Dark Dreams, Pale Horses Page 6

  And Billy said, in his own voice, in a way that broke character but evoked a swoop of magic—reality that stole the breath from her body, “A magnificence that comes out of your eyes and your voice and the way you stand there and the way you walk.” His hand trailed through her hair. She looked at him and lost herself in his dark eyes. “You’re lit from within, Terri. You’ve got fires banked down in you. Hearth fires and holocausts.”

  There; he had used her name—had veered passionately, uncontrollably, from the script. But it didn’t matter. Terri didn’t care. She wiped tears from her eyes with the back of her hand as the dialogue continued, her mind swimming in and out of the movie as if it were being viewed through a fan with huge, slow-moving paddles. Her body trembled against Billy’s and all she could do was hold him, trusting to his heart, wanting so desperately to press her lips to his …

  “You’re the golden girl, Terri. Full of life and warmth and—”

  She couldn’t help herself; if Billy could slant from the script then so could she. Her kiss was hard and clumsy, smearing his lips and chin with petals of scarlet lipstick, imprints of her emotion, trailing down his throat in a line to his heart.

  In that moment, tangled in embrace on the hood of Billy’s Camaro, she did not see herself as Tracy Lord, or even Terri Stanic. She saw herself infinitesimal yet impossibly endless, not a person but a galaxy of feeling, alternately glimmering—exploding planets—of love and fear, of happiness and pain. She wondered if this was how God saw her.

  Days of color, nights of touch.

  “You make me so happy, Billy.”

  His perfect face. His heart pounding limitlessly through the creases of his black leather jacket.

  “Don’t ever leave me,” she said.

  And he said, “I won’t, baby. I promise you. I’ll always be there.”

  I’ll always be there.

  YOU

  The darkness falls around her like deep, cold water. She hesitates, feeling a rush of disorientation, but then realizes there has been a power outage. She looks left and right. The lights are out all over town. Even the traffic light at the intersection of Gloom (Bloom) and Pain (Main)—which always flashes amber from this side, as if it can’t decide between stop and go, like everything else in this unholy scrub of suburbia—is out. Darkness everywhere, and the silence of lifelessness. Terri has an image of a robot shutting down in an old science fiction movie. The town is dead. She opens her purse and feels for the lighter she sometimes uses to light Billy’s cigarettes. She finds it, flicks the little wheel, and the tiny flame produces an unlikely arc of light that throws her shadow across the front yard in a flickering diagonal, as if her likeness has been etched onto this hateful patch of land by a shaky hand.

  She opens the front door and steps into the hallway. The familiar smell of grease and old beer—the smell of him—tells her she’s home; she doesn’t need to see the peeling wallpaper or the holes that anger has made in the drywall. She doesn’t need light to know where’s she’s standing. The little wheel on the lighter gets too hot and she lets go. Darkness, again. She listens. She can hear him shuffling around in the living room, muttering and breathing. He coughs; phlegm crackles in his throat like a plastic bag. She hears him bump into something and curse.

  She flicks the lighter again, wanting just enough light to find her way to her bedroom. All she wants is to sleep. Things will be better in the morning, she thinks.

  She glances over her shoulder. The living room door stands ajar and light stutters on the other side; Daddy has found his own lighter (his cigarettes are never far away). She hears him mutter and curse again, and his shadow fills the hallway like a cloud. In the next moment he is standing in the doorway, painted orange and red by the flame of his lighter.

  “What in the hell time do you call this?” he asks.

  “Sorry, Daddy.”

  His vest is dirty, stretched across his gut so that the ribbed material is distorted, like bent prison bars. The top button of his pants has popped open. His face is grizzled, pushed together in whiskery folds. His hair is a wild bird’s nest; Daddy hasn’t used shampoo since Clinton was impeached.

  “Where’ve you been?” he asks. The sound comes from his chest. It rumbles, passing through his crackly throat like static.

  “Just out,” she replies, but she knows it’s not an answer, certainly not the answer he wants. She hisses and releases the wheel of the lighter again. Her half of the hallway is submerged in shadow. She feels safer, almost invisible.

  “Just out,” he mimics, and steps closer: a shambling, mostly sideways effort. But she doesn’t need to see the way he walks to know that he’s been drinking; she can smell it on his breath.

