She had assumed many of her neighbors would finally go home to Mexico after the tornado, but instead all decided to stay, in large part because the Ranasack Apartments were being renovated to be both “livable” and “green.” Willa Yoder of all people had launched a Go-Fund-Me campaign to raise money for a new roof and then, thanks to some Facebook shares and a spot on MSNBC about the tornado damage and the former dairy workers left homeless, a few anonymous donors kept on giving until there was enough to gut the place and redo the wiring, the plumbing, and the interiors. There was talk of putting in a laundry room, a play area for kids, maybe even a gym, and Pastor Rush and Ruby Rodgers had seen to it that the building was handed over to the county for Section 8 status. Everyone was going to be allowed to keep their original apartments, only those apartments would look nothing like the ones they’d moved into. There would be up-to-date appliances and large windows that let in a healthy amount of natural light and bathtubs instead of camp showers. The work, much of it done by the residents themselves, was scheduled to be completed the following spring. In the meantime, Helman Yoder’s former workers/tenants were being housed by volunteers around town. Maria was staying in Helen Garrety’s spare room, Juan and Mr. Aguilar were with Irv Peoples, Rosa Torres and her two kids, the now infamous family booted out of the Laundromat by Mr. Breeder, were with Shannon Washburn. The housing program, also engineered by Willa, had likewise garnered some national attention. Colliersville was being hailed as a triumph of “tolerance and caring” in a country ripped apart by racial tensions. A Stetson-wearing musician in Nashville was writing a song about it.
The whole thing had turned Nina’s stomach. She told Maria that, far from being a show of empathy and man’s humanity to man, the housing program was “bullshit white-guilt charity bullshit” and the news coverage of it and the apartment building remodel was “bullshit just plain shitty bullshit.” She refused to leave the apartments and settle temporarily with Shellie Pogue, who’d invited her to stay in Brianna’s old room, saying she might hate white people, but she hated being a houseguest even more. And then she died before the cranes came out.
What would Gordy/Ramon have thought of this unlikely turn of events? This transformation in town sentiment, brought about, Maria supposed, by the tornado, Daisy’s death, and the national spotlight focused right on Colliersville’s worst warts? Gordy’s article, in which he referred to her as “Yolanda” (Yolanda?!) and “both the siren and the song,” certainly could take no credit. Maria hated it, the entire piece, found it insulting and condescending, shortsighted and long-winded. Talk about your bullshit shitty bullshit. It didn’t even mention Daisy or Hector Gonzalez or the so-called blood curse, even though it was published just as the search parties were gearing up and the blood was still drying. Probably, Maria assumed, because the minute Ramon/Gordy left Colliersville, the town ceased to be real to him. Pretentious prick.
Still, she missed him, truth be told longed for him. Not for the days at the dairy. Those were awful. Those were hell. But for their nights in their apartment, the movie watching they did and the cuddling and the sex. More than that, though, she just wanted to sit at the kitchen table and eat with him. To see him across from her looking at her the way he did. No man had ever made her feel so cherished. Or so cast off. Not even Larry Peters, who the minute Maria dumped him took up with another former Miss Kitty’s stripper, a young clueless girl from Tennessee with skin like a peach and a habit of saying “all y’all.” All the time. With Larry, out of sight was out of mind. Gordy, on the other hand, had tried to reconnect, to reconcile. Maria had a mountain of letters from him at home. Real letters. All of them saying basically the same thing—I love you. Forgive me. Come to New York. They were good letters and that was the only reason she hadn’t burned them or thrown them in the trash along with the baseball cap and deodorant and mix CDs he’d left behind.
“When do you suppose they’ll get around to fixing that?” Maria asked Mr. Breeder, who was hitching up his pants and staring at a twenty-foot section of wrought-iron fence on the west side of the cemetery, bent and twisted toward the sky by the tornado. The cemetery’s only storm-related casualty, it looked like an enormous tree trunk. A few cardinals perched on the uppermost tendrils.
“I heard they’re taking bids right now,” Chuck said. “They want it to be up before the cold weather hits.”
