Lost Highways (A Valentine Novel) (2 page)

Then one morning barely four weeks after Mama had left them, Rainey went over and found widowed Mildred Covington sitting with her daddy, and words were pouring out of his plumping up body. It was like with every breath he took to speak, his body filled a little more.

Five weeks after Mama died, Freddy broke off with the girlfriend no one was supposed to know about and took up taking Helen to the Main Street Café for breakfast each morning and sitting beside her on the pew of the Southern Baptist Church each Sunday.

Charlene started looking in the mirror and crying because she was turning forty-five, and then she began to pester Joey when he came in from work, dragging him into the bedroom in a desperate attempt to hold the years at bay by trying for a fourth baby.

Rainey looked into the mirror, too, playing with all the Mary Kay, and she saw a woman who was almost thirty-five, twice divorced, had lost the only child she had ever conceived, and
was living in a forty-year-old run-down farm cottage behind her sister’s house. Gazing back at her from every plate glass store window she passed was a lost woman who did not know who she really was, nor where she belonged.

A few false starts will make you stronger, her mother had told her a number of times.

“How many of those, Mama? How many mistakes and wasted years? What if I never get it right?”

Her mother was not there anymore to give the perfect answers.

Rainey did as much crying as Charlene, but there was only her own pillow to soak up the tears.

After about a week of crying, she got out and washed and waxed her mother’s legacy of the truck and trailer. She very carefully waxed a second time around the bumper stickers, and then she loaded up Mama’s eighteen-year-old mare and took off to race barrels. It was the only action she could think to take.

She and Mama had raced barrels together the entire time she was in high school and until she’d gone off to college, where she had met and married Robert, who had considered any horse activity other than the Kentucky Derby the preoccupation of the lower classes. From that time on, she never really got into the sport again. She guessed she’d stayed too busy trying to earn a living and deal with her second husband, Monte. Later she guessed she’d just been too busy dealing with regrets.

Thinking back in the despondent manner one always falls into after a loved one dies, Rainey felt so many regrets and questions. Racing barrels gave her something to do in which she could lose her grief and confusion, and at the same time connect to her mother. Also, racing barrels gave her somewhere to drive
to
and
away from
home. Something to make her forget the pain of lost years behind, the confusion of present life, and the fright of the uncertainties in life ahead.

She got so caught up in this endeavor that she finally quit her job at Blaine’s Drugstore and took off to travel the rodeo circuit for the remaining weeks of summer.

“Just where are you goin’ with this, Little Bit?”

Her daddy always called her “Little Bit.” Directly on quitting her job, she had driven over to tell him her intentions. She had found him watering her mother’s fragrant old garden roses.

“I don’t know, Daddy,” she said, her voice coming hoarse and stammering. “I guess I just need to get away…you know, have time to myself to sort things out. And I like racing. I want to do somethin’ I like.”

Daddy nodded. He never had much of an expression, and he didn’t now. Disappointment sent her spirit slipping out her toes.

He asked her to pull more hose for him, and she did that, then she went in to check his refrigerator, thinking that she might need to go grocery shopping for him before she took off. The refrigerator was full of fruit salad and cottage cheese and skim milk and a plate of shredded barbequed roast. She figured it was Mildred Covington’s work.

Staring at all the shiny plastic-wrapped dishes, she felt a sad sense of fading away, turning invisible.

Daddy came in and said he had a couple of things for her. He went upstairs and came back with two cardboard boxes.

He said, “Since you’re goin’ travelin’, you can take this one over to your Aunt Lillabel in Ardmore. It’s the silver brush and comb from your mama’s dresser. She always said Lillabel should have it, and this one is the mystery books your mama had meant to send to your cousin Rowan down in Waco. You get by both those places. Like as not there’ll be rodeoin’ somewhere around them.”

He looked at her for a moment before breaking the gaze. She knew he was trying to give her places to go to be with people
she knew. Between them, her mother and father had an enormous family scattered all over Oklahoma and Texas.

