From the unpublished story files: 'I Saw Black'
artistic metabolism means letting go
Note: What follows is an unpublished short story from my time at Iowa. It has spent years since then in various slush piles. You know those magazines that keep a story for like two years and only reject it when you query? That kind of thing.
Which is fine, and that’s just kind of the way things go with literary magazines and slush piles.
But lately, I’ve been thinking about metabolism as a part of artistic process (not just 4 bodies!). And how putting work out into the world is just as crucial to the act of writing as gathering images and sparks and obsessions. They say you only learn from the works that you finish, and I think that’s very true. I also think that, in a sense, the finish of a piece of writing happens with the reader, and not with me. There’s an in-breath and an out-breath, and I need them both.
Hoarding a pile of unpublished short stories has come to feel like holding my breath. Of course, yes, I could wait for these to get placed somewhere. That would probably be better for my career, because as soon as I click “publish” on this post, I will have removed the possibility of ever selling it to a paying magazine, or even landing it in a non-paying magazine that compensates by carrying a tremendous amount of clout.
But I have come to see the scarcity implicit in that worldview. The underlying assumption is: What if I never write another story again? What if this is as good as it gets? This is how scarcity becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I wrote this for Ethan Canin’s workshop in Spring 2013, almost 10 years ago. Something I remember him saying during that time: Hold nothing back on the page. Don’t try to save anything. Don’t hoard your good ideas or your images for later. Trust that there will always be more, because there will always be more. Your life will continue to fill up. Write without a backup plan. Leave it all on the field. It’s fantastic advice. Waiting for the perfect publishing opportunity is a form of holding back, too. So, here it goes. (And, by the way, it’s set in Greene County, PA; trigger warning for some Appalachian bigotry.)
P.S. Stay tuned next time for a Behind the Music-style exposition, the story behind the story, if you will.
I Saw Black
Everything we did was for revenge. I drew on my arms with markers. Tag stole books from the school cubby and burned them. I wore the shitty plastic necklaces from the quarter machine at the roller rink: an angel, an eight ball, a pony, a shoe. She knew where to sneak into private swimming holes and how to talk my scared ass into climbing a twelve-foot fence. We threw rocks in the water to scare away snakes and scratched our names in the dock with my house key. We drove around in summer and took pictures of the faces that came out of the houses to cuss us away. That was fine because we liked away.We liked it so much we'd drive the hour to Wheeling or Morgantown just to see a bad movie, steal some lipsticks, get pretty and gone in the green lights of a snack stand and flirt with the men from nowhere who came to work on the gas wells. We loved it when they asked if we were sisters. They always did. We always said yes.
So when the emergency happened, they let me into the hospital like family. Tag's momma bought us coffees from the cafeteria and we drank them feeling serious and adult. Ray-Ray and Nu-Nu were too little to understand why we were there and they banged their plastic firetrucks together under the seats and cried because it was so boring. I bought them donuts from the vending machine and let them draw in cinnamon sugar all over my black sweatshirt while Tag stared at a fixed point under the triage poster. Her Uncle Guthie had tried to kill himself. She had tried to save him. It left both of them halfway between living and not.
Tag's momma French-braided our hair to calm herself down. We took turns sitting Indian-style on the floor in front of her. She yanked my head back and I saw the cardboard and tinfoil New Year's decorations hung over the nurses' station. I could not remember if I had ever seen holiday decorations in the emergency room before, but it seemed like a bad idea. It was early. Some of the people waiting were still drunk. A boy in a barn jacket held his hand at the wrist. A slick pad of pink skin on his palm where the blood welled up and part of the thumb bitten away: I guessed fireworks accident. Two men in Tanglewood Gas uniforms drank coffee, also serious and adult. One of them had a spray of blood on his sleeve. The guy whose blood it was probably staring at the stardust of the acoustic tile ceiling behind the double doors or locked away in his head, no staring at anything anymore. I closed my eyes and tried to feel the shape of the dark in my head. They flirted with Guthie's second wife, Misty, who flipped through magazines like she was waiting for a hair appointment.
