story

by Willie Davis

Calamity Jane

One morning in mid-October, a circus bus came into Hazard, Kentucky, took a slow swerve across the median on Main Street, and then sandwiched Chuck Holloway between its front bumper and a line of parked cars. The driver had had a heart attack, and as he slumped to the side, he grabbed onto the steering wheel to maintain balance. The driver was very strong, the surviving circus performers said, and even dying, when he was no more than a weight, he kept enough strength in his hands to send the bus off course. He was their tragedy; Chuck was ours.

When the EMT’s pulled Chuck from under the tires, they covered him up too quick for me to see. Someone said they were taking him to the hospital but just to clean him. The circle around the body was already three men deep by the time I ran out of my flower shop, so I stayed back. I’m small, and I stay careful. Men in crowds only care about what they see, and they’ll push and prod whatever they can overpower. They held up the ambulance for a few minutes after they loaded in Chuck, which I didn’t understand at first. But then they lifted the driver up on the gurney. No one bothered putting a sheet over that man the way they did with Chuck. He lay crooked on the stretcher. He didn’t look asleep exactly—one eye was cracked open, and I could see the tip of his tongue slipped out of his lips—but he looked at peace. It made me think of Chuck, the death they wouldn’t show us.

The crowd was clamoring. They were looking for answers, but if those wouldn’t come, they’d settle for fights. It was all a distraction, so they didn’t have to talk about Chuck. That would change soon enough; people would start in on where they were when they heard Chuck died and the last thing he said to them. Except no one could even say his name with his corpse decorating the circus van’s bumper. Maybe by nighttime, when the dark could make us think his blood was just another oil stain, but not now. With too deep a breath, you could still smell him.

I was different. I could talk about Chuck or any other man in Hazard, and I didn’t have to wait. They came to me with their problems, treating me like their diary. Wherever I go and whoever I meet, it’s the same: men tell me I listen, but I don’t. I’ll look them in the eye and nod when they need encouragement, but that’s as much effort as I give. Sometimes I catch the lies in their voice, and I smile to show them that I know I’m hearing an invention. But they misread my smiles, and I can’t change how I listen.

The women I know don’t expect my attention the same way. My sister details me half to tears, telling me everything from her grocery list to her cat’s mood swings, but it’s different. She doesn’t need me to hear her, and she knows I don’t care.

My own daughter, Jane, the only person I know who tells me too little, won’t talk to me about anything except basketball. When she was fourteen and fifteen, all she cared about was the form on her jump shot, the locker room gossip, and the possibility of taking the Hazard Bulldogs to Lexington for the Sweet Sixteen. When she turned sixteen, the conversation stayed the same, but her voice changed. There was more to her life than basketball now, but it wasn’t for me to know.

The men in Hazard each had their own way of entering their stories: a little tic that set them remembering again. Gary Motel—so named because of his habit of carrying Roach Motels in his pocket and surreptitiously placing them in every business he set foot in as part of his mission to rid the world of bugs—would stare down at the back of his wrists and click his teeth together before launching into his story about his second wife shooting him in the knuckles. Sometimes he holds his hand to me, clinched in as much of a fist as he can still make, like I wouldn’t believe him otherwise.

Gus Conway, our mountain man of the cloth, fingers the petals of a long-stemmed rose before launching into the story of how he found Christ in the Mississippi River. I keep the long-stemmed roses on a vase by the counter so there’s always one for him to pick up and run his fingernails across like a blind man feeling a flower for the first time. It’s a rather pretty story, so I don’t tell him it’s ridiculous. He exaggerates his accent when he talks about his days spent in the Delta working for SNCC, and he wanted us to see the same Jesus he did. Me, I don’t know Christ, and I don’t believe in anyone who’s found him, but I could listen without laughing. So yes, Reverend Conway, please tell me about the way, the path, the light, and the etcetera. He was just talking about himself anyway. That’s what prayer is as far as I can tell—a divinized way of talking about yourself.

As it happened, Reverend Conway was getting pushed back and forth in the middle of the crowd, hollering against the public, trying to marshal us onlookers into some sort of order. He was frightened, and even though I couldn’t hear him, I imagine the panic made that country-fried lawd-above drawl slide off his voice.

