Wire Mesh Mothers

63

“Lamesa Boulevard,” said Tony, slapping the directory shut and digging at her scalp. They were at a phone behind a tire store. The bank clock on the other side of the street read one forty-three a.m. “1837 Lamesa Boulevard. We find that, we find Burton’s ranch.”

“There might be a map in the front of the phone book,” said the teacher. “Look, quickly.”

Tony opened the book again, and pawed through the thin pages. Zip codes, emergency number, town map. “How about that.” Lamesa Boulvevard, B-5. Tony drew her fingers down across to B, down 5. She paused, and frowned. “This can’t be right. It looks like it’s in town. A ranch isn’t in the middle of no town.”

The teacher was standing with Mistie in her arms, glancing back and forth along the dark side street. Mistie had fallen asleep several blocks back. “I don’t know, Tony. Maybe it’s an old map. Maybe there’s a misprint. But we can’t hang here. We have to get to your Dad’s right away.”

Tony nodded. She reached out toward Mistie. “Give her to me for a while.” The teacher passed the girl over, gratefully. “But I’m only doing it because you can’t walk,” said Tony, “and you’d walk even worse carrying the kid.”

“Absolutely. I don’t want to slow us down.”

“Okay.” Tony rubbed her chin, took several steps away from the phone and glanced at the side street sign. “This is Grove. So Lamesa Boulevard’s gotta be that way.”

The teacher moved surprisingly fast for someone with a ruptured bullet wound in her leg, but not surprisingly fast for someone who was on the FBI wanted list for kidnapping. The three took the Lamesa street-sides with silent effort, moving along sidewalks when there were sidewalks, dodging parked cars on the roads when there weren’t. Tony watched where she was going; she watched her feet. Her toe caught in an uneven lip of concrete and she stumbled, but didn’t fall. Mistie breathed softly Tony’s neck.

Tony shifted the child from one hip to the other. It’d be a bitch to be a mother, having to carry kids around like this all the time. Cars roared past but didn’t slow down, didn’t seem concerned or curious. The drivers had their own businesses to attend to. They had homes and families to return to. They had Christmas trees and lights and candles. They had people who were glad they were home, and who didn’t want them to leave.

Tony grit her teeth and forced her feet ahead even more quickly. She had all that, too. At 1837 Lamesa Boulevard.

There was heavy wheezing from behind, but Tony didn’t look back. The teacher was hurting but there wasn’t anything to be done. Not yet.

They crossed an intersection. Another, turning their faces from the bright illumination of the overhead streetlights and into the faint light from the moon. They waited for a red light to stop traffic, and they crossed yet another street. The kid’s breath was starting to get on Tony’s nerves. In the distance, she thought she could hear the distant whine of a police siren, but it might have only been her own blood fighting its way through her vessels in her skull.

And then she saw the sign, bent, green, white letters. “Lamesa Boulevard.” Crickets hummed in a nearby yard. Tony’s heart picked up the rhythm. We’re here!

“Mistie, wake up,” said Tony. She lowered the child to the walk, but the girl’s legs buckled under her. “Mistie!” She picked Mistie up under her arms and gave her a little shake. “We’re almost there. If you walk, we’ll get there quicker! Last one to the ranch is a rotten egg!”

Mistie opened her eyes and shook her head. “We’re there?”

“Almost! Can you race me?”

Mistie nodded sleepily.

“Can you?” Tony asked the teacher. The teacher said, “I’ll do the best I can.”

Lamesa Boulevard was a residential stretch with small yards and even smaller houses. Burton’s ranch would be at the end of all this, where the town ended and the Texas wilderness began. Maybe the people in these homes worked on the ranch. Maybe ranches didn’t have bunkhouses anymore, they let people have their own houses in town. That made sense. It really wasn’t the old cowboy days anymore.

Tony held Mistie’s hand and they trotted up the sidewalk, past house after house after house after the entrance to a small RV park after house.

Tony stopped. She let go of Mistie’s hand. She looked at the little stone house beside her. The black vinyl numbers on the white, door side mailbox read, “1851.”

No no no no!

The teacher was half a block behind, wheezing audibly. Tony left Mistie on the walk, and ran back. She grabbed the teacher’s arm and tried her best not to twist it off. “I think we’re lost. We’re on the wrong block.”

The teacher was sweating heavily. She ran the back of her hand across her forehead and nose. “We are? I don’t think so. I’ve been watching the numbers. That brick house is 1831. The one next to it is 1833. Your dad should be the second one after that.”

“Should be,” said Tony. “Should be, but it ain’t.”

She retraced her steps and stopped in front of the driveway to the RV park. The entrance was chipped tarmac. It led back to a wide gravely circle. Around the circle were camper trailers on cement and motor homes with their wheels locked between cinder blocks. Cars in various stages of disrepair were pulled off onto the bald lawn patches between campers.

