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CHAPTER 1
THE WHITE ELEPHANT
The dust that Pancho bit down South ended up in Lefty's mouth.
Carline and I sat at the breakfast table dressed as the dancing ostriches from Fantasia. It was Halloween morning, 1967 — the last year of my family's unbroken life — and my older sister and I were having a fight with our mother. She had made these outfits for our schools' costume parade.
"My beautiful ballerinas," Daddy said. "Both of you. Miss Cissy and darlin' Carline the Pageant Queen."
"We're not ballerinas," Carline retorted. "We're freaks."
To eat, we wore our papier-mâché beaks shoved up on our foreheads. My tummy strained against the waistband of the ostrich-feather tutu Mother had stitched; Carline, lithe in her plumage, batted irritably at the huge black hair-bow Mother insisted each of us wear.
"Nobody but Minnie Mouse wears a giant goddamned bow on her head!"
"Language, Carline."
Carline's eyes, lovely and blue and huge, blazed under false eyelashes. My own eyes burned from envy and eyelash glue.
"Carline looks better than me."
"Better than I," said Mother. "Don't compare, Cissy."
"If you didn't want her to compare, you shouldn't have dressed us alike," said Carline.
Unfortunately for us, Mother was a woman of powerful imagination.
"You wanted an animal costume, Cissy," Mother told me. "Carline wanted to go as Odile. It's easier to make one costume twice."
"You always say never do something simply because it's easier," I said.
"A mother can't survive without some double standards, Cecilia. And besides, no one will know you're dressed alike; you go to different schools."
She took a prim sip of her coffee and with maddening composure returned her attention to her halved grapefruit.
"Mama, this getup is about as far from Swan Lake as the moon!"
Carline had just turned twelve and still danced ballet. Most girls had given it up by then. (Mother had already let me quit and I was only ten.) Carline at least was built like an ostrich, long neck and all, so her costume suited her. Except for the beak, she looked gorgeous. I was, Carline pointed out, built more like one of Fantasia's dancing hippos.
"My tutu's itchy," I complained.
"Clothes impart discipline," said Mother. "Look at your father."
Daddy wore his pilot's uniform, which might as well have been a Halloween costume. He flew for Lonestar Air — a trans- Texas airline company his own father had started back in what Pawpaw called the golden age of flight. Daddy was airforce- trained, saw action in Korea. Someday, Pawpaw said, he would run the company, if he kept his nose clean and his whistle dry. Tee-totalitarian, Daddy called him.
The heavy navy blue uniform gave Daddy square corners. His white shirt made him look crisp and alert; the knotted tie dignified his poorly shaven neck and lifted his chin. When he set his heavy captain's hat on his head, its shade lent his features an expression of cheerful seriousness. In his pilot's costume, he looked like someone you could trust.
His uniform perked us all up because it meant he'd be gone from the house. His absence from home was like a pulled tooth, a hole to explore, gingerly, but with deep relief.
"There won't be any fighting during your Aunt Loretta's visit," my father said, and lit a cigarette. "And you girls best get home from school right quick and clean my trophy room."
"I wish you wouldn't smoke at the table," Mother told Daddy. "Carline, you eat two more bites of that egg."
Carline cut the bites and pushed them around on her plate. She didn't like to eat. She used her mouth for sass, mainly.
"It's not our job," Carline announced. "It's her job to clean Daddy's morgue."
"I'm standing right here," said Mother.
Carline pinched me.
"Caroline Louise Bowman," snapped Mother. "You are excused from this table." Carline smiled. She'd gained her point; she handed her plate to Mother, egg uneaten.
Mother stacked the plates noisily. When she leaned over to clear Daddy's, she inhaled deeply and said, "A little more aftershave, Mark. And you might want this."
She slipped him a packet of Sen-Sen to clear up his breath.
"Shoot, Grace, you got a nose on you like a bloodhound," said Daddy. "No one else can smell a thing. Right, Cissy?" I leaned in and sniffed.
"No sir," I lied.
