Travis let go her hand and pressed his thumbs against his temples and shut his eyes, and he suddenly remembered that tonight’s was a different purpose, that his search was not for the one he had lost, that his aims were simpler, his needs more direct. When he opened his eyes, the girl was staring at him, and her smile had begun to slip.
Hurry, Travis, Rue’s voice urged. Do it now.
His arm shot across the table. He seized her hand.
“Hey!” she cried. “What gives, psycho?”
He jammed his thumb above her pulse and felt the quick throb of her life and for a second saw the world as she did. He was in her head looking out and he saw the curtain dropping—
have some fun, Momma’s little girl she can’t tell me what for, shit on the rain, just drink myself stupid, who is he, oh God, oh God oh God what’s happening, what’s going to happen now
—until he saw his own whey-faced grimace from beneath the black brim of his hat and just as quickly he was looking out of his own eyes again, and the girl was blank now, empty, and she was getting up as Travis got up, and she held his hand and let him guide her through the jumble of empty tables and chairs, and no one saw a thing.
He turned off the highway and down a narrow dirt lane that had turned to mud. He drove for miles until there were no lights in any direction and the road dead-ended along a dark wash swelling its banks with rain. He parked beneath a stand of cottonwoods and cut the engine. The headlights shone on a wall of scrub, beyond which surged a black ribbon of water. Across the wash, a lone twisted tree stood like a madwoman shrieking.
In a voice that was slow and slurred, the girl asked: “Whose boots are these?” Her head lolled against the window, against her shoulder. She turned her eyes on Travis, who sat gripping the steering wheel, staring ahead through the silver rain. “These boots in the floor,” she said, each word stumbling through the gate of her lips. “I got a pair of boots like these at home. Except mine are pink, and these are red. I like pink.”
“I like pink,” Travis said, wringing his hands on the wheel.
“Who do I look like?” the girl asked.
He looked at her, sharply.
She moved closer to him, sliding across the seat. “I see her, right here,” the girl said, touching his forehead with her finger. “Who is she? Is she the one? No?” And suddenly her mouth was against his neck, her breath warm and scented with beer. She shrugged out of her denim jacket and let it drop on the seat behind her. She wore a black T-shirt beneath and she took Travis’s hand and thrust it beneath the fabric, over her breast. “Is this what you want?” She pressed her mouth against his ear. “I see her, what she asked you to do, what you did to her.”
The roll of her flesh beneath his hand recalled the sound of a calliope, cotton candy, a great wheel turning—
tighter, tighter
—and she was reaching now for his buckle, tugging at his belt.
Travis fumbled at the cab door and slipped backward as it opened and he all but fell out onto the ground into the mud, and when he looked back up the girl was on all fours in the seat, laughing at him like a loon.
He picked up his hat from the ground and set it back on his head.
“Stop,” he said, but the command was lost. Maybe it was the rain, or maybe she was in his head so deeply now that she had seen it all, seen everything that had happened that night at the farmhouse and all the nights before, all the nights since he was a boy and the music had played on a suitcase turntable, and it was all too horrible and too funny, too pitiful to justify the monster he had become, and so he balled his fist and stepped forward and seized her hair and her laughter came up short when he yanked her head back and brought his fist once, twice, three times into her face.
Her nose broke.
She gurgled and slumped beneath his hand.
He stood in the rain and watched the blood wash away from his knuckles in the dome-light from the cab.
Bring her, Travis. Bring her inside. Oh bring her now.
He stared through water sheeting from the brim of his hat at the girl on the seat, unconscious and bloody. He felt his stomach rumble, and it was enough to wake him when the rain was not. He took his keys from the ignition and hauled the girl out of the cab and dragged her over the gravel to the cabover. Once the door was open, he pulled her up the stoop and dropped her on the floor on her back.
The door stood open and the rain blew in and lightning flashed and Travis thought, for an instant, that the girl’s hair was no longer dark but light, and he would have sworn, had anyone tasked him with the truth at that moment, that Annabelle Gaskin lay on the floor, her nose streaming red.
