What was he blabbing about? Mother didn’t have a sister. I gathered her hair into a thick ponytail, trying to brush it again. Mother kept silent.
“Earth to Babe,” Catfish said, never one to be sensitive. “You going to answer me, or what?”
Mother said carefully, “Yes, Carl. I have a sister near Austin. A little town in the Hill Country, called Cypress Mill.”
That was news to me; Mother had a sister. News isn’t a big enough word. It was a bomb in my skull.
Mother lowered her voice, making it harder for me to hear her. I stretched my eardrums, trying to learn more about Mother’s secret. When she said the words I have a sister it sounded like she was out of her mind, like she was saying I have a Martian.
“What’s her name?” Catfish asked.
“Eleanor,” she whispered.
“Eleanor Henderson?” Catfish asked.
“No, Carl. Henderson is my married name, not hers. She is Eleanor Rose.”
“Rose! Is that your maiden name? Bed of Roses.” Catfish laughed at himself because nobody else ever did.
“Hardly.” Mother reached one hand back and pulled her hair out of my hands. She brought it in front of her shoulder where I couldn’t reach it. “Excuse me, Carl. Why are we talking about my sister?”
“I told you once already, we’re driving right through Austin. Be a free place to stay. Don’t you want a free place to stay?”
“Not really,” Mother said. “And she probably wouldn’t have me.”
“Aww, come on, Babe, she’s your own flesh and blood.”
“She’s more than that,” Mother said. “She’s my twin.”
I dropped the brush. Sister was one thing; twin was another. I tried hard to remember if my mean grandmother had ever hinted at this, or if she had kept photographs in the house, or anything to remind her of her daughter. Nothing.
Twins, I kept thinking and suddenly I asked, “Identical?” I’d seen identical twins in movies, and who doesn’t daydream about having a long-lost identical twin? Ruby Clyde One and Ruby Clyde Two.
“Why yes, identical,” Mother said, as if she had forgotten.
Identical! I sat back hard, bouncing my head against the seat. Imagine that. Another person on this earth who looked exactly like my mother.
“You never told me any of this,” I said, wondering what all else she hadn’t told me.
Mother pursed her lips, then rolled her eyes and said, “Well, she didn’t wish to have me in her life. Besides, she’s a nun.”
“You Catholic?!” the Catfish yelled.
“No,” I said, but they both ignored me. My mean grandmother didn’t trust Catholics, I never knew why, but we weren’t Catholics, that much was sure. Grandmother’s church argued about everything and splintered about ten times, always moving down the road to be the new church of something—adding words like truth, light, and holy—all good words, but they seemed tacked on and wrong.
Mother watched the last bit of sun drop below the horizon with an orange pop. She sighed and said, “I’m not much of anything, churchwise. Eleanor is Episcopalian. They’re a pretty loosey-goosey, do-whatever-you-want kind of church.”
I’d never heard the word Episcopalian and didn’t even care to look it up I was so flummoxed by having a mystery aunt. (To tell the truth, I did look it up later. See, Henry VIII had to get out of the Catholic Church so he could divorce one wife and cut off the head of another. He called his church Anglican, which means Church of England, and it couldn’t have been much of a church if you ask me. Episcopal is the American version of that church; they allow divorce but not beheadings and they aren’t really bad at all.)
“Oh well,” huffed Catfish and stuck his nose up in the air. “Never mind. Old Carl’s got nun use for a nun, want nun of that, nun-thing worse than a nun. Whoo-hoo mercy! Thanks a lot, Babe. As usual, good old Carl will have to come up with a better plan.”
“Honestly, Carl. Enough, already,” Mother said.
An identical twin and a nun! My mind was spinning with the image: a person who looked just like my mother, dressed like a nun. A nun. They looked like witches to me.
My hand wandered down and stroked the little pig, which was asleep on the seat beside me. He squirmed a bit, opened his little eyes, and looked up at me, like I was his mother. Then he rolled back into sleep with a twitch of his nose.
* * *
We rode for the longest time in silence, which was so very unusual for the Catfish. But it happened. We had more driving to do and I hoped we weren’t all talked out, because I certainly wanted to hear more about Eleanor Rose.
