Cavedweller

by Dorothy Allison

  Delia wanted to scream at the figure in her memory, at Randall’s body so long gone, so much of him wasted even when he was alive. He had been so beautiful when he took her in his arms, so strong and tender when she was so hurt. He had felt like the one man on earth she could hang on to and be safe with. How could she not have loved him? She loved him more than her life.

  After the accident in Topanga Canyon, trying repeatedly to get sober, Delia stopped going over to Randall’s place at all. Even when she slipped back into drinking, she wouldn’t let herself be cajoled into climbing into one of the limos sent around by record companies hoping to sign her to sing on her own. She didn’t like the parties anymore, and she’d never enjoyed talking business. Drunk or sober, Delia lived in the small town in her heart, ignoring the world in which all her love had turned to grief.

  Once they moved to Venice Beach, Delia tried to behave as if it were just another small town too, a place like Cayro. It did not matter that behind her house loomed thousands of others, postage-stamp boxes layered across Los Angeles County up from Santa Monica or south to Long Beach and all the little suburbs that trailed down to San Diego. Delia rarely went outside her neighborhood, and as long as she stayed off the highways, she could pretend they were cut off from the world. When she took Cissy over to Randall’s place in West Hollywood or went to the studio annex in Santa Monica, the sight of greater Los Angeles stunned her. The glass structures along Wilshire, the grotesque mansions in Beverly Hills, the interlaced freeways that Randall prowled, none of that was Delia’s world. Her world was the cottage and its tiny garden, the convenience store a few blocks west, and Cissy’s school two blocks past that, with the occasional trip down to Rosemary’s in Marina Del Rey.

  “It’s strange. Every time I take a drink, I go back in time,” Delia told Rosemary not long after she left Randall. “I imagine I am back on the bus, going nowhere in particular, just cruising with the band.”

  “Uh-huh.” Rosemary blew smoke out her nose. “Cruising back to the toilet to puke your guts out and curse Randall with every heave of your stomach? I remember you pregnant and sick as a dog. I remember those bus trips.”

  Delia pushed a strand of hair out of her eyes and shrugged. “In my imagination,” she said, “it’s always 1971 and we are all young and happy. It’s like a dream, a good dream.”

  Rosemary shook her head. “Nothing like the dream life, huh?”

  Delia was the only member of Mud Dog who had loved the road. While everyone else grew pale and exhausted, she blossomed, catching naps during the day and sleeping easily backstage. She drank a lot but ate little, mostly fruit and rice, and avoided the pills and powders that kept half the band wired and sleepless and sick as dogs. In the midst of the tour chaos, Delia was serene. She would drift up the middle of the overloaded bus with a smile and a bottle in her hand, trailing her long fingers over the greasy Formica storage cabinets as if they were flowers and sweet-smelling vines. Sometimes she just stood there, steadying herself with one hand, eyes almost closed. To her it seemed like dancing, balancing there while the bus swayed and rolled along. She would laugh at the thought of herself almost motionless yet hurtling forward.

  What Delia did not love were the motels and the parties, the obsequious roadies dealing drugs behind the luggage vans, the hysterical fans who pounced on her before she could get away. There were always people coming up on her from behind, wanting to talk or to touch her, following her every move so closely she would start to shy away even from Randall or Rosemary or Booger, or Little Jimmy the drummer with his shy nudge. Her skin seemed to wear thin, to the point where she hesitated sometimes before following the band out onstage. After a while the road wore you down until you lost the satisfaction of the music everyone came to hear, and Delia knew that the only thing she loved without reservation was the music’ in her head.. The road itself, the two-lane blacktop and the six-lane freeways, the truck stops where the only things you could be sure of were the eggs and the bottled beer, that was not something you loved. The road was something that took you over unawares—the unexpected poetry of road signs and the reassuring glint of reflective markers counting off miles, the backbeat of the wheels whooshing along the asphalt and the song it awakened in the back of Delia’s head. She got drunk on the road the same way she did on whiskey, a gentle drunk, an easy binge, smiling and loose and careless as death on two legs.

