by Mary Karr
Then it was gone. The man in front of me clicked off his overhead light. He tilted his seat back so deep his bald head seemed to plop in my lap. He can’t have been that close, but that’s how it felt. I stared at his head, which was white as a worm. He reached up to unscrew his wind-vent.
The stale air that blasted across his scalp and into my face somehow carried the familiar backdraft of doubt. Surely hope was for boneheads. Surely any goodwill God held for my future was spent. Hell, I’d wished my own sister dead a few days back. I glanced over at her glossy blond head tipped in sleep. The rough red blanket was pulled clear to her chin. Just like a kid, I thought. I wanted to shake her shoulder and tell her how much I loved her, but she would have said to pipe down.
I glared hate rays at the bald man’s head. The monk’s fringe of black hair circled his pate like some greasy halo. Earlier, I’d wedged my bare-assed Barbie between the seat cushion and the arm-rest. Now I grabbed her legs like a club and drew back. No thought for consequence, I brought her down on that guy’s bare scalp with every ounce of force I had, popping her head off.
The fellow jerked up and let out a whoop. He held his skull with both hands, twisting around to see what had whacked him. I slipped the headless doll under Lecia’s red blanket and quick faked sleep on the arm-rest. When he started dinging the stewardess bell, though, Lecia startled up. She blinked and rubbed her eyes, so I blinked and rubbed mine. Meanwhile, the stewardess tripped over that blond and pony-tailed Barbie head. It skittered up the aisle, then swerved under a seat, never to be recovered.
Lecia and I meandered back to Daddy through an underworld of airport personnel. Pilots, baggage handlers, stews and off-duty janitors washed us and fed us. We traveled gratis, without corporate okay. And not only were we never menaced or pinched, beaten or buggered, we never stared with longing at a deck of cards or chocolate doughnut that some stranger didn’t ante up for it. Their particular faces have been worn featureless as stones, but those uniforms I walked next to at waist-level prove that hope may not be so foolish. (Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild, elsewise every raped baby would grow up to rape.)
On each leg of the trip, the planes got littler and more ragged. In Houston, we reached a green camouflage plane with shark’s teeth painted on its nose and a big X of gray electrician’s tape on the cargo bay. It was parked outside a tin hangar beyond view of commercial aircraft. The pilot wore bifocals. The cubby that he wedged Lecia and me into behind the cockpit was built for flight plans, maybe, or a thermos. We doubled our knees up under our chins. We must have looked, when the pilot turned around to say hold on tight, like a pair of groundhogs poking up from some hole.
The plane cut a tight circle, its headlight just brushing over thick fog. The pilot flipped some ceiling switches and talked back to radio static. We bumped around a lot taxiing. The wings shimmied against bracings thin enough for a backyard swingset. Still, Lecia’s profile was calm studying the plane’s dials, though the engine racket when we surged was like a vacuum cleaner we had to sit in. The pilot reached down at knee level and pulled back with effort, as if his very strength were hefting the plane’s nose off the runway. After considerable bucking around, we pulled into a cloud.
And that was the cloud that held us—with only an occasional deep drop to tease my stomach—all the way to Jefferson County. The pilot used pink Kleenex to scrub at the window steam. But the fog pressed against the windshield was a thick membrane the headlights couldn’t puncture. Even I could see we were flying blind.
Nor did visibility get better with landing. We stood on the wet runway with our Barbie cases. No terminal building or parking lot presented itself. Only a tower beam swept over our heads—a fuzzy cone of yellow light wheeling.
Then from an unmeasured distance, headlights flipped on. A car was parked right on the tarmac. I set down my Barbie case. Through the mist, I made out two shapes walking toward us, each in the riverbed of those twin lights. One was small and slight with a cowboy hat. The other had big hands dangling off a long frame. This second shape broke and ran for us, heavy work boots scuffing on the concrete.
