Karen G. Berry - Mayhem 01 - Love and Mayhem (20 page)

She glanced over to her open classroom door. A young man with terrible posture leaned in the entrance as if he were holding up the doorframe, arms crossed, chewing something and watching her. There was something both contemptuous and beseeching in his doomed, beautiful face. What a fine street-corner pimp he would have made in Little Rock, she thought. “Angus, may I remind you that you are not supposed to be on school grounds unless you’re enrolled.”

“I came to see if you’ll get some school work around for Bonnie.”

“I was planning to bring it up there this evening.”

“My ma says for me to get it. She don’t want no one up there. Not right now.”

“Angus, the whole
point
. . .”

“I know, Miz Strange. I know.” He walked over to her desk and lay something on the papers there. The growl of his voice lowered to a whisper. “Bonnie told me to give this to you to keep.” Melveena looked down. The lipstick. She’d bought it for Bonnie on their secret trip to Modesto. Of course, the Bone Pile women were forbidden to use cosmetics.

They’d made a day of it. A doctor’s appointment, a lunch at McDonald’s (Bonnie’s choice), and a trip to a department store. Bonnie looked wide-eyed at the escalators, the glamorous salespeople, the endless choices. They’d gone to the makeup counter to be helped by a perpetually startled woman in a navy smock.
Your little girl wants her first lipstick?
she’d purred to Melveena, who had just smiled back in that carefully blank manner she used to discourage the overly friendly advances of people in the service industry.

The salesclerk had carefully filled in Bonnie’s cupid mouth. The child was already so startlingly beautiful that reddening her lips was an obscenity. Melveena and the clerk stood back and took Bonnie in: her tiny frame, her shockingly white skin, her unsettlingly wide-open eyes, her plump, painted lips. The salesclerk had shivered.

Such a little thing. “I’ll keep it for her,” she whispered, and let the tube fall from her hand into her desk. The strong bones of her jaw set like statuary. “Angus? I need a fill. Come pump me some gas, will you?”

“Sure thing, Miz Strange.”

She snatched up her handbag and they left the classroom, picking their way through the potholes and gravel, back to her car. He let her walk ahead, but not because he had manners. The Bone Pile men had no manners.

No, decided Melveena. That young man was just enjoying the view.

THEY NEARED THE
unnamed store, the only business in Bone Pile, with its sign that posted the correct price for a pack of cigarettes and the incorrect price for a watered-down gallon of gasoline. The place didn’t even have a door because as the owner told her once when she stopped for gas, “We’re opened fer bidnis 24/7, Ma’am. No point to a door if you never close it.”

While he pumped, she closed her eyes and inhaled the gas fumes. It was a secret addiction, letting those fumes fill her pert nose until she was dizzy. “Miz Melveena? You’re full.” She gave him a hundred. When he emerged with whatever he’d decided to give her of the change, he climbed in beside her.

It didn’t take long to leave the town behind, because there wasn’t much of a town to leave. The car bounced on bad roads. As she drove, he snuck a careful look at her thighs, then aimed a stream of tobacco juice out the window. Melveena drummed her nails on the wheel. “Angus, I plan to stop this vehicle momentarily, and when I do, I want you to empty your mouth of that vile substance.”

“Huh?”

She pulled over and slammed on the brakes, reached across him and opened the door. “Lose the chew or get out.”

Red-faced, he spat, and dug with his dirty fingers to get the rest from the recesses of his gums, wiping his hands on his bibs. Melveena shuddered and wove her way uphill. She bit her tongue as the car fell into a particularly cavernous rut. “That one’s deeper than Fossetta Sweet’s…” Angus trailed off, remembering to whom he was speaking.

She cleared her throat. “Do you have any personal knowledge of the particular area you just mentioned, Angus?”

“No Miz Melveena, I don’t.”

“Does, in fact, any young man from Bone Pile have any geodetic data on Miss Sweet?”

“No Ma’am.”

“I thought not. I suggest you find another metaphor for depth, young man.” He ducked his head. The bad road had her almost wishing the Caddy were in the shop. If it were, she’d be beating the undercarriage of a borrowed vehicle to pieces.

She thought about the community they were approaching. Bone Pile men had fast trucks, polished boots and long arrest records. Bone Pile women had sharp tongues, lined faces, high voices, bare feet, and too many kids. If there was driving to be done, the men did that. If there was work to be done, the women did it. And the men liked it that way. They might spend some time in the military, hitch to Nashville or Austin to try their luck at the music business. But no matter how far the men roamed, no matter how much music or dope or how many women they found available for the taking out there in the wide world, they always came back to Bone Pile. The women never left. They stayed home and made babies, a batch of boys one year, a batch of girls the next, and worked their lean bodies into premature graves.

It was a hard life, and the people who lived it were hard, too. But how beautiful they were, she thought with a pang. And looked at the boy beside her.

“Hey, there’s a mashed coyote!” Angus called. “Can I pick it up?”

Melveena saw the yellow-grey fur of the corpse and shuddered. “Heavens no, Angus.”

“Looked like the hide was in good shape,” he muttered. “Could sell that fur.”

They climbed higher, nearer to where the Bone Pilers congregated in clan groups, the MacGillicuttys, the MacIvers, the MacInnises, the occasional Dunnery. They were from nowhere, and bless their hearts, they were going nowhere, too. Bone Pile was a place with no industry, no farms, no plants, no attractions. All it produced, anymore, was children. But oh, thought Melveena, what children they are.

