Borderlands

by James Carlos Blake

  But the smell he carried that morning was different—a reeking tangle of whiskey and vomit and ladies’ perfume. He was sort of halfway grinning, like he’d just heard a good dirty joke but wasn’t real sure he should tell it to momma. You could see he was still drunk. And he had a mean-looking black eye swollen nearly shut. Once upon a time that eye would’ve moved momma to sufficient pity to forgive him just about anything, even being gone a couple of days, but not this time. She was way past that. When he hadn’t phoned by the fourth morning, Dolores had seen by her face that she’d reached the end of her rope with him. And when the screen door slapped shut behind him and she caught the smell of that perfume, well, that did it. She glared at him and said, “You no-good son of a bitch.” She who rarely cussed and had never before cussed him. The floor dropped out from under his grin and he looked like she’d spit in his face.

  Suddenly it was like the world sped up to sixty miles an hour. They yelled terrible names at each other and the little breakfast table with the coffeepot and doughnuts tumped over and then momma was whipping him across the face with a wire hanger, cutting bright red lines in his face. He backhanded her into the wall and snatched away the hanger and she clawed at his eyes and they knocked over the ironing board as they went down fighting like cats in the mess of doughnuts and coffee on the floor. Dolores recalls screaming for them to stop it, stop it, recalls being so afraid for momma that she tried to pull daddy off her and that’s when he knocked her aside without even glancing at her. (She now remembers hitting the wall so hard her head rang.) And then momma had the clothes iron in her hand and was trying to put it to his face and there was the hiss of its touch against his neck and he roared and wrestled it from her and now had a fistful of her hair and momma was fending with her hands and the room shook with her screaming and was full of the smell of her burning flesh.

  And then momma broke free and ran shrieking out of the house and daddy stomped over to the door and kicked out the screen and hollered a bunch of filthy names but didn’t chase after her. The back of his shirt was smeared with doughnuts and stained with coffee. He turned and caught sight of Dolores huddled in a corner. She was too terrified to move, and she could tell that for a second he didn’t even recognize her. And then he did—and his face sagged like all the bones in it broke at once. He stood there a minute, staring at her and crying without sound, his tears mixing with the blood running off the slashes on his face and dripping off his chin, looking like he’d just crossed over to someplace he’d never be able to get back from again. Then he turned and bolted outside and the truck door slammed and the engine roared and the tires spun in the grass and the truck fishtailed out onto the street and squealed away.

  Then she was out the door too and running down the street and crying so hard she couldn’t see where she was going and a neighbor woman caught hold of her and took her into a house where somebody was yelling into a telephone for the police and a bunch of people were gathered around momma in the kitchen and smearing butter on her hands and arms and momma was crying and crying like somebody’d died.

  They never heard from him again, but they heard about him every now and then over the following year. Arrested in Corpus Christi for disorderly conduct. Locked up in San Antone for destruction of municipal property. Jailed in Galveston for assault. Then came the news about his really bad trouble in Houston and the thirty-years-to-life sentence in the state penitentiary at Huntsville. But they never heard from him in all that time. Never heard from him until now, with momma more than six months in the ground.

  And he says he’s sorry.

  Naturally he says that—just look what he says right after: send me money. I’m sorry, now send me money. Of all the damn nerve! First time he writes to her in the nearly three years he’s been behind bars and he’s asking for money. It’s the only reason he wrote to her, she just knows it, and she feels like both cursing and crying.

  But hey … he remembered her birthday. Right there at the bottom of the page, see. Her daddy remembered her birthday. He even wishes he had a present for her. There he is in prison, living a life of daily torments, and still he remembered his Sugargirl’s birthday.

  Sugargirl. Nobody else ever called her that. Only daddy.

  She feels her heart banging in her chest like a bird encaged with a snake. She goes to the window and draws deep breaths. She feels parched, but she’d rather go thirsty than leave her room for a drink of water just now and maybe run into Aunt Rhonda.

