19
In the morning I drive to work with all the windows of the Pontiac rolled up to keep out the haze of smoke in the air. June is sliding into July, and the old stockyard west of town stinks. Flags hang from porches, and smoke from a grass fire near Cutbank, miles to the west, has settled over Versailles. Soon it will be my birthday. The heat is a constant weight, even in the early mornings, and it still hasn’t rained. Finally, stifling, I roll my window down and feel some relief in the side currents pulling at my hair whenever the Pontiac isn’t slowed to a crawl in the morning rush or stalled altogether at traffic lights.
I’m not ready to go to the Three Hundred Club by myself and sit like an overage groupie at a table near the bandstand, much less get up and sing. I remember the club, of course, a big barn of a place with a bowling alley behind the bar and the dance floor. Maybe by now it’s in better repair than Isaiah’s barn.
The heat is even worse on the third floor of the administration building. I step over a blitz of paper on the floor as I open the door to Student Accounting. Jamie has all the windows open, although the office smells of smoke, and she’s redirecting an electric fan that has blown all the forms and charts off the counter.
Dr. Brenner hangs his suit coat on the back of a chair and loosens his necktie and glares at Jamie and me.
“We’re going to have to get some air-conditioning up here! Next thing these computers are going to crash from this heat!”
“Yes,” says Jamie, turning her fan back on and coming around the counter to help me gather up the scattered sheets of paper. With her hands full of general information forms, application forms for student loans, data summaries, and college policy statements, forms that no one ever uses because all the students fill them out online, she hisses at me, “We need a girls’ night out!”
“Where’s Catina?” I whisper back.
Jamie purses her lips and shakes her head.
Dr. Brenner still fumes in the main office where Jamie’s fan whirs and makes his shirt billow around him.
“This is ridiculous. Turn off those computers before we have a meltdown. You’re pretty well caught up, aren’t you? Don’t you have work you could carry over to the food court, where at least it’s cool enough to breathe?”
“I think I can find some work,” says Jamie with a neutral face.
“Do it then.” He slings his jacket and tie over his shoulder, picks up his briefcase, and is gone.
I look at Jamie, and Jamie looks at me.
“You heard him,” she said.
We gather stacks of paperwork. Jamie’s arms are so full that she doesn’t have a hand free to open the door, so she bumps it with her rear end. It half-opens, stuck against something. Over Jamie’s shoulder I see that Dr. Brenner has paused at the top of the stairs and turned to look back at whatever obstructs the door.
“What the hell?” says Jamie.
She gives the door a full-footed kick, and somebody on the other side yelps.
“What do you think you’re doing?” says Dr. Brenner.
A young man crouches in front of the door, rubbing his ass. He must have seen his chance when Dr. Brenner left the office to sit down with his back against the door. When Jamie kicked the door, it pinched him. Now he scrambles to his feet and looks around wildly, but Dr. Brenner looms between him and the stairs, and Jamie with her arms full of paperwork cuts him off from the corridor.
“Yeah, Dustin, what are you doing here?” says Jamie.
I recognize the golfer now, with his tight-fitting jeans and his backwards cap. He’s got a shag of dark-blond hair and dark brows that meet at the bridge of his nose and give him a sulky look.
“Where’s Catina?”
No one answers.
“Is she still back there in the office?”
Dustin turns to Dr. Brenner but gets the full force of robot impenetrability. His eyes slide, fugitive like, toward the stairs.
“Young man, I think you’d better leave,” says Dr. Brenner. He steps aside, and Dustin shoots off. We listen to his trainers pounding on the composite stairs, all the way down the three flights.
Dr. Brenner shakes his head, but he’s grinning to himself as he gathers up his suit jacket and briefcase and makes his own way down the stairs. So—the robot has a sense of humor. Who knew?
“Ain’t love amazing,” says Jamie.
