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You had to work hard for your gossip in Placedo Junction. Small
things happened. Third-hand got you through an hour or two on a hot August
evening, some halfway apocryphal story you tried to give a little oomph to
by adding a wholly apocryphal detail or two of your own--lies made up on
the spur of the moment just to keep your audience happy--just to keep
things moving in a forward direction you wouldn't be anymore bored with
than they were.
 Mother said pure speculation worked as well as the truth if you
wanted it to, the story of someone in some other town you'd never even been
to whose name you couldn't recall--but you swore it was there on the tip
of your tongue and you'd have it in a minute, or two if those listening
would lean back and light another Lucky and look at the stars and try to
not be impatient.
You could pretty much bet that they would. In that place where we
lived, minor pleasures were worth what in some other place much greater
pleasures probably were. Mother said a long quiet pause in the narrative
flow of a story--when she was out in the yard in the dark with her family
and friends gathered close in a comforting circle around her--was one of
those pleasures you'd have to be a fool to call minor. Even if you'd heard
it verbatim not more than an hour ago at a pump at the Esso station. Even
if you happened to know first hand that the whole damned thing, from
beginning to end, was a tissue of lies. Even if a stutter made the moment
of truth you were meant to be waiting on tenterhooks for seem too far away
and too hard to get to.
Mother said awful was better than nothing at all on a night when
the shades drawn down and chains on the gates of the hurricane fences and
guard dogs asleep on every porch of every house that you passed made you
feel it was you locked out and not the neighbors locked in.
This time though, this time awful wasn't better than nothing at all
since awful had happened to someone we cared for. Eugene pulled on his
boots with the boot hook and told me to run get the keys to the truck on a
night when our telephone rang and Mother picked it up and listened for a
minute with a frown on her face and said, "Slow down, sugar. Take a long
deep breath and try to tell me more clearly what happened."
We knew it was Sonny by the way that she gave us the high sign.
Eugene said, "Here we go again," and then he asked what I figured she'd
done to the poor bastard this time, she being Mother's sister, Lona,
Sonny's wife, Eugene's sister-in-law and my natural aunt.
What she did, if Sonny was right, and it turned out he was, was
breathe an irretrievable, "Yes," that changed the course of the rest of her
life. Not to mention Sonny's. Not to mention the course of the rest of the
life of the man she breathed "Yes" to. And possibly ours. And possibly
even, according to later, less friendly calculations, half a dozen innocent
bystanding others.
Mother said the shifting of human events touched off by Lona's
"Yes," could be explained, if you needed to have it explained, by the
"flutter of a butterfly wing transformed into the gathering winds of a
hurricane" theory. Generations later--when Lona was nothing but a calcium
deposit instead of a good looking woman with a low husky alto--her "Yes,"
because of how strong and long lasting the fallout of "Yes" always turns
out to be, would endure as a tiny little part of the great scheme of
things. At least, among two of the families she knew of in Placedo
Junction. And another one down in Nogales.
Eugene had no idea what she was talking about. He said the whole
thing was simple. Lona had the gall, or the gumption, take your pick, to do
what everyone all along had bet she would do. And that was leave Sonny. He
was sorry for Sonny. But his personal take on the matter was that Sonny had
a much better shot at an untroubled future without her. Lona's "Yes" was
the best thing to happen to Sonny and the worst thing to happen to the man
she said "Yes" to and we should all say a prayer, not for Sonny, but for
the man from Nogales.
None of us met him.
Mother said he came and he went leaving nothing but a knife in
Sonny's heart where the arrow of love had once been and a long set of skid
marks that
Sonny--in the futile gesture of a man who can't believe what is broken
can't somehow be fixed--went down on his knees with a magnifying glass to
get the size and the tread and the make of.
Eugene slammed on his brakes and said, "What the hell is that?"
