Come on, Holy Ghost, she prayed. Just one little fish—that ain’t any big deal—
As if in answer, Curtis’s cork disappeared.
“Hey, Curtis—look!” Elvira shouted. “Your cork’s gone under!”
Curtis was lying on his back with one arm thrown over his eyes. He sat up listlessly. “Aw, it’s prob’ly just crabs again.” But even as he said it, his reel started spinning.
“You got somethin’!” yelled Hank, and everybody else started yelling, too, and for the next few minutes Curtis was the star of the show.
“There you go,” Hank encouraged him. “Easy now—you got a tough one. Now, don’t jerk the line—you don’t want to break it—give him a little slack there.… Good, that’s real good. Bring him in now.… You can do it.… Here, Miss Ivy, be ready with that net.… Get his head in the net, there, Curtis—head in the net—that’s it.… That’s the way.… Bring him right on in there.…Well, would you look at that!”
It was the biggest, ugliest fish Elvira had ever seen. It had googly eyes and fat lips and wiry whiskers and a wicked-looking fin on its back.
“A catfish!” cried Miss Ivy, grinning from ear to ear. “A great big catfish, Curtis—that’s wonderful!”
“That’s a gaff-top,” said Hank. “Best saltwater catfish there is.” He took the net and gave Curtis a clap on the shoulder. “You handled that ol’ devil just right, son. Nobody coulda done it better.”
“Boy, Curtis, he’s a nice one, ain’t he?” Elvira said happily. “Ain’t you glad we came fishin’?”
“Sure, I guess,” said Curtis, doing his best to look as if he caught a giant-sized catfish every day of his life.
But Elvira wasn’t fooled for a minute. She could see that he was just as pleased as he could be. And Hank had called him son.…
They didn’t catch many more fish, so after a while they decided to go on over to the beach and swim. The water was warm and wonderful. The children hooted and hollered and jumped over the waves and hunted for sand dollars and had a great time. Hank and Miss Ivy sat in the sand and watched. Every so often, Elvira would turn and wave to them, and they would smile and wave back. The afternoon sun was slanting on them sideways and turning them all golden and glowing. They look like one of them romantic cards at the drugstore, thought Elvira. One of them cards with two people holdin’ hands on a beach, and the sun goin’ down behind the water, and inside it says somethin’ real pretty like: REMEMBERING YOU or THE MYSTERY OF LOVE IS EVER NEW WITH YOU.…
Well, it wasn’t exactly the same, of course. The sun wasn’t sinking into the sea, for one thing. It was setting off to the side, behind a restaurant with a giant crab balanced on its roof. And they weren’t holding hands. And Elvira couldn’t remember any of the people on the cards ever having white globs on their noses. But it was close enough. Plenty close enough. She wasn’t about to complain.
Curtis spent the whole trip home sitting right next to the cooler with the fish in it. He opened it every ten minutes or so to check on his catfish—just to make sure it was really as big as he remembered. John David was sound asleep, with his head pillowed in Elvira’s lap. Miss Ivy and Hank were sitting together quietly in front. The stars had come out. Elvira leaned her head back and gazed contentedly at the sky. Star light, star bright…
I wish we could just go on and on like this, she thought. On and on and on… If I could pick a moment—one moment that would last forever—I’d pick this one. This one would do just fine.
It was nine o’clock when they turned into Miss Ivy’s driveway. Hank came around to the back of the truck, lifted John David out of Elvira’s lap, and carried him into the house. Elvira marveled at how gently he went about it. She wondered if he had ever picked her up and carried her that way, when she was too little or too sleepy to know anything.
“Are we still gonna have our fish fry?” asked Curtis, as he and Elvira helped Miss Ivy unload the back of the truck.
“It’s a little late for that tonight, don’t you think?” Miss Ivy answered. “John David’s just worn out. I’ll bet both of you are, too.”
“Not me—I’m not a bit tired,” Curtis insisted.
Miss Ivy smiled and rumpled his hair. “I wish I had half your energy. To tell the truth, I’m the one who’s tired. We’ll fry your fish tomorrow night—how’s that? Mr. Trumbull has offered to clean them for us. Isn’t that nice of him?”
