All this time, Daddy had fallen out of my head completely, which must have been Mother’s plan, of course, But when the fact of his absence came rushing back through me like a train, it brought a whole coal car of evil feeling.
I was lying under emerald satin covers with a leather-bound breakfast menu tilted on my middle. Lecia was still a lump on the bed’s far side, but the drapes held a line of light at their bottom that made it morning. Hunger wasn’t bothering me, but I was wondering intensely what a Belgian waffle was when out of nowhere, my last sight of Daddy came sliding fast through my head. Mr. McBride’s gray truck vanished behind a stand of evergreens. The menu dropped from my hands. How could Daddy’s going have slipped my mind? I’d always measured my loyalty in unshakable terms. My head brimmed with tortures I could endure for noble causes, comrades, family honor. But I’d been bought off cheap: a rabbit-fur coat and the stolen fork of a baby devil had shoved Daddy clear from my mind.
By the time Mother started keeping company with a cowboy from the stable, a fellow named Ray who had the small and peglike teeth of a rabbit, I’d stopped riding Big Enough. Colorado and the horses took Daddy Away. I vowed to prove myself worthy of his return through deprivation, thereby luring him back. So I spent my days reading and trying to write poetry, which I did in the cool comfort of the Christian Science Reading Room. Here’s a bona fide excerpt:
Grandma used to wear a scarf
Upon her silvery head.
I thought that she would wear it
Till she rolled over dead
One afternoon I’d nodded off over my volume of e. e. cummings and been poked awake with a pointy finger-bone by the readingroom matron, who suggested that I wobble myself home to nap.
And it was there I found Mother, shirtless, lying flat on the floor before the fireplace with old Ray astraddle her like she was a pony he was fixing to break. He was kneading her shoulder muscles. His cowboy hat sat perched on the sofa back, and his brown hair looked specially greasy and mashed down. In fact, his hat had left a dent all the way around his skull as if it had a flip top. I stared at him, my copy of cummings clutched to my chest. Of course, Ray leapt upright. He was grossly bowlegged. (In Leechfield parlance, he couldn’t trap a hog in a ditch.) Meanwhile, Mother patted her hand around till she laid hold to her bra, which she demurely slipped under her torso and hooked in back with one sure hand, still facedown the whole time. Ray said, Well, hello there, Slow Poke. His voice was loud and rusty. And I corrected him right off: “Pokey,” I said without blinking. “My daddy calls me Pokey, not Slow Poke. Slo-Poke is a brown sucker you buy that breaks your teeth.” Mother pulled her shirt over her head and said she was glad I’d come home for lunch for a change. That lie wounded me worse than the shirtless fact of my mother stretched half-naked under a cowboy. She wasn’t one bit glad to see me.
Ray quit his stable-hand’s job the next week, disappearing for parts unknown. His leaving was coincident with Mother’s solo trip to Mexico. “Acapulco, here I come,” she’d said, promising to buy us both sombreros. But when Mother returned from that trip to pick us up (we’d been staying with the stable master’s family for pay) the man who stood from the car was distinctly not Ray. He was too tall and lanky and black-haired.
I was walking two lathered horses around the corral at the time, and the sight of that male figure by the car made something quicken in me. He stood through the cloud of dust the Impala kicked up. He wore gray slacks and what might have been a shortsleeved white shirt from Sears. I dropped the reins of both animals, prompting Mr. McBride to yell, Don’t leave them horses wet. But I was sprinting toward that tall figure with all the hope of a kid on Christmas morning. I did not, however, skid to a stop in front of my daddy, whose large hands I’d already imagined lifting me light as a ghost to whirl my feet above the dusty stable yard. No, it wasn’t Daddy standing on the passenger side of Mother’s car. It was Hector, the barkeep from the cowboy joint. Mother leaned over the car roof holding out a hand weighed down by a diamond solitaire ring. I stopped in my tracks. Say hello to your new daddy, she said. And I could hear Lecia close the gap behind me, her spurs clanking while I took in Hector’s alligatorlike grin, and Lecia whispered what I was already thinking: Oh shit.
