Among the Lesser Gods

by Margo Catts

  “Miss Poppy says some mamas don’t care.”

  Who was this woman? What she said was certainly true, though it was nothing I wanted to think about right now. And I wouldn’t say it to a child who had just lost hers. So where Miss Poppy said what was true and difficult, I dug deeper in the potato chip bag and opted for something I didn’t believe but thought sounded soothing.

  “Dogs aren’t the same as people, you know.”

  *

  The children prevailed. Within a few moments after throwing away the potato chips, I found myself on Miss Poppy’s front porch, wind chimes swaying and jangling around my head. This house had been a curiosity to me from across the road. Whether it was a small Victorian that had suffered from homespun repairs or a miner’s shack embellished with Victorian flourishes, it was hard to tell. A plastic stag and doe reigned over a mound of frowzy peonies beside the porch. Mr. Fousek, mowing his lawn at the bottom of the road, waved to me. Kevin let Sarah ring the bell.

  I had to stop myself from taking half a step back at the sight of the woman who opened the door: certainly six feet tall, broad-shouldered, wearing a vast muumuu that floated a few inches above ankle socks and men’s sandals. A puff of silver hair ended in a walnut-sized knot on top of her head.

  “Angels!” she cried, holding her arms open.

  Sarah dove into the folds of fabric while Kevin succumbed to a shoulder squeeze.

  “And you’re Elena,” she said. She released Sarah and extended her hand. “Poppy Cosby.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” I said.

  “Come inside!” She released my hand and stood back, holding the screen with one arm to allow the children to pass.

  “If it’s okay. I don’t want to intrude. The children said—” But it was too late. They were already inside.

  “Of course! Anytime!” But she lowered her voice as I passed her. “Just not all the time,” she added close to my ear. “Hah!” she barked.

  It took a moment for my eyes to adjust. I turned my head from one side to the other.

  “Quite a collection, eh?”

  Miss Poppy stood, hands on her hips, evidently pleased at my reaction. But if it was a collection, I couldn’t tell of what. The walls were so covered the paint color was a mystery. An inspirational poster. An Indian rug. A boot. A roll of tape. A dream catcher, feathers dangling over a child’s drawing, probably Sarah’s. A postcard. A license plate. A sombrero. A book jacket. A 1968 calendar, open to January. A file folder with something written in pencil on the tab. A flattened red playground ball. A yellow window shutter.

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “Can you guess what it is?”

  I felt trapped. Would a failure here cause offense? Brand me as ignorant?

  “I—I’m sorry—no.”

  She smiled with what looked like satisfaction and lifted her chin a little. “Keep your eyes open. You’ll get it sooner or later. Everyone does. You want something to drink?”

  From a faint sour smell, I guessed the puppies were being housed inside.

  “No, thank you.”

  “A beer. You need a beer.”

  “Oh, really, no. Thank you. I’m fine.”

  She leaned toward me and winked. “I tend bar, you know. Professional service, but no I.D. required.”

  “Thank you, but no, really. You know, the kids.”

  She tilted back again, hands far apart on her hips, and squinted slightly. “Huh,” she said after a moment. “Fair enough. Well, I want one and I don’t wanna drink alone. Water?”

  “Thank you,” I said. “That’d be fine.”

  Without warning, she turned toward the back of the house and yelled, “You kids aren’t touching those puppies, are you?”

  “No, Miss Poppy!” they called back in unison.

  “C’mon back,” she said, waving me to follow her as she turned toward an open door. “Let’s sit down and have that drink.”

  I followed her through a doorway into the kitchen. A short ledge capping a half wall was covered with porcelain animal figurines. The windowsill held a collection of colored bottles and empty flowerpots. Plates and platters crowded every square foot of wall space not already hung with cupboards, and flowered wallpaper kept the spaces between their edges busy. She opened a crowded cupboard, took out a glass, and started filling it at the sink.

  The children knelt beside a hard-sided blue wading pool in the corner.

  “You’re not making Bella nervous, now, are you?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “We’re just watching.”

