Dad was tough enough but not much on planning. At eighteen he’d left the Ozarks planning to work for big dough on the oil rigs of Louisiana but ended up boxing Mexicans for peanuts in Texas. He slugged them, they slugged him, everybody bled, nobody got rich. Three years later he came back to the valley with nothing to show for his adventure but new scars ragged around both eyes and a few stories men chuckled at for a while.
Dad could be anywhere with anybody.
Mom’s mind didn’t break loose and scatter to the high weeds until Ree was twelve and around then is when she learned about Dad’s girlfriend. Her name was Dunahew and she taught kindergarten down across the Arkansas line at Reid’s Gap. Her front name was April and she wasn’t so hot to look at but she had sweet fat ways and a steady paycheck. Ree had once been taken to Reid’s Gap and left there for most of a week to nurse April through a sickness in her stomach. That was two years ago and she’d not heard Dad say April’s name since or smelled her on his clothes. April owned a pretty yellow house just west of the main road down there, and Dad could be anywhere.
Chapter 7
HALFWAY BETWEEN Uncle Teardrop’s and home Ree turned west on the creek road and climbed a snowy ridge, crossed a white meadow. The Langans had a single-wide trailer that was tan and sat on a concrete pad behind their junk barn. The barn was made of wood that had been drenched by generations of weather and rendered gray and rickety. It tilted one way near the front and another near the back. Junk items unlikely to be needed ever again were tossed into the barn and forgotten. The single-wide had a raised deck and men could piss from a corner to the side of the barn and a short frayed shadow of discoloration had been splattered there.
Gail Lockrum, Ree’s best friend, had been required by pregnancy to marry Floyd Langan and now lived in the tan single-wide next to his parents. Gail and Ree had been tight since the second-grade field trip when they’d bumped heads chasing the same frog under a picnic table at Mammoth Spring and stood to rub their ouches, then took a shine to each other and since spent the idle hours of each passing year happily swapping clothes and dreams and their opinions of everybody else. Gail had a baby named Ned who was four months old, and a new look of baffled hurt, a left-behind sadness, like she saw that the great world kept spinning onward and away while she’d overnight become glued to her spot.
Ree heard Ned squalling as she stepped onto the deck. She stood a moment in snow crust, paused at the door, then knocked. There was the slam of a La-Z-Boy footrest being lowered, mutters. The door seemed stuck by ice and had to be bullied open, and when it was Gail stood there holding Ned, and said, “Thank god it’s you, Sweet Pea, and not Floyd’s goddam mommy’n daddy again. Them two watch me like I done somethin’ wrong or at least maybe I’m fixin’ to the first day they ain’t watchin’ me.”
Floyd said, “Would you hush your mouth about them? Just stick a pickle in it. They put a roof over your head, ain’t they?”
Ree smiled and reached to pinch Ned’s little cheek but recoiled from his demanding mottle-faced squalling and dropped her hand. She looked at his baby face all scrunched up sour by wants he’d been born bawling for but might never be able to name or get for himself, and said, “You goin’ to ask me in, or do I gotta stand out here?”
Floyd said, “She can come in. For a little.”
Gail said, “Hear that?”
“Yup.”
Floyd sat in the front room of the trailer, lying back in his chair, holding a snow-day beer, headphones on a long cord resting in his lap. He was almost twenty and Ree knew most girls would call him handsome or dreamy or some such. Sandy hair, blue eyes, put together strong, with bright teeth and one of those smiles. He’d been steady in love with Heather Powney since junior high but once when Heather was away he’d gotten drunk and come across Gail at the Sonic in town and sat with her in his car listening to thrash metal while the windows fogged. He saw Gail the next night, too, but that was it until Old Man Lockrum came over months later redassed and huffing. Suddenly Floyd became a husband with a kid and Heather Powney didn’t always take his calls anymore.
Ree said, “Hey, Floyd—been gettin’ any?”
“Nope. Learned my lesson on that.” He raised the headphones and held them spread near his ears. “Don’t hang around too long. She’s got that kid now.”
“Yeah, I noticed him.”
Floyd let the headphones snap closed and waved her away.
