Borderlands (18 page)

And he called her Sugargirl.

And he remembered her birthday …

2

During supper Aunt Rhonda asks what the letter has to say. She poses the question as airily as if she’s asking if anybody cared for more iced tea, but there’s no hiding the snoopy hunger in her voice, nor the spite Dolores has gotten to know so well since coming to live with her. (One minute she and momma were eating supper and watching a
Honeymooners
rerun, and the next, momma was facedown in her plate of red beans and rice and dead of a stroke before Dolores could even start to scream.)

Much of her aunt’s resentment toward her, Dolores knows, comes from her dislike of momma, even though the two women met only once, back when Dolores was just a tiny baby. The way momma told it, that one time was enough for both of them. She and daddy were paying her and Frank a visit, and Rhonda put on such pious airs momma couldn’t stand it. So she’d turned the radio on and put it up loud on a boogie-woogie station and flashed a lot of leg at Uncle Frank as she kicked up her heels all around the living room with daddy. “That skinny tight-faced Rhonda didn’t know whether to spit or go blind,” momma said. “And Frank, well, you’da thought he’d never looked on so much of a woman’s legs before to see how he was gawking at mine.” Momma laughed, thinking on it. “But I guess being married to that priss Rhonda, he like as not
hadn’t
seen a woman’s legs in a
long
while. Poor fella was probly hurtin bad from lack of lovin and probly hurtin even worse now. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to hear he’s took up with some little tramp one of these days.” It was the first time she’d spoken to her of such things, and she gave Dolores a look. “I ain’t talking too salty for you, am I?” she asked. “I mean, being your momma and all?” And Dolores, not yet fourteen, shook her head firmly even as she felt herself blushing and said, “Course not. I’m not a
baby
.” Momma smiled and said softly, “Course you’re not.” It was one of the few times after daddy left that she heard momma mention any of the fun she’d had with him.

Dolores herself has provoked her aunt mightily by refusing to attend the Youth Prayer Services held two nights a week at the Good Shepherd Baptist Church just down the street. The one time she went she’d felt like throwing up right there in the church, the other kids were so godawful self-righteous. They’d looked at her like they all had their own private keys to the Pearly Gates and she never would. She has since had to listen to her aunt’s almost daily declamations of the hellfire awaiting the likes of her. She has endured the woman’s ill will by accepting it as just another unpleasant fact of life. Like her allergy to peanut butter. Like mosquitoes in summertime. Like the dirty-talking boys at school.

She loathes living with Rhonda, but where else could she have gone? Fifteen years old and not a penny to her name, and Uncle Frank the only kin the state children’s services could get in contact with. It wasn’t like she’d had a lot of choice about it. But the six months she’s been here seem like six years, and if she wants to finish high school, which she does, then she’s got to live here nearly two more years, and how in the world can she ever last that long in this house? She has often thought that having to live here is like a prison sentence—but after reading her daddy’s letter for the umpteenth time her mouth had suddenly gone dry at the thought of just how truly awful a
real
prison like Huntsville must be. He’d be in there at least thirty years and maybe a lot longer. How in the world could he stand it?

She’d had the sudden and dreadful notion that maybe the only real choice anybody has in life is whether to go on standing it or not.

Because of her own bitter feelings about her father, she has never been too bothered by Aunt Rhonda’s mean talk about him. But his letter has confused her. At the same time that she feels angry about the way he treated momma, she aches to be hugged to his chest and hear him say, “Sweet dreams, sugargirl,” like he used to when he’d tuck her in and kiss her goodnight.

She senses that if her aunt gets wind of what she’s feeling, she’ll jump at the chance to make her feel even worse. And so, when Rhonda asks what daddy (“that man” she calls him) had to say, Dolores simply shrugs and says, “Nothing much.”

“Nothing
much
!” Aunt Rhonda repeats, and arches her plucked brows. “After all this time without word one to
anybody?
Without so much as a word of condolence to his only daughter after her mother passes away? Declare, I’d think he’d have a good deal to say for himself.” She turns to Uncle Frank and says, “Don’t you think so, Franklin?”

