I mixed up some leftovers for Midnight, whom I had not seen all day. I opened the trailer door and began calling, “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty. Come on, Midnight. Here, kitty, kitty.” I squatted to look under the truck. No sign of him. I put his food on the floor and closed the door.
Vicki and I washed and dried dishes while Daddy cleared the counters. Everything had to be put away before Daddy could tape the kitchen cabinets shut. Vicki cleaned off the top of the built-in dresser in our bedroom. Patricia helped Brenda pull a nightgown over her head. After I settled Joni into bed, I opened the trailer door; Midnight had not come back for his supper.
I called again. Then I turned to Daddy in the kitchen as he ripped off a piece of duct tape and slapped it across the cabinets to keep the doors closed.
“What if I can’t find Midnight?”
Daddy looked up; his face softened. He seemed to know what I was asking.
Would you leave without him, too?
“Go on out and look for him. We’ll finish up here,” he said.
I closed the door behind me.
“Here, Midnight. Kitty, kitty.”
I saw Rose through her trailer window, rapped on her door, and slipped inside. Everything came tumbling out. I told Rose that Daddy aimed to move the trailer without Mama knowing; that I feared Mama might not come looking for us; and that on top of everything else, I couldn’t find Midnight anywhere.
Rose was making tortillas in her cast-iron skillet, filling the kitchen with the scent of corn flour. She wiped her hands on a dish towel and laid her hand on my shoulder, trying to reassure me. She told me Mama would find us somehow, and that if I didn’t find Midnight, she would take care of him for me, but she thought she had seen him under her trailer, asleep in an old tire.
I hugged her, told her thank you, and said I would miss her.
“I’ll miss y’all, too,” she said and kissed me on the cheek. “Good luck.”
Back outside, I squinted into the shadows under Rose’s trailer. Sure enough, I spotted Midnight folded into the tire.
“Thank goodness I found you,” I whispered.
I still remembered leaving Trixie at the vet’s in Alvin. Many memories haunted me during this time. I would lie in bed at night repeating, I’ll be so glad when I forget this. I’ll be so glad when I forget this. Sometimes it worked. Most of the time, I still remembered things, but I began to forget how badly they hurt.
I gathered Midnight under my arm and backed out from under the trailer. Like it or not, he was headed for a new home. I wished my perennial wish—that we could live in a brick house, a solid, sturdy home (maybe even with a library) that couldn’t be moved from one day to the next.
I rubbed a cramp below my navel; I had started my period during Mama’s absence. I bled into a Kotex pad hooked onto a sanitary-napkin belt, just like Mama. A sliver of thought, like the slimmest crescent, began to wax in me. How many more similarities would I share with Mama as I matured? I desperately wanted to travel to Africa someday, but never via Timbuktu.
Me, seated on Grandpa’s tractor
Ozona, Texas Revisited
I HELD JONI AND sat in the front seat, where Mama usually sat. Two men studied me through the open window. They looked from me to Daddy pumping gas and back at me.
They think I’m his wife, I thought. I’m twelve and they think I’m his wife and Joni’s mama.
I stared straight through them. I didn’t care what they thought. I didn’t care about anything. I didn’t care about our destination or how long it would take us to arrive. I sat there mute and in a state of shock. Maybe Mama felt the same way when she was fifteen with me on her lap, only the man pumping gas was her husband.
In a sense, we’d all been sucked up into a tornado and spun into a new land. When the spinning stopped and the air cleared, we found ourselves not in Oz but in Ozona, where we had lived fourteen months earlier. Vicki said she reckoned Mama would show up sooner or later.
I attribute Vicki’s nonchalance to the fact that she wasn’t the oldest sister. For better or worse, I had been a buffer between Vicki and the world since the day she was born. Even in my dreams, I stepped between her and whatever locomotive barreled toward us. But Vicki was right. Mama and Nancy did somehow find us.
When Nancy and Mama didn’t see the trailer, they stumbled into their own version of The Twilight Zone. Bewildered, Mama rapped on Bud and Rose’s trailer door. Rose told them what happened and offered to put them up for the night. Rose bedded her boys on the floor and Nancy climbed into the top bunk, leaving the bottom one for Mama, who stayed up to talk with Rose in the kitchen.
