The Onion Girl (34 page)

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Authors: Charles de Lint

BOOK: The Onion Girl
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He switches his fiddlecase from one hand to the other.
“Then we'd better start walking,” he says.
As we reach Stokesville, I start to get depressed again. Everything's unfamiliar, but nothing seems to have changed either. Shacks and little clapboard
houses with tin roofs and walls covered with tarpaper or black joe give way to nicer places with tended lawns and little gardens. The dirt road turns to asphalt and finally acquires a sidewalk on either side, and then it goes downhill again. Now it's two- and three-story tenements and small businesses and then finally we're in the Ramble, Tyson's wrong side of the tracks with all of its bars and diners, pawnshops and poolrooms, dance halls and strip clubs.
For a long time, we're the only white faces—pretty much until we get to Division Street where the Ramble starts—but no one bothers us unless you count the dogs that took to following us for a while when we first reached Stokesville. They made Geordie nervous—after what we went through yesterday, I think pretty much anything around here would make him nervous—but I wasn't. I've never met the dog, doesn't matter how mean its reputation, that I can't make friends with. These ones wouldn't come for a pat, but after I called out to them a few times, they stopped growling and finally faded away down alleyways and side streets.
I'd never been to this part of town—at least not by myself, on foot like this. We drove through it lots of times on the way into Tyson, but it's not the sort of place you bring a kid. I could never understand why, but now that I'm grown up, now that I've lived through my own years as a junkie and hooker, I don't have any trouble seeing plenty of reasons. These last few blocks, all we keep walking by are these poor messed-up druggies, scrawny prostitutes, and tough-looking men who wear tattoos with the casual indifference that uptown men wear a cologne. I find myself offering up a prayer of thanks to whoever or whatever was responsible for Lou finding me and taking me in the way he did.
Everybody looks so rough, Indians, blacks, and whites, all mixed now. In this part of town, the only differences that are noted are who's got the money and who doesn't. We're strangers, and it's pretty obvious we don't have anything anybody'd want, but I still find myself wishing we'd waited for the bus back a-ways, instead of deciding to walk to the station like we are. Nobody's threatening us, but the potential for violence lies thick in the air, as does the hopelessness and despair.
I will us to be invisible, or at least not worth anybody's attention, and that works for a while. But then this guy pushes away from the wall of a
poolroom where he's been leaning with some friends and comes walking over to us and my heart sinks. First impression: he's as wide as he is tall. His chest strains his T-shirt, biceps bulging, arms covered in tattoos. His eyes are dark, unreadable, hair slicked back. His jeans grease-stained.
“Ray Baby,” he says. “I thought you blew town.” But then his gaze drops to my chest, comes back up to my face. “You ain't Raylene.”
“I … I'm her sister,” I say, guessing Raylene's much better endowed than I am.
“No shit. I didn't know she had her a sister.”
“Jillian May,” I tell him. But I don't offer him my hand.
He glances at Geordie, then back at me. Pops a pack of cigarettes out from where it was wedged in the sleeve of his T-shirt and shakes one out. Geordie and I both decline when he offers it to us.
“You said she left town?” I say.
He nods, lights his cigarette. I note the prison tattoos on the back of his hands—they're primitive, self-made, not like the ones on his arms, which were obviously done by a professional. There's a Harley logo on his right forearm, a naked woman on the left. There are others, higher on the arm, but they disappear under his shirt sleeves and I can't make them out.
“I wasn't talkin' to her, my ownself,” he says, “but that's the word. Her an' Pinky are headin' off to make it big somewheres.”
“But you don't know where?”
His eyes narrow slightly.
“We're family,” I remind him. “I haven't seen her in years and thought I'd come look her up.”
“Where ya been?” he asks.
I hesitate for a moment, then fall into a role.
“Hallsworth,” I tell him. Hallsworth Prison is the women's penitentiary just outside of Newford. “I just got out a couple of weeks ago. Fucked the wrong cop.”
I don't even look at Geordie as I'm saying this. I just hope he knows enough to play along.
“There ain't no right cop,” our new friend says.
“Well, I guess I know that now.”
He laughs. “I guess you do. You heard about Del?”
“Del's my brother,” I say, “but he's not exactly on my list of favorite people.”
“Yeah, he's a mean fuck, no question. Him an' me've had words a time or two. Ain't right what he did to that girl, leavin' her to die like that.”
“Being Del, it doesn't surprise me.”
