It had been nearly six months since she’d fled Houston with her battered face. Her flesh and bones had since healed, but her nerves were still beat up. She lived in fear of things she couldn’t even name. She’d wonder sometimes if maybe the Houston cop LeBeau had been right, if she really was no damn good, and such wondering would make her angry at herself. Of course he wasn’t right. What did he know about her anyway? She was as worthy of respect as the next person, dammit. She was.
But her self-assurances could not dispel the fear. And now this nice fella, this good-looking Buddy Underhill, was bringing that fear to a head by wanting to get to know her. She knew that if she let him get close to her she’d soon have to lie to him about her past and then live in the terrible fear that one day he’d find out the truth. Or she could tell him the truth herself. Tell him right off the bat. And watch him run the other way.
He was so gently and so sweetly persistent that she finally relented a little and said all right, he could walk her to work—but that was all. Don’t think about walking her back home, that was the condition. A walk to work was one thing, a walk home from work was something else altogether different and she wasn’t having any of that.
Fine, he said, no problem, any way she wanted it.
Late the next afternoon, he was waiting for her on the sidewalk in front of her little rented cottage, his hair combed wetly, his face freshly scrubbed and grinning at the sight of her when she came out the door. They walked along making small talk and were halfway to The Fiddlesticks when he paused under a huge oak blazing red in the sunset and gently took her hands and smiled into her eyes and told her he loved her.
She busted out crying. “No, you don’t!” she said. “You can’t do that to me!”
And right there by the side of the road, in a shamefaced sobbing fury, she told him everything there was to tell about the brief part of her life that ended in a Houston hospital room after her run-in with Smiling Jack. She talked and talked and the sun dropped behind the trees and he never once interrupted her. And when she was all through talking, the sun was down and an overhead streetlight had lit up and stretched their shadows across the road and she was very late for work and Buddy was holding her in his arms and saying don’t cry, baby, don’t cry.
He told her none of it mattered, not anymore. All that mattered was right now and tomorrow and the day after that. He told her again that he loved her, and he kissed her. And she kissed him back. And for a minute she got scared all over again because her heart was racing so fast and her breath was so hard to catch and her throat was so tight—and then she stopped being scared because she realized all it was was happiness. Because—talk about luck—she loved him too.
And while she fixed the ruined makeup on her happy face in a little pocket mirror in the glow of the streetlight, he carved the heart with their initials in the roadside oak.
They were married six weeks later in a small Baptist church in town. They had a five-day honeymoon in a rented piling house on the beach at Gilchrist and got tanned as dark as Mexicans. They swam in the Gulf and ate boiled shrimp and fried catfish and oysters on the half-shell and drank ice-cold beer by the quart bottle. They took the ferry to Galveston and rode the rides at Stewart Park and at a shooting gallery he won a prize for her, a little ballerina made of blue glass. They made love a half-dozen times a day.
Back in Texas City they rented a house on a bayou and bought some linens and cookware and were given lots more stuff by their friends. They didn’t buy their own home because his job as a rigger would keep them on the move from one oil field to another all over this end of the state. When she unpacked her things and found the .38, she said she guessed she’d sell it, but he said no, keep it. He’d lost his own gun in a poker game a few months before and hadn’t got another one yet and it was good to have a gun in the house. You never knew when you might need it.
Buddy wanted a family and she wanted to please Buddy—and so she was pregnant when they moved to Liberty. When she gave birth to Mary Marlene, Buddy kidded her for a teenage mother. The baby was four months old when they moved again, this time to Baytown, where eight months later Jesse was born.
She was happy. There was no other word for it. She was loved and in love and they had a home and a family and all the bad things were in the past. They made long Sunday trips to the beach at High Island and sang “Row, row, row your boat” on the evening drive back home. They went on picnics in the parks and played games with the kids. They went to drive-in movies and before the end of the second feature the kids would both be asleep and she and Buddy would be necking and groping each other like high schoolers.
They agreed not to have anymore children for a while and so she went back to her diaphragm. Some of their old friends from T.C. had come to work in the Baytown patches too, so they had plenty of old friends and new ones, both, and they all went honky-tonking together a couple of nights a week.
Who—she often asked herself as she fed the babies or checked on supper or hung the wash or held Buddy’s head to her breast in the night—would’ve ever thought it could happen?
