When Horses Had Wings

by Diana Estill

  Momma joined me at the sink. “What’s goin’ on?”

  “I don’t know. Heard the mower stop, so I came to see.”

  Daddy made a couple of attempts to revive what Ricky had obviously killed.

  Ricky sauntered back to the house and opened the kitchen door. Looking down at his feet, he passed behind Momma. Then he halted and stood next to me.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  Ricky shrugged. “I dunno. Bad repairman, I guess.”

  “I can’t be-lieve after all he’s spent, that thing won’t run,” Momma said, still watching Daddy yanking out his guts as he tried to restart that machine.

  I turned back toward the window for further entertainment. Daddy had ceased his futile resuscitation efforts and looked as though he’d been beaten by the class wimp; though in reality, it had been his thirteen-year-old son.

  Behind Momma’s back, I gave Ricky the thumbs-up signal. At that moment, I was proud to be his sister. Maybe, I considered, I ought to quit telling him that he’d been adopted.

  Whack! Wham! Wham! With a sledgehammer, Daddy beat the lawnmower. Over and over he swung at it. I watched until he’d flattened the innocent machinery into something unrecognizable.

  “Jesse? Jesse! What are you doing?” Momma screamed through the single-paned glass.

  Ricky and I pressed in close to enjoy the view.

  Exhausted and near a heat stroke, Daddy had finished the job. He’d put the beast down. Ambling into the garage, he put away his weapon. With no further fanfare, he opened the kitchen door and stared into three anxious faces. As if a sledgehammer might be the standard tool used to regulate lawnmower engines, he passed behind us offering a two-word explanation. “Needed calibrating.”

  Ricky’s eyes widened, Momma shook her head, and I made a mental note: when Daddy was provoked, nobody, not even Momma, could guess his limits.

  SEVEN

  After that lawnmower incident, perhaps Daddy’s sudden shift toward destruction shouldn’t have come as a major surprise. But it took Momma a good half-hour before she thought to inspect the bureau drawer where Daddy kept his gun. I heard her shriek. “Dear Lord, he’s taken the pistol with him! We’ve got to do something!” She wrung her hands and paced. “Ricky, you stay here in case he comes back and wonders where we’ve gone.” Next, she turned to me. “Renee, get up from here, right now. You got him into this. The least you can do is help me get him out.”

  I got him into this? Like I’d told him to leave or had hired him to shoot my husband. All I’d wanted was for someone to protect me. And that wasn’t supposed to have required firearms.

  “What do you want me to tell him if he comes back?” Ricky asked. His voice quivered, mouth hung slack. “I want to go with you. Don’t make me stay here. Let me go, too.”

  “No. Somebody has to be here if he comes home,” Momma insisted. “I need Renee to help me find Kenny’s momma’s place.”

  “Neta Sue’s?” I couldn’t imagine why we’d look for Daddy there.

  Momma gave me a curious look. “Why sure. Where else?”

  How about over at Kenny’s worthless friends’ houses? Or down by the gravel pits, where Kenny went to shoot snakes and drink beer? I thought those questions, but didn’t offer up the suggestions because Momma seemed hell-bent on heading to Neta Sue’s. I half-hoped Kenny was sitting someplace out of harm’s way. I didn’t want him to get hurt. But I surely didn’t want him to injure me or my daddy either. Right then, I thought of Sean. Thankfully, he was still in the hospital, snuggled in blue flannel, and sleeping in his see-through bed. Despite the drama unfolding, his world remained safe. If only I could have been equally as fortunate.

  Momma skittered about, searching for something, before she found her car keys hanging on a hook.

  I sank deeper into my chair.

  “Get up,” she commanded. “We’ve got to go.”

  Ricky sulked and opened a bag of potato chips.

  I rose from my seat at half-speed, none too anxious to follow Momma. “Save yourself, now,” I cautioned Ricky. “Get out a dictionary and look up the word ‘condom.’”

