The Talker. Mary Sojourner
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other. For all the time we lay there looking up into the shiny black sky, the stars wheeling over us, orange flares bursting up from the Marine Base near TwentyNine Palms, I didn’t think about my dad once—until I realized I hadn’t been thinking about him.
Red Billy wasn’t in his room when I went to work the next day. I checked at the nurses’ station. “He’s in Activities Therapy,” one of the nurses said. “But, they need you in the kitchen. The prep gal didn’t show up and somebody needs to get the trays ready for dinner.”
It took me a while to get the trays set up with napkins and silverware. The whole time, the cook, a scrawny Mexican with only one front tooth, muttered to himself in Spanish. I knew a little Spanish, so I figured out he was calling the missing prep gal’s mother a whore and a miscarriage. I finished up and went looking for Red Billy. He sat at a long table with five old ladies playing bingo. As soon as he saw me, he waved me over. “I need to go to that appointment with the social worker right now?” he said.
“Yeah, I’m supposed to bring you to the office to sign papers.” The activities therapist fake smiled and called out, “G23.” She checked off Red Billy’s attendance slip. “You run along with your little friend, Mr. Guidry. You were supposed to be here till five, you know, but I’ll excuse this once.”
I wheeled Billy into the hall. “You’re slick,” he said. “I thought I’d died and gone to hell and was there for eternity. And the old gal next to me kept farting like a dray horse.”
I didn’t know what a dray horse was, but I laughed. “Where do you want to go?”
“How about the so-called patio?” he said. “I need a smoke.”
I wheeled him to one of the tables on the little concrete slab. A torn chicken wire fence closed in the patio. Somebody had once woven red and green plastic tape through it. “This is right cheery,” Billy said. He pulled out his makings and rolled us both a cigarette.
There was nobody in the Vons parking lot except a gang of scraggly black birds. “I love those guys,” Billy said. “They’re cowbirds. I almost called myself Cowbird. Want to know why?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Well, first off,” he said, “they love the road. Second, they always get by. Third, they leave their eggs in other birds’ nests to raise.”
We were quiet for a while. One of the cowbirds figured out how to tug on the edge of a garbage bag in the Vons dumpster and the birds chowed down madly.
“So,” I said, “do you have kids?”
Billy winked. “None to speak of.” He must have seen something in my face because he said, “Hang on. I didn’t really mean that. I’ve got a couple sons and daughter. They’re all grown now. My exes pretty much raised them. I don’t know where the boys are, but me and my daughter talk now and then. I used to send her postcards from wherever I was, but she couldn’t write back because I was always moving.” He looked away. “Dang, look at those birds. It’s party hardy time.”
Right then, I almost told him about my dad, but he shook his head and said, “Man, I miss the bad old days.” So all I said was, “So you were a real biker?”
“As real as you can get,” he said. “There was one time back in the early Seventies, me and my buddies decided to take off from Barstow and head for Chicago with no money and full tanks of gas and see what happened. Bluehorse, this squinchy little Indian with one eye who ran with us came up with the idea. He was always trying to sell us Jesus and he figured if we made it to Chicago, it was proof Jesus was real.”
“What happened?”
“What do you think?”
In fact, what he’d said about Bluehorse had made me think about my dad dying and the stupid Jesus shit people said to me at the funeral. “I think you all became atheists.”
“Whoa, missy,” Billy said, “you’re too young to be so cynical. What happened was we made it to Kingman, Arizona. We was running on fumes. One of the brothers was a big tall handsome guy with steel blue eyes. He called himself Odin. He went into an old trading post and when he came out, he had a sassy lady in tow. She tossed him the keys to her trailer which was behind the post and said, ‘There’s beer and hamburger meat in the fridge. I get off work in an hour. You boys fire up the grill and I’ll meet you there.’”
“No way,” I said.
“For sure,” Billy said. “It was different in those days. The lady and us partied till morning. She gave us fifty dollars for gas and we headed for Flagstaff. A couple Navajo guys saw Bluehorse, yelled, ‘Hey, bro,’ and pointed us to the Sunshine Rescue Mission. We ate and got preached at. Bluehorse fell in love with a cute little volunteer with a Jesus is My Co-Pilot t-shirt. A hippie kid gave us a couple joints and twenty bucks and we were back on the road again.
“See, back then the real people recognized each other. We knew we were strays. Then, that frickin’ coke came into the scene and it was all high commerce.”
“Did you make it to Chicago?” I said.
“We did. It was road people watching our backs all the way. When we got to Shakeytown, Odin and a couple of us sold a few ounces we had stashed for emergencies and we rode the long way back, through all this tall grass prairie that was one of the most beautiful sights I’ve ever seen. Sunset would turn that grass to pure copper.”
“Did it make you believe in Jesus?” I said.
“Shoot, I already did. I’ve always figured he was a road stray. His stories just got cleaned up when somebody figured out how to make money off of him.” Billy reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out a little package of crackers. “Toss those over the fence for me, will you? We cowbirds got to take care of each other.”
I threw the crackers as far as I could. The Activities Director stepped out onto the patio. “Miss, miss,” she said. “Don’t do that. You’ll just attract rats.” She took hold of the back of Billy’s wheelchair. “Time for dinner,” she said. “You and your friend can talk more tomorrow.”
Billy looked straight ahead, deadpan. “Thanks for the talk, missy. I hope to see you tomorrow.”
“You bet,” I said.
“That’s enough chat, people,” the Activities Director said. “Mr. Guidry, you don’t want your din din to get cold.”
I was walking home from work when a text from Liana came in. Talk soon. I called her. She picked up on the first ring. “Jenn, we need to talk. As soon as possible.”
“I’ve gotta go home. It’s my turn to cook dinner,” I said. “Meet me at the house.”
Stace and Chris were playing on their phones when I came in. “Mom called,” Chris said. “You’re supposed to figure out which of the vegetables have been in the fridge the longest and cook them.”
Stace giggled. “Ketchup. Right? That’s been in the longest plus it’s a vegetable. Right, Chris?”
He nodded.
“So, we can have hamburgers because ketchup goes with hamburgers and that’s a balanced meal,” Stace said. “That’s fair, Jenn.”
Just then, Liana came through the back door. She has family privileges and doesn’t have to knock. Same with Travis. “You want me to help?” Liana said. “What are you making?”
“I can help,” Stace said. “I can get the ketchup out.”
“Get, Stace,” I said. “You too, Chris. And no spying. Go outside and ride your bikes. You know the rules.”
Stacy slouched out the back door. Chris slammed his phone down on the table. “You are so not the boss of me,” he said.
I put the phone in my pocket. “I so am.”
He slouched out the back door. “I