The Town You Came From
Rebecca Hanley
Marlo Masterson walked due north down the shoulder of the black, oily stretch of highway dragging her father’s World War I duffel bag. The contents of the duffel bag included: five pair of panties, a red polka dot nightgown, two pair of white cotton short-shorts, a lipstick swiped from Henderson’s drug store, and the August issue of Modern Screen–a swimsuit-clad Jane Russell steaming up the cover.
When she’d left, her mother was powdering up the baby. The baby’s crib occupied a corner of Marlo’s bedroom, and a bucket of bleach water filled with dirty diapers replaced the dollhouse she’d decorated with tiny furnishings. The smell of powder, dry and sweet, and the smell of shit had invaded the room. She’d recall those smells years into the future: “I’ll take that smell,” she’d told the only man who’d ever mattered, “to my grave.”
By the time she reached Leon’s Truck Stop, her beach-brown legs were shrouded in dust and her sandals had cut red welts across her toes. She avoided the front door leading into the restaurant area and slipped into the back door. Leon did not look up when she stepped inside. His black hair shone in the fluorescent lighting over the desk and he scratched with a pencil at a gambling sheet.
Frightened and angered by the fact he would not even look at her, Marlo smacked her fist against the desk and reminded Leon they’d done some stuff up at the turnout above the gorge–stuff like smoking weed, drinking vodka out of the bottle, fucking. All of this when she was under-age.
“You’d better give me the money to get out of this town,” she said, “I want out of this town forever.”
He set the pencil down and looked at her. She would think then, and on up to the very last days of her life, that he had eyes like coal. But there was that moment when he leaned back with a smile, and Marlo grabbed on to the hope that Leon remembered the two rivers flashing neon far below the turn-out, that he remembered the stars raining down out of the sky as they drank vodka from paper cups. She felt joy rise up at the thought that finally, finally, finally, she could escape this town when he said as soft as silk on skin, “Don’t threaten me, missy. Don’t threaten me, ever.” He picked up a shiny silver letter opener, thumbed the blade and said, “I have a wife. I have a kid. If I try for just one minute I won’t even remember your name.”
Within the next half an hour, Marlo Masterson would climb up into the passenger seat of a tanker truck which had just emptied a load at Clipper’s Fuel and Oil. The trucker was more than happy to let her hitch a ride. Leon would watch from the back door to make sure she’d got herself good and gone. The following Sunday, Officer Walter Tripp would pull into Leon’s in his green and white cruiser. A parishioner from the Methodist church out in the rolling wheat fields south of town had seen Eleanor and Gordon’s kid headed to Leon’s truck stop dragging a duffel bag.
Officer Tripp would ask Gordon Masterson why he hadn’t reported his daughter missing days earlier. The man would stare out into the middle distance and say, “She was always trouble. Nothing but trouble,” and leave it at that.
“What girl?” Leon would say when Officer Tripp showed up at the truck stop. “Maybe she applied for a job here once. Who knows?”
At a rest stop in South Dakota the scrawny trucker would hook up with a dealer and inject heroin into Marlo’s arm. His own arms were tattooed with anchors and eagles, and after he’d shot the drugs into her, it seemed as if the birds talons pinned her down onto the dirty sheets. After nights and days the trucker dropped her at the YWCA in Hialeah. Years later, she would explain to the only man she’d ever loved she hadn’t had anything stronger than some weed after that. He’d laugh and say, “That was then. This is now.”
Chief’s Tavern was located at the convergence of the old Hialeah highway and a neighborhood of rental bungalows and low-income apartments. He had routed out of the navy as a Chief Petty Officer well versed in the black market and drug trades. His tavern was paneled in dark wood and had the predictable array of photos of famous athletes hanging on the walls. The photographs were interspersed with inspirational sayings Chief had painted on old boards from the falling down slat fence separating the alley in back from an RV park. One sign read, “Life is good, but . . .”. Another sign read, “Don’t think too much, or . . .” An old shrimper named Howard Fleury suggested to Chief he ought to finish a thought now and again. Chief had smiled and said, “It’s you supposed to finish the thought, you old cretin. Puzzle it out while you drink that beer.”
Marlo was seated at the end of the bar. Old Howard was mumbling something about the weather and Vietnam, but Marlo was not in the mood for conversation. At a back corner table Chief laid out a hand of solitaire. The week prior, on her fortieth birthday, he’d squeezed out from behind the table and the bench seat and trundled toward her. His short limbs and broad back reminded her of a giant sea turtle. He’d handed her a couple of joints and said, “Birthdays, they mean something I guess. But what? That’s the question.” Elray the bartender had told Marlo once that Chief had been fathered on some Pacific Island by a hooker and an American soldier. Marlo replied she could care less about Chief’s genealogy. What did she look like–a Mormon or something? Elray had laughed and wiped his eyeglasses with a bar towel.
But on that particular day nothing seemed funny to Marlo.
The week prior. Ralph Leighton, the guy she’d been shacked up with, stuck a gun in his mouth thus ending the misery of his missing feet, frozen off in the Korean War, and the chronic phantom pain. After a week at the YWCA she figured the place had been cleaned up, but did not figure on the manager not letting her back in.
When she had tried to get back into the place the locks had been changed. The manager, a scrawny Cuban transvestite, decked out in a silver chiffon peignoir set, had told her, “You have no rights to be here. “She adjusted the bright red wig on her head and added, “Puta.”
Marlo sipped the bloody Mary Elray placed in front of her and told Chief that every single one of his unfinished signs should end with, “Who the fuck cares anyway?”
Chief looked at her and said, “Why do you want to go and say something like that?”
“Because,” she answered. “Because I’ve got nothing. Not a fucking thing.” Old Howard, his dirty baseball hat resting on the bar muttered, “No way for a lady to talk,” and spilled beer down his chin.
Chief patted Marlo’s arm, “Don’t talk language like that. It annoys me something terrible.”
Elray added, “Chief don’t like bad language, Marlo. Calm the fuck down, and I’ll take you out back for a quick smoke.”
Dust-covered hibiscus straggled along the tumble-down fence in the alley. Elray gazed at her with the same hang-dog look all ugly men did. His eyes were the same dirty green as the drooping hibiscus leaves, and his stomach folded over his belt.
She said, “You’re too nice to me, you know.”
He scooted a little closer, and she didn’t step back. Elray ran errands for the Chief: collected drug debts, distributed booking sheets, used his muscle. Angie Paris, a working girl who knew what was needed to know, had told Marlo that Elray did time for beating a man near to death who owed Chief money. Angie said Elray looked soft, but steel wasn’t soft. Marlo let him take another step closer, then Chief called out saying he needed Elray back at the bar.
Back inside the tavern, footage of wounded and dead soldiers being loaded into helicopters played across the television above the bar. Marlo thought of Ralph with his blown off legs and empty bank account. Elray was giving her long looks. He placed a fresh drink in front of her even though he knew she never had more than one drink. She was about to ask him to change the channel when a man’s voice said, “Hair that gorgeous can’t be real can it?”
It was a tired line of bullshit she’d heard too often. On the television screen overhead, helicopter blades hammered the air. A soldier was being dragged face down toward the chopper.
“Did you hear what I said? I said you have beautiful hair.”
The man seated himself on the barstool next to her and placed a pack of Camel cigarettes and a book of matches on the bar. The match cover was printed with the words Allen P. O’Malley, J.D.
