Perma red, p.7
Perma Red, page 7
She planned to run away. She would leave school and follow the river. She could make it to Paradise before they figured out she was gone. She began to conjure Baptiste Yellow Knife, willing him to find her. She imagined the details of his face, saw clearly the sharp lines along his cheek that dimpled when he smiled, and made him almost handsome. At night she would see his face before sleep; his eyes were round and huckleberry-dark. She would imagine meeting him beneath the river willow, just outside of Plains, the place where the water swirled and slowed and big trout rested, the place where she often hid from the world. She would see him, picture him there with her again and again. And when she would wake up she would whisper his name. During the long school day she would imagine Baptiste Yellow Knife waiting for her by the river. She knew Baptiste would hide her from Charlie Kicking Woman and Mr. Bradlock.
Louise carefully planned her day of escape from Arliss and Mrs. Finger’s and then she waited for the days to pass. She remembered how she had counted the days of not seeing Jules Bart. She was good at waiting. The days held out sunny and warm but the nights ached with coolness. Mrs. Finger commented to Louise that she loved the fall days. She even told Louise that her father had called these warm days Indian summer and Louise felt good enough to smile at her. She knew she would be leaving soon. The days were melting down but it was still summer to Louise and she didn’t want to be in school. Mrs. Finger stood at the door, twisting the rings she wore on her fingers, straightening her skirt, dabbing at her hair, applying more lipstick. She would turn from her faithful watch whenever a car would pass the house, pretending to be busy and aloof. When the car was gone she would turn again to the window. She was waiting, too, Louise thought. She was always waiting for her boyfriend, Warner Phillips.
Warner Phillips was a thin man, thinner than Mrs. Finger, and together their thinness made them appear stingy and dangerous. There was no warmth in either of them, so when they sat together on the hard sofa the room was cold and angular. When Warner Phillips was around, Mrs. Finger had a habit of crossing her legs, rasping her high heel off of her foot again and again. She seemed to like telling Warner Phillips he was funny but she never laughed at the things he said. If Arliss and Mrs. Finger and Warner Phillips stayed in the same room together, one of them would brood or they would suddenly fall to silence. Warner Phillips rubbing his small hands together. Mrs. Finger clicking her fingernails. Arliss jangling her charm bracelet.
Louise knew something about them she did not want to know. Whenever Warner Phillips appeared, Louise noticed, Arliss would rush to her bedroom to put on her highest high heels. Louise had seen Arliss squirreling her bare feet into her shoes. Arliss would step back into the living room stilted forward, her feet heaved together so tight in the point of her shoes that her toes had cleavage. Too many times Arliss would bound from her bedroom in just her slip when Warner Phillips would arrive. And each time Mrs. Finger would shoo Arliss from the room like an old tomcat. Warner Phillips would shake his head and remove his cap, trying to give Mrs. Finger the impression he understood the company of women. There was something going on.
Louise could taste something in the room when they gathered together, a taste like aluminum, or water from a rusted cup. Louise had seen the way Warner Phillips looked at Arliss, pretending he was not. Louise had seen him rubbing himself on Arliss when he got the chance, acting as if he was only reaching for his keys or another cigarette. Mrs. Finger would sit watching them, a loving smile perched on her lips. For all the attention Mrs. Finger gave Warner Phillips Louise was surprised she didn’t see him at all.
Louise was surprised, too, when she began to feel a small smirk of sweetness for Mrs. Finger. Her grandmother had always told Louise there was some good in everyone. With Mrs. Finger Louise understood she could like someone who wasn’t worth liking.
When Arliss was visiting her girlfriends, sometimes Mrs. Finger would invite Louise to sit at the kitchen table with her. It made Louise nervous to sit across the table from Mrs. Finger. At first Louise kept her legs crossed and her hands still in her lap. But after a while she discovered Mrs. Finger wanted nothing more than to talk to someone, even if it was Louise. And Louise would watch Mrs. Finger as she talked. She talked without breath, one story and then the next. She talked the way some of the old ranchers talked at the Dixon Bar. She talked at times with urgency, leaning toward Louise, making her eyes wide and wider as if that would make Louise understand what she was saying. She talked as if by talking she could make sense of herself. Louise imagined Mrs. Finger running these thoughts through her narrow head with no one to listen to her. Mrs. Finger sighing as she applied her lipstick, as she patted her oatmeal meat loaf. Louise thought she had become Mrs. Finger’s sanity, an endless vent, a constant nodding head.
