She picked up the phone and punched in the number.
She got through on the first try.
IT WILL HAVE BLOOD THEY SAY: BLOOD WILL HAVE BLOOD.
STONES HAVE BEEN KNOWN TO MOVE, AND TREES TO SPEAK.
—MACBETH
The hellish orange fireball is sliced in three angry pieces and it is burning her away. It’s blistered her leg and soon it will gobble the rest of her. Sarah Jane Hurley has finally hit rock bottom where she belongs. She’s crash-landed in the pit of torment, just like Gramma always said she would if she didn’t mend her ways.
She smells awful, like there’s some dying animal inside her—ungainly, stinking, oozing—and now it’s finally dying. And she knows why all this is happening. It’s because of the coat. Lucy Locket lost her pocket. The coat’s what kept her safe while she’s been on the move. Then that fucking Lufkin made her give it away, and now she is unprotected—just a mass of raw, terrified animal nerve exposed to that garish fireball out there.
She’s had that coat since the day she arrived in Austin more than a year ago. She found it with the tags still on it—a piece of good luck for a change, an omen. The second she put it on, she became Cow Lady, a brand-new person with no past whatsoever. Hey, diddle, diddle! It always made her feel there were still possibilities. The cat and the fiddle/The cow jumped over the moon. It’s not that she’s superstitious, but if she’s going to survive, she’s got to get it back.
She struggles to a sitting position and gasps to see the orange fireball become whole. She blinks down at the long grasses she has been looking through. It is morning and the sun is rising over this vacant lot where she’s been sleeping. There’s no part of her that doesn’t hurt—the usual aching and nausea that plague her after a binge, plus the pain in her joints and the throbbing, scorching bites on her left leg that are certainly infected.
She looks down at herself. She’s got no blanket, and no coat. She’s lying on the bare ground, her jeans and sweater damp from the grass. Diddle, diddle dumpling, my son John went to bed with his britches on. She struggles to her feet and staggers to the fence at the back of the vacant lot. She pulls her jeans down and squats to pee. Only then does she see the others, those three long cocoons stretched out on the ground. One shape she recognizes as Lufkin and the other two are the tramps they’ve been drinking with, but she can’t remember their names. She doesn’t even know how many days they’ve been at it, or what day it is now.
She picks up her bag, limps toward the street, and slowly makes her way a few blocks to where a newspaper box stands on the corner. She glances at the paper. It’s Thursday. They’ve been drunk since Tuesday night, she thinks. Somewhere she’s lost a whole day and a night.
She knows without any doubt what she has to do: she has to find Tin Can and get the coat back.
Thursday is Tin Can’s blood day. If she walks up to Twenty-ninth Street she might find her at the Plasma Center. She starts trudging north on Red River, resigning herself to the long walk, limping because of the shooting pains in her left leg.
A block away from the Plasma Center, she finally stops to rest. She leans against the side of Hub’s Donuts and watches the bums wandering into the Center. The smell of fresh doughnuts and coffee drifting from Hub’s makes her wish she had some money. Four of those soft, sugary, glazed doughnuts washed down with a cup of coffee might help. But she has no money—except for the hundred-dollar bill safety-pinned inside her flannel shirt, and, of course, she can’t use that. It is a sacred object, the last thing Ellie gave her. She has vowed never to spend it. Sarah Jane refuses to let herself think about that parting scene when Ellie gave it to her and told her to stay away. When she quits drinking one of these days and gets back on her feet, Sarah Jane plans to give that hundred-dollar bill right back to Ellie. And she’s worked out exactly what she’ll say to her. She’ll hug her and say, “You’re a good daughter, honey, but you need this for yourself. I can take care of myself now.”
Across the intersection she spots Squint and Roylee talking with Zippo, a mongrel-skinny addict who always has an unlit cigarette butt hanging from his lips. Zippo seems harmless, but Squint and Roylee are dudes Sarah Jane tries to stay away from—predators, bottom feeders always on the lookout for a way to cash in on other homeless people. Squint is the boss and Roylee serves as his Seeing Eye dog because Squint is said to be legally blind, able to see only shapes and colors. Sarah Jane doesn’t know whether she believes that or not; it might just be one more of Squint’s scams. Today she is actually glad to run into him because he knows all the homeless people in town and he’s got his nose in everybody’s business.
