Girlchild

by Tupelo Hassman

  The story begins with the splash of desert insects against our windshield, and it’s about a drive Mama took to Mexico when my brothers were small and Mama a single mother trying to make her ends meet. I don’t know if the story’s true because I know from my perch on the Truck Stop’s fridge that Mama “tells a tale to make a sale” and that “flapping lips get the tips.” I don’t know how much of what she says actually took place in the Santa Cruz Mountains that rise over our past and how much got added in the Calle bars that make up our present. But, because this story will be mine someday, like Mama’s hope chest and all the answers that aren’t in it, I’m keeping it.

  Mama met someone who knew someone. This someone needed help getting several kilos of marijuana over the Mexico-California border and Mama said she would do it. And though she had recently been arrested for the coincidence of having marijuana cigarettes in her roller on the same night that her house happened to catch fire, and though she was on probation and had four children to think about, she said she would do it because she could make a cool grand, and in 1971, according to Mama and even the State of California, a thousand dollars went a lot further than Mama’s welfare dime or her dime bags could ever dream of going, so she decided she would go very far for a chance to get it.

  Mama had a boyfriend then, a man who, to hear her tell it, never wore a shirt but always wore work boots under tight-fitting jeans, a man who was hard at work at a construction site when she first saw him and whistled at him from the window of her old blue Corvair, got his phone number, and as she drove away, told her sons to sit up from where they were hiding in the backseat and help her memorize it. This man, shirtless and booted, took Mama as far as San Luis Obispo where he left her with the Driver of a Hollowed-Out Van.

  The Driver of the Hollowed-Out Van was not fond of women and wanted nothing to do with Mama in particular. She wasn’t a pro, she was too young and probably too pretty to be useful, plus she chain-smoked and she never smiled, like she doesn’t smile when she tells this story now, like she would never learn to smile, even with teeth that cost as much as our trailer. But Mama gets in the Van anyway, and because I can’t know which parts of what she says are truth and which are made up to make the trees roll more quickly down the highway, I try to fit the story into pictures I can recognize. The Van becomes Grandma’s red van with the beanbag ashtray on the console the summer it swarmed with bees, and the Van is a van that was parked outside the Hardware Man’s trailer that I have both not enough and too many memories of, dark as the taste of cigarette ash. And Mama and the Driver sit in the front of this Van and they make it across the border into Mexico, make it across easy.

  Mama and the Driver arrive in the city in Mexico where they’re supposed to pick up the bundles that will fill up the hollow parts of the Van that has become Grandma’s Ford Supervan inside my head as we roll along toward her house, except now, the Van is parking on a dusty Mexican street and the beanbag ashtray in the center of the console is filled with cigarette butts and the windows are alive with bees.

  The Driver leaves Mama in a marketplace to consider chicles and leather goods, and when he returns he tells her to go on up the stairs of the little hotel he has just come down from and meet the man who is in charge of the Mexican side of this deal. And Mama, who is nervous but not too much, steps it up when she sees the lines of sweat that are creasing the very bald top of the Driver’s head. She has just bought puppets for my brothers, four banditos, and is considering a señorita for each, but she hands them over to the Driver. The puppets’ strings tangle as he clutches them to his chest and tells her to be careful.

  Mama goes up the stairs alone. The door is open, and there is a fan spinning and a bed in the center of the room with no spread but a white fitted sheet and a white top sheet, and in between, a fat man sitting in a white tank top. The Fat Man is leaning against the pillows of the bed, which are bunched up and crowded behind his back, and there are two more men in the room, one who answers the door and another who sits across from the door and holds the gun.

  The Fat Man in the bed tells Mama to sit down and points to a chair backed up to the wall behind her and she imagines the Driver sitting in that same chair and the blossoms of sweat that tickled his forehead. Mama wishes she had a cigarette in real life and in the story, and in the cab of our Indian truck she pushes in the lighter. I watch it glowing red in her hand and the way she takes a pull, as if it was her first cigarette of the day instead of her third, and it makes me think that maybe this story is true after all.

