(This Week is the Second Book of Sarah and Tess)

Music

Toward her end, Mom didn’t always get enough oxygen to her brain to support a personality. Some doctors blamed it on alcoholic dementia, others figured it was caused by a series of small strokes she had suffered beginning in her early seventies. I do not know enough about medicine to form a dissenting opinion based on science, but I knew Mom as well as anyone ever could, and her so-called dementia was an in and out thing like tides. Her vacuity usually came in when it was convenient to have it and went out when we were alone. I’m not saying that Mom always faked it because there were times when attempting to have a conversation with her was the same as talking to an infant or a dog–not even Mom was that good an actress–but I am certain she was not always as sick as she’d have other people believe.

I admired Mom, if nothing else. She lived her life as though it were a practical joke on the world; her own form of revenge for having been born.

Two weeks prior to Mom’s death from renal failure at what I thought was age seventy-eight, but apparently two years younger, she had traced back to two weeks into her hectic life, as it had been told to her by one of the few nuns she had respected at St. James. The preceding paragraph was culled from hours of Mom’s mumbling whilst on the morphine drip, but as it goes with world class liars like Mom, when they tell the truth you know it.

There was a note pinned to a blanket which contained a sleeping infant girl found by a priest inside St. James Catholic Church at Victoria, B.C. on 1 July 1943. According to the note the baby’s name was Karen Patricia (the surname was not provided). She’d been born on 17 June. The note explained that the alcoholic father had long vanished and that after “two weeks of the blues” the writer of the note (assumed to be the baby’s mother) had decided that either the child or she had to go over nearby Steel Bridge, she had decided that suicide was the better way to go. The RMCP was summoned and the body of a young woman was found lying in the dry gulch a hundred feet below the bridge. An autopsy revealed that she had recently given birth. An investigation, which involved a lot of local door knocking, revealed that the woman’s name was Susan Jones–nineteen, who would have been evicted for non-payment at the boarding house she had been staying at if not for the baby. “Jones” was thought to be as bogus as the dimestore ring the woman had passed off as her wedding band, and further searches of nearby hospital records yielded no further useful information, for all the recent mothers listed were still very much alive and kicking and in possession of their equally lively offspring.

She never explained (or didn’t remember why) she had emigrated to the United States from Canada In 1955. She was raised a ward of the church and was transferred from one Catholic orphanage in Victoria to another in Seattle, from which she ran away regularly and for keeps two years later. Soon after her escape, Mom added two years to her age and changed the spelling of her name to “Kaaren”–after an actress of the same name. She also changed Patricia to Hester (in honor of that one Canadian nun she liked) and Jones to Nelson, which was the surname of what’s now called an “enabler”–someone named “Marie,” whom Mom had met on the outside. Mom said Marie pretended to be her aunt, but never gave me the why or how of it–though she once claimed that Marie had been a girlfriend of her father’s–but that had to be a lie because she’d never learned his name.

Regardless, sixteen-year-old Karen Patricia Jones vanished permanently when eighteen-year-old Kaaren Hester Nelson married our father, Delroy Spahr, on 10 July 1959, four months before I was born. He was in the Navy and I’m guessing that having an obviously pregnant fiance aided in gaining Mom a new green card, identification that further cemented her fictions and a social security number. Apparently the Catholics were not queried, nor did they seem to be searching for Mom. I might have questioned the entire scenario if I hadn’t found her “lost” original green card hidden in the false bottom of a jewel box she had held onto for God knows how long, shortly after her death. Sure enough it belonged to a smiling twelve-year old girl named Karen Patricia Jones. And it was easy to tell that it was indeed her. Anybody else would have destroyed that bit of evidence, but I can just see Mom removing it and gloating over her deception late at night.

Mom was very pretty. Small and thin almost to the degree of lacking enough mass to cast a three-dimensional shape, but she was still most definitely a girl, and men liked her. She and I both had dark hair, brown eyes and high cheekbones. We looked very much alike for years, until I got too tall and jangly to pull off delicacies, like a guy.

And for whatever reason that beat look most people who spend their lives in poverty acquire (our Anna Lou and, to a lesser extent, Nora were prime examples of that) never stuck to Mom. Mainly it was due to her having uncommonly great teeth–which was extremely rare in our society. Years down the road smoking did create lines around her lips, like crazing in old pottery–yet the downtrodden eyes, slurred voice, obsequities to small powers and drag in the step never found her.

She had many talents, but being a parent wasn’t one of them. I might have liked her if she wasn’t my mother.

End Chapter One

I waited outside the church for Tess, I knew she wouldn’t leave early since it was now up to her to protect Mom’s credit at Graydon’s. Everywhere we ever walked seemed to be a mile from home and though there were shortcuts they always came with an extra hill to climb. Too many weirdos afoot to let Tess walk home alone.

