Crooked Hallelujah

by Kelli Jo Ford

  Pitch stood and dusted off his backside. Reney thought he might say sorry. She knew Pitch wasn’t good at sorry, but if he at least tried, maybe her mom would let it go and they could go on with their night.

  Outside, the sky still popped and shook the window with thunder bumpers, as Pitch called great, booming thunderclaps, but the roar of the wind was already letting up. Reney still hadn’t heard the freight train. She reached beneath the thin mattress and pulled out the Terrible Tuesday magazine.

  “Did you see the funnels, Pitch?” she asked, hoping they could all just talk about the weather.

  “Just that weight. It was more the sound and the force of the thing. Felt like my eardrums was going to burst.”

  “If you had your lariat rope, you could have lassoed it.”

  Pitch poked her in the ribs. “Shoot, I’d be flying to kingdom come.”

  “You think Hesdi and the horses are okay?”

  “Animals know what to do,” he said, taking the magazine and flipping its pages.

  “Two kids,” Justine said, her eyes still on the radio that wasn’t picking anything up.

  The way Pitch looked up from the magazine made Reney’s heart lurch. She didn’t exactly understand what her mom was so upset about, but it felt old and worn, not like something that just happened. Not like this accident of Pitch leaving them inside while he ran to the cellar.

  “I said I didn’t know I was getting two kids out of this deal. But I should have.”

  In an instant, Pitch had flung the magazine against the wall and kicked the bookshelf, knocking a low shelf loose. Cans of tuna scattered across the floor, and the Jif jar busted. His quick violence still surprised Reney. She’d only seen it on occasions when her mom wouldn’t stop nagging and once when the stud kicked him bad in the thigh. Pitch looked at the mess on the floor and shook his head, like he was trying to decipher something just beyond reach.

  “You made it clear my pockets ain’t big enough.” Pitch’s face seemed distorted to Reney, hardly his face at all. “Now I ain’t man enough to by-God fight off a tornado, so I imagine you ought to start taping together boxes like you’ve been threatening to do since you got here. If you want to get back across that Red River, I ain’t stopping you.”

  Reney wondered what her granny was doing. She thought of the soft one-dollar bills Granny had sent for her birthday, the sweet, looping letters pressed deep into the paper. She remembered the last time they’d talked on the phone and how she’d told Granny she had to go because she wanted to help Pitch wash the stud, how she’d cried that night in bed feeling bad about it. Each night since, she had dreamed her granny’s soft, brown skin into being, feeling the bend of her arthritic fingers in her own. They’d take their cane poles to Little Locust Creek and catch perch for supper, and Granny would wipe cornmeal on her big, aproned belly. Then together they’d sing the sun up. Always too early, Reney would wake in Texas. Even as she wiped her granny from her eyes, the sound of the stud blowing snot and stamping outside her window always made Reney smile.

  A loud bang startled Reney back to the cellar. Pitch was leaving. Outside, the wind had blown the heavy cellar door from his grasp and slammed it against the ground. Reney started after him, but her mom caught her. As she pulled Reney into her body, Reney tried not to cry. She tried to banish the pictures of twirling vortices carrying Pitch away.

  “He promised me it wouldn’t be like this,” Justine said, stroking Reney’s hair. “When I quit my job to come down here, he promised me. Hell, Nina, we’re barely bringing in enough money to keep the place you gave us lit. They’re supposed to be putting in a Walmart in Sunset, but I can’t get him over there to apply. He’s not lazy. What’s wrong with him?”

  “Just like his daddy,” Nina said. “Don’t want to be tied down.” She set aside the crumpled magazine she was smoothing, tapped another cigarette out, lit it, and sat up. She was so tiny her toes only brushed the concrete floor. Ferrell was hardly ever around. Tonight he was on a trip to Kansas looking at a mare nobody could afford. He was big fun when he was there, always trying to get Reney to do the circle game and making her look, then giving her a thump on her arm when she did. Nina cackled at his foolery when people were around. Other times, she mostly shook her head, if she responded at all.

  “It’s never going to change,” Nina said. “He’ll love you, but he’ll be looking for a runner or running that river until the day he dies. There’s a lot to love about them. More to hate, so I’ll tell you like I told the last one. If you can’t take it, you might as well leave now.”

