In July, we stole his mother’s car and ran away. He probably imagined we’d be gone a few days, I thought forever. We lasted a month, running out of money in Florida. That last week we parked out in Destin where we slept in the car and lived on the beach. The bikinis got to Hank. The water got to me. I was sent home to my mother pregnant, and she was irate, even when it turned out that Hank would only be my stepbrother for another few weeks.
I put on the socks I thieved from the Flea and start walking toward the highway. I’m a little worried about money. I’m only spending when I’m on the road. I know that as soon as I’m done here I should go right back to my mother’s in Virginia and get a job, but ever since I was in prison, I’ve tried in vain to make myself do the things that ought to be done. Of course I have held various jobs: convenience store clerk, waitress, organic farmer (well a brief spell in Mexico where I was paid in food and shelter), but it is so hard to live in the place where everyone knows your shame.
I’m close to Highway 59 when Hank’s truck pulls up on the side of the road and he heaves himself out, wearing his glasses. “Get in,” he says, “I’m taking you to Gautier.”
“Your girlfriend’s gonna leave your ass for good.”
He wipes his wet hair off his forehead. “I don’t want you hitching—it ain’t the sixties.”
“Are you high?” I move my bag, which has begun cutting into my shoulder.
“Not more than usual.”
Every few years either Hank or I try to get back together. It never works much past a week’s delirious phone calls and a fevered meet up in an overpriced motel. Hank knows me like nobody does, but when we’re together everything seems to escalate in a bad way.
I get in the truck and turn to him, his eyes look glazed behind his lenses. “You can’t drive,” I say, “you’re drunker than Cooter Brown.”
He waves me off. “I’m fine. Just had some bourbon. Top shelf. I had to get to it before her.”
“It’s nine-thirty.”
“It’s been a busy morning.” He goes to start the ignition.
I put my hand over his keys. “I’m not riding with you in this condition.”
“Goddamn it, Lucinda, don’t be so puritanical. Do you want to go to Gautier or not?” He throws up his hands. “You drive then.”
I grab my bag from the floorboard. “I’ll get myself there. I don’t need you to come with me.”
He turns in his seat. “You must have your damn license back by now.”
I shake my head. “I don’t.” I hesitate. “I haven’t driven since the accident.”
He stares at me. “But it’s got to have been fifteen years or more . . . How did you meet me last year in Alabama?”
I look at the dust on the toes of my boots. “I took a bus and then I took a cab.”
He massages his eyes under his glasses. “Look, it’ll be fine, honey. You’ll remember. It’ll all come back to you.”
The night the woman that I killed died was cloudy, rainless, overhead a mystery of sky. It was September and I wanted to be close to my youth and the secret purity of death. I walked my mother’s acres spilling my second beer and communing with the trees. When I started my car it was two in the morning. She was leaving a bar at the exact same time. As I drove, the night swelled and pulled black before me. I went too fast because I felt I had to. I broke her chest because I didn’t see.
“Lucinda?”
I hug my bag and close my eyes.
“Darlin, I’ll be right here if you forget.”
I hear Hank get out of the truck and walk around, then open the passenger door. “Scoot over,” he says. I don’t move. He puts a warm hand on the side of my face and says in my ear: “Do it for your mother.”
I take a deep breath, let go of the bag and slide over. I adjust the seat so I’m closer to the wheel. I turn the keys too hard and the engine sounds angry. Then I push my foot down on the brake and my right hand moves us from park. Next is the gas and if my body will obey, we go backward.
My father’s not at the trailer park, but his neighbors remember him. They seem to think he moved to one in Mobile. They said Kim was with him and left behind a birdcage and two plastic flamingoes, which Hank and I decline to retrieve.
By the time we reach the trailer park in Mobile where the land has no trees and everything is blasted desolate by the sun, it’s late afternoon. Hank’s girlfriend has been calling him, but he hasn’t answered. He just looks down at his phone, watching it tremble. I wonder how much longer he’ll hold out.
