One Day the Wind Changed (7 page)

We seemed a race apart, frailer, quieter than those around us. The neighbors were figures of great mystery to me. To the west of us, the Casbeers, a father, two teenage sons. And the mother? In jail? On the run from her men? Dead? What finally happened to mothers in the desert?

Papa Casbeer drove a big red truck and delivered oil field equipment to rig sites. He wore green overalls and a baseball cap. So did his sons. I'd see the boys at night beside the dirty truck in their driveway, smoking and drinking from foaming silver cans. The more they drank, the meaner their laughter became, and the gravel of their voices, though I couldn't make out what they said. I assumed it was beer they drank—“Beer” was part of their name, a marked family!—and Mama said beer was bad for the brain. I watched and waited for the boys to explode into insanity.

Sometimes they slipped inside their father's truck and started the engine. They didn't drive anywhere.

On the other side of us lived Reginald Jones, a jolly bald man who always wore aviator sunglasses and white short-sleeved shirts with plastic pocket protectors. Reginald was a hero. He had raised the prettiest girls in town, Ceci Jo and Jeannie. Their mother was around too, but she was as squat and blunt as a leather suitcase. Reginald was “no movie star,” Mama said, but he radiated a deep mirth and a vitality inherited by his girls. They were eight and nine, too young for the Casbeer boys, but old enough for cultivation. Whenever Ceci Jo or Jeannie walked up the street (wearing cotton shorts and pink halter tops), the boys whistled and called, “Check with me in five years, honey! I'll be here!” Always, Ceci Jo (or Jeannie) shot back, “
That's
for sure.”

Their teasing thrilled me, obscurely. After overhearing their voices through the window screen, I'd jump on my bed as though it were a trampoline. Then, wheezing, I'd stand with my face near the vaporizer.

Reginald liked to drink “precisely one half-glass of beer before supper each night, to settle the nerves,” he told my father. My dad was not a drinker, but occasionally he took a half-glass with his neighbor. Sometimes I'd sit at their feet, playing in the dirt. Sunset shattered across Reginald's bright amber shades. “Ah,” he'd say, sipping his drink. “My soul is restored.” He'd nudge my father's ribs. “I'm surprised you're not a tippler, old man. I thought you shanty Irish had a love of the hops.” And he'd laugh.

The way he said “shanty Irish”-tossed-off and jokey-shamed and confused me.

One night, as my father tucked me into bed beneath the gaze of the clown, I asked him, “What's ‘shanty Irish'?”

“Our name. O'Doherty,” he said. “Our ancestors-your great-great-great-great-grandfather-and before him-came from a far-off place called Ireland. Green and pretty, with a wild, cold ocean.”

“Have you been to it?” I asked.

“Nope.”

“Mama?”

“Never.”

“Would she be happy there?”

“Well.” He pulled the sheet to my chin. “We'll have to work on her, won't we?” As he bent to kiss my cheek, I smelled the beer on his breath, and wondered if he'd hurt his brain.

When he left the room, I turned away from the clown. I settled into my imaginary canyon, breathed delicately, and waited to see if the bells would cut through the steam.

Not the
tink-tink
of Mama's shoes, but the clattering of a spoon on a glass. I sat up in bed. The jester grinned at me. Something at the window: waves of wind. The night wanted to add my body's air to its own. My breathing shallowed-out.

I threw off the sheet, placed one foot then the other on the cold linoleum floor. I crept down the hall to the kitchen. At the table, stirring sugar into a frosty tumbler of tea, sat a headless man in a business suit-one of my
father's
suits. I tried to scream.

Two nights later, I had another dream about my dad. I was sitting on the back porch watching him plant rosebushes by the house. “I don't think they'll grow in this soil and terrible heat, but we'll give them a shot,” he said. “Your Mama'll like them.” I glimpsed a black blur near my leg. A spider, no, a
tarantula
crawling toward me, getting fatter as it moved! I leaped up, screamed. It covered the porch now. Hairy. Writhing like an octopus. “Not to worry,” my father said. He slipped past the creature, into the house, and returned with a double-barreled shotgun.

