Losing Cherry

By

Angela Elliott
© 1^st January 2000
All rights reserved
A copy of this novel has been registered with:
Harbottle & Lewis, Lawyers
14 Hanover Square
London W1R

Table of Contents

1 home

I was seven months pregnant at the time Troy Brewster tied me to the chair and threatened me and my folks with a gun.  I think he’d had too much to drink on  account of it being our wedding day.  Right after that I had the baby.

I was sixteen when I met Troy.  I had cut school more times that summer than I care to remember.  Troy was thirty-seven.  It seemed weird at first ‘cos my Pa was only thirty five and he said no good would come of it and I ought to go finishing my schooling before I thought about getting myself hitched to anyone, but nature kind of took over in that argument and I ended up pregnant.  Anyway I kind of thought I’d had all the teaching I needed.

Moma wanted me to get an abortion.  She couldn’t abide the thought that a man the same age as her husband could father her grandchild.  I don’t think whether I was old enough or not really came into it.  Moma had always wanted a big family, but I was the only child she had.  Maybe she thought I’d let her down; maybe she wanted to take her revenge on my unborn child, though Lord knows it hadn’t done anything to ask for it.  My father worked on the Southwest Chief; the train running through Gallup to Santa Fe, Las Vegas and Raton.  We weren’t from around these parts; we come from over the border in Colorado, so we stuck out like cloves in an apple pie.

Right after Moma found out I was in the family way she fixed for me to go visit the Doc and he said he knew someone who could make everything okay again. Which meant Moma would pay a whole chunk of rainy day money out to some little old lady with a coat hanger.  Least that was what my friend Maria Running-Wind said would happen.  I was so innocent I believed Maria and I couldn’t let that happen to my poor baby, no sir.  So I went straight to Troy and I told him he got to marry me, because if he didn't I’d tell the world his most cherished secret.  I didn’t know whether he had a cherished secret or not, but I was bargaining on him having one though.  Hell who doesn’t?  He wasn’t very happy about it I can tell you that for nothing.

Well now Troy's wife had run off with a carpet salesman from Phoenix three years back, in the fall of ‘93, and right after Troy had filed for divorce so I knew he was free to marry me, and I also knew he didn’t have any kids to worry about, so I couldn’t see what the problem would be, but Troy just got so antsy about the whole thing that I was sorely tempted to go let Moma fix it with the coat hanger woman.  You see Troy didn’t think I was really that young and I have to admit I did let on I was nearer twenty than sixteen.

I remember one night I met Troy down by the bridge back of the chicken factory at six o’clock. It was a Friday.  A warm wind was blowing the smell of dying chickens from the East and my hair wouldn’t set straight.  I watched him walk out of the gates to the factory and thought he could be sixteen like me.  He didn’t have to be thirty-seven.  He could be any age I wanted.  He was a lean man with a bony face and a wisp of a goatee beard that didn’t look as if it ever grew any longer even though he never shaved it.  So I played this game; I gave him and me a new age and new names and, as he walked towards me, I pretended he was already my husband and I was his pretty little wife meeting him from work.  We were Mr and Mrs Charles Benton and he was twenty-five and I was twenty-four.  Well Troy walked right up to me and grabbed me by the arm and whirled me around like he was in some kind of a real state about something.

“I thought I told you never to meet me out of work.”

“But Troy I was only...”

“You’re a jumped up bitch and I never want to see you again.”  He had a hold on my arm like he wanted to tear it right out of my shoulder.

"Troy?  Troy we have to talk." 

He stopped in his tracks and faced me.

"Ain't it just a little too late for talk?"

"Troy I..."  He didn’t give me a chance to explain.  He marched me right to the edge of the bridge and pushed me forward so that the bricks cut right into my belly.  I could see the water down below and I thought this is a mighty fine way to end your life; going over the top of a bridge and floating all the way down to the sea though I hadn’t ever seen the sea.  Maria Running-Wind hadn’t ever seen the sea either and I thought that if I got out of this mess with Troy I might ask her if she wanted to catch the Greyhound bus down to the coast.   We could sleep on the beach like I'd heard folks did in Florida.  Florida seemed such a long way off even when I had the view of the river going down to the sea over the bridge to remind me.

Troy had a handful of my hair and he twisted it and twisted it until I screamed with the pain.  Then he kind of came out of a dream world and let go of me.  I don’t know exactly what had come over him, but whatever it was it was gone in an instant.  I turned toward him slowly, just in case he reared up nasty again, but he just put his hand on my belly, which wasn’t that big yet, and cried.  Tears rolled right down his face.  He set down on his knees and buried his head in my belly and I felt his tears through my dress and I couldn’t hold back my own pain.  We must’ve looked a real sight, him and me; the bleached grass and desert air, the bright blue sky fading to night, the chicken factory and us two poor lost souls weeping for our unborn child as the Friday night shift got off work.

The Starlight motel was right on the intersection.  It was a quiet place catering for the needs of salesmen and cheating husbands mostly.  Troy lived in a chicken-shit trailer no bigger than a dog kennel and he didn’t like to have company drop in there, so when we needed to be alone we would rent a room at the Starlight, overlooking the car park, and Troy would bring a bottle of bourbon and I would make like the place was home.  That Friday night we ended up at the Starlight, but Troy didn’t have any booze with him and it didn’t feel much like any kind of home to me.  We didn’t even fuck. 

Troy's love making was limited to a fumble under the sheets and ramming it home with as much thought as he might give stuffing the neck of one of those dead chickens at the factory right up its ass.  Mostly he was too out of his brain to be able manage even that.  It was a wonder how I had managed to get pregnant in the first place.  That and the fact that as far as length is concerned, and I am no expert, I would say Troy rated as a three on a scale of one to ten, ten being the biggest I had ever laid my eyes on and that was Kenny Amarillo at school. 

Kenny Amarillo was always boasting about the size of his cock.  It scared the shit out of most of the girls and he got a buzz from seeing them squeal when he pretended to open his flies.  I called his bluff one lunchbreak when I got him cornered between the back wall of the gym and the main building. 

"Kenny if you can’t put up shut up," I said to him.  He was a tall guy of fifteen with crooked teeth and terrible dress sense.   I must have been about thirteen years old.  He tried to dodge past me, but I stuck my foot out and he sprawled on the ground.  When he tried to get up I sat on his back and heard all the air go out of him.  His face was mashed sideways into the earth.

"If I let you up you got to show me what it is you’re so proud of."

"No way," he managed to mumble between spitting mouthfuls of dirt.

"I'll show you something in exchange."

"Okay."

"What was that?  I didn’t hear you."

He tried to raise his head in order to get the words out more clearly.  "Okay."

"Alright!"  And I lifted myself off him.  I thought he might try and make a break for it but he just stood there grinning.

"You go first,” he said.

“To hell with that."

"Okay together" he said.

I unbuttoned my blouse and he his flies and we got real close up in the corner between the buildings so that the air smelt strangely hot and spicy.  He put one hand inside my bra and with the other he wrestled his penis out of his trousers.  I wanted a look and I glanced down between our steamy bodies and what I saw was this huge thick thing winking at me. 

"You want to touch it,” he asked and suddenly he wasn’t such a bad guy after all.

I put a finger on it and it felt warm and solid and not like anything I had seen or felt before.

"It don’t bite,” he said laughing.

“I know that."  He had the nipple of my right breast between his fingers and it was just starting to make a tingling feeling go down to my groin.  I knew I could be in trouble if I let things go any further so I pulled away from him slightly, but not too much in case that time should not only pass, but disappear altogether.  His hand tightened around his cock as he started to jerk off.

“Just watch.  Just...” he cupped his other hand around one of my tits and squeezed it, pulling it clear of the blouse material so that he could see it.  When he put his mouth on it I knew I wasn’t going to be able to stop him from going any further.  He pushed me up against the wall.

"No more" I managed to say.  "Someone will see us." 

"Not if we’re quick."  He hitched up my skirt and ran his hand up my leg pulling my panties aside.  Next thing I knew he pulled away suddenly and came all over his hand.  I watched the glistening cream swell out of his cock and ooze between his fingers.  It was the biggest penis I have ever seen even when it was shrinking.  It sure beat the hell out of Troy's, but if that was the only thing it took to make a person fall in love then the world would be full of lonesome small-dicked guys and I guess it’s not.

I thought that maybe that moment out on the bridge had brought me and Troy closer together, but I guess he had seven kinds of demons inside of him and he was no place I could reach.  I just sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the nets and wondered why it was I loved him when he reminded me so much of my Daddy. 

My Pa was a good man, or so Moma always said, but she didn’t know the half of it.  Oh sure he paid the bills and he was never late home and he never got drunk or busted, or played around, or gambled, but Daddy had secrets he didn’t let anyone know about and one of those secrets was me watching him jerk off.  He liked to pretend I was Moma when he had just met her and she wasn’t so antsy about sex.  Don’t get me wrong he didn’t ever touch me.  He just liked me to watch.  He'd do it when Moma went to her friend Consuela's house; Wednesday nights.  She played Canasta or poker or something, and Pa didn’t like Consuela much so he stayed home. Pa probably tossed off other times too, only I don’t know about them or with whom because I didn’t want to know.  After a while I got bored with watching him yank on his prick.  It wasn’t nothing to write home about and it isn’t the same as watching someone else do it.  Mostly I would think about getting my nails manicured like Consuela's.  Consuela had the longest, most highly polished nails west of the Mississippi.  I heard Moma tell that Consuela paid a woman to do her nails because she couldn’t keep her hands still unless they were resting on the table.  It may have been on account of the booze Consuela knocked back, but then Moma may just have been exaggerating.  Moma was given to exaggerating.

Troy locked himself in the head and didn’t come out all night.  I don’t know what he was doing in there and I didn’t dare knock the door and ask.  I lay down on the bed and hugged my knees, because I could imagine the child inside my belly better that way even though it didn’t seem real yet. 

Right around four in the morning, Troy lit out of the motel and left me sleeping in my clothes on the creaky double bed.  I remember because I hadn’t been able to get any sleep and when I heard the door go I looked at the clock.  He never kissed me goodbye or looked at me or nothing.  I could have followed him I guess, but it wouldn’t have done no good.  A man with a problem is like a tornado; you got to leave him be until he calms right down to a breeze again.  I waited until I was sure he’d gone and then I got up and went for a pee.  Right away I knew he’d been shooting up. There was a needle in the basin.  The whole place smelt like he’d let off a thousand times and I had to get out of there.  I stepped out into the dawn and wondered what Pa would say this time.  It was little more than four thirty by then and the sun was rising out on the rim of the world.  The weekend shift would be clocking in at the chicken factory and I thought of all those poor birds about to meet their maker, and Maria Running-Wind and me on a beach in Florida, or some place similar.

My Pa was waiting for me on the porch when I got home.  He wanted to know where I'd been, not that it had ever mattered to him before.  I think he might have been sitting up all night.

"This time it's different" he said.

"Why" I asked.

"Because a woman in your condition shouldn’t go putting it about at four in the morning."   He hadn’t ever called me a woman before.  I guess the problem had suddenly come home to him.

“I went to see Troy.  I thought we’d be getting married now." I was hot and tired and I didn’t want my Pa beating up on me so early in the day.

"I'll handle him.  You just get yourself to bed before your mother sees you."

He watched me go inside and I could hear him grumbling to himself about the sins of the fathers and I thought that perhaps he had flipped.  I went into my room and closed the door and lay down on the bed.  The heat was already up although the sun wasn’t high yet and I could feel sweat on my back, so I pulled off my dress and lay there naked watching my belly rise and fall.  I knew my Pa would fix things right and that I would be hitched to Troy sooner or later and I hoped sooner because I didn’t want to be a single mother and I sure didn’t want to go see the coat hanger woman.  I must have slipped over the edge into sleep.  When I woke Moma was sitting in the chair across the room watching me like she used to when I was a little girl.

That's more or less what happened.  Six months later Troy married me.  It took all the persuading Moma and I could muster and I think he did it more out of a sense of duty than anything else.  We never did get real close again, not like that moment on the bridge when he had bared his soul to the baby. 

It couldn’t be a church wedding on account of Troy's divorce and the fact that folks around here are just so damned religious so we went to the Justice of the Peace and then Moma persuaded the Priest to bless us after.  I was sad that I hadn’t had a real white wedding and all but Moma said that those folks who go getting themselves pregnant before they’re hitched don’t deserve a decent wedding and that I was lucky Troy had finally agreed to marry me anyway.  I could tell that Troy was higher than the wisps of cloud that hung in the sky that morning and I wondered just exactly what I had let myself in for.  Maria Running-Wind said she would be my bridesmaid and then at the last moment dipped out of it with the excuse that some family problem had reared its ugly head and she had to go down to the Pueblo with her Moma. 

No matter the deed was done anyway and I was a married woman.  I don’t want to say much about tying the knot because it wasn’t much of anything 'cepting that we both got to say, "I do".  We went back to my folks' house and Pa and Troy sat on the porch drinking tequilas while Moma and me made sopaipillas and tried to keep the flies at bay.  It was a hot June day.  I could hear Pa whispering to Troy about us finding someplace else to live that was better than the beat up trailer Troy slept in.

"You can’t go expecting a wife to live in a trailer,” he kept saying and all Troy said was "nope".  That's all he said.

I didn’t know then that this would be the last time I ever saw my family all together again.  The kitchen was hot and dusty and I had maize flour smeared on my face where I kept on pushing my hair back from my eyes.  All the time the baby kept right on kicking me in the ribs and I laughed and smiled at my Moma, because despite the fact that she had wanted me to go get an abortion I had done the right thing in the end and married the man I loved.

I set a sopaipilla down on the side.  Pa was shouting at Troy out on the porch, but his words didn’t make any kind of sense and Moma ran outside to see what was happening.  I stood on tippy-toe at the open window and wished that there was a breeze that afternoon when the screen door slammed back against its hinges and Moma came flying in through the door.  Troy pushed Pa inside and Pa wasn’t making no attempt to stop him.  Moma screamed and Troy drew a gun out of his shirt and pointed it at Moma's head.

"One word from you and she’ll get it."  Troy snarled at my Pa and shoved him back down on a kitchen chair. 

Pa was kind of shrunk up like a used watermelon.  I think he was scared to do anything on account of the gun but it could just have been the drink.  Troy grabbed me by the neck and held the gun then to my head.  I wasn’t frightened at that point because I'd seen Troy get riled before and this wasn’t anything new to me, so I just stood there and waited for him to calm down.  Moma was crying and crying and Pa wrapped his arm round her and was trying to calm her down.

"Why aren’t you screaming too?" Troy shouted at me and he shook me by the neck until I thought my head would roll right off.  I couldn’t say anything because the words wouldn’t come out past Troy's hand but I felt tears in the corners of my eyes and I knew that I hadn’t meant to cry but that this was one of those things that happen when you’re stressed out.

 Troy pushed me down on a chair undid his belt and tied me to the chair so that the buckle on the belt dug into my fat belly.  Then he held the gun against my head. My Moma and Pa were huddled together against the table and I couldn’t think straight anymore.  It was like a nightmare only it didn’t seem as real as that even.  I noticed that the flies had started to settle on the sopaipillas and I could see honey running out of one of them and I thought that we would have to make more now.

"Why is this happening Troy” I asked, but he never answered.  He just looked at my Moma and twisted the gun against my head.

"This is what you done to me" he snarled at Pa.

"What" asked my Pa, although it was barely a whisper.  Pa looked used up. He was two years younger than Troy but he looked more used up than a man twice his age.

"You held a gun to my head when you got your little girl in the family way.  I should have done this a long time ago instead of letting you con me into marrying her."

Pa leapt forwards going for Troy's throat but Troy waved the gun at him and he backed off.  My Moma looked at Pa in disbelief.  I closed my eyes.  I never thought for a moment when I told Troy that Pa liked me to watch him jerk off that he would think that my child was also my Pa's.  Jesus how long had that notion been festering inside of Troy's head I wondered.

I felt Troy place the barrel of the gun against my forehead again and at that moment I almost wished he would pull the trigger.  Then the baby kicked me hard in the ribs and I let out a little cry.  No more than a yelp but it was enough to cause Moma to rise slightly from her chair towards me.  Her hand was stretched out to me and she had tears rolling down her face.

"Oh my poor baby, my poor, poor baby" she said.

"Oh quit the noise" growled Troy and he struck Moma across the face with the butt of the gun.  Moma went down on the floor and at that moment a ripple of pain cut through my belly like I had never had before.  Pa didn’t do anything.  He just sat there like he had seen it all coming and was ready now to take his punishment.  I grabbed the table with one hand and with the other tried to free myself from the belt, but the pain kept on coming and it was all I could do to breathe.  I closed my eyes for one moment, trying to draw strength, and when I opened them Troy was gone.  Just like that.  One moment he was standing there like a mad man and the next it was a hot June afternoon, the screen door was banging and more flies were circling the sopaipillas on the table ready to take over when the others had finished.  Moma got up off the floor, her face a mess of bruises, blood and flour and Pa put his hand up to his mouth and scowled at me.

"I told you no good would come of it" he snapped.

The pain in my gut stabbed again and then I realised that I was sitting in a puddle.  My waters had broken and I hadn’t even noticed until now.  I clutched my belly and Moma came right over to me and put her arm round me.

"Billy-Ray she's having the baby, go phone the Doctor or something."

"I'll get the truck,” said Pa.

"You do that, Billy-Ray, you do that." Moma undid the belt that still held me to the chair and I felt like the whole world was about to slide out of my backside.

"Don't move,” she said. "As soon as your Pa's got the truck round the side I'll help you in.  Don't move." 

I heard her turn away from me and pick up the phone but I didn’t see her because my eyes were closed.  All I kept thinking was; it’s too early - it’s too early."

2 home

 Once, when we were much younger, Maria Running-Wind and I visited her Great Aunt Jane Bright Sun. She lived in one of those old Pueblos you can still find out in the desert a ways.  We went with Maria's mother Arabella.  Arabella had been brought up by Jane Bright Sun, although that wasn’t her real name only what she liked to call herself for the sake of the tourist trade. She said that the Germans and English folk that visited the Pueblos in their high-sided air-conditioned buses wanted Indian sounding names along with the turquoise and blankets. Her real name was Juanita Sanchez and she was only one quarter Pueblo Indian.  The other three-quarters of her was Mexican. 

Maria's mother Arabella had lost her mother when she was only three years old. The Sanchez family were a close knit bunch and Jane Bright-Sun had naturally taken over where her sister had left off.  Jane Bright Sun never had any children of her own, although she married a full-blooded Navajo from Gallup and should have been blessed with many children, so she was glad in a way that her sister had died and left her in charge of the tiny Arabella.  She was sad too, that a death had had to occur for the miracle of life to pass into her hands but she knew it would be what her sister wanted.  Arabella, Maria's mother, grew up thinking that Jane Bright Sun was her real mother.  It wasn’t until she was ready to marry herself that Jane told her the truth.  Do you know the craziest thing? Arabella went and told Jane that she’d known all along.  It wasn’t any kind of news to her and it didn’t change a thing; Jane was still the only mother she’d really ever known. 

Arabella told Maria and I these things as we shook our way across the baked earth road in their pick-up on the way to visit Jane Bright Sun.  Maria had heard the story many times before; so many it had become part of the custom of visiting Jane Bright Sun.  I couldn’t have been more than ten years old at the time and had only just arrived in these parts.  Everything seemed really weird and hot and closer to death somehow.

I don’t rightly know what I expected to find when we got there, only that the insides of those places were as cool as any place I’ve ever been and some.  Maria and I left Arabella and Jane to catch up on the latest gossip and Maria took me to a place deep inside the Pueblo.  It was so dark I could hardly see my hands in front of my face.  I remember I held them up and felt along the wall.  Maria was way up ahead of me and I shouted to her.

"Don't leave me."

She shouted back.

"It's okay it’s not much further."

Then the feeling in the air changed around me and I knew that we were in some huge room deep inside the cliff.  My voice echoed when I spoke.

"What is this place?"

"Kiva.  It’s a ceremony place. You’re not supposed to be here. You’re white.  Don’t tell.  Grandma Jane says that the sun never shines down here and the wind never blows and that we are hidden from the enemy but that’s all she’ll say.  I’m not old enough yet to know."

I could feel Maria's thin body next to mine in that awesome space and we clung onto one another in the womb of the earth.  Maybe it seemed like a place of safety to Maria but to me it felt like people had died down there and I wanted out.

I screamed and opened my eyes and a paramedic took my hand.  I was in the ambulance with Moma.  I looked at her and a pain caught me across my belly; a sharp pain which wouldn’t stop and hurt more and more.

"Fuck. Fuck. Fuck."

I knew I must have looked a sight. I was hot and sweaty and sick feeling. 

"I want it to stop."  I yelled at the top of my voice.

"Not much longer now dear. Try and breath deeply. Don’t push yet. Not until I say."  The paramedic was a fine looking woman, but I was in no mood to chat.

"Where's Troy” I asked.  Moma and the paramedic looked at each other and then back at me.  For a moment, between the pains, I could sense that there was something going on that I wasn’t part of.

"Where's my husband?  Where's Troy?" 

"We can’t find him. Pa's gone over to the trailer and when he finds him he’ll bring him right along to the hospital," said Moma.  The pain had gone away and I relaxed a little.  Then the ambulance turned a corner; it seemed like on two wheels, the siren screaming.  I twisted on the gurney.

"Lie still dear," said the paramedic.

"Fuck off bitch," I screamed at her.  She had blonde hair that wasn’t really blonde pinned into a roll on her head.  I could see the roots needed redoing.  I closed my eyes and the siren’s wail blended with my next new torture.

I heard the paramedic say to Moma, "It's alright dear, I've heard a lot worse. She’ll be fine, don't you worry."  Moma sobbed and her hand clutched my arm.

"My poor baby," was all she kept saying and in my hopeless state I wasn’t sure whether she meant me or the baby, clawing its way out of my belly. 

It seemed like forever before we got to the hospital, but it couldn’t have been that long because although I had started to push back at the intersection the baby just refused to be born and I got wheeled through the corridors of the Santa Teresa Hospital on the gurney for all the world to see.  Then we crashed through into the labor ward and the lights were brighter than ever and the people milled around like I was the late night show or something.  I thought, I’m on, this is the night of my life and I’m the star attraction.

"This one’s got problems."

"Let's get her to theatre."

"Okay, clear the way. We’re coming through."

They shot me full of some drug or other and I floated in that hollow space under the earth with Maria Running-Wind. 

"There's a way out of here if you want to go now."  I heard Maria whisper in my ear.

"Okay," I whispered back.  I was afraid of the echoes.  They sounded like the voices of the dead.  I knew that the Mexicans liked the dead, but I wasn’t sure about the Pueblo Indians.  Probably I thought, Jane Bright Sun has got the best of both worlds inside of her.

I took Maria's hand and she led me across the black space to the far wall.

"Put out your hand and touch the wall." she said. 

I did as she said and we walked forward following the wall, my left hand in hers, my right on the wall.  Under my fingertips I could feel that there were pictures cut into the surface but I had no time to work out what they were.  Then Maria tugged on my hand and we turned a corner and entered a passageway.  A faint light shone up ahead and as we neared I could tell that we would soon be out in the heat of the noonday sun.

The brightness of everything was what hit me first that and the smell of cooking hanging in the still air.  The sky was bluer than blue and far into the distance the ground was orange dirt, bright shiny orange dirt with the Sangre de Cristo Mountains way, way off.  We lay on our backs, two ten year old girls together, and stared at the sky until everything we looked at took on the same faded glory and then we rolled over and over, laughing and getting the orange earth in our hair and eyes and inside our dresses and under our arms and in all the nooks and crannies that we never knew we had yet.

I rolled into a gully and stopped when I came up against a stone.  I couldn’t see where Maria had gotten to, but I could still hear her laughing and I thought that she was maybe rolling all the way to Santa Fe.  I lay there letting the sun bake me and watching the tiny drifts of clouds floating in the sky.  I didn’t know it but I was being watched too - by a rattler.  It must’ve been sitting under the rock I banged minding its own business.  As I lay there it sneaked out from its hiding place and made to strike me; only I heard it faintly and Maria sensed it although I didn’t know where she was right then.   She screamed and the snake hissed and rattled its tail at the same time and I was frozen.  I stared at the snake in the gully and it stared right back at me, its mouth wide open, fangs at the ready to take my life.  I could see right on down its throat to the place where it ate things whole. I hoped it wouldn’t come to that with me.

The rock whistled within an inch or so of my ear and hit the rattler square on the head.  Standing on the rim of the gully Maria had lobbed a rock at the snake and hit it.  The rock burst into a million tiny pieces and the snake recoiled from the blow and readied itself to strike.  I rolled away fast as I could and scrambled up the bank. The sides were like fine shale and although the gully was no more than a dip in the curve of the earth I was so frightened I couldn’t get up.  The snake struck out behind me.  I yelped and pulled my leg out of the way as Maria stretched out and pulled me clear. 

All the way back to the Pueblo we hugged each other close and laughed at the way we had cheated death.  Out on that bright orange earth the sun burned deep into the dirt and I hoped that it fried that rattler right up. 

3 home

My baby girl was born dead they said, but they let me hold it just the same and someone took a photo so that for the rest of my life when I looked at it, it would seem like I was a genuine mother with a live baby.  I thought it was gruesome and anyway it made me cry.  Everyone else in the ward had beautiful babies and I had nothing to show for the seven months I had been as fat as an old sow.  All that pain and nothing to show, but for a scar the length of route 66 across my belly.  They had at least cut me below the bikini line, as folks like to call it, but it had put paid to sunbathing in the raw. 

They wanted me to give her a name, but seeing as it hadn’t even had the chance to get baptised I decided to save the name.  I was going to call her after me anyway.

The next morning I lay just about wore out in the hospital bed and I tried to sleep and not look at the cribs and the new mothers.  Moma came and visited in the afternoon and Maria Running-Wind sent a telegram from the Pueblo and said she would try and get to see me as soon as she got back.  I couldn’t understand why Troy hadn’t been yet.  Why hadn’t Pa found him and brought him to me?

"Now don’t fret," said Moma, "I'm sure he can’t be too far away and just as soon as Pa finds him, why they’ll both be along to see you."

The truth was Pa couldn’t bring himself to face me and Moma was covering for him like she always was. 

“I want him here, now.  He ought to be here.  If he knew about this he would be with me."  I burst into a fresh set of tears and Moma shushed me and gave me her handkerchief and tried to calm me down without alerting anyone.

"Cherry, Cherry honey calm down. Your Pa went out to the trailer but he couldn’t find Troy no place. We’ve just about exhausted all the possibilities. You got to put a brave face on now. Come on honey this is your Moma talking now.  Troy has lit out someplace and he’ll be back when he’s good and ready."  She sighed.  "It probably is for the best."

"What could be for the best about it?" I sobbed into Moma's lace trimmed handkerchief.

"Well now we told you all along he was too old for you.”

"What difference does that make now?"  I yelled at her.  The woman in the bed opposite looked at me, and then away again because I made a face at her.

"Cherry that is no way to treat people you don’t even know."  Moma smiled at the woman.

"What difference does it make?"  I scowled at Moma and I scowled at the woman over the way.  She had a baby boy all neatly wrapped up in its crib beside her. What did she need to worry about if a girl half her age made faces at her?

“I got to go now honey. Ill be back tomorrow."  Moma stood up and made to leave.

“I want out of here," I hissed at her.

"Well now I don’t think that’s possible right now Cherry. You got to...”

"Moma I don’t want to stay in this place with all these babies."  The last word screamed out of me. I felt trapped.  There was no place for me here.  My stitches tore at my skin.  I sat up and tried to get out of bed.  Moma pushed me back down.

She hissed: "Now you get back in that bed right now girl."

"Get out of my way," I said to her and shoved her with all my might.

