—
When she fully regained consciousness, she was staring up the rails of a railroad with her head down between them. She blinked, and the towering bars of the drunk tank came into focus. She was lying on her back in a bunk, her head toward the hall. She heard some movement in the enclosure but was too foggy headed to look and also afraid of what unfortunate arrestee she would meet. She thought of her mother up in Canada, Ramona Pistola, originally from Alice, Texas, who was probably now training for the senior female calf-roping event in Calgary. She’d wanted Sue to be a barrel-racing champion, and though she was good at it and liked the horses, she felt there was life outside of Canada, the farther away, the better. She didn’t ever get along with her mother, not for one second, and one reason she lay awake so much at night imagining a father was that he couldn’t possibly be a worse parent. Even absent, he was better for her psyche than Ramona Pistola, a blockheaded woman with hairy ears. Sue liked the job at the fire-truck plant and hoped to God the company wouldn’t fire her. She’d just been promoted to installing wiring harnesses, a skill she’d picked up at Grand Crapaud Online Technical University, which offered a one-semester pre-associate’s certificate for only $5,000.
Finally, she looked up and saw a young woman standing in the middle of the enclosure, turning slowly around. She wore an ivory dress that seemed to be made of a giant crocheted doily and, over that, a bronze Viking woman brassiere. The woman’s green hair was straight and heavy, as though recently spray-painted, and there was a black star tattooed around her left eye.
Sue couldn’t help asking, “What are you in for?”
The woman looked down at her, pulled out the tongue of a large metal tape measure, and let it snap back into its case. “I’m measuring for new flooring, and I just finished.” She pushed on the cell door, which opened with a squeak, and then she locked it with a bright key. Sue watched her fade away down the hall and kept watching until the big balding cop bulled his way up to the drunk tank.
Sydney Babineaux gave her a look of grim evaluation, and she sat up straight.
“Well, we meet again,” she told him, trying not to be groggy, putting a hand up to brush her hair and missing her head completely.
“We checked out Dr. Lew, and he’s clean,” the cop said. “His pills are conventional stuff and mostly placebo.”
Sue frowned at him. “He gives injections like a frame carpenter. He was holding me down in the chair, and I think he got into my brassiere.”
The old policeman looked down the hall. “Our matron told me you’re not wearing a brassiere, so forget about that.”
Sue folded her arms. “Was that her just in here?”
“No. That was Mrs. Pudlewsky. She owns the flooring business down the street. Why’d you try to shoot your dentist?”
She remembered the sound of the shot, huge in the little office. “I didn’t. When I pulled the damn thing out of my jeans, it just went off.”
He nodded. “Okay. I’m not surprised, that little popgun’s a piece of junk. It has no safety.”
“I’ve got a concealed-carry permit for it.”
“We found that. You have to buy him a new surgical light, you know. He kind of thought it was an accident, so he’s not pressing charges. I talked him out of it.”
She put her head in her hands. “How much is this going to cost?”
“I think he said four-fifty for the light and then there’s the little matter of the citation against you for discharging a gun in the city limits.”
Sue groaned like a bear. “At least my tooth feels better.”
“He’s not the best dentist in the world, Ms. Pistola, but he’s a fine pianist.”
She looked up slowly. The statement brought back the dizziness. “What?”
Sydney bobbed his moon of a head. “Internationally famous. Plays the trickiest Chopin stuff, I hear. One reason he didn’t press charges is he had to fly to Leipzig for a week of concerts.”
Sue blinked slowly and placed a hand against a bar in front of the policeman’s face. “I thought he was just some incompetent old perv.”
The policeman made eye contact with her, his big gray irises trying to figure her out. “I’ve got one question for you and I want you to tell the truth, okay?”
“The truth,” she mugged, crossing her heart.
“Did you drink alcohol on top of some pills before you went in to see him?”
