Cavedweller (29 page)

“Retard?” Dede asked.

“He was all right. He was smart, just didn’t talk.” Cissy remembered Wren’s big smile and shy eyes. He was a sweet little boy, and Sonny was always carrying him around on his shoulders. When Delia and Randall were gone too long, she would pretend Sonny was her father and Wren her brother, that they were a family miraculously intact after some big earthquake had knocked out the rest of the city. Then, when Delia and Randall came home, she would feel ashamed and be mean to Wren until Delia scolded her. After they moved out of Randall’s house, Cissy never saw any of them again.

“Grandma Windsor had Blanche to help her look after us.” Dede seemed to know that Cissy did not want to say any more about Wren. “Blanche was a second cousin or something. Think she was only fourteen when she come to stay with us. I don’t know. I was just a baby. Amanda didn’t like her, but she always seemed nice to me.” Dede swirled the flat Coke in the bottom of her glass, then drained it. She set the glass between her feet and took out a pack of cigarettes.

“What Amanda told me was that Blanche had had a baby of her own and got kicked out of school. Maybe the baby died or her daddy gave it away. After she come to live with Grandma Windsor, she never talked about it. She wasn’t no retard neither, but she wasn’t very bright. Had these big old moon eyes, pale blue and wide, pretty but empty. Black-headed and olive-skinned. Pretty enough to get in trouble. Stupid enough to get in more.”

“Was she nice to you?” Cissy tried to imagine Blanche, fourteen and under Grandma Windsor’s thumb, picking up after two angry toddlers and never talking about her lost baby. If she had been Blanche, she would have been mean to Amanda and Dede. She’d have pinched their butts and pulled their hair when no one was looking.

“She was all right. Played with us a lot. Don’t think she’d have done that so much if she’d been smarter. We were boring, but she never seemed to mind. She just did whatever Grandma told her to do, picked up, cleaned, watched us. I liked her as much as I liked anybody.” Dede grinned. “Hell of a lot more than some people.”

“So why didn’t Amanda like her?”

“I don’t know.” Dede picked a flake of tobacco off her tooth with a lacquered fingernail. “I’ve never been able to figure Amanda. When Blanche died, she acted like she’d been expecting it.”

“Blanche died?” Cissy was shocked.

“Accident. Pressure cooker blew.” Dede put a hand to her throat and tapped once to the left of her chin. “Cut her throat.” Her fingers traced a line below the jaw and the ear.

“My God.”

“It was the lid,” Dede said. “Sliced a hole in her neck big enough to put a teacup inside.” She caressed her throat briefly, and then the hand dropped. “It upset Grandma Windsor something terrible, but she said it was bound to happen. Blanche had never paid attention to how that thing worked. She was always letting pots burn up, bathtubs flow over, irons scorch sheets. Just didn’t pay attention. With the pressure cooker, she didn’t fasten the lid down tight, so it blew off. Bad luck she was standing right there.”

“That’s terrible.” Cissy felt sick to her stomach. The black-headed girl she had been imagining looked back at her with a wide smile and a gaping hole in her neck.

“Grandma said it was a wonder Blanche didn’t burn the house down. She was always staring off into space, always seemed to have some story going in her head, some adventure happening that was much more interesting than the life she was leading. Which was tedious as hell, being a day maid to Grandma and us.”

“Were you there?” Cissy asked. “When it happened?”

“In the bathroom.” Dede’s voice was flat. “I heard the explosion. Come running out with my skirt caught in my underpants. Blanche was sitting on the floor with her hands up at her throat and a dark red river running down her front. Everything was dark red. She didn’t even look at me. She just fell back hard. Grandma said she was dead already. You lose that much blood, you are dead before you know it.”

“Lord God!”

Dede tapped her cigarette tin on her knee. “Hell, it’s better than how Clint went, way better.” She paused. “It could have been me easy as her. I’d been standing where she was just minutes before. Grandma Windsor said I must think about why I had to go pee at that moment, what I was meant to do now. But I can’t think like that. Who knows what’s meant and what an’t?”

“It’s scary to think about,” Cissy said, watching Dede’s hand.

“Yeah, for a while I would dream about it, about Blanche. Dreamed I went in and checked on the pot, fastened it down and she didn’t die. Dreamed she called me in just as it exploded. Even dreamed she came and sat on the bed to talk to me.”