 Moma hardly moved that was how weak I was right then.  She looked round frantically and caught the eye of a nurse who had been watching all sly-like from the end of the ward.  I saw the nurse heading my way and I sank back into the pillows.  Getting out of here was going to need planning. The nurse smiled her dreadful know-it-all smile and asked if everything was all right.

"Why fine thank you," said Moma and the nurse patted the sheets back into place and left us in a cold silence.

When the nurse had gone out of earshot Moma leant in close to me and whispered in that "don't you ever do that again" tone to me.

"Make one move out of this bed and you’ll be looking at spending the rest of your life shackled to a bench in the chicken factory."  It was the worst threat Moma could think of off the top of her head.  "Troy ain't coming back and if he was I'd make damned sure that he got both barrels of your Pa's shot gun afore he even set foot on the front porch.  You get yourself well and we’ll say no more about Troy or the baby.  You are damned lucky it did die.  Damned lucky," and with that she turned and fled.

The ward was silent.  I felt as if everyone had been in on it; like it was a plot or something to put me, a jumped up sixteen year old with no baby, in her place.  If I'd have had the strength I would have asked them what they were all looking at, but I couldn’t find the words.  Moma had squashed them right out of me.  I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep and pretty soon I did so.

I was one of those girls at school who kind of grew faster than all the rest.  While they were all still kids I was growing breasts and hiding my time of the month from everyone including my Moma.  This must have been when I was about eleven.  It was a bad time for me I can tell you.  The other girls at school would try and sneak a look at my itty-bitty breasts when we changed for P.T. and I just hated the showers after.  I would wait until they had all finished and then dash through holding my arms in front of my chest and hoping that no one saw me.  I was real shy about the tricks my body was playing on me.  One thing though, I noticed the older boys looking at me and I liked the way they paid me little attentions and tried to be all helpful and everything.  Even the loud ones, the ones who shouted names at me and made my toes curl in embarrassment.

Maria was the only friend I had who didn’t seem bothered by the way I was growing up.  It was like she had her own ideas on the subject and no one, but no one, could alter her train of thought.  Her own body had taken a turn for the worse right around that time and she was shooting up in height to almost five two, whilst I was still a tiny four foot eight.  The effect that the pair of us had on the rest of our class, me with the growing tits and Maria with her body all stringing out, was interesting to say the least.  Everyone developed an interest in what the teacher called "the facts of life".  I had already guessed what the real facts were and didn’t want to share my knowing with anyone but Maria and she never seemed really interested.  We did talk some though and one time I let her inspect me naked so she could compare me with her own blossoming figure.  She was as skinny as anything with a fine down all over her back.    

When I woke up it was night and the ward was silent, except for a baby crying somewhere.  It wasn’t any loud cry, just a whimper, but it made me break out in a cold sweat.  My tits were aching something terrible with all the milk inside of them and I touched my stomach where they had sliced into me to get the baby out and felt the blood-hardened stitches and winced.  If I was real careful I might be able to get out of bed.  I glanced down the ward again.  Everyone seemed to be asleep but I couldn’t really tell.  I inched my way to the edge of the bed and swung first one leg and then the other out from under the sheets.  Way in the distance the baby cried.  I froze, like I was the one that caused it to yell and they would come a running and tie me down or something so that I couldn’t go making a nuisance of myself.  Right then it seemed like I was in some kind of prison and they would never let me out.   I waited until the baby had quit its bawling and then I gingerly stood up.  It took all my strength to straighten my legs and let go of the bedhead.  When I did my legs buckled and all the pain I must’ve been saving up shot through me like it was riding some kind of train.  I sat right back down again.

It was a big ward but it only had 8 beds in it. They were spaced well apart so the journey from my bed at the far end of the ward to the door seemed like miles and miles.  I eyed the distance and decided to wait until morning.  Most of the night after that I watched the nurses going backwards and forwards about their duties.  They didn’t bother sitting at the desk.  They just glanced at us all to see if anyone needed them.  I listened to a little baby cry and then another started up and I heard its Moma tell it to be quiet, that everything was just fine, and I opened the drawer in my bedside cupboard and took out the picture of my poor dead baby and I looked at her and I thought how sweet she might have been had she lived long enough.  I thought maybe I was going off my head and perhaps the time had come to surrender up to God or whatever folks do when they’re at the end of their tether, but I guess it was just because I missed her.  She had been inside me all that time I hadn’t had any time to get to know her, and I remember Moma telling me that when I was born she just lay there looking at me in the crib and wondering how something so small and perfect could have come from inside of her.  She said I was the only thing she’d ever done right.  Right after that she told me I was a slut and that she ought to have gone right on out and drowned me, because I was no use to anyone and only fit for the chicken factory and what use was it giving birth to a child if it was going to spend its days tied to a no good drunk and a conveyor belt.  I think she was mad at the time because Consuela had beaten her at cards again.

I put the picture of my baby under the pillow and lay down. I had cried myself dry of tears and the pain I felt right then didn’t come from my gut but from deep inside my heart, like someone had reached right in and torn a piece of it off and left a raw red wound that would fester for the rest of my life. 

"Some folks get all the luck," I heard myself say.

When I woke daylight was streaming in through the curtains and the nurses were all about their morning duties; primping and preening the new mothers and carrying babies across from the nursery and taking temperatures and writing on charts.  I let them bustle around me and take me to the bathroom and wait while I clutched my gut and shit into the pan.  I hadn’t bargained on there being so much blood coming out end-wise, so to speak, and I asked the nurse to take a look and tell me if I was bleeding to death, but she just said that it would dry up in a few days and not to worry about it.  I practised shuffling my own way to the john after that and as the day wore on my walking got so it was almost bearable.  By evening time I must have walked the length and breadth of the entire United States and I had taken to hiding as many of the painkillers they gave me as I could manage without the pain tearing through me. 

I watched the visitors come and go and wondered where Moma had gotten to but in a way I was glad she hadn’t bothered. She would have preached at me and made me feel like I was a piece of shit anyway.  Two of the women were due to go home the next day. Their husbands brought going home clothes for them and their babies and they put the clothes in their lockers and smiled at their menfolk and forgave them for going with their sisters or friends whilst they were busy having a baby, or that was what I thought anyway.  I chose the woman who looked closest to me in size and decided that whatever she had to wear was going have to do.  Then I turned my back on them all and tried to get some sleep. It was going to be a long night and I didn’t know quite what to expect.

Right around ten, when most of the nurses had gone off on their coffee break and the babies were silent, I slipped out of my bed taking the picture of my dead baby and my stash of painkillers with me, and stole the going home clothes out of the locker of the woman I had chosen earlier that day.  She was asleep although her baby eyed me from the crib and I put my finger to my mouth to warn it not to make a sound and above all not to tell its Moma when it was old enough.  I don’t think anyone saw me.  I slipped into the bathroom and put the clothes on; panties, which had been washed grey, and a print dress that tied at the back and must’ve made me look like something out of "The Grapes of Wrath".  The shoes were flat slip-ons one size too small.  I promised myself I would get me a pair of Levis soon as I could fit into them and opened the door and peered out along the corridor.  It led past other wards with other mothers and babies and then past a nursery where the cribs were lined up against the wall and tagged so as everyone knew just exactly whose baby was whose. 

As I stood there in the nursery I got it into my head that my baby wasn’t dead. That it was as alive as any other and that they had stolen it from me because they didn’t think I deserved to have a child.  I tippy-toed into the room and looked from crib to crib, but I couldn’t see my baby anywhere and then, just when I thought they must have been tricking me, I saw it. It was lying apart from the other babies naked except for a diaper in an incubator kind of thing, only it wasn’t really an incubator because it was glowing Ultra Violet and I didn’t know what this was for only that this must mean this was some special kind of baby.  I took the picture out from the dress pocket and I compared the baby to the picture and it sure looked like the real thing to me. Very carefully I lifted the baby out from under the lights and cradled it in my arms.  It was the most perfect thing I had ever set my eyes on.  I wrapped my baby in a blue blanket, which lay with others on a shelf nearby and glancing round in case anyone was watching me slipped out of the nursery with the baby in my arms.

4 home

It was easy to step out into the cold dark night and stand under the stars and drink in freedom with my baby in my arms.  I had no money and no place to go but home and I knew I would not be welcome there.  I started to walk down the road, a little shakily at first seeing as there was nothing to hold onto if I felt faint.  Away in the distance I could see the lights of an all night diner.  There would be a phone I thought and I could call Maria Running-Wind and she would send her Pa out to fetch me.  With this aim in mind I headed for the diner and put my fear of being caught breaking out of hospital behind me.

The diner was half empty and it didn’t look very inviting.  The tables were used up shiny and the chairs red plastic.  I stood for a while just looking in through the window and imagining the smell of the greasy food until someone took it into their head to shout at me.

"Get the hell away from here!"  It was an old man with egg running down his chin and a mean look in his eye. I stuck my tongue out at him and he started up like he was going to come crashing right on through the window at me but some Mexican-looking woman calmed him down and waved me away at the same time and I turned as if to go but thought better of it.  Clutching the baby close to me I opened the door and walked right on up to the old man.  He looked up at me with a scowl on his face.

"You wouldn’t have a dollar to spare would you?"  I smiled my sweetest smile and waited. He stuck his chin out and clamped his teeth together and for a moment I thought he was going to bite right through his bottom jaw then he caught sight of the baby and looked from me to it.

"Ain't it time that little one was in its bed?"

"It ain’t got no home,” I said still smiling.  From somewhere behind me I heard a man say. "I'd give it a home if you came with it."  I glanced round.  The entire diner was looking at me.  If I could have died right then I would have done so.  I turned on my heels and fled. Tears were streaming down my face and my belly hurt more than ever.  I gripped my gut with one hand and the baby with the other.  It started to cry just as the swing door to the diner closed behind us and we were on the sidewalk again.  A man came out behind me and stood for a moment in silence. Then I felt him grab my arm and pull me around the side of the diner into the alleyway.  He had the look of a worn out old cowboy.  His face was sunburnt and lined and put me in mind of Robert Redford some.  He wore a checkered shirt, which had been washed so many times the pattern was fast fading right off it.  That was all I caught sight of because the alley wasn’t exactly what you call well lit and it stank like the bottom of an old garbage can.

"Can you shut that thing up," he asked.

"She's hungry."

"Can you feed her then?"

"I guess," but I didn’t know. I hadn’t ever had the opportunity to try until now.

"Feed her then.”

"What now?"

"Sure," he said. "Why not? I want to watch."

"You got a dollar," I asked him. “I need to make a phone call."  The baby was crying fit to bust by now.

"Sure I got a dollar. I got ten bucks if'n you’ll feed the baby."

I looked at him and then at the crying baby and then slid down the wall until I was sitting on the damp ground below.  Paying no mind to the man hovering over me I held the baby with one hand and with the other I opened the buttons on the dress front and cupped one of my tits in my hand trying to force it into the baby’s mouth and not making a very good job of it.

"Both of them,” the man growled.  "I want to see them both."  He made a grab for the dress and tore it open some more so that I was exposed for all the world to see. Tears were rolling down my cheeks, not because of the man but because try as I might I could not get that baby to suck on my tit.  The nipple felt hard and sore and over loaded with milk but the baby just didn’t know what to do and neither did I.  The man crouched in front of me a stupid smile on his face then he reached out a hand took a nipple between his finger and thumb and rolled it around until some milk leaked out onto his fingers.

"It's just like this." he said and bent his head down, pursed his lips and started to suck on my nipple.  It was like no feeling I have ever had before.  A kind of brilliant pain and a pleasure at the same time.  Of course it was just the let down of my milk but I thought it must have been some kind of new sexual thing.  The man looked up and I could see little beads of my milk on his lips.  I should have slapped him right then only I wasn’t in my right mind.

“Stick it on that" he said and forced the baby's mouth to the nipple he’d just been sucking himself.  With the pressure off the baby was able to latch right on.  I smiled at the man and he took out ten dollars and placed it in my lap.

"Best tasting milk I had in a long time."  He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and stood up.  It was a strange experience but I felt grateful to him.  He stood over me just watching the baby feed and then he unzippered his flies and pulled out his erect penis.  For a moment I though the was going to take a piss and then he grabbed me by the back of my head and forced his dick between my lips.  My hands were full holding the baby and I was pinned under the man's weight as he bore down on me against the brick wall.  He had my hair all tangled up in his fingers.  I gagged and tried to bite him but he was pumping way at my mouth and banging my head against the wall so as I thought I must have blood running down my neck.  There was no getting out of it.  He shot his spunk right down my throat and I spat it back out again and scrabbled up from the ground as soon as he pulled out.  The baby yanked right away from the nipple and cried and I screamed at the man and held the baby and my belly my dress flapping open and my head throbbing.  I felt as if my stitches had torn right open.

"Get away from me! Get away!"

 The man zippered himself up again and tossed another ten-dollar bill into the dirt.

"The blow job wasn’t up to the same standard though," he said.

 I grabbed a handful of dirt and the money at the same time and threw it at him, but he had already turned his back and walked out onto the street.  I ran after him.  He opened the door to the diner and went in. I heard a swell of laughter from inside as he entered and I looked wildly through the window at him as he crossed the diner to the counter without realising that I was half-naked and totally messed up.  The old man from the time before scowled at me and the woman waved me to go away and then I realised that I must have looked like I was some kind of witch. The baby was bawling and bawling and I felt like my whole world had come to an end.  There was nothing for it, but to go and pick up the money the man had tossed me and get the bus back home.

5 home

When I was a very small child and we lived someplace else I would sometimes go off on my own and play at princesses or spies. I had a whole glut of imaginary friends who would play with me and it all seemed real somehow and not at all pretend.  Moma used to say I was always telling myself stories and that I should go and get some real friends and then when I did she would tell me that they were from common families and that I shouldn’t play with them for fear of contracting some kind of disease, or maybe I'd start talking like them and lose my brains, like brains were a friendly bacteria or something like yoghurt.  I couldn’t ever do anything right for my Moma so I stopped trying. 

I sat on the seat in the bus that the man’s money had bought me and I held the baby tight and it looked like a poorly little thing and I started to think that maybe it wasn’t my baby after all.  The bus was almost empty and dark and although it was only a few miles down the road to my stop I tried to sleep some but the memory of Moma telling me I was bad for having imaginary friends and bad for having real friends kept on waking me up and I thought that she would most likely think I was some kind of whore now for taking the man’s money.  Well he didn’t take anything from me but an itty bitty drop of milk and my pride and though I could have shouted rape or something what would have been the point?  I must’ve looked like a two-bit hooker anyway.  I couldn’t imagine what I had been thinking of going in that diner in the first place.  I could have reversed the charges to the Pueblo.  Maria Running-Wind would’ve accepted the call. 

The town passed by outside and soon we were out on the highway.  Way in the distance the mountains reared up against the skyline and I knew that somewhere out there a storm was brewing up and I thought of Maria Running-Wind and how she had the kind of family I never had and I wondered just what I had done wrong to deserve a life like this one.  I would be seventeen in two days time and I had all but forgotten it.  I closed my eyes and the man in the alley came into my head and I laughed out loud and then put my hand to my mouth to stop myself from laughing more. I looked around to see if anyone had noticed but the few people that were on the bus were either asleep or were ignoring me.  When I thought about it all I could do was laugh.  It was a weird kind of laughter though. The kind you get when you’re really scared and the kind you get when you’re really glad that something is over.  It was the worst thing that had ever happened to me so far and I guessed it wouldn’t be the last.  What Moma would say I dreaded to think seeing as she generally thought men were so damned dirty and all, and she didn’t mean dirty rude, she meant dirty unclean.

There was nobody on the streets when the bus pulled into town and I got off two stops down from my own home.  I had no intention of dropping in on Moma.  I needed a place to crash and the baby had gone real quiet and I was worried about it.  It wasn’t asleep its eyes were open.  It just lay there in my arms looking kind of pale, something like a doll Father Christmas once left me. 

I headed for Troy's trailer.  I knew he Wouldn’t be there, but I knew where he hid the spare keys and I could get some sleep and make plans for the morning, besides I needed a shot of something stronger than the pain killers to take the pain in my gut away.

Troy's trailer was situated with ten others in the Country Valley Trailer Park. The park had space enough for tourists but no washing facilities because most folks made do with what they had in the trailer.  The old guy that ran the place, Mickey Fernando, was a gutless wonder who sat in his own trailer at the gate and watched what life dragged past his window.  If you were someone he didn’t know or like he would come out with his shotgun loaded and point it at you and order you off his property, tourists included. Tourists didn’t bother with the Country Valley Trailer Park much.  Mickey Fernando kept a lazy rottweiler that had seen too many TV dinners to be bothered with eating folks. 

I knew where I could get into the trailer park without having to pass old Mickey's.  There was a piece of broken fencing a hundred yards or so away from the gate with just enough room to crawl through the gap on your hands and knees.  I pushed the baby through the hole and crawled after it.  By now I had become used to my aching body but I could still feel the trickle of blood on my inside leg and when I put my hand to my stomach the dress was sticky with pus or blood or something.  I picked the baby up and ran across the grass to Troy's trailer.  The lights were off and I felt under the gas bottle for the spare keys.  I didn’t need to use them though because the door was busted on its hinges.

Must’ve been Pa that had been through Troy’s trailer like a howling wind off the prairie.  I didn’t dare switch a light on for fear of alerting Mickey Fernando but I cleared a space on the bunk and laid the baby down in the dark and hoped that it wasn’t too ill or dying or something. 

There was just enough light from the three-quarter moon to see that Pa had made a good job of trashing the trailer.  I hoped that he hadn’t found Troy's stash and that Troy Hadn’t taken it either.  I reached inside the hood of the cooker and pulled the grating away from the extractor.  The inside cover came away in my hands and there was a tinfoil screw of dope, a plastic bag with some kind of pills inside and a small tobacco tin.  I placed all these items on the table and opened the plastic bag of pills.  There wasn’t no telling what they were.  Maybe if I'd have had more light.   I opened the tobacco tin.  It held another plastic bag like the one with the pills only this one was full of coke.  I open the bag and licked my finger and stuck it in the powder.  Then I licked my finger and thought it tasted like the real thing and I don’t mean the drink.  I mean as far as I could be sure I didn’t think it had anything cut with it.  I glanced at the baby lying in the darkness on the bunk and it was so quiet I could hardly hear it breathe.  I trailed three lines of coke across the tabletop and rolled a piece of newspaper into a small tube.  Then I snorted back the coke and waited for the rush.

 They had a horse called Frills back at my old home in Colorado.  That was before Pa fell out of friendship with his father and left the ranch we all lived on.  It wasn’t a big ranch just something Grandpa had inherited from his Pa and his before him.  Pa used to say that Grandpa had never had any intention of leaving the place to his children. He said that Grandpa thought the land was about wore out and that he could get good money selling it to his neighbor and using the proceeds to buy himself a better plot to be buried in.  Pa didn’t believe that the old man would sell out just to afford to die.  Pa said he would bury Grandpa with his own hands if he had to.  We would all need a place to live even after the old man did die but Grandpa wouldn’t have any of it. 

"You just want to get your own hands on the place and tear it apart and it’ll be nothing like it was when I was a child and what will that little girl think of you then?"  Grandpa pointed at me.

 I stood by the scrubbed kitchen table where Grandma and too many other of my ancestors to go remembering had kneaded bread and floured pastry and I was just six years old when he said it.  Pa always had a temper on him but no one knew where he’d gotten it because everyone always said Grandpa wasn’t a violent man.  Pa turned real quick and lashed out at me for no good reason.

"Get out of my sight. This is man’s business," he said.  I ran away and hid behind the woodpile and I could hear the two men going at it hammer and nails and I didn’t understand why.  I only knew in my childlike way that it had something to do with Grandpa not being the oldest child when he had inherited the land.  I knew that he had had an older brother, my Great Uncle Billy, because his picture hung in the hallway, but I didn’t know what had happened to him that Grandpa had ended up with the ranch instead of him.  Moma said that the picture of Billy made her shudder every time she passed it and I would go and stand underneath it and gaze at his round babyish face, although he must’ve been 25 years old when the photo was taken, and I would imagine that he could see me there.  Great Uncle Billy's picture didn’t make me shudder any.

Right after the argument Pa went and got himself a job on the railroad and we Didn’t see him much but for birthday’s and thanksgiving and Christmas.  Life on the ranch went on the same as it ever was and I learned to ride the old horse Frills and took to spending more and more time out in the fields at the back of the house or up in Shorty's gulch and not coming home until it was dark and Moma was just about tearing her hair out with the worry of it. 

Grandpa never did sell the ranch but he died anyway and Moma and me buried him in the town cemetery alongside his wife, my Grandma, and the rest of his family.  There wasn’t any sign of Great Uncle Billy’s grave amongst the weeds though I looked all through the service and when the Priest got to burying Grandpa proper I saw my own Pa standing a way off by the trees in the road just looking at us. The sun had bleached all the colour out of the grass that year.  It was 1988 and I was nine years old.  Pa had been on the railroad three years already.

Pa came home then but not to stay.  He had fixed us a little place in New Mexico and he wanted us to come with him. 

"This place hasn’t never been home for me, so somewhere new will be as good as any."  He said he had already put the ranch on the market and that we were to go down to the station in a few days time and get the train to Santa Fe.  He would pick us up and drive us out to our new home.  I remember Moma cutting up kind of rough about the whole thing and I was sad to leave Frills behind in the stable but I knew that Chester, the ranch hand who was older than the Grandpa we had just buried, would look after him until the new owners came by. 

Moma said that Pa never took any mind of what she said and told me that if we didn’t get off the train at Santa Fe, if we went right on through the whole state of New Mexico and out into Arizona what would I think?  I suppose she was fixing to leave Pa but I didn’t really understand her right then.  Anyway we got off the train and that’s how we ended up living where we did.  I never knew who bought Grandpa’s ranch, nor what Pa did with the money and from time to time I would wonder what the feud was between Grandpa and Pa and between Grandpa and Great Uncle Billy.

The sun was coming in kind of slantwise across the bunk when I woke the next morning. The baby looked cold on the bed. Her eyes were open and her breath was so shallow I thought she might give up the ghost right then.  I wrapped her up in the blue blanket and cradled her in my arms, but I couldn’t find any tears for her and she didn’t want to feed when I tried her.  I thought about leaving her there in the trailer but that would have been cruel.  So I made up my mind to take her to the Pueblo and ask Jane Bright-Sun what I should do.

  I washed up some and ripped the sheet off Troy’s bunk and tore it into strips and stuffed them between my legs to keep from feeling the blood from trickling down. Then I changed into some of Troy’s faded out old jeans and a shirt and, although they were all three sizes too big for me, I felt better. The stitches in my gut were all glued up with pus but it didn’t hurt as much as before.  I rolled the tobacco tin of coke and plastic bag of pills in another of Troy’s old shirts and stuffed them into a paper sack.  He had a pair of worn down cowboy boots in one of the cupboards and I put two pairs of socks on and then the boots. They were better than the shoes I had been wearing and I hoped they wouldn’t give me sores.  Clutching the sack and the baby to my chest I studied the trailer park from the broken door and decided that, although I couldn’t see any sign of Mickey Fernando, it was best not to take any chances.  I left the trailer park the way I went in; through the fence, pushing the baby through first and dragging the paper sack after me.

I had a mind to hitch a lift out to the Pueblo but there were no vehicles on the road out east and it was already hot.  I wished I had had the good sense to pack something to drink and was just fixing to do a double back along the edge of the gully back of the chicken factory and steal a bottle of lemonade from Frenchie's drug store when a truck came by and stopped ahead of me in the road.  I could have dropped down dead in my tracks; it was Pa!  I looked back at the way I'd come and I looked out across the countryside and when I looked back I could see the air rising hot off the engine of the truck as it idled.  Pa just sat there watching me. I turned on my heels and started to walk hard in the opposite direction but I couldn’t make much progress because everything had started to hurt again and the baby weighed like lead in my arms.  I heard Pa put the truck into reverse and back up and I kept on walking and wishing I was someplace else.  Why did it have to be him?  What was he doing on this particular road?  The truck stopped and the door slammed.

"They said you had made a run for it but I didn’t reckon on you doing such a damned fool thing as stealing someone's baby," hollered Pa.

"I ain’t talking to you," and I kept on walking.

"The hell you ain't."  Pa grabbed me and I froze.  It felt like the world had closed in around me even though we were standing out on the road which stretched so far into the distance you couldn’t see where it came from or where it was going except that the town got in the way.

"I'm taking you in to the Sheriff.  Like as not they’ll throw you in jail."

I pulled away from him and started to walk down the road with Pa skittering after me.  He grabbed me again and I almost dropped the baby.

"Can't you see it's sick?" I yelled at him.

He sniffed and looked at the mountains in the distance as if trying to make up his mind about something.  Then he turned back to me and slapped me right across the face.  I never saw it coming, but I sure saw the ground as it reared on up at me.  I fell in the dirt but I still had the baby clutched tight in my arms.  Pa wrestled her out of my arms with me rolling away from him and crying and screaming at him. 

"You bastard. If'n it's dead it’ll be murder."  

 Pa looked down at me in the dirt with my shirt all torn and dirty and grabbed me by the hair and pulled me towards the truck.  I struggled and twisted in his grip and finally he kicked out and his boot connected with my chest.  The shock sent me flying back.  I barely saw him get in the truck with the baby.  Next thing I knew I was lying out on the side of the road on my own.  Pa and the baby were gone.  I must have been out of it for a couple of hours because the shadows were different and I felt hot and thirsty and sick all at the same time.  I touched my chest gingerly and winced.  When I opened the shirt I had a welt across my breastbone and my tits ached like they were going to drop off. 

In the confusion I had lost the paper bag and I searched amongst the weeds for it like I was stupid or something until I realised that Pa must’ve taken that too.  I limped down the road some but I couldn’t get my head straight and I knew that if I didn’t get out of the sun I would end up fried or mad or both.  I made for an acacia a way off in the field and when I reached it I slept where I fell.

The coyotes woke me in the night and the moon was covered by clouds and a distant storm played across the mountaintops.  I could see the flashes of light and smell the rain on the air.  It was cold and I was as stiff as hell. 

I tried to work out what had happened to me but I only knew that Pa had the baby and whether it was alive or dead didn’t matter anymore because they had been insistent at the hospital that my baby was dead when it was born so whose baby had this been?  It didn’t make any sense to me but I know now that I must have been crazy at that time.

 I watched the storm close in and then when it reached me I sat with my back to the tree and hugged my knees.  The sky had turned red-golden and when the lightening danced it seemed like God had come to pay me a visit.  The rain slewed down from the heavens and filled the gullies until all the earth was a running stream and the raindrops like jumping fish out from every puddle.  I bent my head into my knees and breathed the hot damp air from my body.  I thought perhaps I was going to die out there.  It would have been a good place to die, but the rain let up and when I lifted my head the clouds were passing in the night sky like an Angel's wings and the stars were their eyes winking at me.

No nothing made any sense any more.  I thought perhaps if Troy Hadn’t have run out on me on my wedding day it would have been alright and the baby might not have died and then I cried and cried until the sobs ate through my body and I thought that nothing could hurt as much as those tears right then.  There was nobody in the world wanted me.  I was out on my own and barely able to look after myself let alone a baby.  Perhaps Moma had been right after all.  Perhaps the baby, my baby, because now I knew that the one I had taken wasn’t mine, was better off dead.  Today was my birthday.  I was seventeen years old and I wouldn’t be having a party this year.  I couldn’t even get high because Pa had taken the paper bag with the stash in it.  I closed my eyes again and tried to sleep and hoped that if I did I would die in my sleep and then I Wouldn’t have to go thinking up a way to kill myself.

I didn’t die. I woke up as dawn broke in the east and I crawled out from under the tree and stood on the damp earth in the borrowed cowboy boots.  At least my feet were dry.  A way off down the road the town looked closed up.  It wasn’t even clocking in time at the chicken factory.  It was a toss up between limping home or heading out down the road for the Pueblo. If I went home I didn’t know what Pa would do.  Maybe him beating up on me was a way of saying don’t come back.  I made it up to the road and headed on out towards the breaking day.  The Pueblo was still a morning’s truck ride away and it didn’t seem like anyone would be coming down this road for another hour or two.

