Eating Memories (27 page)

“Heading out west,” T.J. said. “Maybe Colorado, maybe California. When I hit the green, boys, I’m just gonna stop.” Pa, who had stopped having any sober times you could count, said, “You chicken shit,” in a hissing rattlesnake voice.

The sun was high. When the wind blew, it blew hot, and it spat sand in my face. Against the metal sides of the horse trailer, the ostriches’ beaks made small clattering noises that sounded like rain.

“Greaser!” Pa said. “You never was nothing but a greaser!”

I felt I could have dropped through the floor. T.J. had been too good to us for Pa to have any call to say that.

T.J. didn’t look angry, though. He just looked sort of sad.

“You just go on, then, you just . . .” All of a sudden Pa’s words dried up, dry as the Llano, dry as the pastures. His mouth worked up and down as, if he was going to cry. He didn’t. Instead he picked up a rock and threw it at T.J. The rock hit the side of the truck with a clang and bounced off.

Them ostriches set to clattering again, and I pictured as how I might go to the back of that horse trailer, open it up, and see rain inside there and a little stream. The moistness and cool would hit my face. Inside the walls of that horse trailer, birds would be singing to beat the band, and there would be tender grass and a bunch of yellow butterflies in there, too.

T.J. drove away, raising a plume of dust, taking the ostriches, taking the rain. After a while, Pa went in the house, and, when the sun got too hot, I went in, too. We didn’t talk about Willie or T.J., and that very evening Pa left for Austin, and didn’t come back for three days.

When he come, he brought another girl with him, a pretty little Tex-Mex girl named Teresa, with big brown eyes and a fall of black hair. Her arms and legs was so thin that the bones seemed as it they must be hollow. There wasn’t much flesh on them sparrow bones of hers, and on the inside of each arm, on the tops of her small hands, in the webbed skin between each finger, and on the back of her skinny little-girl knees, were the blue tracks of the needle.

She wasn’t no older than I was.

And all of a sudden, I had two to care for. Pa was starting to get bad sick from drink, and sometimes he and that girl wouldn’t get up till late afternoon. Pa’s bedroom got nasty, like giant mice were nesting there. He never pulled up the shades. When they’d get out of bed, I’d fix them something to eat, and they’d pick at the food, neither one of them bothering to talk. Then they’d crawl back in the bedroom and shut the door, like they was trying to lock the world out. In a lot of ways, it was lonelier than having no one there at all.

Pa brought in some of the longhorns and put them in a corral. Every sixth Friday, Pa would get up, get dressed, and load up a steer. Then he’d plunk the girl in the front seat with him and drive to Austin. He started coming home regular and on time, but with a load of whiskey where the steer used to be, and a bunch of brown stuff for the girl’s arm. When they got to the ranch, they’d get out of the truck and crawl right back in their nest.

Jesus. I don’t think they ever even made love. It didn’t look like they had the energy for it. What they did in that bedroom was a lot more private than fucking, a thing so terrible that I guess they thought that they just had to hide it away.

They were dying, is what it was. Teresa got sick first, with a bad abscessed knee. I got her up and washed, and used the same Blue Star ointment on the sore that we used on the cattle. Pa stood around with his eyes kind of glazed. I wasn’t sure he knew she was sick. I didn’t know if he cared.

“Told you I’d boil them needles for
you,”
I told her. I was pretty angry.

“Sometimes I just forget.”

“You lose your leg, that’ll be a fucking reminder.”

When she started to cry, I felt bad, as if I’d hurt a kitten. Then Pa went down sick, but there wasn’t much I could do but get some water and food in him. Teresa started washing her hair and getting dressed right. She started coming in the kitchen more, and hanging around.

“You’re just a little kid,” I said, staring at her baby’s hands, her stick wrists. “If things was the way they should be, with a sheriff still around and all, he’d put Pa in jail because of you.”

“Sheriff, he don’t care who junkies fuck.”

“How’d you get on that shit, anyway?” I asked her.

She shrugged. “I always been on it.”

“Get the pail and take it in to the Angus,” I always had to tell her everything, spell it out, like she was stupid and not just high.

She did it, though. Everything I told her.

“Don’t know what you see in Pa.”

