Prologue
June 6, 1997
She never touched me again. Not through the flannel sleeve against my shoulders or with her hands, bare and stretching the skin on my thigh saying, Son you got them scars like stars when it’s dark out. Not gentle, not rough, not leaving marks. Not an almost-touch. We sat on top of the hill and looked at the sea of sagebrush, their twigs dry feelers, stiff in the wind. As usual, I thought, but this time her hands were on the wheel, stubborn and still though I was waiting. I was waiting and I was scared for the first time. I didn’t know why she didn’t move, why she didn’t reach over, and if her eyes squinting crow’s feet so deep meant she might caw and fly suddenly out of reach. But she just spat her half-smoked cigarette out of the window, making space in her mouth to speak.
“You feed the dog yet, son?”
“Yes Ma’am. This afternoon.”
“Good,” she said. “Good.”
She looked out the greasy car window, hands still on the wheel, at the sagebrush or the low trees or at something I did not know and could not guess at.
“Ma’am,” I ventured, suddenly daring, though at that time I was only seventeen.
“You ready?” she said, still looking.
“What?”
“Going back to your real mam.”
“Maybe,” I said, and her hands tightening on the wheel gripping knuckle-white told me that this was the last time, this was really and truly the last time.
“Come give me a hug,” she said, voice grittier than usual.
There was a silence. There was a heatwave in the car.
“Come on.”
I looked at her mouth, the downward turn of it, the sun-ruined surface chapped further by dry air.
“Son,” she said, almost pleading now.
“Ma’am,” and I finally unclicked my seatbelt, clambered over the gear stick, and put my face in the musky hollow of her dry, brown neck.
*
Part I
1992
June sixth, she took me in at twelve. Aunt Susie drove me away from the home in her brand new Buick Riviera, blonde as a fresh wheat field. East Wyoming, she said, was some brush but plenty of green, a new place, an exciting place, different from the others. I should like it.
“I’ll try,” I said, and a couple hours later and a foot on the brake, we screeched two inches from a rusty barn door. Aunt Susie didn’t give a damn.
“She’s coming in a moment,” she said, then left me sitting.
Within minutes, they assembled by the front door, low voices grating. I couldn’t hear a word except sometimes my name; their sentences drifted into syllables distant and grainy as the dust kicked high on drought months. Jakey there’s a crier, I pictured Aunt Susie saying, accent yowling on the i's, paws shoved in her pockets. Gets the shit beaten out of him by the big boys so we had to take him out of there. The other woman was nodding, plucking at her bra where an itch would form. Perhaps she was like Aunt Susie, not giving a damn. Almost thirteen, Aunt Susie continued, but looks like he’s eight. His Mam drank too much when she was carryin’, make a boy made to be picked on.
I played with this conversation in my head, Aunt Susie this, Aunt Susie that. I wondered if Aunt Susie liked me. She did, I decided after a while. She did, or she would never stick with me so damn long. She was just pretending, throwing in a cuss word or two as she talked, but if I were there she would reach across, ruffle my hair. He ain’t that bad, she would say.
The woman, on the other hand, looked like she would pick a fight before believing a happy thing. A hand was on her hip, the other scuffed on a doorframe, dirt-stained jeans tucked into boots, shoulders like a man’s. I couldn’t bear it, the sight of this rugged woman. I wondered if she was like the rest of them, if she shouted herself hoarse and if she packed a mean fist.
Or maybe she had five sons downstairs, I thought. I got five sons downstairs, she said. This Jakey boy’s just an extra. He’ll help with the house, I’m one worker short. But I’ll treat him all the same. A son. But a while passed, and no sons came. She stood by Aunt Susie, stoic as a boulder, alone.
“You dreaming?” Aunt Susie said, her face right by mine. “Get there. She’s waiting.”
Aunt Susie stayed by the car, and I could feel her watch me as I walked away, the other woman watching me come. One of the woman’s heels scuffed the soil, sending up a puff of red sand.
When I reached her, she said, “Son.” Up close her eyes were grey and her skin brown and her hair short and matted by all the wind.
“Ma’am,” I replied. It was respectful in my head but my voice came out a mumble.
“Finally here.”
“We left the home late.”
“Yeah?”
“Drove real fast.”
“Drove too fast, maybe,” she said. “You two near hit my barn door there.”
I followed the jab of her finger, feeling Aunt Susie’s glare bore through my skull all the way from the Buick. Never safe from anything.
“It was just near an accident,” I managed, and for a moment she was silent. The back of my head burned.
