“Were you a tomboy, like me?”
“I was worse.”
“You still are. Now, you’re a tom man.”
“A what?”
“A tom man. That’s a tom boy, grown up.” They curved into each other, enjoying the animal nearness. “I wish I was with you every day.”
“On the road? You got your schooling with Grandpa.”
“What’s schooling for, Mom?”
“It’s for reading, for one thing. I missed out on that. I can barely read, Tadpole. Just road signs and mile markers.”
“You could come home, Mom. And go to school.”
“Come home and let Grandpa Tender teach me to read? Nope, Tadpole. That would be a mess.”
Raven hadn’t returned home for more than a week at a time, except for a span of a month when she was twenty. She’d pulled in, hopped out belly-first, looked down at the writhing, impatient mound there, shrugged at her parents and said, Well, hell. Rhondalee had one of her fits, of course.
But on the night Annie Leigh was born, Rhondalee was there, grabbing at her hands while a maternity nurse fussed around, trying to insert a fetal monitor. This goes in the baby’s head, and it won’t hurt you, Honey, she’d cooed. Raven had kicked the nurse in the stomach, climbed out of bed, leaned against the wall and moaned. Her father went to her. Raven slammed her shoulder against the wall, bit him on the arm, squatted down and shot the howling little dark thing out of her into her own hands.
Rhondalee had fallen down in a fit, but even there in a hospital, she couldn’t seem to attract any medical attention. By the time she’d raised herself to her feet, the nurse had washed and wrapped the baby and handed her to her bewildered mother, who stood in a corner, a look of something like glory on her face. A girl. You don’t say, she’d whispered, suddenly calmed by that body against her chest.
She’d stood in that corner while they tried to get her to lie down. Delivered that mess that came after right onto the linoleum. Held on to that baby, looking at her face.
Raven lay in the sun, looked down on that face. It hadn’t changed all that much since the first time she’s studied it; the pointed chin, the grey eyes, the black hair. Freckles, now, and those big squared-off teeth, but that face was pretty much the same one she wore as a baby girl.
Annie showed those teeth in a smile. “Mom? Why’d you name me Annie Leigh?”
“Once your uncle Memphis brought me a doll, and I called her Annie. You looked like her. Skinny and floppy and your stuffing was always coming out.” Annie laughed. “Leigh is for your gramma, because she was going to take care of you. But she had this fancier way of spelling it.” Raven wasn’t a creature of memory, but she remembered how she felt, binding up her breasts and handing her baby over to Rhondalee as soon as she could sit on her stitches. “Don’t you like your name?”
“I like yours better.”
“I was named for one of your great-grammas. Grandpa Tender’s mother. She was pure Sioux.”
“That makes Gramps half an Indian. What does that make me?”
“It’s like a pie that keeps getting cut. I’m a fourth.”
Annie Leigh thought deeply. “I’m an eighth of a pie of an Indian.”
“You’re a smart one, you know that?”
But Annie didn’t smile. She looked over at the fishing poles. “Gramma would say, this is a good day for dynamite fishing. Gramps would say, dynamite fishing. What a waste.”
“Hey Tadpole, let’s pack up our tackle and take a wild ride.”
In five minutes flat they were tearing down the highway in Tender’s old truck.
“Mom, where we headed?”
“Wanna steer?”
“Sure!” She sat on her mother’s lap, and while her mother ran the pedals, Annie made a fairly steady track down the center of the road. “They should make roads wider, Mom.”
“Maybe they should. But they don’t. So if anyone comes along, you better get to the right.” Raven cracked a beer and had a sip. She set the can on the dash.
“Can I have a sip?”
“Not while I’m looking.” Raven looked out the side window and hummed. Annie, with one hand on the wheel, took the beer from the dash and had a long pull. Annie had always loved the taste of beer, the feeling it gave her. She felt it first in the base of her spine as a kind of relaxation, then felt it spread along her arms and down to her fingertips. She replaced the can on the dash. “Guess what, Mom?”
“What?”
“I believe,” she said with a smile, “that beer helps me steer better.”
“Is that right? Well, now.”
They passed an abandoned house. It looked like a shipwreck, all weathered boards and rotting eaves. “We should stop and see if there’s anything good in there.”
