Nearer Than the Sky (12 page)

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Authors: T. Greenwood

Tags: #Fiction, #Contemporary Women, #Family Life, #Psychological, #General

BOOK: Nearer Than the Sky
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I
ndie, I told you fifteen times to put your laundry in your drawers. If I wash one more clean shirt because it wound up on the floor instead of in your dresser, I swear I’ll stop doing the laundry.”
Ma was standing at the kitchen table, spray-painting Lily’s tap shoes silver. One had started to dry and was stuck to the newspaper she’d put underneath.
“Shit,” she mumbled, peeling the paper off the side of the shoe. All that had been on Ma’s mind since Daddy gave in was the Miss Desert Flower contest. From the second she sealed the envelope with the entry form and the glossy black-and-white picture of Lily inside, the only thing she’d been concerned about was getting ready for Phoenix. She even cut back her hours at the nursing home so that she could get Lily ready. There were sequins to sew onto bodysuits and tap shoes to spray-paint. She hadn’t even noticed that I’d been going to visit Daddy at the bar after school every day instead of coming straight home. But now here she was, losing her patience again. Maybe she could clip it to the cuffs of her jacket like Benny’s mittens. Hang it around her neck on a string like my house key.
“Indie? The laundry?”
I wasn’t thinking about laundry. I was thinking about the Spalding personalized two-piece pool cue.
“Now,” Ma said and started to pull the chair I was sitting in away from the kitchen table.
“In a minute,” I said. I was counting the change I’d been saving. My red plastic piggy bank was lying on its side on the table, the rubber plug removed from its stomach so I could get at the disappointing stash inside.
“I
said
now,” she said and pulled harder on the chair. I felt the chair legs scraping across the linoleum.
“Ma . . .”
“
GET UP
!” she hollered. She kept yanking, and the chair tilted backward. I tried to hold on to the edge of the table, but the Formica was slippery. Suddenly, I lost my balance entirely and I was falling backward. My head hit the floor and bounced a bit. The pain was dull in the back of my head. Dull and insistent when I scrambled to my feet.
“I wasn’t doin’ nothin’, Ma!” I screamed and ran past her out the front door. She caught the back of my shirt and held me still on the front steps.
Benny was sitting on the garage roof, which he could get to by crawling on top of Daddy’s dead truck. He was wearing the plastic Batman cape he’d gotten for Halloween the year before. Lily was all the way across the front yard, twirling her baton. She wasn’t wearing the new red, white, and blue costume though. Ma had already sealed that in a plastic bag inside her suitcase so that Lily wouldn’t lose any more sequins in the grass before they got to Phoenix. Lily caught the baton behind her back and then laid it gently down. She raised her arms over her head and then threw her body forward, rising up into a perfect handstand. Her bare feet were pointed straight up toward the sky, her skinny legs squeezed tightly together. She walked quickly on her hands across the yard to the steps, and she didn’t hesitate for even a second before she started to climb the stairs, still walking on her hands.
“Let me
go,”
I seethed and pulled gently away from Ma. My head was aching, thick and steady. But I didn’t run across the front yard. It would have been dangerous to get in Lily’s way. A lot more dangerous than ignoring a pile of clean laundry on my bed.
Soon, Lily had arrived at the last step, where she let her body bend forward until her feet reached the top landing and she pulled herself back up, arms raised. Her face was red, but she was smiling. She looked toward my mother and my mother nodded, her expression serious. Lily nodded back in that strange silent language of theirs, and then dismounted. A flawless and light front aerial off of the top of the stairs, landing gently on the ground in a split.
My mother let go of me and applauded. She was smiling so wide that her lips almost disappeared, her lipstick smearing across her front teeth. I pulled away from her and walked into the driveway. I could feel the bump growing on the back of my head where I had fallen. There was a funny taste in the back of my throat, and I thought for a minute it might be blood. The side of my tongue was sore from where my teeth had come down on it when I fell.
But now Ma had forgotten all about me. She’d probably even forgotten about the laundry. On the roof, Benny clapped his hands wildly and shouted.
“Good pumpkin,” Ma said, swatting Lily’s bottom. “Now go in and get cleaned up.Your knees are grass-stained.”
Ma looked at me, standing in my bare feet in the driveway, and shook her head. There was nothing but disappointment in the way she scrunched her eyebrows up.
Benny crawled down off the roof and ran over to hug Lily. He squeezed her so tightly her feet came off the ground. She let out a small squeak like a rubber toy.
“Can I go see Daddy?” I asked. Each word made the pounding worse. I could feel my heartbeat in each rhythmic thud at my temples.
“I want those clothes put away first. And Benny, you stay here.”
“I’m hungry,” he said. “I want onion rings. I like the onion rings at the bar. Rosey makes mine without the onions. I hate onions. But she takes the onions out for me. One time I ate an onion and my head swelled up. Remember that?”
“I remember,” Ma said, annoyed.
“Onion rings, onion rings,” Benny said, running up Lily’s steps, the Batman cape flying behind him.
“Be careful,” my mother said as Benny reached the top and prepared to jump.
“Onion rings!”
he screamed and leapt from the stairs to the ground, landing in his own version of a split.
“Jesus Christ,” my mother said. “Indie, will you bring him to your father for some onion rings?”
 
