Karen G. Berry - Mayhem 01 - Love and Mayhem Page 7

  “Can you tell me about that?”

  She shrugged. “There’s not much to tell.” Her face lit up with the self-righteous glee of the put-upon. “I always do it a certain way, you know. Tender mocks it, but I like it that way. And I never get any help with set up for the meetings, do I? Other people get all kinds of help, but I never do. I manage this park and take care of my granddaughter while her no-good mother gallivants all over the countryside in that mechanical nightmare she uses to make a living, and I can’t get any help at ALL.”

  Tender stared at the table, his eyes shaded by his John Deere cap. But his shame was not the issue. Memphis nodded at Rhondalee. “And were the usual people there? I mean, was there anyone in particular you expected to see that you didn’t?”

  She thought. “Well. You know, that busybody teacher, Melveena Strange, is usually there. She might have moved, but she still manages to get her nose into Park business. But she wasn’t there last night.” Melveena Strange had lived in the Park for a year when she and her husband first came to this county. They’d since moved to Ochre Water, but Melveena taught an aerobic kickboxing class every week and made every community meeting. “I’m surprised, because all she does lately is just drop by unannounced and pester me about letting Annie Leigh go to school with those Bone Pile kids.”

  “She’s supposed to be a fine teacher.”

  “Annie Leigh is wild enough already. I don’t need those hill critters rubbing off on her. And Tender has taught her to read and write and they’re working on math.”

  Memphis made a note. “What was the main topic of discussion at this meeting, Rhondalee?”

  She cocked her head. “Well, I always make up the agenda based on the contents of the tenant suggestion box. It was parking, Memphis. Sunday parking.”

  “Parking?”

  “Parking is serious business, Memphis. I should have seen it coming. I should’ve known that a heated discussion of the Sunday parking problem would lead to the Reverend’s being attacked.”

  The brothers’ eyes met in a glare of repressed mirth before they both looked away. “We don’t know the cause of it. We don’t even know if it was purposeful. He might have been injured in a hit-and-run, perhaps by a drunk driver. We just don’t know yet, so please don’t jump to any conclusions.”

  “Is he going to be okay, Memphis? Can you just tell me that much?”

  There in the trailer’s yellow kitchen, Memphis let his eyes graze the fiercely cheerful wallpaper border of hens and roosters, the hanging towels appliquéd with hens and roosters, the ruffled white curtains covered with silver thread, stitched into the design of chicken wire. Every make and model of magnetic poultry in the universe covered the refrigerator. The paper napkin holder, shaped like a little henhouse, held paper napkins printed with a design of hens and roosters. The cookie jar seemed to be the only variation on the theme. For some reason, Rhondalee kept her cookies in a big yellow ceramic lemon.

  Why did men marry, if it meant you had to have a kitchen like this, he wondered.

  A shiny black head of black hair appeared in the kitchen. “What’s all the racket?”

  And there she was, Memphis thought. Why men married.

  “Uncle Memphis!” She climbed him like a tree. Four feet of flannel nightgown, silver eyes, gappy teeth, and smooth skin stretched over bird bones. Memphis allowed himself a moment to cradle her, to breathe deeply of the smell she always carried. The outdoors. She always smelled like she’d just been outside.

  “Annie Leigh. Isn’t it late for you to be up, little one?”

  “What about you? You’re real noisy. Are you having a party? Can we play cards?” Her smile turned to a wince as Rhondalee grabbed her by the ear and wrestled her off Memphis’s lap.

  “Young lady, you are going to GET to bed, right this INSTANT, you worthless little piece of street-running…” and so on, out of the room.

  Tender looked pained. “I suppose it is awfully late for her to be up.”

  “Yes. Too late for a child.” They sat in silence.

  They’d been quiet as kids, Memphis remembered, even when they’d been allowed to speak their original language. The LaCour boys came from the Rosebud reservation in South Dakota. Their mother’s name was Winona Three Ravens. Their surname, LaCour, had come from a father they’d barely known. Neither boy remembered much about him aside from height and a guitar. There was a moment of being tossed in the air and caught for Tender, an afternoon by a lake with fishing poles for Memphis. Their childhood had ended when they were removed from the home of their mother and delivered to the echoing school where nuns had cut off their hair and forbidden them to speak the only language they knew.

