Cavedweller Page 4

  There was a loud pop, and Cissy turned to see a bunch of red and blue balloons tied to the Rockhound Camping sign, bouncing in the warm gusts that swept trash along the ground. The balloons were faded, though not so much as the blankets and tarps that shaded the camper vans. The desert was a place full of color, but it was a whole different palette from what Cissy knew, everything bright bleached to a smoky pastel. Cissy could see row after row of flea-market stalls past the vans. People moved through the dust as she watched. A few flat, seamed faces turned in her direction. Without thought, Cissy walked toward them. These were ageless people, tanned dark, with black or white or gray hair and ropy muscles on sturdy bones. Many sat on lawn chairs in front of mobile homes, behind card tables displaying dishes and strings of roughly polished rocks. Cissy stopped under a blue tarp shading a table stacked with glittery stones. She touched a strand of dark red.

  “Red tourmaline.” The woman’s breath smelled of anise and lemons. She grinned at Cissy, revealing big, perfect teeth.

  “Where do you get them?” Cissy could not imagine where all this rough beauty had come from. Hundreds of strings of beads of every gradation of red and black were piled in front of her, fifty or sixty beads to a string, twenty or forty strings knotted together, all arranged so that they lay in sensuous curves like giant snakes covered with gemstones.

  The woman lifted her shoulders and bobbed her head, riffling the pink scarf that was tucked under the band of her eyeshade. Her whole body seemed to quiver and bounce on springy thighs.

  “Go all over. Trade. Buy at discount, sell at a little less discount.” She angled her head at the camper behind her. “Sometimes get something wonderful, never sell it at all.” She lifted one hand to a polished oblong of jade at her throat, green with yellow light trapped inside. Cissy leaned over to see the stone more closely.

  “You like?” the woman said. She grinned again and reached up to push her teeth back in more tightly. “You got good a eye. What you want?”

  Cissy looked down at the table. There were beads cut in odd shapes, stars and moons and faceted balls. She put her hand on a string of black stars. It was warm and almost soft under her fingertips.

  “Good eye. Volcano spit from Italy, bloodrock from Tennessee. Nice for not much money.” The woman nodded crisply, then caught Cissy’s shoulder and pulled the girl in close to her face. She sniffed three times, quickly and deeply, and let her air out in one long breath. “Ah.” She smiled and released Cissy.

  “Black diamond is good heart stone.” The woman gripped a jagged piece of hematite and dragged it across the white paper beneath it. Two thin red lines followed the stone.

  “Oh.” Cissy resisted the urge to back away from the table.

  “Scratch with it, it scratches red. Grind it, make blood ink. Heart sign.” The hand dropped the stone, lifted, spread, and hovered over the piles of strings. The sharp eyes came up and looked directly into Cissy’s face. Green eyes, Cissy saw, faded a little, like the grass near the spigots under the camper’s tie-down. The woman smiled as if she could hear Cissy thinking.

  “What you like, moon or stars?” The hand wavered.

  “Stars.” Randall had a hatband studded with silver stars. The hematite burned silver-black in the sun.

  “Ah.” The old woman thumped the card table, and all the stones moved. “Hematite is special. Egyptian mummies had headrests made of hematite. You know that? Special. Draw your hatred out.” She gathered a string of cut stars, lifted it, and extended her hand. Cissy looked into the green eyes.

  “Heal your heart, girl.”

  Cissy walked back to the car with a string of stars looped twice around her neck.

  “Where the hell have you been? And where did you get that?” Delia snarled the words, relenting only when she saw Cissy’s face fall. “It’s nice,” she said. “Common as dirt, but nice.”

  Mine, Cissy thought, flushing. She fingered the stones as she curled up against the passenger door. The necklace still felt warm and soft, but when she tried to press a nail into the shiny surface of one of the stones, it took no mark.

  The engine growled loud when Delia started the Datsun. Maybe it won’t last, Cissy thought. Maybe it will stall and we’ll have to stay here. Her eyes, when they showed above her glasses, were obsidian in the hot light. Maybe we will wreck, she was thinking. Maybe she’ll run us off the road and roll the car. Her hand stroked the seat belt where it snugged into her belly. Delia’s belt was lying unfastened beside her on the folded map. Maybe she will go through the window, break her neck or cut her throat. If she were dead I could ... What? Cissy’s stomach cramped so hard, she almost retched.

