Nacogdoches 1
a novell by
Lex Williford
1(nak-e-dó-chiz) A town in East Texas, sister city of Natchitoches (nák-i-tish), Louisiana, originally founded in 1716 on the site of the Spanish mission, Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, near villages of the Caddo tribe, Nacogdoche. Nacogdoches Lex Williford
Contents Nacogdoches...... i Contents ...... ii Dedication...... 3 I ...... 5 One...... 6 Two ...... 19 Three...... 37 II...... 50 Four ...... 51 Five ...... 73 Six ...... 91 Seven...... 119 III ...... 181 Eight...... 182 Nine...... 205 Ten...... 236 Eleven...... 262 IV...... 281 Twelve...... 282 Thirteen...... 302 Outline 13...... 366 Fourteen...... 375 Fifteen ...... 377 Sixteen...... 379 V ...... 380 Seventeen ...... 381 Eighteen...... 382 Nineteen ...... 382 Acknowledgments...... 384 End of Book Scraps...... 385
ii Nacogdoches Lex Williford
Dediicatiion
For Colleen, Lilly and Lou, and for my mother.
In memory of Cindy Ryffe, Terry and Debbie Parrish, Gail Irby, Andy Williford, and all the others we lost too soon.
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He was born in Nacogdoches. That’s in East Texas, not far from the border. —Lucinda Williams
These days, everybody speaks of love so loud, they shout as if love were something owed them, like something they can order around, like something that comes when called. —Kurt Elling
Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence. —Franz Kafka
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I
5 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
One Nacogdoches December 27 1988
he day after Christmas, I find myself divorced and moving again, me and my TT cymbal-deaf dog Whôdini, with a U-Haul trailer bouncing behind us for what seems like the thousandth time. And because my sweet-voiced, suicidal sister Maddie called me last night from New York City to say her ex-best friend Allyn Vanderbeck’s just moved back to her grandfather’s old home place at the corner of Starr and Pearl Street, I decide, just for the hell of it, to take a detour through Nacogdoches.
For two hours, I drive the two-lane highways east from Dallas through fog and freezing rain, past ice-glazed silver oaks and cottonwoods, past fanning bare fields of black dirt plow rows, then past stands of scrub pines dangling their roots from red-clay cliffs. Every twenty minutes or so, Whôdini—Whô for short—wakes up and lifts himself onto his front legs to pull his hind end up, then hobbles in circles over the same spot in the passenger seat, toeing and scratching at the ratty bath towel I’ve spread out there, turning and turning in the seat. Then he lies back down to sleep again in the same spot he was sleeping before, snoring and curled against the cold. Ten miles outside town, he blinks open his rheumy blue-gray eyes, then arches his neck at a fleabite, but his back leg just hangs limp over the seat, and he can’t reach the itch anymore, thumps the passenger door with his back paw.
I feel a terrible tenderness for my dog and scratch his neck for him.
6 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
“Worthless damn dog,” I whisper, but, like me, he’s past insults. Already he’s asleep again, his eyes half open and rolled back white.
Then, just past the fog and the wipers slapping away the sleet ticking against the windshield, I see a sun-faded billboard pass to the right like an old dream:
H i st o ric Na co g d o ches The Oldest Town in Texas
My ‘76 Volaré’s backend fishtails, and the trailer bumps over onto the gravel shoulder. I take my foot off the accelerator and pump the brakes till I get the car and the U-Haul back under control, back onto the slushing road. When I look up into the rearview mirror, I see my own face, faint pink scars crisscrossing my lips and cheeks like baseball seams, and I shake my head, the U-
Haul trailer wobbling behind me.
I’m thirty-four and my dog’s fourteen—ninety-eight in dog years—and for a moment I feel almost that old, feel that all the years I’ve spent in Nacogdoches and other college towns since have all been dog years. It’s just the usual self-pity mixed up with a clean shot of adrenaline, I know, but I let myself feel it all anyway. Shake my head against the thought of starting all over, from scratch, after losing almost everything again, everything but this old dog and what I’ve got in tow, not much more than what I started off with when I first drove Highway 21 through Alto,
Texas, and saw this same billboard ten years ago. My dog and I’ve had too much history in this town, and I wish now I’d not gone out of my way. I’ve wasted too much of my life in this town already. This town feels oldest of them all.
But once my tires thump over the railroad tracks and I cross over the Bonita Creek bridge—a rush of red flood water rising below—then pass Lone Star Feed and Seed and drive up
7 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
the hill through the intersection at North Street downtown, onto the wet, red-brick paving, then
past the Old Stone Fort Bank and the public library fountain on my right, I’m feeling a little
better. The old Christmas decorations are still up, red candles with yellow flame bulbs and faded
plastic holly mounted on light posts along the streets. My first thought is to turn around and
drive by Allyn’s big-turreted Victorian on Pearl Street, maybe see her shadow against the kitchen
window shade, but I decide against it, cut left onto Mound Street, where the Nacogdoche planted
their dead, drive slow past the old Ale and Quail club, then park my car behind the old Fredonia
Inn. Whô sits up on the towel in the passenger seat, looks over at me, blinks, his stiff, bitten tail
thumping the passenger seat.
“All right,” I tell him. “Just hold on. And for chrissakes sake don’t crap on the seat.”
I reach to the floorboard for Whô’s red harness, slip it over his neck and clasp it around
his chest while he pulls against me, always in the opposite direction, the direction of his own
desire. I make sure no one’s watching, open the car door and my umbrella, and pick the dog up,
carry him out through the cold rain under a stooping magnolia into the alleyway behind the hotel.
Whô sniffs a puddle at the wet tree roots, blinks up at me.
“Go on,” I say.
The rain’s coming down hard and he shakes it off, shivering a little, then tries to lift his
back leg, but his rear end tilts and he falls over, sitting on his haunches in the puddle like a child.
He looks up at me, blinks again, shivers hard for show, then pulls himself up again and pees in a
steaming yellow stream that pulses against his left front paw.
“Great,” I say. “Excellent job.”
Back in the car, I wad up the towel in the passenger seat and dry the dog off, wipe the
long, mucus-crusted bangs dripping down over his eyes, the gravy-stained whiskers curling from his mouth, the hair matted at the ends of his ears, at his back end where he’s chewed himself bald,
8 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
then his muddy paws, trying to get him to lie down on the floorboard. The wet dog stinks beyond
imagining, like all the times he disappeared ten years ago, off in the wild woods of Nacogdoches,
showing up at my front door, grinning, after weeks of rolling in road kill.
Whô’s fur is matted with burrs and twigs, already orange from the East Texas red clay.
“Stay,” I tell him, like that’ll make any difference, and then I shut the car door. In the hotel
courtyard, I hear the dog start in on his barking, then the same low and lonely moan I first heard
when I left him by himself in my farm room apartment.
I open the courtyard gate and walk by the swimming pool, cut through the hotel dining
room to the service desk, hoping nobody hears my dog before I check in.
I lay my umbrella on the counter, wait for the clerk on the phone, a short college girl with
blue-green eyes and a dark mole like a baby June bug in the arch of her left eyebrow. I feel a sharp
constriction under my sternum when I realize how much she looks like Rachel, my first wife.
I glance over to the closed ballroom doors next to the gift shop, the hotel atrium with its
concrete bench and two geese asleep in their plastic pond, then remember Rachel tossing her
wedding bouquet backwards over her head in that same ballroom, then Allyn Vanderbeck letting
out a little scream when the bouquet fell into her hands, fumbling it, stoned and drunk, like a
wadded ball of newspaper flame, then hurling it at Maddie, who dropped it to her feet.
I glance back at the elevator doors, remember riding that same elevator up—a split lip, a loose tooth crown and an eye swollen shut—standing naked with Rachel in the honeymoon suite upstairs and trying to kiss her without flinching, then throwing back the bed covers and seeing all the white rice Maddie and Allyn had scattered between the sheets, two boxes full. Remember the next morning, waking up with a throbbing skull, staring at Rachel asleep, a kernel of white rice stuck to the corner of her mouth, as I tried to shake off the terrible mistake I’d just made.
Mistakes, I think. Or maybe just the same damn one, over and over. Another mistake coming here. Jesus.
9 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
It’s just another two-hour drive to Shreveport and I could stay the night there instead, I think, head on next morning to my newest stint in the Dark Satanic Instructor Mills, the big state university Sherman burned to the ground, off in the stooped and looping kudzu-smothered pines of Alabama. I pick up my umbrella, start to turn around and leave, when the clerk who looks like my first ex-wife cradles the phone, looks up at me, turns the ledger around to face me.
“Single or double?” she says. Smiles.
I have to think a moment. “Single,” I say and shake my head, whispering to myself,
“again.” Then I put my umbrella back down. Pick up the ledger pen to sign in.
Fifteen minutes later, I’ve sneaked Whô around from my car to my hotel room along the backcourt facing the alley, the dog straining against his leash. I sit on the edge of the bed and switch on the T.V., watch the Weather Channel, the blue mass of freezing rain and sleet stalled at a right angle from Galveston to Texarkana, all the way northeast across the Appalachians to New
York and Maddie’s sooty brownstone in Queens. I should call her, I know, but last time I did she said she’d not gotten any auditions in weeks and she was thinking about cutting Xs across her wrists again, but I’m not up for hearing all that just now, just now starting to feel a little hopeful.
If I leave early next morning, I figure, I can maybe outrun all this bad weather and make it to
Shreveport, then drive the eight long hours through Monroe and Jackson to my new teaching gig in Tuscaloosa. Tuscaloser, I think. The thought gives me no comfort.
Whô sits on the floor at the foot of the bed in the cold room, stares up at me, panting, his long tongue lolling out the side of his mouth like a long turkey wattle. He arches his neck against another fleabite, but his back paw just thumps the matted red shag rug. He jerks his head around to chew, snorting, at the base of his tail. Then he looks back at up me, blinks.
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“All right. Okay.” I scratch him a moment, then reach into the plastic trash bag I carried in from the car, feel around two weeks of dirty laundry, then pull out two plastic bowls and a damp bag of Gravy Train from the bottom, my dirty clothes scattered everywhere across the floor.
At the bathroom sink, I fill the bowl with water, set it next to the food bowl by the toilet, then watch Whô slop and gulp down chunks of food without chewing, drooling gravy all over the bathroom floor.
“Good job,” I tell him. “Nice work.”
While the dog’s occupied, I step outside to my Volaré to get my suitcase, reminding myself to do my laundry in Shreveport or Jackson, Mississippi. The cold rain falls around me in the parking lot, and I try to remember what I did with my umbrella. I unlock the hotel door again and start to open it, but Whô’s already nosed his way out through the crack.
“Not so fast.” I nudge him back into the room with the toe of my Hush Puppies, then drag my heavy suitcase backwards inside and heave it up onto the bed.
“Sneaky little shit,” I say, bending down and ruffling the dog’s hair, and he belches a loud, evil cloud into my face. “God, that was attractive.”
The dog pants at me as his back end falls over, and he settles onto the carpet where he’s fallen, resting his head on his front paws, grinning up at me.
“I’ll be right back, okay?” I look around for my umbrella again, don’t see it, stoop to pet the dog between his eyes. Bend to kiss him on his head, but he just stares off at the wall. “Damn stuck up dog. All right, then, be that way. Just don’t start in on all your pissing and howling while
I’m gone, okay? Get us both kicked out of here.” Hearing my own voice, I realize that, ever since
I rescued him last night from his back yard banishment at the house my second wife and I shared for four years—“He’s just a dog,” she’d said when kicked him out the back door—I’ve fallen back into my old habit of talking to my old mutt, and he’s fallen back into his old habit of ignoring me.
11 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
“Ungrateful cur,” I growl like a melodrama villain and open the door, step outside. “Be good now, all right? And don’t crap all over the place. I’ll give you a bath when I get back.” I close the door, wait, think about driving by Allyn’s place for just a moment, then shake off the idea. Then, just as
I start for my car, the dog starts in on a long, lonesome howl from the hotel room.
Twenty minutes later, I’m parked next to the Mandalay Apartments across Pearl Street from Allyn’s big double-turreted Victorian, eating in my dented Volaré, a shrimp Po Boy from
Yakofritz’s—where Chris Grooms used to play his Martin in the storefront window and sing,
“Louisiana, Louisiana. They’re trying to wash us away. They’re trying to wash us away.” I could just go up and knock, I think, just say hey and stand there for a minute or two, make sure she’s all right, then leave, not even go inside. It’s just that simple, I think.
“No,” I say.
I can’t see much past the naked gray pecans and mimosas and the tangle of dead honeysuckle vines, through the dark and heavy downpour or the fog rising up from Bonita Creek, just one light slatting through closed blinds in the living room downstairs, Allyn’s battered white
Ford F-100 pickup parked in the carport like an Appaloosa with all its gray-primered Bond-O spots.
Any moment now, I expect a cop to drive up and arrest me. Imagine the Daily Sentinel’s headline tomorrow morning: “Clueless Fool Stalks Lost First Love.” I look up at the scarred face in the rearview mirror. For some reason I can’t figure, I want to see Allyn one more time before I leave Texas for good, just a flash of her blond hair at her hips.
Just a quick knock at the door, I tell myself, to make sure she’s all right, and then I’ll be gone. Yeah, yeah, right, I think. The hell with it.
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I drop my greasy wax paper wrapper to the floorboard, open the door, step outside, walk
in the rain across Pearl Street, down the gravel drive past Allyn’s truck, then up the steps of the
screened-in veranda that wraps around her house. The screened door slaps shut behind me,
making me jump, and I stand in the dark at the front door, my finger just a quarter inch from the
doorbell.
What the hell am I doing here? I think, wet and cold to the bone. Then I turn around fast, step
back out into the cold rain, walk back up the gravel drive. I stop a moment in the downpour on
Pearl Street when I see a yellow flash, a black-bearded face in the sulfur flare of a match as a man
lights a cigarette in his blue Karmann Ghia convertible parked at Allyn’s curb. Then I turn away
fast, splash to my car in the rain.
At the Fredonia Inn I unlock my door, ready to get my dog and get my gear and get the
hell out of Nacogdoches.
Nac-a-no-where, Beck’s girls used to call it. Allyn and Marilyn and Sherilyn Vanderbeck.
Nac-a-way-the-hell-out-in-the-middle-of-fucking-nowhere, they used to say.
They always hated this town, they said, the place where they were born and raised up, like their mother Lynn and their father Beck before them, like their grandparents, their great and great- great grandparents, long before Spindletop and the great state of Fredonia, even before the Texas
Revolution and the Old Stone Fort, their mestiza blood a mingling of old Spain and Scandinavia,
Tennessee pioneer and the lost tribe of the Nacogdoche. Moonshine blond and long-rifle rape.
Beck’s girl couldn’t wait to escape to the big city—Big D or NYC—but Marilyn and
Sherilyn and their father Beck have been gone for years now, suicides every one, and now their mother Lynn’s gone now, too. Hung herself two months ago from a high bedroom beam in their old Victorian on Pearl.
13 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
Last I heard, Allyn was living in a rent-controlled artist’s loft not far from Maddie’s
brownstone in Queens, having herself big gallery shows in the East Village and Soho, selling her
dark and muddled mermaids at three thousand dollars a pop, but now Allyn’s back—the last
Vanderbeck left—back in Nac-a-no-where, to finish the business of the dead.
In my hotel room, I shake the rain out of my hair, off my coat. My gray umbrella lies on the nightstand next to the bed, next to it a pink Post-It note stuck to the bedside table:
Mr. Truitt, You left your umbrella at the checkout desk. Hope you didn’t get wet! ☺ Tracy Wadding up the note, I toss it at the wastepaper basket and miss, then glance at the hotel carpet to see if my dog’s left me any gift turds—either because he likes to punish me for leaving him alone or because he’s incontinent and can’t help himself anymore—but I see nothing.
“Whô!” I shout.
The dog probably can’t hear me anyway, so I walk into the bathroom, expecting to find him hunkered down behind the shower curtain in the tub, where he used to hide during East Texas thunderboomers. I take a bath towel from the towel rack and ruffle-dry my hair. “Might as well
give you a bath while you’re in there,” I say. “Good dog.”
I throw the shower curtain back and the tub’s empty.
“Bad dog,” I say, calling for him again, a sinking feeling rising up under my armpits like gumbo-dark East Texas swamp water. I drop the towel to the bathroom floor, run back into the bedroom, flip on the closet light, kneel down to look under the bed.
“No. Please. Not here. Not now.”
14 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
I run out to the parking lot. The wind swirls freezing rain around me and I shout,
“Whô!” clapping my hands together till my cold palms sting, the only sound my half-deaf dog might hear.
At the front desk, the clerk who looks like my first wife says, “Oh, hi. You get my note?”
She looks me up and down. My hair drips into my eyes. My jeans drip to the hotel carpet.
“Yeah, sure. Listen, did you see a dog?”
“A dog,” she says.
“In my room.”
“There’s a dog in your room?”
“There was a dog in my room.”
“When?”
“Before you opened the door.”
“I didn’t see any dog. How’d a dog get into your room?”
“Never mind,” I say.
Back in my hotel room, I grab my coat, my gray umbrella. Outside, I lay the umbrella on the roof of my car, get in and start the ignition, jam the car into reverse, tires spinning out on ice- slick asphalt. The U-Haul trailer jackknifes in the parking lot and almost sideswipes a
Volkswagen bus. I take in a breath, let it out, then make a wide turn around the van, circle the hotel parking lot twice, looking for my escaped dog.
I turn left onto Fredonia, then make a sharp right onto Hospital Street, then drive five miles an hour, looking frantically left and right. Flip my high beams on, my wipers on high, then hunker down in my seat, as the wipers slap back the freezing rain and sleet coming down hard
15 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
against the windshield. I can’t see a damn thing. I try to imagine where my dog might’ve run off
to, circle the block again, turn back onto Fredonia, then right again onto Hospital.
Just as I turn, I see it, the flash of something gray in my headlights in front of my car, then feel it, the thump thump thump of first the front-left, then the back-left, then the trailer tires, bumping over it, before I can stop.
“No,” I whisper.
In my side view mirror I see something flattened out onto the road, lit up gray and red by the trailer’s brake lights. I throw open my door, run behind the U-Haul trailer in the street, look down.
It’s an umbrella. My umbrella. I look back, remember laying it on the roof of my car. I pick it up. It’s bent a little at the handle, but otherwise it looks all right. I open it. Close it. Rain
falls all around me.
The yellow bug light next to the front door on the screened-in veranda blinks on, two
deadbolts unlatch, and the door bumps up against an intruder chain. Through the opening I can
see her left eye, the luminous blue iris like a cracked cat’s eye marble with bright flecks of green.
“Travis?” she says, her voice smoky and hoarse. “What are you doing here?” She pushes the door closed to unlatch the chain, then opens the door a little more, glances past me. “Did anyone see you?”
“Anyone? See me . . . what?”
She looks up the drive, her eyes wide and shining like spoons.
“Nothing,” she says, shakes her head. “It’s . . . nothing.”
Barefoot, Allyn’s wearing long johns and no makeup, smoking a Camel filter. She looks
like she’s not slept in days, the moony shadows under her eyes a bruised blue, like weeks’ old
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shiners. She palms her furzy pale scalp, looks down a moment. What used to be long, straight
hair to her waist is gone. All that’s left is stubble hennaed a reddish blonde like Maddie’s, cut
close to her scalp like a Boy Scout’s. She’s gained a little weight since I last saw her in New
York—What, five, six years ago?—and she looks more like her mother than her old self. I’ve
forgotten how beautiful Allyn’s mother was, how beautiful her mother’s daughter.
“He’s gone,” I say. “Run off again.”
“Who?”
“How’d you know?”
“Huh? What are you talking about?”
I feel trapped in a bad Abbott and Costello routine: I Don’t Know’s on third. Who’s on second.
“Whô,” I say. “Whôdini. Don’t your remember? You gave him that stupid name.”
“Oh.” Allyn looks down, fresh oil paint smeared across her cheeks like war paint. “God,
he’s still alive? I thought he’d be dead by now.” She shakes her head. “Sorry. Didn’t mean it to come out like that.” Rain clatters the tin roof of the screened-in veranda above me. “What’s he doing here?” she says. “What are you doing here?”
I shake my head. “God knows. Listen, I got to find him. He had surgery last year. Hip
dysplasia. His back legs don’t work worth a damn anymore and he’s had a couple of strokes and
he’s half deaf and half blind. And this weather. I’ve been driving around half crazy trying to find him. He could be just about anywhere.”
Shivering, I remember my umbrella in the car and wait for Allyn to invite me in, to hand me a warm dry towel, but she just stands there at the threshold, behind the screened door, her arms
folded under her breasts against the cold. She looks up at me as if she’s just recognized me, then
glances over my shoulder again.
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I wait. Try to stop shivering but don’t know how to stop. Try to think of a way to tell her how I’ve gotten here but can’t. Fight my old fright, my old ache, my old urge to hold her, or escape. Try to think of a way to begin. Again.
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Two Nacogdoches 1978
ix weeks after I first moved from Dallas to a cheap rented room tacked onto a tin- SS roofed farmhouse just outside Nacogdoches, the stray scratched at my front door the first time, his slick, blue-bloody intestines looping out of a ragged tear in his belly—a fight
with the same Doberman that had slavered and barked at my car tires for weeks as I drove home
along an old logging road—and every time I tried to pick the stray up, he yelped and bit my hand,
then wriggled free, dragging his sand-flecked guts across the red clay till he was just out of my
reach. The dog was ornery, a butt-ugly mongrel. A poodle-terrier-shepherd-Chihuahua mix. Or maybe not. Long ears on a wide spatula head, stumpy legs on a short, stubby body. Long, coarse
fur matted with cockleburs and blood-taut ticks fat as dewberries. Somehow the dog had worked
his left front paw through his collar—trying to get free of it, I guessed—and it had worked its way
under his arm instead, where it had cut through muscle and sinew, an infected pink gash half-
healed over the collar like tree bark over barbed wire. It took me half an afternoon to catch the
damn dog, following his bloody paw prints freckling the red-dirt driveway to my farm room door.
Come here, go away, he seemed to be telling me, a trait I found compelling in wounded animals and
women.
19 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
I was just about to give up, my knuckles torn and bleeding, when the dog limped up to
me, licked my bare feet and passed out. It was the licking part that suckered me. I cut the tagless
leather collar free with my landlord’s pruning sheers, waved away the bluebottle flies haloing the
dog’s bloody belly and picked him up, fleas flicking from his ratty fur into my face, as I carried the
stinking dog like road kill to my ’76 Civic. Cost me two hundred dollars to get the underarm
slash sewn up, the dog’s intestines stapled back in—a lot less than it might’ve cost me if Dr.
Tidmore hadn’t made me a deal I had to live with, like it or not. Another fifty for all the dog’s shots and antibiotics and some Filarabit tablets. For heartworms.
“Lucky for you, no needles in the gut,” Tidmore said, poking a sharp yellow fingernail into my stomach and grinning, his teeth yellow as cob corn, thick white hair scrolling out his ears and nostrils like corn tassels. Tidmore, an old small and large animal vet, had oaty horse breath and cracked lips and a bald, veiny head, round and shiny as a creek rock. “Dog’s negative on rabies, parvo, distemper. You better get those hands looked after, though. Get yourself a tetanus shot, if you know what’s good for you.”
I was broke as usual, couldn’t afford any shots, had never liked the damn things anyway— not since I’d had to watch nurses poke my brother Jesse’s bruised arms for twenty minutes trying to find a vein that hadn’t collapsed when I was a kid—and I wouldn’t’ve spent the money on myself anyway, except maybe for food, a carton of Marlboros Reds and a six pack of Shiner longnecks. I felt mildly heroic for a moment, like Timmy saving Lassie for a change. Then I realized I had no milk or bread or Braunschweiger in my farm room dorm fridge, could’ve dropped the dog off at the animal shelter just as easy as at the vet’s, then taken a detour to Safeway or the
local liquor store.
“Damn dog,” I said.
20 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
A week later, I met Rachel Swafford. She was twenty-two, same age as Allyn and my sister
Maddie. I was twenty-four. I’d been playing drums for Half Fast, Maddie’s quartet, the last few weekends at the Fredonia Inn’s Ale and Quail Club—a strange mix of jazz Fake Book covers,
Broadway tunes, old blues songs, Gershwin and Joni Mitchell—and at the beginning of our first fifteen-minute break Maddie said she had a new friend she wanted me to meet.
“Great,” I said, rolling my eyes and sighing a death sigh like my old man, “a new friend.”
A few years before, Allyn had dumped me for my best friend Danny Archer. That’d pretty much killed me. Then she’d dumped Danny and about ten or so others when she’d moved back into her grandfather’s old Victorian on Pearl Street, where she and Maddie had been living together for two years rent-free in grand undergraduate style. Ever since I’d moved to East Texas in August, Maddie’d still been acting like she owed me somehow, for not quite quitting Allyn when Allyn had quit me, so she introduced me to all her party friends at Stephen F. Austin State like that would make a difference: Jo Lynn Matheson, Roselyn Tripp, Leann Pendergast and a few others I didn’t want to remember. I was still among the walking dead.
Maddie finished singing, “My analyst told me that I was right out of my head,” goofing it up and crossing her eyes and singing with a lit cigarette stuck up one nostril, and at the end of the song my old band mate and next door neighbor from Dallas, Kenny Ryffe, kicked on his wah-wah pedal and did a little chattering Shaft rhythm on his starburst Gibson while Korrence Roshelle thumb-thumped a funky bass line, his fat ‘fro round as a black halo, as he rested his chin on
Maddie’s shoulder and sang with her in perfect two-part, “But you know two heads are better than one.”
At the end of the set, Maddie walked me up to the bar during break and said, “Travis,
Rachel.” I glanced around but didn’t see anyone at first till I spotted this tiny bartender with short, curly toast-colored hair, her chin just above the bar’s padded edge, her smile bristling as she
21 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
wiped her hands on a bar towel, her eyes daring me to say a word about her height. I was six foot
five. She was four foot, eleven and three-quarters inches. Randy Newman’s “Short People”
popped into my head first thing.
I reached over the bar, shook her child’s hand.
“So what’s with all the bandages?” Rachel said, petting the gauze taped along my knuckles,
her long fingernails tickling the hairs along the back of my hand. “You hurt the other guy?” She
grinned: the most dangerous woman in the room. Close second anyway to Maddie. Little
firecracker.
“Dog bites,” I said. “Sorry to disappoint you.”
It was all I could say, her face was so lovely. She had wide green-freckled blue eyes like
Allyn’s, blinking like diodes in the neon bar lights. You’re cute, they blinked, then Don’t fuck with me.
Before the band’s first break was over, she’d made me three stiff Amaretto Sours on the house, spiked with Everclear.
Back on the cramped stage, Maddie leaned over my dusty Ziljiäns and whispered, “I think she likes you.”
“God, let’s hope,” I said and shrugged, not believing a word of it.
Maddie lit another smoke, her face and her lion’s mane of red hair glowing from her cigarette’s embered end. Then she started right in on her version of Jobim’s “The Girl from
Empanema”:
“The girl with emphysema goes coughing and every time she goes coughing she goes . . . uhhhhhh.”
Maddie took a long hit from her Virginia Slims menthol, dragging in a ragged breath against the microphone like she was breathing through an aqualung. Smoke dribbled from her mouth and curled into two blue coils from her nose, and she did a little coughing death rattle like
22 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
our father’s mother, our evil grandmother Evelyn. Then Asadollah Amini—the band’s Iranian
keyboardist and Maddie’s latest off-and-on lover—ruined it all with his long, grating Steve Martin
laugh.
Maddie ignored Asa, as she called him—they’d been arguing between sets about Sean
Baggett, her ex—and out of pure spite and meanness, she’d started right in on “Blue,” an aching,
gorgeous thing she’d sung once a cappella to Sean in Allyn’s claw foot bathtub, her liquid silver voice
so pure, like Joni’s, that my eyes leaked whenever she sang it on stage.
The only customer in the place had already left the bar, so Rachel came out from behind it
and slow danced to “Blue” by herself, her eyes closed, her tanned stomach taut as a belly dancer’s,
her red tank top like a wide rubber band pressing her small breasts flat, her nipples to seed corn.
She turned and turned under the dance floor’s mirrored globe like she was at an endless Dead
concert, her long, sheer, tie-dyed skirt swirling around her hips like a fluorescing medusa.
I laid my sticks across my snare and sneaked offstage, took Rachel’s hands and fell into a close, kneeling slow dance with her. She opened her eyes, saw tears in my eyes and me on my knees, and laughed like a fledging jay.
“What a sap,” Rachel said.
At midnight, dance floor dust on my knees, I broke down my Slingerland kit and tight- packed my Civic, slamming the hatchback shut, then waited for Rachel to balance the till and close up, pay the band’s pittance for playing all night to an empty house. Fifteen bucks each. Enough cash anyway for Gravy Train, Wonder Bread, Braunschweiger, Miracle Whip.
“Mind if I catch a ride with you?” Maddie asked me as she divvied up the take among the band members. She’d totaled her ’78 Chevy Luv truck driving back from Dallas the weekend before—third totaled vehicle in two years and not a scratch on her anywhere.
23 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
“No,” I said, then nodded to shy Asadollah, who pled with her in Farsi to ride home with
him.
“No,” she told him.
I whispered in her ear, “Do you have to treat him like a dog? He’s a nice guy for chrissake.”
She folded her arms. “I like dogs.”
I waved my hands in front of her face and shook them, double-fisted. “Work it out.
Please.”
In five minutes, Asadollah had joked Maddie to his car—“I take you home, baby, hokay?”—bobbing around like a wild and crazy guy, Maddie laughing and saying, “God, Asa, you’re such an ass,” and when his ’56 sky-blue Caddy had pulled off with Maddie inside, Maddie shouting at him to leave her alone about Sean, Rachel lifted the bottle of Amaretto she’d been pouring me all night from the bar, and we stepped out to the Fredonia Inn parking lot to drink the rest of it on the dented hood of her green Gremlin. We shared a joint in her car and kissed, sweet
Amaretto and Acapulco Gold on our smoky tongues. Then I followed her Gremlin to her place, a leaning clapboard house with a red-clay rain skirt, just a block off the red-brick streets downtown.
“You got anything to eat?” I whispered in her dark kitchen, feeling weightless and high as a space walk, floating queasy, my stomach full of smoke and sweet alcohol fumes. “Haven’t eaten a damn thing all day.”
“You’ll wake my roommates,” Rachel said too loud, pulling me along without stopping, through a blind hallway, then into complete darkness, stumbling down a short flight of stairs and through a passageway with a low transom, where I hit my head hard. Jarred my jaw.
“Jesus damn.” I rubbed my scalp furiously, tears in my eyes. Tasted blood, a tooth hole in my tongue.
“Duck,” she said and laughed.
24 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
The daybed in her tiny room was a child’s single, too short and narrow even for her. She
pushed me onto it sideways, pulled off my high top Hush Puppies and threw them smack against
the wall, then climbed onto me like a dog-treed squirrel. Pulled off my shirt and kissed my
stomach, unzipped my jeans.
“Oh, my god,” she said. “My god.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Maddie was right. You’re so . . . tall.”
“My sister told you that?”
“Maybe it was Allyn, I can’t remember. You got a thing for lyn’s, don’t you? Allyn.
Sherilyn.” She squinted at me. “Rachelyn,” she said, trying the name out on her tongue, then
shook her head. “Look, this tall thing’s not exactly a secret, okay?”
Blood burnished my cheeks. “Jesus. Allyn. I can’t believe she’d tell you that—”
But Rachel was laughing, kissing my mouth hard now, her teeth clacking against mine like dominoes as she pulled up her skirt and shimmied herself onto my hips.
“God,” I said. “Oh, my god.”
“What?” she said.
“You’re so . . . short.”
She soft-slapped my cheeks. “Hey, not nice.”
“Very nice.”
“I am not . . . nice!” she said.
“Okay. I believe you. No need to get . . . short.”
She wasn’t laughing. She put her tiny hands around my throat. Pressed her thumbs into my windpipe.
“All right, then. Jesus.” Coughing. “I’m sorry, okay?” Always the apologist.
25 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
Rachel was a screamer, and with screamers I got quiet.
“Am I hurting you?” I whispered.
“For crying out loud,” she said, her laugh a low rumbling purr rising to a swelling catcall,
“no!”
Dope- and booze-dizzy, I floated outside myself, felt myself spinning one moment like a drunk on a waterbed, then grew strangely detached and quiet the louder she shouted. Couldn’t concentrate on my own pleasure, I was so concerned about her roommates. “You’ll wake them up,” I told her, almost a shout, but she couldn’t hear me, couldn’t hear her roommates’ fists
banging the walls all around us.
At nine am, she was still asleep facedown on top of me—no other place for her to sleep—
her striped tabby Dido curled up asleep on her back, and I’d not been able to sleep myself but
thirty minutes or so off and on, trying not to sneeze in the haze of dust and cat dander, needing to
pee, worried I’d wake her up or tilt her or her cat over to the hardwood floor if I got up. A
bedspring had punctured my liver like an ice pick all night, and my feet stuck out a foot from the
end of the bed, my ankles wedged between the bed’s railings like wrists jammed through prison
bars.
I jumped—a loud knock from the other side of the house—which jolted a bladder spasm,
and Dido flew up from Rachel’s back, hissing, across the room, a bolting explosion of floating fur.
Rachel opened her eyes and blinked, then peeled a creased red cheek from my spit-wet chest.
“Rachel?” a man’s voice shouted. Then more pounding. “Rachel!”
She stood and jerked the sheets off me, threw them around herself like a toga. Friends,
Romans, countrymen.
26 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
“You better”—she glanced around the room—“hide in the closet.”
I pulled my feet through the bed bars and sat up, stiff-legged, my head thumping like it’d just been guillotined, mouth-gaping, into a wicker basket. The word procrustean came to mind for some strange reason, the sharp edge of a screaming hangover to come. I sneezed. Then I remembered I had a lit-test at noon. Les Miserables.
“Who’s that?” I said.
She tossed me my shirt, my bellbottoms, my Hush Puppies. “The . . . boyfriend.”
“The,” I said, trying to remember what the word meant. Thuh?
My arched neck ached as I stood stooping in her dark closet, trying not to sneeze.
“There’s nothing going on,” Rachel said, the boyfriend’s shouts in her room like a loose muffler grating sparks across pavement. I ducked behind Rachel’s hangared shirts and skirts and sat down, wadded my clothes into a tight ball at my groin, my bare back flat against the closet wall.
“What are you talking about?” she shouted at him. “Are you crazy?”
When the closet door opened, she parted the curtain of clothes and said, “He’s gone.”
Then she knelt and kissed me hard on my mouth where I sat, more tooth than tongue.
“This kind of thing happen to you a lot?” I said. She stared at me straight on without a word and I stood to go, bumped my head on the low closet ceiling. “Look, I need to go pick up . .
. the dog. Need to take a pit stop, too. You mind pointing me to the little girl’s room?”
Rachel frowned up at me, the back of my head and neck flat up against the closet ceiling.
“Go on,” she said. “Talk down to me.”
27 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
“What? Christ, Rachel, you know that’s not what I meant.” Her blue-wax eyes burned,
then softened, went liquid at the corners. “All right,” I said. “I’m sorry.” Apologizing to her
again.
“Stay with me awhile,” she said and stood, like nothing had just happened, leaning kisses
into my bare chest, hooking her hands up over my shoulders and hanging from me for a while like
an organ grinder’s monkey. “It’s okay now. Really.”
“I told the vet I’d pick the dog up at eight,” I said, glancing at the freckled band of white
around my watchless wrist. I pulled Rachel up, lowered her bare feet back onto the closet floor till
she stood upright, a little wobbly, on her own.
She stared at my long fingers and taped knuckles, then frowned down at her own. “Is the
dog . . . hurt or something?”
“Had to sew his guts back in. Look, I really need to go to the bathroom.”
She stepped out of the closet, stood out of my way and folded her arms. “All right, then,
go.” Her sleep-flattened hair stuck out over her ears like a Pomeranian’s. “Go on,” she said.
“Go.” Simple as that.
I ducked out of her closet, rubbed my sore neck. Stepped into my wadded jeans. Grabbed
up my wrinkled shirt, glanced around for my socks and wristwatch and Hush Puppies.
“What’s . . . his name?” Rachel said.
“Who?” I said.
“The dog.”
“Hell if know. Not sure I want to know.” I looked down, buttoned my shirt. “Look,
he’s not exactly my dog, okay? I just sort of . . . rescued him.” I nodded outside her window.
“What’s his name? The . . . boyfriend.”
“You don’t want to know.”
28 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
“Yeah, well . . . ” I tucked my shirt into my jeans, stopped myself short of Thanks, had a lovely evening, then spotted my socks on the floor, my Timex on the nightstand, and grabbed them up. “What the hell were you going to tell your boyfriend if he saw these?” I dangled my watch and socks out in front of her face, then balanced on one foot and stepped into one sock, almost toppling over as I tried to step into the other. Snapped my watch over my wrist.
I’d already turned out of her room when she grabbed my long ponytail from behind and pulled me back, whipped it over my shoulder like a leash.
“Come here,” she said and pulled me down to her, her eyes half-lidded and sleepy.
Her mouth was soft and warm and wet.
“Go away,” she said and smiled, then gave me a little chest shove out the door.
Turning, I hit my head hard on the low transom again. Jarred my jaw.
“Duck,” she said and laughed, reminding me again too late.
I stopped, rubbed my head fiercely. Touched my wet lips, scented her musk on my fingers from the night before. Saw her there with her bed sheet over her bare shoulders and started to turn back into her room. Stopped again. Turned up the short stairs and then down the still-dark hallway, dazed and confused.
In the bathroom, I felt the knot at the top of my head and stared at bloody fingertips, a smear of blood on my lips. Stared down at an unaccountable hard-on and waited for it to go away, then had to bend myself the best I could, peeing painfully, loudly and long, trying to aim for the bowl edge and missing. When I’d finished tissuing my piss mess, I put down the lid. Had grown up with three sisters and knew the consequences. Usually a shout, then a whack across the skull.
In the kitchen, Rachel’s two roommates glanced up at me from their bowls of Cheerios, their hard raccoon eyes softening into a kind of grudging pity.
29 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
“Morning,” I said and blushed.
“Morning,” they said. Shrugged.
At the vet’s, the dog wouldn’t come to me. Growled and snapped, overgrown claws skittering the stainless steel exam table.
“Dog’s really taken to you, I see.” Dr. Tidmore grinned and winked, his long, dipthongy drawl reeling out really like a largemouth bass on a taut line. I held the growling dog back by a fraying canvas collar, petted his hackled back.
“Maybe it’s got something to do with all those staples you put in his belly.” I moved my face inches from the dog’s nose, his teeth baring. Pug snout on a poodle head, terrier ears on an outsize Chihuahua body. Or maybe not. Gray bangs hiding his eyes till he blinked, two puckers of hair on either side of his nose. “Look, it’s not my fault,” I told the dog. I nodded to Tidmore.
“He’s the one did this to you. Used a staple gun from the looks of it.”
A deep throated growl, and Tidmore laughed.
“See?” I told the vet. “He’s not my dog. I told you.”
“He is now. You paid for him. No good deed goes unpunished, and all that.”
“Great.” I shook my head. My stomach was growling at me, too. “Look, doc, I don’t need a dog. I need to eat. Don’t think I can afford a dog, is what I’m saying. Unless I put an ad in the Sentinel. Get the owner to reimburse me for all this . . . expense.”
“If you was the owner, would you claim him?” Tidmore grinned. “Forget it. Forgot.
You are. Like I said.”
“Jesus god, he’s a funny-looking dog,” I said, fisting my bandaged knuckles out in front of the dog’s teeth. “Go on and bite me again, you ungrateful, ugly mutt.” But he thumped his tail on the steel table, suckered me again with a wrist lick.
30 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
“Responds well to insult,” Tidmore said like a formal prognosis. “That’s the way it is
sometimes with strays. Hard to figure. Found one last month with his ears all burned off and his
head red and bald as a turkey buzzard’s. Dog’d been walking around like that for months. Kids’d
dunked his head in kerosene and set him afire. Sick puppies and strays themselves, every one, and
he still followed them around like they were his long lost pack.” Tidmore shook his head, shivered a little. “Nice farmwoman over in Mount Enterprise’s taking care of him now. I birthed her a quarter colt last month for free. Two-way deal. Always is.”
Tidmore checked the dog’s ears, peeled back his lips over his plaque-edged teeth, pressed his inflamed gums till they bled a little. “This here beggar’s about three years old, I’d wager, been scrapping it on his own for about a year or more. Living on pizza house dumpsters and table scraps and overturned trashcans. Mashed ‘coons, ‘possums and army-dillers. Amazing he’s made it this long in such a shape. Crapped a tapeworm yesterday long as your arm, I swear to god.”
Another problem I should know about: The dog had a broken back leg that tilted into a tilde, two breaks in the crooked bone already half healed. No point in breaking and setting the bone again, Tidmore told me. The dog’d limp a little. Maybe a car’d tumbled him while he was dining on road kill. Maybe his owner’d kicked him enough times to run him off for good. Maybe both.
“Maybe I can help you out,” Tidmore said, grinning. “Two-way deal. Always is.”
I blinked at him through floating hard contacts, my eyes bloodshot, raw and sore like I’d been playing softball in a sandstorm. I’d forgotten to take the damn things out, had slept with them in all night, afraid I’d tumble Rachel and Dido to the floor.
“Tell you what,” Tidmore said. “You keep the dog and I’ll just charge you for the meds.
Put your payment for the surgery down as a credit to your account. How’s that? For anything else might come up later.”
31 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
“Okay, I . . . guess. Thanks.” I shook my head—How could I say no?—and stared at the dog’s shaved, freckled pink belly, ran my hand lightly across the corners of the gut-stitched cut, inflamed at the edges where the staples frankensteined their way down to his groin. “What kind of mutt is he anyway?” I said, ruffling the dog’s ratty ears. “You know, case anybody asks.”
“God knows.”
The dog’s tail thumped the table hard like a steel drum.
“So how’d it go with Rachel?” Maddie asked me on the phone. I’d missed my miserable
Les Mis test at two, hadn’t had chance to finish the book, had spent half an hour chasing after the dog and my neighbor’s Doberman Butch as they’d kicked up red dust along the logging road to my farm room door.
“No more friends, Maddie. That’s it. That’s all.”
“Didn’t go so good, huh?”
“Went okay, I guess—till the . . . boyfriend showed up.”
“The boyfriend. Rachel’s got a boyfriend?”
“Thuh?” I said. “Duh?”
“God, honey, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. She should’ve told me! Well, we’ll just have to fix you up with another—”
“I’m keeping the stray,” I said, to change the subject. Keeping the dog had been her idea in the first place, and now here I was, stuck with him for life, thirteen years of bad luck or more.
“Tidmore gave me a credit on my bill, so long’s I keep the dog. Two-way deal, he said.”
Maddie laughed, knowing all about Tidmore’s two-way deals.
“Like you said, Tidmore’s all right,” I said.
“Tidmore’s the best! You’re the best! The best brother ever!”
32 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
“Ease up, Maddie,” I said, my face flushing hot, a terrible hangover thudding sharp- knuckled fists into the backs of my eyes. “And please for god’s sake just keep this between us, will you? Whatever you do, don’t tell Al—”
But Maddie was already shouting the news across the big house to Allyn, who shouted back, “Hurrah, hurray!”
The two of them had been shouting at each other like that since they were twelve. Now they were both running around the kitchen table, from the sound of it, Maddie’s five dogs, a
Golden Retriever and four Chihuahuas bark-yapping after them, each dog a Tidmore-rescued stray.
“What’s his name?” Maddie shouted into the receiver.
“Who?” I said.
“The dog. Can we see him? We’re on our way!”
I held out the receiver, stared at the mouthpiece.
Whatever you do, I’d just started to say, please don’t bring Allyn.
She stood halfway up the tilted barn wood steps to my farm room door, her hand over her mouth as she tried not to laugh, pine wind riffling her sun-silky hair at her hips.
“My god, Travis, that dog’s so ugly he’s . . . cute,” Allyn said, slurring her words a little, the whites of her eyes Panama Red. She stared at the dog, then at me, a little too long, till my whole face grew warm with her look. She averted her eyes and palmed her smile and I covered my mouth, too, my front teeth caps, ran a finger over the bulging lip scar jigging down from my nose to my chin like a broken zipper. It’s a cute little scar, she’d told me a month after the accident. Like
Paul McCartney’s. Let me kiss it. There, all better.
She’d been sleeping with Danny Archer for months by then.
33 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
My landlord’s rattling window unit ground out mildewy air next to Allyn at my side door,
fat drops from the late September humidity plopping from the condenser outside, spattering mud
freckles all over her bare brown ankles and toes. Even after five years, looking at her still had the
red-clay taste of blood. Broken teeth and windshield glass.
I sat cross-legged on the kitchen floor, tried to hold the dog back by his new stiff leather
collar, his dog tags rattling at his neck like nickels as he strained towards the open door. He’d
been laid up at Tidmore’s animal hospital a week, hovering the first day or so close to death, and
now he was ready to go at the Doberman a third time.
“If you’re coming in, Allyn, come in, will you?” I said. “And shut the door, or the damn
dog’ll run off again.”
“Of course, he’ll run off!” Maddie said, kneeling to pet the dog between his eyes. “He’s a
free spirit!”
“Doesn’t like to be tied down!” Allyn shouted from the steps like a little girl jumping for a
Snickers bar in a grocery cart.
Maddie crossed her eyes. “No straightjackets for this dog!”
“Goddamn escape artist,” I said between my teeth.
“Houdini!” Allyn shouted, and that was that. Like it or not, the stupid name would stick,
I knew. And Allyn would never come in. Would never shut the damn door. All my cool was
leaking out around her, into the hot wet Nacogdoches night. Fireflies winked the dark hayfields
behind her like her dime-store diamonds.
“Who!” I shouted back at her, then watched Allyn jump in her pretty skin. Already, I could
see the arrow scrolling out of the ô in the band’s logo like a tail-wagging dog, like an umbrella
opening out over the ô. I felt myself wrestle the name from her and nick it short till it was mine
34 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
again, a name of my own making, a nickname worthy of the man, the band. Keith Moon and The
Whô.
We don’t get fooled again!
Fitting tribute, I thought. Three weeks before, poor loony Moon had overdosed in a trashed hotel room, puke-choking on anabuse pills he’d swallowed with whisky to keep from drinking himself to death. Anti-abuse, the way I read it the first time, then had to go back to read the word right. Accidental overdose, The Times Herald had said. Old Moon. Dead Moon. Manic drummer. Holiday Inn crasher. Drum destroyer. Escape artist.
I imagined two cymbal-symbols rising up over the o’s in Môôn’s in name, like the double- bass drum kit he’d kicked off his too-high pedestal the first time I saw him in concert, his cymbals crashing down all around him while five fat big goldfish spilled out of his Plexiglas floor toms and flopped around on stage. “Baba O’Riley” had blared through my bedroom speakers the first time
Allyn and I’d tangled my bed sheets, stoned and drunk. Now I hummed the song under my breath, just soft enough so Allyn couldn’t hear:
Wasteland, it’s only teenage wasteland. They’re all wasted!
Allyn—still wasted after all these years—still wavered on my front steps, oblivious. She stared down at my dog like someone had shot him in the head, or should, to put him out of his misery.
Go on and shoot the dog, I wanted to tell her. And shoot me while you’re at it. Then shoot my sister, who talked me into this fucking mess, who’s always talking me into these fucking messes. But Maddie just baby- talked the dog, ruffling his wiry hair, completely unaware that she’d impaled me again with presence of her most beautiful best friend.
I rubbed the knot on my skull and told Maddie all about the Doberman.
35 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
“Dog barely gets his guts sewed back in, and what’s he do? Runs off again. Picks a fight with the same big-ass dog that gutted him in the first place. Butch! Dog could’ve killed us both.”
I grabbed Whô by the scruff. “Stupid damn dog.” But he just grinned up at me, panted death breath into my face, his long lip whiskers stained with Gravy Train and blood.
“Butch got the worst of it,” I said. “This crazy dog here noses his way out the door, sneaks up to Butch, snuffling dust in the tree shade. Chomps down a big pointy ear and won’t let go. Then Butch’s dragging him up and down the logging road, screaming like his head’s covered in fire ants. And what’s the Doberman do when my dog lets go? Tucks tail and runs, shivering like a
Chihuahua.”
“Watch it now,” Maddie said, flinching at the slight against her favorite breed. The four little yappers barked exclamation points in my face, trying to lick me on the mouth as they ran all over my lap on Allyn’s couch.
“Scrappy little mutt,” I said, almost proud of my new dog. “Didn’t even pop a stitch.”
“I swear to god, Travis,” Allyn said, still on the porch steps, snickering, still floating in the stoned and boozy ozone of her pretty-girl insight. “That dog’s so ugly, he’s . . . cute.”
Allyn was laughing now, Maddie laughing with her.
I sat on the floor next to my sister and petted my dog, a sorry, butt-ugly and completely worthless mutt, feeling pretty damn worthless myself, pretty damn sorry, too, and too damn sorry for myself. Tried not to look up at my old laughing love, Allyn, in the doorway, the loveliest girl I ever knew—so cute she could be downright ugly.
“For chrissakes, Allyn,” I said, “in or out, will you? And shut the damn door.”
Next thing that would happen, at any moment now, I knew, Maddie would be asking me what had happened the night before with this new girl Rachel, and I’d be telling her everything.
The whole sad and funny fucking story.
36 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
Three2 Dallllas 1968
he first time I saw her at our green-shuttered rental house in Dallas, Allyn just TT stood there like a stray at our front door, her childish, perfect face tanned, oval and bland, her straight, lemon-colored hair falling to the backs of her frowning brown knees, her
eyes bright and dry as Sunday funnies.
She was twelve and I was fourteen.
“You all right?” I asked her, thinking she’d just fallen off the banana seat of her oldest
sister’s Schwinn—me, the protective big brother, eldest of five, just the four of us now since our kid brother Jesse had bled to death in his Baylor Hospital bed. She was a perfect blue-eyed blond
child just like him, the kind who made you stare too long at any imperfection: the yellow-blue
bruises along her red-scraped shin, the smear of peanut butter across her cheek, the tiny spit bubble of milk pressed to the point of bursting between her lips.
“Who is it?” Maddie said behind me, always behind me, tugging at my belt loops, our three-legged Sheltie Reveille barking at our feet.
“Don’t know,” I said and glanced back to the front porch. “Who are you—?”
But the girl at our door was gone.
2 Published in slightly different form as “Beck’s Girls” in Glimmer Train Stories (Spring 2005, Issue 54): 168-179, 243. http:://www..glimmertrain..com/is54sp20..html..
37 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
I heard a high laugh and stepped off our front porch to the sidewalk, glanced left to see
her sun-white hair swing behind her as she walked barefoot across our lawn and around to the side
of our house, her footprints like blue wet shadows in the Johnson grass. Then I looked down and
saw the perfect prints of her bare feet like they’d been pressed into wet concrete, the color of her
own bright blood.
“Stay here,” I told Maddie. “Stay!” And I pointed an index finger at her and Reveille like
our father Deuce barking out orders to us all.
When I spotted Allyn again from the back of our house, she was walking bloody
footprints down our driveway to her own, past the vinyl-lined pool in her parents’ new two-car
garage.
She stood there in the dark of her kitchen doorway and stared at me without blinking,
knowing I’d be right there behind her. I glanced back to see if Maddie had followed but didn’t see her, then stared at Allyn a long time, her green-flecked eyes so blue I thought I was looking up through leaves to the summer-bright Dallas sky. I ran my fingers along the pool’s vinyl edge, touched the lukewarm pool water, the closed-in, new-house smell of two-by-fours and fresh- poured concrete and chlorine sharp in the air around me. Then I followed Allyn inside.
In the Vanderbeck’s new avocado kitchen, a half-eaten peanut butter sandwich lay mashed onto the floor, a shattered jelly jar glass spilled to pooled milk, bloody white footprints smearing the new linoleum to the door. The ugliest dog I’d ever seen, Garçon, Mr. Vanderbeck’s grizzled, gap-toothed Mexican hairless, was tickle-licking the bloody milk around Allyn’s bare feet.
“You cut your foot,” I told her, then pulled her crinkle-skinned dog back by his collar to keep him from lapping glass shards into his tongue. I stepped around the shattered jelly jar glass to the blue princess phone on the counter. “Is your mom here?” I asked her. “Your dad?” I lifted the humming receiver to call home.
38 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
Allyn laughed and pointed out through the kitchen door to the den. Then she disappeared again without a word.
I cradled the phone without calling, glanced down the hallway to the foyer and called out,
“Hello?” hoping her mother or sisters would show—I’d seen them all move in from a big Bekins truck two weeks before—but no one else was there in the house but Allyn’s father.
When I first saw him in the den, shirtless in his summer shorts, he was sprawled out like a buzz-cut clown with a goofy grimace on his face, and I almost laughed, too, till I saw his tanned, bloody back smashed across the glass coffee table like an archer’s broken bow, the tips of his fingers and toes on either side just touching the red shag rug.
Allyn sat cross-legged on the floor next to her father’s head—unpacked boxes from their move from Nacogdoches still stacked all around them—and she petted his sun-stubbly hair, laughing, her blue eyes crazed and luminous as moonstones.
I sat on the carpet floor next to her, thinking her father was dead. Stared down at the deep-cut calluses on the bottoms of her bare feet bleeding into the carpet. Then I looked up and saw Maddie standing there behind me, holding poor shivering Garçon. She’d been there behind me all along.
“Go get Dad,” I told her. “Now!”
Then I reached out to touch Allyn’s shining hair, to press it slippery between my fingers like oil.
“Don’t go breaking your goddamn back showing off for my girls,” Mr. Vanderbeck joked with me three months later, laughing, summer thunder still booming out over steaming streets.
He’d been doing a Hatha Yoga headstand, showing off for Allyn, when he’d fallen backwards across the coffee table and broken his back.
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He winked at me next to the pool in his garage, then coughed, coughed again, unable to
get his breath in his new wheelchair, then lit up another Lucky Strike from the one he’d been
smoking and flicked the sparking stub out into the alley.
“He’s always showing off, Beck,” Allyn’s middle sister Sherilyn said, rolling her eyes at me
and laughing.
Allyn’s oldest sister Marilyn splashed water into my face and said, “He shows off the most
to me.”
Since he’d gotten back from Baylor Hospital, Allen Vanderbeck—Beck, he insisted everyone call him, even his girls, to prevent a confusion of names, after Jeff Beck, his favorite guitarist in the Yardbirds—had let his crew cut and sideburns grow long, had pulled his hair straight back into a stumpy blond ponytail, had grown a thick mustache, the first Fu Manchu I’d ever seen except for Charlie Chan’s, and everywhere he pushed himself around the pool in his chair, the joss-stick stink of patchouli oil and pot smoke followed him around like a napalmed jungle.
“Males are the dumbshits of the species,” he told his girls, leaning forward in his wheelchair outside the pool’s sheet metal edge, straightening his stick legs like a ventriloquist dummy’s. He’d moved his family to Dallas from Nacogdoches to be a Marine Reserve pilot and a new Assistant Professor of Anthropology at SMU till the accident happened, and he was always throwing around words like ape shit and Australopithecus. “Take your old man, for example. Take
Travis here. You hurt yourself, son?”
Beck had just caught me high jumping from one of his barstools into the vinyl-lined pool, the sheet metal sides still heaving from the high waves I’d just made, splashing half the water in the pool, it seemed, all over Beck’s smooth-troweled garage floor. I stood, a little shaky, the skin along my shoulders sting-tingling like Allyn tearing wisps of freckled sunburn off my back.
I rubbed the knuckling ridges along my spine and told Beck I was all right.
40 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
“You sure?” he said. Laughed.
Allyn hugged her goose-pimpled arms and laughed with him, wearing Maddie’s white one- piece bathing suit, tears in her chlorine-red eyes, her long, wet hair like seaweed skirting her tomboy’s hips in the pool.
Maddie shot me a blue-lipped grin, teeth chattering, shivering in Allyn’s mermaid bathing suit, her red freckles dark against her pale skin.
“Dumbshit,” she said.
All that spring and summer—before RFK died in June, then Beck in late August; before my father and I went to war over Vietnam; before I got thrown through my windshield driving to visit Allyn in Nacogdoches; before sex, drugs and rock and roll—I’d spent a lot of my time in storm sewers with Beck’s girls, kissing them in their father’s dark garage while all my buddies were still talking about cooties, singing along with the Beatles and the Monkees and Simon and
Garfunkel from my dead brother Jesse’s red record player in Maddie’s room while Beck lay on his broken back in traction in his Baylor Hospital bed, just down the hall from the hospital room where our brother Jesse had bled to death.
That summer, almost every afternoon, rain fell in flashfloods, the wet-wool heat of the day piling up thunderboomers on the horizon like dark distant Rockies, and I’d splashed with Beck’s girls through cold rain and warm, pollen-yellow curb water, swimming with them for hours in their garage pool, holding my breath underwater as they counted out the seconds and minutes, worried
I’d drown, then coming up for breath and taking each of them one at a time—first Marilyn, then
Sherilyn, then Allyn—into their father’s dark tool closet, shutting the hollow core door behind us and throwing my half-wet towel over their shoulders like Kirk Douglas throwing his robe over
41 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
Gene Simmons in Spartacus. Then I warmed them each in my arms and gave them all one at a time long, shivering-wet movie star kisses in the dark.
I didn’t have the first idea what I was doing, only that I liked it—a lot—and Maddie didn’t.
“What the heck’re you doing in there?” she’d shout from the garage pool, then beat her fists against the tool closet door. “What’s so funny? I want to see.”
“Go away!” I’d shout, and, “Get lost!” Then I’d press Allyn wet against the closet door with a tightlipped kiss, to keep Maddie from shouldering her way in, and I’d shout, “Marco!” from the dark closet, and Marilyn and Sherilyn would shout back, “Polo!” laughing so hard they sometimes peed the pool.
Our fingers grew wrinkled and soft from being in the water every day—Maddie’s with a white spongy froth of dead skin along her nails where she chewed her fingers till they bled, like the jungle rot Beck said humping grunts got in their boots in Vietnam—but our bare feet grew calloused and tough from walking the rough streets, toe-popping black bubbles of sun-hot asphalt in the street cracks till, by the end of the summer, we could step out with our foot sole’s tender arches our father’s or Beck’s butts still smoking in the alley, and never once flinch.
Summer mornings while their father was still in the hospital in traction, Beck’s girls followed me around—Maddie just ahead of them, a troop of rowdy tomboys—to shoot off horned toads and yellow jackets in my Estes X-Ray rocket, or to explore the abandoned limestone quarry in the cotton fields north of our houses, where road crews scraped out black-clay roadbeds in yellow Cats for L. B. J’s big new freeway, where from crumbling chalk cliffs we chipped out whorling nautiluses and flint-sharp sharks’ teeth and watched tiny shad fan their fins above their shadows in the warm shallow water and held bacon strips tied out over tall mud chimneys along
42 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
the creek beds, big claws reaching out and clamping shut, then crawdads dangling in the air, tails snapping, from frayed kite strings.
Allyn was fearless, the first to follow me into the storm sewers, yard-wide concrete pipes that mazed their ways under our subdivision’s streets, washing street-warm storm water under the half-built freeway to the creek. She ducked into the dark, narrow pipes behind me, back-humped and barefoot, then crawled bare-kneed in the algae-slick trickle water, her hands slapping concrete, the boom of her girl’s shrill laugh echoing down the dark beyond my flashlight beam.
When we’d crawled a long time on rough red knees, the bright coin of sunlight showing
Maddie’s head far off disappeared after a turn of pipe, and I stopped and sat, turned off my flashlight, my back against the cool curve of concrete, and I breathed in the clean scent of bubbling algae and silt, listened to the echoing drip of creek water like Allyn’s tongue echo-clacking in the dark next to me. Then I felt her warm peanut butter breath on my face as she kissed me, the smell of her sweet girl’s sweat like fresh-cut clover and wild onion along the creek banks.
Maddie’s shout ricocheted all around us like an echoing shot: “Hey, what’re you guys doing in there?” Then she was on her hands and knees, crawling fast to catch up with us, Marilyn and Sherilyn crawling right behind her, laughing and shouting, “Don’t go so fast,” and “Don’t leave us here in the dark!”
Deep into the pipes one overcast afternoon the first week of August, a turn and then a turn and then another turn under our subdivision’s streets, I stopped barefoot with them all bunching up behind me and turned off my flashlight, like the park ranger in the Big Room at
Carlsbad Caverns the summer after Jesse died, and their shrill shrieks pierced the pipes, swirling the air like the smoky column of bats rising from the mouth of the cave at dusk.
43 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
I covered my ears and laughed just as I stepped forward barefoot into the sharp, arcing curve of a broken coke bottle bottom. The glass cut up into my hard-calloused heel, all the way up to bone. Feeling lightheaded and sick, I fell back against the curve of pipe, fumbling my flashlight on, then watched the sewer water bloom red behind me, Maddie and Marilyn and
Sherilyn all horror-show shrieking in my ears.
“Stop it!” I shouted. Then I turned up the bottom of my foot and peeled back the calloused flap of heel skin and saw white bone, a brimming deep gash that spilled blood into my lap, and I almost puked as I pulled my t-shirt over my head and tight-tied it around my foot.
“Can’t walk,” I said, feeling like I’d pass out, gulping air like a carp on a muddy bank, a taste like silty creek water gone coppery at the back of my throat. I handed the flashlight over to
Maddie and said, “Go get Dad. Now!”
She stared at the flashlight a long time, the only one we’d brought with us. “Dumb shit.”
Then she tugged at Allyn’s hand and said, “Let’s go!”
“Go on,” I told Allyn, but she jerked her hand from Maddie’s and held mine instead.
Maddie scowled at us both, then tight-turned in the pipe without a word and crawled off in a huff,
Sherilyn and Marilyn shouting behind her, “Slow down, will you?” and “Don’t leave us, Maddie!”
in the retreating halo of light.
Allyn sat there with me a long time—forty-five minutes, an hour—waiting, nothing but
the sound of her breathing and mine in the Carlsbad dark.
“My dad’s going to kill me,” I whispered, “if I don’t bleed to death first,” and Allyn
laughed in that same strange way she had when her father’d fallen backwards from a headstand and
broken his back showing off for her. She reached out in the dark to touch my face, feeling around
my cheeks and eyes and chin, then, finding my mouth, kissed me, the corners of her mouth
upturned in the dark with that same strange smile she’d had when she’d laughed so strangely, the
44 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
soft, wet insides of her lips partly parted so that I felt an electric charge like static surging through me, the hair along my arms and legs tipping up till I was shivering, and then, just then, the faint, far-off boom of thunder echoing all around us, cracks of electric light splitting purple anvils piled up high in the sky outside.
“No,” I whispered, understanding too late, the damp hissing coolness of a hard summer rain slow-rising in the pipes around us.
Shirtless in the damp rush of air, I shivered in a faint—I’d lost a lot of blood—and when the water rose, swift enough to whisk away the t-shirt I’d wrapped around my foot, I pulled at
Allyn’s hand and said, “Let’s get out of here.”
The street-warm rainwater rose fast, cold, then colder, up around our ankles and knees and thighs as I crawled forward ahead of her, feeling my way through the pipes. I made a blind turn and then another, trying to remember which way, left or right, then stopped at the T of a wider
pipe ahead, shuddering in the dark rush of air, lightheaded from losing so much blood draining
from my numbing blue foot, the water in the pipe ahead roaring past us like a subway train.
“Turn around!” I shouted. “Made a wrong turn.”
Then I felt Allyn’s icy palm on my bare back, as water rose up around our waists, and I
lost my balance, tumbling forward into the rushing water ahead, gasping as the cold current pulled
me under, till I’d lost my grip on her hand and she was gone.
I rolled over onto my head and then onto my back into the tumbling rush of water,
coughing as I came up, my bare hands scruffing fingernails across the rough pipes as I tried to get a
handhold, tried to keep my head up, riding the swift current up one side of the pipe, then up the
other, like the logjam’s fiberglass chute at Six Flags over Texas.
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The moment I spilled out of the pipe into the roiling, muddy creek, my father was standing there, wading up to his chest against the current and grabbing me by the back of my cutoffs, fighting his way back with me to the slick, slate-gray bank.
His white shirt was soaked to his chest, shoulders and back, his short red hair plastered down to his forehead. “Where’s the girl?” he shouted, spitting a spray of rain into my eyes, shaking me hard by the shoulders as hail pellets pierced the skin of my back like ice needles.
I fell into a fit of coughing and glanced up the creek bank to see Maddie standing there in the rain next to my father’s truck, holding an umbrella up over Beck, his wet, gray dog Garçon shivering in his lap, his wheelchair mired to its wheel rims in muck.
“Where the hell is she?” my father shouted at me again, knuckle-knocking the top of my skull—a loud thock that echoed down the sewer tunnel like a flute of hollow bone breaking—and I said, “I don’t know,” shivering hard and coughing, my jaw-locked words chatter-trapped between clamped teeth.
My father pulled me hard to him and held me.
“Jesus, son, thought you were lost,” he said all of a sudden, coughing, choking. “Another son lost.” And he held me so hard to his chest I passed out in his arms.
“Allyn?” I said, waking bolt upright to the shrill of sirens from our couch, my father sitting next to me and shaking me awake, six or so Dallas cops and firemen and a city engineer all pacing around our living room and Beck’s muddy wheelchair like expectant fathers. Blue-red lights flashed the window shades of my parents’ green-shuttered rental house, and I whispered, “Is she—?” then stopped myself short when I saw the dead cold blue of my father’s bloodshot eyes.
He pulled me off the couch by the wrists and said, “What the hell were you thinking?” and I came down hard on a throbbing heel, which my mother’d tight-wrapped up to my ankle in
46 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
white gauze and tape and Ace bandages. “Were you thinking at all?” my father said. “Don’t you have any brains?”
A sharp headache pulsed behind eyes and I put my hands on my knees a moment, lightheaded, my elbows and back and the tips of my fingers raw-scraped and bruised, two of my fingernails peeled back, and when my father shook me again by the shoulder I tried not to flinch or limp. Then Beck from his wheelchair told my father, “Ease up on the kid, will you?” and my father told him, “For chrissakes, man, this boy’s just drowned your girl!” and then my mother shouted at my father, “Deuce!” and my father pinch-gripped me by the backs of my arms and lifted me straight off my feet, carrying me like a stiff-armed mannequin into our kitchen.
Just as we passed her sitting in my father’s maroon Naugahyde La-Z-Boy with the cigarette burns on the arms, Maddie grinned up at me, Beck’s grizzled dog Garçon wrapped in an old towel on her lap.
“Dumbshit,” she whispered again between her teeth.
In the kitchen, a city engineer rolled out blue-lined drawings, smoothed them out over the breakfast table, leaned over them and pointed. “We’re here. And you found your son where?”
My father pointed to a dark blue sewer line intersecting the creek and the long stretch of freeway construction along L. B. J. “Here.” An architect, his long-dead father a civil engineer, my father told the city engineer he’d been teaching me how to read blueprints since I was ten, grooming me for the profession. He jostled me by the elbow. “Pay attention, Travis, will you?”
But I was still staring off, still remembering what he’d just said about drowning Beck’s girl—remembering a Mexican girl I’d seen on TV weeks before, face down in muddy water, her long black hair floating out around her head like a cuttlefish spouting black ink, her arms and legs
47 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
and neck broken at strange angles, her bones pulverized, tangled into the twisted roots of a giant cottonwood after a south Texas flashflood along the Rio Grande.
My father traced the blue lines crisscrossing the civil engineering prints and pointed. “The storm sewer splits off here, here and here. Which way’d you go? Travis?”
Beck had just rolled his too-wide wheelchair into the kitchen, into the too-narrow doorframe, and he sat there wheel-stuck between the lintels, mud-rows of tire tracks trailing in from the living room, and every man in the room stood, stunned, as Beck’s lovely wife Lynn pushed, then pulled, the chair handles behind Beck, in and out of the kitchen, wheel-scraping chips of paint screeching from the wood, till my father stopped staring like the rest of them and ground his teeth and pulled the chair unstuck. Then Beck and his wife were both there in the too-crowded kitchen with the rest of us.
Beck glanced at me, his eyes sad, like he’d already forgiven me somehow, even if the worst had happened, but Mrs. Vanderbeck wouldn’t look at me, or couldn’t. The picture of Allyn grown up—or never, another child lost—Lynn Vanderbeck had the same slender nose as Allyn’s, the same heart-shaped cartilage at the tip of her nose, the same green-flecked blue eyes, clear and dry and unblinking as a rainbow trout’s lying on a river rock in the sun, with big glassy pupils like peepholes and the same magazine model face as Allyn’s but slightly askew so that in the mirror she’d look like a distant cousin to herself, maybe, or someone almost ugly, not a woman so stunning you had to force yourself not to stare and ached for days remembering.
“Travis,” my father said.
I pointed at two intersecting blue lines. “Here, Dad,” I said. “Or . . . here. I can’t remember.”