CHAPTER 10
One Sunday after Hector came, Lecia and I walked down to the stable and found the tack room still locked up, though the sun was high enough to show behind the mountains. Somebody had been and gone already. The stalls were all mucked out, with clean straw strewn around. And there were oats in the bins and fresh water in the troughs. But the McBrides’ truck wasn’t parked in the dirt driveway in front of their trailer. Banging on their aluminum screen door brought no face to stare down at us. I crossed the bridge and peeked in the café window. Not a soul perched on a single counter stool. I told Lecia it was like that Twilight Zone episode where space guys had kidnaped everybody on the planet except this grouchy old teacher, who wound up being sad that she’d always been such a jackass to everybody.
We sat on the cinder blocks in front of the café. The owner had lined those blocks up there to stop drunk folks from plowing straight through the plate glass. Lecia pulled our sandwiches out of a paper bag. Bologna on Wonder bread—mine with mustard, hers with mayo. Going home wasn’t an option. Mother and Hector had tried one on (that’s how we heard the phrase “tied one on”) the night before. They’d doubtless either still be passed out or coping with the morning whirlies. Hector had concocted a hangover remedy involving raw eggs, vodka, and Pepto-Bismol. I called it a Dismal Flip. The very sight of it tipping up to his lips sent Mother scurrying to the bathroom with the projectile heaves. So mornings with the newlyweds were something we tended to miss. In fact, since Hector’s Florsheim shoes first crossed our threshold, we hadn’t piled into that bed a single morning to watch the bears. I know for my part, I wouldn’t have gone into Mother’s room before noon on a dare.
I ate only the middle of my sandwich, in a nibbled circle that pissed Lecia off. She hated me doing anything eensy. She said that was how squirrels ate, and then she pitched my leftover crust at the sparrows. Not a car passed while they pecked it up. The sun got a notch higher. Otherwise, nothing. After a while, we gave up hoping the McBrides would pull up to unlock our saddles. We played a primitive form of kickball with the wadded lunchbag across the bridge and back to the stable.
Lecia found a pair of hackamores hanging from a nail, and we took our horses for a short lope along a narrow, roller-coaster length of trail with a dip in it that made your stomach drop toward the end. The horses got lathered doing it. We walked them in figure eights through the corral, then brushed and watered them. We killed the rest of the morning snake-hunting in the field behind the stable. There were two or three grass snakes writhing across each other in the bottom of an oat bucket when the McBrides’ truck finally lumbered across the bridge and set us running for it.
Mr. McBride said hey, and we said hey back. He asked me didn’t I know what day it was. I said Sunday, from the look of things. Then Polly stepped down from the running board and swung around to face us with their new baby girl balanced on her hip. That baby’s face stays in my mind as having an uncanny resemblance to Winston Churchill. That’s a sad face, I was thinking, for a girl to bear forward through the world, when Polly said hadn’t we even sent our daddy a Father’s Day card.
The question doused me quick in cold shame. Lecia barged right in over my quiet and said sure we had. Plus we’d sent him a whole tackle box of hand-painted lures from Denver, a bag of red rubber worms, and a new Zippo reel with hundred-pound test line. Mr. McBride said he didn’t think there was a hundred-pound test line, not in nylon anyways. But Lecia would have backed him straight to the wall with that lie before she’d have let it go. She said that Colorado trout were much bigger pussies than East Texas bass. That meant that Yankee tackle stores didn’t need to stock heavy line. Down in Leechfield, she said, hundred-pound was about the lightest line you could get, the biggest being as big aroun
d as her wrist, which she held out for Mr. McBride to study as proof. Everybody around the stable had gotten way sick of Lecia’s Texas-this and Texas-that. That morning Mr. McBride just squeezed her shoulder before heading to the office to open up. His kids spilled out of the truck and scattered, me hating every one of them for having a daddy. I wanted my own tall daddy to come there and make a me a patch of shade with his big cool shadow.