Well, yes. Amazing. How Brazos still held a torch for a girl he’d known years ago in Boise. And how I loved Gall, who screwed every ass he could get his hands on.
Of the two rich kids from Boise, Brazos was the dreamer of the Rivermen and Gall the crazy talent. Bill the Drummer was the workhorse, but there had been a time when Bill had taken up with a girl in Albuquerque and fallen in love. I don’t remember much about the girl, but I clearly remember Bill’s rage when she started seeing somebody else behind his back.
I’m gonna kill her! I’m gonna kill her!
Calm down. She ain’t worth it, Brazos advised him, which of course had no effect upon Bill. He stormed around the bar, drinking straight shots until the bouncers threw us all out, and, once we got back to the motel, yanked off a boot and threw it at the television, where a late-night news anchor was reporting on the war in Iraq. Maybe Bill hoped to smash the screen, but the boot bounced off the screen and lay inert on the green motel carpeting, while the TV anchor placidly went on talking about IEDs and car bombs. Bill started to cry. He picked up his boot, one of the pair of Justins he’d bought in Jackson Hole, and left for his own room on one stockinged foot and one booted foot. The next day he was himself again, his face swollen from his tears and all the whiskey he had drunk, but he was steady as he helped to strike our set from the bandstand and roll up the extension cords and load the amps into the van for wherever we were going next.
Love is amazing all right.
*
The smoke doesn’t seem as bad after work, so I mow Mrs. Pence’s front lawn and watch her piano students come and go. The second “Happy Farmer” girl is late, but she scurries inside, and soon I hear the familiar blunders, interrupted by occasional stumbles. Will she never get it right?
The grass is so sparse and brown from the drought that it doesn’t need mowing, but I like the peaceable ratcheting sound of the old hand mower, which I found clean and freshly oiled when I dragged it out from the garage. When I finish mowing in front, I start on the backyard. The sun scorches my head, and I pause in the shade of the blue spruce and lift my braid off my neck and look back at the tracks of the mower marking where I’ve been. A robin flies down from the spruce and perches on the picket fence that separates the yard from the alley, cocking his head to get a better look at me. Maybe he’s wondering what I’m doing in his territory, or maybe he hopes I’ll get out the hose and sprinkler and water the lawn and bring up some worms.
“Sorry,” I tell him, and he flies off.
Warm sun, the sounds from a block away of children at play, and the scent of spruce needles. I don’t know what I’m feeling, but it bubbles through me even as the old spruce speaks to me. I leave the mower and bend down to part the branches that shelter the warm dim space around the trunk of the tree. Where I crawled, in pain, in the dawn after the night that brought me back to Versailles.
Where I had crawled—
No. I never had hidden here as a child.
Yes, I had.
Kneeling on the cushion of spruce needles, I close my eyes and let my mind drift. Telling me what I know. That I played here as a child. That I had hidden under the spruce boughs from the sharp, quarreling voices of women.
She’s mine! I’m taking her with me, and I’m keeping her!
Like you kept the other one?
I hate you!
I stand up slowly and brush the spruce needles off the knees of my blue jeans. The sounds of the neighborhood drift back. A car passing on the street, getting farther away. The creak of a porch swing. The children, their voices raised now in a spat. The voices from Mrs. Pence’s porch are those of one �
��Happy Farmer” girl leaving and another “Happy Farmer” girl arriving.
I grip the handle of the lawn mower, lean into it, and finish mowing the backyard.
The kitchen feels cool after the backyard. I pour myself a glass of milk, set the carton back in the refrigerator, turn, and nearly drop my glass. Standing behind me, rocking on the balls of his feet, is Dustin Murray.
He must have eased open the front door and sneaked down the hall past the blundering rendition of “The Happy Farmer”. It takes me a moment to remember my glass of milk and set it down. Something’s wrong with him. The muscles around his mouth twitch, and his eyes are unfocused.
“Where’s Catina?”
“She’s not here.”
