Ignore the talk about Hanna, talk that she was betrayed, people pointing
to me and whispering. They're ignorant old biddies squawking about something
they'll never understand.
Spaghetti with chunks of mushrooms and whole olives swimming in the sauce
is how it started, if you must know. The three of us elbow to elbow around
Hanna's tiny oak table in the trailer's kitchen, surrounded by spaghetti,
garlic bread, and salad with wedges of Romaine smothering fat cherry
tomatoes. Cotter steering Pac Man through a baby blue maze in the green and
gray living room, and German chocolate cake I'd tucked inside my yellow
Tupperware Cake Taker so the icing stayed moist sitting out on the counter by
the stove.
Friday night dice with Hanna and Dale, the only event on my social
calendar. Three of a kind is face value in hundreds, fives are fifty, ones
are a hundred, a fourth doubles it, a fifth doubles that, three ones an
automatic thousand, first to ten thousand wins. I'd keep a few hundred
points at a time, like Powell taught me. That's the only good thing Powell
taught me, for damn sure.
Hanna loved having everything depend on how the dice rolled out. Keep
her in suspense, and she was happy. Otherwise, she'd be real sarcastic most
of the time, going off about how she was just a fifth leg on a wobbly metal
desk in the mildewy storage room behind Seleno's Market, how she was bored to
death with balancing the whole town's past due account.
Every ad she saw in the Boise paper for secretarial/clerical work was
like finding a winning lottery ticket she could buy with a copy of her
resume, and she spent them every week, never mind Dale warned her to stop it.
That's what separated us, Hanna wanting to change her life and me
thinking she had the greatest life anybody could have. A one year old yellow
and white Fleetwood trailer with a tip-out, a husband who didn't drink, dodge
work, or smack her around. Hanna's life had looked like heaven to me since I
went to the bathroom mirror six months earlier and there was Rocky at the end
of the first movie, when the screen freezes up on him squinting through
eyelids bloated shut, and he's crying out through puffy purple blob lips.
You could've rolled the credits right over my face that morning, I looked
just like him.
Powell's handiwork, my face. Stoked by Budweiser he charged at Seleno's,
he'd rage through our trailer heaving pots and pans and vases and even the
batteries from our alarm clock straight at me, screaming at the top of his
lungs and throwing punches all the way. Max, Mom's last husband, was the
same way.
Mom used to drag her ratty paperback Good News Bible out of the
silverware drawer in the kitchen and pray for him while she ducked whatever
he was heaving in her direction. Later on, she'd pray over me, asking God
real nice and polite to Do His Thing and Give Us A Break, all the while
swabbing my face with pink cotton balls dripping peroxide, and dotting on
Neosporin from a flattened orange and yellow tube. I couldn't get out of
there fast enough.
Powell was my ticket out. We met at a party the summer before my junior
year. He was nineteen then, and had served almost a full hitch in the Navy.
We got married because of Cotter. Sixteen years old, Mom said, with a bun in
the oven and a bum in the drunk tank, and I'd be running around crazy with
who to tend to first. When I turned eighteen, I decided it wasn't going to
be Powell any more.
I crouched by Cotter's little fold away bed that last morning, feeling
stronger every minute just concentrating on his little zoo animal blankets
going up and down while he breathed in and out. When the living room got
quiet, I tiptoed in and found Powell with his bloated face mashed into the
sofa cushions, his wiry red hair plastered down in mottled, sweaty clumps. I
threw Cotter's clothes and my stuff in a pee yellow Samsonite I'd packed
around since I was ten, fired up the Dart, and went to Hanna.
She was a good friend, stopping in the Koffee Kup every day for turkey on
wheat and my company on her lunch break from Seleno's. Cotter and me stayed
with her and Dale a few nights, gave Powell time to get past the worst of his
mad and let my face unpuff, too.
Hanna gave me the deposit on an apartment behind the Koffee Kup, the old
storage rooms for torn up booths and the milkshake machine. Those got moved
out back after we moved in, and it wasn't so bad, really.
Powell showed up at the Kup maybe two times after we got settled.
Disrupted the whole lunch rush by threatening to kick my ass all the way
home, where I belonged. I had him arrested for heaving his steel toed boots
through the front window of the apartment and screaming that I'd better get
home, and all this at three fifteen on a Sunday morning. Happiest day of my
life was when he signed the papers and disappeared. I never missed him, not
even for a minute, and I'm glad Cotter was too young to remember him at all.
Looking back would've just wasted my time, so I didn't do it. I took
stock of what I had, and was glad of it. Powell got me away from Mom and
Max, gave me Cotter and landed us in Jordan Valley, Oregon. Sand and
sagebrush on the side of Highway 95 between Caldwell, Idaho and McDermitt,
Nevada. Just an open pit silver mine, cattle and sheep ranches, the Koffee
Kup and a gray and orange apartment that smelled less mildewy every time I
vacuumed, going over and over a perfectly round rust stain in one corner of
the living room where the milkshake machine had sat for too long. I didn't
regret. It's not like I could've waltzed back to high school and joined the
drill team, you know. Too much had happened.
