Hands hoisted me at the armpits and I fell, free and blind, but landed before I could yelp. Inside. Out of the wind. The redhead had found the door at one end of the Schultz and got me through it. I sat in the dark, painfully blinking sand out of my eyes with tears. The deep boom of the wind beat at the tin wall as I lay against it. A warm body lurched into me, collapsed beside me. A hand felt my head, my hump. The air was soft and thick with floating dust and the sick, sweet tang of chemicals and worse. The redhead’s warm voice breathed in my ear, “I’ll bet this crapper hasn’t been pumped since Tulsa.”
It wasn’t actually a Schultz-brand portable toilet. It was a Merry-Loo in a truck box with five booths on each side, self-contained cold-water supply for washbasins, MEN on the port side, WOMEN to starboard. Papa had picked it up cheap with its own truck trailer. It was built of thin fiberboard and was so light that a car or a small pickup could pull the whole rig.
“Yuck! I’m leaning on a slimy urinal!” The redhead scooted over, pushing me into the corner. My head banged on something hard and I reached to feel pipes and chilly porcelain, dripping. The sink. My eyes were flushing out sand and I began to see well enough to know that it really was dark in there.
“The twins and your mom are on the other side. We’re on the men’s side. If they’re still there … Lil! Lily!” she shouted.
“Mama!” I yelled, and then coughed with the red dust rasping deep in my pipes. The murk fuddled me. The room was on its side. The sink above me hung the wrong way. If I turned on the tap, the water wouldn’t fall into the basin, it would pour onto my head. We were crouched on a wall with the linoleum floor at our backs. What little light there was came in a brown-gravy mist through the plastic skylight in what was normally the roof but was now the far wall. The sand-heavy wind cast dark, rushing shadows across it. Just beyond the urinal that lay beside us, the booths began. The liquid seeping from the cracks reminded me that all the toilets were lying on their backs.
“They’re above us.” The redhead was standing up on shaky denim legs. “Wow! I’m a little woozy!” Fluid was dripping down from what was serving as the ceiling. “Look, that wall is popping!”
The tab-and-slot construction of the fiberboard wall was loose at the corner above us, drooping. “Here, climb up and pull on it.”
She hauled me up by my hands, balancing me as I climbed to her knee, her hip, her back. “I’m gonna stand up now,” she warned. I stepped onto her shoulders, propping myself against the wall, and tore at the loose flap.
“Mama! Crystal Lil!”
“Hey,” from the dark above us.
“Oly, get out of the way. We’ll lower Mama to you. She’s hurt. Her chest.” It was Elly up there in the dark. I gave the redhead a few extra bruises sliding down. She caught the long, white legs that slid out of the ceiling. Mama’s favorite yellow-flowered skirt was torn, and the blue veins on the backs of her thighs glittered oddly in the dimness. She moaned feebly as she eased downward. “Mama?” Her arms came last. The twins let go and she fell jerkily into the corner with a yelp.
“A light,” Mama said.
The twins lowered themselves through the hole and dropped beside me. They were sodden and they stank. Their hair and clothes were damp with the blue ooze from the chemical toilets.
“It’s all our fault,” Iphy whimpered. “My fault is what she means,” said Elly. They crouched over Mama and the redhead leaned over her, gently pushing Mama’s shock of white hair back from her forehead. Lil was wandering in her head.
We stretched her out flat under the sink and the redhead tore a scrap off the yellow-flowered skirt to lay over Mama’s nose and mouth so she could breathe in the floating dust.
The twins were filthy. “Nothing broken?” asked the redhead. “Then sit over there. That smell makes my sinuses ache. Crapper dumped on you, eh?”
“I acts,” Mama announced calmly from the floor. “Me is acted upon.” We all looked at her.
“Is that grammar?” asked Iphy. Mama laced her fingers together on her belly as though she were napping in her own bed.
“I don’t know. It may just be talk.” The redhead picked at a scrape on her elbow. “I’ll go look outside in a minute. It might be letting up.”
The wind was gusting now, taking breathing breaks between attacks. There was a little more light. The twins slumped on the floor against the first booth. Their faces were as blank as uncut pies. Their eyes stayed fixed on Mama.
