Valentine

by Elizabeth Wetmore

  We’ll need to doctor these bites. Corrine wrings out the washcloth and sets it on the edge of the bathtub. You can come anytime and take a hot bath and watch television, she says, and I will make sure there’s plenty of Dr Pepper in the house.

  All I ask in return—Corrine pauses for a few seconds and pushes Debra Ann’s damp hair out of her eyes—is that you don’t tell anybody about Mrs. Whitehead firing that gun. We don’t want anybody to suffer more than they need to.

  D. A. nods and slides down into the bathtub until she is flat on her back, pretending to float in a lake, her brown hair fanning out on either side of her face. She never wanted anybody to suffer.

  * * *

  There are thunderstorms on the heels of that dust cloud. It will rain for three days and when the gutters on Larkspur Lane overflow, the canal behind Corrine’s house will fill in less than hour, washing away everything that Jesse decided to leave behind—his skillet, the blanket Debra Ann brought when he was cold and the medicine she brought when he was sick, even that old tomcat who, just a few minutes before the flood, was seen chasing a juvenile bull snake deep into the pipe.

  On the other side of the street, Mary Rose’s alley floods and water seeps under the fence, rising gently toward the back patio until it covers the half dozen extension cords that are still plugged into the outlet. For a few days, she will stand at her sliding-glass door and wonder if the yard is electrified. She will tape the back door closed and keep a close eye on her daughter.

  By the time the water recedes and everything dries out, Jesse will be home. His first letter will come in September, a single page with the words Dictated to Nadine written above the salutation. He will describe the long, boring drive back to eastern Tennessee—whether you take the southern route or the northern route, he says, it’s all the same ugly—and his joy upon seeing his mother’s little trailer in Belden Hollow. He promises to send a letter every month, and he hopes D. A. will do the same.

  He will fish the Clinch River and try to find work in his hometown, and when the money that Corrine gave him runs out and there are still no jobs, he will throw his duffel bag into the back of his truck and head down to Louisiana. He will work the oil fields and offshore rigs in Lake Charles, Baton Rouge, Petroleum City, then drive over to Gulf Shores to work as a shrimper. Construction work in Jackson, corrections at the prison in Dixon, farmhand in the Florida panhandle, then on to New Orleans, where he discovers that he is finally old enough to grow a beard that will help keep him warm in the winter months. He will not live to be very old—too much working against him—but each time a stranger shows him a bit of kindness, he will remember Debra Ann, and the way he ends every letter to her, however long or short it may be.

  Thank you for the kindness you showed me, when I was in your hometown. I won’t ever forget it. Love, Jesse Belden

  Karla

  We lose the men when they try to beat the train and their pickup trucks stall on the tracks, or they get drunk and accidentally shoot themselves, or they get drunk and climb the water tower and fall ten stories to their deaths. During cutting season, when they stumble in the chute and a bull calf roars and kicks them in the heart. On fishing trips, when they drown in the lake or fall asleep at the wheel on the drive home. Pile-up on the interstate, shooting at the Dixie Motel, hydrogen sulfide leak outside Gardendale. Looks like somebody came down with a fatal case of the stupid, Evelyn says when one of the regulars shares the news at happy hour. Those are the usual ways, the ordinary days, but now it is the first of September and the Bone Springs shale is coming back into play. Now we will also lose them to crystal and coke and painkillers. We will lose them to slipped drill bits or unsecured stacks of pipeline or fires caused by vapor clouds. And the women, how do we lose them? Usually, it’s when one of the men kills them.

  In the spring of 1962, just after natural gas fields were discovered out near Wink, Evelyn likes to tell new hires, one of her waitresses clocked out, rolled up her apron, and carried it with her into the bar to knock back a few with the regulars. The woman’s car was still in the parking lot when Evelyn locked up that night, and it sat there for nearly a week before they found her body. At an abandoned oil lease, Evelyn says, because that’s where you always find the bodies. Bastard set her on fire too. You don’t get used to knowing something like that.

