The Monument

R
OCKY

SOMETIMES it’s funny how we can’t know things. I get cranky about that, but I’m always getting that way about something or other, so it doesn’t matter.

But it’s still funny.

Like if Python hadn’t killed the chicken he wouldn’t have been sent to prison, and I wouldn’t have helped him escape. He wouldn’t
have become my friend and led me to meet Mick so I could come to know all there is to know about art and life and sex and love and how Bolton, Kansas, is a microcosm of the world, even China, and I didn’t know any of that was coming. Or even what the word
microcosm
meant until Mick told me, but that’s what I mean.

Exactly. I couldn’t know any of that was going to happen.

Mick says that life is wonderful that way. He says that life is really,
really
organic. It moves all the time and flexes when you least expect it to flex, which he likes, but I think sucks. I mean I want to know every little thing that’s going to happen and not have any surprises. But I can’t and that sometimes makes me mad.

Well, never mind. I got carried away.

Mick said I shouldn’t get mad because it colors what I see and I won’t be a good artist. I told him that I would maybe write down all of the things that happened and try to figure them out because I didn’t like not knowing things. He said fine, do it, but don’t get mad.

So I won’t.

But it’s hard.

I DON’T KNOW my real name or even if I had one. When I was a baby my mother left me in the backseat of a police car in Kansas City, Kansas, and I don’t remember name, place, what she was like—none of it.

I don’t even know if it was true except that the sisters at Our Lady of Bleeding Redemption Orphanage
told me that, and they aren’t supposed to lie so maybe it’s true.

They named me Rachael Ellen Turner, the sisters, but I got the nickname of Rocky because I threw rocks to make up for being small. I lived at Our Lady until I was nine years old, and I didn’t think there was any way that I would be adopted.

I didn’t have many friends because about the time you got to know somebody they would get adopted, and I didn’t because of my color and my left leg.

Oh, they said it was for other reasons—there was always some excuse—but it was really my color and my left leg. I am the color of light caramel and have curly tight hair and even though they told us it didn’t count, it was a fact that lighter-colored kids got adopted right away and the darker ones didn’t. Along with that was my leg.

When I was born I guess my mother drank or smoked or did drugs or something, and my left leg didn’t grow right. The sisters sent me to a doctor and they did some operations, but finally
the doctors said all they could do was kind of fuse the knee so it wouldn’t bend and let it grow straight and that’s what happened. It grew with the rest of me and isn’t too skinny or anything but I can’t bend it, and so I’ve always walked kind of funny on it, and I get tired really easy, even now, when I’m thirteen and grown.

Every time somebody would come to look at little girls to adopt, I’d come walking into the conference room with those braces on my left leg and you could see the light go out in their eyes. I used to make small bets with myself as to how long it would take—ten, fifteen seconds. Never a minute on the big clock on the Avail and the light was gone. The sisters used to help me get looking nice and do my hair so I would make a good first impression, a new dress and everything just so, but I knew it didn’t matter.

Nobody wants a caramel kid with braces. Not from the start. Sometimes they’ll love a kid if they already have one and they have to get braces, but not from the start.

So I didn’t get adopted and didn’t get adopted. I thought I might as well figure on staying at Our
Lady until I got pregnant and had to leave, like Mary Ferguson, and that would be my life.

Then came Emma and Fred.

Four days after my ninth birthday Sister Gene Autry—her real name was Sister Eugene but we saw an old cowboy movie on television once and she looked just like the cowboy who was named Gene Autry—came into my cubicle where I was reading a book about horses. I always wanted a horse and sometimes, when I was reading, I could think I owned a horse and it was nearly real. I drew pictures of horses from magazines, and sometimes I could almost think I was riding them. Well. Not really. But close.

“Quick, clean up!” Sister Gene Autry told me. “Hurry.”

“Why?”

“They’re back—the Hemesvedts are back. And they want to see you.” She pulled at my hair. “Hurry. We want you to look good because … well, just because.”

Because these people were the first ones to actually come back after seeing me with my leg brace, that was why, but I didn’t say anything
and let her comb my hair out and try to get me looking nice.