Never Say Never

by Lisa Wingate

  Finally, I wasn’t aware of anything at all… .

  Someone was shaking me, speaking close to my ear, but I didn’t want to listen. I wanted to sink deeper, keep my eyes closed. “Come on, hon, wake up. We got to get out. We come as far as we can go. We’re gonna hole up in this building till the storm blows over. Come on, darlin’. I know you’re plumb wore out, but we gotta get out of this bus.”

  Underneath me, the seat rocked. Metal groaned, and something solid clanged against the roof so hard the bus shuddered. My mind snapped to reality, and even before my eyes cleared, I was aware of the storm raging, people moving around the interior, children crying and mothers calling out, Donetta pulling my arm.

  “Let’s go, hon, let’s go!” There was a sense of panic all around, and in Donetta’s voice. “We gotta get out of here, now.”

  The bus rocked, and passengers staggered in the aisle, colliding with each other and falling into seats. The aisle lights went out, and in the blackness, voices called, “Hurry! Move ’long! Hurry!”

  Donetta pulled my hand, dragging me into the aisle, so that I was sandwiched between her and someone else. We staggered forward as the bus rolled and pitched. Near the exit, rain was pouring in the door, driven on the wind like daggers. I stepped into water and mud. The wind struck hard, shooting shotgun pellets of rain into my skin. Hands grabbed me from the side, moved me along. I felt the mud and gravel in my shoes, icy cold, the rain soaking my clothes and peppering my skin. Wind tore at my shirt, pulling it up so that the rain pelted my waist and hips. My feet sank into the mud, slid sideways. Spreading out, I braced myself and kept moving, clinging blindly to the person in front of me, someone else clutching me from behind—Donetta, I thought.

  The rain and the wind were suddenly gone. I pushed water from my eyes, tried to see. “Come on, come on, cher, move on in.” I recognized Mona’s voice. “We got more behind. Be movin’. More comin’ behind. Be movin’ …”

  I stumbled into the empty space, feeling my way in the blackness, my hands touching people who were only invisible bodies making sounds, breathing hard, crying, calling out to each other, babies squealing, women screaming. I felt something wooden—a railing—clasped my hands over it, inched along, sightless. I blinked, and blinked again, but there was nothing to see except blackness. Glass shattered somewhere, a woman screamed, high, loud, long. The air roared like a freight train and circled the building. A child cried out.

  Crouching against the wet stone floor, I covered my head and clung to the railing. Pressure pounded my ears and crushed my body. Outside, objects thrashed the roof and hammered the walls. The roar grew louder, tunneling into my ears, pressing, pushing, hurting. Overhead, the sections of tin slapped up and down, then vibrated like the tines of a tuning fork. Sharp splinters, bits of glass rained from the darkness, stung my skin, tangled in my hair, burrowed into the folds of my clothing. I curled tightly over myself, debris swirling everywhere, my eardrums pounding inward, my mind exploding.

  Please, I thought, please, but I didn’t know what I was asking for, or who I was asking. I’d always had the sense that if something happened to me, it really wouldn’t matter. But now, with the sky breaking loose and everything turning over, I felt so far from ready, as if I were being dragged toward a journey I hadn’t packed for yet. The thought went out of my head as quickly as it came, and I just hung on to the railing while seconds passed, an eternity of deafening noise and stinging wind.

  The roar dissipated as quickly as it had come, like a train rushing past and fading into the distance. An instant of surreal silence followed, and then people were calling for each other all around the room. Something wet touched my arm, and I knew the dogs were there. In the darkness, I grabbed them both, hugged them close and started to cry.

  We’re still here. We’re all still here.

  A light shone through the room, and I caught the outline of someone—Ernest—passing through with a lantern, checking on everyone. The scene seemed far away, as if I were watching it from an observation tower, as if I weren’t really part of it.

  “Everybody jus’ stay still.” Ernest’s voice was commanding and deep, calming. “We got glass broke everywhere. Don’ move.” The lantern glow spread to the far side of the room, where rain was coming through a tall window. What was left of the glass hung from the framework like teeth in a twisted metal skeleton. Lightning flashed, illuminating three more windows, tall and rectangular, arched at the top. A church. We were in a church.

