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part 1 of the story
The Wind Chime

George R. Justice

    Wendel Sizemore never said much, just kept to himself even when he lumbered in between the trailers mowing what little grass dared sprout up through the sand. It was easier that way, no time wasted in trying to convert the jumble of knots in his head into words, then trying to string them, one after the other, into sentences that were somehow supposed to come out like thoughts as clear as mountain springs. As it was, his speech was limited to nods, and his face, more than not, locked in a still-life portrait. It was his eyes, though, that spoke to the truer part of him, that added gravity to a life filled with its share of annoyances and adversities alike.
    Wendel was the handyman for the Wind Chime Trailer Park; handyman and anything else Sheila Gay Cuthbert needed him to be. From unclogging toilets to keeping the weeds hacked back in the ditch line along the highway, he was all things when it came to doing and mending whatever Sheila Gay set him to. I was there the day she hired him; standing right there next to her in her blue floral muumuu when he came ambling up the lane from the highway, past one pickup truck after another, rusting in one grassless yard after another. He seemed weighted down, carrying an old brown suitcase with a rope tied around its middle. He stopped right in front of Sheila Gay just like he knew she was the owner. Just came right out and said his name was Wendel Sizemore and that he was hungry enough to do most anything. He was about as sizeable a man as I’d ever seen, and when he stepped inside Sheila Gay’s trailer, he had to do it on a slight oblique just to get through the door. Once inside, his six-and-a-half-feet frame made him seem more like ten and a half, and made the floor give just ever-so beneath him. I remember Sheila Gay fixing him a bowl of fried potatoes and pinto beans then refilling it twice. She didn’t offer a third time, though I suspect he would have taken it if she had. Except for him answering the few questions Sheila Gay kept pulling out of the air, he ate in silence, his fingers, thick and purple and savage looking from the extremes of sun and freezing cold, wrapped around the bowl as if we might at any minute snatch it right out from under him.
    “That there’s Noah,” Sheila Gay said motioning toward me. “He belongs to Myrldean ... across the road there,” her head doing a round-about nod toward our trailer. “They’re family.” Wendel and I eyed each other, but said nothing.
    I don’t remember much of what Sheila Gay asked Wendel, but I do remember him saying he was from a way-up-north place called Michigan and had worked most of his life, all forty years of it, felling timber. Cutting pulp he called it. “Up dare in da U.P., eh,” he said, jabbing the air with his fork, pointing to where he thought north ought to be. Sheila Gay and I looked at each other not knowing the first thing about where da U.P. was or what language this was he brought with him, but nodded just the same. We figured what difference did it make anyway. Four cups of coffee later, Sheila Gay laid down the law about her no-alcohol-ever policy, except what might filter through him, say, on a Saturday night someplace far from the Wind Chime. So long as he lived and breathed the air within the confines of Sheila Gay’s five and a half acres, he would have no choice but to abide by what was no less than total and complete abstinence. It was what Sheila Gay saw, without apology, as God’s will. When it was all said and done, Sheila Gay put him in an old school bus clear to the back of the lot, back close to the train tracks and under the only tree in the whole place.
    Sheila Gay was resolute in her ideas as to what beauty was: her assortment of multi-colored muumuus for one, and the functionality of second-hand scrap like the school bus for another. Frugal was the byword that fit her best, though horse’s ass wasn’t all that far from the truth.
    The conversion of an old school bus into a travel trailer had been a test of Millard Looney’s imagination; a labor of ingenuity thrown open to the world some twenty years earlier, only to walk away from it when it wouldn’t start. “Went about it backwards,” he told Sheila Gay. “Shoulda seen to the motor first before I spent everything I had on the rest of it. There’s just too many miles and too much wrong with’r to ever make’r right.” It was a disgrace as much as a letdown, but he told Sheila Gay she could have it if he could leave it where it sat. It was a deal, and nearly fifteen years later, despite the wind and rain and a hard cake of bird droppings, she finally managed to clean it up and clean it out ... just in time for Wendel Sizemore. In the course of a day, Wendel painted it blue. Navy blue. Wheels and all.
    “’At’s uglier’n a blue goose,” Mamma said around the crack of her gum. “Reckon we ought to tell him how laid-up it looks?” It was natural for Mamma to ruminate aloud, and just as natural for her to blow slow delicate bubbles then burst them with a pop. “Fine lookin’ feller for not having better sense,” she said. Her smiles were the work of the devil at times, the kind that added brilliance to her auburn hair and freckles. “Blue Goose,” she said in what seemed like a practiced drawl: deliberate, slow, and full of Texas. Wendel never lessened his pace, just kept brushing navy blue paint across one surface after another. Mamma watched after him until her eyes looked lost and fixed on something far away. “So far from home,” she uttered more to herself than me. “Wonder what he’s running from?”

