Pie Town Page 4

  “Danny let you off the hook because you batted those big brown eyes in his direction and because he has a big crush on you, but I’m the sheriff, and I saw you speed past the work zone, and I say you need to pay.” He pulled his hands out of his pockets. “And why don’t you give that boy a break and go out with him?”

  “Because Danny White was born and raised in Pie Town and that’s the only place he wants to live. I’m aiming for better things,” she said. “I got places to go.”

  “And just where are you planning to go?” Roger asked.

  “I’m not sure yet. I just know I don’t want to stay here,” the young woman answered.

  “Why?” Malene asked. “What’s wrong with Pie Town?” She was working on updating her patients’ charts.

  “What’s wrong with Pie Town?” Christine repeated the question and stared at her coworker. “Are you kidding me? This place has nothing to offer somebody my age.” She considered what she was saying. “Shoot, it doesn’t have anything to offer somebody any age. There’s no stores, no decent restaurants, nothing to do. You can’t even get a cell signal unless you climb Escondido Mountain. There’s not even any pie, for Christ’s sake. All they serve at the diner for dessert is brownies! Why would anyone want to live in Pie Town?”

  Malene shrugged. “It’s a great place to hike and ride horses and be outdoors,” she replied.

  “When’s the last time you hiked a trail or rode a horse?” Christine asked.

  “If I had time it would be a great place to do those things,” Malene responded. “But regardless, it’s got more to offer than just that anyway.”

  “What else?” Christine asked.

  “It’s safe,” Roger answered, tapping his badge.

  “Right,” Malene agreed. “And the folks are nice and helpful. You won’t find this small-town generosity in a big city.”

  Christine laughed. “This town is not generous. You ever asked anybody for a loan in Pie Town?” she asked. “And as far as the folks being helpful, when’s the last time you tried to organize them to do something for anybody? You remember what a hard time we had trying to raise money for a van for the senior center?”

  Malene thought about the question. “Well, as a community, we are a little uncooperative, I’ll give you that. But everybody knows everybody, and you can’t get lost.”

  “A little uncooperative?” Christine repeated. “We can’t agree with each other about anything. We don’t hang holiday lights because some people want snowflakes and others want Christmas trees. We don’t have a July Fourth parade because some people claim we’re still oppressed by a government and that we’re not really independent. We can’t have a library because everybody wants to say what books get put in there. It’s like we take pride in not getting along with each other in this town. I think everybody ought to sell their land to the government, let them bulldoze Pie Town, and build some more radio towers like they did near Magdalena. At least then we’d be sending out some signals in the world other than indifference and orneriness.”

  “Oh Christine, it’s not that bad,” Roger chimed in. “We get along on some things. We accepted the state’s stimulus money to repave the highways.”

  “Yeah, but didn’t we have to pay it back because we could never decide on a bid from a construction company?” It was Malene who asked.

  “We can still have it when we make a decision,” he replied.

  “See what I mean?” Christine said. “It’s like the only time we get together is for Alex’s birthday parties. Beyond that, we got nothing here, and I’m just saying, as soon as I save up enough money I’m heading out of this godforsaken place.”

  “Well, before you leave town, just make sure you pay your ticket,” Roger said. “Or I’ll send Danny to find you and bring you back.”

  “Yes sir, Sheriff.” She stood at attention and saluted Roger. “Now I know why Malene divorced you—because you are no fun at all!” She grinned at the two of them. “I’m going to give Mrs. Otero her meds,” she noted and walked out of the station. “You let me know if he’s harassing you,” she called out to her coworker. “I’ll call the deputy.”

  Malene laughed. “So what’s up?” she asked, wondering why her ex-husband had stopped by.

  “I went by the house after I saw you to check on Alex.”

  “Was he out of bed?” Malene asked.

  Roger nodded. “He wanted to do math,” he answered.

