And if Grandma’s hands hadn’t been so full, if she hadn’t had it up to here most days, with Ginny and dust and scrubbing the crude oil out of her husband’s shirts, Ginny might have asked her why she said that. But she stayed quiet about it, and she sometimes thought about those two skinned knees, the scar that looked like the Sabine River, its meandering path across the woman’s throat as she slept in the shade of a pecan tree. The woman had been beautiful to Ginny. She still is.
* * *
A few miles past the Slaughter Field, the derricks and pumpjacks give way to empty desert. On the other side of Pecos, the road begins to rise and fall. The horizon goes jagged, and the land turns ruddy and uneven. How lonely it is out there. How lovely.
Ginny keeps both hands on the wheel, her eyes shifting back and forth between the temperature gauge and the road ahead. She stops for gas in Van Horn, sitting in her car with her fingers wrapped around the steering wheel while the attendant fills the tank and washes the windows. Cigarette dangling from his lips, he checks the tire pressure and asks if she needs anything more. His coveralls are the same gray as Debra Ann’s eyes, and there is a small oval Gulf Oil patch on his breast pocket. No thank you, she says and hands him five dollars.
He points to her back seat. You forgot to return your library book before you left town. Ginny twists around to see Art in America surrounded by candy bar wrappers and one of Debra Ann’s graded spelling tests, the first two words canceled and trespassing, both misspelled.
At the stockyards outside of El Paso, she rolls the window up tight, her eyes and skin burning when the stench of methane gas seeps through the vents. She is ten miles from the New Mexico border, the farthest she has ever been from home.
* * *
Beauty! Beauty is not for people like us, her grandma said when Ginny tried to explain why she liked to sit and look at pictures in the afternoons. You’d do better paying attention to what’s right in front of you, the old woman said. If you wanted to spend your life thinking about such things, you should have thought of that before—or been born someplace else. And maybe that’s true, but it seems like a high price to pay, and maybe Ginny’s not willing to make the trade—the world or her daughter—because it’s clear she can’t have both.
When the fan belt finally snaps on the other side of Las Cruces, Ginny’s car shudders to the highway shoulder. She gets out of the car and watches the moon rise over the desert like a broken carnelian, and such has been her fear and grief and longing that, for many years, she will not remember the man who pulled up behind her car, his truck wheels grinding against the caliche-covered highway shoulder. She will not remember the words on the side of his truck—Garza & O’Brien, Tow & Repair—or that he fetched his toolbox from his truck and replaced the belt on the spot while she leaned against the trunk and looked at the stars, and wept without making a sound. And she will not remember what he said, when Ginny tried to give him a few dollars. Young lady, I can’t take your money. Pues, good luck.
* * *
She will have seen a thousand miles of sky before she is finally able to stop moving. Flagstaff, Reno, one short and sorry stint in Albuquerque that she tries hard to forget. Weeks and months sleeping in her car after a day spent cleaning houses, or a night waiting tables. She will drive through the Sonoran Desert, its washes and ravines disappearing into box canyons, she will sit at the edge of a meadow just above the Mogollon Rim, newly covered with snow. The road that leads away is full of switchbacks so tight Ginny has to stop and back up, and hope that no one comes around the corner before she can make the curve.
There will be a bar in Reno, where the same old lady shows up every night at nine o’clock and stays until close, her lips creased with lipstick, fingernails the color of blood, her smile as fierce and hard and true as the face Ginny sees in the mirror, most mornings. All of this is beautiful to her—the sky and sea, addicts and old ladies, musicians playing in subway stations, museums at the end of the line. She will see bridges overcome by fog, and sylvan forests teeming and dark and full of hidden water. Every place has a different kind of sky, it turns out, and much of this earth is not nearly as brown and flat as Odessa, Texas. All this wild, green beauty and still, always, a hole in her heart the size of a little girl’s fist. Ginny will drive that Pontiac into the ground and grieve for it when it’s gone. Never, she thinks, will I love a man the way I loved that car. And when people she meets along the way wonder about her, when they try to know her—some of them will love her, and she will love some of them, but never as much as the daughter who grows taller every day, without her—when they ask what’s your story or where are you from, Ginny never knows quite what to say. Each time, she just packs up her car and drives away.
