Published Spring/Summer 2008
 
Operation Skunk
by Sam J. Miller | ns 70
Pastor handpicked us, three of his best girls for the man from CBS to speak to. Earlene, who's seventy-five; me, who's forty; and Shelley, who's seventeen. Pastor called me up and told me to orchestrate the whole thing, our outfits and posture and perfume, and how to coach the girls beforehand, and said I had to host it because Shelley's mom's trailer smelled like burned plastic and Earlene's house was too big and fancy. I got rid of all my Glade Plug-Ins because Pastor said city folks think they're tacky, and bought a tube of cookie dough and timed the baking so the whole house smelled nice when the CBS man came.
Pastor had called me after midnight the night before.
"Remember, this is our chance to show America what good work we're doing," he said. "You three are our ambassadors. Be friendly and humble. Don't answer his questions—respond with our message. He's going to try to paint us a certain kind of way, and you cannot fall into his trap. So if he asks you What do you think of the War in Iraq or something along those lines, you answer All I know is, the government wasn't doing its job out here on the highways of Kentucky, and good Christians stepped up and did it. Okay? Like we said. He's not your audience—you're talking to America tomorrow. You know things need to be perfect for the next phase of Operation Skunk."
"I know it." I was as close to exasperated as I could ever get with Pastor. My ear hurt from holding the phone against it with my shoulder. My hands, slick with mayonnaise, drummed at the kitchen table. I'd been mixing up a batch of tuna for sandwiches and the wooden spoon wasn't getting it done fast enough so I started using my hands. When I'm stressed out I need to seize hold of something. It's a reflex, left over from a million nights where loneliness hit me so hard I snatched up a bottle or some man's forearm.
"You'll call me when it's over?" he asked. He could sound so small sometimes. Up in front of five hundred people, his voice was wide and rich as Gabriel's must be. Other times he'd call me up just inches short of crying. "The man said it would take about an hour, but you know how these people are. So call me when they leave and I'll come over and we'll talk about how it went."
"Sure thing, Pastor," I said. "Now I got to get back to fixing the spread for tomorrow."
"God bless you, Sister Schram," he said. "Helen."
February wind made a baby-crying sound outside. I'd been out back til ten p.m., picking up the yard so it looked less trailer trash. Where had they come from, those ruptured garbage bags and waterlogged cardboard boxes and faded plush and plastic Easter bunnies? I picked this little house for its loneliness, for how far it was from the squalid backyards I'd grown up in, but they'd followed me.
The tuna fish sandwiches would go on the sunflower tray; the peanut butter and jelly on the cow tray. I focused on what they'd look like: crusts snipped off, cut into quarters, the tiny white bread triangles and the pitcher of milk and the cookies and the bowl of apples. The room full of bright lights and camera equipment and men munching on my food while the famous man from television interviewed us. Shelley, sitting on my couch, bracketed by me and Earlene, her chubby arm calm and dry against mine. In AA they tell us to focus on today, and not to worry about the ugly days behind you or the long dry days in front of you. Pastor, on the other hand, says think about Jesus, and think about the future. Think about your mission. Everyone has a mission, Pastor says, although most souls spend a lifetime just wondering what it is. My need was so great I got two of them. Shelley was my little mission; Operation Skunk was my big mission.
- - - - -
Shelley showed up at my door with a bag of popcorn kernels and a big bottle of vegetable oil. 60 Minutes would come on in a half an hour. A soggy sunny day had leaked into nighttime. That was the weekend when spring felt close for the first time, and I'd opened all my windows to let it in. My house had a raw cold feel to it, but I didn't notice until I hugged Shelley and felt a wave of warmth.
"Isn't it just wild?" she asked, heading for the kitchen ahead of me. "I feel like movie stars must feel. All week long I've been calling people, reminding them to watch it."
"Luckily I don't have to worry about anything like that," I said. "Practically the only people I associate with go to First Baptist."
Shelley hauled down my biggest pot, the one I make chili in, and coaxed a big flame out of the front burner. "All my friends said I was crazy, when I told them about the Operation. Now some of them say they're going to start coming to church."
