Chapter One Every blues song stinks of leaving. Backseats, bus stops, diesel and gin and the curled promise of a come-on to move you down the road toward some fresh new heartbreak. Jesus God. You have to stop sometime, no? You pace the earth like a dog fretting a fence line, but even a dog sniffs out a familiar spot to lie down. Which is a bullshit way of saying I ran out of steam first and cash second and therefore came to have Hector the repairman lying on my floor, wedged between the washer and the wall. Hector erupts in a mild explosion, half sneeze, half swear, and jerks back his hand. Little beads of blood soak into the cracked linoleum. "Hector?" I'm helpless. "Hector. You okay?" The lid's open and his voice resonates in the washer's metal belly like the rumble of a truck. "Cats," he says, and a calico kitten skitters across the floor and disappears into a hole beneath the kitchen cabinets. I step hastily into a chair, knock it over. Well, then. Guess that explains the smell. I right the chair and sit at the little Formica table as Hector struggles to come free. It is August and I am hotter than a hairless dog in the Sahara but Hector's cloaked in the same tan insulated coveralls men wear to whittle away at snowbanks in January. There's a tear at the bottom of one leg he has carefully patched with duct tape. Hector bends his knees and uses his heavy boots for traction to scoot himself out. I look down at my own bare feet. Maybe women don't go shoeless here. I tuck one foot behind the other, but they're way too big to hide. Upright, Hector leans against the wall and breathes heavily. He is no longer young. I wait as he reaches into his back pocket for a crumpled handkerchief and dabs at his face. Sweat trickles down his sideburns and streams along the ridge of his jaw. It was a small place for a man that size to find himself. "Mrs. Wooter," he says, slowly shaking his head, "there is no way you are going to get this, this"--his voice bubbles--"to work." "Please," I say, "sit down," and Hector eases himself into the spindly chair, the mate to mine. "Woolston," I say. "Qué?" "Woolston. My name. Willie Lee Woolston." Hector nods sharply. "Good," he says. "Even if your name was Maytag." I laugh, and Hector leans forward, encouraged. "Mira," he says. "The thermostat's stone dead. The drain valve's rusted shut. And the cats!" His eyebrows arc, a tangled stripe above dark eyes. "Malcriados." He lifts his scratched hand for evidence. "Rotten things should be paying rent. Mrs. Wooter"--he leans back in his chair and spreads his callused hands, palms up--"this machine? It's junk." "Willie Lee." "Yes," he says. "Coffee?" I point to the steaming pot. It's been some time since I last entertained company, but I haven't forgotten my social graces. "Please," Hector says, and I pour the weak brew into my only cup. "Sugar?" "Sí, gracias. And milk." "All out of milk." I set the cup before him with my lone spoon and the little sack of sugar. "Bueno." He measures in two scoops, stirs it, delicately lifts the cup to his lips. "Gracias." He sips politely while I look around at this wreck of a house I bought. Seven thousand dollars cash, and I have $243 left to my name. Willie Lee Wooter. "Hector," I say soberly. "The house. Junk, too?" Hector swirls the dregs in his cup and swallows. "Maybe not," he says. A smile warps the corner of his mouth. "Adobe's good. Keeps you warm in the winter." He reaches over to pat the dirt wall and a little trickle of dust spills down. "The roof leaks?" "Could be. I don't think so. I hope not." "Fix it if it does. Pero it's probably okay. Flaco put new ninety pound the summer before last." "Flaco?" "Flaco, Flaco," Hector murmurs, crossing himself. "Wild old cabrón. Almost as wild as me. Lived here forty years until--" He smiles again, a flash of silver from his side tooth. Stands up. "I could help you move that washer to your backyard?" Even with two it's a hell of a task. We huff and stumble to get it out the door and down the porch steps into the packed-dirt, thorn-littered square Hector calls my yard. A slat fence surrounds it, keeps my neighbor's broken washers from consorting with my own. I'm sweating and dusty and miserable in a new way. Hector tips back his cap. I wipe my forehead with the sleeve of my shirt and extend my hand. "Well. Thanks." He gathers it in his reddened mitts in the softest possible grasp. It is barely a squeeze. "De nada," he says, and goes inside to gather his tools. On the table an envelope holds what's left of my cash. "Tell me what I owe you." Hector just smiles and waves away my offer. "Mrs. Wooter," he says, his voice