Gail stood in the kitchen with Ned held to her chest. Gail was thin in the hips and limbs with sharp smart features and freckles. Her long hair fell straight and was of a ruddled hue matched to the freckles dusted across her nose and cheeks. Somehow her skinny body had hid the baby behind a merely rounding tummy and she’d looked more pooched than pregnant until her seventh month. She never did get waddling pregnant and had been skinny again within a few weeks of delivery. She still seemed stunned by this sudden wife-and-mother business and disbelieving that it mightn’t all go away as quickly as it’d come.
Ree smelled the grease leavings in the skillet and the cloth diapers soaking in the washtub. She saw plates gunky in the sink and pork for tonight thawing pink trickles on the sideboard. She threw her arms around Gail with the baby between and kissed Gail’s cheek, her nose, her other cheek. She said, “Aw, Sweet Pea, shit.”
“Don’t start. Don’t start.”
Ree brushed her fingers into Gail’s hair, pulled the long strands apart and picked between them, picked gently and many times.
“Sweet Pea, you got sticky-burrs.”
“Still?”
“I sure keep findin’ ’em.”
The baby was taking a moment to rest and slobber between outbursts and Gail hefted him along the narrow hallway to the main bedroom while Ree followed. Big posters of race cars shiny inside shrinkwrap were taped to the walls. A giant beer mug filled brown with pennies sat on the dresser. The bed was an unmade wallow of yellow sheets and patchwork blankets. Gail laid Ned on the bed, then sat beside him and said, “Been a while, Sweet Pea.” She fell stretched backwards beside the baby with her arms flopped wide and her feet on the floor. “It’s like I make you too sad for you to come see me.”
“That’s only part of why.”
“What’s the rest?”
“Things stack up, is all.”
“So talk to me.”
Ree sat on a stick chair and lifted Gail’s feet to her lap. She hunched over with her eyes down, rubbed her hands along Gail’s calves and ankles, all the while telling of Dad and the law, Dad and the house, her and the boys and Beelzebub’s fiddle. The light in the window passed from dim to gloomy and back to dim while Floyd now and then raised his voice to join the chorus in his headphones and drone thrash lyrics unattached to music behind Ree’s words. She rubbed with bracing vigor until she’d said enough.
“Reid’s Gap? Where exactly’s that?”
“Past Dorta, on the Arkansas side. She’s a kindy-garden teacher.”
“I got to ask him. He keeps the keys.”
“Tell him I can spring for gas.”
Gail rolled from the bed, fell to her feet, and walked toward the droning voice. She was gone but a moment. When she came back to Ree, she said, “He won’t let me drive.”
“You tell him I’ll spring for gas?”
“I told him. He still won’t.”
“Why not?”
“He never says why not to me. He just says no.”
“Aw, Sweet Pea.” Ree shook her head. The features of her face seemed to curdle together. “I hate that.”
“What? What’s so awful wrong to make that face?”
“It’s just so sad, man, so fuckin’ sad to hear you say he won’t let you do somethin’, and then you don’t do it.”
Gail fell stiff like a tree limb to the bed, crashed her face flat into the sheets.
“It’s different once you’re married.”
“Must be. Must really be. You never used to eat no shit. No shit at all.”
Gail turned and s
pun to sit on the edge of the bed. Ned gurgled, churned the air with tiny clenched hands. Gail’s head sagged and Ree leaned to pick at her hair, pinched between the long ruddled locks, brushed strands back with her fingertips, lowered her face and inhaled the smell.
Gail said in a low voice, “What’re you doin’?”
“Pluckin’ sticky-burrs, darlin’. You got a mess of sticky-burrs.”
“No, I don’t.” She pushed Ree’s hands away but did not raise her eyes. “I don’t got sticky-burrs. And Ned’n me need our nap. I feel tired of a sudden. We’ll see you next time, Sweet Pea.”
Ree slowly stood in the dimness, kicked a boot against the stick chair, pulled the green hood up around her head, then said, “Just, I’m always for you, remember.”
