To Come and Go Like Magic (16 page)

“What does Chili have that I don’t have?”

“Nothing,” says Priscilla.

Nothing, nothing, nothing … the whole team agrees.

“He likes her,” says Lily Lou Harris, her voice like a loud bell ringing in an empty church house. Lily’s been on the team all year, but Ginny and Priscilla have never liked her much, never included her in anything outside of practice. She’s in the fast group in class, the Triple As, always making perfect scores.

“What?” Ginny turns toward Lily and frowns.

Lily Lou shrugs. “I guess he just likes Chili better than you.”

Ginny’s face turns red and tough-looking, but her bottom lip starts to quiver. I look at her for a second and turn away like I don’t notice. Lily inches closer to me, but the others stay put. The two of us are the oddballs in this group. We’ll never be cheerleaders or May Day queens. Still, Zeno Mayfield wanted to kiss
me
. He would have given all his allowance for a month just to kiss me one time.

“I declined his invitation,” I say, trying not to laugh.

“What?” Ginny looks confused.

“I said no.”

Lily links her arm with mine and we leave the field together.

V
olcanoes …

Miss Matlock names everything we’re going to need in our packs.

“Water,” she says. “This place we’re going, the water’s not fit to drink. We’ll boil it first, then fill our canteens.”

“What else will we need?” Willie Bright asks. He’s down on his hands and knees using a trowel to dig up crabgrass.

“A warm sweater,” she says. “It’s hot in the valleys and cold in the mountains.”

Every Friday Miss Matlock insists on coming up on the mountain to dig up clumps of weeds and clear briars from the pauper’s lot. We don’t have any of her books with us, so she’s trying to describe the trip we’d be
taking to the Andes Mountains if we were sitting in her parlor in a cool spot with the window fan running.

She says in that part of the world the mountains are so high, their heads are in the clouds and they’re covered with snow and ice. Cotopaxi, she calls this place. A cone-shaped volcano belching up a rain of fire. And there are wide green valleys and high mountain lakes where the water sparkles like tinfoil.

When Willie finishes the crabgrass, we start pulling wild vines off the chain-link fence so the orange trumpet can grow. Miss Matlock says there are vines in the jungle that grow up the trees and strangle them. The tree rots away and the vine gets thick and hard and takes its place, but the tree’s hollow inside. She once stood inside the shell of a vine tree, she tells us, and she could look up and see the sky.

“Wild orchids grow in the tops of the trees,” Miss Matlock says. She takes the hoe and whacks at the stump that we’ve not been able to get out of the ground. Her face is turning red and her hair is wet with sweat. She’s too old to be working in this heat.

I ask for some water so she’ll stop whacking at that stump and take a break. Willie Bright follows us to the shade and pours himself a cup, too.

“What’s there to see when you’re climbing a volcano?” he asks.

“Birds,” she says. “Coots and lapwings. And spectacled bears, too.” She says these South American bears look like they’re wearing glasses. Imagine: bears with glasses.

I glance at my watch. Momma’s leaving work about now and the others will be getting home soon.

“I need to go,” I say. “I’ll get in trouble.”

Miss Matlock pushes her hair away from her face, leaving a dirty smudge across her forehead. Her face sags, but her eyes are bright, almost dancing.

“We’ll go to the Andes again,” she says. “Or maybe the jungle next time.”

Willie and I carry the tools to the truck and make sure we have everything we brought with us. The pauper’s lot started out looking like a big, messy room, but Miss Matlock says it’s now almost clear enough to imagine the possibilities.

We creep down the hillside, over the gravel and ruts, stirring up dust, until we get to where the pavement starts. I lean forward in the seat as if this will make the truck go faster, but Miss Matlock rides the brakes, lifting her foot only when it’s about to stop. I feel stuck in place, like those faraway purple mountains with their heads in the clouds and their feet planted deep beneath the roots of the tallest trees.

H
appiness …

“Happiness comes and goes like Wednesdays,” says Mayme Murphy. She’s Ginny’s big sister, and today she’s giving Myra a Toni home permanent so Myra doesn’t have to go to the beauty parlor and spend a fortune to get her hair fixed. I’m sitting at the kitchen table watching Mayme twirl strands of Myra’s blond hair around little pink curlers. When she gets close to the scalp, she puts a tiny sheet of paper around the curler and latches it tight. Every time she does this, Myra makes a face like she’s been stuck with a pin.

“Happiness is getting this over with,” Myra says, rolling her eyes at Mayme.

Mayme laughs and pats her on the shoulder. “It’s gonna be worth it,” she says. “Men won’t be able to keep their eyes off you.”

“I’m not looking for a man,” Myra says. “It’s too soon.”

