TEXAS WOMAN
BLUES

“Doom is the House without
the Door.”
—Emily Dickinson

I

SUGARGIRL’S DADDY

1

Dolores has been living with her aunt and uncle for six months when the letter comes from her father. Everybody can see it’s from him because of the Texas Department of Corrections envelope. Aunt Rhonda hands it to her like it’s some run-over thing off the road, her face all squinched up. Dolores takes it to her room and closes the door.

The letter is written on institutional stationery. The information in the spaces at the top of the page has been provided in a large ball-point scrawl. Further down, the words of the letter stagger in the same unpracticed hand between the hard straight lines of the page.

TEXAS DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS

Date 10/22/66 Inmate No. 1099 Name Buckman stock Unit Ellis To Dolores stock Relation daughter RFD, St or Box No. 380 Bowie ave City Raymondville State Texas

TO THE PERSON RECEIVING THIS LETTER

All inmates’ mail is opened, censored and recorded by OFFICIALS. Inmates may receive not more than three letters a week from any one person on their correspondence and visiting lists. These letters must be limited to two pages. You may use one sheet and write on the front and back if you wish. Please address the inmate by name and number. If these rules are not observed the letter will be returned to the sender . . .

Dear sugargirl

I’m sorry I have not writen to you untill now. They told me awhile back Hannah past away. I been meaning to write you and tell you how sorry I am but, I have been at a lost for words. I am so sorry sugargirl. I guess you dont believe me but, I loved your moma very much tho I guess I din’t show it too good sometimes. I can’t think of anything to say, to make up for the pain and the heart-ache I caused her, and you too. All I can say is I’m awful sorry. Please try not to think to hard of me sugargirl I know I was’nt much of a daddy or a husband either one. Sometimes I feel like cutting my own throat for the no-count I am. I figgure god’s making me pay back for that more than for what I did to that fella in Houston. I wish I could be with you now, sugargirl taking care of you like a good daddy ought but as you know I got what they call a prior oblagation. (ha ha). I hope your happy and doing good in school. They told me your living with frank and Ronda I’m glad to hear it. I never got to know frank real good for a half-brother but he’s always seemed a good old boy and I guess ronda’s alright too. Be sure and mine them and be a good girl. By the way do you think you could send me a litle money. I’d sure be greatful. I’m always running out of cigs and stuff. Even in this place you got to have some money ain’t that a hoot. Just a few dollers would help a lot. It gets a little irratating in here sometimes but I guess thats why they call it a prison huh. (ha ha.) Well I guess that’s all for now. Please write, Your father.

p.s.—happy birthday sugargirl!!! Sweet sixteen and never been kissed huh? (ha ha, not hardly huh.) I wish I had a present I could give to you.

p.p.s—please excuse my bad writting.

There is no signature. Directly below the last line of the letter is a stamped circle the size of a fifty-cent piece enclosing the word “CENSORED.”

She tells herself to throw the letter away, now, right this minute. Instead, she reads it all the way through once again, slowly, from letterhead to final misspelled word.

He says he’s sorry. Says it right there in his own jerky handwriting. Says it . . . four times, all told. But the first time’s just sorry he hasn’t written to her. And the next two are sorry momma’s dead. Only the last one’s sorry about how he treated momma so bad. And her too, he says, though try as she might she cannot think of a single time her daddy ever mistreated her.

But she has no trouble remembering how he treated momma, and the recollection fills her with a sudden fury. Cut his own throat for being such a no-count, hell—there were bound to be lots of folk who’d be happy to do the job for him, herself included.

She is instantly appalled by the ferocity of her vindictiveness. Lord, girl, why feel so . . . hateful about him?

Because. Because he was a lowlife drunk and a damn whoremonger who was so god-awful mean to momma is why.

Yeah, well . . . but he was never mean to you, was he? Never even raised his voice at you, did he?

She recalls that voice now as clearly as if she’d last heard it five minutes ago. It had made her shiver when he hollered at momma, but oh it was such a sweet voice when he sang. Back in the good old days he used to sing to her at bedtime almost every night. “Goodnight, Irene” and “Red River Valley” and “Hush, Little Baby.” And on the long drives back to Alice from the beach at Mustang Island in the yellow Roadmaster the three of them would harmonize on “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” She always loved singing the part that went, “merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.” She’d always been sunburned and sandy and a little tired, but the way daddy and momma would look at each other up in the front seat and stroke each other and make each other laugh made her feel better than anything would ever make her feel again.

One time when they were driving back from the beach she asked momma if life was really just a dream like the song said, and momma told her, “Sometimes it is, honey,” and reached over and stroked the back of daddy’s neck as he drove along one-handed like always and held a cigarette between his teeth like it was a little prize cigar. “Can be a pretty sweet dream.”

Daddy had grinned around the cigarette and glanced at her in the rearview mirror. “That’s right, darlin, can be. Or can be a damn nightmare, you ain’t careful.”

“Buck Henry!” momma said, slapping at his shoulder. “Don’t you be telling her things like that! She’s just a little girl!”

Daddy chuckled and said, “She sure enough is. My little sugar­girl, ain’t you darlin?” He winked at her in the rearview and they laughed together like conspirators. Momma looked from one to the other of them and shook her head, saying, “You two are so bad, I swear.”

That was way back when, she reminds herself, and she was just a child. That was back before he started losing jobs on one rig after another. Before he started drinking so hard and getting in so many fights. Before him and momma started going at each other so bad.

No, he never did raise his voice at her, but she remembers now that he did give her a sort of push one time. It was only a little shove and only that one time. But still. You wouldn’t think it would’ve slipped her mind so easy, considering when it happened and all. And considering she hasn’t seen him since. And anyway, it was just a shove, it wasn’t like he’d hit her or anything, for pete’s sake.

Yeah, right. But he sure enough hit momma that time, didn’t he? Hit her and worse. God damn him! How could he have done her like that? That low-down sorry . . .

Whoa now, girl, just hold on. Let’s be fair here. Momma did hit him first and that’s a true fact. In the face with a wire hanger, remember? And he was pretty drunk. Not that being drunk is any excuse at all because it’s not, even if momma used to let it be, back before the excuse just flat wore out. Just the same, it’s something to keep in mind, that he was drunk, because it’s a fact, and you have to keep the facts straight if you’re going to be fair.

That’s all she’s trying to do here, be fair.

Hardly a day goes by that she doesn’t think about the last time she saw her daddy. Hardly a day will ever go by. A Sunday morning it was, as pretty as they come, the windows open wide and full of soft yellow sunlight, the blue curtains lifting lightly on a cool breeze. Church bells from down the street. Momma had made sugar-and-cinnamon doughnuts and a full pot of coffee for breakfast. (Her own cup had half-milk.) She was on the sofa looking at the funny papers while momma ironed clothes and hummed along to the songs playing low on the radio. Then here came daddy’s old pickup clattering down the street and roaring into the front yard and braking up a spray of dirt in momma’s new-planted flowerbed, his radio blasting out some Okie song before the engine shut off and the truck door banged and his big boots thumped up onto the porch. There’d been times before when he’d been gone a day or two, but this time it had been five days and nights without a word if he was dead or alive.

Back when she hadn’t even started going to school yet, he’d almost always be singing when he came home from the oil field at the end of the day. The clump of his boots on the porch would make her heart jump as she ran to greet him with momma already at the screen door and smiling. Sometimes the song he’d be singing was a little off-color and momma would blush and hiss, “Buck Henry Stock!” and gesture toward Dolores. He’d hug momma tight and pat her on the rump and then give ­Dolores a big handsome grin and say, “Well now, who’s that pretty li’l darlin?” He’d snatch her up and whirl her around over his head while she shrieked with delight and momma stood by with her fist on her mouth. He’d hug her so tight she could hardly breathe, but her heart would feel as swelled up as a birthday balloon. She loved the smell of him, the mingled odors of oil and sweat and tobacco and beer. And just barely detectable under it all, the hint of some fierce aroma like that of a flaring kitchen match. For the rest of her life in this tough Texas lowcountry, that mix of smells in a man will snag her like a lasso.

But the smell he carried that morning was different—a reeking tangle of whiskey and vomit and ladies’ perfume. He was sort of halfway grinning, like he’d just heard a good dirty joke but wasn’t real sure he should tell it to momma. You could see he was still drunk. And he had a mean-looking black eye swollen nearly shut. Once upon a time that eye would’ve moved momma to sufficient pity to forgive him just about anything, even being gone a couple of days, but not this time. She was way past that. When he hadn’t phoned by the fourth morning, Dolores had seen by her face that she’d reached the end of her rope with him. And when the screen door slapped shut behind him and she caught the smell of that perfume, well, that did it. She glared at him and said, “You no-good son of a bitch.” She who rarely cussed and had never before cussed him. The floor dropped out from under his grin and he looked like she’d spit in his face.

Suddenly it was like the world sped up to sixty miles an hour. They yelled terrible names at each other and the little breakfast table with the coffeepot and doughnuts tumped over and then momma was whipping him across the face with a wire hanger, cutting bright red lines in his face. He backhanded her into the wall and snatched away the hanger and she clawed at his eyes and they knocked over the ironing board as they went down fighting like cats in the mess of doughnuts and coffee on the floor. Dolores recalls screaming for them to stop it, stop it, recalls being so afraid for momma that she tried to pull daddy off her and that’s when he knocked her aside without even glancing at her. (She now remembers hitting the wall so hard her head rang.) And then momma had the clothes iron in her hand and was trying to put it to his face and there was the hiss of its touch against his neck and he roared and wrestled it from her and now had a fistful of her hair and momma was fending with her hands and the room shook with her screaming and was full of the smell of her burning flesh.

And then momma broke free and ran shrieking out of the house and daddy stomped over to the door and kicked out the screen and hollered a bunch of filthy names but didn’t chase after her. The back of his shirt was smeared with doughnuts and stained with coffee. He turned and caught sight of Dolores huddled in a corner. She was too terrified to move, and she could tell that for a second he didn’t even recognize her. And then he did—and his face sagged like all the bones in it broke at once. He stood there a minute, staring at her and crying without sound, his tears mixing with the blood running off the slashes on his face and dripping off his chin, looking like he’d just crossed over to someplace he’d never be able to get back from again. Then he turned and bolted outside and the truck door slammed and the engine roared and the tires spun in the grass and the truck fishtailed out onto the street and squealed away.

Then she was out the door too and running down the street and crying so hard she couldn’t see where she was going and a neighbor woman caught hold of her and took her into a house where somebody was yelling into a telephone for the police and a bunch of people were gathered around momma in the kitchen and smearing butter on her hands and arms and momma was crying and crying like somebody’d died.

They never heard from him again, but they heard about him every now and then over the following year. Arrested in Corpus Christi for disorderly conduct. Locked up in San Antone for destruction of municipal property. Jailed in Galveston for assault. Then came the news about his really bad trouble in Houston and the thirty-years-to-life sentence in the state penitentiary at Huntsville. But they never heard from him in all that time. Never heard from him until now, with momma more than six months in the ground.

And he says he’s sorry.

Naturally he says that—just look what he says right after: send me money. I’m sorry, now send me money. Of all the damn nerve! First time he writes to her in the nearly three years he’s been behind bars and he’s asking for money. It’s the only reason he wrote to her, she just knows it, and she feels like both cursing and crying.

But hey . . . he remembered her birthday. Right there at the bottom of the page, see. Her daddy remembered her birthday. He even wishes he had a present for her. There he is in prison, living a life of daily torments, and still he remembered his Sugargirl’s birthday.

Sugargirl. Nobody else ever called her that. Only daddy.

She feels her heart banging in her chest like a bird encaged with a snake. She goes to the window and draws deep breaths. She feels parched, but she’d rather go thirsty than leave her room for a drink of water just now and maybe run into Aunt Rhonda.

She carefully reads every line of the letter again. He’s allowed three letters a week from the people on his correspondence and visiting lists. Was she on those lists? He says please write, so she must be on his letters list, anyway. What about his visiting list? Wouldn’t he have told her if she was? Wouldn’t he have said come visit me? She wonders who would be on that list. She can’t think of a single solitary soul. Grandpa and Grandma Stock were both dead, and Uncle Rayburn, daddy’s older and only full brother, had been in the crazy ward of the VA hospital since the Korean War and like as not always would be. And who knew where his one sister Sally Stock Brown had been these past five years. Back before she got married, Aunt Sally used to visit fairly often. She was funny and sassy about everything and could make momma laugh so. Dolores thought the world of her. Then she married a fella named Lyle Brown, a truck mechanic from Uvalde who momma thought was a pecker­wood and who she could never understand Aunt Sally getting hitched to. Not six months later Sally took off on the back of a motorcycle driven by a pool player named Farley Zane and nobody’d ever heard from her again. Maybe Aunt Sally wrote to daddy from wherever she was, but not likely, since she would’ve written to momma if she’d written to anybody, but she hadn’t. As far as Dolores knew, the only living kin daddy had was Uncle Frank.

Could be daddy had friends she didn’t know about, friends who wrote him and visited him regularly, but she didn’t think so. The kind of men she remembered him buddying with weren’t the letter-writing sort—if they could write at all. He anyway never did have many close friends. The only two goodbuddies of his that ever dropped by the house were Everett Purdue and a huge red-bearded fella named Double John. But Everett had gone to prison about a year after daddy for armed-robbing a filling station in Oklahoma. And just a few months ago Double John had accidentally gassed himself to death one freezing night after his wife locked him out of the house and he went to sleep in his truck with the motor running in order to keep the heater going. Most likely, Dolores thought, daddy didn’t get too many letters or a whole lot of visitors.

What if she was on his visiting list? Would she go see him if he asked her to? The question yanks her heart up into her throat. Well, now, she just doesn’t know, she guesses it would just depend. She runs her finger swiftly along every line of the letter again. Nope, he doesn’t say it. He doesn’t say he loves her. Not anywhere on the page. A fact is a fact, and it’s a fact he doesn’t say it. “I loved your momma very much”—that’s in there. But not a word about he loves her.

But hold on now . . . the letter was censored. No bones about it, either—it says so right there at the top: “All inmates’ mail is opened, censored, and recorded by OFFICIALS.” And then again at the bottom of the letter—in the big round stamp that practically hollers it at you: “CENSORED.” Maybe the prisoners aren’t allowed to write “I love you.” Maybe that’s part of the punishment. Maybe they’re allowed to say they love somebody else, like he says he loved momma, but not allowed to say it to the people they write the letter to. Maybe they even censor the word “love” out of the letters the prisoners get, so they can’t have even the comfort of being reminded that somebody somewhere still loves them. That would be terrible, she thinks . . . but even more terrible, girl, is just how damn dumb you are, because only somebody dumber than dirt would think something so ridiculous.

Yeah . . . but . . . maybe he was just too scared to say it. What if he thought she might be so mad at him she’d just laugh at his letter and throw it away? Just imagine how it’d feel to think your words of love might get laughed at and thrown in the garbage. She tells herself to be fair now: could she really blame him for not saying “I love you” in this letter, the very first one he’s written her since going to the penitentiary? The first letter he’s written her ever? Shoot, he’s just waiting to see if she’s going to write him back, is all. If she does—and if she doesn’t tell him to go to hell—then he’ll likely trust her to treat his feelings with the respect that’s a daddy’s due. And then he’ll know he can go ahead and tell her what’s really and truly in his heart.

She tries to imagine what it’s like to have to live among hundreds and hundreds of criminal strangers, among heartless killers and robbers and awful men of every sort. What it’s like to have to live in a small steel cell with bars all around and guards watching you all the time. She wonders if he shares a cell with another prisoner, and if he does, if he’s gotten to be friends with him, if he’s told him about his daughter who he calls sugargirl. She wonders if he ever wishes he could just go out and get in a car and drive himself someplace for a cheeseburger and a strawberry shake, or go to a drive-in movie and have popcorn and laugh at the cartoons, or go to the beach like they used to do, him and her and momma, singing all the way there and all the way back: “Row, row, row your boat . . .” She wonders if he spends his days busting rocks with a sledgehammer or picking cotton out in the hot sun. Does he go out with a chain gang and work with a scythe in the ditches by the side of the road with his shirt off and the sweat running off his sunburned back while people drive by in their cars and stare out at him without a bit of pity? Does he work in a machine shop and stamp out license plates? She knows they wear white uniforms. She once saw a newspaper photo that showed a bunch of state convicts working at a cotton farm in the valley, and one of them—a Mexican-looking boy—had his whole back covered with a big colorful tattoo of an eagle with a snake in its beak and its wings spread wide. He was smiling over his shoulder with big white teeth and looked like the proudest thing. Most of the convicts she’s ever seen along the road or in pictures looked like they’d never smiled in their life.

What she wonders most of all is if he ever thinks of her.

Well, of course he does, you nitwit! He wrote to you, didn’t he?

She wonders if he has a picture of her, and if he does, if he keeps it taped on the wall next to his bunk so he can look at it when he’s lying there. It couldn’t be any more recent than her seventh grade picture from four years ago. When he looks at it does he wonder how she’s changed and what she looks like now? Maybe she should go down to the drugstore and get some of those four-fora-quarter pictures from the little curtained booth in back and send them to him. She could make a different face in every one so he could see all the ways she really looks. Would it please him if she did that? Would he think she was pretty? Or would he be disappointed and not even put the new pictures on the wall?

