A Fiery Side Story: The Blade (Luann and Tali)

Tali sits in a strip-mall salon, requesting a makeover. The owner of the shop considers her:

To Luann, the boyfriend sounded controlling. “He don’t hurt you?” she asked carefully.

This is Luann’s backstory. An expanded side story from the chapter “Chrysalis” in Part 2 of Fiery that answers why she asks the question.

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Tali sits in the second chair at the Curl Up and Dye, a towel at her collar, and Luann works the color into small sections at the crown. In the mirror, Tali is telling her about the boyfriend — the way he calls twice if she doesn't pick up the first time, the way he already knows her schedule better than she does.

Luann's hands don't slow. She has done this shift a thousand times, the comb, the fold, the count of seconds before rinse. But something in her chest goes tight and low, an old door swinging on an old hinge.

"He don't hurt you?" she asks. Careful. Light, so Tali can duck the question if she needs to.

"No. God, no. He's not like that."

Luann nods and says nothing else, because she knows the shape of that sentence from the inside, knows how it can be entirely true and still be the wrong answer to the wrong question. She rinses the color from her hands at the back sink and watches the water run pink, then clear, and for a second she is thirty years old again, standing at a different sink, listening to a radio through a wall.

***** 

The wall was thin. That was the first thing she'd tell you, if she told you any of it. A single-wide outside Piñon Mesa, Colorado, and a wall so thin she could hear Dale on the phone in the next room before she could hear what he was actually saying — just his voice climbing, the rasp it took on when the county called.

Six months of letters before that night. A gravel outfit wanted the parcel next to his machine shop, and the county sided with the gravel outfit, and something in Dale went silent in a way that wasn't acceptance. He came home that night smelling of the Elks Club, whiskey riding under his aftershave, and the boys were at the table with their homework and their sister was on the floor with a coloring book when he backhanded Luann across the kitchen for asking whether he'd eaten. The boys didn’t look up in surprise.

Her cheek went hot, then numb, then hot again. A ring set up in her left ear, high and constant, and she would hear that same ring for years afterward under running water, under hair dryers, under nothing at all. She didn't fall. She put a hand flat on the counter and stood there registering the room — the boys frozen over their math, her daughter's crayon stopped mid-stroke, Dale's chest still heaving from the swing of it — before the word for what had happened arrived at all. Then it did. Fear, plain and total, the kind that empties a person out and refills them with something colder and more useful.

That was the moment the patrol car turned into the drive, headlights on but not bright enough yet before the dusk.

Dale went to the window and Luann watched his shoulders change, watched him read the county's insignia on the door panel the way another man might read a verdict. He crossed to the hall closet and came back with the hunting rifle he kept for elk season, worked the bolt, and fired twice through the screen door before she understood he'd decided anything at all. The deputy behind the wheel returned fire, two flat cracks that took a chip out of the porch post, and then everything outside went quiet in a way that pressed on her eardrums, a held-breath quiet with her own pulse loud inside it.

Inside, Dale was already moving. He swept the pistol off the gun safe shelf and the AR off its pegs and shoved them into a canvas pack, hands fast and sure in a way that frightened her more than the rifle had. "They are not taking this house," he said, to the room, to no one. He turned and the barrel came up level with her chest for one full second, long enough for her to see down the black of it, long enough to understand that in this version of her husband there was a door that had closed and a different man standing on the other side of it. Then he was past her, out the back, running low across the weedy yard toward the dozer parked at the shop.

The deputy had taken cover behind his open door, radio keyed, calling for backup in a voice pitched to carry over his own fear. Luann got the boys down under the kitchen table and dialed 911 with a hand that wouldn't hold still, and when the dispatcher asked if anyone was armed, she said yes, my husband, and then said please don't let them shoot into this house, my kids are in here, over and over until the dispatcher told her to breathe.

The dozer's engine caught with a cough and a roar. She heard the tracks bite gravel, and through the window she watched Dale swing the blade toward the patrol car. The deputy fired once, missed, and Dale answered with the AR, three rounds that folded the deputy against his own door before the machine plowed into the car's flank and flipped it onto its side like something weightless.

