Cavedweller (6 page)

“Probably used the bag for the tapes,” Delia said. She was looking at the front seat, where there remained only a smashed cassette of Jefferson Airplane’s greatest hits.

“They took everything!” Cissy, said. “Everything we had.”

“No. Not everything.” Delia hugged her purse to her hip. “We’ll get more. Maybe they need it worse than we do. Like coyotes, panting after what little they can get.” Delia stood by the car with her hands curled up under her chin. Her cropped hair was sweat-dark and limp.

Cissy gaped at her. Who cared what the thieves needed? How about what she needed? Her clothes, her books, the little box of pins and sparkling beads her daddy had given her for her last birthday. “I want to go home. You could call Rosemary. We could stay with her.” She blew her nose on a piece of paper from the car floor and looked up at Delia pitifully.

“We are going home,” Delia said. She felt lighter and freer without all that stuff, absurdly philosophical. She pulled out a kerchief and used it to brush away the broken glass, then shook it and tied it around her head. She sorted through the clothes on the floorboard until she found a shirt big enough to tie over the window from the clothes hook to a rip on the seat cover.

“We’ll be fine,” Delia said firmly. “When we get to Cayro, you’ll see. We’ll be fine.”

“No we won’t. You don’t care about me. You’re stealing me,” Cissy shouted. “You’re kidnapping me.”

About ten feet away a trucker was watching them from the open door of his cab. He was chewing a sandwich and holding a bottle of soda. Delia looked at him and shrugged.

“You got hit,” he said, his mouth full of bread. “Happens out here.” He took a drink, then reached behind his seat and pulled out another soda, which he quickly opened. “Here,” he said. “Give her this. She’s just exhausted. Get lots of fluid in her and let her sleep. Heat out here is bad enough without getting yourself robbed. Got a few more sandwiches too—meat loaf. You want one?”

Delia walked over and took the bottle. “Thank you, no,” she said. “We just ate. But the soda’s a good idea.”

The man jerked his chin at Cissy, who had stopped yelling and was slumped against the bumper. “I got one of my own. They’ll drive you crazy.” He took another bite, keeping his eyes trained on Delia. “Don’t I know you?” The words were clear even though he was chewing.

Delia looked at his face. He was squinting in concentration. No, she thought. Oh no. “Don’t think so.”

He swallowed and nodded. “You know who you look like?”

Delia waited.

“That singer, the one with the long red hair?” The man was frowning. “That one that died,” he said. “Janis, right? Janis Joplin. People probably tell you that all the time.”

“Oh, yeah.” Delia smiled and nodded at him. No one had ever confused her with Janis, but she didn’t want to get into that. She wanted to get back on the road. “Thanks,” she said again.

“He knew who you were.” Cissy’s face was stained with tears and sweat.

Delia shook her head and handed Cissy the soda. “Honey, he’d have never heard of Mud Dog. You can bet every button on his console is set on a country station. He thought I looked like Janis Joplin.”

“Janis Joplin is dead.” Cissy wiped her nose. “Been dead forever.”

Delia’s face was unreadable as she opened the passenger door and motioned Cissy to get in the car.

Cissy ignored her. “We got plenty of room now,” she said, climbing into the back.

Sandy grit rubbed into her bare arms and calves as she lay down on the seat. It might have been rock or grains of safety glass. Delia made up a pillow for her out of a pair of jeans, but Cissy pushed them aside. She lay with her face tucked into the crook of her elbow and cried softly once they were back on the highway. She knew Delia couldn’t hear her over the wind whistling past the shirt pinned above her.

“We’ll be fine,” Delia kept saying, but Cissy knew she was talking to herself. Like a crazy person, Delia was talking just to hear herself say the words. Cissy put her fingers in her ears.

The back of the car remained open to the wind and dust and any other thief who might come along, It was a sign, as far as Cissy was concerned, but Delia just taped up cardboard when the shirt came loose. “You were getting too big for most of those clothes anyway,” she said. “We’ll buy you some nice stuff when we get closer to home, some shorts and sundresses that you’ll like.” As if clothes were the point, Cissy thought, as if they were not broken open themselves, broken open and whistling in the wind. Between the two of them the rage hummed loud as the engine.

 

 

C
issy slept through the Texas Panhandle. “You didn’t miss anything,” Delia told her.

“I want to stop,” Cissy said.

“No stops. We are going to make time, girl. Time.”

