Valentine(65)

Fine, I tell him, I’m not afraid of you, old man. And the bailiff leads me away.

I won’t spend the night in jail—just six hours in the holding cell. Long enough, Judge Rice says when he stops by the cell after the court closes at four o’clock. You ready to go home, young lady? You learned your lesson?

Yes, I tell him.

Yes, what?

Yes.

He looks at me for a long moment, and I wonder if we are about to have another standoff, but he shakes his head and walks out to the reception area.

By the time they find the keys and let me out, my blouse is soaked through, my breasts so heavy with milk, I can barely stand up straight. My purse is pressed tight against my shirt when I walk past the officer at the desk, and I can hear them laughing all the way down the hall. They are still laughing when I step out of the station and close the door behind me and walk across the parking lot to my car.

*

By the time I get to Corrine’s house, the baby is so frantic that I tear a button off my blouse, trying to get him settled. He screams and paws at me, his sharp little nails leaving long scratches on my breasts. When he latches on, we both sigh and close our eyes, our bodies loosening.

Back at the house, my daughter doesn’t say a word while I open some cans and get dinner on, not a word while I nurse the baby for the second time in as many hours. When I stay put in my chair while the phone rings and her daddy leaves a message on the new answering machine, she is quiet then, too. It is an easy bedtime.

At dusk Corrine walks across the street and we settle in. I make a pitcher of salty dogs and carry it, along with the vodka, out to the patio. Corrine grabs an ashtray. We turn out the porch light and leave the patio door cracked open, sit out in the backyard under the darkening sky. It is tinged purple, a sign that there might be a dust storm coming our way.

So, Corrine says, where the hell were you all afternoon? She strikes a match and her eyes glitter in the brief light. Tonight, there’s a small wind loose in the world, and it can’t make up its mind about which way it wants to blow or how big it wants to be. Every match that flickers and dies feels personal, like a closed fist.

Well, I think, here’s my chance to reach across the darkness and tell somebody the truth. But the story I tell Corrine is a comedy about a lady with leaky tits who sasses a judge and lands herself in the pokey. I set the scene for her, me telling Strickland that I’d happily shoot him and Keith Taylor saying, oh shit, and Judge Rice banging his pistol against his wooden desk so hard we thought the wood was going to crack, and I tell the story so well that Corrine laughs and laughs. That is one of the best courtroom stories I have ever heard, she says. I’ll remember it until the day I die.

So will everybody in this town, I say.

She hands me the bottle and I add some vodka to a glass half filled with grapefruit juice. Don’t worry about it, she says. They’ll move along.

Oh, sure. People will forget all about it in a week or two. We both laugh. We both know this is going to follow me around for years, and Aimee, too. She will be the girl with the crazy mama who spent an afternoon in jail. This day will change the two of us. Now when we play cards, I will make her fight for every win, and when she loses, I will make sure she knows why—and not always in the kindest of ways. We will spend hours in the backyard shooting cans off the fence, and when she starts whining that she’s tired, she wants to go play with Debra Ann or one of the other girls on the street, I will tell her to run into the alley and gather up the cans. Set them on the fence, and do it again. Do it again, I’ll say. Again. Again! You must be able to hit your target on the first shot.

I will make her daddy drive into town when he wants to see her, and it will be twenty years before I again walk across that spare, beautiful land out at the ranch, before I sit on my old front porch and watch the sun go down, nothing but a dirt road standing between me and the sky, the only noise coming from cows and birds, the occasional coyote. And in a few years, when I catch Aimee sneaking out of the house at night and driving out to the oil patch with her friends, I will slap her so hard the red mark will still be there when she wakes up the next morning. I will not apologize for years, and by the time I’m ready to say I’m sorry, every word between us will be a bullet in the chamber.

The sky is black now and the backyard is dark, except for our two cigarettes and the diffuse light from the kitchen hovering at the edge of the concrete.

You going to answer that? Corrine asks when the phone rings.

Hell no, I say. I bought a machine that does it for me. It cost me nearly two hundred dollars and I had to order it from Dallas.

We listen as the machine switches on and my voice drifts across the yard.

My God, Corrine says. Will wonders never cease? I’d never have to answer the phone again. She grabs my fly swatter, snaps it against the table, got him, and reaches for the vodka.

The wind shifts direction and the refinery stops being something you can forget about. We sit up straight, pinch our noses, and wait to see what the wind will do next. Keith Taylor’s drawl pierces the darkness. This is Keith Taylor, he begins, and we both grin. Oh girl, Corrine says with her thumb and index fingers still holding her nose, if I were thirty years younger. Giddy-up. And we break out laughing. I laugh so hard I can feel my shoulders loosening, the sharp blades relaxing.

I’ve got some news. He pauses, and we hear him crack a beer open. He is quiet for so long that I start to wonder if he set the phone down on the table and wandered off, or if the machine isn’t working.