“Nothing is an accident,” she finally said, looking down at me, and I was caught in the way her mouth twisted, sad as a dog.
*
We had an afternoon beer, the three of us. Rather, the two of them; I was quiet by the corner playing with the beagle whose limp muted the threat of his bared teeth and growl. Later I would find out that he had no name, an absence that was solid, indestructible, but for the moment he felt as temporary as the woman and the house, the person and place meant to bring me up proper. Like a man, as Aunt Susie said, though she had, by then, said it too many times to earn my belief. “She’ll bring you up like a man, he’ll bring you up like a man, they’ll bring you up like a man,” Aunt Susie said, over and over, but I was seven, eight-and-a-half, ten years old each time, and each time I came back still too young. The home couldn’t account for that, which was why Aunt Susie thought of me as a failed kind of child, the kind that the people wouldn’t keep to raise.
“What’cha do there, you steal? You be nasty to them?” she shouted the first time, but by the third she had resorted to putting my file back in her drawer, shrugging it off. “Maybe you’re just too small, Jakey. They don’t like boys all weeney like you.”
But this woman, this unknown woman, was taking a chance on me.
Aunt Susie was laughing a little too loudly now, and the wobble of her arm made dominoes out of her beer cans, clattering against each other in a line she had made, a full six or seven empty side by side. They jumped and rattled to the floor, and the other woman said, “Drinkin’ on the job, Susie?”
“Don’t matter, Jakey don’t mind. I’ve been working on his case for years now.”
“Years…”
“Rejected all his life,” Aunt Susie snorted, “right from the day his mam went to rehab!”
A beer can spun, her voice rang, and for a moment I thought she was going to burst into guffaws. But the woman’s look quieted her down, and Aunt Susie, glancing at me, said, “Maybe there’s hope yet, Jakey.” Her idle smile. “You’re in good hands, now. Good hands.”
*
Aunt Susie left after dinner, was too darn late for her, she said, it was two hundred miles back to the home, and in the silence that lingered from her vanishing the woman showed me to my room. It was spartan, four white walls and a bed, a stack of empty shelves, a wardrobe with a crooked door. A light-bulb hung from the ceiling, casting dull shadows all around. Aunt Susie had chucked my duffel bag on the only landmark, a round, green rug that seemed to mark the spot. Clothes struggled against the zippers: my collection of raggedy T-shirts. I took it all in, trying to believe that it was, for now, all mine. My eyes hurt from all the space.
“You like it?” Ma’am said, and I did.
“You need nothing else?” she said, and I didn’t.
“You like being inside?” she said, and I shrugged. I didn’t really care.
“Come out,” she said. “I’ll take you out.”
“Where?”
“Come out,” she repeated. “I’ll drive.”
I followed her, my head in stars. Everything was too new. Down the stairs, the banister peeling, the wallpaper terracotta, a mannish hue. We turned into the kitchen, the walls a flat grey stone, and out through the back door, into the yard. The dog barked, a single snarl as the door fell closed. There was a flood of moon through a cloudless sky.
“I’ve no Buick,” Ma’am said, “but she’s a good baby.”
And it was no Buick, resting in the backyard. Her pick-up might have been a Chevy or a Ford but under the dust I couldn’t tell. It traced a shapeless ghost beneath the dim porch lights, the only light for miles around. But the look of the car didn’t matter; its engine was still strong and took us an hour into darkness, the seat bucking beneath me across the bumps. We drove in silence and I looked at Ma’am, one hand on the wheel, her other fingers tapping on her thigh. Her nails were blunted to the quick though not through biting; they simply looked like they would never grow. I was fascinated. I wondered what she looked like in something sleeveless, if her arms were so strong she could pick up a man. But her thick forearms disappeared now into a fold of plaid flannel, cuffed where her elbow bent.
“Nearly there,” she said.
Within minutes we stopped and it was so dark I couldn't see anything but the small pinpricks that were the stars above. The truck was braked at an incline, and its headlights tossed upward in a petulant effort to brighten out the moon. We sat in silence for a while; there was nothing but the sound of her fingers, drumming a low note on her thigh.
“July fourth they get here for the celebration,” she said suddenly. “Right down there, if you can see proper. My favorite place to be.”
I looked into the dark, and saw nothing; the absence of light was blinding.
“Used to come here in this very truck. Watch from the inside when they left me to drink with the crowd. Had a daddy. Two brothers. My mam died, ways ago.”
She opened the window a crack.
“Them, they died too,” she said. “Jack crashing from the bar.”
“…Sorry,” I said for lack of words.
“Don’t be,” she said. “We live, we die.”
