Gun Love Read online

  Once in a while she’d lift everything out of the trunk and bring out the silk bag of jewels. She had a diamond ring surrounded by rubies that had belonged to her French great-grandmother. The bag also contained a rope of pearls and was the longest length one could buy. She taught me that ropes of pearls were measured in inches. The sizes were described as collar, choker, princess, matinee, opera, and rope.

  In the backseat I also learned how to tell if a pearl was real or made of plastic by softly grinding it between my teeth.

  Along with these treasures was my mother’s own tiny pink plastic baby bracelet from the hospital tagged with her name on it. Scrawled in black ink, it read her surname and sex: France. Girl.

  These jewels were never worn. The only thing she wore every day was a small silver ring with a tiny round, blue opal given to her by Mr. Rodrigo, the piano teacher. He’d given it to her because there was a superstition in Cuba that if you wore an opal, the stone had an effect on the piano and bewitched the instrument.

  She always missed the piano.

  My mother liked to kneel on the passenger’s side and lean forward and play the piano along the dashboard. From middle C, which was under the rearview mirror, her hands moved in and out along the gray and dirty plastic. Her fingers went back and forth, her thumbs dipped under her palms to reach keys and hit both sharps and flats. Every now and again, one hand crossed over the other and then rose in the air, suspended for a second, before falling back down to begin the up-and-down race again.

  That was Mozart, she said. Did you like it?

  Or she said, Those were finger exercises.

  I couldn’t tell the difference. She heard hammers beating on strings but I only heard the tap-tap-tap-tap of her fingers on the dashboard.

  We liked to go on pretend road trips. I played that we were really driving somewhere. My mother always went along with my game.

  I was the driver. The seat would be pushed forward but my legs were still too short to reach the pedals. I steered the wheel, turning it in my hands, and pretended to drive.

  My mother would sit next to me on the passenger side. She’d check her lipstick in the rearview mirror, put on her sunglasses, and turn on the radio. My mother always made sure the car battery worked and, over the years, we bought new ones. This was the only maintenance she did on the car.

  We’d put on our seat belts.

  Okay, let’s go on a road trip, my mother would say. Leave skid marks. Go over the speed limit. Drive fast. Let’s get a ticket.

  Where do you want to go? I’d ask.

  On our pretend drives my mother talked about her life.

  I’d pretend to turn the wheel and she’d talk about St. Augustine, where she grew up.

  I knew from my classes in history at school that St. Augustine was founded by the Spanish in 1565 and that the area had been populated by the Timucua Indians.

  Our house was a large mansion surrounded by oak trees, my mother said. I had two closets for my clothes and all the hangers were lined with pink satin.

  When she spoke she’d often reach out and gently rub my cheek with the back of her hand. It was as if a touch with the back of her hand were more gentle and loving than to touch me with her open palm.

  I’d keep my eyes on our imaginary road.

  I can’t believe we’re still living in this car, she said. I always thought we’d only live here for a few months while I got a job and could rent a small house. I’m so sorry, Pearl.

  She was an only child in a house filled with servants.

  Squatting on the seat beside me, my mother sometimes placed her feet on the dashboard and leaned over and painted her toenails and fingernails a bright red. The color was called Meet Me on the Star Ferry. She picked her nail polish by the name on the bottom of the bottle. She had nail polish called Melon of Troy, Surfing for Boys, and Twenty Candles on My Cake.

  For my tenth birthday party my father rented a merry-go-round and set it up on the front lawn of my house, my mother said. It ruined the grass forever after. The men who set it up just trampled all over the lawn, hammered holes into it, and allowed the motor oil from the merry-go-round to spill everywhere. Why did they ruin the grass? Why? They could have put cardboard down or some kind of protective plastic, she said. That grass was suffering.

  How did you know?

  Pearl, you could just feel it. One day a scientist is going to hear everything the plants are saying. Just wait for the day when trees can tell us what it’s like to have their branches cut back. That day is coming soon. Then the world is going to have a real shock.

  On these pretend road trips, even though my arms became weary from holding on to the steering wheel, I held on tight so my mother wouldn’t stop talking.

  Your grandmother died in a car crash, she said. A Pepsi truck crashed right into her. The broken Pepsi bottles spilled everywhere. There were pools and puddles of it. My white socks were brown and sticky and my shoes stuck to the pavement.

  Where were you going?

  We were going to the doctor, the pediatrician. I was in the backseat. I was five. I was sick. I had a fever.

  And what happened?

  You know, I was only just a little piece of a person. I don’t remember everything.

  It didn’t matter how many times my mother told me these events. I wanted to hear about my grandmother’s death again and again. I was open-armed for any tragic story.

  Before the ambulance arrived, my mother said, I could hear what she was thinking as she died. I could hear the sound of our crushed car. I guess it was the motor making noises. It was creaking and there was some air streaming out of something. But then there was a quiet before the police cars and the ambulance arrived.

  How long were you trapped in the car?

  I don’t know exactly, but it took them at least an hour to untangle the car from the truck and get us out.

  What did she say? What did your mother say?

  I always asked even though I knew the answer.