Bone Pile babies were raised in a gentle climate of benign neglect, in households full of mothers and aunts, fathers and uncles, grandparents, siblings and cousins. The babies roamed naked and dusty, chubby on WIC allotments and the love of a shifting mob of relatives.

Those fat babies grew into graceful boys and girls. There was something not quite human about them. Part of it was the shocking whiteness of the Bone Pile complexion, a pallor the California desert sun couldn’t touch. Unearthly, Melveena thought. But those elfin children turned into teenagers who had to be bussed into Ochre Water from the ninth grade on.

The Ochre Water high school administration dreaded the yearly infusion of Bone Pile children. The girls never cut their hair and refused to wear shoes, even while running track. They didn’t drink or smoke, and they were not allowed to run around with boys from town. The Bone Pile boys were the trouble; foul-mouthed and skinny and prone to rolling their pickups, sending the town girls from Ochre Water out their bedroom windows for wild nights of blown-out tires, broken hymens and broken hearts.

Melveena and her colleague in the tiny Bone Pile school fought a losing battle to keep the grade school open and prepare these wild creatures for the rigors of town. Most of the Bone Pile kids dropped out within a year or two, anyway. Like this young man riding beside me, thought Melveena. He’s a dropout. And he might not be an adult, but he’s a man. A Bone Pile man.

And today, she thought, they haven’t allowed a single girl child to come to school. She pulled up hard, looking at the outlandish rigging of a Bone Pile village. “How is a woman in heels expected to maneuver all this?” she muttered.

Angus mumbled and got out fast. He was wise to do that. As distasteful as she found the habit, Melveena Strange felt angry enough to spit.

THE BONE PILE
settlement rose on stolen scaffolding over upended railroad cars. Ladders and poles connected the individual dwellings, a complicated aviary made of tiny vintage travel trailers, fifth wheels, suspended camper tops and the occasional single wide. In places, the thing was four stories tall. It all looked as unlikely as a tree house, and ten times more complex.

“How do they do this?” She’d asked before, and knew the answer was a combination of determination, block and tackle, and sheer sinew. But every time she saw the place, she shook her head in awe.

It was all anchored with pit cars, the lowest and lowliest of the available dwellings, though an ingenious man sick of living under his mother’s thumb could convert one into more than respectable bachelor quarters with oil drum heat, bunks secured by chains, electricity stolen via miles of electrical cable hijacked from unguarded construction sites in Ochre Water. Angus lived in one such domicile. He’d shown it to Melveena proudly six months previously, explaining, “I just piss out the side door.”

Melveena put on a pair of leather work gloves. “To guard my manicure,” she explained, and began her clamber in grand style, impeccable in her navy shantung, crocodile heels and handbag, grateful for strong arms and a history of climbing trees at her family reunions. As she climbed, she rapped a gloved fist at metal doors and gathered up girl children like a hen calling her chicks. She sat at one pull-down table after another, flinching from the harsh, trilling, excitable motherly voices that rose and swooped like an avian danger call. She sipped cup after cup of perked coffee, nibbled a piece of homemade bread sliced off noisily with an electric knife, tasted a spoonful of a simmering Crockpot stew that she feared was made with prairie dog. The fruits of electricity had to be respectfully sampled.

Every woman in Bone Pile had at least one modern convenience, but generally only one. She might have an electric can opener, and boil her baby’s diapers in an iron pot. She might have a Dustbuster and waxed paper over her windows. What could a woman who cooked on a wood-burning parlor stove want with an electric knife? But the women of Bone Pile traded their rare electrical appliances back and forth in a round robin of trailing extension cords.

Climbing the ladders in her best heels, admiring the appliances, reassuring the mothers, gathering up the girls, it had all been exhausting. But it was Bonnie’s mother, Ellie MacIver, who exhausted Melveena the most.

Ellie MacIver, Melveena reminded herself, was the mother of Angus, sixteen, and Bonnie, fourteen. Ellie MacIver was just barely thirty years old. She took Melveena back to a quiet camper top that was serving as an addition to her family’s modest trailer. A girl who looked all of twelve years old lay there in the bed space that was meant to fit over the cab of a pickup truck. Melveena knelt down, stroked her forehead. In a community of beautiful little girls, Bonnie MacIver shone with a fierce, feverish beauty that verged on the consumptive. Her glowing eyes demanded information. “Do you still have my lipstick?” she whispered.

“I’ll keep it for you, sweetheart. But we could always get you another.”

“I want it back once I get done with this thing.” Bonnie grabbed Melveena’s hand and placed it on her belly, where Melveena could feel the pitch and roll of life. Bonnie spoke in the sweet, stirring tones of a Bone Pile girl, a musical outpouring of passion and pain. “I want to give it away. I don’t want it. I want to give it away and leave here. Can you help me?”

Her mother opened her throat to protest in tones of distress that were more song than speech.

Melveena was unable to get Bonnie free from that camper. But there were other girls to consider. It took many words, many promises, but Melveena eventually drove back down those rutted roads with her own twelve students in Grandma’s Cadillac. Bonnie remained up in the hills with her mother.

Melveena drove as fast as she dared, glancing now and then in the rearview to check on her precious cargo. They filled the seats, the floorboards; they seemed to float above the car without holding on. There was no need to worry. The children, accustomed to riding in the backs of trucks, had no trouble at all with an open convertible.

Flashing lights interrupted her reverie. Melveena pulled to the shoulder, the smallest of ladylike curses escaping her lips. The presence of the law struck every Bone Pile girl into silence. They sat in her car like a group of dusty graveyard angels.