2
Mistie Dawn Henderson wore her nightgown to school. It was a light weight pink acetate nightie, with torn lace at the sleeves and neck. Mistie liked the gown; it was pretty and it felt good on her skin. So when she woke up December tenth and found her father snoring face down on the carpet and her mother leaning over her ashtray on a stool in the kitchen, one hand clutching the Winston, the other shading her face from the light that crept through the thin window shades, Mistie had slipped on socks and shoes and her winter coat, then gone out to wait for the bus down at the entrance to the trailer park.
Mrs. Colvin, who lived in the trailer next door to Mistie, saw her trudging past. She'd slammed up her storm window and called out, "Mistie Dawn, you tell your daddy I'm sick and tired of his music late at night. I didn't get one speck of sleep and now what am I supposed to do? My windows was shut and even then I felt like I was rocking on the damn sea. I got nerves! He knows it! What am I supposed to do, answer me that? You hear me, Mistie Dawn? Say something!" Her voice cracked and went up a few notes. Mistie stuck her hands into her coat pockets, tucked her head, and kept walking, down the graveled road between the mobile homes. To either side she could see painted plaster and concrete lawn ornaments, staring at her with their pupil-less eyes. Tiny gardens were dead and brown; it was winter, after all. Bits of cotton from nearby fields had snagged themselves on rose branches and azalea twigs. The few trees between the lots were as naked as those women in the movies Daddy rented on weekends. There weren't any other kids out of their trailers yet; it was still early.
"I'll have the law on him quick as a dog, and we'll see how much music he can play behind bars?" Mrs. Colvin shouted. "You want your daddy behind bars? What you think of that, huh?"
Mistie didn't think much of that. People were always threatening to call the cops on her daddy or her mama for one reason on other, but most of them didn't do it because, as Daddy said, two could play that game and most neighbors had something under their sticky ole carpet if he decided to do a little digging. On the few occasions police did pay visits on the Hendersons, Daddy was polite and agreeable and the cops would say, "Well, okay, then, don't let it happen again." Whatever the "it" was at the time. Cops were rubber-dicks, Mistie's daddy would laugh. It was the social services that stuck in Daddy's craw. Social services had chased Mistie's family across a few state borders in the past two years when they got the idea that the Hendersons didn’t take good care of Mistie. Mistie didn’t really know what being taken care of was exactly, except that in each place they’d lived, ladies in skirts and heels had eventually come around to their trailer or their apartment or their rental house to talk to Mistie about her Daddy and what he was up to. But the Hendersons would pack up and leave once those ladies started sniffing about. At least social services gave up easily, Daddy said with a smile. Not enough workers, Mama would laugh. But, damn, they sure were a bother.
When Valerie died back in Kentucky, Daddy had taken her way away from their apartment and buried her somewhere. He said nobody best find her because he said if the cops and social services got into it, they'd make it seem like Valerie being dead was the family's fault and then everybody would go to jail, even Mistie. If anybody asked, Valerie’d had a bad liver, Daddy'd said. Wasn't his fault she had a bad liver but somebody would try to make it his fault like they did everything else. Mistie had promised never to talk about Valerie so the family wouldn't have to go to jail.
Mistie had been five when Valerie had died; since then they’d lived nine months in Tennessee, a half-year in North Carolina, and then Virginia. Most of Mistie's memories of her sister had disappeared with the body; all she had now was a coloring book Valerie had colored in, one with Teletubies in it. Sometimes, Mistie dreamed of her sister playing with a little cloud of black flies in the summer sun, but she never saw Valerie's face in those dreams.
When the Hendersons got themselves settled in MeadowView Trailer Park in Pippins, Virginia, Daddy had gotten a job working on a cotton farm in the summer and spring and fall. He stayed home at the trailer in the winter. Mama started selling sweet-smelling soap and shampoos from a catalog. Mistie liked the soap and shampoo but Mama never let her buy any and then after a month she threw the catalog in the trash and said nobody wanted that junk anyway. Just a few weeks after that the baby Mama was going to have came out too early. Mama showed it to Mistie as it floated in the toilet, a red blob with a tiny head-like thing and stringy stuff hanging off it, swirling in the water as Mama let Mistie push the lever to flush it away.
Mistie sat on the bank beside the road. She pulled up a dead weed and wrapped the stem around the base of the spiky seedpod.
“Mama had a baby and its head popped off,” she said to herself. She pulled the bent stem forward, and the little pod popped off and up into the air. Mistie smiled. She picked another weed and popped off the seedpod.
A few minutes later, other trailer park children began to gather by the road. They threw gravel back and forth at each other. Mistie got hit on the head and arms a couple times, but she didn't throw any back. It didn't really hurt. She stopped playing with the weeds and sat with one fist inside the other.
A high school boy in t-shirt and no coat in spite of the freezing temperature took out a pack of cigarettes and lit two, one for himself, and one for his seventh grade girlfriend. He leaned on the gray split rail fencing separating the mobile park from the grassy bank by the road and sucked on the cigarette. The morning sun caught the smoke and strummed it like a silent guitar.
"Hey, girl," he said.
Mistie said nothing.
"Hey." He held the cigarette in his teeth, picked up a bit of gravel and tossed it at Mistie. It bounced off her chest. "I said hey, girl. You look nasty. Don't your mama care nothing about brushing your hair?"
Mistie said nothing.
"You all's white trash, don't you know? My grandmama says you Hendersons as white-trashy as they come. Says why don’t you go back to Tennessee or Mexico or wherever the hell you come from."
Mistie said nothing.
"Leave her alone," said the seventh grade girlfriend.