soft for so big-bellied a man. "Call me when you're ready and I'll put you a new one." I lean in my doorway, watch him walk to the road. His truck's an old Ford, freshly painted white, the bed fitted with utility drawers and a metal rack that holds lengths of pipe. When he opens the compartments I see dozens of tools neatly arranged. He slides his boxes over the tailgate and into the bed and turns to wave at me. Dark eyes, broad chest, almost handsome face. Seven children, I think. A man like that could have seven children. Not a rusty part in the lot of them. Maintenance , he said earlier, as another man could say faith , or a third would hiss vengeance . I am trying to change my life. Hector's truck has rumbled down the ruined pavement, has climbed the rise that takes him out of sight, and still I stand in this doorway, watching. It's late in the afternoon and hot, too hot to move. Across the road a single tree rises from the pool of its own shade, shields the dogs that lie, tongues lolling, in the stickers and scrub grass at its base. I know those dogs. In these weeks since my arrival we have come to regard one another with a measured respect, a kind of diffident curiosity. The orange one wags his tail as I watch. They follow me past the end of the pavement if I walk out of town, head toward sagebrush. I could be losing my mind to loneliness and not know it. Look, I'm a traveler. On the road, stay, on the road, stay a little longer, on the road again. It's got me about every place I could think of wanting to be and a few I was lucky to leave with my shoes on the right feet. Walking the line's been half my joy in living. But when you've been at it this long--eighteen hop-jumping years of town to town, gig to gig, rich as Flint one day and hand-to-mouth the next--the thought of one steady home starts to look good to you. Imagine: wake up in the same place, plant daisies under the porch swing, maybe get a dog. I caught sentiment like a disease that no amount of force or persuasion could dislodge. Even my dreams began to take on that peculiar hazy tint. I got tired, I'll admit it. Tired of dusty little gray-walled flats with rat traps in the corners and marks on the doorjambs where someone else's kid grew, inch by inch, over the years and I never stayed long enough to hang curtains. Tired of room service on the road--on the good days!--and Chinese takeout with a bottle of whiskey to wash it down when the gigs barely paid for the gas it took to get there. Tired of haggling over who got what share of the meager take. And then I got tired, even, of the singing. I did. I got tired of those lovely faces in the smoke-filled rooms, and my voice failed me. Oh, I sounded fine. They still clung to one another, shuffling around the small floors on the slow tunes; they still whistled and cheered and demanded more when we closed it down after last call; but the drummer knew, and I heard it myself: whatever I'd had that lit my voice was gone, caught the last train out and left me standing. I quit that night and left without saying good-bye. It was three long months of gray silence before I opened my mouth again. I was standing off to the side of the road in a little clump of foxtails--the burrs were sticking to my socks--and I saw this little tumbledown adobe with the rotten back porch and paint peeling off the slat fence and said: yes. That's all. That's all? Maybe. Maybe not. God knows I didn't aim for this unforgiving corner, knee-deep in dust and disapproving glances, but I'd lie to call it an accident that here's where I ended up. I left something here, once. Five years ago I was through this place--if it even was this place. I kept no record of where I went, that year of hopeless motion: up and down, back and forth, scratching a scab I couldn't reach, trying to shed something, scrape it off along these corrugated stretches of empty road. LJ was dead. Roscoe had gone off, I didn't know where. Without my friends to moor me I couldn't stand to be still and so I walked and rode this stripe of continent until it was printed across my chest like a tattoo, like a pencil line marked hard, over and over, until it pierces the paper. But there are a thousand towns that look like this and I could be wrong. A blue truck. A small woman. Not much past that. I gave that knife away and who could say why? Ask the moon why it glimmers. Ask the wind why it sighs. Stand there at the edge long enough and who knows which way you'll jump. It's cooler inside, and dark, after the sun's brilliance. It smells, of--cat. The kitchen's a big room, not much to fill it but the round Formica table and two