The Liars' Club: A Memoir (41 page)

When I finally opened them, she still had the mascara wand raised in her hand. I blinked a few times. My eyelashes had noticeable weight. In the back mirror, I looked like somebody’s kid sister trying to get in a roadhouse without ID. Lucy went on to whip up a blender of brandy alexanders for the purpose of putting tallow on my flat little heinie. She plunked a few extra filberts in my lowball glass of foam.

By the time her soap opera came on about two, I was affably drunk. The cat clocks’ offbeat tails twitching overhead didn’t faze me a bit. I was the bodhisattva of brandy, the crown princess of alexander.

I woke with my damp cheek flat to the bar. I’d somehow crossed from my original joy into drunkenness, and beyond that into a sugar coma. Hours had passed. My bird’s nest of hair tipped sideways. It seemed to be drawing my worrisome headache far beyond the parameters of my skull. I looked around while Lucy poured me a collins glass of water. The stools beside me had been untipped. A shallow paper bowl of Goldfish sat before each one. At back tables, folks stared intently at the domino tiles they’d lined up into short walls. I drained my glass and slid it back to Lucy, who arched a thin brow penciled the color of coffee and caught me up on Daddy’s pool game.

The neat stack of dollars on the table’s edge had once belonged to Dole and now belonged to Daddy. The cowboy had responded to this by getting sidewinding drunk. He stabbed at the balls in hard, mean little pokes. He was also shooting too high, his cuestick sailing upwards in an arc so it whacked the hanging metal lampshade a few times, sending it sideways. And he didn’t bother to sight along the stick or hunker down so his eye could work out angles. He just sucked his front teeth and jabbed, pissing away every shot.

Daddy was probably just as drunk, but that only made him walk straighter. He took aim with the slow concentration of a man underwater. Nearly every ball he stood behind eventually moved slow to the pocket he’d picked for it. When Dole started making sissy shots—trying to jump one ball over another or shooting behind his back, Daddy said let’s wrap this deal up, which the cowboy snorted at. “You took my money,” he said.

Daddy just grinned. “Hell, brother, you set the stakes.”

Suddenly Dole was at the bar next to me, pounding on the sparkling Formica with his meaty fist. His features seemed scrunched in the center of his round, red face, crowding each other for room. “Beer here, barkeep,” he said.

“You’re eighty-sixed,” Lucy said. “Cut off. No more for you.”

“What for?”

“’Cause I said. That’s what for.” She’d had both hands on the bar when he strode over. Now she dropped one out of sight with a move so smooth I wondered if she kept some ballbat or other equalizer under the counter.

Dole jerked his thumb over at Daddy. “What about Tonto back there?”

“Tonto’s still drinking,” Daddy said. But, in fact, his glass sat empty. He was slipping his cue back in the wall rack even as he spoke.

I was deep in my own headachy admiration of Daddy’s equanimity when
poof
, he appeared at my side. Then Dole was saying we should all go fuck ourselves, and Daddy was balling up his fist to catch that cowboy under his jaw with an uppercut. Dole arched back a few paces, then looked down at his shirt.

It was, of course, a cowboy shirt. Seeing its little embroidered violets (his ex-wife had done crewelwork) speckled with blood where his buck teeth had bitten down on his own bottom lip obviously pissed him off. If he’d stopped to think, though, Dole might have backed off a step, apologized, squirted club soda on some napkins to sponge off his shirt. That would have ended things, for Daddy had dropped his arms to his sides. But Dole made a tactical error. He grabbed the pool cue he’d leaned against the bar and swung it in a whistling arc at Daddy about eye-level, in a motion so wide and slow only a moron would have failed to catch that cue midair and sucker-punch Dole in the throat with it. Which is what Daddy did.

Dole cooperated by falling down. He lay on the linoleum in an x-shape. Lucy fetched his Stetson to balance on his big belly. “That was better than
Gunsmoke
,” she told Daddy.

He never took me to the Legion again. Nor to any bar. Nor fishing nor hunting nor out to throw dice nor to the Farm Royal for chicken-fried steak nor to Fisher’s Bait Shop on Christmas Eve morning, nor anywhere that my mere female presence might provoke some goofball into mouthing off, in which case Daddy would
have to tear him a new asshole. No policy to this effect got announced, but that’s how it worked out.

