by Lee Lynch
Again, she looked out the window. It was early afternoon and Stage Street was deserted. The saloon smelled of sawdust and spilled beer. Her ladies of the night were resting upstairs in preparation for the cowboys on the cattle run coming through later. One of the girls, Cassie Ann, was her bed warmer, though Chick yearned after the widow Hortense, who had pulled on her husband’s old pants and taken over the running of the family spread.
She brought herself back to thoroughly twenty-first-century R. “What can I recommend as a pick-me-up?”
“I’ve tried them all.”
“Maybe it’s time to see a doctor.”
R scowled. “They’ve done me enough harm.”
“Medical doctors?”
“The caesarians I mentioned?”
Chick waited for a caustic criticism.
“Unnecessary. I don’t know if the ob-gyns were reimbursed more for them by the insurance companies or if they feared malpractice suits, but I know now the procedure was used more often than circumstances warranted. It infuriates me to have been denied natural childbirth for the convenience of this patriarchal so-called health care system.”
“Still, something could be wrong, R.”
“Oh, something’s wrong all right. But you don’t carry anything that can shrink a lump in my breast, do you?” R held her left breast up like she was offering a piece of rotting fruit.
Chick felt the goose bumps rise on her forearms. She’d lost an old Chicago friend to breast cancer not four years ago and, 2000 miles away, hadn’t been able to be there for her. What was a bit of depression to this?
She rose from her seat and moved to the other side of the booth to engulf R in her arms and hold her to her chest, all too aware that she needed the hug as badly as R must. “You poor baby. When did you find out? How big is the lump?”
R didn’t struggle at all. She might even have relaxed her stiff neck for a moment to lay her head against Chick’s softness, or, Chick thought with a silent chuckle, R might only have been finding a more comfortable position. Poor proud R wouldn’t admit to a weakness if—if it killed her. She rocked her a little and then, because an unfamiliar customer was parking outside, let go.
The door opened, letting in the noise of the freeway and reminding Chick that there was a world outside this pod of bad news. The customer was a traveler wanting a cold drink, cookies, and directions. When Chick returned to the booth, R was cleaning her glasses with a napkin.
“I noticed it about three months ago. It was a little smaller than one of the giant marbles my sons had as kids. They called them jumbos.”
“And now?”
“I can’t tell. It may have grown some or my memory may have shrunk the original.”
“Pain?”
“No, it’s not painful. The glands under my arms are tender, but they’re far from the lump.”
Her own breasts ached. Now it was R who was alone and naked on a rocky mountaintop crag. “Has Abeo felt it? Katie?” She could not quell this urge to rescue every hurt creature, but really, whose life could she save other than her own?
R looked out the window toward the sky. “Katie would want to do a documentary on living with breast cancer. Abeo’s wonderful.” She spoke even more slowly than usual. “I believe she is a woman trapped in a man’s body. There’s some sort of acculturation that takes place as we are raised as women, however, some nameless intuitiveness, that she lacks. If I told her, she’d turn into a round-the-clock nurse in bed and out. That would be the only way she could express empathy, solidarity, understanding. Whereas you simply threw your arms around me and held me. And then you asked the right questions—because you’re also at risk, so you know what to ask. I’m sure Abeo would be perfect for an HIV positive person, but I imagine even your silk-handed butches would understand better than Abeo.”
“Oh, especially a butch. She’d feel it right here,” she told R, touching her fingertips to her solar plexus. “She’d have the double whammy of being unable to protect a femme against something nasty and knowing it could happen to her too.” She wanted R to get off her high horse about butches and femmes and to understand before it was too late. “I don’t think anyone on earth is more sensitive to women’s pain than a butch lesbian. Except maybe a femme, of course.”
R looked blank.
“So you haven’t told either of them?” She couldn’t imagine not telling something like this to Donny. She would want all the support she could get. When R shook her head, Chick said, “Whatever works for you, sweetheart, is fine, but you’re still describing a good-sized lump. Aren’t you scared?”
