Right 10, Left 11, Right 12

My first cellmate was a drifter from Lubbock who got eleven years for pushing a goat off an overpass. He was hitching somewhere east of Dallas—“headed to Atlanta or maybe Charleston, who could know”—and the goat was up on a bridge eating weeds in the concrete.

“He looked at me funny, like some goats do. So, I knew it was him or me.” He grabbed its horns and threw it headfirst onto the highway below where it smashed through a schoolteacher’s windshield. “She nearly lost her head. The teacher, I mean.”

When I told him that I’d pled guilty to manslaughter for shooting my girlfriend’s stepdad, he didn’t believe me.

“You’re just a kid. And, anyways, they’d stick you with murder for that.”

I told him that it really had been a murder. That it had been thought through—the implications, the morality of it. That I took up smoking to help get my mind right. “A stale box of Newports from my mom’s bedside table.” And then Jules showed up at my house with her shirt ripped up the side and a patch of her hair torn off, begging me to take her anywhere. “That’s when I stopped thinking about it.” I told him it happened in the middle of the night—“I faked a flat tire”—on the dead-end country road out past the old meat-packing plant, not far from their house. In this spot where the tree branches spread low like a thousand arms over the narrow road. I told him that if they had been arms they might have tried to stop it; to grab me and pull me back. But I would have shaken them off, I said, and still—with my wits about me—shot him in the back of the head.

“So, call me what you want. But if I was Christ himself I’d raise that guy from the dead just to kill him again.”

*

I met Jules the summer before junior year. My friend Luke had met some Sonic waitress from the next town over and he said he’d die if he didn’t see her again. She put extra cherries in his limeade and wrote her number on the receipt.

“I know it sounds stupid, Matty,” he said, “but I could see her being the one. Like forever. It’s not about sex with her.”

That Saturday night we snuck out and drove in his truck with the windows down, past Old Hoard Road and through the Sabine River bottoms that flood in the spring. Sometimes in the lowest spots we’d pass through a pocket of cool air, like moving through the ghost of a spring shade. Our backs were sweating by the time we pulled up to a driveway crossed by a rusty gate. He cut the engine and we sat for a few minutes in the dark. I started to worry that he had been duped by his soul mate.

“This feels like the beginning of a horror movie,” I said.

Then voices up the road and we saw a flashlight dancing toward us. I made out two silhouettes: two girls holding hands. The Sonic waitress was in front and she led the other girl around to my window.

“This is Jules,” she said. “She’s blind as a pancake and perfect in every way.”

Jules laughed through her nose. Her face was framed with thick, angular glasses. “And I do tricks if you pat my head.” She leaned into the open window, her curly brown hair falling on my arm. She grabbed my face with both hands and pulled me closer, so that we were nearly nose to nose. “If you’re close enough, I can see you.” Her breath was sweet; chapstick and vanilla. “My friend wants to screw your friend, so I guess we’re stuck with each other.”

We drove with the lights off through an empty pasture, the four of us pressed together, our skin sticky and glowing in the full moon. Jules tapped her foot lightly against mine. She offered me a piece of gum. “Juicy Fruit?” I had hardly uttered a word to her, but it was over for me and she knew it.

Just me and Jules in the grass, looking up at the sky.

“It’s all just blurry to me,” she said.

I traced the moon and the Big Dipper with her finger. “I think this one’s the North Star, but that’s all I know.”

“The Great Bear,” she said. She told me that it was a hundred years old. “The light you’re seeing. The way the stars look right now is how they looked a hundred years ago. My stepdad says we really only see a memory of them.”

I said I thought that was sad and that it couldn’t be true.

“Well, I love it,” she said. “As much as I hate him, I hope he’s right about that.” She told me to close my eyes. “Now we see it the same.”

“You hate him?” I asked.

“Yeah, you’ll see. You’ll hate him, too, soon enough.”

*

With that, the whirlwind of Jules blew up around me. I’d wait impatiently at the Movie Gallery for her shift to end, watching through the plate-glass window as she leaned in close to the computer screen or the cash register, doling out change and DVDs of Titanic or Lonesome Dove. Then we’d walk the aisles at Walmart or make out in my car behind the civic center. It was clumsy and new and consuming. It was Friday football. It was Dairy Queen and promises of forever. It was Jules and then everything else.

