Annie laid her strong, feminine hands on her belly. Her fingertips pushed into her flesh.
Her baby grew. She’d given Stiv a ten-dollar bill. He had nothing. She couldn’t help him any more than she could help herself. I was quiet in the passenger’s seat. I didn’t want to think of her brother shooting a man—a seasonal worker from Mexico. A man who picked salal and sword fern for the tourists’ flower arrangements. A man who picked mushrooms for yuppies in Seattle to eat. A man who did not speak English and wired money home to his family. A man who would not start a union or organize a strike. A man as desperate as desperate could be. Who yearned for the smell of chuparosa and hot creosote. Annie drove to Hoodsport and back to help us think.
I saw La Llorona again. She was thin and shaking—walking in the wrinkles of darkness and rain on the side of Highway 101. She stood against tree trunks and garbage cans. The Skokomish River despaired. She picked through trash around tweaker pads. She didn’t ask for help. Her eyes were weary yet still bled tears. Her clean dress was gone. She wore soiled rags.
Annie said that I needed to eat—that I wasn’t doing so well. Her words bounced around inside my skull that felt broken. I was anemic and drinking too much coffee. Each time I closed my eyes I saw the vapors of gray mist rise from the smokestacks at the abandoned lumber mill downtown. When I opened them I saw the moist, black sky filled with steam. The dampness made the clouds hover. The wavering, coiling billows made things reflect wrong. Figures showed up through the car window even while there was nothing there. “We need to eat and then get some sleep,” Annie insisted. She sighed and was exasperated. “Vera, you’re so sensitive!” I held on to that.
We went to the All Night Diner. Annie tried to get me to eat pancakes heaped with strawberries. It was supposed to be our one night out. Just us girls. My mouth tasted like metal. I couldn’t stop thinking. Stiv shot a man and watched his body bleed. Annie was having a baby and none of us could pay our rent. Colin didn’t act the same as before his skull was bashed in. He was slow and lethargic. His arresting, high-strung intelligence was damaged beyond repair. It was too much—too many hard things. I heard Stiv’s heavy boots walking through maple leaves in crisp, autumn air. They were running through an empty parking lot at midnight. They were coming closer—sneaking up at my back. I turned around. There was nobody in the shabby restaurant but us. The ripped green carpet was bare. The waitress smoked a cigarette and stared at us. I tried to explain myself to Annie but floundered. I felt the dark clouds racing toward us—the machine with motor oil–blood dripping. The words wouldn’t come.
Annie said she was taking me home. Her eyes were beyond worry. She drove to the studio apartment I shared with Jimmy James. I watched for La Llorona more earnestly with both hands tensed on the glass. I knew La Llorona was embodied hurt. A deep sadness. Somewhere, a woman was feeling something so strongly I could see La Llorona with my eyes. That man had a wife. In Mexico. That’s why La Llorona came and went—I saw her through miles of river water and darkness.
I floundered to explain something to Annie. “It’s a stabbing feeling. It squeezes and then lets go. It takes over my whole body when I breathe. It throbs and then comes back. I feel helpless like a little kid. All I can do is curl up in the dark.”
Annie didn’t answer. She shook her head but didn’t say a word.
14
DUANE
I watched the day that Duane took his younger brothers and sisters out to dinner. He just got paid and wanted to buy them all cheeseburgers. They didn’t get treats very often. The excitement radiated out of them. It spilled from their bright eyes and wriggling bodies. Nine little kids all in darned clothing. Eighteen small hands clasped patiently. Their oldest brother had an employee discount. He had a job. Duane carried a tray of water cups to them. He didn’t have enough money to buy them all sodas. But they didn’t mind. It didn’t matter. It felt like the end of all hard times. How could they want more when there were ten cheeseburgers all piled onto a plastic tray? The ten warm bundles with bright orange wrappers took over all their thoughts. All their dreams.
Then Duane surprised them: there were French fries, too! It was too much. Too, too much. There was another plastic tray holding five paper packages of golden, fried potatoes. They would share with each other. The food was perfect. Duane sat back and watched the second-oldest say grace politely and carefully. They were silent and thankful—filled with wonder. They closed their eyes and tasted. Duane smiled and smiled. They would sleep soundly in their beds that night—remember everything with awe.
