by Billie Letts
Ivy made two more stops on the way to the trailer—one to bag up more roadside trash, another to pick up a half-starved hound, which she fed, then put into one of the cages in the back.
When she slid into the driver’s seat again, Mark said, “Are you going to keep him?”
“No, Mom can hardly put up with Bernie, my cat. DeClare has a no-kill shelter. I’ll take him there.”
Mark had never known a woman like Ivy, a woman who wanted to improve the environment and rescue the strays of the world but seemed barely able to manage her own life. She was in her early thirties, he guessed, unmarried, but pregnant; driving a vehicle filled with trash; and by her own admission, unable to keep a job. She was, no doubt, one of those people who had little order in her life. A woman who was living without a plan.
He kept his own car immaculate, had it detailed once a month, had never been foolish enough to father a child, owned a thriving animal clinic and checked his day planner each night before he went to bed.
“Here we are,” she said, when she came to a barbed-wire fence posted with PRIVATE PROPERTY and NO TRESPASSING signs.
She turned in at a break in the fence, easing the van across a rocky gully. A hundred yards beyond that, she parked, turned off the ignition.
“We’ll have to walk the rest of the way.”
“How far is it?”
“Not too far. Maybe a quarter of a mile. Used to be able to drive right up to the trailer, but not anymore.”
After they got out, Ivy went to the back, opened the hatch and scrounged around in the debris, emerging with a pair of worn western boots, a garbage bag and a can of insect repellent. Leaning against the van, she slid her feet out of the black rubber thongs and pulled on the boots.
“You want to watch where you walk. This place is crawling with snakes.” She sprayed her legs and arms with the repellent, then offered the container to Mark.
“Chiggers and mosquitoes will eat you alive without this.”
“You make it sound like a safari. But I’ll be fine.”
“Okay, then. Let’s go.”
Ivy struck out on a trail soon disappearing into pines, blackjacks, pin oaks and bois d’arcs. Boulders and waist-high weeds made slow going for Mark, but Ivy moved at a steady clip. Even as she stopped now and then to stuff litter into the garbage bag, he still fell behind.
“Look,” she said, pointing to a shallow ravine where two does and a fawn skittered into a grove of cedars.
Midway up a steep incline, Mark flushed a covey of quail, their sudden flight causing him to lose his footing. When he landed, he felt the sting of nettles through the seat of his linen slacks.
Ivy, waiting for him at the top, pretended not to see him fall, kneeling to examine the shell of a blue jay egg. When he finally struggled to the crest, he was panting, slapping at mosquitoes, welts already rising on his face and arms.
“You okay?”
“Sure,” he said, gulping for air.
She slowed her pace as they descended the hill to a small pond shaded by willows. As they skirted the bank, a stubby black water moccasin slithered into the edge of the water.
Just beyond the pond, the trailer, sheathed in trumpet vines and Virginia creeper, was shadowed by pines, banked by redwoods and azaleas. A weathered wooden porch tilted beneath the front door, which had been sprayed with graffiti.
“Kids,” Ivy said. “I don’t know how they find this place, but they do.”
Then Mark noticed the containers—coffee cans, plastic buckets, tin tubs—arranged around the porch. Filled with a variety of plants and flowers, all dead.
“Grandma Enid,” Ivy explained. “Mom brings her out because she doesn’t see well enough to drive anymore, but that doesn’t stop her from coming here every year. January thirtieth.”
“The day Gaylene died,” he said, his voice flat, giving away nothing. When he noticed Ivy’s questioning look, he added, “I read everything I could find about her at the library yesterday. I know when she was born, when she died, how many times she was stabbed, where she—”
“Lord, that must have been hard.”
“It wasn’t easy.”
“I suppose it helps you to distance yourself from what happened to her if you call yourself Mark and call her Gaylene.”
