[title subtitle=”words: Marla Cantrell”][/title]
The traffic light turns from yellow to red, and Lena hits the brakes. The old Dodge truck, bronze and white and rusty in spots, shimmies to a halt. Lena looks around. She is driving the back roads to Russellville and then on to Hot Springs, through misbegotten towns without a Walmart, without a McDonald’s. Up ahead, an ancient sign, made with iron letters inside a scrolled frame, reads High Hope Cemetary, the word cemetery misspelled by the unschooled craftsman.
Lena twists her hair, dyed blue on the ends, into a messy bun and sticks a ballpoint pen she finds on the dash, through it. She often wonders what it would be like not to notice things like
that: misspelled words, a perfectly fine house with the wrong color paint, lies that ring false the minute she hears them.
She is thinking of her cousin Tinnie, a year older than Lena. She is thinking about the year Tinnie turned eighteen, when Lena was seventeen and already wild, reckless. That was seven years ago, when Tinnie left Arkansas. She stayed in Paris for six full months, or so she said, sending Lena postcards of spiny fish on beds of ice in outdoor markets, of schoolchildren visiting the Louvre, of Montmartre where Picasso and Van Gogh and Monet painted. The postmarks were always smeared.
When Tinnie returned, she sounded like a Fodor’s Travel Guide, her details precise, her French as bad as ever. When Tinnie returned, she held her stomach and wept every time she saw a baby.
Tinnie lives in Oklahoma now and wears her hair buzzed, and thick glasses that hide her eyes.
In Russellville, Lena stops at Whatta-Burger and stands in a long line waiting to be served. Next to her, a little girl wearing a tutu and cowboy boots stands, her hand caught inside her mother’s. She smiles at Lena, and Lena reaches out and tousles the girl’s fine, red hair.
On the road again, Lena turns on the radio. In Ecuador, an earthquake claims 272. A twenty-six-foot-long python is captured and dies in Malaysia. Protesters line the streets of Cairo.
She is in the Ouachita National Forest when the radio signal fades away. It is a relief, she realizes. She picks up her cell phone. No service. Another relief.
It is that shimmery part of the day, the light regal on the giant pine trees and on the water that rushes beneath the bridge she’s just crossed. A gray heron, its long neck shaped like the handle on a pitcher of ice tea, flies beside Lena for a few seconds and then moves on.
When she got up this morning, she hadn’t planned to be here. But then she lost three dollars in the washers down at Bubbles and Chains Laundromat, and her hairdresser Jade canceled her appointment, and then her mama called, her voice itchy with regret. “I never meant to hurt you,” she said. And Lena listened to her reasoning, listened to the clumsy way she pieced together her story. Her mama was telling the truth.
If Lena had stayed home, she would have ended up at her mama’s. She would have forgiven her. And Lena wasn’t ready for that.
Lena checks into her motel. It’s old and moldy and sits on Lake Hamilton. The wind picks up as she’s carrying her duffel bag from the truck to her room. Lena’s dress blows up, showing her scrawny legs, showing the tattoo on her right thigh that says “Love Hurts,” showing her scarlet underpants. She hears laughter but refuses to look in the direction of the sound. She holds the dress down and holds her head up high until she’s inside.
The nap lasted longer than she intended, and when she wakes the sun is setting. She opens her window and looks out on the lake. The sun is low on the horizon, and then it is gone. A man and a boy fish on the dock, their dark hair going blue in the dimming light.
Lena never feels like she’s in Hot Springs until she sees the oldest part of town. This place was built on the thermal waters that flow beneath the earth, that break the surface of the earth in sweet-smelling springs that seem eternal.
She parks near the town’s fountain, near the sign showing a young Bill Clinton, who spent much of his youth here. She bets he caused trouble. She can see it in his eyes, in that grin that turns mostly to smirk on a dime.
Lena walks down Bathhouse Row, where the righteous and the sinners used to show up to sit in the healing waters of the spas along this block. Today, there are only two of the old bathhouses left: The Buckstaff and the Quapaw, and Lena’s been to both.
Al Capone made Hot Springs his playground, and she imagines him now: fedora, cigar between his teeth, a pocket square in his suit coat pocket. During Prohibition, he stayed in Room 442 at the Arlington, and never stepped foot on the street. There were tunnels and secret passages and accommodations for a man like that. For a gangster who had connections you didn’t want to cross.