Done with me, my father pushed me away from the table as the police and firemen crowded in, and I backed away as the city engineer discussed rescue options or, worse, ways to
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retrieve a body tangled in a logjam at a turn of swollen creek or storm sewer pipe. Then, just as I was turning out of the kitchen, unable to listen anymore, I saw her outside the kitchen window, splash-kicking barefoot through curb gutters, police cars, an ambulance and a fire engine flashing blue and red lights in the afternoon sun, all stalled in the middle of the street.
“Dad?” I said, pointing. “She’s there, right there.” The others didn’t see her, didn’t seem to hear me, and my father paid me no attention at all, unofficial captain of his own mad mission to rescue another lost child.
Allyn turned up our sidewalk, her feet slapping wet footprints onto concrete, already drying as she stepped out of them into the sun.
When I opened our front door, she looked up at me, smiling, and blinked.
“There you are,” she said. “I was looking for you.
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II
50 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
Four Nacogdoches December 27 1988
ou’re always losing things,” she tells me through the front door of her ““YYscreened-in porch, rain clattering the paint-peeling gutters of her mother’s old Victorian.
“Lost you more than once. Guess that makes me a loser, then,” I say and laugh. Try not to shiver like my old, lost dog in my cold, wet clothes. “No shame in being a loser,” I tell her, like
I’m trying to convince myself. “We’re all losers. Lose people and things all the time. Lose it all when it’s over.”
“God, that’s cheerful,” she says, palming her pate as she stares off behind me, scuffing her head stubble, her eyebrows dark, her moony blue eyes wide as a startled cat’s, long-lashed and lovely, like the Irish singer Sinead O’Connor’s.
I shake my head and feel my face flush taut as a blood blister. I look down and remember
Allyn’s sisters Sherilyn and Marilyn, remember Maddie holding an umbrella over Beck’s wheelchair on the high grassy banks of a concrete sewer flue as he stared down into roiling muddy water, holding his ugly, wet dog Garçon, looking for his lost and lovely daughter. All of them gone now, all but Allyn, Maddie and me.
51 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
“God knows,” I say, scuffing my shoe on her rotting door step, “you’ve lost more than me.”
“I haven’t lost you,” she says, her arms folded. “You’re right here.” She glances behind me again like she’s expecting someone with a summons.
That’s not what I meant, I want to tell her. Guess I better get lost, then, I think, pissed at myself for asking for her help in the first place, for ever showing up at her front door, for even thinking about driving through this little piss-ant piney woods backwater. Poor Travis. What a sap. What a loser.
Both my ex’s voices in my head. And my father’s. I turn back into the rain to go, but then Allyn holds the door open and says, “All right, I’ll help you find your dog.”
Soon as I’m inside, she slides the intruder chain back into its slot and shuts the door with a thump, latches both heavy deadbolts like the door to her leaky-roofed warehouse loft, just two blocks away from Maddie’s soot-shadowed brownstone along the East River in Long Island City.
My breath catches when the fumes inside hit me, patchouli and pot- and wood-smoke, turpentine and linseed oil and the rank ammonia-reek of weeks’ old cat’s litter. Two cockeyed
Siamese cats like bookends jump off opposite ends of the fireplace mantle when they see me, disappear in flame and smoke from a long line of votive candles, all lit, an incense burner in the middle of the mantle with half a dozen joss sticks smoking like firecracker punks poking out.
The living room swims in candlelight like it’s underwater, the deck of a sunken, storm- swept shipwreck, completely empty of her mother’s auctioned antiques, changed from Maddie’s grand wedding reception ten years ago, just creaking heart oak floors and a cheap pine futon opened out in the middle of the room, the bed sheets sleep-twisted and heaped with cat-clawed throw pillows, all covered in fine cat fur.
I move to the fireplace to warm my hands, shivering, almost swoon in the heat and fumes, almost gag. Almost say, Jesus god, Allyn, how do you stand the stink?
52 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
I pull a damp handkerchief from my pocket, cover my face against a sneeze. “Dog took off looking for me, I guess,” I say, snuffling, my mouth muffled in cotton. “Must’ve thought I’d run off on him again. Done that a few too many times to the old guy, sorry to say.”
“I’ve got a spotlight in my truck,” Allyn says, distracted and jumpy, like she’s not really listening, her smoke-husky voice on edge, like she wished she could run off, too. “Just let me put on my coat and shoes.” Then she escapes down a long unlit hallway.
“Thanks,” I say to the dark, my head down. “Sorry to be of trouble.”
Waiting, I glance up at the water-stains in the high ceiling corners, black with mildew, draping the wet walls like grape stains, clear droplets sweating from the ceiling that plop and plash into overfilled pans scattered across the warped heart pine floors. I glance into the kitchen, which hisses a faint neon blue like the black lights that used to hang from my ceiling in my old bedroom, where Allyn used to sneak from Maddie’s room to mine to sleep with me in the old days. Allyn’s shut-up the front part of her mother’s house downstairs, trying to heat it with the kitchen stove’s four gas burners cranked up on high.
Burn herself up in this damn place, I think, then jump when I hear a loud, dull thud outside, like a sack of dropped concrete hitting pavement—once, then again, coming close, from the street outside, or from Allyn’s front yard.
What the hell? But I don’t move to look out the window.
Leaning against the living room walls are stacks of bare six-by-four canvases, some with bright turpentine washes like watercolor skies or seas. One canvas leaning against a far wall stops me. It’s hard to make out at first in the shadows, the outline of a dark shape: a self-portrait of
Allyn, naked to the waist, leaning forward, her dark-nippled breasts sloping to a point, then falling into a perfect curve, her head pink-shaved, a giant crescent moon eclipsing her head and tied around her cheeks, the frazzled rope wrapped around her jaws several times at the inside of the
53 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
crescent, then over her eyes like a blindfold, then down again between her teeth like a gag, making her look like a plucked and exquisite bird with a sharp, dangerous beak. Then I see that her legs and waist are swallowed up in a gaping scar of fish scale and fin—one of the secret, dark sirens that’s made Allyn’s work so sought after in so many Soho galleries.
A black cat with a white-spotted face startles me when it sticks its head out from behind the canvas, like it’s eyeing the slick-scaled mermaid for cat food. Then I see a roll of rough rope coiled on the floor and one horn of the painting’s papier-mâché crescent moon prop sticking out from behind the painting like a sickle.
I jump in my shoes again—another floor-rumbling thud outside—just as I turn to see
Allyn standing behind me.
I nod to the canvas. “Don’t know what to make of it,” I say, “but I admire it. Looks like you’ve come a long ways with your work.” The art critic speaks.
“It’s all too derivative, too figurative,” Allyn says, shaking her head and wiping her nose, sniffling, a long, wool Navy coat draped over her shoulders like a cape. “It’s shit, all of it. I should’ve been a stewardess.” Underneath, she’s still wearing her baggy, paint-spattered overalls, the sleeves of her long johns rolled back to her elbows. No matter what she does to herself—shave her head or henna her hair or dress like a field hippy—every time I see her it’s like she’s pointing at me, leaning into me, pressing the whole weight of her body through a single sharp fingernail into my sternum.
Cats of all spots and stripes have gathered everywhere around her in the shadows—five, six, eight, ten, a dozen or more—all unfixed strays her mother fed till they bred like madness, finding a way inside, then taking over the house for months after her mother died, all of them blinking up at me, green and yellow eye-slits glowing from the living room’s dark corners.
I sneeze in motes of floating cat dander. The room wobbles and tilts in candlelight.
54 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
Outside, another loud thump, like a boot heel’s hollow crunch through ice crust, and Allyn
frowns.
“What the hell is that?” she says and walks to the tall window facing the driveway and
carport, peels up a dusty blind slat.
“Oh, no,” she says, palming her furzy head. “Not now.” She rushes to the front door,
unbolts and opens it, shouts outside, “Go away! Get away from this house, goddammit! Get away from that car, or I’ll call the police again.”
What car? I think, then run up behind her, look out over her shoulder.
In the rain the black-bearded man I saw smoking in his Karmann Ghia parked at the curb earlier tonight glances up at us both from the gravel drive, then lifts a chipped cinderblock over his head with both hands and drops it onto my Volaré, caving in the windshield glass.
I trip over the transom, almost knock Allyn over, as I run out to the screened-in veranda, shouting, “Hey, hey!” the rain blinding me as I slip on the icy front steps and fall, headlong, sliding on my elbows in the slushy muck of the front yard.
The man stares at me in the downpour—a big guy, chest and shoulders bulging against his wet dress shirt, tufts of black hair curling out all around his collar, his long hair matted in wet curls over his eyes, blue drops of rain beading and dripping like molten glass from his thick black beard.
He picks up the cinderblock again and drops it with a hollow metallic thump on to the hood of my car, and we both watch it scrape down the hood and bump to the fender, splashing to the gravel drive.
Sitting up in slick red clay, slinging it from my hands and spitting a spray of rain, I shout,
“I’m not sleeping with her, you idiot!” Like sleeping with her somehow entitled the man to bash in my car in first place. Then, like an idiot, I’m running up the gravel drive after him in the rain,
Allyn shouting after me, “Don’t, Travis. All he’ll do is hurt you.”
55 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
*
Jiggling a loose tooth crown five minutes later, rubbing my numb, swelling lips, I reach through the broken driver’s side window and unlock my Volaré’s front door, then sit shivering in the puddle on the front seat, green cubes of safety glass crunching under my ass, under my heels on the floorboard. Rain pours in through the webbed windshield and the back window, on to my only clean clothes and my old Panasonic stereo and speakers piled up in the back seat, out on to the dashboard and steering wheel, down into my lap.
I pull out my headlights switch. Nothing. I’m surprised the car starts even starts up, surprised sparks don’t sputter and spit out of the dashboard when I drive too fast, back tires fishtailing, under the cover of Allyn’s carport. When the car stops, jolting me forward, my chin hits the steering wheel hard, and I sit up, stiff-spined, stunned and numb, unable to move for a moment, my bloody fingers pressed to my swollen lips, thinking of the bearded stranger’s quick, twisting punch to my mouth just before he ducked into his VW convertible and drove off in the rain.
Tonguing the wobbly crown and the raw, ragged tooth marks on the insides of my lips, the taste of my own blood like a clot of East Texas clay in my mouth, I feel a terrible sense of déjà vu, remember Rachel’s and my wedding reception at the old Fredonia Inn, Roger Rogerson, an old schoolmate from Dallas and Allyn’s boyfriend of the month, throwing his half-empty
Shiner longneck hard at Allyn’s head, blood leaking from a cut in her eyebrow so she’d have a shiner, all right, for weeks, then Rogerson punching me twice in the face—me, the tall, long-neck wedding boy with a shiner like Allyn’s—just as I stepped in between them.
I’ll save you, Allyn! Like I was playing Jack again in “Curse You, Jack Dalton,” one of
Rachel’s melodramas at the Crossroads, our old drinking haunt on North Street. Then I
56 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
remember Rachel at the wedding reception pressing my lips with ice from her Amaretto Sour wrapped in a shredded wet napkin embossed with silver wedding bells.
“Dumbshit,” she said. The hero. Thuh. Duh.
Your own damn fault, I think, beating myself up as I am wont to do when beaten. Serves you
right for coming back here in the first place. My father’s and exes’ voices in my head again. Something about
your face loves a fist.
The hinge of my jaw pops and creaks.
I limp around my car and the U-Haul behind it, the front and back windows crumpled
and crazed with cracks, the roof and trunk and hood all cinder-scraped, a long tear along one side
of the aluminum trailer where it screech-scraped a carport column, the fender bent and jammed
down over the trailer tire, flat on that side, where the U-Haul fishtailed into a rust-pocked column,
then bent it almost in half, almost pulling Allyn’s rotting carport down on to the car and trailer.
I remember turning down the moving insurance at the U-Haul counter day before
yesterday—Just twenty bucks extra, the clerk told me, smiling, all my credit cards maxed out—and I
bend over, get a firm grip on the trailer fender and pull it back, the torn aluminum creaking up and
tearing away from the trailer tire, then a sharp pain in my lower back like someone’s stuck me there
with a mover’s box cutter.
“You know, Allyn, you’ve never exactly been the best goddamn judge of men,” I say,
palming my back, trying to straighten up, turning to her in the rain. “Why? Why do you always
hook up with such—”
“Losers?” she says. “Hooked up with you, didn’t I?”
“Yeah. Great. So we’re back to that now. Thanks.”
“Look, I’m sorry,” she says. “I told you not to run after him.”
“Yes, you did. You gave me fair warning.”
57 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
I reach through the hole of the passenger window, pick up my bent umbrella from the
front seat and shake out the glass, try to open it out over us both dripping in the downpour. No damn luck. The latch is stuck.
“Sorry about your carport,” I say. Always the apologist.
“Sorry about your car,” she says back. “You didn’t exactly pick the best time to visit, you know?” Raindrops in her eyelashes.
After covering my car top with a torn tarp from Allyn’s carport, weighting it down with broken chunks of concrete block, icy rain needling my face and neck, I pace her hissing blue kitchen, still shivering, her damp Navy coat scratching my bare shoulders like a wet cat.
“I suppose I should press charges,” I tell Deputy Stanley Rodewald of the Nacogdoches
County Sheriff’s Department. Mid-fifties, with a buzz cut and the fantailed shuttlecock of a cowlick in his widow’s peak, he’s got a wispy gray mustache barely covering what looks like a late- repaired hare-lip that runs up under his twitching rabbity nose. “Car may not look like much,” I say, “but it’s the only car I’ve got. Windshield and back window alone’ll cost me three hundred.
I’m not even sure if the car’s even worth that much. U-Haul’s uninsured, too. Trailer’s due in
Alabama in three days, and I’m not even sure I can tow it there now, much less drive in this rain.”
I stop pacing, try to calm down, imagine for a moment my lost dog, rain-soaked and shivering, hunkered down, clay-pawed, under somebody’s car, his back a streak of oil-pan black.
“Listen, you seen a dog?” I ask Rodewald. “Down around the Fredonia Inn? He’s an old guy. Grizzled and gray.” I bend over, a palm to my back, holding the other palm two feet up from the floor. “He’s about yea high. Can barely walk. Arthritis. Had himself a couple of strokes. Drags his back legs behind him when it rains.” I try to straighten up.
58 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
Rodewald clears his throat and pins me with one eye, all business, my driver’s license stuck to his clipboard as he takes his time writing out his report. He’s cockeyed as the Marilyn’s long- dead Siamese, Ophelia, I can see that now, one eye looking at me, the other seeming to stare at
Allyn, the hairs standing up along her arms in the goose-pimple cold, the hard buttons of her nipples like finger cymbals under her steaming long johns as she leans back against her stove, warming her hands behind her.
“Let me ask you something,” Rodewald says, a whistle through his nose as he scowls at me over his thick glasses. “Do I look like a dog catcher?” He rolls up his shirt sleeve and shows a long ragged triangle of dog’s teeth marks along his wrist like drops of melted candle wax.
“No, sir. I suppose not.”
Allyn’s shoulders are shivering now, and I start to cover her again with her own warm coat, which she covered me with earlier when I took off my cold wet jacket and shirt, but still she shrugs it off.
“Got your insurance card on you?” Rodewald asks me, rolling his sleeve back down.
“Sure thing,” I say, handing the man my State Farm card, and he takes his time printing out my name and old address, biting his tongue like a child, squinching his nose against the patchouli and pot and cat-litter stink of Allyn’s creaking Victorian.
“So who the hell is he?” I ask her.
“Who?” she says.
“You know.”
But Allyn doesn’t answer, just stares off, ignoring me, her hands still crossed behind her back.
“All right, okay,” I say, holding up my hands like the officer’s arresting me. “None of my damn business.”
59 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
The CB radio strapped to Deputy Rodewald’s belt burps and hisses, and he cocks his head
to listen, unclips the microphone hanging from his shoulder. “Fifteen-fifteen Pearl Street. Perp’s
a white male, black hair and beard, two-hundred-forty pounds. Drives a blue Karmann Ghia
convertible. Sixty eight model.” Rodewald turns to Allyn, looks at her with the grudging patience
of a man who’s answered her called fifty times before. “This the same creep you’ve been calling
about last couple of weeks?”
Allyn closes her eyes and nods, pressing her lips into a grim purple line.
“You sure you don’t know him?” Rodewald asks her.
“Never seen the man in my life,” Allyn whispers, one corner of her mouth turning up, just
so.
“She’s lying. Come on, Allyn, tell him. Who is he? What’s he done to you? Has he hurt
you? Son of a bitch.”
But Allyn’s eyes are still closed to me. And Rodewald’s shooting me a cockeyed look that
says, Back off, cowboy, like I’m next in line for a restraining order and the Nacogdoches County
Courthouse. I hold up my hands in the air again in full surrender.
Inside Allyn’s Bond-O-spotted truck, I glance back through wide side mirror, the truck
sputtering oily black smoke behind us, drops of rain pocking the truck cab overhead like machine
gun shots, like Rodewald’s tire-spun gravel clattering Allyn’s trash cans as his patrol car sped off in the dark rain. It’s her grandfather’s old hay truck, the same model and year I bought for $50 bucks when I turned sixteen, the same 1960 Ford F-100 Allyn drove summers as a girl—sitting on a stack of Yellow Pages, eye-level with the dashboard, next to her sisters and Beck jouncing together on the squeaky seat—crowds of lowing, sad-eyed cows gathering around them across their grandfather’s endless acres of just-mown alfalfa dotted with whinnying quarter horses and nodding
60 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
oil pumps, still-green bails and new blue cubes of saltlick weighting down the truck bed and
tailgate.
“Cats and dogs,” I whisper, sneezing away cat dander in the rain-racket, my split fat lip
throbbing, the muscles in my lower back jumping around like I’ve been jolted with a cattle prod, and I squeeze my eyes shut till tears come, my fingers trembling like I’ve got the DTs. “When it rains, it . . . .” For the first time in months, I could use a drink.
The heat from the floorboard and defroster vents has finally stopped the bone-cold shiver under my wet jeans, jacket and shirt, my breath a frayed and shredded wedding napkin at the passenger window. I point the long beam of Allyn’s spotlight, plugged into the truck’s lighter
socket, like a lighthouse beacon sweeping fog for lost ships off a far coast, out through mist and
sleet and slanting rain, between houses, into open garages, under bare azalea bushes and porches
and cars parked in driveways, up to ice-drooping dogwoods and loblollies which sizzle and crackle
under their weight, their ice-coated limbs falling to the streets ahead of us like shattering
chandeliers.
We’ve looked everywhere along East Main, the tire-slick red brick road downtown, then in
all the neighborhoods around the Fredonia Inn, driven past the Thomas J. Rusk Middle School
and Memorial Hospital twice, haven’t seen anything yet but a wet possum with her ass end sticking
out of a trashcan, her eyes glowing like red diodes when she upended and stared up at us frozen in
Allyn’s spotlight as we passed, a thin coating of sleet ice dotting the ends of her whiskers.
Through a cold cupped palm, my fingers icy-wet and numb, I shout out the passenger window,
“Whô?” like it’s Allyn I’m shouting at, to give up the name of the loser who’s left me here in this
East Texas ice storm, like the storm that almost killed me in ’73.
Stranded here now, with a lost and crippled dog and car. A lost and wounded woman.
61 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
“He was my first boyfriend, okay?” Allyn says all of a sudden, as if in answer my question, in a voice so low I can barely hear her over the rain. “The first guy I ever . . . you know.” She laughs and leans forward as she drives, squinting through the downpour, refusing to look at me, her clipped New York accent sliding back into its old drawl as she sips cold Stolichnaya from a paper cup, her cracked wipers barely screeching away clumps of sleet as she dodges fallen tree limbs in the streets. “I was thirteen, I guess, and he was a lot older than me. A whole lot older.” She laughs again and fumbles a mashed Camel out of the crumpled pack on the seat between us, her hands trembling, the sulfur match flaring out the corner of my eye, leaving a hazy blue aura haloing her head like a lie. Right away, I want to bum a smoke from her, smoke the entire pack, in fact, one after another, though I quit that and drinking six months back, two AA meetings and five packs of Trident a day for ninety days, until I finally quit Terri, my second ex.
“He was at my mother’s funeral,” she says, her voice flat but steaming with heat.
“Looking for me, I guess. We met a few nights later for a drink, and I slept with him for old times’ sake. Guess I made a mistake.” She coughs and shakes her head hard like she’s waking from a dream about a burning house into a house full of smoke.
“Now the man’s got it into his head he owns me,” she tells me. Like every other man she’s ever slept with, she adds, like sleeping with him gives him, tax, title and license, like all the new
Caddies Allyn’s stepfather Bob Dobson used to buy her mother off with every other year before her grandfather died and all his money and oil- and pasture-land ran out and Bob ran out on her mother last year for good. “For a younger woman,” Allyn says, “same age as me.”
A policeman—Officer Rodewald, in fact—had called Allyn in New York the first time from the Nacogdoches County Sheriff’s Office to tell her that her mother had hung herself, blue- faced naked, from a high ceiling beam over her bed, with the same frayed silk belt of a chemise Bob had bought her twenty years back ballooning her face with a slipknot tight around her neck, and
62 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
Allyn decided to go back to Nac right away, fix up her grandfather’s old home place and auction off the antiques, sell the damn house and pay the back taxes, bury her mother and settle her estate once and for all, what was left of it, anyway, maybe even get a little painting done for a change, in peace, away from car alarms and police sirens and helicopters chopping the air out over the East
River and old boyfriends and creditors leaving messages on her answering machine day and night, until she finally had to turn the damn thing off. A few months in Nac, she figured, and she could get quiet, work on new paintings for her Soho gallery show in March, make a little extra cash so she could get caught up with her landlord for her rent-controlled loft, then get forever free of this too-old Texas town.
I shake my head, and she glances at me like I’ve accused her of something. “Look, it was a pity fuck, okay?” she says. “I told him right off it didn’t mean a thing to me. I was lit. And a little lonely, I guess.” She thought the man understood, thought she’d gotten free of him, too, but he’s been dogging her here in Nacogdoches ever since.
Allyn leans forward, looking haggard and exhausted by the effort of talking, her elbows resting on the wide steering wheel, too big in her hands. “He was a decent enough guy till I broke it off with him. Then he got crazy on me. You know the story.”
“So who is he?” I ask her.
“None of your fucking business.” She shoots me a copperhead look. “So tell me, what is it with guys like him anyway, huh? Guys like you? I’d really like to know.”
“You think I’m like him? You think I’d hurt you, beat up the first guy who shows up at your door? No damn way. All I seem to be good for these days is hurting myself.” The old self- pity leaking out like squeaky-voiced helium. I reach across the seat for Allyn’s pack of Camels—
“You mind?”—then slap-tamp it into my palm and fumble one into my lap, snatching her lit cigarette from her hand just as she brings it up to her lips, then pull in a long, lung-aching drag.
63 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
“At least I know what no means.” I hand her bent cigarette back and cough, sneezing and
flinching, staring at my bloody cigarette filter.
“Yeah? So what are you doing here bumming my cigarettes? Dogging me here in
Nacogdoches?”
I dry-spit a fleck of tobacco, then flick the just-lit cigarette out the passenger window as
we pass Butcher Boy’s Meats, where Maddie used to buy gristle-knuckled soup bones for all her
shelter-rescued strays, and I sit up in the truck seat, thinking I’ve spotted my dog, finally, in the truck’s iced-over side mirror like a barn rat crawling out of a cattle trough, but it’s only a waddling armadillo like a tank with a crippled tread and track crossing the flooded street, red-lit behind us
by the truck’s brake lights.
“I’m not dogging you, Allyn,” I say, unable to look at her anymore. “I was just on my way
to somewheres else.”
Two hours later, the unvented gas space heater next to Allyn’s sagging bed ticks and hisses
a blue glow in her old bedroom in the closed-off part of her house upstairs, and I stare up at an
amber-black water stain like a giant flying East Texas water roach mashed against the ceiling,
unable to sleep or get warm under a threadbare quilt reeking of mildew and mothballs and cat piss,
my icy feet sticking out over the end of her bed in my damp dirty socks.
I’m stoned, too, blitzed, really, for the first time since Rachel and I split almost a decade
ago—some expensive, resiny Columbian hybrid Allyn bought in Brooklyn, harvested with grow
lights and fancy hydroponics from a Wall Street analyst’s basement—and I’m drunk for the first
time since I left Terri for AA, seven gut-warming shots of sharp, cold Stoli from a frosty liter
Allyn had stashed along with two more cases of the stuff in her grandfather’s old deepfreeze, a
night cap to warm her and help her sleep, she said, an insomniac, like me, since we were both kids.
64 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
Lying in her old bed, the ceiling wheeling above me, I feel like I’ve been holding my breath all
night, underwater, trying to sleep in an abandoned house in an abandoned town, condemned and
damned by some new bass-fisherman’s dam at the bottom of a manmade East Texas lake. All the
drowned dead waiting for me as I hold my breath, singing to me to join them.
I could be halfway to Tuscaloser by now, I keep thinking, a four-course teaching gig and an
efficiency apartment close to campus waiting for me, my old car and rented U-Haul unscratched,
my old dog still dream- and flea-kicking in the car seat next to me. Jesus.
Just as I’m falling to sleep, I hear a shrill animal shriek and hiss in the attic, and I jolt up in
Allyn’s bed. What the hell? But I’m frozen, unable to move for a moment, holding the blanket up
under my chin, till I hear it again, just overhead. Not Allyn scream-strangled downstairs on her futon but an animal of some kind—or animals—fighting or fucking, over my head. Cats? No.
Coons, nesting in Allyn’s attic, their musky piss staining the ceiling over the bed.
I swing my feet around, still dizzy drunk, and step into my cold wet Hush Puppies without tying them, already dressed in my only dry clothes, wrinkled jeans and a dry flannel shirt I found wadded into the wheel well of my car trunk. I look up and listen, hear nothing, then open the bedroom door, and I walk fast down the hallway with my hands out in front of me in the dark till I bump up against the door of Mrs. Vanderbeck’s old bedroom at the end of the long hall. I shoulder open the door, water-swollen and jammed against its frame, then wait for my eyes to adjust in the freezing room, my breath like a white flag in my face, as I stand next to her mother’s old wrought iron bed, the bare coiled bedsprings bleeding rust onto the heart pine floor.
When I hear a faint plop and drip, I flip on the light switch, hoping it doesn’t blow, and see what looks at first like a tabby kitten ducking its head into an open drawer of a water-stained mahogany dresser. The room’s full of overflowing pans under dripping water from a big hole in
65 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
the roof and ceiling, a leaky black bubble of poly bulging lopsided under its weight of water overhead, wallpaper sweating and uncurling at the corners of the room, the pictures on the walls and the bare mattress pushed against the wall all black with mildew and mold. Then I see the top of a fallen, lighting-struck loblolly poking down through a ceiling hole like a stalactite at Carlsbad
Caverns.
A gilt-framed photo of Allyn and her sisters hangs crooked over their mother’s bed, Allyn and Marilyn and Sherilyn all standing in front of the pool in their garage in Dallas, wearing their bathing suits behind their father in his wheelchair, their hands on his shoulders, their smiling faces buckled and water-stained under glass. And high up, just above the bed, crossing the room at the high ceiling, the heart oak beam where Allyn’s mother hung herself with the belt of her night gown.
I jump in my shoes at movement just out of the corner of my eye, and then I see it again: not a kitten but a one-eyed squirrel sticking its head out the top of the dresser drawer. It flicks its tail. Barks a strangled chittering cough. Blinks its black doll’s eye, its other puckered shut into an asterisk. We both stare at each other. Then it ducks its head back into the drawer, burrowing and kicking into its nest of mildewed panties and nylons and bras.
In Marilyn’s old room, the only dry room upstairs at the opposite end of the dark shotgun hallway toward the back of the house, Allyn’s set up a big easel holding up a four-by-six canvas she’s stretched herself—no furniture anywhere, just her mother’s shade-less bed lamp propped up on one of Bob Dobson’s old bar stools, coffee cans of turpentine clustered around the painting on the floor and guttering candles drip-gripping the mouths of empty Stoli bottles like gryphon’s claws, camel hair brushes, swollen and cracking, sticking out of the cans like detonators, the heart pine floor covered wall to wall with paint-splotched drop cloths kicked and buckled like kinked bed quilts after rough love.
66 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
I flip on the stool lamp and stare at the painting she’s been working on through the glare of the bare yellow bulb: seven figures under stars on a night stage, most of them nudes of Allyn transforming. The middle figure of Allyn has long blond hair all the way down to the backs of her knees, a full moon haloing her head white and black-light blue, a garment of scaly silver pooling at her feet like a sheer satin nightgown.
Three more figures of Allyn stand on either side, each staggered back at an angle to the left and right like geese flying in a V. The first set of two on either side are mermaids, Allyn’s hair cut short to her shoulders, her flesh melting into fish-skin and fin below her navel, a half moon behind her head tilted flat end up on the left and flat end down on the right. The second two figures on either side show two giant fish half-swallowing Allyn, her shaved head just poking out of gilled mouths, haloed by a quarter moon like horns pointing up on the left, pointing down like a bowl over her head on the right. Then the third set of two figures, at the far right and left corners, two silver-bellied fish big a marlins upended and suspended, gaffed and mouth gaping, like they’re hanging from a fisherman’s dock.
A shrieking coon-cry shakes the attic beams, and I jump in my cold wet shoes.
Back in Allyn’s old room, exhausted and just dropping off to sleep at four a.m., finally, in the slow-warming bed, I sit up again when I hear the soft creak of the stairs, then the click of the door handle, Allyn’s long blue shadow looming above me, wavering and bent at the ceiling and wall, like all the times Allyn, sixteen, used to sneak from Maddie’s room to mine in the middle of the night the summer of ’72, slipping into my bed with me, my brother Nate on the single mattress next to us snoring and grinding his teeth as we laughed and tried to muffle our moans.
“Am I disturbing you?” she says.
“No, but your paintings give me the fucking willies.”
67 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
“Glad you like them,” she says, her lips turning up into a crooked little smile.
“You’ve got a hole in your roof, you know?”
She nods—“Yeah, I noticed”—then loses her balance a moment as if her knees have given out on her. She catches herself and leans against a wall, laughing, then steadies herself and pulls back the quilt, slipping into the bed next to me, the mattress springs groaning, her long johns whispering against the sheets. She lies on her side facing me in the cramped single bed, the weight and musk and warm glow of her body rolling me into her on the sagging mattress. “Couldn’t sleep,” she says, slurring a little, her breath a blue flame of vodka, smoky against my neck.
“Hard to get much sleep in all this racket.”
She looks up, listens a moment. “It’s only the rain.”
I try not to smile. “You always liked the sound of rain on the roof.” I remember warming her in my bed when she was sixteen, both of us stoned and drunk, listening to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s “Country Girl,” summer rain pinging and sizzling against my father’s new copper roof. “You’ve got coons in your attic, you know? And squirrels in your drawers.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“Never mind,” I say and laugh. “Forget it.”
She slips a fish-cold hand under my shirt, my stomach flinching, then kisses me a long time, the taste of cold Stoli and cannabis on her tongue.
“So what is this?” I whisper. “Another pity fuck? That’s last thing I need right now.”
She touches a finger tip to my swollen lips. I take her wrist and pull her hand away. “I mean it,
Allyn. What are you doing in here?”
She soft palms my mouth and pushes my head back onto the musty goose-feather pillow.
“Marco,” she whispers, tracing the scar down my cheek to my mouth.
68 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
I close my eyes a moment and whisper, “Polo,” and then she kisses me, careful, careful,
around my lips’ tender places, like a slow-turning oak leaf falling in the sun, touching, then floating
across the thinnest skin of water on an East Texas pond.
Allyn moves over me in the cold blue of the room’s space heater, slipping off the bottoms
of her long johns, then wrestling a moment with my jeans and skivvies. Then she straddles me,
bends to kiss me, sucking my tongue into her mouth a moment, then biting my swollen lip.
“Ouch,” I say. “Easy now. Easy.”
She pulls off the top of her paint-spattered long johns, catching a moment over her face,
then throws it out across the room to the floor, and I kiss the hard, cold-stippled buttons of her
nipples above me, the dark oval mole on her left breast I first kissed when she was sixteen and I
was eighteen. I run my fingers along the light blond hairs goose-pimpling at the wide curves of her hips, then close my eyes, reaching up for her long hair, as if I could swim in it, remembering how she’d always catch it under her thumb, then sweep it out of her face and over her shoulder or let it
fall and feather against the skin of my chest and face, laughing. I reach and reach, but there’s
nothing to touch but the soft, prickly stubble at the back of her head.
“Jesus, Allyn, why’d you cut off all your hair?”
“Because you like it too much.” She smiles and kisses me again, her chapped lips flaky
against mine, the aftertaste of her tongue clean like well water in a tin cup.
She pushes up from my chest and onto her knees, then takes me into her icy fingers,
slipping me inside her as she slides astride my hips, folding her hands into mine. Outside, a
mimosa scrapes a window screen, shimmering in the humming yard light outside, its seed pods
rattling in freezing rain, its branches crackling in the wind, the rain shadows on the window
melting into the mesh of mimosa branches moving against her skin.
69 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
Feeling myself inside her, I should be happy, I know, grateful that this moment has come to me again when I thought it never would—Allyn rocking above me, swaying, her head tilted back, her eyes closed—but all I can think of is her mother swaying from a high beam in the room down the hall, and I say it at the worst possible moment: “I was sorry to hear about your mom.”
Allyn stops and looks away, swiping at her eyes with her wrists, her voice a husky whisper.
“You always have to ruin it, don’t you?”
Water stutters against the rain gutters outside as a cat in heat outside drawls a guttural mewling growl in the rain, the wind rising like surf in the tops of the loblollies.
“I was just wanted to tell you—”
“What? That you feel sorry for me?”
“No. Just that I’m sorry, is all, sorry about your mother.”
“Yeah? Well, I’m not, okay? I’m not. Fuck her. That’s what I say.” She sits up from her knees and I slip out of her, already going soft. “Jesus, I can’t do this,” she says, unable to look at me. “I thought I could, but I can’t. I’m sorry.”
I cup her face in my hands. “Who says you have to, for chrissakes? Just look at me, will you? Why can’t you at least look at me?” But she jerks her head away, sits at the edge of the bed, her naked back to me, the dimples at the base of her spine like two eyes closed to me.
“What’s wrong? What the hell did I do?”
I touch her warm shoulder, but she shrugs away.
I shake my head like my ears are full of water. “I don’t get you. What the hell was I thinking coming here? Who are you anyway? I don’t know you. Never have. Don’t know what the hell I’m doing here with you. What you’re doing here with me.”
70 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
“You don’t want to know me,” she says. “Don’t want to be with me. Believe me.” Then she stands too fast from her old bed, stumbling and catching herself again against the wall, her face pressed against it, leaving a smear of shiny tears and sweat.
“Jesus, Allyn, wait, will you? You can sleep in here if you want. It’s all right. I’m sorry, whatever the hell I did. You don’t have to go, all right? We can talk, if you want.” But already she’s swept up her long johns from the floor and turned naked out the door, down the hallway and then down the stairs.
I sit up in the bed, swing my feet to the cold heart oak floor again, pick up a wet shoe and throw it as hard as I can against the wall.
“Idiot. Fucking idiot.”
I shake my head, palm and press the wet from my eyes, exhausted.
Then, before I know what I’m doing, I’m picking up my shoes and stepping into them again without tying them, throwing back the fusty sheets and blanket and tossing them off the bed, then slamming out the bedroom door, almost stumbling over my untied laces and almost tumbling down the dark stairs.
I don’t see her anywhere—not sure I even want to—not on her cat-furred futon next to the living room fireplace downstairs, not in her hissing blue kitchen. Dozens of cats scatter away in the shadows from every direction, like rats spilling off the deck of a sinking ship, and I swing out the front door and out to the front porch, the screen door slapping behind me.
Under the half-collapsed carport, I reach into my broken driver’s side window for my umbrella, but still it won’t open, and I whack it, useless, across my dented car top till it’s a bent tangle of metal tines and vinyl. I hurl it high, as hard as I can, up onto Allyn’s half-collapsed carport. Then I’m walking up the driveway in the downpour, all the way back the mile or more to
71 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
the Fredonia Inn, whispering, “Who are you? Who?” A crazy man kicking through rain in the middle of the night, shouting, “Whô boy! Whô! Where the hell are you?”
72 Nacogdoches Williford
Five Dallllas 1968
e’d been kicking through rain the afternoon when we found him. Late WWafternoon in late August, a week before school started again, a late thunderstorm that had passed fast over us, cold rain and high winds and tiny dots of hail like blue pearls misting the gutters, then the hot sun again and steam rising from the streets, fading thunderheads piled purple on the horizon and pinking in the setting sun, wrinkling and folding in on themselves like gray matter, lightning flashing, then crackling, cracking a hole in the wide red sky, booming the cool air, high up from anvil-black clouds to the flatlands in the distance, thunder rolling out like gunshots, like some grim and dogged memory.
Nothing else for us to do anyway on a late summer afternoon than look out at the sky and wait, watch the clouds rise and build—that or step barefoot and sweating into the hot streets, not even a blister on our calloused black soles, as we stepped on fresh hot asphalt bubbling up from the street cracks.
“Step on a crack,” Allyn said, “and break your father’s back.” Pressed her toes into oozing black tar till her eyes teared. Laughing. That strange crooked smile on her face.
We crouched on a curb, twig-popping bubbles of hot tar, as my shoulders and knees and the backs of my legs burned and blistered, dark-freckled and red as an apple in the sun. Allyn, brown as a fawn, had already made me her first mermaid from melted street tar that afternoon,
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long and slender-finned and black, flattened a little in the middle from sticking out my back
pocket, and I’d given her a gravel-pocked stick man whose legs kept falling off, rolled out like clay
on the sidewalk from soft sticky tar, our fingers as black as they were some Sunday mornings before dawn when she’d help me roll and toss The Dallas Morning News from our bikes to our
neighbors’ sun-yellow lawns.
At the bottom of the long alley that separated our facing garages up the hill, Allyn
stopped, leaned over, her hands on her scuffed black knees as she tried to catch her breath, both of
us winded from running home in the rain, late for dinner again. Her hair, sun-white and still wet
between her shoulders, fell down along her back, below her slender tomboy’s hips, sticking to the
backs of her tanned dark thighs, curling up at the ends and dripping.
She pointed to a thin trickle of red water winding its way down the long concrete trough
of the alley ahead of us, shivering a little, the light downy hairs standing up all along her forearms.
“Travis,” she whispered, “what is it?”
We both stepped back as the long red finger of water rolled toward us, picking up black
dirt and twigs and fresh grass cuttings in its path, steam rising from the still-hot concrete. I
stopped and sidestepped, dodging the red water as it sped up, then straddled it, my feet on either
side, not sure if I wanted touch it or let it pass between my bare feet behind me.
I shrugged and said, “Don’t know.”
We both followed the long line of red water like a pulsing artery, our heads down, a
quarter of the way up the alley. At the bottom loop of the alley’s S, we both stopped again and
looked up at something overturned behind Allyn’s house in the middle of the alley up the hill.
Squinting, I thought at first it was Marilyn fallen from her Schwinn again, bloody-kneed, at the
end of their long driveway.
But when Allyn stepped forward, I held her arm.
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“Stay here,” I said. “Stay.”
His wheelchair lay overturned in the middle of the alley, tipped over to its side with him half in and half out, the up-ended wheel-spokes spinning a little in the wind, his dog-bit wrist wrapped in white gauze, three resiny roaches and a couple of Lucky nubs scattered around his chair, the side of his face flattened out and red-scraped against the concrete, the alley’s rainwater spilling into his open mouth, swirling red around the puddle at the crook of his elbow. Bluebottle flies crowded his open eyes and swollen bloody tongue, shimmering like bright B-Bs, drinking at the corners of his mouth, at the bloody hair blossoming out the hole at the back of his skull, black-matting his blond pony tail.
“Travis?” Allyn shouted in the distance.
“Stay there!” I shouted back, but already she’d started up the hill again.
I kicked Beck’s .38 caliber Marine service revolver into the high grass growing up around the gas meter at Allyn’s back fence, stubbing my toe between the wood grip and concrete, a bright red flap of skin under my big toe that made me hop around awhile holding onto my foot, and I realized too late that kicking the pistol might’ve made it go off again when I glanced up and saw the pink spattering of blood and brains there dripping down the gray cedar gate.
Then I saw a long line of black ants leading to Beck’s crippled Mexican hairless, Garçon, lying on his back in the grass, wind fluffing the only hair on his body, the graying mustache along his chops and the silver tuft at the end of his tail, his bare belly warty and gray-freckled and sunburned, his hind legs still stiff and straight in his white-plaster hip cast, his tongue lolling out, a fly-smattered hole in the back of his head opening out into another, the dark, shattered skull socket where his left eye had been.
“Allyn, don’t come up here!” I shouted as she came closer. Then I ran, limping, stumbling, down the alley to stop her.
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“What is it?” she said again, and I took her arm and pulled her back, turned her away.
“What’s wrong? Let me go. I want to see.”
“No,” I said. “It’s nothing. Let’s just go back around to the front.” But already she’d
pushed me to the rough concrete and run.
At the end of her driveway, she circled the wheelchair, again and again, unable to speak or
look away, her mouth open a little, her bloody wet footprints turning a jagged, perfect circle
around her dead father Beck.
I tried to pull her back, tried to hide her eyes with my hands, but she pushed me hard
against my chest and said, “Go away. Get away from me.”
Then she sat with her bare feet crossed in the blood pooling at his elbow and held her
father’s head in her lap, petting his long blond sideburns and mustache and hair.
Beck’s dog, Garçon, had always loved to lie on the driveway’s warm concrete that summer
and sun, escaped from the too-cold central air which Allyn’s parents were always fighting about,
Beck always wearing sweaters with unraveling holes and blankets over his stick legs in his chair,
Lynn always keeping the thermostat set at 65°, hot and jumpy about having Beck around the house
all the time now, air-brushing his new Aurora models of NASA rockets and Huey helicopters and
Universal monsters he was always buying and building like some mad, manic kid, ashtrays full of
crimped roaches and Lucky Strikes and half-empty pints of Old Crow and newspapers and half- squeezed tubes of Testor’s airplane glue and cups of spattered paint and thinner and untrimmed extruded plastic parts still attached to their numbered trees all scattered across the kitchen table in open boxes, most of the models never even finished before he’d start another, and all us kids would escape their arguments and the air-conditioned cold to the warm pool water inside the
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Vanderbecks’ garage, dog-sitting Garçon sunning just outside on the driveway, so he wouldn’t run
away, just about the only time I ever saw the old dog not shiver in his naked, gray-wrinkled skin.
The week before Allyn and I found Beck and his dog both shot in the head, Garçon had
been lying there in the sun asleep right behind Beck’s blue ’63 Volkswagen bus when Allyn’s
mother Lynn backed out the driveway, talking to Bob Dobson, Beck’s taut-muscled and big- shouldered physical therapist, driving him home like she did every other day after his wife had dropped him off for an hour or so with Beck—Bob with his big arms covered with black patches of hair hard-kneading Beck’s knees and the muscles of his thinning thighs and calves trying to see if Beck could feel or move his legs at all, trying to keep them from atrophying any worse—and without looking back or into the van’s side view mirror Beck’s wife had hit the gas and backed over
Beck’s dog, crushing his hind legs and hips.
Beck and I were both talking about re-gluing and repainting all my old broken models in a dusty cardboard box I’d brought out from the back of my closet when we heard the dog howling outside and then Beck’s wife slamming the door and screaming.
“So how’d these models get broken in the first place?” Beck asked me when I showed him the cardboard box full of broken plastic parts. Beck, a meticulous model builder, had delicately trimmed and airbrushed all his model parts before assembling them, applying glue with toothpicks in tiny drops along their tabs without smears, then holding the parts together with rubber bands, sanding and blending his matt paints in camouflages and sliding on decals expertly, carefully lining the borders between different colors with masking tape cut precisely with an X-Acto knife, just like my father had done when I was ten and we still put together and painted balsa wood and tissue paper planes.
“My kid brother busted them all up,” I said. “Few years ago. Threw them against the wall.”
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“Your brother Nate?” Beck said, frowning. “Sweet kid. Doesn’t seem like the type.”
“No, sir. Jesse. He’s the one did it. The one that died. You know, a few years back, before you moved here? He bled all the time out the nose.”
“Okay, I get it.”
“I beat him up,” I said.
“You did?”
“Yes, sir.”
“When he busted up your models?”
“Yes, sir, I did. My dad said don’t ever hit him. He could bleed. Dad and me used to build models Saturdays, but we stopped after that.”
Beck knuckle-rubbed the rough blond stubble around his Fu Manchu and under his neck, unshaved for a week or more, and he leaned toward me. “So your brother didn’t like you having all those models around, must’ve been pretty jealous of you and your old man, huh? Not that any of us ever gets that way, and for damn good reason. And you must’ve been pretty mad.”
I nodded, looked down at the kitchen table. “I hit him hard. In the stomach.” I rubbed at my eyes a moment and looked away, felt like I was ten years old again.
Beck reached into my father’s old liquor box and picked up Dracula’s severed arm, broken off at the shoulder, Bela Lagosi’s white-gloved hand covered with glossy red blood, and Beck turned it over and considered it awhile. “So what are you saying here, Travis? You think you killed him or something?”
I looked at Beck.
“How long was it after you hit him he died?”
“I don’t know, a long time. Six months. A year maybe.”
“That’s nutso, you know.”
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I kept looking at him.
“Nutso. You’re not thinking straight.”
“You think?” I said.
“Yeah.” Beck thumped his forehead with a glue-rough finger, yellow-brown at the tips
from smoking joints and Luckies down to the nub. “Now, what you say we fix these things up again? What the hell else better’ve I got to do than sit around here all day and freeze my ass off, have that asshole manhandle me, think about him manhandling my wife? Better to sit here with you in this kitchen and fix them all back up, don’t you think? Good as new.”
“Yeah, I guess. Yes, sir.”
“For chrissakes, will you stop calling me sir? Got that from your Aggie dad, I bet.
Goddamn Corps. I’m done with the Marines now, okay? The Military Industrial Complex, all
that crap. And they’re done with me. Not man enough for them now.” Beck huffed out a laugh,
“Ha!” Then he shivered a little in the cold of the air-conditioned kitchen. “All this sir business
gives me the fucking willies.” He glanced up at me and winked. “Excuse my French.”
Just then, I jumped at the screech of brakes outside and Garçon’s low howling moan, then
the van’s driver’s side door slamming and Lynn screaming, nothing but screaming and that long,
rolling, caterwauling wail and howl, which seemed to go on and on.
“What the hell?” Beck said, bumping, then almost upending the kitchen table as he backed
himself up in his wheelchair—big-shouldered himself from working out with free weights in the
living room where he’d broken his back—and he rolled out the new sliding glass door, then down
the ramp he’d built by himself for his chair and out the back yard’s gray-cedar gate.
“God, oh god,” he said, “Garçon.” He rolled his chair over to his dog and reached down,
doubling over in his chair, and the howling dog bit him hard, a bright flash of bloody white teeth,
then sat, panting hard, his back legs and hips all mashed together and hobbled, his eyes wide and
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rolling back white, like all that yowling and shrieking had taken everything he’d ever had out of him, and then he passed out. Beck slung his slashed wrist around awhile, blood stringing out like spattered webs onto the white concrete. “Goddamn it!”
Lynn stepped away from Bob and toward Beck to help him, and Beck said, “You did this, didn’t you?”
“It was an accident, Beck.”
“Yeah, not like you didn’t have any goddamn distractions.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Don’t touch me. Leave me the hell alone. I’m all right. Just give me one of those goddamn rags in the garage to wrap my wrist with.” Beck started crying a moment, and it stopped us all, staring at him like an rhino that could dance on its toes, and then he stopped and started shouting out orders like a drill sergeant to Bob Dobson: “Try rolling him onto that piece of plywood over there—no, over there, behind that mower. Get him into the back of the van.
Careful now! Goddamn it, you’re hurting him. Jesus fucking Christ.”
I’d never seen Beck—any grown man—cry like that before, not even my own father at my kid brother Jesse’s funeral, and then Beck was crying again like a child for just a moment as Bob
Dobson slid the dog through the side door and dragged the van’s short plywood side ramp out and tried to push Beck up. “Get your goddamn hands off this chair, you son of a bitch,” Beck shouted, swiping at his eyes. “And my wife, all right? You don’t think I know what’s going on around here? You think just because I’m crippled I’m stupid? Christ, get away from me. I can do this myself.”
“Beck, man, listen, you got this all wrong,” Bob Dobson said with a strange, crooked smile on his face, his long black sideburns pointy like Elvis’s or Spock’s on Star Trek, as he shrugged it all off, then laid his hand on Beck’s shoulder.
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“Get your fucking hands off me,” Beck shouted, “and keep them off,” striking out at Bob,
slapping his hand away. “Stay the hell away from my house and my wife. I don’t want to see you
around here any more. Get it? I don’t need your goddamn help. Sure as hell don’t need to pay
you for it.” Then Beck was pushing hard against his wheels, his big hands black-calloused and
rough as the rubber tread, trying to get up the steep ramp into the van, but he kept rolling back
down again in his chair, till Lynn, red-faced, glanced over at me next to the gate and pushed him
up, heaving as I helped.
Then Lynn was backing out the driveway again, Beck shouting at her it to hurry it up to
get Garçon to the vet, it was all her goddamn fault, and then Bob Dobson was huffing back into
the house to call his wife for a ride back home, and then Maddie ran out of Beck’s dark tool closet
in the garage, Allyn and Marilyn and Sherilyn all running behind her, out from behind their pool.
“They were kissing, Travis,” Marilyn said. “We saw it all.”
“We were hiding,” Sherilyn said, “and they couldn’t see.”
“Mom,” said Allyn, “and Bob.”
“Bob Dobson,” Maddie said, stopping her crying a moment about poor Garçon, unable to
get her breath, hiccupping like all the times our father chased her around the house—“Willful
child, willful!”—and spanked her backside with a thin belt or coat hangar.
“They kissed,” Marilyn said.
“In the van.”
“Then Mom backed right over Garçon.”
“Garçon!” Maddie cried. “Poor Garçon!”
“It was gross,” Sherilyn said, folding her arms in her mermaid bathing suit.
“Bob’s gross,” Marilyn told Sherilyn. “All that black hair coming out his shirt. Big old hairy arms.”
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“Nasty,” Sherilyn said and spit.
“I think he’s kind of cute,” Allyn said, then covered her mouth with her hand.
“What, are you crazy?” Marilyn said.
“Beck knew it, too,” Sherilyn said, shoving Allyn away.
“How’d he know?”
“Beck’s smart.”
“He ain’t no dumbshit,” Maddie said, still hiccupping and trying to get a word in, glaring at me, like it was all my fault, forgetting for the moment about Garçon.
“Beck’s going to kill them both,” Allyn said, covering her mouth again and giggling a little.
“Ought to.”
“Not Mom!”
“All right. Okay. Not Mom.”
Beck’s girls all folded their brown arms and stood around looking at each other.
“Frenching!” Marilyn announced, her hands in the air. “They were French kissing. Oo la la!”
“Tongue and all!”
“Mom!” Sherilyn said.
“And Bob!”
“Bob Dobson!” Maddie cried.
Then Allyn stepped up to me and put her hands on my shoulders and stood up on her the tips of her toes. “Like this,” she said and kissed me squinting in the sun—her peanut butter tongue flicking in and out of my mouth—and laughed.
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“She’s my friend,” Maddie said, a hissing whisper next to me at the supper table that night, half-burnt chicken fried steak in pools of milky Crisco, mushy sweet peas from a can and our mother’s lumpy mashed potatoes and gravy.
“Who?”
“You know,” she whispered. “You Frenched her.”
“She’s the one kissed me.”
Sighing-sick of our whispered bickering, our father stood from his chair and pushed it back with a screech, opening the freezer next to the kitchen table and whacking an overfilled aluminum ice tray against the kitchen sink—five distinct beats, a nice catchy rhythm like the bass kick in the drum solo for “In-a-Gadda-da-Vida”—and I drummed out a plate-and-silverware- jangling beat on the kitchen table as our father cracked the lever on the aluminum tray like an slot machine and dropped ice slivers clinking into his smoky scotch.
“Stop that, Travis,” my mother said, jumping in her chair, then, “Jesus Christ, Deuce, do you have to make such a god-awful racket?” She pressed her fingers into her eyes—the same electrocuted look she always wore after cooking supper afternoons while I’d practiced in my bedroom upstairs on the Slingerland kit I’d bought with lawn-mowing money from my friend
Kenny Ryffe’s brother Ray, who’d gone AWOL in Mexico. “So, you going to fix me a drink, too?” my mother asked my father, her arms folded, but he just ignored her. “I could sure use one.”
“We shouldn’t be letting these kids run around with those Vanderbeck girls,” he said, tilting back his glass of scotch, his Adam’s apple bobbing like a turkey’s drowning in rain, then sat back down at the head of the table to eat. “Goddamn hippy girls, is what they are.” He coughed, wiped his mouth with his forearm. “Travis, pass me those peas. Goddamn hippy parents letting those girls run wild all day, no supervision, no goddamn moral instruction. It’s no wonder Travis damn near drowned that girl. No wonder their dog got hurt. Travis!”
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I sat up as straight as I could at the table and passed my father the peas. “Beck’s not a
hippy, man. He’s a Marine. He’s supposed to fly Medevac on Hueys in Nam till he broke his
back showing off for Allyn. He’s cool, Dad, helping me fix up all my busted models.” Beck was a
teasipper, too, a graduate from A & M’s rival school, the University of Texas at Austin, but I wasn’t about to mention that. Beck had told me a few good Aggie jokes, too, real howlers, but my father’d forbidden Aggie jokes in the house, except when he told them himself.
“Yeah? Seems like a bad influence to me. So what you think there, Mother?”
Our mother stood at the liquor cabinet, ignoring our father now—refusing even to look at or talk to him—a just-lit Winston clamped between her teeth, her hands trembling a little as she
fished out cracked ice like glass slivers in the sink and poured herself a tall glass of our father’s J &
B.
“You can’t,” Maddie whispered to me, hissing mushy pea breath into my face.
“Can’t what?”
“You can’t have her.”
“She’s my friend, too, okay? Dad says we’re supposed to share.”
“Yeah? Well, friends don’t French!” Maddie shook her head hard, like our dog Reveille
after a bath, then scraped her plate with her fork as she stabbed at a mushy pea. “God, you’re such
a dumbshit.”
“Shut up,” I said.
My father shot me a glance that shut me up, then shouted, “No more fighting at the
dinner table!” and when my mother laughed, “Ha!” he shot her one of his blue-fire looks, then cut
a long bloody piece of gristle and fat and held it out to Reveille lying under his chair. “Come here,
Tripod. Here you go, old crip.” The dog hobbled up, a little shaky at first, then tried to jump,
snapping at my father’s hand as he laughed and held the spiral of steak fat and gristle a little higher
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in the air till the dog clamped his teeth hard onto my father’s fingers, barely balancing on his one hind leg, like Ed Sullivan’s juggler with a plate spinning on a stick, and then my father let go.
The dog belly flopped onto the Mexican tiles and my father kicked at him, shaking out his bit hand, teeth marks going white and blue at his knuckles. “Get! Goddamn dog.” Reveille scrambled off, claw-skittering, his back end skidding along the floor, out the kitchen and under the living room coffee table.
“You hurt him, Dad!” Maddie said, defender of all animals great and small. “Do you have do that? Do you have to call him names? Serves you right. You’re mean.”
“I’m the one got bit,” my father said, rubbing out his bit fingers and holding them out for all to see. “See? Jesus, it was just a joke.”
“Do you have to feed him at the table, Deuce?” my mother went on. “How many times do I have to say it? You’re just teaching him to—”
But before our mother could finish, Maddie asked, for no conceivable reason at all: “Hey,
Mom, what’s a funk?”
“Maddie,” I hissed.
“What?” my mother said, her eyes wide. “What’d you just say?”
“You know, Mom, a funk.”
“Where in god’s name did you learn that word?” my mother said, a smile and a blush spreading up her face like chicken pox, till she covered her mouth and pulled her face into a long scowl with her bright red fingernails. “Who . . . who’d tell you such a thing?”
“Marilyn heard her mom and Bob Dobson in the van. Said they were having themselves a great big fat noisy f—”
I kicked Maddie under the table, and she slapped my sunburned knee, the table jolting up as my knee jerked, jangling the plates and silverware again, and I rubbed my stinging knee and
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shouted, “Ah!” and my brother Nate’s glass of milk overturned in his lap. Then our mother jumped up from her chair with a handful of napkins, knocking the long ash from the cigarette in her mouth into the crater of gravy spooned into her mashed potatoes.
“What the hell are you two fighting about now?” my father said. “Goddammit, you know you’re not supposed to hit.” He raised the back of his hand—Maddie and I both leaning back away from him in our chairs and flinching—and then he stabbed a finger in the air. “See, Mother?
What’d I tell you about those goddamn Vanderbecks? What’d I just tell you?”
Next day, I told Beck my father wouldn’t let me build models with him anymore.
“Goddamn Corps turd,” Beck whispered to himself as he let me in through the garage door. “I guess I’m not feeling much up to building models these days anyway,” he said, rolling himself into the kitchen as I followed behind his chair in a mirage of pot smoke and Old Crow.
“You can do it by yourself now anyway. You’ve learned all the crippled man’s tricks, right? Tell you what. You can have all my models and my airbrush kit and compressor, too. How’s that?
Would you like that, son?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “I mean, cool. You sure?”
“Damn straight.”
He’d already cleared away all his models and glue and paints from the kitchen table and placed them all neatly into my dad’s old liquor box full of broken model parts under the kitchen table.
“Is Garçon—”
“Alive? Sure. Alive but not kicking. Definitely not kicking. No more kicking around for old Beck or Garçon.” Beck laughed like he was strangling with a knuckle of bone caught in his windpipe, a bruised look under his eyes, blue-black half moons like a raccoon’s mask. “We’re
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bringing him home from the vet’s tomorrow. Dog’s not worth much any more to anyone —
except, I guess, to me.”
Beck rolled his chair bumping into the kitchen table and pulled out another chair for me,
dragging it squalling across the linoleum, then laid my father’s liquor box in my lap, sliding the
boxes for his Badger airbrushing kit and his small compressor next to my chair, so I wouldn’t forget them.
He reached for his Smith and Wesson .38 Special, a standard Military Issue Model 10, shiny, newly blued and oiled, like it was just another model he was working on, lying there on a piece of chamois in the middle of the kitchen table. He picked up an aluminum rod from his gun- cleaning kit and squeezed a drop of clear oil onto a round white piece of felt, then folded and threaded it through the slot at the end of the rod, then stuck the rod into the steel barrel and turned the handle as he pumped the rod in and out, staring off in a daze, the felt coming out of the barrel slick and oily black.
“My dear sweet wife Lynn wanted me put the old dog down,” he said, “but I talked her out of it. Against my better judgment. But I got this thing out and decided it needed a cleaning.”
“It would’ve been better for him, better for all of us,” Lynn said, standing behind him in the kitchen doorway, her hands tucked into the back pockets of her bell bottoms. I had no idea how long she’d been standing there listening. “Now, put that damn thing away, Beck, will you?
You’re scaring me.”
“Ought to be scared, woman. I see that slick son of a bitch around here again and I’ll kill him, I swear to god I will.” Beck glanced at me and winked, rubbed the top of my head. “Son, you better get on home now. Don’t want you to get caught in the crossfire of this little firefight.”
So I left, hefting a heavy box of Beck’s new models, airbrush and paints.
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Three days later, Allyn and I found Garçon and Beck, both shot in the head.
Blue-red lights spun in the alley—an ambulance and police car, a coroner’s car and fire
engine—flashing against our house’s kitchen window shades, distant lightning and thunder rattling
the window panes.
“Travis, come away from that window and eat, will you?” my father said. “Your mother’s
already warmed your plate up once.”
I shook my head, unable stop seeing my father standing over Beck in the alley two hours
before, reaching down and picking Allyn up, limp in his arms. “Come on, honey,” he’d told her.
“You shouldn’t be out here.” And he’d palmed her eyes and carried her into her house, rubbing
her back and whispering, “Nobody should ever see such a thing. Nobody.”
“Need to go talk to her,” I said for the third or fourth time.
“I told you no,” he said. “You shouldn’t’ve been hanging around with that girl in the first
place. If you’d done like I told you, none of this would’ve ever—”
“Deuce,” my mother said.
“Jesus god, all right. Can’t you at least just come over here and sit down with the rest of
us?”
“Leave him alone,” my mother said. “He’s not hurting anybody. Least of all you.”
So I stood there at the window and stayed awhile, watched through the kitchen window
shades the dim yellow light at her bedroom window upstairs, hoping to see the shadow of her long
hair swinging at her back.
Late that night, long after three a.m., when I still couldn’t sleep, I stood next to my brother
Nate’s bed as he snored, grinding his teeth in his sleep, and I stared out into the dark through our
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upstairs window, down to the alley below, a long blue line splitting our houses from each other like a creek under a full moon.
There was no trace of Beck anywhere. At dusk, the ambulance and the police and coroner’s cars had all left, leaving behind a Dallas Fire Department truck, and two firemen had unrolled their flat canvas hose and hooked it up to the fire hydrant out in front of Beck’s house, hosing down Beck’s gray cedar fence and gas meter and the long alley, scooping up Garçon with a wide shovel and then dropping him, limp in his cast and crushed hips, into a garbage bag and then into a neighbor’s trashcan three houses down, walking the water down the alley as the long hose rolled out behind them until the blood had all disappeared into the black gumbo dirt and newly cut grass, the concrete as white again as the quarry’s limestone cliffs where Allyn and I’d chipped out sharks teeth along L. B. J. Freeway.
Just as I turned away from my upstairs window, I saw something and squinted, a black speck I couldn’t make out lying there just at the spot in the alley where Beck had fallen, and I slipped on my cut offs, still damp in the air-conditioned cold, and padded across the carpet out of my room and down the stairs and out through the back door, my bare feet slapping the still-wet concrete.
The black tar man I’d made Allyn that afternoon lay there in the alley, his legs fallen off and sprawled apart from him in the bright moon where Allyn must have laid him some time in the night.
I glanced down at my pistol-stubbed toe, then felt for the bulge in my back pocket and pulled it out, Allyn’s mermaid of mashed tar. I turned it over in my hands awhile, thinking I might put it in the freezer and save it for her years later and surprise her when we got married and had our own kids, but then I shook my head and laid the fish girl there next to the tar man I’d made her and walked back inside to sleep.
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A week later—his white Volkswagen Fastback parked in Beck’s driveway—Bob tore down
Beck’s swimming pool to make space for all the boxes piling up in the garage, and I thought of
Beck’s threat to kill him and ground my teeth, wanting to kill the man myself.
Two days later, the pool in the Vanderbeck’s garage was gone, just a slate-gray ring of mildewed damp on the smooth-troweled concrete where it had been, the last of the boxes packed and taped and loaded into a big U-Haul truck parked in their driveway, the mermaid and tar man
Allyn and I’d made all melted together in the alley like a truck-mashed cat, and then Bob Dobson was backing the U-Haul truck out and driving off, grinding the gears, the tire-mashed blob of melted asphalt stamping the same blot over and over again down the alley behind the truck, and then Allyn and Beck’s girls were all waving at Maddie and me in our driveway from the back window of Beck’s blue-ramped van, as their mother Lynn followed behind the U-Haul to drive them all back home to Nacogdoches.
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Six Nacogdoches 1978
’d been avoiding Rachel Swafford for over a month. I’d seen her plenty of times from IIthe Ale and Quail’s too-cramped bandstand, where every Saturday night before our first set, she’d laid a strong Amaretto Sour from behind the bar onto my snare case, sitting there in a puddle till it was watery and warm, warping the heavy black cardboard case with a condensation ring, so that when I was done with the tall empty after the first set, I’d have to carry it back, a little unsteady on my feet, through the smoke and crowds lining up for drink orders at the bar.
“Thanks, Rachel,” I’d say, trying my best to sound cheerful, making sure I’d left two bucks on the bar, one for the drink, the other crumpled into the tip jar. But Rachel just glared up at me, wadded up the bill on the bar and threw it back at me, her chin just above the bar’s padded edge, her eyes mad and a little mournful, sweat pearling her upper lip as she filled frosted glasses with ice and liquor and fizzling mixers, trying to keep up with the two new waitresses and the crowds of people lining up at the bar between breaks.
“Is that all you’re going to say? Go ahead, ignore me!” she’d shout after me in her pinched
Betty Boop voice, as I walked back across the dance floor to the stage, my head down like my dog, chained to a stooping dogwood outside my farm room door.
Since Maddie’s unexpected hit at a New Orleans jazz festival in early October, she’d added a three-piece horn section to her own version of the Saturday Night Live band, now headed up by
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Stephen F. Austin State University’s lab band director, a plucky untenured assistant prof by the name of Mackie Schuck, who’d recruited Maddie at Lake Highlands High two years before and played jazz gigs in the late sixties with North Texas State’s One O’clock Lab Band in packed college auditoriums all across the U. S. and Europe.
Mackey’d made all the right connections to headline, in a venue of three thousand sweaty people crowded into Jackson Square, his new lab band, The Swinging Axes, and his new protégé, my goofy little sister turned star, Maddie Ann Truitt. A pucker-lipped flugelhorn player who always looked like he was kissing windshield glass, Mackie could punch and finesse Chuck
Mangione’s solos in “Feels So Good” or “Bellavia” or “Children of Sanchez,” or funkify and syncopate The Brecker Brothers’ “If You Want to Boogie” or Tower of Power’s “What Is Hip?” without much effort, could hit and hold Maynard Ferguson’s high notes with his dented silver trumpet, the horn bent up in the middle like Dizzy Gillespie’s, a reeling white-gold skreek that made the hairs in my ears jitterbug and purl.
Since the Nacogdoches Daily Sentinel and the university paper The Pine Log had announced in big headlines, “Mackie and Maddie Wow New Orleans” and “Mackie and Maddie Wail at the
Ale and Quail,” Maddie’d been cast in several university and community theater productions, including the leads as Auntie Mame in the theater department’s upcoming spring musical and
Desdemona in a dark, avant-garde version of Shakespeare’s Othello, and she’d been booked up solid for a month between classes, recording local commercials at Greg Hunt’s new Rosewood Studios in Nacogdoches with his specially designed tunable walnut wall baffles, so that everywhere you drove you couldn’t escape her liquid silver voice on the radio singing about the fine pond-raised catfish at the Catfish Cabin or the terrific East Texas sirloins and filet mignons at Butcher Boy’s
Meats or the great chicken fried steak and gravy at The Hot Biscuit.
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Buy your ground round fresh at Butcher Boy’s! she’d announce at the end of her spiffy little jingle, which Mackie Schuck had written and arranged, her lilting new small-town radio personality voice a bit too earnest and enthusiastic, like she’d gladly stand behind the refrigerated meat counter with a cleaver in hand, blood smeared across her white apron. We’ll grind your meat while you wait!
The only job I’d been able to find to pay my rent and bills and state tuition, other than playing Saturday night gigs with Half Fast—a fifty dollar take on good nights, two hundred a month at best, even with the crowds Maddie and Mackie’d been packing in—had been as a part- time pump attendant at a battered Billups gas station on the other side of the tracks, where I’d read all three volumes of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago while I handed out change to haggard black men and women with puffy infected knuckle cuts from working at Holly’s, the local chicken plant, the awful stink of gut and offal ponds on hot nights overwhelming the sweet-pine air, that and the eye-stinging white smoke spuming from the International Paper plant a mile or so away.
I had to pay my way through school, so I got a second job as a short-order cook on the graveyard shift weekends at the Hot Biscuit, where I served endless orders of chicken fried steak and biscuits and gravy till long past four a. m. after Saturday night gigs, flipping eggs and greasy hash browns for Maddie and Allyn and Rachel and their friends, most of them stoned and drunk and laughing at me as white tickets spun past my sweaty face on a stainless steel lazy Susan in the hot kitchen window, me, the tall, greasy-faced drummer boy, Maddie’s goofy big brother, Travis, in his white paper-cook’s hat.
“All right,” I’d say. “Okay. Very funny.”
The year before I moved to Nacogdoches, Maddie’d showed up at the front door of my seedy College Station apartment, Aggieland Arms, where I’d been pretending for a year, for my father’s sake, to get a degree in architecture.
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“God, Travis,” she said, “you look like a Mack truck just ran over you.”
“No, I don’t think so,” I said and stared down at my Hush Puppy high tops, my eyes blurry till I pressed away the hot wet with a thumb and forefinger. “I don’t look at all like that, believe me.”
“God, honey, I’m sorry,” she said and touched my scarred cheek. “Guess I wasn’t thinking.”
“So you want to tell me what you’re doing here?” I said and folded my skinny arms.
I’d lost a lot of weight, was back down to 130 pounds, which I’d weighed when I was sixteen, and I’d wasted most of my father’s tuition money taking world lit classes and drum lessons in the music department, practicing three or four hours a day with my stereo turned up as high as it’d go, my neighbor from Baghdad shouting from downstairs and banging his ceiling with a broom handle.
Most days, I drank Shiner longnecks, barely passing Design I and II, sneaking my Corps turd roommate’s dope from under the couch cushions while he fucked his staunch Aggie girlfriend, a Free Will Baptist, shouting like a fire and brimstone preacher, “Thank you, Jesus!” from his bedroom at all hours of the night and day.