“It ain’t like I love him,” she said, and gave me a look. She was staring at my chest. I was running all over sweat from the heat, and could feel the sting of the sun on my back and the sting of her gaze at my front.

“You want to fuck me?” she said.

I looked away. “No.”

“I won’t tell him.”

“No.”

She walked back into the house, limping a little from her leg. I watched her go, watched how she moved under her shorts. Even with the needle tracks, she was prettier and younger than the San Saba whores.

Pa got sicker instead of better, but when I was outside tending cattle, he’d stumble into the kitchen and get himself a drink. Nights he’d call to Teresa with that whispery dead-leaf voice of his; and then I’d hear her fumbling around in the kitchen.

“You can’t drink, Pa,” I told him. “Not while you’re sick like this.”

In the few weeks he’d been sick. Pa’d become an old man. His hands were all bones and veins. His eyes had sunk back into his head.

He promised me he wouldn’t drink no more, he’d tell me how it was eating up his insides and making him like an animal. He’d cry like a baby and tell me how much he goddamned loved me. But just as soon as I’d go outside to tend the animals, I’d see Teresa at the kitchen window, a bottle in her hand.

One night in the kitchen I screamed at her, “Stop giving him the whiskey! You stupid jerk! Can’t you see he’s dying!”

“I know his kind of need,” she told me straight out, and with a smart-assed tilt to her head, like having to lean on whiskey or dope was something to be proud of. “You don’t know nothing.”

I started slamming around kitchen cabinets and throwing a pot of chili together.

“You want to fuck me?” she asked.

I turned. She was so small that her tininess made my breath catch in my throat. Her eyes were brown and huge, like the sloe eyes of deer or the kind, dumb eyes of cattle. She wasn’t much like the woman in the
Playboy
picture. That woman had been soft but strong, something the earth had nurtured. Nothing fed Teresa. Not Pa. Not me.

I left the chili boiling on the stove, and we went out to the barn so Pa couldn’t hear.

She must have thought I should get acquainted with need, because in the next couple of weeks, she sure introduced us. I could see her just standing there, chin on her hands the way she did, looking out to the corral, and all of a sudden that need would steamroller me.

Having her around made the desert seem okay, not lonely any more or ugly. I started thinking about how I might marry her. And, God forgive me, I started wishing Pa would go ahead and die.

When her supply of stuff started getting low, though, things just fell apart. Cleaning up after dinner one night, she started fidgeting real bad.

“I need to go into town, Tommy,” she told me. I got this real bad need to go there.

I looked up from the dishes I was washing. She was sweating. Her skin was white, and it stretched over the hollow bones of her face like paper. “No,” I said.

“You don’t love me,” she said. “If you loved me, you’d take me.”

“I love you so much, I ain’t going to see you die like Pa’s dying. That’s how much I goddamn love you.”

She sniffed and wiped her nose. The tip of it was red, but she wasn’t crying. “They got methadone in Austin. It’s the stuff that gets you off the horse. Otherwise, that horse just keeps on running, you know what I mean? And the ground goes by so fast, and you’re up so high, that if you fall, you know it’ll kill you.”

She was holding herself like she was cold.

“I been wanting to get clean a long time now.” She started to shiver and looked real sick. “It’s your Pa keeping me back. I can’t quit without methadone, and he won’t buy me none.”

When I didn’t answer, she told me, “You can die from quitting cold. I ain’t no use to you dead.”

“Okay,” I said. “Just a little methadone.”

I loaded a yearling steer in the truck, and we set: off for Austin; me without even bothering to check on Pa, her without thinking about it, neither.

I knew that Austin had been hit harder than most places by the spotted fever, but I never expected how bad it could be. Austin looked like a town somebody’d kicked in the balls. There was empty buildings everywhere, and the state Capitol had most of its windows knocked out. There was dead grass and dead leaves all over the street, and the whole place gave me a hollow feeling in the gut, like maybe the people who’d died of the spotted fever were lurking around in the shadows, waiting.

In an apartment down by the old university, I seen the only signs of life. Three pickup trucks sat in the parking lot, and upstairs on the second floor, some lights were on.

We walked up, and a white man with dirty hair answered our knock. “Hello again, bitch. Who’d you bring with you this time?”

I wanted to punch the man in the mouth. He was too small, though.

