Loralou shook her head. “Chigger woman got the one I might have liked.”
Tessa patted her hand. “Don’t give up, darlin’. See that big old bouncer back there?”
Loralou glanced at Luther standing in front of the door with his arms across his chest. He was as big as the broad side of a barn. His hair was cropped short and his round face serious. She shivered. “Don’t tell me that he’s interested in me, please. Just looking at him makes me want to run home and hide under the bed.”
Tessa laughed. “He’s harmless unless some idiot starts something in here. What I was about to tell you is that he belongs to me. You get a Chigger itch for a big man, you just remember that you got to go through me to get at him. The rest of the peacocks in here are free territory. You don’t like the way that Chigger woman is trying to superglue her boobs to that cowboy, you go out there and tap her on the shoulder. She creates a problem, Luther sends her out the door and lets the next one in.”
Loralou shook her head. “I’m shy.”
“Shy don’t cut shit in the Tonk. We got charm, darlin’, but you got to make your own miracles. You like the cowboy then you make a move,” Tessa said.
“Hey, could I get a bucket of Coors, Tessa? Merle just whipped me and now I got to buy a round for all the boys,” Amos said.
A black leather do rag covered up his bald head with a gray rim showing around the edges. His black vest covered a T-shirt and black leather chaps covered the front and sides of his jeans. When he went to work the next morning in one of the biggest oil companies in Dallas, he’d be dressed in a three-piece custom made Italian suit and few people would believe that he rode Harleys a couple of days a week. He’d been Ruby Lee’s best friend and possibly her lover for many years.
Tessa crammed six longneck bottles of Coors into a galvanized milk bucket, shoveled two scoops of ice on top, and handed the bucket to Amos. Sharlene filled an order for three quarts of Miller. When they looked down the bar Loralou tossed back the rest of her drink, took a deep breath, and plowed right out into the middle of the dance floor. She tapped the Chigger woman on the shoulder and stood back.
The cowboy smiled at Loralou and wrapped his arms around her.
The Chigger woman headed for the bar. “Give me one of them longneck bottles of Coors. I need some beer on my breath.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Sharlene said.
“Damn young cowboys ain’t got a lick of sense. Don’t even appreciate the taste of a good apple martini. I was going to throw him back to the pack anyway before that Sunday school teacher tapped me on the shoulder. I wonder if her preacher knows where she is tonight. If he does, he’s on his knees at the altar praying for her wanton soul. I bet she don’t even know how to two-step,” she said.
“That so?” Sharlene asked. From where she was standing it looked like Loralou had a real good handle on two-stepping and the way the cowboy was looking at her, Sharlene wouldn’t be surprised if the Honky Tonk charm had just pierced her heart.
The woman fluffed back her hair and pulled a tube of bright red lipstick from her hip pocket. She used the long mirror behind the bar to apply a fresh coat and did a lip-pop to even it out. A quick smile at her reflection said she thought everything looked wonderful. “There’s got to be a happy medium. Woman with class like me don’t want a man with a foot in the grave and the other on a piece of boiled okra. But them young ones, fun as it would be to break them in, just don’t see a good thing even when it’s lookin’ them in the eye.”
Sharlene set a cold beer in front of her and made change for the bill she laid on the bar. “Guess you are right.”
She downed half the beer, made a face, and pushed it back. “Well, here goes. I’m going hunting again.”
“Good luck,” Sharlene said.
“So when is a cowboy going to claim a bar stool and the charm going to work for you?” Tessa asked.
“Never. Three times, remember. A genie only gives three wishes when he floats up out of the lamp. Larissa, Cathy, and Daisy got the wishes. I got the Honky Tonk. Wishes are over for the bartenders. Only the customers get the luck of the draw these days.”
***
The joint closed down at two o’clock just like usual. All the customers were out of the place and Luther and Tessa left by ten after the hour, just like normal. But Sharlene’s routine was all messed up. She paced the dance floor, plugged three quarters into the jukebox, and listened to three songs by Ricky Van Shelton.
