Borderlands (23 page)

But he does look like a fool, damn it, he
does
. Acts it, too. If he at least looked a
little
like his daddy, but … he doesn’t … he
doesn’t
.

She tries to ease the guilt by thinking that she really does love them like a mother should, deep down inside—but this time the trick lie doesn’t work. It’s bullshit and she can’t pretend it isn’t and she’s by Jesus had her fill of bullshit, even her own.

Oh, she supposes she
did
love them once, back when they were just babies. But now the girl’s a smart-mouth pain in the ass and the boy’s a scary retard and the fact of the matter is that she wouldn’t mind a bit if they both vanished tomorrow.
Poof!
—gone, just like that. Wouldn’t that be nice?

The guilt bores into her heart. But the truth’s the truth, damn it, and no bullshit in the world will change it.

“Listen to me, Mary Marlene. He say anything
else?
”

The girl sighs with theatrical emphasis—and for an instant Dolores sees herself picking up the TV and hitting the girl over the head with it. She puts a hand to her aching forehead and thinks maybe she’s crazy. Only crazy people think things like that.

“He said he liked Road Runner best of all.”

“What? He watched cartoons with y’all?”

“Only just while Road Runner was on. Me and Jesse, we like Sylvester Cat the best. We wanna see him catch that Tweety bird and eat his head off.”

Judas Priest. Ain’t he the one? Watches cartoons cool as you please before he runs for it.

“That’s it? He didn’t say nothing else?
Mary Marlene!
”

“
Whaaat?
”

“Did he … oh hell, never mind.”

“We turn it up now?”

Without answering she returns to the kitchen and pours the half-cup of heated coffee and sugars it and then pushes the coffee away and slumps against the counter and mutters, “God
damn
it.” She goes back to the bedroom and falls across the bed—and a second later flinches when the TV volume suddenly thunders through the house.

“YE LONG-EARED VARMINT! SAY YER PRAYERS!”

“
Mary Marlene!
”

“EH … WHAT’S UP, DOC?”

She’s on her feet and stomping to the bedroom door, ready to scream at the girl to turn the thing off—
off
, not just down, goddamnit—when she remembers the title. The title to the car is in her name.

She wheels toward the closet and gets down on hands and knees and digs through the pile of clothes and shoes and old magazines until she finds the small toolbox in the back corner. All her important papers are in this box. She’ll just by God show that title to the laws and they’ll run the bastard down and make him give her the car back, maybe even lock up his sorry ass for a while for car theft. She’s almost chuckling as she sits on the bed and opens the toolbox.

The title’s not in there. Her certificate of marriage to Buddy is there, and her daddy’s letter from Huntsville, and her passbook showing a balance of sixty-three dollars and two cents. There’s her emergency roll of cash held tight by a rubber band. A few small tools. A gun cleaning kit and a half-full box of cartridges. Her blued Colt revolver. But no title. The sonofabitch must’ve taken it. Likely get a goodbuddy somewhere to notarize it, then get a new title in his own name.

That sorry lowlife.

Cartoon music clamors. Looney Tunes.

She takes out the pistol and box of cartridges and sets them on the bed, then slips the rubber band off the roll of bills and counts eight twenties and eleven tens. Two seventy. Plus the sixty-three dollars and four cents in the savings account makes … what? She never could figure in her head worth a damn. Three hundred something. And two cents. Whatever it is exactly, it ain’t a fortune. Still it’s
something
, which is a lot more than she’s had a time or two before. She’s not real surprised to find the money still there. Billy Boy wasn’t a thief. Just a two-timing peckerwood and a liar and an Indian giver is all.

She rolls the bills tightly again, puts the rubber band around them, drops the money back in the toolbox and puts the box back in the closet. She sits on the bed, only vaguely aware of the blaring theme music of Casper the Friendly Ghost, and wonders what she’s going to do. Tomorrow. Today. In the next five minutes.

After a while she catches sight of herself in the big mirror over the dresser and she goes over to it and leans in close to scrutinize her face.