There was a little store across the street. “Don’s Market” was the only business on Anoka Avenue. It was run by a Korean couple who didn’t bother to change the name when they bought the store and adjoining house from old Don, who went to Arizona to die. We never lifted from little stores because they were the proprietors’ livelihoods. This was not altruism, for unless you had the bad luck of landing a real asshole, a supermarket clerk would only chase you only so far– until the fact that they’d get paid anyway kicked in. And no supermarket was rumored to have a loaded shotgun stashed below the cash register. Mom and Pop outfits tended to equate five finger discounts with felonious behavior. So, extremely aware that I was being watched, I bought two cans of coke with honest cash earned via school porn sales. I crammed the cokes into my front pockets, crossed the street back to the Presbyterian church and climbed a maple tree that stood in the far corner of the parking lot, which gave me a view of the church’s front door. It was quiet and hot, and I could hear the cracking of Scotch broom pods that only my ears were particularly attuned to.

Coke cans in one’s pants pockets interfere with skillful tree climbing. But I’d reached the nook where the trunk split in twain about ten, fifteen feet up or so without much difficulty. Good News Club was scheduled for an hour. I didn’t have a watch but I figured that there might be forty-five minutes of tree-sitting in my immediate future. I extracted the cokes and placed the one I bought for Tess in a small notch in one of the main branches, tapped the top of mine and pulled the tab, which I automatically placed in my pants pocket for Tess’s art projects. I’d once heard that tapping the top of a can prevents carbonated eruptions–which, of course, is bullshit–but like removing a cigarette from a freshly opened pack and putting it back in upside down for luck (as long as it’s smoked last) it’s something I still catch myself doing to this very day, here on the down side of life.

From my vantage point I saw Dumbo and his mother leave the nearby Catholic church. Dumbo’s Mom, Mrs Holman, was a patient widow of somewhere between fifty-five and sixty–Dumbo was around thirty, but as it goes with people afflicted with his condition, his face wasn’t marked by time. They passed on the walk and did not see me.

A lot of the kids in the neighborhood used to tease Dumbo. Called names. Threw rocks. They did it because they were scared of what he was. I never did, but I didn’t do anything to stop it, either. Tess would. She’d stand up to the others and tell them that Dumbo can’t help being the way he is. No one dared to flip Tess shit because I was her sister, so they laid off when she was around–which, in a sense, meant that I had helped to improve his situation.

I climbed higher in the tree, leaving my soda next to Tess’s. I gained another ten feet because I could; I was skinny yet as powerful as a boa constrictor. When I was alone I didn’t stay in one spot long because it gave the inexplicable sadness that had recently begun its lifelong chase a chance to find me.

There was a pack of Old Gold and a box of matches in the rolled cuff of my right sock. Concealed by my pants, I kept the pack on the inside of my ankle to prevent smashing it. I’d started smoking at nine but didn’t become completely addicted until I was in high school. Mom was a Winston chainer, but I didn’t boost hers unless I had no other choice. Our organic disdain for each other extended to the brand we smoked. The world took place in a nicotine haze. There was no such thing as smelling it on you.

One of the things about Mom I envied was her ability to bring a match off any surface. She could strike one anywhere like Clint Eastwood in a spaghetti western. Said she learned it at Catholic school. She also learned how to roll a cigarette with one hand, deal cards from the bottom of the deck, palm tips off tables and how to change raisins to wine. Not like she told us any of it besides the match part, but Mom sometimes got loose with her tongue while sipping loganberry flips and yakking on the horn with Nora. She was also under the odd impression if she lowered her voice in a confidential manner while on the phone that we wouldn’t make a special effort to listen. We got a lot of information that way.

I was getting good at bringing a match myself. Though hitting one off a dry tree bark was hardly a trick. I lit my smoke and took a long look at the Catholic church I had seen Mrs. Holman and Dumbo exit. It stood at the end of Anoka and had that impressive look you see in mental institutions and prisons.

Although there were a bunch of Christian churches atop Holy Hill on Anoka, It was easy to see who had the most money. The Presbyterian church was an old building, kept clean by volunteers and its white paint job was regularly maintained. But it had no grounds to speak of and there was a definite sag to the building that I also noted in the Baptist Church that most of the colored people attended. It too was extremely clean, but there were cracks in the concrete foundation and their bell tower was missing a few shingles. Not so with the Catholics. Closely followed by Mormons on the east side of town, the Catholics had the cushiest operation going.

They had two blocks all to themselves, and unlike the others did not rent the property. One block was shared by the rectory house, which looked like a mansion to us, and the school, whose students ran from kindergarten age to 8th grade, and yet every kid had to dress in the same uniform. And there were nuns and priests all about in flowing garments that gave the whole place a magical aura present at no place else in Charleston. They had actual grounds covered with green grass, hedges and rose bushes, all maintained by a paid staff of gardeners.

The immense brick church was across the street. I glanced at the cross atop the bell tower and immediately understood to the last atom of my being that there was nowhere near enough happiness on earth for everyone; nor a just afterworld that ends pain and evens the score–unless nothingness counts as fair. And no matter what gods we might suck up to, Tess and I were born to live lives just as third rate as Mom’s. Just more hole in the wall people living hole in the wall lives.

