Borderlands (27 page)

And then she met Billy Boy Renfro in The Barnacle one night and he asked if she’d like to have pie and coffee with him when she got off work. He was the first who’d ever asked her to join him for something other than a drink, and she was caught by such surprise she said sure, why not, more out of curiosity than anything else. She’d reached a point where not much made her curious. He was short and wiry, a welder at the shipworks, and he was funny and sweet and behaved like a gentleman. By the time he dropped her off at her place at two in the morning and kissed her goodnight and said he’d see her tomorrow, she was dizzy with the idea that maybe she still had a little luck left and maybe it was about to turn.

She’d known it wasn’t going to get far with him, known it in her bones. But when you feel like you’re drowning—feel it not just in awful dreams at night but even when you’re awake and walking around in the broad daylight, feel it when you’re having coffee in the morning or staring at your kids from across a room or suddenly catching a look at yourself in the mirror—when you’re always feeling like that, like you’re not even sure you’re going to be able to draw your next breath … well, it’s no surprise you’ll grab at anything drifting by, grab at it and hope it’ll keep you from going under just yet …

They got together almost every evening. He’d come to The Barnacle just as she was finishing her shift for the night and they’d do some drinking and dancing for a while in the company of some of the other waitresses and their boyfriends. Then they would go to her place where the kids had much earlier put themselves to bed and they’d make love into the night.

One time they saw her neighbor Ellis Corman watching them from his bathroom window and Dolores shook her breasts at him like a stripper and Ellis suddenly remembered to turn off his bathroom light and they laughed and Billy Boy pulled down the blind.

They’d been seeing each other for six weeks by then and she said he was spending so much time at her place he might as well live there instead of with his Uncle Raymond like he did. He said he didn’t know about that. She said she did—and put a nipple to his mouth while her other hand roamed over him brazenly. The next day he brought his clothes from his uncle’s house and hung them in her closet.

He seemed always to have plenty of money and he didn’t mind spending it. He told her that besides his welding job at the works he played poker twice a week at Purple Jim’s garage up in Bridge City and had been on a run of luck lately. “Course now,” he said, “there’s times it goes the other way, too, no matter how good you are, and when it does, well, that’s when you get by with drinking beer ruther than Jim Beam and eating hot dogs ruther than steak.”

He said she ought to be driving something nicer than that rattletrap truck and so she traded it in on a yellow Ford two-door and he paid the rest in cash.

She was astonished to see how well he got along with the kids. Dolores hadn’t seen them take a shine to anybody since Buddy. Mary Marlene couldn’t get enough of fawning on him, and Jesse, wonder of wonders, would sometimes get in whispered conversation with him. She asked once what the boy said to him and Billy Boy just grinned and winked at Jesse and said, “That’s our little secret.” It was one of the few instances in the past two years she’d seen Jesse smile.

The first couple of times he went to play poker at Purple Jim’s after moving in with her, she came home from work and took a hot bath and waited up for him, freshly powdered and wearing sexy new underwear under her robe. But he both times came in a little too drunk to do much about it. Even though she was angry she kept it to herself, but after the second time she didn’t bother with the fancy undies and the bath powder anymore.

The following week, when he didn’t come home till dawn and then announced with a chuckle that his luck had gone a little sour and he’d lost nearly three hundred dollars, she got furious.

It was partly because of the money, of course. Hearing him talk about losing three hundred dollars,
laughing
about it, like there was no chance at all the world might ever do him harm, made her angry in ways she couldn’t have explained if she’d tried.
She’d
never been able to laugh about money, goddammit. But it was something else too—a sudden, inexplicable surge of fear. She was so frightened, and so furious
because
she was frightened and didn’t know why she should be, that all she could think to do was tell him what a dumb sonofabitch he was to waste his money that way and come in too drunk to even give a proper fuck to the best-looking woman
he’d
ever have.