It was Sonny. Crawling north along the north south lane of that two
lane blacktop his love had gone north on. With tears in his eyes. So he
couldn't see the treads he was trying to measure. And he couldn't see us in
the truck with our mouths wide open after Eugene slammed on the brakes and
left his own set of skid marks. He said three inches more would have put
Sonny out of his misery and thank God he'd fitted new pads on the brakes
and checked the linings and brake fluid level.
He asked Mother what she figured her brother-in-law might be doing
out there on his knees on the highway and she said looking for tangible
proof that his wife wasn't hijacked by gypsies but left in a car with a
wide-bodied chassies on four rubber chrome plated Goodyears. She said it
gave Sonny something to cope with.
Eugene expected there were five million tires with a similar tread.
Just in South Texas. He said Sonny was the salt of the earth but he
couldn't find the food on his plate unless you turned up the wattage and
pointed it out.
Mother meant cope with his loss. She said Sonny wasn't crazy and he
wasn't a fool. It was just that the unstable vanishing point of a car on
the highway with someone you love in the front seat whose farewell note
makes it clear that they're not coming back can be a pretty bad blow to
your sense of perspective. She said if the meaning of things shifts around
when perspective is altered--perspective being no more than how things
look in the light of a particular place at a particular time on a
particular day when seen through a pair of particular eyes--then a man, if
a man wants the meaning of things in his life to be different, has to
change his perspective. And that's just what the poor boy was doing.
Eugene pulled off the highway and told Mother, "Bullshit." He said
a thing was either real, or it wasn't, and perspective wouldn't change the
fact that Lona had run out on Sonny. He asked if Mother thought perspective
would give Sonny someone to hold when he lay in that icy cold bed with the
smell of Lona's vanished perfume mixed in among the love and the sweat of
their last night together.
First of all, Mother said icy cold beds were a grace you didn't
often come across in Texas in August. And second of all, when you got
within olfactory range of her sister, what you were catching a whiff of was
not from a bottle of tincture of roses. It was natural Lona. She said Lona
preferred not to look in the mirror at a face that looked better than her
own face did and she didn't mind a good strong dose of the pungent. So she
didn't wear scent and she didn't wear make-up.
That was only a line. Lona didn't use much but she did own a dark
brown Maybeline pencil, a cinnabar lipstick that doubled for rouge and a
box of sweet talcum from Juarez. This I can testify to because Lona let me
play with whatever she owned while she and Mother talked on the porch and
drank coffee.
Late afternoons, when Sonny's Cafe was closed and Sonny's Bar
wasn't open, Lona came to us or we went to Lona. So the sisters could
stare, side by side, into the dead still heat of a South Texas blank
afternoon and convince one another of how full of diversions it was.
In a world not pleasing enough not to want to remake, Lona told
Mother what she'd done to try to make it more pleasing. Confessed was more
like it. Long before she left with the man from Nogales there were stories
that Mother, once the story began to unfold, had to lay one finger to her
lips and say, "Lona, honey, lower your voice just a little," since for
Lona, a confession wasn't good without plenty of details.
This was no problem. All I had to do, if she dropped down an
octave, was scoot a little closer to the window with my braids pulled back
from my ears and stop breathing.
They must have thought I was busy with dress up. But I was filling
those blank sheets of paper my ten year old mind hadn't figured it's own
way to fill yet. In a landscape so quiet and empty a child had to make
something up just to say something happened, Lona made something out of
what was at hand. And then she said it was good. Like the bible said God
did. The difference was, Lona never rested since nothing she made ever
lasted.
Bad days, Lona said women love men and men let them. Good days,
close in the evening and kind in the morning, a good-bye kiss she wouldn't
be able to say wasn't love was enough.
There weren't many bad days.
Romance was a handful of dimes for the jukebox according to Lona,
some cowboy with just enough paycheck to buy her a beer, just enough style
to roll her a smoke and then light it on the side of his thumb, a rodeo
rider in a hand-tooled belt that read "Buddy," on his way up to Austin who
wanted to know what a sweet thing like her could be doing in a bad place
like Sonny Montana's.
