The Glass Castle (11 page)

On one trip, Mom went into the bank alone because Dad couldn't find a place to park. When she came out, she was missing a sock. "Jeannette, I'm going to give you a
sock
that I want you to put in a safe place," Mom said once she got in the car. She winked hard at me as she reached inside her bra and pulled out her other sock, knotted in the middle and bulging at the toe. "Hide it where no one can get it, because you know how scarce
socks
can get in our house."

"Goddammit, Rose Mary," Dad snapped. "Do you think I'm a fucking idiot?"

"What?" Mom asked, throwing her arms up in the air. "Am I not allowed to give my daughter a sock?" She winked at me again, just in case I didn't get it.

Back in Battle Mountain, Dad insisted we go to the Owl Club to celebrate payday, and ordered steaks for all of us. They tasted so good we forgot we were eating a week's worth of groceries. "Hey, Mountain Goat," Dad said at the end of the dinner, while Mom was putting our table scraps in her purse. "Why don't you let me borrow that sock for a second?"

I looked around the table. No one met my eye except Dad, who was grinning like an alligator. I handed over the sock. Mom gave a dramatic sigh of defeat and let her head drop down on the table. To show who was in charge, Dad left the waitress a ten-dollar tip, but on the way out, Mom slipped it into her purse.

* * *

Soon we were out of money again. When Dad dropped Brian and me off at school, he noticed that we weren't carrying lunch bags.

"Where are your lunches?" Dad asked us.

We looked at each other and shrugged.

"There's no food in the house," Brian said.

When Dad heard that, he acted outraged, as though he'd learned for the first time that his children were going hungry.

"Dammit, that Rose Mary keeps spending money on art supplies!" he muttered, pretending to be talking to himself. Then he declared more loudly. "No child of mine has to go hungry!" After he dropped us off, he called after us. "Don't you kids worry about a thing."

At lunch Brian and I sat together in the cafeteria. I was pretending to help him with his homework so that no one would ask us why we weren't eating when Dad appeared in the doorway, carrying a big grocery bag. I saw him scanning the room, looking for us. "My young 'uns forgot to take their lunch to school today," he announced to the teacher on cafeteria duty as he walked toward us. He set the bag on the table in front of Brian and me and took out a loaf of bread, a whole package of bologna, a jar of mayonnaise, a half-gallon jug of orange juice, two apples, a jar of pickles, and two candy bars.

"Have I ever let you down?" he asked Brian and me and then turned and walked away.

In a voice so low that Dad didn't hear him, Brian said. "Yes."

* * *

"Dad has to start carrying his weight," Lori said as she stared into the empty refrigerator.

"He does!" I said. "He brings in money from odd jobs."

"He spends more than he earns on booze," Brian said. He was whittling, the shavings falling to the floor right outside the kitchen where we were standing. Brian had taken to carrying a pocketknife with him at all times, and he often whittled pieces of scrap wood when he was working something out in his head.

"It's not all for booze," I said. "Most of it's for research on cyanide leaching."

"Dad doesn't need to do research on leaching," Brian said. "He's an expert." He and Lori cracked up. I glared at them. I knew more about Dad's situation than they did because he talked to me more than anyone else in the family. We'd still go Demon Hunting in the desert together, for old time's sake, since by then I was seven and too grown up to believe in demons. Dad told me about all his plans and showed me his pages of graphs and calculations and geological charts, depicting the layers of sediment where the gold was buried.

He told me I was his favorite child, but he made me promise not to tell Lori or Brian or Maureen. It was our secret. "I swear, honey, there are times when I think you're the only one around who still has faith in me," he said. "I don't know what I'd do if you ever lost it." I told him that I would never lose faith in him. And I promised myself I never would.

* * *

A few months after Mom had started working as a teacher, Brian and I passed by the Green Lantern. The clouds above the setting sun were streaked scarlet and purple. The temperature was dropping quickly, from searing hot to chilly within a matter of minutes, like it always did in the desert at dusk. A woman with a fringed shawl draped over her shoulders was smoking a cigarette on the Green Lantern's front porch. She waved at Brian, but he didn't wave back.

"Yoo-hoo! Brian, it's me, sugar! Ginger!" she called.

Brian ignored her.