She wonders if she’s been unfair these past years for seeing him only as momma saw him—as a no-good low-life who wouldn’t know what responsibility was if he tripped over it on the sidewalk at high noon. And she keeps wondering if she’s going to write him back.

He said he was sorry, girl. What more can he do?

By the time Aunt Rhonda calls her to set the table for supper she’s made up her mind. He is, after all, her daddy—although he signed the letter “Your father,” like he was writing to a grown woman, which she believes she certainly is.

And he did say he was sorry.

And he called her Sugargirl.

And he remembered her birthday . . .

2

During supper Aunt Rhonda asks what the letter has to say. She poses the question as airily as if she’s asking if anybody cared for more iced tea, but there’s no hiding the snoopy hunger in her voice, nor the spite Dolores has gotten to know so well since coming to live with her. (One minute she and momma were eating supper and watching a Honeymooners rerun, and the next, momma was facedown in her plate of red beans and rice and dead of a stroke before Dolores could even start to scream.)

Much of her aunt’s resentment toward her, Dolores knows, comes from her dislike of momma, even though the two women met only once, back when Dolores was just a tiny baby. The way momma told it, that one time was enough for both of them. She and daddy were paying her and Frank a visit, and Rhonda put on such pious airs momma couldn’t stand it. So she’d turned the radio on and put it up loud on a boogie-woogie station and flashed a lot of leg at Uncle Frank as she kicked up her heels all around the living room with daddy. “That skinny tight-faced Rhonda didn’t know whether to spit or go blind,” momma said. “And Frank, well, you’da thought he’d never looked on so much of a woman’s legs before to see how he was gawking at mine.” Momma laughed, thinking on it. “But I guess being married to that priss Rhonda, he like as not hadn’t seen a woman’s legs in a long while. Poor fella was probly hurtin bad from lack of lovin and probly hurtin even worse now. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to hear he’s took up with some little tramp one of these days.” It was the first time she’d spoken to her of such things, and she gave Dolores a look. “I ain’t talking too salty for you, am I?” she asked. “I mean, being your momma and all?” And Dolores, not yet fourteen, shook her head firmly even as she felt herself blushing and said, “Course not. I’m not a baby.” Momma smiled and said softly, “Course you’re not.” It was one of the few times after daddy left that she heard momma mention any of the fun she’d had with him.

Dolores herself has provoked her aunt mightily by refusing to attend the Youth Prayer Services held two nights a week at the Good Shepherd Baptist Church just down the street. The one time she went she’d felt like throwing up right there in the church, the other kids were so godawful self-righteous. They’d looked at her like they all had their own private keys to the Pearly Gates and she never would. She has since had to listen to her aunt’s almost daily declamations of the hellfire awaiting the likes of her. She has endured the woman’s ill will by accepting it as just another unpleasant fact of life. Like her allergy to peanut butter. Like mosquitoes in summertime. Like the dirty-talking boys at school.

She loathes living with Rhonda, but where else could she have gone? Fifteen years old and not a penny to her name, and Uncle Frank the only kin the state children’s services could get in contact with. It wasn’t like she’d had a lot of choice about it. But the six months she’s been here seem like six years, and if she wants to finish high school, which she does, then she’s got to live here nearly two more years, and how in the world can she ever last that long in this house? She has often thought that having to live here is like a prison sentence—but after reading her daddy’s letter for the umpteenth time her mouth had suddenly gone dry at the thought of just how truly awful a real prison like Huntsville must be. He’d be in there at least thirty years and maybe a lot longer. How in the world could he stand it?

She’d had the sudden and dreadful notion that maybe the only real choice anybody has in life is whether to go on standing it or not.

Because of her own bitter feelings about her father, she has never been too bothered by Aunt Rhonda’s mean talk about him. But his letter has confused her. At the same time that she feels angry about the way he treated momma, she aches to be hugged to his chest and hear him say, “Sweet dreams, sugargirl,” like he used to when he’d tuck her in and kiss her goodnight.

She senses that if her aunt gets wind of what she’s feeling, she’ll jump at the chance to make her feel even worse. And so, when Rhonda asks what daddy (“that man” she calls him) had to say, Dolores simply shrugs and says, “Nothing much.”

“Nothing much!” Aunt Rhonda repeats, and arches her plucked brows. “After all this time without one word to anybody? Without so much as a word of condolence to his only daughter after her mother passes away? Declare, I’d think he’d have a good deal to say for himself.” She turns to Uncle Frank and says, “Don’t you think so, Franklin?”

Uncle Frank looks up from his plate and smiles guardedly. He is a large closemouthed man who spends most of his days in his gun shop in town. Dolores has not come to know him very well but strongly suspects that for all his size and apparent toughness he is afraid of his wife. It is hard for her to believe that any man cowed by his wife could be even half-brother to daddy. Life, she thinks, is just full of strange jokes.

“Well, honey,” he says, “I think—”

“I mean,” Aunt Rhonda says, her eyes back on Dolores, “it isn’t every day we get a letter at this house from a bona fide convict, is it?”

Dolores shrugs and busies herself with her stew. She is determined to keep the letter to herself, to keep from being baited into a show of bad temper.

“Now Rhonda honey,” Uncle Frank says, his interjection surprising Dolores—and Aunt Rhonda as well, to judge by the look on her face—“why don’t we let the poor girl be? A letter’s a personal thing, and I guess if Dolly wants to tell us what was in it, she’ll do it when she’s ready to—won’t you, Dolly?” He is the only one who has ever called her by that nickname which she detests.

“Didn’t say much,” Dolores murmurs. “Just howdy, is all.”

“Just howdy?” her aunt echoes sarcastically. “Oh now, I’ll just bet he said a lot more than that.”

“Now Rhonda honey . . .” Uncle Frank starts to say—and then hushes at the look she gives him.

“Yeah, well,” Dolores says, meeting Aunt Rhonda’s eyes, “that’s about all he said.” She holds her aunt’s stare a moment longer, then turns her attention back to her plate. Take that, you!

“Fine then,” Rhonda says. “Be that way.”

Dolores eats the rest of her meal with a great show of appetite, though the only thing she actually tastes is the rare and wonderful flavor of victory.

3

Later that evening, after doing the dishes, she lies on her stomach on the floor of her room and tries to compose a letter, writing with a ballpoint pen on lined notebook paper. She writes, “Dear Father,” but the word looks as strange on the page as it sounds in her head, so she tears the sheet out of the notebook and begins again.

Dear Daddy, she writes, she was so happy to hear from him. It was so sweet of him to wish her happy birthday. She has thought of writing him a letter lots of times before but she never did because she never did know his address. Addresses would be more like it, since they heard he was moving around a lot, especially from jail to jail (ha ha). It wasn’t till they heard he’d be in Huntsville for a good long while that she thought maybe . . . She snatches out the sheet of paper and crumples it into a ball.

Dear Daddy: how nice to hear from him after all this time. But she’d really like to know something. Why didn’t he write sooner? Why didn’t he write to them while momma was still alive? Why didn’t he . . . She wads up this one too.

Dear Daddy: what a surprise! So glad to hear from him. Especially glad to hear he’s sorry. Only, why did he have to wait so long to be sorry? While didn’t he feel sorry before? Why didn’t he feel sorry before momma’s heart finally used up every last drop of love it had for him. Why couldn’t he of told momma he was sorry while she was still alive? Would he have ever told her? Dammit, daddy! Why did he have to run off? Why did he have to go to Houston? Why did he have to go into that poolroom and fight with that man? Why did he have to beat him so damn dead?

Riiiippp!

Dear Daddy: why couldn’t he say it to her, his daughter, his only daughter, his Sugargirl? It’s been all these years and now he writes her this letter but he doesn’t say it, not once, he doesn’t even say . . .

She stands up and goes to the window and stares out at the gathering gloom. The air is still and heavy. Heat lightning flashes whitely way out over the Gulf. Her throat and eyes burn. She leans her forehead against the window frame and stays that way for a few minutes before returning to her notebook on the floor and tearing out and crumpling the page she was writing.

Dear Daddy: she doesn’t like Raymondville very much. She doesn’t like the school she has to go to. Most of the kids are really rude and dumb as sticks. The teachers are mostly a bunch of irritable biddies and boring old farts. Except for Mister Traven who’s about the youngest teacher there and has a neat red beard and the softest blue eyes and always smells a little of oil since he works nights out at the field. He’s the nicest man. Not at all like the mean boys who say they think she’s pretty and everything but get all mad when she tells them she’s not allowed to ride in their cars and then go around telling awful lies about her and saying she’s done just the nastiest things with them. Some of the stories have got back to Aunt Rhonda and she always believes them rather than believe her. Aunt Rhonda can be so mean, daddy. Always telling her how she’s going to hell and all. Always talking mean about momma and him both. Always saying how she’s not worth all that her and Uncle Frank have done for her. Aunt Rhonda makes her feel like she’s not worth anything. Has he ever known anybody who made him feel like that? Sometimes she wishes she was deaf so she wouldn’t have to hear Aunt Rhonda anymore. She wishes there were more people like Mister Traven who once told her she’s the smartest one of his students and will surely make something of herself one day.

She pauses to consider the matter of Mister Traven. Go ahead, girl, she thinks—go ahead on and tell him. It’s the same as lying if you don’t. Tell him how Mister Traven, that nice man with the neat red beard and soft blue eyes, stopped his car for you on the road that sunny afternoon hardly more than a month ago when you were walking home from school and offered you a ride and then stopped at the Superburger Drive-in for a couple of bottled cold drinks and then took you for a drive and said he understood how hard it was to be the new kid in school and all, how he just bet all the other girls were jealous of you because you were so pretty, and how annoying it must be to have a lot of immature boys pestering you all the time with only one thing on their dumb little minds, and how lonely it could feel when it seemed nobody knew the real you way down deep inside. Tell him, Sugargirl. Tell how it just took your breath to hear him talk like that. Tell how he drove to a woods out by the salt lake and said he wanted to know who you really were, way deep inside. Tell about how he stroked your hair so gently, how you couldn’t help reaching out and touching his beard and how, when he kissed you, you could smell the faint odor of oil on his pale skin. Tell it all. Your first time. How pine cones thunked softly on the car roof and your heart was beating so hard while you did it right there on the front seat and you thought you’d die of the excitement. And how confused you got afterwards when he saw the blood smear on the seat and suddenly looked so scared as he buckled up his pants, how he didn’t say a word as he drove you home and when he got you there he only said, “Be sure and do your homework, hear?” How ever since then he hasn’t said three words to you and hardly ever looks you in the eye in the classroom and how you just don’t understand it and how awful it makes you feel. And don’t stop there, either. Go on and tell how ever since then you sometimes dream about that business in Mister Traven’s car and wake up with your heart jumping like crazy and feeling the same kind of excitement you felt at the time.

Tell him that, why don’t you? See what he thinks of his Sugargirl then.

Oh, daddy, she writes, she feels so empty sometimes. Does he know what she means? Does he ever feel like there’s nothing ahead but more of the same awful empty feeling, forever and ever? Does he ever just wish he was de—

She puts down the pen and reads what she has written. And then she slowly crumples the paper. She goes to the window and stares out at the darkness for a long time.

Who you fooling, girl? If he cared the teensiest bit he would have written long before now and he wouldn’t have asked for money and he would have said it.

But he didn’t. He did not say it.

It is after midnight when she writes: Dear Daddy: you BASTARD.

She underlines the final word again and again until the pen point tears through the paper and mars the page beneath, and then she buries her face in her arms to muffle the sound of her crying.

After a while she gets up and blows her nose. Then she gathers all the false starts and slips out into the darkened hallway and tiptoes to the bathroom and flushes it all down the toilet.

She swears to herself she will never write to him, not ever, and the vow will prove to be both true and false. It is true she will never mail anything to him. But during the remaining ten years of her life she will on many occasions begin a letter to him in a late-night whiskey haze. These efforts will be utterly incoherent to her on the following day. None of them will ever extend beyond three or four lines, and most will go no further than the salutation: Dear Daddy . . .

II

PERDITION ROAD

1

Her dreams were frequent and bad. Sometimes, like the one she was having now, they were recollections of incidents in her life, as grainy and unreal as a home movie—and as undeniable. She was dozing with her cheek pressed against the reverberant window of a bus hurtling south through thin morning fog, dreaming once again about the awful business with Uncle Frank, about being crushed under his bulk and gagging on the stink of him, feeling his sweat dripping on her, crying, saying don’t, don’t, and pushing against his pale hairless chest with both hands even as she felt an ambush of pleasure through her protests and hating herself for it, hating him even more, and yelling now, yelling in shock as she caught sight of Aunt Rhonda gaping at them from the bedroom doorway and tottering like a frail stricken bird . . .

She came awake with a gasp.

The over-rouged woman in the neighboring seat was staring at her like she thought she might be loony. Dolores tried a reassuring smile but her face must have done a bad job of it: the woman’s mouth tightened and she quick turned away.

To hell with you, Dolores thought. She was still breathing hard from the vividness of the dream. The air in the nearly full bus was stale and dry. Her throat burned. She felt she might sneeze and hoped she wasn’t catching a cold. As she fished in her purse for a Kleenex she felt a sudden rush of loneliness so powerful she nearly sobbed. She snatched out a tissue and dabbed her eyes and commanded herself to stop it. The woman beside her scooched over toward the aisle a little more.

Oh, God damn that man. Rhonda too, the self-righteous old bitch. Damn that whole sorry business with Uncle Frank. It had been just terrible. Awful. It wasn’t like she’d ever said it wasn’t. But it sure hadn’t been her fault. After all. Not more than partly, anyway. Well, for damn sure not all.

The main thing was, she did not need anybody giving her hell about it even one more day. Especially not Aunt Rhonda. The woman was crazier than John the Baptist in the wilderness, forever thumping that Bible and calling names. (“Whore! Harlot! The sins of the mother shall fall upon the daughter just as surely as those of the father are visited on the son! Look upon her, Lord! Look upon this daughter of Jezebel on her dark road to perdition!” Two solid months of that, every damn day. And Uncle Frank, that miserable peckerwood, sitting through it all in front of the TV and saying not one word, like none of it had a thing in the world to do with him. Bastard.)

“Harlingen!”

The driver’s voice rasped harshly through the speakers, startling her. She pressed up closer to the window and saw that they were coming into town. Palm trees along both sides of the highway. A few motels and cafes. A strip of bars all closed up tight—The Silver Cane, Crazy Jack’s, El Waterhole #2. The bus slowed as they started coming onto traffic lights. It wasn’t a real big town—nothing like Corpus Christi, the biggest town she’d ever been to—but it was plenty bigger than Raymondville. They passed a wide dirt lot where Mexican workers were clambering aboard field buses. Filling stations and fast food places every which way you looked. A shopping center with an almost empty parking lot at this hour and a movie theater sign advertising Bullitt. Realty offices and car dealers. Buck’s Gun Shop with bars over the windows. An Oriental girl with hair like ink setting up a flower stand at an intersection. Rowena’s Beauty Salon. (Rowena! You had a name like that, you had to know something about beauty.) Hi-Way Bowling Lanes, and two old boys leaning against a pickup truck, drinking Lone Stars and the sun just starting to show itself. Chico’s Barber Shop with a big handlebar mustache painted on the window. A woman sitting on a bus bench and looking at her feet. A white-whiskered man carrying a big plastic bag full of who-knew-what over his shoulder and talking to himself as he trudged along the shoulder of the road, his clothes so foul-looking you just knew he carried a smell to reckon with. A dog lifted its leg on a police car’s tire in front of Maria Elena’s Cafe.

The morning sun shone on the storefronts, blazed against the windows. She imagined families at their breakfast tables, kids getting ready to leave for school, getting a goodbye hug and kiss from their mommas, their daddies. She abruptly felt her mother’s absence like a hole in her heart and for an instant she again thought she might cry. Stop it! she told herself. This minute! She blew her nose and sat up straighter.

Aunt Rhonda and Uncle Frank would’ve been up for a while by now. They would’ve seen her emptied dresser drawers and wondered when she’d gone. They might’ve even wondered where. They could go on wondering from now till Doomsday.

The only direction out of Raymondville that didn’t take you into Mexico or the Gulf of Mexico was north, and the first big town you’d come to, a good long ways up the coast, was Corpus Christi. But Uncle Frank had friends in Corpus and might have them track her down if he took a mind to. Way farther north was Houston, which she didn’t have enough bus fare to get to but where she wouldn’t have gone anyway. It was too far away, for one thing, practically in another world—and she’d anyway always thought of it as the meanest town there was, mainly because of the song she’d heard all her life about if you’re ever in Houston you better walk right and you better not gamble and you better not fight or the sheriff gonna get you and lock you up tight.

Daddy sure enough found that out, didn’t he? Four years he’d been in the state prison in Huntsville, little more than twice as long as momma’d been in her grave. The son of a bitch. As far as she was concerned, all the things he did to break momma’s heart amounted to a crime worse than killing that fella with a pool cue. She hoped he lived to be a hundred and never got paroled.