In the early sleepy evenings Louise would find herself idly thinking of Jules Bart as Mrs. Finger spoke of Warner Phillips. Louise would shift in her chair when Mrs. Finger’s stories somehow conjured too many thoughts of Baptiste Yellow Knife. But Louise looked forward to her visits with Mrs. Finger. Mrs. Finger would set out soda crackers and strawberry jam. As long as Mrs. Finger would talk Louise could eat.
Mrs. Finger talked about many things. She talked about her old boyfriends, about Arliss’s father, about her ideas for furniture, her special beauty tips, her pimple remedies, but all her stories and all her thoughts returned again to Warner Phillips as if he was the enchanted key to her life. So many sighing thoughts that little by little Louise began to see not Warner Phillips but the Warner Phillips Mrs. Finger had invented. Warner Phillips the movie star, more handsome than Tyrone Power, as beautiful as summer twilight and just as rare and fleeting, invented somehow by years of longing and loneliness, no longer a man but the dream of a man, more and more like her own dashed ideas of Jules Bart.
But Louise knew the man Warner Phillips. She knew he held no magic or dreams. He would never be a champion or work a hard day to night. If Warner Phillips dreamt at all he dreamt of Arliss, her fat fanny, her plump thighs and matchstick waist. He dreamt of her thin, powdery skin, her hair falling from her pastel snood. Mrs. Finger was too invested in her own ideas to see what was going on between her daughter and her dream man, too caught up in her own desire to believe her Warner Phillips was creeping his hands up her daughter’s legs, lipping his thumb into the elastic of her panties. But Louise knew. And the day was coming soon when Louise would leave this house and Mrs. Finger. She could feel the tick of tension in the kitchen clock, in the radio hum.
Louise had spied on Arliss only once and she wished she hadn’t. She wished she had left her ideas to suspicions but she had seen. She had seen them together. Warner Phillips and Arliss Hebert.
Mrs. Finger had gone to bed early with one of her headaches. Five minutes after Mrs. Finger had lain down in her dark room and asked Louise to close her door Arliss had snuck outside. “If she asks where I am,” Arliss hissed at Louise, “tell her I’ve gone to a girlfriend’s.” Louise looked out the window to see Arliss lady-trot in her high heels across the shadowed backyard. He hadn’t had the good sense to park far from Mrs. Finger’s house or even to pick Arliss up and take her somewhere else.
Warner Phillips had parked his truck on the back side of Mrs. Finger’s junk-filled garage, almost hidden but not. Louise had snuck up on the two of them. She hid for a while behind a corner of the garage and watched them until they slipped down into the truck cab out of sight. Louise crept up on them slowly, carefully, the way Baptiste had taught her to walk, so quietly the birds wouldn’t fly from her footsteps. She had looked in the rear window of Warner Phillips’s truck to see the two of them together.
He was slipping a candy necklace past Arliss’s thick ankle. He rubbed the necklace as far as he could up her leg to her dimpled thigh until the candy buttons were wide apart. “Spread your legs, Princess,” he said to her. Arliss was grinning at him, her skirt bunched up to her waist, her legs splayed limp to him. Louise heard the gurgle in Arliss’s throat as Warner pressed his head to her thigh. Louise felt sick. She crouched down beside the truck to leave them. “I’m going to eat it,” he kept saying, but the only sound Arliss made was a strange, wet gurgle, almost a giggle low in her throat. Louise ran back to the house, holding her breath.
She was startled to find Mrs. Finger in the kitchen ironing a blue dress. “I just couldn’t rest,” she said to Louise. Her eyes were small and troubled. A pot of coffee boiled on the stove. Just past the kitchen wall, so close she could have heard them if she listened, the man Mrs. Finger loved was betraying her. Louise knew all this trouble would rise like a dead fish to the surface. It was happening now: even while Mrs. Finger still waited for Warner Phillips to trap her in his arms, to kiss her like a movie dream, to redeem her pitiful life, her daughter was giving herself away to Warner Phillips in Mrs. Finger’s backyard.
