In Valley of the Sun

by Andy Davidson

  It was not much of a town. The highway bisected it like a scar. A Tastee-Freez drive-in was the first business he passed, behind this a long, low brick building with a flat roof and six yellow Bluebird buses parked out front. Children on the playground. A barbershop. A gas station. A post office made of cinder blocks. Old and ugly cars moved up and down the streets like creatures made sluggish by the sun. Travis turned the Ford into the parking lot of Thrifty Dan’s Grocery. He sat in the cab for a while, watching people come and go, the engine ticking beneath the hood, wondering what he must look like, sitting here in his wrappings and hat. He touched his shirt pocket where the thirty dollars was. He took off his right glove, and in the sunlight his pale, new flesh began to blister red. Travis thought for sure he could hear it sizzle. He put the glove back on.

  Inside, he took a wire cart and pushed it, more to lean on as he walked than to fill. The cart had a gimpy wheel and made a high-pitched squeaking noise, and the few women out shopping among the vegetables and cereal and canned tomatoes gave him ghastly looks as he moved among them with his wrapped face. He put a box of powdered detergent and three jugs of distilled water into his cart. The water he stared at for a while, then put back. He found bandages, gauze pads. Aloe vera cream. He wheeled the cart around toward the back of the store and saw a young girl in jeans and an apron pricing creamed corn at the end of the aisle. Beyond her was the meat counter. Travis pushed his cart down the aisle. The girl stood up from her pyramid of cans and let her price gun drop at her side and watched him pass. She spoke to his back—“Help you, sir?”—but Travis paid her no mind.

  He stood before the meat counter and stared down at the freshly wrapped packages of red, marbled beef. He felt the same ache in the front of his mouth he had felt at the sight of the Gaskin woman in her house. The nerves knitting his teeth to his jaw tingling.

  There were two men behind the counter, one older, the other young. They wore white aprons and white paper hats bearing the name of the store. The younger man was Hispanic, and his eyes were the size of saucers. His name tag read Jimmy. The older man, large and round and possessed of a friendly, wise face, was Ron.

  Ron swallowed and spoke. “May I help you, sir?”

  Travis had begun to salivate. He could feel a dark, wet spot growing on the cotton where the strip of shirt wrapped his mouth.

  “Jesus,” Jimmy said.

  “Don’t be rude, son.”

  “I’m not your son, Ronald,” Jimmy said.

  Travis had begun to sway, ever so slightly, and now there was blood seeping through the denim of his thigh, where the bite marks and the slit were open and leaking once more.

  Ron spoke louder, “Sir, it appears you are in some distress.”

  But Travis only looked up from the meat when the older man came around the counter and took him gently by the arm and said, “Sir? You’re bleeding.” Travis looked from the old man to his thigh, and then at Jimmy, who stared slack-mouthed with horror from behind the counter. Travis pulled his arm away and took one step back and whirled and stumbled over his own boots and pitched sideways into the pyramid of creamed corn.

  Cans went spinning across the aisle.

  The stock girl gasped and pressed herself back against a shelf of dried beans and rice.

  Travis fled the store, his shopping cart abandoned.

  That night Reader sat in a folding aluminum chair in back of his home, just beyond where the stone patio met the edge of the centipede grass. He sat and rolled cigarettes from a small leather pouch of makings and smoked, blowing silver rings at the orange sky. Each ring dissipating as the next followed. Electrical wires crisscrossed overhead. Sometimes Reader featured he could hear them humming. Several blocks to the south, far beyond the pine fence that surrounded his plot of ground here in this comfortable neighborhood of elm- and maple-studded lawns, a train passed slowly through the switchyards, its passing a low, stirring rumble. Reader sat and smoked and listened. He thought about the dead girls and the man who had killed them. He thought about the letters T, R, A.

  He heard the soft thump of the screen door opening and closing, the snap-hiss of a beer-top popping. He smiled as the cold can touched his shoulder. He took it, along with the hand that held it.

