heather debel

You’ll be Back by Morning

Me and Johnny used to ride around the rich part of town and piss on lawns. Johnny soaked his name into the grass. I mastered the backwards crabwalk. These houses were menacing and we had a fight to pick. We always said we weren’t jealous of money. But then again, we never took a leak in the streets of mud valley, not like our parents who’d stumble home dead drunk and like street hounds relieve themselves wherever they wanted. No, you’d never catch me and Johnny holding onto walls to keep the earth from toppling over our heads. We were deliberate. We had time on our side and, unlike our parents, we’d find what we were looking for every time we reached the bottom of the bottle.

We lived next to each other in mud valley. The river flowed through our backyard and when it rained, right through our homes. Our walls were marked not with lines tracking our childhood growth, but with lines marking the most intense floods. How proud we all were of our suffering—and still, somehow, ashamed.

Johnny never seemed to realize that I loved him.

I kept having this dream. I’d feel the warmth of him on my back. I’d feel his arms wrap around me. He whispers my name, Jolene. He must have hugged me that way once or else how would I know I wanted something so specific?

Johnny had a girl, Cassie, whose blouses were so loose the tips of them were always dipping into her food and getting dirty. She lived on the middle ground in town, never saw a good flood in her life.  If he was going to choose a girl over me, at least let her be made of mud and pistols, conceived one drunken night under a full moon. Let her be one of us who floated in cheap beer for nine months and came out perfectly whole except for a chip on one shoulder and a hardened heart.

My mother could sniff out my desperation the summer before first grade when I had come home crying after Johnny got his first girlfriend. Mom used to tell me Johnny was always looking for the next best thing, always aiming higher than he could reach, biting off more than he could chew. She’d say this with a cigarette dangling from her mouth, her stained fingers smoothing around the grease in her hair, her skin still smelling of Southern Comfort. She was talking also about my father, a handsome guy with an equally debilitating drinking problem. He’d run off with pretty married women and he’d come home when they grew bored and kicked him to the curb. Boys get tired of expensive girls. Expensive girls get tired of broke boys. Meaning, in not so many words, one day Johnny would settle for me the way my father always settled for her.

We didn’t like each other from the start, Cassie and me. Johnny put his arm around us and said, “My two favorite girls have finally met.” Cassie looked at me from under Johnny’s armpit and dragged her finger across her neck. After he let us go, I told her to bite me.

The summer of ’02, I dragged behind them like a damn drooling dog. We went often to the dairy queen where we’d get drunk in the parking lot, smoke cigarettes and weed. One night, Johnny suggested she come ride with us through the rich part of town, up in the hills.

“I thought this was our thing,” I said.

“Pissing on lawns?” he asked. “That’s our thing? What does that even mean?”

He grabbed my chin and pinched it. I smacked his hand away, though I wanted the pressure of his fingers to stay.

Knowing I was upset, Johnny let me ride in the passenger’s seat. Cassie sat in the back with her feet up on my headrest and kept kicking it all the way up and into the land of glowing chandelier windows and rippling coy ponds. I was so drunk I felt my head go numb and didn’t care much.

The pressure to go was building between my legs. But, on Cassie’s suggestion, we were going to have a picnic on the hillside, look out at the lights below us. She had even brought a plaid blanket and a basket.

In someone’s fenceless backyard, she spread out the blanket, lifting and lifting it into the air, dust whisking around us. Cassie was beautiful. I hated her for it. This was no rebellion for her, not like it was for Johnny and me. Wherever she was, she believed she had a right to be there. I could see it in the curve of her back. She resented no one. Except maybe me.

I resented everyone and I had to pee. Drunk and angry I dropped my pants a few feet away from Cassie and looked her in the eyes as the pee soaked the grass. I made sure to be uphill, hoping the pee would inch towards her. She screamed a girly scream and stood up.

“What the actual fuck?” she said.

I laughed. I laughed so hard I almost fell over into the wet ground below me.

“What the fuck, Jo?” Johnny said. The sharpness snapped me out of my hysterics. I shimmied to dry off and pulled my pants up, but Johnny was already walking after Cassie who was stomping away.

“I’m sorry,” I tried saying, “I thought this is what we were doing.” But the words came out all slurred and backwards.

“Can’t you see it?” She looked at Johnny. “Can’t you see she loves you, you stupid asshole? The hell is wrong with the two of you? Why don’t you just fuck already?”

I caught up to them. I looked to Johnny to see how he took the suggestion.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Cassie,” Johnny said.

“Hey, Cassie, chill. I didn’t mean anything by it. I’m just drunk.”

“No,” she said, “you’re just trash.”

“Don’t,” Johnny said to her. “Just, don’t.”

Cassie spat on the ground before turning and walking away. I admired her spunk, that pink little poser with her hair in a slicked back ponytail. When he didn’t go after her, hope swelled in my chest.

“I’m sorry, Johnny. I didn’t mean—”

“Relax,” he said to me. “She’ll get over it. She likes the melodrama.”

“She wasn’t lying, you know.”

“About what?”

 I wanted to say something about loving him, but for all my rough edges I couldn’t find one with an ounce of courage to say it. He’d leave, of course. Call me crazy. Who wants to be left alone on such a lonely hill?

“Can you do something for me?” I asked.

“Sure.”

“Can you—hug me? But, like, from the back? Could you just do that and not ask me what the fuck is wrong with me?”

When I felt the pressure of him, that dizzy drunk head feeling subsided and I had a thought that my dreams were not a memory but a premonition of sorts, and I shuddered. I knew, whether he knew it or not, that he was in love with me. He’d have my back because we were one in the same. And for people like Johnny and me, well, we had to be together to keep the world from eating us alive. At least, this is what I want to believe. He told me he would call someone to pick me up and that he would be back at my place by the morning. He kissed the back of my head before walking off after Cassie.

All night, I dreamt of Johnny creeping into my bed. But when the sun came up, he wasn’t there.

He proposed to Cassie by the end of the year and moved into her parents’ house. I know he is not loved the way he wants to be. I know they must think of him as a problem to be solved, a splinter to be plucked out. He comes back to mud valley sometimes, but I don’t go to him. I work at the deli with my mother, spending my days cutting up dead things for strangers. Some nights I drink on my own and find handsome men who will hold me like he did. Like I said, if I have time on my hands, I won’t spend it feeling sorry for myself. You would never catch me too weak to wash my hair because a man had dragged me through the coals. Don’t tell her this, but sometimes I get this creeping feeling that I am worse off than my mother, waiting on nothing, hoping that tomorrow morning will be the morning he decides to come back.