Karen G. Berry - Mayhem 01 - Love and Mayhem Page 13

  “And if not, he will end up mashed in the street, Lord.”

  How much more simple could it be? He guarded what he could, he warned when he was able. But warnings and portents, prophecies and admonitions meant nothing to the errant souls of the Francie June Memorial Trailer Park.

  “Lord, they hear you not.”

  Asa sank to his knees, and he prayed.

  AS MELVEENA PREPARED for work with unusual haste, her greatest mistake sat at the kitchen table, staring at a cup. He gestured at another cup on the table. “I poured you a cup, Veena.”

  “Why thank you, Clyde.” She had a sip. Vile. What was he doing off the couch? Were her powers of suggestion finally working? No, because if they were, he’d be packing, not drinking this foul instant coffee.

  He must be wanting something.

  Clyde kept ruffling his red hair as if he could somehow arrange for some blood to reach his brain by massaging his scalp. “Hey Veena, I guess you heard about the Reverend.”

  “I did, yesterday up at Coffee Klatch.”

  “Well, I guess he won’t be buying your car, now.” For the last year, the Reverend had been mounting a campaign to buy her Caddy. “It’s a shame you never went for it. He was offering good money.”

  Melveena blinked. “If you’d sold my grandmother’s car to that preacher, Clyde Groth, I would have impaled your head on something sharp and posted it at the gate to the Park as a warning.”

  He smiled, shook his head. “You’re a funny one, Veena. A real funny one.” He kept grinning, chuckling, guarded by a simpleton’s immunity from painful truths. Then he unfolded that lanky frame from the kitchen chair it was overburdening and headed back to the couch.

  She watched him, thinking her penance was certainly nearing a end.

  SHE LEFT OCHRE Water behind and drove south on the highway, past the twin cement lions that guarded the gates of the Park, sparing an elegant nod for Minah Bourne, who stood at the community mailboxes surveying her sales fliers. Minah nodded and smiled back, her old eyes sharp behind her bifocals.

  That one sees it all, Melveena thought.

  She reached a stretch of highway so desolate, so ruler-straight and mercilessly dry that it seemed as if time telescoped there. Her biceps moved under her shantung sleeves as powerfully and invisibly as dolphins, guiding the car despite winds that tried to keep outsiders at bay. She entered Bone Pile, a tiny town of hot winds and financial despair.

  “The imperfect is our Paradise.” She pulled into the gravel parking lot of Bone Pile Elementary. It was two rooms, one for girls and one for boys, administrated through the district office in Ochre Water and staffed by two. She taught the girls, and a terrified young man getting his student loans forgiven through Teach For America had charge of all those boys.

  She picked her way through the potholes in her crocodile pumps, entered the large door to the small school, unlocked her classroom and took her position behind the teacher’s desk. She watched through the window as the bus arrived, late of course, and disgorged a shoving, surly mob of dark-haired trouble.

  She had twelve children in her classroom. Willa, Tierney, Serilda, Paige, Orna, Maeve, Mildred, Lesley, Kyla, Glenna, Edana and Colleen. They were apt and eager students, at least while working in pairs. Left to sit alone at her desk, each child struggled. But the girls of Bone Pile could do anything if they worked together.

  However, to work, they had to show up. Where were her ragged girls? When they danced in the door on their bare feet, their long hair smelling of kerosene, when they ringed her desk and looked up with their terrifying eyes, Melveena Strange knew what she was doing in Ochre River County. And today, her classroom was empty.

  She glanced over to her open classroom door. A young man with terrible posture leaned in the entrance as if he were holding up the doorframe, arms crossed, chewing something and watching her. There was something both contemptuous and beseeching in his doomed, beautiful face. What a fine street-corner pimp he would have made in Little Rock, she thought. “Angus, may I remind you that you are not supposed to be on school grounds unless you’re enrolled.”

  “I came to see if you’ll get some school work around for Bonnie.”

  “I was planning to bring it up there this evening.”

  “My ma says for me to get it. She don’t want no one up there. Not right now.”

  “Angus, the whole point . . .”

