She was tired of collecting tragedies, and here was another. She had been duped and someone had killed her father, and yet the first instinct she had was to tell Van—whisper it into his shirts, tell it to his knife as it corkscrewed in her ear—as if he hadn’t known.
The note hadn’t felt right in her stomach, like chicken eaten a day past optimal, like a berry you eat off the pasture bushes and suddenly you’re sure you had misidentified it. Of course the handwriting had not been quite right, but she was sixteen, and what people told her became what was true. That B right there, without any humps, just two angry triangles that looked like flags on a mast, perhaps were not flags at all, but more like fangs.
***
“Marlboro Lights, please.” Birdie was stricken by her voice as it left her mouth. She sounded like a toddler, a smoking toddler, but a toddler nonetheless.
“How old you?” The man working the cash register at the corner store was not one she recognized. The corner store was the only place in the county that was open past midnight.
“Eighteen!” Birdie said much too defensively. Gah! She straightened her back to highlight her breasts, which she was sure had grown lately.
“ID,” he said. He took a drag of his cigarette.
She went through the theatrics of digging around in her pockets. “Must’ve left it.” She shrugged.
He shifted from one elbow to the other, settling in for a show. He looked happy about it, some unexpected entertainment on a late night that didn’t involve a high shoplifter or a parking lot knife fight.
“I’m serious,” she said. “I left my license. I just need these. Well, I don’t. I smoke a different brand. But these. They’re for my grandma.”
“Why don’t your grandma buy them, then?”
“It’s a real sad story.” Birdie pulled her pocketknife out of her pocket and carved around in her ear. “She has lost her mind.”
“We all have, baby doll.”
“Then you know what I’m saying!” She looked at him straight on like Van had taught her. The cashier’s eyes were yellow and bulging, old smoke on his clothes, a dirty white polo shirt stained brown with age around the collar. He shook his head in a way that she knew was meant to shame her. He, like the rest of the world, was unmoved by her. She put her pocketknife away.
She wondered why the cigarettes were so important to her all of a sudden, but it was all she could think about. Bad night? You need a cigarette. She learned things from all the television she’d been watching. Also, her father looked eerily similar to the Marlboro Man had the Marlboro Man smiled incessantly. “Look, I just need these,” she said to the cashier. “I need these.”
“And I need a beer,” he said. He straightened up then, done with show. “And you need to buy sumpin’ and get the hell outta here.”
“I’ll buy you a beer! You know…for your trouble.” She pulled out twenty dollars, smacked it on the counter, then rushed to the cooler at the back of the store—only to register the total absence of alcoholic beverages. She had never tried to buy beer before, but the county, of course, was dry. How had the Baptists managed to ruin absolutely everything? They were worse than the hogs. “No beer.” She laughed nervously and walked back to the counter. “I gotta truck full of watermelon though. Best you ever eat. What if I unload a few out front?”
The cashier smirked, real smug-like, Birdie thought, and then he slid the twenty dollars back across the counter to her.
“You aren’t going to sell me any cigarettes, are you?” she said.
“No, I ain’t.”
She nodded slowly and took in another defeat for the day. She flung open the glass door much too hard like some punk movie kid. It was the only power Birdie had, to push open doors.
“I knew your daddy,” he called.
“Oh yeah?” Birdie took her turn looking unimpressed, but she felt her father admonish her for dismissing another person. He was always watching, it seemed. So she tried to contort her face into one that conveyed interest. She turned and leaned her back against the dirty glass door and forced a smile.
“I worked for him a spell. You’s a little thing.” The cashier dropped his hand down toward the ground to show how tall she had been.
“When was that?” Her question was disingenuous. Behind the cashier, an old poster—a cigarette advertisement of a rocket—drew her in. The ad featured a glamorous woman in a bomber jacket behind a cartoon camel launching a rocket. The camel mocked her with his lit cigarette. How long did camels live? Was the camel eighteen? Could the camel have legally bought the cigarettes?
