Karen G. Berry - Mayhem 01 - Love and Mayhem

by Karen G. Berry

  He guessed it was time to go.

  At the counter, she slowed to banter with other truckers. Easy, laughing. He stood behind her while they talked loads, cops, weather and roadwork. He felt effete, despite his large size. He followed her back to the idling truck, climbed in the passenger side, waited. “I suppose you know all those guys.”

  She looked at him from under the brim of that pale yellow hat. “Of course. It’s the Trucker Club. There’s a secret handshake, and we’ve all got names like Skeeter and Hitch. Since I’m a girl, I write the newsletter.”

  Every time he opened his mouth, she let him know that he’d said something stupid. He didn’t know one thing about trucking, and basically he didn’t care, either. He was just trying to make conversation with this tight-mouthed woman with the disfigured face. He was lost, frightened, on the run and ashamed of the mess he’d left behind in Portland. If he thought about his parents and how disappointed they’d be, he’d cry. The thought of crying in front of this woman was more than he could take.

  The safest thing to do was remain mute.

  The sky slowly darkened. He’d been relieved when he first got in the truck, because that branching scar was on the far side of her face and he didn’t have to look at it. But sitting there waiting, knowing that scar was lurking on the other side of her face, he had an almost unbearable need to see it again.

  After a few more minutes on the radio speaking a jargon he didn’t understand, she rubbed her belly. “I’m shot. All that food. You could probably head south tonight with Harlan, that’s who I was talking to back there at the café. Or you can wait and go with me in the morning after I get some sleep.”

  At the mention of sleep, his eyelids drooped. He shouldn’t have been tired. The nap between the Shasta reservoir and Sacramento should have revived him. His fear at running away, that should have made him alert. But the meal sat heavy in his gut. She hadn’t had a beer, but he’d downed three. “Can I sleep in here?”

  She shrugged. “Suit yourself. But it’s a lot more fun in back with me.”

  ON THE ROAD, even when a big rig is still, it can be oh-so-full of movement.

  Somewhere in those hours of arched backs and straining bodies and twisted blankets, amid the deep sighs and animal cries, feet thumping against fiberglass walls, somewhere in that night, he took a break.

  He sat before her, naked, cross-legged, a home-rolled cigarette hanging on his lip. He played his guitar and sang a Simon and Garfunkel song. She listened, really listened. “Not bad. You sing like Gordon Lightfoot. Or Bruce Cockburn, maybe. Okay, my turn. I need to see if I can still play.” Her exposed neck was as long, as graceful as the fretted neck of the instrument she held. She coaxed the guitar into a minor chord, her personal tuning. She ran a scale and called it good. Her voice was honey and whiskey, sorrow and soul. It hung in the night, lifting and turning and hurting like something caught and twisting in the dark.

  It made him cry.

  “Oh, you great big pussy.” She climbed on him again.

  THEY LAY ON their backs.

  “You know, you’re really good. You could be a professional.”

  “Thanks, but no thanks.” Her smoke rings wafted over their heads. “It might ruin sex for me if I did it for a living.”

  “Noooo, God. I meant being a professional musician.”

  “I did that. I worked the gospel circuit from the time I was four until I was eighteen.”

  “A gospel singer? You? It’s hard to imagine you in a religious environment.”

  Her guffaw echoed around the sleeper cab. She’d been laughing at him since the Jubitz parking lot, but this was the first time she’d laughed this hard. “Listen. The gospel circuit is not exactly a religious environment. Drinking, smoking and swearing, and all those fine musicians. I loved everything about it but performing.”

  “I would have loved to see that.”

  He reached over, but she wrapped up in a sheet and curled away, leaving him alone with a blanket that smelled of wool, dust, and her.

  THE COP’S MANNER was almost paternal as he reached high to guide Isaac’s shaggy head into the back of the State Patrol car. Handcuffs again, and a police car. Of course, in Portland he hadn’t had to listen to all this chitchat when he got arrested. The trooper and the trucker talked like old friends. The weather, the aforementioned talent show, her uncle’s dog. They talked the longest about a messy divorce. He got the bar, she got the trailer. But who would get the dog?

