As he works, the shaky candle-jump light catches the tattoos that peek out beneath the rolled-up sleeve of his shirt. Harmon has never known what to make of them. They split open her understanding of him, leave her with the same queasy feeling she got the time she accidentally walked in on her parents making love one Sunday afternoon. Almost like that, but not quite. Every time someone mentions his tattoos, the scumbled eagle and dagger on his upper arm, relics from his time in California, he stammers a few words about being young and then changes the subject. Her dad, such a dependable member of the Church of Christ, so shy in crowds that nobody even makes him read the scripture out loud like all the other grown men—the fact of these tattoos is inexplicable to her. Sometimes she catches glimpses of something—some youth, some violence in his eyes—that makes her think she understands, but then she loses it. Like when he clubs rabbits in the garden with an old wagon spoke and seems immune to their wheezing screams. Or when he laughs with his old friend Otto and they talk about how they used to have to take baths in the creek with one bar of soap to share between them. But mostly those tattoos remain improbable, alien on the skin of the man she knows as her father.
She leans against the cold wall behind her, the wet fabric of her dress revealing the slope of her legs underneath, and she tries to sink back into herself, into a series of forced daydreams about Jimmy: his wide shoulders, the black outlines of his mechanic’s fingernails, his mouth on the transparent skin of her breasts. The first time he asked her to be on top, she was embarrassed at first, but then something else happened, a connection made between being with him and the way she would rub herself against her bed at night. She started concentrating, gathering the threads of it, and then there it was—dizzying, boundless, like air or water or light. The first time he saw her shudder and pulse, he was surprised, shooting her an embarrassed grin after they were done. “Where’d you learn to do that?”
“By myself, I guess.”
“Well, shit.” And he started tickling her, she thought, to end the moment.
There was such a difference, wasn’t there, between before and after? Before, she was so necessary. Sometimes, they wouldn’t even get as far as the fields along the highway, and they’d pull over and he’d put his hand up her skirt, and even when it wasn’t pleasure, it was the pleasure of being so urgently useful. They’d get to his room, and they’d take off their clothes and go weightless, and she would think: This is it. This is all she wants. How could anyone want anything else? The hot ferment of his breath on her neck: You’re my girl. My girl. Mygirlmygirlmygirl.
And then: separation. Shy and embodied. Bashful drop of his eyes, put-on smile, plunging back to the ordinary objects of this room that smells like feet. Flea jump of anxiety at her throat: He always wants to get up and forget about her, make a cup of coffee on his hot plate or turn on his new TV. After is a demotion. She is at best decent company. She has so little to offer him. One time, she offered to sew a button back on one of his shirts, and he said no, in the Air Force they taught you how to do that yourself. A boy her age would have obliged, even if he knew how. After, she feels bereft, thick sheen of his come down her thighs in the bathroom glare, her pubic hair slicked wet and mossy. She stares at herself in the mirror, at the rinds of moon shadow beneath her eyes, and she thinks about how she should eat more but never does. She knows that, even though she’s too skinny, she still looks like her mama, that she has her big dark eyes and round mouth, and she knows that this is why there will always be another time.
The last night she saw Jimmy before he left for Dallas, he seemed—more than usual, even—as though he was in a hurry to drive her home, and she sat in his truck looking out the window at the flat wash of the blue horizon, slip of moon peeking through the clouds. That Davis Sisters song was playing on the radio, “I Forgot More Than You’ll Ever Know,” and she wondered if this was something she could say to another girl about Jimmy and mean it. She wondered if he saw other girls. Her new house sat at the end of the driveway, so tight-lipped and dim, like nothing she even recognized, a broken-off bit of nothing much against the tumbling vastness of the storm-lamp sky.
The sounds of the rain are doubling, tripling over themselves against the cellar door. The wind bangs it ajar and then closed again, over and over. Her dad comes and sits next to her on the steamer trunk, the .30-30 perched in his lap.