  ~

  By the time Momma had driven cross-county, the sun had set. It was going to be a clear night, a cloudless one. Already a full moon had risen. A jackrabbit crossed the road in front of us. Momma swerved to miss it, shouting, “Move! Dern you.” She never ceased to amuse me with her substitute words for ‘damn.’ It seemed as if she thought the heavens might part and brimstone rain down if she ever uttered a curse word.

  “Let’s go by the duplex, first,” I said, trying every way I could think of to delay the inevitable catfight between my momma and Kenny’s. Momma was no match for Neta Sue, who’d picked her teeth with women bigger than Momma. She could cuss out the postman, argue with the power company, and threaten her paper boy, all in one day. Before breakfast. Nothing civilized was going to come out of that old sow’s mouth. And I could just hear Momma saying something back to her, like, “Dang it. You can’t talk to me that way.”

  “You think Kenny might have come home?” Momma asked. She hooked a left and started down a country road, one that would take us in the right direction—farther away from Neta Sue’s house.

  I shrugged. “He might have.”

  If he was there, maybe I’d tell Momma to drop me off and I’d take whatever consequences I needed to suffer to protect Daddy from pulling twenty years in Huntsville State Prison. Suddenly, I was no longer my primary concern. One person’s beating seemed but a small price to pay for sparing a whole family from ruin.

  I didn’t want to fight. I only wanted to go home, crawl into bed, and pull the covers over my head. Why had I called my parents into the middle of all this? What had I expected them to do? Rescue me from my own stupidity? At that point, I thought if we could all survive the night, that would suit me fine. And if we could manage to avoid Neta Sue’s polecat personality, so much the better.

  ~

  The dirt driveway in front of our duplex sat empty. All the lights in the house remained out. Granny Henderson sat in her porch swing, blissfully waving and no doubt silently wondering why in tarnation we’d driven by without stopping. Momma or I might have asked her if she’d seen Kenny. Certainly she would have told us if she had. That was the whole reason she sat out there in the first place—to see what was going on in other people’s lives, whether or not she knew them. But the way I had it figured, Granny wouldn’t understand why I’d called Momma to escape Kenny, and then asked her to drive me around trying to find him.

  Momma made a U-turn in the Rambler. “He’s at his momma’s. I’m sure that’s where he went.” Now we were heading straight for disaster.

  “What makes you think he’d run to his momma’s house?” I asked.

  “Because he’s a momma’s boy.” She looked like an elementary school teacher conducting class. “He wants to act like a child. So he’ll go there. For sympathy.”

  “Sympathy? Why would he need sympathy? I’m the one who’s just had a baby. I’m the one who’s being treated like dirt here.”

  Momma hesitated before she answered. “He’s scared, Renee Ann. And he doesn’t know how to show it. He’s frightened by all the responsibilities he’s taken on. He’s not sure he’s man enough to handle ‘em.”

  “Hmph. He isn’t.” I stared out the window and into the darkness.

  “Then you got to be strong enough for both of you. ‘Cause ready or not, you two have a child now. That means you can’t be children yourselves, anymore.” Momma turned into Neta Sue’s driveway and switched off the headlights.

  Neta Sue’s garage door was closed. Normally, she left it open. The lights were on inside her living room, and the blue tint of the television flickered against the windows. She was up all right. More like, lying in wait.

  Momma pushed open her door. “You comin’?”

  “Where?”

  “Up to the door. Where do you think?”

  “But he’s not here, Momma. Look.�
�� I pointed to the empty driveway. “His car isn’t here.”

  Momma wasn’t listening. She climbed out of the station wagon. A hand on one hip, Momma seemed determined to enter the lion’s den. “I got something to say to her, either way. You comin’ or not?”

  I couldn’t say I was exactly roaring to join Momma on that stoop. But then I realized I couldn’t let her go alone. The whole episode had been my fault. Though it would have been smart to dodge Neta Sue at any time of day or night, I needed to run interference for my naive parent.

  Momma rang Neta Sue’s doorbell while I struggled to catch up to her. The entry door opened, rattling the “This Home Protected by Smith & Wesson” sign Neta Sue had posted beneath the peephole.

  “Why, what are you two doing here?” Neta Sue asked.

  Wondering the same thing, I looked at Momma and awaited her response.

