Rust & Stardust

by T. Greenwood

  Sally and Doris walked home, kicking rocks and swinging the satchels in loop-dee-doops until their shoulders ached.

  “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back,” Doris sang, stomping on every crack while Sally carefully avoided them, recalling the pain in her mother’s face when her rheumatism flared up.

  When they got to the trailer park, they were breathless from skipping down the sidewalk.

  “Which one’s yours?” Doris asked.

  “That one,” Sally said, motioning to the trailer, which looked gray and dull in the sparkling sunshine.

  “Swanky!” Doris said, giggling, and skipped ahead.

  “Wait,” Sally said, regretting this decision.

  “For what?” Doris said, crossing her arms.

  “Never mind,” she said, and moved toward the door, plucking the key from under the mat.

  Inside the trailer, Doris flitted about, picking things up and putting them down. In the kitchen she opened drawers and studied the contents inside. She lifted a spoon from the silverware drawer, studied her reflection, and then put it back in. She sat down at the kitchenette and jumped back up again, opening the oven door and peering inside.

  “You can just hitch this soup can up and move along whenever you want?” she asked.

  “I guess,” Sally said.

  “I’d pay a million bucks to live like this.”

  Doris continued on her self-guided tour through the small trailer, making her way to the bedroom.

  Sally felt even more breathless than she had been before. The most private and awful place in the world, and here she’d just gone and let Doris in.

  Doris went straight to Mr. Warner’s bed and sat down, swinging her legs. She leaned over and opened up the drawer to the nightstand. She rifled around, plucking out one item at a time: a crumpled pack of cigarettes, some loose change, a condom in a square cellophane wrapper.

  Sally swallowed hard.

  Doris tore open the package with her teeth, studied the rubber, and then blew it up like a balloon. When she released it, it flew about the room. Sally waited for her to make some comment, though she hoped that maybe she didn’t know what they were for.

  Doris yanked harder at the drawer until it pulled almost all the way out, and the gun came sliding toward the front of the drawer.

  “Well, looky here at this,” Doris said, picking up the gun.

  “Put it down,” Sally said, glancing around the room as if Mr. Warner might just walk in. “Please, Doris.”

  Doris held the gun out in front of her the way the cops always did in the movies. Like Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon.

  In all this time with Mr. Warner, Sally had never once picked up the gun. She usually knew where it was, but she’d never so much as touched it before. “You better put that down,” she said. “That’s Mr. Warner’s.”

  Doris lowered the gun and turned to Sally.

  “Who’s Mr. Warner?” she asked.

  “He’s the man I live with here,” she said; her body was vibrating and her skin hot. She thought of the promise they had made, the one made of blood and blades. She looked at the door again, then turned back to Doris, whispering. “The one that took me from my mama.”

  Doris was smiling, but her grin disappeared.

  “What do you mean? You said you live here with your daddy. That your mama’s dead.”

  Sally shook her head and looked down at the gun in Doris’s hand.

  “I lied.”

  “About your mama?” Doris said.

  “About everything,” Sally said, words tumbling. “We’re on the lam. ’Cause I got caught shoplifting, and he woulda taken me to the courthouse, but he said that if I did what he said, he wouldn’t make me go to jail. He said he was FBI.” The rush of words, her secrets spilling, felt strange. Out of her control.

  “What?” Doris said, her jaw slack. “What did you steal?”

  “A notebook,” she said. “From the Woolworth’s in Camden.” Her heart was beating nearly as hard and fast as it had when Mr. Warner caught her up by the elbow at the Woolworth’s.

  Doris looked at her, incredulous. “Kids can’t go to jail,” she said, shaking her head. “Not unless they killed somebody.”

  “Well, now I know he ain’t with the FBI. He says he’s my real father. But I think that’s a lie, too. There’s a reward out for me. He took another girl once, too. Kidnapped.” The word felt odd in her mouth and hung in the air between them like the smell of something rotten.

