Made in the U.S.A.

by Billie Letts

  His face settled into a puzzled look then, as if he’d just heard a joke he didn’t understand. “Why?” he asked.

  “Why? What do you mean, ‘why’? That’s a stupid question. I don’t know why people die. They just do. I guess she might’ve had a heart attack.”

  Fate ran his hands through his hair. “You think she had a heart attack ’cause she was waiting for me? You think she got mad and—”

  “She wasn’t waiting. She was in the checkout line and she just died.”

  “But—”

  A tap at the door made them both turn toward the sound.

  “Miss McFee?”

  “It’s probably that policeman,” Lutie whispered. “Don’t say anything to him. You understand?”

  Fate, eyes wide with fear, nodded.

  “Come in,” Lutie said.

  The policeman opened the door and stepped inside. He was carrying Floy’s brown imitation leather purse.

  “You two doing okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. My name is Sergeant Santos.” He sat down, put the purse on the desk, and took a small notebook from his pocket. “This won’t take long, but I need to ask some questions. Is that all right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Okay. You said your name is Lutie McFee. And you are . . . ?” He looked at Fate, waiting for an answer, but the boy was rigid and mute.

  “His name’s Fate. He’s my brother.”

  “That’s an unusual name.”

  “It was supposed to be Fale,” Lutie said. “That was our mother’s maiden name, but they got it wrong on his birth certificate. They crossed the l.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Out on Springer Road. Just east of the slaughterhouse.”

  “Was the deceased . . . the woman who passed away, was she your mother?”

  “No,” Lutie said.

  “Are you related to her?” he asked.

  “Not exactly. She and my daddy lived together, so she was sort of like our stepmother. But she wasn’t. Not really.”

  The policeman wrote down everything Lutie said. She tried to read it upside down, but it was hard to make out.

  “And you told me her name was . . . is Floy? Floy Satterfield?”

  “Floy is what everyone calls her, but her real name is Florence.”

  “Where can we reach your father?” he asked.

  “He’s in Las Vegas.”

  “When will he be back?”

  Lutie’s hesitation prompted Sergeant Santos to look at Fate, but he wasn’t talking.

  “When did your father go to Las Vegas?”

  “About a year ago,” Lutie said.

  “You know his phone number? His address?”

  “No. We haven’t heard from him.”

  “And your mother? Where is she?”

  “She’s dead.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, then he put down his pen, closed his eyes, and pinched the bridge of his nose.

  “Do you have a migraine?” Fate asked, the first time he’d spoken since Lutie warned him to be quiet. “That’s what Floy does when she gets her migraines.”

  “I’m just a little tired, I guess.” Then he picked up his pen and looked at Lutie. “Do your grandparents live around here?”

  “No. Grandpa Fale died a long time ago, and Grandma Fale’s in a nursing home in Georgia. She has Oldtimers, or whatever it’s called. Daddy’s folks, they’re divorced. I think his mom lives in Canada, but I don’t know where his dad is.”

  “How do I get in touch with her? Your grandmother in Canada.”

  Lutie shrugged. “She got married again, and I don’t know what her name is now.”

  “How about Ms. Satterfield. She have a family?”

  “A sister. Milly Windout. She lives in Rapid City.”

  The policeman studied Lutie, then Fate. “Well, let me make a call to CPS and—”

  “What’s CPS?” Lutie asked.

  “Child Protective Services. They help out in cases like this. They’ll find you a place to stay and—”

  “Oh, we don’t need any help. See, we have an aunt who lives with us.” Fate, dumbfounded, shifted in his chair, but Lutie pretended not to notice. “Our aunt Julia.”

  “What’s her last name?” Sergeant Santos asked.

  “Roberts.”

  “Like the movie star?”

  “Yeah.” Lutie smiled. “People are always making some joke about her being in the movies.”

  “Is she home?”

  “You mean now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well . . .” Stalling, Lutie asked, “What time is it?”

  “Almost six.”

  “She doesn’t get off till nine. She’s a nurse at the hospital.”

