Gypsy Davey (6 page)

“Okay,” Davey said, holding his hands in prayer position, then quickly flipping them over and back to make a sort of moving picture out of his cowboys.

Pete brought them to his motel, which was next door to a sub shop that looked like the tower of Pisa. A one-story, L-shaped building, the motel was white with white shutters and a white cement walk leading to each door. Inside Pete's room was almost nothing. A double bed, a night table, an oil painting of a waterfall in the middle of a forest, with a lot of mist and pine trees edged with snow of titanium white.

“No phone, no food, no pets, lots and lots of cigarettes,” Pete said. “King of the road.” He plunked himself down on the bed, pulled a tall green warm bottle of Haffenreffer malt liquor out of the nightstand drawer, and got right to the point.

“You kids want to come to Florida? You can, y'know. Say the word and the three of us'll hop in El Cam right this minute and be in Fort Lauderdale by the weekend. I sure would
love to have you kids. We could even visit Gary. Jesus, Gary would be thrilled.”

Joanne and Davey stood just inside the doorway. Davey stopped looking at his tattoos, looked briefly at Sneaky Pete, then at Joanne.

“Wow,” Joanne said, a big grin peeling across her face. She sat on the edge of the bed. “Let's go.”

Pete took a long drink, slammed the bottle down, then clapped one loud clap. “Alll riiight,” he said, turning to Davey.

Davey took a step back, groped behind him for the doorknob without looking, opened the door. “Ah, um, thanks, Dad. For, y'know, everything. I gotta go now. Mum'll be missing me by now, so . . . I gotta go.”

He disappeared out the door and started walking the quarter mile toward home. Pete sat speechless. Joanne stared at the door, then slowly turned back to Sneaky Pete.

“You know, right. That I can't leave him. I can't,” Joanne said sadly.

She stood up. Pete stood up next to her and nodded. They went out together, caught up to Davey, and all walked home in the chill beginning of the night.

“Where have you two been?”
Lois said in that fuzzy low growl that held more violence than any scream.

“Where the
ac
tion is,” Joanne mocked.

Lois was rushing toward Joanne, open hand raised, when Pete stepped through the door. “And what the hell do you think
you're
doin'?” Pete yelled.

Lois jumped back, her hand covering her thrumming heart. She had no idea Sneaky Pete, or anyone else, was there.

“Oh,” she said, recovering in a shot. “I would have known it was you. Who the hell do you think—”

“Lois, if I catch you hitting these kids, you can just kiss 'em good-bye, 'cause I'll take 'em to Florida. I'll take 'em legally, and I'll take 'em so far deep into the 'Glades the
'gators'll eat ya before you can find 'em. And if they don't eat ya,
I
'll kick your ass.”

“You want to talk about legal, Pete?
You
don't want to talk about legal do you?”

“What is your problem, anyway, Lois? Afraid the kids are enjoying themselves?”

“Ya, great entertainment, Pete. Look at them.” She gestured toward the living room, where Davey had slunk to the couch and was tapping the crystal on one of his two-dollar watches to get it working. Then she pointed at Joanne, who still stood next to her father and who, on cue, shook her wrists limply to make them clank and tinkle with cheese jewelry.

“They look like
you
for god's sake, you sleazy bastard!” Lois hollered.

“Speakin' of sleazy, where were you anyway when I came and took 'em, huh, Lois?”

“Get out of here, Peter. Just get your deadbeat ass out of my house. And the next time you break in here, I'm calling the police.”

“Next time I break in, you probably won't be here then either.”

“Out,” Lois said, pointing at the door.

Sneaky Pete walked right up to Lois, who continued to point, then walked past her. He went to Davey on the couch.
Davey had the TV on now, and loud, but he wasn't looking at it. He was looking at his tattoos.

“Thanks for a sweet time, Davey,” Pete said. “You guys really make it for me, y'know.” Davey looked up into Pete's face, and Pete stooped to kiss him on his great expanse of forehead. “Whenever you need me, you call, okay?”

“Okay, Dad,” Davey said, then looked away from Pete, at the tattoos again, then at the TV.

