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Billie
IN CELEBRATION OF HER FIND, SHE DRIVES TO WALMART AND BUYS the cheapest bike she sees. There’s no reason that she can’t do at least one of the things she’s been avoiding.
The sunwarm gates to the cemetery are shut. Billie steps through the wide bars of the iron fence where a massive oak bows, its branches touching down in the middle of the grass. There are a couple rows of lacquered, mold-spattered graves then an older section where headstones lean against one another, half of them underwater from the last heavy rain. The world outside of the cemetery gates bends in the dizzy heat.
Among the anthills, the Willies, the Hatties, and the Maes, she finds her father. He lies between Mose and Oz; one who is Only Sleeping, and the other who died in World War II. She crouches so that she can trace his name with her finger. CLIFTON SILAS JAMES 1940–1972.
“Hi, Daddy.” Around her the shadows of the trees move as if directed by the saccharine clatter of birds. “I wish you could see me.” Already her eyes sting. “Even if I haven’t made very much of myself.” She smiles, wiping wet grass from her knee. “But maybe if I strike it rich, I can buy this cemetery from the McGees.”
A warm wind makes the trees drop their fronds onto the soaked earth. A few raindrops hit her shoulder. Billie stands and looks up; a corner of the sky is matted black with clouds. After pulling some weeds and brushing away leaves, she lays flowers on the mud under his headstone. It’s something. A beginning.
Billie rides up the two-lane road and away from the cemetery. There’s a conference call for work tomorrow that she needs to prep for. A man is leaning on a white truck in a church parking lot, the tattoo of a chained dog on his arm.
“Hey,” the guy calls as he spots her. The face under the camo hat is too small for his smile.
She nods, smiling faintly. She should have brought Rufus. The guy takes off his hat and wipes his buzzed, angular head, staring until she can feel the press of him. He has the look of a man who has had something gone bad inside: a miasma, an evil smell thought to cause the Black Death, a rot that corrupted the air. Maybe she should wear one of those terrifying medieval bird masks to ward off guys like him, a prehistoric beak stuffed with flowers and herbs.
“You gotta be careful out here alone,” the guy calls from behind her.
No cars or people around as usual. She pedals faster, turning off the two-lane road as soon as she can and cutting through the parking lot of a shack selling CB radios, heading for a busier road that she knows has houses down it. As she glances back, her bike slips on the gravel and she is skidding sideways, gravity peeling her fingers back from the handlebars. Her thigh slams into the ground, scraping the skin below her shorts and filling it with dirt, the bike pinning her down in the middle of the lot.
She lies stunned under the frame. She tries to push herself up, but her palms are pitted with rocks, so she eases onto her peeling forearms studded with blood. Hot tears stream down her cheeks like she’s eight years old, hobbling home for her mother.
It starts to rain. Hot spatterings at first, then long warm drops. Half of the sky so dark it’s almost green. A color that is telling her something. She sits, spitting into the bottom of her shirt and dabbing it on her stinging hands and knees. She picks up the bike, but the damn chain won’t go back on. That guy better not come looking for her like guys like him sometimes do.
She continues on her circuitous route; eventually this road will connect to hers, and then she will lock herself in the house and not come out. There’s an unpaved county road that’s faster, but it will turn to mud in the rain and is dotted with forgotten houses. In the dirt between asphalt and field, she steps over mangled bits of plastic, a few beer bottles, and an old tin of dip. The first house she passes has a dog chained to a tree and the next has bits of torn furniture that have failed to dissolve on the lawn. Squirrels hop and slink through its clotted trash. A woman is standing barefoot next to a boy and little girl on the porch. When they see her, they huddle back, the woman hiding in the doorway as the boy grabs the little girl by the hand.
It isn’t until she’s already passed the house that she looks back to find a teenage boy, shirt off, lounging on a metal chair in the middle of the lawn. He is looking in her direction but doesn’t seem to see her. He is sitting so still that he is part of the yard. Though the windows are covered with plywood and cardboard, she feels she is being watched.
On a flat stretch of road along a field, a white truck passes her, brakes, then starts making a U-turn. Better not be that guy. As the truck turns, she drags the bike off the shoulder and into the plowed field turning to mud from the rain. She could run across it, but there’s nothing beyond this field but another one. The truck is coming her way. She quickly kneels, trying to jam the chain back on. Riding would be better than running. Maybe it’s just somebody turning around. Fuck it. She throws down the bike and runs.
The truck revs up to her, the passenger window going down. The driver leans over. “Need a ride?”
