by Billie Letts
“Sam, where are you going with this?” Caney asked.
Sam spun, leaned across the counter. “What the fuck you think you’re doing, Caney? What’s that little slanteyed bastard doing here?”
“Sam, why is it that you—”
“We got boys from this town never came back from Nam. Bill Ott’s boy and that Finch kid. Minnie Harwell’s husband, Frank. So what are you doing with him here, huh? Rubbing our noses in it?”
“Well, Sam, if you’ve got shit on your nose, you might’ve had it stuck in the wrong place.”
Sam’s eyes narrowed as splotches the color of raw meat spread across his cheeks. “We left a lot of good men over there, Caney, and it just might be the gook you got working here fired the bullets that killed them.”
“That goddamned war’s been over for twelve years, Sam. What’s the use of—”
“That mean we’re supposed to love them now? Pat them on the shoulder, give them jobs Americans need?”
“You need a job, Sam? ’Cause if you do, I can probably take you on.”
“What the hell is it with you, Caney? You think because you came back in a wheelchair that you’ve got it all figured out? Well, let me tell you something. We didn’t fight that war just so we could—”
“We? Why, I didn’t know you were in it, Sam. I heard you waited it out up north. We, my ass!”
Moving slowly, Sam eased his shoulders forward, laid both arms flat on the counter and curled his hands into fists.
“Mr. Chaney,” Bui said, his voice tight with tension, “I go to home now. Okay?”
Sam turned, eyes locked on Bui. “You going home now, Boy? Well, you be mighty careful. You have some kind of accident, you get busted up, you’ll be in a hell of a mess. Can’t work, can’t drive, might be you won’t be able to feed yourself or wipe your own ass. Might be—”
“Mr. Chaney?” Bui began to move toward the counter. “I finish work now and—”
Without warning, Sam grabbed his beer bottle by the neck and swung it toward Bui, but Caney caught Sam’s hand on the backswing, sent the bottle hurtling through the air and, before it crashed into the Coors sign on the front window, had Sam’s arm pinned to the counter, wrist bent like a chicken wing.
“Now you listen to me,” Caney said, his voice barely more than a whisper. “You mess with him, you’ll have to worry about me the rest of your life. Every time you crawl in some woman’s bed, every time you turn the key in the ignition of your truck, every time you see something move in a shadow.”
Sam, his lips stretched tight against his teeth, eyes squinted in pain, said, “Yeah, what’ll you do, run me down with your wheelchair?”
Caney applied more pressure to Sam’s wrist until it made a popping sound. Sam groaned, sweat beading his forehead.
“Sam. You fuck with him, I’m gonna fuck with you.”
As Caney released Sam’s arm, he shoved him away from the counter. “Now, get your ass out of here.”
The only one inside the Honk who moved before Sam’s truck roared away was Caney. He grabbed his pen and checkbook and went back to paying bills.
Then, without looking up, he said, “Bui, clean up that broken glass.”
Vena didn’t know what woke her until she saw the flare of Caney’s lighter across the room. He was sitting at the window, a thin shaft of moonlight slanting across his face.
He didn’t turn as she raised herself to one elbow but kept his eyes fixed on something outside in the dark.
“We knew it would be a hot insertion,” he said. “The four-five-four was pinned down in a valley with the VC right on top of them, so we couldn’t get any artillery in there to clean things up before we landed.”
Caney took a slow drag of his cigarette, the smoke curling toward the windowpane.
“I was in the third Huey, the last in formation, and I could see the first two go in, VC popping them with everything they had. Antiaircraft, machine guns, grenades.
“The pilot took us in fast. We knew he wasn’t going to set us down, didn’t want to give the VC a target any longer than he had to, so guys started jumping while we were still fifteen feet off the ground.
“Me and the kid beside me had our feet on the skids, just about to jump, when we got hit. Blew the kid’s leg off, right at his knee. Sliced clean away.
“He leaned forward, watched it fall… and when it hit the ground, he pointed to it and yelled, ‘There it is,’ like he thought he might go back and get it.”
