I kiss him on the forehead. “Baby, I’m crazy.”
I watch as the attendant pushes him away. He doesn’t look back at me, and I think this is a good thing. Maybe it’s over for good between us. I feel proud. Like maybe I am in control of my life, and I can walk away from Judah when I need to. Dr. Elgin thought he was bad for me. Someone I needed in order to cope with the bad things in my life. But, it isn’t true anymore. I am in control of my own life. I don’t need Judah. I just like that he is there. I dial her number as soon as I get home.
“I saw Judah,” I say. “He didn’t understand.” She asks me if I’ve been taking my medicine, then tells me to come in to see her right away.
Leroy thinks he’s won. Most men think they are born with a gold medal growing in their nut sack. Winner winner chicken dinner! That’s what Howard thought when he stole that little coffin from the eating house. I’m not done with Howard yet, and I’m not done with Leroy. Leroy Ashley doesn’t know I survived my little ordeal, and with stronger resolution. He’s run from me, but I will find him. If he knew my anger, he’d be preparing. Perhaps he’d buy a gun, or lay off the vodka cocktails he drank every morning for breakfast. He’d take a close look at the burn marks on his body and remember that his skin popped and crackled like bacon when I held my lighter to his flesh. I don’t need to watch him this time. I don’t need to spend hours planning. I know exactly what I’m going to do to him. An eye for an eye. And not for myself. I won’t take revenge for a thing that was done to me, but for each of the girls whose lives he ruined. Because you can’t just do that—knowingly ruin people’s lives. Something will eventually come for you.
THE FOLLOWING SPRING I get my CDL, enroll in a three-week training course, and take a job with a trucking company called Dahl Transport. It’s a desperate measure, one to keep myself out of the eyes of the law and spread myself so thinly across America that I wont be able to hunt humans. I am one of three women who drive rigs for Larry Dahl, and, by anyone’s standards, the most attractive. The men outnumber us twenty-to-one. Linda Eubanks, Dodo Philbrooks, and, of course me.
Linda and Dodo are what the company calls old-schoolers. They wear their rigs just as well as they do their ‘Fuck you, you fucking fuck’ T-shirts. Linda still has a mullet—gray at the roots and bright red the rest of the way down. She lumbers into a room on barrel-sized thighs, her hacking laughter always preceding her. Her counterpart, and sometimes nemesis, Dodo, is the opposite. All bones and wrinkles, her face looks like an old piece of leather with too much hot pink lipstick and blue eye shadow. Dodo always smells like she’s been rolling around in an ashtray. When she’s angry, she throws things around and calls everyone a pansy bitch. I am the youngest hire in the company in twenty years, and the only reason I got the job was because I served Mr. Dahl coffee at the diner and asked him to make me a big, bad trucker. At first he laughed, but when I stayed glued to the spot, staring at him with the half empty coffee pot in my hand, he’d handed me his personal card and told me to come into his office.
I’d made an appointment to see him, and the following week I’d walked to his office on Madison, dressed in ripped blue jeans, my steel-toed boots, and a T-shirt that said: “Born to be a trucker.” Before I’d left my apartment, I’d tied a blue bandana around my head. It gave me the air of toughness. Mr. Dahl’s receptionist had looked me over like I had maggots dripping from my nose. But I knew a little bit about the shrewd Larry Dahl. He was an avid lover of the theater, a Star Wars groupie, and every spring he attended Comic Con, where if you scrolled back far enough on his personal Twitter page, you could see pictures of him dressed up as Obi Wan Kenobi. His fleet of trailers was painted bright colors, works of art according to their owner. Mr. Dahl was a flamboyant artist and nerd, and I was going to give him a show if it would get me the job.
When I walked into his office, he stood to greet me, laughing loudly at my ensemble and pausing to take a picture of me with his iPhone.
“Why do you want to drive a truck?” he asked, after he settled down behind his desk. “Why no college? Fashion school? Career waitressing?”
I pulled a face at all three of his suggestions.
“Because I like to do things that women shouldn’t be doing.”
“It’s a lifestyle, Margo. One that affects your family and friends. Don’t you have anyone to stick around for?”
I think of Judah, then shake my head. “No, no one.”
