When Horses Had Wings (3 page)

“Fine. She can keep them, then.” Before anyone had the chance to say any more about my facial features, I announced, “We’ve got to leave at two-thirty ‘cause Kenny wants to watch the ball game from home.”

Daddy set down his stainless steel fork, giving Momma the cue. She grabbed her plate and raked it into Ricky’s, gathering scraps for the chickens.

“Well, I’m right proud to have ya’ll here anytime you can make it,” Daddy said with a tone I’d seldom heard. Any other time, Daddy would’ve spouted off his usual remarks, said sports were nothing but senseless wastes of human energy, suggested only brainless people knock their heads together intentionally.

I helped Momma clear the dishes and then said my goodbyes. Later, on my way to the car, I noticed Kenny standing behind the vehicle with the trunk open. Ricky flanked him, his eyes wide and hands clutching a brown paper bag. I thought how grown up Ricky looked, unlike his old portrait Momma kept on her dresser. His blond hair was beginning to darken, and he’d soon be as tall as I. Those Sunday trousers of his had climbed up and over his ankles, which caused me to grin. In some ways, I felt sorry for him. That Surfer Cross, which Daddy insisted was a swastika sign, hidden underneath his button-down shirt might have escaped Momma and Daddy’s attention but it hadn’t sneaked past mine. Poor kid. I knew what it was like to live with those two and try to stay in step with popular trends. I remembered how, when I was in eighth grade, Momma and Daddy had refused to let me play basketball on account of religious reasons. I’d been heartbroken the day Daddy said, “God never intended for girls to wear shorts in public.”

Kenny shut the trunk lid, and I wondered why he’d opened it. “Wha’choo two looking at in there?” I asked.

“Nothing,” Ricky blurted.

Kenny shook his head as though I’d said something ridiculous. “Just some junk I found at work the other day.” He smirked.

Nothing worth investigating, I decided. Probably an antique soda bottle or some seventy-eight records. I recalled Ricky’s paper sack. Maybe illegal fireworks.

A vague nausea, one I’d later identify as morning sickness but right then attributed to Momma’s pot roast, suddenly made me swoon. I held on to the Fury’s side panel and leaned through the lowered passenger-side window to release the door. Someday, I vowed, I’d own an automobile with handles that worked from the outside, one with dual-controlled electric windows, too. And I’d raise and lower mine whenever I wanted.

Frozen in thought, I rode home like a statue. Mentally, I dwelled on family, both the one I’d come from and the one I’d soon have. My hair whipped against my face, stinging my cheeks and slicing at my eyes. But I never complained. I simply sat there with my gaze fixed firmly on the American flag waving from the Plymouth’s antenna.

THREE

S
ome rural folks think of neighbors as security. However, Kenny and I never suffered that delusion. From the beginning, the Hendersons proved that living next door to them only increased our risks.

Over the sounds of a blaring televised football game, something blasted like a sonic boom. I heard Granny Henderson yell, “Fhar! Fhar!” She hobbled out onto the front porch, her arms waving above her like helicopter blades. Her right leg, which normally dragged behind her left, moved with newfound strength. Partially crippled since birth, she lurched about in ways I wouldn’t have thought possible as she announced that the other half of our duplex—her side—had ignited.

Mr. Henderson emerged with a grunt, the tips of his snowy hair broiled brown as toast, beard singed, his dungarees dusted with what looked like chalk dust. “Damned old woman. You just got to go runnin’ off before you know what’s what.”

“I s-s-saw fhar!” she insisted. “I heard it explode!”

“What happened? Are you okay?” I asked.

“Well, is there or ain’t there a fire?” Kenny asked, no doubt irritated his football game had been interrupted.

“No. No. I done put it out with some flour,” Mr. Henderson huffed. He waved us off, then tottered back inside. Granny and I followed him.

“Crazy old fool. I told you don’t light the pilot that way,” Granny scolded.

“Oh, shut up. Nobody wants to hear you talk.” The old man mumbled as he made his way to the back of his house to inspect the damage.

