Her favorite book was Les Miserables. In the early years, each Thanksgiving she checked
it out of the prison library where she worked and kept it through Christmas, relying on
the worn Penguin paperback to get her through the holidays. But when in her sixth year
she became head librarian, she initiated readings three times a week in the day room,
and then annually as a holiday tradition she shared aloud Jean Valjean’s story, always to
a full house. It is, after all, a convict’s tale.
This morning, in a Goodwill shift and Baptist Nikes she’s standing alone on the shoulder of
Highway 80, one hundred yards beyond eleven thousand days. Waiting on a Greyhound,
the ticket the warden himself gave her softening in her sweaty hand. A norther is
whipping the dress against her knees. Studying a sky hung to long fields, she wonders
how far it is through the wind to the horizon. Once she could estimate a mile, now she’s
forgotten. It’s a long way. Wind needs plenty of room. An hour passes. She can tell.
Another hour for the bus, one empty seat up front. What first strikes her is how the
passengers’ clothes in the big rearview seem drab, almost colorless; in magazines
clothes had looked bright. Hello--the bus is moving--too fast. She tightens into her seat,
leans her head against a cold window and closes her eyes. A line from Les Miserables
begins running like a wire through her head: “Now the real punishment begins.”
“She’s quiet, you understand.” Brenda says this tapping her pen on her ear, glancing
back and forth, at and away from the woman from Faith Fellowship. The last time Wanda
Cook visited the Salvation Army, Brenda had to pray. Beside her desk, down on the
carpet, in the grip of a woman with a three pound hair tower announcing loud enough to
be heard throughout the building that Lord Jesus had sent another soul into her hands
and she was ready, oh yes, she was ready. Brenda’s nervous about praying again, and
guilty about being nervous—was Christ a loud man? “I hope she’s not, you know, too
quiet for you, for your church, I mean.”
“Lord Jesus makes the dumb to speak and the lame to walk,” Wanda Cook says. “Bring
her in. We’ll pray over her.”
“She was in prison a long time, she---“
“Bring her in,” Wanda says.
Brenda’s tapping. Despite Wanda’s prayers, the last girl Brenda sent to work at Faith
Fellowship made it two days before holding up a 7-11 on her way out of town, a media
black eye for the SA and at Christmas no less. Reverend Tiller, though, wields a big Bible
in a big Bible county. Refuse his apostle Wanda? Foolish. Then again, when Wanda gets
around to poking her long nose into it, how will she and the Reverend react to what it
was that sent their newest employee to prison? Brenda can’t be unconcerned; the SA is
no place for apathy. “Ask Karen to come in,” she says into the phone. She drops her
pen, pushes away from her desk. All right, dammit, let’s pray.
Once she’s demonstrated she can do the work, nobody at Faith Fellowship pays Karen
much attention. Spread over several acres, the complex includes schools, an arena-sized
sanctuary and two smaller chapels, a sports facility, cafeteria, offices---the thing goes on
and on with more construction underway all the time. It’s a little like being at the prison.
The head custodian is Paul. “Brother Paul” the Reverend and Wanda call him. Paul is
Santa less a hundred pounds, all beard and cheer. Lazy, too. After lunch Karen does his
job along with hers while he sneaks off to the power plant to smoke and listen to country-
western, Johnny Cash mostly. Paul has only one ear. She likes to imagine the other one
was sliced off in a sword duel.
There’s also a black girl who’s assigned to day care, and two Mexican men who clean at
night that Karen’s never met. Every day at the end of their shift Brother Paul gives her a
ride back to the Salvation Army. She’s putting her seal belt on in his pickup one
afternoon when he asks her.
“What did you do to get locked up?”
She expects it, always she expects it, yet the shock is still like being shoved off a cliff.
Her silence makes it worse, she knows. Resisting a lie takes time though, wondering
more than she has been all along if he knows already anyway.
“Ah, you don’t have to tell me,” Paul says.
Silence. Making it worse.
“It was about a girl. A little girl.”
“No,” Paul says, “you don’t have to tell me.”
Next day, as Karen approaches a church dumpster with her trash bags, a ragged dog
struggles up to slink away, trailing afterbirth. Behind the dumpster Karen finds five dead
puppies lying in an almost perfect row on a bed of popcorn foam.