  The Fat Man pulls his knees up and looks at her across the top of them, surveys Mama where she sits in the straight-backed chair. He looks her over, then he speaks. And the words that come out of his stranger’s mouth aren’t foreign, they’re American, American as baseball, and Mama knows them well: Winston Dean. Eugene Thomas. Ronald Joseph. Robert Dylan. Hendrix. Hendrix. Hendrix. Hendrix. My four big brothers who never felt so close as I feel them now, hanging by threads in the Driver’s hands on the street below. At the end of this list he says just one more thing.

  “Do you understand?”

  I drain my cola and look at Mama’s face. She says it again, “Do you understand?” and I realize she’s asking me, and I tell her I do.

  Mama says she still doesn’t know how he knew the names of her four sons, my four brothers, who, if you do the division as the Fat Man does, with an eye on profits and losses, are only worth a mere $250 apiece in 1970s scratch. She keeps her eyes on the road, and says, “He was holding the sheet and each time he said a name he pulled the sheet up a little more over his knees. By the time he asked me if I understood, I could see his balls, his cock, everything.”

  My face goes hot and I roll down the window and hang my head out. I lean back against the door, the highway wind in my hair, and watch the side-view mirror until those words are whipped out by the wind, disappear into Mama’s blind spot, and blow away down the highway.

  Back in the Van and a few miles before the U.S. border, Mama pulls a muumuu over her head and folds down the purple frill that circles the muumuu’s neckline, tucks the straps of her tank top underneath it and reveals one shoulder, the other, both, as the Driver slows behind the line of cars waiting for inspection. This is the reason Mama’s on this trip. This is her part to play. She covers her mouth before slipping her hand into her pocket, her hand that is holding the set of teeth that have cost her so much, and she is silent until they reach the guard shack. The guard was bored before they pulled up, tired of inspecting striped serapes and terra-cotta fountains for contraband. He would’ve liked to investigate a big sled like this from dashboard to fender, and certainly would’ve been willing to pass the time with a pretty, bare-shouldered girl caught up in the pleasure of a man in uniform, but his mood changes once Mama, who never in my entire life smiled with her mouth open, offers him a smile that is wide as the noonday sun. He can’t help but shiver at the smooth, wet gums shining back at him, and motions with his gun to the guardhouse to hurry up and let this Van go right on through the gate, free and legal.

  redemption value

  Maybe that was the one time Mama smiled crazy, smiled wide. Maybe shame won’t let you smile with your mouth like a lantern until you know that your sons’ safety rides on you making it past inspection and you see flashes of blinding white sheet and smell the shock of a stranger’s sex in a hot Mexican hotel room.

  I want to see that smile now, and so I say, “That’s pretty cool, Mama,” but she barely laughs.

  “I don’t know about cool, R.D. I don’t know what, but when we’d made it through safe and we’re parting ways, the Driver shook my hand. He said he’d work with me again anytime. I was proud of that, I don’t know about the rest of it.”

  And that’s about where Mama’s story ends. My RC can is empty, our windshield is yellow with bugs, but Mama’s not adding on a moral here. She lets her entire story of strength and guts and crazy risk fade in the rearview mirror, like telling it was nothing more than a way t
o pass the time. She leaves me to make up my own moral, so I do. Forget her telling tales for sales, I’m a liar for hire and I learned from the best.

  My ending is as sweet as a crisp stack of hundred-dollar bills, and begins with Mama putting her dentures back in her mouth and pulling off the muumuu. As she does, she catches herself in the Van’s side mirror. When she sees her face there, she opens her mouth and smiles a big, wide-open smile, and her store-bought teeth are as straight and sure and welcoming as the white lines of the freeway rushing her toward home.

  sunset

  Grandma is sick. We sit all day in the front room of her trailer while the trains roll through the trees, just like the letters she’s sent back to the Calle promised they would. Mama and her play rummy, then cribbage, while I roll skeins of yarn into balls so they won’t snag when Grandma uses them to make her afghans or her toys or whatever she’s making now. There’s no asking her about her health because the cards are out of the box, pulling all of her attention, spades and clubs working at her like magnets, diamonds and hearts full of the promise of their names. The talk around the table is regular gambler stuff, bravado from the loser, “Come on, double or nothing,” even though they’re only playing for beer tabs. Teasing when the win is too easily come by, “Do you smell skunk, Ror? I swear I just got a whiff of skunk.”

