Published in Torrid Literature
This story and "A Drive and a Drink With James Dean" feature the same characters. The stories are separated by twenty-two years.
Wrapped in lace and lies, I wait. In a room brimming with the consequences of coincidence, I wait. If it hadn’t been so damned hot, if I weren’t hung over and fed up, if I hadn’t given in to the desert’s melancholy and the threat of cowboys, if all these hadn’t pushed at me in concert. On the far wall the supplies of faith wait in boxes and on shelves. Hymnals, collection plates, storybooks for kids, Bibles for adults, stacked up like the motor oil and batteries in Dad’s gas station. I wait with them, waiting for our purpose. The clock hand clicks, the lace scratches, and the lies scratch my throat, scrabbling to crawl out on cue.
That morning brightened the bedroom, and heat battered through the open window, before I got a handle on sleeping through a two-year-old’s chest cold. Beau settled into a cough-free doze at the same time I pulled on shorts and a tank and slumped into my day. I grabbed a canned Pepsi from the refrigerator display and leaned in the open doorway of the station. Beyond the gas pumps the desert across the highway boiled into the pale sky on heat waves. At nine in the morning the thermometer needle had glided past ninety-five with no intention of stopping its climb for the top. I rolled the sweating can across my chest like actresses in movies, but the desert air vacuumed up the drops in seconds. It worked better in Hollywood heat. Down the strip of asphalt to the east mirage lakes invited a swim into the purple humps of mountains. To the west, the same.
“Morning, Mercedes. Watcha lookin’ for?” Walter Moncrief occupied his favored metal chair in a patch of shade under the window awning. I imagined that the chair had rusted in that spot since the fifties, with Walter in it. He spent his mornings upholding the West Texas tradition of old geezers hanging out at gas stations, jawing about tractors and cattle and other things beyond their knowledge. He’d toddle on to the café for lunch, then retire for a siesta in the back bedroom of his son’s ramshackled adobe.
“Not lookin’ for anything, Walter, because nothing ever comes. But I can assure you, if something does, I’ll grab it and get out of here. I don’t have any inclination to live out my life here like you.” Or any inclination to live out that day in this place, but that day had already declared itself a lost cause.
He pulled a cigarette from the pocket of his sweat-splotched shirt and lit it. Curls of smoke rode the wind, and I sucked them in, secondhand smoke being my only indulgence in the vice of my youth. Now a grown woman and a mother, I live with Dad in my childhood bedroom and abide by his rules as I never did then.
“Seem to remember you grabbed a certain something a few years ago, but here you are, right here, just like me.” He smiled, proud of his grasp of my hopelessness.
Prickly pear and cholla and tumble weed spotted the bleached sands, contorted into starved apparitions, as if they had withered from a former half-remembered vigor. “Do you see how ugly it is, Walter? Holman, Texas, the capitol of ugly. I want to live in a place with trees and grass. Don’t you ever want to walk barefoot through green grass?”
“I’ll tell you about grass, Mercy. It’s overrated. I visited my cousin in San Antone once, and he had to mow his grass twice a week.”
“You’re stupid, like everyone else in this town.” I finished the Pepsi, now a tepid slurry of sugar and artificial everything, and tossed the can into the trash. “Where’s Dad?”
“Working on Sonny Earle’s truck.”
“I have to go to the bank for change. Beau’s asleep. Can you listen for him and get him if he cries?”
“Sure, Merc, we get along fine. He don’t mind stupid folks like me.”
So off I went into my future, slogging along the highway’s shoulder, dust coating my feet and flip-flops, heat frying my brain, sun burning legs burned since birth, off I went to the bank half a mile away.
A honk behind me, the crunch of tires on gravel, and when I turned, Sonny Earle’s head popping from the window. “Hey, Mercy, want a ride?”
With eight hours of sleep and twenty degrees less of heat, a ride in Sonny Earle’s pickup would have ranked with a barefoot hike across the desert, but on that morning I slid into the air conditioning and settled into the leather and thought that money made life tolerable.
“That was fast,” I said.
“What?”
I enunciated with patience to give him time to digest the words and their meanings. “Dad fixing your truck.” I directed the air conditioning vent at my face and leaned into the current.
“Oh, yeah, it just needed a belt.” He leered sideways at me with a wolfish smile. Sonny’s good looks held a certain attraction, but something of his inner deficiencies always crept into them. “How about going out with me tonight, Mercy?” He tried on a silky tone of seduction, but it didn’t fit. “I’ll buy you a burger.”
“You’ve been asking me out for about ten years now, and have I ever said yes?”
He considered the question and reaching a conclusion drawled, “No.”
“Does it seem to you that the time may have come for you to give up?”
The rest of the short ride passed in silence, a relief and a comfort to Sonny, I knew. Words were his enemies. They tangled up on his tongue, when he tried to express as complicated a notion as his brain could summon, and they tumbled into his ears in a mess of noise, when others fired too many at him.
