Daughter of the Queen of Sheba

by Jacki Lyden

  Love,

  Jacki

  P.S. I know the answer to that one. You're always thinking "come home," aren't you? But I can't. Yet.

  The Fraternal Order of Police sponsored the rodeo in Nitro, a town of a few thousand souls. One of them became my friend. Tiller was the younger brother of our police liaison, Earl Mulles. Mulles watched too many southern lawman movies. He had a gut like Rod Steiger in In the Heat of the Night, but that was all they had in common. Still, he was not stupid. One night I sat in my Nitro apartment reading an article in Harpers magazine about the superficiality of my generation's emotions, "the loss of love among young people who expect very little from love and often get less than they expect." I thought about this. I expected almost nothing from love. I also wondered if anyone else within a fifty-mile radius of Nitro was reading Harper's. I looked down to the neighborhood bar beneath me, the Rebel Yell, glowing in pink neon. Right in the middle of the sidewalk was Earl Mulles, peering up at my apartment.

  Earl Mulles was probably only in his thirties, but he seemed older to me, a stocky man with a rubescent face made more florid by the sun and Nitro's bars. He mimicked Tiller by stuttering his body sideways like a sand crab, then lisping like radio hiss. Or Mulles would stop and scratch his head, feign exaggerated bafflement over simple tasks, oiling a big grin under the frying sun. At all this, Tiller roiled in anger to his hairline. Why should there be harm from the people who are closest to us? Tiller's dreamy paralysis was something I'd seen and wanted to protect. And the feeling of wanting protection deepened as Mulles watched me from his squad car, cruising by the apartment, or stopped by the phone room, or hung out at the café where I ate gravy sandwiches with Tiller. Shadows felt as thick as sludge in Nitro, like the residue of a sulphurous coal process, which they probably were.

  KA, A NAME OF JOY!

  BITTERROOT FARMS

  NEAR HOOD RIVER, OREGON

  Dear Sis:

  You sound stressed. I think you need some Divine Light. It's the source of all Inspiration and Understanding. You can get closer to God naked, but if that's not a good idea down there, just go naked around the house. Reveal the truth! Confront your demons! I gotta go to a meeting, I'm captain of the Spiritual Group.

  Love,

  Ka

  Earl Mulles had strongly suggested to me that I hire a grotesquely fat woman named Cordelia Judge to work the phones. Cordelia described Mulles as a tough-minded man, with "a tighter hand on the wheel than other men round these parts." More determined to have his way, a man like him. I felt a hot wind blowing up my skirt, a hot and determined wind. I fancied Mulles putting climes into a slot machine, myself expelling a jackpot. Perhaps Cordelia was in some way beholden to Mulles, a favor needing payback. Maybe everyone I'd hired in the phone room had debts to Mulles, and were somehow beholden to the police department of Nitro. They were watching me. Don't think, I said to myself. I couldn't afford to go crazy in Nitro.

  Mulles's squad car looped around and around my building at all hours until I began to wonder, If he were wrapping the house in rope, would it be completely covered by now? Me in a string ball. I made Tiller my constant companion, and I do mean constant. I made him dinners, did his laundry, even let him hang an old punching bag by the back entrance where he could practice his woeful karate kicks. Tiller began to sleep in his van outside my apartment at night, and in the morning I had him come in for coffee. I let him clean up in the bathroom. I pitted brother against brother, and if there was a buzz about us around town in the soft caramel month of August it scarcely mattered. Whether Tiller sensed my fear in the direction of his brother, or merely wanted my presence as a puppy wants warmth, wasn't terribly clear. I was glad to my bones he was there.

  AUGUST 20,1975

  LAKE PUCKAWASAY, WISCONSIN

  BULLFROG SEASON, BIG ENOUGH TO FRY!

