The Pale-Faced Lie

by David Crow

  It was daylight when Mom and Dad came back to the waiting room. Through Mom’s muffled tears, we found out that the doctors were still operating. Her eyes were red and her skin was puffed up, as if someone had stuffed cotton balls in her cheeks.

  “Dad,” I said, “is Sam gonna be all right?”

  He raised his hand, signaling me to stop as tears filled his eyes. It must have been really bad if he couldn’t answer me. I went back to counting tiles, but I kept thinking about Sam and I’d lose track and have to start over.

  Staring at the wall, Mom shook and muttered that it wasn’t her fault. She knew the ironing machine would break and hurt one of us kids. It was too fancy for her, she said to no one in particular. Lonnie rocked Sally in her arms singing softly. “Don’t cry, baby.” No one paid any attention to us—we blended into a roomful of sad, tired people who looked like they didn’t want to be there either.

  After what felt like forever, a doctor came out and pulled up a chair in front of Mom and Dad. “Sam will regain most of the use of his left hand,” he said. “But it will take a couple of months before he can leave the hospital. We’ve grafted skin from his stomach to grow over his hand. It’s a new technique that has shown promising results.”

  WE MOVED INTO A ROACH-INFESTED motel room with two beds and a small TV. I slept on the floor with a pillow and my Roy Rogers blanket, and Lonnie and Sally slept in the bed next to Mom and Dad’s. Mom didn’t say much other than occasionally mumbling that everyone blamed her for Sam’s accident. Her eyes seemed to be in a continual trance. Sometimes I’d walk right in front of her and she didn’t see me.

  Dad acted like she wasn’t there.

  For many long weeks, Sam lived behind a glass wall in a tiny bed under a clear plastic tent. We weren’t allowed to go inside. Every day Dad picked me up, held me against the glass wall, and told me to wave to him. Sam’s left hand was taped to his stomach and his other hand was under a bright blue blanket. Straps held his chest and feet tight so he couldn’t move except for his head. He turned to look at me, and I cried, but he gave me the biggest smile I’d ever seen.

  “When will he be able to play again?” I asked a stern-faced nurse in a white uniform and funny hat.

  “Not for a long time,” she said. “He has to live in a germ-free oxygen tent until he’s healed enough not to get an infection.”

  Dad called his boss to update him on Sam’s progress, and Hoot told him he could take as much time as he needed. His job would be waiting when he got back. But Dad wasn’t getting paid and soon our money would run out, so he needed Lonnie and me to help him pick fruit and cotton—the same thing he did when he was my age.

  In the hot Arizona desert, we worked alongside Mexican field hands, and my peashooter came in handy for blowing tiny pebbles at them. Sometimes I hit them in the butt with apples or pears when they bent down. They would yell something in Spanish and shake their hands at me.

  Other times, I lobbed tomatoes at the sides of the trucks to watch them go splat. I didn’t think Dad was watching me, but after one of my best throws, he grabbed me by the arm and said the next time he saw anything flying, he’d whack my little ass hard. So I did it only when he wasn’t around. When I got bored with that, I’d throw apples high in the air and catch them, pretending I had gotten the third out in a big inning. Or I would aim for the baskets we used to collect the fruit. Messing around was the only way I could take my mind off Sam.

  We ate fresh fruit from the farm and groceries that didn’t need cooking, like salami and cheese sandwiches. Dad ate sardines from a tin can that smelled as bad as the buffalo farts. Mom mixed powdered milk with the rusty water from the bathroom sink, making it taste worse than it normally did. I poured it down the drain when no one was watching.

  The day finally came for Sam to leave the hospital. A nurse carried him out of the tent room and handed him to Mom. I ran to hug him, and Lonnie gave him a kiss on top of his head. He giggled. His hand and stomach were covered with giant bandages. The nurse said we needed to be careful around him because his skin was still very tender.

  A doctor told Dad that Sam had to have the skin on his stomach and hand sanded to make it look smooth and natural when he got older.

  “I’m not paying for his hand or stomach to be sanded,” Dad said. “Sam isn’t going to be a movie star. Hell, it looks rugged, and nothing’s wrong with that.”