  Evelyn is small and wound tight, with forearms like sisal and a beehive the color of ripe plums. The next gas fields will be even bigger than Wink, she tells us at the weekly staff meeting. Start your engines, gals. Get ready to make bank. Keep your eyes peeled for the next serial killer.

  * * *

  You raise a family in Midland, but you raise hell in Odessa.

  * * *

  This is a family place. We keep our jewelry and makeup tasteful. We wear red-checkered blouses that match the curtains and tablecloths. Our denim skirts hit just above the knee. Our ropers are brown with pink stitching. When we bend over a table, we smell of soap and cigarettes and perfume. A few of us leave, but most of us stay.

  All you have to do is smile, we tell Karla Sibley on her first day of training, and you can make big bucks, maybe the best money in town, and still keep your shirt on, ha, ha!

  The dinner salad gets two slices of tomato, we tell her. Salad dressing is served in a ramekin on the side. Ranch, French, blue cheese, and Thousand Island. Memorize them. We serve beer in ice-cold mugs, iced tea in quart-sized mason jars, and surf ’n’ turf on our signature Texas-shaped metal platters. Always keep your sleeves turned down, even in the summer, or the metal will leave burns that turn into scars. Like this, we pull up our sleeves. See here?

  We send her home early so we don’t have to split the tips, but before she goes Evelyn gives her a pep talk. Karla, darlin’, an oil boom can mean earning a month’s rent on a single Friday night. It can mean a down payment on a car and a little scratch in the bank. We can post bail, help one of our kids dry out, pay for a semester at the junior college, all on one week’s tips. So when a customer tells us to smile, you can bet your right tit we do it. Our lips curl upward like somebody just pulled a string. Our teeth are paper white, our dimples parentheses.

  After closing time, when the tables have been scrubbed down and the floors are swept and we’ve rolled enough silverware to feed the U.S. Army, we have our shift drink and then walk to our cars in twos and threes. We wait for long enough to make sure nobody has a flat tire or dead battery. We come prepared, with jumper cables and Fix-a-Flat in our trunks. We carry pistols and Mace in our purses. Evelyn, who is left-handed, keeps one little snubbie in her purse and one in the glove box of her Ford Mustang. Behind the bar, she keeps an antique electric cattle prod, for the usual trouble, and a Wingmaster, for when things get out of hand.

  Two o’clock in the morning and still nearly ninety degrees out. The recent rains settled the dust, and now the clouds are moonlit and pale and empty as old churches. There’s the usual light traffic on the drag, but if Evelyn is right about the Bone Springs shale, or the Ozona platform, it will be bumper-to-bumper in a few months, with license plates from all over the country and hungry men with cash in their pockets. Something to look forward to.

  * * *

  Monday through Friday, Karla’s mother works the line at a bearing supply company, but she’s happy to watch the baby at night. New hires work the lunch rush for the first month, Evelyn tells her, so Karla hires a sitter for Diane and takes four shifts a week. In the storeroom where we sit at a folding card table and eat our shift meals, she tapes an index card to the wall with her phone number—I will pick up any nights or weekends. Thanks, Karla Sibley. Someone draws a line through her last name and writes, Darlin’! And below that, Smile! Because it doesn’t seem to come naturally to her.

  While Karla waits for somebody to call in sick, she drinks her weight in coffee and counts her tips and tries to remember to smile. She reminds herself that she lost her last job, a sweet bartending gig at the Country Club, because she couldn’t get along with the regular
s. Corrine Shepard doesn’t count, management told her. Our male patrons think you don’t like them. So Karla rolls extra silverware at the end of each shift and rubs the ice machine until she can see, if not her own face clearly reflected in the stainless steel, then at least the indistinct shadows of her mud-brown curls and wide forehead, the dark smudges beneath her eyes from sweating through her black eyeliner and having a baby at home that still doesn’t sleep through the night.

  The oil reps come in for lunch smelling like they came straight from the cologne counter at Dillard’s. They wear Polo shirts and khaki pants. If they drove in from Houston, they stopped in San Angelo and bought ostrich or alligator boots. If they came from Dallas, they stopped at Luskey’s or James Leddy’s. Everybody wears a Stetson, and everybody’s got a checkbook in his shirt pocket.

