The Liars' Club: A Memoir (38 page)

The receiver was warm on my ear. Daddy wanted to know one thing: “You ’bout ready to come on home, Pokey?” I told him I’d
been
ready. To which he said him too.

Early the next morning, we washed our faces. I brushed each tooth with the neat circle stroke Captain Kangaroo had instructed me to; then we buttoned ourselves into church dresses. By dawn, we stood side by side in the full-length mirror. Lecia had tied the hood of my car coat too tight under my chin, so I felt like a sausage in oversmall casing. Her face floating next to mine in the mirror would never again be the face of a child.

Mother must have squawked about our leaving. She would have yelled or wept or folded up drunk and sulking. I recall no such scene. Nor can I picture Lecia announcing our leaving, as she must done first thing that morning. Mother would have been smoothing Ben-Gay on her shoulder. The Sunday
Times
crossword, each box with a penciled capital letter, would have lain between Mother’s body and Hector’s. (She tended to come up with some kind of answer for each square fast, then erase mistakes later, so the puzzle always looked done but seldom was.)

But I’m making this up. The French door on that scene never swung open. Any talk with Mother after Lecia’s call was siphoned clean from my head. Mother herself was clipped from my memory, though some days went by before we actually left, and I must have said good-bye to her. We must have wept, being a family of inveterate weepers, the makers-of-scenes in airport terminals. She did promise vaguely to come for us soon, but I can’t exactly hear her saying that, nor does even a ghost of her Shalimar hang in the car that ferried us to the airport.

Joey was hired to fly along, to squire us through plane changes. He right off got wasted on scotch in the bar while Lecia and I wolfed peanuts and sipped Shirley Temples. Our square-bottomed stools were covered in black Naugahyde. They swiveled, bumping into each other like big padded metronomes marking off the morning. On the bar before us, our twin Barbies sat, backs ramrod straight. They had on matching prom dresses in baby-blue crinoline with silver sashes. But we’d lost their white plastic sandals in transit, so their arched feet stuck out bare.

Joey’s first act on the plane, after he’d buckled Lecia and me into our seats across the aisle, was to barf volubly into his airsick bag. Lecia and I then dug down in our seat pockets, so our Barbies could do their own make-believe barfing, which troubled the old woman cat-a-corner from me. She sighed disapproval. She shook her head so hard at me her cheek wattles shook above the triple strands of blue-tinted pearls. We moved from Barbie barfing to Barbie fart-jokes and kept those up at top volume clear to Albuquerque, where I announced that my Barbie batched her prom dress with diarrhea squirts. She’d be forced to wear a TWA napkin to the prom, with a rubber-band belt, and minus any underpants.

In Albuquerque, we boarded the wrong plane. Airlines discourage that sort of thing, naturally. They post a fellow at the gate to read your ticket before you even step on a runway. It says right on the front where you paid to fly to. But somehow, against odds I can’t fathom, we all wound up in Mexico City, illegally, of course. Maybe Joey even booked us there on purpose. Mother had planted in his noggin her romantic notion of disappearing to
Mexico. He may have fancied living cheap in some beach shack flapped over by palm trees, with an Aztec princess bringing him rock lobsters and tortillas patted out with her own small hands.

The
federales
who met us at the customs gate had other ideas, especially when it turned out that Joey had dropped his wallet—with all evidence of U.S. citizenship—in the airplane toilet. He claimed he’d been rising from the toilet and suddenly bent over sick. His bowels had just seized up. He didn’t know what fell in the blue toilet water till after he’d zipped up. Then he patted around and found his back pocket light. All his ID had flushed away with an eardrum-sucking pop somewhere over the Sonora desert. He patted his pockets to show the small, official-looking crowd how it happened. Joey had that drunk man’s myopic sense of how interesting this all was for everybody.

Meanwhile, the
capitán
shifted his weight from one shiny black boot to the other. He whispered to the customs officials. When he lifted one sinewy hand, two men with rifles at the baggage rack trotted over. Our luggage was called for and disemboweled —dresses, jeans, nylon pajamas. My torn-legged panties got waved a second like some tattered flag of surrender. Joey looked like a smuggler, or like some Mexican national crossing the border without papers. But his bigger crime—or so I guessed from where Lecia and I stood by the coffee machine with three stewardesses who’d taken hold of us—was his lack of seriousness. He just couldn’t stop giggling.

