Hick (21 page)

The green blue water lays itself out in sharp prisms, slices off the sun, cutting triangles this way and that, turning the creek into crystals, making heaven out of slippery rocks, below the churning of what you never want to talk about or think about again.

If I could stay down deep under the slithery prism rocks, I could stop time from turning and make believe I’d never been. If I could stay down deep, beneath the lost sage tumbling, I could bury that night by the side of the road. If I could stay down deep, I could drift off underneath the rapids and no one would ever know about what happened between my legs with the red coming out and getting two black eyes and a Hot Stuff necklace.

If I could tear my skin off and send it down the river, along with my bones and my blood and my that-night story most of all, I would throw myself in pieces over the rocks and the pebbles and the moss down past Elko through Paradise Valley and the Colorado River beyond. I would tumble over, downwards, in bits and pieces past the muddy waters of the Rio Grande and into the Gulf of Mexico. I would hide myself in the silt at the bottom of the ocean and pull the sand above me like a blanket and tuck myself in deep beneath the clear blue sea until the world stopped turning.

Through the glass water prisms come two giant hands and now I’m up, out of the water, onto the bank. The hands lay me down next to the creekbed while I stare, sputtering, shaking out the picture of myself by the side of the road, with my legs spread open and Eddie above me, on top of me, inside me.

And now I get to see myself from the other side of the creek. I get to stand on the other side of the creek and see myself like a rag doll on the bank. I get to watch myself through the junipers on screen.

I get to see the movie on the other side of the bank, no sound, just the wet rag-doll sopping, some kind of shaky toy getting jiggled this way and that, one arm, then the other, by the giant with the dog, arranging, rearranging, trying to fix. He dries her off and puts her in an old-style dress, delicate, delicate, trying to look away, trying to be discreet. He picks her up, careful, and brings her to his chest. He cradles the rag doll in front of him and walks, in silence, through the forest and into the woods, towards a kerosene lamp in a distant window.

And as I see myself go, as I watch myself go from the other side of the bank, I want to grab myself back and throw myself back in the water, underneath the current, with the water rushing overhead and Glenda tucking my hair behind my ear and pulling me down underneath the slippery rocks, taking me with her, taking me with her, lulling me to sleep deep beneath the deep blue sea.

Beau makes it so the cops don’t bother me. He makes it so they think I’m his stunned precious niece and don’t know nothing and why bother with me anyways. He makes it so, when their lights come up, red and blue, red and blue, in circles, and I sit in the corner with my hair drying, Karl sitting by my side, keeping watch, that I don’t get scared or start crying or make a scene. He makes it so Karl sits next to me and puts him on protector duty while he goes out and tells a story about how Eddie and Glenda were always fighting and how he knew it’d come to this and he just heard shots and there they were.

There’s a big circus outside with cops and sirens, blue and red, blue and red, in circles, and questions and more questions. There’s yellow tape and Beau outside telling the same story, word for word, over and over again.

There’s a red-headed cop that comes up the stairs asking eight hundred questions about what I saw and where was I and how many planks in the floorboards and what’s the price of tea in China
and I keep my answers short and sweet till Beau comes in and calls the whole thing off, saying, “Look, Officer, she’s just a kid, she doesn’t know what’s going on and I can’t say I want her to, you know? I don’t want her to be traumatized or anything.”

And when I hear this, I remember that there are people in the world who would actually try to make it so you were protected. You’d be sitting there in the corner and they would shield your eyes or not let you see them drunk or try not to fight. They’d say, “Not in front of the kid,” or they’d say, “Let’s talk about this later.” They would, if you were just a little kid, put you in a category of something to fend for, something to protect, something to keep away from dirt-bags that want to give you a Hot Stuff necklace.

And when I remember that there are people like that, people who would try to keep you safe and read you bedtime stories and tuck you in, people who would make you hot chocolate and put in a nightlight and kiss your forehead last thing . . . when I think that there are people like that, people that I never met but that exist somewhere, people that I never even dreamed of, I want to start laughing. I want to start laughing cause it’s such a funny joke. it’s such a funny joke that there are people like that and look what I got, look what I got.

