The year we married was the year Pedro died. That was how Mama always remembered it, leaving no doubt to all hearers as to her priorities. And why not—I was going to leave her, the child as if her own, to cleave to a stranger. And not even one that she was sure she fully approved. It wasn’t long, however, before R.T.’s accommodating nature made her decide she had been for the whole thing all along. What I kept her in the dark about, of course, was the superb way in which R.T. and I accommodated each other. Oh, I suppose there was reason to wait. But his body and its riches, its particular slice of heaven, seemed already promised to me. Why not, when you are thus blessed, just reach out and take?
Of the several ranches R.T. managed, one in particular, Mill Creek Ranch, had become our trysting place. Forty acres of bottomland and a fancy house, built by a doctor and his wife whose marriage had, upon their home’s completion, promptly broken up. Probably from going too deep into every little picky decision. Which was never going to happen to us. If anything, I was worried about the opposite, in which R.T. would drift away like Daddy, out of sadness, out of the refusal to engage. Either way, however, it appeared that it was over houses, these fragile wooden frames, that families swam or sank.
On our afternoons, I would find the house closed against the heat, its shuttered windows admitting stripes of lights that fell across the sheeted furniture that filled the rooms like quiet ghosts. It pleased me to push the covers off the long sofa and arrange myself all naked in the cool dark, and wait for R.T. to come in. Mama would have been shocked by such boldness, but you have to set your dreams in motion, I do know that.
Mama had begun to turn the considerable energy of her thoughts towards my trousseau. What sort of towels I brought to this union, how many and what kind of sheets, did I want a monogram. I should have reined her in right there, and saved us all a lot of grief. But I let irrelevance bloom and start to twine, neglecting the future for the stunning present, which seemed to consist entirely of R.T. Sometimes we stood just inches apart, me looking up into his face, smelling his warm beery breath, the space between us alive with something electric. Drunk on sex.
And sometimes R.T. came to see me, when the evenings were warm, and we climbed that lovely hill, where I got to know the Three Graces so intimately, I could feel my way around in the dark. This lovemaking, I think we both knew, was the last of its kind, in that what we shared was about to be changed, and oh, we drank deeply at that well.
“It’s not going to be the same. Once we get settled,” R.T. said to me late one evening. The moon was setting, the light lengthening beyond us, and he gave my breast a kiss.
“It certainly is,” I said, “and what’s more, there’s going to lots more of it.”
“More of what.”
“More of you, I hope,” I said, looking up into the blue shadows on his face, experimentally biting his shoulder.”Ow!”
“More of us. More of anything you want.”
He put his head down on his arm. Then he looked up at me. “I am serious.”
“You are gorgeous,” I said, licking my way up his ribs.
He took my wrists. “You are incorrigible.”
“Insufferable?”
“Impossible.”
“Ineffable.”
He smiled down at me. “Inevitable.”
“Invincible.”
“Incredible,” he said. “Open your sweet legs.”
R.T. decided on his own to tell Mama he had proposed. We were all three having dinner at the ranch, Mama, hopeful of a sleepover, was dropping large and leaden hints, which I was ignoring. R.T. lit up one of the small cigars he liked to smoke, leaned back in his chair, and sprang it on her. On me, too.
“I was going to ask you for the hand of your granddaughter.” he said, blowing out a match. “—but she already gave it.”
I stood up, cleared the plates, and said a prayer in the pantry. When I rejoined them, they hadn’t missed a beat. I was being argued over, like an old-fashioned bride.
Mama was leaning towards R.T. “So, what do you think about children?”
I stood right up again.
“You sit down,” R.T. said. “This concerns you.” The hell it did. I had put the whole issue so far out of my mind that for Mama to even mention babies came as a rude surprise. If I had said anything, it would have been about the heroic efforts I was making not to conceive midst all this nonstop sex, and I was damned if I was going to discuss birth control methods with my grandmother.
I sat down, but I had found my final straw. I knew one was going to appear. Sooner or later there was going to be something to hang onto, and this, I realized, this act of privacy, for whatever good it was going to do me, was it.