She paused, her grey eyes dry.
“What I’m saying is,” she said, “It’s been a while. It was been a damn while and all them neighbors of mine don’t know why you come up today. Hell, I don’t know why I said it was OK.”
“I don’t need nothing,” I said. “I like my room.”
“No, son,” she said.
Her fingers stopped tapping. She turned to me and looked, eyes focused to a point. From the distant glow of the headlights I could only see the way her face contoured, her forty-year-old skin, her square jaw, sharp nose and her mouth, the corners bent down. In the darkness her hand nearly found my knee, as if to pat it roughly, but then she withdrew.
“You don’t half understand a woman like me,” she said, and then as if embarrassed by this revelation, let the engine start back up with a roar.
Days passed slow on the ranch. It wasn’t like the towns where the houses were close together and dirty and there was always something to clean. The ranch was free of the noise disease, and in the mornings Ma’am left a sweep of silence when she headed out at the crack of dawn. Have to talk to the ranchhands, she would say, before knocking back her coffee juice. The stuff was so black it could hide a drowned fly.
She didn’t come back till evening. Most days, she had her hands full. Unlike her, I did little, though sometimes I played with the beagle. We were lazy together, sitting side by side in our melancholy. The house was big, sometimes too big, and once out of desperation I found a rag and began to clean, but she came back just as I was poking around behind the plain oak chairs and said, “What you doing there?”
“Cleaning,” I said.
“You don’t gotta do that,” she said, taking the rag out of my hands. “Here the dust don’t settle.”
Some afternoons, it seemed, she felt bad that I did nothing. Sometimes she brought back ranchhands, “to talk to the boy,” she said, though their handlebar moustaches got the way of any real conversation.
“Kid, you’re just how old?” one said, jerking his head at me.
“Almost thirteen,” I replied.
“Never would’a guessed,” another said as he shoved a spoonful of potato between his lips, gravy catching on his beard. “Never would’a guessed.”
One afternoon, she let me meet Manny to ride the horses.
“You Jakey?” he said the first time I saw him, a long stem of grass between his teeth and worn denim hanging off his frame. Manny was a young guy but the hair around his temples were already graying like a faded tattoo. He had curls for hair, cropped close, and when he smiled he smirked. His teeth, the front two, were yellow.
“Manny,” he said, big hand outstretched. “I help with the cows but I can teach you to ride horses no problem.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“You don’t hafta worry.”
I didn’t. Manny spent the afternoons teaching me to saddle and mount a spotty Appaloosa named Betty, whose every move was a surprise. The first time, Manny led me through the fields, my hands gripped on reins and my knees pressing hard on her sides.
“You falling yet?” he said. “You falling?”
“I’m not falling one bit,” I said in a bit of a huff. “Who d’you think I am?”
“Guess you’re doing all right for a small town boy,” Manny said, grinning.
But while the afternoons were easy, it was the evenings that turned to stone. I went back to Ma’am, where I found her always, sitting by a TV with a beer in her fist, and we sat awhile before as she served up a lukewarm dinner, questions sparse.
“Your afternoon good?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Good,” she said, and a slop of hamburger dripped onto my plate.
“She’s learning how to talk,” Manny explained one afternoon. We were sitting in the shade of a tree, pants rolled to the knee, and sticking our legs out into the sun tanning on long brown socks. Manny’s legs were hairy, I noticed, but the black curls parted around his scars where the shod horses once kicked, biting deep into skin.
“Or at least I think. What else can she do with a kid dropping so sudden from the sky? I dunno, to be honest. Nothing wrong with you Jakey but when you see her, you don’t see a woman with a son.”
“Why does she want me round, then?”
“A real mystery,” Manny said. “I mean she was the only woman in the house but never treated like one, and there ain’t a woman for miles.”
“Well ain’t that better? Won’t be so much yelling around.”
“Yeah,” Manny said, “but that makes one house with barely no words. The old man talk even less than she, and her brothers were damn worse. You know, you grow up round all that silence? You don’t learn to say more than a sentence at a time. So what she gonna do with a kid, you tell me?”
“She’s gonna get rid of me soon, then.”
“I don’t know,” Manny said, curling two fingers into the waistband of his pants. He gave a few good scratches, baring the whiskers on his belly. “Don’t think so. Or you wouldn’t have come in the first place cause she don’t change her mind,” and Manny scratched, “Never change her mind, that woman,” he scratched again, “and besides,” he concluded, squinting into the sun, “it’d be a sad pity to see you go.”
