And she’d now begun to face the truth that she really didn’t like her kids. She’d had them for Buddy’s sake and no other reason. Now Buddy was gone but they were still with her and every day it was harder to go on pretending she cared about them like a mother should. She could see in their eyes that the kids sensed the truth. Was it any wonder the girl was such a pain in the ass, the boy a mute little freak? What could be worse for a kid than knowing his momma didn’t love him? She tried not to think what her momma would say if she was alive and knew how she felt. Guilt fed on her heart like a mangy dog. She started allowing herself a couple of drinks before bed to help her get to sleep. Before long she was having more than a couple.
After three months she gave up all pretense. She quit the Ford place and went to work in a bar called The Lucky Star and shortly thereafter began bringing home men. Most were a one-time thing, some she got together with for several nights in a row. She didn’t stick with any of them for as long as a week.
It was like Baytown all over again, only now she was drinking much harder.
It went on like that until three months ago, until the morning she woke up while it was still dark outside and the radio was blaring “Hello Walls” and one of the dresser lamps was on and there was a naked man sleeping on either side of her and she had no idea who they were. The big one on her right had a crude tattoo of a coiled snake on his back. The bedroom was an unholy mess. Empty beer cans littered the floor, a few gleaming whiskey bottles. Clothes strewn everywhere. Spilled ashtrays. The room was miasmal with the thick tangled smells of whiskey and ashes, sex and sweat. She vaguely recalled meeting these two in some bar, riding with them in their truck, that they were from Vidor, just up the road. Her lack of clear memory added to her fear. She eased out of bed and went to the closet and slipped on a robe and got the .38 out of the toolbox, then went to the blasting radio and turned it off. The sudden silence seemed to plug her ears. She kicked the mattress hard and the big one groaned and pulled the sheet up over his head. The other one snorted and mumbled and cracked one eye open and finally saw her standing at the foot of the bed in a shooter’s stance with the cocked pistol in both hands and pointed at his head. His eyes widened and he raised up on one elbow and said, “What? What?”
“Get him up,” she said. “And you get your asses out of here. I mean now.”
He shook the big man until he came up from under the sheet snarling, “Quit, goddammit!” Then he saw her with the gun and got big-eyed too—but only for a second. He sat up and laced his muscular arms around his raised knees and grinned at her. His arms and chest also carried tattoos, all of them poorly rendered. Jailhouse art. She’d come to know it when she saw it.
Lookit here, she thinks, at the fine company you’re keeping. You really come a long way in this world, ain’t you, girl?
“The fuck you doing, sweetpea?” the big man said. “Put that thing down before I ram it up your ass.”
He scared her so bad she couldn’t stand it.
“Ram this.”
The gunshot rocked the room as the bullet passed over their heads and through the bedroom wall and ricocheted off the block wall in the bathroom and whanged against a pipe.
They threw up their hands and gaped at her with eyes big as boiled eggs.
O lord, she thought, it’ll be cops all over the place in a minute.
She pointed the piece at the big one’s chest and drew back the hammer.
“You shitheads got ten seconds to get out of my life.” Her voice sounded far away through the ringing in her ears.
They scrambled out of bed and snatched up about half their clothes and nearly ran through the walls in their haste to depart the premises.
She followed them to the door and kept the gun on them till they’d got into their pickup and roared off down the street and their taillights disappeared around the corner.
She’d expected to see the neighborhood porchlights blazing, to see people at their doors and gawking toward her house. Expected to hear sirens closing in. But all along the block the houses remained dark under a sky just now dawning gray. Not a soul in sight.
What made her think anybody’d give a damn?
She went inside and locked the door behind her and then went to the bedroom, trying hard not to let a single thought into her head because whatever the thought might be she knew it wouldn’t be a good one.
