BIRTHMARK by Matt Bondurant
My mother was yelling because she didn’t want us to go to the convict rodeo.
Nettie, my dad said, it ain’t gonna do a damn thing to her.
The convict rodeo is all guys who are locked up and my dad says they make the best cowboys and there isn’t anything wrong with watching a good rodeo. I don’t blame him for thinking so. My dad didn’t know that we’d see a convict get stabbed through the heart as he lay in the mud.
Quit cussin’ in front of my little girl, my mother says, and slams the screen door.
My dad is drinking beer at Ginny’s and I’m looking at pictures of dead people taped to the wall. We left in the morning in my father’s work truck. We had the whole day, he said, which was surprising as my dad normally worked Saturdays. He runs his own refrigeration business, fixing people’s air conditioning, freezers, things like that. In Texas this is big business, because everybody has a refrigerator and everyone has air conditioning, except maybe the Mexican kids on the east side. My dad’s truck has a ladder rack and long metal lockers in the back that lock with these heavy padlocks. The tools he has inside are expensive, and people will try to steal them. Before we leave the house he heaves a bag of ice on top of a twelve of Coors in the big cooler that’s bolted in the bed. The truck seat is ripped and there are bits of paper on the floor, chew spit, and flattened beer cans. He cut the seat belts out with a razor. The truck smells like his shop: burnt grease and the smell men give off when they ride around in trucks all day and fix things. It is the smell I have known all my life.
Quick pit stop, my dad says as we pull into the parking lot at Ginny’s Little Longhorn Saloon. Ginny’s is just a few blocks from our house. I say, sheesh, because it is ten in the morning and we haven’t even gone anywhere yet. Ginny’s is just a rinky-dink cinder block joint with doors in the front and back and usually they have them both open and when you walk in you can see right out into the back parking lot and the dumpsters. There is an orange longhorn head painted on the front, kinda like the University of Texas longhorn but a little off, like it wasn’t done quite right. The doors are huge and heavy and made of metal, like a mini-fortress. The crazy thing about Ginny’s is that no matter what time we go, there are always these people sittin’ in there, a row of them at the stools, at the sticky little tables, and the jukebox is always playing the kind of whiney country song my father likes.
While my father orders beer I look at the “Gone But Not Forgotten” wall. It’s this section of the wall beside the bar where they have all these Polaroid pictures taped to the wall with things written along the bottom. Things like: “Terry Hoggle 1901 – 1972. We will miss the jokes and laughter. Miss you Terry.” And it’s this picture of some old guy in a dirty ball-cap with a cigarette coming out of the side of his mouth and his face all screwed up at the camera like he’s thinking what the hell is this contraption they’ve got pointed at me now? They’ve got twenty-six of these pictures on the wall and I always check to see if there is someone new. The last one to go was a guy named Bud who looks so old in his picture that he ought to be in a hospital somewhere rather than hanging onto the bar with a pitcher of beer in front of him. “Bud 1891 – 1969.” That’s all Bud gets so I figure he must have been quite a dud as a live human being.
There is no one new today so I do my next thing which is to inspect the various people at the bar and try to determine who will be next. This is difficult because there are a lot of good candidates. Everybody smokes here, and most of the people are old, much older than my father, or at least just old-looking, some with canes or discolored patches on their faces or flabby bags of skin that hang under their necks like water balloons. They have the kind of faces you would never recognize if you saw them in the street or without a beer in their hand. There is a gray, foggy quality to their bodies and hair, like stuff left in the bottom of the closet, like they are already getting ready to disappear.
My dad has a pitcher of cold Lonestar in front of him and he’s drinking with a real content look on his face. Ginny has bowls of ice and glasses set out on the counter with sodas for set-ups and people dip their crusty hands in and grab handfuls of cubes to chill their drinks. A man with long jowls the color of paste and a freckled scalp rubs the back of my neck and says: hey there Katy! People know me here, and I’m thinking that we need to stay away from Ginny’s as we get older, because apparently a lot of people come here to die. How does Ginny know anyway? She’s just a fat woman with a pile of curly hair and glasses with rhinestones on them. What happens when she breaks out the camera and tries to take your picture? Can you run for it, maybe still escape?
