In Valley of the Sun

by Andy Davidson

  Sonnybaby points at the boy’s mother from where he sits on the edge of the bed and laughs, too, slaps his knee it tickles him so hard, and now the boy feels like he’s just missed the funniest joke in the world.

  “What?” she says, looking over her shoulder at Sonnybaby, grinning up at him. “You laughin at me?” She turns and crawls on her hands and knees to the edge of the bed, and there Sonnybaby sits, the laughter shrinking to a smile, his small, close-set eyes roaming up and down, up and down. She rises up to her knees and slides in between his, and he reaches out with thick, tattooed arms and curls his big-knuckled fingers into her hair. “Don’t laugh at me, baby,” she says. “Don’t laugh at me.”

  He doesn’t.

  The boy Travis doesn’t laugh, either. Not now. Not when his mother tells him he needs to go into the bathroom and stay there a while.

  “We got grown-up talkin to do,” she says.

  “Big pitchers,” Sonnybaby says from the bed, and the boy has no idea what this means.

  His mother closes the door on him where he sits on the edge of the bathtub.

  He hears the scratch of the needle, then the first faint chords of the song.

  The song has finished when he remembers his toy, still under the sink, how it would roll here on the tile. But he knows he isn’t supposed to go out. He knows. Something is happening, as it’s happened several nights before. The sounds he hears—the record too brief to hide them—are not unfamiliar now. Last night he lay awake on his side in the second bed, turned away from the other where his mother and Sonnybaby were making noises. He lay awake and watched the flicker of the television on the wall, the nightly news, commercials for tobacco, a game show. He knows better than to go outside, but the toy is there, and if he’s honest he’ll admit this isn’t even really about the toy. He wants to see. What’s happening. What the noises mean.

  He nudges open the door.

  Reflected in the mirror that hangs on the wall across from the bathroom door, his mother is on her knees at the edge of the bed, Sonnybaby’s hands in her hair, her face in his lap. The boy sees her bare shoulders, the straps of her bra, her blouse on the floor beside the little red record player. A runner in her stocking. She moans and moves her head in Sonnybaby’s lap. Sonnybaby pulls her hair.

  “Oh you bitch,” the big man says.

  Thump-thump-thump goes the needle.

  The boy watches, transfixed, until Sonnybaby looks up and sees him watching in the mirror.

  Sonnybaby looks right back and smiles.

  Thump-thump-thump.

  The boy sits on the porch, listening to the country music drift through the doors as men and women come and go. He holds his tin horse and rider in his lap, but the mechanism is broken, hasn’t worked in days. Sonnybaby broke it when he got mad and threw the toy against the motel wall. The boy had to duck, else Sonnybaby might have broken him, too. His mother had begged Sonnybaby to stop, but Sonnybaby had only slapped her and called her dirty names and told her to go FUCK herself. This is a word the boy has never said, but he knows it for what it is: a word only adults say, only bad adults. This means Sonnybaby is a bad adult.

  No sooner has he thought this than the doors to the dance hall—that’s what his mother called it, a dance hall—burst open and two men come tumbling out into the gravel, swinging their fists at each other. One of them is a man in overalls whose face is bloody. The other is Sonnybaby, and Sonnybaby punches the man in the face again and again.

  “You don’t talk to her!” he yells.

  Another man in a hat and boots rushes out and breaks a bottle over Sonnybaby’s head. He falls out like a heap of wood dropped on a hearth, one hand on the top of his bleeding head. The two men kick him and punch him. The boy’s mother comes staggering out of the dance hall, her lipstick smeared. The men walk away, harsh laughter between them. Sonnybaby crawls in the dirt. The boy’s mother gets down on her hands and knees and crawls alongside Sonnybaby, who bleeds from the nose, the mouth, the back of his head where the bottle broke.

  Rocks and gravel biting into his mother’s palms.

  The boy, still sitting on the porch, toy in hand.

  Somewhere else now.

  Somewhere that smells of detergent and clean linens and has a kind of drowsy, hypnotic effect on the boy, as a television plays cartoons high in a corner of the room and he sits with his tin cowboy and horse in hand.