  Justine kissed Reney’s head and sniffed. Reney considered her life back home: her granny, growing older, Reney knew, by the day. Her mom’s double shifts. The second job at the track bar. First Kenny, then the shared houses. The boyfriends with big buckles and talk who promised microscopes, telescopes, puppies, and all manner of things a Cherokee girl with no father and a mother who loved her fiercely but worked herself ragged might dream of. You had to work hard to find Pitch’s mad streak. Reney figured the walls or bookshelves could take it. She’d seen worse.

  “Leave if you want,” Reney said. “I’m staying.” Then she ran up the stairs and into the storm.

  The rain was just an idea now. Overhead, she could hear big boughs sway and settle, hear the tiny limbs click. The thunder no longer felt like something exploding from her skull outward. She pulled her T-shirt over her head and ran to the driveway where she watched Pitch’s taillights bounce over the cattle guard and seemingly float into the sky.

  She picked up the soggy basketball that somehow still rested where she left it at the base of the light pole. When they had first moved to Texas, Pitch salvaged a door to the ancient barn’s loft and got an old hoop from the school maintenance yard. He spent a whole day sawing, sanding, and nailing it all together before he stuck it, just cockeyed, to the light pole in the driveway. He’d never straightened it like he said he would, but it worked.

  Reney tried to dribble, but the heavy ball landed with a thud. She picked it back up and bent her knees low for a free throw the way Pitch had taught her, but her shot still fell a foot short of the goal.

  She saw Justine walking up but got her rebound instead of saying anything and set herself for another free throw. Before she could loose the ball, Justine took her by the arm and held tight.

  “I’m so sorry, Reney Bean.”

  The taillights, tiny now, disappeared at the highway turn. They watched the white glow of headlights push through the night on an even plane toward town. Hesdi came trotting up, shivering and soaked.

  “We were supposed to be a family.” Reney pulled her hand away so Hesdi could lick it.

  “You deserve better.”

  “I wish you’d quit making him run off.”

  “Reney, life don’t run on shits and giggles. I’ve worked two jobs since I was sixteen to make sure you weren’t raggedy. I had a good job back home. You were in school. We had Lula and Granny.” Her voice dwindled as she looked over at the trailer house. The porch light was flickering with a short that Reney knew she’d been after Pitch to fix. “He couldn’t bear to part with his horses and the Red River.”

  “Everything wasn’t great there, either, so don’t act like it was,” Reney said. She kissed for Hesdi and was halfway up the trailer house steps and through the door before she heard her mom call her name.

  Reney spread a towel on her quilt and patted it for Hesdi to join her. She wrapped herself around him and rested her forehead on his nose. The broken bookshelf was bothering Reney. It made her think of Kenny and their old apartment. She remembered the quiet crying after he left, how her mom would harden when Reney walked in, then smile and say it would all be okay. When he came weeping to the door of their next house, Reney sometimes wanted to let him in, though she couldn’t remember, now, why.

  Reney heard the front door close. When her mom sat on the edge of the bed, Reney squeezed her eyes shut. She wanted to sit up and let her mom hug her and tell her how
she was the most important thing in the world, in that way Justine had of looking deep into Reney so that Reney knew her words were true no matter what had happened to the contrary. As her mom smoothed her hair, Reney’s heart began to fill with love the way it did when it felt like it might burst. She wanted to sit up and say: You are my family, Mama. No matter where we are, you are my family. But then she thought of Pitch and the tornado and how he must have been scared. And how maybe her mom didn’t know the first thing about being scared because all she knew was love and mad and love and mad all over again. So Reney kicked her leg, feigned sleep, and rolled toward the wall.

  Justine shooed the dog. She outlined Reney’s bent legs with her own, pulled Reney into her, and clasped the top of Reney’s hand. Reney could hear from her mom’s breathing that she was crying. They lay like that, Reney thinking to herself, I’m going to turn over now, I’m going to turn over now and say sorry, I’m going to turn over now until her mom sniffed one last time, in the way she had of turning off sad, like it was a radio and you could just stop the sounds and all the feelings would go away.

