T^{rue Believers
by Donnie Lamon}

The road went from paved, to graveled, to dirt, to mud and then to a mixture of mud and something else, something deeper beneath the mud: some virgin, ancient concoction churned up and out and into the world by reckless, deep-rutted tires. The headlights went out in front of the car, their light lay heavily on the road, but on the trees it was thin and membranous, and it made them look like they were moving, though there was no wind—and the darkness behind the trees lay unmolested and silent. The trees came up to the road like anxious green soldiers, but they stopped at the little brown bulwarks of pressed dirt and mud, rolled up into long hills at the edges of the road. They were like little roller coaster tracks, the road was pushed out like dough and rolled up like dough. The car barely fit between them, and tree limbs, their ends bare and rubbed raw by passing things, slapped at the mirrors and windows like little old tired fingers.

A deep, violent rut crept under the headlights and we ran over it, and the car’s front end bounced into the air and down and settled up and down, dying. All of this happened in a little over a second, and then the rear bumper hit the road hard, jarring every molecule of the car.

"Damn, boy." He said.

I knew he was going to ask me where I learned to drive.

"Where’d you learn to drive?"

"Never did learn." I said. "I got my license out of a Cracker Jack box."

"I heard ‘dat." He mumbled.

The road started going down, deep into some black recess just outside the tired, lazy light in front of us. It started to level out, and when the front end of the car brought the headlights up, they shone out over a long, shimmering expanse of water. It covered the road and disappeared out into the trees and the darkness beyond.

"Looks like the road’s flooded." I said, and stopped the car just in front of the water. "They must have got some rain back in here."

"Nope." He said. "It’s almost always like this."

"Almost always?"

He strummed his fingers along the dash board. "Sometimes it’s worse."

"You don’t reckon we’ll get stuck , do ye?" I asked. My car was not exactly pitched within and without like Noah’s Ark. Not that I cared about the car too much. It was just an old, 1983 Plymouth Reliant that used about a quart of oil a day and had to idle for twenty minutes every morning before it would run good enough to get out on the road. I didn’t have any money in it. My uncle had given it to me a month or two ago for helping him put in a fill line at his trailer. I figured that I’d just drive it until it wouldn’t run anymore, and then just leave it on the side of the road somewhere. I didn’t even have it registered at the courthouse, and it didn’t have any tags. I wasn’t too concerned about damaging it on this road, but what I did care about was having to walk out of this deep hollow in the middle of the night, where I didn’t know anyone.

"Just drive slow." He said.

I started the car forward. The tires went from heavy, loud things in the mud, to muted, drowning things beneath us. Brown water sloshed up and into the light ahead of us and onto the yellow hood of my car. It came up on the sides and fell on the windows and trickled down, leaving sluggish yellow and brown stains down it. I had to give it more gas because the water seemed heavier, and the back tires spun and slid to the left, and then to the right, and I eased out of the accelerator a little. I dropped it down into first gear and let off the throttle altogether. The car idled through the water like it was sleepwalking. We emerged from the water and back onto the sinking, sub-road.

"That was fun!" He laughed.

"Like hell it was. You wudn’t the one who had to drive through it."

"Awww." He said, and he glanced askance at me. "Don’t tell me drivin through that little mud hole scared you."

"I yore ass wudn’t drunk, I’d’ve made you drive through it."

"I coulda drove through that with my eyes closed." He said.

"Yore full of shit." I said. "Reach me a beer."

"They all gone."

"All gone? How many did you drink?"

"I don’t know." He said.

"Well, I only drunk three. Hell, they was twelve in the case."

"So?" He said, glancing askance at me again. God, how I hated that.

"So that means you drunk nine and I only drunk three. If you’d ‘uv finished the fourth grade you’d ‘a been able to figger that out for yourself. Yore a damned alcoholic."

He pulled a cigarette out of his shirt pocket. He put it in his mouth. He punched in the cigarette lighter in the ashtray. He waited. It didn’t pop out. He pulled it out and put it to the end of his cigarette. It didn’t light.

"Damn it!" He said.

He pushed the lighter back into the socket. He waited. He pulled it out again. He put it to the end of his cigarette.

"Damn it!" He said, again.

He pushed it in the socket again. He waited. He reached to pull it out.

"Good God!" I said, and I pulled a Bic lighter out from between the sun visor and the ceiling.

"Here!" I said. He took it from me.

"Yore about helpless, you know it?"

