Somewhere Beautiful

There were three billies born in the barn, all still and limp as their mother tried to lick her slick from their fur. Tula stood at the open door and watched as her father slowly took them away while distracting the mother with food.

“Here, here…” he mumbled in his soft voice, sliding the bodies behind him for Tula to move out into the field. She didn’t like the feeling of wet fur, of flesh without any spark beneath it. It struck her what a terrible tragedy she held in her arms and she began to cry, great heaving

sobs that wracked her small body.

Her father came out to check on her after a few minutes, looking down at where she was bent over in the grass, holding the stillborn billy to her chest and nearly screaming in sorrow. The rest of the land was quiet. Far off in the distance a cow mooed softly. Rafferty looked at his daughter again, adjusting his ten gallon hat. It was too heavy for his head and made him look forever curious, neck tilted just a bit to one side or the other.

“It might be something wrong with her,” he explained, not knowing what else to do. He didn’t raise his voice to compensate for her crying so neither could hear what he’d said. “Usually at least one of them lives.”

Tula didn’t move and Rafferty thought she began to look like a toy doll version of a girl. He imagined that her sobbing was a pre-recorded sound and he needed only to spin a windup screwed into her back to quiet her. He looked out into the horizon. Acres and acres of land, green and undisturbed by anyone but himself and now her.

Tula had been dropped off by his ex-wife six months ago. She’d driven as far into the property as she could, then leaned on the horn, hollering his name. When he’d appeared on the porch she’d tossed a bag out into the grass and the girl appeared soon after, stumbling and falling into the dirt road that led up to his house.

“She’s three months along!” His ex-wife had shouted as if announcing it to a crowd. “She’s three months along and I don’t house whores! Let her rot here with you, everything I want comes here to rot with you, Raff. Take her too! Take everything from me!”

She’d driven away after that, reversing down the drive and skidding around to go back the way she came, back to the little bible belt buckle she called home.

Tula hadn’t spoken for weeks except to say she didn’t go by Tallulah and no, she couldn’t have coffee. Rafferty had left before he even saw her in the flesh. She’d existed only as a concept to him, a girl named Tallulah somewhere who was his in some part.

The girl flinched every time he got near her so he’d speak to her from a distance. There’d been a time where there was always a field or a flight of stairs between them.

He didn’t know what to say to her, to make it better. He’d never been good at ease and he wasn’t a warm person, he didn’t think. He was quiet and gruff and tall and most importantly he was just a strange man to her, a punishment her mother had seen fit to subject her to.

But damn, if he didn’t hate seeing her walking around so scared all the time, whispering to the animals and staring out of windows, scurrying away whenever she heard him coming. He hated it almost as much as he hated being made to feel frightening in his own home. Maybe her arrival had been meant as a punishment for each of them. His ex-wife was adept at those kinds of lessons. She never said with words what she could demonstrate with cruel action. 

One day he got tired of it. He knocked on her door and when she answered he told her there’d be a bit of noise but it’d be over soon.

“What noise? What’re you doing?” she asked, moving around her room.

“I’m gonna drill a hole through the wall.”

A beat of silence. “Why?”

Rafferty shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “So we can talk.”

After he drilled a hole through the wall connecting their bedrooms they started to talk. They were sporadic little conversations at first, but as time went on they stretched out longer and longer. They talked until one of them fell asleep at night or in the afternoons when she was tired from being in the sun all day. 

“What did she tell you about me, anything?” Rafferty asked.

“She said you were a pedophile and that if I wasn’t good she’d send me to you.”

“I’m not.” Rafferty said listlessly.

A pause. “I know. She’s kinda a liar. She’s nervous too and she lies when she’s nervous.

She called the cops one day because I said I wouldn’t come out of my room,” Tula said.

Rafferty’s back was against the wall while Tula spoke with her eye to the hole, taking in the darkness. She didn’t like staring out at the empty room, it made her feel lonely.

“Did they come?” her father asked.

“Yeah, they told me to come out and I did. Then they left and she said ‘See that now? See how much power I have?’…I don’t know what she meant by that,” Tula admitted.

“Hm,” Rafferty hummed. “How old are you?”

“Sixteen,” Tula said, proud of her age the way young people were. Sixteen was the height of sophistication to a high schooler. Seventeen and you were past your prime.

“That’s young,” Rafferty pointed out, not knowing what else to say.

Tula blinked into the darkness. “You and mama were seventeen when you had me.”

“Hm.”

Tula kept wailing in the grass and Rafferty slowly bent down and rubbed small circles on her back like he would a baby. He wished he could pick her up. He wished he knew how to

comfort a human, so different, yet the same, from an animal.

