by Billie Letts
“I told you I’d work for tips.”
“Well, at least let me feed you. I can sure as hell afford to do that.”
“I’ve already cleaned the grill,” MollyO said.
“That’s okay. I’m not hungry.”
Caney said, “You haven’t had a bite since you got here.” Then he pushed a package wrapped in foil across the counter to Vena. “I fixed you a couple of ham-and-cheese sandwiches.”
“Thanks.”
“How about a cup of coffee?” Caney offered.
“Just emptied the pot,” MollyO said.
“I’ve got to go, anyway.”
“You want a Coke?” Caney asked. “A bottle of beer?”
Vena shook her head. “I’ll just go get the dog,” she said as she turned and walked away.
Earlier in the day, right after her first customers left, Vena had settled the dog in a small utility room next to the kitchen. Each time she’d checked, the dog was asleep. But she’d had to wake it twice—once for the medicine and again when she replaced the soiled pad inside the blanket.
Now, though, the dog was awake, and as Vena eased it into a cardboard box she’d found behind the cafe, it began to whimper.
“It’s okay,” she said as she shouldered her duffel bag and cradled the box beneath her arm. “Don’t be scared.”
“How’s she doing?” Caney asked when Vena came from the back.
“Not so good.”
“You think she’d eat some ground beef?”
“No. She couldn’t handle that right now.”
“How about—”
“I’ve got something for her.”
Vena stuffed the sandwiches inside her bag while she headed for the door.
“Why don’t you let MollyO give you a ride?” Caney said. Then, to MollyO, “You’re about ready to leave, aren’t you?”
“Not yet. I’ve still got a few more things to do.”
“I’ll walk.” Vena said. “It’s not that far.”
“Okay.” Caney shrugged. “I guess we’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Sure.” Then, as she was closing the door, Vena said good-bye.
Caney, rolling his chair to the window, watched her as she crossed the parking lot. She moved quickly, away from the light, like an animal sensing safety in the cover of darkness.
MollyO finally broke the silence when she picked up the menus and tapped them against the counter until they fell evenly, between her fingers, into a neat stack. But Caney, undistracted, continued to stare out the window even after Vena had disappeared into the night.
“Well,” MollyO said, her voice tinged with relief, “we’ve seen the last of that one.”
“You don’t think she’ll be back?” Caney asked, still peering into the shadows edging the road.
“Not if we’re lucky.”
Caney turned then, studying MollyO’s face. “What’s going on with you, huh?”
“With me?”
“Yeah. You’ve been pissed since she walked in. I don’t get it.”
“No.” MollyO slapped the menus onto the counter, sending most of them flying to the floor. “Apparently you don’t.”
“Then why don’t you tell me.”
“She’s trouble, Caney. Real trouble.”
“She didn’t cause me any trouble, but she’s damned sure got you riled up. What I don’t know is why.”
“Why?” MollyO pulled off her apron, jerking at ties and clawing at straps like a woman coming out of a strait-jacket. “Because she’s a liar and a thief.”
“What are you talking about?”
“When Wilma asked her where she was living—”
“Oh, hell. Wilma was snooping around, hoping to make her ten percent on one of those cracker box apartments she rents out.”
“The point is, she told Wilma she’d found a place west of town.”
“So?”
“ ’Case you didn’t know it,” MollyO said, pointing in the direction Vena had taken, “that’s east.”
“Aw, she probably just got turned around.”
“Her kind don’t get turned around.” MollyO worked at a knot in one of her apron strings. “Woman like that, she always knows exactly where she’s going.”
“Maybe she needed something from the Texaco. She might’ve decided to walk down there before she went home.”
“The Texaco?” MollyO shook her head at the suggestion. “What for? A tank of gas?”
“Hell, I don’t know. Maybe she went to meet her boyfriend. Maybe she went to look for another job. A real job.”
“But doesn’t it seem fishy to you, her saying she lived west, then striking out east? Doesn’t that make you just the least bit suspicious?”
