by Riley, Peggy
“Gimme them letters, girl,” he commands.
She raises her arms to make a W shape, then points her arms out to make an E.
“What’s it say?”
“Wee?” she says hopefully.
“Wrong again. It’s World Wrestling Entertainment.” The picture comes on with a roar as two men, big as cows in shiny suits, spin onto a stage lined with ropes. “Hallelujah!” the old man hollers. “It’s Saturday!” The men slap their chests and bark. “Don’t you worry. Got sumpin’ to show that you’ll like, come Sunday.”
“What?” she asks him, doubtful.
“Sunday’s when the preachermen are on. Go and tell your sister.”
Her hands go into her pocket, to feel the fabric that waits there. Sunday, she tells herself.
32
Do Drop Inn and the Mesa
He drives Amaranth down a thin road between cut fields that runs between the highway and the hog farms. “This is the old road,” he tells her. “The one that used to bring folks to the station when I was a kid. It ain’t Route Sixty-Six, but we got cars enough.”
“I don’t like highways,” she says. There are no street signs, no lights, just their headlights on the dark road and the hiccup jumps of jackrabbits into them.
“Then you’re my kind of girl,” he says.
She’d found him in his room, looking up through his telescope at stars. He’d only nodded when she asked if they could drive. She’d walked past her daughter and his father on the sofa, watching TV like some ordinary family, and she’d shaken her head at how resilient they all must be.
“Where you wanna go?” he asks her now, his face dark. The dashboard lights have burned out, from Sorrow’s fire.
“Not into town,” she says. “No papers. Take me where you’d go if I weren’t here.” He pulls her up before a yellow neon horseshoe and a sign: DO DROP INN. The parking lot is half filled with dirty pickups, parked against a set of hitching posts that flank a saloon door. The trucks are laden with gun supports, their beds full of chains and tools, boxes and barrels, bumper stickers about God and beer. He turns the engine off.
She can picture the bar inside, sawdust on the floor, maybe, a wooden counter lined with farmers and cowboys, their pale mugs of beer, college football on a screen. She tries to picture him walking in with her beside him or behind him, to hide her skirts and her cap. She pulls it off and pops it into his glove compartment when he opens his door.
“You comin’ in?”
She pictures him drinking too much, too fast, coming back to her on his dirt in the kitchen garden, how he drank when he thought he saw his wife. She pictures them inside, together, sees herself drinking too much beside him, trying to be someone else, shaking her limbs to music she doesn’t recognize, trying to fill up all that darkness with noise and liquid. She shakes her head. “No. Take me somewhere you’ve never taken anybody. Not a soul.”
He thinks for a minute, then pulls the door shut. “Women,” he says, giving her a smile.
He turns them back to the dirt road and goes past the turnoff for his farm, driving her west. He stops at a shop for cigarettes and a six-pack and when he doesn’t bring a paper back, she is grateful. “Have one,” he tells her, and she pulls a can from a plastic ring, pulls it open, and holds it, guilty as a child, between her skirted legs. He turns them north, up a blacktop road, and they gain elevation. She can feel her ears pop, see the dark scrub in the headlights change to pine and piñon. The air is cool and she rolls down the window, smells juniper and smoky mesquite.
“You keep driving, you’ll hit Four Corners,” he tells her, “where four states meet. You could go anywhere from there.”
“I don’t want to go anywhere.”
“Well, you’re goin’ to Black Mesa.” He tells her it was named for the volcanic lava that formed its tabletops and valleys, that it adjoins two reservations, Navajo and Hopi, and if it were daylight she’d be able to see the cholla and the pines, maybe spot an eagle, a pinyon jay, or a bear. But it’s dark, so she only sees darkness, the dark shapes beyond them. He turns them up a road, rough and rocky, the truck jostling along a length of barbed wire and metal snow markers. He parks and takes his cigarettes, grabs a flashlight from the glove compartment, and takes the beers by their ring. “Come on,” he says.
“What, we’re walking?”
