Selena Anderson
Sunrise Service
We’re in the thighs of night somewhere in the desert and the rain
comes down. Gertie holds a polka dot umbrella over Miss Fitch
who’s leaned deep into the engine, fixing things again. Gertie’s
twelve and looks like a muppet and she’s the saddest one out of
everybody. She’s a Catholic and is always praying. The other girls
huddle together in the rain, in leather corsets and long johns and
tap shoes — all part of the get up.
When Gertie looks into the bus and gives the signal, I hold my
breath. Celia kicks the gas pedal. Nothing happens. I go back to
braiding Celia’s hair whose volume disappears into each cornrow.
She’s got the woolliest, biggest, most ridiculous hair I’ve ever seen
and I do love every strand of it.
We’ve got to be further out into the desert tonight. Only Miss
Fitch knows the exact spot. Once we are there we’ll meet and service
some men. If we don’t get there on time the men will have lost their
nerve and be gone and Miss Fitch will have found somebody to
blame — probably old, stupid Gertie. She would be the one to get
beat with her own umbrella.
“Fuck are they even praying for?” Celia asks. She’s become my
best friend and is from Killeen, but that’s all I know about her.
“Probably for us to get there on time. They’re so simple.”
“What if we don’t get there?”
“There’s still next week.” And as soon as I say so, I feel my stomach turn around on me and howl out.
“I mean what if we don’t get there at all — ever? What if we don’t
ever go again?”
“Then you’ll never taste orange chutney. They’re coming from
Victoria where all the oranges grow. I bet they got some. You’ve
never had it.”
“I’ll never have it either,” Celia mutters.
“I found some wheat back pennies the last time,” I say. “I showed
you, right? They don’t make wheat back pennies anymore.”
“ — What about all the money Miss Fitch’s made off of us? You
seen any of that?” She tightens her grip around the steering wheel.
See she’s sore at Miss Fitch because they had a thing earlier. The
moment the bus broke down Celia had called herself getting smart,
asking, Where are we? Do you even know? And Miss Fitch got up
right then and slapped Celia across the face. Miss Fitch doesn’t play.
She said Celia must be senile, talking like that. She called Celia an
old, washed out woman. Said Celia must have sincerely lost her goddamned mind. That was the end of it.
I run my finger down a golden curve of Celia’s scalp and tell her
point blank, “I hate your hair braided up.”
“I bet it’s hundreds of dollars,” Celia says in a voice that is mostly
a sigh, mostly empty. She says, “I bet it’s hundreds of thousands of
dollars. Think of all the things we could do with that much money.”
She holds onto the wheel like she may not ever get up.
“We don’t even know where we’re going. We don’t even know
where we are. Don’t you wonder?”
I stand with my hands in her hair and finally say that I do not. I
do not wonder.
Celia presses her nose against the horn. “Wheat back pennies.
You should get paid in wheat back pennies.”
I reach to finish the tail of that last braid but she bats my hand
away. The end is left unfinished and the coarse strands look like a
little lick of fire. She drags a hand down her arm. From her shoulder
blade to her elbow she has acne scars that look something like the
irregular markings of a hyena. She finds an ingrown hair by her
elbow and squeezes it from the root.
“You’re so nasty.”
“It’s nasty if you just leave it.”
After a second I say, “Anyways, you don’t have to do it right in
front of me.”
She glances at me through the mirror. “Well, look away then.
That’s what you do.”
Gertie gives the signal again, so Celia presses down on the gas.
There goes the lovely sound of the engine turning over. Reminds me
of somebody’s old granddaddy that’s about to croak.
Miss Fitch looks up right then with her big moon face and her
upturned nose and when she smiles, it seems like mildew’s gotten to
her teeth. That’s her illness. But she’s still as big as last August. She’s
still got all her hair, hair long enough to sit on. And she’s still just as
mean as she wants to be. Even her elbows and knees grimace. Celia
licks the inside of her mouth, watching.
“What if I just run over her right now?”
“I’ll give you a penny.”
We both smile.
The girls rush back into the bus looking like their beauty pageant just got rained out. Then here comes big old Miss Fitch,
waddling on a leg that bows out and was ruined by polio years ago.
Once she gets up the steps, she pauses to eye Celia who’s still in her
seat.
