Mothers, Tell Your Daughters

by Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Black Mike slid open the pocket door, and there was Red standing right there with his two lower front teeth missing, his hands on his hips, his T-shirt with armpit stains that hadn’t come out in the wash, the worn fabric of his jeans straining against his thighs. The hallway air blasted them like air-conditioning, five degrees cooler than the shut-up room, and Buckeye could smell last night’s whiskey on Red’s breath. Today he wore a red bandanna over his head like a pirate.

  “Hi, Red,” Buckeye said. She always felt happy to see her friend.

  “Let’s go,” he said. Since he’d fallen on a steel rail last year and broken off those teeth, he hissed when he talked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not sure.”

  “Don’t go thinking you’re going to change your mind, Buckeye. As soon as the candy boss notices you getting a belly, you get dumped, whatever town you’re in.”

  “Mike says maybe we should leave the show anyhow.” She’d been like this twice before in the seven years she’d been in the circus, and both times it was Red who helped her out of her situation. Those other times she waited until it showed, but this time she told Red after she missed her first period.

  “I could get a job in a warehouse,” Mike said, addressing neither Red nor Buckeye. “I used to work in a warehouse when I first got out of jail.”

  “I could work in a Laundromat or a nursing home like my ma,” Buckeye said. “Or I could be a waitress and make tips.”

  “Shit,” Red said. He paused to light a cigarette. “You two think you’re going to be able to raise a kid? Where you going to live?”

  “This town, maybe,” Buckeye said. “Phoenix. It’s warm in the winter.”

  “You know what an apartment costs? You got a security deposit? Black Mike, you got anything left after buying speed and coke?”

  “I had an apartment once, back home in Akron,” Buckeye said. “With a girlfriend.”

  “Shit,” Red said again, as though he were spitting. “You’re not leaving the show, Buckeye, and you know it.”

  She shrugged.

  Black Mike looked deliberately away from her, away from Red, toward the stack of cassette cases in the corner, but he was holding Buckeye’s hand now, letting the back of his big hand press against her bare thigh. The other times before this, once in Ohio, once in Los Angeles, she’d felt sick and ready to get rid of what plagued her, but this time wasn’t like that. She wasn’t even sure how it would work, her going to the doctor all filled with love and desire the way she was—her body might not let the thing go. A clinic was a place for regret and mistakes, and her body wasn’t feeling like there was any mistake. This time she felt strong and perfect. She knew it didn’t make sense to anybody else to think about Mike as a father, with all his troubles, but when she was close with him, her body told her something different, that maybe this was the time to have a baby, that maybe the baby was the fix for all their troubles.

  Red said, “Put your damn flip-flops on and get out here. I ain’t the bad guy. Tell him what a condom is and you won’t be in this trouble. Yo, Black Mike, you go around with your goddamned arms and legs covered like you got skin cancer. Why don’t you keep your dick covered instead?”

  It was true, Red was not the bad guy. He was the only one who’d looked out for her, the only person who’d stuck with her when other guys moved on to other girls or got thrown in jail or just disappeared one day, staying in some town instead of getting back on the train.

  “Maybe some time later we can have a baby,” she whispered to Mike, but he wouldn’t look at her.

  She knew he would stay here in this room, stay on this circus train, as long as she was sitting with him, but if she went with Red, he might not be here when she got back. Mike didn’t understand how Red was right, how she couldn’t just park herself in a town and have a baby like some other people did, sit in an apartment and wait for a man to come home and hope he brought some money. Buckeye’s ma had had a baby when Buckeye was fifteen, and her ma used to send her out to steal baby food, until she got kicked out of every store in her neighborhood. And Mike wouldn’t just give up drugs like snapping his fingers—nobody did that. If he was high, she wouldn’t know if she should leave the baby with him while she went to work. When she’d had an apartment with her friend in Akron, they couldn’t afford air-conditioning. Being in heat like this all the time would make anybody crazy.

