Any time a man took off from Tallassee, his woman’s money or car or TV or hope along with him, my momma would look at me, hiss her eyes narrow, say, There’s one thing you can count on from a man, and that’s him leaving. My momma should have been a drinking woman considering, but she wasn’t.

My Willie ain’t that kind of man, I told her. And he doesn’t have a car, so how would he go about leaving if he wanted?

That kind of man? she said laughing, shooting spit out of her beautiful piano-key gap. Hula, there ain’t but one kind of man.

Momma would have known. She’d met him twenty times over.

They said to her, Addie, I’m going to get you off your feet and out of that bar. They said, Addie, I’m going to take you places you’ve never been. They said, Addie baby, I’m going to treat you like a queen.

The last one named himself Fast Eddie, which I thought was dangerous until I met ten men in the next ten years who called themselves Fast Eddie. Only this Fast Eddie played pool by popping the cue ball into the pocket and cursing God and cursing the pool stick and then saying it wasn’t his night and going back to doing what he was good at-drinking whiskey straight.

When my momma worked days, Fast Eddie and me would sit on the front porch, me in Momma’s rocker, him perched on the wide ledge, his long booted legs linked over the railing like a kid on a pier, a guitar in his lap. I’d snap beans for dinner and he’d dip (Hula, he’d say, you can always judge a man by his dip. Copenhagen means he’s got balls; Skoal means he’s a pussy), sip whiskey from the bottle and pluck out Elvis or Willie. Every now and then he’d sing along to a sad part about dying or loss or love, which I learned later are all one and the same, and say, That’s real, Hula, do you hear that? That’s real feeling. You remember that.

Other times we talked about life and the meaning of it all. Eddie told me once, Hula, it’s your choice to live or die. Like I get to pick the way and the when of how I go. Like if some big bus came barreling down on me I could just put out my hand and say, No sir, I ain’t going today. I got laundry to do.

Eddie believed it, but said if by chance the Lord called, he wanted us to perch him up on that big bike of his, pop a cigarette in his mouth and light it, make sure to stock cold beer in the saddlebag, and then douse him with gasoline and set him off to the other world blazing. Said this was Native American-like but modern.

We never figured out if he avoided dying or not because he took off on his bike without the to-do. Momma said he was sure enough good for dying, and that if she ever got her hands on him, she’d prove it. Eddie took her entire week’s paycheck. But more than that, he took her wood-carving tools, took them and not the TV. Guess it’s hard to tote a TV on a bike, and if you’re drunk enough those tools might look like something of worth. And they were to Momma, though I never actually saw her finish a piece in my life, just scratch out a half of a horse or a hint of an angel late at night, which is what I said when she started crying. She said it’s not that she used the tools, it’s that she could have used them, and when your could is gone, what’s left?

***

I was in tenth grade, just sixteen, when I started dating Willie.

You got a good head on your shoulders, my momma said. A shame to waste it. Remember that.

I tried to remember. I made straight A’s and got my name on the bulletin board in Winston High Lobby and my picture taken for the yearbook and the Tallassee Record, a bunch of skinny, tinybreasted girls straddling gym bleachers, a few boys in the shadows.

But Willie. He said I had me a good ass on me. A high ass. The kind of ass somebody would want to eat lunch from, and it would be a shame to waste that, too.

Momma worked with Willie down at the Rodeo Club where he bussed tables and kept things neat. He always smelled like that spray they wash tables down with, real clean and sharp. Had gray eyes near the size of quarters and dark hair that curled against his neck in upside-down question marks.

Willie liked to take toothpicks from the bar and build things on his breaks, little forts and bridges and houses with perfect miniature everything.

That’s how we got together, him asking me to help and listening to my ideas. One day he made a little toothpick sign that said Willie and Hula’s and hung it on one of his houses, and before you know it, that’s what we became, Willie and Hula, one name hooked to the other.

Hula, Momma’d say, slanting her lids at Willie, keep your eyes off boys and on them books.

But Willie, he taught me different things.

Said, Hula, your eyes are sky blue, bluer than that.

Said, Hula, your ass is round as a basketball, bouncy too.

I know that doesn’t sound romantic, but Willie loved basketball, so it really was sweet.

