The Laboratory of Love, page 8
When we discussed a comic book, Lucky sometimes got the story wrong. That can happen, if you read just the pictures.
“The only thing worse than a sap is a sneak.”
For the first time, I heard the voice Lucky used to speak to Them. The bruises on her face, dark against the pale, had been there before. Accidents were bound to happen when you were practicing a new rodeo trick, Lucky would explain. Standing up tall on Champagne’s back as he loped around the ring and you twirled a lasso, you were going to fall a hundred times or more until you learned to keep your balance. It didn’t matter, it didn’t hurt.
The banged-up face was gone from the open boxcar door. I didn’t see Lucky during the following days. Maybe there was a grey-green flash past the camouflaging pines. The crunch of gumboots on snow. Two alert eyes piercing the air’s invisible wall.
On Christmas morning, Ruth gurgled with an empty bottle cradled like a precious baby in her sleeping arms. I searched the trailer in case some presents were hidden somewhere, then stepped outside. Cigarettes and candies were sprinkled over the snow, as if they’d fallen out of the sky, or been dropped from a sleigh speeding through the air. I dumped them into the barrel whose smoking contents Ruth liked to stir with a stick while she muttered about filth and trash, trash and filth.
Lucky still found me after Christmas, but less often. For weeks, I could wait long hours beneath the bridge, by the boxcar, or inside the tumbledown barn without her showing up. Then one day she would appear again. Now Lucky spoke as if I were incidental. She looked intently toward the trees, like her words were really meant for them. Her shiver at the sight of the distant smelter had turned into a shudder. Lucille never came up at all anymore, as if she had died before she really lived. But without asking further about the dancing there, Lucky mentioned Spokane more often. You could ride to the rodeos in the back of a truck, she mused. Anyone could easily cross the border beyond Waneta Junction in the summer, when only college kids worked at the little building with the gate across the road. You just walked around when the big dopes weren’t looking. Once she showed me an American quarter she’d saved, though it didn’t shine brand new. “It’s worth more,” Lucky said, suggesting that it could buy anything you wanted: quantities of cowgirl costumes decorated with rhinestones, and fancy fringes everywhere. I didn’t like to hear about Spokane so much. It picked the scab on my heart to remember the Paradise Hotel where Honey and I had always ended up for one week every second month. The desk clerk with one glass eye and his wooden leg. Lonesome miners over from Idaho for a good time on the weekend. Honey’s face appeared to me through a thick, foggy window these days. I could wave and call, but she didn’t see me, didn’t hear.
Lucky’s blanket, candle, and comic books were gone from the boxcar. I couldn’t find them in the tumbledown barn or in one of the wrecked Fords. It was hard to say where she slept while January turned colder. Her eyes wouldn’t let me ask. “This damn smoker’s cough,” she complained as it got worse. The snow was brown where she spit. Her hardest rodeo trick, standing on Champagne’s back without holding on, didn’t get better; from the look of her face, Lucky fell more often than before. Now when she said she had to go, I tried to follow her tracks in the snow once she was out of sight. At a certain point, they would suddenly trace tight circles that crossed each other in confusion, with no one clear path leading from the maze. I bent over the puzzle, words I should have known how to read, then lifted my head at a snort of laughter. There was no visible source for the sound.
“Hurry up,” said Ruth when I came home from school one day in February.
We were moving into town right now. I’d heard many times how a house on Columbia Avenue had been robbed from Ruth by the City, like everything was stolen from her. Somehow, the place was hers again. Ruth wore a tight, satisfied smile, like she’d pulled a good trick.
Old Man Johnson’s truck had already been loaded up with the treasures that belonged to Ruth, the ones that my dirty hands were never allowed to touch. There wasn’t time to run to Lucky’s secret places to say goodbye if she were there. I couldn’t dart beneath the bridge where I had buried three things Ruth had missed when she burned the contents of the cardboard suitcase that travelled with me from the south. They were three things I promised Honey I would never lose.
