“Pasties Cline?” she asks, back in the truck. She rattles one of my plastic cassette cases.
“Patsy,” I say. “You know, ‘Crazy’;”‘
She squints again at the label on the case. “Your handwriting’s terrible.” She turns and watches the warehouses in the dark. “So were you, like, born around here?”
“Out west. Oil country. Tumbleweeds and dust. Little town called Merkel.” I grin at her. “That’s the way Texans say ‘miracle.’”
For the first time she looks at me carefully in the yellow lights of my dash. I wonder if my curly hair’s out of whack, or if my mustache is springy. “You’re kidding me,” she says.
“Yes, I am.”
She straightens her skirt across her thighs. “Those men? Your friends? What are they going to do?”
“They’re going to get themselves in a passel of trouble,” I say. A tugboat engine coughs in the bay. I never use the word “passel”: another Texas tweak for Missy’s benefit, but it gets no rise from her. “The packers’ union they belong to is snapping up their dues, but it won’t let them govern themselves,” I explain. “Their president’s hopped into bed with the shippers, taking God knows what kind of perks. He’s lost touch, completely, with the rank and file.”
She studies me like someone just discovering she hates the wallpaper she’s hung.
“So Hughie and Joe are going to roust him out for a heart-to-heart tonight, and demand a bigger voice in choosing the board. I can’t imagine that’ll go over too well.” I turn north onto the Loop, toward Houston’s suburbs and Maisie’s neat little neighborhood, ringed by freshly painted wrought iron, blessed by the powers of Miracle-Gro, patrolled by squadrons of rent-a-cops hopped up on caffeine. By now, the freight docks with their cramped warehouses are shadows, slipping far behind us. “Trade unionism’s probably done for,” I say. I see I’ve lost her now.
She’s pulling rhythmically on her lips — a more thoughtful stroke than the diddling with her hair. “Maisie’s had to work late every night,” she says quietly, almost a pout, rubbing moisture off the windshield with her thumb. It’s a pretty thumb, I notice, smooth as a curtain rod. “There’s no food in the house. I’m thinking … I don’t know … we might as well stop and eat or something?”
By the road (we haven’t reached the suburbs yet), billboards advertise strip clubs, investment firms, pregnancy counseling. The signs are stolid and impressive, like the squared-off shoulders of the sleek Armani suits I’ve seen on corporate sharks.
“I mean, you know … so the evening’s not a total bust,” Missy says.
“Okay,” I answer, surprised. “What’s your pleasure?”
“There.” She points, impulsively, at a steak house next to a hot-tub dealer. Her face, squinchy and pale, tells me she’s embarrassed to have suggested prolonging the evening, after being so snooty before, and worried at her quick choice of establishments.
As I kill the truck’s engine, I consider the possibility that she’s interested in me — or at least a little curious — in spite of everything. Maybe, I think, she’s as lonesome as I’ve been since Linda “lit out for the Territory.” (That’s really how Linny put it when she left. I had the presence of mind, in my stupor over our falling-apart, to groan at her speech, delivered as loudly and as ruthlessly as a union hall rouser.)
Grady’s Steaks and Brew House is an utter hole, but a damned popular one. We settle into the only space available, a pickle-and-mustard-colored booth. With a whispery wobble in her throat, Missy orders Buffalo Wings. A toxic Texas concoction, she’s thinking, but what the hell, I’ve slipped this far into purgatory, might as well run the whole nine yards. That’s how I’ve figured her now, and I like her pluck.
“I like your hair,” I say.
“Thanks.” She slurps her Coke. “So, urn … Maisie didn’t tell me what kind of law you did.”
“So I gathered.”
“What did she tell you about me?”
“Maisie loves you. Nothing but praise.” Which is true.
At a table next to us, a red-haired teenage girl with a goose-white complexion bites fiercely into a plastic packet of catsup. Most of the talk around us — “real Texan,” I imagine Missy thinking, appalled — targets football, motorcycles, deer rifles.
Cautiously, she and I share our histories. She graduated from the School of the Chicago Art Institute in 1990 (she’s four or five years younger than Maisie and me), tried painting for a while, then singing, ended up as a DJ. “I’ve always believed art could change the world,” she says, straight-faced, with the sullen, tight-voiced timbre of youthful ambition.
I remember sounding that way, once. I wanted to save the planet too, I tell her now. Fresh from school, I practiced Indian law, working out of a small, sulfur-smelling office in Shiprock, New Mexico, suing Anaconda, Union Carbide, Kerr-McGee for poisoning Navajo lands. “Uranium mining,” I say. “It was contaminating all the groundwater on the reservations, milk from the cows … but I couldn’t get my clients to stick with me long enough to win a case. The young people were hip, but how do you explain alpha particles to a Navajo elder?” I catch myself tapping my paper-wrapped straw on the table, like a teacher with a silver pointer at a blackboard. “I’d tell them radiation’s sort of like steam, but steam is good to them — they associate it with their ceremonial sweat-baths.” Anxiously, trying to gauge her reactions, I scratch my head until my scalp begins to hurt. “So I took up labor law, thinking it might be another way to bulldog Big Money. You saw, tonight, how successful I am.”
“This idealism — if that’s what it is — where’d it come from?” Missy asks distractedly. She’s staring at herself in the maison window, purple, then yellow, doused in neon from the beer signs above us, fixing her hair. Her lipstick, dark as the baked little ridges on soda crackers, flakes in the corners of her mouth.
“I don’t know. My uncle’s a priest,” I tell her. “Golden Rule, I guess. Plus that old idea: to whom much has been given, much is etcetera etcetera? It’s somewhere in the Bible.”
“Sounds to me like you’re too naive to be an effective lawyer.” Missy offers this coolly, like a public service announcement.
“Maybe,” I answer. I don’t know, right away, if she’s hurt me or pissed me off. My not knowing this kind of thing was one of my problems with Linda.
“And your divorce?” Missy’s asking me now. “Let me guess. Fatal romantic. Your wife needed someone a little more practical?” She’s smiling sweetly. Meanwhile, I’m betting on anger. “I mean, after all, anyone who listens to country music — ”
“What about it?”
“Come on. It’s the very seat of sentimentality, you’ve got to admit.” An art school tweak, for my benefit.
The waitress, round as an oak stump, brings our platters of meat. The food steams like dewy sod in an open field.
“The truth is, what happened tonight’s what happened with my marriage,” I say, determined to stay polite while we eat. I’ve had plenty of practice in union meetings pacing my feelings, whenever I’ve figured them out.
Maybe I did that with Linny, I think — too much holding back. “I was always putting work ahead of my wife, hoping next time I’d accomplish something with the unions … or at least make a bunch of guys feel better about themselves for a day.”
“So. We’re a couple of do-gooders, deep at heart,” Missy says.
“That’s it,” I answer. “It’s a merkel.”
She shoves her plate away.
I take a chance with her — the hair, I guess. In my twenties, to get through school, I worked a lot of jobs — construction, furniture moving, house painting — that made me feel like this: cranky at first, then you catch a second wind, and the exertion, stunning, gorgeous, starts to exhilarate you. “You know what it’s like, spending time with you?” I say — swiftly, before I change my mind. “Like Tejano music. Loud, silly — all wrong, to my ears, but still, I’m tapping my foot and grinning.”