  He should have known it would happen. They’d woken up, gone back inside the truck stop for breakfast, which he’d eaten with a ferocity that made her laugh out loud. She’d paid the bill and made a few calls while he used the bathroom. Then, the highway. He’d thought he was getting away. But he should have known that a routine stop at a weigh station, a request for his ID would mean his doom. Maybe he’d wanted to be caught.

  And now, handcuffed in the back of a state patrol car, he couldn’t look away from this black-haired stranger. She glanced over toward the car. “Can I say good-bye to him?” While the trooper leaned against the fender and waited, she climbed in beside Isaac. He wanted to touch her, but handcuffs prevented that. She lay her hand on his knee, a tender reminder of everything she’d done with his body the night before. “Sorry about this.”

  He stared ahead. “I’ll be okay.” He was afraid that if he looked in those flickering silver eyes he’d cry again. “Do you have a cigarette?”

  “Just this last one.” Her hand rose to a solitary cigarette, tucked in her hatband.

  “Can I have it?”

  “No. It’s my last one. Ever.”

  His voice sounded like an angry child’s. “You won’t give me a cigarette?”

  She turned those metal eyes on him, her scar blushing red like a flame climbing her jaw. With a ferocious pounce, she straddled his lap and kissed him. Her breath was heavy with coffee, her lips dry. His body stirred and ached, complaining after the superhuman efforts of the night before. He let out a moan. “Will you keep my guitar?”

  “Last time I did that, the fella never picked it up.”

  “I swear, I’ll come get it.” His throat was so dry he could hardly speak.

  “When you do, I’ll buy you another steak.”

  She retrieved the battered black case from the front seat, pitched it into the open door of her idling rig, swung herself up and into the cab. He saw that flash of skin through the threadbare seat of her Levi’s. She settled behind the wheel, music he hated pouring out the window.

  “Raven sure do love her twang,” remarked the trooper, settling in and readying to leave.

  “Raven? Her name is Raven?” He craned to see her face. Her scar sat in shadow under that pale yellow hat. Her brown arm shone in the sun, fingertips pointing to the words on the door below the window.

  LaCour Independent Trucking

  Ochre Water, California

  Her name was Raven LaCour. She swept her hat from her head, letting the sun hit her face, her smile, her scar.

  He’d never seen anyone more beautiful in his life.

  Saturday:

  3 p.m.

  AS A FORMER reservation child turned gospel singer turned stage manager turned trailer park manager, Tender LaCour had always exhibited a great sensitivity to sounds. It was said he could hear wires singing along the highway, songs playing on radios that were switched off, water from miles away and the thoughts of children, which are known to inhabit a different frequency that the thoughts of adults. A sweet song could play his heart like a stringed instrument.

  Tender LaCour had come to the Blue Moon Tap Room to avoid his least favorite sound in the world. Sadly he’d encountered something that pained him almost as much as his wife’s voice.

  “I believe that the boundaries of morality are getting mighty slack in the Francie June Memorial Trailer Park.” Over in the corner, The Right Reverend Henry Heaven lounged at a table, preaching to the day drinkers in his oily baritone.

  “You bet, Rev
.” Beau, the owner and tender of the Blue Moon Tap Room, swabbed at the bar. “And for that, a man like me gives thanks every single day of my life.”

  The Reverend shifted, trying to find a comfortable position. Due to the lack of padding on his skinny frame, he didn’t so much sit on a chair as drape himself across it, as if someone might be coming by in the morning to put him back on. Beau always said they should run a broomstick through his sleeves and set him out to scare the crows.

  The Reverend caressed his glass of RC. “You have a point, Brother Beau. Sin keeps a man of God in business.”

  Beau’s laughter was polite, no more. He was a consummate diplomat and a good listener, not to mention a fine guitar player. “Need a refill, Tender?”

  Tender raised a mostly full glass of club soda with lime. “Thank you, but I’m good.” Beau went back to wiping down the bar and watching the pool table, where a sweet young thing had on cutoffs so high that her cotton pockets were visible below the fringed denim. She bent to make a difficult shot, showing a white wink of untanned bottom. Tender turned back to his glass with a resolute sigh, fixing his thoughts on the spare flanks of his wife, firmly engirdled in the iron of a catalog-ordered foundation garment.

