Anyway, that’s the last thing I remember before the crash—Lecia’s bandana drawn over her nose.
Then for some reason I still don’t understand, the car went into a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree spin. I don’t know if this was accidental or deliberate on Mother’s part. As I said before, Lecia holds that I was wailing and Mother was turning around to swat at me. I do remember seeing Mother turn the wheel sharply to the left, which forced the car into a spin. After a long time whirling around, I saw the railing on the other side of the bridge rush forward. Then for an instant, we were launched in the air. Our tires just left the bridge altogether. The car jumped the raised pedestrian walkway and flew toward the top rung of the railing. (People never walked over, of course, but workers hung platforms off it for painting and repairs). I saw the rail flying laterally at us. Then the car crunched to a stop. By this time I was screaming and crying.
Amazingly enough, the crash just crumpled the front fender and took out the right headlight. Nobody seemed that rattled about what happened but me. Mother didn’t even get out to inspect the damage. Grandma just hunkered more deeply over her lace. Mother said, “Everybody all right!” but in a cheery voice, like a camp counselor after a long hike. She didn’t even turn around when she said it. In the mirror her teeth were showing in a scary smile.
I was really howling by this time. The car got thrown in reverse, and we unpried ourselves from the rail. We bounced off the opposite walkway backward and headed down the slope, gaining speed.
Lecia slid over about this time and laced her fingers with mine, for which kindness I remain grateful. I can’t have smelled very good. Plus I was blubbering. Big tusks of snot were hanging out of my nose. Anyway, she just took my big hand in her big hands. (We both have hands perfect only for fieldwork and volleyball.) I always felt safe when she did that. Usually it shut me up, too, but this time I whispered why was Mother trying to kill us and was she really going stark crazy. Lecia just said to pipe down, that we’d be at Auntie’s house in twenty minutes and everything would be okay then.
But at Auntie’s house, everything wasn’t okay. We’d escaped the storm, all right. Hurricane Carla couldn’t reach us. Still, stepping down from that car, which was hissing and clicking from having been driven so hard, I didn’t feel any relief. Somehow Aunt Iris’s dirt yard under the tall pines wound up looking as dark to me as Leechfield had. I felt no grace. I had no urge to kiss the ground like some cartoon sailor delivered from shipwreck. The spotted bird dogs that circled my feet got only the most distracted pats before they whined their way back to the porch.
Auntie (pronounced Ain’tee) walked right to me through that pack of dogs, flapping her apron at them and saying to me how was the ride down, sugar? Then I heard my voice saying fine, which lie was beginning to come naturally to me. I was fine. The ride was fine. We were fine. My fear was too great for me to say more; it was so great, in fact, that I couldn’t let myself collapse sobbing into Auntie’s soft and calico-draped bosom. The only need I could state was the obvious one for a bath. The dogs had even shied away from me. They crouched low to the earth and sidestepped back to the porch, circling each other and whining. They had long spotted muzzles, and their yellowed eyes kept watching.
I cannot, however, describe Auntie’s face from that day, or the welcoming faces of my cousins and uncle, who came out to greet us. I must have kept my gaze dog-level. Then even the dogs begin to get dimmer in memory, as if a heavy gauze is being wrapped around my eyes, and all I could see were the faint outlines of those beasts—sniffing and suspicious. I was turning the volume down. I was hardening up inside for another tough-bucking ride.
Grandma was put to bed in Auntie’s back bedroom, and I got a bath. These things certainly registered as improvements over our sitting around in Leechfield, cut off from Daddy and waiting for a tidal wave to smash the house. But Mother’s spooky silence held, and my father’s father—himself seemingly older than Jesus—almost immediately took Grandma’s place as an emblem of death.