Mr. Dahl sat back, stroking his chin. It was a baby’s ass chin—not even the slightest bit of stubble there. “I see,” he said.
I took that as my cue to convince him. “Mr. Dahl. I am not like other girls. I don’t desire for silly, frivolous things. I like to drive. I like to see things. I like to be alone. I’m tough. You won’t have to worry about me. I handle high stress like I was born for it.”
He didn’t look convinced.
“My dad was a trucker,” I lied. “He died before I was born. It’s a profession I respect and believe in.”
The gavel of decision was struck. Mr. Dahl offered me a job, saying they’d train me themselves. I left his office with my new hire package clutched under my arm, marveling at my good fortune. I’d have to keep convincing him, of course. He’d be watching me carefully, making sure I had what it took to keep in time with the boys. But I didn’t care. I’d found that I was perfectly adaptable and good at most things I tried.
I got my first rig nine weeks after my training began. It was a Detroit Diesel DD15—beautiful and powerful. The smell of newness lingered around the cab when I climbed in for the first time. I was not as large or commanding as Dodo Philbrooks or Linda Eubanks, but I wasn’t a small, frail girl either. I fit in with these people the same way an ostrich fit in with the rest of the birds: classified as, but slightly off. And so began my new life as a trucker.
I’ve found Leroy Ashley. Tracked him down to a small beach house in the Florida Keys. I had to call his favorite lingerie catalog, a small company based out of Raleigh, North Carolina that specialized in crotch-less panties. At first I called pretending to be his wife, calling to confirm that they had the catalog shipped to my new address.
“Can you tell me what the new address is?” the girl said. “And I’ll let you know if it’s what we have on file.”
“No,” I snapped. “I already made this call, and you people messed up. You tell me what you have so I can see how incompetent your people are.”
“Ma’am…” she said.
“Look, I say. I lied. My boyfriend broke up with me and took our dog. I’m not sure where he is, but I need to find her. This was the only thing I could think to do.” I wasn’t sure why she believed my lie, or chose to have pity on me, but I hung up the phone with Leroy’s address scribbled on the back of an old power bill. A larger company would never have released that type of information. I lucked out.
I haven’t spoken to Judah since the day I left him at the airport. He’s tried to call, but I’m not ready. His e-mails say that he’s moved back to the Bone and has taken a teaching job at my old middle school. I think about Mo having him as a teacher one day, and I smile.
Mr. Dahl calls me into his office one day and asks if I want to take a job driving a truck of spearmint oil to North Miami Beach.
“It’s not your usual route,” he says. “But Sack is having that Lasik surgery on his eyes and can’t do this trip.”
I pretend to be put out, and then reluctantly agree when he offers me time and a half. Score-score! As I pass through the long stretch of Everglades called Alligator Alley, I wonder what is going through Leroy’s mind. Did he really think I wouldn’t find him? That I’d let it go? I laugh out loud and turn up my music. Taylor Swift, man; gotta love her.
Leroy is much the same. His hair, his diet, his job. His smug fucking face. I admire his moving across the country to get away from whatever trouble I could bring. It took dedication.
He must have Pine-Sol’d the shit out of his new house, the OCD beast. The morning after I drop o
ff my load, I enter Leroy’s house much the same way as I did the last time. Everything is set up similarly, except he finally bought a new kitchen table. I like it; it’s black. I find his porn stash under the bed and page through the magazines while I wait. He has a gun in his bedroom, hidden behind the air conditioning grate. This is for me. I’m honored. I play with it for a while before I get bored and go look for a snack.
He gets home at six o’ clock. I hear him whistling as he walks through the door and drops his keys on the table. I know what he’ll do next; I smile when he opens the fridge and the bottle clanks. It’ll be a PBR for Leroy. Some things never change. I situate myself in the far corner, next to the window, and point my gun at the door. When he sees me standing in the shadows, Leroy Ashley drops his beer.
“Well, hello there,” I say.
The Pabst pools on the tile while Leroy stares at me.
“Oh come on,” I say. “You thought they’d keep my crazy ass locked up forever?” I toss him a pair of handcuffs. “To the bed,” I say. “And it would be my pleasure to blow a hole in that smug little mug of yours, so no tricky business.”
