Honey Mine Page 3

  Sincerely,

  Camille

  Pearl put down the knife she was using to slice carrots, then picked up the cigarette balanced on the rim of the sink. She took a drag and sighed, eying me carefully.

  —Start packing, kiddo. This summer you’re going to be staying with the Budds.

  Oh Mom…A whine went off in my brain, but I kept it zipped. For a moment we both watched her smoke drift under the kitchen light. Then I chose a wry tone and one of Pearl’s own favorite expressions.

  —So, this is the cutty sark…

  She jabbed the cigarette at me.

  —It’ll be great. They’ve got stuff. Horses. Peacocks. Kids your age. I dunno, livestock… A lizard! Willie spent three years in prison for draft resistance during the Korean War.

  She said that with pride. Most of Pearl’s closest friends had spent time in prison, usually for something political.

  —Anyhow, they live in an old mining town, high in the Rocky Mountains. Ruby Ridge it’s called. Derelict—she grinned at me—but cultural. Mina Loy just moved there. The poet Mina. I hope you get a chance to meet her.

  Pearl paused, suddenly wet-eyed, moved by my opportunity.

  I felt a broad and pointless caution. I shuffled to my room and began to pack, stuffing all my blue jeans into a pillowcase. Then I took a bath. Through the steam I stared at the Mina Loy poems Pearl had thumbtacked over the patches of mildew on the bathroom wall. What if I met her. Would I tell her that my mother had covered her poems in saran wrap so we could read them in the bathtub? Mina, the lost poetess, beloved by Pearl. I attributed this love to Mina’s life, which went up in a bohemian blaze whenever Pearl talked about it. Fiery truths. I couldn’t like the poems, but I was attached to their difficult sounds, which made them seem to glint from under their coating of steamy saran wrap.

  A tempered tool

  of an exclusive finishing-school

  her velvet larynx

  slushes

  Pearl drove fast, grim with the task of moving my body over one thousand miles, across the inland sea of parched grass and shimmering heat. But she looked smart, in an orange cotton shift with black marks like paw prints; it was Finnish. At night she rinsed it out in the motel sink. By morning it was as dry as a bone and hung stiffly over her tanned & slender knees.

  I licked my arm when we left Nebraska. The hot wind had replaced sweat with tiny crystals of salt. I was being dumped. What a late blooming baby. Soon I would be in a place where the air was so pure it sparkled. How was it possible? I felt a melancholy nostalgia for Chicago’s dismal intimacy of block by block racial tension. Vacant lots soaked with lead and streets of abandoned warehouses.

  Gray blue hills rose at the horizon. White streams tumbled in a blur. When the Mustang lurched up for the long climb, Pearl began telling stories about the town. About the Budds. Her stories were for the eye, like movies, and that reliable. I never listened so much as watched. But this time I closed my eyes, dozing as she spoke.

  It was familiar, at first: Industrial ruin. Towering gray skeletons next to heaps of slag. The mines had been abandoned for fifty years and the dumps were feathered with grass clumps. Pearl had wandered there by herself, looking for silver nuggets. Surely the tens of thousands of miners who came and went like a flash flood must have left a few pieces of silver behind. She’d found bullets. In the meadow below her, the Budds were picking wildflowers. Newlyweds, they gave bouquets to each other. They were happy because Willie Budd had just gotten out of prison and they’d scraped together the cash to buy a lodge in town. It cost next to nothing—after all, the town was almost abandoned. It was falling apart. You could have bought half the houses for a couple hundred in back taxes, and that would include a small opera house, and a mansion whose wide staircase was built with Virginia oak.

  I woke up when a damp wave entered my nostrils. It was the sweat of gardens. Pearl drove slowly as our stares swiveled from one side of the road to the other. We were in town, and it was not what we expected. Each house had porches and neatly whitewashed gingerbread trim, and all the lawns were thick. We passed a park with a gazebo and an American flag snapping in the wind, over beds of marigolds and daisies.

  —It’s changed, Pearl said.

  The Budd Lodge faced a dusty pine thicket. I left Pearl at the car and walked under the trees, past cages of birds and scattered old mining spools to a red sprawling building. I followed the steep flagstone steps down to a dim basement kitchen. A girl stood by the table, humming along to the worst song of the summer, Alice Cooper’s “Only Women Bleed.” I grimaced some sort of smile, and the girl’s soft eyes turned to me. Her lower lids were rimmed with tears. If she put her hand in mine, I suspected it would be wet.