Not too bad, she thinks, not yet—if it wasn’t for this, anyhow. She puts a finger to a small scarred bump high on the bridge of her nose. That was from Smiling Jack, who put an end to a period of her life she’s never told anybody about except her husband Buddy …

2

She’d arrived in San Antonio on the bus from Laredo and checked into a motel and for the next three nights in a row put on a short sexy yellow dress and sat on the bed smoking and thinking about what Rayette Nichols had said back in Harlingen when she asked her once what it was like to go to bed with men she didn’t even know.

It mostly didn’t feel like much of anything, Rayette told her. You were just letting some fella poke at you and grab at you and slobber on you for a few minutes is all. “Feels about the same, I guess,” Rayette said with a grin, “as for most women doing it with their husband.” Oh yeah, a few of them were fun, she said, but she’d be lying if she didn’t admit that with
some
of them, well, it was like rolling in shit, they were so nasty. But even with the nasty ones you could go home afterward and take a nice hot bath and be just as fresh and clean as before—
plus
be money ahead.

“Hell, honey,” Rayette had said, “all they are is men.”

On her fourth night in San Antone she finally worked up the nerve to go out to a bar and sit by herself. Hardly an hour later she was back in the motel and in bed with a man who paid her thirty dollars for the privilege. She’d been so nervous the fella couldn’t help but notice, but he’d been so understanding about it, so gentle and nice, she would’ve forgot all about the money if he hadn’t taken it on himself after he got dressed again to count it out and put it on top of the TV. He advised her to get the money first from now on because you never knew when some guy might crawfish on the deal after he’d had his fun. That made good sense and she thanked him for it. Later on she would think that if that first one hadn’t been so nice maybe she wouldn’t ever have done it again.

Or if that good-looking young Mex cop six weeks later had been rougher on her, had rattled her sufficiently, that might’ve got her out of the trade soon enough too. She’d taken him for a trick and they left the bar with their arms around each other and when they got outside he showed her his badge and told her to take it on out of San Antonio or next time he’d run her ass in. And her ass was way too nice to get all worn out on the work farm, he said, giving it a pat and smiling like he meant it. She thanked him for the break and was on a Trailways to Austin that night.

She thought the capital was a nice town, prettier and a lot cleaner than San Antone. But there was too much competition from free stuff, from all those horny government secretaries and all those university coeds. After a few weeks she hopped a bus to Houston, where she thought she’d do better.

And she did. She rented an efficiency near the interstate and bought some nicer clothes. She worked the downtown hotel bars mostly and over the next two weeks made more money than she’d thought it possible to make so fast. The first few days she did but a couple of tricks a day at thirty dollars a throw, but by the end of the week she was charging forty-five bucks and getting away with it. She once turned six tricks in one night and felt rich as the Queen of Sheba. She bought more clothes, sexy new underwear, a radio for her room. She got a little toolbox to keep her money in and cached it in the closet.

She was scared of course, every time, all the time. But her luck held well. Nobody got rough with her or tried to cheat her or force her into doing anything she didn’t want to do—and some of them would ask her to do some godawful things.

She’d been working Houston a little over two months when a man took the stool beside her at the bar of the Prince Travis Hotel one late night and introduced himself as Jackson Somebody. She’d been about to go home after another profitable evening, but figured what the hell, one more wouldn’t hurt anything. Especially one so handsome and nicely groomed and expensively dressed. And so she accepted his offer of a drink. He had dark bright eyes and black hair, a deep tan, a soft Louisiana accent and a glorious white smile. When he discreetly slipped her a hundred-dollar-bill her heart jumped up and clicked its heels and they exchanged winks and left the bar arm-in-arm.

Up in his room he asked if she would think him depraved if he sat and watched as she undressed. “Few visions are so sensual,” he said in his lilting accent, “as that of a lovely young woman shedding her clothes in preparation for the act of love. I have always found it enrapturing.”

She’d smiled at his odd way of talking and held his face in her hands and kissed him on the lips and backed away a few feet and started taking off her clothes. He sat on the bed and watched her, smiling, smoking a dark sweet-smelling cigarette. Then she was down to her yellow bikini panties and she stepped out of them and struck a pose—hip cocked, head tilted, one hand over a breast, one hand extended toward him with the panties dangling from her fingers. She giggled and playfully flicked the underwear at him.

Still smiling, he snuffed the cigarette and stood up and took a pair of black gloves from his jacket.

