The Onion Girl

by Charles de Lint

  “Frankie,” he says. “Frankie Bennett.”

  “I liked talking to you, Frankie,” I say.

  Then I take Geordie’s hand and we start walking away. The back of my neck prickles for a moment.

  “You be good, Jillian May,” Frankie calls after me.

  I can feel myself relax then. I turn, give him a smile and a wave, but we keep walking.

  “What was all that about?” Geordie asks when we’re out of Frankie’s hearing.

  I shrug. We’re crossing the tracks that separate the Ramble from Tyson proper, leaving that other world behind. The bars, the junkies, and the whores. Farther back, Stokesville. Farther still, Hillbilly Holler where I grew up. Or at least where I put in some years. I don’t think I really started to grow up until after Lou found me.

  “I was just fitting in,” I say. “I could tell he’d done time. I knew he’d be friendlier if he thought I had, too.”

  “But Hallsworth?”

  “So I exaggerated. You’re still locked up when you’re in juvie.”

  “But you haven’t really been in prison, have you?”

  “I’ve been a lot of places where a person shouldn’t have to be, but that’s not one of them.”

  “You don’t think prison’s the answer? I mean, if you screw up, you’ve got to pay.”

  I guess he’s thinking of his brother, Paddy.

  “That’s not it,” I tell him. “It’s just there are a lot of people inside who don’t deserve to be in there, and a lot of people walking free who should be locked up tight and the key thrown away. They just never seem to get the balance right.”

  Geordie nods. “Well, Paddy’s no angel, that’s for sure.”

  “You think he’ll go straight when he gets out?”

  “I’d like to say yes,” Geordie says, “but I doubt it.”

  There’s nothing I can say to ease the hurt in Geordie’s eyes. I give his hand a squeeze.

  “Let’s find that bus station,” I say.

  He nods. “I guess this was all pretty much a waste of time.”

  I think about the friend I’ve made in him and shake my head.

  “Not for a moment,” I tell him. “Not even for a moment.”

  Raylene

  TYSON, APRIL 1999

  Pinky and me, I guess we cleaned up some since our original cowboy days in Tyson. We don’t talk a whole lot prettier, and we still don’t take no shit from no one, but you could say we mellowed some. Had us a whole bunch of adventures, didn’t we just? But like the pair of bad pennies we was, we finally turned up back home again in the April of ’99.

  I suppose everybody comes back sooner or later—isn’t that a hoot? All us no accounts can’t run away fast enough, but then we come crawling back again, ’cause the rest of the world don’t want no part of us neither.

  But me and Pinky, we wasn’t so much crawling back as just catching our breath, stopping by for old times’ sake. We never had us no plan on staying. We got to town in late March, took us a room in the Slumber Inn Motel on Division Street, and just walked around, remembering. Most of our time we spent in the Ramble, that three-block strip of bars, strip joints, and honky-tonks that still serves up the entertainment for folks from either side of the tracks. Every which way we turned, we was tripping over the memories.

  We walk by the old place off Division Street where we used to live.

  We try to find the bars and billiards halls and all where we used to spend our social time, though most of them is shut down, or got them new names.

  We stop and have us a look at that street corner where Jimmy got himself beat to death by one of the Devil’s Dragon. And that only puts me in mind of the rest of my sorry family. Del and Mama. Robbie. My sister.

  I figure my sister’s still living the good life in Newford. If that article I saw back in L.A. was anything to go by, she’s doing so well there’d be no need to change her ways. But the others …

  One afternoon I leave Pinky in our hotel room, smoking cigarettes and watching her soaps—she got herself hooked on them in prison. Me, I don’t watch much TV no more and when I do, I don’t really see what’s on the screen. I use it like a white noise machine and just go away in my head, thinking—mostly about being a wolf, about that world we’re running through and where it is and how come we can hunt there the way we do.

