by Nan Cuba
My parents brought the district attorney Blair Corcoran, a neighbor and long-time friend, with them to the police station. My mother, her face oily, flushed, came through the door first, huffing, checking the room. She glanced at me sitting on a chair in back, then approached a slab-jawed woman in uniform, who sat at a desk by the door. “Someone tell me what’s going on,” she said. My father and Blair appeared. “Pelton,” my mother insisted, tapping a stack of forms.
“Yes, ma’am,” the woman said, swinging her chair to the other end of the desk, “your daughter’s been charged with destruction of public property.” She pointed to a chair as she picked up the phone. “Take a seat.”
“But what does that mean?” My mother stiffened, her floral handbag squashed against her chest.
The woman mumbled into the receiver, then hung up and opened a desk drawer. “Restitution and a fine, possible jail time,” she said, pulling out a piece of paper. She began to write. “Would you sit down, please?”
“Blair,” my mother said. “What’s going on?” Behind a counter, another phone rang. A shadow flitted past. Someone laughed.
My father stood nearby. He stroked his tie, buttoned and unbuttoned his suit jacket. “Mama?” he said, his expression like the engine’s metal: hard yet broken.
My mother walked over, slid her arm under his, then patted. “Blair’s going to explain,” she said. “Sarah’s all right, see?” She nodded. “Right, sweetie?” Immediately, he approached.
“I’m okay, really,” I said as he checked my eyes, my cheek, head, neck. Removing the temporary cast, he pressed and turned my swollen leg. If a limb could have a migraine, mine had one, the nerves electrified, merciless. A throbbing shot to my groin, almost making me faint. “Oh,” I moaned, clamping my teeth.
He re-wrapped everything, tightening the straps. “I don’t want you to worry,” he said, his eyes watery. “Your mother and I are here to help.” He straightened, his back rigid as ever, then rested his hand on my shoulder. “Now, try to relax. I’ll take care of your ankle as soon as we’re finished here.” Then he walked to Mother, who stood, hand on hip, talking to Blair. “Is there any way,” my father said, “to pay for the damage, whatever those charges come to, and not have to put her through anything else? This, of course, was a terrible accident. Sarah’s always been a good girl. You know that.”
Blair looked at the linoleum then slipped his hands into his slacks pockets.
“I apologize for putting you in this position,” my father continued, “but I don’t know what else to do. Certainly, we want to do whatever you decide is right.”
Mumbled shouting came from the entrance. An officer wrestled a stumbling soldier across the room and into a large cage in the corner. “I want a phone,” the soldier wailed, his words wobbly as a loose wheel. “I know my rights.”
The officer strode to the counter. “Call the M.P.s,” he said, leaning close to the glass. “Tell them to come pick this guy up.” Then he tugged at his waistband, repositioning his pants, turned, and left.
Blair looked at my father. “Let me make a couple of calls,” he said. Suddenly he stood next to a phone on the slab-jawed woman’s desk. Putting on his reading glasses, he watched while she helped him find a number; then he dialed. Following the usual courtesies and a summary of what had happened, he said, “So you don’t have any problem with a fine for damages and some community service? We don’t want to step on your toes, here.” He listened; we waited.
“I’ll call him now,” Blair said into the receiver, plugging his other ear. “I appreciate your cooperation, Willie.” He hung up, adjusted his eyeglasses, and checked on a second number. Again he dialed and relayed a summary of events. “The sheriff says as long as you go along, he’s agreeable.” After a pause, he added, “Then I’ll go ahead and make the plea bargain for you to approve in the morning. Thank you, Judge.” Nodding at my father, Blair asked the woman to prepare a personal recognizance bond. Afterward, he turned to my parents. “You can take her home in a few minutes,” he said.
“Blair,” my father said, reaching for a handshake, “I don’t know how—”
“But what about her record?” my mother snapped. “She can’t have a record. She’s just a girl. Can’t you—”
“Nothing will appear on her record,” Blair said, dropping my father’s hand.
“Mama…” my father said, almost touching her shoulder.