  “I’m here about your son,” Momma began. “It seems he’s caused quite a ruckus tonight.”

  Neta Sue stood between her entry and outer storm door and listened, refusing to invite us inside. Not that we would have accepted if she’d offered. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “I haven’t seen or talked to Kenny today. I been up at the hospital holding my grandbaby.” She gave a smug smile. “Noticed none of your people were there. Poor little thing.” She made a sad face. “Nobody but those ol’ nurses to love on ‘im.”

  “Well, I don’t know when you were there,” Momma said, taking the detour, her tone now defensive. She clutched her handbag tight. “But we were there until noon, when we checked Renee out and brought her home. Seems that’s when all the trouble started.”

  Neta Sue poked at her up-do, one that appeared permanent. She claimed her beauty parlor reset it each week, but I felt sure it was a hairpiece. No one, not even Kenny, had seen her with her hair down. With all her makeup removed and that teased-up hairstyle of hers, until she opened her mouth she could pass for a Pentecostal. “I’ve been lookin’ at my show…” She gestured to something behind her. “So like I said, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m not here to pick a fight with you,” Momma said. “I came to tell you that, if you care about your son the way I care about Renee, you’ll tell him to settle down before somebody gets hurt.”

  “I beg your pardon! You don’t threaten me… or my son, for that matter! Who do you think you are, coming here, bothering me with your girl’s problems?” Neta Sue’s face turned two shades darker. She blurted her words so fast that a spray of spittle flung onto the glass in front of her. “If she—” She pointed her index finger like a weapon at me. “—can’t keep her husband happy, it ain’t none of my fault.”

  Momma gasped. For a second, I thought she might burst into tears. Eventually, she fired back. “This isn’t about keeping Kenny happy. It’s about keeping Kenny alive and my husband out of jail.” Momma adjusted her eyeglasses and attempted to look mean, but she was no Dirty Harry.

  “Jesse’s out there, right now, looking for Kenny. And he’s got a gun,” Momma warned. “All I’m asking is for you to tell Kenny to stop threatening Renee so her daddy won’t lose his temper and do something terrible.”

  Neta Sue grinned. “Oh, I assure you there’s nothing to worry about. Kenny can take care of hisself, and Jesse, too, if need be. He’s a Murphy. And us Murphys don’t take shit off nobody.” She took a step back. “You two need to get along now and worry about yourselves. Me and Kenny’ll be fine.” She gave out a cackle and shut the door in our faces. From inside the house, I heard what could have been a TV sitcom laugh track, but it sounded more like Kenny’s guffaws.

  Steering toward home, Momma cried the kind of tears a hurt toddler might shed. “I can’t believe you just stood there and let her talk to me that way.” She said it as though it had been my role to shield her. But I’d been too busy sizing up the odds, wondering whether Kenny’s car was inside Neta Sue’s garage, questioning if Daddy had maybe sought to gun down the wrong person.

  “What did you expect me to say?”

  “I don’t know. But you could’ve said something.”

  Up ahead, maybe twenty yards, about where that jackrabbit had crossed our path earlier, I could see the Rambler’s headlamps reflecting off a parked car. “Hey, isn’t that Daddy’s Volkswagen?”

  Momma braked to a stop. “It sure is. Why would he be here? There’s nothing out here.”

  Momma eased her car in front of the other vehicle, and then we both exited to search for clues: no keys in the ignition, windows up, doors locked. Daddy’s ball cap rested on the passenger seat, next to his Bible. It looked as if he’d abandoned the Bug.

  “Sweet Jesus, I hope he’s okay,” Momma said.

  “Maybe we should check home before we worry. He could have broken down.” I wanted to believe that, wanted desperately to have the night end peacefully because I’d lost my last nerve on Neta Sue’s doorstep.

  First, Kenny had expected me to be a magician. Then Daddy had tried to turn me into a widow. And Momma had wanted me to act as her therapist while running a reconnaissance mission with her. All I wanted was to feel okay for ten seconds. Hard to imagine that, a mere twenty-four hours earlier, I’d been staring at a revolving bank sign, wondering what tomorrow would bring, and expecting something wonderful.