So over the years, Daddy and I grew abstract to each other. We knew each other in theory and loved in theory. But if placed in proximity—when I came home, say—any room we sat in would eventually fall into a soul-sucking quiet I could hardly stand.

He started off every visit by piling a plate up for me as you would for a linebacker. Meanwhile, I’d urge him to retell some old story everybody else had long since gotten sick of. I’d recorded a few for an oral-history project in college, and that set a precedent. But any story eventually trailed off into quiet. He’d say he had to go check on his truck (translate: sit alone in the dark garage sneaking pulls off a bourbon bottle), or the phone would ring and I’d fly to answer it.

Liquor had eaten away at Daddy. He got mean-mouthed those last few years before the stroke. Mother bore the brunt of it, but it cropped up with other folks too. At my brother-in-law’s farm he’d pulled a knife on a field hand from Oaxaca who contended that the tacos from Daddy’s favorite vendor weren’t authentically Mexican. Another time, a farm partner from Arkansas who’d ridden horseback across a rice levee during dove season found himself looking down the business end of Daddy’s twelve-gauge. “Old man,” the partner claimed to have said, “I own eighteen percent of every stalk of rice growing out there.” To which Daddy said that the fellow was fixing to own a hundred percent of some buckshot in his ass too if he didn’t back that horse off that levee and head right on down the road. In a supermarket line, Daddy cold-cocked a young marine; he went across the counter of the gas company at some surly clerk.

Daddy turned on me just once, the summer of his stroke. I was trying to finish my grad-school thesis and was, as usual, broke. Lecia and her husband had lured me down with a quick-money scheme that involved my trucking live crawfish from Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, to a new crawfish farm out in Winnie, Texas. They were Rolex-wearing young Republicans, and constantly
tried to infect me with the entrepreneurial spirit that powered them both.

Maybe they also wanted to humble me with the task, for the crawfish may stand as the most ignominious-looking creature you can find yourself in service of, being black and shiny with all its jointed skeleton on the outside. It makes a wet clicking noise like a giant cockroach. So if at a dark truck stop you pause to hose down a flatbed truck with eighty-pound sacks of crawfish piled three deep (crawfish die when they dry off, it turns out), the sacks emit damp sucking sounds that conjure in your lumbar region a prehistoric fear and can set clamoring through your head images of insect hordes cresting hill after hill toward you. I drove at night, before the sun’s heat could too quickly dry the burlap I wet down and draped over and around and between the sacks for moisture. This made for slow going.

Still, by late morning, I was usually done unloading and was scrubbing my hands with lemon to get the fish stink off. That left whole afternoons for me to type my critical paper, which I was supposed to be doing in Mother’s studio. But I spent most days dozing, writing postcards or thumbing old
Artforum
magazines. I’d also affected smoking strong French cigarettes after a trip to Europe, and went through quite a few packs of those.

One night Mother startled me awake standing by my bed. Her shadow slid across me, and I jerked upright into the icy blast of a window air-conditioner. She held some big object against her belly like a child. She was crying. “Can you help me with your daddy?” she said. “He won’t let me plug this vaporizer in by his bed. And he can’t hardly breathe.” I slid out of the covers and pulled on a hooded sweatshirt. Her hair was silky white, a glow in the dark room. “Won’t
let
you?” I said. The concept of permission as applied to Mother was foreign. She answered with a tired sigh. I took the sloshing vaporizer, which was the old hot-steam type she’d used for our croup as kids.

Daddy was sitting on the edge of that oceanic bed in his boxer shorts barking out a dry cough. His head hung down between
his broad shoulders like a wounded bull’s. On his right thigh was a plum-colored bump where he’d caught some shrapnel during the war. “Daddy?” I said, and he roared up for me to get the fuck out, which assault seemed to blast all available oxygen from the room. Maybe my hair flew back in cartoon astonishment. Then he wound down again into a gasping cough.

He’d never talked to me that way, and I froze in it. After a while he seemed to forget I was standing there. He lay back down. He wasn’t exactly coughing, but his breathing had a jagged gasp in the middle of it. When I started nosing around behind the dresser for an electrical outlet, he roared up again. “What you want in here?” More coughs, the tendons on his neck stood out in sharp relief. I turned on the dresser lamp. The room was icebox cold, but he was in a flop sweat, his face bright with fever. The bedclothes held moist wrinkles where he’d been resting. I told him I was fixing to plug the vaporizer in.

