Gun Love Read online

  My mother was extra kind to Rose. They were not really friends but they worked together at the hospital and had a distant, cordial respect for each other.

  She’s not a foggy day. She’s not a cloudy day. But Rose does smell like ammonia, my mother said. It’s as if she walked through a cloud of something.

  Why?

  As a teenager Rose’s parents rented a house that had once been a meth lab.

  Rose told me about it once, my mother said. Living in that house, Rose started to get sick all the time and feel bad, really bad, and so did her parents. They figured it out when addicts would stop by looking for drugs. That house had been a one-pot meth operation. There had been an explosion in the cooking of the meth and there was residue everywhere, even in the air-conditioning vents. Rose is spacey. She’s sick. Those crystals got into her.

  Everyone in Florida knew what a meth lab was. The cops were finding them all the time. It was always on the news and everyone had a story about someone making meth. Everyone in Florida also knew that Mexican heroin was taking over the meth business.

  At school we knew one boy, Rusty, who was tall and skinny and always grinding his teeth. He had been put in foster care when his parents went to jail for the production and distribution of meth. It had been bad luck because someone had reported a fire in the woods behind their house, but when the firemen arrived they found an active one-pot lab and 172 grams of meth oil.

  Rusty came to school to say goodbye, I told my mother. He told us he was going to foster care somewhere outside Miami. He made me feel so sad. I think everyone at school felt sad.

  Yes, of course, my mother said. You were upset because, before you even forgot him, even before he closed the door and walked away, you knew you would forget him.

  The job at the veterans’ hospital made my mother think about how quickly people are forgotten. She wondered if the worst fate was to be forgotten or to die. There were too many veterans who never had a family member or friend come around to visit.

  As Rose ate her Doritos, she spoke to us about love. Rose was worried because April May had no interest in boys or being feminine. April May didn’t like Hello Kitty and hated the color pink. She cut her own hair short with the kitchen scissors.

  That morning, as Rose sucked on her bright-orange Dorito finger and drank the Pepsi, she decided to give us some love instruction.

  Instead of talking to men, just touch them, she said. No talking. I never thought a man like Sergeant Bob would love me. Keep your eyes open, girls, for a man who really gets it, who knows a woman is paradise. He should deserve your kiss and fuss. Don’t talk too much. No blah, blah, blah nonsense. If you want to say something, make the word a rub, make the word a pinch. Every time you’re going to talk just touch him instead. Don’t say good morning, just touch his shoulder. Don’t ever ask him if he loves you; suck his fingers instead. You have to make him some memories. Right? Am I right? You tell me.

  And the truth is, Rose did exactly as she said. She never spoke to Sergeant Bob. Instead, we watched as she caressed the top of his head or kissed the back of his neck. Sometimes she’d run her finger over his tattoos as if she were painting them again or following a road map along his body. Under her touch, Sergeant Bob would close his eyes or reach for his wallet and give her a ten- or twenty-dollar bill.

  It’s true, Meat Mud really loves her, April May said to me one day when we were hanging out down at the river. Even if they are my parents and all, it’s kind of disgusting.

  April May had nicknames for everyone. Her father was Meat Mud and her mother was Shortnin’ Bread.

  One Valentine’s Day, Sergeant Bob gave Rose a 9mm pistol.

  When a man gives his woman a gun it’s because he really trusts her, Sergeant Bob said. It won’t ever be a widow maker. Some guns are widow makers, but this gun is true blue. It’s a lot more useful than a box of candy. I’d rather come home and find the coroner carrying out anyone that was messing with her than find she’d baked me an apple pie. Yes, that’s the truth of it. If a man gives his woman a gun it’s because he really trusts her.

  Sergeant Bob had all kinds of names for guns. Some were widow maker, orphan maker, and peacemaker. If they were used to steal a car, he called them carmakers and, if a gun missed its mark, he called it a rainmaker. If it settled a score, the gun was a lawmaker.

  The pistol was pink. He also gave Rose a special pink holster so that she could carry it under her arm, but she was too fat. She just placed the pistol down the front of her blouse between her breasts if she was just hanging around the trailer park or, if she went out, she carried it in her bag.

  Rose said, It’s the best present ever because he wants me to be safe.

  Sergeant Bob didn’t want her to have a pink gun because he said no one was going to take that color very seriously if she got into some trouble, but Rose won every argument by just caressing his hair or squeezing the earlobe of his one ear.

  I believed in guns before I met my husband, Rose said, so he can’t boss me around about guns. My family always had guns growing up. My father hunted. Guns give me freedom. I know this. Anyway, the next pistol on my wish list is a Walther PPQ .40 caliber, and that should make him happy.

  My mother thought Rose should not keep the gun down her blouse.

  It’s like placing a candle near a curtain or drying clothes on a stove, she said. Eventually something is going to burn up.

  Rose said, Once you get a gun, you’re at 99.6 degrees Fahrenheit all the time. I must say, though, I must admit it, I thought he was going to give me a ring.

  My mother said that Rose was a good woman.