“Awww, I dunno. Don’t matter, don’t it?” He lit his own cigarette.
She realized then that the man was waiting for her to look at him, that he knew when he was being ignored. But the man, unlike her, was much more used to it. She felt Van’s admonishment, the guilt percolate through her.
“Your daddy, he good to us,” the cashier said.
“Oh yeah?” Birdie asked. “Who’s us?”
“Me. All the men nobody gave jobs to. And we nobody. But your daddy…he didn’t think nobody was nobody.” He lifted his mouth and blew out a smoke ring. “Ain’t nobody nobody, I guess.”
Van would have loved the turn of phrase. He would have said it for weeks. She wanted it on his tombstone, but her father didn’t have a grave. Only crabgrass.
“Hey,” he said as Birdie stepped out the door. She looked back, and the man manifested a pack of cigarettes. He flicked his wrist, and a single cigarette miraculously emerged like a finger pointing at her. Camels. “I know it’s not your brand.”
She smiled, embarrassed all of a sudden. She took the cigarette and spun it between her fingers like her father had.
“Thank you,” she said. She sucked on the end, the flavor soaking into her mouth through the dry, dry paper.
***
Birdie should have gone straight home—but she had won something, hadn’t she?—and weren’t small victories like the taste of blood for a certain kind of animal, whetting the appetite? She drove past the corner store and cut the lights as she turned onto Bradley’s road, the truck headlights too bold for the midnight darkness of the side street. Immediately, she could see Bradley’s tiny house lit up, a jaundiced glow from the front picture window, casting an outline on the blue truck parked to the side of the house. She held her breath. Bradley. She drove closer and rolled to a stop in front of the house. She peered into the dark and saw it was a Dodge, not a Ford; gray, not blue. Her brief hopefulness shamed her. Her stupidity hung on like baby teeth that wouldn’t fall out. Of course it couldn’t have been his truck. He didn’t sleep there.
In the front window, a silhouette of a woman bounced in the distance, sashaying through the light behind the dirty glass, and then a man lumbered into the picture, their outlines connected, and though it was close to midnight, Birdie rapped hard on the door.
“Who the hell!” The silhouette slithered to the door, and a woman peaked her head out. She was long-faced and angry-eyed, about a head taller than Birdie even with her shoulders curled forward like wilting paper. Ridden hard, put up wet, Van would have said. Birdie knew immediately it was Bradley’s mother. She could see the hint of him in her features, behind the indignation, behind the exhaust cloud of smoke and wine.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” Birdie said. Her voice was frustratingly small again. “I know it’s late.”
“Well, you are bothering me,” Bradley’s mother said. “What the hell you want?”
“I’m trying to find Bradley.”
“Bradley ain’t here.” The woman tried to close the door, and Birdie stuck her foot in like Mayhill had taught her.
“You’re the one been calling my house all day.”
“I can’t get a hold of him,” Birdie said. “Do you have any idea where he—”
“You need to get the hell off my porch.”
“But do you know where he is? I’m worr—”
&nbs
p; “Do you know where he is?” The woman mocked her, voice pitched high. “That boy’s nineteen.”
“But he lives here,” Birdie said. “He didn’t show up for work, and I was—”
“For work? That’s who you are.” A smile spread across Bradley’s mother’s face because this was a woman who loved to be wronged. Birdie had showed herself to be a mouse, and the cat was ready to play. “You’re his boss! You’re his boss and you come to my house at midnight to harass me?”
“I’m not his boss,” Birdie said. “He worked for my dad.”
“Oh, you’re his boss. You’re a little mousy thing, ain’tcha? Don’t pay him shit, but you can show up at my house, my house, at midnight on a Friday.” Her mouth ran like a motor, finger darting back and forth as if following a fly. Birdie saw the bruise then—a landing strip of black and blue branded into her forearm.
Bradley hadn’t done that to her.