It wasn't really that bad. "How you doing, hon?" or whatever your
name was, the way Lona said it, had a certain undeniable charm that made
Sonny Montana's a place filled with men who were happy to be near a woman
who liked men as much as she did.
Lona was a moth to the flame when she wasn't the flame. That
long-backed oil field worker, the one at the end of the bar with a plain
gold band stuffed down in the bottom of his pocket and "No place to go but
back home" in his eyes who was lifting his glass up and smiling at her was
too hard to resist. So she didn't resist. And she didn't dislike herself
later.
Mother had no idea how it felt to make love
to a man with a ring in his pocket so she had to rely on her sister. And her
sister was able to tell her since that line we all draw in the dust, the
one on either side of which faithful and faithless stand toe against toe,
was shaky to Lona.
Long bare legs hiked up on the dash of a truck pulled over in the
dark, you could make a bet were Lona's. And somebody's husband was with
her. Or a boy, raised to be sinless who wasn't anymore.
Mother said no one was not good enough and if Lona couldn't love
you then nobody could. All it took was a match held out to her Lucky. A
Stetson lifted up above a genuine smile and a moment when Sonny was
struggling with the generator down in the basement or lugging back beer and
tequila from a boat off of Galveston Bay that had much better prices than
the Placedo wholesalers did.
Eugene said Lona was callous and Sonny was deaf dumb and blind and
should have thrown in his bartending towel on the day that he met her.
Mother did what she did when she didn't want to talk any more and
said Eugene was probably right. She said, "Eugene, honey, we need to get
Sonny inside so I can strip off those jeans and scrape the gravel and tar
off.
Eugene helped Sonny up from the highway and led him back into the
bar like a devastated wreck of a man you never would have known had been a
wise-cracking cut up with hatchet-like laugh lines an hour ago.
Mother shook her head and told me, "Take a good look at what a
woman can do to a man, little sugar." She said Sonny was Samson and Lona
was Delilah with a big pair of scissors but the truth was, a year and a day
from today, when Sonny's mop had grown strong and thick and bushy again,
some woman would ruffle it up and make Sonny forget about Lona. She told me
I should note that down in those notes in my head she could see I was
taking.
Mother parked the truck and tied the dog to a scrub oak and said to
me, "Baby, you can wait on the porch if you want but I'd prefer that you
run on inside and give Uncle Sonny a kiss and then sit at the bar like a
good girl. And listen." She said I might pick up a little useful
information. She said women like to sit around and speculate on love and
why it waxes and wanes as it ebbs and it flows but men mostly don't so it's
important to pay strict attention when one of them is forced by a bit of
that waxing and waning to open the trapdoor they keep such a lock on. And
Sonny, if we were lucky, was about to take the lock off the trapdoor.
Eugene flipped a switch that caused the neon beer not to pour into
the neon glass on the roof of the bar anymore. Then, to indicate that Sonny
Montana's was "Closed" for the evening, he turned the "Open For Business"
sign around and said we should hush when a bright set of high beams lit up
the walls of the bar and a truck door slammed. Hard wooden heels on the
circle of gravel preceding hard wooden heels on the steps of the porch and
then the rattle of the front door handle made Mother ask why didn't Eugene
just open the door for God's sake and tell the customers Sonny wasn't
feeling one hundred percent and he'd be ready for business tomorrow?
Eugene said he wouldn't want strangers around if the boots he was
standing in were Sonny's. Thank God, he said, that it was family his
brother-in-law had been nearly run down by the reputation of a man in an
anthill like Placedo Junction being pulverized and blown away as no more
than dust in the wind for pulling less of a damned fool stunt than the one
Sonny's pulled.
