Cherry (9 page)

On the white pillow, his black hair was a crow’s wing. A pair of headlights swam slow past the windows. I made out his beaked profile, like the calm, farsighted Indian on old nickels. (His mother was from some tribe we never figured out.) There was no crisis so dire that Daddy couldn’t sleep through, particularly if he’d pulled two nights of double overtime at the refinery, as he just had. I came to stand by Mother’s side of the bed. Still he didn’t open his eyes.

“What if she’s dead?” I said.

“She’ll stay dead,” he said. “She’ll still be dead come morning.” Strangely enough, this was an old conversation in my family. He folded
his hands on his chest like a corpse himself. (I’d later picture him again in this posture when I read a poem by Bill Knott: “They will place my hands like this./ It will look as though I’m flying into myself.”)

“She’s all right,” Daddy finally said. I wasn’t so sure. Her bedside table was still scarred with leftover circles from a series of vodka-full tumblers. On the lacquer surface, moons in various stages of eclipse overlapped. From inside one of those moons came a glint, a dime I figured to pick up.

But what I felt between thumb and forefinger was a ring, the platinum star sapphire Daddy had presented to Mother in a velvet box at Christmas. For months after she first came home from that other short marriage to our stepfather, she’d steer Lecia and me past the jeweler’s at the tail end of any errand to ogle that ring. Daddy paid a month’s salary for the mossy black stone with a six-pointed star that seemed to emerge on the oval surface as if through seawater from uncharted fathoms. Come Christmas morning, Mother clicked open the box and sighed like a burden had been wrested from her. It did not augur well that Mother would slip off that ring, which she’d sworn never to remove, till death do us part and all that.

I didn’t want Daddy to know she’d taken it off and so hid it under a pack of cigarettes in the standing ashtray, a bronze Viking ship poised to sail off the earth’s edge.

When Mother had first come back to Daddy and us, she’d contracted to do mechanical drawings of appliances for repair guides, exploding dishwashers and outboard motors and Waring blenders so every unscrewed washer floated distinct in a lavender cloud. Somehow in moments of fear, I felt myself to be mechanically bolted together like that. The more real the threat of her absence became, the more I felt all the bolts and lug nuts of who I was loosen.

“I’ll stop by the bookstore at the college,” she’d said that afternoon, keys in hand. “Y’all need anything?” Lecia wanted a
True Detective
magazine. Even at that age, she had the authority required to ask for such a thing.

Since my driving Mother away always stood as possibility, I reviewed
my morning with her in the laundromat. While she body-blocked acres of wet sheets into the industrial dryer, I played pinball. Bells dinged, and lights flashed under me. The silver ball zigged and zagged, fell into holes and popped out, flew like a bullet if I whacked it right in a rare instant so it either ricocheted between poles to rack up thousands of unearned points or fell hapless into the slot between the machine’s forward-stretched flippers. My score never hit what I was after. The melon-breasted blond on the glass facing me stared down at the mechanical landscape I’d failed to master with what I took to be a sneer. Behind me, a line of washing machines jogged. In the dryer on the wall, the snaps of my jeans were clicking. An odor of bleach-scented cotton hung in the air.

Mother stood at the plate glass looking out on Leechfield’s sparse main street. Over black capris, she’d buttoned one of Daddy’s massive white shirts, from which she’d torn the sleeves. She’d jammed her feet into brown cowboy boots caked with mud and run down at the heel.

“Wonder how far we’d have to drive to get some provolone cheese,” she said. “Houston maybe.” She moved to the formica folding table and started matching up Daddy’s banlon socks. I didn’t right off recollect what provolone was.

“You know those hoagies we used to buy in Colorado,” she said, “across from the hotel.” (I did remember them.) “I’m talking about that kinda white cheese they used, thin as paper.” She peered through the giant red O in the word LAUNDROMAT and said, “I’d kill for some provolone cheese.”

I hadn’t much liked it and said so.

“Sure you did,” she said. She lowered the pink sheet she’d held before her like a purdah veil. I fingered a cool metal coin return just in case some change got overlooked. That whole row of coin returns just waiting had started to look to me like hope, and there were two rows of washers after that.

She said, “Point is, you can’t buy any cheese but Velveeta in this whole suckhole.” When she leaned over the table to grab the sheet corners, I could make out her bra through the shirt’s thready arm holes. That wouldn’t have bothered Mother one bit.