Cissy shivered, thinking of how she dreamed about Randall coming to talk to her. She had had a lot of them in the last couple of months. He sat on the bed and called her “Little Bit” while he scratched at his mustache and looked around the room. “I know I wasn’t no kind of decent daddy,” he said. “I wanted to be, but I never had it in me. But nobody raised me either, and look how I turned out.” Then he grinned as if he knew what he had said was not at all reassuring. “I’m kidding, Little Bit,” he told her. “I’ll keep an eye on you.”

“Grandma told me that it was a dangerous thing, having a ghost in your dreams. She drew circles around the bedposts with salt, said that would stop the dreams. After a while it did, or they stopped themselves. Maybe they would have anyway.”

Cissy wondered if she wanted her dreams of Randall to stop. Should she sprinkle salt under her bed? Would Clint start showing up in her dreams now?

“So tell me your happiest earliest memory.”

“Happiest?” Cissy closed her eyes and pressed her lips together in concentration. Slowly a smile bloomed. Her eyes opened. “The fire show Randall made me when I was five.”

“What’s a fire show?” Dede was genuinely curious.

“Something he made up.” Cissy’s smile widened at the memory. “Randall had this big old statue of a bird out by his swimming pool. It was ugly, black metal and sharp edges. Delia hated it. But Randall used it to hang things up—wind chimes and ribbons and balloons for parties. That evening he taped all these old garbage bags Delia was saving all over it. She never threw nothing away and he said it was time to make use of her stuff. When the sun went down, he set fire to the bags one at a time.”

“He burned a bunch of garbage bags? What’s so great about that?”

“They burned in colors. All these colors. Some of them wouldn’t catch and just made messy smoke, but some of them went up in a glitter of red and green and blue and gold all mixed together like oily water. The color would change as the flame ran up the bag. So then he took a bunch of bags and tied them to each other, and when he set fire to those, the colors changed as the flame ran up the strings of bags.”

Cissy rocked gently, remembering. “It was all weird and strange and wonderful. When it got really dark it was even better, and Randall went all through the house collecting everything plastic he could find. Burned it all, even some of the curtains out of the pool house.”

“Weird.” Dede pried the lid off the tin, removed a butt, and lit it.

“Yeah, Delia was mad when she got home. There was black stuff all over the grass, and melted plastic on the statue and the flagstones. I had a burn on my foot, and Randall’s jacket sleeves were all scorched. She was really pissed.”

“I bet.”

“But I liked it.”

“Well, you were five. You would like it.”

“It was beautiful,” Cissy insisted.

Dede sucked smoke. “I like fire,” she said. “Always have. Grandma Windsor wouldn’t let me burn nothing. Made me rake up all the leaves and crap but wouldn’t let me burn it. She’d make Amanda burn it. And Amanda hates fire.”

Cissy thought about Amanda. Yes, Amanda would hate fire. “What’s yours?”

“My what?”

“Best memory from when you were little.”

Dede shrugged her shoulders and blew on the end of the cigarette stub. “I don’t know. I liked the cows. Granddaddy Windsor had two really good milk cows, big old lady cows with swollen nipples hanging down. He kept them producing, and they had a great setup in the barn. Sweet-smelling straw and the walls all scrubbed down and whitewashed. That milk barn was cleaner than the house, and I liked to hide out in there. In the winter I’d sneak cups of warm milk from the buckets and climb up on the hayrack and drink it slow.”

“Was it sweet?” Cissy tried to imagine warm milk fresh from a cow.

“Naaaa, not sweet. Frothy and funny-tasting. If the cows got spooked or ate something they weren’t supposed to eat, it would taste kind of sour or get this strange tang. I didn’t care, though. I’d put bread in it to soak it up and eat that for dinner when Grandma was mad at me. You didn’t want to sit at table when she was mad.”

“She looks like the kind would get mad easy.”

“Yeah, but mostly she was tired all the time. Amanda said it was like she was used up and just wanted to coast till she died. Seemed like the only time she was happy was when she was alone. You’d come on her out in the garden or somewhere where she didn’t see you, and she’d be smiling and relaxed, big old smile. Then she’d spot you and get all stern-faced and sad. I don’t think she had too many happy memories.”

