Gods in Alabama (25 page)

Burr parked the Blazer at the foot of the hill, by the path that led up the side of Lipsmack.

“What are we doing here, Lena?” said Burr. Night was coming on fast, and I could not read the expression in his eyes. Burr had beautiful eyes, small and square but so sweet, a warm brown toast color, two shades lighter than his skin. A legacy from his mama.

“This looks like a make-out spot. I don’t think you brought me here to make out.”

“Maybe I did,” I said. I had left a dead man on top of that hill once, and my aunt Florence had dragged him away. I knew he was gone, but I could still feel him up there, cold and still. I was cold, too, so cold I was shaking with it. “Nothing good ever happened here, Burr. Maybe I brought you here to make something good happen.”

I clambered off my seat and swung one leg over his legs, resting myself on his lap. I was tucked in front of the steering wheel, straddling him and facing him. He was so alive; I had a strange, almost clinical interest in the quicksilver heat of him. I started undoing the buttons on his shirt and slipped my hands inside, trying to warm myself with his skin.

“Lena,” he said to me, and he caught my hands and held them fast between us. “Look at me.”

I wouldn’t meet his eyes, even in the safety of the growing night. In that moment, I was not interested in seeing him. All at once I was back in a place I hadn’t been in years, up in the driver’s seat of my brain, chilled to my core, dissociated from whatever my body might want to do. He still held my hands, so I couldn’t touch him, and he was strong. I knew there was no fighting him, so I did not.

I was the driver, and my body was only my instrument, my tool. I forgot my hands, let them go limp in his, closed my eyes, and dropped my head back, exposing my throat to him. I gave him the top half of me, helpless, relaxing at the waist so only his grip kept me from toppling sideways. I felt the steering wheel behind me, pressing my back, holding me close as I straddled him.

Below my waist, I was alive. My body ground its hips against Burr and rejoiced in the helpless physical response the movement pulled from him. My ownership of him and of the moment was complete and dizzying and ugly.

“What is this?” he said.

I pressed into him again, hips grinding, my upper body slack and helpless so he couldn’t release me unless he was willing to let me fall. “Lena,” he said, angry now, and as his grip loosened on my hands, I pulled them free and twined them around his neck, leaning forward so my long hair swung around our faces in a cur-tain, hiding us. I kissed him hard, riding him.

“Shit,” he said into my mouth, and his hand fumbled at the door. I felt the night air come in as he found the handle and swung it open. The dome light came on, hopelessly dim. Burr pulled himself sideways, trying to get out, but I was all over him, clinging, ruining his balance. He lost his innate grace, his legs tangled in mine, and we fell out. He recovered quickly and already was half rolling in midair, so he landed on his back, taking the brunt of the fall. We hit the dead grass, hard, my legs still locked around him. Our teeth banged together, and I felt the sharp tang of blood in my mouth, familiar and bracing. I caught his breath, sucking it into my lungs as it came out of him in a rush.

He was struggling to inhale. My hands were free and I used them on him, running them down his chest. I sat up, straddling him, crotch to crotch, and reached one hand behind my back, low, to cup his balls through his Levi’s. My body was a million different pieces, all separate, moving on him, and meanwhile, I was sitting cold and quiet in my driver’s seat. I watched the two of us fighting each other silently as Burr struggled to breathe.

“Stop!” he whispered as soon as he could inhale. “Shit, get off me.” I was already leaning down to kiss him again, but he grabbed my shoulders to stop me, saying my name, trying to make me look at him. My hands were free, so I slapped his face then, hard, and that shocked him enough to loosen his grip on my shoulders. I bent and kissed him on his slack, surprised mouth. And then I trailed my mouth sideways to suckle the heat of the stinging flesh I had hit.

He caught my hands again, hard and bruising, and I felt some of the coiled strength in him escaping his control. “Lena, stop,” he said, and his voice was soft but intense. “I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want this.”

“Then why is your cock so hard,” I said, in a voice so low and dark I didn’t recognize it.

“That’s it,” he said. He shoved himself up, bending at the waist to sit with me in his lap. My legs were still wrapped around him, and he grasped my wrists between us again. He was long in the torso, so I had to look up at him. For a moment I was afraid, afraid of him, of Burr, and my control trembled. He was so much stronger than me. It was like waking up. This was not some frightened boy I could own so easily with testosterone and dirty talk.    It was like falling a long way and landing in myself. I stared at him, and then I said, my voice as soft as his had been, “I’m sorry.