Said, Hula, you taste like honey, girl, pure honey.

***

My momma worked down at the Rodeo Club most nights, but she wasn’t the kind of woman you’d expect. Sometimes she waited tables and slung beers, but mainly she took care of the numbers and the money in the little room with the Employees Only on the door. It made me feel important when I was little to go and color in that room, because I knew just nobody could go in. Mr. Bill, the owner (who some thought was light in the boots on account of his lisp and the fact he never married and because he only wore pastel shirts), gave me little pink and purple umbrellas they stuck in the drinks on Rodeo Luau night, when all the wannabe cowboys came in with their worn-down boots and worn-down smiles knocking up against all the worn-down women at the bar, fumbling to get their fruit-colored leis over their heads without taking off their cowboy hats or baseball caps. They’d offer their leis to girls, ask, “Hey, you been lei’ d yet tonight ?” laughing beer allover.

I’d take those little umbrellas and twirl them in front of my face like I’d seen dancers do with real umbrellas on TV; but they were too small to do the trick, so mainly I just stuck them behind my ears and danced Hawaiian style. That’s how I got myself the name Hula, even though Tallassee’s a life away from Hawaii, which I always read as a sign I’d be leaving this town. And since they named me down at the Rodeo Club, it was almost as if they were family, and I used to say if I ever got married, I’d have Mr. Bill, queer or not, give me away, big cowboy hat and dipping tobacco and pink tux if he wanted, have him walk me down the aisle white and pearled, since my daddy wasn’t there to do the job.

Daddy left when I was barely five. He was a big man, my daddy, pillowing and open -armed. I liked him. Liked the way he held me on his lap and read Green Eggs and Ham. Liked the way he’d give me sips of his Budweiser until my head got foggy and dreamy and Green Eggs and Ham didn’t live in the book anymore but in my head like cartoon dreams. Liked the way he cupped Momma’s rear with his big hands, not dirty, but sweet like it was precious. Liked the way he made her giggle girlish, spit bubbling and hissing against her piano tooth gap.

Momma always missed him. You could tell because she refused to say his name. She never talked about the stuff she used to like but couldn’t have any more, like Daddy and her schooling and her art. But I heard her crying when she got home from the club, knew she craved some late at night and kept those glossy-paged art books under her bed, along with her poems full of mountains and streams that weren’t streams but rumbling thoughts that flowed into words or bodies and the meaning of bodies speaking words without speaking none.

In the middle of those poems, she kept a long tail-like waterfall of white blonde hair, as white as light, because that was what she used to have before there was me and Daddy and then only me.

When Momma died I took those poems and those pictures over to Auburn and had them framed. I hung them in my living room next to little Hula’s school pictures. My favorite is this eagle flying in sky over a lake because you can’t separate the sky from the lake, can’t tell where things end and others begin.

***

All men don’t leave.

That’s what I told Momma when she found out I was seeing Willie.

Look at Uncle Jerry, I said. And Mr. Teeney. They’re still around.

Uncle Jerry stayed with my Aunt Beanie for more than two decades. Momma said Uncle Jerry stayed because he didn’t have legs from drag racing even though Aunt Beanie told him time and time again to quit pouring money into that souped-up Mustang, and he ignored her until he hit that tree stoned as a monkey and lost his legs, so how was he going to go anywhere nohow?

Besides, Uncle Jerry never worked a day that I can remember, and Aunt Beanie was always crying when we were little that the babies needed diapers and the babies needed food and she hadn’t had her hair done right in years. At least after the accident he drew disability and couldn’t get around too good in his wheelchair so he wasn’t much trouble, just wheeled off in the comer of the kitchen or in front of the TV.

Aunt Beanie said the best thing he’d ever done for that family was to get rid of them legs. Said it with him sitting right there watching her, sad cause he’d found the Lord and Aunt Beanie’d stopped looking. Momma said when you can’t get up and go nowhere, about the only thing left to find is the Lord.

What Aunt Beanie found was a man out at the mill.

This was a few years after my Willie. Leslie Owens. A rough sort on account of the girl name. That went on for half a decade, and after a while Leslie came right on up to Aunt Beanie’s house and ate dinner, sometimes sleeping over, Uncle Jerry sitting there in the corner, nodding off or reading the Bible or praying crazy or eating TV dinners in the living room in front of Dallas reruns.

