by Rilla Askew
“Come here to Aunt Sweet.” Sweet reached for her and took her on her own lap, and the little girl settled down with two fingers in her mouth. The truck bumped hard as they started down the steep, washed-out track. “The bridge is there,” Sweet said. “See where the water’s swirling? See the rock ledge?” Misty Dawn repeated the words in Spanish. Juanito inched the truck slowly forward. Sweet tried to remember how much water it takes to swamp a vehicle. Two feet? This didn’t look like two feet. Did it? The little girl snuggled against her, leaning toward the window so she could see the water; she didn’t look scared, merely interested. And somber. Do not drive into moving water. Sweet knew that. Everybody knew that. The officials were always warning idiot people, who were always doing it anyway. Like us, she thought. We are driving into moving water. She kept a tight hold on the child, her right fist on the door handle. If they got swept away, she would try to save the baby. She would try.
“Cuidado, Juanito!” Misty Dawn’s fingers were clamped tight on Sweet’s knee.
“It’s fine,” Sweet said lightly. “We’ll be fine.” The driver’s side suddenly dipped as the front tire dropped into a washed-out place, and Misty Dawn screamed. Sweet grabbed her hand, dug her own fingers under the vise grip, held on tight, her other arm clamped around the child’s waist. Juanito eased the tire up out of the hole, steering a little to the right, and Sweet cried, “Watch out, watch out! You’re driving off this side!” Juanito straightened the wheel, kept easing along, slow and steady, until they made it across, started up the far bank, which was steeper and even more washed out than the first. The truck swayed and bounced like a tractor.
At the top of the track, in under the cottonwoods, they stopped. “See?” Sweet exhaled long and deep. “I told you we’d be fine.” Her voice was shaking. She let go of her niece’s hand. “God. That was scary,” Misty said. She reached to take her daughter onto her lap. “Plus, now we got to go back.”
“Tell him to drive yonder.” Sweet pointed to the knot of purplish shale showing like a bruise on the side of the ridge through the leafless trees. Misty rattled the Spanish, and Juanito put the truck in gear, headed across the bumpy ground, seesawing between shrubs and thicket, the truck bouncing worse than ever as they neared the slate-colored boney pile at the base of the ridge. A deep blue-black gash slashed from the mine mouth all the way to the foot of the ridge, carved right through the boney by the clear, constant stream. “This is probably as close as we’re going to get,” Sweet said, and at once Juanito put the truck in park. She cut him a look. He understood English when he wanted to.
Misty said, “I thought they supposedly searched this whole place already, all Grandpa’s land.”
“They might not have thought to look inside,” Sweet said. “I’ll be right back.” She got out and began to climb along the side of the coal-colored gash until she reached the mine entrance, a black, low square, timbered across the roof and along both sides; it was so much smaller than she remembered. From the dark mouth the familiar soft breeze wafted. Sweet held still a moment, smelling the earth smell, the water smell, the pure stream. God’s breath. She cupped her hands. “Dusty?” The sound came out choked, too soft. She cleared her throat. “Dustin Lee!” Lee, lee, lee, lee . . . The brief, hollow echo, then nothing. Only the sound of trickling water and, far back in the depths, a slow constant plink. Water dripping. She remembered the dripping.
Abruptly Sweet crouched over and squat-walked in. Beyond the timbers, the ceiling was higher, and she could stand, but she couldn’t see anything past the first few feet. The smell was overpowering, though, sweet and earthen, so familiar it made her chest ache. “Dustin?” she said softly. “Honey, it’s all right. We’re not mad. We just want you to come home. Okay? Dusty?”
She listened again, heard only the continuous rippling song of the water. Their little river, that’s what she and Gaylene used to call it, although it was never more than a few inches deep, clear as glass, flowing out of the darkness across the smooth shale floor. Outside in summers: the parched land, the fierce glare. Inside, the cool dark. They would bring flashlights and play house here in summer, or school, or Belle Starr and the outlaws. In winter, most often they used candles and sat in the warmth and told ghost stories, or Sweet told the stories, and Gaylene huddled against her, listening, thrilled. Sweet stared into the blackness. Why hadn’t she thought to grab Juanito’s flashlight? Even that weak beam would have been something. “You’re not in trouble, honey,” she said toward the darkness. “I promise.”
