Читать книгу The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God - Timothy Schaffert - Страница 8

AFTER his rooftop performance, Hud suddenly remembered he was supposed to help Tuesday’s dad at the drive-in; they were showing a movie with bloodsuckers and prom queens to further celebrate this mock Halloween, and they expected a late-night crowd. The Rivoli Sky-Vue was one of only a handful of drive-ins in the state, and one of only a few in the nation that still showed classic drive-in movie fare. All the spaghetti Westerns and the dirty wet-bikini flicks and the souped-up back-road racing movies were part of a private collection owned by Hud’s ex-father-in-law. He even had a few out-and-out pornos that they showed from time to time after midnight. The Rivoli made little money, but it was the town’s only tourist attraction and had been featured in People magazine and Film Comment.

Though the movie had started, Hud stood at the front gate taking admission for Tuesday’s dad, who they all called Red though his head of thick curls had turned gray years before. Red had a longtime girlfriend, the Widow Bosanko, the town’s librarian. Hud remembered, from when he had checked out Zane Grey Westerns as a kid, how she always wore a bracelet of wooden cherries that knocked together with a pleasant click.

Alone in the drive-in’s entryway, Hud collected a few of the summer’s last fireflies, trapping them in an olive jar to bring to Nina, who enjoyed bugs. He was interrupted when Junior, a boy Gatling’s age, drove up. You wouldn’t know from Junior’s piercings up and down both ears and his black-eye that he was the zealot responsible for Gatling’s religious conversion. Now that Gatling was off touring with the Daughters of God, Junior dated Charlotte, Gatling’s pensive ex-girlfriend.

Hud had always had a harmless crush on Charlotte that had been helped along a few nights before when he had seen her selecting songs at the jukebox at the Steak and Black Coffee, an all-night diner on the highway, her tongue at her lips in concentration. She wore a tight t-shirt pulled over the top of a sundress. After selecting a few dollars’ worth of old country ballads like “Crazy” and “Cold, Cold Heart,” she sat down with Junior, who bowed his head in prayer over his New York strip and hash browns. But Charlotte didn’t pray along, involved as she was in the music, her coffee cup held still just beneath her lips as Hank Williams sang about the robin’s lost will to live.

“Looking awfully lonely there tonight,” Hud said. He peered inside the car to where Junior sat alone.

“Well, I tell ya, old man,” Junior said, handing Hud $5 and shrugging, winking, “I think I scare all the pretty little girls away.”

Hud leaned in more, looking beneath the steering wheel. He reached in to push the button to pop the trunk. “Ah, come on, man . . .” Junior protested. “You can’t . . .”

Hud walked to the back to open the trunk lid, where he found Charlotte curled up. “Some date,” he told her, taking her hand to help her step out. She wore a slick red robe patterned with bluebirds sitting on the branches of spindly trees. Her fine hair was knotted up atop her head and stuck through with black lacquered chopsticks.

“We’re broke,” she said, leaning back against the car, fanning herself with a fragile paper fan that featured faceless geishas fanning themselves.

“I would’ve let you in anyway,” Hud said. He tapped a knuckle against her cheek. “I still like you some.” Hud just barely kept himself from giving Charlotte a short kiss, just on the cheek or the forehead, just something friendly and fatherly. “Here,” he said, handing Charlotte a pair of pink plastic fangs he’d been giving out to the children.

“If you were smart you’d get back with Tuesday,” Charlotte said, moving the fangs between her fingers, pretending they were doing the talking.

“I happen to know that,” Hud said. Just last Fourth of July, Hud and Tuesday had had a momentary truce, a few nights of reunion that involved popping off fireworks in the front yard. When night fell, Hud lit the expensive ones, the ones with all the color and noise, but he didn’t watch the sky; he couldn’t take his eyes off Tuesday, who sat with Nina on her lap, holding a parasol above their heads to protect them from the burnt shrapnel that fell from the sky. The summer had been dangerously dry, and they all looked a little nervously to the leaves of the trees, which rattled as the hot pieces of the spent fireworks rained through the branches.

Junior called out, “Lottie,” a name Hud thought only he and his son called Charlotte, and Charlotte slipped away. As Hud walked to the side of the car, he saw Charlotte taking a drag off Junior’s cigarette, the pink teeth loose in her mouth.

Hud became desperate to see his daughter, as he thought ahead, of her growing up only to become confused and lost and learning too much too fast. He hoped to God Nina never crawled into the trunk of a car at the request of a cheap boy.

