The Liars' Club: A Memoir (7 page)

We stayed in Roundup a few days. The only outward sign of trouble in Dotty’s whole family during that time was that Robert had knocked up his high school girlfriend, who was Catholic and therefore needed marrying. The young wife lollygagged around the house in his football jersey, her belly so big she looked like a balloon from some parade. They were fifteen and slept in his room, on bunk beds. That sort of trouble happened often enough in those days. Robert was going to finish high school and eventually take over the cotton business.

He must have seen me as some sort of warm-up for being a daddy, because while Lecia was learning from Tess how to paint on eyeliner and tease her hair, he played tic-tac-toe with me on my magic slate. I remember he also drew me a Crayola picture of a train wreck he’d seen where people’s legs and heads were scattered every which way among the cotton plants. The cotton was amazingly detailed given how rough the rest of the drawing was. When he tucked me into bed he told me such a vivid (and grotesquely inaccurate) version of Rumpelstiltskin (where the mean troll forced the lady to spin straw into gold herself) that I can still recall my nightmares about it. There was a carbuncular troll who had locusts spewing out of his mouth, and he was threatening to take away Mother’s baby. I finally convinced Lecia to let me crawl into bed with her. But she made me sleep with my head down by her feet, stifled under the tucked-in covers. In the morning, Dotty lit into Robert for scaring me, and he lost interest in playing daddy.

I heard from him only a few other times. Two years later, he sent me a birthday card from China Beach, Vietnam. Mother said I must have made some kind of good impression on him, which was a first for me, so I sent him one of my school pictures. He sent back a picture of himself in jungle fatigues pointing what looked like a grenade launcher at a palm tree. The story is that three years later, home from the war in time for his twentieth birthday party, he stood up from the table saying he didn’t know
why he was alive and his buddies were dead. Then he went crying into the bedroom. His wife and son were slicing the white sheet cake when the shot came.

That was about the only story I ever heard implying that anybody in Mother’s family was inherently Nervous. Oh, she had some outlaws everybody talked about. Her daddy had used his engineering degree to open a garage, which drove his banker daddy nuts. There was her great-uncle Earl who used to dress up like a matador when he got drunk, and her maternal grandfather, who’d been a bootlegger and who used to give her nickels to hear her cuss. I never heard anything more exotic than that. Most of the names block-printed in Grandma’s huge family Bible, which sat in a heavy plastic wrapper on her coffee table, meant nothing to me.

The morning Mother decided to go back to Daddy, she and Grandma had a fight about whether her lipstick was too dark. Grandma had brought it up at breakfast and just clamped down on it like a Gila monster. Finally, Mother stuffed our new clothes in her dead father’s Gladstone bag and piled us in the car in our pajamas again. Again the old woman had crimped her hair. Just before we pulled out, she poked her clamp-studded head in my window. Some curls had sprung loose from the clips, so she looked for all the world like the stone head of Medusa that Mother had shown us in her mythology book. The old lady called Leechfield a swamp, a suckhole, and the anus of the planet before Mother cranked up the engine. The too-sweet smell of Grandma’s hyacinth perfume hung in the car till Mother lit a Salem.

We drove all night, Lecia curled on the backseat. I stretched out dozing on the flat shelf under the rear windshield’s slope. The sheer stink of my hometown woke me before dawn. The oil refineries and chemical plants gave the whole place a rotten-egg smell. The right wind could bring you a whiff of the Gulf, but that was rare. Plus the place was in a swamp, so whatever industrial poisons got pumped into the sky just seemed to sink down and thicken in the heat. I later learned that Leechfield at that time was the manufacturing site for Agent Orange, which surprised
me not one bit. That morning, when I woke up lying under the back slant of the windshield, the world smelled not unlike a wicked fart in a close room. I opened my eyes. In the fields of gator grass, you could see the ghostly outline of oil rigs bucking in slow motion. They always reminded me of rodeo riders, or of some huge servant creatures rising up and bowing down to nothing in particular. In the distance, giant towers rose from each refinery, with flames that turned every night’s sky an odd, acid-green color. The first time I saw a glow-in-the-dark rosary, it reminded me of those five-story torches that circled the town at night. Then there were the white oil-storage tanks, miles of them, like the abandoned eggs of some terrible prehistoric insect.

