Western Swing (18 page)

Patrick's look was nasty. “How the hell should I know. She's dead.”

Something shifted and Mom, Patrick, and I turned our attention to Jennifer. My theory on what happened is that all the disarrayed anger and bitterness flying around the room united into one blazing, pure column of hatred aimed at this brainless outsider who had the
gall
to explain Kathy to us. Her own family.

“When the riots started, Kathy and her little friends drove over to Houston. They said they wanted to watch the cops and niggers shoot each other, but what they really wanted was to loot drugstores.”

“Shut up.” Patrick spit.

I threw in my opinion. “Oh, yeah?”

But Mama was the one to let the emotions flow. No internalizing-caused canker sore for Mama. At least, not on her lips. “To hell with you, Jennifer. Kathy didn't take drugs and she wasn't no tramp. They killed her coming out of Woolworth's with five Barbie dolls and two Kens. Kathy loved Barbie and Ken.”

“Why, Deela, I never said Kathy was a tramp. You know how much Kathy and I cared for each other. We were like sisters.”

“Same as Loren and I are like brothers,” Patrick said, which I thought was a cheap shot.

Mom pointed the iron at Jennifer like an outstretched pistol.

“You always thought Kathy was a whore and a heroin addict and you hate your husband. What are you doing here?”

Jennifer paled. “I came to help you. In times of grief we must forget past differences and support each other.”

“
Bullshit.
”
The iron sailed past Patrick and out the kitchen window. Glass sprayed the sink and windowsill. Mom shouted over Buggie's surprised wail, “You think we're getting what we deserve and you came for a front-row seat, you bitch.” Mom appeared ready to spring around the ironing board. “Maybe Kathy was a tramp, and I've got one boy in prison, Pat always drunk, and that son of a bitch who don't even write in four years, but my baby's dead and I'll be damned if I'll be a sideshow for you.”

The violence drained from Mom's face and tears came. She bent over so I could see the scalp furrows between her electric curlers. A tear clung to the bottom of her cigarette. Others dripped onto her black dress. She lifted one hand to her face and emitted a choked sort of sob.

I put my finger in Buggie's fist and rocked it up and down, watching him cry. Ann, too, concentrated on soothing Buggie. Jennifer sat straight, looking at the broken window and squeezing her left hand with her right. Patrick stared into his empty glass.

Twenty seconds passed. Maybe thirty. The volume of Mom's crying sank from anger to grief to despair to a sniffly lost kind of resignation. Don leaned over and turned up the sound on the ball game. Not looking at Mom, he said, “Quitcher bitchin', Deela. Bad things happen to ever'body. You're not special.”

• • •

High-school funerals always play to a full house. This is because so few teenagers believe in death, and when one of their kind jams the fact home, they stream toward the body, drawn by the irresistibility of all repulsive objects.

The Victoria Bible Baptist Church was packing them in. All young, all stunned. Except for those strange men who make a profession of funerals, I didn't see a single grown-up outside the family pew. Twisting in my seat, I watched the young faces. A few wept, some showed anger and resentment, as if Kathy's death was a colossal gyp, but most wore the lost, lethargic looks of small children—say, a month-old baby. Their egos had not yet deflected the truth, and in that short gap of vulnerability, they seemed almost human.

Buggie pushed a truck along the pew between Ann and me. Patrick and Jennifer sat between us and Mom, with Don on the inside aisle. Mom was through crying. Her eyes stayed away from Kathy, seeming to focus on a chart plotting the figures for last week's Sunday school attendance—DOWN FOUR. Her crossed hands never moved.

Kathy's death affected me a good deal more than her life had. I hardly remembered her life. She was thirteen when I last knew her. She wore a pink cashmere sweater with Kinney Casual tennis shoes and she talked on the phone. She hated cheese in any form. I can't recall her voice.

The people who coordinate these functions had placed a rose across Kathy's breast. I hadn't seen her breasts before. They looked cosmetic. Her neck was longer and her cheekbones higher than I recalled. She'd grown her hair out to where it swept across the side of her face and over her shoulders. This dead Kathy wasn't old enough to legally vote, drink, or make love. She'd never been out of South Texas. I wondered if the Ranger who killed her felt any regret.