“Nope. But then I’m not the suspicious type.”
“Well, you’d better be glad one of us is, ’cause if I hadn’t had my eyes open, which you obviously did not, then she would’ve walked out of here with more than a candle.”
“That’s what this is about? A damned candle?”
“Caney, a thief is a thief. If she’ll take one thing, then she’ll take another.”
“Yeah, you’re right. We’d better count the pickles.”
“Listen. If she walked in here with a gun and said, ‘This is a stickup,’ then—”
“Don’t make any sudden moves,” Caney said as he shaped his hand into a pistol, pointing it at MollyO. “Just hand over your candle.”
MollyO waved his hand away, a gesture emphasizing her seriousness. “If she said, ‘Empty that cash register,’ it wouldn’t matter whether she made off with a dollar or a thousand. She’d still be a thief.”
Then, with the posture of an attorney winding up her closing argument, MollyO squared her shoulders, offered her hands, palms up, and said, “In this case, we were lucky. All she got away with was a candle.”
“Well, since she didn’t hold us up at gunpoint, how did she manage to make off with our candle?”
“She snatched it out of the cabinet in the utility room.”
“MollyO, we’ve used those candles for years. You drag them out every time the electricity goes out.”
“That don’t matter, Caney.”
“They’re nothing but nubbins now. Hell, some aren’t as long as my thumb.”
“What’s important here is that she took what didn’t belong to her.”
“And how do you know? Did you see her take it?”
“No, but—”
“Did you have them counted?”
MollyO shook her head. “I saw it in that bag she carries.”
“Jesus Christ.” Caney shook the last cigarette from the pack he’d opened that morning. “I can’t believe you went through her stuff.”
“I didn’t go through it. I just unzipped it and looked inside. It was right there on top.”
Caney crushed the empty Camel package, then hurled it against the wall.
“Maybe I’m not as trusting as you are, Caney, but—”
“Look. The woman is working for nothing, wouldn’t even eat a meal. She worked seven, eight hours, turned some business and—”
“Oh, honey.” MollyO brushed Caney’s hair away from his forehead like a mother forgiving a misguided child. “She just took the business from in here. If she hadn’t got to them out there, they would’ve come inside.”
“I don’t know about that.” Caney pulled back, out of MollyO’s reach, opened the cash register and began pulling out bills. “I’d say we ran thirty or thirty-five dollars over most Thursdays.”
“Well, it’s neither here nor there now, is it?”
“How’s that?”
“She left here headed for the interstate. Chances are she’s already cozied up next to the fool who picked her up.” MollyO took the bills from Caney’s hand and stuffed them inside a bank bag. “By this time tomorrow night, she’ll be God knows where, carrying that pitiful dog around until she finds someone else who’ll give her a handout.”
“I didn’t give her a damned thin
g.”
“And in case you didn’t notice, she didn’t say ‘good night.’ She said ‘good-bye.’ ”
“That doesn’t mean—”
“Trust me, Caney. We’ve seen the last of Miss Vena Takes Horse.”
“I don’t know,” Caney said, once again staring out into the night. “I think she’ll be back.”
Chapter Seven
THE SCHOOL BUS sat at the far edge of a ravine less than a quarter mile behind the Honk. Vena had spotted it earlier in the day while she was out back, getting a box for the dog. She’d wanted to get a closer look, see what condition the bus was in, but when she saw MollyO watching her from the kitchen, she decided to wait until the cafe closed, hoping the night would shield her from view.
She followed the road until it curved away from the Honk before she cut back and crossed an open field. As she crawled through a barbed-wire fence to reach the ravine, she heard a horse snuffle from somewhere nearby.
From what she could tell, the bus hadn’t been moved for years. Scrub brush had grown up to the fenders, and trumpet vines snaked over the hood and grille. A couple of windows near the front were cracked, but she didn’t see any broken ones, so she supposed the inside might be dry. Still, she didn’t expect much.
