Winter Loon(22)

“That looks like the same one was back in that last place,” I’d said.

“Girl had the wrong idea about me, Little. I had to tell her what was what.”

“She a lizard?” I’d asked.

“Suppose she is, yes.”

He was sitting on the steps of the trailer while I kicked hay into piles, careful not to tangle my foot around the thick black electric cords that wound around behind the rigging. “That how you met Mom? She a lizard?”

His eyes got wide and he smiled and rubbed his forehead. “Your mother is no lizard. Lizards eventually scurry off. No, your mother is a whole different breed of cat,” he said, which at the time made no sense to me. “Don’t make mention of lizards to her, understood?”

She showed up not long after my father got rid of that lizard, summoned by him or of her own free will, I don’t recall now. She said she’d been on the road all night in the borrowed mustard-colored Vega so she could meet up with us and take me back to Wisconsin with her. I made a fuss about going back, but in a truth I never shared with my father, I was ready to be done with the show. The moving around was hard on me in a way I didn’t expect or even understand at the time. I was happy to be at the next place, wherever it was, but not happy to go. I liked watching the show come together, but the dismantling and load out unsettled me. I would often hide in the trailer with Elizabeth so I wouldn’t have to help or even watch the breakdown.

I spent one more night banished to Topeka’s trailer. The next morning, my parents kissed each other long and deep, my mother with her arms clasped behind my father’s head, his hands on her backside, which he swatted when she turned to the car. We left him there with Elizabeth and the trailers, the cotton candy, the greasy food and oily rides, the loud music, and the lizards.





CHAPTER 8

IN EARLY JULY, insects hatched and swarmed, an annual rite of summer in Loma. Black flies in particular were drawn to me, leaving behind red-hot dot-to-dot patterns on the back of my neck. No amount of slapping kept them away. In fact, I think they waited for me to slap blood to the surface of my skin, then came back for more. The bugs I couldn’t keep away. My father was another story.

I tried to pin his continued absence on grief, not neglect. The longer he stayed gone, the more he grew in favor in my head as I imagined him, not in Montana but up in Alaska, working day and night to make money for the two of us. I daydreamed about being able to go with him when I turned eighteen, which didn’t seem so far off anymore. What I couldn’t understand was why he hadn’t been in touch at all. No cards or letters, no phone calls. It was like he’d dropped off the face of the earth. And I imagined it that way when I was low, that the earth had swallowed my mother and rejected my father. I didn’t know what it would do with me.

Gip tended bar a couple nights a week at the taproom, and when he wasn’t behind the bar, he was in front of it. He and Ruby had been haranguing each other nonstop since spring. I owed the increase in animosity to them burying their daughter, having seen those pictures, wishing, like I did, that they could unsee them. For my part, I could hardly look at him without thinking about his coming into my mother’s bedroom. As much as I didn’t want to imagine the worst, I found myself more and more recasting her as a girl my own age who’d been hurt, obscenely so, by her own father. Being in the same house with him felt like I was betraying her all over again.

Summer heat brought everyone outdoors, Ruby included. The house was stifling, and she would often sit in the evening shade of the front landing, a can of beer in one hand, her other bellowing the button placket of her loose blouse. She was not one for undergarments, so whatever bustline she’d once had lay down against her ribcage, flat as kneaded dough.

With Gip gone, I would sit with her sometimes, carefully asking questions about that girl my mother was. She would turn the question around and end up talking about her own miserable upbringing, her own mother who ran out and left her to be raised by her hillbilly father and three older brothers, how she ran out on them herself when she was still a teenager, left for Virginia, she said. When I asked her where she was from, she said only that she came from the hard part.

One of those nights, I took that knife out from the bed frame and grabbed a piece of wood, thinking maybe I could try my hand at whittling, though I knew the blade was all wrong for that. I sat down on the front steps and out comes Ruby, fanning herself, complaining about the heat. She unfolded an aluminum lawn chair. “Shit,” she said. “I forgot my matches. Go in and get them for me, will you?”

I stood, set the knife and wood down where I’d been sitting. Ruby stiffened and paled. “Where’d that come from?” She was looking at the knife.

I hesitated, considering my options. “It belonged to my dad.”

She kept her eye on it like it was a coiled snake. “Did it, now.”

She’d seen the knife before. I’d made a mistake. “Yeah, I think maybe Mom gave it to him, though.”

“Is that right? Is that what you think? That she gave him that knife?” She turned her attention to me. “What would you say if I told you that knife belonged to me? That it went missing years ago. And now suddenly it shows up right back here. You mean to tell me you had that with you the whole time, out there at the lake, then in the hospital?”

“It was with our things.”