A/N: violence, sexual situations with a minor, other things under the general headline of 'disturbing'
A week before he's taken for the second time Carolyn Cade wakes up in the middle of the night.
She pulls on Big John's shoulder blade, "somebody's at the door." He shifts away, turning onto his side. "Sonofabitch." Carolyn's feet shift on the hard floor.
Her eyes adjust from one darkness to another.
This neighborhood becomes strange and alive at this hour-dawn. The Curtis place, boys ripping out hot, burning, hollering. The dead mother and dead father wouldn't control those boys-their own and all the hooligans who hung around screeching like howler monkeys. The boys who stomp through Carolyn's yard and grab their crotches before stealing Big John's plywood. Carolyn's not dumb. She can see that losing a mother is a violent, cruel thing that leaves boys stripped and like animals.
But tonight is strange-near-dead. Between peaceful and eerie this moment wedges itself.
Carolyn opens her door, always her body at an angle. To slip. To escape. To run.
For a second the flash of the badge awakens a fear long dormant. It creeps up her throat. It's been years since she's last looked over her shoulders, years since she woke up feeling like her heart would explode out of her chest.
It won't take Carolyn long to jump straight into it. To glower at the Haint in Stenson boots and sunglasses. "This got something to do with Ted Jones?" Her knuckles are white. Each word a foot in quicksand. "Ted Jones, you got the wrong house. He don't live here. Sir. Go to Mr. and Mrs. Anton-"
He cuts her off. Raises his hands even though he's the one with the side arm and a foot on her. "Lady, I ain't got no earthly clue who that is."
It's a lie. Has to be. That he don't least know of Ted. Hoods and cops have known Ted Jones ever since Ted was arrested. A known associate of "Fast" Eddie Shepard. Sammy Shepard's boy.
"The man of the house available?" He pauses. "There is a man of the house livin' here?" He tries to look inside where he doesn't belong and Carolyn turns herself into a screw. People are always looking where they don't belong. Taking what they can't have.
She curses under her breath. "Well Sir? I got two ears you see. You come knocking on my door at God knows what hour..."
"You any relation to John Cade, Jr.?"
"Why do you want to know?" It's Carolyn's turn to pause. "I'm his mother."
It's hardly morning when the officer wakes up Carolyn Cade to tell her that her son's missing or another way of saying it, a suspect in a murder.
They're on the porch talking like ol' chums, with a gun. Big John, Carolyn, the officer. Carolyn doesn't catch it. Mack or something. Wears dark sunglasses. Carolyn sits down, on the railing, twisting her body away. The officer stands. Holds a wide stance.
They aren't used to company. She offers Mack water. Apologizes for not having more. Mack crumbles his mouth like he's tasting sour milk. Surprises her and says alright, he'd like some cold water.
She walks with her back to her front door.
"He's sixteen," Big John says when Carolyn comes out from inside. He rubs his palms together when Mack wonders about Johnny not being home. Wonders if he had a history of running away.
Carolyn begins to shake. "We can't control him. Even take a belt to him when he disrespects us and don't give us no other choice. NOTHING works. He just does what he wants. Always hanging out with those punks." The glass shakes in Carolyn's hand and her voice is loud and the wind carries it the wrong direction.
"Shut up!"
Carolyn's nerves tighten. "Don't you tell me to shut up! Mr. Officer, how'd you know Johnny stabbed that dead boy? It was probably that other boy. The Curtis boy." She spits. Those boys, she adds, are always running around...
The boy, Mack says dryly, The Pony Boy.
Big John lets out something like a hoot but then shakes his head and tells Mack he doesn't know the boy. "Talk about a loose screw, The Pony Boy" he says and makes a loose screw gesture with his hand. "You ought to arrest that boy's daddy for that crock of a name."
"He's dead, Jack." Carolyn breaks in. "Him and the Mrs. You can't kill the dead." She knows first hand. Some things once gone are gone forever.
She doesn't remember the boy either. Nope, never seen him. Even when Mack gives a brief description. He's slight. Brown hair. Green eyes. About or so in height. She tries to picture him and all those boys blend together. A mass. A body without a tail or head. Aimless and clawed. She'd remember a Horseboy. She'd remember a boy with a tail, a boy with hooves.
Carolyn repeats herself, "who stabbed that boy dead?'
Mack swallows his lips into tight red lines of surrender.
Mack admits to Carolyn that they're still interviewing witnesses, trying to piece together what happened. There's a dead boy in the park. He was president of the local chapter of the Order of DeMolay and the Vikings Social Club-according to the rings they found on his half-boy-half-man-all-dead-body.
Mack fiddles his wedding band. "What I'm sayin' this boy in the park ain't your typical street-rat, he had connections. Money. The whole enchilada. There's gonna be a lot of people up in arms over this. You here in '47, '48 or was yous still out in Indian country Mizzus. Cade?" He talks like a mouth full of tobacco.
Carolyn pauses. Wonders if this is a trick. Holds out that it's not. "Tulsa."
"Hmm. Alrighty. Y'all remember Bobby Bluejacket? Bill Klein? Yeah well this is gonna be just like that case. But bigger. Mark my words." He draws an 'x' into the air. "Want you folks prepared. Your son and that horsekid's mugshot gonna be blasted on ev'ry T.V. station ev'ry newsstand as murders n' thugs." He won't stop his grinning.
Carolyn's son and that other kid, The Pony Boy, killed the dead boy and ran-away. But from the initial facts her son had the knife. It wasn't pretty. The body. Drained of blood.
Some sort of ritual. Mack hints and takes a stick and a paring knife out of his pocket. Tiny shavings gather at his feet.
"Officer Patterson. New kid on the job-wretched in the bushes." Mack's lips quake in a smirk.
"That fuck ain't my fault. SOB got himself in the wrong line of work if he can't handle some blood." Jack coughs.
