AN EVERYDAY by Tracy Winn
But dickhead was a word as dumb
and democratic as a hammer, an object
you could pick up in your hand, and swing.
– Tony Hoagland, “Dickhead”
We didn’t notice when my big sister left Dawn’s purse on top of the Chevette. Dawn, my daddy’s girlfriend, was yelling at Dooley, her own darling boy, to get in his car seat, she didn’t give a toot where he’d left his shoe, we had to get to the store. I flicked the Hardee’s wrappers off the back seat onto the floor with the old girlie magazines and a Chee-to that had died in the corner. Dawn shook her daisy blonde hair and squinched up her nose. She’d had it, what did that man think he was doing dropping three useless kids in her lap, and her life’s sun not even up over the hill. This was the exact afternoon when she was going to haul herself out of this swamp for once and good and all and make sure our daddy, who’d been gone for days, didn’t follow along after, like the goat he was. She was going to get him tethered if she had to. (We didn’t, any of us, know it then, but the State had taken care of that. Our daddy was being held in Concord.)
No one wanted Dawn going anywhere, but that’s not why the purse got left on the car. My sister, Cleopatra, was balancing Dawn’s open Coke in one hand and opening the door with the other, when Dawn jumped in and plunked her foot on the go-pedal like she could get away right then, so Cleopatra had no choice but to leap, spill Coke and pull the door shut, all in one swoop. Cleopatra sometimes forgot stuff, but even if she’d remembered the purse, how could she have grabbed it? She wasn’t even ten yet. I was barely eight. With Dawn wheeling left out of our driveway onto the two-lane highway connector, p-voom, with a little lift-off thrown in as she passed the Road House, the purse should have Frisbeed off the back and landed in that dirt-bath of a driveway. But it didn’t.
I know because we looked. After we’d been to the Skip Mart – where, without the purse, we couldn’t buy the salt off the back of a potato chip – we went home again. Dawn said, How in a two-timed, toss-off of a life was she going to do ANYTHING NOW? And how could anyone, any one woman, be as crazy as our mother must’ve been, to name a scrawny-armed, moth-bitten child Cleopatra. Didn’t everyone know Cleopatra was beautiful and had black hair? Dawn said this because she knew it was the one and only thing that could make Cleopatra cry. Dawn was crying mad herself, pink, like we couldn’t see her standing there in her clappy-flap heels and T-shirt. You shit-for-dirt jack-licks get out there and don’t come back until you’ve found my bag – that, or else grown up. If the screen door had known how to shut right it would’ve slammed. Through it, we could see her hair floating around her head like foam.
Even Dooley with his one shoe – he was only three – clomped along after us, dragging a faded plastic boat on a string, up and down the two-lane we lived on that hooked the truck-stop to Interstate 90. He was as dust-plastered as his boat, with streaks on his cheeks and scabs on his knees. We went back and forth from the driveway to the interstate, past the Road House where the bikers stood around in what Dawn called their toad-collared leathers, blowing smoke over the tops of their precious Harleys and scuffing black boots in the pock-marked yard.
We eyeballed every stalk of ragweed, every yellow rag of whipping-by grass, every highway dividing post, like it was the one that had grabbed her life’s work of a purse. Trucks kickballed the air past us so we scrunched our faces and plugged our ears. We wore our bathing suits for clothes and pajamas, both – so later, when we were falling-down tired, we’d pick road sand out of our bellybuttons. Trailing ourselves up and down the highway connector, we couldn’t get how Dawn’s classy bag – not gotten at just any Kmart, “you snowball brains” – could be swallowed by pavement. It was gone, with her driver’s license and her ciggies and her matches, the food stamps and her gold hoop earrings, and worst of all, her money, her taking-off money, and don’t you forget it.
We were about on our twelfth trip past the hog-riding porkers with their bellies and their bacon-greased ponytails when one came parading out at us. He was giant. He had a tattoo as big as Dooley on his arm and we weren’t sure about the face he was making. He was smoking two cigarettes, or else he could blow smoke out his pants just like Dawn said.
I remember seeing just how far away our driveway was. Dawn wasn’t anywhere, not with her floaty hair and her fast mouth. The plastic that she’d stapled around the housebottom, to keep the wind out, flapped like a wing of roadkill. That plastic, and the siding, and the driveway dirt were all the same say-nothing color, and the windows gave us no clues. So I stuck my hip out and my lip out like I’d seen Dawn do it to Daddy, and I flipped that big leatherette the bird.
He looked at me with his fire-poker eyeballs and said, “That’s real fetching.” Then he asked Cleopatra, polite as a pretty-please, “You-all lost something?”
Dooley couldn’t talk and we knew better. Cleopatra’s blue eyes squinted up fish-shaped and she shook her dirty-blonde head. But before we could shake-a-shimmy, the fire-breather picked Dooley up like a daddy and stole him across the yard of that hog heaven. He had Dooley up on his chest like a bitty kitty of a mouse killer, and Dooley looked like he liked it.
