Valentine(70)

It is not the ginned-up, high-pitched rage you hear when a crowd burns a book or throws a rock through a window or plants a kerosene-soaked cross in somebody’s yard and sets it ablaze. The flatness of Mary Rose’s speech, the hollow affect, the cold and steady tone of voice—all are fear and rage transformed into wrath. Hers is the voice of someone whose mind is made up. All that’s left to do is wait for the little spark that will justify what is about to happen next. All her life Corrine has watched this poison move through her students and their parents, through men sitting at the bar or in the bleachers, through churchgoers and neighbors and the town’s fathers and mothers. She has watched her own kith and kin pour this poison into their best glassware, spoon it onto the plates and bowls their ancestors hauled in wagons from Georgia and Alabama, all while proclaiming that they worked for everything they ever got and nobody ever gave them nothing, they earned it, living and dying in that refinery, in those fields, and they can’t do a goddamn thing about the people who control the purse strings and hand over their paychecks, who can put them out of work with a wink and a nod, but they sure can point a finger at somebody else. If they say it long enough, in enough different ways, they might stop seeing the child of God standing on the other side of those words, or buckling under the awful weight of them. Whatever gets you through the night, or helps you turn your back so you can keep up the lie. Whatever lets you light the match or throw the rope over a strong branch, and still be home in time for dinner and the football game. And while Mary Rose maybe has better reason than most of these fools and sinners to open the door for unbridled wrath, Corrine also knows this: one way or another, it will eventually kill you. But goddamn, you can do some damage on your way out the door.

Corrine presses the accelerator and tries to close the gap between her car and Mary Rose’s. At ninety-five, her Lincoln shakes and roars like a jet. When Mary Rose slows down to make the sharp turn onto the access road and then guns the engine, what feels like an acre of dust is thrown onto Corrine’s windshield. She slams on the brake and slides onto the dirt road with one last look in the rearview mirror, and for the first time in her life she wishes that a state trooper would put down his newspaper or lunch and pay attention to her for one blessed minute.

It is nearly three o’clock, less than an hour since Corrine stepped into her garage and well past the time of day when she mixes up her first whiskey and iced tea and heads for the front porch. When her hands begin to shake, another reminder that she has absolutely no business being out here, she laughs and beats her fist against the steering wheel. She should have driven directly to the police station, or stopped by the 7-Eleven and asked if their phone was working. All she wants—all she has wanted since Potter died—is to be left alone, to slowly drink and smoke herself into the sweet hereafter. But here she is, an old lady with busted lungs and a dead husband, driving all over hell’s half acre in a Lincoln Continental, going to save the world. It is so ridiculous that Corrine knocks her fist against her forehead and laughs until tears draw streaky lines through the dirt on her face. Well shit, she thinks. Here I am.

*

Corrine is right on Mary Rose’s tail when they roar through Penwell, a fusty little town on an otherwise empty stretch of earth interrupted only by pumpjacks and railroad tracks and a single row of telephone poles that looks as if it stretches to eternity. There are seventy-five or so permanent citizens, many of them living in trailers they hauled from Odessa and parked among the remnants of the original pecan-wood oil derricks. All that remains of the old gas station and dance hall is a stack of lumber and broken glass, and piled-up tumbleweeds against a rusty sign lying on the ground. DANCE TO-NIGHT.

Two little boys are standing on the side of the road, and they cheer as the women blow through a traffic light that hasn’t worked in forty years. They pass the gas station without seeing any sign of Potter’s truck. On the other side of town, the road veers south and starts running alongside the railroad tracks. The asphalt disappears and the road deteriorates to a dusty mess of ruts and tumbleweeds. The dust cloud is still ahead of them, mostly, but the wind is unreliable. It dives and dips, seizes the cars and shakes them fiercely before letting go suddenly. When Mary Rose swerves to miss a piece of pipeline that has fallen across the road, Corrine does the same.

Mary Rose hits the brakes a second time, veering madly and leaving Corrine to stare down a mama armadillo ambling across the road with her four pups. She slams her foot against the brake pedal and jerks hard to the right, her face hitting the steering wheel with enough force that stars swim at the edges of her vision.

The two cars careen toward the edge of the road and come to a stop. Potter’s truck is parked up ahead, and a second, older pickup truck is next to it. Corrine taps her horn and tries to pull up next to Mary Rose, but the road is narrow and Mary Rose will not look at her, so Corrine reaches across the wide expanse of her front seat, opens the glove box, and sets her pistol next to her cigarettes. If they get out of this situation with everybody still alive, she is going home and smoking that whole pack. She is going to drink herself half stupid, and then sleep for three days.

Mary Rose’s car rolls slowly down the road until they are only a few yards from the two trucks, and it is only then that Corrine spots the man and girl walking side by side along the railroad tracks. He is small and thin with stooped shoulders and black hair, nothing at all like the man whose pictures were all over the news in the wake of the attack on Gloria Ramírez. Debra Ann’s bangs are in her eyes and she is wearing her favorite terrycloth shorts and sparkly pink T-shirt. In one hand the man holds a jug of water and oh, what Corrine wouldn’t give for a little sip of that. His other hand is gently folded around D. A.’s grimy fingers.