Take Me There

by Carolee Dean

  “I got religion now.”

  Levida glares at Dorie, who quickly loses her smile and puts both hands on the table.

  “Be careful about gettin’ too much religion,” Levida warns him, looking from Wade to Dorie. “You don’t want folks to call you zealous.”

  “Oh, don’t worry, ma’am. I ain’t the jealous type.”

  Dorie and Wade watch old Looney Tunes reruns, giggling and holding hands while Levida and I wash the dishes. At ten o’clock Levida turns on the news and sits on the couch next to Dorie, bringing an end to the girl’s fun. She finally goes outside to the front porch with Wade for a very long good-night kiss.

  I am surprised to see Arnie Golden on the TV screen in front of the Walls Unit in Huntsville. Tornado Tim stands beside him, along with a pretty black-haired woman I can only assume is Tornado’s mother.

  “When a good man like my brother is shot down and slaughtered, the scales of justice are tipped, set off balance, made unstable—and that’s a dangerous situation for all of us. There is only one thing that will right those scales, and that’s what we’ve been waiting for these last eleven years.” Tornado and Mrs. Golden nod their sad heads in agreement. “The governor needs to understand that any lesser punishment for D.J. Dawson would minimize the value of the lives of the law enforcement officers who risk their necks each and every day for the people of this state.”

  “Damn!”

  “Watch your mouth,” Levida says. Then she turns off the TV and studies me. “Well, I don’t guess you boys can sleep in the barn no more. You better go fetch your gear.”

  I can’t believe my luck. I walk outside to find Wade with his tongue halfway down Dorie’s throat. “C’mon,” I say. “We’re moving uptown.”

  Dorie says good-bye reluctantly. Wade and I go out to the barn with flashlights to gather our few belongings, along with the sleeping bags Levida has loaned us. It would have been nice if she could have decided to be hospitable while it was still light out.

  When we walk back to the house, I am surprised to find my grandmother standing on the porch, holding a lantern. “Follow me,” she says, and takes off down the dirt road that leads up a hill toward the family graveyard and into the darkness.

  “Where we goin’?” Wade whispers to me as we approach the white picket fence that surrounds the row of wooden crosses.

  For all I know my grandmother could be planning to shoot us and bury us with the rest of the family, but I don’t think it would help to share this notion with Wade.

  “There it is,” Levida says as a single-wide mobile home appears in the glow of her lantern, over the hill, just beyond the graves. “Home sweet home.” She strides toward it, finds a pile of empty beer bottles in her path, and kicks them out of the way. “Darn kids,” she says, and then walks up the metal steps and opens up the door, which isn’t locked, because the handle has been jimmied. I imagine late-night beer parties at an abandoned trailer, wonder if any liquor has been left behind, and try to push away the thought as Wade and I follow her inside to a darkened living room. “I’ll fire up the generator tomorrow so you can have electricity. You can keep the lantern until then.” She sets it down on a table next to an old coffee can filled with ashes and cigarette butts. Picks up the can. Shakes her head. “I shot the back window out of one of their trucks last month, but they don’t ever learn.”

  By the dim light of the lantern I can see a couch and a table with names carved into the wood.

  I remember it. This is the place where I lived with my parents. This was our home. It hasn’t changed one bit, except for the vandalism.

  The memories come washing over me in waves.

  The couch, still covered in a hideous brown plaid fabric, is where I used to watch Seinfeld with my mother. Next to the couch are the pencil marks on the wall where my father used to chart my growth. The living room opens up across a bar into a kitchen. There is the pantry door next to the refrigerator. I think about the bag of peanuts my father used to keep on a shelf in the back, remember what was hidden there, and shudder.

  “Sweet dreams,” Levida tells us, but there is nothing sweet in the way she says it.

  That night I dream of blood. Rivers of it flowing across the floor of the trailer. Blood dripping down the metal steps, finding its way into the dirt, where it cuts a trail all the way from the Hill Country of Texas to the sandy beaches of California and the Pacific Ocean, where it stains the whole sea red.

