Dust to Dust: Part III.

People Who Live in Glass Jars.

J.Mann

Talula is up on a rock that looks like a huge dining room table spinning with her arms out, and I can still taste that chicken even though I don’t need to anymore. It seems like the saddest thing, this girl swirling around on a big red rock, her dress billowing out, and her head thrown back, and she’s just in the moment, just living it so perfectly. I wonder if I ever lived any moment like that.

“Talula!” I call, and she comes to a stop slowly, like a helicopter touching down, and then she laughs and climbs down and walks drunkenly over to me.

“What’s up baby Mae?” she asks, a little breathless.

“Shouldn’t we be walking some more?” I say.

Talula laughs, and throws her arm around me, and I’m terrified when I see it coming. This girl’s arm is about to slip right through me, and then she’s going to start screaming, and oh hell there’s nowhere to really run in this god awful desert, so she might tear off and get lost and-

But her arm comes to rest on my shoulders just as easy as you please, and she sighs. “I admire you!” she crows. “Somebody’s gotta keep me on track, or I’ll just never get home!” I think she’s going to laugh, but then she goes real quiet, and I have this kind of sick feeling, but we head back toward the road together, and she keeps her arm around me, so I guess it’s all right.

Then we hear another car.

Talula drops her arm, and turns, and when I squint, I can see it’s one of those volkswagon buses that the hippies used to drive. It’s a lemon yellow color, and it’s coming along sure and slow, with no kind of hurry. I’m about to yell something to Talula, like these are her people, and they have to pick us up, and then I see her face.

She’s scared to death. Her mouth trembles, and she looks around like an animal in a cage. “Not again,” she whispers.

“Talula, what’s wrong?” I ask, but she’s gathered up her skirts and she’s running. One of her sandals left behind in the red dirt. I look back at the bus, and stoop to pick up the shoe. I know she’ll miss it, if I don’t, and I start running after her.

It’s hard work running. Even when you don’t have a body to slow you down anymore, it’s like your ghost still remembers what it was like, and you don’t get to fly places, or shoot off real fast in any particular direction, or I’d already be in Vegas by now, and I was never the fittest person, so I’m left in the dust behind Talula’s long legs.

The bus passes me, and I realize this means it’s driven off the road. It’s heading straight for Talula, and that’s when I get real scared. I try running harder, faster. Maybe if I get there, then I can do something, although I have no idea what.

Talula sees the bus coming, and I hear her scream, and then it sways hard in front of her, and stops. I see a man in a black t-shirt, with a pair of those tight bellbottom pants jump out of the side door, and he tackles her hard like a football player.

I can’t hear what he’s saying to her, but Talula’s squirming underneath him, and screaming real hard, and it looks like he’s going to do something with his fly. His hand is reaching down there, and he’s holding Talula’s arm down with his other hand, and he’s sitting on her, and her legs are kicking, one bare foot just flinging clouds of dust up into the air. Her voice is harsh and like a birds. She does not stop screaming, she does not stop screaming, it is louder, and harsher, the closer I get, and the man starts hiking her dress up over her hips, and I’m close enough now, that I can hear him, and he’s crying, in these low, choked sobs.

“Talula, how am I supposed to…” but I can’t make out the rest of it, and I don’t know what else to do, so I just dig deep down for my mama’s voice, and I yell,

“You get offa’ her right now!”

He stops, and Talula squirms a little, but then she’s still, and they both look at me like I came out of thin air.

There’s a pause, and I don’t know what to say, and that’s all it takes.

Talula’s brown eyes are dark like an animal’s, and she pushes as hard as she can with her hips and her legs and her arms, and the man just kind of loses his balance long enough for her to slither out from underneath him. Her dress is mashed into the dirt, and she’s about to push herself off the ground.

The man isn’t looking at me anymore. He’s watching Talula, and I wish I could think of something to yell, but it all just happens so fast, and there’s a rock in his hand, and he throws it, just like you’d throw a baseball, and there’s a sound like a fist hitting the front door of a house, and then Talula’s head drops. Her whole body slumps. The rock bounces off of the back of her head, and the man just shakes. He shakes like an old person, like he just aged a hundred years, and I run for Talula at the exact same time that he runs for the van.

My eyes are full of tears, and I can’t see nothing but a yellow smear as the van tears past us and skitters back onto the highway. Heading in some direction, I don’t care where. I lean over Talula, and her head is turned on its side in this huge, dark puddle of blood. Her eyes are wide open, and her mouth is frozen open too. She just looks surprised.