Charleston would not exist if not for the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. At least it would not be as much as it is. Located between Bremerton and Port Orchard Washington (two other places that have the same condition of existence) on Philo Bay. Charleston, like Rome, is a city of hills.

Torqwamni Hill stands higher, but “Holy Hill” is a close second. It is marked by an impressive pile of bricks that is the Catholic church and school complex, which can be seen from just about everywhere in town. But the pope doesn’t stand alone. The crest is topped by Anoka Avenue, which runs about six blocks north to south and is heavy with religion. The Lutherans, Methodists, Baptists, Seventh Day Adventists, and a Synagogue were up there when Tess and I grew up–since, a Mosque and Sikh Temple have joined the fun–but the Buhddists, Iglesia Del Cristo and Mormons built on the other side of town. And there was the Presbyterian Church at which “Good News Club” was held on Wednesday afternoons.

Most communities had the decency to run Good News Club apace with the school year; but Charleston was an especially godless town so Good News ran year around. Turned out that all the Christian churches (except the despised Catholics, who had their own thing, and didn’t like the competition, either) were in on it and took turns hosting what’s best described as a booster shot of Sunday School–just in case the urge to since rebounded by mid-week. Not that Tess or I knew anything about Sunday Sunday School–we’d never set foot in a church of any kind before, but that was the gist of Good News.

And there we were on Wednesday. Tess was sparkling and pretty in one of the two school dresses that still fit her. While I was in my “uniform”–jeans and white tee shirt for summer, cords and sweater for school. The Charleston school system had announced that girls no longer needed to wear dresses to school, we just had to be clean. A new era had dawned. The high school even erected a “smoke shack” for the students–so they wouldn’t sneak off into the woods behind the school and set the bushes on fire. Those were forward thinking times.

It was we because Tess had lucked into an easy way to get me to come along. Her charm had nothing to do with my attendance; she had found a brand new Swiss army knife just lying there in a parking lot on Saturday–ten times the quality of any we had ever found in a vehicle and not the sort of thing stores made easy to take. The little witch seized the opportunity to trade it for me accompanying her to Good News–and not to ditch at any time unless it was her idea.

The meeting room was in the clean, well lit basement. About half the size of a regular classroom, the walls were that faux knotty pine paneling you could not get away from in the seventies. There were three rows of folding chairs facing a lectern that had a portable blackboard behind it.

“Bet they serve shortbread cookies,” Tess said.

“And lemonade that looks like pee.” I replied.

The defining theme of the room, surprise, was Jesus. Although the sober Presyterians had hung only one picture of the Lord on the wall, it was big and inescapable. Tess whispered that he looked like George Harrison with John Lennon colored hair; I thought he looked constipated. Seems to me there was a copy of the Ten Commandments hanging somewhere, as well as a poster containing the Lord’s Prayer, but I really don’t remember. I do recall that there were no plaster crosses, Madonnas or anything else that could be interpreted as a “graven image”–none of the stuff you see in a Catholic home.

The other kids ranged in age from seven to thirteen. They were the usual assortment of scrubbed goody-goodies and spazzes that I associated with obedience. Some had been hit with the Jesus stick so long that they radiated auras void of individuality.

Tess was a social chameleon who blended everywhere; I always appeared to be up to something and my reputation caused far more people to talk about me than to me.

Some people are addicted to the idea of belonging to something bigger than themselves. Maybe joining teams and clubs that require you to attend meetings when you’d rather be elsewhere are just in the blood. Could be we all are supposed to feel that way and I may be a freak for never wanting to belong to any structured environment by choice. Early on I spied a certain amount of butt kissing expected in every organization from the Brownies on up to Heaven. Something about hierarchical set ups smelled wrong–especially those that gathered children to exalt a higher power of some sort. And although nothing like it happened at our local Good News, history shows that an inordinate amount of sex perverts are attracted to mentoring opportunities.

But my aversion to such things ran deeper than my views on secret handshakes and participating in bake sales–and even deeper than the universal hate of pedophiles. For I’ve always known that giving myself to anyone or anything else other than Tess and her memory would diminish my devotion.

Mrs. Graydon and an old biddy (whose name I never learned) in support hose that concealed monumentally swollen ankles, ran the meeting, which was scheduled for two sharp. It was still a few minutes before the hour when Mrs. Graydon and the biddy entered, both carrying platters of shortbread cookies that the Thriftway bakery sold for a quarter per dozen–or free–if your hands were fast enough. One of the spazzes got excited over the cookies. Even Jesus can’t take some people anywhere.

Mrs. Graydon saw what I was wearing and it shitted on her attitude. She approached and whispered just loud enough for everyone to hear, “Susan, I thought I told your mother that we wear our Sunday best for the meeting.”