  Doris’s eyes were wide. She sat down on the bed and waited for Sally to continue.

  “At night…,” Sally’s words came forth like waves crashing against sand. “He does bad things. To me, I mean.”

  “Like hit you?” Doris asked. Her voice was softer now. Maybe even a bit scared. “’Cause lots of daddies do that. Mine’s got a belt that hangs on a nail by the door. When he gets home from work, Mama tells him what we all done wrong, and we get the belt.”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “Dirty things. Nasty things.” She gestured to the bed, feeling like she might faint. It was like she’d been carrying around an anchor and it was sinking, sinking.

  “You mean…,” Doris started, then spoke in disbelief, “… intercourse?”

  The word sounded wrong. Like a foreign language. She felt the same way she had when she read those words in Sammy’s books. In A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

  “I guess?” Sally said.

  Doris shook her head, as if trying to make sense of what Sally had just said. “You’ll go to hell for that, you know. Y’all will.”

  “No, I didn’t do nothin’ bad. He…” She paused, shook her head. “He makes me.”

  “Well, you can’t let him do that no more. And you gotta go to confession.”

  The anchor dug into the deep, deep sand beneath the watery surface of this awful sea. Suddenly Sally regretted everything. She regretted letting Doris come home with her; she regretted the promise made when they pressed their bloody fingertips together. She’d sworn to tell the truth, but now here she was worse off than she was before. There was no way she was going to kneel in that cold confessional and tell Father Rogers what Mr. Warner had done to her. She barely had the words. That word that Doris had used, intercourse, felt like medicine. Bitter and chemical.

  “If I was you,” Doris said, standing up from the bed and smoothing the blanket flat again, “I would tell him he best stop messin’ with me or else I’d blow a hole through his skull.” Doris aimed the gun at the pillow where Mr. Warner’s head rested on those nights after he crawled off her and back into his own bed. “Bam!”

  SUSAN

  The call came in the middle of dinner at Ella’s house. Susan excused herself and went to answer. She shivered as a gust of cold air came through the cracks around the front door. It was early March, but it could have been the middle of January. The winds were howling, mournful, and the air had a bite to it. Her mother refused to run the furnace, the cost of oil not in her budget.

  “Is Ella Horner there?” the man asked, his voice gruff.

  “May I tell her who’s calling?” Susan asked, peering into the dining room. Al and her mother were sitting at the table. The baby was in her high chair, shoving green beans into her mouth. Al ate quietly, but Ella wouldn’t touch her food. They’d had to plead with her to come downstairs for supper.

  “This is Detective Vail from the county sheriff’s office,” the man said. “Regarding her daughter, Sally Horner.”

  Susan felt her knees liquefying, folding under her. She gripped the edge of the telephone table.

  “This is her other daughter, Susan. Mother’s not well. Can I help you? Do you have news? About Sally?” Her words seemed to float in the air before her face. Her ears buzzed. She could barely hear him through the static.

  “We’ve received some information from the Dallas Police,” he said. “There’s been an arrest made.”

  “Oh my God,” Sally said.

  “A m
an named Joseph Locurto,” he said. “Goes by Joey Bonds.”

  “What was he arrested for?” she asked. “Did he do something to Sally?”

  “No, no, ma’am. He was arrested on unrelated charges. There was a murder at his nightclub around Christmas. During the investigation, he was found to be running some illicit operations in his back room. With underage girls.”

  “Sally?” she asked. “Oh my God.”

  “No, no … however, some evidence recovered during the investigation linked Bonds to Mr. La Salle. Ledgers and receipts. During questioning, it came to light that he is, indeed, affiliated with him. We believe that Mr. La Salle and Sally may be staying somewhere in Dallas.”

  “Who’s on the phone?” Al hollered from the dining room.

  She covered the earpiece. “Just a minute,” she said, her voice trembling. The wind outside howled, and tree branches scratched at the windows.

  “Oh my God. What happens now?”