Anyways it don't matter. Officer Mack says. A fierce line back on his face. Who did the stabbing. Mack's hand on his gun. Both are fugitives. Both are hiding someplace.
It was not an ideal combination. A boy and a horse-boy. Running amok.
"Well fuck they ain't hiding here."
The officer stands up, looks like he would rather be locked in a cage with man-eating rats than be on their porch for one minute longer. "If he gets in touch, Mr. Cade, you let us know." It sounds like it is, like an order, like a threat.
"Sure thing Cap'n." Big John says extending his hand and even though Big John is slight, a lightweight really, Carolyn knows the officer is going to be taken by the force of his grip. Everybody is.
"Don't look at us like that. What we should be broken up? That boy ain't done nothing but cause us trouble. I'm at my wit's end with him. Some time in jail'll do him some good."
Mack snorts. "Mizzus Cade he's lookin' at far worse than weekend in a boys home."
Big John laughs and sounds like he's choking up a rat tail. He coughs. "Eye for an eye," Big John says roughly. Touching right below his milky white pupil.
Looking Mack in his shaded eyes, looking directly at him for the first time. Dares him to call her a liar.
Although Mack does not change expressions she doesn't forget how her left eye is punched out black.
Johnny is missing.
Mack wants a picture of Johnny, for the newspaper.
For the wanted poster, Jack cusses. He goes off to cut the logs into boards, into planks. Into stables. Into jails. Into pirate ships. Into graves. Into cradleboards and back again.
She listens for a minute to the sound of Big John's saw.
Closing the door behind her with a slam. There's the cedar leaves for stopping the ghosts. Then there's Johnny's room at the last door on the left.
She hasn't been in Johnny's room in years. She's hardly home. Working the assembly line until she can't hardly tell night from morning. She's a hard worker. Her feet sore and blistered. Her head dizzy and her mind numb from the fumes.
Jack's on disability from his time in the copper mines but that hardly pays for anything.
This room smells like him, but musty. Or maybe this is how he smells and she's forgotten already.
The only furniture is the bed. There are a few comic books on the floor. Magazines with what looks like aliens and outer space. Playboys. The Rolling Stones Album. The guitar with it's half-plucked out strings on his mattress. The wooden horse. Cigarettes.
She almost trips over an amp and wants to curse. A gift from her sister Ada and husband Anton.
When she opens the blinds the sun gauges her eyes out. Dust, tiny and gray and glittered with the sun revolves around her, touching her on her housecoat, on her skin, covering her with a gray fur. She squirms and pulls it off her. She tosses her pelts into a corner. More dust and ashes grow in its place. The room feels haunting and decaying.
She's still dressed like an animal when she sees the photos. Something from a photo booth of Ted and Johnny. Johnny wears this ugly scar on his face. She's never seen it before. She can't be sure but it doesn't feel like Big John's doing.
Looking dangerous and menacing in another. Stupid. Carolyn pulls her hair off her forehead. It sticks to her, like August and not nearly October.
In another Johnny's elbow resting on Ted's shoulder. Both of them in sunglasses. Their expressions are impermeable. Except Johnny's mouth is open, slightly. Shooting the bird. In the last one shooting finger guns in each other's mouths.
Pow.
The other photo strip underneath is Johnny. With a girl.
The first picture. A face crooked and at a tilt towards Johnny. Carolyn could smell the sex off them both.
The next picture shows their thumbs pressing each other's noses. Giving each other bunny ears with their other hands. They resembled pigs.
The third picture. She's on his lap. On an angle. His hand just under her skirt. On her thigh. Their mouths open like fish caught in a hook. They are looking at each other. Not at Carolyn who loves him best.
The fourth picture they're kissing.
On the back is a note in loopy handwriting that ends with a signature with bolded a bunch of curls like her hair. "MY LOVE IS BIGGER THAN A CADILLAC: I LOVE YOU FOREVER, XOXO ANGEL"
But she didn't know her son had a girl-she doesn't know why it throws her for a loop the way the being a suspect in a murder ought to but doesn't.
She walks out of the room leaving the dust, the fur, the ashes to whip and whirl like the wind.
"You fellas down at the station ever going to get off your duffs and do something about my boy's face being ripped in two?" She says to Mack who is back and on the porch. At midnight he built a porch swing so he could sit here and swing on her porch. Didn't bring oil so the swing creaks and croaks and moans.
"What happened?" Mack eyes her suspicious and bored.
"What am I a cop now? Think I know? You think I'd just stand here like an idiot if I knew?! He sure won't tell me or his father for nothing. We don't know where he is half the time. He treats us like shit! Like shit! Pardon my mouth. But you know who would know? One of those low life hoods he calls friends. Always stealing him away, running around in the middle of the night, drinking themselves stupid, selling drugs, thieving, beating each other up. They're a pack of wild animals. Wouldn't be surprised if one of them did that to him and he's covering up for them. He likes them better than he do his own folks."
It's dangerous, running her mouth like this. Not that it stops her. But she pauses. Scrunches her face up. Before taking a breath. She and Big John are his own folks. Sometimes she talks about herself like she's not in her body. It's easier.
"Looking like an animal got to him, his cheek," she makes a gashing motion down her own cheek. Makes a violent sucking sound out of her mouth.
She must be emotional, she doesn't remember this, but she must be because Mack tells her to calm herself down, to take a breath, to not get so wound up. That it's not helping anything.
She scoffs.
Her boy is missing, looking like a damn dirty hoodlum, murdered a boy, sure okay, yeah boy, she'll relax.
Jack and Carolyn Cade blame each other for Johnny's disappearance. They shout at each other. Objects are thrown. There are tears and faces are red with rage. Carolyn's not sure who she is. If she's supposed to be the mother of a killer, a missing boy, a runaway. The three possibilities swirl in her head. They fuck because that's what they do after a fight. They lie in their bed, like corpses, still.
