Cavedweller

by Dorothy Allison

  Cissy nodded. “Jean’s still at her mother’s place. Mim says she’s going to be fine, but she’s still pretty out of it. Says she plans to sleep the rest of this semester.”

  Delia’s face collapsed. “Lord, Cissy, I could have lost you. You could have died down there.”

  “Yeah.” Cissy smiled. “I know, but I didn’t, and I think that’s the whole point.”

  Delia struggled to compose herself. Her fingers twisted together. The muscles in her neck corded as she swallowed and shook her head. “It’s nice to see you smile,” she managed to say.

  “Well, we did something nobody else has done, what we wanted to do in the first place. We found our way from Little Mouth to Paula’s Lost. Only we didn’t map it and we can’t show it to anybody. Probably no one will believe it, and Jean and Mim swear they won’t go back, so I might not ever get to map it at all.”

  “Is it that important?”

  “It’s ironic,” Cissy said. “It’s like God’s joke.” She looked back at the café door. “Emmet was going to come here, right?”

  “If he could get everything done. If he’s not here in the next half hour, we should go over to the courthouse.” Delia pushed the coffee cup away. “Lord, I almost lost you. And Dede shot Nolan, and Amanda’s drinking, and I just don’t know.” Her voice quavered.

  “I’ve tried too hard to be a good mother. I’ve stayed sober, I’ve taken care of you, but I’ve done something wrong. None of you seem to know who you are or how much I love you.”

  Cissy put her hands down flat on the table surface. “No,” she said. “None of us know who you are. Or I don’t, anyway. I don’t really know you at all. You always hold everything back. Clint told me more about you than you ever did, and when we were out at Granddaddy Byrd’s place, Dede showed me the pictures of your family. You never told me a thing about them.”

  “I told you they died. Granddaddy Byrd raised me.”

  “That’s nothing. That’s less that nothing. How did they die? When? What happened? You had a mama, a daddy. You had brothers. I saw them in the pictures. You never talked about them. You carry around this big silence, even when you go on about being so frank and all.”

  Delia looked around the coffee shop. There were a couple of people at the counter, the waitress with the bad wig in the back, and one man in another booth. God help me, Delia thought. She felt as if her backbone were slowly twisting and pulling free from her hips.

  “I want a cigarette,” Delia said.

  Cissy was startled.

  “I want a cigarette so bad I could eat my own tongue.” Delia turned around in the booth and waved at the waitress. “Ma’am, excuse me. You wouldn’t have a cigarette, would you?” Delia pushed her hair back. “I feel like I am about to die if I don’t get one.”

  The waitress frowned, then gave a rueful smile and walked toward them. From a pocket under her apron she produced a pack of Kool Lights. “I know what you mean,” she said in a slow drawl. “They ever make this diner a no-smoking place, I’m gone that day.” She extended the pack to Delia, shook out one, and pulled another out for herself. From the same pocket she brought out a lighter and lit first Delia’s cigarette and then her own. She looked at Delia’s shaking hands and Cissy’s expression of dismay, and smiled gently.

  “Hell, an’t it? Us being addicts and all?” The waitress put the pack and lighter away, then pointed at the cup. “How about something else?”

  “I think something sinful.” Delia waved the cigarette. “To go with this. Why don’t you make me a malt?”

  “Double chocolate or vanilla, or I think we got coffee ice cream back there.” The woman pushed self-consciously at her wig.

  “Coffee, no. Chocolate would be good. Chocolate would be great.” Delia took a long, happy drag on the cigarette. All this time and she didn’t even feel the urge to cough. Hell, she thought, it’s the worst drug in the world. She turned around in her seat to call to the waitress again. “Hey,” she said. “You know the Bonnet? Down the way? The beauty parlor?”

  “Yeah, the one with the spider plants?”

  “I run it. You come in sometime. I know a style would look really good on you.”

  The woman nodded. “Why, thank you. I’ll do that.”

  “She needs some help,” Cissy said sharply as the waitress disappeared into the kitchen.

  “We all do,” Delia said. “We all do.” She took another drag and put the cigarette out in the saucer of the coffee cup. Then she looked directly into Cissy’s face.

