddies. Forever there had been Momma. Momma was like the ground beneath her feet. Distant, on the far horizon, Tulane could still make out the one who smelled of diesel and cigarettes, but his outline was fading. He tended to bleed into the flatness of that scrabble brush desert, where the blare of semi horns and the whoosh of air brakes crashed into the clatter of tatter-tot plates and the splash of gravy. She saw more clearly the one with the clicking box and the puffy earphones on his head. She saw him on his knees with a spade in his hands, digging gold out of the ground. Gold gleamed in his fingers; gold shined in

17 his eyes; each eye held a little pinprick of a gold nugget he held. Fool's gold, Momma laughed, on that long ago dawn when she let the screen door slip quietly into place, and they tiptoed down from his Winnebago, catching a ride with the white haired man of tobacco pipes and rounded spectacles, who brought them to Moscow. He used to call her pixie-tart, but then his eyes grew dull and cold when Momma wasn't around. The one Momma said was really smart, but who used to call Momma stupid. Before Daniel. That was all before Daniel. Daniel was her daddy, now. But there had been a time before Daniel. A time peopled with zombies who did nothing but stand around, slouching through the distance. Slouching across her momma, their dead eyes cold as the eyes of frogs in the slithering deep of her dreams. Somewhere beyond the horizon, beyond the diesel mechanic, there was a daddy before Daniel. She knew this. She knew how it worked. It had been discussed at kindergarten last year when she told the other children her mother was getting married. The questions led to other questions. Then the children laughed when she said she didn't have a daddy. She said, she'd had several, but none of them were around anymore. “Everybody's got a daddy,” Brandon Kitchens said. “Everybody but bastards,” said Julie Bean, her best friend at Paradise Day School, and what a pierce through the heart that had been to hear. “Who's your Daddy?” Tulane whispered. She pressed her face into the writhing pile of puppies. “Don't worry,” she said, when none of them answered. “I'll be your daddy,” she said. For a long while she lay with the puppies under the porch, until her mind cleared. Finally she felt tired enough to sleep. All the fragments of speech and the faces out of the past fell away from her thoughts. She felt only the warm breath of the sleeping puppies. There was only Coconut’s heartbeat beneath her head. Above her creaked the joists the ranch house. She crawled back to the hole beside the steps. Then she squirmed into the yard. She had to sleep in her own bed. She couldn't fathom the trouble it would be, if Momma ever caught her sneaking out to see the puppies in the middle of the night.

Rebecca had tried to call home. She even got all the digits except for the very last punched into the phone. Then, with her finger poised to strike it, she cradled the receiver, walking away. Finally, she had dialed the number to Kias Williams’ uncle’s house. Thus, there he stood, when she and Tulane got off the airplane at the municipal airport in Jackson, Mississippi, with his arms out to hug her. “I knew you’d change your mind,” he said. When she didn’t step into his grasp, he closed himself around her awkwardly, patting her back in a friendly gesture. Then he quickly dropped away. As a minister, Kias was good at reading grief and the physical needs of the bereaved. To move things along he had a massive fountain of purple flowers that he brought from behind his back. Along with the flowers he carried a Bible and a plastic bag from Toys-R-Us.

In high school, she recalled, Kias had fought his hair to a standstill with his uncle’s Brylcreem, but these days it seemed he was letting it run free. He looked like an electrified Andrew Jackson. Tall and thin, Kias still dressed like he had in the old days. He wore a black suit and a white shirt, punctuated with a skinny black tie. Smack in the middle of his chin sat the same dimple that Tulane had in hers. “I got you a room,” he said. “At the Motel 6 in Lidell.”

Rebecca and Tulane stood as if against a dam, while all around them the airport continued to flow with passengers. Tulane pulled at her mother's pants leg. From the bag he pulled a Power Puff Girl doll. Buttercup. Tulane loved the Power Puff Girls. How on earth had he figured that out? Kias couldn’t possibly be clued in to what little girls might want. The salesperson must’ve helped him. “And this is your baby girl,” he said. He dropped to one knee, looking Tulane in the face. Instinctively Rebecca's hand closed around Tulane's shoulder, drawing her back. Kias planted the Power Puff Girl against the child’s chest. “I got you this here doll,” he said.

Tulane thanked him, trying to stare the doll into submission. Standing to address Rebecca he said, “I thought you might want to hear me preach. I could take you straight out directly if you really wanted, but—”

Rebecca held the bridge of her nose. “I’d like a shower,” she said.

“Come on, then,” he said. He jerked his thumb toward baggage claim. “My car's right outside. Let's get your suitcase. I'll take those bags.” Kias pointed to the carry-ons they dragged behind them. He glanced from mother to daughter and back again. Tulane looked at Rebecca. She wrapped her arms around Rebecca's leg. Pressed between them was Buttercup.

“It's just—”

Rebecca was about to say that she really ought to go ahead and visit Daddy, but her voice faded away. She looked from Tulane to Kias. She felt as if she were stepping out of reality. In truth she pulled forward, tightening her grip on Tulane's shoulder, drawing the girl in close as she could. But in her mind she was stepping back. She saw them together in that instant: Kias and Tulane. He offered the little girl his hand to shake. Suddenly a hole tore through Rebecca’s belly.

The longer they stood together, the longer their hands bobbed up and down, the sooner he would realize. He must’ve suspected. They watched her—Tulane with upturned curiosity, and Kias dead on from across their bags. In that instant it felt to Rebecca as if she were the stranger. As if only now was she meeting the daughter, who she did not even know was hers. Beneath this instant she saw the old church, the picnic tables, the gnarled oak tree, with its massive roots. She and Kias used to shelter away the afternoons down there, wandering the contours of their own private universe. Guilt. There had always been guilt afterwards. Kias would drag his pants back up and she would button her dress and they wouldn’t look at each other. They’d slink back into the church, kneeling in the pews to pray for an hour or more, until the lack of blood sent razors through their legs. With tears in their eyes, they would beg Jesus to forgive them, promising never to do it again. Not ever. Not even later, when they were married. Usually it lasted a day or two, before they were out by that tree again.

“I got a letter from Joe,” she said. “Daddy’s taking Dilaudid?”

“Joe didn’t tell you why?” said Kias. He winced. “Cancer. He had a stroke too, about three months back.”

“They never called to tell me,” she said. “Joe said he stole some of Daddy’s pills. He said Momma wouldn’t talk to him anymore.”

“That's about the shape of it,” said Kias. He checked his watch. “Come on. Why don’t you come hear me preach tonight? I’ll drive you out in the morning. Joe’s funeral is tomorrow afternoon.”

“Aren’t you back at Daddy's church?” she said. “It right there by the house.”

“No,” he said. “It went bust after you left. Your daddy’s not… He’s not walking with the Lord. Your Momma now—”

“Listen, I don’t really think I want to hear you preach,” she said, interrupting him before he could get on a roll. “No offense. But I would like a shower. I’d like to just go to the motel.”

“Ivy’ll be there tonight,” he said.

“Ivy,” she said. Pregnant. Joe's girlfriend. Some remnant of Joe perhaps. She looked around the terminal. The last of the passengers from their plane had filed by. They stood alone amid the advertisements for hotels and car rental businesses.

“So, where are you preaching?” she said, finally, “if not at Daddy's?”

“I got a new church,” he said, beaming with pride. “True Path church of the Great Way. We're at the Dixie Land Plaza in Lidell.”

“The Dixie Land Plaza?” she said.

“It’s a shopping center,” he said. “New. Lidell’s grown by leaps and bounds since you left. The Waffle House. A Motel 6.”

“A mini-mall?” she said, arching her eyebrow. The Lidell she remembered consisted of a Dairy Queen, a courthouse, Lidell High, half a dozen protestant churches, a John- Deere dealership and maybe two thousand souls. Now they had a mini-mall.

“I guess you could call it a mini-mall,” he said. “There's a Piggly-Wiggly there, and we got us a Hobbytown too.”

“Where’d he get the drugs?” she said.

Kias shook his head. “Don’t know,” he said. “I really thought he was getting it together. I really did.”

Kias wasn’t a bad man. In fact, most folks probably thought of Kias Williams as the very model of a good one. Morally upright, he certainly wasn't bad to look at either. A notch or two above Daniel, she had to admit, but then the smell of sheep shit followed Daniel wherever he went. That didn’t help. What smell was it that followed Kias around? Was it righteousness? No. He could thump a Bible and pound a pulpit with the best of them, but he wasn’t overly righteous. He had always used himself as the prime example of a sinner. Perhaps that was why he kept going with her to the oak tree, even when it drove him into fits of guilt and self-loathing. He needed to sin also, in order to more fully prove his devotion to Jesus. Control? Yes. That was it. It was the smell of control that lingered in the air around Kias. Control of Rebecca. He and Daddy both. They were a team at it, back in the old days. Manipulating her into coming to hear him preach with the promise of meeting Ivy was just like him Back in high school when she told Daddy and Kias that she wanted to go to college, neither would speak of the subject, until they realized they were going to need someone with a degree in elementary education to help build the private school they envisioned. After that they couldn’t stick the applications in her hand fast enough. “Elementary education,” said Kias. “Home economics,” said Daddy. When she told Kias she had switched to Classics, he simply stared at her. Dumbstruck. “Why on earth?” he said. “What for?” Not that he hadn’t studied the old tongues himself. His question was why did she need to study them. When he got told Daddy about the switch in majors, Daddy drove the Gremlin up to Oxford for the first of six such episodes on the grassy lawn in front of her dorm. Over that first semester there were six demands for her immediate return to Lidell. She was to be a preacher’s wife. A schoolteacher, maybe. She’d make brownies for the bake sale. That was the plan. That was one of them anyway. BIG PLANS. They had such big plans, Kias and Daddy, such dreams of empire: the private school, which she would run; the radio station from which Daddy would preach; the television show, which she and Kias would host. Plenty of other people had done it before, with money and business sense and satellites and such. Daddy and Kias had none of these things. They had Daddy’s tenacity, his sense of earnest repentance; they had

Kias’ golden throat, his maniacal vehemence. They thought they had Rebecca’s long black hair, her angelic purity, her lips as red as roses. Storming from the bathroom at the Motel 6, she muttered under her breath, “That son- of-a-bitch,” as she unzipped her suitcase and dug through the clothes for a T-shirt and shorts. Daddy probably wouldn’t approve of shorts, would he? Had she thought that far ahead when she packed? Probably so. She looked at the clothes she had thrown into her suitcase. No doubt about it, she had packed to scandalize. T-shirts. Shorts. Jeans. She did have the one nice black dress with her. But that was for Joe. The rest of them got ratty sneakers and cut-offs. Tulane, planted firmly against the back wall, was watching cartoons. But from her breath, she could tell that Tulane had been jumping on the bed while Rebecca was in the bathroom. “Who’s a son-of-a-bitch?” said Tulane. “He’s a son-of-a-bitch,” said Rebecca. “Son-of-a-bitch,” said Tulane. To emphasize the word ‘bitch’ she pounded the bed with her fist. “A complete SOB,” said Rebecca, smacking the wall with her palm. “Son-of-a-bitch,” said Tulane. “Son-of-a-bitch,” said Rebecca. Soon they were both saying it, marching around the room, with their fists in the air. Tulane leapt on the bed. They shouted at the tops of their lungs until, finally, they broke up laughing. Rebecca grabbed Tulane around the middle and tickled her until she begged for mercy. Then, exhausted, they lay on their backs, looking at the water-stained ceiling. Rebecca said it looked like a bird, but Tulane said it looked like an old woman on a bicycle. Rebecca asked her where the old woman was going. Tulane said she was going to a forest to pick mushrooms for dinner. That was why she had a basket under one arm. “But there’s a giant,” said Tulane. “He picks her off the bicycle and carries her through the sky, over the clouds and beyond the world.” “He’s not really a son-of-a-bitch,” said Rebecca, scratching her scalp through her wet hair. “I know,” said Tulane. “It’s not really nice to call people things like that.” “No, it’s not,” said Rebecca. “Let me give Daniel a call and let him know we made it. Then we’ll head out.” The smile faded from Tulane’s face. “Momma?” she said, after a pause.

“Yes?” Rebecca sat cross-legged on the bed, brushing her hair off her face. She took up the phone and began to puzzle over the instructions for making long distance calls. “Is Daniel going to kill the puppies while we’re gone?” “What?” she said. “Of course not. What makes you think that?” “I don’t know,” said Tulane. “Well, he’s not,” said Rebecca. “No…we have to find homes for them, of course. But no, Pumpkin. He’s not going to kill them.”

It had rained. The parking lot reflected the lights from the mini-mall. Overhead the sky still drizzled as they walked across the road to the Dixie Land Plaza. The whole operation radiated a kind of transience, as if modern day gypsies had thrown a slab of concrete down in the jungles of Mississippi. They’d sell a few beads, but they’d be long gone come daylight. In addition to the mini-mall, they had put in another stoplight. It appeared they were about to widen the road as well. Orange cones lined the old highway through town. Soon there would be four lanes of traffic, with a turning lane down the middle. All her life there had been only the two-lane ribbon of blacktop, going from Jackson in the north, through Lidell, past Daddy's house and the church ten miles south of town, then on into Puckett at the county line. Further even. The road went further than that. It went all the way to New Orleans. Rebecca knew. The Greyhound she took, after she left Daddy sitting in front of the dorm at Ole Miss, had carried her one last time through town. It was the last she had seen of Lidell, the last she thought she ever would see. The Waffle House sat in the middle of the parking lot. Behind it the Dixie Land Plaza was lit up bright as Christmas, with blaring white security lights. Cars swarmed the Waffle House. The doors to the Piggly-Wiggly opened and closed with a regular stream of early evening shoppers. Down from the grocery store there was the Hobbytown. Further on she saw a place called The Book Bin, specializing in bodice rippers according to the posters in the window. Beyond The Book Bin sat the Earl Tibbit, Jr. Bail Bonds office. Ronnie—Earl’s little brother—stood in the office door. He ate mayonnaise straight from the jar with a tablespoon. He seemed to have made fair progress. The spoon clinked against the glass as he scrapped out the last of what he could get. “Well, well,”

25 said Ronnie, dropping the jar into a wastebasket behind the door. “If it ain’t Rebecca Wooler. I’m sorry about your brother.” She scowled at him, stopping dead in her tracks. “Ronnie Tibbit,” she said. “I never thought I’d have to see your ugly face again.” Ronnie smiled. With his hands buried in the pockets of his lime green velour tracksuit, he slogged across the pavement, his good-natured grin about to crash into a snicker. When he got to ten feet away, he stopped and spread his arms wide, presenting himself for her inspection. Below the beak of his nose sat the razor edge of a pencil-thin mustache. That fit the part, she thought, glancing at the bail bonds sign over the door. A skip tracer ought to have a pencil thin mustache. Slowly, with his arms stretched out, he turned in a circle, giving her a full view of his person. Inside his tracksuit she could see the butt of a holstered pistol. “Can I help you, Ronnie?” she said. Highly annoyed, she herded Tulane to the side. His grin widened, showing both rows of teeth. He actually stamped his foot on the ground. “You’d feel better about it,” he said. “If you went on and apologized and said you're sorry.” “Sorry I called you ugly?” she said. “Oh, I am ugly,” he said. “That ain’t what I mean.” She knew what he meant. Back in junior high Ronnie Tibbit had picked a fight with Joe on the school bus. Rebecca—never one to tolerate folks picking on her baby brother—jerked him into the aisle. She kicked him between the legs, and then she fell on him. Wham! Wham! Wham went her fist, as she bloodied up his nose. All the while Kias screamed Bible verse at the top of his lungs behind them. “No?” said Ronnie, his face a mockery of sadness. “Well, I forgive you anyhow,” he said. She had planned to wait outside Kias’ church for the service to end. Then she could quickly duck in and meet Ivy. Perhaps they might get dinner at the Waffle House. Rebecca doubted the poor woman had much money. From what Kias had told her in the car, Momma and Daddy had made no offer of help. Not when Joe was alive and not now that he was dead either. Kias said she was staying in the back room of his church for the time being, though clearly she needed a more permanent solution. And while Rebecca

26 wanted to get the whole story from Ivy, she really didn't want to have to listen to Kias ramble on about the Speed Cop for an hour to get it. Ronnie, however, put a knot in this plan. Better to listen to Kias preach than to stand around and listen to Ronnie recount the old days. Looking at the windows of The True Path Church of the Great Way, she saw they had been painted flat black. Ignoring Ronnie she walked to the glass. She tried to look through the chinks in the paint, but she could see nothing of the inside. “You’re going to church?” said Ronnie. “Yes,” she said, taking hold of the door and swinging it open. The Ronnie Tibbit she remembered wouldn’t dare to follow her inside a church. The forces of darkness would’ve laughed him out of their club. “Me too,” he said, smiling. “I was just on my way over.” “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said. “It’s true,” he said. “I’ve found the Better Way.” She might’ve stopped and gone back to the Motel 6 at that point, but Rebecca had already opened the door. With a sour look on her face, she turned and walked inside. It was not what she expected. She ought to have walked into the harsh artificiality of florescent lights hanging from the ceiling. There would've been folding chairs with an aisle down the middle. A table with pamphlets and a massive coffee urn would’ve sat by the door, and the floors would’ve been covered with cheap industrial carpet. She expected vases of plastic flowers by the walls. She knew the place would be packed with the devout, in their long dresses and long hair, just as there had been on the Sundays of her youth. There would be that certain tension in the air, like something big was going to happen, something momentous. That’s how it used to be. Especially on the one Sunday a month when Daddy let the Kias preach. So gifted was the boy, that believers from all over Beckham County would flock to their little white church on the edge of Daddy’s property to hear him. Kias would lead them in a hymn. He’d clap out the rhythm, while fanatical joy reverberated off the walls. See the glassy-eyed smiles. The potato salad love. But what she found inside was nothing like that at all. Candles lit the room. John Coltrane came from a portable CD player in the middle of a silent circle of prayer. They sat cross-legged on the floor; all the folding chairs were

27 stacked in the corners. But it was the walls that caught her attention. Painted in the style of desert scenes on California custom vans, the walls depicted episodes from the Old Testament. At Mount Sinai, Charlton Heston hurtled the Decalogue into the mobbing Israelites as they swarmed around the golden calf. Along the baseboards animal pairs poured from the Ark, flooding the world with life anew. In one corner, Abraham held Isaac to the stone, his blade drawn back. On a high tower above a lonely plain stood the brooding Nimrod, thunderheads crashing in the distance. The Nephilim. The Cherubim. The flaming sword of Yahweh. There was Eve, clothed in the serpent, reaching for the grapes of knowledge. Book of Enoch, she thought. But it was the primordial moment of creation that truly stood out from the rest. In the middle of the back wall, a flowing haired Jack Palance of a God drove his sword into the primal waters of the abyss. The rippling waves coalesced. The sidewinding coils of Leviathan spiraled through the deep. With His sword God split the Dragon’s belly and tore the newborn universe from its guts. Kias had always harbored a flair for the dramatic. Really, his talents were being wasted. He ought to do Broadway musicals. Ivy—Rebecca figured it was Ivy—sat beside Kias in the circle. Her T-shirt, sporting a rock band called Judges 5, stretched across her massive stomach. She leaned back on her palms. Her legs stuck out straight in front of her. Like the others in the circle, her eyes were closed. She swayed slowly to the rhythm of the jazz. Kias smiled, opening one eye to greet her. He nodded for them to join the circle. Tulane, dumbstruck at everything, tugged at Rebecca’s arm. She pointed in every direction at once, barely able to contain herself. Rebecca hung back, waiting for Ronnie to sit. Then she steered Tulane into a place as far away from him as possible. He seemed no longer concerned with her, though, as he greeted the others. Smiling, he squeezed their hands when they offered them. Together, she and Tulane sat quietly, watching the prayerful. Then, out of habit, Rebecca closed her own eyes and listened. When the music ended, Kias stabbed the off-button on the CD player. The circle of people opened their eyes. They greeted one another, welcoming Rebecca and Tulane as if mother and daughter had miraculously appeared. Kias whispered something to Ivy. She waved across the circle, smiling weakly. Besides herself and Tulane, she counted a dozen people in the room. They were introduced, and Kias said she was an old friend, newly

28 returned home. She could see none of the faces from her father’s church. These were mostly young people. Kias looked at the ceiling. He collected his thoughts. He put his hands together, closing his eyes. Then he brought his hands to his knees, lowered his head, and began to speak. “One Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.” The circle intoned after him, “One Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.”

After the service Rebecca and Ivy sat on a sofa that had been thrown into the corner of the room. Candlelight danced along the walls, illuminating the faces of the patriarchs Joe had painted. Of course Joe had painted the walls. She could remember sitting with him under a blanket at night, reading Bible stories by flashlight in his room. The next day he used to draw the pictures from the stories she had read. It was just crayon stick figures at first, but soon his work acquired the Bam-Pow! quality of Marvel comic book heroes. These images on the walls of Kias' church were the perfection of that aesthetic. They belonged on surfboards, on metal-head T-shirts, on the sides of subway cars. She could see old Methuselah molded into the oozy form of a ceramic bong, in some bizarro-world where there are Christian headshops. Kias emerged from the hallway leading to his office, the Bible study room, and the back door. He carried an armload of toys for Tulane. Of course he had Bible story coloring books and Bible story action figures, but he also carried Legos, rag dolls, and a stack of Dr. Suess books. He heaped it in a pile for Tulane to rummage through. Then he disappeared into his office to brew Rebecca a much-needed cup of coffee. “Joe used to draw,” she said, running her fingers over the images on the wall behind the sofa. After Kias had introduced them, the silence had become awkward. She found herself desperately awaiting his return, so he might take over the conversation and better orchestrate the meeting. Rebecca wasn’t a “meet people” kind of gal. Never had been. She always assumed they thought the worst of her. Certainly she tended to think the worst of them, so it only was logical. She expected a nod from Ivy, some sort of non- communicative grunt, but instead the young woman bubbled up enthusiastically. “He can draw all right,” she said. “He's a carver too. Carved this necklace around my neck.” Ivy thrust forward a silver chain, stretching her face close to Rebecca's. From the chain dangled what looked like a piece of ivory that Joe had carved into the form of a tiny infant. Rebecca took it in her fingers, turning it around. He must've used a jeweler's glass to achieve the detail on the pea-sized babble. She squinted, barely able to make out the umbilical cord snaking around the fetal torso. “See,” said Ivy. She fish hooked her cheek, so Rebecca could see the raw, vacant gum line. “I lost my baby girl—Andromeda—when

Joe and I first met. So when I got pregnant again and that tooth fell out, Joe said it was a sign. He carved me this baby girl to replace the one I lost.” “Lost?” said Rebecca. “You miscarried? That's awful.” “It’s awful,” said Ivy, looking at the ground. “Just awful.” Kias returned with a cup of coffee. “Brother Williams is just the best, don't you think?” said Ivy. “I don't know where Joe and I would be without him. Would've been, I guess. Would've been.” She looked at the ground. “I sure don't know where I'd be.” “I'm just trying to help,” he said, sitting on an ottoman. He draped his hands between his knees and let his head slump into his shoulders. “Joe was a good friend.” “I gather this is the Funhouse of God,” said Rebecca. She pulled Joe’s letter from the pocket of her cut-offs, and riffled through it to the part where he discussed this top-secret project of theirs. Gesturing to the walls, she said, “By the way, I see you've been studying your Hebrew etymology. The Dragon of Chaos—“ She pointed to the image of God wrestling with the sea serpent. “—out of the West Semitic Combat Myth. And Eve over there, that looks to me more like I Enoch than Genesis.” “Well,” said Kias, standing. He began to pace. “I don’t know about Enoch, but you’re right, Joe does have a lively interpretation of the scriptures,” he said, holding his chin. He looked around and bit his lip. He frowned. “No. No, this isn't the Funhouse of God. This is the True Path Church of the Great Way. No. We were still in the preliminary stages with the Funhouse. I—I guess I don't know what we're going to do now. I really don't.” “We've got to build it,” said Ivy. “It's all Joe ever talked about.” “It's supposed to have a train?” said Rebecca, puzzling over Joe’s postscript. Kias nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Inside the church?” “Oh, no,” he said. “No. The train goes through a tunnel built around the church. But listen, I ought to leave ya’ll alone. I’ll be by in the morning to drive you out.” “Oh, I ought to get to bed.” “No, please,” said Ivy. “Please stay. I want to hear about Joe. From someone who loved him. Your parents—they weren't interested in us when we came here. They—well, Joe did do some stupid things. But he was just trying to help me. It was all my fault. He went into that Waffle House for me, I just know he did.”

“I doubt it was all your fault,” she said. “Where did he get the drugs? That’s what I want to know. And the pistol.” “Yes, The police said he was on drugs. I don’t know where he got them or the pistol. We’ve been clean for over a year for over a year. Both of us. And I’ve flat out never known Joe to touch a pistol. Even when I first met him, that first night he came to group. He was really ragged out, but you’d never have thought he was violent. Never.” Kias bowed out, taking his leave of them. Suddenly they were alone with only the singsong chatter of the dolls Tulane played with to fill the air in the room. Rebecca sank into the folds of the sofa. She drank her coffee, trying to conjure images of Joe from the slumber of memory. She could remember when they brought him home. A tiny bundle swaddled in a blanket, he was bald as the moon. In those days Momma stayed in her nightgown through the afternoons. She rose in time for General Hospital, only to creak back up the stairs when the show was over. These were the days of Daddy's tears, before his conversion to Jesus, when a flood of agony poured out of the big man. She told Ivy how she used to carry Joe wherever she went. “Dragged, really,” she said. “I was only four. I dropped him a lot.” But she always pulled the screaming boy back into her arms and hauled him to the sofa, while Daddy fixed a fresh bottle of formula in the kitchen. “Whenever Joe wanted a book read,” Rebecca said. “It was me he brought it to. His first tottering steps took him from the edge of the stairs into my arms at the sofa.” When she wasn't reading him stories—often illicit fare like the Brothers Grimm or A Wrinkle in Time—their fancy spilled out the back door. Their imaginations coursed through the woods in a grand march of silver helmets and blazing battle queens. In the evenings they wandered through the county. They were Indians or marooned pirates; they were allied flyers shot down behind Nazi lines. At night, when Joe woke screaming, his mind stepped on by ogres, he would slip down the hall to her room. There he curled beside her until he fell asleep. Joe was a trembling nerve in those days, it seemed the air he walked through caused him pain. It was as if the ground sent razorblades into his feet, he was so gingerly with his presence. “He was delicate,” said Rebecca. At school the teachers blamed him for the outbursts of others; the boys beaned him with spitballs; they locked him in lockers. He used to come home with black eyes, his shirt buttons torn off; his shoes missing from his feet.

His socks hung limp and muddy. One time a gang of boys tackled him and clippered a big stripe down the middle of his head. Rebecca fought them when she could. She fought with girls or with boys. It didn't matter. If they were older she fought them dirty. She kicked them in the balls; she dragged them by their hair. Once she slammed a compass through a boy’s hand. She wouldn't stop either. She fought to win. She wanted to draw blood. That time Ronnie Tibbit picked a fight with Joe on the bus, she got him off balance between the seats and dug her thumb into his eye. What she wanted was to pry it loose of the skull. When you messed with her baby brother that’s just what you got. Rebecca lost fights too. She carried the losses around in her heart like money. She’d come around and spend it one day, when the victor wasn’t looking. “This Dr. Miller,” said Rebecca. It was a sharp change of subject. “Dr. Miller?” said Ivy. “In his letter—“ Rebecca held up the pages. “Joe said that he—that the two of you were involved with this…group. The INS…The Institute of the Nanometric Sun. This Dr. Miller—” “Yes. Of course,” Ivy said. “Dr. Miller. He found me. Joe too. I was with Dr. Miller about year before he found Joe. He’s a great man, Dr. Miller. A psychologist. INS stands for the Institute of Neuroscience Studies. He’s a research scientist at Tulane Medical School in New Orleans.” “Oh, I see,” said Rebecca. “Tulane. Yes. I wanted to go there. I named my baby after the university. But in Joe’s letter he sounds more like a secret agent. Or a cultist. He…Joe says you collected cerebral fluid. He says you tapped it out of your brains to send to this underground…I don’t know…they keep Dr. Miller’s head alive in a jar in some bunker…” “Oh, no,” said Ivy, frowning. “It…It wasn’t anything like that.” “I guess it does sound a little wacky.” “Joe was very imaginative,” said Ivy. “It’s true though, Dr. Miller did take samples of our cerebral fluid. He works with the neuro—you know—the brain juices—the Sarah- something.” “Serotonin?”

“Right,” said Ivy. “Serotonin and dime…Ethel…tripper-mean.” Rebecca shrugged. “It’s the brain juice that makes us—people like Joe and me—the way we are. Dr. Miller had to take samples from our brains see, because the bloody brain baron—” “The blood-brain barrier?” said Rebecca. “Yes! The blood-brain barrier doesn’t let the juices through. It was a research project, you know? He was trying to see if there was some medical reason why we were the way we were… lost, you know. He found us and we had, like, group and things, and also he was attempting to regulate the dime…Ethel…tripper-mean levels in our brains to help us get better. But it’s not just the science. It’s…he—it’s people—” She pulled herself closer to Rebecca on the couch and spoke in hushed, embarrassed tones. “—living on the street, you understand? I was living on the street when he found me. Dr. Miller gave me a place to go. He found Joe too. Joe was on the street. He— Well, you do things when you're on the street.” “I know,” said Rebecca. Ivy looked skeptical. “I was never—as you say ‘on the street.’ But I've seen it. When Tulane was born—she was born in New Orleans, too, at Charity Hospital. Things were pretty touch and go in those days. I was living in this apartment on Marais street, north of the French Quarter. People always think it’s chic when I tell them. But it’s pretty shitty up there, actually. I have no idea what I was doing there. I was just there. My roommates came and went. I barely remember them. They did all kind of things to get by. They—we—I never did any of that. But I saw it. I was pregnant, you know. But when Tulane was born I poured myself completely into her. As completely as I could.” Suddenly she thought of all the childhood pain Tulane had suffered in her short life. Flashes of suffering shot through her mind like lightning. The time in Tulsa when Tulane burned her fingers on the stove after Rebecca stepped away to answer the door. Smiling at the UPS man, Rebecca turned back to the kitchen just in time to jerk Tulane away as the pot of boiling water exploded on the floor. She and Daniel had been married five weeks, when Tulane, standing up as she rode her bike along the dusty gravel, slipped off the pedals. For an instant dust swirled around the bike and rider, a combination of joy and terror blooming on Tulane's face. Then her toe caught in the mechanism. The bike sucked

34 her over the handlebars and slammed her to the ground. She had pneumonia once. They’d gone hiking along a stream in late fall. They weren’t more than a mile from the car, and it certainly wasn’t cold. But Tulane slipped. She fell into the water. Afterwards, Daniel carried her home, trying to cave his body around the screaming child, trying to swallow her whole with his meager warmth. There was hot soup; there was chocolate. Rebecca told her Joe’s fairy tale about the gnomes at the center of the earth and the intrepid girl who crawled her way down to find them and pop their little heads off. Tulane laughed and laughed, but that night the child crashed awake, burning with fever and a heaving cough. She was six days in the hospital, choking up gout after gout of evil green phlegm. These flashed images spiraled through Rebecca's mind like a maze of shifting walls. But I’ve been a good mother, she thought. I taught her to read when she was only four. I cook a home cooked meal every night. She saw Tulane with a window pattern of sunlight beside her cross-legged knees. She saw honey dripping between two slabs of wheat bread. She saw a bundle of snow clothes, round and stiff-armed in the lavender morning. She saw mittens on yarn hanging from winter coat sleeves. But when she thought of Joe she saw none of these things. She saw only that she had abandoned him. Some psychologist had found him wandering the streets of New Orleans. He had gone there in search of her, but she was already in Tulsa by the time he came. He found instead her old roommates. They took him in; they brought him down to the French Quarter. They gave him her new address and he wrote letters. She wrote letters back. But he never said he needed her. He never said that. She would have found him if he said he needed her. Wouldn't she have found him? She saw Joe wandering down alleys, standing in bathroom stalls. She saw him walking jangly, strung out in bus stations and pool halls. He shuffled his gait. His eyes darted along the faces leering from the crowd. Joe was made out of twenty-dollar bills. He was made of rich architects and lawyers. He was the blood red thunderhead as boils through the atmosphere of a syringe. He was her little brother. He was Daddy's baby boy. What ever happened to Daddy's baby boy? He was Tulane. He was her little girl. Someday, perhaps. There was Tulane standing on the corner of some street in some city somewhere in America. Poor little Joe. And Joe's baby. Joe’s little baby.

Rebecca touched Ivy’s engorged belly. She seemed flighty, air-headed, this girlfriend of Joe’s, but Joe loved her. He said so in his letter. Had. Had said. Had loved. Rebecca felt the baby kick beneath her palm. Suddenly a vast undulation of loathing and violence passed through her, as if all of space had heaved loose around them. “God,” she said. “Christ-All-fucking-mighty!” She looked around the room. “You sleep here?” “In the back,” said Ivy. “Brother Williams set us up a bed in the back.” “You can't continue to sleep in a mini-mall church with…Charlton Heston painted on the walls,” said Rebecca. “What's Kias thinking you're going to do when the baby comes?” “There's a phone,” she said. “Kias lives fifteen minutes away. He says he'll come and drive us to the clinic. That was the plan when Joe was—was still—but I don't know now.” “What about after?” she said. “You can't just be... here. What about your parents? Where are you going to go?” “I don't know,” said Ivy. “My parents don't talk to me. I guess I could go back to Dr. Miller, but—” “No,” said Rebecca. “No. Absolutely not. You'll come with me. Tomorrow we'll go to Momma and Daddy's and straighten this out. I don't know why they decided to abandon Joe, but it’s not the fault of this baby, is it? No. They're going to—“ Suddenly she was back in that two room apartment again, with that single swinging bulb of harsh, white light, like a metronome casting over the dishes in the sink, the roaches on the counter, the missing linoleum. She was standing on the floor again, holding her pants where the water flooded down her legs. In the back room she heard…Denise was it? And that man with the hundred-dollar bill. “I will never return here,” she had said, staggering alone down the steps to the dark side street below. She looked toward the streetlights and the traffic. “Oh Jesus, please, just let there be a cab down there. Don't make me take the bus to the hospital like this.” “No,” she told Ivy. “Absolutely not. They're going to take some responsibility and act like adults for once in their Goddamned lives. I can tell you that much.” She was on the verge of tears. Ivy sat with her face in her hands shaking back and forth. Tulane had gone to sleep; she lay curled on the floor with her head on one of Kias' throw pillows. When

36 her forty-eight hours in the hospital were up, Rebecca had gone back to that apartment. There wasn’t anywhere else for her to go. The man with the hundred-dollar bill was still there, but the money was long gone. Thank God it was. Thank God, he didn’t still have that hundred-dollar bill.

Lying beside Momma in the bed, Tulane drifted through a restless sleep. Waking she didn’t at first recognize the room they were in. The shadows were unfamiliar and mean. Then she saw the old lady on the bicycle riding over the moon and beyond the stars, but she was no longer the kindly figure of that afternoon. Wicked. Sinister. She oozed rot. Tulane sat forward. Beyond Momma lay the fat woman they’d met at the smelly man’s cartoon palace. She thought about Coconut, how the puppies had come plopping out: one, two, three, four, while she hid beneath the bushes at the edge of the back porch. The fat woman was like Coconut. She had puppies coming. Maybe she’d have them in the motel. Nervous. Tulane was nervous. Strange place. Strange walls, full of giants and mushrooms. The flutter-crush of bird wings. She rolled her body into Momma's, burying her face into Momma’s side, so the momma-smell overwhelmed her. Let it drive the strangeness of the walls from her mind. She focused only on the smell. Sleep. Smell. Sleep. In the daylight the skull-beams won’t shine like search lights in the sockets of the old lady’s eyes as she rides and rides. She won’t cast those beams over the fields and the hills, the mountains, and the streams, questing ever onward for new babies to snatch up and devour. Either whole or in pies. Or simply mashed down into jelly. Tulane was sold to the gnomes in their crystalline chambers deep in the heart of the space-flung city. Go to sleep. Go to sleep. And wake up with the daylight. But the whirling skirts fluttered out behind, as the witch rode cackling over the ceiling stains, down the windows, and round the walls. Each new pass of headlights in the parking lot brought the creature to life again. With each pass of the headlights, Tulane grew ever more awake. With each pass of the headlights, she saw more clearly the globular form of the pregnant woman beyond Momma. And then she thought of Coconut and the puppies. Daniel would kill them when she was gone. He’d take them out to the stream with a sack of smooth stones. Tie them off at the top and toss them over. He’d said he’d do it. Like he said to Momma when she crept to their door in the late darkness one night. “I ought to tie ‘em off in a sack of smooth stones and toss them in the creek,” he said. Smack. “You’ll do no such thing,” Momma said. No such thing. No such thing. Smack. Smack. No such thing. “Smack,” said Tulane. She’d smacked him. Momma smacked him when he said it. Not hard. She

38 knew it hadn’t been hard. It wasn’t like the way you smacked a cat when a cat goes bad. It made him laugh. Then Momma laughed too, and Tulane crept under the porch to be with the puppies. She sat up and pushed the sheet down. In her pajama feet she slipped to the floor, making her way around the bed. The pregnant woman lay on her back with her massive stomach protruding from beneath the sheet. Slowly, the bulbous mass moved beneath the tight surface of the skin. Walking to the door, she wanted to see the puppies underneath the porch, but taking the doorknob in her hands, she found the door was locked. She could unlock the bolt, but there was a strange mechanism, just out of reach on the door, a hook. And she had to quietly drag their suitcase to the door, pull herself onto it and stretch, holding a pencil from the desk in her fingers in order to flip it sideways, off the latch. Then, she pushed the suitcase away from the door, and slipped out, into the warm night breeze in the parking lot. It was dark outside. They were on the second floor. She wasn’t at home. Curious. And then she remembered the airplane and the cartoon palace and the circle of people and the woman pregnant with puppies. They were at a motel. She crept into the parking lot. Occasional traffic passed by on the road, but it was late at night. There were few cars left in the lot. But there had been lights. Lights on the ceiling. A slug bug. Out there by the cartoon palace where the smelly man talked on and on as the candles danced along the walls. A man got out of the slug bug. Reaching across the seats, he took out a white cane, and Tulane thought maybe he was an angel. Julie Bean said angels looked like that, dressed all in white. A white light seemed to pour down upon him from the sky, or was that the streetlight? No. No streetlight could make those clothes ripple in the wind like that. No. It was angel, glowing in the light of the moon. Sure of it. She was sure of it. She couldn’t wait to tell Julie Bean. She couldn’t wait to sock Brandon Kitchens in the nose with it. Making fun of them the way he did, calling Julie Bean’s momma crazy-stupid like that. At the door to the cartoon palace the angel bent to one knee. It did something with the door and then it slipped inside. It must sleep there. That made sense. The cartoon palace looked like the kind of place an angel would sleep. She’d ask Julie Bean when she got back to school. Julie Bean would know. She knew everything about angels there was to know. Julie Bean’s momma drove the car with the angels on the windows. Her

39 momma knew all about it and had told them when Tulane stayed over that night. Putting them to bed, she said, Remember, the angels are watching over you. Angels? Beings of pure light and goodness, Julie Bean said. She went back to their room, pulling the door closed behind her, and she ran to the bed where she whisper-squealed, “Momma, Momma, there's an angel in the parking lot.” “Hush,” said Rebecca, rolling her face into the mattress. Momma had frowned when Tulane came home from the Bean’s all crazy for angels. “You're only dreaming. Go back to bed,” said Momma. “But, Momma.” “Hush.” Tulane went to the window. She drew the curtain aside. Red brake lights vanished down the road. Perhaps it was the slug-bug driving away. The parking lot was empty, now. The streetlight blinked, it pulsated once, and grew dim. They always did that when she walked beneath them. Goodness. Maybe she could make them go out simply by looking at them. What power. What a terrible, terrible power that was. Dreams. Only dreams. Tulane was given over to her dreams.

At seven the next morning Kias banged on the door to their room at the Motel 6. Somehow he had managed to acquire a booster seat for Tulane, reminding Rebecca of the secret she kept. It made her long for the following afternoon, when she and Tulane would be aloft again, watching the country roll by at five hundred miles per hour. She wished for the sight of that miniature world below. How controlled, how precious it all looks from the windows of a plane. What a fool she had been to avoid air travel. Fear is strange that way. How one fear trumps another. How easily the fear of death is replaced by the fear that you might have to go on living. Kias drove them. They went south from Lidell, along the winding back roads, through the tangled brambly lands of her youth. They drove past fallen-down trailers, past junkyards, overgrown with kudzu and weeds. In the dirt patches sat heaps of rusted refrigerators. They passed wrecked cars piled onto cinder blocks. Gardens of plastic sunflowers spiraled in the breeze. In one ditch lay half a dozen shotgunned televisions on a rotting mattress. Dejected mongrel dogs stood at the ends of thick chains, rooting their noses through mounds of fly-swarmed garbage. The men were just as she remembered them: stoop-shouldered, hard-looking men, full of abject violence and malignant stupidity. The women stood in their ragged flower-print dresses. The downtrodden and the doomed. White trash. These were Daddy’s people. His parishioners. She recognized many of them from the congregation. Some waved as they drove by. Waved at Kias, no doubt. They’d have spit if they knew she was in the car. In there with her bastard child. His too, if they only knew. If they only knew. If they only knew. But they’ll never know. Never. I’ll never let them. Never will. You’ll never have to be… A dirty boy picked his nose by the roadside, waving as they drove past. He grinned his idiot boy’s grin. It was wrong to hate them, to hate even the boy. But hate them she did. She shuddered with revulsion at the thought of what that boy would be. Soon enough. Soon enough he’d grow to understand his world and the limitations he’d been handed. Soon enough he’d learn to take his frustrations out on a little girl like Tulane. You’ll never be one of these people, she thought. Never. Never. Never. Never.

Kias drove with his knuckles tense on the wheel, gripping it firmly at ten o’clock and two o’clock. He kept his eyes intent on the curving road, maintaining a constant speed exactly one-half mile-per-hour below the posted limit. In the backseat Ivy bit her nails. She had torn them down the quick and they were bleeding on her fingers. Nervous. Rebecca was too. She hadn’t been home in seven years and now she was returning to insist they take care of Joe’s girlfriend. Tulane sat in the backseat as well, She held the Power Puff Girl, Kias had bought her. They were singing songs together as Rebecca’s youth flowed by the windows. When they got to her parent’s house, with its droopy-eyed curtains in the upstairs windows and the loose, clattery teeth of its white columned porch, Kias didn’t head up the long driveway to the turn-around. Instead, he pulled into the gravel parking lot at the old church, a small clapboard building. Once white, it was now paint-peeled and gray, revealing the dull weathered boards beneath. Tall weeds shot through the gravel and the porch. Plywood covered the front windows, and a rusty chain hung through the handles of the doors. The picnic tables to the side of the building had warped in the elements. The tire swing in the gnarled oak tree, where the children used to play, now swung on a frayed and rotting rope. The weight of a toddler would’ve snapped it. Idly Rebecca wondered if the tree still held their initials carved in its bark. Beyond the church, the rest of their ten-acre field lay thick with weeds and bramble. It hadn't been in that state since before Daddy converted, back when he gave up liquor. Gave up drinking it himself, anyway. Rebecca knew full well he had financed the church through the illicit sale of government whiskey, that is to say, whiskey with a tax stamp. Liquor was still illegal in Beckham County, all these years after prohibition. Every few days Daddy used to drive his AMC Gremlin up to Jackson, where he bought a case of Jim Beam Whiskey, and a case of Lord Baltimore Gin, which he then resold through Earl Tibbit Sr.’s shot shack down the road. For a criminal enterprise it was pretty miserable stuff. Their only customers were either too poor to own a car, or habitually too drunk to drive one into Jackson for themselves. “It’ll get a fresh coat of paint,” said Kias, kicking at the weeds in the gravel. Rebecca helped Ivy out of the car, and then turned to look again on the fallen down building. It appeared on the verge of utter collapse. “We’ll fix the windows, of course. The little

42 train.” He motioned with his index finger in a long loop. “It’ll go out through the field and come back to the station at the front. At least it would have. That was the idea.” “Through a tunnel?” she said. “That's right,” said Kias. “Joe was going to paint the inside of the tunnel with scenes of sin and then redemption.” “I see,” she said. In the sandbox where Joe used to play, some variety of rhizomorphous weed had formed a web of green veins over the world where he built his cities, his empires. A rusted Tonka truck lay half buried in the sand. Tulane picked it up. A handful of pebbles rattled in the cab, draining out the windows. She dropped it, walking off to explore. “Like if Michaelangelo got a hold of Epcot?” said Rebecca. “It’s exactly like that,” said Kias. Nodding enthusiastically, he poked the air to emphasize her correctness. “But without the robots, right? I mean robots are probably out of your budget.” “For now,” he said. It seemed Kias hadn't caught the tone. “No robots. Right now it’s just the train—was the train. Later we were hoping to put a couple of rides in the field. You know, a Ferris wheel, a roller coaster.” “Joe wanted to call it The Holy Roller Coaster,” said Ivy. “It was all he could talk about.” “Didn’t the Bakers try something like this? Visionland?” Kias looked disgusted. “Visionland? Visionland was nothing. This’ll be the full immersion.” Rebecca snorted. But she recovered herself quickly when she saw they weren't laughing. She contented herself to stand with them for a moment, gazing into the field. She could see the throngs of children out there running with balloons, ice cream dripping down their faces. She could see the Apostles wandering through the crowds, stopping to pose for photos. There was an amphitheater where Moses confronted Pharaoh every half- hour. The security officers were dressed as centurions, as legionnaires. Merchant tradesmen poured through crowd, hawking popcorn and hot dogs. Balloon twisting saints mingled with the children. Perhaps local kids could take summer jobs as temple prostitutes. Maybe in the evenings they’d hurl folks to the lions. Witches! Witches everywhere! Catch a witch by the nose! Redeem her for a ride on the Zipper! Every now

43 and again Jesus would roll through town in a fire belching red Corvette. He’d lay waste to evil. He’d set all the wrongs to right. “See, I was thinking,” said Kias. “Since you’d have to have security, they could dress like Roman soldiers.” “I was just thinking that myself,” she said. “You’ll help us, then?” “Help you what?” “Build it.” “Oh, no,” she said, shaking her head. “Of course not. What do I want with building a church with a train tunnel? Seriously, Daddy went for this? I thought he wasn’t…how did you put it? Walking with the Lord.” “Your momma’s letting us build it,” said Kias. Rebecca frowned. “She won’t talk to Joe, threw him out of the house, but she letting you build on our property?” Kias glanced at Ivy. “She’s selling us the land,” he said. “Ronnie Tibbit—” “Momma is selling our field to Ronnie Tibbit?” said Rebecca. Turning, she grabbed Kias’ by the shirtsleeve. “It’s Joe's vision,” said Ivy. She thought of little Joe in the tire swing, toeing at the dirt. She saw him at the picnic table as the afternoon wound into the evening, drawing a tiny pencil sketch animation of the crucifixion of Jesus into the margins of a dog-eared paperback. She glanced between Kias and Ivy, their eyes imploring her to help. Letting go of Kias, she walked to the oak tree, giving the tire swing a push. They’d been so young, slipping down behind this oak. Kias was always careful about his tie, careful not to untie it. He always slipped it over his head. His tie was the only thing Kias ever took off in their encounters. When they were finished, he was so quick to slip it back on, that perfectly knotted tie. He’d scramble from behind the tress, jerking it back over his head, as he hurled himself into the church to beg forgiveness for their sins. Through one of the busted windows she could see Tulane inside the church, clutching Buttercup to her chest. Seven years. But it was me she cried out to, Rebecca thought. It was me when her fever reached a hundred and two. Rebecca ran her palm along the bark of the tree, passing over their faded initials, KW+RW=LV4EVR. She rolled her eyes.

“There’s snakes in here, Momma,” shouted Tulane, standing on her tiptoes to see through the window. “Come on out of there,” said Rebecca. “And watch that glass. Come out the front.” “They’re just garter snakes,” said Tulane. §§§ On the front porch of her parent’s house, Lurleen, Rebecca’s mother, sat with Willy Tate, one of Daddy’s old parishioners. They were smoking cigarettes, and they each had a tall glass of iced tea. Of all Daddy’s flock, Willy was the strangest as far as Rebecca was concerned. Not for his quirkiness, but rather his lack of it. Willy was a normal citizen. Educated. Genteel actually. He came from old money. During Reconstruction Montgomery Tate had built a fortune speculating on convict labor futures in the commodities market. Why Willy came out to the sticks every Sunday to listen to Daddy preach was something Rebecca had never managed to figure out. But she had always liked him. He was the only person she knew besides Joe who hadn’t frowned on her going off to Ole Miss. When they approached the porch, Momma extinguished her cigarette in the ashtray that sat between them. This was new. Aunt Cinderella was a smoker. Uncle Arzo was a smoker. Daddy had smoked for a while before he fell in with the Lord. But Momma never smoked. She had been smiling at something Willy had said, but when she saw them walking up the drive, her face closed over in a scowl. Now that the house was fully in view Rebecca saw Willy’s powder blue Alfa Romeo parked beside Daddy’s AMC Gremlin in the carport. “Willy Tate,” she said, after they had crunched their way to the bottom of the steps. “I guess you could say I’m a little surprised to see you here. You’re still Beckham County prosecutor?” Willy smiled, standing to greet them. “It’s a part-time position,” he said, taking a drag on his cigarette. He held out his hand for her to shake. “It’ll go full-time after the election,” said Lurleen. Willy shrugged. “Maybe,” he said. Then he added, “I am so sorry about Joe.”

Ivy, who had been standing quietly behind Kias, perhaps hoping not to be noticed, suddenly pushed her way past him. “Are you going to prosecute those murdering pigs who killed him?” she said. “You mean the Sheriff’s Department?” said Willy. “I—Lurleen? You know I looked into it. Everything was by the book. They—they feel just awful about it. Most of those boys had never even drawn their guns before.” “I know, Willy,” said Lurleen. She let her head roll back on her shoulders. She drew in a lung full of smoke from her cigarette, exhaling slowly. When she looked up again, she gave Rebecca a hard eye. Momma's hair had gone the color of iron, but in fact she looked better than Rebecca remembered. Her skin was firm; her eyes were no longer cupped in baggy half-moons of exhaustion. “You've come home,” she said. “Why don't you go on in and see your Daddy.” She pointed at Ivy. “Kias, you keep that dog on a leash, you hear?” “That's hardly necessary, Momma,” Rebecca said. “My name’s Lurleen,” she said, fiddling with the pack of cigarettes. “Momma's just a job I used to have.” “Well, I really ought to be going,” said Willy. He snuffed his cigarette in the ashtray and drained the last of his sweet tea. “I'll see ya’ll this afternoon.” “Can't you haul this bunch in for vagrancy?” Lurleen said. “Trespassing?” “Now Lurleen,” he said, walking off toward his powder blue Alfa Romeo. “Talk to your daughter, why don’t you.” “This afternoon?” said Ivy. “He's coming to the funeral? To Joe's funeral? But he’s one of them. He one of the people who did it.” “Hush,” said Momma. She let out a lungful of smoke and extinguished her cigarette in the ashtray. She laid her box of matches on top of the pack. “I told Joe and I told Joe. I said, Joe, a pistol ain't nothing but the Devil's right hand. In one ear and out the other.” Then, taking sight of Tulane, her demeanor suddenly shifted. “This must be your baby girl,” she said. “Hey there, I'm your Grandma Lurleen.” “My name is Tulane,” said the child. She stood holding onto the back of Rebecca's pants leg, with the Power Puff Girl resting on the top of her head.

“That sure is a pretty doll,” said Lurleen. “You want some ice cream?” Tulane looked up at Rebecca. Rebecca didn’t tend to hand out ice cream in the morning, but things didn’t seem to be going as well and Rebecca wanted them to go. “Sure. Ice cream, it is,” she said. “Well, good,” said Kias. “Good. Good. I see all is well here. I need to get back to town and put the church in order, stop by the funeral home. Etc. etc. Busy day, busy day. But I imagine ya’ll will need a ride this afternoon?” “No, I want to go with you,” said Ivy. “Right now. I don't think I ought to be here.” “I can drive Momma and Daddy in the Gremlin,” said Rebecca, pointing to the bright yellow box of a car under the carport. “Ivy, you need to stay here. Momma, I want to talk to you about Ivy.” “Willy Tate has already agreed to give us a ride,” said Lurleen. “Thank you very much. And my name's not Momma.” She took Tulane’s hand, continuing, “but you can call me Grandma Lurleen. Can't you?” “No, I really want to go,” said Ivy. “I—thank you, but I don't think I belong.” “All right,” said Kias, taking Ivy's elbow. “Let's go. We’ll see ya’ll this afternoon.” “Wait,” said Rebecca, but Momma had already steered Tulane up the porch steps and through the screen door. As Kias and Ivy shuffled down the drive, she found herself alone in the front yard of the house. It wasn't a bad sensation being alone. She closed her eyes and sat down on the porch beside the ashtray. She took one of Momma's cigarettes from the pack. Salem Menthols. They were the same kind of cigarettes Aunt Cinderella smoked. Probably they were Cindy’s. Strange that she’d take up cigarettes. Momma used to yell her sister up one side of the house and down the other for smoking. Glancing over her shoulder, she tried to see through the curtains into the living room. Aunt Cindy and Uncle Arzo. “I’ll bet you anything they’re on the sofa in there fighting over the remote at this very minute,” She said. Down by the church, Kias’ car rumbled to life.

