Bad Girls Burn Slow, page 1
Also by Pam Ward
WANT SOME, GET SOME
Published by Dafina Books
bad girls burn slow
Pam Ward
KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.
www.kensingtonbooks.com
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
Table of Contents
Also by
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Oh Death
1 - Margie
2 - Val
3 - Bernard and Mr. Fowler
4 - Mr. Fowler
5 - Paula
6 - Val
7 - Paula
8 - Bernard
9 - Bernard and Val
10 - Margie
11 - Mr. Fowler
12 - Bernard and Val
13 - Bernard and Val
14 - Bernard, Margie, Val, and Paula
15 - Bernard and Val
16 - Bernard and Paula
17 - Val
18 - Bernard
19 - Paula
Copyright Page
To Mari;
Hana, my mama;
and Guy
Acknowledgments
There is something sinister and delicious about laying souls to rest. The sadness. The wet cheeks of uncontrolled grief. The woeful talk of “going back home.” But there are some folks who aren’t above helping death along. They relish in seasoning the earth with fresh meat and hover over decay just like crows. As a business, death has grown and hellishly changed. Cremations have brought doom to unheard-of profits and the rituals themselves have put Hollywood to shame with the lavishness of their productions. But some of us do need a final resting place and a good soul to navigate the way. That said, I’d like to thank the cemeteries I visited: Rosedale, Forest Lawn, Hollywood Forever, Holy Cross, Rose Hills, and the ancient Evergreen. I thank all the parlors that entertained my calls. I especially thank my mother, the beautiful Bonnie Moore, who told me gory and good stories of redemption and loss and has gone to more funerals than anyone I know. To Guy, my sweet husband, who shows the true meaning of love and gives everything under the sun. To my children, Mari and Hana, for the best gifts in life; and for Ryan and lil’ Ryane, who keep me smiling. To my sweet sisters, Linda and Lisa, my great brother Jimmy; to Rachel my cousin, who gives friendship soul; to Grandpa, Aunt Joyce, Aunt Steph and Uncle Jarrett. To Aunt Donnie; Uncle Lantz; Aunt Linda; Uncle Ed; Uncle Morris; and, of course, the Abrahams clan including Mich the Peach and Ron Sweeney. To Cousin Robin and especially Eddie who gave me grizzly graveyards facts from the parlors along Pasadena. To Claudia and Jeannie; and my agent, Stephanie Lee, who sang praises for me all the way. To Rakia Clark at Kensington, who shoveled through these sheets and got this whole book in the ground. Lastly, I thank those who are no longer breathing: my father who warms my heart like a 1,000-degree oven; my sweet GrandMarie who got this family thing started; and my neighbor, Demora, whose artful hand made death look stunning. May all of your souls rest in peace.
Oh Death
What is this that I can’t see
With icy hands taking hold on me
I am death, and none can excel
I’ll open the doors to heaven or hell
Oh death, oh death
Can’t you spare me over till another year?
Oh death, someone would pray
Couldn’t you call some other day
The children’s prayed, the preacher’s preached
The time of mercy is out of reach
Oh death, oh death
Can’t you spare me over till another year?
’Tis Death, I come to take the soul
Leave the body and leave it cold
To drop the flesh off of the frame
The earth and worms both have a claim
Mother come to my bed
Place a cold towel upon my head
My head is warm, my feet is cold
Death is a-moving upon my soul
Oh death, oh death
Can’t you spare me over till another year?
(excerpt from ancient American folk song)
1
Margie
Fowler, Alice H.
Age 78, slipped away peacefully into eternity, on Tuesday, October 9, 1985. Born Alice Hughes, daughter of Gladys and Rupert Hughes of Texas and heir of the late Howard Hughes’ estate. She is survived by her husband, Edward Fowler and their only son, Bernard and will be interred at 4:00 p.m., on October 12, at Rosedale Cemetery, in Los Angeles.
It began as a con. Something you did and got away with once. But the next thing you know, the whole con was your life and you couldn’t stop even if you tried.
A small girl watched the sky turn from light gray to grime. She was melting the feet of her doll with a lighter while sitting in the back of the car.
It was three. The funeral parlor was now in full swing. The place ran year round and eighteen hours straight. It turned crystal clean air into rancid cologne. A horrible mixture of putrid and sweet, like fruit going bad in a bowl. You wouldn’t know. No, not unless someone told you. That this scent, this burnt licorice rotting aroma was a skin searing, two thousand degree human oven. With a flame so intense, that flesh dissolved from your bones, cooked you clean until nothing was left but scorched limbs and a puddle of smoldering grease.
The girl’s mother sat in front, hunting the obituary section. She read the obituaries each day like they were racing track forms. Who was born where. Who died when and how. Who was the last surviving kin. She was from Memphis but knew all the funeral homes in town. She kept track of death like a bookie does his nags, with both eyes trailing the cash.
“The service is about to start in ten minutes!” Margie wiggled in her seat like a puppy at the screen, panting to be let back in. Her infatuation with death was shrewd and direct. She was like a vulture, soaring over fresh deceased meat with her keen beaklike nose and squat little fingers, she hunted through each fallen bone. She read the obituaries gleefully, drawing rings around names with the red pen she kept in her purse.
