by Mary Karr
Lecia took her place at Mother’s elbow. She stared up with an expression that struck me as lawyerly, like Perry Mason’s at the jury box. At any second she might’ve drawn out a pointer and clicked on an overhead projector, the better to list her arguments, which, by the way, struck me as real obvious. If you shoot him, you’ll go to jail, maybe forever—that sort of thing. This didn’t trouble Mother one whit. She tossed her head and squared her shoulders. At least I’d have done something worthwhile, she said. Killing that low-life sonofabitch. She studied Hector like he was some worn-out farm mule she was fixing to plug. She waxed lyrical about what a worthless sack of shit he was.
Her talk ground Hector down worse. He sighed a lot, sour air whooshing out of him. I practically scanned his neck for the nozzle that had come unplugged, for with every sigh his whole body sagged a level flatter. So I sank deeper into him, the softness of him. Had this progression gone on forever, he might well have melted to nothing but a puddle under me. I stared at his ear, long and leathery with a few stiff white whiskers tufting out of it.
Hector stopped not caring whether Mother shot him or not and started to lobby actively for it. Like getting shot was some kind of solution. Big alligator tears rivered down the folds in his face. She’s right, he said. His voice had a crimp in it. I ain’t never been worth a damn.
I turned from where I lay on him to Lecia, who’d dropped her lawyer pose entirely. She was off on another tack. The look in her brown eyes under the shiny blond shelf of bangs was no longer set. It was weary. And the accent she used next was pure Texan, straight from what you might call The Ringworm Belt. He’s not worth the bullet it’d take to kill him, she said. She wasn’t talking to Mother like some Yankee newscaster anymore. She was buddying up, appealing to Mother’s fury, which she’d apparently adjudged immovable. Jesus, lookit him, Lecia said. She rolled her eyes. She might have been Mother’s cocktail waitress, off-handedly doling out comfort while picking through change on her drink tray. If Hector was on fire, Lecia said, nobody’d so much as piss on him to put him out. Mother said that was dead straight, and under me Hector seconded the idea.
Then Lecia grabbed my foot and tugged. She wanted to lay across Hector too, she said. That seemed a sisterly gesture, helping out with a chore, as if she knew how gross it felt breathing in his whooshed-out scotchy fumes. She heaved herself up beside me as onto some squishy raft bobbing under us in the Gulf.
I saw she’d transformed again. The tired frown she’d carved with her mouth was unbent. Her forehead had given up its furrow. Her round face was the only accurate barometer for the subtle atmospheric shifts in the room. And that face had gone blank and white as dough. Lecia had slap given up. I glanced back at Mother, who was sighting the short length of that nickel barrel as if to draw a very fine bead around us at Hector.
Somehow I’d buried any real fear till then. The whole scene had struck me as goofy. Sure I was anxious, but a low thrum of worry ran through me more or less constantly like current. Anxiety made me a nail-biter, a restaurant fidgeter, the kind of kid liable, in a given day, to spill at least one glass of liquid. But the deep fear that draws all air from your lungs and sends the world into slow motion hadn’t pulled on me for weeks. I’d submerged it till that very instant when Lecia took her place beside me looking wholly empty of herself.
She was telling me to run. But in her pass-the-butter voice. Run across the street to the Janisches’ house. Mother was fixing to shoot Hector right that second unless I could fetch some grown-up to stop it.
Sure enough, Mother had shifted into her ghost self, holding that very real gun with a hand so pale you could practically see through it. She didn’t hear Lecia tell me to go fetch somebody, for she was past hearing. Her lips moved in a whispery way, as if she was praying. But her gun arm stayed straight. Her hair was spiky wild, and her jaw set.
She didn’t move to stop me dashing by. I might have been a cockroach that scuttled past for all the notice she paid. And I didn’t look back. I couldn’t have seen my sister laying so deep in her ten-year-old body, stared at by that silver pistol’s round and careless black eye, and still been able to run off.
Or so I tell myself outside, where time starts to shift. The night itself seems heavy. It drags against my shoulders and keeps me from running as fast as I’m able.