“Hey, hey…we can bury ‘em if you want. Would that be better? We’ll bury ‘em and treat the mama real nice for a while.” Rafferty let out a soft grunt as Tula wrapped her arms around him, crying into the nape of his neck. He took off a glove and ran a hand through her hair. It was unbrushed and kept catching his fingers in the knots.

“Promise you won’t kill her,” she demanded, voice high, unsteady. She coughed then sniffed, rubbing at her face with a fist.

“Who? The goat?” Rafferty asked. Tula nodded and he nodded in turn. 

“I won’t, I promise. I’ve never eaten one of my own.”

He’d told her he was gay after she’d trusted him enough to eat at the same table during 

meals and sit next to him on the couch to watch movies on his old cabinet-television. The screen warbled depending on the weather and sometimes the same line would be repeated for minutes on end until they hit it just right or went to the roof to fiddle with the antenna.

“I’ve never met someone gay before,” Tula had said, looking at him curiously from where she was curled up in the corner of the couch. She liked spaces that clung, where she could fold herself and see everything coming at her.

“I’m sure you have. People just don’t go advertising that sort of thing.” Rafferty drummed his fingers against the arm of the couch and listened to the rain beat against the window. The television chattered through a toothpaste commercial.“Well, maybe they do in other places like Europe or big cities,” he conceded, “but not here. It’s easy to do that sort of thing in crowded places, there’s too many names to keep track of to single you out. Here, everyone knows you. Everyone has your number.”

They sat in silence until the movie came on again. It was something romantic that Tula liked. She leaned forward every time the leading man was on screen vowing to take the girl away somewhere beautiful.

“Do you know who the father is?” Rafferty asked, looking out the window. He was glad for the rain but worried the film would stutter and Tula would bear with it the way she bore with everything, voice trembling but saying it was fine.

“Yeah,” she replied, biting a nail. She worked toward the bone, finally peeling it off between her teeth and spitting it into her lap. She rubbed an eye and yawned.

Rafferty turned back to watch the movie. The leads were dancing on top of a bar, singing while an elderly piano player looked on with a twinkle in his eye.

“I have a friend who does a show like this. It’s in the next town over, it’s a little bigger,” Rafferty said, gesturing toward the screen. Tula didn’t say anything and Rafferty immediately regretted bringing it up, dread pooling in his gut. They’d just started getting along and it wasn’t smart to tell her about stuff like that when they were already on shaky ground. 

He reassured himself. At least silence was better than outward disgust. 

“Can we go see it?” Tula asked, a few minutes later. He’d nearly forgotten what she was talking about. He hadn’t expected her to respond.

“Yeah, sure,” he said, nodding. He hid an irrepressible little smile behind his hand as he pretended to focus on the movie. “Sure.”

They buried the goats in the private cemetery behind their house. Rafferty had started it in earnest two years after moving there. Before that it’d just been a few scant graves old enough that their names and dates had been worn away or never carved into the stones. One of his friends had come to him and told him that her wife was dying, there was something in her blood.

She told him over a steaming cup of coffee that the hospital wouldn’t let her see her, the state wouldn’t let her get a marriage license and they were naming Rafferty next of kin.

“The doctors won’t let me see her because I’m not family but I know that’s not why.  

Bullshit we’re not family, how long have—Jesus, Jesus…If her family gets called I’m never going to see her again,” she’d told him, voice sure and hands steady as her glasses fogged up with steam. So he’d said yes and kept saying yes as others darkened his door, some he knew deeply and some only in passing, all entrenched in varying levels of misery.

He buried the animals there too, everything loved was only six feet under. Sometimes he’d wake up to crying in his backyard, sometimes he’d wake up to singing.

He mumbled a half remembered prayer for the billies as Tula set wildflowers on their

shared grave, one hand on her belly bump.

“Do they die a lot? The animals, here, I mean?” Tula asked, turning toward her father.

Rafferty looked at her as a cloud rolled over them, finding her eyes staring at the tombstone. All the women in his blood had melancholy marble eyes. Tula’s were a pale blue like his mother’s, nearly translucent. 

He turned away. “Nah, there was probably something wrong with her, like I told you.”

He had once, as a child, been nodding off in the back seat as his mother drove them to church. A preacher’s sermon was playing on the damaged radio. His voice skipped and crackled in parts but he was warning about sin as Rafferty’s mother turned to him. They were driving slowly toward a rotted-through wooden bridge with only flimsy yellow tape blocking its use.

His mother’s eyes were almost sunken into her face, dark circles standing stark against her otherwise pale skin and her expression was unreadable to him at ten. He only knew that it haunted him. It seemed like she had just made her mind up about something that would change their lives forever.