My grandpa Karr was well up in his eighties and nowhere near dying. Still, everybody had been predicting his imminent death since I could remember. This and the suggestion of his Indian heritage gave him the kind of authority that I now think old people ought to have. But back then, I resented it. He didn’t have to do any chores. He wouldn’t even bother turning up his hearing aid half the time when you talked to him. He barely even said hello. Mostly he just sat in a cane-bottom rocker on the front porch while people brought him food or pipe tobacco, coffee or iced tea depending on the time of day. He had taken up this bad habit of sometimes climbing on top of things when left unwatched—the barn or a car roof, the shed, almost anything. Aunt Iris told us about it before she went off to work at the drugstore. He’d once even shinnied a fair ways up one of the tall pecan trees that stood in the yard. So Lecia and I were each given a dime by my cousin Bob Earl to watch him. The idea was that if he started climbing, we’d run and fetch our cousin, who was tending Black Angus cattle in the back field. Grandpa sat rocking and chewing on his pipe and sometimes singing a song about lost coon dogs that Mother couldn’t stand because it was so backwoods country.
Somebody stole my old coon dogs
And I wish they’d bring ’em back.
They run the big ones over the fence
And the little ones through the crack.
I remember we felt torn between watching Grandpa, who looked like something set in concrete and unlikely to budge, but whom we had been paid to watch, and keeping track of Mother, who looked spring-loaded on serious trouble.
We finally made a compromise. Lecia would sit outside, with her back to the door screen, watching Grandpa. (I would give her my dime for this service.) I, in turn, would sit inside with my back against her back and the screen door watching Mother, who had the TV tuned to hurricane news. She had also built a fire in the front-room hearth, even though it was plenty hot already. She just sat poking at that fire, the sweat pouring down her face, which was lacquered red by the flames. She had pushed her thick hair back from her face with one of those black stretchy headbands. It fanned out all around her face in a sort of corona. She looked as scooped out and sunk in on herself—she was just squatting there poking at the fire with the cast-iron poker—as any human being I’ve ever seen before or since. She was hard for me to watch, so I watched TV instead—the white greaseboard map on Kirbyville Weather—and more footage of palm trees flattening out in wind.
I wanted to call Daddy. I even talked to the long-distance operator about this. But she said she couldn’t put me through to Leechfield because all the circuits down that way were busy. I said did that mean there were too many calls on the trunk lines or that Daddy’s phone out at the Gulf was broken. She said she didn’t have time to talk about it and unplugged me.
I looked around at Lecia’s plaid cowboy shirt pressed up against the screen grid. After a while, I decided I had to pee and went into Auntie’s bathroom.
Coming out, I noticed Grandma’s hand hanging down off the side of the bed in the back room. I tiptoed in. It was a small, musty-smelling room. Auntie kept a big white freezer packed with deer and squirrel and duck meat in there. The white iron bed, narrow and sagging, sat alongside the freezer. Grandma’s glasses were also on the floor, so I knew she was asleep. I thought to put the glasses on the nighttable, then at the same time maybe snitch her sewing scissors so I could spend some time cutting newspaper snowflakes or making myself a cootie-catcher back in the living room. Grandma’s eyes were mostly closed, sort of rolled up in her head so just white half-moons showed when I peered in.
When I squatted down to grab the glasses, I could see that she’d spilled something on the lenses, something pink and sticky-looking, so the little red ants we called sugar ants were crawling over the glasses. The previous spring I had liberated all the ants in Lecia’s glass ant farm (I’d felt bad they were locked up), and had since been looking to snare some new ones for her. It had been a prizewinning scie
nce project. I was trying to figure out a way to shoo the ants off one arm of the glasses and trap them in a shoebox I found under the bed, when I noticed Grandma’s hand.
It was curled partway open. The fingers almost touched the floor. And running in a track down the very white part of her arm was what I first thought to be a scratch or an eyebrow-pencil line. But the line was moving. I bent right next to her. Then I made out how she’d spilled that cough medicine or red soda pop on the inside of her arm, and the sugar ants were crawling up and down eating it off, and she didn’t even feel it.
I don’t know if I thought she was dead or what. All I knew was her state at that instant was way more than I’d bargained for. I backed out of the room and went back to the living room. I sat with my back flat against the screen so I could feel Lecia’s vertebrae bumping against mine in a way I liked. I sat right there till Mother went in and found Grandma and started screaming.