Crazy thoughts kept on dancing around in my head like I was dreaming but I was awake.  One time I thought I saw Maria Running-Wind out on the road ahead of me beckoning me and smiling and I smiled back at her and she turned into a lizard and when I bent down to pick it up it was my Pa's face staring up at me from the road and I stamped and stamped on it until it was a bloody mess.   When I turned away there were the innards of the lizard spread for the buzzards to pick at.  Sick to my stomach I slumped to my knees and crawled away from the lizard I had murdered. 

I lay down by the side of the road and I thought of all the things I could be doing right then like baking cakes in my home for my new husband.  I thought of the baby sleeping in its crib and white curtains blowing in the breeze at the windows of the nursery.  I saw the ceiling of that room and it was bright blue and so far up that I could barely work out where the walls connected.  Someone had painted fluffy white clouds on that ceiling and the sight made me smile and cry at the same time.  I felt the tears draining out of my eyes and sliding down my face into my ears. When I turned my head the lizard’s red guts ranged into view and I wondered who it was that had made such a mess in the nursery. 

Somehow I crawled back into town.  I meant to go the other way but I guess God didn’t want me to escape into the mountains right then.  It took me all day walking and crawling and sitting some by the side of the road. Every time a vehicle came by I tried to flag it down but they all went right on past.  It was only when the Police whistled by that I lay down flat against the earth and try and dissolve into it.  By the time I reached the outskirts of my hometown I was so far gone I could have blown away with the wind and not noticed.  The town just went on about its business as if I wasn’t there at all and I walked right up the main street in my too-big cowboy boots the world kind of skittering sideways from time-to-time in the evening light.

I never decided to make a visit to Consuela's house; it just happened that way.  I could just have easily ended up home.  Maybe by going to my Moma's best friend’s house I was crying for Moma’s help in a round about way but all I knew at that time was that if I Didn’t get off the street someone would recognise me and run me in. 

Consuela had a big house as far away from the chicken factory as a house could be and not be in the country the other side.  Although it was big it was run down her husband having left her many years back.  Consuela was handier with a bottle of bourbon than she was paint, although she still kept herself looking pretty.  Why Moma claimed to be such good friends with her when they were so unalike I will never know, but then Moma did a lot of things I never understood.

Consuela wasn’t exactly delighted to see me.  Later when I thought on it I could tell that she wasn’t surprised that I ended up on her doorstep.  She pushed me inside like she had known I was coming and closed the door real quick in case someone was watching.  She talked a whole lot of nonsense at me but I don’t know what it was. I couldn’t keep upright any longer.  I fell down on her hall mat and I suppose she got me into her lounge somehow because I came round on her red velvet sofa; the one with the button back.  My face was pressed up against the back and one of the buttons had made a mark in my cheek when I woke.  Consuela was sitting across from me in her cracked leather chair.  She hadn’t tried to clean me up or tend my wounds.  She was the most useless woman for caring about anyone I ever met. 

"You're awake then? I wondered how long I'd have to wait afore I could get you off my best sofa." She lifted a glass to her lips and I thought left her lips on the glass after she had sipped from it but it was only her lipstick.  Cherry red I think they call it.

"You haven’t called Moma have you," I asked.  I could barely move, but I twisted round on the sofa and a pain screamed through my body. 

Consuela sneered at me.

"I was just asking that's all,” I said.

Consuela squinted at me and sniffed like I was bad smell under her nose.

"You can’t stay here. They is all looking for you.  We all know what you gone and done.  We are shocked to the core.  To the core mind you.  That man you taken up with.  What’s his name?... Troy Brewster.  That man.  Everyone knows he’s a no good son of a ... everyone.  They all says so.  All of them.  All the sassy folks that comes round here in the dead of night with their schemes and their "let's get Consuela".  Well I know he was one of them.  I know and he was in here too.  You don’t know nothing about him you don’t.  He was big, but he wasn’t any good at it.  Your Moma knew that right away.  She said to me.  He’s big but he ain’t no good at it.  How could he go getting her in the family way if'n he wasn’t no good at it?  We laughed but your Moma she was sorely upset."

Consuela blasted me with her stream of scorn and I just lay there letting it wash over me.  There wasn’t much of it made any sense but I listened to the parts about Troy and I wondered exactly what it was Moma and her had been up to on the nights Moma came round to play cards. She ranted on for more than an hour and I suppose at least I got to lay still and maybe I slept a little.  I only know that when I woke it was dark and she wasn’t in the room although I could still hear her somewhere in the house.  I guess it’s the drink that makes a woman go on so. 

Although I was sore and dirty and my head still seemed wired for every sound and sensation going I was fixed enough to know that I couldn’t stay at Consuela's.  She hadn’t turned me in but then she hadn’t exactly made me welcome either.  One way or another come morning I needed to be long gone from this town.   It would only be a matter of time before Consuela made a call to my folks.  I couldn’t be certain she hadn’t done it already. 

I tried standing up and it didn’t feel so bad.  Everything had stopped moving anyway.  Consuela was in her kitchen muttering about the way folks leave their trash out back right in the path of every stray dog in the nieghborhood.  She was looking at a glossy magazine and stirring the ice in her glass with a swizzle stick.  I hadn’t ever seen swizzle sticks in action before and I said so.  She looked up at me like I had sworn and then patted the seated next to her.

"Come sit down honey.  We got to talk you and me."

"I haven’t got time."

"Oh you got time for this honey.  I got something real good to tell you."

I sat down and waited while she sucked the alcohol off her swizzle stick with her luscious cherry red lips.  I could have done with a touch of lipstick right then.

"Your Moma told me you was in love with that man."

“I married him.  I had his baby."  I wanted to cry.

"Why honey he was already married."

"He got a divorce."

Consuela nodded.

"Your Pa took the baby back to its rightful mother,” she said absently.  "I thought you'd want to know that it was fine. A little poorly, but alive thank the Lord."

"I never meant it any harm."  I studied the kitchen tabletop hard. 

"He came here you know, Troy I mean," and she looked at me for a long time just waiting to see how I would respond. "He came here because he could get what he wanted."

I stared at her, not knowing what she was saying but guessing it all the same.

"He liked to..."

"Shut up!" I said.  "I don’t want to hear any more."

"I'm telling you for your own good."

"It's Moma isn’t it?  She told you to say this so I'd go home and forget him.  Well I’m never forgetting him.  Never."  I stood up suddenly and the weight of the world came down on my head.  I sat down again and Consuela patted my hand.

"There, there girl. Have a drink."  She pushed the glass towards me.  "It'll straighten a lot of things out for you and then I'll tell you everything."

"I don't want to know,” I said but I drank the whole glass down and waited while Consuela filled it right up again and swizzled like she was a veteran.

"Your Moma and me was running a tidy little business.  Everyone knew.  Even your Pa but he was so scared of your Moma running away from him he couldn’t do nothing.  Wednesday nights we opened the doors." She laughed.  "Your Pa was just about the only one not getting it from your Moma."

I didn’t believe her.  She was lying.  My Moma hated sex.  She said so.  She told me men were dirty and that I shouldn’t go letting them do anything to me.  "Men never wash," she would say.  She wasn’t a whore and that was what Consuela was telling me they both were.

"Your Troy came here every Wednesday.  Right on the dot of seven.  He was poking your Moma something rotten.  He said she was the onliest one for him.  Your Moma said he had a tiny prick and he couldn’t get it up straight," and at this Consuela gave me a sly sideways look to see if I had taken in this new information.  I was sulking and didn’t know what to say. 

She went on.  "He said he’d marry you if she’d run off with him.  He said he’d give the baby a name and no more.  She agreed.   She wasn’t planning on you having the baby so soon but she was mighty pleased that it didn’t live.  She is way off someplace now honey and that’s why I haven’t called in the Police yet.  Your Pa is home brooding and I don’t know what."

"He took the baby," I whispered.  "He took it out on the road, but you know."

“I know.  I also know your Moma fell for Troy and it put paid to our little business here.  I hope she rots in hell honey.  No offence."

I knew what she meant.  I hoped Moma would rot in hell too and a whole lot worse.  If what Consuela was telling me was true then I had all the more reason to go and find Troy.  It explained quite a bit. 

"Now you are upset honey and I don’t blame you.  You don’t need to take any notice of me if it’ll make you feel better but I’m telling you this whole thing was planned from the beginning and your Pa is madder than hell at you and your Moma both.  It wouldn’t surprise me if he didn’t think you was both in on it together. “

"He won’t do anything.  He never could.  He’s got some kind of madness inside of him that goes way back.  I don’t know why."  Consuela nodded her head and looked at me through eyelashes thick with mascara.  She had pale blue frosting on her eyelids.

"Well you can’t stay here and that’s for sure."  She turned the page of the magazine. 

"No," I said quietly. 

The news that Moma had run off with Troy had deflated me.  What I needed to do was rest up someplace and make a plan.  I needed new clothes, a bath and a hot meal.  Consuela's wasn’t the place to get any of that.  Maria Running-Wind was the only person who could help me now.   I took my leave of Consuela and I don’t think she noticed that I was gone.  I stepped out into the darkness of her front porch and promised God that if I got out of this mess I would go to Church every Sunday without fail.  Much more than that I couldn’t pledge right then. 

6 home

 Maria Running-Wind knew all the history of her home although she and her Moma and Pa had stopped living there and moved to town when Maria was just a little girl.  Maria was cagey about letting anyone into the secrets of the history she knew saying most times anyone asked that because we were white we weren’t supposed to know and that there were only a few of her own people that knew all the stories and rituals.  I often wondered if Maria Running-Wind was bargaining on becoming some kind of female shaman and that she hung around her Grandma Jane Bright-Sun more for that reason than that she felt any bond of kinship.

I walked on down the road I'd come into town on and I jumped at every sound I heard.  I had long forgotten that I hadn’t eaten in more than two days.  Food didn’t seem to matter to me.  More important was whether I would make it out to the road leading to the Pueblo before someone noticed that a fugitive was roaming the streets of this quiet town. 

I don’t know what time it was but eventually a truck passed down the road.  I couldn’t see who it was, but I thought that they must know me because the town isn’t as big as all that and most everyone know everyone else’s business.  The truck stopped and I walked up slowly to it deciding that if it were someone come to bring me in I would go quietly now.   When I came up by the passenger door an Indian was sitting in the driver's seat. His hair was neatly combed and greased and he had on his best clothes. He must have been about forty but I’m hazy on ages and mostly I just go by whether I like a person’s smile.  He smiled at me and I thought he had the whitest teeth I had ever had the opportunity to grin back at.

"Fixing a trip are you," he asked.  He never said anything about the state I was in.

"Do you know Jane Bright-Sun?"

"Sure, but I heard she wasn't too good. You want a lift?" He reached over and flipped the catch on the door.  "Hop in."

We sat in silence until we reached fifty miles an hour and then he frowned.  He had on a clean white shirt, which was pulled taught across his belly and tucked into his jeans, and he smelt like wild flowers.

"You know Jane well?"

"Not well.  She’s my friend’s Grandmother."

“I know that family. The Sanchez. Real nice people.  My name’s Johnny Hope." He offered me his hand to shake and I took it and smiled at him again.  His hand was firm, his flat brown fingers strong.  I held his hand just a second too long; he hesitated and pulled it out of my grasp.

"Cherry.  Pleased to meet you Johnny Hope.  Is that a real name or one you got given to please the tourists?"

"Just Cherry," he asked, ignoring my question.  I looked out of the windscreen at the road the truck was eating up. 

"Just Cherry," I said.

“Well Just Cherry I don’t know. You see I’ve been Johnny Hope as long as I can remember but seeing as I don’t remember much past yesterday it could be some name I picked up on the road somewhere."  We looked at each other and laughed and I knew that he had a real good soul.

"Do you like stories," he asked me.

“I like telling them," I said.  "But I like listening to them fine too."

"When my father was a young man he used to tell me a story about a woman he picked up on the road just like you.  She was a beautiful woman with long black hair and he fell in love with her as she rode in the cab of his truck."

I smiled and looked sideways at Johnny Hope. " I don't have long black hair."

"No you don’t but this woman my father met she did.  He never knew where she came from or where she was going but he gave her a lift out of town and to this day he wishes he had asked her."

"Was that the story?"  It seemed like no kind of tale, just a memory.

"No, the story was the one she told my father," and Johnny Hope glanced at me to see if he had my full attention. "She said her name was Olivia Martine and once she lived in a high rise in New York but that that was a long time ago and way before she had come down to New Mexico."

"I thought you said your father never asked where she had come from,” I said.

"He didn’t it's just part of the story. Do you want me to go on?"

"Sure why not?"

"She said one time she was watching a movie about a girl who was hog-tied by this man Don Riolo."

"Hog-Tied?"

"Yeah, you know trussed round the legs and arms and then tied in the middle."

"Oh sure."

"Anyway she said in the movie the hog-tied girl was stark naked and lying on the floor and this guy, Don Riolo, was sitting on a chair in the middle of the room flicking his cigarette butts at her.  Each one landed closer and closer until she could feel their heat on her skin but there was something else Olivia Martine said about the movie; it was like someone was watching through the window of the room and the girl on the floor was scared that she might be seen by whoever it was.  So when the TV cut to the ads Olivia decided to get herself a drink.  She zapped the TV with the remote and then felt her way across the room.  When she hit the light switch just inside the kitchen door nothing happened.  She thought that maybe a bulb had blown but when she tried the living room light - nothing and then she said she had the weirdest feeling that someone was watching her.

"Anyhow she opened the refrigerator door and felt inside for a carton of milk.  There were two, neither of them open.  She tore at the lid of one of them and drank from it then placed the carton on the kitchen table.  Next thing she knew she was in her bed and she had woken in a cold sweat from some kind of nightmare.  The sheets were all wet from her perspiration and she was shaking.  She said she could smell burning, faintly, like a cigarette only she didn’t smoke.  She got out of bed and scanned the rooms.  In the living room a just stubbed out butt glowed on the surface of her glass coffee table but there was no one in the apartment and the door was still firmly locked from the inside.  She was ten floors up.  She went to the kitchen to get a drink, opened the refrigerator and took out a carton of milk.  There were two inside and neither one had been opened."  Johnny Hope paused and looked over to me.  I had almost fallen asleep and I wasn’t sure whether what he was saying was part of the story or part of my dream.

"You still there Just Cherry?"

"Uh huh.  Carry on."

"Yeah, well that’s just about it."

"That was the story?  What was it about?"

"Something to do with reality being all fucked up sometimes I guess," said Johnny Hope.

"Well I sure can relate to that one."  We both laughed.

"You alright to be out?"

"You make it sound like I jumped jail." I gave him a sideways look. I was scared he’d guessed.  Maybe it was written in the lines on my face.  This girl stole a baby, ran off without telling anyone and now she doesn’t know what’s happened to it.  I felt the tears under my lashes and stared hard at the spear-pointed road piercing the darkness ahead of us.

"Isn't any of my business," said Johnny Hope.  I almost wished it was.

"Jane Bright-Sun'll know what to do," I said faintly.

"Jane is poorly right now.  Ain’t nobody knows how long she’ll last.  I wouldn’t go bargaining on her help. She may even be dead already."  Johnny Hope pulled the truck up sharpish on the road and at with the motor idling just looking at me. Sizing up the situation.

"How old are you anyway?"

"Seventeen." 

"Old enough I guess."  I saw his eyes drop to my torn up clothes.

"I'm just tired."

We sat there forever just looking at each other and then Johnny Hope put the truck into first and let out the clutch.  We lurched forward.  I felt like maybe I'd connected with this man and now we were part of something together.  Then he told me about his wife.

"She's real pretty. You’d like her.  We got a daughter about seventeen like you and another who’s eight. "I could tell he was waiting to see what I made of this new information.  "You think I was going to come on to you,” he asked.

"No!"

"Sure, you thought I would take advantage of you."

"No I never!"

 Johnny Hope laughed.

"It's alright.  You look like a fright.  When was the last time you saw a mirror?"

The cab felt unbearably hot even though it was cold outside.  He was married and had kids and I had stolen a baby that wasn’t mine and I felt sick and ill and my gut and chest hurt and I could tell that the blood had seeped through Troy's torn up sheet and was at this very minute staining my jeans.

"I want to get out," I said.

"Now?"

"Now. I’m going to be sick."  He barely had time to pull up.  I opened the door and threw up onto the ground.  It was bile and spit and not much else.  I was hungry and tired and sick feeling at the same time.  Johnny Hope turned the engine off and got out of the cab to take a piss.  He stood facing the black hulking mountains and I could hear his urine hissing through the air. 

"Ever been into the mountains," he asked.

"When I was smaller."

He turned zippering his flies as he did so. "Let's get you to the Pueblo," was all he said.  He got back in the cab and we set off again but we didn’t say much of anything else to each other until we reached the outskirts of the Pueblo, then he asked me if his wife could do anything for me and I said to drop me by Jane Bright-Sun's, because my friend Maria Running-Wind would be expecting me.  It was almost three in the morning and the dogs were sleeping on the sidewalk.

 Johnny Hope dropped me at the side of the road and I crossed the dusty street, which was more like a piece of the moon than tarmacadam road.   The door was shut, the old wood gray in the moonlight.   I could barely stand up by now and when Arabella opened the door in her nightdress I fell into her arms.

It was a full day later before I could sit up again in bed.  Maria and her Moma had taken turns at keeping watch over me. They told me I was lucky not to have blood poisoning.  I wondered where Jane Bright-Sun was and when I asked they told me she had passed on two days before I got there.  The day before I arrived they had been out and buried her in the little cemetery. 

"I never thought she was a Christian," I said naively.

"She was mostly a Mexican,” Maria Running-Wind said, like being mostly a Mexican gave you precedence over Christianity in religious matters.

"We haven’t called anyone," she went on.  “I told my parents we would wait until you felt better."

"Do you know what happened?  What I did?"  I could barely say the words I felt so ashamed of myself.

"We heard you took a baby.  Everyone was talking about it. “

 I looked hard at her but I couldn’t get any sense of the emotions she was feeling at that time.

"I was crazy."

"I know."

"I never meant to hurt it."

"I know."

"It looked like my baby."

"They all look like old men," she said and smiled.  "Even the girls."

"My Pa took it from me out on the road."

“I know.”

"How come you know so much?"

"The store."

"Oh."  I sat for moment thinking. "They'll be after me now."

"Perhaps," Maria said.

“I got to get out of here.  You’ll get in trouble.  I’m a known fugitive."

"You say it like it's a fact."

"It is."

Maria shook her head.  She said it didn’t matter any.  I could always hide in the Kiva.  No one would go looking for me there.  I said they had risked enough just taking me in and now I had to get going and find Troy. He should know that his child was dead, but more than that he should know that I hated him and Moma for lighting out on us all.  Maria didn’t think that Troy would want to see me now.  I knew she was right.  He was with Moma.

"Wouldn't he still be here if'n he did," she asked.

“I got to try.  He’s still my husband."

I slept all that day and in the evening I ate with the family: Maria, Arabella and Maria's father. I never knew his name.  He was a quiet man.  He didn’t look at me much.  I think what he saw unnerved him some.  I liked the look of him though.  He was broad and solid and had jet-black hair cut like he’d just gotten out of the forces.  I wanted him to say something to me but he never opened his mouth but to shovel food in and right after the meal he went out.  When I asked Maria what was wrong with him she told me he didn’t like me much but that he wouldn’t stand in the way of his women taking care of me seeing as I had been so bad and everything.  I felt okay now.  Arabella had given me some of Maria's old clothes: a pair of jeans and a cut-off T-shirt.  I still had the cowboy boots.  I wouldn’t let anyone take them from me.

My stitches were healing real good and I had stopped bleeding.  The bruises had come out on my chest where Pa had kicked me and Arabella said it was a good thing because it meant I was mending.  I said I had to leave real soon to find Troy but she didn’t pay me no mind.  All she said was that I should be real careful not to go letting the Police see me because like as not they would be looking for me.  I guess they were risking their own freedom by hiding me like they were.  I wondered when they would be leaving the Pueblo and going back to town.  I decided I would wait until they went to bed that night and then I would go.  I didn’t want to go getting anyone in trouble.

We watched some dumb show on the TV and I couldn’t sit still because I was planning my next move and all the time I thought that maybe I should tell Maria Running-Wind what I was going to do just in case I needed help later.  She was my best friend after all.  If I couldn’t tell her who could I tell? 

Looking back it seemed like it was all a game.  I was just getting over my ordeal and I wanted to go back out there and take my chances on the road hoping that I would find Troy and Moma and that everything would be alright.  I didn’t know that it was the real world I was dealing with. 

I made my excuses and went to bed early. I couldn’t watch anymore of that TV show.  The room they had put me in was small with mud walls as solid as Maria's father.  It was a warm house as old as the earth it was made from.  I liked it real good but I couldn’t stay.  I knew that.  Moma and Troy were eating away at my brain.  I lay on the bed waiting for Maria and her Moma to go to bed.

Right around nine o’clock someone called to pay their respects to the family.  I didn’t pay it no mind at first but when I heard my name mentioned I listened at the door to catch what they were saying.  As far as I could make out it was the local sheriff.  He had been a friend of Jane Bright-Sun for many years and he hadn’t been able to make it to the funeral.  He had had some worrying news that someone had seen me here and he thought he ought to check it out seeing as I was wanted for questioning by the state police in connection with the abduction of a baby.  He was sorry that he had to question the family at a time when they would all be grieving for their loss.  I heard Maria say something about not having seen me since before the wedding and the sheriff said he was sorry to have bothered them.  I guess he must have left then because Maria came into the room and told me her Moma was worried that she should have told the sheriff the truth.

"Why didn't she," I asked.

"It isn’t anyone’s business but yours."

“I suppose not.  It kind of makes it real lonely though, it not being anyone’s business but mine."

"She's confused.  My mother.  She took you in for me.  She wants you to go when you feel able."

I nodded and Maria said goodnight to me.

Maria and her Moma went to bed eventually but I never found out if Maria's father had returned to the house.  I only know that when I went out back of the place to check out my exit route his old Chevy was parked by the wall and the keys were in it just waiting for someone to steal it.  In the dark kitchen I wrapped up a couple of tortillas in a napkin and took some money I found in a jar on the windowsill.  It was all of seventy-five dollars.  I scribbled a note and then put back ten dollars so it didn’t look like I was desperate.  I was on my way out the door with the money in my hand when I heard someone behind me.  I turned real quick and Maria stepped out of the shadows.

"You fixing on stealing away like a thief in the night," she asked.

“I need to find Troy. I need to."  I stood there in the door to Jane Bright-Sun's house with the moonlight at my back and the Chevy keys in my mind.

"You're going to take the car."

I couldn’t say anything.  I already felt guilty.

"You can’t drive,” she said.

"I can so!"  We stared at each other and I thought that a gulf had opened up between us.  I was misusing her friendship and I knew it but I couldn’t do anything about it.

"Go then," she said and she turned her back on me and it was as if she had never been there.  The kitchen was empty.  I put the money in my pocket and ran from the house.  I thought for sure that I was doomed to burn in hell now.

I sat in the car and turned the engine over like I'd seen folks do but I couldn’t start it.  It must’ve made a terrible noise because Maria Running-Wind came out and yanked open the door.

"Get out."

"What?"

"Get out, you'll wake everyone up."  She grabbed me by the arm and tried to pull me from the Chevy.

"Why wont it start?" I hissed at her.

“I don’t know," she said impatiently.  "Why can’t you just wait 'til the morning?"

"Because I can't."  I turned the ignition again and the car fired up just as a light went on in the house.

"I got to run,” I said to Maria and I slammed the door closed.  I rammed the car into reverse and it lurched backwards against the wall.  Maria's father had parked it close up to the house.  I put it into drive and hit the corner of the house with the fender.  The noise shuddered through the Chevy like it was going to fall apart with me in it.

"Let me in," shouted Maria and I caught sight of her looking wildly round as she yanked open the door.  "Move over," she said pushing me across the seats. 

She pulled the car out of the tight space and ran it out into the road.  I don’t know whether Arabella came out after us or not because we were already a way down the road and heading out of the Pueblo towards the mountains but I think she must have been.  I was a real criminal now and having Maria here, driving her own father’s car, didn’t make a whole lot of difference to my way of thinking.  First a baby and now a car and that wasn’t counting the money I'd taken from Jane Bright-Sun's kitchen.  I offered up a prayer to her dearly departed soul and promised I'd get the money and the car back to the Pueblo as soon as I'd found Troy.  I wasn’t sure when that would be but I believed God must be on my side because I'd survived childbirth and beating and attack and flood and, although I didn’t know what was ahead of me, if the past was anything to go by the future had to be just as bad, maybe worse.

We motored down the road into the darkness. 

"It's almost on empty," said Maria.

"How long afore we run out of gas?"

"Not long."

 Maria drove like a mad woman, glaring at the road and me jumping with fright at every animal that ran through the headlights.  I was sure we were being followed but when I looked back there was nobody behind us.

"I wasn’t planning on you coming with me,” I said to Maria.

"I know that."

"So why did you?"

"I don’t know."  She pulled up in the road abruptly and the headlights suddenly contained all kinds of insect life dancing in their beams.

"Why d'you pull up," I asked.

"We have to go back.  You have to go back."  Maria sat there looking at me with that solemn Indian look on her face.  "They're all looking for you."

"Who?"

"The authorities.  The Police.  Your Pa maybe."

“I ain’t going back,” I said.

"You have to."

"Why?"  It didn’t make any sense to go right back where I'd started from.

"Because they’ll come after you and because I can’t go much further or they’ll come after me."

"You don’t have to come with me. I never wanted you to come with me."  I closed my eyes.  The world was starting to go swimmy in my head again.  I could smell rain although the air tasted hot and close.

"Shit Cherry you are my best friend." Maria thumped the steering wheel with the heel of her hand.

"That don’t mean you have to come with me."

We sat in silence; me with my eyes closed trying to make my various pains go away, including the emotional ones, and Maria breathing in and out in sighs.

"Where were you planning on going anyhow?"

"Santa Fe."

"Why," asked Maria.

"Because that is where Troy came from and that is where his ex-wife lives and it is the only chance I got of finding him."

"I'll take you to the bus depot in Penasco and then it's up to you.  If they ask me I'll say we argued and I dropped you on the roadside."

I opened my eyes and considered her words.

"At least you won’t have stolen the car," she said.

"I guess."

"And anyway I’m not dressed to go driving round the countryside with a fugitive."

I looked at her. She only had on a flimsy cotton nightshift and no shoes.  I hadn’t given her dress any thought up until then.

"How much money did you take," she asked.

"How did... sixty five dollars." She knew everything.

"Okay.  It'll get you almost anywhere you want to go in the state by bus," and she drove off down the road.  I glanced back as the night closed in on our past and Maria Running-Wind said that our past was in front of us because we were facing our mistakes and as long as we walked forward we would be reminded of the things that had been.  When I looked forward out past the main beams there didn’t seem to be anything there.  The world began and ended in each few yards of the bright road.

7 home

 All the folks from miles around send their kids to school in Penasco.   It's a weird place and I hadn't ever had any need to visit until now although it’s only a way down the road from the town I had grown up in these last six years.  The place sprawled and didn’t ever get any closer to being a real town until we hit the bus depot and Maria let me out of the Chevy.  I hugged her close and swallowed my tears at leaving her.

"Go," she said and turned the Chevy slowly in the road.  I thought how it was the wrong kind of car for the winters we get and that I would miss Maria Running-Wind, but I was on a rollercoaster of a journey and didn’t know how to get off it.

