by Lynne Hugo
Big Al repositioned his cap, briefly flashing a well-receded hairline, prematurely so to be sure. With the cap on, he looked ten years younger. Alex figured he wore it right through showers and sex. Big Al pulled the brim lower. “Nothin’? So what’re you complainin’ about? I’d kill to hear nothin’.”
“Yeah, well, I mean like nothin’. Nothin’, man. It don’t matter what I say, how nice I say it. She ain’t talkin’ to me.” He tapped a cigarette on the outside of its box to pack the tobacco before he lit it.
“Oh, she’s just mad at you.” This was Dink’s observation from long experience with his wife.
“No shit, genius,” Big Al said, rocking the chair onto its back legs.
“But see, I didn’t do nothin’. How can she be mad at me when nothing happened? Tried to get her somethin’ to eat, she won’t even say what she’ll eat…makes no sense, it’s not like we had a fight or I told her no about something. Last night, I knocked on her door a couple times and asked what she wanted. I heard her movin’ around in there, but she wouldn’t say a word. This morning, I catch her when she comes out to use the bathroom, and I tell her I’ll take her to school again. What’s wrong with that? How can she be mad at me?”
Big Al was at least trying to suppress laughter, but Dink just hooted. “Oh, man, you think they need a reason to be mad at you? She’s a woman-child ain’t she? Don’t need no reason, not now, not never.”
Alex shook his head impatiently. He wasn’t close to either of these men once you scratched the top layer of skin or borrowed a suit once, but they were the best he had. He talked as they did—which they’d taken on in the military—with cadences part black, part hillbilly, part redneck—just from being around them, but they hadn’t really taken him in and he knew it. It was either that they had families, or disdained that he hadn’t been to ’Nam, as they called it, or worse, “in country,” which made him an unwelcome foreigner. That war seemed to have made blood brothers of every guy who’d been there, as if they’d all been in one battalion together and constructed an invisible, impenetrable force field between those who’d been there, those who hadn’t.
Big Al said, “She’s mad about all of it, you getting her especially. It don’t have to be somethin’ just happened.”
“Well, she can’t stay mad about that forever.”
This time even Big Al hooted. “Hoo-ee,” he chortled. “He’s a father for sure. Got the tire tracks over his face to prove it.”
SHE REALLY COULDN’T STAY mad forever, could she? That night, after the second day of school, Lexie had locked the bedroom door and didn’t answer or emerge when Alex knocked after work. “I fried up some meat,” he said. “It’s not too bad. Or you can fix something else. I can give you money to get something if you want.” Between each offer, he paused, leaving room for hope to rise like a roll for the chicken-fried steak, now cold, hardening in its white grease in the pan.
But silence came back at him.
He tried again later. “Hey, wanna watch some TV?” he said to the blank face of the door. Then he realized she probably had homework and that he probably shouldn’t be inviting her not to do her homework. “When your work’s done, I mean,” he tacked on, trying to sound like a parent. On the other hand, she’d like him more if he didn’t get down on her.
It must have been thinking about the schoolwork that fired the sudden realization that made his eye twitch. How had she gotten back from school? He’d flat forgotten that he took her there himself this morning. And yesterday morning. It was just so disconcerting to have her look at him—through him—the way she did. It took him five minutes to get back to Lexie’s door. “Hey, um, you got back from school okay. Um, how did…do you…” He didn’t even know how to say it. Shit, she didn’t even have the trailer key. He just wasn’t used to reckoning in another person.
Fifteen minutes later, he thought, What if…
No way, he answered himself, but the logic of it, Lexie’s lack of a key—not that Alex always locked the trailer door—was plain beating him down. And he’d not heard the bed creak the way it did when someone sat or lay on it, the sound a cross between a squeal and a moan as if the bed itself remembered beginnings and ends of life. Maybe it did, for all he knew. He’d bought it used. Last night, he knew the girl had been at least on the bed, if not in it.
