Valentine(17)
The plant whistle blows, the longer, more plaintive wail that signals an accident, and she stands for a few seconds with her hand on the steel dumpster. She has spent a lifetime listening to that whistle and wondering what happened. But these particular fears, that her husband might be lying facedown in a puddle of benzene, that he was working in the area where the explosion occurred, that he didn’t move quickly enough, these worries are now the province of Suzanne Ledbetter and a thousand other women in town. Not Corrine’s. In the field behind her house, the cat stays low, its green eyes steady and vacant, as it watches a yellow rat snake race down the dry flood canal where D. A. Pierce and the other little girls on the street used to ride their bikes, ditching them to sunbathe on the steep concrete slopes, before the city got wise and put up a chain-link fence.
Beyond the canal, the 7-Eleven and A&W Root Beer share a parking lot with the bookmobile, a thirty-foot trailer with perilously unstable metal bookcases and shag carpeting that smells like mildew. Six months earlier, an industrial-sized Quonset hut was built on the lot, a windowless steel building called the Bunny Club—a strip club sharing a parking lot with the mobile library—and it is a damned miracle, Corrine thinks, that any girl in Odessa makes it out alive. For twenty years she watched these local girls at the high school, most of them aspiring to little more than graduating before some boy knocked them up. On any given Monday morning, she might walk into her classroom and listen to sad, vicious rumors about the hospital or jail, or the unwed mothers’ home in Lubbock. She attended more shotgun weddings than she could shake a stick at, and she still runs into those same young women at the grocery store, older now, but still clutching pale and round babies to their chests, still shifting them from one skinny, freckled arm to another while they scream at older kids who dart up and down the aisles like manic squirrels.
Corrine is still standing in the alley when a truck speeds up the main drag and turns into the lot. Its wheels spin and squeal as the driver turns doughnuts in the parking lot. Several men are standing in the truck’s bed, shouting and roughhousing and hanging on for dear life. One of the men throws a bottle at the flood canal, and the glass shatters when it strikes the concrete. When another of them falls from the back of the truck and hits the pavement with a cry, the others laugh and holler. He stumbles after the truck, hands outstretched, and when he draws close to his friends, the truck stops abruptly. He has his hands on the tailgate when somebody tosses two bags onto the pavement and the driver hits the accelerator.
The truck circles around a third time as a man leans over the side of the truck bed with a piece of steel pipe in his hand. The truck speeds up and he leans out a little farther, one hand holding on to the truck’s roll bar, the other waving the pipe back and forth. Corrine opens her mouth to yell Stop, just as the man who stands in the lot lifts his hands over his head as if to say, I give up. The pipe catches him square in the back, and he falls to the pavement like an egg knocked from its nest.
Lord, have mercy, Corrine yells and runs for the house. She is moving fast, praying there will be a dial tone when she plugs the phone back into the wall when her foot catches on Potter’s cane and she pitches forward, landing facedown on the kitchen table. Puzzle pieces fly through the air like brown bats rising from an old water tank, and as Corrine settles onto the kitchen floor, she is aware of the clock ticking on the wall. She is also aware of her face and hands, her knees and shoulders, all shot through with a pain so sudden and big that it might as well be everything in the world.
When they were younger, Potter used to joke that Corrine would go out with a bang. There would be a holdup while she was standing in line at the bank and she would refuse to hand over her purse. Or she would flip the bird at some good old boy who was having a worse day than her, or maybe blow a tire while she was driving too fast on the loop. Maybe her seniors would beat her to death with their copies of Beowulf, or they would sneak out during a pep rally and cut her brake lines after a particularly brutal pop quiz. But nope. Here she is, sprawled out on the kitchen floor like an old heifer, boobs and belly in the kitchen, feet and ass still on the patio.
If things had worked the way they ought to have, Potter would have buried her. He would grieve, of course he would, but he also would have gone on living—playing cards down at the VFW, driving out to the plant to say hello, puttering around the garage or the backyard. He would have put together his goddamned puzzles and listened to Debra Ann talk about childish things—the imaginary friends she was too old for, how many bottle caps she found in the alley, missing her mama and wondering when she was coming home. He would never tire of listening to that child, and even if he did, he wouldn’t say so. If Potter were here, D. A. Pierce and the little girl from across the street, Aimee, would be sitting at the kitchen table with two bowls of Blue Bell ice cream, and that damned cat would dine nightly in the garage, probably on cans of tuna fish. But here Corrine is, and what the hell she will do next, she cannot even begin to imagine.
Tomorrow morning, she will survey the damage—a small cut above her left eyebrow and a goose egg on her right temple, a bruise the size of a grapefruit on her forearm. Her hip will be out of whack for weeks, and she will use Potter’s cane to get around, but only in the house or the backyard, where no one can see her. In the front yard when she waters the tree, and in the grocery store where she picks up a few items for Mary Rose and delivers them, along with one of Suzanne Ledbetter’s casseroles that she digs out of the deep freezer in the garage, Corrine will stand up straight and grit her teeth and act as if nothing hurts. When the phone rings, she will answer, and when she hears Karla’s voice on the line, she’ll ask how she can help.