There had been no sex between them, no kissing, no hand-holding. They didn’t talk about being gay, because in fact Berke was never sure Melissa was gay. She dated guys, and talked about how awful some of them were, and how some were really hot and fun but somehow…somehow…they weren’t what she was searching for. Berke figured that if Melissa was gay, she would find her own way to it, eventually. But they were good friends, and they enjoyed being together. My folks are so conservative, Melissa had said. And I’ve never disappointed them. I’d die before I’d disappoint them, they’re looking for me to be perfect at whatever I do, only perfection for our family, you can go back generations and see our accomplishments, our lists of awards and honors. You can’t disappoint a family of people who throw themselves at challenges and always win. You know?
Yes, Berke had said. I do.
I know you’re not very religious, but I thank God we met, Melissa had confided. We can talk about anything.
Except for that thing. The thing that was slowly killing her, and making her take notes in her mind of the strengths of different cords, and the perfect length she would need. Then when the time was perfect, and her mind perfectly fixed on this particular challenge, she had left this world because something in her could not abide the truth of her own heart, and she was too much the good girl to ever disappoint her family.
Berke had had no clue. Their last phone conversation, on that Saturday, had been about where they were going to eat pizza after they saw Rabbit-Proof Fence on Tuesday, their movie night. Melissa had said she was thinking about going down to Macon and spending a few days with her family. But everything had been bright, light, upbeat. Everything had been about the future, that blue-skyed place where all dreams come true and anybody can be who they want to be because This Is America. Melissa’s roommate had found the body, on Monday afternoon. There had been no note, no blame, no incrimination: just a silence, to endure the generations.
The sun was hotter. Berke quickly looked around to get her bearings. She was in an area of dry brown fields, rusted barbed wire fences, and distant farmhouses that appeared abandoned. A few scraggly trees reached up from the miserable earth. It was time to turn around and head back. She was coming to a dirt road ahead that snaked off to the left across a plain of weeds. The air smelled bitter, with the drifting scent of roadkill. She decided she would turn around at the road.
Berke had never doubted her journey. Given the choice between a dress and a flannel shirt, she was glad in plaid. Not that she hadn’t tried sex with guys, just to see what it was like. There had been three different guys, in three different states, in three different seasons. Three times, and three times only. Fuelled probably by alcohol or drugs, or maybe they were all mercy fucks. She couldn’t really remember many details except the rough hands that didn’t know what they were doing, the neanderthalic grunts that made her crush a laugh behind her teeth and at last—oh suffering Jesus, at long last!—the most godawful mess ever to scrawl across a bedsheet. You want to put that thing where? Uh uh, Bluto, my mercy’s used up.
She wanted nothing to do with those kings of artless sex, those preening princes who thought they were a gift to all women of every size, shape and color and who fell apart in whines, tears and rages at the sound of “No”. She did recall her three prizes as being ridiculously heavy, lying atop her like concrete suits. Their hairy backs and pimply asses…urk, she was going to have to stop thinking about this, or she would go over to the roadside and throw up.
She missed Melissa. She missed Mike, and she was going to miss him more as time went on. Maybe that was how the world worked, taking people you loved away from you with no warning, but if that was the best God could come up with She needed to rethink Her game.
Berke was almost to the dirt road. She looked along it and saw what appeared to be a haze of dust floating in the air, as if a vehicle had only recently driven that way. A sun-faded sign that used to be red, white and blue proclaimed Land For Sale. In the distance, a couple of hundred yards or so away and framed by skeleton trees, was a farmhouse the same color as the brown dry brush that surrounded it. The windows looked to be broken out, the chimney reduced to an iron pipe. But, oddly enough, a battered mailbox remained at the turnoff onto the dirt road, and on the mailbox was the name Sam Dodge.
She caught a quick flare of light from a front window. Sun on metal, she thought.
She heard a firecracker go off, not very loud of a pop.
Something zipped past her, a hornet or wasp, about level with her collarbone. She smelled the scorched air under her nose. She looked to her right and saw a plume of dust rising from the barren earth beyond a barbed-wire fence. And then it came to her very clearly that someone had just taken a shot at her, from the window of that house in the field.
Dodge, she thought.
She did better than that: she flung herself to the road and crawled into the weeds on the right. In a matter of seconds, her well-trained heart was pounding, her lungs gasped for air and a new bloom of sweat had burst from her pores.
Berke tensed for a second bullet. Her legs were still in the road. She pulled herself deeper into the weeds. When she looked toward the house again, she could no longer see it. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t be seen. A rush of emotions wheeled through her mind, culminating in anger: who the fuck was shooting? Her New Balances, her knees and her elbows pushed against the ground; she crawled through the brush along the barbed-wire fence. Then there was something right in front of her face that she thought at first was a piece of discarded rope, but since when did rope have scales and alternating light and dark brown bands? She couldn’t see a head and she didn’t hear a rattle but suddenly the thing shot away from her as if it had been touched with a hot iron, and just that fast it slithered through the brush and was gone. She thought she had peed a cup’s worth in her lycra shorts.
She heard a car coming. She lifted her head as much as she dared. A pickup truck that might have been welded together from four or five other wrecked trucks of various colors was approaching over in the left lane, on its way into town. Two men were in the truck, their windows down, and in the back was a piece of machinery that maybe was an air-conditioning unit. On the driver’s dented door was Baumgartner Heating & Cooling with a phone number. In another few seconds the truck was going to pass by. She thought that if she got up and ran for the truck, whoever was in that house was going to have another chance to kill her. But staying here was not an option, and even a snake had that much sense.
When the pickup was almost between her and the house, she jumped up and ran toward it with her arms waving. “Hey!” she shouted. “Stop! Stop!”