Karen G. Berry - Mayhem 01 - Love and Mayhem (32 page)

He’d wanted to cry because she was so beautiful.

He’d stumbled blind back down the hall, burst out of the screen door, staggered across the street and looked back at his home. The air had churned around him, gathering and grey. He’d looked at his wife’s mailbox, at the chicks and hens and roosters painted on the galvanized metal, that mailbox trying so hard to be cheerful in front of that trailer. The paper was there. It was almost a new day. He’d stood in the carport across Sweetly Dreaming Lane, and looked at the two trailers, one holding everything he’d ever had, the other holding all he’d ever wanted.

He burned, groaned, ground his teeth.

The door to the LaCour doublewide opened, and his lawfully wedded wife had stepped out in the grey morning light in her leopard print robe. She had gone to the mailbox. Paper in hand, she’d spun on a slippered heel and tripped back up the clean white gravel walkway, and decisively slammed the door behind her.

Rhondalee.

She’d walked with those careful steps he’d always admired. A head-tossing, polished, tight woman, a woman with dreams, hopes, standards. A woman with drive. He had seen the Rhondalee of thirty-plus years ago transposed on that sharp little figure.

She was blonde back then, with a flirty arch to her eyebrows, sheer stockings, tight sweaters, tiny high heels tripping around the dirt grounds without a stumble. Six years older than Memphis, nine years older than Tender, Rhondalee Hempel smelled of experience, something both the LaCour boys lacked. When he was seventeen years old, she cast her small green eyes across him on the stage and he felt his identity pull into wholeness for the very first time. All the different things Tender had been, a child of the reservation, a student of the boarding school, a stolen son, an indebted brother, a grudging Catholic, a slapdash Baptist. Too many selves, too pulled apart. But when he saw her, he’d become the man who wanted Rhondalee.

But so had Memphis.

It had taken a year for her to make up her mind. He remembered that time with shame, the blood in his eyes, the hammering of his heart, that twisting on the hook she put him through while she decided which of the brothers she would marry. There were times when they came to blows. Both of the LaCours honestly felt that it was a matter of life and death, having her.

Their star was rising on the Gospel circuit. Their songs took on an edgy harshness that made the young girls flock to the stage, something more immediate than Jesus on their minds. Their mother had died, and they’d brought themselves home to Rosebud, not even speaking to one another. They’d stood guard at their mother’s funeral, making sure that her last wishes were honored, that no priests would be allowed to speak at her graveside, desecrating her farewell with their child-stealing, guilt-ridden ways. They’d gone back out on the circuit, Rhondalee managing to be in every town, at every revival, and no one knew what inspired the quavering pain in their voices; the love of God, the loss of their mother, or the desire for that little blonde who couldn’t make up her mind.

When she chose Tender, they dissolved the duo and went their separate ways.

Some events are irremediable. So is time. Time had had its way with Rhondalee, so much more than her husband ever had. And yet, she was still in there, he knew it. But he no longer cared. He no longer wanted her. He no longer loved her. And he no longer knew who he was.

Tender had felt it shaking him down to the soles of his bare feet. He felt like he was flying into pieces. And some of them flew this way, and some flew the other. What bound him together was loosened, and as the sun rose in earnest, Tender shook like a cottonwood in a windstorm. He turned to face the grey. He’d made his way out to the desert by instinct.

The sun beat him like a priest. Tender rolled himself tighter in his blanket to stop the shaking.

SWEET FOSSETTA WAS
taking a bath in the fiberglass tub of her tiny bathroom. She floated, her soft curves and sweet dimples emolliated. Her skin glowed from the heat of the water. Every part of her was ready for entry.

She rose from the water, streaming like a newly born Venus, and tracked down the hall to her room. A satin slip settled over her curves, pale pink charmeuse sprigged with nosegays, the bias cut skimming every soft swell. She brushed her impossible hair, nosed her feet into a pair of run-down moccasins and walked herself up to the Blue Moon Tap Room.

Her entry caused a stir. She raised her hand for a Smith and Kerns and three men offered to pay for it before Beau could set it on the bar. She moved to a table in her slipshod, lackadaisical way. The eyes of twenty men followed the sweet shift of all that softness. There was a collective exhalation, a tender tone played on the harmonium of masculine lust. She took a seat and looked around with an absent smile. She was waiting. She was used to waiting.

She wasn’t waiting for just any man.

HE’D BEEN GONE
all day, taking pictures. She was sitting in the cab, messing with his guitar. She’d retuned the thing so it sounded right, when he climbed in with all his camera cases and began to babble.

“I have my senior thesis DONE, Raven. I’m going to graduate after all. I did a year’s worth of work in a week. A WEEK!”

“How can you do a year’s worth of work in one week?” She felt ornery and tired and worn out, like she’d been the one out in the sun without a hat. “It seems to me that a year’s worth of work is however much work you can accomplish in three hundred and sixty-five days. And besides, is taking pictures work?”