Momma’s knick-knacks had taken over the living room. In the old days Daddy used to throw them out by the sack full, but it looked like Momma could declare victory on the knick-knack front. Spilling from the china cabinets marched a circus of glass lions and tigers, elephants and deer. She had rabbits made of soapstone. She had carved wooden monkeys. Ceramic frogs tumbled from the shelves. Plastic birds lay piled on the end tables. Along the windowsill stood a group of tin soldiers, and on the mantelpiece Colonel Reb leaned against his cane. He looked so nonchalant, in his plantation suit. The walls over the fireplace were hung with Normal Rockwell decorative plates commemorating the great sailing vessels of U.S. lore: Old Ironsides, The USS Constitution. Momma never had left the state of Mississippi, but she had a collection of dust-covered snow globes from every conceivable destination, New York to Sydney, heaped on the dusty bench of an electric organ. Leaning against the walls were political posters and old placards from the Carter, Reagan, and Robertson campaigns. In piled boxes she kept a collection of Reader's Digest and TV-Guide going back thirty years. However, the truly dominant theme of the living room—and this was the work of Lurleen’s baby sister, Cinderella, who, along with her husband Arzo, had lived with them for as long as Rebecca could remember—had always been Christmas. Reindeer galloped through the snow. Santa danced with Mrs. Claus. A string of colored lights flashed along one wall, and stacked by the stairs lay box after box of wrapping paper, tinsel, and ornaments. There had always been a pack of dachshunds, too. Rebecca expected them at any minute to hurtle down the stairs and swarm at her feet, barking, yipping, snapping at her shoes. But standing in the darkened foyer, amid the coats and hats, the umbrellas and the walking sticks as old as she was, the smell of decades hitting her as she entered, there were no dachshunds. She was disappointed in this. How oddly disappointing. She had always taken her father’s side on the dachshund front: two was good, three was plenty, twelve an affront to Godly hygiene. On the sofa Arzo grunted a greeting. Though completely bald on the top of his head, Arzo had refused to give up the mullet. His hair had turned white as cotton and he’d finally grown the beard. He had finally succumbed and become another of Aunt Cindy’s

decorations. He crumpled a dead can of Schlitz and tossed in into a grocery sack of empties. Rebecca looked at the clock on the wall. It seemed awful early for the WWF, but there it was, blasting away on the television. Perhaps he’d put in a tape. “Hey, Arzo,” she said. He grunted a second time, popping the top on a fresh soldier. The old house might be devoid of dachshunds, but what really struck Rebecca was the absence of any Jesus. The last time she was in this living room a dozen King James Bibles were scattered about the tables and shelves. Every wall held a crucifix. There used to be a “Footprints” poster next to the Rockwell commemorative plates, and over the stairs there ought to have been an oil painting of the manger scene. Through the dining room Rebecca could see Momma and Tulane in the kitchen sitting at the table with bowls of ice cream. Aunt Cindy sat with them, positively jiggling with mirth. She seemed just as jolly as Mrs. Claus to have a baby girl in the house. She simply couldn’t get over it. Rebecca took a step forward. “He's upstairs,” said Lurleen. She looked at the stairs. “How bad is he?” she asked. “He's not good,” said Momma. “We’ve got the fella from hospice coming down every few days. Doctors said he ought to have been dead three months ago. Look there under the stairs.” Down the hall and before Aunt Cinderella and Uncle Arzo’s room, there was a cupboard under the stairs, a dark crawl space where Joe used to go when they played hide-n-seek. She could remember pacing in front of it, calling, “Where's Joe? Where, oh where, could he possibly be?” Rebecca went to the cupboard and pulled the latch. On her hands and knees she peered into the webby darkness. She inched further until her face brushed the string. Pulling it sent the light of a forty-watt bulb jumping around the plywood walls of the storage space. A few cobweb shadows fluttered on the breeze. There was a tombstone leaning against the back wall. At first she thought it was Joe's. But it wasn’t. The tombstone belonged to Daddy, to Jack Wooler. It was dated January 29, 1939 – May __ 2003.” “You went ahead and filled in the month?” Rebecca called. “They were on special,” said Momma. “The engraving was thrown in for free. But let me tell you something, these doctors don't know a thing. I haven't the faintest idea how

I'm going to fix it, and now it’s apt to come January before he goes and I’ll have to fix the year, too.” “1939?” Rebecca said. She pulled the string, and pushed her way out of the cupboard, dusting off in the hallway. “I thought Daddy was born in 1948.” “Sure,” said Momma. “Well, that's what he told people. But it was at least ’39. Frankly, I think it might've been earlier.” The kitchen was much as it had been, the walls a little greasier, the linoleum run through with more cracks. She caught a glimpse of herself at this same table where Tulane now sat, spooning ice cream into her mouth. She and Daddy had drunk coffee together at this table. They had leaning on their elbows conspiratorially, while the dying kettle whistled on the stove. She had made two cups. One for herself. One for Daddy. He had sat hunched over Momma’s sewing kit, snipping markers from a roll of Momma’s red ribbon, placing them carefully between the leaves of the Bible he gave her when she graduated. She was to take that Bible with her to that den of iniquity: Oxford, Mississippi. College. Daddy hadn’t thought highly of the idea. He had only agreed to it because of Kias. Kias said a preacher’s wife ought to teach kindergarten. “It’ll go a long way with the state,” Kias had said. “If somebody at the school has an education degree.” “Go see him,” said Momma. “But watch it. The fella from hospice was just here. I suspect he’s looped.” She twirled her finger around her ear. Tulane grinned, her face plastered with chocolate syrup. “Maybe you need some pie,” said Cinderella, bounding across the kitchen to the refrigerator. Rebecca half-smiled and half-frowned. “You be good,” she said, giving Tulane the Momma-stare. At the top of the landing, she took in the sight and smell of the old second floor. Even mustier now, the house had always felt cramped and closeted. The landing wrapped around the stairwell, before it gave way to the bedroom doors—hers on one side, Momma and Daddy’s on the other, and Joe’s further on by the bathroom at the far end. She could see a flicker of Joe with his hands shoved into his pockets and his face crusted over with jelly, a small boy, a child, skinny legs in sailor shorts. What was he doing waving a pistol around the Waffle House in town? Only yesterday, she had held a napkin to his nose for him to blow into, wrapped his presents at Christmas with Daddy in the middle of the

50 night, and sang him lullabies to ease him into sleep. Looking at each door, her eyes came to rest finally at the bathroom. She could see herself down there as a child in pajama feet. She held Daddy’s teeth in her hand, while he vomited into the commode. “Goddamn that mother of yours,” he had slurred between the heaves. His teeth felt slimy in her fingers. Blood from his broken nose speckled the white tile of the floor. “I hardly see how this is her fault,” Rebecca had said. Was she nine years old? She was ten when he converted. She must’ve been nine when she held the teeth. Joe would’ve been five. That was the summer before he converted, before she met Kias. Before the church. “No,” he had said, and rolling over his eyes had looked like busted egg yolks. Leaning against the wall, he had slump to the bathroom floor and closed his eyes. “I don’t guess I can blame this one on her, can I?” She remembered she was still holding those teeth when he began to snore. The door to his room stood ajar. She touched the knob. The darkness in there seemed to encroach on the dim light of the landing. She pushed through. It was black in the room; they’d hung thick blankets over the windows, but with the light from the landing she could see the twisted mound of sheets gently expand and contract on the bed. Nothing more. The room was piled with clothes. The chemical stench of mothballs and stale piss hung in the air. A soft groan came from the bed. She clicked on the table lamp, flooding the room with weak light. Daddy lay amid the rumpled sheets. He had been a big man once, with thick bones and heavy muscles. He used to dance her around the house, but he’d shriveled away to spider limbs and baggy skin. She had thought she would be angry when she saw him. There were many things she had wanted to say over the last seven years, since they last spoke on the lawn out front of her dorm, and not many of them were polite. Time. There was time enough. Suddenly she had stumbled into death. He lay wasted, all but gone, and now she felt herself carried away in his arms, those incredible rock solid arms of God as they careened about the room to Hank Williams, to Elvis Presley, to Roy Orbison. Dancing with her father as the living room swirled by. He was so strong, so alive, so powerful. He was like the earth itself and the walls all around them. He was the timbers of the house in which they lived, and he held her tight in his arms like he’d never let go, like all the world could crash against them and he’d still be standing there with Rebecca in his arms. He’d live forever

and she would dance forever with him, a little girl in her daddy’s arms spiraling through a world she didn’t know and didn’t care to know. Didn’t need to know, because she had her daddy and he was tough as nails and the world had better watch out for the both of them when they fell to dancing. Moving across the room, she placed her palm against the rough skin of his face. Momma had not shaved him in a week. Yellow-white hair burst from his head in long stringy clumps, greasy with eczematous flakes. Rebecca knelt by the side of the bed. His lips were open. His tongue moved with each shallow breath. Every pull of air made a sound like rattling pebbles in his throat. He lay with one eye cracked open, but he couldn’t have seen through that eye. A kind of fungus grew there, frosting it over, like a marble long buried in the ground. On the nightstand, beside the lamp, lay the Bible he had given her, the one he had read from on the lawn in front of her dorm at Ole Miss when he came to bring her home. He had kept it. He had been reading to her from it before he sent her upstairs to pack. Slipping out the side door of her dorm, she never thought she’d see again. She took it up for a moment; then she laid it aside. Several pill bottles sat on the nightstand: Dilaudid, Sublimaze. Heavy painkillers. There were no other medicines. They were only trying to manage his pain, trying to ease him into death. She picked up the bottle of Dilaudid and his scaly hand wrapped around her fingers. She let out a gasp, but he said nothing. His face showed no movement. It might only have been a reflex. “Daddy?” she said. “Daddy, are you awake?” “Long Chain,” he said, coughing. “Charlie?” “Rebecca,” she said. “It’s me.” She knelt by the bed, setting the pills on the nightstand. She took his hand. “Rebecca. Your daughter. I’m home for Joe’s—” “Home,” he said. “Take me home, Long Chain. I’m ready to go.” Daddy opened his good eye. Clear blue, just as she remembered. “Long Chain Charlie,” he said. “Coming to take me home. Rebecca? Can you hear him? Hear his loops of iron rattle down the concrete floors. Long Chain,” he called out. “I’ve laid by this shore a thousand years. For a thousand years I’ve laid by the sea. The foam closes over me and the foam rolls out. Through night and day, beneath the red sun and the yellow, beneath the

52 blue sky and the white, beneath the darkness and the swirling stars. For a thousand years—Rebecca? I’ve waited for her to come and take me. Waited to hear those soft feet in the sand beside my head. Look up and see that skin of polished silver and hair of white bone. I can hear the tiny clacking bones running down her back like rain. I want to breathe that silver milk into my lungs until I’m nothing but earth and sky and sea and sand and bone and her above me. I’ve waited a thousand years. But even now, Long Chain, I hear you come a clanking down the hall.” He fell silent.

Like Joe, like all of them, Daddy had always been imaginative. A blessing? A curse? “Listen,” she said. “It’s me. It’s Rebecca. Daddy, isn’t it just awful about Joe?”

“Awful,” he said. “Yes. Awful. Do you see him in the corner over there? I can see him by the door sometimes, with his red glowing badge. When he lifts his hat you can see the sulfur wisp from the gutted sockets of his eyes. What a cruel toothless smile. He stands there grinning with his chains, his rattle of keys, his marching columns of the damned. Can you hear the rushing carnival beyond? The world beyond is a howling locomotive. Can you see it? Do you see the blood red sun? It hangs motionless like a blood red nail hammered into the milky whiteness of a paper sky. Keys. Clanking chains. See the columns of the damned shuffle past, walking out to sea, the white stripes of their ring- arounds bleeding into the white sky. They are piles of black stripes walking out to sea, making their way into that blood red sun. Long Chain,” he called out, again. “Here I am. I waiting in the sea at the end of the world.” Rebecca again picked up the bottle of Dilaudid. “My pills,” he said. “Yes. I need three of those. Only three. I could take more you know? But she won’t let me. She leaves them by the bed to torment me is all. See I can’t work the caps with my hands the way they are, but I’m ready. I’m ready to go. Let her come glide across these broken bones.” Rebecca listened to this monologue play through again and again. An angel came to him at the seashore. Then it morphed into a demon and dragged him down to hell. After a while she began to cry. She told herself it was Joe she cried for as she sat beside Daddy,

53 listening to him drone through this agony. She held her face in her hands, wishing she’d stayed in Idaho. He’d been so strong, such a bull, with his big fists ready and his voice loud with the Spirit and his sweat smelling of old whiskey, and nothing but hell for any man who got in his way. She’d learned that from him. Suddenly she saw herself in the schoolyard, taking some girl by the ponytail and wiping her head around to take a little medicine, while Joe slunk away in the corners. Why hadn’t Joe learned that? Why wasn’t he the rage and the spit and the thunder of their old man Jack Wooler? It was like all Joe ever learned from Daddy was this moment where Daddy lay in the bed dying. It was as if all of his life Joe had only known this moment with his father, where he would try to walk of this room with a bottle of Dilaudid tucked into his pocket. After a while she stood. Quietly, she made her way out of the room and onto the landing. She could hear him in there even as she let the door close. Soaking in the memory, she stood leaning against the frame. Memory pressed in around her, suffocating. It was as if she breathed the house into her lungs when she breathed. She wanted the wide open Palouse again. The sheep in the distance. No one around her. Nothing to breath in except the blue sky and the thrashing whispers of the wheat. She went to the living room to find the telephone. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” she said, when Daniel answered. “Christ, this is awful. It’s just awful.” “So they haven’t dragged you back into the fold?” he said. “Oh… no,” she said. “Good, good,” he said. “The barn’s coming along.” “The what?” she said. “Oh… Oh, good. Yes… Yes, that’s good.”

Tulane sat in the kitchen with Grandma Lurleen and Aunt Cindy. She talked about the children at school, about her enemy Brandon Kitchens, who tried to get her into trouble nearly every single day, and about her friend Julie Bean, whose momma talked to angels. She told them about the squealing sheep that summer. Sheered of their wool. How the wool peeled off like skin, as Momma ran the clippers down their sides. She talked about Coconut and the puppies and the dogs she couldn’t touch at the barn, and Daniel who was going to toss the puppies in the creek, but who wasn’t such a bad fellow, really, even thought Grandma Lurleen thought that sounded like something a bad man would do. No, he was all right, kind of quiet and dazed. Tulane said he knew everything there was to know about a sheep. Wherever appropriate, Aunt Cindy threw out a round of applause, clapping and bobbing her head back and forth, like a windup monkey, each clap accentuated with a little puff of baby powder. They had been talking for a while, and their second bowls of ice cream were almost gone, when Arzo bellowed at them from the living room. “Hey,” he screamed. “Hey! It’s the satellite’s gone out, again.” “No, it hasn’t,” Aunt Cindy yelled back. Her face flashing from ice cream sweet to boiling savage, and then back again. “Do you want another bowl?” she said, squeezing Tulane’s arm. “No thank you,” said Tulane. Ice cream dripped down her chin, down her forearms. “The picture’s gone,” he called. “I tell you, the satellite’s on the blink.” Cinderella jerked her chair back from the table. She squealed it across the linoleum. “No it’s not,” she said, pointing at the ceiling. “It’s still up there in the sky, Arzo. The satellite is IN THE SKY. The satellite doesn’t go on the blink. It’s that Chinese television you bought’s on the blink. Not our God given satellite.” They could hear Arzo struggle to his feet. Kicking over the grocery sack of empties, he cursed, knocking his TV tray off the couch and dropping the remote. They heard the batteries roll across the floor. Slipping on a battery, Arzo cracked his head against the coffee table, and began to bellow incoherent gibberish. Tulane’s eyes shot wide open with terror, but Grandma Lurleen winked at her, patting her hand to let her know it was

55 okay. This was all expected, and not in the least out of the norm. When Arzo found his words, he continued on about the television. “It’s a goddamned fine TV,” he said. Coming in to the kitchen, he held the corner of his head. A trickle of blood flowed between his fingers. “Don’t you talk like that around this child,” said Grandma Lurleen, threatening him with a drippy spoon. “Oh, my goodness. My goodness.” Her hands to her cheeks, Aunt Cindy became a tornado of misplaced healing aggression. Grabbing a hand towel from the refrigerator door, she ran it under the faucet, and slapped it across Arzo’s forehead. “You’ll give him lock-jaw with that nasty rag,” said Grandma Lurleen. “Not that I’d curse the silence.” Gasping, Cinderella threw the hand towel across the room. “Kerosene!” she said. “We need to soak his head in kerosene.” “Calm down,” said Grandma Lurleen. “It’s upstairs in the bathroom. Come on.” Tulane sat at the table swinging her legs. She stared at her upside down reflection in the licked-clean spoon. “We’ll be back in a minute. There’s cartoons in the living room.” “Satellite’s on the blink,” said Arzo, shaking his head. “The goddamned satellite is IN THE SKY,” Aunt Cindy shrieked. “Hush this nonsense,” said Grandma Lurleen, scowling at them. She winked at Tulane, saying, “I’ll be right back, sweetie, you hear?” Tulane nodded. She heard. She made swirls in the melted ice cream. She sang a little nonsense song with Buttercup. She bit the dead skin around her fingernails. She thought about the puppies. She swung her legs some more, but still Grandma Lurleen did not come back. It must have been several hours at least—maybe even a whole day—of waiting, legs swinging, staring at her reflection in the spoon, and singing nonsense. Finally, she hopped off the chair, tucked Buttercup under her arm, and wandered into the living room. There was more than enough in here to keep her entertained for hours. Every shelf held a new curiosity, every pile a new delight. But she was fixated on those snakes in the shack down by the road. She had nearly gotten a hold of one the last time she was in there. He’d slipped between her fingers as she grabbed after him on the floor, disappearing through a crack in the boards.

Tulane looked at the front door. It had to be at least a mile down to the shack; maybe it was fourteen miles. How would she know? She took several of the knick-knacks from the shelves, turning them around in her hands, before setting them back where she thought they belonged. She had to push a chair to the fireplace in order to inspect Colonel Reb with his walking stick, his winking eye. But all the while, she felt the pull of those snakes and shortly that pull overwhelmed her. She went to the front door, and eased it open a crack. Then, slipping through, she stepped into the warm outdoors. The morning mist had burned away. The sun poured down through the trees, and the air was hot and gooey. Walking along the drive, and around the hedges to the building by the road, Tulane clutched Buttercup to her chest. There was a chain with a padlock through the handles of the double front doors. But earlier she had found that the chain was long enough for a child her size to squeeze through. She could already imagine that snake twine around her wrist, its little tongue forking against the back of her hand. She pushed herself through the opening in the doors and came into the interior twilight of the old room. Cobwebs draped from the darkened rafters. Shafts of dusty light sliced the air, illuminating the piled boards of the old pews. Someone long ago had taken a sledgehammer to the place. There was treasure here. In one corner a massive bronze plaque leaned against the wall. In the meager light she could not make out the names that were written on it, she could only feel the raised bumps of the lettering. Beside the plaque lay a dusty book, the size of an encyclopedia. She flipped in open. Even in the dim light she could see that its pages were empty. Page upon blank page of nothing at all. Curious. She looked around for the snake, but footfalls in the brush outside distracted her. “Hello?” she called, thinking it was the smelly man with the toys, who perhaps had brought her another doll. Standing quickly to her tiptoes, she poked her face through the broken window. But it was not Mr. Smelly. Standing by the sandbox, she saw a being of radiant white gossamer, all lit up by the sun in a dazzling nimbus of white-hot light. “Oh!” she said. He was startled as well. But stepping to the window, he quickly recovered himself. The glow around him dissolved under the shadow of the eaves. She might have thought him merely human then, were it not for the mesmerizing blue—like the deepest of glaciers—pooling in his eyes. His long silver hair fell around his face. He held a cane and

57 he leaned it against the side of the porch and reached out to touch her cheek. He brushed his fingers beneath her chin. He raised her face, looking directly into her, as if to pour himself through her eyes. She could see now that he was dressed in a white suit, like Julie Bean’s momma told Julie Bean angels always wore. “What a lovely child,” he said, cupping her cheek in his smooth palm. “I saw you,” she said, stepping back. “Last night in the parking lot.” “You were only dreaming,” he said. “That’s what Momma told me.” He arched an eyebrow. “Curious,” he said. “Rebecca?” “I better get back,” she said. “What’s that doll you have?” Tulane held Buttercup as tight as she could. “It’s Buttercup,” she said. “A Power Puff Girl.” “You’re Tulane?” he said. “How do you know that?” “I know everything,” he said. “I have to go.” Tulane stumbled in the darkness. She tripped over the busted pews. Forcing her way through the door, she ran as fast as she could to the house. She thought she heard him running behind her, but looking back at the church there was nothing to be seen. In the living room Momma talked on the phone. Smiling at first, her face fell into a frown when she saw Tulane run through the front door. “There you are,” said Grandma Lurleen, walking from the kitchen. “I wasn’t gone but two minutes.” “Do you want to talk to Daniel?” said Momma, handing her the phone. Tulane took the phone in her hand and held it trembling to her ear. “Hel—Hello?” she said. “Hey,” said Daniel. The volume on the phone was turned up as loud as possible. Tulane winced holding the phone away from her head. “What’s it like down there?” “Hot,” she said. “Daniel?” “Yes?” “Daniel, you haven’t—you didn’t—you wouldn’t—” “Are you talking about those old puppies?” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “You haven’t—gotten rid of them have you?” “Well, I don’t know,” he said. “Have you been a good girl?” “Oh, yes,” she said. “Oh, yes. Yes. Daniel. Yes. I’ve been such a good girl. I swear.” “All right,” he said. “I haven’t done anything about the puppies. I’ll probably put an ad in the paper here tomorrow or the next day. We’ll see.” After a moment Rebecca got back on the phone. Tulane retreated to the couch. There wasn’t much to do, so she dug into the crack with her fingers, until she found a little bitten off piece of baloney rind she could chew to pass the time. He was going to drown them. She was sure of it. Or maybe he hadn’t drowned them yet, but he would if she did anything bad while she was away. If she got in any kind trouble, or thought any bad thoughts about anybody, or at least got caught thinking them. When Momma finished with the telephone, she came and knelt by the coffee table, taking hold of Tulane’s knees. “What were you doing outside?” she said, smoothing away a smudge of dirt from Tulane’s cheek. “I wanted to swing in the tire swing,” said Tulane. She knew talking about the snake was the wrong way to go if she was to remain a good girl. “I doubt it could hold your weight,” said Rebecca. “You ought to stay out of it. But I used to play all around this house when I was your age. If you want to play in the sandbox you can, but first you need to ask me or Grandma Lurleen…or Aunt Cindy, I guess. But stay out of the church. You might get hurt in there.” “Yes, Momma,” she said. “Momma?” “Yes?” “Oh, nothing,” she said. “It’s nothing.”

Rebecca’s old room was a naked box of worn hardwood floors and faded robin’s egg wallpaper. There was no bulb in the socket. Four shafts of brilliant dusty sunlight poured through the windowpanes. She had piled her clothes on top of the sleeping bags they had brought from Idaho. She had known her old furniture would be gone, and she had suspected—rightly—that Joe’s would be too. There would be no guest room. There were never any guests. Actually, Mom—Lurleen had taken up residence in Joe’s old room. Having showered, Rebecca stood in her bra and panties in the middle of the dusty floorboards. Tulane braced all her weight against a floor length mirror, into which Rebecca applied her makeup. A scandal that would’ve been. No eyeliner would’ve touched her eyes in Daddy’s day. No blusher ever graced her cheeks. Not until freshman year at Ole Miss, when April, one of the dorm girls, took pity on her, and revealed those secrets. In Daddy’s church, and in Uncle Williams’ basement—their first church, before Daddy started up his own—she had worn, as all the women wore, a hemline to her ankles, and sleeves to her wrists. Her hair—never cut, not even trimmed—she had wound into a tight frizzy bun at the top of her head. These days she took such care of her hair. She piled bottle upon bottle of crème rinse, conditioner, and exotic shampoos, made from the seeds of far off pacific island fruit, onto the shelves of Daniel’s bathroom. He stared amazed at the bottles, the mousse, the hairspray. She knew he had contempt for the softness it bespoke. But in her youth—if he could’ve only understood—there had been nothing more than a cake of Ivory soap in the shower. She turned her face, glancing at the reflection of her cheek. Smoothing her hair over her ear, she dangled a ruby pendant at the lobe. Kias ought to have known she wasn’t going to be their schoolmarm when she came home at Thanksgiving with those holes in her ears. In the mirror, she looked at the tattoo of the pixie child above her hipbone. She and April had gotten them together, but now Rebecca could barely remember April’s face. They’d been such fast friends that first year, and now she couldn’t even think of her last name. Had Kias noticed the tattoo? She turned her hip, letting the light from the window fall across it. No. Slipping down by the oak tree, they had never completely taken their clothes off.

“When did you get that?” said Tulane, brushing the tattoo with her fingertip. “Before you were born,” said Rebecca. The sky-blue dress ‘Grandma Lurleen’ had dug from the closet, made Tulane look like an Easter egg splattered with lace. Rebecca had said, no. But by then Tulane had already seen the dress. They had decked her hair with matching blue ribbons and her Mary-Janes glowed like volcanic glass. Little girls were dressed this way. Rebecca remembered. It was at thirteen or fourteen when the sleeves and the hemlines came down as far as possible. “I want a tattoo,” said Tulane. “Hold the mirror steady,” said Rebecca. She blotted her lips on a fold of toilet paper. “Maybe when you’re an adult, you can get one.” “Were you an adult when you got yours?” “Technically,” said Rebecca. She took the mirror. “I was eighteen. You know you don’t have to wear that dress if you don’t want to. I have the dress we packed in Idaho.” “No,” said Tulane. “I want to wear this dress and I want to get a tattoo of me in it.” Downstairs Momma—Lurleen—sat on the couch. She had dressed for the funeral as well, in a dress she must have taken from the very back of the closet—Rebecca could smell the mothballs. Nor was it the sort of thing the church ladies used to wear. Not at Daddy’s church, and not in Uncle Williams’ basement either. Certainly not for a funeral. Certainly not for the funeral of one’s own son. Not that it was a scandal. Not by normal standards. But it did show skin. And not simply the face, shrouded by hair, and garroted with a collar. It was black, anyway, but it gathered at the waist in a big white bow. The pleats fell just below Lurleen’s knees. Lurleen stood when Rebecca and Tulane came down the stairs. Her arms were completely bare. But what really caught Rebecca’s attention was that Lurleen had put on makeup as well. Suddenly, Rebecca saw her mother as she must have looked in the 1970s, when she was young. Young—Momma was young. She still was. Lurleen was a young woman. It struck Rebecca as awful that she hadn’t noticed this before. “Daddy was born in ’39?” said Rebecca. “How would I know?” said Lurleen. “You don’t approve, do you?” She turned to show her slim profile in the dress.

“Of the dress?” Rebecca shrugged. “It looks good. You look good. You look really good. It’s not exactly funeral attire.” Rebecca looked down the length of her own black dress, chosen also from the back of the closet. She hadn’t worn this dress since Halloween of 2000. “Well, do you think it was before ’39?” “I was nineteen,” Lurleen said, pointing at the ceiling. “He said he was thirty-three. But I reckon he was at least forty. He’s got to be seventy now, don’t you think?” “I should get him up,” said Rebecca. “You want him to come? He’ll be at a funeral soon enough.” “It’s his son.” Arzo and Cinderella came out of the kitchen. Cinderalla’s flower print sack dress was the same as always. Cinderella never had quite figured out the code. Lurleen fell back to the sofa. She grabbed up the channel clicker. “Satellite’s back,” said Arzo, pointing at the screen. “There’s wresting.” “I don’t care if there’s wrestling,” said Lurleen. She clicked past the channel. “You never let Arzo watch what he wants!” shrieked Cinderella. “We live here too, me and Arzo. Momma didn’t leave you this house all by your lonesome!” §§§ Upstairs Daddy lay beneath the sheet, with his head on the pillow and his hands folded across his chest. He was calm now. Lucid. He stared straight into the ceiling. Even when she sat beside the nightstand and pulled at the lamp chain, his eyes never shifted. Weakly he closed his fingers around the hand she offered him. “We’ve got to get you dressed,” she said. “It’s time for the funeral. How do you feel?” “Feel,” said Daddy. It was something between a statement and a question. He could feel, but what was there to be felt? “It’s awful, Daddy,” she said. “Awful,” he said. “Joe was so young.” “Joe,” said Daddy. He called out the name, whispering it over and over again. “It was nice of you to sell them the field,” she said. “Joe was really trying to get it together.”

“The field?” he said, turning to glare at her with his one good eye. “I never sold the field. No, I told them. No.” Rebecca leaned into him. She took his shoulder and sat him forward. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get some clothes on you. I see you’ve got a walker in the closet. How are with it?” “I can use it,” he said. “My arm…My arm’s useless, but I’ve got a little movement in my left leg, and my right leg’s good. When she came back downstairs she had managed to get Daddy into one of his old black suits. With his spidery limbs, Daddy looked like a child trying on his father’s clothes. She had fixed a hat to his head. He looked gaunt, withdrawn. He trembled, clutching her arm, his thick scaly nails biting into her skin. She eased him down the stairs. Slow going. “Joe?” he said, when they stood at the bottom of the stairs. He was bent over, leaning into her. His good eye glared through the eyebrow at Lurleen on the sofa. His other eye lay dead in the socket. Lurleen clicked off the television, and walked across the floor. “Joe?” he said, again. His cheeks ballooned around his empty gums when he spoke. His words came out muffled and warped. “You…sold the field?” “You never told Daddy you were selling the field?” said Rebecca. “My field,” said Daddy. He held the banister to steady himself. A blankness veered across his face. Confusion and vertigo. Suddenly he was alone. Leaning into that banister, he pressed into the hostile space habiting the farthest reaches of life. He went limp. Rebecca sagged with him, struggling to gain her foot. Then she eased him to the bottom step. For a moment he was in the void. Then he came back to them. “Joe?” he said, reaching out. Tulane had crept to the edge of the living room. “That’s your granddaughter,” said Rebecca. “Her name is Tulane.” “It’s not your field,” said Lurleen. Rebecca frowned. “What do you mean, it’s not his field?” “Not important,” said Lurleen. “We’re going to be late.” “Well, it’s not your field,” said Cinderella. “Momma left it to us both.” “Daddy,” said Rebecca. “You always told us you bought this house on the GI Bill.” Arzo snorted. The beer he’d been nursing on the sly shot through his nose and sprayed the sofa. Lurleen cursed. Cinderella whacked him with her handbag. Tulane crept behind

Rebecca’s dress. She hid her face behind her mother’s leg. Rolling her eyes—and this was a childish gesture she would revisit throughout the afternoon—Rebecca said, “Let me go get the goddamn car.” “Arzo can drive us,” said Cinderella. “I can drive,” said Arzo, belching. Rebecca glanced at the clock on the mantle. “It’s two thirty in the afternoon,” she said. “By my recollection Arzo’s been too drunk to drive for an hour now. We’ll need two cars, anyway.” “Now, why do you have to say that?” said Arzo. “Do you have to be so ugly?” said Cinderella. “Ugly to everybody. No wonder you couldn’t keep a man around.” And that’s when Lurleen slapped her sister across the face. Cinderella’s eyes grew big and teary. She dabbed at her cheeks with her splayed fingers, as if testing the hot surface of a metal pan. She made ow, ow, ow sounds. Tulane buried herself further into the pleats of her mother’s dress. “You traded your stake in the field,” said Lurleen. “We may own the house together, but you gave up that chunk of ground.”

For twenty years Daddy had keep the yellow and blue AMC Gremlin running as smooth as could be expected for a car he’d bought ragged out to begin with. Mile after mile rolled by in the odometer, until finally it had cycled through more times than Rebecca could recall. But each time it cycled through, he used to drive her into Lidell to the DQ for a Peanut-Buster Parfait. She remembered that. Sitting in the vinyl booth with Daddy and Joe, spooning gooey soft serve and salty chocolate into her mouth, while Daddy waxed nostalgic about the car. “Country miles,” he used to say. “Those are country miles on that odometer. Worth two city miles any day of the week.” They were miles up and down those gravel roads, as first he took whiskey and then Jesus, and then both whiskey and Jesus into the labyrinth of back woods trailer lots and ramshackle cabins spread across the boggy undergrowth south of Lidell. The same land she had driven through on the way down with Kias that morning. It was land she knew well. Rebecca and Joe used to bounce along beside him in the Gremlin, singing hymns at the tops of their lungs, the windows rolled down. Daddy slapped out the rhythm on the side of the door. He had taught Rebecca to drive on those backcountry roads and in that very car, his patience infinite as the ground, while she tore through one gear and then another. A Godliness pervaded her memory of the car, Daddy’s talks on morality, the hymns, but their trips through the country had not always been Godly. Spider webs pulled away with the muddy blue tarp as she dragged it free in the carport. Kneeling by the driver’s side door, she placed her fingers in the rusted puncture wounds of an old shotgun spatter. “Engine treatment,” said Daddy, when Rebecca came back inside. To Lurleen he added, “I told you to start it up once a week.” Lurleen looked down the length of her nose at him, slumped on the stairs. “You never did teach me how,” she said. “You never once took me out so I could learn to drive.” “All you had to do was start it and let it run,” he said. “It’s froze up now.” “Can’t we all fit into Arzo’s car?” Arzo grinned his half-toothless grin. “I don’t let no one drive my car,” he said. “As a matter of liability, you understand. I’ll have to drive. But I bet we can fit.” Rebecca turned back to Daddy. “You have some STP?” she said.

“In the shed,” said Daddy. “You put it in the tank and pour some—” “Down the carburetor,” said Rebecca. “I know how to start a frozen engine. Arzo, you’re going to jump that Gremlin.” “You would know that,” said Lurleen. “He taught you to drive and he taught you to start up frozen engines too.” Rebecca looked at Daddy. He wobbled on the stairs, like he might pitch forward onto his face at any moment. Pulling him to his feet she helped him shuffle to the couch. “That’s awful,” she said. “You never even taught Momma to drive. No Momma, I learned it from a boyfriend in Tulsa. A mechanic.” “Tramp,” said Cinderella, under her breath. “I’ve always been there to drive her,” said Daddy. “She doesn’t need to drive. When she saw that ad in the paper for cut-rate tombstones it was me who drove her up to Yazoo City.” “Come on, Sweetie.” Scowling at the lot of them, Rebecca took Tulane’s hand. “Momma’s going to show you how to start up a frozen motor.” §§§ Forty minutes later they were on the road to Lidell. They would’ve gotten away sooner, but then, upon reflection, it was rather impressive that they got away at all. First Daddy wanted to drive them. Then Arzo wanted to drive them. Then Cinderella said she didn’t want to go if everyone was going to argue. Then Lurleen pointed out that it was Cinderella doing most of the arguing. Cinderella said that it certainly was not her at all, but Arzo who was delaying things, seeing as how he had gone back into the bathroom and hadn’t come out for ten minutes. Rebecca found him at the kitchen table cracking open a fresh beer. When she got him back to the car, Lurleen was yelling at Daddy to get in the back seat. Meanwhile, leaning against the front bumper, Cinderella and Tulane played a vehement game of patty cake. Of the two, it was hard to say who was more crazed. All the same Daddy refused entry to the back seat. He planned to drive. Resolutely—as resolute as possible anyway, given his tendency to go limp—Daddy clung to the driver’s side door handle, his eye bulging forward to the road. Ultimately it was the pain that stopped him. Rebecca could see the agony wash across his face as he argued. It rolled in like the tide, each wince a little sharper, a little more prolonged than the one

66 before. Finally he leaned against the car, concentrating on each shallow and defeated breath as if it might be his last. Rebecca went back inside and up the stairs to his room. She got a couple of Sublimaze tablets from the nightstand. “Empty stomach like that and he’s apt to go loopy on you,” said Lurleen, when Rebecca reappeared from the house. She held the pills in her fist like a standard and she was dragging Arzo, who had snuck back into the kitchen. Arzo shook her off and nearly staggered down the porch steps. But on the ground he seemed to regain his sense of mobility. As they wandered down to his car, he and Cinderella again took up the subject of satellite television. “Momma, please,” Rebecca said, folding Daddy’s walker and stuffing it into the hatchback of the Gremlin. “Have some sympathy.” “Lurleen,” said Lurleen. “I told you—” “Momma’s just a job you used to have,” she said, slapping the pills into Daddy’s mouth. “I know, I know.” But making their way through the winding county roads to Lidell, Rebecca was less sure of the wisdom of this temporary chemical reprieve. Driving or not, Daddy had refused to sit in the back. Lurleen was only slightly more accommodating. At first they traded barbs across the bench, but slowly Daddy began to fade out, and the metallic edge in his voice softened, until his words ran together when he spoke them and he sank into incomprehensibility. In the rear-view mirror, Rebecca could see the look of satisfaction this brought to Lurleen, who was pretending not to notice. She instead was making silly goo-goo sounds at Buttercup, Tulane’s doll, held on Tulane’s lap. In a sudden rush of anger, she wanted more than anything to slap that satisfaction off her mother’s face. Instead she pushed her disgust down along the muscles of her leg and into the gas pedal. Fixing her eyes firmly on the road ahead, she drew her lips together in a thin line and set her shoulders, locking her arms straight. “You’ll get us all killed,” said Lurleen. “We’re going to be late,” said Rebecca. “Late to your own son’s funeral. You know, I get the feeling both of you have forgotten where we’re going. You know—You know none of this would’ve happened if you had just helped him.”

Lurleen jerked her face so she was looking out the window. When she turned back, she ignored Rebecca completely. “What’s your doll’s name?” she said to Tulane, holding the Power Puff Girl in her lap. “Buttercup,” said Tulane. “She can—” “Did you hear me, Momma?” Rebecca said. “You’re talking over the top of me,” said Tulane. “You—” Rebecca swerved the car across the lanes and back again. Jerking around, she gave Tulane the hard Momma-eye. “I drove,” Daddy mumbled. “It was me behind the wheel. I was the driver.” “Yes,” said Rebecca, glaring at the road. She relaxed her grip on the steering wheel, slumping into the bench seat. “You used to drive us. Everywhere we went. It was you that drove.” They passed through the mucky countryside, back through the land of trailers and shacks, dirt patch yards, and mongrel dogs, old junk cars, and dead washing machines, rusted chest freezers. They passed rain-soaked sofa sets cast onto the porches. Broken down people leaned out of windows. All her own bad memories were here. These were Daddy’s people. His parishioners. Something like the antithesis of nostalgia, a kind of nausea, overcame her, as flashes of the past, like breaking light bulbs, popped in her head. Driving. She was thinking about Driving and being in the car together, as a family. She remembered a time, late in the summer, before his conversion and they had taken a trip down to Gulf Shores in a rental car. A Buick. Daddy liked to pretend he could afford one when they were on vacation. In typical fashion, Daddy had refused Highway 51 and I-20 in favor of more obscure paths. They got lost and then Daddy drove them into a flash flood down around Harrison. Passing over a low bridge, where the water flowed above the pavement, Rebecca screamed at him to stop. But Daddy had had enough talk from his family. He punched the gas pedal, and in the middle of the bridge the flood lurched them sideways, pinning the Buick to the rails. They held a moment before the engine choked, sputtering, and water started pouring in through the floor. Then the rails gave way. The car dropped off the side of the bridge into the creek, where it slammed to a halt, jabbed against wreckage of a Trans-AM. Daddy rolled his window down to get them out, shouting for Momma to do the same, but Momma wouldn’t hear of

68 it. Her dachshund had gone berserk when the water came in, and it had crammed itself into a ball under the dash, working its way up behind the glove box. Whenever Momma grabbed for it, the little dog bit her fingers. “Lurleen,” Daddy kept yelling from the roof of the car, where the three of them sat like treed monkeys. “Lurleen! You got to leave that dog and come on,” he yelled. But she wouldn’t come. He had to reach through the window and pull her out by the shoulders, fighting her the whole way up to the roof, where she finally surrendered. As the rain fell like symphony of hammers they listened to the yapping and snarling until it stopped and the water flowed level with the windows. No one spoke. Lurleen sat with her back to them, her shoulders hunched. She convulsed quietly, privately. She was a million miles away, if she was six inches. Looking in the rear view mirror, Rebecca saw that same blank look on Momma’s face. It was a look that gave nothing and asked for nothing in return. When Momma was dead, she was going to have that look. It said, “here is the last of my nothing. You can take it all up to this point, but no farther. If you come and touch this blankness I will kill you dead.” Momma stared into the back of Daddy’s skull, her eyes as hard as iron. She had crossed her arms. She no longer spoke to Tulane about the doll, and Tulane no longer spoke to her. They were both silent. Sullen. It was as if something had been said between them, but nothing had been said. It was just the general tension in the Gremlin. It was just the fact that nobody really wanted to be doing what they were doing. They were only doing the expected thing to do. “I could take us all home,” said Rebecca “We don’t have to go.” “Long Chain,” said Daddy. “Hear you come a clanking down the hall.” “Yes,” said Tulane. “Then we could swing in the tire.” “Of course, we’re going,” said Lurleen. “It’s my son’s funeral. And you—” She paused, fixing Rebecca’s eye in the rear view mirror. “—If you hadn’t run off, he wouldn’t have followed. I always told Joe, ‘a pistol ain’t nothing but the Devil’s right hand.’ But, I guess you went and got a hold of his left, didn’t you?”

All through high school Kias Williams had maintained that his mother died at Jonestown a year after he was born. He said after that his daddy joined the Contras. For all Kias knew he was still down in the jungle living on rat meat and centipedes. That’s how come Kias was raised by his uncle. Uncle Williams as everybody called him, was the pastor of the Frontline Church of Christ. This was trench warfare for Uncle Williams. Generational. Cataclysmic. Throughout the eons the forces of light and the forces of darkness have been locked in mortal combat across the entire field of reality. From the tiniest depth of the atom to the greatest swirl of the super clusters, and from the most innocent passing glimpse of a woman’s ankle to the wholesale slaughter of nations, apocalypse oozed through the pores of reality. It infused every instant, every spec of soil, every utterance with Cosmic Death, the weight of which is total and absolute. Seeing the Williamses slouched together and glowery eyed beneath the awning to The True Path Church of the Great Way, Rebecca thought of that first time her family had made their way down to Uncle Williams’ basement, where they came to know a particularly virulent and unforgiving form of the message of Jesus Christ. All the way Arzo and Daddy had fought over Arzo’s brown bagged pint—Daddy fought to pour it out; Arzo fought to keep it. On the way they had passed a man selling dachshund puppies out of the back of his truck, and Aunt Cindy had insisted on stopping to purchase one for her grieving sister to replace the one Daddy had drowned that summer. It was squirreled away in her handbag. Walking up the Williams’ drive, Joe kicked listlessly at the pebbles in the road. He dragged his feet, wishing he were elsewhere. As for Rebecca, she had worn the most proper of white dresses, trimmed with lace and bedecked with ribbons, that she and Daddy could find at the JC Penney’s in Jackson on a Saturday night. Lurleen was bed-bound in those days. She still zombied her way through the afternoons in that mottle-stained gray nightgown. It must’ve been two months yet before Rebecca’s momma started coming. “You’ve got to understand,” Uncle Williams had said. “It ain’t everybody going to be saved. Only those that were laid down at the foundation of the world. Turn to Ephesians 1:4.”

Not counting the Woolers, maybe fifteen people were crowded into the basement. They sat on folding chairs and plank boards laid across cinder blocks. Women fanned themselves with paper fans advertising funeral homes and transmission repair. The men sat board-straight with their hands between their knees. On the other side of the basement she could feel Kias’ eyes upon her. She’d steal a glance across the room. He’d dart back to his Bible, but before she looked away, he’d have crept off the page again. She sat hunched forward with Daddy, the brand new Bible on their knees, which neither she nor Daddy had ever read. But she could remember all through the sermon as she flipped through it, looking up the passages as Uncle Williams told them, thinking how right and true and clear it all seemed. How perfectly natural it was. Every instant contained the apocalypse, every sly glance at that dark-haired boy. Every time they locked their eyes perhaps a thousand angels died. Murdered. She had murdered them. There she was every Sunday morning, driving those nails through the flesh of God.

§§§ At the Dixie Land Plaza in Lidell, Kias stood in front of the doors of the True Path Church of the Great Way, looking at his watch and scanning the road. Beside him stood Uncle Williams, bald as the sun and half toothless, along with his razor thin wife, Annie. Kias heaved a visible sigh of relief when he saw the Gremlin pull into the parking lot and come to a slow sputtering halt. Rebecca leaned out the window, exasperated. “We made it,” she said. “I didn’t think we would.” Uncle Williams spat on the ground. Annie flounced at them as she disappeared into The True Path Church of the Great Way. For the funeral Kias had donned a mask of solemnity. Bowing slightly, he closed his eyes, stepping forward to open Rebecca’s door, only to shrink away when Daddy leaned across her, lashing a vicious finger at him. “You!” said Daddy. “You! I knew it! I knew it! We aren’t selling.” “Mr. Wooler,” he said. “Please. Everybody’s waiting.” “Nobody wants that worthless old piece of swampy mud anyhow,” said Uncle Williams.

“Look! Look what you did,” said Daddy, pointing at Rebecca as she got out of the car. He kept jabbing his finger through the window. After a couple of jabs Rebecca got the urge to bite it off. “Got a child on her,” said Daddy. “Mr. Wooler, I—” Kias’ stare went blank. Uncle Williams, about to launch into a speech he had obviously been preparing, suddenly clamped his gums shut. His eyes narrowed to slits. He spun, arms akimbo, to stare at his nephew. Rebecca’s heart flipped around in her chest. “Kias had nothing to do with that,” she said. “I told you—” it was just some boy. On the lawn in front of her dorm, that afternoon when he drove the Gremlin up to Ole Miss to bring this prodigal daughter of his back home, Daddy had asked her with that old violence smoldering in his eyes, if it was Kias who had done it. “No,” she had said. “No. Daddy. It was just some boy passing through town. He’s gone now.” “Well, it was his idea,” said Daddy. “I never thought college was a good plan. I said we didn’t need any degrees. The only degrees we needed were the thousand degrees of the lake of fire. You know about those and you don’t need any others.” “Maybe you need it,” said Uncle Williams. “But the Frontline Church of Christ doesn’t need anything except the truth. That’s all we need.” “Come on, Daddy,” she said, rolling her eyes. “They’re all waiting.” Glancing at Kias, she offered him a sympathetic smile, but he had grown quiet, thoughtful. He was thinking about it now. She didn’t think he had thought about it yet. He couldn’t have. Had he? Maybe the idea had taken root in his head. Maybe it had always been there. Maybe he was just waiting for to admit it. He must’ve seen. Anyone could see. There was that dimple slap in the middle of their chins. Uncle Williams huffed, hurling himself through the doors. “I’m sorry,” said Kias. “I really didn’t mean for them to come. I knew it would be like this and it’s not about them. This is about Joe today. We’re here for Joe. But, oh no. Everything’s got be about them. I wouldn’t have let them come, but they’d have loved that even more. You know, it’s always been a competition.” “You ought to get your own place,” said Rebecca. “Move out on your own.” Kias nodded. “My livelihood doesn’t seem to offer much in the way of financial gain,” he said, staring at the distance. Perhaps he gazed into a land where crazy preachers

72 wandered through the valleys, taking the Good News to the people of the earth, who threw baskets full of bounty at their feet. Wasn’t it a land like America? Didn’t he live there already? She looked at the cars parked along the front of the building. The Jettas and Volvos of the previous night’s crowd were all back again, but there were other vehicles in the parking lot too, dying pickups and Buick station wagons, a Pinto. Willy Tate waved as he stepped out of his powder blue Alfa Romeo. “Hey,” screamed Tulane from the back seat, waving her doll around. Kias winked. He smiled. “Hush, child,” he said, reaching through the window to brush her hair with his palm. “It’s a funeral.” Kias had arranged the folding chairs into proper rows. At the front of the room, beneath the painting of God dragging Creation out of the belly of Chaos, Joe’s casket lay unadorned on a folding table set perpendicular to the seats, as if he lay before them. But the casket was closed. She had not thought that it would be. Her breath caught when she saw it. The lid made a perfect seal with the body of the coffin, Joe beneath. But she would never know; she would never see his face in the clown repose of made-up death. The crowd was much larger than she had expected. All the young people had come down from Jackson, the “new religion” types. But there were also the remnants of Daddy’s old flock, who—she supposed—had followed Uncle Williams back to his basement when Daddy came home from Ole Miss and shut down the church. Hayseeds, in their Penney’s polyester suit coats and wide ties. The small, vacant women with their plain as dirt look and their wiry hair bound up in twisted fits of rage on their heads. They shot hard, slicing looks down the aisle when they saw Rebecca walk through the doors. But when they saw Daddy with her, shuffling along with his walker, they grew reverent, solemn. Suddenly they were embarrassed. They looked to their shoes. As the Woolers walked down to the front row, they reached out to touch Daddy’s arms as he shuffled past. Ivy sat alone, her head bowed, in the first row of seats. Rebecca and Tulane, followed by Lurleen and Daddy took their places on the row. The church grew quiet. The man from the funeral home came in through the back hallway. He carried a bouquet of plastic lilies and orchids, which he draped over the casket. Bowing, he took his leave the same way he had entered. Rebecca put her hand on Ivy’s shoulder. She glanced up, revealing a face washed over with tears, now dried to muddy stains. She

73 offered a halfhearted smile. Her hands in her lap, she sat with shoulders hunched, as if she rested atop the great mound of her stomach. Bulky as she was, Ivy looked as if she might tumble to pieces at the sight of the casket. Closed. Why was it closed? Had they shot him so badly? How many times had they shot him? She shuddered at the thought of flesh. At the thought ff her baby brother, closed up in that coffin, suffocating, his flesh ripped open and pumping blood. Rebecca could see them all watching her; she could feel their eyes. Whatever had happened it was Ivy’s fault. She could imagine the talk around the back porches drinking tea, by the clotheslines hanging sheets, by the lake fixing lures onto lines, and in the aisles at the Piggly-Wiggly, as they debated between Salisbury steak or meatloaf in their Hungryman Dinners. “Oh, have you heard about Old Brother Wooler’s boy, Joe? Got hooked up with that tramp. Now he’s wound up dead.” “I hear his sister got one on her from a boy she met in New Orleans.” “It’s a shame what this world is coming to.” “But it’s like Uncle Williams always said, ‘It’s not everybody can get saved.” “Only those that was laid down at the foundation of the world.” She could see them looking at her too, at Tulane who sat beside her with Buttercup on her lap, swinging her legs in rhythm with the singsong in her head. They whispered among themselves, pointing. Pointing at Tulane. At her baby. Rebecca cleared her throat. “You are all such awful, awful trash,” she said, in a voice loud enough to carry through the room. Turning, she sat beside Ivy, looking straight ahead at the casket of her little brother Joe. Silence fell over the church. “Uh. Well, I guess we’d better get started,” said Kias. He fumbled his way to the other side of the casket. The drugs made Daddy’s eyes swim around in his head. Rebecca doubted he had heard her outburst. But she was deeply touched by the curving smile at the corners of Lurleen’s mouth. Momma had such delicate crow’s feet. If Momma just— if Lurleen—would only rub a little lotion into her skin… Without thinking, Rebecca reached over to brush a stray hair from Lurleen’s face, but she stopped midair. Lurleen jerked away, frowning at the invasion. She glanced quickly around the room, looking for Arzo and Cinderella, but they were nowhere to be seen. Probably Arzo had stopped off for a beer. Sitting in the last row, however, in the very last chair of that row, pushed away from the rest of the chairs so that

he wouldn’t actually have to speak to anyone, was Ronnie Tibbit, Kias and Joe’s partner in this idiotic train-church boondoggle of theirs. The financial backer it seemed, and her arch nemesis from the school bus. Squinting at him, she pursed her lips in disapproval. Kias began to speak, welcoming them on this saddest of days. But she didn’t turn around; she continued to drill her eyes at Ronnie, hoping he’d catch it. Maybe he’d show a little shame. Shame that he would even be here, on this her little brother’s day of rest. But when Ronnie noticed she was watching him, he grinned as wide as he could. He put his two fingers on either side of his mouth, and fluttered his tongue between them, in that classic schoolyard mockery of cunnilingus. What a turd. Rebecca scowled. What a profound little turd you are, Ronnie Tibbit.

The day Rebecca Wooler kicked Ronnie Tibbit in the balls, and tried to pry his eyeball loose of the socket on the school bus, was also the day her daddy dedicated his life to Jesus Christ. He had come home drunk the night before, with blood running down his leg, his backside hamburgered with birdshot. She was twelve years old and Joe was eight. Ronnie had cornered Joe in the back seat, to let him know who did the shooting. He said in the future, if Jack Wooler knew what was best for him, he’d stay away from Earl Tibbit’s shot shack. That’s when she kicked him. Kias—only a years older than her, and already he’d saved two dozen souls—jumped from his seat. He whipped out his Bible, and started laying verse on the fallen boy. Rebecca threw her knee into Ronnie’s gut and ground her thumb around in his eye. “He was out there trying to save your doomed soul is what he was doing,” she screamed. “My daddy ain’t no drunkard, he’s a man of God like Kias Williams here.” Enthralled with the gray-eyed boy who nobody else seemed to understand, she had forged this lie for Kias’ benefit. It was her fantasy. Later that morning, in the principal’s office, the lie nearly came to the surface when Daddy hobbled through the doors. Ronnie was there. Rebecca and Kias were too. The principal had separated them to the corners, where the two camps sat smoldering at one another. When Daddy came in, Ronnie said, “See! See! He’s butt shot! My daddy did it, too.” “He was trying to save your doomed soul,” Kias sneered. “But there’s no point in trying, Mister Wooler. The Tibbit’s are bad seeds, every last one of them.” Rebecca sank her face into her palms. She breathed slowly, waiting. For a while Daddy said nothing. Slowly, she peeked through her fingers. “He ain’t no preacher,” said Ronnie. There was only the sound of the fan motor humming on the ceiling. It was over. The game was finished. When the truth came out, Kias wouldn’t speak to her anymore. “Who says I ain’t a preacher,” said Daddy. “This here miserable boy?” “Mister,” said Kias. “I can see you’re a man of God. That’s how come you got such a fine family. But that right there—” He shot his index finger at Ronnie— “that right there is the product of sinful living.”

“Save their souls,” said Daddy, nodding his head. “That’s right,” he said. “I tried to save your father’s soul. Look at the thanks it got me.” “Now listen,” said the principal. “What I want to talk about is this constant fighting.” But nobody seemed to care what the principal had to say. Ronnie was beside himself with indignation. He snorted and huffed, wanting more than anything to spit. Kias strode across the room and shook Daddy’s hand like a grownup man. Rebecca cried great, bloated tears of joy. It was the next Sunday when she and Daddy found themselves sitting on the wobbly plank-board pews in Uncle Williams’ basement, flipping back and forth in their brand new Bible, trying to keep up with the passages. §§§ When the funeral was over, Rebecca and Daddy, along with Ivy—at Rebecca’s insistence—stood together in the parking lot of the Dixie Land Plaza. Lurleen was over by the hearse discussing the details of how they might pick up Joe’s urn after he’d been cremated. From the looks of it, she was taking the poor man to task over something. Cost no doubt. Kias was by the door to the church talking to Willy, and Tulane—drawn to Kias, but then everyone was drawn to Kias—sat on his shoulders. As he spoke with Willy, he held the child’s feet and she rested her hands on his head. “Well, well, well. Good to see you again. I guess you’ll be winging it back to Idaho come morning.” Rebecca turned, looking for the voice, which she knew immediately belonged to Ronnie Tibbit. Twisting like that she let Daddy stumble. To keep him standing she had to temper the vehemence she would’ve used in telling Ronnie to go fuck himself. “Go fuck yourself,” she said. Calmly though. It made Ronnie laugh. He brushed at his thin mustache and snorted. “I was just thinking you’d probably want to be getting back to your life and all.” “Whatever,” she said. “Yeah. It’ll be nice to get home.” “I’m not selling you that land,” said Daddy, gripping his walker with his good hand. He’d have pointed if he could, but it was all he could do to remain vertical. Still, his sudden lucidity took them all by surprise. Ronnie stepped away. It was an old habit more than likely. Ronnie, like any other Tibbit, would’ve known about Jack Wooler’s temper. Then he smiled. “You might want to talk to your wife about that,” he said, pretending to

77 tip his nonexistent hat to Rebecca. Slowly, he strolled off toward a long black Buick Riviera parked in front of the bail bonds office. Daddy looked even more lost in his suit than he had before. He kept looking from side to side, like something might sneak up on him. The muscles in his neck stood out thin and stringy like wires beneath the loose, baggy skin. His face held a dazed expression, as if he burned beneath the presence of a sun no one else could see. “She is a ship of polished bones,” he said. “Floating out to sea, and my heart goes with her into Hell.” “Please don’t make Mr. Tibbit mad,” said Ivy. “Why not?” asked Rebecca. “Joe’s studio is back there.” She pointed to the Tibbit Brother’s Bail Bonds office. “Joe has a studio?” said Rebecca. “His paintings for the tunnel are in there.” “In the Tibbit Brother’s Bail Bonds office?” “In the back,” said Ivy. “These are pretty big places. The Tibbits don’t use their back room. So they let Joe use it. All his paintings are in there.” “Are you worried he’ll throw them out?” said Rebecca. “You’re still going to use Joe’s paintings aren’t you?” “I don’t know,” said Ivy. “Joe didn’t think Ronnie liked them very much.” Escorting Lurleen from the hearse to the Gremlin, Kias walked across the parking lot, with Tulane still perched on his shoulders. Daddy began to fret as they approached. He played with his fingers; he mumbled to himself. Rebecca helped him into the car, but she could still overhear Kias and Lurleen She knew Daddy could as well. And she knew he wouldn’t want to hear it. Kias said he and Ronnie would be in a few days with the paperwork. She wasn’t sure if it was something she wanted to hear either. But she guessed she could handle it. She guessed it really didn’t matter to her whether Lurleen sold them the field or not. “We’ll build it for Joe,” said Kias, patting Lurleen’s hands. “Just like he always talked about.” “I don’t care what you do with it,” said Lurleen. “I just want my money.” “I never,” said Daddy. “Never said…” He looked at Rebecca from the back seat. His eyes pleading, like the eyes of a child. He was begging her. “I never said to sell it.”