I don’t know what that was.” We sat looking at each other. The night was quiet around us. Whatever it had been, he felt it leave me. We both did. His grip on me loosened, and I took my hands away from him. I reached up and touched my lip. It was bleeding from where his teeth had banged into it. I looked at my fingers, and the blood looked black in the faint light.

“Baby,” he said. “Don’t you think it’s time to talk to me?”

I leaned over and gently shut the door to the Blazer. It clicked shut, and the dome light went out. The sun had gone all the way down, and the moon had not yet risen; we were blanketed in a darkness almost absolute. I shifted off of him and sat on the dead grass beside him. I leaned against his shoulder, and he put one arm around me.

Burr said, “If it helps, I think I know where you’re going, baby.

I want you to talk to me. I don’t think you’re going to surprise me.”

My opening sentence was running through my head. I knew exactly what to say, but I could not begin because Burr, the man who had helped me invent What Have I Got in My Pocketses, was leaping pell-mell to the endgame.

“Baby, say it,” he said. “It isn’t so bad. I won’t stop loving you.  It’s not your fault.”

“It’s so bad,” I said.

“No, it isn’t. It’s not bad. You’re not bad. It’s not like you killed someone.”

I felt my silence change then, as my body went so still that a single beat of my heart shook me like an earthquake. In the pause after that heartbeat, the world was without sound. Burr felt it, too, that everything around us was holding its breath. I felt light break in him in the absolute darkness, and then he knew. “Oh.

Shit,” he said quietly. “Yeah, you should talk to me.”

And finally I found that I could. “There are gods,” I said.

“There are gods in Alabama.” And I told him almost everything.

It came spilling out of me in a great wash, breathy and fast. I talked and talked until my voice was cracking with the strain of constant use. I took him up Lipsmack Hill with me to be my witness. He saw me heft the bottle. Swing. Connect. Then I told him about Clarice, how she rescued me when I came to Alabama with the burnt shell of my mother.

I could not stop after that, could not let him take over. I told him about Rose-Pop. About Jim Beverly’s kindness to me. I told him how I had loved Jim Beverly with a secret, hopeless love. I told him about the aftermath, when Clarice found me in the hydrangea bushes. I spilled out my fears and prayers as I begged God to hide me like He had hidden Cain, to mark me as safe from the repercussions of the world.

I told him everything but why I did it. And the why of it was crafted so deep into the story that I did not have to say it. The story itself was designed to make him say it for me.

But when I wound down, he sat silent for a long time. I waited for him to speak for me, but he did not. He sat digesting, and then he asked the wrong question. “What happened in the winter when the kudzu went to bones?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Something had to happen,” he said.

I did not want to lie to him, would not lie, but while I could confess my own sins to him, I had no right to give him Florence’s.

I said, “Nothing happened. All fall no one complained about any smell. No one went looking. Everyone assumed he had run away.

And in winter I went back up there and looked. The body was gone.”

“How is that possible?” Burr said.

“I think—or I should say I thought, at the time, that God had moved him.”

Burr stirred against me in the dark. “God moved him?”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s what I thought. It was what I had prayed for, after all. I thought it was a miracle. Like maybe God had sent a bear to drag him off, or—”

“God sent a bear? God sent a bear to lower Alabama,” Burr said.

“Will you stop repeating everything I say in that skeptical tone!

I told you what I saw. I thought God took it, or a bear took it. I didn’t know. That’s not the point. That was never the point. The point is that I killed a man. I killed Jim Beverly. And you have to hate me now or you have to forgive me, and how can you decide?” I had talked for so long, my voice was a raw whisper.

Burr seemed distracted by his own thoughts. I could almost hear his brain charging up, humming and whirring as it ticked over into lawyer mode, picking through facts.

I said, “How can you decide what to do if you don’t even know why I did it? If you won’t even say why?”

“I’m not done with the bear yet, Lena. You say you killed a man. And God took the body. I can’t get it processed.” He stood up abruptly, and I was instantly chilled.

“Burr,” I said.