As she started to leave, her father cleared his throat and said, “Rainey, don’t you worry about not knowin’ where you’re goin’. I imagine you’ll know when you get there.”

Greatly surprised, she looked up to see him again averting his gaze and taking out his handkerchief to mop his face.

“Thanks, Daddy,” she said. Very hesitantly, she dared kiss his cheek, closing her eyes and sucking in the dear, familiar scent of him, of Old Spice and tobacco and earth.

He grabbed her hard then, about startling her socks off. He crushed her against his chest, smashing the cigarette pack in his pocket and burying her nose into his salty neck. For a moment he held her tight, and she clung to him.

Then he let go and turned away. Her vision blurred and her throat nearly swelled shut, Rainey watched him walk out the back door, stiff and bent, weighed down by such a cloud of sorrow.

“Have you lost your
mind?
” Charlene wailed.

Rainey must have interrupted her sister and Joey when she had called to announce her leaving, because Charlene was clutching around her what appeared to be one of Joey’s denim shirts, and it could have been all she had on. This shocked Rainey; Charlene had always been the one to hold tight to decorum.

She said, “I guess I have, but I think that I did it a long time ago,” and turned to throw her bags in the back of the truck. She didn’t want Charlene to see her tears, or her shock. Keeping her face averted, she slipped in behind the wheel, while Charlene hollered through the window.

“Oh, Rainey, would you just quit bein’ so dramatic? What
are you gonna live on? You ain’t good enough at barrels to earn any kind of money, and eight hundred dollars a month sure hasn’t made you independently wealthy, you know.”

“Lulu and I made a hundred dollars last weekend.”

She didn’t like Charlene having the idea that she and Lulu were the bottom of the barrel, so to speak. Maybe they weren’t about to take the finals by storm, but they had begun to place about every other go.

“Oh, that’s gonna pay for a day’s fuel and meals and motel,” Charlene said sarcastically.

“I’m only takin’ off for a month or two, and I imagine I won’t be stayin’ in a lot of motels,” she told her sister, gazing out the windshield while she spoke. “The first place I’m goin’ is over to Aunt Lillabel’s. I have to make a delivery for Daddy. I’ll call you every few days. I’ll always let you know where I am, in case you need me for anything.”

She said that, but she couldn’t foresee that anyone would need her. Mildred Covington pretty well had Daddy covered, and Helen was over there a lot now, keeping things up so they would be in prime condition when she got to move in, whether in one year or twenty. Freddy had Helen, and Charlene had Joey and the kids. Rainey was the odd man out, so to speak.

Charlene raked back her hair and said, “Rainey, I know…well, we’re all pretty unsettled right now. But it is only the shock. It will straighten out in time.”

She supposed that her sister was trying to be Mama for her, but she and Charlene had never been particularly close, and right then was not an opportune time to start.

“I imagine so. I’ll call you from Aunt Lillabel’s.”

As she started away, Charlene surprised her by running alongside the truck, sobbing and yelling at her not to be stupid and that Mama would be upset.

Rainey doubted Mama would have been upset. Mama had left upset behind.

And she didn’t know what to do. She saw Charlene’s shapely pale legs catch the sunlight and her bare feet step lightly on the grass and gravel. She was a little afraid Charlene was going to fall down, or possibly throw herself in front of the truck. She would have simply outrun her sister, but she didn’t think it would be very nice to stir dust in her face.

“Rainey, you can’t run away from yourself, you know!”

Rainey thought maybe she could try.

“Where in the world are you goin’?” Charlene finally came to a stop, stamping one bare foot.

“I don’t know,” Rainey called back to her, “but I’m goin’ somewhere, and I guess I’ll know when I get there.”

As she turned onto the county road, she decided not to even tell Freddy she was going.

With one quick glance in the rearview mirror, she left Valentine behind.

Sudden Gifts of Fate

T
he sun was about to drop from the sky when she saw the sign for a Texaco Star Mart. She took the exit, pulled through the entry and over to the diesel pump.

