Borderlands

by James Carlos Blake

  She’d been working Houston a little over two months when a man took the stool beside her at the bar of the Prince Travis Hotel one late night and introduced himself as Jackson Somebody. She’d been about to go home after another profitable evening, but figured what the hell, one more wouldn’t hurt anything. Especially one so handsome and nicely groomed and expensively dressed. And so she accepted his offer of a drink. He had dark bright eyes and black hair, a deep tan, a soft Louisiana accent and a glorious white smile. When he discreetly slipped her a hundred-dollar-bill her heart jumped up and clicked its heels and they exchanged winks and left the bar arm-in-arm.

  Up in his room he asked if she would think him depraved if he sat and watched as she undressed. “Few visions are so sensual,” he said in his lilting accent, “as that of a lovely young woman shedding her clothes in preparation for the act of love. I have always found it enrapturing.”

  She’d smiled at his odd way of talking and held his face in her hands and kissed him on the lips and backed away a few feet and started taking off her clothes. He sat on the bed and watched her, smiling, smoking a dark sweet-smelling cigarette. Then she was down to her yellow bikini panties and she stepped out of them and struck a pose—hip cocked, head tilted, one hand over a breast, one hand extended toward him with the panties dangling from her fingers. She giggled and playfully flicked the underwear at him.

  Still smiling, he snuffed the cigarette and stood up and took a pair of black gloves from his jacket.

  “You are a lovely girl,” he said softly as he fitted the thin gloves carefully over his fingers, this man she would evermore think of as Smiling Jack. “But precious … anybody working as an independent in my territory is stealing from me … and whatever made you think you could do that?”

  Her heart felt like it was tumbling down a flight of stairs. She wanted to tell him she was sorry, she’d meant no disrespect, she’d pay him whatever he thought she owed him, she’d leave Houston and never come back to this town again—wanted to beg him please not to hurt her, but before she could get the first word out of her mouth he was on her like a hard wind out of hell …

  A policeman named LeBeau came to see her in the hospital. He wore a stained yellow jacket and a porkpie hat and looked fed up with the world. All she could tell him was the man’s description and that his first name was Jackson. Her head felt misshapen. Her voice sounded strange in her own ears. LeBeau put away his notebook and smiled at her with nothing but his mouth. Not likely they’d catch him, he said. And even if they did, it wasn’t likely he’d go to trial. And if he did, it wasn’t likely he’d be convicted, not with it being his word against hers.

  “I’ll tell you something, darlin,” LeBeau said, “just between us and not as a member of the Houston Police Department.” He stood and hitched up his pants. “Nobody gives a shit what happens to whores. Any girl sells her ass is trash and just asking for trouble. Who you think cares she finds it?” He wagged an admonishing finger and left.

  She lay in the hospital another two days, congested with rage and humiliation. And fear. She’d remembered Rayette saying all they are is men, but she’d forgotten—more likely chosen not to recall—the business about Victorio. Well, no more of it, no matter what. Better to go hungry than have to deal with any Victorio or Smiling Jack or God-knew-who. Next time could be nails in her knees. No, thank you.

  And as she lay there in her bandages and watched some local news show on the wall TV she realized it was her birthday. She was eighteen.

  Smiling Jack had taken all the money she’d had in her purse, and she told the hospital she was broke. She had to sign a paper promising to pay off her bill when she was able. As soon as she got back to her room she packed her bag and got her money from the toolbox. An hour later she was on a bus to Texas City, ignoring the looks the other passengers gave her battered face.

  And when everything was finally healed—the cracked ribs, the concussion, the bruised breasts, the broken finger, the various cuts on her face—the only vestige of Smiling Jack’s handiwork was the small scarred bump on the bridge of her nose.

  3

  “Pretty face,” she says softly, assaying it in the mirror. “Yes it was.”

  But no more. Too much the worse for wear. No wonder Billy Boy went packing.

  Cut the shit, girl. Wasn’t the face and you know it.

  What was it, then. Answer me that.

  Nothing but you, sugar. Y-O-U. You know that too.

  Oh. Yeah.