That’s a good one.

You would think that death is something that makes you feel fearful and numb. You would think that it’s something that makes you want to curl up into a ball in the corner, twisted up and hanging on for dear life.

But that’s not what death makes you want to do. Death makes you want to be reckless. Death makes you amazed you were even alive in the first place. Death jolts you up out of that passing through, that getting by, you’ve been doing all your life.

I wake up in the middle of the night on a lumpy bed, under a window, moonlight streaming in, cutting a square of light onto the floor.

There is something in me, something in me like a drum beating, below my heart and well below my head, something that wants to take the day’s events, the death and the blood-soaked denim, and tear it up into some animal thing, some freedom from the grave and close-call lust. I cling to the bed and wait for dawn.

In the morning the room is sun-drenched gold by the day coming up outside the window.

Beau stands across the room making eggs on an old-fashioned white stove. He doesn’t notice me wake and I stay quiet, watching his profile shaking the pan. There’s a looming to him, a dull gloom that pushes his head forward into the task at hand, his place and the day. The years behind him pressing into his shoulders, weighing down on his triangle back, through his spine and into the floor.

The rugs on the floor are deep burgundy, with intricate designs, from faraway places with names with too many letters and not enough vowels. And if you’re looking to hang a painting, you better think twice cause nothing doing. it’s covered from floor to ceiling with shelves upon shelves and books stacked top to bottom, left to right, with magazines in between. it’s like Beau kicked out all the little kids and moved into the library.

He’s got furniture that looks like you just got out of your space-pod and landed two hundred years in the past with dark wood, swivels and birds’ claws for legs. it’s like he stole a room out the East Coast, drove it west down I-80 and planted it here in the middle of the piney woods just to make you wonder. He’s got crystal glass animals that catch the light and break it in two, an old wooden globe with a ring around it and wing-back chairs fit for Sherlock Holmes, pipe in hand. He’s got a dark-wood, straight-back piano with little candleholders coming out, mother-of-pearl inlays making flowers on the front. There’s a fireplace at the other end of the room with a mantel made of stone and, on top, a giant oil painting of a pale, pretty lady in a puffy dress you need a hoop for.

He catches me turning the room over.

“Do you read much, kid?”

“Yup. I got a yard-sale World Book.”

“Hm. that’s it?”

“Yeah, I practically got it memorized.”

“Well, how about the library?”

“Looks like you stole it.”

He waits there for a second and then laughs, soft.

“Yeah, I guess it doesn’t suit me, huh?”

“Not really.”

“Well, my mom left it.”

“Oh . . . I’m sorry.”

“No,” he says, cracking the eggs. “She’s not dead or anything . . . she just moved, you know, went down to Los Angeles or someplace weird.”

“Oh. that’s nice. Nice that she left you all this stuff.”

“I guess. . . . she’d like you. She always wanted a little girl.”

This stops the air cause we both know she already had one. She had one with a heart born on the wrong side and what do you say to that?

“You could go visit her. she’d like that.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“She teaches at some weird place where they have huts for the little kids, little hobbit huts and everyone speaks French.”

“Well, I don’t speak French.”

“Well, I reckon that’s why they teach it.”

He stands by the stove, sizing me up. “How bout I give you her number and maybe—”

“Look, it’s okay. I’ll be okay.”

He stops and stares a second out the door.

“All right, well . . . I reckon I’ll just leave it with you.”

He turns back to the bacon and eggs, making a plate. He sets two plates down on the table, between two sets of forks and knives made with intricate designs like the rugs. He pours orange juice into crystal glasses you see in commercials for wine, with rolling vineyards in the background and grapes on the table. The chairs for the table are matching with dark wood, lions carved in the back and velvet pillows where you’re supposed to sit.

There’s a sadness to this room, a loneliness, as if the only people ever here are the people on the pages of those books.