She hadn’t been inside a school bus since she was eleven, when she whipped Braz Iker, a fight that left her facing an angry principal who suspended her bus privileges for a week, a suspension she considered to be a reprieve rather than a punishment. After that, she and Helen never rode the bus again, preferring instead to hitch rides when they could catch them and to walk when they couldn’t.
But the fight on the bus wasn’t the only time Vena and Braz had tangled.
Their first confrontation took place when Vena was in the third grade, the day he called Helen a blanket ass, laughed at her braids and made her cry, an experience which prompted Vena to stab him with a pencil. The skirmish that ensued left Vena with a swollen lip and sprained ankle.
Then, having discovered his power over the Takes Horse sisters, Braz never passed up a chance to get to them.
When he taunted Helen for wearing shoes bought for a quarter at his cousin’s yard sale, Vena wrestled him to the floor of the bus where he punched her in the stomach and made her throw up. When he ripped open Helen’s lunch sack and produced what he claimed was a buffalo sandwich, Vena shoved him down the steps of the cafeteria, for which she paid with a black eye. And when he fooled Helen into believing she’d been invited to a Halloween party given by one of the town girls, Vena hit him in the neck with a rock, a lucky throw for which Braz retaliated by repeatedly slamming her head against the jungle gym.
Though she always came away from such confrontations bruised and bloody, she knew Helen suffered more… Helen, who chopped off her braid and flung her yard sale shoes into an abandoned well; Helen, who went hungry at lunch rather than bring a bologna sandwich from home; and Helen, who cried herself to sleep because she was the only girl in her class not invited to a Halloween party.
But Vena was tough in a way that Helen would never be, tough enough to take on a boy two years older and thirty pounds heavier than she was, the boy she finally whipped the day after her mother was first taken away to the state asylum.
Vena was sure that the news about her mother would have spread quickly after she was found mutilating herself in the Indian church, strapped into a straitjacket and hauled away by an ambulance with sirens blaring. Still, she thought that the Iker family might not have heard since they lived ten miles out on the river road.
But even before she and Helen slid into seats near the back of the bus, Braz started chanting, “Crazy old Indian, gone to the loony bin.”
Helen covered her ears and, screaming, began rocking back and forth while Vena hurtled over two rows of seats to get to Braz, then, powered by fury, pummeled him until his face was a mass of welts and cuts and his front tooth was sliding down his chin in a stream of blood.
But that had been a lifetime ago, a time when Vena still believed she could protect Helen from anything.
Now, as she picked her way across the ravine, she wished for the innocence of her eleven-year-old self, the girl who was just beginning to suspect that a bullying white boy was not the worst life would offer.
Before she could pry the doors apart far enough to squeeze through, she smelled the heavy odor of mice and mildew. When she stepped into the gloom and chill of the stairwell, her flesh roughened with goose bumps.
She moved slowly, her face snagging cobwebs as she felt her way to the aisle. After she jostled her things onto a seat in the front, she lit a match, then held the flame over the box.
“How you doing, girl?” Vena whispered.
The dog lifted her face to the light, her eyes yellow in the reflection of the flame. A moment later, energy spent, her head sank back into the folds of the blanket.
Vena lit the candle she’d taken from Caney’s cafe, then moved tentatively down the aisle. There was little to see—a man’s well-worn western boot, a thermos missing its lid, a couple of paperback books and an unopened can of motor oil.
But in the back of the bus, Vena found a few surprises.
The last two rows of seats had been removed to make room for a thin mattress, the striped ticking stained and dotted with mouse droppings. And heaped in the corner, a tangle of horse blankets souring with mold.
Not much, she thought, but more than she had hoped for. She did, after all, have a bed, a dry place to sleep and silence—an improvement over the motel in Kansas City where she stayed while the dog was at the vet’s.
She’d paid fourteen dollars a night for an airless room with bloodstains on the carpet, a pillow that smelled of soured breath and a crap game in the next room, dice crick-cracking from the time she checked in until she left three days later.