"Isn't that a blessing? I had my doubts about this whole CBS thing, but it surely has made a lot of people pay attention to what we're doing."
"I guess." She poured a substantial amount of oil into the pot and dropped three kernels in. "I think they just think we can get them on television."
"Whatever it takes to get them through the door, that's what Pastor always says."
Shelley nodded, shaking the pot. It took me several tries to find something to hook her. She never wanted to stand in the Planned Parenthood parking lot chanting, or to put together JESUS CARES packages to hand to homeless people up in Louisville. She came to Bible study once and didn't say one word the whole time, and told me later it was exactly why she hated church when she was little.
The episode aired thirty-nine days after CBS left town. People wanted to make it a big party, pack everyone into the church basement and watch it together, but Pastor said no. He didn't say why. "Watch with your families, invite your friends, share your glory with them," he said, but me and the other sergeants of Operation Skunk knew why we couldn't watch together. Pastor and Tom Hoyt would be elsewhere, putting the next phase into action.
Shelley's test kernels popped, meaning the oil was hot enough, so she poured in half the bag of popcorn and put the pot lid on. I went through the house shutting windows.
"Word of our wonderful work has spread all the way to New York," Pastor had told us at worship, a week before they came. "You all know that show 60 Minutes. They're sending somebody to come do a story on Operation Skunk."
What really happened was he called Bracken County's man in the House of Representatives every day for three weeks until he got him on the phone and talked to him about voter turnout in our district in the seven years since Pastor first set up shop. So the man sent an email and made a follow-up call to CBS. So the famous news man called Pastor; came to visit; came back with a crew. Spent a week getting footage, going out with us on our runs and coming to church and coming to meetings and interviewing Pastor a couple dozen different times.
Shelly and I ate popcorn and folded flyers, waiting for the show to come on. The flyers, designed by Earlene's son in one of his split-second stints on the wagon, showed dead possums piled up alongside the highway and Jesus stooping with a garbage bag. LET'S CLEAN THIS PLACE UP—FOR US, FOR OUR KIDS, AND FOR CHRIST. Below were the details of our weekly Operation Skunk planning meetings.
"Watch it with that salt," I told Shelley. She was practically pouring it over her popcorn.
"I'm okay," she said.
I stopped myself from saying something along the lines of Overindulgence is a sign of an addictive personality. "Girl, looking at you is like looking at a time machine," I said instead. "I used to look just like you. You don't want to end up looking fifty-five when you're thirty-eight."
She took a sec to seriously check me out, before politeness made her say, "Shut up, Helen, you look great."
"I'm being real here, Shell. You're at that point in your life when you need to start watching out. When I was your age I thought drinking was what I needed to do to become a grown-up. If I had a penny for every extra wrinkle I earned because of stupid things I did while I was drunk, I could buy us both a couple of cars."
Shelley mumbled, "I'm good."
Having her on my couch gave me a crazy swell of pride. She was a gift, given to me in spite of the horrible things I spent eighteen years doing, sins enough to damn the whole state of Kentucky to hell if you spread them around. God handed her into my keeping even though he heard the hollowness of my prayers, heard me crying on the floor of my closet with my coats pulled down on top of me, because I still couldn't say, not honestly, not a hundred percent, that I believed in salvation. Shelley was the challenge God sent to make me worthy of real faith.
"Oh my god!" Shelley squealed, when the ticking clock signaled the start of the show, but the first segment focused on a pair of Iraq vets with melted faces.
"They better hurry up," she said, after the second story failed to feature us. "They're crazy if they think I won't eat all this popcorn before they get to us."
After that segment, our famous journalist friend came on screen. "After the break," he said, "I'll visit a small-town Kentucky church whose members have found an unusual way to honor the Lord."
"Should I make more?" Shelley asked, showing me the empty popcorn bowl.
"No, I think we've had enough."
"Okay."
The first shot of the segment showed a scenic highway view, what could be any stretch of country road anywhere in America, but which I knew to be the view from the Dairy Queen parking lot, right past where Routes 7 and 9 cross. Then the camera panned down to show a squished skunk smeared across the white line.