    As a rule, I stayed with Sheila Gay an hour or so after school and every other Saturday, all the times Mamma worked at the Whistle Stop Diner just up the road on Highway 77. Sheila Gay was my daddy’s first cousin and felt guilty enough when he left to let Mamma and me keep our trailer at the Wind Chime, and for half the rent. Before long, she came to see herself as our guardian and waved the rent altogether; the hitch, though, was the moral tutelage she felt the right to impart. I never understood it, Daddy leaving that is, but I guess he’d had his fill of the Wind Chime and what little work a drunk could hold onto. Just up and drove off one evening about dusk in a neighbor’s borrowed pickup and shouting out the driver’s window about how he’d be back in a minute. I was eight at the time. By the time I turned fourteen, there wasn’t enough of him to miss anymore. It’s even truer today, twenty years later. But it was different for Mamma, hardly a time when she didn’t catch her breath when she heard tires creep onto the gravel next to our trailer, or the scuffle of boots outside our door.

    Our trailer was like most others at the Wind Chime: bedroom on the back end, kitchen on the other. In between was a bathroom built more for a child than grown-ups, and where our knees touched the door when we sat on the toilet. Then there was a wide spot between the bathroom and kitchen we called the living room because that’s where the couch was. It was the only place to sit other than around the kitchen table, and the place where I slept. The trailer was a single-wide set on jacks and tethered with steel cables to keep us anchored in high winds. It was old in the fashion of a black-and-white TV, washed out and faded to a chalky white. Wendel painted over its pock marks of rust and places blistered from the sun, but somehow the off-color he used and the brush strokes he made left it looking diseased. But it kept out the rain and the snakes, blessings Mamma reminded me of more than not, though there were times when it failed to do either. Time and money just never seemed to coincide with Mamma’s wanting to anchor it on concrete blocks, so we lived with it forever listing this-way-and-that depending on the wind and the rain and the shifting sands. Seams and joints and pipes split and popped and cracked with regular familiarity. And though it wasn’t the most ill of the lot, it was splintery enough to keep Wendel coming more often than either of us wanted, and despite his lack of ever having anything to say. On the occasions when Wendel had to come inside our trailer, he would, as a matter of course, show up unannounced and at the oddest times, then just stand there outside our door, staring straight through the screen and waiting for one of us to see him.
    “WENDEL! I declare. I must not of heard you knock.” Mamma was always obliged to act surprised each time she discovered him on our stoop and blanched of expression. I suppose it was her way of helping him feel less like a freak for just standing and staring instead of knocking. I doubt Wendel ever thought much about it except to wish she had taken half a day to discover him instead of just a few minutes. His manner, even after months, remained stoic, without much beyond an occasional grunt and the heavy vestige of a nod, as if transfixed by mere time and space and waiting to be spurred to yet another chore.