Uncle Jerry drowned himself in the tub one Easter morning, which goes to show what they tell you about two inches of water is true. At the funeral Aunt Beanie cried a lot and cursed that Mustang and cursed fate, but I heard her say insurance don’t pay on suicides and she hoped to get it ruled accidental.

Remember that, Hula, Momma said on the way home from the funeral. It’s a sad thing life does to a woman. Makes her practical and unapologetic for it.

And Mr. Teeney.

Mr. Teeney was my high school biology teacher’s husband. He and Mrs. Teeney came together to football games each Friday, waved their skinny black and gold pompoms and huddled close under blankets and stood up when we scored and screamed Go Bobcats! then sat back down as quick as they could, looking uncomfortable touching.

Well, Momma said, Mr. Teeney’s out all hours at the Rodeo Club rubbing that nice-guy smile over girls about the age Mrs. Teeney teaches. So you see, she said, there are many ways to leave a woman.

Although I didn’t tell Momma at the time because there would have been explaining, all the kids knew about Mr. Teeney and his women. But Mrs. Teeney still came to school early and perky-faced with her church pumps and her pleated wool skirts tucked tight under her thighs and a tighter smile tucked on her face and everyone knowing that her husband was knowing everyone.

Mrs. Teeney was my favorite in school because she cared and you felt it. She drove over to Auburn and bought books the state couldn’t afford, would copy the whole thing twenty times over with her own money. We all kind of felt like her kids, the kids we figured she couldn’t have because she didn’t have any.

In biology when we started talking about reproduction it was hard for me not to see Mrs. Teeney in that drawing of canals and ovaries and wombs, not to see her insides as dark and endless, gnawed out and bottomless so nothing stuck, just poured through her whiskey-smooth. Hard for me not to imagine Momma’s as endless too, endless in a different way, because I stuck and my daddy didn’t.

To teach us responsibility, Mrs. Teeney made us carry around flour babies. She made the boys carry one too. Al Sims, who was rumored to have three balls and real macho for it, said he didn’t see why he had to carry around some baking doll because there wasn’t no way on God’s green earth he could have himself a baby. But Mrs. Teeney, she stuck to her guns, said he had a part in the process as well, and if he wanted details, he should go to chapter six of our biology book. Then she made us paint a face on the pretend babies and paste yarn to their heads and dress them in our baby clothes left over.

I named mine Cheyenne. That’s where I planned on going when I graduated. I gave her blue eyes with yellow yarn hair, because I hoped if I had one it would be looking like me.

After two weeks Mrs. Teeney showed us a video of a woman in childbirth, showed it to all of us, boys and girls, the camera focusing right on that woman’s hot pink privates. Afterwards I told Mrs. Teeney that there ain’t no better birth control than watching a woman get split wide open with a squished-up baby head.

That weekend Momma made biscuits and a chocolate cake out of Cheyenne, and I giggled the whole time eating, thinking if you’re going to have a baby in your belly, this was the best way to do it.

***

It happened like it always happens.

Said, Hula, your shoulder tastes like cotton candy. Pure spun sugar.

Said, Hula, your pussy feels like a glove of fire.

After we fooled around, we used to go get us a shake and a hamburger and some fries. Willie dipped his fries in his shake like catsup, making me love him all the more. Willie, he paid for all of it. And I thought he was a good man and had himself a job and when he saved up enough money, we were moving to Cheyenne. He was going to get himself a pair of cowboy boots and was going to be a ranch hand like in Clint Eastwood movies, or maybe build fancy houses hanging off hills like you see in magazines. In the winters we were going up to the mountains where I would teach skiing like in the Olympics because I loved mountains and snow even though I’d never seen them. Some things you just think you know.

Willie, he threw up on my feet when I told him.

Said, Hula, you sure it’s mine?

Then he said he was sorry, that I was his girl and he’d get another job and we’d raise this baby the right way, that he’d be a better daddy than my daddy or his daddy or any of the daddies we knew.

I said I hope it’d be blonde and blue-eyed like me.

Willie, he said he hoped that too, because the only thing better than one Hula is two Hulas.

