Kind of Kin

by Rilla Askew

  There were several hours of driving then, many wrong turns, many stops for consultations of the map. They drove on two-lane roads in darkness, sometimes through small towns without stoplights. They saw few other cars. The journey was taking very long. Luis stopped to look at the map again, decided to go to one of the big roads. They passed through a town with plenty of streetlights, and outside the town, on the big road, many cars and trucks going north. Luis understood that it was the hour already when people were driving to work. The dark sky was thinning when the boy said, ¡Look! Tulsa. The lighted buildings of a large city rose up in the distance. The vehicles were passing the truck on the both sides now, going so fast. Sometimes they honked at Luis driving slower and slower as the tall buildings drew nearer. The boy sat forward, watching. I cant remember the way my uncle comes. Luis saw an exit and drove down it. The boy shook his head. This doesnt maybe be correct. Then for a time they were driving aimlessly, looking at the tall buildings surrounding them, stopping again and again to wait at the red lights with many other cars. The indicator showed that they were going to need to buy gasoline soon. With what? The coins from the jar? The boy said, Im sorry. I think I am able to know how my uncle goes but . . . is not the same. Maybe we come a different street.

  Your sister has a telephone, ¿yes? We can call her.

  I dont know the number. The boy tucked his head forward, looking up. I dont see these buildings at her house. Of her house. He frowned, looking all around. I think is possible we come this . . . He pointed straight ahead. Luis drove as the boy pointed. Soon they were not among the tall buildings but driving deserted streets between low brick buildings like warehouses or factories, and then they were passing wooden houses and a few empty parking lots with closed stores. The boy seemed very lost. Im sorry, he said, many times, and each time Luis said, No problem, no problem. It is well.

  The bodega, the boy said suddenly. He sat forward, pointing with excitement to a small building on the corner. ¡Here, this is the street here! He smiled hugely at Luis. ¡I dont believe this!

  And how, Luis thinks now, would anyone believe it, except they believe in the guiding hand of the Virgin? They had not had to drive very far from the tall buildings, it is true. Nevertheless, it was miraculous that Luis had driven to the street where the boy recognized the little store—which was not, Luis could see, a true bodega selling wine but a small spanish grocery. On the window was written Food and Beer. His heart leaped to see the familiar words. But the store was not open. Luis turned at the corner and drove along the street as the boy directed to a small yellow house almost at the end of the block. The boy indicated Luis should drive into the big yard. There were no cars here. The white curtains on the windows were closed. But the morning was early, and Luis still retained hope as the boy climbed down slowly from the truck and walked, supporting his left arm, to the front door. Many times the boy knocked and called out a name that sounded a little like his own name. After a time he returned to the truck, wearing an expression of pain. Luis came around to help him climb back into the seat. Your wrist is hurting.

  A little. Without doubt the boy had been hurting all the night, but he had not complained, and still he complained nothing, but his face showed pinched in the gray morning light. I think that my sister is not here.

  We will wait, Luis said. ¿You have hunger? The boy shook his head. ¿Thirst? The boy nodded. Luis turned then and walked around the house, looking at the base, until he found what he wanted, a spigot, and on the ground beside it, disconnected, a coiled water hose. He screwed the hose on, carried the nozzle to the truck. The boy climbed down and drank a long time, and Luis drank. The water was very cold, metallic. He coiled the hose on the ground again, unhooked it from the spigot. They sat in the truck while the day grew stronger, though not bright, because the sky was overcast. After a time the boy slept, leaning his head against the side window. Luis, too, was very tired, but he did not want to sleep. He needed to keep watch. The truck was cold. If the sun would shine through the windows they would be warm, but the sun was hidden in an iron-gray sky. Luis unrolled the sleeping bag from the seat between them—this was not the bag with the crawling man but the dark green one with drawings of turkeys and deer on the inside—and covered the boy. Good. He would let the boy sleep. When he awakened, if the sister had not yet come, Luis would drive to the little store and buy aspirin for the boy, to help with the pain in his wrist. The shopkeeper would speak spanish, naturally. Luis would ask him for advice. Maybe the shopkeeper would allow the boy to stay inside the store until the sister would come for him. The boy could write a note at the little house to say he was waiting at the store. Then Luis could drive on in the truck to the Guymon town. Yes. A good plan. But there was one problem. The gasoline tank was nearly empty. Just to buy the aspirin Luis would have to use the coins from the jar. How would he buy enough gasoline to go to the Guymon town? Even if he would use all the coins, how much could they buy? To Americans, these coins would be nothing, a small fraction of American dollars, like centavos to pesos, he knew this already. Luis felt then the familiar weight on his chest. Another street without exit. The one most familiar. No money.