  On the drive back, I promised to be a better boy so Sam wouldn’t get hurt again. Dad said it wasn’t my fault and not to worry about it. But I did.

  We stopped at a small diner to get Cokes and hamburgers, and Dad launched into more stories about his World War II adventures. I made my best machine gun impression and twirled my arms to look like a Japanese Zero falling from the sky. Even Mom laughed at that. Dad didn’t yell at her once.

  WE MADE IT HOME FOR the Halloween party at the EPNG rec center. I dressed up as Roy Rogers and ate as much candy as I wanted. Dad didn’t seem to mind, and Mom smiled when she saw me dance with Ginger, Hoot’s daughter. She was three years older than I was, but she let me play with her.

  Not long after the party, everything returned to normal. Dad yelled at Mom, Lonnie took care of Sally, and I shot rubber arrows at the pictures on the wall, begging Mom to let me out. It worked every time. Sam still had a soft wrap on his hand, and his stomach was covered with rectangular red scars, but we got used to seeing him like that.

  One warm afternoon the following March, Mom called out from the kitchen, “David, wouldn’t it be nice to take Sam on a bike ride?” She came into the living room where I was stretched out on the floor with my cowboy and Indian plastic toys.

  I looked up and blinked—her hair was combed and she was dressed, ready to go. Lonnie would stay in the house playing the piano and watching eight-month-old Sally while we used her bike.

  In front of the house, Mom sat Sam in the basket hooked to the handlebar. He was wearing only a diaper, without shoes or a shirt. Since the ironing accident, Sam had gone back to diapers, and he didn’t talk as much as he used to.

  Mom turned to me. “Sit on the rack in back to keep the bike balanced.”

  It took her three tries to get on the seat while holding squiggly Sam with one hand and the handlebar with the other.

  I steadied myself on the rack. “Are you sure we won’t tip over?”

  “We’ll be fine. I’ve been riding bikes all my life, and there’s no traffic to worry about. It’ll be fun.”

  Mom began pedaling, and the bike wobbled as my brother kept trying to get out of the basket. “Sam, stay put,” she said, pushing him back down.

  The bike jerked, moving too slowly to stay upright, so she pedaled faster. By that time, Sam had managed to stand in the basket, and he fell forward out of Mom’s grasp. His left foot got lodged between the wheel and the fork, causing the bike to tip over.

  Sam’s head slammed against the sidewalk with a loud crack and Mom dropped on top of him. I fell off the back and hit my head on the sidewalk too, but I managed to roll to my feet. Blood gushed from Sam’s skull and foot, and the raw skin on his stomach was also bleeding. His big left toe hung on the spikes, nearly cut off from the rest of his foot.

  He screamed almost as loud as he had when his hand got caught in the iron. How could Sam be hurt again? How could Mom be so stupid?

  “What happened, Sam?” Mom yelled. She acted like it was his fault and he knew what had gone wrong. When she realized how seriously he was hurt, she picked him up and ran into the house with me right behind. Lonnie jumped up from the piano and helped Mom wrap his foot in a towel.

  “Be careful, Mom! Don’t tear off his toe.”

  Lonnie called Dad, and he rushed the three of us to the hospital in Albuquerque. I had forgotten about the blood oozing from the back of my head, but compared to poor Sam, I was fine. I cried hard, not just for my brother, but for how unfair it was for him to be hurt again.

  Since Mom and Dad always did better in a crisis, there was no yelling or hitting. Dad
took me into the hospital bathroom to wash the blood off my scalp, joking that he hoped I hadn’t broken the sidewalk. Back in the waiting room, Mom cried and shook, as usual, but we didn’t pay any attention to her.

  It was getting dark outside when a grim-faced doctor came to talk to us. “Your son has a fractured skull and a concussion. We’ve sedated him until the swelling in his brain goes down. As for his big toe, a surgeon is working to reattach the tendon. It’s a tricky procedure, but I’m optimistic he will keep the toe. Your son won’t be out of surgery for at least another hour, and he’ll need to stay here for a few days because of his brain injury.”

  We sat some more and then another doctor appeared. “Sam’s toe will eventually heal,” he said. “But he won’t walk normally again for a long time.”