"Who's that?" I asked.

"Some friend of Dad's," he said. "She's dumb."

"Why is she dumb?"

"She doesn't even know all the words in a Sad Sack comic book," Brian said.

He told me that Dad had taken him out for his birthday awhile back. In the drugstore, Dad had let Brian pick out whatever present he wanted, so Brian chose a Sad Sack comic book. Then they went to the Nevada Hotel, which was near the Owl Club and had a sign outside saying BAR GRILL CLEAN MODERN. They had dinner with Ginger, who kept laughing and talking real loud and touching both Dad and Brian. Then all three climbed the stairs to one of the hotel rooms. It was a suite, with a small front room and a bedroom. Dad and Ginger went into the bedroom while Brian stayed in the front room and read his new comic book. Later, when Dad and Ginger came out, she sat down next to Brian. He didn't look up. He kept staring at the comic book, even though he'd already read it all the way through twice. Ginger declared that she loved Sad Sack. So Dad made Brian give Ginger the comic book, telling him it was the gentlemanly thing to do.

"It was mine!" Brian said. "And she kept asking me to read the bigger words. She's a grown-up, and she can't even read a comic book."

Brian had taken such a powerful dislike to Ginger that I realized she must have done something more than shanghai his comic book. I wondered if he had figured out something about Ginger and the other ladies at the Green Lantern. Maybe he knew why Mom said they were bad. Maybe that was why he was mad. "Did you learn what they do inside the Green Lantern?" I asked.

Brian stared off ahead. I tried to see what he was looking at, but there was nothing there except for the Tuscarora Mountains rising up to meet the darkening sky. Then he shook his head. "She makes a lot of money," he said. "and she should buy her own darn comic book."

SOME PEOPLE LIKED
to make fun of Battle Mountain. A big newspaper out east once held a contest to find the ugliest, most forlorn, most godforsaken town in the whole country, and it declared Battle Mountain the winner. The people who lived there didn't hold it in much regard, either. They'd point to the big yellow-and-red sign way up on a pole at the Shell stationthe one with the burned-out Sand say with a sort of perverse pride. "Yep, that's where we live: hell!"

But I was happy in Battle Mountain. We'd been there for nearly a year, and I considered it homethe first real home I could remember. Dad was on the verge of perfecting his cyanide gold process, Brian and I had the desert, Lori and Mom painted and read together, and Maureen, who had silky white-blond hair and a whole gang of imaginary friends, was happy running around with no diaper on. I thought our days of packing up and driving off in the middle of the night were over.

* * *

Just after my eighth birthday, Billy Deel and his dad moved into the Tracks. Billy was three years older than me, tall and skinny with a sandy crew cut and blue eyes. But he wasn't handsome. The thing about Billy was that he had a lopsided head. Bertha Whitefoot, a half-Indian woman who lived in a shack near the depot and kept about fifty dogs fenced in her yard, said it was because Billy's mom hadn't turned him over at all when he was a baby. He just lay there in the same position day in and day out, and the side of his head that was pressed against the mattress got a little flat. You didn't notice it all that much unless you looked at him straight on, and not a lot of people did, because Billy was always moving around like he was itchy. He kept his Marlboros rolled up in one of his T-shirt sleeves, and he lit his cigarettes with a Zippo lighter stamped with a picture of a naked lady bending over.

Billy lived with his dad in a house made of tar paper and corrugated tin, down the tracks from our house. He never mentioned his mom and made it clear that you weren't supposed to bring her up, so I never knew if she had run off or died. His dad worked in the barite mine and spent his evenings at the Owl Club, so Billy had a lot of unsupervised time on his hands.

Bertha Whitefoot took to calling Billy. "the devil with a crew cut" and. "the terror of the Tracks." She claimed he set fire to a couple of her dogs and skinned some neighborhood cats and strung their naked pink bodies up on a clothesline to make jerky. Billy said Bertha was a big fat liar. I didn't know whom to believe. After all, Billy was a certified JDjuvenile delinquent. He had told us that he spent time in a detention center in Reno for shoplifting and vandalizing cars. Shortly after he moved to the Tracks, Billy started following me around. He was always looking at me and telling the other kids he was my boyfriend.

"No, he's not!" I would yell, though I secretly liked it that he wanted to be.

