Moonlight on Linoleum

by Helwig, Terry; Kidd, Sue Monk;

  We followed Daddy down the narrow hall of the ten-by-fifty-foot, three-bedroom M-System trailer house. Daddy had purchased the trailer before Mama and all of us girls arrived in Fort Stockton. It didn’t take us long to explore five hundred square feet of paneling and linoleum, soon to become our new home on wheels.

  Despite Mama’s reaction, Daddy patted the kitchen door-jamb proudly. He had never owned a home before. Mama sat on the sectional, her head buried in her hands.

  In the end, Mama stood up, sighed, and signaled that we should start unloading the U-Haul. Somehow we squeezed our belongings into the green-and-white trailer, parked in a trailer park at the edge of town near West 17th Street alongside a dozen or so other trailers.

  Better Homes and Gardens likely never ran a spread on trailer houses or trailer parks, but a tour of our trailer would have begun with the metal-grate steps that led to our front door. Mama and Daddy’s bedroom lay to the right of the front door, just off the living room. Their bedroom had just enough space between the double bed and the walls for two bodies to stand on either side. A plain square mirror hung over a two-foot-wide built-in dresser, just off the foot of the bed, next to a small closet.

  Outside their bedroom, two sets of louvered windows allowed light into the living room, sparsely furnished with a tan Naugahyde sectional set atop spindle legs. Either end of the sectional could be interchanged with a cushion or a wooden-top side table. The living room opened directly into the kitchen, where the sink and stove lined a side wall, next to a small window. Across from the stove, Daddy placed the long picnic table and two benches he had built so all of us could sit together for meals. We added two chrome chairs to the ends and Mama camouflaged the picnic table with a rectangular piece of oilcloth.

  Chili powder, garlic salt, onion powder, sage, poultry seasoning, ground mustard, and cinnamon filled the tiny spice cabinet Daddy had been so proud of when he first showed Mama the trailer.

  A narrow hallway led to the back of the trailer. The middle bedroom couldn’t have been bigger than six by eight feet. Daddy eventually removed one wall and built oversized bunk beds for Brenda, Joni, Nancy, and Patricia. They paired up, two in each bunk. Two clothes drawers pulled out from beneath the raised closet.

  After Daddy removed the wall to the middle bedroom, Patricia fell backward off the top bunk one morning while making her bed; she had leaned back, thinking the wall still stood behind her. I happened to walk by at that very moment, caught her squarely in my arms, and hefted her back atop the bunk, almost without breaking stride.

  Outside the middle bedroom, our washer hummed almost continuously in the corner of the hall. It marked the entrance to the only bathroom, which was so small you could touch the sink, the toilet, and the tub at the same time. Eight toothbrushes stood erect in a ceramic mug.

  The back bedroom, the largest, with a long built-in dresser and equally long mirror, went to me and Vicki. Mama may have wanted me to be close to the girls in case they needed something, or she may have wanted the back bedroom to be our hangout, which it became. All six girls, along with Freckles, a wirehaired terrier puppy Daddy brought home, and Midnight, my newly found black stray cat, would pile onto the bed to talk, play pitch, do homework, or watch a small television placed catty-corner on the edge of the dresser.

  One afternoon, lying on the bed in the back bedroom talking to Nancy, I raised my arms in the air and moved them rhythmically. “Did you know you can feel the vibrations of the drums beating in Africa?” I asked Nancy.

  “No, you can’t,” Nancy said dismissively.

  “It’s true. In the books I’ve been reading about Africa,” I went on, “it says they use this special wood that sends vibrations around the world. I can feel them right now.” I held my hand very still.

  Nancy paused at this because I had, indeed, been reading books about Africa, tomes actually, some of them five hundred or more pages. I had inexplicably become obsessed with Africa. I wanted to know about its jungles, plains, people, and animals, and about the archaeologists, explorers, doctors, and plantation owners who lived there, such as Karen Blixen, Mary and Louis Leakey, David Livingstone, and Albert Schweitzer.

  I longed for adventure, to explore unexplored places, to stand beneath an acacia tree and scan the horizon for lions, elephants, and horned rhinoceroses.