chrome chairs that came with the house. The washing machine, the table and chairs, a plastic relief with imitation gilding of the Last Supper, and the cats: bonus, no charge. A front door that doesn't close right. A back door with a lock that's missing its key. The window above the sink that looks out on the street, the big window by the back door with its view of the yard, and above the fence the low hills and sky. Two more rooms so small my fingertips brush the walls when I stand with my arms outstretched. Home. Willie Lee, I ask you. I run my finger along the windowsill above the sink. The line in the dust is the road. This dot is the church, this dot the post office, this dot the only market, open three days a week for canned goods and toilet paper. This smudge is the small cluster of adobes and trailers that sit in the center of town, some with dirt yards and junk cars, a few with groomed lawns and fences, carports for the trucks. At the end of the smudge, at the far end of town, I make an X. "You are here," I say out loud. I take the wet rag and wipe the sill. Sooner or later you will have to do something, St. James says. He is standing off to one side at the Last Supper while Jesus blesses the food or argues with his apostles, his halo somewhat askew, and the trio of Marys tends to the men. James is like me: uncertain, in between. Neither of us is busy, so we have time for these afternoon conversations. I know I will, I tell him. I'm trying to get started. Your ways will exceed your means, he says, and I say quickly, Tell that to your friend, and James says, somewhat peeved, Well, see where that got him. But James is right. I can only live so long on canned beans, and the sides of this thin little envelope nearly touch. I had taken the bold step of calling Hector--he was listed in the yellow pages beside the town's one pay phone--in hopes that the washer would be easily repaired and I could sell it, pad my sorry coffers. Lopez Appliance Repair: We Fix Anything, from the Break of Day to a Broken Heart . Now, there's a man with stories, I thought. And me? I come here fat with stories, like a goose ready for the Christmas table. They leak out of me, turn my hair redder, split the skin on my fingertips. My own stories, other people's stories, old blues songs of heartbreak and revenge--Calhoun's dark head, his bald spot rubbed shiny like tanned leather, bent nearly double over his old Gibson as he plucked the strings and listened for their lonesome wail. Today I clean the house and let the stories rattle in my head. I yank the ruined carpet in the little rooms, drag it through the kitchen to the back door and onto the porch, where it will be covered from the rain. LJ's face the last day I saw her, before we had to put her in the ground. It's too hot for this but I keep going, sweep the dirty boards with a broom I found outside, scrub them with water and a brush tucked behind the sink plumbing. Scour the walls, pick at the layers of shredded wallpaper over yellowed plaster. The knife. I go outside and dump the bucket on the parched ground. It sits in a puddle and then soaks into the brown earth, wet stain a darker brown. Blue sky and crickets. Not a cloud. That knife's half of why I'm here, and the other half? Hell. That's anybody's guess. I was nine or ten, not yet eleven. I hardly remember those days, before I found Calhoun in his shack on the river next to the stone bridge nobody used anymore; before I gathered the blues inside me like the hot breath of a fever that wouldn't cure. My father still lived with us, fought with my mother, loved her, threw things, slept on the livingroom floor for his Sunday naps, worked at the mine, came home drunk, played his fiddle while my mother danced. I remember that, how my mother's cheeks flushed as she spun around, lifted her heels in time to the music, how they laughed, how he set aside his fiddle and she fell into his lap. I have his red hair. I know what it is to love. And then he left. I can't remember his going, only when he'd been gone and I somehow realized he wouldn't be coming back. That's when Baba came to live with us. When my mother slipped on the stairs to RJ Kress, the department store she'd gone to work at, was taken to the hospital and then brought home, pale faced and dull eyed, to lie on the couch in the living room and stare at the wall. I ate what was left and tried to feed her. I had begun to grow--quickly--and I was always hungry. I stole from the bread store, I went out back behind the market and loaded what they had thrown away into my school bag, took it home and sorted through it. I grew taller but my