Seeing him circle his puffy arms around and scream silently brought it home for me. No one in Hazard had anything to say about what just happened. We’d all seen the same thing at the same time, and there was nothing we could say to make it feel different. There was a car crash, and two men died, one from here and one from somewhere else. Later, we’d make it mean something, but now we wanted to yell.

I untangled myself from the back line and walked toward the flower shop. There was no point in working, but maybe some straggler would wander into the store and tell me what happened. That was probably more useful than just watching it. But as soon as I put my hand on the glass of my door, I saw the three strangers, a hundred yards away from the mess, talking to the police. If anyone could tell me something new, it’d be one of them.

Just then, the cops were talking to a stocky man with thinned-out hair and eyes like two chunks of concrete. He’d have looked plain mean if not for his mouth, which curled up into a smirk every time he stopped talking. The woman was dark around the face with maybe Italian skin and a drop of Persian blood to shape her eyes. She was the type of woman other women find pretty but men overlook. I wanted to talk to her straightaway, but she was crying too hard, hugging her arms around the crick of the heavy man’s elbow. The third man—tall, thin, and fragile—stood apart from the others, on the street corner, looking at his shoelaces. The police must’ve already spoken to him because he wasn’t nervous.

I walked over to him and fished a Merit out of my purse. “Women’s cigarettes,” I said. “Sorry I don’t have anything stronger.”

He looked at me, squinting like I was a spotlight. “Are we still in Kentucky?” He took my cigarette and held it between his thumb and middle finger. “We’re going to Bristol, Tennessee.”

“You’re about two hours away.” I tried lighting his cigarette, but he didn’t inhale when the flame was lit. He wasn’t used to smoking. “You all work in the circus, or you just like the way it looks on your van?”

“I’m a clown,” he said. “Juggler and Tumbler’s what they put on my union card, but I’m a clown.”

I pointed back to where the policeman was scribbling the others’ statements onto a clipboard. “And your friends? Jugglers and Tumblers as well?”

“Them?” He let the smoke rise in front of his face. “He’s a thief, and she’s a whore. But again, we’re really just clowns.”

He didn’t speak with anger or spite, and I was confused. Then he coughed out a laugh from behind the smoke, and I saw that it was just a bad joke. This is his tic. He needed to feel the embarrassment of a poorly told joke to tell his story. A lot of men were like that. Talking humiliates them, and they need to feel a slight sting of shame to know they can survive it. He needed one more prompt.

“And the other one?” I said. “The man they took away?”

“Gunter?” He shook his head. “Gunter was our strongman.”

The thin clown’s name was Andre Foster, and he joined the circus in California. He had a master’s degree in math, but even when he lived in the world of equations, he dreamed of becoming a clown. His grandparents were acrobats in the Soviet Union, and to him it seemed like an exotic way to make a living, even a means to understanding his past. He mentioned a wife and daughter, but he moved off that topic quickly, either because he couldn’t stand to think about them or because they didn’t exist, and he wanted to keep his story straight.

Much of it was a lie and a half-hearted lie at that. He kept confusing his details: sometimes his grandparents played for a duke, sometimes a baron. Still, some of it rang true. California sounded right. He had that wanderling’s look about him, and I could believe he’d hitchhike west, looking for someplace sunny and a million miles from home. When he saw me nod and smile, he grew bolder and the lies became less believable. He planned to move to Bristol and start a juggling school. When he looked away from my nodding and back to the van, his voice grew patchy again, and I’d have to ask some harmless question to get him comfortable.

I tried doing what I normally do when men tell me about themselves: I meet their stare and imagine them turning younger. With this one, I could picture the wrinkles around his eyes smoothing, the red on his cheeks receding, and the fold of skin drooped just over the corner of his left eye stiffening and raising. He wasn’t a bad looking boy, but he hadn’t aged well. It’s not the sort of look you can keep unaltered for much more than three decades. It was easier to see him as a child than somebody like Gary Motel, who I’d actually grown up with. Certain qualities—the drunkard’s popped-veined nose, the rubberized skin—were impossible to set right again.

I’d almost imagined him back to a schoolboy with his hair parted at the side and a fountain pen jutting out of his shirt pocket when the new thoughts came. Chuck was dead, and I couldn’t muster any tears.

