Valentine Page 13

She is still sitting out there when a truck pulls into the driveway across the street and a man who must be Mary Rose’s husband steps out. He hurries around to the passenger side, where he picks up his sleeping child. And now Corrine is struggling to her feet, moving as fast as her bruised old body can carry her. She has a knot on her forehead the size of a silver dollar, and there’s not enough Chanel No. 5 in the world to cover up the stink of cigarettes and booze, but she hurries toward the man who shifts his daughter from one hip to the other and grabs a flashlight off the dashboard before starting toward the house, its uncovered windows gazing emptily across the front yard and street, still waiting for somebody to turn on the lights.

Wait, she shouts. Wait! The little girl’s hair glows white under the streetlight and Corrine crooks a finger around her bare foot as it swings next to her daddy’s knee. When the young man tries to step around her, Corrine gently touches his arm. Is the baby all right? How’s Mary Rose? She is breathing hard and holding the stitch in her side. Listen, she gasps, tell your wife if she needs anything, anything at all, she can count on me. All she has to do is ask, and I will be right there.


Debra Ann

On a different Saturday afternoon, in a different year, she might never have seen the man. She might have been playing H-O-R-S-E at the prairie dog park or hanging around the practice field at Sam Houston Elementary, or riding her bike to the buffalo wallow to look for trilobites and arrowheads in the dry lakebed. Back when it was full of water, Debra Ann and her mama sometimes drove out there to watch people get saved. It’s something to do, Ginny always said, as she spread an old bath towel on the hood of the car, and Debra Ann climbed up, careful not to let her legs touch the hot metal. They would lean against the windshield, passing a bag of chips back and forth while the saints stood on the bank singing are you washed in the blood of the lamb and the sinners waded in barefoot, stepping right through the pond scum, faith alone keeping them safe from water moccasins and broken glass. And if a preacher smiled and waved them over, Ginny would shake her head and wave back. You’re fine the way you are, she told Debra Ann, but if you feel someday like you’ve just got to be saved, do it in a church. At least you won’t get tetanus. When they were bored, Ginny packed up the car and they drove back into town for a Whataburger. Where will we go next? she’d ask her daughter. You want to drive out and see the graves at Penwell? You want to go to Monahans and walk on the sand hills? Shall we drive over to the cattle auction in Andrews and pretend we’re going to bid on a bull?

But this spring, Ginny’s not here, and everybody is talking about the girl who was kidnapped and attacked. She was raped—the adults think D. A. doesn’t understand, but she’s no dummy—and now the parents on Larkspur Lane, including her daddy, have agreed that no child is to leave the block without adult supervision, or at least without telling somebody where they’re going. It’s insulting. She hasn’t been supervised since she was eight years old, and she’s spent most of the spring ignoring the rules, even after her daddy sat at the kitchen table and drew a map for her.

The northern edge of the approved roaming zone is Custer Avenue, and the empty house on the curve marks the southern border. The western border is the alley behind Mrs. Shepard’s and Debra Ann’s houses, where Mrs. Shepard stands and frowns at the trucks coming and going from the Bunny Club. It’s a titty bar, D. A. knows this too. At the other end of the block, where Casey Nunally and Lauralee Ledbetter live, Mrs. Ledbetter keeps a close eye on everything and everyone. She thinks nothing of grabbing a kid’s handlebars and firing off a series of probing questions. Where are you going? What are you doing? When was the last time you bathed? The other girls are two years younger than Debra Ann, still too young to break any rules, she guesses, or maybe they’re just afraid of their mamas.

She finds the man the same way she finds most of her treasures. She looks. She rides up and down the alley behind Mrs. Shepard’s house, steering around beer cans, carpenter’s nails, and beer bottles with ragged edges. She dodges rocks big enough to send a girl flying over her handlebars and headfirst into the side of a steel dumpster or cinder-block fence. She keeps her eyes peeled for loose change, unexploded firecrackers, and locust shells, swerving hard when she sees a snake, just in case it’s a baby diamondback. She catches horny toads by the dozens, cradling them in her palm and gently rubbing the hard ridges between their eyes. When they fall asleep, she gently slips them into the mason jar she keeps in her bicycle basket.

In the alley behind Mrs. Shepard’s house, she balances on her bike pedals and looks across the field. Everything that lies before her is off-limits—the dried-out flood channel, the barbed-wire fence and dirt lot, the house on the curve that has sat empty since the Wallace boy was killed when a radio fell into the bathtub with him in it, and finally, the flood channel where the canal narrows and disappears into two steel pipes wide enough that Debra Ann can stand up in them. Beyond all that forbidden territory is the strip bar, which opens every day at 4:30. She has been spanked only a few times in her life, and never very hard, but when her daddy got a call from Mrs. Ledbetter in March that she’d seen his daughter riding her bike back and forth in front of the building, trying to peek inside the front door every time some man walked in or out, his face turned white and he smacked her so hard her bottom hurt for the rest of the day.

D. A. rides along the flood channel, and when she is just a few feet from the sharp curve by the empty house, she ditches her bike, climbs onto a metal milk crate, and peers over the cinder-block fence before crawling up and straddling it for a few seconds. When she jumps into the backyard she hits the ground hard, first with a grunt and then with a cry as her knee strikes the hard-packed dirt. At the last second, she rolls and manages to avoid a small pile of caliche that would surely have landed her sobbing on Mrs. Shepard’s porch while the old woman fetched her rubbing alcohol and a pair of tweezers.

Three Chinese elm saplings stand dead in the center of the yard, and a bunch of two-by-fours, bleached nearly white by the sun, lean against the back of the house. Several tumbleweeds rest against the sliding-glass door as if they knocked for a long time, and finally gave up. In the top corner of the glass, a small sticker warns: Forget the dog. This house is protected by Smith & Wesson. Last July, when all the girls still roamed free, she and Casey and Lauralee had sneaked into this same yard to set off a box of M-80s they found under the bleachers at school.

Every house on Larkspur Lane is more or less the same, and at this house, as at Debra Ann’s, two small bedroom windows look out across the backyard. The windows are stripped of any curtains or blinds and they gaze nakedly across the grass, indecent and sad, like the small dark eyes of Mr. Bonham, who lives one block over and sits on his front porch all day threatening people if they let so much as one bicycle wheel touch his damn lawn. The sun’s glare makes it impossible to see into the house, but it doesn’t take much to imagine that electrocuted boy watching from the other side of the glass, his hair still standing on end. It’s enough to give you the shivers, said Lauralee when they were last here.

D. A. is hungry and needs to pee, but she wants to take a closer look at the empty field that lies between the alley and the flood channel. Thankfully, the construction-paper fortune-teller she keeps in her basket agrees. Do Not Hesitate! When she asks a second time, just to make sure, snugging her index fingers and thumbs into the four slots and counting to three, the fortune-teller is clear. Yes! Sometimes she asks the fortune-teller questions whose answers she already knows, just to verify that it’s the real deal.

Am I taller than an oil derrick? No.

Will Ford win the election? Not Likely.

Will my daddy ever order anything but strawberry ice cream at Baskin-Robbins? No.

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