One time a few years ago Ginny took a rag and tried to rub my face. I was quick and she didn’t get it on me. I have a reddish birthmark on my cheek that people always think is food or something. If you look up close the birthmark is shaped like a tiny hand. When I get mad or sweaty it’ll flare up red, and in the winter it will look almost blue. My older sister Dianne, who is away at college in Virginia, used to tell me that it was the mark of an angel who touched me when I was born. I know better now but I let her believe it. My sister is eleven years older than me, with no one in between. She only comes home on holidays, when she has to, and mostly she hunkers around the kitchen in her sweatshirts and old jeans, sighing and arguing with my mother. Sometimes I think that my parents must have been crazy to have another kid, so far apart. But mom says they just wanted to wait for me, for the right kid to come along. As if having children is like waiting for a bus.
My dad uses the tongs to pull a hunk of pickled pig knuckles out of the jar on the counter. The jar is always full of knuckles and eggs, and sometimes I’ll stare into the jar real close and try to count the eggs, which is nearly impossible. Sometimes I’ll think of the pigs and what they would think if they knew their hands and feet were gonna end up in this jar on the bar of Ginny’s Little Longhorn Saloon in Austin, Texas. That’s no kind of pig heaven.
My dad almost never talks to anyone at Ginny’s; he drinks a few beers and then puts a bunch of dimes into the jukebox. I like George Jones okay, but on TV he is real odd looking with those fat sunglasses and he always seems to be singing with and about women who are clearly so much better looking than him. A sad man. My dad doesn’t get sad though; he smiles this strange little smile as he drinks his beer and stares over the bar and ruffles my hair with his hand and we listen to George complain about something. Women wearing more makeup than you will ever see outside of the circus drink glasses of warm vodka without removing the cigarette from their mouths. The sign over the bar says: “Happy Hour 9 – 5PM.” I may be only twelve, but I know that these people don’t go to regular work. Two guys shoot a game of pool that will clearly never end. Then my dad’s pitcher is empty and the jukebox has shifted to some other poor whining fool and we are finally out the door into the hot sunshine.
We get to the rodeo arena just after noon and I’m fired up to see some bulls. But the bulls don’t come on till later so we drop the tailgate in the parking lot and sit a bit, my dad having a chew, and me holding the Beechnut bag for him. It’s something we’ve done for as long as I can remember, sitting on the tailgate, holding my dad’s chew while he munches on it thoughtfully and squints into the sun. My dad has loads of lines around his eyes and mouth, and he’s always a deep cinnamon color. My mother tries to get me to cover up my skin but I can’t be bothered and most of the time I’m the color of a peanut, though nothing like my dad. He’s on a lot of big roofs, standing on black tar, all day long.
The parking lot is mostly full, and people are walking past us to the rodeo. Loads of cowboy hats, which you don’t see in Austin too much. I don’t mention how we missed half of the rodeo already. The early events are a bunch of mush, barrel racing and stuff like that. Who wants to see some girl in a red fringed blouse with stars all over it going around barrels on a horse? Why don’t they just get rid of the girl, and have the horses all race at once, that would be something I’d like to see. When I was a little kid my father used to try and get me to do the lil’ wrangler bit with the sheep. Like I want to climb on some greasy sheep and get dragged through the mud? I can turn more cartwheels than anyone in the seventh grade and I’m always picked first for kickball. I could’ve won any sheep-riding contest easy. I’ve got my University of Texas hat on, pulled down tight and my hair in two small braids. The sun is punishing, but I don’t mind it. A lot of people wear sunglasses around. Me and my dad don’t. Sunglasses are for babies and people from Dallas.
