Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail Read online

  The cab of his truck was stuffy, that peculiar oil-and-dust smell of every man’s truck I’ve ever been in. I lowered the window and felt the mellow river breeze. Jazz chattered non-stop until we got deep into the country. Then he seemed to hush, as though we were entering a grand old church.

  We were traveling on a state road, its winding curves settled comfortably through the bottomland, with its swampy and piney smells. There were no houses, no lights. Now and then we passed an area where kudzu made the telephone poles and bushes look as though they were a giant’s furniture covered up with protective sheets. At a stop sign I told Jazz to go straight instead of following the main road. Soon there was a turnoff, unmarked except for an old sign for a church that I knew had burned down in the fifties. We saw an abandoned pickup straddling the ditch. When the road turned to gravel, I counted the turnoffs, looking for the fourth one. Jazz shifted gears and we chugged up a little hill.

  “Reckon why he lives way off out here?” Jazz said as he braked and shut off the engine. There were no lights at the cabin, and Don’s motorbike was gone. Jazz went over into the bushes for a minute. It was a half-moon night, the kind of night that made you see things in the silhouettes. I thought I saw Don standing by the side of the cabin, peering around the corner, watching us.

  Jazz reached through the truck’s open window and honked the horn.

  I heard an owl answer the horn. When I was little I thought owls were messengers from the preachers in charge of Judgment Day. “Who will be the ones?” I remember our preacher saying. “Who?” Even then I pictured Judgment Day as an orchestrated extravaganza, like a telethon or a musical salute. I never took religion seriously. I’m glad I didn’t force my children into its frightful clutches. But maybe that was the trouble, after all.

  We stood on the sagging porch, loaded with fishnets and crates of empties—Coke and beer bottles. The lights from the pickup reflected Jazz and me against the cabin windows. I tried the door, and it opened into the kitchen.

  “Don?” I called.

  I found the kitchen light, just a bulb and string. The cord was new. It still had that starched feel, and the little metal bell on the end knot was shiny and sharp. It made me think of our old bathroom light when Jim Ed and I first married. It was the first thing I’d touch in the morning when I’d get up and rush to the bathroom to throw up.

  The table was set for one, with the plate turned face over and the glass upside down. Another glass contained an assortment of silverware. A little tray held grape jelly and sugar and instant coffee and an upside-down mug.

  The cabin was just one room, and the daybed was neatly made, spread with one of my old quilts. I sat down on the bed. I felt strange, as though all my life I had been zigzagging down a wild trail to this particular place. I stared at the familiar pattern of the quilt, the scraps of the girls’ dresses and the boys’ shirts. Kathy had pieced some of the squares. If I looked hard, I could probably pick out some of her childish stitches.

  “This is weird,” said Jazz. He was studying some animal bones spread out on a long table fashioned from a door. “What do you reckon he’s aiming to do with these?”

  “He always liked biology,” I said, rising from the bed. I smoothed and straightened the quilt, thinking about Goldilocks trespassing at the three bears’ house.

  The table was littered: bones, small tools, artist’s brushes and pens, a coffee cup with a drowned cigarette stub, more butts nesting in an upturned turtle shell, some bright foil paper, an oily rag. Jazz flipped through a tablet of drawings of fangs and fishbones.

  “He must be taking a summer course at the community college,” I said, surprised. “He talked about that back in the spring, but I didn’t believe it.”

  “Look at these,” Jazz said. “They’re good. How can anybody do that?” he said in amazement.

  We studied the drawings. In the careful, exact lines I saw faint glimpses of my young child, and his splashy crayon pictures of monsters taped to the kitchen wall. Seeing his efforts suddenly mature was like running into a person I recognized but couldn’t place. Most of the pictures were close-ups of bones, but some were sketches of fish and birds. I liked those better. They had life to them. Eagerly, I raced through two dozen versions of a catfish. The fish was long and slim, like a torpedo. Its whiskers curved menacingly, and its body was accurately mottled. It even looked slippery. I stared at the catfish, almost as if I expected it to speak.