“Parmesan,” I finally came up with. “You can get that at Speir’s. Chef Boy-Ar-Dee brand. Right next to the pizza mix.”

“In a can,” she said. “And it’s
Parmigiano
—this hard cheese that comes in a wheel you need an ax to cut into. You grate it. The stuff you get in the can tastes like foot powder.” The sheriff’s car rolled down the road. I looked at Mother’s muscly arm coming out that thread-ragged hole through which her Playtex Cross-Your-Heart was still visible—half a cream-colored nipple’s worth.

“When were you eating foot powder?” I said.

“You’d worry the bark off a tree’s what you’d do,” she said.

“I mean it,” I said. “How did you get expert in the flavor of foot powder?”

“It tastes like it smells. Don’t get all philosophical on me,” she said. She was patting around for matches among used-car swap sheets on the window seat. An unlit Salem tipped down from her lip.

That night she was gone, I wondered if I’d helped Mother match up Daddy’s banlon socks and embraced the folding of the Wisk-scented towels and the scorning of boxed cheese instead of trying to defend its uncertain beauties, her morning would have gone better, and I wouldn’t be staring after the emptiness her absence cut. But the cheese Mother mocked as low-rent I secretly longed for. Melted Velveeta with chopped jalapeños in it could be scooped onto a broken tostada and crunched down on, salty smooth and sharp at once. Mother’s scorn for Velveeta mirrored her scorn for Leechfield in general and for my daddy in particular, which had led to her running off from us before.

The patch of sky between our chinaberry tree and the garage roof had wheeled around so that some archer Daddy always saw assembled from star points forever drew back his bow. But no matter how many times Daddy used his index finger to sketch Orion, I couldn’t make it out. My eyes just saw a random pattern of buckshot. And for my way of thinking, there wasn’t any God up there behind the black scrim steering things. I’d long since ceased to be a dumbass about that. In lieu of some beaded giant in the sky arranging the nail-headed stars, I put my dubious faith in the power of human will.

That’s where Lecia came in. In junior high, she was already will incarnate. If I worshipped anything at that time, it was her canny intelligence. Surely she could rout Mother out when I couldn’t.

It was three
A.M.
when I came to stand above her sleeping, curvy form, her body under the chenille bedspread like the princess’s in
Sleeping Beauty.
The honeysuckle vines across our windows even threw tangled shadows on the lavender quilt like that movie’s thorn vines, which the prince had to hack through when the wicked queen had become a scaly dragon breathing zigzags of fire.
Lecia,
I said. But one word wouldn’t budge her. Like Daddy she’d learned to sleep hard. I sat down, so her rolled-up form tilted ten degrees closer to me.

I put my hand on Lecia’s shoulder. Her brain must have been so hair-triggered for she surged up, gasping a string of invectives that went something like
What, Goddamn, what is it! Fuck’s sake.

She right away came up with driving around to search for Mother. She poached Daddy’s truck keys from the nail by the refrigerator, then we tiptoed barefoot back to our bedroom to unhook the screen and slither out.

There’s much to be said for getting in and out of a dark house by window. The physical sneakiness of it has few grown-up corollaries. Maybe burglary buys you such a thrill, or adultery. But to feel your child’s thumbs pop up a pair of aluminum window-screen latches from the bubble-headed posts that hold them flush is to know the outlaw joy of escape. Your parents’ realm of power has definite borders you can cross out of.

The screen swung out at the bottom. We lay on our bellies looking at the house next door where Peggy Lawrence sat at her parents’ brown upright piano pounding away at a movie song about the hills being alive with the sound of music. In the window well a few gray moth corpses were crumbling to dust. I turned around so my feet stuck out the slot and started worming my way backward outside. The sill scraped my belly, but I finally stood ankle deep in wet grass like a thief birthed from my own room. When Lecia hit the ground beside me, she swatted a mosquito on her calf and stared toward the lit window. Peggy’s boyfriend
turned a page with his long-fingered hand. Her butt in the full skirt of her blue gingham dress took up the better part of the bench. I whispered to Lecia that they proved for every ugly man, there’s a woman. And Lecia shot back that was lucky for me.

