by Mary Karr
We dismounted and tried to wait out the storm under some trees. Lecia even taught me how to count that space in time between when the lightning hit and the thunder sounded. Since that interval was getting littler, she told me, the storm was moving toward us at a good clip, and should, therefore, pass overhead as fast as it had come. But when a bright white line struck a dead trunk in a clearing we could have spit at and hit, we fell to earth and covered our heads. The horses jerked the reins from our hands and went clopping away down the mountain.
We hiked three or four miles down that trail on foot, hatless, soaked through our jean jackets. The temperature had dropped. We got to the stable blue-lipped and shivering. I toweled off in the office. What if we got hurt? I asked Mr. McBride. He said the bobcats tended to drag the bigger bones and carcasses up past the timberline, but that buzzards and vultures would usually clue in a search team as to where to hunt.
Another time, we were racing some kids bareback—Lecia on a borrowed roan named George—when a nasty little tar heel hurled a garter snake at that horse, who reared and toppled over on Lecia, snapping her collarbone. Under the yoke of Lecia’s white blouse, the bone poked the skin as if to pierce it. But when we found Mother sipping a vodka Gibson at the cowboy bar, she just offered Lecia some baby aspirin from her purse. Doctors would no doubt screw it up, she said. She didn’t think that bone could be set anyway, and would we like some cherry Cokes, to which we said no thanks. I can still see Lecia’s face—pale and tearless, with a streak of amber clay along her jaw—when it dawned on her that nobody was fixing to take up the cause of that busted bone. She held that arm in front of her like it was a piece of furniture.
The bartender in that place was a handsome, black-haired Mexican named Hector, who had been reading Mother’s palm when we came in. He set Mother’s hand down long enough to make Lecia a sling out of a bar towel. That towel stank faintly of sour gin and had a candy stripe of red grenadine up the front. Hector also punched open the register and gave us quarters for the jukebox. But we took them the hell out of there and bought bombpops back at the stable instead.
Other than times like this, when we wanted a straight-thinking adult but couldn’t find one, we felt safe enough. We also stopped keeping such close watch on our parents. I failed to notice, for instance, that we never saw them together. Daddy sometimes hung around the stable to drink coffee with Mr. McBride, for Daddy could tell a mare’s age by staring into her mouth, guess a stallion’s weight within twenty pounds, and reckon how many hands high a gelding stood. Daddy had broken cutting horses as a young man, and this earned him a measure of cowboy respect, despite his being Texan, which was reprehensible to most of the hands. Mr. McBride even loaned Daddy his very own blue-spotted Appaloosa free of charge one day to take Lecia and me riding into the mountains.
We tied our horses before a country store with an honest-to-God cracker barrel inside. Daddy paid the man to make us roast beef sandwiches on Wonder bread. He used grainy mustard and thin slices of red onion. We also bought tins of pink salmon eggs and rented fly rods and waders for trout fishing.
Which remains about the only sport I’ve ever whipped Lecia at right off. Whatever reflex makes her sharp with a gun (she can still pluck a dove from a tree) made her restless in the water. Standing around just bored her. She needed more to do.
That afternoon the canvas bag I’d slung around my neck quickly filled up with the shining bodies of flopping trout. When I could no longer carry it, I waded back to the bank to leave it with Lecia, who’d given up and broken out the sandwiches. I nearly laid down my rod too. That would have been a mistake, for the last fish I hauled out of the water that day must’ve weighed five pounds and was all fight.
Daddy laughed like hell when it hit. My rod bent double. I staggered out into deeper water hollering for help. He had to wade back to the bank first and get rid of his pole before he could reel the fish in for me. I did manage to get the net under it myself. Together we dragged it flopping on the grassy bank, where it smacked its tail and made Lecia sidestep with an odd daintiness. She actually said ick. Daddy grabbed its tail in two sure hands to whack its head on a rock.
Then it lay still, eyes staring ahead. Its gills puffed in reflex. It was not, like the old fish that poet Elizabeth Bishop once wrote about, “battered and venerable and homely” with the long mustache of a mandarin. Nor did it have the bulk that thrilled Hemingway in a tuna. But as fish go, it was close to perfect, being clean silver in the sun with that rainbow stripe all pink and blue and yellow-green melted right into its unnicked scales, and not a square inch of moss or tatter to mar it. It resembled some rare Chinese artifact—the way its scales overlocked so neat, like some jeweler had taken a soldering iron to assemble it one scale at a time. Daddy didn’t even suggest I gut or scale it. He wanted to haul it back whole to the country store, figuring the old man who’d rented us our gear would get a kick out of it.