I watched the car fade out of view and listened to the engine after it had disappeared and then I listened to the wind and the town noises and I breathed in the oil fumes and stale smells from the tarmac.  An old man was asleep on a bench with a range of bottles and beer cans surrounding him like the walls of a house.  I vowed I would never end up sleeping on a bus depot bench but there wasn’t any other place to go.  The bar 'n grill across the road looked all shut up and I couldn’t see any sign of a bus arriving.  I chose the bench furthest away from the old man and I hunkered down on it and tried to imagine that I wasn’t really cold.  The wind blew rubbish around until it found an oil slick to float in.  I heard the old man cough and I fixed my eyes on his back wishing I was away from that place and off somewhere near the sea.  A fat beetle crawled out from under the seat I was on and made off across the bus depot on some mission of its own making.

Maria Running-Wind and I used to catch bugs out on the dry desert land when we were kids.  We would make fancy traps for them with rocks and holes and dried grass nets but somehow the bugs always managed to escape as soon as we caught them.  One time we caught a real fat cockroach and Maria said it was so big we could fry it or something and serve it for breakfast. We tried to wall it up in a mud jail with air holes at the top so it could breath but it must have burrowed its way out because by the time we had started a camp fire and fanned the flames so they were high enough to roast the cockroach it had gone.  It would have been kind of sad to eat the cockroach anyhow.  It wasn’t doing anyone any harm out there in the desert.  It wasn’t like it was inside someone’s kitchen or anything. 

Moma always had trouble with cockroaches.  She couldn’t abide the way they crunched underfoot like they were spilled nuts.  She would scream the house down if she caught sight of a cockroach and Pa would come thundering into the kitchen with a rolled up newspaper in his hands.  Then he would beat the living shit out of the poor dumb insect until it was nothing but a squashed up mess.  I got the job of scraping its innards off the floor.  Sometimes when it happened last thing at night I would leave it there until the morning so that it would give Moma a shock when she came down the next morning to put the coffee on for breakfast.  Maria Running-Wind said I had an evil mind as far as my Moma was concerned.  She said I should make my peace with Moma because if I didn’t it would catch up with me in the next life.  Maybe I would come back a cockroach and find myself squashed on someone’s floor.  I thought I wouldn’t mind if I could be the desert kind.  The kind Maria Running-Wind and I had trapped in the mud jail.

So Moma had taken up with Troy.  I wondered when it was that they had first noticed each other.  I wondered if it had been before or after I had told Moma I was in the family way.  Moma's Wednesday nights at Consuela's had been going on as long as I could remember, so she had been whoring for a long, long time, and Pa never said anything about it.  Perhaps he hadn’t known until recently.  Perhaps, like the saying goes, he was the last one to know but I couldn’t believe that.   Consuela had said he was afraid of losing Moma but he had lost her anyway.  He was always going to lose her. 

I got the first bus that came along for Santa Fe, which wasn’t until almost daybreak when the sky was painting itself new in deep blues and purples.  It was almost sixty miles to the city and I slept most of the way but as we approached the outskirts I sat up and took notice.  We passed through Tesuque Pueblo and the sign on the side of the road said the name meant 'The Place where the River Water Disappears into Sand'.   

I'd only been this way once before and that was going in the other direction on the day Moma and me caught the train into New Mexico from Colorado.  We had taken the bus in Santa Fe to a place we had never heard of then, 'cepting that it was written in a letter Pa had sent us, and we had been living there ever since.  I wondered what had possessed Pa to take a house so far away from everywhere; so far away from the state we had all been born in and so far away from the city that Pa's job meant that sometimes he didn’t get home nights.  I imagined him out on the railroad crossing New Mexico back and forth and thought that it was alright for him.  He had seen the world on that train, probably even the sea for all I knew, but he hadn’t ever told me about it.  He never talked about his job or whether he had any friends on the railroad.  He was tight mouthed about everything and I guess Moma had learnt to live around him instead of with him.

Santa Fe proper appeared out of the early morning like a sprawl of unending suburbs.  The mountains had skirted our journey in the east all the way and now the sun rose out from behind them and cast blood red rays across the valley.  Every house looked made from dirt and in a way I guess they were even the stuccoed-board ones.  As I watched Santa Fe grow around me I thought of all the folks who had died to make this place what it was today.  Maybe it wasn’t just a thought, maybe it was a feeling that they were all still here, all the dead old folks from ages past, plastered into the adobe walls and watching us all make regular fools of ourselves.  Sometimes the feelings I got about spirits frightened me rigid and other times I could feel when something wasn’t right about a place or when something good had happened there in the past.  Sometimes I would lie awake at night just waiting for the other side to contact me and wondering what I would do if they did.  They never did.

The bus pulled into the depot.  Everything looked so old and like it had just grown up out of the ground it sat on.   As I got off the bus I asked the driver if he knew the way out to the old Santa Fe Trail where Troy's ex-wife lived.  I figured if anyone knew where Troy was it would be her.  The driver had just gotten off shift and he offered to take me out to the address in his 4x4 provided I didn’t let on to his boss that he had turned taxi-driver.  He was a sad old guy called Hernando, with a sweat stained shirt and beer belly.  He told me he’d been driving buses all his life and was now just counting the days to his retirement.  He’d saved all his overtime for the last five years so he could buy himself a vehicle that wouldn’t get stuck in the snowdrifts.  I knew what he meant.  One time Pa got stuck in a drift on his way to work and Filberto Santos dragged him and the pick-up out with his Bigfoot.

   We drove south through the center taking all the short cuts and avoiding the tourist routes and the rush hour traffic.  When we reached the intersection with the East Santa Fe Avenue I had the bus driver drop me and thanked him for his kindness.  He muttered something in Spanish but, on account of the fact that I never could get the hang of more than a few Spanish words, I didn’t know what it was.  Anyway he was the first person I had met since leaving Maria and that he was a good man into the bargain counted for something with me.

Hernando had left me in a wilderness of old houses and it took me a while to find the right street.  I only had some half-assed memory of Mabeleen's address to go on but when I saw the house at the end of the road I just knew that it had to be the one.  Although it looked like all the rest, board caked with adobe because it was cheaper to build that way; it had a kind of feel to it that screeched Avon lady at you.  Yeah Mabeleen, Troy's ex-wife, was an Avon lady and I never could get it out of my head that here was someone else good at nails. 

I sat on the kerb opposite the house and watched it as if it would get up and walk away from me if it could.  Mabeleen's place had one storey and a porch out front and it was colored a deeper red than all the rest in the street.  I couldn’t tell if anyone was home or not so I crossed the road and knocked on the front door, thinking it should be a piece of cake just to ask her where Troy had gotten to.  After all she and him had been divorced before I came along so she should have no grudge to bear against me, but no one answered the door even though I knocked three more times and tried to see through the curtains inside.  I thought that maybe I could just wait here until she came back, but then she could have a job and wouldn’t be home until late.  That kind of decided me.  I climbed over the fence in back and dropped down into the yard.

Mabeleen had shut the house up good and tight when she had left it that morning.  I could tell she was red hot on security.  Never mind the screen door didn’t shut properly and a piece of metal twisted out of the frame. I smashed the glass in the door behind it hoping that she would think the screen door had slammed against it and the metal had gone straight through.  I put my arm in through the broken glass, taking care not to cut myself, and lifted the latch. 

Mabeleen's kitchen looked to be cleaner than a scrubbed steel bench at the chicken factory.  Clean, but boy did it stink.   I wrinkled my nose as I rifled through her larder for something to eat making a mental note to remind her, when she got back, not to lock up the house in summer with the trash still inside.  Anyway only the cookies were worth eating the rest was flour and dried beans and pickled chillies; stuff like Moma had in her larder.  Nothing you could eat on the run.

I never gave it a thought that I had just broken into someone’s house.  After all I knew the woman, well kind of knew her.  Okay I had heard a lot of stuff about her from Troy and I guess I thought that made me a friend but I wouldn’t have recognised her if she had walked in right then.

I searched the place thoroughly.  I don’t know what I expected to find exactly.  An address book lying open on the very page with Troy's address on it?  Maybe, maybe that was what I was looking for.  It sure would make it a whole lot easier than waiting for the woman to come home.   I covered the living room right off but there wasn’t anything worth finding and I started on Mabeleen's bedroom.  She had a whole range of Avon cosmetics set out on her dresser and I tried them all out painting my face and testing all the lipsticks.  I fought shy of giving myself a manicure because I wanted to be able to afford for someone else to do my nails for me and it felt kind of wrong to use the nail polish but she had a real cool collection of eye shadows and I sprayed myself with three different perfumes and pulled model-girl faces at myself in the mirror.  It was the most fun I had had in a long time and I didn’t think that Mabeleen would miss anything if I just borrowed the colors that suited me the best.  I chose a peach lipstick with a touch of purple and a frosted eye-shadow and 'deep black' mascara.

In the top drawer of the dresser I found a roll of money tied up with a red ribbon.  It was tucked under some panties that had seen the gray wash instead of the white.

I looked at that money for a long time before I untied the ribbon and got to counting it.  It was five hundred dollars and I hadn’t ever seen that much money all in one place.   I argued with myself some, mostly about whether it was worse to steal all the cash or just a little.  I guess the good me won out because I only took a hundred bucks and rolled the rest up and tied the ribbon around it like nothing had happened.  

Then I found the gun.  It was underneath the lace basque in the second drawer. Right away I knew it was the same gun Troy had held to my head in the kitchen back home.  For a moment I wondered how Mabeleen had came to have it but I must have been stupid or something because it meant that Troy had been here.  Perhaps right after he had threatened to shoot me he had crawled back here. Perhaps it was all part of the plan. 

I pulled off my clothes, inspecting the stitches as I went in case they had bled any, and then put the lace basque on in front of the mirror.  My ribs stuck out like some kind of crazy starving child and, although my tits were bigger now that I had had a baby, they still didn’t fill out the cups of the basque.  I pouted at myself and held the gun against my groin like it was a dildo and I was going to use it to wank off, but the more I made like I was modelling the latest fashion the more unhappy I got and eventually I had to put my clothes on again.  I kept the basque on though, under the jeans and T-shirt.  It made me feel like more of a woman.

After I sat down in Mabeleen's living room on the big green sofa and cradled the gun in my lap.  I thought long and hard about what Troy might have done after he had run out on me but I couldn’t work out where Moma fitted in.  Not if Troy had come here, to Mabeleen's, right after.  I figured he could have come here first and then met Moma later on.  After all she had come to visit me in the hospital so she must have still been at home at that point.

I tucked the gun into the waistband of my jeans and took a lurid yellow cotton jacket from Mabeleen's coat stand.  I had it in mind that with the jacket on no one would see that I was carrying the gun and that I would blend in more with the local scenery.

I left the way I had come in and for a while I thought I would wait it out over the road, in an alley between the houses, where I had a clear view of Mabeleen's place and where I wouldn’t be seen by anyone but when I tried the alley out for size I felt like I was caught in a trap.  The alley led to the backs of the houses but the walls seemed to tower over me on all sides and, although I knew they were just regular walls, it felt like I would be buried by them if I stayed there so I walked down the road back towards the center of town and when I saw La Casa Pasqual's and the folks inside all feasting on fresh baked tortillas and drinking hot dark chocolate I realised just how hungry I was. 

La Casa Pasqual's was a real nice place and no one took any notice of me or made any comments about the jacket so I guess I had made the right choice.  I sat at the counter and the waitress served me right off.  She was a homely brown-faced woman and I felt like I had known her all my life.  I ordered the house special and a strong black coffee.

"You new around here," she asked, as she stuck her pencil in the top pocket of her apron and tore my order off her pad.

"Yeah."

"I serve you coffee now, Si?"

"Yeah, that would be good."   I nodded and watched her pour the coffee.  

The door opened and a man and a woman came in and sat down the counter from me.  The waitress put my coffee down, took the pencil out of her pocket and licked the lead.  I sipped the coffee.  It was real hot and I thought I would go get a piss while it cooled; besides the gun was sticking into my belly.   

 In the bathroom I took the gun out of the top of my jeans and put it down next to the sink.  Then I undid the jeans and pulled them down some to see if the stitches were sticking to the basque.  I had to unlace the front of it some to get to my belly.   I picked at a scab and one of the stitches came loose.  There was a red hole either side of the scar.  I was picking at the other stitches when the door opened and in came the woman I had just seen come in the cafe.  I grabbed the gun and tried to hide it, but it was too late, she had already seen it and she yelled fit to bust.  I flew at her, covering her mouth with my hand and pointing the gun at her head, the basque open and my belly showing, not knowing whether the gun was loaded or how to shoot it even.  I was waiting for someone to come in and check out the noise but they never appeared.

"You ain't going to scream again are you," I asked. "If'n you scream I might have to shoot you."

She shook her head and I took my hand off her mouth.  I could tell she was shit scared so I kicked open the door to the stall and motioned for her to go inside.  She inched her way past me and shut the door quickly.  I heard the latch click and the sign read 'occupied'.   I knelt down and stuck my head under the door.  She was sitting on the toilet her panties around her feet.  I could see her fanny as she pissed. 

"Don't go getting any ideas," I said.

She was shaking like a leaf and when she saw my head under the door she yelped like a beat up dog and tried to pull her panties up, but she was still pissing and she wet the floor.  I stuck the gun under the door and pointed it at her.  I guess if I had taken a shot at her right then I would have blasted her right in the ass.   I could tell that I was spooking her.  She had tears rolling down her cheeks.

"I don't bear any grudge against you lady." I said.  ÒI just want out of here, but you seen me now and I got to do something about that.  You hurry yourself now." 

I pulled my head out from under the door and straightened up.  Shoot I wasn’t going to get breakfast after all.  The woman opened the stall door slowly and peeped out.  Her mascara had run and she looked like she was something out of Nightmare on Elm Street part 95.

"Aw, honey I ain’t going do nothing to you," but I don’t think she believed me.  I thought that as soon as I let her out of the john she was going to have the police on me and I couldn’t go back out into the cafe now.  I hadn’t figured on shooting her though.

"I'm going to climb out of the window and you better not try anything, because I still have this gun trained on you and you could end up full of holes.  You understand?" 

She nodded her head.  I opened the window, still pointing the gun at the woman and hoping like hell that she didn’t try to run for it before I had gotten out of the place because if she did I would have to fire the damned thing and she might end up dead.  I climbed out backwards and let myself drop onto the ground.  I knew as soon as I quit looking at her she would scream and the whole place would be overrun with folks.  I didn’t wait to find out, I ran for it, hoping that the screams I heard as I started to run were in my mind.

I sat for hours in Mabeleen's back yard not wanting to wait inside in case I was caught red-handed, but not wanting to be so far away that I didn’t know when she got back.  I must have missed her though; because it wasn’t until she opened the back door and emptied the trash that I realised she was home already and could have been for as long as I had been sitting in the yard.  She cursed when she saw the broken glass in the door, but she didn’t sweep it up or anything.  She just went back inside.  It was kind of weird because she looked like she was half undressed.  I wondered if I should knock on the door or just walk in and make myself at home.  After all I had the gun. 

I knocked on the back door and waited but she didn’t answer and I got to wondering if she had gone out the front and I had missed her again.   Shit this was getting stupid.  I went inside. 

Right away I could tell there was more than just Mabeleen and me in the house.  For one thing there were these noises coming from her bedroom that sounded like she was humping a whale or something and for another there was a pair of men’s shoes in the hall where there hadn’t been that morning.  Right at that moment I had the idea that it was Troy.  I knew it couldn’t be but things were going too fast for me to think it through.  It was just a guess but it was enough to have me bust into Mabeleen's bedroom with them mid-fuck and me waving the gun at them like I was off my head and they were my mortal enemies.

 For one moment I don’t think either of them knew what was going on.  Mabeleen was clutching the covers to her, trying to cover her tits up, like I had never seen a woman naked before I suppose and Troy just twisted round on top of her his mouth hanging open catching flies.

"Shut up."  I screamed at them, though they hadn’t said anything yet.  “I got this gun Troy Brewster and I can shoot you anytime I want."

Mabeleen hit Troy with the pillow and he winced.

"You fuck head, you no good fuck head.  What’s she here for? She’s wearing my jacket. What’s she wearing my jacket for?" she said.

Troy made like he was trying to pull out of her and I held the gun in both hands like I had seen them do on the cop shows. 

"Don’t try nothing.  Don’t make any wrong moves,” I said. 

Troy held his hands up and moved slowly on the bed 'til he was facing me.

"Baby.  What are you doing here?  You should be in the hospital."

"Fuck you ass hole," I said.  "Fuck you.  You ran out on me and your baby."

"Baby?" screamed Mabeleen.  "You got a child?”  She looked like she could kill him.  She swiped at him with the pillow again and he ducked and made a grab for my leg, but I moved out of the way quickly and fired the gun without thinking.  The recoil sent me back against the wall and I dropped the gun and ran out of the room, out of the house, out down the street, not knowing which way to go or whether Troy was dead or running after me.

I got as far as the next street and I had to slow down to catch my breath.  I turned round to see if I had been followed and I saw Troy lumbering after me.  I had never been really scared of Troy.  He was all mouth and not much else.  I decided I had run far enough and that he had some questions to answer so I stood there in the middle of the road just waiting for him to catch up with me and it must have thrown him some because he slowed right down giving me that "what you up to now" look he did sometimes.  When he was about 20 yards from me he stopped.  He was wearing a pair of boxers, and nothing else, and blood was dripping from his arm.  That was how I knew I had shot him.  He was breathing long and slow and his top lip was curling like I was a smell he didn’t like.  I stuck my chin out at him and wished he was dead.

"What am I going to do with you?"  he shouted.  We were still standing in the middle of the street.  It didn’t seem to matter any.  "I mean you come busting back into my life like you owned a piece of it and you go and shoot me."

I started to tap my foot, waiting, just waiting for the right time to open my mouth.  I'd let him go on for a while longer yet.  He was good at tying himself in knots was Troy.

"You on something Cherry?  Is that what this is?  You’re on something and you’re taking it out on me?" It was rich that coming from the likes of him.  I never said a thing.

"You know what your trouble is?  You know what it is?  You’re jealous.   Yeah that’s what it is.  Jealous of my good luck."  He waited and I could tell that me not saying anything was eating him up.  He sure had it coming and I kept on wishing the bastard would drop dead on the street in front of me.

"Jesus Cherry. Say something.  Anything."  He put his hands on his hips and licked his lips, waiting, still waiting. "I thought you understood what I was about."

I dug his grave in my mind and heaped the soil on top of him.

"Where's Moma,” I asked.

"What?"

"You heard.  Where’s Moma?  Last I knew she was with you.  So where’s she now?"

"How the fuck do I know?  And anyway what’s that got to do with anything?"  He turned slowly and started to walk away from me, but I took off after him.

“I had a baby you know.  I had your baby.  Don’t you care?  It’s dead you know.  It died."

"I know that."

"Don't you care any?"  I asked. He was trying to walk faster, get away from me without running.

"Nope."

"Why not?"

"It don’t make a fucking difference.  I never wanted it in the first place.  It don’t make a fucking difference to anything," he said. 

I stopped following then but I called out after him.

"Where's Moma at now?"

"How in hell should I know?"  He spat in the dirt.  "Out there some place.  The city.  We are all well rid of her."

I knew it.  I felt it too but she was still my Moma. 

"You watch your back Troy because you’re going to get yours." I could tell he wasn’t listening.  I hoped he died of blood poisoning.  I really did.   It would save me having to think up a way of killing him.

8 home

I took a room at the cheapest hotel I could find on the Cerrillos road.   It was cheap but even with Mabeleen's hundred bucks I still couldn’t afford it.  I didn’t think I could stay there more than one night without leaving the back way.  I just had this one thought in my mind - find Moma and straighten things out.  She had some fast-talking to do and even if she made it sound real good I would never forgive her.  Then there was Troy.  He was back with Mabeleen and making like everything was just fine.  Payback was just around the corner for the both of them.  I just had to think up a way of doing it that was all.  Shooting them was too good a death.  It had to be something real terrible.

The Nitelite Hotel was run down but clean.  The desk clerk said his name was Freddy and that he was also the manager and chef and that he worked both ends of the day and night to keep from going bust, but that in Santa Fe that didn’t mean a damned thing because near on everyone had two or three jobs.  Freddy let me have a room without a view and I didn’t mind much.  I wasn’t big on views right then.

I slept on the lumpy bed in my clothes for the rest of the day and when it got to night I went out and walked the street with the hookers and the tourists.  The city was alive with folks out enjoying themselves but it was a sad time for me because I had found Troy and failed to kill him and now I had to do it all over and I couldn’t find a place in my head for killing anyone right at that moment.  I had serious doubts if I ever would.  I felt like shit.  I was confused and tired and hungry and maybe still sick from the birth.  I don’t know. 

I saw myself in a shop window and I couldn’t believe it was really me.  There was this skinny bit of a girl standing there in borrowed clothes, stolen clothes some, and it didn’t look like me.  I mean to say I still had on some of Mabeleen's make-up and I felt like I was a real woman in the basque.  I felt like I should be sexy and good about myself for surviving but there was this child in the window and it wasn’t even the person I saw in Mabeleen's mirror.  It wasn’t me.  I started to cry and tore at my clothes and the more I tore at them the more the girl in the window tore at hers and it didn’t seem real any of it.  

I had just about ripped the T-shirt to shreds when someone put their arm around me and I heard this woman say.  "Come on honey, nothing is as bad as that."    I couldn’t see properly through my tears but I felt safe with whoever it was and I allowed her to pull me away and take me inside a bar.  She sat me down at a table and ordered drinks I guess, but I can’t remember.  After a while I stopped crying and looked at her though my body kept on jerking and sobbing long after the crying had done.  She told me her name was Loretta.

"What's yours,” she asked.

"Cherry."

"Pretty name." She took a packet of skins out of her purse and started to roll a joint under the tabletop.  She was a cool customer no doubt about that.  "You were pretty beat up back there.  He got a name?"

"Troy."

"And this Troy, he done this to you?  He beat up on you?"

I shook my head.

"What then honey?"  She lit up and offered me the joint.  I shook my head.  She shrugged.  "He must’ve been someone important to you."

"My husband."

"That so?"

"Yeh.  He was two-timing me with my own mother.  Can you imagine that?  My own mother."  It came pouring out then.  Everything that had happened.  All my fears, my problems, my pains, all of it laid out on that table for Loretta and, when I had done and there were no more tears left inside of me and even the hatred I felt for Troy and Moma was easing some, I closed my eyes and wished silently for God to take me from this place. 

"I done some terrible things," I said.  "How am I ever going to put it all right again?  How is my life going to be now?"  I opened my eyes and looked at Loretta sitting there with a frozen look on her face and I knew that she felt something of my pain.  I knew she understood because she looked like I had told her her own life story. 

"Honey.  There is one thing you got to know.  You do what you have to.  Me, I have done some things.  I have fucked up in a major way, but I still do what I have to.  You, you just got to learn that when things are bad they can sure get worse.  That sounds crazy don’t it?  Nothing is ever that bad.  Nothing.  Nothing you do will ever be that bad because honey there is always someone who will come along and steal your show.  Always.  Always."  She was stoned.  She was worse than me and I was crazy enough.

"Where you staying honey?"

"The Nitelite," I said.

"Hey me too.  I’ve finished for the day anyway.  Let’s go back and I'll tell you a story that will shock and amaze you." 

We got up from the table like best friends and walked out of the place.   The street was full of crazy fucked up lives and I was one of them and maybe it wasn’t so bad at that moment.  It seemed like all these weird people, all these girls with their high heels and tits busting out of cut-off shirts, all these slimy men with sneers and scars on their faces, all the winos and junked up freaks were all part of me.  Maybe I had come home - to the street. 

I never thought I would end up sleeping with Loretta.  I never thought I had those kind of tendencies in me.  She was a hooker and an addict and she told some strange story about how she had been raped as a child by her brother and sold by her sister to a man who had beaten her until she was almost dead.  She said her sister had really been her mother but that she hadn’t been able to look after her and had let her grandmother do it.  So Loretta grew up believing her grandmother was her mother until the day her sister, who was really her mother, took up with this guy from Alberquerque.  That was when hell broke loose and Loretta got to be fucked by her own brother, who was also her uncle.  It didn’t sound any too clear to me and I let her ramble on until the words didn’t make any sense at all. We lay on the bed in the hotel and drank a bottle of tequila down to the worm and then we quarrelled about who would swallow it and I won and said I would let her have it anyway and I thought how beautiful she looked for all that to have happened to her.  She had golden skin and almond eyes and when she smiled her lips parted just a fraction but she bit her nails and that annoyed me.

 It was almost morning again and we had drifted on and off into sleep all night without dreaming of a better world.  Loretta kissed me on the cheek and then on the lips and I let her because she was the only person, besides Maria Running-Wind, who seemed to care about me and if it took sex with Loretta to feel better about myself then I knew I would let it happen. 

"Loretta?  How many men have you had?"

"Hundreds.  Who knows?"

"Is it still good for you?  Do you still get turned on?"

"No honey, no.  They ain’t men.  They ain’t even people."

I lay there watching her, but she didn’t kiss me again and I thought she had drifted off when she asked me if I had ever had sex with a woman.  I bit my lip.

"No.”

"Honey.  It ain’t nothing like going like going with a man, but in my line of work even that’s business."

"What d'you mean?"

She closed her eyes and rolled over onto her back slowly undoing her blouse.  I watched her fingers work the buttons and I could feel myself getting hot for her and it was confusing me some because it wasn’t any kind of feeling I was used to.

"Some of them like a double act.  Two women.  More dough that way.  Especially if you put on a show.”  She turned her head and looked me straight in the eye.  "You want to give it a try?"

"Both of us?"

"Sure.  There’s good money in it."  She slid her hand inside her blouse and started to work at a nipple.  She was good.  She was very good.  She had me fooled.  

"Kiss me," she said and I did.  She loosened the zipper on my jeans and slid both hands down inside cupping my butt and easing the jeans over my thighs.

"Please," I said.  "I think I'm still bleeding."

Either she didn’t hear me or she chose not to listen.  She started to untie the basque pulling the lace through the holes until she could reach inside and touch my tits.  When I was naked she stood up and stripped off watching me all the time.  Her eyes took in every part of my scrawny body, the scars and the bruises and the dried blood and my ribs sticking out and then she got down on top of me and kissed all of those places so gently, so delicately I felt like I was totally loved.  But, even in the middle of all this, I could sense something sick inside me. Something that wanted it to stop. Something that said it should be a man that did this.  It shouldn’t be this woman.  I wasn’t a lesbian.  I wasn’t. 

Afterwards I went into the bathroom and shut the door on her and threw up in the toilet.   It could have been the drink, but I don’t think so.  I sat on the floor and wept and hugged myself and hoped that when I went back into the room she wasn’t there anymore.  I showered.  I wrapped myself in the thread-thin towel and I went back into the bedroom as if what I had just allowed had never happened and she was still there.

"I ain't no dike."

"I know, but it’s a way of making money and now you know how.  If you want to pay your bill on this room.  If you want to get out of this town.  If you want enough to make a better life for yourself you got to put out.  I can get us a job this afternoon.  I can get you enough cash to fix you up, get you out of here."  She was wrapped in a sheet, her hair wild over her face.

"I don't know.  I don’t like it."

"Honey you like it.  You just don’t want to admit it."

"How much?"

"For you? One fifty, maybe more.  Maybe a lot more."

"What about you?  What do you get out of this?"

She laughed.  “I get all the junk I can handle without a beating and I get something to put by for my old age.  I ain’t staying in this game for ever you know."

"Okay."

"Okay?"

"Okay. Whatever you say.  I need to buy myself time to think and what I got left isn’t going to last longer than breakfast.  So okay.  Set it up."  I turned away from her and went back into the bathroom and locked the door.  I couldn’t believe what I had come to but if it meant time to work out my next move then I would do it and God fuck Troy Brewster and my Moma.

