Getting Mother's Body (8 page)

She opens a beer, offering it to me. I shake my head no. She drinks.

“How come he was laughing at you?”

“Not at me. At a joke,” she explains, swallowing her beer down fast and jiggling the near-empty in her hand. There's a quarter-size stain of beer on her blouse. “His brother Jimmy comes over and they're sitting around watching wrestling, you know, Saturday morning. I'm in the kitchen but I can hear what they're saying.”

She got me listening to her now. Her big chest breathing smooth, her wide elastic three-snap belt coming unsnapped at the bottom. Her hair, the same red as the doodads on her shoes, is whipped high like cotton candy.

“Jimmy was telling a joke,” she says, continuing, “ ‘How you f— a fat girl? Roll her in flour and look for the wet spot,' that was Jimmy's joke. Dale didn't have to laugh. And I'm fat and standing in the kitchen thinking, Dale, please don't laugh. And he didn't. Not right away. Then he like, leaned his chair back so he could see me watching him, fat in the kitchen and begging him with my eyes not to laugh and you know what he does?”

“He laughs,” I says.

“Minute to the day, anything he felt for me was over and I knew it.”

“That musta hurt,” I says.

She looks me up and down. “No one ever called you fat, I'll bet,” she says.

“They called me other stuff.”

“I got the last laugh on Dale, though,” Myrna says. Her voice turns low. Lower than when she was talking about the cowboy billboard. Like she's dragging her words behind her on a rope. “He thought he was gonna get me with kid number six. He knocked me up, but Myrna got the last laugh.”

She takes two fresh cans out the bag, opening both and handing one to me. She touches her can to mines. “Cheers,” she says and we drink.

“You in trouble?” she asks. Her voice is so low, so right-in-my-ear that I almost don't hear her. “If yr in trouble, I know someone who can help.”

I turn to the window and sleep.

When I wake up we're stopped. There's a faded red wooden depot with a windmill water-pump in front. A small sign, plain and white with faded black letters:

Three Mexican cowboys, small and handsome in they clean just-bought duds, get on.

Myrna gives them a low whistle. She's peeling an orange with a Case knife. The skin comes off in one long spiral. She sees me looking at it and hands it to me.

“You good with dreams?” she asks and right away she starts in with the telling. “I had me a dream once that I was sleeping and my breasts fell off in the middle of the night. Both of them.”

I fiddle the orange peel, squeezing the dimply skin, making it spray. She divides the orange, juice going everywhere, and gives me half.

“Had me another dream,” Myrna goes on, “dreamt I made a phone call. A whole slew of numbers. Longer than just long distance. Phone rings and rings. Then the party picks up. On the other end guess who it was? It was
me
. I'd called my own self up. I knew it was me cause I could recognize my voice. But I couldn't understand what the f— I was saying, scuze my French, ha ha, it was like I was speaking in another language.”

“Huh,” I say.

“Got any idea what it all means?”

“Nope.”

Sometimes I dream of Mother and me driving. She's got on her jewels and a fur coat. She asks me to read out the signs and I can't read none of them, or she's wearing a long evening dress, gets out the car and walks into a river. When she was living her voice was low and deep, like riding on a gravel road, but in my dreams when she talks her voice is high-pitch. I wonder if, when they pave the supermarket over, I'll still dream of her.

“I bet you got interesting dreams,” Myrna says.

“I don't never dream of nothing,” I says.

“Mostly I dream of my kids,” Myrna says.

I eat my orange. When Laz heard I was pregnant, he got excited, like it was his even though he knew about Snipes and me. He showed me in one of his Encyclopaedias. A baby, just starting out, looks like the section of an orange.
I'm eating this orange but don't you grow none,
I says to the baby.

The bus rolls on fast. Myrna's got a slip of paper close to her chest, hiding the words from me.

“Me and Dale, we look across our kids at each other,” she says. “We used to look at each other and there weren't nothing in between. Now we look at each other across our kids. Five kids. And each time we had one it was like this piece of Dale got born that I didn't even know was there.” She sags back in her chair, handing me the piece of paper she's got.

“Doctor Parker, in Gomez,” I says, reading.

“He's at where the bus stops. Where I got on, that's where his clinic's at,” she says.

“He a friend of yours?”

“He can help you if yr in trouble,” Myrna says. Her voice on the rope dragging in the dirt behind her. She tells me about how Doctor Parker is nice, how you have to spend the night, how it don't hurt, and other things.

“My husband and me ain't in trouble,” I says. But she upends her last beer, not listening.

She sits straight ahead in her seat, putting both hands on her armrest and cocking herself slowly back, three times, until she's laying there almost horizontal. Her flattish belly, where her baby was once but ain't no longer cause she got the last laugh, stretches out long when she stretches out. The boy sitting behind her starts crying again.

We get to Royalty with its big gold shimmery sign right outside my window. Myrna gathers up her things quick.

“Stay sweet, Billy Beede,” she says.

“You too,” I says.

She walks down the aisle, fluffing herself like a Miss America would, walking down a runway. She gets off the bus and, after looking around, heads toward a taxicab.

Across from the depot there's a little piece of train trestle, rusted metal coming from nowheres and going to nowheres. The bus takes off again and the trestle disappears behind a car dealership. Mother tolt me once how when a person jumps off a bridge, on their way down, before they hit the dirt or the water or whatever, they got plenty of time to reconsider. I remember her telling me that. And I remember not believing her. Folks fall too fast.

WILLA MAE BEEDE

This song's called “Willa Mae's Blues.”

My man, he loves me

He bought me a diamond ring.

My man, he loves me

He bought me a diamond ring.

Well, his wife, she found out, she says my pretty ring don't mean a thing.