In the midst of Mama’s questions and confusion, Nancy overheard Mama tell Rose she didn’t expect Eunice to live much longer. Eunice had cirrhosis.
That night, Nancy lay in the dark and cried silently for her mother.
In the morning she and Mama set out after us.
Mama appeared contrite in the beginning, as she and Daddy sorted through the wreckage of their differences, trying to piece their relationship back together. Their détente, however, failed to lessen my vigilance. I found myself constantly monitoring the weather patterns of their marriage. I took note of their interactions the way a farmer might analyze cloud formations to determine if the calves should be rounded up, or in my case, my sisters.
THE THING about both life and weather is that seasons come and go. Sometimes a really fair summer can make up for a really harsh winter, which turned out to be the case for us that summer in Ozona. There’s a Texas expression—walking in tall cotton—which means that times are good. Cotton plants grow tall when everything aligns just right—the sunshine, the rainfall, and a lack of pests. That’s what happened that summer; we walked in tall cotton, both literally and metaphorically.
One evening Daddy walked into the kitchen at the end of a dusty week, dropped his pile of soiled work clothes on the linoleum floor, and looked at Mama hopefully.
“Want to take the girls camping this weekend?” he asked. “I came across this perfect spot on the Pecos River, not far from the rig.”
Mama bit her lip.
“Oh, could we, Mama?” I begged.
Mama looked from me to Daddy.
“It’ll remind you of the Colorado River,” Daddy said, upping the ante.
“Please,” I said.
Mama let out a sigh. “Okay,” she conceded, “it might do us all some good.”
The next morning, Daddy happily yanked blankets and spreads from the beds, rolled up the cotton rug Mama had purchased in Juárez, and tossed clanking skillets, pans, and utensils into a cardboard box, which he loaded into the trunk of our car.
We had no sleeping bags, no tents, no shiny red Coleman stove. Mama wrestled the top rack out of the oven. “Our cooking stove,” she announced.
Impressed, I raised a thumb of approval that seemed to please her.
Daddy dug through a five-pound sack of potatoes. “Phewee,” he said, wrinkling his nose, “there’s a rotten potato in here.”
“And it’s you,” I said, grabbing a squealing Brenda around the waist and nuzzling her neck.
The simpler choice would have been to haul the trailer to the river rather than empty it into Daddy’s pickup and the Ford. After countless armloads, we older girls, wearing cutoff jeans and dime-store flip-flops, helped the younger ones aboard. We formed a caravan: Daddy and a couple of girls in the pickup; Mama and the rest of us following in the Ford.
Our wheels hummed along the hot pavement as we drove southwest on a farm-to-market road that turned into dirt at the county line. The nearest town to us on the Pecos River would be Pandale, now listed as a ghost town. Pandale was reachable only by unpaved roads. A weathered sign posted outside the lonely general store read PANDALE, TEXAS/POPULATION VARIES.
That morning, with windows down and hair flying, we sped through the wilderness dotted with mesquite, desert willow, and scrub oak. The only signs of civilization belonged to nodding pump jacks, grazing cattle, and rotati
ng windmills, which filled the stock tanks with precious water, enabling livestock to survive in uninhabitable land. Even the wild mule deer and pronghorn antelope drank from the stock tanks, increasing their herd size, which made for good hunting.
Daddy slowed the pickup and pulled off to the side of the road. We followed suit. He left his truck door open and walked toward us.
“What’s wrong?” Mama yelled, sticking her head out the window.
“Lookie there,” he said, leaning in toward Mama on the driver’s side.
We all strained to see. Daddy’s eyes were as sharp as a hawk’s cutting circles in the sky. He had spotted a tarantula. Shivers went up my spine. The tarantula was the size of Daddy’s fist. It lumbered near the edge of the road, strumming the air with its front legs.
Daddy pointed out several more. It was too early for the fall migration of mating tarantulas, but they were more active than usual. Storm clouds had likely produced a gullywasher, causing them to seek drier ground.
It was no secret that spiders scared the bejeezus out of me.