  I jerked a blank sheet of paper from the tablet of drawings and worked on a note:

  Dear Don,

  It’s 10:30 P.M. Friday and I came out here with a friend to see if you were home. We just dropped by to say hello. Please let me know how you are. Nothing’s wrong. I’ve got some good news. And I’d love to see you.

  Love,

  Mom

  “It doesn’t sound demanding, does it?” I asked as Jazz read it.

  “No, not at all.”

  “It almost sounds like one of those messages on an answering machine—stilted and phony.”

  Jazz held me as if he thought I might cry. I wasn’t crying. He held my shoulders till he was sure I’d got the tears back in and then we left. I couldn’t say why I wasn’t crying. But nothing bad had happened. There wasn’t anything tragic going on. My daughter was having a baby—that was the good news. My son had drawn some fishbones—drawings that were as fine as lace.

  “Me and my bright ideas,” Jazz said apologetically.

  “It’s O.K., Jazz. I’ll track Don down some other time.”

  As we pulled out, Jazz said, “The wilderness makes me want to go out in it. I’ve got an idea. Tomorrow let’s go for a long hike on one of those trails up in Shawnee National Forest. We can take backpacks and everything. Let’s explore caves! Let’s look for bears and stuff!”

  I laughed. “You could be Daniel Boone and I could be Rebecca.”

  “I don’t think Rebecca went for hikes. You’ll have to be some Indian maiden Daniel picked up.”

  “Did Daniel Boone really do that sort of thing?” I said, pretending to be scandalized.

  “He was a true explorer, wasn’t he?” Jazz said, hitting the brights just as a deer seemed to drift across the road.

  Jazz thought he was trying to cheer me up, but I was already so full of joy I couldn’t even manage to tell him. I let him go on. He was sexiest when he worked on cheering me up.

  It was late, and I wound up at Jazz’s place, a sprawling apartment with a speaker system wired into every room. His dog, Butch, met us at the door. While Jazz took Butch out for a midnight stroll, I snooped around. I found a beer in the refrigerator. I had trouble with the top and beer spewed all over Jazz’s dinette. When he returned, I started teasing him about all the women’s underwear he owned.

  “Put some of it on,” I urged.

  “Are you nuts?”

  “Just put it on, for me. I won’t tell. Just for fun.”

  I kept teasing him, and he gave in. We couldn’t find any garments that would fit. We hooked two bras together and rigged up a halter. With his lime-green bikini briefs—his own—he looked great, like a guy in a sex magazine. It’s surprising what men really wear underneath. I searched for some music to play on Jazz’s fancy sound system. I looked for the Everly Brothers but couldn’t find them, so I put on a George Winston CD. To be nice, I never said a word about Jazz’s taste in music. Exhilarated, I sailed from room to room, following the sound, imagining it was “Let It Be Me” instead. I suddenly felt an overwhelming longing to see Jim Ed again. I wanted to tell him about Don going to school, drawing pictures, making contact with the world again. I wanted to see the traces of Don’s face in his. I wanted the two of us to go out to Arizona and see Laura and the baby when it came. We could make a family photo—Jim Ed and me and Laura, with the baby. The baby’s father didn’t enter into the vision.

  It occurred to me that it takes so long to know another person. No wonder you can run through several, like trying on clothes that don’t fit. There are so man
y to choose from, after all, but when I married Jim Ed it was like an impulse buy, buying the first thing you see. And yet I’ve learned to trust my intuition on that. Jim Ed was the right one all along, I thought recklessly. And I wasn’t ever nice to Jim Ed. I was too young then to put myself in another person’s place. Call it ignorance of the imagination. Back then I had looked down on him for being country, for eating with his arms anchored on the table and for wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. I’d get mad at him for just being himself at times when I thought he should act civilized. Now I’ve learned you can’t change men, and sometimes those airs I’d looked for turn out to be so phony. Guys like Jim Ed always seemed to just be themselves, regardless of the situation. That’s why I still loved him, I decided, as I realized I was staring at Jazz’s reflection in the mirror—the lime green against the shimmering gold of his skin and the blips of the track lighting above.

