Mockingbird (27 page)

Carlos nodded. “
La sinsonte!
” he called, but no bump came from the back of the hearse. “
Está perdida,
” he said. “
Tienes que buscarla.
”

She is lost. You must find her.

The black velvet curtain between us and the back of the hearse twitched and I jumped in my seat, praying it would not open.

“
Ahora. Háblame de tu madre.
”

“My mother? Why do we have to talk about her?”

Carlos did not answer. In the long silence that followed I thought I heard Pierrot snigger. The G moved, turning in my womb like a child in a restless sleep. I should think of a name for her soon. I was at thirty-one weeks already. Babies had been born this premature and lived. “My mother knew a lot about mascara but used too much foundation,” I said. “She went through a can of hair spray in six weeks and her second favorite fingernail polish was Purple Plum. Is this what you want?”

“
Háblame más,
” said Carlos the sorcerer, so I rambled on, my fingers clenched around the door handle, my other hand on the dashboard to protect my womb in case we crashed. Sweat running in my eyes. My heart pounding and pounding.

“Mosquitoes didn't like her much, which is probably why she kept the doors open all the time. They'd like to have eaten me alive. She hung garlic and tansy to keep them off; said her mother taught her that. She didn't talk about her people very often. I do not believe they were educated folk. Momma didn't have a hillbilly accent, but every now and then she would come up with these backwoods expressions: ‘He was the runningest ol' dog you ever did see,' or I'd ask if dinner were ready and she'd say, ‘Purt nigh, but not plumb.' I guess you would call her a liberal; she was in favor of integration and she wanted to vote for a woman president. She used butter, never margarine. She always wanted to go to Paris, but never did.”

I glanced over at Carlos to see what he was getting out of all this, and gasped. He was driving with his eyes closed. For a long moment I stared at him with my heart hammering in my chest. I must have tensed up fiercely, because the G gave a kick like a mad colt.

The car started to drift off the road. “
Habla,
” Carlos murmured. His voice was low and hazy. I had seen people in trances before—Momma had friends who would go into trances as soon as look at you—and I knew he was far gone.

“She, she, she loved biscuits but she hated making them herself,” I squeaked. The car steadied in its lane and we picked up speed. “She always said biscuits in a can were one of God's special acts of grace. She could drink just about anything. With liquor she didn't care if she was drinking single malt Scotch or cheap mixed rye, but she was fond of a good bourbon. When I was little she was the only mom who let me do just what I liked with my hair, grow it out or cut it short or wear it in curls. She told me once her mother made her wear the same little swing for eight years and she swore she would never do that to her child. Uh . . .”

My mind went blank. The Muertomobile began to drift toward the right curb. I groped around for something to say about Momma, some little detail, anything, but for some reason all I could think about was that I could no longer hear the mockingbird.

A girl stepped into the road in front of us. “Christ!” I yelled. I lunged for the wheel just as Carlos slammed on the brakes. I felt a shock as we hit something and then I jerked forward hard, slamming my shoulder on the dashboard so hard it made my arm go numb. The Riders Carlos had summoned into the back of the hearse shot forward and smacked into the wall behind me, then dropped painfully down as the hearse jerked to a stop. The black velvet curtain had pulled off four of its rings. I could hear snarls and mutters coming from behind it.

Adrenaline went whizzing through my bloodstream like ice water, so intense I froze for an instant in pure shock. “Swing and a miss,” I breathed. The G jumped and twisted like a pike in my womb. I blessed her, blind with relief to feel her thrashing strongly inside me. Sensation returned to my right arm, and my shoulder started to ache as if someone had taken a home run cut at it with a baseball bat.

Carlos got out, hurried to the front of the hearse and crouched down in the roadway, talking to someone I couldn't see. Groaning, I eased myself out the passenger side of the Muertomobile.

I didn't recognize the neighborhood we were in; I couldn't even be sure if we were in Houston or in the Little Lost Girl's city, or at some intersection between the two. Three blocks away, traffic streamed down a well-lit road: Richmond, maybe, or Westheimer? Most of this block seemed to be houses, big ones sectioned into apartments to judge by the cars scattered outside. Ahead of us, at the end of the block, music pulsed dully from a tiny club or bar.

