Marilou Is Everywhere Read online

  “First thing, I want you to get in the water and wash up, OK?”

  Virgil had put a bottle of shampoo in his back pocket before we left the house. I knew my hair was gummy under his hand. It stuck under my nose and on my cheeks with its oil. I couldn’t smush the oil off with the back of my hand anymore because it was getting too thick.

  Lately I felt funny about him touching me. I felt funny about all men. At school, I had punched Justin Deeba in the stomach when he said he liked me as we stood in the lunch line. I couldn’t think what else to do. He dropped the confetti plastic tray. The gray green beans and their juice and blubs of salt pork got all down his shirt and down the front of his pants. My face had gotten so I thought it was melting, but I was crying. And I loved how it felt. I spent the rest of the day hiding in the woods behind school, trying to look into the white sky hard enough for it to shimmer.

  Also, I had noticed that men smelled. They smelled like pepper and skunk and oil. Some reeked of it. It frightened me that lately this smell came off my brothers, too.

  When we got to the water, Clinton was already in, ducking his head under and coming up with his mouth wide and his hair flat and bright across his shoulders. He walked out and took off his clothes and laid them out to bleach in the sun. He pulled on a bottle of pink muscat wine and spat some at Virgil.

  “Fucking stop it,” Virgil said.

  “Fucking make me,” Clinton said. He fell back again into the water, slapping home on it. Virgil got tense whenever anybody was drinking or getting stoned. He had never drunk a bit of alcohol. He tried not to make it a big deal, but once I saw him sip on Clinton’s coffee cup by mistake and spit wine right on the floor, and go wash out his mouth over and over.

  I had to do something about the snakes before I could get in the water. I found a few big rocks and carried them to the dock. I threw them down hard so they would send a tail of white water gutting up from the surface, one after another so the snakes would get scared off. This I had always done, since I was little. It was kind of a joke that I still did it, but not the kind of joke that made anyone laugh. Then I walked back around to the marshy edge where the water was shallow and warm and fine like dog hair and started getting in barefooted with my feet sucking down. I didn’t like to jump in just yet. I liked the feel of the water coming up my legs and dimpling where my hairs stuck in it. I did it slow so I could get used to the cold.

  Once Virgil was on the flat land, he jumped in from the dock to make himself look brave again. He and Clinton bashed each other’s heads against the water and kicked. He put some of the shampoo over his shirt and ran his hands to suds it up, then dove down. But he got out again almost right away and laid his wet clothes where Clinton had, then put out the tackle box and started thinking through it.

  The fishing spot was on the other side of the pond where it cut deep into the sycamore banks above it. I could just still see them casting out over there. Their reflections sent out flying tentacles that kissed up at the place where their hooks landed. Virgil was using my Snoopy rod, even though it was sized for a girl, since it brought him the best luck. He always asked me for permission to use it, even though he had given it to me for my eighth birthday.

  Alone in the water I bladed my hand through it until my fingers got grainy. I hugged my legs and arms in to feel the sink. Around one end, benches ringed the dock. The boards were broad and flat so I could lie myself out full length on them and get my front half dry from the sun, all the sticky water shrinking while it dried up. It left a dust all over me. Something was wrong with my skin. When it got wet, I could rub on it to make gray strings, and then sweep them away. In my ankle hollows, the skin was hard and brown and I could peel it off with a fingernail. What was underneath was dusty and white.

  Once I felt good and hot, like the muscles were about to fall off my bones, I would jump back in from the dock and feel the water shock me to pieces. I was getting a body. One day my mother had stopped me at the door and informed me in a blistering whisper that she could see my nipples through my T-shirt. She had given me one of her old bras, teal satin, but you could see down into it that I didn’t have enough chest to fill it up.

  A shadow passed over my eyes and turned the gloom inside my head from red to green. A boy was standing over me. He was tall and his elbows buckled out to the sides since he had his hands on his hips in a disapproving way.

