Between her fingers, the denim dress is smooth, saturated with the fat from ten thousand chickens sacrificed for the marketplace. No matter how often she washes the garment, despite all efforts to remove the grease, the denim remains as waterproof as if it had been treated to repel moisture. And the odor of cooked chicken permeates the cloth as well as the car. Charley doesn’t notice, though, for his blue jeans and his button down cotton shirt are as stained as her own clothing. He smells as rank as she.
Above, the sky is scattered with brilliant stars, tiny diamonds that appear to wink as clouds scuttle across the face of a full moon. Silver light illuminates the dooryard of the concrete block dwelling built in a square, two rooms front to back and another pair with a single bathroom tacked between the bedrooms. The slant of the hill is extreme and, because the car faces downward, there are moments in which she feels quick alarm but it fades in the cool hush of the breeze that swifts through the valley, touches her face and cools it.
After ten hours on her feet in heavy rubber boots that reach her knees, the wind refreshes, revives. Laurie’s feet ache deep into the bones even though she put her simple cotton shoes back on in the parking lot. Yawning, she puts her head back against the seat and listens to Charley. His voice is low and fervent so she hears it as if it comes from far away.
“You’re from out there, too,” he was saying. “You understand. How do you bear it here? How?”
Stretching, she smiles although she knows he cannot see her face in the shadows of the house.
“It’s not so bad.”
“Not so bad?” His deep voice raised three notes higher on the scale. “How can you say so when you wear dresses to the knee like an old woman and can’t even wear lipstick?”
“I don’t know.” She misses makeup, the smoothness of it in her hand before she spread it over her face, the scent of it, the feel of her lips thickened and colored with lipstick.
Neither speaks for a moment. Silence is an easy thing with Charley. He is not her lover and not her brother although he has been taken for both at different moments.
At work, at the poultry processing plant where she debones chicken with her bare fingers and he cooks the birds in a huge vat, most everyone assumes they are siblings. It is their closeness that is seen, their avid interest that lacks romance or sexual desire. They sit, heads together, at break and talk, never hearing the babble that rings in the room.
At church, at the Holiness Church of Jesus Name, many of the brothers and sisters think that they are lovers. Laurie has seen the envy burn in their zealot eyes, lust fueling their fervor as they shout and dance, always watching in the hopes of finding out Sin. The night she began crying, tired and weary of the strange services, he carried her out in his arms. Innocent and yet ancient, these people view all in stark white and dark black, no gray area. If he held her against his chest, then they are lovers, sinners who twine their limbs one against the other in delightful wrong.
They are neither. He is her friend and she is his. Even his mother, a sweet-faced elderly woman married to a fat man, thinks she is Charley’s sweetheart. She helped make dinner once on Sunday when they were invited and his Mama liked her too much. When Charley called her into the bedroom to ask a question, his mother beamed and Laurie cringed deep inside. His mother is religious but not Holiness but, still, Laurie was not raised in church so she finds subterfuge hard. Lying hurts her tongue, makes her mouth ache with the false words but she has told lies more since she came to this church, this place, than ever before.
“I can’t stay much more.” His voice is a low growl like a pickup truck dropped into third gear. “Look at us. We’re in the middle of nowhere, no bright lights, nothing. I want to get back to Nashville.”
He plays guitar and does it well. In another life, he played with many stars in the country music firmament. He drank whiskey with them, sometimes shared their whores or their dime bags, and partied. Charley’s been to Willie Nelson’s ranch in Texas. He can get session work in any studio and she believes it. Sometimes he gets up and picks up a bass guitar, makes it rock when the music is best. Holiness people don’t play the slow-paced, old-fashioned songs she expected but rockabilly beats that get the folk dancing with the Holy Ghost.
“You’ll really go?” Somewhere deep within a hole bursts through the wall of her heart. This man is her one friend, her ally, her sanity and sometimes salvation.