  Days later, I went with Mom and Dad to get Sam out of the hospital. Mom held him in a blanket, but Dad ripped him out of her arms, yelling that she was too goddamn incompetent to hold him without dropping him. As we walked toward the exit, an older doctor came up behind us. “Mr. and Mrs. Crow, may I speak with you in my office?”

  I tagged along since no one told me not to. “Please, have a seat,” the doctor said, closing the door. He picked up a clipboard from his desk and looked at Mom. “I’m trying to understand what happened. Why would you place a small child in a bicycle basket?”

  Waiting for Mom to answer, Dad mumbled to himself, his voice low like a record player spinning too slowly. The usual signs of anger were there: the bugged-out eyes and pulsing Y vein on his forehead, along with dancing crisscrossed lines. It sounded like he was arguing with himself.

  “I couldn’t leave David alone,” Mom said through sobs. “He causes trouble all the time. Lonnie watched Sally in the house . . . so they were okay. I put Sam in the basket and held him with one hand. It seemed safe . . . There weren’t any cars . . . Sam was having fun . . . David balanced the back end, but he’s so heavy I could barely get going . . . Sam wriggled out of my hand. The accident could have happened to anybody. It wasn’t my fault.”

  The doctor stared at her, frowning, and then bent over the clipboard and wrote quickly.

  “Thelma Lou couldn’t take care of plastic fruit,” Dad said.

  The doctor raised his head. “You shouldn’t talk about your wife like that, mister.”

  “Really?” he yelled. “If you want the dumb bitch, I’ll leave her with you.”

  The doctor got up and walked out.

  As we passed through the waiting room, everyone stared at us. I focused on the floor, my face growing hot. I wanted to disappear.

  On the ride home, Mom held Sam in a blanket and retold her side of the story. Dad gripped the steering wheel, working his jaw back and forth.

  “I can’t understand why you’re so mad,” Mom said, her voice shaky with tears. “Sam giggled up a storm and kicked his little legs when I told him we were going for a bike ride.” She turned to the back seat and nodded for me to agree with her.

  But I couldn’t. I looked down at my lap, realizing for the first time that Dad might be right—maybe Mom was crazy.

  CHAPTER 5

  MY PARENTS STOPPED TALKING TO EACH OTHER. In their bedroom at night, they didn’t laugh anymore either. All they did was yell and scream, and the hitting got worse. Mom shuffled around the house with the dull, vacant look I saw in the eyes of the stray compound dogs.

  The neighbors avoided her the way they had at Navajo Station—they wouldn’t answer the door the few times she went outside. “I know they’re home,” she’d tell me. “Maybe they didn’t hear me knock.” She and I walked from house to house, but no one came to the door.

  That’s when Mom started bothering us at night. At bedtime, she came to life and hurried from one bedroom to the next, pretending she was helping us get ready for bed when we were already in bed. “Did you wash your face, David?” she would ask, and even when I told her I had, she’d bring in a washcloth. The same thing happened with the toothbrush. Then she would straighten my sheets and open my drawers, asking me repeatedly if I was ready to go to sleep.

  Finally, she would leave, and just as I drifted off, I would jolt awake, feeling like I had ants crawling in my hair. But it was Mom, tapping my head with her fingertips. She’d put her face close to mine as if she wanted to swallow me whole and then ask pointless questions.

  “David, do you know who left a cup in the sink?”

  “No, Mom,” I muttered.

  Minutes later, she would swoop back and touch me again. “David, I found your shoes on the porch. Did you leave them out there?”

  “They got wet, and I wanted to let them dry.”

  Later, after I’d been asleep awhile, Mom would wake me again with more random questions. Sometimes she shook me so hard I thought Sam had had another accident or Belen Station had blown up and I hadn’t heard the siren or smelled the smoke. She would grab me with clammy hands, holding on as if she were slipping, tears streaming down her face.

  After she repeated this a few times, I couldn’t get back to sleep, anxiously awaiting her quick steps into my bedroom. None of our rooms had locks, so I’d move a chair against the door, only to have her push it away, telling me not to do it again. Lonnie shoved her bed against the door, but Mom stood in the hallway and pounded. “Lonnie, let me in. We need to talk.”

