In Valley of the Sun

by Andy Davidson

  “Looks like you’re getting sunburned pretty bad, mister.”

  “Looks like you’d go on and let me be.”

  Sandy picked up another shard of flowerpot. He looked around and saw the big orange cat sitting in the shade beneath a concrete bench, watching him. Sandy watched it back. The cat yawned. Sandy turned and lobbed the shard toward the highway, where it split against the asphalt. He left the cowboy alone, dusting his hands on his pants as he went.

  Annabelle and Sandy sat at the Formica-topped table in the farmhouse kitchen, heads bowed over meatloaf and mashed potatoes. Annabelle prayed, as the boy had taught her, as she remembered Tom praying, “Bless this house, oh Lord, and bless this food to be the nourishment of our bodies and our bodies to thy service. Amen.”

  Sandy said “Amen,” too, and they began to eat.

  “What’d it feel like when you went under?” Sandy asked after a while. “Was it cold?”

  “No. The water was warm. Was it warm when you went under, back when you were saved?”

  He nodded and kept eating his meatloaf.

  “It came up to my waist,” Annabelle said. “There was a cinder block there for little kids and short people, just like you said. But I didn’t need to stand on it.”

  “You were taller than the preacher.”

  “I was.”

  “You think the preacher ever just wades in and takes a swim when no one’s around?”

  “Probably not.”

  “I would, if I was the preacher. I hope we get our pool filled back up.”

  “Maybe we’ll fill it for your birthday,” Annabelle said. “If our pool man does a good job cleaning it out.”

  “He looks like a cowboy,” Sandy said.

  “It’s Texas, baby. They all look like cowboys.”

  “Daddy didn’t look like a cowboy.”

  “No. Not really. He just looked like your daddy.”

  “Roscoe Jenkins at school said my daddy was a baby killer.”

  Annabelle put her fork down. She swallowed her food. “That was a real shitty thing for Roscoe Jenkins to say,” she said.

  Silence followed, and she took up her fork again.

  “Is it true?” the boy asked after a while.

  “It most certainly is not. Your daddy was a soldier in the war. Soldiers in the war, maybe they did bad things, but your daddy never did.”

  “Did they really kill babies over there?”

  “That’s what folks say. But your daddy was a good soldier who saved men’s lives, and he came home to us and loved us and took care of us until he couldn’t anymore.”

  “I know,” the boy said. “If we fill the pool, does that mean we’re gonna open the motel again?”

  “We never closed it, Sandy. Not really. People still come for the cafe.”

  “But nobody ever stays anymore,” Sandy said. “Not really.”

  They ate in silence after that.

  Annabelle stood at the sink, washing dishes, the sound of the TV drifting in from the living room where the boy sat on the floor watching a car-chase show. A breeze played through the curtains above the sink. Arms in soapy water up to her elbows, she looked out the window and down the hill where a single light burned in the Roadrunner cabover.

  She thought of Tom, the day she had picked him up from the airport in El Paso. December 22, 1968. She had found him waiting in the terminal, his army peacoat zipped, duffle slung over his shoulder. She had hugged him, and he had flinched. They had stopped for omelets six miles out of the city. She remembered smiling, drinking coffee, wondering at how his hands had not sought her waist, her cheeks. Even his words seemed lost. He poured sugar in his coffee and stirred and ate like a wind-up toy, each forkful of egg and ham snapping from plate to mouth to stomach, his eyes downcast. We are strangers now, she had thought, watching him.

  The light from the cowboy’s camper spilled out onto the ground and up the side of the motel. She saw his shadow pass, like a ghost, over the wall. It gave her a shiver.

  She worked her rag over the dishes in the sink, hands moving beneath the warm water, and remembered how Tom had put his fork down and stared out the diner’s window, past the cars and trucks and mountains, seeing something only he could see. There were tears in his eyes, and in the weeks and months that followed, she did not forget this. She realized, much later, that the look on his face that evening had been her first glimpse of the sadness that had followed him home, had already eclipsed his heart overseas, a terrible black shape against which he could never pull or grapple, could never haul himself from its shadow into light.

  He had come home a man without a compass.