Town was just five miles away, but everything was different beneath the smelter hill. Smoke from the tall stacks made my throat burn, my eyes itch. I couldn’t see as good as before; it grew harder to make out the real truth of things. Honey had been a girl in this old house with a slanting porch and peeling paint and one front step missing. Her room above the porch was kept locked. The door wouldn’t pry open with the army knife I’d taken nine-tenths possession of from Kresge’s. I slept on a cot in Ruth’s room; she liked to keep an eye on me these days. That was different, too. Before, Ruth never minded if I stayed out all hours in the fields with Lucky trying to trap rabbits with a snare of string. “Why’d you bother coming back?” she had asked when I came through the trailer door at last. “Since you’re going to leave like that slut in the end.” Now I had ten minutes to make it home from school or else.
For the first few weeks at Columbia Avenue, Ruth didn’t buy bottles. We cleaned the filth and trash, scoured the stink of a slut from the floors and walls. Then Jack Daniel’s started hanging around again. He made Ruth sick and sad; he made her lock me in the closet with the coats. Ruth prayed to Dear Jesus on the other side of the closet door; coloured lights danced in my head when it finally opened and her hand lifted. I tried to remember that all this was incidental. I reminded myself that the world was one big place without walls. “Sky for ceiling,” I repeated in the cramped darkness. “Light bulb stars.”
I had to go to a different school because it was closer. From the far side of the playground, other kids still yelled Yank go home. One recess, I thought I saw Lucky over by the swings. I rubbed my itchy eyes, tried to see better. This girl had the same sharp face, thin legs, slate-grey eyes. Although the March air felt cold, she wasn’t wearing a coat or mittens or scarf.
“Lily,” called a boy about my age and size. As she turned to him, the girl noticed me. Her grey eyes narrowed; she frowned. Then Lily ran away.
Three times, after the snow began to melt, I caught the school bus out to Waneta Junction as if I still lived in the trailer at the end of the dirt road. An old man and woman had moved into the place. I saw her wandering across the field with one end of a rope tied to her wrist, the other end dragging on the ground. “Marie,” the old man called toward the thistles. “Marie,” he called again, when the woman didn’t turn toward his voice. She wasn’t wearing shoes, not even ones with a hole in the left toe.
I waited for Lucky at the same places as before: a wrecked Ford, a boxcar, a tumbledown barn. There were no signs that anyone visited there anymore. Lucky refused to emerge out of the empty air. Now she really believed I was one of Them, I guessed.
“Lucky,” I called loud as I could, but my voice sounded doubtful of its power to summon what my heart hoped for most.
“Luke,” I tried.
“Lucille.”
No matter what name I shouted, Lucky wouldn’t come. I realized that. “Are you insane?” she asked the one time I tried to call to her across Old Man Johnson’s field, before I knew her very well. “Do you want Them to hear?”
It was dark and late by the time I walked back to Brale. There was hell to pay. William was too weak, he couldn’t fight back or run away, he deserved what he got. This time was worse than the others, like falling from a horse in the sky. I had to stay home from school for a week so it wouldn’t show. That was when I began to think about the sailor Honey had sometimes said was my father. I was reminded of him by the tall man who lived down the street. I thought his eyes were blue-green from squinting at the sea. His back must have become strong and broad from pulling up the heavy anchor. Another man, also young and tall, lived in the same house. They were worse than filth and trash, said Ruth. In the closet, I pictured them and thought I heard my daddy’s voice calling from a city by the sea. There was the sound of waves behind wind.
I knew I could go out to the fields to look for Lucky just once more before Ruth made certain I never went there again. Before I left Brale the way Honey had left for good; the way she promised I would. The last try had to count. I planned carefully while Ruth’s marks faded from my skin, like memories of a mother.
All the snow had melted. The creek splashed loud and fast with run-off from the mountain. The air felt nearly warm at four o’clock. Soon it would be summer, time for rodeos in Spokane. I waited in Lucky’s secret places, though now I didn’t really believe she would appear. It might be Lucille, I thought, or maybe the girl named Lily.
The three things I had buried beneath the bridge were gone. Someone had found them and taken them, though they weren’t shiny, though they were just three small things.