  She’s never met a stranger, my mother said. She’s a good nurse. Even when someone’s going to die, she tells them they’re going to live. She’s not gifting anyone some bad news.

  When Rose talked about my mother she said, Your darling mama was given a forty-eight deck of cards. God was not counting right for her or somebody stole those four missing cards right up their sleeve. Even though that mother of yours was born with a silver spoon in her mouth, she’s a good woman. Your mama is the living proof that a rich person can be a good person. She doesn’t boast about her fancy little girl shoes she had and she doesn’t brag about fancy words.

  Everyone liked my mother. I’m sure this was because she could look into them and see what hurt. What was outside came inside of her and settled in her body as if she were a box or bag for everyone to rumble around inside.

  Rose also said, The problem with your mother is she feels everyone’s pain and that’s not good if you work at a hospital. She has true empathy malady. It’s a sickness.

  My mother was a cleaning lady at the same veterans’ hospital where Rose worked as a nurse. It was one of the very few places a person could find a job in our area of Florida. My mother, who did not have even a high school diploma, could only work in the hospital’s sanitation department.

  My ballerina mother mopped floors, made beds, washed bedpans, emptied garbage bags, and swept hallways. She wore a coat over her clothes, rubber gloves, plastic bags over her shoes, and a hair net that covered her whole head and matted down her blond hair.

  Both my mother and April May’s mother complained about the fact that the vets were not properly treated and that doctors came sporadically and the vets were often made to wait months for treatment. Even the hospital’s sanitation department was always running short on everything—even basic supplies like toilet paper and cleaning liquids.

  The hospital is a place between heaven and earth, my mother said. How can I explain the place? It’s where a man can cry like a baby for the loss of his arm. It’s where men are paper dolls to be torn up. They know they cannot protect anyone and what’s the point in being a man if you can’t protect someone?

  Rose said the hardest thing about her job were the suicides.

  Those vets make it through
the war and then they go and bump into a razor or a rope, she said.

  Once a year, during National Nurse Week, the local church pastor who also lived in the trailer park, Pastor Rex Wood, would go to the hospital for a ceremony he invented called the Blessing of Hands. He liked to think up new religious ceremonies. He called himself a religious innovator.

  On Blessing of Hands Day, the nurses would leave their patients and duties for twenty minutes and go outside to the hospital’s parking lot. The nurses would line up and hold out their opened palms for the blessing. Pastor Rex would walk up to each of them and sprinkle a little holy water on their hands while he said a prayer.

  There were always one or two meth or heroin addicts hanging out in the parking lot who watched the blessing. Most people could tell the difference, because the meth addicts had sores on their faces and meth smiles, which were smiles without teeth or with teeth that had no business being in someone’s mouth. The heroin addicts hung around the hospital hoping some nurse might slip them a syringe or a box of laxatives. The heroin users were always falling asleep against a car or even under a car in search of shade on a hot sunny day.

  Everyone knew that it was the only day of the year when every nurse in that place had her nails done at the local beauty salon. I knew that as my mother watched the blessing, her own hands were wrapped tightly around a mop. The other cleaning ladies kept their hands in their pockets. The cleaning staff never had their hands blessed because nobody ever thought their hands deserved it.

  Pastor Rex liked to print out his sermons and blessings and hand them out at church. On the Sunday following National Nurse Week he gave out one that he also read aloud from the pulpit: Lord bless the hands that care and toil. Bless the hands that help another walk. Help the hands that inject and hold glasses of water. Help the hands that clean bodies. Help the hands that are more than hands and carry the suffering of the world. Amen.

  My mother said, You never know where the devil is hiding. Liars are always pretending to be priests or poets. Liars hide out in the purest places.

  After school April May and I liked to go for a walk down to the river, where there was a dock we could sit on and look at the water.

  Let’s talk about this and that, April May liked to say as we sat down.

  We watched dragonflies flick across the surface and always kept our eyes open for any stirring in the river, which might be the slow movement of an alligator. In Florida everyone knew never to sit on the edge of a dock with your feet in the water. But April May liked to dare me to do it and I always did. When I dared her back, she always refused. We both knew I was the bravest.

  Sometimes April May would complain about her mother and father and say, Shortnin’ Bread is driving me crazy and Meat Mud is also driving me crazy. They both drive me crazy. How did I get those parents? How?

  I always just shrugged at this.

  Hey, hey. Well, what about you? Doesn’t Margot drive you crazy?

  I had to answer no.

  No?

  No.

  Hey, April May said. I heard your mother was always given a little gas from the stove to breathe. I’m sure it had to affect her. It’s probably why she’s so dreamy.

  What do you mean? I asked.

  Yes. I heard about it. As a little girl your mother was given gas from the oven to breathe in so she’d go to sleep. Her daddy would hold her over the burner and turn the control knob.

  Of course I knew about it. My mother told me. Her father said, If a girl doesn’t want to go to sleep, a little gas was always better than a glass of milk.

  She’s just got to make you a little crazy sometimes, April May continued. Come on. Come on. Just admit it. All parents drive their children crazy.

  No, I said. Never.

  My mother always knew exactly what to say to give me some sweetness and make me smile.