  She didn’t say this aloud. Of course she didn’t say this aloud, but I heard it. No one believed me. I was only five and no one ever believes a five-year-old.

  I believe you, I said.

  My mother lifted her hands and blew over the wet red polish on her fingernails.

  I don’t think she spoke the words, my mother said, but I heard them: Is this in the Lamb’s Book of Life?

  She said that? Just that?

  Yes. That’s what she said. Is this in the Lamb’s Book of Life? Those were the only words.

  In the visitors’ parking area of the trailer park there was no movement forward. There was no voyage. Our car faced the same wall and trees.

  Do you remember her?

  Yes.

  I looked over at my mother’s ballerina face. She was looking out the window toward the highway.

  My mother said, I know that memory is the only substitute for love.

  When Eli came into our lives, my mother stopped playing her pretend piano and the stories about her own childhood stopped. Now she was telling Eli those stories. I knew it because he once bought her a bottle of Pepsi. She said it was just his idea of a joke but she also said it wasn’t funny.

  6

  My best and only friend, April May, lived in a large silver trailer at the back of the park, close to the dump. Even though she was two years older, we were in the same class and she was my only real friend.

  The small public school we went to was always threatening to lose its federal funding and shut down because there were so few families in the area with children. Over the past three decades, most people had moved away from small towns and to the cities, where it was easier to find work. Many rural schools had already been closed and we knew it was only a matter of time.

  At my school there were only six students in my class and we had the sa
me teacher for every subject. My mother didn’t let me spend time with anyone but April May. She didn’t want strangers asking me any questions. Her constant fear was that I’d be taken from her and placed into foster care.

  There’s always someone out there who wants to do you a favor, my mother said.

  The truth is, no one was knocking on our car door and wanting to be my friend and share a candy bar.

  April May’s parents let my mother use their trailer as an address when I needed to register for school, or when documents required an address.

  I almost always did April May’s homework. She had no head for it, but she was not stupid. I didn’t mind because it was so easy for me, as my mother had taught me so many things way before they’d ever come up in school.

  April May had red hair and was covered in so many freckles that her skin looked reddish brown. My mother called us Ice and Fire.

  April May was bossy and I liked this about her because my mother wasn’t. My mother never told me to do anything except to make sure I had some dreams when I went to sleep.

  My mother said she and I belonged to the Dream Tribe.

  It doesn’t take too long to figure out that dreams are better than life, my mother said.

  April May was so bossy, I called her the cover-your-mouth-when-you-cough police, the don’t-talk-back-at-me police, and the eat-with-your-mouth-closed police. She was bossy because her father had been in the army and treated her like a soldier.

  I didn’t mind her bossiness because she loved to dare me to do things and there were few things I liked more than a dare.

  If April May said let’s go walk along the river, I said yes.

  If she said let’s go to the candy store and you steal some gum, I said yes.

  My mother said I was born under the Risk Star. If you’re not careful, she said, someday you’re going to try to cross the tracks and outrun a train. If we had a roof, you’d be jumping off of it.

  If April May said let’s explore the garbage dump and I dare you to open the thick black plastic bags, I said yes, yes, yes.

  We knew one day we’d find a body in one of those bags. That crime scene was living in our imaginations all the time. We’d already found dead dogs and cats.

  The garbage dump was the small local community dump behind the trailer park. A row of sand pines shielded the view, but nothing could buffer the smells and the sound of the garbage trucks. The shriek of rusted hinges as a truck’s rear loader lifted and dropped the garbage mixed with the sound of wind and rain as if it were a part of nature.

  We were told not to go near the dump because it was dirty, full of things that were rotten, and, because of this, could make us sick. April May’s mother, Rose, even said that there were toxic materials and medical waste from the local veterans’ hospital, where she and my mother worked. But we went anyway.

  A sign outside the dump wired to the fence said DANGER DO NOT ENTER, but there was no gate or lock or guard.

  There was a tall tree to one side of the entrance. This tree had been used as target practice and was full of holes. There were many places in the tree where I could see right through the orange-brown bark.

  Even with all the rot, the dump was mostly a landscape of plastic in every color and broken pieces of glass shone among the junk like green and blue crystals. There were plastic dishes, spoons, forks, bags, boxes, bottles, and doll parts. Barbie doll heads without bodies and with matted yellow, orange, or red hair lay among broken eggshells and milk cartons. There were pairs of pink plastic legs, or a solitary leg poking out of a red box of Lucky Charms, pink arms, and even pink torsos with belly buttons.

  Once April May found a pair of old jeans with a ten-dollar bill sticking out of the back pocket. We couldn’t believe it. From then on we always looked inside the pockets of any discarded, frayed clothing we found.

  On one of these scavenger trips I found a broken thermometer in a small box. The sliver mercury was fragmented into balls. As I played with the shiny liquid silver, moving it around on the surface of my palm, the mercury broke into small slippery drops and then melded back into one large bead. I rolled the liquid metal off my hands and into the pocket of my jeans.

