3
Later that evening, after doing the dishes, she lies on her stomach on the floor of her room and tries to compose a letter, writing with a ballpoint pen on lined notebook paper. She writes, “Dear Father,” but the word looks as strange on the page as it sounds in her head, so she tears the sheet out of the notebook and begins again.
Dear Daddy, she writes, she was so happy to hear from him. It was so sweet of him to wish her happy birthday. She has thought of writing him a letter lots of times before but she never did because she never did know his address. Addresses would be more like it, since they heard he was moving around a lot, especially from jail to jail (ha ha). It wasn’t till they heard he’d be in Huntsville for a good long while that she thought maybe … She snatches out the sheet of paper and crumples it into a ball.
Dear Daddy: how nice to hear from him after all this time. But she’d really like to know something. Why didn’t he write sooner? Why didn’t he write to them while momma was still alive? Why didn’t he … She wads up this one too.
Dear Daddy: what a surprise! So glad to hear from him. Especially glad to hear he’s sorry. Only, why did he have to wait so long to be sorry? While didn’t he feel sorry before? Why didn’t he feel sorry before momma’s heart finally used up every last drop of love it had for him. Why couldn’t he of told momma he was sorry while she was still alive? Would he have ever told her? Dammit, daddy! Why did he have to run off? Why did he have to go to Houston? Why did he have to go into that poolroom and fight with that man? Why did he have to beat him so damn dead?
Riiiippp!
Dear Daddy: why couldn’t he say it to her, his daughter, his only daughter, his Sugargirl? It’s been all these years and now he writes her this letter but he doesn’t say it, not once, he doesn’t even say …
She stands up and goes to the window and stares out at the gathering gloom. The air is still and heavy. Heat lightning flashes whitely way out over the Gulf. Her throat and eyes burn. She leans her forehead against the window frame and stays that way for a few minutes before returning to her notebook on the floor and tearing out and crumpling the page she was writing.
Dear Daddy: she doesn’t like Raymondville very much. She doesn’t like the school she has to go to. Most of the kids are really rude and dumb as sticks. The teachers are mostly a bunch of irritable biddies and boring old farts. Except for Mister Traven who’s about the youngest teacher there and has a neat red beard and the softest blue eyes and always smells a little of oil since he works nights out at the field. He’s the nicest man. Not at all like the mean boys who say they think she’s pretty and everything but get all mad when she tells them she’s not allowed to ride in their cars and then go around telling awful lies about her and saying she’s done just the nastiest things with them. Some of the stories have got back to Aunt Rhonda and she always believes them rather than believe her. Aunt Rhonda can be so mean, daddy. Always telling her how she’s going to hell and all. Always talking mean about momma and him both. Always saying how she’s not worth all that her and Uncle Frank have done for her. Aunt Rhonda makes her feel like she’s not worth anything. Has he ever known anybody who made him feel like that? Sometimes she wishes she was deaf so she wouldn’t have to hear Aunt Rhonda anymore. She wishes there were more people like Mister Traven who once told her she’s the smartest one of his students and will surely make something of herself one day.
She pauses to consider the matter of Mister Traven. Go ahead, girl, she thinks—go ahead on and tell him. It’s the same as lying if you don’t. Tell him how Mister Traven, that nice man with the neat red beard and soft blue eyes, stopped his car for you on the road that sunny afternoon hardly more than a month ago when you were walking home from school and offered you a ride and then stopped at the Superburger Drive-in for a couple of bottled cold drinks and then took you for a drive and said he understood how hard it was to be the new kid in school and all, how he just bet all the other girls were jealous of you because you were so pretty, and how annoying it must be to have a lot of immature boys pestering you all the time with only one thing on their dumb little minds, and how lonely it could feel when it seemed nobody knew the real you way down deep inside. Tell him, Sugargirl. Tell how it just took your breath to hear him talk like that. Tell how he drove to a woods out by the salt lake and said he wanted to know who you really were, way deep inside. Tell about how he stroked your hair so gently, how you couldn’t help reaching out and touching his beard and how, when he kissed you, you could smell the faint odor of oil on his pale skin. Tell it all. Your first time. How pine cones thunked softly on the car roof and your heart was beating so hard while you did it right there on the front seat and you thought you’d die of the excitement. And how confused you got afterwards when he saw the blood smear on the seat and suddenly looked so scared as he buckled up his pants, how he didn’t say a word as he drove you home and when he got you there he only said, “Be sure and do your homework, hear?” How ever since then he hasn’t said three words to you and hardly ever looks you in the eye in the classroom and how you just don’t understand it and how awful it makes you feel. And don’t stop there, either. Go on and tell how ever since then you sometimes dream about that business in Mister Traven’s car and wake up with your heart jumping like crazy and feeling the same kind of excitement you felt at the time.
