Gods in Alabama (31 page)

After a little while, she wrestles the deadweight of him out of the car and heaves him into the trunk. At that point she is thinking not so much of hiding him as of not wanting to drive around looking for me with him dead beside her in the car. Beyond that, she does not think.

No cars pass. No one sees her. By the time she gets him loaded and closes the trunk, she is shaking and weak as a kitten.

She heads back to where he wrecked his Jeep, but sees the state police hooking it up to a tow truck. She cruises past without slowing. Dawn is coming. She drives the route from the wreck to our house. She drives slowly, as if she believes she might catch me trekking home, but in her heart, she has no doubt that I am dead. She feels the same emptiness in the world that she felt when she saw Wayne lying in the yard, tangled in his dog’s leash and with his eyes puffed closed, features swollen, unrecognizable as Wayne to anyone but his mother. She feels me the same way people sometimes feel silence. She feels me as the absence of a heartbeat that, like your own, you hear so constantly you do not notice it until it’s gone.

As she comes over the hill to the house, the sun is rising, and she sees Clarice. She stops as her heart gutters and spits, catching at the sight of her living child. Clarice is bending down, facing away from Aunt Florence, digging in the hydrangea bushes.

Clarice is helping me up. I am filthy, and I lean heavily on Clarice, but I am alive. Florence can’t breathe, watching Clarice load me into the window. Clarice puts the screen back on once I am through, and then she creeps to the front door and slips inside.

Florence watches the silent house with both her girls safe in it, and the world begins to turn again. She hears birds, and it’s like the first sound she has ever heard. It’s beautiful, and there is a dead boy in her trunk. She realizes that she isn’t afraid or sorry.

There isn’t room for anything in her but a fierce ripping joy and the loveliness of the birdsong.

Bruster will be up any second, and she knows better than to lie or try to explain. She simply parks the car and walks straight into her garden and squats down in it, weeding in the dawn, and of course this is the first place Bruster looks.

“You forgot to start the coffee,” he says reproachfully. He is rumpled with sleep, disgruntled and blinking. She shrugs an apology. After he heads back to the house, she realizes she is gutting her vegetable garden, taking out her young tomato plants and setting them aside. She immediately knows why. Behind the shelter of a high bushy clump of lemon balm and in the shadow of the shed beside the garden, she is going to dig a pit.

When she heads in to make breakfast, she absolves us all of yard work. She will need the yard to herself. The house will shield her from the road. Her shed will hide her from Mrs.

Weedy. She can back her car down the concrete drive to the garden.

She can see I am so hungover that I can barely function, so she sends me back to bed, where I sleep like a corpse. She sends Bruster off with a huge errand list, and Clarice drives off in Bud’s car to meet him at his Saturday practice. While they are gone, she plants Jim Beverly deep in the corner of her garden, dumping a twenty-pound bag of lye from the shed over him to keep the neighborhood dogs out. Then she repairs and replants her tomatoes, and the lye makes them grow like crap, and for the first time in three years she doesn’t get a ribbon on them at the county fair, and that’s just fine with her. That’s just fine.

After Florence finished talking, I sat with her for a long time, my hands still resting on the unyielding flesh of her legs.

“Why would you think he had killed me?” I said at last.

“That boy was capable of anything. I knew what he did the year before.”

“You knew?” I said. “Clarice told you?”

Aunt Florence shook her head at me. “No, Arlene, you know Clarice better than that. She kept your secret.”

“My secret?” I said.

“But I knew,” Florence said. “When you changed so much, I backtracked it to the night you and Clarice went out on that double date with him. You weren’t ever right after that, wearing all those black clothes and not leaving the house. Never taking a bath. Clarice did a pretty good dance, trying to keep your secret, but I guessed the why of it. At first I thought it had been that Rob Shay, but then we ran into him one day at the Wal-Mart, and you were sweet as pie with him. You didn’t even blink. I figured it was the other one. A football boy like that, you didn’t think anyone would believe you. But I would have. I knew what he was.”

“What have I got in my pocketses,” I said softly, and Aunt Florence looked at me, questioning. I shook my head at her. I didn’t have any of my own secrets left, but I could keep Clarice’s.

I could keep Aunt Florence’s, too.

I turned around and leaned my back on her hard shins, dropping my head to rest on her knees. We sat there together for a long time, baking in the dry, dark heat of the attic. Aunt Flo’s fingers rambled in my hair. I suppose there was a lot for us to talk about, but in the silence I think we were both deciding not to. I was done with deal-making and telling secrets. I had told the truth to Rose Mae Lolley, and I had lied to Burr, and I was fine with it. Everything could rest right where it was, even Jim Beverly, in his back corner of Aunt Florence’s garden. We would never say his name to each other, to anyone, again.

“What if I came back down for Christmas?” I said at last. “I’ve spent the last nine by myself or with Burr’s mama, so I figure it’s about y’all’s turn.”

Aunt Florence’s hands stilled, and she said, “That’d be real good, Arlene. I’d like it if that happened.”

“Then that’s what we’ll do. But you know, Aunt Florence, if you want me back here, you get Burr, too.”

Her fingers began drifting gently through my hair again. “You know I don’t hold with it. These mixed marriages,” she said, but softly, almost musingly, as if her mind was somewhere else. I smiled, knowing she couldn’t see my face. I was more like her than I had thought; I knew at last how much she loved me, and I was ruthless enough to immediately use it against her, even while I was basking in it.

“We’re a package deal. Love me, love my Burr. And I mean that. You don’t get to be all stiff and barely tolerating. I don’t care how you feel about it, Aunt Florence, as long as you’re a good enough liar. And I guess I know you are. You lie to both of us.

Him and me. Every minute. You take care of him like he was me, and you make him welcome. And you make Uncle Bruster be good to him, too. Or I won’t come,” I said.

After another long pause, she said, “I can do that, Arlene.”

Then she got a hunk of my hair and gave it a jerking yank that hurt down to the roots. “Ow!” I said and tried to sit up, but she pulled my head back down gently onto her bony knee and rubbed the hurt place. “And you don’t leave me anymore. You bring your little butt home when you have vacation time without me having to fight you near to death over it.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

After that we were quiet again for a long time. I suppose I felt too peaceful to move, with Aunt Flo’s hands moving soft in my hair, soothing me. I knew that on Friday we would all go to Uncle Bruster’s party, and nothing bad would happen. Florence wouldn’t let it. There wasn’t a Bent or Lukey alive she couldn’t bend.

I do not know how long we sat there, both of us pouring sweat, but eventually we had to get up and go downstairs. I walked Florence to her bedroom door and kissed her dry cheek.

I waited until she had disappeared inside, and then I crept into my old room. Burr was sleeping hard with his face to the wall. I climbed into Clarice’s little bed and molded myself to his back.

I fell asleep almost instantly, beside him with my family surrounding us, right where I belonged.