Wire Mesh Mothers (34 page)

“Why?”

“We was supposed to be talked about, wondered about. We was supposed to be worried about, all over the county. We was supposed to be the gang everybody was scared of but nobody knew our names. Like the big gangs in the big places, ones that shoot up stuff and people and write ‘don’t fuck with us’ on walls but nobody knows exactly who did the shoot-ups ‘cause they’re quick, man, they’re smart and they don’t get caught. But Whitey shot that bastard and now he’s arrested. He’s gonna talk you can bet. Bark like a dog. All the Hot Heads going down, except me, ‘cause I’m here in fucking Texas.”

Kate stood and put her hand on Tony’s arm. Tony jerked away. “Why you touching me?” she demanded. “Don’t fucking ever do that!”

“He’s arrested. Okay. He killed the gasoline man, he should be arrested. Don’t you think?”

Tony scratched at the back of her ear. “He’ll get the needle over in
Jarratt
if they try him as an adult, you know. It could have been me. I could have shot him, and got arrested. I could have been the first girl on death row in Virginia. Know that? People don’t think girls got it in them, but fuck, they do.”

Kate spoke slowly. “Is that what you want, Tony? I don’t get it. What is it you want out of all this?”

Tony slammed the receiver into the steel box and then down onto the cradle. She put her mouth on her arm and bit down. Kate could hear the air drawing through her teeth.

“Don’t, Tony.”

Tony let go and smiled, her incisors streaked in blood. Her arm bore the angry and jagged imprint of the teeth, outlined in bright red. Already the skin was rising in defense of itself, puffing up against the assault. Tony held the arm out to Kate. “Tastes good! Better than mouse shit I bet! Wanna try? Now if I go down fighting, they’ll be able to ID me from my dental records! Ha!”

“Tony, what do you want?”

“I want a dare from you.”

Kate shook her head. “Let’s get in the truck and go on. I’ve got a map. We can find
Lamesa
. It might not be much farther.”

“Got a dare for you,” said Tony.

“No more dares.”

“A dare. I know too much about your fucking life as it is for any more damned truths. So here’s the dare. Call your husband. And he better be at the office.”

Kate felt a click in the back of her throat. “Tony, let’s leave him out of this. You know we aren’t into pedophilia rings. You know that was way off base.”

The knife appeared, and
waggered
in the air like a steel mosquito ready for the bite. “Call him. Want me to get him on the line for you? I’ll say I’m you. ‘Collect call from Mrs. Kate McDolen, rich bitch moron who licks mouse shit!’”

“I will go with you to
Lamesa
. You don’t need to threaten me anymore. I’ll drive you to your dad’s ranch. But just let Mistie and me alone. Let us go on our way when it’s done. There is no reason to call Donald.”

“Ronald McDonald!” said Tony. “Call him, bitch, or Mistie’s gonna sport a new tattoo, a nice set of teeth marks like mine here, only deeper.” She yanked Mistie back by the arm, and held the girl beside her, knife running through the girl’s hair. “How deep ‘til you hit bone and come out the other side? My sister Darlene was digging to China. Think she’s there yet?”

Kate picked up the phone. Her head itched furiously. She probably had Tony’s head lice. One eight-hundred collect. She pressed the numbers, waited for instructions, spoke her name. On the back of her left leg, the tickling of blood in a warm pattern down through the stubble of hair.

Lisa answered the phone.

“Lisa, it’s Kate.”

“Collect again? Honey, you are having phone trouble!” A small and distant chuckle. Kate couldn’t tell if Lisa was really trying to be funny or if she sensed something was off-balance. “How are you?”

“Okay. Lisa, is Donald in?”

“Sure is, Kate. Just hang on one dilly-dally moment, okay?”

Kate couldn’t say okay. God, but her leg was throbbing now, and both were shaking.
I don’t want to talk to Donald. Maybe he’s in the conference room, maybe he’s out in the hall. Please, let his voice mail pick up.

