Late in the Standoff Read online

  Late in the Standoff

  Tracy Daugherty

  Dzanc Books

  Dzanc Books

  1334 Woodbourne Street

  Westland, MI 48186

  www.dzancbooks.org

  Copyright © 2005 Tracy Daugherty

  All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Published 2013 by Dzanc Books

  A Dzanc Books rEprint Series Selection

  eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-938604-69-0

  eBook Cover designed by Steven Seighman

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  FOR TED LEESON AND BETTY CAMPBELL

  Acknowledgments

  My warmest thanks to Marjorie Sandor, Ehud Havazelet, Keith Scribner, Marshall Terry, Robin Whitaker, and the SMU Press family: Keith Gregory, George Ann Ratchford, and Kathryn Lang.

  “The Standoff” originally appeared, in slightly different form, as “Late in the Standoff” in the Chattahoochie Review. “City Codes” originally appeared, in slightly different form, in The Story Behind the Story, edited by Andrea Barrett and Pete Turchi. I’m grateful to the editors for permission to reprint.

  Contents

  LAMPLIGHTER

  POWER LINES

  THE STANDOFF

  COTTON FLAT ROAD

  CITY CODES

  ANNA LIA

  Lamplighter

  Wallpaper the color of lemonade. Sarah liked it especially now in winter, when you wouldn’t drink real lemonade because of the cold. The walls reminded you of summer, of firefly-nights and frog leg barbecues, big glass pitchers of lemonade filled with sugar as thick as the Milky Way.

  Here in Oklahoma, in her grandma’s house, she slept in the front bedroom. The bed was soft and high, the comforter the dark green of strawberry leaves. Moonlight through slats in the window blinds striped the scuffed oak floor like flashlight beams. Just outside the bedroom door, big as a bear, was an old Crosley radio that didn’t work anymore. It had scared her when she was littler. Her grandma had told her voices used to rise from it, the voices of singers, of funnymen, heroes, and presidents warning of war. In summer, when Sarah couldn’t sleep after the thrill of a cookout in the park across the street, she’d creep out of bed and sit in front of the Crosley. She put her ear to the speaker. It felt like a sponge. What if it soaked up her voice? She’d go through life croaking for food, for love, and no one would understand her. She thought she heard, inside the speaker, a lonely whisper, air inside a beach shell, a president’s ghost sighing, “Fear … fear itself …” She’d run back to bed and shiver till she fell asleep.

  Last summer, just after her ninth birthday, the dial fell off the radio, a round plastic knob. The Crosley was dead, once and for all. No more lonesome whispers. Yesterday, when she and her mom drove up from West Texas, unloaded the car, and carried their bags to their rooms, she was surprised to see that the radio looked smaller than she remembered. She gave it a thump with the corner of her bag as she sashayed past into the front room.

  Her grandma hugged her mother. “Any word from Bo?” Grandma asked. Everyone knew that Sarah’s father, Grandma’s youngest son, was her favorite.

  “He’s been assigned to the Chorwon Valley,” Sarah’s mother said. “This came yesterday.” From her purse she took a letter she’d received from Sarah’s dad. She read aloud:

  We’ve left Pusan. On our way up from the harbor we were told to watch for landmines. Narrow roads. The towns had all been bombed. No one’s left in the valley except for the Number One Boys: Korean kids. The army hires them to carry its equipment. The kids say the dust here is full of parasites that will probably give us worms.

  On a happier note, Cardinal Spellman is supposed to chopper in on Christmas, to say mass. There’s a rumor, too, that Vice President Nixon will show up, but I’m betting he’ll stay in Tokyo drinking whisky with the bigwigs. It was nine degrees this morning. The shell holes on the hillsides froze. Their rims were crusted with ice. I stayed in the tent all day, by the oil stove, wrapped in a poncho, crumbling cocoa cakes into hot water. I shaved three times, just to have something to do. We keep expecting the Chinese to attack us, but so far it’s a waiting game.

