Godshot Read online

  “What is that?” I said, poking the cane. I’d never seen her use it before.

  “Made from the finest of bull penises,” she said. “Steal of a price, you would not believe.”

  I turned away from it and groaned into my hands. Every waking was another reminder my life was real. Why wake up if all that was waiting for me was a cane made from a penis?

  She handed me a metal scraper and a spray bottle full of bleach. “Time to clean the flies.”

  CLEANING THE FLIES meant getting down on my hands and knees to scrape the brown fly larvae from the corners of the walls where, she showed me, they were piled and ready for the hatch. Under the refrigerator, around the baseboards, in the grooves of the windowsills, where she had a theory they were getting in. Wriggling maggots appeared from the brown and those needed to be smashed one by one, or if a group of them was discovered I was to warm soda until it was hot and thick and burn them alive. The already birthed flies swarmed the house in immense clouds. If I was still but a minute, three would land on me. And they were lazy. I could kill them easily but it didn’t matter. They appeared by the second. That morning I kept an eye peeled for baby flies thinking it might grant me some compassion toward them, to witness their helplessness, but they seemed to be born immediately adult sized and by noon I killed them one after another without remorse, stiff bodies crumbing the warped wood floors.

  “When did this get so bad?” I asked.

  “I hate to say it,” she said. “But it was about the time you arrived.”

  I waited for her to laugh, or take it back, but she was serious as disease.

  “No more cows in the fields for them to land on,” I said.

  “Blessed land,” she said. Sadness pulled at her face. The land was like a person we missed. “Now make a plate of bologna sandwiches and come have lunch with your Cherry.”

  She sat on the pink floral couch and patted the seat next to her. I made the sandwiches on white stale bread. The mayonnaise was on its last day. When I sat she flopped her head down on my lap, closed her eyes, and opened her mouth. “Feed me.”

  I took a bite.

  “Feed. Me.” She grabbed my wrist and brought it to her mouth and snatched a hank of bologna from between the bread. In between bites she whined on and on about what she called her wasted life. I watched her old teeth chew, the mayonnaise collecting around her gums. She told me how years before when she’d quit her job at the Pac N’ Save as the bakery manager, no one believed the reason, that she truly had dislocated her pubis, but she had, and not a soul cared not even her own grandchildren, not even me. Lyle was a boy of vigor on his way to something, of course, so she could excuse his not noticing easier than she could mine; me, who was headed nowhere but in circles.

  I remembered Cherry working there, how my mother and I would pop in and Cherry would slide a free cake our way, or a cookie. The secret is just a spat of spittle, she’d say, and wink. I’d never taken her serious but after this I could picture her spitting into the batter easy. Those days seemed far from me now. I thought of Vern’s sermon when things had begun sliding back toward drought, just before he’d announced his idea of assignments. How he’d said that if we had a true faith we would not travel outside of Peaches for supplies. We would have belief enough that God would provide. I didn’t know what that really meant then, but now I knew we were a long ways from eating fresh-baked goods at the Pac.

  “How do you dislocate a pubis?” I asked. She chomped the last bite of the sammy out of my hand.

  “See, all I get is doubt.” She got up and started toward the door. “I’ve become a certain way living alone out here,” she said, kicking open the screen. “Goldie Goldie Goldie! Goldie Goldie Goldie!”

  Goldie was her cat. It hadn’t been seen by a human eye for the better part of five years. I myself had seen Goldie’s remains on the side of the road not a mile from the house the very day Cherry had mentioned Goldie hadn’t come in for lunch. My mother had shaken her head when I pointed out the smear of orange fur. We resolved not to tell Cherry about it, but I thought maybe it wasn’t so bad. Maybe Goldie was happier dead. I remembered when she’d had kittens and became depressed and didn’t mother, but settled her plumpness over their bodies and smothered them. Cherry thought they were nursing and told me to go have a feel of a baby cat and I was already holding the tiny kitten in my hand when I realized it was not moving, not breathing. The feeling of a dead thing in the hand is unmistakable. On reflex I tossed the body to the ground and it hit the floor with a thud. On the way home, after I had stopped crying, my mother said it wasn’t at all strange that the cat had done that, how Goldie was too young to have all those babies, just a baby herself.