  Somehow, someday, I will go to Africa, I vowed to myself. It was as if my life depended on it. I extrapolated that if a twelve-year-old girl living in a trailer park in Fort Stockton, Texas, could find her way to Africa, why then, anything might be possible!

  “Really. If you raise your hand like this, you can feel them,” I said. I tapped out a beat with my hands in the air.

  “I know you’re teasing,” Nancy said. “I’m not going to raise my hand.”

  “Fine,” I said and haughtily left the room. Still, I waited outside the door, peeking in to watch Nancy. I sensed she might be curious. I clomped my feet as if I had walked down the hall into the kitchen. Sure enough, Nancy furtively raised her hand into the air.

  “Ha,” I said as I bounded back into the room and pounced onto the bed, “fooled you.”

  I liked to tease Nancy partly because she was gullible and partly because I loved to laugh. But on some level, I was also jealous of Nancy.

  She and I had been enrolled in the same sixth-grade class in Grand Junction, Colorado. When we transferred to the new school in Fort Stockton, they had only one opening in their upper-ranked sixth-grade class. Nancy and I had similar grades, so we took a placement test to see which of us would win the open slot in the higher-ranked class.

  Nancy won.

  That she had been placed in the higher-ranked class irritated me the way a scratchy label in a new shirt pricks your back. Without thinking, you reach back to scratch where the label rubs, or you find yourself making up stories about African drums.

  DUST STORMS blew through Fort Stockton with some regularity. The arid landscape, dotted with prickly pear, yucca, and desert grasses, tested the fortitude of even the hardiest inhabitants, especially in the early years. The historical marker at the Old Fort Cemetery in the center of town attested to the hardships of frontier life. It pointed out that no headstone was erected for a person over forty. That statistic sobers me more now than it did when I was twelve. At twelve, I considered Mama old at twenty-seven.

  If not for millions of barrels of oil, Fort Stockton might not have lived long, either. Hundreds of pump jacks sat atop the Permian Basin, one of the most prolific oil-producing areas in the United States. The pump jacks looked like giant donkey heads nodding up and down, drinking up the oil trapped between the world’s thickest rock deposits of the Permian geologic period. The caliche blowing around in the dust storms probably harkened back to the evaporation of an ancient Permian sea.

  One day toward the end of the school year, I suggested to Nancy that we pick up our pace and hightail it home before the dust storm hit. Getting tackled by a West Texas dust storm burned your eyes, stung your lungs, and left grit on your teeth. No matter how tight the seal around a door or window, a fine layer of silt usually found its way inside by the time the dust storm subsided. If the winds blew particularly hard, the dust could sandblast a car and leave permanent damage.

  The storm still loomed in the distance when we stepped onto the gravel road that ran alongside our trailer. However, something unexpected waited for us up ahead.

  What on earth? I wondered.

  A colossal bus loomed in our driveway. The bus rivaled the size of our trailer. Nancy and I forgot about the dust storm and studied the bold script on the side of the bus.

  “Oh, no!”

  I stopped in disbelief, reeling as if falling backward from a top bunk with no one to catch me.

  How could Mama allow it?

  Mama might as well have rented a billboard that said “I am unfaithful to my husband.” Right in broad daylight, in letters at least a foot high, the writing on the custom bus read DUSTY DINTON AND THE TROUBADOURS. No doubt t
he bus had already turned every head in the neighborhood.

  I wondered if Mama assumed no one would tell Daddy or if she just didn’t care. I cared what the neighbors thought. I cared if Daddy found out. I cared that Mama had a box of letters from Dusty hidden in her closet and that he had been writing to her since we left Grand Junction.

  We girls suspected Mama had been hiding something. Five hundred square feet does not allow much room for secrets. Our suspicions led us to stand on the foot of Mama and Daddy’s bed and snoop in the closet, after Mama had left for the weekend to visit Juárez, Mexico, a border town on the Rio Grande about 250 miles away. It did not take us long to discover the shoe box full of letters under a pile of Mama’s clothes on a shelf in the closet. We looked at one another and the contraband letters; Daddy was out of town working and Mama would not be back for another day.