  There’s no need to ask her if she’s sick, anyway. Her body tells the story. She’s lost so much weight she put three pillows on her chair, “to save my bony ass,” she says, and her hair has fallen out in patches. The exertion from shuffling the cards sends her coughing all through the next hand until finally Mama says, “You want me to shuffle?” But Grandma’s only answer is, “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Now shut it and cut it.”

  When all the yarn is rolled, I get up and dig through the newspapers and crochet hooks and scraps of fabric that have been pushed together on the table to make way for the card games. When I find Grandma’s brush and I start on her hair, I’m surprised when she doesn’t shoo me away. Instead she says, “Let’s make this the last game, Jo,” and beats Mama easily before sweeping the beer tabs back into their jar. “We don’t want to miss the sunset,” she says. Then, “Help me to the couch, R.D., and open that door wide.”

  The couch is Grandma’s bed still, and Mama moves the blankets over to make room. With the door open, we have a view of the Sierras and the sun setting on their ridges. I’m sitting on the floor, leaning against Grandma’s knees, and it’s a good thing because when Grandma says, “Pink sky at night, sailor’s delight,” she can’t see me roll my eyes.

  The saying may be as old as the hills but tonight it feels brand-new. The sun settles into the mountaintops so gently through the frame of Grandma’s screen door you’d think the Sierras were made to be seen just this way: on shag carpet with bony knees behind, cigarette smoke and the sound of shuffling cards fading in the air.

  It feels like the whole town’s followed the sun over the mountain, it’s so quiet. We sit until the sky’s almost all returned to blue. Grandma finally breaks the silence in the near dark, “You’ll have a good ride home, Jo.” And when Mama answers, “So will you, Ma,” I don’t wonder what she means.

  calle de las flores

  Mama is quiet on the way home and I miss the sound of her voice and the excitement of her Mexico story from the morning, but when I turn to her I see by her eyes that she’s thinking about Grandma, and before I know what I’m doing, I reach for her hand that, for once, isn’t smoking, but sitting on her lap.

  “It’s hard to say good-bye, Mama, you told me that once.” I squeeze her hand and remember the rest of it, Mama’s advice to me about Viv. “You’ll see her again.”

  She squeezes my hand back, our hands almost the same size now. “What a wise young lady I raised,” she says, and holds on until we get on the dark highway. “Keep your eyes open for deer,” she says then, and I try to keep my eyes open, look for the frozen reflection of our headlights in eyes peering from the shoulder, but the window is cool underneath my cheek, and before long I’m back on the Calle, only instead of trailers, we all live in huts.

  The streets are still dirty, the pond still grows frogs and shopping carts and still smells. A retired taxidermist is in Grandma’s space now, his work on display at the Truck Stop. From the same barstools where they stare at Mama’s tits, the glassy-eyed drunks stare across the bar at a glassy-eyed moose, their future reflected. But in the dream, Grandma is dead and men are coming to confiscate her bones. The men are officials. Grandma’s bones are contraband.

  The men will be in uniform and they will be fearsome. I am sitting outside of my shack on Calle de las Flores and I’m afraid. Grandma’s bones are in a bag tied to my belt loop. It is a small bag. They are small bones. Like those of a bird. I am feeling Grandma’s bones through the cloth of the bag, I have already rubbed them smooth as river stones, but my fingers continue to seek the sharpest edges, to wear them down, and they are doing this when I see the fearsome, official drab of uniforms approaching through the dust being kicked up on the Calle.

