WAYS OF WANTING, by Mark Jacobs
On the six- month anniversary of her release from the Fluvanna Correctional Facility for Women, Evaline Dancy woke with an excruciating desire to see her daughter. Made her head ache, her mouth run dry. She sat up in bed crooning, My baby my baby my pretty baby girl. Like being dopesick. That was how come she knew what was happening. The same old curse of bad wanting. She put her feet on the floor. Cold. After a dawdling fall, the leaves hanging onto their trees, winter was finally coming to south Virginia. The oil burner was hungry, and Evaline with nothing to feed it. Of course. The moment had arrived. Time to do something stupid.
Like going to see Piper Louise. Evaline’s baby was five now, living with the Clades on their cattle farm over in Red Buck Run. May Clade was Evaline’s mother’s cousin. In Evaline’s mind, the idea had been for Piper to stay with May and George until she and Digger got their act together. May had her own different idea. This beautiful child will be raised in a Christian home, she supposedly promised somebody at her church. What was so damn Christian about stealing the fruit of another woman’s womb?
The trailer out in the country where Evaline was staying belonged to a friend of her mother’s. One more talky Christian lady wanting to do the right thing. Lucy, Evaline’s parole officer, had helped her get the car, an old Chevy Lumina. The tires had maybe another six months on them before a trooper could write her up for unsafe. Lucy was Spanish, from Mexico. Kind of sexy, that milk- and- coffee skin, nice tits. She was always chewing gum and checking her phone like she was expecting big news, when the only news that ever came was small and disappointing.
But Lucy was good at her job. She understood bad wanting. Their last monthly meeting, she had warned Evaline off any contact with Piper. That was their deal with the court, for which arrangement, thank Digger. Evaline had been seriously dopesick when events on the home front got out of hand. She was in no kind of shape to take care of her daughter. As for Digger . . . the best that could be said of Piper’s daddy was he wasn’t paying attention. Sick as she was, it was Evaline who got Piper Louise to the emergency room when she started turning blue.
In the kitchen, Evaline turned on the stove to heat coffee water, holding her hands over the burner to warm them up. She was back at the point where she could enjoy stuff again. Hot coffee, jelly on toast, birds hopping in the grass. In Fluvanna she had gone through hell, getting clean. That was the easy part. The hard part was now. Over the stove, an insight: bad wanting was wrong wanting. She wasn’t sure what she meant but believed it to be true.
She showered and dressed. In the mirror, she looked like a woman two out of three guys would think about twice. She drank more coffee, ate a second piece of toast. Turned on the radio but it was news so she turned it off again. She spoke a warning to the empty trailer. Watch out now, here comes Digger.
* * *
The powers that be had nailed her for kiting a check at the Briery Walmart. When two deputies showed up at the house, some legal gobbledygook gave them the right to search the premises, or so they said. They got Digger’s stash, which included more fentanyl and Oxy than any two adults could claim had been purchased for their personal recreational use. Evaline and Digger Dancy had history, together and alone. Taking all that into consideration, the judge showed some mercy in sentencing them. Get it together, she told Evaline, stopping just short of a prayer on her head.
Driving to the Clades’, Evaline persuaded herself she had latched onto a good idea. She was skilled at a certain kind of angled thinking. For example, convincing herself that swallowing happy pills one last time was all she needed to be done with drugs, it was her way of saying goodbye to evil shit in all its forms and flavors. Then, as she turned into the long drive that led to the farmhouse, an invisible hand grabbed her heart and squeezed.
The Clades had money. Their farm looked like something out of a movie. It was orderly, tidy. Everything had a pruned and painted look. The bills got paid on time; you could tell. But it was the swing set they had set up in the front yard for Piper that got to Evaline. A sandbox, too. Also, a kid- sized baby buggy standing off to one side, ready for a happy little girl to take it by the handle. Inside, under a pink blanket, there would be a little dolly with a sugar face. She took her foot off the gas, put the transmission in park. Sat there a minute, taking it in. Then she turned around on the grass and went away.
Cold, the hand that squeezed her undefended heart.