“What do you care?” said Rebecca. But he didn’t answer. He turned his head away, working his nervous fingers back and forth in his lap. Rebecca joined the others a little ways away from the Gremlin, away from Daddy. She kept glancing back to see that he was all right, but she could tell nothing of his mood or thoughts. He simply stared straight ahead, lost in his own eyes. “Kias?” she said, nodding her head toward the Dixie Land Plaza where Uncle Williams and Annie stalked along the sidewalk. Uncle Williams had his hands buried in his pockets. She could see they were balled into fists. Annie skitter- stepped beside him, aflutter in her attempts to placate his evil mood. His path was straight and sure. He’d have walked through a man standing between himself and the Ford Escort that was his destiny. Kias followed her gaze. “Oh,” he said, reaching to pat her hand. “I am so sorry about them. I just don’t know what’s the matter with them. Honestly, I don’t know why they came. I guess my uncle just wanted to be ugly. I guess he wanted to let Jack know he’d won. They’re all back in the basement. All the old parishioners.” Rebecca shook her head. Such ridiculousness. “Come on down from there, Pumpkin.” “No,” said Tulane. “I want to ride home with Brother Williams.” Rebecca’s eyebrows shot up. “It’s okay,” said Kias. “I have to drive Ivy out anyway.” “Good,” said Rebecca. “Yes. You’re coming home with us.” She watched Uncle Williams and Annie get into their car. “Kias?” said called. He had already begun walking away, Tulane still atop his shoulders. “Did your mother really die at Jonestown and your father run off to join the Contras?” Kias looked at the pavement. “My parents died in a car accident,” he said. “When I was six. He sold tires up at Firestone and Momma was a teacher.” “Coming home with us?” said Lurleen. She looked like she wanted to spit, but she contained herself. §§§ Later that afternoon, when they were all back at the house, Rebecca settled Ivy into her old abandoned room upstairs. She had found an army cot in the shed, and she hauled it upstairs. Then she dug through Lurleen’s closet for a blanket and pillow. Rebecca was trying to get used to calling her Lurleen. She glanced around at the bare walls, covered in late afternoon light. It was like a campsite they had set up. It was about as comfortable as

79 a campsite, too. The sofa would’ve been better, but there’d have been no privacy. Lurleen had yet to speak civilly to the poor young woman. Ivy sat on the cot once it was unfolded. She rested her hands on the mound of her belly. “I still don’t know,” she said. “I don’t feel welcome here. Don’t get me wrong, you’ve been great, really great. But your mother.” “I know,” said Rebecca. “I don’t know what to tell you. She’s a different person from the mother I knew. I never figured she’d be difficult. But it’s okay. You can be here. We need to figure out what we’re going to do. You…Do you have a doctor?” “Well, there’s my therapist.” “Dr. Miller?” Rebecca frowned. “Yes,” said Ivy. “He—well, we left without telling him we were dropping out of the case study, but he was always available to us. If we ever needed anything.” “That’s nice,” said Rebecca, squatting in front of the cot. “But I don’t think therapy is going to do the trick here. I mean an OB/GYN.” “Oh,” said Ivy. “No…I…I have, like, two weeks still. So I don’t really need a doctor. I—thank you for your help. It’s been really great, but I think I need to take a nap.” “I see,” said Rebecca, nodding as she stood. “Well. I’ll get you for dinner.” “Oh, I don’t—” “Nonsense,” she said. “You’ll have dinner with us at the table. Momma—or Lurleen will just have to adjust.” Ivy looked away. “Thank you,” she said. “For all your help. I don’t know what I would do—” “It’s not a problem,” said Rebecca. Downstairs Momma and Tulane watched cartoons on the television. In the front yard Arzo’s car door slammed shut. She heard Aunt Cindy’s high squealing shriek followed by Arzo’s whining bellow. They were home and still at it. Rebecca marched to the phone. Daniel was probably still in the field with the sheep. She hoped he was. She wanted to get the answering machine. “Listen,” she said, when the machine picked up. Behind her the door slammed; Arzo and Cinderella descended upon the peace of the living room like a horde of riders bent purely on mayhem. “Like you know jack-squat about outer space,” he yelled.

“I know I voted for Jack Kennedy,” she said. “You were nine years old when he was president.” “Yes,” she said. “And in the third grade I voted for him.” Rebecca turned her body into the phone, plugging her ear with her finger. “I have to stay a little longer,” she said. “I’m not coming back tomorrow. I’ve—I’ve got some things I need—Will you two shut up!—I need to take care of some things. I’ll be back—I don’t know, really. I guess in a few days.” “Are you kidding me?” he said. “We’ve really got a lot—” “You managed fine for years,” she said. “Listen, I’ve got some things I need to figure out. Nobody here seems concerned about where Joe got these drugs he was taking.” “I thought you said he had a hard life,” said Daniel. “Christ,” she said. “Not you, too. I’ve got to go. I call again… I don’t know. Tomorrow maybe.”

Tulane lay nestled into Momma’s chest, but she did not sleep. Odd creaks and thunks sounded through the walls of the old house. The wind outside whipped the shadows around the room. Momma’s breath came steady as she slept. They lay together on the floor, atop their sleeping bag. It was too hot to actually be inside the sleeping bag. Tulane could hear Ivy—that was the puppy-woman’s name—shifting in the cot beside them. It had been a long evening, full of strange silences between the adults. Tulane wanted none of it. She wanted to go to the sandbox, and try out the tire swing. She wanted to catch a snake. She wanted to see Brother Williams—the smelly one—again. He was the best, Brother Williams, though she couldn’t figure out how he was her brother, since Julie Bean’s little brother was younger than her and pooped his pants all the time. Brother Williams was too cool for pants pooping. He had taken her to the DQ after the funeral, before he brought her and Ivy back to this creaky old house with its wild oaken arms flailing in the windows. Ice cream. Ice cream. Tulane couldn’t remember the last time she’d had this much ice cream. It was like the whole state of Mississippi was one big banana split. She lay awake wanted more. But really she wanted Idaho. She wanted to crawl under the porch to see her puppies. She wanted to play with Julie Bean by the swings at school, listening to more of the forbidden talk of angels and auras. Anything. She wanted to do anything. It was all so gloomy-goony around here. So when she felt the time was right, when Momma was fully asleep, Tulane slipped off the sleeping bag, rolling onto the floor. Momma made muffled snorting sounds in her sleep, as Tulane padded her way to the door. She had never opened this one on her own, and she knew doors tended to be creaky. Especially in old houses, where the grinding of nails seemed a constant complaint from the floorboards. She took the knob, twisting slowly, until the door came away from the jamb. Like a bunny, she hopped through the slice of darkness and onto the landing. Carefully she eased the door closed behind her. Free. She was free. Free to wander in the night. Maybe she’d head down to that tire swing.

Brushing her fingers along the wall, Tulane crept down the hall, past closed doors to the bathroom at the end. The tarnished doorknob squeaked when she touched it. She tried to put her finger in the keyhole, but it was too small. Bored. Bored. Bored. She was bored by it all. Crawled back to the stairs, she sat and bumped her butt down the steps one at a time, until she reached the bottom. In the living room, she crouched on the floor, surrounded by the vast array of treasures careening off the shelves. In the moonlight that delightful world of carved animals, Santas, and clowns, had taken on a sinister glow. They were the same Santas, but now their smiles spoke of evil thoughts, evil deeds. The monkeys leered at her. The jagged edges of the tin soldiers threatened to slice her open. The slightest false step and shadow stacks of plates would clatter to the ground. The world loomed around her, laughing, alive and breathing. All the breathing monkeys laughed at her from the shelves. She wanted outside, out there in the woods among the crickets and the frogs and the nighttime slithers. She would not be frightened. Not at all. It was this room full of eyes. Eyes rolling off the shelves. Down the stairs they bounced, two-by-two. They dropped from their sockets and oozed along the walls. Eyes poured in around her. She struggled through them. Swimming. Swimming through a lake of boiling eyes. She remembered the angel. She thought of him out there, wandering in the dark woods. Terrible eyes in the face of that angel. Eyes of pure sky. What a terrible blue fire burned in those eyes. She saw him flying in the woods. His wings trailed behind him as he rocketed through the brush. He was terror itself, and she longed to rush headfirst into him. Simply to be done with it and to fear no more, she would hurl herself into that terror. Tulane ran back to the stairs, her heart racing. She thought of the porch boards and the puppies beneath, where she could curl up with Coconut, amid the warm belly squirms and the mealy leaves. But that porch was—She hurried to the front door, but it was locked. She could turn the lock and it clicked in her fingers. The knob twisted. She cracked the door, letting in the dank smell of the swampy woods. Then she heard footfalls on the landing above. Momma. It was Momma up there, coming to find her. She knew she had to hide, but not in those woods beyond the door with their unfamiliar smells, so unlike the dry, pure dust of the wind through the wheat.

She ran padding her pajama feet to where a cabinet door was set in the wood beneath the stairs. She pulled it open, peering into the darkness. Then she crawled inside, bringing the cabinet closed behind her. She could feel the cobwebs brush against her hair. She listened, but there was no sound. She was all alone in there. A string brushed against her cheek and she pulled it. The small stair-angled space filled with soft, golden light. There were shelves lined with canned goods and bottles, sacks of meal and sugar, rusty tools, a box of nails, vacuum cleaner bags. At the back of the space, leaning against the wall, there was a massive slab of rock carved with letters. She set her fingers into the carved lines of the name. She listened. Upstairs. Momma. A door. Click. The door again. She lay her face on the floor, with her butt in the air, the way a puppy would lay. Listening, she felt against her cheek the thin line of sawed boards beneath her skin. She pushed herself up, feeling the floor. It was cut. The boards were cut. They were of a piece, and solid. A trap door. There was a trap door cut into the boards, though she could see no hinge or handle. She tried to pry at it with her fingers, but it was heavy. Too heavy. The door in the floor was too heavy for her to lift. Giving up, she sat, listening, hoping Momma would go back to bed without looking for her. After a while, when no one came, she left the cabinet under the stairs and walked around in the living room. It was just a living room. She had left the front door open. Pushing the knob back into place, she turned the lock until it clicked. The swampy smell was gone. She stood silently amid the knick-knacks, but no one called. No one came down the stairs. Momma would’ve called. If that was Momma awake up there, Momma would’ve found her. Tulane looked at the front door. She looked at the eyes gently rocking on the shelves. She listened to the whispering of the figurines, their sly whispers back and forth. She padded to the stairs, climbing them on all fours, no longer concerned with the noises she made. Let Momma awake if she hadn’t already. Why hadn’t she called? But at the top of the stairs, Tulane froze. She crouched just below the landing, so she could peer over the top step. Through the darkness, a single shaft of harsh, white light like a laser beam shot from the bathroom keyhole. The door to Momma’s room stood open. Tulane could see Momma sleeping on the floor. She crawled along the wall to the bathroom, where she placed her eye against the

84 keyhole. Bright white. Too bright. Tulane blinked. Her vision adjusted. Ivy. It was Ivy in there. Ivy sat naked on the closed lid of the commode. Her breasts, her belly, her thighs. Flesh full and round, rolled over the buried bones of her skeleton. She sat hunched forward. Angry red scars ran like jagged lightning across her stomach. She had tilted her head to the side and she held back the tangled gnarls of her hair. In her free hand she held a test tube close to her skull, just above her ear. Slowly, while the sink faucet dripped out a rhythm against the rust-stained porcelain, a clear fluid filled the tube. After a moment, Ivy lifted her head. She opened her eyes and examined the test tube. Before her hair fell back into place, Tulane saw a tiny metal spigot attached to Ivy’s head. A single drop of liquid hung from the end of the nozzle. When Ivy twisted the valve lever closed, the drop was loosed into space and fell, a single droplet on tile floor.

Tulane awoke before Momma. Ivy slept fitfully on the cot. More than anything Tulane wanted to touch the little metal nozzle on Ivy’s head. She had wanted to do it all night, but she hadn’t found the courage. She would have to sneak over to the cot and pull Ivy’s hair aside. She wondered where Ivy put the tube. What it meant. What it was. She slid out of bed. Momma stirred with the rustle of blankets. “Where are you going?” said Momma. “It’s morning,” said Tulane. “Can I watch cartoons?” Momma sat forward, rubbing her eyes. She glanced at Ivy, and stretched, making a face. “If Grandma Lurleen or anybody else is up, you need to ask,” she said. “Otherwise, I guess it’s okay. I’m going to take a shower.” Momma dug through her suitcase, pulling out clean clothes. She stuffed away her old ones. Tulane waited for her to leave the room. She watched Ivy sleeping on the floor. She thought about the test tube. Presently, she heard the water turn on in the bathroom, the loud flood of the faucet, and then the staticy slash of the shower. Ivy sat up. “Hello,” she said, smiling. “Good morning.” Sad. She was awake. Tulane wanted to so badly. She reached out, but she knew she shouldn’t ask. “I’m going to watch cartoons,” she said, jumping from the cot. Turning on her heels, she ran from the room. Tulane hit the stairs running, but she pulled up short when she saw the open door at the top of the landing. Curious, she thought over the rooms as she understood them. There was the one she and Momma slept in; there was the bathroom at the end, where the shower ran. There were these two other rooms. Those doors had thus far been closed. Now one of them was open. She put her head inside. Clothes lay in piles. There were boxes stacked against the walls. The room smelled like Daniel’s barn. A body lay twisted beneath the sheets on the bed. Grandpa Jack. The old man. “Come here,” he said. Tulane walked toward the voice. She pulled the cord on the lamp by the bed, and he made a face as he adjusted to the light. They’d been introduced before the party yesterday, but they hadn’t spoken yet. There was a chair beside the bed, and Tulane pulled herself into it. On the nightstand sat two empty jars of Gerber’s baby food and a wadded napkin. Grandpa Jack moved his hand. He tried to touch her on the face, but he

86 seemed to lack the strength for it. “In that plastic bottle,” he said, pointing beside the baby food jars. “Can you open that?” Tulane picked up the bottle. She shook it and it rattled with the sound of the pills inside. She tried the cap, but it only turned and turned. “You’ve got to press down,” he said. She tried this and it seemed to catch. His eyes grew wide and he licked his lips. She saw in his face the Big Bad Wolf, but when she turned the cap further the bottle still wouldn’t open. “Damn it,” he said, laying back on his pillow. “I’m sorry.” “It’s not your fault,” he said. “I can’t do it either.” “Maybe we can do it together,” she said. “Maybe so…Maybe…Maybe one of these days we will.” He fell silent. Tulane set the bottle on the nightstand. He closed his eyes. She thought he had gone back to sleep, and she shifted forward to get up from the chair, but his hand fell across her knees. “Stay,” he said. “Did I ever tell you about the Land of the Birdmen?” “No,” she said. “I must’ve,” he said. “When you were little. Before. Maybe I just told your sister.” “What’s the Land of the Birdmen?” she said. “When I was a boy,” he said. “I had rheumatic fever. And because of that, I used to get these fits where I’d lay in the floor convulsing. I think I was about nine at the time and my daddy, seeing as I was worthless due to the fits, he sent me off with the wagon and a mule. In those days—this was the thirties—you could still go the back roads in a mule wagon. He sent me south toward Biloxi. He gave me twenty dollars and the address of this man I was supposed to buy a wagonload of cane seed from. I must’ve been gone a week, making my way through the jungles and swamps down to the gulf shores. I walked out to the water’s edge, to where the sun rested on the waves in the west. I remember it was a blood red sun. I took ya’ll once. When was that? We hit the flood and Momma lost her dog. But we made it. Remember? No flood was going to stop us. That deputy drove us to Gulfport, and we rented us another car. But when we got there it was all condos and motels sprung up along the coast, wasn’t it? It wasn’t like that when I was a boy.

“When I was a boy that beach was completely deserted. I walked in the sand. I slipped my brogans off and then my shirt and my pants, leaving them in a heap by the wagon. I walked totally naked down that beach. It was out on the water, I saw a ghost ship in the clouds. You should’ve seen it. Crewed by men of ragged bones, it sailed beneath the dying sun. And it was like—it was like when I waded into the gulf, the world’s dynamo wound down to a halt out there. It was like deep in the heart of things some tick-tocking mechanism gradually came to rest. I lay in the waves. I let the waters wash over me. It rolled in. It rolled out. Just like it had forever and a day since God created it. But then the gulf began to swirl. It started to drain, flushing like the waters of a great commode. I remember for years after I never would use indoor plumbing.” Here Grandpa Jack made a long slurping, sucking sound before he continued. Tulane gripped his hand. She held it as tight as she could. “I jumped, but it was too late,” Grandpa Jack continued. “The vortex caught me. It pulled me under, and I spiraled through the cold darkness of the water for night after night, until it shat me out into space and I fell through the void for a thousand years. Then one day I slammed into the ground. I lay in a heap of dried bones and ragged flesh. I lay in the vast fiery fields of the Land of the Birdmen.” “I remember this story,” said Rebecca. She stood in the doorway, running a towel over her wet hair. “You used to tell it to us when we were little. Joe was so freaked out by it he wouldn’t use the toilet in kindergarten. He used to go out on the playground during recess. Are you trying to freak my baby girl out?” “I’m not freaked out,” said Tulane. Grandpa Jack frowned. He felt Tulane’s arm, her hair, the side of her face, but he didn’t open his eyes. “They bound me in cords of hot coal,” he said. “They lashed me with whips of fire. Chunks of smoking flesh peeled off of my bones. They dressed me in ring-arounds made of hatred and Black Death. And they sent me into the fields where row upon row of stringy fire bolls grew thick as tar beneath the blood red sun. And that sun hung down so low it rolled across our backs as we called out cadence in the gunline. When the mercy man brought our meals, he brought plates of hot ash; he brought cups of dry sulfur.” “But you escaped, didn’t you?” said Rebecca. “You befriended one of those birdmen and he flew you out. You killed another and you chopped him into little chunks you

88 could toss up as the birdman flew. But just as the surface of the water drew near, you ran out of bird chunks, so you had to cut a piece of your own thigh off to keep him flying.” “Huh.” Grandpa Jack snorted. “Hand me my pills,” he said. Rebecca walked into the room. She took Tulane’s hand, pulling her to her feet. Then she picked up the bottle of Dilaudid. “I see Lurleen gave you breakfast,” she said, indicating the baby food jars on the nightstand. “I suspect she gave you your pills.” “Not enough,” he said. “It didn’t do the trick.” “The hospice man will be here later,” she said. “No, he won’t,” said Grandpa Jack. “He don’t come everyday. He’s sporadic at best.”

It took some doing, but Rebecca finally coaxed Ivy downstairs. Lurleen wasn’t pleased with the sight of her, but offered no snide comments. After breakfast they even sat together on the sofa, staring at the television. There wasn’t any picture on the tube, just static, yet the two women stared straight ahead at the screen, as if intense drama unfolded there. Rebecca stood in the doorway to the kitchen with her arms akimbo. But neither Lurleen nor Ivy would acknowledge the loss of signal. Behind her Tulane jerked at her pant’s leg. Rebecca knelt. Tulane whispered in her ear, “What’s the matter with them?” Rebecca smiled. “Good question,” she mouthed. Then, standing, she clapped her hands to break the silence. “Get your shoes on, Lurleen,” she said. “I’m taking you out to learn to drive.” Lurleen and Ivy both startled. They reached for the remote at the same time, drawing back as if bitten from the touch of each other’s hand. “You’re coming too, Pumpkin,” said Rebecca, ruffling Tulane’s hair. “Go get your shoes on.” Tulane made a foul face. “Oh,” she whined. “Oh, no. No, Momma, please. PLEASE. You can’t make me go, too. Not me, too. PLEASE!” Rebecca spooned Tulane’s cheek in her palm. “I think you ought to come,” she said. “I can watch her,” said Ivy. Rebecca raised one eyebrow. “I’m the eldest of four,” said Ivy. “She’ll be fine.” “I don’t think it’s such a good idea,” said Lurleen, rolling her eyes at Ivy. “If Tulane doesn’t want to go, I don’t think we should do it.” “But you’ve got to learn,” said Rebecca. “You’ve never once driven, have you?” “No,” said Lurleen. “Jack always drove. I doubt it would be safe for me to learn now.” Rebecca looked at Tulane. Probably it wouldn’t be safe. “Okay, Pumpkin,” she said. “You can stay. But don’t bother Grandpa Jack. He needs his rest.” “Yeah!” Tulane screamed. “I won’t, Momma! I promise!” She ran around the sofa so she could sit beside Ivy. “I have cards in my suitcase,” she said. “Do you know how to play Crazy Eights?” “Sure,” said Ivy. “I used to play that with my brothers all the time.” “Wow,” said Tulane. “You know? You mean, you already know how to play?”

They were well into their third game by the time Rebecca and Lurleen left the house. Ivy seemed cheerful enough, and child-savvy. There was a phone, of course. If anything happened—if Ivy went into labor—they could call Kias. Cinderella was there, too. Aunt Cindy used to baby-sit Rebecca and Joe all the time, when Daddy was away and Momma was upstairs in the bed. “We won’t be gone long,” Rebecca called over her shoulder. “Maybe an hour.” “Take your time,” said Ivy, waving her away. “We’ll be fine. Look.” She pointed to the television, where a cartoon mouse whacked his feline arch-nemesis over the head repeatedly with a filing cabinet. “The satellite’s back,” she said. Growing up Rebecca hadn’t found it odd that Daddy never taught his wife to drive. Momma didn’t do that kind of thing. Driving wasn’t Momma-stuff. Truth was, Momma didn’t do most things. She tended to stare a lot out the windows at the raindrops coursing down the pane. She had the habit of sleeping in late and going to bed early, and it was a rare event that she dressed for public in between. More often than not, Momma used to lounge around the house in her gray splotchy nightgown, her hair flying out like the arms of an oak tree. She’d scuffle across the floor in her slippered feet, too lazy even to pick them up as she made her way to the kitchen for a can of Vienna sausages, or to the bathroom for those marathon sessions behind locked doors. She’d make her way to the sofa where she clicked between this daytime drama and that one. Then finally, as the evening news came on, she’d wander wordlessly back up the stairs to bed, where she lay in the same groove now occupied by Daddy’s lingering corpse. She’d gotten a little better after they started the church, but she was a completely different person now. It was as if her presence in the world existed inversely proportion to Daddy’s. As he faded out, she was coming more into focus. “Okay,” said Rebecca, once they were situated on the driveway, the nose of the Gremlin aiming toward the road. They had strapped themselves into the seatbelts, and Lurleen sat glassy-eyed behind the wheel, a look of purified anger in the tense muscles of her jaw. “Just ease up a little on the clutch,” said Rebecca. The Gremlin lurked, jerked. It hiccupped for ten feet and then died. “Okay. All right,” said Rebecca. “Start it up, again.” “I said, I couldn’t,” said Lurleen. “I told you, he never taught me.”

“You live in the country,” said Rebecca. “How—How do you manage if you don’t drive? How do you get groceries?” “Cindy and Arzo get them,” she said, defiantly. “And I do have friends.” “Push the clutch in.” Rebecca turned the key, and the Gremlin rumbled back to life. “Who? I don’t recall you being social.” “Well, if you must know, Willy Tate drives me into town once a week in his Alfa Romeo. Your father asked him to do it when we first learned he was sick.” “Tate?” said Rebecca. “I never fully understood what a man like Willy was doing at a hayseed church like Daddy’s.” “I guess he was looking to get away from himself,” said Lurleen. “Where shall we go?” “Drive up to Lidell,” said Rebecca. “In town? You mean with traffic?” “Sure,” she said. She grabbed the sides of her seat as Lurleen eased off the clutch. The Gremlin jumped and sputtered. They jerked down the drive, and promptly fell into the ditch, busting out the left-side headlight. When they got the car free, it hung limp on the wires, like a plucked-loose eyeball swinging by the nerve. §§§ Slowly, by swerves and close misses, with long stretches of jerking acceleration, followed by bursts of fitful breaking, and punctuated with rolling stalls, grinding gears, and the hurtled threats of other drivers, Rebecca and Lurleen drove to Lidell. It must have been the first time in her life that Lurleen ever sat behind the wheel of an automobile. Rebecca, thankful she had allowed Tulane to stay home, thought it would be the last, but she was determined to see it through. She wanted to talk. They never had talked much before. Rebecca had always been her daddy’s little girl. Who had Joe belonged to? “Why did you marry Daddy?” she said, after they had been silent for some minutes. Lurleen seemed to have the car headed more or less down the road and at the proper speed. But her driving deteriorated with this question. Trying to slow the vehicle, she instead hit the accelerator and wanting to pull to the side of the road, she jerked the wheel hard to the right and then to the left. They started to fishtail until the car hit a patch of loose gravel, spun a donut, and slid into the ditch.

“Jesus Christ!” said Rebecca. She held the dash in one hand and her heart in the other. Lurleen gripped the steering wheel; her hair fell in loose strands around her face. She was breathing hard. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I thought I saw something in him nobody else could see. He—he was a diamond in the rough, your father. He was a good man. Is. I guess I think of him as gone already. But he’s a good man. We have our problems, it’s true, but I could’ve done worse.” “You could’ve done better,” said Rebecca. Lurleen pursed her lips. “I suppose you want to drive now?” “No,” said Rebecca. “Just remember the gas is on the right.” Her confidence seemed to please Lurleen, and when they were moving forward again she appeared to do better. After the road changed from gravel to pavement, Rebecca took another stab at the conversation. “He was telling a story this morning to Tulane. One he used to tell us about going to the gulf in the mule wagon when he was a boy. You remember? We retraced the epic that summer we got caught in the flood?” “I remember,” said Lurleen. “I just wanted to go home so bad when I lost Trixie. But no, no. He was dead set. Had to show you. I don’t even know what. He rolled his pants legs up, hauled Joe into his arms, and walked them out to sea. I thought he’d gone stark raving mad. Figured he was going to drown the both of them.” “It’s just that it was a mule wagon,” said Rebecca. “I never thought about it when I was a kid. But that wasn’t the 1950s. You said yesterday he wasn’t born in ’49. You said he was born in the thirties, but—Momma he looks old. He looks so old. A mule wagon? He was born in the twenties, wasn’t he? I never questioned it when I was a kid. Adults all look old to kids. But Momma he’s—” “Old,” she said, nodding. “He’s an old, old man.” “But why did you marry an old man?” “He wasn’t old then,” said Lurleen. “He was in his forties.” Rebecca looked at the diamond on her finger. Daniel bought and paid for it with cash he had earned when Rebecca was still a child. Daniel was forty-four. She frowned. “Watch this stoplight,” said Rebecca. They had come to the outskirts of Lidell. “Was he married before?”

“No,” said Lurleen, punching the brakes. “If you must know, he was at Parchman. He was there when it was still a plantation in the fifties and sixties. They didn’t make it a Yankee prison until 1972, when Judge Keating ordered them to burn the barracks.” “What?” said Rebecca. “Bullshit.” It was out of her mouth before she could stop it. “I mean he worked at the dock in Biloxi.” “Is that a fact?” said Lurleen. “Well, I guess you’d know wouldn’t you?” “Well…” “No. I guess you’re the smart you aren’t you.” “I just find it hard to believe.” They drove past the Dixie Land Plaza. Lurleen took them into the neighborhoods away from the main road. They went slowly down elm-lined streets, past nineteenth- century houses made of wood and brick, with wide lawns and gnarled oak trees, white columns, and porch swings. The cars here were all shiny and new, BMWs and Mercedes- Benzes. It was an island of prosperity rising from the sea of trailers and shotgun shacks. These several blocks gave testament to the vanishing wealth of a different era. When she first learned to drive, Rebecca used to detour through these streets to look at the homes, fantasizing about the lives within them. Those perfect lives, with all the things that money could buy. “He never wanted you to know,” said Lurleen. “He didn’t want anyone to know. He’d be furious with me for telling you now. In 1949 he was sentenced to life at Parchman Farm. I started writing him letters in ‘75. I was nineteen years old—look—here’s Willy Tate’s place. There’s Willy.” Willy Tate sat on the front steps of his house, shaving sliver moons of almond-colored wood from a chunk of pine. Aiming for the brake, Lurleen instead hit the gas. They popped the curb, jerking to a halt in the middle of Willy’s front yard. Startled at first, he grinned when he recognized them. He waved with the penknife as they got out of the Gremlin. “What are we doing here?” said Rebecca. “Just being social,” said Lurleen.

Over a century had passed since Montgomery Tate had built the Tate fortune out of the worst evils of post reconstruction. Of the grand homes along those streets, the Tate house was the grandest, a tri-color Victorian with a wide wrap-around porch, brass doorknobs and brass knockers. It was also the most fallen into disrepair. Plywood covered the windows of one upstairs room. Leaves unraked from the previous season lay rotting in the lawn. Talk around town said if Tate didn’t slap a new coat of paint on the monstrosity quick, there was no way he’d win his election come November. Folks just couldn’t see their way clear to vote for a prosecutor who didn’t have sense enough to put a couple of guys from the county lock-up to work raking his yard. “He’d best get a work detail over here to fix this place up,” Lurleen confided, as they made their way to the porch. “If he still wants his job next year.” “What do you mean?” whispered Rebecca. “Hey,” called Willy. Standing, he brushed the slivers of wood from his pants, motioning with his head for them to join him. “Ya’ll come in. I was just about to pop an Egg-o in the toaster, but now there’s an excuse to make crêpes.” “That’s okay,” said Rebecca. “We ate.” She hadn’t, of course. But she wanted to get back to learning about Daddy’s life before he married Lurleen. “Fresh blueberries,” he said. “High in antioxidants. Come on.” “Come on,” said Lurleen. “Willy can right make a blueberry crêpe.” “But the car?” “Leave it,” said Willy. He opened the door, gesturing for them to follow. Lurleen was already at the porch, and Rebecca gave up trying. She threw her hands in the air and followed them into the foyer. He led them through the darkened house, past the parlor with its chandeliers, its sea-foam méridienne. Portraits of the dead were hung in the gloom. A baby grand piano sat beneath a sheet. In the kitchen he took coffee cups from the cabinet and poured them coffee. Lurleen and Rebecca sat on stools at the island in the middle of the room. “You ought to get a work detail from the sheriff,” said Lurleen. “And rake that yard.”

Willy took a package of blueberries from the refrigerator and set them opened on the island. Lurleen helped herself to a handful. “I guess it has started to look bad, hasn’t it?” he said. “It’s just you’ve never had to stand for election,” she said. “And it’s your prerogative to have a little help from the county. Folks expect it of you.” “I guess,” he said. He opened the cabinets looking for sacks of flour and sugar. He took these down, along with a bottle of vanilla. Then he took a package of eggs and a gallon of milk from the refrigerator. Donning a flower print apron hanging from a peg by the back door, he gestured at them with a whisk. “How many?” he said. “No thanks,” said Rebecca. “Three,” said Lurleen, holding her fingers in the air. He nodded. “None? Are you sure? You don’t know what you’re missing.” “You really don’t,” said Lurleen. “Fine,” said Rebecca. “Three. So you’re up for reelection?” Willy squatted. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess so. Beckham County prosecutor has always been a part-time job. But I guess the commission thinks we’re on the move. Growth, you know. Progress. New Waffle House. The mini-mall. Etcetera. Etcetera.” He pulled a mixing bowl from beneath the counter. Then he busied himself measuring and sifting flour, beating eggs and adjusting the flame on the stove. “So, they want to make it a full- time elected position. I suppose it makes sense. Crime’s up. Sheriff’s getting a new jail. They say there’s a bad element coming down from Jackson.” “Really?” “Sure,” he said. “Meth, you know—” He lowered his eyes, mumbling. “Drugs,” he said. He wouldn’t look at them. He’d caught himself suddenly talking about Joe. “It’s all right,” said Rebecca. “Your oil.” Tate’s oil had begun to smoke in the skillet. He cursed and pulled the skillet off the flame. “Yes,” he said, taking the oven mitt from his hand. “I am so—so sorry about your brother,” he said. “Yes,” she said. “He was on drugs then? That’s what people have told me, but…” Willy nodded. “The tox screen showed meth,” he said. “I’m sorry.” “Where did he get them?” she asked. “There’s an investigation, right?”

Willy shrugged. “I suppose,” he said, shaking his head. “But these investigations go nowhere.” Lurleen shook her head. “It’s just like they say in the Gazette,” she said. “Big city problems, right here in Lidell. I told him and told him. Over and over again. A pistol ain’t nothing but the Devil’s right hand. Why, oh why couldn’t I have had decent children?” Willy turned to his work at the skillet. Rebecca fumed, until she could ignore it no longer. “You could’ve helped him,” she said. “You could’ve taken him in. And now you wouldn’t even be helping Ivy if I wasn’t making you. I can’t believe you and Daddy just let him live that way.” Lurleen pursed her lips. She began to say something, but then thought better of it. She took another blueberry from the sack. “I mean all he did, Momma—” “Let me show you something,” said Lurleen. “Come. Come with me.” Rebecca followed her from the kitchen back toward the front door. But when they came to the parlor, she turned aside, twisting the dimmer switch on the wall until the lights in the chandelier cast a thousand tiny rainbows all around the room. It was dusty in here. Mildew had begun to take hold. Along the baseboards the wallpaper showed evidence of rot and the silver set on the buffet by the fireplace was splotchy with tarnish. Paintings covered the walls, landscapes of that particularly romantic American variety. The soaring Rockies at dawn. The dawn light cascading around a grizzly as it swipes a salmon from the air. The salmon’s skin is lit up and perfect. What vigor those walls conveyed. Above the fireplace hung a massive scene of English fox hunting. The hounds pouring through a gap in the downed log. The horses snorting as they bayed on their hind legs. The riders are apple cheeked and joyous in the dawn light. “Wow,” said Rebecca. “It’s always morning in this room, isn’t it? There’s always the whole day ahead of you.” “Look,” said Lurleen. Interspersed between the landscapes were hung the portraits of past Tates. There were men alone, standing beside globes, with monocles in their eye sockets, or holding the reins to horses, or in riding clothes with shotguns, either cracked at the breech or leaned against trees. In one a man stood beside a roadster. It must have been the 1920s. In another the same man sat in the cockpit of a bright red biplane. There were portraits of men reading in libraries, seated in massive leather chairs, or standing at the windows looking into the light. These very windows, Rebecca realized. In this parlor,

97 they had sat for these portraits. There were families as well. Beautiful wives. In pearl necklaces and diamond brooches, they stood quietly behind their handsome Tate husbands, with their bushy mustaches, their meerschaum pipes. The children were all blond. The boys were strong and vaguely roguish like their fathers. The girls were all beautiful, like their mothers, and not roguish at all, but with the purity of flawless crystal, and the way the light from the chandelier fell on them, Rebecca could tell they were completely shielded from all things dirty and painful. Not so the Tate men. The Tate men sought both dirt and pain. Over the course of the last century they had provided the nation with no fewer than twenty-six members of its officer corps. Their portraits in uniform, in navy whites and dress blues, were scattered throughout the room on coffee tables and end tables, on the buffet and the telephone stand. If you sat in one of the puffy leather chairs, a young Marine sat next to you. If you leaned against the mantelpiece, holding a single malt scotch in your hand—Rebecca imagined the parlor this way, full of men with cigars and single malt scotchs—the face of Lieutenant Elias Tate, dead with the other men of the Yorktown, stared down the blade of his eagle nose, reminding young Tates of who they were, of what they were made of, and the purpose of their lives. “What a lot of weight to carry around,” said Rebecca. “This is Willy, Jr.,” said Lurleen, taking up a picture frame from the lamp stand next to the méridienne. “Maybe you remember him. He was about Joe’s age.” Rebecca took the photograph of the young marine. “Yes. I remember,” she said. “How is he?” “Dead,” said Willy Tate behind them. He pulled the apron string, and the apron fell away from his waist. “Breakfast is ready,” he said. “I’m sorry,” said Rebecca. Willy nodded. “Come on,” he said. “The crêpes will get cold.” “Willy knows about losing a child,” said Lurleen. “You can tear into me all you want. Maybe I even deserve it. Maybe there’s something I did, or didn’t do, or did sometimes and didn’t do others, or did for you and not for Joe, or for Joe and not for you, or for Jack, or for me. Maybe I did things for me that I shouldn’t have done. Maybe you have every right to be angry. Though heaven knows I can’t recall what I did to make ya’ll run off to New Orleans and never write or call again until finally he was dead. He came home

98 dead, you know. Sure he’s dead now. But he was dead when he came home with that trampy, trampy girl stealing the one thing that gave your father any peace at all in the sad dregs of his sad and miserable life. I don’t know. All I have is a son who died shooting up the Waffle House, stealing money so he could take more drugs. Then I come in this room, and I look at that fine young man in that blue uniform, and I just can’t imagine what it must be like to lose such a fine son like Willy, Jr. A fine boy. A marine. Just look at those eyes. You can see the honor in them. I know you want me to be more upset about Joe, but, Rebecca, he’s been dead for years. You just don’t know.” “These crêpes,” said Willy, pointing toward the kitchen. He pulled the apron over his head, casting it aside on the piano bench. Then he pushed the dimmer switch so the parlor fell into darkness. “It’s not really any honor in death,” he said. “Not really.” “Humph!” said Lurleen. They followed him into the kitchen. He had set out plates along the island, each with three rolled crêpes, smothered in steaming homemade blueberry sauce. There were cups of coffee and fresh squeezed orange juice and milk. With his mitt he pulled from the oven a plate full of crisp bacon.

Hour after hour it was Crazy Eights or Go Fish all day long. Maybe a week had gone by or perhaps a month. It was a year and a day, Tulane thought, if it had been five minutes. Ivy had asked her about school. It was good, Tulane said. She liked school. She knew all the letters and could read quite well. She could read anything you put in front of her. Dared the world to find something she couldn’t read. Numbers were no problem, either. Tulane said she could count up to a hundred and forty-seven. Had done it fifty-seven times at least, and about a month ago, she’d crawled under the porch and watched their basset hound Coconut poop out six little babies, but Daniel was probably going to drown them before she got home, and she knew what a gato was, and that she lived in Idaho, and that Idaho was in Moscow, but this was Mississippi and Mississippi was nowhere near the continent of Australia, which was at the bottom of the world. “But they think it’s the top!” she said. “Can you believe it? Can you believe they think that?” “Crazy,” said Ivy, laughing. Tulane could tell immediately she’d won the woman over, which was what Tulane did. She won people over. Adults. Not kids. Kids were assholes. Like Brandon Kitchens, though Julie Bean was okay, even if she had a crazy momma, like Momma said she had. “What’s that thing in your head?” said Tulane, pointing at Ivy’s head. The pressure of not asking, of not seeing, had gotten to be too much. It was the sort of question Momma never tolerated. Momma had no truck with pointing. No matter how weird looking they were, you couldn’t point. Even if the lady was big and fat and had a goiter the size of a buffalo-butt bouncing around on her neck. No pointing. “But what’s a goiter, Momma? What’s she got in there? Puppies?” “Hush! You just hush your mouth, young lady!” “In my head?” said Ivy. Her hand hovered over the pile of cards for an instant before she drew. “It’s a little faucet in your head,” said Tulane. “I saw it last night, while you were sleeping…unless I dreamed it.”

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Ivy hesitated for a second before saying, “It’s medical.” Then she turned her head to the side and parted her hair above her ear, revealing the nozzle and lever mechanism protruding from her skull. “I have a medical condition that has to be monitored this way.” “Monitored?” “Yes. I have to drain some of the juice from around my brain and give it to my doctor to test.” “What’s wrong with you?” said Tulane. Again, Momma would never have tolerated a question of this sort. How on earth did Momma ever find out anything? Maybe if she’d ask a question or two she’d know about the angels the way Julie Bean and her momma knew. “I have bad thoughts,” said Ivy. “And your doctor can see the bad thoughts in the juice?” “Yes,” she said. “He can monitor them in the Dime…Ethel…tripper-mean.” “What if they get really bad?” “Then he can put good thoughts in,” she said. “Sometimes I have bad thoughts,” said Tulane. “Like what?” “Sometimes I imagine Brandon Kitchens’ head is a pumpkin and I smack it with a mallet so it blows up.” “You should meet my doctor,” said Ivy. “He can make it so you don’t think like that anymore.” “What’s your doctor’s name?” “Dr. Miller,” she said. “He’s the most beautiful man in the world. He has long gray hair and the most piercing blue eyes you’ve ever seen. You can fall into those eyes and its like falling into the warmest blue sea. It’s like falling back into the womb.” “I saw an angel with long gray hair and blue eyes,” she said. “The other day.” “You saw Dr. Miller,” she said. “Is he really an angel?” “Yes.” Tulane thought about this. She played with the card in her hand. “There’s a door in the floor under the stairs,” she said.

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“I know,” said Ivy. “The gnomes live down there,” said Tulane. Ivy tapped the nozzle in her head. “Bad thoughts,” she said. “This house keeps all your Uncle Joe’s bad thoughts down there.” Arzo staggered from the bedroom by the stairs. He scratched his belly and grunted, flopping into the recliner. Grabbing up the remote, he clicked on the television. “Do you have a five?” said Tulane. “Uh—You won again!” said Ivy, laughing. She handed over the five.

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Willy’s wife Eunice Tate had never been a big fan of the Woolers, or of Willy’s penchant for Holy Roller religion. Neither of these things had been part of the Willy she married. In his younger days Willy—and anybody with an opinion on Willy—had entertained notions of a political career. Eunice, with her high cheekbones and willowy figure, had cut the perfect image of the political wife. “It was her cheek bones,” Willy always said. “She has the bones of a governor’s wife.” Eunice had the disposition of one too. She harbored a ruthless will beneath the surface of a perfectly placid smile. And even though her people hailed from Connecticut, Eunice knew her role. She played it better than anyone. She’d found a distant relation from North Carolina who had fought with the 17th Virginia Cavalry Battalion. She had infused her voice with just the right lilt, slowing it perfectly to the cadence of the locals, so that even the Hinds County chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy had found nothing to hold against her. They were on the rise. This new captain of the Tate dynasty and his beautiful queen, as they wandered among the Episcopalians and the Methodists of the upper tier in Jackson, plotting their ascension to the Governor’s mansion and beyond. At least they were on the rise until Willy found liquor and then religion. This was the 1970s and such a narrative arc was not yet in vogue. Virtually overnight Willy’s political star vanished from the constellation of Mississippi politics. It was the Marty Brown incident that started it all. Willy was working his way up the Distinct Attorney’s office in Jackson, when he took the Marty Brown case to trial. A small time hoodlum, Marty Brown had built a life for himself kiting checks, pimping, and selling eight-balls of mostly Standback powder mixed with kerosene. But then one day he jerked a 9-mm off a bailiff and blasted his way out of the Hinds County court house, leaving the judge, his public defender, the court stenographer, and three members of the jury who had just convicted him for pandering, either dead or dying. In the midst of this mayhem the young (and brutally handsome) assistant DA, in a blood-spattered seersucker suit, worked frantically to save the life of the only surviving victim of Marty Brown’s escape from justice: WJAX-TV 12 crime scene reporter, Linda Flanagan. It was Miss Flanagan who never let the pubic forget that

103 the first thing she saw when she came back to consciousness was the beautiful blue eyes of that great American: Willy Tate. Their ascendancy assured, Eunice was ecstatic. But as the intended target of Marty Brown’s attack, Willy, who had remained perfectly still as the bullets flew around him, killing others, was not so positive. He entered a period of deep musing. Survivor’s guilt, they called it. Willy called it his second chance. He picked up his Bible. Everyone said it was a miracle. They said God must’ve saved Willy from the jaws of death for some Great Reason. Probably to be governor. But Willy looked away, ashamed of himself, whenever folks said that. It wasn’t a miracle at all, he thought. People were dead. It was just television. It was just the fact that he looked good in a blood spattered seersucker suit. He looked like the man in charge. He looked like the governor. Maybe even the president. The way Linda Flanagan talked about him on WJAX TV-12, it was a wonder people didn’t think he was the president. Already he sure looked a lot more presidential than the peanut farmer they’d sent to Washington last time around. Where was the blood on his seersucker suit? Soon the hypocrisy overwhelmed him. He couldn’t take it anymore. He couldn’t stand the interviews, the fawning looks, the adoring crowds. To beat his conscience back, Willy fell to drinking. Slowly, one by one, he began to lose his cases. He showed up for press conferences with his hair flying out, his tie askew, looking like he had slept in his clothes. On several occasions he was drunk in court. So, by the time the next election rolled around, all the talk of Willy running for Attorney General had died down to the embers of a life that might’ve been. Willy was five years down the bottle, and working as the part-time Beckham County attorney when Jack Wooler found him, striking up a deal for the protection of Jack’s bootlegging operation. In truth the Tate fortune had been in decline for some time, spreading out amongst cousins, none of whom had Montgomery Tate’s ruthless eye for business. As for Willy, the casinos up in Tunica put the final nails into the fiscal coffin. He was thoroughly in debt. He owed back taxes on the house, and that house was all there was left, when Jack took him under his wing. Eunice hated the Woolers for that. It seemed like the final degradation of her once proud champion, her David in blue seersucker. If he were president, Willy would have fought ol’ Splotch Top in single combat, like a Roman gladiator. Instead he was just the small-time government flunky for

104 a piss-ant little bootlegger—not even a moonshiner, but just a man with big fists, and a car, and enough get an go to drive to Jackson once a week. In fact that was not the final degradation. The final degradation came several years later, during the early days of the Clinton administration, which ought to have been his administration, when Willy drove home from a ‘church meeting,’ claiming that Jack of all people had opened his soul. Willy said he had spoken in tongues. He said he had received the Gift of Joy. Governors—even in those days—did not prostrate themselves and howl with laughter while the Holy Spirit tickled them all over, sending wave upon wave of babble out their mouths. It just wasn’t seemly. §§§ “So where is ol’ Eunice, anyway?” said Rebecca. They were back in the Gremlin and heading out of town. Lurleen’s driving showed little improvement. “I don’t even want to hear about that harlot, Eunice Tate,” said Lurleen. She swerved onto the shoulder, avoiding a pinballing squirrel in the road. “I told Willy not to marry her, and now she’s run off with a Yoga teacher from Hot Springs, Arkansas. Says she never did love Willy in the first place, and Willy, Jr. only nine months in the grave.” “You told him?” said Rebecca, peeking through her fingers. “I did,” said Lurleen. “I said, she may be a governor’s wife, with those cheekbones and good breeding, but you deserve a wife who’ll love you for you. But he was young. He was stupid. I forgive him.” “You mean in high school?” said Rebecca. “You liked him?” “Everybody liked him,” said Lurleen. “He was Willy Tate. But—” She shook her head. “I knew him. I baby-sat his little brother. But it’s different worlds. He was off at Ole Miss. Going to lawyer school or governor school. Whatever. He brought Eunice home one day to meet his folks. They called me up to watch his little brother so they could go to some fancy restaurant in Jackson. I remember how he chuckled when I told him he ought to marry someone who would love him for who he really was. Oh, how my face burned when he laughed like that. It was like he saw me in the hallway there, for the very first time. There I was, holding that little brat brother of his—died, you know? Willy’s brother. Heart attack, the fat little son-of-a-bitch. But Willy saw right through me. He saw this tattered rag of a girl with that squalling brat baby in her arms. Telling

105 him—There I was just telling him everything there was to tell about me in that one sentence. There wasn’t anything left for me to say. Nothing left for him to discover in me at all.” “Momma?” said Rebecca. She reached across to put her hand on Lurleen’s knee, but she pulled it back, thinking of the intimacy it entailed, and the moment at Joe’s funeral when Lurleen had jerked away. She didn’t want them to wreck. An affair? She wanted to ask, but…No. Lurleen didn’t have affairs. She didn’t sleep around. It was Rebecca who slept around. Had affairs. Lurleen couldn’t. It was amazing she’d ever slept with Daddy. Slowly, Rebecca let her hand fall back to her mother’s knee. They drove in silence after that. It wasn’t until they bounced up the driveway, past the church that Rebecca got back to other matters. “About Daddy,” she said. “Go ask him,” said Lurleen. “If you don’t believe me.”

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Seeing that Tulane and Ivy were still happily engaged in their card game, Rebecca marched through the living room into the kitchen, where she retrieved two Gerber’s number threes from the cabinet and a spoon from the drawer. She got a paper napkin from the cupboard, and she filled a glass with water. Then she stormed up the stairs and straight to Daddy’s bed. He lay propped on his pillows. Either he had managed to arrange himself that way, or Ivy and Tulane had come up and done it. She couldn’t fathom the thought that Arzo or Cinderella—planted on the sofa downstairs—might have lifted a finger to alleviate his suffering. “Did they bother you?” she said, hoping he was lucid. “Pills,” he said. “They didn’t give you any, did they?” “No!” he said, scowling. “They wouldn’t. The bitches.” “Good for them,” she said, choosing to ignore this outburst for the time being. Sitting next to the nightstand, she unscrewed the first of the baby food jars, and tucking the napkin into the collar of his undershirt, she began to spoon the goop into his mouth. As they spoke she kept hearing him say it, “the bitches,” over and over again in her mind. It kept digging at her, needling her. She was already on edge, now little spikes of adrenalin razored each of her words as she spoke. With a subdued violence she jabbed the spoon at his toothless head. “Good for them,” Daddy mocked her. “Good for them,” he said between mouthfuls of baby goop. “What do they know about my pain? What do any of you know about it? Christ!” “I’ll give you your damned pills in a minute,” said Rebecca. “But I want to ask you about Parchman first.” “What about it?” he said. “Momma tells me you were there,” she said. “She says you never told us about it, but you were there for twenty-six years.” “That’s a lie!” he said. His good eye jerked. Fighting against his uselessness, he tried to demonstrate at least the remembrance of his old power and authority. “That is a bald- face lie!”

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“The story you told Tulane this morning,” she continued, “the one you used to tell Joe and me about the land of the birdmen, that’s Parchman Farm, isn’t it? What did you do to get sent to Parchman?” “That’s a lie! It’s a flat out lie!” She had stuffed a rather large portion of Turkey and Rice Dinner into his mouth. “Are you trying to kill me?” he said, gagging it down. “If it’s a lie,” she said. “What were you doing for the twenty years before you married Momma? You weren’t born in 1949.” “I was a little boy,” said Daddy. “You were a little boy in the thirties,” she said. “I wasn’t born yesterday, Daddy. I believed it when I was a little girl, because I believed everything you said, but even in a backward-ass state like Mississippi you weren’t traveling the dirt roads in a mule wagon in the 1950s.” “I was,” said Daddy. “I’m fifty-nine.” Rebecca closed her eyes, seeking calm. “Fine,” she said, opening them again. She spooned the last of his dinner into his mouth. “What does it matter, anyway? Listen, I’ve got something else to talk about. I think you ought to ease up on Kias about the field. I think it’d be a nice testament to Joe to have his artwork go for something.” “My pills,” he said. Staring him down, she popped the lid off his pills. She shook two of the Dilaudid tablets into the palm of her hand. He cleared his throat and frowned. She tapped out a third. Then she placed them one at a time on his tongue, holding the water to his mouth for each one. When he had taken them, he lay back, easing into the pillows. He closed his eyes and began to drift. “They don’t hit you that fast,” she said. “It’s the knowledge,” he said. “That they will hit me. They’ll hit me soon. It’ll all be over with before you know it.” “So, what do you think?” she said. “About what?” “About the field. This church could be a kind of testament to Joe.” “No.”

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“You son-of-a-bitch,” she said, hitting him on the chest. His eyes popped open, startled. Slowly he let them close again. “What does it matter to you?” she said. “What does it matter to you?” he said. “Why do you care?” “Because it’s for Joe,” she said. “It’s for your baby boy, Daddy. Don’t you want to do something for Joe?” “Is that right?” he said. “Joe? It’s for Joe? Are you sure about that? Are you sure it’s not for you?” §§§ Downstairs Lurleen and Tulane ate Vienna sausages out of a can. They sat at the kitchen table stabbing them with toothpicks, and then sucking them into their mouths. They had already polished off several cans, stacking them in a pyramid on the table. In the living room Arzo and Cinderella howled with delight. On the screen a professional wrestler held another down in a position Rebecca could only think of as obscene. The sound had been muted, making way for one of Lurleen’s Liberace 8-tracks. Ivy sat on the organ bench, unsure where else to sit. Certainly, she wouldn’t have sat on the sofa beside Cinderella and Arzo, they flailed their arms as they cheered the spandexed warriors on the screen. When Rebecca came down, Ivy pushed herself to her feet and followed her into the kitchen. “Vienna sausage?” said Lurleen. “No, thank you,” said Rebecca, taking a toothpick from the box on the table. She handed it to Ivy, whose wide, hungry eyes bespoke her desire for the processed tubules of meat. Lurleen frowned, but she held the can out for Ivy to stab at, gesturing for her to sit at the table. “He said he wasn’t at Parchman,” said Rebecca. “No? Well, it was in the paper,” said Lurleen. “Just a minute, I got the letters in a box under the stairs.” “Letters?” Lurleen nodded. She made a slurpy sound with the Vienna sausage. “Momma and I,” she said. “Cindy too until she met Arzo—we used to write to convicts. Momma did it for years and she got me started.” “You used to write to convicts?” said Ivy. “Like through Pen Pal Magazine?”

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“Exactly,” said Lurleen. “Pen Pal. That’s what we read.” “I had a cousin who did that,” said Ivy. “She just loved a criminal. Wouldn’t get involved with a man, unless he was bad through and through.” “That was my momma,” said Lurleen. “I was just young. But it was nice getting the letters, and I felt like I really brightened up their day. Now Jack, he was in the paper. See, we’d check on them to know if they were notorious or not. The library keeps tons of old newspapers from all over the country. So you can usually find something if you look long enough. We’d clipper the articles out about the fellas we were writing to.” Wiping her fingers on the hem of the tablecloth, Lurleen headed out of the kitchen. In a moment she returned, covered in cobwebs and dust. Her hair blew loose around her head. She had a worn cardboard box in her arms, which she plopped in the middle of the table. The Vienna sausage can pyramid scattered to the floor, and a cloud of dust rose off the box. Layers of masking tape covered the folds of leathery cardboard. Rebecca curled her knees beneath her on the chair. Tulane stood with her hands planted on the table, trying to peer beneath the flap. Ivy leaned away from the table, arching her back and groaning, while Lurleen cut the tape across the top with a pair of scissors. Photos spilled across the table and onto the floor. It was pictures of Lurleen’s family, mostly. Her mother and father in the nineteen- fifties. They had both died before Rebecca was born, but she remembered seeing their photo on the nightstand beside her parent’s bed. Lurleen had always said they were from Vicksburg. She’d lied about that. Looking at these photographs Rebecca could tell immediately she had lied. Why? To fit in with some lie of Daddy’s? Daddy. When she had asked Daddy about his parent’s, he’d told her the story of the Land of the Birdmen. Rebecca frowned, holding one of the photos close to her face. Having suffered his share of nerve damage in this brawl or that one, Lurleen’s father had the dangerous good looks of a Dillinger. His slightly puffed face held a bemused laziness, bordering on intractability. He tended to pose for the camera standing next to a convertible Buick, a stubby cigar in his hand. His legs made a figure four. It was a pose he’d learned from James Dean. Her mother had a thing for polka dot dresses and cartwheel hats. Even in the black and whites, Rebecca could tell her lips were drop-dead

110 red every day of her life. “They look happy,” she said, holding up a snapshot of Lurleen’s father with a toddler on his lap. “Is that the porch out front?” “It sure is,” said Lurleen. “My daddy bought this house and that four-hole Buick. Paid cash for them both.” “Daddy—Jack—always said he bought this house.” Lurleen laughed. “He couldn’t stand the thought of living in his wife’s house,” she said. “But it’s mine. Cindy’s too—” She jutted her chin toward the living room. “—the house, anyway. Couple of years ago Cindy sold me her stake in the field.” “What happened to your father?” said Rebecca. She looked at the picture of the man with the Buick. There was another of two men in prison stripped up-and-downs. They held rifles over their shoulders. “He made whiskey,” said Lurleen. “Ran it all over the state. And did fine too. But he got on the wrong side of Beauchamp Senior. You know Junior is sheriff now. You remember Junior? Anyway they sent Daddy up to Parchman. He was a trustee shooter, just like Jack. That’s them in that picture, there. But they busted him back to the gunline for something, and—well, once you were a shooter it didn’t go over so well when you went back to wearing ring-arounds.” Rebecca looked at the two smiling men in their floppy brimmed hats and vertically striped pajama suits. “Momma took that picture,” said Lurleen. “That must’ve been a couple of months before he died. ’68 I’d say. I don’t think I ever saw him again after that. Here it is.” Lurleen handed her a scrapbook filled with yellowing pages of old newsprint and hundreds of carefully razored letters. There were so many they spilled from the scrapbook and lay piled in the bottom of the box. They came from all over the United States: San Quentin, Sing Sing, Angola, Leavenworth. Lurleen held up a letter addressed from Alcatraz. “That’s the prize in the collection,” she said. “Momma’s of course. Alcatraz was closed by the time I started writing letters. Most of these are hers, to tell you the truth. She started writing to Daddy when he got sent to Parchman. We’d ride up on the train the first Sunday of the month with all the other wives and families. I remember it broke her heart to see Jack—your father and Daddy’s friend—all alone those Sundays. You know more than anything a convict needs to know there’s somebody on the outside

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that cares about him. Well, Momma couldn’t write to Jack, because she knew it would make Daddy jealous, so she had me write him notes. Daddy said those notes just made Jack’s day. After that Momma kind of let it get away from her. She thought, she’d spread the happiness around as best she could. So we started writing to others. In other prisons, of course, not Parchman. She didn’t want to create any trouble for Daddy, because—well, you know—the letters got kind of ‘blue’ I guess you’d say.” “Blue?” said Rebecca. “That’s correct,” said Lurleen. “Not vulgar, of course. She’d stop writing the minute a convict wrote back with something vulgar. She’d write them maybe a description of an island or something, where just the two of them could go walking hand in hand. She’d describe her bikini. That kind of thing.” “Didn’t they come looking for you when they got out?” said Ivy. “My cousin had that happen.” “She always told me to research them,” said Lurleen. “See what they had done, so you could know when they were getting out. You could plan to ease them back before it happened. I remember she had me send a letter to this one fellow telling him she was dead. A few days later he came by the house with the bruises still on his wrists. I had to take him out back to the field and show him where I scattered her ashes. He stood there crying for thirty minutes before the squad cars rolled up and hauled him back to jail. Momma tried to stick to lifers after that. Here—” Lurleen pointed at a newspaper article pasted into the scrapbook. “—We read that in the paper. Neither of us figured Jack would ever get himself pardoned, but I’ll be damned if he didn’t.” The clipping, from the Biloxi Register, was dated September 4, 1947. It consisted mainly of an interview with Molly Dietrich, a “woman evangelist preacher” from Louisiana, who had come to Biloxi to hold a series of tent revivals in what she called the “Godless reaches of south Mississippi.” She planned to preach redemption before the whole region gave way to the Devil and the devil’s right hand man Jack Wooler, arrested that very morning on suspicion of murdering one Candace O’Hara, the cigarette girl at Jack’s illegal Biloxi nightspot. “Daddy owned a nightclub?” said Rebecca.