People kept coming up to Tag's momma to say nice, quiet things. She worked at the methadone clinic in the strip mall and so she knew everybody. Kids not much older than Ray- Ray and Nu-Nu jogged up to her to say hi while their parents or guardians said It was Guthie, wasn't it? since they all saw it coming. Then a nurse came over and petted her shoulder. She said he wasn't waking up anytime soon. We got in the truck and went back up into the hills.
I stayed at Tag's house until school started again. We turned off all the lights in her room except the aquarium. Her momma slept all day with the air conditioner running even though it was cold out. She said she had headaches so we looked after the babies and ate whatever we could find in the fridge. We watched daytime game shows and bid on the Showcase Showdown while I picked dog hair out of the carpet's shag, like usual. But one night, Tag asked me who I thought, out of everybody we knew, would die next, and how it would happen. I named cheerleaders and said they'd die from poisoned thorns on their prom corsages, too much pep, meningitis at the swimming pool. No, really, she said, I mean everybody we know and looked down at me over the side of the bed. The whites of her eyes glinted like blue milk. I hadn't seen her cry since we were little.
She said since we were getting older, we had to be real sisters.
Tag took out a field-dressing knife from under her pillow. Its tip twisted up in a curve that made me sick. It was serrated near the handle. I tried to remember what part of the deer you used that on.
“This is dumb, but we have to do it, OK?” she said. I said OK and sat up and held my hand out to her. We had pricked our thumbs and held them together in third grade and I didn't know why she wanted to do it again, but she said, “No, no, like this.” Tag pushed the hook point down on her palm so a little blood welled up there. She painted it on my face, a line under each eye like I was a football player. I did the same for her. We looked at each other. She folded the knife and slipped it back under the pillow.
While I slept, the blood on my face flaked off and smudged my pillowcase. Lipstick, I told my momma when she asked the next day.
Tag came over to my house for a sleepover with a black eye and a shopping bag of old magazines and a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20. She said it was time for us to start looking older. I knew she had fallen down drunk and I knew I couldn't say anything about it. She sat at my vanity. It was a boxy beige console I begged and begged my parents to buy from the auction after Mrs. Autrey up the road died. You could change the lighting scheme with buttons on the side for “daytime,” “evening,” and “office.” Tag hit the “evening” button and sucked in her cheeks.
“Moany, you gotta help me. My face looks so fat.”
“At least you don't have a fat ass,” I said, turning to profile and sucking in my stomach.
“A flat ass is worse than a fat ass,” she said. “Momma's boyfriend says.”
“Gross-out.” I dangled my head and brushed the underside of my hair so that when I
stood up, it floated around my head in a gold cloud. Tag looked at herself looking at herself. She petted her eyebrow above the shiner with a pinky finger but didn't flinch. I pulled her hair up off her face. I didn't try to set it in hot rollers because it wouldn't take unless it had been relaxed. One time, I tried so hard to get a curl in it that I burned off a whole chunk and she punched me in the arm. It left a goose egg bruise. Once a year, before picture day, her momma took her to one of the salons that did black hair. Those were all an hour away, too. My momma knocked on the door twice and opened it.
“Hi, girls! Looks like a makeover night? Fun.” Tag pulled a curtain of hair over her dark eye and cheated her face into shadow.
“Hi, Bev,” she said. “Yeah, we got big plans.”
“Is that right?”
“Oh yeah. We're going to be the prettiest girls in Deep Valley.”
“Well, I hate to take the wind out of your sails, but I think you already are.” Ha ha.
Nobody else lived on our run except Mitchells and Gumps. Their families were all boys. She stood for a beat and clapped her hands together. My shoulders clenched. “So. Ramona, dinner's in the oven. Spanish casserole. It comes out at 8pm. Your father and I will be at the fire hall meeting until 10, but if it goes later, we'll call, OK, sweetie?”
“OK.”
“What time?”
“8pm.”
“If the lights go out?”
“I check all the flashlights and call the power company.”
“And we'll be back?”
“At 10 or you'll call.” I gave her one of my tight smiles.
“Have fun, girls. Keep the door locked tonight, OK?”
“Bye, Bev,” Tag said to the door that was already closed.