From the looks of the place, Mr. Henderson had turned on the propane and let it build before he’d struck a potentially lethal match. He’d leaned inside his oven, which had once been white but now appeared charcoal, and been thrown backward by the blast, flames licking at his face. That sonic boom I’d thought I heard had been the Henderson’s kitchen window exploding into shards. It now lay scattered along the easternmost side of their house.

“Lookee here what he’s done,” Granny said, her head gyrating from palsy. “If he can’t kill me, looks like he aims to kill our stove.”

~

Some days I could have sworn our duplex was haunted, both sides of it. The spirits of others who’d stared head on into the eyes of misery seemed to want to share their despair. Those ghosts whispered to us and made us angry; at hard living, I supposed, but we took it out on each other.

One March afternoon after we’d returned from having Sunday dinner with Neta Sue, who I generally tried to sidestep the way I do spooks, Kenny’s woes must have outstripped his patience. He parked his near-dead car in our front yard, and then we both sat there, too full and unenthused to get out. Overhead, a blanket of cucumber-colored clouds threatened to break our monotony—though the storm was still a good half-hour away by my calculations. Being seven months pregnant, I had no inclination to rush anywhere until my water broke.

For the past several minutes, Kenny had been recounting his good fortune at having recently run into an old girlfriend from high school. “She invited me to go to church with her tonight,” he said, as though he might be contemplating the offer.

“Really? That’s great.” I finally found enough initiative to hoist myself from the vehicle. Grunting, I tumbled out into the thick afternoon air. “I’ll go with you.” If anyone needed to ask for penance, it was Kenny. I surely didn’t want to let a petty thing like spending an evening with an old flame get in the way of his salvation.

“No you won’t,” he said, lumbering behind me. “I’m going by myself.”

“Why would you do that?”

“’Cause it’s gonna to storm.” He pretended to study the sky. “Besides, you got no business out runnin’ round at night. You’re pregnant.”

“I’m not dumb, you know. I can tell you’re up to no good. Maybe you want to be with someone you didn’t get pregnant—yet.” I turned my back and strutted ahead of him in my unlaced bowling shoes, the only footwear that would fit my swollen feet.

“Don’t you accuse me of cheating, you stupid bitch!”

Before I could respond, something knocked me off my feet. One minute I was looking at our front porch, and the next I was examining pea-gravel at microscopic range. The ground had risen to meet my nose before I’d even sensed I was falling.

That was how it began, with what otherwise might have been a simple shove had I not been so top-heavy that I’d ended in a prostrate sprawl.

Kenny glared as I righted myself. “How was I supposed to know you’d fall?” he asked, seemingly offended by my accusing look.

I considered his remark. Perhaps I was even clumsier than I was unattractive. How could I have been so foolish? Why wouldn’t Kenny be tired of spending every evening with me? I was grotesque. Wasn’t I simply fortunate to have someone as cute as Kenny Murphy speak to me, let alone take me as his bride?

This teen-idol look-alike had chosen me, the mongrel, out of all the other girls at County Line Skateland, to slow dance with him. We’d swayed to the Bee Gees’
To Love Somebody
and suffered an ache that you might say short-circuited both our brains, a primal yearning so strong that, afterward, we hid shamefully in the dark recesses of the rink, breathing deeply.

Ever since I’d been fifteen, Kenny had teased and flirted with me. He had swallowed me with kisses that promised passion but had led instead to bitter resentment. If I was sure of anything in that moment in the gravel, it was that Kenny Murphy didn’t know what it was like to love
anybody
.

I brushed the finer bits of rock cinders from my maternity smock, the one that Momma had recently sewn for my seventeenth birthday. Checking my stomach for abnormalities, I found none. My baby and I were okay. For now.

Though I could readily dismiss my immediate hurt, I couldn’t shake several stubborn questions: How could anyone shove a pregnant woman to the ground? What did that forecast for my or my baby’s future? If Kenny would risk harming his own child, what else might he be capable of doing?

I opened the screen door leading to our living room.

Kenny had already made himself comfortable in front of the television, his butt squished down into the fake-leather sofa cushions like a potato trying to take root. “You aw-right?” he asked.

I eased my way between Kenny and the most important thing he owned. “It ain’t me I’m concerned about.”

