Night, and Then
Outside now I shivered against the night sounds, an owl or some other critter calling out. Owls and whip-poor-wills were about the only bird names I knew. I spoke other names aloud to fend off the dark. States and their capitals. Kinds of coal. Anthracite. Bituminous. Slack, the coal Ruby said they’d picked up beside the road to get them through a winter. Or types of clouds—cumulus, cirrus—and I thought of Ruby standing and pointing at the afternoon sky. No two clouds are alike, Miracelle, she’d say. Above me, a full moon. So many names for the moon, too. Old man face in the sky. Rabbit, rabbit, first of every month. A sliver of moon like an earring hanging from Ruby’s ear.
I raised my head to the dark of the late summer sky and screamed, loud enough my throat went raw. Ruby Loving? Ruby? Are you here now? No tickle in my hair, no voice in my ear. I was Ruby-empty. I took a long drink of the warm, ditch-water-tasting beer, then asked myself what I’d do next.
I reached into my pack for a cigarette and instead felt the muzzle of her gun. A lady’s derringer, she’d call it, then laugh at herself, a lady and from an old western movie. I took the gun out, laid it in the lap my crossed knees made. The barrel gleamed in the moonlight. Seashell, sea-dream, sea-once. I could hear her, counting the ways she loved the derringer for its abalone. She’d sit with me when I was little and let me rub my hands over it like it was an Aladdin’s lamp, its promises as wide as the horizon, and she’d tell me some story about a fisherman and a flounder and three wishes. What had I wished for, then? I remembered little about wishing. I remembered road signs and towns with names like Leota, Harmony, Bliss, names that could have been women, all of them hoping for as much as Ruby had hoped, once upon a time. And for what? What had either of us hoped for, my mother and me, that had ever come true?
I felt in my pocket and took them out, the three bullets I’d pocketed in the house, and counted myself lucky they slid as easy as oil into the chambers. It was meant to be, I thought, and I spun the loaded cylinder, clicked it back in, and aimed. I aimed at nothing. I aimed at the shadows of tree branches. I aimed at what might have been tiny bats circling toward the wisps of clouds. I aimed at the moon itself, like I could explode the albumen-white of it, its moist white eye. It was almost funny, how I’d travel now with a loaded gun, but I fired it only now and only once. The shot rang in my ears, breaking the night’s stillness. I didn’t fire again, though it felt incomplete not to. Nothing could ever make the sound of the night my mother died. That shot rang out and boots from some man I never saw thudded out a door and I held my mother in my arms as she died.
I must have slept, because I dreamed, first of hands. Cody Black’s and the tattoos on his fingers. Ruby’s fortune-telling hands, and later, when she bled out in my arms, her palms as see-through as melting wax. Hands held other hands in my sleep. A shadow man’s hands atop Ruby’s. A father’s laid atop a mother’s, mine in the mix. Hand over hand over hand. A game of it for me, a little child. Hands changing to shapes on a wall. Birds and horses. Hands held out to me, their palms full of more lines than human hands should have. Then later, in between sleep and memory, I dreamed her voice. Miracelle, Ruby said. Here. She pointed to one long line across my palm’s center. Here and here. The line broke, traveled down my wrist, across my arm, became a seam. Like that I unstitched myself and dreamed myself floating out.
I floated over this earth, before it was a flat dry place of nothing. It was a mountain, then. A dream of a mountain, dark green and ripe. I was that mountain, dark green and alive. I was that dreamed mountain when the world blew apart. Layer upon layer of mountain exploding until nothing was left but a blank earth. And beneath that, a black hole, an opening heading down. In that hole beneath the earth, there were men. All the men I had desired. All the men who had wanted me and not wanted me, all their faces one dreamed face, one dreamed hand pointing toward earth’s heart, coal-black and hard, that heart, wanting and wanting. And the man she loved was there, too. The one man she wanted. That man, my father. How he must have swaggered with it, his right to walk up to a door at night. His knock, and her opening herself again and again. That, my mother said in my dream, is what is at the center of everything. Wanting. And now here I was, wanting him too.
At dawn the next morning, Leroy Loving waited as I took odds and ends—a tiny china cup I found in a drawer, a box the size of a child’s fist. I took Ruby’s tarot cards and the map page of New Mexico. I took her girl-diary. I took out the two letters from the velvet box, both addressed to Russell Wallen in Smyte, Kentucky. Souvenirs or proof, both.
My grandfather rode me back to his place just as the sun rose, thin and hidden by an overcast and now rainy sky. The day ahead would be muggy, but I rolled the car windows down and leaned into it, liking the way it made me come awake. We pulled over at the same edge of the road where I’d parked two nights back, and I stepped out into the Joe Pye weeds. We crossed the yard where we’d leaned into one another that first night. His house, its porch almost hidden by crates and boxes and bales of wire and straw. A yard dotted with castoffs. A boot and jars and bald-looking tires. His rangy dog sniffing.