  Dearest Jack:

  Who are some of these people you're down there with? Jesus, they make my hair stand on end like a spider crawled up my neck. Between you and your mother, it's a wonder I'm not dead yet. I made headcheese today. Does it ever stink! Viola next door complained she was gonna upchuck from the smell. Her ass! She cooks them TV dinners. Your mom and I are holding a rummage sale next weekend. I am putting out my wig she bought me. I've had enough of that bullshit and it makes me sweat bullets. I look like I should be playing piano on Lawrence Welk. Wish I could be. Your mom is always looking for dates to do stuff with. She was dating this lawyer, Roger, from Milwaukee, but he was pretty dumb. I offer to go places with her. She says, "Mabel, you're not my type!" It's so hot here today I'm sitting almost in the altogether. Now I got the fan on and the doors shut to the outside. Pugh! The smell is going away, anyways. I see Viola next door is down on her hands and knees looking for weeds with an itty-bitty teaspoon. You know how she goes over that lawn like it was needlepoint. I feel like going over and planting my foot on her big round rump roast. Here's five dollars. Buy yourself something nice. My damn neck is killing me again.

  Love always,

  Mabel

  After a couple weeks of cat and mouse with Mulles, he sprang. I found him parked on the speckled old sofa in my Nitro apartment, twilight tessellating the floor around him as it came in through the Venetian blinds. He was dragging on a beer from the fridge. I knew he had me now. He could afford to take his time.

  "I got rid of your little lapdog," he said, referring to Tiller. "Jesus, talk about your dog and pony show. You got him on a bit, don't you? I got him over to St. Andrews on a tire dump fire. He gets to set up in the truck and help the firemen. Might take two, three days. You and me, we got a chance to spend some quiet time together."

  I said nothing. If he made a move, I planned to scream and claw. But he'd anticipated that.

  "Want a date?" His mouth was like a piece of liver, working saliva into the corners.

  "No," I said.

  "You will real soon," he said calmly. He got up, smoothed the crenellations that his nightstick had made in the sofa coverlet.

  "I ain't going to beg," he said. "It's like this. You can meet me halfway. Or take the consequences. Your choice. Rodeo brat like you, hanging out with all kinds of scabby people, hands in other people's pockets, you're bound to mess up. Could be I have to get me a warrant says I found some dope in your apartment. Have to take you in, book you. Hell of a mess, expensive. After all, you're guests of the Fraternal Order of Police here. We gotta be cautious, right?"

  He fished a small bag of white powder (coke, baby powder, salt?) from his pocket, held it up between thumb and forefinger as if it were a dead mouse. And looked pleased. He put it back. I had never taken so much as a hit of marijuana. I was terrified of drugs. Losing your mind looked like anything but fun to me.

  "Mebbe you'd beat the rap. I don't think so. Know all the judges round here. Could make bail expensive. I think you will want a date."

  A step toward me, face like a red onion, and he slipped out his nightstick, tapped it on the wall next to my head. He tapped a point beside my ear, over my crown, the other ear. His smile like something oozing from a wound. He leaned down and gave me a look in the eyes. I felt rigor mortis setting in.

  "I'm enjoying my date already," he said. Then he backed out of the apartment like a beetle scuttling to its hole. "See you tumur-rah night."

  "Why don't you get the fuck out of here," I said, but I am sure it sounded as small as I felt. Real trouble this time. Again.

  ***

  If I look at us now, at the Queen of Sheba, at that Daughter of the Rodeo, I see the harm that mother and daughter skirted in a manner both oblivious and flirtatious, like coquettes performing before troops in the field. We beckoned harm, a singsong in chorus, kicking high. Our failure to protect ourselves was a measure of our capacity for self-injury. It was also a measure of our greenness and faith. Sheba fought her battles with an invisible scimitar, twisting it as if she were a snake handler before a dazzled crowd. I have been more prosaic and road-bound. I was road-weary when Earl Mulles drove
away, and I had a bad case of the jitters as well. Yet as bad as Nitro's crooked cop thought himself to be, I felt I could outwit him. I was not only the more desperate. I had witnessed more escapes than even a lawman could dream about. Mulles dreamed of conquest, I was sure, dreamed from his crotch, but my dreams were beaky coppered hawks, hovering on unexpected thermals of air.

  An unforgettable night. I was a skeleton against the wall in a chair, feeling my breath frost against my ribs. Could not move, never had moved. Listening for my heart to stop, waiting for phantoms to line up and take speaking parts. Did you think, Sheba calls in my brain, that you were somehow immune? That you would triumph where I have suffered? I waited for a miracle, and there it was, Tiller's lumbering step on the stairs at dawn. He bounded into the room as if he would do laps in it, smelling like a burned oven mitt.

