Mad Cow Nightmare Read Free Page B

plastic mat they’d lain on nights since they left Canada—walking, stumbling, hitching rides after Uncle’s truck broke down. One night they’d stayed in a shelter: that was heaven, a real honest-to-god foam mattress. Mostly, though, nights were spent on the thin mat, no pillow, her head a torture. And Ritchie wanting sex every night, when her head was hurting so bloody bad she thought she’d die. She just lay there and cried inside. If she fought him it could go worse for her.
    The voices grew louder, arguing. It was Ritchie and Darren— they’d never got on. For one thing, Maggie was Ritchie’s girlfriend first. Then Darren came between, married Maggie, his own first cousin; and the rejected Ritchie went to her, Nola. Nola with the pretty face—and the ugly scar on her breast. Yet for some reason Ritchie, the older by ten years, felt responsible for Darren, wanted him back on the uncle’s farm. Blood sticks with blood, he’d say.
    “Quit bothering me now,” she heard Darren shout. “I ain’t coming and that’s that. I don’t give a good goddamn he’s our uncle, he got poison in his veins. It flows through him and comes out his filthy mouth. Now buzz off, Ritchie, leave me alone. I got cows to milk in the morning, a barn to paint. Go back to the old sumbitch, tell him I’m not coming.”
    “You’ll be sorry,” Ritchie said, his voice sounding desperate, threatening, the way it did when Nola crossed him, didn’t do what he wanted, go the direction he pointed out. “You don’t come you won’t get a penny from me and Uncle. Sweet Jesus, this your last chance, I swear to God. The last!”
    Ritchie stomped back into the tent and flung himself facedown on the mattress. His elbow hit her aching head. She cried out, but he hardly knew she was there. He was crying. Holy Mother, Ritchie was crying like a baby because his brother wouldn’t do what he told him to do.
    “Ritchie?” she said, feeling sorry, wanting to soothe. She tried to stroke his bare shoulder—but “Shut up” was the answer. “I don’t need a mother. I need a woman. And not one who’s forever moaning about her goddamn sick head.” He flopped over, taking up most of the mat, shutting her out.
    It was herself crying now, she couldn’t help it. She was the one needing a mother. She’d never really had one, had she? Her mother always pregnant, running off, fetched back only to get pregnant again. And dead after the eleventh child, a stillborn missing a kidney. They’d burned that last one up, like it was a chunk of firewood.
    “Quit that sniveling, will you?” He flopped over on his back. “Jesus, I could do with a fag.”
    He got up and went out; the night was quiet. Darren would have gone back to Maggie. Nola imagined him lying beside Maggie, arm around her plump body, kissing her, stroking her. Envy cut through Nola like a sharp blade. She had no one. Even her Keeley sometimes kept his distance—afraid of Ritchie, she supposed. Enola, her mother had named her. Turn the letters around and you got “alone.” Her mother would of known that when she named her. Her mother knew it was a Donahue’s fate to spin out her life alone.
    Toward dawn Nola was squatting among the trees in her nightgown to take a pee—Ritchie gone God knows where—when she heard a cough behind her. She sat motionless, feeling an interloper here on this Vermont farm she hadn’t yet seen in daylight. There were mountains, she’d been told, but she could see only the dark shapes of cattle in the pale lemony lights from the trailer and, beyond, from the owner’s farmhouse.
    “Nola?” It was Maggie, praise be, in a cotton nightie, a burning cigarette between her lips. Seeing what Nola was up to, she handed over a papery leaf to wipe with.
    Nola squinted, examining it closely to be sure it wasn’t poison ivy—she’d had a bad experience just below the Canadian border. “Oak,” said Maggie, who knew about leaves, shrubs, plants, and poison berries,