Cavedweller (32 page)

“I could pass that test anytime.” Cissy’s mouth twisted in a devious grin. “I memorized the chart.”

Dede laughed. “Getting ready, huh? Well, you ever manage that, you let me know. I am not going to want to be driving anywhere in Bartow County the day you hit the road.”

Dede drove them all over Cayro, keeping an eye out for Deputy Tyler. She could fool Delia, but that old boy was nobody’s fool. Some nights they went out to the Bowle River and parked below the crest of the hill where the bridge supports were lit up by the railroad company. Dede smoked and Cissy sat and sometimes they talked. It amused Dede that Cissy did not want to learn to smoke. At Cissy’s age, Dede had been sneaking cigarettes out of Clint’s jacket and smoking them in the fields behind Grandma Windsor’s house.

“I don’t like the smell,” Cissy told Dede. “I bet you can’t even smell it no more. But Delia always stinks of cigarettes, and you do too. You think she don’t smell it on you?”

“She don’t say nothing to me about it.”

“She don’t ever say nothing to you, or Amanda either. She’s still trying to get you to love her.”

Dede shrugged. “Feels to me like she’s still trying to love us. She looks at us like we’re some kind of creatures she found in the back of the woods.”

“Yeah, well, she’s been looking for you all my life.” Cissy put her feet up on the dash.

“Oh, for God’s sake. Smoke one.” Dede tossed the pack at Cissy. “You’re starting to get on my nerves.”

“I don’t want it.”

“What is it? You scared of getting cancer?” Dede blew smoke at Cissy. “Or you scared of Delia?”

Cissy blushed. What she was actually worried about was that Dede would think she was trying to copy her. Cissy took a cigarette out of the pack, lit it, and inhaled. It burned her throat and tasted awful, but she wouldn’t embarrass herself by sputtering or coughing.

“Don’t taste like much to me,” she managed to say.

Dede grinned. “Well, it’s probably like beer and whiskey—an acquired taste, as the Petrie boys used to tell me.” She took another drag and thought about Craig. He was fun when he wasn’t being so pushy. She would like to have him asleep or drunk. Helpless. It would be nice to have him helpless. She would like to touch that boy any way she wanted, to stroke him and get him as disturbed as the brothers had managed to get her. She wondered if it would ever be possible to have sex with a boy, not get pregnant, and not have him tell everybody and their cousin you had done it.

Maybe if he was unconscious? Could you have sex with an unconscious boy? She giggled.

“What are you laughing about?” Cissy asked.

“Driving,” Dede said. “The sheer power of the machine.”

Most nights Dede took them twice around the overpass. The first time they went up and over, the old Datsun peaked out at just under 60. Dede checked the gas gauge. She’d have to get more before going home or Delia would notice. Twice already Dede had siphoned a little gas from Mr. Reitower’s car up the street. She was going to have to find someone else to borrow from this time, or maybe she could get Cissy to buy two dollars’ worth on the way back. Cissy seemed to have money now and then. She stroked the steering wheel. It was a good car, sweet. It should be able to go faster. She turned to Cissy.

“I bet if we went back over the grade and came down from the train crossing we could get it up faster.”

“You think?” Cissy seemed eager.

“I think,” said Dede.

The Datsun topped seventy-five on the downhill side of the overpass, the body shimmying but the engine roaring along fine. When the speedometer needle crossed the line, Dede whooped, “Damn!” and Cissy crowed with her. She did not see the needle, but she felt the car lift slightly as they passed the crest and gained momentum. She put both hands straight up in the air, her palms flat on the rooftop, and blew a whistle of happy surprise. The surprise was in the exhilaration, the marvelous rush of air pouring in the windows, the lights along the bridge approach flashing past. She had never gone so fast in her life, never been so afraid and unafraid at the same time. Dede’s hair was whipping in the wind. The damp off the river was cool and sweet in Cissy’s mouth.

“Damn! Damn!” Cissy yelled, beaming at Dede in full impassioned glory. Her stomach felt a little funny. The cigarette, she told herself, swallowing acid. Then the right front tire popped and the car made a terrible shrieking sound. The front spun, poles and trees sweeping past. Dede roared curses along the car’s rooftop as she fought the pull of the steering wheel. They deadheaded a mile marker, then another, slowing with each post that went down. Dede was aiming at the little posts deliberately, Cissy realized, trying to stop the car.