*
We went on night drives, Ma’am and I. The drive was almost always steeped in the sound of wheels, their low growl insistent beneath the radio station, a melodic twang of choice. Again and again we would head down the road that went straight as a bullet until the hill got in our way. Up the hill and she would hit the brakes, pull up. Sometimes she would begin by rolling a cigarette, an attempt to busy those hands. Most times she would just begin, with a sentence or with a phrase, or just quietly, hesitantly, “Son,” she would say, before drifting to a stop.
The car smelled like old smoke and sweat and hay as she got out her questions, her voice hooking tenderly on a question mark, her ensuing silence void of emotion, purposefully so.
“I’m listening,” she said, not looking at me.
I like lemonade, I read old sports mags, I learn from books when it pleases me, which ain’t that often, less they be about mountains. I like mountains. I didn’t like them boys from the home cause they knocked out one of my teeth, yeah you see it just here. And I dunno what’s the best thing in my life that happened, Ma’am, I gotta think bout it for a moment.
“Last year Aunt Susie got me a real hog killin’ hat for my birthday,” I said. “A present from the home. One of them Jagel boys took it from me in the end but I got to wear it for a while at least.”
“Well,” she said. “Well we’re gonna damn that hat, son. We’ve got a Saturday on our hands this year for the fireworks, fourth of July.”
“Really?” I said.
“Damn well be real,” she said. “I’ve been looking forward to this myself something nasty.”
And it began like any other day but when night docked we drove, faster than ever with her foot stuck mean, accelerating into our long, straight road. Within minutes of the hill we began to hear the sounds of people, and I didn’t know why I was shaking but maybe it was because we were no longer alone. She braked a little farther up the hill this time and we looked down to the bodies below, the people milling close around white tents. Someone had a guitar out, spinning out the chords, and some women were singing along, voices slight and lilting to a popular country song. The air was bright with the smell of fresh wind and the light browning of potatoes, which caught on to the tail-end of the breeze. Some kids were eating corndogs, mustard all over their chins. But I didn’t need a corndog to be content. Already I was shaking, just watching the people circle a fire pit and roar, clapping mixed with their cheers.
In minutes the fireworks began. The ones on the ground clacked and popped, the ones in the air got bigger and brighter, from small fizzles, escaping like gasps, to the spidery palm leaves that swirled and exploded, lazy as slow fingers. There was shouting from the ground where the people were, and I could hear the sounds of children screaming in glee. Somewhere, a baby cried, awoken, but was drowned out by more noise. All those bodies moving, all those bodies arcing, looking up into the sky. My face was pressed against the glass. I left a spot of grease on the window. My heart was soaring.
“You see that?” I said, “You see that?”
But she wasn’t looking at the fireworks, she was looking at me.
“Son,” she said, and I turned away from the glass through which the crowd roared.
“Son,” she said.
Her arms were moving, those thick arms I looked at and thought about, and they widened, almost comically, into an empty embrace.
“Come here,” she said, and I looked at her mouth, the sadness of it, the way age made the little lines about her lips sink deeper, and I looked at her hair, still mussed and uncared for, and I looked and I looked and I looked and I went, sinking into her hold, feeling her arms creep about my bony shoulders tight and then tighter, trying not to let go. I felt her grasp me almost carefully, the butt of her wrist slowly moving, up and down my back like she was burping a baby but she was tender as hell and I couldn’t believe she was. Once on an upstroke her finger caught on my T-shirt, dragged it a little upward and I felt her fingers on my skin. I wondered if she felt that I was sweaty, that I was frightened, that I needed this.
Somewhere outside, a firework whistled, sizzled, died.
“Son,” she repeated, and she looked, almost dumbly at me as I reached up to touch her cheek, her jawline, her collarbone.
“Ma’am,” I said, wanting more. “Ma’am.”
Part II
1994
Manny joked about women too much, and sometimes he was callous.
“Boy you near fifteen now and you still don’t ride good on horses, how you gonna manage a woman?” he said.
It was spring and the roads were finally clear of snow. He talked about his weekends where at last he could truck to town and see them all, some you had to pay fifteen dollars for, others only some sweet words. These women, he would use them for the kind of love you thought about only on weekends, the kind involving his cock and some beer, but that was okay, thought about it every day and you’d get nothing else done.
“Gonna see Loretta,” he said one afternoon, squinting up at the leaves above. The wind rustled the branches and the sun made a diamond, expanding and contracting around his left eye.
“That grocer’s kid?”
“You’ve got a good memory, you got, Jakey.”
“You don’t get many women you don’t hafta pay for,” I said.