  “Then why don’t we run over to Memorial and talk to her?”

  “No!” Lutie said, a little too fast, a little too loud. “See, she has a bad heart. Just like Floy. And if she sees us come in with you . . . well, it might scare her so bad she’d drop dead, too.”

  “Then let me drive you home.”

  “Oh, I’ll drive Floy’s car.” She grabbed Floy’s purse, rummaged inside, and came up with a ring of keys. “Her car’s parked right outside.”

  “You old enough to drive, Lutie?” he asked, his voice conveying suspicion.

  “Sure. I have a license.” Then, fearing he might ask to see it, she added, “Well, I don’t have it with me. I left it at home. I mean, I didn’t think I’d be driving tonight.”

  “I understand.” He closed his notebook and slipped it back in his shirt pocket. “You don’t mind if I drop by your place after your aunt gets home, do you? Might be a good idea if I talked to her for a few minutes.”

  “Okay.”

  “Then I’ll see you later.”

  He nodded to them, opened the door, and walked into the hall, where the manager was waiting with another policeman.

  Lutie signaled Fate to be quiet, then she shouldered her purse and Floy’s and motioned Fate to follow her.

  When they walked past the group in the hall, Lutie could hear the policemen talking, but she couldn’t make out what they were saying.

  Lutie and Fate slowed when they reached the checkouts, but all traces of Floy had been picked up, swept out, mopped up, and put back. And it was business as usual at register three, where a checker was dragging cans of Vienna sausage across the scanner.

  CHAPTER THREE

  LUTIE, DO YOU really know how to drive?”

  “Sure,” she said as she tried key after key in the ignition of Floy’s car. “I took driver’s ed.”

  “Yeah, but Mr. Edwards kicked you out before you ever got to drive.”

  “Mr. Edwards is a prick. Besides, I learned the basics.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “The rules, stupid.”

  Lutie finally fitted the right key into the starter, turned it, and the engine fired, but when she mashed on the gas, the old Pontiac lurched forward and died.

  “Are they watching us?” she asked. “And don’t let them see you looking.”

  “How am I gonna know if they’re watching us if I don’t look?”

  “Just do it!”

  Fate took a quick peek out the rear window of the car, then slouched down in the passenger seat. “That policeman who talked to us is, but the other one went back into Wal-Mart.”

  When Lutie started the engine again, she stomped on the gas pedal, causing the car to shoot across the parking lot and bump across a curbed divider into the wrong lane.

  “Watch out!” Fate yelled.

  Lutie turned the wheel sharply, jumped the curbing again, and steered the car into the right lane.

  “You’re going too fast!”

  “Be quiet, Fate. Let me concentrate.”

  When she reached the stop sign at the end of the exit lane, she hit the brakes and the car came to a squealing stop.

  “Is he still looking?”

  Fate glanced back. “Yeah.”
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br />   “Dammit!”

  “Can you get put in jail for reckless driving?”

  The Pontiac’s left front fender grazed a bumper guard at the side of the exit.

  “I bet you’ll go to jail if he finds out you don’t have a driver’s license.”

  “Will you stop talking about jail?”

  Getting a feel for the pedals now, Lutie eased the car into the traffic as she pulled onto the roadway.

  “He’ll probably put us both in jail if he finds out we don’t have an aunt named Julia Roberts.”

  “Fate, will you shut up about jail!”

  “Why’d you tell him that, Lutie?”

  Without warning, Lutie swerved into the left-turn lane, and the driver of the car she nearly sideswiped honked and gave her the finger.

  “Dick-head!” she yelled, returning the gesture.

  Oblivious to the yield sign, Lutie turned left when she reached the intersection, forcing one driver onto the shoulder and another to clip the center median. Relieved to have left the main thoroughfare and the traffic behind, she took a deep breath and rolled her head from side to side to ease the tension in her shoulders.

  “Why’d you make up that story about Julia Roberts? Huh?”

  “Christ alive, Fate. If you ask me one more question . . .”

