The Last Exit to Normal Read online

  I nodded, skating down the walk. “Bye.”

  She called to me, her firecracker voice snapping over the street: “You be late for supper and I’ll skin your behind!”

  I waved and went on my way, on a mission to get more smokes. Miss Mae was like an old record, all scratchy and rough but still functional. She’d skin you, strap you, eat your liver, take you by the ears and beat some sense into your head. I’d been hit with a wooden spoon more times in the last week than I liked to think about, and even though the thought of getting slapped in the face burned hot, there was something about her that I sort of liked. She was like a rebel herself.

  Rough Butte, population four hundred and sixty-three not counting several dozen chickens roaming the streets, had a stagnant creek running through it, a bunch of small stores, and huge oak and maple trees growing everywhere. A town-square park with a wishing well and a bridge over the creek sat in the middle of everything.

  If I were one to admire quaint small-town life, with its clean streets, old-fashioned sidewalk lampposts and all the trimmings, Rough Butte might have been cool, but I’m not one to appreciate anything without a grind rail on it. I couldn’t find a decent one in the whole rotten place. But I did find the sheriff. Actually, he found me.

  There are no cars in Rough Butte. Everybody drives trucks. Most of them had rifles in the cab windows, and I figured impromptu animal-killing went on quite a bit around here. That included the sheriff. He drove a fullsize K-5 Blazer, and he drove up alongside me as I skated home from the drugstore, two packs of smokes stuffed in my pockets and waterfalls of sweat streaking down my body.

  He wore a real cowboy hat and had a mustache, like every other cop in the history of the world. Tall and big-shouldered, and probably about fifty years old by the lines on his face, he wore a tan uniform. He gave me the eye as I skated, then tipped his hat to me, idling his truck under the trees. “Howdy,” he said.

  I thought I’d been transported to a John Wayne movie. I stopped skating and made sure my hands were out of my pockets. I knew the procedure because I’d been hassled a million times back home, and if Spokane cops have one thing they’re good at, it’s acting like they’re mini-gods instead of armed meter maids. I didn’t figure it was any different here. “Hey.”

  He smiled a definite not-cop smile. “You the new people staying with Bonnie Mae?”

  “Yes.”

  “From over Spokane way?”

  “Yeah.” I looked at him, wondering what was wrong. He was treating me like a human being, and I thought that went against cop training.

  He laughed. “Likely bored out of your head, huh?”

  I nodded, loosening up a bit. “And hot.”

  “Your name’s Ben, right? Dad is Paul?”

  I nodded.

  He adjusted his cowboy hat. “My name is John Wilkins. I’ve known your . . .” He looked out the windshield, trying to find a word for “your faggot dad’s faggot husband.”

  I looked at my feet, embarrassed for the first time in a long time about it. “Stepdad.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, your stepdad. I’ve known him ever since he was a kid. ’Course he left and all, but I knew him.”

  I looked at him, not buying it and angry at my shame. Edward hadn’t “left.” He’d been shipped off. “I take it they don’t like fags around here.”

  He blinked, then nodded. “You don’t mince words, do you?”

  “I know what most people think.”

  “Not what all people think.”

  I laughed. “And now you’re going to tell me when the Rough Butte Gay Day Parade is? I’d bet that’s popular.”

  He laughed back, an open, easy one. “Not saying that, Ben. Just saying it might not be as bad as you think.”

  “Tell that to Mr. Hinks.”

  “Norman Hinks is an opinionated man, sure enough. But he’s decent.” He put the Blazer in drive. “You say hello to Eddie for me, huh? And keep your chin up with Miss Mae.” He shook his head and smiled. “One woman in the whole state of Montana I wouldn’t want to cross, that one. Tough as nails.”

  All in all, everything was good. He hadn’t beaten me to a pulp with his nightstick, at any rate, and besides the fact that every person in town stared at me like I was some deformed retard with spiked hair and calf-length shorts, Rough Butte wasn’t that bad, despite being a slab of petrified beef jerky sitting smack-dab in the middle of an inferno.

  It’s funny how, a block later, things can change. It’s the decoder-card thing. I’d never fallen in love with a girl in work boots, and I never thought I would. I did right then, though.