They went on talking without me, and eventually the subject mutated, courtesy of the juggernaut of Mama’s desire; she was insisting that R.T. drag my mother’s old hope chest from under its tarp in the barn. I demanded the thing first be washed with Lysol, Mama said it was not rats I smelled, and she opened it up.
“Well?” she said, “what do you think?”
The papered insides were peeling and damp. There was the smell of trapped air. The trunk was empty.
“It’s my gift, Gad darn it!”
I gave R.T. a pleading look. So did Mama.
“It’s your hope chest—and you cannot prevent me!” she said, “I am goin’ to fill it up! And what’s more, it won’t cost a dime!”
This is how we came to spend the whole of that fated afternoon the in Santa Rosita, driving back and forth down by the freeway. It was a hundred and four, and against Mama’s wishes I had the air conditioner turned onto high. The bone of contention of the moment was that Mama kept rolling down her window to peer out, as if the truck’s tinted glass was all that stood between her and finding the Blue Chip store.
“Are you even sure there still is such a thing?” I said.
My patience was running thin, pressed out even further by the picture of R.T. sitting home alone. I explained about Mama and the truck and her errands, and he agreed, but men don’t always cleave to their words. I think what you say is a promise, a nugget, but to someone like R.T. words were things of the moment, like the wind, wrapping its arms around you, and just as likely to head off somewhere new.
Mama shuffled through the paper bag in her lap, pulling out her pasted-in stamp books, their dry pages bound into swollen bundles held with triple-wound old rubber bands.
“I think the address is on here somewheres,” she said, holding one book up close to her nose. “Christ on a half shell, they print these things so human eyesight don’t stand a chance.” A long finger of wind reached in through the window and swirled a few loose stamps out onto the highway.
“Here, you look,” she said, and the truck wheel wavered while I tried to make out the fine print and also steer. Bugs from all over the country had flown in special to die on our windshield that afternoon.
“I can’t see a thing!”
Mama was rolling rubber bands off her wrist, binding her stamp books into neat, new stacks, rubbing absently at the little red circles left on the soft pouchy underside of her arm.
“Turn on your wipers honey, why don’t you,” she murmured.
I ignored her, but gently, the way you ought to receive any litany, any of the old absent-minded habits of love.
We took a last spin up the frontage road past the K-Mart, out to where the roadside dribbles off into weeds, the desolate kind that mix in with the asphalt and don’t seem to belong to nature at all.
“Does this look likely?” I asked. But Mama would not answer. I had refused to tune in to the Afternoon Hour of Blessedness and she was staring out the window in a wonderfully fine-tuned sulk.
“Well? Is this the right street number?”
“Number?” she said out the window.
I pulled over. “Look, we can find the Blue Chip store or we can listen to Jesus, but I will not have both on the same afternoon.” I was dripping sweat.
Mama reached over and with one fingernail flicked the louver so cool air blew right at me. “Jesus is always with us,” she said, folding her hands in her lap.
“Well, fine,” I said, jamming the truck into Drive, “maybe He knows where the god damn stamp store is.”
“Nothing is revealed to she who taketh His name in vain.”
“You just made that up.”
“I do my best,” Mama said, smiling with her lips neatly closed. I was back on her good side, my accusation transformed by her own peculiar radiance into praise.
We found the stamp store all right, wedged in between a shoe mart and a smelly feed and farm supply. But it was empty, with shadowy insides, and a sign in the window that said, To Let.
Mama insisted in getting out of the truck, and walked up to the window. “Nobody’s in there,” she said, shading her eyes, cupping her hand against the glass. “I think they took their prizes and went.”
I watched her clutching her bag of stamps. Was I going to get out of the truck or not? I revved up the engine, adjusted the mirrors. Rode the bucket seat up and down. Finally she climbed back in, settling herself with a delicate grunt.
“Tell you what,” I said, pounding the dash for good measure. “Let’s go down to Sears and buy us some sheets! With real money!”
“Whose money!” she cried, falling right into the spirit of things with that peculiar feminine grace.
“R.T.’s goddamn money!” I hollered and she looked at me slyly. We sat there a moment and laughed.
What we were to find waiting for us at home colors the rest of that afternoon now, in memory, with a special heart twinge. We were so happy, choosing new sheets and towels. Trying on numerous plastic wedgies. Buying an Orange Julius, perhaps, at the very moment that the snake bit Pedro. Picking out a pound of mixed crème centers while Pedro swelled up like a poor dog balloon.