  “Floy says it’s a sin to use the Lord’s name in vain.”

  “I didn’t say Lord. I said Christ.”

  “Same thing.”

  Fate was quiet until they neared the Buffalo Café, where Floy had taken them the first Friday of every month for the all-you-can-eat catfish special.

  “Lutie, what’s a heart attack like?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You think it hurts a lot? You think Floy—”

  “I said I don’t know.”

  Fate stared at the café as they passed, then sniffed and wiped his nose on the sleeve of his plaid shirt.

  “I know you didn’t like her much, but Floy wasn’t so bad.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I mean, she treated us okay. Better’n Gwen and Mona and Beverly.”

  “Gwen and Mona and Beverly were all drunks.”

  “Well, so is Daddy.”

  “Daddy’s not a drunk. He’s an alcoholic.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “An alcoholic can quit. A drunk can’t.”

  “Floy said Daddy was a drunk.”

  “That’s because he walked out on her. She’s been pissed at him ever since.”

  “Maybe she loved him.”

  “Floy? Hell, the only thing she loved about him was his paycheck. And she damn sure didn’t love us. Always bitching because he ran off and left us for her to take care of. Said she knew he wouldn’t come back for us like he promised.”

  “Well, he didn’t.”

  Two miles past the café, Lutie turned onto the county road that led to Floy’s place, a house trailer on a nearly treeless acre, land owned more by the bank than by Floy.

  Lutie overshot the driveway by a couple of feet, the Pontiac coming to a stop with the two front tires on a scrawny bed of petunias.

  “Come on,” she said as she switched off the engine. “I got a lot to do, and you’re gonna have to help me.”

  Lutie already had the car door open and one foot on the ground when Fate said, “Help you with what?”

  She hesitated for a moment, then eased back into the driver’s seat and turned to face her brother.

  “Pack,” she said.

  “Where we going?”

  “Fate, do you have any idea of the mess we’re in here?”

  He shook his head.

  “Well, we’re . . . Listen. You know why I told that policeman we had an aunt who lives with us?”

  “No.”

  “’Cause if I told him we didn’t have no one but Floy, he’d have those welfare people out here in a flash and we’d get stuck in a foster home. And believe me, that’s worse than living with Floy. It’s even worse than jail.”

  At the word jail, Fate’s eyes widened in alarm.

  “I’m telling you the truth,” Lutie said. “A girl in my class, Peggy Bellamy, she’s in a foster home. Now, the people that took her, they got kids of their own, and they treat them just fine. But Peggy, she’s like a slave to them. They slap her around, make her clean their toilets, feed her slop. That’s not gonna happen to me.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Well, that’s the thing. See, I’m going to Las Vegas to find Daddy. But I can’t take you.”

  “Why not?”

  “’Cause when that policeman comes, I need you to tell him that me and Aunt Julia went to Rapid City to see Floy’s sister, to tell her Floy died. He’ll probably figure it out later, but by the time he does, I’ll be hundreds of miles away.”

  “But what about me? I’ll have to go to a foster home and eat slop and—”

  “No. I been thinking about that. You can go stay with Floy’s friend, the one she goes to bingo with. She don’t have kids and she’ll—”

  “Miss Jacobs? No way, Lutie! She’s about a hundred years old and she smells like mothballs and her hands shake and her dog hates me and—”

  “You won’t be there long. Soon’s I find Daddy, we’ll come back and get you.”

  “You don’t even know where he is. After Floy got that letter, she tried to call him about a hundred times and all the operators said the same thing. He didn’t have a phone.”

  “Yeah, but we have his address.”

  “Floy wrote to him there, but all her letters got returned.”

  “Look, Fate, I don’t have time for this. For all I know that policeman might be calling the hospital right now, and if he finds out—”

  “What are you gonna do when you get caught in a storm, huh? A storm with lightning and thunder?”

  “I’ll deal with it.”

  “You’ve never been able to deal with it before. And what’ll happen if you have car trouble or if someone with a gun—”

  “I’m old enough to take care of myself.”