“I gotta know where she is. I gotta.”
He looks wildly around the kitchen as though he expects Catina to materialize in the patch of empty sunlight that falls through the window on the scrubbed linoleum. I think of Mrs. Pence in the piano room, giving a lesson in happy oblivion.
“Sit down and tell me what’s going on.”
To my surprise, he sits. I sit opposite him. His hands have taken a prayerful position.
“Would you like a glass of milk?”
He shakes his head, but the offer seems to bring him back to the daytime world of kitchen table and kitchen sink. “I thought for sure she’d be here.”
Tick, tock, from the old windup clock over the refrigerator. I find myself counting with it. Tick, tock. Tick, tock.
“What I tried to tell her.” Tears run down his face, and he scrubs a hand across his eyes. “I tried to explain to her. I was careful to explain she wasn’t going to make it in some big grad program. I told her, I told her, okay, maybe she graduated from this rinky-dink college, but that didn’t mean shit.”
He sits there bereft in his baseball cap. I can find no words.
“She’s all I ever wanted. To marry her. I dream about it! How she can go on working in Student Accounting, that’ll be okay with me. How she’ll come home from work and cook supper for me, and we’ll be so happy.”
I wonder what in the world to say to him. “Dustin. Maybe she’s just not ready to settle down.”
“Not ready? She’s twenty-three!”
“How old are you?”
“I’m twenty-four! And I graduated high school!”
His voice rises, and I put a finger to my lips.
“Mrs.—my grandmother—is giving a piano lesson just down the hall.” Grandmother. Easier than explaining.
“Oh. Sorry.”
His eyes dart around the kitchen, seeking answers to the unfairness of it all in walls and curtains and hanging pots and pans. He really is very good-looking. The thick thatch of dark-blond hair under the baseball cap, the regular features and cleft chin. Is that why he has the idea the world owes him a pretty wife?
He sighs. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-seven in a couple weeks.”
“Um. And you never went to college?”
“No.”
“And you’ve done fine. You got a boyfriend?”
“Not anymore.”
“Why not?”
“He had a—breakdown. A drug overdose.”
“Oh. Not much you can do about one a them. But you shoulda stood by him. And here I thought you was going out with the blackie.”
Something in my face makes him sheer off. “I thought you was okay, though. Even if you was on her side. I never saw you acting like you was better than other people. It’s a good thing you aren’t going out with the blackie, though, because he woulda been cheating on you. With her.”
“You’d better leave.”
I’m too angry to care if he’s a threat or not, which maybe he senses, because he gets up from the table and heads for the front door. I follow him out and watch until he has crossed the street and climbed into a black Mustang.
Dustin has always looked so ridiculous, with his golf putter and his golf ball and his cute ass that got pinched in the office door when Jamie kicked it open, that I’ve never thought of being afraid of him. But when I close the door behind him, I lock it. In the kitchen I lock the back door, taste my glass of milk, and find it lukewarm.
Is there anything I should be doing about Dustin and his grievances? Like calling the police? And telling them what? Or calling Catina and warning her? I know she has a cell phone, but I don’t know the number.
When I can’t think of anything else to do, I finish my milk and go upstairs to shower.
20
“Iced tea maybe?” says Jamie.
In the racket of the food court, we stand in line until we each get a glass of tea with wedges of lemon and make our way to a table, where we spread out our stacks of papers. The papers are camouflage. There’s no real work in them. Dr. Brenner is right—we have caught up with the backlog of data entry and won’t have a lot more to do until the flood of student records at the start of the second half-session hits us, so we may as well waste another day sheltering in the food court from the heat and the smoke.
“Where do you think Catina went?”
Jamie shrugs. “That’s something she’s not talking about.”
“We know Dustin doesn’t know where she is.”
“Dustin! The little bastard. You know what he told her?”
“What?”
“He said if she ever dumped him, she’d never catch herself another guy. And she believed him.”
