Moon over the Black Cat
Tree frogs foretold autumn, but I was restless, and night became my time-out-of-times. By ten-thirty the diner floors were mopped, and by eleven Ona Short had taken her turn at carrying the trash to the Dumpster and had headed to her apartment in the outskirts of Smyte. I’d stay by my lonesome and finish up the last slice of banana cream pie and feel some near-midnight regret settle in my chest. At night my fingers itched to pick up a phone and call Cody, but I’d not forgotten the wary in his voice that last time.
I sat in front of a fast food joint for two hours one night with my radio jacked up to Nirvana. Girls cruised the parking lot looking for boys to take them out on back roads for a big time and a bunch of party favors I couldn’t have named these days. Words from Ruby’s girl-diary haunted me. I am hungry, but nothing fills me up. If I took a good hard look at myself in my side-view mirror, I knew that truth well enough. Waydean Long. I’d hidden behind a name here in Smyte, but surely, I told myself, if Russell Wallen knew who I was—and he should have by now, if he’d looked at me good and hard—wouldn’t he have claimed me? Or maybe not. I was a roadie who’d lived a million places and wanted a million lives not her own, and now here I was wanting the father I’d never known to tell me he loved me. I ached with lonely and I wanted to be alone and I wanted nothing at all to do with my own self.
After I closed up one night, I walked a little along the highway and then back into the wide parking area for the mill. The steps of one building had become a spot I liked to go to sit and smoke a cigarette, come the end of a long day. It was the squat warehouse building, and it had a sign teetering over a wooden door. Wallen Industries. I figured if there was an office to his place of business, it was in this building, and apparently I was right. About then a truck pulled in, its windows down, a radio blaring rockabilly. Well, that’s all right, mama. That’s all right for you. That’s all right, mama, just any way you do. A truck door slammed shut. Russell Wallen himself stumbled out of his truck and then stood, mumbling to himself. I could smell the whiskey from where I sat.
He’d left the truck lights on and taken a seat on its bumper when he saw me on the steps. “You a night owl too?”
“Seems like you are.”
He fumbled in his pockets. “You got another one of them cigarettes?” His voice was thick as honey.
“You’re lucky.” I walked over and held out my pack.
There was enough truck light so I could see his face.
“I’ve seen you around a time or two.” He smiled in my direction, slung one leg over the other. “I know who you are.”
“What’s the word on me these days?” I crouched on my heels by the truck’s headlights.
“Woman traveling here and there, ending up in Smyte, for all the likely that is.”
“Something the matter with a woman traveling alone?”
He shrugged. “You never said what you saw on my palm the other night at the library.”
I thought about standing in my room, how I’d wanted, bad, to crash my fists into the glass of Tince May’s photos. “I haven’t got that figured out yet, mister,” I said.
“I’ve got two or three futures.” He flicked his cigarette butt onto the asphalt. “Two or three pasts, for that matter.”
Back in my room I said his name aloud. “Russell Wallen.” It was a name full of l’s. A name full of lulls and spaces and times I didn’t know. I paced, holding his name inside me, then I pushed the window up and said the name again out into the cool night air. I tuned the name inside myself, like it was the fiddle my grandfather had played back in Radiance. I changed the name as I said it to myself, trying variations on for size. Father. Not-father. The-man-who-made-me. I spoke the name again, again. “Russell Wallen.” And then I repeated the sentence from Ruby’s diary aloud, like it was a mantra. “I am hungry, but nothing fills me up.” What had my mother desired when she met Russell Wallen? I said his name again, letting the letters linger over the hardness of his face in the dark near the mill. Had his face looked like that as she tried to love him, all those years and years ago? I remembered Cody Black, the way his eyes went blank with hurt. “Don’t love me,” I’d said.
I was Ruby Loving’s daughter, Russell Wallen’s too. Daughter of a woman who wanted the love she never seemed to find. Daughter of a man who had no idea how I’d lived my life. His name settled inside my chest, took hold of my heart and held on, hard. He had never loved either of us enough to live our lives. He’d never loved me. Never loved the woman who told fortunes and made potions and wished for him, town to town to town.