Cavedweller (2 page)

“Oh, he never returned,”
Delia was singing softly as Randall’s head dropped forward and the dark blood gushed one last time. She stopped then. Something may have passed her in the cool morning air, but Delia did not feel it. Focused on the muscles in her neck and upper back, the ones that ached all the time, she wrapped her arms around herself, gripped her shoulders so tightly she started to shake with the effort, and then let go abruptly. The release was luxurious and welcome. A little of the weight lifted, the weight of more than two solid years of trying not to do what she still wanted desperately to do, to sip whiskey until the world turned golden’ and quiet and safe, until Dede and Amanda Louise, the daughters she had left behind, ceased whispering and whimpering from behind her left ear. She hadn’t had a drink since November, and the strain showed.

I’m tired, Delia thought the moment Randall died. A garbage truck rumbled up the narrow alley behind the cottage. A shabby gray cat jumped the fence with a yowl. Delia’s neck pulled tight again as a shaft of sunlight cut through the tattered palm fronds by the fence. “I want to go home,” she said out loud, and the two girls in her memory lifted their shadowy heads and turned hot eyes in her direction.

Behind Delia, in the little house, ten-year-old Cissy stirred in her sleep and burrowed deeper into the sheets. Her daddy was riding his motorcycle into a red-gold circle of flame. He was laughing and extending his arms high into the bright burning light. He looked so happy that Cissy almost woke up. He hadn’t looked happy in so long a time. “Daddy,” Cissy whispered, then slipped sideways into a dream of the ocean, the water sweet as the rum and Coke Delia let her sip when she was too drunk to say no.

Rosemary called at nine with the news, but Delia had already heard on the little radio she kept set low in the kitchen that opened onto the garden. Within minutes of the report, she had pulled down all the shades and barricaded the front door with a mound of dead plants and old newspapers, hoping the mess would make the house look empty.

When Cissy got up, Delia gave her daughter a bowl of strawberries and a toasted muffin, watched her eat, and then sat down to tell her girl that Randall was dead.

Cissy laid down her spoon and looked at Delia. “I don’t believe you,” she said. “You’re lying. You’d say anything to keep my daddy away from me.”

“Oh, baby, you know that’s not true,” Delia said.

“No!” Cissy threw off Delia’s arm and pushed her away. “It’s your fault!” she screamed. “It’s your fault! He should have been with us. I hate you!”

Delia said nothing. She had lost count of how many times Cissy had said those words in the last two years, ever since Delia had moved them out of Randall’s house. Keeping still and letting Cissy shout had become second nature to her.

Cissy pushed herself back from the table. “You killed him,” she said. “You killed my daddy.”

“Cissy, please,” Delia said. “We’re going to need each other now.” Delia was still struggling for control. She crossed her arms over her breasts. “And that’s no way to talk to me,” she told Cissy.

“How am I supposed to talk?” Cissy’s tone was sharp and wheedling. “Please, Mama, don’t fall down drunk on the floor. Please, Mama, don’t pass out at the breakfast table. Or please, Mama, don’t forget what day it is and send me to school when nobody’s there.”

Delia flinched as though she had been struck.

Cissy glared at Delia’s pink face. “I hate you,” she said. “I hate you more than Satan and all the devils.” She turned away to hide the tears she couldn’t keep back any longer.

Delia forced herself to look at her daughter. The shape of Cissy’s profile seemed to alter as she watched. “You don’t even believe in the devil,” she said softly.

“Oh yes I do,” Cissy sobbed. “I believe in the devil. He’s the one made you.”

Delia felt the bones in her neck turning to concrete. She wanted to weep at what she saw, the child’s face lengthening and closing against her. The left eyelid drooped a little as it had since the accident, but Cissy’s eyes were Amanda Louise’s eyes, her mouth the exact shape of lost baby Dede’s.

Slowly Cissy, the daughter Delia had always sworn was pure Randall and none of her, had grown more and more like the babies Delia had left behind. With every day Delia was sober, Cissy became more pale and cold, more angry and hurt. In Delia’s dreams her girls became one creature, one keening source of anguish, one child monster damning her name.

“I hate you,” Cissy said, and it was as if Delia’s three girls spoke in one voice. “I hate you” became the chorus that slowed Delia’s pulse until she felt as if she were swimming a mud tide, the thick scum of her guilt clogging the chambers of her heart. For two solid years, Delia had scoured her own insides trying not to be what she knew she was—hated and deserving hatred in full measure. She had abandoned her babies and spent most of a decade drunk on her butt. Even the daughter she had tried to protect despised her.

Every time she went back to the bottle, Delia sang the same song. She called it the hatred song, the I-deserve-to-die song. It had no words but Cissy’s curse, no melody but Delia’s own pulse. Sunrise-sunset-goddamn-me-to-hell song. Delia sang it the way she had sung for Mud Dog, with her whole soul and every ounce of her blood. People said that hearing Delia Byrd sing in concert was like hearing heartbreak in a whole new key. Her voice could make you sweat, make you move, make you want to lift your hands and pull justice out of the air. But the song Delia sang inside herself was meaner than anything anyone ever heard onstage. It was almost meaner than she could stand.

When Rosemary came over that afternoon, Delia was sitting on the hassock near the big leather couch, turning over the same six photographs and humming “Puff the Magic Dragon.” Three of the pictures were in color. One showed Delia leaning back against a lazy-eyed Randall, the infant Cissy cradled in her arms. Another showed Cissy at five, riding Randall’s neck with a big smile and bigger eyes. The third, dated two years later, captured them in the same pose, but Randall was noticeably thinner, his face gray and lined, and Cissy wore an awkward bandage over her left eye.

