Getting Mother's Body (23 page)

I like reading
National Geographic
cause when I'm reading about faraway places time passes faster than when I'm reading about familiar things. When I look up from my magazine over a half an hour has gone by like it was nothing. Rude is in the office, from where I'm at it looks like he's on the phone. The fancy car's gone and what looks like a gal, in a big straw hat, is walking away fast down the road.

CANDY NAPOLEON

I don't run no Taj Mahal but I can say that, through hard times and good times, I've kept this Pink Flamingo running.

“You got the manners of a gentleman,” I says to Mr. Laz Jackson. We're sitting out at the picnic table in front of Room 11. He's eating my baked chicken and is working fast through his third helping of my legendary cornbread dressing.

“It's kind of you to feed me,” he says.

“You got manners enough to eat what's in front of you,” I says.

“I'm hungry for sure,” he says. “Dill wouldn't let me stop except for when it was necessary.” He pulls his knit cap down on his head low, covering his eyes and thick eyeglasses, but he keeps eating.

“Dill's been funny all her life,” I says.

“You oughta know, you being her mother and all,” Laz says.

Dill, my own flesh and blood, don't want nothing but coffee. She's sitting out there on the grave with her gun. I got another daughter, Even, my only child with Big John Napoleon, the King of the Cowboys. Why do I call her “Even”? I didn't really want her but the good Lord got even with me. She turned out good, though. Still lives at home.

“You all come out here to dig up Willa Mae?” I ask him.

“I think we come out here not to dig, ma'am,” he says.

“Ain't you hot in that wool cap?”

“No, ma'am,” he says.

When he finishes his dinner I take him to see the rooms. They're all the same and the outside color scheme is continued indoors. Pink bedspreads and curtains. Pink end-tables with matching pink lampshaded lamps.

“How long you gonna be visiting?” I ask Laz.

“That's up to Dill,” he says.

The way he says Dill's name makes it sound like they got a bond of some kind but I know enough about Dill to know Laz ain't her sweetheart. I offer him Room 11 to sleep in. He pets the bedspread then lays down, looking at the ceiling then at the walls. There's a photograph of me riding Trigger, one of John Henry's horses. It was the first rodeo where I showed off my standing-in-the-saddle act. Laz gets up from the bed to take a closer look.

“That you?”

“A long time ago.”

“Standing up and riding in the saddle,” he says. He looks from the photograph to me. I had style then. Now I got more style. My mail-order wig with my hair cascading down to my shoulders. My straw cowgal hat. My hot green western shirt with the silver fringe. My pressed dungarees and red snakeskin boots. I got a gold necklace in the shape of a horseshoe. Turned to the side the horseshoe makes a C. John Henry gived it to me. Horseshoe for luck and C for Candy. I smile at Laz showing him my two front teeth, gold like my good luck charm.

“I could ride bareback too,” I says.

“I'd like to see that,” he says.

Each room's got windows in the front and back. I part the curtains on the back. We see Dill, looking at the grave site with her head hung down. I open the front curtains. “In the morning you can wake up and look at the pool,” I tell Laz.

“There ain't no water in it,” he says, as politely as he can.

“Lemme show you our horse,” I says and we go around back.

The crickets hiss at each other. A baby rabbit wallows in the cool dirt underneath a little soaptree yucca. “Feels like we walking around in a oven,” Laz says.

“Radio says it'll be a hundred and ten degrees today,” I tell him and he looks impressed.

Buster's got goat-milk-colored skin and eyes green as spinach and a swayback. We tether him up to the clothesline. He can run back and forth as much as he likes and a clothesline's cheaper than a fence. Laz pets Buster then fans his hand slow in front of Buster's face, moving the flies away. I look over at Dill. She's moved away from the grave and walked to the far edge of the field. She stands there looking at the single tractor, property of Rising Bird Development. The tractor's tires are right on the edge of my already-sold property line, ready to start plowing the land and making that supermarket come Thursday.

“The grave's over there,” I says to Laz and we leave Buster to go look.