“I’m Al,” he said, “And you’re gorgeous, right?”
Elray pushed his large gut against his side of the bar and said, “You the lawyer guy here to see Chief? He’s at the back table there. Don’t keep him waiting. Don’t ever keep him waiting.”
Al O’Malley had wide cheek bones and a sure look in his blue eyes. He was wearing a white linen jacket and a white shirt open at the collar. He stood and said, “I’ll be seeing you real soon, beautiful.”
He was a player that was clear. Two can play, she thought as he walked away. Whatever game it is, two can play.
As the late afternoon settled into evening, Elray would switch the channel from the news to a Florida Gators baseball game. Al O’Malley would be hired on a handshake to help keep Chief’s present and future legal problems at bay. He would commiserate with Marlo about the ruthless ways of the world and the transvestite who called her a puta, before taking her to his apartment to smoke some Thai stick.
Two months later in the thick humidity of the fourth of July weekend, Chief would win six straight games of solitaire and lose the seventh. In the weeks that followed, he’d claim to have seen an act of violence and an act of redemption in the seventh hand.
“Elray didn’t see those bullets coming, but I did,” Chief would remark in reference to the three bullets Elray took in the back on his way to enforce a drug debt owed the Chief. Al O’Malley would stroke Marlo’s thigh and say, “I guess the redemption you saw in those cards of yours is that Elray survived. Am I right?”
Chief kept his gaze on the television screen. The bodies of Vietnamese were lined up by a tropical hut. He shunted himself from the barstool and said, “Elray? Left crippled up like that? That’s no kind of redemption. Redemption’s yet to come,”
As he walked to his usual table in the back, he added. “I’ve got some good Thai stick coming in if you’re interested.”
A wine-red sweater and a pink hand mirror had been separated from the pile of donations Marlo sorted through at the Salvation Army. Strictly speaking, her co-worker Tiffany Langdomer said, we are not supposed to take stuff for ourselves.
“It’s my birthday,” Marlo replied. “I deserve a few things on my birthday.”
At the morning break, the two women stepped onto the loading dock for a cigarette. Marlo told Tiffany her boyfriend had promised something special for her forty-sixth birthday. Tiffany, dark hair cut short and oiled against her scalp, said, “You don’t look a day over thirty-five,” and kicked at a pigeon pecking too close to the lime green sandals she’d cadged earlier in the week.
“Six years,” Marlo said.
“What about six years? “Tiffany kicked again at the persistent bird with the shining green neck feathers and angry black eyes.
“My boyfriend and me. Six years now. He’s a lawyer, if you didn’t know.”
“I didn’t know. Did you know the British eat these filthy birds?”
At five o’clock that afternoon Marlo went into the thrift store’s restroom, fussed with her hair and scrubbed at her teeth with her index finger and a crumbled breath mint. A few minutes after 5 o’clock Al pulled up in his ten-year-old silver Acura. He complained about the car being old, and the fact Chief called him to clear up a legal matter now and again, but only for small stuff. “I may not look it,” he’d say, “but I’m not getting any younger.”
His hair, the color of shoe black, retained the bitter scent of ammonia from the comb through dye he bought at the drug store. He was sixty and lied about it except down at the senior center which he’d joined to try and rustle up some clients.
“Last Wills and Testaments,” he said, “that’s where the money is. Quick, easy money if you can stand the piss and powder stink of old women.” He fiddled with the radio dial until it landed on a country music station patted Marlo’s knee and said, “Romance tonight, babe. Hot romance.” They drove to the seafood place a few miles out on the old highway. The waiter brought a bottle of Chardonnay, and Marlo told Al when she closed her eyes she could smell the ocean. He said it was probably the tank up front where the lobster waited to die. His birthday gift was a silver locket with a picture of his face shrunk down on a copy machine. They ate shrimp fettucine. Al groused about money troubles, while she watched the sun fall through the black line of highway. The waitress placed a piece of birthday cake, compliments of the house, in front of them. When she bit into the cake the frosting was like sand in her teeth.
Al’s apartment was in an old stucco building jammed between two busy intersections. Inside the apartment the air felt over-heated and ripe with the smells of oil and diesel. He led her to his unmade bed. A ragged, red bedspread trailed onto the floor. The sheets were yellowed with age. He strapped the belt around her arm heated a spoon and said, “This stuff is good. Better than the usual. Chief gave me a deal because it was your birthday.”
The sight of the needle never failed to remind Marlo of the trucker and the things he’d done to her when she was just a kid. A kid on the run out of Delancey. She didn’t want to use the needle. Not on this day or any day. But she didn’t want to make Al angry. Or alone. He’d told her once she’d tried to refuse, that unless they shot up together he’d feel all lonely when he got high.
Before the combination of warmth and nausea overwhelmed her, Marlo recalled the restaurant: the waxy, checkered tablecloths, the lobsters bound and helpless in a tank of murky water, the huge head of the mustachioed and winking chef on the sign outside. She saw her reflection in the thrift store’s water-ruined mirror: the wrinkles at her eyes, her blonde hair streaked with grey. She heard herself telling her co-worker, Tiffany, about her lawyer boyfriend in a bragging tone, as the pigeon strolled casually within inches of their feet. Then she vomited as Al held her over the toilet. He said, “Now, now. That’s my girl.”
Three years after that birthday Marlo would be seated in the tiny office of a public health doctor. The doctor was young with unremarkable features. A red bow tie anchored his collar. He discussed the long and short-term ramifications of hepatitis C in a rush of words and then checked his watch.
Afternoon light slatted through the blinds and glanced off the high polish of the doctor’s brown dress shoes. He would tell her it took between twenty or thirty years for the symptoms to show and asked her if she had practiced at risk behavior from a young age. The smell of diesel, the white lines racing toward her through darkness, the greasy smell of truck stop food, the skinny trucker’s tattooed back and arms had never faded from her memory. Marlo would look up at the doctor and say, “I don’t know what you mean.”
Al’s visits would become infrequent and he would be reluctant, as he phrased it, to “swap spit”. After she hadn’t seen him in weeks, hysterical, she went to Chief’s, but neither Chief nor Elray had seen Al.
Al’s disappearance seemed to cheer Elray, who’d been morose since being confined to a wheelchair by the gunshot injuries and had resumed his long amorous glances in Marlo’s direction.
“Your lawyer boyfriend was supposed to go over some legal work for me, but it’s like he disappeared or something,” Chief said.
Elray added, “Gone. Just like that. Poof.”
Both men stared up at the television. Helicoptors were evacuating the American embassy in Saigon.
“Son-of-a-bitch, “Chief would say,” Can you believe it? We lost.”
It took Marlo over an hour to dress. When she tried to put on the blue slacks the muscles in the back of her thighs and calves cramped violently. Elray knocked on the bathroom door. She told him to give her a minute. Just one God-damn minute. She’d pretty much given up on Al ever returning. Broke and getting sicker with the hepatitis, she’d had to move in with Elray.
The battered wood floor in the living room was dusty. Marlo had wanted it clean before the visits by the social worker and nurse, but she was too weak and Elray, confined to his wheelchair, didn’t pay much attention to housework. She seated herself in the recliner, and he carefully knotted a pink scarf at her throat commenting on the pattern of kittens in berets.
