I drop my duffel on the floor when I get to the bar and lean the shotgun up against the wood afore I take me a seat on a stool. The guy behind the bar’s like one of the bikers hangs out on Division Street, back home in Tyson—what I liked to call loser strip—’cept he’s not practicing being tough the way they all do. He just gives me a smile and comes down to where I’m sitting.
“So you’re back,” he says.
“I don’t think so. You must be thinking on my sister.”
He studies me a moment, then nods. “Sorry about that, but there’s a close resemblance.”
“Yeah, people tell me that all the time.”
“William Kemper,” he says, offering me his hand.
I give him a shake. “Raylene,” I tell him.
“So what can I do for you?”
“Well, I’m hungry, and I’m thirsty, and I wouldn’t mind me a room for the night.”
“I can provide you with all of that.”
“Being an inn and all,” I say.
“That’s our business.”
“Trouble is, I’m not exactly carrying what you might think of as money.”
He smiles. “So what do you have?”
I’ve been worrying on that the whole last hour or so I been coming up the slope to get to this place, and finally decided that first off, I’d try offering up some of Pinky’s smokes. That don’t work, I’ll offer to wash dishes or something. Only other thing I got of value is the shotgun and I figure I’ll be needing me that.
So I get off the stool and dig a pack of smokes outta the duffel and set ’em down on the bar between us. That earns me a look I can’t put no name to.
“We don’t consider tobacco currency here,” he says.
“Yeah, I kinda figured they wouldn’t be worth much, but a gal’s got to try.”
He shakes his head and pushes the pack toward me. “It’s not that. Tobacco is sacred. It’s one of the ways we talk with the older spirits.”
I give him a considering look and then slide that pack on back again to his side of the bar.
“Well, you take this here as a gift,” I say, “Like I’m giving you an AT&T card, gets you a few minutes of spirit talk, no charge.”
“A gift,” he says. His voice is kind a quiet, like we got some big deal going on here.
“Well, sure,” I tell him. “Why not? It ain’t like I’m going to smoke ’em.” I dig in my pocket and drop some bills and coins on the bar. “You consider any of this currency?”
He ignores the money, but he picks up the cigarette pack and puts it in his pocket.
“Tell me what you want,” he says. “Food, beer, a room—it’s on the house.”
“You’re shitting me.”
He shakes his head. “The gift of your tobacco lays a heavy debt on me.”
“No way,” I tell him. “I just gave it to you, no strings attached. I’m willing to pay my way, just so long’s I got something here’s got any worth to you. Otherwise, I’d be willing to work it off.”
But he’s still shaking his head.
“It’s because the gift was freely given that I’m indebted,” he says.
I give him a long look, waiting for some punch line, but I see he’s serious.
“Okay,” I say. “Much obliged. I’ll have me a drink and something to eat, and a bed for later.”
“Beer?” he asks.
“You got anything nonalcoholic?”
“Tea, coffee, soda, water.”
“Coffee’d be real fine.”
“Coming right up,” he says.
I end up staying me a time at the inn. That first night I drink my coffee, eat the stew and bread William brings me, and then go up to the room he says I can use and I’m out like a light. I no sooner lay down then I’m gone. No dreams, nothing. Just a long stretch of I ain’t there no more till I wake up in the morning.
When I come downstairs there’s only a handful of—hell, I don’t know what you call it when you got this mix of people and things that sure ain’t people. Beings, I guess. There’s a pair sitting by the window, kinda slippery-looking, dark-skinned and wet, dripping with weeds, water pooling under their feet. At another table in the center is some guy could’ve been a stockbroker or banker, ’cept he’s wearing sandals and a dress made of leather, belted at the waist with some kinda little bag hanging from it. Then there’s the woman with the head of a goat and a couple of giggling little something or others, four feet short of a yard, sitting right on the table they’re so damn. small. Like little girls with wings, only they got them eyes so old.
I don’t even get me much more’n a passing glance from any of them.
Anywise, when I walk over to the bar, William brings me a coffee and a serious breakfast—sausages and eggs, potatoes, corn, some kinda mash, and pretty much a loaf of bread, toasted up just right and slathered with butter. After I eat I try to see how I can make myself useful, you know, washing up or sweeping or something, but William he won’t have none of that. I try to explain how I don’t like to be beholden to nobody, but he just tells me how it’s kinda late for that now, ain’t it.
So I spend my day walking around the slopes above and below the inn, my head trying to get me to think about a mess of things, but I won’t let nothing settle. It’s like doing time in the hole, back in county. I just got to shut me down for a whiles till I’m ready to deal.
Come the evening I have me some supper, then I sit in a corner, drinking tea and watching the freak show. Thing I notice straight off is, ’cept for a few of these little fairy gals, everybody’s pretty much got them a long face and there ain’t a whole lotta fun being had. I ask William ’bout it and that’s when he explains what the name of the inn means. People come here down on their luck. I reckon that’s why I fit in so well.
I stay in the common room until closing time, until everybody else is gone and it’s just me and William, and then I don’t ask him nothing, I just start in on cleaning up the tables, mopping down the floor. He tries to get me to lay off, but I look at him like I’m some kinda immigrant, don’t speak the language.