When we pull up, my father is sitting on the crooked porch steps, hugging his knees to his chest like a boy exhausted from swimming. He’s in cutoff jeans, holding a tallboy and when he sees who’s in the truck, he comes off the porch to greet us in the gravel drive, his walk an agile stagger. I can tell that he’s coming off a bender the way his grainy eyes pucker. Kim stays at the kitchen window making fried chicken, and he doesn’t invite us in.
“Hey now.” He gives me a rub on the back and shakes Hank’s hand. “Didn’t expect to see you two. Tweedle Dee”—he taps my head and, eyeing Hank—“Tweedle Dumb.”
Hank drags three plastic chairs over the dirt coming up through the grass.
“Y’all staying in Mobile?” My father sits and his cartoon tattoos distend over his belly. Somehow you can see his ribs and the man still has a gut.
“I’ve come here looking for you, Dad.”
He squints at me, annoyed, like I’m yelling. “Well, now you found me.” He looks away.
I decide to try for sweetness. “What happened to your phone? You need a bill paid or something?”
“Don’t offer him nothing,” says Hank.
“Naw, I don’t need to be wasting my money. It’s Kim that likes gabbing on the phone, not me. Let her waste hers. How long’s it been, girl? You look exactly the same. But you, Hank, you put on some weight, boy.”
“It’s been about three years, Dad,” I say.
He looks at me with yellowed brown eyes. “Three years? You must not have seen this, then. We bought this here.” He waves proudly behind him at the flimsy butter-green trailer.
“Where’d you get the money for that, Carl?” asks Hank.
“Counting cards at Blackjack.”
“But you can’t pay for your damn phone bill?”
“Leave it, Hank,” I tell him. “I got something important to say to you, Dad.”
“Hey he ain’t knock you up again, did he?”
Hank is on his feet, his plastic chair toppled over. Behind him is a row of mailboxes with crosses on top.
“Hank,” I stand, my arm out, “the man is seventy—he’s too old to fight.”
Hank glares at him. “He ain’t too old to start one.”
My father doesn’t bother getting up, but all his old effrontery is mottled sublimely in his face. “I’ll be in my grave before you get a hit over me.” He turns and spits in the dust near my feet. “Girl, you come all the way out here just to tell me some bad damn news? Well go on then. Who’d you kill this time? Whatever it is I ain’t paying for it. Even if I had the money, and I don’t.”
Like a switch has been thrown, my eyes fill.
“I knew it’d be like this,” Hank says. “You want me to beat the shit out of him?”
“Dad,” I say, my throat tight, “we’re going.”
“That’s y’all’s decision.” My father crosses his arms over his chest.
Hank steps in front of me, saying under his breath, “What about your momma?”
When my mother told me on the phone that she had stage four cancer, I stubbed out my cigarette in the green curl of my apartment complex’s front yard, but smoke continued to rise from the butt like it was rising from the ground. She asked me to come home and take care of her and I wanted to say no. I have barely taken care of anybody, not myself, not even Levi. He was seven when I first left. For the two years I was in, I wouldn’t let her bring him to the prison. After I got out, I owed the state, the hospital, and
couldn’t look at anyone who knew me, and so I left again.
I take the papers out from my bag and hand them to my father. “Mom needs you to sign these.”
He looks at them and immediately gets red. “I ain’t signing anything.”
I open my bag again, taking out the gun. “Then I need you to sign those.”
Hank tries to grab my arm, but I step away. “Hank, you can wait in the truck, but I’m not leaving without him signing.”
“You better not do anything crazy, you being a felon.” My father grins, but his eyes are boiling.
“Hank, give him the pen.”
My father glares at the pen in Hank’s hand. “You’re forcing me illegally? Under duress?”
“That’s right, Dad, criminal that I am.”
“It’s a shame that a child would pull a gun on her own father. I want you to know Kim’s in there calling the police.”
