Valentine

by Elizabeth Wetmore

  Instead, Jesse tells D. A. that he drove away from Tennessee in January, with his gear on the front seat of his truck and Boomer’s phone number in his pocket, and a particular kind of noise in his head, a Jesse-get-your-act-together kind of noise. He tells her when the trees disappeared on the other side of Dallas, he wondered how on earth any place could be so dusty, and brown. Even the shining blue sky turned the color of dirt when the wind blew hard enough. Sometimes, he could hardly tell which was which, sky or land, dirt or air.

  And you came to Odessa, D. A. says.

  Yes, I did. That foreman at Boomer’s worksite took one look at me and started laughing his butt off. You don’t mind small spaces, do you, Shorty? he asked me. When I said I’d been a tunnel rat overseas, Mr. Strickland gave me a twenty to go buy some boots and he told me to bring a change of clothes the next day.

  My daddy used to muck saltwater tanks, D. A. says, right after I was born. He says the first time he climbed into a tank with his respirator and a broom, and a metal scraper as tall as him, he almost had a heart attack, it was so small and dark in there.

  They are sitting side by side at the mouth of the drainpipe, both of them with their knees drawn up to their chests, trying not to let any bare skin touch the scorching concrete. When I climbed into that tank, says Jesse, I looked like a man. When I came out, I looked like one of them onyx statues I used to see in markets overseas. I was covered head to toe in oil. It took me twenty minutes in the field shower to get it all off my skin.

  My daddy hated it. He said it made him sick to his stomach.

  I guess so, Jesse says and falls silent. Back home, there wasn’t anything to do but fish the Clinch River and look for agates at Paint Rock or Greasy Cove. Maybe drive over to the VA hospital once a week to see if his hearing had improved. But here in Odessa, he works. Like a man does. Jesse picks up a small piece of chalk and uses it to draw marks on the concrete.

  I’m saving nearly everything I make, he tells Debra Ann, thanks to your hospitality. I’ll have Boomer’s money in another month or so, and he’ll have to give my truck back.

  He sees Boomer at the strip club now and then, sitting at the bar with the same men who threw Jesse out of his truck. They drink and watch women, and when they see Jesse sweeping up broken glass or running a mop through some vomit, they put their hands over their mouths and laugh, but they don’t ever talk to him, they don’t ever ask where he’s living.

  D. A. shows him the postcard that arrived just after the Fourth of July. They pass it back and forth, turning it over in their hands. A plaster cowboy, his hat pulled low over his eyes, leans against a sign that says Gallup, New Mexico.

  But the postmark is from Reno, Jesse says.

  I know it, says D. A. I don’t have any idea where the hell my mother is, and she plucks the card out of her friend’s hand, takes off running up the steep embankment without saying goodbye. She is rushing to leave him behind, to get somewhere private, where nobody can see her grief.

  * * *

  Debra Ann has never been on an airplane, never even been out of Texas, but she and Ginny used to drive out to West Odessa every month to see Debra Ann’s great-grandma for an hour or two. Ginny sat on one end of the sofa and D. A. sat on the other while the old lady refilled their iced tea and talked about the Second Coming. When they were walking back to the car, Ginny would sometimes grab her daughter’s hand. Why don’t you and me drive over to Andrews and get an ice cream cone at Dairy Queen, she’d say. Or, you want to drive over to the sand hills and watch the stars come out, then maybe head to Monahans and get a cheeseburger at the drive-in?

  They’d sit on the hood of the car and listen to the wind blow just hard enough that they’d taste the sand in their mouths, see traces of it in the bottom of the bathtub that night, and it seemed to Debra Ann that every star in the sky had come out just for them. There’s Orion’s Belt. Ginny would point toward the southern sky. There’s the Seven Sisters. They say seven, but there are nine, and a thousand other stars that we can’t even see.

  And one night, when they saw a truck coming down the same dirt road they’d driven, Ginny sat up straight, watching, her gray eyes narrow and her shoulders square.

  Should we go? D. A. asked.