Tell him that, why don’t you? See what he thinks of his Sugargirl then.
Oh, daddy, she writes, she feels so empty sometimes. Does he know what she means? Does he ever feel like there’s nothing ahead but more of the same awful empty feeling, forever and ever? Does he ever just wish he was de—
She puts down the pen and reads what she has written. And then she slowly crumples the paper. She goes to the window and stares out at the darkness for a long time.
Who you fooling, girl? If he cared the teensiest bit he would have written long before now and he wouldn’t have asked for money and he would have said it.
But he didn’t. He did not say it.
It is after midnight when she writes: Dear Daddy: you BASTARD.
She underlines the final word again and again until the pen point tears through the paper and mars the page beneath, and then she buries her face in her arms to muffle the sound of her crying.
After a while she gets up and blows her nose. Then she gathers all the false starts and slips out into the darkened hallway and tiptoes to the bathroom and flushes it all down the toilet.
She swears to herself she will never write to him, not ever, and the vow will prove to be both true and false. It is true she will never mail anything to him. But during the remaining ten years of her life she will on many occasions begin a letter to him in a late-night whiskey haze. These efforts will be utterly incoherent to her on the following day. None of them will ever extend beyond three or four lines, and most will go no further than the salutation: Dear Daddy …
II
PERDITION ROAD
1
Her dreams were frequent and bad. Sometimes, like the one she was having now, they were recollections of incidents in her life, as grainy and unreal as a home movie—and as undeniable. She was dozing with her cheek pressed against the reverberant window of a bus hurtling south through thin morning fog, dreaming once again about the awful business with Uncle Frank, about being crushed under his bulk and gagging on the stink of him, feeling his sweat dripping on her, crying, saying don’t, don’t, and pushing against his pale hairless chest with both hands even as she felt an ambush of pleasure through her protests and hating herself for it, hating him even more, and yelling now, yelling in shock as she caught sight of Aunt Rhonda gaping at them from the bedroom doorway and tottering like a frail stricken bird …
She came awake with a gasp.
The over-rouged woman in the neighboring seat was staring at her like she thought she might be loony. Dolores tried a reassuring smile but her face must have done a bad job of it: the woman’s mouth tightened and she quick turned away.
T
o hell with you, Dolores thought. She was still breathing hard from the vividness of the dream. The air in the nearly full bus was stale and dry. Her throat burned. She felt she might sneeze and hoped she wasn’t catching a cold. As she fished in her purse for a Kleenex she felt a sudden rush of loneliness so powerful she nearly sobbed. She snatched out a tissue and dabbed her eyes and commanded herself to stop it. The woman beside her scooched over toward the aisle a little more.
Oh, God damn that man. Rhonda too, the self-righteous old bitch. Damn that whole sorry business with Uncle Frank. It had been just terrible. Awful. It wasn’t like she’d ever said it wasn’t. But it sure hadn’t been her fault. After all. Not more than partly, anyway. Well, for damn sure not all.
The main thing was, she did not need anybody giving her hell about it even one more day. Especially not Aunt Rhonda. The woman was crazier than John the Baptist in the wilderness, forever thumping that Bible and calling names. (“Whore! Harlot! The sins of the mother shall fall upon the daughter just as surely as those of the father are visited on the son! Look upon her, Lord! Look upon this daughter of Jezebel on her dark road to perdition!” Two solid months of that, every damn day. And Uncle Frank, that miserable peckerwood, sitting through it all in front of the TV and saying not word one, like none of it had a thing in the world to do with him. Bastard.)
“Harlingen!”