“You don’t even like cats,” he said. “I’m going to head out, but I’ll be back to fix you lunch.”
When she’d first moved in he was ecstatic and told her he’d waited a long time. But these days, he seemed irritable, as if he were tiring of her. She’d asked him not to leave her alone with the social worker even though she knew he would head out to Chief’s because, as he’d said, those types of broads made him nervous.
“You know,” he said, “they’ll cut off the visiting nurses and stuff you in a nursing home if you don’t get to that door.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“Yeah. Well know it good enough, okay?”
She listened to his wheelchair thump down the ramp to the sidewalk. The room was overly warm even though a fan rattled in the corner. She dozed off for a while but was awake when the social worker appeared at the screen door. Marlo pushed up from the chair and eased toward the door. The woman said, “And so we meet again, Marlo.”
“Yes. I suppose we do.”
Valerie Riddle settled onto the sofa Marlo had covered with a blanket patterned in roses. The woman had a broad face and limp, brown hair. She asked Marlo how she was feeling.
“I’m good. It’s all good.”
The woman rifled through the contents of the briefcase and said, “You seemed very shaky and short of breath when you reached the door.”
The mirror over the sofa reflected the shifting leaves of the magnolia growing in the median between the sidewalk and the street. Marlo had dragged the mirror home from her old job at the Salvation Army. The wooden frame was water-stained; Marlo had spray painted it gold, a bright, shiny gold.
“You’ll be seeing Amy Tesarik this afternoon. She’ll update me with her thoughts about your ability to stay here.”
Amy Tesarik was the visiting nurse. She and Valerie Riddle were responsible for the decision to allow Marlo to stay in the bungalow rather than to be moved into nursing home care.
Marlo stared out through the screen door. The big, orange cat Elray fed with cans of tuna prowled the sidewalk. The cat set its claws into the bark of the magnolia tree. A bird with silver wings clung to a lower branch.
“I always wanted a house,” she said to the social worker. “This is as close as I got.”
Valerie Riddle tapped a skinny black pen against her cheek, and said, “The state doesn’t pay in-home care, Marlo. Not more than the monthly visit by a nurse. You know that, dear.”
The woman had fat fingers and ragged nails. Even at times Marlo couldn’t shake a dime out of her pocket, she took better care of herself than this woman.
The social worker sat with her legs spread out; belly pressed against the zipper of her trousers. She leaned forward and asked, “Have you always lived in Hialeah, Marlo?”
Marlo nodded, yes, and wished it were true.
“Funny, how some folks never leave the town they grew up in. Me I grew up in Chicago. Now here I am in Florida where the sun always shines.”
Marlo wondered how it had come to pass that her fate rested in the hands of all these women who pretended to give a shit. I can see right through you. I can see right through all of you. Just like all those women at her parents’ church who pretended to forgive her teenage pregnancy and coo at baby Jolene.
There was something wrong with the woman’s left eye. It was small and brown and drifted in the wrong direction. Marlo knew people whose eyes had gone weird like that if they were really stoned. Stoned to the point things became scary because no one knew what a person that fucked up might do next.
“I love the color you’ve painted the walls. Such a pretty shade of blue. What would you call it, Marlo?”
“Robin’s egg blue.”
It had taken her three days to paint the small room. That was last year. Now she wouldn’t be able to hold the paint brush for five minutes. The teenage boy who lived in the bungalow next door walked across Marlo’s line of sight and aimed a kick at the tomcat. If Elray had seen the boy kick at the cat he’d be real pissed. Pissed enough maybe to get the boy hurt.
“I hope,” the social worker stood up and said, “that when you see the nurse this afternoon, she’ll be optimistic about your ability to stay here.”
When the woman walked out of the house and down the front steps Marlo sat very still, as if the slightest movement might cause this person, this Valerie Riddle, to return.
Pale yellow sunlight washed over the walls of the room. The blues and pinks reminded her of spring flowers and baby clothes. She recalled the bare white walls in her parents’ house, and her mother leaning over Jolene’s crib saying, “If you can’t love this baby, you can’t love anyone or anything.”
Her mother had been wrong. Marlo had loved Al O’Malley like there was no tomorrow. That proved something didn’t it? A few weeks before Al O’Malley disappeared from her life, high on the opium they’d smoked, he’d promised her a house. He said he would pay for it with Chief’s money.
The neighbor boy sauntered back across the sidewalk, hands jammed into the pockets of his sagging jeans, whistling soundlessly. Looking for trouble. That’s what Elray would say. That kid is always looking for trouble. And one of these days he’s going to find it.
Elray had returned to the bungalow to fix Marlo lunch. He had a smug little smile playing between his round and stubbly cheeks because he’d won at pull-tabs.
He asked, “How’d it go with the social worker?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” Marlo replied and asked if he’d been able to score any opium.
“The money I won is for the rent. Which we are behind on if you hadn’t noticed.”
“Chief will give us credit if you say it’s for me.”
“No credit. No one with a brain does any business with Chief on credit. Not even me. Not paying it back? Same punishment as stealing it.”
Marlo asked Elray if there was time for a smoke before the visiting nurse showed up. He lit a cigarette and handed it to her. A hot breeze pushed the smell of diesel and bougainvillea through the living room. Al O’Malley had called Chief a tight-fisted goon in the weeks before he disappeared. He’d told her that they’d set sail on the Jamaica wind.
“Do you believe in ghosts, Elray?” She asked.
He turned his wheelchair toward the kitchen. “You’re going to need to eat something.”
“I believe in ghosts. I think they hunt us.”
“Haunt. The word is haunt, Marlo.”
“Hunt is what I said. Like hunt us down. I had an old boyfriend once. Came back after me. He’d shove me in the dark.”
“Is that so? Two things. How stoned were you those nights, and what did you do to make him want to hunt you down?”
The front of Elray’s t-shirt was stained with catsup. When he talked it was through yellow teeth. She’d only taken Ralph’s disability money when he was too fucked up to stop her. She hadn’t been that stoned the nights she felt the dead man at her back. She said to Elray, “You know why you’re a slob? It’s because you’re a Leo.”
He wheeled into the kitchen saying the word “bitch” just loud enough for her to hear. She thought of Ralph blowing his head off while she was in the bathroom putting on lipstick. It was the week after that she’d met Al O’Malley for the first time.
“Stupid fucking bastard,” she said into a stream of cigarette smoke.
“Did you just call me a fucking bastard?” Elray said appearing beside her with a sandwich.
“No. That was Ralph who was the fucking bastard. The one who hunts me down every now and again.” But that was not the truth. It was Al O’Malley. What the fuck had he done to go and disappear like that? What had he done?
“I don’t believe in ghosts. Eat your sandwich.”
The sandwich was tuna. Elray had cut off the crust. She shook out the paper napkin he’d placed on the tray and laid it over the sandwich. “I believe in ghosts because I know there has to be more to this stinking life than what happens here.”
Elray fidgeted a red ball cap over his greasy, pony-tailed hair and said, “I’m out of here. I’m going down to Chief’s place and watch the ball game. Don’t you be tossing off any fuck language when the visiting nurse gets here.” He picked up the aerosol can of room scent, “Spring Blossoms” and sprayed it around the room. “If she smells cigarettes it won’t go any better for you.”
“I never used to swear,” Marlo said.