“Just wait.” He was pacing up and down a few steps in front of the Blazer. “I have to think it through. Wait. Did you say? Oh Christ Almighty. Did you say you killed him? You killed this boy, this Jim Beverly?”

“Yes,” I said miserably.

“With a bottle?” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Did you ask me a minute ago how I could decide what to do if I didn’t say why you killed him?”

“I think so,” I said.

“If I, Wilson Burroughs, didn’t say why?” he said. His voice was rising, angry in the darkness. “If I didn’t? Oh, Christ, you have to be kidding me.”

He pushed past where I was huddled on the ground, and opened the driver’s-side door. He leaned in, and I heard a click, and then the path up the hill was flooded with light. He had turned on the headlights. He came to me, grabbed me by the arm, and hauled me to my feet. I stumbled after him as he dragged me into the light, staring down at me so he could see my face.

“I’m supposed to tell you why? This is What Have I Got in My Pocketses, isn’t it? And now I’m supposed to say why? I have to tell you the motive? What are you pulling, Lena? What’s true here? Look me in my eye, because I know you never lie. Tell me.

Did you do it?”

I thought I was crying, but I couldn’t tell. I stared up at him.

“Yes,” I said.

“Why?” he said, practically yelling.

“You’re hurting my arm,” I said miserably.

“Why?” he said, undeterred.

“Burr, please,” I said. “Please. Let me go, you’re hurting me.”

But he did not move or release me. “Why, Lena?” he said.

I said, “It happened, I swear it happened. But then I stole it.”

“Stop dancing,” he said. “Tell me. Tell me why.”

I opened my mouth to tell him, and Rose Mae Lolley came pounding down the last few steps of the path up Lipsmack Hill.

Burr still had my arm, but he half turned towards her when he heard her coming. She grabbed his shoulders and jerked her leg up. Her knee rammed into him between his legs. Burr let go of me and doubled over. Rose twisted at the waist and brought her elbow down hard on Burr’s head, and he fell to the ground.

“Run like hell! Run like hell!” Rose screeched at me and took off like a deer.

I dropped to my knees beside Burr. “Oh, honey,” I said. “Oh, baby, are you okay?” He groaned in answer, curled up on the ground.

I glanced over my shoulder. Rose had stopped a few yards away, her white T-shirt glowing in the darkness. “Arlene,” she said urgently. “You have to run while he’s down.”

“Shut up, you head case,” I said. “He’s not going to hurt me.”

Burr managed to sit up, and I put an arm around him, support-ing him. “He would never hurt me.”

“Shit, shit,” said Burr, still bent at the waist, hunched over himself.

“What the hell are you doing here?” I yelled at Rose.

Rose took a hesitant step back towards us. “Meditating. Until I heard him bellowing at you. I came creeping down, and I heard you say he was hurting you. I saw you in the headlights. He was shaking you.”

I rubbed Burr’s shoulder. “He was just angry, Rose.”

She took another step towards us. “That’s what they all say.

They’re all angry, and being sorry later doesn’t mean shit, Arlene.”

“Not every man hits girls,” I said. “Burr, baby, are you okay?”

He nodded. “I think I’m going to live,” he rasped out and got a deep breath in.

I said to Rose, “What the fuck were you doing meditating up on Lipsmack?”

Rose crossed her arms and said, “What are you doing in Alabama?”

“I came down here to meet you,” I said. “I’ve called the hotel over and over.”

“I haven’t checked in yet,” said Rose. “I came here first. This was a special place for us. It was . . . Let’s just say it was very special for me and Jim.”

I rolled my eyes. “This was a ‘special place’ for everyone, you numb fuck.” I was rubbing Burr’s shoulders. “I think you owe him an apology.”

Rose shrugged defensively. She came a step or two closer. “I’m sorry if I misinterpreted what was happening. But it sure as hell looked to me like you were hurting her,” she said to Burr.

“There is such a thing as a good man, Rose,” I said.

Burr had his head down, taking in long slow breaths.

“I know that,” she said. “I had one once. I told my therapist, and that’s why I’m looking for him. That’s what I came here to prove.”

Burr shook his head, and I said, “If you’re trying to use Jim Beverly to prove you know how to pick a good boyfriend, you’re barking up the wrong tree.”