I went after him, but I couldn’t bite through because hog slipper had leather from the east to the west of his leg, and he flipped his cigarette onto the grass and plucked me up by my shoulder. He dangled me up there like a monkey and said, “Don’t you want to sit on one of them bikes?”
There wasn’t a whole lot I could do, and Cleopatra got all dishy-faced with yeses, so I guessed we were going to. He took about two steps and we were there. The rest of the creaky-leather boogers backed up their circle to make room for him. They laughed at him and said, “What do you want with pets?”
The motorcycles on their kickstands sure did gleam. There was fire painted all over one, and the pipes were polished to a hoo-haa. Dangle-man set me down on the very one I bet blurted me awake in the night when Dawn fucked my daddy against the wall, and his ratty face blinked up yellow in the glow from the Truck Stop sign. Dooley had his own hog-cycle, him and his boat rode a black one. But Cleopatra made like she’d found a new true daddy who wouldn’t go and use her teeth to open his beer bottles. She wriggled like the puppy we used to have when we lived in the left-over motel, and slithered over Harley-Hog like she didn’t care if she ever found Dawn’s purse.
On the other side of the driveway, the trash cans by our backdoor spilled over into the hay of the yard. That’s just the way it was. My own bicycle, which was also Cleopatra’s, lay right where I’d left it after the last blast down the hill back of the house. It had been pink once, and had rainbow-colored clickers on the wheels that went like castanets. I knew just how the grass poked up between the rusty spokes, and how the cock-eyed pedal that rubbed the chain-guard when it went around – thunk-a-swish – stuck up like a broken foot. The bike waved one handlebar over the hay at me. I would’ve waved back, and maybe things would have been different if I had, but I was riding a motorcycle up and down the skyroad in my mind and picturing where a purse would lurch to. Then I thought maybe if we were as snowball-brained as Dawn thought, we wouldn’t find it, and that would maybe mean she couldn’t go anywhere right away.
From the sofa-seat of that motorcycle I could see how there was an order to things if you had a duck’s worth of sense and could get it right. You started riding a bike, and then you graduated to the next thing, and it was like our road where one thing led to another. The highway connector started at the truck stop. I looked back to where the road began and the Truck Stop sign stuck up in the sky like a yellow miracle, hovering high over the rows of trucks, with their pictures of food – juicy sides of beef, bunches of frosty grapes, plates of gooey chocolate chip cookies – food bigger than our house. Everything just lined up along that road like the trucks, one after the other. The Joe Camel billboard, and the house where we’d lived the longest of anywhere, and the Road House – even the trickle-ass river and the hills – got right in line.
The Road House looked like someone had dropped a big Pay-Less shoe box into the line-up and put up a sign in front of it. No, two signs. One said ROAD HOUSE members only and had a picture of crossed pistons on it. The other sign rested on a bucket of sand hanging by the door and said, Put your BUTTS here.
One of the bikers, with a mohawk that made him look even taller, had a Slim Jim. I could feel the spit start under my tongue when he peeled the paper down it and bit. So I didn’t mind when Cleopatra answered yes, we could go for a ride, there was no one watching us. (Dawn was in the house, sure enough, rattling her ice in the glass and staring – but not out at us. She couldn’t have known it, but our daddy’d been picked up for bragging on how he’d taken care of those foreigners at the Mobil station. They’d made the mistake of thinking they could come in there and take over the place where he, American kid that he was, had learned to pump gas. Dawn couldn’t have been planning to take off herself, if she’d known where he was.)
The Harley-honker put Dooley up on the seat between his legs and asked us girls if there was any muscle on our bones because if there was, then we could hold on on back. We two fit easy, and Cleopatra held her arms around his belt like she was shimmying up a tree, cheek to bark. I got ahold of her the same way, and stuck my nose into the smell of her grubby neck.
Slim Jim said, “Dell, you’re not.”
Our porkboy said, “Why not?”
We just zipped BLAT out of there, hanging on like chiggers, and that was as close to being on an airplane wing as I ever want to get.
When we got to the Silver Tooth, the porkers cut their engines and rolled around back to the basement entrance, hunkering in their seats and walking like a bunch of bugs. My skinny butt was stuck like to a La-Z-Boy but I unpeeled. We were bow-legged as chickens, and one flap of Cleopatra’s hair had jigged itself into a bass plug. We followed the smell of hot dogs. I would have gone anywhere after that smell, even the Silver Tooth.
The stools twirled in the dark. Cleopatra went into one of her staring spells the second she saw the arms on the lady bartender. It happened every time she saw a woman with fat white arms and there was nothing for it until she decided it was or it wasn’t our mother. One of the things Cleopatra could remember was our mother’s round white arm going for a box of Fruit Loops on the top shelf of wherever we were and knocking a mousetrap SNAP into the sink.
