Mockingbird

  My mind went blank. The Muertomobile began to drift toward the right curb. I groped around for something to say about Momma, some little detail, anything, but for some reason all I could think about was that I could no longer hear the mockingbird.

  A girl stepped into the road in front of us. “Christ!” I yelled. I lunged for the wheel just as Carlos slammed on the brakes. I felt a shock as we hit something and then I jerked forward hard, slamming my shoulder on the dashboard so hard it made my arm go numb. The Riders Carlos had summoned into the back of the hearse shot forward and smacked into the wall behind me, then dropped painfully down as the hearse jerked to a stop. The black velvet curtain had pulled off four of its rings. I could hear snarls and mutters coming from behind it.

  Adrenaline went whizzing through my bloodstream like ice water, so intense I froze for an instant in pure shock. “Swing and a miss,” I breathed. The G jumped and twisted like a pike in my womb. I blessed her, blind with relief to feel her thrashing strongly inside me. Sensation returned to my right arm, and my shoulder started to ache as if someone had taken a home run cut at it with a baseball bat.

  Carlos got out, hurried to the front of the hearse and crouched down in the roadway, talking to someone I couldn’t see. Groaning, I eased myself out the passenger side of the Muertomobile.

  I didn’t recognize the neighborhood we were in; I couldn’t even be sure if we were in Houston or in the Little Lost Girl’s city, or at some intersection between the two. Three blocks away, traffic streamed down a well-lit road: Richmond, maybe, or Westheimer? Most of this block seemed to be houses, big ones sectioned into apartments to judge by the cars scattered outside. Ahead of us, at the end of the block, music pulsed dully from a tiny club or bar.

  The girl we had hit sat in the roadway examining her hands. “Wow. Blood,” she said. “You’re definitely going to have to give me your name and number in case I need to sue the shit out of you.” She was a white girl with dirty-blond hair. “Fuck, there’s gravel stuck in my skin.” She wore a black skirt and leggings with China flats on her feet, and an oversize black T-shirt with the word Fear slashed on it in white. She had an East Texas white-trash accent. A bad kid from Baytown or Beaumont or Port Arthur.

  “We should take you to a hospital,” Carlos said in English.

  “Do I know you? No, I’m not getting into some stranger’s bizarro car in the middle of the night, thank you very much. You think I never watched a Movie of the Week?”

  “Are you hurt? Besides your hands,” I said.

  “I don’t know. I been hit harder with worse things, probably.” She held her hands up to the streetlight and squinted at them. “That stung.”

  “Please. Let me take you to the hospital.”

  “Uh, no offense, friend,” the girl said, glancing back at the Muertomobile, “but you drive like a complete fucking loon. Even if I didn’t think you were going to, like, torture me on videotape or something, I’m not getting into a car with a skull glued to the hood. With a guy who drives without his fucking headlights on in the middle of the night.”

  “Okay, let’s call your parents,” I said.

  “No.”

  “Do they know you’re out this—”

  “No,” she said again, very fast. “Look. I don’t want any trouble with you guys, okay? I’ll be fine. I was just going to meet some friends in the bar. I’ll go in, wash my hands, and then seek repairs as necessary.”

  She couldn’t have been more than sixteen. “You don’t want to phone your parents.”

  “It’s really none of your business, okay?”

  “They don’t know you’re here, do they?” I said slowly. “They don’t know you’re out. In fact, I bet they don’t know you’re in Houston.” No answer. Bull’s-eye. I thought of Candy sneaking out to get screwed by men twice her age while I studied for my freshman exams.

  “Look, get Speedy Gonzales here to write down his name and number and I’ll call him if I start to hemorrhage,” the girl said. “‘Hundred twenty cc of glycocholine—STAT!’” She laughed. “Could either of you characters spare a cigarette? I gave my last one to my mom.”

  I turned to Carlos. “Let’s call her a cab and take her to the hospital.”

  “I don’t have any insurance,” the girl said. She stood up and rubbed her bloody hands on the side of her skirt. She was a little taller than me, but thin, thin, with shadows under her eyes.