Not one week before, R.T. and I had our big rattlesnake fight on Mama’s porch, where we often disagreed so as not to have to fight alone.
“This,” I had said, waving the book in R.T.’s face, “is the Field Guide to Northern California—”
“I know where we are.”
“—and it says right here, ‘Rattlesnakes not found below 2,000 feet.’” Mama shifted nervously on her chaise. “We do not live above 2,000 feet. Hence, no rattlesnake. I rest my case.”
R.T. scowled and jabbed at the pillows behind Mama’s back, venting a little of his irritation by taking care of her. This was one of Mama’s hurty days, and he had rigged up a series of extension cords so he could run a heating pad out to where she lay.
“I think,” he said, “you bring home too many library books.”
I indicated the pitiful sight of my grandmother. “I only went after her mysteries,” I said. Mama had turned the heating pad up to high and was fanning herself with the Press-Democrat.
It was ninety even in the shade of the veranda’s ripply fiberglass roof. I cried, “How can you stand any more heat!”
“Let her be,” R.T. said.
“Did someone speak to you?”
“Children,” Mama said, rising up on one elbow, “this is awful damn dreary.” She gestured towards Pedro, who lay on his back, legs extended, lower lip fluttering gently on the exhale. “Look at that. God’s own peace.”
“Now put a lid on it,” she said, and she lay back down, placing a pillow squarely over her face.
I pushed the book towards R.T., giving him a little pinch.
“Ow! What the hell was that for!”
Mama raised the pillow and clamped it down even more firmly.
“I don’t care what the damn book says,” he said in a lowered voice, “I told you we killed a five-foot rattler. Miguel hung it over the fence, if you’re so hot to see it.”
“See it! I don’t even believe it. Why would I want to see a dead snake that is not a rattler at all.”
I closed my eyes and leaned back against the old wicker settee where the undone splints didn’t poke too bad. The potato-vine slapped loose against the screen as a small breeze lifted its broad flowers. Mama’s breath evened out as she slipped into a doze. Peedro’s hind foot whisked at his belly as he halfheartedly scratched in his sleep. All that the nest of trouble inside me needed in order to dissolve completely was for R.T. to apologize. Instead, he tipped his chair back and pulled his hat down over his face.
Pedro was named Pedro because it never occurred to Mama to search any further for a name for a Mexican Hairless, feeling no compunction from any quarter to press on toward cleverness or originality. This is probably why I found it so restful to make the drive to the trailer. There on her porch I could leave off stewing over what to do with my life. About my fear that my only talent would prove to be for something worthless, like drawing portraits of George Washington on the typewriter, and about having someone like R.T. for a husband. Two worries whose coming apart and reassembling, jockeying for Worst Problem, kept me in a swivet. On the porch at Mama’s, I felt come to earth.
Pedro’s dying was the hardest happening in Mama’s life, or so the blotting power of time made it seem. Her daughter passed beyond so long ago, the memory seemed hardly to count. And so it feels strange to regard those few days with as much fondness as regret. I tried to explain all this to R.T., but he always demanded of his emotions that they appear on schedule, something like the news on the hour. And so they did. He never seemed beset by that particular tumult of the saddest and the most warming thoughts, all crowding up together. I’m a victim, he liked to tell me. Of my feelings. But it seemed to me more a question of how you choose to live. Like a tree out in the weather, like an animal who might get bit. Or like a man, a tower of strength, who misses out on the wind. Who fails to see the markings, the beauty of the fangs.
Of course, Pedro had become known as Peedro, because that’s how Mama thought it was pronounced, and who had the heart to correct her. Not me. Not R.T. Not Mr. Olsen, the mailman, who stopped his jeep special one afternoon to admire. Giving Mama the chance to recount the whole story, beginning with Peedro in the womb, while Peedro leapt and snarled at her feet, repeatedly flinging himself at Mr. Olsen’s ankle, which brought him up smart at the end of his lead, where, with small choking sounds, he would gather himself for another lunge.