Dell reached back under his leather vest and pulled out, presto change-o, Dawn’s purse. Slim Jim and all the rest of the pig’s knuckles hooted and clapped and said how pretty. It was just macramé with some yellow beads knotted in.
Cleopatra was still eye-stuck on the waitress with the fat arms, so I memorized what came next. Dell opened the wallet and looked at Dawn’s face under the Registry of Motor Vehicles seal. She had a ton of mascara on. He fixed on that mini-Dawn, and you could’ve taken bets on who’d blink first. Slim Jim muscled up behind and hoo-boyed. The rest of them were playing pool in the dark behind us, and beefaloes could have shut up better.
Dell said, “That your mommy?”
Cleopatra said, “Not sure,” but she never looked anywhere but at the bartender. I said, “No, that’s Dawn.” Then Cleopatra swiveled on her stool and saw the purse and you’d have thought she’d gotten a head start into the Toys for Tots collection. She held her mouth like that puppy we’d had, when he caught a grasshopper. She was maybe forgetting that if Dawn got her purse, the best girl that ever happened to us would be buying mac and cheese and Mountain Dew, putting it on the table and going south of tomorrow before we finished chewing.
Dell said, “Does Dawn have a phone number?”
That was one sure as pie thing I knew. I knew that for every place we’d ever lived. I could have told him the old motel number, or the apartment in Clarendon, or Reading, or Irving, or, before Dawn, in Salisbury, or the white house with the dangling shutters, I forget the town, all the way back to two years before, when my teacher taught us Your Phone Number Is The Code To Home: learn it in case you get lost. So I told him 767-, and he said, no wait, come to the phone with me.
But the phone in the corner was miles from where the hot dogs were steaming. I said, “You get me one of them and then I will.”
Then I thought about how the money was the going-away part of the purse. So I pointed to her little old squinchy wallet face, and said, “You can buy franks with the money in there.”
He leaned his pork-belly on the bar and said, “Elsie, three dogs for our guests.” Which settled it: our mother’s name was Marie.
So we slathered those steamed pinkies with French’s mustard and ketchup and sweet pickle relish that made my tongue smart with wanting it, and even Dooley had onions, and we heard Dell tell the phone his name was Delahunt Allen, like it was Dale Earnhardt himself, and he had found her purse and some kids with it, and would she meet him at the Silver Tooth to get them all back. While he was over there in the corner, and not seeing how I was memorizing, he peeled all of the cash out of the wallet, and folded it closed in his pants pocket.
So we waited for Dawn and swiveled on our stools and watched Elsie take glasses from the rack under the dusty plastic flowers and hold them crooked under the beerflow till they filled. She didn’t say one thing – not even with her eyes – as she handed the beers to the hog-Harley beefomatics who we’d known so long that soon they’d be telling us my, how we’d grown. Cleopatra shimmied up onto Dell’s lap, but he plunked her back on the swivel stool and said, no ma’am, he was saving that seat.
When Dawn opened the door, a big slab of light tipped in. She wasn’t but a mite taller than Cleopatra, and she was dressed to meet a real estate agent. She wore the white sleeveless shirt that was long enough to tuck, the stewardess skirt and the navy blue shoes with closed toes. The light polished her hair to a halo soft as when she’d passed out on Dooley’s bed and I sneaked a hold of it so I could sleep.
I nudged Cleopatra. “Shut your yap.” We’d only seen Dawn in that get-up when we’d skipped out on rent and were in the market for a new place.
Dawn lifted off her sunglasses and squinted into the dark, all around from one leather-creaker to the next. Her back gave up and sagged a notch the way it does when the Chevette won’t kick-to, but when she saw Dooley, who’d fallen asleep curled around the bottom of his stool, she came on in like the whole set-up was nothing more than an everyday.
Dell didn’t turn around but he leaned his hammy arms on the counter and got moony-eyed at the bottles on the back wall.
Dawn said to Elsie, “You know a Delahunt Allen?”
Elsie’s lips kept zipped. She wiped the counter.
Dawn said it again, but chirpy.
It took me saying, “That’s him,” for anything to get started.
He spun slo-mo on his stool, and I saw that he’d had his eye on Dawn all along in a mirror behind the bottles. He said, “You look different than your picture.”
I could hear her saying, What do you expect from a mug shot, big shot? But what she said was, “I sure appreciate you calling. Have you got my bag?” She stood with her hands in front of her like her purse was hanging from them already, and rocked up on her bitsy shoes.
We could’ve eaten another hot dog in the time it took him to answer. “I have a wallet, but how do I know it’s yours?”
The place got so quiet it could have been the Silver Tooth Library.