Arizona-before
Jack Cade calls her 'sad eyes.' It was true her eyes were pitiful and mournful.
He's older than her but being a bachelor isn't too unusual for a miner. Carolyn's become an unintended scholar in the ways of miners in the time she's been with Jack, in their secret, hardened language.
Years ago, in a different life Carolyn would have liked to crack Jack like an egg, bend down, pick up the shell with her mouth and let the yolk slip down her tongue. She would have looked at him like a lovelorn teenager, calling him 'my miner' 'my Jack.'
But that Carolyn felt as grabbable as air.
As it is he can make her forget the reason she ran away in the first place. When he's here everything revolves around Jack and his needs, how he likes his shirts ironed, what food she should eat, what he thinks.
He has a bad temper but he's a good kisser and makes her feel beautiful and alive when he throws her on the bed to make love to her. She tries to ignore the chili stains on his undershirt that rubs against her nose.
He liked to talk to her like she was his ex-girlfriend. Called her Serill, or Shirley. It all made Carolyn feel a kind of anticipation–if he was this distraught and committed to Serill or Shirley who wasn't even stroking his balls like they were the ripe grapes she ate in the grocery store–that surely he could want her like that too.
Jack though wasn't her angel. Her angel came in a paper bag. The preachers called it the devil. Then one day watching Jack sleep off his own hangover Carolyn stopped thinking of it in metaphysical terms, as an angel or a devil. It just was.
The mine was hard work he'd explain guzzling down her whiskey before belching little invisible whiskey bubbles into the air. Carolyn opened her tongue up to catch it. She remembered a story she read as a child of a child with apple cheeks and flaxen hair letting fresh snow land on her tongue. Carolyn's never seen snow before–at least not the type of snow that covers everything in white and oblivion. When she sticks out her tongue she feels like that little girl used to be her.
"You're catchin' my burp in your mouth." Jack said laughing. Like Carolyn is a sideshow attraction in a freak show.
"No I'm not." Carolyn swallows the dryness in her throat.
That was the night Jack stuck is foot out–he had a boot on–and tripped her. "You can't be spendin' the night with no one else. What you want people to think you're a floozy? A whore? Get up. Go to bed. Get." He said and gave her a push towards the bed. To himself he said "what in God's fuck was I thinking letting you go 'round like a shit faced penny whore." In the dark she could feel his eyes. She was crazy about his eyes. They were blue and Carolyn thought that this is what people mean when they say 'piercing.'
After that Carolyn stayed just with Jack, cooked his meals and took care of him like a wife or a mother. Jack kept on pulling on the hem of her dress though. Soon enough he started to get agitated if she looked at any man. "Stop acting like a goddamned slut," he told her.
The first time Jack hit her, she hit him back. Hard. Whippings happened at school. Nobody in her family had ever raised their hand in anger to her. Jack was taken aback, she could tell he wasn't used to people hitting back. Jack was built like a wire fish line, light and compact and deceptively strong.
When he wasn't in the mines or drinking or fucking, he said he was sorry and laughed "baby you're nuts."
The second time she flinched. The third time she nearly passed out from the cheap wine that she forgot how it felt.
But it was better with Jack. When she was drinking she wasn't sad and was able to think. She fills up a composition notebook with stories. She had won a prize at Fort Sill for a poem she wrote. She doesn't remember the poem now only that there was a meadow. She writes the way the miners talked to add color and character. There was a moment, right before the tipping point where she drank just the right amount to get her synapses firing and she felt bright, capable and happy.
One night he mumbled in bed, "I got rid of it. Yeah. Punched her in the stomach until she bled it out. Told her I didn't want no kid. Yeah. That was my baby." Carolyn tries not to picture Shirley bent over, cradling her belly, her cheeks inflating and deflating with each blow. He seemed sad about it now.
Carolyn reached over and put her ring finger on Jack's sweaty neck. He confessed something to her, she ought to do the same. "I killed my husband and nephew. My sister and her husband then stole my son."
Jack turned around to look at her. For a second his eyes looked surprised. Then he closed them. "Ain't that so. I like me a son now. Make up for the one I lost. Name it Lil' Johnny after me."
"Anybody can turn into a killer," she says to Mack when he comes back. Gray eyes like a wolf.
There's a steadiness in those eyes, something that would come back to the pack every night with carcasses leaking blood on the snow, turning it red and later, when the sun goes up, brown.
It feels-not good not exactly-nothing about this felt good- but satisfying to see him this morning. Out of his dress uniform and driving his own car.
Mack thinks they found who ripped Johnny's face like a crater. He yanks the coyote up from under the belly of the porch-holds it by the muzzle.
Mack's teeth are shiny with satisfaction. Her reflection multiplies in them. It makes her dizzy seeing so many copies of her. Reflected too is the frying pan in her hand.
She hesitates then scoffs.
Mack draws closer. She's wrapped up in his shadow. It's suffocating in here. "Naw this here's the culprit." His hand tightens around her wrist. Her hand on the frying pan. The coyote between his legs watching. She wishes it would yowl or yelp or bark or make whatever sounds coyotes are supposed to make while they're not eating or pawing through scraps.
The coyote slips something at her. A grin or a snarl.
"Teeth too jagged, what you think it won't just leave after it rips up a face like that? This coyote's going to stay here haunting, waiting?" She sounds a bit hysterical, like she knows what's coming.
She watches Mack's face turn menacing without really moving a muscle even as his tone grows soft enough that she has lean into him. He smells metallic. Now she does too.
When she leans close enough he grabs by the arms.
"Carolyn. Halt. This matches your description. This is the one that hurt your boy."