Hopping out, she hurried back to the trailer to check Lulu, which was the first thing she did any time she stopped. She suffered this nagging worry that somewhere along the way she might have made a turn or hit a rough bit of road that caused Lulu to fall down and break her leg, and that the mare might be lying there in pain, or maybe even dying, while she drove on along. Mama—everyone, actually—had always said that Rainey had a good imagination. Recalling the incident with the little red car, she was a bit frantic.

When she saw Lulu’s nose pressed on the polyester net over the open window, relief washed all over her.

As soon as she released the net, Lulu poked her head out and sniffed for the expected treat—the Twinkie cake. Lulu was a fool for Twinkie cakes, a habit brought on by Mama’s policy
to take sweets along to entice her horses. While the mare sucked down the cake, Rainey buried her nose against her sleek neck, relishing the warm horse smell.

Then she fastened Lulu back inside and went to pump fuel into the truck. While she was going about this, a black three-quarter ton drove up on the opposite side of the fuel island, a real shiny job with lots of chrome and lights. It had the words No Fear across the top of the windshield.

A cowboy got out of the truck. He wore a sharp black hat, starched blue shirt, and a shiny belt buckle so round that he would have had trouble bending. He looked like the kind who drove one-handed, with a bottle of beer between his thighs, and likely yelled “Hey, baby,” to women on street corners.

As he got his nozzle from the pump, he said to her, “Hey, honey…are you one of those fast can chasers?”

She dealt with this by saying, “I’m sorry. You must have me mixed up with someone else. My name isn’t Honey,” and returned to washing bug spots off her windshield.

She heard him say something about “Excuse me, bitch,” and he went about his own pumping.

Inside the store, when she came out of the ladies’ room, he was pulling a long-necked bottle of beer from the cooler. He ignored her.

She went to the pay phone at the front corner and dialed Charlene’s number. She had to make herself do this, because lately Charlene had been making noises about Rainey coming home. After nearly two months, Rainey thought maybe she should go home, but every time she imagined doing so, she felt great dread. So far, in six weeks of traveling, Rainey had renewed acquaintances with many relatives, begun to hone her barrel-racing skills to the point of placing first in a couple of small rodeos, achieving times below eighteen and a half seconds,
learned to navigate back roads all over south Oklahoma and half of Texas, and managed to deliver her parcels. She did not feel, however, that she had gotten anywhere in particular with her own troubled self.

She was relieved when Charlene’s answering machine picked up and she didn’t have to speak directly with her sister.

“I’m on my way to Uncle Doyle’s,” she said into the phone. “I’ll call you when I get there.”

Then she hung up and went to the cooler containing soft drinks, took out a bottle of Pepsi and moved along until she found the Lipton tea, with lemon and sugar. She took two of those and then, continuing on along the aisles, she loaded her arms with Twinkies, Moon Pies, oatmeal cream cakes, fig bars and peanuts. Since she had begun traveling, she had taken to compulsive snacking and had gained five pounds, which she didn’t think was so much considering the amount of sugar and fat she was consuming. Also, she figured it could all be counted as muscle from her extremely active days.

At the counter she snatched up a couple of packages of pretzels, which were fat free. It was going to be a long, lonely night.

As she dug the money from her pants pockets, she brought out a tube of lipstick from one pocket and a pocket knife from the other.

“Looks like you’re a lady ready for anything,” the clerk said. Her voice sounded smart, but her smile was warm.

“I guess—unless I get one confused with the other,” she told her, smiling in response as she handed over several bills.

It was funny how the tiniest thread of friendly connection coming out of nowhere could be immensely precious. It made her grateful in that moment to be alive, made her think that life was worth living after all.

She thought this as she carried out her grocery sack of snacks
and saw that the setting sun had turned Mama’s old truck a pale gold color. The entire world—the fuel pumps, the parking lot rails, the grass bent in the breeze—was washed golden. Like old pictures in an album, all the ugly was softened and made lovely.

The next thing she saw was a long-tailed frisky puppy wriggling and wagging in the bed of her truck, regarding her as if he had just found Jesus.

