Valentine

by Elizabeth Wetmore

  The kitchen is quiet now, save for the ticking of the wall clock next to the kitchen table. Corrine narrows her eyes at it, considering. Empty liquor bottles lie atop the full trash can, along with a stack of unopened doctor’s bills. She picks up a full ashtray and slowly dumps it on the envelopes in the center of the table. Cigarette butts roll slowly across the pile and fall onto the puzzle pieces. The icemaker dumps a batch of ice cubes. Outside the sliding-glass door, the western sky is the color of an old bruise. A mockingbird perches on the back fence, its voice persistent and sad.

  Fetching up the trash can and stepping outside, Corrine jerks the sliding door closed with such force that Potter’s cane clatters to the linoleum and rolls in front of it. The thin sole of her house slipper gives way when it presses against a soft body and she cries out, jumping backward and looking down to see a small brown mouse. She closes her eyes and sees Potter standing by the back fence, sees him struggling with the shovel while he digs the hole, sees him set the animal gently inside.

  She wishes she could do that, bury a little creature, act as if it matters. But the ground is hard and her arms are flabby, and she has to stop and catch her wind when she carries groceries in from the truck. She isn’t nearly as good as Potter, never has been. She grabs a shovel out of the garage anyway and slips the blade under the soft, small body. Nearly choking with rage, she carries the mouse into the alley and flings it into the open dumpster. They could have talked about it, how and when he would die. Potter said he wouldn’t have her taking care of him, and she had promised she wouldn’t ask him to hang on until he was unrecognizable to himself, or her. But in the end, he had chosen to go it alone.

  The plant whistle blows, the longer, more plaintive wail that signals an accident, and she stands for a few seconds with her hand on the steel dumpster. She has spent a lifetime listening to that whistle and wondering what happened. But these particular fears, that her husband might be lying facedown in a puddle of benzene, that he was working in the area where the explosion occurred, that he didn’t move quickly enough, these worries are now the province of Suzanne Ledbetter and a thousand other women in town. Not Corrine’s. In the field behind her house, the cat stays low, its green eyes steady and vacant, as it watches a yellow rat snake race down the dry flood canal where D. A. Pierce and the other little girls on the street used to ride their bikes, ditching them to sunbathe on the steep concrete slopes, before the city got wise and put up a chain-link fence.

  Beyond the canal, the 7-Eleven and A&W Root Beer share a parking lot with the bookmobile, a thirty-foot trailer with perilously unstable metal bookcases and shag carpeting that smells like mildew. Six months earlier, an industrial-sized Quonset hut was built on the lot, a windowless steel building called the Bunny Club—a strip club sharing a parking lot with the mobile library—and it is a damned miracle, Corrine thinks, that any girl in Odessa makes it out alive. For twenty years she watched these local girls at the high school, most of them aspiring to little more than graduating before some boy knocked them up. On any given Monday morning, she might walk into her classroom and listen to sad, vicious rumors about the hospital or jail, or the unwed mothers’ home in Lubbock. She attended more shotgun weddings than she could shake a stick at, and she still runs into those same young women at the grocery store, older now, but still clutching pale and round babies to their chests, still shifting them from one skinny, freckled arm to another while they scream at older kids who dart up and down the aisles like manic squirrels.

  Corrine is still standing in the alley when a truck speeds up the main drag and turns into the lot. Its wheels spin and squeal as the driver turns doughnuts in the parking lot. Several men are standing in the truck’s bed, shouting and roughhousing and hanging on for dear life. One of the men throws a bottle at the flood canal, and the glass shatters when it strikes the concrete. When another of them falls from the back of the truck and hits the pavement with a cry, the others laugh and holler. He stumbles after the truck, hands outstretched, and when he draws close to his friends, the truck stops abruptly. He has his hands on the tailgate when somebody tosses two bags onto the pavement and the driver hits the accelerator.

  The truck circles around a third time as a man leans over the side of the truck bed with a piece of steel pipe in his hand. The truck speeds up and he leans out a little farther, one hand holding on to the truck’s roll bar, the other waving the pipe back and forth. Corrine opens her mouth to yell Stop, just as the man who stands in the lot lifts his hands over his head as if to say, I give up. The pipe catches him square in the back, and he falls to the pavement like an egg knocked from its nest.

