Episode 43: Incest

2003 Prairie Dog Town Award for Fiction

An image of Laurie, diving out the front door with, in this order, keys, cigarette, nail polish, and coaster. The coaster is to return to Brianne down the road. Brianne who’s going to do her nails for her. But not now: Laurie stands in the driveway holding the coffee cup almost level with her collarbone. The coaster’s on it like a lid, and she’s ashing onto it. The tire on her Buick is flat again, to the ground. She looks across the pasture, but can’t quite see to last night, when Jim her husband had the car. Jim who doesn’t always make the best decisions. This one was a waitress named Charla, who’s unmarried enough that there’s mesquite growing up through the ruts of her driveway, the thorns of one branch spaced one and a quarter inches apart. That puts two of the black tips into the Buick’s tire. And they’re all angled towards the morning sun, rising over Charla’s place. Meaning they’d lay down for Jim on the way in, just not on the way out. He probably never saw it when Thomas honked him outside for work at six this morning. Laurie tries to call him but he’s out of the shop—his turn to get the beer for the day. The liquor store opens at ten. Laurie arcs her nail polish through the open window of the Buick and spins on the ball of her foot, is on the phone inside of a minute. Because it’s not her fault, she’s going to make Jim pay for it: she calls the local wrecker out. And they don’t even turn the ignition over for less than thirty-five dollars. And they’re not supposed to change tires, either, but, too, when Johnny Pan the driver rolls up, Laurie’s on the hood sunflowering her toes out to dry. Johnny Pan rolls his tongue along his lower lip in something like thought and twirls the four-way down to the bad tire. The hubcap’s already gone—a dog dish by the porch for the dog that got run over last month—and he’s spun the five lugs off into his hand before Laurie even looks down at him. They don’t even make it inside, just go from the hood (which creases) to the ground (which has sugar ants) to the backseat of the car (which just has memories). Laurie blames it on Jim and them blames it on him again, the next time the tire’s flat. For three weeks she blames it on him, holding the end of her fingernail file to the valve core, until, between the tips he’s having to leave at the diner and the tab he’s running at the wrecking yard, Jim starts looking for a way out. Him and the waitress come full circle: he asks her again for that piece of pie in the window, and she licks her lips again, but this time it’s just nerves. He goes down to the wrecking yard to settle, get on the monthly plan maybe, and winds up trading Charla to Johnny Pan for half his bill. He tells Johnny Pan what to say, how to say it. It’s like at the Dairy Queen, with Brianne (the failed cosmetologist): just ask her for a haircut afterhours, and she’s yours. Johnny Pan stomachs up to the bar of the diner and eyes the pecan pie, the pumpkin pie, and maybe a piece of you, and the world opens up for him. His second time over, he pulls the mesquite up from Charla’s road. There’s only about three feet of plant on the surface, but the roots go for twice as long as his truck in both directions. He tells Charla it would have been easier to have just gone around, maybe—a whole new road—and she threads his bangs behind his left ear (she’s right-handed) ear and kisses him between the eyes and this is how people start to get married. Over a dilly bar Brianne tells Laurie about the wedding and Laurie looks out across the parking lot and already knows, has already parked at the rest stop outside town and backed the negative cable off the battery, waited all day for Johnny Pan to come give her a jump. You’re so predictable, Brianne says, blowing a smoke ring, and Laurie nods, nods, her hand not cupping her belly these days, but her uterus. Little Jim—Slim Jim for however long junior high lasts for him—is still five months away, but Laurie can already picture the birth, how she’ll move somehow from the backseat of the Buick out to the ground, then up onto the hood, where Jim will leave her as he coasts into town with his head out the window, the neck of his beer just touching the lowest part of the steering wheel. He’s almost got the tire bill paid off, by now, almost bought Charla’s ring for Johnny Pan. The rest Johnny Pan will write off when he has to fire up the wrecker to come get the Buick out of whatever ditch Laurie’s giving birth in. It’ll be Charla who talks her through it, every light in the wrecker directed at them. They’ll hold each other at the neck like sisters, and when Little Jim crowns, shoulders his way out, into all this, she’ll hold him to her chest for a moment and look across the bench seat to Johnny Pan, and nod like please. Fourteen years later, Brianne clutching the base of his skull with her perfect fingernails, her thick legs around the small of his back, Johnny Pan will look up through the headache rack of his wrecker and see Little Jim, and stop for a moment, remember. Little Jim will be with his basketball team then, in the drive-thru for the necessary dip-cones of victory. He’s thirteen, then. Only two years later, in that same parking lot with a warm beer poured into a plastic coke bottle, he’ll look up, flare his eyes a little in recognition, and then run away the first chance he gets.

Stephen Graham Jones has two novels out—The Fast Red Road (FC2)—and All the Beautiful Sinners (Rugged Land); a third, The Bird is Gone (FC2) is on the way.

[ jones@32fps.com ]