JUNE BUG by Lori McMullen
ELENI DOESN’T ACTUALLY WANT anyone dead. She’s not hateful and psycho. She just really, really wants to go home.
This, at least, is what she tells herself as she sits six branches up, deep in the split near the trunk, waiting. High up like that, the live oak’s moss thins, and she can survey the road, a smooth, lineless strip that moves cars past like the belt at the Wal-Mart checkout.
It’s been a half-hour since anyone drove by. Since then, nothing. The heat, maybe, is keeping people in today. The heat. The Cheez Whiz-thick heat that fills Eleni’s whole world. She wipes her neck. She swings her legs, whose growth is outpacing the rest of her body. None of this stirs up fresh air or helps even a little.
But today is the day. She just knows it. Today is the day she’ll do something so bad that a judge will have to send her back to prison, back to her mama, back to the only place she can think of as home.
She was born there, in prison, eleven years ago, in a cinderblock room behind the Women with Infants Block (WIB they all called it, the other mamas and the guards too, and even the Governor, who came once to the main gates with a cloud of reporters and talked about his efforts to increase WIB Funding). With her very first breath, Eleni swallowed that stale, ugly air, then she blew out newborn bits of herself into the room, where they danced like mosquitoes on dunes of white lights. In that bright prison glare, she saw, first, her mama, sweat-slicked and heaving on the big bed, and then the guard, standing at Mama’s feet, gripping his gun in its holster, as if he actually thought her birthing mama might run. During those first bits of life, Eleni was silent. Her lungs were strong and her breath was steady, but she felt no urge to cry and sucked up the sounds of her new world instead: the empty coos and clucks of the nurse as she wrapped Eleni in something soft; the sloshy friction of the doctor scrubbing his hands at the sink; the chortles and bleeps of bedside machines. A sense of completion soon settled among the noises in the cinderblock room, and it was with little fanfare that Eleni was handed to her mama and, a short while later, wheeled in her arms to their cell.
The cells in the WIB were nicer than others, with enough room for a cot and a crib and rocker that creaked when it tipped back too far. Eleni ate from Mama, which was good for them both because it meant Mama got extra helpings at meals. Mama’s milk made her grow, and when Eleni got bigger, they sometimes played with a yellow ball in the hard, grassless yard. Sometimes they stacked blocks in a room that had a nine-legged octopus painted on the wall. Her mother used to look at that wall and twist Eleni’s baby silk hair around and around her fingers and say I’ll take you to the beach one day, June Bug. And we’ll dive under the waves, and I’ll find you an octopus and show you it’s got eight legs, not nine.
Aunt Sandy says there’s no way Eleni can remember her time in prison with Mama. She says baby brains aren’t big enough for that kind of knowing. This proves to Eleni that her aunt’s not so bright.
Eleni hears the car before she sees it. It’s coming from the direction of Palatka, which means it will pass her on the close side. She reaches to the branch below, lifts Uncle Jay’s Remington by its cantilevered barrel. The gun is heavy, long. Not designed for a girl. But she knows how to use it and pitches one elbow out as she tilts her head to the side. The scope brings the car closer, delivers it to her like a birthday present.
The car is a convertible. For a moment, Eleni’s unsure. Without a roof, she might really hit someone. She was hoping to just shatter glass, maybe blow off a hood ornament. Through the scope, she watches the car shimmer toward her, sees its tires sear scars onto the road. Eleni steadies the gun, keeps the car in the crosshairs. Her feet hook themselves under the branch below, eyelets pushing on wood, bracing for recoil. The safety lets go with a gasp.
The bullet whooshes over the grass, over the dark, lineless road, searching, like the animals in the nature show Uncle Jay likes to watch, for flesh to rip open. Eleni tracks the bullet, hangs onto it with her eyes. It’s like she’s flying with it through the hot air, and when the bullet crashes into the trunk of a slash pine, Eleni teeters on her branch, shaken and dazed as if she’d hit the tree too. For a breath, the leathery green skin of a nearby leaf is all she can see. It’s a really beautiful green, rich and deep, and it reflects the sunlight almost like glass. The ends of the leaf curve up like the edges of an unsticky sticker. Eleni forces her eyes shut, and the leaf disappears. When she looks again, the world seems to have steadied, and she can see past the leaf, past the branches, all the way to the convertible that is still coming nearer.
