Crooked Hallelujah Read online

  She’d made the mistake of walking over one day when she got off early, and there was Wes, kicked back in his chair picking his teeth, hoping some of Sammy’s cowman shine would rub off on him. Reney endured Sammy’s ribbing when she ordered her tea unsweetened and felt her face burn at Wes’s talk about his “ranch,” how he was planning to double the herd in the next year. Sammy egged him on, inviting Wes to talk smart. Wes, who’d never felt comfortable on a horse, even mentioned getting a couple of cutting horses before Reney excused herself to study in the truck.

  On the ride to work, she counted one dead possum, two coyotes, and a hog wearing a blue scarf hung, by hunters or ranchers or drunk kids, over barbed wire. The land beyond the fences turned colors as they passed winter wheat and geometric coastal patches dotted with cattle. The drought hadn’t passed over the wealthy or the spoiled, though the Sammy Boyds of the world never seemed thirsty regardless. If you had enough land to rotate your cattle instead of overgrazing a scrub thirty acres to China, you could feed less, and beef prices go up in a drought, so everybody who doesn’t need a dime makes three. Wes had grown up with less than nothing and somehow thought there must be magic in cattle. She’d never wanted to know a thing about cattle but soon saw that, like Pitch’s horses, the cow business was more gamble than business.

  When Wes came home after whatever happened on his last Wyoming hitch, he took his garbage bag of greasers from the back of the truck and put them in the fire barrel. Reney stopped short when she came onto the porch to greet him. “We can’t afford new clothes, Wes.”

  “They can take their ‘oil field trash’ and stick it up their asses,” he said. From then on, it was all cows. He wouldn’t hear of trying to get on with another outfit. The picture was clear for him. He just needed a few more cows and a little more land and a woman with a better uterus.

  “Rosalee’s gone,” she said.

  “She take a calf?”

  Reney stared out the window.

  Wes shifted his cap, pulled the brim lower.

  “I told you I’d shoot her.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t know why you want a goddamn mule in the first place.”

  “We’ve been over it, Wes.”

  “She’s taking food from our mouths when she fucks with my calves.” As they approached the stoplight, he shifted down, softened. “Shit. It ain’t always going to be like this, Reney.”

  A glass gallon jar at Reney’s feet knocked into the door. The day before, she’d bought half a tank of fuel for Wes’s truck with the tips she’d been saving. It didn’t matter how many shifts Reney picked up or how often she emptied her jar—he acted as if it were his calves that kept the bank at bay.

  Wes turned into the Dairy Queen and pulled up to the side door. Reney took her backpack and stepped down. She paused before she turned toward work.

  “Don’t kill my mule.”

  “I know, Jack. I’m sorry,” Reney said.

  Her boss raised a palm toward the clock.

  “Hi, Liza Blue,” she hollered across the room. An old lady facing away from Reney in a red booth raised her hand without turning. “Morning, Ferrell,” she said to Pitch’s daddy. The old cowboy came over and made a big show of taking a red bandana out of his back pocket and wiping the tobacco juice off his lips before he kissed her cheek. Then he winked at the cigar-store Indian and went back to his talking.

  “I think Rosalee took a calf,” Reney said, tying an apron around her waist.

  “Again?” Jack asked.

  Reney was already banging old grounds into the trash, licking her fingers for a new filter, popping open a fresh bag of coffee.

  “Listen,” Jack whispered. He looked around at the bored-looking teens working the counter, high school–age kids who for one reason or another weren’t in school. He folded his flap of hair over his bald spot and pushed up his brown plastic glasses. “I know you’ve got things going on, but you’re the manager now. Can’t Wes help out in the mornings?”

  Reney stopped her wiping and turned to him.

  “I’ve got class tonight, but I’ll come in early tomorrow if it helps.”

  “The kids. They talk, you know.”

  She’d heard them whispering about how much she made, which wasn’t much more than them, she’d be happy to tell them if they asked. She didn’t think Jack encouraged the talk exactly, but she figured he probably didn’t discourage it either.