  She goes over and sits on the bed, picks up the pistol and twirls it on her finger like a movie cowboy. It’s a .38 caliber Colt Cobra with a four-inch barrel, finished in blue and fitted with a checked walnut stock. It weighs seventeen ounces and is eight-and-a-half inches long. She has owned it since shortly after her episode with Smiling Jack.

  She learned to shoot from Uncle Frank. She’d been living with him and Aunt Rhonda more than a year by then and hadn’t exchanged more than a dozen sentences with him in that time, but he’d lately begun paying her more attention. One afternoon when she was walking past his gun shop at the edge of town he came to the door and said hi and asked if she’d like to come in and look around. She’d never seen so many guns. He handled them with an easy familiarity she couldn’t help but admire. She’d recently seen the movie Bonnie and Clyde and had wondered what it felt like to shoot a gun. She loved the feel of them. When he asked if she’d like to shoot one sometime, she said oh yes.

  They’d go deep in the woods behind the house and shoot bottles and tin cans. He showed her the proper stance for facing the target, the way to hold the piece in a two-hand grip, how to aim and squeeze—not jerk—the trigger, how to accept the recoil. He let her fire his shotgun too, a pump-action Remington. But her love right from the first had been his two revolvers—a Smith & Wesson four-inch .38 and a huge .44 caliber Remington with a barrel about as long as her forearm, an ancient cannon of a piece he said his grandaddy had taken off a dead bandido when he was riding with Pershing’s cavalry down in Mexico, hunting for Pancho Villa.

  It was during those shooting lessons that he started with the touching. “No, Dolly, turn a little more this way,” he’d say, correcting her stance with a hand on her thigh, on her hip, on her rear. “Straighten your back,” he’d say, his hands spread on her ribs, thumbs nudging her breasts. At first she’d been unsure what to do, thought she ought to say something, make some gesture of objection, but then figured what the hell. It wasn’t like he was hurting her or anything, for Pete’s sake. And truth be told, she didn’t really, well, mind it all that much. It was actually kind of exciting in a way, all that pretending they weren’t either one of them aware of what his hands were really and truly doing. Together with the excitement of the gunfire and the kick of the pistol and the way the tin cans whanged and jumped and the bottles busted in sprays of glass—well, sometimes it all just made her feel like rubbing herself up against something.

  In the absence of any resistance, his touches of course got bolder, and one late afternoon he finally pressed on her the most intimate touch of all, right there on a layer of pine needles.

  She liked it, she can’t ever deny it, but even though she didn’t object, she knew it was wrong and swore to herself it wouldn’t happen again. But of course after it happened once it was bound to happen some more. And it did, the very next day, out on the pine needles again. She wanted to tell him no, wanted to say they ought not be doing this, but, lordy … it was so exciting.

  The next day she was reading in bed and Aunt Rhonda was off at her sewing club meeting when Uncle Frank came into her room, undoing his belt and saying a bed would sure beat pine needles for comfort. Before she could give it a thought her shift was bunched up above her breasts and her panties tangled around one ankle and they were at it again, only this time he was so rough about it she got scared and tried to push him away, but she was also enjoying it in spite of herself and even as she pushed at him with her hands she was pulling him in with her heels and she was
scared and furious and all mixed up and more excited than ever …

  And that’s when Aunt Rhonda showed up at the door.

  4

  She releases the revolver’s cylinder and swings it out, sees that all the chambers are empty, then turns the gun around and peers into the bore as she positions her thumbnail under the breech to reflect light up into the barrel. The inner surface of the barrel gleams, the lands and grooves spiral cleanly, without a pit or speck of dust. Still, it’s been a few weeks since she last cleaned it, so she fastens a brush tip to the end of a cleaning rod and runs it through the barrel a few quick times. Then she unscrews the brush from the rod tip and replaces it with a button-tip fitting. She stuffs a small patch of flannel into the muzzle and thrusts it all the way through the barrel with the rod. Next, she moistens a flannel patch with oil and shoves it through the barrel. She reexamines the inner barrel and smiles at its gleam. She removes the button tip and attaches a slotted tip in its place, then fits a fresh flannel patch in the slot and runs the patch through each of the six cartridge chambers. When all the chambers are sparkling, she snaps the cylinder back in place with a jerk of her wrist, then spins it with her fingertips to test its action. The cylinder whirls smoothly. She has always loved that rapid ticking. Now she applies a light coat of oil to all the exposed metal, then wipes the gun clean with a silicone cloth. The weapon shines.

