Nearer Than The Sky Page 11
As I blew across my coffee cup, the phone rang. I opened the screen door and went into the kitchen to answer it.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Indie, it’s Rich.”
“Hey.” I was glad it wasn’t Lily or Ma. “What’s up?”
“I’m just checking on you,” he said. “Making sure you’re okay.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “It’s a little creepy up here, though. Did you know Ma emptied out all the bedrooms? There’s a shitload of furniture in the backyard and on the porch. I think she was trying to sell it.”
“Hmmm,” he said. It was quiet behind him.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“I’m here. Judy and Lily just took Violet to the doctor. They’re taking some chest X rays.”
“Still no answers, huh?”
“Indie, your mother was talking about Lily having a history of seizures. Do you remember that?”
“Lily was always sick,” I said. “I can barely keep track of all of her health problems.”
“See, that’s news to me. I mean, Lily never gets sick now. Never. And this is the first time I’d ever heard anything about seizures. Even when Violet first got sick and the doctors were going through our medical histories, I don’t remember her saying anything about seizures. And now, I don’t know, it just seems . . .”
“Maybe Ma’s exaggerating,” I shrugged. “She’s been known to do that.”
“It’s not her that I’m worried about. I know what to expect from her,” Rich sighed. “It’s just that Lily is going along with it. All of a sudden she has this whole history of epilepsy or some other thing she’s never even mentioned before. It doesn’t make any sense.”
I sat down at the kitchen table and sipped my coffee. It was cold and bitter.
“I wouldn’t worry too much. If it’s something that might help the doctors figure out what’s wrong with Violet, I guess that’s all that matters.”
“I guess,” Rich said, sounding remotely defeated. “I’m just not making that connection. Violet stopped breathing. She wasn’t convulsing; she was completely limp. You saw her. I can’t even figure out why they’d be testing for epilepsy. I’m worried that the doctors might be wasting their time chasing after some crazy notion your mother came up with instead of figuring out what actually happened to her.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, dumping the cold coffee into the sink.
“I mean why she stopped breathing.”
“Maybe you should talk to Violet’s doctor,” I said. “Maybe something’s just getting lost in translation.”
“Maybe,” he said. He was quiet and then he said softly, “You know, I really was calling to see how you are.”
“Ready to go back to Maine,” I laughed.
“Are you really going to have those people come check the house?”
“I suppose. Who knows? Maybe they’ll find tanks of toxic waste in the basement,” I said.
“Rat poison in the water?” Rich laughed.
“You just need to remember the family you’re dealing with sometimes,” I said. “We operate on an entirely different logic than most.”
I drove Ma’s car into town and parked in the lot across the tracks from Rusty’s. Just as I was about to cross the tracks, the red lights started to flash, the arm descended, and the train whistled in the distance. I stood back from the tracks and waited for the train to come, covered my ears with my hands as it passed, and stared through the blinking spaces between the cars to the other side.
Instead of going straight into Rusty’s I walked across the street to the smoke shop for a paper. It smelled like pipe tobacco and chocolate inside. Heady and sweet. The woodstove in the center of the store was hot. I stood next to it while I waited in line. I pulled a handful of change out of my coat pocket and put it on the counter. I grabbed three nickel candies from a bin and unwrapped one while the girl behind the counter scooped my change and pocket lint into her palm.
I tucked the newspaper underneath my arm and walked across the street to Rusty’s. I stood staring at the smoked glass for several moments before I finally opened the heavy door. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, my heart sank. It had changed. Not so much that it looked like a different place, but enough that it felt off-kilter. Wrong. The booths along one wall had been removed. Now there were high round tables with bar stools situated around them like red vinyl petals on a flower. The wood-burned plaque that said NO SNIVELING was gone from behind the bar. The elk and deer heads that had hung on the walls like quiet friends had been replaced with ugly paintings of abstract landscapes and buildings. Oceans in unbelievable squares of green and blue. Triangular cathedrals without doors. I was happy to see that the mahogany bar Daddy had polished to impossible smoothness remained the central fixture in the room, and the mirrors behind the bar were the same beveled ones of my childhood. The jukebox that Benny loved was still there, but all the songs were different. And when I peered through the doorway where saloon-style doors used to hang, my heart sank. In the room where the extra pool table had always been, the uprooted booths and elk heads lay in heaps. Boxes and a broken cigarette machine.