  Later that night, a rare snow coming down outside and a fire blazing in the wood-burning stove in the living room, the distance between them had shrunk, and they had found, under a blanket on the couch, a new rhythm together, and afterward she held him and he told her about the motel he wanted to build. The cafe. Hot coffee, hamburgers. She listened, stroking his hair, shocked and fearful of all the things she did not know. Of the money it would take. The station and store had always struggled. She remembered how her father had pumped gas for businessmen in Buicks, wiping sweat from his sun-browned neck with a dirty rag as they all pulled away, headed west. How he had watched them go, eyes like slits. Stooped and bent in overalls that hung from his frame like a second skin.

  Still, she had thought, my man has come home to me from a land of blood and terrors, where other women’s men are dying by the scores. Come home to make the best peace he can. His dream was a hopeful, delicate thing, and she would turn it carefully in her hands for fear of breaking it. Before drifting off that night, she heard her mother’s voice, the words the old woman had spoken on the day Annabelle Green had married Tom Gaskin: “A woman’s heart knows no boundaries save the fences and walls she builds upon it, Annabelle. Be careful you keep a plot for yourself, or he’ll lay claim to it all. Every last acre.”

  Maybe we’ll have a pool, she remembered thinking, before she fell asleep.

  Now, the cowboy’s light still burning in his cabover down the hill, dishes drying on the rack, she knew the truth: Tom’s dream had died long before he did, and her life, these last ten years, had felt as random as the junk she had filled the pool with after he was gone. No inclination to sort out the worth of any one object, just the steady task of tossing in. Only the cafe in her father’s old garage had thrived, and this, it turned out, was the plot she had kept for herself. She had painted the cinder-block walls and driven anchors into the cement and hung pictures of her parents and the filling station and the lunch counter they ran, and later of Texas sunsets and sunrises, pictures torn from calendars and bought at yard sales and photographs she had taken herself, waking before the dawn when the world was still and quiet and going out to stand upon the highway and work the lens of a cheap camera got down from the attic—all of these framed in stapled wood that cut her fingers. And she, every evening save Sundays, for ten years, had set the red vinyl chairs upside down on the tables and refilled the sugar dispensers, the salt and pepper shakers, the ketchup bottles, had shuttered the twin garage doors and locked them on days when the wind had been gentle enough to keep them open until closing. And she had worked the register and balanced the books, even while Tom, in the shadow of his great sadness, began to drink up their meager profits out at Calhoun’s.

  “Life’s the choices we make, Annie,” her father used to say. “I chose to be a gas man. You can choose whatever you want.”

  I chose Tom, she thought. And here I am.

  She was draining the sink when the light in the camper below winked out.

  Travis stood naked in the center of the camper and stared down at his body. In the dim light over the sink, he could see patches of skin peeling from his chest. Patches where the flesh beneath had turned white as a snowcapped peak. The first of these had appeared that morning, a small triangular flap peeling from the back of his left hand. Standing in the pool among the trash, he had taken a corner of
the flap between his thumb and forefinger and pulled and the skin had come away in thin curls like soap shavings, and the flesh beneath was not pink and new as it should have been but white and slick like the belly of a catfish. When he touched it, it was cold.

  It was hot that morning, so he had taken off his T-shirt and hung it on the chain-link fence. The sun had blazed down and climbed. He sorted piles on the deck of the pool. He had found a broken Tom Thumb typewriter; a Montgomery Ward television with a busted picture tube; a metal filing cabinet, the locks on its drawers all broken. He wrenched free a swing set and an old deep freeze, the lid missing. Garbage bags of clothes; a table lamp with a frayed cord; an oxygen tank on wheels, the tank light and empty. The Gaskin woman had thrown an entire life in the pool, it seemed, hoping for what he could not guess. Rain to drown it maybe. Midmorning he hauled out several long sections of rusted guttering, and a nest of brown scorpions spilled onto the concrete. He cussed and stamped them with his boot.