  One day my mother said, Pearl, do you know what the best question in the world is? The very best question of all?

  No, tell me.

  Her old life and new life were always in a mixing bowl like flour and sugar.

  Are you going to the ball?

  7

  The river was also the place where April May and I went to smoke cigarettes, which we had been doing since I was ten and she was twelve.

  I was an expert at stealing cigarettes. This, in addition to doing her homework, was my job in the friendship with April May. Everything else was her job. She decided what we were going to do and even directed what we would wear, which meant any color but pink. Any piece of clothing that had a Hello Kitty or a Disney cartoon character on it was forbidden. She detested the Disney princesses.

  Since my job was to find cigarettes, I had to sneak around the park in search of people who smoked. There were not that many people to choose from, as only four trailers on the land were occupied.

  Luckily everybody smoked, except for April May’s parents and my mother.

  I was always sneaking, looking to slip out a few cigarettes from packs that were lying around. If I felt very brave, sometimes I stole whole packs. Often I had to settle with snatching a half-smoked cigarette out of an ashtray. Even on my walks home from school, I’d rescued cigarettes that were lying on the ground and had been stepped on or thrown out a car window.

  One of the homes in the trailer park where I could always find cigarettes belonged to Mrs. Roberta Young. Everyone called her by her whole name. She lived in her trailer with her thirty-year-old daughter, Noelle, two tiny Chihuahuas, and a parrot in a cage. The parrot was kept inside the trailer at night. During the day the cage was placed outside on a plastic chair under the shade of a short palm tree.

  Noelle never went to school, but she was an electrical genius. Everyone knew that if you had a lamp that didn’t work or an electrical socket that sent out a spark, the person to call on was Noelle.

  It was as if she were born from lightning, her mother said. She can fix anything. She can make dead car batteries come back to life just by wiggling the wires.

  Noelle had a large collection of Barbie dolls. The world she had invented around them was all she cared about. Her community of Barbies took up half of her trailer. The dolls were placed standing, lying down, or sitting in all kinds of poses. They all had names and piles of clothes. Noelle kept count of everything and once told me she had sixty-three Barbie dolls. It was all she ever wanted for her birthday or Christmas.

  April May didn’t like Noelle and would never hang out with her. If she saw Noelle coming or going, April May would run in the opposite direction.

  April May believed Noelle could give her an electrical shock and her nickname for Noelle was Voltage.

  Noelle had black hair, which she wore in a braid, and dark brown eyes. She walked with a very straight back as if a board were tied at her waist. She also never moved quickly and always walked on tiptoe.

  April May said, Just guess who else walks on tiptoe?

  Who?

  A Barbie doll, of course!

  Noelle often gave me math classes. These were observation classes, really, as I watched her do a problem over and over again until I understood. She could not explain in words what her mind was doing.

  It took me some time to realize that Noelle, who loved fortune cookies and kept the fortune papers in a plastic bag, had memorized the words as if they were poems.

  A stranger is a friend you have not spoken to yet, she said.

  We can’t help everyone, but everyone can help someone, she said.

  Next full moon brings an enchanting evening, she said.

  Is Noelle very sad? I asked my mother.

  Yes, she’s the worst kind of sad. She doesn’t know she’s sad. She’s a stray.

  My mother called anyone or anything that seemed alone, or ended up in the wrong place, a stray. There were stray people, stray dogs, stray bullets, and stray butterfl
ies.

  Whenever I went to Noelle’s trailer for math classes, Mrs. Roberta Young offered me something to eat. She liked to give me a plate of strawberries and say, Strawberries have two hundred seeds on them and they are the only fruit with seeds that grow on the outside. Or she would say things like, Don’t miss looking at the new photographs from the Hubble Telescope. She always said, Global warming is real just like the sky is blue.

  I knew Mrs. Roberta Young was the smartest person I’d ever met. She’d been to the University of Florida and had studied biology. She was a retired high school science teacher who lived off of a Social Security check. My mother told me she’d lost everything, including her house. Her husband had died after a long illness and the medical bills had left her almost destitute.

  The garbage dump was affecting the area, Mrs. Roberta Young claimed, and we were being slowly contaminated. She wrote up petitions and sent these to the local and state governments. But no one ever came to inspect the dump or check on our water.

  Mrs. Roberta Young once found a dead skink with twelve legs, which made it look like a centipede. She kept that skink in her refrigerator for weeks beside the carton of milk and box of eggs as she tried to think of a way to get it to a scientist or environmentalist. As the days passed by, the creature shrank and shriveled up. Mrs. Roberta Young finally threw the skink out when it became coated with a thin film of green mildew, like a piece of bread.

  She once told me that ombrophobia is the fear of rain.

  Really? Really? Do you know anyone who has that?

  Oh, for sure.

  Who?

  Noelle.

  Noelle?

  Yes, of course. I know about this fear because it’s her problem. Noelle won’t go out in the rain. Not ever.

  What happens to her?

  Noelle thinks she could get electrocuted.

  Of course, she thinks she’ll be a hair dryer that falls into a bathtub, my mother said.