She put up the ladder and washed her hands in the tub sink outside and crept back into the apartment in the rear of the museum building, down the dim narrow hallway, past Aunt Sip’s bedroom, through the living room, and had the door open to enter the museum when she heard Aunt Sip.
“Betty,” Aunt Sip said, her voice a gravelly purr followed by a phlegm-racked cough.
“Yes’m.”
“Where the hell you going?” A voice both plaintive and peeved.
“Just down to the beach awhile.”
“Did you feed Russell?”
“Yes’m.”
“Bring me some warm milk when you come back.”
“Yes’m.”
All this poised in the doorway with one foot just above the museum floor, frozen midstep and praying she wouldn’t have to go back into the room, and when Aunt Sip didn’t respond to the third “Yes’m” she quickly stepped through the door and closed it quietly, then moved past the Native American displays and basin racks of shells and starfish and seahorses, rubber toy sharks, snorkel masks, the standing racks of postcards and suntan lotions, then she was out onto the shell parking lot and across the deserted highway, through the little pass in the dunes, and down to the surf. Nobody was out just then at all. She could see the hazy shape of a shrimp boat on the horizon. The breeze flapped her lank black hair around her pale cheeks and thin, wide mouth. She was so thin and runty she looked like a little crooked, stunted sylph on longish skinny legs, her tiny torso twisted with scoliosis, a small face and large ears that stuck out through her hair like a bush baby’s, and huge eyes that almost seemed to frighten people. She would stand in the middle of her tiny pantry bedroom looking down at her crooked chest with one healthy breast blossoming like a ripe nectarine and the other nothing but a discolored little prune. The scoliosis bent her to one side and down, so it was always surprising what strength she had in her skinny shoulders and arms. She was all too aware of her appearance, not that anyone ever let her forget. She had attended the high school up in Foley until her sophomore year, and then dropped out, tired of the snickers and jeers and the boys who would imitate her crooked hobble down the halls. Of course, the principal wouldn’t let her out of gym, where the other girls barely tried to hide their horrified laughter, their oh my gods behind their palms, their cow eyes cutting over to stare. But it was the mimicking that hurt the most. Hearing laughter after she’d passed a group in the hallway and looking back to see Jimmy Teal humping along, face twisted into a grotesque freak’s, one arm hanging down nearly to the floor, twisted that way, and loping along in a hobbled gait that, altogether, looking like someone doing Frankenstein’s Igor a lot more than someone imitating Betty. It was after one of these incidents that she left school early, caught a ride to the beach in the bed of an orange grower’s pickup, and never went back.
Up the shore where the state park pier jutted into the gulf she could see a scattering of people out on the beach. She thought to walk up there and get away for a little while but knew she’d better go back and get Aunt Sip her milk.
She listened to the sand ticking against the front windowpanes, a steady, irregular ticking and spattering when the wind gusted harder. Candlelight dawn crept into the room. She heard Aunt Sip calling in her harsh, crusty voice, “Betty. Betty.”
Betty cut her eyes that way but did not move. She couldn’t move, not now. Not thinking what she was thinking now. If she moved now she might not be able to think it anymore and she wanted to. She wanted to think it until she knew she could do it.
“Coming,” she said. “In a minute.”
Je’sus stood at his post in the corner behind the glass diorama case, face and hands the color of smoked ham skin. Leathery lips sewn shut with cat gut. Arms crossed over his chest. He was said to be a Creek Indian, and she liked to imagine how it was he got the wounds in his hands that were the reason they’d named him as they did. A shop joke. Aunt Sip made her pronounce it in the Spanish way so as not to offend any Christian customers. Betty went to the library one day and looked up some traditional Creek names, and decided she would secretly call the mummy Chebona Bula: Laughing Boy. It was why they had stitched his mouth shut, to stop him from laughing, make him shut up.
Aunt Sip coughed.
“Betty.”
The cases filled with conch shells, flint arrowheads, little dried dead seahorses, augers, sand dollars, starfish, and sharks’ teeth — in such moments the small dried creatures and angular artifacts seemed still alive, trembling in a stasis barely contained within their dried skins, the polished surfaces of their shells, their coiled and chambered passages. Each glassed-in scene — of a Typical Dinner Preparation Among the Creek Indians of the East Gulf Coastal Plain, of ichthyosaurs-eating plesiosaurs, of sea crocs and prehistoric sharks, of Je’sus the Creek mummy, of Typical Wildlife of the East Gulf Coastal Plain and the Gulf Shore — watched her in reverence of the moment when she would either act or not.
She rose from the stool behind the counter and went back to the door to the apartment. She hadn’t emptied Aunt Sip’s ashtray and maybe that was what Aunt Sip was calling about. Would say, Betty, be a dear and haul your worthless little hyena ass here to dump that goddamn ashtray. She practiced not flinching and blinking but she always did, stood there like someone had just brained her with the blunt tomahawk at Je’sus’s waist, waiting for Aunt Sip to start laughing in her raspy coughing way, falling back into the bedcovers and trying to reach for a Pall Mall, knocking everything to the floor. She was tired of smelling like Aunt Sip’s cigarettes all the time too. She could smell it on her clothes when she’d wear them over her swimsuit down to the beach, where she’d swim if there was no one around. And when she came out of the water and lay down on the sand her towel stank of it, and when she pulled her oversized shirt on over her shoulders again later, the shirt stank of it. It all stank of Aunt Sip.
Her whole life stank of Aunt Sip. The cruelest thing Aunt Sip had ever done was agree to raise her so her mother could go away to Hollywood and be a movie star, then tell her she’d never made it that far, was a prostitute in Las Vegas. She didn’t believe that for the longest time. But when you never hear otherwise, well. So maybe she would do the same. Maybe she would take some man’s money for whatever nasty he wanted to do, and then she would do the nasty all the way to Las Vegas and one night she would take a man away from some old lady who would turn out to be, once she looked hard through all the makeup, her mother, and she would laugh and maybe spit at her and say, Well all right now, how does it feel to be left behind, you old whore?
I don’t know you, she would say. I don’t care a thing about you at all. You can just shift for yourself.
She said these things, whispered them, to her image in the mirror in the bathroom, practiced the tough-looking sneer on her face when she said them.
She straightened one of the embroidered silk pillows Aunt Sip claimed she’d gotten in Shanghai. Said she’d been there buying whores, in the good old days, before the barrier island casinos in Mississippi closed down. Well, she guessed that could be something close to the truth, if you figure Aunt Sip was the head whore. The pillow’s material was smooth and almost slippery between her fingers. The pillow itself was very light, as if filled with the finest of down. She balanced it on one palm at arm’s length.