The driver’s voice rasped harshly through the speakers, startling her. She pressed up closer to the window and saw that they were coming into town. Palm trees along both sides of the highway. A few motels and cafes. A strip of bars all closed up tight—The Silver Cane, Crazy Jack’s, El Waterhole #2. The bus slowed as they started coming onto traffic lights. It wasn’t a real big town—nothing like Corpus Christi, the biggest town she’d ever been to—but it was plenty bigger than Raymondville. They passed a wide dirt lot where Mexican workers were clambering aboard field buses. Filling stations and fast food places every which way you looked. A shopping center with an almost empty parking lot at this hour and a movie theater sign advertising Bullitt. Realty offices and car dealers. Buck’s Gun Shop with bars over the windows. An Oriental girl with hair like ink setting up a flower stand at an intersection. Rowena’s Beauty Salon. (Rowena! You had a name like that, you had to know something about beauty.) Hi-Way Bowling Lanes, and two old boys leaning against a pickup truck, drinking Lone Stars and the sun just starting to show itself. Chico’s Barber Shop with a big handlebar mustache painted on the window. A woman sitting on a bus bench and looking at her feet. A white-whiskered man carrying a big plastic bag full of who-knew-what over his shoulder and talking to himself as he trudged along the shoulder of the road, his clothes so foul-looking you just knew he carried a smell to reckon with. A dog lifted its leg on a police car’s tire in front of Maria Elena’s Cafe.
The morning sun shone on the storefronts, blazed against the windows. She imagined families at their breakfast tables, kids getting ready to leave for school, getting a goodbye hug and kiss from their mommas, their daddies. She abruptly felt her mother’s absence like a hole in her heart and for an instant she again thought she might cry. Stop it! she told herself. This minute! She blew her nose and sat up straighter.
Aunt Rhonda and Uncle Frank would’ve been up for a while by now. They would’ve seen her emptied dresser drawers and wondered when she’d gone. They might’ve even wondered where. They could go on wondering from now till Doomsday.
The only direction out of Raymondville that didn’t take you into Mexico or the Gulf of Mexico was north, and the first big town you’d come to, a good long ways up the coast, was Corpus Christi. But Uncle Frank had friends in Corpus and might have them track her down if he took a mind to. Way farther north was Houston, which she didn’t have enough bus fare to get to but where she wouldn’t have gone anyway. It was too far away, for one thing, practically in another world—and she’d anyway always thought of it as the meanest town there was, mainly because of the song she’d heard all her life about if you’re ever in Houston you better walk right and you better not gamble and you better not fight or the sheriff gonna get you and lock you up tight.
Daddy sure enough found that out, didn’t he? Four years he’d been in the state prison in Huntsville, little more than twice as long as momma’d been in her grave. The son of a bitch. As far as she was concerned, all the things he did to break momma’s heart amounted to a crime worse than killing that fella with a pool cue. She hoped he lived to be a hundred and never got paroled.
So even though there wasn’t much of Texas between Raymondville and the Mexican Border, that’s the way she headed—south to Harlingen on the four A.M. bus coming through from Corpus on the way to Brownsville. And although Harlingen was way closer to Raymondville than Corpus was, Rhonda and Frank didn’t ever go down there (“It’s nothing but wetbacks there,” Aunt Rhonda said, which was what she said about every place in Texas whether she’d ever been there or not). As far as Dolores knew, they didn’t know anybody there they could ask to look around for her.
Shoot, girl, they ain’t about to look for you now or ever and you know it. Be glad of it.
The big bus slowed, brakes hissing and sighing, and swung into the terminal.
2
Twenty minutes later she had herself a job. Counter waitress in a bustling little cafe called The Wagon Wheel, just a block down from the bus station. The owner was a stocky bald man named Shelton. He’d put the little cardboard “Help Wanted” sign in the front window not an hour before Dolores came walking down the sidewalk with her suitcase in her hand and no idea where she was headed. One of his two daytime girls had quit that morning when her boyfriend phoned and told her he was moving to Houston and if she wanted to go with him she had till noon to get ready.
“She’s a fool to go with him,” Shelton said. “He ain’t worth last month’s want ads. Big-talkin’ truck mechanic with white teeth and a head of hair. Girls today ain’t got the sense God gave a barnyard hen.”