"Roadkill," said the host. "Everywhere there's roads, there's roadkill."
"He talks so different on TV," Shelley said.
"I don't like it," I said. "He sounds like a game show host."
On TV his face and hands did half the talking, and his voice climbed up a couple stories. In my living room he spoke softly and seemed almost nervous.
"Most of us drive by a piece of roadkill and don't give it a second thought," he continued. "We assume somebody else will come along and clean it up. And in most parts of the country, that's what happens. Municipal sanitation workers," and the screen showed two men tossing a dead deer into the back of a garbage truck, "prisoners on work detail," and the screen showed a line of black men in bright orange, hunting along the side of the road for dead possums, "and even State Troopers all contribute to cleaning up after us when we hit an animal."
"Is your mama watching?" I asked.
"No idea."
The host continued: "But as rural counties across America are hit by an increasing economic downturn, many have been forced to scale back certain services." On screen, shot after shot showed gruesome animal corpses piling up. "Including the possum patrols."
"Well, it's real simple, actually," Pastor said, looking radiant and handsome, and sturdy as a cedar tree. None of the show's six million viewers could fail to see his specialness. On screen you couldn't tell how short he was, and his bald head reflected the sun. "Bracken County is a real spread-out place; you've got to spend a lot of time driving if you want to get anywhere. My folks noticed all the dead animals building up along the county routes, and they started doing their fair share of grumbling about it. One of my parishioners was talking about how she couldn't even drive with her window rolled down in summertime because the smell was so bad. 'But there's no point in complaining,' she said. 'What can we do about it?'"
The host, dressed in one of our bright orange plastic SKUNK ponchos, walked along the highway. "But Pastor Jessamine figured there was something they could do. Next Sunday's sermon centered on roadkill, and he challenged everyone to come to a meeting on the subject."
"Way I remember it," said Earlene, resplendent in salmon on my couch, "he said how we all know the government doesn't care about Christian values, and they'd rather spend our tax dollars on sinful things than making sure our roads stay clean, and how we needed to step it up as Christians and take up the slack."
"You came on a good day," Pastor said, passing out cups of coffee, wearing the world's only blue SKUNK poncho. "Last night was a full moon, so there'll be lots of critters along here today."
"Operation Skunk is a well-oiled machine," said the host, whose name stubbornly refused to stay put in my brain. "Organized like any army, with Pastor Jessamine serving as general, and five sergeants leading platoons of dedicated soldiers in weekly skirmishes in the never-ending war on roadkill."
"Squirrels, possums, skunks, cats," Pastor said, poking with his trowel stick at a small mammal of indeterminate species. "Those are our biggest clients."
"You ever eat what you get?"
Probably if you didn't know Pastor as well as I do, you wouldn't have noticed the momentary twisting of his face. "Roadkill doesn't make good eating," he said. "That's a common misconception people have. The impact causes the bones to shatter into so many pieces you really can't get them out. That's especially true of things that have been hit by more than one car."
They didn't air what Pastor said next: "And besides, we're saving these critters up for something special."
"Every other Saturday, nearly a hundred volunteers fan out across Bracken County and scrape dead animals up off the blacktop."
"Sometimes it feels like we're fighting an uphill battle, yes," I said, sitting on the same couch on TV as the one I was sitting on watching it. "Every time we go out it feels like there's twice as many dead animals as there were before. But that's what the Gospel is all about. Fighting an uphill battle."
"I can't watch it," I said, and stood up. "I hate the sound of my own voice." I headed for the kitchen.
"Oh Hell, you sound great."
From the kitchen, hands over my ears, I watched myself. All across America, people were thinking, Look at this cow. Look at this sad woman with a voice like an ashtray and unrealistically-red hair. People were thinking, That really is how things are, out in Kentucky. A bunch of sad delusional hicks who use God to fill the hole inside themselves. Even after the show skipped back to Pastor, out on the highway, and through several other interviews and scenes of worship meetings, I stayed in the kitchen. I made coffee and brought it out on a tray when the segment was finished.