So even though there wasn’t much of Texas between Raymondville and the Mexican Border, that’s the way she headed—south to Harlingen on the four A.M. bus coming through from Corpus on the way to Brownsville. And although Harlingen was way closer to Raymondville than Corpus was, Rhonda and Frank didn’t ever go down there (“It’s nothing but wetbacks there,” Aunt Rhonda said, which was what she said about every place in Texas whether she’d ever been there or not). As far as Dolores knew, they didn’t know anybody there they could ask to look around for her.

Shoot, girl, they ain’t about to look for you now or ever and you know it. Be glad of it.

The big bus slowed, brakes hissing and sighing, and swung into the terminal.

2

Twenty minutes later she had herself a job. Counter waitress in a bustling little cafe called The Wagon Wheel, just a block down from the bus station. The owner was a stocky bald man named Shelton. He’d put the little cardboard “Help Wanted” sign in the front window not an hour before Dolores came walking down the sidewalk with her suitcase in her hand and no idea where she was headed. One of his two daytime girls had quit that morning when her boyfriend phoned and told her he was moving to Houston and if she wanted to go with him she had till noon to get ready.

“She’s a fool to go with him,” Shelton said. “He ain’t worth last month’s want ads. Big-talkin’ truck mechanic with white teeth and a head of hair. Girls today ain’t got the sense God gave a barnyard hen.”

He paused to take a sip of coffee and put a match to a Camel. The interview was taking place on counter stools. Squinting through the smoke, he looked Dolores up and down. “How bout you, girl? You gonna run off with the first coffee shop cowboy asks you to go to Big D with him?”

She was flustered by his lingering appraisal of her legs under the skirt that suddenly felt way too short—and by the leers and grins she was getting from the men sitting nearby. No sir, she assured him, her voice tight, she certainly didn’t intend on doing anything like that.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said tiredly. “Girls with your looks don’t have to intend nothing. Intentions just come along and happen to you.” He sighed and exhaled a long stream of smoke. “What the hell, I got to have me another daytime girl and I got to have one now. Job’s yours. Dollar-and-a-half an hour and all your tips. Get paid ever Friday. I give you lunch and a half-hour to eat it. Only listen: try to look at the customers a little less fraidy-cat than you been doing. They’ll most of them talk like loverboys but won’t none of them bite you. You might even try smiling some, jack up your tips.”

He took her into the back room and showed her where to stash her grip. He handed her a red-checkered apron and a white paper hat to wear, then gave her a quick rundown of the counter operation, showing her where everything was she might need—silverware, condiments, napkins and placemats, checkpads. She already knew how to work the register from the job she’d had at the Burger Hut in Raymondville.

“Well, all right, then,” he said. “Let’s get to work.” He hustled back into the kitchen to help a colored cook named Willard work up a steady procession of orders for eggs, fried potatoes, burgers, chicken fried steaks, chili beans and blue plate specials.

A jukebox next to the counter played loudly and incessantly, almost all its selections country-western oldies like Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Bob Wills, Ernest Tubb. Even Tex Ritter, for God’s sake, was on there, and some customers actually played him. Frankie Laine was a big favorite with “Rawhide” and “Mule Train.” In the midst of all that twangy shitkicking, only Buddy Holly and Elvis kept Dolores from going insane.

The place always smelled heavily of fried grease, diesel fumes, men in need of a shower. Even the sunlight that leaned in the windows looked oily. Most of The Wagon Wheel’s trade was from men passing through, grabbing a bite while they waited for their bus. Sad-looking salesmen in stained suits. Uniformed servicemen hardly more than boys. Sunburned oil workers with bright eyes and big voices. Dusty farmhands. Old Mexes in sarapes and young ones with wide neckties and shiny pompadours. Vacanteyed drifters. Sometimes some coloreds.

The field Mexicans were always well-mannered, and the few black folk who sometimes came in for a roll and coffee. But they never had much to spend on themselves and couldn’t afford tips beyond nickels and dimes. Her best tips came from the customers she least liked to wait on—the Mexican dandies, who called her mamacita and ran their eyes over her like hands, and the oil field roughnecks, who liked to get a rise out of her any way they could. They liked to tell crude jokes in voices loud enough for her to hear, then laugh to see her blush, which she nearly always did. Sometimes their voices dropped low and then they’d all bust out laughing and grin at her and she’d know they had been joking about her. Or she’d catch them nudging each other and gawking at her rear end when she was bent over the cooler. She’d feel her face burn and want to shrink into herself, to make herself as small as possible so there would be less of her for them to look at and joke about.

Shelton seemed indifferent to it all, and she figured he’d think she was a big baby if she complained, so she didn’t. But every time some bunch of men at the counter snickered behind her back or showed her their nasty oily grins, her anger would clench in her belly like a fist and she’d want to tell them off. Then she’d spot the dollar bills scattered across the countertop and she’d bite her tongue. And when they called for refills and ogled her up close and smacked their lips and said, “Qué chulita,” or “Darlin, I sure do like the way you wear them jeans”—and even if every now and then one of them should reach over and pat her bottom before she quick pulled away—she’d make herself smile and they’d laugh and push a bill over to her and she’d snatch it up and put it in her pocket. She made herself think of their vulgar talk as simply unpleasant noise to put up with, like most of the jukebox selections. There was no need to take any of it personally, not even the pats on the ass. After all, it wasn’t like they were actually doing anything to her. And she did have to make a living.

And it was a living, dammit, a real job, and she was supporting herself with it, and who woulda thought she could do that? The Burger Hut job was the only other she’d ever had, but she’d only been at it a couple of months before Aunt Rhonda suddenly decided that it was improper and made her quit. (“A decent woman’s work is in the home. The heart of the whore is forged in the marketplace.” That batty bitch.)

On the day Shelton hired her she had asked if he knew of any place close by where she could rent a room, and he directed her to Miss Aurora’s, a boardinghouse for women, only three blocks from the restaurant. “I’m just saying it’s close by and it don’t charge a arm and a leg,” Shelton had told her. “I ain’t saying it’s the damn Hilton.”

The place was a musty old two-story of peeling whitewash with a front yard gone to weeds and faded flowered carpets in the parlor. Except for a retarded girl of fifteen who was the live-in maid, Dolores was the youngest resident in the place by at least thirty years. The half-dozen others were all spinsters or widows. Most of them were usually roosting in the parlor whenever she passed through, and though they always nodded politely when she smiled and said hello, the smiles they showed in return were more like looks of pain. Through the cloying fragrance of their perfumes there always seeped the odors of old closets and turned milk. None of them ever received visits from men. Their eyes would follow her up the stairs when she came in, trail her to the door whenever she left for work. She knew damn well they talked about her, and the idea of it was a constant irritant. She figured that the landlady, Miss Aurora—a skinny fake redhead who looked like she got made up by an undertaker—had rented to her only to give the biddies something fresh to talk about. Juiceless, jealous old bags. She detested the place more than she could say, but it was all she could afford that was close enough to the restaurant to let her walk to work, so it would have to do for now.

The other waitress on her shift was Rayette Nichols, a chubby middle-aged blonde who wore a girdle and the brightest red lipstick Dolores had ever seen. She was quick to laugh and had an easy way with the customers. In private, however, she admitted to Dolores that she didn’t really like the job all that much. After they got to know each other better, she confessed she’d “done a little flatbacking once upon a time—you know what I mean?—for a couple months up in Dallas, way back before I ever met my husband Henry.”

It took Dolores a minute to understand what she meant—and then Rayette laughed at the look on her face. “Shoot, honey, it ain’t like I was committing robbery, for Pete’s sake. I wasn’t hurting nobody. Just the opposite. I was making fellas feel pretty damn fine, if I say so myself. I always gave dollar’s worth for dollar’s pay. Let me tell you, all them who look down their noses at it, they ain’t never been on their own and near to starving, you can bet on that.”

Dolores was fascinated by Rayette’s tales of her hooking days in Dallas. Those days came to an end when a fellow grabbed her into a Lincoln Continental one night as she came out of a motel after doing a trick. The fella’s name was Victorio and Rayette had heard of him but thought the other girls had been making him up just to scare her. But he was real, all right, and she nearly wet her pants she was so scared. She’d heard he once put a cigarette lighter to a girl’s underarms. He told Rayette she had three choices: give him eighty percent of every dime she made from now on, or get out of town, or get nails put through her knees.

“He was offering to be my manager, you see,” Rayette said. “That’s manager as in p-i-m-p. I didn’t even have to think it over. I was on the bus to San Antone that same night. Never done another trick again neither, no ma’am. I was lucky I got away with being a independent for as long as I did.”

That had been a dozen years ago, and ever since, she’d stuck to waitressing. “But a place like this,” she said, looking around The Wagon Wheel. “There ain’t no future in it. Can’t make any money slinging chili to these clodhoppers and blowhards.” She said if Dolores was smart she’d get a job in a bar.

“That’s where the money is,” Rayette said. “I oughta know. I worked most the best bars between San Antone and the border, and I mean to tell you, honey, I was raking it in before I married Henry. Especially out in Laredo. Them Laredo boys don’t know what to do with their money but piss it away in bars. Real good tippers, too. And I was good at my work, I ain’t lying. It’s something you can take a little pride in being good at, not like working in this place here with its two-bit tips. Why hell, even now, I lose me some of these extra pounds, and shoot, I’d be right back in business making gooood money.”

She paused to light a cigarette, then cut a sharp look at Dolores. “So why don’t I do it, right? Henry—that’s why. Says he loves me just the way I am and don’t want me to lose a single solitary pound. He’s no lightweight, Henry. Always stuffing hisself with biscuits and gravy, fried chicken, slugging down beers—and getting me to pig out right along with him. Thinks I don’t know what he’s up to, keeping me fat so’s I couldn’t get a job in a good bar if I tried. He’s never said so, but I know he don’t want me working in the bars again. Jealous, he’s just flat-out jealous is what it is, even if he’d never in a million years admit it. I love him, you understand, but . . . well, sometimes he’s just such a dipshit.”

She blew a stream of smoke at a wall calendar with a photo of a beautiful stretch of California coastline. “You know,” she said tiredly, “I’m still a young woman—damn if I ain’t. But I swear there are days now when I feel oldness trying to press up against me like some bold sonofabitch in a crowded bus. Pressing up on me and breathing on the back of my neck.”

3

On the day she got her eighth pay envelope she told Shelton she was quitting. He wasn’t surprised. “Fact is, you stayed longer than I’da bet on,” he said. When he asked who the fella was and she said there wasn’t any fella, he shrugged and said, “Right you are, sunshine, it’s none of my business. Luck to you.”

She caught the early-morning bus to Laredo and arrived late that afternoon and treated herself to a motel room with a color TV and an air conditioner strong enough to frost your breath. There was a little machine attached to the bed and when she put a quarter in it the bed would vibrate gently. She lay in bed and watched TV and put three quarters in a row in the machine and wished she knew somebody she could call up on the telephone and tell about this. Before she knew it she was crying. She chided herself for a baby but it still took her a while to stop.

The next morning she hiked out to the edge of town where she’d seen a strip of roadhouses as the bus came in. There were bars right there in town she could’ve tried, but they looked too dark and mean somehow, maybe because most of them didn’t have much in the way of windows. The roadhouses she’d spotted had plenty of windows and seemed the friendlier for it. But they were a lot farther out than she’d thought—and a lot farther apart. She worked up a good sweat and was honked and whistled at by several passing drivers before she finally came to a place called The Texas Star with a big sign out front saying BEER—FOOD—DANCING. She dried her face the best she could with a handful of tissues and dusted herself off and went inside. The bartender said they didn’t need anybody right now, thank you. The next two places said the same. One manager seemed real amused by her. “Come see me when you get dry behind them pretty ears, sweetheart.”

She figured they thought she was too young, so at the next place, Sparky’s, she added two years to her age and claimed she was nineteen. The owner said he’d have guessed a tad older, if she didn’t mind him saying so. He gave her a job waiting tables, two o’clock to midnight, six days a week, starting today. She wouldn’t be serving much food, he told her; his customers were mostly drinking men. She almost hugged him, she was so grateful.

She stopped at a laundromat on her way back to town and took a close look at all the handwritten ads posted on a bulletin board next to the dryers. Every laundromat she’d ever been to had a board like this. Sure enough, there were several notices for places to rent. She asked a woman waiting for her clothes to dry, a tall sallow brunette with her hair in curlers, if she could tell if any of the rentals were nearby enough to walk to. The woman studied the ads as she pushed a squalling infant in a perambulator back and forth and a dirty-faced little girl of about three clung to her leg. She pointed to an index card written in red ink and advertising a two-room cottage, furnished and cheap. “That one’s just off the road about a quarter-mile down,” the woman said.

Dolores used the pay phone to call the number on the card and spoke to a pleasant woman who gave directions and told her to go on out and have a look at the place—the door key was under the potted cactus plant on the back porch. If she liked it, call back and they’d settle.

Dolores thanked the brunette for her help and started for the door and the woman asked if she was going to be living out there by herself. Dolores said she was. The woman looked down at the children, both of them now bawling for her attention. She seemed weighted with an exhaustion that could never be rested away. “Sounds nice,” she said.

Three hours later Dolores was in the ladies’ room at Sparky’s, putting on a touch of lipstick before starting her first shift ever as a barroom waitress. She couldn’t stop grinning at herself in the mirror. A job and her own private place to live. Hot damn.

Shoot, if she’d known it was gonna be this easy to get by on her own she’da started doing it long before now. Bet your ass.

4

Unlike the transients at The Wagon Wheel, Sparky’s patróns were mostly a regular crowd and lots of them worked together—ranch hands, construction workers, truckers, roughnecks. It was a rare Mexican who came in the place. Whenever any did, Sparky would unplug the jukebox and the room would get so quiet all you heard was throat clearing and chairs scraping on the floor as some of the old boys turned to give the Mexes some hard eyeballing. At such times Dolores always thought she heard something else too, a faint hum she seemed to feel rather than actually hear, a low keen humming of something to do with blood. None of the Mexicans who every now and then wandered into the place and ordered a beer ever stayed long enough to finish it. “Law says I gotta serve em,” Sparky said. “But it don’t say nothin about havin to be glad to see the sonofabitches.”

Business was always light in the early afternoon, but then right at Happy Hour the guys would start arriving in bunches, dirty and sweaty and joking loud with each other. They were a lot more easygoing than the men she waited on at The Wagon Wheel. Most of the laughter she’d heard in the Wheel was nasty as spit, mean and bitter. But then, the guys in the Wheel had mostly been men on the move, rootless, men without women, men who were alone even in each other’s company. Naturally they’d been bitter.

The men in Sparky’s laughed with a real sense of fun. Many of them were married and had families, or at least had a steady girlfriend, and some of them, to hear them tell it, had a lot more than one. Even some of the married ones (especially some of the married ones) liked to brag about how much fooling around they did on the side, although Dolores was pretty sure most of their bragging was just talk. All in all, they were a rough but likable bunch, and she surprised herself with the easy rapport she struck with them.

She was a natural for the job. To the tables full of men she carried a breezy air of familiarity, a readiness to trade wisecracks and flirty banter. She soon worked up a whole catalog of retorts to their grinning propositions, an assortment of gentle rebuffs for the guys who were serious, and a set of firm putdowns for those who didn’t know when to quit. (“Hey bubba! I tole you bout them hands. Once more and I swear I’ll have those ole boys at the back table there see to it you stop doing what I don’t let them do.”) Whenever she was groped by a regular customer, which she occasionally and naturally was, she’d react with exaggerated shock but also with enough real indignation to keep the fondling from becoming anybody’s idea of a privilege.

When she tended to a table of mixed company her approach was of course much more demure. She’d keep her smile bright but utterly unflirtatious, and she’d give most of her attention to the women. Even so, the mixed tables never tipped as well as the stags.

She also learned fast how to deal with the solitary drinkers. A lot of these regulars liked a quick chat or a little gossip served up with their beer. Others took their drinking more seriously and just wanted to get on with it and never mind the bullshit. She learned when to laugh with the jokers, when to sing along with the guys who sang when they got drunk, when to nod sympathetically at those who never tired of telling their life’s sad story, and when to keep her distance from the guys who sooner or later started talking to themselves in accusatory tones.

The only ones who really bothered her were the silent lookers. Solitary strangers who never smiled and rarely spoke except to order a drink. They almost never took their eyes off her. Even from across the room she could feel their stares trailing her like tracking dogs. These were the true loners, and almost every night one would come in. Sometimes he’d leave after just one or two drinks, sometimes he’d stay until closing. They hardly ever showed up in the place more than once, and only rarely did two of them come in on the same night. It was like they belonged to a club and that was one of the rules—only one to a bar on a given evening. There was something about them, something seething with restrained fury like it was pacing in a cage. They drank hard but didn’t seem much affected by it except in the eyes, which got brighter without gaining a thing in warmth. She avoided their eyes as much as she could—those cold hungry eyes that made her shiver.

5

Ten hours a day, from two o’clock till closing time at midnight, the job kept her busy and from thinking about things. Every night after closing she helped Wally the bartender clean up the place while Sparky tallied the day’s receipts in the back room. They’d sometimes all have a drink together at the bar before calling it a night.