I said if it’s a girl we’re going to name it Cheyenne. Then we did it real slow like and sweet but without a rubber or worry, because I figured you couldn’t get no more pregnant than pregnant.

***

My momma started waiting up for me when she wasn’t working, her hair and clothes smelling of smoke and whiskey, but her breath clean. She barely touched a drop. Said, Hula, don’t you touch that stuff. It doesn’t take you to a better world, just keeps you in the one you’re in for good. Then she’d wink and tell me how I got here, her and daddy drinking a bit too much and then before she knew it boom. The boom always sounded like a car crash.

But she left out what her poems tell, the beauty and the body whispering and how lovely and how tragic it all is. That’s what I thought about when I thought about Willie, all her poems about love I’d found, all those poems about how Daddy made her body feel when his body was inside hers.

Sometimes I wonder about that, my daddy inside my momma, her barely sixteen, her insides, where I spilt from, my daddy’s heat searching. I wonder if deep down in her belly she’d wished I hadn’t stuck. What if? What if I had tumbled out without her knowing when she’d bled one month, just a bad idea, a defect her body took care of like Mrs. Teeney told us bodies do, and her ignorant of the whole thing, ignorant and being a girl just a bit longer.

Momma had me at sixteen. Next to the pictures of little Hula and Momma’s paintings is a picture of Momma in a flowered Sunday dress with her long white hair wrapped in a bun at her neck. She looks petrified. Daddy has his arm, thick and tanned, slung about her stiff shoulders, one side of his mouth tugged into a grin like he’d won something. It’s their wedding picture. I’m in her, tight and balled and buried and forever, only there’s no hint of me in the curve of her belly. How terrified she must have been, her life rearranging and deciding for a thing she couldn’t even see yet, a thing they told her existed but she couldn’t hold in her hands.

I didn’t know how to tell Momma, but it turned out I didn’t have to because I kept throwing up mornings. Bacon, I threw up. Coffee, I threw up. Toast, I threw up. After a week a light turned on in Momma’s head and she came into the bathroom whipping my head back with a fistful of hair making me mess allover myself.

Oh Hula, she said, tell me no.

She looked like I’d hit her, or like she wanted to hit me. Then she stood up, shook her head, and left me on the bathroom floor.

When Momma came back later that night she smelled of whiskey I knew she didn’t hardly touch and her voice laid low and smooth. She pulled me on her lap, little-girl-like, even though I’m a good head taller because I get my height from my daddy. She started talking about responsibilities and souls and doing things for the better of everyone and after a few minutes I caught on that Momma was trying to get rid of my baby. So I told her right then and there that I was old enough to get myself pregnant and old enough to decide to get unpregnant.

She said, Hula, you don’t know what this world can do to you. It takes a lifetime to lose religion and that’s the one thing God’ll give you in the end. I prayed something like this:

Dear Lord, I’m not much on getting rid of babies because I know a soul’s a soul and You know every hair on our head before we’ve even got a head, and right’s right and wrong’s wrong. To tell you the truth, even though You already know this because You knew what I was thinking before I was thinking it, I couldn’t imagine killing me and Willie’s baby, so that’s not what I’m asking. But Mrs. Teeney says that if something isn’t right with the baby that the body’ll often take care of it on its own, just naturally clean it on out. Now I’m not saying that I want you to take a perfectly good baby and make it defected, but maybe if somebody else is supposed to be having a defected one, maybe some older lady like Mrs. Teeney who doesn’t got much time left for babies, You could switch them out and let mine wait just a bit longer in heaven until after I’ve got myself a degree and a ski teaching certificate. It ain’t like a soul’s got a shelf life. And if that’s wrong, I take it all back and please don’t let me die or get hit by a bus or get my face scarred for being selfish. It’s just an idea, but I know You know best. From this moment on, I am going to depend on Jesus for my salvation. Amen.

I’ll tell you this, God’s not always listening, because a month later I was still pregnant and Momma was still coming home whiskey doused. When I tried to call Willie, his momma said he couldn’t come to the phone. Then one day I called and she said he had took off, not in his car, because like I said he didn’t have one, but his grandma’s car which he stole.

My baby’s daddy a thief. What a way to start.