“Celia-baby,” she says. The way Miss Fitch says Celia’s name
gives the impression that she really loves her. The way she pronounces it, without running the sounds together, like she really
enjoys saying the name, it sounds like she really loves Celia. Sea-leeyah. Sea. Lee. Yah.
••
It’s been raining on and off all night. We travel in a straight line
through the desert mostly in silence. There isn’t a road so the ride is
bumpy. Gertie is praying.
Celia drags her finger down my forearm speaking so calm and
so low, feels like either her touch or her voice, one, will cut me.
“Why isn’t somebody looking for us?”
I say, “We’re as dark as night, sister. Who’s even going to see us?”
Miss Fitch starts coughing to where you can hear phlegm and
hell and everything else. We hold our breaths.
“You’re so lucky,” Celia says to me but the way she’s talking,
seems like she could be addressing the air in front of her.
“How the hell am I lucky?”
“You don’t ever wonder.” She scratches violently at her scalp
after those braids. She’s got all that wild Brillo and has the nerve to
be tender-headed. Then, “You’re like a wooden tulip.”
I stare out the window at a blacker reflection of myself and listen
to Miss Fitch coughing. Across the aisle Gertie is praying the beatitudes only she’s got them all jacked up, whispering, “Blessed are the
meek for they shall see God. Blessed are those who mourn for they
shall inherit the earth.” I wonder who we were to inherit Pecos.
Then the bus stops. We all look forward. Gertie is the only one
to stand up. ‘Did we break down again?’ There is hope in her little
voice.
Past my reflection, on the other side of the glass, and some fifty
yards over, there’s some pickup trucks parked around. One of them
is flashing his hazard lights like he means to speak to us — but that’s
dumb. Like a dream, the rain lets up and stops.
••
There are about fifteen of them standing like in a bread line, watching us set up the tent. Once we’ve got it pitched they all file in. We
unload the beds of their trucks. They brought us toys: a plank and
roller skates, stuffed tigers, maracas, things like that. Somebody’s
got something big and funny shaped wrapped up in blue tarpaulin — can’t tell what it is. We let that alone because there’s probably
some special instruction that goes with it.
“Maybe we’ll get lucky,” Celia says eyeing the tarp. “Maybe it’s a
coffin for Miss Fitch.”
And Gertie, that poor idiot, can’t stay on her feet. She keeps
tripping on the hem of her robe, keeps on dropping her end of a
card table. Miss Fitch’s the only one to laugh at her. See honest accidents, disasters, catastrophe, just general stupidity always spark
Miss Fitch’s happiness. The way she laughs at Gertie, seems like a
plague of frogs will come leaping out her old mouth. Celia comes
over and picks up the slack. Gertie stands there for a second searching for something lighter that she can carry and then picks up a
beach ball. Underneath it her legs move quickly.
The men are usually old, though there are a few young guys who
put on like they’re shocked to find themselves out here. Sometimes
they only mess around. One said my hair felt like velvet to the touch.
Listen, there isn’t one square inch anywhere on my body that the
hair grows out feeling like velvet. Sometimes they’re as old as
Pennsylvania and that’s the best you can hope for. For one of them
that can’t walk or do anything down there — or one that’s let his
mind wander so far it doesn’t hardly matter that you there at all. But
most of the time it isn’t like that. Most of the time they want you to
work. So we get it going.
Some turn cartwheels. Haylie and Gertie answer what grade
they would be in school. Some massage shoulders and feet. Veronica
works a man’s instep between her thumbs and his foot nearly eclipses
the stomach it’s pressed against. Some clap hands and sing.
The girls who haven’t been chosen yet stand in a line holding
hands and as the night progresses, the line gets shorter and shorter.
Beth-Ann goes. Then Delores and Ashley go and on like that until
it’s just me and Celia. We’re the oldest. She scratches at her head,
looking right at Miss Fitch. It’s clear from the look in Celia’s face
that she hasn’t gotten over that getting slapped thing that happened
before. But Miss Fitch couldn’t give a damn either.
“Smile Celia,” she says.
Miss Fitch sits in lawn chairs with the man that’s left, a Mr.
Spicer, and they talk things over. Since he’s drunk their conversation
isn’t hindered by her coughing or her bragging. It’s impossible for
Miss Fitch to talk about us without eventually talking about herself.
And when talking about herself, she can’t resist the bullshitting. “I’m
like a mother to them,” she says in a voice that is split in two. You can
hear the illness on both sides. You can hear both Miss Fitch and her
ghost.