They were sitting in a banged up Buick, parked a few cars from the funeral home’s doors. They were grand, hand-carved doors like the front of a hotel lobby, but the paint was such a shiny grotesque, freak show gold that they mocked the cracked sidewalk outside. Two trees in gilded planters added regality to the place, but their leaves were black from soot and their branches so bent they looked like two hunchbacked women clawing at the door.
Margie shifted her gaze to the headstones and grinned. She grabbed her purse and car keys and fluffed her hair in the rearview mirror. She sprayed her cologne along her fat, mole-filled neck, and the cheap drugstore scent filled the car. Along her throat was a gold necklace, sparkling in diamonds. She’d gotten the necklace from her con in Nevada, and it gleamed like the sea in July. Sorting her curls behind her ears, Margie smiled at the picture of Alice again and then carefully drew on some freckles. But her smile evaporated quickly when she saw her kid in the backseat, and Margie let out a big, I’m-so-sick-of-you sigh.
The child was still frying her doll’s feet with the flame. The smoke began filling the car.
“Put that damn fire out!” Margie yelled at the child.
Obediently, the girl blew the flame off the doll’s feet. The rest of the legs were pitted with marks.
Margie shot the child a mean look in the slim rearview mirror and then hastily turned to the street. Staring at the child made her sick. But she was stuck with this disaster. She was trapped even after she had tried to escape. Margie abandoned the kid in a train station once, but miraculously the child found her and grabbed both her knees, just as Margie was boarding a train.
“Come on,” Margie said, avoiding the girl’s face. But she saw something in the mirror that made her stop in her tracks. “Wait a second, have you been messing with your hair?”
The girl grabbed her hair like she was trying to hide something bad.
“Let go! Let me see.” Margie yanked the girl’s head hard. “It’s unraveling again! How many times do I have to tell you not to touch it?”
The girl tried to make sense of her thick loosened strands but couldn’t get her small fingers to weave the hair right.
“Just stop it! My dear God! I’ll do it myself!” Margie got out of the car and got into the backseat. “What did I ever do to get cursed with you?”
But Margie knew full well the answer to that question and angrily grabbed the child’s hair at the thought.
“We’re supposed to be in there. I don’t have time for this now.” Margie snatched the girl’s braid right out of her hand. She pulled it so hard, the girl’s whole skull jerked down and banged against Margie’s large chest. “Sit still,” Margie demanded. “I can’t do it if you move!”
The girl tried to hold her head in a single straight line, but it kept tilting back from the force. When a single strand popped from a follicle in her scalp, the little girl winced and then cried out in pain.
“Ouch, Mommy, that hurts.”
“Shut up, it does not!”
When the girl tried to rub where the pulled hair came out, Margie popped her palm with the back of the brush.
The girl’s body started to quake as she stifled a cry.
“If you cry and ruin your face, so help me God!” Margie balled her hand into a fist. “Wipe that crybaby face off and give me a smile!”
The girl sputtered while trying to contort her face into a fake smile, but it was miserable and so
horribly contrived that tears started streaming down both cheeks.
“Oh shoot! Now look what you did!” Hurriedly, Margie grabbed a Kleenex and dabbed the girl’s jaw. She took some mascara out and redid the girl’s eyes and then brushed some more rouge on her cheeks.
When the girl’s hemline accidentally hiked up her slim thighs, Margie yanked her skirt fiercely and peered in her face. “Now, remember, keep this down. You have to act like a lady.”
Margie gazed at the cemetery. It was a vast sea of gloom. It was as quiet as a spoon left for dead on a napkin, long after the meal was done. The still headstones mocked the lively scene inside of the car, which was a postcard for panic and woe.
Rosedale was the second oldest cemetery in L.A. Seven years younger than Evergreen, the oldest existing cemetery in town, Rosedale’s plots were born in 1884. It was first to use the new approach called “lawn cemetery design,” using flowers, scrubs, and trees, along with monumental art, creating an illusion of nature and peace.
But today, in the fall of 1985, the grass was brown, the weeds had conquered the lawn, and the scrubs looked like angry walls of spite. The east side was the worst part of all. It was where all the ancient abandoned tombstones laid. There were sad crumbling graves of weather-beaten stone. Broken crosses and tombstones that had toppled down or snapped like plates, creating a carpet of decaying gravel. Hundreds of graves that looked bombed or kicked down were crushed by the rage of old age. Even the brick fence that enclosed the whole ancient yard was eroded and halfway gone on this side, replaced with pitiful chain-link and gnarly barbed-wire fence.
Examining the child’s neck, Margie sucked her tongue hard. A tiny birthmark was the only evidence left. Margie stuck a fat rubber band between her teeth. She expertly circled the band around the girl’s hair, harnessing it at the frayed ends.
“I should have pressed this myself, instead of listening to that damn fool in Texas. He took our last bit of money and gave you this cheap awful perm.”
But the disgusted look switched to a hint of a smile, which raised the thick mounds on her cheeks. “But I must say,” she said, pulling a long reddish strand, “that straightening junk really worked. Your hair looks completely different. You’d never even know it was you.”