I thought back to the morning he’d unzipped me from his duffel bag, how I later ran after the truck that carried him off. I was dead certain that I’d die without Daddy around. But I hadn’t died, of course. Oh, I hadn’t started calling Hector “Daddy” like he’d asked me to. (“That’ll be a cold day in hell,” I’d said.) But neither had I written Daddy a letter every day, like I’d promised. I’d fired off five or six letters the first few weeks. But all I got back was a postcard of the Spindletop oil gusher. Daddy had scratched out some lame joke about how rich he was getting by being “in oil.” He’d put “Ha Ha!” after it, which seemed pitiful to me. And he’d closed off with “Love from your best Daddy.” That made my eyes tear up, the best Daddy part, like a whole slew of others were lined up to daddy in my direction.
Plus another thing niggled at me: I wasn’t entirely sure Daddy knew about Hector. It had gotten harder to write stuff without mentioning him. Maybe we were supposed to fake in letters that Mother was moping around lonesome like one of those countrysong divorcées. I had the good sense, of course, not to write about old bowlegged Ray rubbing on Mother’s nude back. But between not mentioning Hector and not knowing whether to sound cheerful or like I was suffering without Daddy, writing him got harder. I spent a lot of time staring around the Christian Science Reading Room. Or I’d try to chew my tooth pattern into the yellow paint of my pencil so the marks lay exactly even all the way down. Sometimes a whole morning slid out from under me in that musty room with not a “t” crossed nor an “i” dotted on my Big Chief tablet.
That Father’s Day Lecia and I crossed from the stable to the pay phone booth at the Esso, which was hot as blue blazes from taking in early sun. Unfolding the glass door let loose a blast of hot air like an oven. The silver floor was crusty, littered with wasps and moths that must have just dropped mid-flight from heat and lack of oxygen. I stood in the doorway so as not to smush them on my shoe bottoms. But Lecia just crunched right over them to the coin slot and dropped in her dime. The black receiver got held an inch or so off her cheek, to keep from scalding her, I guess. She told the operator to dial a collect call to Woodlawn 2-2800. After it rang about a zillion times with no answer, the operator broke the connection. On her next try, the switchboard lady at the Gulf wouldn’t accept charges or put her through to Daddy’s unit. Lecia said in her most quavery voice that it was a medical emergency, then she called the woman a nasty-assed bitch and slammed the phone down so hard it bounced right out of its little silver catch and spun from the cable, whapping the phonebooth glass.
Lecia busted into tears after that. She buckled up like something broke inside her, sliding to the bottom of the phone booth without even checking the coin return for change.
We wound up making two Father’s Day cards from blue construction paper. We put “Dad” in cursive on front of both using sky-blue glitter and Elmer’s glue. I went with a flag motif on mine, adding red stripes in crayon. The silver stars I drew went a dull, gunmetal gray instead of looking sparkly like the Crayola itself did. Staring at the end product rankled me. No matter how swell some drawing looked in your head, it always got cobbled up into a ratty kid-thing by the time you were through.
Mother set both cards on the mantel to dry. Lecia’s at least was clean. Mine had glue scabs all over. Plus she was hell on coloring inside the lines, which I was a long way from at that time. Still, old Hector swayed in front of both like they were the Holy Fucking Grail. He had this bleary, dog-faced look that I now realize was as much myopia as drunkenness. He slurred out a sentence about how he hoped someday we’d make him something for Father’s Day, to which Lecia said, “Don’t hold your breath.” That made me feel sorry enough to hug him before bed. My arms squeezed quick around his middle, which was wishy inside the slippery nylon of his shirt.
The next morning Mother dragged out of bed first thing to hit the post office for stamps enough to mail Daddy our cards. Motoring around before her blood alcohol level got adjusted was no small act of will. She’d brought a Bloody Mary in a tumbler with a lid on it like a baby would sip out of. She sat heavy behind the wheel in front of the P.O., rifling through her brown Coach bag for her wallet. Her hands shook. She finally plopped the whole thing in Lecia’s lap, saying just take it.