The sulky young face, the thrust of Dustin’s brows. “Did he mean—” I pause, trying to remember some fragment from my magpie’s nest.
“He’s trying to convince her she isn’t pretty enough to catch herself another guy. Or sexy enough. However his pea brain thinks.”
I remember a moment a week ago. The new fall catalog for the college had come out online, and several times I noticed Catina scrolling through it when she was supposed to be entering data. Finally, carrying my empty coffee cup for a refill as an excuse, I paused and looked over her shoulder to find her studying a virtual page with a picture of a young woman with an armful of books, smiling up at the doors of the business administration building.
Catina glanced around, caught me looking, and hastily brought up a screen saver.
“Sorry,” I said, and continued to the coffeepot.
An older fragment. Something about a fiddle player in another Boise band that Gall and Brazos and Bill knew. What the fiddle player had done. Said if his girlfriend ever dumped him, she’d never get another guy. She dumped him anyway, and he took a shot at her. Maybe actually shot her? I can’t remember.
“We need a girls’ night out,” Jamie repeats, and I nod.
She sips her third refill of iced tea and makes a face. “God, I hate tea without sugar.”
I push the plastic sugar dispenser across the table to her, but she shakes her head and slaps her stomach. “I’ve got to get this flab off somehow.”
She pokes at her lemon wedge with her straw. Finally, she reaches for her fanny pack and digs out her billfold.
“I’ve been meaning to show this to you.”
I take the little photo she hands me. It’s one of those colored headshots taken at school and sent home in sheets to be cut apart with scissors and distributed to—who?—grandparents or aunts, I suppose. For children who have grandparents and aunts. A little girl with brown eyes, a high forehead, and wispy brown hair smiles from this photo.
“That’s her. Prairie Rose.”
I realize I’m looking at a picture of Jamie’s daughter. I look more closely and think the little girl’s smile looks tentative.
“She’s pretty.”
“It’s been two years since I’ve seen her. But at the hearing they did make him give me her school picture.”
“I’m sorry.”
“My own fault. Booze.”
She takes back the picture and stows it in her billfold. “She’s eight now. The same as you were when they took you. And you said you missed your mother.”
“I did.”
Jamie’s eyes are on her billfold, which lies there on the table in front of her, a double fold of blue fabric, worn to threadbare gray at the corners and held shut with a loop of dark elastic. Jamie’s face looks slack in a way I never noticed before, and I think of Mrs. Pence’s face, the grief there, the yearning she draws from her piano when she plays.
From the time I started working in the Office of Student Accounting, Jamie has been staunch. She listens to Dr. Brenner and faces down the Queen and lectures Catina and lectures me. Now I’m seeing her, really seeing her, and I’m shaken. What does Dr. Brenner see in Jamie’s face that I haven’t seen? For that matter, what does he see in mine? I remember my sense, the first time I met him, of deep thoughts unfolding in his skull.
I’m not living in an animated cartoon, and I need to start paying better attention.
Jamie lays her hand on her billfold for a moment, as though feeling its pulse. Then she seems to snap back into the present moment and stows the billfold in her fanny pack.
“So a girls’ night out. Maybe this Saturday?”
“Not Saturday.”
“No?”
“I’m singing at the Three Hundred Club on Saturday.”
Jamie’s eyes widen. “You sing?”
“I used to.”
“That’s right. You wrote it on your application. Has this got anything to do with your flashy friend what’s-his-name?”
“Isaiah.”
“Right. Isaiah. Saturday night. I’ll tell Catina when I see her.”
*
Another morning, and the wind carries smoke from a timber fire somewhere in southern Montana to join the smoke out of the west. But Dr. Brenner’s new water-cooled air unit is spewing some relief into the office, and the coffee maker is groaning into action when I come in. Jamie is watering her hanging plants, but the stiff angle of her shoulders speaks of trouble.
Ruby Dreams of Janis Joplin Page 11