Crooked Hallelujah Page 6
Reney looks at her mom there waiting. Reney had never had a dad. She didn’t think she was missing anything. She thought about ponytail guy and Kenny. She thought about her mom, beautiful, unable to let herself come to a rest, no matter how hard she worked. And then there was Pitch, sitting next to her, loudly finishing his Dr Pepper with a straw.
“Is it going to be a Paint Horse?” Reney asks.
“We can get you an Indian pony if that’s what you want,” Pitch says. He grins and hugs her against his side. Then he props Justine’s elbow on the table, takes the rope, and flips it around Justine’s arm. “This is the rabbit,” he says, holding up one end. “This here is Mr. Rabbit’s home,” he says as he makes a loop. He shakes Justine’s arm. “And this is the tree.”
Justine sighs and rolls her eyes but plays along as he runs the rope up through the rabbit hole, around the tree, and back home. Reney reaches across the table to try it.
“What about your job at the plant?” Reney asks, rounding Justine’s arm with the rope.
Justine shrugs. With her free hand, she pulls a string of cheese from the slice she’d put on Reney’s plate and drops it into her mouth. She smiles a little, and Reney cannot tell if it is forced. “I was looking for a job when I found that one. I’m sure I can find something.” And with that, it’s decided.
When her bones buzz her awake that night, all she hears is the gas heater’s low hiss. There had been a party, but it was across the street. She had fallen asleep to the muffled thumping of country music and occasional bursts of laughter. Now everything is quiet.
Confused, she chalks it up to nerves. Still she is too unsettled to sleep. She flips one of her granny’s tied quilts to the bottom of the bed and walks across the hallway. She puts her ear against her mom’s door but hears nothing that would set her bones so abuzz.
When she pushes into the room, she finds Justine and Pitch crouched on the floor before the window, a wool Pendleton blanket over their shoulders. “New neighbors are fighting,” Justine whispers.
Relief moves through Reney’s limbs. Whatever it was that had woken her is outside. She and her mom are safe inside this house. In Texas, there would be a whole house and a Paint. Maybe the nights would be punctuated with barking dogs and stamping horses. Maybe Texas would be quiet.
From the darkness, the three of them kneel before the window, looking down across the street. Bare oak limbs spider their view. Pitch pounds the frame twice with the palm of his hand to break the paint seal. When the window pops up, cold air blows across them, and the branches rattle. Reney shivers in her sleep shirt. She reaches up and slides her fingers across the fogged glass, drawing a heart that drips down her arm. Justine opens up the blanket that Granny had saved money to buy for Justine when she graduated eighth grade. Justine pulls Reney close, kisses the top of her head.
A yellow bulb from the porch lights the man from behind as he stands over the neighbor lady. The man’s hair seems to glow, but his face is a shadow. Reney hasn’t seen him before, but she can imagine just what he looks like in the light. From up above, Reney, Justine, and Pitch have just watched the woman run down the cement steps, her long brown hair streaming behind her. They heard the smack when she slapped him. When he pushed her away, the woman fell onto her back in the dry yellow grass and kicked at him.
The man bellows, her name lost in his throat, and grabs at her foot.
“She needs help,” Reney says. Pitch is already reaching for his wadded-up jeans, and Justine has started for the phone. They are too late; from down the street comes the sound of the sirens. Reney presses her forehead against the cold metal screen.
Two cops, one Indian and one white, jump out of the car, and it seems to Reney that everybody across the street starts yelling at once. The man is on his stomach now, the white cop’s knee in his back. The woman cries out and flashes up the steps inside.
When she runs back outside and down the steps, one of the cops shouts, “Gun, gun, gun.” And it is so. Three quick shots.
Pitch covers his head with his hands and ducks before wedging himself between Reney and the window. Justine, too, reaches for Reney, tries to cover her eyes.
The white cop is on the ground now, and so is the woman. The man with the glowing hair struggles to his knees and cries out in a voice so wild, so full of despair and love that it shakes Reney from the inside out.