  “You’re only fifteen.”

  “So what.”

  “Well, if you’re so old, why can’t you take care of me?”

  “’Cause I can’t, that’s why,” she said as she slid out of the car and headed for the trailer.

  Following her, Fate said, “Please. Take me with you.”

  “Fate, I already told you—”

  “You’re the only one I got, Lutie. There ain’t no one else.”

  Lutie turned then, angry enough to take a swing at him. Instead, she saw what she didn’t want to see. A boy whose small, thin body was already bowed by loss . . . the brother whose face already bore the look of defeat and whose eyes, filling now with tears, had already seen too much disappointment.

  “Well, hell.” She tromped up three rickety steps before she said, “Come on. Let’s get packed.”

  Lutie’s history had taught her to avoid attachments . . . to people, to places, to almost everything. So packing for her was easy. She quickly crammed clothes, shoes, and cosmetics into black garbage bags and stuffed them in the trunk of the car.

  She made few concessions to sentimentality.

  One was Mr. PawPaw, a fourteen-year-old teddy bear made by her mother but disabled long ago when a puppy called Fizz chewed off and swallowed one of his eyes and the lobe of one ear. But now, despite his impairments, Mr. PawPaw would ride to Las Vegas on the dash of the Pontiac.

  Her only other emotional ties fit into a floral hatbox secreted away in the back of the trunk, a hatbox filled with mementos from her gymnastic competitions: leotards carefully folded; medals and trophies wrapped in tissue paper; articles clipped from the Rapid City Journal; and photographs of Lutie and her teammates celebrating their victories.

  The day Coach Stebens told her she’d been declared ineligible, Lutie had taken the box with its contents into the backyard, where she intended to burn it. Burn every damn bit of it in a ceremony of revenge.


  But she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t destroy the evidence that the girl in the emerald green leotard with a gold medal suspended from a ribbon around her neck was the same girl who lived on the wrong side of town in a shabby trailer with a three-hundred-pound woman who came to all the events no matter how much the girl begged her not to; a father, the town drunk, who’d disappeared long ago; and a brother—the weirdest boy in school, and the smartest, too.

  No, this girl needed proof, the “you can see it” and “you can touch it” kind of proof. Proof that she had been somebody. Even though her fame had been short-lived, she was the skinny, flat-chested girl who had completed a perfect back handspring, a flawless stepout, and an excellent dismount from the balance beam; then, clutching Mr. PawPaw, she waited for her score to be tallied—9.8; 9.9; 10; 9.9; 10. Two hundred spectators stomping in the bleachers, clapping, shouting her name: “Lu-tie, Lu-tie, Lu-tie . . .”

  She could still hear it all, see it all. Live it again, but only for a few moments before Fate crowded in beside her with a bag of his plaid shirts and corduroy pants, which she squeezed into the trunk. He cared nothing about clothes, but even with Lutie pushing him to hurry, he agonized over his other possessions, wanting to leave nothing behind. He eventually settled on an encyclopedia, a dictionary, his National Geographics, a collection of Farmers’ Almanacsdating back to 1991, The Book of Facts, Who Knew?, and his Trivial Pursuit game.

  Rejecting Lutie’s demands, he wouldn’t let her put these treasured belongings in the trunk; instead, he placed them in the backseat where he could reach them.

  Finally, they set to work putting their funds together—money from Floy’s billfold and the bingo stash she kept in her jewelry box, grocery money hidden in the sugar bowl, change from beneath the cushions of the couch, a few dollars from Fate’s Christmas bank, and the cash Lutie had been saving for her Wonderbra.

  Their total take was $112.47, and that, according to Fate, would hardly stretch all the way to Las Vegas. But just as Lutie started to back out of the driveway, he remembered the change in the coffee can under the kitchen sink, a cache of almost $40, all in quarters, which Floy had been squirreling away for an operation to have her stomach stapled.

  Fate came out of the trailer handling his find like the Holy Grail and made a special place for the coffee can in the backseat next to his books.