At night I'd tuck my son into his fold away bed and curl up next to him,
brushing strands of red gold hair off his forehead, whispering to him about
the Sandman and God's angels, my favorite bedtime people when I was a kid.
Thinking that when he went out on his own, I'd be young enough to get on with
my life.
I'd think about that when the miners came into the Kup on Friday nights,
whistling and waving their paychecks and asking me to help them spend
handfuls of fifty dollar bills. I didn't want another Powell and I wasn't
settling for the first three dollar tip on a cup of coffee, either.
A man had to kick the clay off his boots before coming inside, had to
want to wrestle with my son before dinner, then stay up and watch Letterman
with me, and be content to make a life with us. It was pretty simple when I
saw it in my head, but pretty damned impossible to find anywhere around me.
But I kept seeing it in my head, and I knew that until I found that
person, I still had my son, I still had my work at the Kup, and I still had
Friday night dice with Hanna and Dale.
Hanna stared hard at the table like some mystery of the world was painted
on its top that night, after we cleared the dishes and started playing.
"I'm down fifty bucks."
She shot me a disgusted look which I ignored, because I was seventy-five
to the good and it was only eight-thirty. Cotter was curled around the Atari
console, dead to the world. Dale had collapsed in the Lazy Boy, quiet except
for when he'd gotten up for another wedge of cake, still laughing over
something on the TV that had to do with Letterman's mail.
Sometimes luck smiles on you and you can't help but win, and that's what
happened to me that night. But I wouldn't take Hanna's check when the game
was over, so I ruined the whole experience, she said.
"I can't have a damned thing I want, can I?" Her face pinched up in the
scowl usually saved for when she was crying about rejected resumes or being
"stuck forever in this stupid, podunk town". That one look hurt like those
headaches I sometimes get out of nowhere that hammer against my eyebrows and
barely ease up after three or four Tylenols.
So I gave in because of everything she'd done for me, and because dice
meant a lot to Hanna. You didn't argue them, she'd say. They rolled out a
certain way for a reason.
"There's a power to dice," she'd explained once. "A power we don't
understand, and should never question."
Hanna was big on that stuff. She'd had Tarot cards and a Ouija board
until Dale had thrown both into the wood stove, and after that all she had
left to believe in was the dice.
"Not money." She laid a hand on my wrist like I might change my mind
about playing for keeps, and run off. "We've got to play for something we
really want."
Hanna lived for meetings in dark paneled conference rooms, lunches with
executives, a Franklin Daytimer stuffed with lists of things she had to do.
I only wanted one thing that much. I wanted that time when Powell wasn't
drunk or whaling on me, when I had my own life in my own trailer. I was
tired of handling it by myself when the apartment creaked in the middle of
the night or the neighbor's German Shepherd went nuts and started howling,
waking us both up and sending us into the chilly kitchen, where I'd heat up
half glasses of milk and hope we could both get back to sleep before the sun
came up.
"We'll play for him."
Hanna jerked her head at Dale, like she'd seen right through my forehead,
knew just what I'd been wishing for.
"Hanna, you can't gamble your husband."
"But it's perfect. He's the Great Provider."
"Hanna--"
"First to five thousand wins. I lose, you get Dale."
"I can't do it, Hanna."
"He works hard, he loves your son--" She rattled off features like he
was a new Jeep. "Doesn't drink much. Just feed him a good spaghetti every
weekend, meatloaf once a month, and he's good for a thousand miles."
Crazy is what it was. But contagious crazy. Swiveling around in my
chair, I hollered loud enough to rouse him. "If I win this round, Hanna's
out and I'm in. What do you say, Dale?"
His head came up slowly, staring hard at Hanna then at me, from my toes
all the way up to the crooked part in my hair. Then he shrugged and laid his
head back, shut his eyes again.
"Just let me know," he said, "who's making breakfast."
"If I win," Hanna said, "I can get myself a real job. But if I lose--"
She turned back to me then, because as soon as she said 'job', Dale's grin
had disappeared.
About fifteen minutes into the game, he rested his hands on the back of
my chair, watching the dice clatter across the table. I was trying not to
notice the Old Spice waves that washed over my cheek with every breath he let
out. Powell had never smelled that good. He'd always smelled like warm
booze and dirty socks.
When I rolled five sixes, I shot straight up and wrapped my arms around
Dale's waist, grabbing him like race car drivers grab trophies at the finish
line, like if they let go even a little, they didn't really win. I grinned
down at Hanna and for that one quick minute, I really had won him. Fair and
square, a decent husband for me, and Cotter's new dad.
But just for that minute. Because in the next, Hanna shrugged and pulled
the dice into a neat pile and I pulled away from Dale, jamming my hands into
my jeans pockets because I wasn't sure where else to put them.
"So, what's for breakfast?" Dale brushed a hand across my shoulder
blades and I forced a smile at him, but Hanna just sat there, stacking the
dice into a neat little pyramid.
When I laid Cotter across the back seat of the Dart a little while later,
I guess I felt sort of cheated. And it sure seemed like, when we waved
good-bye, Hanna felt just the same.
