The Familiar Dark(10)

I bent down and pressed my forehead against the steering wheel, hard enough to leave a mark. Hard enough to push the memories back where they belonged. I needed to be in control. The place I was going didn’t allow for weakness.

It was only fifteen miles to my mom’s trailer, but it took more than forty minutes to make the trip. The last five miles over terrain that could only be loosely termed an actual road. Dirt and pitted gravel, not featured on any Google map or adorned with a single road sign. What little mail my mom got was picked up at a post office box in town. She didn’t have an actual address. Growing up, I didn’t know a single person who did. Locations were given in terms of landmarks and miles traveled: Take the first right at the rusted pickup; head south for about a mile; veer left at the gravel fork in the road; if you pass a burned-out double-wide, you’ve gone too far.

“Damn it,” I whispered over and over again as my car slammed against the rough road. I was getting close now, and tension curled between my shoulder blades, stretched its talons up into my neck. A headache throbbed behind my eyes. To the right I saw Carl Swanson’s trailer, one end completely rotted off, the hole patched with a tattered tarp and ribbons of duct tape. There was a new sign in his yard, black paint on an old piece of plywood. Rabbits $2. The greasy taste of rabbit rose in my throat, even though it had been years since I’d eaten one. Around here rabbits weren’t sold as pets, to be cuddled and loved by small children. They were meat, cheap and readily available. Chopped up in stew, legs boiled on the stove, stringy gray meat slopped over plates of gummy rice.

I glanced to the left, looking at the view where the land dropped off, a valley of ripening green stretching out, dotted with old-growth woods, a glint of silver reflecting off the river snaking through. I’d seen it a thousand times—from winter bare to summer lush—but the view never got old. The kind of unblemished beauty that tethered people to this part of the world. Nature that still felt untouched and pure. It was this exact valley, apparently, that had given Barren Springs its name. As the legend went, when the first settlers found this place, there was only one almost-dry little creek and a bunch of dead trees. Soil too hard and rocky to grow much of anything but weeds. But the settlers were tired, out of provisions and choices. So they stayed. And prayed. Begged the Lord to bless them any way he saw fit, but, hey, some water, plentiful game, and better land would be a nice start. Beat their breasts and wept and gave it all up to God. Woke up the next morning to this green abundance. Rivers and creeks flowing, woods full of animals, soil still crap, but beggars can’t be choosers, and two out of three ain’t bad. They decided to name this place Barren Springs to remind themselves how easily things could go bad and how God answered prayers if you truly believed. Most of the town had been praying to God ever since with crappier and crappier results, as far as I could see. For her part, my mama always subscribed to the theory that the settlers were such dumb shits they mistook a simple change of seasons for divine intervention.

I navigated around the bend in the road, slowing down in deference to potholes big enough to swallow a tire. Small rocks pinged off the undercarriage of my car, and my heart began its slow ascent into my throat. One more curve in the road that was really more of a track at this point, and my mother’s trailer appeared. It was set back slightly from the road, ringed by tall grass and heaps of trash, old tires, and a rusted-out car that has been there for as long as I had memories. I used to hide in the footwell when things inside the trailer got too bad.

I bumped over the uneven ground and parked in the grass, next to a black pickup truck with a dented passenger door. Not my mama’s. My stomach cramped up at the thought she had company. The people my mother invited inside were never people you wanted to meet. But my mama was sitting on the front steps of her trailer alone, a beer can in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She stared at me as I unfolded myself from the car, took a long drag off her cigarette as I approached.

My mama was sixteen when Cal was born. Seventeen when I came along, a year younger than I’d been when I brought Junie into the world. She’d almost died from a bad infection after my birth and there were no more kids after me, a fact she always brought up when she was drunk and angry. As if not being able to have more kids she couldn’t afford and didn’t want to take care of was the great tragedy of her life. She was forty-seven now, but looked sixty. Lank dishwater hair, summer-sky eyes, skinny arms and legs framing a loose pouch of belly and saggy breasts. Rumor was she’d been pretty once, maybe even beautiful. Her face the wellspring of Cal’s own good looks. Had men panting around behind her until they figured out her wild streak wasn’t the sassy-comeback type of attitude they saw in the movies. Mama’s wild streak could tear you limb from limb. Even now, with skin dull and pockmarked from too much alcohol and too many drugs, her eyes were sharp. Watchful. She was a woman you underestimated at your own peril.

“Hey, Mama,” I said.

She took another drag off her cigarette, blew the smoke in my direction.

“Hey, yourself.”

I waited for her to say something about Junie, some acknowledgment of what had happened, and realized she was waiting for the same thing. “Cal called you,” I said, more a statement than a question.

“Yep,” she replied, and after another drag from her cigarette, “Sorry about it.”

I sucked in a breath, looked away. The rear of the trailer had a big uneven gash in the siding. My mama had stuffed the tear with plastic bags and newspaper, but it probably did next to nothing to keep the cold out. I hadn’t been inside the trailer in years, but could still picture every inch of it. Could probably navigate it blind, if I had to. Dark and dank, ratty brown carpet, food-encrusted dishes piled in the sink, faint smell of urine from the busted pipe in the bathroom. And always some man who’d be gone in a few months. Not that we ever wanted them to stick around any longer. As daddy candidates, they’d all left something to be desired.