Sissy sits on the wooden porch swing overlooking our whole and entire everything. Sits eating paw paws with her eyes shut tight and knuckles white. Her head’s shaking real bad today. The little dangly star earrings she’s always wearing brush up against her cheeks. And she looks at the floor and says, “Last night while you was tied out back, Dixon come over again.”
This is how it always happens, she goes and ties me out back when the men come and then the next morning she sits on the porch and tells me about it. They never stay the night and it ain’t ever nothing good to hear.
“I could feel his wedding ring right up there inside me under those big knuckles of his,” Sissy says it real plain like scripture. “He don’t even take it off no more.”
She taps her fingernail against her big front teeth. And I go lay on top of her feet, her toes cool on my belly while she presses against me swinging.
I want to tell her some big hurt of mine in return, something real.
Sissy keeps going, “Dixon said This can’t keep happening.” She reaches down and scratches that spot I can’t get between my ears. Her hands justa trembling. She says there ain’t much right in the world no more, there’s hate all over and people getting too beat down to be resilient. But in Sissy’s own words it sounds more like, “Fuck, heck, fuck, fuck, fuck, heck, fuck.”
I tell her that I’ve always kinda liked them feelings of chaos that bubble up in your chest in the wake of some beloved things sudden absence. Them feelings that propel you in all directions and make you wanna run and hold onto things you might not ought to be holding onto in the first place. Things like the pastor’s daughter’s ankles or Mama’s special stick that Daddy brought her back from the big woods. I chewed it up on the floor when I was done trying to do magic spells with it in the barn. Mama’s gone now though, and Daddy’s gone too.
It’s weird when things just disappear and are gone from your life with no warning. You go outside, drag the toys across the yard and just think Damn.
Sissy wiggles her toes under me and just says “C’mon Cass” real quiet and I follow at her heels. She puts on her bright white sneakers and her hair’s all tumbling down over her shoulders. Her face looks like the moon.
We ride on into town with the radio going playing Sissy’s hope song “Always Loving You” by Merle Haggard and Sissy sings along so soft like a baby cooing: Always wanting you, but never having you. Makes it hard to face tomorrow. ‘Cause I know I’ll wake up wanting you again. We drive past a whole world of emptiness and broken promises and Sissy pulls up in the Salvation Army and rolls the windows down for me.
Sissy always goes in there and stays for a long time, touching everything. She wanders around searching for things she don’t know she needs. She lifts the men’s shirts to her face and breathes them in deep, sighing.
Sissy comes back out and hops in the truck all excited and her cheeks are real pink. She shoves her hand up in front of my face and says, “Don’t it look real, Cass? Don’t it just look so real?” Sissy found herself a little silver looking ring with a diamond and everything.
“It’s nice, I think, sensible like. If it’s too flashy the boys won’t come over and talk to me when I’m sitting down at Sully’s. Boys always love a married woman, it’s like winning a prize.” Sissy pulls me towards her and holds her hand out above the steering wheel and admires the future. “This ones real nice and simple I think, it’s just what I want Dixon to get for me.”
Sissy ain’t had the likes of love in a long time.
We pull up to Sully’s and Sissy digs in her pocketbook and gets out her new lipstick and pulls the mirror down. She puts it on so special like she’s conducting an orchestra and she has all the movements memorized so perfect it looks easy and quick. Sissy looks at me and says, “Everything good is meant for only you.” And she taps my nose with the lipstick tube and puts it back in her pocketbook. “C’mon,” she says and I jump out the truck. Sissy can bring me in to Sully’s with her ‘cause Banjo, the owner, lets her do that since she’s been coming in here so long.
Sissy always gets a beer, a shot, and a water, but she never drinks the water, she just pours it in a bowl for me. Banjo got a bowl just for me that says CASSANDRA in red sharpie cross the side. It’s still early and Sissy sips her beer. She already done her shot with Banjo and Banjo poured her another and said it’s on the house today. Sissy says Banjo don’t have a bad bone in his old body and cheerses him again.
Sissy watches the men come in with their wives and girlfriends and their work buddies and sometimes she gets real red looking when the wives and girlfriends walk past but she never ducks her head. Sissy peels the label off her bottle of beer and tears it into tiny pieces there on the bar and I look up at her and say, “Oh, ain’t it just such a joy when someone new shows up.” And Sissy blows air out from between her lips and nods.
The country boys walk in wearing their Wranglers and their boots and I know Sissy loves them boys. Sissy waves her hands in front of her face flashing her little ring while she tells the new boys ‘bout how her husband’s leading a mission trip with the church’s youth group for two whole more months and gosh ain’t she lonely.
Sissy leaves me tied to the stool and dances with the country boys and the country boys play pool with Sissy. And the country boys glance at Sissy when she’s about to break all dipped down over the table and they look at each other with snakes in their eyes but I ain’t allowed to bark inside. The country boys get in fights and then there’s Dixon coming out the smoke filled shadows to pull Sissy away from all that little boy madness.
Dixon smells like the darkness of a well and his hands are so big when he spins Sissy around the bar. And them hands are even bigger when Dixon pats his thigh for Sissy to sit. And Dixon’s hands are the biggest I ever seen when he grabs up Sissy’s hair and pulls her mouth down on him while I sit in the bed of the truck.