Jerry Wilson’s just been gone a few months and Aunt Rose says Myra has to wait a year to look for a man. Besides, her belly’s as big as a basketball.

“After the way he treated you all those years?” Mayme says. She holds a strand of hair in midair and bends over the back of the chair to look Myra in the eyes. “Why, you don’t owe that man one month of waiting.”

“Aunt Rose says it’s not proper,” I say.

“Phooey.” Mayme shakes her head at me.

“But she says—”

“Don’t make no difference what Rose says, little sister. She don’t know what she’s talking about.” Mayme points a pink curler at me.

I don’t like being stopped in the middle of a sentence. I look straight and hard at Mayme.

“Rose was right about one thing,” I say. “She was one hundred percent right about that Mexican.” I smile like saying “cheese” before jumping up from the table and hightailing it out the back door.

“She was not!” Mayme shouts. “You have no idea!”

I have more than an idea. I have the whole story, and so does everybody else in town. This is how it goes: Carlos the Mexican was heading to Delaware to work in the soybean fields when he got off the interstate in Mercy Hill and ran into Mayme Murphy at the Hamburger Hut. He was ordering four hamburgers, two large fries, and a chocolate milk shake when Mayme, big mouth that she is, made a remark to the thin air (because no one else was in line) that she didn’t see where a little fellow
like him put all that food. He turned around with a mean look on his face that melted instantly into a smile when his eyes met Mayme’s and her beauty took his breath away. That’s what Ginny told me back in the spring when she was still my best friend.

Ginny started using words that she’d learned from Carlos the Mexican. He was in love with Mayme, she said, so Mr. Murphy got him a job at the sawmill, and he stayed in Mercy Hill, living off the Murphy family, according to Pop, until it was time to pick strawberries in Florida.

Aunt Rose says you can’t trust Mexicans. You’ve got to keep an eye on them. So, Mr. Murphy watched him like a hawk at the sawmill every day, but he left anyway. I saw him at the Piggly Wiggly the day he left town. Momma had sent me to buy dog food for Old Tate and Foxy Lady. It was like fate put me in that line.

“Hola,”
I said, trying to talk Mexican like Ginny.

“Hola, mi amiga,”
Carlos said. He was buying Pepsi “for the road,” he said, holding up the six-pack and winking.

“Where you going?”

“I go f-a-a-ar away,” he told me, stretching out the word like it was elastic. That’s when I knew he was leaving Mercy Hill.

“Why?” I asked.

Carlos set the Pepsi on the counter and put his hands on my shoulders. I looked into his brown eyes and they
did look kind of magical, the way Ginny said Mayme had described them.

“The longest river in the world wraps around my heart,” he said.

He put one hand over his heart like he was about to say the Pledge of Allegiance and stood like this for a long time, staring at the mountain of Charmin toilet paper on display by the checkout counter. It was hard to tell where his mind was aimed.

Then he was gone, gone from the Piggly Wiggly parking lot and onto the interstate, taking his gold-toothed smile and his Mexican words with him because no one in Mercy Hill had any use for them.

Later Ginny told me about the argument. She’d heard him say that he didn’t belong. “Why I stop here, anyway?” he’d asked Mayme. “I no belong.”

I wish he’d stayed. I’d like to ask him if the mountains in Mexico are the same as they are here, if all the people look like him, if he ever saw the ocean.

Voices drift through the open window. Mayme sniffling and Myra telling her that I’m just a kid and don’t know anything. Mayme says all she wants is happiness.

“That’s all anybody wants,” Myra says.

Myra thinks this hair permanent will change her life. The old Myra will be tossed out with the leftover
blond hair that’s lying on the kitchen floor, and the new Myra will come to life with a head full of springy curls. That’s happiness.

I can see rain clouds slipping over the mountain. It’s sunny on the porch stoop, but a wide band of white rain comes down on the distant hills, making them disappear. Momma says we need rain. It’s been hot and dry for days and the garden is parched. The clay dirt in the backyard has cracks running through it like tiny earthquakes full of ants and roly-poly bugs. The bugs are taking cover now, slipping down through the cracks. They know the rain’s coming even before Mayme and Myra know.

I turn up my face to catch the first drops. Today this is happiness. Cool rain on a hot face. I hold my eyes open for as long as I can before it starts to pour.

Q
uilts and VISTAs …

A VISTA worker is coming from Jellico Springs to look at Rose’s quilts.

“Word got spread around about my sewing,” Rose says. She tilts her chin just so. Momma sent me to help
Aunt Rose get her quilts down from the attic and display them on the couch and the beds and the kitchen table. Wedding Bands, Stars and Chains, Crows in the Pumpkin Patch, Around the World, Spinning Wheels, Flower Gardens. And two Crazy Quilts made from pieced-together scraps.