“End of the line,” he says, whistling his way to the barbed wire and taking his shirt off before it. He lays it over the wire to help her lift her skirts over, snagging and ripping. When she laughs he shushes her. “This is private land. Prob’ly dogs,” he says.
“Is this legal?”
“What do you care about legal?” He pulls her by the hand in the dark, over sand. His flashlight sweeps a dry creek bed, lined with boulders and tufts of dry grass. The sky above them is frosted with stars, thick in a twisted band of galaxies, close enough to pull down. “There,” he says. He points his light at a hole in the ground, saucer-shaped, the size of a dinner plate. “Dinosaur tracks,” he tells her.
“Come on,” she says with a laugh.
“What, you don’t believe in dinosaurs?” He sweeps the light up a row of tracks, staggered along the creek bed, lined up like the gait of an ancient land beast.
“Of course I believe in them,” she says. “Just because my children are ignorant doesn’t mean I am.” She stops and bends to look at it, to put her fingers into the fossilized edges, like doubting Thomas probing a wound. “I saw some bones in a museum when I was a kid, strung together with wire. They were probably plastic. Still, the size of them, I couldn’t believe it.” Most children were fascinated by dinosaurs. Not her children. “Is this really a footprint? How do they know?”
“Everybody wants proof,” he says. He opens a beer and guzzles it, the beam of the flashlight wandering while he swallows.
“Not my children,” she says. They have faith, proof of nothing. “We should bring the girls out, show them proof of dinosaurs, real proof that the world is older than the Bible teaches, older than four thousand years.” What would they make of the tracks? How would she begin to take apart everything they knew and believed? Could she?
He hands the can to her and her lips go over the teardrop hole. She tips the drink back and looks up at the swirl of stars, hoping one will fall so she can wish on it.
“When I was little, I wanted to be an astronaut,” he says.
“Sure,” she says, handing the can back. “Why not?”
“Ma gave me the telescope. Grew up lookin’ up for men on the moon. Just kept extendin’ the legs. I wanted to see their boot prints up there, like it would prove that they’d been and I might go up. Pa’d just say, ‘Nothin’ up there, boy, ain’t no wheat on the moon.’ ”
She takes the crook of his arm and squeezes it, pulls her collars up to her neck.
“Cold?” he asks her, reaching to rub her sleeve with his other hand.
“No, I just—did you never bring anyone here? Not your wife?”
“She didn’t like getting dirty,” he says, and he starts to laugh. “Should’ve never come to Oklahoma then.”
“No,” she says. “She must have been miserable.”
He nods, the laugh falling. “I guess she was. She never did want to plant or work things. Don’t know what those seeds were about. She was always tryin’ to get me to tell her things’d be okay, but, you know, I didn’t know if they would be. Every year I think I’ll lose this farm. Every harvest will fail me. Every child we had, well… We had some bad luck.”
She nods. She knows.
“Life is just seeds,” he says, shrugging. “You know, you plant in the dirt you’re given. It’s all you’ve got. You water, you tend, and sometimes seeds don’t take. Sometimes it all goes away from you. She didn’t want to hear about that. She wanted promises, and you can’t make promises. They’re just what you want to happen, not what will.”
She thinks of all the promises she’s made, all the times she’s said I do and I will, over fifty ce
remonies. She thinks of the promises made by her husband and how they turned to threats. What she wanted to happen, what they wanted to build, wasn’t what they made in the end. Bradley was right. “What would happen if we stayed? With you?”
“Well,” he says, rubbing his face, “it’d probably be much the same. But winters are hard here. You can’t imagine it, this heat, but you couldn’t keep to the porch unless I could box it in. I suppose someday Pa’ll give his room up and the girls could have it, ’less he decides to live forever just to spite me.”
“What would happen—with us? I’m not looking for promises, but—”
“I guess it’d be like this.” He swallows. They stand in their silences, in the dark of night, with the shards of light above them, flaming. They may have died when the dinosaurs walked here, those stars, but the light is still there. Everything seems simple. Possible.
“I want to tell you something,” she says.
“How much more can there be?” He crushes the beer can beneath his boot.
