South of Elfrida (12 page)

“You won't see him,” Louis Shaw says. “He's depressed.” She's glimpsed a figure, ducking in and out with something in his arms. “We have a cat,” the man says, following her eyes, a man who has an answer for everything. She wonders, nonchalantly, if they're nuts—the skulking son, the blunt man, the cat. Probably feral, the three of them.

A cactus wren, a confident bird with a distinctive eye stripe, stalks out from under the brush to check the tire treads for treats. It disappears under her Explorer. Louis Shaw says, “Arizona state bird.” He looks down at his feet. Nina watches him, curious. He murmurs, apologetically, “I want to make love to you.”

At first she wonders if she's heard right. She peers at him as he raises his head. His eyes are hazel. Dark freckles spread across his cheeks, the skin fine against the hard bone. The expression on his face is pleasant. She waits to see how she feels. Not panicky. Not anxious. Not afraid. She says, “You would, would you?”

Her comment brings a shy nod, some twitching in the hands.

“That's lovely.” She touches her cheek, looks sideways at him. “I have a bottle of wine. Would you care to sit down? You'll have to bring your own chair.” Inside the camper, she locks the door as a precaution, and slips the pasta out of the strainer into a bowl, tosses it with olive oil, puts a plate over it. The wine is already chilled; there is nothing as reliable as a Dometic-brand three-way fridge. She fluffs her short hair in the mirror over the sink.

She climbs onto the bed, reaches into the elongated storage space above it for the wineglasses, and unwraps them from their protective towels.

“It's only a cheap shiraz,” she says, outside again. The camper shields them from the highway, but she's heard a string of fast cars go by. Dust floats in the hot air and settles slowly. “Red,” she adds. Some people don't know a white grape from a red one. He's brought a typical aluminum folding chair. Green stripes.

“Oh, I know.” He looks at the label. “The Australians are oaky. But the wines are predictable and generally inexpensive. A good bargain.”

She smiles, offers him the expensive corkscrew.

He places the bottle on her step. “I see. You're a connoisseur.” The cork eases out with a subdued pop. “I shouldn't drink.”

So he's an alcoholic. Perhaps there's a weakness in him that his son has to look after.

“It's Lent. I was giving up wine for Lent.”

“Oh.” That information makes her mind reel in another direction—religion, responsibilities, respectability. “You should have told me. I wouldn't have served you wine.”

“You don't have to serve me anything. We don't have that arrangement, do we?”

“An arrangement.” She laughs. “Nicely put.”

She sees a warm glow spread across his face. She likes a smart man.

He pours her a glass, pours his.

“But I thought . . .” she says.

“This is an exception, an occasion, meeting such a fine lady in what would otherwise be desolation. Though, as I'm sure you know, Needles has its modest fame. John Steinbeck himself reported that the Joad family stopped here.”

“
Grapes of Wrath.
”

He corrects her. “
The Grapes of Wrath.
”

Nina nods and, taking her glass, looks at him over the rim. “A song: ‘I headed for Las Vegas, only made it out to Needles.'”

His head lolls back. “Ah,” he says, coming forward, index finger up. “‘Never Been to Spain.' The group?”

“Three Dog Night. I've had it blasting away all day.”

“Never mind,” says Louis Shaw.

“Never mind?”

“A hit in, what would you say, the 1970s?” He touches the rim of his glass to hers. “To success.”

Nina sits upright in her chair. “Success in what?”

He cocks an eye. “Finding whatever you're after.”

“What makes you think I'm after anything?”

“‘Never been to heaven—'” He's quoting the song again.

She laughs and holds out her glass for more.

The cactus wren, an insect in its curved bill, scoots across the ditch to the brush on the other side. Nina notices a segment of barbed wire fence she hadn't seen before.

Louis Shaw says, “I surmise you've intuited that I'm a man who can't control his words. Why did you offer the wine? You weren't frightened? Insulted by my remark?”

She feels the buzz. “No.” She was flattered in the skewed way that happens in between the times you know what you're doing.

“At our age,” he says, “we haven't time to waste.”