I don’t recall ever having respect for adults. The minute I was fast enough to outrun them and big enough hit back with meaning, whatever fear I had for them dried up–but I did have the sense to avoid the I Don’t Give a Fuck hardcases that inhabited our neighborhood; the guys who observed no standards when it came to victims. I used to think there was something wrong with me–for example, right then, her ugly moon face hovering near mine, I wanted to bury the main blade of the Swiss knife I had in my pocket deep into Mrs. Graydon’s neck just to see the look on her face. Fortunately for her, I had some measure of impulse control, and foresaw consequences not worth the experience.

“This is what I wear on Sunday.”

Tess just sat there and gazed at me with I told you so eyes. The other kids had that jackal shine in their faces–which comes when a grown up is on a kid’s case but you are not the kid in trouble; a perverted twist of the sympathetic heart, which knows all about the being on the spot feeling but enjoys watching the screws put to somebody else for a change.

This was where Mrs. Graydon could have ended it with a reminder to dress properly in the future. I’d hate to think what a stone bitch she might have been without the Lord’s guidance, because she didn’t let it drop. She pushed.

She sighed and shook her head. Mrs. Graydon savored the little moments of power that entered her life and seized every opportunity to play the Big Shot. Like the rest of us in our neighborhood, she couldn’t help being born poor anymore than she could help coming out stupid and ugly. But she could have helped the cheap little meannesses that flowed from her frustration, she could have pulled back and not do her best to embarrass people in order to feel better about herself.

“All right, Susan–we have charity dresses upstairs in the office–follow me–”

“My name is Sarah,” I said.

I had been saving that for the two years or so the cow had got it wrong. For a don’t fuck with it moment that had finally arrived. Mrs. Graydon didn’t have enough inside to take being wrong even about the smallest stuff without it fucking with her in some deep and reachable only by regression hypnosis sort of way. It has always pained me that so many of the people who practically beg for a beating can’t take a punch. The hurt little expressions in their secret faces, that show for just a second, make me feel as though I’m stomping an infant to death. And for a second it appeared that she was going to challenge me for knowing my own name.

Before Mrs. Graydon could bounce back, I stood and handed the Swiss knife to Tess.

“No deal.”

I left and that was the end of my relationship with organized religion.

We lived in a basement apartment in an immense old house on the Wyckoff side of the alley that should have razed after the War. It stood five floors with an attic just above Dumbo’s place. Built for a rich family at the turn of the century, it had fallen on hard times and was converted into apartments during the Depression. The place was always threatening to burn itself down but never got around to it; the overloaded fuses were constantly blowing and you often caught a whiff of a smoldering mattress wafting through the halls because everyone smoked in bed. Our unit had three rooms and a bath–the rent was something like fifty bucks a month. There was only one (often rain-swollen) door, which opened into the kitchen. Being mostly underground the place was a cave and the walls sweated no matter the weather; but it was fairly cool in the summer.

It got too hot to hang out in Fort Oxenfree so we went home and were surprised to see Mom seated at the kitchen table talking on the phone, most likely with her best friend Nora. She usually disappeared on the weekend, ostensibly leaving us under the guardianship of perpetually Percodan gacked Anna Lou, who lived a few blocks up the road; she’d call once in a while but seldom dropped by. If it was early in the month there’d be a five dollar bill under the toaster, sometimes food stamps we sold for half value–but mostly we were left to our own devices.

“Let me call you back, hon–double trouble just blew in.”

This was around the time when Mom had stopped speaking directly to me unless absolutely necessary, or was pissed off enough to do so. Tess had the charm of ten and served as our go between.

“Hiya Mom,” Tess said.

“Hi yourself,” Mom said, cradling the phone. “Goddam old bat Graydon came by a while ago. Said she looked out her window and saw you two lift a bunch of empties from behind the store this morning.”

Mr. and Mrs. Graydon ran the little store in our neighborhood. He had one arm and she was a Jesus freak. Both were as plump as old Elmo and continuously sweaty no matter the season; Mr. Graydon must have had the cardiovascular systems of a tin of Crisco; he was perpetually in recovery from his latest heart attack.

We never boosted anything from inside the store, nor was Graydon’s a prime source for returnables. But those bottles, all with a nickel bounty on their heads, were just lying there in the shadows, screaming “Steal me!” Which we did, first thing that morning. (I later suspected funny business: no one ever told us to give the bottles back or inquire about them in any way. This made me wonder if Mrs. Graydon had set a trap; though planning such would have pushed her limited brain power to the max, she was the sort of person who’d do such a small, shitty thing.)

“Oh, Mom,” Tess laughed, “we didn’t know they belonged to the store.” Unlike Mom, Tess told convoluted, outrageous lies that not even a mental defective like Dumbo would buy. Yet her lies were like TV wrasslin’–you knew it was bullshit but you played along anyway. “We thought someone must’ve left them there by accident.”