  She carefully reads every line of the letter again. He’s allowed three letters a week from the people on his correspondence and visiting lists. Was she on those lists? He says please write, so she must be on his letters list, anyway. What about his visiting list? Wouldn’t he have told her if she was? Wouldn’t he have said come visit me? She wonders who would be on that list. She can’t think of a single solitary soul. Grandpa and Grandma Stock were both dead, and Uncle Rayburn, daddy’s older and only full brother, had been in the crazy ward of the VA hospital since the Korean War and like as not always would be. And who knew where his one sister Sally Stock Brown had been these past five years. Back before she got married, Aunt Sally used to visit fairly often. She was funny and sassy about everything and could make momma laugh so. Dolores thought the world of her. Then she married a fella named Lyle Brown, a truck mechanic from Uvalde who momma thought was a peckerwood and who she could never understand Aunt Sally getting hitched to. Not six months later Sally took off on the back of a motorcycle driven by a pool player named Farley Zane and nobody’d ever heard from her again. Maybe Aunt Sally wrote to daddy from wherever she was, but not likely, since she would’ve written to momma if she’d written to anybody, but she hadn’t. As far as Dolores knew, the only living kin daddy had was Uncle Frank.

  Could be daddy had friends she didn’t know about, friends who wrote him and visited him regularly, but she didn’t think so. The kind of men she remembered him buddying with weren’t the letter-writing sort—if they could write at all. He anyway never did have many close friends. The only two goodbuddies of his that ever dropped by the house were Everett Purdue and a huge red-bearded fella named Double John. But Everett had gone to prison about a year after daddy for armed-robbing a filling station in Oklahoma. And just a few months ago Double John had accidentally gassed himself to death one freezing night after his wife locked him out of the house and he went to sleep in his truck with the motor running in order to keep the heater going. Most likely, Dolores thought, daddy didn’t get too many letters or a whole lot of visitors.

  What if she was on his visiting list? Would she go see him if he asked her to? The question yanks her heart up into her throat. Well, now, she just doesn’t know, she guesses it would just depend. She runs her finger swiftly along every line of the letter again. Nope, he doesn’t say it. He doesn’t say he loves her. Not anywhere on the page. A fact is a fact, and it’s a fact he doesn’t say it. “I loved your momma very much”—that’s in there. But not a word about he loves her.

  But hold on now … the letter was censored. No bones about it, either—it says so right there at the top: “All inmates’ mail is opened, censored, and recorded by OFFICIALS.” And then again at the bottom of the letter—in the big round stamp that practically hollers it at you: “CENSORED.” Maybe the prisoners aren’t allowed to write “I love you.” Maybe that’s part of the punishment. Maybe they’re allowed to say they love somebody else, like he says he loved momma, but not allowed to say it to the people they write the letter to. Maybe they even censor the word “love” out of the letters the prisoners get, so they can’t have even the comfort of being reminded that somebody somewhere still loves them. That would be terrible, she thinks … but even more terrible, girl, is just how damn dumb you are, because only somebody dumber than dirt would think something so ridiculous.

  Yeah … but … maybe he was just too scared to say it. What if he thought she might be so mad at him she’d just laugh at his letter and throw it away? Just imagine how it’d f
eel to think your words of love might get laughed at and thrown in the garbage. She tells herself to be fair now: could she really blame him for not saying “I love you” in this letter, the very first one he’s written her since going to the penitentiary? The first letter he’s written her ever? Shoot, he’s just waiting to see if she’s going to write him back, is all. If she does—and if she doesn’t tell him to go to hell—then he’ll likely trust her to treat his feelings with the respect that’s a daddy’s due. And then he’ll know he can go ahead and tell her what’s really and truly in his heart.