  Jazz followed me into the bedroom, where we worked at getting rid of our French togs. I was aware that Jazz was talking, aware that he was aware that I might not be listening closely. It was like hearing a story at my little neighborhood talk show. He was saying, “In France, there’s this street, rue du Bac. They call streets rues. The last time I left Monique and the two kids, it was on that street, a crowded shopping street. The people over there are all pretty small compared to us, and they have this blue-black hair and deep dark eyes and real light skin, like a hen’s egg. I waved good-bye and the three of them just blended right into that crowd and disappeared. That’s where they belong, and so I’m here. I guess you might say I just couldn’t parlez-vous.”

  “Take me to France, Jazz. We could have a great time.”

  “Sure, babe. In the morning.” Jazz turned toward me and smoothed the cover over my shoulders.

  “I love you,” Jazz said.

  When I woke up at daylight, Jazz was still holding me, curled around me like a mother protecting her baby. The music was still playing, on infinite repeat.

  Tobrah

  Jackie Holmes had taken two trips by airplane. The first, in 1980, from Kentucky to California, included dinner—a choice between short ribs and cannelloni. Jackie ordered cannelloni because she didn’t know what it was. Floating up there above the clouds seemed so unreal—as a child she had imagined God lived there. In Los Angeles, her cousin took her to Disneyland, the stars’ homes, and Universal Studios. They drove down Sunset Boulevard, where the palm trees were tall and majestic. Jackie felt privileged, as if all her life, until then, she had never been allowed anything grand.

  The second trip, to Oklahoma, not long ago, was different. In Tulsa, Jackie arranged her father’s funeral. She hadn’t heard from him in more than thirty-five years, since her parents divorced and he left for the West. She hardly recognized the man lying in the casket. Her father’s eyes had been his most memorable feature—dark and deep-set, like her own. But now his eyes were shut, impervious to her questions. The mourners, men he had worked with at a meatpacking plant, didn’t tell her much. Joe had been drinking, and his pickup slid down an embankment. No one seemed surprised. He left no money or possessions of worth. She brought home a tattered Army blanket she remembered from her childhood and had not thought of since.

  But there was something else. Her father had left a child. The little girl was being cared for by a neighbor, a woman with three children of her own. She told Jackie that the child’s mother had died the year before and that Joe had been despondent. He left a will naming Jackie as godparent. Miraculously, after some red tape in a rose-brick court building, Jackie left Oklahoma with the child. Jackie was forty-four and her half sister was almost five. Jackie, long accustomed to the disappointment of having no children of her own, realized that children scared her a little. She felt like a kidnapper.

  Tobrah, the child, had not been taken to the funeral, and she didn’t seem curious about where her father was. On the airplane, escaping Jackie’s questions, she zipped up and down the aisle, talking to passengers. Jackie wasn’t used to a child’s random energy—the way she squirmed and bounced in the seat, her hands and body busy but her manner oblivious. In the dark apartment that Jackie had cleaned out, she found only a few possessions of Tobrah’s—some small toys, a doll and a teddy bear, several T-shirts and pairs of shorts.

  “Aren’t you cold?” Jackie asked, as she reached up to swivel the air stream away.

  “No.”

  “When we get home I’ll buy you some jeans,” Jackie said. “And a sweatshirt. What’s your favorite color?”

  “Green.”

  “Green? Mine’s blue.”

  “I don’t like blue.”

  When Tobrah dropped off to sleep, Jackie located a blanket in the overhead compartment and draped it over the little girl. The Army blanket was in Jackie’s suitcase, tucked away in the plane’s belly. The airline blanket was bright blue and made of some kind of foamy synthetic material. Outside, the clouds billowed like a bubble bath.

  “What makes you think you can afford to bring up a kid?” Jackie’s mother asked when Jackie brought Tobrah to meet her. Tobrah was on the back porch playing with Lorraine’s mop-like lap dog. Lorraine lived in a small wood-frame house in an old section of town.