Mary Rose
Tonight the wind blows like it’s got something to prove. My daughter comes to me just after midnight with another bad dream, and I do not hesitate to open the bedcovers, saying, You are safe here, we are safe here in town. I fetch the baby from his crib and bring him into bed with us, even though it will surely mean nursing him back to sleep. There is plenty of room in this bed for my kids and me. We have everything we need.
Mercifully, they are both sound asleep when the phone rings. I pick up and listen. I want to know their voices, in case I hear them on the street, in the grocery store, at the trial. Male or female, young or old, they all say more or less the same thing. You going to stand up for that spic? You going to take her word over his?
The drunker they are, the nastier they get. I am a liar and a traitor. They know where I live. I am ruining that boy’s life because a girl didn’t get her way. I am testifying against one of our boys on behalf of a slut—and any other foul word they can think up. I have been hearing this language my whole life without ever giving it much thought, but now it rankles.
Tonight’s caller is pretty well oiled. You kiss your mama with that mouth? I ask him when he stops talking for long enough to take a breath, or swallow some more beer. Then I place the handset back on the cradle. When the phone rings again, I reach behind the nightstand and unplug it. The clock radio shines red, 1:30, just past closing time.
Guess I’m up. I pull the bedspread over the kids and place a pillow longways between the baby and the edge of the bed. The lights in the kitchen and living room are already turned on, but I flip on the rest of them as I walk through the house—Aimee’s bedroom, the bathroom and hall closet. The baby’s room I leave dark, apart from the small night-light next to his changing table. In the living room, I reach behind my new draperies and check the sliding-glass door that leads to the back patio. Because my new front door doesn’t fit right on the doorframe, I check that too. One night last week, I went to bed thinking it was locked, but at two o’clock, when I got up to pee and check on the baby, it was standing wide open. For the rest of the night, I sat at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee, Old Lady lying on the floor next to my feet like a faithful dog. Now I open the door to make sure the porch light hasn’t burned out and then push it firmly closed, lock it, jiggle the doorknob, do it all again.
The wind moves from window to window, a small animal sharpening its claws on the screens. Out at the ranch, you hear this sound and you think possum or maybe an armadillo. Here in town, you might think of a squirrel or somebody’s cat. Lately the wind makes me think of animals that have not been here for a hundred years, panthers and wolves, or twisters that threaten to lift my children impossibly high in the air, only to fling them back to the earth. I turn on the weather report and stand in the kitchen smoking a cigarette, drinking one of the beers Robert keeps here. My beers, Mary Rose, he would say. A man doesn’t keep things in his own house. When I exhale, I lean over the kitchen sink and slowly blow the smoke down the drain. Robert pays the rent, but I don’t think of this house as his. This belongs to me, and my kids.
Last week, I thought I saw Dale Strickland’s truck parked down the street and then again in the parking lot at Strike-It-Rich. Yesterday, I saw him standing in Mrs. Shepard’
s front yard, looking toward my house. I have seen him in other places, too. But he is in jail. I call down there every morning and every afternoon to make sure he didn’t escape or the judge hasn’t decided to let him post bail.