She was cleaning up the mess when she caught sight of the kids at the door, watching her. The boy was sucking his thumb and holding to his sister’s T-shirt and looked like he’d been crying. Mary Marlene looked pale and scared and like she was trying hard not to show it. Dolores felt her heart turn over in her chest. It’s your doing, girl, she told herself—your doing they have to go through this. The girl would never again appear to Dolores as vulnerable as she did at this moment, nor would her voice ever again quaver as it did now when she asked, “Momma? The party over?”
8
She’s heard it said that life is not one damn thing after another—it’s the same damn thing over and over.
Got that right. And whoever said what goes round comes round. For damn sure right on that one too.
The question is, what are you supposed to do when that same damn thing that keeps coming round gets so awful you just can’t stand it anymore? What then? That’s the question. Been the question for a while now, and she ponders it under the steaming shower until the water turns cold.
She dries her hair as thoroughly as she can with a towel, then goes to the kitchen, where a small breeze is coming through the window, to let it finish drying and to do her nails. She sits at the table and puts each foot in turn up on a chair and very carefully applies a coat of Crimson Kiss to the nail of each toe. Then she does her fingernails. While she waits for them to dry she listens to the radio. Oldie-goldies. “Summertime Blues” and “Be My Baby” and “Hit the Road, Jack” and “All Shook Up.”
She now goes to the bedroom and stands at the dresser mirror and stares at her face and decides not to apply makeup. That’s your face right there, girl, Smiling Jack’s keepsake and all. You can paint it all you want but it won’t change a thing. For the next ten minutes she brushes her copper hair till it hangs softly, brightly on her shoulders. Then she picks through the dresses in the closet and she finds the one she’s looking for and slips it on.
She checks herself in the mirror again and thinks, Well, now, ain’t I something? The beauty in the mirror gives her a saucy wink. She’s changed stations on the radio and Ray Charles is singing about the girl with the red dress on who do the boogie-woogie all night long, yeah, yeah. Her hair jounces in time to her nifty little dance steps, the little dress rising high on her thighs as she executes a side-scissor-step across the floor and follows it with a spin and a wicked left-right-left combination of hip thrusts. Yeah, yeah!
Her breasts swell above the low neckline of the little cocktail dress, her nipples jut against the fabric. Buddy bought her the dress for their first anniversary but didn’t see it on her until they got home—and when he did, he said he’d made a mistake, that he hadn’t realized it was going to look quite like that, and he sure didn’t want her wearing it in public because he’d be in one fight after another with all the guys who were bound to look at her in ways he wouldn’t be able to let them get away with. He said he was sorry, he knew he sounded like a jerk, but that was how he felt and there was no way he could lie about it. She kissed him for his sweetness and promised she would wear it only at home, only for him, and they had enjoyed the hell out of this dress many a time, yes they had. This is the first time she has worn it in, what, nearly two years.
Two years. Is that all it’s been? Not quite. A hair shy of two years, actually.
Which means that exactly two years ago he was still alive and she’d been married going on five years and if she was to think real hard about it she might be able to remember exactly what they were doing two years ago, her and Buddy, but all she knows for absolute sure is what they weren’t doi
ng. What they weren’t doing was expecting him to be so goddamn dead so goddamn soon and leaving her all by herself for the world to make whore soup out of all over again—that’s what they absolutely for goddamn sure were not doing … and if you start to cry now, you little cooze …
Okay, all right, I’m fine. See? No crying. No tears here. All smiles am I.
Two years … Might as well be two hundred.
Quit it! That was then, this is now. And anyhow, just look at you. Damn dress never looked so good. You ain’t getting older, honey, you’re getting better.
Yeah, right. I ain’t rightly sure I can stand any more of this kind of better.
How about some pukey self-pity? You stand some more of that?
Believe I had my fill of that too, thank you.
She also believes a drink would help plenty right about now but then remembers there’s not a drop left in the house. No help there.
Oh Lordy, where’s some help?
Roger Miller is singing dang him, dang him, they oughta take a rope and hang him.