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“Of course not,” said Lurleen. “He’s never owned a thing in his life. He worked at that nightclub, as did that woman, Candace. A couple of fishermen found her body washed up on shore. Somebody said they saw Jack heading down to the beach the night before. The whole town jumped on it once Dietrich got involved, everybody from the nightclub’s owner, to the mayor, to the DA, to the judge, to the twelve honest men who tried him. The paper was crazy with it for months. Not a single person thought Jack was innocent, not even Jack. He was just a dumb country boy. Look here, it says, “Jury takes thirty minutes to convict.” Life at Parchman. But it turned out—and I never knew this until we’d been married already—that the nightclub owner confessed on his deathbed. Said it wasn’t even Jack; he said it was that same damned judge, who had presided over the trial. That was maybe five years later, but by then nobody really cared about it anymore. Molly Dietrich had gone on back to Louisiana, and that Mayor was sailing into his third term of office. Jack was a trustee shooter, a good one from what they say. A good white prisoner was hard to come by in those days. So nobody really had that much interest in seeing Jack turned loose. Not even Jack. Not until we started writing, anyway. They got around to pardoning him in 1977, a couple of months before you were born. They no longer had trustee shooters by then. That was all gone by the time Judge Keating burned the barracks. Jack worked at the commissary, and I’d come up to see him on Sundays. That’s pretty much the story. You were born right here in Lidell, at the Lidell Clinic. That SOB Dr. Milkin called your daddy into the room when you were born, and Jack held you in his arms and he cried and cried. He made me promise to never would tell you about Parchman Farm, or that this wasn’t his house.” “Milkin,” said Rebecca. She had considerable contempt for Dr. Milkin and the Lidell Clinic. She was struck with the memory of coming home from Ole Miss at Christmas to find that indeed, one could not purchase a prophylactic of any sort at the Lidell Clinic pharmacy. April, so worldly wise, had told her of these magical things. Rebecca just knew they’d help Kias with his guilt and maybe then they wouldn’t have to pray on their knees until their legs fell asleep afterwards. Maybe just a quick ‘my bad’ would do it. How Rebecca’s face burned crimson when Dr. Milkin looked down the length of his nose at her request. “You took Daddy to Dr. Milkin about the cancer?”

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“Sure,” said Lurleen. “He started getting bad headaches and seeing things about nine months ago. Dr. Milkin said it was brain cancer.” “He just said? Did he send him up to Jackson for a CAT scan or something?” “Oh, no,” said Lurleen. “You know Beckham County is growing by leap and bounds. You’ve seen the Piggly Wiggly and the Waffle House? Well, we got us a CAT scan right there in the clinic.” “Momma, there’s…you never sent him to a specialist? Are you kidding me?” “You disapprove of the way I’ve handled my husbands final months? Of course you would. But where were you? Off in Idaho is it? With…what’s his name? Danny? Where is he anyway? Why hasn’t he called you? Oh, you’re one to come home. Disapproving of everything. Why don’t you treat your children better, why don’t you take your husband to this quack doctor instead of that quack doctor. Where were you? Were have you been?” Lurleen snatched up the photographs from the table and dumped them back into the box, making off in a huff for the cabinet under the stairs. Rebecca thought about calling Daniel, but she didn’t really want to talk to anyone. Instead, she wandered onto the porch to sit and watch the woods, and listen to the birds and the wind. After a while she went inside and picked up the phone, but it was the machine that beeped at her on the line. “Hello?” she said. “Hello, Daniel? Are you there? …I just thought I’d say hello… I love you.” She let the receiver settle back into the cradle.

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The next morning Rebecca found Kias out behind the Dixie Land Plaza dressed in a pair of track shorts, a sweat-drenched undershirt, and a set of white, faux leather loafers. She had wandered through the door to the True Path Church of the Great Way, following the sound of John Coltrane. He stood next to a flatbed truck. On the bed of the truck— covered with a blue tarp—sat the pieces of the kiddie train—the carnival ride that was to form the centerpiece of his new church. He smiled, waving when he saw her. “I put the deposit down this morning,” she said. “Power will be on at the old church this afternoon.” Kias kicked at the pavement. “I didn’t think you were going to help,” he said, squinting into the sun. “I guess I changed my mind,” she said. “Listen. Joe’s paintings. The one’s you’re planning to hang along the tunnel, or whatever…they’re next door, right?” “Joe set up his studio in Ronnie’s back room,” said Kias. “I’d like to see them.” “Me too,” he said. “Joe was secretive. He said he wanted to finish before he let anyone see them.” “Ronnie’s seen them.” “Naw,” said Kias. “Joe wouldn’t let anyone near them.” “Ivy said Joe didn’t think Ronnie liked them.” “Really?” said Kias. He looked at the tarp. “Really,” she said. “That the kiddie train?” “Sure enough,” said Kias. “We just got it down from Arkansas.” “I saw you there,” she said. “In Arkansas?” “At the state fair in Little Rock,” she said. “You were in rare form.” “You didn’t say hello.” “You seemed pretty busy.” “I wasn’t,” he said. “I never was too busy.” “So, Ronnie paid for the kiddie ride?” she said, hoping to shift the conversation.

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Kias nodded. “I rolled through Lidell about a year ago, with my traveling revival. Ronnie showed up to my tent and we got to talking after the service, and Ronnie—well, he seemed to have a real powerful experience, because he said he was ready to sink some money into the church when I told him about the ride I found in Arkansas at the state fair and about my vision and whatnot.” “Just like that?” she said. “When the Lord comes to you, it’s just like that,” he said. “You know…you could’ve said hello. It’s been a long time. I mean everything’s different now.” “You’re right. I ought to have said hello,” she said. “Listen, I’m going over to see Joe’s pictures. I…I decided to help.” “Why?” said Kias. Rebecca looked at the blue tarp on the flatbed. She looked at Kias. “For Joe,” she said, thinking, and not for anybody else and not for any other reasons. §§§ Thinking about the prospect of asking Ronnie Tibbit for a favor made eels flip through Rebecca’s stomach. It got no better at the Earl Tibbit bail bonds office, when she sat across the desk from him. He kept rubbing his finger over that nasty little mustache. He looked so pleased to be of service on the one hand, but she could tell in his eyes he was hard at work figuring out what was in it for him. All her old loathing and hatred shot through her system. She held herself icy, thin-lipped, gripping the arms of her chair. She wanted to brain him with the eight ball paperweight sitting on his desk. Ronnie loved his position in the world, the magnanimity of it, and the cruelty also. To see her coming through those doors must have made his day. What a lot of pain and suffering crawled into this office. She thought of all the human wreckage wandering in here, pulling onto this final shore of desperation. All the mothers and the wives. The girlfriends and the brothers. The sisters and the fathers. She saw them dragging themselves into this office, refugees from their blasted, sucked-out, and dying lives. Failure. Misery. And grief. How thrilling it was for Ronnie to be here for them. To scoop them up from the puddle of their lives, to sell them hope at a ten percent profit. Eyeing her warily, Ronnie took a fifth of Old Grand-Dad from his desk drawer. He set it in the

116 middle of his desk with two shot glasses. “It’s not even noon,” said Rebecca, crossing her arms. “It’s eleven-thirty,” he said. “Have a shot with me. You’re looking for a favor here. The least you could do is drink a glass of whiskey with me to prove your good intentions. Come on, we’ll toast to Joe’s artwork.” She took the shot glass in her hand. “Fine,” she said. They clicked glasses. He drained his shot, and she took a sip of hers, setting the glass back on the desk. Ronnie poured himself another. “You’ll fall behind like that,” he said, raising his glass again. This time after they clicked, she drained it. He filled their glasses and then stood, pacing back and forth behind the desk. With his pinky extended he took little sips of whiskey. It was dainty in a vulgar and mocking sort of way. Rebecca could feel the heat from the liquor rising through her blood. “They’re all I have left of him,” she said. “What good are they to you?” “One time,” said Ronnie, motioning for her to drink her shot. She did, and so did he. Then he poured fresh ones. “One time, I was down in Tallahassee tracking this skip—this paperhanger from Tupelo. I caught him holed up at the Prince Murat motel with this two hundred and eighty pound swamp whore.” Ronnie jumped around the desk. She grabbed the shot glass, thinking she’d whack him with it. Whiskey flew. Ronnie dropped into a crouch; he took her chair, swiveled it straight on, and then he pulled himself lizard-like alongside her shins. “She was just going to town on that fool,” he said. “When slap! Bang! There’s me and Earl crashing down the door. But she didn’t bat an eye. She got that boy’s balls wound up tighter’n a cat’s ass. Jerked them in her fist—” He twisted his fingers in the fabric of Rebecca’s jeans. “—Shouting—” He stuck his fingers in his mouth. “—I got im, owwicer. I got d’ sown-bitch ‘ight ‘ere!” Ronnie busted up laughing. His face turned red, he was laughing so hard. But he wasn’t really laughing. He was just going through the motions of laughing. All the while he held her with those beady little eyes of his, mock-laughing his whiskey-breath laugh all over the room. Then it was like a switch got thrown inside him. He stopped mid- laugh. He was dead serious. “You can’t stand it, can you?” he said. “You are slap beside yourself right now, ain’t you?”

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In the silence Ronnie eyed the shot glass in her hand. He was hoping she’d throw it at him. Rebecca stood. She pushed past him, placing the glass firmly on the desk. Taking the fifth, she uncapped it and poured herself another shot. Placing the fifth down, she held up the glass and drained it. There was little vindication in his disappointment. She would’ve preferred to whack him. Instead she maintained her flat-voiced calm. “What good are his paintings to you?” she said. “At first I thought they were a waste of space,” he said. “But over the months I’ve developed an appreciation for the visual arts. I’ll let you back there. I’ll give you a private viewing as they say. If, that is, you…apologize.” “What?” she said. “Apologize,” he said. “You’ll feel better about yourself if you do.” “You’re not serious,” she said. “You want me to apologize? To you?” “I’m sorry,” he said. “I want to hear you say, ‘I’m sorry.’ Got to mean it though. I bet another shot would help.” He filled the two glasses, spilling whiskey on his desk. He held his up, motioning for her to do the same. She took the glass, closed her eyes. One, two, three: “I apologize,” she said. She drank the shot. Her stomach flipped. “It was wrong of me to kick you like that. It wasn’t a fair fight.” His forehead wrinkled up. “I meant for yesterday,” he said. “But now that you mention it, you do have a number of things to say you’re sorry for, don’t you?” He poured himself another glass of whiskey, himself only this time. His little game was over. He sat back in his chair, propping his feet on the desk. “No,” he said. “I just don’t think you mean it.” He ran the tip of his tongue across his mustache. “That sounded really condescending, in fact. No. I don’t feel it. Not right here.” He touched his heart. “I just don’t feel your remorse.” “You son-of-a-bitch,” she said, without heat. It was matter-of-fact. Ronnie smiled. He drank his whiskey.

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By the time Rebecca got home, a small crowd had assembled in front of the old church. A half-dozen dusty cars and pick-up trucks sat in the gravel lot, with a motley assortment of country people from the old congregation lounging against their hoods, sprawling on the porch, kicking at the weeds, and squatting by the road. A trickle of tinny gospel music played from an AM radio in one of the trucks. Kias must have called them. He was there already, discussing their tasks. Over the course of that day and through the next this was the pattern. A steady rotation of old faces would come and go. Slowly, the little white clapboard church of her youth would begin to glow again, like it had when she was twelve, when they built it the first time. She didn’t care. She told herself she didn’t care. Even as she walked down to the church, visualizing it stark white against the green field instead of weathered gray and paint peeled, she said she wouldn’t actually lift a finger to work on it. She’d get the power going. That was all. But when she saw the gallons of paint and the fresh brushes, she couldn’t help herself. She grabbed up a Spackle knife and began hammering away at the old paint. Kias smiled when he saw her, but she pretended not to notice. Of course, she could’ve painted outside. There was a truck hauling waste to the dump she could’ve driven. She could’ve taken a turn with the Bush Hog in the field. There was a cement mixer out front. Six people stood around the mixer, attempting to get it started, and she doubted a single one of them had the vaguest idea what they were doing. She didn’t know what to do either, but she could’ve joined them. She could’ve stood around scratching her head the way they were doing. She could’ve helped unload cinder blocks. She could’ve helped pull boards up from the porch. She could’ve done what she was ‘supposed’ to do and headed up to the Piggly-Wiggly in Lidell, to buy baloney and Wonder bread in order to feed all these people. But she didn’t. She stayed in the church. She scraped paint off the walls. She worked with Kias. She told herself she wanted to be near someone who had known Joe these last few months, someone who’d cared about him and done what he could for him. In being near Kias, perhaps some of that care might rub off on her; perhaps it was like she had done something too. Almost. It was almost like that. That’s

119 what she said, when she asked herself what she was doing down there. “About the train,” she said. A thought had occurred to her. “The train’s coming,” said Kias. He was pulling nails from the bottom of an overturned pew. He had two stacks of lumber: one that was scrap and destined for the junk yard, and another that was scrap, which he planned on keeping. Rebecca could not tell the difference between the two. “It’ll be here soon.” “Is it a gas powered train?” she said. “Gas?” he said. He lay his hammer down. “It’s supposed to go in a circle,” she said. “Through a tunnel with Joe’s paintings of sin, redemption, Biblical myth and whatnot on the walls?” “Right,” said Kias; frowning, he added, “What do you mean Biblical myth?” “Well…the ones in town, they’re fantastical, wouldn’t you say? The Nephilim? The Dragon of Chaos? Not exactly what Saint Paul had in mind.” “No,” said Kias. “I told Joe no more depictions of God. It’s one thing for the Sistine Chapel, but this is Lidell, Mississippi. And no, none of that universe created from the belly of Leviathan stuff, either. I like it, don’t get me wrong, but I think it confuses people. ” “You really haven’t seen them?” “He was secretive. But listen, Ronnie’s just like that. He’s come a long way, Ronnie. Of course Ronnie has a long way to go. You know it’s hard to change, and folks backslide. But Ronnie’s got his heart in the right place. He really does. He’s just being Ronnie. But—” “Yes, yes,” she said. “But the train. It’s gas, and it’s in a closed tunnel?” Tulane interrupted them. She stood in the doorway with a platter full of baloney sandwiches. Momma held a pitcher of iced tea and a bag of Dixie cups. “We made sandwiches!” Tulane squealed. “We made one for everybody!” Kias took the plate. He set it on one of the over-turned pews, and he whisked Tulane into the air, spinning her in circles. She laughed and laughed. They twirled around the room together. Lurleen chuckled, pouring two Dixie cups full of iced tea. After they left, Rebecca and Kias sat on the floor and ate. “You remember,” she said. “We were going to do that TV show where we’d travel around the world shooting from

120 trouble spots, reporting on Armageddon. You’d have that Indiana-Jones-for-Jesus thing going on, and I’d dress in whatever local costume there was.” Kias smiled. Embarrassed, it seemed. “You didn’t—never mind,” she said. “What?” he said. “Nothing,” she said. “Never mind.” She stood, draining her Dixie-cup. “Listen,” she said. “I want to get in that back room of Ronnie’s. Maybe we can go through the ceiling from your place. What do you think? We could Indiana Jones the place.” “I don’t think we ought do that,” he said. “I didn’t what?” “Never mind,” she said. “It’s not important. But you haven’t even seen the paintings. Don’t you want to?” “Of course I want to,” he said. “I didn’t what?” “Nothing,” she said. “If we could just get a hold of Ronnie’s key we could make a wax impression of it. Then we could make a copy with modeling clay and we could make a plaster cast of the copy and then maybe we could melt down a Barbie doll and use that to make a plastic key.” “Rebecca,” he said. She stood above him. Hunched over his paper plate, he spoke through a mouthful of white bread and baloney. “You want me to go breaking and entering on my business partner, but you won’t even finish your thoughts with me? And yes, by the way, the train does run on gas. Yes, I’ve already thought of that. I wasn’t born yesterday, you know? It’s not really a tunnel. It’s not closed over. It’s open to the sky.” “I was just thinking,” she said. “I figured you’d be married by now. You’re good with children.” He nodded, looking through the busted window to the field beyond. Perhaps he watched that younger vision of them walking hand-in-hand through a dream. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” he said. “I was upset when you left. But the truth is, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I’m back here now. But I got out first. I don’t preach about the things I used to preach about. My uncle? He’s a bad preacher. He teaches folks that God doesn’t love nine-tenths of the world. I had to get out of here to understand that was nonsense.”

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Rebecca walked to the window. Tulane and Lurleen walked in the field. They held hands in the field. Tulane’s sandwich platter was empty of sandwiches. Momma had set the pitcher of tea aside somewhere. “Open to the sky?” she said. “That’s not very…how do you put it? Hellish?” Kias shrugged. “It’s a gas train,” he said. “I couldn’t think of a way to make it dark.” “You’re a good person, Kias,” she said, picking up her Spackle knife. “You are, too,” he said, looking up at her and smiling. His smile made Rebecca wonder what it might look like to divide his brain in two with the edge of that Spackle blade. “Joe had a key to Ronnie’s back room,” said Kias. He picked up his hammer. “I reckon Ivy’s got it still.” He shrugged. “If you want to go in there later tonight—” “You’ll break in with me?” Kias frowned. “It’s not really breaking in, right? We have a key?” “Of course,” she said. “Plus, he’s a complete SOB. I can’t stand him. I just can’t stand the thought of him.” It sent a shiver of violence through her bones just to say these things.

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The thing Rebecca remembered most about her daddy before he got religion was the smell of whiskey in his sweat. It was a yeasty, sweet-shit smell that meant home and comfort and Daddy’s deep voice, singing Johnny Cash or Conway Twitty, as he danced her about the living room on the tips of his muddy boots. It wasn’t a bad memory. In the midst of it, she thought of Joe clapping rhythm on the sofa. She thought of Arzo falling down the stairs. She used to laugh at Arzo the moment she saw him through the window staggering up the front porch. It made Arzo furious to come home and find that little girl in hysterics on the floor. He even yelled at her one time. That wasn’t funny at all, not even when Daddy laid him flat on his back with a single, massive punch, as if he’d hit him with a shovelhead. Daddy found that side-splittingly funny. But no one else seemed amused, especially not Cinderella, who threatened Daddy with a rolling pin. Still, he couldn’t stop laughing, no matter how many times she reared back to smack him. He’d get serious. Then he’d look over at Arzo’s bloody nose and rolled back eyes, and he’d fall to howling again, clutching himself around the middle. But the night he and Arzo came home drunk from Tibbit’s shot shack, Daddy’s backside peppered with birdshot from Tibbit’s .410 and the Gremlin’s door blasted through, it was Arzo’s turn to find the mirth in the situation. Staggering up the porch steps together, Arzo held Daddy by the waist. At the door he began to pound—Cinderella was in the habit slapping a fresh lock on the door whenever Arzo stayed away for more than a night. He bellowed for his wife, for his sister-in-law, for Rebecca, anybody, to come take this fool off his hands. Daddy moaned, swearing at him, but Arzo kept at it. All the years of living under another man’s roof, at the behest of another man’s dollar, the beneficiary of women’s charity, caught up with Arzo on that porch. He poured all his private torment into that pounding fist, as if each strike against that door might take away another layer of self-loathing. He let his pride flow out in a cascade of drunken epithets and proclamations concerning Daddy’s butt and the lead shot within it. When no one came immediately to the door, Daddy began a series of low wails. Arzo heard these as wolf howls. Soon he took up the higher registers, laying down a melody of barks and snarls atop Daddy’s bass-line of carnal pain. The house awoke. There was chaos

123 everywhere. Joe and Rebecca ran from room to room screaming, “murder!” Screaming, “fire!” Simply screaming. Lurleen even poked her head out of the bedroom. They hadn’t seen her for several days at that point. Daddy had been taking her meals up and closing the door quickly behind him all that week. But there she was. Rebecca froze, mid-scream. Joe slammed into the back of her. They stared at their mother in the doorway. She didn’t look like a woman who knew where she was. Lost. She hadn’t the faintest clue where this landing stood. This banister? It led into the darkness below, where men howled like dogs. Lurleen gripped it. Slowly she sank back into the bedroom and the door closed on creaking hinges. When Rebecca went downstairs, she saw Daddy lying face down on the kitchen table, his pants and boots in a pile on the floor. He chewed a dishrag, his face sweaty and full of thick veins. Cinderella stood over him with a pocketknife in her hand. She dug shot from the back of Daddy’s thigh, periodically washing his leg with kerosene. §§§ “There’s a door,” said Tulane. “In the floor in the cabinet under the stairs. Ivy says all the bad thoughts are down there.” “Ivy what?” said Rebecca. It was evening. All the work on the church had come to a halt several hours before, and Kias had gone home, promising to meet her at The True Path Church of the Great Way around midnight. They’d go into Joe’s studio together. “A door?” “In the floor,” said Tulane. They were in Rebecca’s old room. She had been reading to Tulane from The Littles. “Ivy told you about it?” “The bad thoughts are down there.” “That sounds like something Joe would come up with.” “I want to see in it,” said Tulane. Rebecca frowned. “You don’t go in that cupboard by yourself.” “Then you come with me.” Rebecca’s frown deepened. “A door in the floor?” she said. Tulane nodded. “Full of bad thoughts,” she said. They went downstairs. In the kitchen, Rebecca found a flashlight in the junk drawer. Except for Daddy everyone sat in the living room, glowering at the televsion. Ivy looked

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hopeful when Rebecca came through the room, like she might be rescued from the silence. But as she struggled to stand, Rebecca motioned for her to sit, to wait a moment. Ivy crossed her arms, drawing herself in close around her belly when she saw where Rebecca was going. Lurleen noticed too, calling out, “What are you doing over there?” “Just a minute,” said Rebecca. Arzo and Cinderella were oblivious. “Look at that,” he said, tapping a page from the Weekly World News. “That’s how come the satellite goes in and out.” Rebecca opened the cupboard door. She stuck her head in, pulling the light cord. There was Daddy’s tombstone, draped in cobwebs. “See?” said Tulane, crawling between Rebecca’s legs. She squatted. Hunching forward, Rebecca traced the floor with her fingers. She brought her face down close to the boards, turning on the flashlight. Sure enough there was a line cut in the floor. It made a perfect square. There used to be rug in there, she recalled. A kitchen mat made of Wonder Bread bags woven together with fishing line. It was gone now. “I need a screwdriver,” she said. “What are ya’ll doing?” said Lurleen. She stood behind them. “What’s down here?” said Rebecca, crawling from the cupboard. Tulane stuck her face out, peering between Rebecca’s legs. “Bad thoughts,” said Tulane. Lurleen folded her arms. “Nothing,” she said. “Jack used to store things down there.” “I thought as much,” said Rebecca. “Where’s a screwdriver?” Lurleen brought her a screwdriver, though she clearly wasn’t happy to do so. She kept pursing her lips, trying to come up with something to say that might stop this excavation. On her knees, Rebecca jabbed the screwdriver into the lip of the trap door, prying it open. Tulane squatted beside her, and Lurleen crowded behind them, craning her neck to see over Rebecca’s shoulder. Once she had the door open, she set the screwdriver aside and took up the flashlight. It was completely black down the hole. But her light showed a ladder descending about ten feet to a small square room made of earthen walls and a warped plywood floor. She could smell the dirt welling up from the ground. Pocketing the flashlight, Rebecca shooed Tulane out of the cupboard. She turned around. Then, aiming her feet into the hole, she shimmied down the ladder. The air was cool in there. The smell of the soil, damp and pungent, alive with the ends of worms, filled her head.

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Dust from the creaking ladder fell into her eyes. She blinked, rubbing it away. Blurry at first, the root cellar came into view. It seemed like a root cellar to Rebecca, anyway. Certainly there were roots jabbing through the cracks in the plywood. There were aluminum shelves stocked full of canned goods and mason jars. She shined the flashlight at the burlap covered ceiling, and then around the tiny room. She could see Tulane’s face full of wonder in the square of light above her. Lurleen appeared behind the child. On the bottom shelves sat several cases of Jim Beam whiskey and Lord Baltimore gin. “Momma?” said Tulane. “Yes?” “Has Daniel drowned the puppies?” Rebecca frowned. “N… No,” she said. “I don’t… no.” “Brother Williams would never drown the puppies,” said Tulane. “What?” said Momma, crawling back up the ladder. “That’s what he said at the DQ? He said he loved little puppies about as much as anything, and he could imagine drowning one.” “You told Kias… Pumpkin, Daniel isn’t going to drown the puppies.” “He said he was.” “He was just… you weren’t supposed to hear that. He just said it.” “Brother Williams wouldn’t even say something like that.” Momma closed her eyes. She got that exasperated look she tended to get.

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Later that evening, when Rebecca and Ivy got to the church, Kias was all ready for the evenings planned crimes. He was dressed in a solid black tracksuit and a baggy-hooded sweatshirt. Wandering around the darkened interior of the True Path Church of the Great Way, he had pulled the hood tight around his face. The store tags still hung from his clothes. He convulsed with nervous energy, bouncing on the balls of his feet. He was definitely in the spirit of things. He had the lights out in his church. Quickly, he motioned them inside, glancing guiltily around the parking lot as he eased the door closed. Wherever Kias went, he walked on his tiptoes. He took excruciating monster steps, like a B-movie fiend. When finally he spoke, it was only in whispers, through clenched and hissing teeth. “Did you bring the key?” he said. “Of course,” said Ivy, in a normal voice, much too loud for his liking. He shushed her, placing his fingers over Ivy’s lips. “What?” she said. Rebecca jerked her thumb at the wall separating Kias’ church from the Tibbit Brother’s bail bonds office. “Is Ronnie over there?” “No,” said Kias, shaking his head. “But we ought to keep it down, don’t you think?” Rebecca winked. “I like your outfit,” she whispered. Kias beamed with pride. Ivy took the key from her pocket and jingled it on the chain. Leading them through the darkened church, Kias held his arms extended so he could hold them back, the way Fred would’ve held back Daphne and Velma He dodged his head from side to side, his eyes bulgy with fear, as they crept down the hallway to the door opening onto the refuse strewn back lot of the Dixie Land Plaza. Trash blew across the pavement. A wet cardboard box lay ripped apart beside the wall. The orange glow of the security lights pulled shadows out of the crouching jungle beyond the asphalt. Like marionettes of nothingness those shadows danced along the periphery of their vision, each shadow sending a spasm of panic down his body. Held back like she was, Rebecca could feel these thunderbolts of fear as they slammed through him. They crept along the cinder blocks to the Tibbit Brothers’ back door. There, glancing around, Ivy put the key in the lock. She jammed it against the tumblers. Struggling a moment, she cursed. Then Rebecca took over. It was the right key; she could feel it

127 clicking in there. “Here,” said Kias. “These doors are shoddy work.” He took the key, jiggling it violently back and forth. Then grunting, he slammed his shoulder into the door. Backing up several times, he smacked it again and again, until finally the key turned, and the door swung open. Kias slipped the key into his pocket. Reaching inside, Rebecca stretched her hand along the wall until she came to the switch, and the room flooded with florescent light. They slipped quickly inside Kias winced at the scuff of metal, but the visual cacophony of Joe’s studio soon overwhelmed them, and he offered no protest about the noise. The whole room was splashed with paint, in ever shade and hue, and it wasn’t merely the result of sloppy or even feverish work. Rather, a true sense of mission seemed to lie behind the spatter. It covered the walls in a fine lace of pure static, as if a television picture had detonated in the room, splattering the walls with white noise. It made Rebecca dizzy to look around, and a little nauseous. She put her fingers in her ears. “I can hear it,” she said. “I can hear the walls screaming in here.” Kias’ skin had turned a greenish shade of pale. He offered a weak smile. Ivy walked to a shelf where brushes soaked in jars of turpentine. Squeezed out tubes of paint lay piled in a cat-scratched easy chair. She pushed them to the floor, and, holding her stomach, she plopped into the chair. “Are you all right?” said Rebecca. “I am,” she said. “You’re not having the baby, are you?” “No,” she said. “I’m okay.” On a makeshift table, built from two sawhorses and a door, sat a portable radio. Cigarette butts littered the floor. There was the smell of wet ashes mixed with paint and thinner. The stench of body odor. Scattered about the floors and shelves lay sketches in charcoal and pastels, watercolor and pencil. Masses of wadded paper balls overflowed the wastebasket. They lay heaped in the corners of the room. Bits of paper fluttered on the breeze they had brought into the room. Joe had wound half a dozen rolls of duct tape into a giant ball. This silvery planet hung suspended from the ceiling. He had ripped apart a Xerox copy machine, stringing the guts along the walls. Circuit boards opened up, like the green boulevards of a wire world. Rebecca stepped to the middle of the room. Along one wall Joe had leaned six stage flats. Together they made an image about twenty feet

128 across and ten feet high. She could feel Kias beside her. His breath. His heart. He was grasping for something to say, but the terror, the excitement had overcome his ability to talk. “Calm yourself,” she said, patting Kias’ arm. She tried to smile when he shot a panicked glare down the length of his nose. “It’s okay,” she said. “It—it.” He gestured to the flats, and Rebecca turned to consider what was painted there. It was a massive vista of The Song of the Sea, that old kernel of sand at the heart of Exodus. The earth being flat in those days, the ground at the bottom of the image stopped dead at the shoreline. The stars in the sky came down to meet the water. Miniscule, awe- struck dots of colored paint, the fledgling nation of Israel, thronged along the banks of the sea, the Sea of End, the primal waters beyond the world. On a craggy rock jutting over the waves, Moses held his staff above his head, but this was no human-centered stage. In the upsurge of water mid-canvass Yahweh—bull horns thrusting from his head— grappled with the dragon that is in the sea. The painting caught that moment when Pharaoh must have realized his disaster, just as his strength ebbed from his coils. It was the moment right before Yahweh hurls him into the palpable darkness from which he came. Rebecca knelt, squinting. Twining between their legs, thousands upon thousands of Pullman coach cars steamed through the chasm of the divided waters. Kias gestured with his opened palms, shaking at the painting. But no sound came from his throat. Rebecca stood. She continued to pat his arm and to smile. “This—this,” he croaked. “Awake,” she said, punching his arm. “As in the days of old. Was it not thou that didst pierce the dragon and dry up the waters?” Kias scowled. He pointed. “I said, no more images of God. And…and horns?” Rebecca squared her fists on her hips. “The Psalms describe ol’ Yahweh like that,” she said. “I remember discussing that with Joe in a letter a couple of years back.” Kias sat on the floor. He curled his legs beneath him, resting his chin against his fists. “What am I going to do?” he said. “Oh, come off it,” she said. “It’s a great painting—not exactly subtle, but then subtle isn’t really what you’re after, is it?”

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Kias hung his head, his back bent. He stared at the diamond of floor contained within his curled legs. “Oh!” said Ivy. “Oh!” Rebecca’s first thought was that her water had broken. The baby was on the way. Adrenalin shot through her, but when she turned to see, Ivy’s concern was for a fat three-ring binder amid the books on one of the shelves. “What is it?” said Rebecca. “Nothing,” said Ivy. But Rebecca could see what it was. It was Joe’s sketchbook. Rebecca pulled it off the shelf. Several sketches sailed curly-Q to the ground. Gathering them up, she dodged Ivy’s reach. Kias stood to examine what she held. It was an altogether to graphic sketch of Eve giving birth to Cain as a fully-grown man. True enough, but in Joe’s rendition Cain’s fingers had turned to hypodermic needles. He’d plunged them into her thighs. “My God!” screamed Kias. He closed his eyes and shook his head. Rebecca turned the binder over in her hands. “Ultima Thule,” she said, tracing her fingers over the letters written on the cover. “The end of the world. The Romans called Iceland Ultima Thule, because it was the last land to the north. Beyond it lay an infinity of ice. Can you imagine that? A wind-swept world of ice and cold going on forever and ever and ever.” Kias raised his head. “That’s all fine and dandy,” he said. “But this is Lidell, Mississippi. Yes, I wanted shocking, but…do you see this sketch?” “The Good Book does say he was fully grown,” said Rebecca, opening the binder. Sketches poured out, scattering to the ground. Ivy crouched to retrieve them, but she was no match for Rebecca’s quick fingers. “Please, no one’s supposed to look at this,” she said. “Its just for Dr. Miller and Joe.” “What do you mean?” said Rebecca. “Everyone—we all keep a record,” said Ivy. “We write it all down. Only Joe drew it, because he thought better that way. It’s everything we can remember. Everything we can think. Then we give it to Dr. Miller.” “What?” said Rebecca. “You write what down?” “It,” said Ivy. “Everything.” Rebecca looked at the pages in the binder. She turned from one sketch to the next. Sketches of Joe. He was in the sketches. Joe sketched the world as if he saw it from across his own shoulder. In one sketch Joe stood next to the kiddie train, his palm pressed

130 against the bulbous nose of a happy dwarf. She flipped through the binder. In some of the sketches the old train sat rusting in tall weeds, beneath the hot glow of the sun. In another sketch Joe squatted beside the screwball eyes of the engine. Molded plastic pastel bunny rabbits and waving clowns hung from the sides of the cars; balloons and confetti, daisies and rainbows showered along the sides. A steam whistle lay across the engineer’s seat. A sketch of the controls showed them cut from sheet metal, the gauges cracked and useless. Birds had made nests in the floorboards by the pedals. The black and white crusted lumps of their shit covered everything. Of the seven cars Joe had sketched, no two were of the same theme: dwarves, with their pick-axes and silly smiles; another had mushrooms for seats; there was a Chinese dragon, a tiger, an atomic age space ship. In one sketch a happy pirate waved from the deck of his sloop. A caboose brought up the rear. “You’ve got to picture it,” said Kias, his voice drained of emotion. “Without all the clowns. There was going to be Abraham and Moses, the prophets. Paul.” Sure enough there was Joe squatting in the field, while the train chugged past. Plumes of black muck poured from the stack. A wild-eyed Ezekiel, grinning in his tatty over-alls and railroad cap, yanked the whistle string. He tipped a brown-bagged fifth to his lips. “This just won’t do,” said Kias, jabbing his fingers into his temples. Joe had sketched plenty of Moses, David and the prophets. There was Daniel in the lion’s den; there was Samson pressed between the columns. In one sketch Jacob the brakeman climbed atop a boxcar, as the steel trucks clattered down the pass, and the long, drawn out clash of the couplings rolled along the line. Cherubim and rose petals spat from the squeal of the wheels on the rail. At the boiler a pair of soot-faced dwarves chanted songs of life and death over the syncopated rhythm of their shovels in the coal box. In the caboose, sat Peter and Paul, a pair of Pinkerton’s. Train dicks, they sipped their whiskey; they toyed with their pistols; they played a round of five-card stud. They rolled past mountainsides, past the scars of the blast holes where the roadbed was leveled. Through mile long tunnels bored from the stone, the train pulsates, passing into the night. By day they crossed a trelliswork bridge a thousand miles high. The twin filaments of mirrored steel were flung across a gorge like a pair of spider strings suspended from a limb. In one of the sketches smoke poured out of a boxcar. Billowing into the blue, the smoke was thick, shot through with a filigree of red plasma tongues. They had caught

131 themselves on fire in there, in the boxcar. There was fire in the straw. The train rolled on, past dead bodies sunk in pools of burning black tar, through a moonscape of torment and razor wire, a land where the earth itself was bulging veins and slit flesh. Bones littered the ground. They rolled through an Ultima Thule of dried bones. Zombies lumbered out of the graves. In one sketch a man pulled his own guts from his torso. Centipedes and beetles fell out of him. Joe. There was a demon in the straw. Joe had set himself on fire in that boxcar. His forehead opened up, and scorpions poured down his face, his neck, down his arms and body. Clatter clack of legs. Scorpions with hypodermic tails. Joe howled with delight as the tiny lobster legs swarmed along his thighs. From his opened veins a kind of blood-fire, like napalm, oozed through the straw. Poor fool. It’s too late. It’s too late for you now. It’s too late for this toothless old bum. When they opened the boxcar they found the bottle, they smelled the whiskey, but they saw nothing more. He had flung himself into space over a gorge a thousand miles down. “What am I supposed to do with all this?” said Kias. “I can’t believe you never asked to see his sketches,” said Rebecca. “I really thought he was getting his life together,” said Kias. “I thought I could trust him.”

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Cinderella and Arzo had gone to bed. Their empties lay on the coffee table. All that evening the satellite had come in and out, whatever that meant; Tulane guessed it had to do with the TV, since the adults all stopped bickering about it whenever the picture worked. It was working now. She’d watched an episode of the Power Puff Girls, explaining the cartoon to Grandma Lurleen as it went along. But now there was just this show about a bunch of stupid boys doing stupid things with their stupid butts. It wasn’t the sort of thing she found remotely entertaining. Grandma Lurleen must not have been interested in it either. She had fallen asleep in the easy chair, her fingers curled around the remote control. Tulane watched those fingers. She watched the remote. Grandma Lurleen shifted on the easy chair. She snorted, grumbling, almost coming awake. Then she twisted, curling the remote beneath her, and snuggling it like a teddy. Shit, shit, shit, Momma would’ve said. Tulane hopped off the sofa. She wandered into the kitchen. On the counter she found some old kernels of un-popped corn in the bottom of a bowl. Salty. Greasy. She licked her fingers, as she lay on the floor next to the water heater, gazing into the blue pilot flame. After a while, she went back to the living room and then over to the cabinet underneath the stairs. Tulane liked confined spaces. She liked to sit in boxes, to feel the cardboard pressing her on all sides. She used to get the glasses man—the one Momma was with before Daniel—to fold the flaps of the box together, completely enclosing her. Then she’d roll around the carpet, banging into table legs and people, the dog, the television, until Momma made her stop. There were boxes in the cabinet. Better yet, there was the hole in the floor. She wanted to feel the walls all around her, the pressure, the resistance against her breathing. She wanted to sense the existence of the earth enclosing her, swallowing her up, to be consumed by the earth itself, and to rest in its belly. Tulane crept along the baseboards, until she reached the cabinet, but she jerked her hand away. Scratching. There was something scratching in there. Rats? A possum? The gnomes? Yes. It was those dirty ol’ gnomes down there, munching on the bones of little girls, grinding those bones between their molars. Tulane jumped to her feet and stumbled, clattering into the telephone stand. She looked over her shoulder at Grandma Lurleen,

133 snoring gently in the easy chair. The television blasted away. The zing-pow and the boing-sproing of primary colored cartoon chaos. Maybe it was just a possum under the stairs. Possum. It was just a possum. Without thinking much, or caring where she went, she headed up to the second floor landing. She took the steps backwards on her butt. At the top of the landing she walked from room to room, running her fingers over the rough surface of the wooden doors. She went into the bathroom. She pulled the light string. The faucet dripped. She collected the water on her finger. Then with the drip, drip still in her mind, she wandered back to the landing at the top of the stairs. The door to Grandpa Jack’s room stood slightly ajar. Momma had said repeatedly before she left not to go in there and bother Grandpa Jack. The air looked completely black in there, but she could hear the old man snoring. Or was that Grandma Lurleen on the easy chair? She pushed the door open. It squealed on it hinges. Crawling over the piles of clothing on the floor, she made her way to the bedside, where the outline of the old man lay beneath the sheet. She turned to go. “The light,” he said. She jumped, startled that he was even awake. Fumbling with the lamp, she flooded the room with light. “Sit for a minute,” he said, croaking like a frog. He felt for her hand, and she slipped her fingers into his. “Read,” he said. Tulane picked up the Bible from the nightstand. Such tiny and unfamiliar words. She struggled through the letters. None of it made any sense, but he closed his eyes. He listened. He seemed to float on the sound of her voice, halting and faint—even scared. The heart-thundered voice of the child. She read on in the darkened room. As she read, she could hear footfalls in the living room. They were slow, methodical. They came without emotion and without pause. She sounded out the words; she listened to the footfalls at the bottom of the stairs. It wasn’t Grandma Lurleen. The television cracked and howled. Grandma Lurleen would’ve clicked it off, if she’d awoke to find her gone. She’d have called out for Tulane. It was that possum from the cabinet. It was that possum coming up the stairs. It wasn’t the gnomes. It couldn’t be them. They never came up this far. Their brains boiled if they did. It couldn’t be the gnomes. She wouldn’t let it be. Still she read on, struggling with the letters and the words, hardly caring what they might’ve meant. She let their meanings fly away. She was just the sound of reading. She could feel the letters in her mouth, feel them flow into the dark corners of the room, hear

134 them scurry under the mounds of clothing, into the folds of the sheet around this half dead body and through the crack in the door, where the light from the landing stopped cold, as if barred from the room. Grandpa Jack reached across. He placed his palm on the Bible. “Go in the closet,” he said. “Hurry.” She snapped the Bible shut, dropping it on the nightstand. Then she jumped beneath the clothes at the foot of the bed, curling her body into a ball. Barely breathing, she peeked from beneath the fabric. The door creaked open. The end of a cane hit the floor, followed by a foot stepping gingerly in front of another. He sidestepped the piles. A gnome walked to the bed. “Birdman,” said Grandpa Jack. “You’re awake,” it said. Tulane struggled to see more than his feet. She saw him pick up Grandpa Jack’s medicine from the nightstand, and lean his cane against the door. The cane. It wasn’t a gnome. It was that angel with the long gray hair and the shocking blue eyes she had seen at the sandbox. He had a black bag, like a lunch box with him and he placed it on the bed beside Grandpa Jack. Then he opened the bottles of pills on Grandpa Jack’s nightstand. He shook the pills onto his palm, counting them. Then he sat on the edge of the bed. He pulled the sheet down past Grandpa Jack’s legs and he rolled him to his side. He tugged Grandpa Jack’s underwear down and he took from his black bag a rectal thermometer, which he placed in Grandpa Jack’s butt. The angel wrapped Grandpa Jack’s arm in a blood pressure cuff. He got a stethoscope out of the bag and he took Grandpa Jack’s blood pressure. When the air had wheezed out of the valve, the angel wrote notes on a small pad. Then he took Grandpa Jack’s hand. “All right,” he said. “We’ve done this… We’ve done this so many times, now, haven’t we? But let’s do it again. I think we’ve made some real progress. We really have. You know, I had no idea where all it would go when I stumbled across our little Joe Wooler, living the way he was in New Orleans. I still don’t. Frankly, I’d have thought you’d have ended it by now. And here your daughter has returned. What a lovely child she has. Perhaps… Perhaps it’s about the child… Yeah… what do you think, Jack? There’s a block we’re hitting, isn’t there? We’ve made real progress in your treatment, but there’s something getting in the way of our resolution. What is it? Perhaps the child will be a part of it… At any rate, here we go. You know the drill.”

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The angel rolled Grandpa Jack’s pajama sleeve up past his elbow. He tied a rubber band around his arm, just beneath the blood pressure cuff. From his black bag he took two syringes, laying them flat on Grandpa Jack’s chest. “Same as last time,” he said. “I have your morphine in syringe number two. In syringe number one we have 50mg of pure entheogenic endogenous dimethyltryptamine. DMT. Pour soul, we have distilled in our own laboratory, taken straight from the pineal gland of our little Joe Wooler.” Grandpa Jack held up two fingers. The angel leaned over his arm. He tapped against the vein. He primed the needle. “All in good time,” said the angel. “First, tell me…once more…about the punk.” “The punk,” said Grandpa Jack. “He was a dumb punk.” “He was pretty stupid,” said the angel, giving the shot. “Tell me about him again.” Grandpa Jack seized; vomiting, he convulsed and went limp. The angel pulled the needle out and returned it to his bag, but Tulane didn’t want to see anymore. She crawled as far back into the closet as she could. She lay huddled beneath the clothing. In a few minutes they began to talk, but their voices were muffled and far away. When the angel finally left, and she went back into the room, the lamp had been turned off. She crept to the bed, standing over Grandpa Jack as he snored fitfully. The sheet had been pulled back up to his chin and his hands were placed over his chest in a pose of blessed calm. She stood watching him for a while and then she left, returning to the living room, where Grandma Lurleen had awoke from her nap. “An angel comes to Grandpa Jack,” said Tulane. “That’s just the man from the hospice,” said Grandma Lurleen. But Tulane didn’t believe this for a minute. Grandma Lurleen had been asleep. How could she know? The angel had come up out of the floor, from down there were they kept the bad thoughts. He’d gone back into that hole when he was finished with Grandpa Jack.

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Part II

There were hundreds of sketches in Joe’s book. Perhaps a thousand. Some were still in the bindings, but many had broken free. They were stuffed together now, in smudgy clumps of paper and pastel, charcoal and paint. Some were stuck together. Some were folded into tiny squares. Some were blackened over with reworking, redrawing, palimpsests of trial and error; still others appeared to have sprung perfect as any Rembrandt from a single stroke of Joe’s pencil. The sketches were fantastical. The sketches were mundane. When they got home from his studio Rebecca tried to sleep. But that proved impossible. The imagery kept coming back to her. Around four in the morning she arose and walked down to the kitchen, to fire up the Mr. Coffee and settle in at the table. She wandered through the sketchbook without plan or rationale. At first the book appeared to contain no narrative, no method, but there was something in it, there was something hidden under there. Something huge moved beneath the current of the sketches. In one sketch Joe sat naked on a slab of fallen rock beside a mountain stream. He held his arms aloft, as they vaporized into cloud. In another a white robed man had cut away the top of Joe’s skull. Smiling, he poured a beaker of molten gold into the brainpan. There were images of Joe swimming through space. In several he swam away from the dead embers of his own dying body. He had moons growing out of the palms of his hands. In another he watched through a proscenium, looking into the canyon where the slab of rock lay by the cold spring run-off beneath the mountain where God lives. There was Joe, watching himself through the proscenium as he diversified into cloud. In others he sailed through cathedrals blooming within cathedrals. A series of images showed a massive boulder being tossed into the upturned surface of Joe’s eye, disturbing the reflected image of the mountain where God lives. In Joe’s eye ripples of blue expanded outward from the pupil; they overflowed the whites; they splashed into the sky.

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She saw sketches of a cool night, a night of no moon. The desert stars glowed pale white. The immense wash of the Milky Way flowed from horizon to horizon. People squatted around a fire. A man in white robes spoke in the middle. There were sketches of Joe sliding funky and rhythmic down side streets in New Orleans. Flash of gold. Flash of diamonds. The opened doors of taxicabs, of limousines. Joe is shirtless in these sketches. He stands with his hands in his pockets; he waits in the heat, along the starry-eyed avenues. He waits for the mirrored windows to roll down at the curb. She saw sketches of outer space, of incredible technologies, built on planetary scales. Massive juggernauts, hodge-podges of technological monstrosity, they staggered man- like across the icy plane of a distant moon. Joe’s asteroid cities, his Dyson spheres. She sat looking at the sketch of an unfinished Dyson sphere. All around the central star girders formed a geodesic sphere a hundred and eighty million miles across. Where the surface had been completed stretches of cultivation grew between forests and lakes, rivers and oceans, mountain ranges and jungle. Here and there cities and small towns dotted the surface. Where the work was yet to be done, those juggernauts vacuumed up dust and interstellar gases; they grappled with asteroids; they tore apart planets. But where was the line between fantasy and truth? The Dyson sphere hurlting through space? The taxicab in the hot hot night of New Orleans, where Joe leaned so nonchalant with his shirt undone by the street lamp? Those cities and towns in the image of the Dyson sphere, was that the gulf coast of America in there? §§§ “I just want to know what his life was like,” said Rebecca. She had sat with the sketchbook for hours. The pages were spread across the table. Through the window blinds over the sink the morning sun fell across her arms and face. She had run out of coffee long before sunrise, and the machine hummed and chugged on the counter, brewing a fresh pot. “Dr. Miller saved my life,” said Ivy, standing in the doorway to the kitchen. Uncomfortable and bleary eyed, her face a splotchy patchwork of pillow lines, she held the bottom of her stomach. “Joe’s too. I just don’t think you should look at that book.” “Yes,” said Rebecca, smoothing her black hair behind her ear. It fell forward across her face, and she dug in her pocket for a rubber band. “But I have to know. What was his

138 life? I feel so bad that I wasn’t there for him, and now… Now, I feel like nobody cares that he’s dead.” Ivy looked away. “Well, I care,” said Ivy. “I care. He… I’m sorry if I’m not grieving the way you think I should, but I’ve got a great deal on my plate right now. He left me with a great deal on my plate, don’t you think?” “I know,” said Rebecca. “I with people had been more helpful. I feel awful.” “Please,” said Ivy. “Please, don’t. It was awful, but I really don’t wan to talk about it.” Bleary-eyed, Tulane staggered into the kitchen. Rebecca rose, gathering the sketches. She placed the binder aside, and took a box of Cheerios from the cabinet. “I just want to know—” “I don’t want to talk about it,” said Ivy, struggling to her feet. “I’ll go, if you want me to go. You’re just like my parents. All they ever wanted me to do was talk about it. Talk about it, talk about it. Blah, blah, blah.” “No. I don’t—” “Talk, talk, talk,” said Ivy. Head down, her fists balled, she plowed out of the room and up the stairs. “Christ,” said Rebecca, burying her fingers in the tangles of her hair. “Here, Pumpkin. Pour yourself some cereal.” Filling a bowl with milk, she set the Cheerios on the table. Tulane looked at the box. “Spoons are in the drawer,” said Rebecca. “Momma, last night—” “Not now,” said Rebecca. “Eat.” She wandered upstairs, looking in the room, glancing in on Daddy. She thought about knocking at Lurleen’s door, but she didn’t. Ivy was in the bathroom. It was the only place left. She knocked. “Go away,” said Ivy. “I don’t want to talk.” Rebecca knocked again, but Ivy no longer responded. She was about to start a third round of knocking, when Tulane began to scream from the kitchen. “Momma! Hey, Momma!” she called. Rebecca ran to the kitchen, but it was just an accident. Tulane had poured the entire contents of the cereal box into her bowl, spilling Cheerios across the table and onto the floor. Rebecca grabbed up Joe’s sketchbook. “It just came out,” Tulane said. “It just came pouring right out. There was nothing I could do, Momma. Nothing.”

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“I know,” said Rebecca. “I know. Its okay.” She took a dishtowel from the sink, and used it to corral the cheerios into handfuls she could dump into the garbage. Upstairs she heard banging on the bathroom door. “Who’s in here?” Arzo bellowed. “Open up…Rebecca?” “I’m in the kitchen.” “Well, who’s in the bathroom?!” “Just a minute!” Rebecca wrung the dishtowel in the sink. She scooped up another handful of soppy cheerios. “What should I eat?” said Tulane, her tiny feet kicking the air beneath the table. “Just a minute,” she said. There was more heat in her voice than she had intended and Tulane put her head down on her forearms. “Open up!” Arzo continued. “Jack? Are you in here? Lurleen? Damnit. I got a monster in me.” Rebecca ran to the stairs, holding the dripping towel in both hands. “I said, just a minute, you old fool. You’ll scare her to death like that.” “I ain’t got a minute,” said Arzo. “And what’s it to you, anyhow?” He pounded on the door. “Just let her alone.” “It’s that Ivy girl?” he said. “Damnit. I’m about to pop.” “Then go outside,” said Rebecca. She went back to the sink and wrung the dishtowel free of milk. “I don’t want to go outside; this is my house,” said Arzo. “No, it isn’t!” This new addition to the gathering chaos belonged to Lurleen. “Fine,” he said. “That’s just fine. I reckon I’ll have to piss out the window.” Rebecca heard him stomp across the floor above her. The window in her bedroom screeched open. Then Cinderella was howling. At the sink Rebecca pulled the string on the blinds, flooding the kitchen with daylight. The shadow of a long, thin drizzle of piss danced around the walls. Something shattered in the room above, and in a high-pitched squeal, Cinderella began to recount every uncouth aspect of Arzo’s pathetic personality. The litany ran from Arzo’s inability to hold a steady job, to his miserable performance at satisfying her physical needs.

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“Well, I’d have an easier time of it—” he began. “Shut up, just shut up,” screamed Lurleen. She had come out of her room to stand on the landing. Then one of the doors slammed. Rebecca mopped up the last of the milk. “How about some eggs?” she said. Tulane nodded cautiously. “It’s okay, Pumpkin,” said Rebecca, smiling “This is how it is around here, but it’s just a lot of bluster. What were you going to say earlier?” “Nothing,” said Tulane. She balled herself up on the seat. Rebecca hesitated a moment. The poor child had seen her share of adults fighting. She had seen Rebecca fight. Seen her call a man names and heard names hurled back. She had seen these things. Rebecca had too, all her life, but she never saw that with Daniel. Calm. Life on the Palouse was so calm. “You want to go driving again?” said Lurleen. “We’ve got to pick up Joe’s ashes.” She stood in the doorway, using her palm to smooth the wisps of hair back across her head. She had her purse with her. She was dressed and ready to go. The front door slammed. Rebecca took a frying pan from the cabinet and set it on the stove. She took eggs from the refrigerator. “I’d like to see what’s wrong with Ivy first,” said Rebecca. “Joe used to lock himself in the bathroom for hours, you remember?” Outside Arzo fired up his truck. They could hear him fishtail down the driveway to the road. “Yeah,” said Rebecca. In spite of herself she smiled, as she broke two eggs into a bowl and scrambled them together with a bit of milk. “He could stay in there for hours, all right. Let me feed Tulane these eggs. I reckon Daddy could use breakfast, too.” Lurleen poured a cup of coffee. In a draping floral dress, Cinderella bounced down the stairs to the front door. She stood looking through the screen at the dust from his tires. Then, satisfied with his absence, she pranced into the kitchen. “Thank God, Almighty,” she sighed. “It’ll be days and days of freedom, now.” §§§ When Rebecca went upstairs to feed Daddy his morning Gerber’s, Ivy was still locked in the bathroom. She stood on the landing for a moment watching the door. One of the sketches came back to her: Joe and Ivy with a baby. They walked along a deserted city street, with the infant wrapped in a T-shirt. Was this Andromeda? The baby Ivy “lost” when she and Joe first met? Rebecca thought that had been a miscarriage. Hadn’t Ivy agreed that it was a miscarriage? Or had she simply dropped her eyes and allowed

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Rebecca to think what she would? She walked to the bathroom door. She placed her ear against it. “Ivy?” she called. “It’s all right. I’m not going to think bad of you, I just want to know about Joe’s life. You have to understand, I really wish I’d helped.” There was no answer. She could hear Ivy’s slow and steady breath behind the door, as if she stood just on the other side, pressed against it. Rebecca placed her palms on the wood. She closed her eyes. She tried to imagine Joe and Ivy together with a newborn infant wandering the vicious streets of New Orleans. “Ivy?” Giving up, she walked back to Daddy’s room. He lay beneath the covers. She set out the spoon and the napkin and the jars of baby food. She twisted the knob on the lamp. His body looked straight and stiff. Rigid. For an instant she thought he was dead, but his face slowly turned, his good eye swimming into focus. She took the top off the baby food jar and spooned some into his mouth. “What do you remember most of Joe?” she said. “I remember the moonlight on the gulf waters,” he said. “Was Joe with you?” “No.” “I’m wondering about Joe,” she said. “He got involved in some kind of therapy group. I guess it helped him. Ivy too. That’s where they met.” “Joe wasn’t there,” he said. “I told you. But the moon was there.” “Daddy,” she said. “About Joe. I’m just wondering about him. About his life. Don’t you wonder?” “I’m trying to tell you,” he said. “What?” she said. “What you asked about yesterday. I… Last night I had a dream. I… In it I told you.” “I know you were in Parchman,” she said. “I read the clippings in the newspaper. Momma says you didn’t kill that woman.” “Your momma don’t know everything,” he said. “True I didn’t kill anyone. Never have. I’ve never killed a man or a woman either. But Leo told me to get rid of her body. I did that. I wrapped her up in a tablecloth and I drove her down to the gulf waters, that same stretch of beach I’d been to as a boy. I had this piece of plywood and I carried her to the shore on it, and then we walked into the gulf. Out towards the moon on the water, out where I’d seen the ghost ship years before. I remember the waves rolling around my

142 feet as I went. Soon they were crashing all around me. I stumbled once, but then I got past the breakers. I just kept walking, carrying her out to sea. Soon I was treading water, pushing her ahead of me on that piece of plywood. I remember standing in my tuxedo at Leo’s bar. I’d be cleaning the glasses or mixing the drinks. I remember watching while all that big money come pouring out of their pockets to puddle up at her feet and go trailing after those high heels. I stayed with her a long time out there in the water. Her skin was blue in the moonlight. I touched her eyes; I felt the orbs beneath her eyelids. The incredible sadness of those fake lashes, as they fell away in the salt water. Then I took her feet in one hand and gently pushed her out to sea. The water rippled over her head. I stayed out there until she was gone, just treading water and looking at the place where she disappeared. She was just a poor, dumb country girl those sons-of-bitches had dressed up in lace stockings. I was just a poor dumb country boy they sent to get rid of her.” “They were corrupt,” Rebecca whispered. “It all came out in the paper.” “The angel,” he said. “Who comes to me. Who brings me the pills—my pills—” He grasped weakly at her arm. “Just a minute, Daddy,” she said. He had finished the first of the baby food jars. She unscrewed the cap on the second jar. The she picked up the bottle of Dilaudid and shook of the pills into her palm. “Have some water.” “The angel,” he said. “The hospice man,” she said. “It’s the man from the hospice who brings them. He gives you morphine sometimes. Now, eat your breakfast and tell me what you remember about Joe.” “I remember standing in the gulf waters with Joe in my arms,” he said. “No,” she said. “Joe. What do you remember of Joe?” “Joe,” he said. “Yes. In the gulf. We drove down for vacation.” “Oh, that’s right,” she said. “You rolled up your pants and wandered out with him. Out past the breakers. I remember Momma was furious. She sat on the blanket and screamed at you the whole way, but you and Joe walked calmly out to sea, like maybe you weren’t coming back. Is that what you remember?” “Yes,” he said. “Joe loved the sound of the ocean rolling through.”