  Delia dreamed on the bus like nowhere else, humming with the wheels, drifting, her eyelids open just enough to catch the shine of the road lights. In that condition, neither asleep nor awake, Delia dreamed of home, of Cayro and Amanda and Dede. Sometimes she dreamed of them in their bodies, the babies growing into girls while she watched and cared for them. When she dreamed that dream, she would weep with relief as everything that had happened after Dede’s birth erased itself. In that dream there was no band, no house in Venice Beach, no Cissy, no third girl child with Randall’s lazy mouth and her own dark red hair. In that dream Delia was the good mother kneeling on the clay path near her old house in Cayro, her fingers cupping Dede’s baby face and her tears burning her own cheeks.

  Sometimes the dream would play out the years differently, Delia sweeping in like an angel the week after she climbed into Randall’s bus and ran away. In that dream she snatched up her babies, pulling them to her throat as their arms reached to embrace her, her shoulders sprouting wings that carried them all high and far, like the Santa Ana winds over Southern California.

  “Mama,” the dream girls would say in one voice, “Mama,” and Delia’s heart would lurch in her breast. The dream children cried her name and held on to her: “Mama. We knew you would come.” Their cheeks were hot and flushed, their hair smelling earthy and sweet, the way Delia’s palms smelled when she worked in the garden. She breathed them in and felt her insides tremble as the scent filled her. But the arms that reached out to Delia were phantom arms. The dream daughters were ghost girls, imaginary creatures. The road that went everywhere never went to Cayro. As the scent faded, Delia would jerk awake, her face streaked with tears and her muscles straining to hold what was not there.

  Sober and fully conscious, Delia knew these dreams for what they were, a comforting lie. If her daughters dreamed of her, they would not be loving dreams. Raging, angry nightmares, that’s what her girls would dream of Delia. But in the weeks after Randall’s death, she dreamed again her road dreams, Dede and Amanda Louise dreams, Mama dreams, guilt and hope dreams.

  Emptying the closets of the little cottage, Delia picked at the raw sore of her conscience. It had been ten years. Dede and Amanda were not babies. They were twelve and fifteen, nearly grown, but what if they didn’t hate her? What if her girls hoped for her as much as she hoped for them? From “what if” she fell to maybe, then to might be, could be, oh God! surely so. It was the way Delia thought when she was drinking, as detached from the real as anything could be. It was the voice in the back brain, the voice that swore one drink would not kill her and another was all, right too. The devil or desperation, that voice whispered steadily and drew her on. Delia swore she would never drink again, but her girls were not liquor. Her girls were real. Cayro was real. Cayro was home. Maybe no one could earn forgiveness, but listening to that whisper, Delia Byrd packed everything she owned and decided to try.

  Chapter 2

  To Cissy it always seemed that one minute they were in the little bungalow with the bright pink flowers around the windows, and the next they were flying down the highway with all their stuff piled up in the backseat of the old Datsun.

  They left before dawn fifteen days after Randall died. Delia shut the front door, pushed the key through the mail slot, and turned to Cissy with a smile. “All right, we’re gone.”

  Cissy stared at her in outraged grief and refused to climb into the car. “I won’t go!” she said in her refrain.

  Almost before the words were out of Cissy’s mouth, Delia picked her up as easily as the boxes and bags she had been hefting, and tossed her onto the
passenger seat. She slammed the car door and glared briefly into the window.

  Shocked, Cissy curled up on the seat. Delia had never hit her, never spanked her. Even when she was drinking, she had religiously taken the time to talk her daughter out of bad behavior. Reason, she always said. You have to use reason. This was past reason. This was madness. Cissy stared helplessly back at the little house. It had been her home for two years, the only place where she felt safe. That Delia was taking her away from it was incomprehensible. The act was one in Cissy’s mind with her daddy’s death, her whole world ruptured and remade in a design she could not puzzle out. When Delia turned off Venice Boulevard and took the ramp up to Highway 10, Cissy began to sob into her fists.

  “For God’s sake,” Delia said in a smooth, tired voice. “There’s no reason to cry.”

  Four months sober showed in Delia’s face. All the puffiness was gone, but her eyes were shadowy, and there were new lines etched at the corners of her mouth. She had started smoking again and had hacked her long red-blond hair short the night before. She told herself that everything would be fine as soon as they got on the road, that by the time they got to Cayro she would know what to do next.

