Patience

    In the humid darkness of the trailer, she fumbled for the pack of Chesterfield Kings. She hit the pack against her left forefinger, pulled a cigarette out with her teeth, and inhaled the dry unlit cigarette deep into her chest. This was a ritual she’d learned from watching her father smoke.

 

   She sat on the edge of the unmade bed and with her bare toe, flicked on the television set. The screen sputtered and the room filled with soft blue light. She lit her cigarette and the smoke swirled upward. She lost herself in the haze. She was a little girl sitting at the Shanty bar. Her father danced his hands in the air above the bar like a magician with a new card trick. All eyes were on him, all ears on the story about the gold white heat of the smelter that burned so hot that the fire bricks melted. She watched her father’s hands and then in an instant, the sound of the car hurtling down the dirt road outside the trailer pulled her back into the bedroom and the blue grey smoky light of the trailer.

    She waited. She had begun the day waiting. Waiting for him to wake up.  Waiting to make him breakfast--runny fried eggs and sausage. Waiting to crack open his first bottle of beer. She waited for the alcohol to accumulate like some rumbling beast about to gain momentum. She waited for the day to drag on and for the sun to set behind the hills, for him to fire up his Chevy and head into the bars in Tucson. She waited in the dark, humid trailer and lit a cigarette, like she did countless Saturdays before. This waiting too had become a ritual.

    He would go to town and she would sit on the bed. Smoke. She would wait for hours, even though she knew he would not be home until after midnight. She waited, as if by waiting it would all be over sooner. She never once thought of leaving. Where would she go? She never thought of speaking this out loud to another person. Who would she tell? So she waited and concentrated all of her attention on the passing of time, on the blue smoke drifting lazily in front of the television set.

The television set was an old black and white RCA. It had been the one thing she had held onto after her father died. She would sit on his lap and watch the Lawrence Welk show on Saturday night. When Bobby and Sissy moved as one spirit across the ballroom floor, she became another person, a woman, guided by Bobby’s light touch. Now, another Saturday night, in a different world, Lawrence Welk and Myron Floran were in front of her again, silently this time. Their mouths moved but the only voices she heard were those of a little girl and her father. While the sounds of another time moved through her memory, she never lost focus on the sounds outside the trailer. She listened like she waited, focused, and with the hope that the more she concentrated, the quicker this evening would be over.

Two distinct sounds occupied her thoughts. The first was the rumble of cars chattering down the dirt road 200 yards from the trailer. In the stillness of the hot summer she could hear cars turn at the intersection with the main road to the mine or in the other direction, with the main road to Tucson. On a Saturday night there wasn’t a lot of traffic: graveyard miners heading into work, seniors from the school in San Manuel looking for a place to party.  The second sound was that of the brakes on his truck locking up as he slowed to turn into the rocky driveway to the trailer. There were no options for her if she heard his truck. She listened intently for a second vehicle. She drew another cigarette out of the pack, pulled on the dry tobacco with her lungs, exhaled nothing, and waited.

Wait! Her father commanded, catching and holding her eyes with a look she’d never seen before. Do not move. She loved her father. She loved piling in the old pickup and heading out to the wild lands around Bisbee and Fort Huachuca. She was eleven and would much rather spend Saturday traipsing behind him in the tall dried grass than anything else in the world. There was a small group of wild horses that ranged up in one of the box canyons and every fall her father would haul a truck load of hay down from Tucson and leave it for them. Her father wanted to spot them before he dropped off his load and she was almost running behind him as they moved through the grass. Her father had slowed and then stopped and moved his head from side to side, half looking, half listening. She slowed and when she stepped down she knew she was in trouble. She wasn’t watching where she was stepping but when her left foot pressed down on the ground she felt something move beneath her foot. Her father’s command to stop came a second before she looked down. There, beneath the leather of her work boot, pinned to the dirt right behind its head was a two foot long diamondback rattlesnake. Its rattle was shaking frantically and its tan tail was whipping against her leg. You’re ok her father spoke slowly. Just don’t move. In a single motion he slid the colt 45 out of the leather holster at his waist and placed the barrel 3 inches from the snake’s head. Then a quick, “Turn your head away” to his daughter and the silence of the morning was shattered with the sound of the shot. Its echo ran up the canyon. A large family of quail lifted into the air and flew away franticly.  She looked at the hole in the ground. The blood and brains on her boot told her the snake was dead, but the continual whipping of its tail kept her frozen. It wasn’t until her father wiped a spot of blood from her cheek that she realized she was safe. Her ears were ringing.

She waited. Outside the night waited. No cars. No wind. No coyotes howling in the foothills. Only the staccato tap, tapping of the swamp cooler’s motor knocking on the trailer’s metal side broke the silence. She lit another cigarette and inhaled deeply. Tonight would be like every Saturday night. She would wait. He would go to Tucson. She would wait. He would come back late and drunk. He would have another man, a stranger, with him. It would be a different man every Saturday. She would wait in the bedroom, naked under the covers, as she had been told. The stranger would come in to the room, alone. He would smell of saloon, of meat, of anger. He would take her, pound into her. He would be young or old. Rough or gentle. Scared or mean. She would conform.  She would wait for him to finish. The stranger would leave and she would wait to hear his car leave, moving quickly down the gravel road until the sounds of tire on gravel disappeared.

She would wait then for him to come to bed. She would close her eyes and let the drink, the smoke, the memories cut her off. She would move like an actress, disconnected beneath him until he rolled over and snored himself to sleep. Later, she would sit outside in the heat and smoke one last smoke, knowing that in this ritual, she had a week to wait for this night to repeat itself.

 She swung the trailer’s door open and stood in the night’s dark heat and listened. It was almost 1:30. The bars closed at one o’clock. It would take him 50 minutes to make the drive back to the trailer. She thought of slipping quietly into the darkness. She could disappear like smoke. She could move silently through the dry arroyos. She could leave this all behind and never look back. She stepped down the steps into the dry dirt. She laughed. She had run away so many times in her head, even she didn’t believe it. She stepped into the darkness and broke the night open with a howl as close to a coyote as possible, followed by the yip, yip, yip, yip, yip.

Be patient her father said. Just wait. They waited in the low sage, on the edge of a steep side of a wash. They will come, he said. They always come. He tilted his head back and wailed dog into the darkness. She followed with the yip, yip that sounded like a little baby’s cry. Good he said. Just wait. And they came, the two adults, the two pups moving swiftly through the dry sand. She watched them and as they passed she squeezed her father’s hand. He squeezed back and she knew she would be safe.

She moved back into hot trailer. In the bedroom she slipped from her shorts and top. She slid under the cool sheets and took off her panties and tossed them on the chair. She pushed her head into the pillow. The cooler banged. In the distant a coyote cried. She held her hands across her stomach.

Her ears caught the sound of his car hitting the gravel drive, the stones chattering beneath the tires, then the second car, rattling behind. The hair on her arms stood up. She closed her eyes.