“What should I call her? Mother? Mom? Ivy, I’ve been Mark Albright for as long as I can remember,” he said, impatience beginning to creep into his voice. “And I’m not sure I can make the leap to having people call me Nick or saying ‘Mother’ when I’m talking about her.”
“Yeah, I can see that.”
“No, I don’t think you can. How could you? You grew up knowing your family. Aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents. Right?
“You spent most of your life with them. Birthdays, holidays. You’ve seen their pictures, listened to their stories, held their babies, cried at their funerals.”
Ivy nodded.
“But they’re not the people of my history. My father’s name was Morris, my mother was Helen. They were wonderful parents. I was my dad’s best buddy; my mother adored me. And they made sure I knew I was loved.
“They took me to New York when I was seven, to Paris when I was ten. And I skied Aspen every winter. I lived a life most people only dream of.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“Right now,” he said, his eyes shifting to the old trailer, the pond downhill, the cans of flowers nearby, “I’m not really sure. I came to meet Gaylene Harjo, see what she had to say, then get out. I didn’t come to establish a relationship with her if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“What I’m thinking is that you must feel awfully alone right now.”
“How the hell would you know how I must feel, huh?” His anger, an emotion he had been taught to suppress, was just below the surface now. “All of this meant nothing to me until a few weeks ago. So I show up here, meet you, and now, twelve, fourteen hours later, you’re going to tell me how I should feel?”
“Mark, I know you’re upset, and you have every right to be bitter, but maybe . . .”
“You know? You don’t know a damn thing about me, not a goddamn thing, so don’t try to fit me into your notion of what I should be, what I should feel. Don’t try to cast me in the role of the long-lost son mourning the loss of a mother he never knew, because that’s not going to happen. But here is what’s going to happen. I’m going to take a quick look at this trailer, go back to town, pick up my car and drive to the airport in Tulsa. About three hours after I board a plane, I’ll be back in Los Angeles, where I live. My home. Then I’ll see my shrink, who’ll tell me to try to ‘fit this into my life experience,’ and in time, my trip to DeClare, Oklahoma, will seem like nothing more than a bad dream.”
He pulled back then, confused by this anger, mystified by this voice that seemed not to be his.
Embarrassed, he stepped up on the porch to open the door. As an afterthought, he turned back, prepared to offer Ivy a hand up, but she shook her head.
Dank and dark, the trailer smelled of mildew, like the locked trunks he had discovered in his parents’ attic.
The living room held an overturned canvas camp stool and an aluminum lawn chair, the plastic webbing torn loose from the frame. The linoleum was littered with cigarette butts, burned candles, pecan shells and ruined cassettes, their tapes curled and spooled across the floor.
The kitchen had been gutted—stove and refrigerator gone, cabinet doors and faucets missing. A dead bird lay in the rusted sink, an empty Spam can and bottle opener on the countertop.
The toilet had been wrenched from the bathroom, leaving a gaping hole in the floor. “Shit Happins” was scrawled in lipstick on the tile over the tub, the medicine cabinet yanked from the wall, the mirror smashed.
A filthy blanket covered with rat droppings was piled in one corner of the bedroom, a pair of yellowed men’s briefs and a used condom in the other.
He tried to imag
ine how this room might have looked when she lived here, tried to see it with bright curtains at the windows, a baby bed and rocking chair, a shelf holding teddy bears and a wooden Pinocchio doll. But those images were blurred, the pictures dark and distorted.
As he started back down the hallway, he noticed a closet, the door hanging by only one hinge. The floor was strewn with wire hangers, a broken broomstick, lightbulbs and curtain rods.
But there was something else, something half-hidden beneath the crumpled page of a magazine. A bootie crocheted of blue thread, a white silk ribbon laced around the top. The shoe, no bigger than his thumb, was covered with dust, and the ribbon was frayed at one end. But as he turned it between his fingers, studying the intricate stitches, he knew it was a connection. An unexpected gift from her.