9 home

Loretta had this deal going with the owner of some bar to use one of his rooms upstairs so as we could make us both the kind of money we dreamt about.   She left around eleven in the morning and said not to move until she got back.  I tried not to think on it much.  I tried to think of ways of getting my own back on Troy and Moma but I couldn’t keep my mind on it none.  I had already fucked up one method, shooting, because I didn’t have the gun any longer.  I showered for the second time that day letting the water pour over me like I was in a rainstorm.  My hair plastered my face and the water ran in trickles down my body so that it didn’t matter if I cried or not.  My tears mingled with the hot water and their saltiness washed away with my imagined dirt.  I wanted the shower to take my sins away but instead it just made me feel like a wrinkled old prune.  Afterwards I lay wrapped in a towel on the bed wishing my hangover away.

When I was too small to even walk Pa would take me on his knee at night and tell me stories until I was sleepy.  Then, when my eyelids were heavy, he would lift me gently and put me into bed and I would curl up in a ball and suck my thumb.  He would ruffle my hair and I would feel safe.  I don’t know what happened to change him.  I don’t know what I did wrong that made him hate me so much he had to beat me up. I thought I was the girl of my Pa's dreams until I was around eleven.  Then everything changed, everything.  One day I was his little girl and the next he had decided I had the plague or something.  I guess he was seeing me growing into a woman and it disturbed him.  What was I supposed to do?  Stay a child forever?

The thoughts of my Pa stuck in my head until I fell asleep and then I dreamt I was out on the ranch with the sun high in the sky, only I was a grown woman and Pa was an old, old man.  He was waving to me from far away and I tried to run towards him but the faster I ran the further he was away from me.  Then I was on the edge of a cliff and there were fish flying in the sky over my head.  They flew down into the chasm below me and I thought that they were calling to me to follow them so I started to flap my wings and jumped right off the edge.  

Loretta busted into the room out of breath and smiling. 

"We got us a humdinger."  She flung a carrier bag at me. "Get dressed. We are having a party girl."  She had brought me a real swanky red Lycra dress and a pair of shoes to match. 

I showered for the third time, because I had gotten to like being alone in the bathroom when Loretta was around, and I pulled out the last of the stitches on my belly.  The holes they left stung some.  I didn’t have any pretty underwear 'cepting the basque and when I tried it on underneath the dress it made odd shaped lumps so I left it off and slid the red lycra dress back over my head.  I put my hand on my belly and tried to push it in some.  It still stuck out a bit but no one would be looking at it.  When I came out of the bathroom Loretta said I looked dressed to kill and she never knew just how close she was to the truth of it.

Arturo's bar was a way down the Cerrillos road in a part of town that could have been any place USA and not tourist heaven New Mexico like the rest of the dump.  We walked all the way and I got to wishing I wasn’t wearing the high-heeled shoes.  I didn’t take them off though.  I had my image to maintain.

 Arturo was a dickhead but he ran a tight joint where everyone pulled their weight and, better than anything, he had rooms he rented out to anyone who put the dough up front and left it the way they found it.  The best part about Arturo's was that the rooms were decked out like the bar was the best hotel in town and he laid on waiter service for the drinks and everything.  That way he could ensure that folks would want to come back.  Loretta said he took a cut off the top of anything we made besides rent by the hour but that if we wanted to hook the big one then we couldn’t do worse than Arturo's for class.  I couldn’t say because I'd not been in that many swish hotels to be able to say what class was exactly hotel-wise. 

Loretta had this dude coming by at three thirty and he was some out of town rancher who liked them young and duplicated.   She told me we had to sit at the bar and wait until he arrived and then we would do the business on him and go home rich.  I ordered a rum and coke and watched myself in the mirror behind the optics.  It was still that same girl watching me; the same one that I had seen in the shop window.  It still wasn’t me and I wondered if anyone had noticed I looked so young.  The barman looked like he had seen it all before and some.  He never even gave us a second glance.  I sipped my drink and waited quietly trying to keep myself in one piece for the afternoon to come.  I wished I still had Troy's stash on me or that Loretta would have offered me some of hers but she never did and I was feeling too polite to ask.

Right on the dot of three thirty this heavy looking guy walked in and made a beeline for Loretta.  She got up and kissed him hard on the lips and he slapped her ass.  They were clearly the best of friends.

"Howard, I'd like you to meet Cherry.  Cherry this is Howard." 

I smiled at him.

"She's real young. Real young," he whispered to Loretta.  He had a kind of bull’s head; his eyes set wide apart, his neck disappearing into his collar.

“I know that’s how you like it," she said and she smiled at him but only with her mouth, her eyes were someplace else.

We made our way upstairs to the room with me leading the way and Howard and Loretta watching my butt.  I had started to feel like this was not a good idea after all.  Loretta squeezed my hand at the door.

"It's okay honey, just follow my lead and you’ll be fine.  He likes you."

I knew he liked me.  I had seen that look a thousand times but I never acted on it unless the fancy took me and right now the fancy definitely did not take me.

Howard had obviously been here before.  He knew the routine.  He sat in an armchair and pulled off his boots one by one.  He had the biggest sweatiest feet imaginable.  I kept on staring at his feet, not moving or saying anything.  Loretta had to take me by the arm and practically drag me to the bed.

"Honey you have just got to get it together," she hissed at me. 

She pulled the lycra dress over my head and I kept right on staring at Howard’s feet.  Even when Howard got his dick out and started to wank over us all I could think of was his feet.  It was too much like being at home with Pa. When he shot his load all over Loretta's tits and collapsed in a heap at the end of the bed I snapped out of my dream.  Howard was mumbling something about being shortchanged and could we wait until he had got his breath and then we could start for real and I thought  "Oh shit, this is a rerun of my life!"  I grabbed the dress and tried to pull it over my head but I had it on the wrong way.  I found the armholes and poked my arms through them wriggling the dress down over my body.

"Hell Cherry you can’t leave now," shouted Loretta.

"I'm not staying for the encore." I scrabbled over the bed collecting my shoes and my wits at the same time.

"But the deal was for both of us.  It’s what he’s paying for."

"Hasn't he had it already?"

"Shit no.  That was just the start.  He won’t pay unless we make out."

"You make out. I got to find my Moma."

"I knew she was too young," Howard boomed from the end of the bed.  ÒI knew it! She’s got to run home to Moma. Christ!"

"This was a bad idea Loretta," I said.  "A very bad idea.  Perhaps the worst I’ve ever had a mind to follow."  I opened the door and started down the hall to the top of the stairs.  I could hear Loretta fall over Howard in her rush to chase after me.

"You bitch. What am I supposed to do now," she asked. 

"Suck it and see," I replied and took off down the stairs as fast as I could.  Loretta came after and caught me in the back hallway.  She swung me round to face her and I have never seen a woman as angry as she was right then. 

"You can’t just walk out like this."

"Why not?"

“I need this money.  I need it."

"What for? Your next fix?"

"Yeh. So what?"  It was a stand off.  We faced each other in silence both of us snorting and raging under our breath.  She looked wild right then.  Wilder than me anyway.

"I ain't going back in there with him or with you.  I’m not a dike and I’m not a hooker."

"I know you ain’t.  I know that but can’t you do this for me?"  She looked so pathetic I nearly gave in.

"No I can’t. I got to find my Moma.  Her and me have got some unfinished business to clear up."  I turned away from Loretta and walked towards the door to the bar.  She grabbed a handful of my hair and practically tore it out of my head.

"You can’t leave me now."

I twisted in her grip but her fingers were knotted tight in my hair.

"Leave go Loretta!"

She slammed me up against the wall and I felt the place shudder like the walls would fall down on top of us and nothing would make any difference any more.

"Don't go Cherry honey.  Don’t go."  I ignored her.  "Please Cherry.  You are my only friend.  Please.  I'll help you find your Moma.  I'll ask around.  I know some folks."

I grimaced and told her through my teeth that I was not going back up the stairs. 

"Okay. Only please don’t leave me now.  I need a friend.  Please."

"You help me find my Moma and I'll be your friend for life."

"Okay, okay."  She let go of me suddenly and then she was crying and I let her hug me until her tears were done.  “I want out of this Cherry.  I want out, but I don’t know how."  She was shaking all over.

"You got to get yourself clean girl.  Look at me.  My life is shit right now but I’m clean.  As clean as I can be anyway."  I sounded like I was thirty, not seventeen.  I had seen my fair share of dope freaks; losers all of them.  I never looked on myself as one of them even though I popped pills and snorted coke at times.

Loretta smiled at me through her frosted eyeshadow and slick black mascara'd eyes and I thought some of the life had started to show in them but I knew that in only an hour or so and she would be desperate for a hit again.  It was hell on earth for folks like Loretta, hell on earth and no chance of heaven in a million years. 

10 home

Heaven was always a pure white sun-drenched world when I was a kid.  It was Angels in satin with lace wings and God, looking a bit like Robert de Niro in "The Deerhunter", on his throne.  It was sweet Jesus and Mary and singing so clear it was like glass waiting to be shattered.  It was a vision out of a book that I once saw in the library when Moma took me into town and left me in the children’s book section while she went shopping.   I must’ve been about four years old I reckon. 

The library was just about the coolest and most silent place in the world.  Shafts of sunlight beamed in through the high glass windows and struck the shelves at odd angles but standing in those sunbeams felt like being blessed by the bright cool light of God's gaze.  I remember the book I chose had a leather cover and I thought it was real old, although thinking back maybe it wasn’t that the book was that old just that I was young.  Anyway there were these Angels in the book and God sitting on his throne and I thought that heaven must be like a giant library with sunbeams and silence and dust swirling in the air.  It was the only time Moma ever took me to the library and she never even let me get a book out, although I didn’t know at that time that that was what I could do otherwise I would have taken the Angel book and never returned it.   I would have liked that book under my bed, just to look at the pictures, so as I could believe there was a heaven someplace. 

Yeah heaven was the place I was aiming for but hell was the place I had ended up.  They talked a lot about hell in those days.  I guess they still do.  Moma was deeply into religion, any religion; it didn’t matter which it was.  She said there was a little of the truth in all of it.  I suppose that was what made her able to do what she had.  She must have thought there was at least one religion out there that would offer her salvation.  Honest to God though I hoped there wasn’t.  I hoped she would be punished in this world and the next for the things she had done.  My entire childhood started to make sense once I knew that Moma wasn’t the person I thought she was. 

Loretta had promised me faithfully that she would ask around until she found my Moma.  I offered to come with her but she said,  "No you stay at the hotel in case anyone should call the front desk with a message."  I turned on the TV and the shower and the radio and drowned my thoughts out with the noise.  I didn’t know how Loretta was going to find Moma - she only had a name to go on and a description and it seemed to me like the most difficult thing a person could do; go looking for a faceless hooker in a haystack of women.  I guess I just trusted that Loretta would turn something up and, if it wasn’t Moma in person, then at least I might have some more information.  I thought maybe I should have questioned Troy some more, but then again perhaps I wouldn’t have gotten much more out of him.  There didn’t seem to be much love lost between him and Moma, or me and him come to think of it.  It struck me that Moma and I must’ve been more alike than either of us cared to admit, seeing as we had both fallen for the same man.  I wondered just how much like Moma I was.  I wondered if she had seen the likeness all along and that that was why she had tried to stop me from having the baby.  

The thought of the baby had made me feel hollow inside.  Trying to describe how it feels to have a life inside you and then what it feels like to have that life taken away so that you feel like a part of you has been ripped out is so difficult.  I wondered if Moma had felt like this when she had me but then she had at least had a living breathing baby afterwards and I had nothing at all but a wisp of a memory.  Maybe the baby wasn’t real at all.  Maybe I had imagined it all like the make believe friends of my childhood who left deep scars on my mind when they left me as I grew up.

Maybe I should be saying that my childhood was a happy one, at least before we moved to New Mexico anyway, but I can’t really say that I was that much happier in Maupin, Colorado.  I was a deal smaller then and the things that riled me maybe weren’t as life threatening as they are now but there sure was a lot of aggravation one way or another and I tried to keep out of the way of it all.  They were always there, the friends I never really had.  They told me stories and I told them about things that had happened to me or how Moma was railing at Pa for something.  In those days Grandpa was a gruff old guy who never stood still.  If there was work to do he’d be out there in all weathers.  Even when he taken bad in the chest one time he’d not stay in his bed like the Doc told him he ought to.  I never saw Grandpa without he had his outdoor clothes on and a rifle in his hand.  He was a real leftover from those days when everyone lived right on the edge.  Save for riding Frills and trailing behind Chester I didn’t mix much with anyone, if you can call talking to your horse mixing with folks.  Least ways Frills didn’t answer back.

I was always wild I guess.  When I heard Moma had decided to pack up and go live with Pa in New Mexico I hid out on the range for two nights.  I wasn’t scared none.  I just didn’t want to leave the only home I had known until then.  Moma had Chester out searching for me and afterwards, when I thought on it, it struck me that Chester had known where I was hiding all along.  I think he just wanted to give me time to think about things. 

I liked old Chester.  He had a shock of white hair and stubble on his chin to match.  It didn’t matter what day of the week it was he always had the same length of stubble.  I never saw him shave and I never saw his beard grow any longer.  It seemed like a kind of miracle and I liked to feel his chin tickle my arms when he lifted me up onto Frills.  He would smile at me and his eyes twinkled like he had caught stars inside them when he was a young man and they had no chance of escaping until he died.

I hid in a cave at the bottom of the cliff called Shorty's Gulch.  I had taken to digging around in the dirt looking for buried treasure.  Chester told me a tale once about this man Shorty who had robbed a bank and holed up in the gulch when the posse came riding after him.  It was years and years back before there were any cars he said.  Anyway Shorty buried the money he’d stolen from a bank in the gulch and then taken off, trying to lead the posse in the wrong direction and hoping he could double back and pick up the money later.  Things didn’t go exactly right for Shorty though.  First off his horse goes lame and then he drank from a poison stream and gave himself gut ache like there was no tomorrow.  He cut back down the trail and headed for Maupin but somehow he got his directions mixed up and three days later dropped over the edge of the cliff into the very gulch he’d buried his stealings.  I always wondered how folks knew he’d drunk poison stream water, but I guess the posse were hard on his tail and had followed his tracks and put two and two together.

Anyway the posse found Shorty.  His back was broken and he was a white cold ghost of a corpse lying in the gulch.  They lugged him back to the town cemetery and buried him alongside the ordinary folk.  I saw his grave once.  It was in the corner by the fence.  I t was overgrown but I could still make out the name -Elias "Shorty" Frankenfurter, 1891 - 1910. 

They never found the money from the bank he’d robbed and the story went out that it was buried someplace in the gulch.  I suppose at that time everyone went out looking for it.  Chester said his Pa had taken a shovel and dug alongside my own grandfather’s father but nothing turned up.  The years passed and everyone but Chester forgot the reason for the gulch being named Shorty's. 

The story fired my imagination and I would spend hours out there, the light hovering on the edge of night sometimes, digging for Shorty's gold.  One time I turned up an old bone and it was long like a man’s thighbone.  I held it against my leg to measure it and I could tell that it wasn’t any animal bone. I liked to pretend it was Shorty's and, but for the fact that I had seen his grave in the town cemetery, it could have been.  I never told anyone about my find.  I just hid it in the cave along with my other precious things: a shiny stone, three old dimes Chester had once given me and a headless doll that I called Phooey.   I dug around the place I found the bone but I never turned any more up and I let myself think that it had been carried there by a bear or coyote. 

Chester knew I had a hidey-hole in the gulch but for some reason he never rode down there. He liked to ride the cliff and cheat death when the stones rattled over the edge.  I'd seen him many times high on the ridge looking out into the distance like there was another land on the horizon and he was the only one could see it.  Chester loved this high land even when the snow came.  I knew it would take a good deal of trouble to get him to move so when Pa sold the ranch Chester just said he would stay put and take the rough with the smooth. 

Anyway after two days I was hungry and tired and my back hurt because I had had to sleep on the rough ground and I hadn’t thought I would need a blanket.  It isn’t exactly the kind of thing you think of when you’re six and want to keep from leaving the only place you’ve ever had a home. When the storm came on the second night and lit up the rocks in the gulch so that they looked like a thousand demons were keeping me company I decided that maybe New Mexico wouldn’t be so bad after all and that I would give it a try.  If I didn’t like it then I would run away and try and find my way back to Chester.  I dug a hole in the floor of the cave and buried my treasures for the next little girl to find. Then I said a silent prayer to keep the demons away and set off down the gulch.

Chester must have read my mind because he met me on the ranch side of the gulch where the land slopes up to the ridge.  He was riding a horse and leading Frills by the reins.  It was the last time I rode Frills and we took the long way back to the ranch house even though the rain was lashing down by now.  Chester was as silent as we were both wet.  I followed the old nag he was riding on Frills and watched Chester’s bent shoulders and bobbing Stetson, the rain dripping off the brim and soaking into the shoulders of his shirt.  He had given me his own cattleman’s coat, which was way too big for me. Chester did things like that.  It would never have occurred to Pa to take off his coat and give it to someone else, much less his own daughter, but then Pa wasn’t at the ranch then.  He was away in New Mexico and the only other person that was left to worry about me was Moma and I guess she was more worried about her own skin than any child of hers.

The next morning Chester drove Moma and me into town to catch the train.  I had on my new dress and my hair was slicked back in a ponytail.  I sat on the seat between Chester and Moma and watched Chester’s hands on the wheel and wished I had not given up so easily when the storm had come.  The pickup bumped down the track and hit the highway at speed and for one moment I was thrown against Chester’s arm as we turned the corner.  Moma was sitting up ramrod straight, her chin jutting out, her eyes proud.  We made the journey in silence; all of us locked into our own thoughts.  Mine were confused and sad but who can say what Chester and Moma's were?  Chester had never liked Moma so maybe he was thinking it was good to be rid of her.  Moma was a closed book.

11 home

Freddy called my room at nine that night with a message from Loretta.  I was supposed to go to a bar two blocks from the hotel called Crazy Red's.  That was it.  Freddy hung up and I didn't know whether Loretta had found my Moma or if this was another make it rich quick scheme of hers.   I put my jeans on and tucked the dress inside like it was a tight T-shirt.  Mabeleen's yellow jacket still looked okay and I kicked the red shoes into a corner and wore Troy's cowboy boots.  I thought I looked half-decent and I dropped my keys into the desk on the way out and Freddy told me to watch my step.  Crazy Red's wasn’t the kind of place nice girls hung out.   I smiled at him.  I was a 'nice' girl now?

"Crazy Red's is the kind of place you go to get blind drunk and laid," he called after me.

When I got there the gorilla on the door wouldn’t let me in on account of the fact that I didn’t look old enough and I wasn’t I know but I didn’t tell him that.  I dodged the traffic and watched the place from across the road.  Not many folks went in or out.  I kept getting that look from men that women get when they’re on the game.  I guess it didn’t help much me pacing up and down and looking at Crazy Reds every other minute but I didn’t know what else to do.  I thought maybe Loretta was sitting inside waiting for me to turn up and what would she do when I didn’t?  I was just about to cross back over the road when a car drew up at the kerb.  The window wound down real slow and I was still looking at the door to Crazy Red's afraid I was going to miss Loretta.  When I glanced down this scuzzball in the car was eyeing me up like I was for sale or something.

"Fuck off shithead," I said and I kicked the door as hard as I could and dodged round the back of the car before he could get out and beat me into the ground.  The guy must’ve got out of his car faster than that old speeding bullet because I saw the gorilla over the road look across to see what the hell was going on.  The guy with the car was shouting and making like I had caused some kind of terrible damage, when I couldn’t have done much more than just scratch the damned thing.  I hung back from the entrance to Crazy Red's and folk were starting to stop on the sidewalk and look at the dumb guy’s car to see what the hell he was shouting about.  The weird thing was he didn’t seem to know where I had gotten to and I thought it was just as well because here was my chance.  The gorilla had left his post at the door and hung kerbside waiting to see what was going to happen next.  I slipped in through the door behind him just as the guy over the road gave up the shouting and got back in his car. 

I don’t know why Freddy had told me to watch myself Crazy Red's wasn’t anything special, or even that scuzzy.  It was just a regular strip joint with women dancing at tables and a show up on stage.  Once you’ve been in one you’ve been in them all and anyway I had everything they had so what was the big deal?  I stood at the back trying to get used to the lights.

"She's over there."  I heard Loretta whisper in my ear.  She sidled up to me and pointed a long finger at a woman with her back to us on the far side of the bar. 

"How d'you know it's my Moma?"

"I don’t but word is her name’s Louisa and she’s new in town.  Got a job right off, no messing.  Said she’s done it before and she has.  I’ve been watching her.  She’s real good but flying, you know?"

"Moma doesn't do drugs." Hell yeah I thought and she doesn’t normally lap dance either.  I squeezed through the tables until I was standing behind this woman.  She had hardly anything on but for G string and sweat.

"Hey lady get outta the way."  It was a man at the next table. I was blocking his view or something.  I ignored him.

"Moma?" The woman just kept on wiggling her hips at the guy in front of her.  He had a look on his face like she was the only woman he’d ever seen naked, even though the place was full of them.

"Moma?"  I raised my voice and the woman half turned to me.  Her thick dark hair was loose over her shoulders and her eyes were lost in another world.  It couldn’t be Moma.  I turned away from her feeling sick that I had come this close to the bitch that had taken my husband from me.

"Cherry?" Shit the voice was Moma's. I was half way across the room pushing past punters and stripped naked hookers.  I barely heard her say my name again.

"Cherry?  Is that you?"  I turned and the woman was facing me.  The music was blaring and the men were pushing her aside and holding money out to the next dancer.   She just stood there facing me down across the crowded room and I couldn’t move.  Loretta was screaming something in my ear over the noise but everything seemed like I was in a tunnel.  At the end of it was Moma and she was the Moma I should have had; a pinafore wearing middle-aged woman with love in her heart and a smile on her lips.

"Cherry. Come on it ain’t her.  Is it?" Loretta looked past me and then I kind of came out of the dream I was in.

"No. It ain’t Moma," I said and suddenly I couldn’t get out of the place fast enough.  I ran past the gorilla on the door with Loretta chasing after me.  I remember folks scattered on the sidewalk when they saw us running down the road.

"Cherry. Wait."  But I couldn’t.  "Shit Cherry I’ve broken a heel now." 

Loretta must’ve stopped to take her shoes off but I couldn’t really say because I just ran and ran trying to get as far away from Crazy Red's as I could.  I was a block down the road when I pulled up and leaned on a wall to catch my breath.  Everything had started to go blurry and my guts were hurting like I hadn’t mended at all since the baby. By the time Loretta reached me she was barefoot and panting, that’s how I know she must’ve taken her shoes off.

"Fuck it Cherry. What’s gotten into you girl?"

I closed my eyes, but the woman, that woman in Crazy Red's, just kept on calling my name from the darkness.

"Why don’t you just go home?  You ain’t never going to find her.  She is long gone."

"Maybe." I nodded and sank down onto the sidewalk, hugging my knees. "Only thing is.” I looked up at Loretta from behind my tears. "It was my Moma.  It was her."

"Oh honey I am sorry."  Loretta tried to comfort me but I didn’t want anyone near me right then. I wanted to be alone.  I told her so and she didn’t want to leave me there on the sidewalk, underneath the feet of everyone passing by like I was a junked up freak, but I was real shitty to her and she crossed the road and went into a bar.  I bet she was watching me but I didn’t really care.  I wanted to cry and it didn’t matter where I did that just that I had to be alone to do it.  I don’t know how long I sat there but I know the tears dried up and a kind of numbness came over me so that I started to notice the weirdest things like the wheels of passing cars and the way they sparkled in the lights like jewels.  I looked at my hands and saw that my nails were bitten down to the quick and I thought that I needed nail extensions real soon or no one would ever want me again.  That kind of decided me.  I headed back down the road to Crazy Red's and when I reached the gorilla on the door I spat on his shoes and ducked in under his arm as he tried to lash out at me.  Moma was dressed and waiting at the table nearest the door. She looked up at me when I walked in and blew smoke into the thick air like she was a real old movie star.

"I knew you’d come back," she said. “I waited until you came back. I got a room upstairs.  We can talk."

Her room was small and overlooked the lot out back.  There was just enough space for the bed and a dresser the size of a shoebox.  I took a pee in the tiny bathroom while Moma walked up and down past the window and wrung her hands like she didn’t really know what she was going to say to me. I could hear her footsteps and every now and then I would listen hard at the door with my hand on the knob.  I guess I was stalling for time.  She stopped pacing when I came out and I still didn’t know what I was going to say to her.

"You're looking fine," she said.  I couldn’t answer that one.  "You always were a fast healer."  I chewed the inside of my cheek and felt like a little girl again. "I don’t know what to say Cherry. I don’t.  I never meant for it to happen this way."

"Like shit you didn't."

"Watch your mouth.  You’re not that big that I couldn’t take a strap to you if I had to."  I knew her game now and her threat didn’t cut any ice with me.  She one rule for her and another for everyone else. 

"Don't you tell me about not cussing.  You was out there Wednesday nights with Troy and how many others I wonder?  You are just so full of shit Moma.  I’ve no wonder you’ve ended up in the sewer."  There was no getting away from her. There was no putting some distance between us the room was just so small.   I couldn’t even look out of the window; she was standing right in front of it.  It all had to be said there and then.  The only place I could run to, so I could catch my breath, was the bathroom and she could probably hear everything I did in there anyway.  I stood my ground and waited for to start in on me but you know she crumbled.  She looked me in the eye and bit her lip and when she put her hand out to me she was shaking.  She came towards me like she wanted to lean on me or take comfort from me but I couldn’t do that.  Moma or not she was my mortal enemy.  She made for the bathroom and I heard the lock slide over and I sat down on her bed relieved that she was gone from the room if only for a moment.

It wasn’t only a moment though.  It seemed like forever.  I had started to wonder what it was she was doing in there when it struck me.  She was shaking when she came into the room.  She was shaking, and sniffing like she had a bad cold and her eyes were kind of out there somewhere.  She was hitting on something and for all I hadn’t known about the whoring I felt sure she hadn’t been on anything at home.  It's just something you notice about folks, whether they’re doped up or not.  I knocked the door.

"Moma, you alright?"  But there wasn't any reply. “Moma, you need anything? You out of soap?"  I waited and I walked to the window and looked out.  It was a dull little back lot, but the view was of the mountains in the far distance and it made me think of Colorado.

"Moma, you got to let me in.  Whatever has happened between us, you got to let me in."  Still nothing.  I tried the handle and pushed against he door.  It gave some, but the catch was still over. "Moma come on now.  Talk to me."  I thumped the door and pushed hard.  I thought it gave some so I put my shoulder against it and shoved like I had seen them do in the movies.  It was no good.  It was a rotten door but it wasn’t just going to cave in.  I hit it in disgust and turned away.  Moma slid the catch off and opened the door a fraction.

"Moma!"  She fell out of the bathroom onto the floor and she was like a raggedy doll.  "Moma you come on now.  You got to stand up."  I pulled at her and tried to ease her arm over my shoulders but she was too heavy for me. 

"You got help yourself,” I screamed at her.  Her eyes rolled into her head until I could only see the whites and somehow she grabbed a hold of the bedspread and pulled herself across the bed on her stomach.  Her face was twisted and I thought that of all the situations to find myself this beat them all; some scuzzy room upstairs from a scuzzy bar with a scuzzy woman for a mother and here she was OD-ing in my arms.

"You can’t die like this. Get up you bitch," I shouted and I pulled at her trying to get her to move off the bed, but all she did was lie there.  I walked over to the window and looked out but I couldn’t see anything.  I was real agitated.  I didn’t know whether to yell for help or what. 

"Moma! Come on."  I shoved her until she rolled onto her back and then I thought that if she puked she would drown in her own vomit so I pulled her onto her side. 