  Mama had left me to hold down the fort with the explicit instructions that if we needed anything at all, I was to summon our neighbor Rose, in whom Mama confided. I didn’t think it particularly unusual to be left with the girls; I had been babysitting for over a year. It didn’t matter much if Mama was five miles or two hundred and fifty miles away; the chores and responsibilities at home were about the same. If Daddy called, I was to tell him that Mama was not home, which was the truth. Under no circumstances was I to tell Daddy she had gone to Juárez.

  I knew Mama would be furious if she caught us reading her letters, but getting caught seemed highly unlikely. We had plenty of time to read them before she returned. Without hesitation, we shook the letters out of their ragged-edged envelopes and took turns reading White Urp’s professions of love.

  After our snooping, we cooked supper. Our usual fare consisted of fried potatoes, corn bread, and a ham hock simmering with pinto beans. Depending on where payday fell and what had been stocked in the trailer before Mama left town, we might prepare our favorite meal—Mexican food. Under the best of circumstances, five or six darkened avocados would be resting in a bowl on the kitchen counter.

  Our neighbor Rose taught Mama and us how to make beef enchiladas, and guacamole with a mortar and pestle. Rose knew how to make corn tortillas that rivaled those sold at the Comanche Tortilla and Tamale Factory in town, but an hour of cooking could be saved if we bought ready-made tortillas.

  When we cooked enchiladas, Vicki, Nancy, and I stood in a line between the stove and kitchen sink, assembly-line fashion. One of us flash cooked the corn tortillas in oil; another dipped them into a skillet filled with tomato sauce and chili powder; and, finally, one of us filled them with meat, cheese, and onions, setting aside a few without onions for Patricia and Daddy. We rolled the enchiladas jelly-roll fashion and tucked them side by side on a cookie sheet. The trailer filled with a delicious aroma as the enchiladas cooked and bubbled for twenty minutes in the oven. They became one of our family’s favorite meals.

  * * *

  WE HAD big news to tell Mama when she returned home from Juárez.

  A funnel cloud had touched down and whirled in the field across from the trailer park. The sky turned a grayish green and everything grew still. Rose pounded on our trailer door. She told us girls to hurry over to her trailer because she didn’t like the looks of the sky. I hefted Joni onto my hip and we all ran barefoot across the yard to Rose’s trailer, even smaller than our own.

  Rose’s two sons, four and five, stood on the couch looking out the picture window at the vacant field where the new high school was to be built. Our eyes fixed on the dark gray funnel cloud that dropped from the sky and moved across the field like a giant top, spinning a vortex of dust, wind, and debris. We had no storm cellar to run to, no basement to hide in, not even a bathroom or closet large enough to hold all nine of us. So we held our collective breath and waited.

  When I fretted about the future, Mama used to sing the song “Que Sera, Sera” as a way of saying that no one knows what lies ahead. We were no match for a tornado that could crush trailers, uproot trees, and lift cars into the air. The only thing I knew to do was surrender to our fate, whatever that might be.

  Que Sera, Sera.

  The funnel cloud churned parallel to the trailer park in the open field and then disappeared as quickly as it had come. Nothing in our vicinity had been touched; we had been spared. In a matter of minutes the danger had passed. We stood there a while longer, holding on to one another.

  * * *

  MONTHS LATER, on the day of the approaching dust storm, Nancy and I weren’t worried about tornadoes. We walked past Dusty’s gigantic bus into the back door of our trailer. We purposely chose the back door because we didn’t want to say hi to Dusty or any of his Troubadours.

  Mama strode into the back bedroom.

  “I won’t have you being rude,” she scolded as she waved her finger toward the living room. “I want you to march right in there and say hello.”

  I trudged in and said hi. Instead of asking Why don’t you leave Mama alone? I asked, “Why do you have a bus?”

  Dusty smiled and slapped his knee. “Isn’t it great? We’re on tour!”

  The dust storm finally hit.

  Hours later, a fine layer of silt covered the linoleum floor just under the living-room door. Dusty’s bus had pulled out. I secretly hoped it had been sandblasted.

  I don’t think Daddy found out about Dusty’s visit or his letters. But he did find out when Mama went on a road trip with two cowboys. All hell broke loose.