“I can’t hear you,” I tell him.
He tries a couple more times, but finally he lets me be.
So that’s how the time passes for me, I can’t tell you how long. More’n a few days, for sure, but less’n a couple of weeks. Everybody pretty much leaves me alone and I don’t talk to no one ’cept William and we don’t talk about nothing important. A couple of times I see one of them dog-faced boys, watching me from a corner, but I ain’t killing nothing, and they don’t push on me, so we don’t got us a problem.
Then one night this handsome guy comes in, the kind of guy thinks he owns any place he’s in. He’s got him the dark hair pushed back from his forehead, the deep blue eyes with the longest lashes I seen on a man. Clean-shaven and dressed all in black. He orders himself a drink from the bar, then turns around and gives the room a good look-see, kinda smiling to himself until his gaze hits me where I’m sitting in my corner, minding my own business.
I look away, but it’s too late. He’s already coming in my direction.
“Ruefayel,” I hear William call after him, like he’s warning him ’bout something, but I guess this Ruefayel just ignores it ’cause next thing you know I got him in my face, just a-standing over me.
“So you’re back,” he says.
I look up. “Whatever I am, it ain’t none of your business,” I tell him.
He’s got him a chip on his shoulder, and I guess I’m spoiling for a fight, though I couldn’t tell you why ’cept he rubs me wrong. Right from when he come in, I wanted to wipe that smirk off of his face. We’re a bad combination—you don’t need to be no genius to see that.
“I told you before,” he says. “We have unfinished business.”
I already knowed how he’s got me mixed up with my sister, but I don’t bother to set him straight. I can feel this need in me to let off some steam—I guess it’s been building up a time now. I got way too much p
ressure pushing inside me, everything from dying and coming back when I didn’t want to leave that welcoming light, to Pinky dying and staying dead and the whole confusing mess with my sister. And I ain’t begun to touch on none of it yet.
“So why don’t you finish it,” I tell him.
He slams his drink down on the table and starts to reach for me, but he’s way too slow. So’s William, who’s coming out from behind the bar. Afore either of them can blink, I’m outta my seat, switchblade open in my hand. I slip around his side, grab his head with one hand, and lay the cutting edge of my knife against his throat.
“Go on,” I say and put a little pressure on the blade.
That knife of mine’s honed like a straight razor. You drop a hair across the blade and it’ll cut it right in two.
“Why don’t you teach me a lesson,” I tell him.
It’s funny. The whole time this is happening, it’s like I’m two people.
One’s got this bundle of anger and unfinished business suddenly bursting outta her. She’s ready to cut this moron’s throat open and she ain’t even going to blink when he’s lying dead on the floor at her feet.
The other one’s watching it all like it’s happening to somebody else. She’s thinking, this is exactly the kinda crap that made me the no-account piece of white trash I am today. The kinda gal who’s happy when she’s dying ’cause it means she don’t have to deal with no more shit in her life. She don’t have to make no payback for all the hurts and wrongs she’s done ’cause she’s going away into that warm and welcoming light, halle-fucking-luyah.
I give that Ruefayel a shove away and he goes stumbling, hits a table and falls to the floor. I stand there looking at him. I ain’t got no more killing left in me, but I guess he don’t know that. He just scurries back a few feet, then gets up and takes off.
I shake my head as I watch him go. He ain’t no different’n Del. Once you stand up to the likes of them, they just fold. The hard thing is standing up to yourself—to what you end up becoming when you pay ’em back in the same coin they used on you.
I’ve put away my switchblade by the time William comes up.
“I’m sorry,” I tell him. “I shouldn’t’ve done that.”
“Probably not,” he says. “But he’s had something like that coming to him for a while now.”
“Still don’t make it right.”
He nods. What’s he going to say?
I got nothing more to say myself. I mumble something about needing some air and head out the door myself. I hear conversation start up again in the room when I leave it behind me and realize I never even heard it all go still.
Ruefayel’s not out here waiting for me. There’s nothing but the night. I walk outta the courtyard onto the side of the hill and sit me down on a stone to look out at them twilight woods going on into forever in the distance. And I start to get me thinking on my sister and me, and how we turned out so different. But that don’t mean I can’t change. I guess I got to do me a Forrest Gump. Make me some lemonade outta the lemons the world keeps handing me. It’s such a load of crap, but I suppose there’s something to be said for being able to wake up in the morning and not feeling ashamed of who you are, or what you done.
And I can start with keeping my word to Lizzie, that little gal I promised to come back for at the trailer park where Del’s living. I don’t know what she’s going to think ’bout what I got to offer her. She’s expecting me to drive up in that big pink Caddy and take her away to a life that’s full of easy living. But it ain’t going to be like that.
I know how to make an honest living—hell, I been doing it on the side for years with what I learned from Hector.
That’s what I got to do now, full-time. That’s what I got to teach Lizzie.