"Christ Moma you aren’t exactly making this easy for me."  I was angry with her.  Sorry.  Hurt. Tired.  Angry.  Mostly angry.  A rush of feelings like adrenaline coming in and carrying me on that high you get when you just got to run only because there’s nowhere to go you shake instead.   I sat down on the bed next to my dying Moma and cradled her head in my lap and willed her back to life.  I know now I should have called the ambulance.  I know now I should have gone down to the bar and found Crazy Red or whatever the guy’s name was that owned the joint, but nothing sat right with me and it was all I could do to keep on breathing.  After a time I felt like I was breathing for Moma and that if I just kept on, in and out and feeling the air in my lungs, that somehow she would keep right on living and that we would wake up the next day with the room full of sunlight and the shit we had landed ourselves in washed away.

Moma died in my arms.  It could have been one in the morning or it could have been dawn. Time had gotten all screwed up and I shut the door on the room and walked down to the empty bar where the folks from the night before had left an sweat smell and a mountain of cigarette butts, unwashed glasses and beer bottles.  It didn’t feel like she was gone but it felt like I had been released.

12 home

There is no place on this earth that pain does not reach and when you’re really down and life feels like shit it seems as if there is no way out of the darkness which surrounds you.  It’s like once you knew where to turn the light on but suddenly you forgot where the switch was.  For a while now I had been staggering around in the dark waiting for someone to turn on the light for me.  Moma's death made me realise that the only person who could find the switch, or at least light a candle, was me.

I walked out of Crazy Red's into a lukewarm morning.  I was still feeling bruised by Moma's passing but now there was a glimmer at the end of the long tunnel that was called my life.  I blinked in the sunny street as the morning started to spread through the few people there.  The sky was peach colored with faint blue tinges at the edges, as if someone had just painted it, and way up on high I could see a bird circling in the breeze. 

Crazy Red's bar and Mom’s death receded into the corner of my mind as I walked back to The Nitelite and I wondered if I could start over and, if I did, would it really be any different?  Now Moma had gone there were no strings tying me to her except those I let be there still; the fine threads which go out at birth to each and every child from their parents, from their mother especially.  I truly believed as a child these threads multiplied and tangled and wove thin webs around us.  I knew they were meant to keep me safe from evil, from the terrible monsters which feed on little kids, but all of my life it felt like those threads were sinews, or octopus legs, holding me in a prison.  Every now and then I would try and break out.  I would do something really wild and cut loose, only trouble was it was like gray hair; pull one out and two grow in its place.  Moma had tangled me in her net of emotional threads all my living days and now, although I felt like the threads were dropping off me like some snake shedding its old skin, I could see more threads reaching out for me.  It felt like her arms, her hands like claws, were pulling at me from the grave, though she wasn’t buried yet and I would probably never go to her funeral.

"What do you want from me?"  I screamed as the traffic stopped at the intersection and everyone looked at me.  Red cars and blue, metallic grey and yellow, cars with windows wound down and people talking on mobile phones or shaving with cordless razors.  Time kind of stood still and I think I was the only person left alive, moving, seeing the world around me and feeling confused and excited at the same time.  The lights changed to green and everything speeded up again.  I wasn’t the only thing in the world that had been touched by the madness of everything but I sure was the only person who had walked out on Moma's death and her soul in its hour of need.  A rush of guilt came over me and I stepped out into the traffic and didn’t care whether they hooted at me or even ran me down.  I would find Troy Brewster and kill him for what he had driven Moma and me to.  If it was the last thing I did I would see Troy Brewster dead.

Sometimes you can walk and think and it doesn’t matter how far you go you just don’t feel the miles.  I ended up at Mabeleen's house later that morning and I watched the place from over the road, from that alley that made me feel shut in.  It didn’t worry me anymore.  I watched and I waited and I couldn’t think of a way to kill that bastard Troy.  Down a way there was this old guy in his front yard.  He was spraying the weeds with something and every now and then would go back in the house and fill the container with more water.  Then he’d come back out front, pour something out of a bottle into the water and give the spray container a shake.  I watched Mabeleen's house, with one eye on the old guy and his weedkiller, for more than an hour before I realised that here was the answer to my problem.  The next time the guy went in the house I ran over the road and stole the bottle of weedkiller.  There wasn’t much left in it and I didn’t know if it would do the job or not, but it seemed like right now it was the only chance I had and if didn’t take it when luck turned then the chance would be lost. 

I slipped down the side of Mabeleen's house and climbed the fence into her back yard.  I knew where everything was now.  It would be easy.  I waited by the back door listening to her voice from the kitchen.  She was talking to Troy, shouting more like.  I don’t know where he was.  I peeked in through the window and she had her back to me.  She was wiping down the tops and making like a regular housewife.  Then she picked up the coffeepot and came over to the faucet with it.  I dipped back down under the window and held my breath.  I heard the water running and when I glanced back through the window she had poured the water into the coffee maker.  I unscrewed the top on the weed killer and squinted inside.  It smelt like something real bad. I hoped there was enough.  I waited until Mabeleen went out of the kitchen and then I opened the back door and emptied the weedkiller into the top of the coffee maker, where the water was, and threw the bottle in the trash.  I thought maybe that Troy would think Mabeleen was trying to do for him.  I was almost wetting my pants from the fear that she would come back into the kitchen, but I ran for it just as I heard her in the hallway.  I can tell you my heart was thumping in my chest. 

I wasn’t going to hang around in the back yard for the shit to hit the fan so I jumped the fence and made a break for it back to the safety of the alley.  Perhaps it wouldn’t kill him; perhaps it would only make him sick as a dog.  I started to worry my nails and couldn’t stop myself.  Fuck it, nail extensions were expensive but it looked like that was what I was going to have to get once I was out of this mess.

I had almost fallen asleep, with my back against the cold sidewall of the house opposite Mabeleen's place, when the siren jolted me back to life.  An ambulance was parked outside and the doors at the back were thrown open and a gurney wheeled out.   The paramedics thumped the damned thing up the front steps and in through the door and then another gurney came out of the back of the ambulance and I stepped out into the sunlight and crossed the road to get a better look.  There was a crowd of people on the sidewalk watching what was happening like it was a show on TV or something. 

The paramedics wheeled Troy out of the house on the gurney and I rushed forward to him but a man held me back and told me not to crowd him.

"Is he alright," I asked the paramedic as he swung the legs on the gurney up and pushed it into the back of the ambulance. 

"Nothing a stomach pump won’t cure," he answered.  I turned away and Mabeleen was pushed out of the house on the other gurney.  I looked into her half-closed eyes as she lay there and I tried to say I was sorry, that it wasn’t meant for her but the words wouldn’t come out of my mouth.  She looked up at me and just for one moment, before the doors of the ambulance finally swung shut, I think she caught me staring at her.  The paramedics slammed the doors and the show was over.  Everyone disappeared and I was left on the sidewalk alone.

I rang every hospital in the district, from the pay phone at the end of the road, until I found the one that Troy had been admitted to.  They wanted to know if I was family and I said that I was his wife.  They told me I could visit him, but only for a while, he was still very ill they said.  I prayed he was ill enough to die before I got there.  I didn’t want a scene at the hospital.

I had just enough money to take a taxi and when I got to the hospital I went straight to the ward they told me Troy was in.  I couldn’t risk trying to see Mabeleen; guilt was eating away at me for involving her.  I found Troy on the second floor by a window.  The nurse told me just a few minutes and not to upset him any.   I pulled a chair up to his bedside and sat down, too guilty feeling to know what to do.  I still wanted him dead.  Hatred still burned inside me for him, but seeing him so poorly looking made my heart go out to him.  Hell it was just like it always was.  I was hopelessly in love with the shit and nothing he ever did would change that. 

"Troy?  It’s me, Cherry.  I...I came to say I was sorry."  I took his limp hand in my own and felt the tears well up in my eyes. "I never meant to hurt you none."

Troy looked at me from under his dark lashes.  I could feel his brown stare on me and I had to look away.

“I hated you for what you done to Moma, for what you done to me.  You deserved to die only now I ain’t too sure," I said.

"Um.  You better get out of here before I call the police."  He sounded like he could barely make the words come out right.  "My mouth is all...I need a drink," he croaked.

"They only got water here."

He motioned 'give me here' and I poured a glass for him and held it to his cracked lips.  I looked at his hair as he bent to the glass and I could have buried my face in it if he’d let me, just for one last smell of him.

"You ain’t put poison in this too?"

I closed my eyes but no wish came and when I opened them again Troy was staring at me and licking around his lips like he was a cow out on the range testing a salt lick.

"We could start over," I said.  "I'll make it up to you.  I'll be a wonderful wife.  We needn’t think about kids for a few years maybe, if that’s what you want."

"I want you to leave me be," he hissed.

"But I love you.  Even after everything I still love you."

"You tried to kill me.  Twice.  I can’t have no wife of mine trying to kill me. “

"I didn't mean it."

"Leave me alone."

"Troy...” I was on the verge of crying out loud.

"Leave me alone," he said his voice raised now.  A nurse looked over at us and I stood up.

“I never meant...”

"I ain't done with you yet woman." He started coughing.  ÒI want you gone. Out of my sight and when I get out of this hospital bed you’ll pay for this." He was rearing up now and I was crying.

"Please Troy I want us to start over." 

The nurse touched me on the back.  "I think you better leave now," she said.

"But he's.."

"You're dead meat Cherry.  If I don’t come after you the police will."

The nurse started to steer me away from Troy's bed, but I was trying to reach out to him, trying to pull away from her.

"Please," I begged him.

"You know what death is bitch?  Do you want to know how it feels to die?"  Troy was shouting and coughing and looking like a wild man ready to kill a bear or something.  I saw three nurses run to his bed and hold him down as I was dragged away from him, still reaching out and crying and pleading for his forgiveness.

A nurse led me to the waiting room and told me I'd have to leave when Mabeleen walked past, did a second take on me and told the nurse to leave me be.

"I'll take care of her," she said.

"Are you sure?  You ought to be in bed yourself," said the nurse.

"I'm fine," said Mabeleen.

I sat down on the couch and Mabeleen sat down next to me.  I could hear her breathing and it was like she was trying to think what to say to me.

"I think you should just get out of here," she said finally.  I was shaking like a leaf. "He don’t owe you anything you know and you tried to kill us both.  I could have you locked up.  You thought of that?  They’ve already been and questioned me."

I nodded. "Why aren't you as ill as him?"

"I hadn't drunk more than a couple of sips before he was curled up on the floor."

I nodded again. "I didn’t know what it would do.  I never meant for it to hurt you."  I looked at her as if she could take away all my pain but she never did.

"He wont take it lightly you know.  When he gets out of here he’ll be gunning for you.  If I were you I'd get right away from here, out of state and don’t tell anyone where you’re going.  This is all I can do for you.  If he comes after you I can’t protect you.  No one can."

She left me sitting on the couch.  I never saw her again after that.  She was right, Troy would be after me now.  I had to find some place I could hide and the only trouble was I didn’t know where that would be yet.

I never went back to the hotel.  There was no need to, I didn’t have any luggage and the only thing worth stealing was the soap.  I hitched a lift out of town straight off without stopping to think that Loretta might be waiting someplace for me.   It was good to get out of Santa Fe for all it was a nice place.  I would carry the memories of what had happened to me there for the rest of my life and I didn’t want anything else to go wrong, because if it did there would be no visiting when I got to be old and gray and ready to remember.

13 home

My hometown was the same old shithole of a place.  I didn’t want to be there but I thought that maybe, just maybe, I could straighten things out with my Pa and go see the local sheriff.  It seemed like the only thing I could do because I had come to the end of the road and there didn’t seem to be anywhere else I could go. Besides I wanted to see Marie Running-Wind again.  I thought that if anyone could tell me how I should be living my life it was her.  I had pangs of guilt about not doing anything about Moma's body but then they would find her sooner or later and anyone could see it was an overdose.  Funny thing was she didn’t seem so bad now she was dead.  Even after all she had done to fuck up my life it didn’t seem like she was so awful.  I guess times does heal, although it hadn’t been anytime at all since her passing.  Maybe I had just gotten used to the dying part of life.

It felt strange to be walking up the path to my old front door like I was a stranger or a travelling saleswoman.  The yard was overgrown and a line of washing hung out back that had seen sun and rain and days worth of just hanging there.  Right off I knew that Pa wasn’t there but I thought that, considering everything that had happened, maybe he was feeling too shitty to go taking washing in or tidying up around the place.  

It wasn’t any better inside.  Everything had been turned upside down like a hurricane had ripped through the rooms.  Whatever madness had made Pa do this it must have been a while ago because the house seemed real peaceful, like it was asleep.  The clock ticked faintly on the kitchen wall and water dripped onto the pans and dirty crocks in the sink.  Two flies were circling under the lampshade and their buzz was the only sound of life in the whole house.  I walked from room to room looking for something that would tell me where Pa had gone but I couldn’t find anything.  It was all just reminders of my life before the baby and I realised how far I had come since the birth.  I was still only seventeen years old and still only looked to the world like a child, but inside I felt like an old, old woman. 

I was crossing the hall, stepping over the phone books and broken pieces of Moma's best china, when that creep from next door pressed his face against the frosted glass in the door and made me scream with fright.   I stood stock still in the hall waiting for my heart to quiet down and Mr Montez to go away. He was an old guy in his seventies and had bad arthritis. He used to stare at me from his window whenever I went out of the house.  Maybe he had been looking out when I came back and now he thought he would snoop around and see what was going on.  He probably knew what had happened to Pa but I didn’t feel like asking on account of Mr Montez being a lecherous old bastard.  His looks always had more lust in them than kindness. He was real slow at walking back down the path.  I daredn't move for several minutes, not until I was sure he was well away from the house.  I didn’t want a run in with the neighbors, not right now anyway.

I cleaned up some and sat in the lounge waiting for Pa to come home from work.  I knew he wasn’t coming back but I had to give him the benefit of the doubt and besides I was too tired to do much else.  There are times when all you want to do is let go of everything.  It’s like it all gets too much to carry around.   This was one of those times.  I couldn’t be bothered with being frightened by life any more, even though Mr Montez had scared the shit out of me staring through the window like that.  Too hell with it.  If the Police came and took me away for stealing a baby and not reporting Moma's death then let them.  I couldn’t worry about it any more.  I couldn’t.

Right around nine thirty I called the railroad up and asked them when Billy-Ray Arnold came off shift and they told me he’d quit, as if I didn’t already know it.  All they could say was that he’d taken the train north more than a week ago. 

I slept in my own bed that night and Pa didn’t come home.  He wasn’t coming home was he?  They said he wasn’t coming home.  He was travelling north.  Lighting out on everything he’d tried to build down here.  Running scared back to the only other place he knew in the world - Maupin, Colorado.  I sat upright in my bed suddenly.  That was it!  Pa was off back to the ranch.  I lay down again.  I could catch up with him in the morning, though Lord knows I didn’t feel like chasing Pa across the Rockies. 

I listened to the sound of the house sighing in the night and jumped at every noise that seemed out of place.  My eyes grew heavy but sleep wouldn’t come because every time I started to drift off something would jar me awake again.  I guess I was just so uptight about everything.  Being back in my own home felt so weird.  Maybe I wasn’t frightened of what had already happened but I sure was still scared of what was to come.

I woke with a start.  Something was outside prowling around and trying hard not to make too much noise, but I could hear it alright, whatever it was.  The bedroom was all blue-colored.  I guessed it must have been around midnight but I couldn’t be sure.  I lay in the darkness waiting for the scuffling to stop but whatever, or whoever, it was was coming nearer and I knelt up in the bed clutching the cover to my tits and breathing quietly, trying not to make a noise so that I could hear what was going on outside better.  I thought there were voices but it was hard to tell what they were saying and even how many there were.  It struck me that it could be Pa come home and I almost jumped out of the bed and looked through the window but I stopped myself.  It wasn’t Pa's voice.  It wasn’t two voices at all.  It was just the one.  One person mumbling to himself.  One person nosing around the house.  I slipped out of the bed as quiet as I could and dipped under the window ledge.  With my heart in my throat I dared a look out into the night.  The moon was up and the washing on the line glared brightly like ghost flags waving at the souls of the undead.  A movement.  A shadow, or maybe the prowler himself.  I couldn’t tell.  I slid down the wall trying to decide what to do next. 

Time was when something like this wouldn’t have scared me quite so much but such a lot had changed lately that I wasn’t sure exactly what it was I was afraid of and what it was that was okay anymore.  Like I said some of the stuff that had happened didn’t give me cause to worry anymore and some of it, well let’s just say I was scarred shitless right then.  I heard the back door open.  It was that hinge that always creaked when you opened the door real slow and there were footsteps on the creaking board by the kitchen window.  I imagined the prowler staring at the washing up I had ignored.  Someone crunched over the remains of the crockery.  I had tried to sweep it all up but I must have missed some because there was that crunch under the prowler’s feet.  I scrambled into my jeans and pull a T-shirt over my head.  The zipper wouldn’t pull up on the jeans and I couldn’t find my shoes fast enough so I didn’t bother.  I was almost wetting myself with fear by now. I stood by the bedroom door and listened to the prowler coming closer and closer. 

Hearing that shuffle down the hall I got inside my closet and tried to pull the door shut but it kept on swinging open.  In the end I had to hook one finger round the door and hold it closed.  The bedroom door opened and I could see that whoever it was had a torch and was shining it around the floor and then up across the walls, but because I was trying hard not to breath or make a noise and because I had my head buried in last year’s fashion mistake, lime green cycle shorts, I still couldn’t see who it was.  Then he stopped by the closet door and I almost had a heart attack.  My finger was still hooked around the closet door for all to see.  Shit he only had to turn a fraction and shine the torch in my direction and he would see that there was someone hiding inside. 

It felt like hours but it must’ve only been seconds before the prowler went. I almost fell out of the closet along with half a ton of clothes and old toys.  Jesus!  What a noise I made. I was scared that the prowler would find me for sure now.  I wrenched open the window and climbed up onto the sill, but I made so much noise about it that the prowler must’ve heard me.   He had.  When the door started to open again I jumped right out of the window, turning slightly, the world going into slow motion for a moment.  I saw a man coming through the door with a rifle pointing at me.  I landed on the ground with my hands out to break the fall, which was only a few feet.  The dirt dug into my palms and I came up from the ground at a run as the prowler took a shot at me from the window.  I heard him shout, "I'll get you yet," but I couldn’t tell you who it was.  I hadn’t ever seen him before though it was hard to see I'll give you that.  Come to think of it, it could have been Troy.  Maybe he was in disguise or something.

I ran as fast as I could on bare feet, running blind, too scared to look where I was going and too stupid I guess to slow down and think on the situation.  I ran and ran, and ran slap-bang into someone’s chest.  Someone who was standing in the middle of the street.  I daredn't look him in the face and I could barely breathe I had run so fast away from the prowler with the gun.  I smelt him though.  I smelt the man I had run into, and I knew I had smelt him before.  Johnny Hope!  I looked up into his soft brown eyes and fainted right away. 

14 home

Johnny Hope carried me back to the house.  I came round in his arms as he walked down the road, but I pretended I was still out cold so that I could feel the warmth of his body on mine.  He smelt real good and I wanted more of that smell on me, in me, taking me gently and sweetly, making love to me until I screamed with the joy of it, and then I shut that thought right out.  That kind of thinking had gotten me in trouble before now.  It was better I forgot about sex for a good while.

"There Just Cherry," he said to me, "you're safe now," and it was true I did feel safe with him. 

There was no one standing in the window where the man had been shooting at me.  There was no one in the whole house but Johnny Hope and me.  He set me down on the sofa and picked up the phone.

“I got to make a call.  Get someone out here to look after you."

"You can look after me," I said.

"No, you need a friend."

"I thought you were a friend."

"I was just passing through."

"In the middle of the night,” I asked.

He dialled a number and I could hear the faint sound of ringing as he held the phone to his ear. His face was strong, tanned, his jaw firm.  Maybe I was crazy, but I think I was falling in love with the man.

“I found her.  She's back home.  Can you come and fetch her?  There was a pause and I wondered who it was he was talking to.

"Sure," he said into the phone. "I'll wait, but I got to get going tomorrow. I got a long way to go."  Johnny Hope hung up.

"Who'd you speak to," I asked him.

"Arabella Running-Wind."

"Maria's Moma!"

"We heard you'd come back."

"Who told you?"

"It's not important.  You get some rest now.  Maria'll be here in the morning."  He sat down in the chair my Pa always used.  I stared at Johnny and he closed his eyes. "You go to bed now.  No one will bother you."

"Who was it you think tried to kill me?"

"I think it was in your imagination."  He still had his eyes shut.

"I didn't imagine it.  He was shooting.  I could have died."  I let my jaw drop open.  It was Troy!  It had to be!  Johnny opened his eyes and looked at me hard like he could read my mind.

“I think you’ve been through enough already," was all he said but I knew he could read my mind and it felt kind of spooky to be with someone who knew my every thought, and then it made me blush.  Jesus not every thought I hoped.

"But it had to be him. It was wasn’t it?  It was Troy! But it couldn’t be.  I only just left him this afternoon in the hospital."  I sank back down again.  So it wasn’t Troy.  Maybe it had been my imagination.  Maybe I had been running from ghosts or nightmares.  Maybe none of it was real.  For a second I thought that maybe it had been Johnny Hope, but then I knew he wouldn’t be trying to kill me.  Hell he was here wasn’t he?  Looking after me like I was his own daughter.

"Go to bed Just Cherry," said Johnny Hope.  "Maria will be here in the morning.  No one will bother you again tonight."  He never asked me why Troy had been in the hospital but then if he could read my mind he already knew. 

"Why are you helping me?"

"You're a good person deep down and I hate to see a good person fuck up. The Inuit have a saying for it...”

"The Inuit? What about the Zuni or Navajo?"

"Fuck them. The Inuit have got the wise sayings business all sewn up."

I looked at him sideways. It was hard to tell if he was joking or not. 

"So what was it," I asked.

"What?"

"The Inuit saying."

"Oh that.  I forget but it was damned wise I can tell you."

He closed his eyes again and smiled as if he had just caught a wave of my thoughts on the air that passed between us.  I could have hugged him only it didn’t seem the right thing to do seeing as I had given up sex and hugging him would have made me randy as hell, so I went to my room and climbed into bed with all my clothes on.  I wondered if Johnny Hope knew what had happened to Pa.  I wondered if he knew what had happened to Moma.  I wondered why he had been out there on the road waiting for me to run into him and I wondered why it was that everything changed all the time, never giving me time to catch my breath.  Why was life always trying to trip me up?

Two things woke me up in the morning: the smell of cooking and the sun slanting across my face.  It was the best night’s sleep I'd had in a long time and with it my appetite had come back, either that or Johnny Hope had laid a spell on me.  I was beginning to think that maybe he had.  I was beginning to think that the whole fucking Indian nation knew my every move.  When I went into the kitchen it had been cleaned from top to bottom and Johnny had made a pot of coffee and the table was all laid like we were expecting an army for breakfast.

"Is she here yet,” I asked.  Johnny Hope had one of Moma's aprons on and it near made me laugh to see it.

"What's with you this morning Just Cherry?"

"You look... you look like you took a job in a diner."  I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down at the table cradling the cup in my hands like I was cold.  It comforted me to think that here was a man prepared to wait on me like I was something special.  Nobody had ever done that before.

"I've got a long way to go and I can’t drive on an empty stomach."

"Where you going?"

"Where are you going?"

I thought about it.  "Maupin I guess."

"That's where I’m going too."

I smiled at him. "Really?"

"No, but I thought it'd cheer you up if I was."  He grinned at me and put a plate of ham and eggs down on the table in front of me. "Get that inside you. Then we’ll talk."

"Where are you going really?"

"I've got to see a man about a truck. Three trucks actually, up in Denver.  I thought I'd start my own truck hire company.  I’ve driven semis near all my working life and there comes a time when a man’s got to do something closer to home.  So I’ve traded the semi in for three flat bed trucks and I got to sign the deal up in Denver."

He was talking about stuff I didn’t understand and I didn’t really listen. Sometimes I notice that about myself - that I’m not really listening to what’s being said to me.  I get kind of lost thoughts and then when it comes to my turn to speak I can’t say anything because I haven’t been listening.  Folks must think I’m real kooky or something.  It was like this with Johnny Hope.  He talked and I ate and whatever he said I nodded and made like I was listening real good.

Then in the middle of his words I blurted out, "can I get a lift with you?"

"Where to?"

"Maupin.  I told you.  It’s my home town."

"I thought this was your home town."  He motioned with a greasy spatula.

"We moved."

"From Maupin?"

"Yes!"  What, was he stupid or something?

"So what's in this place that makes you want to go back there so much?"

"I think my Pa's there."

"Aha. The ties that bind."

"What?"

"An old..."

"Inuit saying." We both laughed.

"If you need a lift that bad then sure I'll take you along, but you got to promise me you’ll not get into anymore trouble."  Johnny Hope frowned hard at me.

"Sure, no problem." I said without even looking at him. Hell, trouble followed me around waiting to trip me up when I wasn’t looking.  How could I promise not to get into any trouble when I didn’t know when it was going to happen?  I carried right on eating my ham and eggs and let the whole promising not to get into trouble thing ride over me.  Johnny Hope took the apron off and was about to sit down with his own plate when Maria Running-Wind came through the screen door in back.  She stood looking at me until tears filled my eyes and then I ran to her and hugged and hugged her. 

"Jesus Cherry we thought you were never coming back," she said.  Johnny Hope put his plate under the grill.

"You want something to eat?" He picked up the spatula.

"Sure," said Maria.

It was just like that, my homecoming party, with Johnny Hope and Maria Running-Wind.  We ate ham and eggs until we were fit to bust and jawed about all the good things that had happened since I had been gone, which wasn’t that long actually.  But when we came to the bad parts, the parts where I was supposed explain, I clamed up.  It wasn't any use.  I couldn’t get the words out about what I had done.  Oh Maria knew the baby stuff alright, but the rest of it I wanted to keep like a blur in the back of my mind.  Retelling it right then wouldn’t have done any good.

"I'm going to find Pa," I said.

"Where," asked Maria.

"She thinks he's in Maupin, Colorado," answered Johnny.

"But you just got back."  Maria took my hands in her own as we faced each other across the table.

“I know but Pa quit the railroad and I think he’s gone back home.  He doesn’t know about Moma."

"He knows enough to know she isn’t ever coming back to him," she said.

"How do you know that?  How do you know everything that happens without me having to say anything?"

Johnny Hope stood up and started to clear the table. "It's written on your face."

I looked from him to Maria Running-Wind and I knew it was more than that.

"Well that’s what I’m doing anyway."

"Then I'm coming with you this time," said Maria.

"Good," said Johnny. "Maybe you can keep her out of trouble."

I smiled weakly at Maria and she grinned.  It was just like when we were kids, now we were back together again.

By the time we had gotten cleaned up from breakfast it was near lunchtime and Johnny said that we should be making tracks.  We left the house early in the afternoon.  The sun was roasting the fleas off the cat’s back as I passed her on the path out back.  "Bye Toots," I called but she didn’t give me so much as a lazy yowl.  She just cocked a slanty eye at me.  I guess she would be alright.  She’d always lived off the little critters she caught anyway.

The road out of town was shimmering in the heat but there was a storm brewing up along the Sangre de Cristos mountains and I thought of the first time I had met Johnny Hope and he had asked me if I had ever been into the mountains.  I thought he had meant the mountains we could see from the truck, but now I realised he meant mountains in general.

"Yeah, I’ve been into the mountains," I said suddenly as we drove on down the road, Maria between Johnny Hope and me.  I hugged the door, my arm out the window catching the breeze. "Fuck it I lived in the mountains," and I smiled at the both of them as they looked at me like I was crazy or something.

We drove slowly for the most part all afternoon it seemed, watching the road and the mountains and the lazy afternoon light.  It wasn’t as if it was far to the state line but somehow time didn’t matter that much.  This journey was a chance to claw back all the energy I had lost so far and Johnny Hope and Maria Running-Wind made it easy for me to see life as it really was - bright and shiny instead of gray. 