“Not as frightened as I am of the medico-pharmaceutical establishment. I trust the Goddess to bring me healing.”
“R, the Goddess expects us to take care of ourselves.”
“I don’t smoke or drink or expose my breasts to X-rays.”
“Do you keep your fat intake low?” She was being a nag. What else could she be when she felt so helpless?
“Of course. Nor do I wear a bra or antiperspirant.”
“And your family history?”
Her expression as flat as ever, R said, “Radical mastectomies were all the rage when my mother was diagnosed. They took both her breasts, burned her with radiation, poisoned her with chemotherapy, and she took insufferably long to die.”
“You’re not bitter.”
“I’d rather die sooner with all my sacred parts than have the man’s technology chip away at me for years.”
Chick kept herself from throwing her hands up in disgust. R was a fool, but she could think of nothing that would change her mind. “Vitamin A is good. How much C do you do?”
“Whatever I get from fruit and greens.”
“You need to be taking 5,000 to 10,000 mg. daily.”
“Where are you finding your information?”
She rolled her necklace’s tiny green crystal between her fingers, wanting to give it to R for healing, but it had been a gift to her from Donny, and she needed its energy. “In between Western novels and lesbian romances, I read nutritional books.”
“By women?”
“When I can find them.”
“Even the books by women draw their information primarily from male sources. We know who profits from their expensive therapies, herbal or not. No, this is between the Goddess and myself.”
“I don’t know if you’re brave or crazy. I’d be in surgery so fast I’d ask Donny to wheel in my gurney.”
“In the wild I would heal myself or die. This,” R added with one hand on her breast, “is benign. I practice validations continually.”
“I’m getting you to a doctor.”
She heard the side door slam. Jeep passed the front window, obviously avoiding R, the snake who’d stolen Katie from her. Chick watched her push into the street on her skateboard, a damp spot on her purple backpack from the wet fish. She waved without looking at them and headed down toward the freeway. Mary J. Blige and her electronic sounds thumped upstairs.
It was a terrifying thought, but Chick wondered if by next spring Jeep would need to avoid R—if R might be gone.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Garage Sale Dandy
“Aren’t you the garage sale dandy!” Hector exclaimed.
The phrase stopped her dead—almost the words Sarah had used about her. Way cool. “What do you think?” she asked. She planted a dusty brown fedora on her head, set her harmonica in her mouth, and danced a mock soft-shoe.
Hector cleared his throat, his face went red, and he pitched his voice high. “Co-ol!” He gave Jeep the high five she’d taught him. “And look at young Luke, all decked out in his Sunday best.”
With his helmet and knee pads, elbow and wrist guards, Luke wore skateboarder grunge shorts and a Teletubbies T-shirt. He insisted on wearing his gear and carrying his miniboard whenever they went out.
Since she’d gone on unemployment, she and Luke spent their afternoons bopping around town. Not making a living was driving her bonkers. The sch
ool had let her finish out the term, but wouldn’t renew her contract as long as Luke lived with her. And there were fewer jobs out there than the last time she’d been hunting. At least Luke, a foster kid, had medical coverage. So afternoons they’d visit Chick and Donny, then the playground. It helped when Clara and Hector picked them up Fridays, treated them to lunch at the Dairy Queen, and took them to garage sales up the mountain roads.
Sometimes she looked at Luke and was startled by the amazing road he’d led her to. If Spruce, the local Tarot maven, had read her cards and told her this was next on the agenda she’d have said Madonna and child was one thing, but Jeep and child? No way. But stranger things had happened.
At band practice the week before she’d been talking with Muriel, who claimed no knowledge of The Storm.
“You are so out of it, Mur,” Jeep had said. “The Seattle Storm? The WNBA? Women’s basketball? Do you even know we have a women’s league?”
Muriel had turned the tables and scoffed, “So you’re into boy games too?”