He looked at me lazily through his sun diamond eye.
“I sure as hell don’t,” he admitted, “but at least them women I get for free are crazy ‘bout what I am.”
“You crazy ‘bout them?”
He paused.
“Only Loretta,” he said. “Right now, anyway.”
Loretta ain’t much a looker, Manny said, but she’ll do. She’s got hair as dark as his cheap whores’ are platinum, and a body with curves that make you know she’s grown. Manny nodded, chewing a blade of grass, thinking of her.
“She’s crazy about me,” he said. “She want me real bad. Last Saturday she said, Manny you’re my favorite man, my only man, and I said to her, honey, I do love you. First time I ever say that so soon, that’s how I know.”
“You meet her at her daddy’s store?”
“No, at the Davidson barn dance, whole month back. We were standing by the tables where the beers passed round, and I took her hand and I said, you like being around everyone here, or you wanna head out alone? And she didn’t say nothing. She reached out and she was a-kissin’ my face, that’s what she did, and then aw, she bite my ear real hard.”
Manny nodded again, a wayward smile lingering on his face.
“If that ain’t love, I dunno what love is.”
“That’s nice,” I said.
“How bout you, Jakey?”
“What bout me?”
“You near fifteen now,” he said.
“So what?” I said.
“Maybe I’ll take you down to see her. She’s gotta sister or two, you can take your pick.”
“I don’t want no twelve year old girl,” I said, a little mad. “I’m grown now.”
“I’m not talkin' bout twelve, kid. You nasty. I’m talkin' your age, fifteen, sixteen, grown too.”
“Huh,” I said.
“No man too good for a woman or two.”
“No kidding,” I said.
“How bout it?” he asked again, that smile on his face. “Take you to Loretta’s. They’re some pretty young things, them sisters.”
“They ain’t nothing,” I said, spitting into the grass.
*
They continued, our car-rides to nowhere, Ma’am and I. By the time I was fifteen she had taught me to drive, and sometimes I would, the pick-up carrying us through a blind sea.
“When you stopping?” she said.
“Soon.”
I watched the truck follow the road, close, tires scraping the edge where tar ran into dirt. Two miles down, I knew, the road turned into a clearing where the tar stopped and changed to rock and grass. I told her this. By now I knew the truck paths like the back of my hand.
“Here.”
We pulled to a stop, she got out of the truck. She got in the back, and I crawled between the two front seats. Settled into her lap. She put her hand in my hair, tugging gently. It was a clumsy attempt at a stroke, but I didn’t want her to stop. I curled up and she held me, one arm strong against my back, the other touching my middle, then my arm, light as she could. Her fingers were rough pads making circles on my skin.
We lay in the darkness for a while, not moving though sometimes she took a deep breath and I could hear the thump of her chest going louder for a beat. We dozed there, just touching, and I touched the uneven cracks on her elbows and the sinews of her biceps, and against my face, her warm chest, her shirt soft on my cheek. I thought of the women Manny talked about, their big curls, their narrow waists, their high voices. They would make too much noise, I feel. They would disgust me. Here Ma’am was a large and unmoving beast, thighs straining against her jeans. Her belt buckle glinted, her zipper was a faded bronze. I pulled her closer to me, and I was excited by that. It was OK: “Son,” she called me, but she wasn’t my mother.
“You feed the dog yet,” she said, voice clogged with languor.
“Yeah,” I said into the hollow of her neck. She smelled like sweat and a day out in the field, like dry grass and heat-waves and red dust. I poked out my tongue to where her collarbones met and it was salty as an ocean though we were nowhere near water.
“Don’t you do that,” she said, a hand heavy on my neck, but she didn’t move when I poked my tongue out again.
“It’s salty,” I said.
“It’s sweat.”
And I reached down and felt the web between each of her fingers, traversed her thumb gently with my own, put my palm against hers, noticing that mine was almost as big, now. Her wrists were strong, and her veins bumped up on the back of her hands like Braille. I was trying to read her, but she was only a body in this darkness, breathing quiet, and I couldn’t make anything of her.
“Son,” she said.
“It’s time?” I ask.
“Maybe,” she said, “But that’s not it.” She pointed. “It’s light out.”
And she was pointing where the clouds had broken and the slight, cold moon was high, and all around the landscape was grass shrouded by a slate grey beam of light. Beauty at its freezing point. I crept further into her body, her flesh, at least, was warm. She put her hand against my scalp again, tugged at the strands of hair, gentle though her hand was heavy.
“Gorgeous, ain’t it,” she said, half-breathing. “Glad I can share it with a young’un like you.”