She crosses the intersection. Squint turns his head and seems to watch her approach. He is a tall, well-built man in his thirties, with long black hair and high cheekbones. His eyes, which are mere slits, are set close together and very deep into his skull under jutting brows. Roylee is short and square and hairless. His massive arms are covered with blurry blue tattoos. Roylee says something into Squint’s ear, and Squint smiles in Sarah Jane’s direction.
“Hey, Zippo,” Sarah Jane says to the addict. She nods at Squint and Roylee.
“Long time, Cow Lady,” Squint says, studying her through his slits with an intensity that surprises her.
“Cow Lady?” Zippo says. “Where’s your coat?”
“Tin Can’s got it. I’m looking for her. You seen her?”
Zippo’s head bobs on his scrawny, wattled, chicken neck.
“Tin Can? That the lil gal carries a pussy cat around? She was here last week, I believe. We was next to each other in side. Makes us blood brothers or some such thing.” He laughs at his joke, managing to keep the butt between his lips unmoving.
“You seen her this week?”
He shakes his head.
Squint says, “When’d you give her your coat?”
“Lent it. Coupla days ago,” Sarah Jane says. “Why? You see her?”
“No. Just wondering. You don’t come see us at Patchwork no more. Got digs now?” Squint asks.
“Do me a favor,” Sarah Jane says. “If you see Tin Can, tell her I’m looking for her. It’s real important.”
“You didn’t answer me,” Squint says, not smiling now. “Where you hanging these days?”
“Oh, here and there. With friends,” Sarah Jane says.
“Who? Lufkin?” Squint asks.
“Sometimes,” she says, puzzled at his interest. He’s certainly never shown this much interest in her before.
“Y’all still camp down by the crick? Behind the Grill?”
“No,” she says.
“I bet you still hang at the library days.”
“What’s it to you?” Sarah Jane asks.
“I just like to keep track of friends,” Squint says with a broad smile that looks to Sarah Jane like a bear trap opening up.
“Sure,” she says. “See you around.” She enters the Plasma Center, passing right by the nurse at reception, who is busy with some paperwork. She stands at the door and surveys the big room with the rows of black couches. She knows this room well, comes twice a week to sell plasma at nine bucks a shot. This morning about half the couches have people lying on them. They are hooked up to the big white machines that take blood and spin it to separate out the plasma and put the red blood cells back in you. It’s just another way of selling your body, but the money’s regular, and you probably won’t get a disease from it.
There’s a very young black girl she recognizes from the lunch line at Caritas and a skinny guy she’s seen flying a sign on one of the traffic islands, but no Tin Can. She manages to get out the door again without talking to the nurse, which is a relief because she’s afraid if they see what bad shape she’s in they might not let her donate next time. Even here they have some standards.
Stepping out of the air conditioning, she really feels the heat. It’s only May, but at this rate summer will be a scorcher.
Zippo has gone, but Squint and Roylee are still there. “Hey
, Cow Lady,” Squint says, “why you so unfriendly? Don’t you like me no more?” He reaches out and takes hold of her arm.
“I gotta go,” she says.
“Where?” he asks, tightening his grip on her.
“We been through this already, Squint.”
He squeezes her arm. “But you ain’t answered yet.”
She jerks away, breaking his grip, and walks off.
“Hey!” Squint calls out. “Come see us. Come on over to Patchwork. I’ll make it worth your while.”
She glances back at Squint and Roylee, remembering the one night she spent there when she first came to Austin. “Never. I wouldn’t come back there if you were giving away winning lottery tickets.” She turns and walks on, troubled by why Squint thinks she’s worth bothering with. She decides it must be because of Lufkin. Squint’s been making money off Lufkin’s day-labor gigs and he wants to butter up the old lady. But, still, it worries her. Squint is not someone whose attentions you want to attract.