  They carry cardboard tubes filled with topographical maps, and after lunch, they spread them out on the table. The new fields are here and here and here—they point to vast sections of grazing land, or land that used to be good for grazing—three billion barrels of oil and enough natural gas to set the whole world on fire twice. The infrastructure is already in place, they tell wildcatters and hard-up cattle ranchers, or it will be soon. The oil reps talk easements and cattle guards, wastewater ponds and extraction wells and spill contingencies. They talk about a newly discovered shale in the Delaware Basin, natural gas fields out near the Bowman Ranch. They buy and sell water and promise to close the gate behind them so the cows don’t get out on the highway. They nod their heads and promise to remind their men that a good bull is worth three months’ pay. When they close a deal, they take out their checkbooks and lift one finger in the air and Karla brings a round of shots.

  She pays the sitter and helps her mother with the mortgage. She opens a savings account for Diane. On her day off, she drives out to see a 1965 Buick Skylark that was advertised in the American. The storage facility is just outside the city limits, six corrugated metal buildings across the field from the Full River Gospel of Life Church, a confusing name since the closest river is the Pecos and it generally looks like everybody in the county went down and took a shit in it at the same time. It was her mother’s car, the woman tells Karla, and it’s been in storage since the crash of ’72. It can be a little sluggish on the highway, she says, but it’s got eight cylinders and 5,000 original miles. For two hundred dollars cash, it’s Karla’s.

  Karla climbs into the front seat, a palace of gold crushed velvet that still smells of the old lady’s tobacco and baby powder and wintergreen gum. The back seat looks big enough to pitch a tent in, and Karla is already imagining Diane bouncing around back there as they drive down the highway to their next life. The woman hands her a set of car keys—one for the ignition and driver’s side door, one for the glove box, one for the trunk. When Karla turns the ignition switch, the engine burbles and dies. She turns it a second time. The engine roars and rumbles and vibrates from her ass all the way down to her foot resting on the gas pedal. Oh, hell yes, she thinks. Would you take $150 for it? she asks the woman.

  * * *

  Why did God give oil to West Texas?

  To make up for what He did to the land.

  * * *

  Nights are money, we tell Karla when she picks up her first dinner shift. After nine o’clock, it’s mostly men with wallets full of cash and hair still damp after stopping by the house for a hot shower. Karla, darlin’, we tell her, they can run the hot water until their skin peels off, and they will still smell like stale farts in a closed room.

  We tell her which men don’t mean anything by it—a joke, an arm snaking around her waist, a marriage proposal—and which men do. Listen to their damn stories, we say about the first group. Laugh at their damn jokes. About the second group, we say never let them get you alone. Don’t tell them where you live. And watch out for that one—we point to Dale Strickland sitting at the end of the bar, getting drunk all by his lonesome—he’s a pervert with a thing for brunettes. Buckle up, gals, Evelyn says. It’s going to start getting busy any day now.

  Karla tells us Diane’s daddy is in the navy and stationed in Germany, but we spend some time rolling silverware together and the lies fall away PDQ. It doesn’t matter who it was, she tells us, some boy from Midland.

  What matters? Diane napped today and Karla got a hot shower before her shift. She shows us the Polaroid took that morning. Karla has russet-colored hair and eyes the color of sandstones. Constellations of freckles cover her nose, and her round cheeks mark her as still barely out of childhood. A black tank top shows off more freckles on her shoulders. The baby, dressed in head-to-toe pink, stares doe-eyed at the camera, her little cheek crushed against her mother’s. Four months old today, Karla tells us, her name means divine. She’s beautiful, we tell Karla, she looks just like you.

  * * *

  The women’s clinic in Santa Teresa is three hundred miles north, just across the border at Las Cruces, and back then Karla shared a car with her mom. She thought about taking it anyway, but even if she could get there, she would have to spend the night, and how would she explain this to her mother? And what if she were pulled over in one of those little towns between Odessa and El Paso? She had heard stories about those sheriffs, how they knew what girls were up to, when they spotted them driving down the interstate by themselves, how they made girls follow them back to the station and wait while their fathers were called. Game over.