  “Where are you staying?” I said.

  “I told you, I’ve got friends. A lot of friends. Waiting for me,” she said, backing up a step.

  “We’re not trying to hassle you.”

  She looked at the Muertomobile. “Yeah, well, sorry.” She wiped her hands on her skirt again.

  In the darkness I heard the mockingbird begin to sing, and looking at this girl, I thought of Momma running away to New Orleans as a teenager. She never talked about her folks much, never talked about her life between the ages of twelve and twenty. I wondered what the girl in front of me was running from. A stepfather who beat her or a drunken mother, or maybe just her own mistakes? Maybe she was running from nothing worse than Baytown itself, or Beaumont or Port Arthur: those little Texas refinery towns that beat all the hope out of you. Maybe she didn’t know what she wanted, except that it was not to grow up to work at the drycleaner’s or Dad’s plant. Maybe she checked out of school because she couldn’t do math and didn’t have anyone around to make her good at it. I thought of Candy again in her pink halter top, and me behind my books, hiding, and I thought of the daughter in my womb and prayed that she would always be running toward the light in front of her, and never from the darkness behind. Maybe this girl was a bitch or a brat. But looking at her, so young, I thought I could forgive her anything if only I could take her home and feed her and keep her safe until morning.

  “Can I go now?” the girl said. “I’m going. Don’t worry about the name and number. On second thought, I really don’t want to know.”

  “No, let me give you my number,” I said. “Let’s go over to the club where I can get a pen, I’ll write down my name, and you call me if you need any help.” I was crying. “If you need anything,” I said.

  She turned her back, embarrassed. “Yeah. Whatever,” she said.

  The next day Rick Manzetti dropped by to tape another one of Momma’s stories, but instead I ended up telling him about my late-night ride with Carlos. “So then what happened?” he asked.

  “I took her to the club and wrote my name and number on a napkin.”

  “That’s it?”

  “I bought her a pack of cigarettes.”

  He looked disapproving, but I didn’t care. “Momma smoked,” I said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Momma. She smoked.” I was drinking cold milk at the kitchen table. Rick was drinking a Dos Equis with a wedge of lime. “Do you see? Carlos found Momma for me.” Rick made another note on his little yellow pad of paper. He had great hands. “But not the Momma I knew, the one who was so much bigger than me. He showed me that other Elena Beauchamp, the girl from Longview or Tyler or Port Aransas who got out of some small-town Texas hellhole and made her way in the big city.”

  “The Little Lost Girl,” Rick said.

  “Maybe.” I looked at him. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe Angela wasn’t the Little Lost Girl. Maybe Momma was talking about herself all the time, but I never understood it. I guess we’re all Little Lost Girls. One way or another.”

  “There’s a lot of people lost,” Rick said. “So did Carlos’s exorcism work?”

  I nodded. “By the time we got back from the club there were no Riders in the Muertomobile, and the Widow was gone from behind my eyes.” I watched him take a drink of beer. “Rick, can I ask you a question?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Would you marry me? Not now, of course. But I mean, if we got to know one another better, and got along and all that. Could you see yourself married to me?”

  “Mm. I…No. I don’t think so.”

/>   “Figures.” I drank some more milk, wishing I could have his beer instead. “Why not?” He glanced at my distended tummy. “You want to marry a virgin?”

  “I don’t want to be a father to another man’s child.” He scratched his beard. “I don’t think that’s admirable of me, but that’s how I honestly feel, deep down.”

  “Good thing to be honest about,” I said. “Did you know that the rate of child abuse is twelve times higher for stepparents than natural ones? I guess blood really is thicker than water.” I patted my tummy. “I’ve been thinking about that.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You could tell me that you’d marry me if it weren’t for the baby. Just to keep my spirits up.”

  He smiled. “Okay.”

  “You’re not just humoring me, now, are you?”

  “Of course not.”

  I laughed and finished my milk. “I think I’ve told you all the Little Lost Girl stories I can remember. I’ll call you if any more come to me.”

  Angela’s voice came down the stairwell. “Knock knock?”