The girl we had hit sat in the roadway examining her hands. “Wow. Blood,” she said. “You're definitely going to have to give me your name and number in case I need to sue the shit out of you.” She was a white girl with dirty-blonde hair. “Fuck, there's gravel stuck in my skin.” She wore a black skirt and leggings with China flats on her feet, and an oversize black T-shirt with the word
Fear
slashed on it in white. She had an East Texas white-trash accent. A bad kid from Baytown or Beaumont or Port Arthur.

“We should take you to a hospital,” Carlos said in English.

“Do I know you? No, I'm not getting into some stranger's bizarro car in the middle of the night, thank you very much. You think I never watched a Movie of the Week?”

“Are you hurt? Besides your hands,” I said.

“I don't know. I been hit harder with worse things, probably.” She held her hands up to the streetlight and squinted at them. “That stung.”

“Please. Let me take you to the hospital.”

“Uh, no offense, friend,” the girl said, glancing back at the Muertomobile, “but you drive like a complete fucking loon. Even if I didn't think you were going to, like, torture me on videotape or something, I'm not getting into a car with a skull glued to the hood. With a guy who drives without his fucking headlights on in the middle of the night.”

“Okay, let's call your parents,” I said.

“No.”

“Do they know you're out this—”

“No,” she said again, very fast. “Look. I don't want any trouble with you guys, okay? I'll be fine. I was just going to meet some friends in the bar. I'll go in, wash my hands, and then seek repairs as necessary.”

She couldn't have been more than sixteen. “You don't want to phone your parents.”

“It's really none of your business, okay?”

“They don't know you're here, do they?” I said slowly. “They don't know you're out. In fact, I bet they don't know you're in Houston.” No answer. Bull's-eye. I thought of Candy sneaking out to get screwed by men twice her age while I studied for my freshman exams.

“Look, get Speedy Gonzales here to write down his name and number and I'll call him if I start to hemorrhage,” the girl said. “‘Hundred twenty cc of glycocholine—STAT!'” She laughed. “Could either of you characters spare a cigarette? I gave my last one to my mom.”

I turned to Carlos. “Let's call her a cab and take her to the hospital.”

“I don't have any insurance,” the girl said. She stood up and rubbed her bloody hands on the side of her skirt. She was a little taller than me, but thin, thin, with shadows under her eyes.

“Where are you staying?” I said.

“I told you, I've got friends. A lot of friends. Waiting for me,” she said, backing up a step.

“We're not trying to hassle you.”

She looked at the Muertomobile. “Yeah, well, sorry.” She wiped her hands on her skirt again.

In the darkness I heard the mockingbird begin to sing, and looking at this girl, I thought of Momma running away to New Orleans as a teenager. She never talked about her folks much, never talked about her life between the ages of twelve and twenty. I wondered what the girl in front of me was running from. A stepfather who beat her or a drunken mother, or maybe just her own mistakes? Maybe she was running from nothing worse than Baytown itself, or Beaumont or Port Arthur: those little Texas refinery towns that beat all the hope out of you. Maybe she didn't know what she wanted, except that it was not to grow up to work at the drycleaner's or Dad's plant. Maybe she checked out of school because she couldn't do math and didn't have anyone around to make her good at it. I thought of Candy again in her pink halter top, and me behind my books, hiding, and I thought of the daughter in my womb and prayed that she would always be running toward the light in front of her, and never from the darkness behind. Maybe this girl was a bitch or a brat. But looking at her, so young, I thought I could forgive her anything if only I could take her home and feed her and keep her safe until morning.

“Can I go now?” the girl said. “I'm going. Don't worry about the name and number. On second thought, I really don't want to know.”

“No, let me give you my number,” I said. “Let's go over to the club where I can get a pen, I'll write down my name, and you call me if you need any help.” I was crying. “If you need anything,” I said.

She turned her back, embarrassed. “Yeah. Whatever,” she said.

The next day Rick Manzetti dropped by to tape another one of Momma's stories, but instead I ended up telling him about my late-night ride with Carlos. “So then what happened?” he asked.