“You should know where he is!" Birdie snapped. That’s what Birdie had come to say, hadn’t she? “You’re his mother. You’re his mother. You should care where he is!”
“Get the hell off my porch.” She shoved Birdie in the chest and out of the doorway. She slammed the door, her tirade still blowing like a storm behind the thin window. Bitch this and show-up-again that. Something about the sheriff.
Birdie watched the silhouettes, now like conjoined twins, disappear from the front window, but no other light in the house came on. Standing in Bradley’s pitiful yard, she felt sorry for herself, though admittedly much sorrier for Bradley, and she found her empathy encouraging. How awful for the both of them, the neglect of Bradley’s mother. The arrogance of Mayhill. The gullibility of her father. The greed of Dale. Onie’s stifling depression. Texas summers so suffocatingly hot and sticky. Victims to the weather! Victims to the hogs! It was a pitiful roll call of injustices, and she and Bradley were victims to all of it. It overwhelmed her, and she was tired of taking it.
You need to leave before something happens.
Birdie told herself this, but her legs wouldn’t move, her father’s rebellion, pulsing like the tiny thread of fluid up her spine. She tried to shake the feeling but couldn’t let it go.
She hurried to the back of her truck and felt around in the bed. It was hard as a rock, the size of a bowling ball, and it carried every ounce of rage and transgression she’d ever counted in Bradley’s and her young lives. She bobbled it in her hands a moment. A pause.
You should know where your son is.
It all moved in slow motion then: Birdie, with all of her strength, hurling it through the night in a long, triumphant arc, right into the belly of the yellowed house. The deafening shatter. The entire window crashing down like a waterfall.
Then Bradley’s mother, red sweatshirt clamped over her bare chest, running into the light, gasped—wondering what had happened and knowing what had happened all at the same time—until the moment she squinted, and all at once realized that something very different had transpired than she first thought. Because surely it was not possible that this thing rolling over the carpet of glass—shards sparkling like glitter—and coming to a slow stop at her feet was a cantaloupe that some mousy little thing had lobbed through the night.
***
Speeding away, Birdie felt that anything was possible. She felt indestructible. Something was taking the shape of hope. Something suggested that hope was coming. She lit the cigarette and sped down the highway so fast that the truck seemed to fly underneath her, the wheels precarious and slippery, much faster than she had ever gone. Maybe it was the nicotine rising to her brain, or maybe it was the window rolled down, her hair whipping her face so hard it stung, but all she could feel was invincibility right then. Was it relief? A way of looking at the world that before an hour ago seemed impossible?
Birdie hit the gas harder, the trees whirring by. Maybe she could outrun the facts that she would be forced to put together, more feelings to come to terms with, more emotions to assimilate—all this complicated grief and whatnot. She didn’t want to do it! She knew what the right response was: she should be horrified! She should feel enraged that someone had taken her father from her, but all the disgust and anger had escaped into the oddest of weapons—a cantaloupe! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Oh, Dad, you should have seen! A melon plunged through that window. And where all the rage had been, a weird giddiness settled instead. A grin spread across her face, headlights knifing the night.
She sped up and the steering wheel jerked violently beneath her hands. She had never driven this fast, and as long as she sped forward, she could fly into the night with this new feeling, this feeling that something was different, that the grief and anger had moved now, that it wasn’t so stuck, that suddenly she was strong and had control over her life. She had evened the score. She had scored a cigarette! Something unexpected was cracking open inside of her. She couldn’t be sure what it was until she felt the words rising up in her throat like a single tiny soap bubble floating out of the dishwater, and she wanted to zip around town and scream it into the night air. She wanted to send the dozing cowbirds flying into the dark and spread the news to everyone like a frantic carrier pigeon: Dad didn’t leave me on purpose. Birdie leaned out the window, hair slashing like whips, and yelled out into the empty highway. “You hear that, everybody? He didn’t leave me on purpose!”