“Where in the world have you two been?” Teeve asked when Mark and Ivy walked into the café. “I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what happened to you. I looked up and you were gone.”
“We went out to Aunt Gaylene’s trailer,” Ivy said. She and Mark hadn’t spoken since his flare-up at the trailer, not even when she stopped briefly at the shelter to drop off the stray dog. And the silent ride back to town had only increased their discomfort with each other.
Teeve looked unsure of how she should react, knowing her nephew had just been to the place where his mother had been killed. “Well, I guess you had lunch.”
“I’m not hungry,” Ivy said.
“How about you, Nicky Jack? I’ve got some roast beef left,” she offered, thinking food might provide some solace.
“No, thanks.”
“He doesn’t want us to call him that, Mom.”
“Well, I guess it sounds kind of babyish, doesn’t it?”
“His name is Mark. Mark Albright. Besides, he doesn’t have time to eat. He’s got to get to Tulsa.”
“Tulsa? Why?”
“I’ve decided—”
“He’s flying back to Los Angeles this evening.”
“No,” he said, trying again to break into the conversation, “I’ve—”
“But you just got here,” Teeve said. “I thought you’d want to meet Enid, your grandmother.”
“Yes, I do,” he said.
Ivy looked mystified.
“I’m not leaving, Ivy. At least not for a while.”
“But you told me—”
“I changed my mind.”
May 2, 1967
Dear Diary,
I got my period while I was in math class! My stomach was acheing all morning, but I thought it was gas. Boy was I wrong. When I felt something wet in my pants I was pretty sure I knew what was happening. I went to the bathroom to check and sure enough there was blood. Not a lot, thank goodness, because I had on a pair of tan corduroy pants so it could have been a disaster.
The school nurse gave me a sanitary napkin then signed a note so I could leave early. When I got to the bank and told Mom I’d started, she left work and took me home. She fixed me a cup of maidenhair tea which is an old recipe for Cherokee girls when they start they’re periods. I didn’t like it much, but I drank it anyway. I’m glad I finally got my period though. Row’s been menistrating since she was twelve and I think all the girls on our basketball team do too.
I guess I am a woman now.
Spider Woman
Chapter Nine
Did you hear what I said?” Ivy asked.
She and Mark had the café all to themselves, as it was well past lunchtime, but the pool hall was anything but quiet. Lonnie Cruddup and Ron John O’Reily were yelling at each other over the domino table, Teeve was trying to break up an argument between two girls at the video machines and three pool players were razzing a fourth who’d just missed an easy shot.
Ivy tried again. “I asked you why you decided to stay. What changed your mind?”
Mark ran a hand through his hair, glanced into the pool hall to make sure no one was watching, then reached in his pocket and pulled out the blue bootie. As he placed it in the center of the table, he said, “I found this in the trailer. In the corner of a closet.”
Ivy picked up the bootie, pinched a piece of lint from the heel and said, “So you think—”
“She made this for me.”
“Aunt Gaylene?”
“Yes.”
“Mark, a lot of people have been in that trailer since you and Aunt Gaylene lived there. Lots of kids. And some homeless folks, more than likely. Maybe families.
“This”—she handed the bootie back—“could have been left by any number of women, or girls, with babies. After all, the place has been empty for years.”
“No,” he said, closing his fingers around the tiny shoe. “It was mine.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Ivy, when I saw this, when I picked it up, I knew. Before then, I’d been distanced from all this, like it was happening to someone else. None of it had anything to do with me until that moment.”
They were quiet for a while, the only sounds coming from up front.
Finally Ivy said, “So how long will you be here?”
“As long as it takes.”
“For what?”
“To know her,” Mark said as he stuffed the bootie back in his pocket. “Don’t you see, Ivy? I can’t figure out who I am until I know who she was.”
“Mark, I’m so glad you’ve decided to stay for a while longer,” Teeve said, keeping her voice low so the domino boys couldn’t hear. “Your grandma is going to be thrilled to death to see you.”
