Hick - Andrea Portes [74]
I count out the money, low, keeping it out of sight. You never can tell. Be like Glenda. Keep it hush. Keep it secret.
The lady hands me the ticket and I go searching through the crowd for a payphone. I find one in the back and dial the Alibi. It rings and rings and I’m just about to give up but then Ray answers the phone and it’s like the Lord himself just dialed them up to say grace.
“Oh, Luli, Jesus!”
Oh, boy, here we go.
“Tammy! Tam! it’s Luli. it’s Luli on the phone!”
Now there’s a scuffle and too much noise and glasses clanking.
“Oh my God, Luli! We been worried sick. Just sick with this. When you coming home? Where’s your daddy?”
“Um, Mama, I don’t know where Daddy is but I’m coming home soon. I’ll be there tomorrow. Tomorrow morning at seven.”
“Oh, that’s great. That is the best thing ever. Oh my God, Luli, you are never gonna believe this. . . . I sold it! I sold it all to Lux! And now they’re gonna build a Wal-Mart! Can you believe it? They’re gonna build a Wal-Mart, right here in Palmyra!”
“But what about—”
“I’ve got money now, Luli. Hey, maybe you could even work at the Wal-Mart! They got real good jobs there. And when your dad gets home maybe he could work there, too. Hell, we could all work there! Cept me. I ain’t working there.”
“Mama, can you get me at seven?”
“Huh?”
“Seven a.m. The bus leaves me off in Lincoln.”
“Oh, well that’s a little early, honey . . .”
“Okay.”
“Speak up, Luli, I can’t hear you—”
“I gotta go, Mama. The bus is leaving—”
“We’re having a little bit of a celebration here, Luli, so—”
“I love you.”
“What?”
“I said, will you pick me up?”
“Ray!” Tammy laughs. “You are such a stitch—”
“Mama?”
The phone goes click and that’s that I guess.
If I could make Tammy young again, if I could make her not hate me, if I could make us like the people on TV, if I could bring my dad home, if I could bring her baby boy back, if I could hold her in the palm of my hand, gently, gently . . . I would.
But that would be like pulling the sun out of the sky and begging it to leave the moon.
I walk down the station to the bus, idling. it’s a simple gray bus, just like the station, just like just about everything in Denver. I get in and it’s like everybody’s been in there for a thousand years and plans to be there for a thousand more. We sit there, idling, getting hot, restless, until finally we pull out the station and out the city, you can watch this patch and that patch and that one, too. This place is just spreading out. New signs. New stores. New concrete.
And then it hits me, it hits me like someone screwed the top of my head off and placed a diamond pristine in the center of my brain . . . and I know, I know right then and there, that now comes the end of the West. Now comes the end of dusty roads and creaky woodsheds and leaning old farms turning gray. Now comes the end of gravel and hay bales and used-up barns smelling of horses.
And I think about that big blue whale of a Wal-Mart with Corn Pops and Crisco and aisles and aisles of new and improved soap.
And I see every moment of my stupid life, from the jingle-jangle of the wind-chimes to the other fella grinning to the click click click of Mama’s heels down the stairs and my dad laughing tipsy up the porch. I see every moment of my cracker-eating, stomach-grumbling, feet-swinging-out-the-barn days and I want to hurl myself onto the ground and kiss the floorboards. I want to wrap my arms around my house and kick off time. I want to throw myself onto the backyard soil and stop the earth from turning. I want to grab each day I burned to the ground up in handfuls. I want to kiss the dirt and beg it to come back to me, come back to me, before that dull machine comes crushing over our house, turning walls into scraps and scraps into dust. Come back to me before the concrete comes bleeding out from the city, past this house and the next, tumbling out, ruthlessly, inevitably, past the plains and into the horizon.
Come