Winter Loon(37)

A bulbous black-and-yellow “B” on the poster in the window caught my eye, yanked me out of my reflection. Cartoon insects buzzed around the logo I’d seen all over the Barbosa Brothers midway that summer I spent with my father. The same outfit that brought him to town all those years before, when he first met my mother, would operate the midway at the county fair only a week away. The whole of me, still tingling from Jolene, now buzzed.

When I got home, I made straight for the kitchen, parched gray and yellow in the late-August sun. Surely Ruby had heard something from him with the carnival coming to town. Flies swarmed the sink, eager to light on a stray bit of hamburger meat dropped from the meatloaf baking in the oven. She listened to my familiar plea about my father while digging dirt and raw meat from under her fingernail with a jagged lower tooth. She spit into the sink. “Told you,” she said. “Not a word.” She undid the apron from around her waist and threw it at a fly greedily rubbing its legs together like a miser over money. “Goddamned pests.”

“I can’t believe he hasn’t said anything. I thought for sure he’d have been back by now. It’s almost fall. Maybe something happened to him.”

“You’re as bad as the flies.” She flicked a plastic flyswatter with the swift arc of an arm wrestler, then shook the fly guts into the sink. “When was the last time he was even with the carnival, huh? Five, six years ago now? I don’t know why I even bother to explain it to you, you’re so dense about it.”

“You’d tell me if he did call, though, right?”

She examined her nails, took another swipe along that tooth. “You ought to let it go. You knew back in January, just like we did, he wasn’t coming back. I don’t know why you keep on pretending he might.” She sat down at the table and mopped her hand across her eyes, though no tears were there or coming. “You remind me of your mother, you know. She always thought she deserved something better. ‘Better than what?’ I’d ask her, but she didn’t know. Take it from me, eat what’s on the plate.” She lifted her face and looked me flush in the eye.

“Ruby,” I said, preparing to make another pass.

“No more,” she said, raising her voice. “No more now. Why don’t you go do whatever it is you do with that Rook girl.”

I conjured a scene of me ending it with Kathryn, sped up so I wouldn’t have to hear her rage. “We broke up,” I said, sure that my saying it meant it was so.

Ruby leered and snorted, shaking her head. “Of course you did. Of course.” Inevitability was in her every breath, like why would something good happen or last.



AT THE END OF THE next afternoon, Bull, Drew, and I were waiting in the barnyard for Lester to come in so we could quit for the day. A plume of baked dust rose between the fields as the yellow car barreled up the bumpy path.

“Shit,” I said, turning my back to the road. Neither Bull nor Lester had said a thing to me about Jolene, which led me to believe she hadn’t talked either. It honestly scared me, thinking she might have had second thoughts about the whole thing, embarrassed by me. I was keenly aware of our differences, of her brown skin and my white skin, of how our people might have specific ideas about the two of us together. I imagined the worst of what Gip and Ruby would say. It was hard to know about Mona and Troy, who seemed kind but cautious. And it crossed my mind, as Kathryn got out of the car and slammed the door, that Bull and Lester might just beat the shit out of me if Kathryn didn’t do it first.

A flush blazed from her chest to her cheeks. I could see she was struggling with what to say, though I figured she surely rehearsed her tirade in the car.

“Kathryn—”

“Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare.” Her hurt eyes narrowed as she pointed at me.

“Ah,” said Bull. “Lovers’ spat?”

I looked at him, willing him to go away so he wouldn’t hear what was coming next.

“I don’t get you, Wes,” she said. “I really don’t. An Indian? Seriously?” She shot a look at Bull and shook her head. “Sorry,” she said to him, “it’s just that—”

“What did I do?” Bull’s eyes were wide open and amused. “Ballot, you been telling off-color barn stories? I swear, ma’am,” he said, mocking Kathryn, “I only made him fuck that cow the once.”

Kathryn cut off her rant, swiped her tears with her fingertips, calmer now. “Oh, you don’t know, do you? Wes and your”—she grasped for the relationship, dismissing the importance with an elaborate hand flip and eye roll—“whatever. That Jolene. All hush-hush about it. First me, now her. Jeez, Wes,” she said, pulling back as she prepared to launch her arrow. “I guess no girl wants to be seen with you in public. Not even an Indian. And don’t think I’ll take you back because I won’t. We are broken up, you understand? I’m breaking up with you.”

She stormed off, leaving me in a yellow cloud of dust to face Bull.

“Whoa, motherfucker. You’re in the shit now,” said Drew. “I would not want to mess with a girl like that.”

“What the fuck do you know, Drew?” I asked. I tried to shrug it off. “Girls, man.” I spit the last of the dirt from Kathryn’s spinout and tried to get past Bull. He grabbed my arm.