I loved that trip north!  We should have been in Colorado in an hour, but Johnny made the time special for me by pointing out places on the side of the road which meant something to the Indians, or we would pause to stare at the Rio Grande which wound through the valley to the west of us.  I thought of all those cattle that had had to forge this river in the movies and the men who’d lost their lives for real on the Santa Fe Trail.  We learnt this stuff in school - a thousand miles from Missouri to Santa Fe.

The highway climbed slowly into the mountains, heading for Questa and, in the distance, Costilla.  I can tell you that because Johnny Hope gave me a map and I followed the route with my finger.   At one point we stopped for more than an hour to stretch our legs.  Maria and I ran as far as we could from the road with our arms open wide and our faces held to the sky, catching the sun in our eyes until we couldn’t see anything but a bright white light when we looked at the ground.  Johnny Hope leant against the truck and rolled a cigarette and by the time we came back to him he had smoked it and stamped it out with his heel.  The truck seemed to hover in the heat and the road was a black sticky line.  I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy as I was then. 

The afternoon wound north with us on the highway and people passed us in fast cars and RVs and we sang Shiny Happy People at the top of our voices because REM was the only tape Johnny Hope had and he never looked so like someone I could fall in love with for real as he did then.  Right around five we ambled into Colorado, high on our own good vibes.  We stopped at the first truck stop in the state and ate apple pie sitting on the tailboard.  Johnny found a country and western radio station on the radio and Maria and I stamped around in the dirt like we were at a square dance in the Deep South.  Folks drifted past in their cars staring at us from their windows, their mouths open catching flies as we whooped it up.  The dust danced alongside us and Johnny Hope watched, grinning from ear-to-ear.   I guess if I'd have been on my guard I would have noticed that we had been followed into the diner by someone in a big Ford.  I can’t say what kind because I’m not too hot on cars and all, but it was a dusty metallic silver and although it caught my eye I was too wrapped up in the moment to pay it much attention.

"We should have a dog," shouted Maria above the sound of jangly cowboy music.

"Why?" I screamed back at her.

"'Cos cowboys always travel with dogs trailing behind the wagons," she said.  I hit her playfully because she was being downright stupid seeing as she was an Indian and all.

"Naw, why should they get all the breaks?" I heard Johnny Hope say.  "We got dogs too you know."

"Yeah fucking great big ones that bite your ass off soon as look at you."  I curled up with stitch and limped over to the truck.  Johnny Hope wrapped an arm round my shoulders and smiled at me like I imagined a real father would, if he had a heart as big as the prairie for his daughter like Johnny Hope obviously had.

"Happy Just Cherry?"

"Hmm. Peaceful you know?"

“I think we better be making a move.  I was supposed to be up in Denver today." He scooted me off the tailboard and hitched it shut.

"Do we have to go yet? I don’t feel like coming on Pa till the morning.  Besides I’ve got to track him down yet, make a few calls. Can’t we just find a place to stay for the night?"

 Johnny looked at me with that sideways look he had.

"Please,” I begged.

He laughed. “I guess we can.  There’s a motel up the road a way, but we have to be off early.  One day late's the most I can manage." I hugged him and grinned at Maria when she came over.

"Johnny knows a motel we can stay at for tonight," I said to her and she gave Johnny a look that I knew meant, "what's she up to now?"

"It's okay I think Just Cherry here needs time to prepare herself before she meets up with her Pa again."

"I think you’re soft on her," said Maria Running-Wind getting in the truck.  I knew what she meant, I thought he was too.

We found a motel two miles up the road.  It was called Trickshot Katies and it had plastic covers on the armchairs and the toilet seats.  I thought it was so crazy; it kind of said to me that it didn't matter where you dumped.  Johnny booked two rooms, one for Maria and me and one for himself.   It was early so we all sat outside and jawed and drank 7 Up until the stars came out and the air got cold. Then Johnny said goodnight and I watched his closed door for a long time before I joined Maria in our own room.

The night was scented with a disinfectant hospital smell and I had to take a pee twice just to look at the plastic covered john and feel it sticking to my ass.  I thought about sitting up all night so that this day wouldn’t end but I was too tired.  I lay down on the bed next to Maria and she must have felt me because her voice was all sleepy when she spoke.

"I'm getting married Cherry.  I forgot to tell you."

I didn’t know what to say.  If Maria was getting married it would mean no more of this sisterly love stuff.  A husband could really fuck up our friendship.  I knew, I'd had one for a while and it had.

"Who to?"

"Chris Rodriguez.  You don’t know him."

I thought how long had this been going on and why hadn’t she told me before? But I didn’t say that.  I said, "when?"  instead.

"Not for a while."  She never opened her eyes when she said it.  She lay there like she was asleep and I knew that it had taken a lot of courage for her to tell me that she was deserting our friendship.  Then I thought wasn’t that just what I did to her?  I let Troy get between a perfectly good friendship.  I decided I wouldn’t let Maria Running-Wind's marriage come between us.

We must’ve both fallen asleep right around then, only thing was in my head I was still in the truck jiggling around to happy music.  Every now and then I'd jolt awake and lie there wondering who I was and what day came after Tuesday.  After the third time I stole out of bed and went outside to get a breath of fresh air.  It was still and cold and I shivered because I only had my pants on and I had to wrap my arms around me to keep prying eyes from getting a look at my scrawny body.   It was then that I noticed that the metallic silver Ford, the one from the diner, was parked in the lot over from me.  I still didn’t give it much thought, after all it was a free country and there sure as hell were a lot of metallic silver Fords around, still for some reason it reminded me that someone had been in the house and someone had tried to kill me.  If it weren’t for Johnny Hope I could be dead now.

Johnny’s door was shut tight but I thought that maybe he wouldn’t notice if I just crept in and got in bed with him to warm up.  There was a time when I wouldn’t have worried about it at all but now, well now I was a different person and I had my reputation to consider though, come to think of it, it wasn’t much of a reputation right then.  Anyway the fear suddenly overwhelmed me that I was being followed by this metallic silver Ford and that whoever it was wouldn’t stop to think when he busted in and shot me in the head as I lay on the bed next to Maria.  I never gave her safety any thought. Hell she was an Indian, like as not she’d see the danger afore it got to her and hide in the bathroom.  Me, on the other hand, well I was a wanted criminal and why the hell shouldn’t someone be after me?  Could be anyone.  Could even be Troy. I stood on the veranda freezing my butt off and then decided that if I was going to be shot at again I'd rather it be with Johnny Hope next to me.

I opened Johnny’s door as quietly as I could and didn’t shut it until I had seen where the bed was and knew I could reach it without any light.  I could hear Johnny Hope snoring softly and, in the grayness of the room, saw his body under the covers.  I slid into bed and hoped I didn’t wake him.  He was warm like a fire and I lay as still as I could, breathing quietly and smelling the smell of him so close. He turned and felt me against him and drew me to his body and held me gently like he had known me all his life and this was the most natural thing we could do.  He never woke up and I curled myself close to him and slept until the morning light was stealing through the window. 

The morning had come too soon.  I could have lain in that bed with Johnny Hope for the rest of my life 'cepting that I was thirsty.  Johnny Hope looked like some old, old man.  His lay face down on the pillow, his eyes growing bags of skin on top of the folds of his face.  When I tried to get out of the bed he opened one eye and squinted at me.

"Hi," he said.  I waited for the storm but it never came.

"Hi," I answered. "I'm thirsty want something to drink?"

"Coffee would be good.  Take some money out of my pocket."

I skipped out of the bed and ran next door.  The metallic silver Ford had gone already so I didn’t give it another thought.  Maria was in the bathroom.  I could hear the shower.  I pulled on my clothes and ran out to the store over and bought three plastic cups of strong coffee.  Then I ran back put two of the cups down outside Maria's door.  She came out of the shower her hair all wet and dripping down her back but before she had a chance to say anything I went in Johnny’s room and set his coffee down on the dresser.  He was just raising himself from the bed and he didn’t smile at me.  I thought that maybe sleeping in the same bed as him had been a mistake after all.

Outside Maria was hunkered down on the porch drinking her coffee.  She was dressed now and I felt like I was a real shit for sleeping with Johnny Hope.

"Why?  When he’s been so good to you?  Why," she asked.

"We never did anything."

"He's got a wife.  He’s very happy."

"Is he?"  It was a dumb thing to say.  Of course he was.  If he wasn’t he would have jumped me by now.  Least that’s what I thought anyway.

"I don’t know why I came with you.  Keep you out of trouble?  You’ll just go and drag the whole lot of us into more damned shit and then what?"

"Go home then.  Go back to whatever his name is.  I don’t need you anyway.  It wasn’t like you were there for me when I needed you."

"The hell I wasn’t.  I could have turned you in anytime.  That time, when you came to the Pueblo.  I could have turned you in then.  I still could."

"We're over the state line. You’d have to call the FBI."  It was stalemate.  I didn’t feel thirsty anymore.  I locked myself in the bathroom and showered and when I came out they were both sitting in the truck waiting for me.  I got in without speaking and we drove off down the road in silence.  The mood from the day before was broken good.

15 home

We drove for a way without speaking to each other and the air hung heavy between us.  It was 150 miles to Maupin and I wasn’t sure how much further Johnny Hope was going to take me.  All I knew for sure was that I had turned Maria against me and that was the last thing I wanted to do.  Seems like my head and my heart were always fighting each other, and most times my heart won out when it should have been the other way round.

I was sitting next to the window watching the world go by, and wondering how I was going to make it up to Maria Running-Wind now she thought I was a total fuck up, when I saw the metallic silver Ford in the side mirror.  Fuck up or not I knew that this car was following me.  Hell it must be!

"D'you think we’re being tailed?"  I looked in the mirror and tried to see who the Ford's driver was.

"Since we left the motel," said Johnny and he glanced in his mirror.  "Saw him yesterday too, but I didn’t want to say anything."

"What does he want?" Maria tried to turn round and get a look at the driver through the back window.

"Is it Troy?  D'you think it's Troy?"  I couldn’t see who it was.  The car never came close enough to catch sight of the driver.  It just stayed far enough away to keep from us seeing who it was and close enough to never lose sight of the truck.

"Fuck it Cherry this is your fault," said Maria angrily.

"What?  What did I do?" 

Johnny was going faster now; seeing how far ahead of the Ford he could get without causing a car chase.

"This whole damned thing is your fault.  If you hadn’t have gotten pregnant in the first place none of this would have happened."  What was eating at Maria?  I had never seen her so churned up as this.

"What?  Getting pregnant caused this? What?  We got some crazy chasing us and it’s has to do with me all the time?"

"Yes. Yes it does.  I should never have come."

"No you shouldn’t have,” I said sulkily.

"Hell ladies now ain't the time to start a fight.  We got company and he ain’t going away.  Hang on," and the truck suddenly surged forward as Johnny floored the pedal.  We took off faster than I think I have ever been in my life, although God knows it couldn’t have been that fast.  Hell it was only a truck after all.  The Ford seemed to slide backwards for a moment and then it came back again, faster this time, grabbing at the road and eating it with its tires. 

"Fuck," said Johnny.  He was looking in his mirror and swerving across the road at the same time.  "He ain't giving up."  He shook his head and we bumped off the road and sped down the dirt at the side of the road.  The Ford followed but just as we bumped back onto the road again it sideswiped our rear fender and I screamed and turned round, watching as the Ford skipped and juddered from the shock.

"Christ Almighty we’re all going to get killed,” I screamed.   Maria grabbed me and I hung onto her for grim death.

"Not yet we ain't," said Johnny through gritted teeth.  We were jolting along, our heads hitting the roof as Johnny tried every trick in the book to shake the Ford.  Each time we thought we had it beat it came back at us.

"Who the hell is it," asked Johnny.  "Who the hell..."

Maria had her head in her hands and I could barely breath I was so shaken about but I dared to twist round in my seat and knelt up, staring through the window as the Ford came up on us again.  The driver was wearing wraparound shades and for a moment I couldn’t tell who it was.  Then he saw me and grinned and I will remember that grin for the rest of my life.  Yeah you guessed it: Troy.

"Fuck it. Fuck, fuck, fuck."

"What? What?  Who is it?"  Johnny whipped his head round trying to see out my window as the Ford drew alongside.  Then he slewed the truck sideways and smashed into the wing of the car alongside us.  It felt as if the world was going to end.  I saw the Ford slide across the road and just caught sight of it rolling as it hit banked up dirt.  It seemed to roll forever and I thought that this time Troy must be dead.  He must be.  Johnny drove on for a way and then stopped in the middle of the road, the engine idling.  I could see the heat shimmering and steam, or smoke, or both, was coming from the Ford as it lay upside down at the side of the road.  It must’ve been about 200 yards back from us.  Johnny killed the engine and got out of the truck,  Maria Running-Wind and I just sat there, silently watching.  It was like time stood still.  Like those times in the movies when something awful happens and no one can quite believe it.  Johnny walked down the road a way.  He stopped, like he was trying to decide what to do next. Then he turned and ran back to the truck.  He put the thing in gear and pulled away from the wreck as fast as he could.  We none of us spoke.  There was nothing we could say to each other.  I looked back just once and that was when the wreck blew.  I could feel the shock even though we were driving away from it as fast as we could.  Smoke billowed into the air and pieces of metal rained down behind us like it had been the bomb to end all bombs. Then there was this amazing silence.  I can’t say that I was sad that Troy was finally dead.  I can’t say that I felt anything anymore for anyone. 'Cepting maybe for Johnny Hope.

We drove the next 150 miles or so through Colorado without saying anything until we reached Maupin.  God alone knows why Johnny Hope had decided to drive us all the way when he could just have easily let us out at the turning off the highway.  He was late for his truck deal and there was a wreck out on the highway that might be traced to him.  Maupin was smaller than I remembered, smaller and kind of run down like all the folks had moved away at once and left their shops and homes to mice and ram raiders.

"Which way Just Cherry," asked Johnny Hope.  We were cruising down Main Street.  I was hanging out the window looking for someone I might recognise.  Maria looked just like my mother had on the day we left town, kind of annoyed, like the world had done her wrong somehow.  I wondered if the Ford blowing up had confused her.

"It's fifteen miles.  You take the turn at the end of town and when you see the dirt track, well that’s the road up to the ranch.  Hey but you don’t have to do this," I said.

"We should have stopped. Seen if he was dead."  Maria stared at me with all the hate she could muster in her eyes.

Johnny patted her hand as he drove.  "He was.  I would have pulled him out but no one could survive a crash like that, and anyway you saw it blow."  He put his hand back on the steering wheel. “I brought you this far.  Least I can do is drop you at the ranch.  That is where you’re heading?"

"Yeah, yeah that's where Pa'll be."  I looked at Maria and talked to her in my head.  I said - Talk to me please I can’t bear it when you don’t talk to me.  She looked straight at me as if I'd said the words out loud.

"I'm scared of getting married that’s all."  She looked away, through the windscreen again and I decided not to say anything until we were on our own again.  I thought that, considering everything, it must be something more than just getting hitched. 

Johnny stopped at the gate and we all got out.  Maria stared at the curl of dirt winding round to the barns. 

"You'll be alright," he asked.

"Sure.  We’ll be fine.  You get going,” I said.

“I would have pulled him out, only...”

"He's dead now."  I glanced round at Maria. "I'm getting kind of used to having folks die on me.  You ain’t planning on dying are you?"

Johnny held his arms out to me and I clung onto him like that was exactly what he was going to do the minute I let go of him.

"No. I’m not planning on dying right now."  He let go of me and I thought my heart would stop.  I wiped a tear from my eye as he got back in the truck.

"Good," I said.  He turned the truck and drove off down the dusty track and I wondered if I'd ever see him again. 

"Why d'you think your Pa'd be here," asked Maria.  She was standing by the gate. I thought maybe I didn’t really know her anymore.  That the thing with Johnny and then the Ford and Troy had changed everything.  Still, I could tell she was trying to get along with me despite it all. We jumped the gate and waited for any dogs that might be around to come running but there were none so we just went right on up to the first barn and round the corner.

"I don't know," I said. "Seems like this is the only place he's got left to run."

"But if he doesn’t even own it anymore... who’s going to welcome him back?"

I shrugged.  It was anyone’s guess.  I just knew that this was the only place Pa had to run.  If the folks here hadn’t given him a job well then maybe they knew where he was.

"I'm counting on him having passed through at least," I said, hoping like hell that my hunch was right. 

The ranch house was set against a gentle hillside and when I'd been a child I'd always thought how nice it was to have a home that looked like it came out of a picture book.  Well that was what it looked like to me.  Four windows out front upstairs and downstairs and in the middle the door, which we never used, leading into the hall.  Grandpa had laid the front to lawn with rose bushes in neat rows down the sides.  Moma thought it was a might too fanciful for a working ranch and all but Grandpa took great pride in his 'little piece of heaven on earth' as he used to call it.  Now, as Maria Running-Wind and I rounded the corner on the barn, I could tell that something was sorely wrong.  The roses, which even after Grandpa had died went right on blooming, had withered so that the only shoots with any life in them were giant suckers, which wove across the grass in tangles. 

"Oh."  I stopped in my tracks and Maria held my arm.  "It's empty."  It sure was. The roof had holes in where shingles had come off and every one of the windows had been smashed.  My home.  The only one that I had been really happy in and now it was a ruin.  It seemed right then that this was what my life was going to be like for the rest of my days.  One disappointment after another.  Everyone and everything I had ever cherished taken from me or destroyed.  I let Maria drag me round back to the kitchen.  The door was broken on its hinges but someone had tried to repair it recently.

"I can't believe it," I said stepping in through the door I had so often run out of as a kid.  The kitchen was full of dust.  That’s the thing I mostly remember - dust.  There was dust in the sink and dust on the shelves and dust over the table and the range that Moma used to keep hot as anything, even though we had a brand new stove.  Yeah there was even dust on that.  It was like some huge wind had blown the entire prairie west and left it in our kitchen.

"Well he ain’t here that’s for sure," said Maria.

"How d'you know? Do you know?  He could be here.  He could be."  I wasn’t going to give up now.  Our feet had left prints where we’d walked round and round the kitchen staring at all the things I'd known before, and mixed up in those prints, mine and Maria Running-Wind's, were another set. Big footprints, dusty big footprints.

"Look!"  I pointed at the footprints.  The soles had diamonds cut into them. "They go down the hall."  Maybe he was here after all.  Maybe Pa had come home.

We followed the prints but they faded into dusty little marks on the hall carpet. Still at least I knew we weren't alone.  Then a terrible thought struck me.  We were standing under the picture of Great Uncle Billy in the hall and Maria had just turned and was looking at him when I said,  "What if Troy had already been here and Pa's dead already?"  Hell, I had gone crazy.  He couldn’t have been here already and now he wasn’t ever likely to be because he was blown into a million little pieces out on the highway.

"We shouldn’t be here," was all Maria said. She looked from me to the picture and I knew she felt it, whatever it was that had always made Moma shudder about Great Uncle Billy.  I was about to say that it was a miracle that the picture was still hanging there at all when the footprint maker stepped out of Grandpa's study. 

"Chester!"  I cried.

"I knew you'd come. After your Pa turned up I knew it’d only be a matter of time before you came too."

16 home

"Well now.  When your Grandpa was a boy he had a brother."

"Great Uncle Billy,” I said.

"Billy.  Well Billy was a hard man, and when he was a boy him and your Grandpa would fight like two roosters after the same chicken.  They grew up fighting each other and there wasn’t no man could stop 'em, not even their father, your Great Grandpa."

We were standing in what used to be my grandpa’s study.  It was the only place I wasn’t allowed to go in as a kid and I would often as not stand outside the door and wonder what in hell’s name Grandpa got up to in there.  Once I was there when he came out sudden like and he gave me such a fright I could have jumped a million miles out of my skin.  He looked real mean at me and then ordered me go wash my hands.  He was always telling me to wash my hands.  He could tell me to wash my hands in ten different languages could Grandpa, but he always came out with the same 'Hrmph' at the end of the sentence.  I don’t rightly know what it was about having clean hands that got him going, 'cept that sometimes he would say that cleanliness was next to Godliness, and I always did wonder if that meant that God was only partial to clean folk and that those that had dirty hands were destined to burn in hell.  For a while I stopped washing my hands so I could see what would happen.  Nothing did, but Moma got real mean about me fingering the napkins. 

Anyway here we were standing in grandpa’s old study, only the windows were out and last year’s leaves had blown in covering the desk and floor.  The only time I ever got to see the inside of grandpa’s study and it was just like all the other rooms in the house.  The place was falling down around our ears.

Seems Chester had seen us coming.  He spent deal of time up at the old place, on account of the ghosts that followed him around he said.  He told us that after the family had left he took a room in his sister’s house, but then she went and died on him and he couldn’t abide rattling around in her house on his own.  He didn’t have any other family, so he’d taken to sleeping in the bunkhouse here at the ranch.  He still did odd jobs around town but mostly he was too old to do much but scare off the kids when they came by to party.  Chester said Pa hadn’t sold the ranch at all but that it had been repossessed by the bank, whatever that meant.  I always thought it was grandpa’s and then Pa's to do whatever they wanted with but Chester said no, it belonged to the bank and when Pa couldn’t keep up the payments they’d sent a man round to get us out.   That was how we came to go to New Mexico.  Pa was working the railroad but quick as he could earn the money and send it home Moma would spend it on he didn’t know what but he could guess.  Chester wasn’t kind about Moma and he said he was sorry but that that was the way he felt about her then and the way he felt now.  I told him it was okay because she had passed on anyway, and Maria Running-Wind crossed herself.  I remembered I hadn’t exactly told her that story yet but then Chester started in on his tale telling again and there was no time to go into it.

"Well anyway," said Chester.  "It's all the fault of that bastard out there on the wall."  He pointed out of the study door and Maria and I turned and followed his finger. Great Uncle Billy was grinning at us from his dusty photo.

What’d he do,” I asked. 

"Wasn't so much what he did as what he caused," said Chester. He leant forward to me, secretive like. "Bad feelings, that's what he caused.  See he was the oldest. Your Grandpa Ray was three years younger 'an Billy and Billy could whop him real good."  Chester slapped his knees and laughed like he was there when it happened. 

"I seen 'em once, well that’s getting off the point and I wasn’t nothin' more 'an a kid myself then.  Anyways time came when your Great Grandpa upped and died, Lord rest his soul, and your Great Uncle Billy there, well he inherits the ranch.  He always was a cussed individual and he hadn’t found anyone would have him for a husband.  Now your Grandpa, well he wanted to get hitched to Rose Hollister."

"Grandma."

"Your Grandma. Only thing was he didn’t have a darned thing to offer 'cepting himself.  Well Ray, he was a little more than twenty years old and he hadn’t had a chance to find out who he was before his own Pa had died and left him without a cent in the world.  Now here was his own brother inheriting every inch of land they’d both been brought up on.  And what’s more he was gloating, gloating over it.  So what you think he gone and done?"  Chester looked from Maria's face to mine.

"Dunno," I said. "What?"

"He makes a plan.  That’s what he does.  He makes a plan to get the ranch for himself.  Come on I'll show you."  Chester led us out of the study, down the hall again and through the kitchen.  "You got to follow all this now."  We stood out back looking to the hills in the distance where Chester was pointing.

"That's where you’ll find your Pa.  Out in them hills."

I stared kind of blank. "What about Grandpa?"

"Why he’s dead child" said Chester in amazement.

"No, the story.  You said you’d show us what happened."

"Sure and I will, I will.  But you got to know that right now, where we’re going, your Pa's out there already and he might not be too pleased to see us."

"You aren’t making any sense," I said.  He just smiled and started to walk out across the corral, expecting us to follow him.  For a minute I was in two minds. Maria had already started after him and she turned round to me.

"Aren't you coming," she asked.

"I guess." But I didn’t move.

"What?"  She came back to me.  Chester was out of sight already.  For an old man he sure could walk fast.

"Pa's there.  He said so."

"And?"

"And I'm scared of Pa right now."

"Don't you trust Chester?"

"Sure."

"Then what?"

"Somehow it all comes down to this.  The ground we’re walking on.  There’s bad blood runs through this family and it has to do with Great Uncle Billy and Grandpa and Pa.  Hell Maria there’s only me and him left now and whatever it is that’s eating at him, well maybe it’s eating at me as well.  Maybe that’s why everything’s gone wrong the way it has."

"Seems like you came all this way to find something and now you don’t want to."

"It's not that."

"What then?"  We started to walk slowly after Chester.

“I was happy here.  I never wanted to leave but I was too young to have much of a say in anything.  Now it seems I’ve ended up back here again, only it isn’t the same as it was, and Moma's dead and I never even knew her, not really."

"I don't think we ever really know anyone, no matter how close we think we are to them," said Maria.

"I wasn't close to my Moma, only I thought I knew her and I didn't.  I thought she was one thing and she turned out to be another and maybe that’s how it is with Pa too and it scares me."

"Come on, come on," Chester shouted from way up ahead.  "We got a way to go you know."   He waited while we caught up with him.

"Did you know you're being followed," he asked us.  He cocked an eye at the ranch house behind us, scanning it for someone.  "He ain't here now but he’s been out here a couple of times.  I watched him you see.  Ain’t much gets past old Chester Pinkney."

"Was it a silver car?"  I was scared now.  We blew that car up but he’d seen it, Chester had seen it, so it must’ve been before that happened.  So it was true, I had been followed all the way from New Mexico by Troy Brewster.

"It was Troy," I said and took a long look sideways at Maria Running-Wind.  She never showed her feelings about the situation so I let it drop.

"That who's following you," asked Chester.

"Where are we going,” I asked him, ignoring his question.

"Hell child you spent most of your time there when you was a kid.  Never understood why.  Place always gave me the creeps."

"Shorty's Gulch!"

"Yep. Shorty's Gulch.  That’s where it all started and that’s where it’ll all end," and he took off.  It was all Maria and I could do to keep up with him.  He had a pace on him like he was riding the finest stallion you’d ever laid eyes on.   But I didn’t need anyone to show me the way to Shorty's Gulch.  Hell, I even knew short cut, but I didn’t want to get there ahead of Chester and find Pa all on his own and as mean as hell, so we kept behind Chester until we reached the ridge.

We stood on the precipice looking down into the gulch and I was going to take the track down the side when Chester put out his hand and pulled me back.

"Whoa there girl.  He’s down there now and you’ll only rile him something terrible if'n you go disturbing him."

"Does he mean your Pa?" whispered Maria.

I shrugged.  "Guess so."

"So this is where it all happened back then.  Back when your Grandpa wanted to get his hands on the ranch."  Chester sat down on a rock and looked out over Shorty's Gulch.  "Yes Ma'am, this is where it happened and I reckon I can tell you now, 'cos my time's almost up and one way or another this has got to be settled."  There were tears in Chester's eyes.  He wiped them away with the back of his hand.

"You see," he said.  "Your Grandpa Ray was filled with a powerful mean spirit and he had planned to kill your Great Uncle Billy somehow.  But Billy, well he was even meaner than Ray, and he knew that one way or another Ray would try and get him out of the way.  Right from the very day their father passed away, Lord rest his soul, right from that time Billy knew.  He knew that the two of them couldn’t go on living on the same ranch, and he had it in mind to drive your Grandpa off the land.  As far as he could see there wasn’t no reason for him to be there anymore."

Maria Running-Wind and I sat down next to Chester and I kicked some stones over the edge and watched them clatter to the bottom of the gulch.  I wondered if the things I had left down there on the day before we left the ranch were still there.

"Ray was already engaged to be wed.  Rose Hollister was a fine looking woman but they couldn’t do the deed until your Grandpa had someplace for them to live.   Rose was holding out on him see.  Wasn’t just that she wanted a house to live in.  She wanted to be sure that your Grandpa would do anything for her afore she, well afore she gave it away, if you catch my drift.  So, while Ray was still figuring out how to get rid of Billy your Grandma was figuring a way of getting a hold of the ranch for herself."   Chester took out a tin of baccy and rolled himself a cigarette like I'd seen him do many times before.  A bird cawed in the sky and I covered my eyes and tried to catch sight of it, but all there was up there was blue, blue sky - all the way to heaven.