As we are walking toward the arena doors my dad points out the prison buses, which look like regular school buses painted black and white and with chicken wire around the windows. A fat guard sits on the doorway steps with a shotgun across his knees, eating a baloney sandwich. He gives me a short nod, his cheek bulging like a baseball. There is a roar from the crowd in the arena and we know someone has either fallen or been hit or failed in some way, because that is what people cheer for at rodeos like this.
Luckily the arena isn’t full, and we only go about halfway up the metal bleachers to find a spot. My dad takes the three beers he has in his pockets and sets them between his feet. On the arena floor several rodeo clowns are chasing a bucking horse. There are men in uniforms and mirrored sunglasses standing around the tops of the arena carrying rifles with scopes. The Mexican guys are walking around on the dirt path in front of the stands, their brightly colored shirts pressed flat and their new jeans have sharp creases. The Mexican guys always have the biggest belt buckles, but that’s because they are the original cowboys, something Mr. Bingman told us in school when we watched a filmstrip about Mexico. Mr. Bingman has been all over the world and he knows more things than I knew existed. He’s just a little string-bean guy with short ties and a knobby chin, but he’s the only teacher I really listen to.
I just finished my first year at junior high and I can tell you the whole thing stinks. Except for Mr. Bingman’s science class, I wouldn’t have anything to do with it. My big sister Dianne says that junior high is just something you have to get through, and then it gets better in high school. In high school you can start to develop the woman you want to be, Dianne says. I doubt it. Last Christmas Dianne also said that our parents didn’t love each other any more. I said: Big deal.
Saddle-bronc riding is the next best thing to bulls. Sometimes a horse will turn on a man and kick him good, a double-shot of horseshoes and hooves, but its nothing like when a bull gets around, facing a man on the ground, and you know he’s going to go at him with those long curved horns and your stomach seizes up. I’m always rooting for the bull and I don’t think there is anything wrong with that. You think these animals want to be out there getting ridden and roped and tied up like that? You would have to be a dope to think otherwise. Like when my dad watches football on television and I ask him who he is rooting for, he always says the underdog. Like to see the little guy win, he says. My dad’s eyes follow the clowns as they scramble in the mud, little darting movements and I’ve always thought that my father has the most beautiful gray eyes and I’m lucky to have them too, instead of dirt brown eyes like my mother and the Mexicans and most people in Texas it seems. He drinks his beers, his lips puckered on the can for a moment, then his big Adam’s apple working as he swallows. I have to think he is happy. I grab his hand and he says, hey there squirt.
There’s some steer wrestling going on which I don’t watch much because I don’t like the way they twist the necks of the steers, wrenching their nose around and how it makes their body flip hard to the ground. Instead I watch the stalls where the convict cowboys mill around, waiting for their turn. There are guards in there with them, but they don’t seem to be watching them too closely. The convict cowboys all wear the same outfit, grayish pants and shirts and black cowboy hats. The guys who are waiting to ride are wearing leather chaps, but most of them are just hanging out, sitting on a row of benches, smoking cigarettes, hanging onto the metal fence and watching the action in the arena, a couple of them scanning the crowd like they are looking for someone. When they take their hats off to wipe their faces I can see the white skin of their shaved heads, the snaky ink of tattoos on their forearms. I wonder if their families or friends are here, if that was something you did when your brother or father was in prison; you went to see him saddle-bronc at the rodeo.
In Mr. Bingman’s science class we watch film strips of butterflies coming out of cocoons and chimpanzees grooming each other. Mr. Bingman’s got a mustache like a hairbrush and his hair is all shaggy on top like he forgets to comb it and he says things to us like: you are all glorious golden angels born and transformed from rutting animals and don’t you forget it! And I don’t.
