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n on her shoulder and got a high chair from the waitress and set the little boy inside it, then ordered a grilled cheese sandwich for him and a buffalo burger for herself. After Quince ordered, Jamie Sue called the waitress back and asked her to bring a gin gimlet from the saloon next door. “Would you like something from the bar, sir?” the waitress said to Quince.
“Just the food I ordered. Water is good,” he replied, tapping his nail on the water glass that was already full.
After the waitress was gone, Jamie Sue said, “You can have a beer if you like.”
“Thank you just the same, Miss Jamie.”
“I’ve never seen you drink.”
“I’m hired to drive y’all. That means with a clear head. You know that alcohol stays in the bloodstream for three weeks?”
“No, I didn’t know that. But you’re a loyal employee, Quince.”
“That’s a fine compliment coming from you, Miss Jamie.”
She let the personal nature of his remark pass and looked out onto the lake. She could see the wind cutting long V’s in the surface, and Swan Peak rising into the clouds, blue-black against the sky, as sharply delineated as the edges of a broken razor blade. Her gimlet glass was frosted with cold when the waitress brought it, and she drank it empty in three swallows, the gin sliding down inside her like an icicle starting to melt. The food had not been placed in the serving window that separated the kitchen from the counter area, and she called the waitress back and ordered another gimlet.
“Miss Jamie, I heard about you in Miss’sippi, long before I went to work for the Wellstones. I listened to your music on a station up in Tennessee. The jukebox up at the café had a couple of your songs on it,” Quince said. “People played them all the time. People said you were as good as Martina McBride.”
“Yes?” she said.
“Liquor always messed me up. I’d have these blackouts and wake up with spiders crawling all over the room. I’d have memories that didn’t make any sense. That’s what I was trying to say. A lady like you don’t need to—”
“You shouldn’t worry about me, Quince. We’re all doing fine here. Has Mr. Leslie said something about me? Are you troubled in some way?”
His face blanched. “No ma’am, I mean he didn’t say anything to me. I ain’t a bedpost, though. I hear things. I’m supposed to look out for you.”
Quince kept talking, trying to undo his ineptitude, but she heard nothing else of what he said, as though his lips were moving beyond a piece of soundproof glass. The waitress brought her the gimlet, then came back with their plates. Jamie Sue cut the little boy’s grilled cheese sandwich into small strips that he began eating with his fingers, smiling with a mouthful of toasted bread and yellow cheese. She let her own food grow cold on the plate and drank from her gimlet and looked out on the lake and thought about a scene many years ago in a little town in Texas at the bottom of the old Chisholm Trail.
It was a historical place in ways that nobody cared about. The most dangerous gunman in the West, John Wesley Hardin, had grown up in Cuero, right down the road. Bill Dalton’s gang used to hide out there after robbing trains and banks. The biggest herds of cattle ever assembled were put together there and trailed across the Red River, through Indian territory, all the way to the railhead at Wichita. The Sutton-Taylor feud, probably the worst outbreak of violence in the postbellum South, began with the rope-dragging and murder of a cowboy on her grandfather’s ranch.
In reality, she did not care about these things. When she thought about the town where she had grown up, she thought in terms of images and faces rather than events, of kind words spoken to her, of a time when she believed the world was an orderly and safe place where she was loved and one day would be rewarded because she was born pretty in a way that very few little girls were pretty.
Her father, an oil-field roustabout who was barely five feet five, had left one lung at Bougainville and had fixed the other one up with two packs of Camels a day. But he and his wife, a woman born without sight, had opened up a hamburger joint and for five years had made a living out of it and a truck patch they irrigated with water they hand-carried in buckets from a dammed-up creek. Each noon during the summer months, except Sunday, when they attended an Assembly of God church, Jamie Sue’s mother fixed her grilled cheese sandwiches in the café kitchen and let her eat them with the customers at the counter. Every day she drank a Triple X or a Hires root beer with her sandwich, and was the darling of the cowboys and pipeliners and long-haul drivers who frequented the café. Then her father took his last trip to the cancer ward at the U.S. Navy hospital in Houston and died while smoking a cigarette in the bathroom.
The hamburger joint became a video store, and Jamie Sue and her mother lived on welfare and the charity of her grandfather, who owned the remnants of a dust-blown ranch that was blanketed by grasshoppers and filled with tumbleweed and dead mesquite trees. The grandfather cooked on a woodstove and had no plumbing. If a person wanted to bathe, he did it in the horse tank. If he wanted to relieve himself, he did not go to the outhouse, or at least one that would be recognized as such. The “outhouse” consisted of a plank stretched across two pine stumps. The disposal system was a shovel propped against a scrub oak.
In revisiting her childhood, Jamie Sue did not dwell on the years she had lived at her grandfather’s. Instead, she tried to remember the grilled cheese sandwiches that she ate in her parents’ café, and the attention and love she saw daily in the faces of their customers.
The only problem with traveling down memory lane was that you didn’t always get to chart your course or destination. In her sleep, she sometimes heard grasshoppers crawling drily over one another on a rusted window screen, matting their bodies into the wire mesh, blotting out the stars and shutting down the airflow. She saw herself pulling wood ticks off her skin and sometimes out of her scalp, where they had embedded their heads and grown fat on her blood. The admiring patrons of the café were gone, and the only men who took a personal interest in her were the occasional caseworkers from the welfare agency who, while checking off items on a clipboard, asked her if she bathed regularly and whether she had seen worms in her stool.
“I’m going to the restroom. Would you watch Dale for me, please?” she said to Quince.
“Yes ma’am, I’ll make sure he chomps it all down. He needs to drink all his milk to be strong, too. Don’t you, little fella? You all right, Miss Jamie?”
“Of course I am, Quince. What a silly question,” she replied.
When she went into the restroom, she felt the floor tilt sideways. Was it the gin on an empty stomach, or was she coming down with something? No, the gin was not the problem. She felt worse when she didn’t drink it. So how could the problem be connected to her alcohol intake or the time of day when she drank it? If Leslie had not spoken so cynically to her, she wouldn’t have needed the drink. She didn’t crave alcohol, she was not addicted to it. It served to anesthetize her temporarily, but what else was she supposed to do? Excoriate herself because her husband talked to her like she was white trash and stupid on top of it?
Years ago another dancer at the topless club where she used to work started attending A.A. meetings for reasons Jamie Sue didn’t understand. As far as she knew, her friend did a few lines now and then and, on her day off, might drink a few daiquiris on a rich man’s boat, but she wasn’t a lush or a junkie. When Jamie Sue told the friend that, seeking to reassure her, the friend replied that the chief symptoms of alcoholism were guilt about the past and anxiety about the future, that the booze and the coke and the weed were only symptoms.
Those words never quite went away.
After Jamie Sue washed and dried her face and put on fresh makeup, she went to the bar and sat on a stool, waiting for her head to stop spinning. The daytime bartender walked over to her and leaned on his arms. “Want another gimlet, Ms. Wellstone?”
“Can you make an Irish coffee?”
“We don’t get a lot of calls for that one. But let’s see what I can com