  Ginny said, No. We have just as much right to be here as anybody else. She climbed down from the hood and leaned through the open car window to take something out of the glove box, then turned the car radio up and climbed back onto the hood. When the jazz show came on the college radio station, they listened to Chet Baker and Nina Simone, the horn, the piano, the voices drifting across the sand and disappearing behind the dunes.

  Try to remember this night, Ginny said. She had tears in her eyes. The moon rose orange and big across a dozen miles of pale sand in this otherwise empty corner of the world. She smiled at her daughter and handed over the car keys. You want to drive us back to the highway, D. A.? There’s about ten miles of dirt road before we hit pavement.

  * * *

  He tells her that when a young boy stepped out of a side tunnel and stood directly in front of him, they were in an underground room so close to the water table Jesse could smell the minerals. And he had been amazed that a boy had materialized in the dark like that, though he shouldn’t have been. They stood and stared at each other, two frightened boys with their mouths hanging open, and Jesse didn’t see the second boy until he jammed the butt of his rifle into Jesse’s left ear.

  He doesn’t tell Debra Ann that the echo from his service revolver was still bouncing off the dirt walls when he stood and looked at the two boys with matching holes in their chests, that he had shaken his head against the odd dullness in his bleeding ear, as if someone had suddenly thrown up a brick wall between him and the world. It wouldn’t be right to tell her that he wakes up thinking about them. Were they brothers? And if they were, did their mama sit up all night long, waiting for them to come home and wondering what happened?

  Jesse has saved nearly enough money to get his truck back, and he’s starting to believe he might make it home before winter, when one of the dancers tells him that Boomer has moved out of town. She hands him a beverage napkin with Boomer’s new phone number and address on it. He says to come on out when you have his money.

  Jesse studies the phone number written just beneath the club’s logo, a woman’s shadowy figure, her large breasts and the bunny ears coming out of her head. Penwell, TX, trailer behind the old gas station.

  How am I going to get out to Penwell? he asks the woman.

  It’s only about fifteen miles outside of town. She runs her hand gently up and down his arm. I’m sorry, sugar, I’d help you if I could. And in spite of the bad news, Jesse feels the warmth of her touch for hours.

  * * *

  There has been no rain for nine months, and the sprinklers run day and night. D. A. brags to anyone who will listen that she hasn’t had a real bath since the middle of June. She just runs through the closest sprinkler and calls it a day. It is the best thing about not having her mother around, she tells Aimee, who says her own mother never stops watching her.

  Aimee is six inches shorter than Debra Ann, with eyelashes so pale they are nearly invisible. Together, the girls run through the sprinklers in Aimee’s backyard while their faces burn, freckle, and peel. When D. A.’s bangs grow so long they cover her eyes, she gets on her hands and knees and pretends to be a sheepdog chasing Aimee around the yard. They pass bags of chips, tall tales, chiggers, and a case of ringworm back and forth seamlessly. The bug bites that line their arms and legs turn into sores and scabs and scars. When their shoulders turn the color of tomatoes, they sit in the shade of the cinder-block fence and ignore Aimee’s mother, who comes to the back door every few minutes and looks anxiously around the yard. Aimee says the phone never stops ringing at her house. Yesterday, she heard her mom ask somebody if they weren’t tired of it yet and then slam the phone down so hard, it probably busted the caller’s eardrum.

  At the YMCA pool, Mrs. Whitehead s
its stiffly at the edge of a lounge chair with the baby in her arms, watching Aimee jump from the high dive for the first time. When it’s her turn, Debra Ann stands trembling, skinny and full of fear, for a few long seconds at the board’s edge, but then she looks down and sees Aimee treading water in the deep end, urging her on, and she hurls her body into the air. In the seconds after she hits the water, before she kicks her way back to the surface, she thinks she can do anything. Aimee says she feels the same way.

  Their faith is rooted in their bodies, the muscle and sinew and bone that holds them together and says move. They are track stars and gymnasts and Olympic swimmers who win gold medals in diving and synchronized swimming. While Mrs. Whitehead changes the baby’s diaper and tries to get him to take his new bottle, they dunk each another and dive off the side. They sink to the pool’s floor and sit with their bottoms pressed against the rough surface while they gaze up at shoals of children, skinny limbs casting long shadows across the water. They hold their breath for as long as they can, and when they rise from the water, gasping and sputtering, Mrs. Whitehead is standing by the pool’s edge, shouting for someone to help them.