Hud wanted to wake Nina up and pull her out of bed and rock her back to sleep. He wanted to count all her fingers and toes, and all the hairs on her head. He’d sneak in through the window, and he’d tell Nina, “Nobody else is worried about you. Just me. Everyone else sleeps through the night.”

Hud drove quickly to the house and let himself in to find Tuesday sleeping on the sofa, the still hot coal of her cigarette burning a hole in the velveteen of the cushion. Hud sat on the coffee table and took the cigarette from her fingers. He leaned back, took a drag, examined Tuesday’s costume—she wore a 1970s-style shirtdress, her hair swept up in a fresh beehive slightly crushed by the sofa pillow, a false eyelash dangling from one eyelid. A fake yellow bird with synthetic feathers sat perched in a small birdcage at the foot of the sofa. Hud couldn’t figure out who she was supposed to be.

Tuesday had always slept the deadest sleep he’d ever witnessed—her body didn’t move at all, not even with her breath. She usually stayed up late painting desert scenes on the skulls of cows and horses, then fell into her bed. Hud could too easily imagine all sorts of things happening in the night of Tuesday’s deep sleep—a terrible storm, or a kidnapping, or a fire engulfing the entire house long before she choked awake on a single breath of smoke. That’s the only reason I drink, he thought, crossing his legs, crossing his arms, blowing cigarette smoke toward Tuesday’s face to test her as she slept. She didn’t flinch. I drink because I worry myself sick about my girls, he thought.

He started to snuff the cigarette out in a glass ashtray, then recognized it as a souvenir from a family trip of years before. He picked it up and spat in it, then rubbed his thumb at the black. After rubbing some of the ash away, he could see the bare feet of Fred and Wilma Flintstone. Hud and Tuesday had taken the kids, with Nina practically just born, up to South Dakota one summer, where they had walked through Flint-stone Village, taken a tour of a cave, and eaten in a cafeteria with a view of Mount Rushmore. Hud had bought Tuesday a locket of Black Hills gold that she had promptly lost when they went swimming in a naturally warm pool in Hot Springs. Tuesday had cried about it at the motel that night, upsetting Gatling a little, but Hud had loved it. He’d loved holding her and telling her they’d go back to the pool to search, or that he’d buy her another, cooing at her like she was a kid. He’d been glad she’d wanted the necklace so much because even back then, especially back then, they’d had many fights and troubles.

Hud got up and stuck the dirty ashtray in the saggy back pocket of his jeans as he walked through the kitchen, flicking the cigarette into the sink. A nightlight near Nina’s bed lit the room enough for Hud to see Nina sleeping, still in a cowgirl costume, still even in boots and prairie skirt and Western shirt printed with yellow roses. A straw hat hung on the bedpost. Hud tugged on Nina’s skirt, and she woke peacefully, too peacefully, Hud thought. “You shouldn’t be sleeping next to an open window,” he whispered, and Nina sat up in bed and puckered her lips for a kiss. Hud kissed her, then said, “Any creep could come along. Aren’t you afraid of creeps?”

“Oh, sure,” she said, shrugging her shoulders.

“Let’s go for a drive someplace,” Hud said. He opened the window and lifted the torn flap of the screen.

“OK,” Nina said, standing up in the bed, “but first, don’t you like my costume? We went to a party.”

“It’s nice,” he said.

“I’m Opal Lowe,” she said, and Hud was touched that she had dressed up like Opal Lowe, his favorite country singer. He’d taken Nina to a county fair a few weeks before to see Opal singing in the open-air auditorium. They’d had to sit far in the back on a bale of hay, had to strain to hear above the bleats and clucking of the animals judged in nearby pens, but Nina had loved it and had hummed along as Opal Lowe sang about her man’s habits, how he liquored her up on Wild Turkey, lit her Old Golds, made her need him like water.

Nina said, “Can I bring my purse?” and she picked up a clear plastic purse from the end of the bed. Inside was a tube of lipstick, a little box, a comb, and a plastic baby doll’s head with wild yellow hair.

“Sure, bring your purse,” Hud said. He jotted a note in crayon: “I’ll be back with her before sunlight, before you even read this,” and left it atop the rumpled covers of the bed. Nina crawled onto his back, and they slipped through the torn window screen. He imagined never returning with her, imagined his picture next to hers on fliers sent through the mail.