My man, he loves me

He bought me a Cadillac car.

My man, he loves me

He bought me a Cadillac car.

Well, his wife, she seen us driving, and she saying we done gone too far.

She got the paper, she my man's ball and chain.

She got the paper, she my man's ball and chain.

She put her big foot down, bought me a ticket on the very next train.

ALBERTA SNIPES

I got Zekiel on my tit, Daniel on my knee and child number seven bout to bust out me any minute. Ruthie, Joshua, Adam and Eve, they with they daddy over in Lubbock, gone to spend money we don't got at the circus. Clifford wanted us all to go, he got real serious about it but I put my foot down cause here I am ready to drop this child. “You want me to drop this child in the middle of the circus?” I ast him, cause that's what I felt like would happen if I went. I would smell them elephants and, you know, the heavy smell they got would make me drop this child and there I'd be, having number seven not in a hospital. And after Clifford promised me seven would be born in a hospital too. “Can you hold that child inside another day?” Clifford ast me and I just had to laugh. This one ain't due till next month although you would think, looking at me, that it's overdue. If he a he, he gonna be Moses, if she a she, she gonna be Esther. “When you gonna start your work for Doctor Wells?” I ast him. There's a doctor in Midland who hired Clifford to make him a black doctor bag–style coffin and Clifford come home yesterday with a look of pride on his face that I only seen once before, when Ruthie was born. He worked all day and night, drawing and redrawing the pattern for the coffin and then this morning, all jumpy, talking about how it's Thursday and all of a sudden wanting to take us all to the circus. I tell him Thursday comes every week and the circus'll be back soon enough but Doctor Wells may drop dead tomorrow and if we don't got his coffin ready the Wells family will have to put their Doctor in a regular box. At least go pick out the wood for it or something, I tolt him, but all he wanted to do was take us all to the circus. I wasn't about to go. Not in this heat. We got a thermometer on the side of the house that says it's a hundred and two. But I let them all go on. Daniel cried at first but he can go next time. Clifford piling the children in the Ford and looking like he wanna tell me something before he goes, but just kissing me on the lips and saying how he's gonna bring me something pretty back.

It's like Zeke was born with a full set of teeth the way he pulls. Like he got fangs or something. And Moses-or-Esther always kicking.

It's around four in the afternoon when this gal, dark-skinned and on the narrow side, comes up into the yard. She just walks right through the gate towards the house. She's carrying a dirt-colored suitcase with the same color pocketbook swinging in the crook of her arm. She's carrying a big white box on her head. When she sees me on the porch she stops, setting down the suitcase and switching the box from her head to under her arm. She walks back to the gate, where we got the mailbox with the house number on it, then turns and heads at me again.

“How you doing?” I ask the girl. Esther-or-Moses kicks. Daniel shies his head away from the strange gal and Zeke bites down hard.

“I'm doing pretty good,” the gal says smiling. She got a sweaty face from walking. She puts her pocketbook down next to the suitcase, and reaches her free arm up, swiping it across her temple, then licks the sweat off her upper lip with her lower one.

I figure she needs a coffin, but she don't look like she can afford one.

“You looking for Snipes?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“He ain't here right now.”

“I'll wait,” she says. She looks at the porch toward the long square of shade where I'm sitting. There's a rocker there, Clifford's chair, but something in me don't want her sitting in it.

“He's away all day,” I tell her.

“Away doing whut?” she asks. Her hand tightens around her white box.

“You want a coffin you gonna have to come back tomorrow,” I tell her. She narrow, like I said, but there's something fat about her. Something swole around her middle. I know what it is and don't want to know.

She stands on one foot, scratching her leg with the other. “Clifton tolt me to come Thursday,” she says.

“His name ain't no Clifton, it's Clifford,” I tell her. I switch Zeke to my other tit.

“I call him Snipes most of the time,” she says.

“Call him what you want, I'm telling you he ain't here.”

The gal holds her hand up to her forehead, taking the sun off her face. She got a wide nose and mouth, but pretty eyes.

“You his sister Alberta?” she asks.

I don't say nothing to that.

“He tolt me to come today,” she says gently. She comes up toward the steps but I cut my eyes at her and she stops coming. Now there's a worry in her voice. “I'm getting married tomorrow,” she says.

“Not to my husband you ain't,” I says.

She don't move.

“Get yr narrow dusty hussy ass out my yard,” I says.

She don't say nothing, but a look comes into her eyes. A look of—I'm not sure what. She walks away from the porch, with a bounce to her walking that she didn't have when she first came up here. When she gets to the gate she takes what looks like a wedding dress out that box, fishes around in her pocketbook and, before I know anything, she goes and lights the dress on fire, standing there, looking at the little flame it makes, watching it burn. Daniel moves to the edge of the porch to watch the fire too. Then, as quick as she starts it, like she done changed her mind, she stomps on the dress, putting the fire out and stuffing the dress back in the box. She yells something at me that I won't repeat and then she's gone.

Ruth, Joshua, Adam and Eve, Daniel, Ezekiel, and Esther-or-Moses. And me, Alberta, and him, Clifford. My husband is a good-looking man. What I mean is, this ain't the first time something like this has happened. I could mention it to him when he comes home, but me and him would just get to yelling and whatnot, so I ain't gonna say nothing. Hopefully he's gonna bring me home something nice, and something nice for Daniel too.

That gal had a funny look in her eye, and to burn up that dress—she's gotta be crazy.

Plus she never did say what her name was neither.

FAT JUNIOR LENOIR

She come in here about an hour ago, asking if she could use my restroom. Went in there wearing a green housedress and come out in this red-colored one. Waltzed out of here and down the street like she was going to a party. Now she's back, standing at my counter. Don't look like the party went so good.