Duane had short black hair and a baseball cap. He wore cut-off pants—the ragged edges brushed against his knees. He plodded amiably when he walked. I looked at him closely in the fast-food restaurant. He was different from us Cota kids—softer, more idyllic and hopeful.
Country and dirty. But wiry and strong. Strong as strong could be. He had apologetic, nonviolent muscles. Calloused hands. Just poor, poor, poor without being angry. A hardworking poor boy who dreamed simple dreams. A cabin. A wife. Clean rivers where there were still fish. His soft-spoken words made me look at him shrewdly. He was shy. His eyes were brown. I thought that he could not be real. His hands were tan and gentle. I did not understand how he could be so strong and not wear it on his sleeve like a badge of grave courage.
Duane came down from his mom’s little farm in the hills for good when the land got too expensive. It was around the same time Jimmy James came to Cota Street seeking work. Duane wanted to help his mama pay her taxes and keep their land. His two younger brothers were finally old enough to milk the goats, gather eggs, pick berries, chop firewood, and slaughter chickens and pigs themselves.
And besides, Duane was tired of his homeschool books. He thought it was foolish to work so hard just to get by. He wanted to meet people. He was lonely. His mama understood more than he knew. She helped him fill out his job applications. They looked up certain words together in the family dictionary. They printed them out carefully in the spaces provided.
Duane wore handmade flannel shirts. He ate homemade cracked-wheat bread. His mama did the best she could. She was young herself. They lived in a place that didn’t have a name—a few scattered cabins with dirt floors, hovels of fifth-wheel trailers. No school. No books that weren’t church books. No music that wasn’t church music. Trips to town were few and far between. Duane was tired of the miles and miles of dirt roads and trailers and everybody knowing everybody else’s business. As Duane got older, he didn’t think his mom was fooling anybody with her church and her Bibles. He thought about what it had been like before his father left them with the smell of burnt gunpowder. He remembered everything—the cash crops, the frequent visitors. High schoolers and hippies from the state college dropping by. Day in and day out. People looked twice at him now. They knitted their eyebrows. His accent was strong. To everyone on Cota Street, his words sounded garbled. Duane was not clueless. He knew his destiny—his permanent place in society. The gut feeling was imprinted inside his belly. It wouldn’t go away. No matter how hard he tried, his words were always mispronounced. He was outdated. As country as country could be. And country people are wrong a lot.
Duane stayed in a rented room on Cota Street like an animal forced into domestication.
He had instincts hidden inside—but they were soon muted by the asphalt and industrial pollution. He possessed years of hard work and isolation. His senses churned and boiled. He could stalk silently. And kill swiftly. He could work leather and talk to beasts. Duane wanted little from Cota Street. He couldn’t help but feel that everything within the city limits was more complicated than it really had to be. He was lost in the fast-food restaurant with the unnaturally bright colors and fluorescent lights—the sour smell of nervous people pressed too closely together. His skills were confused and without aim. He remembered his uncle Bill’s hunting dogs the year he broke his hip on the tractor and couldn’t take them out. The dogs became angry with their dry food. They wanted pain and fresh blood
. Instead, they stewed in their pen. They wanted to be wild but they couldn’t. They were locked up in barbed wire. Until finally they were shot for hunting chickens.
Duane raged at how his muscles softened. His instincts faded. He worked graveyard.
There was no sun. The kids he worked with teased him. They talked twice as fast as he did. They tried to sell him things he didn’t really want. They drove a cruel path right through all his Bible stories. They lent him their CDs. They showed him their magazines. Duane tried hard to keep up. The other boy who worked the fryer talked to him in unending, abrasive monologues. Duane nodded at the right times. The fryer boy did not particularly like Duane. But he was interested in who Duane knew. The nameless communities up in the hills where the best stuff came from.
