chime collections jangled and belled and donged and rang. One plastic trellis after another slapped against vinyl siding. A black plywood cutout leaned against the side of a trailer. The wind tried hard to knock it down. It couldn’t.
The cutout was nothing special. In these parts, you could see one every half a mile or so, leaning against billboards, sheds, rusted swing sets. It looked like a Marlboro man leaning back, one booted leg kicked over the other casually, his hat tipped down toward cupped hands as he lit his smoke. The smoking cowboy image was meant to be terribly Old West and romantic. The problem was, at anything but high noon it looked like a full-sized redneck robber waiting for a man to leave the house so he could harm the women and smash the gun rack.
The wind blew. The silhouette shook and rocked. It moved as if it were alive. It moved back and forth, back and forth, as if those feet could pull up and walk silently down Sweetly Dreaming Lane, leaving no footsteps behind. Just an old piece of plywood and a high desert wind that keened like something lost in the night.
Wood and wind, that’s all.
RAVEN PULLED INTO the park carefully, guiding her rig between the cement lions, maneuvering down Sweetly Dreaming Lane to the extra long parking space in front of Levi Skinner’s singlewide on Going Crazy Drive. Levi never minded her parking there, because, true to his name, he was doing a little illegal game butchering on the side. He’d passed his taxidermy correspondence course. Officially, that was what he was doing in there, but the tractor-trailer made a nice screen for the various animal corpses brought to him in the night that never came out stuffed or mounted.
Raven parked, fell out more than hopped, stretched. The muscles in her neck and shoulders cracked, complained, and snapped into limber. She headed toward the center of the park, her boot heels tapping the blacktop. She tipped her face up to the moon like all that white light would pour down and give her a drink. The moonlight ran down her scar and made it a vein of silver.
She kicked a little gravel. Touched the cigarette and match in her hatband. What she really wanted was a smoke. What she really needed was a bed. She thought of climbing in next to her little scrap of a daughter, waking her up, smelling her hair. Wrapping her arms around her, singing softly, that song about the hank of hair and the piece of bone.
She thought about Annie Leigh’s grey eyes.
Usually this time on a Saturday night, there were dogs barking, couples tripping back and forth to have a beer with each other. There were men going up to the bar for a game of darts or pool, women coming home from Tupperware parties. No kids, of course, this was an adults park, so the only little piece of trouble running around was Annie Leigh, climbing that satellite dish, sneaking through the broken place in the fence, looking in windows. But not this night, no.
Something was wrong.
She stood there on the moonlit gravel that glowed like luminescent toadstools, and she heard it. Minor keys, a variation on a theme, the upper registers played in dissonant chords of sheer desperation. There were a few pianos in the Park, but only one person who played the piano like that. And he did it in the clubhouse. She went to the door and saw the back of a man bent to the task of playing out his unbearable loneliness on a keyboard. She waited for him to finish.
“Well damn, Pop. Did you write that?”
That long back straightened. Her father, Tender LaCour, turned to meet her eyes. “When did you roll in, Raven?”
“About five minutes ago. You didn’t hear?” She sat down beside him. “Where’s your boots? You weren’t named after your feet, were you?”
Tender lifted his long hands. His fingers spread wide and settled into position on the keys. He broke into a joyfully chorded version of “Kumbaya.” It was an old joke between them, referring to the time when Raven’s mother had
The cutout was nothing special. In these parts, you could see one every half a mile or so, leaning against billboards, sheds, rusted swing sets. It looked like a Marlboro man leaning back, one booted leg kicked over the other casually, his hat tipped down toward cupped hands as he lit his smoke. The smoking cowboy image was meant to be terribly Old West and romantic. The problem was, at anything but high noon it looked like a full-sized redneck robber waiting for a man to leave the house so he could harm the women and smash the gun rack.
The wind blew. The silhouette shook and rocked. It moved as if it were alive. It moved back and forth, back and forth, as if those feet could pull up and walk silently down Sweetly Dreaming Lane, leaving no footsteps behind. Just an old piece of plywood and a high desert wind that keened like something lost in the night.
Wood and wind, that’s all.
RAVEN PULLED INTO the park carefully, guiding her rig between the cement lions, maneuvering down Sweetly Dreaming Lane to the extra long parking space in front of Levi Skinner’s singlewide on Going Crazy Drive. Levi never minded her parking there, because, true to his name, he was doing a little illegal game butchering on the side. He’d passed his taxidermy correspondence course. Officially, that was what he was doing in there, but the tractor-trailer made a nice screen for the various animal corpses brought to him in the night that never came out stuffed or mounted.
Raven parked, fell out more than hopped, stretched. The muscles in her neck and shoulders cracked, complained, and snapped into limber. She headed toward the center of the park, her boot heels tapping the blacktop. She tipped her face up to the moon like all that white light would pour down and give her a drink. The moonlight ran down her scar and made it a vein of silver.
She kicked a little gravel. Touched the cigarette and match in her hatband. What she really wanted was a smoke. What she really needed was a bed. She thought of climbing in next to her little scrap of a daughter, waking her up, smelling her hair. Wrapping her arms around her, singing softly, that song about the hank of hair and the piece of bone.
She thought about Annie Leigh’s grey eyes.
Usually this time on a Saturday night, there were dogs barking, couples tripping back and forth to have a beer with each other. There were men going up to the bar for a game of darts or pool, women coming home from Tupperware parties. No kids, of course, this was an adults park, so the only little piece of trouble running around was Annie Leigh, climbing that satellite dish, sneaking through the broken place in the fence, looking in windows. But not this night, no.
Something was wrong.
She stood there on the moonlit gravel that glowed like luminescent toadstools, and she heard it. Minor keys, a variation on a theme, the upper registers played in dissonant chords of sheer desperation. There were a few pianos in the Park, but only one person who played the piano like that. And he did it in the clubhouse. She went to the door and saw the back of a man bent to the task of playing out his unbearable loneliness on a keyboard. She waited for him to finish.
“Well damn, Pop. Did you write that?”
That long back straightened. Her father, Tender LaCour, turned to meet her eyes. “When did you roll in, Raven?”
“About five minutes ago. You didn’t hear?” She sat down beside him. “Where’s your boots? You weren’t named after your feet, were you?”
Tender lifted his long hands. His fingers spread wide and settled into position on the keys. He broke into a joyfully chorded version of “Kumbaya.” It was an old joke between them, referring to the time when Raven’s mother had
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