“We’ll go anywhere you want to go,” Hud said, helping her into the car. “Should we go to some ocean far away? Go smoke a friendly cigarette with the fishies?” Nina laughed, and Hud said, “Go to Mexico for some cow-tongue soup?”

“No,” Nina said. “Disgusting.”

“We could go to Disneyland and ride a roller coaster,” Hud said. “Just be careful not to spill your beer,” and Nina laughed at the idea of having beer to spill.

Hud drove off toward the highway. “We could run away together for good,” he said.

“I live with my mom, and you have to drive the school bus,” Nina said, almost scolding.

“We’d write songs for a living,” he said. “Our first song could be called ‘Two Fugitives.’ It’ll go . . . um . . . ‘We’re fugitives from a bad life. Breaking free from . . .’ From what . . . ‘From the chains and shackles of separation and loss.’”

Nina sighed with disapproval. She’d become an expert fan of country music ever since Hud had taken her to see Opal Lowe. She turned on the radio now, as they drove to the edge of town, listening, hoping for an Opal Lowe. But instead they heard Chief Kentucky Straight, a man one-sixteenth Ogalalla Sioux who sang of the pain of life on the reservation. They heard a choir of hard-living rednecks called the Widowmakers. Then there was Rose-Sharon and her Lilies of the Valley. Rose-Sharon was a woman with cancer who sang gospel. Nina sang along to her song called “I’m So Full of Jesus.”

“What was your mom dressed up as?” Hud asked.

“A mermaid,” Nina said.

“No,” Hud said, but he thought a second, thinking of the bird, remembering Catherine Deneuve’s canary in a cage at the beginning of Mississippi Mermaid, one of Tuesday’s favorite movies they’d watched many times together. Deneuve hadn’t had a beehive in that movie, he was almost certain, but rather a tall straw hat. He wondered if Tuesday had missed having him at her side at the party, someone who would truly appreciate the charm of her costume. He could have gone as her Jean-Paul Belmondo, but he would’ve preferred to be Belmondo in Breathless in fedora and sharp suit, puffing on a French cigarette.

It was Tuesday who had first called him Hud; when they were dating in high school, they stayed up late to watch the movie, just long enough for them both to be impressed by Newman’s cantankerousness. “You’ve got his snarl and skinny legs,” she said, then they nodded off to sleep long before Newman raped Patricia Neal.

Hud asked Nina, “Do you know why you even wore that costume today?”

“Well, you see,” Nina said, “you see . . . there was this guy . . . and he was somebody’s dad . . . and there were these boys . . . and the dad hurt the boys so bad that they were killed. And everybody dressed up because . . . um . . . there’s going to be a funeral soon.”

“Jesus,” Hud said, sighing and shaking his head with frustration, “nobody even told you much about it, did they? They just let you get dressed up for their own perverted goddamn reasons.”

Nina said, “I do so know everything about it.” She looked out the car window. “And I hate it when you swear.” She normally enjoyed when he let some swearing slip in front of her.

Hud took off down the unlit gravel roads, squinting into the dark, looking for the sign to tiny Rhyme, Nebraska. Behind a grocery store there lay an old Happy Chef, the thirty-foot-tall fiberglass statue that had once towered in front of a highway café. The store’s owner had bought the statue long before, and it now rested flat on its back in the tall grass. Hud had brought Nina there last summer, and she had liked sitting in the Happy Chef’s spoon.

Nina, not speaking to Hud, combed her long, white-blond hair. A strand flew in Hud’s face, and he plucked it away and let it fly out the open window. They drove past a mailbox and a spooky crooked iron weather vane. Hud imagined Nina’s strand of hair finding its way into an old house where a man lived alone, a man who had maybe killed his wife in silence and buried her in a small patch of his miles of untrespassed-upon land. Hud imagined the old man waking with the long hair on his pillow or finding it in his soup and from then on living in terror of what he’d done.

“What’s the name of your doll there in your purse?” Hud asked, to get Nina talking again.

Nina looked down at her clear plastic purse and tapped her finger at the doll head inside. “It’s not a doll,” Nina said. “It’s just a head. Heads don’t have names,” and she returned her stare back out the window.

Hud now felt entirely sober, and very tired. He wished he had just peeked in on Nina, had just watched her sleep undisturbed. A good father, Hud thought, lets his children sleep through the night. This was what Hud didn’t like about being sober. He didn’t like coming to his senses. Good sense can prevent a man from taking what he should have.