That was our last Friday night dice game. Hanna interviewed for an
Administrative Assistant job with Intertech in Boise, and she accepted their
offer without talking to Dale about any part of it. The eighty-four mile
commute each way left her too burnt out by Friday to do anything, she said,
but heat some Campbell's in the microwave and go to bed, sometimes two hours
before Letterman even came on.
Three weeks went by before I stopped by on a Friday night with a lemon
cake and an old Country Crock tub of spaghetti sauce, and offered to stick
around and roll dice if they were up for it. It got the kind of quiet it
gets when somebody dies, as soon as I said anything. Dale just grunted at
me, and Hanna made a big production of wiping off the kitchen counters and
saying, "Maybe next week." Cotter and I were back in the Dart and headed
home in under fifteen minutes.
Hanna loved her job though. She'd call long distance from her new gray
and green cubicle and ramble on about buying a house in Caldwell, which she
said was a real town with Kmarts and Safeways, not just one stupid store like
Seleno's, where everybody had to shop no matter how high the prices got, and
she'd go on about how Dale should commute, not her. There was no future, she
said, in Jordan Valley.
She started pricing houses the next week, and that's what cinched it, if
you ask me. Made the whole thing fall apart, like when you lay a card down
too fast when you're building a card house, and the whole thing falls in on
itself.
Hanna called at midnight the next Friday, from the new Comfort Inn at the
Boise airport, blowing her nose into the phone and sobbing in a high pitched
wail, like a tape played way too fast.
"He said I love the job, not him, because I said if I lost that night we
played dice, I'd quit looking. If I'd stuck to that bet I'd have moved out
anyway, but he said he could never forgive me for betting him in a dice game,
that I'd never been so disposable to him, and it's just over! I'm getting an
apartment." She blew her nose again, away from the receiver this time, and
sniffed pathetically. "Why can't he compromise? Why can't he give in?"
The way I see it, he did. The very next week. Gave her his navy blue
Chevy Blazer and said he'd give her a divorce, too, just as soon as she said
the word.
I hated for anybody to be as miserable as Dale got after that. He'd
wander into the Koffee Kup for pot roast and potatoes, plant both elbows on
the slate gray counter and start yukking it up about his day at the mine and
spooning food from one side of his plate to another, not really eating at
all, just sort of moving it around.
Every night he showed up, rambling on while I refilled ketchups and
sugars and waited on other customers. Just shooting the breeze, me making a
comment here or there and after a week or so, him pushing through the narrow
glass doors and folding his long legs up under one of the red swivel stools
was just sort of expected, one of those things that happened every day at the
same time, like the lunch rush.
I got to picturing him slouched down in the Lazy Boy after leaving the
Kup, maybe not even laughing at Letterman's mail any more, and it was so sad,
I had to do something for him. So I dropped by one Friday night after work,
just to check on him. I'd whipped up a Dutch oven full of spaghetti because
it felt like the right thing to do. Natural, like kicking off my Reeboks and
putting my green flannel slippers on after work.
Never mind the old biddies started squawking then, about how I was a
'homewrecker', squawking loud enough for me to hear as I moved between my
tables. Taking dinner over to Dale's trailer felt more right to me with
every pan of spaghetti, meatloaf, tuna casserole and lasagna, and Dale
must've thought so, too, because one night he put his fork down right in the
middle of dinner and said, "I guess I should have let you gals play for
keeps, huh?" and my heart about hammered a hole right through my sweater.
That's the kind of right it felt like, not that any of those old biddies
would've understood if I'd tried to explain, which I didn't.
But it wasn't right, really. Not inside me. Not until I took a day off
and found Hanna's apartment by the Boise river, my old Dart protesting every
hill. Once we got past the hugging and the crying, she showed me through the
apartment and how the river snaked past her patio and we pretended we weren't
going to talk about Jordan Valley or Dale or what she was going to do. We
got all the polite stuff out of the way before settling back on the green
velvet sofa she'd moved from the trailer, and really talking.
When I explained how it meant enough to me to drive my gutless, oil
sucking Dart all the way to Boise to lay it out for her, and allowed as to
how it would give her a way to make a decision on things, she agreed it was
probably the only sensible thing to do. Like me, Hanna didn't have any other
answers. Not right then, anyway.
It seemed like we should, so we shook hands first. Then we walked real
slow into her new red and black checkered kitchen, settled in around the tiny
oak table and rolled the dice, each of us focused on those five tumbling
cubes, and neither one of us smiling.
I sweat it pretty hard when she rolled a thousand, but when five
beautiful sixes tumbled out of one roll, I could've jumped up and kissed her
new vaulted ceiling. I became a believer right then that Hanna was right,
there was a power in those little cubes. A power not to argue with.
So for any old biddy's information, I won him fair and square.
I knew it, and Hanna knew it, too.
It was all honest and above board, as fair as we could make it, and like
Hanna said, real quiet, at least it told her what she had to tell him. At
least it settled things, took them out of her hands.
I felt good, heading back into the flat nothing stretches of desert that
night, heading home. Heading for something better.
And now you know it was all an honest deal, like I've said all along.
So you just tell that to those old biddies, next time they start
squawking.