“Yeah. Which lifetime was that?”
My young lifetime, she wanted to say and remembered the first time she’d said the word “fuck” it was the day she ran out of Delancy, and the truck driver made her do things she didn’t want to do. She said, “I need to keep positive, keep my chin up.”
“That’s right, Marlo,” Elray answered, “And try not to puke the sandwich up like you did last time.”
The visiting nurse, a short woman with unnaturally red hair, introduced herself as Amy and asked Marlo how she was feeling.
“Better all the time.”
“Really? Are you sure?” As small as the nurse was she seemed to expand and fill up the space. Marlo realized in that moment how afraid of these women she really was. Afraid they could force her from the bungalow into a nursing home. They could do it today. Tomorrow. The next day.
“I made it to the door didn’t I?”
“You did. But the effort clearly cost you.”
The teenage neighbor boy appeared on the sidewalk outside the bungalow. His name was Jayden or Hayden or something like that. She’d never seen anyone so pale. It was as if he was buried and dug back up. That’s how they would have described it in Delancey, way up north there in the hills of nowhere.
Marlo said, “I won’t go into a nursing home.”
“The state will not pay for at home care once you cannot take care of yourself. You know that, Marlo.” The woman wrapped a blood pressure cuff around Marlo’s arm. Marlo could see black roots against the nurse’s blood red hair, and wanted to push her away, tell her to get the fuck out. There was a burst of wild laughter from just outside the bungalow. The woman’s head was blocking her view through the door, but she knew it was the neighbor boy and his girlfriend, touching each other, pressing their dead white skin together and laughing through prematurely decaying teeth.
Al O’Malley would have, could have stopped all of this because he was a lawyer and would know what to do. If he were alive he’d come back for her. Of course he was alive. Why wouldn’t he be?
She said, “I can leave anytime I want. I have friends, friends who will take me anywhere I want to go. I have people who care about me.”
The nurse replied that she was glad Marlo had friends, but her tone of voice was cold and she enunciated each word slowly and carefully as if by repeating them back, Marlo could hear her how absurd they sounded. The nurse was small and scrawny. The cords of her neck showed, and her teeth were too big and white.
The boy and girl under the magnolia burst into a song with strange and garbled words. That boy needs a job, Elray would say. It’s like his job is walking back and forth in front of our bungalow all day, giving us the creeps, she’d answered once to that. The nurse moved across her line of sight then moved away. The nurse had small-boned brittle looking hands. Hands that looked easily broken, like bird wings could break, she said, “I don’t feel optimistic about your condition, Marlo. We need to think of your alternatives.”
The boy and girl collapsed laughing into each other’s arms.
They must be on acid, Marlo thought.
It was nearing dusk and the sky had surrendered to a layer of brilliant, white-topped clouds. The clouds, Al had explained to her once, crossed the oceans from Jamaica. I’ve been to Jamaica he’d said and heated the spoon. I’ll take you some day. I’ll take you to places you’ve only dreamed of.
Chief had a sign up on the wall above the bar that read: “If you dream then . . .” Then what? Marlo had asked. Chief had laughed and laughed but never answered. What’s so funny, she’d asked. What’s so fucking funny?
A delivery van sped past the bungalow. The driver laid on the horn, and the big tomcat skidded to safety under the magnolia. A near miss.
Elray wheeled into the house. He always had the look of a sad drunk, even when he was stone cold sober. She thought how he never stopped eating in little bites: a piece of toast, a plate with crackers, candy from the crystal bowl she’d got at the thrift store.
“I thought I’d have my own house someday,” she said, and Elray watched her as warily as the birds in the tree outside watched the big old orange cat. Marlo knew the look. When she got on the subject of her own house she’d get weepy. But why not? Why not cry once in a while?
“You know I like pretty things,” she said, “All I ever wanted was a place to call my own.”
This time she did not add the parts about crappy rentals and no one ever giving a shit about her. She didn’t add the parts about the Victorian house she dreamed about, daydreamed about. A fine and beautiful place to hang her gilded mirror.
Elray’s head was down; his hands folded across his belly. She said, “Gordon and Ellen had a house you know.”
He raised his head, “Who the hell are Gordon and Ellen, and why the hell should I care about their house?”
“My parents. They were my parents. In Delancey.”
“What about them?”
“They owned a house. If they’re dead, wouldn’t it be my house?”
He fingered the tape that held his glasses together. The lenses of his glasses were smudged with oily fingerprints. She was aware that he looked at her with contempt. It was the same look Leon Staley leveled at her that day in Delancey when she wanted the money to travel out of town, and she wanted to scream: I was just a kid, a know-nothing kid. Leon Staley had got her pregnant up at the turnout high above the Snake and Clearwater Rivers. Was that when her life had ended? Fifteen years old, shit-faced drunk and fucking a married man.
She said, “I left a baby back there in Delancey.”
“You’re just full of secrets, aren’t you?”
“I never told anyone before except one other person.”
Elray fussed his blue Florida Gators tee-shirt across his stomach. “Yeah. I can guess who that was.”
“The baby was a girl. I named her Jolene.”
“So what happened to this baby?”
She watched the birds in the tree branches outside, the swoop, the flutter, and answered, “I don’t know, I don’t think about it much.” And she hadn’t thought much about Delancey either–that nothing town so far up north with its cold winters and scrubby pine trees.
“Maybe you should find this daughter of yours. You’re in bad shape, Marlo. I can’t take care of you. Maybe this kid could.” On his right ring finger was the heavy gold ring he’d gotten off someone or other who’d owed chief. He’d made mincemeat out of a man’s face with it, he’d bragged once.
Clouds sailed inland with the Jamaica wind Al had always talked about. The last conversation they had was nothing worth remembering. His hair was coming in grey at the roots, and he’d lost his right incisor. As he removed his shirt and searched for a vein he’d talked about separating Chief from some of his money. Then he shot up.
The neighbor kid and his girlfriend were sitting in the dirt under the magnolia tree passing a joint back and forth. The boy was so thin his collar bones show through his t-shirt and his face looked as it has been carved from white stone with a sharp knife. He almost looked beautiful. The girl buried her face in his chest her hair a cloud of black smoke.
Marlo said, “Al O’Malley promised me a house. Said he would pay for it with Chief’s money.”
Elray’s fingers with their dirty nails were folded across his big belly. He leaned forward in the wheelchair and said, “That shyster promised you a house with Chief’s money, did he? Well the shyster is gone. I think you’d best forget about Al O’Malley.”
“I won’t forget about him. Maybe he didn’t leave me you know? Maybe something else happened.”
“Like what, Marlo? Something like what?”
“Maybe something like you used to do for Chief.”
The boy under the tree passed the girl a joint and stared at Marlo through the screen.
Elray had left hours before without speaking another word to her. The yellow light of the streetlights shone across the tree branches and through the screen door. The boy and girl were gone. The birds were silent. When Chief appeared in the room it seemed as if he had floated in on the moonlight that flowed through the broken clouds.
It had been so long since she’d seen him she’d forgotten how delicate his features were, how golden his skin. He touched her hand and said she was a real pain in the ass. The words made her laugh Chief said them so nice. He said, let’s give you something to take away your pain and struck a lighter beneath a spoon. The flame flashed across the water-stained, gilded mirror above the sofa, and a bird plummeted into the branches of the magnolia tree.
