Bunny lurched up from being my pillow, jolting me awake. Out in the flat middle of nowhere the Catfish had pulled into the Okay Corral Gas and Food Mart. The overhanging lights made an eerie glow around the car. The place was like a spaceship.
“Where are we?” I asked, wondering why it was called the Okay Corral Gas and Food Mart and not what we’d learned in school—the O. K. Corral, the location of a wild west shootout with the Earp brothers, but Bunny and I called them the Burp brothers. I like Okay better, being the optimist that I am.
“Go back to sleep, Ruby Clyde.” He threw open the door.
Last time somebody told me to go back to sleep I woke up in another state, so I wasn’t about to do that again.
He slammed the car door and that woke Mother.
“Where are we?” she asked.
But I couldn’t answer her, so Mother tapped on the window to ask him, but Catfish brushed her off. “Just stay in the car, for crying out loud,” he said. Soon as he pumped the car full of gas, he marched inside the store.
“Mother, let’s get out now, let’s hitchhike home,” I said.
“It’s a long way back home,” she said.
“At least let’s go to Cypress Mill. Why didn’t you ever tell me you have a sister?”
“Oh, baby, she doesn’t want to see me.”
I thought I was the one she didn’t want to see, but Mother didn’t say that. She went on to say, “Besides, she’s a solitary.”
“What’s a solitary?” I asked.
“A nun who lives alone,” she said. “So they can pray and work and ignore family. So you see, Ruby Clyde, Carl is all we have.”
She couldn’t have been more wrong about that. We had each other.
The Catfish had told me to stay in the car, but staying in the car was easier said than done. My pig had needs. Bunny needed a walk, but I couldn’t find the lasso rope that came with my cowboy outfit, so Mother grabbed panty hose from her bag for me to use as a leash. I tied one stretchy foot around Bunny’s neck. Bunny pulled until the panty hose stretched into a tight thread from my hands to his neck. Hard pig toes tapped across the pavement. It’s funny how you think of pigs as big and fat, but in reality they walk like toe dancers, regular ballerinas. That snout of his raced this way and that, like a motorboat pulling us both through the bushes.
* * *
There wasn’t much in the way of grass around that gas station, just a lot of sandy dirt and rock and groups of small twisty trees. Bunny did his business pretty quickly, then rooted around under the starry sky.
Stars were one thing that always gave me hope, even with that brain-chilling thought about the end of the sky: it couldn’t end—it couldn’t go on forever. So what the heck did it do? I still found hope in the skies—hope that answers existed, whether impossible or not.
Out there in the dark, the sky was filled with bright holes like an upturned colander. I had never seen so much sky. The Big Dipper and Orion were the only constellations I knew by name. But I liked to make up new ones: Jonah’s Whale, Jacob’s Ladder, Baby Moses Floating in the Reed Basket. My very own constellations everywhere. That Texas sky held the entire Old Testament: Lot’s Wife, plain as day; the Parting of the Red Sea; Adam and Eve running around in fig leaves. And looking up in the heavens, I made up a whole new story and wrote it across the sky. I called it the Heroic Rescue of Bunny the Pig. There ran the Catfish, all legs and knees, across the night sky, Bunny tucked under his arm. I was proud to have been a part of his rescue.
Just then cracking sounds and yelling broke out at the filling station. I’d heard that sound back at the IQ Zoo. Gunshots.
* * *
By the time I ran to the edge of the light, I saw Catfish bobbing across the parking lot. He held a bag of something in one hand and was shooting his pistol over his head. “Whoo-hoo mercy!”
This guy ran out behind him yelling, “Get out of my store, fool.” He carried his own long gun, which he pulled to his shoulder and fired.
It was a real-life gunfight but it seemed like they were playacting until the Catfish, who was dancing and shooting, fell forward on his face.
The store owner reloaded and pointed that gun right at my mother, who stood in wide-eyed fear. A slight breeze was blowing her dress against her legs. Her hair moved gently behind her shoulders. The neon lights overhead gave her a halo. The store owner shook the gun and screamed, “Be still, woman, or I’ll pull the trigger!”
“Mama!” I cried from the shadows.
She looked at me with a warning glare that meant be silent, then shifted her eyes to the bushes. I knew that was where she wanted me to go and hide. I was so afraid the store owner would shoot her when she moved, but he didn’t.
“Mama!” I cried out again, but quieter, like saying it twice would make a difference. I didn’t know what to do.
That’s when Mother said, “Eleanor will help.” The owner wouldn’t know what she was talking about, but I knew it was a message for me. And I guess she thought I could just do that, since I took care of so many things in our life.
* * *
My mind detached from my body entirely. My skin was a shell, and my guts were as cold as the inside of a refrigerator, not to mention my scrambled brain. My feet were glued to the earth, like in a nightmare where you can’t move.
Suddenly Bunny began to run circles around me. The panty hose wrapped my legs and made it so I couldn’t walk. I swear to God, and I don’t swear lightly, but I swear I think Bunny was tangling me up trying to protect me.
You won’t believe what I did. I still don’t understand it myself. When Bunny pulled frantically on the panty hose, I let him drag me back out in the bushes, past the lights, back into the dark.
I’m not one to do what I’m told, but I did. I hid just like Mother ordered.
I’m ashamed to admit that I let Bunny pull me back out in the dark, and I let him do it because I was afraid. Plain and simple. I was afraid and my better brain wasn’t working.
Being afraid was not like me at all, but I had no idea what to do. I have never been short on ideas in my life, but this Wild West gunfight was way over the top for me. There was the Catfish laid out on the asphalt, bleeding. There was my mother looking down a shotgun.
I liked to barf—feeling guilty and cowardly, keeping myself safe instead of trying to protect Mother, but what could I have done that wouldn’t have made things worse? Me and my pig. What if I ran screaming up to Mother and got us both shot? What good would that do?
Why on earth had Mother told me to find Eleanor Rose? The woman hated me. Maybe the Catfish was right about stray kids being put in the orphanage. Because what if I found her and she slammed the door in my face? Then I’d still be alone in the world, without any adult. A voice filled my head. Carl’s voice: They lock you in an orphanage until you’re eighteen years old. And underneath it all, the low calm voice of God, saying absolutely nothing.
With all those feelings and voices and silence battling inside of me, it’s a wonder I didn’t vanish.
But I didn’t vanish.
I sat down in the dirt with my pig and shivered.