“But,” Blair explained, “she’ll have to come to court Monday morning.”
“Court?” my mother whined. “You said that—”
I stood. “Daddy, I’m so sorry. I was trying to—”
“Sit down,” my mother said, dropping her purse on the woman’s desk, toppling a cup.
I did as I was told, relieved. Tell me when it’s over, I thought. My mother’s sharp voice had an oddly relaxing effect.
My mother followed in her station wagon as my father drove us in my Corvair to the hospital so he could set my ankle. He helped me hobble to the back entrance then pushed me in a wheelchair to his examination room, my mother walking alongside. After seating me on a table, he swiveled his chair between a bowl of plaster on a metal tray and my leg. He squinted; his jaw locked. His strokes and taps made me weepy. I couldn’t remember if he’d touched me since we’d squeezed together on a saddle at the farm.
“What has gotten into you?” my mother said, pacing. “First your hair, now this.” Her nylons swished with each step. She coughed, then turned, lip trembling. “You could’ve been killed.”
I was as baffled as she was. The fact that I’d reasoned myself into trouble made me numb. I’d had fun with my friends—yes, was that so terrible?—had felt the presence of something—I knew I did—and look where that got me. Now, my sweet, ridiculous parents seemed right. Was I the only one confused? I remembered my face in the reception room mirror: cut, swollen, like the priest’s in my dream. “What now?” I said.
“A man is what the winds and tides have made him,” my father said, wrapping my leg with plaster covered gauze. “Circumstances form the character.”
“Owen,” my mother said, pressing her forehead, sinking into a chair.
“Sir?” I said, afraid not to respond. More than ever, I wanted to understand what he was thinking. I hoped he’d keep talking until I did.
“If you were a jury member hearing this case,” my father said as he layered the dressing, his ritual creating a firm support, the result clean, reliable, “how would you judge the situation?”
That’s when I cried, sobs that shook until my parents helped me lie back, a prostrate offering.
I decided to go with my father and Hugh the next morning to church. Even though people would stare, I could listen to music, think. The familiar rituals, ecclesiastical stained glass, assurance of a loving God, and compassionate crowd were the comforts I needed most. First, though, I had to find out about Mary Jo and Diane.
“That goddess of yours knows how to throw one hell of a tantrum,” Mary Jo said into her hospital phone. She’ll be fine, I thought. Diane said, “I’m grounded till the year 2000.” Good-bye, I’m sorry, I thought.
Dressed, my head in a scarf, I took the mask off the wall. I fingered the earflaps, tongue. When I remembered the looped, clicking voice, I covered its mouth with my hand. I needed a clear definition of Sam’s idea of truth, a description of who he thought I was.
“What happened to your face?” Hugh asked, sliding his socked feet across my floor. His shirt, a hand-me-down, stopped at his belly button.
“Nothing,” I shrugged. Dad had stitched a cut on my chin. “I’ll be all right.”
“Is that a cast?” he said, trotting over, rubbing the plaster. “Can I touch it?”
“I guess so, sure.”
You in trouble?”
“Not any more.” I put the mask in a cabinet underneath my bookshelves.
“What’d you do that for?”
“What?”
“The mask. How come you took it down?” He pi
cked a pen off my desk, threw it into the air, caught it. “If you don’t want it,” he said, stepping forward, “can I have it?” He clasped his hands in a mock plea. “Please? Come on, Sar, do this one thing.”
I remembered telling him about ritual sacrifice; I’d thought I was saving him. “I can’t,” I said.
“Crud,” Hugh said, wilting.
“Wait,” I said, forcing him to face me. “Something happened last night.”
His eyebrows arched.
“Trust me, Hugh. You don’t want that mask.”
Be a cornstalk. Beat your breath.
That afternoon, while I lay on my bed surrounded by homework, Sam appeared. “What are you doing here?” I asked. He wore a t-shirt and faded Levi’s, the row of copper rivets like antique coins. Now, I thought, I’ll get him to explain what he meant when he said I shouldn’t be afraid to look, that I should become my true self.