  Memphis had been intrigued by the gravity and ritual of the Catholic faith. Tender had been beaten into tolerating it. Their musical ability had emerged early, their voices harnessed for the choir, their hands given over to the piano, the violin, and the deep thrumming ache of the cello. They were trotted out to exhibit their respectful manners and musical genius, which were interpreted as successful assimilation.

  But the Catholics hadn’t been able to keep either of them. They’d snuck out to a tent meeting to hear the music and carried some violins with them. Somehow they’d been brought onstage, and after they’d done their instrument-tossing trick, the preacher had given them each a banjo and the promise of a job if they’d ditch the fish-eaters and get dunked Baptist-style. Memphis turned eighteen, finished school and was free to leave. Tender was such a flight risk that they’d barred his windows and set a priest on his door at night. Memphis finally got him out through a bathroom window.

  Their first stop had been their mother’s home. Her eyes had shone at their songs. There was something pained and resolute in her, something that enforced a reserve on the brothers as far as asking about their father; who he was, where he’d come from, where he’d gone. Canada was the answer to the second two questions, and of course the name was a clue. He was the source of their light eyes, strange names, and Memphis’s impressive mustache-growing abilities. Working up their nerve, they asked their mother for more details. Her eyes fogged over with memories, whether good or bad they could not say.

  “Occasional,” she’d finally said in her English, improved over the years by her work at a Shell station. “Your father was occasional.”

  This would have to do.

  The brothers talked about what was next. They knew if they stayed on the reservation, the priests would come hunting Tender. They could go find jobs, hoping their Indian blood wasn’t too obvious, but both of them spoke with the cadence of their original language, even though they’d lost its words. And now there was music, but that would involve a dunking. They asked their mother what she thought they should do.

  She thought for a bit more. “Make some money.”

  They got baptized in the river and took to the stage.

  The LaCour Boys were a novelty act. They played anything stringed, whether it was fiddle, banjo, guitar, dobro or mandolin, their voices rising together in a harmony of heavenly praise. Press clippings called them “the Indian Everly Brothers for Christ.” They worked the fair circuit, and revival after revival, living in a world where they couldn’t get jobs as dishwashers because of their Indian blood, but were put on stage as minor celebrities because of it. It was a fine life, and they kept themselves upright, following their mother’s advice. They visited their mother when they could, until she gave up the ghost. And then came Rhondalee.

  Memphis didn’t even like to remember it.

  Once they’d stopped playing together, there were long years in which the brothers didn’t speak. Memphis joined the Coast Guard. and rose through the ranks while stationed in North Carolina, then attended school in Tuscaloosa for an Admin of Justice degree. After that, he went west, ending up at the Ochre County Sheriff’s Department. Through it all, he missed his brother.

  Eventually there was a call, a call in which Tender invited him to watch Raven perform at a revival in a neig
hboring county. A niece, imagine that. Of course he would come, of course he would be there. He hadn’t even known about the girl.

  A revival was not much fun if you didn’t believe in God and you weren’t playing music. Memphis sat through the preaching. The auditorium went dark and a voice boomed out. “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Littlest Angel for Jesus, Miss Rowena Gail LaCour!” A spot came up, illuminating a big pink cowboy hat. Was there a child under that?

  He’d thought her name was Raven.

  She swayed, stepped from one rhinestone-shining boot to the other. Her hands moved on the guitar. She lifted her voice.

  He is in me…

  Oh, her voice was strong enough to carry the weight of faith, and pure enough to break the heart of any believer. But she didn’t mean one word she sang. What’s worse, she hated it up there. He fought the urge to sweep her off the stage and carry her away from that place.

  He went backstage afterward, pushing his way through the smoking, swearing, spitting, sipping musicians for Christ. His niece sat on a speaker, swinging her bony legs and chugging an RC. The wig and hat lay on the ground below her, begging to be trampled. She wore her makeup as impishly as a Halloween mask, but he could see a tangle of scar tissue on one temple. What was that? What had marked her?