Finally, out of nowhere, Mother began to speak with a soft, storytelling tone in her voice. There is something about being surrounded by night that makes everybody want to tell scary stories or secrets. Mother’s story was both.
“We were like night and day. Eleanor was always angry, fighting with our mother. I’d do anything to keep Mother happy. I don’t know why we were different that way. Then Eleanor got herself pregnant. She went away to a secret place to give the baby up for adoption. It broke her heart.”
Mother kept on, “So when I got pregnant with Ruby and decided to marry Walter, Eleanor went into a dark place. She left town and never looked back. I called her when Ruby Clyde was about three, hoping she had softened, but she said she never wanted to see me or my child. It hurt me, but giving that baby up for adoption had blackened her life. Before she left, Eleanor said not a day passed she didn’t wonder where that boy-child was, and if he had gotten into a good home or a bad one. It left a black hole in her heart. Since Walter died, I understand having a black hole in your heart, and if I were to ever lose Ruby Clyde, well, there would not be blackness enough.”
She took a deep breath and so did I. What would you do if there wasn’t enough blackness in the world to describe your feelings? Invent a new color? Not that blackness is a color, I knew that. Blackness is black. It didn’t matter anyway because Mother was never going to lose me, not while I was alive.
The tires hit the highway cracks in a regular rhythm. We listened to the road song until Catfish said, “So, okay, as I said before—we won’t look up the nun.”
Mother hadn’t told him the half of it. My grandmother was harsh times a hundred. She took my mother in after my father was killed. Raised me with a Bible in one hand and a stick in the other. I’m not saying I hated her, I’m just saying I spent half my life under our bed. Grandmother taught me how to get by in the real world. Mean people have an edge and it’s good to learn their techniques. She’s the reason I could take care of my mother as well as I did. I was nine, almost ten, when Grandmother died and I’d taken care of us ever since—that is until the Catfish came along and messed everything up.
I wanted to find her, Eleanor Rose, the nun who lived in Cypress Mill, and not for a free place to stay, like what the Catfish wanted, although I did have a selfish motive. I thought maybe she could talk some sense into my mother, help us get back home. Also I was more than a little curious about seeing her—her being identical to my mother and all. It didn’t seem possible, no matter how hard I tried, to imagine another person looking exactly like my mother. But they were strange from each other, and they seemed to like it like that.
One thing was clear though: I had been the cause of their strangeness, and that made me a burden and probably not the one to get them to be friends again. What a rotten pregnancy Mother had with me—lost her sister at the beginning and her husband at the end. And she still loved me.
Oncoming headlights bore down upon us, then slid by, one after another. The quiet pulse of late-night travel lulled me to sleep, and I dreamed I was a little pink piglet scampering across an open field. A horrible witch chased me with a butcher’s knife, trying to cut off my corkscrew tail.
NINE
Bunny lurched up from being my pillow, jolting me awake. Out in the flat middle of nowhere the Catfish had pulled into the Okay Corral Gas and Food Mart. The overhanging lights made an eerie glow
around the car. The place was like a spaceship.
“Where are we?” I asked, wondering why it was called the Okay Corral Gas and Food Mart and not what we’d learned in school—the O. K. Corral, the location of a wild west shootout with the Earp brothers, but Bunny and I called them the Burp brothers. I like Okay better, being the optimist that I am.
“Go back to sleep, Ruby Clyde.” He threw open the door.
Last time somebody told me to go back to sleep I woke up in another state, so I wasn’t about to do that again.
He slammed the car door and that woke Mother.
“Where are we?” she asked.
But I couldn’t answer her, so Mother tapped on the window to ask him, but Catfish brushed her off. “Just stay in the car, for crying out loud,” he said. Soon as he pumped the car full of gas, he marched inside the store.
“Mother, let’s get out now, let’s hitchhike home,” I said.
“It’s a long way back home,” she said.
“At least let’s go to Cypress Mill. Why didn’t you ever tell me you have a sister?”
“Oh, baby, she doesn’t want to see me.”