The motel did, however, provide a few luxuries not available in the bus, luxuries like heat, lights and water.
But Vena had greater regrets to deal with than the absence of utilities.
She wrestled the mattress up, pounded it as free of dust as she could, then flipped it over. As it whumped to the floor, a family of field mice scurried away, tiny gray immigrants heading for safer territory.
As soon as Vena shook out the blankets and spread them over the mattress, she moved herself and the dog into their new one-bed efficiency. Then, though she was feeling a little empty, she put aside Caney’s sandwiches for later. She could wait, but the dog couldn’t.
She opened the frayed denim pouch containing antibiotics, gauze pads, cotton balls and plastic liners, all given without charge by the vet in Kansas City.
Dr. Anna, a painfully thin woman who spoke with a quick German accent, had said little to Vena, but she never stopped speaking to the dog. As she set up for the transfusion and got an IV started, she praised the dog for her bravery; while she administered the anesthesia, she explained the procedure; when she removed the tourniquet Vena had applied, she offered encouragement. Even after the animal was sedated and beyond hearing, Dr. Anna continued to converse with her patient, her voice filled with apology as she sawed away what was left of splintered bone.
Three days later, when Vena came to pick up the dog and settle the bill, she put forty-six dollars on the counter—two folded twenties and six crumpled ones. But Dr. Anna had taken only the twenties, then marked the bill paid in full, with nothing in her expression to suggest she was losing money, nothing in her manner to hint at rebuke.
Then Vena had spent more than four dollars of her last six on baby food for the dog and a bottle of aspirin for herself. And though she was almost out of cigarettes, she had decided to hang on to the last of her money.
She’d smoked her last Winston earlier in the evening, just before she left the Honk. By then she’d made a few tips, enough to buy a new pack, but she didn’t. She figured she could survive the night. The dog, however, was another matter.
Vena crushed the antibiotics into powder which she sprinkled into a plastic
bowl she’d brought from the cafe, then poured in a few dollops of baby food.
“Ah,” she said, “tonight you’re lucky. It’s turkey, your favorite.”
After she eased the dog from the box onto her lap, she held the bowl beneath its mouth. The dog took a few laps, then, exhausted, rested its head on Vena’s leg.
“Well, I guess you did the best you could.”
When Vena folded the cover back to tend to its wound, the dog began to tremble.
“Easy, girl. I won’t hurt you.”
After she removed the stained dressing that covered the stump of the amputated leg, Vena cleaned the wound, then covered it with a fresh gauze pad. Next, she cleaned the dog’s hindquarters where it had soiled itself. Finally, she removed the dirty plastic liner and slipped a new one into place.
Finished, she rewrapped the dog, laid it on the mattress and covered them both with the blankets. As the dog warmed against her chest, Vena said, “Don’t you worry about this place. When you’re able, we’ll be on our way.”
A moment later, the dog licked Vena’s hand.
“You’re welcome, lady. You’re very welcome.”
Vena closed her eyes then, inviting sleep, but she was visited, instead, by the voice of a familiar but unwelcomed guest.
Miss Takes Horse? This is Sheriff Jorge Rulfo in Eddy County, New Mexico, and I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you.
Vena started to hum a tuneless melody, hoping the sound would drown out the voice, but she knew better. She’d tried that trick before.
I’m sure sorry I had to be the one to tell you, and especially three weeks late, but we’ve had a tough time tracking you down.
She thought about getting up to go outside, just sit in the chill night air for a while, but she was afraid if she moved, she’d wake the dog, and it had been through enough for one day.
Well, the way it looks, she was living in an abandoned shack out in the Paduca Breaks. Her nearest neighbor, if you can call him that, lived a good four, five miles away… an old hippie, calls himself Wolf. He says your sister might’ve had some mental problems. ’Course, I’m not sure Wolf’s quite right in the head, either.