it seemed. Ozzie kicked gently at Charlotte’s side—he could almost imagine his daughter and Junior sleepy from poison-spiked Kool-Aid.
“Daddy,” Charlotte said, unalarmed, sitting up to stretch.
Ozzie grabbed the box next to the quilt and collected the few things that remained. “Pickup’s parked over there,” Ozzie said. “We’re going home.”
“I’m glad you’re here, Mr. Yates,” Junior said, standing and brushing the dried grass off his jeans. Ozzie saw Junior give Charlotte a wink and a nod, granting her permission to obey her father. The gesture turned Ozzie’s stomach. “I’d like to discuss something with you,” Junior said, his eyes on Charlotte as she walked away.
Though Junior was soft-spoken, Ozzie knew there was no refusing him. Junior had no knives, no gun, and was too slight in build to pose any physical threat. His command of the family was simply the result of Charlotte’s devotion. Charlotte’s fast love for him had turned her feral and easily spooked, and Ozzie was afraid if he made one wrong move, she’d dart.
“Actually, I want to talk to you too,” Ozzie said before Junior spoke again. Ozzie picked up a Slinky from the box and let it coil and uncoil in his hand. “I don’t want you to see my daughter so much anymore.” He looked deeper into the box, his weak demand dropping off. A spark of sunlight glinted off the tip of the boy’s cowboy boot.
“Oh, Mr. Yates,” Junior said, smiling, shrugging. “‘The glory of young men is their strength, and the honor of old men is their gray hair.’”
“I’ll call the authorities,” Ozzie said. He pushed back the bangs of his hair, none of it gray that he had ever noticed. “There’s a thing called statutory rape, and it’s very illegal.”
“I don’t think you will, Mr. Yates.” Junior stepped in and put his hand to the back of Ozzie’s head. He leaned over, whispering, “‘For you bear with anyone if he enslaves you, if he devours you, if he takes advantage of you, if he exalts himself, if he hits you in the face.’” Just the sound of Junior’s voice brought to Ozzie’s mind scratchy black woodcut images of hordes of children, their eyes lidded with pestilence, of screaming angels with burnt wings, of buzzards and dead lions, all of which the boy had described to Charlotte as his picture of the end of the world.
Ozzie looked up again, his eyes only inches from the boy’s. “Don’t you have any words of your own?” he said. But he understood something about Junior. Ozzie had had his own brief bout with religion in the months after Jenny’s death—he’d wanted to sink into the open arms of the church and become disoriented by the archaic recitations of proverbs and creeds. The congregation, their Bibles and hymnals held to their faces, spoke a dark language of rapture and damnation. Ozzie had wanted no ease with the world, or easeful words to speak with. He’d wanted to be ruined for life.
Junior smiled with only half his mouth, a wicked smile, you’d call it, and he snapped a flame from his open Zippo. He lit a hand-rolled cigarette and said, “We’re getting married, Mr. Yates. That’s what I wanted to tell you. And don’t go thinking that she’s too young, because she’s not.” He leaned in again, and Ozzie felt his hot breath on his cheek. “‘Her lips drip honey,’” he said. “‘Honey and milk are under her tongue.’” As he slipped a card into the chest pocket of Ozzie’s shirt, Ozzie shoved Junior’s shoulders. Junior stumbled backward, his arms flailing for balance, until he fell into the tall base of a memorial statue that the Chamber of Commerce had installed on the courthouse lawn in honor of soldiers who’d fought in Vietnam.
“Mr. Yates,” Junior said, getting back up, a spot of blood blooming just beneath his eye from the scratch of the tip of an angel’s stone wing, “we’re told, ‘A tranquil heart is life to the body, but passion is rottenness to the bones.’”
“Rotten bones,” Ozzie mumbled. He turned and walked away with the cardboard box of Charlotte’s things.
Ozzie took from his pocket what Junior had put in: a picture of Christ, a very contemporary representation of him as pretty as a blue-eyed young girl with his long hair partly braided. He was entirely nude and nailed to the cross, blood flowing along the sinewy muscle of his arms, his godly schlong mostly hidden by shadow. His Pain, Your Gain was written at the bottom of the card. Ozzie wondered where the boy had even come across such a picture; perhaps priests handed them out in the street to seduce young people into church.
Charlotte sat in the truck, waiting, reading a tiny green Gideon’s Bible with a magnifying glass. Ozzie got in with the box, then drove away without closing the tailgate. He ignored the light thumping of the peaches as they spilled and rolled across the truck bed.
At a stop sign, he leaned toward Charlotte and smelled something sugary on her breath. Didn’t they used to say that if a baby’s breath smelled sweet, it portended a terrible sickness? As new parents, Ozzie and Jenny had been forewarned of all sorts of infanticides. When Charlotte was first born, Jenny banished Simp, the old tom, to the studio out back. Ozzie had never heard of a cat’s attraction to a sleeping child’s breath, but Jenny had been warned by all the old ladies up and down the street of the danger of such suffocation.
“Did you know,” Charlotte said, barely looking up from her little green book, “that you can break a snake’s back if you don’t handle it correctly? And there are whole churches of people who mix themselves strychnine drinks because the Bible says, ‘Drink poison and ye shall live.’ They call it a salvation cocktail.” Lightly, she delivered this information, this hint at how deeply a religious fervor had infected her.
“On my way back to the truck just now,” Ozzie said, “I remembered that afternoon we found that bat in the house. The one we had in the attic. Remember that? Your mom made me catch it in a coffee can so we could let it out in the country. So the three of us drove a few miles down a road . . . the bat crying all the way.”
Charlotte, clearly bored by the fact that he didn’t make more of her mention of snake handling and poison drinking, rolled her eyes and returned to the New Testament.
Ozzie saw that Charlotte’s lips and fingertips were berry-stained, skeletons of dry leaves caught in her hair. Her scent of sweetness had dissolved into the smell of smoke, but not cigarette smoke, smoke like from twigs and bark. She seemed weakened by her thinking about the night. Keep a tranquil heart, he wanted to warn her. Passion is rottenness to the bones.
On the corner of Elm and Oak sat one of the older churches in town, a squat, homely thing of gray stone, but with a few majestic windows depicting intricate biblical scenes. Ozzie had long wanted to get his hands on the glass of Grace Lutheran—the windows looked to have been shoddily repaired in the past, and poorly maintained, with some of the lighter-colored pieces—like the opalescent skirts of an angel—having grown dim with years of dust. And if he wasn’t mistaken, the belly of the whale was made of what looked to be rotten ruby—a rare antique red.
Ozzie pulled around the corner and stopped the truck a fair distance from the church. He opened the truck door, then picked up a library copy of Franny and Zooey from the box. He dropped the book into Charlotte’s lap.
“I’ve read this,” she said, pushing the book aside.
“And you love it,” he shouted, seethed, really. “Read it again.” He then took from the box the paper-thin plastic Halloween mask Charlotte had worn three years before, when she’d trick-or-treated as Spider-Man. That fall, the first after Jenny’s death, he’d put together an elaborate Rapunzel costume for her for a junior high party—gold and silver thread stitched into a blue velvet cloak, a blond wig with a thick braid that wrapped around her waist and fell to her feet.