  “All right. There’s something I want to ask you. How many people you tell about that eye?”

  Cissy jerked back. Her face flooded color and her mouth fell open.

  “Not many, huh?” Delia shook her head. “Most people don’t even know about it, do they? You don’t bring it up in casual conversation, do you? Say, ‘Hey, my daddy nearly killed me ’cause he was doing drugs and didn’t care that he had me and my mama with him in his car’?” Her face was stern. “Do you explain how much you loved him anyway? And how it don’t bother you at all that you can’t get a driver’s license?”

  “Why are you doing this?” Cissy looked as if she wanted to cry but was not going to give Delia the satisfaction.

  “I’m explaining something.” The waitress set a tall glass of chocolate malt before Delia, who gave a weak smile and peeled the paper off her straw. “Thank you,” she said.

  “Anytime,” the waitress said, her cigarette still in one corner of her mouth.

  Cissy pushed herself sideways in the booth as if she were about to bolt. Delia reached across the table and caught her arm. “No,” she said. “You sit. I’m not trying to hurt you. I’m trying to talk to you about hurt.”

  Cissy shook free. “You aren’t telling me anything.”

  “No.” Delia licked her lips. “You’re right. I never talked about my family. I said they were dead and that was hard enough, but Cissy, there are stories no one knows how to tell, things you don’t tell your children. If I had my way, no one would ever tell you. I figure Granddaddy Byrd told Dede. Probably someone told Amanda, some of it anyway. It’s one of those stories people can’t keep to themselves, but I couldn’t tell it. I couldn’t think about it.” She cupped her fingers around the malt glass. “You sure you want this?”

  “Tell me.” Cissy’s face was as stern as Delia’s, her mouth as hard. “Just tell me.”

  “It was late July. It was the summer I was eleven, 1959. We were getting ready to go on a trip, but I changed my mind. Everything followed from that.”

  They were going to drive over to Fort Jackson, the whole family—Delia, her mama and daddy, and her three brothers. They were going to pick up Luke, Delia’s daddy’s brother, who was finishing up basic training. It would take a day to drive there and a day to drive back, two hot days in the summer heat, but only in the last hour did Delia decide she wouldn’t make the trip. She’d stay with her girlfriend Julia, eat snow cones and play with the litter of newborn puppies Granddaddy Byrd had discovered under his tractor.

  “I was thinking about the heat, and those puppies,” Delia said. That enervating summer heat would have seared four children driving across two states in the back of a run-down Ford sedan, and the brown velvet noses of a half dozen blind, scrambling rusty brown puppies. Delia’s brothers, three stair-step boys all towheaded and sunburned dark brown, teased her for missing the chance to see the soldiers’ parade and to sleep over in an air-conditioned motel. Her daddy picked her up and hugged her tight, praising her for giving up the trip to make her brothers more comfortable. Now there would only be three restless, sweating bodies rolling around on those plastic seat covers. Her mama kissed her forehead and pressed Delia’s cheek to her pregnant belly. Come October there was to be a baby brother, or maybe a tiny girl, Delia’s miniature blinking up like another puppy from the crook of her mama’s arm.

  They were supposed to be back in four days, but there might be bad weather or Mama might need more rest before beginning t
he long trip back. Delia was to stay with Julia one night, maybe two, and then go to Granddaddy Byrd’s for the weekend.

  “Give me another kiss,” her daddy shouted from the car, and Delia put her head in the window, scraped her cheek on his fresh-shaven skin, smelled her mama’s talcum sweat, grinned at her brother Tom, and pinched Max’s shoulder.

  Leroy yelled, “Pick me out a runt!”

  The Ford pulled away, raising a cloud of dust in the driveway.

  “Did you get breakfast?” Julia’s mama called.

  Delia shrugged, and looked back at the Ford. A hand waved from over the top of the faded blue car. One of her brothers or her mama? Delia didn’t know. She didn’t know anything. The car and her family had driven away in a blur of dust and rising heat, and disappeared. The absence was sudden and terrible and complete. There was no word. They never came back. The world closed down on all of them, and there was Delia standing alone with a puppy in her arms. After a week Granddaddy Byrd went to Fort Jackson to help Luke search. He came back with his features blurry and confused and as angry as Delia’s. Nothing was known, nothing was discovered.