  It’s just like Arnie Golden told me. Blood never forgets. It has a memory of an ancient path toward home.

  THE RIVER

  Blood is a river.

  One drop follows another

  until they all reach the bottom

  of

  the

  deep

  blue

  sea.

  30

  IT IS THE EARLY MORNING HOURS, JUST AFTER DAYBREAK, when I hear a gunshot. I scramble to my feet from the couch, still half asleep. Look around the living room. Wade and Baby Face are curled up on the floor.

  I look out the window, half expecting to see Tornado T. and his friends or maybe even Eight Ball, but no one seems to be out there.

  Take a closer look at the window itself. See blood splattered across the blue curtains.

  I kneel down next to Wade and shake him awake. “Are you okay?” I ask him.

  “Let me sleep,” he mumbles, rolling away from me.

  I check Baby Face, thinking maybe she’s been hit by a stray bullet, but she’s perfectly fine.

  I check myself, thinking maybe I’m in shock and dying and don’t even know it, but I’m completely intact, except for my imagination, running wild.

  I glance toward the door, wondering if someone is going to burst through at any moment, and notice the clock.

  It’s an old windup clock shaped like a house.

  A cuckoo clock.

  I stagger backward a step. See the graffiti above the clock.

  THE DEATH HOUSE

  This is the room of my nightmares.

  This is the room where Jack Golden died.

  I walk slowly back over to the window.

  Inspect the curtain.

  The blood is dried. Old. Black.

  I slip on my shoes, don’t even bother with a shirt, and run as fast as I can down the dirt road back to Levida’s house.

  She is outside hanging laundry on the clothesline and does not seem at all surprised to see me.

  “What kind of game are you playing with me?” I say.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says curtly, applying a row of clothespins to a flowered sheet. Levida picks up her basket and moves down to an empty place on the line.

  I take the basket away from her. “What happened in that trailer?”

  “I wasn’t there!” she yells, grabbing the basket back, and then she throws it on the ground between us, sending socks and underwear flying. Her voice grows as quiet as a whisper but keeps its razor edge. “But you were.”

  With that she hurries back to the farmhouse, leaving the clothes behind.

  I can see the clock. I can hear the gunshot. I can even see the blood on the curtains, but I can’t see anything else.

  I take a deep breath, try to steady my shaking limbs, and go inside the house to find my grandmother chopping potatoes, hacking at them with a butcher knife. “I was six years old,” I manage to say, though my throat is as dry as a bone.

  “That’s old enough to remember,” she says, without looking up.

  “But I don’t.”

  “Or maybe you just don’t want to.” She scoops the potatoes up in her hands and throws them into a pot filled with water, then finally looks me in the eyes. “Maybe all this runnin’ around and askin’ questions, nosin’ into other people’s business is to keep yourself so busy that you don’t have to look at the truth.”

  I open my mouth to reply, but I cannot speak—because I have no answers.

  “So quit asking everybody else questions, unless you’
re ready to answer some questions yourself.”

  I walk back up to the trailer, go inside, try very hard not to look at the curtains or the clock as I grab a shirt from the cardboard box. I look for Jess’s note, but it has fallen out of yesterday’s pants. Searching frantically, I find it under the couch. Open it. Look at the words to make sure they are still there; half-afraid they might have erased themselves. Jess is the only thing in my life that seems real, but she is a thousand miles away.

  I carefully refold the paper. I hold it to my lips, then slip it into my pocket, and I am gone.

  When I get to the prison I’m not even sure my father will want to talk to me, but his eyes fill with relief when he sees me through the glass.

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t come back,” he says.

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t see me if I did.”

  “What I told you still stands. You can’t go stirrin’ up trouble with Jack Golden’s family.”

  “I know. I won’t.”

  “If they have any money, they came by it honestly.”

  “I know.”

  “Good. Now, on that subject …” A long, slow breath escapes him like the air from a leaking tire. “How have you and your mama been makin’ out for money all these years?”