The fresh snow on the street I step into is blue as pool water. I don’t even feel my bare feet go cold in that snow. Nor do I note under my white gown the constellation of gooseflesh that must break out down my stick legs. Even the fact that my legs are pumping doesn’t fully register. I can only see the still street bob, which phenomenon reassures me that I’m running. The Janisches’ mahogany front door with its wreath of holly jerks closer to me one stride at a time, in stop-action.
Their porch light is gold, their doorbell lit like a bright period at the end of some long dark sentence I’ve crossed. The finger pressing that doorbell must be mine, for there are my nails, square, with slivers of dirt underneath. A shape moves across the window lace. Then, where the door was, there’s a rectangle of light holding Mrs. Janisch in her blue duster.
What I tell her is a mystery, though I can feel my jaw working. It’s sharp cold, I think, for my very words to get eaten soon as they leave my mouth, before I can even hear them myself. Then Mr. Janisch appears wiping a clear path through the shaving cream on his jaw with a gym towel. He’s wearing a T-shirt and dress slacks. And dangling around his neck is a tin medal of St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes. If you can’t sell your house, you buy a statue of Jude, get the priest to dab holy water on it, then bury it upside down in your yard before dawn. And by suppertime, you’ll be knocking your for-sale sign over with a hammer.
That’s the fact that must for a while occupy all my available brain space, for next thing I know, I’m not at the Janisches’ anymore at all, but back across the street on my own porch, at my own front door with a breathing presence behind me that must be Mr. Janisch. The padded arms of his parka make a whipe, whipe noise when he moves. I can still smell his mint shaving foam.
I feel dumb knocking instead of just walking in yelling hey. But he insists. After nobody comes, though, I watch my raw-looking little hand start slapping flat on that door over and over.
Mr. Janisch grabs my wrist with his leather-gloved hand to stop me, but I twist loose and bang again with both fists. I’ve neglected to listen back on Mother’s house. I was across the street, sunk deep in my own task. So my house has gone grinding through time minus my vigilance.
If, for instance, a gun went off, I’d have missed hearing it. Two or three shots might have been fired. This thought causes me to kick the door with my numb bare foot, so hard that later the big toenail will go black.
Suddenly there sails through my head a hand-lettered banner that used to hang in front of Central Baptist Church back home: Prayer changes things, it said. So if I can eke out the right prayer before that door opens on everybody sprawled around dead like deer you’d line up for a Polaroid before strapping them over the truck hood, maybe I can change the scene we’ll find. I have to pray fast and get it right the first time. God’ll want a convincing trade, not just that weary promise to be good I always back up on.
Then in a flash, the idea comes. How Abraham was ready to cut his own son’s throat solely because God said to. Thinking that, I let one bullet have its way. I give God that bullet killing Hector the way you’d spot points in football when you got only the puny kids on your team.
But God’s counteroffer comes in a backwash. I halfway wanted Hector dead from the git-go anyways. So that bullet may not count as offering enough. In church back home, Deacon Sharp always says—while he slips the offering envelope from his shirt pocket to drop in the prayer basket that’s swooping up the pew on a long stick—he always says to give till it hurts. The real choice is between Mother and Lecia. Mother lying sprawled on the floor in that creamy slip. Or Lecia in a hump across Hector in the chintz armchair.
I would
like to claim that I worried the bone of this choice a long time, but I did not. In an eyeblink’s time, I killed the very sister who’d taken my place in the bullet’s path. No sooner did the choice present itself than I chose. I just begged please God. Then I pictured Mother standing upright, the gun having fallen from her hand.
And God must have heard, for Mother did answer the door, and not even wild-eyed like a TV murderess in her slip. She had on her black turtleneck and stretch pants, and a little beret like a black pancake over her weird hair. She told old Janisch we were just having a family argument. You know how kids exaggerate. Guns, for God’s sake? Her husband didn’t even hunt. She shook her head at me. Mary Marlene, she said, wearing her TV housewife smile. I’d never seen Mother’s face so completely free of irony. Mary Marlene has such an imagination, she said. Then you won’t mind, Mr. Janisch said, if I come in. Mother stepped aside.
There Hector sat in the same parlor chair, Lecia wedged in by him. She had a Nancy Drew mystery on her lap. Mr. Janisch shook Hector’s trembling hand, then looked down at me and said he’d be seeing me at school.