Pete passed again by Lois, who remained like a pointing mannequin. When he reached Joanne, she hugged him around the waist and rubbed her face back and forth over his chest.

“You sure?” he said.

“No, I'm not,” she answered. “But I can't.”

“Okay, sweetheart,” Pete said. “I'll see you soon.”

“Oh no you won't,” Lois snapped.

“Oh yes he
will
,” Joanne spat.

Sneaky Pete smiled at Lois as he backed out the door. “Lo, I gotta tell ya, you're one sucky muthuh.”

He just managed to pull the door closed as Lois ricocheted a shoe off it, screaming without words.

“Take better care of 'em, Lois,” Pete called on his way down the stairs, “or I'll know . . .”

Standing there with one shoe on, Lois stared at the door, fought back tears before speaking to Joanne. “What did he mean, Joanne, ‘Are you sure'?”

“None of your business.” Joanne fully expected a smack when she said it, but she didn't care.

Lois didn't move. She asked again, more quietly, “What was he talking about?”

“What are you,
jealous
? Because he likes me and he doesn't like you?” Like a shark Joanne could taste this kind of thing when it was happening, and she bit. She felt herself getting stronger, more pugnacious, while Lois faded. “Because you're just an old
rag
and
I'm not
? Huh, Ma?” With the words, Joanne marched right up to her mother and stood there, arms at her sides, practically demanding to be hit. Even Davey looked in from the other room, briefly, before turning away again.

But Lois didn't move. She continued to stare at the door, over Joanne's head, but now let the tears roll.

“The only thing I can do for you now is to tell you this, Jo. Don't hold on so tight to being a young thing. Because while you may remain pretty and you may remain smart and you may get rich, the one thing in this world you can be absolutely sure about is that one day, maybe soon, you will not be young anymore. And everybody's going to know it, and nothing else is going to matter.”

Joanne stood, quiet, waiting. “Ya, so?”

When Lois didn't answer, Joanne just walked around her and went to her room.

“Ya, so . . . ,” Lois repeated.

When Joanne came out an hour later expecting to find her supper, she found instead Lois hugging Davey with both arms while he sat staring blankly at the TV. He wore her as calmly as if she were a parrot sitting on his shoulder. Joanne made macaroni and cheese for all of them and they ate in dead silence.

Lois was out of bed at dawn the next morning, reading out of an old yellow Betty Crocker cookbook as she tried to make real pancakes. Puffs of flour dust rose gently, then faded to the table or the floor as she first picked out the tiny brown mealybugs then poured carefully into the measuring cup. An eggshell fragment the size of a fingernail trimming was going to have to stay in the mix after Lois buried it deeper by chasing after it. With every flick of the whisk more batter spilled over the side of the bowl, but it
was
batter. She tasted it with her finger. She was good at this, some time ago, and the taste of the wet batter reminded her of that.

She pulled a half box of breakfast sausages from the freezer. She didn't remember buying them. The box was wide open and the links were crusted in a quarter inch of spiny white frost. That wouldn't matter, though, after the boiling. Lois always boiled sausages before browning them, to reduce the fat.

Lois had just nodded off at the table when the children
crept stiffly into the kitchen. They didn't sit down at first, stood there mesmerized at the mess of cooking stuff all over, and at the actual early-morning presence of their mother. Joanne raised her nose in the air and whiffed the sausages that were warming in the oven. Davey stuck his finger in the dripping bowl that sat on the table, tasted it, then pulled back like he'd seen something wiggling in there.

Lois's eyes opened slowly, followed a few seconds later by full awareness. She was embarrassed. “Come on, sit down,” she said, jumping up and making herself busy. She slapped plates and silverware down, dropped one dollop, then four into the sizzling skillet, and in a few minutes served pancakes, sausages, and sectioned fresh oranges to her gape-mouthed baby birds. Joanne and Davey ate quickly, ravenously, not out of a great hunger, exactly, but out of a
desire
for this food right here. Between bites they would tip glances up at Lois, who was smiling as she watched, smiling satisfied, but smiling tired.