  “He is very smart with his numbers.” Malene studied her ex-husband. “What’s wrong?” she asked. She knew her ex-husband rarely did anything without thought and purpose. She could see that he had come to the nursing home to talk to her about something. “Was everything all right?” she asked. “Was Frieda there?”

  Roger nodded reassuringly. “He’s fine,” he answered. “Everything was fine.” He paused. “You know, you need to water those plants twice a day,” he commented, recalling the pitiful shape her flowers and vegetables were in.

  “I know,” she said. “You tell me that every year.”

  “And every year you don’t listen.”

  Malene was used to the lecture, and she waited for more of his speech on plant care, but Roger didn’t say anything else about it.

  “He asked about Angel,” he finally explained. He stood up straight, dropped his arms by his side, and shifted his weight from side to side. The toothpick dangled from his lips.

  Malene knew that Roger had quit smoking and that he had been without a cigarette for almost four weeks. She also knew that was a record for him. Because she had been with him when he had tried before to quit, she knew he was chewing on anything he could find. He liked gum and toothpicks best, but she had known him to chew on pieces of hay and the ends of pencils when he was desperate. Malene didn’t respond.

  “You think I should try to find her?” he asked. He rested his hands on his hips, waiting for her reply.

  Malene didn’t answer right away. She thought about Angel, how much like her father she was, how much he loved her. She had his frame, his dark hair and eyes. Angel had always been a spitting image of her father. Malene looked away. She knew how much he still missed her.

  When Angel was a little girl, the father-daughter duo had been inseparable. He doted on her night and day, bought her everything she ever wanted, taught her everything he knew about riding horses, fixing a car engine, reading animal tracks. She was the biggest tomboy in Pie Town, and there was nobody more important to their daughter than her father. When Angel became a teenager, gave up those childish games, learned to drive, and started making her own way, it had been hard on Malene, but it had been harder on Roger. He hated watching his little girl grow up. And unfortunately she didn’t do it well or easily.

  Malene and Roger had argued before their divorce, but their fights had been nothing like the fights he had with Angel when she turned fifteen and started hanging out with the Romero boys and that girl from Omega. Those fights lasted two years, and then she was pregnant and then she was gone. And Roger and Malene and their marriage and Angel’s little boy were all left in the wake of their daughter’s destruction.

  Malene shook her head. “I don’t see the point, Roger,” she finally replied. She went back to filing papers, straightening up the area around her.

  “I could just check to see if she’s still up north. I can call my buddy up there, and he could stop by the bar, the last place we have on record where she worked, and just ask a few questions.” He hesitated.

  She glanced at the clock. It was getting late and she still had six sponge baths to complete and eight beds to change. She had to finish charting her daily duties and still work on a new admission scheduled to arrive before she left. She faced her ex-husband. “Alex always asks if his mother is coming to his birthday parties. He asks if she’s going to come at Christmas and at Easter and how to send her a card at Mother’s Day.” She shrugged. “He always asks, but he never seems devastated when she’s not there. Disappointed maybe, but not devastated.” She pic
ked up the folders that needed her notes. “Just let it go, Roger. She knows it’s her son’s birthday. If she wants to show up, she will.” She looked down at the forms she still had to complete. “I’m way behind. I got to get some work done.”

  Roger slid the toothpick from side to side in his mouth. “Yeah, I know. I’m sorry I bothered you. You’re right. I know. I need to leave her alone. I guess Christine is right. This town isn’t for everybody.” He pulled out the toothpick, seemed like he wanted to say something else but didn’t, stuck the toothpick back in his mouth, and nodded his good-bye. He turned to walk away.

  “He ask you about the music?” Malene spoke before he got too far down the hall.

  Roger turned around and nodded with a smile. “There will be music,” he replied and turned around again.

  “See you tomorrow, Roger,” Malene called out.

  He nodded and kept walking, while Malene opened a folder and picked up a pen.

  “He still looking for Angel, trying to bring her home?” Christine was back from giving meds to her patient.