Left alone in the car with Mother, I saw for the first time how drinking had worn away at her looks. She’d bleached her hair platinum for some ungodly reason. She also wore dark sunglasses in daylight. Something about the vast difference between those colors—the hair like scalded grass and the shiny black of the glasses—yellowed her complexion. She had also draped a white chiffon scarf around her head and neck like some bandage too loose and sheer to do any good. Her big square hands trembled even when she did something definite with them, like dumping the ashtray out the window. I was silently scrambling for something to say. But no sooner did a possible sentence scuttle through my head than I could picture the tired scorn Mother would meet it with. She liked to say her bullshit meter went off pretty easy in those days. I only knew I bored her. I watched her sprinkling salt in the sippy hole of that tumbler using a Morton’s picnic shaker she kept in the car. I finally told her maybe she needed a whole block of salt like what we put out in the horse pasture. She pinched her mouth into a stiff little asterisk at that.
Mother’s bleach job put me in mind of an obituary picture I’d seen of Jayne Mansfield, who apparently got her head cut slap off in a car wreck. I was prone to grisly images at that time so it was no strain at all to picture Jayne Mansfield’s head—still wearing cat’s-eye sunglasses with rhinestones all around the edges—all lopped off at the neck and sailing up across the blue air like a fly ball. The image vaporized when Lecia shoved out the glass door into the sunlight. That big Coach bag over her shoulder bumped at her like a soldier’s duffel.
For a week or so after mailing off the Father’s Day cards, Lecia and I stopped at the P.O. morning and evening looking for a letter back. She drew the mailbox key from the string around her neck to open the tiny brass door, whose actual number is nothing but a smudge in my memory. Daddy wasn’t much of a correspondent. It always sat empty as a little coffin.
In all fairness to him, divorced men back then just surrendered their kids to the moms and forgot about it. Like a bad litter of puppies you’d tie in a potato sack and fling from your speeding Ford off the Orange Bridge, kids just got let loose. I wouldn’t have thought such a vanishing possible, not where Daddy was concerned. We’d shot too much pool together. We’d caught too many fish and eaten too many good gumbos. He always spouted stoical-sounding promises about his loyalty. At the first hint of lonesomeness for him, those promises could start zooming through my head like bad reverb: “I’m not a rich man, darling. But I can still walk. And when I walk, I walk heavy. And I swear to God, anybody messes with you, I’ll walk just as far and just as heavy as I ever did for the U.S. Army. I guarangoddamntee you that.”
Sometime that summer, Lecia lost the mailbox key riding. Then it just seemed too much trouble for us to stand in line at the counter and ask for the mail twice a day.
My final campaign to woo Daddy back that summer relied on the Green Stamps we’d never bothered to save before. Stores used to dole out these stamps according to the amount of money you’d just spent. Say you got twenty stamps for every dollar you paid for groceries, something like that. You then pasted the stamps in trading books, and took those books to a Green Stamp center to swap them for “free” stuff.
The stamp product catalogue was thin, like the circular a hardware store might send out for its President’s Day sale. But it lacked ord
er. Kid stuff got scattered in with flashlights; housewares, with fire extinguishers. For ten books of stamps you could get an off-brand of the Chatty Cathy Doll, one that would stop talking after a week of tugging on its string and just gibber a kind of high-pitched monkey language. A hundred books might get you camping gear or a croquet game that fit on a little wheely wooden cart. Thousands of books would buy something as big as a clothes dryer, or a La-Z-Boy recliner. Back in the Leechfield grocery, the lady shoppers had fallen like vultures on the long ribbons of stamps Mother held up at the end of the checkourt lane. “Anybody want these?” she’d holler, waving them in the ai. The carts would converge four deep where she stood, all those ladies. grabbing across their chicken parts and lettuces and fat babies in the riding seat with their stubby legs jammed through the square metal holes like so many rolled roasts. Mother didn’t believe in Green Stamps or coupons. They were a trick to keep women hunched over their kitchen tables after their kids were asleep, not unlike darning and embroidery—things Mother excelled at but refused to do. Nor would she drive a block out of her way to get gas for two cents cheaper. Mother had transcended thrift, even before she got Grandma’s money.