Under The Moonflower Tree

— for Kristyn Brown

I SIT ON THE CURB in the shade of the bay laurel, head and arms piled on my knees, and admire Dolores Wilde in her green bikini across the street. She is a slim girl with gold hair and large, hazy green eyes. Dipping a sponge into a bucket, she slops on figure eights of suds, then rinses and rubs till her stepdaddy’s turquoise Buick gleams like the abdomen of a bluebottle fly. Even though she’s not old enough to drive, she takes good care of that car. Maybe she thinks it will be hers someday. Or maybe she is thinking about stealing it and driving it to Florida to join up with her oldest brother, who left home two days after they put Stepdaddy away. Or maybe, in some peculiar way, she is still trying to please him.

I’ve known Dolores Wilde since she was five and I was eight. Now she is fifteen, and my constant thoughts about her are in danger of putting me in the same category as Stepdaddy. She wears sunglasses and ignores me, except that, just as she finishes, she turns her head in my direction, and the sun catches on the rims of her shades, producing a defiant flash.

That evening I go over to see her.

Tanya, one of Stepdaddy’s two biological offspring, answers the door.

“Mitchell home?” I say, asking for her older stepbrother, who I know is working at the 76 station and will be until past midnight.

Twelve-year-old Tanya clanks her spiky lashes at me, shoves out her chest, and says in a husky voice, “No, he ain’t.”

“Is Dolores here?”

Tanya smiles. She’s seen it all. “Do you want to come in?”

I step up into the house, with its soothing jungle anarchy, Asian war souvenirs, Amazonian parrots, and giant golden Buddha. Both the tv and the stereo are on. The blender would be on too if there were anything to mix a drink with. Birds squawk and skreel at me from three different cages. Dolores is sitting on the love seat, skinny legs crossed, a can of Coors in her fingers. The Wilde house is ruled by children: Peter Pan meets Oliver Twist. Dolores’s mother, a booze automaton with a concave scar on her temple left by a blow from a baseball bat, lives and works as a maid in the motel across from the penitentiary where her husband has been sentenced to four years. She calls every week or so to say that she will be coming home this weekend. She never does.

A wide-eyed Dolores turns to look at me as cats from windows do: a sort of dazed, blurred-out disbelief. “You want a beer?” she says. She is barefoot and wears yellow terry shorts and a thin top that reveals the lean brown hourglass of her midriff. She is the prettiest of the six children — the toughest too, it would appear. Her older siblings don’t seem to have weathered the long-term violent assaults and events of the trial as well as she. As they turned into adults and realized what had happened to them, the others behaved as if bombs with rusted timers had gone off in their heads: one minute you saw them giggling or roughhousing naughtily; the next they were staring blankly into space, curls of cartoon smoke lifting from their ears. When it happened to Dobb, the oldest, he left for Florida, and he hasn’t called home since. When it happened to Sharilee, she buttoned up her trembling frame into the uniform of the United States Marine Corps. Mitchell, who’s my age, now has that ticking-bomb-in-his-head look too, which may be why he works so much. It hasn’t happened to Dolores yet. Maybe it won’t; she’s so good at scrambling incoming signals.

The refrigerator is jammed with tall cans of Schlitz and Coors, all courtesy of Mitchell. I crack open a beer and sit next to Dolores, who blows the hair out of her face and regards me the way a ham might a sharp knife. Tanya and Waymann, the other bio-child of Stepdaddy, like me because I am nice to them and, who knows, maybe I will marry Dolores one day.

We all watch the tv with the sound off. The picture tube is worn out, so even when Waymann changes the channel, it’s all pretty much the same.

The phone rings, and there’s a rush to answer it. Waymann is quicker, but Dolores wrestles the receiver away from him. “I’m the boss here!” she shouts. Placing the phone against her ear, she speaks in a monotone: “Hello? . . . Nothing. . . . I don’t know.” Dolores scrapes the polish from her toenails with her thumb as she listens, phone clamped between shoulder and ear. At one point she sets the phone down on the table to go change the record on the stereo. “What?” she shouts back into the phone. “If you want. . . . I don’t care. . . . Yeah, ok. G’bye.”

“Who was it?” the children demand.

“Mom. She says she’s coming home this weekend.”

“Yeah, right,” says Tanya.

I get another beer and wander down the hall to peek into the disheveled bedrooms. Dolores is in charge of housekeeping, cooking, and watching the youngsters. In between she fitfully attends school, urged on by an overtaxed social worker. I poke my head into her room, which used to be Stepdaddy’s — another peculiar turn of events: after what he did to her, why would she want to sleep in his room?