  When Cissy went on crying and the engine made that familiar knocking sound, Delia paid no mind. She hummed to herself and kept her eyes on the road. The knocking diminished, but every time the speed dropped below 35, the front end would start to shimmy. “It’ll be fine once it warms up,” Delia said cheerfully. When she lost patience with the car and Cissy’s sobbing, she beat her palms on the braided-leather steering wheel cover, missing as often as she hit, slamming her hands down on her thighs with satisfaction. “We’re going home. Goddamn it, just shut up, we’re going home!” Delia pounded on the wheel and revved the engine, keeping her face pointed straight toward Georgia.

  “Put your glasses on,” Delia said, shifting gears while Cissy wiped her eyes.

  “I’m all right.”

  “Put your glasses on!”

  Cissy scowled, but dug in the bag at her feet until she found the glasses. As much as she hated them, they cut the glare and eased her burning eyes.

  Delia sucked angrily at her cigarette and blew smoke out the window. “I swear, Cissy, you’ll do anything to get to me. You know you need to wear your glasses in this bright light. It’s not going to do either of us any good when you’re laying back with a sick headache.”

  Cissy kicked at the bag on the floor. She already had a sick headache from watching the road roll by, the exit signs looming up and passing.

  Highway 10 was first the Santa Monica Freeway and then the San Bernardino Freeway, and then just Highway 10 again. “It will be 10 for a long time,” Delia told Cissy. “All the way to Tempe.”

  The highway was raised for a long stretch, and Cissy could look into people’s backyards, tiny green gardens hidden under bushy trees, garages and clotheslines and lawn furniture. It was like all her dreams of catching a ride and running away, looking down on the everyday world where people could only look up and see her pass by. Cissy’s fantasies had buzzed with excitement and pleasure and contempt for the people below. Now she was the one who wanted to stop, to grab a mile marker and pull herself back to earth.

  The exit sign for San Diego flashed by, and Cissy remembered the rare times she had been allowed on the bus with Randall and Delia and the band. Mostly she had been left behind with Sonny and Patch, to eat healthy food and sleep in the trundle bed with their boy, Wren. It had been exile, no matter that Randall swore it was for her own good and Delia insisted the road was no place for a child. For years Cissy dreamed of traveling, of eating the fried cheese sandwiches Booger made on the propane stove and stopping at diners in the middle of the night, of watching people stare openmouthed at the big blue bus while she sat on her daddy’s lap. The bus was another country, one where Delia smiled and sipped whiskey and combed out Randall’s hair and plaited Cissy’s into a thin shiny braid. Peaceful, the bus was peaceful, the lights always low and music always playing, two or three different tape players going all the time. It was paradise to a child, and Cissy never forgave Randall or Delia for banishing her from the bus. Her fantasies of running away were always road trips where her feet barely reached the pedals of some big wide-seated vehicle with sleek dark windows and a radio that never stopped playing all her daddy’s old songs. Somewhere Delia was crying her name and grieving, Randall was writing a song about losing what he had never known he could not live without. On the road Cissy-child was making her own song, riding a smooth, glossy braid of highway, licking grease off her fingers and swinging her hair to the beat of a band that would someday be her own.

  When the freeway dropped down, there was one shopping center after another, Mexican restaurants and discount shoe stores, gas stations and little markets with bright kite shapes in the windows. But gradually green overtook the shops, trees became thicker as they moved out into the valley. After an hour the process reversed itself as the trees thinned to desert landscape. When they reached Palm Springs, the green came back again, but the landscape made Cissy’s eyes ache and she kept pushing her glasses up on her sweaty face. Delia didn’t stop for gas until the needle hit empty. Cissy got a Coke and a bag of Doritos. If Delia had stopped at a diner, Cissy wouldn’t have had the heart to order grilled cheese. This was not the road as she had dreamed it.

  “We’re making good time,” Delia said when Cissy came back to the car. She waved at the bright sky. “And look at that. Not a cloud in sight. April is the best time for this trip. No snow but not too hot. It should be clear all the way.”