The other three photographs were black-and-white snapshots with cracked edges. Delia fingered them tenderly. In the top one she was holding a baby exactly as she held Cissy in the color photo. A solemn-faced toddler was beside her, and leaning in over her shoulder was a man with washed-out features and stunned, angry eyes. Delia put her thumb over his face and stopped singing. “Damn you,” she said, and looked up to find Rosemary watching her.

Without a word Rosemary picked up the two remaining photos. That man—Clint Windsor—lifting the toddler, Amanda, in front of a small frame house with a bare dirt yard and a porch half shaded by an awkwardly hung madras bedspread; and then baby Amanda, with her wispy blond hair pulled staight up into a knot at the top of her head, and baby Dede, hair just as blond and fine barely visible in the faded photograph, the two bracketing a dark-haired older woman whose hands were linked into a clumsy praying fist. The woman’s eyes were on her hands, but the girls were looking straight out at the camera, eyes enormous and fixed.

“What are you going to do now, honey?” Rosemary asked, handing Delia the photos.

“Go home,” Delia told her. “I’m going home to get my babies.” From the back of the house came the sound of Cissy’s heartbroken weeping.

“Oh, Delia.” Rosemary shook her head. “Lord, girl, you do not want to do that. Those children are half grown now. They an’t seen you in more than ten years. Nobody there is going to welcome you, honey.”

“You don’t know that. I got people there. I got friends.” Delia rose suddenly, nearly overturning the hassock. “And they’re my girls. I’m their mother. That don’t go away. They’ll be mad at me, yeah. But I can handle that. I been handling it here.”

“But you got Cissy to think about, Delia.” Rosemary looked toward the back of the house. “Listen to her. She’s just lost her daddy, and you know how she is about Randall. Child thinks everything that happened is her fault, that he never done nothing wrong in his life. Take some time, Delia. Take some time and let yourself think about what you’re going to do.”

“I am thinking about Cissy. I’m thinking about all my girls.” Delia’s shoulders were shaking. The pictures in her hand crumpled as she tugged her elbows in tight to her abdomen.

“Rosemary, this is what I’m meant to do,” Delia said. “It’s what I should have done years ago. I don’t belong here. I never have. Whatever I loved in the music an’t got nothing to do with living here. I hate Los Angeles. It’s the outer goddamn circle of hell.”

Rosemary bit her lip. Delia’s face was red and sweaty, but she did not smell of drink. She smelled of fever and grief and salty outrage.

“Honey,” Rosemary said, and put her hand on Delia’s wire-taut shoulder. “All I’m saying is you don’t have to rush things. Just give Cissy a chance to absorb what’s happened.” But Delia was not listening. She’s going to leave, Rosemary thought. She’s going to go back to Cayro and fight those crazy people for her daughters. Her hand on Delia’s shoulder reluctantly stroked and soothed. She looked down at the creased pictures in Delia’s hand, the two girls’ faces as bleak as her friend’s.

“Oh, Delia,” Rosemary said one more time. “Please, just take a little while to think.”

 

 

T
he funeral made all the papers. All and all, it was a decorous affair. The Columbia Records executive who called about sending a car for Delia was astonished when she told him she was not going. “I’m not about to let you see me crying,” she said. “Let them take pictures of that girl Randall nearly killed, get a shot of her without her teeth.” But in the end, though she told Rosemary she would rather have chewed dirt than put on that black dress and drive over to the church in Glendale, Delia could not refuse the grieving Cissy. A plot at Forest Lawn had been donated, but no one could swear that Randall would wind up there. Booger, solidly sober and twice the size he was when he had been with the band, drove down from Oregon to handle the arrangements for the burial and he was stubbornly closemouthed about what exactly would happen to Randall’s body. “Leave that to me,” he said. “Just leave it to me.”

“Bet he’s going to haul Randall’s corpse out to the Mojave Desert and cremate him over brittlebush and dried yucca,” Rosemary told Delia.

“That’d be about right,” Delia said, but kept her voice low so Cissy wouldn’t hear.

Cissy cried all through Booger’s mumbled eulogy and the unfamiliar service. Delia sat dry-eyed and silent. Some of the band members stood up to speak, but they kept it brief. Delia kept expecting someone to say what they were all thinking—that Randall’s death was as close to suicide as made no difference, that half of them had not spoken to him in the last year and the other half only when they needed money, but all the speakers looked over at Randall’s sobbing child and visibly rethought their remarks. There was more “God bless” than “goddamn,” and people joined in on the gospel songs with real emotion. It was as close to a Pentecostal service as could be managed in an L.A. Episcopal church.

“Wasn’t too bad,” Delia told Booger on the steps after, and he nodded in agreement. They both knew Rosemary and a few of the band members from the early days had chosen the music, mostly blues, and the nowers—great stands of gladiolas and ridiculously cheerful giant sunflowers imported from Brazil. “One last thing we can charge to the record company,” Rosemary said with a big grin. They had also managed to block the sermon the minister was determined to deliver.

“Randall weren’t exactly religious,” one of the brass players told the minister, prompting boisterous laughter from the other band members.

Standing on the steps, everyone said the same thing. “Wasn’t too bad.”

“Not at all.”

 

 

T
he wake was something else again. Rosemary described it to Delia contemptuously as a goddamned carnival. “Rock and roll is dead” was the refrain, and the catering was done by a discount liquor mart. Most of those who came were already drunk or stoned when they arrived, their faces slack and eyes sheathed protectively in black shades. It was a mistake, one of the Columbia guys said, holding the event at Randall’s place. Rosemary agreed. All of the old band members left in the first few hours. The open house drew the new crowd, the roadies and session players, the dealers and users who had been Randall’s constant companions, and all those women who had trooped in and out of the house since Delia moved out.