Karen G. Berry - Mayhem 01 - Love and Mayhem (47 page)

The room filled with years of grief, resentment, duty.

Annie walked to the door of the clubhouse. “Gramma, you’re a mean old bird, but I will miss you bunches.” She slammed the door behind her.

Rhondalee’s face twitched. The smallest gasp, more of a hiccup, escaped her tight lips, but Rhondalee wasn’t going to think about that door slamming. She refused to think about that. How alone she would be, now.

How ungrateful could a child could be? All those years of doing up braids and pre-treating stains and riding herd on her tooth-brushing, and what does a person get? “Thanks for the tunafish sandwiches.” Sharper than a serpent’s tooth. Something like that, something about Some People being ungrateful and how it hurt, but what it really meant was that you could slave your life away in the service of others, styling wigs and sewing soutache on satin shirts and planning and plotting and wishing and hoping, and it never meant your dreams would come true.

Dumped here like a stray kitten for me to raise.

Tuna-fish sandwiches, indeed.

Rhondalee grieved. She grieved her dreams. She grieved the lost love of her silver-eyed husband. She grieved her twisted hands and her ruined hair. She grieved her daughter, her granddaughter, and the fact that they no longer needed her.

Most of all, she grieved the loss of what she had locked up in the lowest drawer of her office-supply liquidation metal desk.

ANNIE LEIGH LACOUR
ran in her black boots over to the idling rig, pillowcase and guitar in hand. “Where’s Gramps? He’s really coming?”

“He is. He’s in the back, having a rest.”

“A rest? Why is he having a rest?”

“Beats me. You could go check on him if you want to.”

But Annie Leigh was too excited to do anything but scramble up the side of the rig and pitch her pillowcase in the open door. She sat down and began to bounce. “Mom! Guess what!”

“What?”

“Guess!”

Raven thought. “You’re ready to go?”

“I AM!” hollered Annie Leigh.

“Well, here you go.” She set a pale yellow hat on her daughter’s head, just like her own. Around the crowns of both hats stretched the cured and flattened bodies of those rattlers, the snake heads centered over their foreheads, mouths open, fangs bared, evil and ugly and ready to strike.

“Hot damn, Mom.”

“Yup. You ready to go be the Littlest Rattler for Jesus, Annie Leigh?”

“AM I EVER!”

“Then,” said Raven, “let’s roll.” And roll, they did.

IT WAS HOT.

He stood by the side of the road. He had his backpack, his duffel bag, his sleeping bag, his guitar, his camera, eighteen rolls of shot film, and sixty-six dollars. He also had a broken heart. Truck after truck roared past. He tasted diesel. Toxic. He knew how to get a ride, finally. Just stand in the right place, stick out your thumb, and wait.

An eighteen-wheeler pulled over in a spray of fumes and gravel. A brown arm beckoned, motioned for him to hurry up. He broke into a trot, his gear bobbing all around him. He stopped beside the open window, cars whizzing past with such force that his legs nearly buckled. Or maybe it was seeing her again that made him weak.

She looked him over with her usual measure of disdain and amusement. “Wrong road altogether to get to Portland.”

He nodded. “I was thinking of Austin, actually.”

“Austin.”

“Yes. I’m headed for Austin.”

She sat for a long moment, her brown arm hanging out the window. “I guess I could drop you in Austin. Scoot over Tadpole, and let this big man hop in.”

“Hi there.” The little girl glanced at his instrument case. “About time we met. My name is Annie Leigh LaCour.” She stuck out a dirty hand.

“Isaac Mesher.” They shook.

“Mesher is kind of an odd name, ain’t it?”

“Yes. It’s even odd if you’re Jewish.”

“What’s Jewish?”

“Well, that’s hard to explain.”

“Anything hard to explain usually ends up boring. I’m on the way to Nashville with my mom.” She gestured with a thumb. “This here’s her. But you know that. Her name’s Raven on account of she’s a fourth of a pie of Indian.”

He nodded. “I see.”

Annie Leigh ticked off important points on her fingers. “We’re planning on being famous, but first we have to go to the pawn shop and get Mom a guitar, because she wants one, now. Plus we need a laptop and a cell phone and a drummer. We also need to pick a name, because that Nashville man don’t like what we picked, which is the Jesus Rattlers. Which I do like bunches. And I need to teach Mom to read better so she can do the contracts. For now I gotta read it all out loud to her to make sure it’s… what was that word the man used, Mom?”

“Kosher.”