Happiness is a damn funny thing, she thinks as she picks through the ashtrays in search of another long butt to light up. You get to where you’re sure you’ll never have it—and then one day it falls on you out of the blue. You know damn well it doesn’t happen to many and that you best not ask too many questions of it and just grab on with both hands and hold to it for all you’re worth. But even while you’re happier than you thought it was possible to be, you’re afraid, too, because you can’t help thinking something could happen to make it go away. But if after a while it doesn’t go away, you little by little stop being afraid of losing it. A year goes by, and then another and another, and little by little the feel of happiness starts to become as familiar as the smell of shaving cream in the bathroom or the sound of special laughter coming through the front door at the end of the day or the touch of a certain hand on your skin in the night. You reach a point where you don’t even realize how much you’ve come to take it for granted—it’s like the air you breathe—and so you stop paying close attention to it, and that’s a real shame because, afterwards, it’s so hard to remember everything about it as clearly as you wish you could, and it seems to have gone by so fast it’s like you hardly had it for any time at all …
They planned a big party for Mary Marlene’s fourth birthday but in the rush of things Dolores forgot to buy ice cream. She’d picked up everything else—the cake and cold drinks and candles and decorations and balloons—but somehow the ice cream slipped her mind. Buddy got home from work just as the neighborhood kids were arriving for the party. They played pin the tail on the donkey and Mary Marlene opened her presents and then the candles were set in the cake and ready to be lit and Dolores handed out paper plates and plastic spoons and went to the freezer for the ice cream and that’s when she realized she’d forgotten to buy it. Mary Marlene went into a snit, and Jesse, already taking his cues from his sister, started up a steady whimpering.
“What the heck,” Buddy said. “The kids are right. What’s a party without ice cream? Be right back.” And he got in his truck and drove off to a convenience store on the highway just a few blocks away.
The way they told it to her, later, he’d walked into the store just a couple of steps ahead of a pair of uniformed state policemen who’d stopped in to get cigarettes. A holdup was going on. Two nineteen-year-olds with magnums who opened fire the instant they saw the cops. Guns went off all over the place. Three people were wounded. One of the troopers would be paralyzed the rest of his life. The two robber boys were shot dead. So was Buddy.
He was the best part of her life, the longest, the quickest to go by.
6
You never got a Buddy when you need one.
She recalls a song her momma used to sing: “I-I-I-I ain’t got no bodddd-eee.”
Or no Buddd-ee either.
Ah hell, listen to me. Poor little me. Boo damn hoo.
She goes back in the bedroom and stands before the mirror and studies herself. Front view’s not bad at all—especially for somebody pushing twenty-five and with two kids and a few too many rough nights that are maybe starting to show in the face some. She takes off the shirt and tosses it aside. But now just look at that. Hardly no droop at all to those hooters—for sure not enough to hold a pencil under them. And only a teensy roundness to the tummy. Waist still slim as a girl’s and curves right smoothly into lean tight hips. Thighs nice and firm and not a hint of those riding-pants bulges so many women have, even the young girls. When she flexes a leg—like this—or lifts one out to the side—like this—what you see is lines of muscle and tight flesh and nothing else. No sag, no flab, not on this girl.
She turns her back to the mirror and cranes her head to look over her shoulder. Ladieeess and gentlemen … presenting the sweetest little ass in Texas. Round, tight, dimpled over each cheek. More than one man has told her it’s the best he ever saw and the nicest he ever put a hand to. A college professor she once did business with in a Houston motel told her it was a classic. That was the very word he used, “classic.” Get told something like that by a professor, well, who was she to argue? She turns around to face the mirror squarely once more, slides her hands up her thighs and over her belly and up to cup her breasts.
No question about it, baby doll, you’re still a fine-looking thing.
She takes Billy Boy’s framed picture off the wall and holds it facing the mirror. Take a good look at that, mister. That’s what you’re giving up. Don’t it just make you wanna cry, you dumbshit huckleberry? You said you loved these tits.
She sees herself crying in the mirror and the sight infuriates her. She slams the photo against the edge of the dresser, spraying glass over the dresser top and onto the floor, then flings it across the room. It bounces off the wall and lands faceup on her rumpled robe, the frame still intact. She stalks over to it and kicks it spinning under the bed to strike the wall on the other side and flip up and prop itself crookedly against the baseboard. Billy Boy’s grin is still in place.
Her big toe hurts. Blood seeps from under the toenail. She leans against the wall and hammers it with the bottom of her fist until her hand aches, then she sits on the bed and sobs.
A minute later she giggles through her tears and runny nose.
Oh man. I can’t even whip the little bastard’s picture.
A car turns onto the driveway next door, wheels crunching through gravel. She gets up and goes to the window and sees Della Corman’s blue Belvedere. The driver’s door swings open and Della Corman works her ample girth out from under the steering wheel, pausing to tug the skirt of her Value Drugs uniform back down over her gelatinous thighs. She opens one of the car’s rear doors and lugs out two large sacks of groceries, then bumps the door closed with her hip and lumbers up the steps to her screened kitchen door. She struggles to brace the sacks against her chest while she gropes for the door handle.
I hate you, Della Corman. Hate you, loathe you, despise you, wish you were dead. You and your Peeping Tom husband.
She retrieves the pistol from under the bedsheets and aims out the window at Della Corman, setting the sight squarely in the center of her large rump. As Della manages to hook a finger in the door handle and awkwardly pull the screen door open, Dolores squeezes the trigger.
Click.
The small dry sound of hammer striking empty chamber stuns her. She is suddenly aware of the tension in her outstretched arms and tight two-hand grip, of her readiness for the gun’s recoil.
Sweet Jesus, girl.
She unlocks the cylinder and lets it swing out and sees the sole bullet snug in its chamber … the chamber that had been poised to roll up under the hammer with the next squeeze of the trigger.
