“Bubba, no! Lady, get in your truck.” The little boy ran forward, waving the stick.
Unaccustomed to taking orders from a child, but sensing this one knew what he was talking about, Clarissa scrambled back into the cab just as the snake struck the front bumper. Her ovarian shadow women screamed. She thought one of them shouted, “Holy shit!”
“Bubba, stop that right this second or I ain’t gonna give you any supper tonight!”
Clarissa saw something move in his canvas tote. Supper indeed. She craned her neck but could no longer see the snake. With her luck, the venomous reptile would find his way into a heretofore undiscovered hole in the floorboard.
“Now look at what you gone and done. Scared the pee out of the lady.”
The snake slithered into view, undulating across the road, toward the swamp on the far side. He blinked his little slit eyes. Or was that a wink? Clarissa rolled down the window.
“Little boy, that snake can kill you. You need to stay where you are.”
The child waved his stick at Clarissa. “That’s my pet, lady. You’re really lucky you didn’t run him over.”
“Children should not have pet rattlesnakes. Do your parents know?”
“Mind your own business, lady. Besides, my daddy give him to me.”
“But…” Clarissa started to protest the entire idea of a pet viper but looked at the boy’s obstinate, button-nosed face and realized she was in way over her head.
“Come on, Bubba, let’s go home,” he said. “Good thing I found you. No telling what that lady might have done if I hadn’t come along.” He turned his back to Clarissa, paused, looked over his shoulder, and said, “Lady, you need to be more careful. You got no idea what my daddy woulda done to you if you’d killed Bubba.” The little boy spit once as if to reveal the depth of his disgust and then headed back in the direction he’d come from. The snake, sliding along in the low weeds near the road, trailed behind him—his motility fueled by what appeared to be magic.
Clarissa wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. Grave dirt smudged her face, and more of it swirled through the air, dusting the seat and floor. She carried the scent of the two dead girls but did not know this. And thanks to not having a rearview mirror, she had no idea how bonkers she truly appeared. She stuck her head out the window and watched the little boy grow smaller and smaller as he headed away from her. The snake was no longer visible. A truck zoomed up behind her. Its driver honked at the little boy, who waved in response. Clarissa was a sitting duck. She pushed her hazard lights button, but nothing happened.
The driver, a young, heavyset woman with her brunette hair pulled into a tight ponytail, slowed down, eased alongside Clarissa, and asked, “You okay?”
“Yes, I’m fine. I just stopped because a rattlesnake was on the road.”
“Oh, yeah, that was Bubba.” She rolled her eyes as if to say, “Snakes, what are you gonna do!” The girl looked in her rearview mirror—an act that Clarissa envied—said, “You have a good day,” waved a hand adorned with glue-on nails painted what Clarissa considered to be screamin’ eagle orange, and then drove on.
Clarissa put the truck in drive. “Bubba, the Pet Rattlesnake,” she said. “A children’s story by Clarissa Burden.” She stepped on the gas, intrigued and energized by the strange little swamp boy. The snake had actually tried to bite her. This observation made her feel wildly alive. So did surviving the quick mud. As she barreled down the road, she mused that perhaps life lived dangerously was the key to true happiness.
In the distance, she spied a cell tower. She checked her phone; she had juice but no messages. She wanted to talk to Iggy, wanted to let him know she was safe and ask what he was up to. She had, after all, taken the truck even though he had warned her that it was unsafe.
The phone trilled four times before he picked up. She heard a woman laughing in the background and people chatting.
“Yes, Clarissa?” He sounded annoyed. No, worse. His inflection dripped with boredom.
She thought about hanging up but couldn’t. She’d catch hell later for something like that. So she plunged on, feeling stupid, hapless, powerless. “Hey!” She tried to sound casual. “I’m just calling to say hey.”
“I’m busy.” His voice was flat. In her mind, she flashed on her mother yelling at her as she cowered in a corner of the trailer, “You’re dead to me!”
Clarissa hit the end call button and tossed the phone on the seat. If he did give her hell later, demanding to know why she hung up on him, she’d deny it. “I didn’t. I was in a dead zone,” she’d say. She sped up and felt two things: angry that she didn’t have the courage to tell him to fuck off and empowered that she’d hung up on his ass.
