Borderlands

by James Carlos Blake

  God damn them.

  Them? God damn her. Filthy, weak, stupid …

  Why didn’t she just go back inside and ask Sparky to take her home?

  Christ’s sake, she’d been hit in the face, she couldn’t think straight.

  She was clear enough in the head to appreciate that nice Cadillac car.

  Get them. Get the bastards. Call the police. Right now.

  Yeah, sure, the police. Real good idea. Two words against one.

  Call them anyway. Do it.

  Are you simple, girl, or what?

  All her idea, your honor. And if you don’t mind us saying so, the lady had herself a real fine time for a fact. She didn’t hardly want the party to end. She wasn’t the least bit put out till afterwards when we paid up. Claimed it wasn’t enough. Damn if it didn’t seem like a lot to us.

  And the judge: I know the story, boys. Heard it a thousand times if I heard it once. Lots a these working girls don’t know when to leave well enough alone. You, girl: don’t let me see your painted face in here again.

  Case dismissed. But the boys wouldn’t be happy about her putting them through all that. They’d sure enough come around to discuss it with her. How stupid can you get, girl, showing them where you live? Letting them bring you right to your front door?

  O lord, they’d probably come around to see her again anyway, since they’d seen how much she enjoyed it and all. When they’d seen it touch her, Mort had kissed her on the nose and laughed.

  What to do?

  You kidding? Go. Hit the road. Skeedaddle. Ride, Sally, ride.

  She stayed under the shower until it turned cold, then dried off and did the best she could for the shiner with makeup. She put on her best skirt and blouse and packed the rest of her clothes. She tucked her tightly-rolled savings—two hundred and twenty dollars—into the toe of a spare shoe and slipped the shoe in the suitcase.

  She went out the back door and crossed the yard and knocked on the rear door of the Santiagos’ house. Joselita and Moise were having breakfast, already dressed for work. They said they would be very happy to give her a ride to the bus station in town. She had a cup of coffee with them and said she was going to visit her grandmother in Houston. They said that was nice, families should always stay close. They politely averted their gaze from her bruised eye.

  She finished her coffee and went back to the house to get her suitcase. She took a last look around, made sure all the lights were out and all the taps turned off tight. She was halfway across the yard again when she stopped, set down her bag and went around to the front of the house. She knelt on the wet grass and probed the shrubbery under the window—pricking her finger on a thorn and staining the hem of her skirt—and soon found the wadded money. Six twenty-dollar bills. She stood up and folded the money carefully and slipped it into her bra.

  I mean, she thought … after all.

  III

  GENTLY DOWN THE STREAM

  1

  Dolores is drowning.

  The murky water is bloodwarm and tastes of salty copper. Far above her upturned face the surface glimmers dimly. She flails weakly with exhausted arms, kicks feebly against a bottom of soft mud. She can hold her breath no longer and her lungs begin to rip. She tries to scream and the foul water rams into her mouth like a boot heel …

  She bursts awake—pushing up on her elbows, gasping, kicking at the sheets entangled about her legs, for a moment longer still feeling her chest being crushed under a lack of air before she realizes where she is.

  She falls back on the sweat-damp pillow with a huge inhalation which she releases in a long hissing sigh.

  Oh man. Oh that damn dream.

  Her heart hammers on her ribs. Her throat burns. A headache hacks at her skull like a hatchet.

  Easy, sweetie. It’s only morning. Calm down.

  An oily cast of orange sunlight oozes through the window blinds and casts black stripes on the opposite wall. Already the bayou humidity has begun to congeal the air. She is sheathed in sweat.

  She turns her face from the window and stares at the open closet door. The closet seems larger than usual somehow. She puzzles over this for a minute before she understands.

  Billy Boy’s clothes are gone.

  Wake up, girl. Things are happening here.