They kept him, of course, the customs officials. They had to. The miracle was that Lecia and I were let go. The airline folks even took it on themselves to phone Daddy, telling him they’d tote us back to Texas.

Anyway, I never got to ask Joey if he was kidnaping us, or himself running off, or what. My last sight of him was in that customs holding area, where his face under fluorescent lights resembled the washed-out green of a martini olive. For some reason, they’d made him take off his shoes and one sock. He stood on one leg like a stork, arms held out. Periodically, he exploded with laughs so his big toe dipped down to touch the dirty linoleum.

In the airport employees’ lounge, a waiter delivered us an oval platter of huevos rancheros while Lecia told the wide-eyed stews how Joey planned to sell us to some men he knew down there, the extremity of which tale caused me to kick her under the table. Those ladies were paying the check, and I didn’t aim to piss them off before it came.

But Lecia knew the furthest limits of credibility. She always had. The women hung on her every word. Their perfectly manicured hands patted our uncombed heads and squeezed our skinny shoulders through our dress plaid. Eventually, they waved us onto a night plane heading for Harlingen, Texas.

I woke to clouds. A whole Arctic wasteland of them bubbled up in the round plane window where Lecia’s sleeping head was tipped. The clouds seemed to have seized up in violent motion, like some cauldron that got frozen mid-boil. A full moon shone across them. It cut a wide white path straight to us, the beauty of which flooded me with some ancient sense of possibility. Maybe there was hope for me yet, even from the vantage point of being a kid, hurtling across the black sky with my sister, whom I would never know the heart of again. (When mystics talk about states of grace, surely that’s the feeling they mean—hope rising out of some Dust Bowl farmer’s heart when he’s surveying the field of chewed stems that locusts left.) This hope lacked detail. From it came neither idea nor impetus. I only felt there was something important I had to do, held by the clear light of that unlikely, low-slung moon.

Then it was gone. The man in front of me clicked off his overhead light. He tilted his seat back so deep his bald head seemed to plop in my lap. He can’t have been that close, but that’s how it felt. I stared at his head, which was white as a worm. He reached up to unscrew his wind-vent.

The stale air that blasted across his scalp and into my face somehow carried the familiar backdraft of doubt. Surely hope was for boneheads. Surely any goodwill God held for my future was spent. Hell, I’d wished my own sister dead a few days back. I glanced over at her glossy blond head tipped in sleep. The rough
red blanket was pulled clear to her chin.
Just like a kid
, I thought. I wanted to shake her shoulder and tell her how much I loved her, but she would have said to pipe down.

I glared hate rays at the bald man’s head. The monk’s fringe of black hair circled his pate like some greasy halo. Earlier, I’d wedged my bare-assed Barbie between the seat cushion and the arm-rest. Now I grabbed her legs like a club and drew back. No thought for consequence, I brought her down on that guy’s bare scalp with every ounce of force I had, popping her head off.

The fellow jerked up and let out a whoop. He held his skull with both hands, twisting around to see what had whacked him. I slipped the headless doll under Lecia’s red blanket and quick faked sleep on the arm-rest. When he started dinging the stewardess bell, though, Lecia startled up. She blinked and rubbed her eyes, so I blinked and rubbed mine. Meanwhile, the stewardess tripped over that blond and pony-tailed Barbie head. It skittered up the aisle, then swerved under a seat, never to be recovered.

Lecia and I meandered back to Daddy through an underworld of airport personnel. Pilots, baggage handlers, stews and off-duty janitors washed us and fed us. We traveled gratis, without corporate okay. And not only were we never menaced or pinched, beaten or buggered, we never stared with longing at a deck of cards or chocolate doughnut that some stranger didn’t ante up for it. Their particular faces have been worn featureless as stones, but those uniforms I walked next to at waist-level prove that hope may not be so foolish. (Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild, elsewise every raped baby would grow up to rape.)

On each leg of the trip, the planes got littler and more ragged. In Houston, we reached a green camouflage plane with shark’s teeth painted on its nose and a big X of gray electrician’s tape on the cargo bay. It was parked outside a tin hangar beyond view of commercial aircraft. The pilot wore bifocals. The cubby that he wedged Lecia and me into behind the cockpit was built for flight plans, maybe, or a thermos. We doubled our knees up under our chins. We must have looked, when the pilot turned around to say
hold on tight, like a pair of groundhogs poking up from some hole.

