Three Stories by Stephanie Johnson
My Cousin Billy Is Dismantled / Magdalene / Tennessee Travel Inn, Circa 1979
Privately, my grandmother cried for her sister's child. Fingers working rosary beads, she petitioned the Virgin
Mother to reconstruct an unfortunate son. She told us kids to stay on our side of the alley, to respect Billy's
need for solitude. She said it wasn't our fault that we made him nervous, avoiding words like civilians, napalm,
flashbacks.
In the backyard, my grandmother whispered with her sister while they stared at window shades hung like shrouds.
They murmured about barren pantry shelves and fruitless time spent in barrooms bewitching women who had painted
faces and hollow hearts, about how Billy left in his truck each night to roam deserted rural roads.
"I want to see my son," my aunt repeated, a mantra for reclamation. Still, nothing stirred in Billy's house
before dusk.
After my grandmother finally embraced that her entreaties for grace had fallen on deaf divine ears, Billy's
former classmate Rhoda arrived like an uninvited Godsend, her rusty hair held back by a bandanna and her overalls
covered in grease. The only female mechanic in town, she marched across the yard to where my grandmother and
great-aunt sat in lawn chairs.
"Hear you want him to come out," she said.
Without waiting for their surrender, she advanced across the alley, leaned in the open window of Billy's truck,
and popped the hood.
Pulling tools from her pockets, she went to work. The wrench wailed, metal-on-metal shrieking, as she beat it on
the truck's frame. Dipstick and spark plugs, filters and fittings, battery and belts emerged, landed with a thud
in the dirt as Rhoda hurled them toward Billy's back door.
She didn't flinch when the women protested, when Billy pushed the shade aside to pound the windowpane, when his
curses escalated and his sandpaper voice slid through the cracked door, demanded that she get away from his
goddamn truck.
"Make me," she challenged. She didn't look at him.
She continued pitching engine pieces, a mechanic's proof that the whole became worthless without some of its
parts.
The door swung open and Billy, drunk on sunlight, stumbled forward, arms flailing like a drowning man struggling
to stay adrift. He spun her away from his truck and flung the wrench across the alley. The hood slammed like a
gunshot. Hands on her shoulders, he shook her until she broke his hold, brought her fists up to defend herself.
Here, in the no man's land between prayerful principle and pragmatism, I learned the nature of love and war.
While my grandmother and her sister stood witness, Rhoda assessed the damage. Amid the dismantled mess, she
understood the impasse and negotiated Billy's silent surrender. Here, he began handing her fallen pieces, the
broken things he desperately needed her to put back together.
His mother had dreams for him: a girl in pressed cotton dresses and barrettes, one who possessed flawless familiarity with scripture and hummed hymns. I'd never done more than kiss a boy, but I was already soiled as more Magdalene than Blessed Virgin. I wore faded jeans, used hairspray and lipstick, didn't know the difference between the canonical gospels, the evangelists after whom she'd named his younger brothers. The first time I came over, she pulled me aside in the kitchen—his siblings swarming her apron strings—and hissed, "Two feet on the floor or you'll never set foot in my house again." That night, we watched movies in his living room, lights brighter than the floodlighting at the football game we'd skipped because his mother didn't want him to be tempted by alcohol. Two feet on the floor and three feet between us on the couch, I pretended to be enthralled with an innocuous comedy he said he'd seen a dozen times, a G-rated number his mother believed was appropriate. Neither of us mentioned the film we both wanted to see, the one he asked me to rent, the one abandoned in my bag. Perhaps fearing the worst because we didn't talk much when she was in earshot, his mother sent in his baby sister. Thumb in mouth, she climbed on my lap, stuck sticky fingers in my hair. Not knowing what she was saying, she lisped his mother's Old Testament doctrine, "This is what happens if you don't get married first." She pointed at her chest, giggled, squirmed on my lap. He stared at the screen, never said a word. I chewed my cheek until my mouth tasted tinny. I wanted to initiate my own directive, address his mother's flawed logic, but decorum dictated it distasteful to use children as messengers. When his mother took his siblings upstairs to put them to sleep, I wanted to kiss him, but he told me he wanted to see me again, begged me to obey his mother's commandments. When the film ended, we shook hands in the doorway. His mother watched from the stairs. Truthfully, my mother never liked him either, feared boys like him more than the cocksure ones with beer-stained breath who'd promise the world for a taste of a girl's sweetness. Catch-and-release boys came and went, carelessly creating scars, but rarely killing a girl slowly with years of frigid disappointment and shame. Years later, I ran into him in our hometown, where I was just visiting and he had never left. I hadn't thought of him in years, but there he was in the market. I smiled, raised my hand, called his name. He winced, turned away in denial, abandoned his cart in the aisle. My throat burned when it seemed he mistook friendliness for man-hungry advances. I didn't need to see him get in his car to know he was gone. But I wasn't actually surprised when, two days later, he called. He asked me to meet him for coffee at a diner two towns over, and I knew then that someone would always have to be fallen in order for him to believe he had been saved.
Tennessee Travel Inn, Circa 1979 Abandoned, I bawled into the bedspread. My mother watched out the window, smoking and singing along with country heartbreak songs on the AM transistor radio. "Stop it," she said when she'd had enough. "He always comes back." Hours later, we silently ate his peace offering: a kid's meal, greasy hamburgers and fast-food fries. I needed ten more years of haphazardly packed baggage to know he was too afraid of loneliness to ever go for good.
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These stories appeared in issue 1 of Keyhole
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