"What do you think?"
"Oh my God, Helen, you're famous. They gave you like almost as much air time as Pastor. Me they just showed nodding."
"They cut out most of the stuff I said about Jesus."
"That's okay, right?" she said. "I think we got our basic point across."
"We surely did," I said.
The house still had a chill to it, and Shelley slid close to me and spread the crocheted blanket over both of us. All at once I knew it: what we had there, under the blanket, was the love between mothers and daughters. Extract it in a lab and break it down and subject it to all sorts of tests and it'd be chemically indistinguishable from the love between a real mother and her daughter.
- - - - -
Before Operation Skunk, Pastor used to call me up at two and three in the morning and talk me through my problems, whether I was ready to or not. Sometimes I'd almost suspect he'd been drinking. His voice would get a hard edge to it, like nothing I said could stick. He'd scatter his sentences with Bible scraps, sometimes trying out the same one several ways, and then on Sunday I'd hear that one in his sermon. I wondered how many other women he called up at all hours to practice on. By day, when Pastor spoke to me, it was like the sun was all of a sudden shining on me and no one else, but his voice on the other end of the late-night phone line made me think of someone stumbling through the desert. Static buzzed in the background as the wind pushed and pulled on the telephone wires. Once, while he was talking, I heard our town's only ambulance wailing past his window. Ten minutes later I heard it out on Route 7, heading past my place.
Since the Operation got underway, though, he just shows up on my front porch with shovels and garbage bags. Most nights I don't get to sleep till late anyway, I'll stay up watching TV until I pass out, so when Pastor comes I always go with him. We drive out to the county route and park his truck and turn the headlights on and the engine off, lock the door and start scraping up animals.
Our second late-night roadkill search happened right after Shelley started in Operation Skunk. We went way out, on a strip of highway we'd never gone to in the daytime, and even in the chilly October night air I could smell little rotting corpses all around us. We walked slow, sweeping our flashlights back and forth, carrying our plastic bags over our shoulders like two horror movie Santa Clauses with smushed skunks instead of toys.
"Last night I dreamed about Shelley again," I said. "Why do I think about her so much?"
"God is love," he said, shining his light on something that could have been a possum. "Bringing her to Jesus is a way to give life to your love of God." The lump turned out to be a strip of tire.
"I feel like it's... different."
"Jesus will never die. Never get sick. Never move away or get in a fight with you and never speak to you again. The love we have for a mortal thing will always be different. Sharper. More painful and more... fleshy. Because we know that whatever it is, someday we'll lose it."
A tractor trailer, hopelessly lost, blared its horn as it swept past us. GYPSUM EXPRESS was painted down its side, along with an illegible series of graffiti squiggles.
"She's a long way from the interstate," Pastor said, once its noise had faded out. We shuffled along the road in silence, shining our flashlights
"Does it ever scare you, being out here?" I asked him. "With all these woods around us? I'm always imagining a bear or wolf or crazy person with an axe is going to come running out of the dark and kill us."
"If I was by myself I'd be scared. Isn't it funny how just having someone else with you makes you less scared? Even though if a crazy man with an axe came up on us, I don't imagine we'd do too much better together than we would if we were alone."
"Probably not."
The road had been bending away from where we parked, and we were almost entirely out of his headlights' beacon. Both our bags had grown heavy. We stopped but didn't turn right around, just stood there listening to trees swaying in the windy dark.
"Pastor? Do you ever have doubt?"
"Doubt about what, specifically? Operation Skunk?"
"About everything. About heaven and hell and Christ almighty."
He looked at me. I couldn't see his face but he was looking at me. Way off in the woods an owl shrieked, diving for a tiny squishy rodent, and it occurred to me that I could swing my shovel straight into Pastor's neck and there'd be absolutely nothing to stop me. "Do you have doubt, Helen?"
"Sometimes."
He nodded his head and started walking back. "That's why we do what we do," he said. "To become worthy of our love for Him."
- - - - -
Monday morning we donned gas masks and gathered at Planned Parenthood.