I’d recruited Chuck Holloway to teach my daughter Jane everything he knew about basketball. I’d played when I was her age, but the women’s game has changed so much that it’d become almost like the men’s. I wasn’t far removed from when women played two sets of half court and stood as still as chess pieces passing the ball around. In terms of strategy, I didn’t know anything more complicated than setting a screen, but Chuck could help her. I remember him in those too-high blue and gold shorts flitting from hoop to hoop. He was one of the few boy players who came to our games. It was amazing to watch him run the point, screaming at his teammates and then disappearing into a blur. Truth be told, the game may have passed him as well—he’d certainly lost a step—but he still had a quick crossover and strong court vision. If he pushed Jane then she could be a starter, maybe even a countywide star. That meant that there was chance—not a guarantee, but a chance—she could go to a college someplace far away.

And it worked. Her jump shot improved so much that Chuck nicknamed her Calamity Jane because she hit everything she shot. She always read basketball and talked basketball, but she began playing like she had a purpose. Every night when I came home from the shop, she’d be in that same spot just behind the flowerpots, about twenty feet from the basket, shooting ball after ball, and she’d keep it up until I called her in for supper. It was as steady as a drumbeat, that ball banging against the backboard nailed to the side of our house. Sometimes I’d work that rhythm into my life and chop the peppers or scrub the saucepan to that thump-thump-thump tune. If she caught me watching her shoot, she’d stop and dribble between her legs or drive in for a lay-up, but when she didn’t know I was watching, she stood still and shot over and over. She was always a strong shooter, but as the weeks went on, she could hit as many as fifteen in a row, her form so tight that the ball would bounce back to where she stood.

Every Saturday morning, I took her to the blue courts by the river where she met Chuck. He said it was bad form to get over-accustomed to any one rim, and if she became too machine-like then she’d get lost if the first one didn’t drop. Each week we’d arrive right at ten and see Chuck standing under the hoop, bouncing the ball against the corner of the red square on the backboard. “Rebound practice,” he said. “Amazing. Do this fifteen, twenty times a day, and you know where the ball will bounce.”

Honestly, I was surprised he never showed up late. His clothes smelled like day-old sweat and he was unshaven, but he was there regardless. No matter how hung over he was—and sometimes it looked like he took the sound of the bouncing ball personally—he showed up on time.

I wasn’t sure if Jane suspected that Chuck was hung over and not just tired those mornings. She drank a little, but it was an occasional bottle of strawberry Boone’s Farm with her friends. If she’d had the taste for it, she’d have moved to something stronger. She certainly didn’t drink enough to feel hung over in any real way, so even if she noticed Chuck’s shaky morning state, she didn’t understand it. It’s a slowly learned lesson, one I didn’t come across until years too late. I still remember my stupid surprise when I learned whiskey was a drink and not a scent on men’s breath.

I started hearing stories about Chuck: he was at the Devil Moon every night, drinking gin by the truckload. On the nights I could slip out, I’d see for myself. Holly Lunsford, who pours the drinks after her husband passes out, caught me looking at him and mouthed the words, “Every night.” When she works, she puts both of her elbows on the bar and leans forward to talk, so it makes whatever she says sound like gossip. She filed her nails and flashed me a sly glance when he ordered another round. The Devil Moon is not a comfortable place. The stools feel faintly sticky, and whenever someone walks in or out of the men’s room the whole place smells like a urinal cake. Chuck wasn’t here for the atmosphere. He wanted gin, but he feared drinking alone.

I assumed I’d hear about what was on his mind. He was a man after all, and he liked to talk to someone who’d almost listen. But he stayed quiet. In the bar, all he’d say was hello, and then he went back to holding his dram glass against his forehead. Outside of the bar, he didn’t talk much either. Like always, he showed up at the flower shop, and he unloaded a tale or two, but they were stories of his childhood, nothing about what was hurting him now. He kept his job, he kept his friends, and I could still hear the thump, thump, thump on the side of my house. He was teaching her well.

Then he stopped talking completely. He showed up in the shop in the mid-afternoon but didn’t say a word. At first, I thought he was drunk in the daylight, but it wasn’t that. “Look,” I said, finally, “You can stay here long as you want, but be straight with me. Tell me what’s going on.”

He picked up a pink tulip, stared at it, and then dropped it back on the counter. The sun came through the window, making him squint, and he looked more comfortable squinting, like he wasn’t meant to see what was in front of him. “Christ almighty.” He blew me a kiss and walked out into the street.

