It’s not as if Mama has no money. Grandma manages it and doles out a monthly check from the insurance and settlement money they got when Daddy died. Five thousand from the painters’ union and twenty-six thousand from Best Deal Motel where he died. One year’s wages was settlement enough for his life, they figured. Grandma made Mama pay off the mortgage first thing. “Only sensible thing to do with a windfall like that,” she said, and then added under her breath so Mama couldn’t hear, “Something good finally came of a Buckman.” But that still left almost eight thousand dollars. Grandma righteously doled it out in small amounts each month like she was giving communion, and Zoe never heard Mama squeak. For the care of Daddy’s “surviving minors,” Mama also got a small Social Security check each month, but even though Kyle lived with Aunt Patsy and Uncle Clint, Mama kept all the money. All together, with Mama working at the beauty shop, there should have been plenty of money to pay the bills. But Mama didn’t work much, not more than a few days a month, if that, and usually just doing shampoos. Zoe guessed that Sally looked for jobs that Mama could still do. Sally had always been good to her and Daddy. Mama hasn’t worked in three weeks now. Until Mama promised to go to work this morning, Zoe thought she might never work again.
“I’m growin’ moss back here,” the man in front of her yells.
“Me too,” someone farther back in the line calls.
“Same here,” Zoe adds.
The lady at the front turns and glares at the restless hecklers, and the clerk shuffles the paperwork nervously. Zoe wonders if having a gun shop next door adds to her anxiety. The lady counts out the cash, gets a receipt, and stomps off. Only three more to go, Zoe thinks, and then the bell rings and she holds her breath once again.
Eight
Zoe’s car jostles on the loose gravel road as she drives out to the aqueduct. With no tennis practice, no homework, and no shift to work, she has time to fill. She doesn’t want to go home yet, and she won’t let herself go see the room again. The only landmarks to mark her passage are occasional oil pumps. They dot Ruby like little anchors to hold down the paper-flat landscape. Enclosed by chain-link fence, a lot of the pumps in the heart of town are painted to make them more attractive, most often to resemble a katydid. With their angled arms of steel, they do look like an insect poised to hop, but Zoe has always thought of them as wild horses rounded up from the plains and forced to work in tiny chain-link corrals. Their brown coats are streaked with rust and grime. Their blunt heads raise and lower, straining against iron reins for freedom. As a child she thought if she could just pull away the fence they would turn back into the beautiful horses they really were and escape to the open plains. She had had hope in that power. She grunts now at the childish notion.
She pulls off the gravel road and parks beneath a huge stand of mesquite. She was hoping to see other people. The twins, maybe, or Carly or Reid. Or anyone. She can usually count on someone to come out after school and unwind with a six-pack on the hoods of cars in the shade of the mesquite. And then where the aqueduct travels over the wash and is supported by beams, they walk down to cool their feet in the trickling pond below it, always fresh with water leaking from above. Or, if it’s one of those days that weighs on her, she walks on the crossbeams lying on top of the aqueduct. She doesn’t know what compels her to do it, but she thinks today is one of those days. She gets out of her car and looks back toward Ruby. No dust trail churns up the dirt road yet. She wonders if she missed everyone because she wasted so much time at the utility office.
She walks up the small incline to the aqueduct, the sandy red soil rasping under her shoes, whispering, Not today. Not today. But she can already hear the low rumble of the water, her blood is thin, rushing, and she is pulled to the first crossbeam. She kicks off her sandals and places her left foot on the six-inch metal beam, one foot…one foot…one step at a time she tells herself. That’s all it is.
She looks down at the black-blue water, deceptively calm on the surface, a few ripples and nothing more. But she knows the danger, the bodies that have been found miles downstream where the aqueduct widens again. No one who falls in ever survives; the current is too strong, the pull to the bottom unforgiving. She spreads her arms out for balance, and her right foot steps ahead of the left. Another step. And another. The water rumbles, vibrates, her heart beats madly, and a breeze lifts up from the rush below, tossing her hair across her face. She smooths the wisps back so slowly…so gently…and extends her arm again. Another step, and another. Eleven steps across to the other side and then she follows the next zigzag back. And now across again. She stops midway. Lowers her arms. Listens. Feels the frightening power of the water below her…and she closes her eyes.
Just for a second—or a few. She isn’t sure.
Closed just long enough that up melts with down and light mixes with dark. Closed just long enough to know how totally alive and frightened she is. So she can feel her breaths, fast, her heartbeat, the sweat trickling at her temple, her shirt clinging to her back, the tingling of her fingertips, her muscles trembling, tensing, the adrenaline pulsing, so she feels with stark clarity the wild rush that she is alive. Alive. And it could all end with the slip of a foot, the rush to become blackness, the chaos, calm, just with the passing of a few seconds. Her lungs filling with a pint of liquid and it is over.
That’s how fast it could change.
She opens her eyes, steadies her arms, and continues across, two more beams, measuring, concentrating—
“Zoe.” The voice comes hushed, careful and pleading. She can’t turn around.
“Zoe,” it calls again. “Come off.”
She takes two more steps. “I’m fine, Reid,” she calls. “I’m fine.” She reaches the end of the beam and turns around. There is Reid standing on the dirt near the edge of the aqueduct, frozen, as though a sudden movement, even from his eyes, could push her from the beam. “Besides, I’m a good swimmer,” she says. She sees Reid isn’t amused. His face is pale against his coal-black hair. He says nothing else, like there is no breath left to carry his words. She pauses for a moment thinner than a wisp, sorry she has made his brows pinch together and his pupils turn to pinpoints, but at the same time it makes her feel giddy with power.
She completes the eight-beam zigzag walk, and when she steps back onto the soil on the other side of the wash, she screams with her hands over her head in triumph. “Zoe! Queen of the beams! Queen over water! Queen over death!” The power intoxicates her. Five minutes of control seems like a lifetime. She runs down the wash to the other side and to Reid.
Reid walks to his truck with her sandals in his hand and opens the back gate. “You’re crazy, you know.”
She scoots back on the gate and hugs her knees to her chest. “Not really. People do crazier things than that every day.”
“I’m not talking about the stuff in the papers.”
“Neither am I.”
Reid pulls a beer from a grocery sack and flips the tab. He doesn’t offer one to Zoe. He knows she doesn’t drink. She’s tried it. The taste isn’t bad, but she can’t get past the smell. It is always beer and vomit. That is all she smells.
She lights a cigarette, inhales deeply, and forcefully blows the smoke back out. “Where’s Carly?” she asks.
Reid makes the sweeping gestures that Zoe expects. He is part of the drama crowd at school. “Am I my sister’s keeper?” he asks.
“Usually.”
Reid grunts. “Not today. She’s in deep shit, and I’m keeping my distance. Don’t want peripheral grounding.”
Zoe smiles and shakes her head. Grounding. So foreign to her. It sounds so young. “Very gallant of you,” she says. “What happened?”
“Speeding ticket. Her second one. No keys for Carly for a long time.”
“Shit. Where did it happen?”