The day is pale and cold with a blustering wind, but soil in the alley digs easy. The
graves can be small. About the size of a dictionary is good. She unsticks all the packing
material from puppy down, wraps each newborn in a paper towel, and lays it carefully in
its hole. Each dog weighs about what a hamburger would or a woman’s shoe. To push
the dirt back in on them she has to stop thinking, like in prison, and let the gears of what-
happens-next turn her through it, but this done, on each gravemound she carefully plants
a cross of twigs and bag ties. Finally, from its spot between her jeans and the small of
her back, Karen pulls out the Bible Wanda’s given her and begins to read aloud: “Thy
righteousness is like the great mountains; thy judgments are a great deep: O Lord, thou
preservest man and beast---”
After, she finds Paul eating alone in the cafeteria. The vinyl floor she’s cleaned the day
before glares with fluorescent light, and in the familiar Pinesol bouquet, today there’s a
dash of oregano.
“Friday’s for paychecks, Karen. Wanda gave me yours.” Paul hands her an envelope
across his spaghetti. “What’s wrong?”
“I found puppies in the alley.”
“Yeah?”
“Five.”
Paul laughs, like Santa. “What are we going to do with five pups?”
“They’re dead.”
He looks into her eyes for a long time, unable to read her blunt gaze, or dismantle it. She’
s like a forest, he thinks, like a long stretch of woods he had once noticed from a
passenger jet beginning its descent. For miles and miles, under a turbined wing a dark
green blanket had unfolded, and while he knew the forest below held intricacies, knew
there were individual trees there--post oaks and black jack oaks, chittamwoods and
pecans---each singular in its own space, no matter how hard he looked he could make
out only a flat dark blanket.
Whatever she is feeling behind those gray eyes, the intensity of it overwhelms his
appetite. He pushes the tray aside to cover her hands with his, noticing the soil under
her nails.
“I’m sorry, Karen.”
She pulls her hands away, leans toward him. “Do you understand it?”
“What?”
“Why all of them? Can’t one or two live?”
“That’s unusual,” Paul says. “Probably something the mother ate made her abort.”
There’s noise from the kitchen, pans clanking and women’s voices over the clanking, lunch
clean-up underway. He grips the edge of the formica table and scoots his chair back,
sliding further than he intended. It’s a student chair, rubbery pink with plastic feet.
“They were white, one brown,” she says. “They looked like babies, curled up in a womb.”
He senses something collapsing inside her, a tiny cave-in. Devils, he thinks, still mining
her soul.
When Karen returns to the SA after work on Monday, Brenda calls her into the office. On
her knees in Brenda’s chair, a child is coloring earnestly at the desk, mashing a crayon
deep into her project. Her hair is the color of cinnamon and clipped with two blue
elephant barrettes, and on the bib of her corduroy overalls there’s an exuberant tiger.
“Karen, this is my daughter,” Brenda says. “Say hello, Alex.” Without looking up, the
child mutters “Hi.” Brenda leads Karen to a sofa.
“Wanda Cook called me, Karen. She was upset that you didn’t attend church yesterday.”
Karen says nothing. Her expression a blank page.
“The church bus comes to the Salvation Army on Sunday morning. You know that?”
“Yes.”
“So, is there some reason you didn’t go?”
“Reason?”
“Yes. It would be nice, I guess, if you went,” Brenda says. “You work there.”
“I might go, sometime.”
There’s noise at the desk. The child, frowning now, is stabbing at her book with a crayon,
crushing the end of the crayon into violet pieces.
“How are things at the church, Karen?”
“Okay.”
“Is anyone bothering you there?”
“No.”
“Is anything bothering you?”
“No.”
“Well, Mrs. Cook is the kind of person who, if you don’t get along with her, you know,
follow her suggestions, she’ll do something about it. That may not be fair, but it’s the
way it is.”
This is wrong, Brenda thinks. Wanda Cook should be holding this discussion. Then
again, Karen’s feelings wouldn’t matter to Wanda.
“Look, Karen. If you don’t go to church, Mrs. Cook will fire you.”
The child mutters something, something angry, and Brenda looks over at her daughter.
When Brenda turns back, Karen is staring at the child. Karen’s body has contracted into
something afraid and dangerous. In this posture, almost a crouch, with the tops of her
eyes Karen is staring at Alex.