At her insistence, we’d spend long hours at the nursing home with my mom and her early-onset Parkinson’s dementia. A year prior she had climbed onto the roof of the Methodist church carrying the pistol from Dad’s safe, convinced that she was chasing a demon. “Had to give it a taste of it’s own medicine,” she said. “Had to send it back.” They used a firetruck to get her down. That’s when Dad knew it had gotten out of hand. “It’s just beyond my capabilities, Matty,” he said. I told him that I had known it for a while.

If Mom’s hands were steady enough, Jules would paint her nails under a magnifying glass, and Mom would coo and hum, relieved at her touch. Sometimes Luke would join us, too, and my mom would yell “Lukey!” like she did when we were kids. Like she had that time in eighth grade when he made the honor roll and she hugged him in the aisle at school like he was her own son. But other times she would grab my hand and call me by my dad’s name, which turned my stomach and I’d have to leave the room.

Jules’ stepdad, Garver, was a scratch golfer and he invited me to play one Saturday. I hadn’t spent much time with him, but she begged me not to go.

“I told you, you’ll hate him. Everyone hates him.”

“Your mom doesn’t hate him.”

We were bundled together on the back porch and my dad poked his head through the sliding door. “Dinner’s ready. There’s plenty for you, sweetheart, if you’re hungry.” Jules nodded; Dad smiled back and closed the door.

“He might literally die if you don’t stay,” I said.

“I’d never do that to him.” But her mind was elsewhere. She pulled the blanket up over our heads and whispered in my ear: Please don’t go with Garver.

“You expect me to just tell him ‘no’? He’s scary as shit.”

“I don’t care what you tell him. I’m asking you not to go.”

In the end, I didn’t see the harm in it, so I told him yes, and we met at the country club. We loaded the golf cart—“Sorry, these are my grandpa’s old wooden clubs”—and teed off from under a massive pine tree. Mainly, he talked about his work as a prosecutor.

“We’ve got this one case—you may have heard about it—where this guy ran buck-naked around the elementary school. Around and around. High as that damn tree.” I teed up my ball and hacked at it while he spoke. “Shit all over himself and the cops didn’t want to touch him. The bastard’s asking for probation, but I think he deserves jail time considering all those poor kids had to see his pecker like twelve times.” My ball rolled weakly up the fairway. “Damn, buddy. Keep that left arm straight.”

After our round, we ate steaks in the clubhouse and he asked about my mom. “You know, we went to school together.”

I told him that she hadn’t mentioned him before. “But she doesn’t remember much these days.”

“Yeah, Jules told me about all that.” He shoveled a spoonful of mashed potatoes into his mouth. “Truth be told, we didn’t much like each other. Your mom and me. She was one of those weird girls.” He wiped his face. “No offense.”

“Weird?” I had never met anyone who didn’t like my mom.

“Yeah. You know, she wore these full-length dresses like an amish or something. Carried around a Bible. Which, don’t get me wrong, I love the Lord, but it was just weird, you know?”

“Yeah. Weird,” I said. It was hard to imagine her like that. My age, prudish. The Mom I knew was always pressing things, pushing them forward. I had never seen her in a dress. “I wonder what she’d say about you?” I asked.

This stopped him for a beat and he squinted at me. “Guess we’ll never know, will we?”

He ordered a beer and then another. Then a bourbon and Coke—“Make it a double”—and when the waitress placed the glass on the table, she clipped one of the empty beer bottles into his lap. Startled, he jumped up and called her a “fucking moron” under his breath. She apologized and cleaned the mess. He watched her walk away and said, “She looks great from the back, though.”

When Jules asked how it went, I didn’t tell her about the drinking or the waitress or what he’d said about Mom. “It was fun,” I assured her. “I embarrassed myself with those dumb clubs and then he bought me a steak.” I kissed her shoulder, but she was frozen up. “I told you it would be fine.”

