Mockingbird (4 page)

“What? What was that?”

“Ow. Ow.”

“I'll bet. Just take it easy there, kiddo. You aren't fixing to go anywhere soon.”

Candy's voice came from off to one side. “It was the Widow, Toni. She mounted you.” I opened my eyes again, with more success, but Candy was not in my field of vision and there was no way I was going to turn my head. I settled for looking up at the ceiling fan, watching the slow sweep of its long wooden blades. Even when it isn't hot we keep the fan going on low, just to move the air around. Momma always thought that was healthful.

“Ow,” I said, more vigorously. I had a brutal pulsing headache, my stomach was queasy, and my whole body felt like a fried egg someone had just slapped into a hot skillet sunny side down.

I remembered the Widow's smell and prayed Momma's demons wouldn't get me.

Candy said, “This better not turn out to be your idea of a joke.”

“Oh, hysterical,” I said. “Fuck off.”

“Your sister's a little jumpy,” Daddy said. “The Widow put a scare into her.”

“Are you laughing at me? It's not funny! Toni, the Widow said I had to marry Carlos!
Marry
him! And pump out a few little bambinos afterwards!”

“Congratulations. I look forward to your pregnancy. It will be nice to see you fatter than me, for once.”

Candy nudged me in the side with her foot, none too gently.

I straightened out my shaking legs. “Most people have to buy a bottle of cheap tequila to feel like this. Guess I should consider myself lucky. S'okay, Daddy. You can put my head down. I'll just rest here a second or two longer.” Daddy remained squatting behind me, holding my head in his hands. I loved him for it. “Anyway, Candy, you don't have to do what the Widow said.”

“Yeah, right.” Candy started to pace again.

Another throb of pain made my vision wobble. “God, sis, it should have been you the Widow mounted. You
like
this stuff. Oh Candy. I don't want to fight with the Riders. It can't be the Mockingbird Cordial; we both drank that.”

“Um—well . . . To be honest, Toni, you were the only one who drank that stuff. My glass had Dr. Pepper in it.”

“What!”

“Momma said so! She said the cordial was only for you.” More quietly Candy said, “Her last gift was only for you.”

“Oh, great.” A wave of nausea made me gasp and close my eyes. The pain in my head went on and on. “You jealous?”

Candy's footsteps stopped. “To the heart,” she said.

Apparently I had been possessed for about thirty minutes. The Widow had inspected the house, looked through some of Momma's photographs, and informed Candy that she was to marry Carlos. Eventually she had returned to the chifforobe on the ground floor and opened the doors so the dolls could look out. At that point she must have considered her work done; she left my head so fast, Daddy barely managed to catch me as I crumpled to the floor.

By the time I was able to sit upright at the table with my face in my hands, nearly an hour had passed and we were expecting the condolence calls to start at any moment. Candy ran out to pick up some coffee and cakes. At my request, Daddy got one of Momma's bottles of Evan Williams seven-year-old sour mash bourbon and unhurriedly poured me one shot. “You sure you want this, Toni? You're not much of a drinker.”

“I'm thinking of taking it up,” I said. He gave me the glass.

I don't think I ever saw Daddy in a rush. With his sad eyes and his patience and his careful, measured speech, I always figured God had meant him to be a career minor league baseball manager, a quiet mentor to eager young bucks on their way to the bigs. Instead, the Lord had unreasonably chosen to make him a traveling salesman for American Express. He spent a lot of time on the road, getting places to stock the Travellers Checks. Physically he was smaller than Momma, with a fine-boned frame, a small head beginning to show jowls, and rounded shoulders, but she flew around him like the wind swirling around a stone. Many was the time Candy and I had hidden in his lee.

The shaking in my limbs was gradually fading. The bourbon tasted vile and made me cough until my eyes watered. “If this is Momma's idea of a gift, if now, after thirty years I'm supposed to take on her bad debts—” Once the bourbon reached my stomach, it flowered into a warmth in my blood. “I don't see why she has to always get her way. I mean, good Lord, Daddy, why did you let her, let her be that way with us? Why didn't you ever stand up to her?” My father looked at me. I was horrified to find myself saying these things, today of all days. I started crying. “You can't let her do this to me!”