“If there is, the Bone Pilers have cleaned it out.” The Bone Pilers were gleaners of everything abandoned, cars, homes, gardens. They would take the flowers off graves if they fancied them.
“Well, Mom, we could at least have a look.”
“Gimme the wheel.” Annie hopped off her mother’s lap and Raven turned hard, making a U-turn and throwing up a plume of fine desert dust. The suspension of the truck screamed in complaint. The vehicle shook and bucked like an old bronc in the throes of remembering his glory. The cheap fishing poles clattered around in the truck bed, the cooler opened, spilling ice on Raven’s lap. She hit the brakes and her open beer can slid across the dash and flew out the window, shedding a trail of foam across the highway.
They were near to flipping over before they finally stopped.
Raven sat for a moment without moving. “Damn. Bad brakes.”
Annie’s heart beat like a tub drum. “Mom! Can we do that again?”
“No way. I wasted a beer.” She hit the gas and didn’t let up until they lurched to a stop in front of the old house.
Someone had actually locked the ancient front door. “Stand back, Tadpole,” said her mother. “Watch and learn.” With a loud crack and a well-aimed boot sole, it opened. “If it don’t give in, kick it. Remember that.” She looked in. “Step light, Tadpole. This whole place looks ready to cave.”
Breaking and Entering, thought Annie Leigh. She swelled with a sense of trespass so strong that she shivered.
The dry air shone golden with motes. The living room echoed, not even a sagging sofa or an old newspaper to show that anyone had ever lived there. Raven stepped through to the kitchen. Annie shadowed her. “Look,” whispered Annie. She pointed to a nest of old blankets in one corner, some open cans. Bottles. “Mexicans?”
“Yup. Using this place to hide out.”
“They sure are messy.”
“Well, they always leave their stuff behind because they have to travel light.” Raven looked down at her boot, tangled in something filthy. A pair of panties, torn, blackened with spots. Raven tried to kick them away.
“Mom it’s just some old dirty drawers,” Annie reassured her, but Raven didn’t hear, just continued twisting and kicking, in a dance of panic, finally getting them loose and stomping them into the rotten floor.
“Mom, it’s nothing!”
Her mother hammered her boots into the floor like a demon-possessed flamenco dancer. “Die!” she hissed. “Son-of-a-bitch, die… !”
A tearing, creaking sound, a breaking away of all support. Annie Leigh watched as her mother fell through the floor in an eruption of dust and splinters.
“AFTERNOON, GATOR. SEEMS like we were just sitting here yesterday.”
“Afternoon, Sheriff. I believe we were.” Air whistled through the place where Gator’s tooth used to be. “I’m getting a little tired of the food here.”
“No one to bail you out again? It’s too bad the Reverend’s dead. He could have bailed you out.”
The composure cracked a little in the form of a frown. “With what? His mighty Sunday take from those Bone Pile idiots?”
“Maybe he could have… pawned a ring?”
“My bail is a bit higher than
five dollars, and he’d have been lucky to get that for the whole assortment of Cracker Jack prizes he had on his fingers.” Gator made the closest thing to a smile he could. “What’s happening with the Reverend’s body?”
“We’re shipping it to his sister in Utah.”
“That’s his only family?”
“Yes. She says they’ll have a service this weekend.”
“Well. It’s a sad thing, a man meeting his end so far from the people who love him. I thought maybe if he was buried here, your niece might sing at his service.”
Memphis stared through grey eyes at Gator Rollins. “I wonder when you’re getting out of here, Gator.”
“I suppose as soon as you let me.”
“No, I mean, out of this state.”
“As soon as I get my things out of the Reverend’s trailer, I’m moving on.”
“Back to Arizona? What about the talent show?”
Gator looked at him with something close to fury in his face. “I’m having a little trouble with my back-up band.”
“Bone Pilers pulled out on you?”
“Last night. No good miscreants. Those Bone Pilers are just a bunch of hill snakes when it comes to their word.”
“Well, let me tell you something. I’d leave, if I were you. I’d leave now, and I’d leave fast.”
Gator sat there, stony.