Dolores drinks her tall Coors and squints at me now and again. I sit down as close as I can to her. At the commercial breaks she begins to exhort Tanya and Waymann to go to bed, but they are clearly accustomed to not listening to her. Even before Stepdaddy got locked up, the kids did whatever they pleased in this house; why should it be any different with the parents gone?

Dolores, resigned to the fact that she has no effect on the outcome of anything, lights a Marlboro.

Tanya, down on the floor, blond head propped on one hand, asks me, “Are you going to marry Dolores?”

Dolores blushes and throws a pillow at Tanya. “Go to bed.”

“No, you go to bed,” Tanya retorts.

“We’ll just have to wait them out,” I whisper in her ear. “Even those kids in Peter Pan had to sleep eventually.”

She frowns at me, but it comes off fuzzy and cute.

Waymann — who at ten has already burglarized a home, tried to pawn some of his father’s guns, cashed in half of the old man’s coin collection, and been implicated in an arson — bangs open one of the bird-cage doors. The green-and-yellow parrot comes flapping out with a cackle, tours the room twice, and perches on the shoulder of the giant golden Buddha on the hearth.

“Now look what you did,” Dolores says.

“Dolores already has a boyfriend,” Tanya tells me.

“Do you already have a boyfriend, Dolores?” I ask.

“Rollo is her boyfriend,” says Tanya.

Rollo is a drug dealer, a thirty-something, porcine, divorced swinger with permed hair who lives down the block. Dolores baby-sits Rollo’s kids weekly. Last year he nailed my sixteen-year-old girlfriend, who’d gone over to buy some drugs. My parents think the world of Rollo because he can fix just about anything and keeps his lawn neat.

“Dolores is my girl now,” I say.

“She’s my sister,” drawls Waymann, sneaking up on the parrot.

The parrot bolts and slams into the sliding glass door. Waymann picks it up and strokes its feathers downward from the head, as if to reshape it, then gently returns it to its perch, where it shivers once, lifts a claw, and splats the newspaper below.

“I’ll trade you my car for your sister,” I say, dangling my car keys at him.

He stares at the keys as he drops the latch on the cage door. “Deal,” he says.

“Can you drive a stick?”

He snatches the keys from my hand. “Sure.” He’s only ten, but I imagine he can.

“We’ll take it for a spin later,” I say.

Waymann goes across the street to look at “his” new car. I put my arm around his sister. “You’re legally mine now,” I tell her. She regards me with her all-purpose blur.

Waymann is back shortly, swelling with pride.

“OK,” announces Dolores. “It’s time to go to bed.”

“I’m going to drive my car,” says Waymann.

“It’s time to go to bed,” Dolores insists. “Go to bed, go to bed, go to bed.”

“Won’t, won’t, won’t, won’t.”

“I’ll kick your little asses.”

“No, you won’t.”

“I’ll kick your little asses,” I say.

Delighted, they scurry off down the hall. They don’t go to bed, of course, but at least they are out of the room, and my car keys are on the kitchen table.

“Now we should go to bed,” I say to Dolores.

She looks at me as if I have said it will be partly cloudy tomorrow with variable winds out of the southwest.

“I’m breaking up with my girlfriend,” I tell her.

Waymann and Tanya are down the hallway, titter-whispering and popping their heads out.

“Go to bed!” Dolores orders. I kiss her damp gold hair and slip my hand under her blouse. I feel the curves of her stomach, the hard points of her small breasts. I recite the lyrics of a top-forty song in her ear. She grabs my hand and tows me down the hall to her room and closes the door firmly behind us.

Stepdaddy’s old abode still has the camphor-wool-blanket-bacon-machine-oil smell of the hunter. There are at least a dozen rifles behind glass and a variety of handguns as well, including one Old West–looking pistol with a preposterously long barrel. The stuffed heads of a moose and a mountain lion gaze glassily down. Framed photos cover the walls, all showing a smiling Stepdaddy with a dead deer or elk or marlin hanging upside down. Dolores’s unmade bed, with its pink-flowered counterpane, floats incongruously in the middle of it all.

Dolores takes off her clothes, her thin arms heavy with down. The silver chain around her neck glitters on her throat. Her eyes are big green blurs. She lies under me without response while a glow like moonlight pours over us through the screens, though it is only the porch light of a neighbor. On the nightstand a little pink radio plays one sticky pop tune after another.

I stay with her until I hear her brother’s car pull up in the driveway, his heavy boots on the floor, the squeak of a water tap, his cough. It’s already 6 a.m., the creep and flood of dawn. I wait for Mitchell to close the door to his room; then I sneak out and step down into the morning puddle of vapor that smells of orange trees and asphalt, carrying Dolores’s young animal scent on me like a trophy.

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