  What is wrong with you? Aimee yells. She takes a deep breath and dives back into the water, skinny legs kicking hard, carrying her away from her mother.

  We’re okay! D. A. says. We’re just playing.

  Mrs. Whitehead shifts the baby onto her other hip and adjusts his hat. I want y’all to get out and come sit down for a minute, she tells Debra Ann. Please, right now.

  Aimee reads the Karen Carpenter interview in People and vows to drink at least eight glasses of water a day, and when they are ready to leave the pool, she carries her clothing into a closed stall to change out of her bathing suit. D. A. worries aloud that her father is working too much, that she isn’t cooking good enough dinners for him. Macaroni and cheese isn’t really a balanced meal. Aimee says her mother doesn’t sleep nights, and every time her daddy drives into town they stand in the kitchen and shout about the trial. Last week, one of them broke a lamp.

  Daddy wants us back out at the ranch right now, she tells Debra Ann. He says he’s done paying rent and a mortgage. My mother can be a real bitch. Aimee says that last word slowly, D. A. notices, drawing it out and letting it hang in the air between them like the scent of something wonderful, heavily buttered popcorn or a warm chocolate bar.

  * * *

  When she asks Jesse where he’s been lately, why he hasn’t felt like having any company, he says he doesn’t know. Maybe it’s the heat, but lately there’s been a persistent hum in his good ear, a little ache that remains even after the bar is closed and the bouncer has turned off the music.

  He doesn’t tell her that the noise is there when one of the dancers pulls a few dollars from her roll of tips and says, Thanks, Jesse, you’re a real sweetheart. It’s there when he mops the floors and hauls the garbage to the dumpster, when he collects his pay and says good night to the bartender, also a veteran, who lets Jesse come in before the dancers arrive and use the dressing room shower. And Jesse appreciates that, he really does. But he still wishes the man would ask him to sit down and have a drink with the rest of the crew at the end of a long night.

  He doesn’t tell D. A. that the noise follows him home and lies with him on his pallet while he waits for the stray cat to wander in and curl up against his side, that it is still there in the morning when he and the cat wake up and stretch and marvel at the heat, its meanness and persistence. Instead, he says that he figured he could sleep anywhere after being overseas, but his bed feels harder than it did a month ago, and some mornings he wakes up thinking he’ll never get home. Summer is here, and he still hasn’t fished the Clinch River. His sister Nadine hasn’t yelled at him to put on a hat before he dies of sunstroke. There are a thousand miles between here and home. I guess I’m just real tired, he says.

  I know what you mean, D. A. says, because she thinks this is what a grown-up would say. I feel the same. She scratches fiercely at a nasty rash on her ankle. When it begins to bleed, Jesse stands up and goes into his hideout for a tissue. She is not allowed to go inside. Jesse has explained that it wouldn’t be proper for her to see his underwear lying on the ground, or his shaving kit scattered across the top of an overturned milk crate. I’ve already seen it, she could tell him if she wanted to. Sometimes when you’re at work, me and the cat come in and take a nap on your pallet.

  You ought not to pick at that ringworm, he says. That’s how it spreads. The fungus gets up underneath your fingernails and contaminates everything you touch.

  D. A. jerks her hand away from her leg and stares at her fingernails for a few seconds. Tell me one of your stories, she says. Tell me about the time you caught a two-headed catfish. Tell about your sister, Nadine, and how she got baptized twice, just because she thought the first time didn’t take. Tell me about Belden Hollow and trilobites.

  But Jesse doesn’t feel up to it, hasn’t felt up to it for a few weeks. Maybe Debra Ann can bring a few more of Mrs. Ledbetter’s homegrown tomatoes next time, maybe some more of them sleeping pills from Mrs. Shepard’s kitchen drawer. Maybe if he could get a decent night’s sleep, he’d feel better.