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“I remember Joe screaming bloody murder,” said Lurleen. She drove with the window rolled down, her arm flopped out, as if she had been driving for years. Her driving was no better, but her confidence was greatly improved. “They must’ve got a hundred yards out to sea, and he was completely terrified.” “I don’t remember him being scared,” said Rebecca. “You were just a girl yourself,” said Lurleen. “But I remember.” “What do you remember that was good?” said Rebecca. She had brought Joe’s sketchbook with her. It lay on her lap and she thumbed through the pages. “About Joe?” said Lurleen, with a sigh. “My memories of Joe aren’t good, mostly. I know that’s not entirely his fault. But—I just—I guess I remember him crying a lot. He used to come home crying all the time. Everyday. He’d come home crying because some boy had hit him, or some girl. All he did was get into fights. You’d think he’d have learned to avoid them, since they never turned out in his favor. I guess I should’ve seen it coming: the thievery. The pistols. But kids are kids.” Lurleen shrugged. “What was I supposed to do?” “He didn’t get in fights,” Rebecca said. “He just got beat up a lot. There’s a difference. I know. I used to get into fights.” “Really?” said Lurleen. “I never noticed you to get into a fight.” “Well, I did,” she said. “But Joe wasn’t like that. It’s not just me remembering him as a boy, either. Ivy says he wasn’t mean or violent or anything.” “He did rob the Waffle House,” said Lurleen. “Yes, but that’s just it, Momm—Lurleen. Don’t you find that a bit strange? Don’t you wonder where he got the drugs? The pistol?” “He tried to steal you father’s—” “Christ, he just wanted to sell them. He’s poverty stricken.” “That’s what you want to believe.” “And you want to believe he was violent? Why?” Lurleen pursed her lips and said nothing. Rebecca flipped through the sketches.

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She saw a picture of sunlight slashing across the kitchen table. Joe and Daddy sat there, slathering jam over toast. In another Joe held a fishhook, wrapped by a worm. His tiny fingers were mealy with worm-snot. There was a sketch of Joe as a boy crawling through tall grass, while a young Rebecca pretended not to see him. In one Daddy stood shaving at the soap-flecked mirror in the bathroom. He held his chin in his meaty fingers. He ran the razor down his cheek. There was a sketch of a boy holding a sand dollar in one hand. It wasn’t Joe. The boy had tossed off his brogans. It was Daddy. In another sketch he’d dropped the sand dollar and now his palm was marked like a cross-section of fruit. One sketch showed the head of a chicken cast aside on a dusty road. In the same picture a hand held the rope of the tire swing and framed in that circle of rubber, there floated a dragonfly. Turning the sketch she came to a picture where Lurleen had cut her finger with a kitchen knife. In the image she held her cut finger to her lips, but the blood ran down her forearm, dripping from her elbow. It was a bad cut. “Oh?” said Lurleen. “Oh. I remember that!” The Gremlin weaved across the yellow lines. “That was the day Elvis Presley died. I remember that perfectly. That—Joe wasn’t even alive then. That was 1977.” “It must be a different time,” said Rebecca. “You must’ve cut yourself again.” “No,” said Lurleen. Her eyes darted from the sketch to the road and back again. “Look. You can see I’m pregnant there. I was pregnant with you.” “And you cut yourself,” said Rebecca. “Sure. I remember now. Daddy told us about that. You heard on the radio that Elvis was dead. You were cutting up vegetables in the kitchen and you missed and sliced your finger open. Daddy said there was lots of blood.” “Why’d he tell you that?” “He said that was why you were depressed all the time.” Lurleen scowled. She jerked the wheel, sending the Gremlin skidding around a corner and onto the side street leading into Willy’s neighborhood. “That’s got to be the silliest damned thing I’ve ever heard.” “I guess so,” said Rebecca. “I took it for granted when I was little. You sure used to listen to a lot of Elvis. I remember one time I heard the record skipping, so I snuck in and tried to fix it for you. Daddy caught me and jerked me off the floor. He was screaming and yelling. ‘Don’t you ever!’ ‘Don’t ever!’ But then later he came into my room when I

145 was reading to Joe. He sat on the edge of my bed and he cried and cried. He told us about how you cut your finger when you heard Elvis Presley was dead. He said a big chunk of your soul bled out through that finger. He said that’s why you laid in the bed all day and why you were sick all the time.” “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” she said. This time Lurleen managed to park the car on the street and not in Willy’s front yard. She smiled at the satisfaction that gave her. “You seriously believed that?” “I was just a child,” said Rebecca. Lurleen pursed her lips, annoyed. “Let’s go see Willy. But—strange.” Lurleen took the book of sketches from Rebecca’s lap. Lines drew across her forehead as she studied the picture. It was all there: The knife, the cutting board, the steaming pot where she tossed the vegetables, the blood running down her forearm, the radio sitting over the sink, that younger, pregnant Lurleen, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail the way she used to do. There was fear around her eyes. The sketch showed all the pain between her brows, as she sucked the blood from her wounded finger. “Why would he draw that?” she said. “He wanted to understand,” said Rebecca. “Joe was trying to understand you.” Crossing her arms, Rebecca looked at Willy’s ramshackle old house, before she let her eyes wander down the tree-lined street to the other houses on the block. Old houses all of them, solid and well meaning. What strange lives such people must lead. She touched Lurleen’s arm. “Daddy admitted it,” she said. “This morning when I was feeding him. About Parchman.” “Really?” said Lurleen. She seemed only vaguely to be paying attention. “I’ve always wondered,” said Rebecca. “Wondered what?” “What he did wrong. I knew there was something. When we converted, it was redemption, redemption, redemption. You had to be redeemed. I was just a little girl and frankly I don’t think I’d done anything all that wrong at all yet. But Daddy was nuts about it. People were evil. They were monsters. He even got me to thinking that way. I guess I still do, but without all the religion. Still, I always knew he’d done something wrong, you know? He was paying for something all of his life.” “Ah,” said Lurleen. “And you think you understand it now?”

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“Sure,” said Rebecca. “He should’ve gotten her justice. He felt guilty for not going to the police.” “You see this picture of Joe’s?” Lurleen tapped the sketch where she held her finger to her lips. “That never happen in our kitchen. That’s just the way your daddy told it. So that’s how Joe sketched it. There’s that same radio we still have sitting in the same window sill over the sink. But that’s not where it happened.” “Where’d it happen?” “At your grandfather’s. Jack didn’t tell ya’ll that, because he didn’t want to have to talk about it. Blamed it all on Elvis Presley. See your daddy leaves out the details that don’t suit him. He tells, but he doesn’t tell all. If something bothers him, he just leaves it out. Jack’s daddy… Well, you know the story of his mule wagon trek to the gulf? That was Jack’s daddy who sent him down there and Jack not much older than that baby girl of yours. What Jack doesn’t tell you in that story is that when he got back home his momma was dead. Got heat stroke in the field. See Mr. Wooler used to work his wife and boys like they were sharecroppers. Made them pay him off at the end of the season or he’d whip them. One lick with a thick strap for each missing bushel. She fell down dead by the time Jack returned. When he got out of prison we went down there to see his old man, so Jack could show me off to him, if you can believe it. August 16, 1977. I was making a stew for them in the kitchen and listening to the radio when the man came on and said that he was dead. Elvis. I like Elvis, of course. Who doesn’t? And my hand slipped. I cut my finger right to the bone. Right there. It was a bad cut. And that old man stood in that doorway laughing at me. He didn’t go to get a Band-Aid or a towel or nothing. He was fairly drunk by then and he kept saying, ‘pour a little whiskey on it. Get some in her too. Crying over that fool of a singer boy. Can’t even keep her fingers out the knife.’ He just laughed and laughed. You know what? Let me tell you something about your father. It wasn’t my soul that poured out of that cut that day. It was his. Every one of those drops was your daddy’s soul pouring out on that counter, when that old bastard laughed at this silly wife he’d brought down to show off, like she was some kind prize- winning daisy.” She handed the sketchbook back to Rebecca. “You ought not to look at that,” she said.

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They stalked across the yard to Willy’s front porch, where they stood for five minutes slamming the brass knocker against the door. “He’s got to be here,” said Lurleen, pointing at Willy’s powder blue Alfa Romeo in the drive. “You don’t think Eunice has come back, do you?” Rebecca shrugged. “Maybe he’s in the backyard,” she said. They walked around the side of the house, through the wooden gate and into the backyard. With no worry for the respectable eyes of his neighbors, Willy had let the weeds and the shrubbery go completely wild out back. The ground cover had jumped its confines. It ran thick across the flagstones. Ivy crept everywhere. Thorny bushes snagged at their clothes. From a window—Rebecca guessed it was a room off the parlor—they heard an acoustic guitar and a country twang voice. Standing on her tiptoes she tried to look in the window, but it was too high up. The brick walls loomed above them. Intense. Willy’s house was no mere dwelling; it stood witness to the will of the man who had built it. The massive flagstones beneath her feet and the weathered bricks beneath her fingers were cold and hard, resistant to the touch, even as the jungle did its best to reclaim them. “Climb up,” said Lurleen. “Are you kidding me?” But Lurleen was not kidding. She stood by the wall with her hands laced together and her feet planted apart. Rebecca put one foot in the saddle of Lurleen’s fingers. She dug her nails in between the bricks and she hauled herself standing, dodging her head to see around the curtains. “What’s he doing in there?” hissed Lurleen. “He’s playing with his toys,” said Rebecca. The room was Willy’s library. Books lined the walls from floor to ceiling, but there were no chairs, no desks. Stretching from one side of the room to the other a battle raged in miniature. “His toys?” “Little soldiers. It’s a battle,” said Rebecca. “There’s blue guys and red guys. Horses and cannons, buildings and trees. Earth. He’s got mounds of earth in there. Like real dirt, I mean. It’s all over the floor. I think maybe it’s the Battle of Waterloo.”

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Through the window she saw Willy Tate hunched over a tiny metal cannon. He appeared to be dabbing paint on it with a tiny brush. In the far corner of the room, a young blond haired convict, in back and white striped ring-arounds, squatted with a guitar in his hands. “Looks like he took your advice on getting a man from the county lock-up,” she said. “Good,” said Lurleen. “I’ve been telling him he needs to clean this place up if he’s planning on winning this election next year.” “I don’t think that’s what he got him for,” said Rebecca. Out front they heard a car door slam beyond the gate. They listened to the sharp click of cowboy boots progressing up the walkway to the front porch. They heard the brass knocker. Then after half a minute, a raw fist began to pound against the door. “He can’t hear it,” said Rebecca, climbing down from the window. “Because of the music.” They crept to the gate. They couldn’t see the porch, but looking between the slats of wood. She could tell it was Ronnie Tibbit’s black Riviera parked behind the Alfa Romeo in the drive. The music stopped. Ronnie continued to pound at the door. When it opened, they pressed themselves against the gate, trying to hear, but the conversation came to them in wind-garbled half-words and broken phrases. After a while the door slammed shut. Ronnie pounded again, and then again. Then his boots scuffed along the flagstones to the drive. They could hear him cursing as he went. Through the slats Rebecca could see he was angry, flushed red and fuming. Getting behind the wheel, he slammed his door, and brought the motor to life. Then, having backed out of the drive, he left smoking black marks on the concrete and the road. “Hello there.” It was Willy. He stood on the flagstones beside the window through which they had looked. Dressed in a cream-colored summer suit and a bright red bow tie, he stood with his arms akimbo, and a bemused smile on his face. “I saw your car.” “We were worried,” said Lurleen. “Your car was home, but you didn’t answer your door. It was my idea to look.” She glanced at the window. “You looked in my window?” he said. He turned to stare at the panes, scratching the skin around his neck. He glanced at them, sheepishly. “It’s Waterloo,” he said. “Midday, around the time of D’Erlon’s charge. The battle for the Château de Hougoumont has been underway for about two and a half hours now.” Willy gestured with his hands as if he

149 could see it all laid out, just as it was in the house. “A grand battery of eighty guns has just finished cannonading the British center, and four divisions of French infantry have poured into the valley between the two armies. Beyond the ridge—” He motioned with his hand as if this might be going on in the kitchen. “—The Heavy and Union brigades are rallying. They’ll drive the French off soon enough, but the instant—the moment I’m trying to capture here—shows a brigade of Dutch-Belgians fleeing before the advance of the French columns. You can see on the hillside over looking the scene, Napoleon himself with a suite of officers and aides-de-camp. Below, the Duke rides on horseback through the smoke.” “Rebecca says you got a convict in there.” Willy smiled. “Sure,” he said, returning from his revery. “Like you told me.” “He’s supposed to clean up your yard,” she said. “Well, Bobby plays guitar better than he rakes,” said Willy. “What did Ronnie want?” asked Rebecca. Willy and Lurleen were already walking through the gate, leaving her alone by the side of the house. “He’ll calm down,” said Willy. “He’s upset over this election business. Bellman’s retiring from the state house, you see, so it’s an open seat. That fool Ronnie thinks he can win it. Like I told you, the county’s going to a full-time prosecutor next election, and Ronnie knows I’ll be running for it, and well…let’s just say I’ve got some connections in the media. Linda Flanagan, the anchor with WJAX-TV 12, she owes me some favors.” “Didn’t you save her life?” said Lurleen. “During that Marty Brown escape.” “I guess you could say that,” said Willy. “See, Ronnie wants to go the whole get- tough-on-crime route, and he wants to coordinate our messages or some nonsense. Honestly, I’m not sure I even want to go full-time.” “You don’t want to go full-time?” said Lurleen. “What kind of talk is that?” “Ronnie’s running for office?” said Rebecca. “Seriously? That low-life?” “Sure,” said Willy. He grinned. “But I told him I was apt to bag the whole county prosecutor thing and run for Bellman’s seat myself, next year.” “Okay,” said Lurleen. “I can see that. That is thinking. Willy Tate, state rep.” “And that’s why he’s building this church with Kias and Joe,” said Rebecca. “He wants to come off as some kind of ‘Honest Christian Businessman’ for the election.”

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Willy shrugged. “A bail bonds man isn’t exactly the sort of thing that inspires confidence in the voters. So, you’ve sold the field, then?” Lurleen nodded. “We haven’t signed all the papers,” she said. “But they’re starting to build.” “Good,” said Willy. “Excellent. I’ll run over to the sheriff’s department, and see if I can’t get that work detail to come help.”

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It certainly wasn’t the first secret Tulane ever kept from her mother. She was a secretive child. Always would be. All of her life Tulane would hold herself guarded against others. Even many years later, when she was in college, she held a deep terror of crowds, of what they might see when they looked inside her with their noonday eyes. As a child her fears where nameless, great dragon-like fears that roared out the darkness above her. They were huge as the whole wide world. They were her mother. She was born of fear. Fear and slamming doors. She could hear the doors slamming all through her mind. Down a corridor of sobs and grunting barks she heard the staccato rifle-fire of slamming doors. She heard the door slam, and then her mother lay crying on the sofa, her arms wrapped around a throw pillow. Beyond the walls, she heard the barking grunts of the man with the clicking box and the earphones. He got mad, mad, mad whenever Tulane won at Candyland. So she let him win. She never told Momma. Wasn’t he proud of himself? Strutting around like a peacock. She thought he was happy. She thought that made Momma happy. But that night Momma gathered her in her arms and carried her out of the Winnebago. They stole silently into the darkness of the white-haired man with the spectacles who was so smart when he called Momma stupid. Tulane never said a thing about his cold eyes, or the way his face screwed up, like he just chewed something rotten whenever he spoke out of earshot from Momma. He was just so brilliant. He was such a smart man, and Tulane said nothing. She couldn’t bear to see Momma curled on the sofa with that throw pillow under her chest, while the doors slammed down the line, staccato as gunfire, and cruel as razors. She was secretive, and like all secretive people, she had a deep thirst to know the secrets of others. When Ivy finally came out of the bathroom, Tulane was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the landing, waiting to ambush her. “An angel came out of the floor,” she said. “Last night. I saw him. He talked to Grandpa Jack.” “You saw him?” said Ivy. She had been crying. “I heard him,” she said. “I heard him crawling in the walls. Then I saw him talking to Grandpa Jack.”

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Ivy struggled as she dropped to one knee. She took Tulane’s face in her palms. “What did he look like?” she said, her adult eyes darting across the surface of Tulane’s face. “I’ve seen him before,” said Tulane. “He said he was a friend of Grandpa Jack’s. He had white hair and white clothes.” Ivy looked worried. Tulane didn’t speak. She looked around the landing as flashes of Idaho shot through her head. She thought of Coconut and the puppies, playing house with Julie Bean, Daniel in the field with his dogs, and the wheat blowing like the surface of the sea. Home. She thought of home. She was homesick for Daniel, for a bowl of popcorn between them and the room full of sheep smell. She thought of Momma laying back in the easy chair, laughing softly, not howling—Momma never howled—but just that soft rain of laughter Momma had when she was calm and at peace and lying back in the easy chair, as they ate popcorn in the evenings. Momma didn’t want to know about the angel. It would upset her. Like the talk of angels had upset her when Tulane came home from Julie Bean’s with the sheet of stickers and plastered them all over the wall behind her bed. Teal and pink gowns. Mother of pearl wings. Angels to watch over us by night. “I’ll never tell,” she said. “I’ll never tell Momma and we’ll be home soon—but.” “What?” said Ivy, struggling to stand. She leaned into the banister. “Does he live in the floor?” “What do you mean?” said Ivy, squinting, breathing. She was breathing hard. “Let’s go see,” said Tulane. “We can’t. Aunt Cindy’s in the living room.” “No. She’s in the kitchen. She’s doing dishes. We could look.” Ivy glanced around the landing. Vacant. The upstairs was vacant. They couldn’t even hear Grandpa Jack snoring in his room. They might’ve been all alone in the house. Ivy nodded. She took Tulane’s hand, and they crept silently down the stairs, Tulane leading her charge from one step to the next, as if Ivy might fall and burst apart. In the kitchen they heard the sound of water running, of plates being stacked. They were not alone, but no one paid them any mind. They were children. Both of them. They were ignored. Aunt Cindy sang to herself as she clattered through her chores. Happy. Oblivious. In her glee, Aunt Cindy stopped the song and began to argue out loud with her absent Arzo, as if he

153 stood in the room. It seemed to Tulane, as they rounded the stairs and slunk down to the cabinet, that she was getting the best of him this time around. Opening the cabinet door, Tulane crawled inside. She pried the trap door open with the screwdriver Momma had left on the floor. She found the flashlight on one of the shelves. It took Ivy a moment to struggle down to her knees and then to all fours. Blocking out the light, Ivy could get little more than her head and shoulders into the cabinet. They were in darkness for an instant, and then Tulane pushed the button on the flashlight. Hot. It was hot in there. Their breath was close together and hot. “I can’t go any further,” said Ivy. “I’m too big.” “I’ll go,” said Tulane. She aimed the flashlight into the dark hole. Lights twinkled in the room below. The computers and the reel-to-reels. The crystal gardens and the geodes. Down the darkness, where the gnomes drank goblets of liquid light, where they feasted on bloody bread made from the bones of little girls. She saw the pulley-work doors, the twisting maze of passageways below, as they spiraled out of sight, into the darkness beneath the city, where none dared venture anymore. Not in a thousand years, because they didn’t know the codes. Eyes in the darkness and teeth beneath those eyes. Jagged teeth to rip her flesh apart in the darkened caverns. “Wait,” said Ivy. But Tulane had already angled herself down the hole. She descended the ladder, gripping the flashlight between her chin and chest. At the bottom she crouched, aiming the light in all directions. Canned goods and dusty bottles. “Where are the gnomes?” she said, looking up at Ivy, who struggled to peer through the hole above. “Where is the angel who lives here with them?” “Joe told me there’s a tunnel,” said Ivy. “He said Grandpa Jack cut a tunnel from the cellar to the outside. In case the police ever came for him. He dug himself an escape.” Tulane cast the beam of the flashlight around the walls, the shelves, the boxes, and bottles. “I don’t see it,” said Tulane. “There,” said Ivy, pointing. At the bottom of one wall sat a half-circle of corrugated aluminum. Shining the flashlight into it, Tulane could see another hole. This was a hole within a hole. The maze went further on. She was only at the foyer of the gnome hole. That scratching through the walls, it was those gnomes, that angel, coming up through the tunnel. She peered over the

154 lip of corrugated aluminum. Silently, she listened. She wanted so much to hear that scratching in there. That possum? Those gnomes? The angel? If she could only see him, if they would only jump through the hole, teeth bared and claws slashing, she wouldn’t be afraid anymore. Terror could fully seize her. She could scream and Momma would fly down here and save her, but they never came. She couldn’t scream. Quietly, she stood by the lip of aluminum, gazing at the black hole in the ground. If she could just only hear them, then she’d know where they were. If the gnomes where near or far. Perhaps they sat just on the other side of that veil of shadow. They could be within arm’s reach. Or perhaps they were miles deep by now. If she could only hear the scratching sound, then she could say, there’s something crawling around down there. But she heard nothing. She saw nothing. And as it is with fear, seeing nothing and hearing nothing, suddenly it was everywhere. The fear. It was down the hole and it was coming out of the hole and it was above her on the ladder and it was swirling around the shelves of canned goods and bottles. It was crawling all over her. The fear. The fear was like a million tiny spiders crawling through her veins.

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When they got home, after driving by the funeral parlor to pick up Joe’s remains, Rebecca marched straight to Daddy’s room with Joe’s sketchbook tucked under her arm. She threw the door open and plopped down in the chair next to the bed, planting the book firmly between them. She opened it to the sketch of Lurleen cutting her finger. “I remember this,” she said, tapping the sketch. “I remember this plain as day. I crept into this room on my belly to flip that Presley record over, because the stylus was popping at the end. You grabbed me up and hauled me off to my room, yelling not to ever, ever set foot in here again. Momma needed her rest. All afternoon. Every day, all day. Momma in bed listening to that record over and over and over again. Other people’s mothers weren’t like that. You sat us down, and you said that Momma was the way she was because on the day Elvis Presley died she cut her finger. You said a little piece of her soul drained out of that cut. You said she’d been sick ever since. Now of course that’s bullshit, but what’s interesting is this picture Joe drew of that very event. That very afternoon when Elvis died and Momma cut her finger. See? He drew her in the kitchen downstairs, because that’s what you said, and don’t you try to tell me you didn’t because look, it’s perfect in every detail. Not just of the kitchen downstairs, but look at Momma. I bet she looks exactly the way she looked on that day. Just exactly. I bet she even had that very dress on, didn’t she? Joe asked you what she was wearing, didn’t he?” Daddy struggled to push himself up on one elbow. He clawed at the sketchbook to pull it closer, but it was too heavy for him. Rebecca unsnapped the binders and took out the sketch. She folded the sketchbook and laid it aside on the nightstand. Daddy blinked, turning his head to get a good look at the picture. He adjusted its distance. “Joe asked me,” he said. “Sure.” Daddy let his head fall back to the pillow. The sketch slipped from his fingers and dropped to his chest. “He asked you where Momma cut her finger?” “Sure,” he said. “Joe asked me over and over again. I only told you that story the one time. But Joe used to ask over and over again for stories. I told him that one about your momma’s soul and about the Land of the Birdmen—” Daddy pushed himself forward again. “Those are Joe’s sketches?” he said.

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“Yes,” said Rebecca. “He ever sketch the Land of the Birdmen?” “I don’t know,” she said. “There’s hundreds and hundreds. Maybe a thousand. They’re all out of order. I dropped them, but I don’t think they were ever in any order to begin with. I haven’t looked at them all closely. There’s some that seem to be angels. Maybe they’re actually Birdmen. I don’t know. But—” “I want to see the Birdmen Joe sketched.” “No,” she said. “Just a minute. I want to know—” “Give me that book,” he said, reaching for the binder. “Daddy, why did you—” “Give me that damned book,” he said. He pushed himself up. Sitting forward on the bed, he swung one leg over the side. Then he used his hand to pull the other one after it. She had not thought him capable of such exertion. He hooked his fingers on the binder and jerked at it until it fell to the floor. “Give it,” he said. “Put it up here.” Rebecca picked up the book. “Lay down,” she said, adjusting his pillow and propping him up in the bed. Fighting his protests, she hauled his legs back under the sheet. Then she placed the sketchbook open in his lap. “They’re in here somewhere,” she said. “But I want to know why you lied about where Momma cut her finger. Momma says she cut her finger at your father’s house. Why did you tell Joe it was downstairs?” Daddy said nothing. He glared at the pages of the sketchbook. Using his dead fingers like a broom, he turned them, crumpling and ripping the sketches. She pulled his hand away. Holding him back, she said, “Let me. I’ll turn them. But why did you lie?” “Turn them then,” he said. “I want to see.” “Why didn’t you tell Joe that Momma cut her finger at your father’s house?” “My father wasn’t a nice man.” “Momma said in the car he was a real son-of-a-bitch.” “I see we’re reduced to vulgarity now.” “Well?” “Yes,” said Daddy. “He was. And Joe—Lord, Joe wanted to know everything. Every detail. It got so I couldn’t beat him off of me anymore. I’d tell him something and he’d go make a picture of it. ‘How did you feel?’ He used to ask. ‘But how did that make you

157 feel, Daddy?’ Damned high school Dr. Phil was what he was. ‘How did you feel when your father sent you off to Biloxi with the mule wagon and twenty dollars?’ ‘What was it like when you looked back over your shoulder and saw your momma crying with that spade in her hand?’ Every day. A thousand questions. When—” Daddy caught his breath. In the middle of the sketchbook there was a picture of him and Rebecca standing in The Grove at Ole Miss with a grocery sack of New Testaments on the ground between them. Daddy held a Bible open in his palms. While he read, Rebecca handed out the books. She wore a ribbon in her hair, and she seemed to bounce as she walked from the sack at Daddy’s feet to the half-moon of young men gathered together and sitting cross-legged to watch her and listen. “Every day,” said Daddy. “He just wanted detail after detail.” Rebecca turned the page. In the next picture she sat on the lawn in front of her dorm. Daddy sat beside her with his head on his forearms, his shoulders hunched. In the split second of the sketch Rebecca could feel him weeping, the whole composition, the lawn itself, trembled with tears. In the next picture, Rebecca was gone. The security lights in the parking lot had come on, profuse with a haze of bugs. The legs of students wandered past on the sidewalk. But Daddy still sat with his head resting on his forearms, his knees pulled up to his chin, as the evening settled around him. “Finally I just said, ‘no. No more. I can’t take it anymore.’ We fought all the time after that, me and Joe. I—Joe wasn’t a fighter. But he’d come and fight me. I’d hit him down in the front yard out there. He’d go down, but he’d struggle up again. ‘Just go down,’ I’d tell him. But he wouldn’t. He’d struggle up again. Bloody nose, bloody eye. He’d come at me and I’d hit him down again and he’d come at me again.” In the sketchbook they passed several pictures depicting the very things Daddy was saying, sketches Joe had done after Rebecca ran away from college and before he left to follow her. They turned the pages slowly, but steadily, never giving any one picture more attention that another. Impatient with the progress, Daddy pushed her hand away from the pages. He took a large section of the book and flipped it over, scattering the loose sketches to the floor. Rebecca left him to gather them back together. She was still on her hands and knees, when he croaked, “There! That’s him. That’s the birdman. That’s the

158 one I rode out of the vortex on. I cut a piece of my own thigh off and tossed it up to him as we flew.” Rebecca pulled herself to her knees and leaned across the bed. She turned the sketchbook. It was no angel. It was just the face of an older gentleman with longish white hair, a thin, far away smile, who walked with a cane from out of the midst of a grove of trees. He had steeped into a clearing, and in his eyes were reflected the clouds of a cool autumn day. “That’s him,” said Daddy. “The birdman.” “That’s the fellow from the hospice, Daddy. I told you he brings you your morphine in the evenings. Joe must’ve sketched it before ya’ll threw him out.” “He stole my pills,” said Daddy. “Tried to take them away.” “That’s what Lurleen says.”

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It wasn’t quite noon when Willy Tate drove up in his powder blue Alfa Romeo, trailed by a slate gray school bus and a couple of squad cars from the sheriff’s department. A dozen convicts dressed in their ring-arounds stumbled off the bus. They stood scratching themselves and toeing at the dirt. They smiled at everyone in the good-natured way of the county inmate. These were petty criminals, doing a few months for minor possession, failure to support, or Felony DUI. They were men happy to be out-of-doors and moving in the sun; they looked eager to please. A few deputies walked among them, joking casually. It was the politics of dogs. When they had all assembled in front of the church, Willy spoke with one of the deputies. The man answered every sentence put to him with a snappy, “yes, sir.” Then he turned to bark the same commands at the inmates, though in the deputy’s mouth, the genteel lilt of Willy’s diction cracked and warbled as though the deputy had run it through a meat grinder. From the porch, where she sat with Lurleen, Cinderella, and Ivy, Rebecca watched this new spectacle unfolding in the yard. In the bushes by the house, Tulane played with her Power Puff Girl. Kias and a few of his parishioners from The True Path Church of the Great Way already were hard at work by the time they got back from visiting Willy in Lidell. She had meant to go help them, but then she got caught up talking with Daddy, and now it seemed like lunchtime. The four women drank tall glasses of sweet tea. Lurleen and Cinderella smoked cigarettes. Aunt Cindy had been crying for the last twenty minutes. It was an overflow of emotion at the disappearance of Arzo, but Rebecca could not take it seriously. Only several hours earlier Cinderella had pranced about the house, after screaming, “Good riddance!” at the screen door as it banged shut behind him. Now it seemed her whole life had come crashing down around her. This was the normal cycle. While the deputies organized the men into several groups, Willy marched up to the porch. “Well,” he said. “We’ll get this—What’s the matter?” He put his hand on Cinderella’s shoulder. Crouching forward, she threw her arms around his neck, bending him double. “Arzo quit me,” she said. “He left this morning.”

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Willy choked. He pulled at Cinderella’s arm to free his airway, but Cinderella was strong. She could latch onto a neck. “He’ll be back,” said Lurleen. “It’s nothing new,” said Rebecca. “I can’t recall a month that didn’t go by where he wasn’t AWOL for a few days.” “He was getting better,” said Cinderella. “He really was.” “Listen,” said Willy, struggling to extricate himself. “I—hey, Bobby! Hey!” He motioned for one of the convicts down by the church to join them. It was that same convict Rebecca had seen through the window at Willy’s house. Scrawny, his face covered with acne scars, and topped with greasy blond hair, Rebecca doubted the boy was even nineteen years old. He looked for a nod from the nearest deputy, and then he ran to the porch, his ring-arounds flopping past his feet and hands. The other men were led closer to the front doors of the church, where Kias held a gallon of white paint and a brush. “This will cheer you up,” said Willy. When the convict was within range, Willy tossed him the keys to his Alfa Romeo, and the young man scampered off, tripping over his ring-around. Emerging from the car, he carried a guitar case. And now, reverent for the thing he held, he walked with all proper diligence as he made his way to the porch where the women sat together on the steps. “This is Bobby Minton,” said Willy. “He’s gonna be a star some day. Aren’t you Bobby?” “Yes, sir,” said Bobby Minton. Grinning, he returned Willy’s key’s and squatted in the dirt. He took the guitar from its case and began to tune. Rebecca couldn’t look at his teeth when he smiled. “Don’t tease him,” she said. “No, I’m serious,” said Willy. “He’s good. He’s really good. He can play anything ya’ll want to hear.” “You can play anything?” said Ivy. “I can play a lot,” said Bobby. “Can you play Stand By Your Man?” asked Cinderella. “The way Lyle Lovett does it?” he said. “Sure.” He moved to the bottom step and began to strum, getting a feel for the strings. “You keep these ladies entertained,” said Willy. “I’m going to see about this work.”

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“I think, I will, too,” said Rebecca. She stood, brushing the dust from the backs of her thighs. They walked together in silence, she and Willy, while at the porch Bobby began to play. Aunt Cindy and Lurleen joined him on the chorus. Tulane had come out of the bushes to listen. As they walked toward the church, Rebecca could hear that Ivy had begun to sing along as well. “Willy?” she said, as they crunched along the drive in unison. She could see the convicts down by the church, and there was the guitar player on the porch. “What’s in it for you, Willy?” she said. “Me?” “It’s not every church that gets a work detail on the county dime to help build it.” “I used to go to your daddy’s church.” “But this isn’t Daddy’s church. Is it the same thing Ronnie wants? Are you running for office out here? …Is it for Momma?” “Your mother,” he said, “is a very special woman. When Willy, Jr. died, I…” His face grew long and his voice trailed away. She could see his eyes mist over. He fidgeted with his fingers. “She said Eunice left.” He nodded, but he couldn’t speak. “It’s okay,” she said, putting her hand on his shoulder, but of course she had no idea what to tell him. “Do you build the model of Waterloo to take your mind off it?” “I just want to understand,” he said. “About Willy Jr.” “And do you?” she said. “Do you understand?” “No.” He looked at the ground between his feet. Then he looked into the sky above him. “No, I don’t,” he said. “Do you think Eunice will come back?” He laughed a hollow laugh. “She would not be pleased with all the dirt I’ve tracked through the house,” he said. “But no. No, I don’t think so. It’s a horrible thing to look back and think you’ve wasted twenty years. But it’s far, far worse to know it every minute of those twenty as they go by. I’m not helping for the same reasons Ronnie Tibbit is doing it. I can assure you of that. You know…when you left and your Daddy busted up the church, Eunice got me going back to First Methodist in Lidell. She was real happy

162 about that, but I never was. It’s a county club is all it is. I need more spit in the thing, if you know what I mean. I’m not sure if I believe any of it, to tell you the truth. I mean the words, you know. I don’t think I believe the words themselves, but I sure do get a powerful feeling when I hear that brimstone preaching like your daddy used to do.” §§§ Down at the church, Kias had handed out a variety of duties. Several convicts had gallons of paint and brushes. One man had a weed whacker. Others hauled scrap wood from the rotting picnic tables, which another was in the process of demolishing. A large contingent headed into the field with a lawn mower and shovels, pick-axes, and wheelbarrows. A couple of Kias’ people lead the way with a surveyor’s scope and a tripod. Even the deputies had been shamed into work. This was no roadside trash detail, but a higher cause, a greater glory. They carried hammers and nails, stacks of lumber and bricks. Trucks had arrived. They were being unloaded. “Wow,” she said, looking over the operation. Including the convicts and the deputies there must’ve been two dozen people around the church and in the field. “It’s really coming together,” said Kias. “I was on the cell with Ronnie a minute ago. He’s got the paperwork for your mother and he’s driving out with the train. He says he’s found an artist who can do the work.” “Ronnie Tibbit,” she said, shaking her head. Then, “Artist?” She jerked Kias by the sleeve of his shirt. “A what?” she said. “An artist,” he said. “To paint the tunnel.” “You’ve got to be kidding me. It’s Joe’s paintings. This is for Joe…not Ronnie Tibbit and his idiotic political ambitions.” “His what?” said Kias. “Willy here says he’s running for office.” “Is that right?” said Kias. Willy nodded. “Statehouse.” In the field beyond the church the work progressed at a steady pace. Cars had begun to stop along the road. Cars full of people from the old days, Daddy’s old parishioners who had found their way back to Uncle Williams’ basement after Daddy broke up the church. But it seemed word had spread further than that. From Lidell to Puckett and all across

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Beckham County, they came. Kias Williams was putting the little clapboard church in the woods back together, they said. They said, Jack Wooler was going to preach again. They said a miracle was in the works. By the road they gathered in small groups. They recounted the old times. Reminiscing, laughing, swapping stories of their present lives, they had abandoned their day’s pursuits. They had stripped off their ties. They had rolled up their shirtsleeves. They forged ahead into the field. They asked what work there was to be done. A group of women walked along the road. They came as if they had walked all the way from the Piggly-Wiggly in Lidell. They carried grocery sacks full of baloney and Wonder Bread. They carried jars of mayonnaise and heads of lettuce, massive blocks of cheese and bags full of sugar, boxes full of tea. They hadn’t actually walked from town. It was just that the parked cars were lined along the sides of the road until it curved out of sight around the bend. “I really wish we could use Joe’s pictures,” said Kias. “I wish he’d given us what we asked for.” “That’s it!” said Rebecca, smacking her forehead. “Ronnie Tibbit. Ronnie gave Joe the drugs. “Ronnie Tibbit?” said Willy. “He didn’t like Joe’s paintings. And he wouldn’t let me see them today. He didn’t like them. Ivy said so. See, here’s the thing: Ronnie is trying to pawn himself off as some kind of Honest Christian Businessman for the voters, right? That’s why he’s involved in all this. But what Joe painted was pure Spinal Tap. You said yourself there’s a problem in this county with methamphetamine, right? Ronnie and his brother are bail bonds men, so he bails these criminals out of jail, right? He has access to the drug in question. Or at least the people who make it, right? He has motive. We know he’s a son-of-a-bitch…” Willy put his hand on her shoulder. “Rebecca,” he said. “Joe had a rough life. He— You’ve got to deal with the fact that he made some bad choices—” “Why is it,” she said, gripping her temples. “That I am the only person interested in finding out where Joe got those drugs?” Willy looked at the ground, at the walls. Finally he said, “I deal with this all the time, Rebecca. We’ve investigated two suicides this year alone related to meth. Every night there’s at least one domestic dispute in this county where it’s a matter of drugs. We’ve

164 shut down four labs in the last six months, but they just spring back up in another trailer down another dirt road. There’s probably one right down yonder.” He gestured with his opened palm down the dirt road as it led into the jungle. “Down there?” she said. “You mean down that road? Down where Earl Tibbit had his shot shack?” Willy frowned. “You’ve got to understand,” he said. “These investigations go nowhere. We’re looking for the labs. We really are. I know you want to be able to say that Ronnie did this. Or whoever. You want to find the Devil behind the evil. You want to understand, but—” “You agree, though,” she said. “That if Ronnie gave him those drugs, he’d be guilty of something?” Willy thought about this for a moment. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “Your claim…your theory, is that Ronnie Tibbit gave Joe drugs and a pistol and then sent him off to shoot up the Waffle House and get himself killed so he—Ronnie—could hire a different artist to paint the tunnels of a children’s ride Ronnie was investing in, all for the purposes of duping the Beckham County electorate into thinking he’s a Honest Christian Businessman?” Rebecca looked disgusted. In fact this was precisely what she thought. “Of course not,” she said. “That’s ridiculous. I think he—I think Ronnie just wanted Joe to get arrested or something. He probably just put the drugs where Joe would find them. He knew Joe was trying to get his life straightened out. But Joe was weak still. He was a junkie. All Ronnie had to do was put the drugs where Joe would find them. He wanted to get Joe hooked again. Maybe he didn’t know Joe would get a pistol… Where’d the pistol come from anyway?” “Unregistered,” said Willy. “Ivy claimed in her statement she’d never seen it before. Honestly, I don’t think she was lying. She doesn’t strike me as having the confidence to lie.”

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Around one o’clock Lurleen walked down to the church to see if Rebecca would help her and the other women make sandwiches. Rebecca held up the hammer she was using to indicate her reluctance to switch tasks. She and Kias had been hanging sheetrock along the back wall of the church, where it seemed Daddy had taken his frustrations out with a sledgehammer after she ran away. It was stiflingly hot in the church, and she and Kias were both drenched in sweat. Neither had spoken as they worked. They just worked, letting their muscles loosen up with the nailing and the lifting. He was holding the panels in place against the studs. She was pounding a line of nails around their edges. “Please,” said Lurleen. Rebecca rolled her eyes. “It’s all right,” said Kias. “We ought to take a break anyway. I can help, too.” “No, you go on working,” said Lurleen. “And where’s my money?” “Ronnie’s on his way,” said Kias. He looked hurt “He’s got the paperwork.” “Paperwork-shmaperwork,” said Lurleen, as they left him standing in the middle of the gutted church with the hammer and a sack of nails. “I want my check.” Turning to go, Rebecca saw him scratch his arm with the claw end of the hammer. “You ought to be nicer to Kias,” she said, when they were outside. Lurleen snorted. “You’re one to talk, aren’t you?” “I’m perfectly nice to him,” said Rebecca. “I’m helping him put it together even though he’s getting a new artist. And let me tell you, I can’t believe you’re selling this field to Ronnie—” “Stop,” she said, holding up her palm. “Right there. This field is the bane of my existence. I couldn’t care less who buys it or what they build. Period.” They wandered up the drive, through the yard and to the porch steps, where the convict, Bobby Minton, sat strumming on the guitar. “Delta Dawn!” shrieked Cinderella, clapping her hands together as he finished the last of It’s Been a Good Year for the Roses. “Can’t you play Delta Dawn?” In the living room Ivy and Tulane played Go-Fish on the sofa. Joe’s urn had taken a spot of prominence next to Colonel Reb. He was laid out on a lace doily next to a crystal vase full of half a dozen stargazer lilies. Had Lurleen bought those? How appropriate for

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Joe, she thought. How on earth could she have known that? Women’s voices drifted from the kitchen. Rebecca started to walk that way, but Lurleen grabbed her arm. She led her to the stairs. “Wait,” she said. “Wait. Up here a minute.” For fear of waking Daddy, they crept cautiously up to the landing, where Lurleen pulled her into Joe’s old room. A single brass bed sat squarely in the middle of the floor. There was a dresser against one wall, and on the dresser there was a pitcher of water, a hand mirror, and a make-up bag. “About Willy,” said Lurleen. “He talked to me. He said you mentioned me. And well, the thing is I’m tired of lying all the time. I haven’t told your father, of course. That would just be cruel. I don’t aim to be cruel for the sake of being cruel, but I don’t aim to shy away from it either. If I have to be cruel, so be it. It has to be done. So about Willy, Yes, I know it’s wrong.” Rebecca frowned. She crossed her arms, shifting from one foot to the other. “It’s just that you can really focus on the wrongness of it, what with Jack and all. And…and you know you can really miss what’s right.” “Is that a song lyric?” said Rebecca, pointed at the floor between her feet. “Did that convict just play that song?” “A song?” “Never mind,” said Rebecca. She pushed on her temples. “I guess I figured as much. Willy’s a nice man. He was the only person I know out at the church who thought it was a good idea for me to go to college. I mean really thought it. Kias just wanted me to be a kindergarten teacher. It…You know it was Willy who said I ought to take a course in Latin up there. I don’t think I’d ever thought of it before he said that. His whole thing with the little army men is strange, but boys are like that. You do recall that he’s still married?” “I am too,” said Lurleen. “Yeah… I guess that does even it out.” Rebecca looked at the wall separating this room from the one in which Daddy lay. “I know. I know. Your father,” said Lurleen “But you’ve got to understand, I’ve never once done anything like this before. I never once cheated on Jack. Not once. I never even thought about it. Not one single time. I never even looked at a man in an improper way. Not even in my mind.” Here she tapped her head in a gesture Rebecca found reminiscent

167 of Kias Williams. “But…well you know we’ve been dead to one another for years, Jack and me. You’ve got to know that. Early on there was something. We had something. We did. I remember—” She pulled away from Rebecca, walking to the window, looking through it as if onto a vast field of cotton. “I remember coming up to Parchman that one Sunday a month our first year. I’d wear this red dress and black nylons. I used to really clean up, you know it? I know you don’t. You remember me different. But it’s true.” “I’m sure it is,” said Rebecca. “I was just telling Willy you seemed more lively than I remember. You seem better.” “I remember getting on the train at midnight in Jackson with all the other wives and girlfriends. The children. The mothers. We’d come pulling into the station with the sunrise. The men would all be there shaved and clean. If one had gotten himself into trouble and lost his privileges, you know it would just kill that poor girl who had come to see him. She’d be there all day, waiting on the train back to Jackson. We’d see her as we headed off in the morning, crying into someone’s arms. We’d see her again that afternoon when we got back, all cried out by then. But not Jack. Jack never got into trouble after we were married.” “I don’t think I’d want to be married to someone who couldn’t be there.” “I was just thinking about our wedding,” said Lurleen. “I’d been writing to him for a number of years and I wasn’t writing to anybody else. He’d asked me to marry him a couple of times, and I’d always said no on account of just that. I mean I liked writing him and I liked going up on Sundays to see him, but I just wasn’t ready to commit myself to a marriage of one Sunday a month. But then Arzo got Cindy pregnant—Oh, yes. You never knew about that, did you? They got married and four months later she had the baby, but it wasn’t right from the day it was born and it died after about three months. That was just an awful, awful time for us around here. Then Momma died. It was all in the space of about a year. That one Sunday a month when I’d go up there and see Jack was about the only brightness I had. So I said yes the next time he asked. And that was that. I remember the superintendent himself walked me down the aisle. This old timer plunked away at the piano. The other trustees from the commissary threw rice, and Jack carried me across the threshold of the red house. I don’t even know if they still have them, but it used to be they had a couple of rooms for the convicts and their wives. Each room had a bed and a

168 table and a mirror. I remember a blanket covered the window and a dark red light came through the threads. I was so sad because there wasn’t a dresser, and I couldn’t fold up my dress and put it away like we were home. He carried me to the bed and laid me down on the sheet. They’d thought to bring in a fresh one for us, too. On the table there was a vase full of cotton bolls for decoration.” “That sounds sweet,” said Rebecca, not sure what else to say. Perhaps this story had reached its end. She hoped so, but—“I sat forward, with my feet on the floor, and Jack, he dropped to his knees” —apparently there was more to come. “Momma,” she said. “I don’t think I want to know—” “Listen,” said Lurleen. “He pulled the buttons down the front of my dress and it fell off my shoulders just like I always imagined it would. And then Jack fell right into my belly with his face—right here—and I held his head in my arms. He cried and cried and cried. And that wasn’t how I imagined it would be at all, but I told him it was all right. I said he was home with me now. We were home. We sat there like that, and he breathed me in as much as he could. Rocking back and forth. Back and forth. Before long our hour and fifteen minutes were up, and it was time to go.” Rebecca waited. “That’s it?” she said, when it seemed there was no more. “That’s it,” said Lurleen. “For two years?” “Once a month.” “He cried in your lap?” “I didn’t mind,” said Lurleen. “It was that bad year. I could head up there and for a little while I could just take care of Jack. Worry about him and his life, and not even think about me and mine. Then he got paroled. And I know what you’re thinking. I know that sounds selfish. That sounds awful. But you’ve got to understand. I wasn’t used to having him around all the time. It got so I’d leave advertisements for trucking companies around the house. I thought if he’d get himself a job as a trucker that might ease him off me a little. But he didn’t seem to want a job. I guess he’d had enough of working at Parchman. Then when he took up with Arzo, well… There hasn’t been a stitch of honest work done by a man in this house for more than twenty years. I suppose I ought to have seen the whole preacher thing coming.”

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Rebecca looked at the door. “So you want to know if I think it’s all right for you take up with Willy Tate?” “No,” said Lurleen. “I don’t care if you think it’s all right or not. I just want you to understand why.”

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When they came back downstairs, Cinderella had brought Bobby Minton into the house. He was in the kitchen with the women, loading baloney sandwiches onto plates. He smiled sheepishly when he saw them. “I thought you were supposed to play?” said Lurleen. “Does Willy know you’re in here?” “I’m supposed to entertain,” said Bobby, smiling. “Miss Cinderella said she ought to help with the fixings, and I was needed to entertain inside the house.” “Miss?” said Lurleen. “Ain’t he the cutest thing?” said Aunt Cindy, leaning around the doorframe in the kitchen. She licked mustard off her fingers. “Not really,” said Lurleen. “Momma,” said Rebecca. “Be nicer.” To Bobby, she said, “You’re not going to get into trouble?” “No, Ma’am,” said Bobby. “They know I’m not going anywhere.” “That was just like your father,” said Lurleen. “They trusted him.” “You can trust me,” said Bobby. Rebecca doubted it, but she didn’t voice her doubts. In the kitchen they had brewed up gallon upon gallon of sweet tea. Castles of baloney sandwich halves lay nestled beside mountains of pickles and tubs of slaw. They brought it outside on a train of platters. They brought folding chairs and card tables out of the attic. They set it up with paper plates, paper napkins, plastic spoons and Dixie cups. Then they sent for the deputies, the convicts, the parishioners, and the passers-by—men nobody had ever seen before, who had stopped out of curiosity and then stayed to help. Tulane busied herself bringing small items, tubs of butter, shakers of salt and pepper. In their absence, Cinderella had taken charge of the preparations. Now there was little for Rebecca and Lurleen to do, except stand on the porch with their arms folded observing the busyness in the front yard. For six years there had been periodic scenes like this down at the picnic tables along the side of the church. Then for six years there had been none. Everyone seemed to remember their role, to fall into place quickly, and to do as they had done before. Mary Ellen brought her famed mustard potato salad, Suzette Johnson had, as always, two packages of Ballpark Franks and no buns to put them in; Margery Pickett

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showed up with a single-layer birthday cake from the Piggly-Wiggly’s bakery, and Joanna Butts arrived with five pounds of deer sausage. Word was her husband Wayne had been hording it all summer with an eye toward football season in the fall. Disgruntled, Wayne was now down at the church helping Kias with the sheetrock. Several women wandered down the drive to the church. Others went into the field beyond. Soon the sounds of work, the buzz of the mowers, and the ring of the hammers ceased to echo through the trees. Then there was silence, followed by the tromp of boots upon gravel. Voices called out, in the pleasure of wants about to be satisfied. Baked beans sloshed over the sides of kettles. Tea spilled from dropped Dixie cups. Mustard overshot the buns. There was much laughter. Laughter everywhere, and good cheer. They all ate interspersed together, the parishioners, the deputies, and the convicts. This was not standard procedure for a work detail, but the aura of this special thing they were accomplishing had fallen across the eyes of everyone involved. For a space in time they saw things differently than normal. As if transported from this earthy realm, where certain men are prisoners and others are deputies, they had found themselves on a different plane of reality. One given over to a kind of serious joyfulness and absolute presence, where even the plastic knives and the paper napkins, the stacks of Wonder bread and the slabs of mayonnaise-coated American cheese had left behind the realm of the fleeting, the everyday, the pasteboard-movie-set world of normal existence, where men become deputies or convicts, instead of temples of the Holy Ghost. Did Rebecca see them like that? Temples of the Holy Ghost plunged together in the fathomless depths of a Thursday afternoon? She could remember sitting alone in the pews, looking up at Christ crucified on the cross. He was up there bleeding. Bleeding just for her. She used to think she had bled out completely. She thought she was dry as old bones and powdery, a powdery pillar of ash on a wind-swept plane. But she wasn’t really ash. He was there. All the time He was bleeding into her. All of her life she had been like a vampire, at His throat and drinking, like the Nephalim. For years she hadn’t even noticed she was doing it. And then suddenly she noticed. To feel the horror and the guilt. To feel herself ripping into God and drinking His blood. She hadn’t even cared when it sloshed over the sides of her cup, when it ran down the corners of her mouth, when it spilled out onto the ground. She used to sit in

172 there for hours in the mornings before school, begging His forgiveness. Then when Kias came to pick her up, they’d wander off behind the oak tree for twenty minutes, where she’d sink her teeth right through His flesh and wash the world in blood again. She couldn’t help herself. She would sit for hours in the church after school. Alone. All alone, trying to gather the blood of God back into her hands. In the yard, they stood talking, peeling the lids off of Tupperware, plopping masses of Jell-o onto plates. The women. She was supposed to lead them. That was to be her job. To lead the women. To lead them into Tupperware and Jell-o, she’d wrap them all in cellophane and hang them on the Christmas tree. But she didn’t want to lead anyone. All she ever wanted to do was to carry the blood of God in a tiny vessel and not to spill a single drop. “I really dislike these people,” she said. “This is where I learned misanthropy.” “Me too,” said Lurleen. “I know I shouldn’t,” she said. “I ought to be more charitable.” “I’ve never had that problem.” “When I’m done eating,” said Tulane. “Can I feed Grandpa Jack his Gerbers?” “Oh, no,” said Rebecca. “I’ll get it.” They settled down to lunch and then Bobby took up the guitar. When Tulane finished her hotdog she asked to be excused, and Rebecca allowed her to go inside with the promise that she wouldn’t bother Daddy. Willy came and sat at their table, along with Kias and Ivy. They had set out a spot for Aunt Cindy, but she was so thoroughly taken with the young guitar player, she left them immediately to sit at his knee. She fed him pickles between the verses of the songs she made Bobby play. When he finished eating, Kias stood. He wiped his lips with a napkin, and put his hands on his hips, striding to the porch, just as Bobby finished playing The Ballad of Omie Wise. “I know a song,” said Kias. He pointed to the guitar. “You can eat while I play.” Bobby looked around the crowd. Rebecca rolled her eyes. She began to wave Kias off. He’d play something like Onward Christian Soldiers. He’d insist on turning the whole afternoon into some kind of camp revival. As if building a church wasn’t enough. There’d have to be a round of hymns, too. Rebecca followed Bobby’s wandering eyes

173 with her own, until they landed on Willy. He was squatting by the door with Lurleen, a paper plate piled high with potato salad and baloney sandwiches resting on his knees. Willy nodded. Bobby handed the guitar over to Kias. But it wasn’t Onward Christian Soldiers Kias sang for them; it was Roddy McCorley. He sang it high and plaintive and brave too, angry, full of impotent rage, the way it ought to be played, as if he’d grown up in Dublin and had played in the pubs there all of his life. After the first verse Bobby, apparently incapable of not playing, began to whistle clear and loud. A few people who knew the chorus joined in to sing, and after a round or two the others learned it. Soon the image wove together in their voices: songbirds in a blue sky, reflected in the blue eyes of a man who walks along a bridge to be hanged. When the song ended, they all jumped to their feet and gathered around Kias. Bobby said it was the most beautiful song he’d ever heard. Kias guffawed at that. He was no match for Bobby, but he knew a few tunes. “Play more,” they implored. So he played The Kerry Recruit and Galway Races and Black Velvet Band. He played for a half hour and he played no hymns, not until finally the deputies asked him to sing Amazing Grace. Letting the guitar slide gently to the ground he sang it a cappella, with his eyes closed, holding the notes long and deep, the way that old slaver must have felt them when he wrote them. “That was—” But Rebecca cut herself off. She didn’t know exactly what to say when Kias finished. The crowd began to clear away the plates and the napkins and the plastic ware. They stuffed garbage sacks full of waste. They poured tea out onto the ground. They piled the pitchers and the mayonnaise jars, the catsup and the mustard bottles onto the porch beside the folded chairs and the stacked card tables. “That was—that was almost normal,” she said, finally. Kias smiled. “I can act normal,” he said. “Not usually,” she said. “Where did you learn that?” “Being normal?” “No. Those songs.” “Off a Irishman,” he said. “Up in Arkansas. Speaking of which—” “Well, they were nice,” she blurted. Then she followed his gaze down the driveway. A flatbed tractor-trailer had just turned off the road, pulling into the church parking lot. One

174 of the ties had come loose on the covering, and a single bulbous eye lolled from beneath the hood of the blue tarp stretched across the mounds of track and the forms of the train cars. Rebecca frowned. Ronnie grinned from behind the wheel of the semi. Another man sat beside him in the cab. “Should I keep playing or get to work?” said Bobby. Rebecca looked behind her. But Willy and Lurleen had left their spot by the front door. They were nowhere to be seen. “Last he said was to entertain me,” Cinderella said. “So you need to sit on this porch here and play me some more George Jones.” Ronnie brought the semi to a halt. “Hey!” he called out, stepping down from the cab. With his thumb he indicated the man sitting inside. “I got the papers for Lurleen. And this here’s the artist I hired. Let me tell you, Kias. He can slap draw a picture. Drew one of me you’d think was a photograph.” “Oh, Kias,” she said. “Kias wait a second.” He had begun to walk across the yard and she had to step quickly to reach him and take hold of his sleeve. “I… Tulane said she told you about the puppies. The other day. When you were at the DQ. He’s not really going to drown them. He’s not like that. He just gruff… and… I guess he’s still learning about children.” Kias frowned. He nodded. “She mentioned that,” he said. “I’m not sure what all there is to learn—” “Well, there are!” she said. “There are plenty of things. It’s not easy, you know?” She stormed back to the porch, leaving him confused and apologetic in the yard.