“You got two choices,” my father’d told me when I’d graduated from high school in ’73.
“You can go to A & M and join the Corps, and I’ll help pay your way through all five years of architectural school, or you can go to that goddamn teasipper school”—texas university at Austin, he called it—“and pay your own goddamn way.”
“But what if I want to go somewhere else?” I asked him.
“What? You want to go to Harvard?” He laughed, coughing a clot of smoke. “Wouldn’t hurt you to put yourself through school. Nope. A good state school. Not a thing wrong with
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that. Teach you a little industry, which you sorely lack. And none of this artsy-fartsy crap about being a painter or a writer or a drummer, get it?”
“Got it.”
“Good.”
“But architecture’s kind of artsy,” I said, “come to think of it.”
“Like hell,” he said.
For Maddie, a choice of careers had been simpler. She could study stenography at a local
Dallas business college—two years our father would pay in full while she lived at home and took the bus to school downtown—or she could go to Texas A & M to study veterinary medicine, though he’d opposed on principal the university board’s decision to go coed in ’68. “And none of this goddamn nonsense about being an actor or a singer or a dancer, all right? What? You think you’ll be on Broadway? Just remember: You take stenography, you’ll always have a job and you’ll never have to depend on a man.”
“Not unless he’s your boss,” I’d said and grinned, and the old man shot me a one of his gas-flame glances.
“Really, Travis. You look like you just walked out of Andersonville,” Maddie said at my apartment door. Our great, great, great granduncle, Captain Jeremiah Truitt, had been a Rebel captain of great distinction at the infamous Confederate camp in Georgia, our father’s mother
Evelyn was always telling us, never mind what all those Yankee history textbooks told us. She was a prominent member of the Dallas chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy
“So you going to tell me what you’re doing here?” I asked Maddie again.
“Mom’s worried about you. I’m worried about you.”
“Yeah? Well, a phone call might’ve been easier, don’t you think?”
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I looked out into the apartment parking lot below from my balcony door and saw
Maddie’s ’75 Chevy Luv truck, the left and right quarter panels bashed in from two different wrecks in the last year, the heavy smell of curried lamb rising up from the downstairs apartment of my gloomy Iraqi neighbor, who’d come to the states to study nuclear engineering, a follower of an up-and-coming leader in the Ba’ath Socialist Party, Saddam Hussein.
“You drove here all the way from Nacogdoches? Wore your glasses, I hope. Get yourself killed without them. Least you could’ve done was call ahead. My place’s nuked.” I glanced back at a sink piling up with dishes, unwashed for weeks, rafts of mold growing in the green dishwater, crumbs and dried macaroni and cheese and pot seeds all stuck to the coffee table in beer spills, dust bunnies rolled under the couch like tumbleweeds.
“So,” she said, “you going to let me in or what?”
“Jesus. All right.”
I sat on the couch and rolled a joint from my roommate’s stash and put his skinny lid back under the couch cushion, then offered Maddie a Shiner and a seat there next to me on the raggedy green couch I’d bought from the College Station Salvation Army. Ever since I’d refused to join the
Corps—my 4F deferment status had made me a laughable candidate anyway—our father’s offer of full tuition, room and board had pretty much fallen through the floor.
Maddie glanced over at my big Slingerland kit, set up like Carl Palmer’s—six ride toms, four inch to fourteen, and two floor toms circling a double-bass setup under a tier of cymbals filling up the tiny dining room.
“Play something for me,” she said.
“What? Now?”
I should’ve known something was up. Years before, I’d practiced for hours after school in my room over the kitchen, my stereo cranked up till the walls buzzed, and for days she’d
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threatened to throw a large-print Encyclopedia Britannica at me if I didn’t stop. I laughed at her threat and kept playing till she hurled the heavy encyclopedia at me and cold-cocked me good, a nice knot like a fire ant hill growing out the top of my head when the book clipped my skull. She’d never exactly been a percussion enthusiast.
“What for?” I said.
“I missed you. Missed hearing your chops.”
“Yeah, right.” I looked at her a long time, trying to decide what she wanted, then walked to my stereo. “Okay. What you want to hear?”
“Something jazzy.”
For years, my playing had swerved through half a dozen different musical styles and almost as many Dallas bands, playing rock—the Whô, Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Jethro Tull—then art rock—Emerson, Lake and Palmer; Yes; Genesis; King Crimson; Gentle Giant—then the blues—Lightning Hopkins, Muddy Waters, Albert Collins—then jazz fusion and funk—Return to Forever, The Brecker Brothers, the Tower of Power. I decided on something I’d been practicing for months and could play with my eyes closed, Billy Cobham’s “Pleasant Pheasant.”
“This’s a good one,” I said and grinned.
Even before I’d sat down at my drum stool to play, dropping needle to vinyl, the hiss and pop of the record scratches fizzling like firecrackers, she’d already put her hands over her ears and squinted her face into a grimacing grin.
When I was done, I stopped, sweating good. “Another?” I shouted.
Maddie held her hand up like a traffic cop’s at a grade school intersection. “Nope, no thanks. Please. That was great. You got a little ahead of the beat and missed a fill, but that’s not a problem since . . . Listen, you think you could maybe swing it a little, do something more—I don’t know—straight ahead?”
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“Swing it?” I said, turning the volume down, my Iraqi neighbor’s shouts muffled through the apartment’s beer-stiff carpet. “Straight ahead? What the hell is this, Maddie? An audition?”
“Sort of.”
“What?” I stood from my drum stool and folded my arms. “You want to tell me what’s going on here?”
The Swinging Axes, Stephen F. Austin State’s lab band, was losing its drummer at the end of May, she told me, a monster drummer who’d graduated cum laude with a grad school scholarship at the Berkelee School of Music.
“What are you saying here? You want me to go to Nacogdoches?”
“That’d be cool.”
“Goddamn teacher’s college, Dad’ll say. Girl’s school. Party school.” I smiled for the first time in months.
Maddie laughed. “Can’t say you’re exactly thriving here.”
“Not exactly.” I looked around at my dark apartment, realizing for the first time the miserable outhouse hole I’d fallen into.
“You’d have to learn how to read a little more music, though. At least more jazz notation.”
“Yeah. And I’d have to wait three years for any financial aid. Long as the old man counts me as a dependent on his taxes, I’m screwed. I’d have to work pretty much full time.”
“I’ve got a band,” she said, “and a steady, paying gig.”
“Yeah? How much?”
But just then I stopped myself and shook my head again, imagining Allyn and my best ex- friend, Danny Archer, two pretty longhaired blondies walking together across campus, stopping to smooch under the loblollies. “I don’t know, Maddie. It’d be hard to see—”
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“Allyn dumped Danny this summer,” she said, like she’d read my mind.
I stared at her.
“Just don’t get your hopes up about her, okay?”
I tried not to smile, deciding not to tell Maddie that Allyn had just slept in my bed.
Two weeks before, on a trip to Austin to visit her mother and Bob Dodson, working on his Divinity Degree at the Institute for Christian Studies, she’d come to visit me, appearing at my apartment door after I hadn’t seen or talked to her for over a year, and she’d helped me kill off a fifth of Smirnoff and half a dozen bong-loads, keeping me up half the night while my roommate and his staunch Aggie girlfriend pounded the walls with their fists down the hall. Next morning,
Allyn was gone as usual, had left while I was still asleep—a maddening pattern of escape she’d been following for years.
“I’m done with Allyn,” I told Maddie, scuffing my Hush Puppies on a carpet bong-stain.
Maddie shook her mane of red hair. “Truth is, I’m a little worried about that girl. She’s gone a little nutso with the guys, what with her mom and Bob leaving her that big house all to herself.”
“I don’t want to hear about it,” I said, my hands over my ears like Maddie’d been when
I’d been playing, like a fizzling Black Cat about to go off in her hand.
Years later, I’d be thanking my sister for saving my life, for saving me from Aggieland.
“Jesus, Travis,” Rachel said one Saturday night in November, “I’m sorry, okay? What do you want me to say?”
She’d given up on making me her killer Amaretto Sours for weeks now—always, I found out later, with an extra shot or two of 190-proof Everclear—and I’d taken that as a sign. Then, during a rare break in the last set when we were both free, the crowds emptying out, she pulled up
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a chair next to mine at the band’s break table, her tiny feet swinging and not quite touching the floor as she cupped her hands over my ear and hissed out a whisper Maddie and her former ex
Sean Baggett couldn’t hear sitting right next to us. “How’s I supposed to know the boyfriend was going to show up while you were there? I was going to break it off with him anyway, okay? He’s such a loser.”
“The boyfriend,” I whispered to the smoky air.
“Your band’s getting really tight. You guys sound great.”
We’d just played Tower of Power’s “Clever Girl,” and I’d gotten a little carried away, my head down, my long hair hanging down over my face, till Mackie Schuck shouted what he’d been shouting at me for weeks in lab band practice: “Keep it simple, stupid!”
“Maddie and me got cast in two shows together,” Rachel said, her voice like a forgotten child actor’s. “Mame and Othello!”
“Yeah?”
“Maddie’s going to be big.”
“Let’s hope. Look, just don’t let her hear you say that, okay? She’s becoming a little . . . insufferable.”
Just then, Maddie poked a finger into my face like our father barking out orders to us all.
“Travis, we’re on.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, gave her a left-handed salute and clicked my heels together.
Rachel grabbed my shirt sleeve just as I stood to go back onto the stage.
“I had a good time with you that night,” she said. “You can come over again. Anytime.
Okay? Tonight, if you want.”
“I don’t know, Rachel.” Then I glanced up to see Allyn walk into the club, her long straight hair swaying at the backs of her knees through the door of the Ale and Quail, silky white
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against her wide hips and black miniskirt in the stage lights, and almost every man in the bar turned to watch her, a tanned guy with long, looping black hair like the singer Gino Vanelli’s I’d never seen before on her arm, and the moment she glanced in my direction, smiling her crooked little smile, I looked away and cupped Rachel’s child’s face into my palms, bending almost double at the middle to kiss her, lingering and long.
“I work graveyard tonight at the Hot Biscuit,” I told Rachel. “Come to my place tomorrow night, and I’ll fix you dinner. That bed of yours is way too small.” Then I walked back, smiling, to the stage.
“So, what happened to your face?” Rachel asked me at four a. m., tracing the jagged scar zipping down my upper lip the first night she came to stay pretty much for good. She’d been shouting for hours, my spring-creaking bed banging my wall while the old farm couple I’d rented my room from threw their heavy farm shoes and bedside Bible against the wall from the other side.
My face flushed. “Was in a wreck. When I was eighteen. Big ice storm. Best friend flipped his car driving me here to see—”
“Allyn?” I stared at Rachel. “Maddie told me,” she said. “I see the way you look at her.
The way all the guys look at her. Hard to be with a stunner like that. Always having to fight for her.”
I shook my head. “Never fought for her really. Maybe I should have. Never fought for much of anything in my life. Not much into fighting, I guess. Especially not for lost causes.” I lit a Marlboro red and laughed out a blotting Rorschach of smoke. “Truth is, the wreck probably saved my life. Got me a deferment. I’m a 4-F bastard, you know, like my great uncle Hoot. Ever since the wreck, Allyn’s pretty much been out of my league.” I laughed. “No, she’s always been out of my league. Guess I was lucky, though. I’m still kicking, right? Didn’t get shipped off to
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Nam. Didn’t end up in a wheelchair. And my mother’s been working for a plastic surgeon since
‘68.”
I glanced away, telling her about the hours of dental work, three root canals and front tooth crowns across the top, then Dr. Snitkin’s reconstructive surgery, including half an ear he’d carved himself from a block of silicon and tried to rebuild with skin grafts from my thigh and the side of my head. Four week-long stays in Baylor Hospital over a period of two years, my face mummy-wrapped half the time, then twice as many out-patient visits to my mother’s office, till I finally gave up, worried my father’s medical insurance would run out like it had on my brother
Jesse, a stupid worry since Dr. Snitkin had given me four-hundred or more stitches for the just cost of a hospital room and supplies.
Rachel was quiet a long time. Then she palmed my chin, turned my face back to hers, her eyes soft and wet. “It’s not that bad, Travis,” she said, running a finger along the scar running down from my lower eyelid and cheek to my chin, lifting the hair over my half-rebuilt ear, still pink and raw and pointy like an elf’s. “Really. Still, you’re very good looking.”
“Don’t,” I said, pulling her hand away. “Please. You don’t have to say that.”
“You are. Even if you don’t believe it. Maybe because you don’t.” She feathered her finger up from my shin and knee to my bare thigh and stomach and chest, till all the tiny hairs on my skin stood on end in the sweet-grass breeze coming in off the stubbled hayfields, the last late mowing of the year. “I like your long hair,” she said. “Your freckles. Your long . . . body.” She laughed and bent to kissed me, till I was blushing again in the dark.
“Yeah, okay, whatever you say.” And I turned away to wipe at my eyes.
We lay quiet a long time, the sweat cooling on our skin in my double bed as we stared up at the dogwood’s branch shadows wavering on my ceiling, our still-labored breathing dropping off to the sound of single cricket kicking a silver whir from under my farm room bed. Then the Whô
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dog was kicking his collar hard against a fleabite in the dark next to the bed, a loud rattling of dog
tags at his neck like Maddie thigh-slapping her tambourine as she sang.
“He sure makes a lot of racket,” she whispered. “Must keep you up all night.”
“You’re one to talk.”
She smiled again, a face full of lovely morning light I hadn’t noticed before. “Why don’t
you just take his collar off?”
“He’d run off again and I’d never find him. Get himself killed or run over. Then I’d have
to scoop him off the road with a shovel.”
I’d only had the dog a month, I told her, and already he’d escaped a half a dozen times or
more, three times through the open bedroom window and screen, crashing through the same
window again after it was closed and locked, fine glass slivers all over my bed sheets. Then I’d had
to chase him more than once half a mile down the logging road with Butch chasing after us both,
the Doberman dragging his long broken yard chain behind him and snapping at my ankles.
I spent a weekend replacing the glass and screen, had to get Tidmore to sew up the dog’s
wet black nose, his cut lips and jaw. And whenever I chained him to the dogwood outside my
door he’d wrapped himself tightly around the tree, the chain knotted so tightly around his legs that
it cut off the circulation till his paws were blue as a paperboy’s fingers wrapped in rubber bands.
Meantime, the dog’d pretty much chewed up everything I owned and a few things I didn’t, my
neighbor’s hand-sewn drapes and matching flowered kitchen chair cushions and my comforter and
bed sheets, shredding them all and my Salvation Army couch cushions and a stack of newspapers
and a paperback copy of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina I’d left open on the couch into confetti scattered across my farm room floor.
“Almost threw him out the door, hard, headfirst. Wanted to shout, ‘Get lost and stay lost!’ But . . . I just cleaned up his fucking mess.”
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“Just take him to the shelter,” Rachel said. “They’ll take care of him. He’s just a dog, you
know?”
I gave her a look. “Yeah, and Dido’s just a cat, right?”
“Well,” she said, “I’m not a dog person.”
“They’d put him under in a week, you know? You think anybody’d adopt him? Just look
at him, will you?” I shook my head. “I can’t do it. Won’t.”
“You’re awfully loyal. I like that in a guy.”
“I made a promise,” I said, feeling my face grow warm again, remembering how loyal I’d
been to Allyn, for years, long after she’d run off. Like some stupid fawning dog, still waiting for
the stupid human to come home after she’d been partying all night.
“Not many guys around like you any more,” Rachel said. “Sure as hell not my father.”
Her old man, a NASA photographer, she told me, had abandoned her mother for a cashier
at the Pearland Dairy Queen, two years younger than Rachel, a month after her mother’s diagnosis
of breast cancer, and already the man had a new kid on the way. Never bothered to call Rachel
anymore, not even when she had to drop out of Clear Lake Community College for a semester to
take care of her mother, who’d washed down five Jack in the Box tacos with a bottle of
barbiturates and a quart of Oso Negro tequila, then threw it all back up.
Rachel stared at my dog as the sun topped the pines, pinking her lovely face though the
bedroom window, the sparrows chattering from the farmhouse eaves. “I think he likes to watch.”
“Who?” I said.
“Yeah. Whô.”
“Ha!” I said. “Whô! Voyeur dog. Escape artist.” I reached down from my side of the bed and ruffled the dog’s wiry gray ears as he sat up, panting, his long wet tongue hanging sideways
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out his chin like a turkey wattle, a big, goofy grin on his face, his belly scar staple-studded with pink dots like centipede tracks, all that was left of his first fight with Butch the Doberman.
“You enjoy watching all our fun there, Mr. Dog? Did that get you all worked up?” The dog barked, thumping his stumpy tail onto the hardwood floor. “Jesus. Stick that lipsticky little thing of yours back in, will you, for chrissakes? Horny damn dog, you’re embarrassing me.”
“God, he’s funny looking,” Rachel said, and my face flushed again, like she’d been talking about me. “What kind of dog is he?”
“Worthless,” I said, “and priceless. Butt-ugly but beautiful.”
Ever since her big hit in New Orleans, Sean Baggett had been following Maddie around like a panting pup, pleading with her to come back to him—he’d missed her terribly; sleeping with that other girl had been a big mistake; that woman was crazy, he said, fucking crazy—and the job fell to me to cheer up our keyboard player, Asadollah Amini, who Maddie’d dumped as hard as the
CIA-installed Shah.
Every night now, Asadollah smoked his bong—his hookah, he called it—and watched the
CBS evening news, Shiite clerics and thousands of their followers, university students and women in veiled chadors, shouting and carrying tall placards of Ayatollah Khomeini exiled in France, all crowded into the Tehran streets just outside the Shah’s Palace, only a mile or two from the house where Asadollah had grown up, his father a civil engineer and a distant acquaintance of the Shah, a leader of the national development program for irrigation dams along the ancient plains of
Mesopotamia, now holed most of the time up in his home with Asadollah’s mother and sister and their sleek Egyptian Saluki, Pahlavi.
“My father wants me coming home,” Asadollah said, heavy black circles under his eyes, his thick, pointed eyebrows like furry caterpillars with black stingers, as we sat on his couch smoking
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his bubbling bong in the dark of the tiny garage apartment he’d moved into on Wettermark, the
only place he could afford since his father’s tuition and board money had all fallen through. “But
if Shah falls, will they not cut off the hands of this decadent player of American jazz?”
“Lighten up, Asadollah,” I said and stood to turn off Walter Cronkite, then plopped back down on his couch for another bong load. “You worry too much, you know?”
I’d been trying to cheer him up by teaching him how to curse in East Texas redneck—Get
away from my pickup truck, you asshole!—but he kept bringing up the subject of the Shah and Maddie,
and the more stoned he got the more he sounded like a Cypriot sailor with a mouthful of olive
pits.
“This pot,” Asadollah said, his tongue thick in his mouth, trying to smile but only making
himself look more like some farcical Farsi sad sack, “it makes me very . . . how do you say . . .
paramoured?”
“Paramoured, paranoid, what’s the difference?”
“Some things terrible will be happening soon,” he said, shaking his head in the dark.
“Worlds will end.”
“Ha! That’s what my old man says. Always talking about Jesus sucking up all the
Christers from their pickups to heaven, then old J. C. coming down and doing some serious ass
kicking.” I shivered a little in the cool breeze coming off from Asadollah’s balcony and coughed
out a laughing Gatling gun of smoke, imagining my father’s Late Great Planet Earth-inspired version
of the Second Coming, a muscle-bound redneck Jesus and His Archangel Michael with crew cuts
and cammies riding in like banditos on a blinding nuclear blast, shooting automatic weapons from the hip at the longhaired godless heathens like Asadollah and me.
“I miss my dog, my sister,” Asadollah said, shaking his head, his eyes shining in the candlelight. Nacogdoches Power had cut him off and all he had left of his beer and freezer food
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sat melting in a Styrofoam cooler next to his couch. “But I go home, I’m fucked,” Asadollah said and slammed his fist down to his coffee table, tears in his eyes, rattling his bong and almost knocking it over. “Why, Travis? Why Maddie treats me like shit all of the times? Do I act to her so bad?”
“Not bad enough, apparently.”
“What?”
“Never mind. Forget it.”
Weeks before, I’d asked Maddie at the Ale and Quail why she’d dumped Asadollah like a
Persian rug with too many imperfections sewn in for Allah’s glory, and she’d pointed her little finger at me, and said, “All he’s got is this tinky little winky. Tiny as my pinkie. And he’s . . . uncircumcised!”
“Shut up, Maddie, will you? Christ, do you have to say that so goddamn loud? He’s sitting right there.”
And I nodded to poor Asadollah staring at her from behind his Rhodes electric piano on the stage, tinkling out the notes of Joni’s “Blue” and smiling down at her dreamily like she was some freckled, fiery-haired Scheherazade.
“This Sean guy,” I told Asadollah, my voice squeaking out leaking smoke as I passed back the bong, “I don’t like him. Not one bit. Dumps Maddie for some dumb Lufkin blondie the minute Maddie’s down, and as soon as she’s a star, he’s back at her door with roses and Sangria. I don’t trust the man. And that girl worries me. She’s a trial.”
Asadollah grinned at me and said in his clipped, lisping Persian version of an East Texas drawl, “Hey, bud, what do you say we go kick his ass?”
“Hey,” I said, drawing out long diphthongs, “that’s pretty good, Asa. Now you’re getting it.”
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*
“But Sean’s good to me, too,” Maddie had told me a few days later, after I’d told her what
I’d come to say about Sean and Asadollah, both of us sitting on Allyn’s couch in her mother’s old
Victorian, while Allyn was off on one of her all-night dates. Maddie’d been living with Allyn for months now, rent free, but Allyn was hardly ever home, except for the big bashes she and Maddie put on every other weekend.
“Oh, pshaw!” Maddie’d said, her wrist against her forehead like a melodrama damsel.
“Poor Asadollah and the Shah!”
“God, girl, you’re mean,” I said, trying not to laugh, but then she was quiet a moment, shaking her head.
“Sean’s good to me most of the time, anyway. When he’s not pissed drunk . . . and he promised me he’d work on that.”
“Promises, promises.”
“He’s just been through a lot you don’t know about.”
“Yeah? Like what?” I said.
Whô was licking Marilyn’s old Siamese, Ophelia, at my feet, her neck hairs slathered in saliva and standing up on her back, and I pulled him away by his collar, his dog tags tinkling like pocket change—“Cut that out, dog, will you?”—and Maddie was shaking her head again.
“Don’t know if I should tell you.”
“Then don’t. None of my damn business.”
“You’d have to keep it between us. You can’t tell anyone. But I feel like I should tell you.”
“You don’t have to, Maddie, okay? I just want you to be . . . careful. That’s all. If I’m being the overbearing big brother, just tell me to shut—”
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“His priest messed with him when he was a boy. An altar boy. Called him his little bell ringer.”
“Jesus,” I said. Thinking of Quasimodo.
“Father Flanagan. Priest at St. Jude’s Parrish in Texas City. Still saying Mass and baptizing babies. Father Shenanigans, Sean calls him. Father Flash.”
I shook my head, trying not to think too hard about what she was telling me. “I’m sorry to hear that, Maddie. You don’t have to tell me any more if you don’t want—”
“He just blurted it out, you know? Right after we . . . did it the first time. It was . . . my first time anyway.”
“You know, I’m not sure I want to hear all this—”
“We fell asleep in my bed upstairs and it was dark and then I woke up all wet and cold and screamed when he turned on the light. The sheets were red. The mattress. Blood everywhere.”
“Maddie—”
“And he was good to me, Travis—that’s all I’m trying to say.” Maddie’s eyelashes were webbed with tears and I fell silent and palmed her hand. “He said, ‘It’s all right, Maddie girl.
Everything’s okay. No need to worry yourself. Happened to me, too, after my first time.’ And then he held me and told me. He took me into the bathroom and gave me a hot bath and dressed me in clean pajamas like I was a little girl again and then he stripped the sheets off the bed and threw them all in the washer downstairs and asked me to stay in the bathroom with the door shut, crying like a little girl on the toilet seat. Wouldn’t let me go back into the room till everything was all cleaned up. There was still an old plastic bedcover for all the times Allyn wet her bed when she was a girl and I came back into the room and there was no trace of anything. White sheets. White mattress. Nothing. Like nothing’d ever happened.”
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I was quiet a long time, couldn’t say anything after what she’d just told me, the story
working on me in a way that had the opposite effect of what she’d intended. But I told her, “All
right, then. Okay. I’ll lay off about Sean. But be careful, okay? That’s all I’m trying to tell you.
You don’t have to tell me anything more if you don’t want to. I just don’t want you getting hurt.”
Two hours later, I drove home from Pearl Street and found my farm room door standing
open, a big snout-punched hole in the screened door, skewed open, the L latch and a rusty hinge at the door frame broken so that the door sung and clapped in the wind.
“Whô!” I said, then ran full out across the hayfields to my neighbor’s yard.
“Where is he, you son of a bitch?” I shouted at Butch, the Doberman straining against his choke collar and chain, slavering pink saliva, barking at me, his teeth bared. Blood drops freckled the ground all around him, big tufts of matted gray hair and pink flesh tamped into red clay claw prints.
“Looks like old Butch got him good this time,” my neighbor said, laughing through the screened door of his back porch.
“Goddammit! You didn’t try to stop him?”
“He come around here picking a fight he can’t win, and I wasn’t about to get in the middle of it—”
“What’d your dog do to him?” I shouted, imagining the man charging admission for a dogfight, then dumping the dog under pine-needles in a shallow red hole in the woods where I’d never find him. “Where the hell is he?”
“Better keep an eye on your dog,” the man said, grinning, then spit a brown stream of tobacco juice out onto his porch steps. “Come around here looking for trouble and he got it.”
Then he slapped his screened door behind him, laughing in the dark of his kitchen doorway.
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“Get away from my pickup truck, you asshole!” I shouted at him, not knowing what the
hell I was saying. Then I ran back across the hayfield, following the blood and shit and piss
trailing in a long dragging path I’d missed to my farm room door. “Whô? Come here, boy.
Where the hell are you, buddy? Ah, Jesus.”
I stood on my landlord’s porch, swiping the wet from my face, pounding my fist on the
front door till I heard a whimpering under the porch floor boards at my feet.
I crawled a long time under the front porch on my elbows, knees and belly like a prison
camp escapee till I saw him backed up against the sandstone foundation, panting in the ribbony
slats of light and dust and red shadow, his blue intestines looping out of his belly again, speckled
with sand and bluebottle flies.
“It’s me, boy. Come here. Come on. You can come to me.”
But his chops flicked over his teeth, a low rumbling growl in his chest.
“All right, then, okay, I’ll come to you. Oh, man. Look at what he did to you.”
When I reached for him in the dark, he bit my hand hard and wouldn’t let go, shaking his
head and grinding his teeth into my knuckles, frothing like a rabid dog, till I tore my hand from his mouth and slung it all around, my own spattered blood and sweat stinging my eyes, a long
jagged cut showing white cartilage and tendon at the back of my knuckles.
But I reached for him again. The dog bit me hard each time, till I reached around his
snapping jaws and grabbed him by the ears, clamping my free hand over his jaws and dragging him,
whimpering and shuddering, through the dirt and out into the sun.
My shirt and jeans were covered with dust and shit and piss and blood, an awful stink, as I
held him in my arms and stood, one hand still fisted over his mouth, the other trying to hold in his
warm intestines in, steaming a little in the late October air, his black eyes rolling back bloodshot-
white in his head.
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My landlord and his wife both stood there on the porch with their arms folded. “You and that dog of yours’s got to go,” said the man in his baggy overalls, rows of patches like quilting sewed across his knees, a sheen of silver in his days’ old beard stubble. “Making all that racket with that girl at all hours of the day and night. Letting that dog tear everything all to hell.
Messing with the neighbors’ dog. I’m sorry, boy, but you and your dog’ve got to go. Want you and your gear out of here by tomorrow.” The old couple turned back to go inside, but I’d already turned to my Civic and run.
“Best thing for this dog’d be to put him down,” Dr. Tidmore said. “Soon as rightly possible.” Tidmore shook his head and stared down at Whô, lying on the stainless steel exam table, the dog shivering and panting in short, shallow gasps, like my landlord’s penknife rasping whittled wood for tomato stakes on his front porch.
“No,” I said, unable to look at the dog without crying, a grown man of twenty-four hiccupping like Maddie after one of our father’s whippings.
“Now, look, son, I know you’re upset, but you’re not thinking about your dog here. He’s really done it this time—all this torn gut, septic infection blazing everywhere—and I’m just not sure I can help him much except take away his pain.”
“No,” I said again. “Take away the pain, sure, now, but I want you to fix him. You got to fix him.”
“Now, listen to me. You’re not listening to what I’m saying.”
“I don’t care,” I said. “Don’t give a good goddamn what it costs me. I’ll find a way to pay you for your time, everything, I swear to god. Please. Just fix him.”
“All right, then. You’re stubborn as he is, I can see that. I’ll see what I can do.” Tidmore kicked the claw-scratched doorplate of his exam room door open, his rubber-gloved fists curled
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and bloody in front of his face, and he shouted out the open door and down the hall to his
receptionist. “Angie! Cancel the rest of the afternoon bookings. Jimmy! Betty! You better drop
what you’re doing right now. I’m going to need ya’ll in here. Stat.”
I sat in the empty waiting room till long after dark, three hours or more and still no sign
of Tidmore to tell me the news, just a low muffled mumbling of his voice as he asked for catgut
and clamp in the operating room, and when I heard the Animal Hospital door creak open I
glanced up from my throbbing, bloody hand in the dark waiting room to see Allyn there standing
next to a poster of a dog’s heart, split open like a red bowl of spaghetti choked with slender white heartworms.
She sat in the plastic chair next to mine—me stinking like an dynamited outhouse—my hands and face and shirt still smudged with dirt and shit, piss and blood, a white wrapping of gauze blotting the back of my freckled knuckles. “Maddie’s on her way,” Allyn said, hugging herself and rocking in her chair, staring off, flinching away from me when I tried to touch her arm.
“We better get you to the Emergency Room,” Maddie told me fifteen minutes later, peeling back the gauze on my hands, squeezing her eyes shut and turning her head away. “That’s going to need stitches.” Her Luv truck totaled now, she’d hitched a ride in Rachel’s Green
Gremlin from the Ale and Quail, where Mackie Shuck had scheduled, then canceled, our weekly practice, Sean Baggett riding along with them both in the back seat.
“Man, Travis,” Sean said, “what’s that smell? Whew!” He weaved a little, beer on his
breath, waved his hand in front of his face and laughed.
“Shut up, will you, Sean?” Maddie barked at him and pointed him to a chair. “Sit.”
“Sorry about your dog, man. Didn’t mean anything by it, I swear to god.” Then Sean sat
on the other side of Allyn, his head down like a pup struck with the newspaper he’d just missed,
pissing a new carpet.
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“I’m not going anywhere,” I told Maddie and glanced at Rachel, who glared down at
Allyn in the waiting room chair next to mine like Marilyn’s old cockeyed, psychopathic Siamese,
Ophelia, hissing with her hackles up at me or anyone else who dared sit next to my sister on
Allyn’s couch. I paced the room awhile. “The ER can wait till I hear some news. Can’t pay the hospital bill anyway.”
“I can take you,” Rachel said, sidling up to me, not quite knowing if she should touch me, then putting her arm around my waist, hooking her thumb over the back of my belt and pacing with me, bumping into me as we tried to walk together, holding onto my belt like a dog collar.
“We can go in my Gremlin if you want.”
“Thanks,” I said, “but I can drive myself. Go on home now, all of you. Could be a couple of hours.” Maddie paced the room with us now, chewing her cuticles till they bled.
“Maddie,” I told her, “I’m going to need a place to crash the next few days. A place to store my shit till I can find another place to live. Me and my dog’ve been evicted.”
Rachel pulled me to a stop by my belt. “You can stay with me.”
“I don’t know, Rachel,” I said.
But just then, Tidmore kicked the door open into the waiting room, pulling his cotton mask up to cover his bald spot, peeling off his latex gloves.
“That was fast,” I said, certain the dog was gone.
“It’ll be a week before we know anything for sure,” Tidmore said. “I’ve done about all I can do for now.”
“Is he still—”
“Alive? Sure, but I wouldn’t be laying any bets on the old guy. Low pair against a full boat, you ask me, but he’s a scrapper, that one. I pumped him full of pain killers and penicillin.
Cleaned him out and sewed him up the best I could.”
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“How much you think it’ll cost—” I started, thinking I still owed Tidmore for the last
time he’d sewn the dog up after jumping through my farm room window, but Tidmore cut in.
“I’m the one put that dog in your hands, son, for better or worse. You can pay for
supplies—a hundred max, I’d guess, plus antibiotics—but last I checked you had a credit on your
bill.” Then he put a glove-powdered hand on my shoulder, leaving a talc mark there of his palm
that I noticed again later that night at Rachel’s.
“Two way deal,” he said. “Always is.”
I stayed at Rachel’s place for a week, the two of us lying on our sides pinched together on
her tiny daybed, my feet sticking out the end as I sneezed in floating dust and cat dander, my
shinbones bumping the bedpost while Rachel’s cat Dido hissed at me half the night from the foot
of the bed.
Rachel and I didn’t sleep much—her roommates didn’t either, threatened to kick us both
out for days for all the racket we made nights—and I kept most of my thrift-store furniture weighted down with concrete blocks under a canvas tarp in Allyn’s carport till I’d rented the duplex next to Sean’s on Mitchell Street a few blocks down Pearl from Allyn’s Victorian, a one- bedroom place twice as big as my farm room apartment—and twice as expensive, $225 per month—calling my father for money and getting nothing more than a lecture, then borrowing an extra $100 from Maddie she’d made from doing commercial work at Rosewood Studios, so I could write my new landlord a check to cover the pet deposit, just in case.
“Why don’t you just move in with me?” I asked Rachel the night before I rented my second U-Haul trailer in two weeks, not thinking much beyond saving us both some rent and trouble. “We’re together most the time now anyway.”
“Sure,” she said. Simple as that. She’d lived with the boyfriend before.
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*
Three days later, I woke up with Rachel lying next to me on the sagging mattress I’d pulled from the rich students’ townhouse dumpster down the street from our new duplex, unpacked boxes all around the bed, and I rolled over to my side just to look at her face, glowing like a child’s come in from playing out in the cold as she slept with her cat curled asleep on her stomach. Then I felt something hot and wet against my cheek on the pillow, smelled something awful and sat up—“What the—?” smearing the stink across my face and fingers, then grabbing
Dido by the fur at her hackling back, holding her up in the air as she clawed at my face.
“Goddamn cat, what the hell’d you go and do that for?”
The cat squirmed and spun, fur flying like dandelion seeds, and I sneezed as she scratched the back of my hand, popping two stitches, then hurled her with a thump against the opposite wall, landing on her feet, then shooting out across the linoleum floor to the kitchen, hiding the rest of the day behind the warm stove.
Rachel exploded from sleep, beating my chest with her fists and shouting, “You hurt her!
Why’d you do that? She’s pregnant, you son of a bitch!”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I held her wrists as she leaned over me, her whole weight bearing down on me as she tried to slap my face. “Jesus, Rachel, your goddamn cat shit my pillow!”
“Ha!” she laughed. “I don’t care! I don’t give a damn if she shit in your ear—”
Rachel stopped and stared down at the brown pile smeared and seeping into my pillow, the long streak of cat shit on my cheek, and laughed, tears in her eyes, her laughter slipping a long moment into crying.
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When she’d stopped, snuffling and wiping her nose and eyes on her wrist like a child, she
glared at me and told me what had happened to her mother’s tortoiseshell tabby and kittens, the
story spilling out of her like she’d been holding it back for years.
Three years before, long before she’d moved to Nacogdoches, she’d come home from a
theater rehearsal at Clear Lake Community College and found her mother passed out on the
kitchen floor in a pool of her own puke.
She tried to wake her mother up, threw water into her face, then slapped her, dragging her
across the kitchen floor, like a waterbed with bones, down the garage steps and out to her green
Gremlin, hefting and bobbling her mother limp into the passenger seat, holding her up by the
shoulder twice till she could finally get the passenger door shut, then rushing her to the hospital to
have her stomach pumped. For two days and nights, she sat in the hard chair next to her mother’s
hospital bed without eating or sleeping, till her mother sat up in her bed, unsurprised that she was
still alive, even a little cheerful, like she’d gotten a good night’s sleep, drinking apple juice from a kinked straw and eating lime Jell-O like nothing had ever happened, insisting that Rachel go home to check on their pregnant cat.
Rachel drove back to Friendswood to get something to eat, and to sleep, finally, in her own bed, cursing the whole way home about having to clean up her mother’s mess in the kitchen—her father’s mess, really, always cleaning up her father’s goddamn messes—but when she got home, the mess—the barbiturates and Oso Negro tequila and five Jack and the Box tacos— was all gone, the kitchen floor shining dully like it had just been mopped with Mr. Clean.
Rachel wondered if one her mother’s friends had heard the news and come in to clean up while they were gone, but her mother hadn’t called anybody, and Rachel hadn’t either, too ashamed of what her mother’d done, or had tried to do. Then she saw the cat bowl in the corner, stone dry, licked clean, empty of food and water, and just stood there a moment, unable to move.
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She bolted like her mother’s cat whenever her father came home, running all over her house, stooping to look under beds and into closets, calling out for her mother’s tortoiseshell tabby, until she found her nested in bloody sheets at the end of her mother’s bed, cold and stiff, where she’d littered her kittens two days before—just one kitten, the runt of the litter, still trying to nurse, her eyes still closed as she mewled and punched her nose blindly against her mother’s hard cold belly, trying to suckle, the rest of the kittens, all five of them, scattered around her, dead.
“Do I have to spell it out for you?” Rachel said, almost shouting, pulling her wrists from my fists and pushing me away from me in our bed, and I stared at the blood rising from the popped stitches along the back of my hand. Dido was the only one that survived, and she almost hadn’t at that. Rachel had nursed her with an eyedropper for weeks and all the kitten did day and night was sleep. “I don’t want to lose her, too, okay?” Rachel said. “Don’t you ever do that again.”
“I won’t,” I said and tried to hold her squirming away. “I didn’t think, Rachel. I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”
I let her go and wiped at my cheek with a clean corner of my pillowcase, then folded the pillow in half and dropped it to the hardwood floor next to the bed to throw away later, then lay back, my head tilted back against the sagging bed, remembering, as I stared up a long time at a tobacco-brown water stain sprawled on the ceiling like a tire-mashed and mangled cat.
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Seven Dallllas 1971
he first girl I ever did it with killed herself. Marilyn. Marilyn Vanderbeck. The TTlast of Beck Vanderbeck’s girls to enter the storm sewers under L. B. J. Freeway when we were kids. Beck’s oldest girl, the first to kill herself. I’m not saying she did herself in because we did it, okay? I’m just saying . . . it didn’t exactly help.
Both born on November 2nd, 1954—the Mexican holiday El Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead—Marilyn and I’d both just turned sixteen when she drove Beck’s rusted-out ‘63 VW bus back from Nacogdoches to Dallas, and because we’d just missed each other’s birthday, we planned an elaborate joint party for our next birthday together, the day we’d both turn seventeen.
“Joint!” we said, laughing on her new apartment balcony overlooking McCree Creek after we’d practiced for our big gig at the Cellar Club downtown, drinking Shiner longnecks and coughing green dragons of smoke from one of Danny Archer’s ten Zig-Zag joints. “A joint party!” we both agreed, then clinked our brown bottles in a toast to a party full of longnecks and joints and joint friends—Danny Archer and Kenny Ryffe and Hunk Dawkins and my cousin Bobby
Truitt and Jack Doppler and my sister Maddie and all the other freaks we hung out with—all three of Beck’s girls back together in Dallas again, after they’d escaped from their mother and Bob
Dobson in Nacogdoches.
But when the big day finally rolled around for rolling joints at our joint birthday party on
November 2, 1971, Allyn and Sherilyn were back in Nacogdoches again, and Marilyn was dead.
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Two days after Christmas, she called my parents’ new house from a phone booth off I-
635 just outside Balch Springs.
My father’d moved us all in ’69 from that awful green-shuttered rental house we’d lived in
for five years—he’d finally paid off most of my dead brother Jesse’s old hospital bills—then into a
modern split-level thing with Santa Fe stucco my father’d designed and built near White Rock
Lake—all forty-five degree angles and skylights and two stories of high windows and walls and
ceilings and stairs and balconies, like some skewed-gravity house in an M. C. Escher poster. A
month after we moved in, I met Danny Archer, who lived in a corner house at the bus stop a block
away, where the two of us stood around school mornings, scuffing our shoes against concrete and
smoking Marlboro Menthols or skinny, seed-popping joints, waiting for the school bus to pick us
up.
When my mother handed me the phone, I said, “Yeah, what?” thinking it was Danny. A
good thing my old man hadn’t picked up the phone. He and Danny didn’t exactly get along. Bad
influence, the old man said.
“Yeah, what?” she said back, a loud hiss and pop over the public line like bottle rockets
going off, then big Mack trucks and Peterbilts roaring by, shaking the phone booth just off the interstate. “Is that any way to talk to a girl?”
“What? Who is this?”
“Take a guess,” she said and laughed, then shouted over the wind, “Marco!”
“Polo,” I said and covered my mouth, grinning. “Allyn?”
“No, it’s Marilyn,” she said, her voice dropping off like she was a little disappointed.
“God, Travis, I had such a stupid crush on you.”
“You did?” I said, blushing and clueless as usual.
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She’d just dropped out of Nacogdoches Junior High, she told me, had just taken Beck’s
flood-damaged ‘63 VW bus from her mother’s carport—parked under a tarp for two years after
barely surviving a hundred-year flood rising up from Bonita Creek behind their house, red creek-
bottom mud and black mildew stinking up the upholstery, Beck’s plywood wheelchair ramp so
rotted and warped she had to drag it out back and into the creek—but she’d not been able to get
the van started until she’d bought a new battery from the Firestone on North Street and put it in
herself. Battery acid still stinging her cuticles, she’d loaded the van with boxes of eight-track tapes
and her father’s old LPs, garbage bags full of clothes and her schizoid Siamese, Ophelia. Then
she’d gotten the hell out of Nacogdoches while her mom and Bob Dobson were still off on their
honeymoon, snow skiing in Vale. She didn’t bring a bed or any furniture, though, she said, so
she’d have to find something cast off from an apartment dumpster or the Salvation Army. Could I maybe help her move?
“Sure,” I said. “Got me a truck last month. Me and my brother’s old box springs are still out in the carport, too, if you want them. No mattresses, though. We’re sleeping on those, on the floor.” I’d just gotten my learner’s permit and a ’63 Ford F-100 for $150 from Danny’s conman stepfather, who sold used trucks and cars—mostly clunkers and lemons—under rows of pop- flapping red flags out on Garland Road.
I told Marilyn to meet me in the alley behind our old houses near L. B. J. Freeway, an easy walk to the storm sewers Beck’s girls and I’d crawled through as kids, not far from the old limestone quarry where Allyn and I’d hunted for crawdads and prehistoric sharks’ teeth, where the balcony of Marilyn’s new second-floor apartment would overlook McCree Creek.
It didn’t occur to me she might have anyone else in the van with her but her cat.
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When I drove up the alley and parked behind a fence where our old driveways faced each other, my chest fisted, like a drain clogged with our old Sheltie Reveille’s matted dog hair after a bath, and I paced up and down the alley, kicking at the high yellow grass grown up around Beck’s old gas meter, staring down the concrete trough of the alley, half-expecting to see something—I didn’t know what exactly—but it was just an ordinary alley like any other, a slope of gray concrete under low drizzling clouds, the almost-identical tract houses we’d lived in looking a little stunted now, like play houses, since I’d shot up two feet in the last two years, my dented truck backfiring like a pistol shot as I started it up again to turn on the heater, setting off all the neighborhood dogs barking behind endless rows of warped cedar fences turning gray in the rain.
I waited for over an hour, listening to my new eight track of The Whô’s Live at Leeds, singing along with “My Generation” and “Magic Bus” and “Shaking All Over,” beating my truck’s wide steering wheel with my hair slinging down over my eyes, the Craig tape deck I’d installed under my truck seat cranked up on high and buzzing my teeth from the speakers behind the seat.
I jumped when I glanced up and saw a scarred, one-eyed feral calico with fight-frayed ears and patches of scabby skin under matted, ratty fur sitting on my truck’s warm hood, staring up at me through my cracked windshield.
“Get!” I said without much enthusiasm, but the calico didn’t move, just bent double trying to lick himself, his back leg pointed straight up at the sky. Then he turned and stared at me again, one eye unblinking, the other puckered shut. When I ground my truck into gear to drive off, thinking Marilyn wouldn’t show up after all, my brother Nate’s and my old box springs rain- soaked in the truck bed, the calico jumped from the hood just as I heard Beck’s ’63 VW bus come rattling up the S-curve in the alley like my mother’s old Singer sewing machine. Then I saw it roiling oily smoke up the alley, Marilyn and Sherilyn both sitting up front, a cat in Sherilyn’s lap in the passenger seat. Then my heart kicked a Keith Moon double-bass beat when I saw Allyn
122 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
leaning between forward between them from the back of the van, waving at me, grinning, her long straight hair hanging from shoulder to waist like a corn-silk curtain.
Sherilyn was first out of the van, trying to disentangle herself from Ophelia, a cross-eyed
Siamese with a dark oval spot around her nose and mouth like a house-painter’s mask, claw-stuck and pulling long loops of unwinding wool from Sherilyn’s sweater.
Just then, the feral calico shot out across the alley from under my truck, and Ophelia hissed, her back hackling, squirming and spinning, scratching Sherilyn’s hands as she flew, flipping backwards and landing on her feet, scrambling off after the calico into Beck’s old garage.
“Don’t let her get away!” Marilyn said, slamming the driver’s side door. “She’s in heat.”
We all ran after the cat into their old garage, where Beck had set up his girls’ pool years before—just the barest outline of a rust circle almost as wide as their old two-car garage—and the
Siamese let out a low guttural yowl like a strangling infant as Marilyn wrestled her, hissing, from behind a dryer and caught her up like a mama cat by the fold of skin at the back of her neck, brushing dust balls and lint off her fur, then carrying her out to the alley and tossing her into the van, slamming the door behind her, the cat standing on her back feet in the front seat, scritching her claws down the passenger window like glass cutters.
“Stupid damn cat,” Marilyn said.
Allyn stood in the gray circle where their pool had been, glancing up and staring a long time at the door of their father’s old tool closet, where I used to kiss all three of Beck’s girls one after the other while we swam and played Marco Polo. Then she followed me out of the dark garage.
They all three stared at me a long time, looking up and down the alley without knowing what to say or do. Then Allyn came running up to me in the rain and hugged me hard, her hair swinging into me like long tassels. Her sisters did the same each in turn, stepping back away from
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me and hugging themselves in the cold drizzle like they didn’t know what to do next, black asphalt
and roadside gravel and red clay ground into the knees of their wet jeans.
“How long you been waiting?” Marilyn asked. She wore a fringed suede jacket with frayed
sleeves that hung from her like she was a scarecrow, Twiggy-thin, much skinnier than I
remembered, all sharp-angled bones and elbows and hips, almost as tall as me now, maybe five-
eight, her long, narrow face shadow-gaunt and blazing with spots of acne across her cheeks barely covered by foundation and powder and rouge, thick black eyeliner and mascara gunking her eyelashes, pink eye shadow slashing out the corners of her eyes, sharp metal braces crossing her teeth top and bottom like railroad tracks.
“Not that long,” I lied, shrugging.
“We almost didn’t make it!” Marilyn laughed and held up both hands, smudged with
black oil and scuffed rubber. “Had us a blow out.” Her damp hair lay flat against her ears, her
long straight bangs stopping in a straight line across her eyebrows like Cher’s, then falling straight
down past her shoulders to her waist, a shining sienna black.
“I told you to put some air in those tires,” Sherilyn drawled like an East Texas country
girl, shooting Marilyn an ugly look, the cords of her neck stretching up into her jaw. “Miss Texas
State Driver’s License here almost flipped the van. Damn near got us killed.”
Marilyn ignored her and laughed. “Van spun out on the ice a couple times till we were
facing the wrong way on the highway.”
On three flabby tires and one flat, Sherilyn pointed out, her arms folded. Driving that
piece-of-shit van all the way to Dallas. Marilyn and her great fucking ideas.
“Horny old redneck almost hit us head on, honking like crazy,” Sherilyn went on.
“Tried to hit on us, too,” Marilyn said. “Stopped in his ratty pickup to help. Wouldn’t
leave us alone. ‘Fuck off, Mr. Green Jeans!’ I said and ran him off. Fixed the flat ourselves.”
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“I’m the one said it,” Sherilyn said, almost spitting in Marilyn’s face.
“All right, who cares?”
“I’m the one changed the tire, too,” Sherilyn said. “Fuck off.”
Allyn, quiet till now, held her hands up, grinning, rust smeared across her palms and wrists
like dried blood. “I cranked up the jack.” Eyes like a robin’s eggs in rain.
Sherilyn patted the top of Allyn’s head. “All by her whittle-bitty self.”
“Shut up, will you?” Allyn said and shoved Sherilyn away. Eyes burning like glowing
green leaves in the shade of the summer sun.
“Didn’t expect to see you here,” I told Allyn, barely able to get my breath or a word out, like I’d been running hard uphill in high altitudes, the wind watering my eyes so much I had to blink, then take off my glasses and wipe at my eyes. “My god, Allyn, you’re so . . . you’re all so . . .”
But I couldn’t say it, breathless.
Beautiful.
“You grew your hair out,” Sherilyn said, looking me over.
“You, too,” I said. “Looks good on you.”
Sherilyn’s hair, like her sisters’, fell down past her peasant’s blouse and droopy sweater to her hip huggers—goddamn hippy girl hair, my father called it—a dark grainy blond, still wet like just- cut oak, touching the thighs of her white-worn Levi’s.
“Looks good on you, too,” Marilyn said and smiled, reaching up to brush my long bangs from my eyes. Her grackle-black hair beaded with fine drops of drizzle and hung from her fringed coat and tie-dyed t-shirt to her tight jeans and over her splayed hips, fraying to split ends like the uneven strings trailing behind her bell bottoms, knotted muddy white threads where her clogs had heeled away the backs of her jeans’ wide bells dragging the concrete.
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“Yeah, well, my old man doesn’t think so. Look like a goddamn girl,” I drawled and laughed.
“Jesus, Marilyn, I thought it was just you coming. What’re all three of you doing back here in
Dallas? You two just along for the ride?”
“We’re moving,” Sherilyn said, her arms folded.
“Getting jobs,” Marilyn said.
“Going to school here,” said Allyn.
“Getting away from Bob and his big old hairy hands,” Sherilyn said, her thin mouth set in
two grim white lines stretched taut across her teeth like the rubber bands on her braces. “Bob.
Bob Dobson,” she said and spit.
“Had to get them the hell out,” Marilyn said, staring down at her scuffed and muddy
clogs, her face red and a little swollen around the eyes, the blush rising up into her face like her
favorite sweet wine, Boone’s Farm’s Strawberry Hill, her cheeks chapping in the wind. “Bad
enough he has to come around to my room nights. But he starts sneaking down the hall to my
sisters’ and I had to get them out of there. Out of Nac-a-no-where.”
Allyn snickered and blushed, covering her mouth with both hands—that same crooked smile she’d worn when Beck had fallen from a headstand and broken his back showing off for her—and then Sherilyn touched Allyn on the shoulder and Allyn looked away from us both and down at her feet, hugging herself in the cold. I looked down, too, my face burning, then stepped back fast like I was dodging a semi roaring past me when realized I was standing in the exact spot where their father Beck had shot his dog and then himself, fallen to his back and sprawled from his wheelchair into the alley.
“Son of a bitch,” I said, kicking gravel scattering across the alley, smooth round river rocks pocking Beck’s old gray fence like echoing shots.
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“Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea meeting up here,” Marilyn said, looking around the
alley, hugging her arms and shivering, her shoulders up almost to her ears. Then it started to rain
again. “Let’s get out of here. Place gives me the willies.”
“Bet you he’s still a virgin,” Marilyn told her sisters three hours later and laughed, her plucked eyebrows penciled-in like two seagulls over a cheap seascape.
She and I’d both been trying to smoke a skinny, flattened joint I’d stuffed into my back pocket, both sitting next to each other with our legs crossed on the green shag rug, after we’d spent two hours in the cold, gray rain and drizzle, carrying in damp box springs from my truck, then
Marilyn’s eight track deck and tapes and liquor store boxes and garbage bags full of girls’ clothes
and makeup and paperbacks up the stairs into her new one-bedroom apartment near Kingsley and
Plano Road.
Just before we’d finished bringing everything up from Beck’s van, plastic bags all reeking of mildew piled in the back like a garbage truck, Marilyn had tried with her thin, stringy arms to lift a heavy box of her father’s old LPs up over her head in the bedroom closet but couldn’t get it up past her shoulders, much less over her head, straining till she groaned and almost dropped it.
“Here, I got it,” I said, stepping into the closet, and I let her drop the weight of it into my hands and lifted it up to the top shelf.
“Thanks,” she said and smiled up at me, her braces looping around her teeth like razor wire, a front tooth still chipped and graying from the time she’d fallen from her Schwinn in the alley the summer of ‘68. She glanced outside the walk-in closet to see if Allyn and Sherilyn were still downstairs bringing up the last load. Then she looked at me a long time with her big wet eyes, her irises the color of root beer, and she closed the closet door behind us with a click and leaned into me against the door till I could feel her small breasts pillowing my chest, her sharp ribs
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knuckling mine, her pelvic bone pressing into my knee. She kissed me hard in the dark—my shy tongue flitting between her braces like a mouse into a serrated snare—till we were both panting and out of breath.
We both jumped in the dark and froze when Allyn said, “Marilyn, you in there?” just outside the closet door, and I slipped away from Marilyn’s weight pushing me against the door.
“I’d better . . . we’d better not,” I whispered.
“Better not what?” Marilyn said too loud and then Allyn opened the closet door, struggling to fold a dripping umbrella, staring at Marilyn and me, at the raw smear of Marilyn’s lipstick on the side of my mouth.
Marilyn crossed her arms and said, “Go away. Get!” and Allyn popped the umbrella open in our faces in a snap of spray, turning and walking out into the living room and then out the apartment door.
“Great,” I whispered. “Jesus.”
Thirty minutes later, Allyn was back, refusing even to look at me or her oldest sister, standing in the corner of the apartment’s little avocado kitchen, twisting the knobs of the gas stove on and off—poof, poof, poof—little blue-green rings of flame, till Marilyn told her, “Hey, cut that out.”
“It’s cold in here,” Allyn said in the growing dark, the apartment’s electricity still off, the apartment manager a no-show at her office all day, except to sneak in at five and turn the Open sign over to Closed in the office window.
Marilyn exhaled a long-held breath of pot smoke and said, “So how about it, Travis? You still a virgin? Come on, you can tell us.”
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“I . . . I’m—” I said, buzzing good now, my face ballooning with blood, white noise like surf roaring in my ears. “Here, give me that thing,” I told her and snatched the roach from her yellow fingertips to take a hit.
“I knew it!” Marilyn said and laughed.
“I been with lots of girls,” I said, flipping open my dead grandfather’s Zippo and trying to light the spit-wet roach, so flat it wouldn’t draw.
“Yeah, sure,” Marilyn said and smiled over her metallic teeth.
Her new eight track of Tea for the Tillerman was looping through “Looking for a Hard-
Headed Woman” for the third or fourth time that afternoon, a tape she’d gotten from a boyfriend she’d dumped on her sixteenth birthday—that along with a poster of Cat Stephens, black bearded and dark, looking all somber and deep, like he was sitting on a street corner with a battered guitar and a cup of change. She’d taped the poster of Cat up over my old box springs first thing, off- kilter, in the apartment’s only bedroom while I’d plugged in her tinny speakers and her tiny Radio
Shack stereo in the living room.
“Can’t move without music!” she’d said, dancing and singing—her smoky deep voice as raw and lovely as Janis Joplin’s—and she bobbed her head and spun around the room while she sang along with Cat, “Looking for a hard-headed woman, headed-woman.”
“So what you say we go do it?” she asked me. “Now. Right now. In there.” Marilyn pointed at the single damp box springs lying under the cockeyed poster of Cat in the bedroom, the same bunk springs I’d slept on as a kid.
“You’re kidding me, right?” I said, buzz-blushing again. I glanced at Allyn in the kitchen, not knowing what to say or do, but she just stared down at her open palms, still smeared with rust, then held out her palms and warmed them, her blue-green eyes burning like the high rings of flame on the avocado stove.
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“Why not?” Marilyn asked me. “You want to do it, don’t you?”
I glanced at Sherilyn, who lay back on the makeshift couch she’d made from my brother’s
box springs, a moth-eaten blanket and three musty throw pillows. “She’s fucking with me, right?”
“Not yet,” Marilyn said and grinned.
“Hey, come on, Marilyn. Don’t mess with the guy’s head.” Sherilyn rolled her eyes,
petting Ophelia as the Siamese bent double trying to lick under her tail in Sherilyn’s lap. “We just
got here. He did something nice for us. Why don’t you just leave him alone?”
“I want to do something nice for him,” Marilyn said.
“Look, you don’t owe me anything—”
“Come on, Travis,” Marilyn said and stood, a little wobbly—“Whoa! Dizzy
Gillespie!”—steadying herself against a wall, then reaching down for my hand. “Let’s go. It’s no
big deal. You’ll see.”
I held my hand back.
“What’s with you? You some kind of prude or something?”
“No, hell no,” I said, looking to Allyn for help, but now she was sitting on a liquor box
full of her mother’s cracked dishes in the kitchen, four gas burners on high above her head like
tongues of flame. “Look, I . . . I didn’t say I didn’t want to do it. I just don’t . . . I don’t know. I
just want to—”
“—save yourself for marriage?” Marilyn said. “Ho boy. What an altar boy.”
“Am not!” I said, almost shouting, sounding a little too much like my father whenever my mother accused him of another late-night raid of the liquor cabinet. I fumbled and dropped the roach sparking into my lap and burned my fingers and a tiny hole into the crotch of my jeans trying to snuff it out.
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“All right, then,” I said, shaking out and sucking on my finger, hoping she was just bluffing. “Jesus. What the hell.”
Marilyn shook her head and reached down for my hand again. “First guy I ever met didn’t want to do it.”
“Look, I told you. I didn’t say I didn’t want to. I just—”
“Shut up,” she said, pulling me up and leading me into the bedroom, clapping the unlocked door behind us.
“Come on, don’t just stand there gawking,” she said, lying there like a plucked bird of paradise, the first naked girl I’d ever seen for real except for my mother and sisters, and that never too appealing.
Sprawled on the damp bedsprings, she covered her small breasts and the wide black beard like Cat’s between her skinny thighs and wide hips, curved below her hollow stomach like an
English saddle, the fine hairs standing up and goose-pimpling along her thin arms, her tiny brown nipples as hard and dark against her skin as the Nestlé’s semisweet chocolate morsels my sisters
Hanna and Maddie were always sneaking from my mother’s hiding place in the pantry in the middle of the night. “So you going to take your clothes off or what?”
“Sorry,” I said—always the apologist—and glanced away, staring too long, then blushing for wanting to stare again. I slipped off my Whô’s Tommy t-shirt, dropped it next to my coat on the floor, then stepped out of my jeans and skivvies and lay next to her, creaking the cold, damp, mattress-less box, its hard metal buttons like cocktail ice poking up into my ribs, one stray spring popping up through the material and needling my tailbone like a spinal tap.
“I don’t have any rubbers,” I said.
“So?” she said.
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“I don’t want to get you—”
“Trust me. You got nothing to worry about.” She grabbed my wrist and said, “Here,” and she laid my hand on her breast for just a moment, flinching away. “Jesus, warm it up, will you?”
I lay there awhile with both arms crossed, my hands under both armpits, naked and shivering, staring up at the ceiling, and it started to rain outside the curtainless windows, a real downpour, freezing rain and sleet, the same slow-moving storm from East Texas that had almost flipped the van catching up with Marilyn like a disaster.
“Okay, okay,” she said, shivering next to me. “Hurry it up. I’m freezing my ass off.”
I turned on my side next to her and brushed her long dark hair from her shoulder, saw a big purple hickey low on her neck, then another one even bigger just under her collarbone like someone had tried to bite her there and suck out all her blood through her skin.
I touched the tooth-ridged bruise on her shoulder.
“Don’t,” she said, flinching again.
“Does it hurt?” I said.
“No!”
I touched her there again lightly and she pushed my hand away. “Holy hell, Marilyn, how’d that happen?”
“None of your fucking business.”
I shook my head. “Look, we don’t have to do this. I could just hold you and warm you up, if you want.”
“Give me a break, will you? Jesus, what’s your fucking problem?” She lay rigid next to me now, her arms at her sides, her voice almost as bruised as her shoulder, all her tough-girl swagger
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leaking out and sinking away like a float hissing flat in a swimming pool. “Get moving. Come on now. Let’s just get it over with.”
“All right,” I said and sighed.
I lay on top of her carefully, worried her ribcage might cave in under my weight like my mother’s new bamboo finch cage, and I held her and kissed her hard mouth covering her sharp- braced teeth, then her long neck, her right breast, her left, moving down to her navel.
“Hey, no funny stuff. Come here.” And she pulled me back up top, reaching down for me with an icy hand and slipping me into her, a soft, warm placket of wet.
“Oh,” I whispered in a breath.
“Man, you’re kind of big,” she said, sitting at the edge of the box springs and reaching down to the floor for her leather coat, taking a bent Marlboro out of her pocket and lighting it up, slipping her arms into her coat sleeves backwards, lying next to me and blowing smoke up at the ceiling.
“Did I hurt you or something?”
“No, no way.” She laughed, sniffled, wiped her nose with her fringed coat sleeve, a bright smear like a snail’s trail across her suede sleeve. “I’ve had worse.”
“So’s that supposed to make me feel better?” For some time now, I’d been feeling like a real heel.
The rusty bedsprings had made a lot of noise, creaking and banging the wall like a dingy against a boat dock in a hurricane—“Longer boats are coming to win us/hold onto the shore” blasting from the eight track deck in living room as I held on to Marilyn—but she’d been quiet the whole time, staring up at the ceiling, blank-eyed, like she wasn’t even in her own body anymore,
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and I couldn’t stop thinking about Allyn or Sherilyn walking in right in the middle of everything, and now here they were both shouting at each other in the living room.
“I told you we shouldn’t’ve here come with her,” Allyn shouted, her shrill voice cracking, off key, like she was trying to hit a high soprano note. “We should’ve just let her go by herself.”
“I wasn’t exactly going to stay,” Sherilyn said.
“Yeah, well, you could’ve least let me stay.”
“We didn’t put a gun to your head.”
“Yeah, well, Mom and Bob’re going to kill us when they find out we ran away. Marilyn never plans anything. She just does it. She’s worse than Mom, always bossing me around.
Where’m I supposed to sleep, huh? She going to keep the bedroom all to herself? Make us sleep in here on the floor?”
“She’s the one that’s got all the money.”
“Yeah, and she stole it,” Allyn said. “From Bob! I know she did.”
“So? He deserves it after all the shit he—”
I strained to listen but couldn’t hear anything after that, just the hard drumming rain and sleet against the window and Cat’s “Sad Lisa” cranked up full volume in the living room, drowning out Allyn and Sherilyn’s voices through the bedroom wall.
Marilyn and I were both quiet a long time, listening to sleet scratch-tapping the windows like a cat trying to get out.
“I guess you’re my girlfriend now,” I whispered.
“What? Don’t be an idiot,” she said and passed me her cigarette.
I took in a long, deep drag, blowing out smoke and disappointment like a grownup, which was what I’d become now, I guessed.
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“Hey, don’t hot-box it,” she said and snatched her cigarette back. Then she whispered in
the darkening blue of the growing dark, “God, I love this song.” She slipped closer to me and lay
on her side facing me, pressing her cold, bony knees up against my thighs, pressing her warm, wet face into my neck.
I started to sit up. “Hey, what’s the matter? Did I do something? Say something wrong?”
“No. Just shut up, will you? You talk too damn much.” Then she held me hard.
I held my arms up, not knowing what to do with them while she squeezed me, shivering, then put them around her with care and held her, rubbed her bare back, her ribs and bony- knuckled spine, trying to warm her where her coat didn’t quite cover her.
“Liza, Liza, sad Liza, Liza,” Cat sang from the other room, hail and sleet cat-scratching the glass. Marilyn was crying now, too, no sound, just her hot, wet face up pressed into my neck like a hot water bottle.
“God, Travis, I’m knocked up,” she whispered wetly, wiping her face into my neck.
“What?”
“You know, pregnant?”
“Already? I thought you said—”
“It’s not yours, you dumbshit.” I heard just the slightest edge of her father’s long-dead voice, an echo of Beck’s favorite insult for the males of the species. “I haven’t had my period for, like, two months.”
I held in a breath, the hairs standing up along my arms. “Is it . . . Bob’s?”
“No.” She shook her head, scrubbing her face into my hair. “God, I don’t know.”
“Does he know?”
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“Bob doesn’t know shit diddly. He finally gets around to marrying my mother at the
Church of Christ—bunch of fucking hypocrites—and then he’s running around the house half- naked swearing he’s Born Again. Ha! Bob, a Jesus freak. Now that’s a fucking laugh.”
“We could get married.”
“What? Are you nutso?” Marilyn glared at me, the long, cool ash of her Marlboro dangling, then falling, onto my bare chest like a clump of dirty snow. “God, you’re a weird one,
Travis.” She blew away the ash. “I don’t want it, okay? Shit, man, I got to get rid of it.”
She pulled away from me and stubbed her cigarette butt out in the aluminum window sill and reached for my Whô t-shirt on the floor next to the box springs and wiped her red, wet face, handing my t-shirt back to me like the shroud of Turin, the front smeared with an outline of her face in mascara and lipstick and foundation. I wanted to tell her more than anything how pretty she was without all that makeup, how she didn’t need it, masking her face like a mandrill’s, but I decided against it.
“Just don’t do anything stupid,” I said.
“Yeah? Like what? Drag out a big old rusty coat-hanger? Go to a back-alley abortionist?
Wash down a bunch of pills with a bottle of Jack? Do a big fat belly-buster off the high dive? Kill myself like my dad did?”
She was laughing now.
“Yeah, that kind of thing.”
She turned her bare back to me like a survivor from Andersonville and sat on the edge of the box springs, staring out at the rain spattering the blue window, swiping at her eyes. “It’s not like I haven’t thought about it. About a million times.”
“Yeah, well, don’t do it, okay?”
“I got to do something,” she said, then snuffed out her cigarette on the wet window sill.
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Outside the living room window, a full moon broke through scudding clouds as we walked out of the bedroom, and Marilyn glanced at Allyn and grinned, humming along to Cat singing, “But tell me, where do the children play?” for about the twentieth time, her thumb hooked through a belt loop at the back of my jeans like I belonged to her now.
“See?” Marilyn told me, doing her tough-girl strut for her sisters. “I told you it wasn’t any big deal.”
“I’m hungry,” said Allyn, refusing to meet my eyes.
Marilyn shot her a look. “Quit your pissing and moaning, will you?” she said. “What?
You think I couldn’t hear everything you just said in here? Damn straight, I took Bob’s money.
Two grand, if you want to know. From that big fat wallet of his. A twenty here, a ten there, for two years, and he knew all about it, didn’t say a word to Mom—couldn’t—or else I’d tell her everything.”
She laughed, and Ophelia the cat, a black silhouette in the window sill, sang a long, low ululating mewl and growl like a bellyaching baby, clicking her claws against the glass.
“Damn cat, shut up,” Marilyn said, then went on. “Look, I had to do something to get us out of there, okay? And it’s all the money we’ve got to live on till I get work. You want to go back to Nac? Fine with me. One less yapping mouth to feed. Just let me know and I’ll take you to the bus station in the morning.”
Allyn said nothing, just stared down at her clogs and shook her head in the dark, her eyes blue and wet as blue moonlight in the window.
“Hey,” I said, trying to smile, “I’m getting kind of hungry, too.” I touched Allyn’s shoulder and said, “You and me, we could make us a Whataburger run. Get you girls some candles and groceries at the Safeway, least to hold you over till tomorrow.”
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“Get away from me,” Allyn hissed, her spit misting my cheeks. “I hate you, hate you.”
Then she shoved me as hard as she could with the heels of both hands, till I almost fell over.
The room was blue and clouds passed over the moon a moment and I could see everything in the dark like a yellow-eyed cat.
I was a drummer in a garage band.
Oroboros, we called ourselves, after the snake that swallows its tail.
Danny Archer and Kenny Ryffe and Hunk Dawkins and I’d argued for weeks about stupid band names like Pegasus and Mandrake Root and Hard Rain and E. Cannabis Unum, Danny saying he had first dibs on the last name since we were using his garage and he’d bought the band’s big sound system—two huge Altec Lansing Voice of the Theater speakers, a heavy Peavey amp and a four-channel mixing board—with the money he’d made selling matchboxes, lids and pounds of seedy weed we’d grown ourselves that summer from a stock of Acapulco Gold and Panama Red, his mother’s Miracle-Gro Lawn and Weed and endless Folger’s cans of skanky creek water from down the street in Pecan Park, a quarter-acre field of stunted green devil’s claws hidden in a grove of snowy cottonwoods behind a high berm of railroad track and trestle that crossed over White
Rock Creek.
