Break the Skin (13 page)

CAROLYN LIVED
in the house she and Pablo had bought when they got married. She’d kept it in the divorce, but I knew it was hard now for her to keep up with the mortgage payments. It was a nice brick ranch house in the northwest part of Denton where the developers were chopping up pasture land, but still there was open range and longhorn cattle, and land with nothing taller than scrub oak and mesquite stretching out to the horizon. Not much to stop the wind, so plastic shopping bags from the
K-Mart on University Drive blew around and stuck to the barbed-wire fences. I drove out there to look for Pablo. An armadillo scooted across the road, and I had to stomp on my brakes to keep from hitting it.

When it comes to matters of love—real love, the kind that sears you; when it comes to Hearts on Fire—does the pledge ever die? With Pablo and Carolyn it was easy to imagine she was who he’d go to now because even I had to admit that it was true—he still loved her.

But he wasn’t there. Carolyn let me in, and I took in the scent of fresh-baked cookies, one of the air fresheners that she used, and I have to admit it was nice to smell that, and to watch the way the sunlight streamed in through the windows and fell across the blond wood onto all the living-room furniture and sparkled in the globes of the ceiling fan lights, and put shadows on the walls. I could see the lines on the carpets from a recent vacuuming, and there was a can of furniture polish and a cloth on the coffee table.

“I’ve interrupted your housework,” I said.

She reached behind her head and tightened the knot on a red bandanna she was using as a kerchief. Her hair was in a ponytail, and she was wearing a dark green UNT sweatshirt with a smear of white paint across the bottom. That, and a pair of running shoes left just inside the door, one shoe tipped over on its side, was enough to make the house seem more cozy, a house where someone lived with joy and sometimes loneliness and sometimes heartache, the way we all do, one day following another and us with no idea what might be just around the corner.

“Baby,” Carolyn said, “you should’ve known Pablo wouldn’t keep his mouth shut about what you’ve got cooking with that man, that Donnie.”

“Was he here? Pablo?” I had all sorts of horrible thoughts as I imagined the harm that might come to Pablo if he found Slam Dent or if Slam found him. It seemed to me that the two of them were on a collision course, and there was little I could do to stop it. Still, I had to try. “Carolyn,” I said, “tell me where he’s gone.”

She looked at me like I was crazy. “He went looking for you.”

“Just now?”

“No,” she said, “earlier.”

“He hasn’t been back?”

“He was just here once. This morning. He told me the truth.” She put her hands on her hips. “About you,” she said, “and how Donnie doesn’t know who he is and you’ve got him thinking he’s your husband.”

“I imagine you’re happy about that.”

Carolyn shook her head. “I wouldn’t say happy. No, that’s not the right word. Satisfied, I guess. Satisfied, Baby, because now you can’t hide.” She did the most surprising thing then. She leaned over and kissed me on each cheek, and I understood she was welcoming me to the fold, to the clan of women who’d do almost anything for love. “It’s all out in the open now,” she whispered in my ear. “Just how much alike we are. You and me, Baby.” She kissed my forehead. “We’re simpatico.”

She was right, of course, and, really, hadn’t I known it ever since that night I told Lester Stipp his name was Donnie, and then I took him home? How could someone do a thing like that if she weren’t crazy for a man to love her? And wasn’t that Carolyn’s story as well, she who, when push came to shove, would do practically anything to make things right between her and Pablo?

“All right,” I said. “So what are you going to do about it now that you know?”

Carolyn laughed. “Maybe you should put a tattoo on that man of yours.” She was enjoying teasing me, and there wasn’t much I could do but take it. “Yes, sir, Baby. I’d get a brand on him pronto. Looks like he’s a bull that’s apt to wander away from the herd.”

When the phone rang, I nearly jumped out of my skin. Carolyn didn’t move to answer it. The cordless phone was right there on the end table, but she just let it ring. Finally, the answering machine picked up, and it was Pablo’s voice still on the machine from the days when this was his home, and what he said was, “You’ve reached Pablo and Carolyn,” and then I didn’t really hear the rest because I was thinking how once
there’d been love in that house, and maybe it would have had a chance to endure if Carolyn hadn’t wanted too much and Pablo hadn’t gotten into his mess with Slam Dent.