  “I know, Miz Strange. I know.” He walked over to her desk and lay something on the papers there. The growl of his voice lowered to a whisper. “Bonnie told me to give this to you to keep.” Melveena looked down. The lipstick. She’d bought it for Bonnie on their secret trip to Modesto. Of course, the Bone Pile women were forbidden to use cosmetics.

  They’d made a day of it. A doctor’s appointment, a lunch at McDonald’s (Bonnie’s choice), and a trip to a department store. Bonnie looked wide-eyed at the escalators, the glamorous salespeople, the endless choices. They’d gone to the makeup counter to be helped by a perpetually startled woman in a navy smock. Your little girl wants her first lipstick? she’d purred to Melveena, who had just smiled back in that carefully blank manner she used to discourage the overly friendly advances of people in the service industry.

  The salesclerk had carefully filled in Bonnie’s cupid mouth. The child was already so startlingly beautiful that reddening her lips was an obscenity. Melveena and the clerk stood back and took Bonnie in: her tiny frame, her shockingly white skin, her unsettlingly wide-open eyes, her plump, painted lips. The salesclerk had shivered.

  Such a little thing. “I’ll keep it for her,” she whispered, and let the tube fall from her hand into her desk. The strong bones of her jaw set like statuary. “Angus? I need a fill. Come pump me some gas, will you?”

  “Sure thing, Miz Strange.”

  She snatched up her handbag and they left the classroom, picking their way through the potholes and gravel, back to her car. He let her walk ahead, but not because he had manners. The Bone Pile men had no manners.

  No, decided Melveena. That young man was just enjoying the view.

  THEY NEARED THE unnamed store, the only business in Bone Pile, with its sign that posted the correct price for a pack of cigarettes and the incorrect price for a watered-down gallon of gasoline. The place didn’t even have a door because as the owner told her once when she stopped for gas, “We’re opened fer bidnis 24/7, Ma’am. No point to a door if you never close it.”

  While he pumped, she closed her eyes and inhaled the gas fumes. It was a secret addiction, letting those fumes fill her pert nose until she was dizzy. “Miz Melveena? You’re full.” She gave him a hundred. When he emerged with whatever he’d decided to give her of the change, he climbed in beside her.

  It didn’t take long to leave the town behind, because there wasn’t much of a town to leave. The car bounced on bad roads. As she drove, he snuck a careful look at her thighs, then aimed a stream of tobacco juice out the window. Melveena drummed her nails on the wheel. “Angus, I plan to stop this vehicle momentarily, and when I do, I want you to empty your mouth of that vile substance.”

  “Huh?”

  She pulled over and slammed on the brakes, reached across him and opened the door. “Lose the chew or get out.”

  Red-faced, he spat, and dug with his dirty fingers to get the rest from the recesses of his gums, wiping his hands on his bibs. Melveena shuddered and wove her way uphill. She bit her tongue as the car fell into a particularly cavernous rut. “That one’s deeper than Fossetta Sweet’s…” Angus trailed off, remembering to whom he was speaking.

  She cleared her throat. “Do you have any personal knowledge of the particular area you just mentioned, Angus?”

  “No Miz Melveena, I don’t.”

  “Does, in fact, any young man from Bone Pile have any geodetic data on Miss Sweet?”

  “No Ma’am.”

  “I thought not. I suggest you find another metaphor for depth, young man.” He ducked his head. The bad road had her almost wish
ing the Caddy were in the shop. If it were, she’d be beating the undercarriage of a borrowed vehicle to pieces.

  She thought about the community they were approaching. Bone Pile men had fast trucks, polished boots and long arrest records. Bone Pile women had sharp tongues, lined faces, high voices, bare feet, and too many kids. If there was driving to be done, the men did that. If there was work to be done, the women did it. And the men liked it that way. They might spend some time in the military, hitch to Nashville or Austin to try their luck at the music business. But no matter how far the men roamed, no matter how much music or dope or how many women they found available for the taking out there in the wide world, they always came back to Bone Pile. The women never left. They stayed home and made babies, a batch of boys one year, a batch of girls the next, and worked their lean bodies into premature graves.

  It was a hard life, and the people who lived it were hard, too. But how beautiful they were, she thought with a pang. And looked at the boy beside her.