He walked around the bed, leaned against my dresser, aiming his glance. “I came to thank you,” he said.
“For what?” I propped myself higher.
“For taking the heat off.” He started to smile but stopped. “Mom and Dad must be royally pissed.”
“They’re mad all right,” I said shoving books, thumping, onto the floor.
“Yeah, what you did was stupid. For once, I actually agree with them.” He crossed to the bed. “You okay?” He leaned, checking my leg, stitched chin.
“How’d you find out?”
“Who doesn’t know?” He laughed, walking back to the door.
Was he leaving already? Why did he always do that? “How come you’re here?”
He looked at his feet, his thumbs in his front pockets. Dad coughed in the next room, waking from his Sunday nap. “You ever seen Caley Creek?”
I shrugged, confused as usual, waiting.
“Can you ride in a car?”
When I reluctantly agreed to go, he drove to the Holiday Inn on the main highway, singing along with Bob Dylan and the Beatles on the radio. “Sam?” I said as he parked next to a pickup at the end of the motel lot. A woman wheeled a cart of supplies to a room, knocked, then disappeared inside.
“Creek’s in back,” he said, helping me out. If we’d stayed at home, we could’ve talked.
Sure enough, the creek meandered across the vacant lot behind the building’s wings of rooms. With three-foot banks and a foot of water, it was more like a ditch. Weeds, Johnson grass, and rogue cedars dotted its edge. Behind the open acreage, a chain-link fence bordered Nugent’s tiny airport. Sam helped me walk to a marble slab near the creek. Attached was a metal plaque that read:
CALEY CREEK BATTLEFIELD
Named in Honor Of
CAPTAIN HOGARTH CALEY
Who Lost His Life Here
May 26, 1839
With Only 34 Texas Rangers
He Met 240 Indians At This Point,
And Routed Them.
“I never knew this was here,” I said. “Not much to look at, is it?”
“A mile up is a cave and 32 Bluffs.”
“What’s that?”
“Jaime, Wade, and me used to climb the bluffs, exactly thirty-two. So that’s what we called it.” He picked up a rock then turned it, chips sparkling. “Once when he was near the top, Wade put his hand out and there was a rattlesnake.” He threw the rock. “When he fell, his ear almost got cut off.”
“Gross,” I said, picturing a hole in the side of Wade’s head. “He doesn’t have an ear?”
“It was hanging. The doctor sewed it back on.” Sam looked up. “But you’ve been to the bluffs before. We caught that crawdad with string and bacon, remember?”
I nodded, feeling its pinchers, the pressure of the jumping after he’d placed it in my hands. “Did you ever go inside the cave?”
“We tried, but somebody would’ve had to dig a bigger tunnel.”
“Did you take a flashlight? Could you see inside?”
“Sure.”
“What?”
“Springs must’ve been in there.” A car started; a plane rumbled overhead. “It was dark, damp. Smelled like mildew.”
How could I not have heard what happened here? “What tribes?”
“You mean in the battle? Caddoes, Kickapoo, Comanche. Their leader, Chief Buffalo Hump, got his head stuck on a pole somewhere out there.”
I reread the plaque. “’Routed them.’ What does that mean?”
“I wonder,” he said, refusing to tell. But I thought I knew.
“I was trying to do what you told me,” I said, not looking at him, but hoping he’d say where he thought I’d made my mistake. If the best night of his life was when he’d gotten beaten up in a freezing Mexican jail, our little ceremony couldn’t be so bad. Then again, Mary Jo and Diane were in the hospital, and I could have gone to jail. “Sam?” He squatted next to the water, rolling a branch down the bank. “Sam?” I called. He turned then walked me back to the car before I could say anything else.
On the drive home, I tried again. “When you told me not to be afraid to look, what was it I was supposed to see?” I refused to give up ‘til I got an answer.
“Did I say that?” He slapped the side of the car in time to the radio’s “I can’t get no, sa-tis-fac-tion.”
“When you gave me the mask.” He’d imitated an animal that, in turn, disguised him. “You told me to be my true self, remember?” As usual, he wasn’t going to make this easy.
