Читать книгу Last Chance Texaco - Rickie Lee Jones - Страница 10

Chapter 1

What Were the Skies like When You Were Little?

“Oh the skies were beautiful, pink and yellow and blue . . .”

Three-year-old Rickie and big sister Janet

Down along the end of the street was a well, a concrete circle about five feet in diameter. There you could find all manner of water-loving creatures, drawn from the desert to the shade. Tadpoles swam with tiny mosquito larvae. I was carrying a frog I found in the mud.

In the desert, shade means the difference between life and death. Wherever there is shade there are fairies. I knew this instinctively but my father told me all about fairies: “Watch for them out of the corner of your eye. In the dappled light fairies can be seen as they take form, and if you are very still you may see them darting across the limb of a tree.”

Studying the drop down to the bottom of the well, I saw that it was only about ten feet. I let the frog slip from my hands into the well and said:

“Water there.”

“You can swim down there.”

“Be out of the sun.”

When I returned later and saw the frog dead, I looked up from that well and I was sore inside. I had killed a thing. I was inconsolable. There was nowhere to run away from this feeling.

That experiment was nothing like what I expected. Now I knew. People could cause terrible harm, and even I could hurt an innocent thing. That it was an accident made no difference to me or the frog. “I’m sorry, I wish I had not put you down there. I wish I could take it back.” It was here by the well I made up my first song. The song made its home in me and I kept it there. I sang:

I wish, I wish,

That wishes would come true,

And then, I know,

That it would be alright.

God’s little scientists want to know how things work, and sometimes quite by accident, they find out the hard way. I was forging roads between my imagination and the world before me. The real frog died but I saved it in my first song. Out here, in fairy kingdoms, anything seemed possible.

I wandered the neighborhood with my invisible friends, inspecting everything I came across. I was often frozen in some daydream when an invisible horse galloped down the street in a storm of wild fury, only to find me waiting and fearless. A trembling velvet muzzle pressed against my hand, the horse’s gesture of acceptance and trust. Only I understood and could tame its wild heart.

I hollered out loud to my invisible horse to the consternation of my sister and brother who watched me in bewilderment.

The garbage men often ate their lunch in the shade at the edge of our backyard, parking on the dirt road that ran along the farmer’s field next to our house. One morning my mother sent me out with a pitcher of water for the men. Standing some feet away, I began to sing, pretending not to notice they were watching. A couple of the guys clapped their hands, the oleander bush cheered. I bowed, and Mother called me into the house.

My very first performance I was three years old, a snowflake in a ballet recital of “Bambi.” Bowing low at the end of our dance I heard the audience’s applause and took it personally. I remained bowing long after the other snowflakes had melted and left the stage. The dance teacher had to escort me off but the audience was delighted and the die was cast. I liked it up there.

What I really wanted most was to play the piano. Pidgey Muncie lived three doors down and she had a piano.

Pidgey was my age, shy and sweet, plump like her mother. Pidgey could not have visitors once her father came home from work but I would stay until the very last moment to play that little spinet piano. I sounded out the notes to the Doublemint commercial and Pidgey and her mom taught me “Heart and Soul.” They were terrified that I’d still be there when Mr. Muncie came home so they unceremoniously escorted me out the back door.

Mr. Muncie was the most terrifying man I’d ever met. He was short and stocky with a crew cut. An ex-Marine and currently a very angry man. Then one morning I was playing in the backyard when I saw Mr. Muncie digging a hole in the farmer’s field. He had a bag in his hand that he put into the hole and buried. I ran in and told my mother. “Mr. Muncie buried something in the field!”

She was doubtful of what I had seen, but she called Mrs. Muncie, who said:

“Yes, the dog had puppies today. He just took them out there and buried them alive.”

Buried them? What? Alive?

“We have to go dig them up.”

“They are dead now, Rickie. We cannot go get them.”

I felt panicked. How could we sit there as little innocent babies were dying? We must bring them back to life.

Pidgey’s dog died a few days later. I felt she died of a broken heart from watching her babies taken from her. My mother told me she died because there were no puppies to drink her milk. I quit going to poor Pidgey Muncie’s house. I now knew that there were terrible people in the world, people who hurt innocent things, people who were also daddies, or uncles, or neighbors.

My brother had gotten a red bicycle for his eleventh birthday. I was allowed to ride his bike, if I was able to do so. Unable to reach the seat, I balanced on the ungainly apparatus and rode the five houses to the end of our street, then navigated the wide turn and returned to Mother and Danny. I had passed the test and was admitted to the grown-up world of bicycle riders. It wasn’t that hard, really.

One morning I asked my mother if I could ride Danny’s bike.

“Yes, but only to the corner and make sure I can see you.”

I rode round and round in circles at the end of our street. A car came suddenly and stopped right in front of me. It was followed by a second car that screeched to a stop. A redheaded boy jumped out of the first car but then a bigger man in the second car caught up to him. He was swearing as he moved toward the redheaded boy, who seemed to be crying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

“Son of a bitch, you son of a bitch, goddamn.”