I brought in a praying mantis I caught in the back yard and we spent a whole class watching it munch the head off a cricket. Then my mantis cleaned its mouth with its elbows, like it was some kind of neat freak contortionist. Mr. Bingman says that in nature things are settled with bloody tooth and claw. Victory is merely survival. Janey Bishop shook her head and made goofy eyes when he said it but she’s a dang cracker idiot who wears buckled shoes and can’t even really read. I know what he means. The world is like a cloudy day at church with a loop of wire around your neck and somebody other than you think has a hold of the other end.
After the steer wrestling, the convicts get on the bulls and that is where the action begins. We cheer for the first bull rider who gets a full ride and leaps off the back of the horse into the mud, going into a backward roll and then on his feet. The sleeves of his convict shirt are cut off ragged and even from up here you can see the ropey muscles. When I clap my hand on my dad’s knee I can see the glassy look in his eye and I know he’s had the right amount of drink. I’ve been watching my father drink for years and clearly there is a “right” amount and then a “wrong” amount and I can tell he is almost always shooting for that right amount. I can even tell when he is upset that he missed it, and gone and had too much or too little and whatever that is happening up in his head isn’t right and he growls and shakes his head like a sleepy dog or just gets quiet and uptight about things. He works twelve hour days most of the time and some nights he is so sore he can’t do anything but sit in a chair, a glass of Jack Daniels in one hand, and stare at a tiny space in front of his eyes. But when his face relaxes and his eyes get watery he’s on the right track. He looks happy, and he smiles and laughs quietly at nearly anything I want him too. My mother gets on him about it but it is at these moments when I love him most and I can tell he loves me.
The convicts don’t seem to be afraid at all, they jump right on the bull in the pen even as it’s thrashing around and off they go, spinning in the mud. Sometimes it seems that some of these guys have never done it before; they don’t even know where to put their hand, and I can see the other cowboys showing them. I ask my dad about it and he says that yeah, some of these fellas probably never been on a bull before, but they do it because the prison gives them special privileges if they do.
Like what kind of privileges? I say.
Could be anything, dad says. Extra recreation time, access to visitors, extra cigarettes, whatever.
I’m thinking I just can’t believe that any of those things would be worth getting on a monster bull with wicked horns like they got here. Maybe there is something he isn’t telling me. Like maybe if they ride the bull to the buzzer they get out of jail.
The fourth guy out gets launched and then the bull stomps on his chest with his back legs a few times before the clowns can get to him. My dad puts his arm around me but I give him a smile to show that I don’t give a fig and it don’t bother me at all. They carried that fella out on a stretcher and the next convict jumped up quick onto a mottled black and white bull named Just A Dream and you know its going to be bad and the crowd feels it and people are up and shouting. The gate opens with a clang and the announcer says here we go! and that bull comes out sideways about five feet off the ground. Just A Dream ducks its big horny head and the convict goes over the front quick, like he was dumped out of the sky. He crumples on the ground and the bull is on him, hooking at him with his long curved horns and the clowns are waving blankets in his face but Just A Dream pushes him along the ground for a bit, the convict hanging onto his head with both hands, before the bull loses interest and trots back to the open gate. The people around us, skinny guys in tight jeans and blinding white t-shirts, beers in hand, they turn and laugh and slap hands with each other as the convict gets to his knees, holding his side, then limps off to the convict pen. The couple in front of us, an old-timer and his white-haired wife all gussied up in country line-dancing outfits with gold tassels, don’t seem too happy. The old man takes off his hat and scratches his bald head and the woman shakes her elaborate hairdo, her mouth drawn up with lipstick in an odd smile. I say I want to get a hot dog ’cause I’m starved and he gives me a few dollars and I figure I can watch the bulls from somewhere else and no one has to think a little girl is getting twisted from watching convicts get stomped.
