Runaway
Meredith Wadley
Before sunrise one summer morning in South Texas, a mockingbird flew to the topmost branch of a crepe myrtle to begin its predawn trill. The myrtle grew in the yard of a farmhouse surrounded by a citrus grove. These were the days before air conditioning, and the house’s windows were all open, many already glowing. Gloria, an airman’s wife and mother of three kids, was up early, to get her ironing done before the heat.
In an upstairs bedroom, Gloria’s youngest, a toddler, stirred. Janey loved the mockingbird. It could sing pretty, honk like a bike horn, and even bark like Sepp, the family’s black-and-white rat terrier. She saw the lit hallway, stood in her crib, and scratched, setting in motion several of the little white rocking horses on the red fabric of her pajamas.
Janey still slept in a crib, but she was old enough to climb out. She shared a room with Steve and Isabel, both deep and late sleepers. In the hallway, a box fan rumbled. Janey headed directly for the stairs and slid on her belly down to the ground floor.
The front and back doors to the house stood open, creating a breezeway. Several moths batted the front door screen, and music came from the front room, which meant Janey could find her mama there, but the mockingbird’s trills had come from the backside of the house, so she headed that way, into the kitchen.
The family terrier peered through the latched screen door. Sepp spent his nights in the cool crawl space under the house. Earlier, waking to Gloria’s movements, he’d dragged his chain—two links short of reaching the cat’s food bowl—up the back steps and scratched to be let in.
Gloria had ignored him. Janey would not.
He yawned and shook himself. His chain rattled.
“Shhh,” Janey said. “Bird.” Stretching onto her tippy-toes, she reached for the screen-door hook, and Sepp yipped. The mockingbird flew off.
Meanwhile, in the front room, a ceiling fan above Gloria stirred the floral scent of the spray starch she used, and a border station on the radio played its early-bird program, new albums in their entirety. Dressed in a light cotton blouse and pedal pushers, she rocked her hips to Barbara Lynn’s bluesy “You’ll Lose a Good Thing.”
A mile or so up the road from Gloria’s, the lights of a weathered shotgun house also burned. But they’d burned all night long. Rachel, who wore yesterday’s threadbare jeans and a stained T-shirt reeking of goat and Gin, lay sprawled across her made bed. A floor flan sweeping left and right lifted tufts of her short dark hair. Like Gloria, Rachel was an airman’s wife; both houses sat on a country road a short drive from an airfield. Unlike Gloria, Rachel was not a mother, and right now, her head felt crammed with roofing nails. An actual box of nails sat on her dresser next to her husband Wayne’s flight school graduation photo.
The milking goats she kept began bleating, and her head pounded. She drew herself into a fetal position but could not sleep. She heard a rhythmic scratching coming from inside the house, checked her cowboy boots for scorpions, and then shoved her bare feet in.
The scratching came from the front room. A stack of Patsy Cline albums spun on the record player, and the needle rubbed the label of Sentimentally Yours: “Gin tonic, gin tonic, gin tonic.”
Rachel had spent many nights alone, yet until last night, she’d never tippled on her own. She felt mighty miserable.
*
Gloria’s husband Andy was stationed in Goose Bay, Labrador. Last week, he’d been home on leave. The five days of his furious passion—mornings and nights—had left her with a yeast infection, dammit, and swaying her hips to the music aggravated the itchy, crawling sensation attacking her. Unable to resist scratching, she nearly dug a hole in the crotch of her pedal pushers. God, she thought, I hope I’m not pregnant again.
From the clothes pile, she plucked a smocked dress. Sewn for Isabel, the dress was now worn by Janey. Its hem flopped open, and Gloria rolled her eyes. Janey and her rips and tears. This one likely occurred at the base nursery school. Housed in a Quonset hut, the school overlooked the airfield’s ramp. Last time Janey had worn the dress, she’d tried climbing over the playground fence. Had wanted to go find her daddy.