  “I appreciate you being flexible,” Reney said, her voice sharp. “And I’m sorry, Jack, but I understand you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.”

  Reney looked over her shoulder to where a kid at the register lolled his head back and yawned. It wasn’t many years back that she was one of those bored high schoolers, but it might as well have been a lifetime. She didn’t say that she got three times as much done as most of the employees when she was there. She didn’t have to.

  “Well, when you get things lined out for lunch, come on to the office so we can go over the schedule.”

  The schedule for the next three weeks was set. And she knew that when she got back there, he’d have an unsweetened ice tea with lemon waiting and he’d ask her about her classes and she would lose track of time talking about her instructors and the reading and she would become embarrassed when she realized how much she was enjoying their talk. Last week he’d given her a nice leather-bound day planner with a matching journal and heavy pen.

  “Think the schedule’s good until somebody calls in to say it isn’t.”

  Jack frowned. “I was thinking we could look at payroll again, this time in relation to quarterly sales.”

  Jack’s polyester slacks hung off his hips and his short-sleeved dress shirt always had spots of coffee or worse. She wasn’t sure why he was so intent on their meetings. She wanted to think he was a little like Pitch—that is to say, a little like a father—if Pitch showed up when he said he would, stammered more, and didn’t have brown, leathered skin from days spent on the back of a horse.

  “Sounds good, Jack,” she said and sniffed a tub of lemons before tossing them into the trash. She swirled tea dregs in the big metal urn, carrying it to the sink to clean.

  She’d gotten to work too late to catch Pitch, who flew in sideways most mornings for a bacon biscuit and a Dr Pepper. If he’d been there, he would have ribbed her about Rosalee, saying the mule needed a dentist after all the sugar cubes. Reney figured Pitch was a little proud of how she’d taken to the mule, glad it’d given her something to care for after she and Wes got news another baby was lost and there’d be no more.

  That’s what she had told them, anyway. In truth, having kids with Wes was the one thing she had decided to have some say on. She might have married him, and she might still love him, but she wasn’t going to bring a baby into all of it. She’d let Pitch pass the news to her mom.

  She didn’t care what anybody said or what they, in their infinite armchair wisdom, decided was the reason for her devotion to Rosalee. Her life after high school had become work and Wes, Wes and work. Her friends had gone to college for good or were busy starting families. Her mom was her mom. Right as Reney was stubborn. The mule was the one thing that was Reney’s alone. There wasn’t a place in their cramped trailer she could call her own. The cattle were Wes’s, though it was she who scattered the cubes and broke the ice on the cold mornings because he figured she was up anyway and never stopped to refigure that now that he was home, he should get up and do it himself. The truck she drove some but was never once made to feel it was part hers. Even her closet was shared, and the coveralls she wore were his. Let them think what they would. She loved Rosalee, and what small joy she got out of harnessing her up and giving kiddie rides during rodeo season was hers to keep as far as she was concerned.

  Pitch had been beside himself when his mare came up in foal that year. The only thing male and ungelded on the place had been Reney’s mom’s donkey, the only animal her mom had ever let herself get attached to. The little bastard must ha
ve jumped the fence, Pitch said, had his way with the mare, and jumped back over before anybody but the mare knew the difference. So it was, a hybrid molly was born, a barren beast of burden Pitch pretended he’d as soon spit at as see. He acted upset that his beloved quarter horse had wasted a year of her foal-bearing life on something as ugly, unprofitable, and slant-assed as a mule. In truth, he was a sucker for babies of any sort, but Reney’s mom insisted they couldn’t take on another mouth to feed. Pitch had probably called Reney the minute her mom’s truck got out of the driveway. He usually did.

  To Reney, the molly was irresistible from the get-go, all antenna ears and wobbly legs. Frying-pan eyes. She had said she would take her before Wes had time to swallow his coffee and get out a complaint. She loaded the little thing into the truck wrapped in one of Nina’s quilts and made Wes stop at the feed store for a forty-pound bag of powdered formula.

  “I don’t have time to play nursemaid to your mom’s mule, Reney. Your mom damn sure wouldn’t do it for me,” Wes said.

