The World Doesn't Work That Way, but It Could

by Yxta Maya Murray

  When Dan and I came in through her door that night, Billie ran around with liquor bottles for top-ups and trays filled with the miniquiches you can heat up in the microwave. Karl was out back with the grill, getting help with the burgers from their sons. Billie handed me a bourbon and smacked me a quick kiss on the cheek. She gave me a hard little look and said, “Why, didn’t you get dressed up for old me!”

  “Oh, this is just one of my old standbys,” I said about my outfit. I gave her a wrapped present of White Shoulders Cologne and Body Wash, but my head was swiveling around the room as I peered at the partygoers. There was Hans with his new wife, Lupita. There was single Greg. There was Philip Peterson, Rufina’s quiet and broody southern husband.

  Billie laughed and clucked at my chest. I’d put on a short dress made of slinky nylon and propped up my breasts with the aid of a fancy bra I’d fished out of the back of my drawers.

  “Coming into your own,” she said, nudging me with her big hip. “Well, good for you. Drink up, lady danger.”

  That’s when I saw Thomas at the end of the room, talking to Rufina, a scraggly little sunburnt bugeater who’d already had too much to swill and laughed like a hyena at whatever he said. Billie tracked my eyes and nodded.

  “Bambi is cute, and I’ll bet he tastes even better,” she whispered into my ear, so I could smell the bourbon.

  Thomas turned his head and saw me. He looked straight at me and smiled.

  “Oops,” Billie said. “That boy’s getting an eyeful of you in that dress tonight.”

  Thomas untied himself from Rufina and came striding over.

  “Hey there, Linda,” he said.

  “Hello, Thomas,” I said.

  “I see you two have met,” Billie said, her voice shifting gears into a lower speed.

  “How’d those steaks work out?” Thomas asked me, leaning up on the wall and crossing his legs while drinking a beer.

  “I know my way around a steak,” I said, laughing again like I had at the supermarket.

  “I’ll bet you do!” Thomas reached out and clinked his beer with my glass. “I’ll bet you know your way around a lot of things.”

  I stuck out my chin. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s a compliment, ma’am. You look like a capable woman.”

  “A capable woman?” I laughed some more. “Billie, does that sound like a compliment to you?”

  But when I turned to nudge her, I saw Billie had walked away, to the back where Karl and her kids manned the burgers.

  I drank my bourbon and then had another, and another. Thomas kept topping me up.

  “Where’d you come from, Linda?” Thomas said. “California, I’ll bet. Or New York.”

  “Why you say that?”

  Thomas lowered his voice. “Those movie-star curves, if you don’t mind me saying.”

  I went very serious and still, my heart smashing its way through the lake of liquor I’d guzzled down. “Now, you shouldn’t talk to me like that. I’m a married woman.”

  “I won’t talk like that if you don’t want me to,” he said.

  But I did want him to, I did.

  “Don’t fuck up,” Billie hissed at me later that night as Dan and I weaved our way out the door.

  I didn’t see Thomas for a while then, more than four months. The men got busy again with assembling a new rig in Rolling Hills, about a hundred miles south. All the males just disappeared from town. Dan would come home on Friday nights and stay until Sundays. He got sick for about three weeks, though, having his stomach trouble. Carmen had the same thing. I’d run back and forth between them, toting ginger ale and wet towels and the Prevacid. Carmen cried a lot after she threw up, and to make her feel better, I’d play “Speechless” from Aladdin on my phone. Dan waved away the soda and the soup, but he gripped onto my arm in a silent thank-you. He never suspecting any of my treacherous feelings.

  Finally, Carmen and Dan got better.

  “Come here, kitten,” Danny said one night in March. He smiled at me from the bed, and I saw the blue veins in his cheek like the neon star that decorates the Waterhole’s back bar. “Come here, my little kitty cat.”

  I laid down while Dan patted me and kissed me on my neck, trying to be a husband to me. The doctors in Douglas had said that the stomach issue was probably allergies, though one female doctor in Laramie, a specialist, got interested when we told her about living so close to the oil fields. She thought it might be something to do with toxins or the flare stacks. I’d had a few years of panicking about health issues, but the Douglas medicals said that there was no proof that stacks or drilling really hurt anybody. Even so, I’d talked to Dan about quitting and moving, but he wouldn’t hear about it.