  The floor is concrete.

  There are strangers here.

  Washers and dryers and old women folding towels.

  The boy turns in the chair, mother’s record player locked in its box on the seat beside him, and looks out the window. The word Wondermat painted blue on the glass, and through the o the boy can see his mother and Sonnybaby fighting on the sidewalk. Yelling all manner of bad-adult things at each other. His mother crying and digging in her purse. Sonnybaby snatches the purse from her, rips some money from it, and hurls it into the street and stalks away down the sidewalk. His mother walks into the street to fetch her purse. The boy is still watching her when the car, a big Chevrolet sedan, hits her and sends her flying right out of her shoes. He runs out of the Wondermat and falls down beside his mother and calls her Mommy and tries to help her up. She sits up slowly, tears streaking her face. She sees her purse crushed beneath the wheel of the Chevrolet. The driver, a fat man in a business suit, gets out and hurries over. She looks down at her stocking, which is ripped from the knee down, the skin along her calf sheared away, and then she looks at her son, in tears at her side and pulling at her arm and crying for her to get up. She pushes him away. So he sits with her in the road for a while, crying, until the policeman comes.

  Home again. Grandview.

  The front door opens and the boy’s father stands in the doorway, a stern-faced man with a long face and square jaw, chin rough and stubbled like sandpaper. He gives the boy and his mother a hard stare.

  The boy looks up at her. Her hair is uncombed. She wears no make-up and the dark circles under her eyes are like bruises. Her face, he thinks, got lost. The record player hangs between them, one clasp undone.

  His father looks past them to the dough-faced deputy who stands at the bottom of the steps, beyond him another deputy leaning against his car in the driveway, arms crossed.

  “Get in,” the boy’s father says. “Both of you.”

  They go in, are swallowed.

  The door slams in the deputy’s face.

  The boy sits Indian-style in front of the TV watching The Lone Ranger. The Lone Ranger and Tonto are fist-fighting in a saloon with the Cavendish gang. Tonto sends a man reeling through the batwing doors. The Ranger lays another flat out on a table. A third comes at him, and this one the Ranger sails over his head and through the window where the word Saloon is painted on the outside of the glass. At first, the boy is certain the sounds he hears are coming from the TV—breaking glass, angry words. But as the fight subsides and the Lone Ranger and Tonto catch their breath, he hears the sound again.

  A crash from the bedroom at the back of the hall.

  He gets to his feet. Takes a few tentative steps toward the bedroom door.

  The door bursts open and his mother stumbles out of the bedroom. Her blouse is torn and her nose bleeding. She wears a bright yellow pair of pedal pushers, her feet bare. She tugs her shirt together and walks past the boy. His father comes out after her, whipping his belt from his jeans. The boy sees that his father’s head is bleeding from the crown, dripping down into his eye. The boy presses himself tightly against the wall and watches his father take after his mother, who’s halfway down the front sidewalk to the curb now. The boy can see her through the front door, which she left open, the sun outside shining on a bed of begonias she had planted earlier in the year. The pink mimosa tree in full spring bloom. She’s yelling at him, calling him bad names. He grabs her by the wrist and twists her arm and pushes her onto the grass. She goes down on her side. The boy’s father hauls his mother back up the walk by her hair, dragging her along, ki
cking, flailing. She fights him, so he turns and straps her a few times with the belt. She sags just inside the living room. He throws her to the carpet and kicks the door shut and drives her on hands and knees with the sole of his boot back to the bedroom. All the while she cries and begs and spits and screams, and when the bedroom door slams shut, the only thing the boy hears that is louder than the sound of a leather belt whipping flesh over and over again are his mother’s pleas.

  After a long time, the pleas and the belt fall silent.

  Then, suddenly, laughter. His mother’s. High and bright like birdsong.

  The boy wakes the next morning to a dead house.

  He lies in bed for a long time, listening.

  A train passes on the tracks out back, the walls shuddering.

  In its wake, the boy hears no sounds of breakfast cooking.

  No flushing toilet.

  No creaking floorboards in the hall.

  He gets up. Pees in the bathroom. The clack of the lid loud and harsh.