She tries to think about something good, something pure. Images of her mama bead across her thoughts, but the one that gets caught in her mind is an image of her naked, the splayed breasts and dark pubic hair that Harmon glimpsed the night they had to get dressed for bed in the extra room at Little Mama’s house. Why is this the mental picture of her mama that comes to her most often? She has been infected with sex. She needs to get out of here. Out of this cellar, this house, this town. She stares at the blank-faced darkness of the wall behind her dad. There is nothing she can do for him anymore.
So her dad didn’t like Jimmy, fine, but that doesn’t mean he has to take away her happiness. She can’t imagine going the rest of her life without ever having a wedding. And she doesn’t know what she’d do if she didn’t have Jimmy to think about. She already has a hard enough time avoiding the high, keening ache for her mama.
Most of the girls she knew had mothers who were tough, brittle, strict. At their houses, she’d sit stiff as a bolt of fabric and try to seem sweet and godly. At home, she was allowed to think her thoughts and do as she pleased. To check out how-to-draw books from the library and spend afternoons copying down the ships and fashion plates. To read in bed all day and eat candy until dark. Sometimes she’d read a novel, like The Caine Mutiny, and love it so much that she’d get all excited and tell the entire book to her mama, chapter by chapter, and her mama would listen, really listen, and then tell her that she loved seeing the way her eyes lit up when she was talking about her stories. They’d sit up late together playing cards and drinking hot Dr Pepper with melted Red Hots at the bottom. When Harmon got in trouble at school, her mama would shrug and tell her dad that she was probably just smarter than all the other kids and bored. “Your mama let you have your way too much,” her dad said once recently, but she didn’t see it that way. Harmon had been born with a twin—a boy—who had died as a baby and had to be buried in a number-11 shoebox in a grown man’s coffin since that was all they had left at the funeral home. Harmon always figured this made her mama more grateful.
And now the sounds of the rain are pinging against the cellar door, and it’s choking her, this guilt, and she tries not to look at the dark shapes of the blackberry preserves her mama set up right before she died. She tries to focus her thoughts on Jimmy, but then Verle interrupts her.
“I reckon we could play a game?”
And Harmon hates him, she really hates him. His pitiful hair. Why is he in her cellar? “No one wants to play a game with you, shit-for-brains!”
Over Cecil’s braying laugh, her dad says, “Harmon. Where’d you learn to talk like that?”
“Why would we want to play a dumbass game with someone who tries to rob us?”
She feels the hold of his eyes on her, watches the buckle of his mouth as he considers scolding her. “I have a game. It’s called questions. I ask questions, and you all answer them.”
She doesn’t know if her dad is serious.
“First question: What do you boys think a twenty-year-old wants with marrying Harmon? You think I should just let her go get married?”
The boys hold themselves very still, looking down, and she is so ashamed. But after a moment, she sees Verle look up and absent himself from his face as he considers an answer. “Could be that he’s lonely, sir. Not a lot of women his age around here. A lot of people moving to the city.”
The city. These girls who graduate and move to Oklahoma City. She’d have to wait so long if she didn’t marry Jimmy.
“Could be. Maybe Mr. Verle Fight’s brains ain’t so bad after all. Then again, I don’t know. I don’t know about this one.” One
of the candlewicks crackles, shoots a spark twirling to the floor. “Next question: What was you boys doing in my house?”
“We just wanted to shoot some turkeys, we told you!” Cecil says, voice nasal and sullen.
“Come on now.”
Verle sighs a long sigh, and Harmon hates him even more, like he has any reason to be sad, coming over here and taking their things. “We was looking for some jewelry. Then we broke that little jewelry box with nothing in it and saw the gun hanging on the wall.”
“What were you going to do with jewelry? You got a lot of girlfriends or something?”
“We were going to sell it. In the city. I want to start learning to rodeo. The junior division? Takes money, and my dad’s been sick.”
“I was pulling your leg, Mr. Verle. I knew you didn’t have any girlfriends. And you broke one of my wife’s good things. Next question: Harmon, what do you think it’s like in Dallas? Do you think it’s a good place to live?”