Sparky was over seventy years old and looked every day of it, his face dry and cracked from more than fifty years of working outdoors in the cattle business in North Texas, which Wally called Baja Oklahoma. He’d been married twice and had two daughters he never talked about except to say they were “a couple of damn tramps.” He liked to talk about his cattle days, though his tales of drives to Kansas when he was a youngster were more likely rooted in pulp fiction than actual biography.

“The only cow Sparks ever really drove out of Texas was his first wife,” Wally told Dolores. “Drove her right into the arms of a string band player who liked his women hefty. I heard tell they run off to Missouri. Woulda drove his second wife away, too, except she caught the pneumonia and died before she could pack her bags.”

Wally was in his early thirties and still hanging on to handsome despite his barroom pallor and a beer belly that would soon be sagging over his belt. When Dolores asked him if he was married he said, “That’s for me to know and you to find out,” so she knew he was. He finally admitted it—after she’d turned him down for a date every time he asked during her first couple of weeks on the job. He had two kids he was crazy about and he showed her pictures of them, a boy six and a girl four, but he never talked about his wife. He’d joke with the boys at the bar about women, and every now and then he’d ask Dolores with a big grin—and with a wink at the fellas—when she was going to ask him home for a drink “or something.” She’d give him an exaggeratedly vampish look with a lot of eye-fluttering and coo, “Well, I just don’t know, Wally honey. But play your cards right and one of these days you just might get real lucky.” The boys at the bar would laugh and encourage Wally to keep on trying and just generally ate the act up.

On those nights when she joined them for a drink at the bar after hours, either Sparky or Wally would give her a ride home. But whenever she didn’t feel like sticking around, or whenever the two men chose to have one more for the road, she’d simply walk the two miles. She’d keep far off the shoulder of the road, preferring the risky footing of the dark uneven ground to the glaring attention of passing headlights. She did not want anybody stopping to offer her a ride. Who knew when it might be a silent looker.

The first thing she’d do when she got home was make sure the doors and windows were all locked and the window shades all pulled completely. And no matter how gritty she might be, she could not bear the idea of being naked and behind the shower curtain at that late hour of the night, and so she would not bathe until the following day. She would hurriedly slip into her long cotton nightgown and, no matter how hot the night, pull the bedsheet up to her chin. She dreaded the dark and would have preferred to leave a lamp burning, but she was afraid the glow of it might act as a lure to her window. Fortunately, she was usually so tired by the time she got home she had no trouble falling asleep before she was too scared to. And before the low moan of loneliness in the darkness rose to a sob.

6

Sundays were the worst. Her day off. She’d sleep as late as she could, until she couldn’t get back to sleep anymore and finally got tired of lying in bed. She’d take a long shower and wash her hair and then fix herself a breakfast of coffee and bacon and toast with apple butter. She would wash and dry and put away the dishes. She would dust the furniture and sweep and mop the floor. She’d wash her underwear in the sink and hang it on the shower rod to dry. She’d put the rest of her laundry in a pillowcase and hike to the laundromat and when she got back she’d put it all away neatly. She’d iron her clothes for work the next day. She’d spend a long time doing her nails. And all the while the portable radio would be playing—“Happy Together” and “White Rabbit” and “Love Is Blue.”

Sometimes her backdoor neighbors, the Santiagos, would have a cookout that filled their yard with dozens of relatives, and Joselita, a mother of five at age twenty-two, would come over and in her broken English invite her to join them. Dolores did so once, but the warm ties of the Santiagos and their kin and all of them talking mostly in Spanish only made her loneliness feel the keener and thereafter she always turned down their invitations with some lame excuse. She’d sit at home the rest of the day and hear the sounds of music and laughter from the Santiagos’ yard while she chain-smoked Marlboros and leafed through one of the True Romance magazines she’d found stacked in the closet—left by the previous tenant, probably—and thought what dopes the women in the stories were and tried with all her might to ignore the loneliness hanging in the room like a noose.

7

She awoke in the dark middle of a drizzling Sunday night. Her throat was hot and tight. Silent lightning lit the window curtains blue. She was awake for several minutes before she realized she was crying.

All right, she thought, all right. You best do something.

Like what?

Like what do you think?

Well . . .

About time you faced up to it, girl. You know damn good and well what you’re wanting. You ought admit it instead of going on trying to fool yourself.

Well . . .

Go on now, face it.

Dammit, I’m not no trash. I’m not!

Whoa now, girl, who said anything about that? Aunt Rhonda? What’s that crazy old bitch know? Not a thing, that’s what.

Well . . .

You just got a bad headful of her mean mouth is all. You ought not let it keep you from having a little fun. It ain’t right to do yourself like that. You deserve some fun.

Well . . .

You know you do. We’re just talking a little fun, for Pete’s sake, a little company. There’s not a thing in the world wrong with that.

Okay.

About time you faced it.

I said okay.

Well . . . ? Who’s it going to be?

8

She decided on Wally. He wasn’t bad-looking and he was always joking with the boys at the bar about hoping to get lucky with her someday. So why not? But first she went to a clinic and got fitted for a diaphragm. She’d been awful lucky with Uncle Frank and didn’t ever want to push her luck like that again. She felt her face burning with embarrassment the whole time she was in the clinic, but the doctor himself seemed bored with it all and the nurse didn’t bat an eye.

A few nights later she stayed for a drink with Wally and Sparky after closing, then asked Wally for a ride before Sparky could make the offer. When he stopped the car in front of her place she asked if he’d like to come in for a beer. Her pulse throbbed at the base of her throat and her tongue felt slightly swollen. He had long since quit trying to get asked in on the nights he drove her home, and her invitation seemed to puzzle him for a moment, as if she’d spoken to him in a foreign language. Then his grin practically lit up the car.

She let him into her bed five nights in a row. He was always clumsy, always quick, always left her feeling like—knowing that—it would be just terrific with somebody who really knew what he was doing. It was her tough luck that Wally wasn’t him. Even so, she might have given him more time to try to get it right with her if he hadn’t started talking about his wife.

He didn’t mention her until Friday night, after he was dressed again and she was in her robe and they were sitting at the table over nightcap mugs of coffee. His wife didn’t really know him, he said, she didn’t understand him. He did not refer to her by name until Dolores asked him what it was. “Marion,” he said—like the word was raw garlic in his mouth. She had no sense of humor, he said, she hated sex. If it wasn’t for the kids he would’ve left her a long time ago.

Dolores felt like she’d read this story in a hundred magazines. Listening to him talk about his wife the way he did was a little like watching somebody draw a beard on a woman’s picture. The woman might be a total stranger but you still felt sorry for her somehow. And you knew the person doing the drawing just had to be a real ass.

When he came around the table to kiss her goodnight she put up a hand and said, “No. No more.”

He grinned like she was joking and reached for her.

She pushed his hands away and backed out of reach. “I said no, Wally. It’s done with.”

It took him a moment to get what she meant, and then he said, “What you mean, done with? Done with how come?”

She told him she was sorry. She said the whole thing had been her fault. She said she should have known better than to do this with him in the first place.

“It was fun,” she lied, “but let’s leave it at that. I . . . I just don’t feel right about it anymore.”

“How come? Because I’m married? Well hell, I’m gonna get a divorce, didn’t I tell you? I am! It might take a little while, but—”

No, please, she didn’t want to hear about it. A divorce was his own business and she didn’t want to be any part of that. His being married didn’t have anything to do with it, really it didn’t.

“Ah now, darlin, come here to daddy.” He reached for her again but she hastened around the table and over by the stove. He let a long breath through his teeth and flung his hands up in frustration. And then suddenly backhanded a coffee mug off the table and it ricocheted off the wall without breaking.

“God damn it! What do you take me for? Some kid to dick around with?”

“I want you out of my house,” she said. “Right now.” She was scared but absolutely refused to let it show in her voice.

“Bullshit!” He kicked over a lamp table. “You don’t tell me to get out!” He flung magazines around the room. He upturned the table with a crash. He picked up her little radio and was about to fling it through the window when she snatched up the pot of boiling coffee and told him to put it down and get out—now.

He stared at her with his mouth open, then set down the radio and stepped toward her. She cocked the hand holding the coffeepot and said he was going to have a hell of a time explaining the burns to everybody.

For a moment he looked like a confused boy, and she nearly felt sorry for him. Then his face clouded over again and he said, “You fucken bitch!” He spat on her floor and stalked out and slammed the door so hard the only framed photo she owned—a picture of her mother in the dunes at Mustang Island—fell off the wall and its glass pane shattered.

She locked the door behind him and set the furniture right and picked the mess off the floor and then sat at the table till dawn, smoking and sipping coffee and thinking things over.

She was a good person, goddammit, and she had rights just like everybody else. She was proud of the way she’d handled herself with that peckerwood. She guessed she showed him. N-O spells “no” and don’t let the door hit you in the ass, bubba. Damn right. The same goes for the rest of you.

9

The next one was a pimply good-natured kid named Joey who wasn’t much older than she was. He was new to Laredo, a mechanic at the Ford dealership. He’d been in Sparky’s only a couple of times before and it was obvious to Dolores he never in the world expected his flirting with her to get him as far as it did. He’d seemed so stunned by her smiling acceptance of his whispered proposition that she was truly surprised to find him waiting for her in the parking lot, as she’d suggested, when she got off work. They sat in his truck for a while, kissing and running their hands over each other and he told her she had the nicest titties he’d ever touched.

On the drive to her place he dropped a lighted cigarette between his legs and narrowly missed hitting a parked car when the truck veered off the road as he groped wildly under his crotch. By the time they got to the house her nerves were nearly as frayed as his.

In the bedroom he turned off all the lights before getting undressed and joining her in bed. He was sweating like his bones were on fire. He smelled of motor oil. He was so nervous none of the right things happened and he apologized in a high strained voice. She told him it was all right, just relax, don’t worry about it, he was just tense, they had all night, everything would be okay in a while, he’d see. She said maybe they ought to take his mind off it by talking about something else, but all he could talk about was fishing or the stock car he and his cousin were building and planning to race at the dirt track in San Antone and she was asleep in five minutes.

He woke her an hour later with an erection as hard as a tap handle. Before she was fully awake he was in her and grunting like a man at work. Within seconds he was thrusting wildly and moaning on a rising note and her breath caught and her back arched and her mouth went wide with pleasure for a brief wonderful moment that was not quite long enough to deliver its promise of release before he cried out and fell away from her, sighing like a tire going flat. A moment later he was snoring. She lay gasping, her fingers working at the dampened sheets, and was not able to go back to sleep until a long while later.

In the morning he overslept and had to hurry if he was going to get to work on time. His acne was worse than she’d realized. As he was lacing up his work boots she noticed the gunk under his fingernails—and the pale band around his ring finger. He saw her looking at it and grinned sheepishly and took the ring out of his pocket and slipped it on. He shrugged and said yeah, he was married, but his wife didn’t understand the first thing about him and he never in the world would’ve married her if she hadn’t got pregnant. He had a baby daughter twelve weeks old.

That was it for Joey.

That was it for roadhouse pickups. Pete’s sake, you couldn’t even see them all that good in that dim yellow light. Only a puredee fool picks out somebody to go to bed with in worse light than you’d insist on for picking out a new blouse. No sir, no more of that. She swore to herself that the next man she did it with would be single, clean, and interested, by God, in her, not just her titties. Neither Wally nor the Joey kid had asked the first thing about her, about what she liked to do or the kind of music she preferred or anything. Neither one had given a damn is why. Next time it would have to be somebody who cared.

10

She was walking home every night now, passing up the after-hours drink at the bar rather than hang around waiting for Sparky to call it a night and drive her home. About six weeks had passed since she’d turned Wally out of her house under threat of boiling coffee, and his close-mouthed sullenness toward her had lately begun to give way to mooning looks and small tentative smiles. The dumb Okie’s pride was apparently close to fully recovered and beginning to nudge him to give her another try. She realized he was not only foolish but stupid besides. Just the same, she didn’t want to antagonize him all over again by refusing the offer of a ride home—or worse, by accepting the ride and then fighting off any moves he might try to make on her in his car, where she wouldn’t be likely to have a pot of hot coffee handy. So she’d been keeping her distance from him during work hours and leaving for home as quick as she could after they turned the CLOSED sign in the front window.

One night she came out after closing and was halfway across the dimly lighted and nearly empty gravel parking lot when somebody grabbed her from behind. Her immediate thought was that it was Wally trying to be cute, and she tried to wrest herself free more in irritation than in fear, wondering how he’d managed to slip out ahead of her. Then she recalled that Wally had left hours ago, right after receiving a call from his wife about one of the kids getting awfully sick and needing to go to the emergency room, and Sparky had taken over behind the bar for him. Suddenly terrified, she twisted around in her attacker’s grasp and saw his face—the face of a silent looker she’d served bourbon and branch to for most of the evening and who she’d seen go out the door an hour ago. His eyes were huge and furious and he was pulling her toward an idling pickup truck a few yards away. They struggled wordlessly, the only sounds those of their gasping and the scraping of their feet in the gravel as he wrestled her closer to the truck. She finally thought of screaming, and she did, even as she remembered that Sparky was tending to the books in the little office way in the back part of the building and probably wouldn’t hear her. The man punched her in the face and she saw stars and her knees gave way. Just like the cartoons, she thought, feeling herself being dragged by the arm for a moment before the man let go and she heard yelling and the sounds of running feet. She looked up and saw the man jump into the truck and slam the door just as two men in cowboy hats ran up and one of them kicked the tailgate as the truck leaped forward in a rooster tail of gravel and the other bounced a beer bottle off the back of the cab as the truck swung onto the highway with tires screeching and shot away down the road.

“Goddamn coward yellow sonofabitch!”

One of the cowboys was tall, one short, both lean. They helped her to her feet. Was she all right, could she walk, did anything feel broken? The little one was asking all the questions. His voice seemed to come from inside a barrel. The left side of her face was partly numbed, and she discovered that her elbow was torn and bleeding. She wasn’t crying but her nose was running something awful. The little one gave her his bandanna. He said they best take her to the hospital, but she said no, she’d be all right, just give her a minute and she’d be fine. She tried to walk unassisted, swayed, started to fall, and they caught her by the arms again and the little one said they really ought to take her to the hospital to get looked over. No, please. She was just a little groggy, really. She’d be okay in a few minutes, she knew she would. Well, all right, but they for damn sure would at least see to it she got home safe and sound.

They helped her to their car, a magnificent white Cadillac convertible. The top was down and the car shone like the moon. She sat between them and gave directions to her place. Her head began clearing as they sped through the cool night air. She thanked them for their help. The tall one just kept on driving and the little one said think nothing of it, darlin, and they took her thirty miles out in the boonies and raped her.

11

At first she tried to fight, but the taller one pinned her arms behind her, and the little one, the one named Mort, licked her ear and whispered into it that she best cut the crap if she knew what was good for her. And in that instant she knew he was right—knew right then and there that she either did what they wanted or they’d make her do it anyway and be all the rougher about it. So she quit the fuss and did what they wanted.

They were at it for a couple of hours, having fun with her every which way and passing a bottle of Old Crow between them, making her take a drink every once in a while herself. “It’s a party, sunshine,” little Mort said. “Everbody drinks at a party.”

When they’d finally had enough they drove her home. Tucson, the tall ropy one, did the driving, pushing the Caddy up over ninety on the long stretch of highway back toward Laredo. She hoped with all her might that a state trooper or a Ranger would spot them and pull them over, but of course there wasn’t a cop to be seen.

Mort snuggled up close with his arm around her on the drive back and asked if she was all right. She nodded and kept her eyes straight ahead, watching the dark road zooming under the Caddy’s headlights.

He pressed some money in her hand. “Here honey,” he said, “buy yourself some new things, okay?” They had made a mess of her clothes. She’d seen Tucson tuck her panties into his pocket. Mort added to the money in her hand and said, “Some real nice things, okay?”

In front of the house he held the car door for her like a little gentleman. For a moment she had the awful feeling he was going to walk her to the door, maybe kiss her goodnight. But he simply got back in the car and tipped his hat and said, “Thank you, honey, thank you,” like the whole thing had been her idea for cheering up a couple of lonely trailhands.

Tucson, who’d humped on her like he was trying to kill something with a stick, never said a word. Just drove fast and raped hard and stole women’s underwear. Mort was something slimy she’d like to see run over by a car, but Tucson was something else. He was something she wanted to see tied up tight and then have at him with a steak knife and book of matches.

She stood at the side of the road, clutching her torn shirt to her sore breasts, and watched the Caddy drive off into the morning mist. She was afraid to curse them yet, even in her mind, for fear they might somehow hear her thoughts and wheel the Caddy into a quick U-turn.

She locked her jaws against the pain and made her way to the door. Before going inside she wadded the bills in her hand and flung them into the shrubbery under the front window. She went in the bathroom and bent over the toilet but finally had to put her finger in her throat to make herself throw up. In the mirror she saw that her cheekbone under her left eye was swollen darkly. She brushed her teeth for fifteen minutes, then undressed and got under a steaming shower and scrubbed herself thoroughly with a washcloth as hard as she could stand it.

And standing there with the shower cascading over her head, she cried. Cried loudly and long, wailing and sobbing and gasping for breath and wiping webs of mucus from her nose. Cried from the depths of her battered heart.