  “Help me call now,” Cherry told me, so I stood next to her.

  Her hand trembled, gripping the cane. Her voice shook as she projected it as far as she could.

  “Goldie!” I called with her. “Goldie, come on home!”

  But Goldie didn’t come on home. The dead don’t come back.

  THAT NIGHT I sweated until my hair was wet and I dreamed of fat black flies in my sweet tea, in my mouth.

  I LEARNED BY my second week at Cherry’s that I had to guard my own pleasures when I could, before I was sentenced to fly duty or any number of other Cherry-care chores she wanted me to perform on her—waxing the fuzz that grew on her legs, tweezing the corkscrews that sprouted on her chin, combing and plaiting her long hair while I sang whatever hymn she was craving. Quality time, she called it.

  THAT MORNING I settled into my new favorite pleasure. I snuck a romance called Cowboys and Angels, about a poor feed-store-worker girl and a traveling bank robber turned lovers, into Cherry’s bathroom and I stripped naked. I sat on the toilet and read until my legs ached, wayward from gazing into worlds where men held women in soft caresses, where they were hard with muscle but their insides were made of sweet taffy. The men voiced their love feelings loud. The women dipped their heads back, necks arced and pale. They loved the love and it showered them. They returned from the love cleaner than before and wore it like aura, a pastel rainbow above soft curls. The books described women feeling a pulse come over them, a great wash of heat and light. The women would touch themselves sometimes imagining their lovers. I breathed hard. I could not look away. If this was sin it had me in its grasp.

  Pussy, pussy, I could still hear my mother say, and here was the word all the time. Pussy pulse, wet pussy, slippery puss, hot pussy, even gorgeous pussy. I myself had only ever felt the special pulsing accidentally—in a bumpy car ride, climbing the rope at gym class—but now I was finding I could feel it when I read if I moved just right. And when I moved just right I was in nowhereland, not here at Cherry’s, not even in Peaches. I only wished the feeling would last longer, that divine forgetting.

  I had my hand working overtime when Cherry thunked around on the other side of the door, cursing the day. “Blasted devil’s ways!” she shouted. I held still. “Time for consequence!” The doorknob rattled. I threw my sundress over my head, kicked the romance behind the toilet. I knew she was going to take the pleasures from me. She’d beat me until I’d never read another romance again.

  But she wasn’t on about the romances. She was on about clearing out my mother’s things from our apartment.

  “I’m not going,” I said.

  “All right then. We’ll just burn it all.”

  I DIDN’T LIKE going places with Cherry because she didn’t have a car, she had a magenta hearse, and not just any. It was the hearse that had held Grampa Jackie’s coffin and within that, his body, and she loved it and sang to it and still wiped it down with one of his old shirts most every day. After his service, she had insisted on riding along with the driver, who was young and quiet and she distrusted him immediately based on the dopey way he held his face, his slight underbite. Halfway to the fields where Grampa was to be buried, Cherry demanded the driver stop, and she pushed him out and threw a wad of bills at him before she sped off. We saw it happen, my mo
ther and I, for we had been driving behind the big pink thing, my mother nervously laughing about how much Grampa would have hated it. The driver collected the bills off the ground and began a solemn walk back in the direction he came. For weeks we waited for him to return and collect the hearse but he never did and no one ever called. “Country magic,” Cherry said, an explanation for why the hearse was suddenly hers. Soon she would understand there was no such thing as magic. Only God’s giving and taking away.

  “Get in,” Cherry said to me now, opening the pink passenger door. “Ain’t no ghosties gonna bite you, just your dead grandpa in here feeling like a damned fool to have gone bellied up.”

  “You think he regrets killing himself?” I said.

  She winced, but then recovered. “Missing out on your mother pulling this, maybe he made the right call.”

  THE LAKES, APARTMENT 204. Little green Bibles littered the mat where the Body had shown their concern, a deep red cross drawn on the door. WHOREWITCH under that.

  Perd and Pearl and Lyle got out of Perd’s dirty work truck, Perd’s Valley Pest emblazoned along the side. “We’re here with bells on,” Perd said, and took a long greedy drink from the liter bottle of Mountain Dew that was, in varying degrees of fullness, his constant companion. None of them had come by to see me since my mother left, and I expected they might hug me now, or say something kind, like people should when someone has died. But nothing.

