Valentine(25)

Some men down from Austin arrived one morning to find a pile of cattle still smoldering in an open field. The rancher was dead in the barn. His wife lay a few feet away, fingers still curled around the pistol, and the front door of the main house was standing wide open, the wind slamming it madly against the frame. The men found the children locked in an upstairs bedroom, where the oldest, a boy of seven, handed the men an envelope with train fare and a scrap of catalog paper. A brief note was scribbled underneath the name and address of a sister in Ohio: I love my children. Please send them home.

Ginny’s grandma was a toothy old woman, a believer in hellfire and hard work and punishment that fit the crime. If the devil comes knocking on your front door in the middle of the night, she liked to say, chances are you flirted with him at the dance. When she delivered the punch line, she clapped her hands twice sharply, just to make sure Ginny was paying attention.

I’m not going, the oldest boy told the cowhands. I’m staying right here in Texas. Well, all righty, one of the men said. You can come home with me, then.

So there’s your happy ending, Virginia.

*

She is less than thirty miles from Odessa when the whine under the hood of her car sharpens and grows louder, a steady keen that does not abate even when she slows to fifty, then forty-five, then forty. Eighteen-wheelers blow their horns and pass on the right, the wind shaking her car and nudging it toward the median. And then the sound stops. The car shudders once, as if shaking off its troubles, and she drives on, fifty, fifty-five, sixty miles per hour.

The sun stares down on her, flat-faced and bland. By now, Debra Ann has probably beaten every girl in the neighborhood at basketball. Or she is sitting on the bleachers, looking through her backpack for the sandwich that Ginny packed. Or she is walking home, the basketball a steady heartbeat against the sidewalk. D. A. is going to be fine for a couple of years. She is the best part of each parent—the boy who was a second-string quarterback and the girl who loved Joni Mitchell, two kids who hardly knew each other when they drank too much Jack Daniel’s at the homecoming dance and took a drive through the oil patch during the worst sleet storm of 1966, a story as common as dust on a windowpane.

What kind of woman runs out on her husband and her daughter? The kind who understands that the man who shares her bed is, and will always be, just the boy who got her pregnant. The kind who can’t stand thinking that she might someday tell her own daughter: All this ought to be good enough for you. The kind who believes she is coming back, just as soon as she finds someplace where she can settle down.

*

Come to think of it, country and western singers, those purveyors of sad songs and murder ballads where a good woman gone bad gets her just desserts? They’ve got nothing on Grandma—or Ginny, as it turns out.

It was 1958, and Ginny’s parents had been dead for less than a year. The boom had finally begun to level off, and there were fewer strange men around town, fewer roughnecks and roustabouts driving in to spend their paychecks and raise hell, but Ginny was still young enough to hold her grandma’s hand for no particular reason, just because. The two of them were making their way to the drugstore, cutting across the lawn at City Hall on their weekly sojourn to pick up her granddaddy’s pills and maybe a licorice whip for Ginny. It was early summer and the wind held still for a few minutes, here and there, the sun bestowing just the right amount of warmth on their faces when they stopped to watch the light shine through the diaphanous, narrow leaves of the town’s pecan trees. Until they nearly tripped over her, they did not see the woman curled up in the grass, sleeping like an old copperhead.

Ginny remembers it like this: She had sniffed at the air, recognizing the scent of piss and whiskey. She stared at the lady’s naked feet. Bright red polish flaked off her toenails, and her skirt hem rested above two skinned knees. Her bony clavicle rose and fell, and a thin scar on her neck reminded Ginny of the state map hanging on the wall in her first-grade classroom. Something about that long mark made Ginny want to wake her up and tell her, Lady, you got a scar in the shape of the Sabine River on your neck. It’s wonderful. But Ginny’s grandma squeezed her hand tight and jerked her away from the woman, her lips rucked up and pressed tightly together. Well, she said, that one’s been rode hard and put up wet one too many times.

For days, Ginny worked hard to figure out the meaning of those words. Sometimes she liked to imagine the lady saddled and thirsty, her skirt wrinkling beneath a wool blanket, a bit clenched in her teeth, and sweat streaming between her eyes as some old rancher rode her across the oil patch. Other times, Ginny thought about the way the woman had lain curled beneath the pecan tree, her toenails painted the exact red of the little wagon that Ginny hauled around the yard. The quickness with which her grandma had jerked her away from the woman was not so different from the way she yanked Ginny out of her granddaddy’s barn when a bull started climbing up on one of the cows.

And if Grandma’s hands hadn’t been so full, if she hadn’t had it up to here most days, with Ginny and dust and scrubbing the crude oil out of her husband’s shirts, Ginny might have asked her why she said that. But she stayed quiet about it, and she sometimes thought about those two skinned knees, the scar that looked like the Sabine River, its meandering path across the woman’s throat as she slept in the shade of a pecan tree. The woman had been beautiful to Ginny. She still is.

*

A few miles past the Slaughter Field, the derricks and pumpjacks give way to empty desert. On the other side of Pecos, the road begins to rise and fall. The horizon goes jagged, and the land turns ruddy and uneven. How lonely it is out there. How lovely.