  If there’s one weakness I have in my sarcastic and cynical little heart, it’s falling in love. I’m a believer in love at first sight, and I’ve no control over myself. A block after the sheriff left, I saw her getting into a pickup truck and I knew I should run. I should turn away and skate to Oklahoma or Utah and join a commune. I should avert my eyes and think about nuns or dead kittens. I should think about Dad and Edward knocking boots. Impossible. When it comes to females, I’m mush.

  I’d fallen in love before. Her name was Hailee Comstock, and she broke my heart like an elephant accidentally falling on a Popsicle-stick house. She’d been my first, and only, real girlfriend in Spokane, and she was awesome. Her mother was a heroin addict. She lived in a dark, dank, and dirty apartment building called the Coldstone in the worst part of town, and we’d danced among the beer bottles, used condoms, and trash of society’s rejects for almost five months before she dashed my heart to the ground and moved to Portland, Oregon.

  This girl, though, wasn’t a Hailee Comstock. Not even close. No pierced lip, no black lipstick, no short skirts, no tattoos. Blond hair pulled in a ponytail, work gloves hanging out the back pocket of her jeans, a tight white T-shirt, and those work boots. Oh, yeah, and a body to drool over, too. She was my country-fried fantasy, and when I saw her, I could only stand there staring. I was doomed to be her slave.

  She opened the door of the pickup, then looked over at me for a moment, her hand on the door as the sunlight poured down on her. As any Don Juan would do, I gave her a goofy smile and waved like a four-year-old. She smiled, got in the truck, and drove away.

  CHAPTER 4

  The deer-hanging house next door had two occupants living in it, and I’d met Norman Hinks. I hadn’t met his son, Billy, other than saying hello from my window, and over the last week I’d seen him around, but he avoided looking at me.

  Billy worked. Not like chores an eleven-year-old would do. I’m talking work work. Like all-day, everyday work. He mowed with a hand mower, weeded, painted, hammered, hauled, hung laundry, watered, cleaned—you name it, he did it.

  Billy Hinks was a forty-year-old redneck stuck in an eleven-year-old’s body, and I couldn’t get enough of watching the kid from my bedroom window. Big head, skinny neck, big buckteeth, too-small clothes, and a crazy, wild-eyed look in his eyes—he was gangly and awkward and moved like all the right parts fired in all the wrong ways. He got around, though, and there was a kind of clumsy grace in the way he did it, like he’d learned how to deal with being a spaz.

  Several days earlier, I’d watched from my window as Mr. Hinks skinned, sectioned, and quartered the deer. I couldn’t help but watch as he worked the knife over the carcass and explained to Billy in not-so-nice terms how to do it.

  The cool part was watching Mr. Hinks saw the head off, skin it, pop the eyeballs out, get a big propane burner from the garage, and boil the meat and brains from the skull. It was like having a front-row seat to a Hannibal Lecter carnival. Three days later, he’d tacked skull and antlers to the wall above the garage, with the fourteen others hanging there like long-lost brothers welcoming another sibling to the realm of deer death.

  Norman Hinks had lived next door to Miss Mae since he was born, which meant Edward and he had been neighbors. Mr. Hinks inherited the house when his mother died, and hadn’t stepped a foot outside the state of Montana his entire life. He waved and said
hello in a distant, dutiful way to Edward every time he saw him, but he ignored my dad and me like we didn’t exist. Edward told me it was because we were outsiders. I avoided Mr. Hinks because I didn’t want him to boil the brains out of my skull and tack me up on the garage wall.

  Billy was another story, though. I’d watched Mr. Hinks drape a towel around Billy’s neck in the backyard and shave his blond bristles down to the nubbins. When Billy flinched at getting his ear nipped with the clippers, Mr. Hinks cuffed him on the side of the head and told him to sit still. Billy sat still from then on.

  After having the get-to-know-you meeting with the sheriff, I got home and Billy was raking grass clippings. At four o’clock, it was still over a hundred degrees. He wore Levi’s and a long-sleeved shirt, and it struck me that cowboys and loggers and all country-type men in general didn’t wear shorts. It could be two hundred degrees out, and unless you were actively swimming, you wore pants.