“Well, all right, I guess I can wait till tomorrow,” said Curtis. He looked a little disappointed, but then his eyes lit up as another thought struck him. “Is it okay if I go call Daddy and tell him about my fish?”
Elvira imagined she saw the pretty lips fold up a little too tightly for just a second, but then Miss Ivy nodded and said, “I guess it’s not too late for that. Go ahead.”
Curtis ran off happily into the house, just as Hank was coming outside.
“Tell Mr. Trumbull thank-you for the good time!” Miss Ivy called, but Curtis didn’t hear.
“Oh, that’s all right,” said Hank, looking embarrassed.
“It was a wonderful day,” said Miss Ivy, holding out her hand.
Hank took it and turned red as a beet. “It was my pleasure,” he mumbled. He looked down shyly into the blue eyes. Elvira held her breath. She had the feeling that he might be about to say something important.…
“We’d better be goin’ on home and gettin’ those fish cleaned,” said Hank.
Elvira sighed. Not this time, she told herself, But it won’t be long now.…
She rode up in front with Hank on the way back to the trailer park. She felt good. Tired, but happy and so, so hopeful—the hope that had been singing inside her all day long was louder than ever now. She wondered that Hank couldn’t hear it, too.
But as the pickup turned into the Happy Trails and pulled up next to the Trumbulls’ trailer, the singing stopped abruptly. There was a silver Oldsmobile parked out in front. Its license plate said: TEXAS—DARLA B.
16
Hank muttered something under his breath, but Elvira didn’t say anything. She had just turned to stone.
Aunt Darla was sitting on the steps of the trailer. Uncle Roy and Roy Jr. were sitting there, too, but they were unimportant. Invisible, almost. It was only Aunt Darla that Elvira really saw. There was no way not to see her. She was even fatter than Elvira remembered. Aunt Darla stood up as Hank turned off the motor of the pickup.
“Surprise, surprise!” she sang out, in that irritating high pitch that was all too familiar. “We got sick of Padre Island and decided to go home early. We tried to call you—where’ve you been all day? And where’s my little girl?”
I ain’t your little girl, thought Elvira. Not in a pig’s eye… She didn’t say it out loud. She couldn’t. Stone tongues don’t talk.
Hank’s face was strained. “Go on, Elvira. Get out and speak to your relatives.”
Elvira didn’t move. She couldn’t. Stone legs don’t walk. She looked helplessly at Hank, but his eyes didn’t seem to really see her. When was it they had looked at her like that before?
“Go on, Elvira,” he repeated tonelessly. “Where’s your manners?”
Gone, thought Elvira. Dead and gone. Ain’t nothin’ I can do to get ’em back.
But Aunt Darla wasn’t so easily put off. She heaved herself up, marched majestically around to the other side of the pickup, and opened the door herself.
“Well, there you are, Ellie!” she exclaimed, reaching in and gathering Elvira to her. The girl all but disappeared in a warm, damp, suffocatingly sweet-smelling embrace. Melted popsicles, thought Elvira. She smells like melted popsicles. Just don’t let her start cryin’ on me; I couldn’t stand that.…
But the big, old snuffly tears were already rolling down Aunt Darla’s cheeks and splashing onto the child’s pale hair. Elvira felt them and shuddered. She couldn’t help it.
“My, my, look how big you got!” Aunt Darla sniffled. “I cain’t hardly believe it! Pretty, too—isn’t she pretty, Roy?”
> Uncle Roy just sort of grunted. He was seldom called upon to actually speak. Aunt Darla generally took care of any speaking that had to be done. She gushed on:
“Oh, I can just hardly wait to get you to Sulphur Springs and buy you some nice clothes! Your Aunt Darla’s goin’ to show you off all over the place. Won’t we have a good time?”
Great, Elvira thought hopelessly. Just great.
Aunt Darla turned to Hank and spoke to him in a loud whisper over Elvira’s head. “My goodness, Hank, where on earth have you taken this child? She smells—fishy!”
“That’s because we’ve been fishin’,” Hank said flatly.
