It doesn’t cross her mind that he would press charges. She’s young, of course, raised around good people that aren’t perfect but always own up. Mariah was taught that you lie in the bed you’ve made. She’s sure this man knew what was coming to him, and will finally be sorry. After everything. But the wicked have a different head for numbers than most. Any bad they do will end up on the side of never-mind. What’s done to them weighs double.
Romeo Blevins lawyered up and gaslighted the jury like he’d gaslighted Mariah and every other soul ever to know him. Making himself out the good Samaritan, Mariah the crazy jealous bitch. That baby is not even his, says the lawyer in the alligator boots and the gold watch. Mr. Blevins was minding his own business till she came around stalking him. This is not the first time he’s had such trouble, young girls get notions and will try to pin down a man with means. These are other times, it’s the eighties, where they haven’t invented DNA all that much, and take a man on his word. And his means. Word was, Romeo took pity on a little single mother thrown out by her parents, with no place else to go. And then she got clingy. If he so much as went out at night to help some old lady with her Camry broken down on the interstate, Mariah would throw a fit. Too unstable herself to take decent care of a child, as the baby’s doctor testified. For on two occasions she’d brought the little fellow in all weak and sick from dehydration.
The more Mariah wept and wailed on the stand about tortured and tied to a deck railing overnight with the baby in the house, these far-fetched things, the crazier she was. He had ten witnesses to her none. The Peggots did their best for Mariah, but not to the extent of alligator-boot lawyers, such men walking a different cut of grass from the Peggots. They didn’t know what to think. All they’d ever heard was how Romeo hung up the moon and every damn star, Mariah being too proud to complain to anybody but her sister, and not even June knew the worst of it. Nobody ever saw her tied up. By the time Mariah got to the courtroom her scars were healed. Not his. If you’ve noticed, it’s the prettiest people that everybody wants to believe, and next after that, the most wrecked. Romeo was both. The jury decided Mariah disfigured him and ruined his life to keep other women away, so she’d have this prize all to herself.
This is a story that came to me in pieces, over years. People’s doubts and regrets flavored the stew along the way. They made much of how the assault with the deadly weapon occurred so soon after Mariah’s eighteenth birthday. No wishes were made on candles, you can bet. Romeo was not one for romance, and the shape Mariah was in, she probably forgot it herself. Still, a girl comes of age. If her pride had cracked sooner, the shacking-up-with-a-minor business would have played louder, and Mariah might not have been tried as an adult. She could have done some time in juvie and grown up into a whole other life, as Maggot’s mother. It’s all she wanted to be.
For the start of her twelve-year sentence she got sent to Marion, an extra-special prison for the deeply disturbed. Which you have to reckon she was.
Nobody believed a word out of this girl’s mouth at the time of her need. And today, her side of the story stands as gospel. The world turns. It would take no time at all for people to start fussing over little Matty, telling Mrs. Peggot what a pretty baby, he didn’t suck those good looks out of his thumb, did he? The apple falls straight from the tree. Everybody’s got their cross to bear. Mrs. Peggot would have to serve her own time with what she’d told Mariah, about making a bed and lying in it. And with what the whole town heard: a mother turning out her own daughter. Mrs. Peggot bore her cross, changed his diapers, and taught him to tie his shoes.
How all this fits with the story of me, hard to say. Romeo drove away in his panel truck to parts unknown, where he and his new face could tell whatever story suited. I never saw that scary smile except in my nightmares. And sometimes also wide awake, in my mind. Wondering how it would look pumpkin-carved on Stoner. You lie down with snakes, you get up with the urge to bite back. All I’m saying.
7
School started, and I was ready to bust out of home lockdown. The first day we had to catch the bus down at the highway due to our road getting washed out from all the rain. It didn’t look that bad honestly, but bus drivers took no chances, being mostly older ladies and the school having no money to fix a busted axle. Anyway it was not a bad walk, maybe a mile from the top where we lived. There were nine of us for our bus stop, including these first-grade twins, and two sad high school guys of different families that we understood to be marked for life. Bus riders. Even at my young age I knew if you were sixteen and could get your ass to a fast-food job or bagging groceries after school, there were vehicles to be had. We all waited in a little gang watching adults drive out to wherever, work if they were the lucky few. Maggot and me grinning like pups, trying not to paw each other’s shoulders because of all the pent-up shit we had to tell each other. Or not tell, in my case, with Stoner’s words hulking around in my head.