“No. But sounds right. Absolutely,” he said, bouncing his head to the music’s rhythms.
“What does it mean?” I said, clutching the armrest. What if I never found out where I belonged? “Are you saying it’s a good thing to get in trouble? Mom said she thought life was hard enough, even if I was careful. Are you saying she’s wrong?”
“What do you think?” he said, drumming the steering wheel. “I try, and I try, and I try,” he sang. He quit drumming, blinked. “Did I ever say you shouldn’t be happy?” He turned down the radio. “I don’t think so.”
“It seems like whenever you see everybody going one way, you notice what’s wrong with that and go the opposite. If you’re always watching for what’s ugly, doesn’t that make you sad? How do you know, when you think something’s ugly, that you’re right?”
Sam snapped off the radio, stared. “I’m listening.” His fist made loops in the air. “Keep going.”
“You said being in that jail after getting beaten up was great, but it sounds awful. Screwing around with my friends in that engine was fun, but it sure got us in trouble. I see ugly stuff: people hurting other people, animals, kids—terrible—but I can’t stop any of it.”
Sam stared at the road and nodded. “’Routed,’” he said. “To defeat, demoralize, conquer. To massacre. Thirty-four against two hundred forty. Impressive, don’t you think?”
In court Monday morning in front of my parents and other waiting defendants, a man announced my name and a case number. My father and Blair helped me hobble on crutches to the front bench, its mahogany bulk an altar. The judge checked his notes; then, in a smoker’s rasp, he rattled off my charges. He asked whether I was guilty, and the rest happened like Blair had said it would. “We’ve entered a plea bargain, your honor,” he said.
“What do you plead then, Miss Pelton?” the judge rumbled. An inky hyphen smudged his cheek.
“No contest, sir,” I said.
Blair explained that the city park manager had estimated the damages at fifteen hundred dollars. Any excess my father would also pay. I’d work eighty hours assisting city staff during children’s park programs. I didn’t add that I’d probably work five times that.
Never again would I see my father’s broken expression. Trouble: a mirage, a curse. Here it was—wavy, soft; there it went—slinking. Gone. Its only remnant, the memory of my one mistake. Like Moses, I was ready to pay for that.
As Blair thanked the judge and I hobbled out of the courtroom with my parents, the fact that my fine was the same amount as the bribe my father had pai
d to get Sam out of jail seemed more than a coincidence.
CHAPTER 12
BY CORNELIA’S NEXT VISIT, I’ve quit checking for a scar on her lip or marveling at the mother/daughter resemblance. I try not to notice how pale she’s become or how much slower she moves. She’s been turned down a notch.
“Knock, knock,” she says, walking in. “You’re under arrest. Stop that,” she says pointing to my computer, “and follow me.”
“Excuse me?” I say, trying not to smile.
She grabs my arm, lifting me from my chair. “All work and no play makes the professor cranky.”
I hesitate then realize I have an hour and a half before my next class. “Where are we going?”
“We need some vitamin D. Don’t take this personally, but it wouldn’t hurt if you left this cave once in a while. Even moles pop up for air.”
When we get outside, she winces, holding her side while she sits on a concrete bench facing the grassy mall. “Here you go,” she says, patting the seat. When I join her, she pulls another shoebox from her bag, takes a kolache, and hands the box to me.
A couple is lying under a gnarly oak. The boy is propped on an elbow, talking.
“What did Mom used to be like?” Cornelia says, wiping her mouth with a Kleenex. Albina used to do that, I think. “I mean, she married your brother so she must’ve been way different.”
I picture Terezie digging with Sam in the midden, then dressed in her kroj for their wedding. “She wore men’s shoes,” I say, “and nobody cared, not even in high school.” I laugh. “Her nickname for Sam was Chopin.” I want to add that they almost had a baby.
“Chopin, the composer? Why?”
“I don’t remember,” I lie. “You have a napkin?”
“Did he play the piano? I guess I didn’t picture him like that. What was he like?”
How to capture a life, his life? Impossible. “He was, well…we were…close.”