The threat in these dreams seemed part of the atmosphere of the house. A dusty penetration. My mother's emptiness had crept into my night life. What was the source of her misery? West Texas? Our home? Motherhood? My father's job? I didn't know. I'll never know. I loved her. I shared a house with her. I felt her despair like a presence in our midst. That's all I can claim.

My father continued to wear a cheery face, bringing food for us in the evenings, singing to Roy Orbison on the radio, trying to coax my mother to swing-dance in the kitchen (she wouldn't), and bringing the stars to life for me in colorful stories as we stood together in the alley. But I noticed that, more and more, he avoided whichever room my mother occupied. He no longer painted. His homemade easel (nailed together one afternoon in the driveway), his oils, canvases, and brushes were stored now in the back of a closet. In the past, before my bedtime, he'd turn the light on in my room so my ceiling stars would soak it up and glow for hours, once the bulb was out. Often, now, he forgot to do this. The stars remained shapeless, as though time had not yet commenced.

The lethargy that settled over our house made Reginald's vitality all the more attractive to me. “Shanty Irish!” he called to my father over the back fence one night as we returned from our trip to the alley. Supper was finished, but Reginald convinced my father to share a beer with him. “Let me show you my drums,” he said, lightly tapping a beat on my back.

This was the first I'd heard of drums. On our way to his house, I also heard, for the first time, the story of Reginald's plane. Like Papa Casbeer, he hauled oil field equipment from Dallas to El Paso, but he did it in a Piper Cub, not in a filthy old truck. All at once, the words “oil field equipment” acquired an air of adventure I'd not linked to them before.

Reginald's house smelled of fried chicken. I'd never been here. Dark wallpaper, cross-hatched like Mama's word puzzles. An eight-piece trap kit sat in the middle of the living room, between two wooden floor lamps arranged like spotlights. In the lamp glow, the bright red drums sparkled like Dorothy's slippers in
The Wizard of Oz
.

Reginald brought my father half a glass of beer. Then he sat on the stool behind the snare drum and picked up a pair of sticks. Brushes-similar to my father's painting tools. Reginald kept his sunglasses on. “I looked y'all up,” he said. He did a “slow Celtic march” with the hi-hat, the bass drum, and the snare. “In the library. The genealogy section. O'Doherty. You come from the north of Ireland. County Donegal. Rebels, warriors.” The drumbeat quickened. A
tick-tick
on the large gold cymbal, the chiming of a bell. “The O'Dohertys were the last remaining tribe to resist the British before the shame of the Ulster plantations—one of your ancestors, a fellow named Cahir, sacked the city of Derry. That brought the Brits' blood to a boil, let me tell you.” He laughed. “They came after him and
that's
when your family crammed into the shanties. I was right about you.”

He varied the march-beat. Jazz and genealogy were his hobbies, he said. His family was Scottish. One night, in the downtown library, he had researched our name when his great-grandmother's trail dead-ended. “The thing I like about family history is it makes you bigger than you are, bigger than the daily grind. Like flying. The desert's a hell of a lot more impressive from above.”

He thumped the tom-tom. “So, young lord.” He looked at me, eyes hidden behind his shades. “Bet you didn't know you had the blood of rebellion in you, eh? Next time someone gives you guff, remember you're a warrior!” He offered me the sticks. “Take a turn?”

He
was the warrior, I thought. The clan-lord. A sky-god.

A pilot. A drummer. A father of pretty girls.

On his right arm, a running-horse tattoo.

I glanced at Dad, pleading. Can I take the sticks? He shook his head.

“But Dad!”

The gentle tyranny of his frailty.
My
family's heroes have all passed on, I thought. Long ago. Nothing now but ghosts, hoping to suck us dry. “We should go soon,” Dad said. “Baby girl back home …”

“How ‘bout it, boy? Got a hobby?” Reginald asked me, grinning.

“No,” I said.

“I took up drumming when I was your age,” he said. “It's kept me going, all these years. We all need
something
. You should try it.” He made the hi-hat hiss. “What about you?” he asked the slumping shanty man in the corner. “What's
your
pleasure, old fellow?”

My father stared at his empty glass. “Oh. I paint, I guess.”

As he spoke, Ceci Jo and Jeannie pranced into the room. “There they are, the Scottish queens,” Reginald said, staring with frank delight at the beauty of his girls. He rattled a tambourine—first against his knee, then on top of his big, bald head. I had never witnessed such a
talent
for life. It embarrassed and excited me.

