And She Was (9 page)

APRIL 1986

I
stayed with Bellie a couple days, until Marge told me Nicholas was back out fishing. After Bellie’s riot of a house, my little gray home on a hill felt more lonely than ever. Thad wouldn’t be back for a couple more weeks at least, and I had no one to ease myself around, no one to gauge myself by, no one to be anything for. My defenses were down, and I got reflective. Not just about the past, but the kind of reflection that flings the past forward to clash with the present. And battle for a future.

I would think a lot about the last time I’d seen my dad.

I had been cocktail waitressing in Redwood City. The man I’d been shacked up with had just decided to go back to his wife and kids. He left me with an apartment I couldn’t afford and a red Fiat with low-profile tires. I packed up everything I wanted to keep, which barely filled the backseat, and left. I can’t say why I wanted to see Dad one more time. I did not love my father. I had no hope that we’d ever be close again. It may have been a need to know that at least I’d seen him once near the end.

Grandma Jane had given me the address of Yolanda and Phil Caracus at Ever-New Wrecking and Salvage just south of Bakersfield, outside a town aptly called Weed Patch. She also said he was sick. “Oh, honey,” her voice crackling with age, “he’d just love to see you again.” I
knew she sent money now and then. That she’d given up visiting. That he had become one of the invisible: ties dissolving, eyes averted, and waiting to die.

The temperature had climbed into the nineties, even though it was mid-April. And no, I didn’t have air-conditioning in the Fiat. I kept the windows down and a towel between my legs to keep them from sticking together. I found Ever-New right on Highway 56, a two-lane several miles from Weed Patch. The dust made a ball of haze around the car when I stopped. It was close to what I expected—a low-slung, half-metal, half-wood building, the front obscured by crap—an old lawn mower, dissolving cardboard boxes overflowing with small engine parts. A collection of wind chimes and twirlers buried the front door. Nothing moved.

A dangle of humongous bells banged against the glass as I pushed the door open. Inside more junk, once loosely organized, now given way to entropy. To the left a long, fleshy-colored Formica counter stretched under a burden of boxes, grime, and four ashtrays. A man’s head rose from below the counter. His hand felt toward a cigarette burning in one of the ashtrays.

“What can I do for you?”

A small man, thin and made of bundled wires, he seemed both stiff and coiled.

“I heard you know where my dad is. I’m Brandy.”

He looked at me with bargain-hunter eyes, appraising, figuring. “You’re the daughter. He talks about you sometimes.” He crushed out his cigarette. “Let me get Yolanda. She’ll take you out to see him.”

He disappeared through a door behind him. A minute later Yolanda appeared, all tight jeans, sprayed hair, and sharp boots. She came around the counter and stepped right up to me, cupping my face in her lacquer-nailed hands.

“Oh, you sweet thing,” she said, shaking her head slowly. “You poor thing. It’s good you’re here. He could use a reason to keep going.”

“Ah, leave the poor girl alone, Yolanda,” Phil said.

Yolanda’s honey-mother expression broke into a sour-wife expression as she turned, still clutching my face, to Phil. “What do you know about it?”

Phil shrugged.

Yolanda turned back to me, honey-mother expression firmly in place again. “He hasn’t seen his own kids in thirty years,” she said. “He doesn’t know diddley.” She released my face to capture my hand. “Come on. I’ll take you to your dad.”

She led me back out the front door and along the side of the building. I felt like a toddler being dragged behind her mother toward something I was damn suspicious of. It was probably good that Yolanda had me tightly by the hand. Although I’d just driven five sweaty hours to see him, it wouldn’t have been uncharacteristic of me to run at the last minute when something ugly or weighty reared up in front of me. Enough of my father in me to make running the best-looking option a good deal of the time.

I realized Yolanda was talking as we rounded a five-car-high pile of squashed metal. “You know a lotta folks say Phil and me are loony for taking them in like this. But you know I always say ‘When God gives you a solid foundation, you gotta share it.’ With my career going along so well—I’m a Mary Kay consultant, you know—I just feel that I need to give something back. They aren’t bad men, most of them. Oh, sure, we lose a few dollars from the till now and then. But most of them are like family. We let ’em fix up one of the bigger cars to live in, which don’t cost us nothing and keeps ’em off the street. I’m the mother hen. Your dad, now, he’s not one to take advantage. He ain’t never been mean, even when he’s drunk. That’s when he gets weepy. Starts talking about his smart little girl.”