  The Reverend was pretending to analyze the shot. “You could drop the six with the two,” he offered, but the young thing winked over her shoulder at Beau and sank the six with the five. The Reverend shifted a bit as the pool player leaned in for her next shot. “There seems to be no general condemnation of sinful ways in this park. It stands to figure that a naming the place after a harlot might predispose the park to toleration.”

  Beau lifted his eyebrows. “I always thought harlots were the best kind of women, myself.” The cut-off cutie turned around and crossed her arms. Beau gave her a slow smile.

  The Reverend frowned. “Do you read Proverbs, Brother Beau?”

  “Not so much on Bible reading these days, Rev.”

  “Well, Brother Beau, if you read Proverbs, you’ll get a fine sense of the Lord’s condemnation of harlotry.”

  Beau frowned a little. “Proverbs? It’s the worst book in the Bible. Proverbs is like that fussy auntie who comes to visit and always sets to scolding you, so you hide before she kisses you.”

  “I thought you didn’t read the Bible.”

  “I put in my years at Sunday school and Bible camp.”

  “Then you know.” The Reverend rose to his feet, but the effect wasn’t all that majestic. He seemed more suit than man. He raised his arms towards Heaven, or at least the tin ceiling of the Blue Moon Tap Room. “Proverbs is full of warnings. The harlot is a special danger. The harlot will turn your eyes from the Lord.” His eyes slid like something greasy over to Tender LaCour. “And it amazes me that this community lets Fossetta Sweet languish in the pig-wallow of sin she’s created for herself over there in Space 48.”

  The bar was so very, very quiet.

  Hunched on a barstool, Tender LaCour looked like just another three o’clock drinker, his spine rounded from disappointment. But when he straightened his back, squared his shoulders and took a stand on his dusty black boots, he was a sight to see. Smooth skin, black hair streaked with white at each temple, a jaw like a granite block and silver eyes that shone like mercury.

  “Six foot two of pure Indian dynamite,” muttered Beau.

  Tender said not a word as he picked up his cap from the bar and settled it on his head before shoving out the door into the furnace of the afternoon.

  The Reverend, looking even more pale than usual, lifted a glass of RC and melted ice cubes to his mouth. His many rings glinted in the light of the neon Budweiser sign. Beau watched the constellation of reflections dancing through the dim light of the Blue Moon Tap Room. “You’re better than a disco ball, Reverend. But I might get one anyway of those anyway. I hear that harlots like balls.”

  The sweet young thing at the pool table sent out peals of clear, irreverent laughter.

  SMALL OCHRE DUST devils danced across the highway. The hills to the south glowed a faint purple. Tender wanted to put his hands over his ears, but he forced himself to listen. The noise had pained him all day. The air baked the moisture out of him as he waited, submitting to the noise until he could stand to walk through it. He decided he would call his brother when he got to the Clubhouse. He’d ask Memphis if he could hear it too, that stirring howl overhead.

  He set off with a straight-shouldered, long-legged saunter enhanced by a slight back-cant, as if he were catching a tailwind and had to lean back to resist it. The effect was singular, a handsome combination of physical grace and complete lack of concern about getting anywhere on time. Tender LaCour was said to have the second-best walk in the area.

  His big boots barely disturbed a stone as he crossed the highway and passed between the cement lions that flanked the gates of the Park. He passed Minah Bourne’s tidy doublewide with a bump-out in Space 49, the disheveled singlewide mentioned by the Reverend in Space 48, his own sprawling home in the somewhat cramped Space 47. Tender followed Sweetly Dreaming Lane, but it wouldn’t matter what road he travelled. Every lane, avenue, boulevard and thoroughfare in the Park led to the Clubhouse.

  Ah, the Clubhouse, with its barn red aluminum siding, freshly painted white trim, its courtyard paved with indoor/outdoor carpet in a brilliant Kelly green. Tender paused by the sundial in the center of the courtyard. Imbedded in its face was a piece of the fuselage of the plane in which Francie June had experienced her final sweet dream. Tender let his hand linger on the bit of metal, kept polished by the fingers of pilgrims.

  Fortified, he went to face what lay within.

