The Flying Cutterbucks

by Kathleen M Rodgers

  Clay cleared his throat. “It was probably an isolated incident, Miss Jewel. I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”

  Trudy breezed into the room. She gave her mother the evil eye behind Clay’s back and swiped her finger across her throat, a signal for her to can it. “Who wants more wine?” she asked, her tone too chipper. “Clay, how ’bout you?”

  He waved her off. “None for me. I have to drive home.”

  “Momma?” Trudy gave her a tight smile and eyed the empty glass her mother held out.

  “Just a tad, dear. I’ve about reached my limit.” I’ll say, Trudy thought, pouring enough to fill the bottom of the glass.

  Plopping down in her chair, Trudy freshened her own glass and set the bottle on the table.

  Clay glanced sideways, concern in his eyes. “You okay?”

  She pressed her lips together and nodded. “Um-huh.”

  They resumed eating.

  A few minutes later, Jewel let out a series of yawns and announced groggily, “I’m turning into a pumpkin.” She started to stand up but wobbled back down.

  Clay bolted out of his chair and went to steady her. “You all right, Miss Jewel?”

  She gave him a loopy grin. “I’m fine, Clay. Guess I can’t hold my liquor like I used to.”

  You can say that again, Trudy thought as she helped her mother stand up.

  “I’m sorry I left you with a mess, but Cinderella is going to bed.” As her mother latched onto Trudy’s elbow, she tore off her beret and plopped it on Trudy’s head. “You kids have fun.”

  “I’ll be right back,” Trudy whispered to Clay. “Make yourself at home.”

  In the master bedroom, Trudy helped her mother undress and put on flannel pajamas. As she tucked her into the king-sized bed her parents bought when they moved back to Pardon, she thought how tiny and feeble her mother appeared among the pillows and comforter. As she bent to kiss her goodnight, her mother curled into a fetal position and sighed. “Clay’s a good man. Just like your daddy.”

  “I know, Momma, get some sleep. You threw a wonderful dinner party.”

  On her way out, Trudy took off the beret and placed it on her mother’s long dresser next to her parents’ wedding photo. As she turned out the light, her mother whispered in the dark, “Don’t worry, Tru-dee. I didn’t tell Clay about the woman at the cemetery.”

  Trudy paused in the doorway, rubbing her forehead. Her voice vibrated in her chest and eardrums when she finally spoke. “Thank you, Momma. That’s our secret, okay? Get some rest.”

  She’d almost blurted: You tuck it away, deep inside of you…

  Ducking into the hall bath, she checked her makeup and popped two more Tylenol. All that cleaning and moving furniture had caught up with her. One thing was for certain, after her mother’s remodeling project was done, Trudy would hire professional cleaners to scour the entire house and wash the windows. Then she’d figure out her next move: would she get a part-time job or go back to school? Settle down and build a house in Pardon or somewhere else in New Mexico? All of that depended on one thing: where she stood with Clay.

  When she returned to the kitchen, he’d already loaded the dishwasher and put the leftovers away. She felt like ringing up Aunt Star and bragging, “See, not all men are scoundrels.” She found him in the sunroom with the lights dimmed, gazing out the windows. She sidled up next to him, elbowing him in the side. “Thanks for cleaning the kitchen.”

  He jutted his chin at something out the window. “Remember that time you and I walked along the tracks? It was fall, we’d just started dating.”

  She leaned forward to peer out the window. “Like yesterday.” She hoped that’s all he remembered: scrambling up the berm, making out in his mother’s car afterwards.

  He touched the back of her neck and began massaging out the kinks. His fingers remembered all the right places to help her relax. Her head lolled and she found herself floating away with him.

  “When I was young, I used to lie in bed at night and listen to the trains and planes and dream of all the places I would go when I grew up,” he said. “After you left town and I headed to college, I told my mom I wasn’t coming back except to visit. But after I graduated and got married, I realized I was all she had left, not counting distant family. By the time Cinda came along…” The muscles in his jaw flexed. He stopped talking as if he’d been traveling down a dark road of thought and came to a dead end.

  “How long have you been divorced?” she finally asked.