Is he coming back? I asked. I thought maybe he’d gone to make more money, gone to make a better life for me and the baby.

I’m sure he is, Honey, she said, but we both knew better.

***

One morning early, still dark outside, I felt a hand on my shoulder, smelled my mother’s smell, Dove and White Shoulders, her breath clean, her thin silhouette cut against the night, beautiful, like a shadowed mist.

Baby, I just hate to see it. I just hate to see it all start for you now. You understand? she said, her hand against my forehead. Then my light flipped on, and there my momma was, a pair of my jeans and a T-shirt in her hands. You understand, she said, You understand we’re going to Birmingham to take care of this.

The only sound hearts boom, boom pulsing.

She straddled me. We flipped on the floor, my arm knocking the lamp over. She got the T-shirt wrapped tight around my neck and blue jeans stuck on my ankles. She tumbled out of my room, her robe hanging off her shoulders, one tit squished out from under her bra. Then I heard a particular kind of click. I’d lived in the country long enough to know that kind of click, and there was Momma, standing right in my doorway with a shotgun cocked and pointed at my head, her mouth pinched, determined, her hair dancing alive, her legs stabbed firm in the floor. She looked like a superhero, a she-warrior.

You’re going to Birmingham, she said. You hear me?

I heard her.

The whole way there I hoped the police would stop her for swerving or that we’d need gas and I could pass a note to the cashier with something like, HELP, MY MOMMA’S TRYING TO SHOOT ME AND MY BABY, which might have looked strange seeing as how I didn’t have a baby yet and my stomach didn’t show one.

But we didn’t stop and the police didn’t stop us. Momma, her hair a mess of platinum spikes, still wore her bathrobe.

She only spoke once.

Hula, she said, you know why I had you? Why I wanted you? Why I let your daddy put you in me? Why I planned it?

The boom in her stories that made me always sounded accidental, like two bodies bumping into each other with mumbled sorrys lost in night and bodies speaking words without speaking none.

I wanted God to give me something I could keep, she said. Something of mine that couldn’t be taken away. And He did. You understand what I’m saying?

This is what I understood: God was surely a man, and every woman knew it.

When we got to the clinic, Momma parked close to the door so she could see it, told me to go on in, that she was going to be sitting in the car with the gun and if I tried to run off or didn’t stay in long enough don’t think she wouldn’t use it.

Then she said, Hula, you know I love you don’t you? So hurt, my momma.

The building was plain brown brick, like a dentist’s office. Inside everything smelled clean and sharp like Willie’s smell, which made me miss him and then hate him and his heat always pushing against me. There were men huddled in seats twisting fingers and women reading magazines or rocking babies in their laps and the TV mounted on the wall had Donahue talking. All in all, it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be.

I had to wait in line for a while because of the crowd. I guess Saturday, being the weekend, is a busy time for them. When I got to the counter, a blonde woman in a sweater with sewn-on horses wearing glitter saddles reminding me of out West and Cheyenne smiled tight and practiced. She was young and fat and only getting fatter.

I don’t want to be doing this, I said.

She smiled that same tight smile.

Precounseling’s part of the fee, she said. You got an appointment?

I don’t know, I answered.

She looked annoyed. Said, What’s your name?

Hula Hawkin, I said, and her lumpy white fingers started flying on the keyboard.

I leaned real close to her so the people behind me couldn’t hear and whispered, Momma, she’s got a gun.

Those white fingers went stiff as death. She turned around looking for someone to run this by and no one was near so she said, What do you mean she’s got a gun? This is not a joking matter.

In the parking lot, I said. She’s got herself a gun out in the car.

I tried to tell the fat lady that Momma didn’t intend to hurt nobody, and if she did, nobody but me, but she’d pushed some siren, was screaming at the guards to go to the parking lot.

Which car? she said. Where is she?

I said, Wait a minute, lady. You got the wrong idea.

No one listened. The children screamed and the mothers and the soon-to-be-not mothers hid under chairs and the whole place throbbed with that siren and I thought I was going to be sick.

I ran to the parking lot to try to tell Momma she better take off or hide that gun, but they already had her out of the car, her face pressed against asphalt, her legs splayed open so you could see the soft part of her near the top of her thighs, their rough hands moving over her pale skin, her bathrobe thrown from her, showing her matching satin bra and panties.