And with that Carolyn takes the frying pan and lifts it over the coyote's head. Not like she doesn't know what she's doing. She closes her eyes. The frying pan in her hand falls three, four more times. Then five. Six. Seven. Once it all it took though.
Mack's no stranger to cleaning up blood. He wraps the body in a tarp and throws it over his shoulder then tosses it on top of his car's trunk. She waits for droplets of blood to careen down the car's sharpened metal edges.
And when he's back she leans closer smelling him and chats more about the time the dead Curtis man came back from a hunting trip offering meat to the neighborhood. Hosting a cook out and grilling buns on a grill that looked like it could tip over and catch the whole ground on fire. There was a big football game in the yard and he made sure even the little ones got a chance. The ball slipping through their hands.
Their whole street smelled rancid and wild and murdered.
Carolyn is still talking about meat when Mack cuts in.
"Johnny have trouble at home?" Mack asked in that tone that meant he knew the answer and that he knew that she knew the answer.
He holds his microphone up to her chin.
"No more than anybody else in this lousy neighborhood. This place," she gestures wildly, "it makes you insane."
Carolyn is in her pink dress, it made her look old, or the style is old and it was too tight now, but she never had much excuse for getting dressed up anymore.
She wonders if the newspaper men might come by. Might take her picture or get her side of the story. For someone, if she doesn't count Mack, to listen to her.
Mack's wrong. They've been real interested in this case the first day or two-but now there's nothing. Not even the crime blotters section. Nothing like Bluejacket and Klein. She wasn't in Tulsa then. Heard about it secondhand.
The biggest sensation in town and how you couldn't grab a burger without hearing about it. A beef that turned into a rumble and then a murder rap. That's how the newspapers made it out. Talked about juvenile delinquents and youth gangs and made the whole neighborhood sound like a subsidiary of Crime, Inc.
"He loves bologna sandwiches. He loved them fried up best, but he eats them plain or with a bit of mustard too." She shudders a bit. Even she knows. It's the worst damn eulogy in the world.
"Okay."
"I'm a good mother. Would a bad mother know his favorite food?!"
"Lady." He calls her lady though he knows by this time she's Mrs. Cade, Carolyn, he had placed his mouth on her cup, "I ain't here to judge," he offers and it's a lie.
She knows she's sounding like a lunatic, like a crazy woman, with her dirty hair. She hasn't taken a shower in days. Her scalp itches. Tiny pieces fall from her skull.
Did Mack have children? If he didn't how the hell does he have any right to look down on her, on Big John. She didn't even know her son had a girl or nothing he wouldn't tell her a damn thing, always kept to himself, with her at least.
They did everything they could, how's it their fault?
Mack looks at her, puts the microphone under her mouth again, "and what would you say about your boy? Your missing child?"
The lights are hot and burn holes into her skin. She looks out and imagines the audience rapturous and feeding off her. "He's the most perfect person who ever existed on this here earth, without no flaws and errors," she says through her tears.
Phoenix-before
Carolyn's in hell. The vast expanse of redness between Oklahoma and California. It felt like her head was inside a dog's mouth when she inhaled the hot, dry air. She's not sure how long she's been in hell, only that time has a way of looping around the worst moments of her life, pulling until it stretches like a chicken neck on the hook.
The waddle's Jack Cade. Jack's a copper miner, the best looking, the meanest and her favorite. Jack's gone and Carolyn's in the city. "You can always come home," her sister Ada said in a postcard. She included a picture of Teddy in the letter she sent a month ago. The one where she said she and Anton were going to adopt him since Carolyn didn't write back or visit. Talked about him learning to walk. But she couldn't come back. Ada knew that.
The only bright spot was Ruby. Ruby was a young Hopi woman who volunteered with the Phoenix Indian Center. Ruby also organized a co-op of women who sold their blankets, kachina dolls, baskets and beads. "Where are you going sister?" Ruby asked Carolyn one day when she was looking at a doll she couldn't afford to buy. Her eyes were kind and direct.
Her competency and tenderness rankled Carolyn. In Ruby Carolyn saw who she almost was if her life hadn't detoured so spectacularly. At first Carolyn tried to ignore her, but Ruby was persistent. "What's your story?"
Carolyn's nerves felt exposed and shot. She wanted a drink even though there was still the stench of cheap grain liquor on her tongue. She was counting down the hours until she got enough cash. She wasn't bothering anybody. The co-op seemed like a good place to pass the time. At least they had a fan. She was sure Ruby would comment about the alcohol. That mix of disdain and pity like Carolyn was a puppy who couldn't help peeing all over the rug but would need to learn how to go outside. When Ruby didn't Carolyn felt like she'd been tricked but Carolyn also wanted to tell someone her side of the story. It felt so long since someone listened to her.
Carolyn and her husband Landon TwoHatchet and their son Teddy were going to a cabin that Landon's friend's Pap owned. Carolyn joked that she didn't think Indians stayed in cabins. At the last moment Carolyn asked her half-sister Ada if she could take Saul with them. Ada and her husband Anton were fighting and as much as Carolyn wanted to say I told you so to Ada she kept her mouth shut. She had mocked Ada for marrying a white man despite Ada's mother being white herself.
Ada's mother was white and Carolyn's mother was Comanche, a source of pride for Carolyn growing up- but from threads of family lore there was just as much Mexican, German, English and Cheyenne too in her body as Comanche. Not that it mattered. Long before the Nevaquaya sisters entered the world their great-great-great grandparents became not always with choice in the matter- Comanche. The language Carolyn and her grandmother spoke to each other.
Ada for her part seemed relieved to have a weekend without the boy who was three and made Ada half-deranged.
