The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters Read Free Page B

mention hexed.” But Lily, with reverence, lifted the impossibly fragile Kleenex doll from the box and held it in her palm. She touched a fingertip to its bald head. Lily and Jordan once took a bus to Lincoln to visit Starkweather’s grave at the Wyuka Cemetery and to attempt a seance.
    “None of this stuff is for sale, anyway,” Jordan said. “I robbed that woman blind and this is all going to only appreciate in value.” Jordan opened the doors for Lily and Mabel. Mabel slipped into the backseat and sat back. The vinyl was torn, the cushions lumpy, and she wondered if there might be something grisly sewn into the seat—the silent remains of something unspeakable. Jordan didn’t start the car yet, savoring it, holding the steering wheel, steering a little, fiddling with the radio knob and pushing in the cigarette lighter. The car smelled of must and mice. A broken spring in the seat poked at the back of Mabel’s leg. It seemed to Mabel that, in such a car, one would be inspired by the spirit of renegadeyouth and not be scared of anything. But the only thing that affected Mabel was the view out the window. The sun was setting at the edge of the desolation, casting its sharp glow across the miles of nothingness to be traveled before reaching a good place.
    Mabel longed for the circle of lights of the Ferris wheel at the fairgrounds on the edge of town. The Hamilton County fair had just ended after a long weekend; as a little girl, Mabel had sat on the roof of the porch to watch the lights of the fair spin and flash, the carnival like a ghost city, a mid-western Brigadoon, rising from the mist once a year. On still nights she could hear the smash of the demolition derby or even the bleat of sheep penned and judged. Even years later, walking alongside the booths and tents and trucks of the carnival, the air thick with humidity and the smell of cotton candy and candied apples, Mabel wouldn’t have been surprised to see her father holding Lily up to pick a rubber duck from a tub of running water. On the bottom of the duck would be the number of Lily’s prize, a plastic shark’s tooth on the end of a necklace that Lily would give to her mother to wear. When her parents fussed over Lily, when Lily was small, was when Mabel most felt part of a family, when Lily’s crying and laughing, napping and waking, were of great amusement and concern. Mabel would never forget sitting on her mother’s lap in the old apartment one Sunday, both of them rapt and silent watching Lily sleep naked but for a diaper against her sleeping father’s naked chest. Her father lay back on the sofa, Lily in his arms, the funnies spread out onthe floor beside them. The Silly Putty they’d been playing with still held the stretched-out image of Dick Tracy’s daughter-in-law Moonbeam. “Aren’t we lucky?” Mabel’s mother whispered in her ear.
    At the fair just the night before, Jordan, even three sheets to the wind, had won Lily one of those square, painted mirrors, by knocking over milk bottles with a wrecked baseball, its stitching in pieces. On the mirror was a retro cartoon of R. Crumb’s bald-headed
Keep On Truckin
’ high-steppers. But Jordan let Mabel have the mirror when Lily disappeared with a gangly, nothing-to-lose carny who felt her up beneath the bleachers of the rodeo. Lily confessed in the middle of the night, in the middle of the midway noisy with heavy-metal music blaring from the Wild Octopus and the Screaming Mimi, and Jordan forgave her because she was in tears—the carny had stolen her ruby earrings by expertly nibbling on her lobes.
    “There’s a State Highway 666,” Jordan said, the car still and silent, “goes south down Arizona. Can you imagine? Driving Starkweather’s car down Highway 666?”
    The sleeves of Jordan’s shirt were too short for his long arms. Lily traced her finger along the scar across Jordan’s right wrist. “When you did this,” she said to Jordan, “did you leave some kind of