He heard the pressboard door creak open, heard dry hands on the linoleum. He felt Rue rise behind him, her cold arms snaking around his torso, lifting the knife from his scabbard and placing it in his hands.
The girl’s rawhide skirt was hiked to her hips.
Cut her.
Travis closed his fingers around the hilt of the knife and stepped over the girl and took a knee between hers, nudging them apart. He worked her skirt as high as he could to expose the soft white flesh of her thigh. She stirred, briefly, as he slid the blade across the flesh, just below the elastic line of her plain white panties.
Blood coursed over the linoleum, thick and red and shocking.
Travis stared, transfixed.
Eat, Rue said. She hunched outside the cabinet, arms hanging down, bent and crooked and starving.
The girl’s head moved. She moaned.
EAT.
Travis lay the knife on the floor and shuffled forward on his knees like a man about to perform a tender act. He put his face between the girl’s white legs and touched his lips to her wound, and his mouth filled instantly and he was forced to spit.
EAT!
But there was something else now, too, wasn’t there. A warmth. A kindling.
He put his lips against the wound again and this time swallowed when his mouth had filled and the horror and revulsion he had imagined were not the things he felt. He felt only a bright relief as the blood slicked his throat and struck the furnace of his gut and its heat spread, and before all of this had even happened he had swallowed again, and again.
The girl, swimming near consciousness, finally gave out a long, low whimper.
She rolled beneath him, reached up, pushed feebly at his shoulders.
Travis ignored her and lost himself in the simple bliss of the act. The blood was all life returning, washing away every strange, conflicting thing he had felt these last few days: the rabbits, the women, none of it mattered.
Take it all, Rue said. Take it all.
And though the girl bucked beneath him now, to his great pleasure he thought he would, yes, he would take it all, and he was supping still, gulping, smacking, slurping, both hands around her thigh and squeezing, when the girl’s right hand found the knife on the floor. Her fingers closed over it and she raised it and brought it down with the final reserves of her ebbing strength.
The blade plunged into the soft flesh of his left side, tore free, went into him again.
Blood dripping down his chin, Travis pulled his mouth from the girl’s leg, the pain of what had happened not yet dawning. He saw the eagle-crested handle of his Ka-Bar lodged in his left hip, the girl’s hand slipping from it to thump on the floor. He tried to stand and only fell backward against the kitchenette cabinets. He cast about for Rue but saw only her twin red eyes burning from the open door beneath the berth, then receding, fading.
The girl had pushed up on her elbows and was reaching overhead for the edge of the dinette table. She pulled herself to her knees and staggered up past Travis toward the door. She managed two full steps before her wounded leg gave and she pitched sideways into the wall.
Travis closed his hand around the eagle’s head and yanked the knife free. He reached up and grabbed the edge of the counter and hauled himself to his feet. He felt the wound in his side tear wider. Blood soaked through his shirt. He could feel it runnin
g over his abdomen, could see the wound on his hip like a bright red tongue poking through his jeans.
This is not my blood, he thought. I’m wasting it, wasting—
The girl was gone.
He saw the cabover door thrust wide open, long red streaks where she had dragged herself out of the camper and into the night. From the sink he took a dish towel and cinched the wound on his hip. He looked out from the doorway and, in a sheet of lightning, saw a small shambling figure in the road, behind her a black mountain range of clouds and the vast desert plain.
Travis staggered down the steps and along the camper’s shell. He made it to the cab of his pickup, fumbled his key into the ignition, and was about to turn it when he felt the world swim away. He closed his eyes and the outer dark beyond the pickup flooded in like the rising waters of the creek, plunged him—
NO!
His eyes snapped open.
Rue sprawled over his lap, her face buried in the wound in his side. He pushed his shirt down, shoved her away, but she came at him again, this time licking the blood from his chin, and her thoughts were a frantic jumble of nonsense, spilling over one another like fish tumbling from a bucket onto dry land—
finish it you have to finish it Travis she is good warm more my pale man never loved me but you will love me finish it now I love you please hurry blood makes us and in the glass I see myself and this is the only thing that matters please hurry goddamn you please FINISH IT!