In case you think I exaggerate Leechfield’s overall nastiness,
Business Week
once voted it one of the ten ugliest towns on the planet. Mother was working as a stringer for the town paper when the story came out, and the mayor, whose only real job was to turn on the traffic light every morning, called a press conference. Mother brought Lecia and me along, and another reporter was there from
The Port Arthur News.
He was chewing Red Man tobacco, I remember, and spitting into a Folger’s can he’d brought with him for that purpose. In the back of the firehouse, somebody had strung up one of those big flags made out of the royal-blue felt that you see only at Scout jamborees. It had the town motto on it in gold letters: Leechfield Will Grease The Planet! Mother took a Polaroid of the mayor standing in front of it holding up the copy of
Business Week
like he’d won it in a raffle. The big-jawed reporter from Port Arthur told Lecia and me that he felt like he was supposed to write up the winner of a shit-eating contest. After Mother got her picture, we all stood around the fire truck eating moon-shaped cookies dusted with powdered sugar that the mayor’s wife had brought in some Tupperware. It was stuff like that that’d break your heart about Leechfield, what Daddy meant when he said the town was too ugly not to love.

The last stars were clicking out just as we pulled up in our yard. The old Impala’s tires had left deep muddy grooves in the yard in front of our house when we’d backed out for Grandma’s
days earlier. Those were what we plunged back into coming home.

Daddy had come in from the graveyard shift and was shaving at the kitchen sink, his hard hat sitting in the drainboard. He always shaved without a mirror, using soap and cold water, something he’d learned in the war. It was a kind of modesty for him, not watching himself too much. He was standing shirtless at the kitchen sink with little speckles of blood all over his chin. Lecia and I came tearing in and threw ourselves around his skinny legs, but he made out like we hadn’t been anywhere. Like his own daddy, he might well have asked us if we’d got the coffee.

Mother threatened divorce a lot of times, and Daddy’s response to it was usually a kind of patient eye-rolling. He never spoke of divorce as an option. If I asked him worried questions about a particularly nasty fight, he’d just say I shouldn’t talk bad about my mother, as if even suggesting they might split up insulted her somehow. In his world, only full-blown lunatics got divorced. Regular citizens in a bad marriage just hunkered down and stood it.

His uncle Lee Gleason, for instance, didn’t speak to his wife for forty years before he died, but they didn’t bother with divorce. According to Daddy, who broke horses for Uncle Lee in the summer of 1931, Uncle Lee and Annie stopped talking that very year, after they got into a fight about how much money she spent on sugar. Annie Gleason saddled up an old mule they kept to keep the horses calm and rode all the way into Anhuac, Texas, with her boots dragging in the dust. She bought a fifty-pound sack of sugar, turned the mule around, and rode straight back and into the barn where Daddy and Uncle Lee were just nailing the last square-head nail into a quarter horse’s shoe. Still mounted on the mule, Annie slid a jackknife from her apron pocket and, staring straight at Uncle Lee, she raised it up and jammed it down into the burlap bag strapped across the mule’s backside. The sugar poured out of the sack, Daddy said, like a liquid.

We’re bass fishing with Cooter and Shug and Ben Bederman at the time I remember him telling it. We’re in Ben’s big fiberglass motorboat, which is way nicer than the little flat-bottomed
rentals we’re used to. We each have a floatable red Coca-Cola cushion to sit on. I don’t know how old I am, but I haven’t yet outgrown the concept of fishing with Daddy, which must have happened when I was about eleven. I don’t even know yet that such concepts can be outgrown. All I know is that Cooter’s cigar smoke stinks to heaven. I jerk the banana-yellow lure across the surface of the water so its tiny propellers whir and stop, whir and stop. What in God’s name could a bass under water think that thing is, scooting along? I prefer a plastic worm sunk down in the bottom silt, but Ben has bossed me into this gadget.

“And so what’d Uncle Lee do?” Cooter asked. Sometimes I think the Liars’ Club lets Cooter come along just because he always asks the next question. He’s never caught a fish the others didn’t make him throw back.

“Do?” Daddy cocked his head sideways. “Ain’t nothing he could do. He just shakes his head and says, ‘You silly sumbitch,’ and that’s the last they ever spoke. Them three words.”

“Tell how they split up the house, Daddy.”