  I get on the Division Street bus at a stop near our motel and stay on it as the street takes its long curve into downtown Tyson, a slow stop-and-start trip that ’minds me of all them times I went to visit Pinky in prison. I get off at one of our old haunts, the Devary Hotel, but I’m not planning on running no scams today. I’m not even scouting. I just needed to get away on my own for a time.

  I can’t get over how everything’s changed. The Devary’s a Hilton now, all spruced up and shiny like some strollop out for an evening stroll, trying to impress the locals. But the locals all have them new duds, too, when they haven’t been torn down and rebuilt into something different themselves. There’s more fancy office towers and indoor malls and high-end boutiques and galleries than a body’d know what to do with. The longer I go ambling about, the more I realize that Tyson’s not just some hick county seat no more. The developers have done pulled it into the ass end of the twentieth century like they done pretty much every other place else they got their hands on. Makes me wonder ’bout some of the outlying towns like Hazard and Cooperstown. They’s probably your picturesque little tourist traps now, ’stead of the run-down old mining and lumber towns they been for the past hundred years or so.

  Well, it’s not like it’s any of my concern.

  I buy myself a bag of sour jelly candies and check things out. As I walk around for a while, I begin to feel like I’m in any one of the cities me and Pinky come through on our drive back from L.A. I guess I come to understand that it’s not a matter of everything changing, really. It’s that everything’s becoming the same.

  After a time I come upon a Radio Shack and go in to pick up a longer phone cord for my notebook computer. Our hotel room’s not really set up for Internet access and I keep having to move the computer from the coffee table where I use it, over to the bed-so that my cord can reach the phone jack when I actually want to go on-line.

  I can help myself just fine, but naturally a sales clerk comes sidling over as soon’s I come in through the door. I start to tell him I don’t need no one holding my hand, but he’s just grinning like some old coon hound, caught himself a mighty fine smell.

  “Raylene Carter,” he says. “It’s been forever.”

  His using my name takes me by surprise and I find my hand going for my pocket and that switchblade Pinky give me all them years ago that I still carry. I’m used to being invisible. Someone knows my name, it usually means trouble.

  “You don’t look like you’ve aged a year since high school,” the clerk’s saying. “How do you do it?”

  And then I place him and let myself relax. This here’s Benmont Looney, and, man, didn’t he take some ribbing over that name in school. Like Tyson, he’s changed, too, but it weren’t any improvement. He was always this pudgy, moon-faced kind a kid, clothes never fit quite right on account of they had nothing solid to hang from. He’s bigger now and the suit he’s wearing still hangs like a sack. Face is broader and if the zits are gone, so’s most of his hair.

  “How’re you doing, Ben?” I say with a smile I don’t mean.

  “Pretty good, pretty good. I’m managing this store now.”

  All it takes is an encouraging “uh-huh” to start him in on telling me about his wife and his kids and how he’s living in Mountainview, one of the new suburbs outside of Tyson which “is a long step up from the Old Grange Road where we grew up.”

  Funny hearing that stretch of the Holler referred to by its proper name. I can’t remember the last time I did, though it’s only been me and Pinky all these years, so I guess that’s no surprise.

  I let Looney run on for a while, then finally steer the conversation to
the remnants of my family since a guy like him’d keep up on all the kinds of things I want to know. I’m not being mean-spirited here. It’s just that there’s always going to be those who like to keep up on other people’s business and Looney was one of them, no question. Even when we was growing up, he was like that. I remember Pinky was always wanting to thump him, just to get him to stop talking. I never cared much one way or the other and right now I’m happy to let him ramble on about the sorrowful affairs of the Carter clan.

  “I guess you heard about Del going to prison,” he says.

  I nod. “Nothing he didn’t deserve. That was a long time ago—before I left town.”

  “That’s right. He did seven years, all told, and once he got out he took up with the Morgans.”

  “Whatever for?”

  I’m thinking of Del, always wanting to be the top man on the totem pole. It don’t make a whole lotta sense, him taking up with them Morgans where he’s just going to be one more stoop-an’-fetch-it boy.

  “Well, the thing is,” Looney tells me, “seems he fell in love with one of their girls and I guess they took him in on account of her.”