I was nosing about in the fridge. I found a Nesbitt’s orange soda that I opened by holding the edge of the cap against that of the counter and giving a good whack with my palm. Unlike the nasty tiki punch, it was cold and I drank half in one swallow then gave the rest to Tess. “Miz Graydon’s soft in the head,” I said to the room in general. “She thinks my name is Susan.”

“Good thing they go by numbers where you’re headed,” said Mom, sufficiently pissed to speak to me.

For a second I almost told her about it. All of it. The Elmo’s business, the shoplifting and the breaking into cars. Tess was a blue-eyed strawberry blonde who resembled the man in the photo album we were told was our father. Although I already had six inches on Mom, we had the same dark hair and eyes, startlingly identical faces and similar personalities. And neither of us liked that–it intruded on our individuality. For decades, she and I successfully explored each other for the evil we knew was in our own hearts. And we were pretty close in age, for she was married and a mother while only a teen. If it was just me I’d have fucked with it, but there was Tess to consider.

Yet I had to say something.

“Maybe you can stay home and we’ll attend church as a family tomorrow.”

It was still another few months before we began swinging at each other. I’m pretty sure something would have happened then if Tess hadn’t been able to defuse the bomb.

Sensing danger, Tess wrapped her arms around Mom’s shoulders from behind, kissed her on the cheek, nuzzled her ear and offered her a drink of orange soda. “We’re sorry Mama,” Tess laughed, “puleeze don’ give us to the cath-lick orph-nage with the mean nuns.”

It was funny to watch Mom, who, next to lying, took pride in her ability to manipulate people (mostly men) get played herself, utterly ignorant that it was happening to her. She was as smart as she was shrewd and amoral, but it was as though her atrophied sensitivity and subdued credulity gathered only for Tess–who could innocently and, eventually, ruthlessly, play Mom like a fifth ace.

A sinister smile appeared on Mom’s face. She had something to play herself. She never smiled like that unless she held the advantage.

“No orphanage,” she said, “but I did agree to send you guys to some Christer thing the Graydon biddy runs called ‘Good News.’”

Before I could protest, Mom raised her voice, just a touch. What she said next was both the best and worst in Mom; it still rings fresh in my mind after more than fifty years.

“I woulda told any other Christer to fuck off. But since Graydon lets us have credit, and since you guys prefer eating to starving at the end of the month, you can go till the check comes.”

Religion was one subject on which I had respect for Mom’s point of view. She’d been born in Canada, was orphaned and became a ward of the Catholic Church. For reasons never made clear until the end of her life, Mom was “shipped” to the United States. She ran away from Saint James Academy in Seattle for good at seventeen (although much, much later, she confessed that her actual age was two years younger), got married soon after, had me at eighteen and was a widow with two kids at twenty–and learned late, like so many, that she wasn’t cut out to be a mother because she didn’t like children. Though Mom habitually embroidered the Dickensian details of her war with the nuns, the soul of the experience sounded true enough. One thing was for certain, the great hostility she had for all things Christer was unimpeachable.

Still, Mom wasn’t an idiot. She knew Tess would do as told, but my attendance hinged on Tess’s strange ability to get me to do things I would not normally do. I don’t think Mom cared much as long as one of us went; she figured it would be enough to shut Mrs. Graydon up, thus protecting our account. Besides, a potential fifty percent Spahr sister conversion was better than a reasonable Christer would hope for.

Religion briefly entered our lives, uninvited, six weeks earlier (about three before school started) during the dirty month of August in which the grass is thick with hoppers and Scotch broom pods crack and let loose their dusty spawn. We were hiding in the bushes on a Saturday afternoon, waiting…

A Richard Speck-type in a primered Ranchero stopped and dropped three stacks of jackrags in the alley behind Elmo’s Adult Books and rang the bell. This happened every other Saturday, like visitation rights. Sometimes the Speck waited for old Elmo to waddle back, sometimes he’d drive off before the fat fuck unlocked the back door. It was one of the times the Speck drove off first. Tess stood lookout, and I dashed from our side of the alley, snatched a bundle, and got back under cover with seconds to spare. Then it was off to Fort Oxenfree, leaving Elmo a little poorer.

We moved as silently and swiftly as Indian scouts toward Fort Oxenfree. The alley ran about a mile and bisected Callow Avenue and Wyckoff Street. The Wyckoff side of the alley lay at the foot of Torqwamni Hill (forever “T-Hill”), and stood fifteen to twenty feet higher than Elmo’s and the other trashy businesses along Callow. It was a verdant bluff choked with brambles, weeds, struggling dogwoods, ivy, and switchgrass so riotously out of hand that it topped six feet in some places. Tess and I had created a secret world in the bluff, and as we made our way through the paths we had previously formed in the foliage, our feet automatically adjusted to the varying slant of the ground as though we were biped mountain goats.

Fort Oxenfree lay about a hundred and fifty yards south of Elmo’s, directly behind the White Pig Tavern. This meant we had to cross “the gorge,” which was the only relatively bald spot on our route, yet it was partially concealed by a peeling madrone which grew sideways and at a weird angle out of the bluff. Tess deftly crossed the short chasm, which stood over a good long drop, by using the exposed roots of a hemlock for handholds. I hurled the bundle across the gorge, she stopped it with her foot and I crossed even more quickly than she had.