  He began to stroke her ponytail. “About thirteen years. But we separated long before that. When Cinda came out at eighteen, my ex told our daughter she wished she’d been diagnosed with cancer or got killed in a car wreck.”

  Trudy recoiled at the thought of a woman saying something so vile to her own flesh and blood. So that’s what Lupi meant when she told Georgia, Clay’s ex hurt him bad.

  “Jesus, Clay, your poor daughter. I’m so sorry. What woman says that to her child?”

  He shrugged and looked away. “Part of it was her upbringing, I guess. She grew up in a strict religious family. They all disowned Cinda and me once I made it clear I wasn’t sending her to some crazyass intervention camp where they try to convert people. As you can imagine, my daughter has nothing to do with her mother.”

  “God, of course not.” Trudy felt a deep revulsion for a woman she’d never met…a woman who threw away her daughter for being gay.

  Clay continued to run his fingers through her hair. “So, you wanna tell me about Sarah Jewel?”

  Trudy swallowed. “I was forty. She was the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen, but she was stillborn. They let me hold her so I could say hello and goodbye all in the same breath.”

  Clay shook his head. “I’m so sorry for your loss, Trudy. I had no idea.”

  She stared straight ahead, her pulse thrumming in her ears. “She was buried in a tiny white coffin. I took care of all the arrangements. Preston wanted nothing to do with it.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Clay whispered again and again as if he didn’t know what else to say.

  Her voice cracked as she struggled to finish. “He told me I turned him off…he couldn’t deal with the fact I’d given birth to something dead.”

  “That doctor dude, he didn’t deserve you. I’m sorry you had to go through all that alone. If I’d known…” Clay’s voice rustled around her, soothing her like a grownup lullaby.

  The floodlights illuminated the patio and parts of the backyard beyond the plastered bench walls. Breathing in his scent, she listened for the rumble of a locomotive, the clickety-clack of boxcars rolling along the tracks up on the berm. But there was nothing but darkness and an eerie quiet out past the fence line. Until Aunt Star told her the truth about what happened, Trudy would always look out beyond the back gate, see a ghost train rolling by, each phantom car a reminder that fast-moving machines are unforgiving on the human body.

  As Clay reached for her hand, it began to snow like that night long ago, when a blanket of white covered everything, including any evidence Dub had pulled himself up from the cold concrete floor of the carport and stumbled into the night.

  CHAPTER 17

  Demolition Day: Dust Will Fly

  November 9, 2016

  THE HOUSE sat nestled inside a cloud. The fog had rolled in sometime in the middle of the night, veiling the morning in an eerie gray mist.

  At the base of the flagpole, Trudy straightened after replacing the light bulb on the spotlight that illuminated the flags from dusk to dawn. Gazing up, she could barely make out the flags as they drooped in the soupy air: the black and white POW/MIA flag with a silhouette of a man and a watchtower and the New Mexico state flag, with its ancient Zia sun symbol — a geometric red circle with groups of rays pointing in four directions against a yellow background.

  Their limp posture matched her mood: a feeling of defeat as if every hope and dream had been crushed overnight. She wasn’t alone. Her mind drifted to Aunt Star’s group
text at sunrise. It had jarred Trudy awake: I hung my American flag upside down on the front porch in a sign of distress. Make no mistake, girls. Our civil rights are at stake. The election was rigged! How else can you explain how the Orange Cheese Puff pulled this off!

  As Trudy huddled in bed, she pictured her aunt’s small pink adobe on a busy street and people gawking at the inverted flag draped across the porch. Her act of protest was sure to start tongues wagging in her small scenic town.

  Within seconds, a string of text messages volleyed back and forth between the women in the family. First Jewel: Be careful, Star. I don’t want some nutjob coming after you. Georgia chimed in: I’m depressed. How am I going to face my students? Aunt Star to Georgia: Chin up, gal. Put one foot in front of the other and breathe. Drop by after work if you get a chance. Misery loves company.

  And finally, it was Trudy’s turn. She drew in a deep breath, held it a moment before she exhaled, and tapped the keyboard on her phone: This feels like DOOMSDAY.