Louise went to bed. That night the cool sheets on her back-porch bed felt comforting. Louise tried to write to her grandmother but she felt dirty, as if she herself had spread her legs to Warner Phillips. She knew Arliss would arrive at the door soon, smug and flushed and eager to lie. Warner Phillips would tail her a short time later, skunk-shouldered and twitching, angling his gaze toward Arliss’s door as he wheezed himself into the perfumed body of Mrs. Finger.
Louise wondered if it all came to some sense after all. Mrs. Finger made no attempt to hide what she and Warner Phillips did. After Louise and Arliss went to bed Louise could hear the couch thumping. She could hear Warner Phillips grunting. Even worse she could hear the noises Mrs. Finger made, funny noises like she was snacking on cake. Louise would hold her pillow over her head. She wondered what Mrs. Finger was thinking when she made love to Warner Phillips while her daughter lay just a few feet away behind a wall thin enough to rattle with voices. It disturbed her to think of Arliss listening to them, that from her bedroom Arliss Hebert could hear even more than what Louise was hearing. Louise thought of her sister, Florence. She thought of the warmth of their cattail bed, how she liked to listen to her grandmother before sleep settled. The snow would fall soon. The woodstove would crack with fire and her grandmother would tell them stories. Mrs. Finger and Warner Phillips had brought this trouble on themselves. Louise was ready to leave this place. Relief settled in her chest. Her time at Arliss Hebert’s house was closing. She had stayed long enough to convince Mr. Bradlock she was finally settled. She made a point of telling her teacher she liked Thompson Falls. And Mrs. Teeter grasped the idea and took credit for Louise’s adjustment. Louise tried to convince them all she was changing. She hummed to herself now when she sat out on the porch steps at suppertime. And sometimes Mrs. Finger would even offer her a plate of leftovers with a smile. Louise was fooling them all. The days were racking up in her favor. She held to her plan to leave in one week. But three days before Louise’s secret date to leave them all Mrs. Finger’s dream of Warner Phillips exploded like an August weed set to fire.
“I’m going to visit my sister,” Mrs. Finger told Arliss. “You’ll be fine. I’ll just be gone one night,” she said. Then she packed her makeup case and put a pair of panties in a paper sack. Louise hadn’t wanted her to go. She hadn’t wanted to be alone with Arliss for even one night. It was a sunny Saturday morning when Mrs. Finger left them. “Stick to home, you,” she said to Arliss before she drove off.
Louise stayed out on her porch bed, hoping to avoid Arliss. She read Mrs. Finger’s True Romance magazines until her eyes ached. She played solitaire on the bed. It was turning colder and the wind hissed through the window cracks, chased dust across the rough porch floor. She could feel the bite of winter and she wondered if she were to stay here if they would let her freeze to death on their back porch. The lamp beside her bed offered a dim ring of light. She could see her breath now. Her sheets were so slick and cold she placed them on top of her blankets to avoid their chill. The wool scratched her face but held the warmth to her. She tugged the blankets over her nose, pulled her knees to her chest, and closed her eyes.
When she heard the screen door open then bang shut, she wondered if Mrs. Finger had returned. But the house was quiet, too quiet. Louise rolled over, facing the house wall. She lifted her head from the pillow but stayed still. She listened. She heard nothing. But she could feel Warner Phillips in the house. She listened harder with her eyes open. She could feel Warner Phillips’s shoeless feet press the linoleum floor. She thought she could hear the teeth of his zipper unhitching, his clothes dropping to the floor. She heard the groan of Arliss’s bedsprings as Arliss shifted to open her covers to him. Louise pulled the blanket up over her eyes again but strained to hear them whispering. After a long while she slept.