Long after midnight, Pastor and Tom Hoyt had driven dump trucks onto the vacant lot next door, bought by First Baptist half a year ago, before we ever picked up a single scrap of roadkill. Onto that empty lot they dumped every dead animal Operation Skunk had ever picked up. Ever since the start I'd been imagining what it would look like, our mountain of rotting animals. Once, I'd visited the barn where Tom kept the trucks as they filled up. What I'd seen there couldn't compare to the sight of that pyramid of putrescence. How massive its smell, how black streams of ooze were already leaking out onto the sidewalk.
"Abortion is a pestilence," Pastor said promptly at eight. By then the news had turned out in force, along with a substantial crowd and a couple of cop cars with their lights on but their sirens turned off out of consideration. He flung his arms up. "And it stinks to heaven!"
The gas masks were mostly just props. The heap's reek wasn't truly toxic, and we could still smell it through the filters. Six months into Operation Skunk and I thought I was in expert in the olfactory process of decomposition—to the point where one whiff of an animal told me how long it had been dead. But this was stench taken to a new level. Mostly rot has a sweet tinge to it, probably to remind us that all flesh is food. Out on Marrow Boulevard I knew I was smelling the soul-corroding filth Pastor hinted at when he spoke of Hell. Flies, sluggish from the cold, seemed to multiply with biblical urgency.
"Last night, the good Lord gave us a mighty gift—He sent word of our work into every home in America. Thanks to CBS, every American saw how Christians in Bracken County were serious about coming together to solve a problem. This morning, they'll see how Christians in Bracken County are serious about solving an even more serious problem. A sin so severe it has already caused the Lord to turn his love away from this nation. We gather here to cry out, like the angels that came to Lot at Sodom: "For we will destroy this place, because the cry of them is waxen great before the face of the LORD; and the LORD hath sent us to destroy it.'"
The 60 Minutes newsman was on a plane, heading back to town. Pastor had hoped to have him present for the press conference, but the man did not believe we were serious, not until the local CBS affiliate called him up and told him. Now he was an hour from Louisville, complete with camera crew. Pastor would stage a repeat when he arrived.
A newspaper reporter asked, "Pastor, are you worried about being ticketed for creating a public health hazard?"
"We own this land," he said. "It's ours to do with as we please. That's the law, right? Just like these murderers can do what they want to do on their property, even though we find it sick and disgusting."
Pastor didn't add that the sheriff, a member of First Baptist, had promised not to act on any complaints he got. Planned Parenthood would have to solicit aid from outside Bracken County if they wanted anything done about the skunk heap. They knew it, too: you could see the staff watching us from their windows. They knew better than to come outside.
"Pastor, what does Operation Skunk hope to achieve with this act?"
Pastor answered questions patiently, thoughtfully, brilliantly. For an hour we stood there, watching the crowd grow in spite of the stench. We had hoped to make the drop in summer, when the Kentucky heat would make the stink so bad no one would come within a mile, but the 60 Minutes schedule would not accommodate our needs.
From Planned Parenthood we went back to First Baptist, and started getting the word out. Making phone calls to our members, putting together packets with photographs of the heap and a letter from Pastor. Packets to send to churches all over the country, along with instructions on how to set up their own Operations. Packets for the President, and every local affiliate of Planned Parenthood. The basement buzzed even louder than when we spent Christmas Eve wrapping presents for Africans. Hardly any of us even bothered to try to bite back our pride.
"Shame it couldn't be in summer," was the only criticism I could find.
Driving home, though, I realized that even with a temperature of 52 degrees, the smell was sufficiently dreadful. It had worked its way into my skin and turned me foul. The sense of deep peace I'd been expecting, driving down lonely Route 9, having seen the pay-off of six months of roadkill collecting, had not come.
Shelley was sitting on my steps when I pulled up. Her face was pink and damp and her eyes had a hardness I hadn't thought Shelley had in her.
"Why didn't you tell me about it?"
I shut my car door and fumbled for a Bible verse, just to say to myself. None came.