She gently closes the cylinder and sets the pistol on a pillow and stares at it as if it were a frightening note in an illegible scrawl.
Need us a damn drink, what we need.
Still naked, she goes into the kitchen and rummages through the cabinets until she finds a bottle with something left in it. She pours the remaining Old Crow into a jelly glass and raises the glass in a toast. “To me, you sonsabitches!”
The glass is nearly half full, and she gulps it down in two huge swallows. The bourbon hits her stomach with the force of a punch. She staggers back against the edge of the sink, unable to draw breath, gagging—and then her lungs suck air in deeply and she is seized by a violent fit of hacking. The glass slips from her hand and bounces on the floor. Her eyes flood. She sags slowly to the floor with her back against the cabinet doors.
She tries to say “Ahhh!” but can manage only a weak gasp. So she settles for thinking it: Ahhhh! That’s the joke, isn’t it? Ahhhhh, that’s gooood stuff!
She brushes webs of mucus from her nose and mouth with her fingers. Yessir, gooood stuff. From where she sits she can see that all the sunlight has left the living room windows.
Time sure flies when you’re having fun.
Now she catches the odor of her own flesh and sniffs herself more closely.
Hmm. Somebody round here does not smell of roses.
C’mon, girl, let’s clean you up some.
7
She’d read somewhere that porpoises had been known to save men at sea—shipwrecked sailors and men who went topside for a breath of air in the middle of the night and fell overboard without being noticed. The man would be treading water way out there with no land in sight, all alone and helpless, getting weaker by the minute and absolutely sure he was going to drown, and then a porpoise would show up and keep him afloat with its nose, and nudge him along toward the nearest shore, sometimes for days, sometimes for hundreds of miles. Nobody really knew why a porpoise would do such a thing. Some said it was because porpoises were good by nature. She has often thought of Buddy that way—like a porpoise good by nature who kept her from drowning in herself, in her own weakness, which sometimes feels to her as deep and frightening as an ocean. Too bad he didn’t get her all the way to shore before he died. And even if he never could’ve gotten her to shore, even if that was asking too much, even of him, he could’ve at least kept on keeping her afloat.
She’d mourned and mourned and Buddy’s friends had mourned with her. But as the weeks turned to months the friends stopped mourning and half a year after they put Buddy in the ground they started making moves on his widow. And she’d been so sick at heart still, so afraid of tomorrow, so terribly lonely in the sleepless nights, so desperate to touch something, anything, anybody that had been a part of his life and therefore a part of him—and drinking so steadfastly every night—that she surrendered to them. All of them. She went to bed with every man she’d known to be Buddy’s friend and even with some who simply claimed they’d been.
It went like that for month after month. And all the while, her heart cried for her lost good man—and for herself, who could not stay afloat without his help.
One night she and some guy she knew was married but whose name she wasn’t sure of—a guy who’d told her he’d been best friends with Buddy when they were teenagers and worked on the rigs in Luling—were stumbling around drunk in her bedroom and struggling to get out of their clothes and the fool lurched hard against the dresser and her little glass ballerina tumbled off and shattered on the floor. She knelt in the broken glass and fingered the pieces and began to cry. The fella said he was sorry and put his arm around her to try to comfort her and she started slapping at him and cursing him and throwing things at him—a lamp, the bedside clock, her shoes. The man quick grabbed up his boots and shirt and hustled out of there, looking back at her like she was some kind of crazywoman.
The next day she loaded the truck with as much of her belongings as she could fit into it and moved with the kids to Beaumont.
She rented a little house near the park close to Willow Marsh Bayou and got herself a job as receptionist at the Ford dealer’s. She didn’t have any experience at that kind of work but the interviewing man
ager told her he just knew she’d get the hang of it right quick. It was all he could do to look away from her legs in the minidress.
She made it a point to be at work on time every morning and by the end of her third day she knew everything there was to know about being a receptionist. After two weeks the manager gave her a three-dollar-a-week raise and said she was the best receptionist they’d ever had. Every day after work she picked the kids up at the home of a neighbor woman who took care of children for a dollar a day while their mommas were at work. She cooked a good supper every evening and watched TV with the kids and tried to make conversation with them during the commercials. She tried to find things to do with them on weekends. She kept away from the booze. She was trying with all her might to be the good person she kept telling herself she truly was.
But she couldn’t keep from remembering something she’d heard her momma say—that there’s no changing what you are and only a damn fool thinks there is. Dolores lay awake nights wondering how big a fool she was. Talking about daddy one time, momma had said that a leopard can try all day and night to make itself a zebra, but won’t none of its spots ever turn to stripes, not ever.
The job bored her damn near to tears. The fake smile she wore the day long felt like some awful mask. The salesmen all came on to her—every one of them married but acting like he was hot stuff and she ought to be thrilled he was asking her to sneak off to a motel at lunchtime. She told them she was engaged, that her fiancé was in the army and stationed in Germany but would be coming home in about three months. And still some of those peckerwoods persisted.
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