“Alexis…Detta, Detta! Are you in there?” He banged at the door much harder than before, with a force he didn’t think anyone could sleep through. He went to the kitchen and got a screwdriver. “Look, I’m comin’ in, Detta. You better answer me.” He began working on the hinges, continuing to call, his voice tacking back and forth between certainty she was there and certainty that she wasn’t, until the door was off and he saw the room, empty as the cavity of his chest, all the air sucked out of it.
“JESUS, MARY AND Joseph,” Cora said. “No, of course she’s not here. Did you bring her here? How would she have gotten here?”
Alex gripped the phone, hating the call he’d placed as much as any in his life. “I thought she might have called you to come get her,” he said, trying to smooth his voice out. He fumbled for a cigarette, cramming the phone between his shoulder and neck to get one out of the pack, then wildly grabbing for it when the receiver slipped loose and banged on his chest and knee on its way to the floor.
“Alex? You there? What happened?”
“I dropped the phone,” he said, standing in the tight space the phone cord allotted him between the kitchen and living room. He was too jumpy to sit.
“Did you call the police?”
“No, I called you first, I should have, I guess, I will.”
“How’d she get home from school?” Cora persisted. Alex could tell she expected him to know the answer.
“I’m…I dunno.”
“What do you mean?”
“I, um, forgot to ask.”
“Was she in school?” Cora’s pitch was rising toward panic.
Alex was relieved to get a question that he had the right answer to. “Yes, took her there myself.”
“So how was she supposed to get home?” Cora dropped back to asking simple, one-step questions. “I mean, what did you tell her?”
“I don’t…I didn’t…”
“What do you mean? She would have had the sense to ask you if you didn’t tell her.”
“She never asked.”
Alex was just as glad he couldn’t see Cora’s face, though it was flashing in his mind, a mask mutating through confusion, incredulity and rage.
“How did you think she was getting home?” Cora was using the tone a sensible person takes with an escaped lunatic who has precious information that must be carefully pried loose.
Alex, pacing, caught the phone cord on his belt, then caught his lit cigarette on the cord. A splay of burning embers cascaded down his hand toward the floor. “Shit,” he exclaimed.
“What?”
“I dunno.”
Cora’s impatient sigh made a whooshing sound in his ear. “You don’t know what you said, or you don’t know how she was getting home.”
“How she was getting home.”
“Was she in school yesterday?”
“Yes, sure she was. Took her myself, just like today, on the way to work. I was late.” He tacked on the business about being late thinking Cora would think that was good.
“Well, how did she get home yesterday?” It was hard for Cora to term Alex’s trailer home to Lexie, but for clarity and simplicity she did it.
“I…dunno.” Then, again, trying to remove the defensiveness that red-circled the way he’d said it, “I dunno.”
“Could she still be there, at school?”
It hadn’t occurred to Alex. “I dunno,” he said. “Should I…”
“For God’s sake, get over there. If she’s not there, just stop and call the police. Then you call me, hear? I’ll have Jo come stay by my phone and I’ll drive over there.”
Alex very nearly said, ‘Yes, ma’am.’ He cut the ma’a
m off abruptly, as if it were an admission. “Okay.”
BY THE TIME HE gunned up to the school, it was through a languid twilight, though he saw, relieved, a bunch of little kids still outside playing kick the can on a side street, so it must not be too late for kids to be out. And it wasn’t cold, either, just seasonable for late April. Alexis—Detta, he had to get used to that—was sitting on the steps. Two books were next to her, a third in her lap. When she looked up and saw the truck, she looked back down, almost as if she wasn’t going to move so much as a toe. Alex had no idea what he should do if she didn’t come to the truck, but she shut the book in an elaborate embroidery of slow motion, laid it on top of the others, picked them all up and stood. She adjusted the books in a front carry, covering her chest, which, of course, contained her heart. Then she began to move toward where he waited, looking into his lap, trying to quiet the thudding inside him.
twenty-four
I HATE HIM SO MUCH.