  “Hey. Hey. You better get away from here.” I sat up and squinted at him. There were two more boys behind him, and a girl with her hands hitched down into her shorts pockets. Back up at the house, I had missed the white Range Rover. A dark cord flashed across my eyes. Something in my head was ringing, and they came closer. My underwear was drying out and it stuck to my skin when I shifted around.

  “Can’t you see the sign? Can’t you read?” It was posted NO TRESPASSING all around the fence, but I shrugged.

  “Course she can’t read,” the girl said. Her T-shirt sleeves were cuffed up almost perfectly to look like wings.

  “I can read,” I said. I hated how my voice sounded feathery.

  “Then what’s she doing here?” the other boy asked. I wished him to say it louder so Virgil would hear and come tell them off. I cut my eyes to the left, where the fishing was, and saw Virgil and Clinton naked except for wet underwear, leaning their heads together over something. The boys were standing on either side of me now, although I did not believe they had the guts to put a hand on me. The boys had white T-shirts that were so bright in the sun they looked blue. The taller one, he was closer and his jaw hung down. He was looking down my bra.

  I wanted to scare him. So I took his hand and put it to the front of my underwear. He had to stoop down. But he did it willingly. His palms were cold, and I realized he was already afraid, of me or in that moment, some way. The waistband of my underwear was still wet, but the rest of me was all cooked from the sun. He hardly moved, but a clear drop of snot fell from his nose onto my knee. I pushed his hand down farther to my privates. It was so quiet I thought I heard his fingernail catch on the cotton. I don’t know how long we stayed like that.

  “Ew, freak!” the girl said. Except she said it long, like: fur-reek. That’s how I could tell she wasn’t from here. “Whatever, come on.” The tall one was still looking at me. He wiped his hand on his shorts like I had messed it. She kicked the shorter boy in the ankle, and that broke the spell. When I stood up they took off hard, running backward for a second before they turned. They crashed the laurels at the lake rim and threw all the birds in there upward. Clinton looked up at the sound. I don’t know what he saw. Nothing that worried him, plainly. I got the shampoo from where we had dropped our things and poured a flood of it in my hand, hot like my own guts, and walked back into the water to wash.

  It was the kind of gas station where they kept a black rubber hose out front for you to drive over and clang a bell. Virgil and Clinton were about to mow a big field for some gas company that needed a clear plot for a foreman’s trailer, and they were excited about the money. We were still drying off from the pond. My hair floated up white blond. The radio was coming in clear that day, Bad Company and Van Halen, although the clouds were metal blue at their edges and it would rain. I felt good. I usually had a window of optimism after I bathed, which wore off by the time I was dry again. But for just then, I was washed. I was hungry in a clean right way I hadn’t found in some time.

  Inside the gas station was a store that had basically one of everything. All the food was pushed to the edge of the shelf with nothing else behind it, so it looked more like someone’s private soup museum than a grocery. People said it was a front for a secret poker game, or possibly the McConaugheys moved pain clinic pills or whatnot. In any case, it had the soft, sour smell of a room no one uses. Each can had a price sticker on the top and was dim from dust, although you could see brighter swipes from where people had picked the thing up, the cocktail weenies or whatever, and considered buyi
ng it, and then put it back. I went around writing things in the dust. I wrote BABIES on everything. BABIES BABIES BABIES.

  The girl behind the counter had a deep face, like her eyes were all the way back in there, and she had a line down her chin where she had been glued back together, and her name was Melda McConaughey, which I knew because she and Virgil had been the same year in school. They had actually gone to prom together, although just, Virgil said, as friends. Even though they had only graduated three years before, Melda already looked a little like a mom or an aunt I wouldn’t notice. She wore a big sweatshirt with her fingers dangling out of the cuffs, and she had a pink tissue balled up in one fist. When she saw Virgil, she stopped rolling quarters and busted down crying.

  “Oh my god,” she said. “You heard.” What was this? I wondered. I loved it when anybody was in grief. Grief was something interesting. It had a heat, and I had none of my own. It seemed to me I hadn’t felt anything with a point to it, and yet I cried often. One time I cried at the store over a stuffed chimpanzee shoved in with the magazines. It had probably fallen out of someone’s cart. I thought about all the empty hours it would spend, and its lostness. I wasn’t stone. Sometimes my sorrow lay over all I saw, like neon light.