  “You seem ragged,” his wife said. She sat in the chair beside his and opened her own beer. She wore a long red cotton skirt and matching top, her brown feet bare on the stone patio. She had beautiful feet, his wife. His lovely Constantina.

  “I’m always ragged, Connie darling,” he said. “Or ain’t you noticed.”

  “But you’re especially ragged of late,” she said.

  He drank from his beer. He turned it up and half was gone before he knew it.

  “Good, isn’t it,” she said, sipping her own.

  “My father,” he said, “thought that a beer and a backyard to drink it in were two of the three finest things a man could hope for.”

  “What was the third?” she said.

  “That the backyard be in Texas.”

  “You make me happy, old man. All these years, and you still make me happy.”

  “I am glad of it,” he said.

  “My father wanted me to marry a rancher, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “A rich gringo. A terrateniente.”

  “Didn’t you?” Reader laughed. He waved his beer at the small plot of grass behind their ranch-style house, the live oak in the far corner. “All of this, señorita, is yours. Eres una mujer rica y hermosa. ¿Qué más se puede desear?”

  “Nada.” She smiled.

  He felt his heart unburden itself, just a little.

  “Nada más del mundo,” she said.

  He waited until her smile had faded and most of her beer was gone, too, before he said, “We’ve been brought in on something. Something . . .” He hesitated. “It makes me sad,” he finally said. He listened to his wife’s silence, and he wished that sad were not the word he had chosen. He wished, instead, that he had chosen no word, only silence, so he wouldn’t have to say anything else.

  “A girl,” he sighed. “Three girls, actually. We saw the third day before yesterday.”

  “Dead?” she asked.

  “As Caesar.”

  “How old?”

  “Late twenties,” he said. “I can’t help thinking . . .”

  He drank again, and now the can was empty.

  “One more?” he asked.

  She fixed her sharp gaze on him, as if searching for whatever will power was left in him. It’s a bit still there, he thought. After a moment, she got up and went to get the beer.

  “Thank you.”

  He watched her go, thinking of the children they had been when they were married. He eighteen, she seventeen. She a half-breed, he a white Texan boy, theirs a romance, Reader had always thought, befitting the romance of the land itself, the wide open spaces and faraway horizons, where the hearts of the young were as big and green as the vast sweep of the eastern grasslands, and the land and the courses of the lives lived on it moved and rolled in ways no man could ever predict, as though the breath of giants were easing over them, shaping them, turning them.

  Reader had grown up in Canton. His father had been a quiet man, a carpenter who had seemed old and tired for most of Reader’s life. His mother had died not long after he was born, and the old man had raised Reader gently and with patience. They had lived on a small farm just off the highway, on land inherited from some uncle or aunt who had passed long before Reader’s time. His father had tried to teach him his trade, a long and frustrating battle. “No head for angles,” his old man finally said, and instead gave Reader the job of painting and staining and stenciling the furniture and toys he shaped and turned. Together, they had sold their wares each month at the local Trade Days.

  It was there Reader first saw her from the shade of his father’s canvas tent: a light-skinned, half-Mexican girl in a blue dress, turning a busted pocket watch in the sun at the junker’s stall across the way. He had fo
llowed her while his father dickered with a man over the price of a footstool. She had smiled before she went, setting down the pocket watch, and that smile had been like an eddy in a current, had pulled him along, helpless, through the dusty stalls and across the creek where bearded men sold rusted farm equipment and clay crockery from the backs of pickups. Her legs, long and tan and sun-dappled beneath the cedars. She had crossed the highway and disappeared into the dusty warrens of tents and caged livestock for sale, ducks and rabbits and sheep and dogs and horses, the air hot and close with the not unpleasant scents of animals and manure.

  The next month he and his father returned and set up their tables and pitched their tent and laid out a squadron of garden whirligigs: hummingbirds, lizards, roadrunners, bumblebees. Reader sat in a wooden folding chair and took up a small brush and a bottle of white enamel paint. He was hand-painting eyes onto a bee when he looked up and saw her, standing at the same table where he had first seen her the month before.

