Gringa (5 page)

“Who did decide, then?” Abilene thought the answer had something to do with Mexico. You could talk about fate, and about Mexico, and it was the same thing.

They began to walk again. At the door of her apartment, Adele kissed Abilene goodbye. She said, “I don't believe all those things I said. I was upset. I only meant that sometimes things happen to people and it's too painful to think about. We say, ‘What was she doing there, anyway? Why were they up to that?' We say, ‘Thank goodness that can't happen to me.' And I don't want—it would be so terrible, Abilene—I don't want to blame the victims. So I say it was fate, or bad luck, or the evil of other people falling down on them. And I still want to say—how can you go on if you don't believe this—I want to say, you can decide to be who you are. You can decide who that is.”

Abilene wanted to get away. “Then I hope you're right,” she said, because she didn't think she had made that decision yet herself.

I WAS TEN when I realized families weren't all the same. We were living in Hadicol Camp, in the blankest part of West Texas, and there was nothing to do but stare at the landscape and try to imagine cities and oceans and mountains and trees. I watched tumbleweeds come out of nowhere—I'd see them coming when they looked the size of a tennis ball—and I'd watch while they were tossed out of sight, or hung up on a fence until the wind shifted and tore them loose again. I knew to cover my face in a dust flurry, to speak cautiously to my mother and to teachers, not to expect anything out of each day. I didn't know then that what seems true can be all a lie.

My brother Kermit was named for the last real town my parents had lived in, and I for a song. He was three years older and spent his days, when he could, with a boy who had a gun. They went out on the prairie and came back with gutted jack rabbits and ropes of snakes. Sometimes Kermit hitchhiked into town, thirty miles away, just to walk around and spend two quarters on a cheeseburger. Once he came home after dark, stinking of beer and my mother Lenore hit him across the shoulders with a broom. My father Bud took the broom away. When he did that, I felt invisible; he'd never have stood up for me. As for my mother—well it was her we caught hell from in the first place. She had no soft looks for anyone. She looked lost in her own head, with cigarette smoke curling around her chin and up into her hair. She spent hours in bed, or in the bathroom with her shoebox full of cheap toiletries. I knew what she wanted. Paved streets and curbs, a house with proper closets. Our trailer was stacked with cardboard boxes and plastic buckets and chipboard shelves over our heads; she wanted everything in its place.

The trailer had only one bedroom. I slept in a corner of the main room with the kitchen things, the table and chairs, and a vinyl couch with horse-head armrests. Kermit slept on the floor on a wad of quilts, and he could lie down in the midst of any noise and fall right away. I was the last awake, lying with my eyes fixed on a slice of night sky that showed through the window above my head.

My mother had been talking about moving to town all year, while my father talked about the coal fields and ranches up north, in states with mountain ranges and winter snow. Lenore's complaints provoked Bud's; he didn't like it that he got up so early and that his pay was so low, that he often had to swab floors like a green-gilled high school boy. Before Hadicol we had lived in other camps, where women sometimes cried for days or ran away and left their babies, and I had always seen our moves as random events set off by things that happened at the wells and made the work go away, so that my dad was let off when nobody else was. I was beginning to understand that my parents had something to say about these things, that there was a chemistry between them that came of discontent. For Bud it was dry holes. He hid bits of money away and got in on wonderful deals that never worked out. For Lenore, it was Bud, it was life. Nothing bothered me; what would have been the good? I had seen girls at school weep over the placement of their desks. I didn't care about school. I didn't care that Lenore yelled at me when I'd done everything she'd said. I thought growing up would take care of everything; the future floated in front of me. Kermit had a sharper sense of a life to come. He knew, for example, that he would have apricot jam in his house, and not cheap grape, that he'd have a real house with a built-in shower. He didn't say ten words a week to my mother. Lenore took it out on Bud: his drinking and lack of ambition, the way he chewed on toothpicks and cut cheese with a pocket knife, and walked around the trailer in his shorts. Kermit could leave the table with his dishes dirty at his place. He could pee with the bathroom door left open. And Lenore didn't speak. Once, though, he put some of her rouge on, for a joke, and when she saw him, she hit him on the head with a pancake turner to which bits of potato still clung.