“I got the kettle going and a pan of taters and bacon.” He looked tired, his cheeks new-shaved, two cuts plastered with dabs of toilet paper.
I was hungry, but I told him no. I made up a story about Knoxville, a job I needed to get on back to. His eyes, red and hung-over looking, knew the truth of it. I would not stay in Radiance. No staying for a month or a week or even one more long morning, even if his chin had a tremble in it with the asking.
My mouth tasted of sleep and anger, and I said it to hurt. “She was family, Leroy Loving. Why didn’t you help her?”
He dug the toe of his boot into the roadside gravel. “I reckon we all had a part in what happened.”
A car drove past, its muffler scraping the asphalt.
“She was your daughter.” I barely whispered.
“I’ve known that every day and night for the last hundred years.”
He leaned in as if he’d hug me, but I would not.
“You’ll go looking for him.” It wasn’t a question. He fumbled in his pockets, came up with nothing.
“I don’t know what I’ll do.” My voice was hard and I knew it. I tried to soften myself, looked at the soft patches of skin showing through his white hair.
He looked at me. “If you do go.”
“If I do?”
“There’s things you ought to know.”
“You reckon?”
He flinched. “Last I heard anything about Russell Wallen, he was set up good.”
I rubbed my thumb and finger against the envelopes in my pocket. “In Smyte?”
He nodded, not questioning how I knew the name. “Last I heard, he owns some paper mill over that way.”
I cranked my engine and watched a trail of fumes vanish behind me. He vanished too, grew smaller and smaller. Leroy Loving, grown small as a comma in a sentence, then gone into nothing as I drove fast past the heaps of coal, the houses with windows lit for dawn, past the sign I hadn’t seen, before. Radiance. Population 62.
I wanted to disappear, leave the town and him, but memories always left a taste with me, like drinking too much and loving the wrong person the night before did, and now it was her memories in my belly, her regrets. What had I looked like to her, the first time she held me? Was she afraid of me, or had she merely wondered how much I’d interfere with loving him? I remembered the thrift-store paperweight she used to have, how I’d hold it next to my heart like it had answers, but I never got a thing back from it but glass-cold. World made of glass, full of her secrets and his. Who he was? Russell Wallen. I didn’t want a thing from him, and I wanted everything.
I wanted Knoxville back, my room at the Red Sari. I wanted Cody Black, but I didn’t. I wanted Miami or Cleveland or Fort Knox. I wanted cities I’d seen and ones I hadn’t, ones I made up with my own name. Lovingville. Wallentown. I wanted a new name altogether, truth be told, but nothing felt right. Jane or Alice or Felicia. Or a name you couldn’t make up your mind about. Sam or Charlie or Jessie. I could bleach my hair, cut it short, shave it close to the bone. What I wanted was nothing to do with anything I’d ever been, and everything to do with who I wasn’t yet.
The only way I could see was forward, but not as who I was. That would never do. Loving was a name some knew. Fiddle players, fortune tellers. I’d have to let go of Miracelle Loving. If I was going to Smyte, to find my father, I’d have to go on the sly. I’d have to lie low, pretending. And I’d been good at that, most of my life. Pretend this, that, no-account fortunes, love when it wasn’t. This time, I’d sit back and watch. Watch my father until I figured out who he was.
That was far from what my gut wanted. I wanted crash and burn. I wanted the car radio as high as it could go. I wanted the road to narrow into nothing. I reached in my pocket for a cigarette, felt the paper of those two envelopes. Love letters from the past. My hand burned as if I had touched fire, her ghost, hot and restless. How do you remember me, Miracelle Loving? Her voice was as strong as it had ever been inside my head, her memory a knife edge of pain inside my chest, and already I loved my father the very same way. Russell Wallen and her, the both of them like something inside me so sharp it cut my breath in two, cut my life into before and now, and I was smack dab in between.
“Okay, then,” I said aloud. “Who will it be?” Names played on my lips. Joselle Smith. Waydean Long. I could steal a name, become Maria Murdy and pretend I was a prophetess. But before that, I had to say goodbye to who I’d always been. I drove faster, rolled the window down and hung my head out and yelled it as loud as I could. “Miracelle Loving!” I felt my name arc in the wind and slam back against the windshield, breaking into pieces as I drove on.
I took hairpin turns as fast as I could and shouted it out the window again. “Miracelle Loving, goodbye!”
I drove until the car slid off the road and I righted it, then braked to a halt in the gravel, my hands shaking. I was at a wide spot beside a road that felt like it had never seen another living soul. The day was still, not a trace of wind. I could be anyone else, as lovingless as they came. If I tried hard enough, I could even be a woman with a father.