“A lot,” she says.
He turns to her. “Well, I don’t need to know it. That’s all your business, back there, and you’ll deal with it. I don’t need to know what you done. I just want to know what you’re gonna do.”
She thinks that there is only dirt and sky, Bradley and her. It is all she has and all she wants. She can let go of her husband’s family and the family they tried to make, but then she realizes she can’t let go of the children they made, her children, who her children have become. If she never tells him, he will never really know them. He will never understand her darkness or their fears. But she tells him nothing, as he wants.
He smokes and they drink and they speak of nothing together, not families, not histories. Just stars and seeds. No promises, only wishes, until the dark sky pinks behind the mesa and his cigarettes are gone, and the sun rises over them to heat the land where dinosaurs turned and walked away once.
33
The Sunday Preachermen
Sunday, and Amity spins the dial. Sorrow won’t walk into any man’s house, so she stands, glowering, at the doorway, coaxed from her altar with the promise of glory. Her folded arms say this had better be good and Amity wiggles the rabbit ears for all she’s worth.
The old man strains to watch Sorrow over the back of the sofa. “You ever seen a real preacherman, girl?” he asks her. “Not that scrabbling ’round you folk do. I mean, the real Holy Ghost deal?” Sorrow will not speak to any man, but Amity can see she is listening. “Stick your hands on ’em, like a healer would,” he shouts at Amity. “Give it some gusto.”
Sorrow huffs a breath out, which tells Amity she’d better make the TV snow turn into a temple and fast. When she grips the antennae, fit to strangle them, a man’s great finger flies out from the TV, pointing at all of them. “Are you Rapture-ready?” he calls.
Sorrow leans her torso into the house to watch.
“Have you made your peace with God, your Father?”
Sorrow’s arms stretch against the door frame and the old man crows, “Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I say?”
“Hush,” says Sorrow, and Amity looks at her. She does not even notice her rule breaking. She slides a clog into the room.
“The Lord is coming to take you away, and it is up to you whether you follow Him up or follow Satan down. Either way, God is coming for you. He is watching you. He sees every step you make, bringing you closer to Him, or taking you further away. It is no one’s doing but your own.”
“Is the preacherman behind that box there?” Sorrow whispers.
Amity chortles at that. “No. He’s coming through the air in pieces and the rabbit ears make him come into the box.” She points at the old man. “He said so.”
“Where is that preacherman?” Sorrow asks the old man, straight out.
“He could be anywhere. He could be clear across the country or right down the street. There are preachermen everywhere, girl. It ain’t only your pa.”
Sorrow’s eyebrows arch up to her cap. “Everywhere?”
“Watch this,” the old man says, and giggles. “He’s gearin’ up to start speakin’ in tongues. Holy crap, I love this part.”
The preacher holds his hands out to them, as if he can reach right from the TV and grab them. “God the Father can see you,” he says, his voice all syrup now, and then he’s speaking in tongues, right there on TV, for believers and nonbelievers, as if every house is a temple. And as he speaks the words that only God and Sorrow know, she is drawn toward him, drawn in close to the back of the sofa, then around it and toward the box until her very face is up against the screen.
“You’ll go blind,” the old man calls.
Sorrow watches the preacher’s every move, mimicking him with a twitch of fingers and shoulders, the way he raises his hands to the sky and to his heart. She smiles when he smiles, big and wide as she can. “How does he know?” she wonders.
“Girl, everybody knows it. Your father didn’t write the Bible.”
She looks at him. “Not all of it.”
“Girl, he didn’t write any of it. Not one snip. That Bible was written thousands of years ago and I ain’t a bettin’ man but even I’m bettin’ he ain’t that old.”
“He didn’t say that he wrote it, Sorrow,” Amity says.
“No,” Sorrow says. “He said we would write a new Bible. He and I, from what I saw.”
“A new Bible?” The old man laughs. “You can’t just up and write a whole new Bible. That’s like makin’ a new God up.”
“That’s not what Father told me.” Sorrow crosses her arms and Amity looks at her. Wasn’t it exactly what they were trying to do, make new Gods, all of them?
