“Only a trickle,” she whimpered.
She had burrowed into the crook of his neck and shoulder and he had heard her voice, clear, soft, fine as down, the voice of the girl who had danced beneath the stars: I took your blood, and then I gave it back, and now you must take enough to give back to me, and then I will be real and not this phantom thing. Real flesh and blood, and my eyes will be the shade of a warm and inviting sea, and you will love me.
He drew a lungful of smoke and let it work down into him and blew it out.
He waited for the nausea, but none came.
“I hide a pack round every doorway on the place,” Annabelle said.
They watched arcs of pink lightning strike the horizon.
Travis sat and smoked beside her, aware of the space between them, which seemed to generate its own kind of electric arc. He wondered if she felt it, imagined she did, feared she did not. It was not a thing he was built for, this sort of proximity, and it made him anxious, as if some measureless cavern long unexplored had been chanced, and it was not a dark place where terrible creatures lurked without eyes but somewhere rich and strange and teeming with all manner of small life in desperate need of the sun’s bare spark.
But he was also aware—even as he felt keenly the rustle of her denim shirtsleeve or the shifting of her weight in the swing seat, each creak, each turn of her leg, her pull on the cigarette that drew smoke into her lungs and each breath that expelled it—of the artery that pulsed gently in her neck, beneath the backward sweep of her hair, its course quickened slightly, perhaps, by the stirrings between them.
The blood that flowed there was rich and red and would open up in great hot fans upon the whitewashed farmhouse wall, where moths fluttered and lit.
Their cigarettes had burned close to the filters when he happened to look down at the cracked sleeper window and saw a face floating behind the dirty glass, a face like a white sharp moon, framed between white sharp fingers. Red eyes like the ragged cherries of the cigarettes they smoked. And it was grinning, this face, a grin like a spring-tooth harrow.
Now, the Rue-thing said. Take her now.
Travis glanced at Annabelle. Her face was turned out toward the yard, the motel. The storm.
He lifted his hand, trembling, and pushed a tendril of hair from her neck.
She started, slightly, but it was enough to break the arc.
Travis froze, drew his hand slowly away.
After a moment, he stood from the swing.
Annabelle looked up at him, a question on her face, no answers.
A splay of lightning like veins lit the sky.
Travis fled the porch and did not look back.
Annabelle sat in the swing.
She watched Stillwell until he disappeared into his camper.
A roll of thunder sent a tremor through the porch.
“Well, shit,” she said to no one.
Later, when the storm was close, she put her third cigarette out on the bottom of her shoe and walked back to the foyer and returned the pack to its drawer. She looked in on Sandy and found him asleep in his bed in the corner of his room. Outside, the lightning cast the old windmill’s shadow across the dry grass and the sails spun and creaked in the wind. Annabelle closed the window above Sandy’s bed and sat beside him and smoothed his hair from his brow. He murmured in his sleep.
“Shh,” she said. “Shh.”
She went out and sat down on the porch steps and watched the cowboy’s camper for a while, a light burning in the window on the passenger’s side. Every now and then, she saw his silhouette cross the light, as if he were pacing.
Get up and go down there, she told herself. Go down there and tell him you’re sorry even though you don’t know why or for what. Tell him you don’t want him to leave. That you’re happy he’s here. That the boy is happy, too.
But she didn’t.
She wasn’t sure she believed it.
After all, something was terribly wrong with Stillwell. He had dropped ten or fifteen pounds since the morning she had met him. It was not cancer—she knew cancer better than anyone her age ought to—but it was sickness, all the same, and she’d had her fill of that. And the knife, the way Sandy had stared at the blade, holding it with a kind of reverence that frightened her. The knife was military issue. She knew because she had found one like it tucked back in one of Tom’s drawers, in the months after he had died. She had taken it to a thrift shop in town, along with his duffle and canteen and overcoat.
She thought of Billy Calhoun, his silver hair and crossword puzzles. She remembered a night ten years past, much like tonight: early evening, thunder rattling the planks and walls and windows and, after dark, the rain came pouring down out of a black sky. She had stood almost where she sat now, wearing only a robe over her cotton pajamas, the robe untied, a chilled wind gusting through her.
Here she had stood, waiting.
Waiting on Tom.
Waiting on men.
Always waiting, she thought, staring down at the cowboy’s camper.
There had been talk on the TV that night of flooding in Tyson, of roads being washed away by rivers running down the bajadas. She could hardly see the motel at the bottom of the hill through the downpour. There were no guests, hadn’t been any for weeks. Tom’s dream made even less substantial by the rain, an unreal thing slowly dissolved in a wash of blue vapor. A shelter from the storm for travelers who lacked the sense to get out of the rain. Like my Tom, she had thought, wrapping her robe around her.
Gone for hours on a hardware store run.
Christ.
She paced.
She read the Reader’s Digest.
She smoked.