Rebecca Hanley
Marlo Masterson walked due north down the shoulder of the black, oily stretch of highway dragging her father’s World War I duffel bag. The contents of the duffel bag included: five pair of panties, a red polka dot nightgown, two pair of white cotton short-shorts, a lipstick swiped from Henderson’s drug store, and the August issue of Modern Screen–a swimsuit-clad Jane Russell steaming up the cover.
When she’d left, her mother was powdering up the baby. The baby’s crib occupied a corner of Marlo’s bedroom, and a bucket of bleach water filled with dirty diapers replaced the dollhouse she’d decorated with tiny furnishings. The smell of powder, dry and sweet, and the smell of shit had invaded the room. She’d recall those smells years into the future: “I’ll take that smell,” she’d told the only man who’d ever mattered, “to my grave.”
By the time she reached Leon’s Truck Stop, her beach-brown legs were shrouded in dust and her sandals had cut red welts across her toes. She avoided the front door leading into the restaurant area and slipped into the back door. Leon did not look up when she stepped inside. His black hair shone in the fluorescent lighting over the desk and he scratched with a pencil at a gambling sheet.
Frightened and angered by the fact he would not even look at her, Marlo smacked her fist against the desk and reminded Leon they’d done some stuff up at the turnout above the gorge–stuff like smoking weed, drinking vodka out of the bottle, fucking. All of this when she was under-age.
“You’d better give me the money to get out of this town,” she said, “I want out of this town forever.”
He set the pencil down and looked at her. She would think then, and on up to the very last days of her life, that he had eyes like coal. But there was that moment when he leaned back with a smile, and Marlo grabbed on to the hope that Leon remembered the two rivers flashing neon far below the turn-out, that he remembered the stars raining down out of the sky as they drank vodka from paper cups. She felt joy rise up at the thought that finally, finally, finally, she could escape this town when he said as soft as silk on skin, “Don’t threaten me, missy. Don’t threaten me, ever.” He picked up a shiny silver letter opener, thumbed the blade and said, “I have a wife. I have a kid. If I try for just one minute I won’t even remember your name.”
Within the next half an hour, Marlo Masterson would climb up into the passenger seat of a tanker truck which had just emptied a load at Clipper’s Fuel and Oil. The trucker was more than happy to let her hitch a ride. Leon would watch from the back door to make sure she’d got herself good and gone. The following Sunday, Officer Walter Tripp would pull into Leon’s in his green and white cruiser. A parishioner from the Methodist church out in the rolling wheat fields south of town had seen Eleanor and Gordon’s kid headed to Leon’s truck stop dragging a duffel bag.
Officer Tripp would ask Gordon Masterson why he hadn’t reported his daughter missing days earlier. The man would stare out into the middle distance and say, “She was always trouble. Nothing but trouble,” and leave it at that.
“What girl?” Leon would say when Officer Tripp showed up at the truck stop. “Maybe she applied for a job here once. Who knows?”
At a rest stop in South Dakota the scrawny trucker would hook up with a dealer and inject heroin into Marlo’s arm. His own arms were tattooed with anchors and eagles, and after he’d shot the drugs into her, it seemed as if the birds talons pinned her down onto the dirty sheets. After nights and days the trucker dropped her at the YWCA in Hialeah. Years later, she would explain to the only man she’d ever loved she hadn’t had anything stronger than some weed after that. He’d laugh and say, “That was then. This is now.”
Chief’s Tavern was located at the convergence of the old Hialeah highway and a neighborhood of rental bungalows and low-income apartments. He had routed out of the navy as a Chief Petty Officer well versed in the black market and drug trades. His tavern was paneled in dark wood and had the predictable array of photos of famous athletes hanging on the walls. The photographs were interspersed with inspirational sayings Chief had painted on old boards from the falling down slat fence separating the alley in back from an RV park. One sign read, “Life is good, but . . .”. Another sign read, “Don’t think too much, or . . .” An old shrimper named Howard Fleury suggested to Chief he ought to finish a thought now and again. Chief had smiled and said, “It’s you supposed to finish the thought, you old cretin. Puzzle it out while you drink that beer.”
Marlo was seated at the end of the bar. Old Howard was mumbling something about the weather and Vietnam, but Marlo was not in the mood for conversation. At a back corner table Chief laid out a hand of solitaire. The week prior, on her fortieth birthday, he’d squeezed out from behind the table and the bench seat and trundled toward her. His short limbs and broad back reminded her of a giant sea turtle. He’d handed her a couple of joints and said, “Birthdays, they mean something I guess. But what? That’s the question.” Elray the bartender had told Marlo once that Chief had been fathered on some Pacific Island by a hooker and an American soldier. Marlo replied she could care less about Chief’s genealogy. What did she look like–a Mormon or something? Elray had laughed and wiped his eyeglasses with a bar towel.
But on that particular day nothing seemed funny to Marlo.
The week prior. Ralph Leighton, the guy she’d been shacked up with, stuck a gun in his mouth thus ending the misery of his missing feet, frozen off in the Korean War, and the chronic phantom pain. After a week at the YWCA she figured the place had been cleaned up, but did not figure on the manager not letting her back in.
When she had tried to get back into the place the locks had been changed. The manager, a scrawny Cuban transvestite, decked out in a silver chiffon peignoir set, had told her, “You have no rights to be here. “She adjusted the bright red wig on her head and added, “Puta.”
Marlo sipped the bloody Mary Elray placed in front of her and told Chief that every single one of his unfinished signs should end with, “Who the fuck cares anyway?”
Chief looked at her and said, “Why do you want to go and say something like that?”
“Because,” she answered. “Because I’ve got nothing. Not a fucking thing.” Old Howard, his dirty baseball hat resting on the bar muttered, “No way for a lady to talk,” and spilled beer down his chin.
Chief patted Marlo’s arm, “Don’t talk language like that. It annoys me something terrible.”
Elray added, “Chief don’t like bad language, Marlo. Calm the fuck down, and I’ll take you out back for a quick smoke.”
Dust-covered hibiscus straggled along the tumble-down fence in the alley. Elray gazed at her with the same hang-dog look all ugly men did. His eyes were the same dirty green as the drooping hibiscus leaves, and his stomach folded over his belt.
She said, “You’re too nice to me, you know.”
He scooted a little closer, and she didn’t step back. Elray ran errands for the Chief: collected drug debts, distributed booking sheets, used his muscle. Angie Paris, a working girl who knew what was needed to know, had told Marlo that Elray did time for beating a man near to death who owed Chief money. Angie said Elray looked soft, but steel wasn’t soft. Marlo let him take another step closer, then Chief called out saying he needed Elray back at the bar.
Back inside the tavern, footage of wounded and dead soldiers being loaded into helicopters played across the television above the bar. Marlo thought of Ralph with his blown off legs and empty bank account. Elray was giving her long looks. He placed a fresh drink in front of her even though he knew she never had more than one drink. She was about to ask him to change the channel when a man’s voice said, “Hair that gorgeous can’t be real can it?”
It was a tired line of bullshit she’d heard too often. On the television screen overhead, helicopter blades hammered the air. A soldier was being dragged face down toward the chopper.
“Did you hear what I said? I said you have beautiful hair.”
The man seated himself on the barstool next to her and placed a pack of Camel cigarettes and a book of matches on the bar. The match cover was printed with the words Allen P. O’Malley, J.D.
