Borderlands (19 page)

She came awake with a gasp.

The over-rouged woman in the neighboring seat was staring at her like she thought she might be loony. Dolores tried a reassuring smile but her face must have done a bad job of it: the woman’s mouth tightened and she quick turned away.

To hell with you, Dolores thought. She was still breathing hard from the vividness of the dream. The air in the nearly full bus was stale and dry. Her throat burned. She felt she might sneeze and hoped she wasn’t catching a cold. As she fished in her purse for a Kleenex she felt a sudden rush of loneliness so powerful she nearly sobbed. She snatched out a tissue and dabbed her eyes and commanded herself to
stop it
. The woman beside her scooched over toward the aisle a little more.

Oh, God
damn
that man. Rhonda too, the self-righteous old bitch. Damn that whole sorry business with Uncle Frank. It had been just terrible. Awful. It wasn’t like she’d ever said it wasn’t. But it sure hadn’t been
her
fault. After all. Not more than partly, anyway. Well, for damn sure not
all
.

The main thing was, she did not need anybody giving her hell about it even one more day. Especially not Aunt Rhonda. The woman was crazier than John the Baptist in the wilderness, forever thumping that Bible and calling names. (“Whore! Harlot! The sins of the mother shall fall upon the daughter just as surely as those of the father are visited on the son! Look upon her, Lord! Look upon this daughter of Jezebel on her dark road to perdition!” Two solid months of that, every damn day. And Uncle Frank, that miserable peckerwood, sitting through it all in front of the TV and saying not word one, like none of it had a thing in the world to do with him. Bastard.)

“Harlingen!”

The driver’s voice rasped harshly through the speakers, startling her. She pressed up closer to the window and saw that they were coming into town. Palm trees along both sides of the highway. A few motels and cafes. A strip of bars all closed up tight—The Silver Cane, Crazy Jack’s, El Waterhole #2. The bus slowed as they started coming onto traffic lights. It wasn’t a real big town—nothing like Corpus Christi, the biggest town she’d ever been to—but it was plenty bigger than Raymondville. They passed a wide dirt lot where Mexican workers were clambering aboard field buses. Filling stations and fast food places every which way you looked. A shopping center with an almost empty parking lot at this hour and a movie theater sign advertising
Bullitt
. Realty offices and car dealers. Buck’s Gun Shop with bars over the windows. An Oriental girl with hair like ink setting up a flower stand at an intersection. Rowena’s Beauty Salon. (
Rowena
! You had a name like that, you
had
to know something about beauty.) Hi-Way Bowling Lanes, and two old boys leaning against a pickup truck, drinking Lone Stars and the sun just starting to show itself. Chico’s Barber Shop with a big handlebar mustache painted on the window. A woman sitting on a bus bench and looking at her feet. A white-whiskered man carrying a big plastic bag full of who-knew-what over his shoulder and talking to himself as he trudged along the shoulder of the road, his clothes so foul-looking you just knew he carried a smell to reckon with. A dog lifted its leg on a police car’s tire in front of Maria Elena’s Cafe.

The morning sun shone on the storefronts, blazed against the windows. She imagined families at their breakfast tables, kids getting ready to leave for school, getting a goodbye hug and kiss from their mommas, their daddies. She abruptly felt her mother’s absence like a hole in her heart and for an instant she again thought she might cry.
Stop it!
she told herself.
This minute!
She blew her nose and sat up straighter.

Aunt Rhonda and Uncle Frank would’ve been up for a while by now. They would’ve seen her emptied dresser drawers and wondered when she’d gone. They might’ve even wondered where. They could go on wondering from now till Doomsday.

The only direction out of Raymondville that didn’t take you into Mexico or the Gulf of Mexico was north, and the first big town you’d come to, a good long ways up the coast, was Corpus Christi. But Uncle Frank had friends in Corpus and might have them track her down if he took a mind to. Way farther north was Houston, which she didn’t have enough bus fare to get to but where she wouldn’t have gone anyway. It was
too
far away, for one thing, practically in another world—and she’d anyway always thought of it as the meanest town there was, mainly because of the song she’d heard all her life about if you’re ever in Houston you better walk right and you better not gamble and you better not fight or the sheriff gonna get you and lock you up tight.