However, from the safety of our car that summer afternoon, I found Daddy’s arachnology lesson fascinating. I watched the tarantulas with curiosity until Daddy hopped back into his pickup and drove off in another cloud of dust. We continued to bump along behind him on what looked and felt like a rutted wagon trail. A fine layer of grit began to coat my teeth. Daddy’s brake lights winked on and off as he slowed down and abruptly sped up again.
“He’s probably lost,” Mama said. “One of his shortcuts!”
I smiled. Daddy had a reputation for shortcuts. Not very good ones, either. Some of his shortcuts added as much as two hours to our drives. But that day, Daddy seemed to know exactly where we were headed. He zoomed over a cattle guard with us in close pursuit.
Suddenly a loud thumping noise filled the car. The steering wheel began to shimmy.
“Hells bells,” Mama said, “I think we blew a tire.”
Daddy barreled ever onward in the pickup, bouncing like a bucking bronco down the road, unaware that our old horse had thrown a shoe. Eventually, he realized we had fallen behind and he turned around. Flat tires, bathroom stops, missing a turnoff, nothing (except maybe Mama driving off to Colorado with some strange men) ruffled Daddy’s feathers. He good-naturedly unloaded the entire trunk of supplies onto the side of the road and ferreted out the spare tire and jack.
He rolled the spare hand over hand. “You girls oughta look for arrowheads over yonder.” He nodded. “I found one last week.”
After changing the tire and repacking the trunk, we finally reached the banks of the Pecos River, an oasis in the midst of parched land. Sunlight broke into a thousand shimmering diamonds on the water. The river had carved a shallow canyon through layers of rock. Rock shelves, a dozen shades of charcoal, overhung the water. Cedars and scrub oaks lined the top of the canyon walls, their gnarled roots gripping the thin soil and rock to keep from tumbling into the river.
We drove out onto large slabs of bedrock almost as smooth and flat as concrete. I stretched my arms into the blue sky and turned my face toward the sun. I loved Daddy for finding this place, secluded from the outside world.
Daddy immediately started unpacking. He hefted the ten-gallon orange plastic water cooler down from the back of the pickup, its contents sloshing inside. The cooler, covered with dust, left a dark imprint on his white, sweat-soaked T-shirt just below his chest.
Vicki carried armloads of blankets from the trunk; Nancy helped Mama unload the food; and I unfolded Joni’s playpen, where she was to sleep. Brenda and Patricia played games of patty-cake with Joni on the rug that Daddy had unfurled on the rocks.
“Davy, you sure we’re safe from critters?” Mama asked. She leveled the oven rack onto a pile of river rocks.
Daddy dabbed the sweat from his forehead onto the sleeve of his T-shirt. “I’ll tell you what,” he answered, “we’re pretty much surrounded by water. Whatever’s out here would have to know how to swim.”
Our camp rested atop the bedrock, surrounded by the river on all sides. The path we had driven across, lined with mesquite bushes and sage, narrowed and became interspersed with rivulets of water that led to our rock island.
“This here water will keep most everything away,” Daddy reiterated, “except maybe cottonmouths.”
“That’s a comforting thought,” Mama answered. “You girls hear that?”
“Yes, ma’am,” we chorused.
“Snakes can swim?” one of the girls asked.
“Yes siree,” Daddy said.
“How come they’re called cottonmouths?” Patricia wanted to know. Patricia was our little zoologist. She had introduced me to my first horned toad, resting placidly in the palm of her hand.
“Their mouths are white inside, like a cotton boll,” Daddy said. Then, as if remembering Patricia’s penchant for lizards and such, he warned, “Don’t be messing with any moving in the water.”
After we unpacked, Daddy slipped his pocketknife into his front jeans pocket and rested his fishing pole, complete with an orange bobber, over his shoulder. The pole dipped up and down as he and Mama walked away. In addition to fishing, they planned to cut green tree branches to roast our hot dogs and marshmallows.
“Maybe we’ll have us some rainbow trout instead of hot dogs for supper,” Daddy said. He winked and slid his free hand across Mama’s shoulders.