  “I know you can hear me, and I know you love me,” her mom said. “It’s okay that you aren’t going to talk right now. Mama’s got to go to town, baby. I’ll make it all right. You wake up scared, you go get Nina. Go on over there now if you want. Mama and Pitch will both be back soon. We’ll be okay. Don’t let that dog back up here. He has fleas, and he stinks.”

  Her mom got up and moved to the door. Reney could feel her, knew she hadn’t left.

  “I know you love Pitch, Reney. I love Pitch too. I guess he’s just Pitch, is all. But I love you more than anything in the whole wide world.”

  Reney stayed put. They couldn’t know it, but the storm had only meandered that night. Even as her mom’s truck roared to life, powered by the grace of dead dinosaurs and desperation, the system was wrapping back around itself where it would settle on top of the old farmhouse and trailer. There it would stay, intent on letting out all of its howling fight on the five-acre sticker patch sucked dry of oil and useless for growing anything but the horses a certain breed of man’s dreams are made of. Heartbreakers. All Reney knew as she lay there listening to her mom’s truck rattle over the cattle guard was that outside the horses were sleeping upright and anywhere they could be heard, her mom’s words were true.

  Greater the Mass, Stronger the Pull

  We had to sneak to turn on the window unit Mom brought from my bedroom in Texas. Lula was so happy to see us she followed Mom and me from room to room, worrying about the electric bill, worrying somebody might trip over the cord, and—our favorite—worrying we’d catch cold. It had to be 100 degrees in there, but she insisted I wear a jacket because exposed skin was a sin. Or led to sin. I was never exactly clear on the reasoning behind Holiness doctrine. At any rate, Mom and I had hardly unpacked our room, and already Oklahoma July and Lula were bringing out our crazy.

  “Justine and Reney, don’t you just love these?” Lula said. She dabbed sweat with a handkerchief and spread two ankle-length skirts on the bed for Mom and me.

  “We’ll go to a motel, Mama,” Mom said. It was a threat. “We’re not wearing those skirts. Not taking our earrings out either.” A dare.

  We’d come up to Lula’s to stay awhile. Or to stay. We did that sometimes—left Pitch in Texas and headed back to Indian Country. Once we packed up all our stuff and drove all the way to Tennessee where Mom’s two sisters lived. I was hardly enrolled in my new school before Mom and Pitch decided they couldn’t live without each other after all.

  Lula pursed her lips and got after a fly with a rolled-up magazine. I mouthed “be nice” at Mom, but she shrugged and passed a note that said: me and u + 10killer sunset 2night = cool deal?

  She turned to Lula and said, “Let’s make a grocery list, Mama.” Then she motioned me out the door. When she came outside waving her list and grinning, I was sitting in the driver’s seat of her new used Mustang with the engine running. “You must be crazy too,” she said and jerked her thumb toward the passenger seat.

  We ran by the truck stop for a six-pack of baby beers and a Dr Pepper, and then we were flying through town with the T-tops off and windows down. I pushed I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got into the tape deck, but before Sinéad could finish the serenity prayer, Mom popped it out and put in 1999.

  We’d done a version of this the whole five-hour drive from Texas. I’d put in some of my music and feel for a minute like I wasn’t in a car sagging with the weight of half our lives, headed to Lula’s where there was no TV and the only records were Mahalia Jackson and Gospel Elvis. Mom gave everything a chance, but the Prince tape she’d bought at our first fill-up always went back in. She’d go right to “Little Red Corvette” and sing like the car was her shower and I wasn’t sitting there so sick of Prince I could puke.

  Her whole life she’d wanted a Corvette, but she was married to Pitch. Or used to be. Who could say? She’d taken over payments on the Mustang before we left. The thing sounded like it’d been run into the ground, but I think it had her thinking about possibilities again, the future maybe.

  “Please can I drive when we get to the highway?” I asked. I had my hips hovering over the seat, trying to zip the cutoffs I didn’t dare wear at Lula’s.

  Mom whipped her head around and downshifted. Before I knew what was happening, we were mid-U-turn, pulling into the Fill’Er Up parking lot.