Carolyn didn't drink back then–you have to know that–Carolyn drank a little bit but it wasn't….She wasn't a drunk. Later Ada would accuse her of being sloshed but she wasn't. She was tired. Teddy was an infant and Saul was such a little cunning brat most of the time (she didn't say this part to Ruby). Landon was hunting. She was sleeping when Saul slipped out and ran towards the river. Landon must have been up on the clearing over the cabin watching. For three days the police and local Boy Scouts searched the water. Where they found Landon, they found Saul, they found the branch Landon was trying to use as a pole to pull Saul out. Splintered.
After that Ruby told Carolyn she was welcomed to stay with her. Ruby lived alone and loved Nat King Cole and Chinese food. Most of all she liked to talk politics. Carolyn thought such talk was boring, but if she forced herself to listen it would make the time go by faster. The devastating impact of stock deduction on the Navajos-especially women-only two decades earlier. How Indians couldn't vote in Phoenix until this decade. The ones who slowing trickling off the reservations and into the cities and the problems they faced. The women she counseled at the Center who turned to drinking to deal with it all. At this part Carolyn would tune out. She didn't want Ruby to see Carolyn like everybody else. No, she wanted Ruby to wrap her arms around her and treat her like something precious and refined. Tell Carolyn that everything would be alright and hold Carolyn's hand like Carolyn was her tender-hearted sister. That it wasn't her fault.
To Carolyn's surprise Ruby was not a teetotaler. She bought and split one bottle with Carolyn. "Mr. Johnson would fire me if he knew," Ruby said but continued to indulge. The unwritten deal was that Ruby would buy it and Carolyn would keep her drinking down to that half bottle and nothing more. But what Ruby with her plaid jumper and boots didn't realize was how much Carolyn needed to drink.
"Carolyn" Ruby said one night after they had clicked their glasses, "what happened to your son?" Carolyn had not mentioned Teddy since the time she talked about Saul and Landon's deaths. She both wanted Ruby to ask and dreaded the mention of her son. "He's with my sister, with Ada." The air in the apartment felt hot and overbearing. It was funny Carolyn would think later, how talking about the drownings, talking about the unforgivable, it was then that Carolyn wanted nothing more than the sweet relief of cold water to submerge herself in.
The pastor talked about forgiveness. That all things could be forgiven in Christ. But that didn't feel true to Carolyn. God may forgive her, but until the day she died she would have to live with herself.
Why didn't she close that door?
She woke up in a sweat and shaky and she couldn't tell if it was d.t. or her memories. She and Ada falling jointly in grief. Their arms wrapped up into each other. Ada beating Carolyn's breasts and then her own. Ada's face disintegrated into sonloss. Every layer of Ada's face, the face she split with Carolyn through their father's line, cracked open. What emerged was a face as pink, wrinkly and slick as a newborn freshly pulled from the womb. She screamed at Carolyn's hunched over, vibrating head. "Where is he? Where's my baby? Give him back!"
Carolyn didn't mean to get Ruby fired. She was talking about their night of drinking to another woman, she had wanted to brag about how close she was with Ruby. Between working at the Indian Center Ruby was attending Phoenix Junior College. She talked about starting a pen-pal group with other Natives who are attending post secondary schools as a means of supporting one another but also to compare experiences and to make things easier for the next generation. Ruby always looked towards the future. Carolyn admired that in Ruby. Carolyn wanted Ruby to look far into the horizon and see Carolyn somehow on the other side.
Mr. Johnson just happened to walk by. He called Ruby who was translating for an elderly granny who reminded Carolyn of her Kaku despite this woman looking nothing like the formidable woman who raised her-and asked her point blank. Ruby could have denied it. After all, who was Carolyn but a drunkard? He looked regretful and hesitant but he fired Ruby on the spot. They couldn't set a bad example, he said.
That night at their apartment Carolyn packed her items into a large paper bag. For a split second she hoped that Ruby would tell her to stay. That they would figure it out together. Carolyn would tell Ruby that losing isn't so bad. It was freeing. Once something is gone you no longer have to look over your shoulder fearful that it's going to be snatched away. They were smart and able bodied. They could start fresh. At least they could drink together. Share their sorrows and joys inside the bottle. Drinking with Ruby made Carolyn feel a lot less lonely.
But Ruby silently dusted her desk and sniffled.
"Okay well see you later." Carolyn said on her way out. She'd never see Ruby again.
Carolyn used the paper bag as a pillow and slept in the park that first night. At first she thought it was the worst thing to happen to her since the river but there were the inevitable perks. Without Ruby Carolyn was free to drink whatever and however much she wanted without guilt.
Waking up in the park to a vagrant taking a piss on her should have woken up Carolyn that she couldn't live like this anymore but then what were her options? In the daytime the store owners followed her like a hunch on her back until she left the store. One old geezer with a glass eye chased her out with his broom. Hitting a sign with his broomstick that read "No Negroes, No Mexicans, No Indians."
In the park she could keep her eyes closed and pretend that the pee running down her arms and chest was water.
When she woke up for good and went to wash herself she tried to ignore the two girls in long poodle skirts talking to each other in Spanish who stopped abruptly and scrunched up their noses when she passed by. You got it all wrong, Carolyn wanted to tell them, I didn't fall asleep drunk and piss myself. It's not even my pee. Things always happened to Carolyn.
On her own again–it would be fine–Carolyn always did best without people anyways. There were the men. Carolyn would give blow jobs for a $1.00 or a nip of some malt liquor.
Far from pulling her down into the abyss the alcohol gave Carolyn just enough of a push to face the day. She earned money sweeping the front stoops of the Salt River Barrio Church, picking up trash and dusting the Bibles with the gold embossed outlines of animals going two-by-two into the Ark on the cover.
She made herself useful by informing the pastor of fights on the blacktop. She looked at the boys-most of them runaways with hardened eyes. Could Teddy be that one day? It scared her. She loved-still loves her son but alcohol was the force that kept her going. No one, not even her own child could compete with that.