“Oral what?” Hunk asked me, wired on Black Mollies, cranky as usual from staying up three nights in a row. “What the hell kind of name is that?”
“Oor-o-bór-oos,” I said, stoned and earnest as an English student with a dog-eared copy of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. “It’s, like, an ancient alchemical symbol, man. The Gnostics used it. The Greeks, too. And the Egyptians. Kekulé dreamed about it and figured out the chemical composition of Benzene. Pretty cool, huh?”
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“Pretty stupid, duh?” Hunk thumped a low bass string, then lit a fat joint, bent in the middle like his ex-linebacker’s nose. He’d just been kicked off the Lake Highlands Wildcats’ first string, benched after he’d jaw-punched Coach Boggs for trying to give him nine licks with his fancy hole-punched board, then cracked Boggs’ ribs with a folding chair and got kicked off the team for good.
But I’d already painted a Day-Glo green snake swallowing its tail on the front head of my bass drum, encircling the name—
r b r s
—and Hunk and Danny had already lost the argument. The band name stuck.
A week later, Danny’s stepfather Vance ran us out of the garage for smoking one of
Danny’s special ten-paper joints in the utility room and leaving the kitchen door wide open, the whole house smelling like burnt rope, and we were stuck without a place to practice. Vance, on parole from a year-long stint in Huntsville for writing eight thousand in hot checks all across
Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, had toked a few with us in the garage, but then he’d gotten pissed off at Danny for stinking up the house, said he didn’t want his parole officer showing up and sniffing around, busting him for some stupid kid’s stash.
I asked my mother if we could practice on the balcony cantilevered out over the sunken living room of my father’s new split-level show house. My father’d run Danny out of our house three or four times—the last time when he’d overheard me on the phone bragging that Danny was
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the biggest pot dealer at Lake Highlands Junior High—but my father’d done it for all the wrong
reasons, and my mother mostly looked the other way, always taking in my freak friends as strays.
The night Vance sold me a battered Ford F-100 for $150 cash—All Sales Are Final!—from his used-car lot on Garland Road, a Dallas cop had pulled my truck over at midnight, banging my cheek into the hot hood of his police car, then cuffing Danny and me both, driving us behind the wire cage separating the front seat from the back to the White Rock Police Station just two blocks from the houses where we lived.
Stoned as the Stones at Altamont and sick to our stomachs from having swallowed, cottonmouth-dry, four rancid fat roaches that tasted like the ashtray we’d stuffed them into, we thought we were busted for sure, but when I asked the desk sergeant what the charges were at the police station, he said, “Driving a stolen vehicle.”
“What?” I said. “I just bought that truck. It’s mine, officer. The sale was legit.” And I showed the desk sergeant my bill of sale, proof of insurance, title and learner’s permit.
“Yeah? Well, boy, that truck may be yours, but somebody put stolen license plates on it.”
“Vance,” Danny said and kicked the leg of the sergeant’s new Steelcase desk.
The only juveniles in the substation jail, Danny and I both sat on concrete benches across from each other in the same empty holding cell—separated from the adult offenders, mostly snoring drunks and some perv shouting at Danny like some twisted parrot, “Pretty boy, pretty boy!”—till I finally got my one phone call at three a. m. Danny’d already wasted his one call on his mother, who’d refused to talk to him, much less bail him out—she’d bailed out Vance just six months before, most of her savings, ten thousand bucks—so I had to call the one man in the world I didn’t want to call.
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My father showed up an hour later, weaving down the corridor to our cell in his square- dancing outfit, calfskin boots, cowboy shirt and ironed jeans, blowing a mist of J & B between the bars into my face when he said, “You want to tell me what the goddamn hell you’re doing in here with him?”
I tried to explain what Danny and I’d already figured out—that Vance had swapped out my truck’s expired plates with another car’s just to get it off his Garland Road lot—but my father didn’t buy a word of it. On the way back home in our ’66 Chevelle station wagon, my mother sat silent in the passenger seat up front, rustling her crinoline petticoats and yellow square-dancing dress, her bleached-white bouffant flattened against the sagging roof liner, while my father drove, shooting Danny stabbing looks in the rearview mirror and saying, “I don’t like you, boy. You know that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“He didn’t do anything, Dad. It wasn’t his—”
“So things just happen and it’s never anybody’s fault, right? Peace, love, dove,” my father said, like a cobra spitting venom into my eye, one glance from him in the rearview mirror enough to shut me up right away. Then he was spitting poison at Danny again. “You stay away from my son. You stay away from my house. Get it?”
“Got it,” Danny said.
“Good.”
A month later, Danny was fast-fretting a screaming Eric Clapton lead under my father’s twenty-foot vaulted ceiling while my mother peeled potatoes in the kitchen downstairs, her usual
KP duty, just off work from her job as head receptionist for Dr. Snitkin, who specialized in reconstructive surgery, face lifts, silicon breast implants and the occasional odd sex change.
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Danny ended the song singing, “With tales of brave Ulysses, how his naked ears were tortured, by the sirens sweetly singing,” then kicked on his wah-wah wailing till the walls shook and buzzed. The room fell quiet, my ears ringing like a dial tone, and my mother shouted up from the kitchen for the third or fourth time, “Boys, could you turn that down a notch?”
I’d already talked her into letting us practice after school two days a week and to let me practice my drums most weekdays in my bedroom above the kitchen so long as we kept it to a reasonable volume and broke everything down by four thirty, an hour before my father got home from work, raising hell about the mess of equipment and noise and that goddamn no-good longhair hippy drug dealer Danny Archer.
I gave Danny and Hunk a long look and they both bent to turn their amps down. But it wouldn’t last. Next song, they’d be cranking up again just to keep up with me. I played as loud as
Keith Moon, couldn’t help myself, and Danny and Hunk kept turning up until they could hear themselves again over cymbal crashes, rim shots and bass drum kicks, my hair slinging down over my face so I couldn’t see any of Danny’s break cues, Kenny always playing at the same low volume, so low that most of the time we could barely hear him above all the racket.
Danny, lead vocalist and guitarist, the band’s tanned, dreamy girl-magnet—long, straight sun-blonde hair down the middle of his back like Allyn’s and a blonde beard and movie star looks like Robert Redford’s except for the pimpled schnoz in the middle of his face like a proboscis monkey’s—sang like Cream’s bassist Jack Bruce and played a battered sunburst ’65 Stratocaster through a black Super Reverb, a raw distorted sound he amped up even more with a fuzz box, a wah-wah pedal and a Maestro Echoplex he’d stolen under his heavy coat from the big discount music store, Arnold and Morgan Music a block away from his stepfather’s car lot on Garland
Road, and the Echoplex tape-looped screaming leads like Jimmy Page’s on Danny’s favorite new album, Led Zeppelin, with the black and white album cover of the Hindenburg burning.
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Hunk, a big guy—six-six at sixteen and as wide as my mother’s Kenmore refrigerator—
sang a raucous backup and lead on Steppenwolf’s “Magic Carpet Ride” and “Born to Be Wild,”
and he played a Fender bass through a black-padded Kustom stack, ate two or three Whataburgers
a day, then popped at least many Black Mollies he’d stolen from his anesthesiologist stepfather’s
medicine cabinet—just trying to lose weight, he said, grinning—like the SweeTARTs he was always
sucking and crunching like cocktail ice. Mostly, though, he just stayed wide-eyed wired and fast with a thumping, fat sound like the Whô’s John Entwhistle.
A few months before, Hunk had dragged us all to a Restland Funeral Home auction, tripping on a four-way hit of Purple Microdot, and he’d bought a black ‘59 Cadillac hearse with his rich step-father’s money—the Hunkmobile, he called it—like a humpbacked Batmobile with
chromed fins and a tiny steering wheel the size of a cereal bowl he’d installed himself, so we’d all
have something other than my piece-of-crap truck to haul equipment around in, if we ever actually
got ourselves a paying gig.
Kenny, my next door neighbor, had sold me his older brother Ray’s white-pearl
Slingerland kit for a measly $150, the same price I’d paid for my truck when Ray, a rooster-tail
radioman, got shot in the head by a VC sniper near the Mekong Delta. Kenny played a polished
black Gibson, rhythm mostly, a clean, jazzy sound like Wes Montgomery’s keening through his
blonde Fender Tremolux amp while Danny harangued him to crank up, damnit, and rock it, will
you?
In the short space of silence after the band’s screaming jam, my father’s gray-muzzled,
three-legged Sheltie Reveille was doing his puppy routine again—a nervous tic that had inspired
the band’s name—barking and circling us like a herd of sheep while the music blasted, then
stopping when the music had stopped, chasing his tail in quick, tightening circles, till he’d caught it
and just stood there, dizzy, unable to decide what to do next, his one back leg shivering to balance
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himself. He’d chased snakes, too, as a pup, biting their tails and not letting go, even though they could whip around and snap at his nose, until he lost a back leg jumping from the back of my father’s speeding pickup to pounce on a fat water moccasin sunning itself on the hot asphalt on
Goforth Road.
Snake-chasing dog swallows tail.
“Hey, guys, guess who finally popped his cherry?” Danny said a little too loud during a short break later that afternoon, pinging a ringing harmonic note, then tuning up his A string, glancing over at me and grinning.
Hunk and Kenny both glanced at me, the only remaining candidate for the honor in the band.
“Jesus, Danny, I told you not to say anything,” I said, clattering my sticks on my snare’s chrome rim. “And keep it down, will you? My mother’ll hear you.” I nodded downstairs from the balcony to the kitchen and frowned.
“I can hear you now,” my mother shouted up the stairs over the pops of the deep fat fryer.
“You think I can’t hear you?”
“Great,” I whispered. “Thanks loads, Danny-o.”
“Man, what’s your problem?” he whispered. “You’d think you’d just lost your best friend instead of your—”
“I will if you say another word.”
“Whoa,” Danny said, his voice trembling low like Johnny Cash’s. “I’m so scared.”
Just then, Allyn and Maddie walked in through the front door and slammed it hard, rattling the window panes, laughing and singing The Isley Brother’s “It’s Your Thing,” a big hit on
KLIF, the local AM station.
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“You seen Marilyn and Sherilyn?” Maddie asked me, she and Allyn dancing around in the
front foyer like a couple of pixies. “They’re supposed to meet up with us here.”
“Nope,” I said. “Go up to your room, will you? We’re trying to practice.”
Maddie and Allyn had hooked up like Siamese twins ever since Allyn had come back, like
they’d only missed seeing each other by two days instead of two years, starting over right where
they’d left off, singing along to my old scratched Yellow Submarine and Monkees Greatest Hits albums in
Maddie’s room, whispering to each other and giggling and acting stupid like they were twelve again, hitching rides with Marilyn to Pier 1 to buy incense and scented candles for their new apartment, Allyn staying over two nights the week before just to keep from having to sleep on the apartment floor, ignoring me like our whole family ignored Reveille sleep-kicking day and night under our coffee table.
“Travis, let me sing,” Maddie said, falling and sprawling on the couch along the wall behind my drums, her coarse red hair windblown and blowsy as a mimosa blossom.
“No,” I said, swinging around to face her on my drum stool. “How many times’ve I got to tell you? You’re just fourteen.”
“So?” Allyn said, her hands on her hips, refusing to look at me straight on, snooty as a
Highland Park debutante. “I’m fourteen, too. We both can sing. Come on, Maddie.”
She tried to pull Maddie up from the couch but gave up, then danced over to Danny’s mike anyway, her blonde hair swinging out from her hips like willow leaves in a high wind, and she pulled his mike off its stand, knocking it over and almost tripping over the cord, the Shure mike feeding back a high-pitched howl like a gut-shot dog, as Allyn cat-scratched her crotch and sang, off key, “Itch your thing! Do what you want to do.”
Danny and Hunk and Kenny all clamped their hands over their ears and gaped at her and then they all started laughing.
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“It’s it’s, Allyn,” I said, shaking my head, still flinching from the feedback. “‘It’s your thing.’”
She stopped dead and stared down at her clogs, as Danny snatched the mike from her— she’d been a tone-deaf, mishearing mangler of song lyrics ever since I could remember—and she looked at me straight on for the first time since I’d helped her and her sisters move in a week before. “Oh.” She glanced at Danny, then at Kenny, then at Hunk, and blood rose up into her face like mercury into a thermometer. “I knew that.”
“Right.” Swiveling back around on my drum stool, I cued the band members for number four on our song list, then started in on the clanking cowbell intro to “Honky Tonk Woman,” but before Danny could come in on the guitar, Maddie’d hopped up from couch and snatched Hunk’s mike from his stand, her voice booming over the PA, “I know that one, Travis. Come on. Let me sing backup,” feedback screeching all around us.
“Bug off, will you, little girl?” I said and threw down my sticks. “Don’t you and Miss
Priss have somewhere else to go? Jesus, we’re trying to practice.”
Just then, the doorbell rang, Allyn running to get it, and in walked Sherilyn and Marilyn.
“Jesus,” I said again, until I saw who it was. “Hey, now, here’s somebody who can sing.
Danny, this’s that girl I was telling you about. Sing something for these guys, will you, Marilyn?”
“Sure thing,” Marilyn said, taking one look at Danny and smiling, Danny handing her the mike and smiling back, and she reeled out a long, winding note like she’d been practicing the song for months, a perfect imitation of Janis Joplin’s “‘Well, I’m gonna try, yeah, just a little bit harder.’”
“Whoa,” Danny said, grinning like a proboscis monkey.
“Damn,” said Kenny.
“Mama,” Hunk said and thumb-thumped a low E string.
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“See?” I said. “Did I tell you guys or what? She’s a regular Billie Holliday.”
“She the one who popped your—?” Danny asked me.
“Shut up, will you?” I whispered and blushed, staring down at my Speed King kick pedal.
Marilyn frowned at me and turned to Allyn asking her, “You ready to go home?”
“Back to Nac?” Allyn said.
Marilyn folded her arms, the fringes of her suede coat swinging at her elbows. “No.”
“I’m not going back to that apartment. It’s cold in there and it stinks. And I don’t have a bed to sleep on.”
“Well, we got you an air mattress.”
Allyn crossed her arms and shook her head, her long straight hair a wave of white.
Pouting on the couch—no one had asked her to sing—Maddie said, “It’s all right,
Marilyn. My mom said Allyn can stay again tonight.”
Downstairs, my mother stood in the kitchen doorway, her face still dolled up from the office. She sold Mary Kay cosmetics on the side now, trying to win herself a pink Cadillac, saving up for a discounted facelift and breast job, too, taking at least an hour every morning before work, she said, to put on her face. A white smudge of peppery flour dotted the tip of her nose, her hands gloved in flour like the pork chops she’d plopped into the deep fryer, her fingers still trembling a little from an hour of blaring music sandblasting her from the living room like a desert storm.
“You girls want to stay over for supper?” she called up the stairs to the front door. “I always make too much. I’d invite you boys, too, but . . .” She glanced up at Danny at the balcony rail and tried to smile, then frowned at me, her standard cue to start breaking down our equipment.
“. . . your father’ll be home soon.”
But then, just then—wouldn’t you know it?—the old man walked in.
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His Piet Mondrian tie swung loose around his stooped neck, his mouth skewed and tilted sideways after three or four happy-hour martinis at the Playboy Club in the Dallas Cowboys
Building where he worked, and he shrugged off his gray sports coat and walked past Beck’s girls like they weren’t even there, hanging his coat up in the foyer closet and sighing hard. Then he side-glanced all the music equipment on the balcony over the living room and spotted Danny with his battered Strat slung low from his shoulder, and he slammed the closet door and turned to me, his eyes bloodshot and glowing a molten blue.
“What the hell’s he doing here?”
“I told you already, Dad,” I said. “He’s in the band, and we don’t have anywheres else to practice.”
“I see,” he said. Then, looking like someone had spent an hour heating him to a glowing red in a blast furnace, then beating him sparking-flat on an steel anvil, he turned into the master bedroom and slammed the door behind him till the floor-to-ceiling glass rattled in the window panes all around us.
Supper was quiet, too quiet—my father coming downstairs after everyone had started eating, fixing himself a J & B on the rocks in a tall water glass, refusing to speak or even look at me or my mother or Maddie or Beck’s girls all sitting quiet around the table, clinking and scraping their knives and forks, eating like they hadn’t had eaten in months, my mother’s thick peppery pork chops with rinds of crunchy fat and cream gravy and lumpy mashed potatoes and fried okra and green beans—until the phone rang.
It rang three or four times, no one getting up to answer it, everyone looking at everyone else to do the job, my father glaring at me, his flattop like the deck of an aircraft carrier, until my mother threw down her napkin and jumped up from the kitchen table and ran to the phone before
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I could, my father’s face growing redder with each ring, inflating like a water balloon filled to bursting.
“Yes, this is the Truitt residence,” my mother said. “Yes, well, we moved, you know, a couple years back. Mrs. Dobson? I’m afraid I don’t . . . . oh, Mrs. Vanderbeck. Of course, I remember you.” My mother glanced at Marilyn and smiled, and all three girls stared at her, then back at each other, their mouths open, leaning forward into their chairs like they were getting ready to run, Marilyn’s eyes wide and pleading as she looked at me for help.
“Mom?” I said. “Don’t tell her—”
My mother held out her hand like a traffic cop. “Yes, would you believe it? They’re all sitting right here, eating my famous pork chops.” My mother laughed, then grew serious. “No, no, they’re fine, just fine.”
“Mom,” I said again and stood from my chair.
“My god, I had no idea,” my mother said, waving me away, turning her back to me at the supper table, then palming her other ear to listen. “If I’d known they’d . . . run away, I’d’ve . . . .
No, I just thought they’d moved back to Dallas with you. No . . . no, I don’t know where they’re staying. No one’s told me anything. I’m always the last to know.” My mother turned to frown at me. “Yes, of course,” she said, then palmed the mouthpiece and held the phone out to Marilyn.
“It’s your mother. Calling from Nacogdoches.”
Marilyn squeezed her eyes shut, shaking her head, pressing out tears between her lashes like the hard seeds of lemon she’d just squeezed into her sweet tea.
“Mom,” I said the last time, then walked up to her, snatched the blue princess phone from her hand and hung it up with a ringing clang.
My mother gasped. “Travis!”
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“What?” I said, shaking my head, pissed at myself for not having answered the phone in the first place, for not having done something sooner.
“Why in god’s name did you—?”
But before I could say anything, my father had stood, inflating like a boxing clown, cracking his knee against the kitchen table as everyone reached for their tilting tea glasses, hurling himself in my direction, then grabbing my shirt into his fists and lifting my feet an inch off the floor, slamming my back hard into the refrigerator and shouting into my face, “What? What?”
“Deuce!” mother shouted at him, and Reveille clamped his teeth onto my father’s pants leg, shaking his head hard like he’d just been hosed down, till my father kicked him away, whining and skittering his claws across the Mexican tiles and under the kitchen table.
“You don’t understand, Dad,” I said, stunned, my neck and the back of my head throbbing like I’d just been rear-ended, the shadow of a dent in my mother’s new refrigerator where my skull had struck it, the Kenmore nameplate loose and swiveling on one screw.
“No, I think I do,” my father told me, spitting in my eye, a mirage of smoky scotch shimmering in his breath. “You think you can say or do any goddamn thing you want to around here. You think you can be rude and hang up on people and backtalk your mother like she’s a goddamn maid. Think you can disregard every goddamn thing I say and bring trash into my house any time you want.” I glanced over at Beck’s girls, all red-faced and staring down at their plates still piled high with food. “Well, I don’t give a good goddamn if you disrespect me, but you won’t disrespect your mother, get it?” He shook me hard by the shirt, a button popping off and striking him in the eye.
“Got it,” I said. “But—”
“But . . . what?” he said, blinking his eye, his lips quivering white. “What?”
*
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After supper—Marilyn and Sherilyn and Allyn all three standing from their unfinished
meals, their hair streaming out behind them like mermaids’ tails up the stairs as they got their
coats, then rushed out the front door—my mother slipped into my dark room upstairs and sat
next to me on my low mattress on the floor as I stared off at an M. C. Escher poster on my wall.
“You want to tell me what’s going on around here?” she said, flinching at the splash and
clatter downstairs of my father knocking dishes around in the sink. “Is that girl in trouble? Did you get her into trouble?”
“No! She’s got plenty enough trouble of her own.”
“Don’t lie to me, Travis,” she said. “Please.” She rubbed the knot at the back of my head till I pushed her hand away.
“You can’t tell anybody, Mom. You’ve got to promise me you won’t.”
“All right,” she said. “I promise.”
I stared at my mother a long time, at the line of makeup along her jaws, her platinum-
bleached hair, ratted and stiff with Breck hairspray, her eyelashes thick with mascara, blurred and
smeared in shadows under her eyes, only her brown eyes dark and clear and unflinching, still her
own under her pretty-woman mask. Then I told her everything, just spilled it all out, about Bob
Dobson, about Marilyn’s being pregnant, about her taking Beck’s van and escaping with her sisters
from Nacogdoches.
My mother pressed her fingers into her eyes and dragged them down her face, shaking her
head. “And, after all that, you . . . take advantage of that girl? What in god’s name’s wrong with
you?”
“I didn’t know, Mom. It just . . . sort of happened, and then she told me.”
“And you just had to go out and brag about it to your friends.”
“I just told Danny. And I wasn’t bragging. I was just—”
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“No, of course not,” she said. “Boys. Got your cherry popped, huh? Make you feel like a big man now?”
“All right, Mom, I fucked up, okay? I fucked up.”
My mother turned her face away, her eyes fluttering like I’d just slapped her.
“Where’re they staying now?” she said finally. “Do you know?”
I nodded. “I helped them move in. But if I tell you, what are you going to do? Tell Dad?
Call their mother? Bob? The cops? It’ll just make things a lot worse.”
“Take me to them,” she said. “Now.”
Under a humming mercury-vapor light, a mattress lay upright against a parking lot dumpster outside Marilyn’s apartment, Beck’s van parked in the space on the other side.
My mother got out of my vapor-locking truck and followed me up the enclosed stairwell.
I hesitated, hearing Marilyn’s muffled shouts inside, then knocked on the peeling hollow-core door. My mother, bundled up in her faux fox coat, pulled her collar up like a dead cat around her neck and shivered in the cold next to me, blowing white steam.
The door opened, thumped up against the door chain, and Marilyn shouted from inside,
“Don’t let the cat out!” and then I saw one of Allyn’s blue-green irises glowing through the gap in the door.
“It’s me,” I said, glancing down the dark apartment breezeway, half-expecting to see the cops or Bob Dobson. “My mother’s here, too.”
Sherilyn held Ophelia back by her collar as Allyn closed the door, unchained it and then opened it again, and then my mother and I stepped inside a room that looked like a West Texas dust devil had twisted through it, wadded clothes and fast food wrappers and empty coke cans and
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little hard spirals of cat shit scattered everywhere on the carpet all around the living room, boxes still unpacked, the whole room heavy with the stink of patchouli and pot smoke and cat piss.
“I’m sorry about what happened back at the house,” my mother said. “My husband’s—”
“—got an iron rod up his ass,” I said through my teeth.
“Travis, please.”
“I told her everything,” I told Marilyn, my breath seething steam in the freezing apartment. “I had to tell somebody. I’m sorry.”
Marilyn sat wrapped in a frayed blanket on the makeshift couch—my brother Nate’s old box springs—blushing, unable to look at me or my mother.
My mother stepped around the cat shit and clothes and sat next to Marilyn on the creaking low bunk springs and took her hand. “Look, I’m not going to tell your mother where you are, all right? I’m not going to tell anyone. Not unless you want me to.”
“You can’t tell Bob,” Marilyn said. “You can’t tell her about Bob.”
“It’s not my place tell her or anybody. But maybe you should, honey. One way or other, you got to call her, at least let her know you girls are all right. She called again after you left, you know? She’s got the police out looking for you.”
“I don’t care,” Marilyn said, her face splotchy red, her eyes swollen. “I won’t go back. I won’t.”
“Maybe the police should be looking for someone else,” my mother said, dark lines crossing at the corners of eyes, her face powder flaking. “Maybe you’re protecting the wrong person here. Have you thought about that?”
Marilyn laughed, her bleeding mascara masking her eyes like tarantulas. “You don’t know my mother. You don’t know Bob. He’d deny it all.” She glanced at her sisters, who looked away, too, and blushed.
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My mother touched Marilyn’s long brown hair, smoothing and straightening it. “What we talk about is between you and me. Is there some place we could go, just the two of us?”
Marilyn looked into my mother’s eyes for the first time, wiping at her wet face, smearing her mascara and lipstick with the sleeve of her suede jacket. Then she nodded to the bedroom.
My mother stood with Marilyn, held her hand and pulled her up, led her through the bedroom door, then turned to Sherilyn and Allyn for a moment in the doorway. “Girls, could you clean up a bit in here while your sister and I talk? That’d really help.” She glanced at me with a plucked and tilted eyebrow that told me I might as well make myself useful, too. Then she shut the door with the faintest click behind her.
Sherilyn and Allyn and I all three stood around in our coats staring at each other, not knowing what to say or do, listening to the muffled talk coming from the bedroom. Then I reached down for a handful of wadded clothes on the floor and handed them to Allyn, who shivered a little. Then I walked into the hallway to turn the thermostat up to 68˚.
I turned into the kitchen, which reeked of green burger meat in a shrink-wrapped
Styrofoam scattered in bits along the floor around a cat-clawed garbage bag, shredded and half- chewed wax-paper wrappers scattered all across the linoleum, the sink filled with dishes covered in furzy mold, and I stuffed the torn trash back into the bag and put it into another and then came back with a crumpled handful of garbage bags still wadded from the girls’ unpacking. I reached down with a paper towel and wiped up a still-warm cat turd, ripe and wet and smearing the shag rug, and I tried not to gag as I dropped it into an open bag. Already Allyn was moving around me in the cold, picking up wadded paper and clothes, and Sherilyn was in the kitchen, turning on the faucet and filling up the sink with steaming suds.
*
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Outside the apartment, I stood next to the green dumpster in the parking lot and hurled a
Hefty bag lumpy with rotting burger meat and cat shit over the top. Then I upended the mattress leaning against the dumpster and looked it over, front and back. It was torn in one corner, the bedsprings exposed and rain-rusty, but otherwise it looked all right. I hesitated a moment, then sniffed the mattress—just a trace of must, the canvas yellow-stained and dusty.
“Who knows who’s slept on that thing?” a voice said behind me. “What things they’ve done to each other.”
Allyn stood in the shadow of the apartment stairs. She stepped under the humming parking lot light and tossed another trash bag over the dumpster top.
“Looks all right to me,” I said, “but I’m not the one who has to sleep on it.” I looked at her a long time, blinking, then kicked a Schlitz can clanking and spinning out across the parking lot. “Look, I’m sorry, Allyn. If I’d known Marilyn was in all this trouble, I wouldn’t’ve . . . I never would’ve—”
Allyn reached up and touched her fingertips to my lips, nothing more. Then she took one end of the mattress and I took the other end, and she helped me carry it upstairs into the apartment.
That night, my mother talked to Marilyn till midnight. Then she and I stood shivering outside a phone booth at the abandoned Shell station catty-corner from Marilyn’s apartment complex while Marilyn fed nickels, dimes and quarters from my mother’s heavy coin purse into a payphone.
“Call off the police or I’ll call them on you, I swear to god,” Marilyn told Bob, still half- asleep and lying in bed next to her mother in Nacogdoches. “No, I don’t want to talk to her. I’ll call her later, when you get lost. You tell her we’re just peachy, all right? No need to worry. Or
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I’ll tell her everything.” Then she cracked the receiver’s earpiece against the side of the payphone twice, change jangling inside the coin box, and hung up with a loud clack like she was striking a hammer into the man’s skull. She took in a few breaths, her back to us, almost hyperventilating, then wiped at her eyes and stepped out of the phone booth, holding my mother hard like she was her own mother, like she belonged to her now.
The only person other than me I know of who my mother ever talked to about Marilyn was Dr. Snitkin, the plastic surgeon she worked for. Next day, he told her he knew of a doctor in
Carrollton—my mother never said his name—who’d just been subpoenaed, along with a plaintiff named Jane Roe, for a felony count of abortion by Judge Henry Wade, the same man who’d convicted Jack Ruby of shooting Lee Harvey Oswald.
“Your father’ll divorce me if he finds out what I’m doing,” she whispered to me in the kitchen that afternoon after school, shoving a fat roast into the oven.
“Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing, Mom, you know?”
She glared at me. “You can’t tell him.”
“All right,” I said. “I won’t. Why would I tell him?”
Next morning, my father rushed out the front door, late for work, red-faced and huffing, wobbly and a little logy from a hangover, and the moment his blue ‘70 Maverick had bumped over the front curb and down the street, my mother took off in our ’66 Chevelle station wagon, dressed for work but taking half a day off, picking up Marilyn at her apartment near McCree Creek, then driving her fifteen miles north to Carrollton through rush-hour traffic on L. B. J. Freeway.
A few hours later, she dropped Marilyn off at her apartment and put her to bed, pale and a little shaken, with an ice pack and a hot water bottle for her stomach, a 7-Up and a slow-heated
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bowl of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle soup. That night, when I asked my mother what had happened, she told me Marilyn would be all right, nothing more, and she never said another word to me about what had happened again.
Two weeks later, the band had a new place to practice and a new lead singer, Marilyn
Vanderbeck.
She’d just gotten a night job waitressing at the Pizza Hut on Audelia Road, just enough in tips to pay for groceries and most of the rent, she said, enough now to enroll Allyn and Sherilyn at
Lake Highlands Junior High, though Marilyn had dropped out herself after the first couple of weeks, unable to study much with full-time work and the all-night partying she’d started just days after my mother drove her to the doctor in Carrollton. All Marilyn asked from the band was a paying gig soon and $50 a month to set up our equipment cramped together in her tiny kitchen nook so she’d have enough to pay for her sisters’ lunch money.
Before long she was pressing her lips to mikes and singing in her smoke-husky voice
“Dazed and Confused” and “Ask Alice” and “Stormy Monday” until suppertime, when she had to dress in her Pizza Hut uniform to go to work, her downstairs neighbors thumping their ceilings with broom handles and threatening to call the police if we didn’t turn down all that racket.
It’d been Danny’s idea to ask Marilyn to sing. She could hit the raw, high notes he could never reach when he tried to sing Robert Plant’s “You Shook Me” and “Good Times, Bad
Times,” and having her sing gave us a better shot at the audition he’d set up in two months for the
Cellar Club downtown.
For a while Marilyn seemed all right mocking other singers, as she called it, singing like the mad, tortured mockingbird that used to sing in the mimosa just outside her bedroom window
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the summer before in Nacogdoches, keeping her up nights with a thousand confused birdsongs from midnight till dawn.
“Mockingbird singing in my bed at night,” Allyn sang off-key the afternoon of our first practice, her voice flat as a blowout, as she sat next to Maddie and Sherilyn on the sagging dumpster mattress in her apartment living room, mooning over Danny and his fast-fingered fretwork in “Purple Haze” like a wide-eyed groupie.
“It’s blackbird, Allyn,” I said, rolling my eyes, laying my sticks across my snare and wiping my face with a hand towel. “In the dead of night.”
“Oh,” she said.
“I don’t know what you guys want me to sing for,” Marilyn said, gaunt and testy as a mockingbird strutting across a new-mown lawn, skinnier than I’d ever seen her before, down to 90 pounds. “I’m no damn good. Just a pretender. A parrot.” She squawked and laughed.
“Sherilyn’s the one with the voice.” A sweet, serene voice, she said, like the meadowlarks and scissortails that sang from telephone wires across their grandfather’s cow pastures along Appleby
Sand Road. “Come on, Sherilyn, sing these guys a little Joni.”
Shy Sherilyn frowned at Marilyn, blushing, then glanced down at her bruised shins and clogs and shook her head.
“I can sing,” Maddie said next to her. “Come on, you guys. Let me sing.”
“Bug off, little sis,” I said, kicking my bass pedal with a low thump.
“Don’t be mean, Travis,” Sherilyn said. Then, surprising everyone, she sang a high soprano note in a voice only her own, a cappella, a Joni Mitchell tune, nudging Maddie’s elbow until my sister joined in, in two-part harmony:
Songs to aging children come, Aging children, I am one.
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“Damn,” Hunk said.
“Sing it, girl,” said Kenny.
“We don’t play that kind of music,” I said, kicking my bass pedal again and popping a rim shot like a gunshot. “All right, can we quit screwing around and get back to Jimi?”
I started to count out “Purple Haze” again, but Danny held up a hand to stop me and pulled a fat four-paper joint like a white Cuban cigar, wedged between a high string and the truss rod of his Strat head, and he took a deep-sucking hit, flipping his straight blond hair over his shoulders, smoke curling up from the corner of his mouth into a watery, winking eye, Marilyn seeming to swoon at his cool and his smile and the lilting croon of his voice.
She reached for the joint and Danny handed it over to her and she took a long, deep hit like his and held it in, then, smiling, stuck the joint’s glowing ash backwards into her mouth and moved her lips close to his, blowing an explosion of smoke into his mouth. Danny held back a cough, his eyes flooding, then clamped his front teeth around of the brown wet end of the joint still in her mouth, their lips just touching, and she opened her mouth and let the joint go, grinning.
“Hey, let me try that,” Allyn said.
“You’re too young to be smoking dope, little miss teenybopper,” Marilyn said.
“Yeah? Well, you’re not my mother.”
Allyn jumped up from her mattress and ran to Marilyn’s mike stand, laughing, shoving
Marilyn out of the way and singing, “’Scuse me while I kiss this guy”—a high, flat note that fed back a needling screech that could shatter glass till we all covered our ears and Hunk jumped to turn the PA down. Then Allyn snatched the joint from Danny and took a hit, grabbing Danny’s
“Are You Experienced?” t-shirt into her fists and pulling him to her, prying his mouth open with her tongue and blowing hard till smoke dribbled out his nose and his cheeks ballooned like Dizzy
Gillespie’s.
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His eyes teary red, Danny coughed once and started to push her away, then smiled at her and shrugged and pulled her to him with a free arm and they both kissed a long time, blowing smoke back and forth into each other’s lungs, her small breasts pressing against his Strat’s shiny fretboard, until Marilyn pulled them apart, yelling at Danny to stay the hell away from her jailbait sister or she’d call the fucking pigs.
Allyn wiped her flushed and fleshy mouth with a tanned forearm and stared at me behind the drums with that strange crooked smile I’d seen when she’d said, “Step on a crack and break your father’s back.”
“Excuse me, Allyn,” I said, “but it’s ‘kiss the sky.’”
Word got around fast at Lake Highlands Junior High about Marilyn’s apartment, the best place to party down and get laid. The live music after school was free and the drugs were plentiful and cheap. You could score a joint or a matchbox or a lid or a pound of resiny homegrown from
Danny Archer or hits of Orange Barrel, Windowpane or Purple Microdot without too much strychnine, even East Texas ‘shrooms and West Texas peyote from Hunk Dawkins, who stashed most of his dope in a hidden compartment he’d found in his Hunkmobile, under the Astroturf where coffins used to slide in back.
When Marilyn got off work from the Pizza Hut at midnight, most people’d just be showing up, and they’d stay till three or four a.m. sometimes, even on school nights, especially hangers-on and losers like Roger Rogerson and Jack Doppler—who passed out once in Marilyn’s bathroom with a needle broken off in his arm and his face all mooshed into the kitty litter box— most of them tripping or speeding on good pharmaceutical Black Mollies Hunk had lifted from the endless supply in his stepfather’s medicine cabinet or drinking Shiner longnecks Hunk had stolen by the case from his stepfather’s poolside fridge, smoking bubbling bongs and lounging
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around on ripped beanbag chairs Marilyn had lifted in the rain from a dumpster behind the Pier 1 at the Medallion Shopping Center, guys and girls pairing up for an hour or two and going into
Marilyn’s communal bedroom, knocking my old bedsprings against the wall for thirty minutes, then stumbling out, laughing, their long hair frazzle-ratted, their shirts and blouses buttoned lopsided or on backwards, their mouths and chins raw from making out for hours, fat purple hickeys spread across their necks like thumb prints on police ink blotters.
No one seemed to mind that Marilyn’s place always reeked of cat shit and smoky jasmine, pot smoke and stale, flat beer in longneck bottles filled with floating cigarette butts lined up along the windowsills, the cat litter box almost never emptied, tar-yellow spider webs in the ceiling corners, dust bunnies and coughed-up hair balls coiled in the corners like freeze-dried mice, cat hair webbed with static everywhere to the claw-shredded furniture, mostly cast-offs from the
Salvation Army or nearby apartment dumpsters, something as close to a bed for each of Beck’s girls to sleep on as they’d ever have for the short two months they’d be there, even when sleep on school nights was pretty much impossible.
Sometimes, I worried the cops’d show up at any time to crash the non-stop party going on at Marilyn’s day and night, but I tried not to think about it too much, and finally I just decided I could never keep up with Danny and Hunk and Doppler and Marilyn and stayed away, going to bed at ten or eleven, especially on nights when Allyn started sleeping over week nights in Maddie’s room down the hall.
In less than two months, the short time we’d had to work up four forty-five minute sets for our audition at the Cellar Club downtown, Marilyn had pretty much bedded every guy in the band.
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Danny was the first. At the end of practice one afternoon, Danny wiped down his Strat
neck and strings with a smooth chamois cloth and lay it into his guitar case like a dead lover into a
satin-lined casket and said, “Later,” then started out the apartment door just as Marilyn stopped
him and took his hand, shooting Allyn a look and smirking, leading Danny into her bedroom
without a word.
For three or four practices over the next two weeks, Marilyn kept asking me if Danny ever
talked about her when he and I were at school—Did he like her? Did he think she was pretty?
Did he think she was too fat?—clinging to him like she wanted someone, anyone, to hold her safe
in her bed. Then, one afternoon, Danny brought Rhonda Rossi along to practice, smoking a fat
joint between them and making out with her on a beanbag chair between sets while Marilyn looked
on, turning away and swiping at her eyes, then stamping out through the sliding glass door to her
balcony overlooking McCree Creek, leaning over to far like she just might jump.
“That wasn’t cool, bringing that girl to practice,” I told Danny a day later as we played
Dodge Ball in the Lake Highlands Junior High gym.
“Man, ain’t she beautiful? Rhonda. Rhonda Rossi,” he said, closing his eyes, all dreamy
like he was singing the Moody Blues’ “Ohm, Ohm, Heaven.” He hefted the heavy ball from hand to hand, ready to lob it at Kenny on the other team across the basketball courts. “Look, man, don’t get me wrong, okay? Marilyn’s all right”—he grinned—“if you don’t mind screwing a scarecrow.”
I snatched the big leather ball out of his hands like an outsize pumpkin and hurled it as hard as I could at his winter-tanned face and missed, hitting the wooden bleachers behind him instead, Coach Boggs tossing me out of the game and saying, “Truitt, you idiot, don’t you know you’re supposed to throw at the other team?”
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Kenny was next, poor Kenny. About the time his mother’d been diagnosed with bone cancer in ‘67, he’d gotten himself and Debra Darly matching going-steady bracelets at the
Northpark Zales’ Jewelers with his name and hers etched forever in gold, money he’d earn stacking grain and dog food sacks for over a year at his stepfather Bill Sherrod’s feed and seed. Debra and he’d been going together ever since Lake Highlands Elementary, swearing they’d get married when they graduated from Lake Highlands High, sleeping with each other some nights since they were fifteen like a regular married couple—until Kenny found her fucking his brother B. J., the star quarterback of the Lake Highlands Wildcats, in the bed of their sniper-dead brother, Ray.
Next time Danny brought Rhonda Rossi along with him to practice, Marilyn waited till
Danny’d lit up another joint during break and started making out with Rhonda again on one of her beanbag chairs. Then she walked up to Kenny and surprised him with a long, breathless kiss in full view of Danny and Rhonda, grabbing Kenny by a belt loop at the back of his Levi’s and pulling him stumbling backwards into her bedroom for a quickie, then coming back out in ten minutes, just in time to practice the second set, and Kenny slipped his guitar strap over his shoulder and stared down at his feet, splayed like Charlie Chaplin’s, smiling a goofy penguin grin.
“Don’t you think you should, like, kind of take it easy?” I asked Marilyn after everyone had left practice that afternoon.
“My voice’s a little sore, yeah,” she said and laughed, her voice thin and reedy as Janis’s.
She lit a Marlboro from the one she’d been smoking and wheezed, skinnier by the day, her skin a pale yellow tinge, like cigarette tar.
“No, I mean with the guys, Marilyn. I mean, Jesus, it’s only been a month since my mother took you to the—”
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“Shut up!” she said, smoke exploding from her mouth in a cough. “You shut your fucking mouth!”
“Hey, I just don’t want you getting—”
“Knocked up? Who says it’s any of your goddamn business what I do, huh?” she said, a slurry of muddy words spilling out her mouth. “What? You think I’m a slut? Like you got any room to judge me? I’m on the pill, okay? Your mother got me on the pill.”
“Hurt,” I said, finishing what I’d meant to say. Then I left her apartment, rattling my bag of sticks.
Marilyn hooked up with Hunk not long after that and stayed with him for a month, Hunk sleeping over at her apartment most nights, his Hunkmobile stash stuffed into Glad sandwich bags under my old bedsprings in Marilyn’s bedroom, but I could never understand why she chose him,
Hunk with a face and voice like Fred Flintstone’s and a body like Frankenstein’s—maybe, I thought, because of all the free speed and acid Hunk gave her, maybe because Hunk made her feel safe in his giant’s shadow, big enough to beat up Bob Dobson if he ever showed up at her door unannounced, like all the times Hunk had beat me up on the practice fields until I asked him to join the band and he became my fiercest protector. But I couldn’t understand anything Marilyn did by then. Or what I did. What any of us did.
Those were crazy days. On a whim, after smoking and drinking and popping a few
Mollies, all of us loopy and hazed and wired as a high-power line after practice, Danny and Hunk and Kenny and Jack Doppler and I’d jump a high chain-link fence at Flag Pole Hill long after dark and climb the 800-foot WRR FM tower, microwaves buzzing our teeth and warming our blood in the icy wind as we sat huddled in our coats smoking joints and looking out at the Conoco
Building’s red Pegasus on the Dallas skyline, or we’d do Danny’s mad version of a Chinese Fire
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Drill in my truck going seventy or eighty miles an hour down L. B. J. Freeway: I’d let go of my steering wheel just long enough for the guy in the front seat next to me to take it and jam a foot down on the gas. Then he’d move over into my place as I climbed out the driver’s side window and crawled out on my belly across my truck cab, holding on tight as the wind hit me like I was an
X-15 test pilot, and then I’d crawl across the top of the cab and slip down, my feet and my legs wobbly as I slid back inside through the passenger-side window, and the next guy in the cab seat moved left and did the same drill.
We stole, I couldn’t count many times, stacks of new LPs or eight-tracks or cassettes or stereo equipment, cassette recorders and turntables and FM tuners tucked under our big coats at the Preston Center Sanger Harris, or musical equipment—an Echoplex and fuzz box and a Shure mike for Marilyn; cowbells, cymbal stands, high hat cymbals and a new Ludwig Speed King bass drum pedal for me; dozens of packages of coiled Ernie Ball Super Slinky Guitar Strings for Kenny and Danny and Fender Super Bass Strings for Hunk from Arnold Morgan Music or the
Northpark Mall Melody Shop—one of us always on the lookout, all of us walking out in a group like mob freaks when we were done, our long heavy coats bulging at our bellies and backs, our hearts kicking in our chests like Ginger Baker’s double-bass drum solo in “Toad.”
One time on our way back from one of our raids on Arnold Morgan Music, I complained about my truck with its bald, slick tires, and Hunk said, “No problem. Turn here.” I pulled up behind the big Firestone Tire Center at the corner of Garland Road and Northwest Highway.
When the tire installer had turned his back to go to the office, his air-drill spinning out a deafening whir like a 100-pound cicada, Hunk and Danny and Kenny and I all walked into the garage, checked the tire racks for the right size and hefted four heavy new tires with blue-tinted white walls, then dropped them into my truck bed as Hunk ran back into the garage one more time for a spare.
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And sometimes, after my father and I’d gone at it over some petty, stupid thing like my
not carrying out the trash or doing the dishes or cleaning up my room or fixing something at just
the moment he decided I should do it, I did my chores and played Mr. Fixit—the chair leg that
he’d broked at the kitchen table when he leaned back too far, his third J & B shattering on the
Mexican tiles; the hole he’d kicked in my bedroom wall when I snuck out one night to Marilyn’s
with Danny and Hunk and came back blitzed at four a.m.; the dog-chewed lamp cord that
exploded when Reveille bit down on it, kicking the dog, halfway across the living room, half-dead; the Dispose-All always stopped up with my father’s chicken bones; my mother’s fifteen-year-old
Kenmore washing machine always backing up sudsy water into the utility room—and I kept my head down like a leashed, kicked and tongue-lashed dog.
And when I was done, finally, finished with my stupid chores, I played my drums for hours, loud and hard, till I was sore all over and half-deaf and covered in sweat, my sisters shouting the whole time for me to stop. Then I jumped into my truck alone and drove to the local 7-11 to steal packs of Marlboro Menthols and SweeTARTs like Hunk, then sped off to Pecan Park down
the block from my father’s house, smoking one joint or cigarette after another, popping and
crunching sour sugar pills till my teeth hurt, ramming my F-100 like a tank into trees as pecans
clanked and clattered against the truck cab and windshield like the machinegun fire that mowed
down Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde.
And, after all the stupid things I did, I never once got busted.
Allyn had been staying over with Maddie two or three nights a week and most weekends
for a over month, saying she could never sleep or get her any homework done with all the partying
going on at her sister’s apartment, and she warmed up to my family, especially my old man, like a
long-lost daughter.
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At the supper table, she ate my mother’s gristly chicken fried steak and lima beans and
mashed potatoes with thick peppery gravy and laughed at my father’s Aggie jokes and all the
stories he told about his glory days in the mid-fifties as a Cadet in the Texas A & M Corps of
Cadets, all the times he’d hazed the Fish or his superior officers, putting their feet in buckets of
warm water while they slept till they’d pissed their beds, then caught him hours later, feigning sleep
in his bunk with a wet bucket or damp towel under his pillow, then giving him hard-flung licks
with hole-punched boards for every letter of his name—William Barret Travis Truitt, Junior—an extra lick for each space, an extra lick to dot each i and cross each t.
One night, as I turned kicking in my bed, unable to sleep, my little brother Nate snoring and grinding his teeth on the twin mattress next to mine, I heard my bedroom door open in the dark and stiffened in my bed, thinking it was my old man walking through the house barefoot again in the middle of the night with an ice-clinking glass of J & B, until I felt the cold air of the blankets and sheets being turned back, then a small warm body sidling in next to me like my sister
Maddie had done the long year after my brother Jesse’d died, saying, “Travis, can I sleep with you?” and then I touched a soft hip under a cotton nightgown, then long, straight hair slippery as oil.
“Allyn?” I said.
“Sssh,” she whispered and said nothing else, and she held me hard till we’d both fallen asleep.
During the band’s audition at The Cellar Club, we didn’t even make it through the first set, barely thirty minutes, not even getting started till two-thirty a. m. after the house band, dressed like David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, had played four sets to a packed house, and everyone had pretty much cleared out.
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At three a.m. on a rainy Thursday morning during a school week in early March, only two
black-jacketed bikers still in the dark club sitting in the shadows like cave-dwellers behind beer-
sticky tables, I had to play on the club’s house kit, an old Sonar set with duct tape everywhere on
the heads and cymbals thumping and plinking like I was playing on cardboard boxes and trash can
lids, and Marilyn was stoned and wired and woozy drunk on Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill, hoarse
as a crow from smoking day and night, running to the bathroom right before we started to throw up one of Hunk’s late-night Whataburgers—“Got to fatten up my little mockingbird,” he’d said—Marilyn refusing to talk to or even look at Hunk or Danny on stage when she came back,
pale as a thin-skinned gecko.
Then Danny and Hunk played too loud and Kenny didn’t play loud enough, and Hunk
and Marilyn had been shouting at each other ever since they’d come into the club twenty minutes
late, and now here they were going at it again between songs, something about being late again,
something about meth and needles and that loser Jack Doppler. We’d only gotten about halfway
through the third song, Janet Joplin’s “Down on Me,” Marilyn’s voice cracking and shattering all
the high notes, when the club owner ran out of his office at the back of the club, waving his arms
and shouting, “All right, Jesus, that’s enough,” and he walked up to the tiny stage, squinting at us
in the bright lights, and said, “How old’d you kids say you are? Christ, you couldn’t be over
sixteen, any of you. Ain’t it past your bedtime?”
Outside the Cellar at four a.m., Marilyn threw a tire-crushed malt liquor can at the
Hunkmobile in the rain as Hunk drove off spinning his tires out in the slick, blind alley behind the
club, her hair limp and wet and stuck to her forehead, her bangs dripping into her eyes.
“There goes my ride,” she said, her eyes swollen as dog ticks.
“Come on,” I said. “I’ll take you home.”
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She sat quiet, hunkered over in my truck most of the way to her apartment, sick to her stomach, warning me once to pull over downtown when she needed throw up at curbside, then pressing her cheek against the cold glass of the passenger window, unable to look at me, her face pale and gaunt, skull-shadowed under her heavy makeup as she smoked one Marlboro after another, blowing smoke out, then gulping cold air in through the dripping window crack, until she’d started to sniffle and swipe at her eyes again.
“God,” she said, “I fucked up.”
“Hey, you did fine, just fine,” I said over the scritch and slap of the windshield wipers, reaching over to rub her bony back while she cried, flinching away, then leaning forward to squint out at Central Expressway in the wobbling yellow headlights ahead of us, big semi-tractor trailers shooping past and blinding me in their rainy wake. “Jesus, did you hear me play?” I said and laughed, trying to cheer her up. “I sounded worse than this piece-of-shit truck.” I drummed on the steering wheel along with the syncopated beat of the windshield wipers and the engine’s ticking valve rockers, reaching across the seat to touch her arm as she flinched away. “Look, it’s no big deal, okay? We’ll get us another gig. We just need more practice, is all. Besides, who’d want to play in that dump anyway?”
“I’m fucked, Travis,” she said, staring out the rain-streaming windshield. “I’m knocked up again.”
I shot her a look. “What?”
“Don’t look at me like that.” She raised one shoulder of her leather coat, then the other, wiping at each eye and leaving little streaked epaulets of mascara on each shoulder, swallowing hard to keep from crying again. “That fucking Hunk, I knew I shouldn’t’ve told him I was—”
“What? I don’t get it. I thought you said my mother got you on the pill.”
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“She did. I just couldn’t buy more when I ran out. And I didn’t like the way they made me feel, kept forgetting to take them.”
“Jesus, Marilyn, what the hell were you thinking—?”
“Don’t yell at me, Travis, please.” She pressed her thin fingers into her eyes and shook her head again, wiping her nose and weeping into a leather-tasseled sleeve, saying she didn’t have any idea who the father was, Danny, Kenny, Hunk, maybe even my cousin Bobby Truitt.
“Bobby?” I said. “You were with Bobby?”
“Just once. Remember that night you brought him over from Richardson? He’s a sweet one, your cousin.” She was crying a good jag now. “God, I really thought I could make a go of it with him.”
“Hey, it’s okay. I’ll talk to my mom tomorrow, and she can take you back to the—”
“No. The doc said he wouldn’t see me again, all right? Not ever. ‘Don’t you ever come back, little girl,’ he said. You can’t tell your mom, Travis. Please. You got to promise me you won’t. She was so good to me and—”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said and tried to touch her shoulder again across the truck cab.
“I won’t tell anybody if you don’t want me to, and I’ll help you figure out something.
Everything’ll be fine, just fine, you’ll see.”
“God, easy for you to say,” she said and flinched away again. “I hate being a girl.
Nothing worse than being a girl. Anyway, it’s not your problem.”
“No? Well, fuck you,” I said. “You’re my friend.”
A little after 4:30 a.m., I drove into Marilyn’s apartment complex to drop her off but stopped my truck short of her building and shut off my headlights and windshield wipers, backing up fast behind a dumpster and cutting off the engine.
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“Shit,” I whispered and thumped the steering wheel with the heel of my palm.
Marilyn, asleep across the cab seat with her head in my lap, jolted up, bumping her forehead on the steering wheel. “What is it?” said too loud, rubbing between her eyes.
“Shhh.”
I pointed out at the blue and red lights flashing in her apartment lot cul-de-sac, two Dallas police cars parked behind Beck’s VW bus, their doors cocked open in the rain, their radios crackling and hissing at the bottom of the stairs to her apartment.
“My sisters,” she said, then reached for passenger door as I grabbed her wrist.
“Wait.”
A uniformed cop walked off the last step out of the enclosed stairwell carrying a heavy black garbage bag, lumpy at the bottom, so that he had to hold it with both hands swinging into his knees.
“There goes Hunk’s stash,” I said. “Oh, man.”
Another cop behind the first opened a black umbrella over Allyn and Sherilyn, both dressed but still half asleep, and he walked them down the stairs just in front of him, their long hair tangled, their eyes wild. Sherilyn shouted up the stairs, and then I saw another man stepping down behind the second cop from the top of the stairwell, a big man with thick black hair and a dark shine of beard and a pressed white dress shirt tight against his muscled chest and arms, a triangle of hair tufting out his open collar like the back of a hackling cat.
“Bob,” Marilyn said. “I knew that son of a bitch’d find us.” And she tried to wriggle free from my grip. “Let me go, will you? I got to stop him.”
“Yeah?” I said in a hissing whisper. “And how’re you going to do that, huh?”
“I told him I’d tell the pigs and that’s just what I’m going to do.”
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“And you think they’d believe you now?” I pulled her to me in the cab and held her wrists with both hands. “Listen to me. You’re busted, okay? Busted. You go back to that apartment now, and they’ll just take you to juvy. And then what’re you going to do for your sisters?” She pulled one wrist free and cuffed my chest hard with the heel of her palm, knocking the wind out of me, then wailed like a cat, and I put my hand over her mouth and pulled her to me and held her until she’d quieted down.
One of the cops glanced in our direction at the sound of Marilyn’s sobbing. I waited till he’d turned away to talk to other cop, pointing in our direction, then started my truck behind the dumpster and backed it up into an open parking space, turning around and driving fast out the apartment complex entrance, running a red light at the intersection and driving behind the abandoned Shell station where Marilyn had called Bob two months before.
Marilyn opened the passenger door and dry-heaved a long time, long bubbling tusks of spit drooling out her mouth to the pavement.
I handed her my handkerchief and she wiped at her mouth and nose. I reached across the cab to rub her back.
She palmed her mouth with my handkerchief and took in a breath, retching, trying to keep from throwing up again.
“Give me the keys to your apartment,” I said.
“What?” She coughed, retched again.
“Just give them to me. I need to go over there. Find out what the hell happened. Maybe they didn’t find Hunk’s stash, and you’re okay.”
“But they’ll catch you.”
“No they won’t. They don’t have shit on me.”
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She pulled out a key ring from her small blue-beaded purse, a pink plastic mermaid and a faded blue rabbit’s foot dangling from the keychain, and she fumbled for her apartment key.
“Stay here,” I said, her keys jangling in my hand. “Lie down in the seat till you feel better.
And don’t leave this truck till I come back.”
“You got to find ‘Phelia,” she said as I kicked open the driver’s side door. “She’s in heat again—”
“I’ll find her,” I said.
I ran across Plano Road in the downpour, then down a muddy embankment, tripping and sliding down to the creek on my ass in the dark rain, sinking into mud-sucking steps and almost losing a Hush Puppy along the slippery creek bank where Allyn and I’d hunted crawfish as kids with kite strings and strips of raw bacon. Then I crossed the creek and climbed up another embankment, my muddy shoes slipping under me as I grabbed at looping dead vines to pull myself up. Under Marilyn’s apartment balcony, I climbed up her downstairs neighbors’ patio fence and stood on the top fence rail, my legs wobbly under me, then reached up for the balcony edge, my muddy shoes slipping into a fall just as I caught the bottom balcony rail and pulled myself up, straining, my abs jittering in spasms.
I moved Marilyn’s sliding glass door, already open a crack, slow and quiet across its tracks in the steady hiss of rain, pulling back the dusty curtains an inch to peer into the dark apartment.
Not a sound, no one inside.
I stepped across the living room carpet with heavy, mud-bulky shoes and looked down through the window facing the empty parking lot, the police cars and Sherilyn and Allyn and Bob all gone now, Marilyn’s van sitting low to the asphalt on four flat tires. Allyn’s dumpster mattress lay overturned on the living room floor and, next to it, her cotton nightgown, wadded like a white
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cat curled into itself asleep. I thought it was Ophelia at first in the dark, then picked it up and
held it to my face, hoping for the clean scent of Allyn’s hair I remembered from the nights she’d
slept with me like a frightened child, but there was just the faint smell of laundry detergent and dry
cotton, and I pressed the cloth against my wet face and eyes.
“’Phelia?” I whispered, calling for Marilyn’s cat, feeling my way into her bedroom in the
dark, afraid to turn on the lights, my old box springs overturned against the wall with mattress stuffing scattered across the carpet in the blue shadows of the bedroom window.
Hunk’s stash was gone. All of it.
“Shit.”
At the sound of my whisper, the cat hissed a low, growing mewl and growl from inside the dark closet, and I flipped on the closet light and saw her hiding behind a liquor box full of Beck’s old LPs and shut the door fast behind me inside so the light and cat couldn’t escape.
Back at my truck behind the Shell station, shivering, my wet coat and shirt clinging to my back, I knocked on the passenger window, spitting rain, and Marilyn just lay there, dead asleep, sprawled across the truck cab’s long seat.
I panicked a moment and knocked again—“Marilyn!”—and she jolted up from my truck seat and rolled the window down.
“Scared the hell out of me,” she said, glancing around, her eyes wild. “My god, you’re bleeding. What happened to your face?”
“It’s just a few scratches,” I said, then, “Here. The cat’s in the bag.” And through the open truck window I handed her Ophelia, wrapped in Allyn’s dripping cotton nightgown, the cat’s head poking out of the tight-buttoned collar, her eyes wide, her ears back flat against her head, the
nightgown’s sleeves tied together around her like a straightjacket, knotted under her feet like a
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sack, the cat squirming and hissing and growling inside, frantic to get out, her claws poking through and ripping little tears in the wet cloth.
“Here’s a change of clothes,” I said and handed Marilyn a garbage bag through the cab window, clothes I’d unhooked at random from closet hangars. “Just hope they’re yours.”
“We all wear each other’s clothes,” she said and smiled, then palmed her eyes and hid her face from me as she cried.
In my truck, I laid my head on my arms across the steering wheel, my long hair dripping into my lap, trickling down my back like melting sleet, and I tried to catch my breath from running, shivering and exhausted from no sleep.
Marilyn unbuttoned the nightgown wrapped around Ophelia and tried to untangle her claws from the cloth. “What’d you have to go and tie her up for?”
I held up my bleeding wrists, covered in scratches, like the crisscrossed Xs of razor blades.
“Took me a while to catch her.”
“Sorry,” she said.
“No, I’m sorry. Sorry I ever brought my stupid friends over to your place. I should’ve known the pigs’d be looking for you. What the hell was I thinking?” I punched the metal dashboard and waved out my hand, sucking on a bruised knuckle. The cops had taken everything,
I told her, Hunk’s stash, the hand-blown blue-glass bong Danny’d stolen from a Preston Center head shop, everything, and the cops had left everything else, even Allyn and Sherilyn’s clothes and shoes. “None of this would’ve ever happened if I hadn’t—”
“It’s not your fault, okay?” Marilyn said, staring out at the rain, her voice flat, her face slack. The cat, free from the nightgown, clawed at Marilyn and clung, then lurched toward the open passenger window until Marilyn grabbed her by the loose skin at the back of her neck and
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rolled the window back up, rubbing and whispering into the cat’s cocked ear to calm her down.
“Take me to my dad’s van,” she told me. “I’m going back to get them. Back to Nacogdoches.”
I leaked out a sigh. “Your tires are all flat. Somebody cut them.”
“Bob,” Marilyn said, and she pressed her face into the ratted wet fur hackling at Ophelia’s neck. “God, Travis, what’m I going to do now?”
I looked at her straight on. “I’ve got a big test in four hours and I’m dog tired, but fuck the test, fuck school, fuck sleep. I’ll drive you there now. Just cross your fingers my piece-of-crap truck makes it that far. Think you could help me out with gas money? I think I got maybe two bucks in dimes and quarters.”
“Sure,” she said, hopeful for a moment, like she still had her whole life ahead of her.
In five minutes, we were rising up the entry ramp to L. B. J. Freeway. In another five, she’d be dead. It wasn’t anything I could’ve ever imagined happening and it happened so fast I couldn’t do anything to stop it. To stop her.
I merged onto the freeway in the heavy downpour, tired as hell but as wired like I’d just swallowed a handful of Hunk’s Mollies, and I took one of Marilyn’s Marlboros from her crumpled pack on the dash and lit it up, then handed it over to her, lighting up another for myself and smoking my cigarette fast, hot-boxing it till I was coughing, the red coal as long and pointed as the glowing tip of a soldering iron, as we planned what to do next.
Marilyn stared out the passenger window, her cheeks sunken into shadow, and I said,
“We’ll get them back, okay? It’s no big deal. Cheer up, for chrissake, will you? It’ll be all right.”
But she wouldn’t look at me. She just shook her head and closed her eyes, then pressed her face against the cool glass of the passenger window, her face dripping in the rain shadows of passing taillights.
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“Just imagine it,” I told her, trying to convince myself.
In just a couple of hours, I said, we’d be parking my truck a block away from her old house on Pearl Street. Then she and I’d be walking down the block and around to the screened-in porch in back, using her old house key to get into the back door, sneaking upstairs to Allyn and
Sherilyn’s rooms and waking them up—“Shhh, quiet now”—then sneaking them both out the back door, all of us running up the block, then piling, cramped together and laughing—one guy, three girls and a cat—into my truck cab, then stopping off at the Mabank Dairy Queen drive-thru after an hour on the road for a round of coffee and Dilly Bars to celebrate. Back at their old apartment by noon, I’d sneak inside again for their clothes and anything else they needed and toss it to them off the balcony, and then Marilyn could look for a new place where they could all stay, a safe place where no one would ever find them again.
“You think?” she said, her eyes filled with a light I’d hadn’t seen for years, the same lovely light in her eyes whenever I’d kissed her in her father’s dark tool closet.
“Sure,” I said and grinned. “Simple and easy.”
Simple and easy, say, as driving my truck a safe sixty miles an hour east on L. B. J.
Freeway, feeling tired but happy now, grinning at how easy it’d all be to make things right, then rolling down the driver’s side window all down the way without thinking to flick my sparking cigarette butt out into the rain.
A simple mistake.
At just the moment I rolled my window, turning my face into the cold rain, to shock myself awake a moment for the long drive ahead, Marilyn glanced at me and said, “Don’t, Travis!” but when I’d turn to ask her, “What?” the cat had already leapt from her lap and shot across mine, a streak of smoky fur, out through my open window and tumbling onto the freeway in the dark rain.
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I slammed my brakes into a long skirling skid, a speeding car whooshing past, its horn blaring as it hydroplaned in the next lane, Marilyn’s face and the sparks of the cigarette in her mouth flying into the dashboard. I grabbed her shirt and pulled her back into the seat and then turned one-handed into the skid, turning back with both hands gripping the steering wheel, then straightened the truck, pumping my brakes, hanging on as the truck fishtailed, until it had slowed enough for me to pull over to the gravel shoulder.
“Jesus,” I whispered, my going like a hummingbird’s.
My hands, my whole body shook as Marilyn shouted, “Phelia!” and I stuck my head out my window a moment, squinting behind us to look for a cat mashed onto the freeway or trying to dodge speeding cars, blinded by white rain slashing down into the oncoming headlights.
Marilyn tried to open her door and I grabbed her wrists and shouted at her, “You hurt?” and she shook her head, her shout lolling into a long wailing, and I turned on the cab light overhead to look her over, nothing wrong with her, not even a scratch from her cat.
“Stay here,” I said. “You hear me? Don’t leave this truck. I’m going after her.” Then, without thinking or looking before I stepped out, I opened the driver’s side door just as another car blared its horn past, splashing a low, flooded spot in the freeway and soaking me, almost knocking me to the pavement in its wake.
I ran as fast as I could around my truck, then along the flooding shoulder, splashing and tripping through pooled water in the dark, hard fat drops of rain like ice cubes battering my face and back, and when I’d gotten to the place I guessed the cat had jumped tumbling out, I looked along the shoulder and into the flooded muddy ditch flowing fast below it, not seeing the cat anywhere, then waited for an opening in the dawn traffic and sprinted across the highway in the dark, jumping the concrete median like a hurdle, then dodging traffic coming from the opposite direction, cars honking at me like I was a madman, and I ran fast to the other side of the freeway.
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The cat sat there in the grass just on the other side of the gravel shoulder, unharmed
somehow, her wet hackles sticking out like porcupine quills, hissing at me as I approached her, her
paw in the air, her claws extended.
“Come here,” I said and crouched down with my hands out. “Come on. It’s okay.” And
she streaked away from me, across a flooding muddy ditch, then shot halfway up a sloping grass
berm, turning her head back to glare at me with the slit pupils of her yellow eyes glowing in the passing headlights. “Come here, you crazy goddamn cat.” And I leapt after her, across the ditch, then up the berm, and pounced on her like a cat on a hamster. “Got you!” I grabbed her by the scruff as she slashed at my hands and arms and face. “Ouch! Son of a bitch!”
I held her squirming to my chest, clenching her front claws in one hand and her back paws in the other, and she bit at my wrists with her sharp teeth just as I jumped the flooding ditch to start back to my truck, shouting in the dark, “I got her, Marilyn! She’s okay!”
I couldn’t see Marilyn in my truck a few hundred yards ahead across both lanes of traffic, and I took my time waiting for a gap in the cars flashing past me on my side of the freeway, then walked fast across, squeezing the clawing cat to my chest.
But when I reached the concrete median I stopped dead.
Marilyn stood there in a middle lane of the freeway, her head back, her face up to the sky, rain pouring across her cheeks, her grackle-black hair dripping down her back, her eyes closed in the rain.
“What are you doing, Marilyn?” I shouted, blinking and spitting a spray of rain. “I’ve got your cat right here!”
Marilyn ignored me or couldn’t hear me over the horn-blaring roar of the Peterbilt swerving away from her in the middle lane, giant concrete sewer pipes stacked into a pyramid
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strapped to the long flatbed behind it, its headlights growing like the circle of stage lights in the
Cellar Club closing around her.
Then, staring at her like a lightning-struck tree, too far away to run to her in time, I guessed at what she’d decided to do, her cat and her sisters lost to her now, she must’ve thought, if only for a moment, one life inside her that she’d never wanted and another—her own—she didn’t want anymore.
“What the hell are you doing?” I shouted at her from the median. “Are you nutso? Get out of the fucking road!”
But as her wet cat clawed my eyes, she flew.
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III
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Eight Nacogdoches December 28 1988
’m halfway from Allyn’s house to the Fredonia Inn now, my head down in freezing IIrain, my toes numb in mud-sucking shoes, dog-tired and shaking so hard I have to hold onto myself, splash-kicking past Houston Street at four a.m., watching Bonita Creek rise up
and flood the park and playground on the slope down from Pearl Street. A single arcing swing
sings on its chains in the wind just above the red-clay floodwater as two cars prow toward me from
opposite directions like bass boats coming at each other head-on through the ankle-deep street
water, their headlights blinding me till I have to palm my eyes and look away.
The car ahead, a sun-faded yellow ’73 Pinto with a crumpled front quarter panel, slows to
a stop, but behind me I hear the hamster-cage rattle of a Volkswagen plowing water toward me
fast down the middle of the street, and I decide to get out of its way. Just as I turn, I see it, the
same blue Karmann Ghia convertible parked in front of Allyn’s house earlier, veering straight at me, its tires bumping up over the curb just as I run and dive from the tilted sidewalk into a tangle of a dead honeysuckle vines and azalea bushes.
The Karmann Ghia jolts to a stop, its left-side tires kicking up and skidding sideways on the sidewalk. The driver’s side window rolls down and a man shouts over the rain, “Stay away from her, you hear me?” Then the window rolls back up again and the tires plump and plash from
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the sidewalk back into the street as the convertible swerves around the Pinto and speeds off again, spraying a wave of gritty street slush all over me in the bushes, scratched and bruised on my back.
“Jesus,” I say and spit.
The driver’s side door of the Pinto at the curb pops on its hinge and creaks open. A bright yellow umbrella inflates like a birthday balloon, and then a short college girl with a mole in her eyebrow is standing over me on the sidewalk, staring down at me in the azaleas.
“You all right?” she says, dry as a newspaper in yellow plastic.
“It’s you,” I say, looking up through honeysuckle brambles, “the girl that let my dog out.”
“I may be small, but I’m not a girl anymore,” she says, her arms folded in her hooded yellow rain suit, calm as a clown fish hugging a bright reef in a hurricane.