In general, the ladies at the nursery found Janey and her antics manageable—even “adorable.” So did Andy. Gloria herself found her youngest less than manageable and less adorable than Steve and Isabel. She reckoned, however, that she’d come to feel as close to her youngest as she did to Steve and Isabel. In time. The child just made closeness so damn difficult.
Gloria scratched. As she did so, Janey, on the opposite side of the house, pushed a chair to the back door, climbed upon it, and popped open the hook.
As if, in her state, Rachel needed more irritating noises than bleating goats, her two massive black mutts begun barking. They barked as if egging each other on, which usually meant they’d cornered something—rat, armadillo, snake, or feral cat. Running late already, she skipped her morning coffee and swallowed some aspirin before heading out to see what was what.
In the light of the back-porch, Sammy’s nose glistened. At his feet lay a juvenile rattler. Sunshine stood over the chewed-off head, which Rachel tossed into the burn barrel, afraid it might still be venomous. It landed with a thud. Recently, as she’d helped Wayne clean ’round the place, a rattler struck her on the hand; a dry bite; she’d been lucky. She wiped her bloodied fingertips on her filthy jeans and set out for the goat shed.
*
With dawn just a scent away, Sepp marked the sprinkler, the backyard swing set, the pump house, and every odd post of the backyard fence, until he came to the gate.
Ajar.
Here was a chance.
He nosed himself through and trotted to the car. Its tires brought home wondrous stories. Its interior, though, stank of going to the vet.
The dewy lawn soaked the footies of Janey’s pajamas. Their heavy wetness bothered her, but she couldn’t stop to shed them. She slipped through the open gate and trotted down the side of the house, the windows casting crooked panes of light, and music playing.
Ahead, the citrus trees lining the drive held tightly to the dark, but the easing sky now silhouetted their crowns. Janey muttered “no, no, no” to herself as Sepp sniffed his way closer and closer to the country road.
*
Before Wayne had left Rachel for jungle training in Panama—preparation for a Vietnam tour—they’d done work around the place, stacking bales of sweet hay and straw in the goat shed and clearing the junk piled against it. She’d burned barrel after barrel of trash and gotten in the way of that angry rattler, and he’d hauled the rusted pails, bent tools, and knots of baling twine he'd found to the county dump. He even mounted a motion-activated light on the house, nailed down loose roof tiles, and asked the landlord if he could paint the house and outbuildings in exchange for three months’ rent, but the landlord nixed the idea.
On those nights, he treated her uncommonly tender, drawing warm baths and scrubbing her clean. And he touched her as if her curves were ports new for him to explore. “No more pregnancies,” she cautioned, and he said he’d miss her—words that’d had a double meaning she now knew. Yesterday, he returned from Panama without his flight bag and wearing civies.
Said he’d left his things at Holly’s apartment.
Rachel stared at Wayne who stared at his hands. “Holly?” she said. “The box-blonde hoochie who sings at the O club?” The woman specialized in Patsy Cline tunes—hitting notes in key, not so much.
“She’s carrying my child.”
Rachel didn’t go crazy. She didn’t fall to pieces. She didn’t stop staring.
“It just happened,” he said.
“Nothing to do with you?”
He’d looked away, and she’d scoffed.
“You sure it’s yours?” she said, and the back of his hand answered her.
So now, here she was, thirty-five and having lost just about everyone important to her. Three pregnancies to the toilet. Daddy to one last, explosive thrash of his dear, dear heart. And Mom to a forlornness that’d expressed itself as lymphatic tumors. And, damn him, Wayne, too.
She neared the goat shed and triggered the automatic light. Wayne had grabbed a few things before leaving yesterday, but not everything. Not many, many other things.
Sunshine and Sammy looked on and wagged their skinny tails, as Rachel made several trips between the house and the burn barrel. First, in went the Patsy Cline records. Crash. Next, the rest of Wayne's albums and his gear—from skivvies to the Sunday suit he’d married her in. Into the barrel went old engineering textbooks, winter uniforms, insignia, and golfing togs. The wing-tip shoes she’d given him last Christmas, a fine pair she’d had made for him in Matamoros, topped the pile. She chuckled. No more playing a round, hey, Wayne?