Daddy even carried that fish dangling by the gills into the store, and spread it flat out on the fellow’s meat counter. He put both his hands on my shoulders and said that Pokey here had caught that one. The man nodded and called his wife from the back, and she nodded. Then we all stood around nodding a while till the man started giving the names of various taxidermists, at which point Lecia said could she have an Eskimo pie. Even after Daddy bought the ice cream for her, she was all sulled up, arms crossed tight across her sweatshirt. Her lower lip stuck out about two inches in front of her chin, and it was that lip led us out of the damp store into the bright afternoon.
That evening, Daddy gathered kindling for a fire on a boulder about fifty yards up the mountain behind the house. Night was falling. He put Lecia and me in charge of puffing on the little fire he’d lit till it blazed, while he went down to the house for a skillet. We squatted on our haunches and played Indian. I can still make out the loose-limbed shape of Daddy as it came to me through the smoke of that green kindling. He moved between the trees toting the iron skillet up the mountain. He was long-legged and surefooted and made no sound.
Once the fire was high, Daddy swamped each little fish carcass around in a pie tin of cornmeal, then fried it in Crisco. I was hungry as only a day on horseback can make you. A canopy of evergreens waved overhead. Stars were bobbing into view in between. The fire kept popping to send whole handfuls of sparks skittering up the air.
We ate with our fingers off paper plates. The cooked trout gave off a steaming crunch, for they were small and crusty. I kept spitting out the spiny bones. The night air was cold. You had to cool every bite down to a chewable temperature by taking that air in between your teeth with a hiss. This made a nasty noise. Lecia said I sounded like a mule with a feed bag hooked over my ears, and Daddy said, Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. And what might have been a fight evaporated right there, rose up with the smoke and dispersed through all those waving evergreens.
He saved my big fish for last and made a ceremony out of cooking it, which he had to do in halves to fit the pan. Even then, the tail looped over the edge and burnt. It was the meatiest fish we ate that night, with the greatest proportion of white flesh to spiky bones. Lecia and I ate it while he worked up a skillet full of thin-sliced red potatoes along with Vidalia onions he’d quartered.
I can still see Daddy scraping at those potatoes, which would keep the smoky fish taste from the lard. He was singing “Goodnight Irene” under his breath, staring into the skillet with that faraway look. Watching the sky arch above us through pines, I thought about a passage I’d read in the encyclopedias Grandma bought us, how the Rockies were formed by glaciers sliding across the continent to rake up zillions of tons of rock. I pictured one moving slow as white silk across where we sat. Maybe God dropped that boulder off right there, I wrote in my diary the next day, for us to cook on. (Comfort makes fools of us that way, and a kid gets faith back quick.) At one point Daddy said to hush, and through the far pines, lit by a three-quarter moon, we made out the blunted antlers of a moose, which struck me
as noble in its bigjawed ugliness. It chewed in profile slow as a ballplayer. Sometime later, a bobcat even yowled, close enough to make me scoot up under Daddy’s arm, which fear made him laugh and say nothing was going to bother me. And I believed him.
After we ate, Daddy stoked the fire again. He lay back on a jeans jacket he’d balled up and sipped at a silver whiskey flask. Lecia and I undid a couple of wire coat hangers for marshmallows. I roasted three at a time, dipping them right in the fire. They blazed and cooked black outside, but inside were nothing but goo. Lecia was more even in approach: she toasted them singly to a pale gold color. She even bent one end of the hanger, so it had a rotary handle she could turn like an honest-to-God spit. For once that difference struck me okay without sinking me into a swamp of worry about how it might augur about my character, or lack of character. She even told me while she sat twisting her spit that mine was one helluva fish, and Daddy agreed.
We fell asleep beside him on that unlikely cold stone, both full as ticks on fish and potatoes, each snuggled under an armpit, our heads on his chest. He still smelled of horse. A few times some coal crumbling in on itself caused me to jerk awake; then I saw sparks surge up in a tower and felt Daddy draw our football jackets up over our shoulders. Otherwise, he lay still, the flask balanced on his breast bone at the perfect angle so he could sip steady without lifting his head or spilling down his chin. I don’t recall his scrubbing the skillet out with sand and pine needles, nor getting carried down the mountain.