When she fires this time, her shot hits the car, though Eleni can’t tell where, exactly. Screeching and spinning, the convertible humps over the ditch and stops near Eleni’s live oak.
She scrambles out of the tree, scraping her knee as she goes.
“I did it!” Eleni celebrates, in case someone is alive and wondering. “It was me! With this gun!” She waves the rifle in the air like a first place spelling bee ribbon.
The convertible is in the shadow of the tree, but, still, Eleni can see two people. A man and a woman. They are quiet but moving, and in the silence, Eleni realizes she’d expected sirens to start wailing immediately, as if gunshots alone would trigger the police.
“Call the state troopers!” she shouts. “Tell them it was Eleni McGregor!”
Still, the man and the woman say nothing. They’re squirming, looking around the woman’s seat, searching for something. Eleni steps closer, but her confidence is fading. She clutches the Remington tighter.
“I said it was me.” It’s not quite a shout this time. More like a whine.
The man glances at her, then continues his search of the woman’s seat. He looks under her dress, rolls her thighs to the side, looking and looking for something.
“Don’t see no blood,” he finally says to the woman, and it is then that Eleni notices the swell of the woman’s belly.
“You sure?” the woman asks.
The man looks right in the woman’s eyes, cups her whole cheek in his palm. “The baby is fine, doll. You ain’t hurt a bit.”
Eleni drops the gun. She’s shaking too hard now to hold it. Her hands clutch each other while she scans the car, suddenly desperate to find the bullet hole.
She hears the hole before she sees it: the tire is whistling, like Aunt Sandy’s breath when she walks to the 7-Eleven, and the convertible is starting to list on one side. The man notices it too. He squints to hear better, then jumps out of the car. His movements are easy, fluid. Eleni can tell he is good at being himself.
“Tire ain’t nothing to fix. I’ll get it switched out in five, doll, but you need to get out the car.”
“I’d do it in four,” the woman says, heaving out of her seat, “if I could bend over.”
The man laughs, a smile splitting his mask of unshaven stubble. “Don’t I know it,” he says.
Still, no one notices Eleni. Or if they do, they don’t say anything to her. The man sets about changing the tire, shaking sweat off his face like a wet dog because he doesn’t seem to want to waste time wiping with his shirt. He works very quickly. Maybe he’s on a pit crew in Daytona.
The woman, meanwhile, is squatting at the base of Eleni’s live oak. For a moment, Eleni worries that she’s having the baby right there, but then she smells the tang of fresh pee and looks away, unable to watch such a beautiful lady go to the bathroom like that.
“This heat,” the woman moans when she’s done. She straightens her dress and walks toward Eleni, blue cotton swirling around her, making her look like the breeze itself. “Even the shade’s like an oven.”
Eleni doesn’t know what to say. She’s not prepared for small talk with the people she just tried to shoot.
“I used to not mind it,” the woman goes on. “What’s the point of minding it when you live in this place, right? That’d be like living in Alaska and saying you hate the snow. But then the baby,” she rubs her belly, “the baby makes me mind the heat more. Sometimes, if I’m sitting too long, I need to mop with a rag between my belly and thighs because it gets sweaty in there. Funny, right?”
The woman looks at Eleni, as if Eleni could possibly understand. When Eleni doesn’t answer, the woman sweeps hair from her face and goes on.
“But you know what’s the best? Sleeping. Because the baby’s right there, and I can kind of hold it. Like a teddy bear or something.”
This, Eleni can relate to. She sleeps with a toy, a stuffed panda that her mother sent from prison one Christmas. Maybe she should have brought it with her today. Maybe the police would’ve let her keep it, at least in the squad car.
“That’s really nice,” Eleni whispers.
They’re quiet. The woman watches the man, who has the spare tire on and is tightening it now. Eleni looks sideways at her, not wanting to stare obviously.
She’s younger than Eleni first thought. Woman maybe isn’t even the right word. There are freckles on her nose and her cheeks, scattered around as if she’d lifted her face to the sky during a sun-shower and the raindrops had stained. Her brown hair is knotted on top of her head and held in place with a frayed scrunchie, though brown strands have escaped and hang in the air near her face.