The plane cut a tight circle, its headlight just brushing over thick fog. The pilot flipped some ceiling switches and talked back to radio static. We bumped around a lot taxiing. The wings shimmied against bracings thin enough for a backyard swingset. Still, Lecia’s profile was calm studying the plane’s dials, though the engine racket when we surged was like a vacuum cleaner we had to sit in. The pilot reached down at knee level and pulled back with effort, as if his very strength were hefting the plane’s nose off the runway. After considerable bucking around, we pulled into a cloud.

And that was the cloud that held us—with only an occasional deep drop to tease my stomach—all the way to Jefferson County. The pilot used pink Kleenex to scrub at the window steam. But the fog pressed against the windshield was a thick membrane the headlights couldn’t puncture. Even I could see we were flying blind.

Nor did visibility get better with landing. We stood on the wet runway with our Barbie cases. No terminal building or parking lot presented itself. Only a tower beam swept over our heads—a fuzzy cone of yellow light wheeling.

Then from an unmeasured distance, headlights flipped on. A car was parked right on the tarmac. I set down my Barbie case. Through the mist, I made out two shapes walking toward us, each in the riverbed of those twin lights. One was small and slight with a cowboy hat. The other had big hands dangling off a long frame. This second shape broke and ran for us, heavy work boots scuffing on the concrete.

There was no clear boundary Daddy ever crossed over, no second he assembled fully before us out of fog. He just gradually got brighter and denser till he was heaving us both up in his arms. He’d been drinking black coffee during his shift, the coffee that poured like tar from the foreman’s beat-up percolator. That coffee brought my whole former Daddy back. I knew the solvent he used to strip grease from his hands, and the Lava soap applied
with a fingernail brush. His chin bristles scraped my neck. And he must have been sweating from damp or work or worry, for the Tennessee whiskey he’d stood on the tarmac sipping was like fresh-cut oak coming off him. I could feel Lecia’s arms on the other side of him hugging, and for once, she didn’t swat me away, like my hug was messing hers up. For once, our arms reached around the tall rawboned bulk of him to make a cage he fit right into.

His partner was a small, birdlike man named Blue, which was appropriate for he was all over the color of flint. Blue was soundless, odorless, and completely without opinion. He was one of those clean, featureless men who can move for decades on the periphery of a pool game buying his fair share of beers without ever uttering a full sentence.

Blue had bought Lecia and me each a doll, curly-headed, near as tall as ourselves. Lecia’s was blond, mine black-headed. Under the sedan’s dome light, mine stared from its box on the wide back seat with an indifference bold enough to edge over into insult. A copper wire garroted her head in place. Her wrists and feet were likewise strapped down. Highway lights started streaking over the cellophane mask above her perfect features. She gazed out sullen. Her cold blue eyes announced that she wanted some other girl, not me. Well, I wanted my very own mother, and I’d have told her so, too, if the thought didn’t put a lump in my throat. Instead I told her—out loud, I guess—“People in hell want ice water.” Daddy said, “Say what?” And I told him I’d kill for a glass of ice water.

Surely Daddy said more to me in the car. But any other words were wiped clean from my head. He sounded real country talking to Blue while we drove. “Now you take old Raymond there…” he was saying to Blue. But it came out, “Nah yew tike ol Ryemon thar…” And slow, like he was addressing a deaf man.

In the house, Daddy slipped his jean jacket over a kitchen stool. We were fixing to eat, he said. Lecia unstacked the white mela-mine picnic plates on the plywood bar. They looked crude as Flintstone plates after our Colorado china. Each had three plastic
compartments so you could keep your butter beans out of your greens, and the greens’ pot liquor from sogging up your cornbread.

Daddy stood at the stove working with a long wooden spoon inside a pot of something muddy. He dribbled water from the silver kettle into the pot, and I heard it loosen up. In a few minutes you could smell garlic and pork back, and then came the steamy idea of sheer celery slices in a mess of red beans and rice. “This here’ll be even better tomorrow,” he said. He’d also made a wheel of cornbread in an iron skillet, the bottom-crust burnt first in hot lard on the stovetop the way I liked. Lecia cut hers off and flipped it across the butter dish at me. There was a dish of raw green onions we ate between bites. And I nearly finished the whole cereal bowl of collards, spoon after slotted spoonful. “Pokey, you know what I’d do to them greens?” Daddy said. He didn’t even wait for me to say what, just doctored them with vinegary sprinkles from a jar of yellow Tabasco peppers. He kept looking up to tell Lecia he loved her with all his heart, but mine was the plate he fussed over.