25.

I sat in back and nursed Jesus. Has a nice ring, doesn't it? I sat in back and nursed Jesus. I'd never thought about naming a bottle Jesus until I told the skin-headed tripper I was the Virgin Mary. Spanish people name each other Jesus all the time, although they p.r.o.nounce it "Hey-soos," but for some reason you never hear of English speakers named Jesus. Maybe he's off limits to white guys.

Whatever, Jesus and I were in back with Marcella and the kids because I was drinking and would soon sleep, and Shane was in front because he had a cough. He pretended he didn't, of course-"Must be an allergy. I have an allergy to c.u.min that manifests in the lungs, and, no doubt, the chili was spiced with c.u.min"-but the truth was old Shane looked a bit peaked. The head twitches had taken on a rhythmic pattern. I'd have been concerned if he hadn't called me little missy when I helped him in the pa.s.senger's door.

"I need no a.s.sistance, little missy," he said, then he pulled a harmonica from somewhere and went into "Hey, Joe."

"Don't sit on my Etch-A-Sketch, little missy," Andrew snapped, and I almost nailed him with Jesus.

I hadn't seen his Etch-A-Sketch. A person could have hidden a small pony in the back of Moby d.i.c.k and I wouldn't have seen it. Up to the Comanche exit scene, I'd managed to avoid any close looks at the d.i.c.k's cargo section, but now I had to notice a few things just to find a stretching-out spot.

Shane's chair was folded against the back of the driver's seat next to his built-in perch. Marcella had created a kind of family nest from blankets, clothes, sleeping bags, cookie packages, and magazines with their covers torn off. She'd even rigged an orange-crate crib lined in socks and Jockey shorts for Hugo Jr., who lay on his back staring up at a Snap-On socket wrench calendar featuring a b.r.e.a.s.t.s-and-a.s.s floozie in a cleavage-stretcher top, shrink-wrapped hot pants, and painted fingernails caressing a socket wrench the way I used to caress Charley.

"What'd you do with my pistol?" I called up front.

"I've never seen your pistol in my life," Shane called back.

"If I find him in your stuff, I'll shoot you."

"Little lady, if that dratted cannon is in my possession, you have my permission to gun me down."

"Thief."

"Harlot."

I propped myself next to the side doors against a hundred-pound bag of bad potatoes. They had erupted eyes and these white tentacle things that would cause me trouble if I ever DT'ed. From the spud sack to the back window was like an avalanche had swept through Lloyd's Salvage City. Fan belts, hub caps, clamps, more blankets, more slick-to-bald tires, piles of National Geographies, Guideposts, Max Brand and Ian Fleming novels, an empty gerbil cage, loads of clothes-why would two men who appeared to wear the same outfits every day need a thrift store wardrobe? From deep in the pile came the pet.i.te mew of the unnamed kitty.

Andrew screeched, "Don't look!"

Of course, I looked. Marcella was pulling a jammie top down over his upstretched arms and head, while his bottom half was little boy naked. White f.a.n.n.y, remarkably skinny legs, dirty feet-I felt a pang for my Auburn. Who pulled on his Hopalong Ca.s.sidy jammies now and tucked him in and said Lay-me-down-to-sleep for him until he was old enough to say it himself? Dothan sure as heck wouldn't stoop to mother work, and I couldn't stand the feeling of Sugar Cannelioski touching my son.

The best of all bad possibilities would be Dothan's mother. At least she'd give him a bath. They'd all three be telling Auburn what a sick, sc.u.m-sucking Yankee his mother was. If I never saw my baby again, the Talbot family would probably invent a story where I died. Probably in a car wreck. Car wreck is the story most people make up when they create a death myth.

"Read to me," Andrew demanded.

"Mrs. Talbot is cultured. She doesn't have time to read," Marcella said. "I'll read your bedtime story."

"No. I want Maurey."