I look around the room and jump back slight as I catch my reflection in the window. I forgot the part about my hair being black and choppy and being turned into a boy. it’s an ugly look, like I went from Cinderella to the wicked stepmother overnight. But there’s something to it, some preemptive strike against what it is I’m supposed to look like and who it is I’m supposed to be. There’s
something to it that makes me feel a little more brave and a little less ashamed.

I still wonder if you pinched me if I’d wake up back in Jackson and all this was just some daydream by the side of the pool, with Glenda still inside moving up and down on Lloyd. How can it be that you believe a life that blinks on and off from a lit-up tube more than you believe a life that passes smack-bang in front of you? How can it be that you’ll believe a man can walk up on the moon before you’ll believe that Glenda flew up in a bubble and Eddie didn’t make it off the floor?

These things are distant, you think. These things are distant and don’t happen.

But somewhere in America, between the freeways and the Food-4-Less, between the filling stations and the 5 o-’clock news, behind the blue blinking light coming off the TV, there is a space, an empty space, between us, around us, inside us, that inevitable, desperate, begs to be filled up. And nothing, not shame, not God, not a new microwave, not a wide-screen TV or that new diet with grapefruits, can ever, ever fill it.

Underneath all that white noise there’s a lack.

Beau finishes his eggs and leans back in his chair, cleaning his glasses.

“Where you figuring on going?”

“I don’t know. Thought I’d go to Vegas.”

“I reckon I won’t take you there.”

“How come?”

“That’s no place for a girl your age, that’s for damn sure.”

“Where’s my .45?”

“That was yours, eh? Well, I’m afraid it belongs to the boys in blue now.”

I look at Karl, keeping watch on the porch, his head on top of his paws, resigned but not skipping a beat.

“I reckon it’s best you get home.”

“Wull, what if I don’t wanna?”

“I reckon you do.”

I scan the rows upon rows of books, lining the walls, with names like Bartleby and Metamorphosis and The Age of Innocence. I scan the bindings and gold trim, each one different than the next, each one carrying some sort of timeless secret giving you the keys to the kingdom if you can just suss it out.

Beau catches me lost in the bindings.

“Where you from anyway?”

“Palmyra.”

He stops half out the door.

“Excuse me?”

“Palmyra, Nebraska.”

“Huh.”

“it’s not so bad. We got a good football team.”

“Yeah, okay. Listen. Two hours, then we’re leaving. There’s a bus stop in Salt Lake, that’ll take you to Omaha.”

“You’re not dropping me off in Utah.”

“Excuse me?”

“Listen, Mister, you can drop me off in Dallas, you can drop me off in Spain, you can even drop me off in Sparks . . . but there is no damn way you are dropping me off in Utah. If you do I’ll die and it’ll be all your fault.”

“Listen—”

“If you do I’ll go straight to Vegas and become a crack whore and die in a shoot-out and you’ll see it on TV and it’ll haunt you till the day you die.”

“Jesus.”

“I mean it.”

“Two hours. Lord have mercy.”

The screen door bangs into the frame behind him as he stalks off down the path into the woods, Karl in tow. I watch him from behind and suppress the urge to follow.

That lady with the hoop skirt is still staring at me from the painting. she’s made of oil and chiffon but there’s something behind her eyes like she just started smiling. There’s something in her eyes like she’s trying to tell me it was hard for her, too, and that’s the way to buck up. she’s trying to tell me, Join the club, kid, you just got to put your head back up top your neck and pretend blush and wait for the next waltz.

Colorado is split in two pieces.

On one side Colorado is made of piney passes through snow-capped mountains with blond folks made of smiles and exercise and the other half is made of yellow weeds, grumpy clerks and nothing on the ground but a gray tree, one for each acre. it’s like God himself put Miracle-Gro on one side of the state and it bloomed up mountains and valleys and crested buttes with wildflowers and then he looked at the rest of the state, looked at his watch, shrugged and took a nap.

Beau drives a giant red truck from the Fifties, rounded off and old-fashioned, like something you’d see in a Coke commercial. He’s got some kind of engine in it made of horses, cause he can still get ahead of you, even through Monarch Pass.