“Nothing he'd do could surprise anybody.”
I nod. “So you don't know where Raylene went?”
He takes a drag and shakes his head. “Just off to make her fortune.”
“But she was happy?” I ask. “She was looking good?”
He laughs. “Oh, that sister of yours, she was always lookin' good. Not much for the sharin' of them good looks, mind. Not like Pinky. Man, she's the original party gal …”
His voice trails off and he actually looks a little embarrassed with where he was going. I can't even place who Pinky would be. I remember some Millers who lived a little farther down the Old Grange Road, but I thought they were all boys.
“You don't worry none about your little sister,” he tells me. “She can take care of herself.”
“Well, if you see her …”
“I'll tell her you dropped by to say how-do.”
I nod. “Thanks.”
“You need anythin'?” he asks. “I know what it's like, gettin' outta the joint an' there's nobody much interested in even givin' you the time of day.”
“I'm good,” I tell him. I start to turn away, then stop and ask, “What's your name?”
“Frankie,” he says. “Frankie Bennett.”
“I liked talking to you, Frankie,” I say.
Then I take Geordie's hand and we start walking away. The back of my neck prickles for a moment.
“You be good, Jillian May,” Frankie calls after me.
I can feel myself relax then. I turn, give him a smile and a wave, but we keep walking.
“What was all that about?” Geordie asks when we're out of Frankie's hearing.
I shrug. We're crossing the tracks that separate the Ramble from Tyson proper, leaving that other world behind. The bars, the junkies, and
the whores. Farther back, Stokesville. Farther still, Hillbilly Holler where I grew up. Or at least where I put in some years. I don't think I really started to grow up until after Lou found me.
“I was just fitting in,” I say. “I could tell he'd done time. I knew he'd be friendlier if he thought I had, too.”
“But Hallsworth?”
“So I exaggerated. You're still locked up when you're in juvie.”
“But you haven't really been in prison, have you?”
“I've been a lot of places where a person shouldn't have to be, but that's not one of them.”
“You don't think prison's the answer? I mean, if you screw up, you've got to pay.”
I guess he's thinking of his brother, Paddy.
“That's not it,” I tell him. “It's just there are a lot of people inside who don't deserve to be in there, and a lot of people walking free who should be locked up tight and the key thrown away. They just never seem to get the balance right.”
Geordie nods. “Well, Paddy's no angel, that's for sure.”
“You think he'll go straight when he gets out?”
“I'd like to say yes,” Geordie says, “but I doubt it.”
There's nothing I can say to ease the hurt in Geordie's eyes. I give his hand a squeeze.
“Let's find that bus station,” I say.
He nods. “I guess this was all pretty much a waste of time.”
I think about the friend I've made in him and shake my head.
“Not for a moment,” I tell him. “Not even for a moment.”
TYSON, APRIL 1999
Pinky and me, I guess we
cleaned up some since our original cowboy days in Tyson. We don't talk a whole lot prettier, and we still don't take no shit from no one, but you could say we mellowed some. Had us a whole bunch of adventures, didn't we just? But like the pair of bad pennies we was, we finally turned up back home again in the April of '99.
I suppose everybody comes back sooner or later—isn't that a hoot? All us no accounts can't run away fast enough, but then we come crawling back again, 'cause the rest of the world don't want no part of us neither.
But me and Pinky, we wasn't so much crawling back as just catching our breath, stopping by for old times' sake. We never had us no plan on staying. We got to town in late March, took us a room in the Slumber Inn Motel on Division Street, and just walked around, remembering. Most of our time we spent in the Ramble, that three-block strip of bars, strip joints, and honky-tonks that still serves up the entertainment for folks
from either side of the tracks. Every which way we turned, we was tripping over the memories.
We walk by the old place off Division Street where we used to live.
We try to find the bars and billiards halls and all where we used to spend our social time, though most of them is shut down, or got them new names.
We stop and have us a look at that street corner where Jimmy got himself beat to death by one of the Devil's Dragon. And that only puts me in mind of the rest of my sorry family. Del and Mama. Robbie. My sister.
I figure my sister's still living the good life in Newford. If that article I saw back in L.A. was anything to go by, she's doing so well there'd be no need to change her ways. But the others …
One afternoon I leave Pinky in our hotel room, smoking cigarettes and watching her soaps—she got herself hooked on them in prison. Me, I don't watch much TV no more and when I do, I don't really see what's on the screen. I use it like a white noise machine and just go away in my head, thinking—mostly about being a wolf, about that world we're running through and where it is and how come we can hunt there the way we do.
