Once There Were Sad Songs

by Velda Brotherton

  Around them chanting crowds, and he saw he was lying on the wet pavement of a city street.

  The soldier hit the girl again.

  “No, it’s peace. We’re here about peace. Goddammit, you’re killing her.”

  She lay in a crimson pool, and as he bent to touch her, feel the pulse at her throat, the image wavered, became an old woman bent beneath the butt of his own rifle in a faraway place, a place of horror and despair, a place he knew all too well.

  “Steven, Steven. You have to go. Everyone is waiting.” A lonely, haunted voice. One he knew but didn’t know.

  Sobbing, staggering, he searched for her in the darkness that undulated like a viscous ocean. Hope drained from him, dreams disappeared, floated out of reach on the murky waves. It was Liz, and he’d let her get away. He churned both legs, kicked at arms locked around him, stroked in an effort to swim against the swell of waves. All the while he sank slowly into a bubbling mire that boiled hot in one moment and in the next cracked into frigid splinters. A sulphuric stink turned his stomach and he gagged.

  Drifting farther away, she continued to call his name.

  He grabbed for her, fingers brushing the mane of streaked hair that blew in the wind. Not Liz. Jennie. Jennie. Her name erupted from deep in his throat, begging, asking a question he couldn’t comprehend. So there was no answer. Only the gnawing roar of some mammoth unseen beast.

  Bathed in stinging sweat, he batted his eyes open. Morning sunlight slanted through the tent, draped over him and across Liz’s long, bare legs.

  Exhausted by the horrid flashback, he held on to her and drifted.

  Liz awoke and gazed into his face. How young he looked in sleep. She wondered how different things might have been if she’d met him first. Before Levi, before Reudell. But of course that was ridiculous. When she was young, he was but a child.

  How odd, the many things that might happen if we turned one way rather than another. If Reudell had courted someone else, if Levi had not died, if Mama hadn’t been entranced by the cult-like church, if she had followed her childhood dream to go far away to college. One turn, this way or that, and she would not be here today, lying in this tent with a man more than ten years her junior. Contemplating God knew what.

  His lids dragged open and the blue of his eyes glistened. Gently, he knuckled her cheek.

  “What have you done to me?” she whispered. “What have you done?”

  He grew sober. “It’s what I could do that matters.”

  She didn’t understand, questioned him with a look, a touch.

  Fingering a lock of tangled hair away from her face, he took a deep breath.

  “After Mama died, after the funeral, you know?”

  She nodded. “Yes, what?”

  “I went home. I hadn’t been home in what seemed like years, though it wasn’t. And so I just walked through the empty house, touched her things, smelled her powder and perfume, sat on her bed for a long while, surrounded by the purple spread. She loved the color purple. The room was all lavender shades and smells, just like she was still there. Echoes of her laughter, her cries of joy and sorrow, around me like I was sinking in a deep bottomless hole. I remember burying my face in her pillow and crying until I was cried out. A grown man, back from the wars, but still a baby in his mother’s house.”

  Sorrow for his loss crept into her soul. She knew how it felt, losing someone so dear.

  “I went out in the carport then. There was her pickup, the one she bought to replace Papa’s old beat-up thing I’d left with her when I went to ’Nam, and in the back was a can of gas. For the mower. She still did all the yard work to keep herself out of mischief. Papa used to say that, and she took to saying it after he died. I’d say, ‘Mama, why do you work so hard and raise a garden?’ and she’d say in her West Texas drawl, ‘I do it to keep out of mischief,’ and her eyes would glow like gray coals fixin’ to burst into flame, daring me to put a stop to what she wanted to do.”

  Liz lay still against him, one hand spread over his chest to feel the beating of his heart.

  “I poured the gas around on the screened porch where Mama always liked to sit of an evening to catch the breeze off the river. My hands were trembling, but I had to do it, and I touched the back of her rocker, feeling her there, sensing her. ‘See to the place,’ she’d begged me years before. ‘When I’m gone, see to the place,’ and I was doing just that. I had promised.”

