Valentine(19)
In the alley behind Mrs. Shepard’s house, she balances on her bike pedals and looks across the field. Everything that lies before her is off-limits—the dried-out flood channel, the barbed-wire fence and dirt lot, the house on the curve that has sat empty since the Wallace boy was killed when a radio fell into the bathtub with him in it, and finally, the flood channel where the canal narrows and disappears into two steel pipes wide enough that Debra Ann can stand up in them. Beyond all that forbidden territory is the strip bar, which opens every day at 4:30. She has been spanked only a few times in her life, and never very hard, but when her daddy got a call from Mrs. Ledbetter in March that she’d seen his daughter riding her bike back and forth in front of the building, trying to peek inside the front door every time some man walked in or out, his face turned white and he smacked her so hard her bottom hurt for the rest of the day.
D. A. rides along the flood channel, and when she is just a few feet from the sharp curve by the empty house, she ditches her bike, climbs onto a metal milk crate, and peers over the cinder-block fence before crawling up and straddling it for a few seconds. When she jumps into the backyard she hits the ground hard, first with a grunt and then with a cry as her knee strikes the hard-packed dirt. At the last second, she rolls and manages to avoid a small pile of caliche that would surely have landed her sobbing on Mrs. Shepard’s porch while the old woman fetched her rubbing alcohol and a pair of tweezers.
Three Chinese elm saplings stand dead in the center of the yard, and a bunch of two-by-fours, bleached nearly white by the sun, lean against the back of the house. Several tumbleweeds rest against the sliding-glass door as if they knocked for a long time, and finally gave up. In the top corner of the glass, a small sticker warns: Forget the dog. This house is protected by Smith & Wesson. Last July, when all the girls still roamed free, she and Casey and Lauralee had sneaked into this same yard to set off a box of M-80s they found under the bleachers at school.
Every house on Larkspur Lane is more or less the same, and at this house, as at Debra Ann’s, two small bedroom windows look out across the backyard. The windows are stripped of any curtains or blinds and they gaze nakedly across the grass, indecent and sad, like the small dark eyes of Mr. Bonham, who lives one block over and sits on his front porch all day threatening people if they let so much as one bicycle wheel touch his damn lawn. The sun’s glare makes it impossible to see into the house, but it doesn’t take much to imagine that electrocuted boy watching from the other side of the glass, his hair still standing on end. It’s enough to give you the shivers, said Lauralee when they were last here.
D. A. is hungry and needs to pee, but she wants to take a closer look at the empty field that lies between the alley and the flood channel. Thankfully, the construction-paper fortune-teller she keeps in her basket agrees. Do Not Hesitate! When she asks a second time, just to make sure, snugging her index fingers and thumbs into the four slots and counting to three, the fortune-teller is clear. Yes! Sometimes she asks the fortune-teller questions whose answers she already knows, just to verify that it’s the real deal.
Am I taller than an oil derrick? No.
Will Ford win the election? Not Likely.
Will my daddy ever order anything but strawberry ice cream at Baskin-Robbins? No.
From this end of the alley, Debra Ann can see a narrow sliver of the gentlemen’s club on the other side of the flood channel. It is mostly empty this time of the day, so only a few pickups and winch trucks are spread out across the parking lot. Two men, one tall and one very short, are standing next to a flatbed truck. The tall one rests his foot on the truck’s bumper while they talk and pass a liquor bottle back and forth. When the bottle is empty, he steps back into the club while the short one tosses the bottle into the steel dumpster. After a quick look around, he hops the fence and moves quickly across the field, running sideways down the flood channel’s concrete berm and disappearing into the largest of the drainage pipes.
D. A. drags an old Maytag box into the middle of the field and uses a box cutter she found in Mrs. Shepard’s garage to carve out a window just a little bigger than the distance between her forehead and her nose. She climbs into the box and waits. A few minutes later, the man pokes his head out of the drainpipe. He looks left and then right, then left again, like a prairie dog checking for a king snake before it leaves the burrow, then crawls out of the pipe, headfirst, as if he is being born into the day. When he stands up straight and stretches, D. A. claps her hand over her mouth to keep from laughing. Never has she seen such a little man. He is short and skinny and sorrowful as a scarecrow, with wrist bones like bird skeletons, and he can’t weigh more than a hundred pounds dripping wet. If not for the stubble on his chin, he might just be an older kid.
At the end of the flood channel, he crouches and looks both ways up and down the canal, then leans forward and runs up the steep embankment. Once he reaches the top, he walks quickly along the fence until he comes to a place where the barbed wire lies flat. Debra Ann knows this spot. She hops it all the time, a shortcut to the bookmobile or 7-Eleven.
He stops at the dumpster behind the club to take a piss. After he buttons his pants and knocks on the back door of the gentlemen’s club until it swings open, Debra Ann squirms her shoulders and hips and slides awkwardly out of the box. She brushes the dust from her T-shirt and then rears back and pitches a rock. It travels halfway across the field and lands with a solid enough thud to raise some dust. She can’t figure out why the man is living down there unless there’s something wrong with him. Her daddy says you’d have to be half stupid, half crazy, or half dead not to find work in Odessa right now. Everybody’s hiring. Maybe the man is all three—stupid, crazy, sick—but whatever his story, he poses no danger to her. She feels it down deep in her soul, feels convicted in the same way she believes that nothing bad can happen as long as she steps between cracks in the sidewalk and eats her veggies and doesn’t talk to any men she does not already know. D. A.’s confidence has been shaken this spring by Ginny’s leaving, and it is a relief to study this man and know: he will not hurt her.