  She shut off the water. “That’s right. Now Miss Elena and I are gonna sit down for a visit. If you get tired of watching, you can go outside.”

  I glanced out the window. I could see the top of an on-end sofa, a barrel, some boards leaned against the fence, and some unidentified lengths of metal tubing or pipe.

  I started at a tug on the hem of my jeans. I looked down to see a small, snub-nose dog with the denim between his teeth.

  “Sugar! Stop it!” Poppy bent to wave a hand at the dog, who skittered aside, then darted out of the kitchen. “Sorry about that. Can’t stand that damn dog. I don’t know why he’s so fixated with fabric.” She handed me the glass. “He’s always nipping at the hem of my dress in the morning when I’m dancing.”

  Poppy was backlit, hands on her hips, flyaway hairs shining around her head. Behind her, crystals sparkled in the window and fairy decals flitted across the cupboards. Puppies mewed and rustled against the newspaper lining the bottom of the pool, and Kevin and Sarah leaned over the edge like eager gargoyle statues around the roofline of a cathedral. I smelled dogs and coffee and soap, and from nowhere felt a stab of pure, childlike delight. I didn’t laugh, but must have looked like I was going to.

  “What?” she asked, tilting her head a little.

  “Nothing. I’m just thinking I really ought to dance in the mornings.”

  She pursed her lips and shook her head. “So many don’t,” she said. She turned to the refrigerator and got a bottle, then popped the cap against the edge of the counter.

  “Stop bothering my dog!”

  The voice was querulous and high-pitched, and came from another room. I twisted toward it.

  “Nobody’s doing anything, Mama,” Poppy called back. “Miss Elena’s just here for a visit, and Sugar was biting.” I heard no response.

  “Who’s that?” I asked, turning back.

  “Mama Ruth. She mostly stays in her room and watches TV. Sugar is her dog.” She peered over the children into the wading pool, weight on one foot, the other in its man-sandal hovering over the floor so that she assumed, for a moment, the position of a very large and ill-dressed statue of Mercury. She looked back at me over her shoulder. “You wanna see the pups?”

  “Sure.”

  “C’mere. They’re just starting to wake up.”

  I found a brown dog of no particular breed lying on her side like a brood sow, crumpled newspaper around and underneath her, a mash of hairless guinea pigs attached to her teats. Their backs undulated as they shouldered each other and pressed against her belly.

  “How many are there?” I asked.

  “Six.” Poppy took a swig from the bottle. “She had seven, but we lost one.”

  “That’s the one that died!” Sarah blurted without turning her head. Kevin knelt motionless beside her. The magnetic power of those barely moving puppies was extraordinary.

  The mother raised her head and thumped her tail, then started to push herself up on one shoulder.

  “Hey, now,” Poppy said. She bent over, muumuu billowing away from her waist, to push the dog’s head back down with one hand. “Not now, girl.” She looked up over her shoulder at me as she waited for the dog to relax back into her lying position. “She’s a terrible mother.”

  Something in my reaction must’ve made her feel a need to reassure me. “Oh, there’s nothing wrong with that,” she went on. “Some of ’em are just like that. She probably had a bad mother
herself. She just needs a little help, somebody to show her what to do. They can learn, you know.”

  Mama Ruth’s voice came from closer this time. “Where the hell’s my chips?”

  I turned to see a stoop-shouldered old woman in a nightgown and slippers, a roll of Life Savers caught between the fingers of one hand. She was as notably small as Poppy was large, with short white hair mashed to the back of her head.

  “Mama, this is Elena. She’s looking after Kevin and Sarah.”

  “These are my chips,” she said, grasping a bag on the kitchen counter. She shuffled away again, crinkling the cellophane in her fist as she went.

  “But still,” Poppy said to me with a wink, “some mamas will always be better than others.” A door slammed. “Hah!” she barked.