From the doorway, Mother and I watched him stride across the street. She drew me under one arm, to warm me in my eyelet gown. It was then I felt the pistol, sticking out from where she’d jammed it in the waistband of her pants.
That was the night Lecia called Daddy collect. She waited till Hector was passed out and Mother was making popcorn in the kitchen. I could hear the pot bang against the stove burner and the explosions inside it like firecrackers on a string.
What Lecia said to Daddy stays with me, for she was suddenly issuing orders again, first for the operator to put us through, then to the daddy absent so long I faltered on conjuring his face. Here’s exactly what Lecia said: “Daddy, you need to get us two airplane tickets back down there from Denver.” She didn’t ask. There was no maybe threaded through her voice, no sliver of doubt. Had I been making the call, I would’ve told about Mother’s pistol and laying across Hector and fetching the principal. The whole story would have rolled out. Daddy would’ve wanted whys and wherefores. Watching Lecia, I knew no further wangling would take place. She doled out a few cursory yessirs and nossirs. But Mother wouldn’t get summoned to the phone to check was this okay. In short, it was a done deal.
That hits me funny, now. Here you had a fifty-year-old veteran of one major war and innumerable bar fights taking orders from a girl whose age had only recently nudged into the realm of double digits. Daddy didn’t go along with Lecia’s plan because it made sense. It didn’t much. Maybe he’d been missing us so bad that he was set to grab us any way he could. But even that doesn’t explain it. No, what moved him was Lecia, her sudden solidity and power, the sheer force of her will.
I was coiling the phone cord around my index finger when this knowledge settled on me. Lecia’s eyes were the same calm brown as always, her blond bangs were still lacquered straight above dark brows. But her voice held less waver. By the time she handed me the phone, the small space between us had stretched into some uncrossable prairie. She’d moved forever away from me. For my part, I was still skidding around in the slippery, internal districts of childhood. I still half-wondered whether Mother might shoot us as we slept. But Lecia had stopped wondering about such things, had let go wonder altogether. She was set on enduring, no matter what. She’d harden into whatever shape survival required. From that second forward, she had to figure what-all she’d have to lose for that survival, what-all and who.
The receiver was warm on my ear. Daddy wanted to know one thing: “You ’bout ready to come on home, Pokey?” I told him I’d been ready. To which he said him too.
Early the next morning, we washed our faces. I brushed each tooth with the neat circle stroke Captain Kangaroo had instructed me to; then we buttoned ourselves into church dresses. By dawn, we stood side by side in the full-length mirror. Lecia had tied the hood of my car coat too tight under my chin, so I felt like a sausage in oversmall casing. Her face floating next to mine in the mirror would never again be the face of a child.
Mother must have squawked about our leaving. She would have yelled or wept or folded up drunk and sulking. I recall no such scene. Nor can I picture Lecia announcing our leaving, as she must done first thing that morning. Mother would have been smoothing Ben-Gay on her shoulder. The Sunday Times crossword, each box with a penciled capital letter, would have lain between Mother’s body and Hector’s. (She tended to come up with some kind of answer for each square fast, then erase mistakes later, so the puzzle always looked done but seldom was.)
But I’m making this up. The French door on that scene never swung open. Any talk with Mother after Lecia’s call was siphoned clean from my head. Mother herself was clipped from my memory, though some days went by before we actually left, and I must have said good-bye to her. We must have wept, being a family of inveterate weepers, the makers-of-scenes in airport terminals. She did promise vaguely to come for us soon, but I can’t exactly hear her saying that, nor does even a ghost of her Shalimar hang in the car that ferried us to the airport.
Joey was hired to fly along, to squire us through plane changes. He right off got wasted on scotch in the bar while Lecia and I wolfed peanuts and sipped Shirley Temples. Our square-bottomed stools were covered in black Naugahyde. They swiveled, bumping into each other like big padded metronomes marking off the morning. On the bar before us, our twin Barbies sat, backs ramrod straight. They had on matching prom dresses in baby-blue crinoline with silver sashes. But we’d lost their white plastic sandals in transit, so their arched feet stuck out bare.