  “It’s late, Daddy,” she says. “I’m going to bed.”

  “I’m going to bed.” His voice is so ugly. “The hell you are. You’re going to tell me where you’ve been, all dressed up like a whore. You’re going to tell me, sweet cup, or by Jesus it’s the back of my hand.”

  She doesn’t want this tonight. She doesn’t need it. She moves toward her bedroom, casting through the dark by memory. Three steps before Daddy realizes what she’s doing. He lunges for her, but too late. She throws open her bedroom door and slams it behind her, feeling for the security chain she fitted herself after the last time he…he …

  He throws his weight against the door just as she slides the chain into place. She is bounced back, staggering in the dark. The chain is pulled taut, keeping him out. He lunges again, twisting the doorknob with grunts and expletives. The chain rattles and snaps; five inches of brass is all that is keeping her drunk Daddy from bursting in and laying his meaty workman’s hands on her. Hurting her. Again.

  “Open this fucking door, you barefaced cunt!”

  Bang and rattle. She imagines him, breathless, pressed against the yellowing door. She knows that his face will be contorted with rage, bloodshot eyes peeled wide in the darkness, as if they can see everything. The eyes of a hunter.

  He bangs the door again. Terri screams.

  “No, Daddy. No.”

  Two more thuds: his fists pounding the warped woodwork. The door leaps and pushes at the brass chain. Terri backs away, sure that he will break through soon enough—there’s no way the chain can keep him out for long. The backs of her legs hit the bed and she falls back, toppling over the footboard and onto the mattress.

  Another powerful thud. The sound of wood splitting. She hears him gasp and grumble and imagines him bent double with the effort, hands planted on his knees. He breathes in pained, jagged loops: broken glass sounds rattling from his blackened lungs.

  “Oh you blue ribbon bitch.” Wheeze and gasp. Daddy coughs and spits. “You worthless little whore. Open the…fucking door now! OPEN THE FUCKING DOOR!”

  He hits the door again, but it’s a weaker effort. The frame shakes but the chain holds. Terri scampers to the headboard, links her hands, and begins to pray:

  “Heavenly Father, hear my prayer. Please Lord, give my Daddy the strength to fight the badness. Help him, Lord. Help him to be—”

  “Terri,” Daddy says. His voice sounds pained and angry, altogether terrible. She hears something thud to the floor and wonders if he has fallen to his knees. “Terri…baby girl. Sweet cup. Open the door. Daddy just wants to say sorry.”

  “And please, Lord, take me away from this place—”

  “TERRI. Baby, for the love of Christ.”

  “In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.”

  She senses her prayer pressing against the ruined, leaning wall of her bedroom. She thinks she can hear the warped studs creaking under this new pressure, and then she becomes aware of the quiet. She can’t hear him, not even his diesel-like breathing. He could be outside her door, poised silently, gathering himself for another attack. Or maybe he has retreated to the living room to slumber in his damp armchair, pop another can of Red Dog, and wait for the power to flick back on.

  She takes another moment to listen for him, but all she can hear is
her heart drumming, the arthritis creaking through the bones of the house, and the faucet dripping in the bathroom. Nothing else.

  Tears spill down her face: relief, pain, heartache. Endless tears. All she has done tonight is cry. She hates her world—hates Billy for not pulling her from it like the hero he promised to be; hates her Daddy for being the shadow that blocks out the sun; hates this tiny room for trapping her prayers and dreams. She sits in the darkness with her knees drawn to her breast and cries for every woe that has tattooed the young skin of her life. She wonders if the tears will ever stop.

  The summer of my heartbreak, she thinks.

  Her eyes have adjusted to the dark. She can define the milky rectangle of the window that looks out on the back lot. She can see the shape of her dresser against the opposite wall, with its oval mirror imprinted on the darkness like a large, unblinking eye. The shape of her purse rests at the foot of her bed, where she dropped it when she toppled over the footboard. She reaches for it, pops the clasp, finds the lighter again, and flicks the little wheel.

  The room seems even smaller in the scant light. The walls appear diseased, and the ceiling is masked in moving shadows, like thunderclouds. She is almost tempted to kill the flame and let the darkness cover everything, but then she sees her reflection in the mirror on her dresser. She gasps, the flame goes out, and she lights it again.