A noisome swirl of portly bluebottles greeted us upon our arrival at “Fort O.” They were attracted by a recent explosion in a flat of Shasta tiki punch, which Tess had left in the sun. Soon there would be yellowjackets.

“Your pets missed you.”

“Hardee har har.”

We had selected the site for Fort O because you’d need a Sherpa to find it. It was a wildly overgrown flat spot we’d knocked down to about the size of a jail cell. It lay at the highest point in the bluff, atop an old stone wall gone over to blackberries and feral primroses. The front and the far side of Fort O were protected by a very long and sticker-bush laden fall to the concrete below. Entry from the bluff required a five foot climb up the side of the stone wall and through a trapdoor that Tess had made sticks and switchgrass. No friendly way in from behind, either. The alley side of Wyckoff Street was mostly a redundant series of vacant lots overwhelmed by Scotch broom, discarded washing machines and tires–as well as a seemingly sentient network of hiding, grabby ground brambles that would wrap around your ankles if you forgot to lift your feet, and goddamn stinging nettles that raised such hell with your skin that you never overlooked them twice. The Jesus of that kind of vacant lot lay behind Fort Oxenfree. It was such a shitty and hazardous little hellfield that not even the stew bums dared to flop in it.

I dropped the bundle and heard the typical Saturday afternoon din of the Pig below. Our vantage point behind a wall of switchgrass placed us about fifty feet from and twenty above the Pig. As always, drunken Specks bellowed and roared, and their pig-like women squealed and roared–all of it accompanied by the unsatisfying twunk of misstruck cue balls and a steady flow of C&W music coming from the jukebox.

Tess sang along in her sweet little girl voice:

“I turned twenty-one in prison,

Doin’ life without parole–

No one could ever steer me,

But Mama tried, Mama tried…”

We’d hit Elmo’s in preparation for the upcoming school year. The boys at Charleston Elementary were by and large sick perverts to begin with, but even more so when they hit ten; it was like some kind of alarm went off in their pants. Dirty pictures sold well and for a good price in the playground; Elmo’s wares were as disgusting as it got.

“Looky here,” Tess said, showing me the latest issue of Sweet Cocksucker, after we opened the bundle. “Must be a fiver here for sure.”

“Let’s bag ‘em for now,” I said. Which was exactly what we did. We wrapped them in polyurethane and packing tape, then placed the waterproofed booty inside the cache. Although Fort O was nothing special, the three-by-three square cache hole was. We’d dug it out that spring and reinforced it with planks, and waterproofed it with the same never ending roll of polyurethane we had boosted from behind Minder’s Meats.

What made the cache special was the cover Tess had connived from discarded bamboo and endless blades of switchgrass. There wasn’t as much as a screw or a nail in it. Using what she found lying around, she’d somehow created a dead match with the ground, as she had with the trapdoor. She’d also designed a system of “drapes” in the grass wall between us and the alley, which involved pulling strings to get and keep a view of the alley instead of using your hands, but wouldn’t open so wide as to blow our cover. Just nine, Tess had already long displayed superior artistic and mechanical talents–Not that it mattered to the fossilized fuckheads who ran the City of Charleston school systems. Girls who made the mistake of getting born around 1960–welfare brats to boot–had yet to experience much in the way of Women’s Lib. Besides, the district produced more felons than intellectuals, and we’d both realized early all you had to do was show up and do a minimal amount of work to pass to the next grade. A lot of tax money is fed to hopeless causes.

Tess opened a can of tiki punch that had been properly stored (It had to be piss warm, at best; my stomach clenched at the thought of it). She saved the ring top in a baggie with many others. Years later she gave me a stunning hippy art Statue of Liberty created from a thousand or more ring tabs. She’d painted each of them an outrageous color, and had meticulously looped them together over the course of hundreds of hours. Told me it was Janis Joplin singing into the torch. People offer me money for it all the time. I always say no.

Fort O faced east, which allowed us to luxuriate in the afternoon shade cast by Torqwamni Hill, listless from our labor and the heat, shooing bluebottles.Tess drank that stomach-turning tiki punch, sang along with the juke, and kept sneaking peeks at the Pig through the drapes because she found entertainment in the frequent sight of a Speck taking a leak in the alley (I later learned that the heads were one seaters–so you saw a lot of that). I began to fiddle with the slingshot I had reluctantly accepted in trade for a copy of Juggs during what you might call our “End of School Sale.”

I was three months shy of twelve; I’d get my first period for Christmas. Yet throughout that last year of my childhood something had already begun changing in my mind. It was a feeling especially keen during the progression of late summer afternoon shadows; a causeless anxiety underscored by the incessant cracking of broom pods in the quiet moments; a forlorn certainty that all was lost though hardly begun.