  Jackie ignored the question. Her mother had the same attitude about anything—a new car, an appliance, even splurging on a night out. She had a gallon jug full of coins.

  “Do you reckon that hair’s bleached?” Lorraine asked.

  “We’ll just have to wait and see,” Jackie said impatiently.

  Tobrah had a dark complexion, and her hair was a short, tight mass of light curls, darker at the roots. Her eyes were topaz, and her new green T-shirt made flecks of green sparkle in them.

  “That name sounds foreign,” said Lorraine.

  She kept tapping her cigarette in a crowded ashtray. Her gray laminated table had cigarette burns on it. The walls were yellowed from gas-furnace fumes. Jackie’s mother had let her place go since she retired from work. She had been a floor-lady for thirty years, and now all she wanted to do was sit. She got on Jackie’s nerves.

  Tobrah crashed through the door, the dog yapping excitedly at her heels. She demanded a drink of water, and as she gulped from the glass Jackie gave her, she continued to play with the dog—nudging and poking, twisting her body, giggling.

  “Honey, tell me something,” said Lorraine, hugging Tobrah. “Where did you get that name of yours? Did your mama give it to you?”

  “From a story,” she said, holding the glass up for Jackie to take.

  “Does it mean something?”

  Tobrah wriggled out of Lorraine’s grasp and grabbed a ragged piece of chewed rawhide from the floor.

  “Do you want us to call you Toby?” Lorraine asked.

  “No.” Tobrah pulled at her hair. She scooped up the dog and went out the back door again.

  “Well!” said Lorraine, with a sigh of smoke. “What do you make of that?”

  “She won’t talk about her mother—or about Daddy either,” Jackie said. “I already tried.”

  Tobrah had told Jackie she didn’t remember her mother. She said her father was away on a long trip. He might not be back, she said.

  It was true that Jackie couldn’t afford to spend much on a child, but it seemed to her that nowadays children had too much. Her California cousin’s children had a room full of expensive stuffed animals that they never played with. Jackie’s house was a modest brick ranch dating back to her second marriage. She cleared out her sewing room for Tobrah. Jackie’s uncle and aunt let her have an old twin bed they weren’t using, and at yard sales she found toys and furnishings. She collected hand-me-down clothing from friends. Baby talk didn’t come naturally to Jackie, and she stood around awkwardly at store counters and in checkout lines while people burbled enthusiastically to the little girl, as though she were a pet on a leash. They actually said she looked good enough to eat. Being seen with Tobrah, Jackie began to feel an unfamiliar pride. People asked the typical questions: “Wh
ose little girl are you?” and “How old are you?” and “What grade are you in?” Jackie, who was guilty of asking kids the same kinds of questions, had never before realized how trite they were. Yet they were real and important questions. Whose little girl are you? she wanted to know. Where did you get that hair?

  Sometimes in the night, Jackie heard Tobrah stirring and thought of prowlers, then remembered. One night she awoke to find Tobrah curled close to her. The child had waited until Jackie had gone to sleep before crawling in with her, as if she didn’t want to reveal her need. There was so much Jackie wanted to know. What did Tobrah’s mother look like? Did her father love Tobrah? Did he buy her Christmas presents, play dolls with her? When Jackie was small, about Tobrah’s age, her father came home once after a weekend trip to Tennessee. She had waited eagerly all day, and when she was exhausted with the excitement of waiting, he finally appeared. He had forgotten to bring her a present. He had promised to bring her a souvenir with the name “Tennessee” written on it. When eventually he left for good, she was glad. Her mother encouraged her to forget him.

  Jackie pieced together a few facts about Tobrah. She couldn’t read. She had never been to preschool but had been to some kind of day-care facility, a large place where hundreds of children lined up for ice-cream bars in the afternoons. They napped on mats. The woman in charge had “fuzzy hair, big glass eyes, and a fat butt,” according to Tobrah.

  “Do you miss going there?” Jackie asked one morning a few days after their return from Oklahoma. Jackie was getting ready for work—her bereavement leave was over. Bereavement was a joke, she kept thinking.