by Joe Meno
The museum looked like an old-time general store, and when she stumbled inside, she found she was in the middle of a chintzy-looking gift shop. She asked the elderly lady behind the counter if there was a public phone anywhere. The woman pointed to a pay phone, down a short hall, outside a pair of restrooms. The girl smiled, rummaging through her purse for some change, knowing there were only a few nickels and dimes. She would call her father this time, collect. She was through fucking around. If she sounded desperate enough, he would have to help her. She picked up the phone, dialed the operator, told her it was collect, and waited for it to ring. Her father, a Dallas entertainment lawyer, would never answer it himself. It would either be her mother or Marta the maid. After the third ring, Marta’s heavy accent offered a greeting and Rylee immediately started shouting for her father. A few moments later, her daddy picked up.
Apparently he was working out on the treadmill, the sound of its whirring gears, his shoes slapping the belt, and Lynyrd Skynyrd blaring in the background.
“Daddy?”
“Hello?” came the deep voice—a basso profundo—the tone of which made her feel bad for everything she had done.
“Daddy?”
“Kaylie?”
“No, it’s Rylee, Daddy. Dad, I’m in trouble. Real trouble. I need some help.”
She could hear him slowing down, switching off the machine, the Southern rock still rising from the speakers.
“Rylee, Jesus, honey—where are you?”
“Daddy, I need help. I’m in Nashville. I want to come home.”
She could imagine his expression now, him pinching the space between his eyes.
“Rylee, you know the deal. Your mother and I . . . we said we’re not sending you any more money. If you want to come back home, the door’s always open. But I . . . we’ve been down that road too many times with you.”
“Daddy, I’m scared. I really need your help.”
“I don’t know how to help you, sugarplum. What can I do to help?”
“You can send me money for a ticket. I’ll fly home today.”
There was an odd pause, and some sniffling, and suddenly she realized her father was crying.
“Rylee . . . I don’t know what to do,” he whispered. “Jesus, why do you keep doing this to us?”
“Daddy, please. Please. I just want to come home.”
He blew his nose and seemed to regain his composure.
“That last place, that one, Sunnyvale, they said we were enabling you. They said this was our problem too. I’m not going to send you any money. I want to, I do . . . but your mother . . . We just can’t.”
“Let me talk to her.”
“She won’t talk to you, Rylee. If you want to talk to her, you got to come back home.”
“Daddy.”
“We will always be here. If you need to talk. If you need to come home. But we can’t . . . You did this to yourself. We loved you, we trusted you, we sent you whatever you asked for, and all of it . . . you took this family . . . you took this family and turned it into something . . . It’s all bullshit, Rylee, it’s all bullshit. Nobody’s happy now. If you want to come home, we’ll be here. I promise we will. But if you want to stay out there, then you got to be on your own.”
The girl slammed down the phone, her eyes glossy with tears. She wiped her face with the corner of her sleeve, the old lady behind the counter asking if everything was okay. She nodded and saw the sign on the top of the counter. It was a dollar to visit the museum and she paid it with the handful of dimes, nickels, and pennies still in her purse. She walked down a hallway demarcated by velvet ropes and came upon the first exhibit which featured Hank Williams, his lean face emaciated, the flesh the same color and texture as a corpse. The figure’s fingers were overly long, as gravity and time had both done a number on them, the digits looking more like melting candles. There was a layer of dust over everything, his guitar and blue suit looking like they had been stolen from a tomb. It made her think of her geegaw for some reason, and she realized if he died it would be her fault. She had broken his heart and the heart of everyone who had ever bothered to love her one too many times. She had taken his money once again, and now, now there was no way she could ever go back home.
