“I thought you should know,” Janet said. “I thought maybe …”
Daddy-o did not stay to hear the rest. He rose from the table as if his body hurt. He walked to the door of the Dairy Queen as if the floor were made of ice. And then he got into his yellow van and drove away.
“He doesn’t seem that happy to me,” Janet said.
Mabel didn’t answer her. She closed her eyes and let herself float. Up over the table where she saw the white part in Janet’s black hair. Up through the red roof of the restaurant. Up over the winding road that led to the Happy Thicket Motor Lodge. She needed to see where Daddy-o was going, where Daddy-o had gone.
Up close, the spotted fawn on the Happy Thicket Motor Lodge sign was much bigger than Mabel had imagined. From the ground, it had looked like the size of a leaping squirrel, but in reality, it was as large as a prancing dairy cow, fashioned of painted metal and surrounded by a mass of neon tubes that flashed the deer’s three-part escape: before, during, after. It was nearly big enough for Mabel and Daddy-o to climb on and pretend to ride, rodeo-style. They’d been up on the sign since the Dairy Queen, standing side by side in silence and watching the sky go from light blue to dark blue.
Mabel finally spoke. “I didn’t write those notes.”
“But you feel that way,” Daddy-o said.
“Sometimes,” Mabel said. “Sometimes not.”
On the edge of the motor lodge’s sign, fifty feet up in the air or more, Daddy-o and Mabel held hands. The lights hummed like a colossal swarm of gnats and turned the two of them red, yellow, green. Red, yellow, green. Stop, think, go. Stop, think, go.
Below, Mabel could see a fire truck, two police cars, and an ambulance. The motel’s proprietor leaned against Daddy-o’s yellow van like he’d been waiting for this. The firefighters brought out a life net—it looked to Mabel like a large, dotted hoop, a giant dreamcatcher—which they hauled to the base of the sign. They squinted up in the night at Daddy-o and Mabel. Mabel thought she saw Janet in the gathering crowd. Daddy-o pointed out who he thought was Mabel’s mother.
“The girl should go first,” a fireman called through a megaphone. “First, the girl!”
Daddy-o winked at Mabel. His teeth shone bright as bathroom tiles. “Can you?” he asked. “Can you go first, Maybe Baby?”
Mabel nodded and beamed. She touched the hollow of her throat where the silver disk of Daddy-o’s necklace rested. “Can,” she said. “Can do!”
“Then show them,” Daddy-o said. “Show them how it’s done.”
Mabel squeezed her eyes shut. Then Mabel opened them wide. Then Mabel leapt off the sign, just like a deer, the deer, and out into the night, in three robotic flashes, scaling the smiling log to land in the night sky. “I can!” she called to Daddy-o. “I did!”
Mabel galloped through the cool black. Above where the trees, now sleeping, blushed with fall. Beneath where the clouds, now hiding, swelled with rain. Below, she could hear the crowd gasp, a fireman shout, a siren cry a single cry. She laughed until her cheeks shone with tears. And at one point, she looked back to see if Daddy-o would join her, out where nothing and no one could bring her down.
THE PUPIL
AFTER SCHOOL, TO escape my Uncle Drake and his collarbone jabs, I like to climb up on the roof of Mom’s and my straw-colored house with a fresh pack of Luckies and a cream soda. Where the crappy back porch juts out from our cracker box, there’s a small shingled ridge I can straddle like a bronco, slide my sneakers into the gutters like stirrups, and pretend to gallop my sorry self out of this place. Up on the roof, I get a wide view of the world I don’t understand anymore—where the dust-colored plains rush toward a sky that backs away, hands up, the same way Mom does, surrendering against the kitchen wall, when Drake has too much to drink and even more to say. Up here, I can see the desperation of the Oklahoma landscape, how it tries to offer up something worth looking at—just like the homely girls do in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven—but most of the time the sad view falls flat: a distant patch of houses that seem stuck into the earth by old television antennae, a wind-beaten stand of crippled cottonwoods, or that dark skid in the road, where the highway turns toward Enid. That charcoal line the rain won’t wash away; that mark I can touch with the tip of my cigarette, out there, where they found my dad’s motorcycle. A place about two hundred feet from where he landed.
Drake hasn’t caught on to the fact that I sit up here. Sometimes, when he comes out to the backyard to shoot starlings with his slingshot, I’m still on the roof, a phantom cowboy he can’t see. I can hear the things he says to himself: who owes him money, who’s worthless, where he’s gonna tell someone to go. He paces the yard, like he’s in a courtroom, his bald head, white and shiny with two lines of lavender stubble over each ear, as bold as a moonlit honeydew. From up here, I find out what he thinks of me: soft. And what he thought of my dad: softer.
Things were better before Drake came along with his dented suitcase and bottle of strawberry Boone’s looking for a place to shower and shit. Mom’s mouth didn’t stay all screwed up like a cat’s behind. She didn’t get short with me for leaving my Jockeys on the floor or for drinking straight from the carton. She brought me Butterfingers from the vending machine at work, did that little something with her bangs that looked fresh. Now she’s just sagging down like our gutters from her mooch of a brother and his wet-leaf attitude. He’s stocked our freezer with Stouffer’s, parked his truck on our pansy bed, put a big oily stain on the headrest of my dead father’s recliner.
At night, Drake watches Wheel of Fortune while Mom boils him a bag of creamed chipped beef. He picks his cuticles with a pocketknife and sits with his feet spread wide, his unlaced boots sticking out their leather tongues at me. I know he’s got something other than Wheel on his mind. Don’t think the irony that the show is really a glorified version of hangman is lost on me. My uncle can think of plenty of people he’d like to see strung up, from the hippies and the Commies to Carter. Personally, I think Drake’s in a cult. Not the kind that worries itself with comets or Kool-Aid or cornfields. The kind that sticks to the basics. The kind that thinks that God’ll only bless America when it’s as straight and white as a shower-curtain rod.
Mom says it’s good for a boy my age to have a man his age around our two-bit house. Says it’ll teach me the ins and outs of manhood. I say screw Drake. Don’t keep him around on account of my hairless dick. I’d be better off with a dog. That’s all I ever asked for anyway. And maybe some Saturdays at Radio Shack where I can use the remote-control cars without having to buy them.
Drake plays like he knows a lot. When we sit around the glasstop table, he puts his greasy hands all over where Mom Windexed and talks like it went out of style with his ex-wife’s rack. He yammers about interest rates and bass fishing and how Oklahoma has too many Cherokee and how to install a ceiling fan, which he has yet to do. He eats off Mom’s plate, wipes his face from forehead to chin with a paper towel at the end of the meal. He tells me what I need to do with my life, saves that for dessert. Over tapioca he gets bossy.
“See, what this boy needs, Eileen, is direction.”
“That’s right,” I say. “Direction outta town.”
Drake flicks my earlobe with his pudding spoon. “That’s what I’m getting at, Sis. Mickey here’ll smart-ass you straight to hell when you ain’t looking.”
So, Drake signs me up for some derelict day camp. Summer’s coming in. Leaves are shooting out like bright green fly-rod feathers on the tops of the trees. The asphalt smells as strong as moth balls by the bus stop. And by ten o’clock, it’s hot enough for me to start stinking ripe in algebra where I watch Joe Yutt watch Patricia Smurt and wish it was the other way around. Drake says once school’s out, I’ll be spending my time at the Bar None Ranch for Boys. Some dust patch ten miles out of town that specializes in fixing dopes that’ve gotten too big for their britches. He’s done the research, he tells Mom. There’ll be manual labor, farm animals to tend to, healthy competition.