After that, I worried about taking Jane to meet Chuck every weekend. Sadness spreads fast as a jackrabbit. But Jane was steady: her grades stayed middling, her smiles still came easy, and she hit seven out of ten shots when she thought she was alone. Whatever else happened, if she kept her elbow straight and her shoulders square, then maybe she could wind up far away, in a city I couldn’t send her to on my own.

Late one Thursday night, I was between my third and fourth glass of Cabernet, watching the local news with the sound turned low, when I heard the ball beating against the backboard. It surprised me because Jane was at a friend’s house, and I hadn’t planned on her getting back until late. The more I listened, the more I became curious because it wasn’t Jane’s shot pattern. It wasn’t bang-bang-bang at steady intervals, but an irregular thunk. I went to the kitchen to rinse out my glass and looked out the window. Chuck Holloway was hunched down dribbling the ball between his legs, from his left to right to left hand. No matter how fast he dribbled, his arms never moved above the elbow, and he looked up at the rim instead of at the ball. He started the dribble slowly but picked up speed every time the ball ricocheted off his hand until it was no more than a blur. When he couldn’t go any faster, he’d let the ball bounce waist high and catch it on the upswing, moving into an ugly, twisting shot. From my angle, I couldn’t see whether the shots were going in or not, but it didn’t matter. He cared about the dribble: the exactness of the bounce, the downhill speed, his blind faith in his hands. When we were young, he told me the secret to being a point guard was to never let the ball touch my palms. Instead, use my fingertips, let them rock back with the bounce before I dribble. More control, he said. I couldn’t know if that was what he was doing in my driveway, but I saw his control now, as a middle-aged man reeling from sorrow and probably blind drunk, was as good as it’d ever been.

I went outside. “Chuck,” I said. “Chucky. What are you doing?”

He looked at me, gave a toothy grin, and then leaned back, tossing the ball one foot to the left of the basket. He didn’t speak, but when I saw the breath come out of his mouth, I remembered it was September. Seeing his steam rise made me remember myself, no-sleeved, flailing about, trying to grab the attention of the one man in Hazard who ignored me. “Look,” I said, “I can’t be out here like this. You can come in if you want, but if not, go home.”

I walked up my side-stairs, and I heard the ball bounce against the concrete again, hard at first but then softening until soon it was drowned out by his heavy, stumble-drunk footsteps behind me.

When we were inside, I saw him standing in the doorway just like he did in my shop. I wasn’t on the clock, and I didn’t have to accept silence. “All right, what is it? What’re you doing to yourself this time? I know you want to talk so talk.”

He closed his eyes and put his right palm flat onto my walls. There’s no way he could’ve known he was doing it, but with his index finger we was tracing a perfect circle around the petals of my wallpaper flowers. He was trying to talk, at least trying to pry his mouth open. Finally, I threw him a prompt even though I hated to do it. In a small city, you take what job people give you, and I was the listener. “Is it Jane?”

“She’s not going to college.” He spoke with such finality that I thought it was me, not him, who’d been unable to speak a moment before. “At least not for basketball.”

I took a step back but didn’t speak. I felt defiant, but I knew if I tried talking, my voice would crack.

“She’s got a good shot,” he said. “A real strong shot, but she’s one-dimensional.” He stood up straight and walked behind me toward the kitchen. “Calamity Jane can hit what she wants if she can stand still and square her shoulders. College game’s faster. Here, even when they run someone at her she can shoot over the girl. She’s got her daddy’s height, which is great, but it slows her off the dribble. In college, all those sequoias lunging at your girl, and she’s trying to get her feet set? It’s an impossible shot to carry into college because they can block it there.” He pushed against the wall to straighten himself up. “Plus, she’s what, a junior? No one’s even made contact yet.”

I didn’t realize I was welling up, but I saw it in his face. Immediately, he looked ashamed, like he’d smacked me in anger. I shrunk away from him, and then I felt it on myself, that familiar first tremor in the cheeks, almost like a sneeze. Then came the tears.

“Wait.” He put his hands up in front of his shoulders, so he looked like he couldn’t decide whether he wanted to hug me or box me. “I didn’t mean it like that. That jump shot could take the Bulldogs upstate. Or junior colleges.” He took another step toward me, with his arms looked stiff in that half-loving position. “Look at Derek Anderson. Two years of JC, then UK, then, what, something like ten years in the NBA?”