* * *
Lucy kept reminding Evaline she needed a job. Not like she could forget. From the Clade farm she drove into Briery, looking for possibilities. She wasn’t picky. She would do a fast food gig if they’d have her. When it came time to fill in the application form, she’d be tempted to lie. Have you ever been arrested? They would catch her out, though. They had their ways. What made her turn into the Goodfellow Funeral Home parking lot, she had no idea. She did not see the help wanted sign in a window until she had parked. It was one of those enormous old- fashioned houses from the turn of another century, soberly blue, with a turret and gingerbread trim. She went in.
Mr. Amos Goodfellow had a pale face, like one of his corpses, under a head of unnaturally black hair. He was on the edge of old and had some sort of breathing problem, which made him slow to move. Even Evaline could see how expensive his suit was. He wanted an all- purpose helper. Answer the phone, the mail, keep up the website. Now and then, greet arriving grievers. Easy stuff. The novelty of the job, the strangeness of the place, appealed to Evaline.
Here was the bull: grab it by the horns.
“I was arrested. I was in prison.”
They were in Goodfellow’s office. Instead of sitting behind his broad- top walnut desk, the undertaker had taken a seat across from her, the better to size her up.
“May I ask, what was the charge?” His voice was high, almost a squeak, as though her confession had startled him.
Here went nothing. “It was two of them. I wrote a check for more cash than I had in the bank.” She hesitated, plunged. “Also, me and my husband, we was brought up on drug charges.”
“Is your husband incarcerated at the present time?”
No point going into detail about Digger Dancy. “Yes sir, he is.”
Goodfellow nodded. He sucked in air. She could see how sweet it tasted to the man. “I had a son,” he told her.
She knew what that meant. The son was gone. An overdose. Might well have been Oxy. Mr. Goodfellow’s eyes teared. She waited for him to wipe them away.
“We’ll give it a try,” he decided. “Can you start tomorrow morning?”
She told him she could. This was a new experience for her, having something go right. He shook her hand. She felt a rush of emotion but knew better than to put stock in her feelings. Bunch of liars, that was what her feelings were. They would betray her in a heartbeat.
In the funeral home lot, she thought she ought to let Lucy know about the job. But as she picked up her phone, a text from Digger shouted at her from the screen. He was in Buckingham at the correctional facility there. Inmates were not allowed phones, but every once in a while he got his hands on a bootleg cell and texted her. Never about sex, which would be nice. Never about some good thing they had done together, and they had done plenty. Straight and sober, he could be funny, he could be kind. He had a way of holding her – it made her feel snug, the bad guys couldn’t get at her.
What he wanted when he texted, every time, was for her to get in touch with his pals in the opioid distribution business. Digger had plans for when he got out. Evaline’s job was putting the pieces in place so he could get back to work directly, his first day of freedom.
The text she read at Goodfellow’s came couched in her husband’s idea of code. CB wants coffee. Bringing banana cream pie. Credit availabull. Be nice. Sit on it.
It meant Cletus Blaylock was dropping off a bunch of fentanyl at the trailer. He was fronting the product to Digger, no up- front payment required. A get- out- of-jail present for a colleague. She was supposed to welcome him, express thanks on Digger’s behalf, hang onto the fentanyl until he got out next week, when he would turn it into cash.
Evaline hated Blaylock. He was one scary mean sucker and traveled with a Rottweiler named Hackbone, trained to kill. Blaylock loved goading the dog to the brink of murder, then backing it down. The trick was always good for a sick fucking laugh.
She must have known it would come to this. For Digger, nothing was going to change. He loved Piper, sure. In his way, he wanted her back as much as Evaline did. But in his messed-up mind, loving his daughter had nothing to do with selling drugs, or taking drugs. Two separate worlds. Also, he had a way of cutting the legs off Evaline’s good intentions, such as they were. C’mon, baby, you know you need this. Come climb the beautiful mountain with me. You know you love me. You know we’re in this thing together.
To the list of things she was supposed to know, she added one about which no doubt existed. From here on out, life with Digger meant no Piper Louise.
She looked up. Amos Goodfellow had lifted the curtain and was staring at her from his office window. Not hostile, just curious. She waved. He waved back.
* * *
At nine the next morning, she went to work. At nine thirty, she saw her first dead body. An email came in. It seemed like something her new boss might want to know about. She printed it out and went downstairs to the embalming room where he was working on a deceased woman. Young. Died in a car crash. Being in the same room with her freaked Evaline out. But she really needed the job, and she kind of liked Amos. He saw what was going on.