  She held a blue snow cone in a paper funnel, and she was looking back at him, smiling.

  They walked together.

  Her father, she told him, had come to sell pigs this month. To buy goats the month before. She told him her name. He gave his. They met again at the market each month for a year after that, walking together among the vendors in the dusky evenings, holding hands and sharing snow cones and pausing every now and then to listen to cowboys strumming guitars by the creek and singing hymns. After several months, Reader bought her a ring at a stall where tables of cheap jewelry lay glittering in the sun like gems washed up on a fine new shore.

  There had been no conflict between their parents, no anger. Reader was not a rancher, but he was a good man, and that was all her father and mother had ever really asked. There had been only love in their pairing, and he had always been grateful for this.

  When she returned from the house, she placed the fresh cold can of Lone Star against the crook of his arm and he opened it and drank, and the words came after that, and she sat and listened, as she always did, as she always had.

  “Tomorrow,” he finally said, “we’ll go out and talk to some folks. See what turns up.”

  “You’ll catch him?” she said.

  It was a question, not a statement, but Reader was fair-to-middling drunk and he heard only her confidence in him, so he answered, “In short order,” though he wasn’t sure at all, really.

  It was a while, the space of several long breaths, before she said, “Tomorrow would have been her twenty-seventh birthday. Give or take. Can you imagine that? Twenty-seven years.”

  “You always knew it was a girl,” he said.

  “Oh, yes,” she said.

  “Do you still dream about her?” he asked.

  “Not really,” she said. “It was so long ago.”

  He wondered, briefly, if she were lying. “I do,” he said.

  “Is it nice?” she asked. “Or is it sad?”

  After a while, he said, “Can’t it be both?”

  She did not answer, but her hand found his, and there was strength in her grip.

  He finished his beer.

  Another train passed to the south.

  Thursday

  October 9

  Travis was perched on the roof of the motel, face wrapped beneath his hat, hammering shingles, the only task the woman had written down and clipped for him outside the office that day. He looked up at a squeal of brakes and saw a school bus make a loop through the parking lot, dropping the boy at the office. Sandy, carrying a metal lunch box, stood in the gravel and inspected his jeans where the stitching of his belt loops had torn. Travis read the boy’s lips: Son of a bitch. Sandy looked up and saw Travis watching him. Travis waved.

  The extension ladder leaning against the roof shook with the boy’s ascent. Sandy’s head appeared at the lip of the roof, wind tousling his hair.

  “What are you doing up here?” he asked.

  “Fixin the roof,” Travis said. His voice was muffled through his wrappings.

  “Momma said you was workin nights.”

  “Mostly. Can’t fix a roof at night.”

  “What’s wrong with your face you gotta wear those things?”

  “You be careful on that ladder,” Travis said.

  Sandy grinned and let go of the ladder.

  “Don’t fool around.”

  “You scared of heights?” the boy said.

  “Ain’t overly fond of em,” Travis said.

  “I ain’t scared,” the boy said. He climbed onto the roof and settled down next to Travis. Sandy pointed at the winged horse rearing over the office and cafe. “You oughta fix that horse. His leg’s busted.”

  “My old man used to say, ain’t but one cure for a horse with a busted leg.”

  “Yeah, what’s that?”

  But Travis didn’t answer.

  “Yeah. I figured that’s what you meant. So how come you can’t work during the day? Momma says it’s cause you’re allergic.”

  “What am I allergic to?” Travis asked.

  Sandy shrugged.

  “Reckon you think it’s funny, me all mummied up.”

  The boy only looked at Travis from where he sat in the long shadow of the winged horse, and Travis looked back and neither flinched from the other’s gaze.

  “See you had some trouble with your britches,” Travis said.

  The boy fingered his torn belt loop. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said.