I thought I might be the only one in the bar until a man came out of the bathroom and sat down several stools away from me at the end of the bar. He nodded at me. Then the bartender came through the swinging doors from the kitchen, retying her apron.
“Hey,” she said. Her voice was raspy, disconnected from her pretty face. Black hair pulled back into a messy ponytail, a widow’s peak breaking the smooth white expanse of her forehead. “What can I get you?”
“Bourbon?” I said, more like a question than a request.
“Sure thing.” She smiled and spun around to the bottles. I watched her thin wrists as she handed me my drink. There were snakes tattooed around each of them.
“Thanks,” I smiled, and wished I’d ordered a beer.
She turned around to the sink where the soapy water was so greasy the bubbles were almost gone. Her shirt lifted when she bent over, revealing her back. Her spine was bony. Her skin almost transparent. I took one sip of the bourbon and felt sick.
“Excuse me,” I said.
“Yeah?” she said turning around.
“Does Rosey Jimenez work here still?”
“I don’t know. I just got this job two days ago. Is she a bartender?”
“No, she used to work in the kitchen,” I said, my heart dropping. “Back when my dad owned this place.”
“Sorry,” she shrugged. “Maybe come back in tomorrow.”
“Sure,” I said, feeling defensive and angry that the fact that my father had owned this bar didn’t seem to register, or count to her for that matter.
I left the bar and thought about trying to look Rosey up in the phone book at the phone booth outside the bar, but instead I sat in the car in the parking lot until the sun started to make my eyes ache, and then I drove to the nearest car wash and paid for the full cycle. There was something safe and familiar about this. Something pacifying about the whirring of water and the soapy circles against the glass. Inside this car, inside this car wash, nothing had changed.
Indie, I told you fifteen times to put your laundry in your drawers. If I wash one more clean shirt because it wound up on the floor instead of in your dresser, I swear I’ll stop doing the laundry.”
Ma was standing at the kitchen table, spray-painting Lily’s tap shoes silver. One had started to dry and was stuck to the newspaper she’d put underneath.
“Shit,” she mumbled, peeling the paper off the side of the shoe. All that had been on Ma’s mind since Daddy gave in was the Miss Desert Flower contest. From the second she sealed the envelope with the entry form and the glossy black-and-white picture of Lily inside, the only thing she’d been concerned about was getting ready for Phoenix. She even cut back her hours at the nursing home so that she could get Lily ready. There were sequins to sew onto bodysuits and tap shoes to spray-paint. She hadn’t even noticed that I’d been going to v
isit Daddy at the bar after school every day instead of coming straight home. But now here she was, losing her patience again. Maybe she could clip it to the cuffs of her jacket like Benny’s mittens. Hang it around her neck on a string like my house key.
“Indie? The laundry?”
I wasn’t thinking about laundry. I was thinking about the Spalding personalized two-piece pool cue.
“Now,” Ma said and started to pull the chair I was sitting in away from the kitchen table.
“In a minute,” I said. I was counting the change I’d been saving. My red plastic piggy bank was lying on its side on the table, the rubber plug removed from its stomach so I could get at the disappointing stash inside.
“I said now,” she said and pulled harder on the chair. I felt the chair legs scraping across the linoleum.
“Ma . . .”
“GET UP!” she hollered. She kept yanking, and the chair tilted backward. I tried to hold on to the edge of the table, but the Formica was slippery. Suddenly, I lost my balance entirely and I was falling backward. My head hit the floor and bounced a bit. The pain was dull in the back of my head. Dull and insistent when I scrambled to my feet.