  I run for the pond and roll down the embankment, hoping the dust on the Calle confuses the men long enough to let me set Grandma free. I make a small hollow in the muddy shore and push the bag inside just before the men holler at me to stay where I am, hands above my head. I’m about to do as they say when the sound of gravel crunching under tires wakes me to the familiar sight of our headlights against the Nobility and Mama saying, “Come on, girlchild, let’s get you into bed.”

  highlight

  When I grab the wire I can’t keep my eyes open and my body shakes and my teeth chatter and then I let go of the fence somehow, or maybe it lets go of me, and I slam on the ground, and when I open my eyes, there is Horse. He is finally noticing me—me, a person with feelings who needs some attention. And I think I understand him better, I think I understand him better every day. And I think we are making friends.

  I am lying on the far side of the pond, as far as I can go from the Calle without permission. Not that Mama wouldn’t give it, but getting permission would mean asking for it so I skip it. I’m lying under the fading roar of an engine. I open my eyes in time to see a plane disappearing, the white trail it leaves behind, and watch as the streak separates into the rattle of chain link. It could only be Marc and DeShawn jumping over the fence into the field. I don’t even have to look. I know it’s them because they are just too strong, or too dumb maybe, to do anything quiet. But I look anyway and I see I’m right. Even from here I can see DeShawn’s belly button poking out from underneath the T-shirt he’s too big for and Marc, still too small in his dad’s leather jacket. And right behind them, a girl. She is new on the Calle, and her clothes are new too, and I think we could be in the same grade, but her hair has highlights and her earrings are long and shiny and her eyes are frosty. We don’t have any classes together but she hangs out with Marc and DeShawn at breaks, distant at the edge of the quad, huddling by the exit, ready to be the first ones out. She made friends fast. She did not try to make friends with me.

  The three of them walk straight for me, laughing, but I flatten against the ground, hold my breath, they aren’t after me, I say, not after me. When they stop, barely a trailer’s length away, the girl disappears into the weeds at Marc’s feet, and then he disappears too, and then I’m sure I’m right. They’ve already got something to do.

  The three of us lie on the ground together, in the same dirt and the same weeds, but they don’t even know I’m here. Not just here in the field, but here, on the Calle. They don’t think about me like I think about them, like I think about Marc. How the hair under his arms curls weird and silky like the c at the end of his name. Like how DeShawn keeps watch, stays standing, his eyes on the trailers behind the chain link, watching for the flash of cars coming up the Calle, and about how I keep watch too, on him and Horse and sky, everywhere but on the two in the dirt below him. How the streaks of white from the planes pick up pieces of each other and leave pieces
behind, how they take the shape of zippers and hooks and unbuttoned flies.

  When the quiet is over and they’ve started talking again, the clouds are all broken into mist and DeShawn laughs without looking down, he never looks down, he makes their privacy happen even when they don’t need it anymore. He laughs in the direction of Marc’s trailer and then there is Marc, standing suddenly beside him, pounding him on the back, throwing punches at the air. The girl stands up too. She takes a long time smoothing her clothes and even when they are smooth, perfectly smooth, smoother even than when she climbed over the fence, she still does not raise her head, and I see, even from here, where her highlights have grown out, and I begin to understand something about the high cost of upkeep.

  They are gone and the chain link is still and I stretch my arms out and over my head, back and forth, back and forth, a dirt angel for the next plane. I push my hands up to the sky and spread my fingers wide apart, look at the thin, red groove that runs across both palms, from below my pinky to above my thumb, it cracks open and oozes, and when I stand up, brush off, and lift my head, I am face-to-face with Horse.

  The clouds are nice, the planes are good, but Horse is the reason I come to the field because, just like the Girl Scouts say, in the Horseback Riding section of the Handbook, “A horse not only takes you over hill and dale, but he has a real personality of his own.” He is only one horse, but he and his personality have a ton of field, and only sometimes does he make his way this far, and only sometimes does he come close to the fence.