Far back in the black depths she heard a child’s voice: Jaja, come heah! Her breath stopped. The sound of water. “Dustin?” No, it wasn’t Dustin, couldn’t be Dustin. The only one who’d ever called her Jaja was Gaylene, when she was very little and couldn’t say Georgia, couldn’t pronounce the r. At once Sweet felt her little sister beside her, the wiry tense pliable presence, Gaylene waking in the night, frightened, reaching across the bed for her, the soft word whispered. Jaja? Because Daddy would be in the front room, yelling, stacking the furniture, stumbling from wall to wall, cursing, weeping, and Sweet would lay her arm outside the covers for Gaylene to hold. You’re dreaming, Sissy. Go back to sleep. But Daddy was honking the truck’s horn back at the house, calling them, they had to get home, fast! They had to—
Sweet blinked, shook her head, a fierce pinch-me-awake shake. “Dustin, if you’re here, honey, answer me. It’s Aunt Sweet.” Only the water echoed. The earthen empty blackness. The boy was not here. Nobody was here. She could feel her certainty draining away. Why had she believed so hard he would be here? But she knew why. Her aching throat told her. The old hurtful longing. The quiet. The scent of earth and water. Her baby sister. God’s breath.
Far away and faint, the truck horn sounded again. She hadn’t dreamed it—it was their daddy’s signal, the one-note tattoo he used to call them home for supper. For an instant her heart lifted, until she realized it couldn’t be Daddy. It was Terry, sitting in his truck in the yard at Daddy’s house, calling her the same way she called him in from the deer woods: when she needed him during deer season, she would drive up as far as she could get in the mountains, park at a gas well pad site, and honk out Daddy’s same staccato rhythm so that Terry would know it was her and not some other wife trying to reach her deer-hunting husband. Sweet’s first impulse was to ignore him, wait until he gave up and went away. But then she remembered her Taurus sitting at the trash dump, its nose pointing directly to the torn fence where Juanito’s pickup had rammed through. She couldn’t let her husband find that.
She bent double again, scuttled back outside, stood blinking in the sunlight, cold and clear, a brilliant crisp February morning. Then she scrabbled and skidded back down the ridge. The kids were outside the truck now, Misty Dawn holding the baby. “Who’s that honking?
“Uncle Terry.” Sweet walked past them, tossing the words back over her shoulder. “I gotta go back to the house for a minute. Y’all stay here.”
“Why can’t we come with you?”
“He might not be alone.” Which was true, actually—Carl Albert would be with him, and no telling who else—but that wasn’t why. “Y’all sit tight. I’ll be back in two shakes.”
She kept walking. In another second Juanito’s truck started, and soon he pulled alongside her. “El agua,” Juanito said, “es peligroso.” Sweet stopped, squinted up at him. How to explain all of it? That her husband couldn’t be trusted. That her husband might as soon turn him in as look at him. Juanito gestured toward the distant creek. “I drive you, okay? Then I come for my wife.”
“No, you don’t come for your wife,” Sweet said. “You come stay with your wife! You get me?”
“Sí, claro.” He beckoned through the window. “Come.”
The trip back across the creek was harrowing but not so bad as the first. Nothing’s ever as bad the second time, Sweet thought. The horn sounded again as they climbed the far bank. Sweet swung the truck
door open before Juanito had hardly got stopped; she hurried around to the driver’s side. “Go back and stay with Misty.” He had his head turned away, looking through the back window to see how to turn around. “Juanito!” His smooth face swiveled to her. Sweet bounced her two open palms in a “stay” gesture like you’d give a dog. “Stay,” she said. “You and Misty, stay. Understand?”
“Okay. See you later.” He started to back up.