  When I got back to the car, I placed the mercury in a small bag, which I kept under the front seat of the car. This bag contained all the things I’d kept from the dump. I had some marbles, one gold hoop earring, and four brass buttons made with the image of a ship’s anchor on each one.

  One time April May found a cardboard box full of large black and brown moths. At first glance one of the insects was so large, I thought it was a bird. The moths were laid out one on top of the other, with slim pieces of white tissue paper between each moth.

  Inside the box there was also a piece of paper with the names of the species written in ink. The list read: Atlas Moth, Black Witch, Comet Moth, Luna Moth, Death-Head’s Hawkmoth, and Heart and Club Moth.

  We tried to pick them up but, after a few careful attempts, we gave up. The moths dissolved into powder as soon as we touched them.

  This is someone’s collection, April May said. I’ll take it. I can’t just leave all these dead moths out here. It’s a spell on us. If I leave the moths here, bad things will happen.

  April May was so superstitious she even invented her own superstitions on the spot.

  Just leave them, I said. They’re falling to pieces.

  Okay, April May said. But if bad stuff happens, it’s your fault.

  We were also used to finding stacks and stacks of magazines, especially old Time magazines and pornography magazines. We had our sex education out in the dump and saw things in those magazines no person should ever even hear a rumor about.

  There were also baby shoes littered all over the place and some were still in pairs, tied together by their laces.

  My mother said, I’m always thinking that the air from that dump blows out into the ocean. Everything in the whole United States eventually blows across the country and over the Atlantic. Everything that happens in New York ends up blowing over to Iceland or Ireland. Look up at the sky and you can imagine what it holds. Think of all the party balloons that have floated over to France. Think of all the smoke from the Fourth of July fireworks that has blown out across land and sea to England.

  April May’s father, whom everyone called Sergeant Bob, was a war veteran and had been to Afghanistan. He was one of the very first soldiers to go over, as well as one of the first to come back.

  Sergeant Bob was a tall man who shaved his head. He had a short beard that grew only on his chin and he caressed it all the time between his fingers or tugged at it as if trying to pull it off. He was also missing an ear from the same land mine that blew off his leg.

  Sergeant Bob liked to say, with outrage, that he had stepped on a goddamned Russian land mine, as if that made the land mine even more terrible.

  The explosion had also left him almost completely deaf, and so we had to scream when we wanted to speak to him.

  Sergeant Bob said that now that he had only one leg and couldn’t hear anything, he’d discovered books. He could order books through the VA Lending Library catalogs, which operated all over the country.

  Sometimes he wore his prosthetic leg, but mostly he limped around on crutches and with the empty pant leg pinned up with a large diaper safety pin. Sergeant Bob rarely wore a shirt, and he had tattoos all over his upper body. He was inked after two of his friends died in Afghanistan.

  Sergeant Bob said, The most painful place to be tattooed is on the skin over the ribs.

  On his left side and above his waist was written: In memory of fallen comrades. On the right side the tattoo said: In God We Trust.

  I was raised Christian, Sergeant Bob said. But I didn’t really believe in God until I went to Afghanistan. Those boys who died over there could have been anyone. Every day of my life I look at my tatt
oos in the mirror and know how lucky I am. I believe in God now because what else are you going to do at my age?

  Sergeant Bob had seven cartridges inked on his back with the names of the seven friends he’d lost written on the inside of each of the bullets. Every time I was near Sergeant Bob I couldn’t help reading the names: Sean, Mitt, Carlos, Luke, Peter, Manny, and Jose.

  April May’s mother, Rose, was a nurses’ assistant at the small veterans’ hospital in town. Sergeant Bob met Rose at the hospital. She’d been one of his nurses.

  Everyone in the park went to look for Rose if they needed a Band-Aid or an allergy pill. She had it all. Rose also was good at giving someone an injection, cleaning a wound, or putting on a bandage. It turned out that everyone at some point always ended up needing her.

  One day April May and I were sitting on the grass outside their trailer with Rose. It was one of those rare days in July when a breeze blew the humidity away and allowed us to sit outside the trailer. Even the smells from the dump were being carried off, away from us, all the way to Sweden.

  On these clear days my mother said, Today the waters of Scandinavia are being settled by the particles of waste made up of pollen from Kansas, coal dust from Pennsylvania, and spiderwebs from Vermont.

  Rose was sitting on a lawn chair with a large pink plastic glass held between her thighs. The glass was filled with lemonade. She was eating Doritos and licking the salty orange chili and cheddar cheese powder off her fingers after each chip went into her mouth. April May and I were sitting close enough to Rose to hear the first crunch as it broke the triangular chip against her front teeth. She didn’t offer us any. When she finished, she wet her pointer finger in her mouth and wiped it along the bottom of the Dorito’s bag to pick up the last residue of the powder and then sucked if off. The tip of that finger was always bright red.

  Beside her, on the ground, was a can of Pepsi.

  Rose had a Hello Kitty tattoo on her right ankle. To show me that her mother was a true-blue Hello Kitty fan, April May once let me take a peek at her mother’s Bank of America checkbooks with Hello Kitty printed on them as well as her Visa card, which had a picture of Hello Kitty printed on the plastic.