I thought I was the one she didn’t want to see, but Mother didn’t say that. She went on to say, “Besides, she’s a solitary.”
“What’s a solitary?” I asked.
“A nun who lives alone,” she said. “So they can pray and work and ignore family. So you see, Ruby Clyde, Carl is all we have.”
She couldn’t have been more wrong about that. We had each other.
The Catfish had told me to stay in the car, but staying in the car was easier said than done. My pig had needs. Bunny needed a walk, but I couldn’t find the lasso rope that came with my cowboy outfit, so Mother grabbed panty hose from her bag for me to use as a leash. I tied one stretchy foot around Bunny’s neck. Bunny pulled until the panty hose stretched into a tight thread from my hands to his neck. Hard pig toes tapped across the pavement. It’s funny how you think of pigs as big and fat, but in reality they walk like toe dancers, regular ballerinas. That snout of his raced this way and that, like a motorboat pulling us both through the bushes.
* * *
There wasn’t much in the way of grass around that gas station, just a lot of sandy dirt and rock and groups of small twisty trees. Bunny did his business pretty quickly, then rooted around under the starry sky.
Stars were one thing that always gave me hope, even with that brain-chilling thought about the end of the sky: it couldn’t end—it couldn’t go on forever. So what the heck did it do? I still found hope in the skies—hope that answers existed, whether impossible or not.
Out there in the dark, the sky was filled with bright holes like an upturned colander. I had never seen so much sky. The Big Dipper and Orion were the only constellations I knew by name. But I liked to make up new ones: Jonah’s Whale, Jacob’s Ladder, Baby Moses Floating in the Reed Basket. My very own constellations everywhere. That Texas sky held the entire Old Testament: Lot’s Wife, plain as day; the Parting of the Red Sea; Adam and Eve running around in fig leaves. And looking up in the heavens, I made up a whole new story and wrote it across the sky. I called it the Heroic Rescue of Bunny the Pig. There ran the Catfish, all legs and knees, across the night sky, Bunny tucked under his arm. I was proud to have been a part of his rescue.
Just then cracking sounds and yelling broke out at the filling station. I’d heard that sound back at the IQ Zoo. Gunshots.
* * *
By the time I ran to the edge of the light, I saw Catfish bobbing across the parking lot. He held a bag of something in one hand and was shooting his pistol over his head. “Whoo-hoo mercy!”
This guy ran out behind him yelling, “Get out of my store, fool.” He carried his own long gun, which he pulled to his shoulder and fired.
It was a real-life gunfight but it seemed like they were playacting until the Catfish, who was dancing and shooting, fell forward on his face.
The store owner reloaded and pointed that gun right at my mother, who stood in wide-eyed fear. A slight breeze was blowing her dress against her legs. Her hair moved gently behind her shoulders. The neon lights overhead gave her a halo. The store owner shook the gun and screamed, “Be still, woman, or I’ll pull the trigger!”
“Mama!” I cried from the shadows.
She looked at me with a warning glare that meant be silent, then shifted her eyes to the bushes. I knew that was where she wanted me to go and hide. I was so afraid the store owner would shoot her when she moved, but he didn’t.
“Mama!” I cried out again, but quieter, like saying it twice would make a difference. I didn’t know what to do.
That’s when Mother said, “Eleanor will help.” The owner wouldn’t know what she was talking about, but I knew it was a message for me. And I guess she thought I could just do that, since I took care of so many things in our life.
* * *
My mind detached from my body entirely. My skin was a shell, and my guts were as cold as the inside of a refrigerator, not to mention my scrambled brain. My feet were glued to the earth, like in a nightmare where you can’t move.
Suddenly Bunny began to run circles around me. The panty hose wrapped my legs and made it so I couldn’t walk. I swear to God, and I don’t swear lightly, but I swear I think Bunny was tangling me up trying to protect me.
You won’t believe what I did. I still don’t understand it myself. When Bunny pulled frantically on the panty hose, I let him drag me back out in the bushes, past the lights, back into the dark.
I’m not one to do what I’m told, but I did. I hid just like Mother ordered.