  Maybe, D. A. says, but I think the tomatoes might be all played out for the year. She doesn’t tell her friend that she’s been thinking about giving up stealing since Ginny’s postcard came, since she realized she could be the best girl, she could take care of every stranger who found himself stranded in West Texas, and it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference. Ginny isn’t coming back to Odessa, at least not anytime soon.

  They are lying in a shady spot at the bottom of the flood canal, dipping washcloths into a bucket of ice water, wringing them out, and laying them across their faces. If you need to get out to Penwell, she says casually, I could drive you out there.

  You’re too little to drive. Jesse laughs. He picks an ice cube out of the bucket and pops it in his mouth to suck on. D. A. sticks her hand in the bucket and feels around for the biggest piece of ice she can find. She throws it as hard as she can, and the ice cube skitters across the pavement and melts almost immediately.

  Hold on, Jesse says and ducks into his hideout for a few minutes. When he comes back, he carries a wad of bills—seven hundred dollars. He needs another hundred, and then he can go out to Penwell for his truck.

  Can I hold it? she asks him, and when Jesse hands the money over, she hops up and down saying, We’re rich, we’re rich, we’re rich.

  He holds out his hand and she reluctantly gives the bills back. I can bring you a rubber band to hold all that together, she says. When are you going back to Tennessee?

  There aren’t any jobs there, he says, but when I get my truck I can stay here for a while longer and make a lot of money working on a rig.

  What he doesn’t say: If he goes home empty-handed to Nadine and his mama, it will just be the latest fuckup in a lifetime of fuckups.

  They are quiet for a few minutes, each of them sitting up from time to time to dip their washcloth into the bucket and wring it out and lay it on whichever part of their body is most miserable. Forehead, neck, chest.

  I haven’t seen our cat for a couple of days, Jesse says. We ought to give him a name.

  Tricky Dick? Debra Ann says. Elvis? Walter Cronkite?

  Nah, you can’t give a cat a human name, Jesse says. He’s a good hunter. How about something to do with that?

  Archer? D. A. says. Sharpshooter?

  Archer, Jesse says. We’ll call him that.

  She wraps the washcloth around her wrist and leaves it there for a count of five, then wraps it around the other.

  It is late afternoon and the shade has moved a little farther down the flood channel. Jesse scoots over a bit and sits quietly for a moment. His mama never knew what he and Nadine were up to when they were kids. As long as they showed up for dinner, she didn’t care. D. A.’s a tough little kid, he thinks. He will miss her when he goes home.

  She has been watching him carefu
lly, studying the play of emotions across his narrow face. My mama used to let me drive all over hell’s half acre, she says.

  She did not, Jesse says. You couldn’t even reach the pedals.

  Oh, yes I can. I have to sit at the edge of the seat, but I can reach them. Again, she feels around the bucket of water but all the ice has melted. She draws her finger out and traces a heart on the hot concrete. It fades almost immediately.

  If you need somebody to help you get out to Penwell, she says, I could borrow Mrs. Shepard’s truck for an hour. You can drive us out, we’ll get your truck, and I can follow you in Mrs. Shepard’s truck. If we time it right—like maybe when she’s running errands—she won’t even know it’s gone.

  If she doesn’t know it’s gone, that’s stealing, Jesse says.

  It’s not stealing if you bring it back.

  And if you had a wreck driving that truck back to town, I wouldn’t ever forgive myself.

  I won’t wreck it.

  Maybe if you were a little older—thirteen, or even twelve.

  D. A. stands up and walks over to him. She crosses her arms and narrows her eyes. Well, I guess I’m old enough to be helping you out all summer. I guess I’m old enough not to tell anybody there’s been a man living out here, eating Mrs. Ledbetter’s casseroles and working at the titty bar.

  * * *

  The four girls lean an old aluminum ladder against Mary Rose’s new six-foot-high concrete security fence, and because she has the smallest feet and is good on the balance beam, Casey sets up the targets. Every two feet she bends carefully and sets an empty Dr Pepper can on top of the wall. When she has set down a dozen cans, she walks to the end and sits with her legs straddling the concrete. The girls watch Aimee practice. With each shot, a can flies off the fence and falls into the alley. When the last can has fallen, Lauralee gathers them up, climbs the ladder, and hands them up to Casey. And they do it again.