—flapping and gasping, so Travis shoved her back into the corner of the cab, her eyes wild and roving, her tongue like a dirty root. He turned the key in the ignition and put the truck in gear, and the Ford spun away from the muddy banks and slewed onto the road, cabover door flapping shut.
The girl was caught in the headlights. She had fallen in the center of the road, was crawling on hands and knees, her legs pale and pitiful and streaked with blood.
Travis brought the truck to bear on her, and at the final second she turned and her face was seared upon his brain: her nose swollen and black, her long dark hair matted with mud and bits of gravel, her eyes mere slits against the oncoming light.
Travis shut his eyes and pressed the accelerator.
After it was done, he made a slow turn in the road and aimed the high beams where the girl sprawled facedown in the mud. He sat for a moment, truck idling, watching her. Rue was still in the passenger’s seat, her thin bony fingers perched delicately on the dash as she leaned forward, each breath she drew like the dry rattle of a snake.
Travis got out, door hinges crying.
He limped to where she lay, legs bent and twisted, rawhide skirt torn.
He hunkered down and put his hands beneath her and rolled her body over.
He saw her face and cried out in horror. He fell onto his hands and knees and lifted her ruined cheek to his, and the hunger and Rue were all but forgotten. Annabelle Gaskin, Sandy, the other women, his father, the girl from the fair who at sixteen had changed him forever with a stupid request, all forgotten now, for the girl whose face he cradled was not yet dead, there was some small light left in her, her lips sputtering, and her face, the face he held alongside his, laced with quartz and gravel, was the most beautiful face of all, the one he had first seen from the comfort of his own childhood bed, the one he would remember when all the others had long since left him.
The sight of it broke him.
“Don’t,” he said. He sat back and thrust both legs out and pulled the girl’s head up onto his thigh. “Don’t, don’t, don’t.”
Her one good eye was unfocused, distant, its light receding.
With one hand he held her against him. With the other he loosened the blood-soaked rag from his thigh and shoved his fingers deep into the gash and brought them out dripping red, and these he forced into the girl’s bloody mouth.
“Stop,” a voice said.
When he looked up he saw Rue standing crookedly in the light of his headlamps, the rain soaking her white dress against her shriveled body, her hair hanging damp and scant against her neck. She stood slump-shouldered and drowned-looking. She wore her red boots, her withered legs like matchsticks inside them.
Travis pressed his fingers through his torn shirt, into his side, and back into the girl’s mouth. Again and again.
“No,” Rue said, but the word was lost in the downpour. She went quietly away behind the pickup, disappearing into the darkness there.
Travis left his fingers in the girl’s mouth long after she was dead and the blood was running in pink rivulets down both sides of her jaw.
He sat this way in the light of his high beams and wept.
Eventually, the rain stopped, and the storm moved on across the plain.
IV
Travis
Before
Light and screams.
Laughter.
Smell of frying grease.
Big Carson, Big C, a blazing dark star tearing supernova through the jungle. The forest alive with fireflies. Tracers ripping through the upper branches, punching great jagged holes in trunks and men.
A clown juggling fire on stilts reels out of the trees.
A man with a lighter, popping flame, popping smoke. Popping the cigarette behind his ear.
Sonnybaby.
The cigarette between his mother’s red lips.
Lit. Cherry fire.
A carousel.
Calliope.
A girl’s hand tightens in his.
His palm slick.
Cotton candy. Red and sticky when it pulls apart.
The fair, the wheel. The girl’s breast in his palm, warm and alive. All before.
Before Big Carson screaming.
Sonnybaby screaming.
Mommy screaming.
No words for the other sounds she makes.
All a jumble now.
Travis, baby? Wake up. Wake up, baby.
She lifts him, holds him close, carries him from his room. From the safety of the sheets and the friendly posters on the wall, cowboys, dinosaurs. Mommy?