She turned to a page in the magazine about smoky eyes, and I opened my cruddy makeup compact, studying the shapes, trying to work her bruise into it. Just look at a high-up point on the wall, I said as I blended, even though she was lately having all of these staring contests with something I couldn't see. After the hospital, it was sleepwalk, sleepwalk, sleepwalk for Tag. She would maybe fail the year unless my momma wrote a letter on behalf of the school board. Above the mirror, a rosary. When I was little, I would take it down and hold it although I now just thought of it as a necklace for the wall to wear. I held a subscription card from one of the magazines perpendicular to her cheekbone to contour it with blush. While I filled in her eyebrows, Tag read a quiz out loud. What perfume matches your personality? It said Tag was musk and I was floral, but this was wrong. I was swimming pools and gasoline and hayfields. Tag was roller rinks and mint and spit. “Put that thing away,” I said, pretending to be my momma.
I went on one knee to fill in her lips dark red and that did it. I pulled an older face out of her. It was sharper, etched. Well, now we're talking, she said. She wouldn't try on any of my dresses, but she looked good anyway in Guthie's Metallica T-shirt and the jeans that sat high up on her hips with thermals showing through the knee holes. After the hospital, I had given her one of my necklaces, the angel. She wore it every day, looped it around a belt buckle where it hung like a charm. She stood up and held her head this way, that way. “Can't see my shiner at all.”
“You gonna tell me what happened?”
“Absolutely not.” She pulled me by the shoulders to the vanity seat, then flopped down on my bed with her boots on. “Do yours. Hurry. We can be back by nine if you hurry.” My stomach shivered. Tag only ever wanted to go to one place: the Palace of Gold. She found guys to drive us there. Whoever sat in the front seat would make out with the guy in one of the abandoned prayer rooms. Whoever sat in the back walked through the dark halls, counted stars where the ceiling was gone. Drank most of the Mad Dog out of boredom. Kept an eye on the clock, made life plans. The last time, we found a bunch of strangers making out on stacks of prayer mats, drinking lite beer and piling the cans at the foot of the Krishna statue. Tag chased them off, but I figured they'd come back soon.
“I don't know,” I said. “It's kind of cold to go out tonight.”
“Fine. I'll go by myself.” She picked up a softball and flicked her wrist so it rolled into the air above her face, caught it. Let it go.
“Momma said to keep the door locked.”
“Ooh, wittle baby,” she crooned, “momma's only-only.”
“Fuck off, Tag.” I tried to make it sound like a joke but I felt the shakiness in my throat. “Fine. OK.”
“Great,” Tag said, and the power went out. I said shit, then we sat in the buzzing silence, trying to hush our breath. I could hear a car's tires chewing on the gravel drive. Maybe she would just once go without me. I ran into the basement to turn off the water pump so it wouldn't burn out again. The lights went out all the time lately when the gas wells drilled in the wrong place or an oversized truck toppled on a transformer. I called West Penn Power to report the outage. An automated message informed me that the service interruption was due to an accident at the Nineveh gas pad. I drew a bucket of spring water for flushing and left it by the toilet, checked the batteries in the flashlights by the front door, backdoor, toilet, and phone. The guy who was driving us leaned on the horn and Tag went out to tell him to shut up. I took out five gallons of frozen water and wrapped the chest freezer in sleeping bags so the cold wouldn't leak out. I really hated Spanish casserole. Fuck it. I left a note: “Power out. Turned off the water pump & went up the road to Tag's.” Outside, Tag leaned on the driver's side and grinned down at the guy, took his cigarette between her thumb and forefinger like a joint and blew smoke in his face. He smiled like a jail break and Tag asked if I wanted front or back and I said front and wiped the lipstick off my mouth.