"I don't see why we need to clean up for old Aunt Loretta," said Carline from the doorway. She looked over at Daddy to gauge her effect.
He sat turning his pilot's cap over in his hands, putting off the moment when it would weight his head. He had one last Starliner run to make to El Paso — a trip that would bring him back to us by the late afternoon. Fortunately, he hadn't caught Carline's remark. Daddy was a great talker but a bad listener; he tuned in at the wrong times and to the wrong things. If we pitched our voices right the odds were good that he'd miss half the meaning of anything we said. It was safer that way. Daddy had moods.
Usually any mention of Aunt Loretta brought on a tirade about how far away his sister lived or a hymn to her praises. He took hops out to see her in Big Spring because it was on his flight route, but we had never met her. We were pilot's children, but we had never been up in a plane.
"What's this about Loretta?" said Daddy. "You girls ready for the sweetest woman that ever lived? You ready to meet your little cousin? Loretta says he's pure Bowman. I ever tell you girls my sister's nickname?" "Only a thousand times daily from birth," said Carline.
"Can I call her Aunt Pistol?" I asked. I hoped if I loved Aunt Loretta as much as Daddy did, I'd get on his good side.
"It's 'may I.' And say aunt, not ant, Cissy. She's not an insect," said Mother.
"She sure as hell ain't no insect! My big sister," said Daddy, "is a pure pistol; one hundred percent red-blooded Texan — wild, wild, wild. Sure is cute as a bug, though."
He winked at Mother. Mother looked away. She couldn't bear it when Daddy got folksy.
"Ever since we was kids," he said, "I called her Pistol and she called me Gunn. Can't wait for you girls to meet her. She's a true Southern lady. She's a Belle Starr bombshell. She's —" "Getting a divorce," said Mother.
"Don't you start, Grace. It's not for you to pass judgment on my family's affairs."
"Affairs would be the operative word," said Mother.
"Damn right," said Daddy, so busy lighting another cigarette that he didn't catch her meaning.
"They're staying for how long?" I asked.
"Not long, sugar," said Mother. "Loretta never stays anyplace long."
"I want that trophy room clean ..."
"Then you better do it yourself," said Carline, "because I'm not going in there. Those animal heads," she said, "are just wrong."
Three generations of Bowman males had shot and stuffed a whole herd of bucks, a bull moose, a buffalo (bison — dammit, girls, the proper term is bison). On the trophy room's walls hung a mountain goat, a bighorn ram, the tusked, ugly head of a wild boar, the sprouty-whiskered sneer of a javelina, the head of an antelope, pronged as a barbecue fork, a caribou, even a churlish badger with inky black whiplashes down his neck, and of course, Great-Grandfather Bowman's infamous black rhino with its tiny piggy eyes peering out above its great and terrible thorn. The family trophies were all male. Females, Daddy explained, made worthless trophies. Except as wives. Your mother has no sense of humor.
I stared at my yolk stains on the tablecloth and tried sister-telepathy. Oh, leave him be, Carline. Why do you always start something? Let him leave so we can breathe. Carline was too busy looking in the mirror to read my mind.
"Your great-grandfather started out shooting jackrabbits with a slingshot for food, he was that poor."
"By the time he was twenty-five he'd earned his first million dollars and bagged a black rhinoceros," Carline chorused.
I watched Daddy deciding whether or not to be pissed off. But he was too happy about the Pistol coming to waste his energy.
"Well, you girls just know everything, don't you."
"Killing animals for sport is barbaric, Daddy."
"Carline, I never took you for a peacenik! It doesn't suit you, darlin'," said Daddy. "Tell you what, you go in there and clean my trophy room and maybe I'll let you stick flowers in my gun barrels."
He left the room.
Mother picked up his abandoned cap. She touched the heavy gold badge, traced the seraphim wings that strained around a map of Texas as though God himself were hauling our state off to heaven.
"Well, sugar," she said. "Silver liners and silver clouds!"