Yolanda squeezed, and I could feel the slick sweat between our hands. It would be so easy to slide out of her grasp. We wound through rows of smashed cars, the sun bouncing off crumpled metal and forming force fields of rippling heat that looked so substantial you’d be afraid to walk into them.

He was bent over a chocolate brown Pinto, prying off the inner door panel with a crowbar. The ugliest dog I’d ever seen lay, head resting on too-big puppy paws, in a patch of dusty earth shaded by the front bumper.

“Henry,” Yolanda shouted. “I got your daughter here.”

When he turned, I had one of those slow-motion moments that in a movie would have blurred at the edges and been accompanied by haunting, spare notes on a cello. Was it shame I saw in his face? Dis
gust? Pain? Whatever it was, it was not the face I remembered. He was no longer tall. His frame stood, resolute with habit, but his flesh twisted and shrunk around it. He lifted his hand to shield his eyes from the sun. His tan face glistened with sweat trails running from his hairline. He still had his hair, still sandy blond and thick at fifty-two. I saw the tremble in his hand, and he must have seen me see. He quickly lowered it. A smile came tentatively. And he stepped over a bent door frame lying in the weeds. The dog jumped up, came with him, nose even with his thigh.

Panic swirled in the space between us when he got close enough to reach. We bobbed uncertainly toward each other, then retreated. I would like to say I threw my arms around him. But I was afraid of him. This was the first time I’d seen him as an honest bum—a drunk. That last time, five or six years ago, he was still pretending, still keeping an apartment, finding jobs now and then. Back then we had still been able to make believe. Standing in this heat with my father an arm’s length away, I was suddenly aware of the power shift. For years I’d been daddy’s girl, pleasing him with grades and a passion for hot rods; then, when he left, I’d followed my mom’s lead and hated him by turning against everything he’d wanted for me and toward everything he disdained about her. For the last ten years, we’d been in a no-man’s-land, rarely seeing each other but aware that we could negotiate a truce, a slow compromise—if we had the time. And that’s what hit me now, that we had no more time. That he’d robbed me of the time and would leave me with a lifetime of regret. He was going to die and take away my chance to have my father back. At that moment, I hated him for it, and I pitied us both. I wanted to leave him there with a parting hateful remark and never let myself need him again. And I wanted to rush him to rehab and force vitamins into his mouth, and put him to bed on clean sheets and make him recover. Either action would have been better than what I did. Once again, I let him decide.

“I was just passing by and heard you were staying near here,” I said, offering a neutral choice that left all the others open.

He nodded. “Glad you did.”

We remained three feet apart, our feet light, uncertain.

“Oh, for the love of mud,” Yolanda said with a sigh. She shook her
head and stepped over to my father. “Give your daughter a hug, Henry.” She shoved him toward me.

One of his arms came around my shoulders, and we stood maybe six inches apart as he patted my shoulder half a dozen times. “Good to see you. Good to see you.” We remained in this awkward half hug, half standoff for maybe four seconds, then he backed up a couple steps.

Yolanda, hands on her hips, rolled her eyes and blew out a disgusted sigh. “No wonder,” she muttered as she turned to walk back to the shop, leaving my dad and me alone among the corpses of Lincolns and Oldsmobiles.

Dad watched her until she rounded the corner. The silence lay like a blanket folded so long the creases were permanent lines of dust and shadow. I wanted to hold the silence longer this time, force him to ease us out of this. The dog snuffled, watching me.

“Who’s this?” I asked. I couldn’t do it, no matter that I’d been on my own so many years, that his weakness shouldn’t strand me any longer.

“Cowboy,” Dad said, reaching down to scratch the thing’s head. Cowboy tilted his massive skull into the scratch. “My sidekick.”

I knelt and reached my hand out. Cowboy jumped forward, missed my hand, and crashed into my knees. Of course, my knees were balancing the rest of me, which fell back with a plop into the red-dry dust. The dog’s head pushed into my hair, and I had to shove him back to stand up again.

Dad slapped his thigh, and Cowboy leaped across the few feet separating us. “He’s one of the pups Phil’s guard dog had after a wayward weekend. This one seemed to have been born with an affinity for me. Phil let me keep him. Drowned the rest of the litter.”

