Ain’t No Glory for Billy

Short story by Rebecca Wood, published with Concho River Review, Volume 35.2

Nominated for 2021 Pushcart Prize

Excerpt…

We buried Father out back behind the storage barn. Behind where the sun ate away at the greyed paint. Where the sun made it so that nothing could grow except the yellowed brush. The ground was hard. The shovel piercing only halfway into the ground under the weight of our heels. The wooden handle splintered into our hands, rubbed away the layers of skin between our thumbs and forefingers. Our sweat collected in that spot, looking for a gap in the lacquer on the wooden handle. So, we took turns. Until enough earth was turned away to fit the chest freezer. Then we went for a swim.

We went for a swim to wash the sweat away from our skin. 

“You go by Billy, right?” asked Sheriff Acker, shuffling papers inside of folders. He looked like his son or maybe the other way around. My fingers gripped my knees, the skin turning a purple-red like fingerprint ink. When I nodded yes, he continued. “Ok Billy, let’s start here, how could you and your sister, um, Lydia, move the freezer?”

“We pushed,” I said. His body blocked out my body in the mirror behind him. 

“I don’t believe that,” he said. “It should have weighed well over 200 pounds. It would’ve taken 2 full-grown men to move it. Not two girls, especially in your condition.”

“We pushed it. And then at the edge of the hole, we pushed it in.” The folders held photos. Photos of the ranch identified by little yellow and black plastic number tents. 

“But the lid was facing upwards when we found it,” he pressed. 

“So, you could open it,” I answered. My eyes did not shake in response to his. 

“So, you wanted us to find him?”

“We wanted to go swimming,” I replied.

We were born on the last day of August, during the longest reported period with no rainfall. Over a hundred days without the anvil-shaped clouds, two months into the monsoon season. I was born first, followed by my sister nine minutes later. A nurse bundled our small bodies into identical blankets, pink with those absent clouds repeated in rows as they circled around us. They clipped a bow into my sister’s wisps of hair to tell us apart. Wrote down our names, Willamina for me and Lydia for my sister. Only then did they let us go to our mother’s arms. She cried as she looked at us, eyes closed. 

Father was a righteous man. Mother was addicted to the cloudiness brought on by the pills. Her eyes turned to dust storms after those pills slid down her throat so that she wouldn’t have to look at us as we grew up, infants into girls. When we were still little, we put our faces against hers. The tips of our noses touching so that they were slightly depressed against one another. With our faces against hers, we stared into her eyes. Pointed out any difference we could find between her and us.

“Her hair is too dark,” I said once. The thick black curls hung past her shoulders, unwashed and weighed down unlike the light blond hairs on our arms that glittered in the sunlight; freckles intermixed across our tanned skin. A desert camouflage as we moved between the brush playing and hiding. 

“Our ears are more pointed and our eyes wider,” Lydia said after her turn. She always took longer to say something, studying the smallest details. 

I did not like the warmth of Mother’s breath when we were that close playing our game. If she noticed us doing this, she never let on. 

Unlike Mother, Father never closed his eyes. He slept upright in an old chair in the den just off the front entrance to the house, like a house plant starved for the morning sun. My sister and I woke up to his heavy booted steps as he came up the stairs, shouting our names. Slammed twice his hand against the door to our shared room. Work needed to be done and the men who worked on the ranch were arriving. As the sun set over the peaks, he led us in prayer over dinner, his glass of whiskey already near the bottom. 

They were both products of the same place. She lived down the road from him. He lived down the road from her. They fell in love. He fell out of love. She got pregnant. He became a father. She lost herself. Despite the corrosion of sand mixed with wind, nothing ever changed in this story, in this town, multiplied by every house address with curtains blocking the townspeople from peering in.