Caney stopped talking and smoked a while, the room so still Vena could hear the hiss of burning tobacco at the tip of his cigarette.
“The pilot gave it the juice then and that Huey shot straight up, just like a damned rocket. Three, four hundred feet. He was trying to get us out of there, and he might’ve made it, too, but we took another hit.”
Vena eased off the couch, pulled Caney’s robe around her shoulders, then slipped across the room and sat on the edge of his bed.
“There was this tremendous jolt, threw me and the kid back across the floor, that chopper shaking like hell. Then it flipped over on its side and everything started sailing out. The kid went first, skidded right by me.
“And I remember feeling so sorry for him. He had all that way to fall. All that time to think about it.”
Ash from the cigarette dropped, drifting across Caney’s shirt.
“He was a kid,” Caney said.
He dropped the cigarette into an ashtray and watched until the red embers burned out.
“He was just a kid.”
For several moments they sat unmoving and still. Then Vena reached into the silence and took Caney’s hand, slipping her fingers through his where they rested, framed in a wedge of moonlight.
Chapter Eighteen
CANEY HADN’T NOTICED that MollyO had stopped wearing her ring, a narrow turquoise-and-silver band she’d always worn on the third finger of her right hand. He didn’t know that when she was home doing dishes or rinsing out her underwear, the ring would slip off her finger and fall to the bottom of her sink. He hadn’t missed it, had no idea she’d put it away in the small wooden jewelry box on top of her dresser.
Life didn’t miss the ring, either, but since he paid more attention to MollyO’s body than anyone else, he should’ve noticed that her slacks were beginning to hang loose across her hips and her blouses looked a little roomy.
Wilma Driver had noticed a change when MollyO’s face started to thin, but she couldn’t quite pinpoint the difference. At first she thought MollyO had bought new frames for her glasses or switched to a lighter shade of makeup, but she finally chalked it up to a new hairstyle which prompted her to call the Hair Shed and schedule a cut and perm.
Bui had too many problems of his own to pay attention to these small changes in MollyO’s appearance, but he did compliment her one day on a new dress she was wearing. He couldn’t have known, of course, that it had been hanging in her closet for three years along with all her other size fourteens.
But Vena had been watching. And she hadn’t missed a thing.
When she first realized MollyO was passing up her morning doughnut and scraping her half-eaten cornbread into the trash, she imagined a New Year’s resolution was at work. And when she saw her cut her meatloaf into small bites and slip the plate back to the utility room, she thought an animal lover was in the making.
But when she saw MollyO, an ardent nonsmoker, snitch one of Caney’s cigarettes, and when she saw her wearing the same stain on the same blouse two days in a row, she knew something more serious than a diet was on her mind.
Vena thought it might be explained by a new stage of menopause, the next step beyond hot flashes, whatever that might be. Depression, maybe. Perhaps the prospect of becoming a grandmother, a subject MollyO hadn’t mentioned lately, had brought on the fear of growing old.
Or maybe, she reasoned, MollyO had gone and fallen in love, but she looked too unhappy for that to be the cause. Or she might be stewing about Caney, though his dark mood
had been lifting little by little since the day of the horseback ride.
She could, of course, just be worried about money. After all, who wasn’t?
Finally, though, Vena realized she had no way to know, not her business to find out. And even if she asked, she was certain MollyO would never confide in her.
But she was about to be surprised.
When the last of the morning diners had cleared out, Caney reminded MollyO about the bank deposit.
“Do you have it ready?” MollyO asked.
“Yeah, it’s under the register.”
MollyO pulled off her apron, picked up the deposit and grabbed her purse.
“I’m going to stop by Wal-Mart,” she said. “You need anything?”
“Not that I can think of.”
“You mind if I go with you?” Vena asked. “I need to pick up a couple of things.”
“Well, it’s okay with me, but if Caney gets busy…”
“Caney, you think you and Bui can manage if I go along?”
“Sure. Nothing going on here.”