I cry over her until the sun goes down. I wish I knew what had happened. I wish I knew for sure, but I feel like that man must have been her boyfriend, I shudder, when I think of the way she’d said “EX-boyfriend” before. She just wanted to go home, I thought. He wouldn’t’ let her go.

I sit with her all night. Her body, so still, and I listen to the coyotes, and I talk to the stars, and I wonder if another car drives by, how do I get its attention. Can a dead girl dig another her grave? It occurs to me then, that maybe Talula’s going to keep me company. It’s an odd thought, and it’s stops me from crying. Instead I just sit next to her and wait.

Sometime just before the sun comes up, I feel a cold wind blow through me. It’s the first time I’ve felt anything like temperature since I pulled myself out of the ground, and I look down at my bare arms, my fluffy nightgown, and when I look up again, Talula’s body is gone.

There’s no puddle of oily blood, no dress, nothing. It’s like she was never there, and I’m completely alone in the desert.

I cry again, for a while this time.

When I am done, the sun is up, and I drag myself up and away from the spot where he killed her. I get back to the road, and I point myself in the direction of Las Vegas 200 miles, and I start walking again.

I look back, just once, and I think I see her, near the green sign, just a shimmering wisp of white wavering like static in the heat rising from the asphalt: a ghost forever walking in the wrong direction.

                                                *

I sneaked out with Dervish again the night after I took him to Goldies. He only had to throw one rock. I was already waiting for him. This time, at least I was dressed, and I had on my sneakers.

We drove in his uncle’s truck down to the Biwater Cemetary, and Dervish parked sideways on the grass right by the gates, let me out, and rummaged around in the bed of the truck for what felt like half the night. I stood there, trying not to shiver. Something about the swamp air at night just got to me, and it could be a hundred degrees and every sane person from here to Mexico could have their fan turned up to Arctic Blast, and if I stepped outside, I’d just get a chill that ran the course of my whole body. Mama used to say it was the humidity. April said it was on account of me being retarded.

I looked at the stars while I waited for Dervish to find what he was looking for. They never seemed quite the same, and I didn’t know much about constellations or astrology, but they always made me feel kind of friendly, like earth had this group of gossipy neighbors who never want to be a bother, but always have their ears pricked up in our direction or their eyes peepin’ over the fence, just to make sure we didn’t get ourselves into to much trouble.

I watched one wink at me, and I imagined it was like the old man star in a fishing cap with a bunch of lures hanging off it. He was sweet. I though, winking at me, knowing I’d sneaked out with a boy to a graveyard.

Just then Dervish pulled his head out from under a green plastic tarp on the bed of the truck. He had a big mason jar with a lid on it, and a little bit of brown water in the bottom.

“Hang on a tic,” Dervish said, and unscrewed the top of the jar with a hard twist.

He poured the brownish water on the ground, and then took a bottle of water from somewhere else in the truck and rinsed the jar out. He shook it until clear little water droplets sprayed everywhere, even on me. I didn’t mind though. I giggled a little.

Dervish looked at me and smiled, and all of a sudden he caught me around my middle with the arm that didn’t have the jar in it, and brought me in very close to him. We hadn’t even hugged yet, and he looked at me like I’d never been looked at. I wasn’t even sure if anybody’d ever looked at someone the way Dervish looked at me, kind of hungry, kind of scary. I wanted to scream a little, but it was too exciting. I tried, instead, to think of how I would describe this moment to April, if she ever asked me anything about my life that is.

I thought he might kiss me, but instead he just busted out laughing, and then he loosened up his grip and thrust the jar at me.

“Here little girl,” he said, “for fireflies.”

I was delighted.

We took the jar, and Dervish followed me in through the gates of the Biwater. It’s not the prettiest place. Most of the old, historical graveyards are closer to the cities, so out here in the country, near places like The Pit, the cemeteries are whatever poor folks can put together.

Usually they started out as a rich plantation owner’s personal family plot. That’s where the pretty gates came from. And near the middle or the back there would be a little clutch of nice old tombstones all with one name all carved out in little storybook letters. The Biwater Cemetary, for instance, started out as the Chevelle Family Cemetary.