He lit his smoke. "I know it." He took a long drag from his cigarette, let it come out of his mouth and nose, blew it out hard, and then tapped the end of the cigarette on the top edge of the windshield, even though he had not smoked enough to make any ash.

"We can go back to Jack’s and get some more beer, if you wont to."

"Hell," I said, "he’d be closed by the time we found a place in this road big enough to turn this boat around in. ‘Sides, you ain’t got much left outta yore check, do ye?"

He scrunched his face up. He was doing math in his head. "I got jest enough to give Jimmy, and then git us gas to git home on. By the time I bought beer and then Jack took his cut out, I didn’t have too much left. That’s a greedy old bastard, you know it?"

"He’s jest tryin to make a livin, I guess. Same as the rest of us."

His face turned down into a look of disgust. "Well, they ain’t no sense in him ‘a doin people thataway. Specially pore folks like us."

"Well," I said, "it ain’t just everbody that’d cash a dad wife’s disability check."

He fumbled with the radio dials. "Don’t yore radio work?"

"Nope." I said. "Tape player does."

"Let’s hear some musack." He said, and laid his had back on the headrest.

I felt blindly along the seat in the darkness. "Where’s my Blackfoot tape?"

"If it was up yore ass, you’d know it." He said.

"Fuck you." I said. "See if you can find it while I try to keep this piece of crap in the road."

He found it under the seat and put it in and fast-forwarded it to Train, Train, the only song worth listening to on the album.

A possum darted out into the road ahead of us. It stuck its head up into the light like some gopher, its eyes alive and alight and sparkling like alien vessels of moonlight. We drew close to it, and it started to get out of the way, but it was too slow, and my front bumper caught it and it went under the car, bounced up against the undercarriage and out into the darkness behind us.

"Let’s go back and git it." He said, his face coming out of its lethargy.

"What for?"

"Hell, we can sell it to them niggers over in Boogertown. They eat the hell out of possum over in there."

"That’s nasty." I said. "I might be poor, but I ain’t never been so hard up that I had to eat a possum."

"Amen, brother." He said. "Amen."

We drove on, not on the road, or over it, but through it, the trees coming closer to the car and reaching for each other over the roof, forming a dark green canopy of twisted limbs and helpless angst and swallowing up the black silent sky above them. We bounced over deep ruts that cut into the road almost like they were put there on purpose, like some giant had dredged some great plow across it. The tires spun and regressed and slipped on the rough, moon-like surface in protest. Train, Train ended and he pushed in the rewind button.

"How far up the road is this place?"

"Just right up the road." He said. "It ain’t too far now."

"You already said that twice’t."

"You jest drive." He said. "And be thinkin about all that money we’re gonna be makin."

The road went up, and the trees cleared away on the right all of a sudden like, and there was an old barbed wire fence there, that stood upright and leaned over and went down into the mud and disappeared and then reappeared. It was strung on old, tired looking pieces of driftwood and knotted pine stakes. The fence stopped, and there were two tire tracks of depressed grass.

"Turn in right here." He said, pointing with his cigarette-laden fingers.

The path led up to an old trailer. The car headlights struck it, and it seemed to try to shrink away from them, like it was ashamed of itself. It was brown and white and ugly. The tin on the roof was curled up on the edges like overgrown fingernails. The windows were covered with dirt and masking tape, making the light inside of them look brown and dirty. The underpinning was there in places, and in others it lay scattered out in front of the trailer. Underneath, a twisted metal skeleton of pipes ran and went up into the floor. They were covered in places by pink insulation, which drooped and sagged and fell away like leprous skin. There was an old rotten gray porch leading up to the front door, and a screen door hung from one hinge and off to the side like a loose tooth. A dog peered out from underneath the porch, his eyes red and staring.

We pulled in next to a red El Camino. It had a brand-new paint job, tinted windows, shiny mags, and thick black racing slicks. A chrome breather was perched on the hood and silver pipes stuck out the back of the car. There was a bumper sticker on the rear that said, Bad Ass. The front of the car there was a tapestry of painted flames of orange and yellow.

We got out of the car and stepped into the mushy, saturated grass. I could hear music coming from inside the trailer. It sounded like The Scorpions, but I wasn’t sure. We walked up on the porch. It bent and swayed with out steps. Beneath us, the dog growled lightly. He knocked on the door.

"Whatever you do," he said, "don’t stare at his head."