“I’m no young’un.”
“You’re one.”
“I’m good enough for you,” I said.
“But you’re still young,” she said, firmly, and resentfully I sat up, a leg still caught between hers, and pulled her to me.
“Ma’am,” I said.
But she turned her face so that my nose brushed the angle of her jaw line. We sat for a moment, cheek to cheek, and as I raised my hand, wanting to put it against her neck, she said, “Son.”
She said, “Son, the heifers going out tomorrow morning.” Her voice, thick now.
“Yeah?” I said.
“Early out.”
“Yeah,” I said, wishing we didn’t have to go, knowing, almost desperately, that she needed me.
Part III
1996
One thing Manny told me, sullen off his horse at nine one autumn morning, was that love don’t exist in cowboy country. The leaves were yellow now, and the winds had picked up, tousling everything in sight. Manny was scared of an early snow.
“Damn wrong weather to cheer me up,” he said, thinking bitterly of Loretta.
“It ain’t that bad,” I said, brushing Betty down.
“It’s just God,” Manny said. “It’s just God telling me, Manny, love don’t exist in cowboy country.”
“She still loves you, it was just her daddy didn’t like that she did.”
“You don’t talk bout her,” Manny said, chucking his brush in the dirt.
“Yeah?”
“She’s dead to me,” Manny said, sulky again. “She’s dead to me.”
“Naw,” I said.
“You’ll know it someday.”
“Naw,” I said again, not believing him, not wanting to.
*
Love stops existing in split seconds, though it takes us too long to realize it is gone. It was half through October when Ma’am said over a dinner, “Gotta phone call today.”
“Yeah?” I said.
“Yeah,” she said.
“Anything important?” Ma’am made doughnuts today, I thought to myself, pleased.
“It was Aunt Susie,” she said, and something in her voice made me stop halfway, put a dough ball back onto my plate, powdered sugar huffing into the air.
“She said it was your mam,” she said. “Your real mam.”
“Yeah?” I said.
“They said she’s all drink free.”
“What’s that mean?”
“She want you back,” Ma’am said, quietly.
I didn’t know what that meant. I tried to say so, but my mouth worked around empty space and didn’t make a sound. I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t know if that meant my mother had stopped her hoo-haw laughing, her ripping slaps, her silent nights, passed lifeless by the bed. I didn’t know if she remembered the men she slept with, the mornings in her bathrobe with a pain about her head. I didn’t know even if she remembered what name she gave me, if she knew me, if she saw me she would realize I were her son.
“She wants you back,” Ma’am said.
“Oh,” I said. My fingers pressed into the dough ball, leaving a mark.
“Aunt Susie said the sixth of June. She’s fixing everything up between you two and she said your mam wanna see you soon. But she told me, she’ll give us five years together before you leave.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Next year, sixth of June,” she said. “I couldn’t say nothing, son. To that. Aunt Susie tell me I got nothing I can do or say. She’s your real mam.”
The truth was, I could barely hear her. My head was sparkling too much from thinking, in snapshots, of all the things I wanted to cling to. Sudden affection. Sudden longing. Everything, now threatened, precious. There was my room, once sparse, now lived in, my sports mags, chucked all over the floor, my green rug, grey from footprints and dark patches where I’d spilled coffee and once, a beer. Shelves half-filled but not with books, with things I’d found, interesting grasses, sunned-out squirrel road kill, a dried up toadstool with spots the color of the sun. My T-shirts, kicked under my bed, the dirty with the clean. The stables. The pen. The distant cows, the sounds of them, the smell of their burp when I got close. Manny, the long blade of grass hanging from between his teeth, spitting, rolling cigarettes, inhaling, saying, “Love don’t exist in cowboy country.” Love didn’t.
“Son,” she said, chucking a finger under my chin now. “You listening?”
“No,” I said, blinking furiously, the doughnut dilating in my view, my fingers pressing, the doughnut glued, an absurd shape, to my fingers.
“Don’t get upset.”
“I’m not.”
“She don’t drink no more –”
“I don’t care.”
“You’re better with her in town. What you got here? You ain’t got nothing much.”
“I ain’t got nothing much?”
“All I’m saying, you’re a big boy now. Look at you, tall now, real strong, but you ain’t getting nowhere staying here.”
“I’m getting somewhere.”
“Where?” she said.
I shrugged.
“Look, son,” she said, but I wasn’t looking. “I’m sorry. You tell me what you want. I’ll give you anything you want, son. You hear me? One last thing.”
