A horrible noise echoed through the office, a sick, bawling cackle. Rhondalee used her feet to make her chair go around. Spinning. She spun until all laughter stopped and a sickening dizziness sent her head between her knees.
TENDER STEPPED OUT his front door with a suitcase in one hand, a guitar case in the other. The banjo case was tucked under his arm. He was clean and shaved and dressed all but for his boots, which were nowhere to be found.
Great God in Heaven, he was happy to be alive.
He’d been relieved that he could pack in silence, but he knew he’d have to face her. He looked around for the last time at the lanes, boulevards and avenues of the Francie June Memorial Trailer Park. All Roads Lead to Rome, thought Tender, and every thoroughfare in this park leads to the Clubhouse. He looked at it shining in the sun, heat devils rising off the asbestos covered roof. He gazed in wonder at the aluminum siding in a bright barn red, the freshly painted white trim, the double doors that could be thrown wide in welcome, the cactus garden, the courtyard paved with indoor/outdoor carpet in a brilliant Kelly green. He’d always loved that Clubhouse.
Tender paused in the center of the courtyard and stood by the sundial. He let his hand linger on the bit of shiny metal fuselage, kept polished by the fingers of pilgrims. This carpet smells like it could use a good cleaning, he thought to himself. Must have been a dog loose around here.
Tender’s heart beat ever-so-slightly faster. He opened the front door, stepped into the air-conditioned darkness. The meeting room sat dark and empty. “Rhondalee?” he called. He could hear her in there, probably working on that newsletter of hers. “Rhondalee?”
She stepped into the meeting room. Rhondalee was a vision in stirrup pants, done up and tricked out, embellished and emblazoned, painted and proud. He let his silver eyes wash over her as if it were the last time he’d ever see her.
“I’m here, Rhondy,” he said, his voice as soft as his name. She opened her mouth, eyes round, ready to let loose. He raised a hand to hush her. “I’m tired of this misery. I’m leaving.”
It was time for a fit. A fit had always worked in the past. When she fell to her knees, it brought him to his, begging forgiveness, taking care of her. She started her emotional swoon, her hand to her chest, her knees buckling, but he failed to rush to her side. His back in the doorway, that’s what she saw on her way down. She was going to fall and he was not going to be there to catch her, to soothe her, to cradle her through her unspecified time of being overcome with the injustice of this world.
Her swoon was real. So was her solitude.
ANNIE LEIGH WALKED back to Space 47 and into the living room with her boots on. She was half expecting the sting of a slap as she did it, but of course, none came. “I wonder how bad I’ll get, now that no one will hit me,” Annie thought idly. “Pretty bad, I bet.” She looked forward to finding out.
She might have changed, but her room looked the same. The twin princess bed. The dresser full of stuff she hated to wear. The closet full of more stuff she hated to wear. The door that her grandmother often locked to keep her in, the window through which she’d left anyway. Her whole life had been spent trying to get out of this room.
She shoved a few things into a pillowcase, leaving behind all the frilly dresses and scratchy nighties, and most of the underwear. She slung the pillowcase over one shoulder, and reached under her to grab the neck of that huge black guitar. Carrying both, she skipped out the door and scuffed up the road in her new boots to the air-conditioned darkness of the Clubhouse.
Her grandma sat cross-legged on the floor of the clubhouse with her head on her knees, folded up like the very crooked attempt at origami Annie had done in Head Start. “Gram?” Annie waited. “Gramma, you okay?”
Rhondalee lifted her head and glared at Annie Leigh.
Annie Leigh was used to her grandmother’s anger. It had been the steady undertone of all her years. “I came to say good-bye, Gramma. We’re heading out.” She loved those words, ‘heading out,’ loved the shivery feeling she got from saying them. “Won’t you be glad I’m not around here bugging you anymore? I think you’ll be happier.” Gramma wouldn’t speak. “Aren’t you gonna tell me good-bye?” Silence. “Gramma, I know you have hurt feelings. But I just want you to know that I appreciate all the stuff you done for me.” She had to think hard, then, about what meant the most. “All the tunafish sandwiches and Bible-thumpings and whuppings and stuff. And how you made me wash up real good. Everywhere.”