“Happy birthday!” I grinned. Their mouths crimped painfully.
“Were you in here all morning? Mama was worried.”
The two matching faces nodded slightly. The redhead chuckled and whacked at the knees of her jeans, shedding puffs of dust. “It’s their first time bleeding. They thought they were dying.”
Elly glowered, eyebrows bunching downward. “We knew what it was.” Iphy’s eyes tilted up anxiously in the middle, “We didn’t know it was going to happen to us, though. We don’t feel good. And it’s scary. Elly didn’t want to come out but I did. I tried to get her to come out but she wouldn’t.”
Elly shook her head impatiently. “How long do these things last? All night? Or what?”
Lil’s voice came from under the rag, “I would have told you more but I wasn’t sure it would happen to you.”
My heart was beating a panic in my ears, “Mama, will it happen to me?”
Iphy licked at her muddy lips, “Elly wouldn’t come out even when Chick and Mama found us. She wouldn’t let me unlock the door. Mama told Chick to unlock the door and bring us out but he wouldn’t. Because we didn’t want to. But it wasn’t both of us. It was Elly. Our legs went to sleep sitting on that toilet.”
“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”
“Ah, Elly, loosen up. Don’t be so crabby,” groaned the redhead. She patted my head. “Your mama sent me for you so you could crawl under the door of the booth.”
“I would have kicked you if you’d tried,” snarled Elly.
“For Christ’s sake, girl, why make so much of a fuss?” The redhead was exasperated. “It happens to every female.”
“Yeah? Well, it changes things for us. It throws in a lot of new stuff to think about.”
A truck horn started blaring nearby. Its flat voice, thinned by the wind, repeated itself monotonously. Mama opened her eyes. “Dear Al is so impatient.”
“He doesn’t know where you are.” The redhead stood up. The whites of her eyes were blatant in her dust-clotted face. She reached above me to the knob of the horizontal door and pushed it open. The clogged sand in the sill rained down. A rip of wind circled the room, rubbing grime into our faces.
“All right, ladies, party’s over. Everybody out.”
“I’m so glad I had that cake in the refrigerator,” said Crystal Lil. “We wouldn’t have had a bite if I’d left it on the counter.”
We were having the twins’ birthday party on Mama’s big bed. She lay propped mightily on pillows with Papa’s elegant bandage wrappings showing through the front of her kimono and her fresh-washed hair frothing like egg whites above her naked, unpainted face.
We vacuumed for an hour and still the red dust drifted in the air. But now, having showered in relays, wearing clean clothes, we could blink our sore eyes and pick the dry, gritty boogers from our noses in exhausted contentment. Papa, leaning against the pillows next to Mama, winked his scoured red eyes at us. “You girls look a bit better now. Less like a demon crew and more like hungover angels.”
Arty and Chick, of course, were clear-eyed and boogerless, having spent the storm in Arty’s air-conditioned van. We all ate cake and traded long, absurd, and competitively exaggerated accounts of How Terrifyingly Near to Death the Sandstorm Brought Me. Papa’s version had him wandering from trailer to van hollering questions against the wind and getting unsatisfactory answers and “wondering where, by the shriveled scrotum of Saint Elmo, you’d all been blown to.” He took refuge in the generator truck and got the bright notion of sounding the truck’s horn, “lik
e a foghorn, so, if you were wandering in that fiend prairie, you could home in on it.”
“Save a big piece for Horst,” Iphy ordered, “and one for the redhead who helped us. What was her name?”
“Red.”
“All the redheads are ‘Red,’ scummy! They have regular names, y’know!”
Arty had soothed and entertained his (newly discovered) little pal during the storm by letting Chick read aloud to him from Arty’s ancient greeting-card collection. When the wind shifted and Arty’s van considered tipping over, Chick prevented it.
Chick did not have a story. Chick did not eat his cake. His plate sat on his lap as he stared around at each of the fascinating taletellers in turn. He wasn’t enjoying himself but he didn’t say anything. Only after we’d kissed Mama and Papa goodnight and were drifting off toward our beds, Chick caught up with us in the narrow place beside the twins’ door, looking up at them sadly.