His face was, too pinched. His shirt was open, and his bare chest was knobs all the way down to his stomach. I was afraid that if I hit him, the fist would go right through, and I’d find out he, was just a cardboard cutout.

Behind him, on a couch, sat a black man with a torn orange sweat-shirt, and on a coffee table was a big pile of jewelry: rings and bracelets and gold watches.

“This is the old man’s son,” Teresa said in a tiny, apologetic voice. “We come to get some stuff. You got the stuff?”

“Methadone,” I told him.

The white man ignored me. “A little. I been waiting for Julio. Delivery from Juarez tonight.”

I looked at the jewelry on the table again, and knew it was dead people’s jewelry.

“He brought a cow,” Teresa told him.

The man on the couch stirred a little. The man at the door perked up. “Get the gun, Dave,” he said.

The black man with the orange sweatshirt got up, went into the bedroom, and came back with a pistol. Then me and him walked down to the trailer.

I got in by the steer’s head and the black man pushed in, too. When the yearling got jittery and started butting, he raised his gun. “Goddamn!” I shouted. “Don’t kill the fucking steer in the trailer. We’ll never get him out!”

The man was shaking real bad, and he kept trying to aim in the dark. I touched his shoulder, and then jerked my hand back. I had never felt nothing like that. Under that sweatshirt, his bones was all raw, and he felt like a chicken leg a hungry dog had gone after. These men must be starving to death. And then it hit me what Teresa had seen in Pa.

I took the yearling’s halter and backed him out the gate. When I got him out in the parking lot, I seen the white man was there, and I seen Teresa squatting on the asphalt, hugging her knees and shaking her head like she’d just seen something beautiful.

“Oh dear Jesus. Oh sweet Jesus,” she was saying in a dreamy sort of voice.

The black man came up and tried to take the halter out of my hand. I pushed him away. He pushed too easy, as if he didn’t have no substance in him. The two men backed up, scared of me, even though they was the ones with the gun. In the dark of the parking lot, they watched me for a while. The black man was licking his lips.

“Come on, honey,” I said to Teresa, putting my hand down to her.

She kept rocking and shaking her head.

“Come on,” I said sweet as I could. “Get up.”

She didn’t. After a while, her rocking started spooking me bad. “Is that how that methadone is supposed to work?” I asked the white man.

“What methadone?” he said.

My chest went numb. I dropped the lead to the steer, got in my pickup, and left. When I turned the comer at the end of the street, I heard the first of the shots. There were three of them, spaced out from each other a bit. It was only after the third shot that the bawling of that poor longhorn yearling finally stopped. Those hop heads made a mess of everything they touched.

That night, I drove down to the coast and watched the sun come up over the mud fiats. I slept an hour or two in the truck, and then, about eight in the morning, I headed on back to the ranch. When I got there in the afternoon, I seen Pa wasn’t in his room no more. That scared me, and I walked around the barn and the corrals, checking to see if he had dragged himself someplace to die.

When I couldn’t find him, I up and packed my things: all my clothes and, the 30.06 Pa had give me one Christmas. When I got back in the yard, I seen Pa. He was standing against the corral, watching the Angus sniff the longhorns.

“Take a lesson from that old bull,” Pa said. I knew he was mad, and his anger had pushed a lot of the sickness out. He was smiling coldly, and there was color high on his cheeks. “You know, when I was humping her, she stayed. Soon as you started humping her, she left.”

I remembered Teresa crouched in the parking lot, rocking, and, for a minute, I wanted to get in my truck, drive back there like blazes, and see if she was all right. The shame of what I had done, and the need to see her again, was so bad that it made my hands start to tremble.

“I’m leaving, Pa.”

“Taking her?”

“No.” I wanted to take Teresa, but I knew that if I tried to pick her up, my hands would pass right through. She had never been nothing but a ghost, one of the thousands in Austin—dead as the ghosts of the red oaks that stood watch over Llano’s fields. “Heading to Michigan, I reckon.”

“Well, you just get your ass in gear, then. Me and this old bull, we’ll just settle down here by ourselves. He’s the only thing ever goddamned understood me, anyway.”

I could tell that Pa was remembering everyone and everything that had ever left him: Ma, Corpus Christi, the white-tailed deer.