At Rusty’s, Benny liked to sit at the bar. From one of the shiny red stools he could look through the smoky glass out at the people going by on Depot Street. He could also talk to Rosey through the window to the kitchen, and the jukebox was within reach. Once, for Benny’s birthday, Daddy gave him a whole roll of quarters from the safe and he played his favorite songs until all the quarters were gone and everyone in the entire bar was about ready to go crazy with listening to the theme from
Rocky
and “The Year of the Cat” over and over again. Daddy knew now just to give him enough quarters to keep him occupied until his onion rings or french fries or tacos were ready.
“Hi Daddy,” Benny hollered.
Daddy was standing on a ladder dusting off the antlers of Zeus, the only animal Daddy ever killed. What most people didn’t know was that he hit him with our Nova, not with a shotgun. He was driving, not hunting, when he and Zeus had their confrontation. Eddie Grand drove his pickup truck out to where Zeus and the Nova lay intertwined in a crazy embrace of metal and fur, brought him straight to the taxidermist, and had Zeus’s head mounted on a solid piece of oak. Daddy never lied about how Zeus came to his final resting place on the wall just above the good liquor. But he certainly didn’t discourage Eddie’s stories either.
“Benny, can you give me a hand here?” he asked and stepped down from the ladder.
“Can I have a quarter?”
“After you give me a hand.” Daddy grinned and handed Benny the dust rag. “I need you to go find the Pledge in the kitchen and bring me back a clean rag to wipe down the bar with. Ask Rosey to help you.”
“And then she’ll give me those onion rings without the onions, right? Because my head swelled up that one time she forgot to take the onions out.”
“You’ll have to take that one up with Rosey,” Daddy said and folded up the stepladder.
“Hi Daddy,” I said. My head was still pounding dully.
“How’s my little Indian Princess?” Daddy asked, winking at me. That was Daddy’s nickname for me. There wasn’t an ounce of Navajo or Hopi in me, but when he called me that I felt like I really
was
an Indian princess. Like I might find out that my mother wasn’t my real mother at all. That Daddy had once been married to a beautiful Indian lady who died when I was born. When Ma was ignoring me or yelling at me or forgetting to pick me up again at school, I dreamed that my real mother wasn’t from California but from here. That she was the real reason why Daddy moved us all back to Arizona. It wasn’t too hard to pretend, either. In the summertime my skin turned the same color as coffee, the same color as Laura Yazzi’s from my class. Sometimes I looked for my Indian mother in the mirror.
“Does your mother know you’re here?” Daddy asked.
“Yes,”
I said, raising my eyebrows.
Daddy raised his eyebrows too and then wiggled his ears. This was
our
special language. It made me giggle.
Little Ike was sitting at the bar finishing up an order of Rosey’s enchiladas. I sat down next to him and spun around on the stool. I could feel the blood whirring behind my eyes.
“Hi Ike,” I said.
“Hey Indie.You wanna shoot some pool?” he asked, wiping enchilada sauce from the corners of his mouth.
“Sure,” I said.
“What time’s your mother want you home?” Daddy asked.
“Who knows?” I shrugged.
“Well, then we’ve got plenty of time,” Ike smiled. Ike’s voice was like a kid’s; everything about him was small. He lived in the trailer park on the south side of the tracks near the Sacred Heart. He said that because he was a little person, his house was more like a castle than a trailer. That the world was a pretty big and exciting place when you were under five feet tall.