  He finds his father in the morning gloom of the living room, sitting in his chair. His eyes are tired, big bags under them. He smells like beer. He wears only his boxers and a white undershirt. He holds a glass in his right hand, an inch of cheap whiskey in the bottom.

  “Sit down,” he tells the boy, when he looks up and sees him peering out from behind a lampshade near the hallway door. The boy sits on the couch, wearing only his underwear and socks and a T-shirt he’s yet to grow into.

  He sees, for the first time, the record player, knocked from the table beneath the window, its lid unhinged like a broken jaw.

  “Your momma’s gone,” his father says. “She ran off in the night. She ain’t comin back.”

  The boy doesn’t say anything.

  His father looks down at his glass in his hand.

  The boy sees what the old man’s looking at: blood on his knuckles. A quarter-sized spot on his undershirt, too, just above his heart.

  “It finds you,” he tells the boy. And takes a sip of whiskey. “Plastic aprons, goggles. We scrub and scrub at the end of the day, even got little brushes for our fingers. But it’s always there. Little red flowers, blooming everwhere. That’s all it is. Don’t pay it no mind. It don’t mean a thing.”

  “Yessir,” the boy says.

  “You hungry?” his father says.

  “Yessir.”

  In the kitchen, the old man sets him out a bowl of cereal, slopping milk on the table as he pours it from the carton. He shuffles on about his business. The boy picks up his spoon and eats the cereal and listens to the loud silence of the morning.

  Later, playing in the utility shed out back with his busted tin horse and rider, sitting on the cool dirt floor, he hears the back door of the house clap open. He peers through a crack in the planking and sees his father crossing the yard with a heap of clothes in his arms. He watches as his father drops the clothes in a pile in the center of the yard and goes back inside. He returns with more clothes and drops these, too. His mother’s clothes, the boy realizes. Her dresses, her pink and yellow and blue capris, her blouses, and scarves, and Keds, and sandals, a pair of red leather cowgirl boots. An armful of records in their sleeves that go sliding over the pile when he dumps them.

  Then his father is walking toward him. Toward the shed.

  The boy hides beneath a musty canvas covering a stack of paint cans. He hears his father enter, pause in the soft dirt, and move to the wall and take a tool from the pegboard and close the door on his way out. The boy slips free of the canvas and goes back to the loose plank, where he watches his father dig a large hole in the backyard and pile his mother’s clothes and records and the red suitcase turntable in the hole. His father pours a gallon metal can of kerosene over the pile and drops a match on it. The boy watches his mother’s things burn, a dark plume of smoke rising into the sky, where a thin white line streaks the blue, at its head a silver jet. Carrying people who are not his mother, the boy thinks, far away from places like this.

  1963

  He pulls apart the cotton candy and stares at the sticky veins of red between his fingers. He flutters a tuft away, over the side of the carriage. It drifts, light as a feather, and settles on the shoulder of the fat carny at the gears of the wheel below.

  “Ain’t that pretty,” the girl says, her hand tightening around his knee as they rock gently above the midway, bright organ music piping up from below. She’s looking out at the sky that stretches a deep violet, heavy with clouds. The sun going down in the west.

  The carriage moves and stops, moves and stops.

  Travis, who is sixteen and has never been on a Ferris wheel until this night, shuts his eyes. Not so pretty, he thinks. Not so pretty. The carriage lurches again. He drops the spool of cotton candy between his boots.

  “You okay?” she says.

  He opens his eyes, sees her. The wind pulling at her long dark hair. Her cheeks flushed. His mouth a thin, grim line. “Be fine,” he says.

  “You don’t like it up high,” she says, laughing. “It’s okay. Here.” She slips his clammy, candy-sticky hand beneath her sweater and over the swell of her right breast, and his eyes widen at the tender flesh, and she laughs again, as if this is all a lark, but for him the world has just changed, has righted, made sense. Breasts, he thinks, were made to be held just like this. She closes her eyes and opens her mouth ever so slightly as he squeezes. “Mmm,” she says.

  Suddenly, the wheel is thrown full into motion, and she withdraws his hand and places it neatly in his lap, covering the thing she pretends she doesn’t see. The country boy belt she bought him, earlier that night, buckled just above the rise in his jeans.