“Sorry,” I say, still spitting street grit and sleet. “Not what I meant.”
“Mr. Truitt? What are you doing here?”
“Guess I could ask you the same.”
“Just got off graveyard at the Fredonia.”
“Lucky for me. It’s Tracy, right? This is a little embarrassing.” A half-frozen man on his back small-talking from the shrubbery.
“Who was that guy?” she says, glancing back at the Volkswagen’s wake lapping and sizzling against the curb.
“Wish I could tell you.”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say he was trying to run you over.”
“You think?”
“Here,” she says and reaches a hand down into the azaleas to help me out.
Afraid I’ll just pull her in on top of me, she’s so tiny, I say, “I’m all right,” then untangle my coat sleeves and jeans and torn and muddy shirt and pull myself out, ice-glazed branches
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crackling and snapping around me, slap-stabbing me in the face as I try to stand, a little feet shaky, my glasses cocked crooked on my face. I knock leaves and twigs off my shoulders and out of my dripping hair, smooth down my stiff wet jeans, almost frozen to my thighs. I straighten my rain- blurry glasses, wipe them with a squeaking thumb. Rub my arms furiously. Blow an explosion of white breath. Stamp my feet.
She steps closer and stands on her toes like a ballerina. Holds her umbrella high as I duck under it.
“Thanks,” I say, blinking sleet ice from my eyelashes.
“Where’s your car?” she says. “Your umbrella?” She reaches up to touch my swollen lips, then pulls her hand back. “What happened to your face?”
I blush, blood rising up from some hot and hidden place deep inside me and warming my face a moment, till I cover the scar zipping down my upper lip. “Had a wreck when I was eighteen—”
“No, no, not that. I meant . . .” She shakes her head under her yellow hood. “I’m sorry,
Mr. Truitt.”
“It’s okay. Long story. Just, please, for god’s sake, stop calling me mister, will you?
Name’s Travis.”
She looks down at her yellow K-Mart rain boots in the streetlight, her neck blushing the color of her bright cold cheeks. “Guess you could use a ride back to the hotel.”
“Sure,” I say, shivering hard now, my jaw locked over chattering teeth.
She turns to her car but stops, almost trip-slipping on sidewalk ice, then glances back at me. “You wouldn’t hurt me, would you, Mr. Truitt?”
I shake my head and sigh, pull out a dry triangle of shirttail tucked into my jeans and wipe my dripping, fogged-over glasses. “Hurt enough people, get hurt enough yourself, you lose start
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losing the taste for passing it around so much.” I put my glasses back on, try to straighten them on my face. “No. Guess I can’t blame you for asking, though, from the looks of me. Let’s just say I’ve been having a bad night.”
“You weren’t supposed to have a dog in your room,” Tracy tells me in her car after I’ve explained about my wrecked and sleepless night, my lost dog, my wrecked car and my split, fat lip.
She leans forward, squinting through the downpour as she drives her yellow Pinto up Hospital
Street to the Fredonia Inn, her crumpled quarter panel scraping a left front tire, a loose fan belt screeching under her car hood, her tailpipe bubbling and backfiring when her car bounces into a muddy pothole, her muffler dragging like a wedding can clattering in the flooding street.
“It was just for the night,” I say, dripping a puddle onto her cracked vinyl seat cover. “I wasn’t exactly planning on staying.”
“Who is she?”
“Who?” I glance at her and frown, thinking she’s talking about my dog.
“The woman,” she says. “The one you’re supposed to stay away from.”
“First girl I ever loved,” I say. “Maybe the only one, god forgive me.” I stare straight ahead through the dark, streaming windshield, so steamed over I have to wipe it with a wet sleeve.
All of a sudden, my eyes are leaking a little, I admit it, and I have to look away from her, kick the floorboard, my frozen toes sting-tingling in my Hush Puppies as the feeling starts to come back. I shake my head and want to kick myself. “I keep loving all the wrong people. Or maybe I’m the wrong person. There’s something wrong with me. Same damn pothole in the road I keep driving right into. Half the time, have to get the crap kicked out of me to see it, and then it’s too late.
Now I’m stuck here. Stuck in Nacogdoches.”
She drives past a tall stand of loblollies, rough red bark and green needles in gray mist.
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“But I love this town,” she says, a little too cheerful, nodding like the bobble-headed
Dachshund doll in her Pinto’s rear window. “It’s pretty, you know?”
“It is. Some of the best years of my life here. And some of the worst. But everywhere I go now there’s a memory I can’t shake. Too damn much history in this pretty little Texas town.”
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“For what?”
“If I hadn’t let your dog out—”
“It’s not your damn fault, all right?” I say, almost snapping at her, surprised at how pissed
I am at her all of a sudden, at myself, for apologizing for every stupid damn thing. “I just keep losing things, is all, and you were just trying to help.”
“I still can,” she says, pulling her car into the alley behind the hotel, stopping in front of my room. “I could help you find your dog. The least I could do, considering.”
“Look, you don’t have to—”
“I don’t mind, really. I want to help. It’s the holidays, you know? And my family . . . I don’t want . . . don’t have . . . anywhere else to go.” She stares off a moment, then sits up in the driver’s seat, beaming, a little too chipper for me. “Hey, I could use a little excitement, you know?
Gets kind of boring around here with all the students gone.” She hands me her yellow umbrella, its folds dripping into my lap. “Keep it. I’ve got a spare. Besides, there’s lots of them back at the check-in desk. People from out of town leave them there all the time. And never come back.”
Soaking in a tub of scalding water, the tips of my frozen toes and fingers tingling like sparklers till I can feel them again, the gray sunrise framing the hotel curtains in endless rain and sleet, I stand steaming from the tub, a hangover like double bass-kicks into the backs of my eyes as
I dry off, then bend down with my wadded, muddy shirt to wipe away my lost dog’s Gravy Train
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drool, dried on the bathroom tiles. In the cold hotel room, I’m throwing back the bed sheets and skimpy covers, shivering in my skivvies—hoping to get a few hours’ sleep before Tracy comes back at noon to pick me up in her wrecked Pinto—when there’s a knock on the door.
I jump in my skin and duck for some stupid reason, still half-buzzed and a little paranoid from last night. I wrap and tuck a rough dry hotel towel around my waist and press an eye to the peep hole. Shake my head and sigh. Open the door.
“What’d you run off for?” Allyn says, hugging herself and trying to smile, coatless, in her paint-spattered long johns, her knees trembling under her white-worn jeans. “You’re always running off.” That old cat’s eye flirt of hers sparks in her green-glowing irises, a crooked little grin on her face like nothing at all happened last night.
“Yeah? Like you’re one to talk,” I say, yawning till my jaw pops and creaks, aching and sore as hell, my eyes watering till she’s a blur.
All I have to do is blink once, and she’s already walked past me into my room.
“No, I’m not sore or pissed or tired or hung-over at all,” I say, tonguing the raw coppery cut in my upper lip. “Sure, come right on in. Good to see you, too.”
I glance out the door a moment and spot Allyn’s truck parked under the big magnolia drooping over the alley where Whô pissed himself in a puddle the night before. I half-expect a blue Kharman Ghia to come barreling right at me, freezing in my skivvies just outside the door in the breezeway, but I figure I’m just being paranoid again.
I turn into the room, and Allyn pushes me against the back of the closing door, which clicks shut with a hard bump of my skull behind me. She parts the towel around my waist and fishes between my thighs, cups my skivvies swelling into her icy palm, then turns up her open mouth to kiss me, her lips curling into their corners like the soft wet folds of a water lily. I close
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my eyes a moment and swoon, my heart going like crazy, until she exhales a haze of Stoli and
Marlboro and pot smoke into my face, and I turn my head away, heart-sick and woozy.
“Not like this, Allyn, okay?” I say and hold her away. “Please. What the hell are you doing here?”
“What’s wrong with you?” she says, her crook little smile infuriating. “You don’t want to fuck me?”
“For once, I’d like just to fuck you when you’re not drunk, you know? Has there ever been a time we’ve done it when you’re not? You and me both?”
“I forget,” she says, blinking, and stares off, her face slack, like I just struck her. Such a talent for forgetting.
“Truth is, I was on my way through town, thought I’d come see you, see how you’re doing, nothing more, hard as that is to believe. Maybe even to try again to . . . I don’t know. And now . . . god, I’m such an idiot.” My ex’s voice in my head: Every time you get around the girl you get stupid.
“I feel bad about last night, okay?” she says. “Is that what you want me to say?”
“Sure. So you can feel a little better, right? Give me a little pity-fuck for my wrecked car and U-Haul? For all my new dental work?”
“That’s cruel,” she says.
“All right. You’re right. I’m sorry.”
I jiggle a loose front tooth crown till it almost comes off in my fingers, then thumb it up again till it clicks back into place with a hollow crunch, the roots jangling around my gums like I just bit down on a cube of windshield glass. I sigh and open the door again.
“Look, Allyn, I think we’re done here. Why don’t you just go on home?”
She turns away from me at the open door and sits on the bed, hugging herself and rocking.
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I close my eyes and sigh. “Jesus, what now?” I lean back against the door and bump it
twice with my hip till it clicks shut again. “Your boyfriend damn near ran over me last night, you
know? On my way back to the hotel. Could’ve killed me. Man told me to stay away from you,
and I’m thinking he might be right.”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” she says.
“Yeah? So who is he? I deserve to know, don’t you think? Hell, the man owes me an
apology. And a little extra cash, to cover my damages.”
She shakes her head and rocks. “That man doesn’t apologize. Never has. Never will.
You’ll never see a dime from him. You’d be wasting your time.”
“I’m wasting my time now,” stepping toward her. “Who is he, Allyn? Somebody I know?
Something about the man seems damned familiar to me.”
She looks up at me, her round, stubbled skull cocked just so a like my summer-shorn
pup’s. “If I tell you, you won’t be pissed at me?”
I laugh. “Hell, I’ve been pissed at you half my life anyway. What difference would it
make?”
She looks down and away from me, stares down into her lap, presses her fingers into her
eyes. “It’s Bob,” she whispers.
“Who? What are you talking about?”
“Bob. Bob Dobson, you know.” Her faint, fake smile fails her, her face hardening into a
cheap plastic mask until she looks away.
I fold my arms and shiver a little. “You got to be kidding me.”
She shakes her head, wipes an eye, a smear of wet against her knuckles. “Wish I was.”
“Jesus, doesn’t that man ever go away?” I stare off a moment, goose bumps bristling along my forearms. “Haven’t seen that son of a bitch for years. The beard must’ve thrown me off. And
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he’s put on a little weight. But I knew it. Don’t ask me how. I just knew.” I shake my head and
pace in front of her at the foot of the bed. “I don’t get it, though. Why’d he trash my car? Punch
me out? Try to run me over?”
She laughs. “He thinks he’s my father. Thinks he’s protecting me.”
“Against what, Allyn? That’s nutso. Doesn’t make any damn sense. Something’s screwy here.”
“Yeah,” she says. “He thinks he’s in love with me.”
I stop dead in the middle of the room and laugh again, can’t help myself, my own blood like crumbling rust in my mouth, my gut knotting up like I just swallowed a Mason jar full of carpenter’s nails. “Can’t imagine you’d do anything to encourage him.”
“I didn’t!” she shouts and punches the mattress. “I didn’t do anything! God, you’re so cruel to me.” And then she starts to cry.
“Christ.” I sit next to her on the sagging bed, rub the hennaed stubble at the back of her neck, press the muscles knotting up along her shoulders like a bag of marbles. “Ah, Jesus, Allyn,
I’m sorry. Why didn’t you just tell me?”
“I was . . . afraid.” She looks down and away from me again. “Ashamed.”
“It’s all right. You can tell me now.”
“No.” She stares straight ahead, her wet face stunned and slack. “My god, Travis, I did a terrible thing.” She squeezes her eyes shut, crying now, her shoulders heaving as she presses her palms into her eyes. “It’s all my fault. If it hadn’t been for me, none of this would’ve ever happened. Now my whole family’s gone, all of them, and all that’s left is him and me.”
“That’s not true. I’m here. But I can’t help if you don’t tell me what the hell’s going on.”
“He called me Lynn!” she says, almost a shout, then punches the mattress again, a plume of dust rising into the cold room. “At my own mother’s funeral!”
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Then he took a fistful of her long hair at her waist and pulled her hard to him, she tells me, wouldn’t let her go. Right in front of everybody, she says. At the funeral.
“That’s not my name,” she told him, almost spitting in his face.
“But you look just like her,” Bob whispered, “just like my own Lynn when I met her.”
“She was never your Lynn,” Allyn said. “She was my mother.” Then Allyn pushed him hard away till he fell back against her mother’s closed cherry casket, almost jolting it off its green- felt viewing stand, a chapel full of Bob’s former congregation, mostly her mother’s friends in the choir staring at them both and turning to each other in the pews in hissing whispers, a handful of
Allyn’s long yellow hair torn from the root and hanging from Bob’s fist like cheap gold tinsel.
Allyn hadn’t been able to paint for months in New York, she tells me, stuck since her last show in Soho—one long year of work in a loft with three months’ back rent and only one painting to show, a real disaster—but after her mother’s funeral she started painting again.
Right after the service, she drove back to her mother’s house and shaved her head first thing—she didn’t know why exactly—bleeding black nicks like leeches dripping down her bare skull, her long hair fallen to the bathroom floor like cattails. Then she held her grandfather’s old straight razor against the side of her foamy neck, imagining the quick deep flick, the pumping spurt and spatter of jugular blood against the mirror that would end her family for good.
Just then, Bob shouted outside and pounded at the back door, rattling the windows, and she jumped, nicking her neck for real, then held her grandfather’s straight razor away from her bleeding neck and whispered, “No, not like them, never,” and she dropped the stropping razor to the bathroom floor, stared down at her hair coiled like corn snakes under her bare feet.
Instead of answering the door, she dead-bolted it and all the others downstairs, then ran upstairs and locked all the windows, began to paint right away, painted all night while Bob
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pounded and shouted, painted until he went away, then threw a rock through Marilyn’s old upstairs window the next night. Painted like crazy for weeks, one self-portrait after another, and couldn’t stop. Couldn’t eat. Couldn’t sleep. Didn’t bother to bathe for days or unpack her things from New York.
Ever since then, two months now, Bob’s been dogging her like a Doberman, following her in his convertible whenever she drove to the grocery or liquor store, spying on her through the kitchen window, kicking the front door and shouting for her to open up—“It’s my house, too!”— then chain-smoking in his Karmann Ghia parked at the curb at all hours of the night and day till she finally called the Nacogdoches County Sheriff’s Office.
“No wonder he’s gone crazy on me,” Allyn says. “He’s lost everything. Everything, he thinks, but me.”
She laughs, that strange, crooked smile back on her face again, then hugs and rocks herself hard at the end of the bed, the rest of the story spilling out of her like a flood of creek mud and clay.
It all started, she says, three months back.
First, Hurricane Gilbert, a Category-Five storm big as Camille in ‘69, blew through and swallowed up the Gulf of Mexico in September, grazing and chipping away at the coast like a radial saw, cutting down trees, tornados slouching from low clouds and touching down all over southeast Texas, high winds and lightning striking a hundred-foot loblolly in the back yard, sending it crashing through her mother’s roof in the middle of the night, her mother jolting up awake in a booming crash, then staring up and screaming at the treetop sticking down through her ceiling, the rain pouring down onto her in bed. She jumped up and ran, her night gown soaked,
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her feet tripping slippery down the hall, but she couldn’t find Bob in Allyn’s old bed upstairs, where he’d been sleeping for years. Couldn’t find him anywhere in the house.
Next morning, after she’d stayed up all night waiting for him to come home, filling pans, pails and trashcans with rainwater, he finally confessed to her in the kitchen. Yeah, sure, he’d been going out nights, he told her. What the hell’d she expect? To stay in that house with her? She could fix the roof herself for all he cared. He was leaving her.
Not till later that afternoon—calling everyone she knew—did her mother figure out he’d been sleeping with some Church of Christ chippie he directed in the choir, a divorced woman
Allyn’s age, a single mother of three girls, one of Allyn’s classmates from grade school who used to bring her dozen or so Barbies to the house for Allyn to play with when Bob first moved them all back from Dallas. One of the last remaining Melroses, old East Texas oil money going all the way back to the first well drilled in Oil Springs off Farm Road 226 fifteen miles east of Nacogdoches.
“The ungrateful bastard,” Allyn says, spit-bubbles bursting from her lips.
When her mother kicked him out of the house, she wrote him out of her will, too, then hung herself a week or so later like a damn fool, leaving everything to Allyn. Not that there was anything left but a house Bob had mortgaged to the hilt, with three years of back taxes and a big hole in the roof—that and thirty un-spayed and -neutered strays her mother’d been feeding outside for years all moving inside and taking over the house, descendants of Ophelia, Marilyn’s schizoid
Siamese.
The day after her mother killed herself, a Sunday, there was a big scandal at the Church
Street Church of Christ—people hissing from the pews while Bob read the “Song of Songs” from the altar, crying over his lost and beautiful wife, another suicide in a lost family of suicides, he said, all of them lost forever now in hell—but by the next morning Bob had lost his choir girl, too, and his job as choir director and church deacon. Now he was trying to get his lost inheritance through
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Allyn, she was sure of it. She’d told him more than once there wasn’t anything left—he’d pissed it all away—but he refused to believe her. And, still, he refuses to leave her alone.
“I wanted to tell you, Travis. I did. But I didn’t want to get you involved.”
“A little late for that now, don’t you think? I’m kind of stuck here. Stuck with a lost dog and a wrecked car.”
“I’m sorry. I told you I’m sorry. But I’m stuck here, too. Stuck with fucking Bob. Stuck with that big fucking house. A big fucking hole in the roof and no way to fix it. Stuck with fucking me.” She falls back onto the bed and stares up at the ceiling, a shining line of tears streaking into the whorls of her ears.
“Mama tried to call me in New York, for years,” Allyn whispers. “She’d say, ‘Allyn?
Honey, it’s your mama,’ and I’d hang up on her. She’d leave messages on my machine and I’d erase them all without listening. Didn’t want to have anything to do with her anymore. I just wanted to hurt her, Travis. Wanted to erase her from my life for good. Wanted her dead and now she is.
And I got just what I wanted. Just what I deserved.”
“Listen to me,” I say, taking her wrist. “It’s not your fault, and you know it.”
“No? You don’t know anything, Travis. Never did. You don’t know what people can do. What they’re capable of. Or maybe you just don’t want to know. You were always so simple.
So . . . naïve.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“No?” She jerks her wrist from my hand. “Tell me honestly, then. Tell me I didn’t kill her. Kill them all.”
I lean over her on the bed. “You didn’t kill them, Allyn. They killed themselves. And it’s nobody’s fault, least of all yours.”
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I thumb away the welling wet in her eyes, melting away like the ice of blue glaciers. She sits up on the bed, traces the scar down my cheek. Then she smiles like the first time I ever saw her, a twelve-year-old girl in a mermaid bathing suit holding a snapping crawfish, laughing and totally fearless, crawling with me through storm sewers and kissing me in the damp, echoing dark.
She takes my hand and traces a quick-bitten fingernail tickling down my palm. “Your hands. They’re so big. Such long, slender fingers.” She turns my hand over, feathers her fingers down my knuckles, till my hair turns up in the cold room. “And all these freckles. I keep forgetting. I could connect the dots on your body for a lifetime.” She laughs, her eyes a softening promise, her lips still wet and shining at the corners. “You were always good to me, you know?
And so good with your hands. So good at fixing things.” She blinks, her long, wet lashes fanning over her eyes like a soft breath over pilot lights.
Neon green. Blacklight blue. Irises like isinglass.
“Your eyes,” I whisper. “Jesus, they’re so pretty.”
“They’re just my regular eyes,” says and glances away.
She’s quiet a long time, sleet ticking against the hotel windows.
“God, Travis, what am I going to do?”
“For now? Sleep.”
She nods and I wipe her cheeks and stand from the hotel bed, cover her with sheets and blankets, then slip under them next to her, shivering and spooning into her back like the first time, when I was eighteen and she was sixteen and she’d sneaked down the hall from Maddie’s bed into mine in my father’s dark house in Dallas.
Drawn to her warmth, her sweet woman’s scent ripening under the sheets like wild onion and rose pedals floating on sea foam, I hear her sleep-wheezing breath, a soft whistle through her
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nose, and I touch my finger to my tongue, taste the salt-wet of her tears, and sleep, dream of
mermaids circling in a warm wading pool.
When I wake to soft knocking, I sit up in the hotel bed and glance over at Allyn, still
asleep next to me, then at the nightstand clock’s glowing red digits—11:53—and I reach for my still-damp jeans draped over the back of a chair.
Another knock on the door, and Allyn jolts up, reaches for me at the bedside.
“It’s okay. Just someone come to help me look for my dog. Go on back to sleep.”
Allyn hesitates, then lies back in the bed, folding her pillow over her face. I shake my head hard to wake—just three hours of sleep—then stand, put on my glasses from the nightstand, call to the door, “Just a second, Tracy.”
I step into and zip up my Levis like my old summer cutoffs half-dried in the air- conditioned cold, shivering, then step into my damp, cold Hush Puppies, without socks. Put my arms through a wool shirt wadded on the floor and button it up lopsided and leave it. Don’t think to look through the peephole when I open the hotel door.
“What did I tell you?” Bob Dobson says, a big-shouldered shadow in the doorframe, black beard and thick hair tufting out to gray from his white shirt like a hulking circus bear dressed for a
funeral.
He glances over at Allyn sitting up in the bed, her pillow fallen into her lap, her mouth
fallen open. Then he blinks at me hard and swings a hard-knuckled fist like a mauling paw, and I
hear a loud pop as my glasses fly out behind me and I fall onto my back, skid-burning my elbows
on the shag carpet.
Squinting up at the square black blur tottering in the doorway, I fist my bleeding nose, the
cartilage squeaking under the skin of my face like a rusty hinge.
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“Jesus, man, what’s your problem?” I say like a damn fool, blood spilling into my mouth, my voice muffled in my head like there’s batting stuffed into my ears. Then I kick the door shut in his face and stand, my head wobbling on my neck like a broken spring. I flip the lock and deadbolt, cup my palm under the salty hot dripping at my chin. Stagger, half-blind, to the phone on the nightstand.
Allyn crawls to me across the rumpled sheets as I punch in 0. She slips off a pillowcase and holds it up under my face.
I wipe my mouth with it, press the pillowcase up under my nose, screw a corner of the cloth into my left nostril to plug the flow of hot blood, then palm the phone’s bloody mouthpiece.
“You know,” I say, “this’s getting kind of ridiculous.”
She touches my swelling nose, a silver needle of pain like a worm burrowing in, then imploding, blinding me like a lightning jolt of static electricity, till my face fists, stinging tears pouring down my cheeks.
“Don’t do that,” I say and hold her hand away. “Please. Just find my glasses, will you?”
A man’s voice, so cheerful and earnest I want to shout at him, comes over the crackling phone line. “Fredonia Inn. How may I help you?”
“I need the Sheriff’s Office,” I say. “Now.”
I feel something like a sharp kernel of popcorn rolling around under my tongue and spit it out into my palm in a bubbling red froth. My front tooth crown come loose.
“Please,” I tell the clerk with a snaggletooth lisp.
Officer Rodewald, cockeyed as Marilyn’s schizoid Siamese, stares down at Allyn and me sitting at the edge of the bed.
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“You sure you don’t want to tell me who this man this?” he asks again for what must be the third or fourth time. His portable CB chatters and burps like an organ grinder’s monkey from the shoulder of his black leather coat, but it’s still impossible to tell if he’s asking me or Allyn with his eyes cocked and my glasses lopsided and loose on my face, held together in the middle with a
Band-Aid I found stuck to the linoleum behind the toilet. “Might save us all a lot of trouble.”
“Tell him,” I say and give her a little shoulder shove.
She says the man’s name, finally, looks away from us both. “He’s my stepfather.”
Rodewald huffs out a sigh, then shakes his head and frowns, squint-pinning Allyn with his left eye. “You talking about Reverend Dobson, the preacher?”
“Ex-preacher,” Allyn says.
“Yeah, heard about that. Bad enough you have to lose your mother. Any idea where he lives?”
“Last I heard he got himself a run-down efficiency in the student slums,” Allyn says.
“Don’t know which apartment complex. Don’t care to know.”
“I’ll look into it.” Rodewald bites his tongue between his teeth like a fifth grader as he writes down a few notes, his wandering eye floating around in his head like he can’t decide what to look at, Allyn, me or his dog-eared note pad.
“That man’s trouble,” I say. “Been pulling this kind of crap since we were kids.” I want to tell Rodewald more, but red rises up Allyn’s neck like a pox, and she shoots me a look that says,
Don’t you be telling this pig my business. “That man’s really starting to get on my nerves.”
Another knock on the door and we all jump, Rodewald stiffening in his boots, then thumbing up the latch of his creaking leather holster at his hip. He pulls out a finger-smudged .38 caliber service revolver.
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“It’s probably just—” I start to say, but Rodewald points a stumpy finger at me to shut me up.
“Better lie low,” he whispers. “I’ll get it this time.”
I pull Allyn up from the bed and into the bathroom, try to imagine how Rodewald can aim a handgun, much less sight a target in, then glance out into the room just as he throws open the door and holds his pistol double-fisted in Tracy’s face.
Tracy straightens up in her hooded yellow rain slick like a school-crossing guard, a gray wall of rainwater falling from the hotel’s eves behind her. She glances past Rodewald into the room, calm as a seeing-eye dog waiting at a curb for a speeding bus to pass. Then she spots me hiding in the bathroom doorway, my glasses like a broken wing across my nose.
“I could always come back later,” she says and smiles.
“Whô!” I shout from Tracy’s wrecked Pinto thirty minutes later, my voice croaking, reedy as a crow’s, my nose clogged with blood and toilet paper, my eyes watering in the icy rain and wind at the passenger window. Bruised and sore, hot and aching all over—a chest flu or my old smoker’s bronchitis coming on fast from smoking half a pack of Allyn’s Marlboros last night—I half-expect to hear barking and the jangle of expired dog tags as we slow past Allyn’s leaking
Victorian to check out my Volaré in the carport, still under a flapping tarp, red-clay creek water covering the old horse pasture behind Allyn’s house, almost up to the porch steps in Allyn’s back yard. Then I see it: all four of my tires, flat as fallen dough in the half-collapsed carport.
“Great,” I say. “Just great.”
Tracy turns left from Pearl Street a block north, then down the gravel-popping drive of the Nacogdoches City Animal Shelter at the dead end of Rusk Street, backed up, like Allyn’s house, less than a hundred yards from Bonita Creek. “I don’t get it. If the man wanted us to stay
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away from each other, why’d he strand my car at her place and her truck at mine? Doesn’t make any damn sense.”
Tracy says nothing, just shoots me a look that says, Maybe you were asking for it.
Blinking like a raccoon, the shadow of two new shiners rising under my eyes like blue smears of charcoal, I cough, my arms folded tight around me as chills drill icicles into my bruised bones. I try to hold back a sneeze, my nose throbbing and glowing like a hot Christmas bulb.
“All right, okay,” I tell Tracy, holding up my hands. “My own damn fault.”
By now, Officer Rodewald’s probably dropped Allyn off at the North Street Firestone to get her truck towed in and a new set of tires air-wrenched on. All her bald truck tires, like mine, ribbon-slashed with a box cutter’s knife.
“Know what’s good for you,” Rodewald whispered to me in the hotel doorway fifteen minutes before, both of us hypnotized by Allyn’s hip-swaying walk to his patrol car, “I’d stay away from her. Safer for the both of you, you know?”
Tracy slows to a stop in the muddy drive, her peeling wipers screaking fat streaks across her windshield as I stick my head out the passenger window and ask a stub of a man in his mid sixties, “Hey, what’s going on here?”
“Old Bonita Bayou’s rising again,” he says, a scrawny wet pug in his stumpy arms snorting and wheezing, blinking behind teary black eye-crust in the rain. The man’s chest hair is white, his skin as pink under his wet uniform shirt as the dog’s bare belly, City of Nacogdoches Animal Control sewed across his linty shirt pocket, strands of thinning silver hair rain-plastered down over his forehead. “City says this place’s built in a hundred-year flood plain, but this’s been happening twice a year ever since I been working here. And that’s going on twenty years now.” He grins grimly and blinks, a drop of water trembling from the snub of his nose. “Curse of the
Nacogdoche.”
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Flood water’s crept up to the animal shelter’s foundations like a lake, a five-foot-high rain
skirt and flood line from previous floods staining the white concrete block red. Four other
employees wearing army ponchos and hooded rain slicks the color of leaves—all students from
Stephen F. Austin State—run into the shelter, then rush back out, packing and loading wet cats
and dogs into the back of two Animal Control vans as a backhoe shovels creek-bottom clay against
a damming berm.
“In you go, missy,” says the stubby man as he lays the shivering pug onto the van’s front
seat. He cleans the black gunk out of the dog’s eyes and wipes his thumbs across the button-
bulging belly of his wet shirt, then turns to me, looks up and blinks at the fat raindrops plopping
in his open eyes. “Weatherman says more rain and ice, maybe snow. We’re kind of busy here,
son. Can I help you?”
“Lost my dog last night,” I say. “Mind if we take a look inside?”
“Can you swim?” he says, a grim wet grin over his yellow teeth, then shakes his head.
“Nothing came in last night I know about, but you’re welcome to see what we got. Truth is, if you got the time, we could use some help.”
At the back door of a City of Nacogdoches dog-catcher’s van, rain and sleet prickle and pelt my shoulders like ice picks as I palm my eyes to look inside the fogged back window: a Chow
mix with a blue-freckled tongue and a Doberman both growling at each other, teeth bared; a
German Shepherd pup and a yellow Lab huddled together in a corner; a Pomeranian and three
shivering Chihuahuas all snapping and barking in my face, the warm stink of wet dog rising out of
the van like a natural gas leak.
I splash through red mud to the back of the van parked next to it: mostly cats inside,
snarling and hissing, a fat tabby kitten claw-stuck and dangling from the van’s chicken wire screen,
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till I unhook her claws and she falls back inside, mewling. I cover my nose, hold back a sneeze, but then I blow a big wad of toilet paper like a blood clot out one nostril, lying in the mud at my feet.
Inside the shelter, Tracy follows me, splashing through two inches of red-clay creek water, dodging a rainbow slick of piss and dog turds floating around like Tootsie Rolls, dogs barking and wailing through chain-link cages in their long concrete dog-runs, wading through water up past their paws like they’ve been shackled inside a sinking slave ship. I check behind the chain-link gates of the dog-runs, most of them empty already, then unlatch and open up one of them, reach inside for a dark chocolate cocker, wet and shivering in my arms, yapping high-pitched barks into my ears like cracked tweeters, the hair from her long ears matted with blue ticks and cockleburs.
Just as I turn to take her outside, a familiar bark stops me dead and I turn around.
“Whô?” I shout. Then I rush, splashing down to the last cage to look in.
A wiry-haired terrier with asphalt-black eyes and a silver muzzle barks at up at me, then slinks, whimpering and growling, back into the shadows of his dog run, his back left leg in a melting plaster cast that’s unraveling around his haunches, his tail curled between his hind legs like a whippet’s.
Tracy runs up behind me, kicking a spray of water against my ankles and shins.
I stare down at my wet jeans and Hush Puppies, my toes squelching muddy bubbles.
“My dog’s not here,” I say.
She touches my arm.
“Rachel,” I say, “would you . . . ? Will you—?”
“My name’s Tracy,” Tracy says.
“Sorry.” I shake my head hard like a yellow jacket just stung my ear. “You just look a lot like someone I loved once.” She blushes as I hold out the chocolate cocker. “Here, take her out for me, will you?”
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Tracy nods and says, “Sure,” and I drop the dripping dog into her arms, watch her splash
down the long aisle of dog runs and outside. I unlatch and step into the cage of the black terrier,
hunkered back into the shadows, barking at me just like my own lost dog, then soft-talk him to
me, finally, petting him under the knotty mats along his neck, then pick him up in his heavy wet-
plaster cast to carry him out as I duck under the cage door. I’m splashing down the long hall of
dog-runs and cages, then past an open door to my right, when the stubby old man I saw earlier
says inside, “Hold up there, son. That one stays.”
“What?”
I turn to the old man in the exam room to my right, his wet dress shirt stuck to his pink
stomach like Saran Wrap stuck to a salad bowl, his belly bulging out over a stainless steel exam
table, up to his calves in red water.
A mangy black stray like a coy dog, its ribs arcing like a birch-bark canoe under mats of
scaly fur and raw open scabs, lies on the exam table, deflating in front of me, its eyes rolling back,
its tongue lolling out, its head drooping, then hanging, over the brushed-steel table, as the old man thumbs a syringe plunger, then pulls a silver needle from its leg.
“There’s not enough room for that one,” the old man says in a rush, nodding to the terrier in my arms, laying the coy dog straight out on the table and petting its eyes closed. “Vets around town’ll only take in a few—and only the healthy ones.”
“What about Tidmore?” I say. “He was always taking in—”
“Tidmore’s dead four years now, son, sorry to say. Stroke in ’86. Keeled over trying to save a car-struck cat. You didn’t know?”
I shake my head. “I’m not from around here anymore.”
“Dog you got there’s been here over a month. Well past his time. Did my best to adopt him out, even broke a few rules to keep him here so long, but nobody wants a gimp old stray.”
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The old man’s red eyes go wet like he’s talking about himself as he lifts the coy and carries it, its arched back sloping across his big forearms, to the Formica exam room counter next to the stainless steel sink behind him. Then he lays it there, its eyes rolled back white, heavy and wobbly in its bones like a hot water bottle grown furry, next to three other dogs lying limp and lined up in a row. “Got seven shelter dogs of my own at home and not a bit of room for one more. I’m sorry.”
“No,” I say. “Maybe I could take him—” But I stop myself, shake my head, realize I don’t have room either, not even a home to take my own dog to, wherever he’s run off to, not even a way to get there now, just another dog I came here to find, and that only if I’m lucky.
“Better hurry now,” the old man says, reaching out for the black terrier in my arms as I step back from him, wading up to my ankles in icy water rising. “Can’t save them all, you know?”
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Nine Nacogdoches 1978
ould . . . ?” I asked Rachel the day Maddie moved into Sean Baggett’s ““WWduplex next door, the day my dog, Whô, made his first great escape. “Would you—?”
“Would I what?” she said, laughing, trying to catch her breath, her lips chapped, her face splotched pink, flush from our lovemaking that morning. “What are you doing down there? Let go of me, will you?”
I was naked on my knees in front of her, her tiny, hot hands pressed into mine, my bony knees trembling on the heart-pine floor, hard as a pew in a confessional. She stood naked in front of me, in front of our bed, something I’d pulled the month before from a dumpster at the rich students’ townhouses down the block at the corner of Mitchell and Pearl.
Whô was scratching and chewing the other side of our bedroom door now, trying to get in, snuffling dust at the door crack, bumping his skull against the hollow core door hard like a bull against a rodeo chute.
“Hey, cut that out, dog, will you?” I shouted at the door. “Go away! Get!”
Thirty minutes before, he’d been watching us in bed when I’d booted him out of our room and shut the door behind him.
205 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
“Jesus, Travis, does he have to do that?” Rachel’d said. “Your dog’s driving me crazy.”
Sitting up on his haunches at the foot of our bed, he’d been licking Dido’s arched spine,
the hair along the cat’s neck and head sticking straight up like a Mohawk slathered in saliva, the
cat’s eyes rolled back into her head.
The dog was the only thing we ever argued about: trying to nose his way out the latched screened door; jumping up onto our Salvation Army couch, into our dumpster bed, East Texas sand folded into our gritty sheets; following Rachel around the house and sniffing at her ankles till she accidentally stepped on him, howling; keeping her up half the night as he kicked at fleas under his collar, his dog tags jangling like silver coins for Judas.
“Would you . . . marry me?” I said, finally getting it out. On my knees. The only way I could look straight into her blue eyes, freckled with flecks of green.
“What kind of question is that, Travis?” Rachel said. “Would. Would? Sounds like you have no confidence I would.”
“I got confidence. I got plenty of confidence. You want confidence?”
“Yes, I do, especially from such a big tall guy like you.” She grinned dimples into the corners of her mouth, shook her head, the permanent curls of her toast-colored hair bobbing like watch springs. “Why’re you in such a big hurry to get married anyway?”
“I’m not in a hurry,” I said, my naked knees throbbing on the hardwood floor. “I just want you in my life, is all.”
“All right,” she said, her face was pretty as a Dresden doll’s, “if you have the will, then say it.”
“Will? What do you mean will?”
“Will, not would, okay? Is that so hard? Please?”
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“That’s it? That’s all you want? Jesus, woman, you’re a lot of trouble.”
She folded her arms under her small breasts and smiled. “Say it.”
“All right, then. Jesus. Will. Will you marry me?”
“I’ll think about it,” she said, laughing, and fell back bouncing to the bedsprings.
The first month we’d been living together, the Whô dog, completely recovered from his last run-in with Butch the Doberman, his belly a mapmaker’s paradise of scars, had almost gotten himself killed three times trying to escape again.
The first week, Rachel’d caught him snacking kitty-Snickers from the litter box, shouting,
“You’re sick, dog, sick!” then shouted at me, “That’s it, Travis. It’s either me or that damn dog, I swear to god,” till I’d put him outside, chained him to an iron spike I’d pried from a telephone
pole, hammering it into the chain’s last link, then down into the hard clay at the roots of a red oak
shading the front of our duplex.
“What’s wrong with you, dog?” I asked him. “Gravy Train and dog biscuits not good
enough for you?” I petted him between the ears, wiped the black crust from his eyes.
Talking to my dog again.
After trying to pry his collar off his head for half a day while we were in class, he’d
succeeded only in scratching his ears raw, then ran to the end of the chain a hundred or more
times, almost dislocating his neck, finally jerking the spike out of the ground and dragging it down
Mitchell Street till it caught in a storm drain at the street corner, and cars screeched to a stop, honking at him for half an hour till I found him panting and barking in the middle of the intersection at Mitchell and Pearl.
After that, I’d chained him to the red-oak trunk, its roots popping up from the tilting
sidewalk like knuckling burls, but he’d wrapped himself so tightly around the tree while Rachel
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and I were off to classes again that he was passed out and strangling when I got home, the chain pressing so hard into his windpipe he was wheezing and coughing like an old man smoking his last
Lucky, the chain cutting off all the circulation to his back legs so he’d limp for over a week.
“Worthless damn dog,” I said. And I spent half an hour trying to un-kink the chain crucifying him to the tree.
I tried to let him into the duplex for a few hours the second week, but in an hour he’d already torn tooth holes into Rachel’s new K-Mart comforter and shredded her new curtains, almost breaking his neck when he’d perched, teetering a moment, on the back of my old green
Salvation Army couch, trying to dive straight through the front window.
If I hadn’t been pouring coffee in the kitchen at just the moment I heard the glass shatter, he might’ve cut his ears off in the star-hole of glass as he tried to jerk his head back inside. Later that day, Band-Aids like bicycle tire patches stuck to his ears, he knocked over and killed my prized elephant’s foot plant at the window trying to punch out the duct-tape I’d patched the window hole with, a rectangle of potting soil and vermiculite mounded on the hardwood floor like a grave.
“You’re a damn lot of trouble, dog, you know that?” I said, sweeping up black soil as he grinned up at me, panting, till I chained him out front again.
The third week, I put him out back, onto a five-by-ten concrete patio surrounded by a rain-grayed cedar fence just outside our bedroom’s sliding glass door, but he scratched and gnawed and tore out the sliding-door screen till his muzzle was bloody with rust, then scritched his glass- clattering claws at the glass for two days and nights till he finally gave up and let Rachel and me sleep for a little while.
Next morning, I peeked out the curtains to see that he’d gnawed a hole where the bottom slats of the fence lapped the edge of the patio’s concrete slab, and he was jammed kicking into the
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hole up to his hips, his flea-bitten ass sticking out like a breech birth, till I pried up the slats where he was stuck and bought three new boards at the lumber yard, along with two dozen heavy cinder blocks I wired together on both sides across the bottom of the fence.
“That should do it,” I said, popping cinder-dust off my palms after I’d worked half a day when I should’ve been reading Paradise Lost and practicing my paradiddles. “Now, try to get out of that.”
When I woke up the next morning, it was quiet outside, too quiet, so I opened the patio curtains.
He was gone. No dog anywhere, just a humped nest of pawed-together pine needles where he’d been sleeping.
“Rachel,” I said, turning to her, still half-asleep in our dumpster bed, her cat sleeping rumbling purrs into her stomach, “did you let the dog in last night?”
“No.” Sleep creased her face like the scar running down from my cheek to my chin, and she reached over her sleeping cat to the nightstand to light up her first-of-the-morning joint.
“He’s not my damn dog, okay?”
I rushed barefoot in my skivvies out to the cold concrete patio and looked everywhere but could find no gnaw-holes or loose boards, the concrete blocks still anchored with bailing wire to the base of the fence in a tight, even row.
I stood there, rubbing at rough jaw stubble, stumped, then rushed back into the house, stooping down to my knees to look for him, curled asleep under the bed or couch—but still no dog. Then I ran around the house looking in his usual hiding places, in closets, in open cabinets, behind the shower curtain in the tub where he hid during thunderstorms, till I glanced out the front window, still duct-taped and waterproof tight, and saw him high-tailing it up the hill on
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Mitchell, right in the direction of semi-tractor trailers whumping past each other on North Street,
US 59, the main highway north from Houston through Nacogdoches.
Three times that day, he got out of the patio fence again—I couldn’t for the life of me
figure out how—and I checked each warped-pine slat again to see if it was loose, then hammered
each slat flat with finishing nails till the fence was tight as the hull of a dinghy.
But five minutes after I’d slid the door shut the third time, he was gone again.
“Jesus, I don’t get it. Poof! Just like that,” I told Rachel. “Dumpy little mutt couldn’t
any more hurdle that fence than I could. How the hell’s he getting out?”
“Not my dog,” she said in her pinched Betty Boop voice, her tiny fingers fluttering in the
air as she practiced Gershwin show tunes on her upright piano.
When I caught him again five minutes later clicking his claws up the cracked asphalt along
Mitchell Street again, I put him back inside the patio fence and slid the scratched glass door so
hard it rolled bumping off its aluminum track. Then I spied on my dog through a part in the
curtains.
“Jesus,” I said a moment later, my mouth fallen open.
I ran out front, almost tripping over the hissing cat in the hallway, pregnant and wide as a
shoebox full of kittens, and I caught him again out in the middle of the street, feinting and
dodging me like a quarterback dodging a hulking tackle, then carried him squirming in my arms
back out to the patio.
“Rachel? Rachel, come here. You got to see this.”
On the patio—the sliding glass door shut and latched behind him—the dog looked
around and didn’t see us peeking at him from behind the curtains. Then he strutted up to the
right fence corner, looked up like Underdog about to leap to over tall buildings, then bounded left in a deft zig-zagging Z, up to the fence’s bottom right two-by-four cross rail, then up again right
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three feet to the next cross rail, then up again left another foot and right over the top of the
fence—one, two, three and free again at last.
“Did you see that?” I said. “Amazing.”
Rachel gave me one of her smug Dido smirks and shrugged, opened the curtains with a
dust-popping slap, then folded her arms and blinked at me hard, the eyelashes of her right eye
twitching like they always did when she was pissed or unimpressed, fluttering like a moth with a
wing pulled off.
“If I ran off, would you run after me like that idiot dog of yours?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Want to know the truth, Travis? I think you care more about that stupid dog of yours
than you care about me.”
“Hey, now. That’s not true, Rachel, and you know it. He’s not stupid at all. You just
saw what he did. He’s smart. Figured out that little stunt all by himself. Hey, wait a minute.
Rachel? Rachel.” But she was gone again, back to the living room couch, to memorize Maggie’s
lines in her big scene with Brick from “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”
“Think you’re real smart, don’t you?” I told the dog moments later, grinning up at me in
my arms after I’d caught him hiding from me under Rachel’s green Gremlin in the carport, his fur
slicked back with oil pan black as I carried him back through the duplex and out to the patio
again. “Try to get out of this, you sneaky little shit.” Then I snugged his collar, latching his front- yard chain to it and weaving the chain through the double holes of two concrete blocks, then wrapping it around a four-by-four fencepost, nailing it there through the last link, bending the
heavy framing nail over and hammering in the head till it was buried in battered wood, whacking a
blood blister rising under my thumbnail.
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Shaking out my hand, I heard the distinct oil-churning rumble of Asadollah’s pulling up in front of our duplex said, “Now, please, dog, relax, will you?” looking at my watch and realizing I’d wasted half the day chasing after a dog. Maddie’d be pulling up in a U-Haul truck any minute now, I remembered, asking me to help her move our dead grandmother Hanny’s heavy furniture into Sean’s duplex next door, and I ran through the house to the front door.
“Jesus, Maddie, do you have to move in with the guy?” I’d asked her at Allyn’s house the weekend before while Allyn was off staying at a friend’s, Allyn’s codeword for Boyfriend of the
Month. “Half the time I see you and Sean together you’re fighting, and the other half he’s sloshed and stoned out of his kazoo.”
“He’s working on that, okay? He’s really cut down since I we started going out.”
“Yeah, I can see that.” I tried not to laugh, didn’t know how to tell her what I’d seen one rainy Friday night the weekend before. “Look, Sean’s got a drinking problem, Maddie. Reminds me a little too much of you know who, and the guy seems a little confused about his—”
“What?” Maddie said, folding her arms.
“Nothing,” I said. “Forget it. Why don’t you just stay over at Sean’s place while the two of you are getting along and stay here the rest of the time at Allyn’s when you’re not? At least till you get to know the guy a little better. Allyn’s place is rent free and you can still—”
“Keep an eye on Allyn for you?”
“No.” I blushed the color of Sean’s cheap sangria.
“Like it or not, Travis, I love him, okay? Do you always have play to big brother? I’d really appreciate a little goddamn support from you, for once.”
“You’ve got my goddamn support. You’ve always had my goddamn support.”
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“Since when? ‘Marilyn’s the one with the voice. Don’t let Maddie sing. Maddie sounds like a strangled mangled monkey.’”
“Did I say that?” Maddie nodded, her blue eyes shooting acetylene flames into mine like our father’s.
“That was a long time ago, Maddie, and you proved me wrong. Big time.” I stared off and hesitated a moment, trying to say what I’d come there to say.
“I’m thinking about asking her to marry me.”
“Who, Allyn? Come on, Travis. She’d never marry you, and you know it. She told me she’d never marry anybody, ever. She got damn her tubes tied at twenty, for chrissakes.”
“I was talking about Rachel,” I said.
“You’re kidding me. Shouldn’t you wait awhile? I mean, I like Rachel—she’s a cute girl and all—but I’ve been hearing rumors about her around the theater department lately.”
“Yeah? Like what? If you’re talking about her and that pretty-boy bi-guy who builds all the sets, I know all about it, okay? What’s his name? Long black curly hair to his shoulders? Saw him strutting around with Allyn one night at the Ale and Quail.”
“Everett Lee Degaulier, Junior,” she said, swan-necked and prissy, mocking Everett Lee’s formal, lilting Highland Park inflection.
“Rachel told me all about him. No big deal. Just some drunken fling she had. A big mistake, she said, and that was over year ago, before I moved here.” I shook my head, tried to shake off what I’d seen last Friday night in the rain. “Jesus, that Everett really guy gets around, doesn’t he?”
“He’s been cast for Brick and Iago, you know?” She didn’t sound too happy about it.
“Yeah, Rachel told me.” I tried not to think about how Rachel’d told me, with a crooked little grin on her face, tried not to think of Everett trying to feel her up as Maggie the Cat in a
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stage bed during rehearsals, then plotting against Maddie’s Desdemona and her afro-haloed
Othello, played by our thumb-thumping bass player, Korrence Roshelle.
“Everett gets all the good parts,” Maddie says, “but the guy can’t act for shit. He’s even
worse than Rachel—god, don’t tell her I said that. Professor Duncan’s got this thing for him, you
know? Randy old queen following him around like a panting pup, it’s enough to make you puke.
But Everett’s got all that Highland Park money, right? Always buying expensive props for
Duncan’s frou-frou sets. Stop it, cat!”
Marilyn’s cross-eyed Siamese Ophelia—an old cat by then, twelve, thirteen years old—was
popping dust from the arm of the couch with her claws and grumbling like a lioness, and Maddie
grabbed her and pulled her, her long body stretching out like she was a rubber chicken, till her
claws popped a tear in the fabric, a long thread caught on a claw till it snapped. Then Maddie
tossed the old survivor high into a sloping arc till she landed on her feet, her paws thumping the
heart pine floor, her claws skittering and sliding as she shot across the living room floor into
Allyn’s kitchen.
“Allyn thinks Everett’s so good-looking—just like Gino Vanelli, she says—but I think
he’s just plain mean,” Maddie went on. “I don’t know why Sean hangs out with that jerk.”
Maddie took a hit, like she was sucking in spaghetti noodles, then handed me the wet roach we’d
been passing back and forth, squinting her scalded eyes and squeaking out leaking smoke. “Sean’s
pissed he didn’t get the part of Brick. You ask me, Sean’s much better looking, and a better actor
by a mile. I’d take Sean over Everett any day.”
“Yeah, but what if Sean took Everett over you—?” I started.
“What?” Maddie slapped my knee so hard I dropped the roach sparking into my lap.
Then she fell into a fit of coughing and sneezing, allergic to cannabis and cat dander.
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“They’re just friends, Travis,” she said, laughing and coughing like Dido retching up a hairball into one of my Hush Puppies.
“Yeah, I’d say so.” I rubbed the sting from my knee. “Jesus damn, Maddie, that hurt.”
She’d coughed herself into a stuttering hiccup, then took in a breath and held it, folding her arms and glaring at me, red-faced, hiccupping again, like she used to when our father chased her around the house, whacking candy stripes onto her bare ankles, her electric red hair so wild and frizzy in the East Texas humidity it looked like a bonfire at a Girl Scout’s Jamboree. “So what are you trying to tell me, Travis?”
I rubbed out a glowing pot seed sparking at my zipper, burning a rising water blister on my pinkie, and then I told her.
I’d just gotten off work from the Hot Biscuit at four a.m. the Friday before, fumbling with my car keys in the dark, trying to feel for the keyhole to our duplex door, rain beading up and dripping from my hands and face, still greasy from deep frying a hundred orders of chicken fried steak all night, when I heard a car door slam in the flooding dark street behind me and saw Sean run, stumbling and weaving, up the dark sidewalk between our duplexes.
“Jesus, Sean, you scared the hell out of me,” I said, glancing back at him. Then I did a double-take and turned: He was naked and wet as a parboiled chicken escaped from a bubbling pot. “What the—”
“Man, I’ve always wanted to do that!” he said, his breath a burst of white steam, laughing hard and rubbing his arms, running in place in front of his duplex door facing mine, his bare feet slapping cold concrete, his whole body dripping and studded goose-pimple blue in the dark as he shouted out into the downpour, “Hey, I forgot my keys!”
“What the hell have you been doing, Sean?” I said, dropping my keys jangling to my feet.
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“Driving naked!” he said. “With the top down!”
“It’s almost November, Sean. And it’s raining. Case you hadn’t noticed.” I shivered a little just looking at him.
“Yeah, and it’s great, man. You ought to try it.”
He and Everett Lee had been shooting dinking holes into highway signs, too, he said.
“Jesus, what if the cops pulled you over?”
“Just out for a drive, honest injun, ocifer, sir.” He smiled a goofy, bucktoothed grin and held up his right hand like he was reciting the Boy Scouts’ oath. Then he turned his chattering teeth to the street again to shout, “They’re in my jeans. Hurry it up, will you? I’m freezing my ass off.”
A head popped up from the driver’s side of a new blue Jeep parked at the curb, its canvas top down, and someone leapt out, weaving and tripping and streaking up the sidewalk through the rain, barefoot and naked as Michelangelo’s David, tossing Sean’s wadded jeans high in the air till he’d caught them one-handed and felt around in his pockets for his keys. Then a pair of wadded wet skivvies slapped Sean smack in the face.
I heard a high laugh and saw someone stumbling up on to the porch, bumping into and hugging Sean hard, kissing him on the mouth, his curly black hair looping down and dripping to his shoulders.
Everett Lee Degaulier, Jr.
“Oh,” said Everett Lee, buff and tanned as a Polynesian, when he turned and saw me. “I know you. You’re Maddie’s brother, right?”
“Uh, yeah,” I said.
“God, it’s cold and I’m so drunk.” Everett hugged his shoulders, weaving, then fell back against the red brick wall, bumping his skull with a loud clunk into Sean’s mail box. He
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straightened up again, rubbed his scalp, then weaved and spun, tripping and laughing into Sean, who pulled him up into a naked hug and dragged him into his duplex, both of them hooting and laughing and barking like coyotes at a full moon till just after dawn.
*
Next day just after noon, I told Maddie, Everett Lee’s Jeep was still parked out at the curb, filled up almost to the seats with rainwater. When he came out of Sean’s apartment and opened the Jeep’s doors, red-eyed and hung over and a little shaky on his feet, water spilled out into the street, and Everett Lee laughed, pulled a .22 revolver out of his glove box and shot a few holes into the floorboard, till the rest of the water had drained out. Then he got in and drove off like nothing at all had just happened.
“So?” Maddie said and shrugged when I told her.
“You don’t think that’s just a tad . . . weird?”
“No. They were just having themselves a little innocent fun. Just being boys. They’re just good friends, Travis, like I told you.”
“Damn good friends, I’d say. Jesus, theater people with guns.” I flicked the flint wheel of my sparking red Bic, held the flame to the end of the mashed roach but finally gave up trying to light it again, dropping it into an ashtray, wet as a spit wad with Maddie’s saliva.
“Asadollah cares an awful lot about you, you know? Treats you well, too. Too well, you ask me. What’s wrong with him, Maddie? You used to get all moony-eyed over him, said he looked like Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia. Maybe if he treated you like Sean does—like dog shit—you’d be moving in with him instead.”
“Asadollah Amini?” she said, her voice squeaking like a leaking balloon as she laughed, then imitating Asadollah’s thick-tongued accent, wriggling her little finger in front of my nose like an earthworm impaled on a fishhook. “With the teeny-weeny weenie?”
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“God, sis, you’re mean.”
Asadollah didn’t have a place to move into, was pretty much homeless anyway—evicted from his garage apartment two weeks before when his parents, stuck in Iran and unable to flee, besieged by mullahs and Tehran University students rioting in the streets, could no longer wire him rent money every month—but he was the first and only person to show up and help Maddie move into Sean’s duplex next door, loyal to her as a lapdog in a Persian palace.
Soon as I’d chained up my escape-artist mutt to the fenced-in patio around back and come around front, he was sitting in the battered, sun-faded ’56 GMC he’d bought from an old black cotton farmer to replace his new Datsun pickup the bank had repossessed weeks before— something to haul his Moog synthesizer, keyboards and PA equipment around in for the growing number of gigs he was getting as the best keyboard player in a two-hundred mile radius around
Nacogdoches, mostly country gigs. He’d already filled his truck bed with antiques Maddie’d inherited from our mother’s mother, Hanny, so I walked right up to the curb to help him unload.
His truck shimmied and shivered to a stop, dieseling, then backfiring like a smoke bomb.
I waved away the ghost of oily smoke rising from his rust-punctured muffler and reached over the tailgate to pull out one of my grandmother’s favorite chairs, the one with the seat she’d crocheted by hand with bluebonnets.
“Get away from my pickup truck, you asshole,” Asadollah drawled thickly and laughed, stepping out of his truck cab and smiling, a front tooth cracked and dark as a black pearl from a kick he’d gotten in the 7-11 parking lot the month before.
“Hey, man, you’re getting real good with them diphthongs. Starting to sound like a gen- u-ine East Texas redneck.” I gave him a big, hulking redneck hug. “Good to see you, Asadollah.”
“My name is Asa now. Just to call me Asa now, okay?”
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“Whatever you say, cowboy,” I said. “Hey, what’s this I hear about you sleeping in your
truck the last week or so?”
He said nothing, just looked down, blushing, shuffling his scuffed cowboy boots.
“Tell you what? Why don’t you stay with Rachel and me for a while, least till yourself
find a new place? She and I’ve talked about it, and she says it’s okay with her, for a week or two
anyway. Her day bed’s kind of small, but it’s probably better than having seat springs poking you
in the ribs all night, waking up with a stiff neck.”
“Yeah?” he said, his dark face brightening.
“Yeah.”
Taking in another stray, I thought and stepped back, folded my arms. “Man, take a look at you.”
Ever since some bandy, freckled Nacogdoches High School senior with a maroon Gig ‘em,
Aggies t-shirt and a wide straw Stetson had beat the crap out of him in the North Street 7-11 parking lot the month before—telling him to go back his own fucking country where he belonged—Asa’d taken to dressing like his favorite spaghetti western hero in The Good, Bad and the
Ugly, which he’d watched endlessly as a kid in the Shah’s Iran: a crushed felt cowboy hat too small for his head and new creased jeans tucked into calfskin boots too big for his feet, a silver belt buckle with a huge lump of cheap turquoise that made his baggy jeans sag in front.
“Fuck you and God bless America,” the high school kid had shouted at him as he kicked him a few times in the face while Asadollah lay doubled-over, bleeding onto the asphalt.
Asadollah thumbed his belt loops, Clint-squinting, and fell into a swaggering bowlegged stance.
“Howdy,” he said, his accent as thick as a mouthful as gazpacho.
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You look like a damn fool, I wanted to say, trying not to laugh, but just then I saw the pink scars still half-healed across his lips and cheeks and stopped myself, didn’t have the heart for it.
“Nobody’ll fuck with you now, mi amigo,” I said, hoping I was right.
Just then Sean Baggett and Maddie drove up in a twenty-foot U-Haul truck, shouting at each other inside the truck cab.
“What the hell’d she rent that big truck for?” I said, shaking my head. “She’s just moving down the block for chrissakes.”
Sean jumped down from the high cab and slammed the heavy driver’s side door, clanking shut like a tank turret, then strutted huffing past me, bumping my shoulder hard with his shoulder, then tripping and weaving up the sidewalk to unlock his duplex door.
“Fucking nark,” he hissed at me as he passed, blowing hot, beery fumes into my face.
“Jesus, what’s his problem?” I asked Maddie as she stepped down from passenger side of the orange truck cab, but she just looked down at the sidewalk like as she followed Sean inside.
“What the hell’d I do?” I shouted after her, but the duplex door slammed behind her like a pistol shot, and shouting rose up again between them from inside the duplex, a low, muffled grumble like the stomach of a starving dog.
“Man, this ought to be fun,” I told Asadollah. “Just what I need, my sister and her boyfriend living right next door, shouting at each other night and day.”
Asadollah and I finished unloading his truck while they argued, arranging all my dead grandmother’s furniture on the front lawn as I remembered it from her old living room in her old house on Columbia Avenue in Dallas.
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Twenty minutes later, Maddie came out, still shouting at Sean, slamming the screened
door shut in his face with a loud clap. She looked around, puzzled at the familiar arrangement of
antiques, lamps and chairs on her winter-yellow lawn.
“Hanny’s house. Circa 1965,” I said and grinned, sitting on our grandmother’s love seat,
my feet propped up on her red-poppied ottoman. “You want to tell me what the hell’s going on
with you two now?”
“Do you have a broom?” she said, ignoring my question. “Idiot packed mine at the very
back of the U-Haul. That man’s such a slob.”
“Broom’s around back, Maddie,” Rachel said. She’d just joined Asadollah and me, all
three of us smoking a skinny joint around my grandmother’s walnut coffee table, Rachel’s wide
umbrella popped over her head, just in case. “It was leaning against the back fence last I looked.”
“Fine,” Maddie said. “Whatever you do, don’t move anything inside till I’ve swept and
mopped up that filthy, sticky floor!”
I looked up at the low gray clouds and said, “Might want to hurry it up, Maddie. Looks
like it might rain.”
“Fine,” she said again. “Let it.” Then she huffed off around the carport to the back.
Just then, Sean came out and walked right past us to Maddie’s rented U-Haul like we
weren’t even there, lounging around with our feet up under the bare red oak where I’d chained my
dog the week before.
He threw back the latch at the back of the truck with a loud clank, then pushed up the
gate hard till it rolled clattering to the top like a garage door. Then he pulled out the long
aluminum ramp, grunting, dropped it banging onto the street and stomped his feet up the slope, jerking out our grandmother’s wire-bodied sewing mannequin and carrying her headless and armless in his arms down the ramp, then past us and over his duplex transom like a runaway bride.
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“Maddie wants to sweep and mop up before we move anything in,” Rachel shouted after him, but Sean had already slammed the door.
“Guess we better him help unload,” I told Rachel and Asadollah and sighed. I stood and took a long hit and held it in, then took a breathless chug of my Shiner longneck, forgetting to exhale first, coughing out clots of green smoke. “Let’s just leave everything out in the yard until
Maddie tells us to bring it all in. I’ll be damned if I’m getting in the middle of this little dog and cat fight.” I looked up at the low winter clouds, dark as gunmetal bluing.
Sean was on his way back out to the truck when he stopped and turned to me. He just stared at me a moment, blinking, squeezing his fists at his sides, his biceps bunching up and twitching like he was strapped into an electric chair.
“So you think I’m a fucking queer, huh?” he said. Then he shoved me hard in the chest.
“What? What are you talking about, Sean?”
“Say it to my face, you fucking prick.” He hunched over and held up his fists, bobbing and feinting and swinging them six inches from my face, and I threw my head back, trying to dodge his punches.
“Hey, easy now,” I said. “There’s been some kind of misunderstanding here.”
“What? You afraid to fight me? You some kind of fucking queer or something? Come on!”
I slapped his fist away and said, “I’m not going to fight you, Sean. Jesus.” Then he shoved my shoulder hard again, till I lost my balance and fell back into my grandmother’s love seat on the leafy lawn.
I gripped the arms of the chair and leaned forward. “I never said that, Sean. Who the hell told you I’d say such a thing?” Then I remembered what I’d told my sister the week before.
“Jesus,” I whispered. “Maddie.”
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I turned my head and shouted, “Maddie!”
But Maddie was shouting at me now from around back like a melodrama damsel rope-tied to railroad tracks. “Travis, help! Help!” she shouted, a long, lolling high note like locomotive brakes squealing.
Asadollah had just stepped between Sean and me, playing squinting Clint, and I pushed past them both and rushed around the carport to the back, just as Sean shoved Asadollah to the muddy yard.
“Jesus Christ, Maddie,” I started. “Sean says you said I said he was a . . . .”
Maddie’s eyes were bloodshot white as she stood there choking our broom handle, blue- knuckled and unable to move. I followed her eyes and saw my dog hanging from the patio fence from his chain and collar, kicking his legs and bumping against the backside of the fence, shivering and choking and convulsing.
“Oh, god.”
I ran to the dog hanging from his neck halfway down the fence and held him up with one hand while I tried to unbuckle his collar with the other.
“Help me out here, Maddie, will you?”
Maddie unclasped his collar, his dog tags clattering against the fence. Just then it started to sprinkle big cold drops. Then it was raining hard, heavy fist-sized dollops slapping my head and shoulders like wet punches as I carried my dog ducking and running through the heavy downpour out to my Civic around front.
I laid him, coughing and shivering, onto my passenger seat, massaging his neck and trying to get him to breathe.
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Just then I glanced up and saw Sean and Asadollah down in the front yard, Sean sitting on
Asadollah’s back, gripping handfuls of his long black hair and mashing his face into red clay,
Maddie whacking Sean’s head the broom handle and shouting, “Cut. That. Out!”
Sean rolled off Asadollah, and Asadollah rolled over onto his back, gasping, his face a
dripping mask of red clay, and they both lay there coughing and sputtering in the downpour.
“Driving around naked in the rain!” I shouted at Sean as hail popped the top of my car
like mothballs falling from the sky. “I said it was a little weird, Sean! You got to admit it was a
little fucking weird.”
Sean sat up spitting, covered in red mud, yellow grass and leaves glued to his face, broom
straw poking out of his blond hair.
“Nothing weird about it!” he said and spit. Then he kicked over my grandmother’s favorite chair. “I’m not a fucking queer!”
“All right,” I said. “Not that there’s anything wrong with it.”
I glanced at Rachel, who just stood there watching us all under her umbrella like the smiling girl on the blue Morton’s salt box, the rest of us shouting at each other as rain and hail fell
popping all around us, pummeling the ground and our heads, splashing little red puddles on the
ground like steaming white marbles.
“Call Tidmore, Maddie,” I said, covering my head with my arms and ducking hailstones.
“You might want to get that furniture inside, too.”
Then I slammed the car door and started up my Civic, and for the fourth or fifth time in
two months, I was off again, my dog passed out in the passenger seat next to me as I ran three or
four stop lights, sliding all over slick roads and speeding off toward the vet’s on the other side of
Nacogdoches.
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“Dog’ll be fine, just fine, not to worry,” Tidmore said, tweezering fence splinters out of the dog’s paws on the stainless steel exam table, then rubbing the dog’s pink-scarred belly till he kicked. “Nothing broken. Just a bruised neck, is all.”
“You sure you don’t want him?” I said, my Levi’s dripping onto his exam room floor. “I’d like to hold onto my girlfriend a little longer.”
“Dog’s a scrapper, no doubt,” he said. “Used to being on his own, having things his own way. But he’ll settle down, you watch. And she’ll get used to him soon enough. Tell you what.
I’ll check him for heartworms while you’re here and give him a shot to ease any neck pain. How’s that? If you want, I can fix him, too, while we’re at it. Should’ve done that right off. First time you brought him in.”
“You mean cut off his—?”
“Just a little snip and a few stitches. Might settle him down a bit.”
“I don’t know,” I said, squeezing my shut like someone had just kneed me between the knees. “Maybe next time, okay? He’s been through enough for today—we both have—and I’ve still got to help my stupid sister move.”
“All right, then,” Tidmore said, grinning, like a toothless man gumming a wide, buttered cob of sweet corn. “Bring him in anytime. No charge. Two way deal, like I said.”
Fifteen minutes later, I sat parked in the gravel drive outside the Nacogdoches County
Animal Shelter just down Pearl Street from Allyn’s house, petting the dog panting next to me in my Civic, his hot breath filling up the car with the stink of kitty litter, and worse, steaming over the windshield till I had to open both windows a crack, gasping for breath. I rubbed and scratched his sore neck, his back legs thumping the passenger seat in time with the rain pocking the roof of my car. Then I reached across him, over the seat, and opened the passenger door.
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“You want to get yourself killed running off?” I told him. “Or you want me to take you
inside? Your choice.”
He looked out the open door at the gravel-spattering rain and the animal shelter’s chain link gate, shivering a little for show—I’d taken him through that same gate half a dozen times already to give him a free flea-dip in the cattle trough around back—and then he rested his jaw on his paws, raw-scraped from clawing at the fence to get free of his hangman’s collar.
“This is your chance,” I said, pointing behind the shelter to the loblollies rising along
Bonita Creek. “Go on, then. Get.”
He glanced over at me, blinking his wet black eyes, and I wiped away his eye crust and smeared it across his neck.
“No? You want some time to think about it?”
He arched his neck and started to raise his hind leg like he might scratch, but then he shook his neck hard instead, slinging water all over my face and car.
“You sure?” I said, then wiping wet dog off my face. “Last chance.”
But he just sat there grinning at me, panting, his bright red tongue lolling out, drooling on to the passenger seat.
“All right, then,” I said. “Glad we had us this little talk.” Then I reached over him to close the passenger side door and started up my Civic to drive home.
Back at the duplexes, the hail and rain had let up to a drizzle, fog rising up Mitchell Street
from Bonita Creek in layers of mist, all of Maddie’s furniture gone from the front yard outside, a
scar of red clay in the scattered leaves and scalped grass where Sean and Asadollah’d been rolling
around an hour before.
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I carried my dog into my duplex next door facing Sean’s and laid him on to my Salvation
Army couch, cat-clawed and dog-chewed to tatters—he’d’ve jumped right onto it anyway as soon as I’d left—and I covered him with a ratty bath towel and petted him between his eyes.
“Good dog,” I said.
He started to get up again from the couch to follow me outside and I pointed a finger at him.
“You had your chance. Now, stay.”
Then I walked over to Maddie’s duplex, so worried Sean might try to punch me out again,
I left the duplex’s front door cocked open and the screened door unlatched.
I poked my head into Sean’s door—everybody’s muddy boots and shoes outside lined up neatly under the mailbox outside—and saw Maddie’s furniture inside dripping puddles onto the muddy hardwood floor, melting hail steaming from the seat cushions like cocktail ice.
Maddie was in her sock feet, sweeping crimped cigarette butts and beer caps and wine corks and heel-mashed water roaches all kicking into a pile, while Rachel mopped up right behind her, Sean and Asadollah pitching in together like gentlemen, moving the furniture around for the gentle ladies, red clay flaking from their faces and shirts and jeans and socks as they laughed and passed a fat joint around like nothing had ever happened.
“Everything okay in here?” I said, still afraid to step inside.
Everybody looked up at me and smiled.
“Dog’s okay,” I said. “Just a sore neck. And a bit of a hangdog look.”
Nobody laughed, and Maddie threw a beer cap pinging against the screened door, just past my head.