“I took her to the club and wrote my name and number on a napkin.”

“That's it?”

“I bought her a pack of cigarettes.”

He looked disapproving, but I didn't care. “Momma smoked,” I said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Momma. She smoked.” I was drinking cold milk at the kitchen table. Rick was drinking a Dos Equis with a wedge of lime. “Do you see? Carlos found Momma for me.” Rick made another note on his little yellow pad of paper. He had great hands. “But not the Momma I knew, the one who was so much bigger than me. He showed me that other Elena Beauchamp, the girl from Longview or Tyler or Port Aransas who got out of some small-town Texas hellhole and made her way in the big city.”

“The Little Lost Girl,” Rick said.

“Maybe.” I looked at him. “Maybe you're right. Maybe Angela wasn't the Little Lost Girl. Maybe Momma was talking about herself all the time, but I never understood it. I guess we're all Little Lost Girls. One way or another.”

“There's a lot of people lost,” Rick said. “So did Carlos's exorcism work?”

I nodded. “By the time we got back from the club there were no Riders in the Muertomobile, and the Widow was gone from behind my eyes.” I watched him take a drink of beer. “Rick, can I ask you a question?”

“Shoot.”

“Would you marry me? Not now, of course. But I mean, if we got to know one another better, and got along and all that. Could you see yourself married to me?”

“Mm. I . . . No. I don't think so.”

“Figures.” I drank some more milk, wishing I could have his beer instead. “Why not?” He glanced at my distended tummy. “You want to marry a virgin?”

“I don't want to be a father to another man's child.” He scratched his beard. “I don't think that's admirable of me, but that's how I honestly feel, deep down.”

“Good thing to be honest about,” I said. “Did you know that the rate of child abuse is twelve times higher for stepparents than natural ones? I guess blood really is thicker than water.” I patted my tummy. “I've been thinking about that.”

“I'm sorry.”

“You could tell me that you'd marry me if it weren't for the baby. Just to keep my spirits up.”

He smiled. “Okay.”

“You're not just humoring me, now, are you?”

“Of course not.”

I laughed and finished my milk. “I think I've told you all the Little Lost Girl stories I can remember. I'll call you if any more come to me.”

Angela's voice came down the stairwell. “Knock knock?”

“Come on down,” I said. “You aren't interrupting anything. More's the pity.” Rick grinned into his beard and put his tablet of yellow scratch paper into his leather briefcase.

Angela poked her head around the corner of the stairwell. “I just thought of something,” she said. “What about that orange juice?”

She was quite right. With Mary Jo's death and the funeral and the Widow in my head, I had forgotten all about the Frozen Orange Products contract we had purchased. I called my broker in a panic and made him sell immediately, terrified I had missed a deadline and that at any moment I would see a container truck filled with twenty thousand pounds of frozen orange juice concentrate backing up to our yard.

As it turned out, we had two days to spare before we would have been forced to take delivery and pay for the balance of the contract. Apparently even my pitiless discount broker had tried to call, but I had unplugged my answering machine and thrown out the tape with Mary Jo's horrible message, and they had been unable to reach me.

“Well?” Angela asked as I hung up the phone in my bedroom.

I swivelled around in the office chair in front of the computer. “I'm afraid we—” Dramatic pause. “Made six hundred and twelve dollars!”

“Made? Did you say—!” Angela whooped. “Six hundred bucks for forgetting to make a phone call!”

I was grinning like an idiot. “It always happens this way. Everyone makes money on their first trade. And everyone loses money on the second. It's a rule.”

“Quick, let's go make a little one right away and get the losing over with,” Angela said. She had her hair up in a bandanna. A few strands of white showed amidst the brown. It was somehow hugely reassuring that a woman with white in her hair and a seventeen-year-old daughter could still whoop with such conviction. She grabbed the notebook I had been using as a transaction log, flipping past the page written in Mr. Copper's cold clean hand. To my surprise I saw a couple of pages with notes in her messy scribble. “I've been following the Deutsche Mark this week and I think we can still get on the train.”