Daddy pushed his chair back from the table and walked into the kitchen. In a moment he came back with a bottle of Dos Equis from the fridge and a bottle opener. He was fond of Mexican beer. Dew was already beading on the cold bottle from the warm, humid air. Daddy said, “Imagine there's a man who needs a job done. I say I'll do it for a hundred dollars. When I finish, I go to collect my money. But the fella says, ‘Thanks, but I'm only going to pay you seventy-five.' I say, ‘We had a deal. What makes you think you can cheat me out of twenty-five dollars?' Then he pulls a loaded gun out of his desk and puts the barrel to his temple and pulls the hammer back and says, ‘If you won't do it for seventy-five, I'm going to shoot myself.' And I know he means it.”

Which was always the kicker, with Momma. For all the lies she told, she never had to say a thing about her own desperate unhappiness. None of us had ever doubted she wanted to pull the trigger. That was for real.

“Why me?” I said. “Why don't the Riders come for Candy? She'd like them. She'd invite them in. Oh God, Daddy.” The tears were running out of me faster now, I'd lost the knack of holding them in. “It was so awful. It was like being killed. The Widow came into my head and murdered me so she could ride around in my body. I was so scared.”

Daddy drank some of his beer. “Your momma always said it was like being run over and left for dead . . . I imagine that's why it was you the Riders came for.”

“Meaning?”

He looked at me. “Your sister only sees happy things.”

“Ha.”

“It's true.”

I scowled into my shot glass. “If Momma thinks I'm going to start now, with all the spookery and horseshit—No ma'am. You can't have everything your way. Not after you're dead. It's one of the rules. If she wanted to pass along her nasty little presents, she should have done it while she was still alive. I am no kind of mockingbird. I've got one song to sing and that's my song, Antoinette's song.”

“There are some gifts that cannot be refused, Toni.”

I drank the rest of my bourbon. “Horseshit. I refuse. I refuse!”

My father put down his beer, fitting it exactly onto the ring the bottle had left on the table. “I'm going to give you a piece of advice. I love you dearly, girl, but don't try to muscle a fastball through your momma's zone. She'll drill you out of the ballpark. You're AA crazy at best, Toni, but your momma was an All-Star in the majors.”

The Friesens were the first to come by with condolences that afternoon, Bill Sr. with a squat eight-sided bottle of Blanton's Single Barrel, Penny carrying a beautiful lasagna from The Olive Garden.

(I am nine and sulky. My mother is cooking food to take to Mr. Hierholzer at the end of the block. His wife has just died. She dumps a fat tablespoon of butter into a dish of yellow squash poached in cream. Across the street Candy and my friend Greg and Greg's cousins from San Antonio are playing Batman, but Momma has made me stay inside and cook all afternoon. First it was an apple pie and I nearly cried because the air was so humid my crust wouldn't hold. Then chili rellenos. My fingertips are still burning from handling the poblano peppers. Now we're making poached squash. I hear Candy laughing from across the street, she's five and never has to do anything, and I ask why we can't just buy Mr. Hierholzer an ice cream cake at the Dairy Queen.

“When I die, we'll see who brings store-bought and who brings homemade,” Momma says. “Then you'll know who my real friends were.”)

“We were just so sorry when we heard.” Penny Friesen held out her lasagna. I used to think Penny looked down her nose at us—Momma said it often enough—but after I grew up I decided she was just shy and awkward, particularly in the shadow of her big affable husband. Penny always wore the uniform of her class, the white linen blazers, pink lipstick, gold hoop earrings, and white hair spun into a round ball like a puff of bleached cotton candy, but she wore it without conviction, like an impostor.

I forgave her the store-bought lasagna. “Daddy's out back.”

Bill Sr. nodded and waggled the bottle of Blanton's. “I'll bring out some glasses,” I said. Daddy would nurse his Dos Equis, of course, but Bill would want to try some of the expensive bourbon he had brought. I showed them to the French doors and let them into the garden.

The younger Friesen, Bill Jr., was the next to arrive. He was a blandly ugly man: a big head topped with curly brown hair stuck on a big loaf of a body that never managed to fit properly into his very expensive suits. He had inherited his mother's white complexion, turned pasty and running to freckles, along with watery hazel eyes and an unfortunate mouth that was too wide and full-lipped for his face. He was rather a good argument for makeup for men, actually; a bit of foundation and some careful management of his lips would have done him a world of good. I had known Bill Jr. since he was in diapers, and made him show me his wee-wee when we were six. At the time I thought it looked like something you would put on a hook to catch catfish.