Then the blade came around toward the house.

The first hit took the northeast corner. The roofline over the boys' room dropped six inches with a sound like a held note breaking, insulation and shingle raining past the window. Luann already had all three kids moving, her daughter under one arm, a boy's collar in each fist, steering them toward the back door by feel. The frame had bowed in the impact and the door wouldn't give, not a crack, not with her whole weight thrown into it.

The house shuddered again. Second hit, and this time she saw the blade itself through the kitchen doorway where the living room wall used to be, steel and mud and a hydraulic groan as Dale backed the machine off for another run.

Sirens now, more than one, close enough to separate into distinct pitches. She grabbed the trash can from under the sink and swung it into the side window over and over, clearing the frame of glass with the flat of a broom handle until only a few teeth of it remained. She hauled the boys up by the belt and shoved them through, screaming at the older one to catch his sister, and lifted her daughter bodily into the opening, small shoes kicking at nothing until the boy's arms closed around her on the other side.

Luann went next, headfirst, her hips catching at the frame for one long second before the house gave her up. A shard she hadn't cleared opened her thigh on the way through, a clean, deep line of heat from mid-leg to calf that she registered only as pressure, not pain, not yet. She hit the dirt on her forearms and did not stop moving.

The third impact brought the back wall down entirely. She turned in the yard, kids already scrambling toward the ditch, and saw the blade filling the space where her kitchen had been, Dale's silhouette above it in the cab, and understood in the same instant Dale did — she could see it change his face even at that distance — that the machine's next arc would run directly over his own children.

The PA cut across the yard, a flattened voice ordering him to stop, and Dale turned the barrel from the house toward the cruisers and emptied what was left of the magazine into the dark. The return fire came in a ragged volley, three shots, four, maybe more, and she watched him fold sideways in the cab the way a puppet folds when the hand leaves it.

The dozer didn't stop. Untended, it surged forward, blade dropping, engine climbing toward the ditch where her children stood.

She had seconds. Bleeding, one leg gone half-numb beneath her, she threw herself toward them, both arms out, already screaming their names. She got a hand on her daughter's collar and drove all three kids down into the ditch as the blade passed a body's width above them and the machine climbed the far bank, stalled, stuttered, and went still.

For a long moment nobody moved. Then the ditch filled with deputies, with hands, with someone's jacket around her shoulders, and she understood only in pieces — a paramedic's fingers on her thigh, her children’s names in her own mouth, counted twice, then a third time to be sure.

***** 

She was twenty-eight with three kids and a trailer the bank wanted back. She cut hair because her mother had cut hair, because it was the one thing her hands already knew how to do that didn't require anyone's permission. She drove to Alamosa with what fit in the truck bed and rented the back two chairs of a shop that smelled like perm solution and stayed just to sweep floors until the owner, dying slow of something in her lungs, signed the place over for less than it was worth because she liked the look of a woman who showed up early.

Luann kept the name. Curl Up and Dye had been a joke long before she got there, and she'd learned by then that you don't waste what's already funny.

She raised the three of them. She never remarried, though men asked, careful men, men who'd heard some version of the story and wanted her to know they weren't Dale. She found she couldn't hold that kindness against them, and couldn't quite take it either. Some doors don't reopen just because somebody new is standing there being gentle about it.

***** 

In the mirror, Tali's color is nearly done, the last sections folded up in foil, and Luann catches her own reflection behind her client's shoulder — gray at her own roots she keeps meaning to touch up and never does, hands steady the way hands get steady when they've had no other choice.

"You'd tell me," Luann says. Not a question this time. "If it turned into something."

Tali meets her eyes in the glass. There's a pause where Luann can see her deciding how much of the truth to spend.

"I'd tell you," Tali says.

Luann believes about half of it, which is more than she believed from herself once, a long time ago, standing at a kitchen counter with her cheek still hot and no idea yet what the night would cost her. She sets the timer for the color and goes to sweep up someone else's hair from the floor, because the shop still needs sweeping, because the day still needs finishing, because a woman can carry a whole collapsed house inside her chest and still show up, every morning, to unlock the door.