The voice that left a message for Carolyn belonged to Slam. It was raspy from too much booze and too many cigarettes. “He was lucky this time. Next time? Maybe …” For a good while, there was nothing. Then he took another tack. “Sugar,” he said, and Carolyn crossed her arms over her chest. I could feel how afraid she was the night Slam Dent was in her house, how afraid she’d always be, and I sensed how this mistrust of the future was about to be mine because I knew, as soon as Slam Dent said
he was lucky
, he was talking about Pablo, and I knew, whatever the rest of the story was, it wouldn’t be one we’d choose to have waiting for us on down the line. It was like Slam was here again, Carolyn naked in front of him. “Sugar, I dream about you,” he said. “Better keep your door locked.” He laughed. “For what good it’ll do.”

I couldn’t take it anymore. I snatched up the phone and said, “You asshole.”

That didn’t faze him a bit. “Why, hello there, Baby. How’s tricks?”

“Have you hurt him?”

“Hurt him? Why, Baby, don’t you know who I am?” I could hear him breathing. “He had a little cash on him this time. I took that for interest on what he still owes me. Eighteen grand. I want it before the week’s out. If I don’t get it, I’ll kill him. Plain enough for you?”

I couldn’t find my voice. I couldn’t say a word.

PABLO WAS AT THE SHOP
—Carolyn and I went down there in my car—and Slam had beat him bad.

“I found him,” Pablo said with a little laugh, and maybe he even winked at us, but it was hard to tell because Slam had left him with both eyes nearly closed and bruised up ugly in different shades of black and yellow and purple and green. Pablo was sitting on a chair, his arm in a
sling that had been jerry-rigged out of a dish towel, safety pins, and a belt. “Pretty slick,” Pablo said. “That asshole fucked up my shoulder, but Donnie took care of it.”

“It was out of the socket.” Donnie was checking the safety pins that held the belt by buckle and tongue hole to the dish towel. “The humerus was dislocated from the scapula. I put it back in place.”

He said it as if it had been nothing at all, like he went around all the time fixing dislocated shoulders.

“I didn’t find it very humorous,” Pablo said.

“That ought to do the trick,” said Donnie, “until I can get a proper sling.” He looked at me. “Is there a medical supply store in town?”

“On Teasley Lane.” I was having a hard time believing that he’d been able to fix Pablo’s shoulder. “You just put it back into place?”

He nodded. “It’s called a closed reduction. You just put the head of the bone back into the joint socket.”

“Just as easy as that, huh? A snap?”

“I didn’t say it was easy.” He said this with a pained tone to his voice, and I could tell I’d been too flip. Pablo and I had lessened what he’d done with our play on words. I tried to make it up to him by letting him know how amazing I thought it was.

“Of course not,” I said. “You’re a real miracle worker. I don’t know what we’d have done without you.”

Carolyn was standing beside Pablo. She was petting his hair. “Ah, honey,” she said. “This just breaks my heart.”

“That’s better than your nose or your arm,” Pablo said, and he tried to smile, but his lips were cut and swollen, and the effort hurt too much.

Carolyn said, “Don’t talk, hon. We need to get something on your face. Baby, do you have something to keep these cuts from getting infected?”

I had rubbing alcohol, of course, and the A+D Ointment that I gave to customers to put on their new tattoos.

“It’s going to burn, isn’t it?” Pablo braced himself when he saw me douse a cotton swab with alcohol. “A whole hell of a lot, isn’t it, Betts?”

“Afraid so,” I told him, and Carolyn let him hold her hand. “Just tell yourself that when it stings, it means it’s doing what it’s supposed to do.”

I didn’t know how he’d lay hands to eighteen thousand dollars—Slam’s share of the cattle sale—by the end of the week. After making the down payment for that ring, he was close to busted. That was the problem. A huge problem, and no one had any answers. Between all of us, we didn’t have that kind of cash. So there we were. Stuck, and time ticking, and Pablo trying to keep the cops from knowing he was back in town.

“All right.” He nodded at me, and then braced himself for the sting of the alcohol. “Go ahead, Betts. Hit me.”

LANEY

A
s the days went on, I thought things might work out all right. Rose found a job taking care of a shut-in woman out in New Hope, a job that came with a room of her own. She moved out of the trailer, and once she’d saved enough wages, she paid Delilah what she owed for rent. Delilah was glad to see her go, but of course it left us tight for money. We took out an ad in the paper, looking for another roommate, and even put a notice up on the bulletin board at work, but the days went by and we didn’t have any takers.