She started reciting the poem of her purse. “You’ll find Avon lipstick named ‘Moonbeam Misbegotten.’ A half a pack of Marlboros. Two gold hoop earrings.”
“No. No. No. I’m talking wallet,” he said, all teachery. “What’s in your wallet?”
She sighed. “My license, which you saw. And my money.”
“How much money?”
She made a face like she’d just eaten a clam and had to spit. “There’s a hundred and seventy-three bucks.”
Cleopatra said, “You got that much?”
Dawn said, “Shut.”
Dell flapped open her wallet in his palm like he was about to butter it. “This one must not be yours cuz there’s nothing more than about a hundred seventy three cents.”
If I’d been sitting where Cleopatra was, I’d have grabbed it faster than a pickpocket, and been slap gone, faster than a no-see-um, into the ditch by the road where, if I had to, I would have waited until the beefalo army’d gone to church.
Dawn just put her sunglasses back on and said, “If that’s all you’re giving back, I’ll need a drink.” She asked Elsie, “A hundred seventy-three cents enough for a shot of bourbon?”
Elsie poured a glass and left it.
Dell said, “That’s all that was in it.” He clapped the wallet shut. “Except for the three bucks that bought these kids lunch.” With his paw, he trapped it on the bar. “What are you offering for a reward?”
Dawn’s tongue just had to pull free of the flypaper now. She was looking all around. But she just whispered, “I thanked you.”
He said out loud, “I didn’t have to call you.” He said, “I think maybe, say, a ten-dollar reward. That would do it.”
Dawn flipped her empty hands, palms and backs, like a nothing-up-my-sleeve magician. Her arms were smooth and pink as a doll’s. “Oh, I’ll just reach right into the spare money clip I carry at all times,” she said. “And hand you what you want, Delahunt Allen.” She turned to Dooley, sleeping with the rest of her purse on the floor, “Dooley-boy, hand your Mommy that ten-spot we keep in your ear.” His eyelids didn’t even flicker. “Oh, don’t have it this time? What about you Cleopatra? Can’t keep track of a dime? Don’t worry, honey, Kaylene’s going to run a bank when she grows up. She thinks she’s real smart that way.” She barely looked at me. “Right, Kaylene? Why don’t you give the man what he’s asking for.”
So while Dawn ran her mouth, I hopped off my stool. I didn’t like his leather smell, but that wasn’t going to stop me doing what she asked. When I pushed my fingers into his pants pocket, he back-handed me and I hit the bar and went down like a rag doll between the stools.
So, maybe I’m not the best one to tell the rest of this story. I’d guess Dawn tried to do something about me lying like a piece of meat at her feet. I don’t think she would have cried – I wasn’t Dooley. I can picture her squatting by me in her hoity-toity skirt and pumps, wagging my chops from side to side, and then trying to make me hold ice on my face, but I didn’t wake up until later. She might have let fly a few opinions about calling the sheriff, but Dell would have just bought her another drink.
Maybe this story’s just like all of them. A road-hog with a hard-on buys a little blonde one double bourbon after another, using her very own cash to do it, until she’s dancing on the bar and laughing into his tattoo, and then all the pig-warriors rumble off with their pretty door-prize, and we discover there’s more than one way to make Cleopatra cry.
Later that night, she sniffled while we twirled on our stools in the empty bar. I never did get any ice on my face. Elsie made one phone call after another. She couldn’t stop talking then, saying into the phone, what is she supposed to do with three kids, her job is to close the bar – that’s her job – three kids that aren’t hers, in the middle of the night. She and her fat arms. She kept switching the lights off one by one by one while she talked. And we kept hoping that since we had darling Dooley with us, Dawn would make the hog-washers bring her back.
I blame my jack-lick brain for not seeing where Elsie’s phone calls were pointing us. Sometimes I think, if only I’d been behind Cleopatra, maybe I would have seen her put the purse on the car. Or maybe if I’d been sharper, I could have noticed it, maybe heard it, sliding across the roof and saucering off the back. Then everything in this story could have lined up some other way: it would go back and back, to where it could straighten out to where Dawn would have had her purse and could have bought our supper at the Skip Mart, and what happened from there would stretch out differently, get right, as we rolled forward. But what can you expect? Pigeon crap’s got more smarts than me.
I still don’t know if Dawn knew where our daddy’d got to. I’ve got to believe she didn’t, and maybe still doesn’t. The next day, the women at County Social Services toddled Dooley down the office hallway, one shoe on, and shut the door, and that was the last we ever saw of him, or Dawn, either.
Anyone with more than shit for dirt between her ears could have told you that we wouldn’t be going back to that house on the highway connector. I missed all the signs. I hadn’t even seen that my rusty bicycle – waving over the haygrass – was saying good-bye to me.
Tracy Winn’s recent stories appear in Calyx and Western Humanities Review.