The room filled with years of grief, resentment, duty.
Annie walked to the door of the clubhouse. “Gramma, you’re a mean old bird, but I will miss you bunches.” She slammed the door behind her.
Rhondalee’s face twitched. The smallest gasp, more of a hiccup, escaped her tight lips, but Rhondalee wasn’t going to think about that door slamming. She refused to think about that. How alone she would be, now.
How ungrateful could a child could be? All those years of doing up braids and pre-treating stains and riding herd on her tooth-brushing, and what does a person get? “Thanks for the tunafish sandwiches.” Sharper than a serpent’s tooth. Something like that, something about Some People being ungrateful and how it hurt, but what it really meant was that you could slave your life away in the service of others, styling wigs and sewing soutache on satin shirts and planning and plotting and wishing and hoping, and it never meant your dreams would come true.
Dumped here like a stray kitten for me to raise.
Tuna-fish sandwiches, indeed.
Rhondalee grieved. She grieved her dreams. She grieved the lost love of her silver-eyed husband. She grieved her twisted hands and her ruined hair. She grieved her daughter, her granddaughter, and the fact that they no longer needed her.
Most of all, she grieved the loss of what she had locked up in the lowest drawer of her office-supply liquidation metal desk.
ANNIE LEIGH LACOUR ran in her black boots over to the idling rig, pillowcase and guitar in hand. “Where’s Gramps? He’s really coming?”
“He is. He’s in the back, having a rest.”
“A rest? Why is he having a rest?”
“Beats me. You could go check on him if you want to.”
But Annie Leigh was too excited to do anything but scramble up the side of the rig and pitch her pillowcase in the open door. She sat down and began to bounce. “Mom! Guess what!”
“What?”
“Guess!”
Raven thought. “You’re ready to go?”
“I AM!” hollered Annie Leigh.
“Well, here you go.” She set a pale yellow hat on her daughter’s head, just like her own. Around the crowns of both hats stretched the cured and flattened bodies of those rattlers, the snake heads centered over their foreheads, mouths open, fangs bared, evil and ugly and ready to strike.
“Hot damn, Mom.”
“Yup. You ready to go be the Littlest Rattler for Jesus, Annie Leigh?”
“AM I EVER!”
“Then,” said Raven, “let’s roll.” And roll, they did.
IT WAS HOT.
He stood by the side of the road. He had his backpack, his duffel bag, his sleeping bag, his guitar, his camera, eighteen rolls of shot film, and sixty-six dollars. He also had a broken heart. Truck after truck roared past. He tasted diesel. Toxic. He knew how to get a ride, finally. Just stand in the right place, stick out your thumb, and wait.
An eighteen-wheeler pulled over in a spray of fumes and gravel. A brown arm beckoned, motioned for him to hurry up. He broke into a trot, his gear bobbing all around him. He stopped beside the open window, cars whizzing past with such force that his legs nearly buckled. Or maybe it was seeing her again that made him weak.
She looked him over with her usual measure of disdain and amusement. “Wrong road altogether to get to Portland.”
He nodded. “I was thinking of Austin, actually.”
“Austin.”
“Yes. I’m headed for Austin.”
She sat for a long mo
ment, her brown arm hanging out the window. “I guess I could drop you in Austin. Scoot over Tadpole, and let this big man hop in.”
“Hi there.” The little girl glanced at his instrument case. “About time we met. My name is Annie Leigh LaCour.” She stuck out a dirty hand.
“Isaac Mesher.” They shook.
“Mesher is kind of an odd name, ain’t it?”
“Yes. It’s even odd if you’re Jewish.”
“What’s Jewish?”
“Well, that’s hard to explain.”
“Anything hard to explain usually ends up boring. I’m on the way to Nashville with my mom.” She gestured with a thumb. “This here’s her. But you know that. Her name’s Raven on account of she’s a fourth of a pie of Indian.”
He nodded. “I see.”