I waved my hands, which is what I always do when I cry. It’s a way to regain control of my muscles. But still he kept talking. I couldn’t hear him anymore, but I knew he was there, talking to save us from silence. But God help me, sometimes I can’t listen. I stepped toward him, thinking I could put my hand over his mouth. When I moved in, he opened his arms. My wet face grazed against his stubble, and I remember the prickle of his beard.

He pulled back to look at me all at once, and I couldn’t hide it from him. When I cry, I look like Jane. My eyes pull together, my face puckers, and the wrinkles around my eyes look like they come not from age, but from everyday grief. Her face keeps blank except for a frail, pleading look like she’s always just had a small hope squashed. It isn’t an overpowering effect—it’s only a little wish she’s been refused, so she’s not heartbroken—but I’ve noticed boys around her apologizing for no reason, mistaking her blankness for pain. Those boys will love her for it when they get older and learn how much they need that in a woman, how much they want to save her. She’s had that look since she was very young, maybe four or five. Prior to that, she may have felt the same disappointment but didn’t recognize disappointment as a negative emotion. In Jane, it’s paired up with a desire to please. When someone tells a joke, she laughs no matter who tells it or at whose expense it is. If she doesn’t get it or doesn’t find it funny, she’s hurt, not out of sympathy for the joker, but because she recognizes that something’s gone wrong, and she can’t fix it. Sometimes what she doesn’t understand overwhelms her, and she cries, but because she always looks to be teetering on the verge of tears, none of us who love her see it as any cause for concern. Because I’ve grown so used to studying her face, I know that my daughter doesn’t resemble me, but rather, when I cry, I look like her. When he pulled back and looked at me all at once, Chuck Holloway saw that, and then he kissed me.

I didn’t speak until it was over. It would’ve done neither of us any good to ruin his illusion. Maybe I said, “Hurry,” but I probably just heard the word so loud in my head that I thought I’d spoken it. He was gentle and quick, as embarrassed by his desires as I was at diverting them. I’m not sure when I stopped crying, but we’d already lain down by then, and he had clasped his hands around mine. When I turned and noticed how neatly our hands folded together, like those of a frightened child in prayer, I knew I wasn’t crying anymore. I couldn’t have noticed that if I was still in tears.

It’d been a while for him, at least being with someone new. He’d gone back to the teenage boy’s assumption that women were breakable. After a long time away, they lose confidence in their hands and compensate by softening their grip as if with every move they’ll snap us in two. That was how Chuck was at first, fumbling deliberately with each of the buttons on my shirt, half-expecting me to change my mind and send him home. His touch was so light that when he ran his fingertips up my neck and cheeks, I didn’t know if he was grazing me or if I smelled the dirt under his nails and assumed that anything that close had to be making contact with the skin. Finally, when he tried yanking my jeans down past my hips and I didn’t help him by raising myself up, he kept shooting me these miserable, lost-dog glances. All the while, I didn’t move, leaving him to start, sputter, and start again. It might have been worth laughing about except I could hardly stand to smile. My last best hope at sending Jane into school and out of the mountains hadn’t worked, and now there was my brand-new mistake hovering over me.  

When he took his shirt off and tossed it in the corner, I saw he had a slight paunch and that his muscles had gone slack. Even the hairs on his arm had turned gray, which made me realize that the nut-brown on his head must’ve been touched up. He wasn’t the razor-thin point guard I used to watch practice in the school gym. Feeling his stomach nestled against my side made me realize just how much I’d changed as well.

It wasn’t until I felt his fingers fitted next to mine, squeezing hard, that I felt him coming out of his relearning jitters. He would start sweating soon from his chest, and the drops would fall on my collarbone. I was glad I wasn’t crying anymore because I knew that soon we’d have to face each other, and if he didn’t look like a boy anymore then I didn’t want to look like Jane. We were just stand-ins anyway: he wanted to be with someone else, and I wanted to be alone, but this was probably better for both of us. I was the circle around the bull’s-eye, close enough to keep him happy. Whatever else I couldn’t do for Jane, I could still protect her. Maybe I couldn’t stop the wanting, but there’s no tangible harm in that.

And then it was done, and he lay beside me, trying to cover his short choppy breaths. I sat up with my back to him and scooped my shirt off the ground. “Jane will be home soon.”