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“Good thing I was looking for this,” Maddie said, holding up our ratty broom, waving it in the air like a semaphore flag, like she might hit me over the head with it.
“Thanks, Maddie. You probably saved his miserable life.”
Sean gathered up a handful of steaming hailstones from the couch’s seat cushions and laughed, then dropped them into his sweet sangria, swishing his wine glass around with a muddy finger and holding it up in a toast to Maddie, reciting his lines as Cassio to Desdemona, “Hail to thee, lady!” then upended his glass and gulped it all down.
I raised a foot to step inside, and Maddie jabbed the broom handle at me. “Shoes off!” and
I untied my Hush Puppies and lined them up neatly along the wall outside with the others, then stepped inside Sean and Maddie’s duplex.
“Sorry, Sean,” I said, feeling like a damn fool.
“Hey, no big deal, Travis,” he said, weaving a little till he caught and steadied himself on the back of my grandmother’s mud-spattered love seat. “Just a little misunderstanding, is all.
Right, Asa?” And he slapped Asadollah hard on the back.
Asadollah nodded in his muddy white socks, flinching and squinting, weaving a little, too, then slipped on the mop-slick floor, his muddy felt hat crushed over his head like a tire-mashed terrier.
Sean could be a sweet drunk sometimes like our father.
The Whô dog stayed gone for over a month.
Asadollah, our replacement stray, was there almost that long, but he was much easier to get along with than the dog, mellow as Dido lolling around pregnant in the only spot of winter sun moving across Rachel’s old daybed where Asadollah slept. He didn’t band his head against our bedroom door, didn’t come barging in to watch our lovemaking, didn’t try to lick Rachel’s
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pregnant calico, didn’t dine from the kitty-litter box, didn’t tear curtains down and try to crash through windows, and I started waking to Rachel, still half-asleep and clinging to me like a warm kitten again, kissing my stomach and neck. Seeing our newfound tenderness—Rachel coming up behind me to put her arms around my stomach as I washed dishes at the sink—Asadollah stayed away most nights to give us a little privacy, played odd acoustic gigs with Maddie around town for groceries and gas and studied until eleven p. m., closing time at the university library, where he brushed up to pass his first semester of freshman English after failing it three semesters in a row.
Asadollah was happy enough just to have a place to sleep, shave and shower, even happier to have me around to help him correct his cryptic, English-mangling essays on old westerns, the history of American jazz and the conflict between Sunni and Shiite Islam, Iraq and Iran, and he was happier still to have Rachel’s heavy upright Steinway to practice on for a few weeks.
Unlike the practice pianos at school, Rachel’s upright was almost always in tune. A few months before, Asadollah’d helped me and my old neighbor Kenny Ryffe, our sax player Jonathan
Gonzalez and our bassist Korrence Roshelle move the bulky, top-heavy thing up a flight of stairs at Rachel’s old rental house. I bumped my head on the low transom for the last time while
Rachel’s old roommates shook their heads and wished me luck, then strained it up and down from
Asadollah’s sagging truck bed and inside our duplex, neither Asadollah or me able to move from our sprung backs all day, smoking bong loads on the couch and popping muscle relaxants and
Quaaludes from Sean’s stash while Asadollah talked endlessly about how much he missed seeing his parents and playing Chopin on their old Steinway grand in Tehran.
Rachel was happy enough just to get jazz chord lessons, which Asadollah gave her free for an hour a day in exchange for her tiny day bed to crash on at night. Asadollah set up his electric keyboard stack in an L next to Rachel’s piano, between my green Salvation Army couch and my
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sprawling Slingerland drum kit in the cramped living room, her day bed tilted up against the wall
like a rollaway while we played, then back down again at night while he slept.
Afternoons we invited over our rhythm section from the Swinging Axes, and we worked
up our favorite funk and fusion tunes till Half Fast was the tightest, fastest rhythm section in East
Texas. We’d never be half as good or half as fast as the North Texas State One O’clock Lab Band
in Denton, Mackie Schuck always pointed out with a smirk, telling us in front of the entire lab
band at school, “And now Asa and Travis are going to KISS, right, boys? Keep It Simple, Stupid!”
I’d never played with a keyboard player more gifted. Asadollah could move as easily from
Bach’s precise Baroque to Rachmaninoff’s fiery Romanticism as he could from Thelonious Monk’s
quirky ’50s harmonics to Herbie Hancock’s wild ‘70s improvisations of Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew on his Rhodes electric piano. Asadollah and Korrence Roshelle, thumping fat bass riffs like his hero Jaco Pastorius, turned the entire rhythm section on to Joe Zawinul’s Weather Report and
Lyle Mays and Pat Metheny, and later they both treated us to a Pat Metheny Group concert on our own lab band stage, where, years later, I could still listen to the hissing, popping recording of
Asadollah’s howls and whistles from the audience on Travels, the only live fusion album ever recorded in Nacogdoches.
Like me, Asadollah wasn’t much of a swing or straight-ahead jazz kind of guy, preferred funk and fast electronic jazz fusion like the Carlos Santana’s Barboletta and John McLaughlin and
the Mahavishnu Orchestra’s The Inner Mounting Flame, loved Chick Corea and Return to Forever
best, and afternoons he practiced Chick’s Leprechaun with me for hours, then three or four tunes
from the Romantic Warrior album with the band—bobbing his head and bending Chick’s high notes
on his Moog like whistling catcalls while Kenny played Al Dimeola’s fast-fretting sixteenth-note
scales and arpeggios through his Mesa Boogie amp and Korrence played Stanley Clark’s fret-
bending harmonics through his padded Kustom—and the whole time we practiced Asadollah was
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as patient with me as I’d failed to be with his failing essays while I fumbled through and flubbed
Billy Cobham’s and Lenny White’s and Steve Gadd’s impossibly complex drum solos.
“No such thing as mistake,” he told me. “We practice and you help me with my comma
splice. One more time, from the bridge. One . . . two . . . .”
Before long, Jonathan Gonzales, the Swinging Axes’ first-chair sax man from Harlingen
joined us, along with our cranky professor, Mackie Schuck, sitting in on flugelhorn and trumpet, all of us shoulder to shoulder and steaming up our duplex living room windows till our shirts were soaked with sweat. Then Mackie started writing up complex, syncopated Tower of Power and
Earth, Wind and Fire horn arrangements for the lab band, so there was standing-room only for the entire horn section in our duplex hallway.
During song breaks, we’d hear Maddie’s four dogs—three Chihuahuas, Snap, Crackle and
Pop, and Drooler, her shelter rescued Golden Retriever—yapping next door as Maddie and Sean shouted at each other across our thin duplex walls, Maddie knocking pans clattering to the floor until Sean stormed out, slamming the door behind him, driving to Lufkin, where he worked as a
Cobol and Basic programmer, switching his major from Theater to Computer Science the day he’d lost the role of Brick.
Then Maddie and Allyn would be shouting next door, Allyn shouting at Maddie for moving out on her and never paying her half of the utilities, Maddie shouting at Allyn for not ever showing up to help her move out, and Allyn stormed out of Maddie’s duplex past our living room window, her long blond hair swinging at her hips down the sidewalk, then flying out behind her like Isadora Duncan’s yellow scarf as she screeched away in her red MG convertible, off to her new artist’s loft at Joe Brown’s Sacaroaches Studios—an old chicken ranch Joe’d converted from chicken coops to rented artists’ studios—until Maddie and Allyn finally had another big falling out and wouldn’t talk to each other for months.
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“You don’t love me!” Maddie shouted. “You’re not my friend!” she’d say.
Then all the guys in the band would frown at each other and shake our heads, cranking up
the music a little louder, till eventually Maddie stopped shouting and slammed her duplex door
and walked next door to practice, pouting on the couch like she used to when she was twelve, then
stepping up to the mike and sing like a meadowlark on a telephone wire, as we worked up new
fake-book covers for our Friday and Saturday night gigs at the Ale and Quail.
“What’s wrong with you, Travis?” Rachel asked me one night in bed after a long practice
session, my ears still ringing, my back still sore from playing hard for over four hours straight.
She’d just gotten home at midnight, wet and dripping from a rehearsal for “Cat on a Hot
Tin Roof,” looking flushed like she’d just jogged five miles in the December rain—taking a long, hot shower, then dragging me straight to our dumpster bed—and I’d worried about why she’d been so late coming home, what she’d been up to, lying in a stage bed half the night with another man, a fling from the summer before. A man who made men and women swoon, even Allyn
Vanderbeck. Everett Lee Degaulier, Junior.
Asadollah had just moved out, too, a few days before, dragging Rachel’s daybed next door
to Maddie and Sean’s living room so the guys in Half Fast would have more room to practice, and
so Asadollah’d have a place to crash for two weeks till he moved into Jonathan Gonzalez’s
ramshackle trailer just off Appleby Sand Road after Jonathan’s ex-fiancée had moved out.
I just stared up at the mashed-cat stain on the bedroom ceiling and said nothing.
“Guess you miss Asa,” Rachel whispered. “Me, too. Guess you’re worried about Maddie,
too. But you guys sounded great today, you know?”
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“That’s not it,” I said. “I see Asa all the time, and Maddie can hold her own with that idiot boyfriend of hers.” I sat up and bent to kiss her bare brown stomach. “You’re going to think this is nutso, but I miss that stupid damn dog.”
For weeks, I’d been putting up flyers all across the university, in the student union, in the post office next to posters of America’s Most Wanted, in laundromats and restaurants, in the K-
Mart and Wal-Mart, in fast food joints all along North Street and veterinarian clinics all across town. Right after he’d disappeared, I’d called The Daily Sentinel and The Pine Log and put in long, detailed classified ads in the Lost Pets sections, which I’d renewed for five weeks in a row with no calls, not a single one, jolting up from bed or the couch every time I heard the phone ring. Then
I’d gotten up early every morning before classes while Rachel was still asleep and driven two blocks down Pearl to the animal shelter just as it opened, stooping down to look through all the dog runs and pet cages like a prison guard abandoned by his favorite escaped con.
“God, I don’t miss that him,” Rachel said. “Even if I do have to clean out the cat litter box more.”
“What are you talking about? I’m the one who dumps that thing out every day. If I didn’t do it, this place’d end up smelling like a house full of dead cats.”
She gave me a long-lashed wink and petted my head. “A boy and his dog. Poor boy.
Poor dog.”
I lay back in bed again and stared up at the ceiling, cracked like a map of Africa.
“You’re a nice guy, Travis,” Rachel said, propping her chin into her palm, staring at me and tickling her long, thin fingernails up and down my freckled stomach, till I laughed.
“Woman, have I got you fooled.”
“No,” she said. “Really.”
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“Lot of damn good it does me. That’s the first thing I hear right before a woman runs off,
you know? ‘Travis, you’re a nice guy, but’—”
“Not this time,” she said and smiled, her eyes full of blue-green light, like the sky through the trees, and kissed me. “Yes.”
“Yes, what?” I said.
“Yes, I would.”
“Yes, you would what?” I pressed my face into her belly and blew.
“Stop that,” she said, snorting and giggling. Then she said it again, just a whisper: “Yes, I will.”
“Yes, you will what?” I said.
Next morning, after she’d agreed marry me, I woke up to scratching on the screened door
out front, then a long, low lonesome howl like a wolf caught in a trap in the bloody snow.
“Please, god, no,” Rachel said in our dumpster bed, covering her head with her pillow.
“Not now.”
I jumped from our bed and ran in my skivvies, almost tripping over Dido sprawled,
pregnant as a rabbit, on the hallway rug, then out to the front door.
The dog was covered in slick, red mud and greasy black slime, and he stank like bloated
bodies bobbing in a Louisiana bayou, having just spent a whole happy month dining on and rolling
around in road kill, some nice, ripe armadillo and skunk.
He poked the screened door with his nose, trying to open it to get in for once, then
grinned up at me, blinking, panting death breath like a cloud of blue-bottle flies buzzing his head.
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The screened door’s spring sang as I opened it, and I held him back by his sticky collar till
I could hose him off in the front yard and bathe him in tomato juice, then three latherings of
Rachel’s Herbal Essences shampoo.
“There you are, dog,” I said, grinning. “I was looking for you.”
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Ten Dallllas 1972
tapped a fingernail on her bedroom door upstairs like a mockingbird pecking at a IIwindow. “Allyn?” I whispered.
“Go away,” she said, too loud, almost a shout.
I glanced down the dark hallway to her mother’s door, then checked the black stairwell down to the living room, where I’d just sneaked past Bob, asleep, my sock feet creaking the heart pine floor. Under a wide bay window, he’d sprawled in moonlight on an antique couch downstairs, naked and snoring like a bull elephant, a wide patch of thick black hair fanning up his stomach to his chest, tufting up like a bramble of black thorns along his shoulders to his neck, then spilling out of his navel below, spreading a hairy black mass between his thighs like the face of a sleeping mammoth. Then I’d felt my way, blind, up the stairs, my heart kicking a rogue stampede of hoof beats into my sternum.
“Shhh,” I whispered, still trying to catch my breath. “It’s me, Travis.
“Who?”
“Travis.”
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She laughed, her voice rising as she spoke. “What’s wrong, Bob? She kick you out again?
Stop with your stupid games and go back to sleep on the couch.”
“Shhhh,” I whispered.
I fumbled and flipped on my penlight, almost dropping it to the floor, then held it
trembling between my teeth and pulled out my wallet, kneeling down to slip my drivers’ license
under her door. Then I held the light to her doorsill, shining a long yellow line into her room
from the threshold and across her floor.
I heard her bedsprings creak and her bare feet padding across the floor and then a long
space of quiet.
“My god,” she whispered. “Travis?”
“Yeah, it’s me,” I said.
It was the middle of May, school just out for the summer, six long months since I’d heard
her voice.
She took a long time getting her door open, dragging something heavy squalling across her
floor, till it fell over with a loud, hollow thump, rattling the gilt-framed photos of her sisters along the hallway wall. Then she opened her door bumping up against it and pulled me into her room.
One of her mother’s hand-carved antique chairs lay toppled onto its back behind the half- open door, where it had been propped up under the doorknob, and she pushed the door shut again with a click as I levered the chair-back up and helped her jam it back into place.
We both stood there a long time listening. Then she turned to me in a hissing whisper.
“What, are you nutso? What are you doing here? How’d you get in?”
“Drove my truck up from Dallas. Your back door’s wide open.”
“He’d shoot you in a minute, you know?”
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“I just had to tell you, is all. Tell you I was sorry.” I said it all in a rush, still winded, having repeated it over and over again on my midnight drive to Nacogdoches. “I don’t why she did it, Allyn. We were coming here to get you and Sherilyn, and then . . . .” It was coming out all wrong, different from how I’d practiced it for months, and I didn’t know where the hell to start. I paced the floor in my black socks. “My father wouldn’t let us go to the funeral, wouldn’t let me talk to you, tell you what happened.”
“Maybe I don’t want to know what happened. Maybe I don’t want to talk to you. Ever.
Did you ever think of that?”
She pulled her long hair draping over her left shoulder to her waist like a sash of gold silk, then padded to her bed in her cotton nightgown and sat, shuffling her bare feet across the floorboards, winding her hair around her fist.
“When we saw the pigs take you away, Marilyn went a little crazy. But then we talked about coming back to get you and she was okay for a while and then she wasn’t and then . . . she just did it. Maybe I could’ve stopped her. I don’t know. I don’t know why. It all happened so damn fast. Her cat’s okay, though. ‘Phelia’s okay. Maddie’s taking care of her now.”
Allyn wouldn’t look at me, her eyes shining like wet headlights swerving away in rain. She sniffed at her hair, then bit it knotting at her fist as sirens wailed down North Street in the wide
Nacogdoches night.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “If you want, you and Sherilyn can come back with me. Back to
Dallas.”
“Sherilyn’s already in Dallas, you dumbshit. Staying with Beck’s Bible-thumping sister. I thought you knew. She left right after Bob took us back. Wouldn’t stay in this house for anything.” Allyn’s face fisted. “Where’ve you been, huh? What are you doing here now? Did you think you were going to come here and save us?”
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“No,” I said, looking down. “I don’t know. I just . . . . It’s just . . . what Marilyn wanted.”
“And where would I stay, huh? How would I live on my own? I won’t stay with my aunt.
Now she’s got Sherilyn calling me all the time, spouting off all that Jesus Saves crap.”
“Maybe you could live with us awhile. Stay in Maddie and Hanna’s room. Hanna’s hardly there anyway, off riding her horse all day, leaving for some Arizona dude ranch in a week.
We’d have to work on my old man, but I’m sure my mother’d let you stay.”
“That’s nutso, Travis. I’ve got all my friends here. And a boyfriend, okay?”
“Okay. I just wanted to come. Just wanted to see you.” I was quiet a long time and I looked down, my face hot with blushing. I forced myself to look at her, till she looked back at me.
“Guess I better go now. I just wanted to tell you. I’m sorry.”
My sock feet shuffled across the floor to her door as I levered the chair from under the doorknob and set all four legs away down without a sound. I opened the door, stuck my head out, glanced down the hallway, then down the stairs.
I was just starting out the door when she touched my wrist.
“Wait,” she said.
My truck still sat idling at the curb down the block at the corner of Rusk and Pearl.
I dropped two trash bags of her clothes I’d just tossed out her second-floor window into my truck bed, then slapped at my back pocket. “Jesus, my driver’s license. Did you bring it?”
She checked the pockets of her knee-torn hip-huggers, her navel a bright spoon in the moonlight, then dug around in her beaded handbag, shook her head.
“I’ll go back for it. Wait here.”
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“No,” she said and held my wrist. “It doesn’t matter, Travis. He’ll know it’s you. Who else could it be? Your house’s the first place he’ll look. I’ll call my mother in the morning. Tell her I’m staying with Maddie for the summer. She can’t tell me no. She won’t.” Allyn laughed and stared off, that strange, crooked grin on her face. “She’ll be glad to get me out of the house.”
My mother was the first up that morning to make coffee and breakfast for my father before he woke, the first to find Allyn curled asleep on our couch downstairs, two black Hefty bags filled with her clothes for a pillow, her hand resting on Reveille’s back as he slept dream- kicking his one back leg under our coffee table.
My mother woke Allyn on the couch and said, “Hello, honey. Good to see you. You want some breakfast?” Then she fixed Allyn a dark blond cup brimming with Half and Half and sugar and asked Allyn to wait, rubbing her eyes and sipping her sweet coffee at the breakfast table.
My mother walked up the Mexican-tile steps downstairs, then up two carpeted half-flights of stairs to my room, cantilevered out like an artist’s loft over the living room in my father’s split-level house.
She shook me awake next to my brother, Nate, snoring and grinding his teeth in his bed next to mine.
“I knew you’d do this,” she whispered, but she didn’t seem angry with me at all, almost seemed relieved, her face softening, her eyes a little sad. “Get up, Travis. Come on. We need to talk. Don’t wake up your brother. Or your father.”
Allyn had fallen back to asleep again, drooling a little into the crook of her elbow, her face resting on her slender brown arms folded across the breakfast table, her cup overturned next to her,
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coffee pooling on the tabletop, then dripping like muddy creek water into one of the hand-carved kitchen chairs my father’d ordered from Mexico City.
After Allyn woke, wiping her wet mouth, sleep creases across her cheeks like cat scratches, the three of us talked awhile, and Allyn called her mother—just awake herself and frantic, on the verge of calling the Nacogdoches police.
Allyn’s mother shouted at her for a while, Allyn holding the phone out from her ear and rolling her eyes. Then, in a space of quiet, she said, “Hold on,” into the mouthpiece and handed my mother the phone.
“Hello, Lynn?” my mother said, forcing her standard pollyanna smile. “Is it all right if I call you Lynn? Allyn’s fine, perfectly fine. No, she wants to stay with Maddie a few months. No, no need to worry. Of course, she’s welcome. And you’re welcome to call or visit any time. Yes, after all that’s happened, I’d like to think we’re friends.”
Maddie was standing in the kitchen doorway when my mother hung up the phone, knuckling her bloodshot eyes and rattling off sneezes like the door of a Dallas city bus chuffing open. She glanced at me standing with a spatula at the kitchen island stove, splashing frying eggs popping in a pan of bacon grease, then glanced past the fridge and saw Allyn smiling up at her, blowing steam across her coffee cup at the breakfast table.
“What’s going on?” Maddie said, always the last to find out. She tried to straighten her nightgown, lopsided on her shoulders, then mashed her red hair down with her palms like she was trying to smother a fireball. “What the heck are you doing here, Allyn?”
Just then my father tripped into the kitchen right behind her, his eyes puffy and yellow in his head like the bloody eggs I was frying for him, a little shaky on his feet from raiding the liquor cabinet the night before.
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“If it’s all right with your father,” my mother said, standing from her kitchen chair, smiling at the man for the first time in days, “I told Allyn she can stay here for the summer.”
Maddie jumped up and down like a child in a grocery cart, then ran to Allyn to hug her.
“Hey, now, wait a minute, Helen,” my father said. “I don’t think—”
“She’s stayed with us before, Deuce,” my mother said. “You remember, don’t you?”
“Yeah. Sure.” My father stopped himself and grunted, stumped as usual by my mother’s polite calm. He glared at her a moment, his eyes burning like an albino tiger’s—We’ll talk about this later—then turned his eyes, softening, to Allyn. “You’re one of those Vanderbeck girls, aren’t you, honey? I was real sorry to hear about your sister. What was her name?”
“Marilyn.”
“Marilyn,” he said and nodded, then shook his head. “Real sorry.”
My father shot me a look as I splashed grease over his three eggs at the stove, just like he liked them, sunny-side up, the yolks good and runny.
He’d shot me the same look when he’d shouted at me all the way back home from the
Baylor Hospital emergency room the night Marilyn died, my truck towed to the pound downtown, another ambulance siren screaming past us just as he paid the parking attendant.
“What a goddamn fucking mess,” he’d shouted, almost spitting at me as I pressed myself against the passenger door while Ophelia clawed at my arms. “Driving around in the middle of the goddamn night, standing out in the rain in the middle of the goddamn highway.” Then he’d skidded out of the hospital parking garage, almost clipping the rising gate, swerving his ’66
Chevelle station wagon through rain as he honked at cars creeping through rush-hour traffic northbound on North Central Expressway. “What the hell were you thinking? If you hadn’t been fucking around with that girl in the first place, she might just still be alive.”
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“Now, which one are you?” my father asked Allyn, smiling, his eyes a pale powder-blue
like butter cups in spring. “I’m sorry, honey, but your names all sound the same to me.”
Just fifteen minutes after breakfast, dressing in a rush for work, my father and mother had
already started arguing in their bedroom up the half-flight of stairs, my mother trying to explain
why she’d let one of those goddamn hippy girls stay in our house without asking my father first,
my father shouting at my mother for letting Maddie take in another stray.
“Bad enough that girl’s got to bring all these goddamn animals home, dog piss on the
carpet and cat shit in all the potted plants,” he said. “Hell, she forgets to feed Tripod half the
time, too busy with that goddamn rat dog of hers and that crazy goddamn cat. Forgets Tripod’s even alive anymore sleeping under the coffee table day and night.”
Along with Marilyn’s cat, Ophelia, Maddie’d taken in Pearl—a teacup Chihuahua with a heart-murmur she’d rescued from the animal shelter—which gasped and coughed for months till
Maddie’d finally badgered my father into rushing the dog two hundred miles south to College
Station’s veterinary program, where the dog had barely survived experimental open-heart surgery.
“Pet food and vet bills, Lysol and steam cleaning bills,” my father went on, his voice rising
into his usual rant. “We’ve already got half a dozen mouths to feed. Hell, what’s one more,
right?”
“I’ve got a job,” my mother said, her voice rising, her voice muffled on the other side of
the door. Ever since my father’s business partner, Hap, an old drinking buddy and roommate
from the Texas A & M Corps of Student Cadets, had run their architectural practice into the
ground, my mother’d been working full-time for Dr. Snitkin, working her way up to office
manager. “Last I checked, I was one who bought home all the groceries. If it wasn’t for my job,
there wouldn’t be any groceries.”
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“Yeah? Well, I don’t like you working. My mother may not be right about much, but
she’s right about one damn thing. You should be at home keeping up this house, which is a total
goddamn mess. Should be watching these kids, who are totally out of control.”
I stood there listening at my parents’ door till I jumped—my father’s shoe popping against the other side of the door like a pistol shot. Then I sprinted up the half-flight of stairs to my room, glad they weren’t arguing about me for once.
I stopped outside my bedroom door, Nate still asleep inside, snoring and grinding his teeth like a grown man, when I heard Maddie and Allyn down the hall laughing and listening to
Joni Mitchell on my dead brother Jesse’s tinny red record player, laughing and singing like they were twelve years old again, sitting on the queen-size bed in Maddie’s room, where they couldn’t hear my father shout at my mother and slam the front door.
The band with the stupid name no one could pronounce, Oroboros, had pretty much died with Marilyn.
Our last band meeting was at Danny’s house, the day after Marilyn died. Our bass player,
Hunk Dawkins, showed up late as usual with track marks in the crooks of his arms like my dead brother’s transfusion bruises. He lumbered around Danny’s room like a wounded grizzly, like
Fred Flintstone shouting at Barney Rubble, wired and high as a lightning-struck radio tower, buzzed and pissed about the big bust at Marilyn’s place, his bass and amp and stash all impounded—three thousand bucks, he shouted, right down the fucking sewer. Then the police had showed up at his mother’s door at five a. m., waking up his big-shot anesthesiologist stepfather in his skivvies, asking all kinds of questions about why Hunk wasn’t home and where he might’ve gone.
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“Who’s the fucking nark?” Hunk shouted at me, his bloodshot eyes dilated to black and
spinning like pinwheels. “Tell me who he is, and I’ll fucking kill him.”
“What’re you asking me for?” I said. “Marilyn’s dead. That’s not enough for you?”
“Hey, fuck you, man. Fuck you.” And then he came at me—all 285 pounds of beer and killer speed and Whataburger—till Kenny Ryffe stepped between us.
“Hey, easy now, you guys. Nobody narked on anybody, okay?”
“I’ll bet you anything it’s that fucking Rogerson,” Hunk said, punching his palm with a loud slap. “Either him or Doppler. I knew I shouldn’t’ve trusted that little shit.”
“Yeah,” I said, “and you shouldn’t’ve been sticking needles in your fucking arms with those guys either.”
“Who the hell told you that?”
“Marilyn did. About five minutes before she died.”
“You leave her out of this.”
“No,” I said. “You left her at The Cellar, man. You just fucking left her there standing in the rain. If I hadn’t been there with my truck—”
“It’s not my fucking fault, man!” he shouted. “I don’t give a damn what you say.”
“Yeah, and you never gave a damn about her either, you fucking prick.”
Hunk came at me again with his arms straight out, tottering like Frankenstein with bolts
sparking lightning bolts out his neck, till Danny put his back up against Kenny’s between us and
braced himself to stop Hunk grumbling toward me, shoving pushing his hands into the ex-
linebacker’s big chest with all his strength till Hunk almost toppled us all over onto his waterbed
and Danny shouted, “Cut it out, you guys. My mother’ll hear us. Jesus fucking Christ!”
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Next morning at four a. m., Hunk got busted speeding his Hunkmobile weaving down
Preston Road. When the police cuffed him and threw him face-first into his long black hood, he was holding two-thousand dollars in methamphetamines and new syringes stolen from a pharmacy, five pounds of Acapulco Gold in Glad bags and twenty or more blocks of Turkish hash wrapped like caramels in aluminum foil—six Army duffels packed full—another two grand in twenties and fifties rolled in rubber bands stowed under the Astroturf in back and a brand-new Fender bass and massive bass stack he’d just bought from the North Park Melody Shop lying on its back where the coffins had slid into his ‘59 Cadillac hearse.
Hunk was charged with beating a meth dealer to death while the man slept on his couch at
Marilyn’s complex along McCree Creek—some freak I’d seen in a crowd of party-goers at
Marilyn’s old apartment one night. Six months older than me, just three months short of eighteen,
Hunk spent the next two months in the Dallas County Jail, waiting for the jury trial that would sentence him to juvy for four months till he was old enough to go to Huntsville for the rest of his life, to cook for cons and never to play bass again.
Three months after Hunk got hauled away, just as Kenny and Danny and I’d started thinking we had nothing to worry about anymore and could stop laying low at our own houses for a while, waiting for the police to show up at our doorsteps any day to ask questions about Hunk and drugs and murder, Danny got busted, too.
One Saturday morning toward the end of March, when I thought it was safe to talk to
Danny about an audition with Robbie Womble, our latest prospect for a replacement bass player,
I walked barefoot to Danny’s house a block away, planning to smoke a few bong-loads with him and blow smoke up at the black-light stars we’d painted on Danny’s ceiling.
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My heel-worn bell bottoms dragging the concrete, I took the usual back way to Danny’s house from mine—up the alley, then cutting between two neighbors’ houses—when I stepped out into the front yard across the street from Danny’s house and ducked fast back behind a low holly hedge, hoping I hadn’t been seen, staring out through spiked leaves and poisonous red berries at three Dallas Police cars parked half a block down, their CBs burping and hissing, six policemen opening their doors and piling out, drawing their service revolvers.
I ran home as fast as I could to call Danny, scraping my winter-soft feet raw on concrete and gravel, then stumping my big toe throbbing and bleeding against a curb, but when I finally got home, winded and hopping around on one foot, my father was shouting at his business partner
Hap on the phone. By the time he finally got off five minutes later, it was too late.
Danny’s mother answered the phone, and all I could do was just stand there in our kitchen with my bleeding toenail popped up like a bright blue hinge, unable say a word, listening to her breathing into the mouthpiece as Danny shouted at her and the police while they tore his room all apart. Then his mother slammed the phone down like a firecracker going off in my hand just as I was about to throw it, exploding a long ringing dial tone into my ear.
I loped next door to Kenny’s house in a hobble-legged sprint, grimacing at his front door as I told him what had just happened, and he and I scrambled to find a place to hide our stashes, orange packs of Zig-Zag papers and blue-glass bongs and hash pipes and three fat lids, a few of
Hunk’s Black Mollies and leftover hits of Danny’s Window Pane acid, deciding to bury them all together like a favorite old dog, double-wrapped in plastic leaf bags in a big shoebox under the deep cover of the tall cottonwoods down the street at Pecan Park.
Before Marilyn died and Danny’d gotten busted, it would’ve been a flip of a quarter who was my favorite guitar player—Kenny or Danny—or who was my best friend.
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Kenny was a musician’s musician, a thinking-man’s guitar player, a lefty like Hendrix and me, though I played the drums right-handed and he played a left-handed guitar he’d special ordered from Gibson, not a right-handed ax turned upside down like Jimi’s.
Whenever he played, Kenny’d rub the aching bone and muscle where his upper left humerus had snapped once while he was throwing a screaming fastball, then humped his shoulders up and down and around, stretching and slow-twisting his neck till it popped one vertebra at a time, cracking his knuckles one by one like the pecans popping against my truck cab in the Pecan
Park the day we’d buried our stash and piled on dead leaves to cover it up. Then he’d duck and throw his guitar strap up over his head and shoulder and pluck and strum his strings with the long fingernails of his left hand, twice as accurate and fast as Danny’s jiggering turtle-shell picks, running his fingers like a millipede up and down his Gibson fretboard blurring-fast, rolling out sixteenth notes and arpeggios. He’d been practicing for years, paying for two years of private classical guitar lessons with his own money cooking cheeseburgers at Hardee’s summers and hefting heavy Purina bags over Christmas break at his stepfather Bill Sherrod’s feed and seed store.
Kenny’s playing was clean and sweet, and he hardly ever kicked feedback razzing through his tweeters to hide his mistakes like Danny did, distortion thumping and wobbling through his woofers till he’d ended up blowing out his big Altecs like Danny did every six months or so, and he spent twice as many hours a day practicing than Danny ever dreamed of, easy to frustrate whenever he made a mistake, cursing himself like his stepfather did too often, practicing Steve
Howe’s “Fish” and “Roundabout” and “Heart of the Sunrise” over and over again till the songs sounded like he’d composed them himself. And he had the same quirky taste in music as mine, the only friend I knew me who loved to practice to Genesis’s Selling England by the Pound and King
Crimson’s In the Court of the Crimson King.
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Kenny and I had troubles at home in common, too, I guess—mostly the military men we
had to answer to—and Kenny hardly ever took the risks Danny and I took unless he absolutely
had to. A little jumpy like me, Kenny stayed in his black-painted room most weekends and
afternoons after school like a POW in the Hanoi Hilton, stuck with his crazy widower stepfather,
Bill Sherrod, since ‘68, after his mother died of bone cancer and his brother Ray, a rooster-tail
radio man, had gotten shot in the head by a sniper near Bê´n Tre along the Mekong Delta.
His feet propped up, his Lone Star longneck barely balanced on his belly, sleeping like a twitchy ghost till dawn in front of a snowy black and white TV, Bill Sherrod—B. S., Kenny called
him behind his back—shot up from his La-Z-Boy cursing and swinging, ready to crack Kenny’s
skull whenever he tried to wake the man up for work. Kenny didn’t blame him, though, and
neither did I. The man was a decorated Navy pilot, shot down eight miles north of the 38th
Parallel during the Korean War, and he’d spent two years in a freezing Chinese prisoner of war
camp, where all his fingers had been broken and grown back crooked, like his cracked and broken
teeth.
Right after we moved in next door to my father’s fancy split-level show house in ‘69, my
father had hooked up with B. S. right away, both back-slapping drinking buddies, staunch
Goldwater and Nixon men, who’d rant Saturday nights at our kitchen table about all those
chickenshit draft dodgers and demonstrators and long hairs like Kenny and me. While the two of
us threw darts and played pool and ping pong in the living room down the hall, we’d listen in and
laugh at their drunken swagger, grinning at each other and waggling our fingers at each other,
doing a little trembling horror-show dance in our shoes whenever they shouted at us from the
kitchen, “You boys make a run for Canada or Mexico and, swear to God, we’ll hunt you down and
open up a big old can of whoop-ass on the both of you.”
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My old man had spent five years in the Texas A & M Corps of Cadets, an extra year
studying architecture and missing the Korean War altogether, and he felt obliged, always supplying
the booze and the Aggie jokes, leaning over his lawn mower at the property line between our two
houses summers like he was standing in the DMZ, handing one cold one after another over to Bill
Sherrod like war reparations.
I liked Danny’s playing, too, though, mostly for opposite reasons—because he could play
anything by the Whô and Cream and Hendrix and Zeppelin with a gut-rumbling roar, ugly-mean
and fast, winding up and turbo-propping his right arm into a spinning blur like Pete Townsend as
he struck one banging chord after another, then jumped high into the air and kicked out his feet,
his black boots thumping the floor hard just as I kicked my bass drum and crashed us all into the
end of the song. Or he’d wobble his Strat’s tension bar like Deep Purple’s Ritchie Blackmore till
his strings bent into a long, ululating wow and moan, howling like werewolves shot with silver
bullets. Danny could play lead almost as fast as Kenny, too, but he was sloppy a lot of the time,
missing licks and beats with his acid- and cannabis-addled fingers, then tried to make up for his
mistakes by kicking on his fuzz box or wah-wah or volume pedals, cranking up his Marshall amp
even louder till our ears rang and our skulls rattled like maracas.
More than anything, though, Danny was calm and utterly fearless, willing to take the
craziest risks or the wildest hallucinogenics on a stupid dare, just because he thought it was fun and cool: tripping on acid as he sped in his mother’s green Barracuda through red lights at busy intersections while other cars swerved away, blaring their horns; dropping three hits of Purple
Microdot with his chocolate milk and peanut butter sandwich in the school cafeteria, then showing up to Mrs. Mimm’s Algebra II Class twenty minutes late, a bright nebula of swirling clouds and colors floating before his eyes; stealing stacks of new albums under his dead father’s bomber jacket,
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then running full out and laughing when department store detectives stumbled out electric doors
shouting after him to stop; stealing pocketfuls of Vicks inhalers for their cheap, speedy high, then
falling onto the concrete sidewalk in front of the Rexall Drugs, going into mock epileptic
convulsions, just to give two old church ladies a fit.
Never gave a damn what anyone thought about him, ever.
My sisters Maddie and Hannah had spotted Danny first thing two years before from the
school bus that stopped at his house every day, just a day or so after he’d moved up to his mother’s from his dead father’s apartment in Houston, both of my sisters pointing him out to me through the finger-smudged school bus window as he flipped his long hair out of his face and back over his shoulders, then flicked his Kool Filter King sparking against the curb like a fizzling firecracker.
“There he is, Travis,” my sisters whispered to me, swooning as he walked past us down the aisle and sat by himself in the back of the bus.
That’s was new guy at school, they said, the one all the girls’d been ogling and mooning over as he loitered alone, talking to no one, hot-boxing one Kool after another in the smoking lounge, his surfer’s hair sun-streaked and corn-silk straight down the middle of his back, his face tanned and pimple-scarred along his cheeks, and as soon as I heard he played guitar and saw all the girls bunching up and staring at him, daring each other to go up and talk to him, I bummed a Kool from him right away in the high school smoking lounge, hot-boxing it till I was dizzy and the third-period bell rang, walking down the halls and talking to him about all the bands we both liked, Wishbone Ash and Alvin Lee’s Ten Years After and Leslie West’s Mountain and Hendrix’s
Band of Gypsies.
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For the last two years, Danny and I’d spent school afternoons, weekends and summers
hanging out together in his cool dark room, surrounded by humming black lights and colored
strobes—green circuit boards from Radio Shack he’d soldered himself—spattering splashes of
light pulsing his walls in perfect time with the bass kicks blaring through his Kenwood stereo and
speakers and turntable and reel to reel.
We stacked empty tape reels through his turntable spindle and down onto the spinning
platen, balancing Beatles albums on top of the reels, then unscrewing his hundred-dollar stylus and
flipping it upside down. Then we took turns lying on our backs for hours, holding the stylus
pressed up against the turning vinyl with our fingers till our arms ached, taping Sergeant Pepper’s
Lonely Hearts Club Band and The Magical Mystery Tour and The White Album backwards, then listening to
the slooping tape noise over and over again for hours, half-looped ourselves—number nine, number
nine—trying to discover clues that would tell us whether the walrus, Paul, was dead.
Other times, we sat together across from each other at opposite ends of his desk like a pot-
dealer’s assembly line, packing matchboxes and lids full of seeds and stems, some of it we’d grown
ourselves the summer before along White Rock Creek down the street in Pecan Park, then counted
out our take in crumpled, sweaty bills from the pockets of high-school freaks like us. Then we rolled one fat joint after another packed with resiny flower tops and lay on our backs sloshing his
King Size waterbed, sucking in hissing tokes as we stared up at the textured circles on his ceiling which strobed purple-white like a moiré effect poster, talking about god and death as we listened to Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland and the Moody Blues’ In Search of a Lost Chord.
Timothy Leary’s dead. No, nonono, he outside, looking in.
When Danny found out my father’d paid for me to take oil and watercolor lessons at the
White Rock Shopping Center—prepping me, he thought, to be an architect like him—Danny asked me to help him a roll out a gallon of velvety black Sherwin-Williams over his bedroom
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ceiling like a wide night sky in the desert. Then we popped a few of Hunk’s Mollies and smoked a few numbers and spattered Day-Glo white paint onto Danny’s black ceiling with his dead father’s old toothbrushes like two blitzed Michelangelos, mixing up palettes of fluorescent temperas from the head shop at Preston Center, then standing on a his stepfather’s stepladder and painting galaxies and ringed planets and nebulas and exploding novas as we blew smoke up at the black- light stars.
The weekend after we’d finished painting a glow-in-the-dark universe on his ceiling—stars that had already died, we said, and whose light in the sky was just an illusion of their memory like the fossils of giant lizards in stone—Danny offered me my first taste of LSD. Like Kenny, I’d avoided acid for fear my old man would catch me tripping and kill me or send me off to military school. At the time the time I took it, I didn’t know it was a four-way hit of Orange Barrel laced with too much strychnine—Danny didn’t think it was any big deal, thought I could handle it like him, a guy who’d taken acid like aspirin, he said, over three hundred times—but when I washed it all down with one of his stepfather Vance’s warm beers and lay back on his waterbed, I felt nothing at all for while till Danny told me about the time he’d come home tripping his ass off two years before and found his old man in his apartment bed in Montrose, his big toe jammed into the trigger guard of his Remington twelve gauge, his blood and brains stippling and dripping down the wall behind him like wild dogs.
“Wild dogs,” Danny said, his eyes wide as florescent moons. “And they were alive, man, I swear to god. Not wolves, man. Just a lot of your basic, regular dogs. Beagles and French poodles and shit, all gone wild. You know, like in that Hitchcock flick with all those little birdies pecking out old ladies’ eyes? And they were moving, man, running down the wall right at me. I couldn’t look at the hole in my old man’s face, so I just stood there and looked at the wall. Couldn’t move
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my legs. Just tried to come down so I could run the hell out of there and call an ambulance or the pigs. But the dogs were coming at me, man, big hunks of man meat in their mouths, and I couldn’t move.”
Danny finally looked away from the wall—he had to, he said, or he’d die—and then he fumbled around trying to pull his father’s big hairy toe out from the trigger guard, cut bone-deep from the shotgun’s recoil, stiff and blue-swollen and cold as a leftover chicken wing in the fridge, stuck fast like some stupid kid’s dick jammed into the mouth of a Coke bottle, but he was so stoned he couldn’t pull it free.
He didn’t want anybody to see his old man like that, he said—it was embarrassing, you know?—but he couldn’t get the big toe to budge, his father wearing his shotgun like a toe ring.
He even tried slicking it down with soap like his father’d done with his stuck wedding ring a few months before, but Danny finally just gave up. Then he looked up at the dogs on the wall and ran down the hall to his room to practice his guitar all night, all his lights on and his door locked, till he wasn’t too freaked to flush his stash and call an ambulance and the police next morning.
“What’d he do it for?” I asked Danny, trying not to remember Allyn’s father Beck dead in the alley behind our old house, staring up at the black hole of the ceiling sucking me in like gravity
I couldn’t escape tearing me away from Earth.
“It was like there was two of my old man, you know? The nice guy and the asshole, like there was a wild dog in his head sometimes. And the asshole finally won out and killed him, bit his face off trying to get out, and then it was coming right at me.”
I thought about my father, how I couldn’t figure the man out—a gifted artist and architect one minute and a total jerk the next—like there was a wild dog in his head, too, that woke up sometimes biting his brain in his skull.
“But why?” I said. “Why’d he do it?”
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“Hell if I know, man. Jesus. Don’t ask me.”
Then Danny told me his mother’d left his father for his idiot con-artist stepfather,
Vance—a used-car salesman, for chrissakes—who’d bought her off with a new black Barracuda paid for with a hot check that bounced three days after they married.
“Guess he was just fucking sad,” Danny said.
We were quiet a long time, and I had a feeling like my intestines were being sucked looping out of my navel, an astronaut’s umbilical cut loose from his space capsule above the moon, and then rushes shivered through me like electric eels and flashes of red and pink and orange shot out the corners of my eyes like the Perseid meteor shower in the summer sky, my bones going soft, my whole body melting into a wobbly sack of Jell-O on Danny’s waterbed tumbling into space, and I freaked, saying, “Jesus, man, what’d you have to go and tell me all that shit for? Do we have to talk about this right now? Fucking hell.” Then, for some reason I couldn’t figure out, I kept on talking about it, had to talk about it, couldn’t get it out, like a long barbed cactus needle pricking the pink of my brain.
That’s when I told Danny all about Allyn and me finding Garçon dead with his tongue lolling out and Beck lying tumbled-over in his wheelchair behind my driveway, a long finger of blood and rain streaking watercolor-red down the middle of the alley between my bare feet.
Danny said nothing for a while and then he shook his head hard. “God, I was such an asshole to her, man.”
“Who?”
“Marilyn.” Then he looked at me, his eyes kaleidoscope wide. “What was it like, Travis?
Seeing Marilyn like that, you know? Watching her die.”
“Don’t want to talk about it,” I whispered, shivering now, clenching my shirttail in my fists.
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But I told him anyway, couldn’t stop myself. I squeezed my eyes shut against the colors coming, like cars splashing wide wakes of water onto me in the cold rain, their headlights flashing past me, honking as I tried to dodge them running across LBJ Freeway to the shoulder, then red and blue lights and sirens screaming toward me as Marilyn lay there kicking gravel like a truck- struck doe, almost every bone in her body broken, tilted like white candles through her pretty skin, her neck twisted all the way around till her right cheek and the white orb of her eye rested, red- tethered, on her broken spine, her skull crushed and gravel-pocked, cracked open like a cantaloupe spilling pink seeds in the rain.
Danny took in a hit from his joint and coughed out a laugh. Laughed and coughed.
Couldn’t stop.
“You think that’s funny or something? Jesus.” I wanted to crack open his skull and make him look at his own bleeding brain for a while.
“Hey, man, least you weren’t tripping!” he said. Laughing and coughing.
Then he started to cry, his eyes filling, his cheeks wet and shining, but he was laughing, too, hard, swiping at his face, and then I was laughing with him and crying, too, because then, just then, it occurred to me I might just die, die like my brother Jesse and Danny’s father and Marilyn and her father, just now, while I was stoned out of my fucking mind.
“Hey, that’s a bad trip,” Danny kept on, laughing and swiping at his face. “One bad trip,
I’m telling you.”
But I couldn’t listen to him any more.
I squeezed my eyes shut as I tumbled into a blue-flashing void.
I wasn’t even eighteen yet—the hole in Danny’s ceiling sucking me up into space—and already I’d seen two people kill themselves. Why’d I draw death to me like blue-bottle flies? It was my fault, had to be, right? Even if just a little? A little cause and effect? Nixon picking up a
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phone in Washington and punching a little blinking button, talking to some general for a minute
or two, till all of Hanoi—the whole world—was burning?
My fault.
Punching a kid with leukemia in the stomach, my own brother dead. Watching a man in a
wheelchair clean his revolver at the kitchen table. Rolling a window down to flick a cigarette
sparking into the rain.
Danny’s reel-to-reel was spinning out Cream’s Eric Clapton singing, If it wasn’t for bad luck,
I wouldn’t have no luck at all, and I had to laugh.
My fucking fault. And just my fucking luck.
Was it going to just keep on and on and on like this till I died or killed myself, too?
Would I bleed out in some rice paddy for men like my father and Bill Sherrod who I hated more
than half the time, schoolboy bullies who John-Wayned their way through the world till they’d
end up ending it all, blowing the whole planet apart? Would I ever get married or have kids of my
own? Would I even make it to twenty?
I tried to tell all these things to Danny, but light mushroomed from my eyes, blinding me to words I couldn’t see to say, and I couldn’t breathe all of a sudden, like all the air in the room was being sucked out through the hole Danny’s ceiling, sucking the breath out of my lungs till I
was hyperventilating so hard I thought I’d die for sure.
It took most of the night for Danny to talk me down.
“Hey, it’s okay,” he said, turning off his blaring music, flipping off the black lights and
strobes, flipping on the overhead light and the bedside lamp. “See? I just gave you too much, is
all. It’s just the strychnine talking. No, don’t do it, man. Don’t look up at the ceiling. It’s just
the ceiling, okay?”
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When I finally fell asleep just before dawn, curled up like a cocktail shrimp on the shag
rug at the foot of his bed, I jolted awake, blinking, in bright sunlight, in what had seemed like a only moment of sleep, and then I realized it was morning and I’d stayed at Danny’s all night.
“Shit, man,” I said, “I better get home, or my old man’s going to kill me.”
A little after five-thirty a. m., I stumbled, paranoid as President Nixon, down the alley
from Danny’s house, still stoned and rushing, my heart writhing with white worms, and when I got
home my father was still up, sitting on the couch downstairs as I tried to sneak through the front
door and creak up the carpeted stairs to my room.
“Where you been, Trey?” I heard him say from downstairs. He’d been calling me Trey for
years, a name I hated, people confusing our names sometimes, after his long-dead Aggie father, the
first William Barret Travis Truitt. My father’s calm, deep voice made me jump in my shivery skin at
the top landing, rushes shuddering through my muscles.
“Fell asleep at Kenny’s, is all,” I said down to him from the balcony rail, trying to be calm,
trying not to tremble or lean over the rail too far till I flipped over headfirst and broke my neck in
the fall, trying to get my breath, my voice weak and strange in my ears, floating up, then bouncing
back down at me from the living room’s high vaulted ceiling.
“You been over at Danny’s?”
“No, sir. Just fell asleep at Kenny’s, is all.”
Maintain, I thought.
“Come down here,” he said, slurring a little. “I want to talk to you.”
I stepped down both flights of stairs, slow and straight as I could, trying not to grip the
wrought-iron handrails too hard, till I was already standing in front of him on the couch somehow,
unable to look into his fierce blue eyes.
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“What’s the hell’s wrong with you? Let me see your eyes.”
“Nothing,” I said, then glanced at his red face, pocked with acne scars, his mouth pressed together like a hook-caught carp’s, white and quivering a little. I tried to return his stare, his eyes burning blue into mine, but I had to look away, thinking, He knows, my irises pinhole-black, the sunrise too bright in my eyes from the high wall of windows floor to ceiling behind him.
“You kept me up all night,” he said, his voice flat.
I glanced at the glass of J & B and melting ice gone watery on the coffee table, condensation dripping from the glass into a faint water ring that dripped to the Mexican tiles—my father most likely making a dozen or more trips to the kitchen liquor cabinet all night as he’d waited up for me.
“Nothing,” I said again, stupidly, not knowing what else to say next, then shrugged and
said, “I mean . . . I’m sorry.”
“That’s what I thought.”
He stood. Walked a little wobbly toward me from the couch and stood right in front of
me, his face inches from mine, whiteheads and bright red welts of acne rising along his neck. His
blue eyes welded a bright scalding hole melting into my skull till my eyes hurt in the sunlight and I
had to look away.
“You’re a goddamn liar, you know?” he said, calm as I’d ever seen him.
“No, sir.”
He stepped closer to me, his breath a seething mirage of bad breath, cigarette smoke and
scotch.
“Don’t lie to me, son.”
“I’m not, Dad.”
“What’d you take? What are you on? Tell me. Now.”
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“I’m not on anything, Dad. Just a little sleepy, is all. Fell asleep on Kenny’s couch while we were watching TV. I would’ve called you but—”
My father palmed my mouth and squeezed my face in his fist as hard as he could. He turned my face left, then right, his eyes burning into mine like I was staring at a sparking arc- welder without a tilting mask. Then he shoved my face away, and I stumbled backwards and almost fell.
My knees trembled under my jeans as I stood forward on my feet, waiting for a blow.
“Called Bill Sherrod some time after midnight,” he said, stepping toward me again.
“Hated to wake the man up. He has to get up at four, you know? Some people in this world like him and me have to work. When I asked him if you were there, well, you know what he said.”
“All right,” I said, “I was at Danny’s and I fell asleep. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t’ve been there.
I shouldn’t’ve fallen asleep. I shouldn’t’ve lied to you, but I was afraid.”
“Yeah? Ought to be. You think I wouldn’t know? Think I wouldn’t find out? Roll up your goddamn sleeves.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Roll them up.”
I stared at him, tried to stare him down but couldn’t, my eyes losing focus in the intense sunlight, wobbling in my head, till I had to look away again, look down. I unbuttoned my right sleeve, then my left, rolled them both up till they were tight against my bandy biceps.
He pulled my hands to him hard, palm up, one at a time, looking close at my wrists and the crooks of my arms, rubbing my veins hard for knots under his rough fingertips.
“What?” I said. “You think I’d stick a needle in my arm? I’m not that stupid.”
“Yeah, but you’re stupid enough.”
Then I said, “Least I’m not drunk and hung-over half the time.”
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His right hand moved fast, and I flinched and tried to duck, thinking he’d backhand me with his red knuckles and big-freckled hand, but then he was holding my face in his fist again, like he’d caught a mosquito midair, squashing it into a bloody spot on his palm, squeezing my cheeks hard till my jaw popped and sprung open.
I fought the urge to bite the salty web of skin between his thumb and index finger pressed against my tongue as he pushed my head back, and I tripped backwards three steps, bumping my head with a loud thock into the hollow sheetrock wall. He popped my head into the wall three times, then stopped, his white lips trembling.
We both stared at each other a long time as he held my face in his fist and I held his look, refused to look away, couldn’t now, his blowtorch eyes melting through my head, his fists like glowing irons in a welder’s glove branding my face, until he glanced right and up the stairs and let me go, stepping back.
I followed my father’s eyes up like a beacon and saw my mother standing there on the middle stair landing to the front door.
“Nothing,” I said again and shrugged away, shaking my head and wiping my mouth, my jaw popping again as I tried to open and shut it. “There’s nothing wrong with me.”
Then I rubbed the knot rising at the back of my skull and walked past my mother and up the stairs to my room.
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Eleven Nacogdoches 1979
irst day of April, Rachel was feeding me a fat slice of wedding cake, smearing sugary FFwhite icing across my cheeks, laughing like a fledging jay in the Fredonia Inn courtyard, when I heard a loud shattering pop like a light bulb exploding into the big crowd of family and friends behind me, and I turned to Allyn’s squalling screams.
“You ruined my new dress!” Allyn shrieked at Roger Rogerson, her boyfriend of the month, not knowing she was hurt just yet, slinging yellow foam from her hands, staring down and swiping at herself.
Her summer dress, yellow and sheer, dripped bubbling blood and beer, a frothing red line runneling into her tanned cleavage, slivers of brown bottle glass like glitter across her shoulders in the sun, the front of her wet dress pressed to her skin, shadowing her small dark nipples and the dark oval mole I used to kiss above her left breast.
Not bothering to cover herself as everyone at the wedding reception stared at her in their
Sunday suits and dresses, Allyn blinked away blood, then cupped her right eye, a thin black cut brimming in her eyebrow, a line of blood dripping down the side of her nose and chin. Seeing her
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own bright blood in her palm, she screamed at Roger Rogerson again, then ran straight at him, slapping his face hard just as I ran through the crowd to step between them.
“What the hell just happened?” I asked her and shoved Rogerson, knocking him into my father, who weaved and stumbled, fumbling his plastic cup, J & B and cocktail ice steaming from the new green shoots of Bermuda grass.
The roses and azaleas were all in bloom in the courtyard around us, red, white, pink.
I pried Allyn’s hand from her face and pulled a sliver of brown bottle glass like a thorn from the cut in her eyebrow, smearing a dogwood blossom of white icing and blood across her cheek. “You all right? Christ, Allyn, what’d he just do to you?”
“Threw his beer at me!” She spat and lunged at Rogerson again as I held her back, swinging her arms and spewing beer foam and blood, swiping at her mouth and smearing pink lipstick and blood across her jaw.
I glanced down and saw Rogerson’s Shiner longneck, shattered at my feet, glass scattered everywhere in the grass, the bottle bottom upended like a crown, and I kicked it over and pressed its sharp edges into the red clay so no one would step on it as the crowd gathered into a tight circle around us. Then I pulled my handkerchief from my slacks and took off my cheap tuxedo jacket and covered Allyn, holding my handkerchief to her eyebrow, pressing my fingers against hers to stop the bleeding.
Sparrows tittered and chirped like squeaky pulleys from the loblollies overhead.
“Here, hold still, will you?” I said and wiped blood and tears from her swelling eye, tiny cuts like cat scratches across her face. “It’s not that deep. Just bleeding like hell. Here, pressure.
Give it some pressure.” Already the blue half-moon of a shining bruise was forming under her right eye, swelling shut.
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She pressed my handkerchief to her brow and squalled like Marilyn the summer she’d tumbled, bloody-kneed, over a curb from her Schwinn.
I stepped toward Roger Rogerson, leaning into the electric air between us.
“Son of a bitch,” I said.
He wore a blond Fu Manchu and a stupid grin, long, bushy sideburns down his cheeks, his face covered in reddish-blond stubble, his hair back in a stubby blond pony tail like Beck’s.
“What the hell’s wrong with you, man? The fuck you do that for?” I said, a bubble of spit flying from my teeth.
“What?” he said. “You think I’m stupid? Think I didn’t see you kiss her back there?”
I wiped at my mouth, a faint smear of her pink lipstick across my knuckles.
“We’re just friends, man. It was nothing.”
“Friends, my ass,” he said. “Didn’t look like nothing to me.”
I took another step toward him. Then I made the mistake of calling him his old grade- school nickname, “W-woger W-wogerson.”
But before I could say anything else, he smirked at me, scowled like an owl and swung.
Rogerson had gone to school with me in Dallas—from grade school at St. Jude’s all the way up through Lake Highlands High—and after graduation and a four-year stint in the Marines, he’d just shown up one semester in the late seventies along with all the rest of us lost suburban kids from Big D, long hairs and freaks like Maddie and me who’d escaped to the big party school in
East Texas.
A sad, goofy-looking kid at St. Jude’s, Rogerson had sat next to me in the back row in fifth grade, his face always smudged like he’d been eating potting soil pinched between his fingers, his head shaved into a crew cut with little bald crescent scars across his stubbly scalp like he had
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the ringworm. Unable to pronounce his r’s, he always covered his mouth when he talked and
stuttered out his answers till Sister Mary Joseph started calling his name on the roll every day with,
“W-woger W-wogerson,” and all the kids laughed at him and called him Woger Dodger and Elmer
Fudd on the church’s asphalt playground.
The more Sister Mary Joseph cracked her ruler across his knuckles and made fun of the him in class, the more his old man belted him at home to get him to stop, the worse Rogerson’s stuttering got, till finally his old man just stopped picking him up from school one day and my mother had to drive him home with the rest of us kids on her carpool days, his sour boy-stink sticking to the vinyl car seats like old laundry.
“Tank you for the w-wide, Mrs. Twuitt,” Roger’d say, soft-spoken and shy, ducking out of our father’s ’66 Chevelle station wagon and smiling at my mother, then shrugging his baggy coat up to his ears in the cold as he turned up the driveway to his father’s house.
Years later, his stutter gone, his r’s restored, a bullied, dirty-faced boy turned pretty-boy bully, Rogerson’d bulked up like his best buds B. J. Ryffe and Hunk Dawkins on the football squad—beating the crap out of Kenny Ryffe and me more than once on the playing fields just for sport—then got kicked off the team for punching out Coach Boggs for gawking at him too long in the dressing-room showers, grew his hair down to his ass before anyone else did, the biggest jock at
Lake Highlands Junior High turned biggest druggie and freak.
A few weeks before the big bust at Marilyn’s apartment, I’d seen Rogerson there half a dozen times with Hunk and Jack Doppler, Roger’s tight bell bottoms bulging out at his crotch like a roundworm fisted into a cyst, the muscles in his track-marked arms frog-jumping from all meth he’d mainlined with Hunk and Doppler in Marilyn’s bathroom, his blond hair silky-straight as
Allyn’s as he tried to sweet-talk her into Marilyn’s bedroom, till Marilyn told him to stay the hell away from her jail-bait sister or get out. All the big-hipped hippy chicks in their granny dresses
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and flowing scarves and granny glasses swooned and mooned over him like he was Roger Daltrey
or Robert Plant, and he’d already bedded more than a few of them on my old box springs in
Marilyn’s room. Then, after the bust, he just disappeared, making himself scarce at school, till
word got around, true or not, that he’d been the nark who’d turned Hunk and Marilyn in.
The day we all graduated from Lake Highlands High in ‘73, he surprised the entire
graduating class—eight-hundred people in caps and gowns at Memorial Auditorium—when he
showed up and crossed the stage in a Marine Corps uniform, his head shaved down to those little
crescent scars again. He walked up to the podium, praised his father and Jesus for setting him
straight, then announced he was shipping off to Nam next day to fight the good fight, one of the
last Marines to board a Huey from the crowded roof of the U. S. Embassy two years later, the day
Saigon fell in ’75.
Before the wedding began, I’d been squeaking my Converse sneakers down the aisle at
Christ Episcopal in my cheap white tux, my head down, while Rachel shouted at her father behind
me in the church foyer, when I first saw Allyn in her summer dress sitting next to Rogerson in a
dark-stained pew three rows back.
I glanced at the two of them and almost laughed—the guys Allyn slept with didn’t much
surprise me anymore—but then Rogerson threw his knotty arm up over the back of the pew behind her and stroked her long shining hair like a Persian purring in his lap, his slack mouth slinking into a smirk as he grinned up at me like he owned her. Allyn smiled, too, that same strange smile I’d seen when her father’d fallen and broken his back showing off for her, and seeing her there with Rogerson struck me like a long steel screw squeaking through the base of my brother Jesse’s spine, straight into nerve and dark marrow.
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I leaned back against the altar rail next to my best man, Kenny Ryffe, who wore a cheap white tux and Converses to match mine, and I nodded toward Allyn, whispering, “What the hell’s she doing with that idiot?” but Kenny just shrugged and pulled a red rubber band from his teeth, tying his dark hair back into a frazzled pony tail, stretching his neck under the tight, pointy collar of his pale blue shirt till his vertebrae popped.
“Beats hell out of me,” he whispered and grinned, showing a cracked front tooth dark as a creek rock.
I glanced back at Asadollah nodding off like an old lady behind the church organ, then over to Maddie, leaning against the podium behind her Shure mike, frowning at me as she waited to sing for our wedding, and I shot her a stern mock frown just like our father’s till she had to look away to keep from cracking up.
I tried to straighten my face as I faced my frowning father, who sat between my mother and Rachel’s in the front pew. Staring down at her chapped knuckles, then sensing my look,
Rachel’s mother glanced up at me, looking like she’d aged ten years in the last ten minutes, dark creases hinging the corners of her mouth like Howdy Doody’s, and for a moment I imagined I was staring at Rachel twenty-five years into the future and had to look away.
My father was still glaring at my white high-tops and Kenny’s—“Who the hell wears basketball shoes at his own wedding?” he’d asked me on the sidewalk up to the chapel—and he shook his head and sighed like a dying man for the fourth or fifth time in the last ten minutes.
Rachel’s twenty-year-old stepmother—a former cashier at the Friendswood Dairy
Queen—sat in the left front pew, across the aisle from Rachel’s mother and my parents, nursing
Rachel’s half sister, a raisin-faced baby girl wearing a knit cap and blue-footed sleeper, blanketed like a peanut wrapped in dryer lint.
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“Some wedding, huh?” I whispered to Kenny and tried to smile at the congregation,
everyone waiting to see if the wedding would end before it even started while Rachel shouted at
her father from the church foyer behind them.
“Does your girlfriend have to do that in church?” Rachel was shouting. “At my
wedding?” Her high voice echoed under the arch of the heart-pine beams high overhead, brightly
colored dust sparking the air of the nave like a bonfire under the saints smiling in stained glass.
Five minutes before, I’d tried my best to smooth out things between Rachel and her father
in the church foyer, but she’d said, “Butt out, Travis. This’s none of your damn business,” and I’d
squeaked back down the aisle to the altar with my head down like a paper-popped pup.
“You just going to let your girlfriend flop a tit out for everybody to gawk at?” Rachel kept
on, her pinched Betty-Boop voice jangling the nerve roots in my capped front teeth.
I stared down at my sneakers, shook my head, my face warm as a hot plate, and glanced up
at Rachel’s young stepmother, her neck blotched and flushing like a robin’s breast as she pulled a
corner of her baby’s blanket up to cover herself, trying to muffle her baby’s smacking wet sucking.
“What the hell are you doing here anyway, Dad?” Rachel kept on. “I don’t hear from you
for three years, and then you just show up to my wedding with that . . . girl?”
“She’s my wife!” her father shouted back. “Like it or not! I just wanted to walk my little
girl down the aisle. Just wanted my little girl to see her little sister.”
“Yeah?” Rachel shouted. “Well, your wife’s young enough to be my little sister!”
Rachel laughed, a high, snorting laugh I’d found cute once which now made me flinch like
the high, strangled barks of Maddie’s Chihuahuas cough-yapping at my feet.
Forty or so people—my parents, friends and cousins who’d driven the two hours east from Dallas, Sean Baggett and Everett Lee Degaulier, Sherilyn Vanderbeck, a few of my English
department profs, Maddie and Rachel’s theater friends, Maddie and my friends from the Swinging
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Axes lab band—had all shown up to the wedding, and now they were taking turns glancing back in their pews, turning red-faced front again, coughing into their hands and shifting in the hard pews, not knowing whether to laugh or get up and leave.
My father stood from the front pew, his thin lips pressed into two thin white lines, his arms folded straight-jacket tight around him like Nixon, and he stepped up to me and whispered hot scotch fumes into my ear. “You going to do something about this goddamn mess?”
“Rachel can handle herself, Dad. Believe me. Please. Just sit down, will you?”
But Rachel wasn’t handling herself. She was crying now, a real jag of wailing and snuffling, something I’d never seen her do before.
“For god’s sake, don’t you get it?” she pleaded with her father, hiccupping now like
Maddie at twelve when our father used to run around the house swatting the backs of her bare legs with a willow switch or coat hanger. “I don’t want you here, okay? Please, Daddy. Go home, will you?”
My father huffed out another dying man’s sigh and told me, “Goddammit, this’s gone on long enough.” Then he turned up the long aisle, leaning into a long loping walk like a mountain goat with its head down.
“Dad,” I said, catching up with him, “I’m telling you, man, you don’t want to get in the middle of this.”
But he was huffing forward, no more chance of stopping him than a runaway grocery cart with a wobbly wheel rattling towards a new Cadillac.
“Dad,” I said, “please,” trying to catch up.
In the chapel foyer, Father Fell, the Episcopal university chaplain who’d advised us not to marry so soon in the first place, had just touched Rachel’s shoulder to tell her the service should
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begin, when my father, puffed up like a fighting cock, thumped Rachel’s father on the chest, almost knocking the man over.
“You heard the girl,” my father said. “She doesn’t want you here, all right?” Then he knuckle-thumped the man’s sternum again hard like his tie was door knocker.
“Easy, Dad,” I said, stepping between them.
Rachel’s father straightened up and glanced up at my father, a head taller than he was, then up at me, a head taller than my father, then stepped back, smoothing down his wide paisley tie and corduroy sports coat, sweat like Elmer’s glue dew-lapping his upper lip, his right eyelid twitching like a blinking semaphore.
“But who’ll give away my daughter in marriage?” Rachel’s father pleaded, earnest as a strip- mall preacher.
“Hell, I will,” my father said.
Rachel’s father took another step back, shaking his head, and then Rachel stepped toward my father, looking up at him, wide-eyed, like a little girl waving back to Big Tex at the Texas State
Fair. “Would you really?” she asked my father. “Would you do that for me, Mr. Truitt?” She snuffled and hiccupped, a spittle drip dangling from her lower lip.
Rachel glanced back and glared at her father, her wet mascara smudging black stars around her eyes, which glowed like briquettes in white ash. “Maybe you could give my dad a beating while you’re at it,” she said. “Beat him bloody.”
“What?” I said.
But she just smiled at me like she’d asked my father for some trifling wedding gift. A can opener. A blender.
My father nodded and winked at Rachel so her father couldn’t see. Then Rachel’s father shot past us, down the long aisle, jerking his wife up by the wrist from the front pew, taking the
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baby from her roughly, then pulling her up the aisle past us again and through the church’s wide double doors as she buttoned up her milk-spotted blouse, stumbling behind him down the front steps.
Rachel’s father ran a good ways across the church lawn, dragging his wife behind him, then stopped to turn back. “I’ve got a right to be here!” he shouted at us up the chapel steps, his baby squalling milky drool onto his shoulder. “I’ve got a right to give my daughter away! I brought her into this world!”
Rachel laughed. “You already gave me away!” she shouted. “Threw me away, is what you did. Me and Mom both!” Then she swiped at her eyes and nose like a child, a long slick of wet across her wrist, as she turned her back on her father and faced mine.
She’d been unhappier than I’d ever seen before, but now the congregation applauded as she reached up to take my father’s arm and turned with him back to the church sanctuary, smiling now, a lovely blue light in her eyes, my sweet beaming bride to be.
Five minutes later, after she’d washed her face and applied new makeup in the rectory bathroom, fresh red lipstick and black mascara looping into her long lashes, she let go of my father’s arm after their slow walk down the aisle, the long train of her mother’s moth-balled wedding dress rustling up the chancel’s red-carpet steps as she faced me.
Asadollah ended “Here Comes the Bride” with a jazzy flourish on the church organ, and I lifted Rachel’s veil a moment and took her round child’s chin into my fingers and smiled, holding her up face to the light streaming through the stained-glass windows.
“God, you’re pretty,” I whispered but couldn’t help wondering, What am I doing with my life?
Couldn’t help glancing past my father to Allyn sitting in the third pew, her face slack, her eyes staring off, shiny and dark as shark’s teeth chipped from a limestone quarry.
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After we’d said our vows and fumbled around trying to slip on each other’s rings—
matching twelve-caret gold bands I’d bought for eighty bucks each at Wal-Mart, where I worked
now in Shipping and Receiving—Kenny popped his neck and cracked his knuckles behind me and
picked up his acoustic Martin to play, and I heard Maddie’s liquid-silver voice, like a
meadowlark’s, singing Rachel’s favorite Irving Berlin:
I’ll be loving you, always,
With a love that’s true, always.
An hour later, I lay on my back in the grass of the Fredonia Inn courtyard, staring up
through leaves like Allyn’s eyes against the bright April sky, my mouth filling up with blood as I
sat up and spit a loose tooth crown into my palm.
