Last Chance Texaco. Rickie Lee Jones
my mama how to fly.
Everyone was a-runnin’ as fast as they could but Don could see they were still losing ground. The old man Mr. Brown called for help (“Goddamn Glen kids”) and now there were a number of adults trying to head off the Glens. Wisely, Don and Fritz dropped Betty’s hands and she tumbled to the ground. The two of them ran like horse thieves. If Mr. Brown caught him this time, Don knew he was gonna regret ever having been born.
Betty raised her head, calling to her brothers, “Wait for me!” but she would soon learn to accept defeat wordlessly. Never let them see you cry. Jimmy was still running but he was only a year older than his little sister, and he couldn’t get far. He cried out as the men yanked him up. One of them slapped Jimmy on his sore ear. Jimmy and Betty were taken back to the big house and sent straight to bed without supper. Jimmy was small but since he was a boy, he was whipped. Betty was not hit, not because she was too little to beat but because she really had nothing to do with what had happened. Well, maybe a swat or two just for being in the fray.
Sacrificing Jimmy and Betty to the chase allowed Fritz and Don to escape. They were hiding in a ditch making profound social calculations that no child should ever face. Don said, “Hell, they won’t hurt Betty because she’s just a baby. They might spank Jimmy but if they catch me they’re gonna beat me to death. I ain’t a-gonna be beat no more.”
Years later, as I asked about the orphanage punishments, I remember my uncle Don grinning:
“The way they beat me, they like-ta killt me,” and his smile hesitated as if he recalled something that was not smiling back. A flicker of pain. Then he was back to his charming, polyester-leisure-suit self.
Uncle Don, trying to jump-start a ranch of his own, once stole a semi-truck filled with cattle heading for Bob’s Big Boy restaurant. He got caught and went to prison. I confess I enjoyed the dichotomy of twentieth-century-style cattle rustlers in semi-trucks. A certain family pride.
Don and Fritz finally made their way to Chicago where their mama lived. They were outside the State of Ohio’s budget, and “Just let ’em go” finally echoed down a government hall. Don eventually returned to Ohio and bought a house near Wooster. He married a nice Italian lady and they offered their home to kids who needed foster placement. Fritz married a stripper and ended up in Waco, Texas.
When Mother finally left the orphanage in 1944, she headed for Chicago and was reunited with her mother at last. She moved to the North Side, went to secretarial school, got a job, and started spelling her name with an “e” at the end. Bettye. It was the first inkling of her determination to make herself into a new person. Released from the region, she would eventually free herself of that southern Ohio/Kentucky accent that might forever brand her as “un”—untrustworthy, unworthy, and unsophisticated.
Bettye was full of life and energy, the world laid out before her. She planned to stay single until she was at least twenty-eight years old. She wanted to see the world, to be somebody. She would be anybody except what the orphanage had confined her to.
My parents met at a lunch counter where Mother and her roommate often stopped for a quick bite before going to work. My father, the waiter, was classy. He was dark and brooding, back from the war, and handsome like a movie star. Like most World War II veterans, he drank and fought and laughed about drinking and fighting. They took a trip to Florida together before we were born. I only know this because I once asked where a photograph of Mother was taken. She was private, even secretive, so most of her pre-Rickie life went with her to the Invisible World of the Great Beyond.
Bettye was twenty years old when she got pregnant. She wasn’t married. I had suspected this as a child but had been rebuffed with great condemnation—how dare I imply such a thing. One day she accidentally revealed it during a conversation when I was at least forty-five years old.
“Oh, didn’t I ever tell you that?”
“No! Motheeeer! I asked you when I was a kid about that and you scolded me for asking!”
“Close your mouth, you’re catching flies. It was none of your business. I guess you’re old enough now to hear.”
Mother’s life with my father, who also bore the scars of a life without a home, was premised on a vow that they would make themselves into better people than their ancestors. They were determined to jettison their past lives and join a better stratum of society.
My parents married and lived in Chicago for the first four years of my life. My sister Janet (eight years older) was attending school in a Catholic convent and my brother, a little soldier, attended a Catholic military school. Janet had some trouble on her vacation back home, and my father decided we had had enough of Chicago. Shortly after my fourth birthday celebration at kindergarten, we said goodbye to the Windy City and hello to the road. It was the siren call of the West.
Mom and Dad thought that together they could do anything because anything was possible with money and they had a strong work ethic. Together they worked two jobs each and double shifts as often as they could. They saved their money. Their son Danny would go to college, study law, maybe become the president of the United States. Anything was possible with hard work.
But my parents had learned as kids to avoid government, big institutions, and authority. They used cash to avoid declaring income and they avoided obligations beyond next month’s rent. Their mistrust extended even to census takers, so banks and mortgages were out of the question. They pushed themselves hard but never accumulated wealth.
Once they left Chicago they never stopped moving. What were they running from? Well, they ran from cities, houses, and eventually themselves, but they never got away from their difficult childhoods or their love for each other. Long after their lives together ended, my mother would stare at the window tapping her foot as if she longed for the music Father brought to our house. My father missed Bettye’s jitterbug dancing. She was a very good dancer. I oughtta know, she taught me to jitterbug one rainy afternoon in my brother’s log cabin out in Lacey, Washington. We were listening to Van Morrison’s “Jackie Wilson Said.” Mama swung me around like a redheaded stepchild. She knew how to lead alright, because she’d grown up following.
Childhood traumas leave their dirty footprints in the fresh white snow of our happy-ever-afters. No matter what my mom did—or her brothers, for that matter—she found traces of her past obstructing her future. She built a better life but didn’t escape her past. Orphanage children received clothes and schooling, but not love and affection. They had food where others in the Depression did not, but even this privilege came at great cost, for it could be withheld on the whim of an employee. In this torment, my mother learned not to hold onto the things she loved because then no one could take them away from her. Our violent past will also find our children. It echoes. Recovering takes generations.
Betty Jane poses with cake
On Saturday Afternoons in 1963
Rickie Lee in fifth grade
When my uncle Bud died of cancer in Chicago, my father flew back to help with the funeral, and my mother found us a new house. When times got tense, Mom would scour the furnished rentals in the Phoenix Gazette, and we knew we were about to leave our cares behind. Dad was not thrilled with the wonderful new house; it was old and rickety and he loved clean modern things. Mom and Dad were like the parents in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Their weaknesses had polarized them into being their worst selves. I adored my father when he did not drink, and hated how my mother began to hate him even when he didn’t.
We moved to the house on Orangewood Avenue in the summer of 1962. It was an antebellum-style farmhouse, probably eighty years old. The last vestige of early Arizona settlers, these square wooden houses once grew like cactuses in the Southwestern desert. This one came furnished