"What----?" I said, and then the door opened. A short skinny man stood in the doorway, the thin dirty light from inside laying around him like a tarnished halo. He looked forty, or so, and he had on a white tank top and cut off blue jeans. He wore flip flops on his feet, and his feet were dirty things, with long gnarled toes and thick swollen brown toenails. He had long dark hair that parted in the middle and hung down symmetrically on both sides of his face. From about the center of his forehead to the middle of his right cheek was a thick bulbous growth of lumpy skin that stuck out about two inches.

"Jesus!" I said, and stopped myself. His eyes went to me quickly, like a predator. The one under the strange growth of lumpy skin looked pushed back into his head. It was a little black slit beneath the deformity.

Trey said, "Hey Jimmy." And the man in the doorway looked at him, and then it was like he forgot what I had just done, and he smiled. His teeth were bad, but I could not stop looking at his head.

"Come on in, boys." He said, and motioned with his hand for us to enter.

Inside, the light was dirty, and the carpet was dirtier. It looked like it might have been orange at one time, but you couldn’t tell now. There was a beanbag chair in a corner and a lime-green vinyl couch against the far wall. Opposing the couch was a little television set sitting on a pile of books. A coat hanger stuck up and out of the top of the set. A portable stereo was on the floor next to the television. It was turned up loud. Jimmy bent down and turned the volume down some. There was a bar separating the living room and the kitchen, and the kitchen was a world of piled dishes, overflowing ashtrays, beer cans and grease. The whole place smelled like hair spray, cigarette ashes, and old sex that had not been cleaned up, but had been instead piled up on top of even older sex.

There was a woman sitting on the couch. She had one of her knees pulled up behind her head, and her head was down almost to her foot, which was propped on the edge of the couch. She was painting her toenails a bright angry red color. Her other leg rested, indian-style on the couch. She was wearing a pair of pink jogging shorts and one side was slightly open, and I could see the edge of her black panties like a dirty secret. Her legs were long and tanned. She wore a faded, Def Leppard t-shirt that was cut off at the bottom, and her tanned belly was exposed at the belly button and the belly button disappeared and reappeared beneath little rolls of brown flesh when she moved. Her hair was dyed blonde, the dark jaded roots un-denied. She looked like she might have been pretty in the face once, and maybe she still was, in a secret, desperate kind of way. She didn’t seem to notice us when we came through the door.

Trey knew these people, so he walked right on in and plopped himself down on the couch. Jimmy went to the refrigerator in the kitchen. When he opened the door, a bunch of Tupperware containers fell out onto the floor. Some of them came open, spilling red spaghetti sauce and macaroni and rice out onto the floor. He acted like he didn’t even notice it. Maybe he didn’t notice it.

"You boys want a beer?" He called.

"Does a bear shit in the woods?" Trey answered.

Jimmy cackled from the kitchen. He came back with three beers. He handed me one. He handed Trey one, then he looked at me with his good, round eye.

"Set down there on the couch. Carla don’t bite. Do ye, Carla?"

Carla didn’t say anything. She just kept right on painting her toenails, blowing them once in a while and dragging on the long, lipstick stained cigarette between the fingers of her other hand. I sat down beside her.

"So," Jimmy said, "what you two boys into this evenin?"

Trey said, "We thought we might give you a little business." He kind of motioned with his head toward the dark hallway behind the kitchen.

Jimmy looked at me.

"Is he cool?"

Trey said, "He’s cool."

Jimmy took a long drink from the can, and then he looked at Trey.

"You got cash? I can’t be tradin for food stamps no more. I got to run down to the drugstore for more supplies, and they won’t take food stamps for cold medicine and such."

"I got cash." Trey said, and he kind of patted his back pocket.

Jimmy drained the beer and crushed the empty can into his leg.

"Come back here in the bedroom with me and I’ll show you what I got."

Then Jimmy looked at me and said, "You wait here. You can fuck Carla there, if you wont to."

I kind of laughed, and he looked hurt, like he had just caught me looking at his head.

He and Trey disappeared into the hallway darkness. I heard a door open, and then the living room was filled with an acrid smell, like an old car battery. I heard the door close and the smell dissipated.

Carla looked up from her toenails. She said in a thick, wildly sensual voice, "He’s been cookin that shit all day. I can’t stand the smell. It makes me sick. It smells like somethin dead when it’s cookin."

"You smoke it?" I asked.

"Yeah." She said, laying a final brush stroke to her pinky toe. "I smoke it."

She put her little brush-cap into the bottle and screwed it tight. She put both legs down on the floor. She looked at me.

"You?"

"No." I said. "Me and Trey was wontin some to sell."