Everything would’ve been all right, I’d tell myself later, if Allyn hadn’t pulled me aside in
the hallway outside the Fredonia Inn bathrooms fifteen minutes earlier, whispering, “You married
the wrong girl,” then smiled her crooked little smile like the whole thing just was a big joke,
pressing me against the hallway wall and kissing me just as the men’s room door opened and
Rogerson walked out.
But it was my fault, too, more my fault than hers, maybe.
I’d wanted to kiss her again for a long time—the last time I thought I’d ever kiss her—and
I’d kissed her too long, a just-married man, stepping away from her, then wiping my mouth and ducking my head as I walked away, down the hall past Rogerson.
Five minutes later, Rachel was slipping off her garter in the Fredonia Inn ballroom and tossing it underhanded to Asadollah, Sean leaping in front of him at the last moment to snatch it one-handed in the air like he was at a Frisbee tournament, and in another five minutes Rachel was tossing her wedding bouquet backwards over her head, the circle of carnations flying outside the
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circle of girls—Allyn’s sister Sherilyn and my sisters Hannah and Maddie—all waiting to catch it, and it fell right into Allyn’s hands just as she walked in with Rogerson shouting at her back, Allyn fumbling the bouquet like a white ball of flame, then letting out a little scream as she hurled it back to Maddie, who dropped it to her feet.
And another five minutes after that, I’d been feeding cake to my wife in the courtyard, thumbing a crumbling slice into her mouth and laughing, thinking everything would be all right after all, until Rogerson threw his beer bottle at Allyn.
I stared up at the blur of my father’s red face above me as he reached down a hand from the crowd to pull me up from the wet grass.
“Shit,” I said with a snaggletooth lisp and stood, a little shaky in my sneakers, trying to shake out the yellow fireflies blinking behind my eyes. I touched my buzzing lip, split open like a tomato set too long in the sun, and flinched. Scars on scars.
“You all right, son?” my father said, slurring his words and weaving a little as he handed me back my bent wire rims and tried to brush the pine needles from my back.
I fisted the bloody crown in my palm and ignored him, put my glasses back on, a little lopsided on my face, and glanced around above everyone’s heads till I’d spotted Rogerson, his back to the wedding crowd as he walked fast out of the Fredonia Inn courtyard.
“Hey,” I said after him, pushing through the crowd. “Hey!” I shouted.
Rogerson stopped. Turned around. His reddish-blond Fu Manchu and sideburns like carpet samples tacked to his face.
“Don’t, Travis,” Allyn said behind me, and I glanced back at her, still pressing my handkerchief to her eye, already swollen shut. “All he’ll do is hurt you.”
But I walked to him anyway.
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“The fuck’s wrong with you, man?” I asked him again like an idiot, thinking I was being
reasonable, but bloody spit bubbled through the gap between my front teeth and dribbled down
my chin and on to my pale blue shirt.
“Nothing,” Rogerson was saying, stuttering a little. “Nothing w-wong with me.”
But I’d glanced down without thinking, saying, “Oh, man,” trying to swipe away my own bloody spit dribbling into my shirt pocket, when Rogerson’s fist flashed up into my face a second time, an explosion of white, and I was lying on my back in the wet grass again, the sun too-bright in the eyes of this not-too-bright April fool.
I was out awhile until I heard applause, loud clapping and hooting from my own drunken
wedding party, and I sat up to see Rogerson sprawled face-up in the grass, my father walking back
towards the clapping crowd, shaking out his bloody hand and cursing, “Goddamn son of a bitch
bit me!”
My father’d tried the same move on me more than once at home in Dallas, catching my
face in his grip and squeezing hard till my jaw’d popped open like a clam, then pushing me
backwards till I’d tripped or bumped my head up against a wall, but Rogerson had bit down hard
on the web of skin between my father’s index finger and thumb, then held on, shaking his head like
a Doberman with a dead rabbit in his mouth, tearing a red flap of skin back from my father’s hand
like an apple peel, till my father’d popped him in the nose three times with his free fist and
knocked him sprawling to the grass.
The whole crowd was gathering around my father now, Sean Baggett clapping him on the
back and saying, “Way to go, Mr. Truitt. You sure showed him.”
I shook my head and craned my neck from my sitting position, trying to spot Rachel, but
I couldn’t see her anywhere and didn’t feel like getting up to go find her quite yet.
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I glanced down at my clenched fist and opened it, saw my tooth crown still there, pressed into my palm. I wiped my own bloody spit off my shirt and dropped my tooth into my shirt pocket, then glanced up to see my old friend Kenny Ryffe reaching down a hand to pull me up from the grass again.
“Man,” he said, handing me my glasses, “you really know how to throw a wedding.”
“You seen Rachel?” I asked Sean Baggett thirty minutes later as he stopped me in the middle of the wedding party, still going strong in the Fredonia Inn courtyard.
Sean shook his head and snickered. “Been off on a beer-and-bandage run with your old man.”
The wedding reception crowd, eighty or more people now, had all stopped to watch the fight, then, once they’d found out my father and I were all right, had gone right back to eating and drinking like nothing had happened, floating the keg of Lone Star in no time and finishing off the last of the wedding cake and my mother’s homemade hors douvres from Dallas—smoked pork ribs and Ranch Style beans, sweet cornbread and potato salad, deviled eggs and celery filled with pimento cheese, nachos and chile con queso—everyone standing around picking at their teeth with their plastic forks, holding onto their collapsed paper plates and cups of foamy beer while they chattered and laughed about Rogerson, who’d staggering up on to his hands and knees, then stumbled up to his feet and scrambled off as soon as he’d seen my father coming at him again, holding his hand high in the air, wrapped in a bloody wedding napkin, and shouting, “Want to try biting my hand again, you goddamn little weasel?”
“Man, where’d she run off to?” I asked Sean, still looking around for Rachel, peering out over the tops of everyone’s heads, which bobbed as they danced in the grass to Van Morrison blasting through the lab band’s PA.
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Sean handed me a wad of cotton balls fisted in his sweaty palm. “Here. Your mom
wanted me to bring you these.” I glanced over at my mother, still ladling out beans from a big
aluminum pot to the crowd, which stood in a long line across the courtyard. “Want some of this
hydrogen peroxide?”
“Sure.”
He handed me a brown-glass bottle I’d assumed to be Sean’s fifth or sixth beer, and I
unscrewed the top and sniffed at it, poured a little bubbling and fizzing into the cotton, then
pressed it, flinching, to my split fat lip.
“What’s the deal with him anyway?” Sean asked me.
“Who? The guy that hit me?”
Sean shook his head. “Your old man.”
“You’re asking me? Hell if I know. Same difference, you ask me. What’d he do now?”
Sean hesitated, then shook his head again. “He’s just tapping the new keg.” Sean nodded
to a battered garbage can under a blooming dogwood, white blossoms clotted with bright red
stigmata, my father standing in one sock foot over an aluminum keg bobbing in melting ice as he whacked the steel keg spout off with the heel of his dress shoe, spewing beer all over his hand wrapped in gauze and a new Ace bandage.
Sean stared down at his feet with the same stunned look on his face as Rogerson’s just
before he’d run off.
“What, Sean?” I said. “What’d my old man do?”
“Not what he did but what he said. On the way to the liquor store.”
“Don’t tell me he found out about you and Maddie living together.”
Sean nodded, thumbing the cleft in his blond beard and staring down.
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“Sleep with my daughter, and you’re going to by-God marry her, too, and soon,” I said, puffing out my chest and doing my best imitation of my father.
“How’d you know?” Sean said, glancing up.
I laughed and shook my head, patted him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry about it. He said the same thing to me when he found out Rachel and I were living in sin. He’s just a big blowhard. His bark’s worse than his bite.”
“Could’ve fooled me. You should’ve seen him hit that guy. Kicked him in the ribs, too.
Crack!”
“Just don’t piss him off too much and you’ll be all right,” I said, chucking him lightly in the ribs. “My old man doesn’t hit much. Mostly just dogs and little kids.”
“Sounds like my old man on a tear.” Sean looked my face over and frowned, like I’d just pressed it into a paper nest of roiling yellow jackets. “Man, that guy got you good, Travis. You’re getting yourself a nice little shiner there.”
“Thanks.” I blinked my left eye shut, could barely see his face through my right eye, just a puffy blur through a swollen eye slit.
“You all right?” he said.
I tongued the stub of my tooth and the wide coppery cut in my split fat lip, pressed the wet cotton ball bubbling like warm beer to my mouth, said what I’d already said to Maddie and
Allyn and my mother and half the wedding party.
“I’m good. No big deal.”
My brain throbbed against my skull like a bilge pump in a sinking shrimp boat, and I pulled my loose crown out of my pocket and pressed it up hard onto the stump of my stubby tooth, hoping it wouldn’t fall out, deciding right then that Sean Baggett was the last man in the world I’d ever let my little sister marry. Then I set off again in search of my lost bride.
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*
She was sitting on a concrete bench furzy with mildew inside the Fredonia Inn atrium, feeding my mother’s sweet cornbread to a cranky Canada goose.
“There you are,” I said and sat on the bench next to her. “I was looking for you.”
The atrium was hot and steamy as a Louisiana greenhouse, the goose honking and clattering its bills at me like castanets.
“What are you doing in here?” I said. “Everybody wants us to dance.”
“Mom just left,” she said, ignoring me, shaking her head and rustling her mother’s wedding dress, which hung on her like a six-year-old girl trying on dresses in her mother’s closet.
She shifted to the end of the bench, as far away from me as she could sit. “She decided not to stay over. Driving all the way back to Pearland tonight. And who could blame her?” She stared down at two squares of cornbread, crumbling into her palm.
“Jesus, Rachel, I’m sorry. I know, I know. Here we are and this’s supposed to be one of the best days of your life and—”
“Only two days worse than this,” she said, cutting me off, her mascara melting into inkblots under her eyes. “The day my dad left and the day my mom almost did herself in.”
The goose grunted and clapped its bill around a piece of cornbread crumbled into her palm and swallowed it whole, a big lump in its long neck sliding down, then nipped at the yellow crumbs pressed to Rachel’s fingertips, till she snapped her hand back—“Hey, that hurt!”—and gave the goose a little pop on the head. “Damn duck, cut that out.”
“That’s a goose,” I said. “Duck’s over there.”
I nodded to the plastic pond in the middle of the atrium, scummed over with blue-green algae, a white duck next to it sulking under a potted palm with drooping brown fronds, the duck
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blinking its rheumy black eyes, teary with sand and gravel, its yellow bill tucked under its wing, its feathers dingy with duck shit.
“God, why do they have to keep them in here?” Rachel said. “How . . . humiliating.”
“You’re right,” I said. “It’s a terrible thing.”
“Oh, shut up, Travis.” She hurled the last square of cornbread exploding into the goose’s head, and the goose squabbled and blinked, shaking out its bill, then glanced down and gobbled up the crumbs scattered across the atrium till its bill was masked in mud. “First my stupid dad shows up. Then you have to get into a fight over that stupid girl.”
“It wasn’t a fight.”
She snorted. “That’s for sure. I’d hate to see you try and stand up for me.”
“Hey, I’d stand up for you. Any day.”
“Shut up, will you? Every time you get around the girl you get stupid.”
“I was just trying to help.”
“Yeah, and you got your ass kicked for kissing her. Serves you right.”
“Jesus, Rachel. She wished me good luck in the hall and kissed me. So what? It’s not my fault the guy’s a total idiot.”
She looked at me hard as I glanced up, staring at the big skylight overhead, smutty with mold and mildew.
“God, you such a bad liar.”
“All right, I kissed her, and I’m a big idiot. You knew that when you married me. What else do you want me to say? I’m sorry I kissed her.”
The goose waddled up to Rachel again, a little wary at first, slapping at the mud under its webbed feet, then pecked at the cornbread crumbled into the white crinoline folds of her petticoat,
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leaving a smear of mud. “Go away, greedy goose,” she said and popped its head again, and it stood to its full height, honking and flapping its wings into a storm of muddy feathers.
We both sat quiet a long time. The goose clacked its bill and shook out its head, then lay down in the mud at Rachel’s feet and preened.
Rachel shifted a little closer to me on the bench, squeezing her eyes shut and showing her little pointed teeth a moment after she’d looked me over. “You all right?”
“I’m good. No big deal.” I folded my hands in my lap and stared down at them. “Want to dance? Everybody’s asking us to dance.”
“No way,” she said. “You’re too damn tall.”
“Hey, don’t be short with me.”
“God, you’re so stupid,” she said and smiled a little. She tipped her plastic cup down and held her fingers against the ice inside, draining out her watery Amaretto Sour, spattering mud freckles onto the goose’s wings. Then she took the melting ice from her cup and folded it into a wedding napkin embossed with silver wedding bells.
She pressed the damp, cold napkin to my lips.
“Hey, easy now,” I said and flinched.
She shook her head and pressed harder. “God, Travis, why can’t you be more like your father?”
“What?”
“You father’s my hero,” she said.
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IV
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Twelve Nacogdoches December 29 1988
ow’s your dad doing?” Allyn shouts up to me through the tree-corked hole in ““HHher roof. Hasn’t once asked about Maddie since she started asking about old friends and family.
On my knees, my feet slippery on the steep slope down, slick with ice, I stop my sawing at the roofline, about halfway through the pine trunk now, the red bark rain-sopped and spongy, the saw blade binding up every quarter-inch or so till I can barely move it anymore. I cough, finger- sling the stinging sweat from my puffy eyes and nose, from the cut in my swollen lip, try to brush off the sawdust and sticky pine sap clotted into the peeling blisters on my left palm, the ragged cut on my right arm where the jagged blade just slipped.
“The old man’s mellowed some,” I say, “but he’s still got an iron rod up his ass big as this tree.” I laugh, then cough, cough some more. Shivering a little, my forehead hot as a wood stove against the back of my wrist, I glance down at Allyn through a gap between the trunk-shattered shake shingles and the scarred tree bark, sweet-smelling sap bleeding from the white wood like honey, and I see the hennaed peach fuzz on the top of Allyn’s head as she stands right under me,
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next to her mother’s old canopy bed pushed up against the wall inside. “You might want to step
back. I’d hate for this thing to come crashing down on your head.”
It’s taken me almost an hour just to cut this far through the loblolly trunk with her
grandfather’s rust-pimpled pruning saw, pine needles stiff as a tangle of metal tines poking me in
the face the whole time from all the collapsed branches folded back and sticking out through the
roof like an umbrella stabbed into a cardboard box.
I stand a moment to work out the kinks in my knees, my shoes slipping out from under
me on the icy roof shingles till I have to hug the lightning-struck loblolly and get my footing again,
the high gable’s pitch steep as a ski jump. Should’ve nailed down some two-by-fours, I think, try not to
think what’ll happen if the creaky tree—the only thing I have to hold onto this high up—falls
through too soon, try to make an effort not to look down, take in a deep cold breath, a little dizzy
from the height, woozy with booze and fever, then turn my face up to the low gray sky filled with
fat flakes of snow falling in wet clumps and melting onto my crooked glasses. It stopped raining
hours ago, and the snow feels good, like an ice pack settling onto my face.
“You shouldn’t beat up on your dad like that,” she says below, not moving back an inch
inside, standing right next to the overturned treetop hanging like a stalactite into her mother’s old bedroom, right under the beam where her mother hung herself with the sash of her silk chemise.
Allyn folds her arms in her paint-spattered long johns and glances up at me through the gap, frowning, her eyes glowing like sapphires pressed into the face of a clay goddess. “You’re lucky to have a father, you know? He was always good to me.”
I laugh out a clot of white steam, stare at it like a madman’s fist in my face.
Slipping my handkerchief from my back pocket, I slap it out on my thigh just in time to cough into it, wipe my throbbing lips, stare at a smear of blood. “That man never changes.
Works hard, drinks hard, hardly ever sleeps, same as he’s always done. Old friends like you seem
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to take comfort in him now, treat him like their long-lost father. Spend more time with him than I do.” I laugh, cough, squeeze my eyes shut as I blow my sore nose into my bleary hanky, stare at a blood clot like a mashed horsefly and flinch, fold my handkerchief over one-handed. “The man’s pretty much disowned me since I moved off for grad school. Pretty much adopted Danny, who sits with him at the kitchen table most weekends now sipping whiskey and watching Aggie football. Danny’s a big Reagan man now, too, so they’re really tight now, like old drinking buddies since Bill Sherrod died.”
Allyn goes quiet at the mention of Danny, and I cough again, go into a fit of coughing till
I’ve hacked up a little green tadpole into my handkerchief.
“Bleck,” I say and look away. Fold my handkerchief over one more time and slip it into my back pocket, try to clear my throat.
Just when I think I’m all right again, I cough once, hard, like I’m coughing up a whole liquefying lung, a grating, honking cough like a pissed-off goose till I gasp and can’t get my breath, and my Hush Puppies slide out from under me as I slip and fall, smacking my hip against the sloping shingles, grabbing for the first slender branch I can reach, too small around to hold onto much less hold my weight.
I glance down from thirty feet up and hang on, my swollen face pressed against a splintered shingle as I start the slow slide down, and I see the line of roof gutter around the house where I scrabbled up a loblolly from her mother’s second-floor balcony, Bonita Creek below swirling a hundred yards past its banks, risen a good five feet or more now, black branches tangled in bright orange floodwater like nests of water moccasins, Allyn’s back pasture big as a bass-fishing lake, water lapping over the top of her grandfather’s warped picnic table like a raft tethered to her back porch.
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Her half-collapsed carport’s a shrinking island, I can see that now, and I should be down
there fixing the hole in my windshield instead of fixing the hole in Allyn’s roof—just a temporary
fix anyway to stop the flood pouring into pans in her living room until she can hire a roofer to do
the job right—should be jacking up each flat tire and setting the wheel struts on to concrete
blocks, then buying four retreads and spinning the lug nuts tight, replacing my cratered windshield
and hammering out the U-Haul’s fender so I can find my dog and get back on the road to
Tuscaloser, but I made Allyn a promise when the rain stopped, and she promised to help me pay
for my wrecked car and four flats in exchange, and I have to do the one thing before I can do the
other. Jesus, how do I get myself into these fixes? I think and hear Rachel’s voice in my head, pitched as high as the roof I’m clinging to: Always getting into other people’s fixes when you ought to be fixing your own.
I slide, cough into my shoulder, try to stifle the next one coming, my squeezed lung
rattling and wheezing, a bronchial spasm like a bullfrog drumming in my chest, when I hear the
branch I’m holding on to sizzle and crack. I look down one more time and spot what looks like a
baby octopus harpooned on a stick splayed out on the top of Allyn’s collapsed carport below, the
same battered gray umbrella I hurled up there the first night I came back to Nacogdoches.
“You okay up there?” Allyn says. “Travis?”
My nose is broken at the bridge, the cartilage squeaky as a loose hinge, crooked on my face
till yesterday when I squeezed hard and pulled the end of my nose out to pop it back into place,
my eyes flooding with hot tears, and now my eyes bulge out like the eyes of the giant African toad that’s taken up residence in my right lung, spitting out little green squigglies like gumdrops. But
I’ve had more than a few nips of Allyn’s cold Stoli, like soothing spoons of cough syrup, so when I grab another branch and pull myself back up to my feet, a tree hugger again, I’m feeling pleasantly buzzed and numb just as the slender limb I’ve been holding on to snaps off and slides down the roof, clattering against the rain gutter and splashing into the red water below.
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“I’m good,” I say and get my breath, get my footing again, “No big deal. But I’m never going to cut through at this rate. I’ll have to notch it first before it’ll fall. Should’ve worn your granddad’s old work gloves like you told me.”
Then I get back to work, tugging hard on the saw handle to pull the blade free of its bind.
I cough into my fist. “Better stand back, I’m telling you.”
Thirty minutes later, Allyn and I are arguing about Maddie when the whole damn thing comes crashing down.
“Why won’t you tell me what’s going on with my sister?” I say when it all starts, a yard- wide notch finally plunking to the roof, then sliding down and splashing into the lake in Allyn’s back yard, and I push and saw, push and saw from the other side of the notch so the rusty blade won’t bind, lean a shoulder with all my weight against the trunk. “I’m worried about Maddie.
Need to know if she’s crashing again. What the hell happened between you two in New York anyway? Why the big falling out this time?”
“Just drop it, Travis,” Allyn says, a not-so-safe distance back inside her mother’s room below, so I’ll drop it, all right, drop the damn tree top right on top of her head if she doesn’t step back, the heavy black poly covering the warped heart pine floor crinkling under her feet as she paces back and forth right under me. “Just leave Maddie out of this, will you? Maddie’s . . . mad.
And she makes me mad. I don’t want to talk about Maddie.”
“Jesus, I hate to see you two fight like this. You’re worse than an old married couple. She loves you like a sister, you know? Maybe more. God knows, she doesn’t get along with Hanna.”
“That’s not what she told me. Said she hates me. Said I’m despicable, disgusting. And maybe she’s right, for once. Know what she said when I told her my mother’d killed herself? Said she’d been thinking about hanging herself, too. But she was afraid it might hurt too much.” Allyn
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laughs, “Ha!” pacing fast across the room. “Your sister, always so fucking considerate. Never thinks of anybody but her herself. Just like my fucking mother.”
“Maddie gets manic, and she says things she doesn’t mean. You know that, Allyn. She could use a friend right now. I could give her a call and—”
“No,” Allyn says, almost a shout, pacing fast right under me. “Don’t get in the middle of this, Travis. It’s not something you can fix with some stupid fucking Band-Aid.”
“I can’t call my own sister?” I say and wheeze, sawing fast and hard, when I hear a loud seething crackle and crack, the roof rumbling and shifting beneath my feet.
When Maddie called me in Dallas from New York a week ago, Christmas Day, she told me Allyn had moved back to Nacogdoches—the hell with her and good riddance—and when I asked her why she’d move back there of all places, Maddie told me all about her mother killing herself, then shouted, “Suicide Family Vanderbeck!” into the receiver, laughing at her old grim joke. Then she said she’d been thinking about taking herself out, too, in grand Vanderbeck style.
“Stop it, Maddie,” I said. “Jesus, don’t get started in on all that crap again. That’s not something to joke around about. Scares the shit out of me when I hear you talk like that.”
But then she was crying—telling me she and Allyn had just had another terrible fight on the phone, their worst ever, their last, she swore, she’d never speak to Allyn again, not after what she’d seen, not after what Allyn had done this time—and all I could think about was Maddie in
Bellevue with her wrists wrapped in white gauze, the sliver-thin, pink-silver scars across Maddie’s wrists like dog bites and cat scratches.
“So what’d she do now?” I said, exasperated, thinking Maddie’d forgive her in a week no matter what she’d done—run off with Maddie’s black pearls or her latest boyfriend—and they’d
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be back together in another month or two in New York like always, best friends forever again, but
Maddie just ignored me, wouldn’t tell me what Allyn had done this time to set her off.
No happy endings for the Vanderbecks, Maddie went on, ranting into the phone, no,
sirree, no way, not for that shipwrecked, grief-wracked family, no way out, no escape but one—the
same escape Maddie’d already tried once and failed in New York, and mostly because of Allyn.
Seven years ago, after they’d taken turns driving a thirty-foot U-Haul truck for four days
from Big D to NYC, they’d both roomed together like giggly coeds back in college, back in Allyn’s
old Victorian on Pearl Street again, renting a cheap fourth-floor walk-up on 47th Avenue, a soot- smattered brownstone along the East River in Long Island City’s warehouse district, taking the
Seven Train together into Manhattan every day from the Vernon-Jackson stop, then waiting tables in the Lower East Side while Allyn took a few life-drawing and art history classes at NYU, painting and sleeping in her loft upstairs, while Maddie took acting and singing lessons at Carnegie
Hall, the place she’d always said she’d sing someday, memorizing her lines and practicing her vocal scales in their warm kitchen smelling of cinnamon and pot smoke and patchouli.
After a year or two, Maddie started getting cast in a few off-off shows, then off-Broadway, then, four years later, took off for five or six months at a time on the national and international tours of Me and My Girl with Tommy Tune, singing like an East Texas meadowlark to audiences in
Kansas City and L. A. and Portland, Munich and Tokyo and Edinburgh, Scotland, until she came back to a half-empty apartment, Allyn’s easel and paint-spattered drop cloths and coffee cans of cracked camel-hair brushes all gone from the loft upstairs, her furniture all moved out, the smell of linseed oil and turpentine as faint as Maddie felt as she shouted, “Allyn, I’m home,” then found her best friend gone.
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That night she called me, weepy and paranoid, talking breathless-fast without a pause
between words, like Little Miss Maddie the East Texas Diva and Manic Drama Queen was back
again, a hurricane heading straight for the coast and heating up big time after a few years of quiet,
and she told me that Allyn had skipped out on rent and utilities for two months, the landlord
threatening to evict Maddie, even though she’d been sending Allyn checks by the first of the month every month without fail. Allyn had just up and left her, Maddie said, crying, she didn’t know when exactly or why, and she hadn’t even left Maddie a note or a phone number or a forwarding address where Maddie could reach her.
“Probably hooked up with some Wall Street sugar daddy,” Maddie said, her mood turning vicious. “Some big-shot to fix her up in a nice Fifth Avenue loft with a view of Central
Park. That woman sees what she wants and she gets it. Always gets what she wants. Fucking
whore and bitch.”
Maddie started cursing then and ranting, saying Allyn had left our grandmother Hanny’s
ballerina jewelry box open on Maddie’s dresser, stealing Maddie’s favorite black-pearl necklace
from Japan, the same one Maddie always let her wear to her art openings in Soho, dark pearls
looping around her slender neck, then down into the opening of her low-cut black-silk dress, the
shadowy curve of her tanned cleavage drawing the eyes of the rich old men who’d chat and flirt
with her over cheap wine and brie and crackers, then buy her paintings of dark muddled mermaids
for a thousand dollars a pop.
“What am I going to do now, Travis?” Maddie said on the phone that night. “Why’d I
ever think she was my friend?”
“It’ll be all right,” I tried to tell her. “You can put an ad in the paper tomorrow. You can always find another roommate. No big deal.”
“But I want Allyn,” she said. “I miss Allyn.”
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Then she started reminiscing about Sean and Allyn and the old days in Nacogdoches, how things would never change for her no matter how much she’d accomplished, no matter how hard she’d tried or how many times she’d proven herself again and again when nobody believed in her, not even me. No one would ever love her just for herself like she needed to be loved, not our parents, not the men she loved nor the women she loved who called themselves her friends, no one.
They only loved her when she was a star. Then she said what she’d said more times than I could count when she and Sean were still together in Nacogdoches: that maybe Marilyn and Sherilyn and
Beck had been right after all, to pierce that slender membrane into the next world and escape.
But it was all just talk, I thought, like our father’s mother Evelyn calling him day after day for months in Dallas when he’d have nothing to do with her anymore, saying she was going to kill herself and show him, by god, and he’d rush in his ’66 Chevelle station wagon to her yellow-brick house on Liptonshire two miles away, and she’d be sitting on the couch watching reruns of I Love
Lucy and drinking her Gallo burgundy and eating a whole tray of her half-baked chocolate-chip cookies, and they’d fight and she’d call him a son of a bitch and he’d say, “That’s right, Mother.
That’s the first sensible goddamn thing you’ve said all night,” and when he’d gotten back home and gone straight to the liquor cabinet, she’d call him again and he’d hear her wailing on the phone and say, “Go ahead and do it, Mother. Do me a goddamn favor for once in your miserable life and do it,” and then he’d hang up.
Allyn was the one to call me later that night, much later, around three a. m. My phone number taped to Maddie’s refrigerator, the first she’d call in any emergency.
“She’s done it, Travis. Really done it this time.”
“What? Who? Who is this?” And I knocked over my nightstand lamp trying to find the switch to turn it on.
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“Allyn, it’s Allyn. Maddie, it’s Maddie,” she said, confusing me, still half-asleep and fumbling around for the overturned lamp in the dark. “She’s passed out and bleeding all over the bathroom floor. I don’t know what to do. You got to come over.”
“What? Are you crazy? I can’t. I’m a thousand miles away. Did you call an ambulance?
Jesus fucking Christ.”
But, of course, she hadn’t.
“Hang up for chrissake and call 911, now. I’ll call you right back, get there as soon as I can.”
“You try that little stunt again, little sis, and I swear to god I’ll kill you myself, strangle you with my own two hands.”
“Don’t say that, Travis,” Maddie said in her Bellevue Hospital bed, her eyes blue-bruised and shining with tears. “Please don’t be mad at me. Please don’t be mean.”
Her wrists were wrapped in white gauze and tape almost up to her elbows where the transfusion needle went in, a few spots of blood seeping through from her stitches like dogwood blossoms, her right arm taped to a transfusion board like Jesse’s, a plastic bag of some stranger’s dark blood hanging from a stainless steel tree next to her bed, the third or fourth transfusion she’d received since the ambulance had rushed her to Bellevue, less than a mile from her place, sirens wailing in the early-morning dark through the Queens Midtown Tunnel.
“Ah, hell, honey, I’m sorry,” I said, swiping at my eyes as I sat on the hard bed next to her and brushed back the bright red hair curling into her eyes, her eyelids transparent as rice paper, tiny blood vessels webbing them like cracks crazing our grandmother Hanny’s china. “You just scared me, is all. Scared the hell out of me. I’m just glad you’re okay.”
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It had taken me part of the night and most of the next day to fly to New York, catching
whatever one-way flight I could—a little puddle-jumper rattling and kicking through a
thunderstorm for two hours to Little Rock, then a short Delta flight east and too far south—
calling Allyn at the hospital from airport payphones in Atlanta and Cincinnati and Albany, then
calling my mother in Dallas, trying to fill her in and help her arrange her own flight, then calling
Allyn right back, trying to find out if my sister had died between flights.
The last-minute trip, four flights with long stopovers, one of them five-hours as I paced
back and fourth in the airport smoking lounge, had cost me twice as much as it should have,
almost a thousand dollars for a broke and clueless graduate student getting a worthless degree,
living on macaroni and cheese, Braunschweiger and Wonder Bread and Miracle Whip, trying to
study a way to write about his mad sister and family.
“But why, Maddie?” I asked her, holding her freckled hand and petting the rough gauze
taped along the back of her arm. “Why?”
She stared off through the high wide hospital window looking out over the New York
City skyline, the Chrysler Building shooting straight up through the yellow haze, a sleek stainless- steel starburst in the late evening sun, a shining promise like the dreams of two young women from
nowhere who’d braved the great city and done well.
“So peaceful,” she said. “I just wanted to know what it was like.”
Long after two a. m., in the waiting room down the hall from the night nurse’s desk, I let
Allyn have it, shouting at her, asking her how the hell she’d happened to find Maddie in their
apartment at the last possible goddamn minute after she’d been gone for months, not paying the
goddamn rent, moving all her goddamn stuff out without ever telling Maddie where the hell she’d
gone or why. Stealing Maddie’s black-pearl necklace and then running off.
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I was exhausted and wired from too many cigarettes and too much vending-machine coffee, the strain of the day finally getting to me, and I’d just gotten back to the hospital from an expensive cab ride to LaGuardia to pick my mother up on the red-eye from Dallas and take her back to Bellevue—my mother, terrified of the subway and refusing to ride it, my father saying he wouldn’t fly up after all now that he knew Maddie’d be all right; he had last-minute construction drawings to finish, and maybe he’d fly up later, but he never did—and just now I’d left my mother sitting in a stiff-backed chair next to Maddie’s bed down the hall, exhausted from her long flight, shaken and shaking, leaning over the stainless steel bedrail, afraid to touch Maddie’s bandaged wrists as she slept, afraid she might wake her, afraid she might not ever wake.
After I’d shouted at her a while, Allyn sat quiet a long time on the waiting room couch, an ugly green thing covered in coffee stains like something sticking out of a dumpster, and she wouldn’t answer me, just smoothed out her dark skirt across her tanned legs and shuffled her polished black pumps across the worn carpet, wouldn’t look at me.
I sat back in a dingy chair covered with yellow daisies gone green from so many years of people sitting and waiting, waiting, waiting, and I shook my head, pressed my palms into my eyes.
“Jesus.”
Finally, Allyn threw her long blond hair back over her shoulders like a sash and said, “I can’t do it anymore, Travis. That’s all. Can’t live with her anymore. I’m sorry. She wants too much from me. She’s just too much.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“She makes all these demands, all these . . . threats, and then I start thinking about . . . . I had to make a break while she was gone, and now she’s gone and done it, and I’m glad I did it,
Travis. Glad I left. I can’t go through all that again. I just can’t. It’s just too much.”
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I leaned my head back against the chair and closed my eyes, squeezing away the wet, and nodded, said I understood. I was Maddie’s brother and I knew how she could be, had to stick by her no matter what, couldn’t expect anyone—not even her best friend—to be bound by something as old as blood. I understood, I said.
“But why?” I asked her. “Why didn’t you just tell her?”
“I wanted to when I called her in Germany last month. Wanted to before she even left for Europe. But I couldn’t do it. Had to get drunk just to go over there last night and tell her, and then I had to find her like that.” She shook her head, her eyes brimming like umbrellas catching rainwater, her impossibly lovely face, grown hard for years like a mask of her mother’s, softening suddenly and melting away into something familiar for a moment, the tender face of a girl I’d known when I was too young and loved too much. “I never wanted to find her like that,
Travis. Never. I never meant for it to happen that way. You got to believe me.”
I pressed my fingers into my eyes and sat a long time, dead tired, twenty-four hours and no sleep. The hospital was quiet now at three a. m., just the humming buzz of the fluorescent lights too bright overhead, the suck and flow of a respirator and a heart-monitor beeping from a room just down the hall, a distant siren wailing through the night in the great, sleepless city.
I stood and said, “Guess I better go check on her. My mom needs some sleep.”
“Wait,” she said.
Allyn picked up her black-leather purse at her feet and set it on the couch next to her, rummaging around inside till she’d pulled out a wadded tissue and opened it around Maddie’s black-pearl necklace, spreading it out on the coffee table like prayer beads, like a rosary.
“I was going to give this back to her last night. I was only borrowing it, I swear.” She shook her head, her face masked again, all the tears and lovely light draining from her eyes.
“Would you tell her for me? I can’t do it. Can’t see her again like that.” She brushed down her
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sheer skirt, flicked away a few flecks of white lint, then started for the elevator and stopped, turned around. “It got scary there and lonely, Travis. You know how that is, don’t you? She forgot all about me. Started thinking she was some big fucking star.”
“Shut up, Allyn. Shut your fucking mouth. The hell’s wrong with you anyway? She loves you, for chrissake.”
Six months later, after Maddie’d come back from another international tour—this time with Topol in Fiddler on the Roof—Maddie called Allyn to apologize and they made up, and within the month they were living together back on 47th Avenue, best friends again as if nothing had ever happened, laughing like they were sixteen again, sitting on Maddie’s bed in Dallas and listening to
Joni Mitchell on our dead brother Jesse’s tinny red record player.
As the overturned trunk creaks and totters at the notch above Allyn’s roof, I stumble and shout, “Get back!” the treetop grating through the roof hole and dropping, crashing and shattering to the heart pine floor in her mother’s old bedroom below.
I try to catch myself, try to pull myself back at the last minute, sliding on slippery roof shingles, but I’m thinking about my sister as I fall, the trunk as tall as I am, my shoulder pressing my whole weight against it as it topples to the roof with me on top of it, thumping hard and splitting apart, shingles splintering and bark flying in face, my right leg slipping and banging through the roof hole, hanging and kicking from the ceiling inside, just as I try pull myself back.
“Goddammit!” I shout, a sharp stabbing pain in my right inner thigh, my left thumb pinched and mashed under the heavy trunk where I’ve hugged it to hold on as it fell, and I roll back away from the tree I’ve just sawed in half and shove it off, watch it roll down the steep roof like a log down a flue into a swift-moving river, hanging soundless in the air a moment till it sends up a big splash.
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“Allyn? Allyn!” I shout, jammed up to my crotch into the ragged roof hole, a rusty joist nail jabbed an inch into the meat of my right thigh. I shake out my hand and suck on my thumb, blue blood pooling under the mashed thumbnail. “Allyn, you okay down there?”
I try to pull my leg out, but it catches on the nail, bent down into my thigh like a fish hook, and I have to pry it up, then out, with my fingers before I can pull my leg free.
“Son of a bitch.”
I start to slide face down, feet first, my body pressed slanting into the steep gable, my fingers clawing shingle splinters as I reach for and hang on to a rotting one-by-six roof board jutting through the hole, pull myself up with my arms and drop my face into the hole to look down in to the room.
“Allyn?” I say. “Oh, Jesus.”
I see an arm crushed under the fallen treetop next to her mother’s bed. But then I see it’s just the bare wood of a bark-shattered limb, the wood white as a girl’s arm in winter.
“Allyn!” I shout down through the hole.
But she’s not in the room any more and can’t hear me, escaped from our argument about
Maddie to some other dark room in her mother’s old house.
Just as I’ve finished tacking down a layer of heavy black poly over the hole in Allyn’s roof—a second layer overlapping an orange tarp from her carport I tacked down first, my shoes planted solidly this time on the top edge of one of four old two-by-fours I nailed up the steep gable like tree-house steps—I hear gravel popping in Allyn’s driveway and look down over the top of the roof peak, see a black and white Nacogdoches County Sheriff’s car drive up and stop.
Rodewald steps out, slams the door so hard his car shakes, then starts for the screened door of Allyn’s front porch.
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“Up here!” I shout. Rub the throbbing knothole under the rip in my jeans, still bleeding from my inner thigh, my right shin scraped and peeled like a raw carrot.
Rodewald glances up, shaking his head and frowning like he’s hearing voices up in the loblollies, heavy wet snow settling, then melting into the folds of his Stetson sheriff’s hat, his eyes wandering around like crazy in the shadow of his hat brim till he hears me cough and spots me holding up a hammer, my throbbing thumb stuck out from the hammer handle like a hitchhiker who’s missed a thousand rides.
“You might want to come with me,” he says.
Just outside the county-jail cell block in the basement of the Nacogdoches County Court
House, Rodewald rattles a big ring of keys in the lock and takes my elbow at the grated gate.
“Might want to stay back from the bars. He’s a strange duck. Talks a lot of loony-tunes, but he’s still a good preacher, a real snake-oil charmer. Almost talked me out of arresting him till he bit me good.”
Rodewald holds up a short stubby thumb, a wide Band-Aid wrapped around the fleshy joint, the cotton gauze under the perforations showing a crescent of teeth marks along the whorls of his thumb knuckle, brown with dried blood.
I cough and hold my own out in a thumbs-up, my throbbing thumbnail black as a beetle’s wing, and we both turn through the heavy gray gate.
Near the end of the block, past a cell with a drunk sleeping it off and snoring like a snorting bull, Bob Dobson sits on a concrete bench in the shadows of a holding cell, looking a little dejected, like a animal shelter stray waiting for someone to adopt him out before someone puts him down.
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Coughing and wiping my sore nose, hot as a Christmas tree bulb against my wrist, I limp
up to the bars just as Rodewald pulls me back, shoots me a stern cockeyed look.
Still dressed in his pressed black preacher’s suit, his pants cuffs spotted with red clay, Bob
stares ahead at the cell’s yellow-stained sink, then glances up at me through the bars and looks me
over.
I haven’t had a close look at him either since I was maybe fourteen, trying to help Allyn’s
mother roll Beck up into his VW van after she ran over their Mexican hairless, Garçon, and I can
see how a woman like Lynn might think of him as good-looking in a rough, rugged sort of way,
like the lumberjack mascot for Stephen F. Austin State or the bearded G. I. Joe my brother Nate
used to talk to for hours in our bedroom closet, his thick trimmed beard gone to rough black
stubble along his square jaw and high cheeks, then down his neck, where his chest hair tufts out
from the yellow-stained wife-beater hidden under his starched white preacher’s shirt.
Bob shakes his head, leans over on the concrete bench to untie a muddy black dress shoe
and pull it off, takes out a Dr. Scholl’s shoe insert and pulls out something like a credit card from the shoe heel, looks at it awhile, then looks back at me.
“All those scars on your face,” he says. “I didn’t recognize you at first.”
“What?”
“You’re that kid that took her away from me.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
He spins the card through the bars just past my face as I duck away, and its edge snaps against the concrete wall behind me and it slaps to the concrete floor. Rodewald picks it up, looks at it, then at me awhile, then hands it over.
I squint at it, take off my bent glasses, look at it a long time. It’s a picture of me at
sixteen, worn and blurry, warped from being under a man’s heel for too long, looking a little
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stoned and sad, dark freckles spattering my cheeks like a fawn’s back, strawberry blond hair falling past my shoulders and out of the picture frame, down into my lap, as I remember. My first drivers’ license, almost twenty years lost.
“What the hell’d you keep this for?”
“I didn’t want to forget. And I didn’t. I won’t.”
“Look, man,” I say, “I don’t have any beef with you. God knows, you could sit there for the rest of your life and rot for all I care, thinking about what you did to those girls, but I’ll think about dropping the charges if you pay me for my damages. Five hundred bucks cash and a promise you’ll leave her alone, and I’ll think about letting it go.”
Bob laughs and stands from the bench, walks to the yellowing sink.
“Excuse me, gentlemen, but nature calls.”
He unzips his black slacks and pulls himself out, a loud hiss of his piss against white porcelain spinning down the sink drain.
“For god’s sake, man,” Rodewald says, “can’t you use a proper commode?”
Bob grins a little, laughs, glances back at the toilet. “I drink from that.” Then he turns, cupping himself long and limp as a mammoth’s trunk from a black beard, pissing a line dripping midway along the wall as he steps towards us and turns to face us, pissing a strong yellow stream arcing through the bars and against the opposite wall.
“Stop that,” Rodewald says as we both step back a good ways and watch the arcing stream spatter and grow, pooling on the concrete floor, endless it seems, like a lake, like he’s been holding it all in for years.
“I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to clean that up.” Rodewald says. “You just tripled your bail.”
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“Bail’s easy as love,” Bob says and smiles, flicks himself gently, tucks himself back in, zips
up. “Just leaving my mark.”
He presses his face between two steel bars gone shiny with the hands of drunks, stares at me hard. “You may think you know what’s going on, but you don’t. She’s in love with me.
Promised she’d marry me.”
“Yeah,” I say, “and I’m marrying the Pope. Jesus, and you call yourself a man of god.”
“No, I’m a man of dog,” he says, baring his teeth through the bars. “Arf! Arf!” Then he growls and laughs, walks back to his bench and sits.
Overhead, I hear a slow steady hiss against the courthouse steps rising outside and turn to
Rodewald, who cocks his cocked eyes and shakes his head, turns back down the hallway toward the cell-block gate.
“Lot of good that did,” he says and shrugs, rattling his ring of keys in the gray lock, then stops, looks up to listen to the swelling hiss against the courthouse roof, a real downpour now.
“Just what we need. More damn rain.”
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Thirteen Dallllas 1972
he first night she came to my room that summer, it was raining, drops pinging TTagainst my father’s new copper roof like bright pennies into a pan. When he’d moved us all out of that awful green-shuttered rental house on Estate Lane and into his new split-level dream house in 1969, the new roof our father’d settled on wasn’t the one he’d planned—just red-lava gravel on tar and roofing felt left over from a commercial building he’d supervised that spring, the only materials he could afford since his partner Hap had cooked the books for two years and left their taxes unpaid, all coming due about the same time the house was being finished—and after just three summers of rain, the roof had already become shiny-bald and black as flint, the roof tar sun-cracked, most of roof gravel piled in a rain-spattered trench around the house like someone had traced the roofline along the ground with a stick, then hoed a muddy moat.
With its all its five split-levels and high windows facing tall oaks and cottonwoods and elms and pecan woods, all its redwood balconies and stairs and wrought-iron rails and stucco and hand-fired Mexican brick, our father’s new show-house leaked like a torpedoed U-boat, water dripping from the tall brick fireplace and around the white Plexiglas skylights over our living room’s twenty-foot vaulted ceiling, through the tarpaper roof seams and into the front foyer and our bedrooms upstairs, rotting out the sheetrock walls in our closets and peeling back the new bamboo wallpaper in my sisters’ bathroom, and no matter how many times I slapped on a new
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layer of hot tar—boiled to rank bubbles in a battered pan on my mother’s new avocado
stovetop—it would start raining again, and my mother’d have to empty her kitchen cabinets of
pans to catch the pinging drips, and I’d have to shimmy up a fat cottonwood from my bedroom’s
second-floor balcony and climb up to the roof with a bubbling pan to slap on another layer of
melted tar.
It’s the man’s job to fix things, my father’d say when he woke me mornings it rained. If you’re a
man and you have a problem, you fix it. You don’t whine about it like a goddamn woman. You’re not doing your job,
he’d say. If you weren’t such a laggard and did your job right the first time, the roof wouldn’t be leaking like a sieve.
Lying in bed at night, I dreaded the sound of rain on the roof, the dripping pocks of raindrops hitting bald tarpaper over my head, the plop and splat of water onto our bedroom’s new shag rug, brown mildew growing in the ceiling corners like spit tobacco, and when it started sprinkling, I’d toss around on my mattress, unable to sleep, staring up at a blotch like a car-mashed cat overhead, waiting for a drooping drop to fall into an open eye, dreading my father waking me up at dawn to fix the roof again, and when I’d finally fallen to sleep, I’d dream of my father whispering, “Get up. Now. The house is on fire,” and I’d have to throw back the warm bed sheets and blankets, still barefoot and in my frayed skivvies, padding around the house with a garden hose rolling out and dripping everywhere, my father pointing out little fires burning in the
corners of rooms, on the arms of our old love seat and sofa, under the kitchen cabinets, saying,
“Put it out. Hurry, there’s another one over here,” until I finally handed him back the garden hose
and said, “Put the damn thing out yourself,” and went back to bed, and then I’d wake bolt upright
in a sweat, my brother Nate snoring and grinding his teeth like a man in the bed next to me, rain
pocking the roof overhead and dripping into my eyes.
One morning after a late-spring thunderstorm the night before, lightning booming, tree-
shadows flashing and writhing against the wall by my bed, acorns popping off the roof like pistol
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shots, big oak branches crackling and falling and tearing big holes in the tarred roofing felt, my mother finally told my father she wanted a new roof.
She was tired of whining like a goddamn woman, she said, tired of catching rainwater everywhere in her best copper cooking pots, tired of her new kitchen smelling like fresh-laid highway blacktop, tired of worrying her son would fall and break his neck climbing a tree with a hot bucket and boiling himself alive, tarred and sparrow-feathered and dead on the muddy ground.
“It’s a man’s job to fix things,” she said, double-fisting the handle of a frying pan she like she just might hit him clanging over the head with it, water dripping from the kitchen ceiling all around her. “Now be a man and do your job, for once, and put a decent roof over our heads.”
The pinging splashes over my bed a month later were as bright in the dark as the wide copper sheets the roofers had rolled out and crimped into tight seams and flashing around the skylights, across the sloping rooftop down to the copper roof gutters all around the house flashing a bright red bronze, catching the summer sun and all the rain I’d failed to stop, and I lay in my bed with my hands folded behind my head and listened, a faint smile growing on my face, knowing
Allyn was safe back in Dallas again like Marilyn had wanted, asleep in my sister’s bed under a new roof, leak-proof and shiny as panned gold in the sun, till I’d fallen off to sleep to the sound of rain on copper, then woke, my bedroom door cracking open with a creaking click.
The first night she came, I thought it was my father night-walking again with an ice- clinking glass of scotch, a second mortgage rolled out like fifty-thousand pennies rolled flat on to a railroad track and into an expensive new roof, my father and his partner Hap’s architectural practice spinning down like an acorn popping down a copper gutter, but I didn’t see the red ember of his cigarette ash like an eye ever-watchful in the dark and I thought it might be Maddie instead, remembered her at seven, half-asleep, coming to my room for months after Jesse’d died when I was
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still ten, sleeping with me instead of him, our brother escaped from her forever to sleep next to our grandfather, William Barret Travis Truitt, at Restland in a sinking plot of black-gumbo.
The door clicked shut and the room fell dark again, my eyes adjusting to Maddie’s night- light in the hallway to the bathroom, and I watched a slender black shadow with a long glowing veil of hair and a cotton nightgown fluorescing like the Blacklight stars I’d painted on Danny’s bedroom ceiling, heard bare feet shuffle across the shag, then “Ouch” as she stubbed her toe, almost tripping over my mattress on the floor, bending over and feeling along the edge of my bed, till she’d knelt on the carpet and pulled back my sheets and slid rustling into my bed next to me.
I felt naked and too skinny in my shabby skivvies, the elastic band unraveling and coming loose in coils, the cotton frayed with holes, my stomach flinching under her fingers, grown icy in the air-conditioned cold, but when she pressed her hot wet face into my neck and cried, her soft sobs sighing into wet kisses in the hollow of my collarbone, I put my arm around her and held her till she’d quieted in my shushing hushes, and I smoothed my fingers through her long fine hair, slippery as oil.
We didn’t kiss. Didn’t whisper. Didn’t say or do anything at all. Just lay there together in the dark for an hour or more till we’d both fallen asleep listening to the bright patterning rain singing against my father’s new copper roof.
Next morning I woke at dawn and she was gone, and I fell back to sleep till almost noon, when Maddie woke me and reminded me I still had work to do for my father or I’d have to get a summer job.
“Where’s Allyn?” I said, sitting up and rubbing fireflies into my eyes.
Maddie eyed me like a moth fluttering against a lampshade, like a cat ready to pounce.
“Out back.” And she left my room with a humph, saying, “Get up, you bum.”
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I kicked back the bed sheets and dressed for my chores in my paint-spattered bell-bottoms and I went downstairs to pour myself the last dregs of coffee my mother’d made for my father at six a. m., boiled down to bitter tar, and I sat at our kitchen table like I would all that summer and I watched Allyn Vanderbeck brush out her long wet hair into the hot blast of the A/C compressor through the kitchen window shade till she looked up at me and smiled.
She was sixteen and I was eighteen.
I’d missed 1967, too young for the Summer of Love. I’d missed the summer of ’68, too, all the concerts and protests and drugs at Turtle Creek and White Rock Lake and Flag Pole Hill, had only watched Bobby’s assassination and the riots at the Chicago Democratic Convention on our black-and-white TV, my father cursing the rabbit ears topped with aluminum foil, then cheering on the baton-wielding cops kicking cuffed longhairs into police vans, and I had only the vaguest memory of the day Beck had shot himself in our alley that same summer four years before.
I’d missed ’69, too, dancing naked to live music in the rain at Yasgur’s farm, watched it all on TV instead, as far away as the moon-walk that July through a flurry of static and snow, but I’d just bought the new album shrink-wrapped in plastic to play for the summer to come—Canned
Heat and Country Joe and the Fish and Jimi Hendrix and Santana and the Whô at Woodstock wailing through my last free summer before my senior year in high school—and, so far, I’d missed the war.
More than anything, though, I’d missed Allyn, had missed her too much—even more than
Marilyn, who was dead now—had missed almost every chance I’d ever had since we were kids of getting close to her, but as I watched her dry her sun-white hair that first day of summer in June, her tanned neck and arms downy and blond, her smooth legs and heart-shaped face brown as a fawn, I felt a sweet swelling in my belly and already knew: The summer of love for me would be
1972.
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My father’s list of jobs for me that summer, written out in his perfect block letters between light pencil lines on tracing paper, was too long, something to teach me the industry and discipline I sorely lacked:
ONE TIME ONLY ($300 FOR ALL): — SCRAPE MUD, HOSE DOWN, WET BROOM: — MEASURE & CUT NEW SHEETROCK, TAPE CARPORT & DRIVEWAY. & BED & PAINT: BOYS’ BATHROOM, — HOSE DOWN & SWEEP: ROOF. CLOSETS. — CLEAN OUT ACORNS, LEAVES: GUTTERS & — RE-PASTE WALLPAPER: GIRLS’ BATHROOM. DOWNSPOUTS. — SEAL WATER STAINS, SPACKLE & REPAINT: ENTIRE HOUSE INTERIOR CEILINGS & WEEKLY ($10 PER WEEK FOR ALL): WALLS. — CARRY OUT KITCHEN TRASH, WHEN — SCRAPE & REPAINT OUTSIDE TRIM: NEEDED (CHECK TWICE EVERY DAY). KITCHEN WINDOW SILL. — BUFF DOWNSTAIRS FLOOR: WEDNESDAYS. — BUILD RETAINING WALL, STEPS, ROCK: — WATER FOUNDATION AT FIREPLACE: BACK YARD, BETWEEN CARPORT AND MONDAYS, THURSDAYS. KITCHEN. — WATER LAWN, HEDGES & REDBUDS: — RE-SOD WASHOUTS: SIDE YARD, DRIVEWAY. THURSDAYS (EXCEPT AFTER RAIN). — FERTILIZE: FRONT & BACK. — MOW & EDGE LAWN (DON’T FORGET — REFILL DRAINED OIL (DON’T RUN TO RAKE & BAG): THURSDAYS. UNTIL YOU DO THIS), CLEAN FILTER — TRIM HEDGES, PRUNE TREES OVER ROOF, WITH GAS: MOWER. PUT IN ALLEY WITH LEAF BAGS FOR — ORGANIZE TOOLS ON PEGBOARDS: SATURDAY AT DUMP: FRIDAYS. CARPORT CLOSETS.
I had a new band and a new gig coming up at a Flag Pole Hill rally, playing art-rock anthems to an army of longhairs letting their freak flags fly and wearing black armbands against the Nixon and the war, and I had less than a month to get all the band’s new tunes down and my father’s list done—exactly to his specifications, which he typed out like his specs for building contractors—just enough time and money to buy the new chrome snare like John Bonham’s I’d been eyeing at the Melody Shop in the Northpark Mall, where Kenny worked now and always got me a discount—four high-tuned toms like Carl Palmer’s to fill out my growing Slingerland kit and a new Ziljiän Chinese cymbal, its bronze edges hammered out like a gong and played upside down to make a raw, nasty pahhh—and for weeks I’d been asking my father to throw in an extra two gallons of flat-black Sherwin Williams to outline the mural I wanted to paint on my walls.
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“You want to paint your walls black? A mural of what? What the hell for?”
“I don’t know, Dad. Just thought it’d be kind of cool.”
“Jesus god.”
He’d already lost the fight with my mother two years before about my hair, sun-bleached and pulled back now into a wavy ponytail down to the back of my belt, had already lost the fight after Danny’s bust to send me off to military school in south Texas my senior year, till I’d joined the Corps of Cadets at Texas A & M or the army had drafted me out.
It would take him at least three coats of white paint to cover the black when I moved away from home, he told me, and then he said what he almost always said: “No.”
During his lunch break three weeks later, after I’d re-pasted the wallpaper in the girls’ bathroom and cut new sheetrock and taped and bedded the walls in the boys’, after I’d spackled and painted all the mildew stains with a white seal of Kilz and laid down masking tape and painted every room and closet and ceiling in my father’s house with a little help from Allyn, he ran a punch list, walking me through each room as he checked off everything I’d done, one by one, like I was a subcontractor on one of his commercial jobs, and he could find nothing wrong, or almost nothing, just paint spatters on the Mexican tiles downstairs or paint that had bled under the masking tape along the door trim which he pretended the whole time to ignore.
When he came home later just before supper, he drove his ’66 Chevelle station wagon up our carport driveway with a ten-foot-wide roll of exterior sheathing like heavy white poster board sticking out the tailgate window, something he’d been saving at his office for a week from a construction-site dumpster.
He called me down from my room, where I stayed most of the time he was home, and out to the carport, and he handed me six crisp fifty-dollar bills he’d just withdrawn from his bank in
University Park, three-hundred bucks cash, and he shook my hand, squeezing my knuckles till they
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popped. Then he nodded to the heavy roll of white paper and the two gallons of flat-black paint sitting on his tailgate and smiled, his fierce gas-pilot eyes softening to a moth wing’s blue.
“For you,” he said. “For your mural.”
He helped me carry the heavy paper roll through the kitchen downstairs, each of us taking one end up two flights of stairs between split levels to my room, and for an hour he helped me cut and staple the sheathing to my bedroom walls, carpet to ceiling, like the de Arches watercolor paper we’d soaked in my sisters’ bathtub and stapled and stretched to drawing boards when I was thirteen and still painted watercolor landscapes with him at our kitchen table.
“Don’t get any paint on the carpet,” he said when we were done and he rubbed my back and squeezed my shoulder like I was ten again.
I masked the edges and tossed plastic drop cloths over the furniture and floor, then began to draw, mixing jars of fluorescent temperas I’d bought at a head shop in Preston Center, painting
Day-Glo colors between faint pencil lines.
On the wall behind my bed I painted a mural of Hercules slaying the Hydra, his black hair curling down to his muscled shoulders, gore and blood everywhere, something I’d modeled from a cracked Pompeian fresco in a rain-wrinkled National Geographic my father’d left on the stack of
Readers’ Digests in the bathroom downstairs, and on the wall next to my bed, I painted Jimi
Hendrix—two years dead now, puke-choking one night in his sleep—tuning his Stratocaster upside down, a lefty like me, a burning cigarette stuck between his looping strings and tuning screws, the tie-dyed headband around his forehead squeezing his round wiry ‘fro into a wide fat 8.
I hung two eight-foot Blacklights from the ceiling and nailed holes into a Folger’s can, spray painting it flat black, then cramming a tangle of old blinking Christmas lights inside and suspending the coffee can from the ceiling, a poor-man’s light show that shot bright stars spinning out across my ceiling and walls.
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When I was done, I painted a thick outline of black around Hercules and Hendrix, then
rolled out black Sherwin Williams onto the rest of my paper-covered walls, blackened like the
windows of Londoners during Hitler’s firebombing Blitz in WWII. Lights out, Blacklights on, a
buzzing purple haze of patchouli and pot smoke some afternoons as I rolled a towel across the gap
between my door and the carpet, fanning my balcony door to blow out the burnt-rope stink before
my father came home, and soon Hercules and Jimi were slaying the whole glowing world on my
bedroom walls.
Between my single mattress and Nate’s on our bedroom floor, I built a wide stereo console
the length of our beds from scrap two-by-fours and one-by-sixes my father’d taken from a
construction site and left in the carport, staining them all a dark walnut, a sheet of black-painted
plywood framed into a four-foot-high partition separating our beds like a private nook, a stained wooden wine box for my albums mounted up into the console at a forty-five degree angle so I could read the tiny record labels along the edges and play the turntable and amp and tuner I’d bought on the Clearance Table at the Radio Shack in White Rock Shopping Center. Then I mounted four big speakers in each corner of the room, wired for sound day and night, music always playing even as I slept, to drown out Nate’s teeth-grinding snores.
Every weekday afternoon when I wasn’t practicing with my band or doing my chores, I worked on my chops for hours, practicing to The Whô’s Who’s Next and Deep Purple’s Machine
Head and Wishbone Ash and The James Gang Rides Again and Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick and Yes’s Fragile and Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s Tarkus, the stereo cranked up to ten till the walls buzzed and
Maddie kicked open my door popping against the wall and shouted at me, threatening to break open my head with a large-print encyclopedia.
By mid-summer I’d added an extra chrome bass drum and Speed King bass pedal for a double-bass setup and four new chrome toms and new brass cymbals, and I took apart and re-
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covered my entire kit in shiny adhesive sheets of vinyl like imitation chrome, rebuilding the dull pearl Slingerland set I’d bought from Kenny’s brother Ray before he’d shipped off, a roostertail radioman headshot by a VC sniper in the Tay Ninh Province. And when I was done with all my jobs and projects and practicing for the day, some nights I’d be so tired I’d fall asleep waiting for
Allyn to sneak down the dark hallway from Maddie’s room to mine the summer of ‘72.
At first, she just watched as I worked, resting her hand on a bottom rung of a thirty-foot aluminum extension ladder as I stood at the top, ducking my head just under the vaulted ceiling, leaning far up and out, precarious, like a regular daredevil, holding on to a ladder rung with one hand while I stretched out my long arm with a broom to sweep away spiders’ webs in the ceiling corners or a ten-foot paint-roller extension to paint away to white my parents’ yellow nicotine tar fanning out across the high ceiling above our sunken living room.
“You’re not scared?” Allyn said as I climbed down the ladder and shrugged, “Guess not,” then balanced the teetering ladder in the air and carried it over another three feet, leaning it up against the top of the wall where the twenty-foot fireplace shot up through the roof, the aluminum rungs pinging as I dropped the ladder and anchored the rubber base and climbed back up again, and she glanced down at our glass coffee table, tilting her tanned face back and squinting up, gripping the ladder with both hands, trembling like she was at the top and not me.
“But what if you fell and broke your back?”
Every now and then, Maddie’d come out of her bedroom upstairs, frowning, her frizzy hair full of pumpkin fire, and she’d lean her freckled elbows on to the wrought-iron balcony railing cantilevered out over the living room and call down to Allyn like they were both still twelve, “You want to ride bikes up to Flag Pole Hill?” and Allyn would say, “Not right now, okay?” and then
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Maddie’d huff off back to her room and slam her door and crank up our brother’s old tinny
record player as loud as she could to sing along with Joni.
Before long, Allyn was helping me with little things—“Could you hand me that roller?”
“Could you pour some more paint into that pan?”—and soon she was wiping away stray paint
spatters on the Mexican tiles downstairs, then helping me spackle the knob dings on the walls from
kicked-in doors, sanding the outside kitchen window trim and spackling picture holes from my
father’s watercolor paintings of salmon-colored skies in West Texas and fields of Hill Country
bluebonnets and tilting Central Texas barns with rough-grained wood and tall stands of
pinewoods and dogwoods reflecting white flowers in the water of East Texas lakes.
She didn’t say much at first until she started asking about my father’s freaky habits and
rules, and I said, “Freaky, like what?” and she asked me why he sometimes barked out orders and
announcements to us in our rooms like a high school principal over the NuTone intercom in the kitchen or why Maddie could use only three sheets of toilet paper at a time, counting out the skimpy sheets on the roll, ripping them off carefully along the perforations, then folding them over one at a time for thickness, no more than three sets of three sheets each time to save money, and I told her about the year Jesse was sick and my father lost the big high-rise job at the intersection of
Northwest Highway and Central Expressway that was going to save Jesse’s life, and how my father almost went bankrupt when Jesse’s insurance ran out.
“You don’t have to do it that way,” I told Allyn, blushing about having to talk about toilet paper with a girl. “Neither does Maddie, not any more. My mother buys all the groceries and bathroom stuff now, with her own money, and she doesn’t care, always thought it was a dumb idea in the first place. No big deal.”
“Freaky,” Allyn said and covered her mouth, giggling about something that seemed perfectly normal to me, like every family in the world must’ve done it like mine, and then I thought
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about Allyn’s family, all the freaky things they’d done I could never understand—like killing themselves for no good reason—which must have seemed at times as normal to Allyn as brushing her teeth.
“So what you think they did it for?” I asked her, almost casually, without thinking, and she said, “What? Who?” and I felt stupid all of a sudden and said, “Nobody, nothing,” digging myself an idiot hole as I babbled about Marilyn and Beck, then tried to change the subject and ended up making it worse, blushing and saying how sorry I was and all the rest—how I thought it was all my fault sometimes and didn’t know why—until Allyn finally shut me up altogether with her high freaky laugh, smiling that that same crooked smile I’d seen the first day I’d ever seen her at our front door on Estate Lane, her bloody footprints pressed into the blue-wet grass.
I stared at her a moment as she laughed—snickering like she couldn’t stop herself, turning her face away and covering her mouth with her tanned hands—and I turned away to dip a brush into a paint can, my face glowing hot as my father’s copper roof in the sun, and when I turned around again she was gone, escaped up the stairs to Maddie’s room to sing off-pitch with Simon and Garfunkel and to ride bikes up to Flag Pole Hill.
After that, she didn’t come downstairs to help or talk to me anymore, Maddie hopping around upstairs happy as a cricket to have her friend back, shooting me triumphant looks—See?
You can’t have her!—her wicked smile crooked as Allyn’s, only meaner, and I felt lowly and a little sick to my stomach for days, like Allyn would never talk to me again, then remembered Beck’s joke about breaking my back showing off for his girls and stared down from the top of the ladder, wondering how hard she’d laugh if I dove head first into the concrete slab.
Two weeks later, my black Whô t-shirt sweat-soaked and sticking to my chest and back, I was wailing away on my rebuilt chrome-covered drum kit to take a break from painting my
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mural—the last coat of Day-Glow fluorescent paint drying on the walls, Hercules and Hendrix almost finished on stiff paper white—when I stood from my drum stool and opened my bedroom door to wash my face in the bathroom sink across the hall, and she fell sideways into my room right past me, thumping her skull hard where she’d stood leaning with her ear pressed to the hollow-core door.
“Sorry,” I said and helped her up. “You okay? Jesus.”
She rubbed her ear and nodded, smiling a little and popping her Red Hot gum, wearing a blue tie-dyed tube top that showed her dark belly button like a spoon, long white tassels of cotton from her frayed cut-offs tickling her frowning brown knees, her long straight hair swinging around her wide hips and smooth tanned thighs like a limp willow leaves.
“Sorry about that,” I said again, apologizing, always apologizing, stuttering a little and pulling my short sleeves up to wipe my sweaty face. “Didn’t know you were standing right there.
You want to listen awhile? You can come in and listen if you want. No need to stand around out here in the hall.”
Like Hanna, off at some dude ranch with our grandmother Evelyn to ride horses for a month in Arizona, my thirteen-year-old brother Nate had been gone most days to summer school at Lake Highlands Junior High, flunking out the year before and trying to keep my father from yelling at him again for being put back another grade, and I’d had our bedroom all to myself through most of May, my door always closed to my father and Maddie’s interruptions, and no one had seen what I’d done to my walls but Nate and then only late at night after he’d been jumping splintery plywood ramps on my old bike with the ripped banana seat, falling, always falling, scraping his shins and elbows bloody till long after dark.
I glanced both ways down the hall so Maddie couldn’t see Allyn walking into my room, and I shut my door behind her with a click. She sat on the end of the scrap-wood console I’d built
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between my bed and Nate’s and I cranked up ELP’s “Tarkus” and sat behind my big imitation-
chrome kit, my drum stool squeaking as I thumped my bass drum and chicked my high hat shut.
“You might want to cover your ears!” I shouted, the record needle fizzling through dust
till it looked like a Q-Tip, covered with lint, the grooves popping as my drum sticks rolled out the
rising cymbal hiss building through the song’s opening. “It can get a little loud!”
I started the song with a bang, striking and kicking almost every syncopated lick with Carl
Palmer like some intricate machine, playing better than I’d ever played before, then worse, much
worse, my mouth falling open like a goof’s as I watched her watch me play, Allyn glancing back at
my almost-finished mural on the wall every now and then—Hercules and Hendrix glowing under
the blue-buzzing Blacklights, my punctured coffee-can spinning stars out across my walls—then turning back, her mouth fallen open like mine, the insides of her lips fleshy wet and pink, raw- chapped and frayed where she’d bitten them under Maddie’s plum lip gloss.
I swiped the stinging sweat in my eyes, all out of breath, my ears ringing like a dial tone when I was done.
“Man, Travis, you’re so much better since the last time I saw you,” she said. “Did you paint these, too? God, I didn’t know you had any talent.”
But just then, Maddie called for her from her room and Allyn ran out of mine, a quick- escape artist one more time, and I blushed like a Tyler rose.
*
“Maddie says I can’t sing for shit,” she said next afternoon, sitting on my low mattress,
laughing and popping her Red Hot gum between her teeth, straight and slightly off-white from
drinking well-water till she was ten instead of fluorinated city water, my whole room smelling of
her hot cinnamon breath after she’d watched me practice “Heart of the Sunrise” and
“Roundabout” and “Long Distance Runaround.” “Sure as shit can’t sing like my sisters, Maddie
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says. Sharp and flat as a razor blade.” She rolled her eyes and shook her head and fell silent a
moment, wiggling her toes and staring at Maddie’s plum toe polish on her bare brown feet.
“What do you think, Travis?”
“Don’t know,” I said, trying not to say what I really thought. “Don’t know much about
singing.”
She glanced up at me and shrugged, smiling brightly like she had the whole time I’d been
playing, her hands over her ears like the hear-no-evil monkey wearing an orangutan grin.
She sat quiet a moment, hesitant, glancing back at the door like she might escape to
Maddie’s room again, then saying what she’d come to my room to ask me in the first place: Hey,
could I maybe give her a drum lesson or two? Imagine it, a girl on the drums! And, hey, if it
wasn’t too much trouble, could I maybe teach her to a little painting, too? She’d always wanted to
be a painter, ever since she’d spilled finger paints all over her kindergarten teacher.
“Don’t know,” I said again, clattering the plastic tips of my Remo sticks like paintbrushes
against the rim of my new chrome snare. “I pretty much taught myself, you know? Wouldn’t know where to start.”
“Come on. Pretty please?” she said, her plucked and penciled-in eyebrows rising and making a valentine of her face, prettier than any girl’s I’d ever seen.
“Don’t know,” I said for the third time, looking down and trying not to blush. “All right, okay. Jesus, I guess. But I got a lot of practicing to do, okay? I got a gig coming up in a couple weeks.”