Daddy sure enough found that out, didn’t he? Four years he’d been in the state prison in Huntsville, little more than twice as long as momma’d been in her grave. The son of a bitch. As far as she was concerned, all the things he did to break momma’s heart amounted to a crime worse than killing that fella with a pool cue. She hoped he lived to be a hundred and never got paroled.

So even though there wasn’t much of Texas between Raymondville and the Mexican Border, that’s the way she headed—south to Harlingen on the four
A.M.
bus coming through from Corpus on the way to Brownsville. And although Harlingen was way closer to Raymondville than Corpus was, Rhonda and Frank didn’t ever go down there (“It’s nothing but wetbacks there,” Aunt Rhonda said, which was what she said about every place in Texas whether she’d ever been there or not). As far as Dolores knew, they didn’t know anybody there they could ask to look around for her.

Shoot, girl, they ain’t about to look for you now or ever and you know it. Be glad of it.

The big bus slowed, brakes hissing and sighing, and swung into the terminal.

2

Twenty minutes later she had herself a job. Counter waitress in a bustling little cafe called The Wagon Wheel, just a block down from the bus station. The owner was a stocky bald man named Shelton. He’d put the little cardboard “Help Wanted” sign in the front window not an hour before Dolores came walking down the sidewalk with her suitcase in her hand and no idea where she was headed. One of his two daytime girls had quit that morning when her boyfriend phoned and told her he was moving to Houston and if she wanted to go with him she had till noon to get ready.

“She’s a fool to go with him,” Shelton said. “He ain’t worth last month’s want ads. Big-talkin’ truck mechanic with white teeth and a head of hair. Girls today ain’t got the sense God gave a barnyard hen.”

He paused to take a sip of coffee and put a match to a Camel. The interview was taking place on counter stools. Squinting through the smoke, he looked Dolores up and down. “How bout you, girl? You gonna run off with the first coffee shop cowboy asks you to go to Big D with him?”

She was flustered by his lingering appraisal of her legs under the skirt that suddenly felt way too short—and by the leers and grins she was getting from the men sitting nearby. No sir, she assured him, her voice tight, she certainly didn’t intend on doing anything like that.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said tiredly. “Girls with your looks don’t have to intend nothing. Intentions just come along and happen to you.” He sighed and exhaled a long stream of smoke. “What the hell, I got to have me another daytime girl and I got to have one now. Job’s yours. Dollar-and-a-half an hour and all your tips. Get paid ever Friday. I give you lunch and a half-hour to eat it. Only listen: try to look at the customers a little less fraidy-cat than you been doing. They’ll most of them talk like loverboys but won’t none of them bite you. You might even try smiling some, jack up your tips.”

He took her into the back room and showed her where to stash her grip. He handed her a red-checkered apron and a white paper hat to wear, then gave her a quick rundown of the counter operation, showing her where everything was she might need—silverware, condiments, napkins and placemats, checkpads. She already knew how to work the register from the job she’d had at the Burger Hut in Raymondville.

“Well, all right, then,” he said. “Let’s get to work.” He hustled back into the kitchen to help a colored cook named Willard work up a steady procession of orders for eggs, fried potatoes, burgers, chicken fried steaks, chili beans and blue plate specials.

A jukebox next to the counter played loudly and incessantly, almost all its selections country-western oldies like Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Bob Wills, Ernest Tubb. Even Tex Ritter, for God’s sake, was on there, and some customers actually played him. Frankie Laine was a big favorite with “Rawhide” and “Mule Train.” In the midst of all that twangy shitkicking, only Buddy Holly and Elvis kept Dolores from going insane.

The place always smelled heavily of fried grease, diesel fumes, men in need of a shower. Even the sunlight that leaned in the windows looked oily. Most of The Wagon Wheel’s trade was from men passing through, grabbing a bite while they waited for their bus. Sad-looking salesmen in stained suits. Uniformed servicemen hardly more than boys. Sunburned oil workers with bright eyes and big voices. Dusty farmhands. Old Mexes in sarapes and young ones with wide neckties and shiny pompadours. Vacanteyed drifters. Sometimes some coloreds.