  —Hello, you must be Camille, she mumbled.

  That was Willa Budd. We bonded as though we’d been Krazy Glued. It happened instantly, although it was new to me, the deep and sticky bonds of girls, leaking fluids. It’s easy to get the wrong idea. Gloom gives a girl plenty of room and we didn’t talk much. Mostly, I extracted the local gossip from Willa’s weary mumbles. And Shane was there—from the beginning he was part of our cloud. That morning in the kitchen, he’d eyed me silently from the couch, although I hadn’t seen him. He didn’t bother to greet me because Willa was doing that. They were twins. Shane was older by a breath.

  Whatever you have the nerve to do, I will also do. Things happened and swallowed me up. I wiggled up waterfalls after Willa and Shane, to find blasted valleys and cliffs crumbling to dust under our feet. If a few tiny trees hung to a cliff, we would stop scrambling and eat our sandwiches there. I grazed on tiny blueberries and strawberries and mushrooms, drank from creeks that tasted like mineral snow. Mountains hung over us like relatives, the ones who hate you, their gray craggy faces threaded with ice. Big silences, with clouds.

  It suited me somehow, but Willa especially, because she loved rocks. Just loved them, incomprehensibly. She knew a lot of geology, but it was deeper than that. This love was in her big feet and her tawny yellow eyes and the slump in her shoulders. At fifteen, she was already almost six feet tall and she would stoop to pick up any ugly pebble we passed. Then she’d tell us a story about it, talking so slowly and for so long that I’d use the chance to throw myself on the ground and gasp for breath. I got used to altitude eventually. I even learned a thing or two about rocks.

  I’m getting ahead of myself. I need to start at my spot, which was the couch in the kitchen. That’s where I slept, restlessly, due to the babbling fish tank and the slurping hot water pipes under the floor. The whole Budd apartment was a snaky linoleum lined tunnel under the Budd Lodge, and it ran into interference from plumbing and wiring. That first night, as I was dozing off, an iguana crept into the blue flickering light of the fish tank and eyed me, pumping up and down a few times. Then he crawled behind a pile of magazines, his tail still visible. I stared sleepily at the lizard tail, a bright green snake except for the gray stub at the tip, where it had been broken. Fish shadows drifted across the heated yellow floor, dreamy disturbances from the animal world.

  Mrs. Marian Budd’s “Good Morning” chirp yanked me out of my sleep. It was just after dawn when she hustled to a corner of the kitchen table and began throwing things together. Baking. I sat up to watch, pulling my blanket around my shoulders. A woman of great height, she could cook without moving her feet. Cupboard doors all around her were opening and slamming. Ingredients flew together. She had a soft mouth and thick arching eyebrows, and even when she smacked the bread dough it was with an awkward tenderness.

  —It’s only bread, she said, as if I were worrying about it.

  Mrs. Marian Budd plucked handfuls of dough and dropped them in boiling oil. She called these scones; they were breakfast. Their dreamy odor called forth every family member. Willa, in an orange quilted bathrobe and fluffy slippers, shuffled up into the kitchen from her bedroom in the cellar, which she shared with hundreds of jars of home canned apricots, peaches, jams. She huddled at the breakfast
table. Shane walked through, grabbed a handful, and left.

  I got my scone and a cup of coffee and retreated to my couch. Willie came in, swinging his arms with gregarious pleasure. His voice boomed but his body was small. He was talking about his newest horse, a black thoroughbred mare with floppy ears. She was progressing nicely. He’d found her by a road wrapped up in barbed wire and bleeding to death, and bought her on the spot for forty bucks. Next spring, he was going to breed her to an Appaloosa stud and train the foal for the tracks.

  All the magazines piled on the floor next to my couch were about horse racing. Not the regular kind—Appaloosa. I paged through Appaloosa Stud and stopped at a full-page, full-color ad for a spotted little stallion with a well-muscled rump. Stud service? Try This Sleek Little Jackrabbit.

