The Bitch Posse (31 page)

Oh, I’m sure Amy and me will never turn into anything else.

Probably.

That’s okay, though. I’ll always have the memory.

You know why kissing her was so great? It was because it was Amy, someone who cares what happens to me. Someone who loves me. I haven’t felt loved for a long time, not since Mama pulled me to her hip at the barbecue and called me the Cherry Pie I’m not anymore.

I’m getting sentimental, so I know it’s time to crank the music. All of us know this one by heart, and we belt out the rest, especially the part about our “permanent records.” Even Rennie’s singing along, her eyes bright for the first time in months. I think we all know how much power the Bitch Posse holds together, and as the song finishes we collapse into laughter, and somehow all three of us decide it’s a great time for a walk.

There are these beautiful woods behind my place that I guess belong to the city or something. We trudge through Marian’s neglected garden, sagging excuses for tomato plants choked with weeds, a watering can that’s been there all winter. Smoking our cigarettes, we drift onto one of the winding paths, a bowl and some weed tucked into my jacket. We’ll stop in the clearing and get high there, back to nature.

Amy’s decided we can make some wreaths from the heather and other stuff that grows here, which sounds fine to me, it’ll be fun to do a little-girlie-girl art project when we’re stoned. So we’ve brought our great big kitchen shears too, which of course Marian never uses, because Marian never cooks, because Marian is Marian.

I hate Marian, too, for taking my mother away.

I stomp my rage onto the path, snapping sticks, imagining I’m breaking bones.

We round a bend, and there, two feet in front of us, limps a doe. One of her back legs is broken, and she’s dragging it behind her. A splash of red floats over the top of her back like she’s been grazed with an arrow. I don’t know if it’s hunting season or not, but obviously someone’s shot her. It’s so sad, this soft innocent animal, hurt this way, why?

She’s trembling. And she’s absolutely beautiful.

She stumbles and lands on the ground. “Oh, it’s so sad,” says Amy.

From the way she’s lying down, I can see another arrow hole near her chest, a spray of blood over her snowy fur. A little rhyme goes through my head for no reason, something Marian used to read to me (back when she cared): I,
said the sparrow, with my bow and arrow
. . .

“A hunter,” says Rennie. “Poor helpless thing.”

“We should call the Humane Society,” says Amy.

Which is crazy. We’d spend twenty minutes walking back to my place, and the Humane Society’d take at least an hour to get here. By then the doe will be dead, the blood trickling from her like blackberry jam, life flowing out. I tell the girls this, and Amy lifts a hand to her lips and goes pale. Rennie just shrugs, looking resigned.

“So what do we do?” asks Amy. “Just leave her here?”

The doe’s glassy eyes stare up at me. I gaze into them, fall into the pool. Her eyes are enchantment itself. Through her eyes she’s talking to me.
Please, free me from this body
. . . .

Diana, Goddess of the Hunt.

“What we should do,” I say, “is put her out of her misery.”

“If we had a gun, it’d be easy” Amy shudders. “Oh, the poor thing. I can’t believe I’m even talking like this.”

An odd expression crosses Rennie’s face, and she slips the kitchen shears out of her bag. She knows what I’m thinking.

Amy sucks in her breath. “Rennie!”

“It’s die now or suffer for an hour. If you were the deer, what would you want?”

The doe’s chest rises and falls, shuddery breathing. The eyes tremble open.
Help me
. . . .

I slide the scissors from Rennie’s hand. “Now’s not the time to be squeamish.” My heart thumps as I sink the shears into the doe’s neck. She makes a raspy noise, and the blade of the open scissors pops through the skin and the softness inside. Blood pours onto my hand.

My eyes fall shut and I imagine Marian’s blood, Sam’s, streaming over my arms. The metallic warm smell fills my nostrils as I bring my fingers to my face and open my eyes, let the blade slide across my neck, the tiniest wisp of a hurt, just a scratch.

“Oh . . . ” Amy covers her eyes, but I press the shears into her hand.