“I’m sorry,” the boy was crying.

I felt bad for the redheaded boy because he was so afraid, he seemed so sad.

The seat was too high for me to stop the bike without falling, so I rode around in circles watching the men until I could place the pedal in just the right position and gently fall over. I set the bike on the sidewalk and moved carefully toward the cars and the yelling.

The big man looked into the back seat, right over the shoulder of the redheaded boy he had pushed up against the window. Now tears of rage as the man’s fist caught the boy in his jaw, and he threw him down by his shirt as he wept. I was frightened but I approached the car to look into the back-seat window. There was a little girl lying there, a very little girl, maybe two or three. She was lying down on her back.

I cannot remember anything else. My mind—or fairies maybe—lifted that picture and flew it away on the wings of mourning doves. I don’t remember what I saw. Did I see blood? The child seemed languid, stunned. Did I make that up? I petted her, I spoke to her, but I don’t know what I saw in the back seat.

Pidgey and I had met this redheaded boy before. He was the little girl’s babysitter and seventeen-year-old cousin. We’d been to her yard to play. I remembered that he was very protective and would not let us play with her. It was noticeable, so we spoke of it as we left the house.

To leave that little girl’s house we had to cross a fairy ditch. A shaded patch behind her house that filled me with dread. Something told me there was danger there, and it shaped the warning into a pulse, a feeling, a thrill. Perhaps something had already happened there. Or perhaps I felt echoes of time to come, calling to time happening now. Or maybe it was what I now know, that pedophiles are all around lining up to claim the innocent.

Back on the street, people were drawn by the furious shouting of the father. They broke up the fight and pulled him off the redheaded rapist. The father went looking for the babysitter after he discovered his little girl missing but he found them too late. He pursued the boy in a dangerous car chase through town right up to the dead end where I was riding my brother’s bike around in circles on a warm and sunny Phoenix morning.

A lady asked me what was happening. “I saw it all,” I said. She told a policeman and he said, “We will come to interview you later on.” Oh, I felt so important, so grown-up.

The sun had set by the time the officer came. I was safe in my old footie pajamas, wiggling my toes as I watched my mother talk with the policeman. He was standing on the other side of the screen door.

“Yes, Rickie Lee is here, but she doesn’t know what rape is. She’s only five years old.”

“Yes I do!” I called from behind.

The officer veered around my mother to address me. “Tell me what it is.” I stepped up to the screen. “It’s when someone beats someone up really bad.” The officer nodded and said, “We will be in touch if we need your testimony.” He said to my mother, “I don’t think they’ll ask her to testify. She’s innocent, no reason for her to know anything like this.”

My mother closed the door and we all sat down to watch television. Daddy was home that night. He passed out Eskimo Pies. My dad loved Eskimo Pies. I was safe that night, and in spite of the obvious, all that was cruel and ugly seemed far away from our doorstep.

The very first week of school, I was excited and engaged. Then the art teacher said I did not need the special apron my mom bought with pockets for pencils and paintbrushes. She embarrassed me in front of the other kids and she didn’t seem to like me. Perhaps that was enough to change my mind, sow a seed of self-doubt. Starting school was too much for me. I started getting boils and headaches. I was very young to start school, that first year they had to drag me screaming down the corridor. Yet I loved playing horses on the playground, and I loved Stevie Barnes.

I was always pretending I was a horse, no matter where I was. At school I spent my recess minutes galloping past all the other children. One day another little girl started running with me. Soon I transformed all the girls in my grade into a herd of horses, and we ran around whinnying and galloping. By the end of that week of roundups, I couldn’t wait to get to school.

That’s when I met Stevie Barnes. Stevie and the other boys chased those wild horses like rodeo cowboys. Stevie would catch my braids and I would gallop away, making a three-beat sound of hooves, my hands hitting my hips and my feet running in a two-beat ba-dump. In my childhood I never ran without making that sound. Pa ba-dump, Pa ba-dump, Pa ba-dump.

If Stevie Barnes ever kissed me, and I hope he did, I wiped it off like spit even though I was very pleased and proud to be Stevie’s horse.

If there were another book of my life, a different version of myself, it would be one where I grow up with Stevie Barnes and he marries Rickie Lee, his green-eyed mare and childhood sweetheart. I would grow up a good girl and a confident child, pleasing my parents and balancing everything so as not to be too much of anything—too much trouble, too much joy, too much body, too much soul. I would be contained, and all of Rickie Lee and Stevie’s children would be happy grazing in the valley of the sun.

My first and second grade at Ocotillo School were the only years I was a confident and happy child. My mother led the Singin’ Swingin’ Blue Birds troop (Camp Fire Girls) to a triumphant live performance at the father-daughter banquet. One meeting we crafted wooden bluebirds. I still have most of mine. By the end of the second grade those halcyon days ended with a haircut and a move to a new school district. I don’t know which was harder, the loss of my friends or the spectacle of my braids lying on the salon floor. Either way, childhood was abruptly and forever altered, and not for the better.