He stood in his red cotton pajamas with black oil derricks pointing every which way, clutching a Golden Book. I'd been raised on Golden Books. Sam Callahan and Shannon had both been raised on Golden Books. If I didn't pull my act together and get back there to save him, Auburn would probably never know the smell when you first crack open a brand-new Golden Book. Dothan would raise him to converse fluently on cubic inches of truck engines and the Boone and Crockett point system for rating trophy heads.

I said, "I'll read him the story. I used to read stories to my children."

Andrew's face puckered in disbelief. "You have children?"

"A girl and a boy."

"Are they dead?"

I held the book in my left hand and Jesus in my right with Andrew snuggled on my lap in between. He smelled clean, like children do even when they're dirty.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs-not my favorite selection. It encourages pa.s.sivity until a man comes along to save you, and I think Dopey is a caricature of a kid with Down's syndrome. I wouldn't let Shannon read it back when I had some control.

The cover showed a flat-faced girl surrounded by seven midgets holding hands in a circle. They all had bulb noses like Shane and plucked eyebrows.

"'Once upon a time, in a faraway land, a lovely Queen sat by her window sewing,'" I read.

Andrew shifted against my left breast and popped his thumb in his mouth. Page one was about a woman dying in childbirth. On page two the King gets lonely and marries the biggest b.i.t.c.h in literary history. Why was he lonely? He had Snow White. Men always want more than loving daughters, they want b.i.t.c.h women to nail.

And where was dear old Dad later when the Queen shipped Snow White off to scrub floors in the bas.e.m.e.nt?

Mirror, mirror on the wall Who is fairest of us all?

"'If the mirror replied that she was fairest, all was well. But if another lady was named, the Queen flew into a furious rage and had her killed.'"

Andrew's thumb came out of his mouth. "How did the Queen kill the other lady?"

"Crucifixion."

"Like baby Jesus?"

"She made them go swimming during their periods and they died of shame."

Marcella gave me a look, but Andrew seemed satisfied. He either knew the implications of swimming during your period in the olden days, or he didn't care.

I read, "As the Queen was a dog, soon the kingdom had a shortage of women."

"That's not the right way it goes."

"This is the way I'm reading it."

He slapped the book, right on the Queen's mirror. "Do it right. The story goes one way."

Marcella looked over from her baby maintenance. "Andrew has all the books memorized, you can't change a word."

"Then why read to him?"

She looked at me funny. "I thought you had children."

Put me in my place. I took a sip of Jesus and read the right way. "'As the years pa.s.sed, Snow White grew more and more beautiful, and her sweet nature made everyone love her-everyone but the Queen.'"

I didn't really need Jesus. I mean, I needed Jesus the half-pint, what I didn't need was to get drunk. Three of my favorite things-a book, a child, and a bottle-were all within reach, and I was content to wet my mouth with him every few minutes to stabilize the buzz.

Shane had told the hippies that Jesus m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.ed, but Mom took me to Sunday school every week for years, and The Upper Room daily meditation guide never mentioned self-love in the physical sense. When I was Andrew's age and going through a precocious stage, I asked the teacher if Jesus was a virgin because Mary was and it followed that a virgin mother would have a virgin son. I had the deal mixed up with Virgo. The teacher made me pray for G.o.d's forgiveness.

A lesbian from San Diego I knew in college told me Jesus was h.o.m.os.e.xual, like her. "Look at his gang-twelve guys, two wh.o.r.es, and a mother who claimed she'd never done it."

"Is that a normal configuration to turn out gay guys?"

"Put it this way, would a person with an extended family like that one be into man-on-top, get-it-over-with-quick?"

I told Sam Callahan about my lesbian friend's theory, and he wrote a short story in which two anthropologists found some scrolls that proved absolutely, beyond any doubt, that Jesus was h.o.m.os.e.xual.

"My story explains how this discovery would affect Fundamentalist Christian faiths," he told me.

"They would crucify the anthropologists and ignore the truth," I said.

"The ending is too obvious?"

The concept that G.o.d might involve himself in retaliation for bad acts came to me the summer after I graduated from high school, one stormy day on the Forest Service lease when Dad, Hank Elkrunner, and I were fixing fence.