  A ghost stares back at her: ashen-faced, except for the eyes which are shocked black circles, drawn to unreal proportion by splashes of mascara, and the mouth: a livid clown-smile of ruby lipstick. Twists of lank black hair frame the ghost-face. That’s not me, Terri thinks, and she is truly surprised when she tilts her head to the left and sees the ghost in the mirror do the same.

  A single tear runs from the corner of the ghost’s left eye. Terri feels it trickle down her face.

  Terri knows that she cannot look like this; she cannot go to bed, and wake to a new morning, a new day of hope, looking like this. She gets off the bed and crosses to her dresser. There is a candle on its cluttered surface—the same candle that had burned on their table in The Moko Lounge. I never sat at a table with a candle on it before, she had said. She had taken it as a souvenir. Now she touches the lighter to its wick and it burns for the first time since that magical night. Broad wings of light flutter across the room, stealing shadows. The ghost remains: sunken cheeks and abstract make-up.

  She closes her eyes and sees herself as Tracy Lord. Queen of the screen. Perfect form. Beautiful and powerful. Immortal. Indestructible.

  “There’s a magnificence in you, Tracy,” she whispers, opening her eyes and looking at the pallid ghost in the mirror. She reaches for her make-up remover and a cotton pad, and begins wiping the garish smears of color from her face. “A magnificence that comes out of your eyes and your voice and the way you stand there and the way you walk. You’re lit from within, Tracy. You’ve got fires banked down in you. Hearth fires and holocausts.”

  She takes the make-up from her face, brushes the tangles from her hair and ties it back…opening her beauty like a butterfly opening its wings.

  “You’re the golden girl, Tracy. Full of life and warmth and delight.”

  She applies a light blusher but that is all; the ghost is gone. The face that stares back at her is beautiful. The face of a starlet: expression of an endless dream.

  “You’re the golden girl,” she says again, and then stands to look at the movie star in the mirror. She has time to believe that things might actually get better, and then her bedroom door crashes open with a snap of the chain and a cry of splitting wood.

  Daddy is back.

  SEE

  “Look it you, done up like a doll. Daddy’s pretty little girl.” He side-steps into the room with a wink and a sneer—bumps into the wicker chair next to the dresser and stumbles back to the middle of the room.

  “Whoa, Nelly.” He throws out his arms to aid equilibrium. “Son-bitch.”

  He’s been at the liquor (swiggin’ licks, as he likes to say) and he’s more than drunk; Terri can tell from the shape of his eyes that he has bad on his mind. Her Momma’s voice chimes in the back of her mind, warning her like she always used to: Stay away from Daddy now, cupcake; he’s got a case of the nasties.

  “Daddy’s little doll,” he says, leering. She can smell the licks on his breath. She can see it glistening in the wiry snarls of hair on his chin and throat. His vest is soaked with it. Terri has an image of him swiggin’ in the dark—directly from the bottle—most of the drink missing his mouth.

  She takes two steps back. Her shadow trembles on the wall, as if it knows.

  “You got bad on your mind, Daddy,” she says.

  “Yeah…I do.”

  “I think you should go to bed. You’ll feel better in the morning.”

  He staggers closer, shaking his head and pointing with the index finger of his right hand—the finger that has the letter E tattooed above the knuckle: the last letter of the word LOVE. “But you been…been a baaaad girl. Staying out all God’s hours. Then coming home, dressed nothing better than a goddam cum-bucket. And then, by the Christ, then lock…locking yourself in your bedroom. Whose fucking…‘king house is this, anyways?”

  Yours, she thinks. And you’re welcome to it. Have it all.

  But she says, “Sorry, Daddy.”

  “Yeah …” He scratches the pale bowl of his belly, looking at her in the wavering candlelight. “You’re gonna be sorry, sweet cup.”

  She takes another step back when she sees his gaze drop from her face to her body. He raises one bushy eyebrow as he examines what she’s wearing: a pink crop top that shows her tanned midriff; a short white skirt that hugs her thighs, still damp with the tears she has cried. She can feel the greasy pressure of his eyes on her breasts, and she crosses her arms over them and takes another backward step.