At last, just before midnight, she saw the lights of a pickup on the highway. They slowed and turned into the long drive up to the farmhouse, the high beams cutting through a silver curtain of rain. It was not Tom’s truck. She moved back from the rail and knotted her terrycloth robe at her waist. A man got out, a newspaper over his head. He was tall. Jeans and a white T-shirt and beat-up brogans like the kind her father wore. He dashed round to the passenger’s door and by the time it was opened, the newspaper on his head was sodden. He helped the passenger out of the cab, and she could see as they rounded the truck and passed through the beams together that the man the driver was helping was her husband, and her husband was near unconscious drunk. The two men staggered up the steps, the driver supporting Tom with an arm around and beneath his shoulder, Tom’s booted feet falling up over the porch steps like a shambling monster from a horror picture. Annabelle stepped back as the men came onto the porch and into the light, and she saw that the driver was the bartender, Billy Calhoun.
“Bring him on inside,” she said, not knowing what else to say.
Calhoun eased Tom into the bed and left the bedroom without a word.
She stared at him, sopping drunk. Church, she thought. We will go to church this Sunday. It had always brought Tom out of his darkness, at least for a while. Something from his childhood, she thought, a belief that had taken hold in him like a stubborn root.
She tugged her husband’s boots free and set them in the closet and closed the bedroom door, left him snoring.
Calhoun stood dripping on the planks of the living room floor, soggy newspaper in hand.
Annabelle snagged a towel from the linen closet and handed it to the bartender.
Outside, the thunder boomed, rattling the window panes.
She offered him coffee.
“Fresh coffee would be mighty good,” he said.
She saw, in the light of the kitchen, which was soft and warm, that Calhoun was going gray up top. He didn’t say much, and when she brought him a steaming mug he smiled, and the smile, she thought, was kind, like his eyes. They sat quietly at the table as rain drummed the tin roof and drowned out the sawmill snores of Tom down the hall. They sat together in an oasis of light, she and Billy Calhoun.
“Coming down now,” Calhoun finally said, when the storm and
the ticking of the wall clock and the silence between them had grown too loud for comfort. “Fellas came in the bar tonight said they saw three Mexicans in a canoe paddling down Main Street. Swore it was true.”
He had a flat, pleasant voice.
He doesn’t smile when he kids, she thought. She liked that.
“It’s sure coming down,” he said. He held his coffee mug with both hands, which had a picture of the Alamo on it, along with the words You May All Go to Hell, and I Will Go to Texas.
“You served my husband tonight,” she said.
“I did,” he said.
“You let this happen.”
Calhoun took a deep breath, as if he had heard this rebuke before. “Some men,” he said, “need to spill their troubles, and I reckon they have to fill up to the brim first to do it. So it all runs over.”
“I’m drowning in his troubles,” Annabelle said. “He goes off once, twice a month, disappears all day. Sometimes all night. For six or seven months now, this is the way it goes. We ain’t had a customer down at the motel in weeks. If not for that restaurant—” She fell silent. “Well,” she said. “Here we are.”
“It’s a hard thing on a man,” Calhoun offered, “to watch his dreams wither on the vine.”
“A man’s dreams are hard on a woman, too, Mr. Calhoun.”
Sympathy passed over the bartender’s face like the shadow of a cloud upon the land.
She looked at him, just as lightning followed a peal of thunder, and in the sudden flash of it, she saw her future burned like a map of shadows on the bare kitchen wall behind him. “You smoke?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Sure.”
“Smoke with me,” she said.
She went to the antique table beside the living room door and brought back her pack and a box of kitchen matches and an amber-glass ashtray with the word Winston etched on the bottom. This she placed on the table between them. She shook loose a cigarette from the pack, and he took it. She offered him the kitchen matches but he shook his head, reaching into his T-shirt pocket and producing a robin’s egg blue matchbook with the name of his bar scrawled on the outside in cursive black letters, Calhoun’s. He struck a match with his thumbnail and lit her smoke, a deft little move she imagined he had done a thousand times.
“Men got their dreams,” she said, ashing in the Winston tray. “Women got secrets. Usually, I smoke out back or on the porch, where the wind will take it away. But tonight I just don’t care.” She stared at Calhoun for a while after that, and he stared back, and the silence that grew between them was not cold or strange at all.
“Thank you for bringing my husband back to me,” she said at last. She stubbed her cigarette in the ashtray. “I think it’s time for you to go, Mr. Calhoun.”
“Billy,” he said.
“Billy,” she answered.
I am only twenty-four years old, she thought, watching from the porch as the headlamps of the bartender’s pickup had cut their way through the rain toward the road. I am only twenty-four years old.
After a time, she saw the light go out in the camper below. She heard the rear door open and close, saw Travis walk around the camper, disconnecting hoses and lines, raising steel legs. He moved quickly, his head down. He never looked up to the house. She could not see his face for the wide dark brim of the hat he wore. He got into the Ford’s cab. The engine grumbled to life. The truck’s high beams swept the motel as he turned onto the highway.
As the storm rolled in, she found herself thinking that it all didn’t matter, anyway.
This was her life.
The life she had chosen.
Rain began to fall on the farmhouse roof.
