The Flood Girls (6 page)

Rachel deserved this bed. She had earned this bed, and now she owned fitted sheets and a duvet. She clung to this bed like she clung to her sobriety—it was a white-knuckled sort of ownership. Now, overwhelmed, Rachel turned on the bedroom light and threw herself onto the bed. There would never be enough paper for her new to-do list. The town was a creature unto itself, wild and woolly. The people who lived there were unpredictable and could never be crossed off, conquered. Rachel could not organize and proceed methodically—she had learned in sobriety that people, places, and things were impossible to control. The world never did what you wanted. She buried her face in the pillow and recited every prayer she had learned over the past year, silently and desperately. The Fourth-Step Prayer, the Seventh-Step Prayer, the Serenity Prayer. She asked for strength to continue, and for a new bathtub. Then she felt bad for asking for things, so she tried to name all the things she was grateful for, and it was a short list, so she repeated it over and over until she finally fell asleep.

The next morning, Rachel sat on the front porch and drank her coffee. She did not notice the rosary at first, only spotted it hanging from her doorknob when she returned indoors for a refill. She wasn't sure who had left it—probably a religious fanatic determined to ward off her bad energy. She left it hanging, because it was a beautiful thing, the only decorative object on the entire property. Rachel fingered the yellow glass beads and drank more coffee.

It was a strangely warm day for February, and it revealed the swamp of a backyard. Lacy crusts of ice collected in the corners of the fence, and Rachel's feet sunk in the muck as she examined her property. There was no lawn here. The mud was studded with blackened clumps of dandelions, frostbitten patches of clover, and skeletal stalks of tiny aspen trees, saplings taken root.

These were a new set of problems, these things she owned. In Missoula, she left behind Athena, her home group, credit card debt, the paycheck from cleaning hotel rooms, a house that smelled like urine even though it had been bleached and all the carpet pulled. She had left behind a weekly poker game on Sunday nights with a group of middle-aged women, a sober bowling league for which she had finally paid off her shoes, the keys to three different church basements—two Lutheran and one Methodist. Now she owned a trailer house, and guilt and shame. It had been her choice, and she had felt it necessary.

She looked up at the sky and was going to offer up a prayer, but she heard dim music and realized that she was not alone.

A boy was sitting on the roof of Bert's house, squeezed into a tiny lawn chair. Rachel wasn't sure what Bert's disability was, but it had not stopped him from breeding. The boy wore an unzipped silver snowsuit, bright red moon boots, and a white kerchief tied loosely around his neck. He was so close to her that she could see the book he was reading:
Lady Boss
by Jackie Collins. She approved.

He was oblivious to her, his headphones blaring out tinny beats, pop music. His hair was so blond that it seemed silver, his face so delicate and his expression so dreamy that he could have been mistaken for a girl.

She watched him. He was a ferocious reader, and turned the pages so quickly that she briefly wondered if he was faking it. He clutched at the book as if it might be ripped out of his hands at any moment.

Rachel understood how it was to cling to things so desperately. She knew that she must cling to her sobriety, even if the pain rose over the banks, even if there was a deluge. She would find a way to float, find something to hold on to.

T
he last week of February, and the nights were frigid, the air tight as a closed fist. The gales punched sideways, launching last week's powder, made it sting like slivers of glass.

This was how all of Laverna's weeknight shifts ended, playing hearts with the regulars as the washer whirred. The Applehaus brothers were drunker than usual, probably because she had offered shots at one o'clock, out of dirty shot glasses, because she wanted to start the dishwasher. Their fourth was Rocky Bailey, who didn't drink but was retarded, so the playing field was level in her estimation. Rocky drank Mountain Dew out of a can and chewed great wads of grape Bubblicious at the same time. How he wanted to spend his grocery store wages was his business, but she feared he would develop diabetes.

Bert was the only other patron, silent and sullen as always. Laverna slid a pitcher and a pint glass in front of him whenever she felt like it. He sat far away from the others, in his usual spot, under the air conditioner. He never said a word, but tipped well, especially for an unemployed asshole.