  Sweat beaded on his forehead, trickled away. Sunlight embraced the tiny tent, made it unbearably hot inside, but neither made a move to leave. This needed saying, needed shared.

  He cleared his throat, as if choking. “There was an empty coke bottle on the table, and I touched it, lifted it to my nose to see if her smell lingered on the neck, but it didn’t. I wanted to pray, but I couldn’t. What God would listen to such as me? She was gone, and even when the preacher demanded prayer at the graveside, I just stared off at the Kiamichi Mountains, waiting for all her friends to do the praying for me.

  “Before I could do her bidding and see to the place, I read her last letter, had it in my pocket, creased so it was almost coming apart. I could smell the fumes of the gasoline washing over me like smoke in a battle, urging me to get on with it. But not till I read the words. She wrote about me being her immortality, and Papa’s. About how she hated that they had taught me to kill, taught me it was okay. And then she said...she wrote... that the one thing I could do, the thing God would forgive me for, was coming back alive to her, no matter the cost. But she was wrong. Dear God, she was wrong.”

  He rubbed at Liz’s shoulder with the ball of his thumb until it left a sore spot. She didn’t say anything or move away.

  “It made no difference, don’t you see, whether God forgave me or not. I had to do what she asked. She forgave me everything, and the least I could do was see to the place, like she wanted. The house was cold as a tomb, and I remember shivering so hard I almost couldn’t stuff the cup towel down in the coke bottle filled with gasoline. There were matches in the ceramic dish on the stove—the pilot light never would stay lit—and I took a handful and just walked out of the house without looking back. I stood out there in the frozen grass, my duffel laying in the copper light of the dying sun. The wind blew out the first match, and I turned my back so I could strike another and hold it to the dangling piece of cloth.”

  Appalled, Liz waited, unable to move.

  “Then I turned around and without thinking lobbed that cocktail through a window. The explosion shook the ground just like a mortar. And then I bent over, picked up my duffel, and walked away. I didn’t even look back.”

  At last she found her voice, moved her hand to cup his jaw. “Oh, Steven. I’m so sorry. Where did you go?”

  “Back to ’Nam to do some more killing. Well, no, that’s not exactly right. I went back to be killed. It didn’t happen.”

  Pulling his head to her shoulder, patting him as if he were one of the children in her classroom, she thought about what to do. There was no way to do what was right. She couldn’t leave him, she couldn’t stay with him. He needed something she couldn’t give, same as her. Both teetered on the brink of survival, neither knew quite how to keep up the balancing act any longer.

  “Why are you still here? What are you thinking?” he asked gruffly. “How can you lay here and listen to the acts of a madman without running off?”

  “I’m thinking what a mixed-up lot we humans are. We’re doomed to make mistakes, yet we expect to do everything right and punish ourselves unmercifully when we don’t. As if that weren’t enough, we create a God who can rain punishment on us as well.”

  He took her in his arms, hugged her so tightly she grunted. “And so what should we do?”

  “Love each other, I think. Just love each other.”

  “You mean you and me? Embrace now like there was no yesterday and won’t be a tomorrow?”

  “No, not like that at all. I mean care about each other and what happens. What we cause to happen, but don
’t wrap ourselves up in guilt, because we really have little to do with it, you know.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in a Divine Being,” he joked, as if trying to make his way back from his darkest memories to some sort of peace.

  “I never said that. I said I don’t believe in the God my mother and my husband have forced down my throat most of my life. If he exists, then why do we need a Devil? No, I believe...oh, I do believe there is someone who cares more for me than I can ever fathom.”

  He wanted to tell her that was him, but he knew it was too late. Still, maybe they could remain together for a while.

  “Liz,” he finally whispered. “Don’t be sorry for what we did. Don’t destroy its memory with your penitence.”

  “No, no. I’m not. I won’t. I just know we can’t do anything about it. In the end we’ll both be hurt, and neither of us needs that.”

  “Don’t think about it. It don’t matter.”