She stared at the figure awhile longer, leaning against the red velvet rope, passing Johnny Cash—her daddy’s favorite—then George Jones, Charlie Rich, Minnie Pearl and her unassailable price tag, the whole cast of Hee Haw done up in wax, and around a corner, Barbara Mandrell and her two sisters. Then she came to Ernest Tubb, who was decapitated, the sign on the exhibit reading, Under Repairs. There was something about the shape of the figure standing there, missing its head, the sight of it strangely unnerving, the lapels of his suit and shoulders forming an empty plane above which was only darkness, only black. The room was silent except for a distant hiss—the sound of traffic passing by on the interstate outside—and as she leaned forward, she felt a tremor run through her. The girl suddenly knew what she was staring at, though she could not name it at first: she finally realized it was the permanently occluded face of death, whose death she did not know—hers, her grandfather’s, someone she loved, she wasn’t sure—only that it was death before her now, and death behind too, death all around. If that man Rick West found her, he would kill her. She was sure of it. All she could do was think to run, as running was all she had ever known or done.
* * *
As they drove, the grandfather rested his head against the passenger-side window, daydreaming. He saw himself walking in the dark, aged twenty-seven, stiff in civilian clothes, looking up at Deedee Calbert standing on her front gallery, at her bare white neck; then he turned and saw the pickup, his father’s pickup, shipyard blue. He took one step toward it and saw himself inside. He was inside the truck now and there was a girl before him and the girl was in his arms and he was reaching behind her, his hands searching beneath the tight yellow sweater for the clasp of her brassiere. For the life of him he could not get it undone. Overseas, the Korean girls did everything. Here, in the front seat of the pickup, he was all thumbs. He realized he had never in his life tried to unsnap a bra on his own. The girl was being patient, which he took as a kindness. He could feel her heated mouth against his neck, her arms draped stiffly around his shoulders, as if she were holding her breath, waiting for him to get the brassiere off, but he was having no luck.
The girl smiled, a smudge of pink lipstick along the corner of her mouth. She folded her right arm back, and it was this moment—with her thin right arm turned behind her like a bird wing, and a partly amused grin on her lips, her forehead pressed up against his, rolling her eyes and saying, “You can’t tell me you never done this before,” unhitching the pale, rigid garment with one deft movement, laughing, the laugh a shape against his lips—the one moment where he fell crashing into love. The film played before them on the gigantic screen, the other cars and trucks parked in close vicinity, rows and rows of steamed windshields, couples in similar moments of candor, the Western Silver Lode going mostly unseen, Jim fighting to remember he was not overseas, knowing the girl would not want to see him again if he did what he wanted to do, his hand creeping up the girl’s goose-bitten thigh, brushing the fringe of her skirt, making its way upon her stockings, struggling at the garter there, the girl not pushing his hand away but not making any kind of sound either, him struggling to get his pants unbuckled, the oily, perfumed smell of her hair reminding him of the girls over there, what had they done to him, how they made him uncouth, unchristian—and then something went wrong, the feel of her breasts too much or the fuzzy fabric of her sweater, him not getting his pants off in time, something which had happened a few times with the girls over in Korea, him going slack now, burying his face in her hair, and then, for no good reason, absolutely no reason at all, him seeing Stan’s face—lying there in the mud, eyes searching the leaves for a familiar color, a familiar shape, dead, dead, dead—Jim feeling like a child then, muffling tears into the girl’s hair, sq
ueezing her harder than he knew he ought to—knowing no girl worth her salt would bother to see him ever again—and here he was, with a girl from church, a girl his mother had called up for him, an American girl, and he was moaning, the white flash of Stan’s face still rising before his eyes, Deedee’s cheek against his cheek, and then the faint words that ricocheted in his ears, “It’s okay. It’s okay,” she said. “Shush, shush. It’s okay.”
To see her like that again. What I would give.
The boy asked him a question. The grandfather turned, unsure of what had been asked.
“Which is why I don’t know if there’s a heaven,” the boy said, serious, small hands gripping the steering wheel.
The grandfather nodded once and thought, Not a place, and then, but a person, a fragment of an hour.