Since then, Bill Jr. had graduated from the Fuqua School of Business and returned to take up his part of the family business, the investment division where I worked. He was an okay boss. Now that he was in Management, he never called me anything but Ms. Beauchamp. He never closed his office door when talking to a female employee, which was appreciated, and he never raised his voice. As a boy he had often fantasized about being an admiral in the Navy; he saw himself in a commanding, rather than fighting, role, though he carried the ideals of honor fully in his chest. His version of a glorious death was going down with a ship. He was also greedy and a bit of a sneak, as long as he wasn't caught by anyone, including himself. “I'm just so sorry,” he said. “Don't, ah, don't worry about that oil prospectus we were talking about. You just do what needs to be done for the family right now.”

“Thanks. As Momma would say, I'm about worn to a frazzle with Daddy and all.” Not to mention having the Widow creep like a spider into my head.

I showed Bill Jr. into the garden and started putting together a cheese and cracker plate. I was cutting the cheddar into very thin slices to make it look like there was more of it when I heard the Muertomobile drawing up to the house. It was not a sound you could mistake; its engine rumbled like the organ in Satan's front parlor.

Houston is a funny town; superstition and heavy industry have had strange sweaty couplings amid the oil refineries and shipyards, and produced some very weird offspring. There have been spirit cars here for twenty-five years, altogether stranger beasts than the regular low riders, but the Muertomobile outclassed them all. Carlos had salvaged a '62 GM-built hearse, dropped the body down to the legal limit for low riders, and then set about patiently encrusting it with artifacts of power. Seven star-shaped clusters, each made from thirteen silver dollars, demarcated the Muertomobile's zones of power. Its white staring eyes were ringed with polished shells, and a bleached calf's skull served as the hood ornament. The body of the car was coated in photographs of Carlos's ancestors; hundreds of them, all in frames of wood or bronze or plastic or porcelain or pewter or silver, most glued down flat, but some dozen propped to stand upright, such as the great gold-framed portrait of his maternal grandparents that stood proudly on the roof of the hearse, just over the driver's side of the windshield.

Inside the car every surface was swathed in crushed red velvet of the sort you imagine in the bottom of Dracula's coffin. The red air was full of dancing men; skeletons and crucifixes of every description hung from the ceiling, trembling and bouncing on a spider's forest of thin black threads. It was not at all comforting to have Carlos driving behind you, late at night. His souped-up halogen high beams were a white, annihilating stare; he himself was only a black shadow surrounded by a deep red light that welled from the windshield like the afterglow of hell.

“Candy! Carlos is—”

“I know, I know.” She stomped in from the garden. “That damn car is scaring all the grackles up out of the trees. I hope they cover it in birdshit.” She pursed and puckered her lips, brushed back her hair, and checked to make sure her slip wasn't showing. “How do I look?”

Like a centerfold for the Funeral Home Girls of the South pictorial, I didn't say. Outside, the bank-vault doors of the Muertomobile swung shut. “Not bad. A little too pretty, I think. La Gonzales would like to see you a bit more crazy with grief, but—”

“Screw the old hag, I don't care—shit, there they are!” Candy checked the coffee and boxes of pastries set out on the long table, smoothed her dress, and opened the door.

“
Buenos días,
Señora Gonzales,” she said, gravely bobbing her head. “Carlos.”

“An' what's good about it?” asked La Gonzales, stepping heavily through the door ahead of her son. She had a figure like Queen Victoria in her later years. Her forearms were the size of loaves of bread, her knees were hardened from a lifetime of kneeling at early morning Mass. La Gonzales had raised nine children and buried two husbands. Her hair was still as dark as a widow's veil, her crow's eyes black and bright and sharp. “Carlos, put those dishes on the table.”

“
Sí, Mamá.
” Carlos cleaned up rather well. His mother had bullied him out of his usual undershirt and jeans; instead, he wore an old double-breasted black suit of his father's. His beard was trimmed and the line of hoops had come out of his left ear. His only remaining piece of jewelry was a necklace on which was threaded a spark plug from his first car, which he had crashed into a bayou at age seventeen. Miraculously he had escaped nearly unhurt, and ever since then had carried the spark plug as a lucky charm.