*

That winter came earlier and colder than usual. A December storm knocked out power to most of the county for a week. Century-old trees bent and snapped. One old couple was crushed by a live oak while they slept in front of their fireplace. I remember the quiet of it. How the pace had been taken out of everything. We played Uno and made grilled cheeses on the barbecue grill. Listened to my dad read endlessly from the Bible and drone on about his work at the railyard. Jules was a fixture by then, an expected part of our lives.

One afternoon we all napped in the living room, and I woke to her watching me sleep.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

She shook her head and smiled and told me that she was happy. “It’s nice. Here with you boys.”

Luke said I needed to get Jules a promise ring for Christmas. “You can get something at Zales for like thirty bucks.”

I asked him if he had bought one for the Sonic waitress. They had only dated for a week.

“Maybe I can just use that one.”

“Screw you.”

Jules’ parents invited me and Dad for Christmas Eve dinner, but Dad declined. ”You should go, son,” he said. “No, really. You should. I’ve signed up to read the nativity story to your mom and her friends.”

So I went alone. Her mom answered the door. She was squat and gray-haired, and I wondered if Jules would look like her one day.

“Hello, Matthew.” We hugged awkwardly in the doorway. “Jules will be right out, just make yourself at home.” That would be nearly impossible. Their house was decorated more formally than my mom would have done. The tree was silver only—tinsel, snowflakes, bows. I sat forward on the couch, rigid on the edge of the cushion, and heard whispers from the hallway.

When Jules finally emerged, I saw a cut below her eye. She subtly shook her head and I didn’t ask about it. We ate ham and cornbread and listened to more of Garver’s work stories as he downed a bottle of Merlot. I knew it was Merlot only because he kept saying, “That’s a good Merlot,” every time he refilled his glass. He talked about a police chase, a theft at the Dollar General, the superintendent’s DWI. In his view, they all belonged in prison.

“How else will they learn?”

I don’t recall Jules saying anything the whole meal. Her mom smiled and laughed hollowly at Garver’s bliterations, but he didn’t notice. By the end of it, I was exhausted just from sitting there and wishing I had gone to the nursing home with Dad. Jules would hardly look at me. I knew she was wishing the same thing.

Looking back, it was stupid to give her the ring that night. I sometimes wonder how things might have played out if I hadn’t.

I gave her parents a giftcard to Red Lobster and they gave me a box of golf balls and a bottle of Cool Water. Her mom told me it was the same cologne that Garver wore. “It’s very professional.”

When I pulled the box out of my coat pocket, it was obvious what was inside and Jules looked panicked. I tried to stuff it away again, but it was too late.

“Alright, it’s the lovebirds’ turn,” said Garver, walking from the kitchen holding a mug of spiked eggnog.

Jules tried to get out of it. “We can do ours later. I know ya’ll are tired.”

“Don’t be silly, Julia,” her mom said. “You were so excited to give him your gift.”

“Yeah, don’t be silly, Julia,” said Garver. He made his way to the couch and sat on the other side of Jules, so that she was sandwiched between us. He put his hand on her knee and she stiffened. Her mom saw it and then bolted out of her chair.

“I’ll get it for you, Jules,” she said and rummaged around under the tree. “Here you are.”

“Ladies first,” said Garver. She had slid from under his hand, but she didn’t move toward me, either. Instead, she balanced between us on an island and I was too dense and too lost in my own feelings to understand why.

She opened the box and rubbed the small opal with her thumb. She said it was beautiful and thanked me, but didn’t take it out of the box.

“Well, aren’t you gonna put it on?” asked Garver.

“That’s ok,” I said. “It probably doesn’t fit. The salesman said we could get it resized.”

“Jesus. Give it to me.” Garver took the ring from the box and knelt in front of her. “This is how you’re supposed to do it.”

She flinched as he slid the ring onto her finger.

I wanted to tell him that, no, it wasn’t an engagement ring, that it was just a promise ring, that it really didn’t mean much of anything. But I just sat and watched him and watched her eyes well up and her jaw clench. 