I don’t know how she’s going to take having to work for a living, but I guess there’s only one way to find out. At least, we’ll be starting out on the right foot, what with me not breaking my word and leaving her there to wait for me like I done for so long, waiting on my sister who never come—not so’s I knew, anyways.
All I had me was Pinky, god bless her, and she weren’t much when it come to making an honest living.
Oh, Pinky.
I have me a hard cry then, the one I been holding back forever, it seems. Crying for her and me and how we went so wrong.
I’m out there a long time, long after the tears are gone.
I come back in after closing to help William clean up. We don’t talk at all till we’re finally done and we’re sitting at a table, having us some tea. I find myself telling him the whole sorry story of my life—that’s twice I done it now in as many weeks, once with my sister and now with him.
“Everybody makes mistakes,” he says when I get to the end.
“Yeah, but do they keep on making ’em the way I done?”
He nods. “Until they figure it out they do. Don’t be so hard on yourself. You haven’t had a whole lot of breaks.”
“I got no right to expect any kind of sympathy from nobody,” I tell him.
“You could start with giving yourself a little.”
“It don’t work that way,” I say.
’Cept how the hell would I know? I always been too busy trying to work me an angle—that is when I ain’t just wallowing in depression like I done for way too many years back in L.A. afore I got me that job at the copy shop.
“You won’t know until you try,” William says.
“I suppose. But if I can’t forgive myself—how can I expect anybody else to?”
“Don’t concentrate on that,” he says. “Instead, be the person you want to be. Take it a day at a time. Allow yourself some history of doing the right thing.”
“Start small.”
He nods.
We sit awhile longer, then I finish my tea. Time I was going.
“I was wondering if you could tell me how I can get home,” I say. “Back to the world that’s on the other side of this one, I mean.”
He explains how the archways work—you just have to focus on where you want to be on the other side and when you step through, that’s where you’ll be.
“Works the same way for coming back,” he tells me.
“I won’t be coming back.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yeah, I do,” I say. “I met me some old spirit in the woods told me when I leave the dreamlands this time, I ain’t never getting back in again.”
He doesn’t say anything for a long moment.
“I liked having you here,” he tells me then. “You made a good start on being that person you want to be.”
“’Cept for when I tried to cut the throat of one of your customers.”
“Except for that,” he agrees.
I stand up and go to shake his hand, but he gives me a hug instead. Funny thing. I got this whole issue with personal space, but I don’t feel none of my usual anger and anxiety right now. I just hug him back. It’s like grabbing a big piece of something comforting and real.
“Let’s get your stuff,” he says.
I shake my head. “I don’t need none of that—’specially not that shotgun.” I take the switchblade outta my pocket and try to give it to him. “I won’t be needing this neither.”
But he won’t take it.
“Just because you’re turning over a new leaf,” he says, “doesn’t mean there won’t be those who’ll try to take advantage of you. You could still need that. Remember, there’s no shame in fighting back when the cause is right.”
“What cause would that be?” I ask.
“The one that allows people the freedom of being who they want to be. There are those who’ll do anything to rob us of that freedom—that’s something that doesn’t change no matter what world you’re in. We can’t ever let them win.”
“So you’re condoning violence?”
He shakes his head. “No. But we have the right to defend ourselves when violence is done to us.”
This just confuse
s me.
“Don’t that make us no better’n them?” I ask.
“Turning the other cheek only lets them win.”
“Yeah, but I thought a good person was supposed to learn to forgive.”
“You have to be alive to be able to forgive,” he tells me.
I take that thought with me, back to the world on the other side of this one.
Jilly
NEWFORD, AUGUST
I guess I thought that when the paralysis finally eased up, my life would go back to normal again, but it doesn’t work that way. Though I get the feeling back in my arm and leg, it’s still all pins and needles a lot of the time and I don’t have any real strength or coordination in them at all.
The best thing was when the cast came off my arm. I went from completely helpless to suddenly being able to do all those things we take for granted: feed myself, comb my hair, just being able to pick something up. Sometimes I hold a pencil and roll it back and forth between my thumb and fingers—just for the pleasure of being able to do it. But I haven’t tried to draw yet.
I do get to sit in a wheelchair, though. I got them to remove the footrest on the left so that I can move myself by using the wheel with my good arm and kind of steer with my foot on the floor for extra leverage. I move at a snail’s pace, and I get tired really easily, but I can’t begin to explain what it means to be mobile again, even in this limited capacity. My right leg doesn’t seem to be regaining its strength the way my therapist was hoping, but we’re working on it, every day.
I still get the headaches, but they’re not nearly as frequent, and I’ve stopped losing little pieces of time, though I doubt that I’ll ever recover anything out of those black holes in my memory from before. That weird imbalance between logic and intuition has continued as well. I just can’t seem to deal with numbers at all, no matter how simple.
Of course my bruising’s all gone and I’ve got about an inch of hair on the right side of my head where all I had was stubble. I’ve stubbornly refused to cut the rest of my hair to match the new growth. I don’t care what it looks like. I have this illogical idea that if I cut the rest of my hair, I’ll be giving something up. Not the hair itself, but something inside me.
The Onion Girl Page 55