  There was Red standing before her, his freckled arms thick from twenty-some years of holding snow-cone trays over his head, his thighs ropy from climbing stadium stairs eight hours a day. In a voice like gravel from shouting, Snow cones! Get your snow cones! and There’s no balls like snowballs! Red was telling her she needed to come with him. Now. She stood up, and Mike let her hand slip away, but then grabbed her wrist and held it. Pretty soon even Buckeye wanted him to let go. She tugged, and his face remained expressionless like when those Bulgarians had been hitting him. Red grabbed hold of Mike’s hand and tried to peel off the fingers, but he was clamped tight. With the Bulgarians, Mike had just stood there with blood running down his face. Now he kept hold of Buckeye while Red pounded his arm with a fist. Mike didn’t even use his free hand to stop Red from hitting him.

  “Don’t, Red,” Buckeye said. “He’s not hurting me.”

  “Let go of her,” Red said. “We got an appointment.”

  “You got to let go of me, Mike,” she said.

  After the Bulgarians had punched him a dozen times in the face and a few times in the gut, Buckeye had begged them to stop, said she’d pay the money back. Mike had wanted to leave the circus that day, to just give up, but she begged him to stay. Today Buckeye was borrowing money for the clinic from Red.

  “Me going with Red is for both of us. It’s helping you, too, Mike. You just don’t see it right now.”

  Red stopped hitting Mike. Red pinched his cigarette between his lips, squinted against the smoke, and reached down to Mike’s wrist, the wrist of the hand that was holding her, and worked at a button on Mike’s shirt cuff. As soon as Red got it undone, Mike pulled away to rebutton it, and Red yanked Buckeye’s arm free. And there was Buckeye walking out with Red, leaving Mike sitting on his bunk with the sheet sprung off the dirty mattress.

  “I’ll be back in a couple hours,” Buckeye said from the hallway. “Stay here and wait for me. Please, Mike.” The other two times she’d gone to a clinic, there had been nobody waiting on her, no man other than Red who even cared about what she was doing.

  “We got to walk a half mile to the bus stop,” Red said as they passed through the vestibule. “Bus comes every fifteen minutes, a guy told me.”

  She followed Red outside and across the railroad stones, some of them sharp enough they cut into her feet through the soles of her sandals. When she had picked her way over the second set of tracks, she turned and looked back at Mike’s window. He had taken down the black plastic and was watching her through the scratched Plexiglas. No man had ever wanted her to stay with him the way Mike was wanting her to stay now.

  “Wait,” she said to Red.

  “Where you going?”

  “I forgot my purse.”

  “Hurry up,” Red said. “I’m not coming after you again.”

  She climbed into the vestibule, left Red standing on the stones with his arms crossed. She found Mike still sitting on his bunk with the door slid open, his forehead beaded with sweat, headphones on, music turned up so loud Buckeye could hear the rage of a guitar solo from the hall. She saw her purse on his duffel bag, but instead of picking it up, she smoothed the sheet over the bare mattress and brushed away a little sand. She stood close to Mike, close enough that he could have reached out and taken hold of her and begged her not to go one more time, could have told her again how they’d leave this show and make a life in Phoenix, or someplace. He took off the headphones, and death music screamed out of the tiny speakers beside him.

  “I might not go through with it,” Buckeye said. She knew that before she saw the doctor s
he would have to fill out forms and somebody would talk to her about having the baby or not.

  Mike laid his wrist on his knee, palm up. With his other hand he unbuttoned the cuff of his shirt. He started rolling up the sleeve as she’d never seen him do in the months she’d been with him, revealing blue-black jagged marks that became two lightning bolt tattoos charging down his arm. He revealed a dozen scarified reddish lines stretching over his wrist like a man would make himself with a razor blade. As he continued to roll up his sleeve, she saw a series of crude, swollen crosses the size of dimes or pennies. He folded the sleeve at his elbow, exposed the length of the lightning bolts and a scar that looked like a centipede as long and thick as a pinky finger, with ragged stitch marks across its body. There were three scabs on his vein. When he turned his arm around, she saw blackish welts like stab wounds on his muscle, and shadow bruises that seemed to have come from deep under his skin. There were places where his flesh rose in knots. He tugged the sleeve up still farther to reveal gray-pink burns, most as small as the ends of cigarettes, one as big as a mouth screaming, and more blue-black smears. A swollen vein at the inside of his elbow had bumps so close together they formed a dark ridge. Above that was a teardrop-shaped patch of raised irregular dots. The wounds she’d felt in the dark had always seemed sad to her fingertips, but in the blue-steel light of this room, the wounds were ferocious, hungry.