“Please, stop,” she whispered to him. She was fully his in that moment, and I wasn’t even in the room anymore. It struck me suddenly that she had begged this of him a thousand times before. Their knowledge of each other was unsettling. I stood and reached for her but she was telling me something with her eyes: I told you. I told you you’d hate him.

And I did.

“Maybe we should get some air,” I said. But she didn’t move and now I was on the island.

“Jules was right, it is getting mighty late,” Garver said, stepping toward me. “Thanks for the gift card. I really love those coconut shrimps.”

“Oh, yes,” said her mom, wringing her hands. “And the cheese biscuits.”

That night I came down with a fever that laid me in bed for a week. I dreamed in constellations and hunting the Great Bear and demons on the steeple. Everything silver and silver and silver. Jules beside me, telling me to close my eyes. Just close them with me. And Dad praying in the dark, light from the hallway. Luke with Sonic drinks—“extra cherries like we like” and “did you actually see anything?” and “maybe you should tell the cops.” And I said that Garver was the cops. And Jules said they called it a “he said, she said.”  And shadows in the hallway and whispers of please stop. Please. Stop. Stop. Please. Everything red and red and red. And the Little Bear closes its eyes and the Mama Bear is quiet and cold and it’s all about belief—he just wouldn’t do that—and nothing is just right and now I’m burning hot. Dad says it’s 104.1 and I tell him, no, someone has to do something. And I tell her I think that’s the North Star. Or at least a sad memory of it. And she says I wish he was dead.

“I just wish he was dead.”

*

After the fever lifted I was with my mom on New Year’s Day and there was a light snow on the ground. Dad was out searching for coffee—“Or at least some donuts.” It was a good day for Mom, which meant she could drink hot chocolate from a sippy cup and she made a bit of eye contact when we spoke.

I told her what had happened with the ring and that I had just sat there and done nothing. She watched A Christmas Story on the TV while I talked. It was that scene where Ralphie beats up the bully, Scut Farkus. What, are you gonna cry now? Come on crybaby, cry for me. Come on, cry.

“I’m just so angry, Mom,” I said. I was beside her on the bed and we watched together for a while. Then I told her what Jules had said. “What do you think she meant?”

She muted the TV and looked at me with her old, clear eyes, calling me Matty one last time.

“Matty, you can’t just cry about it.” She told me that demons don’t take our tears into account when they hurt us, so we have to think like they do to protect the ones we love. I told her it was more complicated than that. “No,” she said. “It’s not.” She told me that sometimes we have to get that gun from the safe in Dad’s closet—“Right 10, Left 11, Right 12”—and ask ourselves what the demon would do.

She kissed me on the forehead.

“And then do it.”

*

I served eight of my fifteen years and then the parole board let me out. I knew it was just a matter of time before I’d see Jules again. My first year in, I called her as much as possible but it felt like I was at the bottom of the ocean and she was on the moon and we were both screaming into the void. The calls became letters until eventually we stopped talking altogether. The age-old story: high-school sweethearts done in by a step-patricide.

They released me to live at home with Dad. He had driven four hours every Saturday to visit me at the prison. I told him to stop coming so often but he just waved me off. We’d eat Butterfingers from the vending machine and he’d tell me about Mom. At one point she started pulling the fire alarm at the nursing home, which is not ideal for the nursing home. “I went to see her and there were fire trucks and they had evacuated all the patients out into the parking lot like a herd of sheep,” he said. She died a few weeks after that.

We didn’t talk about Jules when he visited. I could tell he had questions, but he never asked them. Without fail, though, he always told me he was proud of me. Imagine it. This simple man from the piney woods, who recited the Lord’s Prayer every night before bed, who kept the same job for forty years, saying this to his murderer-son while they sat inside a prison. “I’m just really proud of you, Matthew,” he’d say. Those nights after he left were the loneliest.

Luke helped me get a job operating carnival games. It was either that or washing dishes at the BBQ place. So, for $5.15 an hour I ran the Goldfish Toss. My boss said that they needed someone trustworthy—“We can’t have all the fish dying”—and that even though I was an ex-con, I had the right kind of face for it.