"Your Grandma was a canny old women.  She knew the boys hated each other and she knew just exactly how to get what she wanted. One night she came a calling.  Now Ray, he’d gone off into town drinking.  Rose came calling and she threw herself at Billy.  She told him he was the one she wanted.  She made a real meal off it and Billy fell for it.  Hell, a man will always fall for a pretty woman if'n it's laid out on the table.  Well you can guess what happened next."  Chester grinned as us both.  I could tell he was enjoying telling this particular part of the tale and I wondered what part he’d played in it. 

"Your Grandpa he came home and found the two of  'em at it, or at least almost, and he was mighty sore as you can guess.  He went for Billy with his bare hands, but Billy always was the bigger of the two and he knocked your Grandpa out cold.  Rose was hollering fit to bust that they got to do something and that they couldn’t just leave him there out cold on the floor, what’d happen when he came round?  So Billy saddled up his horse, old Rattler, dead afore you were born, and he threw Ray over the saddle and rode him all the way up here, meaning to throw him over the edge and have done with the feud once and for all.  Only your Grandpa had come round by the time they got here and he was ready for Billy.  Just as Billy was about to manhandle him over the edge your Grandpa twisted out of his grip and.... well that was it for Billy.  He went down and hit the bottom and he never got up again. We buried him where he fell and your Grandpa married Rose Hollister, your Grandma, the following spring.  Silenced her good and proper telling her if'n she ever said anything to anyone she’d go the same way.  Hell she wasn’t going to say anything anyway 'cos she got what she wanted, which was the ranch."

"You said you and Grandpa buried Billy?"

"Yup.  Buried down there and I haven’t never stepped foot down there since. 'Cepting once.  I almost did that night you stayed out.  Only I didn't have to 'cos you'd already made up your mind to go home."

"How come," I asked.  "How come you were here when Grandpa killed Billy?"

"Hell child I worked for this family since I was fourteen.  I was currying the horses when Billy came and saddled up.  Wasn’t no more than your age when it happened but your Grandpa, well he knew he could count on me to keep my mouth shut."

"Why," asked Maria.

“My own Pa had worked this ranch.  We were loyal to the Arnolds no matter which one it was lived in the big house.  Yes sir.  You could count on Pickneys in a crisis."

"Couldn't you just."  

The voice came out of the blue and over the ridge.  Pa stood there in the glare of the late morning sun.  He looked old and dirty and not the same as I remembered him.  His eyes were sunk into his head and his stomach was caved in like he hadn’t eaten anything in weeks.  I jumped up and then sat down again.  Didn’t seem like there was much point in making a scene.  Seemed like the scene was going to make itself without my help.

"Fine family you got yourself," Pa growled at me. 

"It was time Billy-Ray.  It was time she knew," said Chester.

"They named you after him didn’t they?"  I stared at my Pa with my jaw set and my eyes all squinty.  "What you run away for?  I was always coming home."

"Wasn't nothin' to stay for.  Ain’t nothin' here either.  I thought it would be the same you know?  Only it’s all different, all changed.  I’m sorry.  I’m truly sorry Cherry."  He stood there on the edge of the precipice and stretched out his arms to me like he was ready to take me back into the family and I stood up all prepared to let him, and was about to walk to him and take his hand, when the shot rang out.  Pa toppled over the edge of the ridge and fell like a rag doll to the bottom of Shorty's Gulch.  I ran to the edge and stared over but he was already dead, his blood spread across the rocks at the bottom where I used to play. 

Now I knew where that old bone came from.  It was Great Uncle Billy.  Or part of him at least.  I shuddered and the life force left me for a moment.  I was sailing out on a thermal with the birds.  I thought I saw Pa's soul rise but when I tried to reach out to it, wishing it would take me too, it faded, like morning mist over the mountains.

Chester took off over the grass after the unseen gunman but he didn’t ever catch him.  As fast as Chester was, the gunman, whoever he was, was faster.  I reached the bottom of the gulch by slipping and sliding all the way down the side of the track that led to the bottom.  I couldn’t get there fast enough.  I thought that maybe Pa would still be alive and that I could save him, but I knew he wasn’t.  I knew from the moment he spun off the top that this was the end of my Pa.   He went the same way as his namesake and in the end it seemed only right.

Pa was a bloody mess and no mistake.  His head was split and I stared for a long time, looking at the way the gore made patterns in the dirt and wondering if this was all there was in the end, if there was maybe no heaven or hell at all, just a sudden silence.  I could see the way Pa had toppled and it was like a film running over and over in my head.  One minute he was there, sorry for the things we had all done and the next - BANG - he was falling into space.  I tried to make it so that the film of Pa's death had angels in it catching him and carrying him to heaven but it wouldn’t work.  Every time I reran the picture he fell to the bottom of Shorty's Gulch to join Shorty and Billy both, in a heaven or hell of their own making. 

There wasn’t anything could be done now to rescue my family's sad past.  Chester went to get the cops and I sat by Pa's body waiting for them to show.   The gulch was just the same as I remembered it, right down to the ants marching across the dirt.  I watched them for a long time without really thinking about anything.  Tears streamed down my face, but I couldn’t feel them.  I only knew that I had no family any more and, for all that they weren’t the family that I wanted, they were the only family I had.  It gets so's you make the best of a bad job.  After a while Maria pulled me away and I let her guide me out of the gulch.

We waited in the ranch house while the cops did their thing.  Chester was out showing them where it had happened and Maria and I sat in the dusty kitchen waiting for all hell to break loose.  There wasn’t anything could be done now.  It was all over.  It had always been only a matter of time before the cops caught up with me and now it seemed like that had happened.  Maria was as good to me as she’d always been but I could tell that she didn’t feel comfortable around me anymore.  It was like I was hexed or something.

"Why don’t you take off?"  I told her.  "Go home.  They got two witnesses, what with me and Chester.  You could go home and get married."  That was another thing that was eating at my craw; Maria getting hitched.  I thought my friendship with her had run out of uses.

"It'll be alright, you see," she said.

"It's okay for you to say that.  You haven’t been through the stuff I have." 

"You're strong Cherry."

"I'm fucking tired.  I'm so fucking tired of all this dying.  Everywhere I go someone dies.  You better get out before it happens to you too."

"Do you want to know what I think?"  Maria was stood over me and I could hear the sirens outside so I knew that the ambulance was off down the track with Pa's body and that the cops would be back here real soon to question me.

"You're going to tell me anyway."

"I think you're going to come home with me and start over.  I think the cops will buy it if you don’t let your mouth get the better of your brain."  I thought on her words and was still thinking about them when a state trooper walked in.  He was fat and forty and looked like he’d had all the dead bodies he could handle for one day.

"We'll need you to make a statement."

"Sure," I said.

"You too miss," he nodded at Maria.

"You got any idea who could have done it?"  He fingered his gun in its holster.

"No."  I shook my head.  Troy was dead, so it couldn’t have been him and there wasn’t any point in saying more.

"Righto.  Like I said if you could drop by and make that statement I'd be mighty obliged.  Be seeing you ladies," and he cocked his hat and left.  I let out a sigh of relief.

“I wish I knew if Troy had died in that wreck.  I wish Johnny had gone to see.  I wish I could tell them who shot Pa... But I can’t...  I don’t know.  I thought for a moment it was Troy.  I thought it must be.  But...”

“And think on it Cherry.  If you had've told them what happened out on the road, the entire story would have gotten out and then where’d you be?" 

She was right, she was always right.  Tell them about Troy and the Ford and like as not I'd be the one they’d throw in jail.  I had to keep my mouth shut for now.  I had to figure out a way of finding out if Troy Brewster was really dead or, if by some miracle, he had escaped the wreck and was still gunning for me.  He had caused more trouble in my family than anything I could have dreamt up on my own.  I sure did hate Troy fucking Brewster.  God I really did, and even if he was dead, he wasn’t buried yet.

We said goodbye to Chester at the ranch and wished him well.  He looked real cut up, like the life had been knocked out of him.  I knew he didn't have much time left on this earth, because he told me he had cancer and was only going on borrowed time now, so I told him not to worry, that all the folks he had ever known were waiting for him in the afterlife.  I’m not sure he believed me and I’m not sure I believed it either anymore, but I felt better for saying it.  Seemed like I'd had just one death too many to cope with recently.

Right around four in the afternoon Maria and I walked into the station house and gave our statements.  I was expecting an interrogation but all they did was ask me if Pa had any enemies, and I told them probably lots, but none that I could think of right then.  The guy asking the questions looked as if this kind of thing happened every day and he really couldn’t be bothered with it all.  I never did catch his name.  My statement wasn’t anything much but I gave the facts plain as I saw them.  Told them we could be reached at Maria's Moma's and that they could bury Pa any place they wanted, but probably next to his family in the town cemetery was a good idea.  I didn’t want to be there when it happened, and anyway Maria wanted to get back and she wasn’t going anywhere without me.   As for me, I wanted to put everything behind me and make a new life, so going back with Maria seemed like the right thing to do.  She was due to get married and I had to make it up to her somehow.  I had to find a way to say sorry for what had happened.  Only thing was I didn’t know if I could.  It didn’t feel like there was a lot of feeling left inside me anymore.

17 home

We caught the bus home right after we'd given our statements. I slept most of the way, but when we passed the place that Troy had lost his life Maria Running-Wind nudged me awake and we both stared at the blackened remains of the car. 

"No way could anyone have survived that,” I said, more to convince myself than make Maria feel better about Johnny not dragging Troy from the wreckage.

"No I suppose not."

I pressed my face to the bus window as the wreck disappeared from sight.  I was almost sure that Troy must be dead, but who was it had shot Pa? Who wanted him dead?  Something was eating at me, telling me that, even though the burnt out remains of the Ford were there for all to see, that evil bastard Troy had gotten away with his life after all.  I sank back into my seat and closed my eyes.  I wanted God to make everything right again but I wasn’t sure that I believed in Him anymore and, if that was the case, what was I going to do?

We had to change buses at Taos and Maria Running-Wind made a call to her Moma from a payphone while we waited.  The depot was full of tourists and I felt out of place.  They all looked so happy.  What did they have to worry about?  I felt incredibly tired of life right then.  It was like all those smiling faces, all those fucking holidaymakers, had no right to invade my unhappiness with their tans and sun-bleached hair.  I scowled at them until Maria finished her call and then we sat on a bench in the shade of a tree and waited for the bus to come.  I had no more energy left for anything other than just sitting there and letting life sweep over me.  I think I must’ve looked like a bum or something.  I sure did feel like one. 

We reached the Pueblo as the sun was setting and I hoped than the sheriff wasn’t going to be waiting for me on Maria's doorstep, but I didn’t need to worry.  Maria's Moma welcomed me back like I was her own long lost child.  I noticed that Maria's father wasn’t anyplace to be seen, but I didn’t give it much thought because it was all I could do to stay awake long enough to say "Hi".  I fell asleep in the bed they had put me in once before, centuries ago, the first time I had hitched a ride with Johnny Hope.

I dreamt some terrible dreams that night; dreams that keep coming back to me even now.  It was like all the acid trips I had ever had, and was ever likely to have, had flashbacks at once.  In my dreams there were monsters that rose up from the bowels of the earth and ran through my old home, belching fire at me as they dragged my mortal remains after them.  I was falling into a huge hole and I couldn’t see the bottom for the hands that were stretched out to catch me; huge clawed hands that I was trying to get away from, at the same time as falling towards them.  Then I was drifting in a place that had no sound and no colour, only blackness all around.  It should have been peaceful, only it wasn’t.  It felt like all my nightmares had come at once and cancelled each other out so that there was just this terrible silent nothingness that hurt all the more for being so desolate.  The worst part was that in my sleep, I knew that this was what it was like to die.  There was no God in that place.  It wasn’t heaven or hell it was just emptiness.  I wanted to escape.  I wanted to see something, anything, except this black hollow hole in the earth that was filled up with... yeah that’s it!  It was filled up with the lost souls of all those people in my life who had left me, but most of all it was full of the child I had lost.  My own sweet dead baby.  I think I cried, but I can’t say because dreams have rules of their own, especially when they’re nightmares, and if you were to ask me if I knew the difference right then between a dream and reality I wouldn’t have been able to tell you.  I woke up and I still thought I was dreaming and I climbed out of that bed in the earth colored house and I looked out on the Pueblo sleeping all around me and I hoped like hell that I was going to wake up soon, because if I didn’t I couldn’t say I was sane anymore.

The morning came slowly and then there were other mornings and soon I had spent more than four days at Maria's house without ever having a visit from the sheriff, and I started to get nervy about what was going on, and saying that I had to get out before anyone came looking.  I heard Arabella and Maria arguing about what they were going to do with me and I think Maria won out because she asked me to be her matron-of-honour.  Her wedding was two days away and they had been preparing for it when they got the call from Johnny Hope that I was back in town.  That reminded me that I hadn’t seen or heard anything of him since I had gotten back.  Hell, there hadn’t really been any chance for me to catch up on the news because Arabella and Maria guarded me like I was something real special.  To tell you the truth it was getting me down.  I had to have some time to myself. 

On the fifth day I slipped out back and went looking for Johnny Hope.  I hoped he was back from Denver, but I thought that if he wasn’t maybe that was why he hadn’t come by to check me out.  I felt for sure that if he knew I was here he would have called by now, although something also told me that if he was back he was avoiding me.  I didn’t know where he lived and I wasn’t about to go asking anyone, although I didn’t need to worry none.  Not one person, 'cepting maybe the local sheriff, would have turned me in to the state police.  I even had my doubts about the sheriff seeing as he was so close to Maria's family.  Hell, they were all close to Maria's family.  It made it seem like everyone was related to everyone else, and I think they probably were, though I never asked because it didn’t seem polite to go inquiring about people’s kinship.

I walked the dusty paths between the houses, which were cut high into the hillside and others like they had just grown up out of the ground.  Everything was so much the same color of earth that it was hard to say what had been made by man and what had always been there, like trees or rocks.  This place comforted me; made me feel better about myself.  In this adobe homeland there were literally hundreds of empty houses, places no one had lived in for hundreds of years.  The whole place didn’t have more than two hundred folks living in it and the empty houses; well they were dissolving back into the dust, along with the ghosts that still lived inside each of them.  I wandered through those silent walls that only housed gophers and snakes, ants and bugs, and all the spirits of the dead Indians, and I felt peaceful and rested.  Even though it seemed like I had found somewhere I could feel safe at last I knew that this meant it was time to move on.  These weren’t my people.  I didn’t have a home anymore.  What I had was a dream.  I had always had a dream to go to Florida.  Find the beach; see the sea.  That was always the dream.  Right from the start that was what I had wanted. All this shit about Troy and getting married.  All this had confused it.  All this had turned the dream into a nightmare.  I decided I would stay for the wedding and right after I would go to Florida and start a whole new life for myself.  After all Maria Running-Wind didn’t need me anymore, although I knew she would always be my very best friend in the entire world.

Maybe I got lost in that underworld of Indians souls.  I only know I came out a changed person.  Changed because I knew that if anyone turned me in now I would go willingly and suffer the consequences.  I had the dream to hold onto and Florida wasn’t going anyplace.  Unless, that is, you count the Everglades slowly slipping out to sea and becoming Cuba on the way.  My geography was a little shaky on account of my schooling having stopped right about the time I got pregnant.

Another thing; I gave up on Johnny Hope.  He was married.  I didn’t want any of that anymore.  I didn’t want a middle aged married man with kids.  I didn’t want some man's wife hating me for fucking up her marriage.  I didn’t want to see her kids screwed up by the mess I would cause when their father walked out on them.  I gave up on Johnny Hope and any idea I might have had that someone could replace the father I'd never really had.  I thought I'd try just be the person I was and kind of let growing up take over, because it didn’t seem like I'd had a childhood before I was trying to be a woman, and if I was a woman why did I still look like a kid?

All this went through my head as I tried to find my way out of the maze of broken down Pueblo houses back to Maria Running-Wind's.  All this and then I had to go bumping into Johnny Hope after all.  He was parking his truck as I came out of a doorway onto the road.  He waved and got out of the truck, running over to me as I turned away from him.  He caught me by the arm.

“I heard what happened.  You’re okay then?”

"Sure."

"I was worried about you."  He let go of my arm and I scuffed the dirt.  I sure still felt like I wanted him, but I had made up my mind and that was that.

"I got to go," I said.

"Okay." I walked away from him.  Oh fuck. It was the hardest thing I have ever done, but what a sense of freedom it gave me; to be able to walk away from my desires and not pay them any mind.

Johnny Hope called after me.  "You going to Maria's wedding?"

I didn’t say anything.  I knew he would understand.  It was hard for me right then, but I was doing the right thing.  I had turned a corner and there wasn’t any going back now.

18 home

I hadn’t known what to expect of Maria's wedding.  I wasn’t part of the life she led at the Pueblo.  I was part of the life she had had at school.  I was part of the life she had in town, but since Jane Bright-Sun had died, and I had gone off the rails, I hadn’t been part of that either.  I wasn’t part of anything much anymore and my folks dying had just sharpened that up for me, so that now all I could think of was what next for me? 

I didn’t think Maria's wedding would be like it was - all white dress and flowers and a Priest and everything.  I didn’t think I would be dressed in pink lace with shoes that pinched my toes and my hair all curls so that I must’ve looked like something out of Vogue.  I thought it would be an Indian thing, you know?  I thought it would be wearing beads and feathers and dancing in the dirt, but hey, what did I know?  It would be all these things later, but right now it was a regular wedding and it made me realise that no way was my marriage meant to work.  I had wanted this, all this, and all I had gotten was a broken heart.  It had started with me meeting Troy Brewster and thinking I could make a difference to his life, and my own too.  Nothing I had learnt up 'til then had prepared me for what I had been through.  I just hoped that Maria was better prepared for married life than I had been, though I have to say I hadn’t had that much of a married life, and my own Moma and Pa's wasn’t anything to go setting up as an example.

I remember the sun was shining through the windows so that the inside of the Church looked like it had been sliced into pieces.  I remember the folks all wearing their best clothes and filling the pews until there wasn’t any more room and they had to stand up at the back.  I remember that every one of them was an Indian 'cept for me and the Priest.  I remember Maria floated down the aisle in a white dress that Arabella must've been sewing for weeks, and I remember wanting to cry for the beauty of it all and for Maria Running-Wind's happiness.  I stood behind Maria and for the first time in my life I felt proud to be part of something that was meant to be.  For sure Maria's marriage was meant to be.  For sure this Chris Rodriguez guy she was marrying had to be one of the good ones.  I said my prayers as I stood there, not really listening to the Priest, or to anything else that was going on; just soaking up the atmosphere and saying prayers of my own, saying to God that I hoped Maria would find happiness with this man.  

I saw Chris Rodriguez put the ring on Maria's finger and I saw the love they had for each other rise above the congregation and spread, like the wings of angels, over everyone in the building.  God's spirit shone down on us all and I felt as if I had been forgiven for all the bad things I had done and for all the terrible things I had seen.  Maria turned to smile at me and took my hand in her own, clutching it tight as if to say "everything's going to be fine now" but, as she did this, the look on her face turned from happiness to fear. 

"What?"  I whispered and I turned to follow her gaze down the aisle.  It was then that I realised that the whole place was as silent as a graveyard because at the back of the Church stood Troy.  He had a gun in his hand and he was pointing it straight at me.  Suddenly everyone started to scream at once.  It was really weird - from silence to a roar in seconds!  Troy waved the gun from side-to-side as he came closer to me.  No one dare make a move to stop him, but I saw Johnny Hope at the back step out of the crowd and block Troy's path out.  Troy grabbed me by the arm and yanked me to him pressing the gun up under my chin so as my head was twisted backwards. 

"Make it slow,” he said to me and he started to walk back down the aisle, only this time backwards, all the time glancing round and watching for someone to do something stupid like try and rescue me.  I couldn’t do anything else but go with him.  It wasn’t any use trying to fight it.

I saw Maria standing at the alter, next to Chris Rodriguez, and she had tears in her eyes and I think she thought that this was it and that I was going to die now.  I have to say that it crossed my mind that God hadn’t forgiven me at all, that here was divine retribution, delivered up in the shape of one Troy Brewster, fresh from the jaws of death.  I thought that maybe Johnny Hope would stop Troy on the way out, but Troy didn’t give him the chance.  He shoved the gun up under my chin still further and I looked wild-eyed at Johnny, scared that my time was up.  I guess Johnny Hope saw my fear and decided not to do anything because the next thing I knew we were out in the street and Troy kicked the door shut behind him.  He had a car parked out front and he pushed me in and drove like a madman away from the Church.  I only know I was sweating like a pig with the fear of it all and I wondered why he was doing this to me.  What had I ever really done to him?  Oh sure I'd tried to poison him and failed but then I'd said my apology to him.  I'd tried to make it up to him.  I guess Mabeleen was right when she said he would be gunning for me and I thought that here was another person that I thought I'd known and it turned out that I didn't. 

Troy must’ve known that it wouldn’t be long before all hell broke loose and the cops too.  I didn’t know where he thought he was going but he sure was going there fast.

I bit my lip. "I thought you was dead."

"You was wrong."

"You won’t get away with this."

"You want a bet?"

I could hear the sirens in the background now and I hoped that the cops reached us before we rolled the car and ended up a bloody mess.

"You killed Pa didn't you?  It was you out on the range wasn’t it?"  We screeched past a dog dumping its load in the street.  The dog leapt a million miles up in the air and I think the shit came out of its ass faster than a bullet out of a gun.

"It was meant for you."

"How'd you escape from the crash?"

"Jumped clear before it rolled.  You thought you had me licked but you was wrong.  Now it’s your turn."

I couldn’t believe this.  After all I'd been through.  "Why didn't you just do it there and then, back in the Church?"

"What, in front of witnesses?"

I made a lunge for the gun.  It was lying across his lap.  All the time I'd been in the car I'd eyed the gun and he didn’t seem to notice, but now, now that I was within a hair’s breath of grabbing it, he took one hand off the steering wheel and grabbed my arm, twisting back, away from the gun.  At the same time I saw the corner of a house looming up in front of us and I started to say the Lord's Prayer in my head over and over so that the words got all confused.  Troy fought with the steering wheel single-handed, still holding onto me so as I didn’t grab the gun.  I heard the siren wail and wail and I closed my eyes as the house came closer and then we were airborne, rolling round and round, my head hitting the roof and then my ass hitting the seat.  I felt Troy let go of me and the gun flew past my head and hit me on the back of the neck as I whiplashed back and forward.  Before I knew it we were upright again and the sirens were wailing so close that they sounded like they were on top of us.  Troy had blood running down his face but he tore at the door trying to get out and when he realised that it wasn’t going to open he tried to climb out of his window.

"You could have killed us both," I screamed at him.  I couldn’t feel my legs and I felt sick and scared.  I think it was about that point that I wet my pants.  I remember feeling it spread between my legs and it was a toss up between blood and piss and I chose piss because blood would have meant I was hurt.

"Shut the fuck up bitch."  Troy was trying to pries his body through the tiny window when my door opened and an arm reached in and pulled me out.  The cop steadied me as I fell against him.  My legs were wobbly and my head was spinning.  It was piss; I could smell it on me.

"You okay Miss?"  I just nodded and brushed my hair out of my eyes.

Troy was stuck half way in and halfway out of the car window.  A State Trooper had him covered.  Two of them pulled him from the car and frog-marched him across to the waiting patrol car.

Troy shouted back at me. "You get me out of this or I'll tell them all about you."

"Go ahead you bastard,” I screamed back at him, but I don’t think he heard me.  The cop shoved Troy's head down and pushed him into the car.

"What next?"  I tried to smile at the cop, as if this kind of thing happened to me all the time and it was no big deal, and, on the face of it, I guess it did happen all the time to me.

"You need a bath and clean clothes."

I looked down at the beautiful dress, covered in all kinds of shit and smelling worse than a urinal.

"Maybe I've got a few things I ought to own up to."

"Later," said the cop.  "Right now we get a doctor to check you over."  Jesus he was being real nice to me.  I wondered what was coming next.

The doctor said I was fit and handed me back to the cops.   They gave me someone else’s clothes to change into and I sat in this empty cold-looking room waiting for someone to some and talk to me and I wondered what exactly it was I was going to say to them.  Was I going to start at the beginning?  Was I going to tell them about the baby?  But hell they knew about that.  They could just as easily charge me with kidnapping the baby as they could Troy with murder.  Maybe they thought we were in it together, and I guess in a way we were.  Then I thought about Moma and the overdose and I thought that they had probably checked that one out too.  Then there was Pa.  Like as not they had already talked to the Colorado Police.  So all in all I was dead meat.  If I hadn’t meant to harm anyone there sure were an awful lot of folks been hurt anyway.

The room was quiet and so still.  There was just me and a table and chair and the two-way mirror and, as I sat there leaning on the table, I started to cry.  I felt all the pain, that had been locked away inside, come pouring out and I thought that if they were watching me now, through the two-way mirror, then I hoped that they could see from my tears that I was truly sorry for all the shit I had caused.

The door opened but I didn’t look up.  A woman cop stood next to me and offered me a tissue from a box and I took it.

"None of it was my fault.  Not really."  I looked up at her and I was pleading with her in my heart to forgive me, because no matter how hard I prayed God always came back at me with something else, so maybe it wasn’t God who had the power to forgive after all.  Maybe the feelings I'd had in the church were more to do with Maria's happiness than anything God had a hand in.

The cop sat on the edge of the table and held my hands.  "The mother dropped the charges when your father brought the baby in safe and sound.  So you don’t have anything to worry about.  You haven’t had for some time."

"I tried to..." I remembered what Maria Running-Wind had told me back at the ranchhouse.  She'd said not to let my mouth run ahead of my brain so I decided not to tell the lady cop about trying to kill Troy.  Instead I said:  "what'll happen to me?"

"Will you testify against this Troy Brewster?"

"He's my husband." I didn’t mean that I still felt anything for him.  Even I knew that a woman couldn’t testify against her own husband.

"He was already married."

"He told me he got a divorce."  It seemed like the last straw.

"You play ball with us and we’ll cut you a deal."

"For real?"

"For real."

That was how it was then.  All I had to do was tell them what they wanted to know about Troy and I was off the hook.   Seemed too easy to be true, but it was.  The weight of the world lifted off my shoulders and if anyone can say they have ever felt reborn in the moment then I can.

We partied that night - Maria Running-Wind, who was a married woman now, and Chris Rodriguez and all the folks that had been at the wedding.  We partied the way I always thought we should have - Indian style.  The Pueblo folk put on their fancy clothes - their beads and feathers and tanned skins - and the dancing and chanting carried on well into the night and then out the other side of dawn into next morning.  I drank myself stupid and sat listening to the chants and the stories and the laughter.  I watched the stars fade out and the blue sky start another day out on the mesa and I felt part of it all, like I had combined with everything and everyone in the world.  Then again it could just have been the booze. 

19 home

The folks at the Pueblo threw me a lifeline and I took it and hung on for dear life not bothering to look back.  They gave me my plane fare to Florida and enough money to start over.   I was grateful to them all; for sheltering me, for caring for me, but most of all for loving and believing in me when no one else did, certainly not my own family anyway.  I was sad to leave them all but a new life was beckoning to me and I am going to make the most of it.

Key West.

This is the end of the United States.  Out there somewhere is Cuba.  The sea.  The rest of the World, which is just so fucking big it’s hard to think about in one go and not get a headache.  Sometimes I just stand on the edge of the sea and watch the waves coming in and out and think how lucky I am to be part of something as beautiful as the earth.  I’m waiting tables in a bar'n grill for a couple, Sammy and Bette, and going to college.  I want to be a teacher, though I think I've got a long way to go.  It doesn’t matter any because I’ve got my head together now.  Some folks live for a lifetime and die all used up, never having had the chance to do what they want and some folks, well they live for their dreams, just like me, even though at times those dreams are nightmares.

Hey, and I got my nails done!

The End
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