  She did the same thing to Dad. He typically came home from the evening shift, ate, and went straight to bed. Mom would wake him up minutes after he’d fallen asleep. He would yell at her to stop being a stark raving lunatic, and just as I was falling asleep again, he’d stomp through the house, a blanket and pillow in hand, and head for the Green Bomber.

  Soon Mom’s birdlike feet pitter-pattered down the hall, and the screen door banged. “Thurston,” she’d yell, pounding on the car window, “we have to talk!”

  “Go to bed, you dumb bitch,” Dad yelled back at her. “I need to sleep so I can work to pay for all your accidents.”

  Mom would stand on the porch until Dad got quiet and stopped moving. Then she’d run to the car and pound on the window again, screeching that they needed to talk. When he ignored her, she pounded harder and screamed until he got out of the car and hit her. Then she would run into the bedroom crying as Dad went back to sleep in the Rambler.

  Neither of them paid any attention to Lonnie and me as we watched from the porch.

  ONE MORNING IN THE MIDDLE of the summer, I spotted a group of older boys down the street with their bikes. I raced home and got my bike, my first without training wheels. I would turn six in August and was ready to ride with the big boys. But they didn’t see it that way.

  “Get out of here, you little pest,” they said.

  I followed anyway and convinced one of them to tie a rope from the seat pole of his bike to my handlebar. As he pulled my tiny bike, I pedaled hard so we wouldn’t fall behind the others. But my little legs couldn’t keep up, and the boy jumped off his bike, untied the rope, and took off, yelling over his shoulder, “Go home, kid.”

  I didn’t care what he thought and slowly, steadily rode toward Belen. The compound was ten miles from town, and I’d been on the road for what seemed like hours. It couldn’t be much farther.

  My legs felt wobbly when I finally reached the bridge crossing the Rio Grande River. By then, the boys were nowhere to be found. That was okay—I didn’t need their help. The sun wasn’t high in the sky anymore, but I still had lots of time for fun.

  I didn’t cross the bridge and go into town. There was no sidewalk, and I was scared to ride where the cars drove. Putting down my kickstand, I got off the bike and spotted a small corner store that sold candy and soda pop, the “capitalist crap” Dad never let us have. It had been a long time since breakfast, and I was hungry.

  “Can I get some things while I wait for my mom and dad?” I asked the pretty lady behind the counter. “They’ll pay for them when they come get me, after they run some errands.”

  “You’re cute,” she said. “Sure, get what you want.”
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  I roamed the aisles, picking up candy, cookies, bubble gum, and a comic book. The lady winked at me when I thanked her. This was the best day of summer ever. I went back so many times that my pockets bulged with Sugar Babies, and it didn’t take long before my stomach hurt from all the candy.

  I gathered a bunch of rocks to throw into the river. The muddy water was moving slowly, and I wanted to make some big splashes.

  As I sat on the riverbank, the sun began to sink. It would be dark soon. The lady closed the store and came over to ask if I was okay. I told her Mom and Dad would be along anytime, but after she left, I started crying. I should have told her the truth.

  Cars and trucks passed me by as I watched the headlights shine on the water. I wished someone nice would pick me up and take me home, but no one noticed me. It was like the time I’d fallen into the hole, except the husky wasn’t there to help.

  The sun faded, and the red streaks across the sky dimmed. I could see a few stars now. Alone and afraid, I knew it would be hard to find me, even if someone were looking. I stuck my hands in my pockets and shivered as the temperature dropped, the way it always did at night in the desert.

  A short time later, bright truck lights blinded me, and I heard a man shout, “There he is. Go get Thurston!”

  I recognized the man as one of the new EPNG workers. He smelled like grease and cigarettes. “You created quite a scare, little fella,” he said. “Every spare man in the compound has been looking for you for hours.” He wrapped me in a blanket and carried me to his truck. Another man picked up my bike and followed.

  Two more trucks pulled onto the side of the bridge. Dad jumped out of the last one. I couldn’t see his face as he yanked me high in the air and said, “Are you all right?”

  As soon as I said yes, he threw me over his knee and hit my butt so hard it knocked the breath out of me. The men watched, but no one said a word.