“I wasn’t doin’ nothin’, Ma!” I screamed and ran past her out the front door. She caught the back of my shirt and held me still on the front steps.
Benny was sitting on the garage roof, which he could get to by crawling on top of Daddy’s dead truck. He was wearing the plastic Batman cape he’d gotten for Halloween the year before. Lily was all the way across the front yard, twirling her baton. She wasn’t wearing the new red, white, and blue costume though. Ma had already sealed that in a plastic bag inside her suitcase so that Lily wouldn’t lose any more sequins in the grass before they got to Phoenix. Lily caught the baton behind her back and then laid it gently down. She raised her arms over her head and then threw her body forward, rising up into a perfect handstand. Her bare feet were pointed straight up toward the sky, her skinny legs squeezed tightly together. She walked quickly on her hands across the yard to the steps, and she didn’t hesitate for even a second before she started to climb the stairs, still walking on her hands.
“Let me go,” I seethed and pulled gently away from Ma. My head was aching, thick and steady. But I didn’t run across the front yard. It would have been dangerous to get in Lily’s way. A lot more dangerous than ignoring a pile of clean laundry on my bed.
Soon, Lily had arrived at the last step, where she let her body bend forward until her feet reached the top landing and she pulled herself back up, arms raised. Her face was red, but she was smiling. She looked toward my mother and my mother nodded, her expression serious. Lily nodded back in that strange silent language of theirs, and then dismounted. A flawless and light front aerial off of the top of the stairs, landing gently on the ground in a split.
My mother let go of me and applauded. She was smiling so wide that her lips almost disappeared, her lipstick smearing across her front teeth. I pulled away from her and walked into the driveway. I could feel the bump growing on the back of my head where I had fallen. There was a funny taste in the back of my throat, and I thought for a minute it might be blood. The side of my tongue was sore from where my teeth had come down on it when I fell.
But now Ma had forgotten all about me. She’d probably even forgotten about the laundry. On the roof, Benny clapped his hands wildly and shouted.
“Good pumpkin,” Ma said, swatting Lily’s bottom. “Now go in and get cleaned up.Your knees are grass-stained.”
Ma looked at me, standing in my bare feet in the driveway, and shook her head. There was nothing but disappointment in the way she scrunched her eyebrows up.
Benny crawled down off the roof and ran over to hug Lily. He squeezed her so tightly her feet came off the ground. She let out a small squeak like a rubber toy.
“Can I go see Daddy?” I asked. Each word made the pounding worse. I could feel my heartbeat in each rhythmic thud at my temples.
“I want those clothes put away first. And Benny, you stay here.”
“I’m hungry,” he said. “I want onion rings. I like the onion rings at the bar. Rosey makes mine without the onions. I hate onions. But she takes the onions out for me. One time I ate an onion and my head swelled up. Remember that?”
“I remember,” Ma said, annoyed.
“Onion rings, onion rings,” Benny said, running up Lily’s steps, the Batman cape flying behind him.
“Be careful,” my mother said as Benny reached the top and prepared to jump.
“Onion rings!” he screamed and leapt from the stairs to the ground, landing in his own version of a split.
“Jesus Christ,” my mother said. “Indie, will you bring him to your father for some onion rings?”
At Rusty’s, Benny liked to sit at the bar. From one of the shiny red stools he could look through the smoky glass out at the people going by on Depot Street. He could also talk to Rosey through the window to the kitchen, and the jukebox was within reach. Once, for Benny’s birthday, Daddy gave him a whole roll of quarters from the safe and he played his favorite songs until all the quarters were gone and everyone in the entire bar was about ready to go crazy with listening to the theme from Rocky and “The Year of the Cat” over and over again. Daddy knew now just to give him enough quarters to keep him occupied until his onion rings or french fries or tacos were ready.
“Hi Daddy,” Benny hollered.