  Pearl braced her legs apart and raised two hands toward us and closed her eyes. “God in Vern, do not let Louise’s sin that has rubbed off on her daughter rub off on us. Keep us pure and purer in our devotion to you.” She opened one eye. “Had to put my armor on, you understand.”

  Cherry fumbled with the lock and Lyle came close to me and said, “What’s it like living at Cherry’s?”

  I paused. Did I want to tell him the truth? How my fingertips bled from scraping the larvae and my nails had worn down to stumps and my eyes burned from the bleach and I missed my mother in each place on my body, that my neck had stiffened and knotted, that all my sadness was stored in those knots and if I pressed a finger into the largest most painful one, tears arrived behind my eyes as if on command?

  “Not what I expected,” I said to him instead. But he was already pushing his way inside.

  INSIDE, THE APARTMENT was how I left it, upturned, the carpet covered in rice cake crumbs and candy wrappers that seemed to have never not been there. I looked for a note, a phone number, a sign in case I missed something in the flurry of searching moments the day I’d come back to the apartment and realized she was gone, but there was nothing. I stood in the doorway as they threw things into garbage bags with not a lick of grace. Perd muttered to himself about how it was his one day off and tossed my mother’s toothbrush in with a box full of opened Ajax containers and stained washrags, and then put her sprays and lotions in after that. My mother had always turned her nose up at Perd and Pearl, making fun of his nearly incomprehensible valley drawl and the way Pearl was plainer than soda crackers in looks and mind. Pearl and my mother seemed at quiet odds with each other, my mother the one others took to with quickness. It was true that people wanted to look at a beautiful thing.

  “Let’s just pay one more month of rent,” I said to the room. “What will she think of us getting rid of her stuff like she’s dead?” I tried to sidle up to Pearl, my mother’s own blood sister, after all.

  “You think she’s off making sure this guy’s gonna be a good daddy for you?” Pearl said. “If I were you I’d be praying double-time.”

  Guilt covered me. I hadn’t been praying. For the first time since Vern had claimed me saved, I was at a loss for words when I knelt before the baby mattress at night and closed my eyes. And I knew that each minute I spent with my romances was a minute I was not spending with God. I hung my mother’s pageant sashes around my neck. I’d never seen her in pageants. They were her other life before me. I’d never considered she could have a life apart from me, but here I was in it.

  “Can’t imagine a child living in this filth,” Pearl said, shaking her head. “No wonder she wouldn’t have us over. I’d have left myself just to get away from the mess.”

  It was filthy. My mother stopped cleaning after she’d taken up assignment and we lived amid our trash. I only saw it clearly then, though, the blond hairs balled up in the corners of each room, the trash overflowing out of the kitchen to the living room, the brown of the toilet bowl. The dishes in the sink and how once they were dirty they were dead to us. We just didn’t use that dish anymore. Now, though, a smell had taken hold, my mother’s iceberg lettuce rotting on the countertop, the decay of stuck macaroni and cheese in a dish, cans left open and waiting for nothing. It was strange, I could not remember eating with my mother, only the image of her leaning over the sink, picking at things. Never cooking, just opening cans and handing them to me. Once she said to be careful not to cut myself on the sharp raw tin and it felt like a kind of care. I loved Spam and sardines and could imagine that she was cooking up delicacies, but now seeing the piles of cans on the floor I felt embarrassed for us.

  CHERRY SMOKED A pink berry-scented Sweet Dream cigarette in the corner, muttering to herself. The smell of the Sweet Dreams covered the rot a bit, but meant a probable headache for me. Cherry told me I just had to get used to them and had offered me one in the living room a few nights before when I was sullen and it was agitating her. I smoked it and coughed and got a headache so bad I asked all night for God to take me in my sleep. I imagined telling Lyle about the cigarette to make him jealous or shocked, but something told me that it was like the dirty apartment, another thing to hide.

  “Vern’s right,” Pearl said. “First thing to go is your obedience, then the church, then your community, then your ever-loving mind. And them witch women. That’s another story.”