The field Mexicans were always well-mannered, and the few black folk who sometimes came in for a roll and coffee. But they never had much to spend on themselves and couldn’t afford tips beyond nickels and dimes. Her best tips came from the customers she least liked to wait on—the Mexican dandies, who called her
mamacita
and ran their eyes over her like hands, and the oil field roughnecks, who liked to get a rise out of her any way they could. They liked to tell crude jokes in voices loud enough for her to hear, then laugh to see her blush, which she nearly always did. Sometimes their voices dropped low and then they’d all bust out laughing and grin at her and she’d know they had been joking about her. Or she’d catch them nudging each other and gawking at her rear end when she was bent over the cooler. She’d feel her face burn and want to shrink into herself, to make herself as small as possible so there would be less of her for them to look at and joke about.

Shelton seemed indifferent to it all, and she figured he’d think she was a big baby if she complained, so she didn’t. But every time some bunch of men at the counter snickered behind her back or showed her their nasty oily grins, her anger would clench in her belly like a fist and she’d want to tell them off. Then she’d spot the dollar bills scattered across the countertop and she’d bite her tongue. And when they called for refills and ogled her up close and smacked their lips and said, “
Qué chulita
,” or “Darlin, I sure do like the way you wear them jeans”—and even if every now and then one of them should reach over and pat her bottom before she quick pulled away—she’d make herself smile and they’d laugh and push a bill over to her and she’d snatch it up and put it in her pocket. She made herself think of their vulgar talk as simply unpleasant noise to put up with, like most of the jukebox selections. There was no need to take any of it personally, not even the pats on the ass. After all, it wasn’t like they were actually
doing
anything to her. And she did have to make a living.

And it
was
a living, dammit, a real job, and she
was
supporting herself with it, and who woulda thought she could do that? The Burger Hut job was the only other she’d ever had, but she’d only been at it a couple of months before Aunt Rhonda suddenly decided that it was improper and made her quit. (“A decent woman’s work is in the home. The heart of the whore is forged in the marketplace.” That batty bitch.)

On the day Shelton hired her she had asked if he knew of any place close by where she could rent a room, and he directed her to Miss Aurora’s, a boardinghouse for women, only three blocks from the restaurant. “I’m just saying it’s close by and it don’t charge a arm and a leg,” Shelton had told her. “I ain’t saying it’s the damn Hilton.”

The place was a musty old two-story of peeling whitewash with a front yard gone to weeds and faded flowered carpets in the parlor. Except for a retarded girl of fifteen who was the live-in maid, Dolores was the youngest resident in the place by at least thirty years. The half-dozen others were all spinsters or widows. Most of them were usually roosting in the parlor whenever she passed through, and though they always nodded politely when she smiled and said hello, the smiles they showed in return were more like looks of pain. Through the cloying fragrance of their perfumes there always seeped the odors of old closets and turned milk. None of them ever received visits from men. Their eyes would follow her up the stairs when she came in, trail her to the door whenever she left for work. She knew damn well they talked about her, and the idea of it was a constant irritant. She figured that the landlady, Miss Aurora—a skinny fake redhead who looked like she got made up by an undertaker—had rented to her only to give the biddies something fresh to talk about. Juiceless, jealous old bags. She detested the place more than she could say, but it was all she could afford that was close enough to the restaurant to let her walk to work, so it would have to do for now.

The other waitress on her shift was Rayette Nichols, a chubby middle-aged blonde who wore a girdle and the brightest red lipstick Dolores had ever seen. She was quick to laugh and had an easy way with the customers. In private, however, she admitted to Dolores that she didn’t really like the job all that much. After they got to know each other better, she confessed she’d “done a little flatbacking once upon a time—you know what I mean?—for a couple months up in Dallas, way back before I ever met my husband Henry.”

It took Dolores a minute to understand what she meant—and then Rayette laughed at the look on her face. “Shoot, honey, it ain’t like I was committing
robbery
, for Pete’s sake. I wasn’t
hurting
nobody. Just the opposite. I was making fellas feel pretty damn fine, if I say so myself. I always gave dollar’s worth for dollar’s pay. Let me tell you, all them who look down their noses at it, they ain’t never been on their own and near to starving, you can bet on that.”