Laverna had forgiven the Applehaus boys for their indiscretions with Rachel, all those years ago. The town was too small, and patrons were too important. Anything the Applehaus boys had done with her daughter would always be dwarfed by Rachel's own betrayal. However, Laverna still held a tiny grudge and would mention her revulsion from time to time, especially when an Applehaus unloaded the queen of spades.

Talk turned to the completion of the new church. Last summer, Reverend Foote and his family had relocated from Kansas, and he had built the church by himself. He contracted out the plumbing and the electricity, so the citizens of Quinn took comfort in the fact that he wasn't totally self-reliant. He had named his church New Life Evangelical—a denomination new to Quinn. Laverna loved the Catholic church in town—even though it was a small congregation, they drank heavily, and often. They already had Lutherans, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Methodists. The Methodists were a bunch of backsliders, vaguely pious. Black Mabel sold the Methodist wives diet pills, so they were also vaguely wicked.

Reverend Foote slowly but steadily poached his parishioners from each of the other churches, proving Laverna's long-held theory that nothing stuck in Quinn, except for the snow.

The new church was a perfect square, plain, slung low to the ground, much like Reverend Foote himself, whom Laverna had chanced upon at the post office. He was a short man with thick auburn hair carefully parted. He wore brown pleated slacks and a tucked-in button-down shirt that was the worst shade of yellow, faint, like a white shirt completely stained with the sweat of a chain-smoker. She hated him on sight.

Laverna shot the moon for the final time of the night, and the game was over, because she declared it so. She pointed to the Budweiser clock mounted above the door, set fifteen minutes fast.

The Applehaus boys began gulping what was left in their glasses; Laverna had eighty-sixed people in the past for not honoring closing time, or even those who dared to argue, who pointed at their watches to compare them to the Budweiser clock.

Rocky Bailey pushed back his stool and swept up peanut shells. Bert poured the inch and a half left in his pitcher into the glass and considered it carefully; Laverna knew it was warm but didn't care. Bert was a slow drinker. He was determined to get drunk, but did so at a methodical pace. This was how the unemployed drank at the Dirty Shame. On slow nights, Laverna longed for the distraction of Red Mabel, even though she was partially to blame for the very existence of the insidious Rachel. Red Mabel was her right-hand man, and Laverna always described her as such, and nobody dared argue about the genitalia.

Twenty-seven years ago, it was Red Mabel who drove a crazed Laverna into the mountains, directions to Frank's cabin gleaned from bar patrons, nebulous and contradictory. Laverna and Red Mabel prided themselves on being adventurous, and pieced together the directions, written on the back of a receipt from the grocery store, a cocktail napkin, and the back of Red Mabel's hand. They navigated the fire roads and one-lane bridges until they found his cabin. Though the roads had thawed to muddy ruts, the snow still fell lightly. Red Mabel was used to driving in the mountains—she considered herself a huntress, although the local authorities considered her a poacher. When they found the cabin, Frank was outside, stacking firewood. When he heard the truck, he looked up at the arrival, as if he had been expecting them all along, but didn't stop stacking wood. Laverna made Red Mabel wait in the truck, and she stepped out into the mud, bearing a brand-new boot warmer and a bottle of Black Velvet. She talked her way into his cabin, by pretending she was cold, which was untrue, because she and Red Mabel had drunk nearly a third of the bottle on their journey. Frank and Laverna sat across from each other; the rough pine floor seemed an impossible distance. At least he offered her the couch. He stared at her silently.

“I can't stop thinking about you,” proclaimed Laverna. He made a noise in his throat and looked down at this boots. She continued, unsuccessfully, to make small talk, until they heard gunshots. They emerged from the cabin to see Red Mabel dangling a wild turkey in the air. Unfortunately, it wasn't wild—it was Frank's pet. Red Mabel warned Frank that turkeys carried all sorts of diseases, which wasn't true. Red Mabel warned Frank that Laverna would not leave without a date, which was.