Mother said, "Who the hell cares what they think?" She didn't. And
neither did Sonny. And neither did Lona. And neither, she hoped, did the
daughter she was trying to raise not to glance back over her shoulder at
the face of the multitude dogging her footsteps and watching to see if her
gait was a good one or not. She told me, "That's a sure way to stumble,
little lover." Then she asked if I did care what anyone thought. I said
that I did care what she thought. And I did care what Eugene thought. And
Aunt Lona and Sonny. And maybe Paco and Earl. And my dog. When I told her
that was all I could think of, she patted my knee and promised I could try
on a pair of her high heeled slippers and walk around the house in her silk
dress from Houston. Once Sonny was better.
Eugene made a noise reserved for moments when Mother, by chance or
by design, touched a spot that was tender. He asked why thumbing her nose
at the sanctified order of things seemed to give her such pleasure.
Mother wasn't thumbing her nose. She asked Eugene how easy he
figured it was for her to walk past those women lined up on the front steps
of Final Rest Baptist who wouldn't say good morning to Lona and only said
good morning to her because they couldn't find a good reason not to. But
they were biding their time. Watching and waiting. With their tails curled
around them. And if she had a nickel for each and every time she'd wanted
to give them a good reason not to smile and wave and say, "Good morning,
Leda," she could pay for Eugene to be fitted with a pair of those
high-heeled wide-shanked X-toed boots made of turquoise python displayed in
the window of a custom-made boot store down in Caborca. The ones she'd seen
him stand before and covet with the burn of a red hot desire in his eyes.
Not to mention a nice little Mexican ring for her daughter. She said we
could all use a trip to Caborca. But she never gave into those urges so she
didn't have the nickel collection.
Eugene said he expected she would. Give in. One of these days. When
the urge got stronger.
That wasn't true and he knew it. He said how perfidious her sister
had turned out to be only pointed a light on how fidious she was.
Mother said fidious wasn't a word but she knew what he meant. Then
she pushed back a lock of his hair and looked in his eyes and said he was
more likely to wake up one morning and run off to someplace exotic, like
Juarez, than she was.
When Eugene said, "Never," she told him "Never say never, Eugene."
She said always and never are flame-throwing words and it's best not to
torture that sniper up there in the clouds with a finger on the trigger of
a blowtorch aimed at the roof of our house with how smug and secure we
appeared to be feeling these days.
She said you do what you can to get by and you try not to hurt
those you love but sometimes, sometimes it turns out you have to. She said
the thing that hurt her was that Lona hadn't stopped off to tell her
good-by and let her give her a kiss and a blessing and take that turquoise
bracelet off her own wrist and snap it on Lona's. She said she was sorry
she hadn't just handed it over when she saw how much Lona liked it. Now,
she might never get to. She also was sorry her daughter wasn't blessed with
a sister like Lona to share half the load of herself with. She guessed she
just hadn't noticed how much there was in her life to be sorry about.
That wasn't like Mother. Eugene put his arms around her shoulders
and held her and nobody said anything for awhile.
Except Sonny. He thought the note that read, "So long, you long
drink of water. Take care of yourself. Love, Lona," had the sound of a note
being written with a gun at the side of her head. He was calling the
sheriff. That is, he was calling the sheriff until Eugene, with a knife in
his voice, told him, "Put that phone down, Montana."
Sonny said he had to do something. He said maybe he'd dust off the
whiskey glass for prints. He thought maybe he might use the box of sweet
talcum from Juarez. But it reminded him of Lona. Straight from the bath. He
said there were two little tracks by the side of the bed and we shouldn't
let the dog in or open the window. He said a breeze might blow them away.
Or the dog might lie down and lick them. The way he'd like to do.
Eugene said Sonny ought to try to get a hold of himself. But Sonny
didn't seem to be able to do that. Mother pushed him back in his chair and
unbuttoned his shirt and took the lid off the jojoba oil and said, "Just
let me rub out the kinks in these knotted-up muscles, Montana. Eugene,
honey, why don't you mix this poor boy a drink and help him make a little
sense of what's happened."