  I like the guys in my outfit. Fellow draftees. We’ve hung tin cans on the perimeter wire—our version of decorating a tree. It kills me that I can’t be with you and Sarah on Christmas day. Say hello to Mom for me. When this little skirmish is over, I swear, this time, I’ll make the drilling business work. I know the oil patch will bless us someday, and we’ll scoot out of that trailer house and find a nice new home. All my love

  Sarah’s mother pressed first one hand, then the other, to her lips.

  “Your daddy’s a brave man,” Grandma said to Sarah.

  “Yes ma’am.”

  This morning, slumped over coffee and the remains of her breakfast, Sarah’s mother dabbed at her eyes with a shredded blue tissue. She was far away, the way she always seemed to be these days, but Grandma worked hard to cheer her up. She’d made a towering breakfast, stacks and stacks of hotcakes, with lots of melted butter and maple syrup. Now Grandma wondered aloud if it would snow on Christmas eve, just two days away, and promised she’d take Sarah and her mother shopping later for presents and a tree.

  At Mr. Leery’s Discount Emporium, next to the bowling alley downtown, Sarah bought her mom a music box, black lacquer with white roses decoupaged on top. Its tune was a song her dad sang. Something about a pony. She hid it behind her back, so her mother wouldn’t see it until Grandma helped her pay for it, and it was safely hidden in the paper bag Mr. Leery had handed her.

  Mr. Leery was tall and very kind. He was Pop’s friend. Three years ago, Pop, Sarah’s granddad, had died of emphysema. His lungs were weak because he’d been gassed in southern France during the First World War. Above the bed he’d shared with Grandma was a framed citation honoring his military service: a sketch of a woman in a white, billowing robe, waving the stars and stripes over Pop’s full name, Dee Eugene Olin. One July Fourth, when the town’s families had gathered on Main Street to watch fireworks, Mr. Leery told Sarah he’d never fought in a war (he was a few years older than Sarah’s father), but he knew Pop had been amazingly brave.

  “How do you know?” Sarah had asked.

  “Because he doesn’t talk much about the fighting,” Mr. Leery said. “The ones who brag all the time—I don’t trust them. They’ve still got something to prove. But the brave ones, the ones who’ve already proven themselves, well, they don’t need to keep yakking about it.”

  On weekdays, in midsummer, Pop used to take Sarah and Blackie, his golden retriever, to the rodeo arena, on the edge of town. It was Pop’s job to paint signs on the walls above the bleachers: ads for arthritis pills, foot powders, muscle relaxers. “Whatever ails you,” Pop said. “I slap the cure up here, so everyone will buy it and get better.” Sometimes, on his lunch break, Mr. Leery came to keep Pop company while Sarah chased Blackie around the arena. Mr. Leery brought doggie treats, and for Sarah, a handful of apple taffy candy. Later, at home, Grandma would complain that Sarah had gotten filthy running around unsupervised, and besides that, she was so full of candy she wouldn’t eat dinner. Pop just grinned at Grandma and smooched her cheek until she slapped him away, playfully.

  After Pop died, Mr. Leery made a point of stopping by Grandma’s house each day to see if she needed anything. “He got me through the roughest time,” Grandma told Sarah. “I’ll always be grateful to him.”

  His store smelled of perfumes, lotions, and soap
. Light fixtures, all for sale, lined the wall behind the cash register—globes and squares and frosted glass shades. Sometimes, Mr. Leery let Sarah turn all the fixtures on. They were linked together to one big plug. She’d stick it in the socket and light flew all around her, yellow, orange, white. The moment always made her laugh. She could feel the warmth of dozens of bulbs. Next door, when someone bowled a strike, the thunder of pins shook the wall, and the lights rattled, a crazy-quilt of bright and dark across the floor.

  Today the lights were off. Customers crowded near Mr. Leery’s newest display, a row of television sets, six of them, made of slick red wood, each one as big as her daddy’s backyard tool bench. They were all tuned to the same station. Over and over, Sarah heard the same words. Korea. Cease-fire. Hope. She squeezed between her mother and her grandma, gripping the sack with the music box in it. Her mother was about to cry again. In gold, in cursive, the word Crosley stretched beneath one of the flashing gray screens.

  Mr. Leery sold them a tiny live tree, small enough to sit in the corner of Grandma’s living room between the silent radio and the front door. As they were leaving the store, he knelt beside Sarah. He smelled creamy, like one of his soaps, the brand that came in a black cardboard box with loopy pink lettering on the front. Into her palm he pressed a piece of apple taffy. “Merry Christmas,” he said.