  “Come on down,” I said. “You aren’t interrupting anything. More’s the pity.” Rick grinned into his beard and put his tablet of yellow scratch paper into his leather briefcase.

  Angela poked her head around the corner of the stairwell. “I just thought of something,” she said. “What about that orange juice?”

  She was quite right. With Mary Jo’s death and the funeral and the Widow in my head, I had forgotten all about the Frozen Orange Products contract we had purchased. I called my broker in a panic and made him sell immediately, terrified I had missed a deadline and that at any moment I would see a container truck filled with twenty thousand pounds of frozen orange juice concentrate backing up to our yard.

  As it turned out, we had two days to spare before we would have been forced to take delivery and pay for the balance of the contract. Apparently even my pitiless discount broker had tried to call, but I had unplugged my answering machine and thrown out the tape with Mary Jo’s horrible message, and they had been unable to reach me.

  “Well?” Angela asked as I hung up the phone in my bedroom.

  I swivelled around in the office chair in front of the computer. “I’m afraid we—” Dramatic pause. “Made six hundred and twelve dollars!”

  “Made? Did you say—!” Angela whooped. “Six hundred bucks for forgetting to make a phone call!”

  I was grinning like an idiot. “It always happens this way. Everyone makes money on their first trade. And everyone loses money on the second. It’s a rule.”

  “Quick, let’s go make a little one right away and get the losing over with,” Angela said. She had her hair up in a bandanna. A few strands of white showed amidst the brown. It was somehow hugely reassuring that a woman with white in her hair and a seventeen-year-old daughter could still whoop with such conviction. She grabbed the notebook I had been using as a transaction log, flipping past the page written in Mr. Copper’s cold clean hand. To my surprise I saw a couple of pages with notes in her messy scribble. “I’ve been following the Deutsche Mark this week and I think we can still get on the train.”

  “You’ve been following the Deutsche Mark? When?”

  “Frankly, Toni, you haven’t been a lot of fun the last couple of weeks,” Angela said. She hefted the copy of Schwager’s Complete Guide to the Futures Markets I had finally broken down and bought after committing myself to life as a speculator. “I’ve been sitting in front of the fan reading this stuff for the last ten days while you’ve been moping.”

  “Lord. I’m so sorry. I haven’t been much of a host.”

  “It’s too bad, because you’re a way better cook.”

  Which was true. I had slowly gathered that a Canadian’s idea of spicy food pretty much topped out at dill pickles. I resolved to get back in the kitchen that night. Maybe stuff some poblano peppers for chili rellenos. Then a thought struck me. “Um, when are you supposed to be going back to Calgary?”

  “Two days ago.”

  “What!”

  Angela shrugged. “I thought you could still use a hand around here, so I exchanged my ticket.”

  “I didn’t know you could do that.”

  “I bought a full-fare ticket, in case I got here and, um…”

  “In case you wanted to get the heck out of Dodge after meeting us.” I leaned back in the office chair, pushing hard against the pillows I had piled there to give some relief to my back, which was aching all the time now. “Good planning.”

  Angela picked her current glass of iced tea off the computer desk and held it against her forehead. “To be honest, Toni, I didn’t know how you guys would react to me. I mean, I’m the one who got Elena’s money.” She smiled wearily, and I saw the crow’s-feet around her eyes, the lines beginning to deepen on her forehead and around her mouth that she did not bother to cover with foundation, as Momma would have. “And I thought I might be too angry to stay here. I always hated you, growing up. Not you you. Whoever my mother had left me for. Because she loved you more than me.”

  “She lived with us, at any rate.”

  “It’s the same thing,” Angela said.

  She sat on the edge of my bed, watching the CNBC ticker. The black iron fan whirred, tugging at her sweaty shirt. “Toni, what does ‘directly’ mean? You’ve been using that word a lot the last two weeks. As in, ‘I’ll get to that directly.’”

  “Um…‘not now.’”

  “I had finally begun to figure that out.”