This question troubles her. She’s worried about the water in Dallas. She can’t even stand to drink the water in town. It’s so sweet and soft, filmy on the tongue. She likes their hard cistern water on the farm, water that slakes your thirst with a bite of something metallic on the end. And Jimmy said his mother likes to wear hats and that he was going to buy Harmon a new hat from Foley’s to wear when he introduces her to his parents. Wearing hats isn’t really the thing around Dill City, not except for at church.
“I think it’s probably better there. People are smarter.”
“Do you think God wants this for you?”
Does he? Is her mama with God now? Church of Christ women have to sit mutely while the men do everything. Do they sit mutely in heaven too? Other kinds of people, like the Baptists, let their women sing and read. They even have instruments. Maybe it was more like that. But then again the Baptists said that the Church of Christ didn’t baptize right—a prim little sprinkle instead of a dunk—and that if you don’t get baptized right, you go to hell, so maybe it was better to hope they were wrong. Mostly, it seems like God goes about his own business and she goes about hers. Before her mom died, the Holy Spirit did seem alive in the church some Sundays though, in the preacher’s thunderous voice, the great, roundhousing energy that echoed through the room, the curlicued spirals of logic that clenched a final place in her heart—We know God loves us because the Word lives—but then she’d go home and everything would be the same. As far as she was concerned, God could work his side of the street and she’d work hers. Lately she sits in church and thinks only about Jimmy.
“What I think is that God loves other people more than me.”
“Harmon Lee, don’t talk like that.”
Harmon Lee. Her dad says it, like a lot of people’s dads say their middle names, when he’s mad, but her mom would always say it when she was happy. Harmon Lee Sweetheart. Harmon Lee Sweetheart. Oh Jesus she has to get out of this cellar.
“I have a question,” Verle says. He had been watching this conversation, rapt, absorbing its moments with little exhalations and faces. He needed to mind his own damn business. “Where’s your wife?”
“How stupid are you? Why are you asking questions? My dad asks the questions.”
“She passed,” her dad offers.
“Oh.” Verle looks panicked, searching the air above him for something to say. “I’m sorry. How, how’d she die?”
“Don’t you know that’s not polite, dumbass?”
“It’s all right. She was in an accident. Painless. It happened real suddenly. She’s in heaven now.”
Nobody seems to know what to say, so nobody says a word. How is her dad so sure that her mama’s in heaven? And, suddenly, that word. Like all the words people have used about her mama since she died, especially at the funeral, there’s something sideways about it. Harmon has relived that day so many times. She’s sick of hearing this singsong version of it offered up to people who don’t even matter.
It was almost suppertime. Cotton-chopping season. The sun dipped low and the heat hung back. Her mama in the doorway of her room. I’m all cooped up in here. Let’s go for a drive and get us a Dr Pepper from town. Harmon putting down her old copy of Little Women and getting up from her prone position on the bed, unwholesome ache in her belly from eating Sugar Babies all day in the dark. I keep telling you that’s bad for your eyes. Hot wind on the sweaty hair stuck to her forehead. You drive, Harmon, I’m tuckered out. Why? Why did she agree to drive? What if her brother had lived, and he had driven instead? What if her brother had lived and she hadn’t?
To say something happens suddenly is to forget that everything happens suddenly. But there are some moments that heave more weight onto themselves than our minds can bear. The Plymouth turning out from the bowling alley, striking them headlong and lifting. The truck sent spinning. Sheeting shrapnel of glass, light in the air, hanging, pealing down on her in cuts, cuts, cuts. Her mama pitched through the windshield, floating, up and up, and then the truck’s heavy whirl, around and around and into the ditch, Harmon’s head against the metal door.
And then the icy surface of something, fleet on the face of it, skating light, falling through, plunging. The man pulling on her. Putting her on a stretcher like a lank doll. Where is she? Where is she? I need to put my head on her jelly chest and cry about this. Goddammit, I need her.
Oh, her mama. She was beautiful, that wrecked word. It doesn’t even touch what all she was. The photo of her in her dad’s wallet that drew him back from California, back to this town, this farm that had once belonged to her parents. Doe-eyed, dark-lipped, the rest of her life shining forth from her eyes looking up and to the right of the camera.