That was the family airline's motto. Our grandmother Gigi came up with it; it sounded grand until you unpicked it and realized it didn't mean a thing.
Daddy designed the trophy room without windows, to protect the trophies from sun damage. The room had no overhead light, just standing lamps that cast pale amber puddles and created deep shadows in the corners of the room. With their fringed shades and skinny, old-fashioned poles, the lamps had the effect of palm trees leaning over tiny lagoons. When I switched one on, the heads on the walls leaped and loomed.
I was ten years old before I realized that all the heads in Daddy's trophy room weren't alive. I used to believe they were only pretending to be dead. I kept their secret. In reward for my silence, they looked at me. No one else in the family did. Carline spent most of her time looking in mirrors. Her breasts were very new; she couldn't get over them. Also, she was beautiful. Mother looked at Daddy, or read her books, and Daddy looked off into space.
Until I was ten I believed in everything: fairies, witches, magic, god, the future and the present, though I was old enough to know which beliefs to conceal. I also believed in cleaning my plate, which all my life was crowed up as a virtue, but then I turned ten and that, too, changed. Heifer, elephant, buffalo, pig — I became them all. The trophies taught me to focus on the head and drop all sense of body, and for that I loved them. When I looked in a mirror I pretended my body was plastered up behind a wall. I had big fringed eyes and a steady gaze. I could still be someone's prize.
In the corner across from the piano, Daddy's glass-fronted gun cabinet made a ghost of me, golden and distorted, frisking across its reflective surface. Inside it, the guns, too, hummed. I didn't doubt they were alive. Anything that could kill you had a life of its own.
"You ever notice," Carline said, watching me from the doorway of the trophy room as I wiped the dust out of Mickey Moose's eyes, "how worn the heads are getting? Like they're dying all over again?" She cracked her forbidden gum. (Mother said it was uncouth.)
Carline leaned into the room, reeled out a long grey-pink string of chewing gum, and fixed one end of it to Buffalo Bill's nose.
"I hate this room," she said. "Mother hates it too."
"Maybe," I ventured, stating my own suspicion, "she is afraid the heads are alive."
"Ha! She hates it in here because everything is dead."
Carline went on. "Other kids have pets. We have Daddy's heads."
She leaned farther into the room, crooked her leg in an impressive attitude, then extended it in an even more impressive arabesque and pressed her gum more firmly onto Bill's nose.
"You don't even have a tail to wag, mangy old cuss. You don't have a buffalo butt like Cissy, and you haven't got a leg to stand on."
As part of my pact with them, I had never touched the heads. If I touched them, I'd know for certain — alive or dead? But that day I broke faith with them. When I scraped the gum from Bill's nose and wiped the film off Xavier the javelina's teeth, it felt as pointless as any other dusting.
"You know," I said to Carline, "I guess I hate this room too."
That night Cousin Danny and the Pistol arrived in a big red convertible with fins on its back side and crushed bugs on the windshield and dollops of bird doo scattered like dripped pancake batter on the dirty hood.
"Trick or treat!" sang Aunt Loretta. They weren't wearing costumes.
Carline sloped over to the car and held out our bowl of candy. Aunt Loretta grabbed a fistful of Baby Ruths. She wore dark glasses even though it was deep twilight and tied her hair tomboy-style in a bright red kerchief dotted with white paisleys that looked a lot like the bird doo dabbing the car. Our cousin Danny hugged close something wrapped in a baby blanket. At first I thought it was a doll but that made no sense because no nine-year-old boy would have a doll, except maybe a Howdy Doody. Then I guessed it might be another cousin, but it turned out to be a monkey.
They'd been on the road a long time — through Arkansas all the way up to Wisconsin, and then out to California and back, he said.
("Chasing that man," I overheard Mother sing to Carline. "Might as well try and catch the wind."
"Mother, I never knew you liked Donovan."
"There's no law against it," said Mother. "Even if I am over thirty.")
