The Honk and Holler Opening Soon (6 page)

But even before she and Helen slid into seats near the back of the bus, Braz started chanting, “Crazy old Indian, gone to the loony bin.”

Helen covered her ears and, screaming, began rocking back and forth while Vena hurtled over two rows of seats to get to Braz, then, powered by fury, pummeled him until his face was a mass of welts and cuts and his front tooth was sliding down his chin in a stream of blood.

But that had been a lifetime ago, a time when Vena still believed she could protect Helen from anything.

Now, as she picked her way across the ravine, she wished for the innocence of her eleven-year-old self, the girl who was just beginning to suspect that a bullying white boy was not the worst life would offer.

Before she could pry the doors apart far enough to squeeze through, she smelled the heavy odor of mice and mildew. When she stepped into the gloom and chill of the stairwell, her flesh roughened with goose bumps.

She moved slowly, her face snagging cobwebs as she felt her way to the aisle. After she jostled her things onto a seat in the front, she lit a match, then held the flame over the box.

“How you doing, girl?” Vena whispered.

The dog lifted her face to the light, her eyes yellow in the reflection of the flame. A moment later, energy spent, her head sank back into the folds of the blanket.

Vena lit the candle she’d taken from Caney’s cafe, then moved tentatively down the aisle. There was little to see—a man’s well-worn western boot, a thermos missing its lid, a couple of paperback books and an unopened can of motor oil.

But in the back of the bus, Vena found a few surprises.

The last two rows of seats had been removed to make room for a thin mattress, the striped ticking stained and dotted with mouse droppings. And heaped in the corner, a tangle of horse blankets souring with mold.

Not much, she thought, but more than she had hoped for. She did, after all, have a bed, a dry place to sleep and silence—an improvement over the motel in Kansas City where she stayed while the dog was at the vet’s.

She’d paid fourteen dollars a night for an airless room with bloodstains on the carpet, a pillow that smelled of soured breath and a crap game in the next room, dice crick-cracking from the time she checked in until she left three days later.

The motel did, however, provide a few luxuries not available in the bus, luxuries like heat, lights and water.

But Vena had greater regrets to deal with than the absence of utilities.

She wrestled the mattress up, pounded it as free of dust as she could, then flipped it over. As it
whump
ed to the floor, a family of field mice scurried away, tiny gray immigrants heading for safer territory.

As soon as Vena shook out the blankets and spread them over the mattress, she moved herself and the dog into their new one-bed efficiency. Then, though she was feeling a little empty, she put aside Caney’s sandwiches for later. She could wait, but the dog couldn’t.

She opened the frayed denim pouch containing antibiotics, gauze pads, cotton balls and plastic liners, all given without charge by the vet in Kansas City.

Dr. Anna, a painfully thin woman who spoke with a quick German accent, had said little to Vena, but she never stopped speaking to the dog. As she set up for the transfusion and got an IV

started, she praised the dog for her bravery; while she administered the anesthesia, she explained the procedure; when she removed the tourniquet Vena had applied, she offered encouragement. Even after the animal was sedated and beyond hearing, Dr. Anna continued to converse with her patient, her voice filled with apology as she sawed away what was left of splintered bone.

Three days later, when Vena came to pick up the dog and settle the bill, she put forty-six dollars on the counter—two folded twenties and six crumpled ones. But Dr. Anna had taken only the twenties, then marked the bill paid in full, with nothing in her expression to suggest she was losing money, nothing in her manner to hint at rebuke.

Then Vena had spent more than four dollars of her last six on baby food for the dog and a bottle of aspirin for herself. And though she was almost out of cigarettes, she had decided to hang on to the last of her money.

She’d smoked her last Winston earlier in the evening, just before she left the Honk. By then she’d made a few tips, enough to buy a new pack, but she didn’t. She figured she could survive the night. The dog, however, was another matter.

Vena crushed the antibiotics into powder which she sprinkled into a plastic bowl she’d brought from the cafe, then poured in a few dollops of baby food.

“Ah,” she said, “tonight you’re lucky. It’s turkey, your favorite.”