“Hello, Donald McDolen speaking.”

“Donald….”

“Kate! Where are you? I found your note. God knows I’ve respected your request to let you be awhile, but I thought you’d at least call, to at least touch base, for Christ’s sake. Are you all right?”

Kate looked at Tony, who whispered, “Tell him you kidnapped Mistie. Tell him you’re in Texas with one of the Hot Heads, running from the law.”

“Kate? Are you still there?”

“I’m here, Donald.”
I’m not far from Mexico, no matter what I tell him, Tony doesn’t know I’m going to Mexico.
“Here, in Texas.”

“Texas? You’re kidding, right? What in the world did you think you’d find in Texas?”

“Tell him the town,” said Tony.

“Nacogdoches, Texas,” said Kate.

“Whatever you say. Is the air good there? All that, what, nice dry heat to clear you head? Is there a counselor there to work on…your issue?”

Fury flared up the back of Kate’s neck.
Son of a bitch! My issue? Am I getting help?

“No.”

“I covered you, Kate,” said Donald. She could see him as he told her his this, one arm locked over his chest, the elbow of the other resting on top of the balled fist, sitting on the edge of his desk. The gray hair, neatly cut and neatly
moussed
, now just a little frizzy around the edge with anger. “I called Stuart Gordonson and asked him to let the school know you’d be out a short while. Of course, you didn’t say how long, so I felt a bit the fool on that count.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re on your way home now, am I right? I can tell Gordon you’ll be this week, yes? By, say, Wednesday at the latest? I can tell Gordon that?”

“Tell him what you did,” said Tony. She picked at a front tooth with her knife, wiped the blade on the side of her camouflage shorts, then pointed it back at Mistie. “C’mon, now, you’re talking on his dime.”

“I…I have a girl with me.”

A pause back across the many miles in Virginia. “A girl. What do you mean?”

He’s thinking I’ve got a lover,
thought Kate
, some kind of Texas cowgirl lover.
The thought was nearly enough to bring on a dry laugh. Nearly. “A girl from my school. A second grader.”

“Her name,” whispered Tony.

“What’s her name?” asked Donald.

Mexico, a few hours, tops. We’ll be okay, we’ll make it.
“Mistie Henderson,” said Kate.

“Henderson,” said Donald. “There was something in the local paper about a Henderson girl not showing up at her trailer park. They weren’t sure if she’s an
abductee
or a runaway. The residents thought she was a runaway. You…have her?”

“I do, Donald. Let me explain….”

Then Tony pinched her nose and wailed, “Help! I’m Mistie! She grabbed me and threw me in her white car! Help me…!” Then Tony snatched the receiver; slammed it down, and hopped back with a little skip-jump. She laughed loud and long, rocking back like a hyena in a Disney cartoon.

“What did you do that for?” cried Kate. “That’s not how it happened!”

“It don’t matter how it happened,” laughed Tony. “It happened. You’re a kidnapper, you said so yourself! And now your husband knows it, too!”

“He won’t believe it. Not the part about throwing her in the car. He’ll think I’m the one kidnapped. He’ll think I was forced to make the call. Do you know how fake you sounded?”

“But he’ll wonder, he’ll doubt! You left him in the first place, didn’t you, and wrote a note to tell him go were going? I heard that! So he’s gonna know something’s screwed up.”

“He won’t believe what you said.”

“Maybe, maybe not. But the police believed it.”

Kate paused, gaped, wiped sweat from her eyes. Her heart stopped one beat, then another, then picked up again. “The police…
believed
it?

“After I talked to Leroy, I called the police. Right here in whatever the hell this town is called, I forgot. It was easy, got an operator, didn’t even need the one-eight hundred collect. Asked for the city police department. Said my name was Tony and I was with a kid and woman from Pippins, Virginia. Said I’d robbed an Exxon back home and you’d stole a little kid named Mistie. Said they could check up there and know I was right. They wanted to know why I called to confess, and I said what’s the fun of nobody knowing? And I hung up real quick.”