The humiliation! It felt like something jammed in her windpipe. Just took what they wanted. Like she was nothing but some . . . thing. Some thing they could do whatever they wanted with. No asking, no nothing. Just took it.

Worse. Let’s face it, girl, it was worse than that. They’d both seen it. Seen it and heard it. That goddamned red blazing moment when she’d suddenly arched up under that Tucson bastard and dug her fingers in his back. They’d seen it and they’d heard the sound she made and they’d known it wasn’t pain.

God damn them.

Them? God damn her. Filthy, weak, stupid . . .

Why didn’t she just go back inside and ask Sparky to take her home?

Christ’s sake, she’d been hit in the face, she couldn’t think straight.

She was clear enough in the head to appreciate that nice Cadillac car.

Get them. Get the bastards. Call the police. Right now.

Yeah, sure, the police. Real good idea. Two words against one.

Call them anyway. Do it.

Are you simple, girl, or what?

All her idea, your honor. And if you don’t mind us saying so, the lady had herself a real fine time for a fact. She didn’t hardly want the party to end. She wasn’t the least bit put out till afterwards when we paid up. Claimed it wasn’t enough. Damn if it didn’t seem like a lot to us.

And the judge: I know the story, boys. Heard it a thousand times if I heard it once. Lots a these working girls don’t know when to leave well enough alone. You, girl: don’t let me see your painted face in here again.

Case dismissed. But the boys wouldn’t be happy about her putting them through all that. They’d sure enough come around to discuss it with her. How stupid can you get, girl, showing them where you live? Letting them bring you right to your front door?

O lord, they’d probably come around to see her again anyway, since they’d seen how much she enjoyed it and all. When they’d seen it touch her, Mort had kissed her on the nose and laughed.

What to do?

You kidding? Go. Hit the road. Skeedaddle. Ride, Sally, ride.

She stayed under the shower until it turned cold, then dried off and did the best she could for the shiner with makeup. She put on her best skirt and blouse and packed the rest of her clothes. She tucked her tightly-rolled savings—two hundred and twenty dollars—into the toe of a spare shoe and slipped the shoe in the suitcase.

She went out the back door and crossed the yard and knocked on the rear door of the Santiagos’ house. Joselita and Moise were having breakfast, already dressed for work. They said they would be very happy to give her a ride to the bus station in town. She had a cup of coffee with them and said she was going to visit her grandmother in Houston. They said that was nice, families should always stay close. They politely averted their gaze from her bruised eye.

She finished her coffee and went back to the house to get her suitcase. She took a last look around, made sure all the lights were out and all the taps turned off tight. She was halfway across the yard again when she stopped, set down her bag and went around to the front of the house. She knelt on the wet grass and probed the shrubbery under the window—pricking her finger on a thorn and staining the hem of her skirt—and soon found the wadded money. Six twenty-dollar bills. She stood up and folded the money carefully and slipped it into her bra.

I mean, she thought . . . after all.

III

GENTLY DOWN THE STREAM

1

Dolores is drowning.

The murky water is bloodwarm and tastes of salty copper. Far above her upturned face the surface glimmers dimly. She flails weakly with exhausted arms, kicks feebly against a bottom of soft mud. She can hold her breath no longer and her lungs begin to rip. She tries to scream and the foul water rams into her mouth like a boot heel . . .

She bursts awake—pushing up on her elbows, gasping, kicking at the sheets entangled about her legs, for a moment longer still feeling her chest being crushed under a lack of air before she realizes where she is.

She falls back on the sweat-damp pillow with a huge inhalation which she releases in a long hissing sigh.

Oh man. Oh that damn dream.

Her heart hammers on her ribs. Her throat burns. A headache hacks at her skull like a hatchet.

Easy, sweetie. It’s only morning. Calm down.

An oily cast of orange sunlight oozes through the window blinds and casts black stripes on the opposite wall. Already the bayou humidity has begun to congeal the air. She is sheathed in sweat.

She turns her face from the window and stares at the open closet door. The closet seems larger than usual somehow. She puzzles over this for a minute before she understands.

Billy Boy’s clothes are gone.

Wake up, girl. Things are happening here.

She tries hard to recall the night before, fuzzily remembers drinking bourbon from the bottle while she watched TV. She hadn’t seen Billy Boy in, what, two days . . . no, three. And now she vaguely recollects reeling into the bedroom and . . . oh yeah . . . Ellis Corman, the next-door neighbor . . . peeking over into her bedroom again from his bathroom window, the hairy-ass pecker-wood. So this time she left the blind up and turned on both dresser lamps to give him better light to see by and turned the radio on loud and dropped her robe and danced all around the room in just her panties to the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me,” kicking her legs up high and shaking her ass and titties and just generally giving that horny sonofabitch a hell of a show, letting him drool over what he couldn’t have . . . And then . . . and then Della Corman was at her own bedroom window and looking over at her with her mouth open big enough to hold a watermelon. And then Della was gone from the window and a second later busting through the bathroom door and Ellis nearly jumped five feet in the air with his eyes like golf balls as Della came in whacking at him with both fists and he was all hunch-shouldered and ducking and sidestepping and finally managed to get around her and out of there and Dolores remembers standing naked at her window and laughing . . .

And then Della Corman was at the bathroom window hollering “You filthy whore!” and yanked the blind down and snapped off the bathroom light.

The fat-assed bitch. Dolores had been of a mind to go over there and snatch her bald headed but decided to have another little drink first . . .

She remembers nothing more.

Billy Boy must’ve come in after she passed out.

She sits up and swings her legs over the edge of the bed and kicks over a nearly empty bottle of Jim Beam as a bolt of red pain flares in her skull. She cradles her head in her hands and watches the bourbon spread and vanish in the cracks between the floorboards.

Sweet Baby Jesus. The little sonofabitch did it. Got his hat and gone.

She stands up, sways dizzily for a moment, then staggers naked across the hall and into the bathroom. She reemerges wearing a man’s blue workshirt, only slightly too big for her, and goes into the living room. The kids are sitting on the floor watching television cartoons. Bugs Bunny.

The volume of the little black-and-white is barely audible. Bugs Bunny gnaws at a carrot. The kids don’t even smile at the action on the set, just watch it blankly while they eat sugar-coated cereal by the handful from the box set between them. On the screen Yosemite Sam is hopping with rage and shaking a cutlass in Bugs’ face. Bugs does not look too concerned. The kids don’t even glance at her.

She goes into the kitchen and sees a note stuck to the refrigerator door with a pink wad of chewing gum.

Just like him to use gum. Goddamn bubblegummer. What else can you expect from somebody named Billy Boy, for Christ’s sake?

Sorry slim. No more for me. Your probly sick of it too so I guess I’ll move on down the road. You got great looks, you’ll do all right. I’m a low life I know. Luck to you and the kids.

Little prick didn’t even sign it. Lowlife is right. All of you. Lowlifes. Good goddamn riddance.

On the kitchen table is a loose-leaf sheet of paper beside an empty Old Crow bottle. She steps over for a look. “Dear Daddy” is scribbled in a barely legible hand across the top line. The rest of the sheet bears a big X. She crumples the page and tosses it in the direction of the full garbage pail.

Yesterday’s pot of coffee is still on the stove. She gives it a shake and finds it’s yet holding about a half-cup, so she turns on the burner under it. On top of the three-day pile of dishes in the sink are two empty bottles of Pearl. She just bets he didn’t bring them in with him and goes to the refrigerator and looks inside and sees that, sure enough, the little bastard drank her last two beers.

She goes to the kitchen doorway and leans against it, her head throbbing. “You kids see Billy Boy this morning?”

They remain fixed on the screen, seem not even to have heard her, though she knows they did.

“Hey! I’m talking to you! You seen Billy Boy today?”

“Yesssss,” the girl says without looking away from the TV. Nearly six years old, she is older than her brother by a year.

“Well? What’d he say?”

“Nothing much.”

“Mary Marlene!”

The girl cuts her a fast look. “Nothin! He give me and Jesse fifty cent apiece to keep real quiet and not wake you up.”

She suddenly thinks of the car. She strides quickly to the front window and pulls aside the curtain and sees through the screen that the Ford is gone from under the big magnolia in the front yard where she always parks it for the shade. The bastard said the car was hers, he got it for her. Liar. Oh how they lie. She catches the fragrance off the white blossoms. A ship’s horn blares sonorously out on the channel. Purple thunderheads are already building high over the gulf.

She turns back to the girl. “What else did he say? Mary Marlene! Look at me when I’m talking to you!”

The girl glares at her mother, her mouth in a tight little line.

“I want to know what else he said. Tell me exactly.”

“Nothin! Said he hadda go to Houston or someplace. Give me and Jesse fifty cent each and said we could spend it on whatever we want!”

“I’ve told you about taking that tone, missy.”

The girl shrugs and turns her attention back to the television. Beside her the boy watches the screen with his jaws slack and snot shining under his nose. That one’s a dummy for damn sure, Dolores thinks, a purebred fool. And she feels an immediate rush of familiar guilt. What kind of mother thinks such things about her own child?

But he does look like a fool, damn it, he does. Acts it, too. If he at least looked a little like his daddy, but . . . he doesn’t . . . he doesn’t.

She tries to ease the guilt by thinking that she really does love them like a mother should, deep down inside—but this time the trick lie doesn’t work. It’s bullshit and she can’t pretend it isn’t and she’s by Jesus had her fill of bullshit, even her own.

Oh, she supposes she did love them once, back when they were just babies. But now the girl’s a smart-mouth pain in the ass and the boy’s a scary retard and the fact of the matter is that she wouldn’t mind a bit if they both vanished tomorrow. Poof!—gone, just like that. Wouldn’t that be nice?

The guilt bores into her heart. But the truth’s the truth, damn it, and no bullshit in the world will change it.

“Listen to me, Mary Marlene. He say anything else?”

The girl sighs with theatrical emphasis—and for an instant Dolores sees herself picking up the TV and hitting the girl over the head with it. She puts a hand to her aching forehead and thinks maybe she’s crazy. Only crazy people think things like that.

“He said he liked Road Runner best of all.”

“What? He watched cartoons with y’all?”

“Only just while Road Runner was on. Me and Jesse, we like Sylvester Cat the best. We wanna see him catch that Tweety bird and eat his head off.”

Judas Priest. Ain’t he the one? Watches cartoons cool as you please before he runs for it.

“That’s it? He didn’t say nothing else? Mary Marlene!”

“Whaaat?”

“Did he . . . oh hell, never mind.”

“We turn it up now?”

Without answering she returns to the kitchen and pours the half-cup of heated coffee and sugars it and then pushes the coffee away and slumps against the counter and mutters, “God damn it.” She goes back to the bedroom and falls across the bed—and a second later flinches when the TV volume suddenly thunders through the house.

“YE LONG-EARED VARMINT! SAY YER PRAYERS!”

“Mary Marlene!”

“EH . . . WHAT’S UP, DOC?”

She’s on her feet and stomping to the bedroom door, ready to scream at the girl to turn the thing off—off, not just down, goddamnit—when she remembers the title. The title to the car is in her name.

She wheels toward the closet and gets down on hands and knees and digs through the pile of clothes and shoes and old magazines until she finds the small toolbox in the back corner. All her important papers are in this box. She’ll just by God show that title to the laws and they’ll run the bastard down and make him give her the car back, maybe even lock up his sorry ass for a while for car theft. She’s almost chuckling as she sits on the bed and opens the toolbox.

The title’s not in there. Her certificate of marriage to Buddy is there, and her daddy’s letter from Huntsville, and her passbook showing a balance of sixty-three dollars and two cents. There’s her emergency roll of cash held tight by a rubber band. A few small tools. A gun cleaning kit and a half-full box of cartridges. Her blued Colt revolver. But no title. The sonofabitch must’ve taken it. Likely get a goodbuddy somewhere to notarize it, then get a new title in his own name.

That sorry lowlife.

Cartoon music clamors. Looney Tunes.

She takes out the pistol and box of cartridges and sets them on the bed, then slips the rubber band off the roll of bills and counts eight twenties and eleven tens. Two seventy. Plus the sixty-three dollars and four cents in the savings account makes . . . what? She never could figure in her head worth a damn. Three hundred something. And two cents. Whatever it is exactly, it ain’t a fortune. Still it’s something, which is a lot more than she’s had a time or two before. She’s not real surprised to find the money still there. Billy Boy wasn’t a thief. Just a two-timing peckerwood and a liar and an Indian giver is all.

She rolls the bills tightly again, puts the rubber band around them, drops the money back in the toolbox and puts the box back in the closet. She sits on the bed, only vaguely aware of the blaring theme music of Casper the Friendly Ghost, and wonders what she’s going to do. Tomorrow. Today. In the next five minutes.

After a while she catches sight of herself in the big mirror over the dresser and she goes over to it and leans in close to scrutinize her face.

Not too bad, she thinks, not yet—if it wasn’t for this, anyhow. She puts a finger to a small scarred bump high on the bridge of her nose. That was from Smiling Jack, who put an end to a period of her life she’s never told anybody about except her husband Buddy . . .

2

She’d arrived in San Antonio on the bus from Laredo and checked into a motel and for the next three nights in a row put on a short sexy yellow dress and sat on the bed smoking and thinking about what Rayette Nichols had said back in Harlingen when she asked her once what it was like to go to bed with men she didn’t even know.

It mostly didn’t feel like much of anything, Rayette told her. You were just letting some fella poke at you and grab at you and slobber on you for a few minutes is all. “Feels about the same, I guess,” Rayette said with a grin, “as for most women doing it with their husband.” Oh yeah, a few of them were fun, she said, but she’d be lying if she didn’t admit that with some of them, well, it was like rolling in shit, they were so nasty. But even with the nasty ones you could go home afterward and take a nice hot bath and be just as fresh and clean as before—plus be money ahead.

“Hell, honey,” Rayette had said, “all they are is men.”

On her fourth night in San Antone she finally worked up the nerve to go out to a bar and sit by herself. Hardly an hour later she was back in the motel and in bed with a man who paid her thirty dollars for the privilege. She’d been so nervous the fella couldn’t help but notice, but he’d been so understanding about it, so gentle and nice, she would’ve forgot all about the money if he hadn’t taken it on himself after he got dressed again to count it out and put it on top of the TV. He advised her to get the money first from now on because you never knew when some guy might crawfish on the deal after he’d had his fun. That made good sense and she thanked him for it. Later on she would think that if that first one hadn’t been so nice maybe she wouldn’t ever have done it again.

Or if that good-looking young Mex cop six weeks later had been rougher on her, had rattled her sufficiently, that might’ve got her out of the trade soon enough too. She’d taken him for a trick and they left the bar with their arms around each other and when they got outside he showed her his badge and told her to take it on out of San Antonio or next time he’d run her ass in. And her ass was way too nice to get all worn out on the work farm, he said, giving it a pat and smiling like he meant it. She thanked him for the break and was on a Trailways to Austin that night.

She thought the capital was a nice town, prettier and a lot cleaner than San Antone. But there was too much competition from free stuff, from all those horny government secretaries and all those university coeds. After a few weeks she hopped a bus to Houston, where she thought she’d do better.

And she did. She rented an efficiency near the interstate and bought some nicer clothes. She worked the downtown hotel bars mostly and over the next two weeks made more money than she’d thought it possible to make so fast. The first few days she did but a couple of tricks a day at thirty dollars a throw, but by the end of the week she was charging forty-five bucks and getting away with it. She once turned six tricks in one night and felt rich as the Queen of Sheba. She bought more clothes, sexy new underwear, a radio for her room. She got a little toolbox to keep her money in and cached it in the closet.

She was scared of course, every time, all the time. But her luck held well. Nobody got rough with her or tried to cheat her or force her into doing anything she didn’t want to do—and some of them would ask her to do some godawful things.

She’d been working Houston a little over two months when a man took the stool beside her at the bar of the Prince Travis Hotel one late night and introduced himself as Jackson Somebody. She’d been about to go home after another profitable evening, but figured what the hell, one more wouldn’t hurt anything. Especially one so handsome and nicely groomed and expensively dressed. And so she accepted his offer of a drink. He had dark bright eyes and black hair, a deep tan, a soft Louisiana accent and a glorious white smile. When he discreetly slipped her a hundred-dollar-bill her heart jumped up and clicked its heels and they exchanged winks and left the bar arm-in-arm.

Up in his room he asked if she would think him depraved if he sat and watched as she undressed. “Few visions are so sensual,” he said in his lilting accent, “as that of a lovely young woman shedding her clothes in preparation for the act of love. I have always found it enrapturing.”

She’d smiled at his odd way of talking and held his face in her hands and kissed him on the lips and backed away a few feet and started taking off her clothes. He sat on the bed and watched her, smiling, smoking a dark sweet-smelling cigarette. Then she was down to her yellow bikini panties and she stepped out of them and struck a pose—hip cocked, head tilted, one hand over a breast, one hand extended toward him with the panties dangling from her fingers. She giggled and playfully flicked the underwear at him.

Still smiling, he snuffed the cigarette and stood up and took a pair of black gloves from his jacket.

“You are a lovely girl,” he said softly as he fitted the thin gloves carefully over his fingers, this man she would evermore think of as Smiling Jack. “But precious . . . anybody working as an independent in my territory is stealing from me . . . and whatever made you think you could do that?”

