Valentine(54)

Jesse’s stories are so much better than hers. He was in the army and he served overseas. When he came home to eastern Tennessee, he tells her, he kept his discharge papers in the front pocket of his shirt for a time, as if somebody might demand to see them, as if maybe just coming home alive made him a criminal. He said they fixed his teeth when he joined the service and after his mama saw him for the first time, she started to cover her mouth when she laughed, her big hands marked with scratches, knuckles twisted and raw, scarred from hammers and meat hooks and industrial sewing machines.

At the welcome home party, Jesse stood in his family’s trailer and watched people smile and shake hands. He tried to keep them on his right side, but he still missed a lot of what they said. He nodded and grinned and let them fill his cup, and when somebody asked where Jesse had been, he said, Hell if I know, I never did learn to pronounce the name, and he thought about the two boys he had killed. The aunts talked about picking cotton or working in textile mills. The uncles talked about driving to eastern Kentucky for jobs in the mine, their eyes going soft when they saw Jesse watching them. You picked a hell of a time to come back to Belden Hollow, they said. There ain’t nothing going on here.

And then here came his cousin Travis, pulling into the yard in a brand-new Ford F-150 that he bought in Texas. Paid cash for it, too, he said. He wore new boots and had a new nickname—Boomer, he said, because he nearly blew himself to kingdom come his first week on the job.

Because she’s a kid, and a girl, Jesse doesn’t tell Debra Ann what his cousin said to him next. You don’t need to know jack shit about petroleum. Just do what they tell you and collect your pay every Friday. Three hundred a week, and all the West Texas pussy you can handle. Pack your rubbers, brother. Get ready to party.

Instead, Jesse tells D. A. that he drove away from Tennessee in January, with his gear on the front seat of his truck and Boomer’s phone number in his pocket, and a particular kind of noise in his head, a Jesse-get-your-act-together kind of noise. He tells her when the trees disappeared on the other side of Dallas, he wondered how on earth any place could be so dusty, and brown. Even the shining blue sky turned the color of dirt when the wind blew hard enough. Sometimes, he could hardly tell which was which, sky or land, dirt or air.

And you came to Odessa, D. A. says.

Yes, I did. That foreman at Boomer’s worksite took one look at me and started laughing his butt off. You don’t mind small spaces, do you, Shorty? he asked me. When I said I’d been a tunnel rat overseas, Mr. Strickland gave me a twenty to go buy some boots and he told me to bring a change of clothes the next day.

My daddy used to muck saltwater tanks, D. A. says, right after I was born. He says the first time he climbed into a tank with his respirator and a broom, and a metal scraper as tall as him, he almost had a heart attack, it was so small and dark in there.

They are sitting side by side at the mouth of the drainpipe, both of them with their knees drawn up to their chests, trying not to let any bare skin touch the scorching concrete. When I climbed into that tank, says Jesse, I looked like a man. When I came out, I looked like one of them onyx statues I used to see in markets overseas. I was covered head to toe in oil. It took me twenty minutes in the field shower to get it all off my skin.

My daddy hated it. He said it made him sick to his stomach.

I guess so, Jesse says and falls silent. Back home, there wasn’t anything to do but fish the Clinch River and look for agates at Paint Rock or Greasy Cove. Maybe drive over to the VA hospital once a week to see if his hearing had improved. But here in Odessa, he works. Like a man does. Jesse picks up a small piece of chalk and uses it to draw marks on the concrete.

I’m saving nearly everything I make, he tells Debra Ann, thanks to your hospitality. I’ll have Boomer’s money in another month or so, and he’ll have to give my truck back.

He sees Boomer at the strip club now and then, sitting at the bar with the same men who threw Jesse out of his truck. They drink and watch women, and when they see Jesse sweeping up broken glass or running a mop through some vomit, they put their hands over their mouths and laugh, but they don’t ever talk to him, they don’t ever ask where he’s living.

D. A. shows him the postcard that arrived just after the Fourth of July. They pass it back and forth, turning it over in their hands. A plaster cowboy, his hat pulled low over his eyes, leans against a sign that says GALLUP, NEW MEXICO.

But the postmark is from Reno, Jesse says.

I know it, says D. A. I don’t have any idea where the hell my mother is, and she plucks the card out of her friend’s hand, takes off running up the steep embankment without saying goodbye. She is rushing to leave him behind, to get somewhere private, where nobody can see her grief.

*

Debra Ann has never been on an airplane, never even been out of Texas, but she and Ginny used to drive out to West Odessa every month to see Debra Ann’s great-grandma for an hour or two. Ginny sat on one end of the sofa and D. A. sat on the other while the old lady refilled their iced tea and talked about the Second Coming. When they were walking back to the car, Ginny would sometimes grab her daughter’s hand. Why don’t you and me drive over to Andrews and get an ice cream cone at Dairy Queen, she’d say. Or, you want to drive over to the sand hills and watch the stars come out, then maybe head to Monahans and get a cheeseburger at the drive-in?

They’d sit on the hood of the car and listen to the wind blow just hard enough that they’d taste the sand in their mouths, see traces of it in the bottom of the bathtub that night, and it seemed to Debra Ann that every star in the sky had come out just for them. There’s Orion’s Belt. Ginny would point toward the southern sky. There’s the Seven Sisters. They say seven, but there are nine, and a thousand other stars that we can’t even see.