Cissy thought about Grandma Windsor’s face at the funeral and about Amanda and Dede growing up in her house. They had been standing within a few feet of her and she had never looked at them. “What’s your worst memory?” she asked.

Dede didn’t even pause. “Clint, he’s all my bad memories.”

Cissy flinched. Her face felt hot, and the skin below her eyes was sweaty. She remembered how scared and desperate he had been the last week. “What’d he do?”

“Do?” Dede sounded angry. “He didn’t have to do nothing. He’d just come around, and everything would go bad. Grandpa Windsor would start cursing and being mean to Grandma, and she’d get all hunched over and start being mean to us.” She shook her head. “Mostly Clint didn’t do nothing. He’d show up drunk or looking like he just got sober. He’d say things to Grandma you couldn’t make out, and stare at us like we were dogs in the road. He was just bad news, bad news always coming around.”

The cigarette butt in Dede’s hand had burned down to the filter. She crushed it out on a rock between her legs. “Grandma was always making us go over to see him. We’d get all dressed up and go over there and sit at the table, and he’d just look at us with that stupid expression on his face, like he’d got hit by a truck or something. Always smelled like he had been sitting in spoiled milk. Always looked like he had shaved himself raw. Wasn’t nothing to do or say. We’d eat what Grandma had sent over, and we’d try to talk some, but it was no use. It was purgatory, sitting there waiting until we could get away. Worst thing was, everyone knew he was our daddy, and they’d look at us like we were gonna turn out as useless as he was. Like being some criminal’s child or something. God.”

Cissy licked her lips. “People used to stare at me that way. ’Cause of Randall and Delia and everything.”

“That was because they were famous.” Dede spat once on the ground. “It’s not the same.”

“Maybe not, but it would get bad sometimes.” Cissy rubbed her temples, remembering the embarrassment. Once, when Randall was arrested for speeding, reporters came out to the house and took pictures of her and Delia through the windows.

“Okay, your turn,” Dede said. “Tell me the absolute worst thing you remember.”

“Fighting,” Cissy said immediately. “Delia and Randall fighting. Yelling and breaking things and cursing each other and Delia crying and screaming. Before we moved out, they were fighting a lot.”

Dede raised an eyebrow. “He hit her?”

“No. Randall never hit nobody.” Cissy wiggled uncomfortably. “He broke things, though. Worst time, he got so mad he went through the living room kicking the furniture over. He smashed the little tables and the lamps, pulled down the curtains, and threw stuff in the fireplace—all the ashtrays and dishes and stuff.”

“You were there?”

“I was up on the staircase. They didn’t even know I was watching.”

“Oh.” Dede sounded
disappointed.

“Randall kept shouting,” Cissy went on, “and shoving things over. While Delia was telling him he was a sorry excuse for a man or a dog, he went to kick the big coffee table in front of the couch. Delia yelled, ‘You crazy son of a bitch,’ but he did it anyway. Broke his foot.”

“Broke his foot?” Dede laughed.

“Yeah, had to wear a cast for two months. Told me it was a lesson for us all, not to let your temper run away with your good sense.”

Cissy leaned back against the garage wall and watched the clouds bunching overhead. Randall had a fast temper, but his anger would go away just as fast, like clouds racing across the sky. His sense of humor was the same, sudden and wry and turning sad without warning. Changeable. Her daddy had been changeable. She still had trouble believing that he was gone, that he would not someday walk in on them and give that lazy smile, and hug her tight. He could not be dead. She could not keep it in her head. Some thoughts just did not want to stay.

“Broke his foot!” Dede rocked forward and came up on her bootheels. “Wish I could have seen that. Wish Clint had broken his sorry ass one time and I could have seen it.” She tucked her cigarette tin in a back pocket and smiled down at Cissy. “You tell good stories, little sister. Really good.” She kicked leaves up on her way back to the house, kicked them so they scattered before her.

Cissy looked down into the glass tumbler between her legs. It was empty now but coated with a sticky residue of Coke and scotch. Clint had told her he liked to drink whiskey, Wild Turkey or Jim Beam. He had talked about it like it was the best thing in the world. She tried to remember what Randall drank, but all that remained was the memory of some unlabeled red-brown bottle sitting at the top of his bed. Her eyes flooded again. This time she didn’t know who she was crying for, Clint or Randall or herself.