“Aw, now, don’t be stupid, Renee. You know you’re aw-right.” He paused, then yelled after me, “Gimme some tea, will ya?”

Later that night, Kenny put one arm around my shoulders and said, “Just to prove I didn’t mean to hurt you, I’ll cancel my plans. I can always go to church some other time.” He kissed my forehead and gave out a horselaugh. “They ain’t missed me being there yet!”

I was delighted to have won back his devotion. He’d stayed home with me when I knew he’d fancied being with someone else, someone much more physically attractive.

I didn’t tell anyone what Kenny had done, not even Granny Henderson, who, at the time of my fall, had likely been cooking on what was left of her stove. I didn’t share the news with Momma, who probably would have simply felt bad about it, or Neta Sue, who’d have denied that
her
son would ever purposefully do such a thing. The whole episode was too atrocious to admit, too shaming. If I didn’t talk about it, maybe it would go away, pass right out of my memory like my childhood had, and then maybe I’d stop dreaming about deformed babies dying of malnutrition.

~

For several days, Kenny called me “Woman” but acted like he’d said “Sugar-Pie” instead. He only laughed one morning when I overslept and forgot to pack his lunch. And later that afternoon when he returned from collecting garbage, he even brought me a gift.

“Here, I found this today. Thought you might like it.” He dangled a heart-shaped golden locket like a pendulum in front of my face.

I stood over our stove, stirring a pot of pinto beans and wondering whether he was trying to impress or hypnotize me. Possibly a little of both, I decided. “What is it?” I stopped the locket in mid-swing.

“I dunno. You put pictures in it, I guess.”

“Pictures?” I laughed. We didn’t own a camera.

“Oh, you
know
what it is.” Kenny let go of the chain and unbuttoned his uniform shirt with the KEN insignia on it to help everyone, including me, remember who he was. He took a few steps, then stumbled and grabbed at the kitchen doorjamb.

“You okay?” I asked, setting down the necklace.

Kenny staggered to our bed and then caved onto it. He lay crosswise on his back, his legs hanging limply off one side of the mattress, an arm thrown over his forehead, eyes closed. “I’m fine,” he said. “Got a little dizzy all o’ sudden.”

I turned down the flame under the beans and joined him in the bedroom. “You want me to get a cold rag?” I reached to touch his mottled cheek.

He caught my hand and caressed it. “Would ya?”

Lifting his legs, I righted him and positioned a pillow under his head. “I’ll be right back with a wet towel and some ice water.”

Kenny patted my arm and smiled. For the first time in many months, I thought he actually saw me.

When I returned, I dabbed at his face and neck with a damp cloth, wondering at his almond-shaped eyes and dark lashes. Those were the orbs that had lured me in and invited me to dance, kiss him, and eventually have sex. And there I was, about to have his child. Gently, I pulled him from his shirt, loosening one sleeve at a time.

Within a few months we’d be parents, however unprepared either of us might be to fulfill our roles. I vowed to make the most of it. After all, as Momma had said, this was “my bed to lie in.” With that thought, I wrapped the spread around me, encasing the two of us inside a Chenille cocoon. Maybe we could emerge transformed into the perfect family I’d fantasized.

The smell of burning beans soon awakened me, the pungent odor a roiling reminder of dinner and my limitations. I slipped out from underneath the covers and scurried on tiptoes into the kitchen, grateful, for once, that it was only five steps away. Dousing the pan with tap water, I managed to save our supper.

The locket was where I’d left it on the stovetop. I lifted the piece for inspection. My fingers traced the tarnished necklace as I imagined the accessory made of 14-karat gold, a gift purchased from one of those fancy mall jewelry stores—the kind where couples with hopeful eyes hover around dazzling display windows. What would it be like to
plan
a future instead of succumbing to fate? I longed to know. Maybe I could start setting goals instead of idly waiting to see what each day might deliver. Maybe I could salvage my situation the same way I’d saved our supper. Maybe that was what Kenny had been trying to do when he’d brought me the necklace.

It was a good gift, a thoughtful one. Later, I’d have our family portrait made. And inside it, I’d keep a photo of the three of us: me, Kenny, and our baby. Smiling at that image, I split the pendant open and noticed the clasp was broken.