The preacher was younger than me. Tanned, self-assured, he stood up there like a golf pro—a fourth-generation country club sophisticate. He prayed awhile, then he compared Kathy's life to the flight of an arrow. “
It's not how far you fly, it's how straight.”
I felt like saying “crap,” but everyone else seemed to buy the Kathy-as-straight-arrow metaphor, who was I to push for realism?

I should face something here. Ever since I boxed up a squashed mole for Show ‘n' Tell in the first grade, I've been a pseudodeath obsessive. I think about death, talk about death, write about death, play little games with it. I figure flow charts on the possibilities of heaven, reincarnation, transmigration, the void; does the spirit inhabit rocks? Are snow crystals unborn babies? However, in spite of a daily diet of the stuff, I have no idea what really happens when people disappear. I'm an expert without an opinion. Religious and antireligious beliefs all strike me as bizarre.

The one image of death I hold to came from a
Twilight Zone
I saw years ago. I must have been very young; I remember watching the show in my rocking horse jammies and my brother Garret spilling a purple Fizzies drink on the rug.
The Twilight Zone
was about an old woman who was frightened of death and would never open her door for fear it would get her. Robert Redford played a charming young man who tricks his way into her apartment, convinces her that death is neat, and leads the old lady away into a fog bank. Ever since, I've pictured dying as being led into a fog bank by Robert Redford. According to my odds chart, this has the same degree of possibility as heaven.

The element I hadn't expected from Kathy was the wash of creative energy. Rose-colored, smoky waves flowed from the casket, pressing me into the wood of the pew. Trapped in her dead body was all the creativity of another Emily Dickinson or Tennessee Williams. Or Agatha Christie. Exploding potential…I couldn't understand how that much potential could go unrealized. I mean, I understood how—a hollow-point bullet through the spine—but why? Nature, God, blind chance, Whoever is so thriftless. Sitting next to Buggie, I thought,
If someone is in charge of this world, He, She, or It doesn't know His, Her, or Its ass from a hole in the dirt.

Ann touched my hand. “Don't think that.”

Had I spoken? Or was Ann's intuition getting out of control?

“It's time to go,” she said.

“What?”

“We have to leave first. Get Buggie's truck.”

• • •

“Didn't Mom say people from her bar would be there? I didn't see anyone old enough to work in a bar.”

“There was an old guy sitting back by himself. That one.” Ann pointed out a small brown man coming through the church door. He walked slowly, like something was the matter with his legs, and a number of teenagers shuffled behind him, trying to get around and out into the sun.

“He looks like a teacher or school janitor,” I said. “He doesn't move like someone who works in a bar.” Ann, Buggie, and I waited in the unstarted Chevelle, watching Kathy's friends and classmates. I balanced my hands on the steering wheel while Ann twisted around to strap Buggie into his safety seat.

“There, all cozy and secure like a good little Bug,” she cooed. Ann settled back into the front seat. “That was kind of sad. Your sister was very pretty.”

“I can't believe this heat. How can people live here?”

“Was Texas always this hot when you were growing up?”

“In August. Did you hear that minister, ‘how straight the arrow flies'? I almost got up and said something.”

“What?”

“I don't know, something.”

Two girls Kathy's age walked past the Chevelle and got into a Datsun 240Z. One of the girls was very tall and skinny and when she smiled her mouth glittered from braces. As the door shut, I heard laughter. The effects of death were already wearing off.

“We're supposed to pull in line after Patrick,” Ann said. “I hope he can drive.”

“Jennifer's behind the wheel.” I looked at my hands. “God, it's hot.” Carloads of Texans swept by on the avenue to our left. Across the street, people moved in and out of a Burger King next to a bowling alley. There wasn't a dog or bird or cat in sight. In front of the church, one scrawny juniper hung on in a circle of dirt surrounded by concrete sidewalk.

Ann looked out her side window. “We had a storm at Mama's funeral. A creek rose and flooded the cemetery, filled up her hole so they had to bring out a sump pump before they buried her. Dad fried a salmon for supper. I rolled up some hush puppies. Larry kept asking when Mama'd be home.”

