Crooked Hallelujah Page 16

  I moved to the chair by the doorway and pushed a pair of dirty britches onto the floor. She flinched when the buckle clattered on the plank flooring. I said, “That buckle’s the product of an arm jerker I drew in 1959.” She didn’t smile or sparkle or ask to see my buckle. Nina coughed in the other room, and the quiet after was big enough to carry us away, house and all. The girl pushed a hunk of wet hair behind her ear and unzipped her bag, real cautious to contort herself and stay covered. She kept a tight grip on her towel with one hand and started ripping a brush through her tangles with the other. I wanted to take that brush from her hand and work it through her hair gentle until it was smooth. Something wasn’t letting me leave my seat, and she didn’t come no closer to me when she was finished. I took a spare quilt from the closet and bedded down on the living room couch.

  That’s the long and short of it. Question it all you want. She left the next morning after brushing Elsie. Hugged my neck quick and promised to let me know when she was nearby. I got a postcard from Ruidoso. Later, a rodeo program from Calvary. She didn’t ask nothing of me or give me a forwarding address. I was at the DQ when my wife called 911 for her own heart attack, giving the Indian one more thing to place on my head. Can’t nobody say my mourning wasn’t real.

  When I pulled into the drive, a shutter had come loose and was banging against the house. Elsie ran up to the fence swinging her head. She didn’t like the wind or what was behind it. Pitch flew in behind me, and the first thing he did was grab a piece of baling wire from his truck and go over and tie the shutter up. Sometimes I forget he was born here too. Born tiny as could be, squalling in the back room his mama passed in, but I didn’t have time for recollections. I tied my bandana over my face for the wind and stepped out to catch the mare. I had a magic horse in need of shoes. I had mountains on my mind.

  The expert said fire exclusion leads to a buildup of fuel. He said sometimes you can set a fire to head another fire off. A fool could tell you that when the fire is roaring in a howling wind and the prairie is thick with underbrush, it’s too late. It has to run its course.

  I don’t tell the tale to rectify the situation or to say I’m sorry, I done wrong. I tell it to say that sometimes all the years and tears don’t amount to nothing but a slow death upon you. Sometimes life’s variables don’t add up to evening-time sipping on lemonade in a porch swing, not that I’d have it that way if I could. As a bucktooth boy, I built my daddy’s barn by hand. As a man I watched it fall down around me until one day a fat little filly hit the ground and blew a breath in my face that went straight to my insides and lit them up.

  Bonita

  Whichever way the wind shifted that week brought in a different smell. You could close your eyes and imagine the Oklahoma prairie a distant campfire with marshmallows roasting over it, but the oil patches burning out in West Texas smelled like a grease fire. It hadn’t rained since early September. With just one dusting of snow, the winter wheat wasn’t nothing but squares of dirt and stems. Cows were skinny and bored, crowded around salt blocks, and feed bills were sending everybody to the poorhouse. Great big limbs broke off the oaks on account of the wind. To top it off, it wasn’t even cold, and it was damn near February. Seemed God himself was turning North Texas into the Sahara right before our very eyes, and all we could do was sit back and watch, try not to blow away or burn up.

  I told Pitch I smelled mattresses and teddy bears in smoke coming from Fort Worth. He said I was being dramatic, but the Red Cross filled whole gymnasiums with cots and fire refugees, as they called those poor people. It was awful. Hank Marshall from Channel 7 called the entire region a tinderbox, said the grasses were like matchsticks. I called Bonita one stop short of hell, but that’d been the case for years.

  Other than the news on the television and the smell, it was business as usual, except I guess we were all a little on edge. On Friday, me and Pitch got into it before we left for the brick factory where we work the night shift. Business as usual.

  We’d only been in bed a few hours when who but Pitch’s daddy comes ambling in bright and early, not knocking, dragging his spurs across the kitchen floor and spitting tobacco juice all down the side of the trash can, like he does. Then he sticks his head in the bedroom and says, “Come on, Pitch, cock’s crowed. Need you to shoe the Fat Mare.”