His mood immediately soured. “I feel like you don’t respect what I do.”

“What you
do?
”

“Photography.”

“Well, what’s the deal? I mean, all the stuff you take pictures of is already there, right? It’s not like you make anything.”

He’d sounded a little huffy when he replied. “I think that’s a reductive way to look at it.”

“Whatever reductive means.”

“There’s more to it than just recording. There’s an element of creation in photography. It imparts the photographer’s vision.”

She shook her head. “Why look at someone else’s vision? Why not get out there and look at it for yourself?”

“Well, what about places you can’t get to? Like Europe, or a war zone?”

She’d thought for a minute. “Looking at a picture of it and thinking you seen it is like going to Vegas and thinking you seen Paris.”

“You sound like Plato, dismissing the arts as mimetic.”

She snorted. “I just bet I do.”

He’d ignored her point and changed the subject. “I hate Las Vegas. It’s a cancer on the landscape. It should be leveled. Just wiped out.”

She gave him one of those looks. “I took Annie to Vegas last year for a treat. We went to some shows, rode the rides. We hung out in the casinos all night. She brought me luck at cards. We spent a night camping in the canyon. I let her play the slots on the sly at a drugstore and she won three hundred dollars. She brought home a whole stack of those little cards they give away on the corners. Those cards with naked ladies on them, the ones with stars over their privates.”

“I can’t believe you took your daughter to that cesspool.”

“Well, I did. I know it’s not Europe. I know that. But Annie likes places like that. She doesn’t mind smoke, and she doesn’t mind drunks. And she likes the music. You know, every little lounge in Vegas has a stage the size of a tabletop, and on that stage, some fool is singing his heart out. Annie loves that. She loves any kind of live music. I’ve always taken her to hear the local bands whenever I was home. She was the only kid to go to Head Start with a hand stamp.”

She finished this little speech and looked at him with narrowed eyes, daring him to respond.

He sat there blinking. “Why the hell are you so pissed at me?”

She knew the answer to that one would take up what little time they had left. She climbed out and went back to the sleeper. She wanted to be alone.

Of course, after a few minutes of pouting, he came back there, too. He stepped over her as he stashed his gear. He bumped his head. “Ouch.” She ignored him. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say that about Plato, especially to an artist.”

She rolled her eyes.

“Anyway, I think the ozone depletion is really bad, out here. I’m sun-stupid. I should have worn a hat.” He lay down beside her. They lay in silence. “I feel like you’re mad at me.” He felt panicky, saying it, panicky and needy. “Are you mad at me?”

“Nope.”

“Are you sure?”

“Do I ever say anything I don’t mean?”

That shut him up for a little while. But just a little while. He lay his hand so lightly on her breast. She knocked it away.

“I think we should talk this through. I think we need to talk.”

“I need to take a nap.”

“No, I really think we need to talk.”

“About what? Plato?”

“What do you want out of life, Raven?”

She wanted to be left alone. “I guess just to live it.”

“Just live it? That’s enough?”

“Well, sure.”

And he found, that rather than exasperation, he felt envy. He thought about the hours of introspection, self-doubt, the mental tail-chasing of trying to understand himself and what he was doing. “How do you do that? How do you just live without thinking about it all the time?”

“Hm.” She had her hat over her eyes. “I guess what I do is put it in gear and drive it down the road.”

“Don’t you want to do something important?”

“What’s important?”

“Well, I think an artist with a unique vision is important.”

“Important to who? Artists are like weeds. They’re always springing up. They don’t matter any more than any other person.”

“I can’t believe you were an artist and you talk like that.”

“I was never an artist. I was a performer.” She sounded so flat. “I was like the whale at Seaworld or those idiots wearing the horse and knight suits at the Excalibur casino.”

He thought of his own private fantasies. Shows, galleries, the shine of admiring eyes on his work, sophisticated words of praise from lips poised over paper cups of dry white wine. “But you had an audience.”

“Playing music is just like trucking, that way. Everybody loves you if you just show up on time.” And she sat up cross-legged. Her eyes were hard, remote, looking past him to a horizon he couldn’t see. “When I was on the circuit as a kid, there was only one part of it I liked besides playing my guitar. That was being on the road. Watching the miles streak by, the radio tuned to those local stations where they have a remote from the county fair, hearing about what was important in that area. Playing cards all night with the boys. Falling asleep in the bus to wake up in a new place. Being on the move. That’s what I loved. The movement and the music. That’s why I’m a trucker. I can listen to music and keep moving and I don’t have to stand up and sing about Jesus to do it.”

“Well, I think you really weren’t making your own choices, then. I think it could be different, now, Raven. I’ve heard you. I think you have a gift.”

She shook her head. “You think too much.”

He lay there blinking.

THIS, SHE REALIZED,
was getting all out of hand. This whole thing was getting to be just the way she hated for anything to be. Complicated. Raven, who could not abide complicated, rose up and got the hell out of there.