She figures that Tin Can’s probably back at her old place along the creek. That’s the place to look. She starts walking south on Trinity, but after a block she decides to take a detour, go wake Lufkin up. She’s mad at him about the coat, but she needs someone to talk to. She needs the company.
She turns east toward the vacant lot off Red River. The soles of her high-tops are worn so thin that her feet feel the red-hot pavement and every piece of gravel. Hot cross buns. One a penny, two a penny. Her bag feels heavier than usual, the strap cuts into her shoulder, but she has no safe place to leave it, and even if she did, she can’t be separated from it. Everything else she once owned has disappeared because she let herself get separated from it. This bag she’s got to hold on to for dear life. It’s part of her.
The lot is a jungly overgrown patch between a junk store and an abandoned bar, mostly concealed from the road by a rickety wood fence. Sarah Jane shuffles through the long grass. Two blanket-covered lumps show no signs of life, but Lufkin is awake and sitting propped against the fence, staring into space. He looks up at Sarah Jane as she approaches.
“Ah,” he says, “the damsel cometh, bearing in her bag doughnuts and coffee for her lord and master, I hope.” He presses his hands together in a praying gesture. He once saw a movie called The Scarlet Pimpernel and he likes to try to copy the way the hero talked in it.
She looks down at him—a tall, emaciated tramp sitting on a filthy bedroll. His streaky black and gray beard has pieces of grass and loose tobacco in it. He’s so pathetic with that silly talk from an old movie when he’s sitting here on a dung heap, hungry and hung over. And he’s so ridiculous—she’s never once brought him anything, and here he is thinking maybe she’s brought him doughnuts.
“If I had any money for doughnuts, you think I’d bring ’em back here?” she says.
“Ah. A fiery wench, proud and spirited. No man’s servant, she.”
“For God’s sake. Get up and walk with me to Tin Can’s place down by the creek.”
“Why?”
“I’ve got to find her. Come on. I’ll tell you while we walk.”
“The spitfire wench needs a knight to protect her from the wrath of her enemies.”
She smiles in spite of her annoyance. “That’ll be the day—when I need you for protection.”
He gets to his feet, slowly, wincing as he straightens his bad knee, which Sarah Jane knows looks nothing like a knee, more like a lump of dough, all scarred and swollen under his filthy khakis.
“One moment, please.” He walks off a few feet and turns his back. “The knight pisseth,” he says over his shoulder as he urinates a long stream against a tree. Then he turns around, zipping his pants, and says, “Lead on.”
As they walk south on Red River in the blazing noonday sun, Sarah Jane tells him what happened under the deck Monday night, about Tin Can running off.
Lufkin is quiet, seemingly caught up in the story. When she finishes, he says, “What did those dudes talk about up there on the deck?”
“Like I said, I don’t remember much.”
“Try,” he says.
“Okay. It’s so dumb. The Billy Goat Gruff one was supposed to kill everyone in the chamber, you know, the Senate chamber, with some poison so deadly that Hitler wouldn’t even use it.” She glances over to see his response, expecting him to be laughing, but he’s not. “And the other one, Toe-tapper, paid him some money from some group, a posse, I think, and, hell, that’s all. I don’t remember the rest.”
“When is this supposed to happen?”
“Whenever some bill on guns is voted on. Monday, I think.”
“Shee-it!” Lufkin says. “You got yourself a goddamned hornet’s nest in your outhouse.”
“Huh?”
“A honest-to-God moral problem.”
“What say?” She glances at his hairy profile bobbing along next to her, his bad leg dragging behind. He is the strangest creature.
“A moral problem,” he repeats. “You ever hear of morals?”
“Bullshit.”
“No. This is serious. You can’t just let these honchos go and poison folks up there in the Capitol, can you?”
She is stunned by this take on it; it never occurred to her. “Got fuck-all to do with me.”