Traffic is heavy, and a motorcycle inches so close Lena could reach out and touch him if she had a mind to. The driver has a raccoon that walks from his right shoulder to his left, his paws denting the driver’s leather jacket. It is tethered to a dog leash that’s attached to the driver’s belt. The man looks at Lena, winks, and Lena, out of habit mostly, considers the possibility of him, the thrill of finding somebody new who hasn’t heard her stories yet, who hasn’t had time to form an opinion.
Lena punches the button at the next traffic light and waits to cross. A thin man walking a pink poodle stands beside Lena, his teeth too white when he smiles down at her.
There is music coming from a tiny park that’s tucked into a few spare feet of grass between two of the old buildings. Christmas lights are strung up in a nearby oak tree, and a jug-eared man wearing overalls stands on a small stage, playing an electric guitar and singing.
His voice is off, and when he sways he does it stiff-legged. When Lena gets closer, she stands still. His guitar case is open, and there’re no more than two dollars inside it. He’s singing a Kenny Rogers’ song about a heartbreaker named Lucille, the word Lucille coming out Woo-cille.
Lena pulls out her wallet, finds a twenty she needs for rent and drops it in the case. She says, “My mama’s name is Lucille,” and the man grins at her and nods.
When the song ends, she shakes his hand. “Thank you a whole bunch,” the man says. “You like Kenny Rogers?”
“I do,” Lena says.
“You like Dolly Parton?”
“Sure do.”
“She’s got pretty hair,” the man says and holds his hands out beside his head, showing the width of Dolly’s teased tresses.
Later, Lena gets her fortune from a Zoltar machine that sits on the sidewalk like a dare. Inside a space about the size of a phone booth, the upper half of Zoltar’s body shows. He is a bearded manikin, sitting before a crystal ball. She remembers Zoltar from the movie Big that she watched on her VCR with Tinnie so many times the tape snapped in two. She drops in her quarters, waits for her fortune, which is printed on a yellow ticket the size of a Zippo lighter. “The important thing is self-reformation,” the fortune says. “There is nothing you can do to gain complete satisfaction without self-reflection. If you have faults do not fear self-improvement.”
She knows the fortune is a fluke, but somehow it seems as if it’s not. Lena reads it again, drawing an imaginary line under the word self-reformation. If Lena started reforming now, she might be a better person by the time the baby was born. When she told her mama she was pregnant, she said, “I expected better from you.” And Lena said, “That’s your problem, Mama, expecting anything good from somebody like me.”
Lena’s whole life up until then had been a series of bad decisions and near misses. When she found out she was pregnant, she felt as if her luck had run out. But then she sat on her bed, the canopied one she’d brought from her childhood room, and she remembered her mama coming in at night when she was a little girl, smelling of Ivory soap and Jergens lotion. When Lena had a bad dream, her mama would say, every time, “Whatsoever things are pure. Whatsoever things are good, think on these things.” And Lena would imagine she was a princess in a high tower with the world at her feet, and she would close her eyes and drift.
In the hotel, she picks up her cell phone and calls her mama. But it is her daddy who answers. He says, “Are you eating enough fruit? Are you putting your feet up when you’re tired?” And she knows her mama’s told him.
“Sure, Daddy. I practically live in the produce section of Telstar Grocery.”
“Well, good,” he says. He clears his throat, and then he tells her he’s been watching one of those history shows. He tells her the story of traffic lights, how they were first installed in London in 1868, and how the first gas-powered wonder exploded, killing the policeman who was operating it.
“That was 150 years ago, honey,” he says. “And now traffic lights are everywhere, safe as your own front room. Why, there’s 12,460 in New York City alone,” he says, and she can see him standing in the kitchen, phone to ear, the facts coming to him like proof of something.
“What I’m trying to say is that the traffic light got off to a bad start, but it done a heap of good. That’s all I’m saying.”
Lena hears her mama saying, “Harry, who you got trapped on the telephone?” And when Lena’s daddy tells her, Lena’s mama comes on the line.
“Oh, Bug,” she says, using Lena’s oldest nickname. “I’ve been praying and praying you’d call.”
The traffic is loud on the wide road outside the motel. Lena parts the curtains and looks at all the traffic lights: green and red and yellow. She touches her belly, still flat but not for too much longer.
She sits down on the bed and listens to her mama talk, closing her eyes, letting the words fall like stars all around her. After a while, Lena’s eyes get heavy and she yawns, the day catching up with her. Lena’s mama asks if she wants her to go, and Lena says, “No, Mama. Not just yet.”