When the sky started to get dark, I walked to Lucky’s favourite spot for practicing rope tricks. It was a clear patch of ground behind the tumbledown barn. Once, we guessed, a corral held dancing horses there. The world twirled like a lasso in the air as I bent to scratch big letters with a stick into the ground.
“Incidentally, I’ll never be one of Them,” I printed as neatly as I could, though I knew Lucky couldn’t read my promise.
After the Glitter and the Rouge
“At least it’s only the one side,” says Diamond Lil, the last of the old-time strippers, appearing out of the pale Portland sunlight to take Honey from the hospital. The doctors have been only able to do so much, the grafts failed to take as well as they hoped; there were certain complications. Lil doesn’t flinch at her friend’s face; she’s witnessed worse. A stiff blue body on the bathroom floor. There’s nothing for Lil to do but unsnap a roll of twenties and settle the bill and hand Honey dark glasses. Then the marquee outside The Golden Arms makes a promise, Live Girls!, that grows bigger as the taxi nears. Honey watches the driver try to keep his eyes from the rearview mirror; he would have stared for a different reason before. “Everything heals,” Lil tries to gloss over in their room, packing feathers and boas and fans, preparing to follow the Jupiter Circuit on to Eugene one more time. They drink a champagne toast and, to the tune of shattered glass, vow to work together again some day.
“Maybe a mask, maybe a bit of classy kink,” muses Lil, snapping her makeup case shut on that remote possibility, hardening herself to the fact that she’s pushing forty like it’s a boulder you have to heave uphill or be crushed by. The Circuit is unaffected by accidents; it will orbit Lil back this way again. She’ll bump into Honey here or there or in Eureka, California. Lil laughs at all the lies life makes you tell, grimaces at sentiment too expensive even on installment. Honey stays on at The Golden Arms with her costumes and Camels, with the lotions and the pills. Lou lets her keep the room till the end of the month for old time’s sake. Food ordered in, curtains always closed, a strange face floating in the speckled mirror. One night she tries to see what glitter and rouge will do; they only make the left side flame more brightly. Crimson neon clicks Dancing Nightly! across the curtain, buzzes through Honey’s dreams. Each week fresh dancers troop in stilettos and robes down to the Showroom; their grumbled dissatisfactions are known to Honey as well as her own name. May rain slices in straight lines onto Centre Avenue. Traffic lights switch like a lost boy’s eyes change colour according to which arcade photo of him hovers inside your heart. Then quarters drop into a pay phone during the northbound Greyhound’s ten-minute Tacoma pause. “I’m coming home,” she says, after Ruth’s voice needles through a bad connection. “Frances,” she says, knowing it’s time to forget being Honey. Or Blaze or Star or Crystal.
“It’s not pretty,” comments Ruth, opening the screen door Frances slammed shut sixteen years before. “Ran off same as you,” she offers to explain the absence of the boy they took from Honey and sent to Ruth when he turned eight. The old woman sighs. Like mother, like son. Now look what charity’s brought to the door; this beat-up whore back beneath her Christian roof. Ruth glances at the cardboard suitcase, pushes at her wig, goes into the kitchen. Reheated coffee spreads bitter fumes while Frances unpacks in her old room above the porch. She balances on the mattress edge, tries to detect a hollow that held her sleeping son. Possessions left behind here at sixteen were burned in a backyard fire; Ruth hissed slut into the sparks and smoke. Now that thin voice calls supper up the stairs. It becomes obvious that Ruth goes out only to the Safeway, to the liquor store, to cash her monthly cheque. “The house is paid for,” she volunteers, a rare revelation. Apparently, the bank tried to take the place at some point, and Ruth was in a trailer out by Waneta Junction when the boy arrived to stay with her.
Frances can’t ask how tall Billy had grown by the time he left, can’t wonder where a boy of twelve would go except eventually out to sea like some sailor whose arms are known for a single salty night before he must be back on board. She can ask only who lives next door these days. “Same ones as always,” Ruth sniffs. Plenty of neighbours have moved away, the smelter keeps laying off, good riddance to bad rubbish. Still too many dirty dagos around East Brale; they’d be better off up in The Gulch with their pervert Pope.
