Desperation Road(18)
Twice, both times in the middle of the night after Annalee was back asleep after a bottle, she had gone up. But both times she had won. Stopping at the door and her knuckles bending in preparation for a knock but she never raised her hand. The tension falling from her bent fingers. The voice inside backing her away and telling her you will not become what he wants you to become. She moved back down talking in rhythm with her steps. Don’t go up the stairs. Don’t go up the stairs. Don’t go up the stairs. The second time she returned she closed her door and leaned against it and she was breathing hard as if she had been running from the bad guys and had slipped inside only an instant before they got her. She caught her breath and went to the bathroom and looked at herself and it was unfamiliar—health. They were eating. Didn’t matter what or how much but they were eating. They were sleeping. She had stopped smoking two months before the baby was born and hadn’t started back but for one at lunch and one at night. No beer. Beer had always led to nastier and happier things.
There is not one damn reason to go up there, she had said and pointed at herself in the mirror as if to add and I fucking mean it.
Several nights later he knocked on her door. She opened it and he was holding a small Ziploc bag containing a handful of pills. Some blue and some white. He held the bag out to her and said welcome to the neighborhood. He was wiry with deepset eyes and the distant look of the sleepless. He wore faded jeans and was barefoot and his blond hair was cut tight on his head. He held his mouth halfopen and his teeth were badly stained from cigarettes.
“I don’t want them,” she had said and she closed the door. She waited and listened for him to walk away and then the Ziploc bag slid under the door.
“Then throw them away. I don’t give a shit what you do with them,” he said and then he was gone.
Maben heard voices outside in the parking lot. Gruff voices and a couple of gruff laughs and then nothing. She slid her back along the wall and lay down on the floor with her arm folded under her head and she started to cry quietly. As she cried she could see the Ziploc bag sliding under the door. She could see the bad habits not listening to her demands to stay away. Not staying way the hell over there but inching closer and closer until they were right there with her and the child. The summer faded away and in early October the weather turned damp and cool and Annalee coughed and coughed and wouldn’t sleep and her fever went up and down and because she had kept the Ziploc bag underneath the kitchen sink and not thrown it away, taking it out and opening the bag and sticking her fingers into it and raising them to her mouth was an easy thing to do. And by Christmas she was no longer paying the rent and by February she and Annalee were locked out of the apartment and that was where the clarity of what she remembered from the last four years ended. The fog settled in.
Maben sat up and wiped her eyes. She got off the floor and walked across the room and sat down again in the chair. She pulled back the curtain wide enough to see from one side of the parking lot to the other. Dawn was coming in a few hours and she knew that with the first light the world would begin to spin faster.
12
HE FOUND THE ARMADILLO, A CORNER BAR ON THE BOTTOM FLOOR of a three-story building. He parked and went inside and sat down at the bar. Brick walls and a sticky wooden floor and a yellowstained ceiling. A dozen or so people sat at the tables and along the back wall was a small stage. Stacks of speakers were on each end of the stage and a drum kit set up in the middle. The chairs and tables were pushed back away from the stage, leaving room for dancing. A young man appeared from a door behind the bar. He carried a case of beer and he slid open the top of a cooler and stacked the bottles inside. His arms were covered with tattoos and his hair messed up in the right places. Russell sat alone at the bar and when he finished stacking the beers he gave Russell a nod and Russell asked for one of them. For the next hour or so this was the game. The bartender came and went in preparation for the night ahead and Russell sat quietly, smoking and watching, trying to decipher where one tattoo ended and another began. He occasionally asked for a beer and the bartender gave it to him.
In the next hour the door to the Armadillo opened and closed more frequently as the tables began to fill up. Russell moved to the end of the bar where he could watch the door. Most everyone who came in looked either too young to be in there or too old. A burly, bearded man came in the door and stepped into the middle of the floor. He looked around. Stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled. Another bearded man wearing a black bandanna around his neck pushed open the door and then guitar cases and amps were walked in and through the maze of tables. Once the equipment was in place the band plugged in cords and tapped microphones and tuned guitars. It was the ugliest band Russell had ever seen.
Another bartender showed up to help with the crowd. A young woman, equally tattooed. Her shirt bared her belly and a sun flared around her belly button and Russell happily watched it move behind the bar. Jesus or Elvis could have walked in the door and he wouldn’t have known or cared as he was magnetized by the black sun and the way its rays bent and twisted as she reached for bottles and poured strong drinks.
The bar stools filled up next with those who had come without friends and after the burly band drank a few beers and smoked a few cigarettes the lights went down and a row of moody, yellowish bulbs illuminated the stage and dance area. A guitarist struck a wiry chord and then on the count of four the night jumped to a new level as the burly band played Skynyrd as tight and crisp as Skynyrd themselves. Heads began bouncing and shoulders began swaying and there was no more talking, only yelling, and the band never slowed between the first three or four songs and a couple made its way to the space in front of the stage. Clutching and clinging more than dancing but damn sure not caring what anyone thought about it. Russell’s knee bounced in rhythm and he noticed the tattooed bartenders pouring the drinks heavier than they had been pouring them before the music began. People kept coming in and it wasn’t long before it was hot inside and in another handful of songs there were more sweaty faces than dry faces. Russell had to go to the bathroom but knew if he left his bar stool he wouldn’t get it back so he tried to ignore it by watching the sun that was now glistening with sweat in the neon light of the beer signs hanging behind the bar.