Pitch tries to pull the window shut, but now it’s stuck open. He puts all of his weight behind it, but it will not close. Instead, he grabs the pull-down vinyl shade, but he fumbles it, and it springs up inside its roller. “Real nice setup you got here,” Pitch says. “Nice town.”
“There’s work,” Justine hisses, straining to pick Reney up.
Pitch doesn’t answer. He takes a deep breath and drapes the blanket over the rolled-up blind. Then he slides down the wall to the floor.
Reney wraps her legs around Justine’s waist, locks them at her ankles. Everyone is quiet as Justine carries Reney over to the bed. Pitch, looking smaller than before, stays put.
Justine pulls Reney’s head to her chest. Reney can tell her mom is quiet crying, so she is relieved to hear Justine’s heart pound steady and regular, if a little too fast, a little too loud. Reney thinks she is too old to stay in her mom’s lap, but she doesn’t care. Reney settles her head onto Justine’s shoulder and closes her eyes. Even after the flashing lights spin out of the room and the sound of sirens deepens before growing faint, Justine and Pitch stay fixed to their places, as if they are on a stage waiting for curtains that will not come.
Terra Firma
When Reney’s adventures through the pumpjack pulse of the oil fields grew old, she’d climb the fence, wrestle the saddle off the Paint, and place the pad upside down to dry like Pitch had shown her. She might sneak an extra handful of sweet feed to a colt or let the dog, a blue heeler pup named Hesdi, chase her across rows of round hay bales. When she fell between the giant bales, he’d come bounding after her, and they’d both come up scratching and spitting hay before taking off again. From the top of the bales, it was easy to see across the Red River to the scrubby ocher ridge that was Oklahoma.
She’d look upon the low ridge wondering how her granny was doing. She thought about her old friends back in Indian Country, getting ready to start fifth grade too. She’d won the fourth-grade regional Ready Writing Contest after they moved. Then she hit a lanky phase, and because her new school was so small, she was asked to try out for the junior high basketball team. Her friends, she figured, were probably still running around playing freeze tag after lunch.
Nearly every afternoon that summer, storm clouds popped and played on the ridge before dissipating into a burst of color along the eastern horizon. Reney and Hesdi kept a close eye on the storms, anxious until they passed. Sometimes she waved or cupped her hands to her mouth and shouted, imagining somebody might be on the Oklahoma side looking back at her, but she never heard anything in return other than a distant roll of thunder.
When she got tired of animal company or bored with her jump shot, she’d pick the hay from her long brown hair and head toward the old farmhouse where Pitch’s mama and daddy, Nina and Ferrell, lived. If the house was quiet and dark other than the sparkle dust coming through the blinds, she’d tiptoe to the back bedroom. There she would crawl into bed beside Nina, click the three-way lamp to the lowest setting, and tap a finger along a row of serial killer biographies and Stephen Kings. Snuggled against her new grandmother’s back, she squinted herself into worlds far scarier than any she knew.
She might shuffle to the far side of the room and select one of the Westerns that Nina taped when she was in good spirits and obsessively poring over the TV Guide from her lady-size recliner, twirling her gray curls, timing the pauses for commercials perfectly. Nina had captured every John Wayne movie ever made and labeled each one in her perfect cursive. Reney did her best to watch them all that summer. She cheered for the Indians, though she knew John Wayne would always end up the hero.
This was something like the family Reney always wanted, the one living out these evenings when the beer brought happy and nobody was talking about finding work or trying to coerce anybody to be something they weren’t. These evenings, her mom seemed ready to throw out the flattened boxes stored in the barn and stay. But when the happy spilled over and voices grew sharp, Reney would tuck her tied patch quilt under her arm and write Justine and Pitch a note that she was going to watch movies with Nina. During the summer, she didn’t even have to ask to sleep over. She’d shuffle out the door where Hesdi would meet her on the trailer steps and bite at her legs all the way across the drive.