  Ernest passed by with the lantern, his feet crunching on broken glass. He touched my shoulder. “You all right?” he asked.

  Beside me, Hawkeye stiffened protectively.

  “I’m fine.” The words rasped in my throat, knotted in a mixture of ebbing fear and rising relief. “What was that?”

  “Tornado blew over, sha.” The lamp lit his face, and I saw him clearly for the first time. He was younger than the shaved head made him look—maybe not much older than me. “The church van, they found us a place to hole up, so we jus’ put the pedal to the flo’, trying to get here before that storm eat us up.”

  He rose and moved on, checking others as more lanterns and flashlights lit the interior, and the group carefully began circulating, feet crunching on the mixture of water, grit, and shattered glass. Around the edges of the room, rain pushed through cracks in the decaying stone walls, swelling the puddles on the floor. The room was empty of furniture and the building smelled of must and old plaster, but compared to the bus, it felt like a safe haven.

  Mona and several other women herded the kids into the front of the building, where the floor was dry. Imagene’s white hair glowed in the dim light as she, Donetta, and Lucy helped to quiet the children. To convince them to stay still, Donetta promised to tell them a story about a cowboy named Pecos Bill, who lassoed a Texas tornado and rode it like a horse.

  By the door, men began carrying supplies from the bus, while Ernest and another church member opened a toolbox and struggled to cover the broken window with a tarp. As they worked, the tarp blew inward, flapping like a flag, flicking raindrops throughout the room.

  Tying the dogs to the railing, I stood up, gripping the wood unsteadily for a moment before starting toward the broken window. My legs vibrated like Jell-O, my hands shaking as they grabbed a corner of the tarp and held it in place. The scene felt like a dream, something too far away, too strange to be real. When the tarp was secure, shutting out the storm, I moved to the area near the doorway, helped carry in pet crates from the delivery truck, then sort available food, blankets, and dry clothing from luggage taken off the bus. I found my duffle bag among the items carried in. The bag and most of the contents were soaked, but Gil’s Bible was all right. I tucked it into the plastic-lined swimsuit pocket on the end of the bag, zipped it up tight, then carried it to the edge of the room and set it by one of the walls before returning to the doorway to help.

  My body was boneless and weary when the work was finally done. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt so completely depleted—perhaps when I was young and we were working in carnivals. Hours of teardown had to be done when the carnival closed at midnight and we prepared to move on.

  As everyone settled in to wait out the storm, I moved my bag to a place by the wall near Donetta, Imagene, and Lucy. The room was cold and the supply of blankets and towels limited, so we huddled together under one blanket, trying to keep warm and ward off the dampness. Lucy fell asleep with her head on my shoulder, and I closed my eyes, exhausted. The day spun through my mind, the images as wild and random as if they’d been caught in Donetta’s Texas tornado with Pecos Bill.

  Listening to the sounds in the room, I tried to push away the noise of the storm, the gusts of wind buffeting the building, the tin flapping overhead, causing the tarp to billow inward like the mainsail on a Spanish galleon. Onboard, we huddled close, unwilling passengers, unable to do anything but wait.

  Next to me, Donetta was praying—not loudly enough that I could hear the word
s, but in little whispers of sound that passed into the air like the wheezing of a napping baby. I listened impassively, thinking that if praying comforted her, then it was harmless enough, but the night my little brother died, I’d learned that prayers are like wishes on stars. No matter how much you want something, how much you need it, the stars don’t hear you, and neither does God.

  The prayer ended in a weary amen.

  “Donetta,” Imagene whispered after a while. “You awake?”

  “Who could sleep?”

  “You think we’re gonna make it out of this?”

  “ ’Course we are. Don’t say that. The storm’ll be gone by mornin’.”

  I turned my face away, the conversation feeling too intimate to be heard by a third party. I tried to focus on something else, but I couldn’t.