A bead of sweat hung from his nose. He wiped it with the back of his hand and squinted my way. “Your mother sent you in here, didn’t she?” Then he started a rant against her the likes of which I’d never heard. She was the most selfish person he’d ever known. She’d ruined everybody she ever touched. Including me and my sister. We weren’t nothing. Lecia with her Phi Beta Kappa in physics. Me with my MFA—Mother-Fucking Asshole’s what that stood for.

Where he got the wind for all this, I can’t guess. His voice came out in a guttural rasp, like the possessed kid in that exorcist movie. Daddy railed down to his last breath: I couldn’t master my own rosy red ass, he said. Thermometers had degrees, he said. I still didn’t know my butt from a hole in the ground.

I was crying by then. Once coughing had shut him up again, I started groping along the baseboard for an outlet. The lamp cord got jostled in the process, so the room plunged to black. He didn’t say anything. When I plugged the vaporizer in, a chubby road of steam started puffing right in my face. It smelled of menthol chest rub. He waved his ropy arm in the mist. “Get that
fucking thing out of here!” Daddy’s whisper was both fierce and frail. I sat back on my heels. He doubled over coughing again.

And that’s how we stayed for a while, like figures in a paperweight—me still as a deer with that warm steam going down my lungs somehow cool, him seizing up spastic for breath. “Mary Marlene”—
kharf kharf kharf
— “I’m gonna throw that fucking thing out the window”—
kharf, kharf
—“and you behind it,” he said. The steam was making phantoms of us, clouding the room with eucalyptus. I finally said if he wanted the fucking vaporizer unplugged, he’d have to come over me to get it. Which, apparently, he didn’t see fit to do.

When he finally curled on his side, breathing ragged, he looked like something dry you’d shake out of a shell.

Next day, I came in from my crawfish run to find Daddy upright at the table laboring slightly for breath. I kissed his scratchy cheek. His eyes showed nothing of the night before. He was cradling his white cat, Bumper, like a swaddled baby, cooing. “Confound the luck,” Daddy said, meaning,
goddamn your fate.
His thumb smoothed the animal’s throat, then rubbed along his jawbone where scent glands hid under fur.

Bumper was the sole survivor from a herd of mewling kittens that Daddy fed at the barn till the litter took sick and died. Poisoned, we later figured, judging by the mother cat’s last seizure. Bumper himself lost every stitch of fur on his head. It grew back leaving bare patches, perfectly square, on his pointed face. Plus he walked with a weird shimmying gait, like his back legs wanted to list off in their own direction. Maybe he was swaggering around his testicles, which were big as golf balls. His meow stayed so dim and soprano, though, you couldn’t hardly hear it. So he’d learned to bump the screen with his ass if he wanted in or out. Hence his name.

The Lone Star I took from the fridge matched the one sitting in front of Daddy. “I don’t know how you drink one of these salted,” I said and popped the top. He said he didn’t rightly know. I drew my stool across from his. On the varnished plywood
that stretched between us lay scattered foil sample packets of penicillin. “Dr. Boudreaux stop by?” I said. He said yep and commenced to tamping down a Camel.

“Bet he didn’t want you smoking for a while,” I said.

“Didn’t say nothing about it,” he said. Bumper slithered from Daddy’s lap to the floor with a liquidy plop. He rolled over for me, his legs sprawling off his round belly. Daddy kept that cat so loaded up on Friskies and wet food, Bumper was round as a bear.

“Know what he weighs?” Daddy said. I couldn’t guess. “Seventeen pounds,” he said. Every morning Daddy dropped the struggling cat on the bathroom scale, peering down at the little window till the red needle stopped swinging. He logged each day’s weight on a scratch pad by the phone.

I played My Hand’s a Spider on the cat’s belly a minute. He batted back with slow, soft paws. “He wants stretching,” Daddy told me. He’d trained the cat to get stretched before coming in or out. This involved holding the cat’s hands and feet, pulling gently while he arched his whole length. All this time, you had to say (I shit you not, the cat would only come in or out once these words were spoken), “Gosh, what a long cat.” Afterwards, Bumper body-blocked the glass door and trotted out. A wave of heat rolled in.

When I turned back to Daddy, his cigarette’s thread of smoke was coiling right into his eyes. I hadn’t planned to tell him to quit drinking that day. But something in how Daddy never blinked at that curl of stinging smoke, something of that small discomfort, cut right to where I loved him most.