  Cissy twisted around and watched the parking lot and all the campers slowly dwindle away. A sign for Big Horn Trailer Park loomed up, stained red and tan with dust and blown sand. Cissy wondered if it was named for Little Bighorn, where Custer died. Cowboys and Indians, she thought, and rubbed her eyes.

  “We’ll have to cut up toward Flagstaff,” Delia said. “Drive the long way through the Navajo reservation. Monument Valley is up there, the Painted Desert and the Petrified Forest. We’ll be able to see some of the hills from 40. All those cliffs against the sky. If there’s any moon, it will take your breath away.”

  Cissy kept her face turned to the window.

  “Randall and I went up to Monument Valley once.” Delia’s voice was careful. “It’s amazing. Like an open cathedral. Something to see.”

  Cissy watched the sign for Buckeye coming up on the left. A cathedral, she thought. She looked out at the far red rocks, the purple and gray mountains in the distance. It was all a cathedral, open and pure and wide as death.

  Delia took 17 up through Phoenix to pick up Highway 40. She spread the map to show Cissy the route. “This will take us most of the way. Forty is like Ten, goes on forever. From here to Nashville anyway.”

  Cissy remained silent, and Delia put on the radio again. Twice she found stations playing Mud Dog, but twisted the dial past them as quickly as she could. She didn’t want to hear any of that. She found a stubborn rock station in Tempe playing Captain Beefheart and Steely Dan as if no one had ever died, and settled on that one as long as it would come in.

  Late that afternoon they crossed Arizona into New Mexico and Cissy saw more and more Indian names. After Gallup there were Laguna Pueblo signs, with little hand-tinted posters advertising good turquoise jewelry and traditional blankets. Was Albuquerque another Indian name? Maybe it was Spanish. It didn’t matter. Delia told Cissy to close her eyes and take a nap. She wasn’t going to stop just to sleep.

  Cissy dreamed of culverts and big concrete pipes, of stars and moons shining in black water, and of dark-haired women bending to scoop up beads of tears. She woke up with her eyes crusted and swollen when Delia stopped near Tucumcari. They had been making good time in the good weather, but both of them were tired and sticky with dried sweat. When the Datsun fishtailed in the slipstream of a passing semi, Delia noticed that her arms and legs were starting to feel rubbery and numb. She realized suddenly that they had not had anything but chips and Cokes since leaving Los Angeles that morning. New Mexico was dotted with diners and low mud-brown stucco buildings that proclaimed themselves “family restaurants.” Delia chose a big truck stop and pulled in close to where the semis were parked.

  Salad of iceberg lettuce and tomato quarters with cubes of bright yellow cheese, chicken chili, and Texas toast. Cissy gave the food all her attention and drank three glasses of iced tea. Delia picked at her scrambled eggs and stared longingly at the men drinking beer at the bar.

  “We’ll get to Amarillo by midnight,” she told Cissy.

  “Why are you in such a hurry?” Cissy’s necklace glowed red-black against her throat in the fluorescent lights.

  Delia used her napkin to wipe condensation off her tea glass. “Your Granddaddy Byrd is expecting us.” She looked into the glass.

  Cissy put her fork down. “You called him?”

  “He’s expecting us,”
Delia said again. “Cissy, please. All I have ever wanted you to know is that you are not alone in the world.”

  The table was dark wood shellacked so thickly that Delia could see her reflection in the surface. Her face looked like it was underwater, slightly out of focus, the murky image of a woman who had never known how to say what she was thinking. She remembered how Granddaddy Byrd had looked at her when he took her to live with him, the sullen rage beneath the grief. She remembered when she had started to sing to herself to fill the world with more than loneliness. She wiped her hand across the image on the table.

  “Having family,” Delia blurted. “Even sisters you’ve never met. It’s a blessing, Cissy. You’re part of something bigger than just yourself alone. Growing up, all I had was Granddaddy Byrd.” She shook her head. “Way he was, sometimes that felt worse than being alone. Man was just about the closest thing to a rock I ever knew.”