There was no clear boundary Daddy ever crossed over, no second he assembled fully before us out of fog. He just gradually got brighter and denser till he was heaving us both up in his arms. He’d been drinking black coffee during his shift, the coffee that poured like tar from the foreman’s beat-up percolator. That coffee brought my whole former Daddy back. I knew the solvent he used to strip grease from his hands, and the Lava soap applied with a fingernail brush. His chin bristles scraped my neck. And he must have been sweating from damp or work or worry, for the Tennessee whiskey he’d stood on the tarmac sipping was like fresh-cut oak coming off him. I could feel Lecia’s arms on the other side of him hugging, and for once, she didn’t swat me away, like my hug was messing hers up. For once, our arms reached around the tall rawboned bulk of him to make a cage he fit right into.
His partner was a small, birdlike man named Blue, which was appropriate for he was all over the color of flint. Blue was soundless, odorless, and completely without opinion. He was one of those clean, featureless men who can move for decades on the periphery of a pool game buying his fair share of beers without ever uttering a full sentence.
Blue had bought Lecia and me each a doll, curly-headed, near as tall as ourselves. Lecia’s was blond, mine black-headed. Under the sedan’s dome light, mine stared from its box on the wide back seat with an indifference bold enough to edge over into insult. A copper wire garroted her head in place. Her wrists and feet were likewise strapped down. Highway lights started streaking over the cellophane mask above her perfect features. She gazed out sullen. Her cold blue eyes announced that she wanted some other girl, not me. Well, I wanted my very own mother, and I’d have told her so, too, if the thought didn’t put a lump in my throat. Instead I told her—out loud, I guess—“People in hell want ice water.” Daddy said, “Say what?” And I told him I’d kill for a glass of ice water.
Surely Daddy said more to me in the car. But any other words were wiped clean from my head. He sounded real country talking to Blue while we drove. “Now you take old Raymond there…” he was saying to Blue. But it came out, “Nah yew tike ol Ryemon thar…” And slow, like he was addressing a deaf man.
In the house, Daddy slipped his jean jacket over a kitchen stool. We were fixing to eat, he said. Lecia unstacked the white mela-mine picnic plates on the plywood bar. They looked crude as Flintstone plates after our Colorado china. Each had three plastic compartments so you could keep your butter beans out of your greens, and the greens’ pot liquor from sogging up your cornbread.
Daddy stood at the stove working with a long wooden spoon inside a pot of something muddy. He dribbled water from the silver kettle into the pot, and I heard it loosen up. In a few minutes you could smell garlic and pork back, and then came the steamy idea of sheer celery slices in a mess of red beans and rice. “This here’ll be even better tomorrow,” he said. He’d also made a wheel of cornbread in an iron skillet, the bottom-crust burnt first in hot lard on the stovetop the way I liked. Lecia cut hers off and flipped it across the butter dish at me. There was a dish of raw green onions we ate between bites. And I nearly finished the whole cereal bowl of collards, spoon after slotted spoonful. “Pokey, you know what I’d do to them greens?” Daddy said. He didn’t even wait for me to say what, just doctored them with vinegary sprinkles from a jar of yellow Tabasco peppers. He kept looking up to tell Lecia he loved her with all his heart, but mine was the plate he fussed over.
We didn’t even have to beg to sleep with him, just bounce twice and say please once before he said okay. First, he lit the gas stove in the bedroom with a whump, then smoothed my socks over the top, so they’d be warm come morning. Lecia buttoned our dresses up on hangers while he stripped off his khakis. His legs were white and skinny poking out of blue-patterned boxers. The pinched fingernails he ran all along his pants crease, to sharpen it, made a stuttery
noise in the cloth, rrrrr. After, he draped them over a chair back and hit the light.
Lecia and I lay down in the vast bed with Daddy in the middle. He slept on top of the covers because he couldn’t stand anything binding his feet. And from the second Lecia and I slid our legs under the sheet on either side of him, he was crying.
It’s a fine trait of Texas working men that they cry. My daddy cried at parades and weddings. Watching the American flag slide up the pole before a Little League game could send tears down his leathery face. That night, I stoppered my ears against it. Still, I could make it out under the seashell noise of my own skull. Sniff and sniff and a deep-chested moan of grief rising from him. Through the window, the refinery towers burned, sending out black strands of smoke against the acid-green sky, so many threads weaving around each other. I finally unplugged my ears and the sobs rushed in with gale force. I squeezed his broad hand in both my smaller ones till I thought the finger bones would snap like twigs. I only let go when he needed to reach under his pillow for a red bandana to wipe his nose on.