She swiveled her head around to see the black No Fear truck disappearing down the entry ramp to the interstate. She looked at the empty spot where it had been beside the pump, and then again at the puppy. A dark-gray-and-brown mutt, a sort of German shepherd mixed with something equally big and clumsy.

She threw her sack onto the seat, hoisted the thirty pounds of puppy out of the bed, aided by aggravation, and went back into the store.

“That dang guy in the black truck just dumped this dog on me. Right in my truck.” Maybe she didn’t have proof of this, but she just knew it was so.

The clerk said, “People have nerve, don’t they? People drive up here all the time and leave dogs and cats, and once somebody left fightin’ roosters. I imagine they’d leave children, if they thought they could.” She shook her head with wonder. “Why don’t they just drown them?”

Rainey said maybe they didn’t have water. She suggested the clerk call the police or the dog pound, but the clerk said the police didn’t handle it, and there wasn’t any dog pound to call.

“Just leave him outside. Either someone will take him, or he’ll get hungry and go off lookin’ for food, or he’ll get runned over.”

A line was forming behind Rainey. A sweaty man in a faded
T-shirt and Bermuda shorts made impatient sighs at her shoulder. The clerk, who had seemed to be her
compadre
ten minutes earlier, now regarded her in a far less favorable light.

“You need to move your rig,” the clerk said. “There’s a customer waitin’ to use the pump.”

As Rainey turned for the door, a mother jerked her son away from her, saying, “No, you can’t have that dog.” Then she shot Rainey a weak smile.

Outside, Rainey set the puppy down and strode away quickly, picking up the pace until she was fairly running to jump into her truck.

The puppy’s head was almost caught in the slammed door.

She looked out the window. He gazed up at her, an expectant, hopeful light in his marble-brown eyes.

Jerking back inside, she started the engine, having the idea that the powerful roar would scare the puppy away. As she shifted into gear, the image of the puppy squashed beneath one of the wheels filled her mind.

Pressing the brake, she peeked out the window again. She didn’t see the dog.

A horn honked. In her side mirror, she saw a rusty gold Cadillac Seville nosing the bumper of the horse trailer. Apparently there was a wide lack of knowledge about the unwritten rule of the road.

She strained to catch a glimpse of the puppy, hopefully wagging up to someone else. Not seeing him, except in the horrendous picture continuing in her mind, she jammed the lever into park again and jumped out of the truck. The guy in the Cadillac started yelling at her.

The puppy came wriggling from in front of her rumbling truck, wagging his tail and again looking at her as if she were his beloved savior.

She could not bear to look at him as she lifted him and put him over into the truck bed. She squinted out of one eye.

“Don’t jump out, or that’ll be the end of you, and it won’t be my fault.”

He put his paws up on the side, cocking his head to the side.

She was startled to see the guy from the Cadillac striding toward her. A big man with a bulging belly, he yelled, “Look, lady, do you want me to get in and move this truck for you? I ain’t got all night.”

The puppy barked his young bark fiercely at the man.

“I’m sorry to have failed to see you are the only one with a life,” she said, and then hopped into her truck, halfway expecting the guy to grab her by the collar and yank her out, which she believed he could have done with one hand.

Slamming the door, she again shifted into drive and started off slowly, mindful of Lulu and not wanting to give the Cadillac guy the idea he had compelled her into hurrying. Circling toward the road, she checked her mirror to see if the puppy jumped out. She felt certain the Cadillac guy would run him down if possible.

Then she saw the puppy’s face in the side-view mirror. He was up on the side of the truck and happily jutting his face in the wind. His paws indicated a really big dog to come.

Looking north, she saw the road sign that listed Abilene as being 152 miles ahead. She pressed the accelerator, and the old truck and trailer rumbled out onto the blacktopped state highway.

The puppy tapped on the back window glass. He wagged his entire rear end at her.