  “I thought they were all inbred.”

  He gives me that old Looney grin, you’d really think he was short the full load of bricks. He ain’t half dumb, really—I remember that from school—but that grin and his name pretty much sealed his fate when we was kids.

  “You’d think that, from the look of them,” he says, “but I’ve got it on good account that your brother’s not the first to marry into the Morgan clan.”

  “Then how come they all still look the same?”

  “Stronger genes, I guess, than those they take in.”

  See, that’s what I mean. Looney might look like some dumb old yokel, but there’s plenty of thinking going on inside his head.

  “I guess our mama wasn’t too pleased,” I say.

  He gets that look folks do when they know bad news you don’t.

  “I’m sorry to tell you this, Raylene,” he says, “but your mama’s dead. I would have thought someone might have told you.”

  Then why do you think I’m asking you all of this? I think. But I only tell him how I’ve been pretty much outta touch all these years.

  “Well, I’m sorry to have had to be the one to give you the bad news,” he says.

  What bad news would that be? I’m wondering. That’s just one more no-account Carter for me not to have to think on.

  “How’d she die?” I ask.

  Hard, I’m hoping. She didn’t deserve nothing less.

  “Well, there’s the irony, I guess,” he says. “All those years she was fighting against the stiff penalties for drunk driving and what does she do but get killed herself—head-on collision with Dewie Mackery who was so full of whiskey and beer that night you could’ve stuck a spout in him and opened a bar.”

  That sounds like my mama, I guess. Del got jail time for drunk driving and killing someone, so she’d be up in arms against that, never you mind all the poor innocent folk getting themselves killed with all of them drunks on the road. She never did look no further than her damn own self and her favorite boy.

  “Quite the turnout at her funeral, though.”

  “People just wanted to make sure she was really dead,” I say.

  He gives me a look, then nods. “You’re probably right. She wasn’t exactly well liked. Never did her cause much good, what with her own drinking and strident ways.”

  “And Robbie?” I ask. “Is he dead, too?”

  “Got on that road not long after Jimmy was killed—but I guess you were already out of town by then. They fished him out of Pine Creek, dead of an overdose.”

  All them Carters dead. Makes the world just a little bit sweeter, I figure.

  “What about Del?” I ask, hopefully.

  “You didn’t hear about the Morgans? I figured that was big news everywhere.”

  “I don’t follow the news much,” I tell him. “It’s all bad anyways.”

  “Well, this was bad all right. The official story is they had some falling out with a bunch of colored boys and the whole clan got wiped out.”

  “That can’t be true.”

  He nods, pleased he’s found someone who don’t know a thing about such a big event.

  “Oh, it’s true, all right,” he says. “They only caught one of the killers and he was executed back in ’83 or ’84.”

  “You said official story—what’s the unofficial one?”

  “That the man they killed did it all on his own. But that’s not possible. There must’ve been forty, fifty Morgans died that day and you know how mean they could be. They’d cut a man for giving them a sideways look. There was no give to those Morgans, not an inch.”

  I give a nod. Plenty of folks found that out the hard way.

  “Who’s saying that one man killed ’em all?”

  “That’s the talk on the rez. Story is he was some kind of hoodoo man, maybe a ghost or a spirit. But that’s just talk. You know how people like a good story.”

  I think about me and Pinky and our pack of wolves, running through the dreamlands. I guess I know firsthand how what you see in this world ain’t necessarily all there is. But I don’t see no reason to enlighten Looney on that account.

  “So did Del die with the rest of them?” I ask.

  “No, but he was pretty broke up about losing his family and all.”

  He lost us a long time ago, I’m thinking, but I know that isn’t what Looney means.

  “He still around?” I say.

  Looney nods. “He’s on welfare and living in that trailer park at the end of Indiana Road.”

  A place to avoid, then, though I got to admit to a certain curiosity. The thing is, he still troubles me. I don’t know what kind of loser he’s grown into, but the Del that terrorized me as a kid still stands tall in my head. I’d like to get him in the dreamlands, see how well he stands up to a pack of wolves.