PART THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“Do you think Dale would have shot you?” It was early evening, and Bradley was stewing on a mess of information. The money. It was more money than he could ever imagine. But the next thought: Dale’s gun. Dale’s gun winding through the air and then pointing right at Jason. What would Bradley have done if Dale shot Jason? Would Dale have shot him too? And the next thought: the money again.
“Dale ain’t gonna shoot nobody,” Jason said. “Just on edge. I seen him puke three times yesterday.” Jason sat on the camp chair with a paper plate full of fried chicken in his lap. Grease smudged his mouth. Bradley stared at his own plate of fried chicken, battered an inch thick. Dale had made it himself for dinner. “To take care of his boys,” he had said like a father. He had killed the chickens himself.
But Bradley—simultaneously terrified and elated—couldn’t eat. After leaving Dale’s, he had worked his body hard the entire day. His arms ached, his hands had blisters, his legs were quivering. His fingers remained in a perpetual curl, trained by the limb cutters. His stomach rumbled for fuel but he just took tiny sips of beer as if it were ginger ale and he had taken to a sick bed. The cicadas’ song plugged his ears. Dale had retired to his house for the evening. Stacks of depressingly avocado-colored plants lay in heaps around the woods, but they still had more to go before tomorrow evening. Tomorrow would be brutal.
“He pointed a gun right at you,” Bradley said. Dale was a riddle he couldn’t figure out, but he desperately wanted him to be good.
“Bad shit’s gonna happen,” Jason said. “Look around! You ain’t working in a daycare! You’re in a cartel! You gonna eat that?”
It is not a cartel. We are gardeners.
Bradley handed his plate of chicken to Jason. “You just wanna think you’re in a cartel,” Bradley said. “This isn’t a cartel.”
It is not a cartel.
A cartel was a dangerous game run by men named Guillermo in crisp white shirts with machine guns. He had learned as much on television. Bradley, to the extreme contrary, was a fence builder, ranch hand, and part-time gardener, and he reminded himself of that fact at all times when he began, much too late, to doubt his life choices.
It is not a cartel.
But part-time gardeners did not make seventy-five thousand dollars. He wondered if Dale had promised Jason the same. Where had Dale even gotten the extra money? Bradley had been too stunned to ask. Or maybe he didn’t want to know.
“Getting a little money is all,” Bradley said. “Not a big deal.”
“Ain’t a little money,” Jason said. “What
are you going to do with it?”
“Get a shower.”
“Oh hell. What you really gonna do?”
“I’m serious,” Bradley said. “All I want.”
“That’s your problem right there.” A wad of chicken hung from Jason’s mouth and tumbled onto his plate. “You think you better than everybody.”
Bradley was silent.
“Well, LA DI DA!” Jason said.
“I’m not better than anybody,” Bradley lied.
Jason didn’t say anything—just wiped his hands on his jeans and crumbled the two plates into a plastic grocery sack. Bradley couldn’t tell if he was really mad, and this made him uncomfortable for some reason, as he suddenly wanted certainty about everyone around him. He was surprised to find that he really, really wanted to talk with Jason right then.
“I don’t think I’m better than anybody,” Bradley said. “I just want normal stuff.”
Jason nodded and lit a cigarette. He sank deep into his camp chair, an unlikely therapist, and listened intently. Bradley felt oddly grateful.
“I just wanna be somebody,” Bradley said. “Somebody people pay attention to.”
“Go on.” Jason nodded, his face suddenly inscrutable and thoughtful. Then he took out his pocketknife and began to clean his ears.
Of course the money had ballooned in Bradley’s brain since talking with Dale. No longer was just land possible. An impact was possible. The way Van had operated, employing the whole town practically. Bradley explained that he wanted to be the kind of man who came into a little money and did something noble. He wanted to do something the newspapers would write up, the television would talk about, like if he signed an NFL contract and bought his mama a house.
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