  Just before the sun reached its noon apex, he broke to drink from the gallon jug of water fetched from his camper. He had been working against a slow and growing numbness in his arms and back, and now there were new and coiling pains in his joints, knots of snakes where the ligaments stretched over muscle and bone. He was thirsty, so he sat on the edge of the pool, jug in hand, expecting the cold water to feel good when it hit his stomach. It did not. A lesser cramp than the one that had bent him double in the camper that morning rolled up through him when the water went down, and the wound on his leg came alive with sudden heat. He dropped the open jug into the pool and the water coursed out, thug-thug-thug.

  The scorpions on the concrete were red and brown smears crawling with ants.

  Later, after the boy had come and gone with his talk of rabbits, Travis had returned to the camper and sat for a while in the cool dark. Listening to his stomach gurgle like pipes in an old building.

  Now, stripped of his clothes, he counted nine patches of peeling skin, all different shapes and sizes. He had pulled some of these away, the ones he could reach, always the moist, pale flesh beneath. Painless as peeling dead skin from the sunburns he had gotten as a boy, fishing on Grandview Reservoir with his old man. Even now, he reached for the triangle on his hand and peeled. All the way past the wrist, the forearm, to the marks that had been cut in his flesh with a hot blade in a jungle years ago, the shape of a wolf’s shaggy head. He kept peeling, and now the flesh there sloughed off, too. It curled, ash-like, falling. Old scars gone.

  Shed, he thought.

  . . . Shed.

  The word conjured a memory he did not like: the little work shed in back of his childhood home, a place he had once hidden as a boy.

  Shed like the past, my love.

  That voice: a whisper in the cave of his skull.

  But the past was not shed, he thought. No, it was always with him, always would be, wouldn’t it? His life was a scene in a rearview mirror, a backward glance at a family of three stranded on a roadside, some dead, vague shape on the asphalt before them. What this shape was, what it meant, he did not know, but it and they were always there—hazy, ever-distant, but there. Man, woman, boy—the boy watching his grown self speed away in a stolen life. He remembered the boy he had been: small and wiry. He remembered holding a broken-winged bird in the palm of his hand when he was ten. Watching it thrash, blood bright crimson on its beak. It had struck a window in back of the house. He remembered closing his fist and calling it mercy. His father tall and terrible in a broad straw hat. The smell of the slaughterhouse. The war. The hospital in Wichita Falls, surrounded by strange and incomplete men, some whose scars were not apparent until they spoke, if they spoke at all. Lives as empty of meaning and purpose as lines of static on a television set. He felt as though he had been pushed from the womb at once too soon and too late, his coming nothing more than a dream in an unformed mind. No warm embrace to welcome him into this new and frightening place. To shelter him from its pain.

  He remembered the women.

  Three of them.

  One in Fredericksburg. The one in Austin before her.

  The one in Grandview, his first.

  He looked down at the belt he wore, ran his fingers over the buckle.

  He had never used his knife on any of them.

  He remembered the blood on the seat of his father’s pickup, a long time ago, when he was sixteen. Just a spot, but enough to get him thrashed. It had not been his.

  But no, he had never spilled a drop.

  So the blood was mine, he thought.

  But who had cut him? Who—or what—had made him bleed, made his skin slough off, made his face turn dim and ghostly in a glass?

  He took another patch of skin, the one nearest his heart, and ripped it free with a kind of numb fascination, thinking of a man he had known up in Wichita Falls, a man who would sit cross-legged for hours, tearing sheets of paper in long, thin strips until he was half buried in a ragged nest of his own making.

  He stared at the skin where he had dropped it in the sink and thought: You are not the thing you thought you were. You are becoming something else.

  Her voice again, soft and urgent: Are you frightened?

  Yes. Whoever you are, yes.

  Good, she said.

  Travis limped to the cabinet door he had kicked shut that morning. He hunkered down, naked, before it. He balanced himself with one hand flat, and with the other he reached for the knob.

  He eased the cabinet door open.

  Inside, the space wide and dark, his two spare propane tanks had shifted and rolled to a far corner. A red metal toolbox pushed up against them. There were three empty gallon milk jugs, one missing its blue plastic cap, a broken whirligig in the shape of a roadrunner. Dust and cobwebs.