Sue was of the generation that saw lying as a navigational aid for the river of life. “Of course not,” she said, looking him right in the eye. “How stupid do you think I am?”
“I don’t know anything about you.” He looked at his glossy boot. “The older I get, the less I know about young people. You know, I have a daughter about your age, kind of looks like you, who just up and left town one day. Last thing we all expected. She calls about once a year but won’t tell us where she lives. We never argued except for a couple usual things. My wife and me, we just don’t know what to think.”
Sue tilted her head. “How cruel of her.”
He looked up and nodded. “I called the guy at the Harley place and got you released into his custody again,” he said softly. “I’m going out on a limb for you. I guess because I’d like to think someone else would do the same for my daughter, wherever the hell she is. But the Harley guy’s busy at the dealer’s biker rally. His wife said she’d sign you out and drive you home.”
“His wife?” Her mouth dropped open a bit.
“Look, I’m doing you a favor here. You could be in big trouble. Just promise me you’ll lay off the sauce.”
She put a hand through the bars and put it on his shoulder. “Do they call you Syd?”
“Sydney.”
“Well, Mr. Sydney, I’ll lay off the sauce.”
—
The Harley guy’s wife, Gloria, was gorgeous, bigger than life, long-legged, blindingly blonde with near lavender eyes. She picked Sue up with a minivan, two toddlers strapped in back, May and June.
Sue looked back at the girls as if they were exotics in a cage, or maybe leprechauns. She was an only child and didn’t know a lot about children. “Hi, girls,” she said to them, giving a little wave as an afterthought.
May, who seemed to be maybe four, said, “Are you glad you’re out of the jailhouse?”
Sue glanced at Gloria, who was busy with traffic. “I sure am,” she said.
June, who looked to be near seven, began singing:
She’s in the jailhouse now
She’s in the jailhouse now,
I’ll tell you once again,
Stay ’way from that whiskey
And leave off of that gin,
She’s in the jailhouse now.
Then she began to yodel, but her mother flashed a stern glance at her in the rearview. “Sissy, that’s mean. You have to excuse her, Sue, she just loves country music. And I don’t know where she got those lyrics.”
“Grandpa sings it like that,” June said.
May, a miniature of her mother, slowly shook her head. “Sissy mean.”
At her apartment, Sue expected to be dropped off, but instead Gloria parked the big Chrysler and unbuckled the children, her bright fingernails flashing.
“I’m all right now,” Sue told her, showing her palms.
“Oh, I know. I just want to come in for a minute,” she said, herding the girls in through the door.
Sue found cartoons on her small TV and fixed glasses of iced tea for Gloria and herself. She moved a wad of clothes off the sofa and sat down near the glossy woman. “So, Gloria. What are you, a stay-at-home mom?”
“Nope.”
Sue guessed she was a fashion consultant. Maybe a catalog model. She looked at her expensive white jeans. “Sure, you must be a dress designer, right?”
Gloria took a big gulp of tea and stifled a burp. “I work for the regional health department. I’m the sewer and septic tank inspector.”
The statement made the room revolve half a turn. “Oh, is that right?
”
“What about you?”
“You know, I just work down at the fire-truck plant. Stringing wire.”
Gloria’s perfect face became serious. “And why do you drink?”
“Whoa. Aren’t we getting a little personal here? Do I look like a drunk or something?” Sue started to get up, then sat back down.
Gloria watched her closely. “You’re pretty nervous. Edgy, like you’re ready to jump out of your skin.”
Sue looked at the television, where Disney’s Princess Sofia was ice-skating around her lavender palace. She remembered winter in Canada with her mother. Washing horses in the snow. “Yeah, I need a drink.”
“You need a program.”
“Please. I don’t know what I need.”
“Yes you do, but you won’t do it.”
Gloria got to her feet, picked up the remote, and turned off the TV.
The girls let out a short whine in unison, then came to their mother, and hung on her long, long legs and yawned. May asked, “We leaving the lady?”