When Ree came out the front door Floyd stood at the corner of the deck lashing an arc of piss to the junk barn wall. The piss hit the wall and steamed, steamed and bubbled brief suds sliding down the wall to the snowbank. Hot drops burrowed into the snow and left jaundiced dots and scrawls. He continued to piss, shivering in shirtsleeves, shoulders hunched against the breeze, and said, “Reckon it’ll ever turn cold today?”
“If it don’t today it will tonight.”
Steam rose from the barn wall in light wisps and Floyd glanced over his shoulder at Ree. He said, “You think you get it but you don’t. I mean, you oughta try it your own self sometime. Get drunk one night and wind up married to somebody you don’t hardly know.”
“I know her real good.”
“Yes’m, girl, you oughta go’n get yourself good’n drunk one night and have you a kid. I mean it.”
“No thanks. I already got two. Not countin’ Mom.”
Floyd’s arc of piss slackened and slackened until he shook the last drops loose.
“Nobody here wants to be awful,” he said. He hopped a little as he zipped up. “It’s just nobody here knows all the rules yet, and that makes a rocky time.”
Chapter 8
REE FOLLOWED a path made by prey uphill through scrub, across a bald knob and downhill into a section of pine trees and pine scent and that pious shade and silence pines create. Pine trees with low limbs spread over fresh snow made a stronger vault for the spirit than pews and pulpits ever could. She lingered. She sat on a big thinking rock amid the pines and clamped her headphones on. She tried to match the imported sounds to the setting and selected Alpine Dusk. But those wintry mountain sounds matched the view too perfectly and she switched to The Sounds of Tropical Dawn. Snow worked loose on branches overhead and sifted between pine needles to drift down as powder while she heard warm waves unrolling and birds of many colors and maybe monkeys. She could hear the smell of orchids and papayas, sense a rainbow of fish gathering in the shallows near the beach.
She sat there until the big thinking rock made her butt too cold.
Chapter 9
GRAY NAILED down over the sky complete and all the windows. Mom’s head bent into the kitchen sink and her hair billowed to fill the basin. She seemed lost to an episode of splendid pleasure, given up entirely to the joys of being fussed over by a daughter, mewling as Ree’s fingers scrubbed her scalp, raised a shock of white lather, rinsed with water poured from Mamaw’s ancient lemonade pitcher. Ree’s fingers were strong and drew blood tingling to the roots. The boys sat on the countertop close enough to be splashed, wrapped in quilts, watching her scrub, lather, rinse. Ree glanced their way frequently to keep their attention. She’d nod toward Mom’s head in a gesture that asked, Are you getting this?
Harold said, “Some suds got missed.”
“We’ll get ’em with the next rinse.”
Sonny called forth a shallow cough and said, “Got’ny more of that syrup?”
“Huh-uh. You two like it too much.”
“It sure gets rid of that scratchy feelin’ good, though.”
Ice hung from the roof eaves, catching dribbles of melt to become longer and stouter pickets of jagged freeze stretched across the window above the sink. The sun was weak in the west, a faint smudge behind middling clouds, and low. Soup stock from deer bones simmered on the stove and steamed a comforting scent.
“Might could mix you some later—but now you watch this. Watch how to do her hair.”
Harold said, “Got suds in her ear still.”
“Forget them goddam suds—watch what I’m showin’ you. So, now, once the soap is good’n washed out you’re s’posed to dump conditioner on, but alls we got handy is vinegar. So we’ll use vinegar. Watch close how I measure this out.”
The television competed for the boys’ attention. This deep in the valley reception was poor and they only received two channels, but the public channel from Arkansas came in best and the late-afternoon shows the boys loved were about to commence. The smiley dog that jumped around among time periods chasing adventure and historical insight came on the screen wearing a suit of shining armor. As the vinegar smell spread and Ree bent over Mom yet again, both boys quietly slid from the counter and made for the front room and the worldly dog.
Ree watched them go.
“You’re about to look peachy, Mom.”
“Could I?”
“Yup. So peachy you’ll be feelin’ all strutty, probly start dancin’, kick your toes to the ceilin’.”
“Could I?”
“You used to.”
“That’s true, isn’t it? I did used to.”
“Was special to see when you did, too.”
Ree gripped Mom’s hind hair like a rope and squeezed, squeezed and twisted. The last free drops twisted loose to run down Ree’s hand and wrist and she dried on a towel. She then spread the towel over the pile of wet hair.
