Barking Man (6 page)

Not that it mattered to me that the pots fell down, except for the noise and the time it took to pick them up again. Living alone like I was I didn’t have heart to do much cooking, and if I did fix myself something I mostly used a plain old iron skillet that hung there on the same wall. The rest was a set of Revereware my family give me when Patrick and I got married. They had copper bottoms, and when I first moved in that apartment I polished them to where it practically hurt to look at them head on, but it was all for show.

The whole apartment was done about the same way, made into something I kept spotless and didn’t much care to use. A piece of dirt never got a fair chance to settle there, that much was for sure. I wore down the kitchen counters scrubbing out the old stains, I went at the grout between the bathroom tiles with a toothbrush, I did all that kind of thing. Spring Valley was the kind of place where people would sometimes leave too fast to take their furniture along, so I was able to get most everything I needed from the manager, who saved it up to try selling it to whatever new people moved in. Then I bought fabric and sewed covers to where everything matched, and I sewed curtains and got posters to put up on the walls, but I can’t say I ever felt at home there. It was an act, and I wasn’t putting it on for me or Davey, but for those other people who would come to see it and judge it. And however good I could get it looking, it never felt quite right.

I’d step into the place with the same cross feeling I had when I got in my car, an old Malibu I’d bought a body and paint job for, instead of the new clutch and brakes it really needed. But one way or another I could run the thing, and six days a week I would climb in it and go back down to the state road, turn north and drive up to the interstate crossing. There was a Truckstops of America up there, and that was where my job was at. I worked the three snake bends of the counter and it was enough to keep me run off my feet most days. Or nights, since I was on a swing shift that rolled over every ten days. I wouldn’t have ate the food myself but the place was usually busy and the tips were fair. I’d have made a lot more money working in a bar somewhere, being a cocktail waitress or what have you, but that would have been another case of it not looking the way it was supposed to.

The supervisor out there was a man named Tim that used to know Patrick a little, back from before we split. He was how I got the job, and he was good about letting me have time off when I needed it for the lawyer or something, and he let me take my calls there too. By and large he was an easy enough man to work for except that about once a week he would have a tantrum over something or other and try to scream the walls down for a while. Still, it never went anywhere beyond yelling, and he always acted sorry once he got through.

The other waitress on my shift was about old enough to be my mother, I would guess. Her name was Priscilla but she wanted you to call her Prissy, though it didn’t suit her a bit. She was kind of dumpy and she had to wear support hose and she had the worst dye job on her hair I just about ever saw, some kind of home brew that turned her hair the color of French’s mustard. But she was good-natured, really a kindly person, and we got along good and helped each other out whenever one of us looked like getting behind.

Well, I was tired all the time with the shifts changing the way they did. The six-to-two I hated the worst because it would have me getting back to my apartment building around three in the morning, which was not the time the place looked its best. It was a pretty sorry lot of people living there, I hadn’t quite realized when I moved in, a lot of small-time criminals, dope dealers and thieves, and none of them too good at whatever crime they did. So when I came in off that graveyard shift there was a fair chance I’d find the sheriff’s car out there looking for somebody. I suppose they felt like if they came at that time of night they would stand a better chance of catching whoever they were after asleep.

I didn’t get to know the neighbors any too well, it didn’t seem like a good idea. The man downstairs was a drunk and a check forger. Sometimes he would break into the other apartments looking for whiskey, but he never managed to get into mine. I didn’t keep whiskey anyhow, maybe he had some sense for that. The manager liked to make passes at whatever women were home in the day. He even got around to trying me, though not but the one time.

The man next door, the one that beat up his wife, didn’t do crimes or work either that I ever could tell. He just seemed to lay around the place, maybe drawing some kind of welfare. There wasn’t a whole lot to him, he was just a stringy little fellow, hair and mustache a dishwater brown, cheap green tattoos running up his arms. Maybe he was stronger than he looked, but I did wonder how come his wife would take it from him, since she was about a head taller and must have outweighed him an easy ten pounds. I might have thought she was whipping on
him—
stranger things have been known to go on—but she was the one that seemed like she might break out crying if you looked at her crooked. She was a big fine-looking girl with a lovely shape, and long brown hair real smooth and straight and shiny. I guess she was too hammered down most of the time to pay much attention to the way she dressed, but she still had pretty brown eyes, big and long-lashed and soft, kind of like a cow’s eyes are, except I never saw a cow that looked that miserable.

At first I thought maybe I might make a friend of her, she was about the only one around there I felt like I might want to. Our paths crossed pretty frequent, either around the apartment buildings or in the Quik-Sak back toward town, where I’d find her running the register some days. But she was shy of me—shy of anybody, I suppose. She would flinch if you did so much as say hello. So after a while, I quit trying. She’d get hers about twice a week, maybe other times I wasn’t around to hear it happen. It’s a wonder all the things you can learn to ignore, and after a month or so I was so accustomed I barely noticed when they would start in. I would just wait till I thought they were good and through, and then get up and hang those pans back on the wall where they were supposed to go.

What with the way the shifts kept rolling over out there at the TOA, I had a lot of trouble sleeping. I never did learn to sleep in the daytime worth a damn. I would just lie down when I got back till some of the ache drained out of me, and then get up and try to think of some way to pass the time. There wasn’t a whole lot to do around that apartment. I didn’t have any TV, only a radio, and that didn’t work too well itself. After the first few weeks I sent off to one of those places that say they’ll pay you to stuff envelopes at your own house. My thought was it would be some extra money, but it never amounted to anything much of that. It just killed me some time and gave me something to do with my hands, in between smoking cigarettes. Something to do with myself while I was worrying, and I used to worry a good deal in those days.