In the dim garage, the truck’s grillework looked like nothing so much as bared fangs. I’d toted a pillowcase with two encyclopedia volumes and
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
to wedge at the small of Lecia’s back so she could inch closer to the floor pedals. Daddy was a demon on any detail relating to his truck, and he might notice the seat hiked to the wrong notch. Since he also kept maniacally close track of the odometer for purposes of standing at the gas pump and boasting about his good mileage, I’d upended a screwdriver in my back pocket for opening the glass over the dashboard and jacking the numbers back.

The driver’s side door creaked loud enough to start Lecia and me hopping around flapping our arms at each other. She gave me the finger, and I hissed at her. Afterward we stood in the silence a full three minutes listening toward the house. But Daddy must have been snoring on, for his footsteps didn’t crunch down the gravel path.

I was charged with steering backward out of the garage while Lecia pushed on the front bumper. I stuffed the pillowcase of books behind me and still could only reach the clutch with a tiptoe. The shift went into neutral—
the crossbar of a H,
Daddy had told me. Using the rearview, I fixed on Taylor Avenue, the back entrance to our house. It rolled big and bigger out of that oblong mirror as Lecia heaved against the hood. There was one bad bump and a curve I had to cut before the road’s slope started the truck rolling faster than I’d figured. Lecia was shout-whispering for me to stomp on the brake. The truck finally seized up with its back wheel a foot out of a wicked ditch.

A low fog covered the road. Our headlights dipped into it as we lurched along from gear to gear.

“Not the smoothest ride I ever had,” I said.

“Then get out and walk,” she said.

We bobbed along in pouting silence a few blocks. Stop signs reared up, and we edged into the empty intersections past them. At the Fina
station on the corner, a long purple sign held a psychedelic lightning bolt down it—Pflash! The James Brown Package Store was long since closed, but in its parking lot sat a squat, pumpkin-shaped vehicle with its amber parking lights on and a pair of sockless feet in loafers jutting out the back window. It was Adam Phaelen’s car we crunched up beside on the oyster shell gravel.

He reared up blinking, his hands raised up like we were the law. I hopped out, ostensibly to ask had he seen Mother. But in truth, his pale blue shirt was unbuttoned, and I wanted to look at the narrow patch of curly hair on his otherwise smooth brown chest, for Adam Phaelen was my Elvis. He bore before him along the otherwise gray avenues of Leechfield one of the handsomest faces in Christendom. He had black curly hair and china-blue eyes that crinkled up in a know-something-about-you-that-ain’t-public grin. When he made a rare appearance at a football game or the town pool, I made it my business to elbow my way through the gaggle of teenage girls that comprised his orbit. He wore English Leather cologne that I’d seen him draw out of his glove compartment in a wood-top bottle.

It was that silvery odor of cologne that wafted to me from the open window of the pumpkin-mobile that night. He squinted at me and lowered his hands, then paused to look back at Lecia behind the wheel of Daddy’s chugging truck.

“What y’all doing out this late, squirt?” he said. I told him while he fished a broken Kool from the green-and-white pack in his breast pocket. “Ain’t that the shits,” he said. “Last damn one too. Y’all don’t smoke, do you?” I shook my head and halfway figured to start. On the off chance that Adam Phaelen’d ever again require from me a Kool cigarette, I would manage to produce one with a flourish.

He hadn’t seen Mother, of course. He’d been playing poker with some old boys for nearabouts two days and had a dim memory of heading out for more smokes. How he’d wound up in the parking lot of the dead-bolted package store was a mystery. He leaned over the front seat, then wondered aloud what fucking asshole made off with his keys. “Sorry, baby,” he said for swearing. When he called me
baby,
all the molecules
in my body listed toward him, but he was lying back down, saying there was no help for it now. He was just gonna stretch out till daylight when his mother’d be up. I stood there while his heavy-lashed eyes sealed themselves against me, and the fine tendons of his sockless feet resumed their post crossed in his loafers out the window.

Back in the truck, I felt my body still vaguely luminous from its brief amble into Adam’s vicinity. I could so easily picture him standing on my concrete porch in a powder blue tuxedo, holding a plastic corsage box with an orchid big as my head inside. On the other side of the door, I stood rustling in a black taffeta gown, a diamond choker around my neck, my hair sprayed into an almost topiary form.