“Tony, we’re
this
close to
Lamesa
! You could have gotten with your dad!”

“I still will, but its better this way!”

“You’ve lost your mind!”

“You think I ever really had it, bitch?”

Kate looked over her shoulder at the road. How long until they have photos of the missing Mistie from Pippins? How long until they check out the story on the Exxon robbery? “You didn’t give them my name?”

“Sure.”

This will be FBI. This will be federal. God. God.

“The truck we’re driving?”

“I said it was a tan truck. I’m not stupid enough to tell them everything like
thelicense
plate or anything, shit, they gotta do some of the work.” Tony grinned, wiggled her eyebrows. “Guess we should get going. How
far’s
Lamesa
?”

God, we have to hurry!

Tony put out her hand as she slammed the passenger’s door behind her and turned on her butt to Kate at the wheel. “And I hope you got something good to eat in that store back there.”

T
he aspirins tasted okay, the crackers tasted okay, and her head didn’t ache as much as it had, but Mistie wanted to go home. She was tired and she hated this truck. She wanted to see Mama, to see Daddy. Daddy did stuff she didn’t like but she still liked Daddy. He never hit her like one of the old men did his little boy Jake back at MeadowView. Daddy never “punched out her lights” like that other Daddy did his boy.

Mistie rubbed her crotch until it grew real warm. She licked cracker crumbs off her hand and then whined because she was really, really thirsty and the teacher hadn’t gotten anything to drink back at that store.

“What’s the matter, Mistie?” asked the teacher. She was driving. Her hands were tied up again, one on the wheel and the other on the stick thing on the floor.

“I’m thirsty. I want to go home.”

“I’ll look for a water fountain soon. There has to be one in one of these towns.”

“I want to go home.”

“She wants to go home,” said the girl with the knife.

“Honey, I can’t do that. It would be wrong. I’m going to make the wrong right.”

Mistie put her hands over her ears and repeated, “Mama had a baby and its head popped off, Mama had a baby and its head popped off.”

“
Shh
,
Misite
, it will be okay,” said the teacher.

“Mama had a baby and its head popped off.”

“
Shhh
.”

F
arstone
looked like a real Texas town. Tony had her head out the window, blinking in the warm wind and sucking it all in. Clinging to Route 180, the town was three blocks long and four to five blocks wide, with trailers and shacks and two greasy-windowed lounges (the “Gila Monster” and “Blue Star Lounge, Adults Only”) making up the bulk of the place. This was the kind of town Tony would have expected to see sheriffs with hip holsters and horses tied to hitching posts and tumbleweeds careening along wooden walkways like runaway rabbits. Here, Tony could have expected to see Tony Perkins standing with his arms crossed beneath an elm tree on a high and dusty knoll, one boot propped up against the base of the trunk, his head turned out across the vast stretch of barren land, not a single emotion showing on his face.

There were no gun-slinging sheriffs or hitching posts here, but there could have been. The town was dusty and brown and even the air tasted like cattle and barbed wire. The landscape was flat, the dogs sleepy, and the trees bent and haggard. This, Tony knew, was the Wild, Wild West.

“Look,” Tony said to Mistie, nudging her with her elbow as they entered the town limits and passed a cluster of little white
houses
surrounded by billowing clothes on clotheslines. “I think that’s a roadrunner out there, see? You like T.V., you’ve seen the roadrunner, right? Beep
beep
!”

Mistie looked out the window and nodded at the small blur of brown that darted across the rocky ground between the white
houses
. She didn’t seem so sick anymore, not since they’d stopped for a drink from a gas station water hose back about an hour ago in town called Carbon. The kid had eaten the whole pack of peanut butter crackers the teacher had stolen from the store and then half the crackers in another pack. She had listened with what seemed like a real interest in the stories Tony wove about her father and the
Lamesa
ranch.