The concourse area is just a cement path halfway around the arena with a few vendors selling fake cowboy gear, the walkway covered in popcorn and beer cans that crunch when I walk over them. The snack bar is mostly empty seeing as everyone wants to see the bulls. The crowd roars and I get a dog and a Coke from a lady behind the counter who is so dried up and dark she looks like something you’d see in a filmstrip about the Amazon. When I turn around there’s these two runty boys about my age in ridiculous cowboy hats and brand new Wrangler jeans and they are looking at me kind of sideways and nudging each other. I’m holding my dog and I sip the Coke and just watch them squirm for a bit. I see them glancing at my face and I’m thinking they are going to say something about my birthmark. I can feel it blazing, like someone holding a miniature little hot hand on my cheek, but there’s nothing I can do about it. The arena is warm and maybe it’s the bull-riding but I feel ready and I think about how I will throw my Coke in their faces if they say anything about it.
So, the one kid says, searching for words. You a Longhorn, huh?
It’s my hat, and I know right off that these idiots are Aggies.
Yeah, I say. So?
Well, the kid says, looking around. Aggies gonna kick your tail again this year.
I refuse to be drawn in to this. If you live in Texas then this happens all the time.
How? I say, and this confuses them.
Finally the other one bursts out: Football!
Big deal, I say.
I do love Longhorn football, but A&M has been whipping us lately and I’m not going to even let on that I know that.
Big deal?
They are incredulous. Aggies are always like that. They think everything lives and dies with football. They wear their Wranglers and hats and kick around their dusty town in snakeskin boots like it’s the center of the world.
You guys dress like that at school? I say.
Sometimes, they say together.
I got better things to do, I say, and leave them flat.
There are a few bulls left and one convict actually gives it a decent ride, arm flapping, his hat flying off and the buzzer goes and everyone cheers. My father is sipping his last beer, the other two empty cans crushed beneath his boots. Down in the arena they are rolling out a circular card table and some chairs. I’m wondering if my sister Dianne gets to see a convict rodeo in Virginia, and somehow I doubt it. She says her college is the oldest in America and has tons of old buildings covered in ivy full of really smart people. People like us, she tells me one night. Dianne says she finally feels a part of things there, that people understand her. It is one of the best colleges in the world, though I know it isn’t better than UT. That’s where I’m going.
Last Christmas break Dianne came home and for days we went shopping together or went to the Flight Path Coffee Shop to read books. She made a big deal about mom sleeping on the couch, where she’s been sleeping for as long as I can remember.
It’s sad, Dianne said to me. That’s not the way married people are supposed to live.
How do you know? I said.
Listen, Katy, she said, you want to remember this so you never do this to your family. You can’t allow it to happen.
How? I said.
Mom and dad got married at nineteen, Dianne said. They didn’t know better. It was good at first, as it usually is. They were happy once, but they aren’t any more. It was a mistake.
There’s us, I said. Isn’t that something?
My sister is tall and beautiful and she’s the smartest person I know other than Mr. Bingman. But she doesn’t know everything.
Ladies and gentlemen, the announcer rumbles, it is now time for that most dangerous card game . . . place your bets . . . it’s convict poker!
People in the stands whoop and cheer and I ask my dad what this is about but he doesn’t answer, he just stares out over the crowd, his face like stone. His eyes have lost their wet look and I’m thinking he may have lost the right amount. The clowns set up the table and six chairs and six convicts come trooping out in their matching outfits. Right away I can tell some of these guys are out there because they have no business on a bull. One fellow was at least three hundred pounds, and there are two skinny black guys. Another man was wearing glasses, a funny thing to do in the rodeo, and he was walking real unsteady, his pantlegs flapping. These six guys take a seat and pick up the cards and deal and then start playing poker like you’ve never seen. I mean they are picking up and throwing cards, like some kind of speed poker.
Ladies and gentlemen, here we go! Introducing our final player: Here comes King Deuce!