Mistie was beside Tony now. “Are we through running?” she asked.

A row of galvanized mailboxes were nailed to a post by the entrance. Each had a number painted on the little front doors. “1835.” “1837.” “1839.” “1841.” “1842.” There were several more; she quit looking.

“Are we through running?” repeated Mistie.

Tony yanked open the mailbox belonging to 1837. There was no mail inside. She slammed the door shut. Hot prickles were jumping under her skin, and she said, “Don’t come with me.”

She strode forward, every nerve blazing, every hair standing at dreadful attention. A man with a long ponytail and no shirt, squatting by his motor home and banging on a Harley with a wrench, called out, “Hey, there, girl, you lost?”

“Fuck off, grease monkey, it’s way past your bedtime,” said Tony.

“Oh, yeah, we need another one like you ‘round here,” said the man.

Tony watched the numbers. They went chronologically around the circle, and she was coming in from the right, the high side. She counted down each shit-ass tin can. 1845, 1843, 1841, 1839.

1837.

It was a camper. A beat up, sorry-ass, rusting camper with a splintered picnic table near the door. Beside the table sat a woodie wagon with two flat tires.

I could be wrong, Tony told herself. I ain’t wrong much, but I could be wrong. Phone book misprint, the teacher said. Maybe there’s more than one Burton Petenski in Lamesa. Maybe he uses this dump as some kind of front, so he can use another name over at the ranch.

There were lights on in the camper. Well, maybe just one light, the place wasn’t big enough to need more than one. Tony stepped up on the block porch and knocked on the door.

“Tony?” The voice was from behind, the teacher’s voice.

“Go back to the street,” said Tony. “This is just a mistake, that’s all.”

She pounded her fist on the door, and inside she could hear a grumbling, a thumping, and then the door handle was wiggling back and forth.

Got to be wrong. This is not the right place.

The door jerked open; the whole camper vibrated. Tony held her breath.

There was a man in his undershorts, his hand on the knob and the other hand clutching a beer. A Bud. Mam’s favorite kind of beer. He had thick black hair and a black beard. A thin man, he had a major gut that hung over the elastic of the shorts.

“What the hell do you want, little girl?” he growled.

“You know me?”

“Should I?”

Tony said, “Let me in. Don’t make this worse than it is.”

“What…?”

Tony pushed her way past the man and slammed the door.

The interior of the trailer wasn’t much better than the outside. There was some furniture, a refrigerator and stove, and a table that folded into the wall when it wasn’t being used. A bathroom stall door hung open. Tony could see the little shower and the clogged toilet from where she stood.

“Burton.”

“What? What do you want?” His eyebrows went up and down over his face, dark waves on a stormy countenance.

“I’m Angela.”

The man froze, then tilted his head. He put his beer down on the folding table. “No shit.”

“No shit.”

“Love your ranch. Dad.”

“My ranch? What are you talking about?”

Tony looked over the table. Hanging on a little wire rack were two guns, a rifle and a revolver. Burton might not have done much, but by damn, he’d replaced the gun he’d lost to Mam.

“Get the hell out of here, Angela,” said Burton. “I didn’t ask you to come here. I got my own troubles.”

“So I’m trouble?”

“Could be. They see me with a kid, they might kick me out. I’m signed up as a single.”

“What about your ranch?”

“What ranch?”

“You sent me a birthday card when I was thirteen. You wrote on it, ‘how you like my ranch?’ There was a photo of you on a fence with the ranch behind it!”

Burton sighed and dropped onto a single hard-backed chair by the stove. “Oh, God Angela. I wasn’t drinking then. I had a good job, at a ranch outside of here. The Triple-Bar. Worked there nearly six months. I just called it mine for fun. I liked it. Then I got fired.”

“Why?”

“Drinkin’.”

Tony’s chest hurt. She leaned over to pull in some air, but little came. “I can’t believe it. You. God, you lied to me.”

“You just misunderstood. Now go home, Angela.”

“It’s Tony!”

“Get out of here. Go home to your Mama.”

It was in her hand before she even knew she had jumped on top of the folding table and snatched it down off its rack. And oh, this one had bullets in it. She knew. She could feel them inside like she could feel the little snake-like babies inside her last year. Solid, expectant, anxious to come out. She aimed at Burton, and his eyes grew as round as big, brown longhorn cow piles.

She fired. She fired again. Burton, hit directly in the chest, fell back off his chair to the food-littered floor. He didn’t have time to complain about it like the deputy had.

Tony took Burton’s beer and poured it over his body. She turned on his gas stove and lit a rolled up magazine, then moved the torch about the place, touching things she knew would burn right away. The curtains on the window, filmy, cheap things like Mistie’s pink nightie. The bedspread on the little love seat. The rug by the sink. Burton’s thin-ass boxer shorts. Burton’s thick black hair, which puffed and lit and fell to the floor by the dead man’s head. A toupee.

Figured.