  At home, late that afternoon, Grandma, Sarah, and her mother tossed tinsel onto the tree and strung the lights. The tree smelled like earthworm-dirt, just after a late-in-the-day thunderstorm. In Lubbock, where Sarah lived, there weren’t any trees, just tumble-weeds and scrabbly old mesquite bushes. People hung ornaments on the bushes at Christmas and found it funny, but Sarah thought it was pathetic. Here in southern Oklahoma, mistletoe, sprouting naturally, spreading wild, hung low in the oaks. The air smelled of pine needles, loam, stems and leaves.

  When Sarah was smaller, her father would pick her up and lift her into a roadside tree so she could grab a handful of mistletoe. They’d bring the mistletoe back to Grandma’s and hang it in the kitchen doorway. Now, as Sarah stretched to place some tinsel on a limb, she could almost feel her father’s hands, tight around her waist as he raised her into low, snaky branches where the mistletoe grew.

  As the ladies fussed with the Christmas tree, Sarah’s mother was weepy but smiling. She liked the word cease-fire. She said it several times. Sarah thought the day might turn out fine, but then her cousins arrived. All afternoon she’d managed not to think about them: the bratty boys from Baton Rouge, the snotty Kansas kid. They were a few years younger than she was. Thank goodness, or they might want to kiss her under the mistletoe (earlier this week, Grandma had bought a pale bunch at a nursery). Sarah liked her uncles and aunts, but this year she felt skittish around them. Mad? Yes, that too. She remembered her mother telling Grandma, right after Daddy left, that the uncles could have helped Daddy more when he was struggling with his drilling business. The uncles were well-to-do oil men. They thought a man should stand on his own. Now, Sarah’s cousins were surrounded by their families, while her daddy was gone. It was good the house was small. They’d all have to stay in a motel out by the rodeo grounds.

  On Christmas eve, the trees in the park puffed and rocked with the wind. The sky was snow-thick, but no flakes fell. Sarah’s cousins ran around the park, aiming their fingers at each other, shooting each other dead. Her uncles and aunts carved hams and turkeys in the kitchen, while her mother helped her grandma bake apple pies. Sarah had set out the flour, the eggs, and the butter, but then Grandma shooed her away. She sat at the table staring at the clock above the stove. It was shaped like a spoon, a spoon about the size of a ukulele. The hands were a knife and fork. Her mother had told her that, when she was just a little girl here in her grandmother’s kitchen, Sarah had confused the word clock with spoon. Sarah didn’t remember this (though food and time were always linked in her mind, the way her father was linked to her mother). All she remembered was sitting on the gritty red tiles in the middle of the floor, watching the clock, rubbing her face in Blackie’s fur. Blackie’s heart had stopped one day in the kitchen. He’d fallen to the floor—a thud like a bowling ball hitting a rubber backdrop. He’d always been ancient, ever since Sarah had known him. He was her pal when her cousins were too little for games and she couldn’t pry her daddy away from his brothers: they’d stand in the yard for hours arguing about money.

  All day today, Sarah’s cousins had trembled with excitement, waiting for Santa. Each year, in Grandma’s neighborhood, Santa walked door to door on Christmas eve carrying a fat bag full of candy. Sarah was pretty sure she didn’t believe in him anymore. Her school friends said he was someone’s father in a costume. Sarah thought of a fat old man, like the one who read the gas meters in her mobile home park and left behind a trail of tobacco juice in the dirt.

  A man on her grandma’s transistor radio, the purple one in the bathroom, had said they’d be tracking Santa’s movements all day and would provide hourly updates. He’d also said the cease-fire in Korea wasn’t holding. Bing Crosby came on, singing “White Christmas.” Sarah’s mother had spent most of the day in her bathrobe, quiet, drinking coffee, smoking.

  Clock, spoon, fear itself.