And there were times when I’d look at my gifted little sister and feel guilty about what I was doing to her.

I had plenty to feel guilty about. You see, every last thing–from the dirty magazines right on to the can of tiki punch Tess was drinking was stolen, even the returnable soda and beer bottles we had hidden in the grass because there were too many for the cache had been lifted from one place or another. If something could be boosted from a loading dock or a car in our little realm, we had it up there at Fort Oxenfree. Besides a substantial amount of hardcore porn, we had filled empty pickle jars with parking meter change we cleaned out of car ashtrays, some folding money, endless amounts of penny candies and gum lifted from a dozen different stores, several packs of cigarettes, lighters, a box of shotgun shells, sunglasses galore, prescription pills, lids of grass. We also had a bunch of cameras we didn’t know what to do with because we weren’t old enough to pawn stuff. Tess got the notion to “Robin Hood” them. We’d walk around and stick them in front of doors and in mailboxes of the shittiest looking places. We even left one for Mom and Anna Lou. They both pawned theirs.

And shoplifting was a scream. We’d dress for school and go into a store downtown (never shit in your own yard), and while Tess charmed the clerk, I’d get after everything that wasn’t nailed down and shove it in my pockets and underwear. Then we’d buy some stuff to make it look good. Alas, even the slingshot had been paid for with stolen titties. Only an incredibly gross 14-inch dildo that somehow oozed out of Elmo’s and just lay there in the alley had been gained in an honest finders-keepers sort of way. (I eventually tossed that beaut through the open window of my teacher’s car and hid in the bushes for the payoff.)

And it was all my idea.

If discovered and linked to us, the contents of the cache (especially the dope and porn) probably meant two tickets to the Mission Hill Academy for Girls. My guilt figured that I had it coming, but since none of it had been Tess’s idea, and since I was supposed to protect her, I figured I’d better try to do something.

“Tess?”

“Huh?”

“If we ever get busted, you don’t know shit about the stuff in the hole.”

“Half’s mine, Sarah.”

“I’m not sayin’ it’s not,” I said. “Just sayin’ if Mom or the cops or some other fucker we can’t do nothing about comes round and has a look in the hole, then there’s hell to pay. Just act like you know nothing about it. Let me do the talking. Don’t be such a molecule.”

Tess sometimes got shitty about being called a molecule, even though she heard it plenty. She handled the situation by fetching at least six Bazooka Joe’s from the cache and sticking them in her mouth. So gross. She sucked on them until they got soft enough to chew. That was her way of making certain she could give me the silent treatment. Pink drool dribbled down her chin.

I sighed. So much for the high road. Anyway, it must’ve sounded pretty cheap coming from me. There was something people saw in me that was different from “just a girl.” I was tall, strong and as unnecessarily violent as I needed to be. Some called me “Psycho” behind my back, but I didn’t discourage it because it added weight to the “Tell and I’ll kill you” I dispensed at the end of every porn transaction.

Tess never stayed mad at me long. Even when the years came that saw me extract her from one shithole squat to drag her to rehab for the God-only-knows-how-manyieth time, she’d be quick to forgive me. I’d strong-arm her to the car and she’d be screaming just how much she hated my faggot guts, and that for a hummer she could have my dyke cunt raped and murdered. Then she’d cry and promise it would be different this time. And I’d say my lines, those sincere there for you words that were never enough.

She tapped me on the arm, trying not to choke on the wad of gum in her mouth because she was laughing. I was rooting through the cache for a handful of the thousand or so shooting marbles we got hung with that spring (marbles as a game was always around, but sometimes it rose to a faddish level as it had that April. We stole untold dozens of bags from several drug stores and sold them at half price. Couldn’t give the fucking things away come May). I had gotten real good with the slingshot and could take a blackberry off its stem from twenty yards.

“What?” Then I saw.

Tess had parted the grass to check on the wild side of life and sure enough there was a Speck urinating behind the Pig. There were an inordinate amount of Specks in Charleston. All were skinny creeps who brylcreemed their hair into a pomp as though it was still 1950-something; and they had boney faces and small muddy eyes that conveyed an overall dullness of mind. Still, even a Speck usually had the decency to piss on the wall, but he was facing us. It wasn’t the first dick we’d ever seen. On the top floor of our building was a grown man yet forever a child with Down syndrome who lived with his aged mother. He’d see kids, and if his mother wasn’t around, he’d ask “Wanna see my elephant?” His name was Eddie but we called him Dumbo. Sometimes there was talk about sending Dumbo away to a “special school.” But that never happened partly because he never touched anyone and mainly because he was retarded.

“I’ll shoot him in the weiner,” I said, taking aim with the slingshot.

A horrified expression raced with consent to fill Tess’s face. She was that way. Her eyes and face were extremely expressive and often contained contradictory messages vying for control.

I was just playing around–I’d no more shoot the Speck in his elephant than yell out our secret location. For I may have been antisocial but I wasn’t reckless; I reckoned that even a Speck could figure out where the shot had come from. But Tess would have done it; she wasn’t big on thinking ahead.