  She dumps a handful of bullets out of their box, picks one up and regards it closely. Hardly bigger than a peanut. But no goober in the world can do you the damage one of these can. She drops the round back on the bed and aims the pistol at the blank wall across the room where she now envisions Aunt Rhonda’s face. You ugly hateful old bitch. The hammer snaps down with a clear flat click and Aunt Rhonda’s face dissolves. She lowers the gun and lets out a long breath.

  Hell, why shoot you? It wasn’t you humping his own half-brother’s daughter, his own half-niece.

  The word “incest” intones lowly in the back of her mind and she feels her face go hot.

  It wasn’t that. It can’t be that except with a daddy or a brother and he wasn’t either one. It wasn’t that.

  On the wall hangs a framed black-and-white photo of Billy Boy wearing his usual cowlick and lopsided grin. His freckles clear and sharp, making him look like Howdy Doody at age 37. Squatting beside a billygoat at the petting zoo of the county fair, where a roving photographer took the shot. Dolores paid a dollar for it.

  She takes aim on his right eye.

  Click. That’s for all your lies, you bastard no-count.

  The sight sets on his left eye.

  Click. That’s for all your damn cheating.

  She aims at his big front teeth.

  Click. That’s for breathing the same air as me.

  Click … click … click.

  She opens the cylinder again and slips a round in a chamber and closes the cylinder and spins it. She places the muzzle against her breast and feels her heart thumping wildly up against the pistol barrel.

  Go ahead, girl. Try your luck. One little squeeze.

  She eases her finger off the trigger and lowers the pistol to her lap. Her breath is wedged in her chest and her pulse throbs in her throat.

  You damn crazy woman.

  She suddenly remembers the old boy back in Alice who couldn’t stand it anymore and took a shotgun to himself. A shotgun, for Christ’s sake! How can anybody botch it with a damn shotgun? But he did. Took off half his face and a fairsized portion of his brain and still lived through it. If you can call it living to be damn near totally paralyzed. That poor fella laid in bed for months with no control over bowel or bladder, his head wound constantly seeping pus and god-knows-what. All he could move was the one eye he had left, that and his nose. He was fed through a tube in his arm. They said he passed his days soiling the sheets and shedding tears out of his one eye and snorting up snot. His sister had to spend much of her day mopping up his messes. Not long after they left Alice they heard she’d choked him to death and been sent to prison for it.

  You do not want that, she tells herself. Besides, who’d take care of you if you botched it? Who’d change the sheets when you made a mess in bed?

  “Who’s gun’s that?”

  Startled, she jerks around to see the two kids at the bedroom door, their eyes fixed on the revolver in her hand. She had not been aware of the television’s silence.

  “Whose gun’s that?” the girl repeats.

  “Well, not that it’s any of your business, Little Miss Nosy, but it’s mine.” She slips the pistol under the rumpled sheets. “What you-all want?”

  “We wanna know can we go to Ruben’s and hep him build a treehouse.”

  “Ruben’s? Just yesterday you said Ruben Harris was the stupidest boy in the world.”

  “His daddy gave him a big buncha lumber and we wanna go hep him build a treehouse.”

  “So now you don’t care he’s the stupidest boy in the world?”

  The girl shrugs irritably. “We’re gonna go hep build a treehouse,” she says, and turns to leave.

  “Hold it right there, missy! You don’t tell me what you’re gonna do, I tell you. What do you know about building a treehouse or anything else, anyway?”

  The girl glares at her. “You said if we asked we could do stuff. You said.” The boy steps closer to Mary Marlene and takes hold of her shirt. His eyes big on Dolores. The boy was more tight-lipped than ever lately. Hardly ever spoke anymore except in whispers to his sister.

  “First you get the word right. It ain’t hep, it’s help. I told you a hundred times. You want to grow up talking like some ignorant ranchhand? Now say it, say help. H-E-L-P. Say it!”

  “Help!” the girl snaps. “You said if we asked and I done asked!”