When he could, Tweet stopped by late in the afternoons just as Delilah and I were getting the day started. Sometimes he brought a box of doughnuts, the kind with the white icing and the pink sprinkles that Delilah liked so much, and we all sat around the breakfast table drinking coffee and eating those doughnuts and gabbing about this or that.

“I hear you and Delilah were playing Mommy and Daddy,” I said one day. “You know, when you were driving that Explorer back from Terre Haute.”

Tweet gave Delilah a puzzled look. “We were?”

“Oh, that’s just Laney talking to hear her head rattle.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “She does that sometimes.”

“Seats seven,” I said, a reminder of what she’d told me about that Explorer.

“We were just yakking while we were driving,” he said. “We were
just playing.” He twisted his mouth around and chewed on his bottom lip. “Least I thought we were.”

“Sure, baby, that’s what we were doing.” Delilah waved her hand at him, like she was batting down any notion that they might have been serious. “We were just shooting the breeze.”

He nodded his head in agreement, but I thought he looked spooked.

THEN IT WAS
Memorial Day weekend, and Helmets on the Short Bus were playing at the Amvets Pig Roast and Raft Regatta up at Dark Bend, playing at a club called the Boar’s Nest. Lester said he wouldn’t go.

“Tweet turned me out,” he said, “and that’s the way it is.”

We were on our break at work, sitting in his truck, an old Ford F-150 that used to be red but now was faded to an orange almost the color of rust.

“Well, if you won’t go, then I won’t, either.”

He shrugged. “You can go if you want. I don’t mind.”

But I could tell he really did mind. I thought of how it made me feel the first time I saw Tweet play that guitar of his. “We’ll see,” I told Lester, and then it was time to go back to work.

“Oh, Laney, you
have
to go,” Delilah said when I told her I probably wouldn’t.

We were driving back to the trailer after work, and she stopped the Malibu on the railroad tracks. There was a freight that came through town that time of morning, and I thought about how the crossing arms came down, their lights flashing and their bells clanging.

“Delilah, drive!” I told her. I didn’t know how she could bring herself to do such a fool thing after what her mother had done.

“Not until you say you’ll go.”

“What if the train comes and the arms come down on your car?”

She put the tip of her finger in her mouth and gave me an innocent look. “Gonna leave a mark,” she said.

“All right, I’ll go.”

She took her foot off the brake and drove on over the crossing. “We’re going to have fun,” she said. “You’ll see.”

We drove up in the evening just as the sun was setting, casting streaks of orange and purple low in the sky. We zipped by bean- and cornfields that stretched back to tree lines, and everything felt as wide open as the land around us, the plants, barely ankle high, running in neat rows as far as I could see. The wheat fields were turning, going from green to what would soon be that yellow gold I always loved. It was just warm enough to make things nice, but not too hot, and I could tell that Delilah was jazzed. She had on a new pair of Lee jeans and a hot-pink tank. She wore a cowboy hat on her head—“a little special touch,” she said as we left the trailer. It was one of those straw hats with the brim curled up at the sides. A long red feather stuck up from the band. “What do you think, Laney?” she asked when she was getting dressed. She put on the pink tank and tucked it into her jeans. “Gretchen Wilson?” One of her favorite singers, a girl from Illinois who wasn’t about to let anyone run over her. “Or …” She slapped on that cowboy hat. “Lucinda Williams.” Lucinda was my favorite. I loved her sad-old, wise-to-the-world ways, and that voice that told you she’d been hurt every way there was for a woman to be hurt, and still she hoped for love. “I’m working on my image,” Delilah said. “I can’t decide.” She took off the hat. “All jacked up?” Then she put the hat back on. “Or Mister, you and me, we’re right in time, and if you ever forget it, I’ll roast your ass in a song?” I told her it depended on the message she wanted to send: “Take me.” Or “Careful, cowboy. Paybacks are hell.”

She nodded. “Both,” she said, and then she asked me to grab her purse and hand it to her. I picked it up from the doorknob where it was hanging, and I felt the weight of that Taurus .38. She was ready to go.

Now she turned up the volume on the CD player. Trace Atkins was singing “One Hot Mama.” She winked at me. “Just wait till Tweet gets his eyes on me. Laney, I can bet you, he’s gonna wanna.”