  “Okay, I guess. Mom has a job singing at a nightclub in California. I’ve got a job too. Plus, Uncle Mitch sends us a thousand dollars a month and lets us live in one of his rent houses for six hundred. I never understood why he doesn’t just send four hundred, but that’s Mitch.”

  “Is that all he’s doin’ for you?”

  “Yeah,” I say, thinking it’s a lot, but then maybe my father doesn’t know what rents are in Southern California.

  “Damn him,” my father mutters under his breath.

  It makes me wonder, was there money for my mother and me, like there was money for Tornado Tim and his mother? I can’t ask with the guard listening.

  “Was he your border connection?”

  My father looks at the guard, and if I could read minds I’d guess he’s wondering whether or not he wants to rat out my uncle. He finally looks back at me and says, “There are a lot of things I can’t talk about.”

  I nod, afraid to push him too far, but at the same time hungry for answers and revenge. My life could have turned out totally different if we’d just had a little bit of money. I might have settled in a different neighborhood, done better in school, gone to college, ended up with Jess.

  “Cartwright told me he gave you my book,” my father says, intruding into my thoughts.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I think you’ll find some of the answers you’re lookin’ for in chapter five.”

  “Chapter five.” I groan. There is no way I’ll make it through an entire chapter.

  We sit in silence, all the unanswered and unasked questions thicker than the wall of glass between us.

  “How’s your mama?” he finally says. Today is the first he’s mentioned her, and the look on his face surprises me, as if everything hangs on my response.

  I think about how lost and desperate my mother looked the last time I saw her and wonder how she’s doing at Uncle Mitch’s house in La Puerta. I’ve hardly thought of her since I left California, and I’m suddenly filled with guilt. “She’s okay,” I lie.

  “You said she was singin’ at a nightclub in California. Is it a nice place?”

  It’s a cocktail lounge inside a bowling alley, but I’m not about to tell my father that. “Yeah. Pretty nice.”

  “Did she ever find someone?”

  I’m not sure what he means, but then he adds, “Did she remarry?”

  “No,” I tell him, realizing that she never really looked. Wondering why, becoming conscious of the fact that I’ve been so wrapped up in my own grief and misery that I’ve never questioned hers.

  He nods, as if this makes him sad for some reason. “Does she ever talk about me?” he asks, and then he seems to hold his breath while he waits for the answer.

  “No.”

  He nods again, but this time there is the faintest hint of a smile on his face, even though he looks as if he could cry. “Good,” he tells me. “Maybe when this is all over she can forget.”

  When I leave the prison I notice a large black vehicle coming up behind me, gaining speed. I’ve been so worried about my father I haven’t planned what to do if Eight Ball catches up with me.

  I killed his brother, and he will come after me. Then he will kill me. There are few things in life as certain as this. I wonder if Two Tone’s dead, empty eyes haunt Eight Ball the way they haunt me.

  The black SUV gets closer and I see that it is not a van, but a Jeep. I inhale a small breath of relief, but it is still clear that someone is following me. I wonder if Tornado Tim and his friends have decided to kill me in Livingston, away from the watchful eye of Uncle Arnie.

  I pull off the main road and wind through the town, make quick turns onto various side streets. All the while the Jeep stays on my tail. Whoever is driving isn’t even trying to hide the fact that they’re after me. I take two more quick right turns and pull into a car wash before I lose the guy.

  I drive to Huntsville, checking my rearview mirror all the way. I cannot stop shaking and realize that part of the reason is that I haven’t eaten all day. As much as this place gives me the creeps with its nine prisons and its death house sitting in the middle of town, I decide to stop at a sandwich shop on the town square for lunch.

  Maybe a small part of it is morbid curiosity. Leaning into the thing you fear, like Uncle Mitch used to advise me. Out the window of the café I can see protesters lining the street on both sides leading up to the Walls Unit.

  The waitress, an old woman with too much makeup and flaming red hair not even close to a natural color, delivers the roast beef sandwich I ordered.

