So We Can Glow - Stories - Leesa Cross-Smith Page 0,26
could smell me too. Held out my wrist so he could take a big sniff and a bee zip-buzzed right onto my bare shoulder like I was a flower.
Knock Out the Heart Lights So We Can Glow
Exie roamed the aisles of the twenty-four-hour grocery store when she got lonely—touching things and gently placing cans and paper cartons in her little basket, only to make a loop and put them back on the shelves. She liked the music they played. Songs about trusting Jesus and boys driving around with girls and first kisses on front porches. She was drawn to the dusty items no one else seemed to love. A long, crinkly-packaged stripy jump rope on a crooked rack in the cereal aisle. Weird, local homemade sauces in the condiment aisle. Her favorite jar was Eula’s Egg Sauce. The drawing of Eula was sweet-smiley and big-busted. Exie had never met either of her grandmothers, but she liked to think that they were like Eula. She bought the sauce and went to her car. Locked the doors, opened the jar, stuck her tongue in and licked. The sauce was goopy pudding-thick and yellow, but Exie thought it tasted purple. At home, her husband, in his sleepiest blanket-voice, asked her where she’d been. “Do you remember when I was eating pineapple and started to cry because I was alive and some people weren’t?” she asked. Reminded him of that morning after church when her hair was baptism-wet. How she sat at the kitchen table, born again, drowning in the sunlight. Her husband was a good man and she loved him, but he didn’t know how to be special, how to glow. She said it was pretty simple and she’d teach him. There was no big secret. You just had to let the things in your heart get real dark first.
Get Rowdy
I told every one of those guys I could do some things to make them forget how much Rowdy owed them. As long as they promised not to kill Rowdy or put him in the hospital. They had to leave him alone for good. I gave them all the same speech, every time.
“I know he’s a fuck-up. Trust me. I’ve known him since high school. Our daddies used to work together up until his daddy died in his sleep couple years back. Everybody knows he’s no good. I’m just trying to help him out.”
Rowdy’s daddy’s soul had slipped right out of his body real easy, like oil; Rowdy had a hard time wiping that oil off his hands. You think it’s gone but when you get your hands wet, you see it. Beading up, streaking off. We weren’t exactly together and we hadn’t had sex yet and I didn’t know why. Figured he might’ve looked at me like I was a sister or something, but no. We kissed sometimes and made our dinners together. And sometimes I’d go over to his house in the middle of the night and climb into bed with him. We’d sleep.
I was in love with Rowdy and always had been. Big-time. I loved how he talked to me, how he said things. So plain. And I liked how most times he put his warm, rough hand on the back of my neck when he kissed me. He was no good, but I loved him anyway. He always had his gun, was always getting in fights down at the bar, always owed somebody money. We’d be at the bar and somebody would holler JACK and he wouldn’t turn around. They’d holler JACK BOONE and he still wouldn’t turn around. They’d say ROWDY because that’s what everyone called him. And finally he’d tap some cigarette ash into an empty beer can, turn around and ask what the hell they wanted. That right there was what he was like.
One night, we wandered around under his neighborhood’s sodium street lights, drinking beer, smacking creek cattails against the hot metal guardrails. When we got back to his place, Rowdy was half-drunk, half-asleep, and I asked him to tell me who he owed money to. He closed his eyes, mumbled them off. Six guys, six crazy names.
“Dallas, Hot Knife, Black Ray, Coot, Johnny Step, and Smoke,” he said. I wrote them down, put question marks next to the ones I didn’t know. I didn’t want Rowdy knowing about it, so I had to ask around to find out who they were.
Easy. All I had to do was wear a low-cut shirt and ask the