Uncle Frank looks up from his plate and smiles guardedly. He is a large closemouthed man who spends most of his days in his gun shop in town. Dolores has not come to know him very well but strongly suspects that for all his size and apparent toughness he is afraid of his wife. It is hard for her to believe that any man cowed by his wife could be even
half
-brother to daddy. Life, she thinks, is just full of strange jokes.

“Well, honey,” he says, “I think—”

“I mean,” Aunt Rhonda says, her eyes back on Dolores, “it isn’t every day we get a letter at this house from a bona fide
convict
, is it?”

Dolores shrugs and busies herself with her stew. She is determined to keep the letter to herself, to keep from being baited into a show of bad temper.

“Now Rhonda honey,” Uncle Frank says, his interjection surprising Dolores—and Aunt Rhonda as well, to judge by the look on her face—”why don’t we let the poor girl be? A letter’s a personal thing, and I guess if Dolly wants to tell us what was in it, she’ll do it when she’s ready to—won’t you, Dolly?” He is the only one who has ever called her by that nickname which she detests.

“Didn’t say much,” Dolores murmurs. “Just howdy, is all.”

“Just
howdy
?” her aunt echoes sarcastically. “Oh now, I’ll just bet he said a lot more than
that
.”

“Now Rhonda honey …” Uncle Frank starts to say—and then hushes at the look she gives him.

“Yeah, well,” Dolores says, meeting Aunt Rhonda’s eyes, “that’s about all he said.” She holds her aunt’s stare a moment longer, then turns her attention back to her plate. Take
that
, you!

“Fine then,” Rhonda says. “Be that way.”

Dolores eats the rest of her meal with a great show of appetite, though the only thing she actually tastes is the rare and wonderful flavor of victory.

3

Later that evening, after doing the dishes, she lies on her stomach on the floor of her room and tries to compose a letter, writing with a ballpoint pen on lined notebook paper. She writes, “Dear Father,” but the word looks as strange on the page as it sounds in her head, so she tears the sheet out of the notebook and begins again.

Dear Daddy, she writes, she was so happy to hear from him. It was so sweet of him to wish her happy birthday. She has thought of writing him a letter lots of times before but she never did because she never did know his address.
Addresses
would be more like it, since they heard he was moving around a lot, especially from jail to jail (ha ha). It wasn’t till they heard he’d be in Huntsville for a good long while that she thought maybe … She snatches out the sheet of paper and crumples it into a ball.

Dear Daddy: how nice to hear from him after all this time. But she’d really like to know something. Why didn’t he write sooner? Why didn’t he write to them while momma was still alive? Why didn’t he … She wads up this one too.

Dear Daddy: what a surprise!
So
glad to hear from him.
Especially
glad to hear he’s
sorry
. Only, why did he have to wait so long to
be
sorry? While didn’t he feel sorry
before?
Why didn’t he feel sorry before momma’s heart finally used up
every last drop
of love it had for him. Why couldn’t he of told
momma
he was sorry while she was still alive? Would he have
ever
told her?
Dammit
, daddy! Why did he have to run off? Why did he have to go to Houston? Why did he have to go into
that
poolroom and fight with
that
man? Why did he have to beat him so damn
dead?

Riiiippp!

Dear Daddy: why couldn’t he say it to
her
, his daughter, his
only
daughter, his Sugargirl? It’s been all these
years
and now he writes her this letter but he doesn’t say it, not
once
, he doesn’t even say …

She stands up and goes to the window and stares out at the gathering gloom. The air is still and heavy. Heat lightning flashes whitely way out over the Gulf. Her throat and eyes burn. She leans her forehead against the window frame and stays that way for a few minutes before returning to her notebook on the floor and tearing out and crumpling the page she was writing.

Dear Daddy: she doesn’t like Raymondville very much. She doesn’t like the school she has to go to. Most of the kids are really rude and dumb as sticks. The teachers are mostly a bunch of irritable biddies and boring old farts. Except for Mister Traven who’s about the youngest teacher there and has a neat red beard and the softest blue eyes and always smells a little of oil since he works nights out at the field. He’s the nicest man. Not at all like the mean boys who say they think she’s pretty and everything but get all mad when she tells them she’s not allowed to ride in their cars and then go around telling awful lies about her and saying she’s done just the nastiest things with them. Some of the stories have got back to Aunt Rhonda and she always believes them rather than believe
her
. Aunt Rhonda can be
so
mean, daddy. Always telling her how she’s going to hell and all. Always talking mean about momma and him both. Always saying how she’s not worth all that her and Uncle Frank have done for her. Aunt Rhonda makes her feel like she’s not worth
anything
. Has
he
ever known anybody who made him feel like that? Sometimes she wishes she was deaf so she wouldn’t have to hear Aunt Rhonda anymore. She wishes there were more people like Mister Traven who once told her she’s the smartest one of his students and will surely make something of herself one day.