Sorrow relents. “Whose God is this preacherman’s God?”
“He’s everybody’s God, girl. Your God and mine. There ain’t but the one God, whether you got a hat on your head or three heads. God is big enough for everybody.”
“Show me these other preachermen,” Sorrow says.
Amity spins the dial and there’s a slick-haired man at a podium, reading calmly from a Bible. She spins and finds a pack of people in robes, clapping their hands and singing while a man kicks his legs and dances before them, like he’s having a holy fit. Sorrow’s eyes never leave the screen. She only asks, of each one, “Do you like those preachermen? Do you like that one?”
Amity watches Sorrow settle herself onto the sofa beside the old man. And then it is Amity who has to stand behind it to watch.
“It’s theater, girl,” the old man says. “It’s all for show. It’s how they make their money.”
“Money?” Sorrow blinks at him.
“Preachers need money. Churches need money. Why you think they’re on TV?”
“God doesn’t need money. Money is man’s.”
“You had a church, didn’t you? All them mouths needed plenty of money. Didn’t you shake bags and boxes under the noses of the faithful?”
“No,” Amity says. “They brought whole carloads of things. Tea sets and cans of food.”
Sorrow glares. “Can anybody be a preacherman and go on TV?”
“No. You gotta have money to get on TV so you can ask for money. You can’t just start there, you gotta do the rounds first, earn it. Make a name for yourself. All them preachers started out on the tent circuit, like they always done.”
“Where is this tent circuit? Will you take me there?” Amity watches Sorrow lean toward the old man, locking his eyes with hers so that they are the only two in the room, in the world. She’s seen it before.
“Here’s how it works. You start out on the road, drumming up crowds in fields and parking lots. Then maybe you can get yourself a tent and some musicians. From there, you might rent a town hall or a little theater. You can’t just jump from a dirt farm in Oklahoma straight to TV, that’s for sure! I tell you, I seen ’em all.” The old man hardly stops for breath. “I seen the devil scared straight out of a crazy man. I watched the devil hop out, little red imp he was, run ’
round the inside of the tent, and fly out through the flap. He left a burn mark, right there on the grass. I saw a whole family stick their hand in a box of massasauga snakes to prove their faith.”
“What else have you seen?” Sorrow purrs.
The old man doesn’t give Amity so much as a glance now. “Things that’d make your hair curl, if you had any under that shower cap, but none of that matters. Thing is, you need your own gimmick. Everybody’s got sumpin’ special. Back in the hungry times, we was lookin’ for miracles. We was lookin’ for rain. We was waitin’ for somebody to tell us that God had not left these lands, wrung ’em out like a dishcloth, and headed to California Hisself. There was many a pretty rainmaker makin’ money here. There was cloud seeding and soothsayin’ and rain dances, white people all up and out dancin’ ’round poles like prairie chickens. We started to think that maybe God sold us out, and the devil had a hold of our Panhandle, so’s he could hold it over his fire. You gotta find what people want to hear and when you give ’em that, then they’ll give you money.”
“I don’t want money,” Sorrow says.
“Well, you will. Money ain’t an end, it’s a means. Means it gets you where you want to go and I’m bettin’ you wanna go somewheres.”
Sorrow considers this, leaning her cap against the sofa cushion. “But this is the end of time. This is the time of false prophets. No one will listen to me.”
“Preachers been talkin’ about the end for years and we’re all still here. We’re all still stumpin’ up cash for ’em, too. Lookit.”
“Even with how they live here?” Sorrow points to the TV, where a woman slides her oiled breasts across a car, waiting for the preacherman to come back and shame her.
“Well, don’t look at that,” the old man says, coughing. “It ain’t all wicked like that.”
“I see what I see.”
The old man looks at her until her smile fades. “You don’t, girl; you see what you want to see. Your folks kept you stupid and that’s their fault, but it’s your fault if you wanna stay stupid and I don’t think anybody ever told you that before. Nobody told either one a you. That you could choose who and what you wanna be.”