The first time she’d had the dream she was so scared by it she started drinking at midmorning and was passed out by late afternoon and did not go to work that night. When she called in sick with a hangover for the third time that week the manager told her if she was going to be all that undependable he’d have to let her go. “Well, I guess I’ll just let you go, mullethead!” she said—and banged down the phone as hard as she could and hoped she’d blown out his eardrum.
She was drunk as a coot when Billy Boy came in just after sundown but not so drunk she couldn’t smell the perfume on him or see the lipstick on his shirt. The next day her memory of the fight was vague. Lots of yelling and cursing. A dim recollection of going at him with both fists and landing a couple of good ones. Of glaring at him while she caught her breath—and him standing there and fingering a bloody lip and looking at her in such a pitying way she wished she had the strength to hit him again. Of telling him if he was so hot for other women he could go fuck them all and when he was done with them he could damn well go fuck himself.
She had clear memory of the sound of his car driving away.
That was three days ago.
Since then she’d sat home all day, drinking and knowing he’d come back because he’d left his clothes and a man leaving for good does not leave his clothes behind.
And then this morning his clothes were gone.
Took his clothes and her car.
Left her nothing except all to herself.
10
She is sitting on the front steps watching the lowering sun set the sky aflame. The air is hot and shrill with cicadas. It smells of dust. The Spanish moss dangling from the oaks tilts slightly in a small waft of air. The shadows of the trees now stretch nearly across the street.
Almost suppertime. Before long the neighborhood will resound with the high cries of mothers calling their children home, and with the distant echoes of “Coming, momma! Commming.”
She has never joined in the evening’s communal call for kids. Her children won’t anyway come home till just before dark, as always, after everybody else in the neighborhood has sat down to supper.
Her children … The words have an alien sound. Smart-mouth Mary Marlene and closemouthed little Jesse. Jesus. They deserve better. Had the best daddy in the world but no momma worth a damn.
Ain’t but one way, girl. You know it.
What about them? Be awful for them.
Can’t be more awful than what they got now. A momma who don’t love her children … that’s an awful thing. Anyhow, Billy Boy maybe don’t give a damn about you but he won’t let nothing happen to them.
She regards the way the leaves on the trees shine bright as red glass with the sun just above them.
“I hate to seeeee … that evenin sun go downnnnn.” She snorts with a half-laugh, half-sob, and tells herself to cut it out. She feels like most of the air has been let out of the world and it’s all she can do to achieve the next breath.
The sun is almost touching the trees now. Heat rises off the ground like a slow exhalation.
All right. Enough of this.
She stands up and feels the dress clinging wetly to her belly and the backs of her thighs, then goes inside. The house is full of shadows. In the bedroom she peels off the dress. The radio is playing “You Don’t Have to Be a Baby to Cry.” She notices dark smears on the dress and is puzzled and then looks in the dresser mirror and sees mascara rivulets on her cheeks. She is surprised, because she certainly doesn’t feel like crying, not now, not anymore.
As she washes her face over the bathroom sink, a euphoria such as she’s never before felt in her life swells in her chest until she aches with the sheer pleasure of it. She pats her face dry with a towel. The bathroom mirror fills with her grin. She regards the smiling fresh-scrubbed look of herself and can hardly believe how good she feels.
Maybe this is how it feels to people who have cancer and then get it cut out and are all cured again, something like this. She feels wonderful because for the first time in longer than she can remember she does not feel afraid. She has lived in fear for so long that, now, in its sudden absence, she feels almost happily drunk, the way you do in about the middle of your fourth quick drink.
She goes into the bedroom and gets the pistol off the pillow and then goes to the front window of the living room and looks out at the reddened evening. In long keening voices, mothers are calling their children home.
For some reason she will never understand, she thinks of her father. Pictures him in his little cell at Huntsville. Lying there in his bunk and feeling his worthless life wasting away heartbeat by heartbeat behind those prison walls. She wishes now she’d at least sent him a postcard.
“Dear daddy—wish you were here.”
You were here, you son of a bitch, I’d sure enough shoot you.
No, not true, I wouldn’t. That’d be the biggest favor anybody ever did you in your whole entire life. Leave you in that damn prison is what I’d really do. And you’d go right on dying little by little, breath by breath, over all the years to come. Because you’re too much of a coward to do anything else but. Because you’re way too damn much of a coward to do this.