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Momma had said not to worry about Grandpa Jack and his Gerber number threes, she’d see to it in a minute. But a whole bunch of minutes had gone by—probably half a day’s worth—and there was Momma, out on the porch, listening to Brother Williams play around on the guitar. Meanwhile, Grandpa Jack was getting hungrier and hungrier up in that bedroom. It was just like the puppies. Momma said they got fed once a day, but Tulane couldn’t imagine getting fed only once a day. Typically she’d scoop a 32-ounce Super Slurpy cup into the dog food in the pantry, and sneak it out to them under the porch several times a day. Not that Momma let Tulane get away without eating. She was on about it all the time, saying Tulane was apt to float away for lack of substance on the nights she refused to eat those nasty, nasty greens, which Momma insisted on boiling down to mush. Not even Daniel would eat those greens. In fact a dog wouldn’t eat them. Tulane knew. She’d tried many times to get Coconut to take them under the table. But no such luck. Dogs ate dog food. People ate mushy greens. Grandpa Jack ate his Gerber number threes. That was how it went. But you’d float away for lack of substance if you didn’t get them on time. And who was there to get them on time for Grandpa Jack? Surely he was about to float away. While the adults listened to Brother Williams on the guitar, Tulane snuck into the kitchen. She pushed a chair to the counter, and then climbed up to the cabinet where she had seen Momma get the jars. Opening the drawers, she found a spoon, and so armed she was about to leave the kitchen when she heard the screen door open and close in the living room. But it wasn’t Momma coming to fetch Grandpa Jack his Gerbers; it was Grandma Lurleen and the man in a sky blue suit. Tulane was about to call out to them, but something in the way they walked, close together, Grandma Lurleen’s hand behind her back holding the Sky Blue Suit’s hand, made her stop. Freeze. She held the baby food jars beneath her chin. They walked up the stairs together. They hushed one another as they went up. No good. She could tell. Tulane had a radar for no good. She could spot it a mile off. They acted like a couple of boys on the playground just before they knocked you over.

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When she heard them creak across the floor at the top of the stairs, she peered cautiously around the doorframe, and then crept into the living room. Outside, people clapped, hollering for more. She held a baby food jar in each of her hands, her teeth clamped on the spoon. Tulane took the steps, carefully, slowly. She was so much more careful and slow than they had been. She made no noise as she crept. Adults made noise. Bad children made noise. Tulane was silent as the fishes. Her ears were opened wide as the trees. She was a creeper, Tulane. She could really creep. Creep up on you before you knew what was coming and lay a kiss on your cheek. That was Tulane, and Tulane knew the first thing the creeper does is listens. Then you creep. Outside, the guitar began to strum and a dozen voices carried softly across the air. The house groaned. There was something chewing its way through the walls. There was something in the earth below. Water thundered through the pipes. Presently, a metallic rhythm joined these voices. Bed springs. They were up there jumping on the bed. She looked at the baby food jars, at the spoon. She didn’t want to feed Grandpa Jack anymore; she wanted to go jump on the bed with Grandma Lurleen and the Sky Blue Suit. But at the top of the landing she saw the door to Grandpa Jack’s room. She thought of him floating away in there. She saw him float up to the ceiling, where he slipped through the cracked window. Diving and spiraling through the air, he floated up past the clouds and out into space. The moon sailed by, followed with the planets and the sun. He floated away. Out beyond. He was beyond. Beyond even the asteroid city where she crept through a maze of deserted shafts and abandoned tunnels, listening for the evil laughter of the deep. He was out there. He was deep in the black, black, black of nothing at all. Something had to be done. She had to help him. Shrugging her shoulders, she hoped they’d still be at the jumping when she was finished. Grandpa Jack wasn’t in bed. When she pushed her way through the door, he was leaning on the bedpost. His lungs dragged at the air. He was naked but for a set of gray, stained boxers. Thin and spidery limbed, gaunt and hollow looking, with his hair splayed out around his head, he stood gripping the bedpost, gasping for air. She pushed through the door, but he didn’t seem to notice. “They’re jumping on the bed in there,” she said. “Do you want me to go tell them to stop it?”

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“Why bother?” he said, flopping around to see her. “Help me to the window. I need my walker.” She set the baby food jars on the nightstand and went to the closet where she had seen the walker the night before. Dragging it to the bed, she pushed the piles of clothing out of his way, clearing him a path. She had to help him move the walker forward. He’d step into it and then take his weight onto his good foot, while she pulled the walker a few inches more. In this manner they made their way slowly to the window overlooking the front yard. Outside, she heard the grind of a semi-trailer pulling into the drive; the guitar died away. There was clapping. The whole yard was full of clapping. In the walls the rhythm of the bedsprings grew faster. She could hear them breathing in there, grunting. “They ought to take a rest,” she said. “They’ll get stitch in their guts.” Grandpa Jack snorted. “Pull the curtain,” he said. Tulane climbed onto the bed. She dragged the curtain aside, holding it in her fist. He fell forward, his face and palm pressed against the glass. His dead arm hung limp at his side. In the yard a man got out of the semi trailer and yelled. “Hey!” he said. “I got the papers for Lurleen. And here’s this artist I hired. Let me tell you, Kias. He can slap draw a picture. Drew one of me you’d think was a photograph.” “Those sons-of-bitches,” said Grandpa Jack. “Look at those sons-of-bitches in their ring-arounds. I said, no. I said, no. I said, no.” “I brought your Gerbers,” she said, not know what else to say. The anger of adults rolled out like the anger of gods. It was like the weather. She had been angry herself many times. Her own anger ripped through her like a ravaging horde of rats, but the anger of adults raged high above her, in the clouds, in the mountains. Like comets it blasted into the ground from deep space. “But I brought your Gerber’s,” she said, again, breathless this time, her chest heaving. He turned his head. He wouldn’t look at her. The rhythm of the bedsprings in the wall remained constant and steady. “But—” “Out!” he screamed. “Just go. Leave me in peace.” Dropping the jars and the spoon on the nightstand, she dashed out of the room and down the stairs. She fled back onto the porch, where she wrapped herself around Momma’s leg. “You weren’t bothering Grandpa Jack were you?” said Momma. “No, Momma,” she said. “Oh, no.”

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That afternoon the deputies packed all the convicts into the school bus and drove them back to jail for the evening. Willy said he’d bring them out again the next day. He said he had a man who could use an arc welder and another who knew a thing or two about engines. They had signed the paperwork. Ronnie had cut the check. The train and the track sat piled in the field behind the church. From the looks of it, the thing hadn’t actually been run in quite a few years. Probably it had sat beneath that tarp since the day Kias saw it at the fair in Arkansas. It looked exactly like the train in Joe’s drawings. “I showed him photos,” said Kias. They stood together by the engine, looking at the cracked gauges on the control panel, the old bird’s nest beneath the gas pedal, the ripped vinyl seat. Rebecca had brought the sketchbook down from the house and she thumbed through the sketches, until she came across an image of Joe with the train, squatting in that field in Arkansas, where he had never been. Tulane ran from one car to the next exclaiming what it was, as if neither Rebecca nor Kias could possibly have known. “This one’s a tiger!” she shouted. “This one’s in outer space!” Completely beside herself, Tulane climbed into the pirate ship. “Avast Ye, Matey!” she screamed, giving them the one-eyed-scowl and a look of piratical disdain. With a handkerchief Kias wiped at a crusted splotch of bird shit on the bright red end of a dwarf’s nose. He glanced sidelong at the sketchbook in Rebecca’s hands. “He sure was good,” said Kias. “I hope this artist of Ronnie’s is up to the job.” “But don’t you get it?” she said. “Don’t you see? That’s just it. He—” “Please,” said Kias. They had been through this again and again. They had discussed it all afternoon as they busted the last of the pews out of the floor, piling the scrap wood in the middle of the church. It had been their plan to haul it outside before they quit for the evening, but they’d gotten sidetracked arguing about Ronnie and the time slipped away. “Listen, if you don’t want to help,” he said. “I do.” “I’d understand,” he said. “You’re only helping because it was Joe’s art. But you’ve got to see that we can’t use it.” “No. I want to help,” she said. “Not just for Joe.”

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“Why, then?” “No reason,” she said, a little too fast. But she was thinking of those puppies under the porch in Idaho, and how Kias wouldn’t even have made that joke, and maybe he deserved better from her than to take this piece of his life and carve it out before he even knew it was there. Maybe Tulane deserved… But she wouldn’t think that. Not yet. Kias watched her. “I was hoping that it might be for you, too.” She pursed her lips. “What do you mean by that?” “I always…Well, see what you think of this,” he said. “We got the track, right? And it goes around in a oval, about a hundred and fifty feet out that a way and then it comes back to the station right here.” Kias gestured into the field and then to the back wall of the church. “But I was thinking why not have the train drive right into the church?” “Okay,” she said, shrugging. “Sure. Why not?” “And that—now get this,” he said, taking her elbow in his hands. He was getting excited like he used to. Pretty soon his words would start to flop around loose of his tongue. His hands would do their best to herd them along. Behind the pulpit he never allowed himself this loss of control. Everything was precise, measured. Perfect. Even as he appeared to be in the throws ecstasy, she knew, like a jazz virtuoso he had it all under control. When he got like this though, when he couldn’t quite keep himself together, there was something endearing about it. The excitement of it. Yet it was terrifying at the same time. He’d get her lined up in those laser beam eyes of him. He’d drill down upon her with some crazy plan as he dressed her up like Bible-School Barbie. Trapped. Confined. She breathed in; she breathed out. Calm. Calm. I do not have to do anything I do not want to do. “I been thinking,” he said. “I ought to get rid of the whole black suit and black hat thing. It’s not twenty-first century. Now—let me start at the beginning. See, I worked at this movie theater once, up in Tennessee. This drive-in—” “You lived in Tennessee?” she said, shaking him off her arms. “I did,” he said. “But—” “What were you doing in Tennessee?” “You’re not the only one who got out of Lidell, Mississippi after…I’ve been all over, you know it?” He beamed with pride. “I’ve been to New York City.”

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“You’ve been to New York?” she said. She could’ve kicked herself at the way she sounded impressed by this. “Visiting, sure,” he said. “But I’ve lived all over. I lived in Jacksonville for a bit and Amarillo, too. I drove a school bus in Tuscaloosa and I waited tables in Holly Springs. I washed cars in Mobile, and I was on the country station in Lake Charles. Preached a girl off a suicide right there on the AM dial. Had to barricade the booth to do it, but I talked her down. Folks all over Lake Charles said it was best preaching they’d heard in years. After that, me and that girl started up the Traveling Revival. That’s when I went to New York City. We went everywhere, too. Out to Seattle. Over to Phoenix. We preached in Prince George, British Columbia one time. And it was a month later we were down in Panama. No telling where we’d end up. Folks would line up a mile when they saw us coming. I preached to a thousand people in Brownsville, Texas. It was really something.” “What happened to her? The girl from Lake Charles. The one you started up the revival with.” Looking off in the field, Kias said, “She split me in Little Rock. At the state fair. We put on a good show, but…I guess the devil puts on a good show, too.” He grabbed Rebecca’s arms again. “That’s when it hit me,” he said. “You’ve got to be more audacious that the Devil even. See, the devil’s got those crunchy guitars, right?” “Crunchy?” Rebecca raised her eyebrow. She shook herself loose again. “That’s what they call them: Crunchy.” “Sure,” she said. “I just didn’t know you knew that.” “Course I know that,” he said. “You ever hear of Billy Hargis?” “No.” “Back in the Cold War Billy Hargis got the idea to float two hundred thousand Bibles across the iron curtain. He put them on helium balloons. Can you imagine? The whole sky full of Bibles. Soviet ack-ack blasting away, but you can’t stop two hundred thousand Bibles. Beautiful. Just beautiful. Audacity, see? So, I’m up at the Arkansas State Fair and I thought, sure, the devil’s got the crunchy guitar, but what he doesn’t have is a church with a train in it. See, I’d been thinking about this in the back of my mind ever since I worked at the drive-in—” “What was her name?”

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“Who?” “From Lake Charles.” “Betty,” he said. He twirled his index finger around his ear. “The drugs had bungled up her head pretty bad. But she had her heart in the right place—at least until that fair. There was this rock band—Ratt.” “Wait a second,” she said, stopping him, palms up, her face as shocked as a sunflower. “Hold on. Kias Williams lost his girlfriend at a Ratt concert? At the Arkansas state fair?” She couldn’t help herself. She had to laugh. “It’s not funny,” he said. “No. No, it is,” she said. “It’s okay. You can laugh about it, too. She was your girlfriend, right?” “That’s always been my weakness,” he said. “I neither drink nor smoke. I do not curse, and I do not steal. But…it wasn’t—I just want you to know, we were strictly monogamous.” “Until Ratt rolled into town.” “It hurt me,” he said. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Please, go on. You were saying about the drive-in.” “At the drive-in I worked the projector. We showed mostly English horror movies. Lots of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Mr. Sanders, my boss, he loved that stuff. I couldn’t watch it, but it was the only job I could get. Well, one night the film broke. Everything at this place was falling apart, you understand? Held together with spit. So I go to splice it back together, and I notice this tiny section of film that Mr. Sanders had already spliced, and can you believe it? It was a picture of a bikini woman holding a big ol’ glass of Co-Cola.” “Sure,” said Rebecca. “Subliminal messaging. Like Judas Priest.” The Diesel Mechanic she had lived with in Tulsa was a big fan of the Priest. He used to get positively apoplectic about their legal troubles, insisting that Tipper Gore was the source of all things wrong in America. After she left him, she heard he’d been arrested for shooting his deer rifle at a National Guard helicopter as it passed over the truck stop. She could only imagine it was Tipper at the yoke.

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Kias tapped the side of his head with his index finger. “That’s exactly right,” he said. “Now I was outraged, of course. The Lord God Our Father did not create the female form to hawk Co-Colas at the B-Movie drive-in. I took those three pieces of film, I spliced them back in, and jammed the projector so it froze for all the world to see. Melted by the time I got down to the screen, but it up long enough. They knew. So I marched down to the screen with this bullhorn. Mr. Sanders, you see, he was big on the nuclear holocaust. He figured the drive-in would make a good Civil Defense coordination site, so he had flare guns and MREs and whatnot stocked up at the concession stand. Anyhow, I marched down to the screen with this bullhorn and started preaching about how the Lord God Our Father didn’t create the female form to hawk Co-Colas.” “Good for you,” said Rebecca “What happened next?” “Well, I was arrested,” he said. “And they gave me the twenty-four hour psychiatric. But that’s not important. The thing is it got me to thinking. If you could use subliminal messaging to sell Co-Colas, why couldn’t you use it to spread the Good News?” “You want to have bikini women as ticket takers on the train? Or that’s not subliminal is it?” “No, no, no,” he said, waving his hands. “No bikinis. Of course not. What I want to have happen is this: You get in the train at the station right over here. You’re going along through the rooms. You’re in the rooms of sin, you’re in the pain room—” “You want to give ‘em a little zap in the pain room,” she said. “You zap ‘em through the seat of their pants.” He paused to consider the genius of this idea. “I don’t know about that,” he said after a moment, “but all the while as you ride around there’s this voice. It’s real low at first. You can’t even hear it. But it gets in. It gets up under you mind. And it’s getting louder and louder as you’re coming through the rooms, until bang! You hit the redemption chamber! That voice is clear as day. It’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever heard. Like sunlight through the meadows! That train comes barreling out of the darkness into the sanctuary and the full glory. There you’ll be. You and that baby girl of yours. You’re up there singing! That’s what they’ve heard all through the ride. They come pulling in and the whole church flows, like gossamer and butterflies. Rose petals float through the air. You’ll wear white lacy dresses with garlands of wildflowers. Smiles on your faces, you’ll

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sing your hearts out, tossing flowers to the people as they come through the tunnel. There I’ll be in a peach colored suit, standing at the pulpit. Ready to preach up a storm like they’ve never heard preached. And not just on Sundays, either. You can come down seven days a week to ride the train.” Kias clapped his hands. “Don’t you love it? Don’t you just want to be a part of it?” “I think that’s about the silliest damned thing I’ve ever heard in my life,” she said, laughing at him. She couldn’t help herself. She hated to mock him, but it was just to ridiculous. “I told you I didn’t want to get involved. I’m only helping for Joe.” “What else?” he said. “What else? Nothing else.” “But we aren’t using Joe’s pictures. You just said it wasn’t only for Joe. What else?” “Nothing,” she said. “I said—that didn’t mean anything. I’m doing it for Joe.” “But we’re aren’t using Joe’s pictures.” “Well, I think you ought to,” she said. “I don’t think you ought to use this artist of Ronnie’s. And I don’t think you ought to be involved with Ronnie at all. He’s an asshole. You think he’s just ‘being Ronnie,’ but that’s who he is. He’s Ronnie Tibbit.” “People can change,” said Kias. “No,” she said. “No they can’t. Now listen. I listened to your crazy story. Now you listen to mine. I want your help. I need the key. I want to break into Ronnie office tonight. Not just the studio. I want to find proof he gave Joe those drugs.” Kias walked to the caboose. He called inside for Tulane to join them. Then he dragged the tarp back over the top of the train. He tied the ends to stakes and he drove them into the ground. He worked silently. She thought he wasn’t going to answer, but after he finished securing the tarp he came and stood with them by the church. “Why don’t you run on up to the house and see what Grandma Lurleen’s got happening for dinner,” he said, winking. Dutifully, Tulane took off at a dead run toward the house. Rebecca turned to follow, but Kias took her hand. “Joe had a lot of pain in his life,” he said. “You’ve got to come to grips with that. He killed himself, Rebecca. It was a sheriff’s deputy that held the gun, but it might as well have been Joe pulling the trigger. If those pictures in that sketchbook don’t tell you that, I just don’t know what will.”

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After Kias left, Rebecca and Lurleen went for a walk to the manmade lake about a mile down the road from the house. Tulane ran in front of them, chasing butterflies, jumping at birds. As they went, she pointed out everything along the way, from the presence of rabbits by the roadside, to the thick slugs on the underbellies of logs, to the piles of garbage thrown into the ditch, to the mother-of-pearl shimmer on the surface of stagnant puddles, beset with water bugs and tadpoles. As the road wound into the woods beyond the Wooler’s property, the holdings fell further into ill repair than those closer to Lidell. At the end of the Wooler’s field—now Ronnie Tibbit’s—the road curved under the vine hung trees. The air grew dark in there. She and Joe used to come down to the edge of the property. They’d peer into the darkness of the hanging trees; they’d dare one another to wander down to the lake where Daddy used to go. Down to Earl Tibbit’s shot shack. Down to the levee. Down where the older boys and the men gathered in the evenings with their boats and their chicken guts, a cooler full of Schlitz and a Hank, Jr. cassette. Where they cussed and talked football and fought and acted trashy. Rebecca laughed at herself. It was only a road. “We used to be scared to come down here, Joe and I,” she said. The evening had hat grown cool, but it was cooler than it had been that day. It was bearable. Rebecca had pulled her hair into a greasy ponytail. It hung limp down her back, like a dead snake she carried, it was so heavy with grease. “He stopped being scared,” said Lurleen. Her iron gray hair had fallen from the bun she had tied it in. Strands of hair curled around her face. They walked past doorless trailers. They walked past shacks where the boards themselves were peeling off the frame, yet people still lived there. How they kept the elements at bay was anybody’s guess. “We ought to dye your hair,” said Rebecca. Tulane scurried back as a dog came out to meet them, a dog Lurleen knew. A friendly dog. People waved. Rebecca remembered some of them from the old church. A few she had seen that afternoon working on the new one. Several boys were heading to the lake to fish, cane poles over their shoulders, sacks of rotten chicken blood in their hands. Men worked on cars. Transistor radios blared crackly music. Children played in the hose. They squealed, barking back at the dogs.

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They ran wild. They were wild little children. Not like Tulane. She wasn’t wild like that. She wasn’t feral. Rebecca smiled with pride. She was raising Tulane up right. “After you left for college,” said Lurleen. “Joe started coming down to the lake. By the time Jack came home from Ole Miss that night, he was pretty drunk. He took a sledgehammer to the church and then he went into the cellar under the stairs and he dug out another bottle of whiskey. He hadn’t touched it since ya’ll started the church, and he hadn’t sold it since the church got completely built, but there was still a few cases of it down there. It’s a tunnel, you know? He built it so he could escape if the sheriff ever came out to bust him. Idiotic really. Just where did he think he was going to escape to? Not like he had a Swiss bank account, but Jack didn’t care for the notion of going back to jail. He wanted a plan. Anyway, he brought up a couple of bottles of whiskey and dumped them on the pews. Joe tried to stop him. Joe said it was your church not his in the first place. He said you made it happen. You and Kias. He said Jack didn’t have any right on this earth to burn it down. Jack swung the bottle he was holding, and he clipped Joe on the side of the skull. Knocked him flat over those busted up pews. He cut Joe’s head up and his own hand, too. Then he dumped the whiskey out on top of Joe and the wood and everything. Got his lighter out like he was going to burn the whole place down around the both of them. Oh, I remember just shrieking. Just shrieking in the doorway. If it wasn’t for Arzo… You know, I never have had anything good to say about Arzo, but he knocked that lighter out of your daddy’s hand and he jerked him back up to the house. Joe started coming down to the lake after that. Hanging out with Ronnie and his brothers. Just like your daddy did with old Tibbit, Sr. You really think I ought to dye my hair?” “You’re young,” said Rebecca, but she was thinking about Joe staggering in the doorway of the church, defending it against him, because it was her church. It was, wasn’t it? The church was her idea. But she was just child. She’d lied to a boy she liked and said that her daddy was a holy roller because she was ashamed of who he really was. Would it have been better to remain ashamed? “I never have been young,” said Lurleen. “No, I’m not young. What color would I dye it, if I did?” “Some kind of brown,” said Rebecca. She reached across the space between them and twirled a piece of Lurleen’s hair between her fingers. “With red highlights.”

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“I guess you never dyed your hair,” said Lurleen. “You have your father’s hair.” Rebecca pulled the end of her ponytail over her shoulder. It was black as coal. “I’ve dyed other people’s,” she said. They walked on in silence, until they came to an offshoot in the road, two ruts cut in the forest, the center of which was still heavy with weeds. At the end of it sat the lake. Or rather it festered. Logs shot up through the muck. Rebecca hauled Tulane into her arms to keep her away from the water moccasins. There were no boats at the levee, but she could see the boys about a hundred yards off with their cane poles. They scrambled down the bank to the water’s edge, where reeds swayed gently through a field of dead stumps. She could see fish moving in the water. A big languid catfish drifted along the bottom. Schools of minnow dodged about, and a couple of brim stood sentinel in the weeds. Looking for snakes, she let Tulane slip to the ground. They squatted together. Rebecca took a stick and drew circles in the water, sending the minnows in a frenzy. “You asked me about a good memory of Joe,” said Lurleen. “You’re right, he wasn’t violent. But he did get beat up a lot. Even Jack. Even Jack hit him. He had this kind of contempt for him. He loved him, too. He really did. But he had this contempt. I think maybe it was contempt for the love he felt, maybe. I’ll tell you, I never cared for that church or any of those people, but I was proud of Joe when he stood up to Jack about burning it down. He did that for you. I know I wasn’t a very good mother for ya’ll growing up. I guess I shouldn’t have ever been one. I guess I wasn’t a very good wife for Jack either. I think he needed somebody more…I think he needed somebody as crazy as he was. I was just sad, sad, sad.” She paused. “Why don’t you tell me about this husband of yours.” “He owns a sheep farm,” said Rebecca. She found a flat rock. She stood, and let it skip across the surface of the lake. One, two, three. It dribbled out to seven before it plunked out of sight. “He’s forty-four.” “Yeah,” said Lurleen. They were silent. Tulane caught a tadpole. Rebecca found another flat rock and sent it skipping across the lake. “He didn’t call you back,” she said. She found herself thinking about men. She thought of them in quick succession, how they led to Daniel, all the men she had lived with up until him. In New Orleans Fredrick had saved her from Denise and the roach infested shit box north of the French Quarter.

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He had saved her from the hundred dollar bills. This was what she told herself at the time; it was why she loved him. For that whole month that she’d loved him. Because he’d saved her. Fredrick waited tables and he was good enough at it to secure a one-room apartment, away from the staggering drunks and the random pistol shots. He said he was a communist. He certainly was tall and thin and he had the patchy goatee of a communist. He looked dashing and revolutionary in his star-bellied fatigues. But like Orwell points out, waiters are never communists, not really. “I just don’t think I can raise another man’s child,” he said. In his hands he held the letter from his father telling him it was time to come back to Augusta, time to get back to college. Time for his life to begin again. She had to leave that city. There was something wrong with it. Something mutant, in a common sort of way, like a three-legged toad. In Tulsa there was the truck stop and the trailer with the diesel mechanic—paranoia, the black helicopters, marijuana. He was hard and tanned, wiry with a sailor’s tattoos on his arms. “You’ve got a college degree,” he said, as they lay in bed one day smoking a joint. The sound of Sesame Street in the other room. “Why are you here?” A lie. Her new lie: she had graduated from college. She sure had worked to scrub the rust and gravel of central Mississippi from her voice, and she read constantly, even at the counter in her pink uniform. As the morning unfolded, he drifted back to sleep before his shift. She sat in bed watching the sun work its way across the room. She got up, pulling the sheet with her and she sat by the Johnny Walker box in which she kept her books. Gibbon. Tacitus. The Arguments of the Emperor Julian Against the Christians. She pushed the train of her hair onto her back. She took up a volume on Botany. She thought of vines growing up from the floor through the pages of a thousand hardbound books. She thought of a library, overgrown with lush jungles, where crossbar inched around her legs, up through her muscles and nerves. A million stars of jasmine grew from the pages of the Decline and Fall. They exploded in the sockets of her eyes. She looked at him, asleep in the bed. She didn’t go to her shift that night. She and Tulane never looked back. They never said goodbye. They lived alone in Little Rock. She worked as a secretary; she worked in a bookstore. There was never enough money. At night she worked as a cocktail waitress, in a purple bolero and fishnet hose. From there the prospector took them in Nevada. He drove them

188 in his Winnebago. He filled her with tales of gold. He said his daddy had made and squandered a fortune prospecting for uranium in the 1950s. He still had the Geiger counter. For a summer they lived in a campground east of Reno, where she got a job as a cocktail waitress at the Circus Circus. His mother lived with them. She watched Tulane, while they wandered in the country looking for a claim. Ridiculous. As ridiculous as anything Daddy or Kias ever did. One day they hiked in a gorge and at the top where a butte leveled out they came across a paleontologist and a great femur he’d scooped from the rock. He was in tears. His face had run with dirt into his white beard. They shared a bottle of Canadian Hunter with him. They built a small fire when it was night, and she danced with him around the bone, as her prospector played the harmonica and the stars swirled overhead. The old scientist told her their names when the prospector fell asleep. “Procyon is the good dog,” he said, pointing into the great expanse above them. “But Sirius is the bad dog.” “I know,” she said. The hair on his chest was white and springy beneath her fingers. “The Plague Bringer,” she said. And so they came to Idaho. The scientist. Older. Brilliant. A glowing coal of cosmic knowledge. She had been in awe of the scientist. But when Tulane spilled her soda at the dinner table and it splashed across his sleeves, she caught his hand as he reared back to slap her with his knuckles. It took them all of thirty seconds to walk out the door, leaving her Johnny Walker box behind. She still saw him sometimes, wandering forlornly across the campus at the university. Daniel. Then there was Daniel. “He doesn’t like to talk on the phone,” said Rebecca. She skipped another flat stone across the surface of the stagnant lake. “They’re like that out west, you know? They’ve got that whole quiet thing.” “Humph,” said Lurleen. “I don’t think there’s a place on this earth has a monopoly on the whole quiet thing.” She squatted by the bank. Rebecca skipped another rock. Around them the woods exploded with the bellow of the crickets. “Where would we get this hair dye?” she said. “At the Piggly-Wiggly,” said Rebecca. “You know I always thought it was a good idea for you to go to college, too. It wasn’t just Willy.”

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“Really? I never knew that.” Lurleen nodded. “This Daniel… He go to college?” “No,” said Rebecca. She let another rock skim across the surface of the lake.

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But Rebecca didn’t head straight home from the Piggly-Wiggly with the box of Loreal Auburn Sun and the chilled liter of pinot grigio she had bought for the purpose of dying Lurleen’s hair. Instead, alone in the Gremlin, armed only with Joe’s sketches, she turned off the road and down the driveway to Uncle Williams’ house. Kias’ uncle. She had been debating this move ever since Lurleen told her about Joe’s friendship with Ronnie. But then, finding sketches of the two drunk at the levee together, she knew it was the only way forward. She had to show Kias. Uncle Williams lived about mile closer to Lidell from the Woolers. His house was situated in a group of boxy ranch houses painted bright colors, like Easter eggs. His was baby blue. In the front yard a herd of plastic deer mingled with rabbits, a lion lay down with a lamb, and a flock of pink flamingoes grazed amid a field of pin-wheeling sunflowers. Rebecca parked the Gremlin. The sign hanging over his front door read, ‘Frontline Church of Christ.’ In a plastic holder by the doorbell several rain-stiffened, purple mimeographed tracts spelled out the creed. Rebecca closed her eyes, sniffing the purple ink. It smelled like kindergarten. When he came to the door, Uncle Williams’ narrow eyes drilled down to points. She smiled, tucking his tract into her pocket. At the sight of her pants those points extinguished altogether. Deep lines formed across his forehead. He held the doorframe to steady himself. “Who is it?” called his wife, Annie, from within the house. “Why, it’s the devil’s own whore,” Uncle Williams called back. “I’d like to see Kias, if you don’t mind,” said Rebecca, ignoring him. “Wouldn’t you, now?” he said. Aunt Annie came to stand behind her husband. She sucked her breath when she saw Rebecca on the porch. “I never figured we’d see you darken our door,” she said. “Is he here?” said Rebecca. “He said he was staying with you while he builds his church.” Uncle Williams harrumphed. “His train church?” he said, slurring out his contempt for all it was worth. “Don’t you think you Woolers have done enough?” said Aunt Annie.

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“Filling his head full of all those ideas,” said Uncle Williams. “Daddy?” “Jack, you, Joe, all of you. Ephesians 1:4—” “Even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world. He destined us in love to be his sons through Jesus Christ,” she said. She stabbed a pointy index finger at him, poking him in the chest. Uncle Williams jumped back, knocking Annie out of his way. “Is this correct?” Rebecca continued. “You’re upset with me because Kias gave up on predestination?” “All he talks about is how you’ll come back to the fold one day,” said Uncle Williams. “I told him a whore is born a whore.” “A whore’s a whore,” said Aunt Annie. Rebecca laughed. “So Kias believes in me, does he? That’s sweet. It really is.” “I told him that whore and her whore-spawn—” Rebecca jabbed him in the chest with her finger again “You can say what you like about me,” she said. “Because I don’t take you seriously. But you say one bad thing about my daughter, I will straight out knock you senseless. Now where is he? I need to talk to him.” Uncle Williams shrank away, rubbing the spot where she poked him. He looked concerned, unsure of himself, like maybe she’d blasted him there with black magic. “Got him a trailer out back,” he scowled. Nodding, she thanked them syrupy, and went to the Gremlin to get Joe’s sketchbook. §§§ In the Williams’ back yard a patchwork Airstream trailer rested on concrete blocks. Kias had duct-taped cardboard over a busted window. Snaking from behind the cardboard an orange extension cord and a length of coaxial cable ran to the back door of the house. His car was there, along with what looked like a chariot welded from a boat trailer and a sheet of corrugated aluminum. He had the light on inside the trailer, but Kias sat cross-legged atop a cable spool he was using as a picnic table. He was lost in thought and she startled him, zapping him awake when she touched his arm. Scrambling off the cable spool, he positioned it between the two of them. She could tell he wasn’t used to visitors. There was something embarrassing about it. His eyes kept darting from the airstream to the

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house, where she knew the curtain had been drawn aside. She could feel their beady-eyed heads, stacked one on top of the other in the window, watching. She could feel the loathing bore through her back. She held Joe’s sketchbook out to him. “I want to show you something.” Inside, Kias had covered nearly every wall of his trailer with bookshelves. There was a bed at one end, in the carpeted, living room area, and a kitchenette at the other with a hot plate, a sink, and a Formica table. In the living room he had a couple of beanbag chairs, a lava lamp, and a console hi-fi system that looked like a buffet when the lid was closed. Apparently it played eight tracks: Frampton Comes Alive, The Best of Jim Nabors, Peggy Lee. Spread across the table was a mock-up of the church and train he had built out of Popsicle sticks and Elmer’s glue. She could only imagine him in here late at night, his face sticky with Popsicle juice, eating glue off his fingers, with the lava lamp bubbling, and Peter Frampton blasting away on the stereo. “Have a seat,” he said, sweeping his hand in a grand gesture toward the beanbag chairs. “You and Willy should get together,” she said, pointing at the model. Kias frowned, and she decided not to explain, not to say, ‘he plays with little toys too.’ Why say it? Smiling, she was proud of her restraint. “Look,” she said. “Look at this.” They both sat in the beanbag chairs, scooting them into the middle of the room. She laid Joe’s sketchbook open on the floor between them. She turned to a page with a drawing of the levee, the lake, a bass boat being lowered into the water from a Ford F-150. Several men stood around waiting at sunrise, their cheeks puffed up with tobacco plugs. Joe among them. Ronnie. Ronnie’s older brother. Another boat. “I went for a walk with Momma this evening,” she said. “We walked down to the lake and she said that Joe started hanging out with Ronnie after I left.” “Sure,” said Kias. “Your daddy busted up the church and folks kind of went their own way.” “Did you know Daddy built a tunnel under the house?” “No.” “You boys and your tunnels,” she said. “You see, Daddy kept his supply of whiskey in a hole under the stairs. Now I used to think that after he converted he stopped doing that. After all Mr. Tibbit shot him with a .410, you remember? That’s when he converted.”

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“Right,” said Kias. “I figured that out eventually. Neither you nor your Daddy could find a passage in the Bible.” “Well, I bet I could find it now,” she said. “I bet I could quote it back to you from memory.” Kias put up his hands. “I won’t compete with you,” he said. “I learned long ago not too. Your daddy either, I might add. He really did believe. Does, I’d say.” “I thought he stopped with the whiskey. Momma, too. But I think he kept his relationship with Tibbit, Sr. Here, look. This is when Mr. Tibbit died.” Rebecca turned back several pages. Seen from below, as if from within the open grave, there was a picture of Kias standing over a coffin, reciting from the Bible. “Mr. Tibbit never was religious,” said Kias. “Never came to church once. But your Daddy insisted he get a Christian burial.” “I was a senior,” she said. “Six months later I headed up to Ole Miss and—” She turned the page. “Here’s Daddy and Joe meeting with Ronnie. His brother must’ve already been making bonds.” There was a drawing of Joe and Daddy unloading bottles of whiskey from the backseat of Daddy’s Gremlin, while Ronnie Tibbit smiled in the background. She turned the pages. There was a drawing of Joe and Ronnie drinking straight from the bottle. In one they played a game where they tried not to stab their outstretched fingers with a buck knife. There was a picture of Joe with a woman on his lap. There was one of Ronnie with the same woman, wearing the same T-shirt. There were pictures of fights between the two of them. There were pictures of Ronnie and Joe staggering arm in arm through the trees. In one picture Ronnie had fallen over in the lake. He lay in the water, grinning at the artist and pointing to the Dixie cup he held, having managed to spill not a single drop from it as he fell. “I think these are the pictures,” she said. “The one’s Joe was going to use. Some of them, anyway. They’re from the time after I left to when Joe ran away from home. They don’t show Ronnie in a flattering light.” Kias ran his palm over his forehead. “Ronnie was a little wild,” he said. “He freely admits that.” “To admit you were wild is one thing,” she said. “To have pictures of yourself doing drugs—” She flipped forward to a drawing of Ronnie Tibbit completely naked but for a

194 pair of leopard print bikini briefs wrapped around his head. He was passed out on a chaise lounge, with one arm curled around a two-foot bong. Rebecca frowned. On the opposite page was a picture of Joe. Sly-dog eyes and sneaky shoulders, he was pissing into that very same bong. He held a finger to his lips, hushing himself. Kias rubbed his face. “Not the kind of thing that screams ‘Public Servant,’ is it?” she said. “No,” said Kias. “I guess not.” “People are going to ride through this tunnel,” she said. “Looking at these pictures of sin and redemption and then come into your sanctuary for a sermon. They’re going to meet you and they’re going to meet Ronnie. You’re going to ask for their soul and Ronnie’s going to ask for their vote.” “That wasn’t part of the idea,” said Kias. “If Ronnie wants to run for office—” She smacked Kias on the forehead, and jabbed at the drawing of Ronnie passed out in the chaise lounge. “Are you going to vote for somebody who’s so stoned he can’t even tell that his bong water’s been peed in? Come on, now. I can’t—” Rebecca closed her eyes. She held her palms over them. “I can’t keep saying this and have nobody listen to me. He wanted to get rid of Joe. I don’t think he wanted him to get killed, but he wanted him out of the picture. He had a reason to. Don’t you see? When is somebody going to stop saying, ‘Joe had a hard life. Joe had problems?’” Kias picked up the scrapbook. He flipped through several of the pages. “All right,” he said. “All right. But if Ronnie knew these were the pictures Joe was working on, why didn’t he get rid of the sketchbook? We found it in Joe’s studio.” “Probably he did get rid of the pictures he saw,” she said. “Whatever Joe showed him. You know, Joe wouldn’t have thought he was ruining Ronnie’s political career. He didn’t think that way. He thought he was painting a tunnel with images of him and Ronnie coming to redemption. Ronnie’s got sense enough not to throw away everything in Joe’s studio a couple of days after Joe dies. If anyone bothered to ask questions that would look suspicious, so he left the studio completely alone. I bet it’s all gone now that Joe’s cremated, and it doesn’t look like anyone’s going to look into the matter. What do you want to bet?” Kias glanced from the drawings to Rebecca and back to the drawings. Finally he looked up, closing the sketchbook. “That’s just…” Kias shook his head. “Crazy.”

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“I want to get into his office. I want to see if the Tibbits are involved in any crystal meth cases.” “You want to break into his office? The front part?” “I just need the key,” she said, holding her palm out. “Seriously? You really think Ronnie would drug Joe and send him off with a pistol to get killed?” “I don’t think he wanted him to get killed. I just think he wanted him to spiral into decay.” It took Kias a while to answer. He got up and wandered into the kitchen, where he filled a glass of water from a jug on the counter. Apparently the sink wasn’t actually connected to any water source. “All right,” he said, finally. “I left the key at the church in town.” She smiled, jumping up to hug him. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you. I’ll meet you at the mini-mall tonight. I got to run home quick and dye Momma’s hair.”

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By the time she got to the True Path Church of the Great Way later that night, the pinot grigio she had drunk with Momma in the kitchen had worn down to a dull throb between her temples. She was tired and no longer enthusiastic for the crimes ahead. She was simply determined to see them through with a grim faced refusal to yield, either to Kias, who she suspected would try to talk her out of it, or to herself, fragments of which had been trying to talk her out of it all evening. More wine would help. Perhaps a shot of Ronnie’s whiskey. The plan was simple. She’d park in the back this time, alongside his car. The lights in the church would remain out, as would the lights in Joe’s studio. They’d carry small penlights with them. They’d whisper this time. Ivy wouldn’t be there. It was all a lot more serious. Kias again wore his black tracksuit and hoody, though he’d managed to rip the tags off, and he’d covered the reflective stripes on his tennis shoes with electrical tape. She could tell he meant business. “You don’t have to go in,” she said. They stood together outside the door to Joe’s studio. Their shadows loomed large against the concrete blocks of the wall. Kias took her arm and tugged her close to the door, diminishing their outlines. “I just need the key,” she whispered. “You’ll need help getting through the ceiling,” he said. “You’ll need a boost.” Kias pulled the key out of his pocket and slid it into the mechanism. She could hear his breath through his nose. She could feel his tension in the grip he kept on her arm. Once they were inside, she moved toward the light switch on the wall, but he stopped her, turning on the penlight. Quickly he cast the beam around the studio. Rebecca frowned. In the circle of light she could see the place was exactly as it had been. There was Joe’s painting of the Song of the Sea. There was the easy chair in the corner. The strung out electronics guts still hung on the walls; the disco ball of duct-tape still dangled from the ceiling, and the scraps of paper still littered the corners. Through the air, the profuse smell of spattered paint lingered just as it had the other day. If Ronnie had been in this room, he had left it undisturbed. Certainly he had not pulled any books off the shelf; he had not been through here searching, at least not haphazardly, the way Rebecca imagined

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Ronnie searched. Even for his lost keys, no doubt. Even for the misplaced pen behind his ear, or the hat he had already slapped to his head. Ronnie tore apart anything to get at what he wanted. She saw him as a bratty child dumping out the Fruit Loops to lay his hands on the decoder ring. “See,” said Kias. “Ronnie doesn’t care about the pictures.” “Boost me up that wall,” she said, pointing toward the door. Kias put his penlight in his teeth. He leaned into wall, lacing his fingers together. He braced his hands against his thighs. She stepped into his palms and worked her way up to the ceiling tiles. She could just reach them with the tips of her fingers. “I’m going to have to get on your shoulders,” she said. Kias pressed himself flat against the wall. He let out a series of muffled grunts as he lifted her into place, and she stood on his shoulders. Bracing herself, she pushed the ceiling tile into the darkness above. Popping her head through, she took the penlight from her pocket, shining the light into the space of the false ceiling. To her delight, several thick water pipes and an electrical conduit traversed front to back through a hole cut in the drywall. Chalky dust covered everything. It made her want to sneeze. “Just as I hoped,” she reported, her voice echoing in the dark recess of the space. “The pipes go over to the front office. It’s a tight squeeze, but I think I can make it.” Kias grunted. She pulled herself up by one of the pipes and got her hand on the lip of the drywall. She stuck the penlight in her teeth, and pulled herself fully into the ceiling and through the hole. It was a tight fit and she could feel the drywall flaking off as she forced her way across. Resting against the water pipe, she pulled up a ceiling tile from above the front office, and aimed the penlight down through the hole. She could see nothing except the wood-grain paneling of the walls. “Are you all right?” Kias whispered through clenched teeth. “Hush a second,” she said. “I’m thinking up here.” She put the penlight in her pocket, testing the strength of the water pipe. It seemed sturdy enough, and she put a little more weight on it, inching her way forward, until she was completely through the hole and hanging above the ceiling of the front office. But before she could lower her feet through the missing tile, she felt a sickening twist of metal as the pipe came free of the brackets, and she fell through the ceiling, grabbing at the tiles and the metal strips that held them into place. She crashed in a heap of dust and broken ceiling. “What?” he screamed through the door. “What was that? Is everything all right?”

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“It’s all right,” she said, standing, brushing herself off. “Everything’s fine.” Retrieving the penlight from the floor, she scanned the office. Through the front windows she could see the parking lot of the Dixie Land Plaza. A few cars drove by on the road. A sheriff’s car. She held the penlight against her chest. A Semi-trailer lumbered through town. Calm. Calm. Stay calm. Keep the light out. They can’t see me in the shadows. I’m in the shadows. Stay there. Stay in the shadow. Whatever you do, I can see you. “I see you, too,” she said. “Rebecca?” Kias called, again. She unlocked the door. Then, realizing she was leaving fingerprints, she took a tissue from her pocket to polish the doorknob. “Turn out your light before you come through,” she said. “And don’t touch anything.” “My—My goodness. Goodness gracious. Oh,” he said. “Oh, oh, oh. What—Oh.” He was dumbstruck, standing beneath the hole in the ceiling. “How will we fix that?” “We won’t,” she said. “Hurry. Look.” “Oh, Lord,” he said. “What for?” “I don’t know exactly,” she said. They stood together in the darkness of the office. Silence all around them. “Anything to do with crystal meth. Paperwork. Evidence. Something. Anything. Something that proves he did it. But don’t touch anything.” Kias remained motionless, unsure how to process this order. “Go,” she said. “Just look.” Using the tissue she pulled open the drawers to Ronnie’s desk. There was his fifth of Old Grand-Dad. He had stacks of sticky notes, papers, pads of various forms, receipts, pencils and pens, his emptied jar of mayonnaise with a crusty spoon. Frowning, she picked up by one corner a copy of Backseat Bullmeat, a pornographic magazine aimed a rather narrow demographic. On the cover was woman in the back seat of a limousine, her body strategically covered with raw steak. “See?” she said. “This is your quote changed man un-quote. Backseat Bullmeat? Who reads something called Backseat Bullmeat?” She held it out for him to inspect, but Kias waved her away. He was busy making fish-faces and gesturing at the hole in the ceiling. She dropped it back in the drawer. Rebecca walked to the filing cabinets, but they were all locked. She rifled through the bills in the correspondence holder on the wall. She inspected the things tacked to a piece of corkboard. She looked through his brother’s desk. “Keep looking,” she said. “Come on.”

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“I just don’t know what I’m looking for,” he said. “You—okay—you’re right. Ronnie isn’t sincere in his belief. I believe you. I’ll—I’ll get out of our deal. I’ll pay him back what I owe him—somehow—I don’t know exactly how. But—Rebecca what are we looking for?” “Proof he killed Joe,” she said, a little too emphatically this time. Even she could hear the tremble in her voice. Even she knew, she sounded crazy. It was crazy, but it had to be true. Joe was dead. Ronnie was a son-of-a-bitch. She knelt by the waste paper basket, digging through the trash, the beer bottles, the wadded paper. She scanned each item with the penlight. But there was nothing. Nothing. She saw nothing in the trash. “Joe had a really hard life,” he said. “You’re not going to start that again,” she said. Kias knelt. He placed his hand on her back, between her shoulder blades. She tensed, but she didn’t move away. “It was after talking to him one night, when he told me everything about his life,” said Kias. “That I started trying to find you.” “It must’ve really disappointed you, huh?” she said. She sat back, tucking her legs beneath her. “When you found out I wasn’t a crack whore or something.” “Of course not,” he said. “I was worried. Yes. But then Ronnie said you were living in Idaho. He said you were married. And then talking to you on the phone you sounded good. When I saw you at the airport I knew you must’ve stayed true to your faith.” “Stop,” she said, holding up her palm. “Right there, Kias. It was paranoia. Pure and simple. I was too paranoid, that’s all. I’d like to think it was some kind of inner integrity. But it wasn’t. No, I was never as bad off as Joe and Ivy. I never stood on a street corner, but I sure as hell have stayed in relationships long after I knew it was a bad idea—bad for Tulane—simply because he put a roof over my head. And I had opportunities, too. Let me tell you. I was a cocktail waitress in Reno. I could’ve taken so much money off those poor stupid losers. But you know what, I was scared to death every single one of them was a private investigator Daddy had hired to drag me back to Lidell, back to you. Back to all this. To your TV show. To the school. To everybody trying to make me be what you all wanted me to be. But I’m over it now. I’m over all that now. I’ve got a good life.” “Come on,” said Kias. He stood. “We’re not going to find anything. Even if the Tibbit’s have bailed some crystal meth people out of jail, it wouldn’t prove anything. No

200 one knows where Joe got those drugs. They questioned all of us. They asked me. They asked Ronnie. They asked Ivy. They asked everyone he worked with down at the Waffle House. Nobody knew where the drugs came from. Nobody knew where the gun came from. It’s a mystery. But…the thing is, it’s not that mysterious. It happens all the time. That’s what Willy says. That’s what the sheriff says. That’s…that’s why we’re going to a full-time prosecutor next election. That’s why the sheriff’s getting a new jail. There’s big city problems moving down here from Jackson. Rebecca, read the Beckham County Gazette. It’s in there every week. You’ve been away for so long, but it’s changing around here and this kind of thing is happening now. I know it doesn’t make any sense that it would be Joe, but this kind of thing happens all the time. Now…now I helped you. We did it. We broke in. My God…we’ve broken into Ronnie’s office. But can we go now? We’ve done it. We broke in. We looked for evidence.” She saw the trash strewn around the floor of Ronnie’s office. She saw the pile of busted ceiling tiles. She thought she ought to cry, but she had no tears. She had nothing. There was nothing in her; she was a dry husk, like a scarecrow, full of sticks and dry earth. “I just wish I’d done something,” she said. “I kept saying I would. Every letter I got from him, I told myself I ought to write back and tell him to come live with me, wherever I was. He could’ve come and lived with me. I could’ve helped him. I could’ve gotten him back into school. He never even finished high school, you know? I could’ve helped him get his GED. I could’ve kept him off drugs and out of the streets. I could’ve been there for him when no one else was. No one but some stupid shrink in New Orleans. He’s my baby brother and he had to go to some stranger, when what he needed was me, and we were all so busy with our own idiotic crap, even Daddy. I know that’s not fair. I know he’s dying and he ought to be able to just die in peace, surrounded by people who love him. But…but…but he never loved us. Not really. He never really loved Momma or me or Joe either. Not really. It was just this lie he was living to try to absolve himself. Can you understand that? That’s what our whole lives were about. It was just about Daddy and his stupid soul. What about Joe? Why didn’t anybody help Joe? Why didn’t I? Why didn’t I help him? What the hell’s wrong with me?” “Come on,” said Kias, wrapping his arm around her shoulder. He led her back through Joe’s studio, and outside to the back lot, where they had parked their cars. The night was

201 muggy and it fell down like a pallet load of bricks when they left the air-conditioned rooms of the Earl Tibbit Bail Bonds office. The swarming bugs made a constant din around the glare of the security lights. Sitting behind the wheel of the Gremlin, she waved to him as he got into his own car and started the engine. He pulled around even with her, and rolled his window down. He hadn’t turned his lights on, like maybe he wouldn’t until he was a block away. She rolled her window down also, feeling the night breeze on her face. The dark jungle seethed in the shadows beyond concrete slab of the parking lot. He smiled, letting his palm swim through midair as if it were a fish. “Good night,” he said. Pulling away, he drove around the side of the building. After a few seconds, she couldn’t hear his car anymore. “I wasn’t having you on the other day,” she said. “You really ought to start a family. You’d make a good father.” The silence crashed all around her, and the jungle gobbled up her words.

202

Tulane lay in bed thinking of the astro-archeologist at the core of Space City. Down in the deepest cavern, where no one ever goes. So the story says. Like Momma told her. The room was dark. She lay atop the sleeping bags. She looked out the window at the stars. Their names were all forgotten long ago. She thought of lost names. Names lost in the reel-to-reel memory banks of those ancient and senile computers. Names deep in the lost heart of the lost asteroid. Down there where mad gnomes still work the levers and push the buttons. Their grins drip with slobber. Their noses run with snot. Their laughter is the cruel, cruel laughter of the wind as it ripped through the hair of the pajama-footed girl, lost in January amid the semi trailers and the cackle. She heard the whoosh of air brakes and the clatter of the couplings. There was static on the radios. The sky was alive with chatter. It moaned out in long, dull groans. Glass shattered on the pavement. Tires unwound on the highway. The land was flat, flat, flat, all the way to the sky, where the stars scream out in vain. She watched the silent screaming stars as they rolled down the screen of the sky. They hurtle slantwise, screaming as they slam the highway. The whole land was screaming as it unwound in a howl of goblin jowls and the mealy boned crunch of rodents snuffling all around her. Running through the cabs, through the trailers, past the ogres in the night. Running through the field. She was screaming. She screamed out the land all around her. It poured out of her mouth, out of her eyes. It flooded the plain. Plunging deep, deep, miles deep, into the belly of the asteroid, she carried in the palm of her hand the dying embers of that lost sun. Who wanders this deep, anymore? So the story goes. Who ventures past the old doors? Who knew the old codes? Who knew to bring a bit of rat meat for those pale and shrunken gnomes in the pits of the old city? This city of Stone. Space City. She offered up the rat meat on her trembling palm, an offering to the idiot gods, chattering amongst the levers and the pulleys. They negotiated her death by lasers, her death by mind ray. Do we tie her to the floor and carve her up for jelly? They’ll grease the old computers with her slime. We’ll get a few centuries yet from these enfeebled tubes. Who bargains for the old charts, the old names? Who pulls from her pocket the old stones, the artifacts, aglow with the aura of thirty thousand years? Who still speaks with the old gnomes deep in the pits of this lost city?