“That’s nice,” Maria said.
“Yeah,” Chuck said.
“Well.” Maria pulled her hair off her neck and fanned the sweat away. “I was just leaving.”
“Me too,” Chuck said. “Me too.”
The sun was hot and bright behind Maria’s head and Chuck found it difficult to look directly at her. It had always been hard to look at her, both because he hated her and because she was so beautiful. He knew that if he spent too much time on her face he wouldn’t hate her anymore. He would want her and then what? He would dream of her? He already did and in his dreams she hovered over him like an angel, naked and soft skinned and glittery, black hair blowing upward, breasts hanging down, and what was wrong with him anyway he needed to have his head examined he was at his own child’s grave for God’s sake and what if Dolly knew what he was thinking she would kill him and she had every right. Sometimes it was terrible being a man. It was the worst thing.
For a long time after the “No Mexicens” mess, Dolly wouldn’t speak to him. She said that the man she married would never have done such an ignorant, racist, unfeeling thing. Then she moved out of their bedroom into her sewing room and stopped having her meals with him. Chuck had thought he would never experience the kind of misery he felt after Joy’s untimely death, but being shut out by Dolly was worse. She was his best friend, his only friend really. He couldn’t eat or sleep or finish a crossword without her. So, gradually, he became disconnected from his life, and the Laundromat, which, like Dolly, seemed almost an extension of himself, was no longer a safe space. To begin with, there was that bloodstain to step over every day. And sometimes people protested in front of the shop, only a handful and they were generally peaceful but still. Chuck started staying home more, paying Shannon Washburn overtime to open and close and make the bank deposits, and he hired one of the Tucker boys, the nice one, to help her.
And then the e-mails started coming in. E-mails and letters and phone calls from Bob in Tennessee and Cheryl in Alabama and Roy in Utah and Lori in West Virginia and Lee in Idaho and George in Ohio and Travis in Arkansas and the overwhelming Texas contingent—Becky from San Antonio and Wes from Lubbock and Vic from Fort Worth and John from Waco and on and on and on. Hundreds and then thousands of e-mails and letters and calls from people who swore allegiance to Chuck’s “cause” and vowed to defend him, with force if necessary. And to donate money should he need it to pay his legal fees and get “that Pinto bitch to shut her wetback cakehole.”
“You know who these people are, right?” Dolly asked in a rare moment of loquaciousness. She had a pile of letters in her hand and was headed for the recycling bin. “The ‘organization’ they belong to? The cause they’re so eager to trumpet? The KKK. Congratulations, Chuck. Your biggest fans wear white sheets and burn crosses and lynch people. Good work.”
He got a new phone number and e-mail address and threw most of his mail right into the trash. He dreamed of being part of the witness protection program.
“I don’t like it here,” Maria said to him now. It was as if she could read his mind. “I never did. I think I might be moving.” Then she clamped her hand over her mouth, surprised to have confided that much to him.
“Oh good,” Chuck said. “I mean, I’m not glad that you’re leaving. Only that you have the opportunity.”
“Thanks to you,” Maria said, laughing awkwardly.
Chuck bowed and some coins fell out of his pocket. A few were pesos, the edges scarred by Scottie Horne’s screwdriver. “You’re very welcome.” He picked up the coins.
“Well,” Maria said.
“Well,” Chuck said. “
So, where?”
“Where what?”
“Where might you be moving to?”
“Oh.” Maria twisted a lock of her hair. “New York, I think.” Now that it was out, she realized it was exactly what she wanted to do. To go to Gordy, to give their love a chance. “Might as well take my bite out.”
“While you’re still young.”
“Right.”
Chuck and Dolly were talking of taking a trip to New York themselves, at Christmastime maybe, to shop and see a Broadway show. Dolly had thawed to him after the settlement conference and because he refused any and all help from the e-mail and letter writers. Things between them were almost back to normal, not quite, but getting there. To the east of Joy’s grave were Chuck’s and Dolly’s plots, just waiting for them. Chuck sighed. How long would it be? He hoped he went first.
