Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

“You have your sister and your cousin here, I see.”

“And you got Smoky Joe,” she said. “My horse. I could have raced him myself.”

“You have a ten percent interest in him.”

“And you took Maisie and Jeff and Big Man and Little Man too, and you sold them.” She couldn’t stop herself. Anger rose up like smoke out of her ruined heart. Ross Everett gazed back at her. He wore the same worn three-piece herringbone suit, and a white muffler of rough silk was draped over his shoulders. It made him look like a man in a magazine advertisement, or as if he were about to offer communion. She wondered where he got it. Probably his dead wife. Jeanine’s hand drifted to her eyes. She brushed away a small accumulation of tears.

“You’re drunk.”

“No, I’m not.”

“You could at least not be drunk in public. Stay home and drink Lydia Pinkham in the barn.”

“I’m sober as anything,” she said. “As whatever things are sober.”

“And you’re about to get mean.” He drew on the cigarette.

“You’re just dying to ask me out, aren’t you?”

She was indeed drunk or she wouldn’t have said it.

“No.” He took the cigarette from his mouth and turned in his chair to shove it into the dirt of a potted palm.

“Why not?”

“My boy runs them all off.”

“Children need discipline.”

“I’m taking you home.”

He got up and went away and then came back, put her coat over her shoulders and helped her get her arms into the sleeves. She suddenly seemed to have four arms but he managed. They crossed the street in the cool night air and he lifted her into his two-tone Dodge pickup in the parking lot of the men’s store.

They pulled up in front of the old Tolliver farmhouse where the lamps were on and the second story stared into the winter night from blind windows. The light from the parlor lamp spilled out onto the long front veranda through the thick Virginia creeper vine, and their five-leaved clusters threw spider shadows. She trod on a saucer of milk and bread crusts. There was milk all over her pumps.

“Let’s sit on the porch a minute,” he said. “Until you sober up.”

“My mother will jerk a knot in my tail,” she said. “If she knew I’d been drinking.”

“Well, just sit here for a minute.”

They sat for a while as the sky cleared over the Brazos valley in scudding small clouds. He put his left boot up on his knee and ran his hand over it. The stars turned on their immense and distant wheels and Orion stood out in blazing winter jewels.

He turned his hat in his hands. “Here’s the plan, Jeanine. You choose Smoky’s colors. Racing colors. And come with me when we cash in at the official tracks.”

“That means we’re dating. That means your kid is going to put a hole in my truck with double O buckshot.”

“I’ll break his arm. We’re not dating. We’re business partners.”

From inside they heard the radio laughter from Fibber McGee and Mollie. Milton said their names were really Jim and Marian Jordan, that they had tried out for the Crazy Water radio program but they got turned down. So they went to New York and said to hell with you, Texas. Jeanine listened for a moment, staring at the spur marks on his boots and then lifted her wobbly head and said, “Ross, don’t say anything to my mother about my percentage.” She put her hand on his coat sleeve.

He ignored her hand and her sudden alarmed expression and sat sturdy as a post in his heavy wool suit and the odor of cigarette smoke and Lysol. Inside the kitchen Bea and her mother had turned off the radio and were singing “We Are Marching to Zion.” Their voices poured out of the kitchen into the halls and rooms and out onto the veranda of the old house. Jeanine closed her eyes for a minute and still behind her eyelids Orion swarmed with stars on his shoulders. She suddenly felt ill and bent forward.

“Are you going to throw up?”

“No. Not yet.” She opened her dress collar for air. He reached over and pulled it back gently and saw the blue bruises around her neck.

“Have you tried to hang yourself, Jeanine?”

“No. Don’t tell Mother.”

“Don’t tell Mother what?”

He waited a moment. He contained his exasperation by drumming his fingers on the chair arm.

“I got my scarf hung up in the drive chain of the cultivator. Both ends. It finally ripped loose.”

He took a pack of Lucky Strikes from his coat pocket and shook one out.

“Is this going to bother you?”

“No.” She fell against the chair back again.

“You’d probably feel better if you threw up.”

“I don’t want to throw up.”

“You may not have any choice.”

Jeanine drew in another deep breath through her nose. “Don’t talk about it and I won’t.”

Sparks from his cigarette sprayed into the dark. “Is there some kind of gear cover on it?”

“No.”

“All right. I’ll see what I can do.”

He saw headlights in the distance turning off on the farm-to-market road. It would probably be her sister in a car full of revelers, all reveled out. He laid his arm along her shoulder, on the back of her chair, and turned his face up to stare at the sky. Several long moments passed.

“And now what?”

She said, “I wish I could drive nitro like my dad used to.”

He nodded. “I see.”

“I think I could get to like driving nitro.”

“You probably could. But you need to be fashionable and have a career as a secretary. Then you can find a man and get married.”

“My dad told me I’d never get a man.”

“What a goddamned shitty thing to say.”

“Excuse your language.”

“Thank you.”

“It gets worse.”

“Worse how?”

Jeanine hesitated. Then she said, “My mother has invested everything we had in some phony oil-well scheme. Everything left over from when Dad died. And we owe a lot in county taxes and there’s no money for milk and malt tablets for Bea. A horrible county nurse comes and brings us relief supplies and she is a hateful witch and she insults everybody. She’s always checking Bea’s hair for lice.” Jeanine took in a sobbing breath. “I keep thinking about killing her.”

“Really.”

“Yes.”

“Which oil well?”

“It’s a wildcat company called Beatty-Orviel up there in Jacksboro. I forgot the promoter’s name. Anyway I’ll think of it later. I can’t think right now.”

Ross drummed his fingers on the chair back. “We can never get our parents to act right, Jeanine. I know. I’ve tried. So has my boy.”

This was lost on Jeanine. She was lost in inebriated thoughts of her difficulties. “They all blame me for covering up for Dad all those years,” she said, and hiccuped.

“Yes, well, as I remember, you did. In fact.”

Jeanine started to say something. Probably something in her own defense but he laid his blunt forefinger on her mouth and said, “You were caught between them.” He put his hand back into his lap. “Do you miss him?”

“We all do but nobody will say it.”

“How is Bea?”

She fell back into the crook of his arm. Might as well. He was big and he loomed and she had known him forever. It was cold. She slipped her hand into his coat pocket and pressed against the warmth of his body.

“Jeanine, you are messing with me.”

She smiled up at him. “I know it.”

“I asked you about Bea.”

“Good. She’s doing everything the doctor says. And that hound Winifred. The county nurse.”

He smiled. “I know her. Tough it out.”

She realized she was not going to throw up after all and she could say something about food.

“You know what? I’ve never been out to dinner in my life.”