  Delia had replayed it in her mind endlessly, that one white hand waving over the top of that car, the scent of warm seat covers and loved bodies, the image of a little brother or sister, her life changed utterly. She cried for the baby when she cried, the lost chance, the mystery. Granddaddy Byrd never cried at all. His silence enlarged and hardened until Delia felt the pressure of it on her bones. She would go to him, touch his arm, and feel him pulling away from her like the moon rising up to the sky, everything leaving her behind and alone. Granddaddy Byrd drowned the puppies, lifted them one at a time in his big, knuckled hands, thrust their open mouths under the scummy water of the old washtub in his backyard, pulled them out limp and silent to lie in a line on the other side of the tub, glossy black in the hot afternoon sun. Delia watched it all with dry eyes, biting the insides of her cheeks so she would not scream.

  When the Ford was found just before Christmas in a dealer’s lot in Savannah, Uncle Luke came home to stay for three days. Delia felt a stir of hope then—not for her brothers or her mother and father, but for herself, for word of any kind, someone to say, “This is what happened, this is the story.” Luke did not have that word to give. He was Granddaddy Byrd’s boy, nothing of Delia’s daddy in him but grief and confusion. Luke glanced at Delia impatiently, grimly, as if he wondered why she was still there, still breathing and demanding something he did not have. He pushed aside the plate of macaroni and cheese she had warmed for him, and sat at the table drinking Granddaddy Byrd’s Jack Daniels while Delia retreated to her cold sheets. Christmas morning, she found him passed out on the floral-print couch in the front room. She stood over him, looking down into his open mouth and shadowed eyes. She felt it then, the stonelike silence that lay on Granddaddy Byrd, felt it shaped over again in her uncle, felt it ready to creep up through her body, felt it like something animate and dangerous, an animal that wanted to eat her alive.

  At eleven Delia Byrd did the only known thing she could do. She balled her hands into clumsy fists and hit her uncle with all her strength, punched and kicked his stubbled chin and knobby ear, slapped at his loose drunken body. All the time she made the sound a baby makes being born. She opened her mouth and it came out—a groan that rose to a scream, a lifesaving terrible shriek that grew and grew. It was a cry that pulled Granddaddy Byrd out of his stony bed and rocked her uncle onto the floor. Granddaddy Byrd came into the living room with his hands out and his mouth open. His cold hands could not stop Delia’s howl. He lifted her up off her feet as easily as he had lifted those puppies, but she kicked at him until he dropped her and stepped back. The two of them—her uncle, her grandfather—vibrated in tune to her rigid, shrieking form, a wisp of a girl holding them off with a scream.

  It was her stolen world that Delia mourned, loudly and desperately. That world lived in her always, no matter how far down she pushed it. Grief burned in her glance, trembled on her chafed and bitten lips, spread like a circle of shade around her. Delia mourned her lost life and the people she had loved with a constant croon of anguish. Years later, when she stood up on a stage and opened her mouth to sing, it was the mourning wail that came out.

  “Delia Byrd sings like the angel of the apocalypse,” a reviewer wrote. “She sings like she has been to the bottom of the river of life and come back full of the knowledge of death.” Delia laughed when she read the man’s words. She got righteously drunk and stayed drunk a long time. “River of life,” she told Randall, and crawled into his arms. “I been bathed in the river of life.”

  “My sweet Lord,” Cissy said.

  “I cursed them. Uncle Luke and Granddaddy, but also my mama and my daddy, and whoever had stolen them. I would have cursed God if I could have confronted him.” Delia smiled bitterly. “I been cursing ever since. Singing, making noise, humming in my throat. I can’t be quiet. You know.”

  Cissy swallowed hard. The faces in those pictures, the happy family, suddenly loomed in the close confines of the overheated diner. That mama leaned over and touched Cissy’s cheek. Those boys, whistling and wiggling, passed before Delia’s pale face. That lost grandfather put a gentle arm around Delia’s shoulders. Then they faded like the ghosts they were, and there was only Delia sitting across the table with the straw between two fingers.