  RHONDALEE LACOUR SAT in the Clubhouse office at her warehouse-liquidation metal desk, putting the final touches on her column for the monthly newsletter. She was trying to write a notice about the Park’s upcoming dog show in such a way as to discourage the entry of pit bulls.

  It is Park Management’s hope that the dogs entered in the show will reflect well on our Park-wide morals and standards here at the Park, and that they will…

  “They will… will… will what? Not rip each other to shreds? Eat the cats?” Rhondalee was tired of trying to edit the Park. But the truth was no one ever read the newsletter, no matter what she put in there.

  She could hear the ladies leaving the meeting room. Specifically, Rhondalee could hear Minah Bourne of Space 49 saying good-bye to everyone. Minah, a pillar of community service and common sense, President of the Tenant Association, Keeper of the Community Bulletin Board, Leader of the Afternoon Crafts Circle, and Elected Sovereign Mistress Supreme of anything else in the world that Rhondalee might have cared to run for, yes, that Minah.

  “Well,” grumbled Rhondalee, “I have my newsletter.” She put her hand on the lowest drawer on the left-hand side of her office-supply liquidation metal desk and gave it a tug. That drawer was always securely locked, but she had to check it a couple times an hour, anyway.

  Still locked. She smiled a prim and thin-lipped smile.

  Melveena Strange pushed open the metal office door with an elbow. “Rhondalee? Do you have a sec?”

  Distractions and bother, the life of a trailer park manager. The busybody teacher was smiling, of course, smiling and smiling because apparently she was so darn happy all the time. Melveena wriggled her way over to a chair. “I was just here for the Afternoon Crafts Circle, and I thought I’d drop by and say hey.”

  “I’m real busy.” She glared at the scanty pile of papers on her desk. She decisively moved some acrylic paperweights from one stack to the other and back again, as if she were playing a board game.

  “Oh I understand that. I mean, you have so much to do around here.”

  It was about time for someone to notice that. Rhondalee warmed a little. “I do. It isn’t easy with Annie Leigh badgering me all the time. That child is so noisy. Jesus says children should be seen and not heard, you know. Jesus likes peace and quiet. It says that there right in Genesis or somewhere.” Rhondalee had never opened a
Bible in her life, but that didn’t stop her quoting freely from what she assumed to be between the covers.

  “Amen to that, Rhondalee.” Melveena looked like a cat ready to pounce. “I was wondering, have you given any thought to my idea?”

  “Your idea?” Rhondalee had a deep and abiding mistrust of all ideas. Ideas were dangerous. “Which idea was that?”

  “The idea of Annie Leigh going to school out in Bone Pile? I’d pick her up on my way, and drop her at home, too. Of course, she’d have to stay after a bit with me, but I’d get her home eventually.” And there was that beauty queen smile again. “By law at age seven, she’ll need to be enrolled. Think of the work you could get done with her gone all day.”

  Rhondalee wrestled briefly with temptation. It was true, Annie Leigh had requested to go to school several times, and she would probably love to go out to that wretched little school with those wretched little girls. For Heaven’s sake, she might even make friends with some of that tick-ridden trash. Rhondalee shuddered. “Those Bone Pile kids are not godly. I don’t think they’d be a good influence on my Annie Leigh. Heaven help the Reverend, he has his work cut out with that ministry.”

  Melveena smiled again. This smile had so many teeth in it that it looked downright carnivorous. “Think about it, Rhondalee. Don’t say no just yet.”

  For reasons she couldn’t figure out, Rhondalee didn’t say no, though she certainly wanted to. The Community Meeting would start in three hours. “I have work to do, Melveena. I have to get ready for the meeting.”

  “Of course you do. Well. Bye, now.” Melveena waved a little pageant wave and elbowed her way back out the door. She might have been a lady, but she didn’t exactly walk like one. The men in the park said she did her best work from the waist down. Melveena Strange was considered to have the best walk in the area.

  I wonder if they all walk like that in Arkansas, thought Rhondalee. Her face fell into lines and pouches. When some women age, the girls they were hide just below the skin, peeking out now and then with spark and sass. But this was not the case with Rhondalee. Age had drained the youth from her as thoroughly as if she’d been put through a cider press. A generous application of hair dye, Aquanet and party-plan beauty products had done nothing to restore it.