  Tuesday | February 26, 2008 | 10:45 P.M.

  Moorehouse residence on Peaceable Road

  McAlester, Oklahoma

  Monica Moorehouse paced the dark length of her den in McAlester, stood a moment staring out the sliding glass door at the freezing rain—a trillion tiny glass splinters spilling down onto the cement patio. She turned and paced to the opposite end of the room. The window facing the street was small, chest high, a 1960s relic. She glared through it at the low dark ranch-style catty-corner across the street. No lights on inside. Peaceable Road was peaceable all right—excruciatingly so. No passing cars. No street sanders, of course. Nothing but dead ice-spangled grass, the gleaming leafless twigs of the crape myrtle beside the window, the glittering shards streaming down in the streetlight. She would be stuck in McAlester till who even knew when. Charlie had already gone to bed.

  She retraced her worn path between the couch and the darkened flatscreen, which she’d clicked off in disgust during the ten o’clock news. Good God, you’d think there’d never been ice in eastern Oklahoma. Only every damn winter since they got here in 2000—that Christmas ice storm, that was the worst. That’s when she’d known for sure her husband had transported her from civilization to the absolute outback. Please, please, do not let there be another power outage, she thought. Not like that one. They’d been without electricity for seventeen days. She had very nearly lost her mind. Monica peered out at the yard. In the patio light the ice sheath on the Bradford pear tree appeared to be very thin. Maybe, just maybe—if the temp would only rise a degree or two, if the falling precip would quit falling—maybe she’d be able to get out of here early tomorrow morning. The front was moving east, as the hyped-up forecasters kept saying, devastating Arkansas, canting north into Missouri. They were welcome to it—and may the nasty thing continue on into midwestern oblivion. Damn it, she’d told Charlie they needed to get out ahead of the storm! Did he listen? Did he ever listen? The TV was still babbling in the bedroom at the other end of the house. Charlie was almost certainly flopped back against the pillows with the remote in his hand and his mouth open, snoring. She envisioned herself slipping into the room and lifting the keys off the nightstand, going out to the garage and starting the Escalade, driving across town through the sleet to turn north on Indian Nations Turnpike, west on I-40—how far west would she have to drive to get out of the bad weather?

  Pausing beside the coffee table, Monica picked up the remote, held it a moment, then tossed it onto the couch, where it thumped against the leather. Charlie’s Cadillac was still parked at the apartment in the City. She couldn’t leave him here without a car. Even if the roads were cl
ear this minute, she’d still have to wait till morning. Oh, she was so ready to get back to the capital, the tension, and attention, the buzz . . . she could stop by Kevin’s, have a drink, find out . . .

  A drink. What a good idea. Monica mounted the low step into the dimly lit kitchen, dug under the kitchen sink for the vodka bottle.