The girl was ghoulishly cute with mascara and lip gloss lips like one of those six-year-old beauty pageant kids. She sat perfectly still. She didn’t smile or frown. Exhibiting the mannequin face of a skilled poker player, the girl showed no emotion at all. But then, ever so slightly her left knee started to twitch. She tried to sit stiff but began shifting back and forth and then mildly shaking across the seat.
“Mommy?” the girl asked, using a mild-measured tone. She said the word as if testing a stove to see if it was still hot.
“What?” Margie asked, putting another rubber band between her lips.
The girl looked hesitantly at her mother. She tugged the hem of her pink chiffon dress.
“What is it? Speak up!” Margie demanded.
“I have to go,” the child offered meekly, bringing her hands to her face as if waiting for the next blow to appear.
“What? Are you saying you have to go now? Why didn’t you use it at the gas station like I told you?”
“I did. But now I have to go again.” The girl bit the meaty part of her palm.
“Well, you can’t go right now. It’s too late,” Margie told her. She noticed an older man sobbing alone by a tree. Both his arms circled a headstone.
The girl panicked. Her legs twisted across the cold vinyl seat. “I could go in those rosebushes over there.” The girl pointed to some shrubs near the cemetery’s entrance.
“No you can’t! Are you crazy? You’re a lady for God’s sakes! You can’t just go pee in a bush.” Margie pulled the girl’s hair so fiercely her head slammed against her chest.
“But we did it before,” the little girl offered.
“The hell we did! Don’t you ever mention that again, okay? Listen, you’re a lady. Everything’s changed. You have to be respectable. You have to act decent and look clean. Little girls don’t pee in a graveyard of scrubs. They sit quietly and learn how to hold it.”
Margie watched the old man standing by the lone tree again. “Besides,” she said, keeping her eyes on the man. “People could see you out there.”
The little girl stared at the rosebush and squeezed both her knees She tried to will the strong need down, but it would not go away. She turned toward the mortuary’s door.
“I bet they have one in there,” the girl offered hopefully. “It looks like the same kind of place we put that dead man in Memphis.”
Margie whirled around and slapped the child hard across her mouth. “I don’t ever want you to mention Memphis again, hear?” Margie watched an orange tractor lower a casket in the ground. “I sunk lower than I ever did in life in that town, and I’m never going down that dark path again.
The girl cupped her jaw and rubbed her sizzling cheek, which felt like she’d held a hot comb too close to her ears.
Margie didn’t like hitting the child and avoided these confrontations. She was glad she was sitting behind her and didn’t have to look at the child head-on. She avoided her at all costs, tossing the child magazines to read instead and stacking big piles of books near her legs. Reading kept the child occupied and quiet. It kept Margie from doing what she dreaded more than anything in life, having to actually sit down and deal with the child face-to-face, to have to look inside the miserable child’s vacant eyes, having to see what she’d done to her own flesh and bone. Just the thought sent a horrible chill up her spine, rattling her teeth like a bitterly cold night, and torched the soft hairs of her soul.
Margie frowned to herself, keeping her lids toward the ground, burying the sorrow that burned inside her stomach.
The worst part was that she couldn’t talk to anyone about her troubles. A naturally talkative person, Margie was forced to bite her tongue. She couldn’t utter one word. She kept their secret locked inside her tightly clenched jaw. It stayed shut like the arsenic she kept in her trunk and the fine jewels she took from her marks. Margie was a natural con artist. As good as it gets in this game. But things had gotten out of hand lately, and they barely escaped their last scam. She had to rearrange their lives to get out of the state. All she had to do now was sit quietly and cool her heels. Wait for things to simmer down and turn back around. If she gave it a little more time, the fire would eventually burn out. If she could just get through winter and wait for summer to heat up, then maybe she could put the past behind her. Maybe by June or July she could undo this lie and finally begin to breathe deep again. She was living with a ticking time bomb, but there was a definite end in sight. And at ten, the girl was more than halfway done being a child. In a few short years—not many more now—the child would be grown and hopefully gone and then things could be normal again.
Margie sighed deeply. She studied the birthmark on the girl’s neck. Normal seemed a long way from now.
Margie wrinkled her nose and sniffed toward the sky. Life was different now. Things had gone tragically wrong, but if she sucked it up and played one last little con, she could relax and be done with this drama.
“Come on,” Margie said, getting out of the car.
And then slowly, the girl daintily slid out one of her feet. She was wearing a white patent leather boot, trimmed in soft rabbit fur, which licked the taut meat of her calves.
“My name is Paula Green,” the girl said to herself. She curtseyed, pinching her dress between her index finger and thumb. But before she got all the way out of the car, the girl stopped to look back at her mother and let “slut,” casually slip from her lips.
Margie grabbed the girl’s hand and walked toward the mortuary door, oblivious to the girl’s hostile curse.
A protester held a cardboard sign etched in red letters, blocking the Chapel of the Pines entrance.
“Bake bread, not bodies,” the scrawling type read. The protester’s hair was the color of used coals. She looked a hundred years old.