“Come on, Amy. Help the creature out.”

She shakes her head, and Rennie snatches the shears from her. “Honestly, Amy. Look at her.” The doe’s choking out breaths, but my stab hasn’t killed her, there’s an artery I didn’t hit or something.

Rennie plunges the scissors into another part of the animal’s neck, and she must have hit it closer because the pressure forces blood into the air in droplets, and Rennie’s sprayed by it, blood spattering her face in little dots.

Is she sick like me and thinking of violence? Or maybe she’s just feeling she’s freeing an animal from pain. Guess I’ll never know, that’ll be one of the things the three of us always keep from each other. Her expression reveals little as her eyes shift into distance again. It’s funny how you can see life ebb out of something, a magnet pulling it into the sky, a spirit (do animals have spirits?) shifting from a warm live body into the lifeless air.

The doe’s holding on by a thread. It’s up to Amy.

Rennie presses the shears into her palm.

Amy closes her eyes and (who knows what’s going through her
mind?) raises the scissors and slams them into the bloodstained fur of the doe. She cuts so deep and so hard that her fingers disappear into the doe’s body, and blood soaks over the whole white section of fur. The doe’s eyes go silent and still, and tears fall from Amy’s. My own vision’s blurred too, and I know Rennie’s crying, but aloud I say, “We had to do this, girls, we had to do this. It was the only way.”

In that moment of consciousness we stare at each other. The enchanted hunters. Blood streaks across Rennie’s face, pours over Amy’s fingers and mine.

“We should go back to your place,” says Amy. “Take showers.”

“What about the doe?” asks Rennie.

“Leave her here,” I say. “Back to nature.”

Have we all changed somehow, shifted? I feel a sense of steadiness I didn’t before, my anger at Sam and Marian defused. As we walk back to my house in silence, I sense peace in Amy and Rennie as well, Amy’s steps solid and sure, Rennie’s head held high.

Funny.

How hurting something seems to have put us back together again.

May 2003
1-80 West

It feels a lot better to be behind the wheel of this sporty red Mustang than the 4Runner she and Scotty owned together, the one she pictured using to drive Lucky to ballet lessons and soccer practice and fucking school. Of course, the SUV came in handy when she was driving through the moonscape of Wyoming and over the Rockies, where it was snowing, snowing in May!

Later, just outside of Reno, she made a quick trade. No problem, because they love seeing SUVs in the mountains, and she paid for the rest with a check, cleaning out her and Scotty’s account, probably. Someone had to do it. She’s glad she swapped, though; the Mustang handles so nice on the highway. A little while back, she stopped at Donner Memorial State Park and read about the doomed pioneers while she ate a sandwich, because it makes her feel superior to think of people who had it worse than she does. Now, as she’s soaring toward
the coast, she savors the details of the Donner Party, compelling in a sick sort of way, like so much else in Amy’s life.

They drew straws to see who’d be the human sacrifice. Patrick Dolan got the smallest, but no one could bear to kill him. That was before stuff got really bad, of course.

Dolan died anyway. Then the pioneers realized they had no other options.

You might say they had run out of luck.

One woman had to eat her own husband. Yeah, that one begs for a dirty joke. But seriously. What else are you going to do?

At the end of it all, one of the survivors opened a restaurant.

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.

It all makes Amy feel so blessedly normal, just for a second. The highway spins by her, and nothing really matters, not anymore, nothing means anything, not really.

Even Donner Pass is just a tourist spot, like everywhere else in America.

She grips the steering wheel of the Mustang, the leather rippling under her fingers, the pedal so light, she’s flying. Zipping in and out of traffic, she spends around fifteen minutes thinking about how she’ll make it on her own. The money from the divorce settlement will last awhile, and then she’ll have to figure out what to do with her life. What the hell can she do with an art degree? Teach, that’s a joke, she’s the last person who should be teaching anyone anything. Maybe she’ll become a stripper, or a hooker, that just sounds appropriate. Anyway, who cares about the future? It’s just a dream, imaginary, something you make up in your head.