“Right,” he said. “I’ll go.” He stood up just then, but turned to the side, almost modestly. I’ve never been close enough to any man that the sight of him naked and standing up didn’t strike me as either funny or sad. With Chuck, it was funny, him unbalanced and red-cheeked, moving around the room like a walking apology.

It wasn’t until later that night when I heard Jane crack open the door and sneak upstairs that I became angry. I could still hear him in the room with every crow’s caw outside my window or each time the breeze blew strong enough to ring my chimes. Even with my eyes open, I imagined his fingertips were stroking up and down my cheekbones again, so softly they could pass as wind.

Had I even said yes? Obviously, I assented in some way—I remember feeling the back of his scalp through his hair, guiding him closer to me, and once, when he clasped my hand, I hooked my calf around the back of his legs—but I never said, Yes, please. At Jane’s age, I thought Yes, please was the standard. Please, so I’d know I meant it. Then I discovered that women didn’t say please because men took it as begging.

All Chuck gave me aside from that handhold was a dry peck on the cheek once he’d gotten his shirt tucked in. His fantasies didn’t seem harmless anymore. They could be redirected, but they couldn’t be killed. That meant there’d be more nights when he’d come pounding on the side of my house with a basketball. There’d be no end to it because as soon as I locked the door, I’d picture him seeking out Jane. It could even start with an accident, him stumbling upon her when he was overcome with booze or hard luck. She’s understanding by nature, and all he needed from me was a soft touch on the back of the neck. Did that mean I had to take care of him every time the world overwhelmed him? Christ, I’d do it a hundred times over if I thought it was a cure. If someone could promise me that one day I’d kill that hope inside him, then he could set a tent up at the foot of my bed. But until then, I had no choice but to delay it little by little and worry when one or the other of them wasn’t in my sight.

I laid awake the better part of the night, with my head stuffed under my pillow, dreaming that I could hear the basketball banging against the house, steady as rainfall.

The following Saturday, I tossed Jane the keys to my car and told her to drive herself to the court. “Be back by 12:30, the very latest.” I couldn’t stand the sight of Chuck welcoming Jane to her lesson. Anyway, I’ve always maintained faith in daylight, and I didn’t believe anything could happen in the late morning with the sun shining on them for everyone to see. When she came back, I felt a tremendous relief. After that relief faded, as all reliefs will for a mother, I devised ways to keep her in the house. I invented fake chores for her to do after school, or I slipped her thirty dollars and told her to go shopping. So long as she’s not just wandering, she’ll be safe, I thought. When people wander, that’s when they get in trouble. I knew it wasn’t true, even as I repeated it to myself, stretched out and meaningless, like a mantra, and whispered so low that I didn’t even unclench my teeth as I breathed it. “So long as she’s wandering, she’ll be safe.”

The next Saturday and the Saturday after, I dropped her off at the blue courts for her session with Chuck, and she came home on time. School was fine, her friends were fine. Except something was on her mind. Basketball season was coming up. Once it started, I couldn’t control Jane’s schedule anymore. They’d have practices and team dinners, and I’d see her less.

The panic muted after three weeks and no news. I could remember those fifteen minutes under Chuck more fully now. Right after it happened I could only remember it in pieces: his weight on my chest, me staring up at the uneven spot in the corner of my room where the wallpaper doesn’t rise to meet the ceiling, how with every breath I didn’t know if I’d be smelling him or the air freshener I’d sprayed on my pillowcases that afternoon. Now with a little distance, I could remember it all at once. It wasn’t a pleasant or unpleasant memory but a memory nonetheless. All my fear for Jane had turned back on me. I was the one afraid to leave the house except to go to work or the store. When I finally realized what a shut-in I’d become, I opened all the windows on the first floor and began breathing in the early autumn breeze. It was the warmest day of a cool week, and I felt the warmth rush into the house. It tickled my nose, and I wanted to sneeze, but it died in my throat. Outside, with a ripple of wind bringing the neighbor’s yards to me, I could smell the azaleas and gladiolas and the wishing flowers and DDT swirling around one another and skirting the edge of my porch. For a moment, I thought I caught a breath of honeysuckle, but I knew it wouldn’t have survived this long. Next week would be the middle of October, and these flowers were one chill away from dead. Standing on the porch, taking them in for the last time until spring, I knew that this was the final warm night of the year.