Shh, don’t talk, baby. Don’t talk. Mommy’s got you.
1951
He wakes on the seat of a pickup, a slice of blue sky framing his mother’s face. She’s putting on makeup, a brush in hand. Her cheeks are rosy, her eyes shaded blue. Hey, baby, she says.
He sits up, still wearing his pajamas.
The day is so bright he has to squint to see.
The big man driving the truck smiles down at him. He’s a man with hair slicked back into a duck’s ass. A man the boy has never seen. He wears a tight white T-shirt and jeans tucked into cowboy boots. A cigarette behind his ear.
“Look at that,” his mother says, brushing her cheeks with powder. She smiles into her compact, lips bright and full. “I found my face. That face got found. What you think, little man? What you think of Mommy’s face?”
“I know what I think of it,” the big man says. He reaches over and pinches the woman’s cheek.
She laughs. “That’s all you think of, ain’t it.”
“Only thing worth thinkin of, am I right, pardner?” The man winks at the boy.
The boy’s bare feet brush the top of his mother’s suitcase record player where it rides in the floorboard.
“Where’s Daddy?”
“Now don’t you go and ruin our little adventure, baby.” She smoothes his hair back out of his face, brushes it gently with her fingers. Her touch so light. So loving. “Everything’s gonna be just fine. You’ll see. Be just fine. Won’t it, Sonnybaby?”
“Right as rain, darlin,” the big man says. He switches on the radio, tunes through the channels. “Right as rain.” He settles on something high and thin with violins, and the miles unwind.
Sitting on the floor under the motel sink, wearing a red drawstring cowboy hat and a striped shirt and corduroy pants. These his mother bought for him at a five-and-dime in El Paso. The shirt and pants are too short in the sleeves and cuffs, and they ride up his arms and legs. The hat had come in a pape
r and plastic box, along with a tin wind-up horse and rider. He plays with these on the carpet beneath the sink. Winds the horse and sets it down and watches it roll until it falls over, wheels spinning. He knows he could play in the bathroom on the tile, where the horse would roll better, but he likes it here, under the sink. Here it’s cozy, safe.
On the floor by the bed, the red turntable sits open like a wide, friendly mouth, a 45 spinning, one of his mother’s favorites: “Don’t Rob Another Man’s Castle.” He listens to the song over and over as he plays, resetting the needle when the last chords fade. He plays a long time, long enough to get sleepy, long enough to roll over and curl up into a ball and drop away and dream in the middle of the song.
Later, the boy wakes when he feels the boot of the man his mother calls Sonnybaby nudge him beneath the sink. He sits up, hears the steady thump-thump-thump of the turntable’s needle as the record spins dumbly beneath it. The door to the outside world is open, the afternoon light blinding, and his mother is sitting on the end of the bed. The boy can hear the sounds of big trucks hammering past on the two-lane blacktop.
“You still alive?” the big man wants to know. He toes him again, right in the butt, then laughs real hard.
“Of course he is,” comes his mother’s voice. She comes over from the bed and hunkers down.
Sonnybaby takes a step back, sits on the bed, stares away at nothing the boy can see. There’s something wrong with Sonnybaby, he thinks. He isn’t right, in the way adults sometimes aren’t.
The boy smells his mother’s familiar scents: vanilla, lemon, cigarettes. She used to smoke, before Daddy made her quit. Last few days, she’s taken it up again, but the boy doesn’t mind. He likes the smell. Daddy wouldn’t like it, but Daddy isn’t here. That’s what Mommy says, every time she lights up. Daddy isn’t here.
“Hey, baby,” she says now, just before she topples backward and lands on her backside. She hits the record player, sends the needle across the vinyl with a loud, nasty scratch. She’s laughing, but there’s something in the laughter that doesn’t feel funny to the boy, so he just watches, noticing that he can see his mother’s pink underwear and thinking that he shouldn’t be looking.
In Valley of the Sun Page 16