  I turn over to the wall. Of course, Pitch jumps up and jerks on some clothes and runs out the door, stepping over a pile of laundry, shoving his foot down in his boot. I sit up and yell, “Bathroom sink’s filling that coffee can faster than I can empty it out.” All I get in response is Pitch’s truck coughing and kicking in the driveway. I throw the covers off and run to the window and yell some more, but he’s already gone.

  I’d been asking him to fix the sink for two weeks. It wasn’t like we had the money to call the plumber, so I finally gave up and spent the morning on my back with a monkey wrench, twisting and turning, trying to replace the P-trap. Took me the whole morning to do what he could’ve done in thirty minutes, and I couldn’t even get the new pipe back on right before I had to start getting ready for work. While I’m standing there at the sink putting on my makeup, here he comes banging in the door right before we have to go. He starts running water for a bath, on account of the shower was broke too. He smelled like hay and horse sweat, which isn’t a new smell by any means, but that day it made me just about want to puke.

  “We better hurry,” he says and strips down, leaving his clothes in a wad like he does, his underwear and socks still stuffed down in his pants. I had the 7 News at Noon on for noise, and from the tub he says, “Hank Marshall calling for rain?”

  “Hundred percent under the goddamn sink,” I tell him.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, slapping his forehead like this was the first time in the world this sink or a million other leaks all over the godforsaken house slipped his mind. “I shod the Fat Mare for Daddy, then we got to working on fence—”

  “He pay you?” I say, knowing the answer already. Pitch glared at me and started scrubbing shampoo into his hair.

  “He’s got plenty money to get his pants pressed and buy that two-hundred-dollar hat,” I start in. “You could’ve helped me pick up this mess this morning, you could’ve fixed the sink, or you could’ve at least shod for somebody who’d pay you, Pitch.” I wait a minute. “Or you could always sell that colt.”

  He’d been offered five thousand for it already. It didn’t matter that I wrote the check for the feed bill every month—I didn’t have a say. Since I got him on at the plant, he expected the money to be rolling in. Every Thursday I still raced checks to the bank to keep us from being overdrawn. He didn’t count all those years of getting behind, when he was a roughneck or a jockey, not finding a new job when the rig moved or the horse came up lame.

  “I guess I’m just a sorry son of a bitch for helping out my daddy,” he says. Then he gets to going. “Justine, I don’t drink, don’t run around on you, don’t hit you.”

  “Some standards to set for yourself, Brother Barnes,” I tell him, like a thousand other times. But he lays under the water to rinse his head, so I go back to putting on my mascara.

  And then I sneeze. I grab a Q-tip and turn on the water in the damn sink without even thinking about how there’s not a pipe under there. Water starts gushing out, and all the while he’s making all kinds of noise, pouring water from a plastic pitcher over his head, blinking like crazy, like he can’t even hear me. I turn the water off as fast as I can, but not before half the floor is soaked, including two pairs of his jeans and underwear. My only pair of steel-toe work shoes are soaked through. My pants are wet. In the mirror I see the black all around my eyes, and then I really get to yelling.

  “You’re just like your goddamn daddy,” I say. “This house is fixing to fall down around me, just like your mama’s did. But you don’t have to worry about it. Your ass isn’t ever here.”

  He gets out of the tub, wraps a towel around himself, and starts moving his jeans around in the w
ater with his foot, like he’s doing a great big service, cleaning up my mess, sighing the whole time, peering around the corner, trying to see the clock because all the sudden time is real important.

  I keep going. “I damn near had three nervous breakdowns trying to hold this house together with baling wire and duct tape and keep your underwear picked up. You leave your shit laying around. You come and go as you please. I’m not your mama, and I’m not about to end up like her. I don’t want to die in this mess.”