Nothing ever sticks to the man, thought Memphis.
Nothing.
HER FACE HUNG over the edge of the hole. “Mom? Mom? Are you down there?” She’d heard the landing, a thump and a curse and what sounded like a struggle. There’s Mexicans down there, she thought, they thought we were the Feds when we kicked down the door, and they hid down there and now they got my mom.
Could life be any more exciting?
“Mom? Mom, where are you?”
“Hey Tadpole? You’re not gonna believe this. Would you go out to Tender’s truck and get me a flashlight? I’m sure there’s one rolling around in there somewhere.”
“You break anything?”
“I sure did.”
Annie ran to the truck. The glove compartment had banged open when her mother made the U-turn, and maps, tapes and empty whisky bottles covered the floor. She tried two flashlights. The smaller one worked. She shone it around the floor of the truck a little, and something bright wedged by the seat bracket shot out sparks like a diamond.
It was a diamond. In her Gramps’ truck.
She scooted across the floor of Gramp’s truck and pried it out. Well, she liked this. A gold ring in the shape of a lion’s head, with red rubies for eyes and a big white diamond held in the fangs of the lion’s mouth. She slipped it on one of her bony fingers. Yes, this ring was quite a find.
Mom! Her mom was trapped in a cellar with a mob of horny Mexicans! She ran inside. She shone the beam down into the hole, and it struck her mother’s hat. “Here, Mom!”
Her mother tipped her head back. “I got my hands full. Can you just kinda shine it around the edges, here, so I can see where the hell I can get out?” Annie hung most of her body over the hole. “Be careful, now, don’t you fall in here, too.” Man, did it stink down there. There didn’t appear to be any steps.
“Hey, Annie, go outside and look for some cellar doors.” Annie set the flashlight on the linoleum and ran out the front door and around the back. There they were, just like in the Wizard of Oz, and they weren’t even padlocked. She threw them open. “Hey!” she called into the gloom.
Raven walked up the dirt ramp. Her jeans were muddy, her hair loose, her face smiling. Her hat was clean. She emerged into the flat, dry sunlight of the California desert.
For as long as she lived, Annie Leigh would remember the sight of her mother walking out of that cellar and into the sun, the whip-like body of a rattlesnake dangling from each of her white-knuckled hands.
RAVEN SAT BEHIND the wheel but couldn’t drive, yet. Too keyed up. Her hand touched the cigarette and match in her hatband.
“Are you going to smoke that cigarette, Mom? I think you should maybe smoke that.”
“Nope. I’ll save it.” She sipped on the beer they were sharing.
“Mom, could you tell it one more time?”
“Well, I landed on one, you see. Killed it right then. But then I heard the rattle of the other.” She imitated that soft shaking, sshksshksshk. “I felt it strike my boot three times, but these are good boots, Annie. When it drew back for another strike, I clobbered it with the body of the dead snake. It got all wound up then, and I stepped on ’em both. Stepped hard.”
Annie imagined her mother standing on snakes in the dark of a cellar. She shivered.
“I had them both trapped under my feet. I could feel ’em under there, Annie Leigh, one was dead but one was alive, twisting and trying to get away.”
“What were you thinking?”
“I was thinking, God I hope I don’t mash these up too bad.”
“Were you scared?”
“Yup. But I kept standing there, and I listened. Just stood there and listened. I had to hear the rattle to tell when it was dead. That’s why I was so quiet.”
“I’m glad you landed on at least one of ’em.”
“Me too, Annie. Me too.”
“Mom, what’ll you do with those snakes?”
“Hmm. I don’t know. Maybe we’ll take snake-salad sandwiches on our next fishing trip.”
The girl giggled. She closed her fist around her own prize. She wanted to show it to her mother, but compared to two snakes, well, it just didn’t seem so impressive. “I better go get Gramps’ flashlight.”
“Be careful, Tadpole.” Raven leaned back and closed her eyes. “And hurry up.”
Annie Leigh went back into the house on tiptoe. She picked up the flashlight and switched it on and off a few times. She grasped the edges of the hole and shone the beam into the dark. “Hey! If there’s any snakes in here, I ain’t afraid of you.” She waggled the light to get a better view, then passed it to her other hand. The ring slipped off her finger and landed in the gloom without a sound. “Damn.” She shone the beam around, hunting. The horn honked. She looked one last time into the dark hole and let the ring stay where it was.