“In a minute.”
“Okay,” June said. “This place smells like a shoe.”
Gloria put a finger gently against her daughter’s lips and turned to Sue. “My husband told me you looked like a person very worthy of either advice or good luck. That’s why I’m here. If you want to talk to me about anything, call him at the dealership. I can get you help.”
“So he looked at me and figured me out?”
“Yes. Some people have it in them to do that. I’m not so good at it.”
Sue walked to the door and grabbed the knob as if for balance. “Maybe I can get along with a little luck.”
Gloria turned her perfect face to her as she walked outside and said, “We make our own luck, sweetie.”
—
Sue Pistola tried to make it through the rest of the afternoon without a drink. She poured what was left of her vodka down the drain, holding her breath. Then she went for a stroll, up the steaming sidewalk to a coffee shop where she ate buttered French bread and drank a cup of dark roast. Farther down the street she drifted past the blowout lounge, and a man in Schlumberger coveralls pushed through the door in a wash of icy air, cigarette smoke, and something else, a little dagger of gin sailing out the door and under her nostrils. She was attacked by a manic longing for a drink, for her imaginary father to show up and tell her to control herself, for a cutting Canadian wind, a longing that nearly knocked her over with the power of a fire truck speeding to its inevitable disaster. She plodded on in the heat, feeling tentacles of air-conditioned air pulling her back to the bar. Escaping to the little downtown, she thought she was safe, but then she walked past an old hardware store where a clerk was coating the iron façade with oil-based paint, and the midday heat was cooking the thinner out of the enamel, the odor driving her wild-eyed back to her apartment, where she sat in a chair and tried to read a book of wiring schematics. Then she tried a book of jokes a friend at work had given her, a friend who’d told her she needed cheering up. But the humor was thin and pathetic, especially the one about the dumb blonde in an airplane who was told they were flying over a crater made by a meteor crashing down a million years ago. “Damn, that thing almost hit the highway,” the blonde said. Sue began shaking a little and thought about calling the Harley dealership, but instead she decided to call her mother’s house phone, an old beige thing that would not show her number.
Someone picked up the receiver and said, “What you know good?”
“Mom?” Sue ventured.
“Suzie, where the hell are you, gal?”
She drew her legs up against her breasts. “I still don’t want to tell you.”
“Aw, come on home. You’ll like it. My boyfriend left and took all his smoke with him.”
“Angus is gone? He left you?”
“Naw. You ain’t been home in a while. Angus was two years ago. This was Clint.”
Sue looked down at the ratty berber carpet in her apartment. She’d liked to pretend that one of her mother’s partners, most of them nice fellows, was her real father. Angus was pretty jolly when he was sober. “Will you ever tell me who my dad is?”
The line went quiet for a minute. “Don’t start on that.” The easygoing cowgirl talk her mother had picked up like borrowed clothes in bars from Mexico to Kamloops suddenly disappeared. “Just don’t bug me about it again, you hear me?”
“I searched the computer for Pistolas in Texas and found a few, but they didn’t know of a Herbert. Wasn’t that his name?”
Her mother’s voice came at her like breaking glass. “Damn it, I said don’t talk about him. As far as you’re concerned, he doesn’t exist. I hope he’s dead.”
“Mom.”
“Where the hell are you, worthless? If you’d come up I could get you ready for next month’s barrel race. If you placed I sure as hell could use the money.”
Sue sponged her eyes with the heel of her left hand and turned off her cell. Then she went to the closet, and in the bottom was a quart of Old Overholt rye, a taste she didn’t care for. Back in the little kitchen she poured four fingers in a water glass, two fingers of cola, and added one ice cube. She tested the root canals with her tongue, and they were fine. Walking over to her swayback sofa she tried to imagine what her father looked like, if he was tall and fair like she was, something she’d wondered about all her life. Somewhere there was this older man who was a part of her that had fallen away, making her incomplete. If she could ever find him it would be like getting back a leg or both eyes. She would look and look at him and hope that he was someone she could figure out at a glance. Sue shook her head and took a long swallow. So far, no one in her world was who she thought they were.
