Backseat Saints (23 page)

She saw me nab a chocolate cookie from her pretty cousin Clarice. Clarice was a leggy blonde with honey-colored skin, and
Jim Beverly
had
dated her. I’d thought Clarice’s smile was both too dim and friendly and too wide and white, so that she looked to me like
the love child of a cannibal and a Labrador retriever. Still, a lot of boys went for her, including mine.

Stealing her cookie was a victimless crime, as I’d never once seen Clarice Lukey eat dessert. I planned to slip the treat
into the sad brown paper sack of this kid whose crunchy mama packed his lunch every day: spelt bread with nut butter and homemade
yogurt that smelled like baby urp.

I drifted by with my best underwater walk and palmed the cookie. When I looked up, Arlene Fleet’s big eyes were aimed my way
across the table, glossy black and blank as an animal’s. After that, she seemed to be creeping around the edges of every room
I was in, staring at me with that same fever-bright, accusing stare. Her name did not appear even once in my notepad, as I
could see no possible connection between a scrub like Arlene Fleet and my quarterback boyfriend, but she had him now. Not
for long. If I could soothe and feed and sex Thom through the next four days, he’d be off to Houston. I’d go to Chicago and
take Jim back from her.

“Honey,” I said to Thom. “Sugar. Of course it’s different now. You know I’m off the pill.”

He turned on his side toward me, and now the moonlight was entirely behind him, making his hair into a faint gold halo. I
could see nothing of his face, and my own was pointed directly into that
scant light. My eyes must have glittered at him in the dark, hard and shiny as a feral cat’s, too reflective for him to read
them.

“I thought about that. It seems like that would make a girl… mushier,” he said.

I laughed out loud, a harsher sound than I intended, and said, “Like they make babies on TV? Slow? With the covers up? You
want to get all missionary, Thom? If you like, I can stare up at you all weepy and think about Pampers while you pump away.
That sound fun?”

“No, thank you,” he said. “Don’t be like that. I thought you’d want baby making to be more romantic.”

“I don’t feel romantic,” I said. “I feel more like, I don’t know. Primal.”

“That’s pretty clear, Cowgirl,” he said, and I could tell by his voice that a little smile had snuck up on his face under
cover of this darkness.

“That’s Reverse Cowgirl to you, bub,” I said, making my voice sound smiley back. “Mrs. Reverse Cowgirl.”

“So we’re having
National Geographic
sex,” he said. “Primal.”

“You bet,” I said, and that was true, because nothing was more primal than survival. Reproduction was absolutely not going
to happen. Ivy Wheeler, proud new licensed driver in the great state of Texas, had driven her sweet ass directly to Planned
Parenthood. I’d committed some identity fraud to get a supply of pills that would not show up on Thom Grandee’s insurance.
Three wheels’ worth were hidden under the bathroom sink in my tampon box, uneasy roommates with a votive candle and the rosary
beads I prayed through as a penance every time I took one. To Thom I said, “We are leopards making more leopards. We are sharks
making more sharks.”

“If you want to do it like leopard sharks, I’m your boy,” Thom said, his tone light, but another thirty seconds passed before
he lay back down.

Who is he
had been pushed back, but it had not gone away.
Thom was searching for his Ro, wanting her sugar-talk that could change on a dime to a sass-mouth, wanting her penchant for
yielding to him and enraging him by turns. I would not be her for him, not for five minutes. I couldn’t afford to be her for
thirty seconds, but Thom’s favorite question had surfaced, and that meant I was running low on time.

It had taken too long to find Jim. I’d had to rely on the information of the kids who’d been my kind, football boys, mostly.
I’d learned early there was no point calling the girls, especially the ones that Jim had dated, when I tracked down Dawna
Sutton.

She was now a social worker up in Boston, and she ended the conversation forty seconds in, saying, “Yes, I remember your piece-of-shit
disappearing boyfriend. I hope he’s dead and frying deep, deep, deep in deepest hell. As for you, I don’t think you spoke
more than nine words to me in school. Meanwhile, a live baby with a crack problem got pulled out of a Dumpster this morning,
and I have to find a place for him. Your ‘good old days’ chat can go suck it.” She hung up.

None of the girls Jim had dated had cause to feel any more friendly than that toward me, so I stuck to folks that did.

