“If you’re my girl, you bes’ untie me now.”
His girl.
“I ain’t going back,” she said, “and neither are you.”
He was quiet for a minute.
“You ain’t goin’ back to Momma?”
When she didn’t say anything, he went on. “She thinks she got us under her thumb, makin’ out like money’s everything.”
“This ain’t about money.”
“It’s always about money! No appreciation. She don’ understand what I do, though I’ve stayed with her all those years . . . all those fields and tents.”
“This is about a cabin.”
But she knew he was right. It was about money. A cabin was about money. Momma always talked about climbing up off the bottom rung, where they’d been stuck for years, living in that tent, cordoned off by river, tomato fields, train tracks, and highway. Momma told everybody how she got them out from under a Texas bank’s bootheel, all the way to Sacramento. If Momma wanted power over her fate, she needed money for leverage. She’d do what it took.
“You think this is ’bout us? You think that baby’s mine?”
She didn’t answer, wondering if it mattered who the daddy was. In her experience, it was the momma that mattered.
“Okay, then. You’re right,” he said. “We’ll head down to San Luis. Get us some pea work. There’s some nice little bars there that like a good singer. You untie me, and I’ll drive us there.”
She understood he was trying to trick her.
“I’m not going with you.”
Her eyes blurred. Her cheeks were wet.
“What are you sayin’?”
“Momma’s moving to Tumbleweed, you can go to San Luis, and I’ll . . .”
What would she do?
She thought of a poster at the theater downtown, for the movie San Francisco. It reminded her of Uno’s daughter Sweetie, who’d run off to the city some time ago. The name of that movie rose up before her now, as a place you run off to.
“I’ll go to San Francisco.”
He was quiet at first. Then he exploded in laughter, a mean look on his face. “Sounds like you got a bona fide plan. Yes, ma’am! Whole lot of pickin’ work in Frisco, acres and acres of tomatoes. Yes, ma’am. Who’m I to interfere with a girl’s bona fide plan?”
He thought she was stupid. She hadn’t known that.
She slowed for the Galt stop sign—dark Texaco station, butcher, feed store, depot. A spotted dog ran across the road. Daddy looked left and right. She shifted and pushed her foot on the pedal, and the car lurched forward.
Galt was in the rearview now, nothing but road and sky and the SP tracks and Tokay grapes near harvest, glowing on the vine.
“You can’t leave a person on the side of the road,” he said, a jagged edge to his voice.
She thought of Uno, wondering at the limits of that code.
“I’ll untie you. You can catch a ride to Stockton.”
She pulled the car over, crunching onto gravel, its front wheels stopping just at the shoulder before it dropped into an irrigation ditch. She got out and opened the back door.
He stood, five inches taller than her.
She saw his black blood, and the skin on her face felt cold.
He turned his back so she could untie him. It took a while, as her hands were shaking and Momma’s knot was good.
The rope dropped and he turned back around.
They stood there a minute, his face scrambled. Was one eye higher than the other? Had it always been? He wasn’t right.
Water rushed in the ditch behind him.
He grabbed her right wrist, twisting it, making her drop to her knees.
“Wrong choice, girl.”
Her face contorted in pain from his twisting, but she didn’t drop the key on its chain. He wouldn’t go any further. He couldn’t do that to her. He didn’t have any other people— Granny was buried next to Benjamin back in Amarillo. He wasn’t going to cut the last real connection he had.
This is what Jane thought.
He twisted harder.
“Disloyal,” he said. “You ain’t so good’s I thought. You turned out a disappointment. Not so special after all.”
Her head burst into noise again, like an out-of-tune, full-volume radio show in her head, music and static and a screaming voice, too, and her skull nearly split, like something new had entered her, or something old wanted out. Then a husky radio voice yelled, Hit him!
So she did.
She punched Daddy in his groin with her left fist, felling him for the second time. She’d always been good with both hands, like he was.
He lay there moaning and clutching himself.
Scrambling up to get away, she dropped the key.
Though he was doubled over, he rolled and grabbed it.
She snatched the blood-sticky crowbar off the floorboard—“I’ll do it again!”
He threw the key in the dark, and she could see it flipping through the air. It took so long before she heard the clank, metal on metal, up near the car’s front end.
Why’d he do that? Throwing that key seemed like the worst thing he did that night, the worst thing any of them did that night.
Cain’t trust neither of ’em! the radio voice in her head yelled. They ain’t for you!
She saw it was true.
Better off on your own!
Hearing those thoughts as that river of anger rushed through her, she brought the crowbar down on his hip, this time like a pick, not a bat, releasing some essential Jane that had never gotten out before, almost like this had nothing to do with him or with her.
He bellowed and grabbed her feet, knocking her down, and she fell into the ditch. Her face hit cold water, and she sputtered and rose up, coughing. She struggled to stand, the water waist high. She stepped on something sharp—a branch? —tearing right through her shoe into her foot. She pulled it out, screaming. The pain moved in a wave through her body, into her head, pounding to get out. But still she crawled up the edge to the muddy bank.
He was standing over her now. “I thought you were different!”
You are different! raged the voice in her head.
“I am!” she yelled.
Different than he thought, different than she was a few hours before.
She thought he was going to throw her back in the water, drown her. She knew it. This was how she would end. Momma was wrong. She wasn’t going to do something. She was going to end right there, in the muddy water. Not in the papers, on the radio. Just a dirty, ugly girl, white trash, dead in a ditch, alone, if she didn’t do something now.
Her fingers sank in the mud, inches from moonlit metal, the crowbar. She reached and gripped it again, rose up and swung a third time, hitting him hard on his knees.
He cried out, tumbling into the ditch himself, splashing, yelling.
Her whole leg throbbed. Her skull was brittle, like it might explode from pressure.
She climbed up, sobbing, her face muddy, streaked red, brown, white.
Finally she stopped crying. The only sound left was the rushing ditch water. Still she waited, her heart pounding, but nothing happened—something should happen! She waited longer. Still nothing. No one. An empty space between then and now.
She breathed—one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. When her breath no longer rasped, she thought, Maybe he swam off, climbed out of the ditch down the road. He’s hitching a ride to Stockton. He won’t come back.