Her heart felt like it was tumbling down a flight of stairs. She wanted to tell him she was sorry, she’d meant no disrespect, she’d pay him whatever he thought she owed him, she’d leave Houston and never come back to this town again—wanted to beg him please not to hurt her, but before she could get the first word out of her mouth he was on her like a hard wind out of hell . . .

A policeman named LeBeau came to see her in the hospital. He wore a stained yellow jacket and a porkpie hat and looked fed up with the world. All she could tell him was the man’s description and that his first name was Jackson. Her head felt misshapen. Her voice sounded strange in her own ears. LeBeau put away his notebook and smiled at her with nothing but his mouth. Not likely they’d catch him, he said. And even if they did, it wasn’t likely he’d go to trial. And if he did, it wasn’t likely he’d be convicted, not with it being his word against hers.

“I’ll tell you something, darlin,” LeBeau said, “just between us and not as a member of the Houston Police Department.” He stood and hitched up his pants. “Nobody gives a shit what happens to whores. Any girl sells her ass is trash and just asking for trouble. Who you think cares she finds it?” He wagged an admonishing finger and left.

She lay in the hospital another two days, congested with rage and humiliation. And fear. She’d remembered Rayette saying all they are is men, but she’d forgotten—more likely chosen not to recall—the business about Victorio. Well, no more of it, no matter what. Better to go hungry than have to deal with any Victorio or Smiling Jack or God-knew-who. Next time could be nails in her knees. No, thank you.

And as she lay there in her bandages and watched some local news show on the wall TV she realized it was her birthday. She was eighteen.

Smiling Jack had taken all the money she’d had in her purse, and she told the hospital she was broke. She had to sign a paper promising to pay off her bill when she was able. As soon as she got back to her room she packed her bag and got her money from the toolbox. An hour later she was on a bus to Texas City, ignoring the looks the other passengers gave her battered face.

And when everything was finally healed—the cracked ribs, the concussion, the bruised breasts, the broken finger, the various cuts on her face—the only vestige of Smiling Jack’s handiwork was the small scarred bump on the bridge of her nose.

3

“Pretty face,” she says softly, assaying it in the mirror. “Yes it was.”

But no more. Too much the worse for wear. No wonder Billy Boy went packing.

Cut the shit, girl. Wasn’t the face and you know it.

What was it, then. Answer me that.

Nothing but you, sugar. Y-O-U. You know that too.

Oh. Yeah.

She goes over and sits on the bed, picks up the pistol and twirls it on her finger like a movie cowboy. It’s a .38 caliber Colt Cobra with a four-inch barrel, finished in blue and fitted with a checked walnut stock. It weighs seventeen ounces and is eight-and-a-half inches long. She has owned it since shortly after her episode with Smiling Jack.

She learned to shoot from Uncle Frank. She’d been living with him and Aunt Rhonda more than a year by then and hadn’t exchanged more than a dozen sentences with him in that time, but he’d lately begun paying her more attention. One afternoon when she was walking past his gun shop at the edge of town he came to the door and said hi and asked if she’d like to come in and look around. She’d never seen so many guns. He handled them with an easy familiarity she couldn’t help but admire. She’d recently seen the movie Bonnie and Clyde and had wondered what it felt like to shoot a gun. She loved the feel of them. When he asked if she’d like to shoot one sometime, she said oh yes.

They’d go deep in the woods behind the house and shoot bottles and tin cans. He showed her the proper stance for facing the target, the way to hold the piece in a two-hand grip, how to aim and squeeze—not jerk—the trigger, how to accept the recoil. He let her fire his shotgun too, a pump-action Remington. But her love right from the first had been his two ­revolvers—a Smith & Wesson four-inch .38 and a huge .44 caliber Remington with a barrel about as long as her forearm, an ancient cannon of a piece he said his grandaddy had taken off a dead bandido when he was riding with Pershing’s cavalry down in Mexico, hunting for Pancho Villa.

It was during those shooting lessons that he started with the touching. “No, Dolly, turn a little more this way,” he’d say, correcting her stance with a hand on her thigh, on her hip, on her rear. “Straighten your back,” he’d say, his hands spread on her ribs, thumbs nudging her breasts. At first she’d been unsure what to do, thought she ought to say something, make some gesture of objection, but then figured what the hell. It wasn’t like he was hurting her or anything, for Pete’s sake. And truth be told, she didn’t really, well, mind it all that much. It was actually kind of exciting in a way, all that pretending they weren’t either one of them aware of what his hands were really and truly doing. Together with the excitement of the gunfire and the kick of the pistol and the way the tin cans whanged and jumped and the bottles busted in sprays of glass—well, sometimes it all just made her feel like rubbing herself up against something.

In the absence of any resistance, his touches of course got bolder, and one late afternoon he finally pressed on her the most intimate touch of all, right there on a layer of pine needles.

She liked it, she can’t ever deny it, but even though she didn’t object, she knew it was wrong and swore to herself it wouldn’t happen again. But of course after it happened once it was bound to happen some more. And it did, the very next day, out on the pine needles again. She wanted to tell him no, wanted to say they ought not be doing this, but, lordy . . . it was so exciting.

The next day she was reading in bed and Aunt Rhonda was off at her sewing club meeting when Uncle Frank came into her room, undoing his belt and saying a bed would sure beat pine needles for comfort. Before she could give it a thought her shift was bunched up above her breasts and her panties tangled around one ankle and they were at it again, only this time he was so rough about it she got scared and tried to push him away, but she was also enjoying it in spite of herself and even as she pushed at him with her hands she was pulling him in with her heels and she was scared and furious and all mixed up and more excited than ever . . .

And that’s when Aunt Rhonda showed up at the door.

4

She releases the revolver’s cylinder and swings it out, sees that all the chambers are empty, then turns the gun around and peers into the bore as she positions her thumbnail under the breech to reflect light up into the barrel. The inner surface of the barrel gleams, the lands and grooves spiral cleanly, without a pit or speck of dust. Still, it’s been a few weeks since she last cleaned it, so she fastens a brush tip to the end of a cleaning rod and runs it through the barrel a few quick times. Then she unscrews the brush from the rod tip and replaces it with a button-tip fitting. She stuffs a small patch of flannel into the muzzle and thrusts it all the way through the barrel with the rod. Next, she moistens a flannel patch with oil and shoves it through the barrel. She reexamines the inner barrel and smiles at its gleam. She removes the button tip and attaches a slotted tip in its place, then fits a fresh flannel patch in the slot and runs the patch through each of the six cartridge chambers. When all the chambers are sparkling, she snaps the cylinder back in place with a jerk of her wrist, then spins it with her fingertips to test its action. The cylinder whirls smoothly. She has always loved that rapid ticking. Now she applies a light coat of oil to all the exposed metal, then wipes the gun clean with a silicone cloth. The weapon shines.

She dumps a handful of bullets out of their box, picks one up and regards it closely. Hardly bigger than a peanut. But no goober in the world can do you the damage one of these can. She drops the round back on the bed and aims the pistol at the blank wall across the room where she now envisions Aunt Rhonda’s face. You ugly hateful old bitch. The hammer snaps down with a clear flat click and Aunt Rhonda’s face dissolves. She lowers the gun and lets out a long breath.

Hell, why shoot you? It wasn’t you humping his own half-brother’s daughter, his own half-niece.

The word “incest” intones lowly in the back of her mind and she feels her face go hot.

It wasn’t that. It can’t be that except with a daddy or a brother and he wasn’t either one. It wasn’t that.

On the wall hangs a framed black-and-white photo of Billy Boy wearing his usual cowlick and lopsided grin. His freckles clear and sharp, making him look like Howdy Doody at age 37. Squatting beside a billygoat at the petting zoo of the county fair, where a roving photographer took the shot. Dolores paid a dollar for it.

She takes aim on his right eye.

Click. That’s for all your lies, you bastard no-count.

The sight sets on his left eye.

Click. That’s for all your damn cheating.

She aims at his big front teeth.

Click. That’s for breathing the same air as me.

Click . . . click . . . click.

She opens the cylinder again and slips a round in a chamber and closes the cylinder and spins it. She places the muzzle against her breast and feels her heart thumping wildly up against the pistol barrel.

Go ahead, girl. Try your luck. One little squeeze.

She eases her finger off the trigger and lowers the pistol to her lap. Her breath is wedged in her chest and her pulse throbs in her throat.

You damn crazy woman.

She suddenly remembers the old boy back in Alice who couldn’t stand it anymore and took a shotgun to himself. A shotgun, for Christ’s sake! How can anybody botch it with a damn shotgun? But he did. Took off half his face and a fairsized portion of his brain and still lived through it. If you can call it living to be damn near totally paralyzed. That poor fella laid in bed for months with no control over bowel or bladder, his head wound constantly seeping pus and god-knows-what. All he could move was the one eye he had left, that and his nose. He was fed through a tube in his arm. They said he passed his days soiling the sheets and shedding tears out of his one eye and snorting up snot. His sister had to spend much of her day mopping up his messes. Not long after they left Alice they heard she’d choked him to death and been sent to prison for it.

You do not want that, she tells herself. Besides, who’d take care of you if you botched it? Who’d change the sheets when you made a mess in bed?

“Who’s gun’s that?”

Startled, she jerks around to see the two kids at the bedroom door, their eyes fixed on the revolver in her hand. She had not been aware of the television’s silence.

“Whose gun’s that?” the girl repeats.

“Well, not that it’s any of your business, Little Miss Nosy, but it’s mine.” She slips the pistol under the rumpled sheets. “What you-all want?”

“We wanna know can we go to Ruben’s and hep him build a treehouse.”

“Ruben’s? Just yesterday you said Ruben Harris was the stupidest boy in the world.”

“His daddy gave him a big buncha lumber and we wanna go hep him build a treehouse.”

“So now you don’t care he’s the stupidest boy in the world?”

The girl shrugs irritably. “We’re gonna go hep build a treehouse,” she says, and turns to leave.

“Hold it right there, missy! You don’t tell me what you’re gonna do, I tell you. What do you know about building a treehouse or anything else, anyway?”

The girl glares at her. “You said if we asked we could do stuff. You said.” The boy steps closer to Mary Marlene and takes hold of her shirt. His eyes big on Dolores. The boy was more tight-lipped than ever lately. Hardly ever spoke anymore except in whispers to his sister.

“First you get the word right. It ain’t hep, it’s help. I told you a hundred times. You want to grow up talking like some ignorant ranchhand? Now say it, say help. H-E-L-P. Say it!”

“Help!” the girl snaps. “You said if we asked and I done asked!”

“Dammit, Mary Marlene,” Dolores says through her teeth, “what’d I tell you about sassing me?” She’d like to smack the girl’s face. She’s never once hit either of them, but lately the impulse to do so has been constant and almost irresistible. And has terrified her.

The girl looks as though she wouldn’t mind smacking her, either, her eyes blazing with rage. How does it happen, Dolores wonders. How do they get this way, those darling little babies?

“Aw hell,” she says, feeling a sudden exhaustion right down to the bone. What’s the damn point of arguing with a smart-mouth brat anyway? “Go ahead on.”

They streak through the living room and screech the front screen door open wide on its rusty spring as Dolores calls out, “Don’t let any flies in or slam the—” and the door bangs as loud as a pistol shot.

She gets up and goes to the screen door which as always remains partly opened and latches it against the entry of any more flies. Then goes to the kitchen and contemplates the pile of dishes in the sink, the shiny patches of cooking grease on the stovetop and the wall behind it, the dustballs on the floor.

Used to be you kept house some better than this.

She takes the now cold half-cup of coffee to the little kitchen table and sits and sips at it. The room is quiet but for the buzzing of the circling flies.

The next thing she knows she’s still at the table and the coffee is still in front of her, but she’s aware that time has passed because the sunlight has completely withdrawn from the window over the sink and is now streaming through the windows on the other side of the house. She’s obviously been asleep but doesn’t see how it’s possible for somebody to sleep sitting on the edge of a straightback chair and not fall over. Maybe she wasn’t asleep, maybe just in a trance of some kind. The thought scares her, but she doesn’t know why, and her confusion makes her angry.

“Damn it,” she says, and starts to stand up and realizes that her bare ass has been pressed for so long into the hard edge of the chair it has gone numb.

No wonder I been in a trance—my brains are paralyzed.

The shift of her weight on the chair has renewed the circulation in her buttocks and now they burn. She moans and stands up slowly, massages her ass with both hands, limps into the living room.

Everything’s so quiet. The room seems utterly alien to her and she feels a momentary confusion before the furniture regains its familiarity and she spies the open box of Sugar Pops on the floor where the kids left it, and one of Mary Marlene’s frayed sneakers poking out from under the sofa, and the usual sloppy pile of Cosmopolitans next to the ripped armchair in the corner.

I know this place, she thinks, her heart sagging, and she sits on the sofa and puts her head in her hands.

The low coffee table is spotted darkly with cigarette burns, littered with several issues of TV Guide, a scattering of matchbooks, nearly empty paper cups of Kool Aid, a blackened banana skin. The two ashtrays on the table are full to overflowing with cigarette butts. She looks around for cigarettes but sees none anywhere and does not feel like getting up and going into the bedroom to search. She picks through both ashtrays until she’s found the longest butt, then straightens it the best she can and lights it with a match. She takes a deep drag and exhales with a huge sigh.

In the dust coating the coffee table a fingertip has traced the shape of a heart containing the inscription “M. U. + R. H.”

Mary Underhill and Ruben Harris.

Not even six years old and she’s already a fool for love. Little idjit. She’ll see.

5

Buddy once carved a heart with their initials in it. Into an oak trunk in Texas City. B. U. + D. S. It was a late afternoon and the sunset blazed red as fire in the oil-fumed air. It was the first time she’d permitted him to walk her to work, the first time she’d ever been in his company outside of The Fiddlesticks, the roadhouse where she worked as a waitress. For over a month he’d been coming in the place every day after work at the refinery to have supper and a few beers and to talk to her. He’d been doing this ever since the night he came in with a bunch of friends and saw her for the first time. The talk between them was easy and full of laughter without him ever getting raunchy like the others. After the first week he wasn’t even trying to hide how he felt about her. She could see it all over his face. The whole place could. His bubbas made good-natured fun of him—calling him a goner, saying love had done poleaxed him for sure—but he didn’t mind their ribbing at all. She’d blush whenever they kidded him about being so sweet on her, and Buddy would beam at her all the more. Every time he came in he asked her for a date—asked her to go dancing, to a movie, for a beer and sandwich someplace, for a walk along the bayshore. And every time, she turned him down.

It had been nearly six months since she’d fled Houston with her battered face. Her flesh and bones had since healed, but her nerves were still beat up. She lived in fear of things she couldn’t even name. She’d wonder sometimes if maybe the Houston cop LeBeau had been right, if she really was no damn good, and such wondering would make her angry at herself. Of course he wasn’t right. What did he know about her anyway? She was as worthy of respect as the next person, dammit. She was.

But her self-assurances could not dispel the fear. And now this nice fella, this good-looking Buddy Underhill, was bringing that fear to a head by wanting to get to know her. She knew that if she let him get close to her she’d soon have to lie to him about her past and then live in the terrible fear that one day he’d find out the truth. Or she could tell him the truth herself. Tell him right off the bat. And watch him run the other way.

He was so gently and so sweetly persistent that she finally relented a little and said all right, he could walk her to work—but that was all. Don’t think about walking her back home, that was the condition. A walk to work was one thing, a walk home from work was something else altogether different and she wasn’t having any of that.

Fine, he said, no problem, any way she wanted it.

Late the next afternoon, he was waiting for her on the sidewalk in front of her little rented cottage, his hair combed wetly, his face freshly scrubbed and grinning at the sight of her when she came out the door. They walked along making small talk and were halfway to The Fiddlesticks when he paused under a huge oak blazing red in the sunset and gently took her hands and smiled into her eyes and told her he loved her.

She busted out crying. “No, you don’t!” she said. “You can’t do that to me!”

And right there by the side of the road, in a shamefaced sobbing fury, she told him everything there was to tell about the brief part of her life that ended in a Houston hospital room after her run-in with Smiling Jack. She talked and talked and the sun dropped behind the trees and he never once interrupted her. And when she was all through talking, the sun was down and an overhead streetlight had lit up and stretched their shadows across the road and she was very late for work and Buddy was holding her in his arms and saying don’t cry, baby, don’t cry.

He told her none of it mattered, not anymore. All that mattered was right now and tomorrow and the day after that. He told her again that he loved her, and he kissed her. And she kissed him back. And for a minute she got scared all over again because her heart was racing so fast and her breath was so hard to catch and her throat was so tight—and then she stopped being scared because she realized all it was was happiness. Because—talk about luck—she loved him too.

And while she fixed the ruined makeup on her happy face in a little pocket mirror in the glow of the streetlight, he carved the heart with their initials in the roadside oak.

They were married six weeks later in a small Baptist church in town. They had a five-day honeymoon in a rented piling house on the beach at Gilchrist and got tanned as dark as Mexicans. They swam in the Gulf and ate boiled shrimp and fried catfish and oysters on the half-shell and drank ice-cold beer by the quart bottle. They took the ferry to Galveston and rode the rides at Stewart Park and at a shooting gallery he won a prize for her, a little ballerina made of blue glass. They made love a half-dozen times a day.

