Karen G. Berry - Mayhem 01 - Love and Mayhem (25 page)

Memphis cleared his throat. “Now, it was a pleasure speaking with you, as always Rhondalee, but I have a call to make.” And in as mannerly a fashion as he could, the Sheriff rolled up his window and drove away.

Memphis felt shaken, and it wasn’t just Rhondalee’s earrings. I was sitting in that car looking at my hat, he thought. My
hat
. Someone could have snuck up on me with a gun and I would’ve just turned to meet my fate with just the right tilt to my brim.

I’m getting old, he thought. I’m old, and if I want to be older yet before I die, I’d better be more watchful.

THE MORNING SUN
shone warm on the dusty banks of Ochre Water Creek. Two bamboo poles sat propped up and waiting for whatever fish in the world might like to nibble on hooks baited with miniature marshmallows. Clouds, high and striated like shredded paper napkins, kept the air from becoming too hot. A small plastic cooler full of RC Cola and Pabst Blue Ribbon sweated drops of condensation. Tender’s truck offered shade.

Raven and Annie were fishing.

Annie had stepped out so carefully that morning, carrying that little cooler, terrified that her grandma would catch her and ruin all their plans. “Mom,” she whispered. “I can’t find Gramps’ keys.”

Raven tested the door of the truck. Unlocked, as usual. “Get in, Tadpole.” She lay on the floor of the truck under the steering column. “Watch and learn.” Raven made short work of it, and they soon drove out of the Park, making a point of bumping Quentin Romaine’s freshly painted lawn jockey on their way to the gate.

They’d already eaten the bologna sandwiches that Annie surreptitiously assembled the night before. Raven turned her attention to the crackers.

Annie picked up a rock, looked at it, and discarded it based on some criterion known only to her. She’d kept a pile of them. Raven squirted a little cheese onto a Ritz, held it out. Annie took it and shoved it whole into her mouth. “Mom? Guess what?” she said through orange goo and crumbs. “Guess what I’m doing with all those rocks?”

“What?”

“Guess.”

“Hm. Let’s see. You’re piling up those rocks and you’re gonna stone Quentin Romaine to death for being an idiot.”

“Nope.” Annie Leigh scraped at a rock with her jackknife. “I’m looking for some of that special stuff they used to find in Bone Pile.”

“Uranium?”

“Yeah. You can sell it for lots of money. But I don’t actually know what it exactly looks like.”

“It don’t show. You have to find it with a Geiger counter, not a knife.”

“What’s a Geiger counter?”

“Something that clicks, and counts Geigers.”

Annie folded her jackknife and sighed. “What’s uranium for, anyway?”

“Bombs.”

“That’s what it’s for? Bombs?”

“Yup. Bombs that can blow up the world. But they don’t make those bombs no more, and anyway, the uranium around here ran out.”

“Mom, then why do they call it Bone Pile?”

“Well, before the uranium, they used to make potash there.”

“And what’s potash?”

“I can’t remember, just that there was a use for it during the World war, and they made it with bones. All the skeletons from the desert, and from cattle and horses. They had piles and piles of potash out there, and piles and piles of bones. Get it? Bone Pile.”

“Is that all they made in Bone Pile, is stuff for wars?”

“Yup. Uranium and potash and boys for the Army.”

“They make music there.”

“They sure do. But there’s no call for that in a war, I guess.”

Annie abandoned the hunt for rocks and curled up next to her mother like a kitten at the teat. She ran her fingers along the scar, feeling where it started, the pink knot at the temple, tracing its raised path over the cheekbone. “It’s like you got a flame decal on this side of your face. Like a Mexican hotrod. You should put those flames on the left side of the truck, to match.”

“I think detailing my face is enough.” Raven’s eyes sank shut.

“Mom, are you going to do the talent show on Saturday night?”

“Nope, I’m not.”

“Why not?”

Leaving Raven, of course, to remember why.

IT WAS A
long path that led from dreams of the Opry to the management of the Francie June Memorial Trailer Park, just outside of Ochre Water, California.

They’d towed in a trailer full of spangled outfits, musical instruments, speakers and monitors. Her mother held a scrapbook in her lap that chronicled the rise and fall of one Roweena Gail LaCour, a young gospel singing sensation who wowed the fair circuit only to be cut down by scandal.

The papers had said she was fifteen.
Fifteen year-old gospel-singing sensation Rowena Gail LaCour was found naked in a motel room with the drummer of her band, Floyd Labor. Authorities reportedly found conspicuous amounts of tobacco, alcohol and a half ounce of marijuana
. They arrested Floyd, wanting to charge him with furnishing alcohol to a minor. But she was eighteen, not fifteen, and they were in Nevada, so that charge evaporated, along with the idea of charging him with statutory rape. And the pot had been in the pocket of a denim jacket, a piece of tour swag that said, “Gospel Angels for Jesus” in rhinestones across the back. The jacket was hers, too. Floyd got off clean. Her career was cleanly leveled.