mother wouldn't eat. She shrunk in size until I loomed over her, suddenly a giant, wily and desperate. I could see through her skin, see the blue veins moving her blood lazily upriver. I wanted to scream at her but I was silent then. I stopped going to school and spoke to no one. When Baba came my mother's lips were cracked and bleeding. I carried her back and forth to the bathroom, her bones folded twiglike in my arms. My mother was dying, it was clear to me, and I had grown so monstrously large in so short a time it seemed that I had somehow absorbed her mass, taken her being into myself. But Baba came and stopped all that. Baba was as round as she was tall. She walked slowly, tipping her weight sideways from one foot to the other. Her face was round and wrinkled and she kept a scarf wrapped around her head and wore an overcoat, even in summer. It was summer when she came. As I lifted the curtain to watch her labor up the steps, I saw beyond her the spent flowers of the overgrown forsythia on the neighbor's corner lot. This is how I remember Baba: the last crumpled blooms of glorious yellow, fading, and the clothworn overcoat. I didn't know the old woman climbing the steps. I didn't plan to let her in, but she didn't knock, didn't pound the doorbell. She turned the knob and came into the hall. I heard her set down her bag with a thump. She came around the corner of the living room and stood there. She said, Margaret. I sat on the couch next to my mother. I saw her stir, saw her eyelids flutter. Baba watched her. Baba's eyes were bright blue stones in her wrinkled face. My mother didn't turn. She didn't open her eyes. Baba looked at me. And you? she said. Who are you? I kept looking at my mother. Her eyes stayed shut, but a tear rode the high blade of her cheekbone. Willie Lee, I said, not looking at her. The old woman stood quietly. To me she said, Granddaughter. We never talked of it, why Baba was there, why she hadn't come sooner. When she was well again I never spoke with my mother about her sickness. Baba fed us and a weight fell from my shoulders and I grew even taller, my hips filled out, my breasts began growing. My mother grew, too, fattened like a calf, and the color came back into her skin. Baba stayed. I never heard them speak to one another with anything but news. Baba read the gossip papers and laughed, but my mother didn't laugh. It was as though my father had taken that with him when he left. I was free then, but it was a strange kind of freedom. I had grown separate from the world of people and walked the train tracks in the woods, stayed clear of the abandoned mines that could swallow you in a moment's time, your body left rotting, undiscovered, in the bottom of the shaft. I tried school again but cast it off like the rest of my old clothes, too small, too tight. I walked the tracks, overgrown, obsolete, and wandered along the river until I found Calhoun. It wasn't Calhoun who gave me the knife. Calhoun gave me my voice because his was gone and he wanted to hear the old songs again. Calhoun tried to pass off his Gibson but I wouldn't take it, knowing I was going, knowing it meant he could go, too. The music that rang in his ears got louder as he got older, as his ears failed him and his fingers bent like tree branches in a wind, and the guitar had grown into his lap, like the burl on a tree. No, it wasn't Calhoun. The knife's lovely handle, mother-of-pearl, worn from so much use. The single blade, a crescent formed into its top, its edge reshaped from so many rasping passes on the stone. I was fifteen and anyone could see I was going. My mother went to her job, came home, watched the news. Her beautiful black hair had turned white. She watched me out of the corner of her eye. I wouldn't face her. Granddaughter, Baba said. It was dark at the top of the stairs. Her hand was soft and damp as she pressed the small heavy object into mine. I knew what it was. She always had it with her, riding her hip in the pocket of her apron, nestled in the mended satin pocket of her overcoat. Baba, I said, and she hummed at me, her hand still covering mine, her eyes gleaming. Don't wake your mother. I nodded. She patted my hand gently but her voice was harsh. Keep it sharp, she said. I nodded again and dropped it into my pocket. I shouldered my canvas bag and bent low to kiss her forehead. I will, I said, and brushed past her to go down the stairs. Willie Lee! she rasped, and I stopped at the landing. I waited while she mumbled in the old language. I couldn't see her, only hear her voice make its strange hiss and rumble, its coughs and whines. She was singing, softly. I