Dill sees us walking and leaves the tractor, crossing the field in her long-legged strides, beating us there. At the head of the grave there's a mound of stones, chalk-red but white-painted, in a low pile. A sprig of cudweed, with its round papery-white flowerheads and its nice lemony smell, is wedged in the middle of the rocks.

Dill snorts. “You put in them rocks?” she asks me.

“Even done it,” I says. “She gathered and painted the rocks and puts a new flower there when the old one wilts.” Even was eighteen when Willa Mae and Billy comed through. She seen her sister Dill kissing a dying and bloody woman on the lips.

Laz stands at the foot of the grave, looking at it. He takes off his cap and bows his head. His hair is pressed down and uncombed and a little long for my taste. “It's a nice headstone,” he says.

“Cept the head's at the other end,” Dill says.

I fight back the need to slap my daughter. Last time I hit her she was eight or nine. She was taller than me already and she hit me back.

LAZ JACKSON

I wonder when Billy and them will get here. Maybe she's changed her mind and won't come at all.

Dill shows me what's in her cloth bag. A pistol. She took my hearse into town and came back with a newspaper for Miz Candy, some peppermints for Even, and two boxes of bullets. Now we're both at the grave, walking around it and looking from the grave to the office and the motel rooms.

“Billy and them could come around either corner,” Dill says.

“You gonna shoot them?”

“I ain't letting them dig,” Dill says. “You be my lookout. When they come you tell me.”

I don't want to be no lookout for Dill. She's got a gun.

“They probably ain't gonna get here before the tractors start,” I says.

“Line up them cans and bottles,” Dill tells me, pointing to a cement half-wall on the far side of Room 33. I line them up and she stands astride the grave and shoots. She hits them all but one.

“Line them up again,” she says and I line them up again. She shoots them all down this time.

Miz Candy comes outside to sit on the back porch and read her newspaper.

“How come you shooting?” she asks.

“Just passing time,” Dill says.

After a while of Dill's shooting and me resetting, Miz Candy goes in and gets a chair so Dill can sit while she practices her gun. Dill sits there, in a fold-down chair, right next to the grave. Me and Miz Candy sit in the shade.

“Dill's a good shot,” Miz Candy says. “If a man was sitting in that tractor, Dill could shoot his eye out from where she's sitting right now.”

The tractor's at the edge of the already-sold five acres. From where I'm sitting it could all fit in my hand. Shit. “Dill's planning a shoot-out,” I says.

“She better not,” Miz Candy says.

“I'm just saying what she said to me.”

Miz Candy waves at Dill, catching her attention. “You kill Billy and them, you'll get the electric chair,” she yells.

“I'll take my chances,” Dill yells back.

Miz Candy stands up and puts her hands on her hips. Dill quits shooting. When she sits back down Dill starts up shooting again.

“Dill and me don't favor,” Miz Candy says frowning up her face at Dill like she knows they mother and daughter but ain't sure how it happened.

“She wants to kill someone,” I says.

“She can want all she wants but she ain't killing nothing,” Miz Candy says. Her mouth is set in a hard line. I relax a little bit, but just a little. “If you ever have children make sure you have more than one,” she says.

“How come?”

“You might not get it right the first time.”

“That's good advice.”

“I got a second daughter, Even, she's following in my footsteps. Not like Dill. Even's a horsewoman, like me.”

“I'd like to meet her.”

“She don't get up till after noon,” Miz Candy says.

“More cans!” Dill commands me, and I reset the cans again on the cement wall. She shoots them down and I reset them, getting new empties from the trash when the ones getting shot get too full of holes. The bullets move faster than you can see them. You can hear the ringing sounds when they hit. You can see the cans jump up, surprised.

“That bit of cement wall's the start of Room 44,” Miz Candy says.

Dill shoots. Buster, the horse they got, stamps back and forth.

“I guess there ain't gonna be no digging,” I says.

“Billy ain't had her say, yet.”

“They might not get here,” I says.

“They'll get here,” Candy says.