  “A rock. Well, that’s good. I can’t wait to meet him,” Cissy said.

  “He didn’t mean to be like that.” Delia shifted in her chair. “He was too hurt to comfort himself or me. And he was old, too old to take on raising a child.”

  “Then why did he?”

  For a minute Cissy thought Delia was going to slap her. Then she said, “He had to. There wasn’t anyone else.” She wiped the table with her napkin. She could not smooth her image.

  Cissy stirred her bowl of chili. She had thought chicken chili would be something special. This wasn’t special. The chicken was stringy and tough, the tomato tasted bitter, and the chili powder made her tongue feel spongy. The best thing on the table was the lettuce, and what was that? Water.

  Delia got up to pay for the meal. Cissy rubbed her fingers along her necklace and pulled her elbows in tight to her ribs. In her nightmares, Amanda was a sharp-beaked, black-winged crow cawing loudly right behind Cissy’s bent neck. Dede was a wire-haired boar with razor-tipped hooves dancing close to Cissy’s bare pink feet. Cayro, Georgia, was a pit of red dirt and gray clay sloped so steeply that Cissy could not crawl free. And Granddaddy Byrd was a rock. She put her hands over her eyes and pressed hard. Stars bloomed in the dark. The backside of nowhere, the ass-end of the universe, Cayro, Georgia, and the family Delia loved more than she would ever love Cissy.

  The back window of the Datsun had been smashed in. The trunk was popped open. There was nothing left but a box jammed between the spare tire and the jack, and the half-full Styrofoam cooler with the crack down one side. Cissy leaned over the backseat from the open door and picked through the debris. The thieves had dumped a bag of clothes on the floor.

  “Probably used the bag for the tapes,” Delia said. She was looking at the front seat, where there remained only a smashed cassette of Jefferson Airplane’s greatest hits.

  “They took everything!” Cissy, said. “Everything we had.”

  “No. Not everything.” Delia hugged her purse to her hip. “We’ll get more. Maybe they need it worse than we do. Like coyotes, panting after what little they can get.” Delia stood by the car with her hands curled up under her chin. Her cropped hair was sweat-dark and limp.

  Cissy gaped at her. Who cared what the thieves needed? How about what she needed? Her clothes, her books, the little box of pins and sparkling beads her daddy had given her for her last birthday. “I want to go home. You could call Rosemary. We could stay with her.” She blew her nose on a piece of paper from the car floor and looked up at Delia pitifully.

  “We are going home,” Delia said. She felt lighter and freer without all that stuff, absurdly philosophical. She pulled out a kerchief and used it to brush away the broken glass, then shook it and tied it around her head. She sorted through the clothes on the floorboard until she found a shirt big enough to tie over the window from the clothes hook to a rip on the seat cover.

  “We’ll be fine,” Delia said firmly. “When we get to Cayro, you’ll see. We’ll be fine.”

  “No we won’t. You don’t care about me. You’re stealing me,” Cissy shouted. “You’re kidnapping me.”

  About ten feet away a trucker was watching them from the open door of his cab. He was chewing a sandwich and holding a bottle of soda. Delia looked at him and shrugged.

  “You got hit,” he said, his mouth full of bread. “Happens out here.” He took a drink, then reached behind his seat and pulled out another soda, which he quickly opened. “Here,” he said. “Give her this. She’s just exhausted. Get lots of fluid in her and let her sleep. Heat out here is bad enough without getting yourself robbed. Got a few more sandwiches too—meat loaf. You want one?”

  Delia walked over and took the bottle. “Thank you, no,” she said. “We just ate. But the soda’s a good idea.”

  The man jerked his chin at Cissy, who had stopped yelling and was slumped against the bumper. “I got one of my own. They’ll drive you crazy.” He took another bite, keeping his eyes trained on Delia. “Don’t I know you?” The words were clear even though he was chewing.

  Delia looked at his face. He was squinting in concentration. No, she thought. Oh no. “Don’t think so.”

  He swallowed and nodded. “You know who you look like?”