CHAPTER 5
My daddy watched Hurricane Carla come up the Intercoastal Canal from the Gulf. He claimed to be high in a sort of crow’s nest at the time, behind a thick glass wall that let him look out over half the county. The crow’s nest was on a giant tower facing the refinery, beyond which lay the oil-storage tanks, and finally the canal, a glorified ditch that Houston oilmen had spent a fortune having dug so they could boat their oil from offshore rigs right to the refineries. Daddy later said the tower swayed back and forth in the gale. He and Ben Bederman swore they had to hold on to the countertops while the rolling chairs slid around. Through the observation window, they watched a gray wall of water twenty feet high move up the canal toward town. I can almost see my daddy cock his head and squint like it was some animal he was tracking in the distance. He even took a minute to point with his ropy arm when he was telling the story, like the tidal wave was coming right at us that minute. “It was like a whole building made out of water,” he said. I later had cause to wonder how his view was so clear in the midst of the storm. But hearing him tell it, you would never doubt he’d somehow actually cowboyed his way through it all.
Remarkably enough, the hurricane didn’t go in at Leechfield, this despite the fact that a tidal wave had been dead set on a course that would have squashed every remaining citizen flat as a roach. The odds on a direct hit had been high. But the storm took a weird turn, the kind of dodge people later likened to a fast quarterback barely scooting around some bullnecked lineman. The move was a forty-to-one fluke. Just before Carla came ashore at Leechfield, the storm stopped almost dead in place; then it made a sixty-degree turn. Only the edges swept over East Texas, the rest flying full force into Cameron, Louisiana, which hadn’t battened down at all.
Cameron’s preparations wouldn’t have mattered much, though, since a good hunk of the Gulf of Mexico essentially lifted itself up and then toppled over right on the low-lying town. People shinnied up trees, trying to get away from the rising water. Civil Defense did what they could at the last minute, and some families managed to outrun the flood in their cars when the radio announced where the storm was heading in. But a lot of people didn’t happen to have their radios turned on. Casualties were high. The TV ran footage of guys in hip waders sloshing through their own living rooms, feeling around underwater for pieces of furniture that hadn’t washed away.
The storm also flooded the bayous and brought all manner of critters from both salt and fresh water right into buildings and houses. When the water went down, one guy I read about in the paper found an eight-foot nurse shark flopping on his kitchen tiles. Whole bunches of people opened dresser drawers to find cottonmouths nesting next to their balled-up socks. There were also nutria-rat bites, kids mostly, toddlers who got cornered in their own yards. The rats were as big as raccoons and had front teeth shaped like chisels with bright orange enamel on them, which made the attacks particularly scary to think about. Neighbors came back to town bringing stories about cousins or friends of friends who’d been bitten, then gone through the agonizing rabies shots in the belly. I was a vulture for this kind of story.
Grandma died during all this, of course. It turned out that she hadn’t been fully dead at Auntie’s, just in a coma. I’ve been told that she actually came out of that coma and spent a few days bedridden back at our house in Leechfield before she died. I don’t remember it that way. Apparently I just blanked out her last visit along with a lot of other things. She died, and I wasn’t sorry.
The afternoon it happened, Frank Doleman came to the door of my second-grade class with Lecia in tow. Mrs. Hess told me to get my lunch box and galoshes. Out in the hall, Lecia was snubbing into a brown paper towel that covered half her face so I couldn’t see if she was ginning out real tears or just making snotty sounds in her head. Uncle Frank kneeled down eye-level to tell me that Grandma had “passed away.” I remember this phrase seemed an unnaturally polite way of putting it, like something you’d hear on Bonanza. All the local terms for dying started more or less coursing through my head right then. She bought the farm, bit the big one, cashed in her chips, and my favorite: she opened herself up a worm farm. (I had the smug pleasure once of using this term up north and having a puzzled young banker-to-be then ask me if these worm farmers in Texas sold worms for fishing, or what.)
I sat in the back of Uncle Frank’s white convertible going home with Lecia blubbering nonstop in the front bucket seat and him putting his hammy hand on her shoulder every now and then, telling her it was okay, to just cry it out. What was running through my head, though, was that song the Munchkins sing when Dorothy’s house lands on the witch with the stripy socks: “Ding dong, the witch is dead.” I knew better than to hum it out loud, of course, particularly with Lecia making such a good show, but that’s what I thought.
