this is a weeping song.
There are too many fucking kids already when She tells you She's knocked up again but what the hell are you gonna do 'cause you sure as hell can't make Her get an abortion not with her telling half the fucking world already so you deal with it and you put aside more from your paycheck because some day one of your kids is going to go to college and the ones you've got so far aren't gonna be able to make it, you can tell. This round you get Her to lay off the booze and you pray to God that at least one of your kids comes out smart like all your teachers said you were before you dropped out to take care of Her and your first kid.
Five months later he's premature and you hold your breath and you say God just let him do all right, and when he comes home you go and tithe extra the next Sunday and breathe out hallujuahs.
*
Alex is the little kid next door who won't stop fucking following your ass everywhere, and you figure maybe it's because you were making rockets last week in the gully but you're not sure. Maybe it's that he's third youngest of eight with another on the way, Christ, you know when you're older you're not getting knocked up for anything.
So, you say, stopping your bike and staring at him on the sidewalk, scabby knees in his shorts and drippy Popsicle in hand that you gave him.
He shrugs, a little, and eventually you cave and make those goddamn rockets with him, and he says that when he's fifteen he's going to marry you, and you laugh and ruffle his hair and say sure, kid, see you in ten years. He's pretty cute, for a brat.
*
Of all your students, you think Alex works the hardest. He doesn't get the top grade in anything, but he's up there, and you know it's not because the kid is naturally smart at all - you just look at his family and, well, you don't say inbred hicks but you do think it - but he works harder than anybody, an eight year old with shadows under his eyes and a tight, quiet mouth.
You think you understand at Parent-Teacher interviews when his father nearly looks like he's going to cry over his report card, and that kid just lights up like you didn't even know he could. You decide that he's going to make it out of here after all, that one, if he stays out of trouble.
*
Your big brother is a bastard, you know that, because he kicked you out of your sandbox for three days and dug around in it.
And then you don't know if he's a bastards because he glues the broken bottle pieces he found in there to the window of the room you two share and they shine all pretty in the morning on the wall and your hands when you hold them up to the light, a big old cross sitting in your window that'll keep the Devil out of you, he says, and tucks you in.
Your big brother is maybe okay.
*
You paint, and it's really all you've got; thirteen years old and not good at anything else with a cheapass dollar store set of watercolors, fat and slow with glasses and your name is Erwin, for Chrissake, you're pretty much doomed around this town.
So you get your ass kicked and your pants hiked up and people call you porker and you grin and bear it, and come home to paint blurry, bloody carnage on any kind of paper you can get your fat fucking hands on.
And you go to church, and you pray that God either kill you or them, because this is quite frankly driving you out of your mind.
Except he does neither, and gives you a friend instead, a year younger than you and small for his age like you're fat for yours, and it's one of those things that you'll never remember how it starts but it keeps going anyway.
He's the first one you show your pictures on purpose, crumpled and crackling, and he actually seems to like him, so that he's a Godfreak and you're starting to think you're not a freak for anything is something you work around.
It feels pretty good to have somebody getting spitballs thrown at him too next to you on the walk home, really.
*
You're pretty sure that God doesn't mind sex as much as people say, considering that he invented the damn thing and made boys so good-looking, but your boyfriend doesn't agree. He says that for one thing you're too young but the most important thing is you're not married, and you say that you don't mind doing a little penance, you just want to try it.
That's the first time you break up, but you get back together and keep trying, because you can get laid where you want but nobody else actually gives a shit about how nice you make your hair look in those big shiny piles like on the soaps, even if he also called you a whore a couple of times and threw the teddy bear you gave him on the lawn in the rain and it got all messed up.
*
The kid's shaking when you go to get him out of the back of the patrol car, blood crusted under his nose and it's a damn shame to see a kid no older than your daughter Trish messed up like that, and worse yet, living in a place like this, dead cars scattered everywhere and those damn plastic lawn ornaments reeling like drunks on every lawn.
The kid keeps telling you you can't tell his dad, you just can't, and you ask why and from how he shuts up, yeah, you think you know.
And then you don't, from the way his mother answers the door and he just stops shaking and starts praying, quiet and fierce.
*
This town is better than the city in some ways; worse in most others. You miss how easy it was to make a kill, and you miss your hobby, but your big big brother best friend says you have to be good now, have to be good or it's good morning sunshine for real this time, no van to take you away and hide you somewhere new.
And you're good. You're good a whole month before the little piggy bumps into you on a street corner and his bag tumbles out redredred and you want it, you do, you take it, and you leave little piggy all broken and little skinny all tied up in an alleyway.
You tried. You really really did.
