In An Arid Land (26 page)

Roland's look was all shock and already his eyes were apologizing, and frightened too. Mother said, "Oh, no," and she was over me and out the door before anybody else could act. All four of the kittens were dead, three crushed by the tires and one caught in the fan belt, the little bodies all bloody and twisted but perfectly calm. Father sent me inside to get shoe boxes.

He said, "Our closet," meaning his and Mother's. "Jancy, you go help him. Go! Quickly."

In the back of the closet, under the old smell of their old clothes, we found plenty of shoe boxes. I had known they were there, knew all along, knew that Mother had saved them for something just like this. Father was waiting for us at the door. "Stay here," he said. He took the boxes and went off behind the garage. It was just a minute before he emerged and waved to us to come.

Roland worked the shovel there by Mother's compost pile. Mother was holding his suit coat over her arm. On the ground sat the four boxes two from Thom McAn, one from Penny's and one just plain. Then Father put the boxes in the hole that Roland had dug and Roland covered them with dirt and Mother hugged us to her, Jancy and me, and we all prayed. I peeked and saw Tiger sitting by herself out in the yard just licking her paws like this had nothing to do with her.

So we got in the car again, everybody quiet as midnight, and we set out again for church, even though we were quite late. About halfway, on the road by the railroad tracks, Roland stopped the car, just as Father had done. His face looked horrible, confused and fearful and sad. He said, "I've got to think. Y'all go on," and with that he was out the door. Father yelled to him to wait, to come back, but Mother said to let him go, and he did.

We had missed Sunday school and Brother Hobson was already well under way with his sermon, so half the congregation of maybe 500 people glanced over their shoulders at us when we slipped in and sat down under the balcony. It was about fifteen minutes later before Roland appeared. His shirt was unbuttoned and his tie was down and he looked like he had run all the way. He hurried up the side aisle to the pew where he and Mary always sat, and right off they started whispering, Roland with his arm around her on the pew-back. Mary's head would turn so her ear was to his mouth and then her head would turn so her mouth was to his ear, and then Mother and Father started whispering back and forth above Jancy and me. Each time they said something they would slide a little closer together and their hips would push Jancy and me along with them until I was almost sitting on Jancy's lap.

This went on till Roland and Mary got up and walked out, holding hands and going quickly, as if what they had to say to each other was too important for whispers. I think everybody in the church watched them leave and old Brother Hobson paused in his sermon as if he'd lost his place, and even he watched until the door to the foyer closed behind Roland and Mary.

Then the uproar became a rage.

It was at the end of the sermon. We were all standing and singing that hymn about how softly and tenderly Jesus calls us, and there was Brother Jones, our song leader, up in the pulpit now and waving his hand, his mouth round and gleeful. And there was Brother Hobson on the steps in front of the pulpit with his Bible raised high, calling the sinners down front to confess in prayer before us all, and his voice rang loud and beseeching above our singing. It wasn't going too well for old Brother Hobson as nobody had taken the step, and we were singing extra verses of the hymn just in case somebody who needed to was hesitating. Everybody was glancing around as they sang to see who might do it. And that's when they did it.

Mary came first, walking down the center aisle with tears rolling from her eyes and looking directly at Brother Hobson, who was looking directly at her, too, with a face that showed surprise as if she were the last person in creation he expected to see. We had reached the end of the hymn for about the third or fourth time and so Brother Hobson turned and nodded to Brother Jones and Brother Jones threw up his hand again and set us off singing yet another verse. Brother Hobson came down from the steps and took Mary's hand and smiled at her warmly and knowingly and directed her to a seat on the front pew and then he stepped away, gazing hopefully up the center aisle again.

So Roland came second. Only he came quickly as if he wanted to catch up with Mary, or get away from something. Now none of us had ever gone down front before, what with Father a deacon and all. And I could feel heat all through my body, knowing how people would act toward us in the future, how they would smile at us wretchedly as if we were sick, the same way Mother and Father always smiled at people who'd confessed. Father said, "Roland, no!" and he started toward the aisle as if he wanted to grab Roland and bring him back. But Mother reached out for him, held him there, and they looked at each other with faces of ruin.

Brother Hobson took Roland's hand and sat him down next to Mary and then he looked up the aisle one more time just in case there was anybody left. Mother and Father went to whispering again till the singing quit and we sat down with everybody coughing and shuffling and arranging themselves, and Father's eyes were very grave. Jancy said, "What are they doing, Mama?" but Mother just shook her head.

Brother Hobson talked then about the wondrous nature of repentance and how God loves us all and forgives us all no matter what, and then we prayed for the sinners, who weren't sinners at all: they were Roland and Mary. And we sang another song and prayed again and then finally it was over and we started filing out, all the brothers and sisters smiling and chattering and shaking hands as if nothing in the world had happened.

But something had happened, at least to us, and Father couldn't get out of there fast enough. He took us straight to the car and then went off in search of Roland. He came back in just a few minutes looking wretched and saying he couldn't find Roland and that we were leaving without him. Which we did.

Roland was waiting for us at home. He explained that Freddy Mathews had driven him in his car. Father said, "I hope you know what you've done to us," and there was lots of low-voice talking again. Jancy and I were sent outside, of course. We looked all over the garage and the yard but couldn't find Tiger anywhere and we never saw her again after that day.