  “What’s the matter?” Virgil asked her. “Is it your mom? Is she OK?”

  She waved away the thought. Her mouth was open and she sucked in air while her shoulders racked.

  “It’s Jude,” she said. “She’s been missing for weeks, but nobody knew.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I don’t know, I just heard.”

  “Why you crying about it if you don’t know how true it is?” Clinton asked.

  “Well, last week they found that other girl in the woods behind the CoGo’s. It’s terrible!”

  Clinton shrugged like maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. “She could’ve just run away.”

  “She’s dead,” Melda said. “I can just feel it. Sometimes I just know things. I knew it as soon as I saw you.”

  “Whoa,” Virgil said.

  “You were the one she really loved. You know that? Because it’s true. I’m sure she died loving you.”

  Melda spoke in a fashion borrowed from soap operas, and I thrilled in it. I felt almost a secondary kind of fame from it. I maybe was not that much of anything, but my brother, he was a dead girl’s true love. Virgil and Jude had dated for almost two years, which was long for high school. I had always been a little obsessed about her. Sometimes, when I was bored, I would go through my catalogs and pick out a gift for Jude on every page, what I imagined she’d like, anyway, and I had from that the illusion that I knew her well. It says a lot about my interest in Jude that I took her disappearance as some juicy twist instead of danger coming to a real person. I guess I thought of her as a character above anything else. She seemed fearless, even as different from everybody else as she was. I, on the other hand, said strange wrong things almost constantly and burned with the shame of it. So I made her a hero, and sowed meaning in everything she did, but I couldn’t accomplish this without making her flat, without real features or pain.

  Virgil went behind the counter and he held Melda. Like a little girl she tucked her head into his shoulder. She was still holding the paper sleeves for the quarters, and they rustled as she clasped her hands around his neck. And that was the only sound happening in there. Clouds moved over the sun. The light in the room shrank away.

  “You know if anybody’s checked on Bernadette?” Virgil said.

  “Who’s that?” Melda asked.

  “That’s her mom. Shit. She’ll be in pieces.”

  “Well, I don’t know. You go up and ask at Pecjak’s. Everybody’s talking about it. I heard they set up a TV on the hoagie counter.” Just like that, Virgil was already out the door without good-bye. Right away the truck started up. Christ, Clinton said to the hurry.

  Sissy Pecjak’s gas station had a row of tables inside, so it was something, very slightly, of a restaurant, and you could also buy motor oil, tires, kiddie pools, feather dusters made of real dyed chicken feathers, and everything like that. There was a coffee smell as soon as we got in the door, and it was too hot because so many people were standing around sweating and the smell of wet tobacco and salt and oil and hay came up to punch on my brain. I had never seen so many people there before. It was all men, except for Sissy herself, and she was reaching up to find a pack of cigarettes in the dispenser while her own lit one shook down a cap of ash onto her blouse. The sound of everybody talking went like: wash, wash, wash. All the newspaper racks were empty. Virgil asked if anybody’d spare a paper and some bald-headed man with little round glasses and white muttonchops told him he could go find one on the floor of the john. I stood in the back. The refrigerator case leaked hot air on the backs of my legs. Clinton dropped his hands down on my shoulders like they were keeping me from floating away. It was plain that everybody was very excited. On the TV, they showed a picture of Jude from senior skip day. She was sitting on a garbage can in front of the Sheetz with a backward baseball cap and an extra-large Mountain Dew and very stylish round sunglasses. If you didn’t know her, you might think she was tough, but she played violin and read poems on the morning announcements. Still, all the men standing around were muttering about she must have gotten herself into some bad business, dealing drugs like her kind usually did. But what they really meant was: She was black. Well, mixed, but in Greene County that meant basically the same thing, and she was the only black person in school. Her father, Alistair Vanderjohn, was a college professor and a black man, all at once. Whenever he came to visit, you could feel the effort people made to not stare, just like you could feel us all move our eyes around Jude.