The gate swings open and a pale gray bull comes trotting out. King Deuce has a hump on his back like a beach ball and he swings a look over at the convicts playing cards and then trots around the side a bit, checking out the edges of the arena. This bull’s horns must be three feet long at least, and they have a load of curve to them. The men at the table don’t even look, just keep dealing and throwing them down and I know they aren’t really paying attention to the cards. The bull seems to notice them again and turning his big head begins to trot over to the card players and the crowd stands up. He comes up behind them and still the men don’t turn around until the bull is right there and then one of the black guys pops up like a jackrabbit off his chair and makes a dash, the bull right on his heels, the clowns bouncing around flapping blankets and things.
I inspect the convict with the glasses, sitting ramrod straight, his elbows close together on the table, chin tucked to his chest, holding his cards with both hands. I can tell he is clenching his jaw to keep his mouth from hanging open. He has thin white arms and pointy fingers and doesn’t seem like much of a convict. He looks like one of those people in Ginny’s, who could be any age at all but you wouldn’t know because they are preserved with booze and cigarettes like an insect in amber. Mr. Bingman brought in a mosquito in a smooth marble of amber to class one time, and he told us that it was over five thousand years old. Mr. Bingman said he carried the thing around in his pocket, like a good luck charm. Janey made her goofy eyes and whispered that everyone knows the earth ain’t even that old, much less some mosquito. Sometimes I’m not sure Janey knows the difference between something alive and something dead. Brush your teeth sometime, I told her. Mr. Bingman let me rub the golden ball between my fingers and inspect it real close, and I couldn’t help but think about the world that this mosquito knew back then, how much different it must have been. I asked how it got in there and he told me that it was just sitting on a tree in South America one day and a drop of tree sap fell on it and that was it. Now nobody hates skeeters more than me, and I’d kill them all if I could. But I liked to think this one didn’t really know what was happening to him, he didn’t know that he’d end up getting handled by a bunch of kids at McCallum Intermediate or spending most of his time inside Mr. Bingman’s linty pockets, or in a change dish on his dresser at night. Frozen for five thousand years, in that same sprawled pose, and for five thousand more.
When King Deuce comes back again he just rams his forehead straight into a guy’s back, jamming him against the table, the long horns curved around his shoulders, spilling cards everywhere. This guy hits the ground on all fours and goes under the table and out the other side, the bull circling around the table following him. The convict with glasses does a funny little shrug when the bull passes him but then he seems to calm down and picks up some fresh cards, his mouth set in a line. He has a long, squarish skull and nose that bends in the middle. His long fingers flutter as he holds his cards. I figure I need to rethink the underdog situation. This convict doesn’t look like he could do much damage even if he had a shotgun in one hand and a stick of dynamite in the other.
King Deuce comes up slowly and just starts nosing at a guy’s elbow who’s trying to deal. You can almost see the bull making up his mind, and when he snorts and rears up a bit, the dealer and another guy bolt, tossing their cards in the dirt. The crowd boos as the clowns jump in front of the bull and in the bleachers in front of us the men in the blinding white shirts laugh and punch each other in the back. Now it’s just the skinny poke with glasses, the fat guy who is busting out of his convict uniform, and the second black man left, who is bobbing his head in a funny way, like he’s saying yes yes yes yes as the fat man deals another hand. They get all their cards before the bull charges again and with a thrust of his horns the bull flips the table high into the air, end over end like a coin. The chubby convict goes sprawling, his chair busted, speed-crawling for the fence, the last two men still sitting in their chairs, holding their cards like nothing happened, the black man’s head bobbing faster like a deranged bird. The table lands more than ten feet away and the bull spends a moment or two stomping on it for good measure as the clowns scamper about in their patched overalls and straw hats.
Now you can see the legs of the remaining convicts, and the black man looks like he’s dancing sitting down, his legs just flailing out there. The convict with glasses is just vibrating in waves, like he’s sitting in a cold draft, his loose pantlegs rippling. They just don’t seem like the right fellows to be doing this. The other convicts in the holding pen, hanging onto the rails and watching, smoking cigarettes and their sleeves cut off, tattoos blazing, most of them are clearly bigger and stronger and tougher than these two stickpins. But there they are, holding their cards with dancing feet. For extra cigarettes and a few more minutes in some dismal concrete prison yard?