  She tries hard to recall the night before, fuzzily remembers drinking bourbon from the bottle while she watched TV. She hadn’t seen Billy Boy in, what, two days … no, three. And now she vaguely recollects reeling into the bedroom and … oh yeah … Ellis Corman, the next-door neighbor … peeking over into her bedroom again from his bathroom window, the hairy-ass pecker-wood. So this time she left the blind up and turned on both dresser lamps to give him better light to see by and turned the radio on loud and dropped her robe and danced all around the room in just her panties to the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me,” kicking her legs up high and shaking her ass and titties and just generally giving that horny sonofabitch a hell of a show, letting him drool over what he couldn’t have … And then … and then Della Corman was at her own bedroom window and looking over at her with her mouth open big enough to hold a watermelon. And then Della was gone from the window and a second later busting through the bathroom door and Ellis nearly jumped five feet in the air with his eyes like golf balls as Della came in whacking at him with both fists and he was all hunch-shouldered and ducking and sidestepping and finally managed to get around her and out of there and Dolores remembers standing naked at her window and laughing …

  And then Della Corman was at the bathroom window hollering “You filthy whore!” and yanked the blind down and snapped off the bathroom light.

  The fat-assed bitch. Dolores had been of a mind to go over there and snatch her bald headed but decided to have another little drink first …

  She remembers nothing more.

  Billy Boy must’ve come in after she passed out.

  She sits up and swings her legs over the edge of the bed and kicks over a nearly empty bottle of Jim Beam as a bolt of red pain flares in her skull. She cradles her head in her hands and watches the bourbon spread and vanish in the cracks between the floorboards.

  Sweet Baby Jesus. The little sonofabitch did it. Got his hat and gone.

  She stands up, sways dizzily for a moment, then staggers naked across the hall and into the bathroom. She reemerges wearing a man’s blue workshirt, only slightly too big for her, and goes into the living room. The kids are sitting on the floor watching television cartoons. Bugs Bunny.

  The volume of the little black-and-white is barely audible. Bugs Bunny gnaws at a carrot. The kids don’t even smile at the action on the set, just watch it blankly while they eat sugar-coated cereal by the handful from the box set between them. On the screen Yosemite Sam is hopping with rage and shaking a cutlass in Bugs’ face. Bugs does not look too concerned. The kids don’t even glance at her.

  She goes into the kitchen and sees a note stuck to the refrigerator door with a pink wad of chewing gum.

  Just like him to use gum. Goddamn bubblegummer. What else can you expect from somebody named Billy Boy, for Christ’s sake?

  Sorry slim. No more for me. Your probly sick of it too so I guess I’ll move on down the road. You got great looks, you’ll do all right. I’m a low life I know. Luck to you and the kids.

  Little prick didn’t even sign it. Lowlife is right. All of you. Lowlifes. Good goddamn riddance.

  On the kitchen table is a loose-leaf sheet of paper beside an empty Old Crow bottle. She steps over for a look. “Dear Daddy” is scribbled in a barely legible hand across the top line. The rest of the sheet bears a big X. She crumples the page and tosses it in the direction of the full garbage pail.

  Yesterday’s pot of coffee is still on the stove. She gives it a shake and finds it’s yet holding about a half-cup, so she turns on the burner under it. On top of the three-day pile of dishes in the sink are two empty bottles of Pearl. She just bets he didn’t bring them in with him and goes to the refrigerator and loo
ks inside and sees that, sure enough, the little bastard drank her last two beers.

  She goes to the kitchen doorway and leans against it, her head throbbing. “You kids see Billy Boy this morning?”

  They remain fixed on the screen, seem not even to have heard her, though she knows they did.

  “Hey! I’m talking to you! You seen Billy Boy today?”

  “Yesssss,” the girl says without looking away from the TV. Nearly six years old, she is older than her brother by a year.

  “Well? What’d he say?”

  “Nothing much.”

  “Mary Marlene!”

  The girl cuts her a fast look. “Nothin! He give me and Jesse fifty cent apiece to keep real quiet and not wake you up.”