“Who's Larry?”

“My littlest brother. He was only eight and someone told him Mama went to heaven but he'd see her again real soon. I thought Dad would sock him if he didn't shut up, but he kept asking and asking, wouldn't let it go.”

The hearse pulled out slowly, followed by Mom and Don, then Jennifer and Patrick. “We're next,” Ann said.

I looked across the street, thinking about William Faulkner. A little boy coming from the Burger King dropped a white sack and his mother swatted him on the rear. A man in a Buick LeSabre pulled up to the drive-away window. What would William Faulkner make of this, I wondered. That death and Burger King coexist?

Buggie gurgled, “Foonral.”

“They're going without us,” Ann said.

“Would you mind if we skipped the cemetery?”

“Go straight back to your mom's?”

“Let's just sit here a minute.”

Ann reached across and took my hand. That felt nice. I really loved Ann and Buggie. I tried to picture us in South Texas, driving down this busy street, pulling into the Burger King, wearing shorts and T-shirts ten months a year. I could see Texas and I could see us, but the two pictures wouldn't come together. Those kids at the funeral hadn't looked like anyone I'd ever seen in Denver. Texas suddenly felt like the wrong place to be.

I pushed in the clutch. “Let's leave town,” I said. “I don't really care to see the family again today.”

“Where do you want to go?”

The engine kicked on with a rumble, then idled down to quiet. “This is no way to spend a honeymoon. Let's drive along the coast and up across Mississippi.”

“Won't your mom be hurt?”

She had said one in prison, one drunk, and that son of a bitch. Why was I the son of a bitch? I had a college education and a wife and child. What more could she want?

“I don't see how I could hurt her any more than I already have. We're just starting life. I think we ought to stay away from my relatives awhile.”

I made a U-turn, heading the opposite direction from Kathy, Mom, and Patrick. Cracking the side vent, I leaned forward so my shirt wouldn't stick to the car seat. There comes a time, even when it's closest and most real, when you must say
Fuck death. This heavy crap is a bore,
and get on with your life. Even if life ends, it's still out there and has to be somehow handled.

“Why Mississippi?” Ann asked.

“I've never been there.”

She smiled. “Which dead writer are we going to happen to be near?”

“No dead writers. I'd just like to see a swamp for a change. Don't you ever get tired of the Rockies?”

• • •

I told her at supper that night.

“William Faulkner.”

“I knew we'd find a dead writer before the honeymoon ended.”

“We're not going just to see Faulkner. He's along the way.”

Ann laughed like I'd delighted her again. “That's why I love you, Loren. Only you would think Mississippi is along the way between Texas and Colorado.”

“That's a typical thing to say.”

Ann rolled clam linguini around her fork. “Have you ever read his books?”

“I started
Sound and the Fury
once. Faulkner was so creative most people don't know what he's talking about.” We ate in a dark place with booths, just across the Louisiana line from Beaumont. I think it was called Neptune's Cavern. We stopped there because of an old RECOMMENDED BY DUNCAN HINES sign above the door.

“Do you know what he's talking about? Buggie, sit up. Loren, pull Buggie up before he falls.” Buggie had managed to slide down between his booster seat and the table. Another six inches and he would drop, conking his head and causing a scene.

I pulled Buggie upright by his armpits. “I'll know after I see the grave.” He held a cracker out over the carpet and mashed a fistful of cracker crumbs.

“How will you know?”

“He'll tell me.” I tried to distract Buggie with a french fry, but he turned his head with a “Yish,” and kept crumbling crackers onto the floor.

“The french fry has ketchup on it,” Ann said. I knew that.

“Yish,” Buggie said.

“He won't eat ketchup anymore.” Buggie's picky food habits changed by the day. For six months once he lived on macaroni and cheese. Then he switched to a peanut butter and jelly period. Ann came around the table and knelt to brush Buggie's crumbs from the floor onto her paper napkin.

“You don't have to do that.”

“It'll only take a second. He's making a mess.” Buggie squeezed another cracker. Some of the crumbs floated into Ann's long hair.