“It’s not so easy for me, Karen, to find you work.”
Does she hear? It’s like a net has fallen over this woman.
“Karen!”
Karen is breathing in darts now, blood slamming into her temples. There’s a cry at the
desk. Brenda begins to move that way, where Alex is tearing up the page she’s colored.
The girl striking at her furiously, Brenda scoops Alex into her arms, turns and backs
toward the door, intent to deal with Karen. But she’s gone.
On his lunch hour Wednesday, Paul picks up Karen at the Salvation Army. The day is
wind-driven, raw and cold.
“Is that all you have?” Paul says. “That bag?”
Karen nods, strapping a seatbelt across her lap. She pulls her stocking cap down over
her ears, sits on her hands.
“Sorry, the heater doesn’t work,” Paul says. “Where are your work gloves?”
“I left them in the supply closet.”
“Here, take these.”
“I’m all right. Look, Brenda gave me some boots.”
“For your feet,” Paul says. “These are for your hands.”
She pulls on the cotton gloves, wiggling her fingers in the air.
“Now what else do you need?”
“Can we stop at a book store on our way?”
“Yes, we can,” Paul says. He releases the clutch and eases onto Highway 80, the wind
whistling stubbornly through the old truck.
Near the mall entrance, Paul parks at an island of trees.
“You need me to go with you?” he says.
“It’s in there?”
“Just inside those doors, on your left.”
“No,” she says. “You’ll be cold out here.”
“But I can smoke.”
He watches her cross a fire lane and disappear into the building. Kind of plain in the face,
some gray hair poking out from under her black stocking cap, a little heavy in her jeans
with that weight women bear for the world. Like other women her age, he thinks.
Women shopping in the mall, getting their hair tinted, or sipping lattes—Karen resembles
them probably. But inside she’s different--being locked up can’t change that--and when
your insides aren’t like other people’s, you’re going to have trouble.
The wind is scattering autumn’s last leaves across his windshield. Paul lights a cigarette,
takes his first hit deeply. He wonders if Karen is like the women she was with in prison.
That’s the trouble. Where is Karen missing from? Who does her life belong to?
She’s back soon. Quick as she’s in the truck she hands him a paperback.
“I got you something.”
“Les Miserables,” he says, pronouncing all the consonants. “I think I saw the movie. Is it
about a little girl?”
“Yes.”
“This is kind of thick.”
“Well,” Karen says, “you can read it afternoons at work.”
“Yes, I can,” Paul laughs. “Thank you. What did you get?”
She pulls another book out of the plastic bag.
“The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” he says. “I know I saw that movie.”
The bus station is in a truck stop at town’s edge. Paul pulls up behind a grimy coach
idling beside diesel pumps.
“Go get your ticket,” he says. “I’ll make sure the driver waits for you.” Paul knocks on
the double steel doors until they swing open.
“My friend is buying her ticket,” he says.
“She better hurry up,” the driver says. He’s thirty or so with a tattoo on his neck. Writing
on a clipboard, talking out of the side of his mouth.
“You need to make sure she gets to where she’s going safely,” Paul says. “No hassles.”
“Sure, whatever,” the driver says.
“No, it’s not whatever.” Paul steps up into the bus. “Is she going to be okay on your
bus?”
“If she don’t cause any trouble,” the driver says, looking at Paul now, noticing an ear’s
missing, “we’ll get along fine.”
“When do you come back through?” Paul says.
“Day after tomorrow.”
“I’ll be here. And I’m going to ask you if she made her trip okay. Understand?”
“I got it,” the bus driver says. “It’s no problem, dad.”
“I’m not your dad. I’m her friend. I’ll see you Friday.”
Karen returns with a ticket. They tell each other goodbye, words turning to vapors in the
cold air. The image of Karen in her stocking cap climbing into the bus, clutching her ticket
and bag in his brown cotton gloves, seizes Paul like the first instant of a vision. Steel
doors close, brakes release with a gasp. Methodically building speed through its low
gears, the bus rumbles out of the truck stop lot, onto the shoulder and down the
highway between long fields, trailing a dark diesel cloud steadily ruined by the wind.
Heaven on Earth by Mike Wade
r.kv.r.y. summer/fall 2007 fiction
r.kv.r.y. summer/fall 2007 fiction
| artwork by Tamar Factor |