“What’s kosher?”

Raven shrugged.

Isaac smiled. “It’s a Jewish thing.” Annie Leigh looked at him and frowned.

Raven muttered. “It’s pickles.”

“I like pickles.” She kept her eyes on Isaac, wondering about his various uses. “Can you read?” This was a reasonable question to ask a man within the boundaries of the Park. Chances were about sixty-forty.

“I can.”

“Hm. Are you going to Austin to get famous? Because I don’t think you’re gonna get famous, Isaac. Not to hurt your feelings or anything, but I heard you play at the talent show and you’re not a front man. But you’d make a fine rhythm player.” She pointed to his guitar. “In fact you can play that right now, if you want to. I wouldn’t mind a bit.” He took out his guitar and picked his way through a tune. Annie Leigh lay her head against her mother’s shoulder and dreamily began to pick her nose. “That’s pretty. Damn pretty. You have good hands.” Her bony finger poked his shoulder. “What are you gonna do in Austin?”

“Well, first, I’m going to get a bunch of pictures developed.”

“Did you take any of my mom?”

“Yes.”

“Can I see ’em?”

“We have to see what turns out.” He thought about his pictures. There were the color rolls he’d shot, of hills, cactus, roads that led nowhere, cliffs in all the color of Crayolas. The stars in that cold, desert sky. But that wasn’t his work, and he knew it.

He had shot the rest in black and white.

Hard cheekbones and lonely, haunted eyes. Buns and braids, feathered bangs, Aquanet bouffants. The feel of the wind whipping through cotton dresses. Cut-offs. Painted toenails in dime store sandals. Ruined hands braiding hair, frying things, folding things, coaxing home made beauty from yarn, thread, floss, fabric.

The run-down heels and thin soles of boots worn past their prime. Strong arms and flat buttocks. Rakish smiles of crooked teeth, stained with tobacco juice, coffee. Tape decks. Beat up trucks maintained with the pride and care usually bestowed on yachts. Wranglers.

A glass jar of pickled eggs. Hands on the neck of a guitar. A defiant sneer of curling smoke in the light of a neon Budweiser sign.

Satellite dishes. Chick pea gravel and scalloped wire fencing. Tin and aluminum, bent and dinged and painted and flaking. Screen doors.

To make it real to those who had never seen it. To impart his own unique vision. Would it all come through, he wondered. Would any of it show?

“THINK ANY OF
them pictures will turn out?” This was Raven.

“I never know how things will turn out.” He looked over the dark head of the sleeping girl to the darker hair of her mother. “I always have to wait and see.”

“So it’s a gamble?”

“I guess. No guarantees.”

“Everything’s like that, ain’t it.”

“Probably.”

She smiled so small, he almost missed it. She reached over her daughter and started the CD player. Some angel-voiced woman sang out over a fiddle, a soft song of love and forgiveness.

He looked at her face in the sunlight. This was the smooth side, the beautiful side. But the scar was still over there, even though he couldn’t see it. He knew it was there. He also knew that even if he stayed with her for years, he might never manage to win her over. They would fight and break apart and come back together, and that would break his heart, over and over again. He knew all that. He didn’t care.

That was why he loved her.

The Last Monday

MEMPHIS SAT ACROSS
the street from the rusting singlewide trailer. He could see the heels of those soft pink moccasins protruding from the mailbox. She’d never taken them inside. He remembered his early morning sojourn by that mailbox, holding those shoes, caressing their soft pink leather. And now, after what had passed between them, she was gone, too.

He started up his cruiser, considering what it all meant.

HE DROVE OUT
to Bone Pile Elementary, first. The girls’ classroom was empty. He looked around the room, almost hearing their song. Next door, he heard the beleaguered tones of a young man from Teach For America on the phone. “Not one,” he said. “No. I drove out there and checked. No you don’t understand. There’s Bone Pile the town, and that’s just this school and a gas station. And then there’s the Bone Pile where they all live. That’s the real Bone Pile, and that whole place is gone. No, I mean it’s gone. Bone Pile is gone.”

Memphis didn’t bother to talk to the young man. He just got back in the car.

HE DROVE THROUGH
Ochre Water, down the main street with its deserted building and unused park benches. He ended up at a lavender bungalow. It took some time for anyone to answer the door. “Is Miz Strange here?” Clyde looked at the Sheriff’s boots and frowned hard, as if trying to figure out who Miz Strange might be. “You know who I mean, right, Clyde? Your wife?”