THE DRIVE HOME was a slow one. Annie Leigh lay her head against her mother’s side. “Mom, sing me a story song.”
“Tadpole, my voice closed up tight when I was snake-killing.”
“Then put on a tape.” Raven put in a Steve Earle tape, but Annie couldn’t sleep. She kept thinking about how much she wanted to show those snakes to someone, anyone. The beer had gone to Annie’s head. “Gramps never drinks.”
“I know.”
“Quentin Romaine says Gramps is a damn Indian and he can’t hold his damn liquor.”
“And what do you say to that?”
“I say Quentin Romaine is a lying crap-sack, is what I say.”
Raven smiled. “That’s my girl.”
BY EARLY AFTERNOON, it had become clear that the Reverend’s rings were not the only things missing from the Park. Tender LaCour had come up missing, as well.
Rhondalee paced. She fretted. She fumed. Mostly, she worried. An entire night! All the next morning! She brooded on it. Rhondalee had a rare gift for brooding. I’ll divorce him, she thought. THAT’S what I’ll do. I’ll divorce him, and THAT will teach him to come home at night.
It occurred to her that in her distress, she’d neglected to put on her make up. What if Tender came home and found her in such a state?
She stood in her bathroom applying foundation, crème blush, mascara, broad strokes of liquid eyeliner. She looked at her reflection and smiled. Whatever she saw when she looked in the mirror, it had no relation to the ghastly, painted mask that looked back at her.
Who needs a husband? She asked herself. Who needs some no-good, no-account, silver-eyed, slim-hipped Indian devil to ruin your life?
Her face in place, she felt she could face the rest of the day.
She walked back out to her living room.
I’m keeping everything, Rhondalee decided. She addressed the Committee, as if its invisible members were allocating possessions in the event of a divorce. She saw the ceramic imitation Hummel on her end table. If he thinks he’s getting THAT in the divorce, she thought, he’s got another thing COMING!
She settled down, then. He would appear eventually, wouldn’t he? He would beg to come home. She started fantasizing about the lengths and depths to which she would make him go before she would let him.
IT WAS EVENING at the Francie June Memorial Trailer Park.
Raven and Annie returned to Space 47. Annie ran to her grandmother, babbling about bands of migrants with no underwear and caves full of rattlesnakes and haunted houses that caved in and finding treasure in the truck and rescuing her mother from a deep, deep snake pit.
Rhondalee stomped her slipper. “Stop your lying, Annie Leigh! Stop it right now! Every lie you tell is a chink in your soul that the Devil uses to get in and make you wicked!”
Raven pulled her daughter out of smacking range, and handed the cooler to her mother. “Why don’t you fry these up for dinner, Mother.”
Rhondalee slammed the cooler down on the counter. “Oh, leave it to you to take Annie off and fill her head with nonsense and lies and then you bring me some old nasty river fish full of freshwater stink and expect me to cook it for you, Raven LaCour, that’s just the kind of thing you do, bringing your fish home and…”
She lifted the lid and fell down in one of her fits.
SHERIFF MEMPHIS LACOUR had a long wait, standing there in the evening shade of the carport in front of the doublewide that Rhondalee and Tender called home. He was there to make a call it pained him to make.
He absently checked the shoe rack. There were those new boots of Raven’s, and Annie’s matching pair. Both pair were black and both dusty. There were perhaps forty pair of shoes belonging to Rhondalee. His brother’s boots were gone.
The door opened. “Hello, Rhondalee. I was calling for Raven. Is she here by any chance?”
“WELL.” Rhondalee got herself positioned to huff. “She took Annie this morning and hot-wired Tender’s truck to go FISHING. In fact, they just got HOME. And they brought home two SNAKES. DEAD ONES. I FAINTED, I’ll have you know, and when I fell down, I knocked my ceramic lemon cookie jar RIGHT TO THE GROUND. It’s broken all to BITS.”
Karen G. Berry - Mayhem 01 - Love and Mayhem Page 17