The meal finished, the kids sat back pregnant with round bellies and with feelings they didn't know, things they couldn't get out. Lois disappeared briefly into the bathroom and returned with a comb to attack the mop that was always on Davey's head. The comb got impossibly stuck an inch above his forehead, and she pulled it out with a laugh. Joanne gave her mother a weak smile and tapped Davey on
the shoulder, and they got up. “Thanks, Mum,” Davey said as Jo led him out to school. “Thanks, Mum.”

“You want me to take care of that, Davey?” Joanne said hurriedly, pointing at his tattoo. “I'm sure I could take that right out in no time. With cold cream.”

“No thanks,” he said, walking away with his hands clasped behind his back. He'd already touched up both tattoos to keep them alive a little longer, working with either hand, with a pen.

When they were gone, Lois looked around at the kind of domestic mess she hadn't witnessed in years. Dirty dishes, heavy batter solidifying on the table, the floor, the stove. Every container she'd opened sitting open. Eggshells and orange peels sitting in the sink. The entire room seeming to be powdered in flour.

She stood up to work on it. The smile left her, the flutter of joy in her belly gone with it. The tiredness returned in its place. Lifelessly she picked up the batter bowl and trucked it toward the sink. The bowl slipped out of her buttery hand and exploded like a smashed windshield on the floor. Lois stared down at it, stood on it, and quietly began to cry again. She couldn't do this. Not really, not for real, not for long, not even for one more meal, she already knew. She couldn't do this. She couldn't do
this
.

Joanne came back through the kitchen door, making
Davey wait outside for her. She
could
do it, she thought after she'd left. She could tell her mother thank you. But Joanne was stunned all over again to find the abandoned kitchen, the untouched mess, to crush under her feet the smashed pieces of glass. She walked to her mother's bedroom and found her lying under the blankets, coiled on her side, staring at her music box, which was open and tinkling “Nadia's Theme.” As it would play for Lois all day long.

Joanne crept back out of the room. She cleaned the kitchen so thoroughly it was hard to remember the breakfast scene. Then she went out and collected Davey, who still waited, forty minutes and late for school, on the step.

They want to take Jo's
baby away. I don't know who they are but they are making a mistake because they can't have him. Because I don't care I really don't what they say or what they think or whatever about how maybe Jo does or can or doesn't or can't take care of the baby Dennis but it's all just stupid as hell because I can take care of the baby Dennis and that's that.

They said that maybe 'cause Jo isn't there at the house all the time and because her old man like she calls him isn't there at all and because the baby Dennis spent too much time with nobody stopping him from standing up in his little cracked painted crib that was mine a long time ago that Ma said Jo stole but if it was mine I say he can have it so never mind Ma and Jo and all their stuff. Staring out the window chewing enough
of the paint off the side of the crib and some more off the windowsills when he goes there to stare some more that now he has to go to children's hospital every week and let them look at his blood and he has to take some medicine they think that's the reason that maybe he should get taken away.

But who doesn't stare out the window is what I say. If I had a nickel for every hour I spent staring out the window at maybe a cloud that looks like my mother's ice-white pretty face or at the rain that looks like the drops grow and grow into blobby clear water balloons as they get closer to the ground because I have eyes good enough that I can zero in on one single one from all that far away. Or at a star in the purple at night. For a million hours I could do that. Well if I had a nickel for all the times I did that I'd just have a lot of money is what I'd have.

And
I
make him take his medicine anyway. All the time just like he's supposed to I make him swallow it even though he hates it and he gets crazy and he hates me for giving it to him and he slaps me and scratches me and kicks me and there is nothing nothing that can hurt me like my baby Dennis trying to hurt me. I used to come just some days but now I come practically every day because Jo isn't so serious as maybe she ought to be about giving the baby Dennis his medicine and once she found out that I was very serious about it I think that just maybe she forgot a couple of times on purpose just to make sure I'd
come and boom she could get out of the apartment like on a rocket ship. And giving me two glasses of wine now because she's so happy to be going and I'm so happy to be staying.