The wipers slapped away the sheeting water. Travis hunched over the wheel and wiped at the glass, which only fogged over again with his breath. Suddenly, the radio crackled to life, and the sound that came warbling out of it was Johnny Horton singing “Honky-Tonk Man.” He did not look over to see the dry, dead arm that fell away from the knob, even as the cabin filled with the close scents of lemon and vanilla and the musty smell of long-moldered flesh. He saw her from the corner of his eye: white dress over a desiccated frame, gold locket at her throat, hair a litter of twigs. Her red boots lay on the floor and her feet were bare, her calves tucked beneath her on the vinyl seat, much like Annabelle’s posture in the farmhouse swing, only Travis could see bones through Rue’s torn flesh and wasted muscle.
We could have had a fine old time back at that motel, she said. A fine old time.
He looked over and saw she was smiling.
The roots of her teeth were black.
She laughed.
Travis heard things squirming in her throat.
He turned up the radio.
He drove east. He made no turns, and the rain did not let up. He pulled into a dance hall not long after ten. It was a place far from Cielo Rojo and nowhere he had ever been. Railroad tracks ran in back of it, and by the shape of the building Travis could tell it had once served some long-gone settlement as a train depot. It was set just off the highway at a junction of two roads, each stretching into the dark and empty in the storm. Travis sat in the parking lot for a while and watched the neon-lit night wash away and dissolve through his windshield. Rue’s head lay on his shoulder, the skin of her cheek brittle as onion peel. The parking lot emptied out as the storm raged on, and when there were only a few pickups left, he cut his engine and got out, his truck door squalling in the hammering rain. On the porch, he held the door for a last gasp of cowboys and cowgirls leaving, their hats wrapped in plastic, their hair covered in scarves.
He looked back at the cab of his pickup. It was empty.
On any other night the place would have been like all the others he had ever known, could have been the first he had ever walked into. There was only one juke joint in all the world, it seemed: different buildings, different cities, different doors, but all those doors opened on the same long, wide room, the same hot lights and smoke-thick air, the same crush of bodies on the floor. Tonight the floor was empty, the storm having washed people back into their lives. The room was quiet, only a few small clusters left at tables here and there, a slow jukebox number playing, itself nearly drowned by the roar of the rain on the hall’s tin roof.
He bought a beer from the bar, which was little more than a U-shaped stack of wood pallets and planks, and found a table along the wall. He sat down and popped the ring on his beer, but he did not drink it. He set it aside and tipped his chair back on its legs and let the warble of the juke settle beneath him like wings and bear him aloft, and he was carried above the empty tables and the lingering rags of smoke and into the pine rafters where the whole of the room was spread below him.
At the far end of the dance floor, four men on a stage in boots and vests were breaking down their set, packing away a steel guitar and three fiddles, a drum kit and tambourine. Three other tables were occupied, one by an elderly couple in matching cowboy hats who sat holding hands through a forest of bottles, another by a lone trucker in a corduroy coat, a few beers and a plate of food before him. Not far from the stage, where the band was vacating, three girls sat at a table. They were young. Two of them were falling-down drunk, loud and yelling, one laughing into her arms on the table. They wore off-the-shoulder blouses and dangly earrings, had big, teased hair. The third sat quietly apart from the others. She had straight hair swept back behind her ears, a dusting of freckles across her face and collarbone. She wore a denim jacket and rawhide skirt and earrings made from Indian beads. Her eyes were fixed on the floor. She nursed a can of Pearl, and with each sip she slumped lower in her chair, even as her friends grew louder.
Time passed.
The trucker in the corduroy coat paid his check and left.
The couple in matching hats staggered out into the rain.
Soon after this, the juke ceased playing and the only sounds were the women laughing and the rain roaring and the bartender stowing glasses by the crate. Travis let his gaze wander,
lighting on the table, lingering long enough for the girl in denim to notice him, then moving on. He pretended to drink, tipping his can to his lips. He could feel his nerves winding together from spine to feet, strengthening into a rod that would set him upright at the first opportunity.
He got up and went to the jukebox at the back of the room, a Princess.
He dropped a quarter and found an old song his mother had loved, a ballad.
He let it play, and the music turned him, as it always did, the red glow from the box’s innards casting a hellish light beneath his chin, his face not his face now, but a stranger’s.
His chance came before the song had ended.
The bartender called last call, and the two drunk girls got up from their table and staggered together across the dance floor and disappeared into a pair of batwing doors, Ladies burned into the wood.
The girl in denim, alone and solemn, yawned.
Travis moved away from the jukebox, beer in hand, and sat down at her table.
She stared at him, and the laughter that followed was like an invitation. “You can’t just come over here and sit down,” she said.
He let the stranger step forward, as he always did, and the stranger gave the girl the smile that was the finest lie he knew. He told her she reminded him of someone, now who could that be. The girl blew air through her lips and said she had no idea, and he said, “Well, I reckon I don’t either, but you look like someone I ought to know,” and again she laughed, her eyes rolling. “My name’s Travis,” he said, and he made the formal offer of his hand.
“I’m Jody,” she said.
Touch her. Touch her where I touched you.
In Valley of the Sun Page 15