“Okay,” MollyO said without enthusiasm, “but we’ll have to be back to help with lunch.”
“I won’t slow you down.”
As they crossed the lot to her old Ford, MollyO said, “My car’s kind of a mess right now. I’ve been buying a few things for the baby.”
“A few things for the baby” turned out to be a plastic baby seat, a diaper bag, a Rubbermaid bathtub, boxes of baby bottles, a bassinet, a sterilizer, stacks of crib blankets, a potty chair, eight deluxe-size packages of disposable diapers and more toys than Santa could fit in his sleigh.
Vena helped shift enough of it to wedge herself into the passenger seat, but only by holding a large plastic duck on her lap.
As MollyO steered the car onto the highway, she said, “I got that duck for fifty cents. You know, you can pick up this stuff at garage sales for almost nothing, but you go to buy it new, it costs a fortune.
“ ’Course, not all of it’s used. I clip coupons for disposable diapers and every time the IGA has double coupon days, I save two dollars a package. It’d make more sense for Brenda to use cloth diapers, but she’s never been one to take the sensible route. I can’t see her washing a dirty diaper in the toilet the way I did. No, I can’t see her doing that at all.”
As the car picked up speed and began to shimmy, a naked rubber doll on the dash bounced off into MollyO’s lap. She was doing forty, driving only a little faster than she was talking, a sudden departure from the past few days when she’d had so little to say.
“I wish now I’d kept Brenda’s things. She had a white baby bed with little gold angels painted across the headboard, and a four-drawer chest to match. And I made curtains for her room, pink with ruffles at the bottom. I got her a music box, too, with a china doll on top that turned around when I wound it up. Played… oh, what was that song?”
MollyO tried to hum the tune, but gave up after the first few notes.
“I kept all that stuff for years, but I don’t know why. I was forty-one when she was born. I knew there wouldn’t be any more babies. But it was hard to let it all go. Her little gowns, her highchair, that precious crib.”
As MollyO increased her speed to fifty, the shimmy worsened, causing the baby bottles to rattle and the potty chair to clack against the back window.
“Finally, I gave it all away, all except the rocking chair. My mother rocked me in it when I was a baby and I rocked Brenda in it till she was almost big enough to rock me.”
MollyO was lost in thought then, silenced for the first time since they’d gotten in the car, prompting Vena to jump into the conversation.
“How’s she doing?”
“Why, she’s been dead for almost ten years.”
“No, I meant Brenda.”
“Oh, she’s great. Just great! A touch of morning sickness now and then, but that’s to be expected, isn’t it? She’s gained four pounds, but she says she’s not showing yet, so she’s still performing. Making good money, too. And she says she and that Travis are saving like you wouldn’t believe.”
When Vena saw they’d entered a forty-mile zone, she expected MollyO to slow down. Instead, with her foot heavy on the gas, she had them moving at sixty and gaining.
“She’s been real busy planning their wedding. They’re going to get married at the Love Eternal Chapel where the windows are all shaped like hearts, which I think is so sweet. She’s already picked out her dress, white with seed pearls stitched on the bodice, but she decided not to get a veil and I’m glad ’cause Brenda’s got such beautiful hair. It’d be a shame to cover it up on her wedding day. She’s decided on a bouquet of pink carnations with sprigs of baby’s breath which will be just perfect since she’s—”
When the car started drifting to the right, Vena saw that the needle on the speedometer was nearing seventy.
“Maybe you ought to slow down a little,” she said, but the car continued to accelerate, still tending to the right.
“MollyO?”
“She picked out her ring last week…”
They were moving dangerously close now to the edge of the asphalt. Beyond that, a narrow graveled shoulder gave way to a steep drop to a bar ditch.
“… a cluster of diamonds set in a—”
“Watch it!” Vena yelled as the right front tire dropped onto the shoulder.
MollyO made a rasping sound which Vena took for fright, but when she glanced at MollyO’s face, she saw she was crying.
