Valentine

by Elizabeth Wetmore

  Her uncle returns by seven o’clock every evening, carrying bags from Whataburger or KFC, and some small gift—a magazine, lip balm, a small hot plate and cans of soup so she can make lunch, peanut butter and a box of saltines, a Spanish workbook with hardly any of the words filled in that he found on the ground next to a pumpjack. Every night he brings something, and when he hands it to her, she can see that he has done his best to get the oil off his hands.

  One evening, he comes home with a pair of sunglasses, a portable cassette deck, and three tapes—Carole King, Fleetwood Mac, and Lydia Mendoza. Drove all over West Odessa to find that last one, he says. This machine is portable. You can carry it anywhere, you don’t even have to find a plug. He shows her where to put the batteries, how to adjust the shoulder strap.

  I don’t want it, Glory says. I don’t want to hear any music, and if I did, it wouldn’t be this crap.

  Okay. Victor loads the items back into a grocery bag. I’ll set them on the dresser in case you change your mind. Let me take a shower and we’ll watch some TV. Soon, Victor tells his niece, Alma will be back and they will all sit down together and watch their programs. He has sent letters to their family in Puerto Ángel with their new address. It’s only a matter of time before Alma writes back to let them know she is fine. Your mother will have a plan, he says. She will try to cross again in September, when the weather is cooler.

  It is June, and the patches of hair that cover Glory’s head are scarcely thicker than pinfeathers. Her hair, like the rest of her, is starting over. Like Brandy Henderson, the soap opera character in The Edge of Night who goes into hiding and disappears from the story, Glory’s life is a long pause, a stopped tape. But she is getting ready to start moving again. Come August, all she has to do is testify, her uncle says. Just put on a nice dress and walk into that courtroom, and tell the truth. I’m not doing it, she tells him. I don’t care what happens to him.

  * * *

  It is ninety-eight degrees outside when the air conditioner switches off, ticks steadily for a few minutes, and goes silent. Within minutes, as if it has been waiting for its opportunity to strike, the heat begins to seep through the windowpane and climb in through the small cracks on the windowsill. It crawls through the narrow gap between the door and carpet, and slithers from the vent above the bed.

  Glory usually waits it out in a bathtub filled with cold water, but today it is so hot the water comes out of the faucet warm, and her embarrassment about her scars and hair, her desire not to be seen, and her fear and sorrow that she has been stolen from herself, that she has been wounded, maybe fatally—all are in abeyance to something she has not felt since February. She is bored. Or at least that is what she will name it this morning. In a few years, she might call it loneliness. This afternoon, she digs around in a box until she finds the bathing suit Victor bought for her, a simple blue one-piece with sturdy straps. She pulls it on without looking at her stomach, or her feet and ankles, or the star-shaped scar in the center of her palm.

  Grabbed onto a barbed-wire fence to stop yourself from falling? Victor said when she showed it to him in the hospital. Girl, that’s some army-level toughness. But I fell anyway, she said. Well, don’t tell that part of your story, he said. Tell people you squeezed that fence until the barbs bent flat in your hand.

  My story? No. This is not my story.

  She squeezes the doorknob of her motel room tight and grips the wrought-iron railing that runs along the second-story walkway. Heart pounding, one hand on the pocket of her shorts where she can feel the knife pressing against her groin, Glory tries to act as if she goes to the pool every day, as if she walks down these metal stairs several times a day, as if she is a normal girl.

  She sits on a lawn chair at the far end of the pool, still wearing the Led Zeppelin T-shirt and jean shorts she pulled on over her bathing suit. Before she left the room, she wrapped a bottle of Coke in a white bath towel that rests on the deck next to her feet. She drinks it quickly. For weeks she has been peeking through the curtains, watching the woman she saw swimming on their first night at the Jeronimo Motel. Every day she comes down to the pool with her two kids, a chubby little boy who has his mother’s yellow hair and always wears the same navy-blue swim trunks, and a little girl, long and skinny as a rifle, her freckles and stringy red hair glowing in the sunlight.

