Marvel and a Wonder (32 page)

His knees felt like he was on shore leave. He was happy reminiscing like this. He was getting pleasantly light-headed thinking about all those times. Bells rang in his head, the traffic roaring past like the engine of his old ship: the USS
Abraham Lincoln
. No. No, that wasn’t the name of the first one. What was the name of it? Jesus. He had to get his head together. Shoot. Take a deep breath. Good. He moved the shirt away from his forehead and saw it was stained a motley red. Shit.

He climbed inside the vehicle, searching for the keys in his pocket; upon finding them he realized his eyelashes were stuck together with blood. He breathed for a moment and saw the driver’s-side door was hung wide open; he was sitting there in a fog, staring at nothing, and bleeding. What had that girl done to him? He glimpsed the digital clock on the dashboard, even though his left eye was now closed with blood. It occurred to him that it was now one o’clock in the afternoon, though for the life of him, he could not remember why this even mattered.

_________________

The black man glanced up from the battered blade of the riding mower—the machine lying on its side, its metallic undercarriage gleaming, greased, exposed—running the whetstone against the edge, trying to get it sharpened once again, hoping to get one more run from it before he was forced to order its replacement from Dallas. Beyond the green hummocks of Spring Hills, the cemetery was peaceful at this time of the day, the headstones placed at solemn intervals, extending in all directions as far as the eye could see. Peering over the top of his glasses—the glasses which were all but useless, as the prescription was a good ten or twenty years out of date; his daughter, who would take care of such things, had finally gotten married to a man from her church and had moved away to New Orleans sometime back—the man felt a tremor run through him, right down to his toes. He placed a hand over his chest, directly beside his name tag, which was stitched with the name
Roy
in blue cursive.

A white woman—in a white veil—was walking through the woods. He set the whetstone down, crouching behind the overturned lawn mower, the apparition slowly moving among the graves, searching for its final resting place, moving only as a ghost could, in a languorous, drifting motion, rising and falling, rising and falling with the wind through the loblolly pine. And then, just as it was making its way toward him, his hand searching for a screwdriver or folding knife—anything with which to defend himself—it disappeared. The old man pushed the glasses flush again his face, seeing it was not the ghost of a woman but the ghost of a horse, some Confederate charger searching for its long-dead rider, as many of those gray soldiers of old had loved their horses more than their wives or children, stealing rations for them, blankets for them, sleeping right beside them at the edges of the battlefield. In some of these cemeteries were colonels and generals buried right alongside their famous steeds, and there were two or three plots only a half-mile off where a handful of racehorses had been buried. The groundskeeper was no longer startled by the white horse tromping there, as it was only one of a dozen ghosts he had seen over the course of his years working that particular job; and so, resuming his work, he eyed the blade, taking the whetstone in his hand again, and set it against the dulled edge.

* * *

Inside the motel room, the grandfather glanced around at the rumpled twin beds and blotchy carpet like it was a crime scene. He took a seat on one of the beds, pulled the telephone into his lap, and hit
Redial
on the glossy receiver. Soon someone on the other end answered, announcing that it was the bus depot in a twangy drawl. The grandfather smiled and asked for a street address. They immediately headed back to the pickup as it was now past two o’clock and there was no telling how much time they had lost already.

* * *

The girl ran. The first thing she came upon was a long concrete embankment leading up to an overpass. She followed the sound of traffic until she made it to a thoroughfare where she thought it would be safer to try to walk like a normal person. She decided the most important thing was to keep moving; anywhere, as long as she was moving. She could think about the rest later. Because that asshole would be after her, and when he did find her, he was going to seriously fuck her world up. Just keep moving. She peered both ways down the drag, saw a strip mall, a Bob Evans restaurant, some sort of factory where they made frozen chicken, and a wax museum. What she needed was a telephone right now. And somewhere she could hide out for a while so she could have a chance to think. All right. She decided on the wax museum, limping there, her soles sore from running in stupid fucking heels.

The museum looked like an old-time general store, and when she stumbled inside, she found she was in the middle of a chintzy-looking gift shop. She asked the elderly lady behind the counter if there was a public phone anywhere. The woman pointed to a pay phone, down a short hall, outside a pair of restrooms. The girl smiled, rummaging through her purse for some change, knowing there were only a few nickels and dimes. She would call her father this time, collect. She was through fucking around. If she sounded desperate enough, he would have to help her. She picked up the phone, dialed the operator, told her it was collect, and waited for it to ring. Her father, a Dallas entertainment lawyer, would never answer it himself. It would either be her mother or Marta the maid. After the third ring, Marta’s heavy accent offered a greeting and Rylee immediately started shouting for her father. A few moments later, her daddy picked up.

