The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God. Timothy Schaffert
rubbing some of the ash away, he could see the bare feet of Fred and Wilma Flintstone. Hud and Tuesday had taken the kids, with Nina practically just born, up to South Dakota one summer, where they had walked through Flint-stone Village, taken a tour of a cave, and eaten in a cafeteria with a view of Mount Rushmore. Hud had bought Tuesday a locket of Black Hills gold that she had promptly lost when they went swimming in a naturally warm pool in Hot Springs. Tuesday had cried about it at the motel that night, upsetting Gatling a little, but Hud had loved it. He’d loved holding her and telling her they’d go back to the pool to search, or that he’d buy her another, cooing at her like she was a kid. He’d been glad she’d wanted the necklace so much because even back then, especially back then, they’d had many fights and troubles.
Hud got up and stuck the dirty ashtray in the saggy back pocket of his jeans as he walked through the kitchen, flicking the cigarette into the sink. A nightlight near Nina’s bed lit the room enough for Hud to see Nina sleeping, still in a cowgirl costume, still even in boots and prairie skirt and Western shirt printed with yellow roses. A straw hat hung on the bedpost. Hud tugged on Nina’s skirt, and she woke peacefully, too peacefully, Hud thought. “You shouldn’t be sleeping next to an open window,” he whispered, and Nina sat up in bed and puckered her lips for a kiss. Hud kissed her, then said, “Any creep could come along. Aren’t you afraid of creeps?”
“Oh, sure,” she said, shrugging her shoulders.
“Let’s go for a drive someplace,” Hud said. He opened the window and lifted the torn flap of the screen.
“OK,” Nina said, standing up in the bed, “but first, don’t you like my costume? We went to a party.”
“It’s nice,” he said.
“I’m Opal Lowe,” she said, and Hud was touched that she had dressed up like Opal Lowe, his favorite country singer. He’d taken Nina to a county fair a few weeks before to see Opal singing in the open-air auditorium. They’d had to sit far in the back on a bale of hay, had to strain to hear above the bleats and clucking of the animals judged in nearby pens, but Nina had loved it and had hummed along as Opal Lowe sang about her man’s habits, how he liquored her up on Wild Turkey, lit her Old Golds, made her need him like water.
Nina said, “Can I bring my purse?” and she picked up a clear plastic purse from the end of the bed. Inside was a tube of lipstick, a little box, a comb, and a plastic baby doll’s head with wild yellow hair.
“Sure, bring your purse,” Hud said. He jotted a note in crayon: “I’ll be back with her before sunlight, before you even read this,” and left it atop the rumpled covers of the bed. Nina crawled onto his back, and they slipped through the torn window screen. He imagined never returning with her, imagined his picture next to hers on fliers sent through the mail.
“We’ll go anywhere you want to go,” Hud said, helping her into the car. “Should we go to some ocean far away? Go smoke a friendly cigarette with the fishies?” Nina laughed, and Hud said, “Go to Mexico for some cow-tongue soup?”
“No,” Nina said. “Disgusting.”
“We could go to Disneyland and ride a roller coaster,” Hud said. “Just be careful not to spill your beer,” and Nina laughed at the idea of having beer to spill.
Hud drove off toward the highway. “We could run away together for good,” he said.
“I live with my mom, and you have to drive the school bus,” Nina said, almost scolding.
“We’d write songs for a living,” he said. “Our first song could be called ‘Two Fugitives.’ It’ll go . . . um . . . ‘We’re fugitives from a bad life. Breaking free from . . .’ From what . . . ‘From the chains and shackles of separation and loss.’”
Nina sighed with disapproval. She’d become an expert fan of country music ever since Hud had taken her to see Opal Lowe. She turned on the radio now, as they drove to the edge of town, listening, hoping for an Opal Lowe. But instead they heard Chief Kentucky Straight, a man one-sixteenth Ogalalla Sioux who sang of the pain of life on the reservation. They heard a choir of hard-living rednecks called the Widowmakers. Then there was Rose-Sharon and her Lilies of the Valley. Rose-Sharon was a woman with cancer who sang gospel. Nina sang along to her song called “I’m So Full of Jesus.”
“What was your mom dressed up as?” Hud asked.
“A mermaid,” Nina said.
“No,” Hud said, but he thought a second, thinking of the bird, remembering Catherine Deneuve’s canary in a cage at the beginning of Mississippi Mermaid, one of Tuesday’s favorite movies they’d watched many times together. Deneuve hadn’t had a beehive in that movie, he was almost certain, but rather a tall straw hat. He wondered if Tuesday had missed having him at her side at the party, someone who would truly appreciate the charm of her costume. He could have gone as her Jean-Paul Belmondo, but he would’ve preferred to be Belmondo in Breathless in fedora and sharp suit, puffing on a French cigarette.
It was Tuesday who had first called him Hud; when they were dating in high school, they stayed up late to watch the movie, just long enough for them both to be impressed by Newman’s cantankerousness. “You’ve got his snarl and skinny legs,” she said, then they nodded off to sleep long before Newman raped Patricia Neal.
Hud asked Nina, “Do you know why you even wore that costume today?”
“Well, you see,” Nina said, “you see . . . there was this guy . . . and he was somebody’s dad . . . and there were these boys . . . and the dad hurt the boys so bad that they were killed. And everybody dressed up because . . . um . . . there’s going to be a funeral soon.”
“Jesus,” Hud said, sighing and shaking his head with frustration, “nobody even told you much about it, did they? They just let you get dressed up for their own perverted goddamn reasons.”
Nina said, “I do so know everything about it.” She looked out the car window. “And I hate it when you swear.” She normally enjoyed when he let some swearing slip in front of her.
Hud took off down the unlit gravel roads, squinting into the dark, looking for the sign to tiny Rhyme, Nebraska. Behind a grocery store there lay an old Happy Chef, the thirty-foot-tall fiberglass statue that had once towered in front of a highway café. The store’s owner had bought the statue long before, and it now rested flat on its back in the tall grass. Hud had brought Nina there last summer, and she had liked sitting in the Happy Chef’s spoon.
Nina, not speaking to Hud, combed her long, white-blond hair. A strand flew in Hud’s face, and he plucked it away and let it fly out the open window. They drove past a mailbox and a spooky crooked iron weather vane. Hud imagined Nina’s strand of hair finding its way into an old house where a man lived alone, a man who had maybe killed his wife in silence and buried her in a small patch of his miles of untrespassed-upon land. Hud imagined the old man waking with the long hair on his pillow or finding it in his soup and from then on living in terror of what he’d done.
“What’s the name of your doll there in your purse?” Hud asked, to get Nina talking again.
Nina looked down at her clear plastic purse and tapped her finger at the doll head inside. “It’s not a doll,” Nina said. “It’s just a head. Heads don’t have names,” and she returned her stare back out the window.
Hud now felt entirely sober, and very tired. He wished he had just peeked in on Nina, had just watched her sleep undisturbed. A good father, Hud thought, lets his children sleep through the night. This was what Hud didn’t like about being sober. He didn’t like coming to his senses. Good sense can prevent a man from taking what he should have.
When Hud’s car began to sputter, he stomped on the gas pedal, and the car went a little farther before sputtering again, then stopping. It wouldn’t start back up. The needle of the gas gauge had been stuck on empty for years, and the odometer had read 138,323 for several hundred miles, but the old Pontiac and its habits had become so familiar to Hud over time that he’d thought he knew well how far he’d