Joey’s first act on the plane, after he’d buckled Lecia and me into our seats across the aisle, was to barf volubly into his airsick bag. Lecia and I then dug down in our seat pockets, so our Barbies could do their own make-believe barfing, which troubled the old woman cat-a-corner from me. She sighed disapproval. She shook her head so hard at me her cheek wattles shook above the triple strands of blue-tinted pearls. We moved from Barbie barfing to Barbie fart-jokes and kept those up at top volume clear to Albuquerque, where I announced that my Barbie batched her prom dress with diarrhea squirts. She’d be forced to wear a TWA napkin to the prom, with a rubber-band belt, and minus any underpants.
In Albuquerque, we boarded the wrong plane. Airlines discourage that sort of thing, naturally. They post a fellow at the gate to read your ticket before you even step on a runway. It says right on the front where you paid to fly to. But somehow, against odds I can’t fathom, we all wound up in Mexico City, illegally, of course. Maybe Joey even booked us there on purpose. Mother had planted in his noggin her romantic notion of disappearing to Mexico. He may have fancied living cheap in some beach shack flapped over by palm trees, with an Aztec princess bringing him rock lobsters and tortillas patted out with her own small hands.
The federales who met us at the customs gate had other ideas, especially when it turned out that Joey had dropped his wallet—with all evidence of U.S. citizenship—in the airplane toilet. He claimed he’d been rising from the toilet and suddenly bent over sick. His bowels had just seized up. He didn’t know what fell in the blue toilet water till after he’d zipped up. Then he patted around and found his back pocket light. All his ID had flushed away with an eardrum-sucking pop somewhere over the Sonora desert. He patted his pockets to show the small, official-looking crowd how it happened. Joey had that drunk man’s myopic sense of how interesting this all was for everybody.
Meanwhile, the capitán shifted his weight from one shiny black boot to the other. He whispered to the customs officials. When he lifted one sinewy hand, two men with rifles at the baggage rack trotted over. Our luggage was called for and disemboweled —dresses, jeans, nylon pajamas. My torn-legged panties got waved a second like some tattered flag of surrender. Joey looked like a smuggler, or like some Mexican national crossing the border without papers. But his bigger crime—or so I guessed from where Lecia and I stood by the coffee machine with three stewardesses who’d taken hold of
us—was his lack of seriousness. He just couldn’t stop giggling.
They kept him, of course, the customs officials. They had to. The miracle was that Lecia and I were let go. The airline folks even took it on themselves to phone Daddy, telling him they’d tote us back to Texas.
Anyway, I never got to ask Joey if he was kidnaping us, or himself running off, or what. My last sight of him was in that customs holding area, where his face under fluorescent lights resembled the washed-out green of a martini olive. For some reason, they’d made him take off his shoes and one sock. He stood on one leg like a stork, arms held out. Periodically, he exploded with laughs so his big toe dipped down to touch the dirty linoleum.
In the airport employees’ lounge, a waiter delivered us an oval platter of huevos rancheros while Lecia told the wide-eyed stews how Joey planned to sell us to some men he knew down there, the extremity of which tale caused me to kick her under the table. Those ladies were paying the check, and I didn’t aim to piss them off before it came.
But Lecia knew the furthest limits of credibility. She always had. The women hung on her every word. Their perfectly manicured hands patted our uncombed heads and squeezed our skinny shoulders through our dress plaid. Eventually, they waved us onto a night plane heading for Harlingen, Texas.
I woke to clouds. A whole Arctic wasteland of them bubbled up in the round plane window where Lecia’s sleeping head was tipped. The clouds seemed to have seized up in violent motion, like some cauldron that got frozen mid-boil. A full moon shone across them. It cut a wide white path straight to us, the beauty of which flooded me with some ancient sense of possibility. Maybe there was hope for me yet, even from the vantage point of being a kid, hurtling across the black sky with my sister, whom I would never know the heart of again. (When mystics talk about states of grace, surely that’s the feeling they mean—hope rising out of some Dust Bowl farmer’s heart when he’s surveying the field of chewed stems that locusts left.) This hope lacked detail. From it came neither idea nor impetus. I only felt there was something important I had to do, held by the clear light of that unlikely, low-slung moon.