When Hud’s car began to sputter, he stomped on the gas pedal, and the car went a little farther before sputtering again, then stopping. It wouldn’t start back up. The needle of the gas gauge had been stuck on empty for years, and the odometer had read 138,323 for several hundred miles, but the old Pontiac and its habits had become so familiar to Hud over time that he’d thought he knew well how far he’d get on a full tank.

Before turning off onto the country roads, Hud had taken a deserted back highway, with no traffic across its broken pavement. They wouldn’t make it back tonight on foot even if he could find the way. He tried to think of what else might be wrong with the car, something he could easily fix. He turned the key again and listened closely to the engine as it still refused to turn over. He became frightened, and he worried over all the destruction that was about to befall him. By not returning his daughter to that bed next to that wide-open window, in that house with the weak locks, where his wife slept through everything, everything for him could change. He might be arrested. He might not be allowed to take Nina out again. He might lose his job.

“Goddamnit!” he practically screamed. “That bitch!” He pounded his fists against the steering wheel. He punched the horn at the center of the steering wheel, then drove his fists into it, holding the horn down to blare. The muscles in his arms were tight, and he thought if he pushed harder, he’d make the noise louder, deafening.

When he let up on the horn, the hollow silence of the night fell again, and he could hear Nina sobbing. Her face was turned away from him, and she held both her hands tight at her mouth, like she was trying to keep herself quiet. Hud gently pushed the hair from Nina’s face and behind her ears. “Nina,” he said, “I’m sorry. I should have just let you sleep.” He should have just taken her out trick-or-treating, to collect some sweets and heave some bad eggs, like everybody else was doing.

“It’s all right,” Nina said, still crying.

Hud wiped her tears with his thumb. She swallowed hard, then wiped her face with her sleeve. She took from her purse a little hinged box and opened it. “I haven’t shown you this,” she said, her voice still all chokey. She displayed her collection of dead desert bugs, identifying each one—the brown recluse, the palo verde beetle, the tarantula hawk. When she touched her finger to a brittle scorpion’s back, its hooked stinger broke off. When Tuesday and Hud first tried a trial separation almost a year ago, the fall before Gatling left, Tuesday had taken Nina with her to Arizona, where her mother lived in a cool, square cottage painted blue. Tuesday had even talked about moving there but had been concerned about the bugs in the house. She wanted to know which ones to fear, to learn about poisons and toxins and antidotes. She’d heard that scorpions climbed up walls and flung themselves into children’s beds, that wasps caught in sheets on the laundry line and stung in the night. “I need to know what to be scared of,” she’d told him on the phone. She’d used a playing card to knock a black widow into a Dixie cup. She’d freeze the bugs, then take them in a little tin that used to be a sewing kit to Poison Control, where she’d have them identified.

“I caught some fireflies for you tonight, but I guess I forgot them at the drive-in,” Hud said. He thought of them dying, slowly losing their flicker in the olive jar. “Nina . . . we’re out of gas, I guess. And I’m not real sure where we are. But see that dot of light over there?” He pointed to someplace far up the road. “I think we can walk over there, and maybe there’ll be a phone.”

Nina shrugged, and said nonchalantly, “Mom won’t be mad. It could happen to anybody.”

Hud took a flashlight from the glove compartment. Outside the car, he squatted so that Nina could crawl onto his back. She wrapped her legs around his waist, clasped her hands at his chest. With her warm breath on his neck, he thought he could walk for hours and hours. And he thought he might have to—the small dot of light was not growing. When Hud nearly tripped on some barbed wire at the edge of a cornfield, it was as if he could feel the danger in his ankles then, a tenseness, and he kept the beam of the flashlight low to the ground. After a while, Nina’s grip loosened, and she was slipping, and he asked if she’d like him to carry her in his arms so she could sleep. He felt her nod her head against his.

In his arms, she was much heavier, and he tired quickly. He sat down to rest on the edge of a ditch. When he looked up for the light, it was gone; the family in the house had simply turned out their lights and gone to bed.

Let it happen, he thought. Let’s stay lost. The summer sun could wear their skin away and bleach their bones. Experts would have to unlock their rib cages and untangle their skeletons. Then, in memory and punishment, the town could celebrate Halloween again, no matter what season of the year, dressing up in skull masks and glow-in-the-dark bone suits.

Nina scratched her ear in her sleep. As Hud ran his finger along her cheek, the bridge of her nose, her lips, he welcomed all the misery that would come in the morning for having kept her in his arms in the middle of nowhere. He felt brave only because Nina felt safe and protected enough to rest.