Long after I thought he’d drifted off, his cracked voice rose up to ask if we’d say a prayer that Mother would come on home.
He had to say it, of course, for such a request struck us wordless. I’d never heard Daddy pray. He’d only gone to church for funerals, when he was toting somebody in a box. “Lord,” Daddy started, “please bring these babies’ momma back—” Then he broke down crying some more. We patted on either side of him till he quieted and Lecia threw in a big hearty amen.
I lay awake a long time listening, Daddy with his arm over my shoulder, Lecia behind him. We warped together like planed lumber. At least, that’s the thought I had. We were just like the three curved boards for the hull bottom of some boat that only needed gluing and caulking together.
When Mother did come back, she arrived unannounced in a rented yellow Karmann Ghia sports car with Hector behind the wheel. She unfolded from the car’s low-slung seat. Her alligator heels sank in the spongy ground, leaving holes like a crawfish makes. For weeks, I’d practiced the cool indifference I’d greet her with if she ever came back. But when I saw that beaver coat hem swirl around her calves like so much sea foam, all my resolve washed away. I slammed out the door and bounded toward her. I would have reached her first, too, had not Lecia shoved me down in the flower bed crowded with English ivy.
They’d come to pick up some clothes, Mother told Daddy. No more was said in the way of plan or explanation. If he knew she was coming before, he hadn’t let on. He leaned on the far porch while she stooped down to hug me, that coat soft as any bunny and exuding Shalimar. “I miss you, baby,” she said. She eyed Daddy over my shoulder the way you’d check the chain length of a tethered hound before you stepped in his yard. He didn’t flinch under the gaze. He stayed rock still, but gave her wide berth. Eventually, she and Hector set about dragging dresses by armloads to the car, trailing hangers all down the yard and walk.
If the pope had advanced on us, outfitted in embroidered robes with acolytes behind wagging gold incense burners, the neighbors would have been held in less thrall. No sooner had that low yellow car halted in its tracks than every family on the block started from their various houses, prepared to stay a while, wearing wind-breakers and winter jackets and rain slickers in case the fat clouds overhead broke open. They pulled their lawn chairs out of garage storage, aimed them to face us, and sat watching like we were some drive-in movie projected across the soft gray horizon. The misty rain that speckled the air didn’t stop them. Mrs. Dillard just unfolded her clear plastic rain bonnet from its tuckaway pocket and tied it right under her chin, so her hairdo wouldn’t get sticky. Mrs. Sharp wielded the massive black umbrella they toted to football games.
The men who weren’t working stood together under the eaves of the Carters’ garage, smoking, the red coals of their cigarettes visible when drawn on. They were watching too. Don’t think they weren’t. The kids scampered behind their front-yard ditches like nothing special was happening, all but Carol Sharp, who crossed the street to stand right at the edge of our yard. I gave her the finger in full view of everybody. That set her loping back to tattle, her Keds slapping against the wet asphalt.
I walked back and forth along the ditch’s slope till it struck me that I’d once seen a cow dog patrol its territory with the exact same level of concentration I was bringing to bear. Mother and Hector toted some more dresses out the house. They were made of silk, colors of whipped cream and beige and palest tangerine shimmering in the gauzy air. I could just imagine the neighbor ladies reckoning their worth—“Why, one a them alone’s worth Pete’s whole paycheck…” I hated them at that instant, hated their broad heavy bottoms slung low in those stripy garden chairs. I hated their church suppers, their lumpy tuna casseroles, their Jell-O molds with perfect cubes of pear and peach hanging suspended. I hated their crocheted baby booties and sofa shawls, the toilet-paper covers shaped like poodles everybody worked on one summer.