  “Can you tell me how to get to La Puerta?” I ask her.

  “La Puerta!” says the waitress. “That’s all the way down on the Mexican border. Two hundred and fifty miles. It’ll take you at least four hours to get there. Why would you want to go all the way down there?”

  “Family.”

  It’s a slow afternoon. She shrugs, sits down in the chair across from me, and draws me a map on a paper napkin. “Take Interstate 45 to Houston. Then catch 59 to Victoria. Then you’ll merge with 77. Stay on 77. If you find yourself in Mexico, you’ve gone too far.”

  “Thank you,” I say, tucking the napkin into my back pocket.

  “Looks like it’s gonna be a big one,” she says, looking at the protesters gathered down the street.

  “A big one?”

  “You can rate ’em by how early the protesters start lining up, how many TV cameras show up, how big the crowd gets—that sort of thing. Sometimes hardly nobody shows up at all. Like in the case of that child molester they killed last week. No sympathy for him. Raped two little girls, sisters, and left their bodies in shallow graves next to Ray Roberts Lake up by Gainesville. Washed up after the first heavy rain. After what he did to ’em, they had to use their dental records to identify the bodies.”

  I was starving half an hour ago, but now I look at my half-eaten roast beef sandwich and can’t find the stomach to finish it. The waitress continues, “Used to always be a crowd, back in eighty-two after the state first started doin’ executions again. Now they’re so common nobody pays ’em much notice.”

  “Oh.” I say. I wonder what it has been like for this woman, working in this diner all these years, with a front row seat to a constant parade of executions every other week. But then maybe it’s not that much different from Southern California, where you learn to tune out the sirens and police helicopters and the murder statistics on the late-night news.

  “Could I have my check, please?”

  “Sure thang, darlin’,” the waitress says, easing herself out of her seat and ambling toward the register like she has all the time in the world.

  As I walk to the old Ford, the only thing on my mind is putti
ng as much distance between myself and that redbrick fortress as possible.

  31

  WHEN I GET TO LA PUERTA, I ASK FOR DIRECTIONS TO Mitch’s Motors and find a gigantic lot filled with used cars out in the middle of nowhere. There are so many Cadillacs of so many strange and varied colors, it looks like somebody burst open a huge sack of M&M’s.

  Behind the cars is a warehouse where I imagine barrels of flashy paint are stored. It looks a lot like the warehouse in East L.A. where Wade and I used to chop cars, only this one is three times as large. The entire property is surrounded by an electric fence.

  “Señor Mitch is at home today,” a man in a blue dress shirt informs me, pointing to a compound about a hundred yards farther down the road, surrounded by a brown stucco fence twelve feet high. He’s wearing a semiautomatic secured in a shoulder holster. Pretty tight security for a car lot.

  I get into the pickup and drive to the compound, where a man wearing another semiautomatic greets me in front of an electric gate. Behind him looms a sprawling adobe house covered in a Spanish tile roof. I think about Tornado Tim’s big house in Quincy, remember the tiny rent house Mitch lets me and Mom live in, and wonder again about how different my life might have turned out if we’d had a little money in our pockets.

  “I’m Dylan Dawson. I’m here to see Mitch Osterhaus. He’s my uncle,” I tell the guard.

  The man eyes me skeptically, talks in Spanish over a two-way radio, then switches open the gate. “He says is okay,” he tells me, flashing me a nearly toothless grin.

  I park in front of the house and have to peel myself off of the vinyl seat before I get out. My body is covered in sweat, and it’s all I can do to keep myself from sticking my head in the fountain covered in blue tile as I make my way to the front door.

  I’m so thirsty I could drink the thing dry.

  “Dylan, is that you?”

  I turn and see my mother, standing by a row of rosebushes, holding a pair of pruning shears. “Mom?” I nearly don’t recognize her in the big floppy hat. There is no sign of the distraught, catatonic woman I last saw in Downey. In fact, she looks completely recovered, but then gardening tends to do that for her.