She looked at the boys. Sometimes she saw their boy-self. The person they were when they were little or who they might have been if life had turned out better. The bright eyes are like an eclipse. It made Carolyn angry and ache. Who were their mothers? How could they allow this to happen?
Sometimes though she looked at them and saw not boys, not Teddy, but on the cusp of manhood. It was different than the men in the park or the train station-the hard anonymity. Here there was space for tenderness Carolyn thought when she was with Paul. She tried not to think about how similar that name was to Saul, just how she felt with Paul. She knew the words the boys called her behind her back, how they treated her like some combination of a whore, an informant and a big sister. How she wanted to tell him, "see I get you, your mama doesn't, she threw you away, but I care," but all she could think about was Paul's fuzzy nascent mustache and the concave of his chest moving rapidly and pushing his way into her. "That's it baby," she said the first time they had sex, directing him where to go, 'there you go."
One day cleaning the ladies bathroom–the young girls always trying to flush their napkins down the toilet and making a mess-a woman Caroyn had never seen before rammed her against a stall. She swore and cussed and kicked Carolyn in the tender part of her calves forcing Carolyn down on her knees, her mouth open against the cement wall.
"Bitch!" The woman screamed "get your dirty pervert ass away from son!"
Son! Where have you been? Carolyn thought at first. Boys from good homes didn't need Salt River. She felt a sensation of superiority. Your son wants me, he chose me. It was too late for this woman to try to play mother now. Carolyn pushes the woman–her own strength was a lovely surprise to her-"You're crazy. He begged me 'please don't do me like my mom does' and Carolyn runs out like the devil's on her tail.
Well that was it. She couldn't go back to Salt River. She blamed Ruby. If only Ruby had told Mr. Johnson that Carolyn was full of it she would still be living with Ruby. She felt her back scrape against a brick wall. She was too exhausted to cry. Every bit of good she'd ever been given: Landon, Ruby, even Salt River and Paul she lost and destroyed.
She had no place to go. That's why returned to Salt River Barrio Church. She didn't care if Paul's mother was there or if she told Father Mike. Carolyn was tired of always being on the run. It was nearly midnight when she returned to Salt River, the lights were out and the boys who spent the night were in the backroom with it's moth-eaten mattresses and disregarded army blankets.
On the stoops that Carolyn swept was a woman, light brown haired and holding a bundle of clothes under her arms.
Carolyn was about to tell her that she'd have to come back tomorrow when she heard an unmistakable cry emit from the blanket.
"Is that…a baby?" Lord have mercy. She couldn't imagine a bundle of dirty blankets being any less human. But there it was that cry again. The woman was shaking so badly and wasn't even holding the head up right.
"Can I see?" Carolyn said and pulled the blanket back and there it was a baby. A baby with scabs on his small face and crust around his lips and way too small.
She had lifted him out of his mother's arms who looked like she was on a different planet and put the baby softly on the grass. The baby was wearing a burlap sack.
The smell. Carolyn felt vomit come up her throat. She wretched right there on the sidewalk. Green and yellow slippery diarrhea ran down the baby's legs onto its little feet. He didn't have a diaper, just newspapers wrapped around and kept in place with rubber bands around his legs.
There was shit crusted on the back of his neck at the base of his skull. He screamed his head off every time Carolyn gently pressed a finger on the few spots not covered in scabs or shit. The baby had black hair. Like her own.
She could run she thought. It was too much. But the baby was screaming and so helpless.
She thought of Teddy. Even in the broken cage of her worst grief she never let it get this bad. Ada said she was neglecting Teddy, drinking instead of taking care of her baby, but she was never this bad. But now Teddy wasn't even hers. Wasn't even Teddy TwoHatchet but now Teddy Jones.
She felt a heat of anger boil inside her towards this woman–how could she treat her baby like a piece of disregarded meat. Even animals and beasts had more mothering instinct. Some people shouldn't be allowed to be mothers.
But there she was in a stupor and shaking and practically foaming at the mouth and Carolyn was the one without a son?
"What's wrong with you?!" She screamed at the woman who was still cradling her arms as if she was holding onto something.
This baby would be better off being raised by a she-wolf.
"Sister," Carolyn tried to sound like Ruby, "do you want your baby to be cared for?" The woman nodded though Carolyn knew that it wasn't in response to anything she had said. Still, Carolyn grabbed onto it knelt down to pick up the baby.
Later, she would feel it as a possession. She was possessed. She felt like something not of her own was working through her. All she knew was that she had to save that baby. She felt a force a person-a mother-running into a burning building to save her child.
"Okay baby," she said–her voice as smooth and sure as butter, "it's okay. You're going to be alright."
She hesitated but it felt right, "mama's got you."
Arizona-before
"The hell it is!" Jack said when Carolyn introduced him to his new son. Jack was originally from Phoenix and it felt like a sign from above when she discovered that he was back in town sleeping in a bachelor's motel.
"Okay, okay, he's not your boy, but he's mine and if we get married he'll be ours. Little Johnny."
"Lil'... woman have you lost your damn mind?"
Carolyn breathed deeply and burped the baby. He had put on weight and his scars had healed. Certainly she had earned her right as his mother. She was the one who loved him. "You told me you wanted a son, a little Jack, now you have him. I know he ain't yours, but he's a sweet thing and he'll love you and you can take him on hunting trips and to baseball games. He looks a bit like you and me too. You'll also get a wife to take care of you, darn your socks, cook your meals. You need to settle down, you're too old to be coming down with v.d."
"You did a horrible thing to Shirley and her baby," Carolyn imagined herself telling Jack in five years when he tearfully asked her why she gave him a second chance. "You were as mean as a hornet to me too. But I knew who you really were. I knew the man inside of you and I forgave you and set you free."