  “Reney—” She killed the car and took a big breath. “Don’t look, but there’s your daddy.” We bugged our eyes at each other. Then we started laughing.

  My father wasn’t a wound or even a scar, not a black hole or a dry desert. He just wasn’t. Not for me anyway. Mom was my sun and my moon. I was her all, too, and that was us. Her: equal parts beautiful optical illusion and fiery hot star. And me: an imperfect planet she kept as close as she could. So when she pointed her lips at a man getting gas and said, “Don’t look, but there’s your daddy,” it was Arsenio, not the Nightly News. I got all tingly. I said, “Better late than never.”

  Mom was still nervous laughing when she yanked the parking brake, but everything shifted in the evening swelter. A truck passed by with a one-two country bass pumping. Then the only sound was an occasional tapping coming from the tire shop across the street.

  I tried to smooth my hair and did my best to pull my shorts from my butt, wishing I was still wearing my jeans. A drop of sweat ran down my stomach into my belly button. Straining to see without looking, Mom and I found each other’s hands as we crossed the parking lot.

  Even from the opposite side of the gas pumps, I could see why I was so much shorter than Mom and why people in Texas mistook me for Mexican more than they did her. The guy wasn’t much taller than the pumps, and beneath his cutoff denim shirt, his shoulders and arms were a deep, reddish brown. He had a white cowboy hat with a big turkey feather sticking out of the band pulled low over his eyes. I nearly stopped in the middle of the parking lot trying to see his face. But then Mom was pulling me through the jangly glass door and dragging me down an aisle with a clear view of the register.

  We stood there long enough for the lady at the counter to get to thinking we were stealing, which seemed pretty close to the truth of the matter: Mom thumbing through Slim Jims way too nonchalantly, me pretending to care about the ingredient list on a can of Pringles. “Can I help y’all?” the lady finally said and started moving around the counter to check on us, but before she made it, she yelped “Hey!” and ran for the door.

  Mom took off after her. I grabbed the Slim Jim she dropped and followed just in time to see that the man in the cowboy hat was now a man in a truck, pulling away. A redheaded kid about my age with britches tucked into stupid pointy-toed boots met the lady at the door.

  “Seven twenty-eight on pump two, ma’am,” he said, all breezy, like it wasn’t 200 degrees outside and my alleged father hadn’t just skinned the fuck out before I could get a good look at him. Suspicious, the lady looked from the wad of one
s to the kid’s face.

  “Feller told me if I paid for his gas I could keep the change. Important business, I reckon,” he said with a smirk. I was sure all that kid was going to do with the change was buy something he could huff into his blank brain.

  “That son of a bitch,” Mom said. She pushed into the parking lot and shouted—at the sky I guess because the man was down the road—“FUCK YOU!”

  I shoved the Slim Jim into my shorts and went after her.

  “Motherfucking bastard,” she shouted, which I only later understood to be irony.

  Mom pushed the engine hard and shifted. She hit the speed limit quick once we were on the highway, then pulled a tiny Coors Light from the sack behind the seat.

  “Told you not to look.” She forced a grin, then steadied the wheel with her knee and twisted the beer open. “Shit. I’m sorry, Reney.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said, turning toward the window.

  “I never would have said anything—”

  “How’d he know it was us?”

  The question was dumb. Her oldest friends called her Teeny and me Tiny Teeny. I had her thick, straight black hair, before I permed the shit out of it on skinny rods, introducing my Disco Diana Ross moment. Our blue eyes were the same, our round noses, and don’t even get me started about our teeth.

  Before she got me braces, she’d say, “Let me feel,” and run her finger over my one slightly bucked tooth when she lay down to say good night. Then she’d feel hers and say, “You’re just like me, Reney.” She’d shake her head in wonder, like our matching half-buck teeth were the craziest things in the world. It wasn’t crazy to me. Being her daughter was all I’d ever known.

  Now that I was in high school, she worked harder than ever to make sure I wouldn’t have to get a job that would interfere with studying or basketball practice. She made sure I understood that I could call her no matter what time it was or what I’d gotten myself into. I’d hardly started seventh grade when she started telling me how important it was to “wrap that rascal” and that the pill was only a phone call away.