  She tries to imagine what it’s like to have to live among hundreds and hundreds of criminal strangers, among heartless killers and robbers and awful men of every sort. What it’s like to have to live in a small steel cell with bars all around and guards watching you all the time. She wonders if he shares a cell with another prisoner, and if he does, if he’s gotten to be friends with him, if he’s told him about his daughter who he calls sugargirl. She wonders if he ever wishes he could just go out and get in a car and drive himself someplace for a cheeseburger and a strawberry shake, or go to a drive-in movie and have popcorn and laugh at the cartoons, or go to the beach like they used to do, him and her and momma, singing all the way there and all the way back: “Row, row, row your boat …” She wonders if he spends his days busting rocks with a sledgehammer or picking cotton out in the hot sun. Does he go out with a chain gang and work with a scythe in the ditches by the side of the road with his shirt off and the sweat running off his sunburned back while people drive by in their cars and stare out at him without a bit of pity? Does he work in a machine shop and stamp out license plates? She knows they wear white uniforms. She once saw a newspaper photo that showed a bunch of state convicts working at a cotton farm in the valley, and one of them—a Mexican-looking boy—had his whole back covered with a big colorful tattoo of an eagle with a snake in its beak and its wings spread wide. He was smiling over his shoulder with big white teeth and looked like the proudest thing. Most of the convicts she’s ever seen along the road or in pictures looked like they’d never smiled in their life.

  What she wonders most of all is if he ever thinks of her.

  Well, of course he does, you nitwit! He wrote to you, didn’t he?

  She wonders if he has a picture of her, and if he does, if he keeps it taped on the wall next to his bunk so he can look at it when he’s lying there. It couldn’t be any more recent than her seventh grade picture from four years ago. When he looks at it does he wonder how she’s changed and what she looks like now? Maybe she should go down to the drugstore and get some of those four-fora-quarter pictures from the little curtained booth in back and send them to him. She could make a different face in every one so he could see all the ways she really looks. Would it please him if she did that? Would he think she was pretty? Or would he be disappointed and not even put the new pictures on the wall?

  She wonders if she’s been unfair these past years for seeing him only as momma saw him—as a no-good low-life who wouldn’t know what responsibility was if he tripped over it on the sidewalk at high noon. And she keeps wondering if she’s going to write him back.

  He said he was sorry, girl. What more can he do?

  By the time Aunt Rhonda calls her to set the table for supper she’s made up her mind. He is, after all, her daddy—although he signed the letter “Your father,” like he was writing to a grown woman, which she believes she certainly is.

  And he did say he was sorry.

  And he called her Sugargirl.

  And he remembered her birthday …

  2

  During supper Aunt Rhonda asks what the letter has to say. She poses the question as airily as if she’s asking if anybody cared for more iced tea, but there’s no hiding the snoopy hunger in her voice, nor the spite Dolores has gotten to know so well since coming to live with her. (One minute she and momma were eating supper and watching a Honeymooners rerun, and the next, momma was facedown in her plate of red beans and rice and dead of a stroke before Dolores could even start to scream.)

  Much of her aunt’s resentment toward her, Dolores knows, comes from her dislike of momma, even though the two women met only once, back when Dolores was just a tiny baby. The way momma told it, that one time was enough for both of them. She and daddy were paying her and Frank a visit, and Rhonda put on such pious airs momma couldn’t stand it. So she’d turned the radio on and put it up loud on a boogie-woogie station and flashed a lot of leg at Uncle Frank as she kicked up her heels all around the living room with daddy. “That skinny tight-faced Rhonda didn’t know whether to spit or go blind,” momma said. “And Frank, well, you’da thought he’d never looked on so much of a woman’s legs before to see how he was gawking at mine.” Momma laughed, thinking on it. “But I guess being married to that priss Rhonda, he like as not hadn’t seen a woman’s legs in a long while. Poor fella was probly hurtin bad from lack of lovin and probly hurtin even worse now. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to hear he’s took up with some little tramp one of these days.” It was the first time she’d spoken to her of such things, and she gave Dolores a look. “I ain’t talking too salty for you, am I?” she asked. “I mean, being your momma and all?” And Dolores, not yet fourteen, shook her head firmly even as she felt herself blushing and said, “Course not. I’m not a baby.” Momma smiled and said softly, “Course you’re not.” It was one of the few times after daddy left that she heard momma mention any of the fun she’d had with him.