For the first time, I felt the power my family’s strangeness gave us over the neighbors. Those other grown-ups were scared. Not only of my parents but of me. My wildness scared them. Plus they guessed that I’d moved through houses darker than theirs. All my life I’d wanted to belong in their families, to draw my lunch bag from the simple light and order of their defrosted refrigerators. The stories that got whispered behind our supermarket cart, or the silence that fell over the credit union when Daddy shoved open the glass door—these things always set my face burning. That afternoon, for the first time, I believed that Death itself lived in the neighboring houses. Death cheered for the Dallas Cowboys, and wrapped canned biscuit dough around Vienna sausages for the half-time snack.
I picked up one of the coat hangers that had dropped on the ground, cocked my arm, and hurled it across the street at the Carters’ house. It sailed like a boomerang, that hanger, but didn’t even cross the street. Daddy called out to me then. “Pokey, come on in here.” He’d moved just inside the screen, his profile sharp through the fine mesh.
Hector slammed down the Kharmann Ghia’s hatch. Mother kept looking back at us, at Lecia and Daddy and me, behind the screen. I could feel us pulling on her like magnets. Her face went soft. On either side of her lipsticked mouth were deep parentheses of fret. I didn’t hear what Hector said to her. I was too busy in my head pulling on Mother to stay with us, using a prayer full of thee’s and thou’s. Lecia later told me that Hector had told Mother to get her ass in gear, or some such.
What happened next points to Hector having said at least something that bad, for Daddy fast closed the space between himself and the yellow car. He reached inside and dragged Hector out by the shoulders, though Hector tried hanging on real hard to the wheel to prevent that happening. My stepfather was standing, though, before Daddy threw the first punch. I keep a very distinct image of Hector’s thin-lipped mouth drawing itself into an “o” of surprise as it dawned on him that he was fixing to be hit. Hard, and more than once if necessary.
I would like to say the film clip I’ve shot for myself stops there, for I have seen men fight in the parking lots of certain bars. And always after the first collision of fist with face, or the first spots of blood down a shirtfront, I turned away, thinking myself too tenderhearted to watch. On that day I watched steady, for Daddy’s pounding on Hector made me truly glad.
After he’d knocked Hector down once, he pulled him up to stand again, only to knock him down again. He practically dusted off Hector’s shirt and adjusted his collar before clocking him the second time. Hector went down again easy, his legs swiveling under him like rope. He lay stretched there in the grass. Then Daddy did something I’d never seen him do before, which was to keep beating a fallen man. He sat down on Hector’s chest and started swinging on him steady, pounding hard in the face without reason, for Hector had long since ceased to pose a threat to anybody. I watched Daddy’s back muscles get very specific through his thin blue workshirt the way a boxer’s would on a heavy-bag
drill. He kept it up till I heard what must have been nose cartilage crunch.
That noise seemed to stop him. His shoulders dropped. He sat there on Hector’s chest winded a second. Then he stood, staring down at his own bloody hands. He turned them over like objects of great curiosity, as if they belonged to another man and had been sent to Daddy solely for repair or inspection.
At that point I became aware Mother had been screaming. Her words—stored somewhere in my head all the while—came racing back like a tape I’d rewound. “Get offa him, Pete, you’re killing him, Baby. Oh God. Lecia, Mary—somebody stop him—” She shut up as soon as Daddy stood. She didn’t want to rouse him any worse. He looked at her across that yellow car roof and sighed. “I’m sorry,” he said, and seemed to mean it, though when he glanced down at Hector again, the fury must have rushed back through him again, for he raised his boot and stomped down on my stepfather’s rib cage. I heard ribs crack with a noise like icy branches going down in wind.
Hector rolled on his side, and I feared he was curling up like a tumblebug would if you’d squashed him too hard playing. But after a while, I saw his mouth suck for air.
Still, all the pity that surged through me that day was for Daddy, for the world of ugly he’d kept inside that came pouring out on my stepfather. In fact, seeing Hector’s face like a slab of veal just pounded with one of those wooden kitchen mallets pleased me no end. Lecia and I moved outside to study him better. It amazed me that he wasn’t dead. His breath was light and rattly. When he rolled over to spit out gouts of blood, you could hear tooth chips hit the sidewalk.