“Fishing? Well, if that isn’t just like a man! Takin’ a little girl where he wants to go instead of where she wants to go—that’s exactly the kind of thing I’ve been talking about, isn’t it, Roy? I can see I haven’t come a minute too soon.” Aunt Darla gave a loud sniff, causing a couple of fat tears to fly off the end of her nose and plop onto Elvira’s bare arm.
It was too much. Elvira found her voice.
“I-I like f-fishin’,” she stammered, gagging a little as she wiped off the wet spots with the back of her hand.
“Well, would you listen to that?” cried Aunt Darla. “Tryin’ so hard to please her daddy.… It just breaks my heart, that’s all.” Her voice broke again.
Oh, Lord, thought Elvira.
“Well, why don’t we all go inside and sit down?” said Hank, in the same flat tone, after an embarrassing minute or two of everybody standing around watching Aunt Darla blubber. “Y’all ain’t plannin’ to drive all the way to Sulphur Springs tonight, are you?”
Aunt Darla was still too overcome to answer. She motioned to Uncle Roy that he should explain.
“No, it’s a good six hours from here,” he said. “Darla thought that would be too much to try to make tonight. We’re stayin’ over at the motel till tomorrow mornin’.”
Aunt Darla got hold of herself—it was really quite a remarkable recovery—and put in: “Of course we wanted to give our little girl a chance to do her packing. Not that she has to worry about taking much,” she added, casting a pained glance at Elvira’s fishing attire. “As I was saying before, Ellie, we’ll be getting you a whole new wardrobe once we get to Sulphur Springs. Oh, we’re going to have such fun! I cain’t wait to introduce you to Mary Kay Pickett. She’s just your age, and she lives right around the corner from us. She has the sweetest little doll collection!”
Aunt Darla kept chattering on as Hank unlocked the trailer door and led the way inside. They all sat down in the cramped living room. Elvira didn’t really listen to what Aunt Darla was saying. She suspected that nobody ever really listened to her. How could they stand it? She just sat there, thinking stupidly about Mary Kay Pickett’s dolls. Elvira hated dolls. She had liked them all right when she was little, but then one time she had seen an old Night Gallery rerun about a doll that turned mean and started eating people. She had never trusted dolls after that.
Now Aunt Darla was going on about how awful Padre Island had been.
“Not worth a nickel,” she declared, and was about to elaborate when Roy Jr. surprised everyone by speaking up.
“I liked it all right,” he said quietly.
“Oh, don’t be silly,” said Aunt Darla. “You only thought you liked it. Nobody could really like that awful place, with the water that putrid shade of green—they called it a blossoming of algae, but I didn’t see any blossoms—and there was something wrong with the sun, too. You know how it aggravated your acne.”
At this, Roy Jr. turned a brilliant shade of scarlet and said no more. Elvira might have felt sorry for him, if she could have felt anything at all.
“But the sand was the worst,” Aunt Darla went on, shaking her head. “I just cain’t stand sand—it gets into everything in those beach houses. I don’t know how people tolerate it. I suppose they’re just not as particular about housekeeping as I am. I tell you what, that sand just makes my flesh crawl.”
“That’s the thing about islands,” Hank said dully. “It’s so hard to find one that don’t have sand.”
That’s a joke, thought Elvira, just as dully. He’s makin’ a joke.…
But Aunt Darla appeared not to have heard. She talked on a little longer, and then she said that they really ought to be going, since they’d want to get an early start in the morning. “We’ll be by for you at eight, Ellie. Eight on the nose. I pride myself on being punctual, don’t I, Roy?”
“That she does,” said Uncle Roy—a little grimly, it seemed to Elvira.
“Now, you get a good night’s rest,” Aunt Darla went on, giving her one more paralyzing squeeze. “Tomorrow you’ll be starting on a whole new life.” Her eyes moistened up again. “I just imagine your sweet mother in heaven is crying tears of joy at this very minute,” she sniveled.
I don’t want a whole new life, thought Elvira. My old one’s all right. And I bet my mama ain’t no crybaby.
When they had gone, Hank and Elvira sat in zombie-like silence in the miniature living room. It was as if there had been another death in the family.
We were so close, thought Elvira. Everything was goin’ so good. And then Aunt Darla had to go and spoil it all by comin’ early.