He looked at her for a moment like he was trying to see if she was joking, but she could see in his eyes how her face must look, and he lost his smile quick and said he didn’t much appreciate her talking that way to him.

She said she wasn’t really all that interested in what some drunk money-waster did or did not appreciate.

He said she ought to have more respect for her kids, if not for him, than to use that sort of language in the house.

She said she would talk any fucking way she pleased in her own fucking house and her fucking kids were none of his fucking concern, thank you very much.

And he was out the door and gone.

Real smart, girl. Let him see you for what you really are, that’ll wow him for damn sure. She felt like howling.

He came by the next day just before she left for work and they told each other they were sorry and they kissed and made up and sealed the reconciliation with a quickie before she had to rush off to the job. But damage had been done. She saw it in the shift of his eyes, felt it in his touch. She heard it in the vagueness of his voice.

That night when she got home he was watching a late movie on TV, and she got a beer and joined him on the couch. They watched the movie for a while and then during a commercial he told her they’d just been given an extra-special job down at the shipyard, a priority job for the Coast Guard, and he’d be working double shifts for a time, round the damn clock practically, and so like as not he’d most of the time eat and bunk right there at the yard. She said that was good news, the extra work—and even as she told herself to keep her mouth shut and not say anything more about it, she added, “Oughta help some to make up for that three hundred dollars, huh?” He gave her a look she couldn’t read and then turned back to the TV without saying anything.

She didn’t see him for the next ten days. And now she began to have the drowning dream nearly every night—the dream of treading water way out in the Gulf, so far out that the shoreline was no more than a dark line on the horizon. She’d have no idea how she got out there, rising and falling on the swells under a vast gray sky and looking toward the distant shore and knowing she could never swim that far. She’d be exhausted from the struggle to keep her head above water—and then a wave would close over her and she’d be sinking, face upward to the receding silver surface, feeling her lungs starting to tear as her feet touched the soft mud bottom and sank into it and her mouth opened for air and filled with the coppery strangling water … and she’d waken in a soaking sweat and with her heart lunging hard against her ribs.

The first time she’d had the dream she was so scared by it she started drinking at midmorning and was passed out by late afternoon and did not go to work that night. When she called in sick with a hangover for the third time that week the manager told her if she was going to be all that undependable he’d have to let her go. “Well, I guess I’ll just let
you
go, mullethead!” she said—and banged down the phone as hard as she could and hoped she’d blown out his eardrum.

She was drunk as a coot when Billy Boy came in just after sundown but not so drunk she couldn’t smell the perfume on him or see the lipstick on his shirt. The next day her memory of the fight was vague. Lots of yelling and cursing. A dim recollection of going at him with both fists and landing a couple of good ones. Of glaring at him while she caught her breath—and him standing there and fingering a bloody lip and looking at her in such a pitying way she wished she had the strength to hit him again. Of telling him if he was so hot for other women he could go fuck them all and when he was done with them he could damn well go fuck himself.

She had clear memory of the sound of his car driving away.

That was three days ago.

Since then she’d sat home all day, drinking and knowing he’d come back because he’d left his clothes and a man leaving for good does not leave his clothes behind.

And then this morning his clothes were gone.

Took his clothes and her car.

Left her nothing except all to herself.

10

She is sitting on the front steps watching the lowering sun set the sky aflame. The air is hot and shrill with cicadas. It smells of dust. The Spanish moss dangling from the oaks tilts slightly in a small waft of air. The shadows of the trees now stretch nearly across the street.

Almost suppertime. Before long the neighborhood will resound with the high cries of mothers calling their children home, and with the distant echoes of “Coming, momma!
Commming
.”

She has never joined in the evening’s communal call for kids. Her children won’t anyway come home till just before dark, as always, after everybody else in the neighborhood has sat down to supper.

Her children … The words have an alien sound. Smart-mouth Mary Marlene and closemouthed little Jesse. Jesus. They deserve better. Had the best daddy in the world but no momma worth a damn.