Frank came into town the next month, and took Laverna out to eat at the Bowling Alley, and quietly endured her barrage. To silence her, he took her to bed. They eloped that May, to Winnemucca, Nevada. Laverna drank with elderly showgirls, while Frank gambled on battered machines. “That was a sign,” Laverna would say later. “We put a quarter in a slot machine and Frank broke the handle off.”

The thought of quarters reminded Laverna of closing, and she opened the ancient cash register, pulled a zippered deposit pouch from underneath the counter. She began to stack ones and fives. Only the lesbians paid with larger currency, and they had been absent tonight. Most likely they were singing folk songs in the woods, or playing demolition derby with broken heavy equipment jerry-rigged at the junkyard, something they were known to do.

Chuck Clinkenbeard's son pushed through the door, the snow blowing in with his entrance. Laverna ignored him and kept counting the cash. He was sixteen, but he had a thin black mustache, and Laverna had served him in the past, especially if it was a slow night and there were no cops in sight. The cops drank at the Bowling Alley, so Laverna often poured for any kid who looked past the point of puberty. She couldn't remember his first name, but it was too late for last call. All the Clinkenbeards had neatly trimmed mustaches, but no beards, thumbing their noses at their name. She pointed up at the clock and continued counting. Laverna would not be serving this Clinkenbeard tonight.

Still counting, she heard a sharp thwack, and stopped to glare at Rocky, who had dropped his broom. She considered yelling at him, but then the Applehaus boys had hit the floor as well, a thud and a clatter as they took their barstools with them.

She realized then that Chuck Clinkenbeard's son had a small .410 shotgun, undoubtedly filled with bird shot. The Clinkenbeards had been on a grouse genocide mission for as long as she'd known them. He slowly raised the weapon and advanced toward her, stopping in front of the jukebox as it played a Tammy Wynette song. And then the gun was pointed at Laverna. He nodded at the cash she had been stacking in neat little piles.

Black Mabel stumbled through the front door, always looking for an after-party, and seeing the raised gun, she immediately turned around, back out into the night. Laverna looked everywhere but at the gun. It was as if she didn't acknowledge that it was happening, and by doing so, it simply wouldn't. That was how things worked in the rest of her life. Black Mabel watched from outside, through the filthy window. Rocky kept chewing his gum and pointed at the gun, as if Laverna didn't notice it.

The Clinkenbeard boy said something, but Laverna heard none of it. She had turned to look at Bert, who averted his eyes and looked down at his pint glass. The jukebox whirred and now it was Juice Newton, and Laverna finally turned and looked at the gun.

“You're not robbing me,” she said. “You're a fucking idiot. You're not even wearing a mask.”

“I'm leaving town,” he said, and raised the gun an inch and took another step forward.

“I will destroy your entire family,” declared Laverna, which he apparently did not appreciate, because she heard the catch of the safety. His teenaged face closed up like a fist: his features turned into one eye and a snarl as he looked down the barrel.

Laverna glanced out the window as Black Mabel's ghostly white face looked in. Laverna sighed and began to gather the rolls of quarters. One slid from her grasp, and she could hear a whimper as it rolled off the edge of the bar and landed on an Applehaus.

“Jesus Christ,” Laverna said, and reached over for a dishrag. She had planned on waving it like a white flag, but this little motherfucker had apparently never heard of the protocols of surrender.

There was a blast. She ducked in time, but her arms and the white rag were still raised. The explosion deafened her, and she felt pain like wasp stings. The glass from the mirror behind the bar rained all around her. After the gunfire, it kept falling in giant, jagged pieces, freed from the glue that had held it behind the bar for so long. She curled up on the plastic bar mat. She saw the Clinkenbeard boy's class ring, his hands, as they grabbed for the dollars. She cradled her arms, slick with blood. Laverna couldn't believe how her mind worked sometimes, but she found herself calculating how much he was taking. It had been a slow night, except for the gunfire.