  She grabbed her purse, pressed it to her belly, and backed away, moved slowly into the hallway until her shoulder hit the steel wall as hard as if she’d been thrown against it. When Mike looked up at her with angry bloodshot eyes, she stopped breathing. She’d never seen him angry, not at the Bulgarians, not at Red, and certainly not at her, but his look was as hot as blood.

  She turned away and walked, still without breathing, toward the vestibule, supporting herself with one hand on the wall. She descended the stairs and leaned against the outside of car seventy-eight. When she dropped to her knees under Mike’s window, she almost fell into the train’s steel wheel. She had studied Mike’s wounds with her fingers in the dark, had dreamed the marks were telling a story about the two of them, but she saw now that they were his own terrible story.

  She cupped her hands over her knees. She’d scraped them on the stones, and one was bleeding.

  Red was standing where she’d left him with his arms crossed, tapping his foot against a rail that was shining white as a bone in the Arizona sun. Buckeye picked up a railroad stone, so hot it burned her hand. She’d thought Mike’s wounds were something she might soothe or even heal. She pressed the jagged gray stone into the softest, whitest part of her thigh and squeezed her eyes shut against the pain. Mike wouldn’t be able to see her below his window, but he was so close that she felt his oversize heart swelling. Buckeye heard Red shout, but couldn’t make out his words. This town was no place to raise a child. No town was. She couldn’t do it, couldn’t bring forth another body that was just going to feel confusion and humiliation and pain. She looked out over the tracks, saw people walking away with bags of laundry, returning with groceries and six-packs of soda and beer. Two showgirls laughed as they bumped shoulders. Without wigs and makeup, dressed in their jogging shorts and tanks, they seemed like carefree teenage boys. Beyond them, a few beat-up palm trees wavered, distorted by the heat. She ground the stone deep into the wound as Red approached. She remembered Red’s name: James Allen. He crouched beside her and said, “What the fuck are you doing?” He pulled his bandanna off and pressed the red cloth against her knee. He took the bloody stone out of her hand and tossed it onto the other stones. She heard moaning from somewhere, or maybe it was the hum of the train’s generator. As Red bent over her, she touched his bald head with both hands, found baby-fine hairs, pressed her cheek there.

  My Dog Roscoe

  As my big sister predicted from her cell in the county jail, I became pregnant early into my marriage to Pete the electrician. That tarot reading Lydia did for me was the last before one of her cellmates reported her so-called satanic activities to the authorities and got her cards taken away.

  Just when I was starting to show, a stray dog—bigger than a cocker spaniel, smaller than a retriever, white with black pepper spots and a black circle around one eye—appeared at the back door of the house that Pete and I were renting with an option to buy. The dog’s faded red collar had no identification tags, but Roscoe was written on the fabric in alcohol marker. At first I tried to shoo him away, told him to go on home, but he stuck around, and I became fond of his lopsided face—one ear hung down lower than the other. Pete suggested we might wait and get a puppy after the baby was born. Until recently, I’d always appreciated Pete’s long-term view, but here was a living, breathing creature who needed me now, and in my fifth month, maybe my hormones were talking, too. For a week, I reminded Pete of how lonesome I was when he worked out of town, and all the while I fed the dog breakfast cereal and leftover meatloaf and pizza under the back porch stairs where I had built him a nest of blankets. When Pete agreed to our adopting Roscoe, I bathed his coat with coal tar shampoo, took him to the veterinarian for shots, and, on Dr. Wellborn’s advice, made an appointment for the surgical neutering a few weeks down the road.

  Soon after he moved in with us, I began noticing a worldly light shining in Roscoe’s dark eyes. His soulful expression revealed that he had known pain—if not in this life, then in a previous one. Perhaps we had suffered together in times past. Maybe we’d been on a Roman slave ship, chained side by side to our oars. Or if I had been Cleopatra, then he might’ve been some hardworking stevedore on the Nile, or a deckhand, a handsome swarthy man I’d hardly noticed until he threw his body between me and an assassin’s blade.