“You get used to it,” he told her. “Can’t tell you that’s a good thing, or a bad thing.”
When she came into the room, he had pulled a sheet up over the body, protecting the dead woman’s privacy and the live one’s feelings. Evaline kept waiting for the sheet to move up and down as the woman breathed, but there was no miracle.
“I’ve been around the recently deceased my whole life,” Amos said. “My daddy started this business when I was knee- high to a grasshopper.”
He scanned the email and told her she was right to bring it to his attention. A customer had a complaint; he would deal with it.
“So,” he said. “What’s on your mind this chilly December morning, Miss Evaline?”
Maybe he was only being polite, making conversation with his new hire, letting her get used to rubbing elbows with the dead, but she leapt at the opportunity to do some out- loud thinking. She explained her situation. He continued to work, concentrating on the dead woman’s face, which to Evaline’s eye did not have the peaceful expression people talked about; rather, it was troubled. Well, why wouldn’t it be? After a few minutes, the chemical smell permeating the room did not seem quite as terrible as it had when she first came in. Respect. That was the word she wanted. Amos Goodfellow was demonstrating respect, working on the body of a woman with even worse luck than Evaline’s.
“Seems to me,” he said, bending over the woman’s face, focusing on the eyebrows with what looked like a tiny pistol, “you have a choice to make.”
“What choice is that?”
He straightened up, looking at her with a nervous mouth. It was odd and somehow pleasing to her that he plied his trade wearing a white shirt and a conservative tie. The end of the tie was tucked between two shirt buttons so it didn’t dangle.
He said, “You tell me.”
Well damn.
She took a breath. “It’s either Digger or Piper Louise.”
He nodded. “How you figure that’s going to come out?”
“I love my husband.”
Another nod. “I used to believe the things people say. Took ’em for granted. Like tough love, that’s one you hear all the time. ‘What that boy of yours needs, Amos, is some tough love.’ The truth of the matter is no kind of love, tough or gentle, did my Jimmy a bit of good.”
“I figured you was going to give me some fatherly advice.”
“All I can give you, Miss Evaline, is a paycheck. Provided you earn it.”
“One thing I figured out. It’s not about which one I love better.”
“Then what is it about?”
She didn’t say, because she didn’t know.
At quitting time, five o’clock, she drove out to the cold trailer wanting warm, which seemed to be what Cletus Blaylock was offering when he showed up with his killer dog. He was a little older than she and had a Confederate look, a battle flag tattooed on the inside of his left forearm, a war- torn face, whupped by Yankees on his home ground. She took the bag of fentanyl he handed over, trying not to look at the Rottweiler because the thing scared the life out of her.
“Got some top- shelf bourbon here,” he told her, taking a bottle from a brown paper sack.
He came on to her halfheartedly, probably thought he had to. Didn’t amount to much. This was as far as it went: the two of them side by side on the couch covered with the same blanket, fentanyl and whiskey producing a strange and brilliant high in both of them. Hackbone lay at its master’s feet, content so long as Cletus was content.
Stumbling out the trailer door at two thirty, Cletus reached for her boob but allowed her to swat away his hand without complaint. The dog gave her a dirty look. Already, by the time she heard the engine of his old truck turn over, afterpain and regret were giving her a taste of how bad morning was going to be.
At the funeral home, she could not hide her condition. First off, she was forty- five minutes late. Also, she looked like she had slept in her clothes, which she had. Her hands trembled, and the tongue in her mouth was clumsy, refusing to let words come out. In his comings and goings, Amos studied her from the corner of his eye. At noon, he came into the office and took a seat not too close to her. She knew what was coming.
“I’m afraid it isn’t going to work out.”
“I had a bad night. I’ll be fine. Please, I promise it won’t happen again.” He exhaled slowly, folded his hands in his lap. “My Jimmy, lordy, I quit keeping track of his promises. Understand, I’m not blaming you. The drugs are strong, and for reasons that are not clear to me, some people cannot resist the pull. But I cannot have another addled person on the premises, I just can’t.”
He gave her two folded hundred- dollar bills. “Hopefully this will tide you over until you turn up another job.”