Hank is looking from me to my father to Kim in the kitchen window. I don’t look at the trailer, even the thought of this terrifies me. “I don’t care,” I say.
“I don’t think you have the balls to use it.” My father gestures to the little pistol.
I lift it from his chest to his head. “But you wouldn’t be the first person I’ve killed, right?”
“Honey,” Hank says, “we can figure out a better way to do this.”
“If I did sign,” says my father, “and I’m not saying I will, I want the two of you to never come round here again.”
“Carl, why would we want to, with you always poking old wounds?” says Hank, disgusted.
My father looks at me, hands on his hips. “Why does she want me to sign it now?”
“Because she’s sick. Because she’s dying and she doesn’t want to die as your wife. She might live another year, but then she’s gone.” The tears come now, fat and terrible. “And we’ll never see her again. There won’t be an again. So we have to say yes to whatever she wants, to whatever she asks me and you.”
“Of what?” My father demands, running a hand through his gray hair. “She’s dying of what?”
I gesture at Hank and wipe my face with my shirt. “Cancer,” Hank says.
“So please sign it,” I say. “Please. It’s what she wants.”
My father takes the pen and leaning on Hank’s back, signs the papers in his uneven scrawl. Hank takes them and looks them over. I let the gun drop, but can’t bring myself to put it back in my purse. As I walk to the truck, my legs jelly, desperate to sit and hide in that hot metal space away from the light, Kim comes out onto the porch and in the snap of the screen I hear my father say, “You think you’d feel these things.” Said to himself as if he were an actor who finally finds he is alone onstage.
Hank drives us to Panama City and parks in front of the beach. He buys a bottle of Canadian whiskey and we lie out in the truck bed. I take off my boots and he rubs my feet. It’s warm but there’s a merciful thick breeze.
“Can I ask you something?” Hank props himself up on an elbow.
“Why not?” I take a drink from the bottle and curl my back on his chest.
“Why’d you wait so long to tell Levi I was his father?”
“I don’t know.” I shrug deeper into his body. “Mom always said it was better that way. She thought it would be confusing for him since you were my stepbrother.”
He sits up. “That again? It wasn’t even for a year.”
“But still.” Above, the stars are too many to count.
“If he’d known I could’ve done more.” Hank lifts the bottle from me. “You think I should’ve done more?”
“I don’t know,” I say, but I do know.
He takes a long drink. “It’s not looking like I’m gonna have me any other kids, which means Levi’s my only son and what have I done for him?”
I take back the bottle, tracing its mouth with my finger, round and round. “When I was a little girl, sometimes at church they’d skip the service and stage Judgment. You never knew whether Mrs. Monroe in the starring role of Jane, or Mr. Daniels playing Lance were gonna be damned or resurrected based on the measure of their various sins until the angels or devils came to take them. But who took them was never the worst part, it was the waiting.”
He leans forward, looking down at me. “You saying it’s too late?”
I sit up and try to find where the night meets the water. “The truth is my mom does everything—did everything for him anyway.”
“But I feel bad, Lucinda,” Hank says. “Could you maybe tell her that? I want her to know, I really do, that I feel so bad.” He sinks back until he’s lying flat.
When Levi was born, I didn’t want to be a mother. I thought I would, or hoped I would later. I don’t wish that it didn’t happen, I only wish it had happened differently.
In the morning, the beach is empty except for a couple of joggers. Hank and I strip naked and race each other down the hot white sand to the breaking waves. We are happy, we are frightened, and we are not saved.
The Diplomat’s Daughter
THE KALAHARI DESERT, BEIRUT, 2001–2011
Natalia used to be a wife. His name was Erik. His name was Viggo. His name was Christien. His name was Lucas. His name was Nils.
He hit her. They had no children. He drove a motorcycle. Ran a company. Was a pastor, a surfer, an accountant. He taught her how to shoot, to drink, to bleed. Her husband. Her boss. Her man. See her as student, as interpreter, as waitress. See her learning how to skin: you start at the neck, then you dig into the hide, into the cooling fat, and pull away from what lived.