  I’ve said all this before. It always gets him because he knows how his mama died, all alone in that rickety farmhouse on the river, doing without. When his daddy got too old to train horses, he started sitting on his ass all day at the DQ, bragging about all the runners from his glory days, showing off his trophy buckles to every traveler who stopped in for a bite. She was down in her back for damn near twenty years, waiting on him to come home and tell her about his day—who he saw, what they said, but mostly what he said. It was all I could do to take them a roast or stew a couple times a week. Hell, Pitch’s daddy wanted applause when he brought in fish from the DQ once in a blue moon. Finally, her heart gave out and she died, all by herself in her little bedroom with a feed bucket sitting in the corner collecting water from the hole in the roof. To top it all off, his daddy still hasn’t got her a proper tombstone. He said he couldn’t afford it. Pitch made a cross out of cedar and sank it at the head of the grave himself.

  This time Pitch drops his towel in the water on the floor, stands there stark naked, looks me in the eye, and says, “I’m his boy. I reckon that’s who I am then.” He stomps out, throws some clothes on, jumps in his truck, and drives to work by himself.

  Used to be, when I called Pitch his daddy, he denied it or got real upset, and maybe we’d have a heart-to-heart, and he’d say he’d change his ways, because it hurt him to know how his mama died. But when he stared me right in the eye and said, “That’s who I am,” I knew then and there that things weren’t ever going to change. Don’t know why it took me sixteen years to figure that out, but it did.

  We both worked the night shift, but he ran a forklift in packaging, and I sweated my ass off at the kiln. Our lunches were together, and that night when I saw him laughing and talking to the boys on the other side of the lunchroom, sneaking up to stick a tail he made out of duct tape to somebody’s backside, like nothing in the world could be the matter, I thought to myself, That’s it. I’m done. Driving home from work, looking at the fires glowing orange far off to the west, I set my mind to leave.

  Reney was halfway across the country in school by then, smarter than I ever was to set her sights on gone. She’d met a nice man with soft hands and letters after his name. She said she could “go in a lot of different directions” with a degree in literature. I didn’t know exactly what that meant, but I figured it was damn sure better than this. When she told me about her big plans or whatever backpacking trip she’d been on, she sounded happy. She sounded like a whole different person from the one that left here without so much as a hi, bye, kiss my ass. Now was as good a time as any for me to follow her lead. My hair was going gray, and my face was starting to sag in ways Merle Norman couldn’t help. Talking about Reney and how proud she made us seemed like the only nice conversations me and Pitch ever had anymore.

  This wasn’t like when I was drinking, back when I’d declare religion and drag Reney kicking and screaming, hell-bound to Mom’s in Oklahoma. It wasn’t like when I loaded up mad and hit a straight shot for my sisters in Tennessee. I’d saved a couple hundred dollars from garage sales, and I thought I could stand to stay at Mom’s until I got on my feet. Do it right, really make a life for myself. I figured with Cherokee Nation’s help, maybe I’d take some computer classes, see if I could cut it. Get in line for an Indian house with siding you don’t have to paint or maybe even something brick, have an extra bedroom for the holidays. I wanted someplace Reney wouldn’t feel embarrassed to bring somebody home to. A place without all the yelling.

  After work that morning, Pitch turned on Hank Marshall, and we went to bed without saying a word about what happened between us. I let that coffee can spill over and left the wet clothes laying on the bathroom floor. For the first time in ages, I slept just fine. When I woke up and—like always—Pitch was already gone, I set about packing.

  I made neat stacks and labeled every single box. Things were going to be different back in Oklahoma. I’d stuffed my clothes in black garbage bags, had my knickknacks wrapped in paper and boxed, and I was trying to separate the cast iron his mama’d given me, God rest her soul, from what I had to steal from mine when she wasn’t looking. I couldn’t hardly see taking these little corncob molds, since his mama’d only passed a year or so before and he loved the things, but despite my better judgment, I couldn’t stand the thought of some hussy-come-lately putting a perfect little corncob in Pitch’s mouth, wiping the butter off his chin with her pinkie.

  I’d just about decided to pack them, since it was me she gave them to, when I smelled the fires. They came blowing in the west window strong all the sudden, too strong. I ran out the front door. There I saw a great wall of smoke billowing up around Comanche Hill. The wind was blowing so hard my eyes were watering. All I could hear was the roar of the wind until the emergency siren went off, round and round, screaming.