My father poured three rye whiskies over ice cubes and gave one to
Sonny and one to my mother who wrapped it in the hem of her long gathered
skirt so the chill wouldn't cut through the warmth of the jojoba oil she
was sliding her fingers down Sonny's long back with.
She asked if he was feeling any better but Sonny wasn't able to
hear what she said.
He was going over ground he would most likely cover a few more
times in this lifetime--if Mother knew Sonny--and she thought that she
did--since she knew his most intimate secrets--from Lona.
Sometimes, after one of their talks on the porch, a feeling came
over my mother that she knew a little more about Sonny than she did about
Eugene. But that couldn't really be true since a wife knows a husband like
the back of her hand. And Eugene was her husband. And Sonny was Lona's.
Not for long though, if things were as bad as Sonny said that they
were.
It took awhile to get the whole story out. Sonny could only
conjecture so we all had to piece things together through how much we
figured we knew about Lona and what we were able to imagine we knew about
the man she'd run off with.
Because of that neon bottle of Lone Star pouring itself in a
perpetual way into an overflowing neon glass on the roof and a sign that
read "Last Cold Beer For A Number of Miles," the man must have slammed on
his brakes, thrown the car into reverse, and fishtailed into the
grass-colored gravel of the parking lot of Sonny Montana's, a roadhouse
that stood--in that long stretch of oil rigs and cotton and cattle--like
a cool green mirage just perfect for breaking the back of that tedious haul
from Nogales to Dallas.
But inside this particular roadhouse stood a woman named Lona just
waiting, in an untrimmed sundress of sea island cotton, to help rid the man
from Nogales not only of boredom, and his need for a stretch and a smoke
and a drink, but of life--right up until 3:45 on that Friday in August--as he had known it to be. There, in that dark smoky room, with the jukebox
jammed on perpetual play and an overhead fan lifting strands of her halo of
hair, Lona poured a whiskey and soda and leaned--we'd all seen her do it--just a fraction unnecessarily forward as she set it on a "Sonny Montana's
of Placedo Texas" paper napkin and stirred it with the tip of her finger
and asked if there was anything more she could offer.
He must have known, right away, that there was.
But what it was hadn't dawned on him yet.
In the filtering rays of an afternoon sun shot with dust mites,
Lona's "Yes," if you believed in that flutter of a butterfly wing
transformed into a hurricane theory, had just stirred the air with the
tentative spread of its opening wings.
Sonny was down in the hurricane cellar with a generator gone on the
fritz and the after-work crowd was still breaking their backs on the wells
so that Lona's undivided attention helped the man from Nogales understand
what it was that he wanted to ask for.
Sonny never once, not even for an instant, suspected that upstairs,
while he was downstairs banging on a rusted-out screw bolt he couldn't fit
the monkey wrench around, those wings had completed their spread and were
starting to flutter.
He said he climbed up those stairs and yelled, "Lona, honey, hand
me the lug wrench," but all he heard back was the whir of the overhead fan.
And the echo of a high-powered motor in the distance being dropped into
third. And then nothing.
"Absolutely nothing."
He said, "How could she do it?"
Eugene answered "Easy." He said how Sonny didn't know all along
that it would end up this way was a mystery to him but Mother said "Eugene,
honey, we see and we hear what we want to." She said the version of Lona
Sonny made for himself took a great deal of work on his part to construct.
And Sonny was a hard working man. So he did a good job. On whatever he did.
And then she patted his head. The way she patted mine when I woke in the
night with a dream that I was caught in the pull of a quicksand bog on the
banks of the Nueces River.
She said, "Listen to me Sonny. Calm down and try to tell us one
step at a time what you think must have happened."
Sonny said there weren't any steps. All he found, when he climbed
up those stairs, was her bartending apron spread out on the floor and a
gold embossed card that read:
"Top Notch Nogales Novelties, Inc."
"Jesus Medina."
"El Vice Presidente"
"Plaza Dolores, Nogales"
That. The dregs of a whiskey and soda. An unfinished blue panatela.
And the note.