  That night, after everyone had wolfed down two helpings of pie with plenty of whipped cream and strawberries pulled from the freezer, they settled into the living room. On the wall above the couch, framed pictures hung in a row: Grandma and Pop, Pop painting a DOAN’S ELIXIR sign on the rodeo arena. There were wedding photos of Sarah’s folks and the weddings of her uncles and aunts. The uncles tried to cheer up Sarah’s mom: “What a pretty young bride you were.”

  Earlier in the day, through the front room window, Sarah had overhead the uncles in the yard talk about how foolish their brother had been to marry so young.

  “Bo never had a speck of sense,” said Sarah’s youngest uncle.

  “Ma spoiled him, that’s why,” said the older man. “Didn’t have to work after school. Remember? Ma’d shut him in to do his spelling and his math. Thought he’s going to make something of himself. Meanwhile, I’m out in the fields laying pipe for old man Clinton. What the hell was Ma thinking? She knew she didn’t have money to send him to college.”

  “A few more seasons in that trailer, we’ll see how spoiled he is.”

  The eldest brother said, “I told that knucklehead he should have put off his wedding a little longer—he might have firmed-up a business. Maybe he wouldn’t have left a daughter behind when the army called him to war.”

  Traditionally, the family didn’t exchange gifts until Christmas Day, but Sarah’s mother looked so miserable, Sarah thought it would lift her spirits to open her present. She handed the package she’d wrapped so carefully in green and gold paper to her mother, who was sitting off by herself in one corner of the living room. The red and blue lights of the tree reflected off the music box. “Oh!” said Sarah’s mother. “It’s lovely!” She closed her eyes and swayed to the whispery tune. Her lip quivered. Sarah knew her mother was thinking of Sarah’s dad. Her mother rose, sniffled, kissed the top of Sarah’s head, and set the music box on top of the Crosley. She disappeared into her bedroom. One of the aunts started to follow her, but Grandma touched her sleeve and shook her head. The adults coughed, smiled, spoke in strained, eager voices of Christmases past.

  “Remember the year we taught the kids to bob for apples?” said one of the uncles. “Brought out Ma’s old washtub and nearly drowned poor Bo, holding his head underwater.”

  The uncles laughed.

  “That wasn’t very nice,” Grandma said.

  “Ah, Ma, we were just having fun. Bo didn’t mind.”

  “Those were wonderful times, wonderful times,” the aunts and uncles murmured.

  Sarah’s cousins grabbed their coats. “Call us when Santa comes!” They bounded out the back door, into the alley next to the yard.

  Sarah crept close to her mother’s bedroom door. “Let’s leave her alone for a while, sweetie. Sh
e’ll be all right,” Grandma said. Sarah plucked the music box off the radio and set it under the tree. She slipped on her coat and walked out front.

  In the porch swing she started a slow, steady motion, watched the fog of her breath in the mist.

  Cease-fire. Hope. Whatever ails you.

  A shadow moved through the park. She quit swaying. Yes, there it was again. A boy. Not one of her cousins. Waving a flashlight, he flitted beneath the hissing leaves of the trees. What was he doing? Sarah squinted to see. Another movement, farther down the street. There was Santa, loping up the sidewalk, swinging his bag. His boot heels clicked on the concrete. The streetlamps brightened as he came, haloes in the mist, as though, just by walking past, he was lighting them. One by one, on the corners, they flared. His timing was just right, giving a magical glow to the night.

  The boy was spying on Santa. As the big man swung his bag, candy flew from it, but he didn’t seem to notice. When Santa had gone a little way, the boy sprang from the trees, swept his flashlight along the curb, grabbed the stray sweets, and shoved them into his pockets. Then he’d rush back into cover. Sarah studied Santa’s walk. Was it a real Santa walk or the walk of a father in a costume? How could you tell? What was the difference between a—

  “Sarah?”

  Her mother stood in the doorway, one foot on a wooden plank in the porch, the other inside the house. The plank whined beneath her step.

  “Yes?”

  “May I come sit with you?” Sarah’s mother pulled her coat collar around her neck. She sat down, jostling the swing. “Aren’t you cold?” she asked Sarah.

  “No.”

  “Santa will be coming soon, honey.”

  Sarah glanced up the street, but saw no one now. “I’m sorry,” she said to her mother.

  “For what, honey?”

  “I’ll get you another present.”