He lumbers forward. I watch him, my finger hooked around the trigger. I want him to do something stupid, just so I can shoot him. No. I can’t get emotional. An eye for an eye. I have to do this the just way.
“Anything you’d like to say?”
“I’ll fucking kill you, you cunt.”
I backhand him. “You’re all talk, you fuck. You should have done it when you had the chance.”
Oh my God, he’s so angry. I sit on the edge of the bed closest to his head.
“Tell me something,” I say. “Were you born this way? If you had better parents, would you still be a rapist?”
He blinks at me and yanks on his handcuffs. I tap him on the forehead with my pistol.
“Stop. That.”
“Fuck you,” he says.
“Leroy.” I laugh. “I have blonde hair!” I pat my ponytail to make my point.
“I don’t think you would. Seriously, that’s the saddest part. If your mom hadn’t been a selfish cunt, you’d be a semi-normal person.”
“Don’t talk about my mother,” he roars. I’m happy; it’s the first time he hasn’t cussed at me.
“You think we’re different? You’re better than me? I see the sick in your eyes,” he says. “I’m going to kill you.”
“This was a good conversation,” I say, patting his head.
He’s hollering loud as he can, eyes burning with hate, when I inject him with a sedative. Right in the neck. He flinches and tries to bite me. I smack his cheek and tell him, “No.”
I wait in my corner while he falls asleep, humming the new Taylor Swift song that I heard on the ride over. When Leroy is asleep, I cut off his penis. I put it into the little pink cooler that I brought with me and cauterize his wound with a new pink Zippo I bought at the 7-11.
I pack ice around his member, and then I take his eyes. Super messy work. But I think it’s fair. Without eyes, he will no longer be able to see women or carry out a plan to hurt them. I take off his handcuffs before I leave and pat his belly. “Rot in hell, you sick fuck.”
I carry the cooler with me, on the Greyhound back to Miami. It sits in the cab of my rig until I throw it into the desert somewhere in New Mexico. I didn’t know I was going to allow him to live until he let me live; an eye for an eye. But he will not live the same life as he did before. Perhaps this one will be worse than death. Leroy Ashley has been brought to justice.
I WAS BORN SICK. As was my mother, and her mother before her. It’s in our marrow. The eating house calls to me one day, and, just like that, I pack up my things and go back to the Bone. I don’t even have to think about it. It’s just time to face who I am. I paint it red, for all the blood I’ve shed. Then trim the windows in the purest white. I hire a man to lay new wood floors, and replace the cabinets and countertops in the kitchen. By spring of my first year back, the eating house has new smells, a new glow. There is even a shower in the bathroom where the old, chipped blue tub once sat. It has shiny glass doors and sprays water from two directions. It’s still the same, scary house, but I fixed it up to serve a new purpose. Dr. Elgin calls me once a week for the first year I’m back, but then I stop hearing from her. I think she knows I’m okay now. Mo knocks on my door almost every afternoon during the winter. We drink hot chocolate in front of the fireplace, and he tells me about the girls he likes at school. In summer, the most I see him is when I drive by a field and watch him passing a football back and forth with his buddies. He lifts a hand to wave at me and goes back to what he’s doing. He still hardly ever smiles, but I’ve come to like that about him. If I’m lucky, he stops by with a basket of blackberries that he’s thought to pick for me. I grin and bear those summers, because Mo always comes back to me in winter. My father comes to see me once, when he hears that I’ve moved back to the Bone. He’s old; his skin hangs from his bones like it’s melting away. I sit him at my new kitchen table—black, in honor of Leroy—and make him tea. He wants to tell me he’s sorry. I take his apology because I know he’s just a fucked up human like the rest of us. Before he leaves he tells me where he buried the tiny coffin I found that day in the oven. I’m glad. I want to take my sibling flowers. He tells me it wasn’t his baby, but I don’t believe him. He might have apologized, but he’s still a lying scumbag. He dies two months later. I won’t be taking him flowers, but I’m glad he made his peace.