  She laughs, and the world just spins.

  Later, it happens in the cab of his father’s pickup in a distant corner of the parking lot, the lights of the fair burning behind them. It’s late, and the grass field has emptied out, the last of the pickups and station wagons caravanning toward the south gate where the police are directing traffic.

  Their breath fogs the windows and soon they’re lost in a world of their own making. She leans back against the passenger door of the pickup, one sturdy black shoe planted on the floor, the other stretched across the seat, in his lap. She takes her hair down and lets it fall unpinned. It’s coal black. Her skirt, long and flowing, spreads about her like a fan.

  Low on the radio, the Grand Ole Opry, Patsy Cline sad and lonesome. “Leavin’ On Your Mind.”

  “We’re friends, right, Travis?” she says.

  He sits behind her in English. They share cigarettes each morning before first bell in back of the machine shop where old tires from the school buses are stacked, weeds and saw briars growing up through them. She wears a man’s shirts and tight skirts that are safe, just below the knee—the principal has a ruler and stops girls between classes—but the fabric of these is thin and smooth, and the skirts are old with threads around the edges. Her only makeup a smear of bright red lipstick. She talks about how she hates her mother who fixes hair for a living out of their kitchen and her father who works graveyard at the paper mill.

  “Why do you hate your old man?” he asks one morning.

  “Because he wants to screw me” is her answer. “But he don’t cause Momma, she’s on to him.”

  Travis says nothing. She goes on talking about singers he doesn’t know, hopping a train west, hitchhiking to California, sitting on a tire and smoking, and he listens, thinking she has the nice, big breasts of a girl who’s bound for trouble. One day in the autumn he asks her to the fair. She shrugs, says sure.

  “I liked being on the Ferris wheel with you,” he says.

  “Yeah,” she says. “Sure you did.”

  She draws the skirt she’s worn tonight up her legs, and he can see that her knees are scabbed and bruised, boy’s knees.

  “I like my belt,” he says.

  “It suits you. Maybe one day you can get yourself a great big buckle, too.”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “I ma
y just stick with this regular one.”

  “I’m a virgin, you know.”

  He nods, though he hadn’t known this at all. Had suspected, in fact, the opposite. “Me, too,” he says.

  “Sure you are,” she says. “When we do it, I’m going to bleed.”

  “I know,” he says.

  “But before we do that, there’s this other thing. I’ve read about it in these magazines my old man gets in the mail. They come wrapped in brown paper so you can’t see what they are, but I know where he keeps them in his bureau. They have pictures and everything. You have to take off your belt for it.”

  Heart pounding, he unbuckles his belt. Pulls it free of his jeans. Places it, like an offering, on the seat between them. She bought the belt from a vendor on the midway, had watched as the old bearded man in the stall slapped the belt tight across a big flat stone on a pedestal, then stamped each letter of Travis’s name, one steel letter at a time, into the belt and oiled it down. She had said nothing as she watched, her gaze rapt, her eyes wide and bright in the frenzied lights of the nearby duck booth and shooting gallery.

  She pulls her sweater over her head, makes a deft movement behind her back, and all at once her breasts hang free beneath her unsnapped brassiere, and there’s something both tender and silly about them. A mole just beneath her clavicle. She takes the belt from the seat and draws it closer, stretches it to its full length, snaps it—the sound is explosive in the quiet, fogged-over cab—and drapes it around her shoulders, lightly.

  “You’ll do what I say?” she says.

  “I will.”

  “When I say do it.”

  One last nod.

  “Come over here,” she says, “and let’s find out what this feels like.”

  He slides across the seat.

  In the end, the belt goes around her throat up to the fourth notch. He fumbles at the clasp while she fumbles at his jeans. She takes him into her mouth, briefly, then pushes him away and turns on the seat and pulls her skirts above her hips and presents herself to him without panties in the manner by which a dog would ask for fucking. He sees her, smells her, and soon is inside her, pushing hard, and she cries out and bleeds and says, “Oh, it hurts, oh tighter. Tighter . . .”