“Aren’t you going to call the police on me?” Eleni finally asks.
The woman turns to Eleni, wrinkles her nose as if Eleni has said something hilarious.
“Are you kidding?” she asks.
The man, who is lowering the jack, glances at Eleni. “The one thing in the world we ain’t doing is calling the cops.”
Eleni looks from the man to the woman and back.
“But I tried to kill you.”
“You ain’t the first.” The man smiles.
“But,” Eleni pauses, struggles. This is not how it was supposed to go. “But aren’t you mad? Don’t you want justice? I just did aggravated pre-meditated attempted murder or something on you.”
“And I just done worse,” the man says. “So we ain’t calling no cops.”
Eleni drags her heel through the dirt and thinks about this.
While she is thinking, the woman bends with a groan and picks up Uncle Jay’s Remington. She hands the rifle to the man, who puts it in the trunk of the car.
“Okay,” Eleni announces, decided. “Then I’ll call them myself.”
The man looks at her. He laughs.
“We’ll be long gone by then, honey,” he says. “And if there ain’t no weapon and there ain’t no victim, then there ain’t no crime.”
The woman stands close to Eleni, rubs one palm over Eleni’s head. The heat from the woman’s touch is hotter than the day.
“Come with us,” she says. It sounds like a challenge.
In front of her, Eleni sees the hump of the woman’s dress shift. The baby, she realizes, has moved.
“What? Why?”
“Because,” the woman shrugs, as if she hadn’t yet thought of a reason. “Because then you wouldn’t be here.”
Eleni considers this. Not being here is an important part of being there.
“Will you drop me near Putnam?” she asks. “I need to get there. To Putnam.”
The woman turns to the man.
“Are we going near Putnam?”
The man nods a few times, consulting his inner roadmap. “We could,” he says.
The woman looks again at Eleni. Her eyes are as blue as her dress.
“We’ll drop you near Putnam,” the woman says. “But you have to promise—I mean promise promise—not to tell anyone ever about us.”
Eleni nods. Tears gather on her lower lid. Finally, she’s going home.
***
Riding in the convertible makes Eleni hot and cold at the same time. In the car, there’s no escaping the reach of the sun, except when they drive under a bridge, and even then it’s just a quick blink of not-sun. But the man drives fast, too fast, and the air rushes over Eleni, chilling her as she overheats.
The backseat is cramped. In front of Eleni, the wind pulls the woman’s hair loose, and though the strands are not very long, Eleni’s seat is so close that the brown hair tickles her cheeks, gets stuck in her mouth. She wonders how far it is to Putnam. She wonders what she will do when she gets there.
The man will not drop her close to the prison. Eleni knows that. She’s lucky that he’ll even go anywhere near it. She’ll have to walk through that sorrowful town, where—she once read in the newspaper—the shops are all shuttered because the only commodity left is criminal justice and that’s bought and sold in the courts, not a storefront. Then she’ll find the road. The one that leads both toward and away from Mama, the only thing in the world that matters at all.
She was twenty-two months old when she aged out of the WIB and the warden sent her away. It was a day that turned her memories rotten, a day she’s tried to scrub from her head with Uncle Jay’s lava soap.
The afternoon was hot, like this one, and Eleni napped on the bed with Mama. Sharing a bed was against the rules, but Mama knew Eleni would have to leave prison soon, so they slept together whenever the lazy guard was on rounds. Something startled Eleni awake that afternoon. A key in the lock, probably. Or the thud of big boots on the floor. In the moment that followed, Eleni heard a gasp, a loud, everywhere gasp that came not from a human mouth but from some unbodied monster with gas giant lungs. Eleni felt herself lifted, hefted. She was in the air. Like a bird. She’d just been asleep and now she was floating. From somewhere outside the cell walls, the invisible gasping force drew all the air from the prison, leaving a vacuum, like outer space. The twisty halls and crowded yards of the entire complex all stilled to breathlessness. In that moment, that moment that would last their whole lives, Eleni and Mama understood they were apart and would not be put back together. Then the moment exploded. The monster exhaled, refilling the prison with sour air, and time started ticking again, but faster and faster than it ticked before. Eleni and her mother did the only thing they could possibly do: they loosed shrieks of hellfire.