Spicer smiles at me with a tequila worm between his teeth, like
that’s the first time I’ve seen that. Like that’s something new. But it
makes Miss Fitch’s face go red. She turns away. He points at me with
his big toe and hollers, “Her. I want that one.” I keep hold of Celia’s
hand. You don’t want to run over at once. Just because they’re paying for it doesn’t mean they want you to act easy.
Something has spooked Gertie. I only catch the tail end of it. She
spits directly on one of these old jokers then runs over to Miss Fitch,
whining. She don’t have no hair, just bangs in the front and a kitchen
in the back, and they’re both nappy. When Miss Fitch sees Gertie
approaching, and realizes she means to disturb her, her eyebrows
come together like two dark clouds over hell. But Gertie’s dumb and
twelve and tries to explain herself anyway. Miss Fitch grabs her by
the arm and speaks through gritted teeth, telling Gertie, “Now,
apologize to Mr. Dietrich.” Everybody’s looking to see how this will
turn out, to see if Gertie refuses or takes too long and gets her head
beat in for it. Gertie goes back to Mr. Dietrich. He stands over her
with crossed arms and she apologizes with her head down. Vertebrae
like pearls show through her neck and the upper part of her back.
Mr. Dietrich nods to Miss Fitch and then motions for Gertie to go
on and continue what she was doing before. She and some other
girls lay out in a circle. They call out “duck” and the men holler back
“goose” to an order and rhythm that makes no sense to me.
“Her too,” Spicer says of Celia. And Miss Fitch and him negotiate a price which gets buried in the deep trench of her chest. Once
she catches me watching, she straightens up. “Girls,” she mutters,
“help Mr. Spicer get his tent and piano off the truck.” I almost laugh
at that. Fuck the piano. Classy-ass brought his own tent.
••
I kick off a shoe and hold the right pedal between my toes. In Spicer’s
tent it’s quiet except for the papery sound the wind sometimes
makes against the tarp. The piano is a walnut Kawai and is glossy all
over like a lollipop that has been licked down. I can not make out
my face. I can only see the shape of it and know from this that I
must have one. Grayed bows of fingerprint smudges show over the
varnish. There’s a double stripe mark on one of the legs where it
looks like a rodent dragged his front teeth. The music stand is missing a screw and somewhere the little gold thing is standing on its
head. I have a fleeting impulse to run my tongue down a black key,
down b flat. It really is a gorgeous piano.
Celia puts her hand on my shoulder to balance and steps onto
the top. The heels of her tap shoes clank against the wood. She stands
still on top of the piano, waiting. Above me she looks about ten feet
tall and indomitable. She’s ashy at the elbows and knees. She’s got
the pointiest joints I’ve ever seen, like she’s growing horns out her
shoulders. Moonlight like gaslight falls along her collarbone and
onto her hips. Her nostrils are wide, epic. Her eyes are slanted and
black, and they’ve got that questioning look you usually catch in
nocturnal animals. Then she looks down at me. She says, “What?”
Spicer’s behind me, waiting too. I curl my fingers over the keys
and watch them shake. I’m supposed to play the piano but I only
know the Happy Birthday song and Turkey in the Straw.
He laughs. “The ice cream truck song? You got it. Play that.”
I play the ice cream truck song. Celia starts tapping.
Spicer yells for me to play harder. I do. But it isn’t hard enough
for him I guess because he slaps me upside the head. It’s quiet for a
while with me not playing and Celia not tapping. The second after
getting smacked, while you’re thinking about what just happened,
that’s worse than getting smacked in the first place. He yells for Celia
to keep tapping and she does. He yells for me to keep playing, harder
and louder, and I hope he doesn’t hit me while I’m trying to catch
the beat. I bang out the ice cream truck song — like really, really
bang it out. And Celia taps along, biting her lips in. I miss a note. He
bangs my head against the keys twice and when he pulls me up, I
play like that was part of the song. I will not mess up again. He pulls
me back by my neck to kiss me and once he does, feels like a wet
slimy nightmare’s in my mouth. Then he lets me alone. He tells
Celia to smile. She smiles. I watch the hood of the piano where
Celia’s feet in their shiny shoes are tapping.