Ain’t but one way, girl. You know it.

What about them? Be awful for them.

Can’t be more awful than what they got now. A momma who don’t love her children …
that’s
an awful thing. Anyhow, Billy Boy maybe don’t give a damn about you but he won’t let nothing happen to them.

She regards the way the leaves on the trees shine bright as red glass with the sun just above them.

“I hate to seeeee … that evenin sun go downnnnn.” She snorts with a half-laugh, half-sob, and tells herself to cut it out. She feels like most of the air has been let out of the world and it’s all she can do to achieve the next breath.

The sun is almost touching the trees now. Heat rises off the ground like a slow exhalation.

All right. Enough of this.

She stands up and feels the dress clinging wetly to her belly and the backs of her thighs, then goes inside. The house is full of shadows. In the bedroom she peels off the dress. The radio is playing “You Don’t Have to Be a Baby to Cry.” She notices dark smears on the dress and is puzzled and then looks in the dresser mirror and sees mascara rivulets on her cheeks. She is surprised, because she certainly doesn’t
feel
like crying, not now, not anymore.

As she washes her face over the bathroom sink, a euphoria such as she’s never before felt in her life swells in her chest until she aches with the sheer pleasure of it. She pats her face dry with a towel. The bathroom mirror fills with her grin. She regards the smiling fresh-scrubbed look of herself and can hardly believe how good she feels.

Maybe this is how it feels to people who have cancer and then get it cut out and are all cured again, something like this. She feels wonderful because for the first time in longer than she can remember she does not feel afraid. She has lived in fear for so long that, now, in its sudden absence, she feels almost happily drunk, the way you do in about the middle of your fourth quick drink.

She goes into the bedroom and gets the pistol off the pillow and then goes to the front window of the living room and looks out at the reddened evening. In long keening voices, mothers are calling their children home.

For some reason she will never understand, she thinks of her father. Pictures him in his little cell at Huntsville. Lying there in his bunk and feeling his worthless life wasting away heartbeat by heartbeat behind those prison walls. She wishes now she’d at least sent him a postcard.

“Dear daddy—wish you were here.”

You were here, you son of a bitch, I’d sure enough shoot
you
.

No, not true, I wouldn’t. That’d be the biggest favor anybody ever did you in your whole entire life. Leave you in that damn prison is what I’d really do. And you’d go right on dying little by little, breath by breath, over all the years to come. Because you’re too much of a coward to do anything else but. Because you’re way too damn much of a coward to do
this
.

Naked at the window in the dying light of day, she puts the muzzle in her mouth. She hears a fly buzz as she squeezes the trigger.

There is a sudden loss of sound except for a faraway hum—and in that instant her skull feels abruptly stuffed with cotton.

There is a slight muted thump somewhere at the top of her head.

And—all in the same instant—she feels a wild exhilaration.

Whooooeeeee!

And then that instant passes and the next begins and—

BLAM!

She is knocked backwards from the window and falls against the sofa and tumbles to the floor and plunges into the deep end of the world’s vast pool of pain—pain that annihilates all possibility of definable sensation. It overwhelms everything except the roaring in her skull.

And then the roaring stops. Everything stops.

No sound. No pain.

There. All done. Dead.

Hmm … Not quite.

Dead people don’t itch.

Her nose itches.

She is aware of the smells of piss and gunsmoke.

She finds herself on her hands and knees.

Something oozes along her breast, bunches at the nipple, drops to the floor in a viscous gob. Hard to tell what it is because she can’t see too clearly at the moment. She tries to wipe her eyes and falls on her face. The jolt seems to dislodge something in her head, but, except for the stirrings of a faraway ache in some distant region of her skull, there is still no pain, no sound.

Back up on all fours. More drops of goop hit the floor. They’re coming from her head.

Pieces of my head, she thinks. Why ain’t I dead?

She tries to shout that question but when she opens her mouth what emerges is a gargling dark-red rush of blood.