Painted Dresses

by Patricia Hickman

  The silver earrings were a good match for the black and white clothes. I dozed. It was the first time I felt safe enough to go sound asleep since Delia had shot Sophie Deals. When I woke up, we were coasting into William P. Hobby Airport in Houston.

  13

  BEFORE CHECKING OUT the next morning at the airport hotel, I took the three photos of my mother and pinned them in a trinity inside my suitcase lid. There was the one of her as a bashful young girl and the one I remembered of her as a teen. There were common items in the teenage photograph, such as a wheelbarrow and a washtub against my grandmother’s house, a spotted dog on the porch. My grandmother posed in the middle of a group of relatives. Mother stood two people away. Grandma wore a cotton dress and a black straw hat, small brimmed, but tall as a three-layer cake. Like my mother, she gardened no matter what the circumstance. Even though hard times shadowed all the relatives’ eyes like sinkholes, the photo revealed a trio of begonias in clay pots on the porch steps.

  Delia ranted about the hotel, criticizing the loud airplanes roaring overhead all night. So I checked us out and asked the concierge to reserve a car for me. The rental car attendant brought it right to the curb.

  “We left that Grady far behind, I’ll say that,” said Delia. “He’ll never think to look for us in Pasadena.”

  An old billboard advertised the Strawberry Festival from last May.

  “I’ll be. Here I thought they was the place for the Rose Parade,” said Delia.

  The gas tank was only partly full, so I pulled off of Gulf Freeway into a convenience store lot. Delia struck up a conversation with the station attendant while I selected an atlas. His name tag said, Beefy. “Busy place, this Houston. What do you do for fun around this place?” she asked.

  “Used to go dancing down at the Cowboy Ranch museum. They shut the place down,” said the young man. He had a gold-capped front tooth and wore an earring with a feather. “There’s a Waffle House and a CVS drugstore on every block, but we lose the one thing that made us not like every place else.”

  “Why don’t you open the Cowboy Ranch yourself then?” Delia asked.

  He looked startled, like he’d been asleep and just got shook.

  I bought Cheetos and cold drinks. Delia got a jerky just to say she got one in Texas.

  Beefy asked Delia, “What’s your name?”

  “Delia. What’s yours?”

  “Todd.”

  “Never knew a Todd named Beefy before.”

  He glanced at the name tag, laughing at Delia. He was charmed by her. Men often were at first. They bought into her childish pout as if she sold it for a dollar.

  I looked down and saw a large moth upside down on the floor. It was coated in ants. I tapped Delia’s foot since she was about to put her foot right on it.

  She jumped.

  We paid and then drove onto 1-45. Cars were stacked, lining up for rush hour.

  “Texas is like every place else,” said Delia.

  “You haven’t been every place else. How do you know that?” I asked.

  “TV.”

  “What did you expect?”

  “Horses, guns.”

  I told her to look around us at the idling drivers. “Lots of cowboy hats. Don’t see that in North Carolina.”

  “I guess so.” She sniffed the jerky. “Gaylen, you was crying in your sleep at Aunt Renni’s.”

  So much had happened since we left Siphon. Delia jolted me back to Renni’s. “I don’t know why I do that,” I said. “Mother used to shake me awake and ask me what was so much to be sad about. When I woke up, I didn’t know. I seemed to know more in my sleep than I did awake.”

  Delia took out a cardboard picture of Jesus. It was the size of a pack of cigarettes and hung by a chain.

  “Where did you get that?” I asked.

  “Todd give it to me, probably because he slid his phone number into my hand at the same time. I’ll hang Jesus up for luck.” So she hung Christ over the rearview mirror.

  He had a purple heart painted right over his robe.

  “You think Jesus really looked like that?” she asked. “White dress, purple heart, hair like Jerry Garcia?”

  “There weren’t any cameras to take his picture.”

  “I think the purple heart means he’s sad.”

  “He’s the King of kings, Grandma used to say. Why would Jesus be sad, Delia? Because he knew he was going to die?”