For an hour that afternoon, I struggled to teach her the most basic four-four blues-rock beat, playing along with something simple, Led Zeppelin’s “Your Time Is Gonna Come,” John
Paul Jones’s Hammond organ and Jimmy Page’s guitar wailing as I played John Bonham’s fancy machine-gun fills right down to the last beat, showing off to Allyn like a freaky fool.
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The music off, I played Bonham’s basic beat for a while, counting it out for her slow and steady, then said, “That’s it, all there is to it. Here. Come here and I’ll show you.”
“What? You want me to sit in your lap or something?”
“No . . . no way! Jesus, you want me to show you or not?” And I sat so far back to give her space on the stool I fell right off, almost racking myself on the stool edge, banging and scraping my tailbone against the window sill.
I stood, wincing and blushing again, then sat with great care, wrapping my legs around her wide hips on the tiny stool, putting my arms around her brown shoulders and leaning into the clean scent of her still-damp hair, wanting more than anything to press my face into her neck and breathe in her Herbal Essences shampoo for the rest of my miserable life.
I folded her dark delicate hands around my sticks, showing her how to hold them, my pink knuckles rough as burls, my hands ugly white and freckled against hers. Then I took her slender wrists and moved her arms to play, counting out a steady 1-2-3-4 stick-tapping chick on the high hat with her right hand over her left and a basic two-measure pattern between snare snap and bass kick: kick, wait, snare, wait; kick, kick, snare, wait.
“See? That’s not so hard. Yeah, now you’re getting it.”
She relaxed into the beat and smiled back at me, her eyes closing a little as she moved her face closer to mine, the soft insides her lips wet along the folds like a water lily’s, then turned her face away from mine, squeezing it into a grimace of pained concentration as she popped the snare and her cinnamon gum. She seemed to have the beat down after twenty or so repetitions, so I stood from the back of my drum stool and slipped, tried to catch myself on her shoulders but fell back against the window sill again, standing and rubbing my tailbone furiously.
“All right, you try it now. Just start with the four-count on the high hat, and then count out the rim shots and kicks along with me. One-two-three-four . . . .”
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For half an hour or more, she tried the simple beat over and over again, but she kept laughing and cursing herself whenever she messed up, which was most of the time, since couldn’t keep the steady high-hat taps going with her right hand without kicking all four beats with her right foot, couldn’t thump the bass kicks without losing all four beats on the high hat, always snapped the snare off the beat or on the wrong beat or never at all, never getting it right, till she finally just beat the hell out of my drums for a long time, screaming and flailing her arms like a monkey doing a drum solo, then broke a stick in half against the snare rim and threw both sticks as hard as she could clamoring against my cymbals.
“Shit!” she said and folded her arms. “I can’t do it, okay? I just can’t.”
“All right,” I said. “Easy now. We’ll try it some other time. No big deal. ”
“No, I don’t want to do it anymore. I can’t do it.”
“All right. Okay. Who ever said you had to?”
I was just reaching down for her hand to pull her up from my stool when Maddie kicked my door cracking against the wall, knocking the door knob right through the sheetrock and leaving a big black hole.
“Goddamn shit, Maddie,” I said, shouting like my father. “Look what you just did. Jesus
Christ, I told you not to do that! Now I got to go back and fix the whole goddamn wall again!”
But she paid not the least attention to me at all, just stared at Allyn’s brown hand in mine and frowned.
“What the heck’re you guys doing in here?”
Next afternoon, I put a camelhair paintbrush into Allyn’s hand instead of drumsticks, but not before I asked her first, “You ever painted with watercolors before?”
She shook her head and glanced at Maddie, who’d stuck around, she said, just to watch.
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“It’s not like oils,” I told Allyn. “You got to paint the darks around the light. Got to work fast and make whatever comes work.”
I got out my father’s old watercolor brushes and palette trays and half-dried watercolors rolled up like tiny tubes of toothpaste, then dug his old mounting boards out of the back of his closet, big square sheets of white wood against swashes of bright paint stroked out from the masked margins of old paintings we’d done together at the kitchen table years before, when I was still a Boy Scout with a crew cut working on a painting merit badge, long before I’d become a goddamn pain-in-the-ass hippy delinquent. I soaked two large sheets of de Arches watercolor paper in Maddie’s bathtub while Allyn and Maddie watched the steam rise and curl in the air- conditioned cold. Then I blotted out the sheets over dry towels and smoothed them out over the boards, stapling them and letting them dry till they’d stretched taut, then set them angled up from some of my father’s old Civil War books stacked on the kitchen table.
“I want to paint, too,” Maddie said, her arms folded, her mind already changed again like always, at the very last minute.
“Too late now, little sis. Only soaked two sheets. You said you just wanted to watch.”
“Hey, don’t call me that. I’m not little anymore!” She’d gained weight since Marilyn had died, her blouse sleeves tight around her inflated arms ever since she’d started sneaking downstairs at night again to eat all the Neapolitan ice cream in the freezer or all the Nestlé’s chocolate morsels my mother’d hidden in the pantry, but I didn’t say a word, didn’t call her “lard ass” like Hanna did sometimes, even though Hanna weighed more than Maddie did, didn’t say, “That’s for damn sure,” just kept my damn mouth shut.
“Come on, Travis,” she said. “Please?”
“All right. Jesus.”
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Thirty minutes later, after I’d stapled a new dry sheet for myself without soaking or stretching it, I found a rain-wrinkled seascape from a National Geographic in my father’s magazine stack in the downstairs bathroom, knowing my watercolor seascape would bulge and buckle just like the photo, and soon we were all painting the sea and sky and high cliffs along the Rock of
Gibraltar—“One of the Pillars of Hercules,” a caption read—round limestone boulders like white whalebacks rising in mirrored ovals along the shore, the seawater clear and calm as the tap water in the Mason jar we cleaned our brushes with at the kitchen table.
After peeling apart the magazine pages still stuck together from our old leaking roof, I rough-sketched the photo, then showed Allyn and Maddie how to paint a quick flourishing wash of sky against wet paper with a wide wet brush, standing back to blur my eyes as the watercolors bled into red clouds, and Allyn seemed to catch on right away, moving her brush in quick clean strokes of bright blooming color.
“Hey, that’s good,” I told her, then turned to Maddie. “Don’t work it too much, or it’ll get all muddy. Jesus god almighty, Maddie, I’m telling you.”
But it was too late.
“You ruined it,” I said, sounding like my father again, staring down at Maddie’s mess of sky, like a big glop of red East Texas clay dripping down the wet paper. “Look at that. Jesus, a whole goddamn sheet ruined. You know how much that shit costs?”
“God!” she said and stood, the legs of her kitchen chair screeching and peeling the wax off the Mexican tiles as she almost knocked the chair over. “Do you have to be so mean to me?
You’re always so nice to her.” Then she threw her brush loaded with bright vermillion and burnt sienna smack into the middle of her painting, paint spattering everywhere, and she huffed off and ran up the stairs and slammed her bedroom door hard three times.
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“Think I should go up talk to her?” Allyn said, covering her grin across the kitchen table
from me.
“Nah, she’ll be all right,” I said, trying my best not to grin, too. “She’s just too goddamn
sensitive.” Something my father’d say about me. “You sure you never painted with watercolors
before? Jesus, you’re a natural, you know? Much better than me.”
She hid her painting from me awhile, wouldn’t let me look at it, held it away from me
every time I tried to look, teasing her, and when she was done an hour later, Allyn turned it around
and said, “Travis, look,” and I saw that she’d added three mermaids lolling around in the sun on a
smooth white boulder, their hair flowing down to their laps and covering their bare brown shoulders and breasts, their scaly tails copper bright, their wide-fanning fins dipping into the wine-
dark sea.
Next morning, I rolled out the last six feet of white exterior sheathing my father’d brought
me, cutting and stapling it inside a recess in the wall for my dresser, then tacking her painting to
the back of my closet door swinging out into the light so Allyn could re-paint her masterpiece in bright Day-Glo colors, her own glowing mural along the wall facing my bed in a Blacklight gloaming. It was dark outside and thundering now, had just started to sprinkle, a tinkering of
raindrops on the copper roof over our heads.
“I think I’ll call it . . . ‘Three Mermaids of the Mediterranean,’” Allyn said dreamily,
sticking the end of the paintbrush into her mouth like a cigarette holder and puffing out, staring a
long time at the blank white wall.
“That’s good,” I said. “But, hey, what if you, like, added this big ship, you know? Like
Ulysses tied to the mast? And his shipmates’ve got their ears all plugged with wax? And the sirens
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are all calling out to him, saying, ‘Hey, Mr. Ulysses, want to come wreck your pretty ship on our
rocks?’”
She shoved me in the chest and shook her head, her hair wisping out from her hips like
long gossamer strands of silk. “No way, Travis. These aren’t those kind of mermaids. These are just your basic regular mermaids, you know? The kind you see all the time.”
“Yeah, okay.” I frowned a moment and nodded, rubbing the spots of fuzz furling out from my chin. “Yeah, sure. Okay, I get it.”
For three hours she painted while I outlined my murals of Hercules and Hendrix, filling in the white spaces, then rolling out flat-black Sherwin Williams along the walls, top and bottom, the smell of wet latex paint and patchouli and Herbal Essences and cinnamon gum sweet in the air, the
Beatles singing “Here Comes the Sun” and George Harrison singing “Apple Scruffs” and “All
Things Must Pass” and Neil Young singing from Déjà vu—
Country girl, I think you’re pretty Got to make you understand . . .
—until Allyn shouted, “Oh, no!” and threw her brush spattering to the shag at her feet and cried, “It’s ruined, Travis! I fucked it all up!”
I turned around to see Allyn crying, a bright blot of glowing lavender dripping down her mural on the wall, from white rock to white beach, a Rorschach of purple on the shag rug my father’d be shouting at me to clean up.
“I’m cursed,” she cried. “Fuck up everything I touch.”
“Easy now,” I said behind her. “No big deal. Sometimes accidents are gifts, you know?
You just have to look. Look close. Hey, I think I can see it. Yeah, there it is. Here, quick, give me your brush.”
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And I pinched out all the paint in her brush, then stroked fast, drawing the bright blot of
lavender into the brush, then up and down—thirty or so light strokes like quick calligraphy
dashing up and down and around, like Allyn’s bright hair showering down to her hips—till I was
done.
“See?” I said, stroking her soft hair, slippery and damp along her neck. “You just made a pretty willow on the beach.”
That was the first night she came to my room, the first night of summer.
It was raining and I lay there in the dark, resting my head back in my palms against my
pillow, smiling as I listened to the syncopating pings of rain against the copper roof, and then the
door clicked and creaked open, and I thought it was my father at first and then my sister, and then
she felt her way into my room, almost tripping over my mattress on the floor, then pulling back
my bedspread and slipping into my bed next to me, her white cotton gown whispering between the
sheets. She sighed then, crying into the hollow of my collarbone, like it was the only place she’d
ever let herself do such a thing, in the dark, with me holding her and hushing her till she’d quieted.
Why was she crying? I wondered but already knew, stroking the soft damp hair at the back of her
neck. But why with somebody like me? Some tall, long-haired guy, spotted and long-necked as a
giraffe, skinny and bony as an old carp in creek mud, his underwear unraveling like his stupid life.
For the next five nights in a row it rained, and she kept coming to my room—I couldn’t
believe it, my life, my luck—and she kept crying into that same hollow at my neck, and I couldn’t
believe that someone like her would choose someone like me to cry with so openly, my neck and
shoulder wet like the nights when the roof still leaked, rain plopping onto my forehead, then
dropping into my open eye as I woke and sat up with dread. I touched the wet along my shoulder
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and tasted her salt on my fingertips and then we lay back quiet and listened to the soft bright
patterns of rain pattering echoes across my father’s copper roof, acorns falling from the oaks
overhead, then popping and rolling down into the rain gutters—no rain, no more rain but the
sound of rain, I thought, the sweet sound of rain—till I was happier than I’d ever been in my life
or would be since, and then we both fell asleep.
On the sixth night, the crying seemed to stop at first, and as soon as she’d come to my bed
in the dark, she reached for my hand, warming it in her palm a moment, then laid it onto the sheer
cotton at her breast, panting like a sparrow, then sat up in my bed and lifted off her nightgown,
pulling it cross-armed over her head and tossing it to the shag next to my bed. Then she lay back
again, pressing my palm to her small warm breast, panting, pressing my palm down, across her ribs
and down to her smooth stomach and bare hips, into the wet down between her downy thighs,
pressing her palm into my hair and panting, pressing my head down and down as I kissed the oval
mole on her left breast, then her nipples, stippled in the dark, then her ribs and her navel, tasting
her salt and musky scent like sweet clover and wild onion, and she kept pressing my head down,
down, until she’d opened herself to me like a plum and I pressed my tongue inside her, warm and
wet against her tender seed till she was whimpering and moaning, then crying again.
“You all right?” I whispered, worried I was hurting her, worried she’d wake my brother.
“No, no,” she whispered, then, “Yes. Yes, Travis. Yes.”
“Nate?” I whispered next morning at five. “Hey, buddy, why you up so early?”
I’d felt his shadow pass over me and then his eyes staring at me in the half-light of dawn,
standing in his ratty white skivvies like mine at the foot of my bed when I woke, skinny as a stick bug and almost as tall as me, a bright red ‘fro haloing his head like a rusty Brill-O pad, his cheeks
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dark-freckled with spatters of raw sienna, his lips soft and red and too big like a girl’s, our father was always saying, and I followed Nate’s shy eyes down to her, still asleep in my bed sprawled on top of me, her long blonde hair showering down her bare brown back and the dark curve of her spine, the sheets just above the dimples at the base of her spine and hips, her slender arms thrown around my neck, her breasts and wet mouth pressed into my chest as she slept.
I put my finger to my lips and reached around her, trying not to wake her as I pulled up the sheets to cover her bare back and shoulders.
“She was afraid,” I told Nate. “Like Maddie used to be. No big deal. Don’t wake her.
Don’t tell anybody, okay?”
“Okay, man. Just needed to pee,” Nate whispered and went right back to bed.
When he was snoring and grinding his teeth again, I kissed whispers into her ear and said,
“My parents’ll be up soon. Better go back to Maddie’s bed before she wakes up.”
*
Later that day, after I’d slept in late till after one, Maddie banged my door for the fifth or sixth time and yelled from the hall, “Dad’ll be mad if you don’t get up, you bum. You forgot to mow the lawn. Allyn’s going to my voice lessons with me.”
“Shit,” I whispered and kicked back my bed sheets, stumbling forward to step into the legs of my skivvies and bell bottoms, zipping up and buckling my belt as I ran barefoot out to the front yard, but Maddie and Allyn were already halfway down the block, laughing like they were twelve again on my sisters’ banana-seated Schwinns, Allyn’s hair flying out behind her like a cape of gold foil.
The ground was spongy and damp, the wet grass high, plush like green shag from all the rain, tickling my bare feet and ankles inside the bells of my jeans, the scalding sun scarifying my bare back, and I wondered if I had time to mow and edge the lawn before band practice in two
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hours, before my father got home raising holy hell at five, but it was already too late, a hundred in the shade now and humid as a Louisiana hothouse, the afternoon sun a bright blinding bronze against my father’s new roof, so I went back inside and took a long hot shower and dressed and broke down my rebuilt drum kit and waited in the air-conditioned cold for Kenny to come over from next door.
Carrying his heavy black Fender Super Reverb and the case for his left-handed black
Gibson, his stepfather Bill Sherrod shouting at his back for skipping out on work after his lunch break at Bill’s feed and seed store, Kenny helped me load my gear and his into the rusted-out bed of my ’63 Ford F-100, and we drove off to pick up Robbie Womble on our way to the abandoned bathhouse at old Vickery Park, where our new band practiced every Tuesday, Thursday and
Saturday at four.
*
It was just Kenny and me now, and two new band members, the old band gone along with the old band names—Oroboros and E. Cannabis Unum—Marilyn dead now over six months and
Hunk on his way from juvy to Huntsville for murdering a meth dealer, Danny still in county lockup for possession of two pounds of marijuana, his mother refusing to bail him out for months as he waited for his trial date, the handwriting on the blank white postcards he’d sent me from his jail cell shrinking so small I could barely read them anymore, until they finally stopped coming altogether.
We called ourselves Pegasus now, the first band name I’d ever come up with, after the horse that sprang from Medusa’s blood, the same red-winged horse I used to draw as a kid with my father’s colored pencils, its red tail twisted into a fist as it flew out over the Conoco Building across from my father’s old office building high above the Dallas skyline downtown.
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Our new bass player, Robbie Womble, was something of a prodigy on his fretless
Rickenbacker, sitting on a stool in his father’s cluttered garage where Kenny and I first tried to talk him into replacing Hunk on the bass, his long black hair greasy as the amoebas of motor oil spread out all over his father’s smooth-troweled garage floor, his red face inflamed with volcanic acne that made it hard to look at him for long, until he started to play and then we couldn’t look away, his foot propped up on a battered toolbox like a classical guitar player. He’d just turned sixteen, the same age as Allyn and Maddie, but he wrote all the band’s original music—a bizarre mix of classical and complex art rock that I had a hard time counting out much less keeping up with— and he could sing raspy and low like Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson or in a high falsetto tenor like
Yes’s Jon Anderson while he played more than one instrument at a time, kicking window-rattling bass notes on his electronic foot pedal like Genesis’s Mike Rutherford while he played his acoustic
Martin or flute, spit-flying as he voiced his notes on Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick.
Smiley Bickel, our new keyboard player, didn’t smile much and usually drank too much
Schlitz Malt Liquor with the Vickery Park gatekeeper before he came to practice. Twice-divorced at thirty-two, a graduate of Devry Institute, fired by Robbie’s father at Texas Instruments when the
China Lake Naval Weapons Center in California cancelled the laser-guided AGM-83 Bulldog missile he’d helped Robbie’s father design, Bic was always complaining to Robbie about losing his job, like Robbie could do anything about it—idiot got his ass fired because he was always showing up drunk or late to work, Robbie said whenever Bic didn’t show up for practice on time or didn’t show up at all—was always complaining about the debt he’d taken on for all the equipment he’d bought on credit right before Robbie’s father’d stolen his design, then fired him, Bic insisted, more equipment than any musician I’d ever seen, more equipment than talent or good sense, Kenny always said.
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Round-lensed black glasses like a tiny bicycle racked across the bridge of his raspberry nose, a plastic pocket protector in his wrinkled shirt pocket always crammed with bleeding Bic pens and his T. I. calculator, his hair wild and frizzy like he’d gone after it with my mother’s ratting comb, Bic had too much time on his hands, which trembled when he played sober, and he was always tinkering around with his new Moog synthesizer, taking apart and cleaning the tape heads of his temperamental Mellotron—which played eight-inch tape strips of recorded orchestra music for each of its thirty-five keys like my old eight-track tape deck—when he should have been practicing his chops for our big gig coming up at Flag Pole Hill. He always hung around Robbie’s garage, too, waiting for Robbie’s father to get off work so he could ask for his job back, until
Robbie’s father said we’d have to find ourselves another keyboard player or new place to practice.
“Where the hell is he?” I said and looked at my watch, almost five p. m., glancing out through the bathhouse doors where I’d set up my drums to catch any available breeze, looking back across Vickery Park’s abandoned rides like rusted mining equipment, steam rising from the damp earth like fumaroles. “Jesus, it’s hot in this place.”
“He’ll be here,” Robby said. “I called him when I left the house. Said he was on his way.”
“That was an hour ago,” Kenny said. “On his way to Big Tex Liquors, more likely.”
“Or chugging a few with his old buddy Andy,” I said.
“You know it.”
“Guess I better check again if he’s over at the gatehouse shack,” I said.
“Tell him to hurry it up, will you?” Kenny said. “It’s hotter than a screaming Baptist in this place. Bic and his big ideas. What a dump.”
When Robbie’s father’d kicked Bic out of the garage, Bic had talked the rest of the band into practicing at the old Vickery Park bathhouse. He knew the gatekeeper, an old drinking buddy who’d flunked out from Devry. Andy lived in the gatekeeper’s shack for free and got a $200
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check from the Southern Baptist Convention every month to keep out drunks and druggies, horny
teenagers, queers and noise-making, rabble-rousing reprobates like us. For a case of Schlitz Malt
Liquor, Andy gave Bic an extra key to the padlocked gate, which Bic copied for the rest of us, and
Andy let us in as long as we supplied him with a cold quart in a paper bag at the gate, let us
practice in the bathhouse as long and as loud we wanted to, as long as we paid the park’s electric
bill, which amounted to about five bucks each a month.
Old Vickery Park, abandoned for thirty years until the Baptists bought up the land, had
closed down during the polio epidemic when my mother was still a girl, begging my grandmother
Hanny to let her swim in the big Olympic pool, but Hanny’d said no, no daughter of hers was
going to spend the rest of her life in an iron lung or leg braces. The big cinder-block pool out
back was cracked now and full of dissolving leaves, three feet of tea-colored rainwater at the deep
end, only mosquito larvae and tadpoles swimming there now, peepers whistling from the toppled
diving board, hopping, then plopping into the water as soon they heard me come out of the
bathhouse at dusk.
I walked across the park, overgrown like a jungle with poison ivy and grapevines looping
over pecans and oaks and collapsed concession stands, a Tilt-A-Whirl tilted over and about to fall,
a carousel of cracked-wood horses with paint-flaking grins, and I found Bic sitting on the collapsed green couch in front of Andy’s leaning shack, sharing a quart of malt liquor in a brown paper bag with his buddy.
“Hey, Andy,” I said, then, “Jesus, Bic.”
Andy waved a finger at me, his arm around Bic’s shoulders on the couch, his bloodshot eyes heavy lidded, his skin yellow, the stink of alcohol sweat pouring from his pores, drunken mosquitoes banging against his face like bees trapped in a beer bottle.
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“On my way,” Bic said and staggered up, jumping into his GMC van, low to the ground and filled with heavy, expensive gear just outside the open gate. “Want a ride?” he said out the driver’s side window.
“Think I’ll walk.”
I watched his van weave as he made a hard turn through the gate, his muffler low to the ground and scraping sparks against concrete as his tires bumped over to gravel and swerved around a leaning Ferris wheel and through the rust-barked park rides, his tired spinning out mud, his power-steering belt loose and screeching like a flayed cat.
It took all four of us an hour just to unload his heavy Hammond organ and Leslie speakers, his Moog and his Mellotron, his PA and all the rest of his gear, Kenny and me chain- smoking Marlboros until Bic was finished plugging in cords and fiddling around with knobs at six, and we practiced our standard forty-five minute set—mostly Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer and Jethro Tull and King Crimson—then worked up Genesis’ “Watcher of the Skies,” Bic surprising us all when he played the eerie Mellotron opening against Phil Collin’s complex six-four beat and didn’t miss but a lick or two, the sound of a full orchestra behind the band echoing across the bathhouse walls like we were playing in Carnegie Hall.
“Man,” Bic said without smiling, about as enthusiastic as he ever got, “we’re cooking with gas.”
When we’d loaded up all his equipment into his van again, another hour of heavy lifting, the muscles in my back aching and jumping around, the park was a nightmare of twisted shapes in the dark as Bic’s headlights shot out through the mist, weaving wildly through the rides and toward the back gate.
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“You guys mind if we stop off at the J. C. Penny’s in North Park?” I asked Kenny and
Robbie while we loaded the last of our gear into my truck bed. “My skivvies are getting kind of ratty.”
“Must be love,” Kenny said and grinned, the only one I’d told about Allyn.
“Hey, shut up,” I said. “I’m getting some BVDs for my brother, too, okay? Kid’s still wearing the same skivvies he wore when he was ten, I swear to god.”
Kenny spit on the cracked bathhouse steps, where I’d backed up my truck and put down the tailgate. “Any excuse to stay away from B. S.,” he said, referring to his stepfather, Bill Sherrod.
“Shit heel’s going to kill me for skipping out on work after lunch, but I’m sick of looking at him, having him boss me around day and night. Bad enough I have to live with that son of a bitch.”
“Yeah, my old man’s going to whack it to me, too,” I said. “Forgot to mow the lawn today.”
“Could one of you guys loan me some money? Need to get some new strings at the
Melody Shop,” Robbie said, glancing at Kenny and hoping to get a loan and a fifteen-percent discount since Kenny worked there weekends.
“All tapped out,” Kenny said and pulled his pockets inside out, shaking out lint.
“I got a little cash,” I said. “Sure.”
We all climbed into my truck cab, Robbie shaking his head as he sat between Kenny and me, his inflamed face studded with whiteheads like potato eyes. “Too bad we can’t fire his ass like my old man did,” he mumbled.
“First he stole my design and then he fired me!” Kenny said, riding shotgun at the passenger window.
“Bic!” we all shouted at once and laughed. Too bad he owned that big P. A. and all that cool equipment, we all agreed for the hundredth time. Too bad we didn’t have any roadies to
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carry around the heavy stuff—and maybe a few groupies, too—but maybe that’d all change soon, you never knew.
“We’re going to have to keep a close eye on that idiot before our gig,” I said. “This is our big chance, and I’ll be damned if he’s going to make a fool out of me.”
“Hey,” Kenny said, “I think he plays a little better when he’s drunk.”
When I came home at nine, three hours late for dinner, my father was waiting for me in the kitchen, his face hot as the leathery meatloaf my mother’d left for me in the oven, his upper lip sweating like his second or third glass of scotch sitting in a slick of water on the kitchen table, his kitchen chair screeching across the Mexican tiles as he stood.
“That’s it,” he said. “You’re getting a job.”
“Didn’t have time to mow the lawn today, Dad,” I said, my excuses as lukewarm as the glass of milk waiting for me on the kitchen table. “Something came up this morning and it was too hot outside and when I was done I had to practice with my band. I’ll get right on it tomorrow.
No big deal.”
“You’re a goddamn liar. Mow and edge the lawn every Thursday or you’d have to get a job—that was our agreement.”
“I had other things to do, Dad.”
“Like sleep in till one?”
“All right, okay, I had a hard time sleeping last night. Can’t you just let it go this once?”
“Nope.”
I’d have to make my way in the world soon, he said, and I wasn’t going to make it if I slept in all goddamn day, kept wasting my time playing weird music and painting hippies and niggers on my bedroom walls.
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“That hippy’s Hercules, Dad, and Jimi Hendrix was one of the greatest guitar players of all—”
“I don’t give a good goddamn if he was Jesus Christ on the cross. You’re getting a job.
You got too much time on your hands. You want to end up in jail like that friend of yours, what’s his name?”
“Danny,” I said. I wasn’t going to end up like Danny Archer, I said, no way.
“Damn right, you’re not, not if I have anything to say about it.”
I had a choice, my father said. Either I could go to work for him that summer and continue learning a good profession with a little security—Little is right, I thought, thinking about my father’s business, more famine than feast, trying not to roll my eyes or sigh like my old man— or I could go to work for my cousin Drake like I’d done the last two summers, digging postholes in Oak Cliff, laying out orange PVC piping in the hot Texas sun all day, installing gas lights and grills for the Lone Star Gas Company.
“But who’ll do my chores?”
“Maddie and Nate.”
They were old enough now to mow and edge the lawn and take on the rest of my chores, he said, reminding me for the third or fourth time in a week that I’d be leaving home soon and better by god start thinking about paying my way through college, unless, of course, I joined the
Corps at Texas A & M—free tuition, room and board, and all the spending money I needed from my father every month.
“Jesus, Dad,” I said.
“Don’t you goddamn Jesus me.”
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Kicking up the carpeted stairs to my room upstairs without eating supper, my stomach
growling like our Sheltie Reveille sleep-kicking his one back leg under the coffee table, I passed
Maddie in the hallway, growling and wanting to kick her, too.
“Dumbshit,” she hissed as I passed.
“If you’d kept your stupid mouth shut, you wouldn’t’ve been stuck with my chores. Jesus,
you’re such a fucking nark.”
“Am not!” she said and shot me a crooked grin like Allyn’s. “Besides, I like mowing the
lawn.”
“Daddy’s little girl,” I said. “What a weasel.” And I slammed my bedroom door in her
face.
“How’d you like to quit your job with B. S. and come to work for me?” I asked Kenny on
our way to pick up Robbie for practice that Saturday, my seat springs squelching under me as my
truck bumped over ruts on White Rock Trail, ELP’s rendition of Aaron Copland’s “Hoedown” blasting from the eight-track deck under my truck seat.
“Right,” Kenny said. “Hey, can you turn that down a little?”
“I’m not kidding, man,” I said, bobbing my head and banging out beats on my steering wheel as I down-shifted gears on the steering column. I reached down to pop in my truck’s lighter.
“You got a smoke?”
Kenny sighed and shook his head, pulled the new pack of Marlboros he’d just bought at the 7-Eleven from his t-shirt pocket and slap-packed it into his palm until the lighter popped back
out, then tore off the cellophane and ripped out a square from the bottom, tapping out and
lighting up a cigarette for each of us hissing against the lighter’s red coil, handing one over to me,
then reaching under my seat to turn the music down.
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“Thanks!” I yelled too loud in the sudden quiet and took in a deep, lung-aching drag and reached under my jouncing seat to turn the music back up again, grinning at Kenny. “We could skip out from work after lunch on practice days. Come home and work whenever we wanted to, nobody to boss us around. Just you and me calling the shots.”
“And you could buy your own smokes for a change,” he said.
“I’ll buy you a carton, a whole goddamn case of cartons.”
“Yeah, heard that one before.” Kenny shook his head. “No more dealing for me, Travis.
I’m not ending up like Hunk or Danny. No way.”
“What? I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about a job, a real job. It’s good money, man, I’m telling you.”
“Yeah, right,” he said.
“No kidding, I made a sweet deal with my cousin Drake. You’re not going to believe it.”
And then I told him.
The night before, my father’d handed me our Blue Princess phone from the kitchen wall, saying I couldn’t put off getting a job in life any more than I could’ve put off signing up for the draft—duty, God, country—and then he handed me Drake’s phone number on the back of a liquor store receipt and stood over me with his arms folded as I punched in the beeping numbers,
Drake’s phone ringing in Wylie, Texas, where he’d just moved his wife and newborn.
“Wide Awake Wylie,” the city limits sign read just before the turnoff to Lake Lavon and
Drake’s ramshackle trailer. “Blackest Dirt and Whitest People in Texas.”
Drake didn’t need me, he said on the other end of the line, he and his pretty wife Angie’s new baby boy Drake Junior screaming in the background like he was being broiled alive. Drake’d already hired his summer help, he said—his worthless, piece-of-shit brother-in-law Billy—but a
335 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
whole slew of Oak Cliff niggers had been buying up grills that summer for their big-ass barbeques
and such, more installation orders than he could ever keep up with, and maybe we could work us
out a freelance deal. At the beginning of spring, he’d bought himself a fancy new trencher—cost
him three thousand bucks! he said—and the damn thing did it all, dug and laid out quarter-inch
orange PVC slick as dick in pussy, he laughed, but he still had that fifteen-year-old Ditch-Witch
we’d used the last two summers in his portable shed, a rattling trencher like a giant lawn edger with
a wobbling yard-wide blade that cut an inch-wide, foot-deep trench through grass and black
gumbo. He’d give it to me for five hundred bucks, he said, that and fifteen percent for all the
orders I installed for him.
“What? No way,” I said, almost shouting into the phone, my father’s arms folded, his
eyes glowing like blue gaslight mantles. “A hundred bucks for the trencher, Drake. Five percent
or nothing, man, or no deal.”
I’d never much cared for Drake, not since I was ten, had always steered clear of him
whenever I saw him at my grandmother Hanny’s big Sunday dinners, laughing and yelling, “Travis,
boy, look at you, all grown up!” slapping me hard on the back and almost knocking me over,
leaving a red hand print across my shoulder blade. I’d never wanted to work with the man either,
but my father’d insisted on it when I’d turned sixteen—either that or work with Kenny at Hardee’s for $1.50 an hour. Old enough to drive, my father said, old enough to work. A little hard work never hurt anybody. Builds character, he said. Discipline.
At sixteen, Drake had run away from my aunt and uncle’s farm in Waxahachie when his
Texas Aggie father’d lash him half-naked with a bullwhip for refusing to gather eggs or do the rest
of his farm chores. The whippings had been going on for ten years now, ever since Drake, six, had
put his baby sister into the oven and turned it on. This time, though, the old man got himself
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whipped instead, Drake punching him in the nose till it was broken flat against his face and he was down, bleeding through his nose and ears in their leaning chicken coop, snuffling dust and chicken shit, Drake snapping up his father’s bullwhip and giving his old man a lashing while he was down till he was bleeding stripes through his work shirt and overalls.
The summer he ran away, the summer Jesse almost died the first time, I got farmed out to
Drake because all the adults were at Baylor Hospital—my parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles, my kid brother bleeding from almost every opening in his body, his platelets count down almost to zero—and I ended up staying that night at Drake’s tiny Wellington Apartments’ efficiency in East Dallas. He got me whisky-drunk the first time ever and I puked Campbell’s
Vegetable Beef soup all over his shag rug and passed out. He let me sleep it off awhile, then woke me on his Salvation Army couch at two a. m., still drunk himself, sitting on his pillow pressed into my face and laughing, my screams muffled in cotton, till I promised to clean up my mess, and the next day when he let me swim in his apartment pool, he dunked me and held my head under till I came up coughing chlorinated water that burned in my lungs for days.
On the job, his petite wife Angie already pregnant again, Drake was always talking about getting himself a little nigger skank on the side, all those lonely nappy-haired housewives in their robes unable to resist a fine-looking white man working with his shirt off in their back yards, his muscled back scarred as a slave’s, and more than once he just disappeared—Mr. Back Door Man getting kinky with the kinkies, he called it—leaving me to finished the rest of the work, and when he came back out an hour or two later, flushed and sweating, I’d complain that we were late for our next installation, complain about the heat, blisters peeling in the afternoon sun along the back of my neck, and he’d tell me to stop my fucking whining and help him load his new GMC truck.
“What a pussy,” he always said. “You don’t know nothing about pain.” Then he’d start in again about his old man, the scars across his back like tiger stripes.
337 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
On the phone, Drake said, “That trencher cost me a thousand bucks!”
“Yeah, and that was, what, like a hundred years ago? That thing’s a total piece of crap,
and you know it. Nothing but bailing wire and spit.”
“Take the deal, “my father whispered and gave me a little shoulder shove. “Whatever it is,
take it.”
I palmed the receiver. “He’s trying to stick it to me, Dad.”
“Yeah? Well, stick it back to him, then.”
“Fifty bucks a month rent for the trencher,” I said into the phone. “No percentage of my
take, take it or leave it. You got ten seconds and then I’m hanging up.”
Drake paused a moment, then whinnied canned laughter like a rerun of Mr. Ed. “Hey, kid,
I was just messing with you, okay?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said. Asshole.
“When can you start?” Drake said, like the whole thing had been his idea all along.
I hung up a minute later, the deal done, and my father grabbed me one armed, pressing me into his chest in a rib-grating hug.
“Good man,” he said, his eyes wet as a Maddie’s teacup Chihuahua Pearl’s.
“We’ll split the take fifty-fifty,” I told Kenny as I pulled into Robbie Womble’s driveway.
“That’s about twenty bucks a job, gaslights, grills or both, three to five jobs a day, depending, fifty
bucks each on a good day, close to a thousand each a month.”
Kenny’s eyebrows shot up at that.
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“But we split expenses, too, okay? Gas and oil for my truck, fifty bucks a month for the trencher, anything else comes up. Gas company’ll supply all the PVC and fittings we’ll need, and
I’ll buy the tools. Fair enough?”
“Hell, I’ll do it,” Kenny said, then shook his head. “Anything to get free of B. S.”
Two days later, we started working at the Lone Star Gas Company.
Monday morning, a salmon color sky like a watercolor wash along the horizon at 5:30 a.m., chirring crickets singing from the wet grass, steaming from the rain the night before, Kenny pulled himself up into my truck cab, unshaved and barely awake, sleep creases like razor cuts down his eyelids and cheeks, his hair flat on one side and tilted out from his skull like a graduation cap, and he sat, squelching the passenger seat, duct-taped across its split seams, and almost crushed his new carton of Marlboros.
“Who’s idea was this anyway?” he said, and I snatched away his carton on his seat before he sat it flat. “Jesus, man, it’s too damn early.”
He slammed his door like a tank turret lid, the whole truck cab shivering, and glanced down at the carton I’d just dropped into his lap.
“Got one I can bum?” I said.
“Jesus, Travis, you got to start in so early? Sun’s not even up yet.” He groaned and stretched. “This theory of yours you smoke less if you don’t buy your own, I don’t buy it for a second.”
“Just bear with the bum, okay?” I laughed and unscrewed the thermos of coffee my mother’d brewed for us and poured some for Kenny. “Just shut up and be my pusher, man.
Here.” And I handed him a steaming cup.
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“I said, goddamn!” he sang, his morning voice growling just like Steppenwolf’s John Kay,
singing, “Goddamn the pusher man!”
He sipped his hot coffee and rubbed his eyes and lay the cup on the metal dash, then
cracked open his new carton, packed a red pack in his palm and lit a smoke for us both, handed
mine over to me while I cranked up Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s “Abaddon’s Bolero,” and we were
burning tread, off to Oak Cliff, smoke trailing out my truck’s windows, from my bald tires and
rusted tailpipe.
The drive took an hour through sunup and stalled Central Expressway traffic
downtown—sit and wait, move ten feet, sit and wait—cars honking and cutting in front of us,
diesel fumes and my own truck exhaust choking us through our open windows, and by the time
we’d finally crossed the Trinity River bridge on I-35 and taken the exit to South Polk Street in
Oak Cliff, we’d used up over half a tank of energy-crisis gas and a quart of recycled oil I’d bought
by the case. But Kenny and I laughed the whole way, singing along to Yes’s “Starship Trooper,”
The Whô’s “Going Mobile,” ZZ Top’s “Neighbor, Neighbor” and Jimi Hendrix’s Cry of Love cranked up so loud we couldn’t hear ourselves laugh and shout. “Freedom,” Kenny sang, banging the metal dash, “that’s what I want now. Freedom. To live. Freedom. So I can give.” The morning air, already humid and hot, whipped our long hair into our faces like stinging wasps, but the two of us were happier than we’d been since we’d first started hanging out together in ‘69, freer than we’d ever felt and maybe ever would.
As I drove up to the loading dock behind the Lone Star Gas Company, my cousin Drake shot me a look over his shoulder and shouted at his brother-in-law, Billy, who’d just dropped a big
Arkla gas grill into his truck bed with a rattling clank.
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“You break it, you buy it,” Drake shouted at Billy, then shouted at me over his shoulder,
“You’re an hour late. Christ Jesus, can’t get decent help anywhere.”
I pulled up next to his GMC, leaned out my truck window and said, “Got stuck in
traffic.”
“Yeah? Well, I got twice as far to drive as you do, all the way out in Wiley, and I made it
on time. I want your ass here at seven, no excuses, get it?”
“Got it.”
“Good.”
His old trencher sat in the loading bay behind his truck, the blade and blade guard held
together with rusty cotter pins and coat hangers, the yard-wide blade half-exposed and spattered
with black oil, pocked with rust and dirt clods.
“Can’t believe I’m spending fifty bucks a month for that piece of crap,” I told Kenny as we
got out of my truck to fill our orders, loading heavy grill boxes up with orange coils of PVC and
pressure fittings and Sacrete, heaving the heavy trencher up on to my tailgate, straining as we dropped it and rolled it into the truck bed, almost throwing our backs out before the day’d even gotten started.
“Mark my word,” I said. “Before the day’s over, that damn trencher’s going to end up getting one of us killed.” And I wasn’t too far from wrong.
It took us an hour just to find the first address, Kenny trying to navigate with my father’s out-of-date Mapsco splayed out in his lap, one wrong turn after another, until we finally pulled up
to the tract house of an elderly black woman all the way out in Desoto, spine-bent in her dark
living room behind her screened door, smoking a briar pipe and staring out warily at the two long-
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haired white guys in knee-frayed jeans on her front porch, holding her screened door open just wide enough to offer us a paper plate of warm oatmeal cookies.
“You made these for us?” I hesitated and took a bite, a warm cookie melting with butter.
“Wow, thanks. Better than my grandmother Hanny’s. We’ll fix you right up, okay? Have you cooking with gas by noon.”
But I was wrong. We had five jobs to do that day, but we’d never get the chance of finishing even the first: a gaslight in the old woman’s front yard facing downtown Dallas, shimmering in a yellow mirage of summer smog in the far distance, a gas grill along the edge of her cracked back porch, her back yard fence and alley backed up to the fanning black rows of a cotton field, so lush and green it was almost blue, like Allyn’s eyes glowing in my bedroom’s black lights.
For two hours, I showed Kenny all the jobs we’d share: how to assemble the gaslight and grill with Arkla’s lousy owner’s manuals—worse than putting together a kid’s swing set—how to tie and mount the fragile silk mantle and insert the sharp glass panes into the gaslight frame without shattering them and cutting our wrists, how to pipe-wrench the stuck valve at the meter to shut off the gas, how to punch a hole in the gas meter pipe to the old woman’s house behind her rain-warped pine fence.
I tightened a quarter-inch nut onto the punch’s pipe joint as Kenny stood over the gas meter right behind me, and just as I was about to swing my hammer into the pipe punch, Kenny clinked his Zippo open against his thigh and lit up a cigarette.
“Put that damn thing out, will you?” I shouted, making us both jump, turning back to him with my hammer mid-air like I might just whack him over the head with it. “You want to blow us both up?”
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“Thought you’d just turned it off,” he said, his eyes fluttering like my kid brother Nate’s when I shouted at him.
“The pipe’s still full of gas, Kenny. Still under pressure, for chrissakes.”
Flinching again, he flicked his just-lit cigarette sparking into the alley and heeled it out in his dead brother Ray’s olive-green jungle boots, grinding the butt into frays of yellow filter and ash and shredded tobacco, then kicked gravel pocking against the gray pine fence like a pistol shot.
At just the moment the punch popped through steel, the rotten-egg stink of natural gas chuffing and hissing out flakes of silver paint, a grasshopper kicked a click-whizzing arc right past my nose from the high grass around the gas meter, then across the alley and into the wild primroses pinking the fringes of the cotton field behind us.
I was showing Kenny how to screw in a pipe plug until we were ready to attach a stub-up after we’d finished laying PVC, when I noticed he wasn’t paying attention, scuffing his brother’s boots and flaking mud up and down the alley, his straight black ponytail swinging down to his belt from his neck like a snapped noose.
“What?” I said. “You going to mope around now like a scolded kid?”
“No,” he said and turned to me. “But, Jesus Christ and hell, Travis, if I’d wanted somebody to bark orders at me all goddamn day long, I’d’ve just kept working for B. S. Or joined the fucking army.”
“All right, okay. I’m sorry.” I shook my head, pissed at myself. “Guess I’m starting to sound too much like my old man. What you say we take us a break?” I stood and grinned, palmed his shoulder. “Eat us some more of that old lady’s killer cookies.”
“What the hell’s up with you today anyway?” he said, his head down, as we walked to my truck in the alley and sat on my tailgate, both of us passing the paper plate of cookies and a big
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orange plastic Thermos back and forth, icy water spilling down our chins and necks and into our sweaty t-shirts. “You were in such a good mood, and then all of a sudden you just start in on me.”
“Thinking of something else,” I said, quiet a moment, trying to shake off the thought, staring off at the high grass grown up around the gas meter. “Remembering something I don’t much like to remember.”
He stared at me, waiting for me to tell him.
“Not sure I want to talk about it, okay?” I said, thinking how Allyn never wanted to talk about it either, laughing last night in my bed when I’d tried again to get her to talk about her father. “It’s got nothing to do with you, Kenny,” I said, then turned up the water jug, spilling icy water down my neck again and swiping at my mouth.
He just kept staring at me, waiting.
“What?” I said. “All right. Okay. Jesus.”
The whole time I’d been punching the pipe, I told him, I’d been thinking about finding
Beck dead in the alley behind my house on Estate Lane, all bled out like his head-shot dog Garçon.
Thinking about stubbing my big toe when I kicked his service revolver into the high grass along his gas meter. What the hell’d I do that for? I’d been thinking. Like was trying to hide it for Beck.
Trying to hide what he’d done from Allyn.
Kenny knew the story—he’d heard me tell it more times than he liked—and he listened one more time, nodding as he glanced out to the frayed white cotton swabs spotting the wide field’s lush cotton plants, glowing Day-Glo green in the summer sun behind the old woman’s house.
“I love her too much,” I said without thinking, thumbing away the sweat stinging my eyes.
“Think about her all the time. Can’t stop thinking about her. It scares me, man. And every time I
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try to talk to her about her old man or Marilyn, she just laughs. This weird-ass laugh. Gives me the fucking willies.”
Kenny stared off, stone-faced and silent awhile. “Maybe it’s the only way she can handle it, you know? Maybe it’s just too much.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, nodding, then shook my head. “Things’ve just been going so good with her and me lately and, I don’t know, I just can’t help thinking something terrible’s going to happen.” I squinted up into the sun. “Keep waiting for this big blue sky to come crashing down on my head.”
“Think it and it’ll happen, sure as shit, Chicken Little.”
“Yeah? So tell me, then. What the hell’s she doing with me anyway? I don’t get it.”
“Me neither.” He shrugged and grinned at me, showing me his cracked front tooth, dark as an elfin tombstone. “Beats hell out of me, boss man.”
“Look, I’m not your boss, okay? We’re partners, fifty-fifty. That’s what we agreed on, right? And I’m not fucking around here.” I stared off at the gas meter half-hidden in the high grass. “Everything good that’s ever happened to me’s just turned to shit. It’s like I’m cursed, man.
Like god’s got it in for me big time.”
“Hey, you getting paranoid on me again? Been smoking something you didn’t tell me about?” Kenny laughed, a honking little burro snort. “Jesus, Travis, every time something good happens to you, you expect the worst. Can’t ever just enjoy yourself. Some girl says she’s digging on you and right off you start digging your own grave.”
“You know what I mean, Kenny,” I said, turning on him, almost spitting out the words.
“First your mom dies, then Ray, and then you get stuck with B. S. Then, just as you’re all set to marry Debra Darley, you catch her fucking your idiot brother B. J. in Ray’s old bed. You know what I’m talking about.”
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“You leave Ray out of this,” Kenny said, gripping the tailgate where he sat, more hurt than pissed. He leaned forward and stared down at his dead brother’s boots, palmed his black-stubbled jaw, jutting out like a bookshelf, and jacked it back and forth like I’d just cracked him with my elbow. He shook his head and sighed, rubbed the arm where he’d broken it once pitching a screaming fastball, then stood from the tailgate, the whole back end of my truck creaking up.
“Least our old ladies didn’t turn us in to the pigs like Danny’s did,” Kenny said. “Leave us to rot in County. Jesus, lighten up, will you? And get off your fucking pity pot, man. It’s not even noon yet and you’re already bringing me down.” Kenny started up the old woman’s driveway, black mud waffles peeling from his boot heels.
“Hey, I’m sorry I brought it up, okay? Come on, Kenny. Don’t go walking off on me, man. Kenny? Shit.” I wanted to kick myself but kicked the tailgate under me instead. “It’s just .
. . I just . . . can’t shake off the feeling something awful’s going to happen to her.”
“Like what?” He turned to me, his brother Ray’s boots scuffing a black arc of rubber onto the concrete. “You mean, like with Marilyn?”
“No, no, man, not like that.” I shrugged, shook my head. “I don’t think she’d do that.
Hell, I don’t know. Maybe I’m just being paranoid like you say. Or maybe she’s just too goddamn beautiful for me. So beautiful it hurts just to look at her. Like Tippi Hendren in The
Birds, you know?”
“Tippi Hendren?” Kenny snorted. “Give me a break.”
“Isn’t there, like, some big law in the universe that says a girl that looks like Tippi
Hendren should never hook up with a guy like me? Some skinny, freckledy-ass fool with peach- fuzz on his lip? And if you break that law, then . . . .” I shook my head. “I mean, Jesus, Kenny, just look at me.”
“You know, I’d rather not.” He palmed his eyes and grinned. “Hurts too damn much.”
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“Ah, shut up,” I said and laughed, stood from the tailgate and shoved him in the shoulder.
“And you’re what? Robert fucking Redford? You goofy looking son of a bitch. Let’s get back to work, man. Christ, this is some cheerful goddamn conversation.”
Kenny started up the alley to the gate by the old woman’s garage, flipped down the thumb latch and faced me. “Maybe she just doesn’t know how pretty she is yet. Not all uppity and snooty yet like some Wildcat cheerleader.”
I nodded, shrugged.
He pushed the gate creaking open, then turned to me again. “You ask me, though,
Marilyn was prettier. Like Cher with braces.”
“Cher?” I laughed. “Right.”
“I had it bad for that girl. Real bad.”
“Come on, Kenny. You were just with her that one time.”
“No, man. There were plenty of times you don’t know about. She and Hunk’d get into some big fight and she’d call me at three in the morning. Crying, asking me to come over to her apartment. Couldn’t sleep, she said, unless somebody was sleeping with her. Week before our gig at the Cellar, she up and tells me she’s pregnant. Hey, I’ll marry you, I said, not thinking. But she just said I was nutso. She’d never get married, never have kids. Why bring a kid into this fucked up world?” Kenny palmed his eyes. “I guess I just never expected she’d . . . .” He dragged the heel of his palm down his face like it was a rubber Nixon mask, squeegeeing sweat dripping from his dark chin stubble. “Hell, Travis. Kid could’ve been mine, you know?”
I stepped up to Kenny, who leaned his forehead against the gate, his face gone gray as the fence. I started to palm his shoulder, but he held his hand out to stop me.
“See that dent on my bumper?” I said, stepping back. “I kind of went nutso the day she died. Rammed my truck into trees all day at Pecan Park. Bang, bang, bang.”
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“Make you feel any better?”
I shook my head. “Just dinged up a bunch of nice trees. That damn truck’s a tank, man,
and I’m such an idiot.”
Kenny took in a breath and scraped the mud from the side of his brother’s boot against
the gate’s bottom two-by-four railing. “I keep telling myself she was just a girl, you know? But I
can’t stop thinking about her. Can’t get her out of my head.”
I squeezed my eyes against the thought of Marilyn lying on the shoulder of LBJ Freeway, her head split open like a cantaloupe spilling pink seeds, her pretty face mashed flat like a roadside armadillo.
“Allyn’s just a girl, too, you know?” Kenny said.
“No, she’s more than that. I’m going to marry that girl, man, if it kills me.”
For an hour, I sat in the blazing sun next to the gas meter trying to get the trencher started,
sweat tracking dirt down my face, stinging my eyes as I pulled the starter rope till my left arm was sore, the engine coughing and dying a dozen times or more until smoke finally sputtered out through the rust-pocked muffler, spattering my face and arms with black oil-freckles, the blade screeching and wobbling like one of my truck wheels gone loose on its lug nuts.
I watched the blade spin into to a blur like a big Skilsaw, shooting a spray of sparks like a bench grinder against the sides of the wobbly blade guard, jerry-rigged with coat hangers, the screws holding it on all stripped out, and I killed the engine before the yard-wide blade could come flying off and decapitate me.
“Drake,” I said and spit, accidentally, on to my own shoe. “Got-damn.”
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I’d just tightened the big center nut holding the blade on, trying to keep from stripping out the bolt even further, pinching a rusty cotter pin through the end of the bolt just in case, when
Kenny walked out through the gate again and down the alley, shaking his head.
“Just hit Oak Cliff chalk,” he said, “not even a foot down.”
“You’ll just have to use my old man’s pick ax,” I said and blinked, sleeve-swiping the sweat stinging my eyes.
“You’re kidding me, right?” he said. “That’ll take all goddamn day.”
The grill and light poles were supposed to be set and leveled in at least three feet of wet
Sacrete, I told him. He’d have to shoot for two, at least, I said, then, “I’ll help you when I’m finished trenching, fair enough?”
Kenny squinted up at the white sun like a melted globe of arc welder’s steel. “What’ve I gotten myself into?” Then he swung my father’s heavy-headed pickax from my truck bed and through the fence gate, back to work in the back yard, grumbling and cursing.
I trenched hard forward, furrowing a long black inch across the back yard, the blade binding up against packed black clay, screeching against the rattling blade guard, spitting sparks and grass roots and chinch bugs and black mud from the rain the night before, my fists at the trencher handle shaking so hard my teeth buzzed. Behind me, Kenny wheezed and huffed with each wild swing of the heavy pick axe in the hothouse humidity, a loud clank of steel against limestone, his shirt soaked with sweat, a wide band of white salt circling his armpits, his face glowing like a ripe tomato dripping dew.
I stopped a moment and held the trencher handle one-handed, my jowls wobble-jabbering as I swiped away the salt stinging my eyes, the hot sun prickling my sunburned neck like it was
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wrapped in jellyfish tentacles, and I shouted back at Kenny, “Hey, ease up, man, or you’re going to
have yourself a heat stroke!”
He didn’t hear me so I cupped my hand over my mouth and shouted again but stopped
myself dead when I sniffed Allyn’s faint musk on my fingertips from the night before.
I closed my eyes a moment, thinking about kissing her for hours, holding her smooth and naked in my bed and kissing her, a thousand ways of kissing, our lips red-chapped, then watching her smooth brown body rise over mine in the black-light dark of my bedroom.
Gravel pinged and sparked from the blade, and I shook my head, blinked away sweat and swiped at my face with my slick, grass-speckled forearm, then shouted at Kenny one more time, till he looked up and said, “I heard you!” Then I gripped the trencher handle and pushed on, black dirt and turf flying.
I’d only trenched another ten yards from the gas grill’s half-dug post hole when I was daydreaming about her again. Couldn’t stop thinking about her, couldn’t help myself.
I rounded the corner at the side of the old woman’s house, and instead of paying attention to the trencher, screeching and rattling in my tingling fists like a jet spinning down, all I could think about was the rain on my father’s copper roof the night before and Allyn’s brown body rising over mine in my cramped single bed, her hair, fine and white as spun silk, falling straight to my chest in coils as she swung it across my face and laughed, her tanned skin almost black in my bedroom’s black lights, the whites of her eyes like Day-Glo moons, her irises cool blue flames like pilot lights, her small breasts glowing white, too, stark against her dark bikini lines, like two eyes staring down at me as she straddled me, pressing the hollow of her blond wet pubis into mine, her slender waist a smoky champagne glass sliding down to its stem, her navel a dark spoon, her wide hips like an English saddle soft as chamois.
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Crosby, Stills and Nash were singing, “Guinnevere had green eyes, like yours, m’lady, like
yours,” as I palmed the soft the curves at her pelvis and sat up with her striding my hips, cupping
her left breast in my palm, the freckles at the back of my hand like a Dalmatian’s spots against my
glow-worm skin, and I kissed the brown oval mole above her nipple as Graham Nash sang:
The brownness of your body in the fireglow except the places where the sun refused to go. Our bodies were a perfect fit, in afterglow we lay.
I shook my head again, lightheaded in the hot sun, thinking it was just a feeling, just a
stupid fluttering joy like the first time I’d ever swallowed one of Hunk’s Black Mollies and lay still
in my bed all night smiling up at the ceiling, not wanting the feeling to go away, ever, a tickling in
my chest like a moth’s wings bumping against the cool lamp of my heart, like the tickling of
Allyn’s long blond hair feathering my face as she giggled and bent to kiss me again, and Graham
Nash sang, “I never want to finish what I’ve just begun with you, my lady of the island.”
At the side of the old woman’s house, the trencher was bucking dirt like a calf in a roping chute, making a terrible racket as I pushed forward, a daydreaming fool, the blade pitching up and binding, screeching like the nut holding the blade on had stripped free, and then, just as I was about to kill the engine to take a look, my shoulder brushed the scalloped fringes of a sun-faded canvas awning hanging low from the old woman’s kitchen window, and I heard a loud banging backfire and saw a puff of black smoke from the muffler, then felt a sting and then another sting and then a bright burning at my neck and shoulder and chest.
At first, I thought a loose bolt or flying gravel had flown from the blade housing and struck me in the chest like shrapnel, but then, slapping at my sternum like I’d just been heart-shot,
I glanced down, expecting to see my own blood, and instead I felt a sharp sting against my palm and turned it up, saw a quivering wasp mashed into my Whô’s Next t-shirt. That’s when I glanced
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to my left to see a swarm of black tiger stripes buzzing my eyes, then a giant paper nest like a
chrome showerhead hanging, half-hidden, from the awning, seething with yellow jackets that shot
straight at me, spraying my shoulder and chest and face like scalding water, pressing their stingers
into my shirt as I jumped away and shouted, “Got-damn!” slapping at my face and back and chest
and shoulders and neck as they stung me again and again.
Without thinking, I ducked under the awning, my face just inches from the roiling nest,
and I slapped it down and stomped it flat into the grass, smearing white larvae and eggs bubbling
in their combs like tapioca as yellow jackets covered my arms and hands and neck and face.
I caught a toe stumbling once over my own ditch as I bolted off, the trencher blade
jammed and stuck in the dirt while the engine ran full tilt, screaming as it kicked up and toppled
over to its side over without me there to hold onto it, the blade spinning out at my ankles like a lumber-mill saw as I toe-skipped around it, and I ran as fast as I could around to Kenny in the back yard, swatting wasps and slapping my body everywhere, the black swarm following me and falling on me like rain.
I sat in the grass at the edge of the patio, panting hard, wheezing, and when Kenny laid his hand on my shoulder, I slapped it away like it had just stung me.
“Idiot!” I shouted, slapping at myself even though the wasps were gone.
Kenny shook out his slapped hand and said, “Hey, take it easy, will you?” He leaned over me and peeled back my t-shirt at the back of my neck. “Man, they got you good.”
I rubbed the scalding welts rising along my neck, my throat tightening up like it was noosed, but I could still hear the trencher, pitched over onto two wheels at the side of the house, screeching like a duck sucked into jet engine.
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“Cut that thing off, will you, Kenny?” I croaked, wheezing hard now, trying to catch my
breath. Then I saw his eyes, wide and white in the sun, and said, “Forget it. I’ll do it myself.
Don’t want you getting stung, too.” I stood, a little wobbly on my feet, and tried to get my breath,
wheezing like my grandmother Hanny having an asthma attack after smoking Pall Malls day and
night. Then, just as the engine died, I stepped once toward the side of the house and my lungs
seized up and my legs melted under me, and I hit the concrete patio hard as a hundred-pound bag
of Sacrete.
I woke on the old woman’s green couch, my nose clotted with blood. Still wheezing hard,
I clutched at my throat, swollen as a toad’s, warty with burning welts, and I sat up just long enough
to puke a gruel of the old woman’s oatmeal cookies all over my lap.
“Oh, man.”
“It’s all right,” the old woman said, rubbing my back. “Just a old couch, is all. You get
that poison right on out of your system now, honey, and don’t you worry about it. That’s good.
Now lay back and be still.” My Whô’s Next t-shirt was off, wadded on the hardwood floor, my chest covered in hot rolling hives like a map of the mountains of Africa, and she pressed me back with her rubbery palm into a yellow goose-feather pillow at my shoulders. “There you go,” she said. “Better now, hmm?”
“You all right?” Kenny said, kneeling next to me like I was Dorothy back in Kansas again in black and white.
“Idiot,” I said and coughed, palmed my hot forehead, then gave it a good knuckle thump until I saw fireflies. The old woman sponged off the puke across my knees and her couch, then squeezed tea-colored water into a mixing bowl on her coffee table from a big brown wad like peat in her palm.
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“What the—?” I croaked and I sat up, lightheaded again.
“Just a little tobacco,” she said and pressed me back into the pillow again, smearing the
wad of wet tobacco like a poultice onto to my chest, smoothing it up and around my shoulders, clumping it around the welts. “Had to let Prince Albert out of his can.” She smiled and laughed a crooning hmm? “Take the sting right out.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” I said, hoarse as a crow, wheezing until couldn’t get my breath, lying back like I might pass out again. Then I was hyperventilating, feeling like I might throw up again, my vision whirling like I was drunk on a water bed, my chest rattling like a tobacco tin full of pennies, and she rubbed my chest with wads of wet tobacco till I’d calmed down some.
“Don’t talk now,” she said. “And lay still. Blood pressure’s dropped and your throat’s all swole up. I seen this before. My daddy raised honey bees up in Palestine out East Texas way.
Got stung more times than a old bear. Finally gave up on beekeeping. Too many of them and just one of me, he’d say. Old Prince Albert’ll draw it out, hmm?”
The old woman smiled, her bony hip pressed like an ax blade into mine on the couch, and she smoothed back my hair at my forehead, her mouth crinkling at the corners like suede, a long white wire of hair curling out of her chin like a question mark.
Two hours later, Allyn and Maddie and Kenny all stood around my bed, gawking at my
stings.
“Had chicken pox once looked just like that,” Allyn said, hugging herself, her tie-dyed tube-top nipple-dimpled in the air-condition cold, her knees frowning under her cutoffs, white strings dangling down her smooth brown calves. She slung her hair back over her shoulders—
Isadora Duncan in a long white headscarf—and I covered myself, embarrassed to have her see my
red-pocked chicken chest in the noon sun angling down through my bedroom windows.
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Sitting at my bedside next to me, my mother slapped my hands away from my chest and said, “Don’t do that, Travis. You’re just making a big mess.” Then she spooned out more dripping dollops of Arm & Hammer baking soda onto my lumpy stings, the soda crumbling on to the sheets whenever I moved, gritty under my bare back like wet sand.
“Jesus, Mom, that’s cold,” I said, my stomach flinching in. “I’m all right now, okay?” I sat up again, shivering, goose pimples rising on wasp stings, but she slapped my wrist again, pushed me back to my pillow.
“I said stop it.”
Kenny’d called her at Dr. Snitkin’s office from the old woman’s house in Desoto, and my mother’d taken off the rest of the day from work, rushing home from her office on L. B. J. Freeway to meet us, feeding me a fistful of Excedrin and Benadryl, giving me a shot of hydrocortisone and sending me off to bed for the rest of the day.
“Baking soda’s not going to do me any good now, Mom. That old woman already—”
“Shut up,” she said, “and be still.”
“Itched like crazy,” Allyn went on, fine blond hairs standing up along her brown forearms.
“Big old blisters like Bob’s hairy chest pimples. Gross. Mama said not to itch it, but I couldn’t help—”
“It’s not the same thing!” said Maddie, flinging her arms around, getting all dramatic.
“Those bees could’ve killed Travis! And you don’t itch an itch, Allyn. You scratch it. Don’t you know nothing?”
Allyn squinched her face at Maddie and said, “Anything!”
“Leave her alone, will you, Maddie?” I said. “Jesus, what’s your problem today?” She’d been sniping at Allyn ever since Kenny’d driven me home in my truck. “Anyways, these were yellow jackets. Bees die when they sting . . .”
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“Serves them right!” Maddie said, almost spitting into Allyn’s face.
“. . . and wasps just keep on stinging.”
“Sure did this time,” my mother said. “That old nigra woman probably saved your life.
Anaphylactic shock. Almost had to rush you to Baylor Hospital last time.”
“That was a long time ago, Mom.”
I’d been eleven, playing baseball at McCree Park the summer after Jesse died, when Mike
Waslin knocked a homerun over my glove at the left field fence, and I jumped the rattling chain-
link and run—my father shouting red-faced in the stands me for to stop the goddamn grand
slam—and I belly-crawled under the holly bushes around the tennis courts where the ball had
rolled, red-berried holly leaves prickling my back until I felt a hot sting and then another, and then
my neck and back were on fire, and I’d run, crying like a girl, my father said later, as I swatted at
the yellow jackets swarming me from a nest in the holly.
Maddie frowned at Allyn, then at me. “How come you always take her side?” Then she
bared her teeth, a sparkling light-show of chrome braces, her blue eyes glowing from under her red
eyebrows. “You think I don’t know what you and her’ve been doing? Think I’m stupid or
something?”
“Shut up, Maddie.”
Maddie shot me a vicious grin. “Where’s Allyn been sleeping? Not in my room, that’s for
sure.”
My mother shot me a look, her black eyebrows arched like grackle’s wings. “What’s she
talking about?”
“Nothing, Mom. She’s just jealous. Has to have Allyn to herself all the time. Can’t stand
Allyn being my girlfriend and all.”
“She is not your girlfriend.”
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“Is, too.”
“Is not.”
My mother sighed like my father, a loud exhalation of air. “What are you two fighting
about now?”
I glanced at Allyn to help me out, her arms folded under her breasts, but she just turned
her face left and right and looked bored, like she was watching me beat Maddie at ping pong
downstairs for the hundredth time, her mouth turning up into that same crooked smile she’d worn
when her father’d fallen and broken his back showing off for her.
“Jesus, Maddie, you’re such a nark. You say another word, and I swear to god I’ll tear
your stupid nose off—”
“Knock it off, both of you,” my mother said.
“I better get on home now,” Kenny said a little too loud behind Maddie, looking like he’d
had enough for one day, backing up to my bedroom door and pulling his black pony tail straight
out from his neck like a leash. “Got to tell B. S. I’m going back to work for him.”
“Hold on now, Kenny. The day’s shot—okay, maybe the whole week, stupid damn
trencher—but I don’t need you to go copping out on me right now. I’ll get it fixed, man. Don’t
know how, but I will.”
Kenny glanced down at his brother’s combat boots, tugging his ponytail straight toward
the open door like he was trying to lasso himself out of my room. “I don’t know, man.”
“So we had us a bad first day. No big deal. The work’ll get easier, man, you’ll see. You can’t just bail on me because—”
“I don’t know.”
“I can do it,” we all heard just then, my brother Nate’s muffled voice coming from behind the closed closet door, and everyone looked around the room, trying to figure out who’d spoken.
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“Do what, Nate?” I said, sitting up again, baking soda crumbling on to the sheets till my
mother pushed me back down.
Nate, thirteen, had spend half his life talking to his G. I. Joe in that bedroom closet,
building plastic models after school on his glue- and paint-spattered dresser between rows of coat
hangers, the oak veneer scored and peeling back where he’d trimmed thousands of plastic parts
with his rusty X-Acto knife.
We all stared at my closet door, waiting.
“Come on out of there, buddy,” I said, “and tell us.”
Nate’d been building a ’69 Shelby Cobra GT on his dresser-top inside for months, but he
hadn’t worked on it much since the summer started, buying up bagfuls of Testors glue that spring
from the White Rock T. G. & Y, careening out of our closet, his eyes and nose runny and red, whenever I knocked on the closet door and said, “Nate? What you doing in there, buddy?” worried he was huffing the stuff.
“Nate?” I said again.
The closet door creaked open a crack, and Nate peeked out at Allyn, blushing like he always did when he sneaked peeks at her, his face red as his ‘fro, which was big around as a Bozo wig.
“I can fix it,” he said, almost a whisper, and he stared down, curling his bare toes in the shag’s dirty nap.
“You sure?” I said.
He glanced at up Allyn, who was smiling at him now, and he glanced down at his feet and blushed even redder. Nodded.
358 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
My mother was still glaring me—had been ever since Maddie’d asked about where Allyn
had been sleeping—her bleached bouffant ratted and stiff with Breck hairspray, pouffy and round
as a football helmet.
“Everybody out,” she said all of a sudden, swinging her thumb toward Kenny at the
bedroom door. “Travis and I need to have ourselves a little talk, don’t we? Nate, you, too. Out
of that closet. Out, now. All of you, get.”
Maddie grinned at me on her way out, my mother’s back turned to me, and I bared my
teeth at Maddie like a baboon, mouthed the words, Dead meat.
When everyone had rushed out of the room and Maddie’d slammed the door behind them, my mother stared at me a long time.
“She’s been sleeping in here with you? For how long?”
I stared off at Allyn’s mural over my dresser, mermaids basking in a Day-Glo sun. “Don’t know what you’re talking about—”
“Don’t you lie to me. Have you two been . . . doing it?”
“Doing . . . what?”
My mother raised her hand to slap me but balled her fingers into her palm and pressed her fist between her silicone boobs. “Times like these I think your father’s right. Out of control, is what you are. What’s wrong with you, Travis? She’s just sixteen.”
“Seventeen. She turned seventeen two months ago, okay? And I love her, Mom. I’m going to marry her.”
“No you’re not. You live at home. You’re not even out of high school yet. How would you support her? Playing the drums? Installing gas lights and grills?”
“I’m not talking about right now.”
359 Nacogdoches Lex Williford
She shook her head, glanced up at the mural of Hercules slaying the hydra over my bed behind me. “Are you using any . . . protection?”
I shook my head, looked down. “Got me some . . . rubbers from the Shell station last week and—”
“Boys.” My mother stood, the mattress on my floor creaking up, and she paced my black- walled room, shaking her head hard. “I’m not doing this again. I can’t.”
“What?”
She turned to me, almost shouting. “Think, for once, will you? First, her sister gets herself knocked up and you expect me to fix everything. Then, when I try to help Marilyn out, she up and kills herself . . . .” She stopped and sighed hard, a loud chuff, and pressed her fingers into her eyes. “I can’t do it again, Travis. I won’t.”
“Do what?” I said, but already she’d opened my bedroom door and stepped out into the hall, glaring at me, slamming the door hard behind her, a cool puff of air from the hallway on my face as I sat on my bed, rubbing the stings on my neck and chest, shaking my head and thinking,
Your fault. Your own damn fault.
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