He went to Hominy and didn’t come home to Celia’s one night after he got up there. He took up with some running wild cousins and didn’t come back ever. Demons know fire too. Maybe demons chased him so hard that he could not slow down until he stopped for good on the side of the road where he came to such terrible awful rest after 18 years. Nearly 18 years.
He told me before I sent him up to Hominy to die—Granny, them old boys and their tire iron ain’t got nothing on me. You should have seen them! And then he laughed, squinched up his busted eye, and doubled over. Black hair sticking all everywhere, needing a haircut.
John Joseph tried to fix the broke door with masking tape and a screwdriver before he left. That boy fiddled all morning with the flapping door, singing Elvis Presley songs to me. Never fixed it right. It’s still stuck together with tape. Needs a new screen. I told him so that morning. I told him so and I sent him off to that highway in Hominy. I should have locked the door and never let him leave. Should have tried to scare him with the love of Good Lord. John Joseph probably would know better. That boy has a way right to my insides. He tapped the screen with the screwdriver and winked with his good eye. He grinned, said—I’ll take care of it, Granny.
I give nickels to pay on dollars I charge. I add up, take away. Nothing evens out, and I don’t think it will get fixed ever. I just as soon it stay that way. I see the tape and remember John Joseph holding a screwdriver and eating fried bologna I fed him, grinning up at me, good eye and bad eye trying to hide behind that greasy hair. I remember him like that. Try to. Bent over but looking up. Just a warm boy still, saying he’s sorry for the trouble, but he’ll make it all right. And this old lady don’t say nothing to him. Don’t drag him down to pray, don’t pick up the telephone to conspire him away to death. I take that sweet, running boy in my arms. I press my face in his wild hair and hold on.
Reney’s bones can feel a fight long before the rest of her wakes to the rising voices and clattering bottles. She is eight, almost nine. Granny and Lula live in a new rent house across the tracks and down a long hill, not so very far. Over there—standing on a chair rolling up balls of dough as Granny’s hearing aids whistle or lying curled into Granny’s great body napping—is Reney’s best place. But Reney knows that her place is with her mom.
Tonight, Reney is leaning against the bathroom doorjamb with her arms crossed, watching Justine and Christy, a junior in high school with permed black hair and thighs that bulge around her cutoffs. The young women dig into a pink suitcase of makeup samples that just arrived in the mail.
“Emerald Noir, fancy!” Christy says, opening a plastic eye shadow tray. “I can’t believe you signed up.”
“Wrote a check, so it won’t cost anybody anything,” says Justine.
“An’it,” Christy says, and they laugh like bouncing a check is the funniest thing in the world. Reney doesn’t laugh.
“Just kidding,” Justine says, tossing a cotton ball at her. “Besides, if I get good at this, we’ll be in our own place before you know it. We’ll probably get a pink Cadillac and drive to Dallas and dine with Mary Kay herself.”
“I’m definitely skipping school for that,” Christy says, bumping Reney with her butt. “I’ve never seen a vampire.”
Reney and Justine rent the two upstairs bedrooms of this big, old rickety house from Christy’s mom, who Justine worked with on the line before switching to days. Reney likes it here okay. Christy lets her come into her room and listen to albums sometimes. She lets her watch television with her and her friends after school. Justine isn’t quiet like she was at Granny and Lula’s, isn’t so mad.
Justine makes a V with her fingers. She puts them over Christy’s cheeks and tells her to hold still and quit grinning. She colors in dark rouge, first on Christy’s cheekbones and then her own, just the way the lady had shown her. She pulls out a deep maroon lipstick to match the rouge and turns to Reney.
“Sure you don’t want to get dolled up, Bean?”
Reney shakes her head. The lipstick is so dark it looks almost black in the fluorescent light of the bathroom mirror.
“Doesn’t matter. You’re the prettiest little Indian I ever did see.” Justine rolls her lips together, smoothing the lipstick, and then kisses a piece of toilet paper and hands it to Reney.
Makeup, Justine had said, was just one reason they couldn’t live with Granny and Lula, who quoted Timothy so much that Reney could mouth the entire Scripture along with her: “In like manner also, that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety . . .” and so on. Reney could count on Justine to follow with a crack about Timothy’s next verse: women staying in silence and subjugation. Then there would be stretches of hard quiet, and they were just better off here, so said Justine.
Reney takes the toilet paper and presses her own lips to it, rolls them into the color. She stands on her tiptoes in front of Justine and looks in the mirror, then wipes her lips with the back of her arm.
A good-time crew from the factory drifts in and out of the house. Cigarette butts transform ashtrays into morning-after volcanoes. Reney turns the ash-dusted tabletops into canvases, tracing hearts in her path when she creeps to the kitchen in the morning quiet. Men, some with union money to spare, bring occasional gifts (a bone-handled jackknife, a book of knots, the licks of a bobtailed dog). They fill the house with noise and a sweet-smelling smoke that Reney has come to know. They leave behind safety glasses, a stray sock here or there. One leaves the Waylon and Willie record that Reney keeps stashed beneath her bed.
“If being with my ex taught me anything,” Justine says, “it’s take not one ounce of shit from a man.” Justine, who won’t call Kenny by name anymore, holds her eyeliner to the flame of a match to soften it before touching it to her eyelid.
Reney leans in the doorway, waiting for the familiar sermon.
“You can’t trust a man to take care of you. Remember that, Reney. You can’t trust them at all for that matter. They’ll lie to get what they want. And they always want something.”
Justine steps over Reney and disappears into the kitchen. She is going to work tonight at the second job she’s picked up, waiting tables at a cowboy bar. Justine walks back in with a shot glass of tequila.
“I wish you wouldn’t go to that job,” Reney says. The low-cut blouse Justine has to wear makes Reney feel equal parts angry and embarrassed.
“I wish Granny and Lula didn’t have to walk to the laundromat. Wishing won’t get that washing machine out of layaway.” Justine does a little shake with her hips, holds up her tequila, and winks at Reney.
Reney digs through Justine’s purse and finds the lemonshaped squeeze bottle and disposable saltshaker. She passes the salt and squeezes a bit of lemon into her own mouth before handing it up to Justine, who has already licked the back of her hand.
“I go and prepare a place for you,” Justine says before giving the salt a shake and drinking the tequila down. She cackles, then gets mock serious—maybe, Reney is not sure—and says, “Father, forgive me.”
Kenny seemed good-natured enough until he didn’t. After him, men ran together in Reney’s mind. There could have been one or ten. There was the one who traveled around sharpening barbers’ razors and scissors and prided himself on keeping the kitchen knives sharp. There was a rodeo clown with the sweet dog and his own bag of makeup. Then there was the one whose friend owned the bar where Justine worked. This one wore a .38 Special in a holster he clipped to the inside of his cowboy boot. He had a long red ponytail and plenty of money but no job. After Justine ended it the