Elizabeth Massie: Wire Mesh Mothers

In the middle between Buddy and Leroy was DeeWee. DeeWee was ugly and retarded, but he was Leroy’s fourteen-year-old brother so he always came along. DeeWee’s hat was just like Leroy’s, only green. The gang didn’t do colors, although they knew from the T.V. that gangs out in California and other big cities did. The Pippins gang wore hats. They called themselves the Pippins Hot Heads.

Next to the left window in the back was Whitey. Whitey was black but he got burned once and it left a long white scar on the side of his neck. Whitey had an old beret he’d stolen from his uncle. Whitey was almost as old as Leroy, but Leroy didn’t let it matter. Whitey didn’t let it matter, either. Leroy was boss.

Between Whitey and Tony was Little Joe. Little Joe thought he was a cowboy, just like the country singers on channel 47. Little Joe had bright red hair and freckles and was from Louisiana. He used to wear a cowboy hat but Tony cut it up with a razor one time. So Little Joe was reduced to a red stocking cap advertising “Castrol Motor Oil.” He also wore a belt buckle with Johnny Cash’s face on it that he polished with spit.

It was almost 11:30 in the morning. The Pippins Hot Heads had been riding around since just after ten, trying to keep warm since the car’s heater didn’t work very well, shooting road signs and a bum-legged skunk with Leroy’s bb gun, drinking the beer Tony had stolen from her mom, and having a half-hearted on-again off-again belching contest. Everyone’s breath was cotton-smoke on the cold air in the car. Tony could see spit in Little Joe’s breath smoke and it pissed her off. Idiot should learn to breathe without spitting; it was gross.

Today’s car was a green-and-rust Chevelle. It was Whitey’s aunt’s but she didn’t go to work today, she was in bed with the cramps, so she didn’t know it was making the rounds. The thing groaned and thumped and smelled of private, auntish things like perfume and sex. The sex smell pissed Tony off even more than Little Joe’s spit did.

“Shit, Little Joe, get them goddamn boots away from me!” Tony shouted suddenly, slamming her heel onto the top of his foot. “Keep them away from me!”

“Ow!” whined Little Joe. “Can’t just cut my damn legs off just to give you room. Where you want me to put my feet? Whitey ain’t complaining.”

Whitey turned his attention from the flat countryside out the window and looked at Little Joe. “That’s ’cause I got control of myself. Tony don’t know nothing ‘bout control. If I was Tony, I’d tore ‘em off long ago.”

“I’m ready to cut your feet off inside those boots and throw ‘em all out the window!” swore Tony. “Those boots’s pussy, Little Joe.”

Little Joe’s eyes drew into slits and he slumped against the back of the seat. “Fuck.” But slowly he pulled his feet together as closely as he could. “Ain’t pussy.”

“They’s pussy and they’s queer, too,” said Leroy from the front seat. He fingered the buttons on the radio, sending a mad barrage of song clips yelping out through the speakers in the rear. “We’ll find you a good pair of shoes soon, baby boy, and you can kiss them high heels good-bye.”

“These boots cost a lot,” said Little Joe. But his voice was almost a whisper, and Tony was the only one who heard him. Little Joe was the bottom of the Hot Heads pecking order and knew it.

“Damn radio,” Leroy hissed. “Can’t get nothing but old shit and preachin’. And on a Tuesday.”

“Bent antenna,” said Buddy. “It wasn’t bent we’d get something better, maybe from up at Richmond.”

Leroy drove his fist into the on button; the music died. “Yeah,” he said, “if we had a good antenna we could get Richmond stations with rap and shit. Whitey, tell your aunt get her antenna fixed.”

Whitey grunted, then let out a long, crisp belch that threw DeeWee into a temporary fit of laughter.

They drove a few more minutes, down a stretch of frozen country road, with no sound other than Little Joe’s raspy breathing and Buddy’s occasional sniffs and curses. Silently Tony counted the rails of the fences they passed so she wouldn’t jump out of her skin. The day was frosty and clear. It was December tenth. Good little boys and girls were in school. But not the Pippins Hot Heads. They were in a beat- up Chevelle, driving around the county looking for something to do. Usually, if they could get a car, the something to do was stealing folks’ mail then smashing their mailboxes and whacking cows in the butt with a crowbar to watch them run. When that got wearisome, they’d pool their cash for a couple gallons of gas at the Exxon, swing by Whitey’s trailer at MeadowView for some of the doughnut sticks his aunt always had hidden in an upper kitchen cabinet, and go eat behind the old chimney in the woods back of the trailer park.

Here, in the farmland back roads between the tiny towns of Pippins and Capron, fifteen miles from Emporia and Interstate 95 that ran north to Richmond and south into North Carolina, it was real easy to hang out and not go to school. There weren’t many police around except for troopers and not many of those, either, and they watched Route 58 most of the time, watching for speeders. The Hot Heads rarely talked to anybody else, and if, while pumping gas or pocketing candy at the Exxon, someone actually demanded to know why they weren’t in school, the gang just said they were homeschoolers. Worked every time. Homeschoolers were good, Christian kids.

Tony squinted and kept up with the rails on the side of the road. Fifty-seven, fifty-eight, fifty-nine, sixty, sixty-one, sixty-two, sixty-three. Boredom and rage burned her spine with a furious heat.

The need to teach that bitch Martin a lesson clawed the tendons in her neck.

“Buddy, Buddy, stop,” said DeeWee. “Gotta pee.”

Tony peered over the seat and grimaced. DeeWee was holding himself through his pants, pulling and tugging like he was manning a fire hose. Buddy pulled the car to the side of the road. The cotton field next to the road was flat and broad with a small barn squatting in the corner. The barn was a pretty cool place in the summer because you could have damn good parties once you scraped the spiders from their hiding places. One time, a couple months ago, the Hot Heads had caught two middle schoolers making out in one of the barn’s stalls. The Hot Heads had made the two strip naked and run barefoot across the stubbly pasture to wherever, anywhere but the Hot Heads’ barn.

Tony had kicked the girl just outside the barn door and the girl had come down in the sharp cotton stalks on her pretty little made up face with its fucking pink lipstick and blue eye shadow. Stalks, right in her face and in her hands, making her bleed, kinda like Jesus after Pilot got through with him. It was beautiful. Tony had then stomped the girl on the neck, hard — stomp stomp stomp ! Oh, it felt wonderful ! — until Leroy pulled her off, then the girl had choked, gagged, then scrambled up and ran, stumbling, after her white-assed boyfriend. It had been good for a laugh, then it was into Tony’s mama’s beer and the doughnut sticks.

It took DeeWee a full eighty-three seconds to whiz, zip, and get back into the car. He smelled like pee. He had probably leaked on himself. The car pulled back onto the road. They drove another quarter mile, past the strobing fence posts along a small cattle farm.

Forty-three, forty-four, forty-five, forty-six.

Tony couldn’t stand it anymore. “Stop the car.”

“Nuh-uh, ain’t stoppin’,” said Buddy. “You shoulda peed when DeeWee peed.”

“Stop the goddamn car, Buddy.”

Leroy hawked, rolled the window down and spit. Most of it caught the rear window like a clear streak of bird shit.