She woke to a sound like a cat whine and then the house seemed to rock. It occurred to Louise that Warner Phillips was rocking the house with his lovemaking. Glass cracked then shattered. She thought she heard the voice of Mrs. Finger, shrill and distinct. Louise sat up. For one brief moment the house was very still. Then the hollow crack of gunfire numbed her ears. She grabbed a blanket around her shoulders and slipped out the porch door. Her heart throbbed at her throat. Her feet ached in the frosted grass. Every light in the house was on. Every light, even the kitchen lights, scorched the black morning. Louise ran to the front lawn and then she moved slowly to the window. She could see Mrs. Finger trembling with light, her hands fluttering at her face. Louise saw the deer rifle already propped against the door to Arliss’s room. She saw the white face of Arliss standing naked by her bed. And there was Warner Phillips bending over, ass blazing, as he fumbled to stuff his legs into his pants. The lights in the house across the street flipped on and then the house lights came on next door. If Louise could see them clearly she knew the neighbors could too. It was as if Mrs. Finger’s dream had come horribly true. They looked like a movie screen, a movie stuck in an ugly scene and Mrs. Finger, Arliss Hebert, and Warner Phillips were the bright stars.
Warner Phillips tumbled out the door still pulling on his pants. Louise could not hide from him. But he ran past her blind. And he kept on running. He leaped into his truck, and without shutting the door, he lurched down the road, leaving Arliss naked before her weeping mother, the neighbors looking on.
Louise kept her shoes on until the sun warmed the road. The sky was cloudless. She walked fast, looking behind her. She stepped off the road and hid in the bushes or lay down in the tall grass when she heard the high hollow sound of a car approaching. The morning fields steamed. She felt like running. Before Paradise she stepped into an apple orchard just off the road and ate so many apples her mouth puckered. And then she kept walking.
It was midafternoon when she came upon the willow place. She was tired and a lonesome feeling was settling in her chest. Baptiste was not in sight. She put her feet in the cold water and rested. She closed her eyes and smelled the warm autumn grass. The day would be short. She would follow the river.
She put on her shoes and began walking the river line. The wind clicked the river bramble and skimmed over the water. She stood dazed for a moment, watching the flashing water rippling. She heard the snap of old branches, the slight slough of field grass, someone walking. She hunched behind a gray log. She put her head down and pulled her hair to one side. Louise knew they wouldn’t be coming for her for some time. Arliss and Mrs. Finger were too occupied with their own tough luck to think of her now. She took a long breath and let it out slowly.
Her grandmother had told her there were places along the river where water waited to be heard. River stories. They ice-fished the Flathead after her grandmother had made certain the ice was solid. She remembered the water gurgling in the steaming ice hole. And just before dusk a sound would wobble across the skim of ice, always a hard clattering like the river giving way, then a wire-pitched zinging close to her ears, a woman wailing. Her grandmother would smile then and tell them it was time to go. Louise would pitch the slick string of fish over her shoulder. Walking home Grandma would tell them it was the sound of Mali, the woman who fell into the river when Grandma was a girl herself. “Greedy,” Grandma would say, “trying to pick berries over the river’s edge.”
She always thought her grandmother had told her those stories to scare her from water. Last spring when the water was high and silt-brown, she had slipped beneath the swirling water to escape Charlie Kicking Woman and water had shut over her like a door to a dark room closing. Water tightened around her throat and pulled her downward and then up. She felt the arms of water, the sting of river sticks and stray branches. She fought the current but after a while she let the current carry her. She was lifted to the surface downstream. She had heard Charlie calling her but he had seemed far away. Sometimes before sleep she would remember the burning cold of the river. Thoughts of an old woman with sticklike fingers leaning over her. Now she sat still, listening. She had never expected the things her grandmother had told her would prove true.
She had the uneasy feeling that someone was watching her. She looked around carefully. She could feel her breath heavy in her throat so she closed her mouth. She waited. She waited a long time and when she was sure she had just scared herself she stood up.
She didn’t see him at first. He was still as a deer. Baptiste Yellow Knife sat on the bank watching the river. She thought if she looked away for a moment she would lose him, that he would blend away into the river grass. “I could see you,” he said. He waved to her. “I could see you the whole time.” He seemed almost shy to her. He was sober. She felt a sudden rush of relief push at her chest. She grabbed Baptiste’s shoulders and squeezed him. She had believed Baptiste would know where to look for her and he had answered her thoughts.