I couldn’t help but think this was for the best. One of these atrocities in the world was enough. He was massive. Although still a pup, Cowboy’s head came most of the way up my thigh. His body was one coiled muscle, and his head flattened with a low forehead and squared-off jaw. His hair was slick and short and gray-brown brindled, ideal camouflage for a junkyard. His tail was a thick cord of whipping muscle.

“What is he?”

“Mother’s a rottweiler. Think the sire was a big wolfhound that kept sniffing around.”

“He’s a monster.”

Dad nodded. “Hardly fits in the Lincoln anymore, and he snores. But we’ve negotiated an arrangement. He sleeps in the front seat; I get the back.”

Cowboy came toward me again, still too exuberant. But I was firmly planted on both feet. He rubbed against my leg, and I stroked his flat head. He panted and looked up at me.

“He likes you.”

Suddenly I was thankful for this monstrosity of a dog. He had given Dad and me a way to talk. A link that passed between us without the weight of our past. I knelt and hugged the big puppy, who smelled of heat and dust.

“You want to get something to eat?” I asked.

“Sounds good. I’ll be done here in a couple hours. Place not too far down that sells good burgers.” He paused. “Don’t know if Phil’s paying today. May have to owe you.”

“I got it.”

Dad walked me to my car, Cowboy flopping his big paws in the dust between us, occasionally stopping like his tail was on fire to dig his teeth into the hair on top of his rump. Fleas.

Dad opened the driver’s door for me just as the sound hit us. One of the garage doors on Ever-New swept upward as an ignition echoed inside. Through the haze of exhaust, we watched a long, purplish Cadillac slowly, carefully back out. It turned, cleared the garage, swung left, then eased forward until it rolled to a stop beside my Fiat.

Yolanda stepped out.

She had on an unbelievably tight pantsuit. Her hair was pinned up in a scaffolding of curls, her face an American bimbo version of a geisha. How she had accomplished the transformation from western hoochie mamma to bimbo businesswoman in ten minutes still befuddles me.

“Are you guys off somewhere?” she shouted above the Caddie’s throaty engine.

Dad didn’t say speak.

“No, I’m going to get a room. We’re going to dinner later.”

“Well,” she said, waving her hand over the car, grinning, posing, “what do you think?”

The Cadillac’s fan turned on, already overcome by the heat. Across the back, in metallic gold were foot-tall letters that spelled out MARY KAY LADY. Now Mary Kay pink is not a pretty color to begin with. Its paleness has an organ quality. Yolanda’s obviously self-made Mary Kay Caddie was off a bit. Too much purple. Too much shine. And the letters. Mary Kay letters are small, gold, and in a cursive script. Yolanda’s were block letters so large they stretched all the way across the wide car. They had been spray painted with stencils, and the paint had leaked through, blurring the letters at the bottom.

“Isn’t it just gorgeous?” Yolanda ran her long-nailed hand over the hood. “Phil did it for me. After my gooney sponsor messed up and didn’t count all my orders. I had a car coming. Anyway Phil says, ‘Babe, I’ll fix you up with a better Mary Kay car than any of those makeup sissies.’ Didn’t he just do a delicious job?”

Yolanda turned to rub a smudge off the hood. Dad and I grinned at each other behind her back. I saw the smirk twitching at his mouth. It broke loose, and he coughed to cover it. My dad is one big mess of problems, but one thing he’s never lacked is a sense of the humor and the irony that stings everyday moments.

I stroked the car’s hood. “Wow,” I said.

Yolanda smiled wide. “You know, hon, you could use a facial treatment. How ’bout I give you one. I’m all set up for a facial party in a couple hours, so everything’s all ready. I was just heading into town to make a delivery, but it can wait. I can squeeze you right in.” The smooth back of her nails traced my eyebrows. “Even give you my discount for anything you wanna buy.”

She stuck her torso into the car, switched off the engine, and man-handled two large, rectangular pink cases from the passenger seat.

Now, I’ve always thought Mary Kay looked like corpse makeup, so thick you couldn’t properly move your face underneath. But Yolanda was so sincere, so sure. “Sounds fun,” I said, figuring I had little choice at this point. And I had an inkling even then that a makeover was exactly what I needed. I just had no idea what sort of remake I should go for, and a pretty good idea that neither I, nor Yolanda, were up to the task.