  Billy stopped raking when I skated up to the house. Edward and Dad, as usual for two as-yet-unemployed guys, were sitting on the front porch, drinking lemonade and watching the world go by like they’d been born to this kind of living. Edward wore a straw hat, and my dad wore jeans. They were like a cross between Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and some cheesy country music video.

  Billy’s stare bugged me out. The kid had alien eyes, and that big head bobbing on his pencil neck weirded me out even more, and that’s why I couldn’t stop watching him. I kicked the board up, grabbed it, and looked at him: “Hi.”

  “I ain’t supposed to talk to you.”

  I shrugged. “ ‘Ain’t’ isn’t a word.” I kept walking.

  After a moment, he called to me. “I had a skateboard once, you know. Got it at a garage sale for two bucks.”

  I turned around. “I thought you weren’t supposed to talk to me.”

  He looked at the handle of the rake, studying the grain of the wood like there was a secret message in it. “Just sayin’.”

  “Still got it?”

  He shook his head. “Broke.”

  “What, a truck or something?”

  He looked at me, his brow furrowed.

  “That’s one of the wheel parts. Underneath.”

  “No. The wood part.”

  I knew how difficult it was to break a wooden deck. You had to slam something hard enough to break bones most of the time. “You jump off the roof with it or something?”

  He shook his head. “No.”

  Just then the screen door opened and Mr. Hinks came out. He didn’t look at me; his eyes were on Billy. “I told you I don’t want you talking to nobody over there, and I meant it. Now get yourself done with your chores and come inside.” Then the door slammed shut.

  Billy looked at me, shrugged almost like he was saying sorry, and went back to raking. I looked at the house, then at my dad, who gave me a blank look, then at Billy for a second more. He ignored me. “Bye, Billy.” No answer. I walked up to the porch, set my board down, and grabbed the pitcher of lemonade, pouring myself a glass. If there was anything I liked about country living, it was the lemonade and home-cooked dinners, and Miss Mae always had plenty of both. “That was nice.”

  Dad looked at Billy. “He’s just doing as his father tells him, Ben.”

  “Did Hitler have kids?”

  Dad rolled his eyes. “Leave them alone, Ben.”

  Edward gave a wry smile. “When the voice of the Lord speaks . . .”

  I cocked an eye at him. “What?”

  Edward laughed. “Mr. Hinks isn’t really Mr. Hinks. He’s Pastor Hinks.”

  I looked over at their house. “That guy is a pastor?”

  “Yes. Pentecostal. But he hasn’t ministered for years. He’s a car auctioneer now.”

  “Pentecostal?”

  Edward nodded. “The ones who speak in tongues and believe in demon possession. Fire-and-brimstone stuff.”

  Dad shot Edward a glance. “Care to generalize about anything else, Edward? Not all Pentecostals are that way.”

  “Maybe he thinks I’m a demon,” I said.

  Edward took a sip. “Whatever makes you think you aren’t?”

  I rolled my eyes. “So the good pastor must think all work and no play for his kid is divine.”

  Dad, ever the optimist, nodded. “People do things differently, Ben, and as far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing wrong with teaching your child a work ethic.”

  Edward laughed. “Come now, Paul, are you referring to your son? Why, if Ben were ever to work a full day in his life, he’d need electroshock therapy to bring him out of it.”

  Dad shook his head. “I think Ben could use some work.”

  “Oh God.” I looked at Edward, who nodded agreement.

  Dad smiled. “Miss Mae insisted, and I agree. Go look on the refrigerator.”

  I walked inside. Miss Mae gave me the stinkeye, just on general principle, when I came into the kitchen. She was so good at the stinkeye that even if you hadn’t done something wrong, you felt like you did. She had an apron on and was preparing what looked like a big hunk of mushed guts on the counter. “Get that dish down.”

  “Do you ever say ‘please’?”

  She wagged a finger above the sink, ignoring me. “The one with the blue on it.”

  I didn’t move. “Say ‘please.’ ”

  She stopped mushing the meat, then raised her eyes from the counter. “Come over here.”