  Them witch women. I tried again to imagine who they were, how they’d poisoned my mother with their ways. It was clear something had happened to her working there. Something they said maybe, that slowly pulled her from faith. From me. Something that pushed her to start drinking again, and when the opportunity came, to run and not look back. It seemed likely that all of this was their fault, a curse we were under.

  “You’re lucky you’ve got us around to keep guiding you,” Pearl said low. “Lyle said just the other day he was going to start coming by to help you in your Bible studies and whatever else.”

  I looked at Lyle in the kitchen dumping my mother’s collection of colorful plastic forks and knives into a bag. He’d never shown me any attention before. The extent of our contact was rolling our eyes in solidarity when Cherry loaded stale years-old raisins into her special meat loaf for Sunday dinner. Pick them out and mouth gross.

  As they worked, I pulled things from boxes, making my case for why they should stay out. I tried to create a pile of necessities for when my mother came back but Cherry put the pile in a garbage bag when I wasn’t looking and added it to the others. I touched my things on my small shelf by the bed. The costume jewelry she’d given me, my angel figurines. Who needed any of it now? I tossed it all in a garbage bag and then went into the tiny bathroom and took out my romance. I was deep into the story about the two fugitive lovers, how the whole time the reader knew that the woman had it out for the man, that she was the smarter one, and was biding her time. They did have romantics, though, for sometimes she gave in to her woman’s needs and the necessity of satisfaction.

  Women’s needs had never been mentioned in the church, never mentioned by anyone that I could remember, and I lapped up any sign of them by instinct like a long-starved wolf. My mother had held this same book before me, but why hadn’t she ever told me she’d read it when she was my age? It felt like something I should know about her. All the things she’d never told me waited just under the surface of this world like untouched land mines.

  Lyle came in and shut the door behind him. In the small bathroom there was really only space for one person, unless it was my mother and me,
who got ready side by side in our synchronized routine. The bathroom never felt small with us in it, but with Lyle here it was crowded and my knees nearly pressed against his stomach. I curled them up to my chest. This close, he seemed taller. Thin, but arms long with rivets of muscle, his shoulders stooped a little, the last evidence of his boyness. His sandy hair swooped over his forehead. He brushed it out of his face and then I saw myself. Yes, there were my same eyes. My high freckled cheeks and pointed canine teeth.

  I turned the sink faucet on and let brown-tinged water cover my dirty toes.

  “Takes a gallon of water to grow one almond,” Lyle said, turning off the tap.

  “Pearl says you’re gonna teach me the Bible. You don’t think I know the Bible by now? Been at church long as you.”

  “We’re concerned over the quality of your belief,” Lyle said. “GOTS ain’t just any church, you know. You can find a church anywhere. Vern’s church is different.”

  I wondered if Vern had put him up to this, if he still cared for me and hadn’t forgotten my use.

  Lyle turned the tap back on and looked at me. It seemed like a permission to waste water, to be bad. His hand grazed my leg. Drips of sweat clung to his earlobes. He cupped my shoulder and I could feel a low tremor run through him to me. “Lacey,” he said. “This is what family’s for.”

  WHEN ALL WAS loaded into Perd’s truck we drove together to the Peach Pit Mini Storage and Cherry went in to do the paperwork. She charged back to the car after a few minutes.

  “I’m not shelling out forty-five a month to store a bunch of crap,” Cherry said. “She’s your sister, Pearl. Maybe you could contribute something here.”

  “Mama, this isn’t my fault,” Pearl said in a high baby whine.

  Cherry turned to Perd and said, “To Tent City, then.”

  TENT CITY WASN’T really a dump, but a name for the town homeless encampment, though it was well known that you could take your garbage there, your broken dishwasher, your kicked-in armoire, and someone would find use for it. The homeless of Tent City were in Peaches proper, but they were not of Peaches. They were a Fresno problem that had leaked over. Everyone called it Tent City on account of the makeshift tents everywhere, and the town knew to wear thick-soled shoes because of the needles. I asked my mother what the needles were doing there, why there were so many, and she said the needles were to inject the devil right into you, and that was just what some folks wanted. We were always trying to convert the people out here because they were desperate for any kind of saving, but now it was deserted aside from a few sleeping lumps, shaded by cardboard boxes. It seemed most had left for greener pastures.