"Pastor didn't let us tell anybody about it. He was afraid the word would get around, and the plan wouldn't work out the way we'd set it up." My house had shrunk since the morning. Twilight was a long way off, but I already felt all the heat and light drain out of the day. "Do you want to come inside and talk about this, honey?"
"No. When I came here, I was mad," she said. "I came out here to yell at you. But now I see I'm not mad. I feel hurt, Helen."
"Hurt how, honey?" She flinched away from my embrace, but didn't move when I sat down beside her.
"Hurt that people I care about could do something so horrible."
"There's lots of kinds of horrible in this world," I said. "We have to find a way to fight back against the things that bother us. God gives us life as a chance to choose between good and evil. Most people choose evil, by not choosing good."
"What I liked about you was you didn't talk like him. Like every sentence was a sermon. Like everybody else was retarded, and you had to explain things to them. This crazy fucking plan made sense to you, Helen? You didn't think to yourself, 'This is some crazy evil fucking shit we're doing'?"
"Shelley, I pray to Jesus every night that you never find out just what a horrible thing it is that they do in there," I said. "You want to talk about crazy evil fucking shit, that's it."
"What would you know about it? My mother was right—church is for people who don't know anything about life, and want to tell everyone else how to live."
"Shelley, honey, listen." Rocks shifted in the riverbed of my stomach. "Only Pastor knows this about me. I was eighteen when I had an abortion. In that self-same place. I'd already been carrying on like the whore of Babylon for ages. And you just cannot comprehend how it hurts. What it's like to wake up feeling the heat of hell all through your body. This stabbing pain struck me in my belly for years afterwards, every time I was passed out in a strange man's back seat or puking in filthy bathrooms, or driving down these late-night highways feeling blue as grass, thinking about how I had that one chance for salvation and I literally murdered it."
She hugged herself. Pressed her mouth against her knees in a little-girl pout. Darkness was already bringing the temperature down. "But you needed it," she said. "You needed that place and it was there. This lady who lives across the way from us—she's a total crystal meth addict, and she's got a three-year-old son. I remember when she was pregnant, how she was still getting high all the time, how she used to tell my mom that she was gonna quit just as soon as her kid came along. She's still fucking cooking up in there, and I see that little kid roaming around with cigarette burns on his arms, sometimes. You know what a bag 'ho is, Helen?"
I didn't dare move my mouth or budge my head to say I did, or how.
Shelley said: "A bag 'ho is a girl who's so desperate for meth that she'll fuck a guy for the dust at the bottom of a plastic baggie. That's what this girl is—all kinds of horrible guys always coming through her trailer. I don't know what your life was like before you started going to First Baptist, besides that you seem to think that it was the most sinful life ever lived, but you wouldn't have stopped doing those bad things just because you had a kid. You'd just have been doing it to a kid, as well as yourself."
I rubbed one hand up and down her back, and she let me.
"Mom said to me—she said I shouldn't mess with First Baptist, that you all were a bunch of sour broken people trying to make everybody else as sad as you, but I went to services anyway. I opened up to you all. Because I wanted something positive. But you all are even sicker than she said."
"Honey, no," was all I knew how to say. Pastor coached us on what to tell the people who got in our face, the news reporters and the town folks who hated us for what we were trying to do—Pastor taught the sergeants what to say about babies and murder and love and sin—but to say it to Shelley would be to break something between us. If it wasn't already broke.
- - - - -
Bracken County has three main trailer parks. In a half-dozen other spots you'll find trailers clumped up together in threes and fours, but those are mostly just extended families or failed attempts at religious communes. Trailer parks are like high schools: you've got rivalries and mascots and competitions and everybody's up in your business.
Shelley lived in Bee Lick Manor. From the age of eighteen to thirty-six I lived in Gravelswitch Drive. I was trailer park, through and through. Pulling up in front of her mother's trailer felt like walking back into the quicksand I'd clawed my way out of.
"Hello?" I hollered. The front door was ajar. I knew her mom. She was a couple years younger than me. I'd see her at bars and parties. My bare arms broke out in goose bumps. Familiar scenery surrounded me. Random splurts of sagging onion grass, the red of a bashed-in gas can. So much plastic. Toys, chairs, a garden hose connected to nothing. Faded bouquets of fake flowers.