  "I'm back," he said. "They don't need me no more. Cain't put that fire out for a month of Sundays. They thanked me for my help. I remembered: ain't the rodeo coming tomorrow? I wanted to see it every night!"

  "Tiller," I croaked, "coffee?" I was sweating now after a night of paralysis. Mulles was a crooked cop who wanted me to deliver the goods, namely myself. If I tried to file a formal complaint, whom would I report him to? I had no faith in the local powers. Who would vouch for me? And if I left Nitro immediately, I imagined more trouble from the Diamond S, not to mention the squawking unpaid phone hustlers who'd want their last wages. The cowboys were already in town setting up for that nights rodeo. Gordon and Mary were due in that afternoon. I had to stay on at least another week. Live in a netherworld of cupcake riders, and, oh! nether things can happen to you! Make up your mind now, tonight! Sheba, her quirky spears darting at the world from behind her shield. Sheba would take on anybody, say anything, wield monkey wrenches. Hadn't Sheba been arrested by sheriffs, spat back at them, faced them off in courtroom and squad car and told them their faces looked like old socks? And she was right. If you threw some pea meal into an old nylon stocking, squished it around, and added black buttons for eyes, you would have Mulles's jowls and general mien.

  Later that morning I handed Mulles a rendezvous letter, wishing I had written it in arsenic. He hung over his squad car like a sandbag on a levee. King Leer. I went to my flat and packed my bags as carefully as if I were storing nitroglycerin. Mary and Gordon arrived, in town as Uber-collection agents for that night's cash proceeds. I hung around the rodeo camp during the day, sitting on the newly erected corral. I hooked my feet in its rope slats, listened to the cadences of the shellacked bravado and road swill from the young and middle-aged cowboys. The horses were unloaded, so forlorn they looked as if they were about to become a French delicacy rather than a Wild West legacy in Nitro. I will never see you again, I thought, looking at the men's card faces. I'd named them to myself that way. He's the jack of hearts. He's the king of spades. A man named Buford came over, saying there was something he had to talk to me about. I thought he wanted me to buy him a drink.

  "I just want to say something," he said, hulking and spitting. His cheeks were as pitted as a piece of cantaloupe rind, and he puffed them up and let out air. "You have the purtiest voice," he said. "I never heard one so purty. Are you English?"

  Night descended, and the moon was a miner's lamp that someone had hung over Nitro as if we might want to use it to locate exits. Families, grannies, grandpappies, children of all ages came to the rodeo, bestirring themselves from television and arguing, Nitro's two favorite pastimes. I wandered through the crowd to see the exhortational looks from the kids at the home for the mentally retarded (two dozen kids, couple hundred seats sold), cheering on their charity John Waynes. Other children were from the black lung fund, a few dyslexic kids from the reading program, some very little black children who were part of the hot lunch assistance program at a county daycare center. There was a woman I always saw in Nitro who had velvety tumors growing on her neck and body like a pumpkin patch. Cordelia Judge screeched by, embossed in Pepto-Bismol pink stretch pants. She looked like a small dirigible. "Miss Bossy," she clattered, "you all gonna pay us in the morning, right?" You know it, Cordelia. I had written out the checks for somebody to find the next morning in the phone room.

  The rodeo began. Buford, Merlin, a hardcase-looking woman I didn't recognize—the night's cupcake rider—paraded around in the ring on the horses, Yankee Doodle, Pop Star, and Spunky, names bestowed by children who'd loved them for a while before abandoning them to the glue factory. The Diamond S got them cheap. As the horses circled the ring, oompah music lent the effect of a carousel spinning round, damned to do so for all eternity.