    Sheila Gay Cuthbert owned theWind Chime Trailer Park, or rather its ground, had ever since her husband went face down in his breakfast gravy some ten years before I was born. It was a story I got exhausted listening to with each telling, but bore up under it for Mamma’s sake, like each time was the first. The Wind Chime Trailer Park started out as the Wind Chime Café situated alongside Highway 77, just south of Harlingen, Texas. When housing became too expensive for the blue-collar laborers of south Texas, Sheila Gay and her husband decided to grade the five and half acres out behind the café and turn it into a site where folks could park house trailers. Thirty years later, and the café now a laundromat, it’s still a treeless track of sand and rock, as flat and dry as the corn tortillas served on the street corners of downtown Harlingen, and about an inch from the Mexican border as Sheila Gay is so fond of saying.
    The back of the property runs adjacent to a set of north/south railroad tracks whose trains rumble past us at all hours of the day and night. Livestock and produce account for most of what they haul, but on nights without a moon, it’s not uncommon for those trying to escape the poverty of Mexico to jump from its boxcars and come running with labored breaths past our listing tin trailers. We often heard them, Mamma and me, but never moved to action of any kind except to scrunch a little deeper into our covers. It was a sure thing that after such a night Sheila Gay would be up before the sun’s first rays, rattling and poking about, rifling under trailers and wagons and whatever else might offer Mexicans a place of concealment. She never found anybody, ever, but it never stopped her from looking. But it was on just such a morning that Wendel stepped from his big blue bus and came face to face with a short and roundish woman all but collapsed under his floorboard. If there had been others with her, they were cleared out. Gone. She was alone.
    A look of confusion can often be as palpable as a whole mouthful of words, in particular when it came to Wendel. He was the benchmark of such expression, but today in the dawn’s pale-yellow light, and staring dead into the eyes as deep and dark as the woman we came to know as Rosa Cantina Venezuela, confusion was only the tip of what sought to lay hold of him. It was, at such times, up to people like Mamma and Sheila Gay to bring him back into the fold, into the icy glare of now, until his expression gave way to understanding.
    By the time Wendel got our attention in the way of a sizeable dirt ball thrown against the side of our trailer, Rosa Cantina Venezuela was locked in panic, trembling like she had stepped into the path of a lion. “It’s okay, Wendel,” Mamma said. “She’s just lost, though mostly tired and hungry I’d say. Ain’t that right, darlin’?” Rosa Cantina Venezuela just stood there in the morning light, big-eyed and with her chest heaving, working hard for breath. Mamma said a few words in Spanish, which all at once released a flood of tears from Rosa’s darker-than-dark eyes. Mamma spoke enough Spanish to get her by; enough to banter with the locals at the Whistle Stop and even to make small talk seem like real conversation. She understood more than she could speak, but was somehow always able to get her point across when she had to. She was bright that way, Mamma was, her eyes often conveying what she was unable to say— tangible to how we f—g that made the risk worthwhile. Mamma and I knew with each passing day that Rosa’s time with us was borrowed at best; that we needed to help get her to Arkansas and to the brothers who awaited her, and that we needed to do it sooner than later.