203

Rolling to her feet, she padded to the window. The stars were out and bright. She thought about the stories. The ones in Joe’s letters. She’d been lost in the parking lot at the truck stop that night. Back when they lived with the one who smelled of diesel, the one so far away on the horizon now, he was only the shadow of a man and that smell. Shadow of a smell. Momma said she would be home soon. But she was not home. Ivy wasn’t in bed. She had gotten up a few minutes ago. Tulane had pretended to sleep. But she had not been asleep. She was thinking about the hole in the floor. The hole and the hole within the hole, the hole that led on down to nothing. The gnomes. The nothing- gnomes. If only she knew where to get a piece of the sun. He was out there. In the hallway. The angel. She had heard him. That’s where Ivy was. Ivy had heard him, too. The floorboards had creaked when Ivy rose to gather her T- shirt from the floor and slip it on, over her head. Tulane had watched her bulk slouch across the floor. When Ivy entered the hall, there was the briefest of light. Tulane saw him on the landing, by the door to Grandpa Jack’s room. He leaned on his cane. His hair, wild with static, flowed around his face, like a crown of a thousand albino snakes. She got up and tiptoed to the door. Grandpa Jack had been angry earlier, though she hadn’t told Momma. She hadn’t mentioned Grandma Lurleen’s jumping on the bed either. She didn’t tell. She wasn’t a tattletale. Slipping through the door, Tulane walked onto the landing. Beside her the stairs plunged into the blue glow of the television in the living room. She heard Grandma Lurleen say something to Aunt Cindy. She pressed her ear against the door to Grandpa Jack’s room. Grandma Lurleen would want to know. She’d want to see an angel, wouldn’t she? She’d like that. She’d like to know an angel was watching over Grandpa Jack. Tulane turned to go downstairs, but as she did so, the door swung open. Ivy grabbed her arm, yanking her inside. She jerked the door closed, sweeping away the hall, sweeping away the landing, Grandma Lurleen, and the whole house beyond. Gone. It was all gone. Swept away. She was in the room, held in Ivy’s grip. Grandpa Jack lay above the sheets. His head rested on the pillow. He was wide-awake, watching. Watching the room, Ivy, Tulane. The angel knelt at his side, but Grandpa Jack wasn’t watching the angel. He wouldn’t look at him. He wouldn’t see what the angel did. He wouldn’t watch the angel wrap his arm with surgical tubing. “I thought I heard a mouse,” said the angel,

204 turning his head briefly to smile in her direction. “Come,” he said, waving her closer. “Come and see.” “She ought to be asleep,” said Ivy. Kindly, now. She had yanked her through the door. Tulane thought harsh words, sharp admonitions were sure to follow, but her voice was pleading. She was Ivy. When Ivy spoke, she was pleading with the world. “You should be asleep.” “But she isn’t,” said the angel. “She has come to me because she wants to know. Over here.” He waved her close again. “Sit with us.” Tulane crawled over the piled clothes until she stood by the bed. Grandpa Jack lay staring at the ceiling and mumbling under his breath. She touched his big toe. Cold, craggy toenail, crusted yellow and old. She wrapped her fingers around it. “My name is Dr. Miller,” said the angel. “I thought you were an angel,” said Tulane. “I am,” he said. “We all are. You too. We are a race of angels. You think—” He turned. He had a hypodermic syringe in his hand. Holding it to the light, he cleared the air from the needle. “You think you are this body, holding the big toe of this other body on the bed. But this is not you. You are an angel, right here.” He tapped her on the forehead, between her eyes. “At forty-nine days, seven times seven weeks, the soul enters the fetus through the pineal gland, when the one becomes two and then ten thousand. This is entheogenic endogenous dimethyltryptamine, DMT, purified soul. It flows through the pineal from planes of existence at right angles with this one. I am that flow. Your grandfather is that flow. You are that flow. We are together in this room one massive flow of dimethyltryptamine on the other side of our pineal glands. Our differentiation is but an illusion. In this syringe, I have 50 milligrams of pure soul… Perhaps child, you would like to know what it is like to feast on pure soul?” “No,” said Ivy. Tulane looked at the syringe. A drop of fluid held to the tip of the needle. “No,” she said. Dr. Miller smiled. “A wise choice,” he said, returning his attention to Grandpa Jack. “Would if we were all so wise as the child, eh?” He punched the needle into a popping vein on Grandpa Jack’s arm. He pushed the plunger down, and Grandpa Jack sucked his

205 breath. His eyes bulged. He convulsed, flexing his back. Tulane nearly screamed, but Ivy clapped her hand over Tulane’s mouth. The angel did the same to Grandpa Jack. He continued to jerk, but after a few seconds he calmed, until he lay there only breathing. The angel took his blood pressure and checked the readout on his rectal thermometer. Perhaps five minutes went by, perhaps an eon. “Now tell me,” said the angel, when Grandpa Jack’s eyes began to flutter. “One more time. Tell me about the punk.” “When I was boy,” said Grandpa Jack. “I had rheumatic fever.” “No,” said the angel. “The punk. Tell me about the punk.” “The punk,” said Grandpa Jack. “The punk,” said the angel. “Can you see him? Is he here?” “The punk,” said Grandpa Jack. “He lay in the field with blood on his lips and I rushed to his side. I took him in my arms, and we started walking. They are all yelling at me as we walk across the cotton, over the delta and into the river. They are all shouting, but we just keep on walking, the punk and I, growing tall. Tall as the clouds. We wander over the continents, over the oceans. Expanding. We’re expanding as we go. We just keep on walking, blowing up like a bubble, until we pop. His last words still hang in the sky as we vaporize. ‘Aim high,’ said the punk. And I pop into nothing. A dark hallway of cells. The hard scuff of feet and dragging chains. I can hear them calling out the names of the damned. I can hear them calling my name.” “The punk yelled ‘aim high’?” said the angel. “That’s right,” said Grandpa Jack. “He was a dumb punk.” “He was,” said the angel. “He was pretty stupid.” “He trusted me,” said Grandpa Jack. “Why would he do that?” “He was a dumb punk,” said the angel. “You knew him? You knew the punk?” “I did,” said the angel. “Why did he trust me?” “You said you would aim high. You were nice to him, when no one else was. He was a punk, but you stopped that, didn’t you? You found them, remember? We were on a work detail and the captain sent the punk with those men back to the truck for the

206 shovels. You found them in the back, remember? With the punk pressed down against the floorboards. You put that .30 .30 on them. Remember? He trusted you, because you helped him. He thought you were his friend.” “I told him I’d aim high if he ran. I told him I’d let him escape.” “But you didn’t.” “No,” said Grandpa Jack. “I shot him for a pardon. They used to pardon the trustee shooters if we stopped an escape.” “But they didn’t pardon you, did they?” “No,” said Grandpa Jack. “There was a moratorium on it.” “And the punk?” “They added twenty-four months to his sentence for the attempt.” “Did you help him after that?” “No,” said Grandpa Jack. “After that when I found them in the back of the truck with the punk, I just turned away. I couldn’t look at him anymore. I couldn’t stand the sight of him.” “Good,” said the angel, stroking the side of Grandpa Jack’s face with his palm. “When can we go?” said Ivy. “Soon,” said the angel. “You’re not due for another week. We’ll be long gone by then.” Returning to Jack, he said. “It’s almost over. Now what do you want to do?” “Burn it down. But I can’t.” “This child,” said the angel. “I didn’t know at first why this child had been sent to us. But I see now. Don’t you? This child has been sent to help.” “She will help,” said Grandpa Jack. “It doesn’t belong to them.” “No, it doesn’t.” “Just tell me again. Before I go. I want to hear it one more time,” said the angel. “Tell me once more about how you shot the punk.”

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When she got home the house was quiet. The trees loomed around the darkened windows. She could hear the crickets. She could hear the frogs. She could hear the night scurry in the woods and in the field. The night air was liquid, thick; it made the stars shimmer like a school of minnows beneath a thin slip of pond water. Squat and defiant, as if punched out of copper, the moonlit church glowed in stark contrast against the jungle. She thought of Joe fighting with Daddy in the gravel. She couldn’t sleep. She knew she wouldn’t. All night. She could tell this was a night of coffee, of blood shot eyes, and a ragged, throbbing brain. She didn’t want to go inside just yet, so she descended to the church, crunching through the gravel, until she came to the grass beyond the oak tree. Out in the field, she slipped her shoes off, rolling the legs of her pants up to her knees. She wandered into the field of stars, slick with august, her skin sticking to the fabric of her shirt, as the weeds slapped at her calves. Around her the great lung of the earth exhaled the liquid night. There’d been a worthless mule out here once, and a shed where the worthless mule slept. They had used the shed boards when they built the church. Standing in the middle of the field, she looked up at the sky. She thought of a Dyson sphere around a distant sun. Those Dyson spheres of Joe’s. What race of being would disassemble its solar system to construct such a monstrosity of gleaming metal and power? Who could enslave a five billion year old god? And where are all the burned out husks, the discarded tin cans of all the dead Dyson spheres? The extinguished ash of their dying gods. Where is the junkyard of those stellar engineers? Where is the junkyard of Joe’s mental flotsam? Why did some shrink have to be there for him? Why couldn’t she? She should’ve been there for him. It would gnaw away at her all the rest of her days. She would look up in the sky, where once she had seen only jewels glowing in the heavens, diamonds and pearls running in rivulets down the arc of the dome, as she walked barefoot in the night of Eden, and Joe walked with her, while Daddy split firewood and Momma danced around the coals, and she would see only Joe, his guts ripped inside out and stretched a hundred million miles. He was inside out. He was papered over the sun. Disassembled. Discarded. He lay in a scrap pile of burned out Dyson spheres. Guilt. For the rest of her days she saw only guilt when she looked at the

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stars. “Ultima Thule,” she said, brushing her fingertips over the letters on the cover of Joe’s sketchbook. It had become a part of her, that book. She would never set it down. Inside the house, she listened at the door to Cinderella’s room; she stood with her ear pressed against the door to Lurleen’s; she glanced in on Tulane and Ivy sound asleep. At Daddy’s door she paused a long while before easing through. There was no moon on this side of the house. It was dark, and Daddy’s shallow breath issued from the darkness. “Oh, oh, oh,” he moaned. “Oh.” He was not asleep, though the hospice man should’ve given him his morphine several hours before. She went to him and knelt by the bed. He had managed to uncover himself and he lay atop the sheets in a pair of boxer briefs. She felt his forehead. He stiffened to the touch. “It’s me,” she said. “It’s Rebecca, Daddy.” “I carried him in my arms,” he said. “I carried him across the fields and over the Delta.” “Who?” she said. “The punk.” “The punk?” Daddy grabbed her hand against his face. “Rebecca?” he said. “The book? You have the book?” “Yes,” she said, clicking on the lamp. She held Joe’s sketchbook open on his gaunt stomach. It rested against his ribs he was so thin, so wasted. “The birdman,” he said. “It’s toward the back,” she said. “It’s the hospice man.” “No,” said Daddy. “It’s the punk. He comes to me in the night. He…I never told. Never. I couldn’t tell.” “What punk?” she said. “I carried him across the field and over the delta. We… we rode together and I cut a chunk of my own thigh off to toss up to him as he flew.” Rebecca stood, taking the book with her. He grasped after it, but his fingers slipped dead and useless from the pages. “Ghosts,” she said, turning off the lamp “It’s the hospice man. Joe sketched him because he had the pills. I’m surprised there aren’t more sketches of him in here.” She tried to sleep after that, but even before she lay down in the cot beside Tulane, she knew it would end fruitlessly. So after a few hours of fading in and out and jerking

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suddenly awake, as stabbing dreams sent waves of adrenaline through her body, she untangled herself from Tulane, took up the sketchbook, and went down to the kitchen for another night of puzzling through the sketches and drinking cup after cup of black coffee, until her mind buzzed like a shot speaker. Aunt Cindy’s. She found the carton in the fridge, and lighting the first one on the stove, she then she lit them from the butts of the ones she finished. Joe’s sketches. They were only sketches. If they had been photographs…but they were only sketches. They could’ve been pictures of anything. In some she could tell precisely who was drawn, but others were vague, more abstract, more dashed off and smeared. She looked at the pictures of Joe and Ivy with the man she guessed was Dr. Miller. This psychologist, this savior. She hated him. She felt the visceral waves of hate every time she saw him. He had been there for her little brother? In retrospect, of course, she should’ve realized. She should’ve put it all together. Guilt. Again. This was something she would feel guilty about for the rest of her life, because it was something she could’ve stopped if only she had put the sketches together properly. Seen one way, the sketch of the hospice man was clearly a sketch of Dr. Miller. But she had to see it that way for it to be so. In truth the sketches were wild; they were fantastical. Even the ones that seemed real. What were they? The details of this sketch came from that story, and the story told by any one sketch was built out of details culled from another. It wasn’t just the sketch of Momma cutting her finger, and the fact that Daddy had omitted the detail of where it happened. She could’ve put it all together, if it was only a matter of a few omitted details. But as she looked through the book, as she tried to compile the images in her head, as she tried to hold on to them and to build sense from them, they broke loose of their moorings and they dissolved hyper-dimensionally, so that no single image could be called discreet onto itself, flat on the page and localized. Pieces of this image fused with pieces of that. They blooped together as if seen in a funhouse mirror made of rolling mercury. She saw Dr. Miller. She saw Joe. She saw Ivy. They stood in a desert, surrounded by street kids. They stood in a swamp surrounded by street kids. They stood by the fire, and their eyes goggled out like a pair of moons. Joe stood in that crowd with his hands stuffed into his pockets. He held Ivy’s hand. She was so thin in that thinnest of dresses. It blew all around her in the wind. And Rebecca. She was there. She was there in the crowd too,

210 with her toddler bouncing at her side. Tulane. There was Tulane with her spheroid helmet and zap-gun. She took tri-coder readings of the cool night air. He led them over the dunes. He led them through the swamps. He dragged them down alleyways. He pushed them out of windows. They were with her in Tulsa, at the truck stop in the flatness. They poured out of a school bus, in white shirts and black ties, those same street kids from the pages before. There he was by the school bus, pumping gas into the tanks. Joe had been with them. Or had she written all this? Had she sent him a letter? Was it just like the picture of Momma’s cut finger? There was a sketch of Rebecca dressed in her pink uniform. She held an order pad in her hand, a chewed pencil propped behind her ear. She looked sad in that picture, standing at the counter. She looked distant from it all, reaching for the pencil, as if she were watching it all from the doorway. Joe must’ve stood in the doorway, and watched her working some night when they came through Tulsa, but he never said hello. Was Ivy with them then? Had she stayed on the bus? The school bus? There was a school bus? They lived on the school bus? They found her in Little Rock. They found her in Reno. There were sketches of the Winnebago. Sketches of the prospector. Joe had sketched out the gorge where they hiked all day with that metal detector. He had drawn pictures of the scientist, with his spectacles and pipe, his patchy sleeves, and smug pride. Had she written these things? She couldn’t have written them. She had written so little. There was the sign over the driveway to Daniel’s. The postal box by the gravel road. She could hear the crashing waves of the wheat in that sketch. The Palouse alive in the summer wind. Daniel and his dogs out herding the sheep. Had he stood at the mailbox? Had he sketched these things, not a quarter mile from where she loaded the dishwasher, or sliced apples for pie, or canned blackberries for the winter, or tossed a tennis ball for Coconut, or read with Tulane, or sheered wool from the sheep? At her mailbox, sketching? Sandwiched between visions of Dyson spheres hurtled through space, between sketches of homunculi, their nerves pouring down from the sun to pull out Joe’s eyes. These visions of her own life sketched in-between? They were only sketches. It was any waitress in any truck stop by the side of the highway anywhere in America. It was only some school bus. It was only Ivy so thin in that thinnest of dresses. It was only the night sky over New Orleans. It

211 was just that one sketch of the man from the hospice. There was no way she could’ve known. If only she could’ve known. If only she could see it for what it was, but it all ran together in her brain and in made no sense at all and the more she stared at it, the less sense it made, like the image on a television screen, looked at from an inch away. The morning was full of birds, stale smoke and the butt ends of ashes. She was tired. More tired than she had ever been. Her head buzzed. She was awake. She had been so for almost forty-eight hours, and there was the sunlight pouring through the window, just about to dawn on the longest day of her life. “Ivy,” she said, when the woman appeared at the bottom of the stairs, her face grayed over with fear and cold sweat. “I want to talk to you about Dr. Mi—” “It’s time,” said Ivy, breathless and struggling. She gripped her soaked thigh with one hand. With the other she clung to the banister.

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“Don’t worry,” said Cinderella. “Tulane don’t want to stay around the clinic all day long. She’ll be fine here with me. Yes. Yes. Yes. We’ll call Willy up. Yes. We’ll be fine. Ya’ll go or that baby’ll be born in the back seat of the Gremlin.” She rambled on in this same manner, stroking Tulane’s hair as she spoke. Tulane could tell Momma didn’t want to leave, and Tulane didn’t want her to go, but she certainly didn’t want to have to go herself, either. She stood silently, gripping the hem of Cinderella’s dress. She watched as Momma and Grandma Lurleen carried Ivy, arms over shoulders, to the back of the car, where Grandma Lurleen had laid down a pile of towels. “Oh, Jesus,” said Ivy. “Oh.” Her eyes looked so big with the pain. “Oh, something’s not right,” she said, as they helped her into the backseat. “I need to call my doctor.” “Your doctor?” said Lurleen. “Dr. Miller,” said Ivy. “Your therapist?” said Rebecca. Frowning, she climbed behind the wheel. After they left, Cinderella and Tulane remained on the porch, watching the hole in space where they had been. Neither spoke. But Aunt Cindy continued to stroke Tulane’s hair. Missing Momma already—she was gone all the time these days—so busy—Momma was so busy—Tulane wrapped her arms around Cinderella’s leg. The woods, the swamp. The bugs. The air around the house breathed in and out, with the slow, deliberate influx of another boggy late-summer morning. “Well,” said Cinderella. “I guess we ought to have some ice cream.” “Yes,” said Tulane. “We ought to.” Cinderella, she had noticed, ate more ice cream than any adult she had ever encountered. Her appetite for that smooth wonder of the tongue never died. Any time at all, from the break of day to the middle of the night, was a good time for ice cream. It made Tulane seriously question Momma’s wisdom. Momma would not have thought much of the idea of ice cream for breakfast. “Ice cream,” she said, grinning from ear to ear, “is definitely what we need.” Sitting at the kitchen table, they ate big bowls full of vanilla ice cream, covered with thick chocolate syrup and dotted with bright red maraschino cherries. On the table between them chocolate sauce oozed down the side of the Hershey’s bottle. When they

213 finished they played a few rounds of Crazy Eights; they played Candyland; they played Chutes and Ladders. Every time they finished a game, Aunt Cindy would shriek that she knew the location of another, which they had not yet played, but which must be played now, if they were to make it another five minutes. She’d run off to the attic, bringing back to the kitchen table a dusty game board and a zip lock baggy full of pieces. After a few hours they started in on a second bowl of ice cream. Tulane was just finishing hers and Aunt Cindy was busy getting herself a third, when a scattering of pebbles rattled the windows in the living room. Aunt Cindy jerked her head around. “Son-of-a-bitch,” she said. “Arzo’s come crawling back. And here I was just getting used to my freedom.” But it wasn’t Arzo tossing pebbles from beyond the trees. Crouching in the bushes, peering wide-eyed and dirty faced across the yard, was that guitar playing blonde boy convict from the day before. He wore the black and white stripped pajamas that Grandpa Jack called ring-arounds. Crawling on his hands and knees through the mud, he’d managed to rip holes in his clothes, and it looked like the twigs and snapping branches had caught him more than once. His face was streaked with tiny red welts. Cinderella opened the door. Tulane stood behind her with the bowl of ice cream melting in her hands. “Bobby?” said Aunt Cindy. “Oh, Bobby. Is that you?” “Yes, Ma’am,” he said, glancing his sharp eyes at the tress from which he’d come. “Bobby Minton,” she said. “What on this earth do you think you’re doing?” “I got away,” he said. “I had to come see you again. I had to play more.” “You wanted to see me?” she said, setting her bowl of ice cream down on the porch. She pulling herself erect, shifting her bulk so her fists rested on her hips. “What do you think you mean by that?” “It’s just I played those songs for you yesterday, and you listened like you did. I can’t help it. I been thinking about it all night. It’s just playing. You got to understand, I love to play. And I haven’t got to until Willy pulled me out the other day.” “But he said ya’ll was coming back.”

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“That’s just it,” said Bobby. “They said they were going to assign me to a different detail today. I just couldn’t stand the thought of not playing. Won’t you let me play you just a song or two?” “Really,” she said. “You’ve got to get back. If they catch you away… why they’ll get you for escape. You could get real serious time. How did you get out?” “It’s okay,” he said, grinning. His smile looked like somebody had taken a dozen meat hooks and forced them through a pork shoulder. “The jail thinks I’m on the trash pick up, and the trash pick up thinks I’m at the jail sick. I got ‘em all fooled.” Cinderella couldn’t leave her ice cream melting on the porch for long. She bent and picked it up, slurping the cream off the sides of the bowl with her tongue. “I’d love to hear a song,” she said. “But we don’t have a guitar. That’s Willy’s.” “What you got?” said the Bobby. “I can play other things. You got a piano?” “We got a organ,” she said. “It plays like a piano, if you set it right.” He grinned again, standing erect in the bushes. “I can make magic on the piano,” he said. “I can play the piano like Elton John. You got anything to drink in there?” “My sister left a fifth of something-or-other greasy-hoe in the fridge,” said Cinderella. “Is that like a blush Chablis?” he said. “Oh, no,” she said. “It ain’t as good as a blush Chablis, but it beats grape juice.” “Well, let’s get us a taste,” he said, jumping up and down. Cinderella waved him up to the porch. She held the door for him as he entered. Then, taking a quick glance around the yard, she pulled the door shut. Standing with her back to it, she watched Bobby gaze at the knick-knacks, the glitter, the spangled eyes, the monkeys, the elephants, and the tin soldiers, all the Americana, as it thundered through the room. She pulled a couple of tattered boxes of Christmas ornaments off the organ bench, running her palm over its glossy surface to clear the dust. Patting the bench, she indicated the on-switch. He sat, popped his knuckles, fluttered his fingers, and flipped the switch, examining the buttons and keys. “But what about Grandpa Jack’s breakfast?” said Tulane, following Cinderella into the kitchen. Cinderella dug through the paper plates and the bags of napkins until she found a sleeve of Dixie cups. She set two of these on the counter and opened the refrigerator, pulling out the bottle of wine Momma had brought home when she dyed

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Grandma Lurleen’s hair the night before. Aunt Cindy drained the bottle into the Dixie cups and dumped the empty into the trashcan. “Why don’t you take it up to him?” she said. “Let me see to this pour lost soul in there, and when you’re done you can get yourself another bowl of ice cream.” Aunt Cindy dug a pack of cigarettes out of the carton in the fridge. She took a fresh book of matches from the kitchen drawer. She thumped the pack against the butt of her palm to pack the tobacco, and she lit two cigarettes in her mouth at once. Picking up the Dixie cups with her free hand, she made for the living room, but she stopped at the door to the kitchen and turned. Tulane had crawled onto the counter to open the cupboard. She was reaching for Grandpa Jack’s Gerber’s. “Grab us those Ding-Dongs while you’re at it,” said Aunt Cindy, her eyes blinking away the double streams of smoke rising from her mouth. “I just bet you anything, he could use him a Ding-Dong.”

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Leaving quick as they had, amid Ivy’s sudden pain, Rebecca thought briefly about all those times Aunt Cindy had baby-sat her and Joe when they were little. It wasn’t that Aunt Cindy was mean. Generally, she was nice to a fault. Highly indulgent of children. And so childlike herself, she could find hours of amusement in board games and sing- alongs. Personally, Rebecca couldn’t stand Candyland or Chutes and Ladders, but she remembered Cinderella begging to play them. She felt certain Aunt Cindy would keep Tulane entertained, while they saw to Ivy. Just so long as Cinderella didn’t get drunk. When Cinderella and Arzo got drunk, they got emotional. Arzo’s poison was volatility and danger. He’d get drunk and set up half a dozen coca-cola bottles full of gasoline to shoot at across the field, or he’d head down to Tibbit’s shot shack for a few rounds in the parking lot with whatever drunk fool happened to get in his way, or he’d wrap a car around a phone pole. Cinderella turned to maudlin self-pity when she crossed over the redline. She’d be perfectly content, sitting on the sofa with a cracked open beer in her hand, laughing at something on the television, but then, mid sentence sometimes, she’d freeze, set the beer on the coffee table, and break out in a furious howling wail. Incredible tears—Rebecca remembered them as bunches of clear grapes—pouring down her face. They ran through her fingers. The sofa cushions convulsed. Everyone in the room backed away. “Oh, why, oh why, oh why me?” she’d scream, open throated in pure, unabashed misery. Rebecca used to grab Joe up and haul him to the porch, whenever it happened. They’d play hide and seek outside until Daddy came home. Sometimes, creeping to the windows, they’d hear her in the house throwing things, pounding her fists on the floor, or pounding her own flesh. Once, sneaking back inside the house for a couple glasses of Kool-Aid, Rebecca saw the door to Arzo and Cinderella’s room open. Cinderella stood naked in the middle of the floor, pulling, pinching, hitting at her own flesh and cursing. But that was only when they drank, and Arzo had taken off. Typically he wouldn’t return for several more days. And Rebecca had never known Aunt Cindy to drink in the mornings. Not generally anyway. Not unless it was Christmas, or the Fourth of July, or there was an especially important Rebels game on the television. No. For Aunt Cindy to drink in the AM, it had to be a special occasion. And there wasn’t anything special about

217 that morning, other than the fact that Ivy had gone into labor, and while that might call for a drink later in the afternoon, it certainly didn’t merit one now. So while she didn’t feel quite right about it, she left anyway, making a silent promise to herself to spend more time with Tulane after this. After. When this was over. But when? When was that? What were they going to do? She guessed Ivy would have to come and live with them in Idaho. She wondered what Daniel would think of that. But, she couldn’t just leave her. She couldn’t leave Joe’s baby. What was to be done? “This psychologist?” she said, glancing at Ivy in the rear-view mirror. “This Dr. Miller—” “Please,” said Ivy. She was sprawled on the backseat with her head rolled back. When she sat forward her eyes were huge with terror. “Please. Not now. Oh, God.” She held the sides of her face in her hands. They had come to the outskirts of Lidell. Lurleen began to direct her down one street and then another toward the clinic. As they passed the streets of Willy’s neighborhood, Lurleen seemed to pause momentarily, as if she might ask to get dropped off there and then picked up later, when all of this was finished. But a sharp, stabbing utterance from Ivy made Rebecca push the accelerator to the floor—hardly impressive in the Gremlin. She took the corners without looking. Stop signs ceased to carry significance. The Lidell clinic was a small brick building on the northern side of town. It had a reception area with a couch and a couple of vinyl office chairs. A few faux-pointillist prints of gulls flying over calm seas and blue-ribboned girls wandering through flower gardens decorated the walls. Behind the reception desk two nurses chattered sweetly in their flower print uniforms. The innards of the clinic held two examination rooms, a file room, and a pharmacy. But like everything else in Beckham County, they were expanding. Earthmovers had already broken ground in the empty lot across the road, where the new Beckham County Hospital was to be. Seeing the clinic again, she thought of Daddy on the lawn of her dorm, the day he drove up to Oxford to fetch her home. “You’ll have the baby at the Lidell clinic,” he said. “Dr. Milkin brought you, your momma and your Aunt Cindy into this world. He can bring this one in, too.” When she thought of those lizard-like claws of his gripping the crown of her baby’s head, the poor thing making its first entry into this world, only to get

218 slooped up by the ankles and slapped silly by that mean old man, it was the very final straw. “Hey!” said Lurleen. “Could we get some help here? We got a woman giving birth.” The nurses gaped in disbelief. It wasn’t that they hadn’t seen emergencies before. Usually two or three times a week an accident on one of the back roads would leave a couple of busted up high school boys sitting around the reception room of the Lidell clinic with their buddy’s teeth lodged in their cheeks, or their scalps ripped clean off their skulls, or maybe a gear shift shoved through the palm of their hand. “What’s the matter with ya’ll?” said Lurleen. The nurses continued to stare. One of them dropped her gum out of her mouth. “What?” Then, they saw it. One of the nurses—not the gum chewer—had been reading the Beckham County Gazette, that weekly “newspaper” of such dubious journalistic value. It spent the bulk of its copy on tractor and feed advertisements, fried chicken recipes, interviews with high school sports stars, editorials written by a rotating stable of local pastors, and pictures of car crashes. This time though, the Gazette had managed a piece of real news. The nurse lowered the paper to the desk. She stabbed her index finger at the photo of Joe, pistol in hand, as he ran from the Waffle House, just seconds before the deputies riddled him with bullet holes. The headline above the photo read, “Scourge of the Community: Big City Problems Come to Lidell.” Lurleen frowned. Rebecca wanted to swipe the paper off the counter to get a good look at the photo. She hadn’t known there were any pictures. Any press there at the time. No one had told her. “Where’s Milkin?” said Lurleen. Neither of the two nurses spoke. The one reading the paper took her bifocals off her nose. She cleared her throat. Ivy gasped, digging her fingers into Rebecca’s arm. “This is a private clinic,” said the nurse. “We do not take the uninsured. And we do not see new patients spur of the moment—” “I’m paying for it,” said Lurleen. “Dr. Milkin knows I can.” “University Medical Center in Jackson is only forty minutes away,” continued the nurse. “If you’ve only just begun to contract, I’m sure you can make it.” “My doctor,” said Ivy. “I need to see my doctor. I need to brain tap.” “So, you have a doctor?” said the nurse with the gum.

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“Get that SOB Milkin out here,” said Lurleen. “He’s my therapist,” said Ivy. “Oh, my God,” she said. Her knees slacked. “Ain’t no therapy going to help you now,” said the nurse with the paper. “Brain tap?” said Rebecca. “You mean the shunt? What—” “Milkin!” Lurleen huffed. She kicked the baseboards along the wall and stalked off, slamming her palm against the doors leading to the examination rooms. “Milkin,” she continued to shout. Rebecca heard her pounding on the doors. “You mean like in Joe’s letter?” said Rebecca. “Like you told me in the church?” She patted her pockets, searching for the pages of Joe’s letter and dropping the sketchbook. It burst open and the sketches exploded from the bindings, skidding across the linoleum. “I don’t want to talk about it,” said Ivy. “All right, all right,” said a man, coming through the doors. Lurleen was hard behind him, shooing him along. Dr. Milkin frowned when he saw Ivy doubled up at the reception desk. He snapped around on his heels to face Lurleen. “You can pay?” he said. “Yes,” she said. “Of course. Do it. We’ll chalk it up as my one good deed for the new millennium.” “Get signed in then,” he said. “I’ll be in room 2. There are chairs in there for both—” “No,” said Ivy. “No. You can’t. I don’t want anyone in the room.” “Ivy!” said Rebecca. “Why?” “No. I don’t want to talk about it. I just—I need—I just need to brain tap.” “Brain tap?” said Dr. Milkin, frowning. “I’m paying for it,” said Lurleen. “If she wants the brain tap then give her the brain tap. I didn’t bring Jack within a mile of this clinic because of precisely that attitude right there.” “Please,” said Ivy. Dr. Milkin had begun to lead her away. He kept glancing back to Rebecca, looking for guidance, but with a shrug, she told him she had none to offer. “I’ve got to relieve the pressure in my head,” Ivy went on, as they walked through the door, Dr. Milkin nodding the whole way. “It’s the birth. I’ve got a build up of soul in my pineal gland. We’ve got to release it. If I could just call my therapist…” The gum popper continued to watch them, her eyebrows dancing with curiosity. The one with the newspaper grinned at them evilly, searching her head for something vicious

220 to say. No longer encumbered with Ivy, Rebecca got down on all fours to gather together the scattered pages of Joe’s sketches. “Betty Jenkin,” said Lurleen. “You were a stuck up snob in high school, and you still are today.” “Jenkins?” said Rebecca, looking up from the floor. “You’re Tommy Jenkin’s Momma?” “Yes.” “I remember him,” said Rebecca. “I knocked his eye-tooth out in biology class ‘cause he was so mean to my baby brother. I bet he told you it was somebody else, didn’t he?”

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Upstairs Grandpa Jack lay atop his covers. He was awake, and mumbling to himself under his breath. Tulane was scared to walk farther into the room than a few feet from the door. She stood clutching the jars of Gerber’s to her chest, watching him, waiting for some signal that he knew she was there, that it was all right to approach him. He’d been so mad before. So angry. She didn’t understand why people had to get angry. She really hated it when she was angry, but she couldn’t help it either. She got really pissed sometimes. “Grandpa Jack?” she said. His breathing changed. There were words in the breath, but it was still mostly just breath. “Good,” he breathed. “Come here.” He waved with his fingers for her to come closer. She stood beside him looking at the knobby purple veins running along his legs. “I got your breakfast,” she said. “I won’t need it,” he said. “I don’t think I’ll need it anymore.” She set the jars of baby food on the nightstand and pulled the cord. Grandpa Jack blinked away the light. “Where’s Lurleen?” he said. “Off fucking that DA?” Tulane shrugged. The sentence meant nothing to her. “There’s a man downstairs,” she said. “A ring-around man.” “A convict?” said Grandpa Jack. He dragged his fingers down her arm, pulling her closer. “Like yesterday?” “A convict,” she said. “They think they’re going to take my church away from me,” he said. “Long Chain wants it back, you see? But we’re going to fix them. Where’s Lurleen?” “Gone,” she said. “She and Momma and Ivy went into town to get a baby.” “A baby?” he said. He scowled. “Plenty of babies. Plenty, plenty of babies. Too many. World full of babies. Listen, I need you to do some things for me.” “What about your breakfast?” “Don’t worry about that,” he said. “I need you to go down to the living room sneaky- like. Can you be sneaky-like?” “I’m a sneaker,” she said. “I can sneak anyplace.”

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“Good,” he said. “I need you to sneak down to the living room and go to the side of the stairs. You’ll see a latch there and—” “There’s a cabinet,” she said. Tulane grabbed his arm. She placed her mouth next to his ear so she could whisper. “Under the stairs. I know. But Grandpa Jack, Grandpa Jack, there’s a door in the bottom of the cabinet. There’s a hole in the floor and there’s a hole in the hole. There’s a tunnel going on forever down there. Forever and ever into nothing. All the bad thoughts come up through the hole.” Jack nodded, slowly at first, but then as vigorously as he could, given his condition. He patted her hands. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. All the bad thoughts are down there. I need you to go get me one.” “Oh, I—I…” “You can do it,” he said. “They’re in bottles in the boxes. Brown bottles. Can you read?” “I can read,” she said. “They say whiskey on them. I need you to bring me one.” “Okay,” she whispered, creeping to the door. “Okay. I’ll—” “But listen,” he said. “Don’t let them see you. The convicts. If they see you Long Chain will know. He knows everything they know.” “Yes,” she said. Tulane left the room. She stepped onto the landing and eased the door shut behind her. Downstairs she could hear the convict playing the organ and singing. Cinderella tried to keep up, but she was no match for his voice, like a hot viscous liquid filling the corners of the room. Tulane tiptoed past them to the hall along the side of the staircase. The door to Cinderella’s room stood ajar, and she could see the hanging clothes draped on the furniture, the piles of stuffed bears, the twisted aluminum cans, the scattered plates and bowls on the floor. Tulane pulled the cabinet latch. She crawled inside. Her face brushed the dangling cord and she took it in her hand, swelling the small space with light. She could smell the stone. She put her cheek against it to feel the cool letters engraved in the marble. Cobwebs tugged at her hair. She found the screwdriver and worked it between the boards in the floor, forcing the trap open until she could shove it clear. Then she

223 peered into the hole, breathing in the wet earth, the stale, dank air of the under-chamber, where the bad thoughts lay sealed in their bottles of dusty brown glass. In the darkness she saw the worms down there. Great white worms as big around as her fist. They twisted in the walls. Their toothy ends dripped poison and the laughter of worms. A kind of dead laughter that was really more like breathing. She knelt at the hole, gripping the screwdriver in her hand. Her hair hung around her face. She could sense the worms crawling toward it. Crawling up the ladder, up the rungs. Those worms—more like fetal puppies, still wrapped in amniotic sacs, trailing fluid and whimpering. They converged at the ladder down there, on the floor down there; they were pouring out of the moldy boxes, from behind the shelves, out of cracks in the walls. But there was nothing there. There was nothing down that hole at all. She could sense the presence of eyes in the darkness, of long teeth below the eyes, of squids pulsating through the mud and stone. She could feel it. But it wasn’t there. Her hand found the flashlight on the floor. Aiming its beam into the hole, she scattered those shades into the corners, into the walls. Gingerly Tulane turned around. She placed her feet on the ladder and backed down into the hole. The earth itself was shaking. Trembling. The whole planet quaked along with the rhythm of her heart. But she had to go. She couldn’t let him down. She was headed into the caverns, into the twisting mines beneath the city of stone, where the mealy mouthed gnomes held feasts of old tubes and twisted tape. At the bottom of the ladder she crouched against the dirt floor. She crept to the far wall, where the boxes sat stacked on the bottom shelves, below the cans, and the jars, those mason jars of pickled eyes, pickled hearts, and the pickled lungs of little girls. Their faces twisted in the jelly. She could see her own face in there. As she crouched looking up at the sparkling jars, she saw her own bloated and worm picked face turn slowly in the fluids. She slammed her eyes closed, gripping the flashlight to her cheek. She breathed. Go on. She had to keep going. Crawling along the floor, she wouldn’t look at the other side of the room, where the half moon of corrugated aluminum hid the hole that led further on. Further down. Further in, where the gnomes were buried. She could hear them in there. She could smell them. Tulane jerked the flap back on the box. She dragged out one of the bottles, and tucked it under her arm. Then standing, she dropped the flashlight, to run. Run. She ran as fast as

224 she could to the ladder, struggling to gain the top one-handed, while she clung to the dusty bottle. She pushed it over the top, and it rolled along the floorboards in the cabinet. Out of the hole, she slammed the trap shut, and sat breathing against the cold hard marble of the stone. Grandpa Jack’s stone. She brushed her fingers against it, feeling the letters. I’ll have a stone some day, she thought. Picking up the bottle, she scampered out of the cabinet, past Aunt Cindy and Bobby at the organ. She dashed up the stairs, clinging to the bottle with all her might. Her heart exploded. Yes! Yes! Yes, it screamed. With each contraction of that muscle, each forward pulse of blood, each staggered leap up the stairs, her entire existence seemed to expand geometrically, so that by the time she made the landing and threw open his door, holding her trophy aloft in her fist, she was large as the sun, large as the moon and the sky above the fields, large as the darkness and the light. She was a giant. She was exploding. She was victory itself. “Yes!” she screamed. He had managed to pull his legs around. His feet rested on the floor. He sat hunched forward, as if he’d slumped with the exertion. But he twisted his head, leveling his one- eyed stare at the raised bottle. “Good girl,” he said. “Now, go in Aunt Cindy’s purse and get us a book of matches. Fire! Like for cigarettes.”

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After she gave Kias a call, Rebecca sat with Lurleen in the waiting room at the Lidell clinic staring at the walls. After the first rush of their newfound solidarity against the nurses, they had chattered away about the vile nature of prying eyes, of gossipy people, and of small towns given over to both, but as the minutes piled up, one after the other, they each fell quieter and quieter into their own inner thoughts. For Rebecca, it was the night of Tulane’s birth. 1997. When she stumbled through the alleyway toward Canal Street. She could see the glow of the French Quarter over the roofs of the buildings. She thought she could hear the honking cries of that swirling throng of criminals and drunks down there, their lives unfolding as drunken lives do. As she hurried down the alley, it came to her in flashes through the pain. She could see them out on the avenues. All those people falling into love and falling out, she could hear the clink of their money and the swirl of their beer. All the muggings and the rapes, the murders and the suicides. The young man getting lucky at Bally’s; the young man getting beaten by the river. The saloons coughed their beery breath into the asphalt, where the fat man washed his sidewalk with a hose. That old prostitute fell down against a light post, while the college boys puked in the gutter. It all swirled on without her, down Canal Street. Like the packed up memory of yesterday’s sideshow, the world was moving on without her. She was here. She was now. In this night of no cabs, she held her belly, breathing slow, shallow breaths, in the dark, while the brick walls towered above her and the steam rolled out of the grate and the horns called out to one another, like dying birds. Slow. Steady. She was slow and steady, trudging down the alley toward the strangers at the other end. A night-world full of strangers packed onto the head of a pin and brawling together, as they hurtled round the sun. But that window rolled down. In the dark interior of that automobile, he had the tip of his finger on the button. A good man? A stranger. He was a good stranger. How did Joe meet Dr. Miller? Ivy? What of their life together? Their lives exploding in this life they’d made. Lurleen fidgeted. She had the tendency to stand, to begin to pace, and then to return quickly to her seat, where she crossed her legs and frowned, as if she’d swallowed something bitter. Rebecca slacked in the chair. She eased her head back, counting the

226 holes in the ceiling tiles. An hour passed in silence. Perhaps two. Lurleen walked down to the DQ to buy them a couple of hot dogs for lunch. When she returned she had found a copy of the Beckham County Gazette, which they both read, silently, passing the pages between them, but passing no words, until another hour had passed, and Rebecca could stand it no longer. She said, “This man gave me a ride to Charity Hospital the night Tulane was born. I remember there was a place, this shelf, I guess, at the entrance to the emergency room. It was before you were in the room itself, where you could leave your baby. You know, if you’d had one you didn’t want. Joe sketched a picture of that shelf.” She held open the gathered together pages of Joe’s sketchbook, looking through them until she found a picture of Joe and Ivy together in New Orleans. Ivy held a newborn baby wrapped in a shirt. They huddled together, walking along the city streets. On the next page they stood in the brightly lit entrance to a hospital, waving goodbye to the sleeping infant. “It’s the same hospital,” she said. “I remember that shelf. This man gave me a ride. I can’t believe it. I must be the least trusting person in the world, but there I was in a car with a total stranger. I have no idea why I trusted him. But he was a good man. He took me to the hospital.” Lurleen ground her teeth. Her jaw flexed. She stood and wandered outside. Rebecca watched her through the window, pacing back and forth in front of the entrance. She was out there smoking, and she was lighting her cigarettes from the ends of the ones she was finishing. She must’ve smoked through half a pack this way before she came back inside the clinic. “I came here to Dr. Milkin,” she said. “Both you and Joe. Jack waited out in the lobby both times. We took you straight home, but they had to take Joe into the University Medical Center in Jackson, since he had the jaundice. I did…I did want to love Joe. I hope you know that. I think I could’ve loved him. When I think back in my mind, I think of myself loving him—you too—I just couldn’t. I didn’t know how. What kind of mother doesn’t know how to love her own children?” She paused as if Rebecca might interject, but there was nothing for Rebecca to say. She had heard herself say things like that to Momma before, but in her mind she’d never heard Momma say them out loud. She wasn’t ready for that. “So Joe and this girl, they had a baby already?” said Lurleen. “I never knew that. You’d think after you dropped one off at the shelf, you’d leave off having them, wouldn’t you?”

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“Not everyone has it as good as you do.” This was more in keeping with the imagined conversations. “Oh, I see,” said Lurleen. “Yeah. I have it good, don’t I? So it’s my fault I didn’t start in with drugs and whore myself out on the corner, is that it? If I had, then suddenly I’d have all your sympathy, wouldn’t I?” “No. Of course not.” “You know I was really excited when Jack first got out of prison. It was all we talked about for those couple of years, when I only knew him down at the red house. It was going to be perfect when he got sprung. We used to talk in the little red house for our hour and fifteen minutes. I’d hold his head in my lap and we’d talk and talk and talk. He’d tell me about the cotton, and the fellows coming and going and I’d tell him about Momma and Little Cindy and Arzo. But when Jack got out. I don’t know. It was strange. He became different. At the red house he used to laugh all the time when I saw him. Always had a joke to tell. Always had a smile. His eyes used to light up when he’d see me. But it’s like the wide-open world put a fear in him, or not a fear exactly. He never was afraid. A darkness. A kind of sadness you’d see around his eyes, like whatever you were looking at, however nice and simple it might’ve been, he saw something different. Not different, but like the flavor was bitter. Maybe I’d see a bunch of sunflowers and I’d go, ‘what beautiful sunflowers,’ and he’d say, ‘yes.’ They were beautiful sunflowers, but he wouldn’t mean it at all, because to him they were nothing but dried up weeds. We used to look at you when we first brought you home, and I’d say, ‘what a beautiful baby girl we have,’ and he’d say, ‘yes.’ You were a beautiful child. But he’d say it like he was looking at a dried husk of bones. “We use to talk all the time about having children. He wanted children so bad when he was still in jail, but when he got free and had one, held you in his arms, he closed up inside. He became a different man. He used to walk with his chest out and his eyes up, but when he got loose he hunched forward, he doubled over and caved in around himself when he walked. It was like the whole world was looking at him suddenly. Suddenly he was looking at himself with their eyes and he saw what they saw. After he became a daddy, he saw what you saw. And it got worse and worse and worse, til he could hardly stand to be in the same room with himself anymore. He hid that from you. You never saw

228 it, but I did. It wasn’t that we fought. We hardly ever fought. That would’ve been better. Instead we just stopped talking. We got like a couple of zombies together. Go a week some times without speaking. I don’t even know how we had Joe, but I guess we did. I guess we must’ve. There he was. There was Joe.” “But you…you were always… You just wandered the house in your robe.” “I guess you wouldn’t have talked to me either, would you?” “Well, you didn’t talk,” said Rebecca. “Daddy—” “What? Tried? Is that what you’re going to say? ‘I tried and tried.’ I can hear him say it now. But his eyes would go smooth as bumper chrome when he saw me coming. He’d blank out. Totally blank. I’d reach over to touch his knee on the couch and he’d jerk his leg away. Twenty-some years of my life. Raising kids that hate me. Waiting for the sheriff to knock on the door. Praying in that stupid church. Eating all that Goddamned potato salad, but did anybody ever ask me what I wanted?” “That’s why I left,” said Rebecca. “That’s why I left Daddy sitting on the lawn in front of my dorm at Ole Miss and moved to New Orleans and—” “—Found yourself going to the hospital with a stranger?” said Lurleen. “Yes.” How stupid. But she didn’t say that. She wanted Lurleen to say it first. She wanted Lurleen to admit to being stupid before she admitted to it. “You asked me about Daniel,” she said. “At the levee, before we dyed your hair… When Daniel asked me to marry him, I wasn’t in love with him.” “No?” “No,” she said. “But I’ve come to love him.” Lurleen nodded. “A little after Jack had the stroke—this was maybe two months ago—Arzo drove me up to the Piggly Wiggly, and I ran into Eunice.” “Willy Tate’s wife?” “Yes. I remembered reading in the paper about Willy, Jr. dying and so I told her how sad I was about it. I said I was praying for her and Willy. Which was a lie because I don’t pray at all for anybody, but it seemed like a nice thing to say. And she thanked me and said she and Willy were doing well, that all the prayers were helping. But it wasn’t a week later that she left him. Lies. The whole conversation was all lies. I lied to her and told her I cared and she lied to me and told me she appreciated my concern. Lies. Lies.

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Lies. That’s all us humans are, is lies. So I decided to stop. I roasted up a chicken, hitched a ride into town, walked over to Willy’s and banged on his door. ‘I’m done lying, Willy Tate,’ I said. ‘I don’t aim to be married again after Jack dies, but I’d like to come in.’ I don’t know if that’s love or not. I don’t even think like that anymore.” Kias came through the clinic doors. He was in a huff. Behind each of his ears he still carried a dab of shaving cream. Rebecca waved him over when she saw him. “Where’s Ivy?” he said, scanning the lobby. Rebecca leaned her head toward the examination rooms. “Didn’t want anyone in there,” she said. “So we’re waiting in the lobby like old fathers.” The nurse came through the doors carrying an infant barely ten minutes old. Wrapped in a blanket, the child was already sleeping. “I need to clean her up,” said the nurse. “But I thought you’d want to see her. Momma’s fine. She’s resting. Said the baby’s name was Andromeda Miller. Kids these days.” She shook her head, holding the bundled baby out for them to see.

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When Tulane returned to the darkened room, carrying a box of Cinderella’s kitchen matches gripped tight between her forefinger and thumb, Grandpa Jack had managed to drape the bed sheet across his shoulder. He had cinched it with a thick leather belt, into which he was trying—pirate-like—to stuff the bottle of whiskey. Thus far, it had yet to stay put. When he saw her, he cast it onto the bed. Breathing fierce as a bull, he leaned on his walker, animated it seemed with a sudden burst of energy. He looked strong, sure of himself. He was young again, his true age banished for the moment. It hovered in the corners of his eyes. It was there waiting. Age was always waiting. It flickered across his toothless jowls when he spoke. But when she held up the matchbook for him to see, he nodded his approval, and his voice rolled out with vigor and heart. His blood was warm. She could see it in his face. He was flushed with splotchy excitement. “I’ll need you to carry the whiskey,” he said. “And the matches. When we get to the stairs, you’ll need to bring my walker down.” Slowly they made their way over the piled clothes, Tulane clearing a path for him to shuffle through. The door creaked open, rusty on its hinges. On the landing they paused to listen to the music in the living room. Then, as Cinderella’s laughter echoed through the house, they crossed to the stairs. Grandpa Jack eased himself down until he sat on the topmost step. “I will go down slowly,” he said in a raspy, harsh voice. Sweat beaded up on his forehead, and an instant of death flickered across his face. She could see his skull beneath the papery skin. A fetal puppy tunneled through the socket of his frosted eye. Tulane gripped the walker. “Quietly,” he whispered. “Take it down stairs and wait for me at the bottom. Don’t let them hear you.” Breathless she nodded, sat on her butt, and began to drag, and then to push Grandpa Jack’s walker down the stairs. It banged each step on the way down, and she could see him cringe with each thump, but either that organ was too loud or Aunt Cindy and Bobby were too oblivious to care. Neither turned to watch her descent, even when the walker slipped from her grasp and slid the remaining steps, crashing into the floor at the bottom. Frozen in horror, she didn’t move as Bobby ended one song, blending it seamlessly into

231 the next. Grandpa Jack had managed to get halfway down. “Fools,” he said, shaking his head. Tulane scampered back upstairs to retrieve the bottle of whiskey. At the bottom he pulled himself erect, holding onto the banister. She helped his hands to the walker, and then they shuffled slowly to the front door. Her quick eyes darted back to the organ time and time again, but they were never seen. Later, when she spoke with the sheriff, Cinderella would swear up and down that the child couldn’t possibly have gotten out of the house. Beyond the screen door, they made their way onto the porch and the bright blue sky of the beautiful day. They had only the steps to get past now, and they tackled these in the same manner as they had the staircase. “Take this bottle and those matches down to the church,” he said, once they stood in the yard. “The hard part is behind us now.” “Yes,” she said. He cinched the leather tighter around his middle, as she set off at a run for the white clapboard building down by the road. Reaching the church with her lungs bursting, she ran around the outside, thinking of hiding places. She wasn’t even sure why it needed to be hid; she simply knew it had to be. Knew in her heart the sneaking was not yet over. That she was involved in a whole new kind of sneaking, quite beyond the horizon of what she had thought was possible. She buried the bottle and the matches in the sandbox, by the tire swing. Then she ran back to join Grandpa Jack in the yard. He had managed to shuffle to the top of the drive, and he stood gripping the walker, as if it were a scrap of wreckage he clung to in the midst of a crashing squall. “It was many years ago,” he said. “I saw a ghost ship sailing on the far horizon. It was in the gulf, so far away. It listed tall against the sky, and its sails were made of ragged blood. It drifted on a sea of shadows.” His voice trailed off to a whisper. Slowly they crept down the drive. “It drifted on a sea of shadows,” he kept repeating over and over. Soon he wasn’t speaking at all, but she would look up and see his lips moving, and she could tell from their movement that he said this again and again and again. When they got to the church she pointed him to the hiding spot in the sandbox. “Shit,” he said. She followed his gaze up the road. A sheriff’s SUV rounded the bend, followed by a black, shark-like car. A steady cloud of gravel dust poured out from the wheels of the vehicles. “Shit,” said Tulane.

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“Hurry,” he said, settling the walker against the side of the church. “Give me the matches. Take the bottle in through the window.” She handed him the matches and then dug the bottle from the sand. He took the bottle, leaning his weight into the walker to keep steady. She climbed on top of the walker and stretched out her fingers to grab onto the windowsill. “I’ll pass it through,” he said. “Hurry.” They both glanced at the cars on the road. Closer now. Taking hold of the windowsill, she cut her finger on a sliver of glass, crying out, but she didn’t care. Her heart raced, thumping. In her mind great gouts of blood pumped out of her fingers, out of her knees, which she cut also, as she heaved herself up and over. Grunting, tumbling, she fell forward into the church, where she lay scraped and bleeding, terrified and exhilarated. She for the snake again, but there was only the light slanting through the slats of plywood. It fell across the mound of broken pews in the middle of the room, the cans of paint, the thinner, the brushes and the rollers. She could smell the turpentine. The chemicals. It burned her nose. There was sawdust in the air. She stood, twisting to see the window through which she’d come. The cut on her finger was not so bad as she’d imagined. Scrapes. They were only scrapes. Grandpa Jack held up the bottle. On her tiptoes, she reached out and took it by the butt and pulled it through the window with both hands. “I’ve broke the seal,” he said. “You can do it, now. Everywhere. Get it everywhere. Hurry. Get it on the boards and the busted pews.” She unscrewed the cap and tipped the bottle, sloshing it around the pile of debris in the middle of the room. “Good,” he screamed. “Good. Do it.” He was howling. “Get it everywhere.” She splashed it against the walls, shaking the bottle out to the last drop, pouring it down her arms. The whiskey soaked through her shirt. A sweet, rotted smell, it was like a sweet poison. His voice was a harsh, steely whisper. He was full of urgency, and she was urgent too. She could see it coming. She knew what came next. Suddenly it all made sense to her, his plan. But she couldn’t stop, not until the last drops of amber liquid fell from the upended bottle. She heard him run the kitchen match across the striker. She turned to see it flame in his fingers, blooming in his face. He held it there to settle for an instant. “I saw a ghost ship once,” he said. “Out on the far horizon. Its sails were made of blood and it floated on a sea of shadows.”

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He tossed the match. Flames shot up the far wall, and the sound of flame, like breath, drowned his whispers in a rush. His face warped in a sudden wave of heat. She reached for the window, but she slipped on the wet floor, and quick as goblins the fire raced across the slick boards. It was on her then, snaking up the fabric of her clothes. Fire twisted from the ground. It rained down from the ceiling. He was still lighting matches. He was tossing them at the piled pews, at the walls, at the trays of paint and the brushes. He howled, falling, tumbling over. He struggled to get a last match away. That last kitchen match arched through the window as he fell. In the heat, Tulane let out a screech as the fire raced across her. Then her vision jerked sideways. Hands grabbed her, ripped her from the floor. There were flames all around, but a square of blue sky appeared in the midst of the red and the smoke. There was a face she didn’t know and the flames caught all around it. Then it was dirt. She was dirt. Hitting the dirt and rolling. Rolled in the dirt. Rough hands rolled her in the dirt. Dust and gravel swelled up. Heat from the fire. “Jesus,” he kept saying. “Jesus H. Christ.” Over and over. Grandpa Jack howled in the distance. She heard the fire. The siren. There was a siren wailing in the sky as the fire died in the dirt all around her. Dirt choked her nose, her eyes, her throat. She couldn’t breathe. Her breath came through a pinprick. But the heat was gone. There was no more heat. Or what heat there was felt distant and far away, as far off as the dry planks of the church boards crackling as they fell. The hands rolled her onto her back. Above her crouched the blue heaven of the sky. She could see Grandpa Jack. Walkerless he stumbled from the side of the church. He kept striking matches and tossing them at the flames. She heard a timber fall inside the building. She coughed on the dirt. It was all she could do to breathe. “We need us a ambulance,” he said, speaking into a cell phone. “Hurry.” When he was finished with the call, he sat beside her. There was an officer behind him, a policeman crouching in the dust. He took her fingers in his rough hands and leaned over the top of her, looking into her eyes. “It’s okay,” he said. “Ronnie’s got you, Little Darlin’. You’re going to be okay.” “What are you doing out here, Ronnie?” said the officer. “What are you doing out here, Sheriff?” said Ronnie. “We got us a convict on the loose.”

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“I see,” he said. “I’m investigating some shenanigans at my office last night.” “Sure is a lucky thing,” said the sheriff. “Sure is lucky,” said Ronnie.

235

“Can we go back and see her?” asked Rebecca, as she pulled the lip of the blanket down to get a better look at the infant. Kias stood beside her, and Lurleen hovered close as well. Conversation in the waiting room stopped, as all eyes turned to this newest member of the human race. “She…she said, no,” said the nurse. “I thought I’d show you the baby, but the truth is she told me not to. She said, she didn’t want to see you again and she wants a telephone. She wants to call her therapist. I told her I had to clean the infant up and I came out here.” Rebecca folded her arms. She looked at the infant. The splotchy, mashed face, bundled in the blanket. “Where’s Dr. Milkin?” she said. “She has this thing in her head,” said the nurse. “A kind of shunt. Dr. Milkin is in his office trying to figure out exactly what it’s for… She… We had to give her a sedative. There seems to be something wrong. She keeps talking about a build up of—we think she’s saying, dimethyltryptamine—in her pineal gland, which she has to drain. Dr. Milkin is in his office trying to figure out she’s talking about. He asked me to ask if you knew.” Lurleen and Kias looked equally perplexed. “She was involved in some kind of case study at Tulane Medical Center,” said Rebecca. “The shunt is for close monitoring of neurotransmitters, I think. Dimethyltryptamine?” The nurse shrugged. “Dr. Milkin says it’s a naturally occurring chemical in the brain. He says it’s… you know… highly…” She twirled her finger around her ear. “Crazy?” said Rebecca. “It’s a crazy chemical?” The nurse glanced sideways, whispering, “Psychedelic. It’s—you know—like the ‘60s.” “I see,” said Rebecca, bending between the seats to retrieve the pages of Joe’s sketchbook. “I’ll talk to her,” she said. “You really aren’t supposed to,” said the nurse. “She’s requested—” “Then stop me,” said Rebecca, pushing her way through the doors into the hallway. There were bathrooms along one wall and several examination rooms. Opposite these was a room with an actual bed for the occasional over-nighter. At the end was Dr. Milkin’s office.