  “I think it was because he had to watch us running around like ants, eating each other alive. He wanted to stop us, but it was like stopping ants.”

  I thought about the ants on the giant moth. I did not know if that was the right analogy. I studied bugs in high school and the way they made colonies. I never read that ants were eating each other. But I imagined them down in the bowels of the earth, not knowing that a Waffle House was being built right over them. “I think he was sad because he has to look down on the earth and everywhere he looks people are asleep. So he comes down here to see who he can wake up.”

  Delia looked over at a car idling next to us on the interstate. A woman was driving a shiny truck. Next to her sat a man with a cowboy hat over his eyes, his arms crossed at his chest. His mouth had fallen open.

  “I want to get me a Texas cowboy hat just so my friends at the Waffle House know I been to Texas,” said Delia.

  We merged onto 1-610. The closer we got to Mr. Savage’s house, the more nervous I got. It was a twisted kind of nervous, like cables of nervous and mad wrapped up around my chest. I imagined Mother and Daddy in California, but I could not see Truman. Mother once said she took me down to the ocean and touched my newborn foot to the salt water just so she could tell me I had been to the ocean. When she told me that story, it was like she had lit a torch inside of me, making me want to leave Boiling Waters and see the other side of the ocean. I could not imagine the rest of the country spread out between the place where I was born and the place I grew up. I wondered now if she did that on purpose or if she even knew what she was doing to me. But she never said what had come of her boy. Was he with her and my father in Salinas? Mr. Savage would surely know since Truman was his boy too.

  Delia kept saying, “Stay straight, turn right, and turn right again,” until we finally pulled up right in front of the address I had printed in the library. We got out and sidled gingerly up the walk. The house was a brick ranch, like the kind built back in the ′50s. The door opened. Mr. Savage was a big man like my father. He kept staring at me as if he were reading something familiar in my eyes. “May I help you?” he asked.

  “I’m Gaylen and this is Delia. Our half brother’s name is Truman Savage.”

  “I don’t know any other Truman Savage in the country. I’m the only one.” He seemed proud of that, his heels lifting a bit when he said it.

  Delia pulled out Truman’s grade-school picture. I didn’t know she had grabbed it from the house. “This is him,” she said. “Our brother.”

  His face turned the color of a shell. “What do you want?”

  I said, “Mr. Savage, you and my mother were once married.” He kept staring so I said, “Fiona Chapel from back in North Carolina.”

  He studied me more intently, like he wanted to push me off his porch. “I left: that all behind,” he said. “I don’t have anything to do with those people. Say, what’s this about anyway? You come digging up trash around here, you’ll not get anywhere with me.”

  I tried to assuage Mr. Savage’s temper and assure him I wasn’t looking to trash him. “Not at all, sir,” I said. “My mother passed away some years back. But my brother, your boy Truman, he’s in prison.”

  That surprised him.

  “Could we talk to you, sir?” I asked. “We’re trying to understand a few things about him.”

  He did not invite us in right away. But then Delia set to gibbering about our inheritance and how we
were driving all over the country seeing family. Something about the words spilling out of her caused him to sigh, like he realized he could not get rid of us. So he invited us inside.

  The house was decorated like everything had come from a Cracker Barrel country store. Little jars of okra and jars of cookie mix tied with ragged pink ribbons lined a shelf in his kitchen. Photographs of Mr. Savage and his wife, Gloria, and their son, Parson, were all over his house, on a fireplace hearth and next to medicine bottles on pretty little Hepplewhite tables. A miniature Christmas tree covered in faded silver and blue ornaments decorated the hearth. Mr. Savage had left it all as if Gloria might happen through the living room at any moment. He saw me looking at the tree and said, “My niece Tess worries over me since Gloria passed. She put that up. Otherwise I’d not fool with Christmas.”

  I took a seat in an embroidered rocker. “Your wife was Gloria. I noticed that she passed away.”

  He looked suspiciously at me. “How did you know that?”