She knows exactly what would help right now. More than a drink. More than anything has ever helped except for Buddy.
To shoot something.
That would do the trick, she knows it would.
She can feel it in her bones.
9
The day after she ran the two Vidor dickheads out of her house at gunpoint, she packed up the truck and took off with the kids again, heading east for the Sabine River and Louisiana just on the other side of it, not thirty miles away. Like she’d heard some old boy say in the bar one time, the only thing worth getting out of Texas is your ass—and she was dead set on both changing her luck and getting as far out of Texas as her meager grubstake would take her.
But she’d gone only a dozen miles when the truck overheated and the motor started clattering and black smoke came pouring out the tailpipe. By the time she pulled into a garage in Orange she’d burned up a bearing. The mechanic said he could have it fixed in ten days or so but the bill was going to be a whopper.
She’d felt like sitting down and crying right there on the floor of the garage. Fixing the truck would cost all the money she’d been counting on to get settled in New Orleans, maybe, or in Florida, better yet. But there she still was in Texas, with the Sabine within spitting distance, practically. She asked the mechanic if he knew of any jobs in town and he said no ma’am he sure didn’t. A young woman waiting to get tires put on her car overheard her and asked if she’d ever worked as a cocktail waitress. Dolores sighed and asked if there was any other kind of work in the world, and the girl laughed and said she knew what she meant. She said there was an opening where she worked, at The Barnacle, in Port Arthur, just on down the road. Two hours later she had the job. An hour after that she used the last of her money to rent the little frame house off Proctor Street.
Over the next two weeks she felt like she could never quite get her breath, felt as if she had something small but as ashy and compact as a chunk of coal lodged in her chest. Her pulse raced constantly. She knew it was fear but she told herself she didn’t know why she should be so afraid, and the lie only made the fear worse, because what she was afraid of was that she would have to go on being herself, and she didn’t believe she could stand much more of that.
And then she met Billy Boy Renfro in The Barnacle one night and he asked if she’d like to have pie and coffee with him when she got off work. He was the first who’d ever asked her to join him for something other than a drink, and she was caught by such surprise she said sure, why not, more out of curiosity than anything else. She’d reached a point where not much made her curious. He was short and wiry, a welder at the shipworks, and he was funny and sweet and behaved like a gentleman. By the time he dropped her off at her place at two in the morning and kissed her goodnight and said he’d see her tomorrow, she was dizzy with the idea that maybe she still had a little luck left and maybe it was about to turn.
She’d known it wasn’t going to get far with him, known it in her bones. But when you feel like you’re drowning—feel it not just in awful dreams at night but even when you’re awake and walking around in the broad daylight, feel it when you’re having coffee in the morning or staring at your kids from across a room or suddenly catching a look at yourself in the mirror—when you’re always feeling like that, like you’re not even sure you’re going to be able to draw your next breath … well, it’s no surprise you’ll grab at anything drifting by, grab at it and hope it’ll keep you from going under just yet …
They got together almost every evening. He’d come to The Barnacle just as she was finishing her shift for the night and they’d do some drinking and dancing for a while in the company of some of the other waitresses and their boyfriends. Then they would go to her place where the kids had much earlier put themselves to bed and they’d make love into the night.
One time they saw her neighbor Ellis Corman watching them from his bathroom window and Dolores shook her breasts at him like a stripper and Ellis suddenly remembered to turn off his bathroom light and they laughed and Billy Boy pulled down the blind.
They’d been seeing each other for six weeks by then and she said he was spending so much time at her place he might as well live there instead of with his Uncle Raymond like he did. He said he didn’t know about that. She said she did—and put a nipple to his mouth while her other hand roamed over him brazenly. The next day he brought his clothes from his uncle’s house and hung them in her closet.