  “A person has to recognize the good when it shows up and hold onto it,” he said.

  So I didn’t worry about toxins on the night when my husband felt well enough to pinch me and cuddle. Carmen had moved back to her bedroom with her sisters, playing with her dollies and getting angry at Samantha and Lila for leaving her out of their games. Dan rolled on top of me, and I looked up at the ceiling, where I saw Thomas’s face as if it’d been painted there. I pictured Thomas’s chest and his fist-hard muscles. I came up with scenarios where I’d gone to the man camp under the cover of night and surprised him in his bunk. I fast-forwarded to where he had me bent over and scratching at him. I wanted him to pull my hair and to say nasty things to me. Danny and I’d been married for over twenty-three years, and as far as I knew, he’d never gotten into a tangle with another woman. He’d done everything for us.

  Thomas sent me a text in late April.

  “How you doing Mrs. Im just checking on u—Thomas.”

  “How’d you get this number?!” I wrote back, scared.

  “It’s on the web baby all I had to do was type ur name in”

  “Don’t you call me baby,” I tapped out, laughing in my bathroom.

  “But ur such a pretty baby I can’t help it.”

  I got these romantic notions in my head then. I started looking for the sage grouse nests, their leks. I wanted to see the males puff out so that the yellow hot spot opened up, on their breasts. I wanted to see the little brown hens pecking daintily in the dirt as if nothing was going on.

  I’d do my aerobic walking around the empty areas that still remained, after dinnertime until dusk. I’d peer into the frosted patches of brush that hadn’t been dug up. The skies would flush bright, then go dark, bright, then go dark. Those flare stacks beat like a heart in the weather. There used to be small flocks of grouse around here, like I said, back maybe seven years ago. But now I couldn’t see any birds. I told myself that it was still too cold, and I hoped that they’d just tucked themselves deeper in the snow.

  A week after I got Thomas’s message, while I was on my way back from the Safeway, Samantha called me from the house and said Carmen had passed out in the living room. I raced home practically fainting and found Carmen sitting up on the floor by the sofa, looking drained.

  “Let’s go, Nugget,” I said.

  I called Billie, who said she’d look after the girls. I took Carmen straight to the ER, where we did a long round of tests. My daughter looked wrong under the lights, too white and thin, and I was sure they’d find cancer. I leaned over her bed and kissed her hands and prayed. I couldn’t remember any prayer but that one Pastor Bill had gone on about in the winter, the one where God blesses you with all that you need. I said, “God, you give me what I need, which is this child to not be dying.” It took some time to get the results, hours and hours, but they didn’t come up with anything, so I guess Corinthians worked.

  “Some kids just come out delicate,” the nurse said.

  We came home around two in the morning. I put Carmen to bed while her sisters hovered at the doorway and then disappeared. Billie went to the kitchen and made coffee.

  “I don’t like being sick,” Carmen said and fell right asleep.

  Billie and I went to the living room and held t
he hot coffee cups in our hands. It had started snowing outside.

  “How you doing?” Billie asked.

  “Like shit on a shoe,” I said.

  Billie sipped her coffee and gave me a plain-dealing look. “’Cause of the kid or ’cause something else?”

  “What are you talking about?” I said, but I didn’t meet her eyes.

  “I’m going to give you a piece of advice,” she said after a second or two.

  “I’ve had a night of it, girl, give me some rest.”

  “Tell you anyway.”

  “I suppose you will.”

  “Don’t do it, and if you already did, make your penance and get right,” she said.

  “Go home, Billie,” I said.

  “You think it ain’t been hard for me with Karl and the cancer? And him getting to be an old man? And my losing those babies? You think I haven’t had some dick come sniffing around? You want to wind up like Felicia and Michelle? Get right. Get right. Your daughter’s in there. Get right.”

  “Go home,” I said.

