More of This World or Maybe Another Read online

  More of This World or Maybe Another

  Barb Johnson

  For Virginia Sonnier

  And for Mid-City—

  heart of New Orleans,

  heart of my heart

  Contents

  More of This World or Maybe Another

  Keeping Her Difficult Balance

  If the Holy Spirit Comes for You

  Issue Is

  Titty Baby

  Killer Heart

  What Was Left

  The Invitation

  St. Luis of Palmyra

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  More of This World or Maybe Another

  Delia has to walk past A. J. Higginbotham and his crowd to get to the gym, which is where the dance is. The boys are installed on the railing under the long breezeway like they’re at a livestock auction, cans of Skoal wearing their way through back pockets. Delia raises her right hand and shoots the bird at the lineup for the entire fifty-foot walk.

  Pup-py Chow for a ful-l-l-l year—till she’s full grown! A.J. sings as the group of girls behind Delia passes him. Higginbothams. Fuckers don’t know enough to keep off each other. All eight inbred Higginbotham brothers and sisters are in high school at the same time. A.J. is in Delia’s remedial math class, his second go-round. They’ll probably pass him this time. If they don’t, there’ll be a Higginbotham logjam next year, and their teacher said she won’t put up with more than two Higginbothams at a time. Frick and Frack. One in the front and one in the back.

  Delia pushes through the crowd bunched up at the door, scopes the gym for her friend, Calvin, and his twin sister, Charlene. Charlene—everyone calls her Chuck—drove Calvin to the dance an hour early so he could help set up the sound system. Chuck drives an old Valiant, paid for with her own money, Calvin said. He didn’t say how she got the money, but Delia knows it has something to do with the weed that can be bought at the caretaker’s shed behind the old Blue Moon Drive-In.

  There’s no sign of Calvin, but Delia sees Chuck right away, glowing, high above the crowd in the bleachers. She’s sitting with a group of girls who are a blur of heavy eyeliner and large hoop earrings, girls who laugh really loud at just anything. Chuck, though, she’s like a bright red engine light in a dark car for how she can get your full attention without making a sound. Everyone knows she keeps a switchblade in one of her boots. Delia licks her lips, which have gone suddenly dry, and weaves her way toward the bleachers.

  She’s not sure what the arrangement for tonight is, but she hopes that she and Calvin are not supposed to be on some kind of date. There are plenty of girls who would love to date Calvin Lafleur. He got left back when they were in junior high, so he’s a year older than the other boys in the junior class. The baby fat in his face is gone, but there’s still plenty of it in his head. He’s always bragging about how often he has to shave, like it’s some kind of accomplishment. The other girls fall for it, but Delia could give a damn. She wants other things. Things she doesn’t even know the name of. And anyway, she’d hate to ruin her and Calvin’s friendship with a bunch of dating rigamarole. Since her best friend, Renée, has gone all boy-crazy, Calvin is about the only one who’ll go with Delia to the pasture out on the highway and sneak rides on the Higginbothams’ horses. Sometimes Calvin’s friends come. And, lately, Chuck.

  “Seen the meat?” Delia calls up from the bottom riser when Chuck finally looks away from the group of girls. Chuck’s eyes are black-black, and looking into them gives Delia a feeling like driving without headlights at night, like speeding down one of the mile roads that separate the rice fields at the edge of town where she lives.

  Chuck flicks a sheet of hair, dark and liquid, over her shoulder. “The meat’s in the dressing room smoking a doobie,” she says. “Why? You looking to dance?”

  “Might be,” Delia says and stares through the gaps in the bleachers.

  Chuck scoots away from the other girls. “Wouldn’t be a date without some dancing,” she says. “Or maybe you’re after a kiss?”

  Delia looks in the direction of the locker room. Looks at Chuck. “Maybe,” she says.

  Chuck waves Delia up. Her hands are muscular and look like they’re built to do something very specific. The top half of her right index finger is missing, and this makes Delia think of the switchblade in Chuck’s boot. She wonders if it came before the stumpy finger or after. She studies the fleshy nub the way she’s caught people studying the hot-grease scar on her own forehead. Behind Delia’s bangs, there’s a medallion of skin from her upper thigh that was laid over a grease burn she got when she was five. It’s the same size and color as a Ritz cracker now. Her head has grown, but the skin graft has only stretched. It looks like a shiny, wrinkled eyelid up there.