The place where Davey had been fostered out was not all that far away, just about ten or twelve miles on up the road, out there in the farm country. The people were named Baker, I never got to first names with them, just called them Mr. and Mrs. They were some older than me, just into their forties, and they didn’t have children of their own. The place was just a small farm but Mr. Baker grew tobacco on the most of it and I’m told he made it a paying thing. Mrs. Baker kept a milk cow or two and she grew a garden and canned. Thrifty people, in the old-time way. They were real sweet to Davey and he seemed to like being with them pretty well. It was a place a little boy would expect to enjoy, except there weren’t any neighbors too near. And he had been staying there almost the whole two years, which was lucky too, since most children usually got moved around a whole lot more than that.

But that was the trouble, like the lawyer explained to me, it was just too good. Davey was doing too well out there. He’d made out better in the first grade too than anybody would have thought. So nobody really felt like he needed to be moved. The worst of it was the Bakers had got to like him well enough they were saying they wanted to adopt him if they could, and that was what plagued my mind the most. If I thought about that while I was doing those envelopes, it would start me giving myself paper cuts.

Even though he was so close, I didn’t go out to see Davey near as much as I would have liked to. The lawyer kept on telling me it wasn’t a good idea to look like I was pressing too hard. Better take it easy till all the evaluations came in and we had our court date and all. Still, I would call and go on out there maybe a little more than once a month, most usually on the weekends since that seemed to suit the Bakers better. They never acted like it was any trouble, and they were always pleasant to me, or polite might be the better word. They wanted what I wanted, so I never expected us to turn out good friends. The way it sometimes seemed they didn’t trust me, that bothered me a little more. I would have liked to take him out to the movies a time or two, but I could see plain enough the Bakers wouldn’t have been easy about me having him off their place.

Still, I can’t remember us having a bad time, not any of those times I went. He was always happy to see me, though he’d be quiet when we were in the house, with Mrs. Baker hovering. So I would get us outside quick as ever I could, and once we were out, we would just play like both of us were children. There was an open pasture, a creek with a patch of woods, and a hay barn where we would play hide-and-go-seek. I don’t know what all else we did—silly things, mostly. That was how I could get near him the easiest, he didn’t get a whole lot of playing in way out there. The Bakers weren’t what you would call playful and there weren’t any other children living near. So that was the thing I could give him that was all mine to give. When the weather was good we would stay outside together most all the day and he would just wear me out. After it turned cold we couldn’t stay outside so long, though one of our best days of all was when I showed him how to make a snowman. But over the winter those visits seemed to get shorter and shorter, like the days.

Davey called me Momma still, but I suppose he had come to think your mother was something more like a big sister or just some kind of a friend. Mrs. Baker was the one doing for him all the time. I don’t know just what he remembered from before, or if he remembered any of the bad part. He would always mind me but he never acted scared around me, and if anybody says he did, they lie. But I never really did get to know what he had going on in the back of his mind about the past. At first I worried the Bakers might have been talking against me, but after I had seen a little more of them I knew they wouldn’t have done anything like that, wouldn’t have thought it right. So I expect whatever Davey knew about that other time he remembered all on his own. He never mentioned Patrick hardly and I think he really had forgotten about him. Thinking back, I guess he never really saw that much of Patrick even where we all were living together. But Davey had Patrick’s mark all over him, the same eyes and the same red hair.

Patrick had thick wavy hair the shade of an Irish setter’s, and a big rolling mustache the same color. Maybe that was his best feature, but he was a good-looking man altogether—still is, I suppose, though the prison haircut don’t suit him. If he ever had much of a thought in his head, I suspect he had knocked it clean out with dope, yet he was always fun to be around. I wasn’t but seventeen when I married him and I didn’t have any better sense myself. Right through to the end I never thought anything much was the matter, his vices looked so small to me. He was good-tempered almost all the time, and good with Davey when he did notice him. Never one time did he raise his hand to either one of us. In little ways he was unreliable—late, not showing up at all, gone out of the house for days together sometimes. Hindsight shows me he ran with other women, but I managed not to know anything about that at the time. He had not quite finished high school and the best job he could hold was being an orderly down at the hospital, but he made a good deal of extra money stealing pills out of there and selling them on the street.

That was something else I didn’t allow myself to think on much back then. Patrick never told me a lot about it anyhow, always acted real mysterious about whatever he was up to in that line. He would disappear on one of his trips and come back with a whole mess of money, and I would spend up my share and be glad I had it too. Never thought much about where it was coming from, the money or the pills, either one. He used to keep all manner of pills around the house, Valium and hides and a lot of different kinds of speed, and we both took what we felt like whenever we felt in the mood. But what Patrick made the most on was Dilaudid. I used to take that without ever knowing what it really was, but once everything fell in on us I found out it was a bad thing, bad as heroin they said, and not much different, and that was what they gave Patrick most of his time for.

I truly was surprised to find out that was the strongest dope we had, because I never really felt like it made me all that high. It sure didn’t have anything like the punch the speed did. Yet you could fall into the habit of taking a good bit of it, never noticing how much. You would just take one and kick back on a long slow stroke and whatever trouble you might have, it would not be able to find you. It came on like nothing but it was the hardest habit to lose, and I was a long time shaking it. I might be thinking about it yet if I would let myself, and there were times, all through the winter I spent in that apartment, I’d catch myself remembering the feeling.

I had come just before the leaves started turning, and then I believed it was all going to happen quick. I thought to have Davey back with me inside of a month or six weeks. But pretty soon the lawyer was singing me a different tune, delaying it all for this reason or that. He had a whole lot of different schemes in his mind, having to do with which judge, which social worker, which doctor might help us out the most. I got excited over everything he told me, in the beginning I did at least, but then nothing ever seemed to come of it at all. It turned off cold, the leaves came down, that poor little apple tree underneath my window was bare as a stick, and still nothing had happened.