  Dolores herself has provoked her aunt mightily by refusing to attend the Youth Prayer Services held two nights a week at the Good Shepherd Baptist Church just down the street. The one time she went she’d felt like throwing up right there in the church, the other kids were so godawful self-righteous. They’d looked at her like they all had their own private keys to the Pearly Gates and she never would. She has since had to listen to her aunt’s almost daily declamations of the hellfire awaiting the likes of her. She has endured the woman’s ill will by accepting it as just another unpleasant fact of life. Like her allergy to peanut butter. Like mosquitoes in summertime. Like the dirty-talking boys at school.

  She loathes living with Rhonda, but where else could she have gone? Fifteen years old and not a penny to her name, and Uncle Frank the only kin the state children’s services could get in contact with. It wasn’t like she’d had a lot of choice about it. But the six months she’s been here seem like six years, and if she wants to finish high school, which she does, then she’s got to live here nearly two more years, and how in the world can she ever last that long in this house? She has often thought that having to live here is like a prison sentence—but after reading her daddy’s letter for the umpteenth time her mouth had suddenly gone dry at the thought of just how truly awful a real prison like Huntsville must be. He’d be in there at least thirty years and maybe a lot longer. How in the world could he stand it?

  She’d had the sudden and dreadful notion that maybe the only real choice anybody has in life is whether to go on standing it or not.

  Because of her own bitter feelings about her father, she has never been too bothered by Aunt Rhonda’s mean talk about him. But his letter has confused her. At the same time that she feels angry about the way he treated momma, she aches to be hugged to his chest and hear him say, “Sweet dreams, sugargirl,” like he used to when he’d tuck her in and kiss her goodnight.

  She senses that if her aunt gets wind of what she’s feeling, she’ll jump at the chance to make her feel even worse. And so, when Rhonda asks what daddy (“that man” she calls him) had to say, Dolores simply shrugs and says, “Nothing much.”

  “Nothing much!” Aunt Rhonda repeats, and arches her plucked brows. “After all this time without word one to anybody? Without so much as a word of condolence to his only daughter after her mother passes away? Declare, I’d think he’d have a good deal to say for himself.” She turns to Uncle Frank and says, “Don’t you think so, Franklin?”

  Uncle Frank looks up
from his plate and smiles guardedly. He is a large closemouthed man who spends most of his days in his gun shop in town. Dolores has not come to know him very well but strongly suspects that for all his size and apparent toughness he is afraid of his wife. It is hard for her to believe that any man cowed by his wife could be even half-brother to daddy. Life, she thinks, is just full of strange jokes.

  “Well, honey,” he says, “I think—”

  “I mean,” Aunt Rhonda says, her eyes back on Dolores, “it isn’t every day we get a letter at this house from a bona fide convict, is it?”

  Dolores shrugs and busies herself with her stew. She is determined to keep the letter to herself, to keep from being baited into a show of bad temper.

  “Now Rhonda honey,” Uncle Frank says, his interjection surprising Dolores—and Aunt Rhonda as well, to judge by the look on her face—”why don’t we let the poor girl be? A letter’s a personal thing, and I guess if Dolly wants to tell us what was in it, she’ll do it when she’s ready to—won’t you, Dolly?” He is the only one who has ever called her by that nickname which she detests.

  “Didn’t say much,” Dolores murmurs. “Just howdy, is all.”

  “Just howdy?” her aunt echoes sarcastically. “Oh now, I’ll just bet he said a lot more than that.”

  “Now Rhonda honey …” Uncle Frank starts to say—and then hushes at the look she gives him.

  “Yeah, well,” Dolores says, meeting Aunt Rhonda’s eyes, “that’s about all he said.” She holds her aunt’s stare a moment longer, then turns her attention back to her plate. Take that, you!

  “Fine then,” Rhonda says. “Be that way.”

  Dolores eats the rest of her meal with a great show of appetite, though the only thing she actually tastes is the rare and wonderful flavor of victory.