Valentine

A hungover Corrine finds her husband’s pickup truck gone from her garage. In addition, D.A. has gone missing. The commotion brings Mary Rose from across the street. They discover a napkin from the strip joint on the garage floor with the words “Penwell” and “gas station” and “Jesse Belden.” The two surmise that the strange man and the girl have gone off together. Mary Rose asserts that the man who left with D.A. is Dale Strickland. The thought fills her with “rage and purpose” (249). She retrieves her rifle, gets into her sedan, and heads to Penwell. Corrine follows in her Lincoln, certain that her neighbor is confused and hence dangerous: “Hers is the voice of someone whose mind is made up” (252). Certainty, she knows, is “poison” (252). When the two reach Penwell, they pull up to the gas station (the only one) and spot Potter’s pickup truck parked next to another truck.

They see D.A. and Jesse walking together along the railroad tracks. Mary Rose leaps from her car, her rifle pointing at Jesse. “Let her go, Strickland,” (258), she demands. Jesse, terrified and flashing back to Vietnam, falls to his knees. Mary Rose fires off a shot but misses. D.A. screams that this isn’t Dale Strickland, that she’s helping Jesse get home to Tennessee. Unfazed, Mary Rose begins to reload when Corrine finally catches up and tells her to stop: “You don’t want to shoot the wrong man” (261). Mary Rose rants, “They didn’t do a goddamn thing to him” (262). To a terrified Jesse, she says, “Why don’t we care about Gloria Ramírez?” (263). Corrine convinces Mary Rose to lower the rifle. The tension is broken. They all return to Odessa. Corrine, knowing that Mary Rose could be arrested, convinces D.A. to say nothing. Jesse leaves for Tennessee. When he gets home, he sends a heartfelt thankyou to D.A.

The novel introduces Karla Sibley, age 17, who works the diner in Odessa that caters to the oil field workers. Karla is taught early that the workers are crude but are the best tippers, really the only tippers, in town. She’s told to smile pretty and “laugh at their damn jokes” (274). Karla needs the job. She got pregnant and had to leave high school—she tried homeopathic abortion remedies, but “the pregnancy stuck” (275). Karla’s mother, who works at a factory, helps watch the baby, now nine months old. Karla is saving for a 1965 Buick Skylark—when she sits under the stars and smokes a joint, she dreams of heading to San Antonio with her daughter. She “wants to do something beautiful and true, something that will blow the lid off the world” (285).

One night, Dale Strickland comes to the diner and drinks most of his paycheck. He begins to pester Karla. She brushes him off. “You got a piece of coal stuck up your ass?” (279), he snarls. Karla whispers something to him. Whatever she says, he takes a swing at her but misses. The men rally around Karla—they escort Dale to the parking lot, where they administer a brutal beat-down: “But we all know how this goes. We will all laugh and say good thing he was too drunk to land a punch” (279).

A few days later, the sheriff comes into the diner to ask about the fight. He tells them that someone ran over Dale Strickland, twice, out on the main highway: hit him and then backed up and hit him again. Apparently, Dale staggered around the red mud of the oil field for two days before finding his way to help: “The doctor says it’s a miracle he’s alive” (283). None of the wait staff mention the caked red mud on Karla’s bumpers. That night Karla tells them she’s leaving. The wait staff pitch in and give her $300 and a bag of groceries. The next morning, Karla and her daughter head to San Antonio. It’s Karla’s 18th birthday.

Glory and her uncle prepare to return to Mexico to rejoin Glory’s mother in distant Puerto Ángel. It’s early September. To help his niece heal, Victor lies to her, telling her that Dale Strickland was given a long sentence in the state prison in Fort Worth. Victor wants to get out of Texas and away from the racism, bigotry, hate: “The cops and lawyers and teachers and churches, the judge and jury, the people who raised that boy and then sent him out into the world, to this town—every one of the is guilty” (290). Their drive to the border and then to Oaxaca is long. The car keeps breaking down, storms chase them across the emptiness of the Texas Outback, and Glory is even challenged by a rattlesnake. To pass the time, they tell stories. Victor tells about a rancher and his wife and baby who lived in Texas just after the Red River War a century earlier. One morning when the couple went to the river to do their laundry and left the child sleeping, Comanche warriors broke in, took the baby outside, and shot it full of arrows. There, dead in its basket, it looked “like a porcupine” (301). When the Texas Rangers learned of the attack, they tracked down a random Comanche woman with a baby and summarily blew off the baby’s head with a single rifle shot to settle the score. The shrieking ghosts of the children and the mothers haunted the Rangers and the Comanche, and within five years the men were all dead. The mothers, satisfied, returned to their graves with their babies.

Victor and Glory cross the Rio Bravo into Mexico. Glory feels giddy and oddly free. Victor tells his niece, “You’ve come home from the war” (305). As Glory traces the scar on her stomach, she knows that the scars will soon be gone. She’ll then be the “girl who walked barefoot across the desert and saved her own life” (306). That, she decides, will be her story.