“I’m Al,” he said, “And you’re gorgeous, right?”
Elray pushed his large gut against his side of the bar and said, “You the lawyer guy here to see Chief? He’s at the back table there. Don’t keep him waiting. Don’t ever keep him waiting.”
Al O’Malley had wide cheek bones and a sure look in his blue eyes. He was wearing a white linen jacket and a white shirt open at the collar. He stood and said, “I’ll be seeing you real soon, beautiful.”
He was a player that was clear. Two can play, she thought as he walked away. Whatever game it is, two can play.
As the late afternoon settled into evening, Elray would switch the channel from the news to a Florida Gators baseball game. Al O’Malley would be hired on a handshake to help keep Chief’s present and future legal problems at bay. He would commiserate with Marlo about the ruthless ways of the world and the transvestite who called her a puta, before taking her to his apartment to smoke some Thai stick.
Two months later in the thick humidity of the fourth of July weekend, Chief would win six straight games of solitaire and lose the seventh. In the weeks that followed, he’d claim to have seen an act of violence and an act of redemption in the seventh hand.
“Elray didn’t see those bullets coming, but I did,” Chief would remark in reference to the three bullets Elray took in the back on his way to enforce a drug debt owed the Chief. Al O’Malley would stroke Marlo’s thigh and say, “I guess the redemption you saw in those cards of yours is that Elray survived. Am I right?”
Chief kept his gaze on the television screen. The bodies of Vietnamese were lined up by a tropical hut. He shunted himself from the barstool and said, “Elray? Left crippled up like that? That’s no kind of redemption. Redemption’s yet to come,”
As he walked to his usual table in the back, he added. “I’ve got some good Thai stick coming in if you’re interested.”
A wine-red sweater and a pink hand mirror had been separated from the pile of donations Marlo sorted through at the Salvation Army. Strictly speaking, her co-worker Tiffany Langdomer said, we are not supposed to take stuff for ourselves.
“It’s my birthday,” Marlo replied. “I deserve a few things on my birthday.”
At the morning break, the two women stepped onto the loading dock for a cigarette. Marlo told Tiffany her boyfriend had promised something special for her forty-sixth birthday. Tiffany, dark hair cut short and oiled against her scalp, said, “You don’t look a day over thirty-five,” and kicked at a pigeon pecking too close to the lime green sandals she’d cadged earlier in the week.
“Six years,” Marlo said.
“What about six years? “Tiffany kicked again at the persistent bird with the shining green neck feathers and angry black eyes.
“My boyfriend and me. Six years now. He’s a lawyer, if you didn’t know.”
“I didn’t know. Did you know the British eat these filthy birds?”
At five o’clock that afternoon Marlo went into the thrift store’s restroom, fussed with her hair and scrubbed at her teeth with her index finger and a crumbled breath mint. A few minutes after 5 o’clock Al pulled up in his ten-year-old silver Acura. He complained about the car being old, and the fact Chief called him to clear up a legal matter now and again, but only for small stuff. “I may not look it,” he’d say, “but I’m not getting any younger.”
His hair, the color of shoe black, retained the bitter scent of ammonia from the comb through dye he bought at the drug store. He was sixty and lied about it except down at the senior center which he’d joined to try and rustle up some clients.
“Last Wills and Testaments,” he said, “that’s where the money is. Quick, easy money if you can stand the piss and powder stink of old women.” He fiddled with the radio dial until it landed on a country music station patted Marlo’s knee and said, “Romance tonight, babe. Hot romance.” They drove to the seafood place a few miles out on the old highway. The waiter brought a bottle of Chardonnay, and Marlo told Al when she closed her eyes she could smell the ocean. He said it was probably the tank up front where the lobster waited to die. His birthday gift was a silver locket with a picture of his face shrunk down on a copy machine. They ate shrimp fettucine. Al groused about money troubles, while she watched the sun fall through the black line of highway. The waitress placed a piece of birthday cake, compliments of the house, in front of them. When she bit into the cake the frosting was like sand in her teeth.
Al’s apartment was in an old stucco building jammed between two busy intersections. Inside the apartment the air felt over-heated and ripe with the smells of oil and diesel. He led her to his unmade bed. A ragged, red bedspread trailed onto the floor. The sheets were yellowed with age. He strapped the belt around her arm heated a spoon and said, “This stuff is good. Better than the usual. Chief gave me a deal because it was your birthday.”
The sight of the needle never failed to remind Marlo of the trucker and the things he’d done to her when she was just a kid. A kid on the run out of Delancey. She didn’t want to use the needle. Not on this day or any day. But she didn’t want to make Al angry. Or alone. He’d told her once she’d tried to refuse, that unless they shot up together he’d feel all lonely when he got high.
Before the combination of warmth and nausea overwhelmed her, Marlo recalled the restaurant: the waxy, checkered tablecloths, the lobsters bound and helpless in a tank of murky water, the huge head of the mustachioed and winking chef on the sign outside. She saw her reflection in the thrift store’s water-ruined mirror: the wrinkles at her eyes, her blonde hair streaked with grey. She heard herself telling her co-worker, Tiffany, about her lawyer boyfriend in a bragging tone, as the pigeon strolled casually within inches of their feet. Then she vomited as Al held her over the toilet. He said, “Now, now. That’s my girl.”
Three years after that birthday Marlo would be seated in the tiny office of a public health doctor. The doctor was young with unremarkable features. A red bow tie anchored his collar. He discussed the long and short-term ramifications of hepatitis C in a rush of words and then checked his watch.
Afternoon light slatted through the blinds and glanced off the high polish of the doctor’s brown dress shoes. He would tell her it took between twenty or thirty years for the symptoms to show and asked her if she had practiced at risk behavior from a young age. The smell of diesel, the white lines racing toward her through darkness, the greasy smell of truck stop food, the skinny trucker’s tattooed back and arms had never faded from her memory. Marlo would look up at the doctor and say, “I don’t know what you mean.”
Al’s visits would become infrequent and he would be reluctant, as he phrased it, to “swap spit”. After she hadn’t seen him in weeks, hysterical, she went to Chief’s, but neither Chief nor Elray had seen Al.
Al’s disappearance seemed to cheer Elray, who’d been morose since being confined to a wheelchair by the gunshot injuries and had resumed his long amorous glances in Marlo’s direction.
“Your lawyer boyfriend was supposed to go over some legal work for me, but it’s like he disappeared or something,” Chief said.
Elray added, “Gone. Just like that. Poof.”
Both men stared up at the television. Helicoptors were evacuating the American embassy in Saigon.
“Son-of-a-bitch, “Chief would say,” Can you believe it? We lost.”
It took Marlo over an hour to dress. When she tried to put on the blue slacks the muscles in the back of her thighs and calves cramped violently. Elray knocked on the bathroom door. She told him to give her a minute. Just one God-damn minute. She’d pretty much given up on Al ever returning. Broke and getting sicker with the hepatitis, she’d had to move in with Elray.
The battered wood floor in the living room was dusty. Marlo had wanted it clean before the visits by the social worker and nurse, but she was too weak and Elray, confined to his wheelchair, didn’t pay much attention to housework. She seated herself in the recliner, and he carefully knotted a pink scarf at her throat commenting on the pattern of kittens in berets.