“What is it, sweets?” asked Iphy.
“I knew where you were. I should have brought you out, huh?” His eyes were growing in his face like the size of the question. Elly smoothed a hand across his hair.
“No, Chicky, you did just right.”
“If I had got you out like Mama wanted, you would all have been home like me and Arty. Mama wouldn’t have got a broken rib. You wouldn’t have got scared.”
I let go of his hand and punched him softly on the arm. “Don’t feel guilty about me, I had a great time!” and I sagged off to my warm cupboard, leaving the twins to console him or not.
I was standing on Arty’s dresser polishing the big mirrored one-way window to the security booth. He was lolling on his new velvet divan leafing through a torn magazine retrieved from the pile in the redheads’ trailer.
“If I were an old-money gent with a career in the family vault,” Arty proposed, “and heavy but discreet political influence, how would I dress?”
I looked back over my hump to see if he was pulling my leg. He had his nose in the magazine so I answered, “Quietly.”
“But what’s quiet for a man with my build?”
“I don’t know.” I climbed down and wiped my footprints off the dresser top. “A tweed T-shirt? Gabardine bikini trunks? Charcoal silk socks?”
“Socks.” He stretched his bare hip flippers, flexing each of the elongated digits separately. He hated socks. “But I suppose they’d be warm.” He kept turning pages. “Oh, Toady. Why were the twins hiding in the latrine?”
So that was it. I dropped my cleaning rag and hopped onto the divan, grabbing his lower flippers.
“I’ll tell you if you’ll tell me about Chick and Doc P.”
“It’s no big deal. She doctors that horse for me, I let her study Chick.”
“Study how?”
“Talk to him. Ask questions. Observe. What about the twins?”
“They started bleeding that morning. It got Elly spooked.”
“Bleeding?”
“Their first time. Do you think I’ll bleed too?”
He yawned. “I’m going to do some work now. You’d better go.”
Chick’s legs and sneakers were sticking out, toes down, from under the family van. “Whatcha doing, Chick?”
“Looking at ants.”
I flopped onto my belly and wormed in beside him, careful not to crack my hump against the van’s undercarriage. A school of small ants swarmed on a damp lump in the dirt.
“That looks like cake.”
“It’s my piece of the birthday cake. They like it.”
“You were over at Doc P.’s again this morning, weren’t you? What’s she like?”
His hot pink face flashed at me, smiling. “She’s going to make Frosty the horse well. And she’s going to let me help her. She’s going to show me how to stop things from hurting. Arty says it’s good. But today I just moved her garbage out.”
The twins and I were wiping the jars in the Chute with dust cloths and spray cleaner. I rubbed the big jar hard and peered through at Leona the Lizard Girl floating calmly inside. “Is Mama sick?” I asked.
“She has to sleep,” said Elly. “Papa gave her an extra shot so she could sleep. It’s good for her ribs.”
They were cleaning both sides of Apple’s jar. Iphy kept one hand spread across their wide, flat stomach.
“Does it hurt, Iphy?” I asked.
Elly snorted. “She keeps thinking about it.”
“Let Oly do the Tray, Elly. I’ll throw up if we have to do the Tray.”
“You won’t puke. Close your eyes while I do it.”
“You think about the bleeding, too,” Iphy protested.
“Yeah, but I’m not going, ‘Ooh, what’s that? Does it hurt?’ every time something rolls over in our belly. I’m thinking what it means for us.”
I was working on Maple’s jar by then, spraying and wiping. “What does it mean?”
Iphy’s eyes were closed as Elly examined the Tray’s jar for fingermarks and smears. “What if we can have a baby? Don’t you ever think about what’s going to happen when we grow up?”
Iphy shook her head, eyes closed. “Nothing will change.”
“What will change?” I was suddenly scared. Elly was impatient with both of us.
“Stupid! What do you suppose is going to happen when Mama and Papa die?”
Iphy’s eyes popped open. “They’re not going to die!”
“Arty will take care of us,” I said, dusting the “BORN OF NORMAL PARENTS” sign. “He’ll be the boss.” But I was thinking I’d marry Arty and sleep with my arms around him in a big bed and do everything for him.