Delaney passes one August; she simply falls into the grass while she’s gardening and takes her last breath under the sun. It’s Mother Mary who finds her. Mother Mary, who is ninety-seven years old, and will probably outlive us all. She says she knew to go to Delaney’s that day because the week before she predicted her death. When his mother passes, Judah moves out of his apartment and into her house. He tries to convince me to sell the eating house and move in with him, but I’ll never let the eating house go, or maybe it won’t let me go. It doesn’t matter anymore. So we take turns visiting each other’s spaces—a night here, a night there. He uses Delaney’s life insurance money to outfit the kitchen, lowering all of the countertops and buying custom made appliances. He leaves one counter high enough for me to stand and cut things when we cook together. The sentiment makes me cry. I never do buy a TV. Judah makes me watch his.
We are sitting side by side on the couch one evening, a bucket of popcorn between us, when he turns on the news and leaves to use the bathroom. The news makes me anxious; whenever Judah puts it on, I leave the room, but this time I turn up the volume and lean toward the picture of a man with extraordinarily kind mazarine eyes.
“A man is at large tonight in Washington,” the reporter says. I glance at the bathroom door, and scoot forward ‘til my rear is barely on the couch. “Cult leader Muslim Black escaped his Minnesota compound last week when police arrived to arrest him. He is said to have fled to Spokane, where police are searching for him now. During Black’s twelve-year reign as leader of the Paradise Gate Group, he reportedly raped and kept more than three dozen women prisoner…”
I hear the knob on the bathroom door rattle, and quickly change the channel. Judah smiles at me when he settles back down, and for a moment his face is enough to cleanse me of the sinister rage that I am feeling. All of his open beauty, his effortless love, the boldness with which he embraces his wheelchair. I smile, too, but for different reasons. Underneath my skin and underneath the sinewy tendons of muscle, my bones are rattling.
Rrrrrra ta ta ta
My marrow cries out, reminding me of who I am. I am Margo Moon. I am a murderess. I believe in poetic vengeance. Muslim Black is at large. It’s time, it’s time, it’s time … to hunt.
I ONCE SAW A YOUTUBE VIDEO of a woman beating her baby. I was shocked by how calm she was. She wasn’t being forced; she wasn’t visibly angry or flustered. She sat with her back to the camera, punching, slapping and pinching—over and over while he screamed.
Why did I spend six minut
es of my life watching as a child, who could not yet sit up by himself, was brutally beaten by his mother? Because he suffered, and I didn’t want to turn my face away from his suffering. Some might say that you don’t need to see it to know it exists. And while that is true, I felt that if he was hurting, the least I could do was hurt along with him. Somehow, by watching his pain, I was also acknowledging it. I have to tell you, the images of her hand coming down on his skin are ingrained in my memory, probably for as long as I live. He was too little to know that he was not supposed to be beaten. His mother’s harsh cruelty was his norm.
I will not forget him. I will not forget that people hurt each other, or that children suffer for the sins of their parents, and their parents before them. I will not forget that there are millions of people crying out for help at this very moment. It makes me feel hopeless … like I’m not enough.
To cope with this very aggressive reality, I started typing. Because if I could not take vengeance on behalf of that small child, I would have Margo do it for me. Margo and her poetic vengeance. I killed them all in this book: the rapists who took from my friends, the rotting sadists who hurt children, the takers of life, the killers of hope. I killed them and I enjoyed it. And while that makes me equally as corrupt—a murderess in my own right—we are what we think, after all.
I want to make it clear that I believe in justice both in this life and the next. I believe we ought fight for the hurting, open our eyes to suffering. Not just our own, but the suffering around us. Sometimes, by saving someone else, you save yourself a little as well. By loving someone else and expecting nothing in return, we learn to love ourselves and expect nothing in return. Perhaps it is the simple act of doing for others that makes us feel more valuable in our own skin.
I want to implore you not to hurt yourselves. Not to cut your skin, or swallow pills, or drink to drown pain. Not to hand yourselves over so easily to men for validation. Stop feeling useless and worthless. Stop drowning in regret. Stop listening to the persistent voice of your past failures. You were that child once, who Margo would have killed for. Fight for yourselves. You have a right to live, and to live well. You’ll inherit flaws; you’ll develop new ones. And that’s okay. Wear them, own them, use them to survive. Don’t kill others; don’t kill yourselves. Be bold about your right to be loved. And most importantly, don’t be ashamed of where you’ve come from, or the mistakes you’ve made. In blindness, love will exhume you.