Then two days later Jane didn’t come home. Looking back, it seems so small—it was a Friday, and almost everybody in town was away from home—but I thought it was a direct result of me taking my eye off Jane.

For the first few hours, I stared at the minute hand of the clock over my oven, with my ear cocked, listening for any clicks that I could mistake for the scraping of her keys across the lock. The sun pouring in my kitchen turned orange, then copper, then bruise pink, and then turned into moonlight. All the while I tried thinking of something else, but the picture that kept rising to the top was that new full memory of mine. Except instead of me breathing in his sweat, I saw Jane.

Finally, I went out looking for her. That’s what I told myself, but really I was looking for him. I made a beeline to The Devil Moon.

It was dark and crowded inside. I’d been living so far inside my head that the sound of hearing other people talking, laughing, and clinking glasses stunned me. I weaved in and out of the crowd until I got a clean view of Chuck’s usual seat. Instead of Chuck, there was a young, hopelessly innocent-looking Black girl with smeared pink lipstick. That sealed it. If Chuck wasn’t here, he was with Jane.

Rachel Collier’s boy, Ronnie, was playing guitar in the corner. He had no amp and no microphone, and with the noise I could only hear him when he strummed full chords. When I get sad, sometimes the only thing that can set me right again is someone else’s music. I walked to the stage, but I hadn’t taken ten steps before I felt someone touch me just below my shirt collar, between my shoulder blades.

It was Chuck, with the same hollow-faced look he always got when he was too drunk to hide it. He gave me a giant joyless smile. “How you been?”

I couldn’t find words for a second and instead pointed to his usual seat. “I didn’t think you were here.”

“Oh yeah.” He jerked his thumb to Ronnie. “I wanted to hear some tunes.” Then he turned back to his drink: a whiskey glass full of a clear liquid, vodka or gin. By his side was a bowl of green olives that the bartender had left out just for him. This was his dinner.

“Have you seen Jane?”

He cupped his hand around his ear and leaned forward.

“Jane,” I said. “She didn’t come home from school.”

He stuck his hand on the olive bowl and scooped out a fat green one. He popped it into his mouth, scraped the meat off with his teeth and then spit the pit into an ashtray.

“Listen,” I said, “I’m worried.”

“I know.” He looked up to Ronnie and then back to me. “Don’t let it scare you too much.” He tossed another olive in his mouth and tried to grin. “I’m sorry. About all this.”

About all what? I started to ask but stopped. I couldn’t remember the last time someone owed me more than one apology at once.

“Wherever she is, she’s safe. She’s a smart girl.” He said it in the same way that he’d told me that maybe, just maybe, she could end up like Derek Anderson playing in the NBA. I had to bite my lip to keep from crying.

Ronnie Collier ended his song and took a bow, seemingly unaware that no one was clapping.

“Hey Collier,” Chuck called to him through cupped hands. “‘Pretty Saro.’”

Ronnie winked at Chuck and began plucking a few high notes.

“You know this one?” he asked me.

Of course I did. That song was to hillbilly bars what the national anthem is to wars. "When I first came to this country in 18 and 49," it began. "I saw many true lovers, but I never saw mine." It tells the story of a man in love with a woman who doesn’t love him back. He’s an immigrant—"Me, a poor stranger, and a long way from home"—and he rambles around the mountains looking for some sign of his darling Saro.

Holly Lunsford refilled Chuck’s glass with gin. He swirled it around, held it in front of his face and took a gulp. “You know she’s got a boyfriend?”

“Jane?” I took his glass from him and took a small sip. “She does not. Who?”

He put two olives in his mouth at once and held them between his gum and cheek without chewing.

“Did she tell you that?” I get more frustrated with quietness than with rudeness. “Is it serious?”

He signaled at Holly, who brought over a second dram glass of gin. “For you.”

“Listen,” I said, trying to get more out of him and knowing I wouldn’t. “You mentioned junior college before. Is that still possible?”

He pinched the bridge of his nose. “This part breaks me up. The last verse.”

“I’m talking to you, Chucky. Talk back to me.”

“The one about the bird.” He wiped his brow with the back of his hand. I wasn’t hearing anything about Jane until the song was done, so I listened to the lyrics.

I wish I was a turtledove,

Had wings and could fly,

Far away from this loving country

Tonight I’d fly nigh.

