The Devil's bed

Bo was sick to death of it. Sick to death of everything. And he said the cruelest thing he’d ever said to her. “He left you, you know, because you weren’t pretty enough.”

She drew back as if Bo had struck her. Then she let go her hold on the robe and slapped him. The robe fell open. Bo could see the stretch marks on her breasts and belly. “You will not speak to me that way,” she said in a choked voice. “I’m your mother, goddamn it.”

“That’s not my fault, goddamn it,” Bo threw back at her. He turned and stormed out the door.

It was a long way to the river, and Bo walked the whole distance in heated strides. The streets were empty. The season was autumn, the night cool and windy. All around him Bo heard the scrape of dead leaves on pavement. He made for a grove of cottonwood trees near the High Bridge where an old school bus sat wheel-less in tall grass. The bus smelled of urine and was full of litter, but it offered seclusion and a measure of protection, and kids often gathered there to get high and sometimes to crash. As he approached, he could see a glowing ember in the dark inside.

“Hey, man,” a voice called to him in a laid-back greeting.

“Otter, that you?”

“Halloween in a couple of weeks, Spider-Man. I thought maybe you were a goblin.” Otter laughed softly. He sat near the middle of the bus with his feet propped on the back of the seat in front of him. He was a tall kid, awkward-looking, but when he moved it was with a slow kind of grace that always put Bo in mind of a giraffe. “Late to be out, even for you.”

“You, too,” Bo said. He sat down across the aisle from Otter and accepted the joint his companion offered.

“The devil’s in my old man tonight. Figure I’m better off here until he cools down.”

Otter’s old man was infamous. A huge railroad worker, he was a brute who laid into his son with frightening regularity. Bo had often sat in the bus with Otter while his friend smoked or drank away the pain of a beating.

“So what’s up?” Otter asked.

They were hardly more than a stone’s throw from downtown St. Paul, and the lights of the city drizzled a neon illumination over the grove of cottonwoods and the bus within it. Bo could see Otter’s face, long and serene.

“Fight with my mom,” Bo replied.

“I wouldn’t mind fighting with your mom,” Otter said. The attractiveness of Bo’s mother was a constant subject of comment among Bo’s friends.

“She hit me,” Bo said. “She’s never hit me.”

“She hit you hard?”

“Doesn’t matter. She hit me.”

“It matters, believe me,” Otter said.

They were quiet for a while. Bo saw something big moving on the river. The trees made it difficult to see exactly what, and the wind through the branches covered any sound.

“Hear that?” Otter said

Bo heard only the wind and the leaves.

“I think it’s the dead getting restless.”

“What are you talking about?” Bo asked.

“I’ve been hearing it a lot tonight. With Halloween coming on, I figure all those dead folks are getting anxious for a little action.”

Otter was definitely stoned, probably drunk as well. The restless dead thing Bo decided to chalk up to altered consciousness.

Bo said, “I’m going to take a piss.”

He left the bus and walked out of the trees to the riverbank. The Mississippi was like a strip torn from the night sky and laid against the earth. Bo could see the glow in the pilothouse of a towboat that was nearing Harriet Island. Maybe that was the sound Otter had heard, the deep thrum of the engine as the towboat had passed. Bo watched the light until it disappeared beyond a bend in the river, and he imagined what it would be like to escape on a barge bound for New Orleans. He relieved himself in the grass on the riverbank, zipped up, and returned to the bus.

Otter offered him a swig from a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20. Bo declined. “You going to spend the night?” he asked.

“Probably,” Otter replied. “You?”

“Naw. Think I’ll go back home.” He headed to the front of the bus. “Later,” he said.

“Later, Spider-Man,” Otter called after him.

It was going toward morning by the time Bo returned to the apartment in Frogtown. The walk had done him good. Probably the joint, too, and the mellow influence of Otter. When he stepped inside, the place was quiet. He could see that the door to his mother’s bedroom was slightly ajar. An open door usually meant that the man who’d come with her had done his thing and left. Bo went to the doorway and peeked in. He saw the bedding in a jumble and saw the stains, black in the darkened bedroom. He hit the light switch, and he saw the rest-a bloodied broken bottle, and his mother’s skin, once marred only by stretch marks, marred now, and forever in Bo’s memory, by the deep cut of glass.

All his life, Bo would wonder if other people had a moment that clearly divided their lives. There was everything before, and everything after, and between, only one unforgettable heartbeat. Standing at the door to his mother’s bedroom with his hand still on the light switch, Bo had his moment. It ended in a cry that brought the neighbors running.