  Who would have guessed? Appaloosas were bounding all over the county tracks of Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado. I learned there was such a thing as Appaloosa Racehorse of the Year, and it came with a thousand dollar prize and a trip to Vegas. It turned out Willie had even bred a winner, a fast and vicious mare named Sparkle Plenty. She swung her head like a club, teeth bared, whenever anyone got near her. He sold her before she won the prize.

  Horse racing, on the cheap. I was fascinated. One night after dinner, as I sat hunched on my couch, sketching the family tree of last year’s Appaloosa Racehorse of the Year, Shane walked over to me.

  —Hey faggot, he said, his big boned face and body leaning over me. I looked up at him, mystified. His hair was the color of sand.

  —Faggot, he repeated. We’re going out to the bar tonight. Are you coming?

  There was a silence during which Willa examined a ring on her finger and didn’t look up. Finally, she said softly,

  —They let us in if we go up the backstairs.

  I went. The faggot went to her first bar. It was called Mountain Fish Joint. A huge rainbow trout was mounted on the wall, so old its scales had peeled back and glistened like cellophane fur. Men in beards and flannel shirts loomed in the smoke. Their faces were red and they laughed furiously. I turned around and around, one moment after another sprinkled with the lemon pepper of dread and adrenaline. Willa and Shane were walking stealthily as panthers, their shoulders slumped. That’s what I imagined, anyway. Willa stopped next to a guy and the color drained out of her face. Their shoulders touched. His big black framed glasses hung crooked on his face and he had those lean muscles that looked like they’d popped up overnight and grabbed him, causing him pain. He scowled and shoved his glasses back up his nose.

  Then Shane grasped the tender point above my elbow with his thumb and forefinger.

  —Faggot, he whispered, it’s a good time for you to learn how to play pool.

  He steered me to the back, to the pool table which looked soft as pasture under the layer of smoke.

  Sullenness rose like a wad across my face. I pointed myself at this task like any girl of the street. I got good enough at it to beat him after a few games. I guess that bored Shane, for he retired, and I started playing various drunks. Mostly, I won. I only stopped because my last opponent, a guy with a cowboy hat and a Texas drawl, sprayed something bright pink onto the green felt. We all stared, amazed, as it foamed up, even the Texan who’d produced whatever-it-was, bubbling with stomach acid. Tequila, possibly. Then Shane bought me a beer.

  The reaction happened later. After we’d all gotten home, and I locked the bathroom door. Most of the time my brain is a sealed chamber but then something happens, the tiniest pinprick, and it leaks in, flooding everything, like, uhh, puffs of squid ink. Dread and horror tumble, tiny twins, down every rung of my spine. Fag, no way, I told myself. What does that mean anyhow, for a girl? I stared at my face, brows floating up across a pointlessly high forehead, a long skein of greasy hair down my back. It was braided, the loose strands tucked behind my ear and kept back with a rolled-up kerchief. My headband. I was very attached to it. I’d started with it back home after a neighborhood boy declared his love on the wall outside my bedroom window. They were just kids I ran the streets with: Paul, a foster child, so light-skinned I think he was mixed, and Shaquille, who tried to walk like he was street—a lope and a roll of the shoulders and a lope and a roll and a lope…They were standing on the wall below my window, sweet as pecan pie. When Shaquille got to the Would ya be my girl stuff, Paul crumbled in giggles and fell off into the bushes. That’s when I hit the bed, flattered and terrified. I was so deeply not interested.

  Today I don’t think it’s so different. Being a dyke. It helps you get over being a girl, but so does whoring, or professional sports. Back then I thought I was smelling my own death, and what do you do with that? Perhaps, during that moment in the mirror, I realized that I was in fact a lucky girl, to have lived in a neighborhood so rough and distracted by racial tensions that there was more room than usual for junior homosexuals. But I doubt it. I was too distracted by my new situation. The headband that no one noticed at home drew reactions here. Like Shane’s first words to me: Welcome home, Pocahontas.

  Cloud Boy

  Spooky as I was, I loved the mescaline. It came from Cloud Boy.

  I met him at Callie’s, where the door was always open. All day, Callie tipped elegantly in her spike heels back and forth from the bed, with its view of the television, to the window of her tiny manager’s unit in the Budds’ new motel. Over the fistfuls of pansies stuck in the window box, she exchanged guest money for keys. She always wore black. It sent a message: formerly of the Hells Angels. She was open about this. It had intrigued Willie Budd. He’d hired her on the spot, without references.