“You
are
a
lovely
girl,” he said softly as he fitted the thin gloves carefully over his fingers, this man she would evermore think of as Smiling Jack. “But precious … anybody working as an independent in my territory is stealing from me … and what
ever
made you think you could do that?”

Her heart felt like it was tumbling down a flight of stairs. She wanted to tell him she was sorry, she’d meant no disrespect, she’d pay him whatever he thought she owed him, she’d leave Houston and never come back to this town again—wanted to beg him please not to hurt her, but before she could get the first word out of her mouth he was on her like a hard wind out of hell …

A policeman named LeBeau came to see her in the hospital. He wore a stained yellow jacket and a porkpie hat and looked fed up with the world. All she could tell him was the man’s description and that his first name was Jackson. Her head felt misshapen. Her voice sounded strange in her own ears. LeBeau put away his notebook and smiled at her with nothing but his mouth. Not likely they’d catch him, he said. And even if they did, it wasn’t likely he’d go to trial. And if he did, it wasn’t likely he’d be convicted, not with it being his word against hers.

“I’ll tell you something, darlin,” LeBeau said, “just between us and not as a member of the Houston Police Department.” He stood and hitched up his pants. “Nobody gives a shit what happens to whores. Any girl sells her ass is trash and just asking for trouble. Who you think cares she finds it?” He wagged an admonishing finger and left.

She lay in the hospital another two days, congested with rage and humiliation. And fear. She’d remembered Rayette saying all they are is men, but she’d forgotten—more likely chosen not to recall—the business about Victorio. Well, no more of it, no matter what. Better to go hungry than have to deal with any Victorio or Smiling Jack or God-knew-who. Next time could be nails in her knees. No,
thank you
.

And as she lay there in her bandages and watched some local news show on the wall TV she realized it was her birthday. She was eighteen.

Smiling Jack had taken all the money she’d had in her purse, and she told the hospital she was broke. She had to sign a paper promising to pay off her bill when she was able. As soon as she got back to her room she packed her bag and got her money from the toolbox. An hour later she was on a bus to Texas City, ignoring the looks the other passengers gave her battered face.

And when everything was finally healed—the cracked ribs, the concussion, the bruised breasts, the broken finger, the various cuts on her face—the only vestige of Smiling Jack’s handiwork was the small scarred bump on the bridge of her nose.

3

“Pretty face,” she says softly, assaying it in the mirror. “Yes it was.”

But no more. Too much the worse for wear. No wonder Billy Boy went packing.

Cut the shit, girl. Wasn’t the face and you know it.

What was it, then. Answer me that.

Nothing but you, sugar. Y-O-U. You know that too.

Oh. Yeah.

She goes over and sits on the bed, picks up the pistol and twirls it on her finger like a movie cowboy. It’s a .38 caliber Colt Cobra with a four-inch barrel, finished in blue and fitted with a checked walnut stock. It weighs seventeen ounces and is eight-and-a-half inches long. She has owned it since shortly after her episode with Smiling Jack.

She learned to shoot from Uncle Frank. She’d been living with him and Aunt Rhonda more than a year by then and hadn’t exchanged more than a dozen sentences with him in that time, but he’d lately begun paying her more attention. One afternoon when she was walking past his gun shop at the edge of town he came to the door and said hi and asked if she’d like to come in and look around. She’d never seen so many guns. He handled them with an easy familiarity she couldn’t help but admire. She’d recently seen the movie
Bonnie and Clyde
and had wondered what it felt like to shoot a gun. She loved the feel of them. When he asked if she’d like to shoot one sometime, she said oh yes.

They’d go deep in the woods behind the house and shoot bottles and tin cans. He showed her the proper stance for facing the target, the way to hold the piece in a two-hand grip, how to aim and squeeze—not jerk—the trigger, how to accept the recoil. He let her fire his shotgun too, a pump-action Remington. But her love right from the first had been his two revolvers—a Smith & Wesson four-inch .38 and a huge .44 caliber Remington with a barrel about as long as her forearm, an ancient cannon of a piece he said his grandaddy had taken off a dead bandido when he was riding with Pershing’s cavalry down in Mexico, hunting for Pancho Villa.