  “You been the best friend I ever had, Netta. I want you to know that. Nothin’ in my life woulda been the same if Miss Laudermilk wouldn’ta put you and me together at that desk in nursery school.”

  I tried to imagine what it would be like to have ties that long, to have been close to someone since childhood. My childhood was a sea of moving images, people who came and went with the seasons, disconnected pieces that had no relation to one another.

  Donetta snorted softly. “Heaven’s sake, Imagene, don’t talk like that. We ain’t dyin’.”

  Imagene’s sigh quivered with emotion. “If it was our time—if another tornado come along—I’d want to’ve said it, that’s all.”

  “You been the best friend I ever had, too, so I guess we’re even.” Their bodies shifted, tugging the blanket sideways, and I knew they were hugging. I felt the pull of an old yearning. When Gil and I were growing up, everyone in our lives was transient. We hung out with carnie kids here, and kids on a harvest crew there, and sometimes the kids of some bar owner where my father was playing music, but we knew better than to get too involved. Most of the people who worked with us were just like we were—one step shy of homeless. Either they’d be moving on soon enough or we would, and it was easier to pick up and go when you didn’t have entanglements.

  Beside me, Donetta and Imagene grew silent, and my mind drifted back to the times when our adventures and our fortunes changed by the week, the month, the season, the only constant being that whatever new place Gil and I landed, we would explore it together.

  “I didn’t want to be your friend at first,” Donetta whispered, her voice bringing me back to the church, casting me into the storm again. “I was jealous of you, Imagene, and that was wrong of me.”

  “What?” Imagene’s voice was drowsy and thick. “Netta, why in the world? You were always the pretty one, and the smart one, and you’re still the skinny one—well skinnier, anyhow. You got your own beauty shop and the hotel, and all I done is raise kids and work at the café. Here, you built up a business by yourself, and all I done is listen to Bob Turner flap his gums behind the fry grill all these years. There ain’t a soul I ever met didn’t think you hung the moon. I always wished I had half the salt you got.”

  Donetta laughed softly, but it was a sad, resigned sound. “I been jealous of you a lot of times. I was jealous of the way your daddy loved you, the way he used to take you around town with him on Saturdays, and to the café for breakfast, just you and him. I wanted my daddy to do things like that.”

  I wanted my daddy to do things like that. I felt the pull of Donetta’s yearning. So many times, I’d wanted to know that my father loved me, that I mattered more than his next big plan, his next trip to the casino, his newest demo tape, the next big gig that was going to get him noticed. I wanted Gil and me to come first, but we never did. Our only choice was to follow after.

  Imagene pulled in a soft breath. “Netta, it ain’t your fault your daddy took to the bottle. You know that.”

  Donetta seemed to consider the answer, and something in me understood, before she replied, what the answer would be. “Your head knows that, but your heart don’t really understand it. Your heart just keeps lookin’ for someone to make you feel … special, I guess. I think that’s why I ran off and married Ronald so quick after you met Jack. I couldn’t hardly stand it the way Jack had stars in his eyes for you, and I wanted someone to feel that way about me. I wanted to know somebody could.”

  A lump rose in my throat, and I swallowed hard, stuffing down an unwanted swell of emotion. I understood Donetta’s words, her feelings. I shared them, even if I didn’t want to. Would I end up someday laden with regrets and realizing that the major decisions in my life had been an unconscious reaction to my parents?

  “Netta, Ronald loves you. He just … don’t know how to show it, I guess. He’s a man’s man—all that huntin’ and fishin’ he does. There’s lots of men know their way around a tackle box and shotgun better than they know their way around a woman’s heart. Just because he don’t know how to come out and say it don’t mean he don’t have the feelings.”

  “Sometimes I wonder.” Donetta’s voice trembled, the last word ending in a sniffle. “Sometimes I wonder if he’d ever even notice if I just didn’t walk in the door one day.”

  “Netta,” Imagene admonished.

  “I guess he’d get hungry after a while.” Donetta laughed softly, then sniffed again, and Imagene laughed with her.