“This goes on,” Daddy says, “more than ten years.” He roots around in the cooler for a beer. “First they leave notes around the house. Grocery lists, that sort of thing. But pretty soon they leave off with that too. Then something funny happens. It’s like Lee knows what Annie wants before she even wants it. And viceyversa. Say she needs some lard or some such thing. In walks Lee with just-bought lard. Or he wakes up hungry for biscuits, and she’s got the jar lid pressed into the dough already.”

Shug makes a mmh-mmh-mmh sound that says the wonders never cease.

“Not a goddamn peep between them,” Daddy says. “Sleep in the same bed. Eat out the same pot. When I get back from Germany, I’m walking up the road, and he’s just climbing outta his Jeep. ‘Pete,’ he says, ‘you’re the very duck I been waiting for.’ And he tells me this plan he’s worked out.

“Next morning we get up, and sure enough, they ain’t talking. Old Annie hugged on my neck—she could flat hug you hard. Spoke to me like he wasn’t even in the room. After a little while
she gets the eggs and bacon cooked and a mess of grits. We set there and eat. And when she leaves for church, me and Lee we get the lumber saw and split that house as clean in half as a oyster. Top to bottom, roof down to the floor. I mean, when she pulls up in that old Jeep that night—they had some function or other that kept her all day—we’re just hooking up the tractor to haul her half off.”

“And she don’t have nothing to say about all this?” Shug asks. He’s helping me untangle one of my lure’s three-pronged hooks from the green nylon line.

“Wouldn’t have said shit with a mouthful of it. See those reeds over there, Pokey?” He gestures with his Schlitz can. “I’d try and put it over there.” He frequently leaves off his own fishing to instruct me, and I am today feeling too big to be instructed, having already been instructed out of my plastic worm and into this miserable excuse for a lure by Mr. Bederman.

“Why didn’t they just get a divorce?” Shug asked.

Daddy cuts his eyes back over at Shug like he’s nuts, then shrugs. My lure plops in the reeds while I squint to recollect the divided house. The two halves sat on the same acre of ground, a scruffy bank of pines separating one half from sight of the other. Daddy and Uncle Lee had nailed raw planks over the sawed-open part. But the idea of the house split wide open like that, showing everything inside, gave me the hives.

Maybe that’s what Mother and Daddy should have done. Still, I swore to myself in that very boat that if they ever split up for good, I would run away and live in the bathroom of the Esso station. I would buy a thirty-five-cent corn dog one day and tamales from the road stand the next. However much that added up to, I planned to make it shining shoes at the barbershop.

Mother kept a copy of a map I left her once when I was running away from home. It shows a dashed line between our house and the Gulf station. There’s an X in the ladies’ room with “me” marked above it.

What I didn’t know until I finally did leave home at fifteen was that, if I had lit out, nobody would organize any posse to
sniff me down. Hell, they just figured that wherever I was headed, it must be better than Leechfield. I was a seventh-generation Texan by way of Tennessee and before that Ireland. So I was descended from what the writer Harry Crews once called the great “If you git work, write” tradition. For generations my ancestors had been strapping skillets onto their oxen and walking west. It turned out to be impossible for me to “run away” in the sense other American teenagers did. Any movement at all was taken for progress in my family.

Sometimes, when my parents were raging at each other in the kitchen, Lecia and I would talk about finding a shack on the beach to live in. We’d sit cross-legged under the blue cotton quilt with a flashlight, doing parodies of their fights. “Reel Six, Tape Fifty-one. Let her roll,” Lecia would say. She would clap her arms together like a gator jaw as if what we were listening to was only one more take in a long movie we were shooting. She had a way of shining the flashlight under her chin and sucking in her cheeks, so her eyes became hooded and her cheekbones got as sharp as Mother’s. She also had a knack for Mother’s sometime Yankee accent, which only came out under stress or chemical influence. Think of a young Katharine Hepburn somehow infected with the syntax and inflections of an evangelist:
I wish that whatever God there might be had struck my car with lightning before I crossed the bridge into this Goddamned East Texas Shithole.
Sometimes she’d just cry, and Lecia’s imitation of that was cruelest:
There’s no hope, there’s no hope
, she’d say with a Gloria Swanson melodrama, her wrist flung back to her forehead like it had been stapled there.