I leave Spicer’s tent while he finishes up with Celia. The sand
crunches under my feet as I walk to his truck. I climb into the wet
bed of it, lay down, and stare up at a wonderfully large sky. Folks
when they’re lonesome, when they have no place to go, they stare up
at the sky. Could seem like a way out somehow. And since it’s the
only one thing that sees everybody’s troubles, everybody’s deaths, I
guess some folks might be pressed to speak to it. I turn away.
When I move water sloshes beneath me. I sit up and look back
at Spicer’s tent. He was too drunk to take on both of us so he picked
the pretty one with the pretty hair. Celia called it. I am lucky.
Celia’s silhouette moves on the other side of the tent. She looks
around herself, turns in a circle, then picks something up. Her shoes.
Awkwardly, she puts them on, balancing with one hand out, trying
to stay up. She stands still and her shadow is big and fuzzy but as she
comes forward, away from the light, her image gets sharper and
smaller and black and finally she is back to normal. Celia pokes her
head out the seam. We take a good look at each other. I open the bed
of Spicer’s truck and push down the beams so we can pull the piano
back up them. It begins to rain.
••
The men are still in the tent with Miss Fitch while we load their
trucks again. Once the roller skates are up and the piano is wrapped
up and tied down and all the planks of wood are put up and the
maracas and toys are put away, we just stand around doing nothing,
I guess. Breathing I guess. Then we go around pulling the handle of
each door, hoping for a miracle. Every truck’s locked up. I cup my
hands around my face, looking through windows. Every truck’s
empty. We go trying the handles out of habit — when one gives.
Together we look back at the tent. Janet swings the door open and
we all run over.
It looks like a citrus grove heaven has opened up and rained
inside this truck. There’s grapefruits, oranges, and lemons sitting as
little mountains on the seats. We dive in together. I reach and grab
meanwhile fighting stomachs and elbows and a cold bare foot and
arms and thighs and someone’s face is pressed into my back.
Everyone is wet and dirty. I want to get out and be somewhere else.
But I’m being kicked and I kick. Every part of my body is met with
jerking, sharp hipbones and toenails and soft skin. There’s no way
out of this and I when I realize this, I feel loneliness. I push and grab
and pull and someone bites my Achilles but I don’t scream. We fight
each other silently, through gritted teeth because if we scream, if
Miss Fitch hears us . . . But you have the impulse to fight and to
scream and to kick. And this is the best part of the night, these
oranges.
Everybody wins and falls from the truck with arms full of fruit.
We run to the bus to hide what we’ve won. Even Gertie gets some — all
lemons, but she has her arms full and is happy.
Only Celia is empty handed. She sits on the back of Spicer’s
truck with the tarped piano behind her. That last braid along her
left ear has completely come undone. She looks at me the way we
sometimes look at Gertie.
“You find your orange chutney?”
She hops off and takes a walk. After a while she’ll come back.
••
“You’re lucky,” Celia says touching my face. Her two fingers walk
across my cheek and stop on either side of my eye. “You don’t bruise
easy.” Yeah. The sole reason God made us dark was to hide the
bruises. I want to tell her that but by the time it takes me to come up
with something clever, the moment has passed me by.
“How’d this happen?” Celia whispers. I give her a look that let’s
her know just what she sounds like and that shuts her up for a
moment.
“Celia,” Miss Fitch sings her name from the front of the bus. “Is
that your whining voice I keep hearing?”
After a while Celia pinches my elbow and moves in close to me.
She grabs my arm and pulls me to her. “You know this is all Miss
Fitch’s fault.”
I jerk my arm back and ask, “What’s that verse in the Bible about
not biting the hand that feeds you?”
“When’s the last time Miss Fitch fed us?”
‘There was plenty of fruit. It’s your own fault for not getting
any.”
“I shouldn’t have to steal fruit and you shouldn’t have to either.
I shouldn’t have to dance on some old fool’s raggedy piano.” When
she says the word “dance” her voice breaks. “And you shouldn’t have
to play for these old bastards. You could be at home playing your
piano.”
“And you could be at home under your step-daddy.”
With that Celia slams me between the eyes. I didn’t know she
was going to hit me until after I saw lightning. She got me right
above my left eyebrow and I watch her upside down, stomping onto
the bus. The other girls stand around not saying anything and I get
it. I understand wanting to see somebody else bleed.
The last one is Gertie. She sits on the bumper swinging her legs.
“Get on the bus before you get us into trouble.”
“You’re still out here.”
“It’s worse if there’s two of us.” After a moment I go on without
her.