He seemed always to have plenty of money and he didn’t mind spending it. He told her that besides his welding job at the works he played poker twice a week at Purple Jim’s garage up in Bridge City and had been on a run of luck lately. “Course now,” he said, “there’s times it goes the other way, too, no matter how good you are, and when it does, well, that’s when you get by with drinking beer ruther than Jim Beam and eating hot dogs ruther than steak.”
He said she ought to be driving something nicer than that rattletrap truck and so she traded it in on a yellow Ford two-door and he paid the rest in cash.
She was astonished to see how well he got along with the kids. Dolores hadn’t seen them take a shine to anybody since Buddy. Mary Marlene couldn’t get enough of fawning on him, and Jesse, wonder of wonders, would sometimes get in whispered conversation with him. She asked once what the boy said to him and Billy Boy just grinned and winked at Jesse and said, “That’s our little secret.” It was one of the few instances in the past two years she’d seen Jesse smile.
The first couple of times he went to play poker at Purple Jim’s after moving in with her, she came home from work and took a hot bath and waited up for him, freshly powdered and wearing sexy new underwear under her robe. But he both times came in a little too drunk to do much about it. Even though she was angry she kept it to herself, but after the second time she didn’t bother with the fancy undies and the bath powder anymore.
The following week, when he didn’t come home till dawn and then announced with a chuckle that his luck had gone a little sour and he’d lost nearly three hundred dollars, she got furious.
It was partly because of the money, of course. Hearing him talk about losing three hundred dollars, laughing about it, like there was no chance at all the world might ever do him harm, made her angry in ways she couldn’t have explained if she’d tried. She’d never been able to laugh about money, goddammit. But it was something else too—a sudden, inexplicable surge of fear. She was so frightened, and so furious because she was frightened and didn’t know why she should be, that all she could think to do was tell him what a dumb sonofabitch he was to waste his money that way and come in too drunk to even give a proper fuck to the best-looking woman he’d ever have.
He looked at her for a moment like he was trying to see if she was joking, but she could see in his eyes how her face must look, and he lost his smile quick and said he didn’t much appreciate her talking that way to him.
She said she wasn’t really al
l that interested in what some drunk money-waster did or did not appreciate.
He said she ought to have more respect for her kids, if not for him, than to use that sort of language in the house.
She said she would talk any fucking way she pleased in her own fucking house and her fucking kids were none of his fucking concern, thank you very much.
And he was out the door and gone.
Real smart, girl. Let him see you for what you really are, that’ll wow him for damn sure. She felt like howling.
He came by the next day just before she left for work and they told each other they were sorry and they kissed and made up and sealed the reconciliation with a quickie before she had to rush off to the job. But damage had been done. She saw it in the shift of his eyes, felt it in his touch. She heard it in the vagueness of his voice.
That night when she got home he was watching a late movie on TV, and she got a beer and joined him on the couch. They watched the movie for a while and then during a commercial he told her they’d just been given an extra-special job down at the shipyard, a priority job for the Coast Guard, and he’d be working double shifts for a time, round the damn clock practically, and so like as not he’d most of the time eat and bunk right there at the yard. She said that was good news, the extra work—and even as she told herself to keep her mouth shut and not say anything more about it, she added, “Oughta help some to make up for that three hundred dollars, huh?” He gave her a look she couldn’t read and then turned back to the TV without saying anything.
She didn’t see him for the next ten days. And now she began to have the drowning dream nearly every night—the dream of treading water way out in the Gulf, so far out that the shoreline was no more than a dark line on the horizon. She’d have no idea how she got out there, rising and falling on the swells under a vast gray sky and looking toward the distant shore and knowing she could never swim that far. She’d be exhausted from the struggle to keep her head above water—and then a wave would close over her and she’d be sinking, face upward to the receding silver surface, feeling her lungs starting to tear as her feet touched the soft mud bottom and sank into it and her mouth opened for air and filled with the coppery strangling water … and she’d waken in a soaking sweat and with her heart lunging hard against her ribs.
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