  She carried her drink to the couch, sat in the dark with the lavender-tinged patio light streaming in to her right, the little gray square of streetlight at the other end of the room, the muted yellow kitchen stove light behind her. She stared at the blank screen on the brick wall. Charlie had bought a bunch of Jerome Tiger prints and hung them encircling the television like a war party attacking a covered wagon. Monica patted along the hard leather cushion until she’d located the clicker, sat holding it without using it, like an unlit cigarette in her hand. What was the point? All evening she’d scanned the channels. Locally, the only news was the weather. Nationally, it was all about the primaries, a different kind of gossipy hysteria that interested Charlie infinitely, but not her, at least not tonight. Even the Headline News Furies, the barking former prosecutor and her flared-nostril sisters, were off onto a new track—some mother had killed her children in Idaho—and the Dustin Brown story was barely mentioned. Monica couldn’t decide if this made her glad or mad, or merely depressed. In her rapidly shifting emotions, she felt some of all three.

  Charlie kept bragging about how much she’d done for her national profile this morning, but Monica wasn’t satisfied. She couldn’t feel it. She wanted to get back to Oklahoma City, hear what people were saying—damn it, she did not want to miss another day of session! And here she was, trapped again inside this low-slung mildewed ranch-style cavern to which her husband had relegated her eight years ago. He’d known perfectly well she wanted to live in something brand-new, clean and modern, not a forty-year-old tasteless buff-brick shag-carpeted grotto that no amount of framed Indian art on the walls was going to help. She took a sip of her vodka tonic—more vodka than tonic, but who the hell cared? She wasn’t going anywhere.

  She shivered, pulled the faux Pendleton blanket from the back of the couch and wrapped it around herself. This night reminded her way too much of that first winter, when she’d felt like she’d just made the worst mistake of her life, letting her husband drag her down here to Oklahoma. Not that she’d been so crazy for Indianapolis—in fact, she had more or less hated it—but at least in Indiana the term winter storm meant snow—plowable, shovelable, walkable. Here, it meant sleet and freezing rain, and you couldn’t do anything about ice, couldn’t walk on it, couldn’t drive on it. No escape. She took a long sip.

  Had she really hated Indianapolis, or did she just tell herself that now to tamp down the little nagging flares of regret?

  Yes, well, as Charlie would say: What was there to regret? Her job filing contracts at Superior Finance? Their infrequent trips to Chicago? Certainly there’d been nothing to regret from the years before she met Charlie—what did she have then? A lousy job running the cash register at a Sirloin Stockade and boring night classes at Ivy Tech. The falling-apart house on North Adams. The occasional phone call from her brother in Florida asking about their mother quietly drinking herself to death in the upstairs bedroom. Charlie Moorehouse was by far the best thing that had ever happened to her: she’d known it then, knew it now. He’d been sort of good-looking, actually, back in the day. Dark hair and bedroom eyes, or that’s how she’d seen him then, standing at the front of the classroom. She’d thought his Texas drawl was sexy. She hadn’t expected his hair to turn lank and thin so soon, or his bedroom eyes to go buggy, or the faint little paunch he’d sported back in the 1990s to become such a gut. Oh, never mind. Never mind. Charlie’s looks were hardly what mattered.

  She set her drink on the coffee table and, with the blanket draped over her shoulders, felt her way to the framed mirror beside the kitchen divider. She could just make out her face in the glow from the stove light. Thirty-seven. Still remarkably young for all she’d accomplished, as Charlie constantly reminded her. People thought she was younger. Reaching up, she fluffed out her hair. Too bad there hadn’t been time to get the highlights put in. Kevin had been right about that, as she’d seen immediately in the first clips of herself standing in the shitty barnyard looking haggard and hungover after the mad midnight ride from the City. Iced tea vat indeed. Even so, the ones on the noon news had looked pretty damned good.

  Oh, and she had so managed to outshine that aw-shucks-ma’am senator, Dennis Langley—him with his shaggy mane towering over everybody in the kitchen, gossiping with reporters, acting like he was just there as a friend of the family. Why, surely he had not showed up at the highest-profile news story since the bombing as a legislator; why, he wasn’t even any sort of a politician at all. Just a friend, ma’am, just a friend. To Monica’s infinite satisfaction, the darty-eyed aunt never spent one minute talking to Langley. Some of the local news people acted way too chummy with him, but who did the network camera crews follow around, pray tell? State Representative Monica Moorehouse. Yes, ma’am.

