Elizabeth Massie - Wire Mesh Mothers

“Yes.”

“Good question. Because I could, I guess. I could, easily, so wasn’t any point to it.”

“Oh.”

“And dying ain’t sufferin’. You gotta pay for what you tried to do to me in that barn!”

Another long moment of silence. And then Baby Doll whispered, “Truth.”

Tony looked at the kid. She brushed the girl’s hair back from her face to find a pair of blue eyes watching her. “What did you say, Baby Doll?”

“Truth.”

“Not you, I meant the teacher. Truth or dare ain’t a game for kids.”

Pale, cracking lips, whispered, “Truth. I wanna go home.”

Tony shifted on the lumpy, fuzzy plants. She liked the kid better before. She didn’t want the kid to be talking. “You be quiet, you ain’t well.”

“Valerie got killed,” said Baby Doll, so softly that the words seemed part of the after-rain breeze. “Valerie didn’t have a bad liver. It was her head that got cut off.”

“You’re sick,” said Tony. “Don’t talk creepy.”

“Who’s Valerie, Mistie?” asked the teacher.

“Baby sister Valerie,” said Baby Doll.

“I don’t want to hear it,” said Tony.

Baby Doll rubbed her mouth, her crotch. She said, “Daddy said Valerie got a bad liver ‘cause if we told what happened the social services would put us in jail. In jail for not watching. I was s’pose to watch her. She ran away. Her head got cut off. I think the train did it. It was rolled over in the trash.”

“Fuck,” said Tony. She didn’t want to know this shit.

“Oh, Mistie, dear God,” said the teacher softly.

“I forgot,” said Baby Doll. “But not now. I wanna go home.”

“It’s okay, honey,” said the teacher. “I’m here. You’re safe.”

Tony laughed. “You think you can make her safe? Oh, yeah, you got a hell of a record these past days!”

The teacher said nothing. Tony turned to Baby Doll. “Truth, okay?” she prodded. “Why’d the teacher have you in the back of her car? She like to play with you? She takin’ you somewhere to play with you?”

Baby Doll frowned, confused.

“To, you know,” said Tony. She pointed at her own crotch, pretended to rub it. “She do that to you?”

Baby Doll shook her head.

“Her husband do that to you?”

Baby Doll shook her head.

“Somebody do that to you? You want to play truth or dare? You gotta tell the truth ‘bout this.”

“Daddy,” said the kid. “Mama didn’t want no more kids. She wouldn’t let him rub her down there no more. He said I should do what Mama wouldn’t do. So to make him happy.”

Tony’s skin prickled. Her head itched, and she dug at it. “He fuck you, didn’t he?”

Baby Doll didn’t seem to know what that meant, and Tony let it go. She stood up, and walked up to the teacher’s tree, around it, and back again, kicked wet leaves. She wrapped herself in her arms, tightly. “Your Mama didn’t stop him?” she asked.

Baby Doll shook her head. “Daddy said don’t tell Mama.”

“Mistie,” said the teacher faintly. “Oh, honey, I thought so.”

“You thought so?” Tony strode up to the teacher and struck her soundly across the mouth. “You thought so and you didn’t tell anybody?”

The teacher lifted her chin. “You want the truth, here it is. I knew about it. Or I suspected. So did most of the school. But no one had made a move to protect Mistie. I decided it was up to me. I was taking her away, I was driving her to Canada. I had her under the quilt so no one would see her. I was rescuing her.”

Tony slapped her again for the piss poor job she’d done at rescuing Baby Doll. Then she straightened and chewed a loose cuticle from her thumb. It tasted like rust. She spit it out. “Why didn’t you tell me right off? I’d believed that more than the other shit you tried to feed me.”

“I was kidnapping Mistie. You know what that means if I’m caught? Taking a child across state lines in a kidnapping? A teacher doing something like that?”

“I wouldn’t have told.”

“How would I have known that? You cut me up, beat me, you kicked me, you tried to drown us in the car.”

“I wouldn’t have told ‘cause that’s probably the best thing a teacher could do, saving a kid.”

“Teachers do a lot of good things, Tony….”

“Most teachers don’t do shit!” Tony let out three loud breaths. Her fists clenched in and out. “They don’t care about nothing! Truth? Okay, while we’re at it. I didn’t try to drown your ass. I rolled the windows down so I could get you out. That’s the truth. You ain’t dead, are you?”

“I think you just decided we were better to you alive than dead. We made a tolerable-looking family unit, the three of us.”

“I don’t kill people.”

“You killed the gasoline man.”

“I did not! Whitey did.”

The teacher caught her breath. Tony counted seven long heartbeats, and then, “You didn’t shoot him?”

“Whitey did. And he wasn’t suppose to have bullets in his gun, but he did. It was an accident.”

The teacher looked away from Tony, and stared out through the forest in the direction of the cattle field and the barn. Tony had stared out that way for more than an hour after they’d climbed the fence, while Baby Doll was curled up and the teacher was still passed out. Tony had been sure the farmer and his troops would come after them with hounds and county sheriffs. But the fire had obviously been their primary issue. They’d put it out before much damage was done. The building was still standing. Hell, they hadn’t even called the fire department.

“You didn’t kill him?” said the teacher.

“No,” said Tony. “But if I really had to kill, I would. Don’t ever, ever forget that.”

“I won’t,” said the teacher.

Tony scratched her head. It itched down to the bone over her ears and at the nape of her neck. “We need clothes we going anywhere tomorrow. There’s those doublewides not too far from here. I’m gonna see what I can get without nobody knowing. You stay here, watch the kid.”

“Her name is Mistie.”

“Yeah, Mistie, okay, whatever.”

“We need some Tylenol, too, and alcohol.”

“Don’t push your luck.”

“You were good to Mistie, I could see that. Letting her lean on you like that.”

“It was an accident,” said Tony. “I didn’t know she was leanin.” Tony strolled off, but stopped several yards away and called back, “By the way, how the hell’d you get out of those bale strings?”

“Backed up to the saw you found in the store room,” said the teacher. “Had to work myself around like a contortionist in the Cirque Du Soleil but I sawed them apart.”

“What the fuck’s the cirk duh soul?”

“Doesn’t matter, really. My ankles were easier after my hands were free.”

“I’ll never leave you untied again. Next car we get, you drive with your damn hands tied.”

“I guessed as much.”

“You were going to kill me, you really were.”

The teacher’s expression unreadable. “Don’t be long now. Please.”

Please and fuck you, thought Tony.

This truck wasn’t half as bad as the Nova had been. It was a manual transmission, though, so Tony had tied Kate’s left hand to the steering wheel and the right hand to the gearshift with leftovers from Kate’s Christian Camp director jeans. Kate’s calf throbbed mercilessly when she had to press the clutch, but Tony had allowed her to re-bandage it, and though excruciating with certain moves, she thought it would probably heal. But some alcohol would assure that would happen.

Tony had brought clothes from a dryer in a shed outside one of the doublewides. Overalls for Kate, and a white tank top with stained underarms. Tony had claimed a man’s pair of camouflage shorts and black tee shirt with “Napa” emblazoned on the front. For Mistie there was a flower-printed polyester shift, a little short but not too snug around the torso. Tony had also brought an extra shirt so Kate could check and wrap the wound in the back of her leg. But Kate knew better than to thank her. Tony had the drive in her eyes again, the set of brow she’d had back in South Carolina. All she could talk about was Burton and Lamesa and how much money her father had.