The original Palace of Gold claimed to be America's Taj Mahal. We grew up right up next to it and didn't know it was there until half of the temple burned down. To us, it was just a faded blue-and-white sign on Highway 250 toward Wheeling with golden triangular flags paled by wind. Sometimes kids from the city came looking for it. They had worn-out clothes and bright hats and black patches all over their backpacks, and they got the open hostility treatment when they stopped for directions at Pecjak's service station. Something funny about anybody wants to go there is what our parents said. Stories about sex rituals. Cell phones and GPS still don't work out here most of the time. They'll send you turning off on an old logging road that ends in the middle of a hayfield. You can't give directions without using some part of us that's burned down and gone. Take a left where the Isiminger barn used to be. Keep going past Tommy Junker's old place. You've gone too far if you reach the abandoned jail in Littleton. If you're not from here, you're better off if you just keep going. But to me, those kids were news of another world, and I feasted on them like they were the pages of a catalogue. I tried to memorize them, make them stay, but they always left to find the swami.
Lloyd Cheatham was a senior with a big head and jug ears, and a wrestler, so he was popular even though he wasn't handsome or smart, and he kept touching on my thigh when he reached for the gearshift. It was too hot in the car and I puddled into the seat. I kicked around the cheeseburger wrappers at my feet. He drank from a can of beer nestled in his crotch, finished it, threw it out the window, opened another. We took the left where the Isiminger barn used to be.
“You look pretty,” he said to me.
“I know,” I said. I spun the radio dial looking for something other than country.
“You guys know Tara Barnhart?”
“Yeah. She rides our bus,” Tag said from the back, where she was sunk down with her knees up on the seat. The bottle jingled as she tipped it back.
“Well, she's got a tattoo on her cooter.”
“Lloyd, what the fuck,” Tag said. “Man, you do not know how to talk to girls.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“Huh?”
“What is it a tattoo of?”
“Well, now I don't want to say.” He had one of those young president haircuts. You could
tell that his momma still ran his life. His face was dark from blushing.
“Aw, come on,” I said. “We aren't prudes. Well, I'm not.”
“Hey!” Tag kicked the back of my seat. “So tell us already.”
“It's a Tweety Bird,” he said, “pushing a lawnmower.”
“Oh my god,” Tag said. “Never in my life.”
I turned to face him. “And you know about this how, exactly?”
“She has to shave half of her pussy every day. So you can see it.”
“Ever, ever, ever in my life!” Tag rolled on her side, shaking with giggles. “Wow.
Seriously.” We went past Tommy Junker's old place. The people who had moved in didn't know how to throw things away. Three old Buicks sat up on cement blocks. A dog charged back and forth on the run where his chain was strung up between the porch and the dog house. I hated seeing dogs like that, muddy to the shins. They always forgot how much lead they had on their chains, yanked back over and over to their one slick path.
“So does she dye the other half of it green?” I asked.
“I don't know.”
“What do you mean, you don't know?”
“You haven't even seen it, I bet,” said Tag.
“Oh, I seen it. But it was dark.”
“Poor Lloyd, can't you see in the dark?”
“Quit it, Tag. Gimme some of that.” I was the only one who could talk to Tag when she got mean. She passed the bottle over my shoulder. I tried to open my throat up and gulp it so there would be less for her to drink. Some went up my nose. I let out a few acid coughs. Tears jumped up and I held my eyes open carefully so they'd dry without ruining my makeup.
We saw the Palace of Gold for the first time after Guthie bought it at auction. He took the whole family to dinner at Rohanna's, Greene County's only golf course/fancy restaurant. Tag and I split a ham steak so salty it burned our throats, and we clowned in the coat check, trying on old ladies' furs that smelled like ether. Guthie was an overnight millionaire. Over coffee and cake, he explained that the Marcellus shale bed under our very feet held enough natural gas to make for more millionaires in the county than there were on the whole isle of Manhattan. That's how he said it, “the isle of Manhattan,” so you could hear how they said it in Dallas. All the Texas land agents told him he was gonna be so rich he could buy his own island. I guess the Palace of Gold was the closest thing he could find.
You couldn't see the temple through the trees until the dirt road's last curve, and then it reared up like a dragon, black and red with gold foil, running at angles all over the hill. The blue sky behind it was sharp, brand new, and flower beds fanned out farther down where they overgrew and spilled over. We ran out of the truck and traced the paths skipping with our arms open. Guthie pointed out a sacred cow chewing forsythia near one of the fountains. The sun felt good. We were dumb, pointing at things, pulling up handfuls of red snapdragons and pelting each other. The blood ran around in our heads while we tried to look at everything.