  The thing about sin is that it doesn’t feel like anything wrong. It feels like the right thing, that you should be doing this. The earth gives its gifts. You’re one of God’s children, and what you’re meant to do is bask in that abundance. Even when you look at the scars on the hill or the kid being sick or your tits pushed up friendly in a dress, you’re in a state of grace. You move past the place of virtue and evil to a station where there’s nothing but your own good reasons.

  Two nights later Thomas and I curled up in the back seat of his Mazda, and I felt blessings rain down on my skin. I never, never, never felt my whole body open up like a wild bird’s.

  “What about when I do this?” Thomas whispered at me. It was muggy in the car from the heater and our breath. I stared hard into Thomas’s eyes, which look nearly black in the nighttime. But when the flares went off, they turned brandy colored.

  “Do that, yeah,” I said.

  “What about if I get down under here like this?”

  “Yes, do that,” I gasped.

  The shame could come later. The disaster too. I leaned back and opened my mouth. The sky flashed gold, and the sky flashed red, and the mysteries released from the wells and spread.*

  Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi and Ohio stopped short of outright bans, instead passing so-called heartbeat bills that effectively prohibit abortions after six to eight weeks of pregnancy, when doctors can usually start detecting a fetal heartbeat. Utah and Arkansas voted to limit the procedure to the middle of the second trimester.

  K. K. REBECCA LAI, “Abortion Bans: 9 States Have Passed Bills to Limit the Procedure This Year,” New York Times, May 29, 2019

  The Perfect Palomino

  With thanks to Pam Madsen

  THE DAY I DECIDED I was a Palomino my sister Monica locked herself up in the bathroom.

  “Get out of there,” Mom said. She was wearing her pink robe and had her hair tied up in a blue cloth.

  “I’m going to do it in here,” I heard Monica say. Her voice was a little muffled from her being on the other side of the door. “I got a spoon from the kitchen, and I’m going to just see if it does any good.”

  “Get out here now,” Mom yelled.

  “Mom, I’m a Palomino even though they say I can’t be,” I said, wandering up to her in the hall.

  “Monica,” Mom screamed.

  “Oh, cut that hollering,” Monica said.

  “Monica, don’t you hurt yourself,” Mom kept shouting.

  “Mom, Monica isn’t going to hurt herself,” I said, because I know my sister is smart.

  “Holy God,” Monica said.

  “Get me the axe,” Mom said to me, chewing on her lip. “It’s in the garage, in the back.”

  “Don’t get the axe, Chris,” Monica said.

  “Monica,” I said through the door, “Emma says that I can’t be a Palomino but have to be a Clydesdale or an Appaloosa.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m too dark.”

  “Well, that’s just racism,” Monica said.

  “That’s what I said,” I said.

  Mom started hitting the doorknob with both of her fists, like to break it.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Monica said. “Can’t I just have a little self-abortion here by myself?”

  “Don’t say ‘abortion’ in front of Chrissie,” Mom cried.

  “Mom,” Monica said. “Mama. Stop having a fit. I’m coming out.”

  “She’s coming out,” I said. “Back up.”

  “Get the fuck out of that fucking bathroom right now, Monica Miranda Gutiérrez!”

  Monica opened the door and stood there, dripping and naked. Her stomach looked popped out, tight, and shiny. In her right hand, she did hold a spoon. When I saw that she’d actually not been joking about that, I thought that maybe she would have hurt herself after all. Then I started to feel bad.

  “Do you know someone who’ll do it around here?” Monica asked Mom. “Like your friend Teddy, she seems kind of witchy and up to no good.”

  “Teddy’s a nurse,” Mom said, snatching the spoon from Monica.

  “Yeah, but the crooked kind. She sells oxy.”

  “She does not!”

  “You know she does, and it’s either going to be me seeing her or taking a trip to New York, which I can’t afford anyhow even though it’s the cheapest place that’ll take care of me.”

  Mom blinked up at the ceiling, thinking. “Is Arkansas a place where they say okay if you were raped?” Mom said that last word whispery and mouthing it even though I knew what it meant.

  “Yeah, it’s Alabama and Ohio and Missouri and some others that don’t budge.”