  Today, when they walk to the shallow side of the pool, the three of them pause and stare briefly at Glory, as if she is trespassing. The little girl lies down on a lounger and opens a thick book, and the boy jumps into the pool with his small collection of things that float—a faded plastic boat, a tennis ball, a blow-up raft that has been patched with several pieces of silver duct tape. The mother paddles up and down the pool a few times and then wraps a towel around her head and puts on her sunglasses before sitting down next to her daughter. Mother and daughter slather baby oil on their legs and arms. They lie back and wait for the sun to turn them pink, bright pink, then lobster red. They wear matching one-piece bathing suits covered with large red and yellow flowers, the girl’s a little too large for her skinny body, the mother’s a little too small.

  They might be the homeliest people Glory has ever seen. The boy has a large gap where his two front baby teeth used to be, and the little girl picks at the skin peeling from her sunburned shoulders, covertly putting the pieces in her mouth while she reads. The mother’s arms and legs are round and hairless and pink, like something plucked from a shell.

  Glory leans back and closes her eyes until the sun burns her eyelids and the knife grows hot against her skin. She tucks it into the folded white towel, but puts it back in her shorts after a few minutes. As the day grows hotter, she walks to the edge of the pool and lowers the towel into the water, then wrings it out and lays it across her legs, her arms and face.

  The little boy paddles his float to the deep end of the pool and hovers next to the edge a few feet from where Glory sits. You got change for a dollar? he asks suddenly, as if he is hiding a bill somewhere in his swim trunks and might pull it out, wadded up and dripping wet, to trade for a handful of coins. Glory looks at him with her mouth open, as if the fact of him, or more particularly, of his voice, has left her stupefied.

  Do you speak English? he drawls.

  T. J.! You leave that girl alone. The woman jumps to her feet and hustles across the pool deck, large and quick as a parade float caught in a sharp wind. When the towel on her head comes loose and begins to slide down her back, she tosses it on the deck. She moves fast for a woman her size, closing the distance between herself and the little boy and Glory in just a few seconds.

  T. J. grins at Glory and pushes his float away from the edge of the pool. Why don’t you get in the swimming pool? he says. Are ya afraid ya might get grease in the water? Afraid your back might get wet? He giggles then, shoving his fist against his mouth as if to stifle the sound. Wetback, he says. He looks like he weighs eighty pounds, and while she can’t really swim, Glory thinks she could probably drown him.

  The mother gets down on her hands and knees, stretches her arm across the water, and grabs at his raft. God damn it, T. J., you little shit. You come out of that water right now. She drags the float to the pool’s edge and he is already yowling when his mother reaches down and grabs him by the arm. Standing now, she lifts her son into the air, his arms flailing, fat legs churning madly. Her strength is surprising, and wonderful.

  Glory is already on her feet, reaching for her towel and eyeing the gate. She will have to walk past the woman and her son to get to it, or go the long way around the pool, past the little girl who has set down her book and sits laughing on her lounge chair.

  Wait, the woman says to Glory. Can you just wait a minute? Red-faced and panting, the woman sets her son on his feet and towers over him. She wraps her fingers around the soft part of his arm and pinches so hard he yowls. You won’t be able to sit down for three days if I ever hear you talking like that again. She tightens her grip and the boy snuffles.

  You
hear me? She is still holding the soft flesh of his arm.

  Yes, ma’am, he says.

  Get your ass upstairs and take a nap. Tammy! Take T. J. up to the room—she glowers at her son—he’s tired. Glory thinks for a second the woman has said tarred, her accent is so thick. He’s tarred.

  The little girl is on her feet now, holding her book in the air and yelling back at her mama. It’s hot in there and you promised to take me to the bookmobile.

  We’ll see, maybe later. Beneath her T-shirt, the woman’s chest moves rapidly up and down. Y’all get to the room now.

  They watch the little boy fuss and stomp across the parking lot, and then the woman holds out one hand. I’m sorry about that, he gets it from his daddy’s side of the family. Glory shoves her hands in her pockets. I don’t really care.

  I’m Tina Allen from Lake Charles, Louisiana, and those two little wretches are T. J. and Tammy. My husband works on a rig near Ozona.

  Glory looks at her without saying anything until Tina sighs and walks back to her lounge chair. She digs around in her purse for a few seconds. I’m going to get myself an ice-cold drink. Can I get you something?

  No, thank you.

  C’mon, sugar. Let me buy you a Dr Pepper. It’ll make me feel better. Tina’s laugh is horsey and rough, and it reminds Glory of a teacher she had hated, before, when she was a C student who dreamed of learning to play the guitar and earning her own money and calling her own shots, when the teacher called the Mexican kids her little brown refugees, when Glory and her friend Sylvia stole a box cutter from the woodshop and slashed two of the woman’s tires. I wish we knew how to cut the bitch’s brake lines, Sylvia said and held out her hands as if she were clutching a steering wheel. Save me, you little brown refugees! It still makes Glory laugh out loud, and miss her friend terribly.