She pauses to consider the matter of Mister Traven. Go ahead, girl, she thinks—go ahead on and tell him. It’s the same as lying if you don’t. Tell him how Mister Traven, that nice man with the neat red beard and soft blue eyes, stopped his car for you on the road that sunny afternoon hardly more than a month ago when you were walking home from school and offered you a ride and then stopped at the Superburger Drive-in for a couple of bottled cold drinks and then took you for a drive and said he understood how hard it was to be the new kid in school and all, how he just bet all the other girls were jealous of you because you were so pretty, and how annoying it must be to have a lot of immature boys pestering you all the time with only one thing on their dumb little minds, and how lonely it could feel when it seemed nobody knew the real you way down deep inside. Tell him, Sugargirl. Tell how it just took your breath to hear him talk like that. Tell how he drove to a woods out by the salt lake and said he wanted to know who you really were, way deep inside. Tell about how he stroked your hair so gently, how you couldn’t help reaching out and touching his beard and how, when he kissed you, you could smell the faint odor of oil on his pale skin. Tell it all. Your first time. How pine cones thunked softly on the car roof and your heart was beating so hard while you did it right there on the front seat and you thought you’d die of the excitement. And how confused you got afterwards when he saw the blood smear on the seat and suddenly looked so scared as he buckled up his pants, how he didn’t say a word as he drove you home and when he got you there he only said, “Be sure and do your homework, hear?” How ever since then he hasn’t said three words to you and hardly ever looks you in the eye in the classroom and how you just don’t understand it and how awful it makes you feel. And don’t stop there, either. Go on and tell how ever since then you sometimes dream about that business in Mister Traven’s car and wake up with your heart jumping like crazy and feeling the same kind of excitement you felt at the time.

Tell him
that
, why don’t you? See what he thinks of his Sugargirl then.

Oh, daddy, she writes, she feels so
empty
sometimes. Does he know what she means? Does he ever feel like there’s nothing ahead but more of the same awful empty feeling, forever and
ever?
Does he ever just wish he was de—

She puts down the pen and reads what she has written. And then she slowly crumples the paper. She goes to the window and stares out at the darkness for a long time.

Who you fooling, girl? If he cared the teensiest bit he would have written long before now and he wouldn’t have asked for money and he would have
said
it.

But he didn’t. He did
not
say it.

It is after midnight when she writes: Dear Daddy: you BASTARD.

She underlines the final word again and again until the pen point tears through the paper and mars the page beneath, and then she buries her face in her arms to muffle the sound of her crying.

After a while she gets up and blows her nose. Then she gathers all the false starts and slips out into the darkened hallway and tiptoes to the bathroom and flushes it all down the toilet.

She swears to herself she will never write to him, not ever, and the vow will prove to be both true and false. It is true she will never mail anything to him. But during the remaining ten years of her life she will on many occasions begin a letter to him in a late-night whiskey haze. These efforts will be utterly incoherent to her on the following day. None of them will ever extend beyond three or four lines, and most will go no further than the salutation: Dear Daddy …

II

PERDITION ROAD

1

Her dreams were frequent and bad. Sometimes, like the one she was having now, they were recollections of incidents in her life, as grainy and unreal as a home movie—and as undeniable. She was dozing with her cheek pressed against the reverberant window of a bus hurtling south through thin morning fog, dreaming once again about the awful business with Uncle Frank, about being crushed under his bulk and gagging on the stink of him, feeling his sweat dripping on her, crying, saying don’t, don’t, and pushing against his pale hairless chest with both hands even as she felt an ambush of pleasure through her protests and hating herself for it, hating him even more, and yelling now, yelling in shock as she caught sight of Aunt Rhonda gaping at them from the bedroom doorway and tottering like a frail stricken bird …