Okay. See you later. She hurried along, picking her way through the scrub brush until she reached the gulley and scrambled down. Terry wasn’t honking in rhythm now, just one long continuous blare. HONNNNNNNNNK. She ran to her car, considered tapping out an answer—but no, that would only draw his attention this direction, not to mention provoke such questions as What the hell took you so long? She started the car and headed toward the house. She had to get Terry to go home. No. No! Not home. Back to Poteau. Because she was going to have to hide the kids at the house and wait for dark—what else was she going to do with them? She’d make them all lie down in her backseat for the drive to town. How she would sneak them from the carport into the house in broad daylight she didn’t know, but she’d cross that bridge when she came to it. Sweet snorted. Cross that bridge.
Her husband’s large Silverado looked oddly small in comparison to the giant horse-trailer-hauling pickups parked all around. Terry himself looked small, standing beside the open truck door with his burgundy cap in his hand. Their son wasn’t with him. Sweet glided her window down. “Where’s Carl?”
“At the preacher’s. I went by there looking for you. He said you must have come out here for the mounted search.” He glanced behind her toward the pasture. “What were you doing?”
“Just, you know, looking around. For Dustin.”
“Hadn’t they been out there already? They been all over this property.”
“I know, I just, you know. Killing time. Waiting on the searchers to get back.”
Silence. After a moment, Terry said, “How you doing?’
“Good. Good,” she said. “You?”
“Good.”
“How’s Carl?”
“He’s good.”
Another silence. Tee stood in the crook of the truck door, examining his frayed cap brim, turning it in his hands, plucking at the loose threads. After a long time he said, “I’m . . . I’m . . . I really hate it that it turned out like it did for your daddy. And for . . . everything.”
“Okay,” she said. That was the nearest she’d ever heard him come to saying I’m sorry.
“Me and Carl, we . . .” Terry glanced up. “He needs to be home, Sweet.” Her husband waited, gazing steadily at her now, the bags under his eyes thicker and paler than ever. When she didn’t answer he looked back down, gave the cap another turn. “We oughta . . . we got to be in this together.” He raised his sad brown gaze. “I need to be at home.”
Seventeen years. He was a good man. She loved him. “Just . . . not right yet, Tee,” she said, wavering. “Carl Albert don’t need to be in the middle of all this. Let’s wait till things settle down. Till after Dustin comes home.”
“We’ll deal with it,” Terry said. “We’re a family. I’m, I really am . . . aw, honey, you know I didn’t mean for things to get messed up like this.”
“You didn’t.”
“Not for your dad! Not for Carl Albert, or Dustin!”
“Just for the Mexicans?”
“It ain’t every Mexican, just the wetbacks! Just ones coming here to take people’s jobs! You know how many men been laid off from Arkoma in the last year? Nineteen! Look, I come out to borrow your dad’s trimmer for the bar ditch. His truck was gone so I went to the barn to get it, the place was crawling with them, they scattered like a bunch of minnows! Not a damn one of them could speak English. They couldn’t even tell me where your daddy was at! Face it, Sweet, he’s a fanatic. I’m sorry, but he is. You seen how he acted last summer at that blamed whatever it was, that party at Misty Dawn’s house!”
Yes, she remembered; in her mind’s eye she could see her father on the Mexican side of the yard gesturing around with his hands, acting out the words, while Terry leaned against the church van with his arms folded, watching him—and yes, all right, it had bothered Sweet, too, honestly, to see how cleanly her daddy fit in over there, but that was him. That was just Daddy, a man who would go to a Mexican church in Heavener the same as he’d go to a black church in McAlester, or a Catholic church, even, just . . . whatever. Daddy just had that weird streak. She remembered how Terry groused the whole ride home, talking low, barely over the van’s motor, so her daddy wouldn’t hear from the back. If Sweet wanted to go to any more family shindigs in Tulsa, he’d muttered, she could blamed well drive herself. This was the last time he was putting up with such crap! Sweet had wondered in silence what was so terrible that he’d had to put up with—a little trumpet music and barbecue smoke? Her daddy trying to act like he knew Spanish? Aloud she’d said only, “All right, you won’t have to go. I’ll drive next time.”
But there hadn’t been a next time. The police had stopped Juanito a few months later for—what was it? Some sort of driving infraction, illegal lights or something; Sweet never quite got the whole story. It had happened so fast. By the time Misty called Sweet, sobbing hysterically on the phone, Juanito was already in the Tulsa County Jail. And then he was gone.