He takes me to school and leaves me there, never says a word about how I’m supposed to get back to his horrible little tin can. I figured he was going to pick me up since he took me, so the first day I waited outside on the school steps and watched a Cub Scout troop play baseball on the field, if you can call that mess of ruts and mud a field. At least it was sunny, but I felt like I was in some kind of prison camp because of the metal fences. The steps up to the school are high, though, and I figured I could see trouble coming if it did, so I really wasn’t too scared. At four-thirty, the principal came out, on her way home I guess, and asked me what I was doing there. So I told her. Then she says it’s not an area I should sit around in by myself once the Cub Scouts are gone which will be any minute, so she’s going to drive me home. What was I supposed to tell her, no? So I get in her car, and of course, she asks me where, and I don’t know how to get to the trailer park, so she goes back into the school and looks up the address and drives me there.
“Talk to your dad,” she says. “But you can take the bus, you know. Come into the office tomorrow, and I’ll look up exactly where your bus stop would be, most likely at the entrance to the court.”
She’s a nice lady, older than Mom, not as old as Grandma, and she colors her hair brown. I know because her roots show, but only a little bit. Her teeth are sort of buck and at first you just keep looking at her face trying to see her teeth, because they’re funny, but then she smiles and you forget to check out her teeth when you have that chance.
So we get to the trailer court and have to drive around because I can’t even remember exactly what the outside of Alex’s place looks like, actually, they all look pretty much alike, but I finally figured it out. I was so embarrassed. He’s not there, of course, which I was glad of, and I don’t have a key, but I didn’t have to tell the principal that because the door was unlocked. She got out of the car and said she’d like to talk to him, but since he wasn’t there, she just checked to make sure nobody was in there and told me to lock the door. “Talk to your father,” she says, like I’d ever do that, and then she gives me a hug. I was so surprised I just stood there like a tree, but I wanted to hug her back and then it was too late.
I was pretty hungry, even though I had lunch money from Grandma and ate at school, so I took some bread and some lunch meat stuff out of the refrigerator and put it in my room. Then I quick went to the bathroom and washed up and went into the room and locked the door. Alex showed up at maybe five-thirty, but I was already locked in, so I was glad. He banged on the door a couple of times, but I didn’t care. I guess he went to school and I wasn’t there, and I hope he shit his pants.
So yesterday, I come out in the morning to use the bathroom and he’s all dressed and says, “I’ll take you to school.” So I think, okay. He drives through McDonald’s like he did the first day, and I didn’t speak to him, and he just gets coffee again. I was going to go in to the principal’s office and find out about the bus, but then I just felt stupid because I wouldn’t know anybody on the bus, anyway, and what if I didn’t know where to get off, and they’d all think I was in Special Ed. I decided I’d just wait for him, and get a ride that way. There’s only like five more weeks of school; I can do anything for five weeks.
So I sit there, and I sit there, and the stone steps make my butt cold, and I read my lit assignment, which is a bunch of completely retarded poems, and I look at the geometry, but you need to do it with a compass and I left mine at Grandma’s, and I just wait like some idiot. He’s probably getting even with me for freaking him out by not being there when he came to pick me up yesterday, but he could have told me when he was coming at least. So today, I sit there and my stomach is growling and my butt is sore and cold and I’m thinking I’ll start walking and find a pay phone and call Grandma collect, that’s all I can think to do because I don’t even know where Alex works, not that I’d call him. Anyway, he must have gone home from work anyway, and just left me here for revenge for yesterday. I wouldn’t call him there and beg, that’s just what he wanted. He finally shows up at something after seven o’clock. I don’t talk to him, but I try to make him wither up and die with my eyes. Tim used to say a person could make his eyes into laser death rays, and I tried, but it didn’t work, not that I really thought it would.