  And then, just a little after noon, the sheriff had made his grand entrance, all flabby eyed from his trip, and she had mopped the floor with him, that’s what Charlie said. No challenge at all. There’d been such a mass of people milling around, cameras and mic cords everywhere, inside and outside the house, but Monica had had no trouble sorting out who to pay attention to, who not to waste time on—an art the sheriff had obviously not mastered. Anyone with a microphone to stick in his face could get a long blustery self-serving explanation about why the boy hadn’t been found. And every tack the sheriff took, Monica followed up with her own color commentary.

  She was skilled enough—and she had Charlie’s eyes and ears abetting—so that she could appear to be listening intently to the search team captain, nodding worriedly in her tan suede western-cut jacket and Dingo boots, while simultaneously monitoring every asinine comment the sheriff made. Then she’d appropriate it, give it nuance, make it her own. If Holloway got defensive about the roughed-up kid, Monica implied family child abuse. If he talked about the grandfather’s arrest, she’d mention rumors of a “deported illegal alien family member.” When the sheriff barked orders like he was the big high muckamuck who had everything under control, Monica would smilingly mention to some reporter how she’d felt it was “important to be here at the search site while Sheriff Holloway had to be out of the state on his recent media visit to Los Angeles.” And yes, all right, by five o’clock the local newscasters were already fixated on the weather, but they still gave her good chunks of coverage, and cable news stayed with her right through to prime time. She’d been flawless. Leadership was bound to be pleased. Monica gazed at her pale image in the mirror. She ought to feel happy. She ought to feel satisfied, at least. Why did she feel so irritable, and restless, and depressed?

  Well, the damned weather, of course. Who wouldn’t be depressed?

  Retrieving her tumbler from the coffee table, she went to the kitchen to fix herself another drink. When she returned to the den, she resumed her catlike pacing—patio doors to street-side window, street side to patio, behind the couch one direction, in front of it the next. What was there to plan for? What was there to do? Read bills for tomorrow’s meetings, in case they did manage to get back? No thank you. She was too keyed up to just sit. At the moment the only thing she could have possibly watched on TV would have been news clips of herself, and unfortunately she was off the radar just no
w. Hah, she thought. Literally. In her mind she saw the pink and purple Nexrad images jerking across the weather map in time-lapse sequence, lurching from eastern Oklahoma into the neighboring Ozarks, again and again. How quickly the media jumped to the next thing! And just precisely when she’d found the perfect note, she thought resentfully. The perfect tone.

  Charlie was only half right. Oh, it was about image, certainly—who could deny that? But it was also about sound. He was always on her to use the right words—folks of the Eighteenth District, not people; Oklahoma taxpayers, not citizens—but from the very first news clips this morning she’d heard it: the pitch-perfect intonation she’d been striving for. Monica wasn’t naturally husky voiced but she had learned how to keep her voice in the lower registers, just as she’d learned how to sound smart but not too smart, how to smile winningly but without flirtation, how to briefly, rarely, and seemingly unthinkingly, refer to her Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. So yes, of course, on the clips, she had looked right, she had sounded right, she had used all the right words. But what most astonished and pleased her was how she had delivered them in the soft, pitch-perfect, almost-but-not-quite Okie drawl she’d been working on for years. And she hadn’t even been conscious of trying to use it! She had, she realized, internalized the thing at last. Oh, she’d been shining. In those early news clips she had owned the story. Then the goddamned weather swept her off the map.

  Glass in hand, Monica stood again at the sliding patio door. The freezing rain had stopped. Had it stopped? She squinted. Yes, she thought so. The arrow on the round plastic outdoor thermometer still pointed at 30, but it was a cheap thing they’d bought at Atwoods years ago; it always took forever to adjust when the temperature changed. The painted-on cardinal still looked startled, taken by surprise, frozen on his white circle. But wasn’t that water—plain glorious melted water—dripping from the eaves? Oh, hallelujah. She headed for the kitchen.