  Right about then, here comes Pitch’s beat-up truck sliding sideways into the driveway. He jumps out and leaves the truck door open like he does—always in a hurry to get going again once he shows up—and then he runs up on the porch yelling, “Coming this way fast, you got to leave, where’s my fire coveralls?” All in one breath, just like that, and he was gone into the house.

  I’m standing there in the middle of the yard, dumbstruck, holding on to a cast-iron corncob. I knew there wasn’t any telling in God’s green Earth where those coveralls were, but Pitch is yelling his head off about where I put his coveralls, because today he decides he better really volunteer to be a volunteer fireman instead of just putting the sticker on his truck and gabbing at meetings. I come to my senses, spit the dust out of my mouth, and run into the house. When I get to the kitchen, all I see are shirts and pants flying from the bedroom door, a pair of underpants hanging on the kitchen chair.

  “You seen my coveralls?” Pitch yells from the bedroom.

  “Did you check the hamper?” I yell back, stuck to the kitchen floor, wondering if he’s seen my boxes.

  “Why would they be there?” Pitch says, huffing and puffing, holding his grandpa’s pocketknife and his daddy’s little .410. His race saddle is tucked under his arm, and he’s wearing his first jockey helmet, the one his mama stitched the number 7 on by hand.

  “Check the closet.”

  “What’s all this?” he says, looking around at the boxes.

  I do something I’m not exactly known for, think before I speak.

  “It’s your mama’s cooking stuff,” I say and drop the corncob into an open box.

  “Just take what you need.” He shakes his head and runs out to his truck like a kid with his toys. He has no idea this ain’t the fire I’m running from.

  Then it hits me. Reney’s baby stuff. I run to her old room—which is just the way she left it except for the junk I’ve stacked in there—and start pulling stuff from under the bed, looking through Christmas decorations, witch hats, and dusty suitcases for the baby pictures. I find a box of brand-new jeans I was intending to sell that I got for almost nothing when the Boot Shop went under. I find two dog biscuits and a dream catcher made in China, one of Mom’s teepee drawings, and a wooden keychain with my name on it that Reney made in eighth-grade shop. I shove that in my back pocket and get lucky again and find a little baby food jar with two silver-capped baby teeth rattling in it. But I cannot find the pictures or the birth certificate.

  Pitch runs by the door with three more guns tucked under his arms, a beat-up felt Stetson stuck on his head, and chaps hanging around his neck that he hadn’t been able to fit into since th
e year we met at the track. I fling open the closet door. It’s stacked wall-to-wall, two deep all the way to the ceiling with boxes full of God knows what. I start pulling them down. Right off the bat I find a box of old photo albums—not what I want—but I throw them into the hall and yell at Pitch to put them in my truck when he runs by with the mounted deer head.

  He’s grunting picking up the box. Outside the siren is blasting, and the shutters are banging against the side of the house. “Why are you taking so much shit?” he says. He doesn’t get it. He never gets it, and now’s not the time to hash it all out again.

  “Why do you need so many guns?” I yell back, but he’s already gone. The siren usually only goes off for tornadoes, but the shutters are making so much racket that I wonder if there’s not a damned tornado out there, too, so I start yanking down boxes faster.

  Pitch comes in Reney’s room. He’s loaded everything important and wanting his coveralls.

  “I don’t know where your goddamn coveralls are,” I say.

  He’s playing the saint, making a big show out of trying to be patient, shoving his hands down in his pockets, breathing deep. “Do you know where my old ones are?”

  I ask him where he put them. That always stumps him.

  “There ain’t time for this, Justine,” he yells, flinging his hands and kicking a hole in a box of eight-tracks.

  And he’s right. I start to cry, kneeling in front of the boxes full of everything and nothing at all.

  “We need to go,” he says. “Now.”

  “I can’t find her baby pictures. Her birth certificate, the baby book. I looked everywhere. I can’t find them.” I cover my mouth and look around at the tapes and the wrapping paper and the mismatched socks. My hand smells like iron and Crisco. I smell the smoke in my hair already, on my clothes, on Pitch standing over me. “There’s so much shit,” I say, wiping my eyes, trying to straighten up.