was in the house, but they wadn’t no way I would tell Belinda Coates that. I thought about mowing so the grass would throw on Belinda Coates’s vehicle. I thought that might make her leave, but more likely she’d start something up with me, which I didn’t have no interest in. I’d done my share of arguing and making a horse’s behind of myself, and I was trying my level best to steer clear of such.
I was weedeating under a weeping cherry tree. Belinda Coates started blowing her car horn and That Woman and her yellow dog come out on the screened-in porch to see what was going on.
I knew That Woman thought highly of me because when I stopped to drink a pop she had asked me would I be interested in feeding that dog and taking it for walks when she was gone. That Woman didn’t have no man nor kids, not that I could see, and it seemed that dog was near everything to her. I guess somebody who’d had it before had beat on it and tied it up and left it when they moved away and That Woman had saved it, and so she prized it even though it looked like every other yellow dog you’d ever seen.
Belinda Coates took a break from blowing her car horn when she seen That Woman on the porch. Belinda Coates started hollering, “Tricia Jewell, if you know what’s good for you, you’ll get your ass down here.”
That Woman did a lot of cleaning up on her sister Tricia’s house. I know because I helped her do it. We packed clothes soaked in toilet water and broken glass and just plain filth down them steps for days. And when That Woman had them haul up some of her furniture from Tennessee to put in that place, I helped pack that stuff up them steps too.
That Woman come out from the screened-in porch and started down the steps, and when she did, Belinda Coates yelled up at her, “Who the hell are you?”
When Belinda Coates did that, the yellow dog stood up on its hind legs so it could see out the porch screen and started barking hard as it could go, rared up like a person, barks booming out over town like the tornado siren. That Woman tried to hush the yellow dog, but she couldn’t. She came down a few more steps and said, “I’m June. I’m Tricia’s sister. What’s your name?”
I had stopped weedeating by then and was standing sideways on the hill facing them, one leg higher up the hill than the other. Hard to stand like that, steep as it was.
“Don’t you worry who I am,” Belinda Coates said. “Where’s Tricia?”
That Woman come down some more, about twelve steps between her and Belinda Coates. That Woman sat down collected and calm, said, “She aint here, honey. I don’t know where she is. I wish I did.”
Belinda Coates come around the front of her car. She put her hand on the wall at the base of the steps. “I don’t believe you,” Belinda Coates said. “You’re lying. You’re just another lying Jewell.”
I stepped closer, still packing my weedeater.
“I aint a Jewell,” That Woman said, “but I do wish I was lying.”
“Tricia Jewell got my daddy throwed in jail,” Belinda Coates said.
Belinda Coates was talking about her uncle Sidney Coates.
“She got him throwed in jail and got his money confiscated cause she’s a rat snitch and when I find her she’s a dead rat snitch. Said my daddy sold her pills and he never did. Never sold her pill one.”
That Woman started punching buttons on her cordless phone. That’s when Belinda Coates come on up the steps and slapped the phone out of That Woman’s hand. That phone went flying, and Belinda Coates busted That Woman right in the side of her face and That Woman tried to stand up but Belinda Coates pushed her back down.
I was still a ways away and they was an unruly hedge between me and them, but I didn’t care, because Belinda Coates smacked That Woman in the face again, this time with her other hand on the other side of That Woman’s face, and I said, “Hey! You wait right there,” and I headed over there, because see,
So I said, “Hey!” again and then when Belinda Coates got a handful of That Woman’s hair and started yanking That Woman down the steps, I said, “You stop that now,” and stepped right into my weedeater and went chin first into them steps and when I tried to get up, my feet went out from under me and I went tumbling down That Woman’s hill and That Woman shouted and I imagined it was because of me, but more likely it was where Belinda Coates was flailing her, but whichever it was, I went over the edge of that wall, which was about a four-foot drop, and landed right on my forehead on the sidewalk in front of That Woman’s house.
My forehead split open like one of them TV wrestler’s and I sat up and wiped the blood out of my eyes and seen a man from the waterworks grab ahold of Belinda Coates and it surprised me how the bald of his head looked like the head of the lawyer lived next door to where my sister did before she shot herself the morning of Easter past, me trying to get in her locked kitchen door, my arm all bloody through the broken glass of the deadbolt, her all tore up because her husband was gone on pills and had took up with this girl they had known in high school who was also gone on pills. I begged my sister not to do it, her with the gun in her mouth, her who had fixed my meals my whole life, had got me little jobs and made Brother take me on, who read my stuff for me, who begged me to stay out of them payday loan places. I told Sister I couldn’t do without her and she shot herself anyway and when she did I had gone to that bald lawyer’s house and his wife looked at me through the locked storm door glass and said, “Gene, what’s the matter?” and I said, “I need some help with Sister.”
As it was, that waterworks man held Belinda Coates by one arm while he got the police on That Woman’s cordless, That Woman saying, “No, no, no, we don’t need the police, no, no, no,” and my head light as dried grass and that dog barking like if it didn’t, That Woman would tie her up and move off, and That Woman’s beautiful bathtub eyes telling me she didn’t need me to be her hero, and that I wadn’t never going to be no more to her than the man who mowed the yard. But that didn’t mean she didn’t need me.
3
AIRPLANE GIRL
DAWN
Friday night, Nicolette slept in her car seat all the way to Kingsport, so I had the sundown light on the dragon-green ridges to myself. When we got out of Canard County, we were in Virginia, and stayed in Virginia for a hour till we got to Kingsport, which is in Tennessee.
Kingsport smelled like something dead you’d left in the car trunk and forgot. The last sun lit the white vapor plumes coming off the paper plant, the shiny new supermarket where the book press had been, the old stone bank on the corner in the middle of town. The chemical plant smokestacks where Willett’s dad worked glowed like the lightsticks they throw out to mark the corners of wrecks on the highway at night.
My husband’s hometown seemed like more of nothing than anything I’d ever known. People with nothing to talk about but going to work, going to ballgames, eating ice cream, and going to the beach. Nothing.
Willett’s mother lived on a broad street in town with big flat front yards, grass like carpet, and trees grown on purpose tall as trees get. The houses were big as schools. His mother’s, the smallest on her street, was still plenty big.
It was dark when we got to the house. My nerves were raw and my bones