“You were wrong,” she says clearly confident that she’s being
understood. “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you. That’s not in the
Bible. It’s not anywhere in the Bible.”
••
All I want to do is sleep or talk to Celia. She’s curled against the window, in the very back of the bus. She’d been pulling her hair out of
the plaits so half of it lays down in cornrows and the other half
sticks out as a mossy explosion of curls. The other girls are falling
asleep. I press my forehead against the window and watch as rain
snakes down the glass. I whistle the ice cream truck song.
We’ve been going for almost an hour when the bus starts rattling again. Miss Fitch gets to cursing. Then the bus stops.
Miss Fitch stands up and she is an enormous, bovine woman.
She faces us, her audience with a big, bad smile. When she laughs
you can see sixty years of grime between her teeth. Miss Fitch raises
her hands halleluiah high in the air and slaps them down on the seat
in front.
“I am going to need some help,” she declares. Even in her moment
of crisis she is able to put on a show.
Gertie starts praying but in a wailing, whining way that’s barely
tolerable to everyone around. The girls hiss at her and tell her to
shut it up. Gertie keeps on praying.
“Damn it, Gertrudis! Don’t you dare ask God to help me!”
Miss Fitch says her name with such grace, I think for a second
old Gertie must be a really spectacular person.
Miss Fitch bends down with difficulty and retrieves a wrench
from under the seat. She hollers for Celia to come help her, to bring
the umbrella so she doesn’t get wet. From the way they look at each
other you can tell they’ve still got that thing between them.
“And you,” she says of me. You is my name. Her is my name.
“You press down on the gas when I say so.”
Gertie doesn’t want to give up her umbrella and Celia just takes
it from her. Gertie isn’t big. She can’t do a thing about it. She just
watches Celia get off the bus with her umbrella. And you can tell
she’s taking it hard, not being the one to shield Miss Fitch’s wide ass
from the rain.
I dig my thumb into the dimpled rind of my grapefruit and after
I push it back the scent is everywhere. It’s so lovely my entire body
has to sigh. Gertie breaks her prayer to watch me peel at it. I start to
tell her, “You’re the idiot who only picked out lemons.” When I stop
peeling, she looks me in the eye. When I start peeling again, she
watches my hands. I don’t even have it halfway out the hull when I
give up and hand it over to her.
Before she has the chance to get cute and ask for more, I take my
little box of fruit and move to the front of the bus where Miss Fitch’s
seat is. The floor’s sticky and shines from where she’s wasted something. The seat is so low I can hardly see over the dash. It’s so far
back I can hardly reach the pedals. Out the corner of my eye I catch
Celia giving me the signal so I reach far in front of me, and press
down on the gas. Nothing. She turns to Miss Fitch like that proves
something, the bus still being broken, I mean. I look down.
All these fools get to praying. It starts with Gertie and then old
stupid Haylie joins in and so does Beth-Ann, then Delores and
Ashley and. All these fools are praying to God, Jesus, Mary, the Holy
Ghost and whatever saint that comes to mind. They’re making deals,
begging — maybe for a double rainbow to appear. They would.
Maybe for us to just sit here.
I groan, my stomach wails, and beyond that Celia hollers once at
Miss Fitch. It feels funny like when you hum in the exact note as the
person next to you and everything in your face vibrates.
I look out the windshield just in time to see Celia beat Miss Fitch
across the face with the handle of the umbrella. When Miss Fitch
falls down I think the whole world might turn on its side. Celia
rushes up on her holding the umbrella over her head with both
hands, like she’s trying to harpoon a whale.
“Celia is killing Miss Fitch,” I scream.
Right away, like she’s been waiting for it, Gertie says in her hopeful, little voice, “Thank God.” Her fingers glide up and down her
rosary. There’s a lump of citrus pulp on her forehead.
The other girls run up to the front and right at the last minute I
decide I want out. In a second we’re all on top of each other and I
have to fight to get out. We’re all pressed together yelling and pushing. I start to fall. My ankle grates against the steps and I feel cold air
where there’s no skin. I try to stay up. I grab for an elbow, then the
hem of something satin. I catch hold of Gertie’s little wrist and
nearly pull her down with me. Somebody’s nose is pressed into my
neck. My ear is between someone’s shoulder blades. Hair that might
be mine tickles the corner of my mouth. And we’re stuck here and
we’re all fighting. We are all fighting.