I poke my dad’s leg. What’s the deal, I say.
And he looks over at me and gasps like he’s surprised to see me sitting there next to him. His lips move funny and he reaches his arm around and takes me close to him and I push my face into his chest and watch with only one eye as the bull lurches at the convict in the glasses and dipping his head hooks him hard with a sideways wrench, tossing him off his chair like a doll. The convict lies crumpled there on his stomach, his glasses gone, and he reaches one hand out and pats the ground slowly, like he’s feeling the earth for moisture, his fingers tracing lightly, his legs sprawled out, one pantleg tugged up revealing a bone-white calf that doesn’t look any bigger than my arm. Then the bull is on him and I can see the horn sink neatly into his back like a stick pushed into mud.
The crowd goes mostly quiet save some whispered cursing. Damn, you see that? God damn he got stuck! Damn old boy got it good! I’m holding my dad tight and thinking of those stupid Aggies at the concession stand, Mr. Bingman and his slides of long, dark rivers in Africa, lime green frogs with red eyes, dusty monkeys playing in the leaves, a mosquito locked in the golden embrace of forever. My father holds me tight and he’s whispering in my ear but I can’t hear him because I’m crying because it’s not like I saw the horn go into that man’s back, it’s more like it was always there and we didn’t know it.
The old woman in the line-dancing outfit is wiping my face with a napkin and I let her because my nose is running fierce. The golden fringe under her arm brushes against my cheek. Everyone seems a bit dazed and the sound in the arena seems muted and lost, like everyone just woke up at once. After a while they are dragging out a stage with a drum kit into the center of the mud and these four guys get up with guitars and cowboy hats. I never even saw them carry him out.
The announcer comes over the PA and there is a weak cheer and when the lights come down the band begins to play. The small circular stage rotates slowly and a series of colored lights play over them and then go shooting off across the crowd. People start to warm up to it, coming back to life, and the men in white t-shirts, glowing in the purple light, wrap their arms around each other like they are brothers and sway together, belting out the lyrics. A spinning mirror ball from the ceiling is lit up with spotlights and little flecks of light go flying around over us, so much like snowfall that I can’t help but hold out my hands to catch it. The Mexicans stand straight in their pressed jeans, immaculate pearl-snap shirts, holding hands with their dark-haired girls and the old folks in front look into the lights like they are little children remembering something. I have my hand around my dad’s neck and he is smoothing my hair as I watch the band playing their sad songs. Everyone seems to have forgotten the convict with the glasses. The music makes me think of the people in Ginny’s Little Longhorn Saloon, how close to death they are at every moment. I’m standing there listening to my father’s music and the voice of the sad and lonely cowboy sounds like something new to me, something strange and beautiful.
That night in bed I hear my mother’s shuffling footsteps in the living room. She made chicken and biscuits for dinner and my father went right to bed, woozy and red-faced from food and beer. He will get up early tomorrow and go to work, as he never takes off both Saturday and Sunday. I can hear the gentle swish of sheets and blankets as my mother arranges her bed on the couch. I think of my mother in the morning, neatly folding her blankets and pillow up on the couch, putting them into the closet, making coffee as my dad rattles out the door to work.
I will tell my sister Dianne about this next time she is home. When she is home Dianne sleeps with me in my bed and we whisper in the darkness and in the morning her skin is hot and the covers thrown off onto the floor. I will tell her about the skinny convict with the hole in his heart and how he held himself so straight at the table. Thinking of this makes me realize that I miss my sister so badly, more than anything. In the dark I will whisper to Dianne that our father is still in love with our mother and she will murmur, yes, yes, I see it now, her eyelids smooth as we fall asleep.
Matt Bondurant’s fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, Prairie Schooner, and The New England Review. His first novel, The Third Translation was published by Hyperion, 2005.