She makes herself stop thinking.

After she speeds through Sacramento, she stops in some little town and buys a bottle of Belvedere at a Safeway near the highway, the good stuff. (Goddamn it, she deserves the good stuff, doesn’t she?) Which is now hidden under the passenger seat, and she bends down and takes a
swig every now and then. The booze has given her this incredible high, and it must be a third of the bottle she’s drunk, but funny she doesn’t feel plastered or silly. She feels sharp, sharp sharp sharp sharp sharp, buzzed. It’s as if she herself is a razor blade, ready to slice thin little pieces of pain off of herself and ditch them here on 80.

The sign
OAKLAND
35 MILES comes up, and shit, wasn’t this where she always wanted to be? Back when they were the Bitch Posse Goddesses? They were all going to head out West together. Rennie would already be here with her ticket to Stanford, Cherry’d finish her associate’s degree and transfer to San Francisco State, and after Amy was done with her undergrad at Michigan she’d head for the Academy of Art, and it didn’t work out that way, did it? She fell in love and Cherry got in trouble, and really it was that night at the Porter Place that screwed them all.

To blot all that out, she pulls the Belvedere from under the seat and takes a gulp. Straight’s the way she likes her booze now, and it burns her throat going down. She makes an “ah” and caps it, and
goddamn, these people are driving slow! What the hell, they’re in the fast lane and going seventy! What the fuck’s with that?

Amy turns on the radio, and for some amazing reason she runs across a station that’s playing “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want” by the Smiths. Now there’s a blast from the past. Scotty hates the Smiths and most of the music from her old days, says it’s depressing.

So she cranks it. God, that
Pretty in Pink
sound track was good. All those songs still hold up. She belts the words out by heart, and as the last notes fade her throat’s knotted up, but damned if she’s going to fucking cry.

She cuts all the way to the right lane, and the speedometer rails to eighty-five, ninety even, and she cuts back in just a smidge before rear-ending some slow-ass in the right lane and there, there, nothing but open road in front of her, sweet goddamn, it feels good to be so free.

The speedometer curls toward ninety-five, and now the booze hits her head. Some other song’s playing now, some hideous brand-new song that repeats the same three lines over and over again. So fucking irritating. What’s happened to music these days? “Damn,” she says aloud, “
everything’s
dying.” She snaps the radio off.

Giddy, she reaches with one hand for the bottle and swigs more. She tosses it on the passenger seat, not even bothering to hide it. Who the fuck cares, she’s flying away, leaving it all behind, no more memories, of Lucky or Scotty or her parents or the Bitch Posse or any of that, she’s just a star falling through space and the road blurs ahead of her . . .

Suddenly (all of a sudden! this never happens!) suddenly there’s two of everything, and she leans into the left-hand vision of the road and wobbles back into her right-eye vision of the road, and a little voice in her head says,
Pull over, pidl over, Amy.

But aloud she says, “Fuck that shit,” and keeps on flying, and the car spins out and the world crashes to an end with glass breaking and metal tearing and the squall of tires, and Amy laughs just moments before everything dims in front of her, and the shades fall down on her eyes.

Her eyes pull open and even that hurts. Her body yawns with pain, and sitting at the foot of her bed (
bed? what?
) is a man with a Winnie-the-Pooh tie and a clipboard and a stethoscope around his neck. Her right leg’s jammed in a gigantic cast and hoisted up in traction, while her left arm is covered with gauze from her wrist to her elbow. “Where am I?”

And of course it’s obvious, she’s in the hospital. Shards of the wreck pierce into her. Someone yelling about an IV Faces swimming above her. Then blackness.

“Summit Hospital, in Oakland. How much do you remember?” asks the doctor, he must be a doctor.

The IV tube’s still attached to her arm. “What’s in the IV?”

“Some pain medication and heparin. We need to prevent clotting; you won’t be moving for a while. Do you remember the accident?”