“Sit by the stove so I can comb you out and get you dry.”
There was a perimeter of warmth around the potbelly and Mom sat with her head held straight. Ree took a wide-tooth comb to the hair, raked it back into a jumbo sleekness, patted it with the towel, then slicked it again. When Dad was in the pen Mom’d dolled up a lot, every weekend night, dressed herself sparkly hot and let herself be taken places. Her eyes would shine and she’d act girlish while she waited, then a horn would honk and she’d say, “I’ll be back, babe. Have fun.”
She’d be back for breakfast looking worn, jaded and uneasy. Shaking the ache of loneliness is what she slipped away into those smoky nights hoping to do, but she never could shake it from her trail. It was always back in her eyes by breakfast. Sometimes marks showed and Ree’d ask who did that and she’d answer, “A beau did, sayin’ good-bye.”
“You smell nice, Mom.”
“Like flowers?”
“Some kind probly.”
Came a time when Mom told Ree details about those nights out in roadhouse joints, or parties at the East Main Trailer Court, or how things got out of hand at the River Bluff Motel. The time of telling came when Mom sensed the smoky nights were done for her and she’d taken to fingering the memories of them from her rocking chair. She’d absorbed a few beatings for love in life and gotten over them, but it was those terrible ass-whippings she’d taken during one-night stands, motel quickies with fellas from the Bar Circle Z Ranch or handsome tramps in town that hung with her. Those times just hung in the mind swaying, swaying, casting shadows behind her eyes forever. Love and hate hold hands always so it made natural sense that they’d get confused by upset married folk in the wee hours once in a while and a nosebleed or bruised breast might result. But it just seemed proof that a great foulness was afoot in the world when a no-strings roll in the hay with a stranger led to chipped teeth or cigarette burns on the wrist.
“I think I’ll root around and find your makeup, too. Get you painted up special today.”
“Like before was.”
“A lot of the time.”
But there’d been hot buttered parts of those nights she’d liked so and missed. The sweet beginnings that held the promise of who knows what, the scent, the music, the shouted names in a loud place, names you might never get straight. The spark of fun
when two men quickened at the sight of her, stepped forward on the same snap and tried to woo her, one in this ear, the other in that. Lust slaking to dance tunes, standing hip bone to hip bone, the new hands moving over her rumples and furls and tender knobs, hands good as tongues in the dark corners of those whiskey moments. Words were the hungered-for need, and the necessary words would be spoken low, sometimes sounding so truly true she could believe them with all her heart until the naked gasp happened and the man started looking for his boots on the floor. That moment always drained her of belief in the words and the man, or any words and any man.
“Don’t fidget—you’re near about dry.”
While Dad was in prison the rule had been to never see the same stud three nights. One night is forgot like a fart, two like a pang, but after three nights lain together there is a hurt, and to soothe the hurt there will be night four, and five, and nights unnumbered. The heart’s in it then, spinning dreams, and torment is on the way. The heart makes dreams seem like ideas.
Ree went into Mom’s room and flicked on the light. The walls were papered pink from Mamaw’s day. There was a nice curly maple dresser with a mirror that had been Aunt Bernadette’s before the flash flood caught her dawdling strangely on the low bridge and never even gave her body back. Hard not to see glimpses of her face in the creek or the mirror since. Above the bed there was a dusty, cockeyed picture of Uncle Jack, who’d lived through Khe Sanh and four marriages, then died at a roller-skating rink from something he’d snorted. The bed had brass parts, fat brass tubes at the head and the foot, and the bedspread was red and kicked aside. Ree’d been made in that bed, and she’d caught Mom and Blond Milton making Sonny there on a slow sweaty morning. Mom’d already begun to crack in her senses a little and flung an ashtray at Ree, shouting, “You’re lyin’! You’re lyin’! This could never happen!”
“Can’t find your makeup kit, Mom. I’ll paint your face pretty another time.”
Mom rocked in warmth beside the potbelly, touching her hands to her hair, and did not seem to have heard. She stared across the kitchen toward the television, squinted past her two sons and cocked her head sideways.