It was between showers, and Dad was using the wire stretcher, his muscles all bunched up and sweaty, and I had a semi-incestuous thought. Nothing disgustingly incestuous like me-and-him-don't you just hate a dream where you're romantically entangled with a member of your immediate family? G.o.d, that makes me feel icky. This was a daydream where I wondered what Dad was like with a woman. Was he any good? Did he grunt? Did he dig his chin into her right shoulder?

In my wildest imagination I couldn't picture him with Mom, so I ran through all the possible women in the valley and ended up with Lydia Callahan. She was with Hank, but he wouldn't mind. It was only a daydream.

Hank was working the crimpers and I was leaning on the post hole digger with one hand on the barbwire fence; I'd just come to the part where Dad uses his tongue on Lydia, and I couldn't decide if his beard tickled, when lightning hit the fence about two miles up the mountain.

Here is a verifiable scientific fact: Electricity travels through barbwire faster than thunder through air. The jolt paralyzed my arm for like a half second, then blasted me ten feet into the sagebrush.

I was on my back, doing yellow-and-black spots, when the thunder pa.s.sed over. Two of the spots gelled into Dad's and Hank's faces. They were both grinning, which was the only way I knew I wasn't dead.

Dad's beard split. "G.o.d give you a wake-up call?"

Hank touched my ozone-smelling hair. "Maurey, what did you do to anger the thunderbirds?"

I closed my eyes and swore to Father, Son, and Holy Ghost all three that I would never fantasize my Dad naked again.

26.

I swallowed a c.o.ke bottle top. Shane pulled out his little knife and said, "You need a tracheotomy." Then I lay on the floor while he cut my throat.

I slept on my back using an old army blanket as a pad and Jesus as my pillow. Around dawn I blinked awake and looked at the fuzzy light on Moby d.i.c.k's ceiling. Oklahoma, I thought. Andrew slept with his head on my left shoulder and Owsley slept with his head on my right. I thought, Gee, Owsley has gorgeous hair. Look at how the highlights shine when he breathes.

Then it hit.

"Owsley!" I sat up fast and clonked both boys' heads on the blanket.

"You aren't here," I said.

He came to his knees sleepily and wet his lips with his tongue. His eyes were the silver-gray color of aspen ashes. "I'm here."

"You aren't supposed to be here. How did you get here?"

"He slid out from under the junk pile after you pa.s.sed out," Marcella said.

"Went to sleep."

She sat with her back against the far wall, nursing Hugo Jr. "He said you said he could come."

"I said no such thing."

Shane pulled himself around the pa.s.senger seat to face back. "Tsk, tsk, another alcohol blackout."

That's another problem with drinking. People can claim you forgot something you didn't forget and you're supposed to trust their memory over your own.

"I didn't black out anything, I never said a word to him about coming with us."

Owsley kept his eyes down. "You said there's always room for one more in the ambulance. When people in trouble travel together they have to take care of each other."

"I said that to Critter."

"I'm in more trouble than she is." His lower lip kind of quivered, and his hair hung in that limp dejection thing that women use to look forlorn. Men shouldn't be allowed to express themselves with their hair.

I was confused, but then I'm always confused before I've brushed my teeth. "We can't take on a runaway boy, Freedom will call the Highway Patrol."

"Not a likely supposition," Shane said.

Owsley brushed hair behind his ears. "Freedom don't care about me. He had Mary Beth claim me for Aid to Dependent Children, but the social worker found out she was only three years older than me and cut us off. Now, Freedom don't care what I do."

"Mary Beth is..."

"Critter. He was mad on account of he got ripped off in Dallas and the truant lady come out to the house. Last thing he'd do is call the law to fetch me back."

I looked from Marcella to Shane. The brother-sister duo seemed to take for granted we'd added a pa.s.senger. Where was Lloyd, anyway, and why were we stopped in the country? Outside was hardwoods and bird sounds and the distant chug of a pump. One disorienting day sliding into another.

"We have to take him back," I said.

Owsley raised his eyes. "I ain't going back to Freedom."