  Lord, have mercy, Corrine yells and runs for the house. She is moving fast, praying there will be a dial tone when she plugs the phone back into the wall when her foot catches on Potter’s cane and she pitches forward, landing facedown on the kitchen table. Puzzle pieces fly through the air like brown bats rising from an old water tank, and as Corrine settles onto the kitchen floor, she is aware of the clock ticking on the wall. She is also aware of her face and hands, her knees and shoulders, all shot through with a pain so sudden and big that it might as well be everything in the world.

  When they were younger, Potter used to joke that Corrine would go out with a bang. There would be a holdup while she was standing in line at the bank and she would refuse to hand over her purse. Or she would flip the bird at some good old boy who was having a worse day than her, or maybe blow a tire while she was driving too fast on the loop. Maybe her seniors would beat her to death with their copies of Beowulf, or they would sneak out during a pep rally and cut her brake lines after a particularly brutal pop quiz. But nope. Here she is, sprawled out on the kitchen floor like an old heifer, boobs and belly in the kitchen, feet and ass still on the patio.

  If things had worked the way they ought to have, Potter would have buried her. He would grieve, of course he would, but he also would have gone on living—playing cards down at the VFW, driving out to the plant to say hello, puttering around the garage or the backyard. He would have put together his goddamned puzzles and listened to Debra Ann talk about childish things—the imaginary friends she was too old for, how many bottle caps she found in the alley, missing her mama and wondering when she was coming home. He would never tire of listening to that child, and even if he did, he wouldn’t say so. If Potter were here, D. A. Pierce and the little girl from across the street, Aimee, would be sitting at the kitchen table with two bowls of Blue Bell ice cream, and that damned cat would dine nightly in the garage, probably on cans of tuna fish. But here Corrine is, and what the hell she will do next, she cannot even begin to imagine.

  Tomorrow morning, she will survey the damage—a small cut above her left eyebrow and a goose egg on her right temple, a bruise the size of a grapefruit on her forearm. Her hip will be out of whack for weeks, and she will use Potter’s cane to get around, but only in the house or the backyard, where no one can see her. In the front yard when she waters the tree, and in the grocery store where she picks up a few items for Mary Rose and delivers them, along with one of Suzanne Ledbetter’s casseroles that she digs out of the deep freezer in the garage, Corrine will stand up straight and grit her teeth and act as if nothing hurts. When the phone rings, she will answer, and when she hears Karla’s voice on the line, she’ll ask how she can help.

  And what of Potter’s puzzle pieces that flew across the linoleum, several of them skittering so far beneath the icebox and stove that there will be no retrieving them? In a few weeks, when Corrine starts packing up his things for the Salvation Army, she will scribble a note for whoever might get the puzzle next, a little warning that some of the pieces might be missing. Because as Potter has told her a hundred times, there is nothing in this world worse than working that hard, for that long, only to discover that you never had all the pieces to begin with.

  Tonight, she rises up from the kitchen floor and plugs the phone in. She calls the police station downtown and tells them that she didn’t see
a license plate or notice the color of the truck, and she can’t really describe the men, other than to say that they were drunk, and white, and sounded like they were still boys.

  The man is long gone when she returns to the alley. Everything hurts. But it’s a pretty night with lots of stars and Mars glowing in the southern sky. There’s a light wind blowing from the north. If she carries the radio out to the front porch and sets it on the windowsill, she might get the radio station in Lubbock. They’ve been playing a lot of Bob Wills since he died, and it will be good company.

  She is still sitting out there when a truck pulls into the driveway across the street and a man who must be Mary Rose’s husband steps out. He hurries around to the passenger side, where he picks up his sleeping child. And now Corrine is struggling to her feet, moving as fast as her bruised old body can carry her. She has a knot on her forehead the size of a silver dollar, and there’s not enough Chanel No. 5 in the world to cover up the stink of cigarettes and booze, but she hurries toward the man who shifts his daughter from one hip to the other and grabs a flashlight off the dashboard before starting toward the house, its uncovered windows gazing emptily across the front yard and street, still waiting for somebody to turn on the lights.