I watched as he and Mama walked out of sight. The weather forecast looked good; I had high hopes that the two of them were on the mend.
Joni napped in her playpen. I glanced her way periodically to make sure she still slept. A while later, I did a double take.
An enormous, hairy tarantula stood poised on the pink blanket no more than ten inches from Joni’s face. Mercifully, Joni still slept. Little patches of perspiration clumped her blond hair into ringlets around her face.
Where was Clint Eastwood when you needed him?
I knew Joni might wake any moment.
“We’ve got to get Joni out,” I told the girls.
We gathered and quickly formulated a plan. We decided to drop a large rock on the tarantula after I removed Joni. We couldn’t risk accidentally dropping the rock on Joni or missing the tarantula with Joni so close by. Mustering all my courage, I reached into the playpen with the speed of a striking rattlesnake, grabbed Joni, and snatched her up into my arms.
Joni fussed, but, unbelievably, the tarantula didn’t move. Not even a shiver. I quickly passed Joni off and we moved into Phase II of our plan.
Vicki hefted a large rock into my hands, which had begun to tremble slightly. I carefully positioned the rock above the unsuspecting tarantula, praying I wouldn’t miss. If the tarantula jumped on any part of my flesh—Had Daddy said they could jump?—I would faint, never mind being bitten. I held my breath and dropped the rock.
Bull’s-eye!
“We did it,” everyone cheered.
When Mama and Daddy returned to camp, Daddy figured the tarantula must have hitched a ride when we stopped to change the flat tire and unloaded the contents of the trunk onto the side of the road. He felt certain we didn’t have to worry about any more.
THAT EVENING, Daddy dredged fresh-caught trout in cornmeal and tossed the filets into a cast-iron skillet crackling with bacon grease, which we stored in an old Folgers tin. Mama covered potatoes in foil and buried them in the ashes at the edge of the fire until they were done and the foil had turned black. Daddy sat on the cooler and the rest of us atop blankets, savoring the sweet taste of trout and licking butter that melted over the sides of the potatoes.
Later, while toasting marshmallows, we heroines basked in Mama’s and Daddy’s astonishment and admiration as we told and retold how we had rescued Joni. Firelight lit our faces and our laughter traveled out into the night. Afterward, we settled onto our pallets for the night.
I lay outstretched on my back, my head cradled in my hands. I felt the firmness of the bedrock beneath my blankets. Some of the girls
slept in the back of the pickup, but I preferred to be near the campfire, trusting that Daddy was right. There were no more tarantulas about. I luxuriated in the rare feeling of solitude. Embers glowed in the fire. A night symphony played within the canyon: the plangent howls of coyote harmonizing with chirping insects and rippling water.
My body ached from riding the rapids earlier that afternoon. I bumped against the rocks for so long that I wore a hole in my cutoff jeans. We older girls sat on our butts with our feet pointing downstream. Much to our delight, and Mama’s chagrin (Mama had dreamed more than once that I had drowned), we shot through a chute of rapids flowing briskly over large stones. Laughing and sometimes coughing up mouthfuls of water, we lined up, over and over, for another ride.
Lying there, I felt slightly dizzy, as if I were still bobbing in the water. But when I looked up to see a million stars staring back at me, my full attention turned to the night sky. Could anything be more beautiful? The Milky Way looked like a veil tossed across the horizon.
As if on cue, a falling star flared across the sky. I gasped when I saw another and yet another. I stopped counting when the number reached into the teens. I had unknowingly stumbled upon the Perseid meteor shower, which peaks in August every year. Meteor after meteor hurled itself against the night sky. It was magical. I lay there enraptured. My mind stopped clamoring. Worry, longing, bewilderment—everything quieted. I became nothing other than a portal for amazement.
With the stars still falling all around me, I vowed to remember that night forever. I decided to fireproof it in my memory by painting a picture, much like Van Gogh’s Starry Night, onto the canvas of my mind.
There would come a time, when summer passed and other winters came, that I would lie awake, beneath the tin roof of our ten-by-fifty-foot trailer, and summon up that picture of an infinite universe, spinning with stars and wonder.
Moonlight on Linoleum Page 12