I can only guess what Mother was up to that night: reading, maybe. That was her Russian history summer. The jacket photo on her Rasputin biography showed him wild-haired and googlyeyed above a bird’s-nest beard. But she could also have been bellied up to the cowboy bar in town ordering shots of tequila. Or she often sat for hours at home in the Adirondack chair on the front porch that poked out over a sharp drop, sipping vodka by herself in the dark. She did that a lot, drinking and staring down the mountain. If I’d had a penny’s worth of sense, her sitting in that deep, downward-sloping chair wrapped up in a serape and sucking down vodka would have struck me as a bad sight.
The night my parents announced their divorce, Lecia and I hadn’t even been home for the buildup to it. That always struck me as a moral failure on our parts, like we might have talked them out of it. But the stable held night rides up the broad, easy trails for cookouts. The stablehands would bring out a few guitars and lead the dudes through “On Top of Old Smokey” and “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer” before we rode back down. I’d been extra happy that night too. I rode down the mountain with the moon hopping along beside me through the pines. I fell asleep at some point in a saddle slump. The horse rocking me as he picked his way over stones had a rhythm like the Gulf, which until that night I’d never once thought of. It was a fetal rhythm, I guess, the kind that sneaks under your heartbeat and makes your brainwaves go all slack and your eyelids seam themselves together.
I’d started drooling down my sweatshirt when Big Enough reached the trail’s end and startled. The clomp of his hooves on asphalt woke me up flailing. I clutched at the saddle horn just before he broke into a light trot at sight of the stable. There, in the headlights shining across the empty stalls, stood the lanky, big-handed figure of Daddy in loose khakis. He had on a baseball cap with Lone Star State embroidered on it. Under that logo was a yellow star that caught just enough moon to make itself seen. I rode toward that star. Under the brim lay a broad pit of dark. His face stayed in that dark, and the quiet that came with it, all the way home.
Mother sat on the curvy living room sofa in front of the fireplace heaped with ashes. The screwdriver she’d been drinking had gone watery. She had on black stretch pants and one of the white shirts we gave Daddy from Sears every Christmas. This one had just been unfolded, I could tell. A little tab of cardboard stuck out like a priest’s sprung collar. The new deck of Bicycle cards on the table was untouched, its seal unbroken.
I can’t recall how they announced the divorce. Daddy just sat heavy on the far end of that curvy couch. He was leaned over with his elbows on his knees, his big rawboned hands dangling toward the floorboards. His head hung down at the angle a bull’s does at the end of a fight, when he’s lost a lot of blood and the shoulder muscles have been picked at and stabbed so he can no longer lift that head to make a charge. Big tears fell from Daddy’s eyes onto the floorboards. He didn’t even bother to wipe at them. Every now and then he dragged the back of one hand across the bubble of snot that kept starting from his nose. The tears left dark drops on the wood floor. I studied the splatter of them a long time to keep from watching him cry. They were some connect-the-dots picture I couldn’t make sense out of.
On the other end of the couch, Mother stayed dry-eyed. That’s no testament to how she felt, mind you. Maybe she held down a wellspring of ache, or maybe not. She wasn’t really there, of course. The enormous screwdriver had taken her Away, which was its purpose.
They point-blank asked us who we wanted to live with. Mother was staying in Colorado; Daddy had to go back home. They spread those facts before us as if setting out two ice cream flavors we got to pick. Which would be better to have—a daddy or a mother? Or we could divvy up ourselves if we wanted, so each got one.
Lecia called me into the kitchen for a powwow then. She claimed she’d slap me senseless were I to shed a tear. But I was nowhere near crying. I wanted to curl up in a ball.
We peeked around the doorjamb into the living room. The backs of our parents’ heads poked over the sofa back. They sat not speaking like strangers on a subway. That one would go forever Away seemed impossible. I pictured the globe with its dividing meridians. I knew how far it was from Texas to Colorado. But it wasn’t just geography I was picking. I eeny-meeny-minied between their two heads a second. I considered a coin toss. In my head, I zigzagged between swamp and mountain, between impossible heat and blue cool. I still wanted to lie down on that floor with the Italian tile against my hot cheek and go noddyblinkems till the bears woke us up. While I fretted, Lecia’s gaze went very level, as if she’d seen this choice coming across the far sky like a weather front.