There were two families in the camp that year that made me think about my own. One was the Wellers, next door. Mrs. Weller wasn't much more than a girl, and her baby cried all the time, but she was always smiling and moving slow. She sat out in front in the evenings on a folding chair, with the baby in her lap, and her husband sat on the step and smoked, and they talked in low happy voices. My mother said it was downright peculiar to sit out like that and watch bugs. My father said it was because they were young and the baby was new. Lenore said, “When did we ever talk like that?” The Wellers-this, and the Wellers-that: they kept coming up, a stick my parents tossed back and forth. One morning Kermit stepped out of the trailer in time to see the Wellers on their step, kissing and hugging so hard that Mrs. Weller's housecoat had come open all the way up her legs. Kermit let out a hoot, Bud and Lenore rushed to see, and Lenore banged the door shut so hard the little set-in pane of glass popped out. After that it was closed with a piece out of a box. I knew my mother was jealous of Mrs. Weller.

The other family, the Moosters, lived across from us on the other side of the laundry shed. I hung around with Natty, who was in the class ahead of me at school, and already twelve. She had swingy hips and a pouty mouth. She had little breasts, and her periods. Her bangs were cut deep to make a bushy mass of hair in front that bounced on her forehead. Natty's mother did her hair; she'd once been a beautician, and could do nails too. Mrs. Mooster was fat in the belly and hips, and her upper body looked like a cone stuck on a worndown mountain. She had purple veins streaking up and down her legs. She wore safety pins in her clothes. But I never heard her shouting at her kids to find out what they were up to. She and her family were so different, they were like circus people to me, curious, inimitable, brave.

Mr. Mooster worked in the field like my dad, but he spent all his free time inventing things. Natty said they'd all be rich one day. She had her father's optimism and her mother's good spirits. I didn't know what to believe. To me, life was a chancy thing; happiness came up like high cards in a draw. I thought that was why we were an unhappy family; it couldn't be helped. But I'd watched with longing when Natty came in from the prairie in the Mooster pickup, her face streaked muddy with sweat and dust. Her father was teaching her to drive. He taught his kids all the constellations, too, and sometimes he would stand outside the trailer at night and put his arms over Natty's shoulders and down onto the front of her, across her bumps. I never saw him stand like that with his wife, but maybe Mrs. Mooster didn't have time for it. She had so much cooking and laundry to do. She didn't make her kids do anything at all, but she always had them working on projects. They used thread spools and yarn, broken clothespins and socks worn at the heels, popsicle sticks and paper clips. They glued and tied and cut and wove. The trailer was lined with their drawings. Mobiles dangled from the ceiling. There were piles and piles of things to step over or around: clothes, books, comics and newspapers, toys, board games, empty cartons and cans, and sometimes the kids themselves, playing or fallen asleep.

None of the kids did very well in school, and Mrs. Mooster was often called to come and collect her scoundrels; she bought them ice cream and used the drive to get to the grocery store. She sang and played harmonica and a plastic recorder, and all the kids could hum with combs in their mouths. Natty memorized poems like “Ballad of the Harpweaver,” and read “Talk of the Town” from The New Yorker out loud while her mother made supper. She rolled her baby sister Plum's hair with rags, and told fearsome stories about a Norse wolf named Loki that ate villagers. When I went over she handed me lemonade in a jelly jar and told me about other countries like it was a geography class. She said that all that really mattered was to get out of Texas when you were old enough. She said her mother said so. She said she would be a famous performer and be on television all over Texas so everyone would know her. She seemed years and years older, as if she had an entirely different, better life.

One day my brother grabbed me coming back from the Mooster trailer, and pushed me around to the back of our trailer; the heat off the metal made me dizzy. “That little rooster friend of yours is a whoor,” he said. I didn't know what he meant. “You dope!” he shouted. “A whoor. For money. You know that.” All I knew Natty could do for money at her age was babysit, and nobody needed a babysitter in Hadicol Camp. Kermit was getting exasperated. “A whoor,” he said, “does sex for money. Now do you get it?”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Like fuck.”

“Who says!”

“Well, maybe I don't know for sure she fucks. But probably. Everybody knows at school. In study hall I saw her reach up under her skirt and stick her hand in her pants and she scratched her goldamned ass!”

“For money?” I was being sullen. Natty was my only friend.

“Twerp.”

“Do you do it?” I asked him.

“What?”

“Fuck. Do you fuck.” It was the first time I'd heard the word.

“You don't have any business saying fuck, twerp. You don't know shit about it.”

“But you do. Because you do it.”

He twisted in his own trap. “Not exactly.”

I did know one word for sex. “You mean humping, don't you?”