On the way back to the trailer, he drives through McDonald’s and he buys two Big Macs, a nine-piece Chicken Nuggets, large fries, two milk shakes, a soda, and some of those chocolate chip cookies. This costs him like fourteen dollars. Then he takes one of the Big Macs and one of the milk shakes out of the bag and puts the bag on the seat next to me. I could smell the fries and I was starving. He says, “Look, there must be something in that bag you like, take whatever you want, it’s all for you.” He eats the Big Mac while he drives. The milk shakes is between his legs and I’m thinking Good, I hope it freezes his balls off.
We got to the trailer when it was almost dark. I left the bag on the seat of the truck, went in and peed which I’d had to do since school got out, but there was no place to go since it was closed. Then I just went in and locked the door and tried to pray to my Mom, but I don’t think she’s there anymore.
twenty-five
ALEX STUMBLED ON HOW to get Detta to speak to him. By the end of the third day, when that morning she’d successfully held out through his saying, “I’ll be by the school at four o’clock to pick you up. That early enough?” and he hadn’t seen her eat anything at all, he tried, “Do you wanna go spend the weekend at your grandmother’s?”
Detta had stared at him for maybe ten seconds and then said, “Yes.” That’s all. Just yes. But Alex went in and told Dink and Big Al, with a powdering of triumph in his voice. They mocked him, snorting into their coffee.
“Yep, Daddy, you done good. She jus’ be fallin’ all over her daddy now.” Even Alex knew that she’d only spoken to him so she could get out of there.
It was no fun calling Cora for the third time that week. All he’d told her when he called the second time, to say he’d found Detta at school, was that they’d…“gotten our signals crossed.”
“Can I talk to her?” Cora had asked anxiously.
“Uh, she’s in the bathroom,” he’d lied, afraid Detta would refuse to respond to him if he called her to the phone, and Cora would know.
“Well, is she all right?”
“Yeah. I bought her dinner and all,” he’d said, again neglecting the rest.
“Will you let her call me if she wants to talk to me? She can reverse the charges.”
“No need,” he’d said gruffly.
Now, Alex was wrapping the phone cord around his hand like cold rubbery spaghetti—and in his own house again—keeping his voice low. “Cora? I, uh, this is Alex O’Gara.” Stupid. Of course she’d know who Alex is. Probably had paid to get his name put on God’s curse list at some church. “Uh, could, uh, well, I thought maybe Detta could come see you this weekend. If that’s okay.”
Cora didn’t let on if she knew anything was amiss. “Of course it’s okay. I miss her som
ething fierce. Shall I come get her?”
The notion of not seeing Detta’s you’re-a-dead-man stare suddenly relieved Alex. “She might like it fine if you pick her up from school.”
“I can do that.”
“Four o’clock,” Alex said. “You know where? Over the other side of town, on Southwest Ninth. Just stay on forty-three, turn left on Central and go to the first light. Big brick place.”
“Tell her I’ll be there,” Cora said.
“Okay,” he said, and hung up without either of them saying goodbye.
HE LEFT HER OFF at school, once again having driven through McDonald’s, offered her breakfast and bought only coffee when she turned her head and stared out the passenger-side window. He could see her reflection in that faint mirror, washed out, her mouth set like already-hardened cement. She sure had his father’s coloring, even with Christine’s eyes like stones under pale-blue water in the window reflection. He didn’t think of his own coloring, nor take in the fringe of black lashes and honed chin that were his own. He remembered Chris as birdlike, quick, small movements. He’d not seen it in Detta, but then, how much had he seen her after all? She was fragile-looking, the way Chris had been, bony shoulder blades like useless wings.
She got out of the car sullenly, leaving the door swung open so he’d have to lean across the seat and grasp after it to pull it closed. “Remember your grandmother’s picking you up after school,” he called, thinking it sounded normal. She didn’t even glance in his direction.
As he drove to work, though, he shook his head. Once, he banged the steering wheel. He reached down and turned the radio off, then back on.