Inside, it was cooler. Fire damage showed on the walls like mold on a cake and the ceiling was gone in places where bars of light fell to the floor. Guthie took off his shoes at the entrance and showed us the rooms where you prayed and the throne where the swami sat. He dipped a finger in a bowl of red paint on the platform and drew lines on our faces. Ray-Ray and Nu-Nu grabbed at his jeans and he tossed them in the air, one then the other.
“You girls like it?” he said, putting Nu-Nu down on a straw mat under a chandelier.
“I wanna live here,” said Tag.
“Tell you what, sweetness. We'll have a whole Tag wing!” He tickled her and chased us around the room. We hid behind the swami's throne and huffed.
“What about Moany?” Tag said.
“Oh, Ramona, you'll be a most honored guest. You'll stay in the Ramona Suite, of course. We'll keep a silk bathrobe by the pool just for you.”
“There's a pool?” Tag asked.
“Not yet. But I'm gonna fix this place up.” We walked with him through all the hallways and he said what Krishna was doing in the paintings. No way did he know all of it. Krishna was pale purple with arms as thick as a baby's. In most of the paintings, he hugged a cow with one arm and held a bunch of flowers and peacock feathers in the other. Krishna loved cows because they gave and gave and didn't ask for anything back.
“That's just like me,” Guthie said. “I drove truck for 20 years. But now I see the ground under me was made of gold the whole time.” He took out a can of orange spray paint and marked a big square in one of the rooms where pillows and mats were stacked along the back wall. He wrote “HT” next to it, for “hot tub.”
I didn't notice how all the adults stayed outside by the trucks, smoking. Tag's uncle Duke on her momma's side kept his engine running and listened to the Pirates game on the radio with the windows all rolled up. Misty fanned herself with a road map and angled her face into the sun, wanted to go get ice cream or go home. Later, I would hear about how she said the whole thing was retarded and no way would she clean that place by herself. Fuck this and fuck that and fuck all these bullshit philosophies, what do you mean, you're like some holy fucking cow? How they fought loud enough so everybody on the ridge could hear them and Misty chucked all of Guthie's new things over the hill, into a ravine. Leather jacket. Custom bowling ball. A Dobro that belonged to Stevie Ray Vaughan.
Tag's momma came in to fetch us after we'd been roaming for almost an hour. She looked tired, both pale and flushed where a sunburn flared over her shoulders. She wouldn't let us paint red lines on her face. I didn't see how she could look so sad. If Tag got a wing of her own, her momma would obviously get one, too. Guthie was putting in a bowling lane and a movie screen. Tag was going to go to college for sure, anywhere she wanted. He would fix the bridge in Deep Valley that had been out of commission since before we were born. He would put up a band shell so we could have concerts in summer and dance.
One of the sacred cows stood in the headlights. It kept still even though Lloyd honked the horn and nudged forward so the bumper almost touched it. Its coat was dingy and its haunch stood out like a tent pole. Somebody had written FAGGOT on its side in orange spray paint.
Tag got out and dug around under the snow for a handful of leaves. She crushed them in her hand and held them under the cow's nose to draw it off the road.
“What a pretty, pretty, pretty,” she said to it. “C'mere. Shhh-shhh. Look at what a pretty.” I thought, like I thought all the time, that she was the best person I knew. It followed her, flicking its ears. She scratched its neck and thumped on its ribs like it was an overgrown dog.
A truck was parked in the gravel lot. In the dark, the temple looked even more like a dragon perched on the hill. Without leaves on the trees, you could feel how high up we were. Sometimes, at the curve of a hill like that, I felt like I could fall right off the world's edge, just roll off into the sky with nothing to do about it. Valley people get that way on ridges. We like the lock of hills pinning us down. Tag plucked the bottle from my lap and took off like she was trying to lose us.
The custom of taking off your shoes before going inside had stuck somehow. There were four pairs of boots, including Tag's. The flashlight made the room feel emptier. Little drifts of snow glowed in the hallway under moonlight. It was so huge I couldn't hear anything.