He paused to take a sip of coffee and put a match to a Camel. The interview was taking place on counter stools. Squinting through the smoke, he looked Dolores up and down. “How bout you, girl? You gonna run off with the first coffee shop cowboy asks you to go to Big D with him?”
She was flustered by his lingering appraisal of her legs under the skirt that suddenly felt way too short—and by the leers and grins she was getting from the men sitting nearby. No sir, she assured him, her voice tight, she certainly didn’t intend on doing anything like that.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said tiredly. “Girls with your looks don’t have to intend nothing. Intentions just come along and happen to you.” He sighed and exhaled a long stream of smoke. “What the hell, I got to have me another daytime girl and I got to have one now. Job’s yours. Dollar-and-a-half an hour and all your tips. Get paid ever Friday. I give you lunch and a half-hour to eat it. Only listen: try to look at the customers a little less fraidy-cat than you been doing. They’ll most of them talk like loverboys but won’t none of them bite you. You might even try smiling some, jack up your tips.”
He took her into the back room and showed her where to stash her grip. He handed her a red-checkered apron and a white paper hat to wear, then gave her a quick rundown of the counter operation, showing her where everything was she might need—silverware, condiments, napkins and placemats, checkpads. She already knew how to work the register from the job she’d had at the Burger Hut in Raymondville.
“Well, all right, then,” he said. “Let’s get to work.” He hustled back into the kitchen to help a colored cook named Willard work up a steady procession of orders for eggs, fried potatoes, burgers, chicken fried steaks, chili beans and blue plate specials.
A jukebox next to the counter played loudly and incessantly, almost all its selections country-western oldies like Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Bob Wills, Ernest Tubb. Even Tex Ritter, for God’s sake, was on there, and some customers actually played him. Frankie Laine was a big favorite with “Rawhide” and “Mu
le Train.” In the midst of all that twangy shitkicking, only Buddy Holly and Elvis kept Dolores from going insane.
The place always smelled heavily of fried grease, diesel fumes, men in need of a shower. Even the sunlight that leaned in the windows looked oily. Most of The Wagon Wheel’s trade was from men passing through, grabbing a bite while they waited for their bus. Sad-looking salesmen in stained suits. Uniformed servicemen hardly more than boys. Sunburned oil workers with bright eyes and big voices. Dusty farmhands. Old Mexes in sarapes and young ones with wide neckties and shiny pompadours. Vacanteyed drifters. Sometimes some coloreds.
The field Mexicans were always well-mannered, and the few black folk who sometimes came in for a roll and coffee. But they never had much to spend on themselves and couldn’t afford tips beyond nickels and dimes. Her best tips came from the customers she least liked to wait on—the Mexican dandies, who called her mamacita and ran their eyes over her like hands, and the oil field roughnecks, who liked to get a rise out of her any way they could. They liked to tell crude jokes in voices loud enough for her to hear, then laugh to see her blush, which she nearly always did. Sometimes their voices dropped low and then they’d all bust out laughing and grin at her and she’d know they had been joking about her. Or she’d catch them nudging each other and gawking at her rear end when she was bent over the cooler. She’d feel her face burn and want to shrink into herself, to make herself as small as possible so there would be less of her for them to look at and joke about.
Shelton seemed indifferent to it all, and she figured he’d think she was a big baby if she complained, so she didn’t. But every time some bunch of men at the counter snickered behind her back or showed her their nasty oily grins, her anger would clench in her belly like a fist and she’d want to tell them off. Then she’d spot the dollar bills scattered across the countertop and she’d bite her tongue. And when they called for refills and ogled her up close and smacked their lips and said, “Qué chulita,” or “Darlin, I sure do like the way you wear them jeans”—and even if every now and then one of them should reach over and pat her bottom before she quick pulled away—she’d make herself smile and they’d laugh and push a bill over to her and she’d snatch it up and put it in her pocket. She made herself think of their vulgar talk as simply unpleasant noise to put up with, like most of the jukebox selections. There was no need to take any of it personally, not even the pats on the ass. After all, it wasn’t like they were actually doing anything to her. And she did have to make a living.
Borderlands Page 14