A few months after he'd moved to town, Billy told me he wanted to show me something really funny.

"If it's a skinned cat, I don't want to see it," I said.

"Naw, it ain't nothing like that," he said. "It's really funny. You'll laugh and laugh. I promise. Unless you're scared."

"'Course I'm not scared," I said.

The funny thing Billy wanted to show me was in his house, which was dark inside and smelled like pee, and was even messier than our house, although in a different way. Our house was filled with stuff: papers, books, tools, lumber, paintings, art supplies, and statues of Venus de Milo painted all different colors. There was hardly anything in Billy's house. No furniture. Not even wooden spool tables. It had only one room with two mattresses on the floor next to a TV. There was nothing on the walls, not a single painting or drawing. A naked lightbulb hung from the ceiling, right next to three or four dangling spiral strips of flypaper so thick with flies that you couldn't see the sticky yellow surface underneath. Empty beer cans and whiskey bottles and a few half-eaten tins of Vienna sausages littered the floor. On one of the mattresses, Billy's father was snoring unevenly. His mouth hung open, and flies were gathered in the stubble of his beard. A wet stain had darkened his pants nearly to his knees. His zipper was undone, and his gross penis dangled to one side. I stared quietly, then asked. "What's the funny thing?"

"Don't you see?" said Billy, pointing at his dad. "He
pissed
himself!" Billy started laughing.

I felt my face turning hot. "You're not supposed to laugh at your own father," I said to him. "Ever."

"Aw, now, don't go get all high-and-mighty on me," Billy said. "Don't go and try and pretend you're better than me. 'Cause I know your daddy ain't nothing but a drunk like mine."

I hated Billy at that moment, I really did. I thought of telling him about binary numbers and the Glass Castle and Venus and all the things that made my dad special and completely different from his dad, but I knew Billy wouldn't understand. I started to run out of the house, but then I stopped and turned around.

"My daddy is nothing like your daddy!" I shouted. "When my daddy passes out, he
never
pisses himself!"

* * *

At dinner that night, I started telling everyone about Billy Deel's disgusting dad and the ugly dump they lived in.

Mom put down her fork. "Jeannette, I'm disappointed in you," she said. "You should show more compassion."

"Why?" I said. "He's bad. He's a JD."

"No child is born a delinquent," Mom said. They only became that way, she went on, if nobody loved them when they were kids. Unloved children grow up to become serial murderers or alcoholics. Mom looked pointedly at Dad and then back at me. She told me I should try to be nicer to Billy. "He doesn't have all the advantages you kids do," she said.

* * *

The next time I saw Billy, I told him I'd be his friendbut not his girlfriendif he promised not to make fun of anyone's dad. Billy promised. But he kept trying to be my boyfriend. He told me that if I'd be his girlfriend, he would always protect me and make sure nothing bad ever happened to me and buy me expensive presents. If I wouldn't be his girlfriend, he said, I'd be sorry. I told him if he didn't want to be just friends, fine with me, I wasn't scared of him.

After about a week, I was hanging out with some other kids from the Tracks, watching garbage burn in a big rusty trash can. They were all throwing in pieces of brush to keep the fire going, plus chunks of tire treads, and we cheered at the thick black rubber smoke that made our noses sting as it rolled past us into the air.

Billy came up to me and pulled my arm, motioning me away from the other kids. He dug into his pocket and pulled out a turquoise and silver ring. "It's for you," he said.

I took it and turned it over in my hand. Mom had a collection of turquoise and silver Indian jewelry that she kept at Grandma's house so Dad wouldn't pawn it. Most of it was antique and very valuablesome man from a museum in Phoenix kept trying to buy pieces from herand when we visited Grandma, Mom would let me and Lori put on the heavy necklaces and bracelets and concha belts. Billy's ring looked like one of Mom's. I ran it across my teeth and tongue like Mom had taught me to. I could tell by the slightly bitter taste that it was real silver.

"Where'd you get this?" I asked.

"It used to be my mom's," Billy said.

It sure was a pretty ring. It had a simple thin band and an oval-shaped piece of dark turquoise held in place by snaking silver strands. I didn't have any jewelry and it had been a long time since anyone had given me a present, except for the planet Venus.