“You been here before, right?” The flashlight beam wavered while Lloyd stood on one foot and the other to slip off his boots.
“Well, yeah. The whole place is Tag's, basically,” I said.
“So, where can we get some privacy?”
“Uh, this is pretty private.”
“You know what I mean.”
I walked down the hallway looking at how it had changed. The chandelier in the throne room had fallen and there were footprints in the spray of glass. The bowl of red paint was tipped over in an arc on the floor. Used condoms. Somebody's underwear on Krishna's head. Somebody had painted orange X's over Krishna's face in the room where the hot tub was supposed to go. And somebody had written DIE FAGS FUCK U COON BITCH CUNT FUCK U COON BITCH CUNT TAG TAYLOR IS A COON ASS BITCH all over the wall.
Lloyd came up behind me and rested his head at the back of my neck. “In here is fine,” he said. He turned me around to face him and held onto my hips, pushing our pelvises together, and his tongue was all over my mouth. He had a bad sense of direction and tasted like paste. I didn't know if I liked it. I knew this was what I signed up for. I thought about the other times it was more exciting. Under the bleachers with Tanner McCoy who still gave me a dopey Valentine's teddy bear even though he tried to skateboard and act tough. Lloyd's tongue was cold. He wagged his head back and forth like that was how you were supposed to do it “with feeling.” Coon bitch cunt. It ran around in my head, picking up speed. It became a little melody. He grabbed my hand and put it on his crotch. “I really like you, Ramona.” I pulled my hand away.
“Lloyd, you should probably go home.”
“Do you want a beer or something? I have more in the car.”
“No. I mean, thanks, though.”
“Um, OK.” He looked down at his socks. In fifth grade, our class had to invent a country, name it, draw its flag, and make up its national anthem. We made Lloyd the king of Ligobobia. He took it so seriously. He wore a tie to our final presentation and asked his momma to make cupcakes for the whole class decorated with our new flag.
“Look, I'm sorry.”
“Tag said you guys came up here to party.”
“I don't know. Just go home, OK?”
“How will you get back?”
“We'll figure it out.”
“Who else is here?”
“I don't know! I have to find Tag. Thanks for the ride.” I ran into the dark and slid over
the snow patches.
I didn't remember the room from any of the other times. It was lit by a fire in a trash can. Two guys in camo jackets were spitting chaw juice and passing a plastic handle of vodka. I didn't know them from school. They were older, maybe, or had never gone. One of them wore a ball cap that said “Always Smell It First.” A girl in underwear and a T-shirt straddled Tag and held her down. The shadows around Tag's head were thick but then I saw it was her hair and the girl was cutting it off her with a knife.
“Hey, girl, look. It's your dyke-ass girlfriend.” The guy with the hat threw his cigarette in the fire and lit another. He had a thick voice. Tag strained. She stared at the ceiling like it would give up and tell her some secret. I had never fought anybody. I didn't know what you did. I didn't have shoes on, or a knife, or anything.
Tag found Guthie in his hunting cabin. She wasn't even supposed to go up that weekend. I forget why she did. On the kitchen table, there was a folded Metallica T-shirt and a field-dressing knife of Guthie's that she liked. There was a note to Tag sitting on the T-shirt. She heard a chair kicked out in the bedroom and ran in. Guthie hung from an extension cord tied around the exposed beam and Tag ran up to him tried to hold him up. They stood that way a long time. I hate to think about the quiet in that room. Nothing but Tag breathing in air all jagged from panic and the hum from the overhead light. She somehow slipped the noosed cord off Guthie's neck and laid him out on the floor and ran toward the Whipkey place on the other side of the hill to call the ambulance. Tammy Whipkey went back to the cabin with Tag to wait for the EMT. She made her coffee. She didn't try to get her mind off it. I keep meaning to go up and thank her, but I can't make myself drive up that hill. I'm too afraid of seeing a ghost. Not Guthie's, but Tag's, scared and running.