*
Almost everybody hears the explosion or says they did, but nobody knows why the Martel boy blew up that old abandoned house on the edge of town, but they're saying he could die, maybe, and his family don't even do anything about it, that cow wandering around the grocery store just as pert as you please, and you know she said she can't go to church on account of the priest being too soft for her tastes but it's pretty clear God's calling down some judgement on her hypocritical ass, and did you know she's got another one on the way, can you believe it?
Maybe it's all about what happened with that poor boy and his friend with that drifter- sheriff doesn't have a single lead at all, I hear, and it's probably never gonna get solved, but maybe it put him off in the head, that boy. But I don't know, that's just what I think.
*
Jackson Martel is a loyal member of the congregation, so you do your best to sound genuine when you do the rites for his dead wife, but you can't bring yourself to feel much over her personally.
Praying for his children's recovery, though, that you take to with a will, and take up a collection as well. Five of his dozen in the hospital (two likely not to recover, God bless their souls and ease their suffering) with barely enough money for when they were well from his manager's job. You don't imagine they'll be staying together, and in that you're right.
*
You've never even heard of a killer like this around here before, not like this, and it's two murders on his bill and a third looking like it'll come any day now, not to mention the ones breathing but...that little girl's hands aren't putting themselves back on, oh no, and you don't know if it's worse to die or live crippled.
And the burned one, he knows something he's not telling you, but the doctors tell you getting him worked up is bad for him in his condition, his back all charred like a turkey left too long in the oven, but you don't think that's what eating at him most.
He keeps telling you he doesn't know, and you say his family sure won't benefit from whoever he's trying to protect, that if somebody threatened him he best go and tell you, and he gets real quiet for a moment, all flat around the eyes, and you lose him right there.
Nobody ever gets caught, for what they did to that family in their own goddamn home, and you'd think with the way people spy on each other they'd have seen something, but nobody ever gets caught, nobody ever got seen, and you never feel real easy about it.
*
There's no way you can place nine kids in the same foster home, especially not with the needs some of them have, and you're not even going to try with the way their ages are spread out. The oldest sister takes the two youngest, but the rest...well, you don't know, especially not with the pyromaniac you have on your hands in one of them.
You're relieved, but don't show it, when he up and disappears on you, because it eases your caseload and saves the government a dime they were spending on his healthcare.
*
You'd never thought you'd finally stop being over something as tiny as one little boy, awkward on his feet and clumsy with his hand, and as the sun comes up you try to imagine how you ended up tied to this tree, and why he's crying as he hugs the shotgun he used on your legs.
*
The kid in the front seat of your car isn't eighteen, and both of you damn well know it, but he's quiet and he helps you with the flat you get on the highway, so you figure he's all right. You ask him where he's headed and he just says anywhere that's not here, and he's so banged up you'd feel like shit saying no.
*
The bomb stares up at you when up open it in the middle of your haven, and you have about three seconds, according to the timer, to wish you had stopped checking the mail yourself.
*
When you bury Angela, all you really want to know is why somebody'd shoot your baby girl down in the street for no reason, your baby girl who never did anything to anybody and went on peace marches and looked after her garden so good it bloomed next to the freeway like it was in the middle of the countryside.
*
Careless, that's what you are, running after that kid who threw the bottle at your car, and the smell of gasoline mingles with the taste of copper in your mouth to make you sick as he keeps asking, quietly, where your brother is, and you really wish he'd stop flicking that lighter.
Yeah, you really wish he'd just cut that out.
*
Your son calls you, sometimes, your born early broke late son, and usually you talk about sports and sometimes he asks about Katie, the one you kept, and how college is going for her (she's in her sophomore year, and your Katie, she's going to be an engineer) and you don't ask where he is, and it suits you both just fine, you think, because he keeps on calling and you keep on picking up.
He's a good, God-fearing boy, your son. You're sure he's trying to do things right, in his own way. You keep telling yourself to be sure.
*
In September, late in the month, you're working the midnight shift at the diner and hating the thin soles of your worn out old tennis shoes and wondering why the hell you're open anyway on a night like this, rain coming down like it's getting ready to wash you away, when he walks in, soaked to the bone and shivering so hard you have trouble understanding him until he has a few swallows of coffee in him.
He orders a slice of pie, cherry, to go with his coffee, scoop of vanilla ice cream on the side, and it gives you something to do besides hate this job of yours, so you set him up.
You get to talking, because you're still bored and he's company, even if bad company, and eventually you ask what occasion would get him out here in weather like this, and he stops on a forkful of pie and looks you over for a second.
Turns out it's his twenty-third birthday, and you're so surprised you tell him that if he's younger than thirty you'd be blown out of your mind, but he keeps insisting he is until you start believing just because you don't have the stamina not to.
It was God's work, he tells his hands, and you just happen to overhear it. That's what this is.
He leaves a damn good tip, if she's assuming that he must've walked five miles in this weather in that coat because he didn't have any better, drier way of getting here, and you don't think about him much after that. You've seen worse.