  And a dress, he saw. White and crumpled behind the jugs.

  He pulled it out and stood with it, letting the dress fall to its full length, and something small and hard dropped out of it and hit the floor. It was an old-fashioned locket. He popped it open. Inside were two tiny photographs of a girl and a boy, both young. They looked alike, brother and sister, perhaps—strong bone structures, long white necks. A smattering of freckles across the boy’s nose and cheeks. The girl was thin and pretty and sharp, somehow, like a blade. Had he taken the locket from one of the women? The one in Grandview maybe, with the dolls? He never took things. What did it mean? Travis closed the locket and hung it from the knob of the closet door. He held the dress up and looked at the rose-petal print, and when he pressed the fabric beneath his nose, he smelled something familiar, something between the warmth of a woman’s perfumed breasts and the cold, moist scent of rot. He thought of the scorpions bursting on the concrete, and it came to him like a shudder, like a sigh: the girl-woman-thing with red hair, her dress of blood.

  Oh God, he thought. I’m hungry. So terrible hungry.

  Monday

  October 6

  The Bell 47 cruised above rolling hills of rock and tree, oaks and cottonwoods bent by wind and time. The two rangers in the glass cockpit wore headsets beneath their Stetsons and spoke in nods and gestures. Reader nudged the stick and watched the snaking green rivers and a hundred dirt roads sweep past between his boots. Cecil, he saw, gripped the sides of his seat, his round face pale. The junior ranger’s tie flapped loose in the wind. Reader’s was tucked neatly between the buttons of his shirt. Beyond Fredericksburg, he angled north, toward a stretch of green where I-10 climbed away toward the plains. Cecil shut his eyes as the Bell dropped and banked, and soon they had set down in a trailer park on an open patch of ground, the helicopter kicking up a cloud of dust.

  Nearby, a cluster of sheriff’s deputies held their hats in place against the winds. Reader held his, too, so tall when he stepped out of the cockpit that he had to hunch forward for fear of losing his Stetson to the dying rotors. Cecil followed on shaky legs, a green metal tackle box in hand.

  The Gillespie County sheriff, a broad-shouldered fat man, fell into step alongside Reader and
thanked him for coming. Reader smoothed his tie and let the man talk as they walked up the concrete steps and through the front door of the trailer. Cecil kept a step back, as was his habit. The cops in the living room—who all wore modern pistols of square porcelain on their hips—stepped aside for the rangers. Reader and Cecil and the sheriff walked through the kitchen and down the narrow hall, to where the girl’s bedroom door was shut.

  “We’ll take anything you’ve collected off your hands,” Reader said to the sheriff. “Soon as we’ve had a look ourselves.”

  The sheriff hitched up his belt in the back. “Whatever you boys need,” he said, his bulk filling the hallway as he turned back for the kitchen. “We’re grateful.”

  Reader looked at Cecil, who rolled his eyes. Reader smiled. “You ready to see something bad?”

  Cecil said, “As I’ll ever be.”

  Reader opened the door.

  The girl lay naked on the bed.

  Reader saw immediately that the window had been raised.

  Three flies buzzed above the corpse.

  “Close that goddamn window,” Reader said.

  Cecil closed the door first, then the window. He set his green tackle box on the dead girl’s vanity beside a bottle of perfume and a porcelain frog. Silver and plastic bracelets hung from the frog’s neck. Cecil opened the tackle box and took out a jar of menthol rub. He put a dab beneath his nose and tossed the jar to Reader. Reader did the same and handed it back. Cecil took a pair of rubber gloves out of the box and pulled them on and the rubber gave a sharp snap in the silent bedroom.

  “Boss,” he said and handed a pair to Reader.

  Reader put the gloves on and regarded the dead girl. Late twenties. Black hair, thick and long. Her torso bloated and turning the blue-green color of beard grass. Her eyes were open and staring, her mouth ajar. Her neck bruised purple.

  Cecil was unpacking his tackle on the girl’s vanity: magnifying glass, paper evidence bags, tweezers, plastic baggies, cotton swabs, a brush, fingerprint powder, transparent lifting tape. He laid it all out like surgical instruments.