Cissy put her necklace in her mouth. The hematite tasted salty and dark. The sun was just over the horizon, and the ground was blue-gray and flat as a saucer. Oklahoma looked like New Mexico, occasional patches of farmland with low, unrecognizable plants interspersed with vast stretches of rock and desert, hills always silhouetted in the distance. Green, Cissy wanted green lush plants and bright hot flowers, Venice Beach and all those hidden gardens. When they first came into Oklahoma City and she saw the lush green trees, Cissy thought she would cry with relief. She stuck her head out the window and pulled in great breaths of cool air. It smelled like it might rain or had rained recently. Damp and rich and wonderful, a different cathedral.

On the eastern outskirts of the city, Cissy threatened to flag down a highway patrolman. Delia just patted her purse. “I’ve got your birth certificate right here.” She blew smoke out the open window and laughed. “Besides, look at you. You think any sheriff wouldn’t see you belong to me?”

Cissy leaned out the window again. She knew she was Delia’s miniature, red-brown hair and hazel eyes, muscles that rode the bones in the same pattern, every inch her mama’s girl. She remembered Thanksgiving, when Randall had come over too late for dinner. He had hugged Cissy and told her how much she looked like her mother. “Only thing of mine you’ve got is my mama’s name and my teeth, my soft old milk teeth,” he said. “You’re going to have to keep an eye on those teeth, little Cecilia.” He slipped his plate down and wiggled it with his tongue.

“If you changed your habits, you might keep the rest of those teeth.” Delia had been sober for two weeks that holiday. By night she would be drinking again, and they all knew it. Randall smiled at her indulgently and let Cissy sip his whiskey. Delia jumped up from her chair. “Don’t give her that. An’t you done enough?” she shouted, and Randall walked out the door.

“You hurt his feelings,” Cissy complained when Delia put her to bed.

“I’d like to hurt more than that.” Delia spit the words. She said she had moved out of Randall’s place to stop drinking and be a good mother to Cissy, but for most of the two years after they left him she matched him drink for drink. Every time he came around, she would start again.

In the backseat of the car, Cissy opened her eyes and watched brightly lit neon signs flash in the windows. If Delia got drunk, she would check them into a motel and let them both sleep it off. Drunk, Delia was no trouble at all. Drunk, she would sing along to the radio and make big fruit salads and giggle to herself. Sober was trouble. Sober, Delia was angry and miserable, scolding Cissy and constantly rubbing the back of her neck. Sober, Delia had headaches. Drunk, she felt no pain at all. A wave of cigarette smoke blew past the flapping cardboard.

“I’m thirsty,” Cissy said. “I’m drying up back here.”

Delia said nothing.

Cissy sat up and leaned over the front seat. She rested her chin on the sticky upholstery and sighed. “Don’t you need some cigarettes?”

Delia turned her head slightly and shrugged.

“I could get you some, and me something too. A Coke, or orange juice with lots of ice.” Cissy licked her lips. “I’d love to have an orange juice with lots of ice, maybe slices of orange in the glass.”

Delia changed lanes smoothly. There was a lot of traffic on the strip, people in a hurry going somewhere.

“Juice,” Cissy said. “We could stop anywhere here.”

“In one of the bars maybe?” Delia tossed her cigarette out the window. Sparks flew back toward the rear bumper. “Get you some juice, me something too while we’re there?”

Delia leaned down and tugged at a brown bag stuck under her seat, tearing the paper when she finally got it out. Two cartons of Marlboros thudded on the passenger seat. Delia looked left at a big Oldsmobile crowding into her lane and speeded up to pass it.

“When we need gas, I’ll get you some juice,” Delia said. “Get you some ice too, and maybe another cooler. But I an’t stopping when I don’t have to. I’m getting us to Cayro, Cissy, the fastest way I can.”

Delia stopped at a Quick Mart near midnight, filled the gas tank, and then cruised the grocery shelves while the blinking clerk watched her. She bought another Styrofoam cooler, a carton of juice, an economy pack of luncheon meat, two boxes of saltine crackers, half a dozen chocolate bars, a big bag of peanut brittle, and a small bag of ice.

“Sustenance,” Delia said to Cissy when she put the cooler on the floor of the backseat. She paid no attention when Cissy glared at her, just tore open a chocolate bar and revved the engine.