“Get real. You’re the one sharing the land with a trannie.”
“You mean Abeo? Spare me! One of these days, I’m going to put a list of who’s who at women’s land on your violin so you stop getting us all mixed up. She’s not at Dawn Farm—she’s R’s partner!”
Jeep felt her hands burn. “R’s partner? Did Katie and the Rat break up?”
“No one broke up. It’s Katie and R and Abeo now.”
“Holy holodeck, that’s disgusting.”
“You’re going to bring up a male child and you think that’s disgusting?”
Muriel had hit below the belt with that Katie news. Katie with a trans man? There was no way. The land women were focusing on Katie, the newcomer city girl, when it was R acting so weird. Somebody needed to tell them that Katie was pure lesbian. In San Francisco it had been Katie always steering them to women’s spaces, Katie avoiding the Castro because there were too many men there, Katie putting in her time in the straight media world so later she could go out on her own and do women-only documentaries or whatever. Even this story she’d heard Katie was working on, the environmental thing, you could bet the women in it would turn out to be the heroes, no question. She smiled to herself. If Katie was spending time with R and Abeo, it was for the story angle. Katie’s camera was kind of like a semipermeable barrier. She looked at everything through it, but only took what she needed. She was going to change the world for women.
Jeep really believed that. She’d never known anyone as focused as Katie was—like twenty-four/seven. She was honest as fire and pure as music. How could she not have fallen for Katie after sleazy Sami?
“I don’t believe it about Katie and Abeo,” she found herself saying aloud at odd times and stopped herself now as Luke brought her a yellow Pokeman that looked kind of like someone’s dog had chewed it up. He picked up and smelled every musty old thing he saw until he tentatively circled a set of toy trap drums.
“You going to be the little drummer boy?” Hector asked. “Brump-a-pum-pum.”
Luke gave him his sunny smile.
“You should have seen him up in Portland. I think when he gets old enough he’s going to run away from home and join the Lions of Batucada, not the circus.” Luke started dancing the samba at the reminder. She danced with him and told Hector and Clara, “Did you ever hear them? Brazilian music, up tempo to the max.”
“Tell Grandpap to buy you those drums, Lucas,” Clara said, shaking out an old white tablecloth trimmed with strawberries. “I had a cloth like this when the kids were young. Ruined in a picnic. Looks like I should have waited and sold it instead of cutting it up for rags.”
“He’s already got Jeep’s blue ukulele and our Sonny’s penny whistle,” Hector complained.
“And a real drum pad at school,” Jeep added.
Hector said, “Hey Luke, why did Johnny tiptoe past the medicine cabinet?”
Luke ducked his head and grinned, hands resting on the skin of a drum. He looked like he could tell Grandpa Hector was going to crack a joke.
Hector laughed and answered, “He was afraid to wake the sleeping pills!” Luke brushed soft applause on the drum.
Jeep handled red salt and pepper shakers in the shape of two hens. Mother Hubbard at the restaurant across from Donny and Chick would love them, but a dollar was too high to pay at a garage sale. Now if these were in an antique-y kind of shop, she’d charge three bucks and come down to two for regulars.
“Course, you could always resell the drums, Jeep, if he lost interest. Growing boy like that, you could open a store with everything he’ll lose interest in.”
“A store called Garage Sale Dandy?” she asked, distracted. “Hector, this will fit that light fixture you showed me.”
Hector took the glass globe from her and turned it in his hands. “Dang, but you’ve got an eye for these things, Jeep. I looked right at it.”
She was thinking that she might as well open a store except for the capital it would take. Count them—twelve employers had turned her down for a job this week alone. The over-helpful woman at the employment office told her it was because the tourist season hadn’t started and the government wouldn’t let the loggers cut so their business was down. Depressed, Jeep said she’d be glad to clean rooms at the casino hotel, but they didn’t hire her either. She ran her hand over her hair. She could’ve supplemented cleaning work with music lessons and bought up every secondhand instrument that came her way, then resold them on eBay. At this rate she’d have to go to the music therapy program up north and try to live on whatever grant they gave her. Her hands started chilling up.