A cold thought struck her then, sinister, sickening. Had Terry turned in Juanito, too? Sometime after the party? But why would he do that? Oh, surely, surely to goodness the man she had lived with all these years was not that low-down ordinary skunk-ugly mean. She looked at him now, scratching his chin under his beard, rubbing his forehead; she knew the signs. He was starting to lose patience. He suddenly tugged his cap on, reached in and swiped his keys off the dash. “I hate that frickin’ motel,” he said. Then he leaned in and jabbed the truck key in the ignition, which started to buzz. The door dinger dinged to announce that it was standing open with the key in the ignition. Terry straightened, stood peering down at her, a firm, settled look. “We’re not waiting till Dusty comes home. He might not ever come home. He might be—”
“Shut up!” She whacked him on the chest. “Don’t you dare say it! Don’t you ever, ever say those words!”
“Aw, honey, no. I don’t mean that. We’ll find him, sure. Right now today, this morning. They might’ve found him already.” He reached for her. She let him pull her toward him, let him put his arms around her back, but she didn’t soften against him. “Don’t worry, honey, he’ll turn up.” Terry tried to make his rough voice soothing; he stroked the back of her head with his big paw. “He’s probably just, who knows, wandering around. The sun’s out, he’ll get his bearings, he’ll come on in, the men’ll find him, don’t worry, it’s all right, it’s all right . . .” The buzzer buzzed, the dinger dinged. After a time Terry reached in and unseated the key. In the silence Sweet heard a motor coming up the gravel road. She twisted around, and Terry released her as she turned toward the approaching vehicle—a mud-spattered SUV filled with men. Her heart lurched. Back already. That was good. Maybe that was good. Or bad. She didn’t recognize the fellow climbing out of the driver’s seat. She couldn’t tell a thing from his expression. Terry took her hand, held tight while they waited.
“Did the sheriff get here yet?” the man said.
“We don’t expect him till the teams get back,” Terry said.
Sweet looked beyond the man’s shoulder at the five men in red hunting caps inside the Explorer. She didn’t know any of them, either.
“Deputy in town told us to wait here for the sheriff,” the man said. “He don’t want folks going out unless him and his men coordinate it.”
“Y’all haven’t been out searching?”
“Got to wait on the sheriff. But they said he’ll be here pretty quick. Soon as he can get things organized.”
“What things?”
“I don’t know. Communication lines. Or paperwork, maybe? I really don’t know. They’re moving search headquarters out here from Wilburton, they said. Sheriff wants everybody heading out from one location, wants it all centrally coordinated. Makes sense, I guess. How about we pull over and park next to that GMC? That won’t be in y’all’s way, will it?”
Monday | February 25, 2008 | 1:30 P.M.
State Capitol Building | Oklahoma City
Monica had felt all morning like she was sleepwalking through her committee meetings. Present in body, absent in mind. Her grande extra-shot skinny latte had failed to help. Half her attention was focused on trying to rehearse her bill presentation, the other half kept looking over her shoulder, wondering who was talking about her, and what they were saying. Lunch was no better. Prepped and served by a clutch of student dieticians flanked by homemade signs advocating healthy eating, the food would have ordinarily suited her—baby carrots, chunks of broccoli and cauliflower, ranch dressing, fruit cups, little cartons of 2 percent milk—but today she had no appetite whatsoever. And where were her brains?
Tanked up on caffeine and no food, by the time session started, Monica Moorehouse was grinding her teeth. The speaker pro tem’s voice reverberated over the sound system: “The House is now in session! Clerk will call the roll!” Everyone kept milling and milling and gossiping and laughing, which irritated the bejesus out of her. Nothing out of the ordinary, just the regular early-session roving, but the chitchat and commotion further frazzled her nerves. Things weren’t helped when the representative from the Nineteenth District stood to introduce his special guests, the assistant chief of the Choctaw Nation and a whole row of tribal elders. And wouldn’t you know, the Doctor of the Day just had to be named Gonzalez.