  “Local authorities as well as the FBI are collaborating,” he said. “We’ll keep you posted if we get any more information. Can you please pass this along to your mother, ma’am?”

  “Of course,” Susan said. “Thank you,” she added, but he had already hung up.

  She stood in the hallway for several moments, collecting her thoughts and trying to recall exactly what the detective had told her about Sally. She needed to figure out a way to tell her mother without getting her hopes up. Sally was still gone. Still missing.

  “Sue!” Al hollered again. “Your chicken’s getting cold!”

  Susan straightened her skirt and took a deep breath, and put on a careful smile.

  “Who was that?” her mother asked, grimly pushing the chicken around on her plate.

  Susan reached for her mother’s hand, and Ella looked up at her and her face filled with terror. She shook her head.

  “Is it Sally?” she asked.

  “It was the police, Mama. They have some information. They think that man La Salle may have taken her to Dallas. There’s someone, some man who owns a nightclub? The police there, the FBI, are looking for her.”

  “Was it Vail?” Al said, standing. “Is he still on the phone?”

  Susan shook her head.

  “She’s never coming home,” Ella said. Not a question, but an awful certainty she now seemed to have.

  “Don’t say that, Mama,” Susan asked. “Why would you say that?”

  “But it’s true,” Ella said, shaking her head. She turned and looked straight into Susan’s eyes. “Don’t you understand? It’s just like with Russell. Don’t you see?” Her words hung there, in the air. Suspended.

  ELLA

  When Ella plumbed those terrifying depths, the dark murky waters of her memory, this was what she recalled: the smell of rosemary and thyme, steam fogging the kitchen windows. The mournful sound of Lester Young playing “Sometimes I’m Happy” on the phonograph. It was spring. The tulips Russell had planted had begun to burst from the earth, their blooms like swollen hearts.

  Ella was making chicken noodle soup, the chicken thighs creating greasy swirls. Russell hadn’t gotten out of bed in a week. She’d put the record on, cooked his favorite soup, and hoped that it might entice him to come back to the land of the living.

  Sally was six years old, a bubbling bright child full of questions. “Is Daddy sick?” she asked each time Russell retreated. “Does he have a temperature? Can we make him chicken soup?” And today, because Ella was tired of making excuses about what was wrong with Russell, she nodded and began to gather the ingredients from the pantry. As she chopped the anemic celery and limp carrots, salvaged from the icebox, she wondered if it was possible. If there was a cure for this. If he would ever be well.

  Susan was upstairs getting ready to go out to a picture show with some girlfriends. Some Gary Cooper flick. She was sixteen. Her whole life ahead of her. Ella watched her sometimes, and envied her youth. Not her unlined skin or silky hair. Not even her untroubled bones. Instead, it was the optimism of youth. That carefree, trouble-free trust. The breezy obliviousness to all the ways the world can, and will, conspire against you. What Ella wouldn’t have given to have even a single day in which she once again believed the world to still hold promise.

  She assumed it was Susan coming down the stairs, the light spring in her step, and so she was startled to see that it was Russell. He was wearing a clean shirt, pressed pants, and she could still see the comb marks in his pomaded hair.

  She turned to the stove and studied the noodles, fat as fingers spinning lazily in the broth.

  He came up behind her and nuzzled his clean-shaven chin in her neck. She could smell liquor on his breath already. God, did he have a bottle hidden upstairs? She felt her shoulders stiffen.

  “Thought I’d go out for a drink or two,” he offered, as if this were a gift. As if this were her reward for holding the house together for the last week while he retreated into that private melancholy.

  She turned to face him, holding the wooden spoon in her hand.

  A slow grin crawled across his face, the only evidence of his travels to the land of misery in the lingering dark pockets beneath his warm brown eyes.

  “Dance with me, El?” he said, as the needle in the record moved to “Empty Hearted.”

  He reached around her waist with one hand and grabbed the hand holding the spoon with the other, and the spoon clattered to the floor. But instead of allowing him to whisk her away, instead of giving in to the smell of his skin, the softness of his hands and his eyes, she pulled away from him. She picked up the spoon from the floor and held it out like a weapon.