  She took a sip of the malt. “It’s good,” she said. “I forgot how good.”

  Luke Byrd went to jail on a charge of manslaughter shortly after Valentine’s Day. The conviction was more than deserved, Delia told Cissy. “The man should have stayed in jail where he couldn’t hurt nobody.”

  Luke was drunk, people said, had been pretty much since he left his daddy’s place after the family disappeared. And drunk and stupid, he had smashed his truck head-on into another man’s car just outside Atlanta, killing a stranger who knew nothing of Luke’s rage. Through the trial, Luke stood numb and silent, blinking at the judge, who seemed entirely sympathetic and nodded when Luke’s lawyer brought up the family’s loss. But the dead man’s family was not sympathetic, and neither was Delia. “More people hurt for no reason,” she said. “Luke killed that man out of his own careless grief and seemed to feel nothing for what he had done.” A few years later he killed again, just as senselessly, two men in a tavern in Memphis. It was for that crime that he was still in prison.

  “He probably thought he’d get away with that too,” Delia said. “You got to remember that people like Luke are always out there, crazy people who’ll waste your life for no reason that has anything to do with you. Maybe that’s what happened. Maybe whoever robbed me of my life that was meant to be and left me with this one, maybe they thought they were justified. Somebody had hurt them and they could do anything.”

  Delia turned away; a kind of growl reverberated briefly in her throat. “Things happen, and they have nothing to do with what we want or expect. Luke never expected to kill nobody, like my mama never expected to disappear, but do you think I should have told you any of that when you were a little girl? When we came back to Cayro? When Clint was dying? Do you think that is what a mother does for her children? Hands them a vision of a world as terrible as that?”

  Cissy sat quiet so long that Delia got nervous. She reached over and took her girl’s hands in her own. She said, “It’s all right, baby. It all happened a long time ago.”

  No, Cissy thought. It’s still happening, still going on. She thought of Dede, the way she wrung her hands and prophesied. “Something terrible is going to happen. It’s all going to go to hell,” Dede had said. Something terrible was always coming, always echoing down from what went before.

  “I never imagined,” Cissy said finally. “I thought a car accident or a fire. Something.”

  “Something terrible,” Delia finished for her. She held Cissy’s eyes for a moment and then looked back at the door, “I’m starting to think that Emmett’s not going to make it. If we’re going to get this plan
in motion, maybe we better get over there. I don’t want Dede to spend another night in jail.”

  Cissy nodded, but it was a moment before she could make her legs move. She watched Delia open her purse and count out the money for the coffee and the malt. Delia waved at the waitress, and the woman waved back.

  Cissy forced her hips to the edge of the booth. She looked up at Delia’s worn face, the sad brown eyes looking back at her.

  “I love you,” she said.

  Delia’s eyes softened, the corners crinkling though she did not smile.

  “I know,” she whispered and took her girl’s hand.

  Nolan kept bouncing on the seat of the wheelchair. If he hadn’t locked the wheels tight, he would have been halfway to Atlanta by the time Emmet came out of the courthouse to talk to him.

  “She’s all right?” he said first thing. “Is she all right?” he asked again when Emmet pushed him inside and rolled him into the judge’s antechamber. “Just tell me she’s all right.”

  “No, she an’t all right.” Emmet was losing all patience with Nolan. “She shouldn’t be all right, boy. She shot you, remember? She’s lucky she’s got people willing to stand up for her. I’m still not sure she shouldn’t stay in jail.”

  “Dede don’t belong in jail.” Nolan was shaking but determined. “This should never have happened.”

  “No, it should not have happened, but I’m not sure where Dede belongs, and you should ask yourself a few questions about that while you got the time.” Emmet pushed his hair back. “You love her, we all are agreed on that. And everybody says she loves you, but nobody who would shoot the man she loves is all right. You want to get her out of here, and I can almost understand that notion. But, I’d be a damn fool not to tell you that you’re as crazy as she is. The first thing the two of you should do is get some help.” He leaned into Nolan’s face. “You understand me?”

  “I understand.” Nolan’s head bobbed. “You just don’t understand me and Dede. Nothing like this is ever going to happen again.”