Desperation Road(16)
He sat down on the living room floor and ate everything then felt sick. He thumbed through the Playboy, looking closely at the curves in the hips and breasts of the young, perfect women, trying to remember what one felt like. What one smelled like. He had long since forgotten and he had hoped that the fresh air would bring back the scent but he tossed the magazine aside and realized that only the real thing would make him remember. He kicked off his boots and walked through the house and turned off all the lights. Then he removed his clothes and lay on top of the bare mattress with the folded duffel bag serving as his pillow.
And that wasn’t going to work.
He got up and put his clothes back on and he walked out in the backyard and lit a cigarette. He felt the tender spot over his eye and the tender spot in his ribs. Might as well call them up and get it over with. Come on over and let’s finish it. Come on over here with whatever you got cause he’s still dead and I’m not so come on over. I can take it. Took it all for eleven years. Wasn’t enough that I got held down and wasn’t enough that I lost a couple of teeth. Then I gotta come home and they sit waiting on me. Come on over cause it can’t be no worse. Hell no not any worse. Just come on and let me pay some more. Fuck. Damn near cut your head off, they said. Another inch that way and you’d have bled to death, they said. Another inch. Jesus.
He ran his fingers along the scar that stretched from ear to ear underneath his chin, camouflaged beneath the growing beard. Ripped wide open but alive. Ripped wide open but recovered. Ripped wide open but not wide enough. Lucky, they’d said. A miracle, they’d said. Bullshit, he’d said. The first week in prison he’d been beaten so badly that his eyes had swollen shut and as he lay on the nurse’s table blind and throbbing he had called out for that extra inch. Give it to me now please God. You son of a bitch. Go ahead and give it to me. The nurse stuck him with a shot when he wouldn’t shut up and then everything went black. When he woke he had picked up where he left off. Calling out for one more inch and then beginning to wonder about that one more inch and that was only the beginning of thinking about it. Of thinking about it and thinking about it. He had wondered about it a thousand times. A thousand times a year times eleven years came out to a lot of fucking wondering and it seemed to him now that there would be no end to it. Come on over. Bring whoever and whatever and come on over cause I ain’t going nowhere. He imagined the brothers sitting in somebody’s living room, drinking from cans, bragging about what they’d done. Got his ass right off the bus, they were saying. Stomped his ass, they were saying. Gonna do it again, they were saying. They don’t know shit, Russell thought. They don’t know.
A cricket hopped onto his arm and he watched it for a moment. Felt the tiny tentacles in the hairs of his arm. So gentle and unassuming. Like eyelashes batting against his skin. Then he tossed away the cigarette and smashed the cricket with the palm of his hand and he rubbed its guts up and down his forearm. Come on over, he thought and he felt the same rhythm in his pulse that he’d feel in the moments when there were three of them. Or four of them. A violent, pounding pulse that seemed to lift him up to some other level where he accepted the hurt and the pain. He wiped the bug guts on his jeans and he knelt down in the tall grass and he reared back his head and howled at the moon like some lunatic and he felt no end to it all.
When the howling died away he walked back inside and picked up the Playboy from the living room floor. He opened to the blonde with the green eyes. She lay on her back with her legs spread open, only a slither of satin concealing what she knew they wanted. He touched his fingers to the glossy page, eased them across the hard nipples, along the curve of the hip, up the inside of the thighs. And then he dropped the magazine on the floor and he got in the truck and drove downtown. He moved slowly between the old buildings, hoping to find anything with a neon sign that looked like it might be alive. Hoping to find others who could not be still in the night.
11
SHE HAD WASHED ANNALEE’S FACE WITH A WASHCLOTH AND SAT next to her on the bed with her arms wrapped around her until the child stopped crying and calmed down, promising her over and over that she wasn’t going to leave her. I swear to God, Annalee. I swear it. The child eventually stopped huffing and sniffing and then they moved back on the bed and pulled the covers over them and Annalee rested her head on Maben’s chest and draped her arm across her mother’s waist and she was finally able to sleep again. Maben had slipped the pistol into the bottom drawer of the dresser and she stared at the drawer handle as she lay still until Annalee was thoroughly asleep and she could move out from under her. When the tension left the child’s body and her breathing was slow and heavy, Maben eased Annalee’s arm from across her waist and then she gently moved the child’s head from her chest onto the pillow. She waited to see if Annalee would wake and then Maben sat up in the bed. Swung her legs off and stood.
She walked to the sink and took a plastic cup and filled it with water and she drank it in one take. She did this twice more and then took the wet cloth she had used to wipe the child’s face and she wiped her own. She sat down on top of the toilet and closed the door to the bathroom and was still in the darkness. Waiting for a knock on the door. Waiting for a siren. Waiting for something. Opening and closing her eyes. Unable to tell the difference. Listening and listening and listening.
She finally opened the bathroom door and she drank another cup of water. She looked in the mirror at the small mound on the bed under the sheets and blanket. I swear to God, Annalee. I swear it. She turned and walked to the edge of the bed. The sheet had pushed down around Annalee’s waist and she lifted it and covered the child’s sunburned arms. And then she took a chair and she sat down next to the window and pushed the curtain back half a foot, enough to see the parking lot from one side to the other.