  “Oh, yes. Yes, it does matter. Very much. I want the rest of my life to be of some value to me, to matter. And when you say it doesn’t, you negate my worth, yours too.”

  “Words can’t do that. We are what we are, what we’ve been made by what’s happened to us.”

  She sat up out of his arms. “No, I refuse to believe that we have no control over what we become. We can make ourselves valuable human beings no matter what happens to us, no matter what it takes.”

  “Bullshit. Just bullshit. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  She hesitated a moment, feeling a bit ashamed because her suffering must seem so insignificant to him.

  “All I know is I’m here searching for the answers, and I refuse to believe there aren’t any. I put up with my miserable life for a lot of years without thought of making it better. Just get through it. So tell me, why did I finally say enough is enough? I don’t know, but it was not simply some romantic notion. There must be more to it and I just can’t see it yet.”

  He couldn’t stand in the tent but rose anyway, all bent over. “Where you going to look for answers? Out there in the world? Well, let me tell you, it ain’t out there. I done been, I done seen, I done stopped looking.”

  “Oh, Steven, no, you haven’t stopped looking. If you had, you wouldn’t have opened your heart to me.”

  By the look on his face, he wanted out of this conversation, wanted to take refuge in some kind of disgraceful action, yet he didn’t. He only glared at her, looking like some sort of creature, all humped over like that.

  And so, because she did love him and because she didn’t want to see him hurt, she beat him to the punch. “Why don’t you say, ‘fuck you’? Why don’t you just tell me to fuck off?”

  Her tongue burned and her stomach performed a series of little flip-flops, but the look on his face made it worth the effort of uttering the dreadful word. Twice.

  He looked almost like an old-maid schoolteacher hearing such a thing for the first time but knowing full well what it meant. His mouth moved to form a reply, but none came. His eyes widened, his hands flapped. Cheeks puffed out, air shot from rounded lips.

  “Mary Elizabeth, my God. Shame on you.”

  Once she began to laugh she couldn’t stop, and after a while he joined her. There they were, hunkered in the scorching heat of the tiny tent, shaking with laughter. A celebration of sorts, to honor this unexpected revelation of life’s strange foibles.

  Chapter Fourteen

  He left her sitting cross-legged in the tent, attacking her hair with a brush, muttering something about cider vinegar he didn’t understand. In the doorway, he turned for one last look. Lips clenched, she held strands of tangles in one hand and worked at them with the other. She must've sensed his gaze, because she paused, looked up at him, and smiled so sweetly his heart nearly stopped in his chest. If and when that ever happened, he hoped he would die with that picture of her before him.

  After another moment, he tucked the flap open to let in air and went to join Lefty, who hunkered beside the fire, glowering in his direction.

  “Here I am hopin’ you was having a good time, non?”

  “What you up to other than that?”

  “Think to conjure up a pot of coffee. It don’t work so good.”

  “I see that. Where’s Shadow?”

  “Took off into the woods when you-all didn’t come out her tent. Think that boy might be having himself a hard on and too polite to mention it.”

  It would do no good to deny Lefty’s supposition, so he didn’t. “Reckon we ought to get us a list made up so he can go for supplies.”

  “Figgered maybe you’d changed your mind and you and her might go. Spend some time together.”

  “She don’t need to make that walk out of here.”

  Lefty nodded. “ ’Cause of her age and all.”

  No need giving the man any satisfaction, so he didn’t. “Won’t hurt Shadow none. Get his mind off his particular problem. Besides, I want to find my Harley and get it running. Got a piece of paper?”

  Lefty patted his pockets elaborately. “Oh, sure, got me one right here. Well, look at that, must’ve lost it.”

  “I’ll ask Liz.”

  “Yeah, you do that. You ask her.”

  The tone rankled and Steven tried not to react. This time it didn’t work. Lefty had burrowed under his skin too deep. “How long you gonna keep this up?”

  Lefty shrugged, bugged his eyes, and scratched at his Brillo hair. “Don’t know what you talking about, ole son.”