  “How about you?” Looney asks. “What’ve you been up to? You ever see Pinky anymore?”

  “Oh, sure,” I tell him. “We moved down to Florida where we’ve been working as secretaries all this time. Thought we’d take a holiday this year and come back to the old hometown. Look around, see how things’ve changed.”

  “Whereabouts in Florida?”

  He’s got the nose, all right, but I’m not up to adding to his storehouse of gossip. I can just see him, next time he runs into one of the old crowd. “You’ll never guess who I ran into the other day …”

  “Tell you the truth, Ben,” I say. “I’m kind of pressed for time here. Why don’t you sell me one of those phone cord extensions and we’ll do us some more catching up a little later on. Maybe get together with the old crowd and have us some laughs.”

  He likes that idea, but after he’s rung me through the cash and starts in asking where we’re staying, I just take his card from the little holder by the register and tell him I’ll give him a call.

  He smiles and I smile and we both know we’re never going to see each other again, unless it’s like this, by accident.

  Pinky caught up on her own family not long after we arrived. She didn’t go looking for them, which was just as well, I reckon, since when she did run into her brother Elmer on the street one day, there wasn’t even a how-do. He just up and slapped her openhanded across the face and told her not to be calling on their mother as she weren’t welcome in that house no more.

  “Always figured you’d end up to no good,” he says, “but even I never thought you’d sink so low as to be making the kinda movies you done.”

  Pinky’d used her a fake name in her porn days, but you ain’t exactly hiding much when the name you’re going by is Pinky Sugah and everybody back home knows what you look like anyways. Though now that I think on it, seems strange that old Looney, so on top of everything else, didn’t have something to say about it. Maybe he was just being polite..

  But them Baptist boys like Pinky’s brother
s was always walking the high road, and I guess politeness don’t enter into the story with them. Course it makes you wonder what they was doing watching them porn movies in the first place. But then I was raised Catholic my own self and I sure as hell know Catholics ’round here don’t have much integrity neither—not if my own family’s any kind of example.

  When Elmer hit her like that, I half expected Pinky to knife him, or at least take a swing at him her own self, but she didn’t do neither. Guess the time she spent in prison taught her something—when to fight and when to walk away, if nothing else.

  I asked her later if she felt bad about how things turned out.

  “You and me,” she says, “is all the family either of us need.”

  I knowed it was true for me, but I guess I never stopped to question how it was for her, what made her so hard and able to stand up for her own self with no never mind for nobody else. I’d always thought she got along fine with her folks and her brothers and she never said nothing to make me think different.

  “It wasn’t like that,” she tells me. “They taught me how to be tough, yeah, but it wasn’t outta any kind a love for me. I had to go learn that on my own, just so’s I could stand up to ’em. They never done nothin’ like Del done to you, but they’re so dumb, it wouldn’t surprise me none that it just didn’t never occur to ’em. Lord knows they had the morals of dogs, though that ain’t bein’ fair to dogs. And as for my momma and poppa—they wasn’t quite in the drinkin’ league of your old lady, but they wouldn’t’ve shamed her much neither.”

  “It don’t seem right, us growing up like that.”

  Pinky laughs. “When you going to figure it out, Ray? The world don’t turn on right and wrong. It’s just what it is and you and me, we got to make the best of it how we can.”

  “Seems to me, we got us a choice,” Pinky says one day.

  We’re sitting in the Pearl, a diner on the Ramble, early of a weekday morning, drinking bad coffee and smoking—or at least Pinky is. The Pearl hasn’t changed much. It’s still no better’n one step up from a pigsty. We don’t actually recognize nobody, but it’s really only the faces that’ve changed. The waitress who slops our coffee on the table could be the daughter of the old bag serving us fifteen years ago. A drunk sits at the counter, nursing a hangover. A couple of hookers are in one of the back booths, counting money. In the booth behind us some guy’s snorting blow through a cut-down straw, the coke laid out in lines right on the table.