  The moment she sent the text, she recognized a seismic shift within her: She didn’t know she would care so much…about the outcome of an election.

  Her mother poked her head in the door a few minutes later. “I’m going to make coffee. Unless the world ends this morning, Hector should be here at nine.”

  Trudy set her phone on the nightstand and tried to go back to sleep. She punched her pillow a few times before giving up. After sliding into her robe, she limped into the kitchen, fumbled for her coffee cup, and joined her mother at the table in the sunroom.

  But there was no sunshine warming the room on this chilly November day. The patio and everything beyond had been swallowed up in an opaque mass that hovered over the land.

  Jewel’s hand shook as she pushed aside a plate of half-eaten toast and picked up her coffee mug, gripping it in both hands. “Even Mother Nature is protecting herself. Why else would she cover up in a shroud of fog on the morning after?”

  Trudy sat in a stupor, rubbing sleep from her eyes after sitting up half the night watching the election results. Glancing out the window at the ghostly gray, she lifted the mug to her face and savored the aroma of dark roasted coffee. After a couple of sips, she regarded her mother. “You’ve hardly touched your toast.”

  “I’m not hungry this morning. I ate enough to take my pills.” Her mother released the death grip on her mug and pushed the plate of toast toward Trudy. “Here, you take the other half.”

  Trudy licked her finger and dabbed at the crumbs before she nibbled a wedge of toast. “Momma, would Daddy have voted for a woman if he were here? It’s been bugging me since I went to bed.”

  Jewel let out a heavy sigh and stared out the window. “Funny you should ask. I was thinking the same thing yesterday as I drove to the polls. Knowing Shep, there’s no way he would vote for a draft-dodging braggart who disrespects Gold Star families…” She paused to take a breath and turned to look Trudy in the eye. “And then have the audacity to claim he’d always wanted a Purple Heart.”

  Trudy swallowed a bite of toast. “I keep thinking about that young man we saw at the bank. I can’t get over his friendly face or the web of scars on his right calf.”

  Her mother nodded and picked up her mug. “Unlike that young man you encountered, the Orange Dude doesn’t know the first thing about service and sacrifice.”

  They fell into a comfortable silence.

  While Jewel sipped her coffee, Trudy polished off the last piece of toast then glanced at her watch. “I better get dressed. Looks like zero visibility out there, but I don’t want to get caught in my bathrobe in case Hector shows up on time.”

  Jewel directed her gaze toward the chuck wagon that sat at an attractive angle facing the southwest toward the old base. “He might have to wait for the fog to lift. Leave that plate. I’ll get it.”

  Rising from the table, Trudy stopped and placed a hand on her mother’s shoulder. “Enjoy these last vestiges of peace and quiet for a while, Momma. Things are about to get crazy.”

  Her mother reached up and patted Trudy’s hand. “Are you referring to the wall project or the state of the union?”

  “Maybe both.”

  At the archway to the kitchen, Trudy paused and said, “I’ll bring in the paper, but first I need to change the light bulb on the spotlight out front. It blew out in the middle of the night.”

  Her mother swiveled in her chair. “The one beneath the flags?”

  “Yeah, I noticed it when I came to bed around three.”

  Hoisting herself out of the chair, Jewel wriggled her fingers at Trudy and uttered a spooky “woo-OOO-ooo” before she began clearing the table. “Maybe it’s a sign there are other forces at work.”

  Breathing in the vaporous air, Trudy reflected on her mother’s last comment as she turned away from the flagpole and gaped out at the thick haze. The giant yucca appeared in the middle of the yard like a creature from another world. “Daddy,” she yelled into the murk, “was that you passing by when the light bulb blew? Do you fear for our country…and the very ideals you lost your life defending?”

  The rumble of an engine out on Seven Mile Road drowned out her voice. The motor grew louder as the sound of tires crunched in the gravel driveway.

  Must be Hector. How on earth did he drive in this weather?

  She brushed a loose strand of hair from her face and moved toward the driveway.

  His candy-apple red pickup emerged through the cloud and came to a stop. She was close enough to see chrome on the front bumper and a sticker that read, “Where the bumf**k is Pardon, New Mexico?”

