fall away. I didn’t want to read anymore. Everything in the romances was a lie. I didn’t want to watch TV and even Cherry had cooled off from her soaps and her televangelists, shutting herself in a corner chair tapping her hand on her green Bible. Periodically she would get up to shove hard raisins under the door to our prisoner and he would grunt something incomprehensible.
The baby in me shifted and moved and I pressed my hand to it but I didn’t talk much. Words came to mind but did not have the strength to come out. I tried to detach, to stay in the moment, to not imagine it being taken from me. The phone rang several times and we didn’t answer it. I watched the light turn dusky. I dreamed of water.
Cherry poked me with the bull penis cane. “Sharon Stam’s asking for you. It’s her mother. She says you’re the only one she’ll see.”
I WALKED BESIDE the canal, but not down in it, all the way to the Stams’, a tiny farmhouse on what was once a nice stretch of vineyard down about a mile from Cherry’s. The house was like a box divided in four, and Sharon and Laramie shared a room. It smelled like yeast inside, like Wiley’s whiskey and spoiled cheese.
Sharon’s mother had lost weight, and she appeared distorted, her wide face bobbing above a too-narrow body. “In there.” She pointed to the room as if there were a rabid animal inside. I passed Laramie eating canned pigs’ feet on saltines lying in front of the television.
“Wiley’s had to lock up all his guns, that’s how she’s acting.”
In the room Sharon lay on the floor looking up at her ceiling. Her stomach was a huge hill pinning her body down.
“Don’t lie on your back,” I said. “I read it can cut off blood supply.”
“A fine way to go.”
“I’m supposed to tell you everything’s okay.”
“I called nine-one-one again,” she said. “They said, are you a child? They said, let me talk to your father. But then I realized that even if they came, I’d still be pregnant. This will always be my life.”
“One day you’ll be old enough to leave and you will,” I said.
“What about you? You’re just gonna hand over that baby to Vern? You’re just gonna push it out of your body and hand it to him?”
“It’s easier this way,” I said.
“I don’t want to think about hell anymore,” she said, sleepy-sounding. “I’d rather just be there than think one more day about it.”
“Let’s stand next to each other on the Birthing Day, okay?” I said.
I lay down beside her. I thought of Stringy holding the articles. The tales of a polygamist pastor trying to evoke blessings for who-knew-what reason by having many wives. How that hadn’t done anything remarkable for the world. How we were all still begging for rain just the same.
She took a deep breath. “Swear?”
“On my life.”
I WALKED THE canal home, surrounded by blackness. I didn’t want the moonlight on me. I didn’t want any light. I never felt safer or more untouchable than when I was in the canal. I dragged my hand along the wall of it. I imagined it full of water. Maybe one day it would have water again.
Then there was something ahead, a footstep maybe, a stick cracking. A whisper. I stopped and pressed my back against the wall. I reached for the go-phone but stopped. If I used it to light my way, I’d only reveal myself. The feeling of a thousand eyes crept over my skin. I just had to climb out of here and into the dim light of the moon. I felt the wall for somewhere to place my foot, for an edge to grab, but it was smooth. If I carved something it would make noise. Calm down, I told myself. You’re imagining things.
But then a voice from above. “Where you off to?”
“Who’s there?” I said.
“Going somewhere important?” another voice said.
I was so slow, so pregnant. Two bodies jumped in and landed before me, forming a wall. The tang of sweat and baby powder, dirt and salt: boy. How Lyle smelled when he was over me. How the boys’ club smelled with their newly grown-out long hair, the stripes of glitter they wore on their cheeks like war paint. Vern’s soldiers. “We have on good word that you’ve been going to the red house outside of assignment.”
“Let me pass,” I said. I folded my arms around my