Apparently he was working out on the treadmill, the sound of its whirring gears, his shoes slapping the belt, and Lynyrd Skynyrd blaring in the background.

“Daddy?”

“Hello?” came the deep voice—a basso profundo—the tone of which made her feel bad for everything she had done.

“Daddy?”

“Kaylie?”

“No, it’s Rylee, Daddy. Dad, I’m in trouble. Real trouble. I need some help.”

She could hear him slowing down, switching off the machine, the Southern rock still rising from the speakers.

“Rylee, Jesus, honey—where are you?”

“Daddy, I need help. I’m in Nashville. I want to come home.”

She could imagine his expression now, him pinching the space between his eyes.

“Rylee, you know the deal. Your mother and I . . . we said we’re not sending you any more money. If you want to come back home, the door’s always open. But I . . . we’ve been down that road too many times with you.”

“Daddy, I’m scared. I really need your help.”

“I don’t know how to help you, sugarplum. What can I do to help?”

“You can send me money for a ticket. I’ll fly home today.”

There was an odd pause, and some sniffling, and suddenly she realized her father was crying.

“Rylee . . . I don’t know what to do,” he whispered. “Jesus, why do you keep doing this to us?”

“Daddy, please. Please. I just want to come home.”

He blew his nose and seemed to regain his composure.

“That last place, that one, Sunnyvale, they said we were enabling you. They said this was our problem too. I’m not going to send you any money. I want to, I do . . . but your mother . . . We just can’t.”

“Let me talk to her.”

“She won’t talk to you, Rylee. If you want to talk to her, you got to come back home.”

“Daddy.”

“We will always be here. If you need to talk. If you need to come home. But we can’t . . . You did this to yourself. We loved you, we trusted you, we sent you whatever you asked for, and all of it . . . you took this family . . . you took this family and turned it into something . . . It’s all bullshit, Rylee, it’s all bullshit. Nobody’s happy now. If you want to come home, we’ll be here. I promise we will. But if you want to stay out there, then you got to be on your own.”

The girl slammed down the phone, her eyes glossy with tears. She wiped her face with the corner of her sleeve, the old lady behind the counter asking if everything was okay. She nodded and saw the sign on the top of the counter. It was a dollar to visit the museum and she paid it with the handful of dimes, nickels, and pennies still in her purse. She walked down a hallway demarcated by velvet ropes and came upon the first exhibit which featured Hank Williams, his lean face emaciated, the flesh the same color and texture as a corpse. The figure’s fingers were overly long, as gravity and time had both done a number on them, the digits looking more like melting candles. There was a layer of dust over everything, his guitar and blue suit looking like they had been stolen from a tomb. It made her think of her geegaw for some reason, and she realized if he died it would be her fault. She had broken his heart and the heart of everyone who had ever bothered to love her one too many times. She had taken his money once again, and now, now there was no way she could ever go back home.

She stared at the figure awhile longer, leaning against the red velvet rope, passing Johnny Cash—her daddy’s favorite—then George Jones, Charlie Rich, Minnie Pearl and her unassailable price tag, the whole cast of
Hee Haw
done up in wax, and around a corner, Barbara Mandrell and her two sisters. Then she came to Ernest Tubb, who was decapitated, the sign on the exhibit reading,
Under Repairs
. There was something about the shape of the figure standing there, missing its head, the sight of it strangely unnerving, the lapels of his suit and shoulders forming an empty plane above which was only darkness, only black. The room was silent except for a distant hiss—the sound of traffic passing by on the interstate outside—and as she leaned forward, she felt a tremor run through her. The girl suddenly knew what she was staring at, though she could not name it at first: she finally realized it was the permanently occluded face of death, whose death she did not know—hers, her grandfather’s, someone she loved, she wasn’t sure—only that it was death before her now, and death behind too, death all around. If that man Rick West found her, he would kill her. She was sure of it. All she could do was think to run, as running was all she had ever known or done.