I’m ashamed to admit that I let Bunny pull me back out in the dark, and I let him do it because I was afraid. Plain and simple. I was afraid and my better brain wasn’t working.
Being afraid was not like me at all, but I had no idea what to do. I have never been short on ideas in my life, but this Wild West gunfight was way over the top for me. There was the Catfish laid out on the asphalt, bleeding. There was my mother looking down a shotgun.
I liked to barf—feeling guilty and cowardly, keeping myself safe instead of trying to protect Mother, but what could I have done that wouldn’t have made things worse? Me and my pig. What if I ran screaming up to Mother and got us both shot? What good would that do?
Why on earth had Mother told me to find Eleanor Rose? The woman hated me. Maybe the Catfish was right about stray kids being put in the orphanage. Because what if I found her and she slammed the door in my face? Then I’d still be alone in the world, without any adult. A voice filled my head. Carl’s voice: They lock you in an orphanage until you’re eighteen years old. And underneath it all, the low calm voice of God, saying absolutely nothing.
With all those feelings and voices and silence battling inside of me, it’s a wonder I didn’t vanish.
But I didn’t vanish.
I sat down in the dirt with my pig and shivered.
TEN
Sitting out in those dark bushes was not an easy thing for me to do.
I prayed with all my heart that I would not hear another gunshot because the only gun left was pointed at Mother’s chest. And while I could put a lot of bad things out of my mind, that was not one of them. So I prayed, and that desperate prayer sent up a constant vibrating plea to God. If anybody on this earth could have heard it, they would have thought it was the school bell clanging, the one that tells you there’s a fire in the building, tells you to get outside, run, run for your life. I don’t think God enjoys those kinds of prayers very much, but it was the best I could do. And it was either pray like a fire alarm or disintegrate on the spot.
Prayers and superstitions weren’t helping me at all. But Bunny did. My pig leaned into my side until I stopped shivering, which seemed like quite a long time. His snout pointed up at my face like a periscope, swiveling with my every move. He was determined to make me feel supervised and cared for, with a wrinkle and a twitch.
The police sirens swarmed the air. I t
urned my head to look, but Bunny squirmed himself into my line of vision. He poked my cheek with his snout, forcing my face back to the shadows.
I kept thinking, Any minute Mother will come looking for me. I half expected to hear people calling my name, telling me to come out, that everything would be okay. But she didn’t. They didn’t. It wouldn’t.
* * *
Sirens whipped around, churning my heart so hard I grabbed my chest to hold it in. Police lights lobbed bright blue ropes up in the dark sky. The excitement wasn’t dying down. I needed to see what was happening, orphanage or not.
I mustered my best fake bravery and tiptoed through the edge of darkness in my cowboy boots, dragging my piglet on a panty hose leash, like it was the most normal thing in the world to sneak up on a gas station where a robbery had just taken place.
I crept through the trees until I could see better. They were loading the Catfish’s stretcher into the back of an ambulance, but he kept sitting up and hollering, “My leg. My leg. I been shot.”
The store owner stood out front and hollered, “Quit that complaining, fool. You shot your own stupid self.” And he slung that shotgun on his shoulder like this kind of thing happened every day at his place of business. He had a trickle of blood down the side of his face, which didn’t seem to bother him.
A policewoman was putting handcuffs on Mother.
That was so wrong, I liked to died. Why were they arresting Mother? The Catfish was the criminal, not her. She hadn’t done anything wrong except keep company with the Catfish, who turned out to be stupider than I ever imagined.
I had to force myself back in the bushes. Otherwise I would have flown at the policewoman fists a-flying. Mother didn’t want me to do that. I found a safer, darker place behind a large rock where I settled into a leafy nook.
I found my lasso, the one I would have used as a leash for Bunny. It was right under my nose—literally. I had hung it around my neck and forgotten. Soon as I got my hands on it I knew what to do. I strung out the rope and laid it in a circle around myself and Bunny, just like the bad child’s circle in Mr. Upchuck’s office. I hoped so bad that it was true about keeping the snakes away. We pulled in all our legs.
Almost Paradise Page 4