  14

  Joan was formidable. She hid it pretty well with the rosy cheeks and the round face and the springy little curls, but that was the only explanation I could come up with for how Saturday night found me in the doorway of the Powder Keg, where Poppy worked, craning my neck in an effort to find Joan and her friends. When Joan had come to pick up Kevin Friday morning for a birthday party, saw the bartender she already knew gardening across the road, and found out I’d be alone in Leadville over the weekend, the plan clicked together and locked into place before I fully understood what it was. Girls’ night at the Powder Keg, seven thirty. Sharp. These women didn’t have kid-free time to waste with people being late.

  The tavern was a century-old saloon with plank floors and a tin ceiling that had expanded into a former bank lobby next door. I’d pictured something darker and more secluded, but it was loud—with voices and laughter and jukebox music clanging off the ceiling and the hard floor, ceiling-hung televisions competing for attention with their separate offerings of a Dodgers game and an episode of Hawaii Five-O—and it was full of men. Alternating as I had been between the worlds of an old woman and children, I’d lost track of the way that even a century after the prospectors, Leadville was still a town of men. Uncomfortably so, at the moment. With no sign of Joan or a likely-looking group of women, I locked my eyes on an empty seat at the bar as I threaded my way through the room.

  “Hey, doll!” Poppy hailed as I sat down. She wore another loose caftan, now cinched around the middle with an apron so that she looked like a pair of sacks stacked on top of each other, rather than just one. “What can I get you?”

  “A Coke, I think.”

  I’d had alcohol only once in my life, getting drunk at a party during my freshman year of high school. The feeling of lost control, the sense that I might lack the capacity to stop myself from doing something with everlasting consequences, frightened me as nothing had since the fire.

  Not drinking now had nothing to do with the pregnancy. I had not yet been to a doctor, I ate without a thought to nutrition, and I took no vitamins. Still, Poppy eyed me, then leaned toward me and lowered her voice.

  “No kids here now, you know,” she said.

  “Thanks, but no.”

  She leaned back, still studying me, then gave a single nod. “All right, then,” she said. She pulled a glass off a shelf that barely cleared her head, scooped ice, and started filling it.

  “Hey, Poppy! How ’bout another?”

  She turned her chin to speak over her shoulder without looking away from the tap. “I’m cutting you off, Bill.”

  I glanced at my watch. It was just after seven thirty.

  “He’s a vet,” she said as she slapped a napkin in front of me and set the glass on top of it, as if that was all the explanation anyone would need.

  “I heard you!”

  “Oh yeah? What’d I say?” Poppy snapped back without looking.

  “That I ain’t done yet.”

  “Sorry, Bill. That wasn’t it. I’m gonna pour you some coffee. You can stay here or go home. Don’t matter to me.”

  The man lifted his empty beer glass and gestured toward me. He wore a plaid shirt, open at the collar, where an impressive mat of dark hair pushed out.

  “Who’s ’at?” he asked.

  “That’s my friend. You leave her the hell alone. She’s new in town and doesn’t need your crazy talk.”

  “Huh.” He pulled his glass back toward himself and looked down into it, either satisfied or distracted. But I sensed a shift of nearby heads and shoulders toward me as soon as she said “new in town.”

  “Joan will be here soon,” I said, a little louder than I probably needed for just Poppy to hear me.

  “Oh, sure. They’ll be here any minute. Once a month, regular as old Aunt Flo. Bah!” She leaned toward me confidentially. “That’s probably half the reason they do it.” She straightened, then cleared a couple of empty glasses into a plastic tub below the bar.

  “See that man over there?” She tipped her head toward the threshold between the original tavern and the bank lobby. “In the toupee.”

  He was easy to spot. The ginger nest distinguished a short man in a denim jacket from the group of five or six around him. “Wow. Yes.”

  “That’s Roger Hoopengarner. You need to talk to him. Assistant principal at the high school. I hear they’re looking for a science teacher.”

  “Oh, no. I’m not looking for a job.”

  “Really? With your grandma here and everything? You said you studied science. Seems like it’d be a great fit.”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Shame.” She leaned forward on her elbows and lowered her voice. “The last one had a little … trouble. Little situation with the law. And the Department of Wildlife. Some poaching, maybe. And trafficking. And maybe a little farming what he shouldn’t have been, where he shouldn’t have been doing it, if you know what I mean. And resisting arrest. That’s just what I heard. Anyway, he won’t be back, and Hoop tells me they’re having a hell of a time coming up with a replacement.”