-1-

Tess nagged me into visiting our father’s grave. She said it was the sort of thing that daughters should do. While she arranged a handmade wreath composed of daisies, bluebells, buttercups and dandelions on his tombstone, I stood there and felt stupid–thus more inclined to be a pain in the ass than acting the part of a dutiful daughter. Naturally, I had to get on her case about the inclusion of dandelions:

“Those are weeds, molecule.”

“So? People don’t grow the other stuff on purpose, either, Sar-duh.”

He died when I was two, shortly after Tess’s birth, thus destined to be just another smiling ghost in the family album and little more than the source of our surname. It never occurred to us to visit his grave, or even ask where it lay. But that changed on the first day of the 1971-72 school year, when at ages eleven and nine, we finally learned how he’d filled his grave. Suicide. One of Tess’s subnormal classmates had teased her about not having a dad. Said ours shot himself in the head in order to keep from knowing us–Tess especially.

“Tell me, fucker, or else,” I informed that kid, after school, in the playground, my arm locked around his neck, my knee in the small of his back, his face inexorably inching closer and closer to a mound of freshy squeezed dogshit. He told me he’d overheard his parents talking about it. I believed him because people are uncommonly truthful when faced with a high-end or else. Still, he got a bit anyway for making Tess cry–and for being stupid enough to think she wouldn’t tell me and that nothing bad would happen if she did.

Our mother was a word class liar, once in a lifetime. She capitalized on the specious notion that true sounding things are brief. “He had an accident” was her go to fiction about our father’s death on the very few occasions we brought it out. Nary a syllable more. Though characteristically terse, it depended more on a look in her eyes that told us not to fuck with it than brevity to get over. Quizzing our only other living relative, a pill head “aunt” from his side, would have been useless because Anna-Lou knew better than to cross Mom; and Mom’s best friend Nora would have just blown us off and reported our curiosity. Although it appeared to be common knowledge in some circles, Tess and I vowed to keep that we knew a secret. For me it was something I could use to fuck with it at leisure; my sister’s reasoning is harder to explain.

Tess had a secret word for the beauty she saw flashing in ugliness, like panning for gold in shit creek. I don’t recall the first time I heard her say Dreampurple, but it must have been around 1969 or ‘70–certainly no later than that time in ‘71. So, it made sense that she’d see the Dreampurple in self murder. Mom was big on labeling the things she didn’t understand about Tess us “phases.” If Mom had known about the wreath laying business she would have attributed it to yet another of Tess’s passing fancies with the same certainty she had that I’d wind up in Hell via the Washington State Women’s Corrections Center at Purdy.

At the time Tess was going through a Jesus phase. But it burned off like summer fog because you have to seek the Lord, whereas brutal reality never stops until it has killed you. It took me a long time before I realized that there was a difference between Tess’s phases and that which she held in Dreampurple esteem; Mom never got it, though sharp, for her it all added up the same. She didn’t know that the phases were temporary while the Dreampurple was for keeps. Naturally, I figured that Tess had nagged me into going to New Town Cemetery due to a newly found infatuation with Heaven. I went along because sometimes it was the only way to get her to shut up about a Big Idea.

I still wonder why flowers look natural on graves. You’d think that the two items are so far apart as concepts that they would clash in the mind. Conditioning, I suppose; the result of long term exposure to a tradition that’s formed a mental link in the species. Tess had arranged the wreath so it made a circle around the words etched on his small, rectangular cement tombstone:

DELROY DEAN SPAHR

1935 1962

I almost felt something when I looked at his shitty little poorman’s grave–a tiny cement square, not even made from natural stone, already cracking, certain to give away his name only after a few winters had leaned on it. It seemed to me that a life should add up to more than a name and two dates–all that time being a someone marked only by a small empty space between cold numbers. And the missing dash between the years you normally see on tombstones bothered me. It felt as though he’d been slighted in a way that I took personally.

This thinking didn’t go well with my baseless fear of the long shadows of late September afternoons. There’s something about September that’s death already; something that the shadows uncover rather than conceal. Ever since winter I’d been experiencing shocking, sudden mood drops; these had no triggers and are best described as an instantaneous switch from my familiar tone of thoughts to a cold, certainty that the universe and everything in it, like our parents and us, was already dead, and had been for a long time, if not always.

For the first few years of my Endless Now, I found that I could talk my way from it–even shake it off and pretend it hadn’t happened.

“I don’t want to be here,” I said. “If you’re gonna say a prayer, say it so we can go.”

“Don’t think so,” Tess said in a voice that weighed more than a nine-year-old kid should have to carry. She’d only say “Don’t think so” when something was over. Don’t think so items hadn’t passed the Dreampurple test.

Jesus might have walked on water, but he’d sunk for Tess. Christianity assayed fool’s Dreampurple. Nothing ever got a second chance at the test.

End Chapter One. Chapter Two on Monday