  Delia waited.

  “That singer, the one with the long red hair?” The man was frowning. “That one that died,” he said. “Janis, right? Janis Joplin. People probably tell you that all the time.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Delia smiled and nodded at him. No one had ever confused her with Janis, but she didn’t want to get into that. She wanted to get back on the road. “Thanks,” she said again.

  “He knew who you were.” Cissy’s face was stained with tears and sweat.

  Delia shook her head and handed Cissy the soda. “Honey, he’d have never heard of Mud Dog. You can bet every button on his console is set on a country station. He thought I looked like Janis Joplin.”

  “Janis Joplin is dead.” Cissy wiped her nose. “Been dead forever.”

  Delia’s face was unreadable as she opened the passenger door and motioned Cissy to get in the car.

  Cissy ignored her. “We got plenty of room now,” she said, climbing into the back.

  Sandy grit rubbed into her bare arms and calves as she lay down on the seat. It might have been rock or grains of safety glass. Delia made up a pillow for her out of a pair of jeans, but Cissy pushed them aside. She lay with her face tucked into the crook of her elbow and cried softly once they were back on the highway. She knew Delia couldn’t hear her over the wind whistling past the shirt pinned above her.

  “We’ll be fine,” Delia kept saying, but Cissy knew she was talking to herself. Like a crazy person, Delia was talking just to hear herself say the words. Cissy put her fingers in her ears.

  The back of the car remained open to the wind and dust and any other thief who might come along, It was a sign, as far as Cissy was concerned, but Delia just taped up cardboard when the shirt came loose. “You were getting too big for most of those clothes anyway,” she said. “We’ll buy you some nice stuff when we get closer to home, some shorts and sundresses that you’ll like.” As if clothes were the point, Cissy thought, as if they were not broken open themselves, broken open and whistling in the wind. Between the two of them the rage hummed loud as the engine.

  Cissy slept through the Texas Panhandle. “You didn’t miss anything,” Delia told her.

  “I want to stop,” Cissy said.

  “No stops. We are going to make time, girl. Time.”

  Cissy put her necklace in her mouth. The hematite tasted salty and dark. The sun was just over the horizon, and the ground was blue-gray and flat as a saucer. Oklahoma looked like New Mexico, occasional patches of farmland with low, unrecognizable plants interspersed with vast stretches of rock and desert, hills always silhouetted in the distance. Green, Cissy wanted green lush plants and bright hot flowers, Venice Beach and all those hidden gardens. When they first came into Oklahoma City and she saw the lush green trees, Cissy thought she would cry with relief. She stuck her head out the window and pul
led in great breaths of cool air. It smelled like it might rain or had rained recently. Damp and rich and wonderful, a different cathedral.

  On the eastern outskirts of the city, Cissy threatened to flag down a highway patrolman. Delia just patted her purse. “I’ve got your birth certificate right here.” She blew smoke out the open window and laughed. “Besides, look at you. You think any sheriff wouldn’t see you belong to me?”

  Cissy leaned out the window again. She knew she was Delia’s miniature, red-brown hair and hazel eyes, muscles that rode the bones in the same pattern, every inch her mama’s girl. She remembered Thanksgiving, when Randall had come over too late for dinner. He had hugged Cissy and told her how much she looked like her mother. “Only thing of mine you’ve got is my mama’s name and my teeth, my soft old milk teeth,” he said. “You’re going to have to keep an eye on those teeth, little Cecilia.” He slipped his plate down and wiggled it with his tongue.

  “If you changed your habits, you might keep the rest of those teeth.” Delia had been sober for two weeks that holiday. By night she would be drinking again, and they all knew it. Randall smiled at her indulgently and let Cissy sip his whiskey. Delia jumped up from her chair. “Don’t give her that. An’t you done enough?” she shouted, and Randall walked out the door.

  “You hurt his feelings,” Cissy complained when Delia put her to bed.

  “I’d like to hurt more than that.” Delia spit the words. She said she had moved out of Randall’s place to stop drinking and be a good mother to Cissy, but for most of the two years after they left him she matched him drink for drink. Every time he came around, she would start again.