Winter Loon(9)

I could smell lemons even over Gip’s tree-shaped air freshener and the cigarette smoke. I twisted around and sniffed for my mother like a hound, expecting to see her in the back seat, smiling her crooked-teeth smile, or fiddling with the silver hoops on her favorite earrings, or folding her hair behind her ears with both hands.

“Sit back down before you make me wreck,” Gip said. I tried to scoot closer to Ruby, but she shoved me toward Gip and told me not to crowd her. I sucked myself in. Heat blasted from the vents and Charley Pride was singing “Kiss an Angel Good Morning” on the radio, and all I could think about was my mother under the ice.

“I’m gonna be sick.”

“It’s that goddamned smell,” Ruby said.

Gip cranked the wheel right and the car lurched onto the shoulder. I clambered over Ruby’s lap and fell out the door, skinning my chin on the frozen ground. By the time I’d emptied my stomach, I was on my knees, a penitent covered in blood and vomit and gravel. Ruby nudged me aside and got out of the car. I tried to wipe the vomit off my mouth with my shirtsleeve, but the gravel scraped into my cuts, making the pain even worse.

“Hold on now,” Ruby said, grabbing something from the back seat. “Get your hands off there before you get an infection.” She dabbed at my scrape with one of my mother’s white blouses. Drops of blood and dirt dotted the fabric as she turned it over and over. “That ought to about do it.” She lifted my throbbing chin, then turned my face from side to side. She softened, allowed me to see her grief. Tears pooled in her eyes but didn’t fall. Instead they seemed to recede, like the cascade went down her throat and into her belly. The moment was deep and fleeting and gone.

Gip peered over from the driver’s seat. “Can we get back on the road now or we waiting here all afternoon?”

“You done puking or you got more in you?” Ruby asked, stiff again, her guard back up.

“I don’t know. I think I’m done.”

“Well, let’s get going then. Climb back in there.”

Ruby got in next to me, pulled the heavy door shut, then opened it right back up.

“Jesus, you stink! Take that shirt off,” she said, her hand outstretched. “I mean it.”

I didn’t want to take off my clothes, no matter how bad they smelled. I’d had enough of baring myself to the cold, and I was already shivering.

“No.”

“Take off that shirt, Wes,” Gip said. “Do as you’re told.”

When I pulled the sweatshirt inside out over my head, the smell of my own vomit made me gag again. I swallowed hard, then handed it over. Ruby dropped it on the frozen ground next to my mother’s bloodstained blouse. “That wasn’t so hard now, was it?” she said. I crossed my arms over my thin undershirt. “And turn up the heat before we freeze to death.” We hushed as those words condensed and took shape around us. Ruby went back to staring out the window.

We passed mile after silent mile of barren winter fields and shuttered barns and clumps of white pine. Fence rails pointed us down the road and brief squalls dappled huddled cows white. It was near dark when we passed the municipal tower with the word “Loma” still visible, though the paint had faded over the years. We’d been on the road nearly three hours, and I was ready to put my feet on the ground.

This was the town where my mother grew up, the town we visited when she needed money. That was all it was to me—a town where her parents lived in a cinder block house next to a trailer park on a street called Willow Lane. My mother and I were last there in the summer, when slobbering dogs snapped on the end of chains and kids rode Big Wheels in the street and stared at us when we drove by. Now, the street was empty and dim lights were on in the trailers we passed. We pulled up to the dark house.

Gip made the first move, swatting his big palms on the steering wheel. “Well,” he said, and got out of the car. Ruby exited next. They left their doors open, daring me to choose sides.

“You waiting on an invitation? Let’s go,” said Ruby as she climbed the rickety steps. I slid out the driver’s seat, then slammed both car doors shut.

Gip had already gotten himself a beer and was sipping off the foam by the time I walked in. I’d forgotten the bowel smell that lingered in their house, like cabbage and boiled meats. My mother claimed her nose had dulled to it over time. “You learn to put up with a lot in a house like that,” she said. I curled my fingers and stroked my empty palms. I felt younger than my age, weak for it, longing for her hand in mine like that.

“Should I grab something out of the car? From the back?”

“We’ll get around to that,” Ruby said. “I picked up a few things down at the Commodity Center. Toothbrush is in the bathroom. You don’t want to end up toothless like me.”

Gip sputtered his beer. “You couldn’t get him a new toothbrush?”

“What do you take me for, anyway? ’Course I got him a new toothbrush. Jackass.” She kicked her shoes off at the door and slid into slippers, all the while shaking her head, looking at me as if I were her ally, like the two of us would form a gang to take on stupid Gip now. “You want to be helpful, you take him on back,” she said, gesturing to the hall. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

My mother’s old bedroom. I took slow steps behind Gip, afraid of what I would find there, of falling through the crevice of my own life and winding up in hers. He turned the knob and flipped the switch. The overhead light had a missing bulb so the room was half in shadow. There was a twin bed with a flowery bedspread, a white dresser with chipped paint, a mismatched side table, faded pink shag carpet. The walls were covered in bird’s-eye maple paneling and Tiger Beat posters of smiling boys I didn’t know.