  “He’ll never stop,” Malene replied. She jotted down a few notes and picked up another folder.

  “Is that why you broke up?” Christine asked. She sat down in the chair next to Malene.

  Malene turned to the younger woman. She shook her head. “No,” she answered. “That wasn’t why we broke up.”

  Christine waited for more from Malene, but her colleague kept working on her files. Christine sat down and pulled out the schedule for the following week. She hadn’t noticed before that it had been completed. “I got six shifts,” she said, going over the next week’s assignments and sounding perturbed. “I told Shirley I only wanted five.”

  “We’re short-staffed again,” Malene noted. “I’m working six too. They’re trying to hire somebody.”

  “Hiring somebody and keeping somebody are two different things,” Christine said. She put the schedule back in its place beside the phone. “Well, I guess I can use the money, right? So why did you break up then?” she asked, returning to the earlier topic of conversation.

  Malene finished her charts and placed them back on the chart rack. “I got a lot of work to do, Christine,” she replied.

  The younger woman could see that she was being dismissed and that Malene wasn’t going to answer any more of her questions about her former marriage. She had never really given a reason for the divorce, and Christine was always curious. She watched as Malene hunted for her supplies to give baths. “Doesn’t matter anyway,” she said. “You might as well not be divorced. Y’all act like every married couple I know. You’re worse than that couple on Mrs. Henderson’s soap opera.” She found a bath cloth on the counter, picked it up, and threw it at Malene. “I say, you should just get back together. Then maybe he wouldn’t come around here so much and you’ll quit being so bossy.”

  Malene took the cloth and folded it, adding it to the supplies she had gathered. “Thank you, Christine. I’ll keep your advice in mind the next time I have a minute to think about Roger and me.” And she headed out of the nurses’ station and down the hall to finish her work.

  Chapter Seven

  It makes a little rattle when I rev up the engine.” Oris was talking to Frank, the town mechanic. Frank had his head under the hood, listening for the noise Oris had called about earlier that morning when he made an appointment for an oil change.

  “Hit the gas again,” Frank called out, and Oris bore down on the pedal.

  Frank waited a second and then finally pulled his head out and closed the hood. “I don’t hear it, Oris. It sounds fine.” He wiped his hands on the rag he had hanging from his back pocket, then held the rag and waited. He was tall, and he wore his black hair in a long ponytail that hung down his back.

  “Listen again. I swear there’s a rattle.” Oris was seated behind the wheel of his new Buick. He revved up the engine again and waited.

  Frank shook his head, confirming what he had just said—he couldn’t hear anything.

  “I thought you Indians could hear things the rest of us couldn’t.” Oris turned off the engine and swung his legs around, placing his feet on the ground. It was hot and he was sweating.

  Frank walked over to Oris. “That’s your wife’s people, Zuni, they’re the trackers, the ones with good ears. For us, it’s just another myth, Oris, just like the one that claims we aren’t good at business. You owe me twenty dollars for the oil change.” He stood next to the open door. Frank was Navajo, and his family had been in Catron County for generations.

  “I was told that my oil changes were free for the first year of ownership,” Oris responded. He stepped out of the car. “You see the size of the trunk?” he asked.

  Frank rolled his eyes. He had seen the trunk.

  “If you take it back to the dealership in Albuquerque. Do I look like I sell Buicks here?” Frank asked, glancing around at his garage.

  Oris reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. He fished out a twenty-dollar bill and handed it to the other man. “What happened to the good old days when we traded in tobacco and animal skins?” he asked, putting his wallet back. He yanked up his pants and stuck his thumbs in his belt loops.

  Frank took the money and stuffed it in the front pocket of his coveralls. He wiped his hands again and returned the rag to his back pocket. “We got screwed is what happened. Now it’s cash only, my friend.” He winked at Oris.

  “How’s your mother?” Oris asked. “I haven’t seen her since the graduation.” He recalled seeing all of Frank’s family when Frank’s son graduated from high school. Even though Oris didn’t have any young people in his family finishing school, he liked to attend the special ceremonies. He went every year just to see how the children had grown.