  The place had been a worn-out motel called The Skunk. The Budds hammered up white wooden icicles and window boxes, planted a few spruce trees out front, and then reopened under the name Tyrolean Villas. Willa, as the Budds’ only daughter, was obliged to be the motel maid. Every morning in a fury she’d head to the Tyrolean Villas, rip the sheets off the beds, and collect the tips that were spending money for the day. Then she’d stop off at Callie’s unit. Shane would already be there, sprawling out over most of the floor. Willa would flick on the tube and lay next to him as they watched the day’s episode of their horror soap opera, Dark Shadows.

  By the time I showed up, Willa was too absorbed to acknowledge me. She was eyeballing a television screen washed with spooky fog and a gleaming black river. There were moans off-screen, then the camera moved in on a terrified actor. Splash. Willa loved this stuff. Dark Shadows was her daily horror pulse.

  Callie came in, jiggling keys. As soon as she sat on the bed, Shane jumped up next to her and lay his head down in her lap. Absentmindedly, she stroked his hair and his grin was full of joy.

  —Whatta puppy you are, said Callie. He stuck his tongue out and panted, then pulled Callie’s head down, her long black wavy hair covering everything but his fingers.

  Her skin was pale and tender as the underbelly of something wild, not to be touched. I couldn’t stop watching her. Maybe she was on the run from a nasty biker boyfriend, but she seemed too cool for that. Cool as the devil. She was the witchiest woman I’d ever met and not because she believed in the earth goddess. Callie was at least fifteen years older than Shane and twelve years older than her other boyfriend, Cloud Boy.

  Dark Shadows was getting really good. A stabbing. Shane slid off the bed and hit the floor next to me as the camera closed in on a big ghoulish face that opened out into screams every time the knife entered his chest. His teeth shone like gray pearls. Eyeshadow ran down the gutters in his cheeks. We huddled around the screen as Callie folded up some bills and put them in a box on her dresser. That was when the door swung open and Cloud Boy came in.

  He strode up behind Callie and gave her a teddy bear hug, a smacking kiss on the neck.

  —Sweetie PIE, said Cloud Boy. How’s my girl?

  In his big hands, she was as still as a tiny porcelain figurine. But soft, unimaginably relaxed. He nodded in my direction; his eyebrows bobbed.

  —Howdy. The name’s Cloud B
oy.

  —Cloud Boy, I said slowly, remembering. Willa told me about your, uh, group therapy?

  —Yeah. Our group leader was trained by Werner Erhard himself.

  —That means no bathroom breaks. They’re not allowed to pee during group, Willa said. Her eyes didn’t stray from the screen.

  —You can’t leave the room. It’s resistance. Nothing works if you resist. That’s something we learned.

  Cloud Boy was bright in a dumb way, a boy light bulb. Willa had told me he was supposed to inherit a million in six months, when he turned twenty-one, but there would be nothing left. Mom was on a spree. She had been for years. So, Cloud Boy sold drugs for pocket money. Drugs were the patch of ice under the lumbering Volvo of the town class structure; anyone could skid up, or down, or slide all around. People were either flipping burgers for tourists, or in this other group. Trust funds. Mostly it was the burger flippers who were selling drugs to the people with high class cash. But Cloud Boy’s tracks were greased, and he could go anywhere.

  —Look what I’ve got for you kids, he’d say, tenderly.

  Then he would chop and divvy up his line of good earthy mescaline, which oozed over hours and hours.

  Late one night, tripping, Willa and I followed Shane into an Aspen grove. The trees were white stems and the leaves shivered, sounding like music that had broken into tiny pieces. Shane was jumpy. He insisted that all these trees had Aspen Rot. That, he said, was a black succubus which attached to the white papery bark of the trunk and then slowly rotted out the inside of the tree. He pointed out the black circles that were dotted everywhere on the slivery trunks. Dead branches stuck out from their centers like arrows in a target. He broke one off and gave the tree a hard push. It tore through the canopy and crashed to the ground. We all started pushing trees. They fell with a soft sickening rip of roots through soil. We pushed over a whole rotten forest.

  Party