I get on the Division Street bus at a stop near our motel and stay on it as the street takes its long curve into downtown Tyson, a slow stop-and-start trip that 'minds me of all them times I went to visit Pinky in prison. I get off at one of our old haunts, the Devary Hotel, but I'm not planning on running no scams today. I'm not even scouting. I just needed to get away on my own for a time.
I can't get over how everything's changed. The Devary's a Hilton now, all spruced up and shiny like some strollop out for an evening stroll, trying to impress the locals. But the locals all have them new duds, too, when they haven't been torn down and rebuilt into something different themselves. There's more fancy office towers and indoor malls and high-end boutiques and galleries than a body'd know what to do with. The longer I go ambling about, the more I realize that Tyson's not just some hick county seat no more. The developers have done pulled it into the ass end of the twentieth century like they done pretty much every other place else they got their hands on. Makes me wonder 'bout some of the outlying towns like Hazard and Cooperstown. They's probably your picturesque
little tourist traps now, 'stead of the run-down old mining and lumber towns they been for the past hundred years or so.
Well, it's not like it's any of my concern.
I buy myself a bag of sour jelly candies and check things out. As I walk around for a while, I begin to feel like I'm in any one of the cities me and Pinky come through on our drive back from L.A. I guess I come to understand that it's not a matter of everything changing, really. It's that everything's becoming the same.
After a time I come upon a Radio Shack and go in to pick up a longer phone cord for my notebook computer. Our hotel room's not really set up for Internet access and I keep having to move the computer from the coffee table where I use it, over to the bed-so that my cord can reach the phone jack when I actually want to go on-line.
I can help myself just fine, but naturally a sales clerk comes sidling over as soon's I come in through the door. I start to tell him I don't need no one holding my hand, but he's just grinning like some old coon hound, caught himself a mighty fine smell.
“Raylene Carter,” he says. “It's been forever.”
His using my name takes me by surprise and I find my hand going for my pocket and that switchblade Pinky give me all them years ago that I still carry. I'm used to being invisible. Someone knows my name, it usually means trouble.
“You don't look like you've aged a year since high school,” the clerk's saying. “How do you do it?”
And then I place him and let myself relax. This here's Benmont Looney, and, man, didn't he take some ribbing over that name in school. Like Tyson, he's changed, too, but it weren't any improvement. He was always this pudgy, moon-faced kind a kid, clothes never fit quite right on account of they had nothing solid to hang from. He's bigger now and the suit he's wearing still hangs like a sack. Face is broader and if the zits are gone, so's most of his hair.
“How're you doing, Ben?” I say with a smile I don't mean.
“Pretty good, pretty good. I'm managing this store now.”
All it takes is an encouraging “uh-huh” to start him in on telling me about his wife and his kids and how he's living in Mountainview, one of the new suburbs outside of Tyson which “is a long step up from the Old Grange Road where we grew up.”
Funny hearing that stretch of the Holler referred to by its proper
name. I can't remember the last time I did, though it's only been me and Pinky all these years, so I guess that's no surprise.
I let Looney run on for a while, then finally steer the conversation to the remnants of my family since a guy like him'd keep up on all the kinds of things I want to know. I'm not being mean-spirited here. It's just that there's always going to be those who like to keep up on other people's business and Looney was one of them, no question. Even when we was growing up, he was like that. I remember Pinky was always wanting to thump him, just to get him to stop talking. I never cared much one way or the other and right now I'm happy to let him ramble on about the sorrowful affairs of the Carter clan.
“I guess you heard about Del going to prison,” he says.
I nod. “Nothing he didn't deserve. That was a long time ago—before I left town.”
“That's right. He did seven years, all told, and once he got out he took up with the Morgans.”
“Whatever for?”
I'm thinking of Del, always wanting to be the top man on the totem pole. It don't make a whole lotta sense, him taking up with them Morgans where he's just going to be one more stoop-an'-fetch-it boy.
“Well, the thing is,” Looney tells me, “seems he fell in love with one of their girls and I guess they took him in on account of her.”
“I thought they were all inbred.”
He gives me that old Looney grin, you'd really think he was short the full load of bricks. He ain't half dumb, really—I remember that from school—but that grin and his name pretty much sealed his fate when we was kids.