“You don’t even like cats,” he said. “I’m going to head out, but I’ll be back to fix you lunch.”
When she’d first moved in he was ecstatic and told her he’d waited a long time. But these days, he seemed irritable, as if he were tiring of her. She’d asked him not to leave her alone with the social worker even though she knew he would head out to Chief’s because, as he’d said, those types of broads made him nervous.
“You know,” he said, “they’ll cut off the visiting nurses and stuff you in a nursing home if you don’t get to that door.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“Yeah. Well know it good enough, okay?”
She listened to his wheelchair thump down the ramp to the sidewalk. The room was overly warm even though a fan rattled in the corner. She dozed off for a while but was awake when the social worker appeared at the screen door. Marlo pushed up from the chair and eased toward the door. The woman said, “And so we meet again, Marlo.”
“Yes. I suppose we do.”
Valerie Riddle settled onto the sofa Marlo had covered with a blanket patterned in roses. The woman had a broad face and limp, brown hair. She asked Marlo how she was feeling.
“I’m good. It’s all good.”
The woman rifled through the contents of the briefcase and said, “You seemed very shaky and short of breath when you reached the door.”
The mirror over the sofa reflected the shifting leaves of the magnolia growing in the median between the sidewalk and the street. Marlo had dragged the mirror home from her old job at the Salvation Army. The wooden frame was water-stained; Marlo had spray painted it gold, a bright, shiny gold.
“You’ll be seeing Amy Tesarik this afternoon. She’ll update me with her thoughts about your ability to stay here.”
Amy Tesarik was the visiting nurse. She and Valerie Riddle were responsible for the decision to allow Marlo to stay in the bungalow rather than to be moved into nursing home care.
Marlo stared out through the screen door. The big, orange cat Elray fed with cans of tuna prowled the sidewalk. The cat set its claws into the bark of the magnolia tree. A bird with silver wings clung to a lower branch.
“I always wanted a house,” she said to the social worker. “This is as close as I got.”
Valerie Riddle tapped a skinny black pen against her cheek, and said, “The state doesn’t pay in-home care, Marlo. Not more than the monthly visit by a nurse. You know that, dear.”
The woman had fat fingers and ragged nails. Even at times Marlo couldn’t shake a dime out of her pocket, she took better care of herself than this woman.
The social worker sat with her legs spread out; belly pressed against the zipper of her trousers. She leaned forward and asked, “Have you always lived in Hialeah, Marlo?”
Marlo nodded, yes, and wished it were true.
“Funny, how some folks never leave the town they grew up in. Me I grew up in Chicago. Now here I am in Florida where the sun always shines.”
Marlo wondered how it had come to pass that her fate rested in the hands of all these women who pretended to give a shit. I can see right through you. I can see right through all of you. Just like all those women at her parents’ church who pretended to forgive her teenage pregnancy and coo at baby Jolene.
There was something wrong with the woman’s left eye. It was small and brown and drifted in the wrong direction. Marlo knew people whose eyes had gone weird like that if they were really stoned. Stoned to the point things became scary because no one knew what a person that fucked up might do next.
“I love the color you’ve painted the walls. Such a pretty shade of blue. What would you call it, Marlo?”
“Robin’s egg blue.”
It had taken her three days to paint the small room. That was last year. Now she wouldn’t be able to hold the paint brush for five minutes. The teenage boy who lived in the bungalow next door walked across Marlo’s line of sight and aimed a kick at the tomcat. If Elray had seen the boy kick at the cat he’d be real pissed. Pissed enough maybe to get the boy hurt.
“I hope,” the social worker stood up and said, “that when you see the nurse this afternoon, she’ll be optimistic about your ability to stay here.”
When the woman walked out of the house and down the front steps Marlo sat very still, as if the slightest movement might cause this person, this Valerie Riddle, to return.
Pale yellow sunlight washed over the walls of the room. The blues and pinks reminded her of spring flowers and baby clothes. She recalled the bare white walls in her parents’ house, and her mother leaning over Jolene’s crib saying, “If you can’t love this baby, you can’t love anyone or anything.”
Her mother had been wrong. Marlo had loved Al O’Malley like there was no tomorrow. That proved something didn’t it? A few weeks before Al O’Malley disappeared from her life, high on the opium they’d smoked, he’d promised her a house. He said he would pay for it with Chief’s money.
The neighbor boy sauntered back across the sidewalk, hands jammed into the pockets of his sagging jeans, whistling soundlessly. Looking for trouble. That’s what Elray would say. That kid is always looking for trouble. And one of these days he’s going to find it.
Elray had returned to the bungalow to fix Marlo lunch. He had a smug little smile playing between his round and stubbly cheeks because he’d won at pull-tabs.
He asked, “How’d it go with the social worker?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” Marlo replied and asked if he’d been able to score any opium.
“The money I won is for the rent. Which we are behind on if you hadn’t noticed.”
“Chief will give us credit if you say it’s for me.”
“No credit. No one with a brain does any business with Chief on credit. Not even me. Not paying it back? Same punishment as stealing it.”
Marlo asked Elray if there was time for a smoke before the visiting nurse showed up. He lit a cigarette and handed it to her. A hot breeze pushed the smell of diesel and bougainvillea through the living room. Al O’Malley had called Chief a tight-fisted goon in the weeks before he disappeared. He’d told her that they’d set sail on the Jamaica wind.
“Do you believe in ghosts, Elray?” She asked.
He turned his wheelchair toward the kitchen. “You’re going to need to eat something.”
“I believe in ghosts. I think they hunt us.”
“Haunt. The word is haunt, Marlo.”
“Hunt is what I said. Like hunt us down. I had an old boyfriend once. Came back after me. He’d shove me in the dark.”
“Is that so? Two things. How stoned were you those nights, and what did you do to make him want to hunt you down?”
The front of Elray’s t-shirt was stained with catsup. When he talked it was through yellow teeth. She’d only taken Ralph’s disability money when he was too fucked up to stop her. She hadn’t been that stoned the nights she felt the dead man at her back. She said to Elray, “You know why you’re a slob? It’s because you’re a Leo.”
He wheeled into the kitchen saying the word “bitch” just loud enough for her to hear. She thought of Ralph blowing his head off while she was in the bathroom putting on lipstick. It was the week after that she’d met Al O’Malley for the first time.
“Stupid fucking bastard,” she said into a stream of cigarette smoke.
“Did you just call me a fucking bastard?” Elray said appearing beside her with a sandwich.
“No. That was Ralph who was the fucking bastard. The one who hunts me down every now and again.” But that was not the truth. It was Al O’Malley. What the fuck had he done to go and disappear like that? What had he done?
“I don’t believe in ghosts. Eat your sandwich.”
The sandwich was tuna. Elray had cut off the crust. She shook out the paper napkin he’d placed on the tray and laid it over the sandwich. “I believe in ghosts because I know there has to be more to this stinking life than what happens here.”
Elray fidgeted a red ball cap over his greasy, pony-tailed hair and said, “I’m out of here. I’m going down to Chief’s place and watch the ball game. Don’t you be tossing off any fuck language when the visiting nurse gets here.” He picked up the aerosol can of room scent, “Spring Blossoms” and sprayed it around the room. “If she smells cigarettes it won’t go any better for you.”
“I never used to swear,” Marlo said.