She could picture Jack with little Johnny on his shoulder telling his boy, "boy we'd be a mess without mama. She loved when no one else did. She's the only one who loves us."
He was a woman beater, and a killer and he'd end up a child beater too; but he was naive in his own way. Was willing to take a risk and hope that things might end up working after all. He was a grown man, but he was like a big child too.
"I'm goin' to regret this. But what the hell? Prolly works out for the best the tyke ain't got no Cade blood in his veins."
Jack doesn't know it but Carolyn has no intention of raising Little Johnny. They're moving to Tulsa, might as well, Jack said, and in Tulsa she'll give Johnny to Ada and Anton and get Teddy back. But then the baby starts crying and reaching his little arms out to her. She's the one he loves. She's his whole world. Teddy doesn't love her–not like this. Blood wasn't everything. This baby was hers. She would do such a good job with Johnny that Ada would apologize for taking Teddy, maybe both boys would live with them. Jack could build them bunk beds.
When she finishes rocking him, Johnny smiles. At her.
In the middle of the night Carolyn holds a blade to her hair and cuts into it. The same way she and Ada did after Landon and Saul died. She holds the knife over Jack's neck.
She left the door open-why? There had to be a reason. She had gone outside and she didn't close it when she came back inside. Why didn't she close it? She plays it over in her mind, sometimes clear, sometimes fuzzy, sometimes she sees things that don't make sense-like a blizzard even though it's summer in Oklahoma. Things that don't make sense like a dead nephew and dead husband.
She can't help but think that Saul did it on purpose. Saul wasn't an ordinary child. He was bossy and had a mind of his own and liked to torture helpless animals. He always did the opposite of whatever you told him. He liked to interrupt and hit when he wasn't given attention. He liked to sing his own songs. He liked to make up nonsensical words and spend all day babbling like a baby even though he learned how to talk when he was an infant.
He killed a bunny. A baby bunny hopped into the Jones' yard and Saul called it 'mine, mine' and petted and hugged it so tight it started to shake and breathe slowly. Then Saul took a stick bigger than him and hit the bunny on the head, over and over. "He was trying to revive it," Ada said but Carolyn could tell she was spooked. Saul though had burst into snot and tears when his mother told him the bunny had died. "Come back! Come back!" Little Saul Jones said hitting the corpse again and again with his bloody stick. Blood splattering on him and on his mother who held him close.
Anton burns his son's toys, his bed. He didn't wash the bedsheets before so the fire smelled like Saul before it smelled like smoke and ashes. You could cook a full grown deer in the heat of those flames. Anton shoots birds the one his son loved to finger gun out in the sky.
Saul loved to laugh and he laughed so hard that his shirt would lift up exposing his belly. He was going to be a fireman and he would marry a girl named Delilah, he told his parents. One day Ada got a bee sting and after that Saul was fascinated with the red bump on her finger. He took her other finger and bit down and sucked. "Now you got my bee sting too mama." He ran outside to play in the yard. Fifteen minutes later he ran back inside. "Do you still got my sting?"
He would come back. He would die and come back, he said that. Three years old.
Landon's dead too, but a dead child weighs more. A dead child suffocates. A dead child stops all reasons for breathing.
Mack his arms protectively around her, "she's sorry, she's sorry. She's not well. She lost a child. You'll have to excuse her," he'd say to the doctors and nurses, some who come out of other rooms to see what the commotion is. The police guard would give her a sad look even as she spit in his face. "Her boy is dead," he'd say over and over, "her boy is gone."
There's a fire and children and Mack says that her son is a hero. Her mother gave her a broach- a real pretty one-set in diamonds. She lost the broach.* Carolyn always lost precious things. She thinks about those children, the ones her boy saved. She was lonely sometimes and she waited by the phone for them to call her.
Except she didn't lose it, she dropped-kicked it into the mud and smashed it with her boot.
Mack comes back. "How did you get that black eye? Did your husband do that to you?" He asks point blank.
"Have you ever killed anybody?" Carolyn Cade asks. Mack reminds her of a cross between Elliot Ness and John Wayne.
"If you mean kill and not murder, sure. It was two nights ago. Shot a kid waving a gun."
"You don't say. What happened Mack?"
"Kid died."
Carolyn always thought cops lacked in imagination.
"Can I see?" Carolyn asks.
"The body? Naw the medical examiner's got it."
"No, can I see how you shoot?"
Mack pauses and cocks and eye and points his finger right at her heart.
Carolyn said, "so you know what it's like too. Johnny and you, got something in common."
Sometimes, Carolyn told Mack, she needs to be afraid, it's the only way she knows she's alive is if her heart is beating like crazy. But on night was particularly bad. Big John was drinking, that wasn't unusual. He drank a lot, he drank more than me. I'd threaten to leave him and he'd say he'd call the cops on me or he'd kill me, and he'd do it. There were a million ways of dying, I'd already knew about drowning. I wasn't afraid of dying and I was sick of Jack's yacking. Landon would say I sounded like a dapom, but I'm not crazy, just... I told Jack to kill me. I hit Jack you know. Sure I never gave him a black eye or a broken bone. But I gave him bruises, so I'm not like those women who just stands down and takes it. Anyways no matter how hard I hit Jack always hit harder. I called Jack a lousy bitch and told him to be a man and kill me. Jack tried, I think he really did want to kill me, but he couldn't. Johnny heard me screaming, I think I might have been screaming 'help! help!' he heard me and he tried to get in-between us. Big John pulled Johnny by the ear and began to kick him. He was on the floor and started to kick him. Anyways I thought you should know, because I think Big John might have killed Johnny."
Sometimes Johnny and Carolyn Cade had matching black eyes. "I thought when he was older he'd think I shared that with my mother. I wasn't alone. But some folks no matter how hard you try are just natural loners. I think Johnny was. He didn't like people."