  “Dammit, Mary Marlene,” Dolores says through her teeth, “what’d I tell you about sassing me?” She’d like to smack the girl’s face. She’s never once hit either of them, but lately the impulse to do so has been constant and almost irresistible. And has terrified her.

  The girl looks as though she wouldn’t mind smacking her, either, her eyes blazing with rage. How does it happen, Dolores wonders. How do they get this way, those darling little babies?

  “Aw hell,” she says, feeling a sudden exhaustion right down to the bone. What’s the damn point of arguing with a smart-mouth brat anyway? “Go ahead on.”

  They streak through the living room and screech the front screen door open wide on its rusty spring as Dolores calls out, “Don’t let any flies in or slam the—” and the door bangs as loud as a pistol shot.

  She gets up and goes to the screen door which as always remains partly opened and latches it against the entry of any more flies. Then goes to the kitchen and contemplates the pile of dishes in the sink, the shiny patches of cooking grease on the stovetop and the wall behind it, the dustballs on the floor.

  Used to be you kept house some better than this.

  She takes the now cold half-cup of coffee to the little kitchen table and sits and sips at it. The room is quiet but for the buzzing of the circling flies.

  The next thing she knows she’s still at the table and the coffee is still in front of her, but she’s aware that time has passed because the sunlight has completely withdrawn from the window over the sink and is now streaming through the windows on the other side of the house. She’s obviously been asleep but doesn’t see how it’s possible for somebody to sleep sitting on the edge of a straightback chair and not fall over. Maybe she wasn’t asleep, maybe just in a trance of some kind. The thought scares her, but she doesn’t know why, and her confusion makes her angry.

  “Damn it,” she says, and starts to stand up and realizes that her bare ass has been pressed for so long into the hard edge of the chair it has gone numb.

  No wonder I been in a trance—my brains are paralyzed.

  The shift of her weight on the chair has renewed the circulation in her buttocks and now they burn. She moans and stands up slowly, massages her ass with both hand
s, limps into the living room.

  Everything’s so quiet. The room seems utterly alien to her and she feels a momentary confusion before the furniture regains its familiarity and she spies the open box of Sugar Pops on the floor where the kids left it, and one of Mary Marlene’s frayed sneakers poking out from under the sofa, and the usual sloppy pile of Cosmopolitans next to the ripped armchair in the corner.

  I know this place, she thinks, her heart sagging, and she sits on the sofa and puts her head in her hands.

  The low coffee table is spotted darkly with cigarette burns, littered with several issues of TV Guide, a scattering of matchbooks, nearly empty paper cups of Kool Aid, a blackened banana skin. The two ashtrays on the table are full to overflowing with cigarette butts. She looks around for cigarettes but sees none anywhere and does not feel like getting up and going into the bedroom to search. She picks through both ashtrays until she’s found the longest butt, then straightens it the best she can and lights it with a match. She takes a deep drag and exhales with a huge sigh.

  In the dust coating the coffee table a fingertip has traced the shape of a heart containing the inscription “M. U. + R. H.”

  Mary Underhill and Ruben Harris.

  Not even six years old and she’s already a fool for love. Little idjit. She’ll see.

  5

  Buddy once carved a heart with their initials in it. Into an oak trunk in Texas City. B. U. + D. S. It was a late afternoon and the sunset blazed red as fire in the oil-fumed air. It was the first time she’d permitted him to walk her to work, the first time she’d ever been in his company outside of The Fiddlesticks, the roadhouse where she worked as a waitress. For over a month he’d been coming in the place every day after work at the refinery to have supper and a few beers and to talk to her. He’d been doing this ever since the night he came in with a bunch of friends and saw her for the first time. The talk between them was easy and full of laughter without him ever getting raunchy like the others. After the first week he wasn’t even trying to hide how he felt about her. She could see it all over his face. The whole place could. His bubbas made good-natured fun of him—calling him a goner, saying love had done poleaxed him for sure—but he didn’t mind their ribbing at all. She’d blush whenever they kidded him about being so sweet on her, and Buddy would beam at her all the more. Every time he came in he asked her for a date—asked her to go dancing, to a movie, for a beer and sandwich someplace, for a walk along the bayshore. And every time, she turned him down.