“Yeah. Which lifetime was that?”
My young lifetime, she wanted to say and remembered the first time she’d said the word “fuck” it was the day she ran out of Delancy, and the truck driver made her do things she didn’t want to do. She said, “I need to keep positive, keep my chin up.”
“That’s right, Marlo,” Elray answered, “And try not to puke the sandwich up like you did last time.”
The visiting nurse, a short woman with unnaturally red hair, introduced herself as Amy and asked Marlo how she was feeling.
“Better all the time.”
“Really? Are you sure?” As small as the nurse was she seemed to expand and fill up the space. Marlo realized in that moment how afraid of these women she really was. Afraid they could force her from the bungalow into a nursing home. They could do it today. Tomorrow. The next day.
“I made it to the door didn’t I?”
“You did. But the effort clearly cost you.”
The teenage neighbor boy appeared on the sidewalk outside the bungalow. His name was Jayden or Hayden or something like that. She’d never seen anyone so pale. It was as if he was buried and dug back up. That’s how they would have described it in Delancey, way up north there in the hills of nowhere.
Marlo said, “I won’t go into a nursing home.”
“The state will not pay for at home care once you cannot take care of yourself. You know that, Marlo.” The woman wrapped a blood pressure cuff around Marlo’s arm. Marlo could see black roots against the nurse’s blood red hair, and wanted to push her away, tell her to get the fuck out. There was a burst of wild laughter from just outside the bungalow. The woman’s head was blocking her view through the door, but she knew it was the neighbor boy and his girlfriend, touching each other, pressing their dead white skin together and laughing through prematurely decaying teeth.
Al O’Malley would have, could have stopped all of this because he was a lawyer and would know what to do. If he were alive he’d come back for her. Of course he was alive. Why wouldn’t he be?
She said, “I can leave anytime I want. I have friends, friends who will take me anywhere I want to go. I have people who care about me.”
The nurse replied that she was glad Marlo had friends, but her tone of voice was cold and she enunciated each word slowly and carefully as if by repeating them back, Marlo could hear her how absurd they sounded. The nurse was small and scrawny. The cords of her neck showed, and her teeth were too big and white.
The boy and girl under the magnolia burst into a song with strange and garbled words. That boy needs a job, Elray would say. It’s like his job is walking back and forth in front of our bungalow all day, giving us the creeps, she’d answered once to that. The nurse moved across her line of sight then moved away. The nurse had small-boned brittle looking hands. Hands that looked easily broken, like bird wings could break, she said, “I don’t feel optimistic about your condition, Marlo. We need to think of your alternatives.”
The boy and girl collapsed laughing into each other’s arms.
They must be on acid, Marlo thought.
It was nearing dusk and the sky had surrendered to a layer of brilliant, white-topped clouds. The clouds, Al had explained to her once, crossed the oceans from Jamaica. I’ve been to Jamaica he’d said and heated the spoon. I’ll take you some day. I’ll take you to places you’ve only dreamed of.
Chief had a sign up on the wall above the bar that read: “If you dream then . . .” Then what? Marlo had asked. Chief had laughed and laughed but never answered. What’s so funny, she’d asked. What’s so fucking funny?
A delivery van sped past the bungalow. The driver laid on the horn, and the big tomcat skidded to safety under the magnolia. A near miss.
Elray wheeled into the house. He always had the look of a sad drunk, even when he was stone cold sober. She thought how he never stopped eating in little bites: a piece of toast, a plate with crackers, candy from the crystal bowl she’d got at the thrift store.
“I thought I’d have my own house someday,” she said, and Elray watched her as warily as the birds in the tree outside watched the big old orange cat. Marlo knew the look. When she got on the subject of her own house she’d get weepy. But why not? Why not cry once in a while?
“You know I like pretty things,” she said, “All I ever wanted was a place to call my own.”
This time she did not add the parts about crappy rentals and no one ever giving a shit about her. She didn’t add the parts about the Victorian house she dreamed about, daydreamed about. A fine and beautiful place to hang her gilded mirror.
Elray’s head was down; his hands folded across his belly. She said, “Gordon and Ellen had a house you know.”
He raised his head, “Who the hell are Gordon and Ellen, and why the hell should I care about their house?”
“My parents. They were my parents. In Delancey.”
“What about them?”
“They owned a house. If they’re dead, wouldn’t it be my house?”
He fingered the tape that held his glasses together. The lenses of his glasses were smudged with oily fingerprints. She was aware that he looked at her with contempt. It was the same look Leon Staley leveled at her that day in Delancey when she wanted the money to travel out of town, and she wanted to scream: I was just a kid, a know-nothing kid. Leon Staley had got her pregnant up at the turnout high above the Snake and Clearwater Rivers. Was that when her life had ended? Fifteen years old, shit-faced drunk and fucking a married man.
She said, “I left a baby back there in Delancey.”
“You’re just full of secrets, aren’t you?”
“I never told anyone before except one other person.”
Elray fussed his blue Florida Gators tee-shirt across his stomach. “Yeah. I can guess who that was.”
“The baby was a girl. I named her Jolene.”
“So what happened to this baby?”
She watched the birds in the tree branches outside, the swoop, the flutter, and answered, “I don’t know, I don’t think about it much.” And she hadn’t thought much about Delancey either–that nothing town so far up north with its cold winters and scrubby pine trees.
“Maybe you should find this daughter of yours. You’re in bad shape, Marlo. I can’t take care of you. Maybe this kid could.” On his right ring finger was the heavy gold ring he’d gotten off someone or other who’d owed chief. He’d made mincemeat out of a man’s face with it, he’d bragged once.
Clouds sailed inland with the Jamaica wind Al had always talked about. The last conversation they had was nothing worth remembering. His hair was coming in grey at the roots, and he’d lost his right incisor. As he removed his shirt and searched for a vein he’d talked about separating Chief from some of his money. Then he shot up.
The neighbor kid and his girlfriend were sitting in the dirt under the magnolia tree passing a joint back and forth. The boy was so thin his collar bones show through his t-shirt and his face looked as it has been carved from white stone with a sharp knife. He almost looked beautiful. The girl buried her face in his chest her hair a cloud of black smoke.
Marlo said, “Al O’Malley promised me a house. Said he would pay for it with Chief’s money.”
Elray’s fingers with their dirty nails were folded across his big belly. He leaned forward in the wheelchair and said, “That shyster promised you a house with Chief’s money, did he? Well the shyster is gone. I think you’d best forget about Al O’Malley.”
“I won’t forget about him. Maybe he didn’t leave me you know? Maybe something else happened.”
“Like what, Marlo? Something like what?”
“Maybe something like you used to do for Chief.”
The boy under the tree passed the girl a joint and stared at Marlo through the screen.
Elray had left hours before without speaking another word to her. The yellow light of the streetlights shone across the tree branches and through the screen door. The boy and girl were gone. The birds were silent. When Chief appeared in the room it seemed as if he had floated in on the moonlight that flowed through the broken clouds.
It had been so long since she’d seen him she’d forgotten how delicate his features were, how golden his skin. He touched her hand and said she was a real pain in the ass. The words made her laugh Chief said them so nice. He said, let’s give you something to take away your pain and struck a lighter beneath a spoon. The flame flashed across the water-stained, gilded mirror above the sofa, and a bird plummeted into the branches of the magnolia tree.