The sun had dried out the patch of ground where the kittens were buried behind the garage. Jancy knelt and smoothed out the little balls of dried dirt on top as if she were sweeping the floor with her hand and then she stuck four sticks in the ground like crosses. We just stood there for a while looking at the balls of dried dirt and the sticks and I imagined the little kitten bodies in their shoe boxes calm and peaceful but gone forever and forever changed. Jancy said, "Poor Roland but why Mary?" and this got me to thinking and then to praying the way Mother had taught us, as I knew I would never have the courage to go down front and confess, and I didn't know any better then.

"Oh, Lord," I said. "Please forgive me for the blue jay I killed with my BB gun and please forgive me for the garter snake I sliced in two with the hoe last week and please forgive me for the toad I smashed with the rock that time down in the creek . . . ."

But that was all I could remember of the killing I had done in my life, and besides Mother was calling us in for lunch.

I

What I'm about to tell took place near the little town of Alpine, Texas, when I was fresh out of the service and had some money in my pockets, the first real sum of money I'd ever come across, though looking back I see it was just a pittance in an expensive world, and I had what I thought then was a lot of time ahead of me. The thing that happened shouldn't have happened and I wish that it never did. But there's no denying it and in a way I've been on the lam because of it ever since.

I'll call myself John, as good a name as any, and I should make it clear that I've changed quite a bit over the years. I have a wife now and two children, plus my sister's girl to help out, and I own a business that's done pretty well by us these past few years. We live on a piece of land outside the town of Huntsville, Texas, with enough acreage to graze a few cows and to keep our two horses. And we have friends there who know nothing about me except that I give money to the local Democrats, and take my kids to church on Sundays, and help out my neighbors when I can. This is the way a man should live, the sort of life that keeps you out of trouble. It's a happier life than others.

Of course that's not easy to know when you're twenty-one and full of the stuff the Marine Corps pumps into you the stuff time has not yet had the opportunity to pump out again. I'm talking now of 1974 when the war was slowing down and Nixon had been found out, people still wore bell-bottom jeans, and possession of even a few marijuana seeds was a thirty-year crime in Texas.

I received my discharge the Monday after Halloween at the base in California and I took a bus to Alpine to spend some time with my big sister Marie and her little girl Crissy. Our folks were long since dead, so these two were all the family I had and I guess I was wanting to make that kind of contact again. I was also looking forward to some good times at some bars that weren't full of guys wearing khaki or olive drab, and I knew that Marie's husband I'll call him David Smith I knew David could be counted on to point these out. I say husband, but far as I know there was no marriage license on file in any courthouse anywhere. From what I could tell in her letters they had lived together long enough and cared enough about each other that one day they simply started calling themselves married. He was "Daddy" to little Crissy, whose natural father had died in a copter crash on a rig in the Gulf before she was even born. This was back when I was a freshman in high school, after Marie had left home and school at seventeen and taken up with a pretty rough crowd of oil-field people and fliers down in Corpus Christi. In some regards David wasn't much different from those people but at least he was kind to them and helped provide for them when he could.

I had met David only once, when I was on leave in Houston just after boot camp for me and before they moved to Alpine hoping the high-desert air might help little Crissy's bad lungs and he had kept me drunk and stoned for the better part of a week before putting me on a flight back to San Diego. David had been to college and he'd been in the war too, long before my time, as a pilot of light observation planes. But he got into some kind of trouble with his higher-ups. There was a court martial involved, a bit of prison time, some nasty business with a rotten bed sheet and a light fixture that wouldn't hold his weight, and frightful nightmares plagued him the rest of his life. This is all Marie ever told me about it, and I could see how he and the military would not get along. Still, to hear Marie talk, he could fly a plane as if he'd been born with a control stick in his hand. But then pilots and aircraft had always turned Marie's head. She liked to ride low and fast, all the while swearing that what she really wanted was "the chance to own my own place and to raise my own tomatoes." At least that's what she talked about in her letters back then and for all I know she's searching for it to this day. A sadness comes over me whenever I think of her.

I remember the morning I arrived in Alpine as one of the best of my life. The bus ride had been an all-nighter and I hadn't slept for thinking about what was up ahead. So I was awake for the sunrise, which is quite a sight in West Texas and quite a feeling too, what with the nights so black and deep that you have to wonder if daylight will ever come again.

On our way south from the interstate we had passed by the Davis Mountains where my old Dad used to take me camping in the woods near the observatory we lived in Odessa then, one of several oil towns I knew pretty well by the time I was twelve and we settled in Houston and those mountains were perhaps my favorite place in the world. A mass of swirling purple clouds hung low on the peaks and I imagined the storm that was forming up there and I wanted to be in it, sleeping in a tent or just driving a pickup with the wipers slapping across the windshield. This was the feeling I had for the mountains. But more than all that I was a civilian again, thinking civilian thoughts for the first time in three years, and when I stepped off that bus it was like being in a new country.

Marie was waiting for me at the depot, all kisses and hugs. She was thin as a cedar stay and her hair had gone from blonde to that muddy color blondes go. She was still smoking cigarettes like they were the breath of life itself. Right off I noticed the odor of food all over her, and when I told her she smelled like she'd just stepped out of the kitchen, she said, "Well, I have. I'm working these days in the cafeteria over at the college. In fact, I got to hustle you home and get on back to work."

In the truck she told me that Crissy was in school and David was at the house. "He's real nervous about seeing you," she said. "It's some kind of business deal. He says soldier boys always get out with a load of cash and he wants to talk you out of some of yours. For the good of us all, he says."