  One member of the audience waited to grab the brass ring. "Meet me at ten," I'd told the cop, and I could see him across the rodeo ring, snuffling through the dust. "There's a yellow rose in Texas," the loudspeaker blared, "that I'm going to see." The music twanged. Got that right. In the ring, the Brahmin bull was all but trampling Elmo. The rodeo fans had gotten exactly what they came for. Mary and Gordon were expecting me in the morning to put the books together. My pulse sped in the dust, as I stared at cotton candy tubes on the grass. I walked to the parking lot and drove to the apartment, entered it from the back staircase without turning on the lights. It was almost ten o'clock. As still as a rock. Thick nails of dust in my snout. Heat under my armpits. I slipped a brick I'd taken from the street into a sock, waiting for Mulles. I could see the Rebel Yell below, lit up like a cinema. Precisely at ten, I heard a crash, and a stool made a tingly trajectory through the storefront window of the bar, a solid launch that pulverized the glass. Inside, Tiller stood swinging a pool cue wildly over his head. He paused and looked up once toward my darkened window. Had I called his name? Then he sliced the cue across the mirror behind the bar, fracturing the glass.

  "I'm going to bust up this bar," cried Tiller, and other men were shouting either "No you hain't" or "Lemme at 'im," and they closed in on Tiller, and on one another, for good measure. Fists bounced off the walls, pogoed off belt buckles and jawlines. Under a frieze of neon, the men danced in a brawny embrace, a beer barrel polka at a shotgun wedding, woozy partners stepping on each other's boots. Off cue and out of sync, sirens bleated down the street. One, two, three squad cars, all that Nitro had in its tiny force, drawing simultaneously to the bar like magnets. Earl Mulles huffed out of his car, glanced spookily up at my place. Smart guy, Mulles. Maybe he even guessed what I'd done, but what could he do? Walk away? Tiller was supposed to get a chunk of insurance money from Joe the bartender to whom I'd given three hundred dollars with the stipulation that he give fifty of it to Tiller. And Tiller wouldn't be able to tell them where I was going because I'd never told him the truth about where I came from in the first place.

  No time to think about the old life. Young people of this generation expect very little from love and get even less than they expect. A girl with her breath skittering, her knees like petal jelly, throws two suitcases down a stairway, plashes into a pitch-dark back yard, hides herself in Nelleybelle, and, with her lights out and engine in neutral, rolls down the hill and out of sight forever. Drives farther south because she thinks someone might look for her on roads going north. Dawn comes like someone cracked an egg into a glass of beer—too yellow, too putrid. I felt my wits return with the sunlight, pulled the car over to watch a girl my age hang wet clothes on the line. So placid. Behind her was a barn so entirely stuffed with tobacco sheaves that it resembled a cardboard packet of matches. The girl hung up a quilt that probably had a named pattern—Log Cabin, Wedding Ring, Rose of Sharon, something like that—and she hung up a bandanna, and a clownish turquoise shirt. I knew eyes that color blue, like the color of squirting dish soap. What did Tiller's face look like now? I tried not to imagine a dirty egg, a beaten baseball, milk scum in the refrigerator. I saw a purply mottled rag over his head, teeth crowded down his throat like seeds.

  I got back in the car. An hour later there was a ripping sound and a nasty hiss of air as the rear tire blew out, a cheap retread sold to me by yet anoth
er misbegotten son of Nitro. A hundred miles later, the same thing happened to the second rear tire, another retread. Each time I sat for long, flat hours while I waited for help to come, trying to read Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out. Soon I had less than fifty dollars left—gas money, folded in my bra, the better to ration it. I threw water on my face at the auto shop. My hair felt like a straw hat, my forehead prematurely wizened with dirt and motor oil. Nelleybelle had no air conditioner, and the sun beat down with the strength of a branding iron. I was heading back to middle-class life. Back to my twenty-second birthday, back to my mother, back to my chance to be an overnight journalistic sensation. I intended to stop at the home of a friend who lived somewhere outside Chicago, an insouciant girl, Valerie, who'd been with me in Cambridge. We would shake off everything that had come before us all summer long, like dogs shaking off water. We would quaff beer, throw the bottles over our shoulders, talk about men, and remind ourselves that we would be forever young and good-looking. But Chicago was an unknown metropolis to me, one suburban name more meaningless than the next. I got lost when I got off the Interstate and into the spaghetti of bypasses around the city. I hadn't slept in forty-eight hours. I passed a patrol car. I wouldn't ask a cop for the directions to hell. I pulled off the road to ask the way to a girlfriend's house in the suburbs.