The truck still needed to be washed, but she was ravenous, so she elected to take herself to lunch at the Treetop General Store. At Treetop’s, they wouldn’t care how she was dressed, how much mud caked her jeans, or how badly she smelled. And their smoked mullet was to die for.
As she traveled north, the land became higher and drier; in ten minutes she had left the swamp and entered the forest. Here the world gleamed dark and bright like a bird whose flickering wings balanced sun and moon in wavering measure. The high, sandy plane was home to dwindling populations of foxes, bears, bobcats, pileated woodpeckers, redneck farmers, black farmers, and old hippies. The only things flourishing were the coyotes. Welcome to the twenty-first century, she mused, where most everything is a threatened species.
A murder of crows winged out of the forest, cast frenetic shadows across her path, and spiraled into the sweltering dome of the solstice sky. She sped past miles of robust habitat, the giant oaks towering over an understory of magnolia, dogwood, cabbage palm, and loblolly pine, which in turn created a shelter for blackberry, deerberry, bracken fern, and more. Ten minutes in and the forest’s dense complexity was replaced by the rigid geometry of a pulp farm: pine trees planted in regimental rows that supported no understory to speak of.
But the pulp pines, destined to become toilet paper, were in trouble. The columns of skinny, vertical trunks topped with exploding green fans were interrupted by large stands of dead trees, their remaining needles resembling rusted bones scratching news of their demise into the wide plank of the bleached sky. An infestation of pine beetles threatened huge swaths of the piney woods.
She slid her sweating palms along the circumference of the steering wheel. Everything is dying, she thought.
Ahead, someone driving a late-model camouflaged green Ford pickup pulled out of a side road and then crawled along, well below the speed limit. In under a minute, Clarissa was just yards behind the old man, who seemed content to mosey. Even though his speedometer probably worked and hers didn’t, she—brimming with what the old man would most likely call the arrogance of youth—felt she had a better grasp on what constituted a safe speed. She hit the gas and zoomed past.
The dying pulp pines and her increased speed dragging against the old man’s crawl served no purpose other than to pull her, as if by the hands of a petulant god, back into the morass of her marriage. In the swirl of motion, color, wind, and light, the recognition—while not new—that her marriage hung by a single tendril spun of stubbornness and fear kicked her in the spine. She tightened her grip on the steering wheel and bore down on the tough nut of her marriage. Their union had not always been fragile. Spousal death scenarios had not always hounded her conscious and unconscious thoughts. He had not always clung to the opposite side of the bed as if intimacy with her would give him smallpox.
She squinted into the heat-quivering distance and tried to focus on other issues, other ideas, other planets. Before she could chew hard on anything new, the Treetop General Store rose out of the heat, shimmering, distant, and real. She slowed, put on her blinker, but nothing happened (Jesus, this truck is falling apart before my eyes, she thought), waited for two cars in the oncoming lane to pass, wondered where Adams was and if she should call him. If she went tonight, what should she wear? She sat there,
blinkerless, flipping through her mental closet: blue jeans, flouncy skirt, skinny black dress. She was just about to inventory her shoes when her meanderings were shattered by the cacophony of a honking horn and screeching brakes. The light inside and outside the truck shifted. She jerked her head to see what was happening, but of course, there was no rearview. She heard a whoosh—her heart pounded; she instinctively wanted to jerk the truck out of harm’s way but had no idea what direction that would be. A commotion popped, definite and loud, on her passenger side. The old man in the Ford was on the shoulder, passing her. His full-moon eyes snapped with fear, anger.
“Get some brake lights!” he yelled.
She watched him rumble back onto the highway. She shouted, “I’m sorry!”
He stuck his gnarled hand out the window and flipped her off.