Annie Leigh ticked off important points on her fingers. “We’re planning on being famous, but first we have to go to the pawn shop and get Mom a guitar, because she wants one, now. Plus we need a laptop and a cell phone and a drummer. We also need to pick a name, because that Nashville man don’t like what we picked, which is the Jesus Rattlers. Which I do like bunches. And I need to teach Mom to read better so she can do the contracts. For now I gotta read it all out loud to her to make sure it’s… what was that word the man used, Mom?”
“Kosher.”
“What’s kosher?”
Raven shrugged.
Isaac smiled. “It’s a Jewish thing.” Annie Leigh looked at him and frowned.
Raven muttered. “It’s pickles.”
“I like pickles.” She kept her eyes on Isaac, wondering about his various uses. “Can you read?” This was a reasonable question to ask a man within the boundaries of the Park. Chances were about sixty-forty.
“I can.”
“Hm. Are you going to Austin to get famous? Because I don’t think you’re gonna get famous, Isaac. Not to hurt your feelings or anything, but I heard you play at the talent show and you’re not a front man. But you’d make a fine rhythm player.” She pointed to his guitar. “In fact you can play that right now, if you want to. I wouldn’t mind a bit.” He took out his guitar and picked his way through a tune. Annie Leigh lay her head against her mother’s shoulder and dreamily began to pick her nose. “That’s pretty. Damn pretty. You have good hands.” Her bony finger poked his shoulder. “What are you gonna do in Austin?”
“Well, first, I’m going to get a bunch of pictures developed.”
“Did you take any of my mom?”
“Yes.”
“Can I see ’em?”
“We have to see what turns out.” He thought about his pictures. There were the color rolls he’d shot, of hills, cactus, roads that led nowhere, cliffs in all the color of Crayolas. The stars in that cold, desert sky. But that wasn’t his work, and he knew it.
He had shot the rest in black and white.
Hard cheekbones and lonely, haunted eyes. Buns and braids, feathered bangs, Aquanet bouffants. The feel of the wind whipping through cotton dresses. Cut-offs. Painted toenails in dime store sandals. Ruined hands braiding hair, frying things, folding things, coaxing home made beauty from yarn, thread, floss, fabric.
The run-down heels and thin soles of boots worn past their prime. Strong arms and flat buttocks. Rakish smiles of crooked teeth, stained with tobacco juice, coffee. Tape decks. Beat up trucks maintained with the pride and care usually bestowed on yachts. Wranglers.
A glass jar of pickled eggs. Hands on the neck of a guitar. A defiant sneer of curling smoke in the light of a neon Budweiser sign.
Satellite dishes. Chick pea gravel and scalloped wire fencing. Tin and aluminum, bent and dinged and painted and flaking. Screen doors.
To make it real to those who had never seen it. To impart his own unique vision. Would it all come through, he wondered. Would any of it show?
“THINK ANY OF them pictures will turn out?” This was Raven.
“I never know how things will turn out.” He looked over the dark head of the sleeping girl to the darker hair of her mother. “I always have to wait and see.”
“So it’s a gamble?”
“I guess. No guarantees.”
“Everything’s like that, ain’t it.”
“Probably.”
She smiled so small, he almost missed it. She reached over her daughter and started the CD player. Some angel-voiced woman sang out over a fiddle, a soft song of love and forgiveness.
He looked at her face in the sunlight. This was the smooth side, the beautiful side. But the scar was still over there, even though he couldn’t see it. He knew it was there. He also knew that even if he stayed with her for years, he might never manage to win her over. They would fight and break apart and come back together, and that would break his heart, over and over again. He knew all that. He didn’t care.
That was why he loved her.
The Last Monday
MEMPHIS SAT ACROSS the street from the rusting singlewide trailer. He could see the heels of those soft pink moccasins protruding from the mailbox. She’d never taken them inside. He remembered his early morning sojourn by that mailbox, holding those shoes, caressing their soft pink leather. And now, after what had passed between them, she was gone, too.
He started up his cruiser, considering what it all meant.
HE DROVE OUT to Bone Pile Elementary, first. The girls’ classroom was empty. He looked around the room, almost hearing their song. Next door, he heard the beleaguered tones of a young man from Teach For America on the phone. “Not one,” he said. “No. I drove out there and checked. No you don’t understand. There’s Bone Pile the town, and that’s just this school and a gas station. And then there’s the Bone Pile where they all live. That’s the real Bone Pile, and that whole place is gone. No, I mean it’s gone. Bone Pile is gone.”