  “Nobody’s asking you to,” Reney said, climbing back into the truck with a rubber-nippled bottle tucked under each arm. The molly’s eyelids fluttered as she nursed on Wes’s finger. Her ears sagged in an upside-down V until Wes pulled his finger back and wiped the slobber on his pants.

  “You know the cost of hay.”

  “I’m not asking, Wes.” She leaned over and changed the radio to an eighties station playing a Prince block.

  He put the truck in reverse, and neither of them talked on the way home. When they got there, Wes went into the house, leaving Reney to haul Rosalee and the formula to the barn.

  For all his softness, Wes carried a mean right punch. Reney had experienced it only twice. They were kids the first time, kids in the kind of thing that starts in the boozy bench seat of a pickup and proceeds to oversized homecoming mums pinned to a girl who thought she didn’t care about such rituals. It should have ended in a screaming match at a riverside blowout, with Reney moving on to UT–Austin in the fall and Wes off to the oil field and a younger girl who would make him a baby that fit, just barely, in the palm of his callused hand and grew to fetch beer from the fridge and follow in his footsteps until, if all went right, the kid took a jagged turn and decided to read some books.

  It didn’t end there. Wes bloodied her nose that night at the river. She was a senior, and he was three years removed from school. She was able to cover the bruising with makeup. She didn’t talk to him for almost a month, certain that they were finished and she was off to school soon anyway. She couldn’t remember what happened first—the Pell Grant falling through or her taking him back. He’d sat in the DQ parking lot while she worked, leaving notes under the windshield of her beat-up Ford Ranger, pages upon pages filled with his sweet, crooked letters and misspelled words. She refused to look his way, unlocked her truck, and drove away. He even talked to her mom, coming nearly clean, and getting run off their property with a shotgun in the process. Her mom, whose nonunion factory job bumped her pay just enough to disqualify Reney from the Pell, forbade Reney to see him, swore she’d kill him. If it wasn’t the heartfelt letters that brought them back together, her mom’s mandate must have. Soon they were hand in hand, more in love than ever, and Reney had plans to work for a year and save money to pay for UT on her own the next fall.

  The next time is not important except to know that it came, and she was pregnant again, though they did not know it. Wes did not have anything to do with her losing the babies. It was her own misshapen insides that did that. But after the punch and the second lost baby, one that had lodged herself in the wrong place and nearly took Reney with her, Reney’d had enough.

  Wes had just left for Wyoming, full of tears and apologies that he would never touch Wild Turkey again and begging her to go back to school if that was what she wanted but to please, just please not leave, because he couldn’t live without her and he was a sorry piece of shit that loved her more than life.

  She didn’t leave, and this time she couldn’t say why not. When she started bleeding, she could have gotten word to Wes, but she didn’t. She told old Dr. Mac to take care of it for good, close it all off. “You’re young,” he said. “There is still a chance that you can carry a healthy baby full term. No guarantees, but no guarantees you won’t. Don’t you want to wait and talk to Wes or your mother?”

  “No. I don’t want you to either,” she said and turned to stare at the giraffes and elephants on the wallpaper. They’d been busy that day and stuck her in a kid’s room. Dr. Mac set his flabby jaw as he scribbled something on his clipboard. He didn’t say anything else until she woke after the procedure. She always wondered whether his wife knew, and if she did, who else did, but when she told Wes they’d lost another one and that Mac had said it wasn’t likely there would be any more to lose, he’d kissed her head, held her, told her they’d keep trying when she was ready.