* * *
Rick’s left eye was tacky with blood, his head echoing, thrumming like a jukebox that had been dropped down a mine shaft, as he drove along the breakdown lane of the highway, searching the leafy woods along the side of the road for any sign, any flash of gray or white. Before him was a thick forest, and far beyond the rearview, more of the same. Behind the steering wheel, his fingers gummed up with blood; he realized it might be easier to just drive off now, to forget the horse, the girl, old man Bolan and his job, to get as much distance between him and anything else that might happen. Then he remembered that old son of a bitch’s rage, the look in Bolan’s dyspeptic face, how—propped up by a legion of pillows and afghans—he would receive the news of the missing horse and the missing girl and Rick himself, and would, in his inestimable rancor, assume he had been cheated. It would be this assumption, this old Texan and his unvanquished sense of honor and valor, that would cost Rick West his freedom or his life, for as far as everybody in East Texas knew, the old man was not one to be cheated—not in business nor horse deals nor any other quarter. He would call the Texas Rangers himself, or hire someone, someone with the ferocity of the local Mexican drug cabal, a group originally from Mexico City whom the old man had gotten friendly with—renting out his lumber trucks to the traffickers for their state-to-state distribution—no, if he burned the old man, the old man would issue his revenge, even with his final, foggy breath, and that, that was no way to live, on the run, as he once had, leaving Fannie in this wasting little town five or six years back. No. What he had to do was to find the horse and get his eye to quit bleeding. He took the next exit off the highway and cruised slowly past the muted colors and overcrowded structures of nameless motels, of failing auto dealerships, of row houses too worn for welcome mats, each of these reiterations of the same dreary dream, taking shape outside the bleary windshield. It would be nothing to spot a fine horse in a shithole such as this.
* * *
In the front of the age-old Winn-Dixie, its white facade withered and peeling, there were two children riding the mechanical carousel, a boy and girl, brother and sister, the boy on a green frog, the girl on a silver pony. “Again,” the little girl kept saying. The mother, wanting to avoid another blowout with her husband—who was busy spending Saturday afternoon in bed trying to get sober—decided to take as much time with the grocery shopping as possible. She searched through her purse, found another fifty cents, and slipped the coins into the machine, the two children galloping on with joy, their faces pink with excitement. The mother lit a menthol cigarette and wondered if she ought to call her sister. Deb always had an extra room. She held up a tentative finger to her sore face, thinking on it. Her left eye was turning blue-black, and no matter how much makeup she used, it was obvious what it was. She sighed, took a long drag on her menthol, and saw something moving fast between the rows and rows of parked cars, something fearsome and unequivocal, like a vision, insistent in its own opulence. She turned and stared at it full-on, a white horse, unsaddled, unbridled, clambering directly across the Winn-Dixie parking lot at a steady bolt, its hooves striking the pavement with a metallic ring. The children gaped, all three of them, this small forlorn family, for a moment at least, feeling blessed.
* * *
It did not matter if she was lost: the important thing was to keep moving. Anyway, it was better than just standing around waiting to get killed. The girl Rylee had thrown her gold high heels into a gutter a few miles back, finding it easier to go barefoot. Then she found a phone booth, searching for the bus station’s address, tearing the soft yellow page from its binding. The bus stop was on Charlotte Avenue, somewhere on the other side of town. Already the sky had started to go dark. She walked on, sure she could feel the black pickup pulling beside her.
About seven miles from the bus stop, the girl stopped tumbling forward on her bare feet and remembered she was broke. She had no money and nothing on her worth anything. She had pawned whatever jewelry she had back in Arkansas and that asshole Brian had pocketed the small roll of bills they had gotten for it. She did not think she could do what she knew she might have to for the bus fare, though she had done all sorts of things in the past, as recently as a few days ago with the dealer they had met in Marked Tree, the old biker with prison tattoos and sun-spotted hands, who, at once, decided Rylee would be part of the transaction. He had been in two different federal institutions, or so he claimed, not bothering to take off his pants. When he placed his pockmarked hands on her bare shoulders, the age showing around his wrinkled eyes and mouth, it occurred to her that what was happening was kind of like incest. Moments later, when he ejaculated, it was quick and violent, though what was lasting was not the sensation of his bristly flesh, but the oddly grateful look Brian gave her when he returned to the motel room. He was a fucking coward and did not care for her, which she realized as soon as she met his face.