There in her lily-white arms,

I’d lay there all night,

And watch through the window

For the dawning of day.

I watched him as the words rang throughout the bar. He stared down at the fist around his glass, his big red knuckles jutting out. Just then, if only for an instant, I understood him. Maybe he’d rather be another species, staring at my daughter through the rest of his days, until that unresolved rhyme ended his song. In a way, he was harmless. He’d never touch Jane, but no matter what I did for him or to him, I could never stop that desire, that looking through the window, that imagining. So long as she lived in Hazard, I’d know of his wishing.

“Junior college,” I said again. "In west Kentucky. Somewhere. Talk to me, Chucky.”

He looked at me, almost surprised I was still there. “Junior college?” he said, one eyebrow arched up. “Maybe. Got a jump shot. Parts of a jump shot can’t be taught.”

I remembered all of that as I stood in front of this underfed circus clown, listening to him lie. Suddenly, I couldn’t take it. Chuck Holloway was flat on his back, riding his way to the morgue. He was shaking as he went over the bumps in the road, and those were the last movements he’d ever make. That long, low look that would follow my daughter all her life—the greedy, sad stare—was no more.

“Please,” I said to the clown. “Stop talking.”

He looked stunned, slightly embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” he said.

I shook my head. “It’s just I can’t hear you talk anymore.”

He thought he’d offended me, so he put up his hands to apologize.

“Please,” I said. “Just don’t.” I was almost happy, or at least I’d have thought so, but I felt one hot teardrop curl onto my cheekbone.

The crowd had turned to face me. With the bodies gone, they needed something to stare at, and they saw me talking with the stranger. Reverend Conway was still trying to yell sense at them, but they’d pushed past him and were looking at me for information. But I didn’t answer questions, and I couldn’t keep a crowd happy; I pretended to listen to men’s stories and imagined them growing younger as they spoke. I offer only that.

The thin circus clown dropped the cigarette I’d given him and squashed it on the street. He looked bone weary but resigned for one more performance, whatever kept the people satisfied. He had his instincts, and I had mine, but I could still help. I dropped my purse and ran back to my flower shop. No one was there, so I grabbed dozens of roses, gladiolas, snapdragons, and tulips.

I didn’t have answers, and if I did, I wouldn’t give them away. When the crowd saw me with my chest full of flowers, people stopped talking for a second. Maybe they expected me to use the flowers as some sort of memorial, but I couldn’t offer that. People cleared a path for me as if I was holding a bomb.

I’d heard all their stories. Almost everything in town that was said and forgotten had filtered through my store, even if the stories only passed through a friend of a friend of a friend. Finally, someone—the big-eyed woman from the circus—plucked one of the gladiolas from the top of my pile. “Do you mean these to be for us?” she asked.

“Please.” I nodded my head. “They’re for everybody.” I tried taking a lily from the top to give away, but when I moved my hand to grasp it, half the flowers spilled from my arms and onto the street. That didn’t matter. I handed out the flowers to the people beside me. I was moving so fast that I could barely register their faces. When my hands were empty, I bent down and grabbed the spilled flowers on the ground and flung them at people’s chests. They were talking again. Some were yelling, some crying, but they’d gotten over waiting to find out more. It was as chaotic as before.

I kept throwing the flowers in the air and watched as the men jumped up to grab them, just like they had as boys. There were always more flowers, I thought. I could empty out my entire store and open up tomorrow with nothing but stems, petals, and pine needles, and that’d be okay. I’d have no money tomorrow, and I have almost none today. I thought of my daughter, twenty years from now, mirroring my movements in the same town, listening to the same five folk songs, doing what she can to rearrange men’s affections. Maybe someone could tell her the story of the time her mother lost her mind and started tossing flowers in the air like those God-lovers in the airports, and maybe all the time the man’s talking, she’ll be thinking of the petals on the flowers in his hand reclosing, the stem shrinking and shrinking until it sinks itself in the dirt, and then the sprout resealing into its bud.

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Willie Davis is the winner of the Willesden Herald International Short Story Prize (judged by Zadie Smith) and the Katherine Anne Porter prize (judged by Amy Hempel). He is the author of the novel Nightwolf and the short story collection I Can Outdance Jesus. His story cycle, Honeysuckle Season, will be published in April.