Daddy was standing on a ladder dusting off the antlers of Zeus, the only animal Daddy ever killed. What most people didn’t know was that he hit him with our Nova, not with a shotgun. He was driving, not hunting, when he and Zeus had their confrontation. Eddie Grand drove his pickup truck out to where Zeus and the Nova lay intertwined in a crazy embrace of metal and fur, brought him straight to the taxidermist, and had Zeus’s head mounted on a solid piece of oak. Daddy never lied about how Zeus came to his final resting place on the wall just above the good liquor. But he certainly didn’t discourage Eddie’s stories either.
“Benny, can you give me a hand here?” he asked and stepped down from the ladder.
“Can I have a quarter?”
“After you give me a hand.” Daddy grinned and handed Benny the dust rag. “I need you to go find the Pledge in the kitchen and bring me back a clean rag to wipe down the bar with. Ask Rosey to help you.”
“And then she’ll give me those onion rings without the onions, right? Because my head swelled up that one time she forgot to take the onions out.”
“You’ll have to take that one up with Rosey,” Daddy said and folded up the stepladder.
“Hi Daddy,” I said. My head was still pounding dully.
“How’s my little Indian Princess?” Daddy asked, winking at me. That was Daddy’s nickname for me. There wasn’t an ounce of Navajo or Hopi in me, but when he called me that I felt like I really was an Indian princess. Like I might find out that my mother wasn’t my real mother at all. That Daddy had once been married to a beautiful Indian lady who died when I was born. When Ma was ignoring me or yelling at me or forgetting to pick me up again at school, I dreamed that my real mother wasn’t from California but from here. That she was the real reason why Daddy moved us all back to Arizona. It wasn’t too hard to pretend, either. In the summertime my skin turned the same color as coffee, the same color as Laura Yazzi’s from my class. Sometimes I looked for my Indian mother in the mirror.
“Does your mother know you’re here?” Daddy asked.
“Yes,” I said, raising my eyebrows.
Daddy raised his eyebrows too and then wiggled his ears. This was our special language. It made me giggle.
Little Ike was sitting at the bar finishing up an order of Rosey’s enchiladas. I sat down next to him and spun around on the stool. I could feel the blood whirring behind my eyes.
“Hi Ike,” I said.
“Hey Indie.You wanna shoot some pool?” he asked, wiping enchilada sauce from the corners of his mouth.
“Sure,” I said.
“Who knows?” I shrugged.
“Well, then we’ve got plenty of time,” Ike smiled. Ike’s voice was like a kid’s; everything about him was small. He lived in the trailer park on the south side of the tracks near the Sacred Heart. He said that because he was a little person, his house was more like a castle than a trailer. That the world was a pretty big and exciting place when you were under five feet tall.
Benny came out from the kitchen with a red plastic basket filled to the rim with onion-less onion rings in one hand and a rusty can of Pledge in the other. His face was twisted in concentration. Rosey followed behind with a dust rag.
“There’s not gonna be a thing left to that bar if you keep on polishing it. All that rubbing is gonna wear down the wood,” she said, handing Daddy the cloth.
“See your reflection in it, though. That way all my customers can see how drunk they look before they go home. This bar has saved a few marriages the way I figure it,” he said.
Ike slapped his little hand on the bar and chuckled. He pulled his snuff can out of his pocket, grabbed a matchbook from the wooden bowl of Rusty’s matchbooks at the edge of the bar, and yanked a match out. He carefully scooped a bit of the snuff from the can onto the match and then snorted.
Benny sat spinning on the stool closest to the jukebox, stuffing the crispy onion rings into his face as fast as he could.
“You feeding that kid?” Rosey asked, wiping her hands on her apron. “You’d think he never ate nothing at home.”
“I’m a growing boy,” Benny mumbled, his mouth full.
“Grow much more and I won’t be able to afford to feed you,” Daddy said and sprayed the long section of the bar that no one was sitting at. The whole room smelled like lemons.
“Can I have a quarter?” Benny asked.