  Roscoe was wary around Pete, perhaps because Pete was so tall, but when the dog and I were alone, he had a habit of rolling onto his back and opening his legs in a way that reminded me not of a fellow slave or an Egyptian, but of my old fiancé Oscar, may he rest in peace. Two years ago, the dashing and philandering Oscar fell headfirst from a hayloft, where he was nakedly comingling with a Galesburg girl, who at the funeral claimed Oscar had been her fiancé. My sister Lydia, who as a practicing wiccan should have been respectful of the dead, never even let me speak Oscar’s name wistfully without reminding me of the ways I’d been betrayed. In the eight years Oscar and I were together, he had twice given me chlamydia (swearing both times it came from an exercise bicycle) and in the last few years of our time together had taken to disappearing for hours or days without explanation. Life with Oscar had had a lot of ups and downs, but I had fallen for him in tenth grade and had loved him with a blindness and durable intensity that I wasn’t sure I could muster for my husband Pete, better man though he might be.

  One morning, a week into the adoption, as I scratched Roscoe’s chest, which was surprisingly muscular for a twenty-pound mongrel, his tongue snaked out and he began to lick the underside of my wrist. It gave me a shiver. Only two people in this life had ever known that my wrists were my most romantically sensitive body part. Perhaps Roscoe had been studying Pete and me in our intimate moments through the crack in the door. Or perhaps this dog and I had been very close in our previous life together. Maybe those slave ship captains had severely whipped him when he voiced his opinions about human rights, and maybe I revived him with fresh water from my own meager rations before we found ourselves in a passionate embrace.

  Roscoe turned from me to minister to his own privates. When he tired of that, he headed toward the kitchen, but he paused in the doorway to look over at me and puff up his chest and, if I wasn’t mistaken, to suck in his little belly, exactly the way my sexy boyfriend Oscar used to. I followed him into the kitchen and kneeled to look into his face. Couldn’t be. Ridiculous. Plenty of dogs had soulful brown eyes. Plenty of dogs licked people’s wrists and inflated their chests. How could I even think such a thing? Roscoe took a nugget of dry food in his mouth and crunched it distractedly, pretending not to notice I was looking at him—but hadn’t such pretending b
een another of Oscar’s postures?

  When I stepped out of the shower a few hours later, I looked down and saw Roscoe gazing up at my breasts with his tongue hanging out. I’d felt proud of the slight swell of my belly, but something about the the dog’s expression embarrassed me. I wrapped my bathrobe around myself and stepped over him. “Stop it,” I scolded. The dog whined and lowered his eyes with a look of guilt I knew all too well.

  While Pete was outside changing the oil in his truck, I reclined on the couch and opened a bag of Be-Mo sour-cream-and-onion potato chips. Although Pete preferred plain salted chips, he found no fault with my eating these or any other snacks—recently he had allowed me to spell out the letters of baby names on his bare stomach in cheese doodles while he read a biography of Abraham Lincoln.

  Roscoe’s eyes followed my hand as I lifted each chip from the bag to my mouth. When I finally offered him one, Roscoe stretched up and took it in his teeth. I breathed a sigh of relief. Oscar had always hated chips, and he had especially hated the sour-cream-and-onion kind and complained when I ate them. But this dog liked them, and that was that, and all the rest had been my imagination. Roscoe sauntered into the kitchen, and I leaned off the couch and caught sight of him spitting out the chip. He proceeded to lap water from his dish, as if to wash the taste away. Then he puffed up his chest and sat ignoring me.

  “Oscar?” I said.

  The dog turned my way and sucked in his stomach.

  “Is that really you?” I asked.

  He trotted back to me and tilted his head sideways—it was a darling gesture. Dr. Wellborn had said the droopy ear indicated frostbite damage, but now I knew better. Oscar had departed this world as a result of falling from that barn’s loft onto a threshing spike, which had entered his brain through his right ear.

  Roscoe opened his mouth and let his tongue hang out over his small bottom teeth.

  My first feeling was of joyful recognition, but I quickly reminded myself of all that had passed between us. I took a deep calming breath and snorted. “So you’re back, are you? I should’ve known you weren’t done taking advantage of my forgiving nature.”