Last Chance Texaco. Rickie Lee Jones

in the world, people who hurt innocent things, people who were also daddies, or uncles, or neighbors.

      My brother had gotten a red bicycle for his eleventh birthday. I was allowed to ride his bike, if I was able to do so. Unable to reach the seat, I balanced on the ungainly apparatus and rode the five houses to the end of our street, then navigated the wide turn and returned to Mother and Danny. I had passed the test and was admitted to the grown-up world of bicycle riders. It wasn’t that hard, really.

      One morning I asked my mother if I could ride Danny’s bike.

      “Yes, but only to the corner and make sure I can see you.”

      I rode round and round in circles at the end of our street. A car came suddenly and stopped right in front of me. It was followed by a second car that screeched to a stop. A redheaded boy jumped out of the first car but then a bigger man in the second car caught up to him. He was swearing as he moved toward the redheaded boy, who seemed to be crying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

      “Son of a bitch, you son of a bitch, goddamn.”

      “I’m sorry,” the boy was crying.

      I felt bad for the redheaded boy because he was so afraid, he seemed so sad.

      The seat was too high for me to stop the bike without falling, so I rode around in circles watching the men until I could place the pedal in just the right position and gently fall over. I set the bike on the sidewalk and moved carefully toward the cars and the yelling.

      The big man looked into the back seat, right over the shoulder of the redheaded boy he had pushed up against the window. Now tears of rage as the man’s fist caught the boy in his jaw, and he threw him down by his shirt as he wept. I was frightened but I approached the car to look into the back-seat window. There was a little girl lying there, a very little girl, maybe two or three. She was lying down on her back.

      I cannot remember anything else. My mind—or fairies maybe—lifted that picture and flew it away on the wings of mourning doves. I don’t remember what I saw. Did I see blood? The child seemed languid, stunned. Did I make that up? I petted her, I spoke to her, but I don’t know what I saw in the back seat.

      Pidgey and I had met this redheaded boy before. He was the little girl’s babysitter and seventeen-year-old cousin. We’d been to her yard to play. I remembered that he was very protective and would not let us play with her. It was noticeable, so we spoke of it as we left the house.

      To leave that little girl’s house we had to cross a fairy ditch. A shaded patch behind her house that filled me with dread. Something told me there was danger there, and it shaped the warning into a pulse, a feeling, a thrill. Perhaps something had already happened there. Or perhaps I felt echoes of time to come, calling to time happening now. Or maybe it was what I now know, that pedophiles are all around lining up to claim the innocent.

      Back on the street, people were drawn by the furious shouting of the father. They broke up the fight and pulled him off the redheaded rapist. The father went looking for the babysitter after he discovered his little girl missing but he found them too late. He pursued the boy in a dangerous car chase through town right up to the dead end where I was riding my brother’s bike around in circles on a warm and sunny Phoenix morning.

      A lady asked me what was happening. “I saw it all,” I said. She told a policeman and he said, “We will come to interview you later on.” Oh, I felt so important, so grown-up.

      The sun had set by the time the officer came. I was safe in my old footie pajamas, wiggling my toes as I watched my mother talk with the policeman. He was standing on the other side of the screen door.

      “Yes, Rickie Lee is here, but she doesn’t know what rape is. She’s only five years old.”

      “Yes I do!” I called from behind.

      The officer veered around my mother to address me. “Tell me what it is.” I stepped up to the screen. “It’s when someone beats someone up really bad.” The officer nodded and said, “We will be in touch if we need your testimony.” He said to my mother, “I don’t think they’ll ask her to testify. She’s innocent, no reason for her to know anything like this.”

      My mother closed the door and we all sat down to watch television. Daddy was home that night. He passed out Eskimo Pies. My dad loved Eskimo Pies. I was safe that night, and in spite of the obvious, all that was cruel and ugly seemed far away from our doorstep.

      The very first week of school, I was excited and engaged. Then the art teacher said I did not need the special apron my mom bought with pockets for pencils and paintbrushes. She embarrassed me in front of the other kids and she didn’t seem to like me. Perhaps that was enough to change my mind, sow a seed of self-doubt. Starting school was too much for me. I started getting boils and headaches. I was very young to start school, that first year they had to drag me screaming down the corridor. Yet I loved playing horses on the playground, and I loved Stevie Barnes.

      I was always pretending I was a horse, no matter where I was. At school I spent my recess minutes galloping past all the other children. One day another little girl started running with me. Soon I transformed all the girls in my grade into a herd of horses, and we ran around whinnying and galloping. By the end of that week of roundups, I couldn’t wait to get to school.

      That’s when I met Stevie Barnes. Stevie and the other boys chased those wild horses like rodeo cowboys. Stevie would catch my braids and I would gallop away, making a three-beat sound of hooves, my hands hitting my hips and my feet running in a two-beat ba-dump. In my childhood I never ran without making that sound. Pa ba-dump, Pa ba-dump, Pa ba-dump.

      If Stevie Barnes ever kissed me, and I hope he did, I wiped it off like spit even though I was very pleased and proud to be Stevie’s horse.

      If there were another book of my life, a different version of myself, it would be one where I grow up with Stevie Barnes and he marries Rickie Lee, his green-eyed mare and childhood sweetheart. I would grow up a good girl and a confident child, pleasing my parents and balancing everything so as not to be too much of anything—too much trouble, too much joy, too much body, too much soul. I would be contained, and all of Rickie Lee and Stevie’s children would be happy grazing in the valley of the sun.

      My first and second grade at Ocotillo School were the only years I was a confident and happy child. My mother led the Singin’ Swingin’ Blue Birds troop (Camp Fire Girls) to a triumphant live performance at the father-daughter banquet. One meeting we crafted wooden bluebirds. I still have most of mine. By the end of the second grade those halcyon days ended with a haircut and a move to a new school district. I don’t know which was harder, the loss of my friends or the spectacle of my braids lying on the salon floor. Either way, childhood was abruptly and forever altered, and not for the better.

       Chapter 2

      Juke Box Fury

      My mother, Bettye, and my nieces

      My mother was raised in orphanages around Mansfield, Ohio. Her parents, James and Rhelda, were unable to care for her. The Glens were a clan who ran full on at life and just kept going.

      My maternal grandfather, James Glen, was the youngest boy in a family of women and a doughboy in World War I. He survived the terrible Battle of Argonne, in France, where mustard gas was used on soldiers. Family lore claims he was badly damaged by the gassing, and for the rest of his brief life he drifted, jobless. I don’t know how he felt about his children. There was only one encounter between James and my mother. There are no pictures of him. He died of tuberculosis while my mother was still a teenager, and I do not know if anyone came to his funeral.

      James Glen returned from the blown-up fields of France and against his family’s wishes, married a teenage girl,