  “Hey, there’s a mashed coyote!” Angus called. “Can I pick it up?”

  Melveena saw the yellow-grey fur of the corpse and shuddered. “Heavens no, Angus.”

  “Looked like the hide was in good shape,” he muttered. “Could sell that fur.”

  They climbed higher, nearer to where the Bone Pilers congregated in clan groups, the MacGillicuttys, the MacIvers, the MacInnises, the occasional Dunnery. They were from nowhere, and bless their hearts, they were going nowhere, too. Bone Pile was a place with no industry, no farms, no plants, no attractions. All it produced, anymore, was children. But oh, thought Melveena, what children they are.

  Bone Pile babies were raised in a gentle climate of benign neglect, in households full of mothers and aunts, fathers and uncles, grandparents, siblings and cousins. The babies roamed naked and dusty, chubby on WIC allotments and the love of a shifting mob of relatives.

  Those fat babies grew into graceful boys and girls. There was something not quite human about them. Part of it was the shocking whiteness of the Bone Pile complexion, a pallor the California desert sun couldn’t touch. Unearthly, Melveena thought. But those elfin children turned into teenagers who had to be bussed into Ochre Water from the ninth grade on.

  The Ochre Water high school administration dreaded the yearly infusion of Bone Pile children. The girls never cut their hair and refused to wear shoes, even while running track. They didn’t drink or smoke, and they were not allowed to run around with boys from town. The Bone Pile boys were the trouble; foul-mouthed and skinny and prone to rolling their pickups, sending the town girls from Ochre Water out their bedroom windows for wild nights of blown-out tires, broken hymens and broken hearts.

  Melveena and her colleague in the tiny Bone Pile school fought a losing battle to keep the grade school open and prepare these wild creatures for the rigors of town. Most of the Bone Pile kids dropped out within a year or two, anyway. Like this young man riding beside me, thought Melveena. He’s a dropout. And he might not be an adult, but he’s a man. A Bone Pile man.

  And today, she thought, they haven’t allowed a single girl child to come to school. She pulled up hard, looking at the outlandish rigging of a Bone Pile village. “How is a woman in heels expected to maneuver all this?” she muttered.

  Angus mumbled and got out fast. He was wise to do that. As distasteful as she found the habit, Melveena Strange felt angry enough to spit.

  THE BONE PILE settlement rose on stolen scaffolding over upended railroad cars. Ladders and poles connected the individual dwellings, a complicated aviary made of tiny vintage travel trailers, fifth wheels, suspended camper tops and the occasional single wide. In places, the thing was four stories tall. It all looked as unlikely as a tree house, and ten times more complex.

  “How do they do this?” She’d asked before, and knew the answer was a combination of determination, block and tackle, and sheer sinew. But every time she saw the place, she shook her head in awe.

  It was all anchored with pit cars, the lowest and lowliest of the available dwellings, though an ingenious man sick of living under his mother’s thumb could convert one into more than respectable bachelor quarters with oil drum heat, bunks secured by chains, electricity stolen via miles of electrical cable hijacked from unguarded construction sites in Ochre Water. Angus lived in one such domicile. He’d shown it to Melveena proudly six months previously, explaining, “I just piss out the side door.”

  Melveena put on a pair of leather work gloves. “To guard my manicure,” she explained, and began her clamber in grand style, impeccable in her navy shantung, crocodile heels and handbag, grateful for strong arms and a history of climbing trees at her family reunions. As she climbed, she rapped a gloved fist at metal doors and gathered up girl children like a hen calling her chicks. She sat at one pull-down table after another, flinching from the harsh, trilling, excitable motherly voices that rose and swooped like an avian danger call. She sipped cup after cup of perked coffee, nibbled a piece of homemade bread sliced off noisily with an electric knife, tasted a spoonful of a simmering Crockpot stew that she feared was made with prairie dog. The fruits of electricity had to be respectfully sampled.

  Every woman in Bone Pile had at least one modern convenience, but generally only one. She might have an electric can opener, and boil her baby’s diapers in an iron pot. She might have a Dustbuster and waxed paper over her windows. What could a woman who cooked on a wood-burning parlor stove want with an electric knife? But the women of Bone Pile traded their rare electrical appliances back and forth in a round robin of trailing extension cords.