  Wait, she shouts. Wait! The little girl’s hair glows white under the streetlight and Corrine crooks a finger around her bare foot as it swings next to her daddy’s knee. When the young man tries to step around her, Corrine gently touches his arm. Is the baby all right? How’s Mary Rose? She is breathing hard and holding the stitch in her side. Listen, she gasps, tell your wife if she needs anything, anything at all, she can count on me. All she has to do is ask, and I will be right there.

  Debra Ann

  On a different Saturday afternoon, in a different year, she might never have seen the man. She might have been playing H-O-R-S-E at the prairie dog park or hanging around the practice field at Sam Houston Elementary, or riding her bike to the buffalo wallow to look for trilobites and arrowheads in the dry lakebed. Back when it was full of water, Debra Ann and her mama sometimes drove out there to watch people get saved. It’s something to do, Ginny always said, as she spread an old bath towel on the hood of the car, and Debra Ann climbed up, careful not to let her legs touch the hot metal. They would lean against the windshield, passing a bag of chips back and forth while the saints stood on the bank singing are you washed in the blood of the lamb and the sinners waded in barefoot, stepping right through the pond scum, faith alone keeping them safe from water moccasins and broken glass. And if a preacher smiled and waved them over, Ginny would shake her head and wave back. You’re fine the way you are, she told Debra Ann, but if you feel someday like you’ve just got to be saved, do it in a church. At least you won’t get tetanus. When they were bored, Ginny packed up the car and they drove back into town for a Whataburger. Where will we go next? she’d ask her daughter. You want to drive out and see the graves at Penwell? You want to go to Monahans and walk on the sand hills? Shall we drive over to the cattle auction in Andrews and pretend we’re going to bid on a bull?

  But this spring, Ginny’s not here, and everybody is talking about the girl who was kidnapped and attacked. She was raped—the adults think D. A. doesn’t understand, but she’s no dummy—and now the parents on Larkspur Lane, including her daddy, have agreed that no child is to leave the block without adult supervision, or at least without telling somebody where they’re going. It’s insulting. She hasn’t been supervised since she was eight years old, and she’s spent most of the spring ignoring the rules, even after her daddy sat at the kitchen table and drew a map for her.

  The northern edge of the approved roaming zone is Custer Avenue, and the empty house on the curve marks the southern border. The western border is the alley behind Mrs. Shepard’s and Debra Ann’s houses, where Mrs. Shepard stands and frowns at the trucks coming and going from the Bunny Club. It’s a titty bar, D. A. knows this too. At the other end of the block, where Casey Nunally and Lauralee Ledbetter live, Mrs. Ledbetter keeps a close eye on everything and everyone. She thinks nothing of grabbing a kid’s handlebars and firing off a series of probing questions. Where are you going? What are you doing? When was the last time you bathed? The other girls are two years younger than Debra Ann, still too young to break any rules, she guesses, or maybe they’re just afraid of their mamas.

  She finds the man the same way she finds most of her treasures. She looks. She rides up and down the alley behind Mrs. Shepard’s house, steering around beer cans, carpenter’s nails, and beer bottles with ragged edges. She dodges rocks big enough to send a girl flying over her handlebars and headfirst into the side of a steel dumpster or cinder-block fence. She keeps her eyes peeled for loose change, unexploded firecrackers, and locust shells, swerving hard when she sees a snake, just in case it’s a baby diamondback. She catches horny toads by the dozens, cradling them in her palm and gently rubbing the hard ridges between their eyes. When they fall asleep, she gently slips them into the mason jar she keeps in her bicycle basket.