Frances walks past the old high school, over the bridge. There are few people to gawk at her, none she recognizes. The town itself appears unchanged. The same metallic taste to the air, same banks of black slag. Smoke still coughs from the stacks up on the hill. The doctor told her to stay out of the sun; whatever the weather, she won’t take more walks. Instead, the days are spent inside with Ruth and the TV on an endless loop. “Greasy Italians,” the old woman mutters in the midst of boiling potatoes, frying meat. “Filthy Wops.” They eat early, while the afternoon is still hot. Heavy meals steam the kitchen damp, curl the corners of Frances’s sight. Afterward, Ruth climbs the stairs and closes her bedroom door. She clinks the bottle against the glass; whines prayers to Jack Daniel’s and to Jesus. Frances sits out on the front porch; the boards are warped, grey paint peels. I’m your private dancer, moan cars cruising Columbia Avenue on those summer evenings. Drivers are boys with last names like Lorenzo or Catalano, with grandmothers who’ve never learned English. Maybe they’re heading down to Gyro Park with gallon jars of papa’s homemade wine. They’ll get brave enough for the cold fast river, try to swim to the flat rocks midstream. That last summer, when she was sixteen, the boys didn’t call her Little Orphan Frannie any more, but Brale girls still didn’t trust her. Rough red wine, cast-off clothes upon the bank, moon touching a current white. The first time she made it to the rocks, Frances knew she’d be gone by fall.
“It was an accident,” she finally says in September, when Ruth still hasn’t asked. Frances reaches for her mother’s hand, guides it to her face. Where the skin is puckered, pink.
First doctors then police explained that he must have planned it well in advance. The acid was quite rare, difficult to obtain, used only in specific laboratory experiments. He’d lurked beyond the purple and the pink for years. One of the unseen angry men who cloud the stage lights with Camels, who wait for the next blonde move. Honey had felt him out there ever since Lil found her strung out on Seattle speed, spreading in the rough Red Room when she could get herself together. “There’s more to the business than young pussy; little girls burn up in a week,” Lil chided Honey, teaching her costumes and music and lights. Soon they were trading off the Jupiter’s headline spot, doubling up in hotels, living steady and sober and straight. A Eureka winter away from the glitter and the rouge for Billy’s birth; back on the Circuit while he grows into a gap-toothed boy. Social Services send him north at eight to become the kind of memory a dancer can’t afford; one more phantom haunting the no-man’s land between a blue pill and a red. Then the audience seems to glower with greater rage each night, makes Honey nervous as sixteen. “I come every time I’m on that stage,” cracks Lil, parking herself inside their room with paperbacks after the last show, going through pages like some love-story junkie. On all those nights, in Salem or Olympia or Eugene, Honey tries to stay in with Lil and sew sequins by the window. She tries not to wonder which of her moves will make something click in his head, tell him she’s the one who needs to wake up in a motel room with fire feeding from her face. He’ll stop her dancing, he’ll make it so the hot lights never dim. They’ll bore into her skull always. White current wiping away what made her restless, burning pieces of before into ash and cinder. “I don’t remember,” she said when they asked who he was, how he looked, what took place on that night she grew tired of waiting for it finally to happen. Afterward, she felt relieved.
Frances goes up to her room above the porch as soon as evening cools. Once her midnight ladder, then perhaps a trap for Billy’s paper planes, the pear tree outside the window rises twisted, gnarled. She wakes with heat like stage lights on her face, with a shadow shifting on the wall. At the end, she could pick up cues blind, close her eyes and feel the difference between a red spot and a gold. “When a Man Loves a Woman” and “Misty Blue” and the one about the rain against the window: she swayed to them all. Downstairs in the dark, her fingers discover the piano hasn’t been tuned since the last time she practiced for her Friday lesson with the teacher with the cats. She’s forgotten how the pieces went, or eighteen years have flattened them into something else. Behind her, a black shape looms in the doorway. “I always knew you’d be back,” says Ruth, satisfied at last. From now on, everything will be quiet and slow.
Part Three: What the World Takes Away
We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go.
For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.