  “You can’t do this anymore,” she said.

  “Come on. I just wanna dance with my girl,” he said, and reached again for her, lowering his chin and looking up at her like a little boy in trouble with his teacher.

  She shook her head. Her eyes burned with the smell of pepper, onions.

  He pulled at her, the cheerful sounds of the music mocking the sadness that gripped her. As if he’d passed it along to her. Infected her.

  She knew what would happen. He would leave her here alone in the kitchen. Susan would skip out the door with her girlfriends. Even Sally would retreat to her own little world. And she would remain. Caught inside these four walls. Pots to scrub, sheets (stiff and stinking with his sickness and sweat) to wash. While he went out and drank himself into happiness, maybe even into other women’s arms (she didn’t know, how could she ever know?), she’d be left alone. Again.

  “Stop it,” she said, pushing him as hard as she was able. He stumbled backward, knocking his hip against the kitchen table.

  “Jesus, El,” he said, laughing. “You tryin’ to hurt me?”

  “Hurt you?” she blurted. “I’m the one. I’m the one who hurts.”

  And as she said it, it became true. The pain she ignored knocking at her door like the church ladies who came on Sundays. Knock, knock. But this time, she answered it. Let the pain in, and it settled in her bones. In her aching chest, her breaking heart.

  “You go out tonight, you don’t come home,” she said.

  “Aw, Ella.” He still must have thought she was teasing. How could he think she was joshing with him?

  “I mean it,” she said, summoning the words she’d tried to say a hundred times. “You leave me now, you might as well be dead.”

  His smile disappeared. He backed away, hands up in surrender. Then he stood in the foyer, hands lowered, shoulders slumped. For a moment, she thought he might just simply walk back up the stairs, return to bed. But he stood still and stared into her eyes. “Might be easier,” he said, shrugging.

  “What?” she asked, the words catching on the lump in her throat.

  “If I was dead?”

  He reached for his hat on the hook, his coat.

  “Yes,” she said, her body aflame. Her heart a crimson tulip blooming in her aching chest. “It would.”

  SALLY

  “Where are we going?” Sally asked. Sh
e clung to Tex, who was wriggling in her arms, his sharp little claws digging into her skin.

  “Get in the truck,” Mr. Warner said.

  “But I like it here,” she said quietly, shaking her head. “I’m doin’ good in school. My teachers all say so. I’m practically getting straight As. And I’m the one who got picked for the May crowning; I’m supposed to put the wreath on Mary’s head. Only one girl gets picked by the sisters, and it’s me. I can’t miss that. And Doris wants me to join the Girl Scouts with her next year, and I told Lena I’d be here this summer when the circus comes back, if Ruth…”

  He laughed.

  “Please. Why do we gotta leave?”

  “Get in the truck,” he said. “I won’t hear another word out of you.”

  She looked at him, felt the words bubbling up in her. Acidic. She never talked back to him, never argued. She’d been doing what he said for almost two years without complaint. She’d been too afraid. She’d also believed that if she did as she was told that he’d eventually let her go home. That he couldn’t keep her forever. That if she was a good girl, he’d have to let her go. She couldn’t get in that truck again. Couldn’t let him take her even farther away from home. When would it stop? When would she be free?

  “I don’t really belong to you,” she said, the words escaping. “I don’t care what you say. You ain’t my daddy.”

  He struck her, and it nearly knocked her off her feet. She dropped Tex, and he yapped at Mr. Warner’s feet. She touched her split lip with her finger, staring at him with disbelief as she tasted the blood.

  “No,” he said. “I ain’t your daddy. Your daddy killed himself rather than spend a minute more in the house with you and your crippled mama.”

  Tex growled, baring his sharp teeth at Mr. Warner, who lifted his boot, connecting with the little dog’s ribs. The dog flew at least five feet across the dirt, howling loudly.