  ~

  We found Daddy in front of an empty fireplace sitting in a chair he’d pulled from the dining room table. A jolt shot through me when I saw him there with a pistol in his lap.

  Momma rushed to his side. “Jesse? Jesse? Jesse, please tell me you didn’t fire that gun.” She looked up at the ceiling. “Dear God, I can’t bear this. Jesse?”

  Daddy raised his head. “I fired it. Hit a car.”

  Momma fanned her face with her hands.

  “Engine needed calibrating.” And then, for no apparent reason, he burst into laughter. “By golly, if that old Bug didn’t give me up. I couldn’t get her started to save nothin’. Couldn’t see out there on that dark road, neither. Flashlight batteries had burnt out.”

  “So you shot the Bug?” Momma asked, already aware of the answer.

  “I didn’t even know you had a pistol—” Ricky chimed.

  “And you can forget you ever saw it,” Daddy said.

  “You’d have shot him, Daddy?” I was more concerned about his intentions than his temper fit with a Volkswagen. “He’s my husband. I mean…” I snared my purse from the kitchen table. “I’m sorry. I never meant...I shouldn’t have called you.”

  Daddy carried the pistol to the kitchen countertop and set it down. He let out a sigh. “You should have told me sooner so I could’ve put a stop to it.”

  Momma studied the weapon. “With a gun? Jesse Goodchild, do you mean you’d let that man damn your soul to Hell?”

  “He’s my husband. This...I need to go.” I eased toward the back door hoping Momma would rise to the opportunity and return me to my original doom.

  Daddy stepped toward me. “I’ll take you home.”

  I waved him off. “I can’t be responsible for you getting into a fight. I’m sick of fighting.”

  Daddy put his arm around my shoulders. “Not going to be no fighting. I’ll take you home. I need to check on the Bug, anyway.”

  ~

  “I’m coming in with you,” Daddy said, when he witnessed Kenny’s car parked in the dirt drive.

  I shook my head, but Daddy ignored me.

  “Just want to be sure everything’s okay before I leave. No trouble. I promise.”

  When Kenny saw me and Daddy, he raised his Naugahyde throne upright. “Where you been?” he asked, as though I’d failed to obtain a pass for temporary leave.

  “Went for a visit.” My eyes dared him to say more in front of Daddy.

  “Ever hear of leavin’ a note?”

  Daddy removed his feed store cap and approached Kenny. “Look here, son. I know y’all been having marital problems. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to settle differences.” With
his calloused fingers, he squeezed the rim of his hat.

  Kenny kept his seat, refusing Daddy any respect. “Yeah? What’s the right way? Call your daddy?”

  His jaw pulsing, Daddy stared down at him. “Any man who’d strike a woman is a lowlife.”

  “I ain’t never hit her. She’s a liar.”

  I tugged on Daddy’s free arm. “Kenny’s never hit me. I never said he’d hit me.”

  Daddy scrutinized me. “Shoving don’t count?”

  I tried to think if it did. Were there different degrees of violence? Did I need to suffer a black eye or broken bone before I could call Kenny a horrible husband?

  “Well, what do you call a man who cheats?” Kenny asked. “One that slips off to the motel with a girlfriend who drives a better car than he does?”

  In a roundabout way, Kenny appeared to be asking questions similar to the ones in my head. I understood him to be suggesting how much worse some guys behave. Someone more astute and less concerned for her safety might have connected the dots differently. But I didn’t.

  “It’s late,” Daddy said. “I’m going to leave you two alone to patch things up.”

  For the moment, Kenny had escaped Daddy’s ire. However, it hadn’t felt like the hand of God in action. More like His little pinky, maybe.

  EIGHT

  Granny Henderson had a way of prying into family matters as innocently as if she’d asked for the time. “It ain’t none of my business, but if you wanna talk about it, you can.” She pushed her good foot hard against the cement, setting her porch swing in motion. The bench seat’s faded wood peeked through the final remains of cracked, cheap paint. Granny searched the pockets of her floral-print apron for a tissue. Finding one, she set it in her lap as if to suggest one of us might soon need it.