  She suddenly thinks of the car. She strides quickly to the front window and pulls aside the curtain and sees through the screen that the Ford is gone from under the big magnolia in the front yard where she always parks it for the shade. The bastard said the car was hers, he got it for her. Liar. Oh how they lie. She catches the fragrance off the white blossoms. A ship’s horn blares sonorously out on the channel. Purple thunderheads are already building high over the gulf.

  She turns back to the girl. “What else did he say? Mary Marlene! Look at me when I’m talking to you!”

  The girl glares at her mother, her mouth in a tight little line.

  “I want to know what else he said. Tell me exactly.”

  “Nothin! Said he hadda go to Houston or someplace. Give me and Jesse fifty cent each and said we could spend it on whatever we want!”

  “I’ve told you about taking that tone, missy.”

  The girl shrugs and turns her attention back to the television. Beside her the boy watches the screen with his jaws slack and snot shining under his nose. That one’s a dummy for damn sure, Dolores thinks, a purebred fool. And she feels an immediate rush of familiar guilt. What kind of mother thinks such things about her own child?

  But he does look like a fool, damn it, he does. Acts it, too. If he at least looked a little like his daddy, but … he doesn’t … he doesn’t.

  She tries to ease the guilt by thinking that she really does love them like a mother should, deep down inside—but this time the trick lie doesn’t work. It’s bullshit and she can’t pretend it isn’t and she’s by Jesus had her fill of bullshit, even her own.

  Oh, she supposes she did love them once, back when they were just babies. But now the girl’s a smart-mouth pain in the ass and the boy’s a scary retard and the fact of the matter is that she wouldn’t mind a bit if they both vanished tomorrow. Poof!—gone, just like that. Wouldn’t that be nice?

  The guilt bores into her heart. But the truth’s the truth, damn it, and no bullshit in the world will change it.

  “Listen to me, Mary Marlene. He say anything else?”

  The girl sighs with theatrical emphasis—and for an instant Dolores sees herself picking up the TV and hitting the girl over the head with it. She puts a hand to her aching forehead and thinks maybe she’s crazy. Only crazy people think things like that.

  “He said he liked Road Runner best of all.”

  “What? He watched cartoons with y’all?”

  “Only just while Road Runner was on. Me and Jesse, we like Sylvester Cat the best. We wanna see him catch that Tweety bird and eat his head off.”

  Judas Priest. Ain’t he the one? Watches cartoons cool as you please before he runs for it.

  “That’s it? He didn’t say nothing else? Mary Marlene!”

  “Whaaat?”

  “Did he … oh hell, never mind.”

  “We turn it up now?”

  Without answering she returns to the kitchen and pours the half-cup of heated coffee and sugars it and then pushes the coffee away and slumps against the counter and mutters, “God damn it.” She goes back to the bedroom and falls across the bed—and a second later flinches when the TV volume suddenly thunders through the house.

  “YE LONG-EARED VARMINT! SAY YER PRAYERS!”

  “Mary Marlene!”

  “EH … WHAT’S UP, DOC?”

  She’s on her feet and stomping to the bedroom door, ready to scream at the girl to turn the thing off—off, not just down, goddamnit—when she remembers the title. The title to the car is in her name.

  She wheels toward the closet and gets down on hands and knees and digs through the pile of clothes and shoes and old magazines until she finds the small toolbox in the back corner. All her important papers are in this box. She’ll just by God show that title to the laws and they’ll run the bastard down and make him give her the car back, maybe even lock up his sorry ass for a while for car theft. She’s almost chuckling as she sits on the bed and opens the toolbox.

  The title’s not in there. Her certificate of marriage to Buddy is there, and her daddy’s letter from Huntsville, and her passbook showing a balance of sixty-three dollars and two cents. There’s her emergency roll of cash held tight by a rubber band. A few small tools. A gun cleaning kit and a half-full box of cartridges. Her blued Colt revolver. But no title. The sonofabitch must’ve taken it. Likely get a goodbuddy somewhere to notarize it, then get a new title in his own name.

  That sorry lowlife.

  Cartoon music clamors. Looney Tunes.