  “I really don’t want to teach.”

  Poppy shrugged. “Suit yourself. But it’s summer, and they’re desperate. He might hunt you down if you don’t talk to him tonight. And it’s a job. Yours for the asking.”

  I looked at the man in the toupee again. He didn’t look predatory. He was short, a little thick around the middle, and stood with a glass mug in one hand and a plump woman hooked on his other arm, talking to another couple. The woman on his arm was watching him with an expression of pure delight. He looked—jolly. He would be the least threatening adult in any high school.

  “Well, still,” I said.

  “Hey Poppy! How ’bout another?”

  “I got that coffee coming right up for you, Bill.” She patted the counter in front of me, then nodded toward the door. “Your friends are here,” she said. She took a coffee cup down from overhead and walked away, the ties of her apron bouncing against her backside.

  “Elena!” Joan called, waving overhead. With her were three women I didn’t know and, mercifully, Mindy, who stopped at the door to talk to someone else. Joan worked her way between the tables toward me. She had on a lot of blue eyeshadow, and her hair was fixed and shiny. She gestured in order to the three women just behind her. “This is Lizzie, Kim, Leslie.”

  One had a narrow, severe face and long neck; the second had striking silver-blue eyes; the third had black hair, parted in the center, that hung glossy and straight on both sides of an oval face. I already couldn’t remember which was which.

  “Good to meet you,” I said, as much to myself as to them.

  Polite agreement, pleasantries, and I trailed along behind them as they ordered a round of margaritas from Poppy and picked their way to a table near the back of the room.

  A girl probably only nine or ten lined up a shot at the pool tables nearby. She wore white sandals, a sundress, and a red cardigan, and stood on her toes as she wiggled the cue back and forth in front of the white ball. With a sharp rap she struck it, sending a green one spiraling toward the side cup.

  “Good job, baby.” A man with a gray mustache at a nearby table raised his glass towa
rd her.

  A waitress set a basket of tortilla chips and a cup of watery salsa in the center of the table, pulling my attention back to my own group. In just that long, I’d already become unhitched from the conversation. Someone was sick, I inferred. Or maybe not. The tone suggested that whatever it might be was commonplace, more annoying than worrisome, and whoever this woman was she couldn’t expect a lot of sympathy from this group. Loose pieces of the conversations going on at the tables around me fluttered past like scraps of paper on a breeze.

  “… the first one after that was …”

  “… went with him, too …”

  “… is no way in hell …”

  “… before she ate it …”

  “… one that got stuck on his ass for …”

  I was particularly intrigued at the last, but like the others, the edges were torn off, this time by Mindy.

  “Hey,” she said, sliding into the empty chair beside me.

  “Oh, hi.”

  She reached for a chip, coated it in salsa, then popped the whole thing in her mouth.

  “They sure didn’t waste any time, did they?” she said, voice low, tipping her head a fraction toward the rest of the table.

  “What?”

  “The gossip.” She caught a dribble of salsa on her lip with one finger. “Sheesh. How bored are you?”

  “Completely.” Why did I say that? No, I wasn’t bored, even though I had no specific interest in the health of some person I’d never met or heard of. But agreeing was easy, and the path of least resistence usually led to the closest outlet. Sometimes I had to do a little digging to create the path, but I most certainly found my way onto it. Always.

  “Sorry it took so long for me to rescue you,” she said with a grin, then popped another whole chip into her mouth. I wouldn’t have thought she had a large enough mouth. Perhaps her bony jaw hid it. Was that Olive’s mouth? Olive’s chin? I thought of the splotched mirror hanging near the wardrobe in John and Olive’s house in Hat Creek. If only it could’ve retained one image of Olive before she was gone forever.

  I could already tell I didn’t like knowing Mindy’s secret when she didn’t even know it herself. It turned things upside down. We were scarcely better than strangers. I glanced at the little girl at the pool table, now on her toes again, digging balls out of a corner pocket. Cleared my throat.