The girls slipped out the door, wearing tight blue shorts. My father rose. “Okay, young lord,” Reginald said to me. “Next time, you'll play me a paradiddle.”

“Thanks for the beer,” Dad said. He stepped out under the stars. I followed him. He was quiet. “What's that one?” I asked, pointing to a constellation south of the Milky Way. He didn't respond.

“Dad?”

“Hm?”

“Why don't you paint anymore?”

“Oh, I don't know,” he said.

“I think you should.”

He laughed. “I thought you were afraid of my little jokester?”

How did he know? Had Mama passed my secret fear on to him? How did
she
figure it out? It was my turn not to respond.

Laughter, low and mean, from the Casbeers' house. Where were Ceci Jo and Jeannie?

I couldn't see a thing down the dark, flat slab of Hill Street.

We walked into the house. “I'm going to check on your mom,” Dad said. “Get your pj's on, okay? I'll come tuck you in.”

“Boys, is that you?” Mama called from the kitchen. “Where
were
you?”

I heard my father sigh. My mother's voice rose.

Before I made it to my room I'd lost my breath.

In her crib, beside a largely empty bookcase in my parents' bedroom, my sister cried. I sat on my bed, glaring at the clown, waiting for someone to comfort the baby. I got up and toggled my light switch. A slow pulse—rebellious, steady, as glorious as a Celtic drumbeat. I told myself I was trying to ignite my stars. Would anybody see them?

Shouting in the kitchen. “Dusty,” “ugly,” “breath,” like scattered clues from a puzzle. My father said, “Shh.”

I went to my sister, whose face was puffy and red. From beside the bed I picked up my mother's house shoes. The bells rang. The baby hushed and watched me. Slowly, I waved the shoes, timing my shallow inhales to the beat I'd begun, recalling the firm movement of Reginald's fingers on my body earlier tonight. “Shh,” I said. “Shh, shh, shanty girl. You're bigger than you think you are.”

Wind rattled the window—seeking the last of my air. I sensed a shadow behind me. My sister laughed. Still shaking the bells, I drew the largest breath I could, and turned to look at my mother, my father, in the doorway.

T
he trees and the fountain, along with the tinted glass and marbled granite of the storefronts, formed a small town beneath the transparent green roof of Westgate Mall. An idealized Main Street. Sitting in the regulated air (a constant sixty-eight degrees, Howard guessed), listening to water slap fake stones, he was happy to discover he could still feel desire.

If this was Main Street, it sure as hell belonged back east, Howard thought. The glitzy signs and the faceless mannequins in the displays were like nothing else he had seen in southwest Texas. He had courted Mindy on a typical West Texas street, twenty-three years ago. Walking home from the high school gym one October afternoon following a football pep rally, he had waited on the sidewalk while she ducked into Beasley's Shoes. Had he held her books? Probably, though he didn't remember. Junior year, 1975: chemistry, calculus,
The Red Pony?

Every few minutes, she would tap the window inside the store to get his attention, lift slippers, pumps, or outrageously risqué red high heels, and seek his approval with her head cocked to the side, charmingly (she had built up to the high heel moment, she confessed to him later). In that brief ritual of the shoes, on that mild afternoon, he knew their future together. They would marry. Always, she would reach for the next dazzling thing. And he would wait on her and approve.

So how had he missed the fundamental fact: that one day she'd reach for the sky? He was an oil man. His world was prescribed, not in the clever way of the mall, with sales displays set in your path, bold colors used to inspire the impulse buy. No, Howard's world was defined by rotted organisms and the moraines in which they had died. Oil country was precisely circumscribed for a man with his rudimentary skills. In West Texas, he understood what to look for so detritus could be coaxed to the earth's surface for refining, packaging, and selling.

Outside this region he knew he'd be lost. So he kept his head down and paced the same old ground.

Petroleum's thick, jellied stink never did dazzle Mindy, except to repulse her. Finally, one year, dissatisfied with Howard and his desert world (it had been
her
world too!), she snagged a man from the clouds: a Boeing engineer. He whisked her off to Seattle, whose surfaces glistened with rainwater and looked twice as bright as they really were.