Leatherface Kate



Leatherface Kate drank tall glasses of straight bourbon on ice and smoked Virginia Slims cigarettes and lived in a faded blue trailer out behind the El Puente bar, of which she was part owner. She possessed a fifty-percent interest in the roadside drinking establishment, the other half of which was owned by her friend Charlie, with whom she also shared bartending duties. Charlie lived in the nearby town of Clifton; and would commute out to El Puente early each morning, to mix up a Bloody Mary for Kate’s breakfast and then awaken her from an always deep, drunken sleep before opening the bar for the day’s business.

Kate rarely, if ever, ventured beyond the property lines of El Puente. When she wasn’t working behind the bar, she was usually sitting in front of it, smoking her Virginia Slims one after another and drinking bourbon on the rocks with a face that resembled the cracked, dried-up sole of an old shoe; and throwing back her head with a deep, raspy laugh that sounded like something belched up from somebody’s grave and lent her the uncanny likeness to a Halloween skeleton: "Hah-hah-hah, fuck you ... ; hah-hah-hah, go to hell, bastard...." These activities she generally referred to as "managing." She had wine-colored hair and wore a big turquoise ring and boot-cut blue jeans with a large silver dollar belt buckle and western shirts with metal-rimmed, artificial pearl snaps; and though she was somewhere in her fifties, she often - particularly in the morning at breakfast - looked as though she might have been seventy-five.

About twenty years earlier, Kate had moved west from Oklahoma, after abandoning her husband and leaving behind three children who - now grown - had since never visited, phoned, nor written to her. She came out to Arizona with a long-haul truck driver whose name she claimed to have forgotten; and who drove off and left her early one morning, naked and drunk in a motel room in Tucson. Eventually making her way to Greenlee County, she met up with Charlie - whose wife had died of a heart attack two years before while swimming in Chase Creek - and got a job working for him as a barmaid at El Puente. Once she had saved up enough money (since she no longer had to pay for her drinks), she rescued Charlie from bankruptcy by buying a half interest in the bar. Proudly, she could now consider herself a business person and a property owner, with El Puente to show as her own little piece of the American Dream. In the years since her arrival in Arizona, she had tried a number of times to contact her children, but had never received so much as a single reply. Her only news of them came by way of her ex-husband: now at the ages of twenty-four, twenty-seven, and thirty, one was a waitress married with three children in Oklahoma City; one was in the Army in Germany; and one was living in Memphis, unmarried and on welfare with a six-year-old daughter. Kate’s ex-husband had never re-married; and in his letters and phone calls still often asked if she might ever consider retiring in Oklahoma. She told him she would think about it.

On Friday and Saturday nights, local cowboys and mineworkers from the copper pit in Morenci would drive out to El Puente to drink and dance with Kate to the latest country-and-western hits by Nashville recording artists such as Marty Robbins, Tanya Tucker, and Freddy Fender. Kate lived for these Friday and Saturday nights, when El Puente would ring with the twang of steel guitars from the jukebox and Kate’s throaty, sputtering laugh. Generally, she would set her sights on some good-looking young cowboy who appeared as though he might have just been dumped by a girl; and would supply him with drinks on the house and dance the jitterbug with him until he was in the right mood for an evening of drunken sex out back in Kate’s trailer. Then, the next morning the lucky young stud would awaken next to a naked Leatherface Kate with the taste of cigarette butts and dog vomit in his mouth; and would slip out quietly and drive off, sometimes never to return.


Next to her bed, Kate had a small black-and-white RCA portable TV, on which she watched reruns of “Hee-Haw,” “Gilligan’s Island,” and “Bonanza.”


Unlike Kate, Charlie hardly ever drank himself; and when he did, it only amounted to a beer or two. Like Kate, however, he also lived in a trailer¯a shiny old Airstream which, from a distance, rather resembled a giant metallic sausage. When the sun hit it just right, you could see its glint clear over from the main highway, four miles away. In his trailer at night when he couldn’t sleep, he would often listen to radio talk shows on his short-wave, as callers from places like Baltimore and Seattle phoned in with reports of UFO sightings and near-death experiences. He also enjoyed coin collecting, and reading paperback westerns by Zane Gray and Louis L’Amour.

Charlie was a retired plant guard from the copper-smelting operation in Morenci, having purchased El Puente together with his wife and all their savings during his first year of retirement, only a few months before she died. He and his wife - whose name was Helen - had moved down to Arizona from Idaho some thirty years before, just after Charlie’s return from the Pacific toward the end of World War II. He still walked with a slight limp, from a Japanese bullet he had received in the Philippines. His only son, Mitchell, had been killed in action in 1970 in Vietnam. Charlie and Helen had both voted for Nixon in ‘68, but he had since decided that the newly-resigned President - as well as that bastard Spiro T. Agnew - was a dirty no-good sonofabitch.

Charlie was Kate’s one true friend in the world, and he took care of her like a baby. She seemed to fill a void in his life that his dead wife had left open; and though they had never slept together, the two of them were, for each other, the closest thing that either of them would ever again come to lovers. At night after closing time, Charlie would often sit with his arm around her and listen quietly while she sobbed about her children; and each morning he would arrive at El Puente and faithfully walk out to her trailer with a fresh Bloody Mary to awaken her. On the morning he arrived to find her lying dead on the floor in a pool of coughed-up blood and puke, he went outside and sat in the dirt with her drink in his hands and cried.


For the next few days, he kept the bar closed while he made arrangements with a funeral home in Clifton for her disposal. At his own expense, he had her cremated; and her ashes sent back home to her ex-husband in Oklahoma.

Previously published in Tears in the Fence, No. 24, 1999, pp. 34-36. (Blandford Forum, Dorset, UK; David Caddy, Editor).

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