The girl who had Tag pinned turned to look at me and I shoved her on her side. The knife went skittering. Tag sat up and grabbed a handful of the girl's hair and yanked on it. A gold hoop came away in her hand and the girl started screaming after she saw it. The guys laughed. “Catfight! Catfight!” They smiled like this was the best thing ever. The one with the hat unzipped his fly and I saw all of the worst things happening to us. But he took out his dick and pissed on the girl. We got back and watched. We were too dumb to move. He hinged back at the hips and sighed, sank into his stance. She was still screaming, holding her ear. Piss puddled and spread out. It darkened Tag's jeans where she was kneeling.
I pulled Tag up and we took off running. They didn't come after us. We were just for fun.
His laughter died out after we turned a corner and it was quiet again. We shoved our feet into the first boots we could get and I was trying to figure out how we would get home but Lloyd's car was still there. Engine running, lights cut, the call-in show on the country channel playing. He had worked his way through the rest of the six-pack based on the little pile of cans under the driver's side window. He read the owner's operation manual in the light of the dash. When we got in the car, he put it in drive like he had been waiting to pick us up from softball practice.
I promised myself I would repay this kindness later. Go to one of his wrestling matches. Ask him to dance at prom. But I never. I would take whatever I needed to get through each emergency and go on thankless. Tag and I would change this story as we told it. We'd make it three girls and give one of them a gun and claim we hitchhiked home with a traveling preacher. We'd tell about Tara Barnhart's tattooed pussy like we had seen it ourselves. Lloyd was the king of an imaginary country. We couldn't give him any better. The night we almost died. It got funnier and funnier.
***
Both of our mommas were waiting up at Tag's house. They had been drinking coffee for hours so they could stay really mad till we finally showed up. Tag Anne Taylor, they said. Ramona Lee Kowalski. They informed us that this delinquent business stopped right away, and we agreed. At home, the power was still out. Dad sat at the kitchen table with a beer and a candle going, doing the word jumble from the daily paper. When we came in, he showed me a scorched Spanish casserole and asked if I'd had dinner yet. I took a candle up to my bedroom. It was so quiet I could hear the blood singing in my ears. I couldn't sleep. I paged through the yearbook. Who the fuck were these people?
***
When we were little, Tag and I played a game called Detectives. To play it, you had to find something out of place like a crowbar in the lilac bushes or a pile of dirty magazines in the hay loft or a leather glove with the ring finger cut off caught in the shallows of the crick. This was a clue. Then you made up the criminal who left the clue behind and looked for more. We spooked ourselves into dreaming about the Man with No Face and the Killer Nurse. We believed they were real. We looked for them in the woods.
But I wanted to understand why anybody would cut the ring finger off a glove anyway. Why was there a crowbar in the bushes? One summer, somebody in Deep Valley set cars on fire on Wildman Run. One every weekend. In one wreck, they found a Russian passport and a box of rare marbles. Explain it. Two of the Gump brothers shot each other in a fight over a TV set. When we looked for the Man with No Face, we found snuffed camp fires in the Big Meadow and the blade of a corn knife wedged in a rotted stump nearby. Was somebody living in the woods behind my house? Explain it.
Misty finally saw sense and cut off Guthie's life support. She made a lot of new friends in the hospital. She joined their church, one of the talking-in-tongues ones. She had Guthie baptized before they pulled the plug. It's never too late for Jesus, said the pastor. At the funeral, the church people talked about how strongly they felt the wealth of Guthie's spirit and embrace of the lord. The more honest ones admitted they never met him, but said they knew Guthie had lived in the light of His love, His wonder, His power. Explain it. Ray-Ray and Nu-Nu banged their firetrucks together under the pew. Lloyd waved at us and blushed. Tag and I sat to the side in our black dresses with the sun heating our backs and sang the song Misty chose from the old- time hymnal: “What Wondrous Love Is This?” Exactly. Afterwards, we ate cold cuts at the VFW. His old trucking company sent a wreath shaped like a bowling ball, the carnations all dyed black, with “We miss you Guthie” in gold script. Tara Barnhart sobbed into a hanky and we had to run outside laughing. Green grass, new sky. Explain it. Explain it.
Thanks for reading! All my love. In breath. Out breath.