  Cissy licked the powdery orange surface of a Dorito and bit off the triangle corners one at a time before eating the part that was left. Then she took a sip of Coke and began the ritual again.

  Delia shrugged and turned on the radio, spinning the dial for something cheerful. Christopher Cross’s “Sailing” was playing on two of the stations. “Nothing like a hit,” she drawled. It was the kind of music Delia hated, with lyrics that could mean anything and therefore meant nothing. That roar of sound behind Cross’s plaintive wail would have bothered Randall, all muddy brass instruments so loud the notes were indistinguishable. He’d once kicked over the stereo when Rosemary had put on a Rod Stewart album. “Son of a bitch needs a strong bass line,” Delia muttered, then looked over at Cissy, who was still munching Doritos. Delia sighed and twisted the dial until she found a disc jockey doing an all-day tribute to John Lennon. “All right,” she said, but after a few miles it became obvious that the guy was only playing the Double Fantasy album and making the obligatory rude comments about Yoko Ono.

  “Son of a bitch. Man’s only been dead a few months and already they’re talking bad about her again. A rock-and-roll widow. Everyone thinks she might as well be dead if she’s not going to turn herself into a priestess for the man that’s gone.” Delia had never met John Lennon, but she had once watched Yoko sit patiently through the kind of numbing interview she had never been able to stand. She turned the dial again and stopped at a surfer channel doing a reprise of Beach Boys and Jan and Dean hits, “Little Deuce Coupe” sung in a resolute falsetto.

  After Palm Springs, there were Indian names everywhere. Reservation signs appeared past Indian Wells and Indio, billboards that promised turquoise and authentic native pottery, and giant lush renditions of Las Vegas showgirls in rhinestones and little else. The Cabazon Indian Reservation sign had been knocked sideways near one that announced the Colorado River Aqueduct. Cissy wondered if the aqueduct really had water in it. How could there be water under ground so flat and white and stony? A cloud of yellow dust rose, and Cissy’s eyes burned. She looked back at the shadowy basin where a pipe jutted out from the sand. People lived on the street. Some even slept in culverts. Was that where she would wind up? Sleeping in ditches with Delia and stealing hamburger scraps from the garbage cans outside McDonald’s?

  “So much desert,” she said. She could see her face in the sideview mirror. The whites of her eyes
were crossed with tiny red lines like the map on the seat beside her.

  “Oh, this isn’t the real desert.” Delia skimmed sweat from under her eyes with her left forefinger. “Wait until New Mexico. That’s real desert. Saguaros and tumbleweeds. Every time I see those Roadrunner and Coyote cartoons, I think of New Mexico.”

  “I got to pee.” Cissy kept her eyes on the mirror.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Cissy. It can’t be much more than an hour since the last stop!”

  Cissy turned to stare at Delia.

  Delia floored the gas pedal. “You can pee in Arizona, damn it. I’m not stopping again until we’re out of California.”

  Arizona was much like California, more wide-open baked desert landscape. But just off the road near Quartzsite there was a vast parking lot and a big aluminum sign announcing a rock market. The lot was bumper-to-bumper, and cars were parked all along the highway. Delia slowed and pulled into a Chevron station. She climbed out of the car, rubbing her back.

  “You can pee here,” she said. “And don’t go nowhere.” She limped toward the station with money in her hand.

  Cissy started toward the adobe walls of the building, shit brown and crumbly, with little bits of grass sticking out all over. Dusty logs protruded from the walls a few feet above the doors, some sporting faded orange pennants hanging limply from yellow plastic cords. A Coke cooler was sitting open and empty next to the bathroom door. Cissy held her breath and went inside.

  She was surprised at how clean the bathroom was. The sink shone silver and white, and the paper towels had green borders. A dark purple plastic vase contained a spray of paper leaves in autumnal shades of orange and brown. A bright poster for a kachina exhibit at the University of Arizona covered one wall. Cissy quickly went about her business and washed her hands, sniffing but not using the eucalyptus-scented soap on the counter. When she stepped outside, she saw Delia standing at the open hood of the Datsun with a mechanic who was holding the oil gauge and shaking his head.