  “You could say you were raped,” Mom said.

  “I’m not going to say that, because that’s not what happened,” Monica said, and a tough little look rippled across her face.

  “It’s an option,” Mom said.

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Don’t start up with that no tolerance policy of whatever is not the nicest thing, Monica.”

  “I’m trying to be a certain kind of person, Mom,” Monica said.

  “And you are a certain kind of person,” Mom said. “You are certainly pregnant.”

  Monica ignored Mom and got a towel off the back door and dried herself off. Mom grabbed Monica’s blue bathrobe from the bathroom floor and draped it around her shoulders.

  “What’s a Palomino again?” Monica asked now in a softer voice.

  “Palominos are pale-gold horses with white tails,” I said, clutching onto her arm. “They were bred to blend in with the desert so enemies wouldn’t see them. The color is caused by a genetic whatchamacallit. It’s an allele of this dilution gene that’s called the cream gene that makes the horse go all pale yellow.”

  “Well, don’t you know your horse science,” Monica said.

  “I read about them when I was studying to be in my girl gang,” I said.

  “Of course you did,” Monica said.

  “We’ll figure something out,” Mom said. “We’ll fix it up when you calm down.”

  “Clydesdales are bay, which means brown, with little white spots,” I said. “Appaloosas are spotted too.”

  “You are a perfect Palomino, Chris,” Monica said, slipping on her robe and tying it up around her waist.

  I hugged her, tight. I buried my face into her robe and said, “You’re not going to have your baby?”

  “Nope,” Monica said.

  “No, she is not,” Mom said. “She is going to college.”

  I kept my face in Monica’s robe and felt myself start to get the fits. So I calmed myself down by racing with the Palomino in my mind, golden colored like the sunrays and stampeding across the mountains of Appalachia.

  “You don’t have to go away to college,” I said. “You could have that baby, and we could all live here.”

  Emma, Lucinda, Karen, and I were all eleven years old and in a girl gang of hor
ses. We didn’t ride the horses. We were horses. Emma was an Arabian even though she was white with blond hair. Lucinda was an Akhal-Tiki, even though she was white with darker blond hair, though I supposed it was more normal because Akhal-Tikis are sort of dark blond. But then Karen was white with brown hair and green eyes, but she was a Peruvian Paso, which is shiny black and sometimes gray.

  “If you can be an Arabian and Karen can be a Peruvian Paso, then I can be a Palomino,” I told Emma in our school’s Gifteds Study Room, the day after Monica wouldn’t come out of the bathroom. I’ve got big hair puffed up in separate ponytails and long horsey eyelashes and a Palomino’s magic specialness.

  “I’m not saying it because it’s light and you’re, like, not,” Emma said, shrugging. “I’m just saying your personality is more like a Clydesdale or a nice Appaloosa.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they’re so sweet.”

  “It’s racism.”

  “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peckers,” Emma said, so Karen and Lucinda started screaming with laughter. “And anyway, I’m leader, and so I say.”

  “You’re not the leader!” I said. I looked over at Lucinda and Karen, who were rolling around on the floor. “Say she’s not the leader.”

  Lucinda danced around with her butt. “I think she’s right.”

  Karen said, “Me too,” and started copycatting Lucinda’s wriggling.

  “Well, I’m going to New York, and when I get there, I’m never going to talk to any of you again,” I said.

  Emma tilted her head. “Why you going to New York?”

  But I already knew I shouldn’t tell because from what Monica was saying, the law would set its monster men on her if anybody heard about the spoon and the baby.

  “To get away from you,” I said.

  Monica, Mom, and I sat at the kitchen table and did some strategy.

  “If I can get my hands on some pills, I could just do it right here,” Monica said, resting her elbows on her blue-and-red calculus book from school. Monica’s nineteen and a senior at Millikan High. I know she’s a little old to still be in twelfth grade, but for six months, when she was in tenth grade, she got hurt and didn’t feel good and had to take time off. She’s fine now, except for the having a baby in her. She’s tall and has long braids and shiny emotional eyes. She’s a thoroughbred, which is the best kind of horse.