I see Gloria Ramírez, too. Yesterday morning, when Suzanne Ledbetter knocked on the door with a plate of cookies, I stood perfectly still for a few seconds with my hand on the doorknob thinking it might be Gloria on the other side, more wreckage than child. Yesterday afternoon, when Mrs. Shepard sent Ginny’s daughter to my front door with a casserole—the third that old heifer has sent over in as many weeks, I throw them straight into the trash can—I stood blinking in the doorway for a few seconds at the tall, dark-haired child standing on my porch. Debra Ann looks just like her mother, big and square-shouldered, dark-brown hair, gray eyes that look right through you. I knew your mom in high school, I said. She helped me once, when I was having a bad day. I took the dish, gave her my thanks, and gently closed my front door. Gloria could be any of our girls, I thought, and sat down right there in the hall, and cried until Aimee came and stood over me. Are you okay? she asked me. And I said, of course I am, because she is my daughter, and a child. She asked if we should call her grandma, my mother, and see if she might come over and help us out. Absolutely not, I told her. Grandma has her hands full. I reminded her of my two youngest brothers still living at home, and my dad’s work delivering truckloads of water all over West Texas, and my brother’s three kids who are living there while he works a rig in South America. If we call Grandma, I say, she will think something’s wrong. We take care of our own business.
Who was that girl at the front door? Aimee had been watching from the kitchen window.
I don’t know, I lied. Just some little girl that lives in the neighborhood.
She looked like my age. Was she nice?
I don’t know, Aimee. She looked—tall for her age, big-boned. I don’t want my daughter making friends. If she makes friends, she will want to run all over the neighborhood and I can’t have her out there. I don’t tell her that Debra Ann Pierce is the spitting image of her mama, a quiet, thoughtful girl who always had a book in her hand. I don’t tell her that I cannot reconcile that teenager who stood with me in the school parking lot with the woman who has left her daughter behind.
Aimee hopped from one foot to the other, bouncing up and down like a tennis ball. Maybe I could go outside and see if she wants to ride bikes with me?
Outside. I rested my hand on Aimee’s head, pushing gently so she would stop bouncing. Maybe in another month or so, I told her. Don’t we have everything we need here?
I’m bored, she said, and I promised her we would be ready to have some company for her birthday in August. If you get that Daisy BB rifle you’ve been asking for, I said, maybe she’ll come over and y’all can shoot cans in the backyard.
But Mama, it’s only June! My daughter said this like I am still living in February, like I don’t know the day or the month.
There’s plenty of time to meet these girls, but you and me—I held her soft and pale cheeks between my hands and looked into her blue eyes—how much more time do we have together? You’re going to be ten!
I am going to be the first two-digit number, a composite number, she said.
And I’m going to keep you safe, Aimee, I said. I will always keep you safe.
Day in and day out?
It has become a little ritual of ours since we moved into town. I say, I will keep you safe, and Aimee says, Day in and day out? But that afternoon she frowned and looked as if she might argue. When the baby started whimpering, revving himself up for a good cry, I was grateful for the excuse to leave the room.
It is the same cry I hear now, his cry of hunger, and even though my breasts ache at the sound of it, I go to him. In half an hour, we will all be asleep—the baby’s mouth still pulling at my nipple, Aimee pushing up against my back, her feet across my ankles, her arm trying to wrap itself around my throat. Yes, day in and day out. Always.
The clock radio reads 5:30 when I again untangle myself from the baby and head back to the kitchen. Sun’s up in less than an hour, so I might as well have another cigarette and hope the baby doesn’t wake up. At our old house in the desert, I used to sit outside and listen to the little creatures move in the brush while the desert turned pink and orange and gold. Once, I watched a pair of roadrunners work together to kill and eat a small rattlesnake. The noise out there was, it seemed to me, the true noise of the world, the way the world ought to sound. I felt that way right up until the morning Gloria Ramírez knocked on my front door. Even the pumpjacks switching on and trucks hauling pipe through our property didn’t bother me as much as the noise here in town—honking and shouting, sirens and music from the bars on Eighth Street.