Finally Peedro tinkled on the government-issue oxfords of Mr. Olsen, who good-naturedly took this as a reminder to get on with his rounds. Mama stood by the road, waving him off, Peedro tucked firmly under her arm like a naughty but particularly endearing baby. “You bad thing,” she said, while Peedro wagged his entire body and drooled down the front of her dress.
“These must be the prettiest sheets in the world,” Mama said, speaking out the window as part of her ongoing conversation with the world. Not that those present were excluded. It was just a habit, born, I think, of living with no one but Peedro, and also part of the reason that being with Mama often felt like attending a small if strange party. In this way, she made the people around her feel a little less lonely, and that this was unintentional in no way subtracted from its charity. “Oh my bed of flowers!” she said, hugging the package to her chest. She had chosen orange printed sheets, loud enough to wake the dead from their permanent sleep. But a pattern was not a pattern to Mama unless it spoke in the clearest of terms, and a gift was not a gift unless it bore fair resemblance to precisely what she would buy for herself.
A few miles out of Santa Rosita, we rolled down the windows, where the freeway ran through countryside again and all the smells were sweeter. The late afternoon sun shone its slanted light, stirring up all the colors. Broad purply shadows spread over the vineyards. The road cut turned to crimson and the tall grasses became white gold upon the fields.
“Pee-dro! Pee-dro! Where is Mama’s pre-cious!” Mama was leaning out the window before we even were halfway up the driveway.
But it was I who found him, lying neatly dead on her doormat.
“Mama,” I called, “you wait there!”
“What for,” she said, gathering up her things.
Because Peedro is dead. Because Peedro is lying here like some hideous bee. I went down and turned her away.
“It’s bad,” I said. She looked into my eyes. “It’s Peedro.” She dropped her bags and ran up the walk.
And that’s how R.T. found us, Mama kneeling over this grotesque little sight that only that morning had been her dog, me sitting on the bottoms step, smoking and crying, looking out over the fields.
R.T. took one look at me and bounded up the steps. In a minute he was back. He sat down beside me.
“Jesus,” he said, panting. “I thought it was your Mama. How long you been here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Damn thing’s drawing flies.”
I wiped my nose. “You’re all heart.”
He patted my head. “You and your Mama got the corner on heart, babe. I’m going to find a shovel.”
I wrung out a dishtowel in water and persuaded Mama to lie down. With the shades pulled, her bedroom seemed old-fashioned and sweet, its knotty pine walls smelling gently of old trees in the heat. She closed her eyes and drifted off.
R.T. was hunkered over Peedro, whose lifeless limbs stuck out like four small sticks. “Looks like snakebite,” he said, standing up.
“Why would you say that!”
He rolled Peedro over with the tip of his boot. “First place, look at the size of him. And there,” he said, indicating one tiny haunch, “there’s your bite. There’s where the fangs went in.”
“Maybe it was something else. Some other snake.”
“No other poisonous snakes around here.”
“No rattlesnakes either!” I insisted. Because I read it in the field guide? Because there must be some rules that override the faithless information of the senses.
R.T. gently picked up Peedro’s lifeless form and held it out to me. “Babe,” he said softly, “this ain’t something else. This is this.”
He was right. It was the most this I had seen in a long time. I studied R.T.’s hands, the reddish hairs on his fingers. All movement and talk seemed suspended, but the heart listens, and the soul remembers.
When Mama came outside, it was nearly dark. I was on the steps watching R.T. shoveling out under the trees. We could just make out the white of his arms.
“I been thinking,” Mama said. She came and sat down beside me. “I bet it was one of them killer bees, come up from Africa.” I reached over and took her hand.
R.T. called to us. “You want to say some kind of prayer?”
“No,” Mama hollered, “you just finish up, bless your heart.” Pretty soon all we could see was R.T.’s hat bobbing around. Two bats flew zigzag over our heads and off into the trees, far, far above. I looked up into darkness.
“I hate them little things,” Mama said.
“Bats? They’re harmless.”
“Bats. Bees. Rattlesnakes.” She got up, pushing off on the knuckles of one hand. “I’m going get started on supper.”
This story was published as The Rattlesnake Line, (in a magazine no longer extant) and became Chapter 4 of my novel, The Last Time Anyone Was Happy. For which I am seeking representation..Still.