Naked at the window in the dying light of day, she puts the muzzle in her mouth. She hears a fly buzz as she squeezes the trigger.
There is a sudden loss of sound except for a faraway hum—and in that instant her skull feels abruptly stuffed with cotton.
There is a slight muted thump somewhere at the top of her head.
And—all in the same instant—she feels a wild exhilaration.
Whooooeeeee!
And then that instant passes and the next begins and—
BLAM!
She is knocked backwards from the window and falls against the sofa and tumbles to the floor and plunges into the deep end of the world’s vast pool of pain—pain that annihilates all possibility of definable sensation. It overwhelms everything except the roaring in her skull.
And then the roaring stops. Everything stops.
No sound. No pain.
There. All done. Dead.
Hmm … Not quite.
Dead people don’t itch.
Her nose itches.
She is aware of the smells of piss and gunsmoke.
She finds herself on her hands and knees.
Something oozes along her breast, bunches at the nipple, drops to the floor in a viscous gob. Hard to tell what it is because she can’t see too clearly at the moment. She tries to wipe her eyes and falls on her face. The jolt seems to dislodge something in her head, but, except for the stirrings of a faraway ache in some distant region of her skull, there is still no pain, no sound.
Back up on all fours. More drops of goop hit the floor. They’re coming from her head.
Pieces of my head, she thinks. Why ain’t I dead?
She tries to shout that question but when she opens her mouth what emerges is a gargling dark-red rush of blood.
One eye comes clear and she sees the gun lying a few feet away. She crawls to it, clutches it. She swallows blood, and it occurs to her that the taste is much like the dirty-penny taste of the loneliness.
She’s upright now, leaning her shoulder against the wall, her hair sopping, the floor slippery under her bare feet. She’s having a devil of a time trying to work her finger into the trigger guard and onto the trigger. The pistol seems to weigh forty pounds and feels like some alien tool she’s never handled before.
The idea, of course, is to shoot herself again. Do it right this time. No more of this half-ass stuff.
You’d think she was an old lady with bad arthritis to see all the trouble she’s having getting her finger on the trigger again. Blood in her eyes doesn’t help much. Or the dizziness.
The room abruptly tilts way over and she staggers forward and crashes into the screen door and falls out on the porch, scraping her chin on the rough wood planking and losing her grip on the gun, which goes spinning over the edge of the porch and out of sig
ht.
Damn.
She wants to go down and get the gun but she can’t move. She’s lying on her face, cheek pressed into the edge of the porch, looking down at the top step six inches down.
Voices distant and close. Screams. Faraway and practically in her ear.
She regards the step, sees with absolute clarity the pattern of its texture, the dark knotholes, the sharp splinters, the grooved grain.
Blood is dripping onto the step and flowing slowly in thin red ribbons along the sinuous grooves of the plank toward its outer edge, where it begins bunching into tremulous drops.
And watching those winding ribbons of blood, she feels herself floating along with them, in them, simply floating … for the first time in a long time … floating gently down the stream.
Acknowledgements
On initial publication, most of these works appeared in slightly different form.
“The Outsider: An Introductory Memoir” copyright © 1998 by James Carlos Blake appeared previously in The Los Angeles Times Book Review.
“Runaway Horses” copyright © 1994 by James Carlos Blake appeared previously in Saguaro.
“Three Tales of the Revolution” copyright © 1993 by James Carlos Blake appeared previously in The Sun. Portions also appeared in Quarterly West as part of the novella, “I, Fierro.”
“Under the Sierra” copyright © 1994 by James Carlos Blake appeared previously in Fine Print.
“Aliens in the Garden” copyright © 1987 by James Carlos Blake appeared previously in The Sun.
“The House of Esperanza” copyright © 1988 by James Carlos Blake appeared previously in The Sun.
“La Vida Loca” copyright © 1998 by James Carlos Blake appeared previously in Gulf Stream Magazine with the title “Small Times.”
“Referee” copyright © 1998 by James Carlos Blake appeared previously in Smoke.
“Texas Woman Blues” copyright © 1991 by James Carlos Blake appeared previously in part (Perdition Road) in A Long Story.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1999 by James Carlos Blake
cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
This edition published in 2011 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media
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Borderlands Page 21