A load of towels in the washing machine has turned sour, and the kitchen table is covered with scissors, crayons, and scraps of construction paper, the remnants of Aimee’s final school project, a diorama about the siege at Goliad. I clean it up while the coffee brews and I am just sitting down at the table when I remember the bucket that’s catching a slow drip under the bathroom sink. After I drag it out and dump it in the bathtub, I pause for a second. When was the last time I took a bath or put my makeup on in the morning? I am letting myself go, as my mother would say, but for whom would I keep myself up? Aimee and the baby don’t care, and Robert is still so mad I answered the front door and let that girl into our home, he can hardly see straight. He blames her for our troubles.
In the church where I grew up, we were taught that sin, even if it happens only in your heart, condemns you all the same. Grace is not assured to any of us, maybe not even most of us, and while being saved gives you a fighting chance, you must always hope that the sin lodged in your heart, like a bullet that cannot be removed without killing you, is not of the mortal kind. The church wasn’t big on mercy, either. When I tried to explain myself to Robert in the days after the crime, when I told him I had sinned against this child, betrayed her in my heart, he said my only sin was opening the door in the first place, not thinking of my own damned kids first. The real sin, he said, was some people letting their daughters run the streets all night long. Since then, I can hardly stand to look at him.
The sheriff’s deputy had taken Strickland without a fight. When Aimee called the sheriff, she gave the dispatcher an earful about the girl sitting across from her at the kitchen table and the man she could see through the window. Where is the man now? the dispatcher asked, and when Aimee said out front with my mama, they put a rush on it. The sheriff’s deputy walked up to the young man and jammed the barrel of his revolver into his sternum. Son, he said, I don’t know if you’re stupid or crazy, but wipe that goddamn grin off your face. You are in some serious shit.
The deputy was right. The new district attorney, Keith Taylor, charged him with aggravated sexual assault and attempted murder. Mr. Taylor’s secretary, Amelia, calls me every few days to tell me about a new delay in the trial or ask me questions about Gloria. Did I know her before? What did she say to me? Did I feel threatened by Dale Strickland?
You go into that house and get her, he told me. Do it right now. Don’t wake up your husband who is sleeping upstairs, who is not sleeping upstairs, who is not even at home, you go in there, Mary Rose, you take that child by the arm and stand her on her own two feet and bring her to me.
And I was going to do it.
When morning comes, I walk around the house and turn all the lights off. Robert will pitch a fit when he sees the electric bill. We can’t afford to rent a house in town, he will say, especially not this year. We already have a house. Yes, but out there, I say, and you wanted us to move into town before all this happened, and then Robert will remind me that I used to love that old place, and that now he can’t afford to be away from his cows. When he left a hired man in charge for the three days it took me to have our son and heal up enough to come home, the man took off for a job in the oil patch. Screwworms infested the animals’ open
sores, their ears, even their genitals. Robert lost fifty head of cattle. Shot this year’s profit margin to hell, he says bitterly every time it comes up, which is every Sunday when he comes into town with a bag of candy for Aimee and flowers for me.
Thank you, I say. After I’ve put them in some water, we stand across the room from each other—him thinking I ruined our family, me thinking he would have preferred me to leave that child alone on the front porch while Aimee and me stood on the other side of a locked door.
Sundays, Robert looks at the baby like he’s just bought a prize bull at auction. He holds my son on his lap for a few minutes, marveling at the baby’s big hands—a quarterback’s hands, he says—and then gives him back to me. In a few years, when he’s big enough to catch a football or throw a bale of hay from the back of a truck or shoot snakes out at the ranch, the boy will be more interesting to him. Until then, he’s all mine.
After the kids are asleep, I give Robert a couple of casseroles for his week’s meals and he either leaves directly, or we have a fight and then he leaves. It’s a relief to hear his truck door slam and the engine turn over.
I am bound and determined to keep my kids safe here in town, but I miss the sky and the quiet. Almost from the minute we moved into town, I started thinking about moving out. Not back to the ranch, but someplace as quiet as the ranch used to be, before screwworms and oil-field companies, before Dale Strickland drove up to my front door and turned me into a coward and a liar.
Valentine Page 9