Unfortunately, she found the gas can empty, so she splashed the dregs of last night’s sorry gin over an alligator shirt. A weak flame flickered and went out.
*
Sam Cooke sang that he didn’t have long to stay. Gloria had once seen Mr. Cooke sing, in her Dallas days. She and her college girlfriends would hunt for a taxi with a driver who’d think nothing of taking three white girls on a Friday night into Deep Ellum, where a few rhythm-and-blues places had survived the war years. They’d danced as best they could in their segregated corner, taking care—or not—against the lascivious moves of the fair-haired men packed alongside them. And Sundays, in church, she’d pray that her Friday night urges be extinguished. And God bless, Andy, a slender young pilot, appeared at the next church function. Following three months of tame cinema and soda-fountain dates, he proposed, and Gloria obeyed God’s Will.
She set down her iron and scratched her crotch. Andy had been shocked by her taste in music. Did not approve of listening to border stations. She scratched and scratched. Ah, there she’d gone and done it, splitting her seam.
*
In the twixt of twilight, Janey could make out the whiteness of Sepp’s coat as he scurried down the country road’s shoulder. Had she known how dogs could get hit by cars, clawing and thrashing their way to kingdom come, or how toddlers could be hit too, she might not have followed him.
Ahead of her, Sepp kept his nose low, his nostrils fondling each ghostly roadkill scent until he reached dog, fresh on the air. Male. And something unpleasant he’d detected once on the tires of the family car. Grass eaters.
Spotting a mailbox pole to mark and oblivious to an approaching pickup, he trotted across the road.
Janey ran after him, herself oblivious to the danger. In her sheltered experience crossing intersections in town, drivers always stopped, so she didn’t give the fast approaching truck a thought—but then it wasn’t slowing, and she cried, “Sepp!”
*
Rachel, seated on a stool, pressed her face into the warm flank of her last doe. Mabel jerked against the milking table’s stanchions, and the nape of Rachel’s neck tingled as if someone stood behind her. Wayne, she thought, already regretting having trashed his things. She touched her cheek where he’d slapped her and did not regret having trashed his things. She would wait for him to seek her.
But she hadn’t heard his pickup, and the dogs weren’t going berserk. She reached for her pitchfork, and as she spun around with it, a child’s voice said, “Goats.”
Framed by a flamingo-pink sky and her hair a ratty halo, Janey. Naked.
“Gracious,” Rachel said.
“Babies.”
Rachel knew this child.
Only recently, Gloria had appeared at Rachel’s front door, Janey propped on her hip and the older two clutching her skirt. “A flat tire,” she’d said, gesturing toward a silver-blue Impala blocking the end of the drive. “Just a mile from the house and a day before my Andy gets home on leave—he’s an airman.”
On that occasion, the dogs had beat the devil out of town with their nonsense. Odd, their silence. Still, Gloria had to be around; the child couldn’t have gotten here on her own—but what a state she was in, her feet as wrinkled as if fresh out of a long bath yet filthy.
“We’re in here, Gloria!” Rachel yelled.
On the day she’d changed her neighbor’s flat tire, she’d offered Gloria coffee and the children milk and oatmeal cookies. The boy had picked the raisins out of his and announced that the milk smelled like dirty socks. “You’ll die if you drink it,” he’d told the girls. They’d left their glasses untouched.
Rachel considered Janey’s filthy feet—she couldn’t have walked here, could she have? She released the herd into their enclosure to graze, picked up the milk pail and Janey’s hand, and said, “Let’s get to the bottom of this.”
As soon as they were out of the shed, Sepp trotted into view, and Sunshine and Sammy exploded from around the side of the house. Barking savagely, they hit the ends of their chains, and Janey clutched Rachel’s legs. “Bad dog,” she said.
Sepp casually lifted his leg on the burn barrel.
When Rachel let her pair off their chains, they tore after Sepp, who dropped and rolled, four paws in the air. In a dust-raising scuffle, the three sniffed each other nose to ass, ass to nose. All good.