Carolyn wasn't as bad as Big John but she lost her temper a few times. Hit Johnny across the face. She didn't mean to do so. It was hard raising a child these days, especially a son, there were all sorts of bad influences. People blamed the tragedy and her drinking for how she was but that wasn't fair. She confessed to Mack. When she was younger she used to have blackouts. She doesn't remember what she said or did. Only that when she woke up her head throbbed. The drinking helped that.
The day after Johnny was gone she went over to the Curtis house she opened the door-they were stupid enough to keep their door unlocked in this neighborhood-and she screamed something at the boy with the muscles. No, she doesn't remember what she said. Her biggest crime, she'd say as a mother, was that she drank too much. She neglected her son.
Sometimes though she thought the drinking made her a better mother. She was the type of mother who made mud pies with her son and sang silly songs at him to make him laugh. They were outside, cleaning up the mess Carolyn and Big John made when they had their blow up the night before. She pauses here, noting that Jack wasn't cleaning up his own mess.
On Johnny Angel (Johnny Angel)
'Cause I love him ('Cause I love him)
And I pray that someday he'll love me (Ah, da dum, da dum dum)
And together we will see (Ah, da dum, da dum dum)
How lovely Heaven will be (Johnny Angel)
She smiled and grabbed his hands.
"Ma, stop, Ma don't. Please, people are looking." He looked embarrassed. That's what happens Carolyn says when your son starts thinking of himself as a man, you lose him and you lose part of yourself, because who are otherwise without your child?
It's the act of thinking that separates us from the animals.
Jack 'Big John' Cade is dead. Carolyn finally breathes, he can no longer threaten her with telling the police she's a kidnapper. A baby thief. Her hair is chin length now. Mack comes by, again, this time with a Boar. Slung over his back. Twine tied up around the feet. Also dead.
Carolyn drags Jack's corpse and Mack drags the boar's into unmarked graves. She stares at the hole where Jack's head had once existed and hits the dirt with a metal shovel.
Officer Mack chews the femur. He is lean with a potbelly. Sunglasses on. A six shooter around his neck like a noose. Another in his holster. He has walked 6,000 miles to reach the Cade home. His patience is tried and burned.
When he says that Carolyn notices for the first time the rope burn marks on his wrists. She doesn't ask.
"The quiet ones," Carolyn Cade says at last to him, "you got to be real weary of the quiet ones."
"Like snakes in honey."
There's no response and after minutes of silence Mack says, "Carolyn, you know how to skin a steer?"
She guesses Johnny was about four months old when she found him. But she always gave his birthdate as March 1, 1949-the day he became hers.
Teddy didn't come back to her.
She knew he wouldn't, deep down inside.
He'd come to their house on Sundays. But every time Teddy had to leave Ada-whom he called momma-he turned into something ugly and flaying. All Carolyn could do was remind Ada that she needed to control the boy better, that it wasn't natural for a boy to be this attached to someone. "And it's not like you're his mother," Carolyn says heavy and under her breath but by that time he was Carolyn's nephew not her son.
Ada took him to see Santa each year and had his First Communion portrait placed on the mantle. She put him in Cub Scouts and signed him up for a ball team; one where all the other dads drove station wagons to carry their new grills in.
When Ted is doing petty crimes for Fast Eddie Shepard Carolyn imagines going to the courthouse and glaring knives at Ada. Didn't think she was too big for her britches now did she? Didn't think she was that good of a mother now?
At least Johnny hasn't been hauled into the station, Carolyn would say, but Carolyn is sleeping off a hangover when Ada's son is sentenced.
Carolyn didn't put Johnny in Scouts or volunteer to supervise a room party at school; but Johnny wasn't arrested, didn't cause trouble. Not really. Not when Carolyn thinks about it. Most of the trouble he caused had been a lack, an absence. He couldn't fill up Carolyn's heart. He couldn't fix her. He couldn't make her a good mother like she knew she could be.
Teddy had his own band. Ada tells her that he's real popular. His band was invited to play at all the high school dances and he's good too, might even get a record contract someday. Eddie's twin brother, Joe Shepard, even asked him to play at little Patty's 6th birthday party.
In Ada and Anton's garage. Carolyn watches though they can't see her. Teddy with the cheap mic. Johnny's on electric. Anton's nephew Terry Jones on a drum kit. Terry whips the sticks at the wall in a huff- unable to keep the time. Johnny struggles at first, curses under his breath and then plays-angry and fierce.
Ted tells him that he should join his band, Ted and Carolyn, they have the same smile.
Johnny gives Ted a weary smile, as if he doesn't trust him, as if Ted has something up his sleeve.
Ada takes the boys to get 15 cent burgers. Carolyn and Anton pass cedar leaves similar to the ones Carolyn has in her own house. For a second, and Carolyn knows this is crazy, she closes her eyes and pretends Anton is her husband.
Ada took Ted, but Carolyn could take something from her as well, and unlike Ted, whom Carolyn could still see, still talk to, Ada could never get that orgasm, the one Anton gave her, the one she took from Anton, back. It was lost forever. And it was hers.
A/N: thank you so much for reviews and reads it's all so appreciated. The Bluejacket case was a real case in Tulsa. Bobby BlueJacket: The Tribe, The Joint, The Tulsa Underworld by Michael Daley was an incredible source of information about this era in Tulsa.
for my own universe-beyond the Mrs. Cade being Chrissy and Francesca's grandma through Ted-the mention of Terry Jones is the kid mentioned as a 'real nut' by Bryon in TWTTIN, he's also fwiw Kathy's brother in The Outsiders and Smokey's cousin in Rumble Fish-what can I say-kid gets around. Patty Shepard is the Patty of RF too.
Johnny Angel is a song by Shelly Fabares.
Thank you!
