Charky Coral

She died last summer in a flash flood, four wheeling with that girlfriend of hers and drinking in the monsoon muggy heat. They’d hang out in high school all about town sunbathing nude on rooftops where you could only almost see. They’d drink their beer and deepen the shade of their brown freckled shoulders and giggle when a mystified mail man craned his neck up and drove past slow… are those girls…are they…? Charky and Marianne separated at birth and joined by blood rites and barbed wire fences and mud and desert blossoms and rattlers. Each got a tattoo of a lizard on their ass as soon as they turned eighteen. 1

Charky had a baby, then split. Who was the daddy? A Mexican, they suppose, since the baby had such a thick black mane. An illegal in town for the night, they say. The kid stays with family in town, Marianne baby-sits every other night and calls Charky girl on the road, on payphones, hotel phones, tells her about her beautiful child babbling and crawling and playing and No, you don’t need to come back. You need to get the fuck out of this town, just keep running while you can.2

Charky played the oboe all through high school then picked up the fiddle after she dropped out. She got real good, real fast, and played in a little country band for a while. They got a few recordings done, made a little off the effort by selling around Fourth of July, bake sales and other busy days in town. She was some sort of creative genius, most people could tell just looking at her. She was mad and manic and possessed by passion and music and the west. And she did love Mexicans.3

Five years playing fiddle in every town from Tucson to Miami, six sweet Mexicans and an abusive Irishman, seven hundred and eighty phone calls later, Charky feels the love of her girlfriend finally settle real sincere and grief wells up in her breast from the child she could have raised. She gets drunk, gets a tattoo around her waist of a rattlesnake for the one that Marianne had caught for her and scared her so bad that they both beat it to death with a shovel and wooden oar when they were fifteen. She shows up in her hometown on her friend’s doorstep thinner, lighter and far less mature. 4

They buy a trailer together outside of town and raise that crazy half-breed child to love Mexican food and reptiles and dogs and country and Elvis and mountains and mineshafts. That little girl, it soon becomes apparent, has always loved her momma though she holds nothing to her and only expects her to exist. Which is why the moment she stopped her existence is the moment she could stop loving her. She will grow up wild and terrifying to her teachers. She’ll grow up strange and feral and spiteful towards men. She’ll stop loving Marianne, too. She’ll love trees and pebbles and insects and snakes, and they won’t betray her at all. She’s seven now, so all this is yet to come.5

That Sunday the terrible two, Marianne and Charky, had screwdrivers and pancakes for breakfast and headed out into the mountains. The little one was at a friend’s. Electricity spiked their blood and set their wild hair on end, and they fought and shoved and embraced each other, still only school girls and torn sisters at heart. They left their shirts and shorts on a branch, floated down murky torrents in white skin and red-painted toes. Big drops of cool desert rain splish-splashed on their beaming faces, glistening breasts.6

Hours they spent out there, the first time in years Charky had been in that ravine, and they found themselves a band of young, dirty aliens huddled under a giant cottonwood. The blissful, drunken, naked women were ecstatic at their shyness and alarm, and hopped out of the dark brown creek, sat down beside them on dusty blankets and battered what Spanish they did know trying to get the boys to crack a smile. How could they not? The beautiful women talked of las montañas, lluvia, amor, secretos. The boys, baffled but grateful for American acceptance, stripped down as well and waded in undershirts and briefs toward the wild women’s truck. Tequila and whiskey all around, this was una aventura! The women loved their place in life, their bonds of friendship and monsoon heat and desert passage. The rocks and air and hawks circled around their intoxicated heads, singing and celebrating with them.7

Marianne drove back with those boys in her pick-up. They had insisted on coming, though they knew they’d get sent back home. “We’re tired anyway,” they said. “This country isn’t for us.” Marianne crying and ragged and bloody from searching among the rapids and rocks. Boys silent and traumatized. They’ve been near death before, but never so sudden or violent. They were only there to comfort the other one, and get a ride back from la migra. There was no chance her body would be recovered. The rains had swallowed that woman whole.8

It served as a lesson to youngsters, rancher’s children and summer workers. Stay out of the mountains, stay away from illegals; they drowned that poor wild girl because the stupid little thing trusted them. All stories are skewed out of proportion by race and hate and spite. Not many people were fond of Charky, not many people ever got close enough to know her. Her spirit was on fire, and most people shied away from flame.9

Don’t stop even to look at a man lying face down on the side of the road, they say. Chances are, he’ll jump up and demand your keys. Poor Charky Coral, pretty little thing, they bemoan, though they pity her none. She sure loved her Mexicans.