The woman in the front seat of the car twists to look at Eleni.
“You say something?” she shouts over the wind.
Eleni shakes her head no.
As the woman twists back, her blue dress shifts, falls a little bit off her shoulder. There are freckles there too, on the crest of her arm. Little ones like the ones on her nose and her cheeks. And in the midst of these tiny freckles, rising like islands from the sea, is the pillowy pink skin of a scar. Her mama has scars on her shoulder, too. Beautiful pink ridges that felt, to soft little fingers, like blobs of old Play-Doh.
Eleni reaches for the scar, touches it with the fleshy pad of one finger. She moves her finger over its hills and valleys. The scar is smooth, hairless, darker in some spots than others.
Again, the woman twists toward Eleni. Her smile is kind. She doesn’t seem to mind the touch of Eleni’s fingertip, but Eleni pulls back anyway, embarrassed, and pushes her hands under her thighs for safekeeping.
“Know where we’re going after we drop you?” the woman asks with a secretive grin. She’s like a kid in school, whispering to the person behind her while the teacher writes on the board.
Eleni shakes her head.
“We know a guy in Apalachicola. He’s got a boat. And we’re going to take it to Mexico. And when we get there, to Mexico, we’re going to get a little casita near the water, and the baby will be born there, right there on the beach, or maybe even in the water, like a little dolphin, and everything is going to be all right.” She nods fast. “It is. Everything’s going to be completely all right when we get there.” The woman’s voice drains as she speaks. She works to keep up the smile, and it seems to Eleni that she’ll never stop nodding.
Eleni doesn’t know what else to do, so she frees her hands and puts one finger back on the scar. She presses. For a moment, that part of the pink line disappears, as if her touch had erased it, and the woman’s nodding slows and slows until her head is finally still.
“Fifteen miles to Putnam,” the man announces.
The car trembles on. Eleni takes her finger from the woman’s scar and picks instead at the cut on her own knee, wondering if it’s deep enough to leave a mark. She tries to think again of walking through Putnam, of approaching the walled fortress where she was born. She needs to figure out what she will say, what she will do, when she gets there, but all she’s able to imagine is Mexico. She’s sure the casita will be a pretty Crayola color. Goldenrod, maybe, or Cerulean to match the water nearby. And there will be a fan on the ceiling that circles like a carousel, and the baby will lay beneath it and watch it go round and round. The man and the woman will eat mangoes with every meal, and they won’t need to play music because the sound of the waves will shush the baby to sleep.
“Next exit,” he says.
The sun still wails from above, baking the treetops, the blacktop, the scalps of Eleni and these people who might look, from above, like a small happy family. The heat and the wind stuff their ears, muffle the world, and the sirens are close before Eleni hears them. At the wheel, the man curses. He puts his hand on the woman’s belly and shouts, “Hang on!” before pressing the pedal and lurching the car toward its highest speed. No one notices the exit for Putnam. They’re rushing instead toward a dream, toward turquoise water that will take them to a place without chains, without bars, a place where a child doesn’t age out of her Mama’s embrace.
“Want to go to Mexico?” the woman shouts at Eleni.
Eleni leans forward. Their heads are close.
“Will we see an octopus on the way?”
The woman grasps Eleni’s hand in her own.
“We’ll see the whole world, June Bug.”
The sirens get closer, but they sound further away. Eleni’s ears are filled not with the war cries of the state trooper cars but with the sounds of gasping waves and can’t-catch-your-breath laughter. The car hurtles west. Eleni clutches the woman’s hand and closes her eyes.
The ocean isn’t far now. As time rolls over itself like waves on a faraway beach, everything Eleni ever wanted is almost, almost in reach.
LORI McMULLEN grew up near Miami, Florida, and is a graduate of Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School. Her short fiction has appeared in the Tampa Review, and her first novel Among the Beautiful Beasts—based on the early life of the environmentalist Marjory Stoneman Douglas—will be published in June 2021. Lori lives with her family in Chicago.