Back in Texas City they rented a house on a bayou and bought some linens and cookware and were given lots more stuff by their friends. They didn’t buy their own home because his job as a rigger would keep them on the move from one oil field to another all over this end of the state. When she unpacked her things and found the .38, she said she guessed she’d sell it, but he said no, keep it. He’d lost his own gun in a poker game a few months before and hadn’t got another one yet and it was good to have a gun in the house. You never knew when you might need it.

Buddy wanted a family and she wanted to please Buddy—and so she was pregnant when they moved to Liberty. When she gave birth to Mary Marlene, Buddy kidded her for a teenage mother. The baby was four months old when they moved again, this time to Baytown, where eight months later Jesse was born.

She was happy. There was no other word for it. She was loved and in love and they had a home and a family and all the bad things were in the past. They made long Sunday trips to the beach at High Island and sang “Row, row, row your boat” on the evening drive back home. They went on picnics in the parks and played games with the kids. They went to drive-in movies and before the end of the second feature the kids would both be asleep and she and Buddy would be necking and groping each other like high schoolers.

They agreed not to have anymore children for a while and so she went back to her diaphragm. Some of their old friends from T.C. had come to work in the Baytown patches too, so they had plenty of old friends and new ones, both, and they all went honky-tonking together a couple of nights a week.

Who—she often asked herself as she fed the babies or checked on supper or hung the wash or held Buddy’s head to her breast in the night—would’ve ever thought it could happen?

Happiness is a damn funny thing, she thinks as she picks through the ashtrays in search of another long butt to light up. You get to where you’re sure you’ll never have it—and then one day it falls on you out of the blue. You know damn well it doesn’t happen to many and that you best not ask too many questions of it and just grab on with both hands and hold to it for all you’re worth. But even while you’re happier than you thought it was possible to be, you’re afraid, too, because you can’t help thinking something could happen to make it go away. But if after a while it doesn’t go away, you little by little stop being afraid of losing it. A year goes by, and then another and another, and little by little the feel of happiness starts to become as familiar as the smell of shaving cream in the bathroom or the sound of special laughter coming through the front door at the end of the day or the touch of a certain hand on your skin in the night. You reach a point where you don’t even realize how much you’ve come to take it for granted—it’s like the air you breathe—and so you stop paying close attention to it, and that’s a real shame because, afterwards, it’s so hard to remember everything about it as clearly as you wish you could, and it seems to have gone by so fast it’s like you hardly had it for any time at all . . .

They planned a big party for Mary Marlene’s fourth birthday but in the rush of things Dolores forgot to buy ice cream. She’d picked up everything else—the cake and cold drinks and candles and decorations and balloons—but somehow the ice cream slipped her mind. Buddy got home from work just as the neighborhood kids were arriving for the party. They played pin the tail on the donkey and Mary Marlene opened her presents and then the candles were set in the cake and ready to be lit and Dolores handed out paper plates and plastic spoons and went to the freezer for the ice cream and that’s when she realized she’d forgotten to buy it. Mary Marlene went into a snit, and Jesse, already taking his cues from his sister, started up a steady whimpering.

“What the heck,” Buddy said. “The kids are right. What’s a party without ice cream? Be right back.” And he got in his truck and drove off to a convenience store on the highway just a few blocks away.

The way they told it to her, later, he’d walked into the store just a couple of steps ahead of a pair of uniformed state policemen who’d stopped in to get cigarettes. A holdup was going on. Two nineteen-year-olds with magnums who opened fire the instant they saw the cops. Guns went off all over the place. Three people were wounded. One of the troopers would be paralyzed the rest of his life. The two robber boys were shot dead. So was Buddy.

He was the best part of her life, the longest, the quickest to go by.

6

You never got a Buddy when you need one.

She recalls a song her momma used to sing: “I-I-I-I ain’t got no bodddd-eee.”

Or no Buddd-ee either.

Ah hell, listen to me. Poor little me. Boo damn hoo.

She goes back in the bedroom and stands before the mirror and studies herself. Front view’s not bad at all—especially for somebody pushing twenty-five and with two kids and a few too many rough nights that are maybe starting to show in the face some. She takes off the shirt and tosses it aside. But now just look at that. Hardly no droop at all to those hooters—for sure not enough to hold a pencil under them. And only a teensy roundness to the tummy. Waist still slim as a girl’s and curves right smoothly into lean tight hips. Thighs nice and firm and not a hint of those riding-pants bulges so many women have, even the young girls. When she flexes a leg—like this—or lifts one out to the side—like this—what you see is lines of muscle and tight flesh and nothing else. No sag, no flab, not on this girl.

She turns her back to the mirror and cranes her head to look over her shoulder. Ladieeess and gentlemen . . . presenting the sweetest little ass in Texas. Round, tight, dimpled over each cheek. More than one man has told her it’s the best he ever saw and the nicest he ever put a hand to. A college professor she once did business with in a Houston motel told her it was a classic. That was the very word he used, “classic.” Get told something like that by a professor, well, who was she to argue? She turns around to face the mirror squarely once more, slides her hands up her thighs and over her belly and up to cup her breasts.

No question about it, baby doll, you’re still a fine-looking thing.

She takes Billy Boy’s framed picture off the wall and holds it facing the mirror. Take a good look at that, mister. That’s what you’re giving up. Don’t it just make you wanna cry, you dumbshit huckleberry? You said you loved these tits.

She sees herself crying in the mirror and the sight infuriates her. She slams the photo against the edge of the dresser, spraying glass over the dresser top and onto the floor, then flings it across the room. It bounces off the wall and lands faceup on her rumpled robe, the frame still intact. She stalks over to it and kicks it spinning under the bed to strike the wall on the other side and flip up and prop itself crookedly against the baseboard. Billy Boy’s grin is still in place.

Her big toe hurts. Blood seeps from under the toenail. She leans against the wall and hammers it with the bottom of her fist until her hand aches, then she sits on the bed and sobs.

A minute later she giggles through her tears and runny nose.

Oh man. I can’t even whip the little bastard’s picture.

A car turns onto the driveway next door, wheels crunching through gravel. She gets up and goes to the window and sees Della Corman’s blue Belvedere. The driver’s door swings open and Della Corman works her ample girth out from under the steering wheel, pausing to tug the skirt of her Value Drugs uniform back down over her gelatinous thighs. She opens one of the car’s rear doors and lugs out two large sacks of groceries, then bumps the door closed with her hip and lumbers up the steps to her screened kitchen door. She struggles to brace the sacks against her chest while she gropes for the door handle.

I hate you, Della Corman. Hate you, loathe you, despise you, wish you were dead. You and your Peeping Tom husband.

She retrieves the pistol from under the bedsheets and aims out the window at Della Corman, setting the sight squarely in the center of her large rump. As Della manages to hook a finger in the door handle and awkwardly pull the screen door open, Dolores squeezes the trigger.

Click.

The small dry sound of hammer striking empty chamber stuns her. She is suddenly aware of the tension in her outstretched arms and tight two-hand grip, of her readiness for the gun’s recoil.

Sweet Jesus, girl.

She unlocks the cylinder and lets it swing out and sees the sole bullet snug in its chamber . . . the chamber that had been poised to roll up under the hammer with the next squeeze of the trigger.

She gently closes the cylinder and sets the pistol on a pillow and stares at it as if it were a frightening note in an illegible scrawl.

Need us a damn drink, what we need.

Still naked, she goes into the kitchen and rummages through the cabinets until she finds a bottle with something left in it. She pours the remaining Old Crow into a jelly glass and raises the glass in a toast. “To me, you sonsabitches!”

The glass is nearly half full, and she gulps it down in two huge swallows. The bourbon hits her stomach with the force of a punch. She staggers back against the edge of the sink, unable to draw breath, gagging—and then her lungs suck air in deeply and she is seized by a violent fit of hacking. The glass slips from her hand and bounces on the floor. Her eyes flood. She sags slowly to the floor with her back against the cabinet doors.

She tries to say “Ahhh!” but can manage only a weak gasp. So she settles for thinking it: Ahhhh! That’s the joke, isn’t it? Ahhhhh, that’s gooood stuff!

She brushes webs of mucus from her nose and mouth with her fingers. Yessir, gooood stuff. From where she sits she can see that all the sunlight has left the living room windows.

Time sure flies when you’re having fun.

Now she catches the odor of her own flesh and sniffs herself more closely.

Hmm. Somebody round here does not smell of roses.

C’mon, girl, let’s clean you up some.

7

She’d read somewhere that porpoises had been known to save men at sea—shipwrecked sailors and men who went topside for a breath of air in the middle of the night and fell overboard without being noticed. The man would be treading water way out there with no land in sight, all alone and helpless, getting weaker by the minute and absolutely sure he was going to drown, and then a porpoise would show up and keep him afloat with its nose, and nudge him along toward the nearest shore, sometimes for days, sometimes for hundreds of miles. Nobody really knew why a porpoise would do such a thing. Some said it was because porpoises were good by nature. She has often thought of Buddy that way—like a porpoise good by nature who kept her from drowning in herself, in her own weakness, which sometimes feels to her as deep and frightening as an ocean. Too bad he didn’t get her all the way to shore before he died. And even if he never could’ve gotten her to shore, even if that was asking too much, even of him, he could’ve at least kept on keeping her afloat.

She’d mourned and mourned and Buddy’s friends had mourned with her. But as the weeks turned to months the friends stopped mourning and half a year after they put Buddy in the ground they started making moves on his widow. And she’d been so sick at heart still, so afraid of tomorrow, so terribly lonely in the sleepless nights, so desperate to touch something, anything, anybody that had been a part of his life and therefore a part of him—and drinking so steadfastly every night—that she surrendered to them. All of them. She went to bed with every man she’d known to be Buddy’s friend and even with some who simply claimed they’d been.

It went like that for month after month. And all the while, her heart cried for her lost good man—and for herself, who could not stay afloat without his help.

One night she and some guy she knew was married but whose name she wasn’t sure of—a guy who’d told her he’d been best friends with Buddy when they were teenagers and worked on the rigs in Luling—were stumbling around drunk in her bedroom and struggling to get out of their clothes and the fool lurched hard against the dresser and her little glass ballerina tumbled off and shattered on the floor. She knelt in the broken glass and fingered the pieces and began to cry. The fella said he was sorry and put his arm around her to try to comfort her and she started slapping at him and cursing him and throwing things at him—a lamp, the bedside clock, her shoes. The man quick grabbed up his boots and shirt and hustled out of there, looking back at her like she was some kind of crazywoman.

The next day she loaded the truck with as much of her belongings as she could fit into it and moved with the kids to Beaumont.

She rented a little house near the park close to Willow Marsh Bayou and got herself a job as a receptionist at the Ford dealer’s. She didn’t have any experience at that kind of work but the interviewing manager told her he just knew she’d get the hang of it right quick. It was all he could do to look away from her legs in the minidress.

She made it a point to be at work on time every morning and by the end of her third day she knew everything there was to know about being a receptionist. After two weeks the manager gave her a three-dollar-a-week raise and said she was the best receptionist they’d ever had. Every day after work she picked the kids up at the home of a neighbor woman who took care of children for a dollar a day while their mommas were at work. She cooked a good supper every evening and watched TV with the kids and tried to make conversation with them during the commercials. She tried to find things to do with them on weekends. She kept away from the booze. She was trying with all her might to be the good person she kept telling herself she truly was.

But she couldn’t keep from remembering something she’d heard her momma say—that there’s no changing what you are and only a damn fool thinks there is. Dolores lay awake nights wondering how big a fool she was. Talking about daddy one time, momma had said that a leopard can try all day and night to make itself a zebra, but won’t none of its spots ever turn to stripes, not ever.

The job bored her damn near to tears. The fake smile she wore the day long felt like some awful mask. The salesmen all came on to her—every one of them married but acting like he was hot stuff and she ought to be thrilled he was asking her to sneak off to a motel at lunchtime. She told them she was engaged, that her fiancé was in the army and stationed in Germany but would be coming home in about three months. And still some of those peckerwoods persisted.

And she’d now begun to face the truth that she really didn’t like her kids. She’d had them for Buddy’s sake and no other reason. Now Buddy was gone but they were still with her and every day it was harder to go on pretending she cared about them like a mother should. She could see in their eyes that the kids sensed the truth. Was it any wonder the girl was such a pain in the ass, the boy a mute little freak? What could be worse for a kid than knowing his momma didn’t love him? She tried not to think what her momma would say if she was alive and knew how she felt. Guilt fed on her heart like a mangy dog. She started allowing herself a couple of drinks before bed to help her get to sleep. Before long she was having more than a couple.

After three months she gave up all pretense. She quit the Ford place and went to work in a bar called The Lucky Star and shortly thereafter began bringing home men. Most were a one-time thing, some she got together with for several nights in a row. She didn’t stick with any of them for as long as a week.

It was like Baytown all over again, only now she was drinking much harder.

It went on like that until three months ago, until the morning she woke up while it was still dark outside and the radio was blaring “Hello Walls” and one of the dresser lamps was on and there was a naked man sleeping on either side of her and she had no idea who they were. The big one on her right had a crude tattoo of a coiled snake on his back. The bedroom was an unholy mess. Empty beer cans littered the floor, a few gleaming whiskey bottles. Clothes strewn everywhere. Spilled ashtrays. The room was miasmal with the thick tangled smells of whiskey and ashes, sex and sweat. She vaguely recalled meeting these two in some bar, riding with them in their truck, that they were from Vidor, just up the road. Her lack of clear memory added to her fear. She eased out of bed and went to the closet and slipped on a robe and got the .38 out of the toolbox, then went to the blasting radio and turned it off. The sudden silence seemed to plug her ears. She kicked the mattress hard and the big one groaned and pulled the sheet up over his head. The other one snorted and mumbled and cracked one eye open and finally saw her standing at the foot of the bed in a shooter’s stance with the cocked pistol in both hands and pointed at his head. His eyes widened and he raised up on one elbow and said, “What? What?”

“Get him up,” she said. “And you get your asses out of here. I mean now.”

He shook the big man until he came up from under the sheet snarling, “Quit, goddammit!” Then he saw her with the gun and got big-eyed too—but only for a second. He sat up and laced his muscular arms around his raised knees and grinned at her. His arms and chest also carried tattoos, all of them poorly rendered. Jailhouse art. She’d come to know it when she saw it.

Lookit here, she thinks, at the fine company you’re keeping. You really come a long way in this world, ain’t you, girl?

“The fuck you doing, sweetpea?” the big man said. “Put that thing down before I ram it up your ass.”

He scared her so bad she couldn’t stand it.

“Ram this.”

The gunshot rocked the room as the bullet passed over their heads and through the bedroom wall and ricocheted off the block wall in the bathroom and whanged against a pipe.

They threw up their hands and gaped at her with eyes big as boiled eggs.

O lord, she thought, it’ll be cops all over the place in a minute.

She pointed the piece at the big one’s chest and drew back the hammer.

“You shitheads got ten seconds to get out of my life.” Her voice sounded far away through the ringing in her ears.

They scrambled out of bed and snatched up about half their clothes and nearly ran through the walls in their haste to depart the premises.

She followed them to the door and kept the gun on them till they’d got into their pickup and roared off down the street and their taillights disappeared around the corner.

She’d expected to see the neighborhood porchlights blazing, to see people at their doors and gawking toward her house. Expected to hear sirens closing in. But all along the block the houses remained dark under a sky just now dawning gray. Not a soul in sight.

What made her think anybody’d give a damn?

She went inside and locked the door behind her and then went to the bedroom, trying hard not to let a single thought into her head because whatever the thought might be she knew it wouldn’t be a good one.

She was cleaning up the mess when she caught sight of the kids at the door, watching her. The boy was sucking his thumb and holding to his sister’s T-shirt and looked like he’d been crying. Mary Marlene looked pale and scared and like she was trying hard not to show it. Dolores felt her heart turn over in her chest. It’s your doing, girl, she told herself—your doing they have to go through this. The girl would never again appear to Dolores as vulnerable as she did at this moment, nor would her voice ever again quaver as it did now when she asked, “Momma? The party over?”

8

She’s heard it said that life is not one damn thing after another—it’s the same damn thing over and over.

Got that right. And whoever said what goes round comes round. For damn sure right on that one too.

The question is, what are you supposed to do when that same damn thing that keeps coming round gets so awful you just can’t stand it anymore? What then? That’s the question. Been the question for a while now, and she ponders it under the steaming shower until the water turns cold.

She dries her hair as thoroughly as she can with a towel, then goes to the kitchen, where a small breeze is coming through the window, to let it finish drying and to do her nails. She sits at the table and puts each foot in turn up on a chair and very carefully applies a coat of Crimson Kiss to the nail of each toe. Then she does her fingernails. While she waits for them to dry she listens to the radio. Oldie-goldies. “Summertime Blues” and “Be My Baby” and “Hit the Road, Jack” and “All Shook Up.”