Nina was the opposite of Reney’s granny in almost every way. A tiny lady—loud and prone to delightfully creative cursing—she colored and permed her hair at home, snipped the curls herself with orange-handled sewing scissors. When her slipped disk acted up, she stayed woozy in the back bedroom surrounded by pill bottles and ashtrays, smoking and reading, tugging at the tiny gold pendant that hung from a chain around her neck.
Just when it seemed Nina might not ever leave her bedroom again, Reney would wake to find her in the kitchen flipping bacon, a cigarette pinched between her lips, ash curling over the skillet. “Garden seed, papoose,” she’d say, the pitch of her voice registering high among the ceiling tiles. “Rats been congregating in your hair?”
Reney would rub the sleep from her eyes and grin. She was browner than she’d ever been now that she lived in the country and passed her days outside. Her hair, long and nearly black, was uneven at the ends.
On these days, Nina set about fixing up the rattletrap farmhouse where Pitch and his daddy were born as if she might never have another chance to set things right. That summer she covered the whole place in wood-grained contact paper. Wood-grained counters. A wood-grained deep freeze and fridge. She even put contact paper on the already wooden kitchen chairs and the lid of the toilet seat.
It was on one of these bacon days that Reney followed Nina out the back door and down its sagging steps to the cellar. Reney raised the heavy concrete door enough for an odd rusty piece of iron to counter the door’s heft.
“Hey, it’s got those teeth just like your necklace,” Reney said.
“It’s a drill bit. It chews up earth and spits it out so they can ramrod a pipe into the mud and pull up money,” Nina said. “Goddamned useless now. Like most of this Shinola.”
Reney kept quiet. She knew better than to get Nina talking about how drillers were pulling up and stacking oil rigs all over the state, much less Ferrell’s mineral rights.
Nina pushed past Reney into the dark cement room. You could hardly find a spot on the floor that wasn’t cluttered with hardened race bridles, jangly bits, or boxes of filthy, broken china. Nina opened the vent, lit a cigarette, and twirled a piece of hair around her finger as she surveyed the mess. Reney started by sorting through a box of curled victory pictures but soon stopped at a magazine with a front cover picturing a tremendous cloud of black that spouted a tornado with three dancing vortices. Terrible Tuesday was written in white horror font in the middle of the main cloud.
“What’s this?” Reney asked. Nina reached for the magazine.
“It was a storm. A terrible storm. Fifty people or more died. Wiped out half the town.”
“Were you there?”
“Ferrell was. Or I thought he was. Thought it killed him.”
Nina flipped the magazine closed and put it in the trash pile.
“But he was okay?” Reney asked.
“Turned out he’d gone over to Ross Downs to see Pitch ride. Fingers too by-God busted up to call home, but yes, you could say he was okay. Go get us some trash bags.”
When they were finished, the cellar looked like a perfect little jail cell. Coal-oil lamps separated two springy cots covered with quilts, and they’d maneuvered a bookshelf down the steps where Nina stored jars of potatoes and green beans put up in a previous fit of activity. They bought a case of tuna fish and a big tub of Jif, so much more festive than the black-and-white commodities from her granny’s that Reney imagined the disasters that would lead her to unscrew the lid and break the smooth surface with her fingers.
Before she hauled out the trash, Reney snaked Terrible Tuesday out of the bag and hid it between the cot springs and mattress. After much thought, Reney put Huck Finn on the shelf, leaving The Stand and the John Wayne whoevers for life aboveground. She didn’t question their preparations.
Cleaning out the cellar left Nina bed-bound for weeks. She groaned and grasped at pill bottles when Reney crawled into the bed beside her. She threw an arm over her eyes if Reney turned on the light. When Reney wasn’t on the Paint Horse or shooting basketball, she stayed in the cool of the cellar, leaving the door open, reading, reading, reading. She worked on her clove hitch and began to keep her eye out for driftwood. She squirreled away rope from round bales and stashed cans of tuna here and there. She saw warnings on the horizon, kept careful count of the seconds between lightning and thunder.