She had a missionary zeal he did not give her. It was a fatalistic streak he admitted from the start was hers. He was, you see, a Calvinist at heart.
“Erik,” she asked, “am I ready?”
“No,” he joked, scratching his beard. “It’s Christien.”
Christien.
When she spoke that name always her voice hid behind her.
What he did to her was done to them all. There was an essential equality in their small company. But she could admit she was the favorite. Though attention is not always a benefit. In some cases, it merely means more scrutiny. And for the purpose of building endurance, they were all Erik’s in ways he thought necessary.
When training was over she was called to his temporary office. The door locked as it closed and the room shrank.
“You did well, Natalia,” Erik said, walking out to meet her.
“Thank you.” She was almost happy.
He pushed his thumbs into her shoulders, kneading bone as she undressed and bent over the desk. Through the pendulum of the blinds she saw the dust that colored everything wheat. The bunkers trembling in the sear. The absence of humanity.
“It is a simple assignment. And in a week I’ll meet you there.” He straightened, zipping up his pants. “Now have you learned your Spanish?”
She laughed. “Where am I going? Mexico?”
“Ask Lucas,” he said.
“I don’t like that game.” She frowned. “Besides, training’s over you said.”
Out in the world, she was most often Viggo Hjort’s wife: when buying guns, guarding the client, making a drop. But for those few last months of 2010, she worked alone in Beirut, becoming familiar with the city, going for long walks by the sea, getting closer to the boy, to the bomb.
The night before the bomb, she startled awake in the dark, queasy with dread. It was only pacing the apartment, drinking Cokes, going over him again and again: Daddy—what he’d looked like, everything he’d ever said—collecting proof that she’d once been a daughter, which allowed Natalia to fall back to sleep. By the time she heard the alarm, her alarm had dissolved; its logic evasive. And by the time she was facing the bathroom mirror brushing her teeth, Erik had arrived in the lobby, and Natalia was ready to be a wife again.
LYNCHBURG, VIRGINIA, 1997
“But I don’t wanna go in the kitchen—Bill’s still watching TV,” Milla said.
Overhead, the fan
curdled the air in the trailer and the cicadas beat their bodies against windows that had no screens.
“Go to sleep then.” From where she lay on the mattress, Natalia couldn’t see the moon, but she could see it pushing bright against the wall.
“My stomach hurts,” Milla said.
Natalia yawned. “Put pants on if you’re going out there.”
Milla flipped onto her back, squeezing up her stomach. “Fat people still get hungry you know. Mom told me I might get skinny when I hit puberty. If I get tall then my fat will stretch out. What? I’m the liar? We were supposed to stop by Bill’s then go to Grandma’s. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but this shithole isn’t Grandma’s.”
“Stop moving, you’re making the sheet come off. It just got too late to drive.”
“You mean Mom got too drunk to drive. If we call Dad—”
“No.” Natalia sat up, pointing at her. “You hear me, Milla? No.” She flopped back down, fanning her long brown hair across the yellowed pillow. “Besides, it’s like a seven-hour time difference.”
Milla rolled up. “I’m getting a bowl of cereal.”
She grabbed Milla’s arm. “Put pants on, I said.”
Milla twisted free, making for the kitchen. Natalia scrambled across the mattress, pinning her to the door, hissing, “If you go out there I’ll put peanut butter all over your face and set the dog on you.”
Milla tried to bite her. Natalia took her by the shoulders and slammed her against the door, smacking her head against the hollow wood, and she dropped to the carpet.
“Hey.” Natalia lightly kicked her thigh. “Get up. You’re okay.” She tried to pull her up by the shoulder. “C’mon. Hey, you’re not crying, are you?”
“No.” Milla sniffed.
Three years older and a foot taller, Natalia scooped her little sister up.
“Put me down, retard,” Milla said.
“Don’t say retard.” Natalia tossed her onto the mattress. “You’re overtired.”
The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead Page 5