  I squirmed in my chair, pressing my fists into my back. It was stinking hot and sweaty, even with the fan on. I couldn’t remember the last time I had been able to have even a sheet on me at night. My face was always flushed and my body felt as if I had just stepped out of a long hot bath twenty-four hours a day. “It goes with ‘fixin’ to,’ which means, ‘The thought had crossed my mind.’ As in, ‘I’m fixin’ to cut the lawn.’”

  Angela laughed. She picked up the transaction book and read over her notes, then looked at me. “How about going into business together?”

  “Business?”

  “Trading futures.”

  I stared stupidly at her, then wiped at my perspiring face, managing mostly to get a little more sweat into my eyes, where it stung. “Are you kidding?” I said, blinking. “You’ve made one trade, Angela. You made some money. I made money on my first trade too. It’s not a good way to make a living. Ninety-five percent of all independent traders—”

  “—go broke within the first year. I know. I’ve been reading your books, remember?” Angela shrugged, that same lanky, raw-boned nonchalance Momma always had about the future. “If it doesn’t work out, it’s not as if my life is over. Do you think I don’t know what it’s like to fail?—Or maybe it’s you who’s never failed before,” Angela said. She poked at me with the transaction book. “That’s it, isn’t it? You’re scared because you’ve never taken that first big hit, have you? Never been divorced, gone bankrupt, been stuck in hospital with tubes up your nose.” She leaned forward and patted my hand. “Honey, don’t be scared. It’s a rare crash in this life you can’t walk away from.”

  “Did I ever tell you I worked as an actuary?”

  Angela laughed. “You see everything as if the very worst was going to happen. Well, guess what? It usually doesn’t. If it did, insurance companies would all go broke. Which they don’t, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “Yeah, yeah, okay.” I could not keep myself from smiling. “I hear you.”

  “Even when the worst does happen, you survive. Hell, I survived a car crash that broke both my legs and the time Monica fell out a window when she was two and a breast lump and a bunch of divorces—you think I’m going to ruin my life over a few commodity trades?”

  “Enough!” I said. “How many husbands have you had, anyway?”

  “Two of my own,” Angela said, considering, “and countless others.” She looked at me and burst out laughing. “Toni, you look like you’re chok
ing on a pickle. Are you shocked? At the age of thirty-one?”

  Yes! I wanted to say. Yes, you can’t be cavalier about screwing other women’s husbands! And yet…and yet I really liked Angela. I really did. And I didn’t know the story behind her affairs. So all I said, after a long, stammering pause, was, “You really do remind me of Momma.”

  “Uh-oh,” Angela said. “I love it when you say that; I love the idea that I have some part of her after all. But I also know you well enough to know it’s not supposed to be a compliment.”

  “But it is. Sort of. You have her style. Momma was a pirate. She was a privateer. You would have liked her. I wish you’d been with us.”

  “I think I would have stood up to her a little better,” Angela said.

  “I’m sure you’re right. But she was so big, Angela. She devoured the room. But you could have laughed her off.” You’re the hatefulest child there ever was, Antoinette. “I wish you’d been here. I think I would have liked not being the oldest child,” I said. And then, “I did the best I could.”

  Angela said, “I know.”

  Then she gave my hand a brisk squeeze. “Here’s my offer. Between Elena’s bequest and the money my wonderful lawyer screwed out of Darth Vader, I’m pretty flush right now. Have you ever heard me talk about the job I have in Calgary?”

  “Um, no.”

  “There’s a reason for that. Frankly, I’m itching to call my boss and tell him my vacation is being permanently extended. Since I was supposed to be at work yesterday, he may have fired me already, mind you.” She shrugged. “I have enough cash to put us in four or five contracts at a time, which I think we’re going to need to do, if we want to see a constant income stream. On top of that, I would buy one of those Omega Tradestations you were talking about.” She waved dismissively at the TV. “Waiting every ten minutes for a quote is insane; the market changes too fast. Also, I think we should work with a full-service broker, at least on big trades.”

  “You really have been reading up!”

  “We’d go in as partners. I want to be able to bug you into taking a risk every now and then, but we make no trades except by consensus.”