“Raffi,” she’d said, so quiet he’d had to strain to hear her. Twigs crunched underneath the 

car’s tires and the tape warning ‘UNDER CONSTRUCTION!’ crept closer. “You’d tell me if there was something wrong, wouldn’t you?” His heart had pounded against his chest in dull, forceful thuds. He was jittery with fear but of what he couldn’t say.

The preacher on the radio warned of the devil you knew, of rapists and pedophiles and homosexuals that preyed on the good people in your community. He warned that one might be under your roof, might be sitting next to you right then, right under your nose. Rafferty felt cold. He heard the wood of the bridge creak and the yellow tape snap in half as the car tore through it.

“Nothing’s wrong,” he said, finding his voice buried somewhere deep inside him. He tried to smile but it came out as a grimace. His body was cold and he was shaking. “I love you, Mom.”

She’d let the car keep rolling for a few seconds more before slamming on the brakes. She stared at him a moment, her breath growing heavy as she seemed to search for something before backing up the car and driving the rest of the way to church without incident. He knew then that he could never tell his mother. His stomach hurt for the rest of the day. It still hurt whenever he thought about it.

Rafferty and Tula got ready for the show after the burial. Both of them were sweaty and splattered with afterbirth, tears and snot. They listened to the various animal cries coming through the open windows as they showered and did their hair. Rafferty put a bit of makeup on Tula when he saw her watching him do his own. Golden eyeshadow, blush and stick-on rhinestones like stars across her skin.

“Will they stare at me?” she asked, keeping her eyes open as he rimmed them with black.

The words felt like an echo out of time.

“Why wouldn’t they?” he asked, ushering her to turn around and see herself in the vanity. “You’re beautiful.”

They drove to the next town over while listening to the radio, taking turns singing and learning the rhythm. Rafferty was off-key and Tula couldn’t hold a note for more than two seconds without her voice breaking but they laughed and sang anyway. There was a lull when evening turned to night and Rafferty thought Tula had gone to sleep. The radio was playing something bluesy and slow when her voice rose from the shadows to the right of him.

“It was a black boy named Elijah,” she said. Her voice wasn’t shaking then, it was steady and low and spilled out of her like water from a faucet. Not fast but continuous. “We went to school together and we got teased a lot because we were poor and I didn’t have a daddy, but he got the worst of it. He couldn’t take the school bus because someone tried to set his hair on fire. We walked home together. He’s real sweet, you know? He wants to be a vet ‘cause animals don’t judge or hate or nothing, they’re innocent of that.” Tula began to furiously wipe at her tears, trying to get them before they had a chance to fall. She talked as if she were trying to beat something, as if pausing would stop her from starting again.

“I didn’t mean to get pregnant, I didn’t, but he was fine with it. When I told him he looked at me and said ‘don’t you worry, I’ll do right by you.’ with a real sturdy look. He had a sturdy look. He didn’t smile much but it wasn’t because he was angry, just sad. He had sad eyes but he—Mama didn’t give him a chance. She found me throwing up and went wild screaming whose is it whose is it whose is it and I knew she’d kill him if she knew. I knew she’d send her power down to his house and wipe it off the map so I said it was a door-to-door salesman who came while she was out in the evenings.”

Tula was sobbing by then, pressing her face to the window and shaking with grief. 

Rafferty drove faster, looking ahead, minding the road.

“I was so scared,” she whispered, hugging herself. Rafferty veered the car into grass and unbuckled himself to hug her, crying in unison with her. She was small against him, he could feel her bones poking into him, he could fit her under his chin. He realized that he loved her, this strange girl with bits of him stuck into her at odd angles. He wanted to rearrange the world to suit her better. He felt, finally, like a father and not a man housing a girl.

“I’ll get you to him one day,” he promised her, petting her newly brushed hair. “I’ll bring him here to us, I could use a vet-type anyway.”

Tula laughed low, leaning heavily against her father. For a moment she seemed to wince. When Rafferty asked if she was alright she shook her head then nodded. “He would know how to save them,” she said, looking out the window. “The goats, I mean.”

“I bet he would,” Rafferty nodded. “No doubt in my mind.”

The show was at a bar labeled with one inconspicuous word: Here.

No flashing lights and no windows uncovered. Inside it was a disco ball. Bearded men with feather boas and women holding other women in their laps, sucking jello shots off bare chests.

Everyone smiled at Rafferty when they walked in and a few people waved to Tula. She stuck to his side at first, but hour by hour she unpeeled herself. 

The bar and the people in it were warm, exclaiming at her bump and drinking “in her honour,” making her laugh. Rafferty supposed she hadn’t had much joy around that baby. Even he hadn’t been particularly excited about it. He wasn’t the type to fuss but people needed fuss sometimes, especially young people. 

Something about the atmosphere changed her, imbued her with a confidence that led her to the stage. Rafferty knew that confidence well. If he had to guess, he’d guess everyone in the bar knew it well. 