She chose, finally. If we left Mother by herself, she’d get in capital-T Trouble. But Daddy would just go back to work at the Gulf, so we’d always know where he was. The logic seemed solid enough. Let’s go back in there and break it to them, she said.
Daddy left the next day about dawn. Mr. McBride’s truck lunged up to the house. He stepped out on the running board and left his motor going and said no to coffee when Mother asked. Daddy came out to heave his army duffel bag in the truck bed. I’d tried to zip myself up into that bag in the middle of the night. I buried myself among the flat-folded hankerchiefs and balled-up socks. I fit pretty well, too. But I’d stopped the zipper right under my chin, being basically a sissy about the dark.
That’s where Daddy found me asleep in the morning. He smelled like Old Spice. His weathered face was nicked up. There were red polka dots of blood on which he’d stuck white squares of toilet paper. He squatted down with his brown leather dopp kit in one hand. Get outa there, Pokey, he said, drawing the zipper down to my belly button. God sakes, you’ll break a fella’s heart.
Then Mr. McBride’s gray Chevy truck was drawing Daddy away down the mountain. His head got smaller in the window, till it was no more than a black dot, like one of those towns on the map we’d once been in such an all-fired hurry to get to. All across Texas I’d ridden behind that head. I knew every comb mark in it. Daddy’s leaving never even dimly occurred to me as possible on that trip, though Mother’s was a constant, unspoken threat. But Daddy was the guy you set your watch by. He woke in the same humor every morning, asking did you want oatmeal or eggs. And now Mr. McBride’s truck was winding him away from us in hairpin turns down the mountain. I finally stopped watching for glimpses of the truck to break through the dark spaces between trees and put my head down and ran hard down the dirt road. I kept running till the dust gave way to asphalt, even though
that vehicle had long since disappeared.
Back at the cabin, Mother pulled the rollers out of her hair in about three swipes of her hand and announced that she felt like a freed slave.
We drove to a vast and canyonlike Denver department store where she bought what she called an honest-to-God cocktail dress, along with church dresses for Lecia and me (though we’d rather have chewed linoleum than gone to Sunday school). The place gave me vertigo. The glass cubicles were sharp-edged. They gleamed, displaying impossibly bright scarves, jeweled cigarette cases, real gold chains for the sole purpose of holding your glasses around your neck. The smell of new dye from the clothes made my eyes sting. Metal escalators meandered between floors and threatened to eat my toes off at the end.
We all got fur coats. Mother’s white shirred beaver was softer all over than the inside of my arm. It had a lining of pale beige silk that felt on my bare shoulders like the menthol lotion you get smoothed on for sunburn. Around the heavy swirling hem of that coat ran a wide strip of black lace. The parkas Lecia and I picked out had rabbit fur around the hoods and pockets deep enough to squirrel extra dinner rolls in.
That afternoon, we flounced into a grand hotel’s great marble lobby hung with chandeliers. The guy running the elevator had on the brass-buttoned uniform of a naval officer. He drew a steady paycheck for nothing more than pressing buttons all day, he said. That caused me to speculate on how the union in those parts must play hell with the hotel companies. He and Mother laughed at that like old pals. He was still laughing when she pressed five dollars into his white-gloved hand.
That night in the dining room, our table had a whole starting lineup of spoons. Still our waiter brought eensy baby forks with our shrimp cocktails. He wore a tuxedo and claimed the potato soup was cold on purpose. There was another guy with a gold cup tied around his neck who tasted Mother’s wine before she got to. At the end of the meal, the chef himself came out of the kitchen in his puffy hat with a skillet of chopped-up bananas he set fire to right at the table, then ladled over our gold-plated dishes of ice cream. Mother ordered a bottle of Dom Pérignon and crystal glasses for us to share. We ratholed the cocktail forks in our skirt pockets to steal as souvenirs. Mine looked like a devil’s trident belonging to a tiny little devil, I told Lecia, and she nearly wet her pants laughing. We clinked our glasses to staying in that hotel like princesses forever. Meanwhile, the waiters in their black clothes took our plates away and scrubbed crumbs off the table with silver-backed brushes they maneuvered using wrist movements too strict to seem natural.