Usually she had a beer while she sat in a chair with her boots propped up on a table, listened to a quarter’s worth of music, then turned out the lights. That wound her down enough to go back to her apartment and tell Waylon all the news. He would have gotten a big kick out of that night’s stories. Loralou stole the cowboy from Miss Redder-than-red lipstick. The Chigger finally went home with a middle-aged rancher with a little gray in his temples. Merle had whipped everyone who’d challenged her at the pool tables like always. Amos bought one round of beers for the pool sharks. One of his biker friends, Wayne, bought a round and Derrick, a Monday night truck driver who sometimes rented trailer space out behind the Tonk, bought another. She’d sold enough beer and pitchers of mixed drinks to keep the Titanic from sinking and the cash register was bulging. Tessa took home a pocket full of tips and Luther had only had to break up two fights.
Sharlene went straight into the apartment and settled down on the sofa. Waylon didn’t come out from the bedroom to snuggle up against her. She’d been interrupted at his funeral and never did really tell him good-bye. He’d been her friend for a long time. It wasn’t right not to tell him a final adieu.
“It’s the middle of the night. They’re all asleep. They’ll never know I was even there,” she said.
She picked up her purse from behind the bar and headed toward the garage out behind the Tonk. She got out into the yard and went back into the apartment. She couldn’t go to Waylon’s grave at two thirty in the morning. The guys in the white coats with straightjackets in their white vans would jump on her and carry her to the nearest mental facility.
She tossed her purse on the sofa and sat down beside it. “This is crazy. It’s my house and my garden spot and my cat’s grave. If I want to go talk to him then I can do it and to hell with anyone who doesn’t like the idea.”
She grabbed up her purse and marched out the door without stopping to lock it and went straight toward the garage. She hit the remote door opener and left it up when she pulled the VW Bug out of its slot.
The moon hung in the sky like a king with all the twinkling stars acting as subjects in the lunar kingdom. She didn’t pass another vehicle, but then normal people were in bed sound asleep. Hopefully, Holt and the children would be snoring too. If there were lights on in the house she promised she would drive back to the Honky Tonk and forget about telling Waylon good-bye.
The house was dark so she parked at the end of the driveway. Holt’s truck and trailer with Jackson’s Carpentry written on the side separated the back porch from the garden plot.
She laid a hand on the cross and whispered, “Waylon, I missed your furry old hide tonight. I never did tell you good-bye so that’s what I came to do tonight. You can’t be expecting me every night but it’s been a hell of a twenty-four hours. I could have bent your furry old ear for an hour tonight.”
“Who’s out here?” Holt whispered loudly from the back door.
“It’s me, Sharlene,” she said. “I’m here to visit Waylon one last time and you were supposed to be asleep. Besides, I wouldn’t even be here if you hadn’t interrupted my funeral today. I never got to tell him good-bye so I needed closure.”
He rounded the front end of the truck and leaned against the fender. “This going to be a habit?”
He was shirtless and wore some kind of baggy pajama bottoms. His chest was broad and his dark hair stuck up every which way, testifying that he’d been asleep. Sharlene felt guilty that she’d awakened him when he had to get up early the next morning and work.
“What kind of work did you do in Iraq?” He changed the subject abruptly.
“I’ll be leaving now. Good night,” she said.
“You were the one who kept talking about being there when you were drunk. I’ve never known a woman who was over there,” he said.
“I could talk all day and you still wouldn’t know how things really were in that place.”
“Kind of like raising two kids. Folks can talk about it all day but until they’ve actually done it, they can’t understand the job.”
“What happened to your sister?” Sharlene asked.
“Stupidity.”
“There might not be a cure for that disease but it’s not fatal. I see living proof every night. I am living proof after Saturday night. Took me all of Sunday and until Monday at noon to get rid of the headache.” Sharlene sat down in front of Waylon’s cross, pulled her knees up to her chin, and wrapped her arms around her legs.