—
About dusk she was what her mother would call knee-walking drunk, and imagined, like many in that state, that she needed to get out and drive around. She revved her dusty little car and tried to see if she could make the tires squeal out to the street, but all the compact Chevy could manage was a single eek. Soon she was galloping through traffic on old highway 90, sliding through town, clipping curbs and laughing at the horn blasts of the amazed motorists in her wake. Then she bolted into a supermarket parking lot, riding the Chevy like her old horse Jake, rolling around to the back of the store where the clerks piled the cardboard boxes before they collapsed them, and she reined the car into a big one and spurred into a circle, swinging back around the building toward the highway, sideswiping a shopping cart on the way to the exit. Sue raced again through town, the box still trapped under the floorboard and roaring like escaping steam, and somewhere around the old railroad station, here came flashing lights and a siren up to her back bumper, a really excited siren squawking at her like a six-ton bird. She slowed but didn’t pull over, thinking, What will I say now? It has to be the perfect thing. It has to be the best thing a woman ever said to a policeman in the history of the automobile. She kept slowing, trying to concentrate, knowing she had to stay free so she could drive through east Texas looking for Pistolas, for leads to a father she needed like a parallel rider plucking her off a bucking horse, but she couldn’t unless she came up with the words that would save her now. Finally, she drifted to a stop in a small parking lot in front of a psychiatric clinic. HELP FOR THE HELPLESS, its sign read, and she wondered how to get into the place. There was a tap at her window and she saw Sydney and the big starry symbol on his chest that gave him the right to do whatever he wanted with her whole life. She lowered the window and he stuck in his face, hangdog with disappointment, staring, trying to figure her out, and she stared back, hoping he was what he seemed to be.
“You drinkin’?” he asked.
Sue reached up and pinched a big slab of his left ear between her thumb and forefinger and said, “You buyin’?”
Died and Gone to Vegas
Raynelle Bullfinch told the young oiler that the only sense of mystery in her life was provided by a deck of cards. As she set up the card table in the engine room of the L
eo B. Canterbury, a government steam dredge anchored in a pass at the mouth of the Mississippi River, she lectured him. “Nick, you’re just a college boy laying out a bit until you get money to go back to school, but for me, this is it.” She adjusted her overalls straps and looked around at the steam chests and piping, sniffed at the smell of heatproof red enamel. She was the cook on the big boat, which was idle for a couple of days because of high winter winds. “My big adventure is cards. One day I’ll save enough to play with the skill boys in Vegas. Now set up those folding chairs,” she told him. “Seven in all.”
“I don’t know how to play bourrée, ma’am.” Nick Montalbano ran a hand through long hair shiny with dressing. “I only had one semester of college.”
“Bullshit. A pet rat can play bourrée. Sit down.” She pointed to a metal chair and the oiler, a thin boy wearing an untucked plaid flannel shirt and a baseball cap, obeyed. “Pay attention here. I deal out five cards to everybody, and I turn up the last card. Whatever suit it is, that’s trumps. Then you discard all your non-trumps and draw replacements. Remember, trumps beat all other suits, high trumps beat low trumps. Whatever card is led, you follow suit.” She ducked her head under the bill of his cap, looking for his eyes. “This ain’t too hard for you is it? Ain’t college stuff more complicated than this?”
“Sure, sure. I understand, but what if you can’t follow suit?”
“If non-trumps is led, put a trump on it. If you ain’t got no more trumps, just throw your lowest card. Trust me, you’ll catch on quick.”
“How do you win?” The oiler turned his cap around.
“Every hand has five tricks to take. If you take three tricks, you win the pot, unless only two decide to play that hand after the draw. Then it takes four tricks. If you got any questions, ask Sydney there.”
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