  “My mother and all my family are well, thank you,” Frank replied. “They don’t travel much in the summer. They stay up in the mountains where it’s cool.”

  “And your boy,” Oris hesitated, trying to recall the name. “Raymond,” he remembered. “He still heading off to the army later this month?”

  Frank nodded. “Getting ready to go to boot camp, and against my better wishes,” he answered. “But what’s a father to do?” He shrugged.

  Oris leaned against his car and then pulled away because of the heat. “He’ll get a good salary, learn a decent trade. It’s not all bad, the military I mean.”

  Frank didn’t respond.

  “Could be worse,” Oris noted. “Could be screwed up on drugs, locked up in jail, living with hippies in Taos.”

  Frank looked at Oris. They both knew he was talking about his granddaughter Angel.

  Frank had not asked about Alex’s mother in a long time. The news never seemed to change, and it always appeared to be an uncomfortable topic for Oris, and Angel’s parents, Roger and Malene. At first, everyone in town thought she would give up whatever she was chasing and come home. They all agreed it was just that she was trying to figure things out, needed a little break from Pie Town, suffered from postpartum depression, or was trying to find the baby’s father. But that was ten years ago. Frank, like most of the others in town, quit asking about Angel once Alex was old enough to understand the questions and understand his family’s embarrassment or discomfort in answering them.

  He nodded at his older friend.

  “Ah, but that’s the way of being young, isn’t it?” Oris asked, not expecting an answer. “Lord knows I did my share of stupid things when I was a teenager.” He laughed and shook his head. “And if my memory serves me, seems like you did a stint in the army. Doesn’t look like it screwed you up too bad.”

  Frank glanced down at the ground. “There wasn’t a war when I signed up,” he said. “The worst thing I saw in four years was some of the recruits suffer from heat stroke at boot camp. I was stationed in North Carolina and Georgia. It was just boarding school for me. Raymond’s likely to face a whole lot more that I don’t think he’s cut out for. He’s soft.”

  Oris considered F
rank’s assessment of his son. “The boy might surprise you, Frank,” Oris concluded. “Could turn out to be a hell of a soldier. My boy’s done okay.”

  Frank just looked at Oris.

  “ ’Course, it doesn’t matter anyway, everybody has to find their own way. Seems like I remember you telling Roger that a few years ago.”

  Frank nodded, remembering the conversation he had with the sheriff when Angel left town after Alex was born. He and Roger had been friends since they were kids.

  “I suppose you and his mother have carried him strapped on your backs for as long as you can,” Oris added.

  “I guess you’re right about that,” Frank responded.

  Neither of the men spoke for a few minutes, and then Frank glanced up at the sky behind Oris. “Looks like yesterday’s storm is finally coming in,” he noted. “Or bad company.”

  Oris didn’t even turn around to look at the sky. “I’m not falling for that Indian crap. If you can’t hear the rattle in my engine, I’m not going to believe that you can read the sky for a weather report or ghost sighting.”

  Frank shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

  The two men glanced at the street. A car was turning in their direction.

  Following it with their eyes as it stopped and pulled in, they both recognized the car and the driver.

  “Mrs. Romero needs her tires rotated,” Frank said, acknowledging his next customer.

  Oris watched as the car pulled in behind his Buick. He turned back to Frank. “Mrs. Romero has had those tires since the 1980s,” he commented. “Seems like to me they need more than just rotating.”

  Both men waited as the woman steered her car around them and then stopped beside Oris’s, parked, and stepped out. “Hello, Oris,” Mary said as a greeting to the man she had known all of her life. She was carrying her purse on her arm. She was wearing a pink dress and high-heeled shoes.

  “Mary,” he said in reply. He made a slight smile. “You going to a wedding?” he asked. “Or did you get dressed up for Frank here?”