Cousin Danny looked like a Campbell's Soup kid — wide, smackable cheeks, and round eyes. Danny's monkey wore a tiny diaper fastened with a blue diaper pin, and flashed its teeth in a way that just told you it bit, and it had tiny hands with little gray nails and dark brown palms.
When Aunt Loretta waved up from the car calling "Gunn! Gunny!" our daddy ran over to her like a boy and called, "Here she is, girls! Don't she look purty?" He sounded extra Texan when he said it, and I knew this annoyed Mother, who said that real Texans have no discernable accents and that his hill-country drawl was a hick affectation.
"Here she is, here's my Pistol!" Daddy always raved about how beautiful his big sister was, but in the porch light Aunt Loretta looked like the bad side of fifty — her face gray and rubbery and pulled into skewed witch lines, though she wore lipstick like a beauty contestant, a blossom of red all wrong on her old-lady face and her hair under the red bandana dyed black. The Pistol hopped out of the car. She wore tight dungarees and open-toed wedges, and her toenails were chipped bright red.
"Mark, honey, I'm in love."
"Let me look at your eyes," said Daddy.
She trembled in the heat, and when she whipped off her sunglasses her eyes looked like dead lightning bugs at the bottom of a jar.
"Take a look, Cissy darlin'," said Daddy. "Loretta has the Bowman eyes. The prettiest eyes in the world."
If those were the Bowman eyes, I was sorry that I had them too. I envied Carline, who took after Mother. Mother was ten times as pretty as Aunt Loretta in or out of makeup, and she didn't stand there lashing her tail like a cat, letting off a sweet sick smell of nerves. The Pistol was so thin and ugly, I felt sorry for her and kind of also for Daddy, for being blind about it.
Cousin Danny inched out of the car carrying the monkey in the baby blanket. One hairy arm snaked out of the blanket and hooked its fingers in Danny's belt loop. Danny hooked a finger in the belt loop of Aunt Loretta's dungarees, so the three of them — monkey, cousin and pistol — latched together like burrs. She just unhooked his fingers and said, "Honeybunch, why don't you show the girls your monkey."
Daddy guffawed and the Pistol swatted him. Daddy strode up the porch steps, his boots booming. He poured them each a bourbon, rattled a glass out over the railing to entice Aunt Loretta. Danny reached for her again but the Pistol was already halfway up the porch steps.
I hated her. The Pistol.
But I wanted her to like me, so I said "Come on, Danny," in my best company voice and took him to the trophy room, where I thought maybe the monkey would feel more at home. With a real live monkey scrambling around the walls the room felt bigger, less frightening and more alive. The monkey wiggled out of its diaper and pooped on Mother's grand piano. Then it climbed up between the moose's antlers and refused to come down.
An hour later we wandered back out to the driveway, where Daddy sat at the wheel of the convertible, contemplating an empty glass smeared with worms of red lipstick set insecurely on the dash. Aunt Loretta lay in the back seat; her chipped toes peeked over the side of the convertible. Danny ran over and jiggled her foot.
"Momma," he said. "Momma!"
"Leave her be, son."
"I thought she was dead."
"Shoot, she's just sleeping. Go on inside."
Mother came out onto the porch and put her arms around Cousin Danny.
"Mark, she should leave him with us. He shouldn't be out of school. And that man she's chasing —"
"I don't like it neither. But she's in love."
"It's no life for a little boy. First his daddy and now —" "That's my family's business. I won't have ugly talk, Grace."
Daddy caught the monkey with a pool net and told us they'd be leaving in the morning.
"Your poor Uncle Jefferson. His tire treads weren't even cold before Loretta started chasing Nestor Roche," Mother said to Carline.
"Uncle Roach?"
"He's not your uncle. Jiminy crickets! Cockroach? The man is a cockleburr. Saved your daddy's life in Pusan, my eye. More likely he enticed him into some foolishness and then 'saved him' to make an impression. He's a Heep! Heep!"
"A heap of what?"
"Don't you read anything, Carline?"
I retreated behind the kitchen door.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Beasts & Children"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Amy Parker.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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