  Even though she wasn’t holding a spoon, I knew she’d do just fine with her knuckles, and I was sick of it. “No.”

  She took a step toward me, and we stared at each other. She set her jaw. “You’ve got some things to learn, boy. Now get that dish and get it now, because you don’t want to make me mad.”

  “You’re always mad.”

  “Woman my age has the right to be anything she wants.” She slid a stepstool to the cupboard and got the dish herself. “Call your father in here.”

  “Why?”

  She turned on me, her eyes blazing. “If I had a mind I’d take a belt to your behind and strap you until you bled.” She turned around, mumbling something about me not having a mother, then hollered to my dad on the front porch.

  Dad came in, and of course was oblivious to the tension humming in the air like a bass speaker. He looked at the food. “Mmm. Meat loaf, Miss Mae?”

  She nodded, then gestured to me. “He ain’t having any.”

  I looked at her. “I’m not?”

  She shook her head, her eyes meeting my dad’s. “I will not tolerate insolent children in this house, and I will certainly not tolerate this boy sitting at my supper table eating food that he has no business eating.” She turned on me. “If you expect to be treated with courtesy and respect in this house, you’d best learn what it is to earn it.”

  I shook my head, smirking. She hadn’t been nice since the day I got here. This joke had gone on long enough, and this was just another of her tantrums. “Okay, I’m sorry.”

  She ignored me, talking to Dad. “You tell your boy he’s welcome to live in the woodshed until he knows what the word ‘respect’ means and I decide he can come back. Until then, he’s not welcome in this house.”

  I gaped. “No way. You’ve got to be kidding. . . .”

  She stomped up to me, her eyes coming up to my chin. “You shut your mouth this instant. You will speak when spoken to.”

  “Come on, I said I was sorry.”

  “I don’t take ‘sorries’ from the likes of you, and a decent man has no reason to be sorry in the first place.” She looked at my piercings. “And you get those things out of your face before you come back, too. Now get!”

  Dad sighed. “Miss Mae . . .”

  She squinted at him, her wrath close to the boiling point. “You have something to say about the way I run my house, Mr. Paul?”

  He looked at her, then at me, then back at her and shook his head, the point taken. “Very well. Ben?” He gestured to the back door.

  I held my hands up. “Whoa the
re. Dad . . .”

  Then the broom hit my shoulder and Miss Mae was chasing me out the back door. I made it to the driveway and she slammed the door shut. Then she locked it.

  With the smell of seasoned meat loaf and gravy coming out the screen window, my mouth watered. I sat on a rusted five-gallon barrel of oil at the entrance to the shed, trying not to die from the heat. Even at six-thirty, the shed was like a convection oven. An hour passed. Two hours passed. Darkness came. Plates clinked in the sink. Then my dad came out with two blankets and a pillow tucked under his arm.

  I smirked. “You’ve got to be kidding me, Dad. This is ridiculous.”

  He stood at the entrance to the old woodshed. The mosquitoes that came with the evening were biting me. He didn’t say anything.

  I swatted at one of the bloodsucking things, pretending it was Miss Mae. “You’re really going to make me sleep out here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why? Tell me one good reason why, and I will. I’ll plop myself right down here and be a good little boy. I’ll even wear a flannel shirt and suck on hay straw and say ‘Shucky, darn it all.’ ”

  He sighed. “See? That’s why, Ben. You are disrespectful. Even if you are joking half the time.”

  “Did you get together or something and decide to make my life miserable? Like ‘Get Ben’ or something? Jesus, Dad, I hate it here.”

  He shook his head. “This is her house, and you’ve got to respect her. We’re guests here.”

  “I didn’t even want to come! You made me! And you want to talk about manners? She can’t even say hello, and every time I do something wrong she hits me with something! She’s a monster.”

  He leaned against the shed. “This place is different. Different than even I know, and I understand you don’t like it. But the people around here are hard, Ben, and Mae is no exception. She’s worked every day of her life, raised a family, and scrabbled together a way of living that doesn’t have much room for leeway. She’s a proud woman, and I respect that.”