All the way across the rest of Oklahoma, Cissy chewed peanut brittle. A couple of times she crawled up front to get away from the wind that poured across the backseat, but she did not speak. Delia turned on the radio. Cissy turned it off. They rode in silence as they sped across the spring landscape. Just across the Arkansas line, Delia’s adrenaline finally gave out, and she steered the car over to the side of the road. The two of them slept fitfully for several hours, Delia gripping her keys tightly as if she feared someone would steal the car.

Once they reached Tennessee, Delia drove as if her sanity depended on it. She made peanut butter and white bread sandwiches on the bumper for Cissy, rinsed fruit from roadside stands with service-station hoses, poured peanuts into twenty-eight-ounce bottles of RC Cola and chugged as she drove. They made steady progress, but not fast enough to suit Delia. She kept rubbing her neck and grinding her teeth.

At a service station near Chattanooga, Delia untied her head scarf for the first time since New Mexico and fought a wave of nausea from the overwhelming smell of gasoline. Whoever came through before them had spilled gas in a puddle next to the pump. They should clean that up, Delia thought, glancing at the rearview mirror. The attendant was staring at her, but why shouldn’t he? She looked like hell. There was a band of pale skin across her forehead where the scarf had been. Her lips were cracked, her nose bright pink and peeling. The collar of her blouse was stiff with sweat, and she had rubbed the back of her neck raw. She closed her eyes and felt the world wheeling around her still body. Cissy pumped her heels at the dash, and Delia turned to her. The girl looked as bad as her mother, sunburned and filthy and miserable. Delia saw with a shock that Cissy’s left eye was puffy and red.

“Christ,” she said. “Where are your glasses?” She rummaged through the junk on the seat until she found the thick, dark lenses. “Put these on right now.” For the first time Delia registered the desolation on her daughter’s face. She reached over and patted her shoulder.

Cissy flinched. “Don’t touch me.” She got out of the car and crawled into the backseat.

Delia set her jaw and filled up the tank. She looked at Cissy once in the mirror, put the car in gear, and drove.

When they were on the highway again, Cissy considered tossing the glasses out the broken window, but she knew that Delia would back up a mile to get them.

 

 

T
hey came into Cayro late that night. Cissy was sound asleep in the backseat. Delia pulled in behind the Motel 6 on the Marietta side of town and curled up under the steering wheel. “I’ll just sleep for a little, just a little while,” she whispered, and immediately fell unconscious.

 

 

C
issy woke up toward dawn as the light brightened and the traffic noise increased. Delia was asleep in the front, the torn and wrinkled road map sticking out from under her right hip. Cissy lay there listlessly until an awful grinding made her lift her head and look out the window. A big yellow and red Dixie General label shone on the side of an eighteen-wheeler steering slowly past the Datsun. Cissy wondered briefly just what the General was shipping, then stretched and unlatched the door. Her face was dirty and creased from the plastic seams on the seat cover. She rubbed her left eye and looked around. A sign across the highway advertised a Maryland Fried Chicken two exits away. Another sign, this one green and white, directed traffic toward Atlanta with a sharp arrow. Limping slightly from stiffness, Cissy walked toward the motel.

“Morning, honey.”

The woman had tightly curled hair and was wearing a white uniform. Maid, Cissy thought. Then she watched her go into the little restaurant at the side of the motel. Waitress.

Honey. Cissy mouthed the word, mimicking the accent. Georgia. They must be in Cayro. Cissy was here because her daddy was dead and her mama was crazy. What was it like to be grown and crazy? Cissy looked around the parking lot. Probably lots of crazy people around here.

Honey. Cissy stretched the syllables, the way Delia talked when she had been drinking. Southern accent, honky-tonk twang. Randall had loved it. Cissy hated it.

Cissy headed for the restaurant. No one stopped her, so she went on into the bathroom and washed her face and hands. That felt so good she pulled down a wad of paper towels and rubbed soap and water up under her T-shirt and down into her shorts. She wanted to take off her clothes and scoop water all over herself, but she was afraid someone would walk in on her. Instead she pulled down more towels and scrubbed herself until her skin burned. She tried to comb her hair out with her fingers, but it was dark and stiff with sweat, so she stuck her head under the faucet until her neck got cold. Then she dried off with the last of the paper towels. In the clouded mirror over the sink, with her hair wet, she looked different—older, almost a teenager, a brunette with big brown eyes and a few freckles. “Honey,” she said to the teenager, then laughed, surprising herself. She sounded like Randall.