Vena grabbed the wheel. “MollyO, I want you to take your foot off the gas,” she said, trying to conceal her panic.
“… wants me to come for the wedding,” MollyO whimpered.
“Take your foot off the gas!”
MollyO lifted her foot and slumped in the seat, sobbing.
“Now, listen. Do what I say, exactly what I say. Gently… very gently, put your foot on the brake. Good. Now, press. Easy, easy.”
Vena was doing her best to hold the wheel steady, prepared in case MollyO stomped on the brake which was certain to send the car into a skid.
“… something borrowed and something blue…”
“Just keep pressing down on the brake. That’s it, good.”
“… loan her my locket…”
“A little more pressure, MollyO, but take it easy.”
As the car began to slow, Vena brushed a pile of baby blankets off the seat and scooted over, crowding MollyO against the door.
“I’ve got it now,” she said, placing both hands on the wheel. “You can let go.”
MollyO’s hands fell limply to her lap as she eased the brake pedal to the floor and the car rolled to a stop.
For several moments, neither of them spoke.
Finally, Vena put the car in park. “I’ll drive,” she said.
When she stepped out, her legs buckled, and as she made her way around to the driver’s door, she staggered and nearly fell.
She gently nudged MollyO to the far side of the seat, then slipped beneath the wheel.
“She never called,” MollyO said, her voice breaking.
Vena’s heart was pounding like a sprinter’s at the end of a race. “What? Who are you talking about?”
“I haven’t heard from Brenda since she was here. Christmas Day.” MollyO snuffled. “Not a word.”
Vena’s fingers were still trembling as she readjusted the rearview mirror.
“I waited nearly a month, thinking she’d get in touch with me, but when she didn’t, I called information in Las Vegas, you know, thinking she and that Travis might have a phone, but the operator said she didn’t have a listing.
“Well, I didn’t think much about that ’cause Brenda said they’d only be there a little while, so I thought maybe it wouldn’t make any sense, them getting a phone.”
Vena waited until a truck passed, then eased the car back onto the road.
“So then I called that club where they were booked, the Lucky Lady, but they said they didn’t know what
I was talking about. Said they’d never heard of Brenda O’Keefe or Travis Howard.”
MollyO wiped her nose with the back of her hand, then dug in her pocket for a tissue.
“That’s when I really started to worry. Edna, down at the library, let me take a Las Vegas phone book home and I started calling all the casinos there. Started with the A’s, the Aladdin, and worked my way down the list.”
Vena kept the car steady at thirty, five miles below the speed limit as they entered the outskirts of Sequoyah. When she finally relaxed her grip on the wheel, she realized her nails had been digging into the palms of her hands.
“So last night I got to the H’s, the Hacienda. The guy I talked to said Brenda’s band wasn’t booked there, but he knew Travis. Told me he was playing some dump, that’s what he called it, ‘some dump,’ called the Seven-Come-Eleven.
“And sure enough, that Travis was there. I had to call back three times before I caught him on a break, but I got him.”
MollyO’s fingers had found the naked doll in her lap, and she began absently smoothing back its nonexistent hair.
“He was mad ’cause I called. Real mean. And when I told him I wanted to talk to Brenda, wanted to know where she was, he said, ‘How the hell should I know? She split three weeks ago and I don’t give a good goddamn where she is.’ That’s what he said.”
“Well, it sounds like they’ve had a fight,” Vena said. “But chances are they’ll be back together before you know it and—”
“That’s what I figured. She’s mad, staying in some motel, making him wonder where she is. That sounds just like something Brenda would do.
“But I just have to talk to her. See, when she was here, she was having a pain in her side. Promised me she’d get to a doctor, but—”
“Then she probably has. And if anything had been wrong, she’d have called you. Sounds to me like the best thing for you to do right now is wait for her to call. And try not to worry.”
“I can’t do that. No way I’m not going to worry about Brenda. And as far as waiting, I’m not too good at that, either. I’ve already started calling all the motels in the book. I’m already up to the Boulder.”