Kermit bent over and whispered in my ear. “I'll bet you a dollar I can get her to put her hand on my dick.”

“That's the dumbest thing I ever heard.” I couldn't imagine anything worse.

“For a quarter,” he said. “I can get her to touch it.” His was a sly look. “And for another quarter I bet she'll kiss it.”

“If she does it'll be because she'll want to know it's not just a worm in your pocket. Dumbutt! Shithead!”

“Betcha!” Kermit said. He was proud of himself for thinking of it, for making me miserable. “For fifty cents. That bitch thinks she's shit on a stick.”

In the back of the Mooster trailer there was an old Chevy with no tires. I told Natty what Kermit had said while we were sitting in it. She thought it was hysterical. “You wouldn't, would you?” I asked.

“I've got brothers. I've seen my pop. What do I care about your brother's little stupid peee-nis.”

I felt better, until she said, “I'm going to let him pay me fifty cents and see what he gets.”

She started coming around our trailer when Kermit was there. She'd see the two boys coming in with their bloody rabbits and come over and act like it was wonderful, what they'd done. I couldn't believe how she was acting. I couldn't believe he fell for it.

Then one day she brought over beer, while my parents were both gone, and the three of us got a little woozy. She stretched and yawned, so that her belly showed, and she said, “Cold beer makes me want to go outside and get hot again so I can drink some more.” She looked at Kermit. “Want to?”

There was just a second of silence, and then they were gone. I felt queasy and apprehensive. I sat there, worrying about what Kermit would do to Natty, or what Natty would do to Kermit—I bolted out of the trailer and ran back towards the Chevy. I could hear Natty laughing like the devil and yelling at me, “Abileeeeen!” I got to the car just in time to catch a wad of clothes flying through the window of the car. Kermit's pants. Kermit made a barking sound and started cursing, but Natty was already out of the car. Her blouse was all undone; I could see how her chest smoothed out over those two little bumps, white and soft like the flesh of a spring flower that only lasts a single morning. We ran as fast as we could to her trailer. Natty was laughing so hard she said it was giving her a stitch. We ran past her mother, who looked up and said, “What's going on?” and buried our giggles in towels, sitting on the floor of the bathroom. “It wasn't a worm,” Natty said. “It stood up and begged.” I was mortified.

Natty saw my misery and loved it. “I told him he could undo his pants if he'd put his hand inside mine. He was shaking like a leaf!”

“Did you touch him?”

“Sure. Silky. Soft.”

I had to know. “Did you kiss it?”

She curled her hand into a loose fist, thumb stuck up. She raised her hand up to her face and bent over a little so that she could place her pouting mouth at the tip of her thumb. “Only a little, like this,” she said, and her little tongue darted out and touched the top of her thumb. I ached as if I'd fallen off a step. “Where did you learn that!” I asked.

“From my daddy.” She put her arms out and put her hands on mine. “Didn't anybody ever touch you there?” she said. I couldn't say anything. “You don't know!” she cried. She ran her hands down my sides and stopped at my waist like I was a dancer ready to leap. “Come closer,” she said. “I'll show you.”

Kermit never said anything. Ten days later the Moosters were gone. They were going out farther west towards El Paso. I watched them load up. Mrs. Mooster had thrown away a stack of magazines in the trash barrel by the laundry shed; I dug them out and hid them behind the vinyl couch at home. My mother found them and made me take them back. Then it was time for school again, when all the best parts of the day are spent on buses and sitting like a board at school learning nothing new and taking all day at it.

Maybe it was early to learn this about sex, but at least after that I wouldn't be as surprised: it could be fun, it could be funny, and it could be used to put you in your place. I didn't know about concepts like fate, but I did sense that my life was laid out from that summer forward. I couldn't get out of the way if I didn't see it coming.

My dad found a job driving a cement truck for a driller, and we moved to a small city. There were two high schools (not counting the one for colored kids), two pools in parks like oases, a shopping center and a library. We rented a square squat peeling house in a treeless part of town, and my mother found a job as a waitress. Right after that, Bud went to Lubbock. In a few weeks it was as if he'd never been there. Lenore sagged from the shoulders. She worked a split-shift, serving laborers who lived alone, and old people. She stopped cooking or cleaning. We didn't make any effort to pretend we were a family. I thought of my dad like an old movie: there he was, far out on a ribbon of road, chewing on a toothpick and leaving everything behind.