“Come on,” she said, “let’s clean you up and get you home.”
The child thrust her arms upward, and Rachel hesitated at the gesture. Honestly, how could she hold this adorable child and keep the desire for her own at arm’s length?
Especially now that any hope for one was gone.
Up, up, Janey’s arms insisted.
She scooped up the child, put her on the john, washed her feet, and brushed her mess of thick brown hair—more like her own than Gloria’s. Her fingers could hardly leave the luxury of touching it. It’d been too long since she’d had a small child herself, going way back to her babysitting years in high school. She plaited two braids, just like her mama had once done to her hair.
“Pink!” the toddler cried at the T-shirt Rachel slipped over her head, covering the mite from dimpled elbows to dimpled ankles. Janey twirled as if wearing a dress.
The T-shirt had come from a trip to Playa Bagdad in Mexico; it should have gone into the burn barrel along with Wayne’s gear. They’d gone there after her last miscarriage and taken Sunshine and Sammy along. While watching the dogs playing in the Gulf surf, Wayne had said, “Let’s not give up. Not just yet.” He’d refused her suggestion of adoption, but then brought her two does, now her milking herd of six and a satisfying little business selling fresh milk and potted cheese.
*
Gloria carried the hamper of ironed clothes past the children’s room. Steve and Isabel slept with mouths gaped and their sheets twisted around their compact bodies. Good little sleepers. Not a peep from the early riser, she thought, having failed to notice the empty crib. She shed her ripped pedal pushers, slipped into a Mexican cotton dress, and made her way back downstairs, where she lathered a sanitary napkin with cooling yogurt from the fridge to wear against her miserable parts. Why couldn’t she have met and married a nine-to-five man?
Outside, a mockingbird trilled. The heavens triumphed morning in citrus pinks, oranges, and yellows, and a T-29 flew overhead.
*
Getting the terrier into the car wasn’t going to happen. He ignored Janey’s calls and Rachel’s commands of come, sit, and stay, and disappeared into the citrus groves as soon as she opened the back end of the car. She set Janey on the front-seat bench. “Let’s get you home.”
She would have phoned Gloria, had she known her neighbor’s last name. Both may have been airmen’s wives, but the two had never socialized; Rachel avoided the young mothers. And maybe she should have realized sooner that Gloria must be going crazy with worry, but Rachel was not herself this morning.
Sunshine and Sammy, back on their chains, tilted their heads, their eyes glistening with the love of car rides. Maybe they, too, recalled romping on the Bagdad beach.
“Bye-bye Sunshine, bye-bye Sammy,” Janey cried. She broke into a booming “This Old Man,” her “nick knack, paddy whack” a “ni nah, wanny wah” that broke Rachel’s heart. If only she could keep her. She thought of Wayne cradling a child, not hers, and at the end of the drive, she braked. A crazy idea came to her: Turn left, head to Mexico. Keep the child.
“Give the dog a home,” Janey sang.
She could back up, load the dogs, and be on the beach before noon.
“This old man came rolling home.”
Who would be the wiser?
The car idled. Rachel could not lift her foot. Her leg began to shake.
Janey pointed to the goats’ enclosure. “Mabel!” she cried.
The doe trotted along the fence, her teats swinging. She bleated, and several answers followed. Then her kid came running. He bumped her bag and suckled. Rachel pictured her ladies in the evening, huddling against the shed, anxious to be let inside to be milked, and their bags as full as grief—
Crazy. Crazy idea. Rachel’s foot came off the brake, she turned the steering wheel in Gloria’s direction. What kind of crazy woman would abandon her goats?
*
Gloria recognized the car coming up the drive and wondered why the goat lady would be visiting this time of the morning. Her quiet time was now truly over, and she expected to hear Janey crying “Mommy!” from upstairs—but the child’s cry came from outside. Her youngest was in the goat lady’s arms, dressed in pink. What the h-e-double-l?
In a burst of possessiveness, Gloria marched. The screen door slammed, the porch steps groaned, and the rows of citrus trees shook. She snatched her baby from Rachel so fast the little one’s head jerked, and it was all she could do to keep from saying, “How dare you!”