Surrounding the four Chevelle tombstones the other graves had grown up like weeds and wildflowers. Long after the plantation was gone, the local people just started bringing their dead here, and nobody had any money, so lots of folks just made their own tombstones: crosses nailed together out of spare wood, just shoved in the ground and knocked all kinds of angles by the wind and weather; painted rocks with names and dates, some said Sunrise and Sunset, some just said Mama, or Daddy. After the sewage treatment plant diverted one of their pipes through the swamp, the place became known as the Biwater. At least that’s what Mr. Pikes said. He heard I went down there with Dervish, and gave me the hell he guessed my Mama was too drunk to give me, but that’s for later.

Dervish and I made our way around mounds of dirt and, raised box graves, teddy bears and fake flowers left near smaller piles, or a smashed jar, or a pair of shoes left at the foot of some turned over earth. There was deep sticky grass on the side of the Biwater closest to the run off pipe, but on the other side of the cemetary, closer to the road, there were a few swamp willows dripping with ashen Spanish Moss, and over there winking around the branches just like that friendly old star, you could see the fireflies.

Dervish and me ran like children toward them, scattering anything we might have caught in the jar, but after some giggling and a lot of shushing, from me anyway, we got still, and they came slowly back. I held the jar, and waited, not even realizing I was holding my breath. Then the little bug was right there, and I lunged with the jar covering up the glass mouth with my hand and whisper yelling at Dervish to get the lid screwed down.

We were out there for a while, until I had at least fifteen fireflies in the jar. Dervish took my hand as we walked out of the Biwater, and I felt like I was walking on a cloud.

He helped me up into the cab of the truck, and as I got settled in with my jar of fireflies, he disappeared for a minute. When he came back he had a little stuffed chick. I’d seen it earlier on a little mound of dirt near the longer swamp grass, but everyone knows you don’t steal from the dead.

“Here,” Dervish said, holding it out to me. “It reminded me of your little chickie shorts.”

I must have looked upset because he stopped holding it out. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“We can’t take that,” I said finally, so scared of making him sad or angry and ruining such a wonderful night.

“How come? It’ll remind you of our first adventures.”

“I know, I just, you shouldn’t steal from the dead,” I said, so quiet the words almost dribbled down my shirt and didn’t come out at all.

“Aw, baby,” Dervish chucked my chin and hopped out of the car. I watched him walk around to the gate, and I thought he’d go put the little stuffed chick back, but instead he just tossed it, easy as a baseball, through the gates. I don’t even think he paused to see where it landed.

My heart went with that stuffed chick a little bit. I felt so sorrowful for it just scudding along the dirt like that, but Dervish had listened to me. He was a boy, after all, he probably just didn’t understand why I was being so sentimental. I looked down at my fireflies, and I felt the cab lurch as Dervish hoisted himself back in.

He had just called me baby for the first time. I couldn’t just let that go by without a slight thrill.

We drove back to The Pit, and I swallowed hard and reached across the bench seat for his hand, and he took mine. We stayed that way right up until he parked the truck beside Joel’s trailer.

Then he let go and hopped back down from the cab, came around and opened up my door. Instead of taking my hand though, he wrapped his big knuckled hands around me and lifted me right out of the seat. I was still holding the mason jar, and I was glad for the little space it made between us so he couldn’t feel how hard my heart was beating. When he set me on the ground, firefly jar or no firefly jar, my toes barely touched the gravel, and he kissed me again. I kissed up at him, and he kissed down at me, and I felt the scrape of his cheek, and the dry warmth of his lips and everything else was just magic and all that stuff you don’t want to hear about. My stomach felt like it was full of bright white lightening bugs for a full minute and a half, I swear.

Dervish silently walked me back to Mama’s trailer, and then he let go of my hand, and hugged me. I could feel my stupid heart beating away, practically screaming, “Take me anywhere! I’ll go! Just get me out of here!” Even though I didn’t know that’s what it was saying at the time. Dervish told me later.

“Goodnight Baby Mae. Can I see you tomorrow?” he asked.

“May…be.” I said, and we both laughed, and I watched him disappear into the shadows between the other trailers, and I left my jar of fireflies on the ground by the door, scared if I took them in, April would be awake and demand to know what I’d been up to.

In the morning, the first thing I did when I woke up was go check on my jar of fireflies, but they were all dead and stuck to the bottom of the jar in some of that brown stuff. I guess Dervish hadn’t been able to get it all out.

                                                                    *