After she eased the dog from the box onto her lap, she held the bowl beneath its mouth. The dog took a few laps, then, exhausted, rested its head on Vena’s leg.

“Well, I guess you did the best you could.”

When Vena folded the cover back to tend to its wound, the dog began to tremble.

“Easy, girl. I won’t hurt you.”

After she removed the stained dressing that covered the stump of the amputated leg, Vena cleaned the wound, then covered it with a fresh gauze pad. Next, she cleaned the dog’s hindquarters where it had soiled itself. Finally, she removed the dirty plastic liner and slipped a new one into place.

Finished, she rewrapped the dog, laid it on the mattress and covered them both with the blankets. As the dog warmed against her chest, Vena said, “Don’t you worry about this place. When you’re able, we’ll be on our way.”

A moment later, the dog licked Vena’s hand.

“You’re welcome, lady. You’re very welcome.”

Vena closed her eyes then, inviting sleep, but she was visited, instead, by the voice of a familiar but unwelcomed guest.

Miss Takes Horse? This is Sheriff Jorge Rulfo in Eddy County,
New Mexico, and I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you.

Vena started to hum a tuneless melody, hoping the sound would drown out the voice, but she knew better. She’d tried that trick before.

I’m sure sorry I had to be the one to tell you, and especially three
weeks late, but we’ve had a tough time tracking you down.

She thought about getting up to go outside, just sit in the chill night air for a while, but she was afraid if she moved, she’d wake the dog, and it had been through enough for one day.

Well, the way it looks, she was living in an abandoned shack out in
the Paduca Breaks. Her nearest neighbor, if you can call him that,
lived a good four, five miles away . . . an old hippie, calls himself
Wolf. He says your sister might’ve had some mental problems.

’Course, I’m not sure Wolf’s quite right in the head, either.

One night a couple of months ago, she’d turned back to Jack Daniel’s, her old remedy for getting through a bad night, but she found out liquor was no match for this.

Anyway, Wolf said he’d seen your sister walking around out there
night and day, talking to herself and setting fire to timber, scraps of
paper, a mattress. Anything that’d burn. Said he only talked to her
once when she came asking for a butcher knife to cut off her hair.

Sometimes she stayed awake all night, thinking she’d be safe to sleep during the day, but the voice was always waiting, no matter when she closed her eyes.

No, ma’am. From what I’ve been able to put together, it looks like an
accident. Somehow, she set her clothes on fire.

Just before Vena drifted off, she realized she had left the candle burning. But the voice was silenced now, and she didn’t dare move for fear it would speak again.

Besides, she thought, no one was going to notice a light flickering in the windows of a deserted bus.

And she was nearly right.

B
UI KHANH’S JOB at the Dallas Auto Detail lasted less than three hours. He wasn’t quite sure what he had done wrong, but the boss, Apostolos Kartsonakis, had no doubts about the reason.

Apostolos hadn’t been enthusiastic about hiring Bui in the first place because he had trouble understanding him. Bui’s opening line, “Please needs to working cars cleaning,” caused Apostolos to shake his head in confusion. And if anyone knew the value of learning the language, it was Apostolos, who had come to America with an English phrase book in one pocket and five drachmas in the other.

Still, two of the regular detailers hadn’t shown up, and cars were already jammed all the way to the street when Bui walked in asking for a job. Besides, as Apostolos often said, “Beggars can’t be chewers.” But when he turned Bui over to the manager of the cleaning crews, he told her to make sure Bui didn’t talk to the customers.

Sheniqua, an energetic woman with skin as dark as Bui’s, oper-ated on only one speed—fast-forward. Her rapid-fire instructions whizzed past Bui like bullets, most far wide of their mark. But he paid careful attention as she demonstrated the equipment and showed him the supplies.

Ten minutes later, Bui joined one of the crews, three men wearing blue shirts stitched with their names. When a new Mercedes was pulled forward in the line, they swarmed it.