  “I’m sorry I popped you one. I don’t know what else to say. I thought we’d gone past it. Anyway, no need in taking it out on her.”

  “Ain’t that all what’s bothering me, exactly.”

  “What then?”

  “I think she ought to go. I mean leave. You done see how she cause trouble. Woman like her out here with the three of us. No good can come of it at all.”

  “The way I see it, it’s not her causing the trouble.”

  Lefty hung on his gaze for a long while, then looked down at the fire. “It’s what you think. You the boss. Always has been.”

  “No boss around here, but you’re gonna keep being a shithead about it, aren’t you?”

  Lefty grinned crookedly, though clearly he wasn’t amused. “I try not to, but can make no promises.”

  “I’ll get us a piece of paper.”

  After Shadow collected money from everyone, he left with a list of supplies, and Steven went in search of his bike.

  Nursing a concern about handing her car keys over to a strange black man, Liz watched him disappear out of sight. Suppose he decided to take her car out to fetch supplies? Well, of course, he wouldn’t do that. But what if he did, and someone she knew saw him in the car and recognized it as hers? What would Reudell do if someone reported to him they’d seen her car with a black man driving it? Call the police and report her as kidnapped and killed, no doubt.

  Shaking away the fanciful imaginings, she scolded herself. Shadow would not take her car. He would only do precisely what he was supposed to because he was that kind of man.

  But it had been much more than that. And though some of her perceptions had changed, a need to discover her true purpose apart from Reudell and his life wouldn’t simply go away because she willed it. Something unfinished nagged at her, and she could not go home yet, no matter what. She’d just have to hope no one recognized the car with that distinctive bumper sticker everyone in Chapel Hill sported.

  Steven had gone in search of his bike and hadn’t invited her along. Probably a good thing. For a while she wandered around within the confines of the clearing, discovering tiny blue anemones and long-stemmed black-eyed Susans, and poking through bits of flint in search of arrowheads.

  Back at the campsite, Lefty worked on his bike and shot dark glances in her direction. She told herself that hunger drove her to return, but she felt a driving need to confront the irascible man. Clearly he had a bone to pick with her, and perhaps it was time they cleared the air, away fr
om Steven’s influence.

  His ominous stare followed her as she prowled about, looking for and finding nothing in the way of food. When she could take it no longer, she went to stand over him. Not a good idea to so challenge him, but she could no longer be the subject of his hatred without doing so. He worked with the proficiency of a professional, stubby fingers caressing the greasy parts with a reverence he showed no human. Though he had glared at her from a distance, he managed to ignore her up-close scrutiny.

  Finally she asked a question to break the cold silence more than anything else. “How’s Shadow going to bring all the supplies back?”

  He stiffened, and for a moment she thought he might not answer, but he did. “Goin’ out to meet him soon’s I get this hog fixed. Maybe we hook that car of yours up to that tree blockin’ the road and just drag it outten the way. Could near drive it all the way in. Would do no more than scrape the doors a bit, maybe ruin a tire or punch a hole in the oil pan.”

  Refusing to allow him to annoy her, she simply smiled.

  He didn’t give up. “You could leave. I take you out myself, if I thought you go.” He held the grease-smeared hands motionless, as if afraid he might not hear her reply.

  “I suppose I could. I’m thinking about it.”

  “Why you don’t leave him be?”

  “What?”

  “I said leave S’n’M be. He don’t need no truck with someone like you.”

  “I will grant you that.” Her reply shut him up for a brief moment, and she took advantage of it. “What does S’n’M stand for? Why do you call Steven that?”

  “His name’s Steven Michael. It just seemed the thing to do at the time. Seeing as how he liked his ‘wet work’ so well in ’Nam. You know, hands-on maiming and killing? Anyways, nobody goes by their name in country.”

  “But doesn’t S’n’M stand for...?”

  “Yeah, it does. Sadistic. Masochistic. That’s what it mean. Folk who like to hurt others, hurt themselves. You figure it out yet? Or are you really as pure as you play-act to be? Me, I don’t think so, non.”