“God, God, God!” Cissy screamed in a rush of adrenaline.

“God, yes!” Dede screamed back at her as the car slammed into a dogwood sapling and came to a sudden wrenching halt in the mud and weeds of a shallow ditch.

“My God,” Cissy breathed.

“All right, little sister, all right.” Dede was shaking, hands tight on the wheel. “You okay?”

“I’m fine,” Cissy said.

“Oh Lord!” Dede put her head on the steering wheel. “Shit! No way Delia an’t gonna find out about this now.”

Cissy felt her stomach roll. “Damn,” she whimpered, and threw up out the window. “I have always hated this car,” she said, and threw up again.

Miraculously, the Datsun survived. All the damage was to the body.

For all Delia’s shouts and accusations, Cissy never admitted how fast they were going. “I asked Dede to drive me,” she said. “It was just an accident and Dede saved our lives.” Cissy stared hopefully at Delia’s stern face.

“You could have killed your sister,” Delia said to Dede.

Dede looked over at Cissy, her face suddenly pale and frightened. “I know,” she said, “I know,” and began to sob like a child for the first time in her life.

Delia watched her and remembered all the times she had said the same thing to Randall.
You could have killed her.

“But you didn’t,” she said to Dede, and took her daughter into her arms.

 

 

I
t took Amanda about a minute and a half to decide to marry Michael Graham when he proposed to her the Christmas after they graduated. At the time, she and his mother were decorating the tabernacle, carrying in great pots of poinsettias and piles of white carnations.

“Let me help you,” Michael called to Amanda, rushing over and bumping his forehead solidly into hers. His mother laughed and went outside for more flowers. Amanda saw stars and the bright sheen of embarrassment that flooded Michael’s already rosy features. He’s gorgeous, she thought, and said yes almost before the question was out of his mouth.

“God led me to you,” Michael told Amanda repeatedly, and meant it with all his heart. His daddy approved. His mama beamed. That Amanda was a good Christian girl, a little serious and unsure of herself now and then, but a fine young woman. People talked about her mother, but Amanda wasn’t wild. She was a faithful member of the congregation. She’d make a fine preacher’s wife.

At first the only question for Amanda was whether she deserved Michael, whether she was godly enough to be his wife. Her doubts on the subject made Dede stay out of her way, and sent Delia out to her garden and Cissy off on a long contemplation of the more obscure holdings of the county library. But once Amanda convinced herself that she could somehow make herself into the wife Michael needed, she became equally insecure about all the things she imagined would go wrong before the wedding. For weeks Amanda squalled through the house, certain that Michael would drop dead or the sky fall before she could be married. She became fanatical on the subject of church attendance, but neither Dede nor Cissy responded well to harassment. A few times Delia gave in and went with Amanda to Cayro Baptist Tabernacle, where she hadn’t set foot since crying season. There she shifted uncomfortably in the pew next to Michael’s uncle, a carefully benign expression on her face. That expression vanished after the service, when Delia stood outside the church talking and laughing with M.T.

“Lord God!” Delia exclaimed loudly at one point, ruining the good impression her numb endurance of two weeks’ sermons had won her.

“You embarrassed me!” Amanda wailed once they got home.

“Why can’t she just marry that boy and leave me out of it?” Delia said to Cissy when Amanda ran back to her room.

Amanda’s hopes for Delia’s salvation were sudden and constant. She seemed determined to bring Delia to God—specifically to Baptist Tabernacle, Michael’s family church—as proof of her own worth, her destiny as a preacher’s wife. Cissy doubted that even a penitent Delia would solve Amanda’s problem. Amanda was never going to believe herself safely a part of the God-fearing, respectable family that had produced her Michael.

“You’d probably have to renounce me,” Cissy told Delia with a smirk. “After you joined the church and all.” Delia gave her a long calculated look, but said nothing.

Amanda got married on the second Sunday in March, a week after her eighteenth birthday. That morning she shut everyone out of the bathroom with the makeup mirror, and Dede kept going out back to smoke. Craig Petrie had reappeared at Thanksgiving with a determined smile and a little baggie of Panama Red. When he left, the smile was wider, and the bag and a packet of papers were safely hidden in Dede’s boxes of secondhand books in the garage.