“Stop at the bank.” I got out onto the dusty street and missed the refrigerated air of wealth. “Thanks.”
“I could wait for you.”
“No, that’s okay. Don’t know how long I’ll be here.” Two minutes with Sonny Earle was my daily limit.
When I walked through the door and collided with the wall of the bank’s formidable air conditioning, Cheryl called from the teller’s booth, “Hey.”
“Hey.” I pulled two twenties from my pocket. “I need some ones.”
“How’s Beau? Still got a cold?”
“Yeah, the cough syrup kicked in at nine, too late to be of any benefit to me.”
“Did I just see you get out of Sonny Earle’s truck?”
“Better than walking.”
“You know, maybe you should give him a chance. He’ll inherit that ranch someday, and he’ll need a brain to help him run it. Might as well be yours. Just think, you’d have all that money to play with, and Sonny would do whatever you told him. Like a big puppy dog.” Cheryl counted out the ones.
“I don’t value the prospect of sleeping with a big, stupid puppy dog, even if he is rich. Why don’t you go after him, if you think it’s such a tempting idea?”
“Maybe I will. I’ll just close my eyes and pretend I’m with Kenny Chesney. Course, I’ll need a fifth of bourbon and a few joints to get there.”
“Sounds like a plan. See ya.” I turned toward the door and the garden spot that was Holman.
“Hey, Merc, it’s Friday. Let’s go to the Outpost tonight. We haven’t done that in a while. I think we deserve some fun.”
“I’m too tired for that sort of fun. The cowboys’ll hit on us, we might be drunk enough to sleep with one of them, and we’ll wake up tomorrow with a hangover and swear, never again. Think I’ll pass.” Cheryl looked indignant. For a desert-baked chick Cheryl has a streak of sensitivity more at home in those citified millennials who make an art form of navel-gazing. I surrendered to a lukewarm reconciliation. In a town the size of Holman friendships require nurturing. “I’m sorry. Maybe a few beers and a cowboy are what I need. Let’s do it.”
“Great. Seems like I never have any fun anymore. Remember when we all used to pile into a pickup and go out in the desert and get trashed. Those were good times.”
“They were, but we’re paying for it now. We’re both single mothers stuck in Holman, because of those good times.”
We stepped into the Outpost and into a Holman weekend ritual I had avoided for a good long while. Waylon Jennings still reminisced about Luckenbach, the odor of grilling beef still competed with the stench of stale beer, and a fog bank of smoke still stained every surface with decades of yellow grime. Not altogether a bad thing. I inhaled the smoke. All the secondhand nicotine I wanted.
I saw him a minute after my eyes adjusted to the gloom. The curls on the back of his head, the shoulder muscles under a cowboy shirt, the slouch against the edge of the table, the way his hands slashed the air in rhythm with his words.
“Did you know?” I asked Cheryl.
Cheryl’s eyes followed the trail of mine across the crowd and found him. “God, Merc, I swear I didn’t. You want to leave?”
“No way.” Most old sayings carry truth in them, like the one about last straws. For this day to end with him fractured my polished coating of civilization. I stopped my march across the bar just behind him and caught a whiff of his cologne. Nothing about him had changed, including the way he was mesmerizing a table of girls ten years his juniors. “James.”
He turned in mid-sentence, and lost his words. “Hey, Mercy,” he finally managed. “You’re looking good.”
“When did you get back?”
“Yesterday. Mom’s been bugging me to visit. I was meaning to call you.”
“And why would you do that, James?”
“You know,” he shrugged. “Thought I’d come by and see the kid.”
“Beau had his second birthday last month, and you haven’t bothered to lay eyes on him yet. Why now?”
James lowered his voice. “Let’s not get into it here, okay?”
“Where would you like to get into it?” I said loud enough to include the bar in the discussion. “You think these people don’t know you’ve never seen your son?” He stepped back, as if I had struck him, so I piled it on with relish. “You think they don’t know you’ve never sent me a dollar? You think they don’t know you left me like roadkill in Tucson, when you found out I was pregnant?” I took a step toward him, and he shriveled inside his starched shirt. “Well, James, you must have forgotten what a small town this is. They know everything.”
His face flushed, and I could see his inadequate mind struggling to form an adequate retort, but none was forthcoming, so he left the bar without defending his proven lack of honor.
Someone clapped and someone else whistled. “Way to go, Mercy.” I made a small curtsey and said, “How about buying me a beer in return for all this entertainment.”
As predicted Cheryl vanished around eleven with one of the hands from Lon Earle’s ranch, and I chased after drunkenness until my reason teetered on collapse. Three men I had known since kindergarten plied me with beer and honeyed cowboy sweetness in pursuit of the memorable payoff they had yet to realize in a decade of trying. So I gathered what will was left me and wound through the tables and down the hall to the rest room, where I induced vomiting, splashed water on my face, and felt able to walk home.