I called to her. She closed her eyes so she couldn’t see me, so I disappeared.

After a few hours they let me have the car to get myself back home, and when I-459 hit Highway 280, I thought of not taking it, of maybe turning around and heading back to that clinic and getting myself cleaned out. But I’m not as strong as my momma and I knew it even then. I thought of not turning east back toward Tallassee, of taking that car and turning it west, west to possibility, west to mountains with mansions clinging to them like kudzu, west to snow skiing and real cowboys, not the wannabe cowboys at the club, but thick-skinned cowboys who face the elements, who rust out in the workday sun to a ruddy, well-used brown color.

I was on the off-ramp to 280 east without realizing which way I’d gone, not even feeling that steering wheel in my fingers, just hummed into silence by the thunk of the road beneath me.

 

***

Momma died with Little Hula and a book spread on her lap.

I’d found her three years before in the Employees Only room mumbling words that weren’t words, her face slacked soft and somewhere else.

Hu-wa, she called me after that. Hu-wa, wha a uh?

You’re here, Momma, I said. At home.

She was smoothed beautiful those last years, her face forgetting what she told me to remember, her body slight and fragile like glass you put high so fingers can’t touch.

Me and Aunt Beanie and Hula were planning breakfast on the back patio at Momma’s, where me and Hula lived to make sure Momma did.

Aunt Beanie and me were cutting potatoes in the kitchen, talking about the men who were our men at the time, the things they said to make our bellies dip low and hot.

Hula had been reading to her Grandma in her wheelchair out back, Green Eggs and Ham, her favorite and my favorite, and she’d yell I do not like green eggs and ham! Then shrill laughter tinkling though windows like chimes or drapes in a summer breeze that remind you of clean things like hope and little girl bodies pulled wet and long from the tub.

I walked outside to see if Momma needed anything or if Hula wanted cheese on her hash browns, and Momma, the skin on her forehead lacy with veins the color of water at night, had her head tilted back, soaking up the summer sky hot on top of us, her smile smooth and sure, her necklace caught up in Little Hula’s hair — Willie’s hair — Little Hula cheek-smashed against Momma’s breast, smiling the smile of girl dreams, the book open and dangling from her tiny hand, but held there. And Momma gone.

I thought of Fast Eddie, his philosophy about deciding the way and the when of how you go, of Momma putting her hand out and saying, No sir, not today, I’ve got reading to do with Little Hula here, and God listening.

 

***

Willie came back before Momma’s mind left.

Of course he did, Momma said when I told her. They always do, one way or another.

Then she told me my father turned up on our doorstep the summer I turned nine. She peeled back the drapes and there he stood, his hat in is hand, in the same black suit, too short in the sleeves, he’d worn to weddings and funerals when they’d been together.

What did he have to say? I asked.

Don’t know, she said. I didn’t let him in.

All those years of her lost in the quiet of that room with Employees Only on the door. All those poems, desperate words about her body against his, not knowing where one began and the other ended.

Why? I asked.

You were asleep, she said. I didn’t want to wake you.

Little Hula and me were at the post office sending off bills when I felt a hand on my shoulder. He looked the same. A few crinkles around the eyes, but still dangerously Willie.

Hi, I said. It was all that came to me.

He palmed Little Hula’s dark head, like he should want to touch her but didn’t. At three she already knew to dimple, was already a flirt.

She looks like me, he said.

Yeah, wouldn’t you know it, I said.

What’s her name?

Little Hula, I said.

I thought you were naming her Cheyenne, he said. I always liked the idea of that, Cheyenne.

I did, I said. But it didn’t stick.

He handed me an envelope with an address in south Texas and a telephone number and two hundred dollars in it and drove off in his grandma’s blue Chevy. I pointed the car out to Little Hula, told her in a few years I’d tell her a story about that Chevy, a story she should remember.

I tried calling a few months later, thinking Hula should know her daddy, thinking I should know her daddy, remembering his heat against my thigh, in my belly, but the line had been disconnected with no forwarding number.

Good Lord, Hula, my momma said, what did you expect? 

Then she laughed, shooting spit though that beautiful piano-key gap.