After a while, Dill quits shooting. She relaxes in her chair with her straw hat pulled down over her face. “When they get here, you tell me,” she says, going to sleep in the sun. Miz Candy's nodding over her newspaper, falling asleep too.

I go look around, peeking into the rooms from their windows that face the back. I peek in the window of the office. There's some papers on the desk. There's a kitchen with pots on the stove, and the sack of mints Dill bought when she bought her bullets sitting on the table. There's a bedroom. One bed neatly made and in the other bed there's a big gal sleeping. She's about the size of two of me. A fan on the ceiling moving slow. Pictures of horses on the walls.

Out front's the pool. It's painted blue so, from a distance, you would think it had water in it. If you passed the Pink Flamingo quick without stopping, you would, maybe in the heat of the desert, kick yrself for not stopping to take a dip. But there ain't no water in this pool. There's just a wooden diving board that looks full of splinters, sticking out like a dried-up tongue over the big blue-painted cement hole. I always thought the water made a pool blue, not the paint.

The big gal comes out of the office to stand beside me. She got on a white dress and white sneakers with no laces or socks. She's eating the mints.

“Only guests can use the pool,” she says.

“They got to bring they own water, too,” I says. She laughs and I like the way her body shakes.

I tell her I come here with Dill Smiles and she runs, pretty fast too, around the house to see. After a minute she comes back to me, walking.

“You my sister Dill's friend?” the gal asks.

“Kind of,” I says, and we tell each other our names.

“You taking Willa Mae home in yr hearse?”

“Dunno yet,” I says.

Even takes a red-and-white peppermint out of the sack, holding it between her finger and thumb, letting the color melt off a little before putting it in her mouth and crunching down. The mint smell coming from her mouth makes the hot air smell good.

“I'm bored looking at this pool,” she says. She goes around back again and this time I follow her. We stand there looking at the horse.

She jerks some grass from the ground and holds a clump out. “Buster,” she says to the horse. He comes over. She holds the clump flat on her hand. “You gotta feed him like this or he'll bite you,” she says.

Buster mumbles the clump into his mouth. Stands there chawing.

“My mom's training me to ride bareback like she do.”

“You gonna be in the rodeo?”

“They're coming to town in October. I'ma try out,” she says. She keeps feeding the horse.

Buster stands very still, eating, pricking up his ears and turning them backwards and forwards listening to Dill sleeping and Candy sleeping and the tractors plowing the land even though they ain't started plowing yet. But they will be. Come Thursday, first of the month. Maybe they're making a sound right now that only Buster can hear. He pricks his ears east. If Billy and them are coming down the road the horse might hear them coming. He can hear Billy's baby being born too, I'll bet, even though that's farther down the road than Billy and them getting here. I'ma ask Billy to marry me again. Maybe the horse can hear that too.

Dill, stretched out in her chair, baking in the sun, draws a long line with herself.

“Yr sister sure is tall,” I says.

“Mister Dill,” Even says laughing. “But she ain't no real man.”

Yr sister's more of a man than I am
, I say in my head, not out loud.

Buster's skin shivers and he takes off, running back and forth.

“He's gonna break free and run off,” I says.

“We're getting a fence put up when the tractors start,” Even says.

“If I was Buster I would break free and run off just for fun,” I says.

“Where to?”

“I would just run, you know, around,” I says. I take off my glasses wiping them clean on my shirt. The horse makes a nice white blur then I put my glasses on again. I see Even looking me up and down and I tuck my shirttail in and smooth down my cap.

“Guess how old I am,” Even asks. I look her over and guess eighteen.

“I turned twenty-four in May,” she says, cocking her head and looking womanish.

“I'm twenty,” I says.

She walks over to Buster and unclips his chain.

“He's gonna run off,” I says.

She ain't looking at Buster. She's looking at Laz.

“You was watching me sleep,” she says. She takes my hand. Her hands are nice and big and cool to the touch. I wanna get with her, but I don't know how to ask.

“Tell me something,” I says.

“Tit for tat,” she says.

“How much do a horse like that cost?” I ask instead of what I wanted to really ask.