One of Bui’s jobs was to apply wax to the car after it had been washed and dried. He was expected to work quickly to stay ahead of Milton, the man with the polishing machine, the man who taught him the meaning of “Get your ass in gear” and “Okay, let this shit wagon roll.”

By the time Bui’s crew moved on to the next car, a black Volvo, he was beginning to enjoy the feel of the sun on his back and the deep, rich smell of car wax. He also liked listening to the other workers, some who spoke languages he had never heard before.

For the first time since he left Houston, Bui started to feel safe again.

He had been trying to convince himself for the past five days that the yellow-haired woman had recovered from her injury, that the money he gave her had paid for her damaged car and that the police had more important work to do than search for him.

On that first night, as he walked away from Houston, the lights of every passing car made him step into the shadows and turn his face away. Even as he crawled out of the train car the next day in Nacogdoches, he was certain the barking dogs he heard were coming for him.

That evening he paid two hundred dollars for a car with one door wired shut and no backseat. The woman who sold it to him lived in a sagging house with peeling paint, bars on the windows and a dozen other cars in the yard, most in worse shape than his.

The woman did not ask Bui for an insurance form; he did not ask her for a title.

He drove to Dallas that night, slept in his car and started looking for work the next morning in Little Asia where he blended in with thousands of other Orientals. But the restaurants needed no cooks, the coffeehouses were full of waiters and the meat markets had enough butchers. So he drove into a part of the city where signs in the windows said HELP WANTED.

He had tried a beauty shop, two liquor stores and a motel before he stopped at the Dallas Auto Detail.

Just before Bui and his crew finished their third car of the morning, Milton handed him the buffer and told him to finish while he went to take a leak.

And that’s when the trouble started.

At first, Bui was afraid Sheniqua would see him doing Milton’s job, but he was also afraid not to keep working because the owner of the car, a woman dressed like a picture in a magazine, was watching him from the window of the customers’ lounge.

Bui worked the buffer in slow, easy loops, but when the woman came out of the building to stand a few steps behind him, the loops seemed less easy.

“I have an important meeting at noon,” she said.

Bui glanced at her and offered a tentative smile. Her hat, a soft shade of gray, matched her hair and the silk suit she was wearing.

“I have to be on time.”

Though he didn’t understand all the words she used, Bui could tell she wanted him to hurry. When she raised the sleeve of her jacket to check the time, the diamonds of her watch sparkled blue in the glare of the sun.

“How much longer do you think you will be?” she asked.

Bui nodded, still smiling.

“Do you speak English?”

“Yes, I am learning to speak English,” Bui said, careful to enun-ciate and glad now for the opportunity to use the sentence he had learned from the beginner’s language tape.

“Can’t you work any faster?”

“Yes, I am learning to speak English,” Bui said as fast as he could.

“No! Not
speak
faster,” she said. “
Work
faster.”

Bui tightened his grip on the buffer as he jerked it fitfully from side to side.

“Perhaps you should call back the other man. . . .”

But Bui had stopped listening to words he did not understand.

He had used the only response he knew to answer her questions, and he did not think she wanted to hear it again.

The woman continued to speak, but Bui had no time now for either smiles or nods. He bent to the work, the buffer skimming across the surface of the car. If Milton was not coming back to rescue him, he would have to rescue himself.

By the time he went after the last smear of wax, the muscles across his shoulders felt full of fire and his arms had numbed from wrists to elbows.

Finally, finished, he switched off the machine, stepped back and turned to the woman. Then, with a courteous bow of his head, he said, “Okay. Let this shit wagon roll.”

*

After Apostolos yelled at Bui in two languages, neither of which Bui understood, he took him to his office where he stuffed a twenty-dollar bill into his pocket, kissed him on both cheeks, then said good-bye to him at the door.

Several of the detailing crews were taking their lunch break when Bui left the office and started across the lot. Most didn’t even try to hide their grins as he passed, and when someone whispered, “Shit wagon,” a few laughed out loud.

When Bui saw his own crew bunched together, he would not look into their eyes. But as he passed near them, a hand gripped his shoulder and Milton said, “Take it easy, kid.”