  Climbing the ladders in her best heels, admiring the appliances, reassuring the mothers, gathering up the girls, it had all been exhausting. But it was Bonnie’s mother, Ellie MacIver, who exhausted Melveena the most.

  Ellie MacIver, Melveena reminded herself, was the mother of Angus, sixteen, and Bonnie, fourteen. Ellie MacIver was just barely thirty years old. She took Melveena back to a quiet camper top that was serving as an addition to her family’s modest trailer. A girl who looked all of twelve years old lay there in the bed space that was meant to fit over the cab of a pickup truck. Melveena knelt down, stroked her forehead. In a community of beautiful little girls, Bonnie MacIver shone with a fierce, feverish beauty that verged on the consumptive. Her glowing eyes demanded information. “Do you still have my lipstick?” she whispered.

  “I’ll keep it for you, sweetheart. But we could always get you another.”

  “I want it back once I get done with this thing.” Bonnie grabbed Melveena’s hand and placed it on her belly, where Melveena could feel the pitch and roll of life. Bonnie spoke in the sweet, stirring tones of a Bone Pile girl, a musical outpouring of passion and pain. “I want to give it away. I don’t want it. I want to give it away and leave here. Can you help me?”

  Her mother opened her throat to protest in tones of distress that were more song than speech.

  Melveena was unable to get Bonnie free from that camper. But there were other girls to consider. It took many words, many promises, but Melveena eventually drove back down those rutted roads with her own twelve students in Grandma’s Cadillac. Bonnie remained up in the hills with her mother.

  Melveena drove as fast as she dared, glancing now and then in the rearview to check on her precious cargo. They filled the seats, the floorboards; they seemed to float above the car without holding on. There was no need to worry. The children, accustomed to riding in the backs of trucks, had no trouble at all with an open convertible.

  Flashing lights interrupted her reverie. Melveena pulled to the shoulder, the smallest of ladylike curses escaping her lips. The presence of the law struck every Bone Pile girl into silence. They sat in her car like a group of dusty graveyard angels.

  Sheriff Memphis LaCour unfolded himself from his prowler and walked regretfully to her door. A tall, rangy, grey-eyed man who looked just like his brother Tender, the sheriff spoke politely. “Miz Melveena.”

  Melveena unleashed her
best cotillion smile. That smile nearly brought Memphis to his knees, but it was her polite growl that did him in. “Sheriff, you have no idea how relieved I am to see you.” Her accent hit him near the knees and migrated upwards, settling around his future generations.

  Memphis had to steady himself with a hand to one of her fenders. “Now, Miz Melveena, I can’t imagine you’d be too happy to see me when you’re driving down the highway with all these children packed in here without benefit of seatbelts.”

  She batted those green eyes. “Oh, but this is where you’re wrong, Memphis. I’ve had to use Granny’s Caddy as an impromptu school bus, and I’ve just been sick with anxiety over it. And I was just thinking, wouldn’t it be helpful if some long, strong arm of the law could encircle us the rest of the way to the schoolhouse, and keep these babies safe?”

  “I’ll do it on one condition.”

  “What’s that, Sheriff?”

  “I was on my way out to talk to you about the Reverend’s death. I trust you’ve heard about it by now.”

  “I certainly have. What a shame.”

  He looked back at the girls. “I can see you have your hands full. I’ll get you to the school if I can drop by this afternoon and talk to you then.”

  She smiled again. No man born could resist a second smile.

  HE FOLLOWED A ways back. Far enough back that the girls relaxed, turned from stone to flesh and blood. Even though his lights flashed in the desert sun, the girls began to play.

  They talked and bounced and sang, road dust marring those icy white complexions and catching in their sharp teeth. They traded lines back and forth, one to another, without missing a beat. They could do that for an hour, she knew. If a child got stuck on a word, she kept the rhythm and changed the rhyme, or the girls started rhyming in alternation.

  hope I die before I get old

  the lightening cracked and the thunder rolled

  I wanted that car but the damn thing sold

  he swung the ax and her red head rolled