“Well,” Hank said finally, because somebody had to say something, “I guess you ought to be gettin’ to bed.”
“Yessir.”
“You got a big day ahead of you tomorrow.”
“I guess so.”
Hank was thirsty. He had never been so thirsty. He stood up and walked over to the kitchen. Opened the icebox. It was empty. He slammed it shut.
“Look, I got to go out for a while. You go on to bed. I’ll see you in the mornin’, before you… Well, I’ll see you then.”
“Yessir.”
He left. Elvira stood up slowly, walked exactly ten steps back to her sleeping nook, and lay down on the bed. She didn’t go to the bathroom or brush her teeth or take a shower—she really needed a shower—she was all sticky from the beach water. And she was filthy; Aunt Darla had said she smelled fishy, and she had been right. But it didn’t matter. She might never shower again. What did it matter? Maybe if she got dirty enough, Aunt Darla would send her back. She had said she couldn’t stand dirt, right? No, it was sand—she couldn’t stand sand, that was it—Aunt Darla hated sand. Well, maybe the sand hates you, too, Aunt Darla, just like I do. Didja ever think of that? I bet you never thought of that.…
She drifted into a troubled sleep and dreamed a whole slew of senseless dreams, one after another.… She was standing on an old sunken hulk out in Galveston Bay, watching Hank try to fix spaghetti over an open fire, but he didn’t do it right. He was pouring the raw noodles into the sauce. You don’t do it like that, she tried to yell at him. You got to read the label! But he couldn’t hear her or see her, either. She was invisible. She was a ghost.… She was kneeling in Miss Ivy’s garden, pulling weeds, only instead of a weed she pulled up Curtis’s catfish. “Throw me back,” it told her. “There ain’t gonna be no fish fry. You forgot to clean me, remember?” She was standing up now; she was back on the jetty, but she got too close to the rough side, and she fell in. Only it wasn’t water at all. It was a toy store filled with Aunt Darla dolls that whined and tried to bite her.…
Thunder rumbled in the distance, way off in the dark. Elvira opened her eyes. The smell of rain drifted in through the window screen.
All of a sudden she was wide awake. The stony feeling was gone. Her heart was beating fast, and her breath was coming fast, just like it had done that other time—that time when… when whatever it was had come to her. She had thought it was the Holy Ghost, but she didn’t know what she should call it now—not that it mattered, anyway. She knew what she had to do.
She got up and looked in Hank’s bedroom. He wasn’t there. She walked into the kitchen and checked the clock. It was 11:48. Thank the Lord there was time. Eight o’clock in the morning was still a long way off.
She opened
the trailer and looked around. There was nobody in sight. That was good. She didn’t want to have to think up excuses for being out in the middle of the night. She started running—silently—her bare feet making almost no noise as she flew along in the darkness. There were pools of murky yellow where the street lamps cast their sickly light, but she avoided those. She was no more than a shadow darting, a breath of wind, a scrap blowing down the sidewalk.
It thundered again. It would rain before long. That would do her garden good. It had been too long since the last rain; the rice farmers were all bellyaching.…
She had never run so fast. She made it to South Street in less than fifteen minutes. A new world’s record, she told herself, as she stood, panting, on Miss Ivy’s doorstep. It was way too late to go visiting, but that didn’t matter. This was an emergency. She rang the doorbell. She waited a minute. Then she rang it again, longer and harder. Now she could hear movement in the house and see lights being turned on. Then the curtain of the window by the front door was parted, and Miss Ivy’s face peered out. She gasped when she saw Elvira.
“Elvira, sweetheart!” She opened the door. “What on earth—what’s wrong?”
“I’m sorry to come so late, Miss Ivy, but I got to talk to you.” The words tumbled on top of each other. Elvira could barely get them all out; she was still breathing hard.
“Well, of course—come right in—calm down, now, darlin’—that’s right—you just tell Miss Ivy all about it.” She sounded so sweet and kind and concerned, as she put her arm around Elvira’s shoulders and led her gently away from the door and over to the couch, that it was all the girl could do to keep herself from dissolving into a disgusting puddle of tears. But she managed, somehow. This was no time to break down and be stupid. She had to keep a clear head.
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