Into this spiraling silence, her dad’s voice breaks like a clay pigeon, shattering across the air. “Harmon, I can’t let you get married in the church. It’s a sin, being with him. I don’t think any of this is right.” He pauses for a second. Opens his mouth, then closes it. Then he says, “I heard you leave at night, Harmon.”
And the rain has slowed down to hard, staccato bursts, and this is the worst kind of shame, that he said this in front of these ridiculous boys.
“Do you think he’ll be good to you?”
“No. I don’t really think so.” And as soon as she says it, she knows it’s true, is visited by it, this radiating knowledge that doesn’t change a single thing about her plans to marry him.
She met Jimmy at the drugstore in Cordell two months after the funeral. She’d take the Buick after school while her dad was still out with the workers, and she’d sit there at the counter, drinking dun-colored coffee heaped with high piles of sugar and cream. She liked reading the women’s magazines, the articles about skincare regimens and ideas for ways to busy herself creating colorful finger foods for her husband when he got home from work. They made life seem conquerable. She hated being at home. Sometimes Karen and Carolyn would come sit with her, and they’d talk about the boys, but most days they had chores.
The first time Jimmy spoke to her, he sat down next to her and said, “You look like a girl who wants to go to the rodeo with me next weekend.”
She was startled at first, but then she considered his uniform, his cheekbones, his slick smile. She decided she was probably lucky.
“I love the rodeo.”
He put his hand on hers for one jolting moment and asked, “What’s your name?”
She told him, and he said, “Harmon. That’s different.”
“It was my grandpa’s name. And then it was my brother’s name. But he died, so they gave it to me.”
He studied her face. “How old are you, anyway?”
“Fourteen.”
“I would have guessed sixteen at least.” And it was true, she did look older lately, with her face painted up to match the saturated colors of her store-bought clothes. Carolyn had pierced her ears just the week before with an ice pick and an old piece of potato. That fall, instead of winding her wet hair around curlers every night, the way her mama used to do for her
, she started getting her hair set once a week at the beauty shop, unsticking it from her scalp in the morning with a pick reeking of Spray Net. She had also stopped wearing her glasses on account of the fact that her homework had always been too easy for her anyway. She looked like her mama now—everyone said so.
“Does that mean you don’t want to take me anymore?”
“You don’t have to be sixteen to go to the rodeo.”
From that point on, all that mattered was Jimmy.
The cellar is getting colder. She can’t sit still, can hardly stand herself, shivering and smelly, her dad’s watchful gaze filling up the room, headache growing more insistent. She gets up to move her body, to look around at all of this detritus the two of them have been avoiding so assiduously. Boxes of quilts bubbled with holes that expose the batting, stiff nursing uniforms that smell like dust and rot, an old black iron that once belonged to her Choctaw great-grandmother. Her mama’s high school recipe cards, and the coursing energy of her looping scrawl, returned from the dead right there in blue ink. A sack of something lumpy and fetid behind the boxes. Harmon reaches for it, holding her nose as she picks it up, and then dangles it away from her. Onions. A sack of onions. And she can feel a grin spread across her face. What would her mama want with a sack of onions, anyway? She didn’t cook with them.
“Lookit, Daddy. Mama’s got onions down here.”
She holds them up, the stench stinging her nostrils, and he looks pained for a moment, but then he laughs and then laughs again, and he keeps going, far more laughter than she’s comfortable with in her dad, really, these laughs that don’t even work right—he hardly makes any noise and just bats at the air with his hands a little as his face turns red. It’s embarrassing.
Cecil looks over at her dad, elbows Verle, and says, “Don’t take much to get him going, does it? He better quit or he’ll piss hisself,” and then Cecil starts laughing too, showily, Harmon thinks, peacocking for Verle.
Finally, her dad says, “I just knew that’s what it was. Well, Pauline. I swear. Thank you for that. I needed it.”
PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2019 Page 13