"Where your books, girl? You never take books to school. You lose 'em or what? Don't you want to learn nothing?" The boy laughed, nudged his girlfriend who popped a large bubble of gum, and shook his head. "What's that bruise on your neck? How'd you get a bruise on your neck?"
Mistie touched her neck but felt nothing. Did she have a bruise? Maybe. She fell asleep watching T.V. last night and rolled off the couch. Maybe she got a bruise when she hit the floor.
"You screwed up, you know that?" the boy continued. "Fucked up in the head. It's from your daddy playing that loud music at night. Mrs. Colvin's gonna get you all kicked out of the court. She told us. We gonna have us a party when you gone."
Mistie looked down the paved road to where she couldn't see anymore because of the curve in the road and the trees clustered by the road. She listened for the rumbling of the school bus, but couldn't hear it over the shouting and fighting of the kids around her.
"Fucked up in the head," the boy was saying beside her. "Really fucked up, your whole family is fucked up and they ought to be taken out back someday…."
It trailed. The voices of the other kids closed in on themselves; faded. The road and trees narrowed and vanished, the light swallowed up in grayness. Comfortable, cottony nothingness cushioned her; a familiar humming pulse played behind her eyes. She rocked in its arms.
Something heavy slammed her in the back. Sights raced in like water over the rim of a flooded bathtub. Sunlight stabbed her; noises jammed their picks into her ears.
"Bus is here, you retard," said the high school boy. Mistie blinked and looked at him. He'd already finished his cigarette and was stubbing it out on the gravel with the toe of his cowboy boot. The girl friend was tugging on his arm and tossing Mistie a look of tempered tolerance. Other kids were pushing around Mistie, swinging book bags and purses, climbing up the steel steps and into the big yellow vehicle.
Mistie took the handrail and pulled herself up the steps. The bus smelled of mildew and cleanser and stinky feet. The bus driver, a man whose name she didn’t know but who was always the bus driver, gave her a scowl. Then he said to the high school boy behind her, "Lose the cigarettes, Ricky, or you’re off the bus for the next two weeks."
Ricky planted the heel of his hand between Mistie's shoulder blades and shoved her around the bar and into the aisle. Her breath went out with a whoosh, but she choked and caught it back, saying nothing.
"Ain't got no smoke,” said Ricky. “Want to search me? Want to strip search me?" He winked at the high school girls on the bus. "You a queer or what?"
"Talk like that'll get you off the bus for a month," said the bus driver.
"Like I really care," said Ricky. He pushed past Mistie and strode to the back of the bus where he dropped onto a vinyl-covered seat. Other high schoolers, sitting nearby, turned around drew together, heads going down, talking loudly but incoherently.
Mistie found a seat by herself halfway back. There was a pencil stub on the seat. She flicked it to the floor. "Mama had a baby and its head popped off."
This was the only bus in the county that had a cross-grade population. It transported kids from all three schools, Pippins Elementary, Curtis Middle School, and Patterson High. The high school kids who rode this bus hated it, and let everyone know. At least they had the shortest ride, only three miles, and then they were gone, leaving the younger kids catching their breaths and rolling their eyes at each other.
A little ways down the road, the bus shuddered to a stop in front of a row of small, once-colorful box houses. A lot of these houses had kids. Bent bikes and up-turned plastic wading pools littered yards. Some of the chain link fences were torn down and most of the grass in most of the yards was gone, leaving cold-packed dirt and ruts. Five cars and two pickups in various stages of disrepair sat in the driveway of the pink house. In the side yard of the gray house, frozen sheets swayed stiffly on the line.
There was a girl who lived in the purple house who Mistie liked. Her name was Tessa Kessler. Tessa and Mistie were in the same second grade class at Pippins Elementary. Tessa was pretty, with bouncy blonde hair and a lot of new clothes. She wore makeup sometimes, and she missed a lot of school because she had to baby-sit her little brother when her mama ran down to Roanoke Rapids in North Carolina to shop. Tessa got to be in pageants on weekends. She looked like Princess Silverlace on that show on Nick.
Kids from the box houses filed onto the bus. Mistie pulled her foot clear of the aisle as they came, and watched for Tessa. A first-grader sat down by Mistie, bearing a blue plastic lunch box and a scowl. He looked as though he'd been crying. Sooty rivulets zigzagged down his face. Mistie was disappointed, because if Tessa were coming to school, maybe she would have sat with Mistie.
But Mistie didn't ask the boy to move. She shifted in her seat, slouched against the side of the bus, and stared out the window at the green house. From the front of the bus, she could hear the door hissing closed, and the grinding of the bus gears as the bus driver settled in for the remainder of the trip.
Then the front door of the purple house opened with a jerk, and Tessa was jumping from the stoop to the narrow concrete sidewalk, a denim book bag dangling from her elbow. Mistie sat straight, watching.
The bus driver said something over the din of students, and the bus door clanked open. Tessa rushed through the open chain-link gate, past her sagging mailbox, and jumped onto the bus steps. Mistie clenched one fist; the other went inside her coat and stroked the satiny nightgown.
"Mama had a baby."
The boy by Mistie farted and scooted his butt around to let the smell escape.
Tessa dropped into a seat near the front, beside another little girl. The bus honked its horn at a passing car, then pulled onto the road. The boy beside Mistie pulled a set of Pokemon cards from his pocket and began to shuffle through them, mumbling to himself that his brother had bent up the best ones. Mistie found a tear on the back of the seat in front of her. She watched it, bouncing up and down and sideways, making her pleasantly dizzy, until the bus was at Pippins Elementary, and it was time to get off.