Duane tried hard to stay away from the cat piss–smelling meth labs. The hungry dogs. The shacks and the tarps. Angry, snaggletoothed old men ignoring sour-faced, skinny women. His heartbroken cousins. But eventually he let the fryer boy take him up there. Out near an old logging camp. Where the clouds hovered low and the trees grew sparse and tall and thick. Duane showed him where to park. They slammed the doors. The fryer boy looked around him at the trees. He furrowed his brows. “Where’s the house?” he asked. Duane laughed for the first time in months. Shook his head and started walking. The fryer boy followed. He couldn’t have imagined how dark it got back there between the trees. The slough with ducks. The Doug fir so old it saw through him. Too dark for salal or blue huckleberry. Some of the last few mountain devils hovered not thirty miles away. The tension between Duane’s shoulders eased. The fryer boy grew nervous and ill. Duane breathed in deeply. His senses awakened to the quiet damp echoes of the forest air. Here, Duane knew, you could not control anything. Fast talking meant nothing. His nostrils flared like a snuffing black bear. He pawed the ground like a rutting bull elk. Here, he did not fear death. It was out of his control. The most moral thing to do was die quickly and quietly. Raindrops splattered off the branches far above. The fryer boy had no choice but to follow the strange boy through the wilderness. Duane’s leather boots crunched over the gravel and thudded on soft mounds of moss. The fryer boy twisted his ankle on a fallen branch. His canvas tennis shoe flew off. Duane did not wait for him. They came to a vague trail. The smell of wood smoke hovered. A small cabin hid above a valley with a winter creek. Eight hound dogs found them long before the cousins and uncles. Their howls chilled the fryer boy down to his bones. Duane smiled. The dogs sniffed and wagged. The rifles lowered their aim when Duane called out. The children were let out of the attic. Both Duane and the fryer boy invested their entire paychecks in meth. Duane would rather have bought the black bear rug or a nice new cookstove. Or some of his grandmother’s cast iron pots and pans. He liked how the copper kettles glowed against the wood wall of the cabin. But some things were not for sale. His dreams would have to wait. Times had changed drastically.
Back on Cota Street he laid out a line for himself on the table. He snorted it without thinking. Soon, he did whatever was on anyone’s table. He sold to whoever wanted some. He was not careful. He had the best hookups out of all the Cota kids. He did everything too fast, too much. He wanted to make up for lost time. He wanted to get out of there as soon as possible. He did not answer the calls from the fast-food restaurant. He paid his rent in twenty-dollar bills.
Even though he no longer worked graveyard he still did not see the light. He started dating fifteen-year-old Kat. Kat who would cook and clean. Kat who was not jealous. Kat who was never mean. Kat who would let Duane ash his cigarette in her lap and not complain. Kat who did whatever he wanted.
Duane became a fast, hard skeleton. He found himself floundering—hitting up against one sensation after another. His flesh burned away. He felt himself as only a cadaver. The Cota kids hurt him without meaning to. They did it out of habit with no regrets. It had been done to them a thousand times before. He learned to be the man his mother wished he wasn’t. He acquired the same stubbly, set jaw as his father. The man Duane remembered with patchy, emotional distraction. The smell of a grown man—the hands of a hard worker—a thick chest that was hard and steady.
Duane changed more and more the longer he stayed on Cota Street. His mama despaired.
He felt guilty and cried at weird times. It made the Cota kids laugh. He was socially awkward and didn’t like talking out loud. He grabbed the bodies of underage girls—they were not people to him. He wanted something to replace the flesh he had lost. He had sex with them when they were too drunk to say no. He took pictures and showed the other Cota kids. He felt insatiable. He was all mouth—a hunger that sometimes scared him. He needed to prove something he wasn’t sure about. He tried to erase the memories. But he still thought of his daddy’s shootin’ car. His six-year-old self propped up on his daddy’s knee. How his father let him hold the gun and aim at the shootin’ car. Then a blankness. Then his shut eyes. Then the gunshot.
Duane was frustrated and angry for longer and longer periods. He watched Jimmy James as his moods grew more and more foul. He was angry that his fast-food wages hadn’t been enough. That he couldn’t support himself. That he didn’t know how to do anything but hunt and fish and harvest. He didn’t like how Jimmy James walked. How Jimmy James made the transition so smoothly from the hills to Cota Street. People liked him. Jimmy James taught the Cota kids about firearms and Johnny Cash. Jimmie Rodgers sang from apartment windows.