  They sat in silence for a while, Sandy slumping, staring out over the hills as the wind blew his hair every which way. Travis watched him from the corner of his eye. He saw in the boy’s posture, in his faraway expression, the shape of himself when he was a child, set by his mother before a window that looked out upon a vast expanse of sunlit world. How small he had felt. How alone.

  Travis held out the hammer and a roofing tack. “You know how to do this?”

  The boy took them both, one in each hand. “Reckon it ain’t hard,” he said.

  “Set it so,” Travis said. Sandy listened and did as he was told. “You tap your tack in place. Be gentle first. Then you hit it, just once. Swift and hard. See?”

  Sandy brought the hammer down. The tack went into the roof.

  “Do another,” Travis said.

  “Why do you wear em?” Sandy asked again.

  “Pay attention now.”

  Sandy put another tack into the roof. “You aim to stay a while, don’t you?” he said.

  “You don’t lack for questions.”

  “Well, you ain’t so big on answers,” the boy said. “I reckon that makes us a pair, don’t it.” The boy swung the hammer and caught his thumb. “Son of a bitch!” He dropped the hammer and it clattered down the roof and over the edge.

  Blood pooled beneath the boy’s fingernail.

  Travis stared at this for a long time. His stomach suddenly felt as if it were lined with razor wire.

  The Rue-thing whimpered in his ear, a lusty moan.

  “Damn, that hurt like a bastard!”

  “You’ll be all right,” Travis said. He leaned over the edge of the roof and saw the hammer on the boardwalk below. It had landed near the boy’s lunchbox, where he had set it before climbing the ladder. He stood and moved slowly over the roof’s edge, one leg at a time, but his boot did not find a rung and he almost slipped. As he got his footing, the wind came up and tugged a flap of cloth loose from his chin and a swath of white skin was exposed. He felt it warm and redden. He touched the skin and the fingers of his leather work gloves came away spotted with pinpricks of blood.

  Travis glanced up at the boy, who sat with his bruised thumb in his mouth.

  So easy, the Rue-thing whispered. It would be so easy.

  Travis held the strip of shirt in place over his chin and gripped the ladder with his free hand. He climbed on down. At the bottom he took a few steps back from the ladder, into the shade of the boardwalk canopy, and hunkered down. He fixed the strip of shirt. His chin bled a little m
ore, then stopped.

  Travis picked up the hammer. He looked up and saw the boy peering down at him over the edge of the roof. “Maybe that’s enough for today,” he called up. “You better come on down, before your momma sees you up there and I lose my job.”

  The boy said, “You okay?”

  “Hot out’s all.”

  “You want to see them rabbits? It’s cool and dark in my shed.”

  You ought to leave this place, Travis thought. Get in your truck and go. Right now.

  Travis said, “Okay,” and swallowed.

  The boy scruffed one of the rabbits out of its cage and handed it to Travis where he sat Indian-style on the cool dirt floor of the shed. Here in the gloom of the shed was the first relief Travis had felt all day from the sun’s hot eye. It was small comfort, he thought, next to the hunger gnawing at his guts. He unwrapped his head and took the dwarf rabbit from Sandy in trembling hands, strangely terrified of it, as if he’d been passed a newborn child. Its ears were small and veined and pink. The veins were all crooked, like the branches of a river on a map. The rabbit struggled in his grip.

  “Don’t worry, she likes to be held,” the boy said. “Like this.” He took the second rabbit from its cage and held it near his chest and ran the flat of his palm over its ears.

  Travis did as the boy did, but still the rabbit fought him.

  “Whenever I’m mad I come out here and hold her and it makes it better,” the boy was saying. “One of these days, I’m gonna get mad enough at Roscoe Jenkins, even my rabbits won’t make it better. Some days I think I might just kill that son of a bitch.”

  “Who’s that, your friend?” Travis said, trying to hold the rabbit. He could feel the rabbit’s heart ticking fast against his hand.