  She had given him an appraising stare. You look like my pop.

  I’m your Uncle Memphis. He handed her the gift he’d brought, a rag doll.

  She stuffed it down her shirt. Look. I’m knocked up.

  A man took a swig from a flask and smiled at the child. Who’s the daddy, Raven?

  Ain’t got no daddy. I’m like Mary. And off she skipped.

  Well, he’d thought, that was one child who never would have survived reservation boarding school. They’d have beaten her all the way to death, trying to get the devil out.

  He’d heard her voice, then. Its tang of metal and lure of sex. Memphis? Memphis, is that really YOU? He’d braced himself. For her, he’d turned away all the other women who had come to him over the years. For her, he’d remained aloof and alone. For her, he’d saved himself.

  When he turned around to see Rhondalee, his disillusionment had been considerable.

  That was how many years past? Twenty? And that little girl was a woman, now, a mother in her own right. Annie Leigh reminded him of Raven, but she reminded him more of his brother, that wild boy who had fought silently with teeth and nails to keep his hair, who would rather be beaten than catechized.

  And Lord, how beaten he was now.

  The men sat in the kitchen, surrounded by silence. “We need to talk about just a few things, Tender.” Tender nodded. “Now, I understand that yesterday…”

  Rhondalee swept back in, looking distinctly beleaguered. Memphis went silent and she glared at him. “Well, you just go ahead, Memphis. Go ahead with whatever you were saying. Anything he has to say to you, he can say in front of me. We’re man and wife, after all.”

  “I understand that, but it’s customary that I speak with people alone.”

  “The Lord has joined us together, Memphis! Do not mess with the Lord!”

  Memphis looked at his brother’s wife. Her face reminded him of a clothespin, dry and splintery and pinched. When she opened her tight mouth, he could almost hear the squeak of that little metal spring, which in turn reminded him of a mousetrap, that same shabby little piece of wood, that same coil ready to snap, that same bite.

  “Tender, why don’t we go sit in my car?”

  TENDER SHIVERED. HIS brother looked at him, rolled up the window. “Better?”

  “I’m fine.”

  Memphis turned on the dome light, turned down the radio, opened his little notebook and drew something. Probably Tic-Tac-Toe, thought Tender. That’s his favorite game.

  “Why don’t you to tell me about yesterday, Tender.”

  “What about it?”

  “Why don’t you tell me whatever you want to, about it.”

  Tender swallowed. “It was a regular day.”

  “So, being that it was regular, you were up at the bar in the early afternoon. Coffee?”

  “It was too hot for coffee yesterday.”

  “Have you been having any trouble up there?”

  Tender looked down at his hands. “I’m not much of a fighter anymore. But if I were, I’d have come to blows with a certain mail-order preacher over his unmannerly remarks concerning a neighbor of mine.”

  Memphis nodded. “I’d had enough of that, so I went up to the Clubhouse, and then we came home. Rhondalee made me some coffee. We did some yard work.”

  “The grass looks good.”

  “Thank you.” Tender’s hands, folded, sat so quietly in his lap. “And then I needed a shower. And then we went to the Tenant Association meeting.”

  “We, being…” Memphis waited.

  “Me and Rhondalee.”

  “Did anything happen there at the meeting? Any conflicts, confrontations?”

  “I didn’t go in. I went back up to the bar, hoping for some music. No one was playing, and all I could hear was this mess in my head, Memphis. That ghost sound. Did you hear it?”

  Memphis nodded. “A little. You have the better ears.”

  “I’d rather have yours.” Tender and Memphis heard what people whispered, what they mumbled, what they hissed under their breath. Neither could shop in the Ochre River Mall because the subliminal messages encrypted in the Muzak tapes ground at their serenity. But Tender could be brought to his knees by the wrong kind of noise.