Duane couldn’t stand how Jimmy James looked at him as if he were nothing. His gaze swept through him. Or openly glared.
Duane started to look for chances. He wanted to show Jimmy James a thing or two.
Irrevocably.
He found me, Brady, and Jimmy James one morning in a parking lot when the sun had just risen. Jimmy James and Brady were leaning under the hood of our truck. Jimmy James already had his shirt off. We just bought a new battery. Duane came from uptown. He hadn’t slept in a week. He was drinking cheap vodka straight out of the bottle. It was wrapped in a brown paper bag. He stopped and stared. He started to talk.
Jimmy James and Brady glanced at him and smirked without answering. They were not as kind as they could have been. They looked too satisfied with themselves—slick and united—like they knew things Duane didn’t. Jimmy James belonged to the mechanic’s union. Duane tripped over his own feet and weaved while he talked. He smelled strongly of alcohol. Waves of chemical sweat found us on the warm breeze. His words became gibberish in the dusty air—lost in the curdled smell of his breath. Jimmy James looked annoyed. Duane looked desperate. It was then that Annie arrived. With hot coffee for all of us.
Duane looked at her short skirt in the morning sun. He said something he shouldn’t have. Her forehead scrunched up in anger. Hot coffee splattered down his front and onto the pavement. Brady dented Fitz’s Honda slamming Duane into it. Got real close to his face. Explained that if Duane ever touched Annie he would feed him his teeth. Duane wasn’t like the other Cota kids. He’d never been beaten. His body held no memories of broken noses, teeth rimmed in blood, or eyes swollen shut. He hadn’t smelled human blood in a long, long time. And in his mind the smell mixed with peat mulch in the warm sun. It came with the silence after a gunshot and crippled him with memories of his daddy going out to the back field. The one that had been plowed up so that the dark soil stood naked and vulnerable.
Jimmy James and Brady did not think about the downfall of the economy. Or the rise of sex abuse and teenage pregnancy. Or news reporters, the war on drugs, and social control. They knew only that things were different. And they might have to rewrite history. They did not think about the new prison built on the wetland. Or all the men locked up there. They were not assessing churches or silenced goddesses. They knew only that to destroy a man was one thing. But to destroy a man and everything he believed in was to destroy the women he loved. And that rape was a part of war. The boys with shaved heads had only one weapon to protect us. That morning, I hid behind Brady and Jimmy James. Their hard, c
lean bodies stood shoulder to shoulder. I closed my eyes to meet the scent of their aftershave. I realized that I felt safe. And how important it was to feel safe.
Duane slurred and puked. Brady dropped him on the pavement. He took out his brass knuckles and tried them on—just to see if they still fit. He stretched his fingers through them lazily. He would wait for a better time. Jimmy James’s eyes grazed over Duane. That distancing, appraising look. He turned his back completely. He shook his head and smiled to himself. He closed the hood of our truck. The battery was hooked up now. Duane stumbled away on wobbly legs. He wanted to be wild but he couldn’t. Fresh blood was out of reach. He was locked up in barbed wire.
Duane left the parking lot in a haze. He was feeling dizzy. He couldn’t stop the memories. The smell of peat mulch and fresh blood. He closed his eyes and saw the red and black and brown—the sun shining through his eyelids. The light-headedness—the first few seconds of a blackout.
He resolved then in the alleyway, between the deli and a housing project, to buy a pair of black combat boots. He was going to put white laces in them. The blacktop would have to welcome the New King of Cota Street.
He closed his eyes. But his mind was not done yet. He remembered:
His daddy was crying. Bending down in the back field. Wailing. Drunk. He had the shootin’ gun. But he wasn’t near the shootin’ car. Duane and his mother ran to him. Their words never made it to their mouths. The pistol was raised. Duane closed his eyes first. Heard the gunshot second.
His daddy had looked at him.
Straight into his eyes before he pulled the trigger. Red-rimmed. Sallow sockets. A pistol falling. Thudding against the red-darkened soil—the suddenly wet peat mulch.
Vera Violet Page 9