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In the room, Ivy had pulled herself out of bed. She stood clutching a chair, and gasping for breath, red faced and crying. “Oh, God,” she kept saying. “Oh, God.” Rebecca slipped through the door. “Get back up there,” she said. “You need to lie down.” “No,” said Ivy. “I can’t stand the pressure. I need to relieve the pressure. There’s too much soul in my head. Birth. There’s a massive burst of dime…ethyl…tripper-mean at birth. I’ve got to drain it, but… but… I need something to collect it in. Please. Please, you’ve got to help me.” “Come on,” said Rebecca. “Lie down.” She moved across the room and took Ivy by the arm. She held her thigh and back, struggling to ease Ivy into the bed. “I know it’s not comfortable,” she said. “But you really need to lie down.” “No,” said Ivy, fighting lamely. “No. You don’t understand. I’ve got to tap it off.” “I do,” said Rebecca. “You have a shunt in your head. You need to drain off your cerebral fluid. Dimethyltryptamine, like in Joe’s letter. Why?” “Yes! Dime…Ethel…tripper-mean. It’s… It’s pure soul. It flows into this plane of existence from another at right angles to this plane. It flows through the pineal gland and I’ve got to tap it off. My head is about to burst.” “It’s some kind of drug?” said Rebecca. “That’s what the nurse said.” “Oh, no,” said Ivy. “No. It’s not a drug. It’s everywhere, you understand? It’s in everything. Plants, animals. It’s in you. It’s like the blood of Christ.” “I see,” said Rebecca. “No, you don’t. I’ve got to drain it into something, so I can give it to my therapist.” “Like in Joe’s letter?” said Rebecca. “He said you send it to Virginia to keep Dr. Miller’s brain alive. But that’s not really it, is it? Please, lie down and tell me why?” But Ivy would not lie down easily. As weak as she was, she was no match, but Rebecca didn’t want to force her into the bed. “You got to help me,” said Ivy. “I was supposed to call. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I’m not due. Not for another week. I told him. I said it might come early. He knows that. He’s a doctor. He knew. Why? Why couldn’t we just go?” “What are you talking about?” said Rebecca. “Dr. Miller? He knew? Stop what?” “No. I can’t. I need to relieve the pressure. I need to put it in something.”

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“If I get you a test tube will you lie back on this table?” “Yes,” she said. “And if I get you a test tube, you’ll tell me about Dr. Miller?” “No,” she said. “No. I can’t talk about it.” “Then I’m not getting you a test tube.” “But I can’t take the pressure,” said Ivy. Her face was flushed as red as any face Rebecca had ever seen. Perhaps her eyes even bulged, her skull engorged with cerebral fluid. Perhaps it was just the excess fat of the pregnancy. Had her eyes always bulged like that? “I’m not getting you a test tube,” she said. “You’ll just have to blow, unless you tell me about Dr. Miller.” Ivy was crying. Tears streamed down her cheeks, as she clutched Rebecca’s arm and the examination table. Her knees slacked. She was weak; she couldn’t move. On her forehead a vein had begun to throb. “Okay,” she croaked. And she allowed Rebecca to ease her into the bed. Running out of the room, Rebecca glanced to the end of the hall. Dr. Milkin leaned monkey-like over the keyboard of a computer. His puzzled face glowed blue from the screen. Beside the blood pressure machine in the hallway, there was a long wall of cabinets, and she opened these doors, rifling through the contents, until she came across a box of test tubes. Back in the room Ivy waited. She had rolled to her side, pulling her hair back, and she held the nozzle lever in her fingers. “I’ll do it,” said Rebecca, pulling the doctor’s stool across the floor and sitting with the box of test tubes on her lap. She held one beneath the nozzle and twisted the lever. A thin rivulet of clear fluid dripped from the end of the shunt. One. Two. Three. She twisted the lever closed. “Now, tell me,” she said. “And I’ll drain the rest of it.” “No.” “Tell me. I helped you. Now you help me, and I’ll drain the rest of it. You’re still in contact with this doctor? I thought you and Joe left the study?” “No,” she said. “Joe left. He did. He really did. But… I was afraid.” “He had one of these things in his head?”

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“He took it out,” said Ivy. “He just pulled it out. Dr. Miller warned him not to. But he just jerked it right out of his head.” “And when did Joe meet him?” “A little over a year ago,” she said. “More. Drain more.” “But then Joe left and it was under bad terms. Did this Dr. Miller give Joe those drugs?” “What? No, of course not.” “It’s just I thought he was a legitimate scientist,” said Rebecca. “You made him sound like he was a serious scientist. Does he really work at Tulane medical center?” “He did.” “He did? They fired him, right? For this crack-pot nonsense?” “It’s not crack-pot nonsense,” said Ivy. “You’ll see. You’ll all see. Dr. Miller is a brilliant man. Everybody is afraid of his ideas at first. Afraid of what it means. But you’ll all see. He’s proved scientifically that at forty-nine days the soul enters the fetus with the emergence of the pineal gland. Through the pineal Dime…ethyl-what-not flows from the world beyond the veil into this one. Dr. Miller trained us to siphon pure soul straight from the source. You can get it elsewhere: certain toads, a variety of South American plants. But the only pure source is in the ventricles below the human pineal gland. That’s where the tap goes. Straight to the source. But if we don’t drain it off, the pressure builds up and it might blow back into heaven. We could blow all our bad thoughts into heaven and contaminate everything. We could destroy the multiverse. Please. You need to tap more. I need to drain.” She opened the nozzle. “He takes your cerebral fluid and he…refines this stuff out of it?” she said. She shut off the flow of cerebral fluid. “Sure,” said Ivy. “He gets the pure soul.” “And then what? You were traveling around in a school bus right? He travels around looking for street kids. People he could control. It was some kind of drug cult is what it was. But he gave Joe the drugs. He gave him the gun. Why?” “Please,” said Ivy. “Just a little more.” “Tell me first, and I’ll leave it on.”

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“It’s not about Joe,” she said. “It’s about the Up-and-Down. It’s about the trustee- shooter, your daddy, Jack.” “Dr. Miller,” said Rebecca. “…the punk?” “Yes,” said Ivy. “Please. Please, turn the nozzle back on. Please, I’ve got to drain.” She pushed the lever open. “But why kill Joe?” she said. Ivy closed her eyes. “He didn’t,” said Ivy. “That was never part of the plan.” “What plan?” “The plan that was no plan,” said Ivy. “That’s what’s wrong with all of you. You all plan. Dr. Miller taught us to listen through our pineal glands to the Grand Plan. The Plan of Plans. He just let it happen. When he met Joe on the streets of New Orleans, he knew it was part of the plan…” Relief washed across her face and her skin grew pale. Her forehead no longer throbbed. Soon the drips came less and less. In the distance Rebecca heard a siren calling. An ambulance. At first it was far away. None of her concern. Just a random siren calling through the streets. But as it drew near to the clinic, paranoia crept through her flesh, crept up her spine. She sensed, as often happens, that the siren was for her. She had a tendency toward this feeling. Whenever she passed a fire truck on the road, she would pause a second to consider if it was heading toward her house, where the babysitter had fallen asleep with a frozen pizza in the oven, or to Paradise Day School, where she had just dropped Tulane off in the morning. Her pulse would quicken. Silly, she would say to herself. But she would have to turn the car around and drive past her home all the same. Silly, she would say, when all was fine. Silly. But there it was. There was that siren, howling through the walls as the ambulance pulled into the Lidell Clinic parking lot. She heard footsteps slamming the hallway. Dr. Milkin running. Chaos in the hall. She closed off the nozzle in Ivy’s head and put a stopper in the test tube. Then, rolling her eyes, she tossed it in the garbage, as she made her way into the hall. Kias burst through the double doors from the waiting area. All the blood had drained out of his features. He was corpse. A ragged death-doll marionette suspended from invisible strings.

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Rebecca couldn’t breathe in the examination room as she watched Dr. Milkin apply the bandages. Her mind swam in thick water. Her vision tunneled down. Lying on her stomach, Tulane’s shirt had been cut away, revealing a deep peal of skin along the middle of her back, spots of blistered flesh, and ugly red burns along her shoulder blades and down her arms. She screamed as the EMTs brought her in, but now she only whimpered, crying softly, steadily. Rebecca bit her lip to keep from crying, too. She wanted more than anything to grip Tulane’s hand. Hard. Crushing. She couldn’t help it. But the worst of the burns were there. Kias stood next to her, supporting her at the small of the back. An IV dripped into Tulane’s arm. “Shouldn’t she be at the University Medical Center in Jackson?” said Kias. “I know it looks bad,” said Dr. Milkin. “But it’s not as bad as it looks. Burns are terrible, they really are. But the worst here are only second-degree burns. She’ll need daily cleaning, antibiotic ointments…I guess, a pain reliever. Three weeks. Good as new. But it’s all outpatient. She won’t have to stay at the hospital or anything. You can take her home tonight.” “I know it hurts,” said Rebecca. She stroked Tulane’s hair. “That’s good,” said Dr. Milkin. “Third-degree burns don’t hurt. The nerves have all been burned away. The pain is a good sign. She’ll be fine. Thank God for Ronnie Tibbit, don’t you think?” Rebecca closed her eyes. She had no response for this. Of course, yes, thank God, thank God. Kias put his arm around her shoulder. She fell into his neck. They stood together, while Dr. Milkin worked. “Momma?” said Tulane. “Hush,” she said. “It’s okay.” “Grandpa Jack didn’t mean to do it,” she said. “I know he didn’t. It was the angel who lives under the stairs. He told him to do it. Last night.” “Grandpa Jack,” said Rebecca, grinding her teeth. “It wasn’t him,” said Tulane. “Last night the angel came up through the floor and gave him a shot and he made him do it. Grandpa Jack didn’t do it.” “Up through the floor?”

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“He lives down there with all the bad thoughts,” said Tulane. “Please don’t be mad at Grandpa Jack.” There was a heavy fist on the door, and Sheriff Beauchamp stuck his nose through the crack. It wasn’t old Beauchamp, Sr., sheriff of Beckham County for the last forty years; it was Junior. She remembered being a freshman when he was a senior at Lidell High. She remembered watching him roll off the football field with his four bottom teeth shoved through his lower lip. Blood everywhere. She remembered Beauchamp Sr. belly bumping his way down the stands to the sidelines with Dr. Milkin, who sewed that lip up good as new right there on the spot, without a drop of Novocain or so much as a Tylenol tablet. Junior was born to sheriff. Born with a bullhorn in his hand, a smooth swing with his baton, and a steady bead on whatever he aimed to shoot. Shoot. Here he was. He’d been there. He shot Joe. This was the man. If not him, then some deputy of his. She could hear the static of a two-way radio. Boots scuffed the linoleum in the hallway. There were men out there. Sheriff’s deputies. She’d seen them when the EMTs brought Tulane in, but she hadn’t cared about them. “Miss Wooler,” he said. “Martin,” she said. “Ms. Martin.” “Mrs. Martin,” he said. “We need to talk to you out here a minute. Mr. Williams, you too.” “Can’t it wait a minute,” she said. “My baby.” “All right, you can stay a minute,” he said. “Mr. Williams, I need you to come out here in the hallway.” “Me?” said Kias. “That’s correct,” said Sheriff Beauchamp. Kias looked a little confused, as he walked across the room. But Rebecca couldn’t worry about it. She was concentrating on Tulane, on holding her hand. She was pouring herself into those pleading eyes. “What is it, officer?” said Kias as he stepped through the door. “You know full well what it is,” said Ronnie. This was vague and far away. The door closed on the rest of Ronnie’s speech. She watched as Milkin cut more bandages. He rocked slowly back and forth on the stool, as he scissoring them out to fit the pattern of burns on Tulane’s back. After a few minutes, Sheriff Beauchamp returned. “Mrs. Martin,” he said. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to come with me.”

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“What?” “We’ll explain it down at the station,” he said. He held his hand out, as if for her to take. With his foot he kept the door from closing. “What?” she said, again. “Can’t it wait? My baby.” “Mrs. Martin,” he said. “I don’t want to have to arrest you in front of your little girl. Will you please step out into the hallway?” “But—” “Come on.” “My baby.” “Child Services said your momma can watch her until we sort this out,” he said. “Child Services? It—her grandfather has a little dementia. He didn’t mean—” “This isn’t about him. Please, will you step out here in the hallway? I don’t—I really do not want to have to pull you out in front of your little girl. Please.” “Momma?” said Tulane, reaching after Rebecca as she stood. “Momma, where are you going?” “Just a minute,” she said. “I’ll be right—” “Momma?” said Tulane. She began to cry again. “No. Momma? Where are you going? You can’t go! You can’t go!” she shrieked, as Rebecca turned to leave. Beauchamp opened the door fully and stepped into the room. In the hallway behind him one of his deputies held up a set of handcuffs. The sheriff took her arm, but Tulane wouldn’t let go, and Rebecca had to pull herself free of the child’s grip. “Momma!” Tulane screamed. As she came to the door, she saw a little ways down the hall where another deputy had Kias thrust up against the wall, with his hands cuffed behind his back. Tulane kept screaming. It was all Rebecca could hear, even as the sheriff was speaking to her. She had no idea what he was saying. It was all a blank wall of white noise, across which was scrawled the jagged signature of Tulane betrayed. “Hold still,” Dr. Milkin kept saying. “Just hold still.” She turned at the door to see him pull Tulane’s arm out from under her, where she had tried to prop herself up, tried to reach out, tried to stop it. The sheriff waved the deputy with the handcuffs away. He led her out of the room, and the door closed on Tulane’s harsh, gasping cries.

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Lurleen was in the hall, her eyes downcast. When Rebecca passed, she reached out, but the sheriff kept them moving. The exam room door opened and then closed. She could hear Lurleen in there, with soft cooing words. But Tulane continued to wail, to scream, “Momma, Momma,” over and over again, though Dr. Milkin and Lurleen did all they could to calm her. Even as the doors closed and they walked through the waiting room, she could hear the frail voice as it broke into coughing shrieks. Each stabbing cry echoed through the walls, slamming through her as she stumbled into the parking lot. Talking. He was talking. The sheriff kept talking. But she had no idea what he was saying. Under the bright sun, the sheriff finally turned her away from him, twisting a set of handcuffs onto her wrists. She could still hear Tulane. Muffled. Distant. Dying cries. If she could only drag her arms around, if she could stand against that cry as it wailed through the walls, flooding all around her in the parking lot. If she could wrap her arms around that voice and smother it back to nothing. As Tulane’s voice died away, Rebecca’s heart leapt out through her ribs and vanished in the sun. “It wasn’t any of it Rebecca’s doing,” shouted Kias. He struggled with the deputy, who was trying to pack him into the back of one of the squad cars. “It was all me. I did it.” “Shut up,” said Ronnie. “You wouldn’t break into your own trailer.” In the parking lot Rebecca saw the sheriff’s SUV and two squad cars, the ambulance, and Ronnie’s Buick. Three deputies leaned against the cars, waiting perhaps for another round of shooting from the Wooler clan. Beauchamp eased Rebecca into the back of the other squad car. She could see Kias’ face pressed against the glass, his eyes blazing. He was screaming in there, but she couldn’t hear what he was saying. “Your partner’s admitted it,” said Junior, sliding into the front seat and twisting around to talk at her over the bench. “Admitted what?” she said. “About the break in,” he said. “The key? Ronnie there tells me he had a break in at his office last night. He’s hopping mad, too. Say it’s Watergate all over again. Now I wouldn’t know much about Watergate, but I do know breaking and entering when I see it. That’s a real crime. Eighteen months for sure.”

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She had paced the cell for hours now. Hours and hours. For hours now she had run her fingers across the bars, across the concrete block walls, trailing her fingers over the mattress, circling, staring at the floor, at the ceiling, at the waning daylight as it poured through a small window, at the other empty cells, at the bars. Then she sat on the floor, with her face buried in her palms. Then she sat on the mattress. Then she paced the walls, again. She tried desperately to pry her mind away from the absence, but it was always there, at the pit of her thinking. The absence coiled up her spine. It gnawed at the base of her skull. Momma would take care. Lurleen… Momma… Pry your mind away, she thought. Tulane is fine. Pry your mind away. She had stopped crying long ago. She sat on the mattress. She stood. She paced the walls. She sat on the mattress. She pressed her forehead against the cool blocks of the wall. The concrete reflected something into her, not back at her, the way a mirror reflects back, giving as it pulls away, presenting a world within the world of oneself. Rather the concrete forced her mind in upon itself, isolating, compacting, compressing her smaller and smaller into a draining vortex, at the kernel of which lay the absence of the child. Her child. Her responsibility. Hers and no one else’s. Who she alone had named Tulane. Who was this sheriff? How could he cleave her down the middle, split her belly wide and fold her open, stretch her out against these walls and pin her there for all the world to rummage through? What laws were these? Who wrote them? She drained ever further, ever deeper into that sucking absence. She rattled along the walls, banging the side of her head against the blocks. What was this thing down there inside her? Crawling around. This great big thing. She felt it in her organs; she felt it slide between her cells. It was like a chemical; it was like a wash of chemicals rolling through her stomach; it was like a knife-edge carving out her lungs. It was this great big thing crawling around inside her. It was long teeth in dry grass; it was the leopard as it circles the chattering monkey. It was murder; it was that instant of murder. It was this great big thing, this murder, crawling all over. She could feel it crawling up her legs, this spider- thing, this alien-bug. This great big lizard, it lay inside her belly. It lay in the vast and shifting dunes of her interior desert. A desert stretching out to no horizon, curving up to the sky, into a sphere. A vast sphere of desert sand, shifting in the rotating winds of grit

245 and blow and dunes. Dunes shifted across her body; sand blew into her. It blew into her mouth, her ears, her eyes. Sand blew through her until she was only sand. An image of Rebecca in sand. No longer possessed of body, but just a shifting image in the sand. She blew out in long rivulets of running sand. She scattered through the desert, and there was only that vulture snapping at her bones as they dissolved into sand and coalesced in her belly. It was there in her belly, crawling upwards, crawling up her throat, into her lungs and arteries, through her heart to the muscles in her fist. It was there in her fist. That monster; that murder. It crawled into her fist. She curled it, cupped it in her other hand. She paced the walls. She dragged her skull along the blocks, until her forehead scabbed. She held her fist, staring at it, through it, deciphering it layer-by-layer, sinew-by-sinew, bone-by-bone. I am a ragged sackcloth of old bones. A tattered dress of dragging bones. Of nerves running through this fist, like a mess of wires, steel wires cabling bone to bone. She was a bone hard fist. Screaming, she hurtled it into the concrete blocks. There were shots of jarring fire and ice in the bone against bone of the throw. It rang up her shoulder. A hammer blow had struck her in the shoulder. She fell back onto the mattress. She was nothing more than a throbbing fist released into space, where she floated in a sea of black razors. She thought of the pot of boiling water in Tulsa, of Tulane’s toe caught in the bicycle chain. She thought of fevers, of wailing, jagged cries in the night, of blue-lipped babies dragged from stagnant ponds. She was in the box. There was only the one dimension stretching out forever and forever, plodding onward and away. There was only time. Time and right angles all around. Right angles pressing down on her, into her, and through her, as she lay gripping her broken knuckles, pinching back the self-pity and the loathing. She thought of old women leaning their liver spotted arms along the window ledges of a horn-drenched hell, as old shirtless men, nameless and howling, stagger in the streets below. They call to one another; they call to no one; they lean in their windows, waiting to die. Whole families, they crawl through the streets in torn and ragged sacks of gray; beneath a ragged gray sky they come, scratching at the earth. They make a pale flame jump out. Grunting, they hurl boulders. They tear their hair. They eat the mud. Their bones clatter all around them. Their speech is a sky full of hurled boulders. Who are these monsters? Inheritors of the earth. In the evening, we came upon the ruins of a great capital, deep in the viney jungles along the banks of an ancient river. The seated

246 god of a lost people. Obelisks and eagles. The bones of the great lizards are strung along the walls. All their incredible clockwork birds. The vessels, those saucers full of life they sent drifting into the black milk of space. Rebecca had left his sketchbook in the room with Ivy when she heard them bringing Tulane through the doors. She hadn’t thought about it. Hadn’t thought of Joe out there inhaling the black milk of space. But now she thought of Joe. And how Joe saw little Tulane in her metallic space suit, giving orders to her team as they spread through the ruins of this city where that bastard sheriff wanders home for the evening to kick his dogs, and fuck his wife, and smack his snot-nosed children, like roaches on the lam as they scurry across the floor. What a stupid smile. Probably a Baptist. Love, he says. It’s all about the love. When he smacks his dog, when he squashes his kids, when he hogs his wife, it’s all about the love, he says. In church with those snot-nosed brats, amid the grunting boulders hurled from the pulpit, he’ll stagger drunk to the front, where he flips the vestments over the pastor’s head to shove his pistol in, screaming, it’s all about love. It’s all about the love in here. Shiny-headed reverend, soft and pink as a newborn, beady red with sweat and screaming, I love you, I love you. They’re all screaming: I love you, while the shack thunders beneath the mechanism of the mechanism of flesh mechanized and ripped open. Hours. She thought this was the first few hours of several years to come. She had only been in jail for six hours when Willy Tate came to get her out. She held her throbbing hand against her heart. “That was stupid,” she whispered. “Oh, was that dumb.” Blood had begun to ooze from her knuckles. She tried to clean them with her tongue. Down the hallway a door clanged open. There were footfalls along the concrete. She didn’t look up until the steps came to a halt outside her cell. “Rebecca,” he said. “Come on,” he said. The deputy unlocked her cell-door. The tumblers fell away with a heavy metallic echo. The door clanged open with a deafening rage, followed by total silence. “Where’s my baby?” she said. “At home with Lurleen,” he said. “Come on. I’m getting you out of here.” “You paid my bail?” she said. Willy said nothing. The deputy jangled his brass ring of keys. “What about Kias?” she said. “Him too,” said Willy. “He’s over on the men’s side. Come on.”

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Rebecca walked into the hall. She turned and looked back at the space inside. Time. Time and bad dreams. How long had it been? “What time is it?” she said. “Six-thirty,” he said. Six hours. She thought of Daddy and his twenty-four years. Outside the cells, the world of the sheriff’s station opened onto the greater world beyond. At the counter a secretary typed into a computer. Deputies milled about the room. There were papers being shuffling. Harsh, jarring sounds ricocheted off the walls. Lights. Feet scuffed on the floor. Chalk scrapped on a board. A man laughed. There was chatter everywhere. Flags. Pistols. There were pistols everywhere. It was sensory overload. Everywhere the great big world was opening up around her like a day lily. The sheriff came out of his office. He leaned in the doorframe, frowning, then he grinned. His eyes fell back into his skull, and there was only the drift of yellow smoke in the torn and ragged sockets of the bone. He skulked into his office, closing the door behind him. At the counter she collected her things. “My brother’s sketchbook,” she said. “I had it in the room with Ivy. But I didn’t have it in the room with Tulane. Did…did anybody find it?” The deputy at the property counter shrugged. “Come on,” said Willy. “I’ll ask Dr. Milkin if he’s seen it. But we’re not finished here yet. Rebecca, there’s one more thing.” “What?” she said. From the opposite end of the sheriff’s station a deputy led Kias through a door and into the lobby. He led him over to the property counter, where he stood blinking in the glow of freedom, much as she had moments before. She touched his breast. “What is it?” she said. “Come on,” said Willy. “Outside. I’ll show you.” Willy’s Alfa Romeo was parked in the parking lot of the Beckham County Sheriff’s station next to several squad cars and a white Econoline van from the WJAX-TV 12 news team – ‘The first in news.’ Through the opened side door, Rebecca could see the sound and recording equipment, the cameras and the lights. A tall blonde woman in high heels and a black dress, her face blasted with stage makeup and diamond earrings, held a microphone for Ronnie Tibbit to speak into. She leaned forward when he spoke, intent on his every word. Smiling. Friendly. She was so friendly. Rebecca frowned. Ronnie and the blonde woman continued to talk. Willy put his hand on the small of Rebecca’s back. He

248 began to walk her across the pavement. “That’s Linda Flanagan,” he said. “She’s anchor of the WJAX-TV 12 Newscenter. She’s owed me a favor for ten years now.” “Willy, don’t—” “Hush,” he said. “You can do eighteen to twenty-four months with Beauchamp here, or you can get on that camera in a minute and tell the whole wide state of Mississippi what a Godsend Ronnie Tibbit is. A real American hero. It’s your choice. This is the best I can do for you.” As they approached the van she could hear the interview in progress. “I understand you’re running for Representative Bellman’s seat in the state legislature next year,” said Linda Flanagan. The cameraman twisted the focus on his camera. Ronnie, his face still slashed with a perfect streak of soot, looked radiant, his hair mussed, heroic. He smiled, his teeth gleaming. “Oh,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to talk about that at a time like this. It’s true, I am a candidate, but I’m just so happy I could be there to pull that poor child out of those raging flames.”

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Aunt Cindy, her eyes full of tears, jumped up from the couch when she and Kias came through the door, but Rebecca waved her away. She didn’t want to talk to any of them, Aunt Cindy, Momma, Daddy. Daddy. She could feel the presence of Daddy, up there in that bed. Why hadn’t he been arrested? That sheriff probably didn’t want a corpse on his hands. A corpse. She had thought in the car about killing him. Finally doing it. Freeing him of the misery. She could open that bottle of Sublimaze and pour it down his throat, stoppering up his mouth with the bottle. She’d thought of choking the life out of Aunt Cindy too, that fool of a guitar plunking convict, Arzo for running off when he had. Herself, for ever letting Tulane out of her sight. All the long ride out to the house, she and Kias had not spoken. Not once. Though he must’ve had something to say. She awaited it with dread. Not about being locked in a cell. If anybody could handle that, it was Kias Williams. He’d have taken pride in his stoicism. What she waited to hear was what he had to say about Linda Flanagan. Standing in the cool night breeze outside the sheriff’s station, under the glow of the lights and goggle-eye of the camera lens, telling all of Mississippi what a godsend Ronnie Tibbit was, what a hero and a gentleman, a kind of calm had come over her. If she could do this, she could do anything. She was prepared for anything. “And you’re the father?” Linda Flanagan had asked. The eye of the camera bore down upon them as they stood in the parking lot clutching one another. “Oh,” he said. “N—” “Yes,” said Rebecca. “This is her daddy, right here. This is Kias Williams. He’s the father of my baby.” Upstairs in the room, they sat together with the surgical tape, the gauze, and the scissors spread out on the floor between them. Tulane lay face down on the cot, sleeping. They sat cross-legged, watching the slow rise and fall of her back. “Why?” he said. “I don’t know,” she said, after the silence. “Six years,” he said. She looked at the lines around his eyes, the deep black welts on his cheeks. “I couldn’t,” she said. “I just couldn’t come back here.”

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He picked up the package of gauze, turning it over in his fingers. He looked like he wanted to say something, but he couldn’t put the words together. “You know Joe’s painting?” she said. “Of the Exodus?” “Yes,” she said. “I’ve always thought that Exodus is the most powerful myth the world has ever known. Can you image its birth? Dragged into exile, the priests are looking for a way to keep themselves and their god relevant, so they retell the creation myth in terms of a nation. A part of me has always wanted something like that. To be together with the other members of my nation. But try as I might, I’ve always felt that I was the water through which others had passed on their way to nations out beyond me. You. Daddy. You two were always forging ahead, building schools, radio stations, TV shows, churches with trains in them. Roller coasters. Etc. Etc. I just couldn’t bring Tulane into that. I couldn’t have her dressed in frills and singing starry-eyed-goo-goo-Jesus- songs. I wasn’t going to let her be your Bible-school-Barbie-doll. Or him. It would’ve been even worse if I had had a boy. He would’ve grown up to be just like you.” “Damn it,” said Kias. “You know… no. I can understand that. I actually can. I had to get away from this town, too. But… I never knew I had a daughter. I never knew. You kept that from me.” “Well, You have one,” she said. “I want to see her,” he said. “She’s…” “I want to be a part of her life.” “I don’t know if I’m all right with that,” said Rebecca. Kias looked at his hands. “You can’t just go on telling her her daddy is dead,” he said. “She has a daddy,” said Rebecca. “Daniel. Daniel’s a good father.” “The one who’s going to drown her puppies?” said Kias. Rebecca stood. “He’s not going to drown her puppies,” she said. “Did she tell you that? You see? You don’t know the least thing about children.” She waited, but he didn’t respond. After a while he set the package of gauze down on the floor, and brushed his hand over the hair of the sleeping child. “Just yesterday, you said I’d make a good father.”

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“That was yesterday,” she said. “Then why tell me? Why tell the state of Mississippi?” “I don’t know,” she said. “It just came out. I was vulnerable. I’d been in jail. I felt bad. I got you in jail. I don’t know. I shouldn’t have. I shouldn’t have gotten involved at all. I just ought to have gone back to Idaho after the funeral. Or not come, like Daniel said… And you listen to me Kias Williams, don’t you even think of involving the law in this. You will not stand a chance in a court of law.” “The law?” He said it vague, far away. As if he saw it ghostly and through a fog. “I have no use for man’s law,” he said, gathering himself to his feet. “You’ll let me see her, because it’s the right thing to do.” They clicked off the light and walked out of the room together, closing the door gently behind them. Kias went on down the stairs to the living room, where they heard Willy’s voice talking with Lurleen. Rebecca remained on the landing. She said she would be down in a bit. Down there she knew she would be faced with Cinderella’s apology. She’d have to decide whether to accept it or not. She looked at the door to Daddy’s room. He wouldn’t have the faculties to apologize. Going in there she wouldn’t be forced to accept anything she wasn’t ready to accept. She pushed the door open. He lay twisted in the sheets. Walking to the side of the bed, she stood above him for a while. His one eye was open, but it was devoid of anything beyond the faintest flicker of life. She knew it was all but accomplished anyway. What a simple thing it would be to put the pillow over his face. No pressure at all. It would require only the smallest interruption to his already labored breathing. She could send him into the gulf of which he spoke so reverently. He was already there, wasn’t he? It was what he wanted, wasn’t it? Twenty-four years. She had been there for little more than six hours, and in this she felt a sudden rush of love for the old man, such as she had not felt for many years, not since she was a little girl swinging in his arms and there was nothing at all in the blue sky and the green fields, but herself and her daddy and the motion of they made, as they swung through the world, laughing and flying and caring about nothing, but just the thrill of being alive and warm and protected and loved in a world that was made out of love. She sat in the chair by his bedside. Momma had fed him already. There were two empty jars of baby food on the

252 nightstand beside the lamp. She thought of that long ago evening when they weathered the Bible together, starting it all. It was the day she had kicked Ronnie Tibbit on the bus, dragging him down between the seats. It was the day she and Kias sat in the principal’s office, waiting for Daddy to come, with his shot up backside, and she’d known it was all over, but then he’d lied. Daddy had lied for her. When she got home from school, she had found him at the kitchen table, writing in a brand-new leather bound Bible. He was intent, silent. He held his chin in one hand and a fountain pen in the other. Spread across the table was a scattering of papers, the scrawled notes and diagrams of a family tree made of smoke and in the process of deep revision. The new Wooler family tree. He glanced up at her as she set her books down beside him. “Look at this,” he said, moving the papers around until he found the one he wanted. “It starts right here, in seventeen fifty-three when a Wooler first moved from someplace over in Alabama west into Mississippi. Now, the way I see it we don’t really know too much about that. It was so long ago.” “I don’t think there was a Mississippi or a Alabama in seventeen fifty-three,” she said. “Well, there was something? It ain’t like there was nothing at all. So he moved into what would be Mississippi from what would be Alabama.” “What was he doing in Alabama?” she said, pulling her chair around to sit by him and lean on his shoulder as he spoke. “Same thing he did when he got to Mississippi,” said Daddy. “Spread the Word. And he brought this Bible with him.” Rebecca eased back in her chair, fixing Daddy with her eyes. “Nobody’s gonna believe this Bible was printed in seventeen fifty-three,” she said. “First off—here, look here.” Picking it up, she flipped to the beginning and set it back on the table, with her index finger pointing to the title page. “Says it was printed in nineteen eighty-six.” Daddy took the page in his fingers and ripped it from the book. Wadding it into a tiny ball, he cast it aside. “Okay,” he said. “Find me another.” “It’s obvious it’s a brand new Bible,” she said.

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“We’ll take care of that in a minute,” said Daddy. “I got to write in these births and deaths and marriages. Look, I got it all figured out. It starts here with this Wooler coming out of Alabama.” “It’s just it would sound more reasonable if it started in eighteen fifty-three.” “But I got it all plotted out,” he said. “Look, in eighteen oh-three the grandson of that first Wooler had ten kids by these three different wives. The family fragments from there, moving all over the state. They were preachers and plantation owners, senators and judges. I been working all day, waiting for you to get home.” “No. I like it, Daddy,” she said. “Why let’s stick to a few generations. It’ll be more manageable. If you do it like this, there won’t be anybody in the state of Mississippi except Woolers. Now where’s the last page? The one’s got us on it.” Daddy frowned. “I haven’t put that one down yet,” he said, shuffling through his notes and charts. She and Daddy worked on the diagrams into the late afternoon. The tales of the generations spun out and meshed together with the fabric of the land and the time and the people of central Mississippi, until they had worked out the myth of the Wooler Baptists, going back to the middle of the nineteenth century and starting with a move westward out of Alabama. When they had finished the charts and committed them to memory, they wrote the names in the Bible, trading off writing between them and using different pens to achieve a realistic effect. Then, when the names had been written, they went out to the front yard to weather the book. They beat it against rocks; they kicked it through the dust. Rebecca took a hose from the side of the house and sprayed a fine mist across a number of pages. They shook out the water and took it inside and dried it in the oven. While it dried, they drank sweet tea and made up stories about the names they had written. Then they brought it back to the front yard. It was night by then, and Daddy held a flashlight. He scanned it across the ground. Cinderella came trudging up from the road. “You ain’t seen Arzo?” she said. “I looked for him everywhere. All down at Tibbit’s and at the levee and everything.” “No,” said Daddy. “I haven’t seen him. Got to find him though. We need to raise some money. We’re gonna build a church down in that field.” He pointed toward the

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drive. The old, busted mule down there quietly looked up from grass he was munching. This was the first Rebecca had heard of this new twist to the myth. “Now you’re gonna build a church,” she said, turning to watch the evening settle. “What you doing out here?” “Looking for a chicken,” he said. “There’s one.” Rebecca ran after the bird, catching it up by the hind legs. She carried it squawking back to the porch. Handing her the Bible, Daddy took the bird and walked to the chopping block. He laid the bird down on its side, and with a single blow from a hatchet, he took its head off. The body jerked, kicking, and Daddy dropped it; it ran under his Gremlin and fell dead. He walked back to the porch with the chicken head, and taking the Bible from Rebecca, he opened it to the middle, squeezing a few drops of blood across the pages. Then he began to speak of that battlefield in eighteen sixty-three where his great grandfather wandered in no man’s land among the dying, spreading The Word to those most in need, the air on fire around him and his ankles deep in mud—when a pistol ball carried him off to his own reward. Sitting beside his deathbed, all these years later, she felt his forehead, his cheek. “Daddy?” she said. “It’s done now,” he said. “I did what he told me.” “What who told you?” “The punk,” he said. “Tell me about the punk,” she said. “He said I wouldn’t have to tell it again.” “You do,” she said. “You need to tell me about it. You tried to burn my child up alive because of it.” “No,” he said. “I yelled for her to get out.” “She’s just a child,” said Rebecca. “I yelled.” “Tell me about the punk,” she said. He lowered his eye, looking at her in the chair. He was quiet for a while before he started. “I was a trustee shooter,” he said. “In the old days they used to give certain of the convicts—the biggest ones, the toughest ones—a .30. 30. They’d set you up on post

255 around the gunmen in the rows. There wasn’t any parole in those days, but you could get a pardon if you shot a man trying to escape. Naturally, it set up an incentive. The punk— this was in the sixties—he was some longhair they busted driving through the state with a pound of marijuana in the trunk of his car. They gave him three years hard labor as a lesson to other longhairs. He was just a dumb kid. Skinny. Weak looking. A Yankee. I don’t even know if he was eighteen. The boys were pretty bad to him at Parchman. They—prison’s ugly—” “I’m sure it is,” she said. “But not me,” he said. “I never was mean to him. I…I never did anything, but…” “What?” “He was a dumb punk,” said Daddy. “What did you do?” she said. “They kept the shooters and the gunmen separated,” he said. “But you could say things. Out in the field. By the fence. There were moments you could talk. We all did it. We all teased them. Told them to run. Said we’d aim high if they just went and told our mommas something. It was just teasing. I mean you’d dream of getting a fish on the line who’d actually bite for it. Actually run. But nobody ever did. They were smarter than that. He was just some dumb punk.” “And he ran.” “And I shot him,” said Daddy. “They tacked two more years onto his sentence. It must’ve been the worst years of any man’s life. That shot up leg didn’t help him get away.” “But you could’ve helped him, couldn’t you?” she said. “You could’ve looked out for him.” “You didn’t do that sort of thing,” he said. “You didn’t look out for people. He was weak. If you looked out for him some of that weakness might rub off on you.” “Is that why they let you out?” “No,” he said. “There was a moratorium on it. The whole system was changing. They burnt the barracks a couple of years later and the whole trustee-shooter system was gone. I got paroled just like anybody.” “But you didn’t even do it,” she said. “You didn’t kill that woman.”

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Daddy nodded. “The parole board took that into consideration.” “Rebecca?” She turned. Lurleen stood at the door with the phone in her hand. “It’s Dr. Milkin,” she said. “Ivy’s run off. The nurse said she went in to check on her and she was gone. Left Andromeda sleeping in the crib.”

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Willy was on the phone with Child Protective Services for a good hour before he and Lurleen drove to the Lidell Clinic to pick up Andromeda. Kias—inspired with a sense of mission—headed for Northpark Mall in Jackson, to clear out the stores of any and all baby paraphernalia he could find. Aunt Cindy went with him. She didn’t seem to relish the thought of being alone in the house with Rebecca. She wasn’t leaving Tulane. Perhaps she wouldn’t leave her ever again. She did, however, get on the phone with Daniel, once they were all away and the house was quiet. She thought it would be a struggle, and he was hesitant at first, but in the end he said yes, yes of course. Of course he’d fly down. He’d be there the next day. “I know there’s a lot of work,” she said. “There… It’s not important,” he said. “I… Is she hurt very badly?” “No,” said Rebecca. “I mean, yes. It’s bad, but she’ll be fine. Three weeks the doctor says. He says she won’t have scars or anything. But Daniel, I told him. I told Kias the truth. Her father. I—It’s been a long week. I…I was arrested.” “Arrested?” he said. “For what? You didn’t set the church on fire, did you?” “I broke into a bail bonds office,” she said. “It’s complicated. It’s okay. We worked it out. My mother’s having an affair with the county prosecutor. I’ll fill you in when you get here. Just, please come. I’ve missed you, too. But I can’t come home just yet. What about harvest?” “It’ll be all right,” he said. “I’ll hire someone. It means we’ll be tight this winter.” “I’ll skip the semester,” she said. “…No,” he said. “We’ll figure something out. I… Rebecca?” “Yes?” “I’m sorry,” he said. “I should’ve just kept her here.” “You had no way of knowing this would happen.” “No… but… I’m learning, but… I need to…” He breathed into the receiver. “It’s all right,” she said. “No, I need to say it.” “Come down here and say it,” she said.

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“I missed you,” he said. “I missed you, too,” she said. After she cradled the phone she wandered back upstairs to the room where Tulane lay on the cot. She was awake, sitting up, smoothing her hair around her face. Rebecca had brought her half a Tylenol-3 crushed in a spoonful of honey. “Momma,” she said, pulling the spoon out of her mouth. “I’m sorry.” “It’s not your fault,” said Rebecca. “But I shouldn’t have snuck around.” “Snuck around?” said Rebecca. “No. Don’t sneak around. Where did you go?” “One time I snuck out of the trailer,” she said. “I snuck into the parking lot between the semis.” “In Tulsa?” said Rebecca. “At the trailer,” said Tulane, shrugging her shoulders. “And sometimes I sneak under the porch to be with the puppies. Please, don’t kill the puppies. Don’t let Daniel kill them.” “He won’t,” said Rebecca. “But you shouldn’t sneak out.” “And I snuck under the stairs,” she said. “There’s a hole down there. A tunnel. It’s where the bad thoughts are. The angel who comes to Grandpa Jack come out of that hole.” “He learned about Daddy’s escape tunnel from Joe,” said Rebecca. She brushed her hand along the child’s face. “He’s been coming in an tormenting Grandpa Jack. But we’re going to stop him,” she said. “All the same, you need to stay in bed and not sneak.” “I won’t,” said Tulane. “I promise.” She sat with Tulane until the child fell asleep again. Then she clicked off the light and walked onto the landing. The house was dark. Quiet. The boards had ceased their creaking. The pipes were still. She pushed her way into Daddy’s room. He was asleep. She stood listening to his breath in the dark, and then she clicked on the lamp, and picked up his bottle of Dilaudid. She shook the pills. A full bottle. The hospice man had been by the day before. There was a full bottle of Sublimaze on the nightstand too. She unscrewed the caps from both bottles, placing them together on the nightstand. Then she went to the bathroom and filled a glass with water. Returning to Daddy’s room, she found him

259 awake. He had pushed himself up to his elbow. She set the glass on the nightstand beside the pills. “You want me to take them?” he said. “No,” she said. The golden 40-watt light spread across their faces, though their eyes were set in dark pools of shadow. “Perhaps, it’s what you want,” she said, folding her arms. He looked at the pills. He shifted under the sheet. She pulled the chain on the lamp and left him in the room, slipping the door closed silently behind her. She walked back across the hall to her old room and the sleeping child. She sat cross-legged on the floor and placed her palm on the small of Tulane’s back, just beneath the bandages. She felt the rise and fall of the tiny lungs. She was still there, still sitting like that, when they came home with the baby. §§§ Andromeda brought with her a brisk wind of hushed excitement. Lurleen and Aunt Cindy cooed over the baby whenever she opened her eyes. They gathered in the living room and sat around the sofa. Lurleen fixed a bottle. Kias rode in with a mass of diapers and blankets, teddy bears and clothes. He’d bought a cradle, collages, music boxes, and rattles. Anything and everything. Rebecca sat on the stairs, away from them all, but listening. Willy went to the kitchen to make coffee. “I remember,” said Lurleen. “When Joe was first born. He had the jaundice pretty bad and they kept him in the hospital for a couple of days. Jack and I stood by the window to the nursery and watched him. They thought they were going to have to give him a transfusion, but they didn’t. I remember Jack prayed and prayed looking through that window. You asked about good memories. I guess that isn’t one, is it?” Rebecca shrugged. “Maybe,” she said. “I think it means you loved him. That Daddy prayed and that you remembered it. I know you had your problems. And you think maybe you didn’t love him, but maybe you did and you just don’t know it yet.” Pointing at Joe’s urn on the mantelpiece, she continued, “You did put those stargazer lilies by his urn.” Willy came back into the living room. “You really have no idea what love means,” he said. “Until you have a child.” Lurleen nodded. She glanced at Rebecca. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “You’re thinking I was laid up in bed all those years. But I did love you. I loved the both

260 of you. I know that. I just couldn’t… I just couldn’t keep going all the time. I couldn’t keep—” “Pretending,” said Rebecca. “How’s Jack?” said Kias. “I don’t think he has long to go,” said Rebecca. “He sure has suffered,” said Willy. “He’s suffered enough,” said Kias. “I wonder if,” said Rebecca, “any of us ever really suffers enough.” “Jack would say, no,” said Lurleen. “He’d say we haven’t even begun to suffer enough.” “I think that’s what hurt him the most,” said Lurleen. “I think if he could’ve just suffered a little more, he’d have been happy.” “I think he’s suffered enough,” said Kias. “Probably,” said Rebecca. “Probably, he can’t complain.” “Well,” said Willy. “I guess… I guess maybe I ought to go.” Rebecca looked up. “Aren’t you staying?” she said. “You ought to stay,” said Lurleen. “I’ll make us waffles in the morning,” said Rebecca. “Kias, you should come over and have waffles. Did you find Joe’s sketchbook at Dr. Milkin’s?” “No,” said Willy. “Dr. Milkin said there was nothing left in the room, but the baby.” “I’m still thinking,” she said, turning her attention to Kias as he got up to leave. “Come over for waffles and I’ll give you my answer in the morning.” But Rebecca didn’t go to sleep with the rest of them. Once the lights were out in the house, she went to the carport and dug through the junk, until she came up with a rusty tire iron. She took a couple of test swings at the air. Then, satisfied with this weapon, she went back to the house, and into the kitchen, where she found a small candle and a box of matches. Crawling into the cabinet under the stairs, she lit the candle and placed it in front of Daddy’s tombstone. She didn’t want to pull the light cord for fear of the sound it would make when she turned it off. She could extinguish the flame with a gentle breath. She curled her legs beneath her. She sat crossed legged, with the tire iron laid across her knees. She waited. She would wait all night if she had to. And if not tonight, then the

261 next, or the night after that. Eventually, she knew he’d come. He’d finish it. It seemed this was his life’s work. This act of terrorizing her father and destroying his children. She waited a long time. After a while the candle burned out. The cabinet fell into darkness. No matter. In her mind she practiced swinging at the space above the trap door as it opened. She went over the motion a dozen times. Then a dozen times more: the door would creak open; she’d whap him on the skull, demanding his surrender. If he didn’t offer it immediately, she’d whap him again. She’d beat him into submission. She’d drag him into the living room. She’d make him confess to Willy everything he’d done to Daddy and Joe both. Ivy too. Had he kidnapped her? Where was Ivy? She’d make him tell. But it was a long time waiting. The candle had gone out. She was alone in the darkness, listening. She listened for any hint. Then, just when she was beginning to think he wouldn’t come, she heard it. In the ground beneath her, she heard scratching, as if a creature burrowed through the earth. It was just a faint crunching at first, but it grew louder as it approached. She steadied herself. She sat forward on her knees. Her hands grew sweaty on the tire iron. She brought it back, imagining the trap door, as it would open in the blackness. She took a practice swing. The earth was moving down there. This great big thing. There was something alive down there, devouring the rocks below, grunting as it came. A tight squeeze. It was a tight squeeze in that tunnel. And the thing down there was grunting as it crawled. She practiced with the tire iron. Then there was silence. All she could hear was the sound of her own blood storming through her body. Silence. He kicked a can over. He grunted. Human. It was human grunting. He huffed. She heard him reach for the ladder. It creaked beneath his weight. He scratched at the trap door. He was just below her now, pushing at the trap door. She envisioned the swing. She pumped her muscles. The door opened. One heartbeat. She waited to hear the breath in his nose. She waited for his hands to scuff along the top most rungs of the ladder. There was a grunt, a snort, then a sudden in-suck of breath as he perceived her looming in the darkness. She swung at the bobbing skull, cracking the tire iron across the top of that muddy head. “Oh, Jesus, God!” he croaked. He let go of the ladder, and fell, banging his chin on the rungs as he went down. She jerked the light cord and looked into the cellar. Arzo lay sprawled in the

262 dirt, like a wounded spider. He held his face. He gripped the top of his head. Blood poured out of his scalp, through his fingers. “Arzo,” she yelled. “You stupid son-of-a-bitch. Why didn’t you just come in the front? You nearly scared me to death.” “Jesus, God!” he wailed. “Oh, Christ, All Mighty. Oh, oh, oh! I think you busted my tooth out.” He rolled over to all fours and spit a bloody tooth into the dirt. “Get up here,” she said. “What are you doing sneaking around like this?” “I always get back in through the tunnel,” he said, pushing himself to his knees. She could smell the liquor on his breath and in his sweat, too. He’d been drunk for several days without a bath. “Cindy switches out the locks on me.” “Well, damn it,” said Rebecca. “She didn’t switch them this time. Come on in the kitchen and let me fix you up.”

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Dr. Miller showed up the next morning, not long after Daddy died, or at least not long after Rebecca learned that he was dead. “I believe he’s gone,” Lurleen said. Rebecca, who had been mixing waffle batter at the counter, turned, wiping her hands down the sides of the apron she wore. The morning sun came in slants through the kitchen windows. The buzzer on the waffle iron sounded. On the stove the teakettle began to vibrate, though it had not yet started to whistle. “What?” she said, shocked. Her heart leapt. “I believe he’s gone,” said Lurleen. She clasped her hands together. “Sometime in the night. I just stopped in to check on him.” Though she managed to get the bowl of waffle batter set down on the counter, Rebecca dropped the mixing spoon. She ran out of the kitchen and up the stairs. Willy was just coming out of the bathroom. He ran a towel through his hair. He smiled sheepishly when he saw her; then, realizing where she was going, his face fell to dread. He followed her to the bedroom door. Running to the bed, she grasped Daddy’s stiffened hands. They lay peacefully together on his chest. His eyes were closed. On the nightstand beside the lamp the glass of water she had filled still sat where she had placed it the night before. She grabbed up the opened bottle of Dilaudid. Neither those nor the Sublimaze had been touched. She could feel Willy standing behind her. Lurleen came to the door. Rebecca turned to face them. She held the bottle of Dilaudid against her chest. Willy reached and took it. Rebecca sat on the bed. She smoothed Daddy’s hair down on the top of his head. “I guess he felt he had to suffer it out to the very end,” she said. “How’s Tulane this morning?” said Willy. “She’s in pain,” said Rebecca. “I gave her another half a Tylenol-3 not long ago so she could sleep.” “Go sit with her,” said Willy. “I’ll call the coroner.” In the doorway Lurleen was in tears. She bit her knuckles. “Oh, Lord,” she said. “Oh, Lord.” That’s when Dr. Miller arrived. He didn’t sneak in through the escape tunnel, though. He rang the doorbell like any other traveling proselytizer of doom. Rebecca expected it to

264 be Kias. But it was the man from hospice care standing on the porch. He held the lapel of his suit coat, with one hand. With the other he leaned on a cane. He smiled at her. His gaze was far away and made of the purest blue. “I came to check on your father,” he said. She stood inside the screen door, speechless for a moment. “You,” she said. “From the hospice… But you’re not from the hospice are you?” “I’m an old friend,” he said, after a few seconds of silence. “It’s true.” “No you’re not,” she said. “You—how could you show up here? You’ve killed him.” “I’ve killed no one,” he said. “Your father told me yesterday he’d be dead by morning. He said he thought you’d kill him. He said he had done something awful. I shook my head. He just couldn’t seem to stop doing awful things.” “You snuck in here through the floorboards and gave my daddy weird drugs,” she said. “You—you probably gave him the stroke and the cancer, too.” “I have no such powers,” he said, holding up a key in his fingers. “And if I have come here, I did so at your father’s request. I am old friend of his, and if he has taken drugs— weird drugs, as you say—they were his to take or not to take.” “I should kill you were you stand,” she said. “Where’s Ivy?” He frowned. “You are a very violent young woman,” he said. “I can fix that, if you let me… But no, I see you are not ready for the truth. Ivy is fine. You have the baby? Good. I’m sure you’ll give the child a fine home.” “Joe?” she said. “What did you do to Joe? Where’s his sketchbook?” “Who is it?” She turned to see Willy coming down the stairs. He held the phone in his hand. She pushed the screen door open, shouting, “Get the sheriff on the phone.” But when she looked to the porch again, Dr. Miller was gone. She saw only the blue sky over the charred remains of the burnt down church, the gravel road as it stretched past their property, and the field beyond. “Son-of-a-bitch,” she said, running outside. Willy held the screen door open. But though she ran around the house and down to the road, and even though Willy called Sheriff Beauchamp to put out an APB, she never again saw Dr. Miller in the flesh, or Ivy either. It was only the memory of Joe’s pictures that she ever had to confirm that he was even real at all. And as she ran down the drive, down to the road, down past the soupy ash in the burned out hull of their old church, she was still

265 screaming in her mind, that he’d done it, that he’d killed her baby brother, that he’d given him drugs and put a pistol in his hand and marched him like a marionette into the Waffle House only to blast his way out again once the sheriff’s deputies had arrived, because a funeral would get Rebecca to come home with her baby girl, and then he might destroy Daddy further before he finally killed him through her—Rebecca, marionette like, as she opened the pills and set them on the nightstand with a glass of water from the bathroom, because…because… But that had been her choice. She had chosen to unscrew those bottles. Just as Daddy had chosen—ultimately—not to take them. Just as Joe had picked up that pistol on his own. Because he wasn’t her baby brother. He hadn’t worn sailor shorts in many years, and his life had spiraled down into madness and chaos on its own. She could see the dust from Dr. Miller’s car, but she couldn’t see the car. It had gone around the bend in the road before she got there. Ivy. She had gone back to him. She couldn’t make it without him. Desperate, on drugs, provided by Ronnie, or some customer of Ronnie’s, or Dr. Miller, it didn’t matter, desperate he’d snatched up a pistol and staggered into the Waffle House to get the one thing everybody thinks will make it all better and got himself killed for the effort. Did she know that was how it happened? She knew nothing. She believed nothing. She knew only that she would never know. “Momma?” she said, bursting back through the door. Lurleen stood behind Willy on the stairs. “What hospice are you using?” “What?” “The hospice,” said Rebecca. “You arranged for hospice care.” Lurleen frowned. “Dr. Milkin arranged it, I guess. I don’t know. The hospice man just started coming.” After that Rebecca retreated to her old room. She sat on the floor holding Tulane’s hand. The days ahead would be long days. Days of sitting. Days of hand holding. When Kias came, he was dressed in a tie and black suit. He was there in his official capacity. He held a Bible. His hair was slicked back. He had his duties, but he came and sat with Rebecca and Tulane in the abandoned room. They sat quietly with the child. Once, when they were changing her dressing, Tulane opened her eyes. She began to cry. He placed his hand against her cheek, as if to catch her tears in his palm. She closed her eyes. She

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drifted off again. They didn’t speak to one another. In silence, they tended the angry flesh beneath the bandages. §§§ That evening, before he left to get Daniel at the airport, Rebecca called Kias into the room. Tulane was sitting on the cot, eating a bowl of oatmeal. Rebecca held the spoon. Kias squatted on the floor. He winked. “I’m heading to pick up Daniel,” he said. “Daniel,” said Tulane. Her face broke into a grin. “Daniel’s coming here?” “Yes,” said Rebecca. “Dr. Milkin says it’ll be another week before you can fly home. It’s dry air on the plane. It won’t be good for your burns. But when I called Daniel last night he said he couldn’t stand to be away from us that long. But Tulane, listen, I have something to tell you. Now…now, I know I’ve always told you not to lie—” “I’m sorry I snuck out, Momma,” she said, bursting into tears. “I’ll never do it again.” “I’m not talking about you,” said Rebecca. “I’m talking about me. I lied to you, and I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry I did.” “What is it?” Rebecca took a deep breath. She reached for Kias’ hand, her fingers twisting around his. He breathed with her. It was all right. He was all right. Tulane was all right. Daniel would be there soon. Kias was about to drive to the airport and get him. What a strange ride that would be. Friendly though. She knew it would be friendly. They were both good people. Daniel, he was as solid as the ground itself. She thought of their flesh together, as it had not been for these last few days. Every night for eight months they had been together until these last few days. She had not known how desperately she would miss it. Even just lying in the dark, forearm against forearm, as they spoke of the next day’s chores. She thought of sitting up in bed, letting her fingertips brush across his chest as she gestured with her hands, speaking with her hands the way she did, when she got excited. She would look into his face, his teeth. In the dark his eyes would look like black spiders; their hips would bump as they twisted in the sheets. Nerve seeking nerve. They shift together and he is a lodestone, pulling her nerves through the flesh of her collarbone, drawing the fire-ends of her nerves out through her skin. All their nerves pool together, like a bed full of snakes. And a locomotive plunders through the two of them, pounding out their blood, beating it out, malleable. Their blood

267 is malleable and beaten out like copper. Copper pounded into form and razor smooth, uniform. They are flesh and nerve dissolved together in a propagation of nerve into nerve into nerve. Daniel is solid, like the earth itself. Kias is like the pollen, blown on the wind. Kias is grass seed, blown across the oceans, drifting through space. He is the scream as it pours through the vast, infinite silence between the stars. She gripped his hand tighter. She could see in his eyes the nervous excitement. The jittery, uncontrolled effluence. He would pop, burst. He’d go nova. She could tell. He was insane. He was crazy. She closed her eyes. Tulane needed this too. In her life she deserved that also. “Your father,” she said. “I know I told you he died in a car wreck…” She breathed. Kias breathed with her. “But that’s not what happened, at all,” said Rebecca.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Charles Michael Henley has lived from one end of North America to the other. He attended the University of Montana, receiving a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy in 1995. In 2001 he graduated from the University of Alabama with an MFA in Creative Writing. Currently he is a doctoral candidate at the Florida State University.

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