“Cow Lady! How you gonna feel when you hear they’ve gone and done it, and folks have died?”
“I won’t feel any way in particular. Except surprised. This was just men talking big.”
“Maybe. But sometimes people do what they say. They say they’re gonna bomb buildings and shoot Presidents and goddamned if they don’t go out and do it sometimes. You gotta pay some attention.”
Sarah Jane shrugs. What a ridiculous man, with his newspapers and his morals. “Let me get this straight. Here you are, a bum who would steal a bottle from a baby if you got the chance, and you’re preaching to me like it’s a Baptist Sunday morning.”
“I ain’t preaching. But you gotta remember—”
“I hope you aren’t gonna say ‘What goes around comes around.’ “
“But it does. Didn’t you never go to Sunday school or nothing?”
She remembered her gramma dragging her, unwilling and resisting, to Sunday school every week while her mama slept off her Saturday night benders. “No.”
“Anyway,” he says, “you can’t just ignore this.”
“Watch me.”
“You should tell the police.”
She shakes her head firmly. That she can never do.
“Why not?” he asks.
She’s never told anyone about the howler and all the blood and what a fast getaway she had to make from Houston. “Cops,” she mutters, “think they own the world.”
“Well, just remember I told you: what goes around comes around. You do the wrong thing here, it’ll come back and bite you in the ass.”
“Wouldn’t it be just awful if I lost everything and had to live out on the street?”
“There’s worse things,” Lufkin mutters.
They are getting close now to the Creekside Grill. Sarah Jane leads the way to an old railroad bridge and a hidden path down to the creek. This is terrain she knows so well she can do it in the dark, and often has. It has magic for her because it is a wild place right in the middle of the city and it is hidden, so most people don’t know it is there. She pushes aside a branch and holds it for Lufkin. The path of trodden-down earth winds its way down the bank to a flat grassy area that is pocked with debris. Brown bags, flattened cardboard boxes, beer cans, and Styrofoam cups mark it as an occasional encampment for the homeless. But no one is around today.
As they descend, the temperature drops several degrees, and it is darker with the high banks and the foliage overhead blocking all but a dappling of sun. The air is so muggy Sarah Jane can barely breathe. Lufkin starts to call out for Tin Can, but Sarah Jane hushes him.
They walk silently along the stony creek bed. It reminds Sarah Jane of playing Indian as a child; she has always been able to
move quickly and quietly in spite of her size. They stop when they get to the familiar clearing where Tin Can’s oil drum cooker stands close to the creek. They look around in the dappled light for the woman and her calico cat. Sarah Jane glances apprehensively up toward the Creekside Grill, but it is not visible from down here. She takes a chance and calls out very softly, “Tin Can! You here?” They listen to the silence.
Lufkin sits down on a boulder and pulls a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from his breast pocket. “Lord, I’m still wasted. What day is it?”
Sarah Jane doesn’t answer. She is walking around the clearing, peering up and down the creek as far as she can see into the dark bends. She looks into the oil drum, hoping there might be signs of recent cooking, but the remains of burned charcoal and wood look ancient. She sniffs, but there is only the acrid odor of old fires and damp, decaying vegetation and her own sharp sweat.
Sarah Jane wonders if Tin Can could possibly be under the deck, but she doesn’t want to go up there. She crosses her arms over her chest and looks down into the few inches of water trickling over the rocks. She is stymied, not used to making decisions. She’s gotten rusty.
She turns to Lufkin. “Well, damn. The little shit is avoiding me. She’s hiding. She’s scared I’m gonna be mad. And I am mad.”
Lufkin is sitting on the rock with his eyes closed, smoking, looking very much at peace. It makes her want to poke at him, stir him up, make him feel as anxious as she does. This is all his fault, anyway. She says, “Help me look some more. You go upstream a bit toward the Grill, and I’ll walk the other way.”
He blows out a trail of smoke. “Knee’s resting.”
“Well, give me a smoke then.” She rarely buys cigarettes since he always has some and never refuses to share.
All the Dead Lie Down Page 12
