Valentine(21)
She doesn’t tell him that she has been watching him for weeks. She says, Yes sir, and promises she will always sit on his right side, where her words will be as clear to Jesse as the cold streams he tells her about, back home in eastern Tennessee, where he used to live with his mama and his sister Nadine.
*
He is twenty-two years old and she is ten, and they are skinny as ocotillo branches. They both have a small scar on their right ankle, his from a bad infection he got in Southeast Asia, hers from a firecracker that exploded before she could sprint away from it. They eat baloney sandwiches and watch the cat chase sunflower shells they spit on the concrete. They talk about getting a collar for the cat, so if he gets lost somebody can call Debra Ann’s house and tell her to come get him.
She brings chocolate bars that melt in her pocket and they lick the warm liquid directly off the foil wrapper. When she asks him why he works at a strip bar, the back of his neck turns scarlet and he looks at his feet. Without his truck, he can’t get to his job in the oil patch. They only let me mop the floors and take out the trash, he says, but I used to work with my cousin mucking saltwater tanks.
He doesn’t tell her that he came to Texas because there aren’t any jobs in Tennessee and Boomer swore he was making money hand over fist. Nor does he tell her about a two-week stop at the VA hospital in Big Springs where he slept in a good bed and ate some pretty good food, and talked to a doctor who eventually walked Jesse out to his truck and handed him an envelope and said, You are twenty-two years old, son, and lucky you came home in one piece. There isn’t one thing wrong with you that some hard work won’t fix. He doesn’t tell D. A. that he felt the weight and shape of the man’s class ring against his T-shirt. How far is it to Odessa, Jesse asked him, and the doctor pointed west. Sixty miles and be sure to lock up your truck at night, he said, and Jesse wished the man could be his father.
D. A. tells him that she went looking for the cat yesterday and saw Mrs. Shepard’s Lincoln parked in her driveway, which was strange because Mrs. Shepard only drives her dead husband’s truck now. There was no answer when she knocked on the front door, and Debra Ann guessed she was taking a nap, but then she tugged open the garage door to see what she could find in the deep freezer and found Mrs. Shepard sitting in Mr. Potter’s old truck with the motor running. How come you’re out here? D. A. asked, and Corrine sat for a few more seconds without moving, then sighed and said Jesus Christ and turned off the motor. How come you’re out here?
I’m looking for a sharp knife.
Corrine pointed to a workbench covered with gardening tools and dust. Bring it back when you’re done, she said. Don’t run with it in your hands.
Have you seen the cat?
No, I have not seen that goddamned cat. Now will you please get out of my garage?
Jesse and Debra Ann chew blades of St. Augustine that she pulled out of Mrs. Ledbetter’s lawn and saved in plastic bags. They drink a gallon of orange juice that one of the bartenders gave Jesse. They play poker with a deck of cards she pilfered from Mrs. Shepard’s kitchen drawer. He shows her a small leather bag filled with agates he found near the Clinch River, which is so close to his family’s hollow that you can hit it with a rock. Pick out your two favorites, he says. They’re good luck.
Before the war, he tells her, his hearing was so good that his uncle used to brag that Jesse could hear a doe swat a horsefly off her ass from a hundred yards away. He could hear a tick let go of a dog’s ear, and a catfish farting from the bottom of a swimming hole. He doesn’t tell her that when he came home after three years overseas, he walked a little ways into the woods and stood real still, waiting. And when the sounds finally came—a branch striking the dirt after the wind had shaken it loose from the tree, a whitetail tearing up the woods, a rifle report from the other side of the hollow—he couldn’t tell if he was really hearing those sounds, or just remembering them. Thrum of cicadas, frogs belching by the creek, two crows fighting off a blue jay trying to steal their eggs, buzz of mosquitoes and yellow jackets, the splash a rainbow trout made when Jesse pulled it from the river—maybe he heard all these noises when he came home from the war, maybe he just wished he did.
D. A. tells him she always checks the toilet bowl before she sits down because she has heard stories about water moccasins climbing up through the sewer pipes and curling themselves around the rim. There was a girl in Stanton who sat down in the middle of the night to pee, and a four-foot-long water moccasin crawled up and bit her right on the cooter.
The cooter? Jesse starts laughing his ass off. Yeah. D. A. laughs. She swole up like a deer tick. She takes a deep breath and fills her round cheeks with air, then reaches over and flips the cat onto its back, feeling around in its fur. When she finds a lump, she pulls out a fat gray tick, fully engorged and big as her thumbnail. Like this, she says and squeezes it with her fingernail until it pops and blood spurts all over her fingers.
She tells him that she has consulted her fortune-teller and her mother will be home in time for the Fourth of July fireworks show. Next time she comes, she will bring it with, so he can ask some questions of his own. Will he get his truck back from Boomer? Will he be home in time to fish the Clinch River before it gets too cold and the fish stop biting? She tells him that she visits the bookmobile so often the two old ladies who work there, unmarried sisters from Austin, have threatened to put her on the payroll. They let her check out as many books as she wants, and some mornings, she is already sitting on the rickety metal stairs when the sisters pull up in their Buick. Sometimes, Debra Ann says, one of the sisters tosses her the keys to the trailer and lets her unlock the front door, and then Debra Ann lies on the wet-dog-smelling carpet in front of the swamp cooler and reads all day long.