  The band starts an out-of-tune version of “Crimson and Clover,” and a strobe light flashes above the stage. Very psychedelic. Chuck’s friends scatter like buckshot, snagging boys to dance with. My, my such a sweet thing…Delia holds her breath. I want to do ev-er-y-thing…She imagines herself singing this to someone. Could she? She wonders if other girls wonder these things. When the band gets to the song’s stuttering refrain, Delia sings along, batting an index finger against her throat: O-O-O-Over and O-O-O-Over…Chuck looks at Delia and laughs, a sound that runs down Delia’s spine like a message in code. Then Chuck works her stumpy finger against her own throat, and Delia sees that half an index finger is plenty to do what needs doing in life.

  After the song is over, Calvin staggers out of the boys’ dressing room, and he and his friends shuffle in the general direction of Delia and Chuck. “Cyclops,” he says to Delia on his way up to the top of the bleachers.

  “Meat,” Delia returns, pushing her bangs up and flashing the third eye of scar at him.

  Calvin and his crowd settle in on the top row of the bleachers, several levels above Delia and Chuck. Delia’s mother made her wear a dress to the dance, and in between songs, Delia overhears Calvin and his friends discussing the ease of access created by this fact. She makes a noise like a pig, a sound so realistic that farm animals have been fooled by it. Calvin and his pals start up barking. There’s a pretty big difference between how Calvin acts when it’s just him and Delia, and how he gets when he’s around his friends. A couple of weeks ago, when they were alone, Calvin told Delia that if he ever got drafted, he wasn’t going. “It’s just wrong, you know? The military? It’s messed up. I’m gonna dodge.” Delia’s brother has recently returned from the war, so nobody ever talks about skipping out on the military around her. “I’ll drive you to Canada myself,” she told Calvin, and that’s when he tried to kiss her, spoiling a perfectly good moment.

  Delia thinks about the future when she’ll likely have to marry one of the idiots behind her, or somewhere in this room, at least. She can never imagine how it will happen, but she knows that one day she’ll wake up in a house full of Higginbothams or Lafleurs and not have one clue how she got there. Or why she hates it, which she knows she will.

  In between songs, Chuck reaches over and taps Delia’s knee with her stumpy finger. “It’s okay if you want to go up there and talk with Calvin,” she says, tipping her head back toward the boys.

  “Hell no,” Delia says. “Bunch of idiots.” She can feel the place where Chuck touched her leg, as though she’s been stamped with the heated coil of a car’s cigarette lighter instead of the wrinkled tip of Chuck’s stubby finger.

  A few songs later, Calvin comes down from the top of the bleachers and squeezes in between Chuck and Delia. “You want to dance?” he yells to Delia over the music.

&nbs
p; “Nah,” Delia hollers back, not taking her eyes off the dance floor, “I’m stag.” When Chuck was trying to convince Delia to come to the dance a while back, she said, “I’m going stag.” Delia has no idea what stag means. It seems like maybe it’s a category. Like there are girls who want to be on a date. And girls who don’t. Saying “stag” lets people know which kind of girl you are. “Besides,” Delia tells Calvin now, giving him a pig snort, “I don’t dance with livestock.”

  “Suit yourself,” Calvin says, turning and climbing back up the bleachers to his pals. Delia knows it doesn’t matter to him one way or the other whether they dance together. He’s probably only asked her on a dare. Recently, it seems as though Delia’s whole class has turned into a bunch of cattle for how they only do what everyone else is doing or daring them to do.

  After Calvin leaves, Chuck taps Delia’s knee again and points to the dance floor. Delia’s soon-to-be-ex-best friend, Renée, is dancing with a boy she began seeing a few weeks ago, which is exactly how long it’s been since Delia’s seen Renée anywhere but at the bus stop or on the bus.