“Please, Mr. Goodfellow.”
He rose like a tired, overweight Jesus and shook his head. “You will please show yourself out.”
Which of course she had no choice but to do. She drove downtown and parked on a side street. She called Lucy.
“That job I told you about?”
“I’m not going to like this, am I?”
“I been fired.”
“Well.” A pause, then, “What’s your next move, Evaline?”
“Been thinking. I can’t go back with Digger. He sees me next week, I see him, it’s all over. Any hope in my life, I mean.”
“What’s part two of your thought process?”
“I’m working on that.”
Lucy expressed professional encouragement that she did not really feel. The call had been a mistake. So was the next one, to her mother.
Miranda Johns had her own problems. They were similar to Evaline’s, involving abuse by men and of substances. Problem- solving was not her thing. She did, however, tell Evaline something that caused the cold hand to squeeze her heart again. The Clades wanted to change Piper’s name. Something more Christian, that was their idea. Around the house they were already calling her Ruth.
In a daze of jangled feeling that resembled grief, Evaline drove to the trailer. She was not sure what she intended to do but packed her clothes and other personal items into a couple of suitcases, loaded them in the trunk of the Lumina, and drove back into Briery. She parked in the Goodfellow’s lot and went in through the side door just as though she still had a job there.
Quiet, and no sign of Amos. She felt like a prowler and wished she had a plan. There were three viewing rooms. When things got busy, Amos brought in help, men who wore good suits and knew how to carry themselves in the company of the dead. Now, the only corpse laid out for viewing belonged to the woman killed in the crash. Evaline went noiselessly into the room, where banks of chairs were set up for an evening visitation. They faced the casket, whose lid was open on a brass hinge that looked expensive. Evaline had no desire to go up close and look at the woman, whose family had assembled a shrine of things that used to be hers. A teddy bear in a sweater, some Barbie dolls, riding boots, a big jar of jelly beans.
Evaline picked up the commemorative brochure and read that the woman’s name was Amelia Barrow. She was nineteen and had been in her second year at Longwood University. She had a huge family and a fiancé named Buddy. The tears in Evaline’s eyes blurred the lines of print describing the life from which Amelia had made a premature exit. How come it was getting to her this way? The answer came as she closed the little brochure and stood. Because Amelia Barrow had no more last chances.
Then Amos was there in another impeccable suit. “What are you doing here, Evaline?”
“I figured something out.”
He shook his head. “I won’t go through this again.”
She spoke in a rush before he could turn away. “My husband is getting let out next week. He expects me at this trailer I’m staying at out in the country. It’s a big bag of drugs there, ours to sell. My fault, that’s my fault, I admit it. The point is, I can’t be there when Digger shows up.”
“Do you have family?”
“My momma, she’s in worse shape than me. Can’t I stay here, just ’til I sort things out?”
She was ninety- nine percent sure he was going to say no. What he did say was, “Two weeks.”
He led her upstairs, which had been converted to its own separate apartment with bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room with a huge flat- screen television. They had tried to make the apartment feel like its own independent living situation, nothing to do with dead bodies stacking up below. A way of protecting normal life.
Amos gave her Jimmy’s room, which bore no traces of the dead son.
“Margaret, she was my wife, she kept all his things in the room, just like he was a little boy again. After she passed, I couldn’t bear having them around.”
“Was it Jimmy’s dying that killed her?”
It was a hard question, but like it or not a connection had been established between Amos and Evaline, and he did not mind the hard.
“It was a factor,” he whispered, as though someone might overhear. Then, in his regular voice, “Do you have clothes and such?”
“In the car.”
“Bring them in. Get yourself settled. I have to get ready for the Barrow viewing. Plenty of food in the fridge. Help yourself.”
Evaline unpacked her clothes and arranged them in Jimmy’s chest of drawers. She hung a few things in his closet. Then she fried herself a couple eggs, sopped the yolks with an English muffin, and lay down to think. Except instead of thinking she dozed. Well, slept.
Organ music woke her in the dark evening. The viewing was going on downstairs. The idea of keeping the apartment separate from the work below, that didn’t really work. The music creeped Evaline out. She tossed in the bed under Jimmy’s covers. Tossed some more. Here it was, the thing she most dreaded. Dope lust. Strong. Strong as it ever got.