After days of dead-end conversations with boys who had last seen Jim at Missy’s party, I got aholt of Bud Freeman, former
linebacker, currently married to Clarice Lukey. Judging by the noise at their house, she’d pumped out about a thousand angry
babies for him. No one else had even had an inkling of where Jim spent the blank hours between leaving Missy’s and wrecking
his Jeep, but over the thunder of rioting toddlers, in the middle of a walk down memory lane, Bud told me. He said it off
the cuff, almost in passing.

According to Bud, Jim Beverly was out at Lipsmack Hill with Arlene Fleet the night he disappeared. My breath stopped. Lip-smack
Hill. With Arlene Fleet. I knew perfectly well there was only one reason to go up on top of Lipsmack. I’d traded my virginity
for Jim’s on a scratchy picnic blanket atop that very spot.

I asked Bud for Arlene’s number, but Bud snorted. “She won’t talk to you. She lit out of Alabama close to ten years ago, and
we ain’t seen hide nor hair of the girl since.”

“No kidding,” I said, and another memory was surfacing. One time, when Jim and I were broken up, a pack of cheerleaders tried
to get a rise out of me by saying they’d seen Arlene wearing his letterman jacket. They told me Jim had been walking Arlene
down the hall with an arm around her shoulders. I’d said, “Charity work, clearly,” in a breezy voice, though I’d felt it like
a fast, pointy elbow to the kidney. A few days later, Jim and I were back together, and I’d forgotten it. I asked Bud, “Do
you know where she’s living?”

“Chicago, and she don’t truck with nothing or nobody from back home. She’s ass-rat crazy, Rose Mae.”

“Like, in an institution?” It was a fair question. Arlene’s mother had spent more than one “vacation” at the special hospital
over in Deer Park.

He chuckled. “Well, I reckon not. But she’s crazy. She ain’t even been home to see her mama. Ain’t talked to Clarice for more
than a minute on the phone for years now, and as kids Arlene was welded to her hip. I couldn’t hardly get my Clar alone for
half a minute.”

I didn’t answer. I myself had zoomed out of Alabama like the state itself had lit my tail on fire. I had not spoken to my
own father in more than a decade. For me, Arlene’s behavior lived next door to normal.

“She married?” I asked. I was remembering something else, too. I’d seen Arlene with Jim together once myself, at the movies.

Bud said she wasn’t married. She was teaching college English at a big state school in downtown Chicago. But she had a fellow,
he said. One who was comfy enough to answer the phone at her place. They’d never heard a word about him from her. No name.
Not even an admission he existed.

It was a lot to process. Arlene Fleet had been with Jim out at Lipsmack the night he disappeared. Arlene had followed me all
over school for months, watching me like… like the other woman might. She’d had his jacket. I’d seen them out together. Arlene
had fled Fruiton the same way Jim had, same way I had, the first red second she could. Now she was half a country away, living
with a mysterious man. She wouldn’t visit home. She never told her family about her fella.

As I got off the phone with Bud, it struck me that she and I were of a type. The other girls Jim had dated had been as unlike
me as he could find. Tall girls, redheads and blondes. Arlene had been a teeny, dark-haired, waxen thing. She was like my
photocopy, but pale and fuzzy round the edges, made on a broken-down machine.

I tapped Mrs. Fancy’s phone button to get a dial tone, then punched in 411. “Chicago, Illinois,” I told the operator. “I need
an address and a phone number for Arlene Fleet. Two e’s.”

It was that simple. She should have changed her name or ditched her family altogether, as I had done. And was about to do
again. I tapped the disconnect button again and dialed Arlene’s number. Three rings, and she picked up.

“Hello?” she said. Almost a decade in Chicago, and her accent was still pure backwoods Alabama. “Hello?” she said again, sounding
like me before some Texas got up inside my mouth.

Behind her I heard another voice, asking her something from across the room. It was deep, a man’s voice, not a boy’s. I strained
to catch the tones. It could be Jim. Older, with a wider, deeper chest; I could imagine him sounding like that. But it wasn’t
the voice that made me sure. What made me sure was the way Arlene Fleet shushed him, nervous and immediate. Her voice was
worried, much louder, when she said, “Who is this?” into the phone. “Who is this?”

She had him. He was there, and she was hiding him still, all these years later. I made my voice husky and tried to talk like
a Yankee. “Wrong number. Sorry.” It came out sounding like a Muppet with a cold, but it worked.