  “Internet.”

  “You looking up my business for a reason?”

  “We thought you was murdered by Judge Cuvier,” said Delia. She looked at Mother’s ex, the two of them staring at one another, quiet as sunning gators, until I said, “My brother, Truman, wrote to us, telling us that he needed money to get an attorney and get back his father’s land in Houston.” I then told him what Truman had said about him. “He said you were murdered.” I half-smiled. “Obviously you’re not murdered.”

  “I’m as alive as can be. What would he say that for?”

  “He wants money for an attorney,” I said. “He just wants out of prison.”

  “Mr. Savage, my brother sounds sad. Do you ever contact him?” asked Delia.

  There was a festering anger in his eyes. “I’ve disowned Truman. He knows why. But he’s nothing but a liar, so don’t ask him to tell you anything. It won’t be true.”

  “My mother told us that he ran away from home,” I said, remembering Renni’s different version but playing dumb. “I’m trying to find out why.”

  He sat with his hands clasped, tapping his thumbs, like someone accustomed to holding together others dependent on him. I tried to imagine him married to my mother. If my father had not gone off on emotional tangents, he would be a lot like Mr. Savage: a man of few words, who, when he finally speaks, examines the words before allowing them to go public.

  “The day he ran away from our house, my Aunt Renni says he came to you. Is that right?”

  “Best I knew, your daddy put him on a bus,” he said. “Had to. His mother, Fiona, kicked him out. There wasn’t no running away to it. Don’t know why she told you that.”

  Delia glanced at me.

  “My father bought him a bus ticket?” I had not counted on my father being in on the trouble with Truman.

  “Had to. Truman was only fifteen. He wouldn’t have had the means.”

  “How long did he live with you?” asked Delia.

  “A month.” He pressed his hands together as if smashing a bug. “My little boy, Parson, came to me crying. The whole month Truman lived here, he was molesting his little brother.” His jaw clenched. “If Parson had told me sooner …” he stopped. His shoulders lifted slightly as he breathed, while he tensely stroked his forehead with one hand. Finally he said, “But Truman had threatened him, told him that if he told, he would hurt him worse.”

  The room darkened. There was a change in the Texas weather.

  I sighed, my head suffering the early pangs of a headache. “How do you know my mother made Truman leave?”

  “Truman said she threw him out, but that didn’t surprise me. She never treated him right. Of course, I always thought poorly of her as a mother, so I felt sorry for him. I’d tried to get her to let him come and live with me. If she didn’t love the boy, why’d she have to hold on to him?” He got up and went for his medicine. “Pardon me, ladies. I just had a recent spell with my heart. Put me in the hospital. Got to watch my blood pressure.” He went into the kitchen for water and then returned to the living room.

  “What kind of mother was she … my mother … to Truman?”

  “Mad as all get out. She whipped him, sometimes for no reason that I could see. But she was mad at me, mad at her mother. Fiona Chapel was mad at the whole world.”

  “I remember her like that,” said Delia.

  “I think she tried harder with us to be a better mother,” I said. “I was born in California, Mr. Savage. But my parents moved back to North Carolina after I was born. Did Truman go with my mother to California?”

  “He did. I tried to keep her from doing that. She had up and married one fella, but it was short-lived. Then she run off with Mr. Syler, your daddy. I told her he’d not put up with her any better than me or any other man. No man could tolerate her angry spells. She was two-timing too.”

  I imagined on the flight from North Carolina asking him if the dallying had been mutual. But sitting looking him straight in the eyes, I could not get up the nerve to form the words. He had an imposing stature and took a hard line on his own opinions.

  “But I didn’t want Truman so far away I couldn’t check on him. She never listened to me. Fiona Chapel could not be told what to do. She was going to have things her way or not at all.”

  I said to Delia, “So Truman was living with Mother and Daddy in California. He was there when I was born.”

  Delia said, “Hah!”