“Right!” Elly sneered. “We can depend on Arty!”
Iphy tried to be reassuring. “I’m going to marry Arty and we’ll take care of everybody.…”
Elly’s spray bottle hit the floor as her right hand closed into a white fist and sailed in a short, tight hook to Iphy’s mouth, where it smacked, spreading Iphy’s lips and snapping her oval head back on her long-stem neck. Iphy tried to stuff her dust cloth into Elly’s mouth and block another punch at the same time. They fell, squealing and thrashing, biting and pulling hair. I stood staring through the green lenses of my huge new sunglasses at the convulsing tangle of twins on the floor. I probably could have stopped them, but I didn’t feel like it. I turned and shuffled out of the green-lit jar room and down the narrow corridor, leaving the twins to their mutual assault.
We were still in Burkburnett when Dr. Phyllis did the job on Frosty with Chick to help and Papa joining in for the messy bits. They did it late one night in a smallish tent that reeked of antiseptic. The tent was so brightly lit inside that, from the outside, it glowed like a damaged moon heaving with shadows.
I sat fifty feet away on the hood of the humming generator truck and watched their silhouettes. Chick, a tiny motionless lump at one end of a long dark heap, and the squat, bulging form of Dr. P., standing for long periods in one place with only her head and shoulders moving. Al was busy, the large Papa shadow bending, stooping, rushing from one end of the glow to the other, seeming to pace nervously.
They made the big table from a pair of sawhorses and a steel door from one of the vans. The scarcely breathing heap in the middle was the ancient horse.
While Mama and the twins slept, while all the camp fell dark and the midway lights cooled in their sockets and the night guards shifted and spit and sighed at their scattered posts, I watched, leaning on Grandpa’s urn, feeling its cold bite working through my hump to my lungs.
A light filtered through the window of Arty’s van but no movement showed on the glass.
It took a long time. The black sky should have ached with cold but there was no wind. The stillness was almost warm, almost comfortable. No frogs, no crickets, no birds sounded. I nodded off and woke with cramped shoulders and a sprung neck.
The rotten edge of the sky was moldering into arsenic green when the light in the tent went out. The grey fabric was suddenly dull and three shoddy figures crept out through the flap and traile
d away.
I could hear Papa talking in low tones. As they passed me, Chick reached up to grab Papa’s hand, the small boy figure drooping sleepily over stumbling legs.
• • •
There are parts of Texas where a fly lives ten thousand years and a man can’t die soon enough. Time gets strange there from too much sky, too many miles from crack to crease in the flat surface of the land. Horst theorized that we’d all live longer for “wintering in these scalped zones.” The redheads moaned that it just seemed longer. As the days and miles went on they stopped moaning and leaned toward long silences. Their faces took on the flat, wind-tracked look of prairie. “The grave looks good by bedtime,” they said, but the complaints lacked their usual spice and crackle.
We’d holed up near Medicine Mound and were taking fearful advantage of the truckers and riggers and a crowd that had come down 250 miles from the Indian Nation in customized maroon buses with fiddle and accordion bands playing next to the toilets and ice chests full of beer every five seats. The Indians stopped off to stretch their legs and their eyeballs at our facilities on their way to the annual stockholders’ meeting of some oil company.
Horst himself was reminiscing about the Texas town called Dime Box and the glories of Old Dime Box, which seemed isolated in his eyes to the broad, strong hips of one Roxanne Tuxbury (pronounced Tewbury) who ran a motorcycle-repair shop there and was undismayed by the indelible stench of cat in a man’s chest hair.
Papa was handing out doses of his most rancid tonic before breakfast. “The winter sun is kind of green and doesn’t have the Go juice. That’s why you get so sleepy.” Horst was leaning on the door waiting for his secret spoonful of vile black Binewski’s Beneficent Balm.
“Just don’t let Dr. Phyllis know,” Papa muttered with every pour from his big bottle of Triple B.
“Roxanne Tuxbury always rides a kick-start cycle,” explained Horst, “and the thighs on that woman are as long and strong as her laugh, which you can pretty much pick up in Arkansas if the wind is right. She wears a little leather halter three hundred and sixty-five days of every year.”