We were set up downtown by the train station at the Sweet Potato Festival.  I wore a lapel mic and tried to drum up business. “Fishy, fishy! Everyone wins!” It was getting late into the fall, that time when the car exhaust trails up thick and heavy. The streets were blocked off and filling with people—kids bundled-up, clumps of screaming teenagers.

They were waiting in line for corn dogs. Jules wore a red sweater, and a tiny girl with curly hair and glasses clung to her leg. Jules leaned against a tall, bearded guy, her arm in his arm and her face pressed into his shoulder. Luke told me that she had married someone from college—“he’s a meter reader or something”—and that they had recently moved back.

The air bunched up around me. They were like any other family. The bearded guy picked up his daughter and kissed her cheek and kissed it again. Jules smiled her same smile and I was just standing there, watching the memory of something that had never quite happened.

A woman with three children came to the booth and handed me some cash. I hardly heard anything she said. I was in the grass with Jules and we were tracing the moon. I gave them their ping pong balls and they plinked around the glass bowls. We were in the grass and she said that the light was a hundred years old. They won two fish, and I fumbled to put them into plastic bags full of water. We were in the grass just barely touching and she said You’ll hate him, too, soon enough. The children took their fish, and I looked back to where Jules had been standing, but she was gone.

I went straight to bed that night, making sure to avoid Dad who was watching Law and Order in the living room. I learned in prison that I could put anything out of my mind by pinching the inside of my thigh until it bled. It was the only way I could fall asleep most nights. I pinched in the dark until my fingers were slick with blood, but Jules was still there. I pinched harder.

The next morning Dad and I were eating Eggos when the doorbell rang. I answered the door, and it was her. She wore the same sweater from the festival.

“Jules?”          

“Hi, Matty,” she said. Her eyes were red under her glasses. “We’ve been sitting out there for hours. I’m surprised no one called the police.”

The bearded guy sat at the wheel of a tan Corolla, idling on the street.

“Can I come in? Just for a minute?” Then she saw Dad, who had crept up behind me, and her face softened.

“Well, of course,” he said, brushing past me to give her a hug. He was barely holding it together, seeing her. They scooted through the door, Jules careful not to touch me, and I noticed she was carrying a wrapped box. I followed them, Dad telling her to come in, come in, apologizing for the mess. “I wish we’d known you were coming, I would have made pancakes.” She sat on the couch and he lingered for a moment, then left. I stood, half in the hallway.

“I heard you on the microphone last night,” she said. “Fishy, fishy.”

I looked away, embarrassed. The local weather scrolled across the TV screen.

“Why are you here, Jules?”

I had imagined this conversation a million times, except it never had any words. It would always happen with Garver lying there, dead. I would be panicked and holding the gun. Or I would be in prison screaming through outer space trying to get her to hear me. Or I would be with Mom in the shadow of the steeple. And Jules would tell me, somehow without talking, to just close my eyes. It’ll all be okay.

“I don’t know,” she said. A tear fell onto her folded hands. “No matter how hard I tried, all I could think about is what we did.”

I sat in Dad’s recliner and leaned forward over my knees, pinching my leg. I wondered if she also thought about how the gunpowder had smelled like Black Cats. Or about the thud of his head hitting the bumper. Or about how little pressure it took for her to pull my finger back on the trigger, because I couldn’t quite do it myself.

“What’s her name?” I asked.

She was confused, then understood. “Penny. Penelope. She just turned two.”

“She looks just like you. I couldn’t believe it.”

Jules nodded and forced a smile. “You saved me, Matty. But there was no going back after all that.”

“Yeah.” I was still pinching, but she remained.

I asked her about the box.

She laughed through tears and lifted the package. “You never opened it.” It was her gift from that Christmas Eve with her parents. She handed it to me and I saw the ring on her hand. The opal. The Zales special. “It didn’t need resizing,” she said.

I unwrapped the gift and pulled out a small wooden frame. It held a hand-drawn picture on a sheet of cobbled-together gum wrappers. The outline of a bear around a dozen points and lines, like a connect-the-dots puzzle. The words Ursa Major scrawled at the bottom.

We were in the grass, looking up at the sky.

“Juicy Fruit?” I asked.

“Yeah, Juicy Fruit.”