Maria felt the sweat starting on her back now. She’d be a sticky mess by the time she showed up for her shift at Sharkey’s. On second thought, maybe she wouldn’t show. No one would care anyway. Since the tornado had turned Miss Kitty’s into a condemned rattrap, Sharkey’s had added a pole in the corner where the jukebox used to be. The idea was to cater to the now defunct strip club’s most loyal clientele, but no one came to Sharkey’s to watch half-naked girls. They came to drink cheap beer and eat peanuts and argue about the Bears and the Colts and the White Sox versus the Cubs. They wanted nothing to do with Maria or the girl from Tennessee with the perfect tits. The tip situation was abysmal.
Chuck visited Sharkey’s some and, like the rest of the mostly balding beer drinkers at the bar, scowled and turned his back when a dancer’s name was announced. “Real tragedy what happened to that girl,” he said to Maria. “Daisy was her name, if I’m remembering correctly.”
“Yes,” Maria said. “A tragedy.”
“And then that tornado coming right on the heels…”
“Crazy,” Maria said.
“You lost some of your friends in the storm, I think.”
“My friends?”
“Well, some neighbors, at least.”
Maria had never liked Ulises. Too much swagger there, a tendency to lie and get away with it, and Elena was a passive-aggressive nightmare and a horrible mother. Her daughters, now in the custody of Mrs. Gutierrez, were better off without her. Harsh, but true. “May they rest in peace,” Maria said.
She and Chuck stood there a little longer, both looking at the grass, both thinking of what was under there. A heron flew over, made a sharp shadow on the ground, and a man came to mow. Across the road at the trailer park Fikus Ward and a little girl in a pink bathing suit seemed to be holding a kind of ceremony under a bird feeder. A shoebox was involved. And some praying.
“Well, good-bye, Mr. Breeder,” Maria said. She held out her hand.
He took it. It was so small and dry. They hadn’t shaken hands at the settlement conference. Chuck had left too soon and too angry. “Good-bye, Miss Pinto.”
They walked back to the parking lot, Maria leading the way, stepping gingerly in her high heels. Chuck followed with his head bowed and hands clasped behind his back. Neither of them spoke. They read the stones. Names. Dates. Bible verses. They watched as engravings of cherubs and ivy and trumpets flashed by. They got in their separate cars and drove away, Chuck home to Dolly and Wyndham-on-the-River and Maria eastward, maybe toward a new life, both thinking they knew too much now, of men and women and the world, to hate each other any longer.
Murphy
(July)
“Hey, Fikus?”
“Yes, Tiara?”
“You don’t have to be so sad. It’s not your fault.”
“It’s not?”
“No. I don’t blame you. And you shouldn’t blame yourself, either.”
“But I do blame myself. Every day I wake up and I blame myself.”
“Then I’ll pray for you. We should pray anyway, cuz this is a funeral.”
“Of course.”
Tiara took the shoebox that held the limp remains of Murphy the goldfish and placed it in the hole they’d dug below Fikus’s bird feeders. She covered up the lid with dirt and placed a single daisy on top. Then she closed her eyes, clasped her hands, and knelt in the grass beside Fikus, who was already crying.
“Slow down,” Tiara said. “This is going to be a full Christian burial. You got to pace yourself, for shit’s sake.”
Fikus nodded, snot billowing out his nose.
“Okay, here we go,” Tiara began. “Dear Lord, who art in heaven, hollowed be thy name, thy will be done if kingdom comes, on earth as it is times seven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our messes as we forgive those who mess up against us and lead us not onto plantations, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom and the flower and the gory, forever and ever. Amen.”
“Amen,” Fikus said.
Reincarnation
(One year later)
They talked about what was ruining this country. The woman with the stringy blond hair who’d once stolen money from the high school cafeteria cash register and the man with the scruffy face and green fingers. They talked all night of ruin and rot and people taking their j-o-b-s. The woman kept saying the man had a choice to make. It seemed like a very important choice. “You need to decide,” the woman said. “You can’t have us both. Do you want me or do you want her?”
“I want you,” the man said.