You don’t be sorry. The doughnut grew heavy wet in my eye, the doughnut threatening to fall, the doughnut threatening to splash, to shame. I was blinking furiously, I was trying not to think, I was trying to keep the doughnut, dilating further now, in my eye. Ma’am, I thought. I thought of those car rides, those long car rides to nowhere and hell, those car rides in the summer, where the grass grew less green, the sound of them when the night winds blew, a chilly rustle through the gap of a wound-down window. I thought of the car rides when it was cold, where the big wheels dug troughs in the snow, where we didn’t go far but sat with the heater, bright hot on our skin. I thought of the in-betweens, the times when I wasn’t warm or freezing but the view from the hill was either, depending on the moon, if it was there, if it was white, if the sky was puce from an oncoming rain. You don’t be sorry. Ma’am, she needed me. I needed to be here. You don’t be sorry.
We live, we die. We live, we die.
*
I was not sullen like Manny was. I was too busy thinking of what I wanted, that one last thing. I was thinking of how I could say goodbye to a woman who was about to disappear, a quick death, from my life.
I thought on the winter ground that I walked on, sinking low, leaving pockmarks filling slowly with snow, melting to slush from the press of my step. I thought as I chipped icicles from the roof and watched them drip from each canine tip. I thought listening to the sound of snowmelt from the far-off white-capped mountains, the sound of expansive silence that filled my insides, a hollow drum. I thought with the smell of burning wood in the house, the floors still cold to bare feet, linoleum too shiny on my skin, and I thought while watching the blades of grass poking out, a signal of spring. I thought when the leaves were shooting, sharp as knives, when daisies began to pop, when weeds unfurled and began their slow conquest of the earth. I thought as I tore off calendar pages, January to May, a sad hero, a living cliché. Summer coming, and as I rode Betty, adept now, it was hard to realize, not sullen but with horrifying ease, that summer was coming at last.
Part IV
1997
We said nothing but looked at the empty field where they would soon gather, bodies hustled close between the white tents, beers foaming from their cans, waiting for everything to begin. I thought of their necks, cricked from their heads bending faces toward the sky. They were waiting with breath held taut. I thought of the sound, the shot of bright dust into the air like harmless bullets, the sound of whirling, the sound of sudden freedom. Somewhere, someone was wearing the flag over his shoulders like a shawl.
“It’s nice here, ain’t it,” she said, her arm around me.
“It’s a good place to be,” I said.
“Right from when I was a kid,” she said, nodding, then almost smiled. I touched her ears, her earlobes, the soft hairs on the back of them, the baby skin, the only part hidden from those decades of sun.
“Let’s come back again,” I said.
“We will,” she said.
“No, on the fourth, this year.”
She hummed.
“Ma’am,” I said, sure of myself now. “I wanna come here again. That’s the one thing—I wanna, watch the fireworks.”
She didn’t say a word though she twitched, as if surprised. In the seconds that followed all that happened was her palm, dragging itself across the dashboard. She cleared a smidge of worn leather through the dust.
“Of all the things, son.”
“I wanna.”
“You just gotta pick the one thing I can’t real do,” she said. “You can’t stay no longer.”
“Well,” I said. “You promised.”
But I was isolated by my desire to be there. I imagined the men, some of them red-faced, a few of them already puking by the bins, holding on to their pudge, bringing everything up, beer waterfalls. The women, carrying their biscuits high and shouting at their kids to got the hell down here an’ help, though they were smiling too, or laughing, I couldn’t decide. I just wanted to see the teeming bodies, close, huddled, lighted beneath the brilliant spray of pomp and fire.
“It’s gonna be the last time,” I tried again.
“You’ve only been here once when it happened, son.”
“But that first time, I still remember it.”
“Well keep it at one, you’ll remember it better.”
“But that the first time.”
“What you saying?”
“That the first time, you don’t remember?” I said. “You try to make me hug you, you try to touch me, you –”
“Watch your words, son,” she said.
“What, you forget it all now?” I said.
“We’re not going,” she said.
“No – ”
“Yes,” she affirmed.
“You couldn’t – ”
“…Son, there’s naw nothing you’re doing ‘bout it.”
“Why –”
“No.”
“I need to make it happen again,” I said, panicked now, but angry too.
She made a non-committal noise, picked a half-smoked cigarette from the stowaway bin, and crammed an end back into her mouth. Dug for a lighter.
“You got my light, son?”
“No,” I said.
There was a pause. I watched her search, old, brown fingers prying.
“I’m going away,” I said suddenly, trying my best not to shout. “I’m going away and you don’t care? You want me to go away so bad? You want me to go, I’ll go right now.”