“We’re going to her place now.”
“Unless you need me here, Mom,” Ivy said.
“Honey, you all go on. Nothing here I can’t handle.”
“We’ll be going by Wal-Mart. Anything you need?” Ivy asked.
“Yeah, you might ought to pick up a case of . . .”
When the door opened behind him, Mark could tell from the look on Teeve’s face and the shift in her posture that whoever was coming in had put her on alert.
“Afternoon, O Boy,” she said.
Mark had an uneasy feeling when he saw the sheriff, dressed now in his uniform, a badge on his pocket. And he remembered Teeve’s warning: Don’t underestimate O Boy Daniels. He might come across like a yokel, but he’s nobody’s fool.
“You’re a little late for lunch,” Teeve said.
“I didn’t come for lunch. I came to talk to Mr. Albright here.” He inclined his head toward Mark.
“Well, my feelings are hurt,” she said, trying her best to sound natural.
Then, when she noticed that O Boy’s arrival had gotten the attention of the domino boys, she said, “Why don’t we go in the back and—”
“I can take care of my business right here.”
“No reason for us to stand when we can sit back there, have a cup of coffee.”
“What brings you to DeClare, Mr. Albright?”
“Insurance,” Teeve offered too quickly. Then, remembering that Mark had told O Boy he was an attorney, she added, “And he’s a lawyer, too.”
“Trying to settle an estate. Isn’t that your story, Albright?”
“Yes, but—”
“Now, that’s interesting. Real interesting. You say you’re a lawyer. But when you checked into the Riverfront, I believe you told Patti Frazier you were in real estate. And now you’ve got Teeve believing you peddle insurance.” He leaned against the counter and crossed his arms. “Either you’re confused, fella, or you have your hands in a lot of pots.”
“Well, I—”
“You got to town night before last. Is that right?”
“Yes.”
“Patti said you checked in at six.”
“Six, six-thirty. I’m not sure.”
“What did you do when you got here?” O Boy asked.
“Drove around for a while.”
“Why?”
“Just taking a look at the town,” Mark said.
&nb
sp; “Yeah, that’s what I figured.”
“I’d like to know why you’re asking me these questions. If I’m in some kind of trouble . . .”
“What happened there?” O Boy asked, gesturing toward Mark’s bandaged arm.
“I was bitten by a dog.”
“Tell me how that happened.”
“I’m a veterinarian. I was treating a keeshond in my clinic and—”
“Hold on here. You were a lawyer, then an attorney, and now you’re a vet?”
“I can explain all that,” Mark said.
“You’re damn right you can. And you will.”
“When I came to town—”
“So, you got bit by a Keystone, whatever the hell that is, and you—”
“Keeshond. It’s a dog.”
“Did you need stitches?” O Boy asked. “Go to a doctor?”
“No, I took care of it myself.”
“Sure you did.”
“What’s this about, O Boy?” Teeve asked.
“Haven’t you been reading your paper, Teeve? We’ve had five break-ins the last two nights. They started when your friend here hit town.”
“Well, that doesn’t mean—”
“And whoever tried to get into Dewey Gentry’s workshop tangled with his German shepherd.”
“Are you accusing me?”
“I think we’d better talk about this in my office.”
“O Boy,” Teeve said, “you’re making a mistake.”
“How’s that?”
“He’s not . . . well . . .”
“He’s not what, Teeve?”
“He’s not who you think he is. You don’t know the truth about what’s going on here.”
“Then maybe you’d better tell me.”
“This is Nicky Jack.”
O Boy looked as if he’d just had the wind knocked out of him. Not only did he seem to be having trouble drawing breath, his skin paled to the color of corkwood.
“Nicky Harjo,” Teeve said. “Gaylene’s son.”
Chapter Ten
Then I had dinner in the motel.”
“Yeah.” O Boy grinned, an expression intended to convey contempt, not humor. “I hear you don’t care for fried catfish.”