“Old fool!” Clarissa said, fully aware that the man had a right to be angry. Hands shaking, she pulled into Treetop’s oyster-shell drive and parked beside a truck that had a FORGET HELL bumper sticker and a rear window vinyl graphic of a rebel flag. Jerk. Clarissa always appreciated assholes that loudly announced said affliction. A fully dressed Harley gleamed in the space nearest the door. She sat in her truck, in the record-breaking heat, trying to calm down. After damning herself for nearly getting hit, she damned her husband for a host of violations. Did she have to do everything? Cook, clean, earn their living, and get the truck fixed? Maybe she should take matters into her own hands and drive this piece of junk into a lake. Lake Reform. And then run away with Trash Man. Ha!
She looked at the signs plastered willy-nilly on the outside of the building. It didn’t take much to know what Treetop sold. In addition to being part hardware store, part grocery store, customers could buy Skoal, ice cold beer, boiled peanuts, Sopchoppy night crawlers, fried oyster po’boys, and, of course, smoked mullet.
From the moment Clarissa stepped foot into Treetop’s five months prior, she loved the store and its owner, the cocoa-skinned, sweetly freckled Miss Lossie. The authenticity of the place, the no-frills goodness of it all, helped her feel grounded, which, considering the precarious nature of her personal life, was needed. And right now, having fallen into quick mud, survived a rattlesnake, and almost been rear-ended by an angry old man who was probably legally blind, she was more than happy to be here.
Clarissa reached for the door handle. It came off in her hand. She tossed it on the floor and opened the door by unlatching it from the outside. She barely even cared. As she slid out of the truck and made her way toward the door, she clicked through a mental list of everything she knew about Miss Lossie. Her great-grandparents had been slaves on a cotton plantation just north of where the store stood. She claimed to be eighty-four years old but looked to be in her sixties. She was a wife (her husband was by all accounts still spry, but Clarissa had never laid eyes on him) and mother of ten (Clarissa had met her two youngest) and was taking an online real estate course. She said she didn’t want to become a Realtor, she simply wanted to know how to outfox them.
Feeling better but hungry and needing to wash up, Clarissa first wound her way out back where there was a spigot and hose, an outdoor restroom, and three picnic tables. Four teenage boys, one with a Mohawk and the rest with crew cuts, ate sandwiches at the table shaded by a lone oak. They passed a brown bag–wrapped bottle. Miss Lossie sold beer and wine but not liquor. And she’d never sell alcohol to minors.
“What are you looking at, sweetmeat?” Mohawk asked. His cohorts laughed as if he were the wittiest fool on the planet.
Clarissa ignored them. Drunken males in groups scared her. She turned on the spigot and took the hose around the corner so they couldn’t see her.
“Watch out,” one of them yelled, “we might just come over there and get you.”
“Yeah. Fuck you like you ain’t never been fucked before.” Their laughter battered the sky.
“Jackasses,” Clarissa whispered. She ran the water over her hair and rinsed out the grave dirt. The water ran down her T-shirt, soaking it. She washed her arms, sprayed her tennis shoes, and then took a long drink out of the hose. A wasp dive-bombed her. She batted it away, tried to wring out her T-shirt, and walked again to the back of the store.
The boy sitting beside Mohawk chugged the bottle. Mohawk slapped his back, causing the kid to snort liquor out of his nose. As Clarissa bent to turn off the faucet, the boys whooped and hollered as if they’d never laid eyes on a female before. The shortest of the four threw the bottle into the parking lot. Mohawk already was passing another one. The scrawniest of the four pulled a blue plastic cooler from under the table, opened it, pulled out a pick, and began chiseling away at a block of ice.
Chugger stood up, grabbed his crotch, and yelled, “You want some of this, baby?”
“You’d have to grow up first,” Clarissa said, trying to hide how addled she was.
“Bitch!”
Clarissa, having already had one hellacious, albeit fascinating, day, was in no mood. She spun around. “What did you say?”
“Bitch.” Unsteady on his legs, he curled his lip and sneered. She thought the little idiot might puke at any moment.