The floor outside the rest room shifted, and I grabbed the wall. Down the narrow passage the bar and the crowd whirled, and I experienced a moment of alcohol clarity. Down that dingy hallway my future beckoned, coaxing me into its arms. I’d marry one of these men, these small town losers, from desperation or lethargy or worse, misguided attraction. I’d bear more children, live in a dilapidated adobe with a garden of dust and brush, work at the gas station until Dad died, then maybe my ne’er-do-well husband would take over management and run the business into bankruptcy, at which time we’d join the food stamp brigade. I’d never leave Holman. Beau would grow up here, be a grease monkey at the station and another Friday night drunk at the Outpost. I’d die here.
“Mercy. Hey,” Sonny Earle said in my ear. I turned, and his face was inches away. His eyes reflected the bare light bulb on the ceiling. They were green with specks of blue and gold. He had drunk enough beer to loosen his recalcitrant tongue. “What do I have to do to get you to go out with me, Mercy? I’ll do it. Just tell me.” He put his hand on my arm, and I flinched. “Please, Mercy, you know I’m crazy about you, always have been. Just go out with me once. You name it, I’ll take you anywhere.” I had never heard so many intelligible words escape Sonny’s vocal chords. “I know,” he brightened, as if surprised by a rare idea, “I’ll take you to Marfa. We’ll have a steak dinner at the hotel.” He grinned at his genius. “No, wait,” another idea having bubbled up, “better yet, I’ll take you up to Odessa. We’ll do the town, have dinner, go dancing, whatever you want, Mercy. Just say yes.”
“Whatever I want?” Something better than promises never kept, better than a rented trailer in Tucson instead of a beach house in California, better than waiting tables to support the latest scheme for fast money, better than calling Dad for bus fare back to Holman? “How about New York? Would you take me to New York, Sonny?”
He looked confused. He had offered Odessa. “I guess. Sure,” he decided. “I’ll take you anywhere.”
“Anywhere?” To his father’s ranch, to live as the pampered daughter-in-law Lon thought he’d never have, to share in the wealth, to wade in the money flow from the gas wells and wind turbines and cattle? I stroked his cheek. Was this pretty, moronic boy in a man’s body my ticket out of Holman? All I had to do was say yes. Just say yes, and the adobe shack would scuttle into someone else’s life. “Paris? Would you take me to Paris?” A big puppy dog. He’d do anything I asked.
“I’ll take you to Paris, Mercy. Will you go with me?”
Yes. If nothing came down the road tomorrow or next week. “Maybe, Sonny. Ask me again when I’m sober. For now, just take me home.”
And he did, because I told him to.
The phone rang through my hangover, and I answered to stop the jangling.
“Mercedes?” he said.
“Yeah. Who’s this?”
“Lon Earle. Got a minute?”
“Sure, Lon.” Nothing but minutes, hours, days, years. In Holman, going nowhere.
“Sonny has this idea he’s taking you to Paris.”
Christ. “Just a drunken joke, Lon.”
“Oh. He sounded like you meant it. You finally said yes. He’s making plans.”
“I’m sorry. I was too drunk to know better.”
“He’ll be disappointed. Don’t suppose you’d rethink it.”
“What?”
“Look, Mercy, I know he’s dumb as a stump, but I love the kid and want him to be happy. He thinks you could make him happy.”
“But I don’t love the kid. I wouldn’t make him happy.”
“I don’t know how to tell him.”
“You want me to do it?” I had years of rejecting Sonny under my belt.
“I have an idea. Would you meet me at the café? I’ll buy you lunch.”
And so I wait in my Neiman Marcus lace and four carats of engagement ring, a bought-and-paid-for bride. In my defense, I didn’t settle for an allowance and a new car. I’m a native desert creature, hardened and opportunistic. An adoption to confer on Beau the privileges and rights of an Earle, private school in Dallas to stretch the distance between him and the Outpost, and whatever other luxuries I can conjure. On Lon’s death a trust fund managed by the bank for Sonny and everything else for me. I inherit ownership of the ranch, the gas wells, the real estate in Dallas, and all I do in return is stay with Sonny and keep him smiling. That I can do. I’ve brought smiles to tougher pieces of manhood than Sonny Earle. Lon can amble into old age with the assurance that his legacy will be in capable hands, Sonny can discover if his fantasies are worth a fortune, and I get everything except love. But I tried love and found it to be like Walter’s grass. Overrated.
The door opens, and Cheryl’s hairsprayed bouffant makes an entrance. She’s a pink cream puff in the confection of a maid-of-honor dress, her choice from Neiman’s impressive lineup. “It’s time, Merc.”
I stand, ready for the stroll with my father’s grimace of disapproval between the pews of people who know a sham when they see it, and the lies queue up in my throat. Will I take? I’ll take all he has. Will I have and hold? I’ll hold onto our contract with a grip that even old Lon’s lawyers couldn’t break.
At the café Lon asked me, “What do you want?”
“Everything. Everything you have.”