  Can I have a cigarette? she asks Tina.

  Pardon me, but you don’t look old enough to smoke.

  Well, I am. These are the most words Glory has exchanged with anyone other than her mother or uncle since she left the hospital. She’d really love to have a cigarette, it occurs to her, and maybe sit with her feet in the water while she smokes it.

  Yeah, I guess you’re right. Tina walks over and holds out a slim and pretty Benson & Hedges. Can I sit down for a second?

  They sit and look across the parking lot. It is past noon and the full force of the sun is unleashed on their bodies. The air conditioners have not come back on, and the courtyard is quieter than usual, but across the road, flatbed trucks pull in and out of pipe yards and bearing-supply companies. Behind the motel lies a field, fawn-colored and scattered with broken glass that catches the light and shines green, red, blue. Behind that, lay small wooden houses with dirt yards and thin curtains that smell of noxious fumes from the plant.

  Tina sucks deeply on her cigarette and then turns her face upward and blows the smoke toward the sun. I miss Lake Charles, and it weren’t exactly paradise on earth. You can’t throw a rock without hitting some good old boy with a bad attitude, and the bayou is full of gators and ’skeeters and rats as big as a dog, nutria, they’re called—she ashes on the deck and rubs it with her big toe—but the fishing’s good and some people are nice. And there’s trees. Dogwood and sugarberry, cypress. I miss trees, and I miss sucking the heads off crawdaddies. Me and Terry are just here to make enough money to buy a shrimp boat. That’s all I want, a fishing boat for Terry to earn a living, and for my kids to go back to school. That don’t seem like too much to ask.

  She smiles at Glory. How about you? You been here very long?

  Glory has been listening intently to the other woman, and it occurs to her now that she is expected to say something, tell the woman something about her life, participate in the give and take. I’m here with my uncle, she says. He works in Big Lake, hauling water and mucking tanks. I’m recovering from—an accident.

  Pauvre ti bête, Tina says, and when Glory looks at her, Poor little thing. Is that what happened to your feet?

  Glory looks down. Dozens of thin scars cover her feet and ankles—from cactus thorns and stray pieces of steel, broken glass and bent nails, a mess of stickers and a stray piece of barbed wire, all the things she stepped on when she walked away from his truck—and her throat closes on itself.

  It’s okay, hon, Tina says.

  Glory opens her mouth, closes it. She shakes her head and looks at her cigarette. I was attacked by a man out in the oil patch.

  God damn it all, Tina says, and after a long pause, I’m sorry.

  I got in his truck and went with him.

  Well hell, sugar, Tina says. That don’t mean jack. That evil belongs to him, it’s got nothing to do with you.

  They sit quietly for a few minutes and then Tina starts talking about the trees back home, the knobby-kneed bald cypress that loses its needles in the winter and can live for a thousand years, the tupelo with its scarlet Ogeechee limes. They ain’t worth a damn for eating, she says, but the tree gives good honey. Tina tosses her cigarette butt toward the fence and immediately lights another. But it isn’t all greenery and good fishing, she says and holds the box out to Glory. You want to hear a joke?

  I guess so. Glory plucks a smoke from the box and puts it between her lips.

  What’s the definition of a Lake Charles virgin? Tina inhales deeply and blows three perfect smoke rings toward the sun. For a few seconds, they hang in the hot air like rain clouds.

  I don’t know. What is the definition of a Lake Charles virgin?

  Tina snorts. An ugly twelve-year-old who can run real fast. She pauses and stares into the swimming pool for a few seconds. Guess I weren’t ugly enough, or quick enough.

  Ha, Glory says. Ha, ha. And then they are both laughing. Sitting under the hot sun and smoking their cigarettes, laughing their asses off.

  Well, it is hot as a well digger’s balls out here, Tina says. I’m going for a swim. She stands up and tamps a half-smoked cigarette against the pool deck, then walks over and sets it on the table for later. She eases her large body into the water, her bathing suit hugging her large breasts and arms. You want to come in, Glory? It feels pretty good.