"Hi, Helen," her mom said. "You looking for Shell?"
"Yeah. She around?"
Being back had me itchy. I rubbed my hands together to keep from scratching the skin off. Bee Lick was a world apart from Gravelswitch, with a slightly-lower median age and a slightly-higher standard of living on account of it being so close to Wal-Mart, but the feel was the same. A smell of fried food and kitty litter. Blue tarps and broken glass and water-logged empty Sudafed boxes everywhere you look. Grass growing through discarded window screens.
"Expect her back?"
"She didn't say. She's pretty upset about that stunt you all pulled."
"She talked to you about it?"
"Course she did."
I inspected my hands. Across the way, a little dog was yipping and scratching at its door, trying to get to me. Even without seeing it, I knew that it had dirty-white fur and ooze around its eyes. Nothing changes in a place like that. Everybody knows your business. When your man beats you or your momma has a stroke. A fat old woman across the way waved to me from her porch, and I waved back, but hated her for the pang of concern that struck me. I couldn't stand seeing how deep these people had sunk their roots in me.
"Can you tell Shelley—" but it was stupid of me, not to bring a note, to have to depend on this woman, who no doubt despised me. But I didn't want to be careful or withholding or any of the things Pastor tells us we should be with the things of this world. Not with Shelley. "Can you tell her that I love her and that I'll do absolutely anything she wants, if she'll forgive me?"
"Forgive you," she said, and laughed. "What, you think she's through with you—she's never going to talk to you again? Helen, don't you know anything at all about love?"
And then, heading back home, I passed three bright orange vests: an Operation Skunk squad. One of them recognized my car and waved. Shame kept my hands stuck to the steering wheel, and then I felt a terrible stab of sadness. I hadn't seen who it was, but they'd be worried. They'd wonder why I didn't wave. People knew me. Depended on me. Loved me.
One drunk night, right before I found Jesus—or rather, right before I started looking for Jesus, because I haven't found him yet—I heard someone groaning outside my window. Easily two a.m., maybe halfway to three. Only reason I was awake was because I hadn't had enough to drink. I'd just stopped going out, and taken to drinking alone.
"Hello?" I said. Televisions were on in my neighbors' windows, but probably just because people had fallen asleep to them. Generators hummed. In the morning we'd find frost on the grass. Standing there in my doorway, tasting the chilly air, I felt like my four-acre trailer park had fallen under an evil queen's enchantment.
"I'm drunk," a woman said.
"Who's there?"
"Anabeth," she said, and I saw her, sprawled out alongside my trailer. Wearing dark clothes, so she was hard to see. Anabeth was a neighbor. We were friends, in that weird loose way of people stuck in the same basic space with the same limited entertainment options. Bars and parties. When drunk, we could sit for an hour and talk about movies and men and mutual friends who were dead or locked up.
"Hell," she said, and reached out an arm.
"It's okay, honey," I said, and squatted down next to her. "Come on inside. You can sleep on my couch."
"Listen, Hell. I'm drunk—I need." She trailed off.
"Come on. Let's go inside."
"No. I can't. I have to go home."
Anabeth was fat. I stood, tried pulling on her arm, but she was as heavy as a mountain and as firmly rooted to the earth.
"Shh," I said, and petted her hair back from her sweaty face. She smiled. I thought about singing a lullaby, but none came to mind. "Shhh," I said again.
A boyfriend of mine had fucked her once, and with my hands on both sides of her face I could snap her neck as easy as thinking about it. I settled back; plopped my behind on the ground. Somehow, I had to find my way out of Bracken County—in spirit if not in body. Out of this swamp, where our happiness depends so fully on other human beings every bit as fucked up as we are.
"I need to," she said, but then the sentence dissolved into gagging, and then she was asleep.
"Hush," I said.
A dog yipped, somewhere across the park. Lone yaps at long intervals, like she knew she'd never get what she needed. No moon was out. Anabeth sweated in her sleep. Under my fingers, her pulse slowed down to normal.
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