Holt’s voice sounded weary when he started talking. “She got pregnant right out of high school and married the loser. He got drunk one too many times and tried to straighten out a curve before the kids were born. He wasn’t even old enough to buy the beer that killed him. She went from job to job until last May. She was partying with some of her friends and shouldn’t have driven home. Kind of like you were at the bar on Sunday night. She made it all the way home, got out of her car, and opened the front door to her house when her little dog ran out into the street. She ran after him. A drunk driver swerved to miss the dog and hit her. Impact killed her instantly. The dog ran off and no one ever saw it again. Her in-laws shifted the kids around among them for three weeks and then they called me and said they didn’t want to raise two kids forever so I inherited them.”
“I’m sorry. So the kids have been shoved from baby-sitter to grandma’s most of their lives?”
He nodded. “They need stability. You heard what Waylon said about drinking beer. She was too young for kids and too pretty for the men to leave alone.”
A hot summer wind picked up strands of Sharlene’s red hair and stuck them to her sweaty forehead. She brushed them back and blinked away the tears.
“Hot night, ain’t it?” he remarked.
“It’s not as bad as the Shamal wind,” she whispered.
“The what?” Holt asked.
“The Shamal winds. They’re not as strong as the Sharqi wind but they are just as wicked. We’d go hours and hours with restricted visibility. It was like a blizzard only with sand instead of snow. It gets into everything. Your hair, your ears, your boots, even between your teeth. The Shamals aren’t as strong as the Sharqi but the temperature is higher. More than a hundred degrees and thirty mile winds make you feel like you’re up against a sand blaster. I’m sorry. That’s just an information dump that wouldn’t make a bit of sense to you. The hot wind reminded me of the first time I encountered the winds of Iraq.”
“Well, thanks for the info dump. Go on and tell your cat the beer joint news. And Sharlene, it’s all right if you want to come around and talk to him in the middle of the night. Most of the time, I’ll be sound asleep.” He raised his arms over his head and stretched. His chest and abdomen were muscular and ripped like he’d been spending hours at a gym.
“Thanks, Holt. I’m sorry about your sister,” she said.
“Me too,” he said softly.
He disappeared around the front of the truck and she heard the door close softly. The yellow glow of the light coming out the kitchen window went out. She patted the cross a couple of times and went back home to the Honky Tonk.
She parked the small car in the garage and pushed the button to lower the doors. The steady hum of truckers’ engines out in the trailer spaces provided background music for the crickets and tree frogs. She opened the back door of her apartment, peeled off her clothes, and left them on the bathroom floor. A quick shower and shampoo and a favorite old nightshirt with a picture of Betty Boop on the front and she was ready for bed.
She laced her hands behind her head and stared at the dark ceiling. It became a screen for mental pictures from Iraq. The bombed out buildings. The little children in a war-torn country. The fear that was always right behind her. The joy when someone finally got to go home. The sorrow at leaving comrades behind maybe to never make it back to the States.
Chapter 3
Everything was eerily quiet under the heavy layer of camouflage. Sharlene missed Jonah. Even when they didn’t talk he was there beside her, but now he was gone. She’d flown with him back to the hospital praying all the time that he wasn’t really dead; had stood beside his body while Joyce and Kayla tried to resuscitate him; had saluted the coffin when they loaded it on the plane; and had refused to answer questions from her four best friends about why she was so sad.
Sweat ran down the bridge of her nose and dripped off the end. It reminded her of the icicles hanging on the house in Corn, Oklahoma, in the winter. When they started melting they dripped just like the sweat dripping off her nose.
