There Must Be Some Mistake (9 page)

CHANTAL AND
I were up in the Airstream and she was telling me about her daughter, Tinker, a wild child. Tinker had lived with her grandmother, left for California after a stint at a boarding school, lived on the streets panhandling out there. We were meeting Tinker downstairs. I'd seen a picture of her in a book of photos Chantal had by some Memphis photographer, not the famous guy, somebody else. Tinker was nineteen in the picture, and she was all rags and mascara, skanky clothes that were too big for her, bidirectional hair, and punctures all over her face. You could have done a photo essay and sold it to a fashion rag. Name your year. “Go easy on her,” Chantal said. “It's her first time home since then.”

I asked why things had gone this way, the daughter fleeing and staying away, and Chantal sighed. “I don't know what to tell you. There was trouble with my first husband. He was a rough customer. Yeah, I know how to pick 'em. Anyway, I didn't have control and then I was alone, and I couldn't handle her. I feel bad because I sent her to my mother's and that was the last I saw of her until she came back at nineteen.”

We met at a corner table in the Velodrome. The place was empty otherwise. The daughter was lean and deep eyed, wearing black tights and a black T-shirt, a half-dozen scarves, a few strings of beads, a couple of chains at her neck and more at her wrists, a dozen bracelets, tattoos peeking out on her neck, shoulders, wrists, and legs, studs in her face, and more rings than I could count. She hugged her mother when we got there, said hello to me.

“Pleasure to meet you,” I said, offering my hand.

“So, what are you—Corrections?” she said.

I shrugged at her, recalled my hand. “A pleasure is one of the broad class of mental states that humans and other animals experience as positive, enjoyable, or worth seeking,” I said.

“I could have spoken too soon,” she said.

“So, how are you, dear?” Chantal said.

“Good,” Tinker said. “I'm doing art now. I'm here awhile, if that's OK. I'm tired of wandering around. I've been everywhere since I saw you last. All over. Nonstop.”

“Pascal?” Chantal said.

“Still functional, far as I know,” Tinker said.

“Who's Pascal?” I said.

“This guy, years ago, wanted to get married and I didn't. I spent months with him trying things out, but pretty soon I was leaving.”

“She attracts the guys,” Chantal said.

“They love me out there,” Tinker said. “God knows why.”

“When she was eleven her father sort of died in a bank robbery,” Chantal said, filling me in. “He didn't really die, just died in spirit. Roy worked at the bank in Quantum, Florida, on the Gulf in that deserted stretch south of Tallahassee where nobody arrived, nobody left, and people kept opossums for pets. In hurricane season the water ran right up into town and stayed. Mostly Roy watched the girls and I watched him, because you had to.”

“That's not fair,” Tinker said.

“We had no business being together in the first place,” Chantal said. “He was a southern boy from Plaquemines Parish and I was Miss America, metaphorically speaking. Two kids came to rob the bank, and Roy decided he was finished being on the bottom rung. He pulled an aluminum bat from under his desk and, you know, that ticked off the boys. Eventually one gun goes off, then another, and pretty soon Roy is on the floor bleeding substantially.”

“The perps flee with beaucoup loot,” Tinker said.

“Things changed after that,” Chantal said. “Daddy got meaner and less daddy-like during his recuperation. He bought a pistol for twenty dollars from a guy in town.”

“He wasn't that bad,” Tinker said.

Chantal arched her eyebrows and squinted at her daughter. “She was twelve and he was nasty as a rat with cabin fever. He smacked her around; smacked both of us. I couldn't protect her or myself. He wouldn't let up, and when I came home early one day and found her crazy bruised I got the pistol and shot Roy right in the chest. Pop. Just like that.”

“Him too, huh?” I said.

“Too?” Tinker said. She turned to Chantal.

“Was a little gun,” Chantal said. “I felt bad, figured he was dying. Things get a little rough sometimes.”

“Roy was fine,” Tinker said.

“We called emergency, and they took him to the ER, and he was saved. I missed the heart and everything else that mattered, clean as a whistle. I wasn't even close. Thereafter I sent Tinker to her grandmother's in Lovine, Alabama, for her safety and for my sanity. Roy was in and out of the hospital in short order, and on a bus heading west. Permanently.”

“As for me,” Tinker said, “Grandma had the habit of tapping me with her cane, sticking me with it, poking me, and she kept saying I needed to behave myself or I'd never find a decent man.”