  She laughed out loud. She’d missed seeing that the day he came out to give them a bid.

  “Imagine that,” her mother called from the front door. “A contractor who’s on time.”

  A wiry man about five foot eight inches walked toward them out of the fog. His brown eyes glittered in a friendly greeting. “Good morning, ladies. Are we ready to tear down a wall?” Despite flecks of gray in his day-old beard and deep grooves around his eyes and mouth, he had the weathered face that grew more handsome with age.

  She didn’t remember him in high school. He was a few years younger than Clay.

  “How on earth did you drive in this fog?” Trudy reached out and shook his hand. The hand of a working-class man, strong and firm, rough like sandpaper.

  “There were a few patches of fog in town, but nothing like out this way. It seemed to get a lot thicker about a mile back. About the time I passed Drake’s Salvage Yard.”

  Old Man Drake was a bomber pilot in World War Two…Clay’s voice rolled through her mind as she pictured a giant cloud swooping down and covering everything that lay in the junkyard, located to the east of her mother’s property, even including the airplane propeller guarding its entrance.

  Maybe Momma wasn’t joking about other forces at work.

  Hector wore a pair of loose jeans, work boots, and a T-shirt with a Marine logo. He didn’t wear a jacket even though it was cold.

  Before Hector headed down the hall to get to work, Jewel led him into the kitchen. “My sister and two daughters think my kitchen is outdated. Maybe they’re right.” She crossed her arms and lifted her chin in defiance. “I don’t care what you come up with, but my Mexican tile countertop stays.”

  Trudy took a seat in the conquistador. Once again, Momma was full of surprises. “Hector, my dad ordered the tile special and installed it himself right after we moved in. He did more than fly jets. He liked to build things.”

  Hector glanced over his shoulder at Trudy, acknowledging her with a thoughtful blink. He had a slight overbite that appeared more prominent when he was concentrating, the way his tongue curled over his bottom lip.

  He listened respectfully then turned and swaggered over and ran his fingers along the tiles. “The major was an excellent craftsman. I can tell he took pride in his work.”

  Jewel glanced over her shoulder, her eyes dancing with satisfaction at Hector’s praise of her husband’s work. �
�See, Trudy, what did I tell you?”

  Hector scanned the room from one end to the other. “The tiles are gorgeous and add character.” He inspected the cabinets, the sink, the range and matching fridge, and dishwasher. “These are easy fixes. A new sink and faucet, new doors on the cupboards, a fresh coat of paint, stainless steel appliances…” He spun and walked back and stood next to Jewel in the center of the room. “Mrs. Cutterbuck, have you ever thought about installing a freestanding island?” He glanced down and stamped his feet as if marching in place. “Right here. It would give you extra countertop and make the room appear bigger.”

  Trudy’s jaw dropped. She and Georgia had been saying the same thing for years.

  Jewel clasped both hands on top of her head, nesting them on her knit cap. “Why, Hector, I think it’s a marvelous idea. Work me into your schedule after that wall comes tumbling down.”

  The fog lifted by noon. After Hector left for lunch, Trudy drove into town to grab a few items at the grocery store. As she pulled into a parking spot, her phone pinged with a text from Clay: Babe, how’re things going with Hector? Have you had on any local news? Someone painted swastikas all over the front and side of Gold’s Department Store at the corner of Main and Fourth. I’ll call you later.

  Two things struck Trudy as she bent over her phone to text him back. Clay hadn’t called her babe since high school. And sadly, Pardon wasn’t immune to the hatred and intolerance spreading across the nation.

  Inside the store, Trudy grabbed a cart and wheeled up and down each aisle, loading up on fresh fruit and veggies, multigrain bread, fish and chicken, orange juice, skim milk, wine, laundry detergent, and paper products.

  At the checkout, a stone-faced male cashier in his twenties greeted her with a robotic voice. “How’s your day going?” His expression lacked all emotion as he rang up each item.

  She pushed her cart forward and studied him a second as she went to insert her card in the scanner. Glancing left and right, she muttered, “Honestly, it kinda sucks.” She tried to gauge his reaction.