"You got somebody to sell it to?" She asked, and she reached her hand up in under her t-shirt and scratched her armpit. "I mean, you can’t exactly run a ad in the paper for it, you know."

"Ain’t never tried to sell it before." I said. "We mostly just sell pot, but everbody and their brother has got it these days. We thought we’d try somethin that’s a little harder to come by."

"One thing’s for sure," she said, and she leaned toward the end of the couch, put her hand down in under it and fished around. "Once’t you start sellin it, you’ll have loyal customers."

"I guess." I said.

She pulled her hand out from under the couch and had a little metal piece of pipe in it. It was about two inches long. Near one end, on the top, was a small bowl. She put her hand down into her jogging shorts and pulled it back out, holding a small plastic baggie.

"I grabbed this when he wudn’t lookin." She said, and she opened the baggie and shook five or six crystals into the bowl. "He’d be pissed off as hell if he knew I had it, onnaccounta I ain’t fucked him for it yit."

She picked up a lighter from the armrest and started trying to get it to light. It clicked, and little impotent sparks lived and disappeared in an instant.

"So, you and Jimmy ain’t. . .you know. . .together?" I asked, pulling my own lighter from my pocket and handing it to her.

"Hell no." she said. "We hep each other out from time to time. He’s got somethin I need, and I got somethin he needs. I guess we got a, what do you call it? A parasitic relationship."

She put the pipe in her mouth and lit my lighter against the bowl. She inhaled deeply and the crystals glowed orange and red. She jerked her head away from the pipe violently, and her face grimaced and her eyes shut tight. She turned her head to the left, and then to the right, and then she slapped her bare leg with the palm of her hand, leaving a light place in the brown flesh that rose up and disappeared like a fingerprint. She exhaled, and the smoke came out of her nose and mouth in thick, billowy acrid plumes. Her eyes opened and went wide and she swallowed hard.

"Goddamn!" She said, and she handed the pipe to me.

"No thanks." I said.

She looked at my like I was crazy, then she shrugged her shoulders and hit the pipe again.

"No," she said, "Jimmy ain’t my man. I don’t need a man."

"You a lesbian?" I asked and laughed a little.

She relit the pipe, and inhaled. "Nope. I just don’t need a man."

Her words began to slur. "Only man I need is Jesus." She said, and her eyes were glassy. "He’s lookin for me, you know. Man come by the house the other day, him and this woman and a little teenage girl. They come right on up to the trailer door and axed me if they could come inside.

"That girl was right smart lookin. She was wearin a flowerdy dress that was blue and purple and white. She had ribbons in her hair, jest like a picture. She kept lookin at me. It made me a sight nervous at first. I never did care too much for people eyeballin me.

"They set right down on the couch, and I didn’t think to offer them anything to eat or drink. We didn’t have nothin, anyway. That girl crossed her legs and pushed the hem of her dress down over her knees. I liked the way she did that. It was how my momma used to tell me to do. Just like a real lady.

"She kept lookin at me, but I started to not be so nervous about it, ‘cause she wudn’t lookin at me like them men do down at Jack’s or over at Stoot’s, or like them women look at me when I go down and git our groceries with food stamps. She was lookin at me like she really liked me. Like they wudn’t nothin else in the world she’d rather be doin.

"The man was dressed in a suit, like a banker, or a preacher. He kept readin from this black bible that he had on his lap. Ever once in a while, he would look me in the eye and put his hand on my knee, but they wudn’t nothin sexy about it. The woman with him was kind of prayin under her breath the whole time. The man tole me that Jesus was comin to take his bride up to Heaven. Say he gonna take me up there to be with him, where we’ll walk on streets of gold and rest in mansions of glory. Say he gonna dry all my tears, and that they won’t be no need for doctors or drugs cause they won’t be no pain and they won’t be no sorrow, cause they ain’t no rememberin up there."

"Is that right?" I asked.

Her eyes rolled back in her head and then shone brown again, and her fingers fidgeted with the hem of her shorts. She started speaking faster, and her words slurred together at the ends, hinged together with saliva and breath

"That’s right. I jest can’t figger out what’s takin him so long to find me. I been right here my whole life. Ain’t never been nowhere."

innocent thing of it, and she was pretty then, in that moment when she believed.

"One of these days he’ll come through the front door and carry me off up out of this place."

I said something like, "That sounds nice."

The cassette tape in the stereo ran to the end, and then changed over to the other side. A new song started playing. I recognized it. It was The Scorpions. I had that same tape out in my car. The song was Still Loving You.