  “No, Daddy.”

  He points at her again, saying nothing—not needing to. His tongue slides out and rolls over his bristly chin, leaving a trail of slime that glistens with the liquor he has spilled down himself. He staggers closer. His shadow is huge on the wall, a fluttering shape that cripples where it meets the ceiling. Terri thinks that Daddy’s shadow doesn’t look like anything human. She thinks it looks like a moth.

  Her back bumps against the wall—the kinked, slanting wall where all her prayers are gathered. She feels as trapped as every pointless Amen. She has nowhere else to go.

  “You’ve been a bad girl,” Daddy grumbles. The letter E stands out on his finger: the end of LOVE. “But you can make it all good with a l’il hug. What says you, sweet cup?” He opens his arms to her. “Come make it up to Daddy.”

  She shakes her head, yet more tears spilling down her face. She knows that the only way out is to go around him—to bolt through the dark house and into the night, to run endlessly from him…from his roving, bloodshot eyes, from the licks on his breath, and from his awful, fluttering moth-shadow. She makes her move in the next second, pushing off the wall and veering toward the gap on Daddy’s left side…and just when she thinks that she is past him—that she has a clear run into the night—his arm shoots out and snags her wrist. Daddy is drunk, but he is still quick, still strong. He whips her around and delivers a backhanded blow to the side of her face, hard enough to knock all color from her mind. She falls to one knee but he drags her up, and then raises his hand to hit her again. She readies herself for the pain—and for whatever will follow—when two things happen at the same time: the power returns (clicks and whirrs throughout the house as lights and appliances breathe again). On its own this is not enough to stop her terrible father—distract him for a second or two, maybe, but not stop him (not even the all-too tempting strains of late night television blaring from the living room can hold him back for long). However, the second thing that happens is more than enough.

  “Touch her again and I’ll kill you.”

  Daddy’s heavy hand hangs in the air, as if it is suspended from the ceiling by fishing line. Both he and Te
rri look to see who has spoken, although Terri already knows.

  I’ll always be there.

  Billy is standing in the bedroom doorway.

  IS

  Daddy lowers his hand and turns to face Billy. He pulls his shoulders square and stands at full-height. He is—in his own parlance—one big rig: six-six, two fifty-five, blue collar muscle and faded tattoos. He is also hopelessly drunk. Not a problem against birdlike, vulnerable Terri, but Billy is a different story. The brawn he has earned digging holes for the city won’t help him now.

  Terri scurries away, her back pressed to the wall once again. She looks from Daddy to Billy as a torrent of emotion washes over her: she glides with excitement, shudders with grief; she shines with relief, dwindles with pain—a waterfall of feeling, conflicting and beautiful, like the sharp edges of glass in a kaleidoscope.

  “Is this your boyfriend?” Daddy asks, swaying on his feet. He regards Billy with corkscrew eyes. “Is this the little punk who thinks…thinks he’s gonna take you away?”

  Billy reaches into the pocket of his black leather jacket, takes out his smokes, and pops one into the corner of his mouth. He lights a match off his thumbnail, brings it to the tip of his cigarette, and blows smoke into the flickering air. He never takes his eyes off Daddy. Not once.

  Daddy swipes his forearm across his damp chin. He grins at Billy, baring his uneven teeth. “You think because I’ve been drink…drinking that I won’t be able to lay you out like a cheap rug?”

  Billy shakes his head. “Wouldn’t make a difference if you were sober.” He exhales a pearly ribbon of smoke from the side of his mouth. “It’s over now. Terri is coming with me.”

  Daddy sways and sneers. Bad intentions—the nasties—circle him like the smoke from Billy’s cigarette. He wants to put a hurt on Billy—maybe even kill him, Terri thinks. Her heart clamors inside her chest with all the emotion in her soul.

  Billy…She tries to speak his name but no sound comes out. The way he looks tonight, with his long hair falling over one eye and the cigarette perched between his lips, reminds her of the way he looked when she met him at The Slum. Like a movie star, she thought then, and thinks again now. She recalls how the bass player had grabbed her arm and pulled her close, and how they had left him—weeping on his hands and knees in a puddle of beer and broken glass.