Raven was an official public disgrace. She had ridden it all out with something suspiciously like a smile on her face. Anyone looking at her would have thought she was glad to be done with warbling gospel standards at revivals and state fairs. Rhondalee refused to sell any of the fortune in equipment. “We’ll need that,” she’d insisted. “We’ll need it for this little slut’s comeback.” Tender didn’t argue, of course, as Tender rarely raised a word in argument against his wife.

Her Uncle Memphis had called and told them of an opening for a couple to be on-site managers for the Francie June Memorial Trailer Park. “Francie June! It’s an omen,” Rhondalee said. In the spirit of Francie June, Raven would rise like a phoenix from the ashes of her gospel career. Rhondalee would lower the necklines and tighten the skirts of all those spangled, fringed dresses that Raven had hated to wear so much. Who knew… maybe, just maybe, she and Raven would take to the stage together, like the Judds.
Yes
, said Rhondalee,
It’s a sign. We’ll be back, and better than ever. Jerry Lee had some scandals in his day, too. We’ll be back
.

Tender had shaken his head. It was a sign, all right, thought Tender. A sign about going down in flames, and never rising again.

Raven had just whistled. Her father offered Levi Skinner fifteen dollars they didn’t have to help unload. When they opened the trailer, Raven saw his eyes gleam like Aladdin’s when he looked into the treasure cave.

With Levi’s help, she and her father had loaded all her mother’s hopes and dreams for her daughter’s musical future into the locked pole barn behind the Clubhouse. And with Levi’s help, Raven had opened that barn door every night to an assortment of local musicians who had heard about the remarkable deals available at the Park. She’d sold all three of her guitars without a blink. She’d sold the PA to Beau Neely to replace the aging system up at the Blue Moon Tap Room. He’d given her a fair price, impressed with her cold and calculating desire to rid of herself of a dream that had never been her own.

Pageant mothers had stopped by, too. She’d sold every dress, every hat, every pair of boots including the little pink ones that said, “
I love Jesus!
” across the toes in rhinestones. She’d sold the curly blonde wigs that Rhondy pinned over her Indian-black hair. She felt her greatest satisfaction while unloading the case full of stage makeup she’d had to endure the application of every night she sang, to cover what her mother called
that accursed scar that ruined your face
.

It had only taken a matter of days. All that remained of the Littlest Angel for Jesus was an old black guitar in a heavy case. A marker. Raven had brought it in on the night they moved to the Park. It wasn’t really hers, so Raven wouldn’t sell it. She’d forgotten it in the back of her closet.

Rhondalee had screamed when she’d opened the door a week later.
ROBBED!
She’d fallen to the floor in a fit, and repeated the performance when she found out what had really happened to all that equipment.

Raven kept the money for trucking school, a commercial license and a nest egg that she would add to in order to get her own rig.

The Littlest Angel was free to fly.

“OKAY, I’M WAITING,
Mom. Why not?”

“I never liked being on stage.”

“I don’t believe you.” Annie frowned.

“What, you think your mom’s a liar?”

Annie laughed. “Sing me one a your songs, okay?”

“Okay. Let me think.”

Her voice rose like the lapping of the river, cool and dark and deep.

“That’s pretty, Mom. Did you write that?”

“I might have. I don’t remember. Pop and I wrote ’em together.”

“I think it would be fun. Writing songs with your folks, singing ’em, everybody looking at you, listening to you. I’d like it.”

“OK, tell you what. How about I paint your face a color it ain’t, and slap a great big blonde wig on you, big like Gramma’s hair, and then you can wear some fluffy dress like the Mexican girls wear on their Quinceañera, and call you Rowena Gail and make you sing about Jesus, and you tell me how fun you think it is.”

“Oh no thank YOU, Mom.” They lay in the sun, their black hair flowing together like a spill of shiny crude oil. “I
would
like a hat.”

“Would you, now.”

“When you were my age, you had hats.”

“Yup, but they were custom-blocked nightmares.”

“I still want one.”

“Well, I’ll get one for you as soon as I find one small enough for your hard little head.”

“Were you a tomboy, like me?”

“I was worse.”

“You still are. Now, you’re a tom man.”

“A what?”

“A tom man. That’s a tom boy, grown up.” They curved into each other, enjoying the animal nearness. “I wish I was with you every day.”

“On the road? You got your schooling with Grandpa.”

“What’s schooling
for
, Mom?”

“It’s for reading, for one thing. I missed out on that. I can barely read, Tadpole. Just road signs and mile markers.”

“You could come home, Mom. And go to school.”

“Come home and let Grandpa Tender teach me to read? Nope, Tadpole. That would be a mess.”

Raven hadn’t returned home for more than a week at a time, except for a span of a month when she was twenty. She’d pulled in, hopped out belly-first, looked down at the writhing, impatient mound there, shrugged at her parents and said,
Well, hell
. Rhondalee had one of her fits, of course.

But on the night Annie Leigh was born, Rhondalee was there, grabbing at her hands while a maternity nurse fussed around, trying to insert a fetal monitor.
This goes in the baby’s head, and it won’t hurt you, Honey
, she’d cooed. Raven had kicked the nurse in the stomach, climbed out of bed, leaned against the wall and moaned. Her father went to her. Raven slammed her shoulder against the wall, bit him on the arm, squatted down and shot the howling little dark thing out of her into her own hands.