  In the alley behind Mrs. Shepard’s house, she balances on her bike pedals and looks across the field. Everything that lies before her is off-limits—the dried-out flood channel, the barbed-wire fence and dirt lot, the house on the curve that has sat empty since the Wallace boy was killed when a radio fell into the bathtub with him in it, and finally, the flood channel where the canal narrows and disappears into two steel pipes wide enough that Debra Ann can stand up in them. Beyond all that forbidden territory is the strip bar, which opens every day at 4:30. She has been spanked only a few times in her life, and never very hard, but when her daddy got a call from Mrs. Ledbetter in March that she’d seen his daughter riding her bike back and forth in front of the building, trying to peek inside the front door every time some man walked in or out, his face turned white and he smacked her so hard her bottom hurt for the rest of the day.

  D. A. rides along the flood channel, and when she is just a few feet from the sharp curve by the empty house, she ditches her bike, climbs onto a metal milk crate, and peers over the cinder-block fence before crawling up and straddling it for a few seconds. When she jumps into the backyard she hits the ground hard, first with a grunt and then with a cry as her knee strikes the hard-packed dirt. At the last second, she rolls and manages to avoid a small pile of caliche that would surely have landed her sobbing on Mrs. Shepard’s porch while the old woman fetched her rubbing alcohol and a pair of tweezers.

  Three Chinese elm saplings stand dead in the center of the yard, and a bunch of two-by-fours, bleached nearly white by the sun, lean against the back of the house. Several tumbleweeds rest against the sliding-glass door as if they knocked for a long time, and finally gave up. In the top corner of the glass, a small sticker warns: Forget the dog. This house is protected by Smith & Wesson. Last July, when all the girls still roamed free, she and Casey and Lauralee had sneaked into this same yard to set off a box of M-80s they found under the bleachers at school.

  Every house on Larkspur Lane is more or less the same, and at this house, as at Debra Ann’s, two small bedroom windows look out across the backyard. The windows are stripped of any curtains or blinds and they gaze nakedly across the grass, indecent and sad, like the small dark eyes of Mr. Bonham, who lives one block over and sits on his front porch all day threatening people if they let so much as one bicycle wheel touch his damn lawn. The sun’s glare makes it impossible to see into the house, but it doesn’t take much to imagine that electrocuted boy watching from the other side of the glass, his hair still standing on end. It’s enough to give you the shivers, said Lauralee when they were last here.

  D. A. is hungry and needs to pee, but she wants to take a closer look at the empty field that lies between the alley and the flood channel. Thankfully, the construction-paper fortune-teller she keeps in her basket agrees. Do Not Hesitate! When she asks a second time, just to make sure, snugging her index fingers and thumbs into the four slots and counting to three, the fortune-teller is clear. Yes! Sometimes
she asks the fortune-teller questions whose answers she already knows, just to verify that it’s the real deal.

  Am I taller than an oil derrick? No.

  Will Ford win the election? Not Likely.

  Will my daddy ever order anything but strawberry ice cream at Baskin-Robbins? No.

  From this end of the alley, Debra Ann can see a narrow sliver of the gentlemen’s club on the other side of the flood channel. It is mostly empty this time of the day, so only a few pickups and winch trucks are spread out across the parking lot. Two men, one tall and one very short, are standing next to a flatbed truck. The tall one rests his foot on the truck’s bumper while they talk and pass a liquor bottle back and forth. When the bottle is empty, he steps back into the club while the short one tosses the bottle into the steel dumpster. After a quick look around, he hops the fence and moves quickly across the field, running sideways down the flood channel’s concrete berm and disappearing into the largest of the drainage pipes.

  D. A. drags an old Maytag box into the middle of the field and uses a box cutter she found in Mrs. Shepard’s garage to carve out a window just a little bigger than the distance between her forehead and her nose. She climbs into the box and waits. A few minutes later, the man pokes his head out of the drainpipe. He looks left and then right, then left again, like a prairie dog checking for a king snake before it leaves the burrow, then crawls out of the pipe, headfirst, as if he is being born into the day. When he stands up straight and stretches, D. A. claps her hand over her mouth to keep from laughing. Never has she seen such a little man. He is short and skinny and sorrowful as a scarecrow, with wrist bones like bird skeletons, and he can’t weigh more than a hundred pounds dripping wet. If not for the stubble on his chin, he might just be an older kid.