  Of course Reney had dreams. She still dreamed of her great-grandmother, but more often she dreamed of her mother now. They’d always joked about growing old together, since her mom had been a kid herself when she had Reney. Occasionally her dreams included Wes, a different Wes. A Wes who didn’t bite his nails and throw them on the carpet or long for magic cattle. She could talk to this Wes about her literature classes and the jokes the instructor made. She could tell him about the headache of filling out a schedule made up of burnouts and half-wits, and he would do more than say, “Cocksuckers ought to pay you more.” They packed picnic baskets and laid their heads on the same blanket under the stars without saying a word. Dream Wes loved her for more than who he thought she was in high school, a pretty possession, a Cherokee princess, a wild girl in the good classes, scary from behind the three-point line and sneaky on defense. Of course he had a job. But he didn’t have to be rich. That wasn’t what she was after. If it had been, maybe she could have figured out how to bring herself to touch sweet, sad Jack, who probably wasn’t rich, either, but didn’t have to worry about his light bill or how he would fill his sensible-man’s car with gas. In her dreams, Reney donned a backpack and trekked through forests and airports alike. She carried candy in her pocket for the children she came across. There was rain. Her mother spoke to her and didn’t have to break her back day after day in a factory that might as well have been an oven. At night, Reney didn’t have to close the bedroom door to read over the sound of the television. She hadn’t given her heart to a mule.

  Reney had already changed shirts to get rid of the grease stench and rebraided her hair, but Wes still hadn’t called and asked her to make him a Frisco burger with double meat and extra cheese or a Strawberry Cheesecake Blizzard. She tried to get ahead in her reading but couldn’t stop checking the window. She was watching what had to be the tenth black diesel pickup turn into the drive-through when Jack passed by her table carrying a load of towels.

  “Do you mind if I use the office phone again?” Reney asked.

  “Wes?” Jack said.

  “He’s probably just running late.”

  “I have to go to Gainesville anyway,” Jack said. “I’d be happy to take you to class and pick you up after I run my errands.”

  “Would it be too much trouble to take me home instead?” Reney asked. “I’ve got to check on Rosalee.” She thought a minute. “I might be able to make my late class.”

  “I can go to Gainesville anytime,” Jack said.

  They passed through town not saying much. When the speed limit increased to seventy-five, Jack kept pulling to the shoulder of the two-lane road to let cars pass. He twice took a deep breath as if he were going to say something.

  “There’s something I’ve been meaning to say to you, Reney,” he said finally.

  “Okay?”

  “I’m real proud of you.”

  Reney kept her eyes on the road, clasped her hands around the tattered brown backpack in her lap.

  “I just mean you sticking with your classes all this time. That’s really something. You’re really something.�
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  “Jack.”

  “I don’t mean that in a bad way. Not that.” Jack let a tanker truck pass. The wind nearly blew the LeSabre off the road. “Not that I haven’t imagined something else, but Reney, you deserve better. You deserve better than all of this.”

  “Thank you, Jack.” Reney had steeled herself to let him down easy. He was a kind man. He had been good to her. She felt a little embarrassed when she saw she wasn’t going to have to let him down at all.

  “Please, just . . . I’ve been putting a little money back here and there. You know I don’t have anybody to spend it on, and a man can only sponsor so many baseball teams.” Jack sighed. “I want you to know that if you ever might find yourself in a situation where you need some money . . . Maybe you want to get closer to school. Really dedicate time to that. Work less, try to knock this thing out? Well. There wouldn’t be any strings attached is what I’m saying. I can help.” He smiled at Reney. “I want to help you. As a mentor or maybe a friend. As somebody who might like to know how far your dreams and your mind and your work take you. Somebody who imagines it might be the moon. Somebody who wants the moon for you, Reney.”

  “Get closer to school?” Reney said, trying to understand. She realized that her next thought, stupidly, was: What about Rosalee?

  She thought she was long past crying over her place in life. It was a place she had made as a girl, and then as a young woman in a wave of stubbornness, and now in near indifference. She hadn’t seen community college as a means to an end. She hadn’t stopped long enough to consider the end. Motions upon motions, feed the animals, bang the coffee grounds, read the books, fall into bed. Just as she felt her tears would surely spill over and drown them both where they sat in the leather seats of Jack’s beige LeSabre on Highway 52, closer to Oklahoma than Austin, almost to the windy patch of home where she’d breathed in so much cow shit and bone-dry dust that it seemed her insides couldn’t be made up of anything else, they passed a faded billboard: BONITA, IT’S NOT TOO LATE TO TURN BACK, Y’ALL! Reney cackled.