They were feeding on each other, Chantal and her daughter, and Chantal, who previously passed as ordinary people, now sounded like a long-in-tooth version of the street-tough daughter. It bugged me.

Tinker picked up the story. “After a while there were too many boys and too much trouble, and eventually I was scheduled for three years at the Certification School for Troubled Youth near Birmingham. Grandma had a friend there. It was a warehouse building on the site of a chemical factory. I did my schoolwork in some woman's office and made my grade-school diploma in record time, and then, one night, I managed to wiggle out through a concrete pipe in the cellar of the main building, and I never looked back. Hitched my way around until I was all the way to Cali.”

“When I saw her last she was nineteen,” Chantal said. “I was going on forty.”

“When I came back Quantum was still a backwater, but like everywhere else the kids had taken over, frightening their parents, so I had a natural crowd. I climbed their water tower, smoked in their abandoned depot, swam in a couple of creeks, laid out on the beach with them. There was an old Ford dealership, a snowball stand, a quadplex and the Gerald R. Ford High School, where all my new pals gathered for drug sales and fistfights.”

“She was queen of the May with that bunch,” Chantal said.

“So one day I took a walk to see the famous bank where my father took his stand, which was by then a slab of concrete littered with glass and four-foot weeds. North of the place there were these tall Cyclone fences peppered with
KEEP OUT
and
MILITARY INSTALLATION
signs.”

“That was months later,” Chantal said. “I'd already moved to Houston with Bert.”

“Third time's a charm,” Tinker said.

“We were good, Bert and me,” Chantal said.

“What? Are you kidding?” Tinker said. “For a year?”

“I loved that one with all my heart,” Chantal said.

“Sure,” Tinker said. “So I had a room at the motel in Quantum and pretty quick landed a job at a toy store called Bigger Models.”

“Owned by Pascal Lullaby,” Chantal said. “He was real nice to her, but he was thirty and looked like the kind of guy who might try to pay a pretty girl for one thing or another.”

“How vivid,” Tinker said.

“I'm adding color,” Chantal said. “You go ahead.”

“So one night I'm finishing my shift and Pascal was in there being as sweet as pie and I figured why not, so I shared a soft drink with him and sat and listened to his story, all about his ex-wife, his toy store, the rest of his life. That got to be a habit at closing. The clientele was old guys who sat like stones at the checkout counter, drinking beer and talking model airplanes, HO-gauge trains, about the tiny people they put on their layouts. I felt bad for Pascal because his story seemed about like mine. One day Pascal says to me that he likes me pretty much, and he reaches out and rests a baseball-glove-sized hand on my thigh.”

“Didn't see that coming,” Chantal said.

“So I swatted the hand off my knee in a friendly way, like I was being playful, which was mixed signals, I guess, but Pascal backed away quick.”

“Hallelujah,” Chantal said.

“The store was in a nice spot across from the beach and we closed at one every night. I asked why we were open so late—
OPEN
'
TIL ONE,
the sign said—and he said modelers need glue all hours. He said I needed a better place than the motel, and I told him he had that right. So when he said he had an extra room I figured it would be OK. Pascal himself was only like the tenth-worst guy on the planet, and I'd already visited with the other nine, so I had nothing to lose. We crawled down the highway one night about a week into my employment, his convertible's exhaust hammering and thudding, the sky big and black, and he told me he was ready to be whatever I wanted him to be, and when he asked me how I felt about that, I said, ‘So soon?'”

“She always was a smart aleck,” Chantal said.

“But then I felt maybe I wasn't taking him seriously enough and told him I liked him OK, too. He was touched, he said, and I felt even worse. I was getting cold feet and I hadn't even got in the door. When we went upstairs to the apartment I could only imagine my future, Mama and Roy all over again. But the place was clean and straight, and from my room I could see the white ridges of the surf across the way, and I figured it was worth a try. I told him there was only the one rule, and it was that I was not dealing with his needs, and asked him if we still had a deal, and he shot out his hand to shake on it. Then we went to the motel, got my things, stopped at the convenience store for Cokes and chocolate bars and pork rinds, and moved me right on in. When bedtime rolled around that first night he appeared in my doorway to say good night, outfitted in solid-brown pajamas, white piping. He blew me a kiss, and that was it. I slept like a baby.”