  She takes out the pistol and box of cartridges and sets them on the bed, then slips the rubber band off the roll of bills and counts eight twenties and eleven tens. Two seventy. Plus the sixty-three dollars and four cents in the savings account makes … what? She never could figure in her head worth a damn. Three hundred something. And two cents. Whatever it is exactly, it ain’t a fortune. Still it’s something, which is a lot more than she’s had a time or two before. She’s not real surprised to find the money still there. Billy Boy wasn’t a thief. Just a two-timing peckerwood and a liar and an Indian giver is all.

  She rolls the bills tightly again, puts the rubber band around them, drops the money back in the toolbox and puts the box back in the closet. She sits on the bed, only vaguely aware of the blaring theme music of Casper the Friendly Ghost, and wonders what she’s going to do. Tomorrow. Today. In the next five minutes.

  After a while she catches sight of herself in the big mirror over the dresser and she goes over to it and leans in close to scrutinize her face.

  Not too bad, she thinks, not yet—if it wasn’t for this, anyhow. She puts a finger to a small scarred bump high on the bridge of her nose. That was from Smiling Jack, who put an end to a period of her life she’s never told anybody about except her husband Buddy …

  2

  She’d arrived in San Antonio on the bus from Laredo and checked into a motel and for the next three nights in a row put on a short sexy yellow dress and sat on the bed smoking and thinking about what Rayette Nichols had said back in Harlingen when she asked her once what it was like to go to bed with men she didn’t even know.

  It mostly didn’t feel like much of anything, Rayette told her. You were just letting some fella poke at you and grab at you and slobber on you for a few minutes is all. “Feels about the same, I guess,” Rayette said with a grin, “as for most women doing it with their husband.” Oh yeah, a few of them were fun, she said, but she’d be lying if she didn’t admit that with some of them, well, it was like rolling in shit, they were so nasty. But even with the nasty ones you could go home afterward and take a nice hot bath and be just as fresh and clean as before—plus be money ahead.

  “Hell, honey,” Rayette had said, “all they are is men.”

  On her fourth night in San Antone she finally worked up the nerve to go out to a bar and sit by herself. Hardly an hour later she was back in the motel and in bed with a man who paid her thirty dollars for the privilege. She’d been so nervous the fella couldn’t help but notice, but he’d been so understanding about it, so gentle and nice, she would’ve forgot all about the money if he hadn’t taken it on himself after he got dressed again to count it out and put it on top of the TV. He advised her to get the money first from now on because
you never knew when some guy might crawfish on the deal after he’d had his fun. That made good sense and she thanked him for it. Later on she would think that if that first one hadn’t been so nice maybe she wouldn’t ever have done it again.

  Or if that good-looking young Mex cop six weeks later had been rougher on her, had rattled her sufficiently, that might’ve got her out of the trade soon enough too. She’d taken him for a trick and they left the bar with their arms around each other and when they got outside he showed her his badge and told her to take it on out of San Antonio or next time he’d run her ass in. And her ass was way too nice to get all worn out on the work farm, he said, giving it a pat and smiling like he meant it. She thanked him for the break and was on a Trailways to Austin that night.

  She thought the capital was a nice town, prettier and a lot cleaner than San Antone. But there was too much competition from free stuff, from all those horny government secretaries and all those university coeds. After a few weeks she hopped a bus to Houston, where she thought she’d do better.

  And she did. She rented an efficiency near the interstate and bought some nicer clothes. She worked the downtown hotel bars mostly and over the next two weeks made more money than she’d thought it possible to make so fast. The first few days she did but a couple of tricks a day at thirty dollars a throw, but by the end of the week she was charging forty-five bucks and getting away with it. She once turned six tricks in one night and felt rich as the Queen of Sheba. She bought more clothes, sexy new underwear, a radio for her room. She got a little toolbox to keep her money in and cached it in the closet.

  She was scared of course, every time, all the time. But her luck held well. Nobody got rough with her or tried to cheat her or force her into doing anything she didn’t want to do—and some of them would ask her to do some godawful things.