Calliope: Voice of the Writers
The Great Novel Race 2008:
Tumbleweeds
by Erin Trauth
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Chapter 6: The Mourning Bird
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As soon as we got outside and were skipping full force away from house to God know where, West introduced me to her little brother, North, who didn’t seem to have much to say. He looked about 11, a short boy with West’s warm brownish features and a shy, lopsided grin. He kept his thumb corked in his mouth.
“Don’t mind him,” West said. “He’s just shy.” North looked at his feet.
I knew how he felt.
“You wanna come to our house?” West asked. I sure did, I said.
We walked into the backyard and around the creek, to the tiny white house I had never been in, never seen up close my whole entire life of living across from it. West was still talking to North and I as we walked, leading the conversation about her thoughts on eating meat, of which she definitely did not approve. It just does not make sense to eat something that is just going to turn around and eat us when we’re dead and gone and become dirt, she said. And besides, she said, chickens are birds, and she’d never do that. She kept this going until we right in front of her house, and the whole time I wondered if she knew how much ground beef I had just eaten in the spaghetti, wondered if she could smell the meat on my breath.
Before we even walked in the door to West and North’s house, when we on the creaky front porch steps, I could hear a woman’s voice yelling something about being so sorry, the kind of harried, unconvincing sorry you say when you’re smack dab in the middle of doing whatever it is that’s making you so regretful, the kind of sorry my Mama used a lot lately. The woman’s voice was husky, like someone who had either smoked for years or had been screaming all day.
“What’s that?” I said, slowing my steps before we reached the door’s threshold.
“Don’t worry. It’s just Maybelline,” West said, and her wide eyes crinkled as she turned her head to face mine.
“Who?”
“You’ll see. Maybelline.”
We walked into the house into the small front foyer, coming closer to the hollering. The inside of the house smelled strong of bleach, and a little bit like oranges. Now, as West lead me to the living room, I could hear what sounded like something liquid squirting from a bottle and a repetitive thumping noise, like the person still apologizing was cleaning her windows and tap-dancing at the same time. I wasn’t so sure if that would surprise me.
I looked around the tiny living room. The dark wood-panel walls were covered with multi-colored ribbons, the kind that say “1st place” in tacky gold cursive but don’t actually say what activity the person placed in. It could have been a knitting contest; could have been for a flag-football championship. From what I could tell from West so far, it really could have been either. One wall was tacked up with what had to be fifty of them, reds and blues and yellows of thin artificial silk placards proclaiming various places in nameless contests. The opposite wall was a mix of more ribbons, and several different pictures of what looked like the same horse head, all drawn on white construction paper using a mixture of mediums – there was a drawing made with pencil, an oil-based, a water-painted, even a paint-by-numbers horse head. An ironing board was assembled in the center of the room, with a mammoth pile of woman’s clothing exploding every which way off the top of the board. The room had only one couch, a ratty green leather loveseat with what looked like rows of haphazard cat scratches down the side. Smushy, bright yellow foam poked through the scratches. There was nothing else in the room but the rug, a furry, florescent green area rug that had been matted down from years of people walking on its fluffy hairs. Somewhere very close, the woman was still making a God-awful commotion. West led me into the kitchen, and there she was, the remorseful tap-dancing cleaner – except she wasn’t cleaning at all. She was stomping, rather, on an army of sugar ants that were parading from the plastic-tiled floor onto the corner of a dark wood kitchen cabinet. A can of Raid was clasped in her right hand, and a thick haze of the poison wafted in the air above us. The woman wore only a pink towel that had been streaked with bleach and frayed on corners that were matted to her slender legs. She was beautiful, too, I quickly noticed, with dark hair cascading in thick curls for what seemed like miles down her back. She was covered from head to toe with light freckles that kissed her milky skin in tiny constellations, and I could make out the Big Dipper from a cluster of seven thick freckles that spattered her right shoulder. She did not look quite old enough to be West’s mother, but looked enough like her that she had to be related. Her toenails were painted purple, and were still smashing violently into the sugar ant brigade.
“Little shits!” she went on, continuing her sadistic dance. Stomp, spray, stomp, spray. “Ant bastards!” But she was so sorry, she said in her trance, and she hoped that they all went straight to ant heaven, and she would pray for their little ant bodies, but she just could not have little buggers all over the house. Crumpled brownish-red specks littered the floor around us. The woman did not look West, North, and I’s way as she continued to drown the bugs.
Stomp, spray. “Get out of here!” she yelped, spraying Raid in our direction, but I wasn’t sure if she was talking to us or to the ants.
“Maybelline!” West yelped right back. “MAYYYYBELLLLLINE! We’ve got company!”
Maybelline stopped exterminating. She turned around fast to look at me, her damp hair spinning in a tornado from her back down on to her shoulders. Dark russet eyes, like West’s, bore into me.
“Well, aren’t you a pretty little thing,” she said softly, smiling, her features softening, a Jekyll to the Hyde she had been just a second before. Never in my life had I been called a ‘pretty little thing,’ and all of a sudden, I loved this woman standing amidst a giant pool of putrid white poison in half of a bleach-splattered towel.
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