  At eight weeks, Karla drove over to the health-food store and bought tinctures of black cohosh and cotton root bark from a woman with frizzy hair and a muumuu so electric it ought to have come with a seizure warning. Put this in hot water and drink a lot of it, the woman said. Gallons. You ought to be peeing every ten minutes. If you run out, come back and get more.

  Karla drank until she was bent in half with cramps. The tea tasted like dirt and mold, and when she puked and shit, her mother sprayed Lysol in the bathroom and asked what the hell she’d been eating. She went to band practice and wrote a paper on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In gym class, she stood with her arms at her sides while dodge balls hit her square in the belly until Coach Wilkins yelled at her to get the hell out of the way. In the locker room, she stared at the shower floor. Water, water, every where, nor any drop to drink. And not a drop of blood anywhere, she thought. In bathroom stalls all over school, she studied wads of toilet paper and the crotch of her panties. But the pregnancy stuck. It stuck, it stuck, it stuck. My uterus is a painted ship, Karla thought, and I am waiting for the trade winds. Ten weeks, fifteen—and then she was at twenty and it was too late to pretend anymore.

  The woman at the health-food store introduces herself as Alison and asks Karla if she’s breastfeeding. When Karla explains that the labor and delivery nurses didn’t think it was a good idea, since she needed to get a job ASAP, Alison gives her several joints and tells her to stay away from booze and crystal. It is fall now and Alison’s muumuus are the color of wildfires and whiskey. Coffee and weed is the best possible combination of drugs for a single mother, she tells Karla. Don’t let yourself get busted. Never share. Never tell anyone, not even your boyfriend—especially not him. Don’t buy paraphernalia. Instead, roll joints and tuck them in a pack of cigarettes, never in a plastic baggie.

  You’re going to be fine, Alison says. Just don’t start thinking you’ve made all the big decisions you’re ever going to make.

  Does Karla love her baby? Yes, fiercely. Diane’s got a big, strong name and a grin that could melt the devil’s heart. When they are alone together during the day, Karla hardly wants to set her down for a moment. But becoming a mom has taught Karla plenty of things. That she can get by with less sleep than she could ever have imagined. That it doesn’t take her long to be able to hear herself think at the end of a nine-hour shift, just a short detour through the desert on her way home from work and a little time looking at the stars. That you can love someone with all your heart and still wish she weren’t there.

  We wish we had known you back
then, a couple of us tell her later. We could have loaned you a little money if you were short. One of us would have driven you up to New Mexico. We wouldn’t have told any of the prayer warriors.

  * * *

  What do you call a single mother who has to be up early in the morning?

  A sophomore.

  * * *

  When she gets home from work, Mrs. Sibley changes into a pair of sweats, clasps her granddaughter between her knees, and stares into her big blue eyes. Well then, Miss Diane, is this all there is to it? She feeds and bathes and rocks her granddaughter and holds her on her lap so they can watch Oral Roberts together.

  Mrs. Sibley’s got a scrap of her late husband’s great-great-great granddaddy’s gray uniform framed and hanging in the hallway next to his daguerreotype, and a cedar chest full of pictures from the old family plantation, and she can’t for the life of her figure out how her family got from there to here in just a few generations—here being stuck in West Texas, trying to keep the dust out of your eyes and a roof over your head while Mexicans and feminists take over the world.

  When Karla comes home from her shift, she stands in the dark behind her mother and child, watching the television’s blue light play across their sleeping faces. Time for bed, she says, and carries Diane to her crib. Karla loves her mama, but she worries that Mrs. Sibley’s fear and hatred will eventually kill her. What will happen to her mother when she and Diane are gone? After her mother and daughter are tucked in, Karla stands out in the backyard and smokes a joint and imagines a different story for herself, one where she tries a little harder to get to that clinic in Santa Teresa.