“Don’t believe what people tell you about this stuff,” Dede told Cissy when she offered her a toke. “It’s like a bottle of beer but you don’t get bloated or nothing. Makes you a little hungry, though, you got to watch that.” She found another boy to sell her a bag at a good discount. She wasn’t going to let herself become dependent on a Petrie for anything she liked so much.

Cissy and Dede were giggling at the awful dresses they were required to wear as bridesmaids when there was yet another crisis of faith.

“Wouldn’t be too bad,” Dede drawled, “if we shortened the skirt, dropped the neckline, changed the color, and pulled off this rickrack crap.”

Cissy doubled over with laughter and noticed for the first time that Dede had already cut off the hem of her dress. “I think the best thing we could do is march naked behind Amanda, wiggle our butts, and remind everyone what a marriage is really about,” she said.

Amanda came out of the bedroom with a towel around her neck and her makeup half done. “I heard you. I heard you.” The big wire curlers all over her head rattled menacingly. Limp wisps were already falling around her temples. Those curls were never going to hold up for the ceremony, Cissy thought.

“This marriage,” Amanda sputtered, “is about joining our souls before God, committing ourselves to the Lord’s service.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Amanda.” Cissy knew she should say nothing, but she couldn’t help herself. “You’re getting married, not taking a vow of celibacy. God isn’t keeping count of every minute of your life. I’m pretty damn sure he’s got other stuff going on.”

“You don’t know anything about God,” Amanda shouted. “God is the judge of our lives. Wait and see what you know when you’re burning in hell, when the flames of God’s judgment are licking at your crusty soul.”

“What is going on?” Delia came out from the back.

“We were just joking about the dresses,” Cissy said.

“She was telling me about God!” Amanda’s mascara had started to run.

“Well, what did she say?” Delia’s face was almost as pink as the tea roses pinned to the veil she was holding in her left hand. It was Amanda’s veil, and Delia had been pressing it out when the shouting erupted.

Cissy stopped in the act of reaching for Kleenex. “I didn’t say shit, but I’ll tell you, she better start asking God to sweeten her soul. She has got to stop trying to run everybody else’s life.”

“If I was running your life, I’d run you right out of this house. I’d run you out of Cayro. I’d run you clear out of the state of Georgia. Don’t you know you are going straight to hell?”

Cissy looked from Amanda’s wrathful countenance to Dede’s frank enjoyment of the fight. Then she looked down at the orchid and yellow bell-shaped skirt Amanda had insisted she wear. It was only one dress size smaller than Dede’s, but Amanda did not seem to notice how much Dede had shortened hers. Now that Dede was standing up, Cissy could see that Dede had put in enough darts to make the dress cling suggestively at her hips and bust. Catching the direction of Cissy’s glance, Dede produced a glassy smile. That is not the grin of a sober woman, Cissy thought. Can’t Amanda see?

“Oh yeah, Cissy is damned if anyone is,” Dede drawled. “No question.”

Dede was no devotee of Christian dogma. She had even been known to declare herself a Buddhist when pressed, but she took her faith by spells, a fierce believer when she was in the spirit, even if she usually slept through Sunday services and sneaked beer with the boys at Sunday afternoon ball games. Christmas and Easter, Dede worshiped with utmost seriousness. Most of the summer she did not. Last Christmas, right after Amanda got engaged, Cissy found her stoned and supine under the tree weeping out loud at the fate of the baby Jesus. The Cross, Dede explained, was like the tree. It had cradled the Son of God. Dede’s hands were deep in the fir branches and covered with scratches, and Cissy did not doubt either her sincerity or her grief. They might have been chemically induced, but Dede’s doctrine was heartfelt, no matter that she picked absently at the almost invisible scrapes and shrugged off Amanda’s invitation to a revival meeting two weeks later.

“I got faith,” Dede protested in answer to Amanda’s accusation that she did not. “I just don’t always make a big stink about it.”

At heart, Delia’s first two girls were believers. Amanda worried about her own worth, but not about the possibility that there might not be a Nazarene to judge her. Dede’s faith was seasonal but there was no blasphemy in her, while Cissy picked at the idea of God like a prickly abrasion on her soul. It was Cissy, they all agreed, who was the heathen.