  Within seconds, Glory’s T-shirt and shorts are saturated and sagging, tugging her toward the pool’s bottom, as if to say, go ahead and sink. She isn’t a strong swimmer—the public pools are for the white kids and although her friends often swam in the livestock tanks they came across when they were out driving, Glory never climbed in with them—but now she discovers she can stay afloat, if she holds her arms away from her body and moves her hands in gentle circles. Eyes closed, Tina and Glory float in the pool next to each other, the sun a jackhammer against their eyelids, the heat a dead weight against their bare skin. They drift, and Tina occasionally sighs, goddamn, goddamn.

  When the water pushes them close enough that Tina’s hand lightly brushes against hers, Glory jerks her hand away as if she’s touched a snake. In late February, one nurse held her chin and told her to close her eyes while another nurse gently snipped the stitches at the top of Glory’s head. She tugged each stitch with a pair of tweezers, one by one, until they lay in thin black rows in a small bowl next to the table. And that was the last time Glory felt someone’s hands against her skin.

  I once burned my mother’s favorite bedspread on purpose, Glory says, and I wish I hadn’t. We were fighting about school. I didn’t want to go anymore. I wanted to go to work with her and make some money. I wanted to buy some clothes and a guitar, maybe take some lessons.

  Kids do all kinds of stupid, Tina says. Look at mine. Your mama probably didn’t care one bit about a hole in a bedspread. She stretches her arms above her head. Never has Glory seen a more buoyant person.

  So when are you going back to school? Tina says. What do you want to be when you grow up?

  Glory lifts her hand from the water and holds up one finger. First question: never. She holds up another. Second question: I don’t know. At school, she often left the building at lunch and didn’t come ba
ck for the rest of the day. She and Sylvia would catch a lift to somebody’s house and spend the afternoon there, listening to music and passing a joint around, watching some of the other kids slide their arms around each other’s waists and wander down the hall and slip into one of the bedrooms.

  Tina sighs, her large body expanding and contracting on top of the water. No school? Really? Because girl, I can’t wait to get my two little angels back into school. Your mama’s right.

  Maybe. Glory drifts across the pool with her eyes closed, arms moving in slow circles. When the water again pushes the woman and girl close, she reaches over and takes Tina’s hand and squeezes real hard. She waits, and after a pause, Tina squeezes gently back.

  They will never meet again. This day will feel too big for Glory, and she will retreat back to room 15 for another week. Tina’s husband will get a job making more money on an offshore rig closer to home, and after some discussion they will carry their sleeping kids to the station wagon in the middle of the night. By the time Glory carries her pocketknife and her towel and a bottle of cold Dr Pepper to the pool again, Tina will be back in Lake Charles. But Glory will never forget her kindness, or her throaty laugh, or the slippery warmth of her hand against Glory’s when they threaded their fingers together and Tina asked, When did it happen?

  * * *

  In February, when Alma and Glory were fighting every day about homework and money. When Glory said, I want to quit school and go to work, I want some money of my own, and Alma shook her head fiercely. It was her job to work, her daughter’s job to learn. When boys sometimes pulled into the alley behind their apartment and tapped the horn until Glory grabbed her rabbit’s fur jacket and dashed out the door, but not before Mr. Navarro beat on the front door and hollered at Glory and Alma to stop shouting at each other. On Valentine’s night, when her mother cursed Glory in Spanish while they waited for the van that would pick up Alma and drive her to work, and Glory walked into the bedroom and stood over to her mother’s bed for a few seconds and then casually, as if she were standing over a flowerpot, tamped her cigarette out on the new bedspread. I can’t understand you, Alma. You won’t let me learn it and neither will the school, so speak English, goddamn you. And when, two hours later, Glory took a long, last look around the Sonic parking lot and decided she had nothing to lose. When she climbed into Dale Strickland’s pickup truck and pulled the heavy door closed. When the morning is still as a corpse. When tumbleweeds newly torn from their roots are flung across the land. When the wind picks up, when it says stand up. And she stands up. When a mesquite branch snaps beneath the weight of her bare foot and she hears her uncle’s voice in the slight echo that follows. Walk quiet, Glory. When she thinks she will miss this blue sky stretched tight above the earth’s seam because she can’t stay, not after this. When the wind is always pushing and pulling, losing and gaining, lifting and holding and dropping, when all the voices and stories begin and end the same way. Listen, this is a war story. Or maybe, this is yours.