Memphis didn’t bother to talk to the young man. He just got back in the car.
HE DROVE THROUGH Ochre Water, down the main street with its deserted building and unused park benches. He ended up at a lavender bungalow. It took some time for anyone to answer the door. “Is Miz Strange here?” Clyde looked at the Sheriff’s boots and frowned hard, as if trying to figure out who Miz Strange might be. “You know who I mean, right, Clyde? Your wife?”
Clyde scratched his head and retrieved speech from somewhere in his under-used frontal lobe. “She went to work.”
“She did not. She’s not out there, Clyde.”
“She ain’t?”
“No. She isn’t.” The two men stared at each other. “Do you think I could look around a bit in here, Clyde? Just informally?”
“Why sure.”
Clyde led him to the bedroom with the air of a man who had rarely visited it. Memphis extended a hand to the top drawer of her bureau, pulled it back. It just wasn’t seemly. “Clyde, could you open that for me?”
“Sure, Sheriff.”
He braced himself for the sight of her personal things, the pile of perfumed silk and lace he’d always imagined, but the drawer was empty. One by one, he pulled out the drawers. They were empty.
Back in the car, Memphis took the radio in hand, depressed the button. He sat for a moment while around him, the honey-scented air began to warm. With a sigh, he put down the radio. He turned the key, put the cruiser in gear.
He shook his head and took to the road.
MELVEENA STRANGE HEADED down the freeway with the top down and the wind in her hair. The enormous trunk of that mauve ’66 Caddy was full to the brim with Louis Vuitton luggage.
Beside her on the seat sat Tender’s boots. She did not want to touch them. It was worst with metal, but it could permeate leather, pearls, paper and even cloth. So she’d let those boots alone for a week. She watched those boots stumbling around the Park on Tender’s feet, sitting on the shoe rack amongst Rhondalee’s wardrobe of bespangled footwear.
She waited for them to cool, like a pie.
After a week, she clipped them from the shoe rack and threw them in her trunk with her luggage. The Gulf of M
exico, she thought. Maybe that’s where she’d put them. Let some Great White scent the blood, gobble them up. Some fisherman would find Tender’s murderous boots when he gutted the monster.
All escapes require a certain amount of combustible fuel, and Melveena was running low. “Cash or credit, Ma’am?” asked the hang-toothed young boy who was there to pump her gas.
“Cash, baby,” she purred. No credit card trail for this trip. None at all. Which was great, considering she’d come into quite a little pile of cash on her way out of town. She’d have to find a nicer shoebox, though. Imagine. Thom McCann.
A knot of migrants was smoking and laughing over by the air pumps. They were decked out in their agreed-upon version of masculine finery, snap shirts and reptile boots and straw hats. These men appraised Melveena as she went to her trunk, opened it, and walked toward them holding the boots at arm’s length. “Anyone want these?”
The boots, she knew, were nicer than any of them wore. But there was such a thing as pride, especially among men who left spacious homes in Mexico to come north and sleep twenty to a room while they harvested hops.
She held out the boots, the pain in them radiating up her wrist. She tried not to wince. “Come on, fellas, do me a favor. These boots are just taking up space in my car. The man who wore them was a no good, sweet-talking cuss of a ladies’ man who ran away so fast, he left them behind. And they’re too nice to throw away. “
The men traded looks, shook their heads, smiled politely. Finally, one stepped forward. “I’ll take them for my brother, okay Lady?”
“Okay.” She turned from the men, leaving them lulled by her voice, her wink, her walk and her generosity.
She’d touched those boots for the very last time.
The gas jockey got sixty dollars and another wink that made him shift and blush. It was time to cruise. Melveena’s skirt blew up over her thighs. Her nails beat a tattoo along with the radio. She wore cat-eye sunglasses, not because she needed to, but because she wanted to.
She was not looking in her rearview mirror.
Karen G. Berry - Mayhem 01 - Love and Mayhem Page 30