“You'd think that, from the look of them,” he says, “but I've got it on good account that your brother's not the first to marry into the Morgan clan.”
“Then how come they all still look the same?”
“Stronger genes, I guess, than those they take in.”
See, that's what I mean. Looney might look like some dumb old yokel, but there's plenty of thinking going on inside his head.
“I guess our mama wasn't too pleased,” I say.
He gets that look folks do when they know bad news you don't.
“I'm sorry to tell you this, Raylene,” he says, “but your mama's dead. I would have thought someone might have told you.”
Then why do you think I'm asking you all of this? I think. But I only tell him how I've been pretty much outta touch all these years.
“Well, I'm sorry to have had to be the one to give you the bad news,” he says.
What bad news would that be? I'm wondering. That's just one more no-account Carter for me not to have to think on.
“How'd she die?” I ask.
Hard, I'm hoping. She didn't deserve nothing less.
“Well, there's the irony, I guess,” he says. “All those years she was fighting against the stiff penalties for drunk driving and what does she do but get killed herself—head-on collision with Dewie Mackery who was so full of whiskey and beer that night you could've stuck a spout in him and opened a bar.”
That sounds like my mama, I guess. Del got jail time for drunk driving and killing someone, so she'd be up in arms against that, never you mind all the poor innocent folk getting themselves killed with all of them drunks on the road. She never did look no further than her damn own self and her favorite boy.
“Quite the turnout at her funeral, though.”
“People just wanted to make sure she was really dead,” I say.
He gives me a look, then nods. “You're probably right. She wasn't exactly well liked. Never did her cause much good, what with her own drinking and strident ways.”
“And Robbie?” I ask. “Is he dead, too?”
“Got on that road not long after Jimmy was killed—but I guess you were already out of town by then. They fished him out of Pine Creek, dead of an overdose.”
All them Carters dead. Makes the world just a little bit sweeter, I figure.
“What about Del?” I ask, hopefully.
“You didn't hear about the Morgans? I figured that was big news everywhere.”
“I don't follow the news much,” I tell him. “It's all bad anyways.”
“Well, this was bad all right. The official story is they had some falling out with a bunch of colored boys and the whole clan got wiped out.”
“That can't be true.”
He nods, pleased he's found someone who don't know a thing about such a big event.
“Oh, it's true, all right,” he says. “They only caught one of the killers and he was executed back in '83 or '84.”
“You said official story—what's the unofficial one?”
“That the man they killed did it all on his own. But that's not possible. There must've been forty, fifty Morgans died that day and you know how mean they could be. They'd cut a man for giving them a sideways look. There was no give to those Morgans, not an inch.”
I give a nod. Plenty of folks found that out the hard way.
“Who's saying that one man killed 'em all?”
“That's the talk on the rez. Story is he was some kind of hoodoo man, maybe a ghost or a spirit. But that's just talk. You know how people like a good story.”
I think about me and Pinky and our pack of wolves, running through the dreamlands. I guess I know firsthand how what you see in this world ain't necessarily all there is. But I don't see no reason to enlighten Looney on that account.
“So did Del die with the rest of them?” I ask.
“No, but he was pretty broke up about losing his family and all.”
He lost us a long time ago, I'm thinking, but I know that isn't what Looney means.
“He still around?” I say.
Looney nods. “He's on welfare and living in that trailer park at the end of Indiana Road.”
A place to avoid, then, though I got to admit to a certain curiosity. The thing is, he still troubles me. I don't know what kind of loser he's grown into, but the Del that terrorized me as a kid still stands tall in my head. I'd like to get him in the dreamlands, see how well he stands up to a pack of wolves.
“How about you?” Looney asks. “What've you been up to? You ever see Pinky anymore?”
“Oh, sure,” I tell him. “We moved down to Florida where we've been working as secretaries all this time. Thought we'd take a holiday this year and come back to the old hometown. Look around, see how things've changed.”
“Whereabouts in Florida?”
He's got the nose, all right, but I'm not up to adding to his storehouse of gossip. I can just see him, next time he runs into one of the old crowd. “You'll never guess who I ran into the other day …”
“Tell you the truth, Ben,” I say. “I'm kind of pressed for time here. Why don't you sell me one of those phone cord extensions and we'll do us some more catching up a little later on. Maybe get together with the old crowd and have us some laughs.”
He likes that idea, but after he's rung me through the cash and starts in asking where we're staying, I just take his card from the little holder by the register and tell him I'll give him a call.

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