  “Ssshhh,” Imagene whispered, and the blanket rustled. I felt them lean away from me and toward each other. “If you start to cry, Netta, I’ll cry.”

  “I just wanted to tell you I always knew you loved me, Imagene. And that meant a lot.”

  “I always knew you loved me, too,” Imagene whispered, then they fell silent, and there was nothing but the sounds of the others in the room and the storm pressing in.

  Chapter 11

  Donetta Bradford

  I didn’t close my eyes till it was near mornin’. By then, the wind had died down and a light rain was sprinklin’ on the tin roof, just as peaceful as you please. Imagene was sound asleep. Ernest’d cut the light back to one lantern, so the glow was dim, like a candle behind gauze, but I could see Imagene with her head tipped back and her mouth hanging open. She’da died to know she was callin’ hogs in a room full of people, but I left her be. We’d been sitting there squeezing each other’s hands for hours while that old building rattled and shook. Then her fingers got slack in mine, and I knew she’d finally give it up.

  Thinking back on it after she fell asleep, I felt a little silly for all them things I said to her. I hadn’t ever admitted that about Ronald to anybody—not even to Ronald. I’d tried to hint around over the years—said things like, “Ronald, guess what Jack and Imagene did? They just hopped in the car and went off to Fort Worth to go dancin’. There’s a big ballroom there that plays all the old music. That’d be somethin’ to see, wouldn’t it?”

  Then Ronald, his face still hooked to the TV or a fishin’ magazine, would say something like, “Sit in all that traffic up there, like cows in a chute? They coulda just headed over to the VFW Saturday night. Coulda got music and a hamburg. Cheaper.”

  That ain’t the point, I’d think, but I wouldn’t say it, because then Ronald would think I was holding him up against Jack. Ronald’d always had a chip on his shoulder because Jack’d been all over the world in the service and then he got to be an insurance salesman, and Ronald just worked forty-eight years for the county road service and only left the county for weddin’s and funerals.

  I could never find a way to make Ronald see I wasn’t holding us up against Jack and Imagene; I just wanted to feel like I used to when I was a young gal and I’d load up with my chums and slip off to some Saturday evenin’ social, or the street dance after a rodeo. All the boys would come around askin’ for a dance, and I’d feel just like Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind.

  Back then, I could dance just like Ginger Rogers, except Ginger Rogers didn’t do the Texas waltz and western swing.

  I was thinking about dancing when the storm finally hushed outside. I closed my eyes and saw myself in my red felt skirt with t
he horses sewed all along the edge. That skirt was in the window of the Ladies’ Store in San Saba, Texas, when I went there with my brother for a rodeo. Frank won the saddle bronc ridin’ that afternoon, and he took his prize money and bought me that skirt so I could wear it dancin’. It was the nicest thing any little brother ever did for his big sister. Frank was always good that way, which was probably why Kemp was such a sweet nephew to me. He learned it from his daddy.

  My mind turned tired and misty, and I let myself dance to the “Tennessee Waltz,” just twirling and twirling and twirling while the horses ran wild on that red skirt.

  When I woke up, the air was quiet and calm. The first glint of a cloudy sunrise trickled light over the people curled up around the walls. I don’t think I’d ever praised God for the start of a new day quite like I praised Him for that one. There’s nothin’ like a stormy night to make you grateful for a clear mornin’. I blinked and looked out that window, and thought

  Thank.

  You.

  Lord!

  In three separate sentences, just like that.

  The rain’d washed the glass clean and bright as a Christmas bulb, and now I could see that, at the top of the windows where they arched up, the panes were colored red, and yellow, and green. The middle window’d shattered, and there were colored pieces of glass all over the floor, catching the foggy light.

  Off in the front corner, the door was open and some of the men were trying to read a map and figure out where we were. We’d come a ways from the main road, and the worse the storm got, the more we were turning down one county road, then the next, trying to work our way north, or west, and uphill. We’d probably passed right by houses and such, but there was so much rain, you couldn’t see five foot from the bus. The only reason anyone’d noticed the old church was because it sat almost right in the road.