If there was a moment that finally made her look at me, it was this. Her eyes squinted a little, her head crooked to a side as if I were someone she barely knew, as if she was trying to understand me but couldn’t. I was furious by then, and taken by the idea that I could, that I could jump out of the car and run till I touched the horizon with my fist, that I would never have to come back, that I would never have to, right now.
“I’ll do that. Let me go or I’ll do that.”
She found the light.
“That’s a fine idea, Jakey,” she said, taking a long and stuttering breath. Exhale, a curl of smoke from her nostrils. “But you’re going anyway.”
And I didn’t know if I began to yell or if I began to cry, my hands scrabbling at the seatbelt where I was fixed in, trying to get out. “Son,” she said, then said again but I couldn’t listen to nothing if nothing was listening to me. The seatbelt came off but her hands were against mine, roughly now, trying to stop me, pushing me back into the seat.
“I need to see this,” I sobbed, and the both of us were grappling and she was winning and we were both surprised by our own insistence. Unexpectedly I was shouting properly now, not just in my head, and then her hands were off me, suddenly, and I tipped toward the door and jumped out and stood there for a moment, breath catching, a skinny, broken thing with a streaky face.
I was off. I was bursting into the moonlight. I was running trying to got my fist to the horizon I longed for. I was darting too fast to be caught by the bumbling truck. I was fleeing, I was leaving her, I was free.
If I closed my eyes long enough I could pretend it was pitch black, I could pretend that I was finally out of the truck and bucket seat and unstrapped. My hand was brushing some lady’s full skirt and a kid was darting into my leg. A drink fizzed over my hand, slopping onto my boot, and I was red-faced and holding onto my middle and nearly puking, nearly bringing it all up, knowing that Ma’am was in the car, wanting me, needing me, trying to got me to come back to hold, touch, to mother.
But I couldn’t hear the fireworks. And though I had left her I was only fifteen feet from the truck where she sat, a cigarette dangling from her fingers from an open window. And though I had left her, when I turned back and looked, what I noticed wasn’t a sadness in her eyes, but the absence of it.
*
June 6, 1997
You learn to live alone and there ain’t five years that will change nothing. I emerged from her touch and we didn’t say a word. It was nearly ten now, an hour since the sunset and it was one, two hours to where I was supposed to be at.
“Aunt Susie’s at the home. She’s expecting you in at midnight,” she said.
“Twelve’s too soon,” I said.
“Naw,” Ma’am said, extricating herself. She climbed back into the driver’s seat, while I waited a moment in the back.
It meant that we had to leave. I pushed myself through the gap of the front two seats, my feet slipping on the worn leather, a broken toenail catching momentarily on the gear shift. I brushed her shoulder, and it was firm as ever. I wedged myself carefully into the bucket seat, my left hand reaching a diagonal, pulling a belt across my chest. Stuck in. The seat was a little too small. I was cramped at seventeen.
The drive back was the same as it was coming, across dirt paths and tar, kicking up dust where the cars hadn’t run much. But some roads were more paved now, fixed. I was surprised when I didn’t bump, my head crashing into the roof, the velour not softening the blow.
“It would’ve been nice,” Ma’am said, fingers drumming. She stared at the upcoming road, the lights brightening up what was ahead. “To watch 'em. The fireworks.”
“Yeah?” I said.
The truck swung across an easy bend. Across was another long, straight road.
“But you would’ve had to go anyway,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Even if we had waited for the fireworks. You’d still have to go. You know I’m not your mam.”
And she steered, one hand low on the wheel, and as I reached out, wanting to touch her elbow, she said again, “I’m not your mam,” and looked at me through the low slant swing of her eye. The truck swaggered, pressing me back into my seat, and taking my hand with it.
“We’re gonna reach soon,” she said.
“I know,” I said.
“Aunt Susie’ll be there.”
“Don’t care for that bitch.”
“You watch your words,” she said, still staring at the road.
I stared out with her.
“Aunt Susie’ll be there,” she continued. “She’ll help get your stuff. I’ll throw out that bag of yours. You’ll get out of the truck. I’ll get back in, and I’ll go.”
“That’s it?” I said.
“Yeah,” she said.
“You not gonna say goodbye?” I said.
“I’m saying goodbye,” she said, and I looked at her profile, her old skin, her square jaw, sharp nose, and her mouth, the corners bent down. I looked at her, waiting out the seconds as midnight edged closer. And as the truck lights pitched us forward, I felt us exploding, bright and fluorescent, sizzling into the darkness.