    After bringing us the angel food cake, Wendel came by every day: in the morning, in the afternoon, at dusk. It made no difference. He would show up at aase—stretched tight with personals—the short distance to our trailer ... and with Wendel in tow. “She’ll be alright,” Mamma said. Mamma was reassuring just as a matter of course. “We’ll all be just fine. No need to scare ’bout nuthin’.” That’s when she put her finger to her lips in a shhhhhh aimed at Wendel, then gently shooed him away.
    Before the day was out, Wendel managed to find one thing after another around our trailer to mend or tend to, and all to Sheila Gay’s chagrin. So much so that she wasn’t shy about letting him know. Came right at him, she did, wagging her finger in his face, her preponderant arms of flesh and fat flapping and swaging in time with her bouncing jowls and the spittle popping from her lips. Sheila Gay was a reckoning force when she thought she needed to be, her in that blue floral muumuu. Wendel took it, but only for about a minute before he waved a big hand in her face and walked off; before he locked himself behind the big double doors of the Blue Goose. It was a full two days later before we saw him again. It was near twilight and he was standing at our door holding an angel food cake still in the cellophane wrapper from the Dragon Drop Food Mart just up the road.
    “WENDEL,” Mamma gasped when she discovered him standing at our door like she’d been caught in her bloomers.
     “Thought there might be a need for sump’m extra,” he said, motioning toward Rosa through the screen door, then shifting his weight from one gigantic cowboy boot to the other.
    Mamma stood with her jaw half open, listening and blinking. “Wendel,” she finally said in a voice as calm as pond water. “I believe to my goodness that’s the first time I ever heard you speak more’n two words at a time.”
    He nodded. “Reckon so,” he said. “Keep to myself biggest part ’a the time. Ponderin’ mostly.”
    Mamma looked him over real good then turned toward Rosa huddled against the kitchen table. “Well,” she said, “Reckon you might as well bring it in. I was just saying how long it’s been since we’ve had us an angel food cake.” She looked at me and rolled her eyes.
    He pushed his way around Mamma almost before she finished talking, and into the confines of cramped space. Then, without a moment’s hesitation, reached the cake past Mamma to Rosa. Rosa looked down at it, then at me, then at Mamma.
    “Here, I’ll take that,” Mamma said, elbowing her way. “Sit yourself, Wendel,” she said. “Where you been, anyway? Ain’t seen you in a few days.”
    “Yep,” he said, almost afraid. Then, when Mamma looked him dead in the eyes he said, “Been holed up.”
    “More pondering?” Mamma said.
    Wendel shrugged, “Mostly.”
    “’Bout a lot of things, I bet.”
    He just nodded, eyeing each of us in turn. We waited for him to add something, anything, but that was it. Mamma gave me a sideways glance then said something in Spanish to Rosa. I was pretty sure it was about Wendel since Rosa’s gaze drifted toward him slow and careful like, and with her eyes opened a little wider.
    We all waited while Mamma sliced and dished out the cake. “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you without your baseball cap,” Mamma said. “Until right now that is.”
    “’Bout right, I guess,” Wendel said, his voice muffled behind a big bite of cake. Mamma eyed me with her chin pulled in and her lips pooched to a pucker.
    “New duds?” Mamma asked, trying for nonchalance.
    “Might as well be,” he said, “for what little I wear’em.”
    “Smellin’ good, too,” Mamma said. “Is that soap?” Wendel said nothing, just kept chewing. He was a bit red faced, but then seemed delighted at being the center of attention. Mamma watched him for a moment then leaned in close and whispered something to Rosa, which turned Rosa to a flush tone and pretending indifference.
    Things fell silent after that, the clink of our forks against our plates seeming to echo all the way to Sheila Gay’s. We went round the room, each of us eyeballing the other until a clarity of unspoken understanding worked its way up and out of each of us, even Rosa, until our munching, munching, munching, became the starter fuel for a few sudden and unexpected chuckles. Laughter, funny bone and full out, followed then died without any of us saying a word. Wendel sat with his eyes aimed at his plate and glimpsing what I thought was too often in Rosa’s direction. But then in a burst, his visit was over. In a manner that was all Wendel, he rose and raised his hand in a good-bye, all in one easy motion ... out the door and gone almost ahead of our thanks. It wasn’t genius that helped us ferret him out, that made us see past his slicked-back hair and the soap-shine on his face. But he was suddenly a man we didn’t know, and that angel food cake only the beginning.

    Mamma talked of Rosa in hushed tones and with back-and-forth glances out the window. We knew we couldn’t hide her forever, but her outlaw status brought a sense of intrigue to our otherwise mundane existence, even added a greater density to Mamma’s sense of drama.
    “She’s trying to get to Arkansas,” Mamma said just above a whisper. “Place called Springdale. Got brothers there ... four of them ... all that’s left of her family. It was her brothers who sent her the money. You know, to help her get out of Mexico. Paying somebody to get you across the border ain’t legal; cheap neither. Two thousand dollars a head and all of it going to the one’s they call coyotes ... the ones that lead the way. Getting’ from there to here is ’bout as dangerous as a rattler, but a body’s got to do what it needs to get a leg up on happiness. Said she tried crossing the border twice before. First time just her and her husband going it alone. They were about dead from lack of sleep and water when the Border Patrol caught up with them. Wasn’t much punishment attached to it, just being put on a bus and sent back home. Second time was pretty much the same, only with coyotes leading the way. She thought it would be easier, but it turned out to be even harder. Making it meant staying ahead of the border patrol, and that meant walking at a crippling pace under a beating sun. When she couldn’t keep up, she just sat down. Said she didn’t have another step in her. Tumbleweed and cactus is most of what she remembers, that and hot rocks and dust devils, and hoping that a scorpion wouldn’t crawl up inside her drawers. The big difference, though, was her husband and how he just kept walking ... even after she couldn’t go another step, even after she called to him. His backside was the last she ever saw of him. Some say he has a new life and a new wife to boot. Others say he died right there in the desert no more than a mile from where he left her. Either way, he’s dead to her. The Border Patrol picked her up not long after. Gave her food and water and bussed her back home again. Only this time she was out two thousand dollars.”
    None of what Mamma said seemed to matter to Wendel, though it was hard to tell. He just sat there, blank and blinking now and again like a mule hitched to a plow and left to smolder in the sun.

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