Sighing, she looked ahead. On her left, the sky reflected the last coral rays of the sun, and on her right, a bright half-moon was rising. It seemed as if she were driving in a corridor between
them. As if she were going right up a launching ramp. And she had an odd feeling, as if something were pressing between her shoulder blades, urging her onward.

Shrugging the sensation aside, she thought that she would definitely have to get rid of the puppy. Maybe she would drop him in the first town. Or maybe in Abilene, which would likely be big enough for her to get away unnoticed. She would drop him there in the first yard she passed with a house with lights on.

As she stuck a George Strait cassette into the player, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. She thought maybe she should have refreshed her lipstick, but then her eyes strayed to the grocery sack of snacks. Digging inside, she pulled out a package of peanuts.

It was good and dark, and she was on her second George Strait cassette and opening her second Twinkie cake, having polished off the entire package of peanuts, when her headlights flashed on a figure at the edge of the road.

A man, in a dark sport coat and slacks.

It happened so fast. She saw the figure illuminated by the headlights, his pale profile turn to her, and then she glimpsed him blow away like a paper silhouette into the darkness.

Oh, Lord
. The awful knowledge that she had not been paying sufficient attention fell all over her.

Oh, God…ohmyGod, don’t let me have hit him
.

Her headlights beamed on the blacktop ahead, as her mind did an instant replay. She thought that surely she hadn’t hit the man. She hadn’t been that close. She hadn’t felt anything like a whop.

Maybe there hadn’t been a man. Maybe it had all been her imagination.

This possibility was as unnerving as thinking she’d run someone down.

All the while her mind was dealing with this, she was pressing the brakes, mindful of Lulu back in the trailer sucking the flooring with her hooves. Coming to a stop, she tried to see the man in the side-view mirror, but even in the moonlight, it was too dark to make out anything.

Of course, if he were dead on the side of the road, she wouldn’t see him standing.

A thump made her just about jump out of her skin.

It was the puppy with his big paws on the rear window glass.

She swung the truck and trailer around as quickly as she dared, mindful of Lulu. Texas had really good state and county roads, paid for with all the oil money in the seventies and eighties. They all had wide graveled shoulders. Her tires crunched on the gravel, the right back tires spun slightly, and then she was heading back the way she had come, peering intently out the windshield. She turned off the stereo. She hadn’t realized how loud the stereo had been, and the wind, until now.

There was no one.

She peered hard, sticking her head out the window, but there was absolutely no one alongside the road or in it. No one and no car anywhere.

Getting very nervous now about possibly losing her mind, she retraced her route almost a mile, then once more turned around and came back slowly. She had begun to tremble but would not raise the windows for thinking she should get fresh air to clear her brain.

Then there he was
. She hadn’t been imagining things after all, which came as a flash of relief, quickly surpassed by rising concern as she watched him in the beam of her headlights, bent over, dark sport coat, darker slacks, and loafers, appearing to be getting to his feet.

Coming to a stop much faster than she should have and
probably causing Lulu to scramble for balance, she slammed the truck into park, slipped her daddy’s little Colt .25 from its pocket on the side of the seat and hopped out of the pickup, ready to deal with what had every appearance of a crisis.

Rainey had a talent for dealing with crises, a point upon which many agreed. Charlene was one to say that crises just seemed to find Rainey. She was always cautious, but not fearful. Her mother used to tell each one of them, “You are a child of God and not given a spirit of fear,” which didn’t speak to stupidity at all but had succeeded in instilling a certain amount of confidence for dealing with demanding situations. Rainey had held her own with green colts, wild college boys and rowdy cowboys, so one slender man in a sport coat and slacks on a road in the middle of nowhere did not overly frighten her.

“Are you all right? Did I hit you?” she called to him from a position beside her truck fender.

He lifted his arm against the glare of her headlights. She stepped back to the truck and cut the headlights down to the parking beams, then slowly went forward, the pistol held discreetly, and politely, down at her side.

Her eyes adjusting quickly, she saw he now stood looking off at the land. The thin moonlight shone on the top of his head, but the rest of him was deeply shadowed and colorless. Her impression was of a tall, thin, youngish man.