  DADDY WRENCHED the trailer hitch until it thudded onto the ball mount of the truck. I grasped his hand, slippery with sweat and grease, and tried to pry it from the winch, hoping to dissuade him. “Please, Daddy! We can’t just leave. She won’t know where to find us.”

  He jerked his hand away as if my touch stung him. “I don’t give a damn. She should have thought of that before she took off.” Then, pointing his finger toward my nose, “And you should not have lied!”

  “I don’t know where she is, other than what she said, honest. She was taking Nancy to visit her mom, that’s all she said.”

  “And the men in the car?”

  I looked down at the chalky white patch of caliche. I had omitted the part about two men being in the car. But how could Daddy know that? He was drilling a hundred miles away.

  He slammed everything into the back of the truck: our rusted bicycles, the oil-drum barbecue grill, the metal steps leading up to the trailer house. I had never seen Daddy this angry. Veins bulged near his temples, his eyes narrowed to slits. He stopped and looked at me over his shoulder, sweat saturating his white T-shirt. “Get inside and finish making supper.”

  “But—”

  “You heard me. I’m gonna teach her a lesson she won’t forget. We’re leaving in the morning.”

  I knew he meant it. That night would be our last in Fort Stockton, Texas. And unless Mama came home in the next twelve hours, which was unlikely, knowing Mama, she would be driving up to an empty trailer space, with no forwarding address.

  I climbed into the trailer and slammed the door behind me. The fan of the swamp cooler whirred in the ceiling; the evaporating water felt cool against my hot cheeks.

  “What was Daddy hollering about?” Vicki yelled from the back bedroom.

  What should I tell them?

  I walked into the bedroom to see Vicki twisting a rubber band around Patricia’s braid.

  “My hair’s gettin’ braided, too,” Brenda piped up. She was playing with Joni on the bed, next to Vicki and Patricia.

  I slumped onto the chenille spread, following its ridges with my finger.

  “We’re moving,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant, willing my eyes not to water. If any crying was to be done, it would have to come later, after everyone else had fallen asleep.

  Vicki’s head jerked up. “Where?”

  “How come?” Patricia wanted to know, turning her head sideways, one braid in, one braid out.

  “I don’t know. But we’re leaving tomorrow.”

  “Without Mama?” Vicki asked.


  “That’s what Daddy said,” I told her, “but I’m sure Daddy will tell her where we’re going.”

  In fact, I was not sure at all.

  EARLIER THAT week, Mama walked into the back bedroom, where I was folding laundry on the bed. “I’m putting you in charge of the girls for a few days,” she announced, picking up some of Nancy’s folded underwear and stuffing it into a brown bag. “I’m taking Nancy to visit her mother in Colorado.

  “Hand me that,” Mama said, pointing to her black bra on top of a pile.

  I tossed it more forcefully than necessary.

  “Watch it, Teresa Eilene.”

  She glared into my face and I felt my cheeks grow hot. I knew to keep my mouth shut. Mama couldn’t abide sassing. Not long ago, she had slapped me across the face; the memory of her stinging handprint was a powerful deterrent.

  Doors and drawers slammed as Mama packed. She and Nancy scurried down the trailer steps, carrying their bags. I followed them outside, Joni slung across my hip. That is when I saw them—two men, waiting in the car. I had never seen them before.

  “I should be home before your dad gets back into town. But,” she said, looking me squarely in the eye, “if he asks, you tell him we took the bus.”

  Then, pulling away, she leaned her head out the window and yelled, “You girls need anything, ask Rose.”

  I stood there watching the car disappear out of the trailer park. In a matter of minutes, Mama had packed up and said good-bye, as if the trip had come up unexpectedly, over a beer at the bar.

  Mama went to visit Eunice in Colorado. That’s what I told Daddy when he came home sooner than we expected.

  Daddy had come home early because the company wanted him to work in a new location. Under ordinary circumstances, he might have decided to commute a little farther rather than move us again so soon; we had been in Fort Stockton little more than six months. But in light of Mama’s latest escapade, he planned to teach her a lesson. As he told her when he first showed her the trailer house: Just tape the cabinets shut, hook up the trailer hitch, and that’s that. Nothing needs to be packed. We were about to discover just how fast our house on wheels could move.