  “I let him go all the way,” Renée wrote in the back of her notebook one morning last week. She held the page between them on the bus seat so Delia could read it. When Delia didn’t say anything back, Renée leaned in closer. “I finally lost my virginity,” she whispered, cupping one hand around Delia’s ear. “Can you believe it?” Why wouldn’t Delia believe it? It’s cause and effect. If you have sex, you lose your virginity. “It’s really beautiful,” Renée went on in her new prissy-wise voice. “You’ll see.” All the way to school, Delia thought about that phrase, about “letting” someone go all the way. It made sex sound like something Renée had to put up with instead of enjoy. Like how Delia dressed in three heavy coats one Christmas and “let” Pooky Langlois shoot at her with his new BB gun. Pooky gave her five dollars, so it was worth it. She wonders what Renée got.

  Right this minute, Renée’s draped over the boyfriend out on the dance floor, swaying off-beat to the music. The boyfriend, Renée has explained, is her best friend. She can tell him anything. Delia imagines this is probably the end of the line for her and Renée, and she turns her head away from the dancers.

  When Chuck goes off to the bathroom, Delia goes to get some punch for both of them. While she’s ladling the fruit and liquid into the cups, A. J. Higginbotham asks her to dance.

  “I’m stag,” Delia tells him.

  “The hell you are,” A.J. says and starts barking, which starts the other boys barking. Barking is the new thing this year. It’s like there was a meeting this past summer, and the boys all agreed that the girls would enjoy a full year of dog talk.

  When Delia gets back to the bleachers, she hands over one of the cups of punch to Chuck, who has moved closer to the dance floor. Chuck frowns at the delicate paper cup and downs the whole drink in a few gulps. Delia settles in next to her and turns her attention to where A.J. and another boy are poking their scrawny chests out at each other. A crowd gathers around them in hopes of seeing a fight. Idiots. When Delia looks at Chuck again, she’s carved her initials into the side of the empty punch cup, which means she’s pulled the switchblade from her boot and done the carving without Delia ever seeing it. Delia wonders what else she’s missed.

  After a while, Chuck leans over and says, “You want to go have a smoke in the car?” Her voice is close, and her breath is moist against Delia’s ear. Delia pretends she doesn’t understand, waits to see if Chuck is going to invite others along because Delia’s not about to be trapped in a car with the hoop-earring-and-eyeliner catpack.

  Delia goes back to watching Renée on the dance floor. Chuck gives her a nudge and points again in the direction of the parking lot with a question on her face. Another girl might favor her good hand, might keep that stump out of sight. Does Chuck use that finger to dial the phone, Delia wonders, staring at the wriggling stub, or has she learned to get the phone dialed some other way?

  When they get to the gravel lot behind the gym, Chuck’s rusty Valiant is backed up to the edge where matches flash and die like fireflies, and all the loud talk defeats the purpose of hiding out behind the building.

  The car’s dashboard is swollen and split, its stuffing exposed. Below the dash, on the ledge in front of the speedometer, is about half a tightly rolled fatty. Right out in the open.

  “Roll up your window, would you?” Chuck asks. “We don’t need to listen to all that jackassness going on out there.”

  Delia tries to think of a question she can ask to get the conversation going. She picks at a brittle flap of dashboard skin just over the radio. “Radio work?” she asks. Music is a way to be with someone but not.

  Chuck looks at the radio, clicks the knob on and off, on and off. When the clicking stops, there’s just quiet again.

  Delia sneaks a look across the front seat to see whether the silence is bothering Chuck or whether she likes it. Chuck seems fine, and Delia turns to watch people from the dance stumbling out the back door of the gym. Rich kids in their designer clothes—Mr. and Miss Everything. A few hippies. Ten or so goat ropers in their dress cowboy hats, pearl-snap shirts, tight jeans and boots. The stream of ropers pools around the car parked next to Chuck and Delia. Boys in one group. Girls in another. Even goat-roper girls aren’t interested in watching their dates spit tobacco juice. Instead, they start up a high-pitched debate about barrel racing.