HE PUTS HER BIKE IN THE BACK, AND WHEN HE GETS IN THE CAB, reaches over and squeezes her fingers, then puts the truck in drive. She leaves her hand where he squeezed it, admiring her wrist’s innocence. To escape the tornado, they drive south for a drink. Billie tells Harlan how she fell trying to get away from the creepy guy in the church parking lot. She likes that he believes her, no questions asked.
On the way to the bar, they pass a church billboard: HONK IF U LOVE JESUS/TEXT IF U WANT TO MEET HIM.
“Have you ever texted?” she asks.
“No.” He slows and honks.
“A believer, huhn?” A couple of crushed empty beer cans keep sliding into her feet.
“It was a big part of my upbringing.”
“But then wouldn’t you want to meet him?”
“Already have.” He dials down the radio. “You got pretty banged up.” He gestures at her legs, the gashes filling with stinging blood. “I got a first aid kit in the back.”
“I need a drink more than gauze right now,” she says. “Besides, I’ll have to shower to wash all the dirt out.”
“Are you big into bike riding?”
She laughs. “I haven’t ridden a bike in years. I bought it because I’ve been sitting on my ass reading and eating cheese. Maybe I should’ve brought my gun to ride my bike, but I didn’t know where to put it.”
“He probably wasn’t going to do nothing but be a jackass.”
“You never know what kind of childhood he had.”
He rolls his eyes.
“What? Too bleeding heart for you?”
He lifts a hand from the wheel to concede. “Maybe I shouldn’t judge cause I had a pretty good childhood, but if somebody’s an adult then there are consequences for their choices.”
“Sure, but there are crimes committed out of ignorance and deprivation and suffering, and then there’s actual evil people who are sociopathic narcissists. Shouldn’t you be preaching to me about forgiveness and redemption? You forgive not seven times but seven times a hundred.”
“Seventy times seven,” he says.
“I was close.”
“You seem to know the Bible for someone who isn’t a Christian.”
“My mother was an academic. She specialized in Christian medieval theology. So I know me some King James.” She inspects her raw elbow. “My cousin is in jail. I hate thinking of him in there. He was such a sweetheart.”
“What’s he in for?”
“Weed. I think possession with intent to sell.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Yeah, if he was white he wouldn’t be in there.”
SHE WOULD NEVER COME HERE ON HER OWN. WHITE BOYS TOO YOUNG to be smoking are out front with their dirt bikes crowded around a beat-up car. There’s one girl, maybe fourteen, in flip-flops and too much eye makeup, smoking a menthol next to a cobwebbed grill in the middle of the yard. Billie follows Harlan into the double-wide trailer through a doorway wreathed with tiny American flags. Inside is dark and the AC is blasting. Beneath everything is the rotten apple stink of old beer. She is the only woman except for a blond bartender, bending over rinsing glasses at the far end of the bar.
Harlan orders whiskeys while Billie goes to the bathroom and tries to wash the grit from her hands and knees using pink industrial soap and brown paper towels. She comes out smelling like second grade, of a tiny elementary school in Utah outside of Ogden where she was set adrift in a sea of Mormons. Her mother used to let her ride in the truck bed of their blue pickup when she dropped her off. Once she was climbing out and she fell, losing a loose tooth to the ice.
She slips quickly into their booth, happy to hide from all the eyes she’s getting because she’s brown, or a stranger, or a woman. She raises her whiskey. “To you not running me over.”
He clinks her glass. “I am a gentleman.” He drinks then says, “I figured you’d have left town by now.”
“I was going to, but I’ve decided to stay a little longer.”
“Any reason in particular?”
“I can’t say yet. I don’t want to jinx it. Let’s talk about you. Are you married?”
He smiles, a real smile with teeth. “Haven’t gotten around to that. I almost did with my ex. We talked about flying to Vegas the first month we were dating. She’s never been out of Mississippi except to go to the casino in Baton Rouge and Panama City.”
“Panama?” There are these little rocks she can’t get out of her hand.
“Florida. There’s a pretty beach there. Beautiful clear blue water, white sands. I prefer Destin though. We’ve got a kid, a little boy who’s five. Tyler. He’s basically the center of my life right now.”
“Are things rough?”
“It’s mostly all right.” He drinks his whiskey. “But man, when we first broke up and she wouldn’t let me see the baby—I’d be driving to work, going along like normal, and it would just seize me up. I tried to get her to do counseling, but she wouldn’t. She doesn’t want to know why she does what she does.” He picks at a groove in the table with the bottom of his glass. “Enough of me. You ever had your heart broken?”
“I’m not drunk enough to answer that question.”
“C’mon,” he says, smiling agai...