She actually missed Sami’s music shop in San Francisco sometimes, and the freedom to look the way she liked to look. She’d probably have to straighten up if she was going to school. School had never exactly been her favorite thing. She’d hated sitting in a classroom when she could be playing music.
Luke patted the drum skins with his hands, Pokeman forgotten on a card table stacked with old cookie tins. There were no drumsticks, so every once in a while he’d sound the cymbal with a flick of his fingers. She saw in the little furrow of his brow the concentration it had once taken her to capture a melody, to make a song with her bow.
“Don’t you already have that one?” complained Hector, as Clara set the tablecloth by the seller’s cash box.
Clara clucked at him. “How much do you want for the drums?” she asked the seller.
“Oh, those drums!” the woman said with a laugh. “Thank goodness my daughter’s moved on to basketball. At least that noise is outside. What do you think is fair?”
Luke patted and brushed with his little hands. He found the foot pedal of the bass drum and made a respectful thump. This was primo timing. Muriel had agreed to try rehearsing with Luke in the room—how liberal of her, Jeep thought, since Luke lived where they rehearsed—and Jeep suspected Muriel might be coming around again. Luke was entranced by the band’s music. He had his drum pad and would silently play along. Jeep always tried to keep focused on the band, but now and then slipped over to correct Luke’s hold or tell him he was a dynamite drummer.
“We can pay four dollars,” said Clara.
“Oh, I’d have to get at least ten.”
“It’ll cost you that to take them to the dump. Five dollars.”
“Eight.”
“Six.”
“They’re yours.”
Jeep soaked it up. She was learning from old skinflint Clara. “This hat,” she said, holding out the fedora, hearing the tentative sound in her voice, “says a dollar. Will you take fifty cents?”
The seller looked at Clara and Hector hefting the little set of drums toward the car. “You’re a lot like your mother, aren’t you? Seventy-five cents.”
Jeep let the woman’s mistake go, started to put the hat back, examined the shakers, started to put them back too, then offered, “A dollar for the hat and these old shakers.”
“Oh, I suppose I can take that.�
�
Bingo, another deal! Bargaining had seemed so mysterious a process. Her parents had pulled out the checkbook and paid the asking price. Now she did deals like Clara. But garage sale dandy? Dream on, girlfriend. She really could hawk music stuff on line, though. If she had a computer. She’d left her computer with Sarah. When she’d abandoned civilization to drive out West with Katie, she’d thought she’d make enough money to buy a laptop. Maybe Sarah would ship it to her. Maybe she didn’t have the guts to ask.
They moved to their next stop, Jeep playing with the shakers, Luke keeping an eye on the drums. As much as she’d needed to get out of Reno and see the world, this was the happiest she’d been since she left. And as much as she’d wanted to have great romances—first with Lara, who’d simply disappeared, then sleazy Sami, then restless Katie—great romance hadn’t lived up to its billing, though Katie had been fun while she lasted.
A few months after she’d arrived in San Francisco it had come as no big duh to her that, as revved as she was about the band she’d joined—a folksy-bluesy-bluegrassy group, half men and half women, that mostly played Oakland and Berkeley spots—and as revved as she was about the band getting an interview with the TV station’s evening news magazine, she was more revved about Katie Delgado the reporter, a short stick of dynamite in a long red sweater and black tights that made her think for the first time of the allure of legs.
“Jeep,” the bass player had called from his van when the interview was wrapped. “The bus is leaving.”
“Catch you at rehearsal,” she’d answered, waving him away.
Duane tilted his cowboy hat down to his muttonchops and aimed his fingers like pistols at her. She’d suspected the guys had appreciated the reporter too.
“Where’s your next gig?” Jeep asked the reporter.
“Down at the Embarcadero.”
“I’d love to watch.”