Rachel, having anticipated a happy mother and child reunion, gasped.
Janey, unfazed, said, “Pink, Mama!” She twisted in Gloria’s arms as if to look for something. “Bad dog.”
“I couldn’t get him into the car,” Rachel explained.
Gloria’s eyes narrowed. “You have my dog? What’s going on here?”
“Janey and the dog just showed up. I was milking the goats.” Rachel ran her hands down her jeans, realizing she hadn’t thought of changing into something clean. As she did so, Gloria eyed her top to toe and frowned.
Janey squirmed to be let down.
“She showed up naked.”
“She does like to shed her clothes,” Gloria allowed. She smoothed the front of her dress and pardoned herself. “I wasn’t aware she was gone.”
“Well, she’s safe home now.”
“Yes, thank you.” Indebted to this woman twice over, Gloria felt obliged to offer coffee, but she didn’t want the goat lady inside her home, considering the state of her. “Please,” she said, indicating the swing on the front porch, “let me offer you coffee or an ice tea.”
In the kitchen, Gloria saw the chair her youngest had used to escape. From the sink window, she saw the open gate. Damn monkey.
Once, at the Base Exchange, before she’d even noticed her youngest had gone AWOL, she caught sight of the child on the shoulders of an enormous black sergeant. To an apologetic Gloria, the man said, “I figured she’d be missed, ma’am. We’re picking out a birthday card for my gran. Can’t get home for her eightieth.” He swung Janey to the floor and asked her, “This one?” and she grinned at his choice. He placed his hand over his heart, touching Gloria with his sign of affection. Janey could be, after all, a sweet child. But a damn monkey all the same.
As she readied the coffee tray, Sepp appeared, nosing the screen door, panting, business as usual.
*
Heading home, Rachel nudged her car onto the wide shoulder without slowing to allow a yellow convertible room to pass—as one did in Texas. She shuddered to think of naked Janey and Sepp ambling along the same shoulder. In the dark. How easy her life could have ended in tragedy.
The passing driver waved thanks, a young man, his girl nestled against him. High schoolers, maybe. Rachel had met Wayne in high school. Together, they’d walked down sidewalks, the church aisle, and hospital corridors. It would have killed her daddy to know of Wayne’s crime against the sanctity of marriage, of his backhanding her for his own damnable sins.
She gave Sunshine and Sammy the run of the yard. They took turns lapping water from their bowl before running up the porch steps. Something by the front door excited them, a lump as red and lifeless as afterbirth.
But Rachel’s does had all kidded, and they were in their enclosure, grazing in a strip of shade cast by the citrus trees. Their kids napped. She’d recently hired a billy to cover the does, starting a cycle she had never completed, would never complete.
She poked the red wet pile with the toe of her boot, making out small white rocking horses—toddler pajamas, their sodden footies filthy and torn. No wonder the imp had taken them off. Little mite.
Rachel carried them to the burn barrel.
It lay on its side, shards of glass and black vinyl reflecting the hard, early sun. She righted it. So, the man had come rolling home, and he’d taken everything—maybe even the severed snake head. She imagined it raising a stink. Fine.
The pajamas hit bottom with a splat, and Rachel recalled naked Janey. Picturing herself naked, she removed her boots and her belt. Wayne’s jeans slid easily to her ankles. Off came his stained T-shirt. Into the barrel, they both went. There was plenty for her to consider, the legalities of her new situation and how to support herself; first, though, she had a pen to muck out, fresh bedding to lay, and a body to scrub clean.
Meredith Wadley lives and works in a medieval microtown on the Swiss side of the Rhine River. Her most recent longform fiction appears in Longleaf Review and Line of Advance. Pieces from her series of idioms reimagined as flash fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in several venues, including Bandit Fiction, Fiction Kitchen Berlin, Gone Lawn, JMWW, Lammergeier, Lunate, and Orca Lit. Please visit at www.meredithwadley.com. She tweets at @meredithwadley.