By July, the storm clouds stopped passing them by. It seemed every afternoon brought a storm. When the trailer began to strain against the tie-downs or the shutters of the farmhouse began to bang, Reney was the first and usually the only one to go to the cellar. She’d light a lamp and spread herself facedown across a cot, readying her bones for the freight train sound of a tornado. She whispered pained prayers for her patchwork family, who stayed inside doing dishes, banging on the television, playing cards, loving, fighting. She wouldn’t creep up the narrow stairway and lean her shoulder into the door until she was certain the storm had calmed.
There wasn’t any notice, of course. Pitch, laughing at something her mom said, had hardly stepped onto the farmhouse’s front porch to check the clouds when the storm door slammed against the outside wall. The hinges wrenched and moaned terribly against the frame, and Reney swore she felt the house wobble under her feet, like the hull of the V-bottom boat when she stood up too fast. Then, just as quickly, the wind reversed course and sucked the door shut. For a moment, Nina, Reney, and her mom stared dumbly at one another, clutching canasta hands, mouths agape in the glow of Coors Light cans and Nina’s special apricot brandy.
It was Nina who reclaimed time, shouting, “My God!” and throwing herself out the door. Reney moved to the doorway, afraid to run to the cellar, afraid to stay inside. The metal double-seater rocking chair hung in the splintered limbs of an oak tree. The tire swing had wrapped itself around the naked trunk before coming to a slapping rest, straining against the rope, and blowing back the other way. There was nothing at all on the porch, which before the storm had been cluttered with oil field detritus, muddy boots, horseshoes, and all manner of collected crap dragged in by Pitch and his daddy. Most especially, there was no Pitch. All that was left was a fading roar and the black-orange glow of the evening sky.
Reney’s mom was suddenly dragging Reney past rattling windowpanes and out the door. Nina bowed in the wind on the last step, shouting Pitch’s name. Reney grasped her cuff as they bounded past. Heavy drops of rain pelted them, sparsely at first. By the time they reached the cellar door, the rain beat their bodies so violently that Reney could not hear what her mom was shouting, could barely see her mouth O-ing words into the storm. Reney strained toward the sky looking for some sign of Pitch’s boots, hoping to catch the flash of his grin or the sound of his voice as he passed over, imagining him huddled over, going
to the bat, riding the cloud to victory.
Then, she was clinging to her mother, crashing into the hole. Their wet bodies mashed together, pulling and grunting into the cramped, cool stairwell. It took both of them to hold on to the concrete door so Nina could latch it. Reney could hear Nina sobbing once the storm was muffled, could hear her fumble open the cellophane of a new pack of Merits.
A lighter clicked. Nina’s face glowed, then darkened.
“Give me one,” Justine said. The thin, yellow light led them down the steps. The lighter clicked again, and Justine was briefly illuminated.
Reney sat on one of the cots and felt for the lamp, her fingers lifting the glass bulb and rolling the wick by habit. When the light settled on the room, there was Pitch, huddled in the far corner. He held his knees tight to his chest, and when he looked up at them, he took a deep breath and spit between his legs.
“The wind,” he said. “It took a pumpjack weight right off the porch. Spiraled up like a piece of paper.”
Justine took a drag of her cigarette. Her ember deepened, and for a moment it seemed to Reney that everything might be fine. Justine must have felt relief, too, for a few seconds. Pitch was okay. They were all okay! Nina rushed to Pitch and took his head to her tiny hip, crying, “My boy, my baby.”
Pitch almost let her continue, but then he looked at Justine and pulled away.
“We thought you were gone,” Justine said. “Thought the wind took you.” An accusation. She tapped the cigarette with her index finger three times and reached to open the vent. Lightning flashed through the slats, and Reney waited for the thunder.
“Thought I was goddamn going to die,” Pitch said.
“So you left your family to get blown away?”
Nina put a hand on the small of her back and shuffled over to the other cot and lay down. She twirled a curl and hung her cigarette hand off the cot. Justine didn’t say anything else, which to Reney was the weirdest thing she could have done. Instead she clicked on the radio and started spinning the knob across the static.