Her hands went up over her head and kind of floated there. Then they danced around in front of her face and went back to toying with her shorts.

"I love this song." She cooed and she started singing along, or trying to sing along. She didn’t know all of the words, and she couldn’t sing very well, but she sang like she believed it. She sang like the words were true.

Time, it needs time

To win back your love again.

I will be there. I will be there.

She kind of leaned back against the armrest and kicked her leg up on the back of the couch. The other dangled off, her foot lightly touching and lifting off the floor. Her eyes went all around the room. One hand went up over her head, and it dangled there in midair, as if it wanted to fly away. She put the other hand to her face, caressed her cheek like it forgot it was there.

Love, only love

Can bring back your love someday.

I will be there. I will be there.

"So . . ." she said, and she was looking at me, but her eyes were not seeing me. The were seeing something else. They were believing something else.

"Do you want to fuck me, or not?"

"I guess." I said.

She didn’t say anything. She didn’t smile. Nothing. She brought her legs together on the couch and her hands floated down to her shorts. She pushed them and her black panties down around her knees, then she brought her knees up to her stomach and she pushed her clothes down around her ankles and unhinged them from her body and dropped them onto the floor. She hooked her leg back up onto the top of the couch and let the other hang down off, letting me get a good look at her secret place. She looked down at it herself, and then she looked at me.

"Come on, then." She said.

I unbuttoned my pants and bunched them down around my knees. I leaned over her and she sunk her hands into my buttocks and pulled me to her and then into her, and when I went into her, she started singing again, looking off, up at the ceiling.

Try, baby try

To trust in my love again.

I will be there. I will be there.

She moaned like some deeply wounded angel, and her eyes closed and I could see them moving underneath the lids, like they were watching something far, far away.

If we’d go again

All the way from the start.

I would try to change

The things that killed our love.

When the guitar solo started, I started to lose control of myself. I pulled away from her. She opened her eyes and dug her fingers into my legs.

"Don’t worry about it, baby." She whispered, and pulled me back into her, and then her hands went to my neck and she pulled my face down to her lips. She whispered in my ear.

"You can come inside me. They’s somethin broke down there. I can’t have no babies."

She closed her eyes.

"It’s just a cold, empty space for people to use. It ain’t special no more."

Then her face changed, or didn’t change. It didn’t change. It was just the first time I noticed it. Her face still believed. It believed what she had just said like it believed that Jesus was coming for her. Like it believed that the song was true.

I couldn’t look at her anymore.

I’m still loving you.

When the song ended, I was finished, and I kind of went limp in her, lying against her, my face buried in her neck, breathing hard, silent in the afterbirth of my orgasm. She pushed me off of her. She didn’t want to hold me, she said. She sat up and got her panties and her shorts and pulled them on. I wanted to say something to her, but I could not think of one single thing.

She asked me for a cigarette. I gave her one and lit it for her. I lit one for myself. We ashed in an empty beer can. She stared at the small nucleus of red ember at the end of her cigarette, buried beneath the gray ash. She stared at it like it contained the answers to all the great mysteries in the universe.

Jimmy and Trey came out of the back bedroom, and they were laughing about something. Trey had a little paper sack in his hand. Jimmy looked at Carla, and then he looked at me and kind of smiled. He winked at me with that little black eye beneath theat weird growth on his forehead. It was a greasy wink, and I suddenly felt like throwing up.

"She’s a peach, ain’t she?"

I didn’t answer him.

Trey said, "You ready to go?"

"I guess." I said, and I got up off the couch.

Carla acted like she didn’t know we were still there, much less that we were leaving. Who knows? Maybe she didn’t know. When we walked out the door, Jimmy called after us:

"Come back and see me when you run out. They’s plenty more where that came from!"

I didn’t know if he was talking about the meth, or Carla.

Back in the car, driving down the dark narrow road, Trey would not stop talking.

"I’ll tell you what, that’s some set up he’s got back there. He cooks it all up right there in the back bedroom. He showed me how to do it, and how to make it look like it ain’t nothin if somebody shows up that don’t need to see it."

He went on and on about how cheap it was to make and how he and I could make a killing if we went into it ourselves. He was already making plans. He would clear out the two extra bedrooms in his trailer and set the whole thing up right there. It would be a money making machine, to hear him tell it.

And he told me all about it, but I wasn’t listening.

I was thinking about Carla, and her face as it lay there beneath me, believing.

I wished it hadn’t believed.