* * *

As they drove, the grandfather rested his head against the passenger-side window, daydreaming. He saw himself walking in the dark, aged twenty-seven, stiff in civilian clothes, looking up at Deedee Calbert standing on her front gallery, at her bare white neck; then he turned and saw the pickup, his father’s pickup, shipyard blue. He took one step toward it and saw himself inside. He was inside the truck now and there was a girl before him and the girl was in his arms and he was reaching behind her, his hands searching beneath the tight yellow sweater for the clasp of her brassiere. For the life of him he could not get it undone. Overseas, the Korean girls did everything. Here, in the front seat of the pickup, he was all thumbs. He realized he had never in his life tried to unsnap a bra on his own. The girl was being patient, which he took as a kindness. He could feel her heated mouth against his neck, her arms draped stiffly around his shoulders, as if she were holding her breath, waiting for him to get the brassiere off, but he was having no luck.

The girl smiled, a smudge of pink lipstick along the corner of her mouth. She folded her right arm back, and it was this moment—with her thin right arm turned behind her like a bird wing, and a partly amused grin on her lips, her forehead pressed up against his, rolling her eyes and saying, “You can’t tell me you never done this before,” unhitching the pale, rigid garment with one deft movement, laughing, the laugh a shape against his lips—the one moment where he fell crashing into love. The film played before them on the gigantic screen, the other cars and trucks parked in close vicinity, rows and rows of steamed windshields, couples in similar moments of candor, the Western
Silver Lode
going mostly unseen, Jim fighting to remember he was not overseas, knowing the girl would not want to see him again if he did what he wanted to do, his hand creeping up the girl’s goose-bitten thigh, brushing the fringe of her skirt, making its way upon her stockings, struggling at the garter there, the girl not pushing his hand away but not making any kind of sound either, him struggling to get his pants unbuckled, the oily, perfumed smell of her hair reminding him of the girls over there, what had they done to him, how they made him uncouth, unchristian—and then something went wrong, the feel of her breasts too much or the fuzzy fabric of her sweater, him not getting his pants off in time, something which had happened a few times with the girls over in Korea, him going slack now, burying his face in her hair, and then, for no good reason, absolutely no reason at all, him seeing Stan’s face—lying there in the mud, eyes searching the leaves for a familiar color, a familiar shape, dead, dead, dead—Jim feeling like a child then, muffling tears into the girl’s hair, squeezing her harder than he knew he ought to—knowing no girl worth her salt would bother to see him ever again—and here he was, with a girl from church, a girl his mother had called up for him, an American girl, and he was moaning, the white flash of Stan’s face still rising before his eyes, Deedee’s cheek against his cheek, and then the faint words that ricocheted in his ears, “It’s okay. It’s okay,” she said. “Shush, shush. It’s okay.”

To see her like that again. What I would give
.

The boy asked him a question. The grandfather turned, unsure of what had been asked.

“Which is why I don’t know if there’s a heaven,” the boy said, serious, small hands gripping the steering wheel.

The grandfather nodded once and thought,
Not a place,
and then,
but a person, a fragment of an hour
.

* * *

Rick’s left eye was tacky with blood, his head echoing, thrumming like a jukebox that had been dropped down a mine shaft, as he drove along the breakdown lane of the highway, searching the leafy woods along the side of the road for any sign, any flash of gray or white. Before him was a thick forest, and far beyond the rearview, more of the same. Behind the steering wheel, his fingers gummed up with blood; he realized it might be easier to just drive off now, to forget the horse, the girl, old man Bolan and his job, to get as much distance between him and anything else that might happen. Then he remembered that old son of a bitch’s rage, the look in Bolan’s dyspeptic face, how—propped up by a legion of pillows and afghans—he would receive the news of the missing horse and the missing girl and Rick himself, and would, in his inestimable rancor, assume he had been cheated. It would be this assumption, this old Texan and his unvanquished sense of honor and valor, that would cost Rick West his freedom or his life, for as far as everybody in East Texas knew, the old man was not one to be cheated—not in business nor horse deals nor any other quarter. He would call the Texas Rangers himself, or hire someone, someone with the ferocity of the local Mexican drug cabal, a group originally from Mexico City whom the old man had gotten friendly with—renting out his lumber trucks to the traffickers for their state-to-state distribution—no, if he burned the old man, the old man would issue his revenge, even with his final, foggy breath, and that, that was no way to live, on the run, as he once had, leaving Fannie in this wasting little town five or six years back. No. What he had to do was to find the horse and get his eye to quit bleeding. He took the next exit off the highway and cruised slowly past the muted colors and overcrowded structures of nameless motels, of failing auto dealerships, of row houses too worn for welcome mats, each of these reiterations of the same dreary dream, taking shape outside the bleary windshield. It would be nothing to spot a fine horse in a shithole such as this.