  “Fiona dropped out of contact with me after that. I moved off to Texas and married my wife. I had mailed a letter to Fiona one last time, just so Truman would know of my whereabouts. Then we had Parson. Life was finally good … until the day he showed up looking pitiful.”

  “My brother must have been good at gaining sympathy,” I said.

  “He was quite the actor. Boy could summon tears like a woman. And believable! He could work an adult like no kid I ever saw. I got my eyes opened, though.”

  “Did you make him leave?” I asked.

  “I did. I wanted to kill him with my two bare hands, but throwing him out somehow seemed better punishment. Not twenty minutes passed and my brother Will called me from three streets away, angry. Said I was a terrible father for kicking Truman out without a dime or a place to eat. He took him right in.”

  “Didn’t you tell him what had happened to Parson?”

  “Of course not! People don’t talk about such things,” he said.

  Delia asked, “How long did Truman stay at your brother’s place, Mr. Savage?”

  He looked as if the color was completely bled out of his face. “He molested all three of my brother’s children: Tess, Bo, and Jana. Then my brother kicked him out.”

  I wanted to ask Mr. Savage again why he did not tell his brother about Parson, the same as my mother who did not tell why she kicked him out. He could have stopped it from happening. But he looked so lost, having been forced to stop and consider the past, that I kept my thoughts to myself, and they were legion.

  The sun evaporated, and Houston beamed like a Mexican festival on the flat plain of southern Texas. I drove to a taco stand for a late lunch. Then Delia and I stopped in at a giant flea market before driving into Houston. I was glad to put Mr. Savage behind us. Not knowing what to expect, I had booked a flight to leave the next day.

  “Truman molested us, didn’t he?” Delia asked me.

  “I’d like to know for sure,” I said.

  “Mama should have told us. We’ve got the right to know.”

  “There’s got to be someone who knows for certain,” I said.

  “Truman knows.”

  I felt angry but did not tell Delia the thoughts going through my mind. I imagined Truman sitting in prison, waiting to get out. I wondered if my mother had been in contact with him all of those years. In the letter to Delia and me, he had called us baby sisters. That was how he remembered us: in
fant girls, young and vulnerable. But I could not remember any tangible evidence of the events that transpired his last day in Boiling Waters. No matter how hard I tried, I could not picture his teen face. I tried again to remember the day he left our town. All I could remember was how he stood over my father’s bed, dissecting a frog and then my mother beating him.

  It was like trying to see through a painted window.

  We drove up and down the downtown streets, Delia ogling the city sights and me wanting to hunt down whatever restaurants were driving me nuts with the smell of Tex-Mex and Mex-Mex.

  We pulled up to the Magnolia Hotel. The valet opened Delia’s door. She stepped out in her fake lizard boots and cowboy hat. Although I would not have put cowboy boots with the Burberry outfit, she somehow blended with the Texas glitz of downtown Houston. She kissed the doorman’s cheek and asked him his name. He blushed and told her, “Duke.” I thought it was some name all the Texas hotel people were told to say, so I did not take stock in it. She asked him if there was a vacancy, and he was certain we could get a room.

  I asked him, “Where do you recommend we eat?”

  “You can’t beat Houston for food, ma’am. They say the food here is like visiting one hundred and twenty or more countries. But if you want, I can make you a reservation, call you a cab. That way you won’t have to find your way around.”

  “Give us thirty minutes, then, Duke. You pick the place.” I gave him the keys, and we hauled luggage out onto the walk and checked it with him.

  Delia skipped up the walk under the long black hotel awning. A woman walking a small white dog bent to scoop up her pet and step aside, wide-eyed at the sight of Delia laughing and flinging her hair. I walked past the hotel guest, smiled, and whispered, “She loves those Texas margaritas.”

  “Why sure, sure!” the woman laughed. “Can’t blame her for that!”

  Duke touched my arm. “Is your sister single?”

  “Um-hm,” I said.

  “She’s pretty as any woman I’ve seen,” he said.

  “You just have to watch, Duke. My sister bites,” I said.