Benny came out from the kitchen with a red plastic basket filled to the rim with onion-less onion rings in one hand and a rusty can of Pledge in the other. His face was twisted in concentration. Rosey followed behind with a dust rag.
“There’s not gonna be a thing left to that bar if you keep on polishing it. All that rubbing is gonna wear down the wood,” she said, handing Daddy the cloth.
“See your reflection in it, though. That way all my customers can see how drunk they look before they go home. This bar has saved a few marriages the way I figure it,” he said.
Ike slapped his little hand on the bar and chuckled. He pulled his snuff can out of his pocket, grabbed a matchbook from the wooden bowl of Rusty’s matchbooks at the edge of the bar, and yanked a match out. He carefully scooped a bit of the snuff from the can onto the match and then snorted.
Benny sat spinning on the stool closest to the jukebox, stuffing the crispy onion rings into his face as fast as he could.
“You feeding that kid?” Rosey asked, wiping her hands on her apron. “You’d think he never ate nothing at home.”
“I’m a growing boy,” Benny mumbled, his mouth full.
“Grow much more and I won’t be able to afford to feed you,” Daddy said and sprayed the long section of the bar that no one was sitting at. The whole room smelled like lemons.
“Can I have a quarter?” Benny asked.
Ike jumped down off the barstool and reached into the front pocket of his little-boy Levis. He pulled out two quarters and laid one in the palm of Benny’s outstretched hand. He kissed the other quarter and held it up to the light. “For luck against Minnesota Skinny here.”
I smiled, but my head was still pounding.
Benny picked a song, and Sheila came out of the kitchen. She was retying the red canvas apron around her waist, careful to make sure she wasn’t covering up her belly button. Her
navel,
she would say. That black hole of a belly button was the key to her tips, she said. And halter tops were God’s greatest gift to waitresses. I don’t think it was her navel that the customers were looking at, though. She wiggled her hips while Andy Gibb’s soft voice crooned. She didn’t know the words, but she sang along anyway. Sheila had been working at Rusty’s since January. She was Eddie’s cousin. She was eighteen, only six years older than me, but I couldn’t imagine how in six short years I might metamorphose into that. I couldn’t imagine that a halter top would ever have anything to halt on
my
chest.
Ike racked the balls and I found the best cue leaning against one of the booths. I couldn’t wait until I had enough money to buy the Spalding cue. I chalked up my hands on the pyramid of white chalk by the men’s-room door and then waited until Ike was happy with his rack.You never break while your opponent is still standing on the other side of the table. Ike had a friend who got knocked out cold because someone didn’t wait. The thirteen ball hit him square between the eyes before he dropped. When I leaned over to shoot, it felt as though I’d been hit in the back of the head with a cue ball instead of by our kitchen floor.
I hated to break. I didn’t have the same sort of power as a regular-size person. But Ike had taught me exactly how to use the strength I did have, and how to set the cue ball just off to the right or the left of center. I didn’t get any balls in, but it was a good break. The balls weren’t all bunched up together like they sometimes were when I broke.
Ike was the best pool player in the whole bar. He’d been playing on these tables since before Daddy even owned Rusty’s. But the thing I liked about Ike was that he never let me win. He played against me just like he played against Simon or Eddie.

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