The sun came up different in Iraq. She couldn’t explain the odd way it looked as it jumped up from the end of the earth and into the sky. She’d been hunkered down on the top of the building across the street from the store for the last hour. She’d had a late supper the night before at the hospital with her friends before she got the call. After she finished the job, she’d go back to the hospital and do her job without nearly enough sleep. But that was Sharlene’s life. At least once a week she got a call that meant she had extra duty. If she didn’t keep up with her regular routine at the hospital, questions would be asked that had no answers because the army didn’t train women to do what Sharlene did best. Hells bells, they didn’t train her either. They came one day and talked to her, sent her to a psychiatrist who said she could do it without falling apart, and then they put her on a plane to Iraq.
Kayla always asked the most questions and teased her about having a secret boyfriend who kept her out all night. Letting her think that was easier than telling her the truth. Sharlene stopped thinking about Kayla’s teasing the minute the store opened and the target stepped out into the light. He raised his hands. He looked like dozens of harmless old fellows who sold fruit and bread. No one would have ever mistaken him for a terrorist, yet intel said that he was the center of a cell that had been killing American soldiers. She blinked twice for good luck. Then laughter rang in the streets and children ran in front of the store. She wiped her brow and waited. How could the children laugh and play?
Same way that they did in godforsaken Corn, Oklahoma. That town and its way of life put you in this army, but it’s still home. This is home to these children. They might jump at a chance to leave it but it’ll always be home.
She couldn’t shoot into them. She waited until they had run into the store next door and the man started back inside. She blinked twice and squeezed the trigger. The terrorist dropped to one knee and fell forward onto the sidewalk as if he was praying, but he was kneeling in the wrong direction.
She awoke sitting up in bed holding her pillow like a rifle. The noise of kids giggling outside her bedroom window was very real. Why on earth would Iraqi children be in the Honky Tonk yard? And that absolutely could not be sunshine peeking through the mini-blinds. She hadn’t had time to get back to the makeshift barracks she shared with the four nurses.
Reality replaced the past in a jolt. She threw the pillow on the floor and moaned. “I’ve become just like Larissa and Cathy.” Both of those women hated, no, they abhorred (that sounded so much worse than merely hated) mornings. And now that she’d owned the Tonk a few months she was growing up to be just like them.
She sat up and peeked out the mini-blinds to see Waylon and Judd playing tag. Their hair was plastered to their heads with sweat. They both wore shorts
and knit shirts. Other than Judd’s dark ponytail flying in the hot Texas wind, they were two identical blurs as they sprinted in a foot race from the end of the Tonk out to the first trees beyond the trailer park.
She remembered playing like that with her brothers until they each got too old to run and romp with her. Nostalgia and homesickness hit and she was glad she’d planned to go home to Corn, Oklahoma, for a couple of days. She’d watch her nieces and nephews play in the big backyard and listen to her mother scold her about her biological clock being broken. She’d tell her mother the same thing she had ever since she’d come home from Iraq. Women didn’t marry at sixteen anymore. They waited on marriage and children. It wasn’t unusual for a woman to be forty or even more before starting a family. At which time her mother would cluck her tongue and say the whole world had gone plumb crazy.
She stretched and was about to throw back the sheets when she heard Judd screaming at Holt. “I got to go right now. Where’s the bathroom, anyway?”
Sharlene ran to the apartment door and swung it open. “In here, Judd. You can use my bathroom.”
“Sorry,” Holt said.
Sharlene ignored him. When a boy child had to go really bad and couldn’t find a bathroom, he could always find a tree or a bush to hide behind. It wasn’t so easy for the girl children.
Sharlene put a hand on her shoulder and ushered her through the living room, down the short hall, and right into the bathroom. “Right in here.”
Judd yanked at her shorts on the way and she settled her fanny on the potty. Her feet didn’t touch the floor and she swung them as she looked around at the room. It wasn’t as big as the bathroom in their new house. That one had a bathtub that Uncle Holt said was as old as God. Judd wondered how Uncle Holt knew God’s birthday and how old He was as she rolled off a fist full of toilet paper.
“I’m getting dressed. If you need anything, holler at me,” Sharlene said.
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