“That’s okay.” She sounded a little too relieved, and she hung up a little too quickly.

I stood breathless with triumph, my hand still curled around the phone. He was there, and he was with her because she looked
like me. Arlene had been a fetal kind of pretty back in high school. If she put on a little weight, grew some boobs, learned
to smile, we’d be even better matched. I felt my whole body flush. Jim Beverly remembered. He was hearing me every time she
spoke in that thick accent, touching me every time his hands reached for her slight, pale body. I could go to Chicago, knock
on Arlene’s door, and Jim Beverly would open it. He was living with the shadow, but I was his real thing. I could knock on
her door and take him back. Easy as that.

The four days after I knew where Jim was were the hardest of all. Thom could smell it in me, a deep-set, bubbling purpose.
He had no idea what it was, but he was dead sure he didn’t like it. I picked up every extra shift at the gun shop I could
get and even instigated a dinner with Larry Grandee and Margie. I volunteered Thom and me both to clean out his mother’s garage.
I kept us too busy to give him time to ponder, too public for him to tear me open and read the new name written on my heart
and lungs and guts.

The morning of Thom’s Houston trip felt like the tail end of a countdown. While he was in the shower, I slipped outside with
a razor-sharp fillet knife and cut our phone line. When he came out, rubbing his hair with a towel, I had the receiver in
my hand and I was glaring down at the phone.

“Our phone’s gone out,” I said, my back to him, tapping and tapping at the button in a manufactured pout.

Thom had to come over and tap the button himself and hold up the receiver and shake it and hear no dial tone. He said a few
choice words, and I laid a soothing hand on his damp shoulder.

“Never mind, you’ll miss your flight. I’ll call from a pay phone and get a repair guy.”

“When we land, I’ll call you at the store,” Thom said.

“I’m not working today,” I said, and he gave me a long, level stare, too many wheels set turning in his brain for my comfort.

Driving him to the airport, I had to work hard to keep my hands still on the wheel, to not jiggle or twitch. I put my gaze
on the road, and the car ate the last miles between me and a brief window of freedom.

“Baby, your eyes look overbright. Are you sick?” Thom asked.

“I’m fine,” I said.

“You’re so quiet,” Thom said.

“I’m fine,” I repeated, and then I veered sideways into a gas station parking lot, opened my door and leaned out and threw
up all my breakfast.

“Yeah, you look fine,” Thom said.

I flapped one hand back over my shoulder at him and puked some more.

When I finally sat up, he was looking at me with one eyebrow up, his expression a hybrid of concern and I-told-you-so. “Do
you need me to stay home?”

It was mostly a courtesy, as it would take a disaster on a par with one of Egypt’s ten plagues for Joe to let his eldest off
the hook for this trip. A delicate wifely puke out a car door wasn’t going to rate. Even so, I practically hollered, “Lord,
no!” at him.

I said it way too fast, way too fervent. There was a pause between us, and in that space, Thom swallowed a whole bag of thunderclouds.
They didn’t seem to be agreeing with him. “You seem pretty set on getting your husband out of town,” he said. His whole body
flexed like a fist, closing and tightening beside me.

I gulped, pitiful, and added, “No woman wants her best fella watching her throw up. I can’t think of a thing more likely to
kill the air of mystery.” I gulped again and tried to look wan. Wan should have been an easy sell, tense as I was, thick as
the air in the car had become.

“But if you’re sick… ,” Thom said. Heavy emphasis on if.
Who
is he
had climbed into the car with us, and that question had the power to keep Thom home, Joe or no Joe.

The hanged man card was coming, and there was no stopping it. I could only hope to put it off and get him on that plane. Then
I’d go get Jim and set him like a wall between us.

“Maybe I’m not sick at all,” I said, desperate. “Maybe this is something else? We’ve been trying awful hard.”

He didn’t know what I meant for a second, and then his eyebrows came together. “This fast?”

“Why not?” I said. “Maybe we hit it right out of the gate.”

“You think?” Thom asked, and I saw a faint easing in the line of his arms and shoulders. I dropped wan and tried to look bloomy.

“Sure. According to Larry, the Grandee sperms are so ever-lovin’ mighty, he knocked up Margie by standing upwind and thinking
about Cindy Crawford. Maybe it runs in the family.”