  Slowly, the windshield of Chuck’s car fogs up, and Delia slouches in her seat, low, then lower, so she can watch through a small clear patch.

  “I guess we better put the windows down,” Chuck says when there’s no clear space left. “People are going to think we’re in here making out.”

  Delia’s face heats up, and she turns it toward her open window in case Chuck can tell. Over against the gym, a couple of hippies have begun making out. How do you know when to close your eyes for a kiss, Delia wonders. What if both people close their eyes, but no one leans in? What if you lean in, and the other person turns away?

  While she’s watching the hippies, Delia hears the flink of Chuck opening her lighter and the scritching of the spark wheel against the flint. She turns back expecting to see Chuck lighting the joint, but just as a flame appears, Chuck flips the cap shut. She does it again and then again so that the sound of it is like a conversation. Like Chuck’s saying something and Delia’s listening.

  A ship’s horn sounds out on the river a couple of miles away. Two blasts: something big passing something small. The big ship, a freighter probably, will dock downriver from Delia’s house, and all night big blue cranes will load rice or soybeans or oil into its hold. Food and petroleum are forever on the way to parts of the world Delia is afraid she will never see.

  “You ’bout done?” Chuck asks. Out of the blue, it seems to Delia, and way too soon. Done with the dance, Delia supposes Chuck means. Or maybe done sitting in the car? Everything Chuck says could be this thing or that thing, or even a thing Delia has never heard of.

  While Delia’s still trying to figure out the question, Chuck lights the joint. She leans over to shotgun it for Delia, and Delia pulls back. She rubs at her eye like the smoke got in it until Chuck backs off the shotgun pose and hands over the joint. Delia inhales and holds the smoke until her lungs burn so she can be sure the high will take hold. Eventually, whatever was snagged, turned sideways in her, settles to the bottom like an anchor. She can hear A.J. and the boys around the corner of the gym. Puppy Chow for a ful-l-l year…they’re singing to some girl. To any girl. It’s like A.J. doesn’t know he’s a buck-toothed, inbred bastard. He acts like the whole world is his to comment on.

  They pass the joint back and forth without talking, Delia, then Chuck. Each time they let smoke out of their lungs, it hangs between them for a second like something solid that’s been said, that needs thinking about before it goes back to being just air.

  This might be it, Delia thinks when they finish the joint. This might be all. “You want to go to Emeral
d City?” she blurts out, turning toward the open window quick like she’s caught sight of something interesting. The pot has made time all screwy, and Delia makes herself count to ten before she says anything else. “I know where there’s an empty tank,” she says. Empty tanks are the best. No mucky oil. No killer stink of petroleum.

  Chuck runs her fingers through her hair. “Emerald City,” she says, then reaches over the seat and pulls a set of amber-colored Clackers up by a single string. She hands them to Delia. An answer.

  Emerald City is what they call the tank farms across the river where miles of oil-storage tanks, like thirty-foot-tall cans of tuna, are laid out in a petrochemical subdivision. Anyone can climb the stairs up the side of one, open the door, and go on in. It’s best to bring along flashlights and Clackers and mushrooms pinched from beneath cow pies. An old sheet if you have it. Turn the flashlight off and smack the Clackers together—click-clack, click-clack—until the high, sharp echo shakes you loose from yourself and lifts you up out of this world and into another.

  Holding the Clackers up, Delia asks, “Who’d you get these from?” They’re chipped, a telltale sign that they’ve been smacked together too hard and too long. In whose hands, Delia wonders. When?

  “Oh, I’ve had those quite a while,” Chuck says.

  There’s the sound of a key sliding in the ignition. Delia can hear each tooth shoving the pins of the lock aside. She watches Chuck’s hand turn the starter, and the Valiant’s busted muffler roars to the crowd behind the gym. The goat ropers jump a mile high and yell something at the car. Words she can’t hear. Barnyard words probably.

  The sharp, bright curves of Chuck’s movie star profile cut into the dark outside the window. She gets dimples at the corners of her mouth when she smiles, which is not all that often. Though she’s smiling at Delia now. She lets up on the gas, and the muffler quiets to a low rumble. “You ready?” she asks.