It seemed she had been surrounded by men her whole life who were weaker than her and she felt she would never get out from under them. So there, in the middle of River Hills Drive, her left foot stiff and scraped pink, she rifled through her purse, then her wallet, then purse again, searching for a rolled-up bill, a flattened twenty. But there was nothing, nothing but a silver dime and two dull pennies, which she had known was all there was before she had even bothered to look. She stared down at the coins, feeling betrayed. The bus ticket was thirty dollars, which was twenty-nine dollars and eighty-eight cents more than she had. She spat at the ground and slung the purse over her shoulder, trudging on.
At the next intersection some black children were playing ghost-in-the-graveyard in the middle of the street. It was a game she faintly remembered: a girl was standing with her eyes closed, hands folded over her face, while the other children ran in all directions, flinging themselves under porches, over railings, underneath parked cars. Rylee stood there smiling dumbly as the young girl counted out loud, “Ninety-five, ninety-six, ninety-seven, ninety-eight, ninety-nine, one hundred!” The girl dropped her hands from her eyes and was startled to see Rylee standing there, her face caked in dirt, smudged makeup across her eyes, a bruise appearing along her chin, barefoot, reaching out desperately from the half-shadows of fallen darkness. “Help me,” Rylee hissed, her mouth cracked and dried, “help me,” to which the young girl screamed, quickly disappearing behind the corner of a small house. Rylee paused there, feeling the exhaustion and emptiness of the last nineteen years of her life, and sat on the front steps of the nearest house, peering down at her dirty toes.
A few minutes later, two girls approached, both under the age of ten and wearing the same handmade outfits—blue dresses sewn from a grubby floral pattern. They walked up to Rylee without suspicion and asked her what was wrong and what had happened to her shoes and where did she live. Rylee stared at them and began to lie, knowing that in doing so they would never trust a white stranger again. She told them she was a country singer who was lost. She told them her tour bus had broken down. She told them back home, in Texas, she had two mansions, each with its own guitar-shaped swimming pool. She told them she had dozens of gold records on her bedroom wall and she could send each of them one if they wanted. She told them she only ne
eded a few cents so she could call her bodyguards who were probably worried out of their minds about her. When the two sisters came back with their mother’s vinyl pocketbook, searching through it for change, Rylee snatched the wallet from the eldest girl’s hands and took off running faster than she ever had. She did not feel shame at that moment, only regret, regret that what she was now running toward was nowhere near as lovely nor welcoming as what she had said.
_________________
As they sped across the Southern city, the boy glancing out the window at the crumbling midcentury facades lined with decay—the square-shaped brick buildings, the once baroque electric signs advertising joints and jukes that no were longer open—he lost track of the one thing his grandfather had warned him of. The truck wound down, its engine having seized up, the vehicle coasting to a stop just past the intersection of Lufton and Gatewood. The boy stared at the wheel as if it had somehow failed him, the grandfather groaning awake with a snort.
“What is it?”
Quentin, unsure, knowing and not yet knowing—not wanting to know, as it would mean he had failed his grandfather—tried the key again and again, the ignition switching on and off, though the truck refused to start.
“I don’t know. It just died on me.”
“It did, did it? When was the last time we filled it?”
“I dunno. While we were on the highway.”
“That was awhile back, wasn’t it?” The grandfather looked the boy directly in the eye.
Quentin glanced down at the gas gauge with a cumbersome feeling of guilt. “It says there’s still some in there, but I guess maybe we ran out.”
The old man reset the white hat upon his head. “Well, son, I’d have to say you’re probably right.”
Embarrassed, the boy asked, “What do we do now?”
“We got to find some gas.”
“There was a gas station a couple blocks back.”