She got out of bed, went down the hall, then down the stairs. In the office, finally a little luck. Three hundred dollars in fifties in an unsealed envelope in the top drawer of the desk. There was no chance Amos would catch her. He was on duty with one of his well-dressed assistants at the Barrow viewing.
She went out the side door into the lot. Wet snow was falling from a windless sky. She noticed her hands were shaking, but that was from anticipation. Behind the wheel, she felt a burst of enthusiasm. She had been ignoring texts from Lucy. Nothing to say to her P.O. Plus, Lucy had a sixth sense and would know, even from a text, that Evaline was about to commit a royal fuck-up. She turned the key in the ignition. Click. Just clicks. The battery was dead. Getting out of the car in the serene snowfall, she slammed the door.
She had some cash, thanks to Amos’ loan and her own thievery. She began walking toward the city’s downtown. She was not dressed for winter weather. She would go somewhere out of the snow, get her shit together, call a friend from high school who lived in Briery. Roxanne had been known to ride the Oxy- coaster herself.
As she walked, snowflakes clumped in her hair, on her shoulders. She shivered. Then a vision came to her. May Clade on her back porch calling, Yoohoo, Ruth. Come eat your dinner.
She stood still, feeling her cheeks freeze. Low. Was there any place lower to go? Only where Amelia Barrow went. The land of no last chances.
Stop; stop.
She put the image of May Clade out of her mind. Turned around, walked uphill back to Goodfellow’s. In through the side door. Amelia’s service was still going on. Evaline heard a woman crying steadily, probably the dead woman’s mother. She went to the office, opened the desk drawer, put the three hundred dollars back in the envelope. Scene of the crime. Didn’t they say criminals always went back?
She sat in Amos’ high- backed chair. No thought, no plan, no next. Eventually, the service broke up, and she heard people filing out. She waited for Amos to appear. When he didn’t, she made her way to the viewing room, where Amos and his assistant had closed the casket lid. She could hear them talking in another room. Shop talk. She noticed a vacuum cleaner in a corner, an old upright. She plugged it in. She began vacuuming the carpeted floor. No next.
When she became aware of Amos standing behind her, she switched off the machine. It was up to her to speak.
“My daughter’s name is Piper Louise.”
“It’s a nice name.”
“The family that’s keeping her, they want to call her Ruth. But that ain’t her name. Her name is Piper Louise.”
“I see.”
His body language, spoken in his slow and deliberate fashion, communicated something that was not malice. What it might actually be, she didn’t know. It intensified the feeling coursing through her that she ought to explain herself. To herself, anyway, by way of the undertaker.
“The things I been wanting.”
He waited. Why did he not encourage her? Maybe that was what his silence was supposed to do. She wanted to think so but was not sure and did not trust her instincts.
“It’s like,” she said. Where were the words? “It’s like, the things I been wanting, it’s all turned around wrongways. They’ve been wanting me.”
That was not clear to her. How could it be clear to him? She heard a door close. The assistant was leaving. She pictured him in the parking lot, loosening his dark respectful tie. She had it. The thought that had been skittering. Lost it again.
Amos nodded, as though catching what she herself missed. He opened his mouth, took in a little air, let it out again, like a man practicing.
“When I vacuum after a viewing, I usually move the chairs.”
“Backwards,” she said.
His eyebrows, which may have been dyed to keep up with his hair, asked the question his mouth did not.
“I get out of bed in the morning, nine times out of ten I set out backwards.”
Another non- question; how he listened.
“Stop, turn around, head in the right direction. Now you’ll feel better, I tell myself.”
He began folding up and stacking the chairs against one wall. In the sealed casket, death – damn his cold everlasting hand – squeezed Amelia Barrow’s eyes shut.
“Sometimes I do,” she told him. “Feel better, I mean.”
She walked to the row of chairs opposite the one he was taking down. She began folding and stacking them, one at a time, against the wall.
Mark Jacobs is the author of five books that include Stone Cowboy (Soho Press, 1997) and A Handful of Kings (Simon and Schuster, 2004). His stories have appeared in The Hudson Review, The Atlantic, Playboy, The Southern Review, and The Kenyon Review.