felt the warmth from her hand collected in the knife, felt it warm against my thigh. Willie Lee! she said again, and I heard my mother moan and turn on the couch. God go with you, Baba said, and I slipped quietly into the night. The man was waiting. I was riding in the front seat and I was never going back. I imagine I could scrub so much this house would dissolve and still it would not be clean. I've got down the rest of the plaster scraps that clung to the walls in the big room so the mud blocks are exposed; I've swept and scrubbed the linoleum until its top layer chips up in my hands; I've rubbed, I've scoured the rust stains on the kitchen sink, shoved newspaper into holes the cats seem to use. There is nothing I can do about the way the kitchen floor slopes wildly or the odd relation the windowsills bear to level. My arms ache and my joints are sore from kneeling. The sun has gone down. I sit outside in what's left of the light and swing my legs over the edge of the back porch. "You! Scram!" I yell to the cat who has positioned herself on my washer, but she pays me no mind, lifts her paw to lick it, washes her face. "Beat it!" I yell, pushing myself off the porch and advancing toward her. She fixes me with a stony gaze, flicks her tail, leaps lazily onto the fence post. I step further into the yard to look up at the roof. It's a mishmash of paper: red, tan, two shades of green. Has the look of a roof that should leak. And though I'm not quite sure what to check for, still I'm standing on the washer, pushing off the fence-top for a leg up. The roof surface is rough and grainy, still hot on my bare feet, not too steep to climb. I cut a diagonal path and pray it'll hold me. Grab the ridge when I get there, toss my leg over and straddle it. It's a comfortable perch. There are no holes I can see, just green and red, green and tan, tan and red, all sewn together with the dime-sized heads of nails. The pipe from the woodstove sticks out, cockeyed. Probably okay, I think, feeling adept. Probably just fine. Lights shine in my neighbors' windows. Dusk is deepening. The first star. I lean back and let my spine wiggle to one side of the ridge and then to the other. The warmth pours through my shirt. I look up at the sky; more stars. A dog barks. From my rooftop perch I can see clear to the center of town, and what for a while is a dark shape in dark air becomes, as it draws nearer, a figure on horseback. The air is perfectly still and I can hear the slow clompclompclomp of the horse's hooves on pavement. I sit up; feel the line of the ridge press the back of my thighs. Wait for them to pass. But they don't. The horse moves into a circle of porch light and stands and the rider swings a leg over the horse's rump and slides down. Wide-brimmed dark hat and a figure too slight and too soft for a man's. She holds the horse by the reins and peers toward the front door. "Straight out of a Western," I say. Watch while she follows my voice. She laughs. Tips her hat back to look at me, sticks a hand in her jeans pocket. "Truck's in the shop," she says. Shrugs. "Chavela Abeyta." "Willie Lee Woolston," I call down. "You can call me Mrs. Wooter if you like. Hector Lopez does." Smiles. "Hector has a strong heart and a weak memory." She knows him. "And seven kids?" Raises an eyebrow. "None, unless you count my brother and me. He's my uncle." "He seems so fatherly." "That's his dedication. He's bent on making all the broken things in the world work." "Except my washing machine." She looks at me and frowns. "He really is distressed about that," she says. And then something happens. It starts when the frown that wrinkled her mouth loses its foothold and the edge of her lip lifts into a grin that spreads across her whole face. It makes me look at her, straight on, at those dark brown laughing eyes and the scar that left a lightning streak down the center of her face, and it's such a good face, such a hopeful, irreverent face, that I start to laugh myself, and it feels rusty, an unfamiliar sound creaking out of my throat, but we go on laughing and I get used to it, I get so I like it, the sound of my laughter and hers, I get so I like it a lot. She reaches around to her back pocket and pulls out an envelope. "Willie Lee," she says. "Hector asked me to bring this to you." There's a lilt to her voice and the trace of a challenge. I scope the distance between roof ridge and ground. It's never stopped me before. "Okay," I say. "Catch me if I fall." And inch forward on the grainy pitch. She steps forward. Raises an arm. I do believe she would. Copyright © 2001 Summer Wood. All rights reserved.