  The people standing around were saying the Vanderjohn girl had been gone two weeks at the slightest, and she’d run away because her momma was a hoarder and a bestiality practicer, and someone had seen Jude in the Greene Plaza shopping center, which was where people waited in their cars to buy dope from other people in cars. And someone else said oh my god she was just there to buy those chocolate bars from the Aldi’s that everybody’s so crazy about. Well, I’m just saying. Well. It sure is sad, is what they were all saying. It’s so sad. What a tragedy, so young, and all this, except their eyes were glass burned up with joy, with the kind of light you don’t see except in happy people. I swear it. Someone had even brought a cooler of beers inside the store like this was all for fun. I couldn’t understand why people’s faces were matched so badly to their words. Except of course I could. Everybody loved a tragedy, especially me.

  The bald-headed man leaned up next to Clinton and said, “Can’t believe it, but it happens all the time.”

  “Yup.”

  “You better watch out for that one. She’s old enough to worry about, sure.” His eyes landed on me, wet and shivery, I guess because of some emotion. I didn’t like how they stuck on my chest.

  “Oh no, Cindy’s good, she stays at home and helps. Huh, bunny?” I could feel right then how my belly poured out over my shorts and my T-shirt kept rolling up over it, and how my legs were crammed together with sweat at the top. I would give anything to disappear.

  “Well, that’s good. That’s remarkable.” The last part he said louder, so I knew he was trying to talk to me. When he turned away, I wrote F-U-C-K-Y-O-U on my arm with a fingernail.

  Virgil was back with the newspaper. It had been folded so the pages were all shuffled up and had wavered from water drying. His mouth was plucked down at the edges, and he looked a little wild in the eye. He bought a candy bar anyway since it would be rude to not buy anything. A Caramello, which he handed off to me like no big deal, but he knew they were my favorites. I carried it lightly by its edges so the heat from my hands wouldn’t ruin it. I would eat it alone in my room, and if I did it right I would briefly begin to float.

  I don’t know, and maybe I just wanted the attention, but disappearing
didn’t seem so awful to me. I liked the thought of it, right away. I know that sounds cold, but I wanted so badly to be gone. She had passed to another side where there was no accounting for her actions, and where there was nobody to talk at her. I wished I had thought to go missing.

  And I wanted to be famous. I wanted all the hidden hearts to search for me. I wanted to sparkle in the vast outline of the gone, because the gone took up the whole sky and air. How had Jude done this magic? Gone was a place where nobody could touch you. Like a heaven, or that’s what I thought.

  Pulling away from Pecjak’s, a new cold edge came on the air. The road spooled out backward from my spot in the truck bed. Each curve ate the last gray curve, and when we dipped the silvery trees and signs and things were whipped clean away by our motion. I imagined Jude carried off by a vast wind, scattering the treetops as she passed. The storm broke, and threw cold coins of water down on me in the back of the pickup.

  III

  The first time I really noticed Jude, I was little, maybe ten or eleven. It was a summer day, blind and hot. Through the vines, I could see the dogs moving in the bowers. Grapes hung down between their legs, little ones, and their backs were black. The air and sun lit up their edges blond. They went in circles or turned back to pace. A green car went through, a black truck, a blue truck. I was watching them all morning.

  My brothers mowed yards for money every spring and summer, but I had always been confined, unfairly, to the house and the porch. I counted the cars, all the kinds and colors, for something to do, but it was a hobby with a lot of boredom in it.

  “Get me out a piece of bread, Cindy,” Virgil said that particular day. He was a senior in high school then. He had come in from mowing and the seeds dandled off his arm hairs and stuck to his sweat. His shirt was all stretched out. He wiped the grease on his chest like a V.

  “She ain’t supposed to be fetching for you,” Mom said. She was in the kitchen smacking can icing down onto a sheet cake with a butter knife. Clinton was in the dark on the couch just waking up. He threw his arms wide and wiggled the fingers.