  Once, many years before while stopped in Wallace, Idaho, the rest of the band had still been asleep in a decrepit hotel. Tender and his daughter had risen early, at noon, and ventured out in the hard heat of a high country summer to find ice cream. It had seemed uncomplicated enough, a man and his daughter looking for ice cream on a summer’s day. But then a drone had risen to assault them. Tender had felt that wail in his bones like an ancestral blood call, and sank to his knees, covering his ears with his hands. His daughter had looked around, hair visibly rising, to locate the source. Pop, it’s just that fella in the skirt. A man in the whole Scotsman regalia stood in front of a fraternal lodge, red-faced and bare-kneed, blowing steadily and looking as if his face might rupture from the exertion. People around them were pitching dollars in the man’s coffee can. Hey Pop? Maybe if they give him enough money, he’ll stop that noise. But Tender hadn’t wanted it to stop. It was ‘Amazing Grace,’ and the beauty of it had made all the hair on his body stand on end, even as it made him wish for death.

  There seemed to be no stopping the huge, atmospheric bagpipes blowing around the Francie June Memorial Trailer Park.

  Tender shook his head. “I can’t tell you what it was or where it came from. But I heard something worse than I’ve ever heard before.”

  “And you left the meeting with Rhondalee and went to bed for the night, is that correct?”

  “Well.” Tender felt embarrassed for his brother, who was giving him an opportunity to lie. He would never lie. “No, I didn’t. Rhondalee and I did go home. But I couldn’t sleep for that noise, so I went back over to the Clubhouse to play the piano.”

  “What time was that?”

  “I’m really not sure.”

  “And what happened then?”

  “Well, Raven came by and we sang a song. We sang ‘Kumbaya.’”

  “That’s a really pretty song.”

  “Yes, it is.” Tender sat for a moment, remembering singing it at that Baptist youth meeting in their teens. “And then she said she was going to the bar, and she asked me to join her. But I stayed there and played for a while more. That piano drowns it out, you know.”

  “How long were you playing the piano?”

  “I lose track. I don’t know.”

  “And what happened when you left?”

  Tender felt himself tense up. He swallowed hard. “Nothing.”

  “Tender? What?”

  “Nothing.” His voice sounded stubborn and harsh to his own ears.r />
  “Did you see something?”

  “I didn’t look at a thing.”

  “But did you hear something?” Memphis’s low voice had almost dropped to a whisper. “Tender, I think you’d best tell me, right now, what happened.”

  The night before, Tender had left the Clubhouse and walked down the Sweetly Dreaming Lane with his large hands stuffed deeply into his pockets. He’d played it all out of him. He felt emptied.

  He’d been ready to face his wife.

  Outdoor lighting was somewhat patchy at the Park. There was the occasional decorative Victorian-style street lamp shining down on some decorative white gravel paths, or a halogen anti-theft light burning down full force on a truck with exceptionally attractive wheels and tires. But mostly, the desert sky was left to light the way home.

  That night, the moon had hung high and full, like a forbidden white fruit begging to be bitten. It had spilled down silvery light all over Tender, turning the blacktop lane at his bare feet into a path of pearly treasure, lighting the brim of his hat like a halo. Tender had walked with an easy stride, a walk as natural as the flight of a heron, as graceful as a dance.

  The chick pea gravel of his driveway had shone like diamonds, but his truck was gone. Rhondalee had probably hidden it. She’d done that before to keep him from driving. She’d hide his boots, too, until she figured out he liked to walk barefoot.

  That’s when he’d heard it. Another melody had called to him on the cool night air.

  Hers.

  A song in a scale of desire had risen in his soul, filling him with an ache that could not be poured out in music, an ache that could not be soothed in any bed that contained Rhondalee, an ache that could never, ever be released. He had stood under the California stars and listened to Fossetta’s song of passion, his heart shattering all to pieces.

  “Fossetta had Randall Stagg over there.” He waited, his cap hanging in shame. His shame was warranted. For men with hearing like theirs, listening was a far more intimate act than looking could ever be.

  There was a manly moment, then. A moment of fidgeting in the front seat of the cruiser, adjustment of sheriff’s hat and shirt sleeve and belt buckle. There was ear-scratching, mustache-smoothing. One man cleared his throat. The other wiped his nose with the back of his hand. They might have been sending secret signals from pitcher’s mound to home plate, with all that shifting.