Eugene couldn't understand why Sonny felt the need to dust the
glasses for prints if he had the fellow's name all along but Mother told
him Sonny had a right not to think straight. She said we all do.
Eugene said, "That's for damned sure."
He didn't mean to be mean. He just didn't care much for Lona. He
said her "Yes," was a good or a bad thing depending which side of the fence
you were on when it came to taking sides in a fight about Lona's
indiscretions and he damned well wasn't in the middle. He was down
foursquare on the side of those women at Final Rest Baptist.
Mother intimated her husband might have gone a little farther than
a man ought to go when he was criticizing family but Eugene said Lona
wasn't family in his eyes. Not if she could throw Sonny's love out the
window. Along with Sonny's faithful devotion. And that roof above her head
he'd laid triple insulating panels across to block the blistering heat of
those South Texas heat waves. Not to mention that big picture window
knocked through at the head of the bar that gave Lona a nice wide view of
the highway and all those men unable to pass without stopping, or at least
slowing down for a honk and a wave, so her days weren't hard and her nights
weren't boring.
Sonny said he should have nailed a truckload of four-by-eight
plywood panels in front of that damned picture window.
He put the blame on himself.
So he wouldn't have to put it on Lona.
When Eugene said Sonny had nothing to blame himself for and Mother
said neither, if you looked at it closely, did Lona, he said, "Bullshit,"
again. That's when Sonny threw a punch at my father, a wild one that
didn't connect since Eugene caught him by the wrist and said, "Slow down,
Goddamn it. Take it easy, Montana."
Sonny was so tired he had to.
Mother took a sliver of ice from her whiskey and held it on the
back of his neck and you could see Sonny liked it. So I carried a tray from
the freezer and gave her a big one to run along the front of his forehead
and over the hair on his chest where the sterling silver slide on a bolo he
wore like a necklace was a heart crossed with "Sonny Loves Lona." Not a
valentine heart. But an organ. With valves. To show how real the love was.
Eugene took a pan of fresh water outside to my dog while I set the
table and Mother made dinner by moonlight.
Sonny wouldn't eat it. He wouldn't even push it around on his
plate. But he did say he would take a drink if my father would make it.
Two more whiskeys all around and Sonny, at last, started crying.
Mother moved her chair a little closer to his and took his hand in
her own and just stroked it. When she dabbed at his tears with a "Sonny
Montana's of Placedo Texas" paper napkin, some of the red white and blue
came off on his face so that Sonny didn't look quite as good as he usually
did.
Eugene said, "Leda?"
But Mother said, "Let the boy rest."
She said Sonny was reaping the whirlwind for not being able to see
past the retinal image of Lona. She said even the best men grope along the
surface of things in a blind search for beauty. And that's not a bright
thing to do. Since beauty likes to hide in the hard-to-see cracks where the
light won't bleach all its mystery away. She said Sonny couldn't see past
the retinal image of a woman any more than any other man could.
"Most," Eugene said, "but not all." He said she ought not to go
quite as far as she went in condemning how shallow the nature of man is.
Take him for example. What he cherished in her was her sweet disposition.
Not those small specks of amber he only could see in the green of her eyes
when he turned her face against the light of a candle at midnight. When he
told her he never could leave her, Mother said there he went again with his
always and nevers. She said he'd better watch out or he'd call down the
wrath of that sniper. And end up like Sonny. Then she cut Sonny's chicken
fried steak into pieces. And fed it to him. One small piece at a time. And
wiped his face with a cloth dipped in whiskey and water. So the red white
and blue came off. And he looked a little better.
Sonny whispered, "Thank you, Leda." And then he laid his head on
her shoulders while I cleared the dishes and Eugene sat on the porch with
his boots hooked onto the railing and lit another Lucky with a match that
he struck on the side of his thumbnail and leaned back and looked at the
stars in the sky and the moon on the fields while he talked to himself in a
voice too low for me to hear what it was that he was out there talking
about.
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