“Then do something. Christ. Do something. For once in your life or I’ll kill you myself.”
“Okay okay okay.”
The little yellow dog that had followed Daisy away from the bus stop barked and yipped circles around them. Their conversation made circles, too. Bubbles that expanded and contracted. Burst sometimes. They talked about what would happen after they died. The woman seemed to think she’d meet God at a gate. The man said that was all a bunch of superstitious bunk and that what awaited them all was nothingness. A big black screen over their eyes for all eternity.
“You suck,” the woman said, sticking her tongue out at him.
“That’s not all I do,” the man said.
The blond woman and the scruffy-faced man talked all night but rarely to Daisy. More they talked at and around her. They said a lot about Basketball Juan, about how he was responsible for what was going to happen to her, but Daisy didn’t understand. How could he be responsible? He was home, probably watching a telenovela with Nina. And what was going to happen to her?
When they weren’t talking death and Juan and j-o-b-s, they smoked sweet- and sour-smelling stuff and ate white powder and snorted it, too, and decided between themselves that when Daisy died she’d return to the world as a mermaid. “Because you can’t walk,” the woman said at Daisy.
“Stands to reason,” the man agreed.
But the man and woman were wrong. Daisy hadn’t come back as a mermaid. She came back as a great blue heron, and now, instead of a wheelchair or fins, she had slick yellow legs, broad wings, and a trout inside her belly, half-digested.
Swim? she thought. Thanks but no thanks. I’d rather fly.
It had all happened so fast, that beam falling from what seemed like the sky but was really the ceiling. The blackness and the light. The dog lying next to her, silent. Protective. The man and woman waking up and panicking over Daisy’s motionless face, arguing and crying and throwing her limp body and busted wheelchair in the back of a car. The long drive to nowhere, during which the man dumped the dog on the side of the road because he said they needed to lighten the load, to cut all ties. The woman crying some more, saying, “He’s going to get hit and then we did that, too.” The man throwing up his hands. “We did not do that. Do you hear me? None of this is our fault.”
The car ride ended in a jerky journey through a stinking meadow to a grass-choked ditch with a view of soaring metal above and a tree whose bark was all but gone. Days of flies followed. Sun. Blue with white in between. Then came rain and wet grass bent over, tickling. There were nights of stars and mosquitoes and low,
fat moons. And quiet. So much quiet. Finally, the little yellow dog came back from the dead, its black nose digging around. It barked and howled, and the man with the big belly said, “Oh my God,” over and over and over. The rain came again, this time for real, and the wind howled, and a few other men joined the big-bellied man in the darkness. They picked her up and took her away and later cried alone in their cars.
Daisy hadn’t really wanted to see any of it, but after the beam fell she was everywhere and nowhere all at once. She wasn’t yet a body or a bird, more an idea buoyed around like a seed that might never take root. She was witness to her own funeral at the Baptist church. She watched as Hector lost use of his legs in grief. A nice fat woman in a red necklace caught him as he fell, and Hector said to her that it was strange, wasn’t it? He’d always wondered what it was like for his sweet little girl confined forever to that stupid wheelchair and now he knew. The graveyard attendant fetched him a chair they kept around for emergencies. “Now,” Hector told the fat lady, “I know everything.”
But he didn’t know that right after they buried Daisy, someone or something whispered to her that nothing would be what she expected but that was the way of the world and soon, very soon, the ground would fall out from under her and she’d make friends with the clouds and the orioles, the rainbows and the blackbirds, the mallards and titmice and woodpeckers. Not the geese, though, the voice said. Geese are awful.
“Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you,” said the geese anytime anyone got near them or their precious air pockets. “Mine, mine, mine.”
In the spring, Daisy became an ovum, a mass of blood vessels in a blue shell, then a downy hatchling eating right from her new mother’s gullet. She ate and chirped and grew. She left the nest and the geese taunted her as she learned to fly because, unlike the other sleek-feathered juveniles born that April in the rookery off Route 20, she ran into telephone poles, trees, the sides of buildings. She defecated upon liftoff, almost every time, and ruined two nests too, practicing a glide.
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