Once she was onstage Tula hesitated, wincing. The crowd murmured their concern but she waved them off, taking a deep breath. Then she began to sing about a love who was waiting for her somewhere, in a house down by a river somewhere, in a home built just for them somewhere, somewhere beautiful.

The crowd cheered and Tula beamed. Rafferty hadn’t ever seen her smile like that, in a way that made him realize how happy she could really be. 

Rafferty was amazed at her existence. Amazed that at sixteen she hadn’t collapsed under the weight of her own misfortune. He knew he’d collapsed; for almost a decade he was a stranger to himself and everyone around him. He’d brought home girls to show his mother and had sex

with them to have something of his own to talk about in locker rooms.

His life seemed to pass by in a blur until one of the girls he’d brought home and to bed had said; “I’m pregnant.”

Then everything came into sharp focus and he’d stared in horror at what he’d done.

When his wife was eight months along, Rafferty knew he couldn’t be there for the baby. He’d started to collapse again, even further down. He’d started to become a father and a husband and he’d started to love her, a little girl named Tallulah. If he stayed he would become irrevocably buried and so he told the girl he’d married in a courthouse blur that he was gay, half expecting her or God to kill him before he could finish saying it out loud. But she’d only screamed at him, tossing baby bottles and glasses at the back of his car as he drove out of town that same night. He’d dropped out of highschool; he had no family, no friends, no prospects, nothing. But for some reason he’d laughed as he drove, joy bubbling up from his chest as he made his way somewhere.

He never thought he’d see her then, but now, as he watched Tula swaying with the music, he couldn’t imagine a world where he hadn’t.

Toward the end of her song Tula’s voice flickered in and out but she kept going, holding strong at the crowd’s encouragement. Her hands floated around her stomach as if searching for strength from the baby too, and when she finished she was sweating parts of her makeup off, her hair sticking to her forehead. The crowd cheered and she beamed once again, bowing. Rafferty thought she was soaking in the moment when she didn’t straighten right away but then her hand flew to her stomach and she looked up with widened eyes, finding his own in the midst of the crowd.

“I’m,” She grabbed the mic stand and began hyperventilating, screaming; “It’s coming! I-I think it’s coming!”

The bar flew into action, patrons running for the exit and running for a doctor. Calling the nearest hospital and calling for another shot. Rafferty broke a bottle accidentally, climbing onto a table and shouting for help. 

“Does anyone know a doctor? Does anyone moonlight as a doctor in their free time?” He half-dragged Tula to a cleared out booth and propped her up on the cushions.

A drag queen ran to them, pulling off his earrings and bedazzled gloves and introducing himself to Tula, saying that everything would be alright. Raffety knew him, he had a practice in town.

“Just keep calm honey, we’re getting stuff from my car. The good stuff, alright?”

A woman dressed as a sexy nurse ran in, shoving a bag into the drag queen’s hands as someone in the corner loudly took bets about whether the baby would be a boy or girl.

They gave her a shot of something and told her to push as three dancers took turns holding her hand and counting her breath. Rafferty sat on top of the divider between booths so that she could see him every time she opened her eyes. He gave her an encouraging smile as she began screaming, back arching like a woman possessed.

An hour. It only took an hour for the baby to slide from her and be lifted into the air in triumph. 

“It’s a boy!” Someone shouted and a few people grumbled, handing over money before the bar grew hushed at the baby’s silence.

Time froze as Tula took the baby, eyes bleary and arms shaking as she brought the still and quiet thing to her chest. She grit her teeth and whispered in its ear.

“No, no please.” She held the baby closer, her chest ached. “No, you can’t.” she 

whispered, then louder. “You can’t!” Then again, the roar of a lifetime of bearing and bearing and bearing without complaint. “You can’t!” The bar fell silent, mourning and praying and grieving for the baby and the girl.

Rafferty stared at his daughter in numb horror. For some reason his thoughts kept returning to early mornings woken up by crying. Crying in the cemetery, mourners behind his home. He thought of himself crying as a kid in church, crying as he drove away from his ex-wife and his unborn baby after the laughter died down, the baby crying now over the body of her baby. 

Rafferty had never liked crying, but he’d be damned if he wouldn’t give anything to hear some right then.

Tula shrieked once more and before she could gear up again her sorrow was accompanied by a new voice and all eyes opened to see the boy in her arms squirming and blinking angrily, kicking his foot. He was crying at last.

Rafferty leapt up and shouted in joy and the bar followed suit, hollering and hugging

whoever was nearest, people hanging out the window shouting, “He’s alive! It’s a boy! He’s alive!”

As Tula laughed and laughed, the red-faced infant grabbing her thumb so tightly, they seemed to her to be one perfect being that that beautiful somewhere had created.