That was it. She was done with this group of twerps. Clarissa tossed her hair and planted her fists on her hips. “Number one, son, there are no bitches present. Number two, you kids don’t even know how to drink, forget about being of age. Number three, there is no amount of desperation in the world that would allow me to let a single one of you lay even a finger on me, you with your stupid racist bullshit plastered on your truck. Grow up! And number four”—Clarissa sighed heavily; the heat ratcheted up her irritation—“I’m going to go inside and call the sheriff on your no-count, scrawny asses.” Clarissa marched toward the door, her wet T-shirt clinging to places she did not want it to. But there was nothing she could do, no self-conscious tugs or readjustments; she would not let the punks see even the smallest crack in her facade. She walked, head high, letting the catcalls, epithets, and jeers bounce off her like foam balls. Right as she passed the WE RENT VIDEOS sign, she tripped on the uneven concrete walk that lined the side of the building. She caught herself before she fell, but it was a definite win for the Punk Brothers.
“Have a nice trip?” Mohawk cackled.
“Come back next fall!” Chugger chimed in.
They laughed, and she could hear them high-fiving. Little no-brained, fat-necked cretins.
She grabbed the door that was adorned with a WE SHOOT FIRST AND ASK QUESTIONS LATER sticker, threw it open, stepped inside, was hit with a wall of cold air, and said, “Oh, my God, it feels good in here.” She stood stock-still for a moment, letting her body sink into the cool temperature. “Like a different world.”
Miss Lossie looked up from the TV that blared full-tilt the People’s Court theme song. “Goodness gracious, will you look who it is! I thought somebody done stole you!” She hit the mute button, rose to her feet, walked with the wide stride of a man even though she was only five feet two, came out from behind the counter, and started to hug Clarissa but stopped. She crinkled her eyes and took two steps back. “Oh my.”
“I know, I know, I stink.”
She waved her hand in front of her nose. “You got that right. What on earth have you been doing, child?”
“Well,” she said, pulling her T-shirt away from her curves and hollows, trying to think of a reason not to tell Miss Lossie everything but not finding one, “my husband has been using my truck as a trash can. I’ve told him to stop, but he ignores me. No matter how many times I’ve asked him to at least take the trash to the dump, he refuses. And no matter how many times I’ve asked him to fix something, anything, on the truck, he acts like he doesn’t hear me. The thing is falling apart. I mean a-p-a-r-t! No mirrors, no gas gauge, no speedometer, no brake lights—I almost got killed out there thanks to the brake lights—no nothing. So I just decided that at the very least, I could clear out the trash my own self.” She brushed her palms together as if wiping them clean. Wow, it felt good t
o unload. Dangerous and damn good.
Miss Lossie shook her head as though she knew intimately what Clarissa was going though. “You know what I say?” She had a pencil behind her ear, and Clarissa thought it made her look oddly coquettish.
“What?”
“You need to tell that husband of yours to get his ass in gear or find himself someplace else to stay. Look at you! You smell like you been living in the Dumpster.” Miss Lossie fiddled with the belt that circled her tiny waist. She wore a pretty red cotton dress, buttons down the front, and white tennis shoes. “That was you that almost got hit out there? You running with no brake lights! What’s that man going to do without you, you get laid up or killed?”
“I know, I know. You’re right.” Clarissa shook her head, feeling comforted by Miss Lossie’s solidarity and guilty over talking like this about her husband.
“You bet I’m right.” Miss Lossie sauntered back around the counter. “You’d best be taking control of some things. If he won’t do it, find yourself somebody new. You ain’t bad-looking. A pretty little thing like you!” Her face wandered from defiant to mischievous. “At least when you ain’t been wallowing in the trash bin!” And then she proceeded to have a good laugh at Clarissa’s expense.
Near the front of the store, a man dressed in white fishing boots, yellow shorts, and nothing else save for the sunglasses perched atop his head, laughed, too. He was tall and thin, wide-shouldered and long-armed, and was sifting through a pile of fishing lures. Even from where Clarissa stood she saw that the man, who was both tanned and burned, sported a silver-veined goatee and his shorts that hung low on his hips were staying put only through the power of prayer. She figured him to be around the same age as her husband, except he, from her vantage point near the register, appeared hard-bodied. Iggy, on the best of days, was soft in all the wrong places. A flutter rose and fell in her stomach. She dismissed it as sun poisoning. A dust bunny with a tiny spider trapped in it rolled like tumbleweed down the candy aisle.