She now goes to the bedroom and stands at the dresser mirror and stares at her face and decides not to apply makeup. That’s your face right there, girl, Smiling Jack’s keepsake and all. You can paint it all you want but it won’t change a thing. For the next ten minutes she brushes her copper hair till it hangs softly, brightly on her shoulders. Then she picks through the dresses in the closet and she finds the one she’s looking for and slips it on.

She checks herself in the mirror again and thinks, Well, now, ain’t I something? The beauty in the mirror gives her a saucy wink. She’s changed stations on the radio and Ray Charles is singing about the girl with the red dress on who do the boogie-woogie all night long, yeah, yeah. Her hair jounces in time to her nifty little dance steps, the little dress rising high on her thighs as she executes a side-scissor-step across the floor and follows it with a spin and a wicked left-right-left combination of hip thrusts. Yeah, yeah!

Her breasts swell above the low neckline of the little cocktail dress, her nipples jut against the fabric. Buddy bought her the dress for their first anniversary but didn’t see it on her until they got home—and when he did, he said he’d made a mistake, that he hadn’t realized it was going to look quite like that, and he sure didn’t want her wearing it in public because he’d be in one fight after another with all the guys who were bound to look at her in ways he wouldn’t be able to let them get away with. He said he was sorry, he knew he sounded like a jerk, but that was how he felt and there was no way he could lie about it. She kissed him for his sweetness and promised she would wear it only at home, only for him, and they had enjoyed the hell out of this dress many a time, yes they had. This is the first time she has worn it in, what, nearly two years.

Two years. Is that all it’s been? Not quite. A hair shy of two years, actually.

Which means that exactly two years ago he was still alive and she’d been married going on five years and if she was to think real hard about it she might be able to remember exactly what they were doing two years ago, her and Buddy, but all she knows for absolute sure is what they weren’t doing. What they weren’t doing was expecting him to be so goddamn dead so goddamn soon and leaving her all by herself for the world to make whore soup out of all over again—that’s what they absolutely for goddamn sure were not doing . . . and if you start to cry now, you little cooze . . .

Okay, all right, I’m fine. See? No crying. No tears here. All smiles am I.

Two years . . . Might as well be two hundred.

Quit it! That was then, this is now. And anyhow, just look at you. Damn dress never looked so good. You ain’t getting older, honey, you’re getting better.

Yeah, right. I ain’t rightly sure I can stand any more of this kind of better.

How about some pukey self-pity? You stand some more of that?

Believe I had my fill of that too, thank you.

She also believes a drink would help plenty right about now but then remembers there’s not a drop left in the house. No help there.

Oh Lordy, where’s some help?

Roger Miller is singing dang him, dang him, they oughta take a rope and hang him.

She knows exactly what would help right now. More than a drink. More than anything has ever helped except for Buddy.

To shoot something.

That would do the trick, she knows it would.

She can feel it in her bones.

9

The day after she ran the two Vidor dickheads out of her house at gunpoint, she packed up the truck and took off with the kids again, heading east for the Sabine River and Louisiana just on the other side of it, not thirty miles away. Like she’d heard some old boy say in the bar one time, the only thing worth getting out of Texas is your ass—and she was dead set on both changing her luck and getting as far out of Texas as her meager grubstake would take her.

But she’d gone only a dozen miles when the truck overheated and the motor started clattering and black smoke came pouring out the tailpipe. By the time she pulled into a garage in Orange she’d burned up a bearing. The mechanic said he could have it fixed in ten days or so but the bill was going to be a whopper.

She’d felt like sitting down and crying right there on the floor of the garage. Fixing the truck would cost all the money she’d been counting on to get settled in New Orleans, maybe, or in Florida, better yet. But there she still was in Texas, with the Sabine within spitting distance, practically. She asked the mechanic if he knew of any jobs in town and he said no ma’am he sure didn’t. A young woman waiting to get tires put on her car overheard her and asked if she’d ever worked as a cocktail waitress. Dolores sighed and asked if there was any other kind of work in the world, and the girl laughed and said she knew what she meant. She said there was an opening where she worked, at The Barnacle, in Port Arthur, just on down the road. Two hours later she had the job. An hour after that she used the last of her money to rent the little frame house off Proctor Street.

Over the next two weeks she felt like she could never quite get her breath, felt as if she had something small but as ashy and compact as a chunk of coal lodged in her chest. Her pulse raced constantly. She knew it was fear but she told herself she didn’t know why she should be so afraid, and the lie only made the fear worse, because what she was afraid of was that she would have to go on being herself, and she didn’t believe she could stand much more of that.

And then she met Billy Boy Renfro in The Barnacle one night and he asked if she’d like to have pie and coffee with him when she got off work. He was the first who’d ever asked her to join him for something other than a drink, and she was caught by such surprise she said sure, why not, more out of curiosity than anything else. She’d reached a point where not much made her curious. He was short and wiry, a welder at the shipworks, and he was funny and sweet and behaved like a gentleman. By the time he dropped her off at her place at two in the morning and kissed her goodnight and said he’d see her tomorrow, she was dizzy with the idea that maybe she still had a little luck left and maybe it was about to turn.

She’d known it wasn’t going to get far with him, known it in her bones. But when you feel like you’re drowning—feel it not just in awful dreams at night but even when you’re awake and walking around in the broad daylight, feel it when you’re having coffee in the morning or staring at your kids from across a room or suddenly catching a look at yourself in the mirror—when you’re always feeling like that, like you’re not even sure you’re going to be able to draw your next breath . . . well, it’s no surprise you’ll grab at anything drifting by, grab at it and hope it’ll keep you from going under just yet . . .

They got together almost every evening. He’d come to The Barnacle just as she was finishing her shift for the night and they’d do some drinking and dancing for a while in the company of some of the other waitresses and their boyfriends. Then they would go to her place where the kids had much earlier put themselves to bed and they’d make love into the night.

One time they saw her neighbor Ellis Corman watching them from his bathroom window and Dolores shook her breasts at him like a stripper and Ellis suddenly remembered to turn off his bathroom light and they laughed and Billy Boy pulled down the blind.

They’d been seeing each other for six weeks by then and she said he was spending so much time at her place he might as well live there instead of with his Uncle Raymond like he did. He said he didn’t know about that. She said she did—and put a nipple to his mouth while her other hand roamed over him brazenly. The next day he brought his clothes from his uncle’s house and hung them in her closet.

He seemed always to have plenty of money and he didn’t mind spending it. He told her that besides his welding job at the works he played poker twice a week at Purple Jim’s garage up in Bridge City and had been on a run of luck lately. “Course now,” he said, “there’s times it goes the other way, too, no matter how good you are, and when it does, well, that’s when you get by with drinking beer ruther than Jim Beam and eating hot dogs ruther than steak.”

He said she ought to be driving something nicer than that rattletrap truck and so she traded it in on a yellow Ford two-door and he paid the rest in cash.

She was astonished to see how well he got along with the kids. Dolores hadn’t seen them take a shine to anybody since Buddy. Mary Marlene couldn’t get enough of fawning on him, and Jesse, wonder of wonders, would sometimes get in whispered conversation with him. She asked once what the boy said to him and Billy Boy just grinned and winked at Jesse and said, “That’s our little secret.” It was one of the few instances in the past two years she’d seen Jesse smile.

The first couple of times he went to play poker at Purple Jim’s after moving in with her, she came home from work and took a hot bath and waited up for him, freshly powdered and wearing sexy new underwear under her robe. But he both times came in a little too drunk to do much about it. Even though she was angry she kept it to herself, but after the second time she didn’t bother with the fancy undies and the bath powder anymore.

The following week, when he didn’t come home till dawn and then announced with a chuckle that his luck had gone a little sour and he’d lost nearly three hundred dollars, she got furious.

It was partly because of the money, of course. Hearing him talk about losing three hundred dollars, laughing about it, like there was no chance at all the world might ever do him harm, made her angry in ways she couldn’t have explained if she’d tried. She’d never been able to laugh about money, goddammit. But it was something else too—a sudden, inexplicable surge of fear. She was so frightened, and so furious because she was frightened and didn’t know why she should be, that all she could think to do was tell him what a dumb sonofabitch he was to waste his money that way and come in too drunk to even give a proper fuck to the best-looking woman he’d ever have.

He looked at her for a moment like he was trying to see if she was joking, but she could see in his eyes how her face must look, and he lost his smile quick and said he didn’t much appreciate her talking that way to him.

She said she wasn’t really all that interested in what some drunk money-waster did or did not appreciate.

He said she ought to have more respect for her kids, if not for him, than to use that sort of language in the house.

She said she would talk any fucking way she pleased in her own fucking house and her fucking kids were none of his fucking concern, thank you very much.

And he was out the door and gone.

Real smart, girl. Let him see you for what you really are, that’ll wow him for damn sure. She felt like howling.

He came by the next day just before she left for work and they told each other they were sorry and they kissed and made up and sealed the reconciliation with a quickie before she had to rush off to the job. But damage had been done. She saw it in the shift of his eyes, felt it in his touch. She heard it in the vagueness of his voice.

That night when she got home he was watching a late movie on TV, and she got a beer and joined him on the couch. They watched the movie for a while and then during a commercial he told her they’d just been given an extra-special job down at the shipyard, a priority job for the Coast Guard, and he’d be working double shifts for a time, round the damn clock practically, and so like as not he’d most of the time eat and bunk right there at the yard. She said that was good news, the extra work—and even as she told herself to keep her mouth shut and not say anything more about it, she added, “Oughta help some to make up for that three hundred dollars, huh?” He gave her a look she couldn’t read and then turned back to the TV without saying anything.

She didn’t see him for the next ten days. And now she began to have the drowning dream nearly every night—the dream of treading water way out in the Gulf, so far out that the shoreline was no more than a dark line on the horizon. She’d have no idea how she got out there, rising and falling on the swells under a vast gray sky and looking toward the distant shore and knowing she could never swim that far. She’d be exhausted from the struggle to keep her head above water—and then a wave would close over her and she’d be sinking, face upward to the receding silver surface, feeling her lungs starting to tear as her feet touched the soft mud bottom and sank into it and her mouth opened for air and filled with the coppery strangling water . . . and she’d waken in a soaking sweat and with her heart lunging hard against her ribs.

The first time she’d had the dream she was so scared by it she started drinking at midmorning and was passed out by late afternoon and did not go to work that night. When she called in sick with a hangover for the third time that week the manager told her if she was going to be all that undependable he’d have to let her go. “Well, I guess I’ll just let you go, mullethead!” she said—and banged down the phone as hard as she could and hoped she’d blown out his eardrum.

She was drunk as a coot when Billy Boy came in just after sundown but not so drunk she couldn’t smell the perfume on him or see the lipstick on his shirt. The next day her memory of the fight was vague. Lots of yelling and cursing. A dim recollection of going at him with both fists and landing a couple of good ones. Of glaring at him while she caught her breath—and him standing there and fingering a bloody lip and looking at her in such a pitying way she wished she had the strength to hit him again. Of telling him if he was so hot for other women he could go fuck them all and when he was done with them he could damn well go fuck himself.

She had a clear memory of the sound of his car driving away.

That was three days ago.

Since then she’d sat home all day, drinking and knowing he’d come back because he’d left his clothes and a man leaving for good does not leave his clothes behind.

And then this morning his clothes were gone.

Took his clothes and her car.

Left her nothing except all to herself.

10

She is sitting on the front steps watching the lowering sun set the sky aflame. The air is hot and shrill with cicadas. It smells of dust. The Spanish moss dangling from the oaks tilts slightly in a small waft of air. The shadows of the trees now stretch nearly across the street.

Almost suppertime. Before long the neighborhood will resound with the high cries of mothers calling their children home, and with the distant echoes of “Coming, momma! Commming.”

She has never joined in the evening’s communal call for kids. Her children won’t anyway come home till just before dark, as always, after everybody else in the neighborhood has sat down to supper.

Her children . . . The words have an alien sound. Smart-mouth Mary Marlene and closemouthed little Jesse. Jesus. They deserve better. Had the best daddy in the world but no momma worth a damn.

Ain’t but one way, girl. You know it.

What about them? Be awful for them.

Can’t be more awful than what they got now. A momma who don’t love her children . . . that’s an awful thing. Anyhow, Billy Boy maybe don’t give a damn about you but he won’t let nothing happen to them.

She regards the way the leaves on the trees shine bright as red glass with the sun just above them.

“I hate to seeeee . . . that evenin sun go downnnnn.” She snorts with a half-laugh, half-sob, and tells herself to cut it out. She feels like most of the air has been let out of the world and it’s all she can do to achieve the next breath.

The sun is almost touching the trees now. Heat rises off the ground like a slow exhalation.

All right. Enough of this.

She stands up and feels the dress clinging wetly to her belly and the backs of her thighs, then goes inside. The house is full of shadows. In the bedroom she peels off the dress. The radio is playing “You Don’t Have to Be a Baby to Cry.” She notices dark smears on the dress and is puzzled and then looks in the dresser mirror and sees mascara rivulets on her cheeks. She is surprised, because she certainly doesn’t feel like crying, not now, not anymore.

As she washes her face over the bathroom sink, a euphoria such as she’s never before felt in her life swells in her chest until she aches with the sheer pleasure of it. She pats her face dry with a towel. The bathroom mirror fills with her grin. She regards the smiling fresh-scrubbed look of herself and can hardly believe how good she feels.

Maybe this is how it feels to people who have cancer and then get it cut out and are all cured again, something like this. She feels wonderful because for the first time in longer than she can remember she does not feel afraid. She has lived in fear for so long that, now, in its sudden absence, she feels almost happily drunk, the way you do in about the middle of your fourth quick drink.

She goes into the bedroom and gets the pistol off the pillow and then goes to the front window of the living room and looks out at the reddened evening. In long keening voices, mothers are calling their children home.

For some reason she will never understand, she thinks of her father. Pictures him in his little cell at Huntsville. Lying there in his bunk and feeling his worthless life wasting away heartbeat by heartbeat behind those prison walls. She wishes now she’d at least sent him a postcard.

“Dear daddy—wish you were here.”

You were here, you son of a bitch, I’d sure enough shoot you.

No, not true, I wouldn’t. That’d be the biggest favor anybody ever did you in your whole entire life. Leave you in that damn prison is what I’d really do. And you’d go right on dying little by little, breath by breath, over all the years to come. Because you’re too much of a coward to do anything else but. Because you’re way too damn much of a coward to do this.

Naked at the window in the dying light of day, she puts the muzzle in her mouth. She hears a fly buzz as she squeezes the trigger.

There is a sudden loss of sound except for a faraway hum—and in that instant her skull feels abruptly stuffed with cotton.

There is a slight muted thump somewhere at the top of her head.

And—all in the same instant—she feels a wild exhilaration.

Whooooeeeee!

And then that instant passes and the next begins and—

BLAM!

She is knocked backwards from the window and falls against the sofa and tumbles to the floor and plunges into the deep end of the world’s vast pool of pain—pain that annihilates all possibility of definable sensation. It overwhelms everything except the roaring in her skull.

And then the roaring stops. Everything stops.

No sound. No pain.

There. All done. Dead.

Hmm . . . Not quite.

Dead people don’t itch.

Her nose itches.

She is aware of the smells of piss and gunsmoke.

She finds herself on her hands and knees.

Something oozes along her breast, bunches at the nipple, drops to the floor in a viscous gob. Hard to tell what it is because she can’t see too clearly at the moment. She tries to wipe her eyes and falls on her face. The jolt seems to dislodge something in her head, but, except for the stirrings of a faraway ache in some distant region of her skull, there is still no pain, no sound.

Back up on all fours. More drops of goop hit the floor. They’re coming from her head.

Pieces of my head, she thinks. Why ain’t I dead?

She tries to shout that question but when she opens her mouth what emerges is a gargling dark-red rush of blood.

One eye comes clear and she sees the gun lying a few feet away. She crawls to it, clutches it. She swallows blood, and it occurs to her that the taste is much like the dirty-penny taste of the loneliness.

She’s upright now, leaning her shoulder against the wall, her hair sopping, the floor slippery under her bare feet. She’s having a devil of a time trying to work her finger into the trigger guard and onto the trigger. The pistol seems to weigh forty pounds and feels like some alien tool she’s never handled before.

The idea, of course, is to shoot herself again. Do it right this time. No more of this half-ass stuff.

You’d think she was an old lady with bad arthritis to see all the trouble she’s having getting her finger on the trigger again. Blood in her eyes doesn’t help much. Or the dizziness.

The room abruptly tilts way over and she staggers forward and crashes into the screen door and falls out on the porch, scraping her chin on the rough wood planking and losing her grip on the gun, which goes spinning over the edge of the porch and out of sight.

Damn.

She wants to go down and get the gun but she can’t move. She’s lying on her face, cheek pressed into the edge of the porch, looking down at the top step six inches down.

Voices distant and close. Screams. Faraway and practically in her ear.

She regards the step, sees with absolute clarity the pattern of its texture, the dark knotholes, the sharp splinters, the grooved grain.

Blood is dripping onto the step and flowing slowly in thin red ribbons along the sinuous grooves of the plank toward its outer edge, where it begins bunching into tremulous drops.

And watching those winding ribbons of blood, she feels herself floating along with them, in them, simply floating . . . for the first time in a long time . . . floating gently down the stream.