◆
Sissy’s still got cum on her chin a little bit when we’re swerving our way back home but I lick it off before she sees it. Sissy looks at me and tells me she’s “Bad, bad, bad.” Sissy says she thinks the bad’s gonna kill her one day and that it ain’t no good for her to already know that.
Sissy tells me how she don’t want to be bad no more and how if she got all the bad out, maybe the trembling would stop. Sissy tells me Dixon done gone and broke her heart.
I tell her it ain’t her fault, it’s loves fault, ‘cause those cravings will drag you through all kinds of dirt and leave you split wide open on the side of the road. Sometimes the badness drives us and we call it love, even when it ain’t and even when it hurts real bad.
I remember back before I was with Sissy and how I was bad. I never would listen to That Awful Kurtis Man. Kurtis was a drunk and Kurtis was an oil painter too and in his studio there was paintings of all the mountains that filled our world. Kurtis would load me in his truck with his easel and his paints, the turpentine and the wooden palette I had marked once when he left it on the floor. We would drive to a mountain so close but it would feel so far as we winded up the roads to the top and from there Kurtis would let me out to run as he painted the sky and then filled in the ground and all the things that reached up into the sky from there.
That Kurtis Man struck me hard one day and my head felt like it was underwater and I couldn’t hear him cussin’ me anymore. I felt warm all over and I felt the hairs on my back bristle, reaching into the sky the same way all the things in Kurtis’s paintings liked to do. I turned my body to him and showed him my teeth and when I looked back up into Kurtis’s eyes he hauled off and kicked me so hard I flew into the wood pile beside the stove. Kurtis walked away and I tucked my tail so tight between my legs it felt like waiting to be born as I bolted out the back door.
I ran off then for a long while following a scent trail. It was something I’d never smelled before. Something real that called to me so deeply that I chased it straight into the thick and didn’t come back to That Kurtis Man at all after that. I slept curled tight in the high grass fields that lined the roads ‘cause I was too scared of ending up like Daddy did, with his mangled body gettig’ drug down the back roads out the back of a blue pickup by all them bored teenage boys.
Once I got to the end of that scent trail, I realized it was Sissy. She found me shivering on her front porch. Sissy’s got flowers in her blood, I can smell ’em floating around in there and I seen ‘em too, reflecting in her eyes and tucked behind her big freckled ears.
◆
When we get home Sissy throws her pocketbook into the corner and everything flies out. She picks up that new lipstick and says, “Oh, god, ain’t it just so sad how these things happen, I bought this lipstick for nothing.” She’s always saying that.
I follow Sissy back to her room and she takes all her clothes off in front of the long mirror behind the door. Sissy drops her star dangle earrings on the floor with her panties and her panties smell so good and she don’t kick at me for smelling ‘em and she don’t yell at me for taking them away to the bathroom rug to chew on.
I can still keep an eye on Sissy from the bathroom. Sissy gets on all fours and gets the big shirt from under her bed, the shirt Dixon said was a rag. It goes almost all the way to her knees and she looks like a small small child in it. Tears come down her cheeks like little flashes of lightning.
Sometimes we don’t realize we’re lonely and sometimes we all want love so bad.
I stay chewing on Sissy’s panties till I get lost in Sissy’s panties. It ain’t about getting the bad off of ‘em, it’s about connecting to the higher power through a cycle of prayer and redemption and I just wanna taste that closeness some more, and chew on all that strength. I close my eyes and it’s like fish swimming upstream.
I need to be strong, so when Sissy’s crying I can be there without crying too.
I look up and Sissy’s crawled back into bed again even though she said she won’t gonna keep on like that. She’s just laying under them piles of quilts her mama sends her every Christmas. Laying in there curled up like a ball crying and sometimes silent not making a single sound or hiccup, nothing. It’s bad when it gets like this. It don’t matter how much Sissy fucks, Sissy always finds more bad in her she wants gone.
I get on up there in the bed with Sissy (with my paws and my ears and all the markings that make me different) and I wait for her to move just enough so I can see her face and lick the salt away. Sissy don’t ever push me or no one else away.
Sometimes when it gets like this, Sissy stays in the bed for days.
There’s knocking’ at the door and I bark at it and I bark at the window too ‘cause Sissy is moving real slow. And Sissy wraps herself in the quilts and comes to the door and lets Neighbor in.
He tells Sissy he added her to the prayer circle this morning and everyone’s been missing her singing at church. Neighbor gives us boiled eggs, banana bread, and a half empty gallon of orange juice left over from the baptism and tells Sissy to eat up quick specially the banana bread, cause it won’t keep long and to be sure to drink up some juice so she won’t get muscle cramps in her hands from grasping on the blankets so tight.
The porch light shines and I see Sissy’s still got that little diamond ring on too. Sissy tells Neighbor that she don’t need to grasp the blankets so tight anymore. I try and tell Neighbor that Sissy don’t like eggs, but he just pats me firm on the head before closing the door.
Sissy puts down the orange juice and the banana bread and lets the quilts fall to the floor before she takes the bowl of eggs and heads out the back door. Sissy rolls the egg between her hands and stands in the back like that for a good while just rolling that egg and making them shells crackle and then Sissy tosses the egg out in the tall grass and I run so fast and bring the egg back to Sissy. And Sissy throws the egg out in the tall grass and I bring back the egg to Sissy. And Sissy throws the egg out there again and laughs and laughs just standing there in her tee shirt. And I bring the egg back to Sissy.