Valentine(79)

Good luck to you, Karla darlin’! Just as sure as we are standing here, you are a thief and a wannabe murderer, but we are rooting for you. We will miss you when you go. Keep an eye out for us in your rearview mirror. Watch us grow smaller and smaller, watch us disappear.

*

Why don’t girls from Odessa play hide-and-go-seek?

Because nobody would go look for them.

*

This place. Flat earth, flat sky. How long does it take for an oil derrick to rust away in a place this dry? How to describe the way home? A ribbon of brown with an asphalt hem, each sewn to the other with a thread of fury? While the wind riffles her hair and a waning moon rises over the oil patch, Karla Sibley stands in her mother’s backyard and listens for the baby. Yesterday, she turned eighteen. Tonight, their bags are packed and loaded into the trunk of a car that Karla already loves as if it were an old grandmother. By the time they return to Odessa, Diane will stand nearly a foot taller than her mother. They will walk from one end of that town to the other, and no one will know who they are.





Glory

Because sometimes she wakes up swinging, knife in hand, her finger already on the catch, Victor has learned to stand on the other side of the room when he calls to her. M’ija, he says, taking care not to use the name she hates. Time to wake up. Sometimes he calls her after the birds he loves most—wren, for the plain gray bird that will build her nest anywhere, even under pumpjacks or next to railroad tracks, or cantora, after the brown-headed cowbird that builds no nest of her own, preferring instead to leave her eggs in those of other birds. Singing, singing, always singing, morning, noon, and night. You would too, Victor tells his niece, if you tricked someone else into doing all your work. This afternoon, Glory is drowsing under one of her mother’s light blankets, her breathing regular and steady, when he calls her phoebe, for the fierce little flycatcher that sings her own name. Phoebe, phoebe, calling faint and far away.

Time to go, his voice is quieter than usual. Time for you and me to get the hell out of Dodge.

They have been planning their departure since the middle of August when Victor returned from court and rapped on her door, hat clenched between his hands, the collar of his best white shirt ringed with sweat. In preparation for the trial, he had trimmed his thick mustache and run the shaver over his head. He had scrubbed his hands for so long that the cuticles cracked and bled. There were dark circles under his eyes, and his hands trembled slightly when he walked into Glory’s room and set his hat on the dresser.

Did he pay? she wanted to know. Did he pay for what he did?

Victor listened as the man in the room next door flushed the toilet and turned on the shower. Yes, he lied, Dale Strickland’s gonna pay for this every day for the rest of his life.

Now it is early September, and Victor has returned from a meeting at the district attorney’s office when Glory asks again if Dale Strickland paid for what he did. He pats the front pocket of his pants where five thousand dollars, most of it in Benjamin Franklins, is held together with a rubber band. This is her money, but she doesn’t know it yet. When they get to Puerto ángel, he will give it to Alma. Here, he will tell his sister, for a nicer place to live and a few pieces of furniture, and school tuition for Glory. He looks away from the small shape huddled under the bedcovers and lets his gaze fall on the single heroic ray of sunlight that has pushed its way through a thumb-sized gap in the curtains. He will let her keep on believing that Strickland is at the state prison in Fort Worth, that he’ll be farting dust by the time he gets out. They’ll have to roll him out the gate in a wheelchair, Victor says, with a new set of false teeth and a bag full of extra underwear.

I hope he dies there, she says and hunkers a little deeper into Alma’s sheets. The heat broke early this year, and although Glory still turns on the air conditioner in the afternoons when she comes in from the pool, it is only for ten or fifteen minutes, just long enough to drive the stuffiness from her room. The recent storms settled the dust and smashed records for precipitation. On the street where Glory and her mother used to live, the Muskingum Draw flooded. Little kids floated on old tires from one end of town to the other, and when the water grew shallow and sprawling, when they could see the buffalo wallow ahead, now thick with mud and water moccasins, they stood and wrested their tires out of the water. Outside town, the flash floods eventually settled into ravines and gulches and cattle crossings. If Glory looks closely when they drive through the desert this afternoon, Victor says, she will see flowers she’s never seen before—butterfly daisies and buffalo bur and cactus blossoms the color of fresh snow.

When she was little, maybe four or five, a rare snowstorm passed through Odessa overnight. At dawn, Alma woke her daughter, and they went outside to see the ice crystals that covered the ground and sidewalks and car windows. It was the first time either of them had seen snow, and they stood in front of their apartment, mouths agape. When the morning sun cleared the roof of their complex, the ice began to sparkle and shimmer in the light. Make it stay, Glory begged her mother, but by noon, the snow had turned to red mud and soggy grass, and Glory blamed Alma—as if her mother could have stopped the sun from rising and the day from growing warmer, if only she had tried harder.

Glory rises from her bed and starts packing. I hope he suffers, she tells her uncle again. Victor nods and curls his fingers around the money in his pocket. Take it, you lazy wetback, Scooter Clemens had said, pissed off that Strickland hadn’t shown up to do his own dirty work. He slapped the bills on Keith Taylor’s desk while Keith sat frowning and looking out the window, saying nothing. After everyone had signed the agreement, Victor stood with his hat in his hands and imagined his large thumbs pressed against the man’s throat. But of all the things Victor learned during the war—that living to see another day is almost always a matter of stupid luck, that men who know they might die any minute can learn not to give a shit about who’s the All-Star and who’s the Mexican, or that heroism is most often small and accidental but it still means the world—the greatest lesson was this: nothing causes more suffering than vengeance. And Victor has no taste for it, not even as the sole witness to his niece’s suffering.