“Sounds familiar,” I said.

“He was a mystery,” Tinker said, turning her head sideways that way some dogs do when something is not quite right. “He was fatherly. Full of instructions and directives and lectures, all of which made good sense, and this aspect of our relationship was magic for me. I liked it. Everything seemed settled. I was working at Bigger Models and teasing Pascal in front of his customers, and he got a kick out of that, got mileage with his regulars for having the teenage live-in. I'd tease him and he'd do his sweet grin while they all rolled their eyes and reset themselves on the stools, continuing to meditate on the niceties of modeling. We got weeks into it, then months, and we had fun together, watched some TV, ate takeout food, drove around aimlessly in his convertible car.”

“We still do that here,” Chantal said. “Don't we, Wallace?”

“We do,” I said. “Often I say to your mother, ‘Why don't we go out and drive around aimlessly for a time?' And she agrees, and we do. Enjoying it completely.”

“Uh-huh,” Tinker said. “Anyway, that's the story. I liked walking the beach, going down there around closing time, standing there in the middle of the dark night, the wind pushing at me and the water coughing up on the beach and then sliding across the road like some mutant organism.”

“Like some new science fiction show that was almost as good as some old science fiction show they'd pulled after running it into the ground?” I said.

She didn't notice me being clever. “It was not too bad,” she said. “Watching. Standing there, a couple of flood lamps on the top corners of the store spraying all the light there was except maybe the blinking red a half mile down toward the center of town.”

“So I come to visit, get a room at her Motel 6,” Chantal said. “We meet at a restaurant in town, Mulvahill's, and I meet Pascal, and Pascal has this giant head. I mean, huge. Massive. Basketball sized.”

“It was not,” Tinker said.

“Was,” Chantal said. “Gigantic head, and the setup with herself had gone to it. He tells me Tinker makes him feel like a kid again, and he starts pawing her right there.”

“That's true. He wouldn't stop,” Tinker said. “There was something about Mom being there that made him need to fondle me, wrap his arms around me, touch me.”

“I told her he wasn't a keeper,” Chantal said.

“She said he seemed like a meatball I would rather not have rolling around on my plate,” Tinker said. “Those were her exact words.”

“He was fine as long as he stayed in his cage,” Chantal said. “But when he went all Romeo and Juliet, told her she was the sun and the moon and the stars, well, it made my baby feel poorly.”

Chantal and Tinker were having too much fun telling this story, performing for each other, and seemed about two times too seasoned for me to be messing with in the first place. Right then I wished I had stayed at home and gone to jail for stealing the hogs of Curl Trenary, as we loved to say back in the eighth grade. I wished for a quiet evening with Jilly, maybe watching a Netflix movie or a nice
Wallander
episode, in Swedish, subtitled.

“That's a heck of a story,” I said.

“Wait, there's more,” Chantal said. “Isn't there, sweetie?” She petted her daughter then, by which I mean she touched her daughter's shoulder and back in a manner that was exactly the manner in which you would pet a dog.

Tinker said, “Get off me, will you?”

“It's OK, baby,” Chantal said.

“I like being an afterthought,” Tinker said. “You know? Not too much is expected, things remain on an even keel, and every time you manage to smell nice it's a big accomplishment. I'd been that girl and I was OK with that, it was familiar. Finally Pascal said he wanted to marry me. I told him he was a lovely man, a kind man, a generous man, and a good man, but no.”

“And then he raped her,” Chantal said.

“Well. Almost,” Tinker said. “Sorta.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“That was a bad night,” she said. “He was turned all the way up to deranged zombie. He knew he was in trouble. When I got free I got the twenty-two Mama used on Roy, which I had inherited and gotten repaired, and I gave Pascal a couple of flesh wounds to remember me by. Nothing too serious. Nicks and bruises, really, and he looked startled by that. So I told him I was taking the car, and he said to me, ‘You can have the car.' I told him if he squealed about the car I'd come back and testify. He nodded, wouldn't say a word, stared at the floor. I gave him a chocolate bar to cheer him up. He looked at me and did that monkey thing where you say
I love you
by pointing to yourself, rocking an imaginary baby in your arms, and pointing at the other person. That was something. I gave him a kiss on the forehead for that. Took the car and split. I've been driving around ever since. Almost ten years. All over this damn country. I've been going continuous. I'm ready to quit that, to do better.”