eyelashes, and inside had been plush daisies on the toes of bedroom slippers, daisies in the corners of stationery, on a springtime raincoat and rain boots.
But Daisy thanked Elvis, with kisses and kisses, for the dress he brought her, because how could he know? After all, she had nothing with daisies now; they didn’t even grow in her flower patch.
Daisy sat with her knees together, her hair bobby-pinned in a futile effort to control its frazzle. She held the cold bottle on top of her knee. “You think I’m a nervous little girl for not wanting to drink in the house,” she said. Elvis had bought the bottles of hard lemonade for the evening, and the drink, though weak, got Daisy tipsy fast. She never drank except when Elvis was on the farm. And he’d only been there a few times before, for a few days at a time, over the last few years. So whenever she drank with him, it went right to her head.
“You are a little girl,” Elvis said. He held the bottle to her mouth, then kissed her wet lips. He put his hand to her head and pulled her close to his chest. He had muscles in his arms, and his T-shirt smelled of pipe tobacco. “That’s why Daddy loves you, right? Daddy loves his little girl, doesn’t he? Daddy loves Daisy.”
In her comfort, resting against him, she told about sitting in this pickup years ago, waiting for her father by the irrigation pond, deep in the field. She’d been young enough to have no sense of the expanse of the world, and she’d imagined herself in a jungle, continents and continents away from home—immersed in the lush green, and the bugs that bit and itched the skin, and the chorus of toads that creaked their foreign noise.
As she continued to talk and talk and talk to Elvis, she told him about her father in the months before his death thirteen years before. She told about him sitting at the end of the vegetable garden, in a rusted metal folding chair, pointing his cane at potato plants for Daisy to dig up. As she’d shoveled and harvested throughout the garden, she’d found herself watching and listening very closely to her father; she’d sensed something fatal in his every flinch and cough.
“I’ll never leave you,” Elvis told her, and Daisy loved just leaning against him, leaning into him, the muffled thump of his heart in her ear pressed against his chest. She hadn’t wanted to drink in the house and hadn’t wanted Lenore to hear her with Elvis, to hear her whimper in his arms and to beg him to call her his baby. It’d been bad enough that Lenore had seen her sit in Elvis’s lap as he’d read aloud from a fraudulent Miranda-and-Desiree novel he’d bought from a street vendor in Hong Kong, a piece of apocrypha that fell between books six and seven, in which Miranda and Desiree find and saddle an extinct Tasmanian tiger and rescue a family of orphans who’d been locked away in a grandfather clock. Elvis collected everything—all the counterfeit books bought in other countries, the miles of pages of fan fiction online, the encyclopedias of characters and associations and devices, the dolls, the movies, the board games, the cereal boxes, the comic books, the first two seasons of the animated series on DVD, and the DVDs’ hour after hour of extras.
When Lenore had fallen asleep, Daisy and Elvis had walked to the old pickup behind the tin lean-to in the feedlot. She’d carried her shoes in her hand, though the grass was dry and burned-up, sharp against her bare feet.
After they’d stepped into the pickup, as Elvis pried open the bottle tops of the hard lemonade against the steering wheel, Daisy checked herself in the rearview mirror. So very plain, she thought.
To desire and to be desired was the best part of it all. Sex left Daisy feeling greedy—she could never get close enough. She’d rather stay in the quiet moments leading up to it. She wanted to be whispered to, all his little promises. She would, every night that he was there, lie with his arms around her, her back to his chest, cradled, and he’d fall asleep first, his hold growing sweetly slack, his breath going slow. She loved staying awake long enough to lose him like that.
It was already the middle of July, but a few leftover fireworks nonetheless popped and spun in the black sky, shot off by kids on adjacent farms. Daisy and Elvis drank and watched. This time, Daisy fell asleep first.
· 13 ·
In the morning Elvis was gone, and Lenore was gone too. Or, as many might say, she was not gone at all but suddenly there, newly sprung from her mother’s imagination.
What woke Daisy in the early morning wasn’t the racket of the airplane’s motor but rather the tickle of the pickup seat she lay against. A mouse scurried beneath the vinyl, tiny among the rusty springs, working into Daisy’s dream about sleeping on the kitchen floor. A chill shimmied up her spine from the thought of the mouse, and she sat up just soon enough to see the plane lift into the sky and only just clear the electrical lines at the tops of the poles.
Elvis was an aerial photographer, flying from town to town across the country’s farmlands—he would take photos of a home place from far enough above to capture several verdant acres, to offer a rare view of rooftops, and rows of corn bins, and the geodesic patterns in the colors of the crops. But somehow, also, and this was his gift, he’d bring out some fine detail that made the photo more than just a view of a farm from a few miles up. In a photo of the Ruskind place, you can see the dots of Mrs. Ruskind’s prize Whirly-Girl tomatoes, still only a lemony orange in midsummer, like freckles, in the vegetable garden near the house. In the photo of the Jansenn farm, there’s the family’s snow-white husky, since dead from a sudden liver failure, a blur, chasing a passing car. Sunflowers along fence lines, pale green apples visible in the dark green leaves of trees. In these photos taken from a distance, Elvis allowed farmers a new intimacy with their own homes.
Elvis would develop the photos, put them in fancy gilt frames, and peddle them door to door, asking you to pay for pictures of your own place. He’d wear a charmingly outdated denim leisure suit, with a pair of aviator sunglasses pushed up on the top of his head. His hair was just a tad too long, tucked behind his ears. Women were happy to invite him in for a cup of coffee (but he preferred tea, Darjeeling if you happened to have it), and he might stay for an hour, or longer, complimenting your needlepoint or demanding your recipe for the rhubarb pudding cake you cut him a slice or two of. By the time you wrote the check, you hated to see him leave.
This was all before, though, a few years before, during his other sweep through town, before he cultivated the Vegas-style pompadour and whatever kind of beard that was. We didn’t know his name—some of us remembered him as Kip; others remembered him as Jeb; others seemed to think his name was Mickey. Kim, Hank, Dusty, Max, Seymour. Some of us insisted his name was Cash, as that was who we all made our checks out to.
But the farm wives did remember, vividly, some other names—the women’s names on his arms. Because Elvis calculated his sales calls so they’d fall when only the missus was likely to be home, he’d at some point take off his jacket, revealing short sleeves and the names tattooed and crossed out up his forearm. Vicki. Mitzi. Veronica. Lois. It might have been his idea of a joke, but the women liked entertaining the thought of him falling so passionately, so permanently for these temporary loves.
All the winking and drawling he did, the effortless romancing of the women in and around our town, probably didn’t help Daisy’s case, especially when she told her stories to the newspaper—all that “Daddy” and “Baby” business, all that Baby needs her daddy. It sounded perverse to the women in our town, but, worse yet, many of them were jealous. No, no, worse than that: they were regretful. Why, for God’s sake, had they led the lives that had led them to sit there, dusting their thimble collections or stirring ice cubes into their Jell-O mixes, while this prettylipped freak sat, sex on the brain, wrinkling the doilies on their sofas? Why did that very strange woman, only a few farms over, get to be the one to be violated? All any of the farm wives would have had to do was reach over and flick a few top buttons of his shirt to see his hairy chest—they’d