Daddy was squatting on the porch in his blue overalls and hard hat, smoking, when we pulled up. He’d obviously been called right out of the field. He was dirty and smelled like crude oil when he hugged Lecia and me, one under each arm. Our principal didn’t pause, though, before shaking his hand, didn’t even dig out his hankie to wipe the oil off his palm after he shook. He was partial to white starched shirts, but knew when to set that aside.
While Uncle Frank backed out, Daddy and Lecia and I stood together a minute at the head of the driveway waving bye-bye. I remember leaning across the front of his blue work shirt to tell Lecia that was some good crying she did, to which she lowered the paper towel so I could finally see her face. It was like a coarse brown curtain dropping to show a mask entirely different than the grinning one I’d expected. Her eyes and nose were red and her mouth was twisted up and slobbery. All of a sudden, I knew she wasn’t faking it, the grief I mean. It cut something out of me to see her hurt. And it put some psychic yardage between us that I was so far from sad and she was so deep in it.
It must have pissed Lecia off too, somehow, that gap between her misery and my relief. Later that evening, Daddy was frying up a chicken, and she chased me down over something mean I’d said about Grandma. She was fast even then (in junior high, she would run anchor on the four-forty relay), so I didn’t make it a half turn around the yard before she caught me by the back collar and yanked me down from behind. The collar choked off my windpipe, and the fall knocked the breath out of me. Before I knew what hit me, she had me down on my back in the spiky St. Augustine grass.
She sat on my chest with her full weight. Her knees dug into the ball sockets of both my shoulders. She said take it back. I sucked up enough wind to say I wouldn’t. I tried bucking my pelvis up to throw her off. Then I tried flinging my legs up to wrap around her shoulders, but she had me nailed. Still I wouldn’t take it back. All I had to fight back with was my stubbornness (which I’d built up by being a smart mouth and getting my ass whipped a lot). I never actually won a stand-up fight, with Lecia or anybody. Hence my tendency to sneak up blindside somebody weeks after the fact. But I could sure as hell provoke one and then drag it out by not giving in. I took a warped sort of pride in this, though I can see now it’s a pitiful thing to be
proud of—being able to take an ass-stomping.
I don’t know how long she had me pinned. Her knees dug twin bruises in my shoulders. I found them when putting on my pajamas that night, the size and shape of big serving spoons. She kept me there a while. The sky was going pink. I could hear Daddy’s spatula on the skillet scraping chicken drippings for cream gravy. Finally, she got tired of my not giving in and decided to spit in my eye. She hawked up a huge boogery gollop from way back in her throat, pausing every now and then to tell me she was fixing to huck it at me. It had bulk and geometry. It was hanging in a giant tear right over my face, swinging side to side like a pendulum, when Daddy came slamming out the screen to haul her off me.
That night in bed I could hear her crying into her pillow, but when I put my hand on her shoulder, she just shrugged me off.
Mother was on her way to bury Grandma during all this. Thank God, because Lecia and me fighting always made Mother sit down crying. She had always longed so fiercely for a sister that she couldn’t understand why we whaled on each other.
Anyway, while Lecia was trying to spit in my eye, Mother was driving across the Texas desert in Grandma’s old Impala, heading from the hospital in Houston to Lubbock and the funeral. She says that she wore her black Chanel suit with Grandma’s beige-and-ivory cameo, which her great-grandmother had brought from Ireland. She also wore pearl earrings, and a white pillbox hat of the type Jackie Kennedy had on when her husband was shot. (It is a sad commentary on the women of my family that we can recite whole wardrobe assemblages from the most minor event in detail, but often forget almost everything else. In fact, the more important the occasion—funeral, wedding, divorce court—the more detailed the wardrobe memory and the dimmer the hope of dredging up anything that happened.) She took the trip solo because she didn’t want to upset us. Or so she told us on the phone. “There’s no need for y’all riding all the way out there just to get upset” was how she put it. That sudden surge of maternal feeling seems odd to me now. I mean, we’d already seen all manner of nastiness and butchery, including Grandma’s lopped-off leg at M. D. Anderson Hospital. Plus we’d watched Grandma achieve whole new levels of Nervous as the cancer ate out her brain. It just didn’t make sense.