“Indeed.” She rethinks his plainspoken words.
I want to make love to you.
She misses sex. She glances across at the man who knows she's looking. He's put his glass on her camper step, taken off his hat to fan a fly away from his face. She wonders what his penis is like. She thinks about the shapes and textures of some she's known. One blunt, fat, and rubbery as a wine stopper. Another sharp, with that mean little curve that the man liked to use, holding her up so that her back arched and he could see the shape of the head of his penis inside her. How thin she was then, all hip bones and a recessive pelvic floor. The one that felt too thin, too long, her vagina unable to get a grasp on him, slippery in other ways too. She had loved looking at the penises, lifting them to study the undersides. It seemed a miracle of construction, the way a penis connected to the testicles and the testicles connected themselves to the body.

The cactus wren, perched on a eucalyptus in the distance, calls in its harsh, unmusical syllable that starts low and gathers speed. When she does go home to Oregon, she will miss the sound of that bird.

The air has cooled. Trucks rumble past with running lights on. Nina touches her shoulder. A star is working at being seen. She looks across at Louis Shaw, who smiles as though he shares her thoughts. She nods, acknowledging that he, too, has a history.

His fingers mesh to keep the twitch at bay. “I want,” he says. “I am compelled to say it again. I want to make love to you.”

She understands that he has a tic and that he is not a dangerous man and that his words mean merely the natural connection between a man and a woman. “I can imagine it,” she says. “You would be good.” She drinks. Whatever attempt at sex she and this odd man might undertake would be memorable only in the odours and awkwardness, the ordeal of removing underwear in such a small space, the two of them struggling.

“In Oklahoma, in Arizona, what does it matter?” She moistens her lips, settles back in the chair. Says, “Oh, God.” She holds the glass in front of her face to keep back a wayward laugh. “Oh, God,” she says, closing her eyes.

He makes a sound like a chuckle. His mirthful sound, a burble of good feeling, makes her smile. The cactus wren picks up the pace with its
cha cha cha
. A light goes on in the Prowler. A rustle of warm wind lifts her hair.

She wakes early, dabs the grit out of her eyes with water, runs her fingers through her hair, smears on a pinkish lip coating, and steps outside. The Prowler is gone, as she knew, of course, it would be. “This ain't no thinking thing, no left brain or right . . .” Country songs, she's finding, give solace and advice. She throws the chocks in the bin, checks the hitch and stabilizer, and heads for the California coast, to find a special place at the ocean, another request of Miriam's.

Nina dries a brush with a rag and lays it by her paint box, lifts the phone, and dials. Waiting for Miriam to pick up, she looks out at the sky above the roof next door, a riotous blue, streaky with clouds. Mourning doves coo and strut on eaves. The phone on the other end rattles. Nina waits. She listens to her mother's breathing. Nina asks, “Are the birds at the feeder yet?”

“I'm taking my time this morning.”

“Are the finches there yet?”

“I don't know.”

The feeders are new. Nina put them up for her mother's amusement. “Can't you see them from your chair?”

Now Miriam isn't talking.

“Mother?”

“I'm in bed.”

“Why are you in bed?” Nina knows why Miriam is still in bed. Parkinson's is building in her brain like the flow of bad news on
TV
.

“Never mind,” her mother says. Hangs up.

Nina has rented a one-room apartment, close to Miriam, the travel trailer parked out back. She glances at her easel, a watercolour sketch of the Catalina Mountains with a focus on Table Rock. She did it
plein-air
. Not bad, but she has yet to capture the quiet observance, some as-yet-undefined quality inherent in them that makes your eyes look up. Wherever you are in Tucson, you are aware of the Catalinas. She dials again, takes a breath. “Is now the time? Should we go now?”

“Yes.”

Online, Nina reads: “The Gentle-Ride Suspension U-Haul moving trucks ensure that even your most delicate possessions benefit from gentle cross-town or cross-country transportation.” She loves the phrase “even your most delicate possessions.” Frank would laugh. She drives over to the U-Haul outlet, signs the papers to rent the seventeen-foot Easy Loader, the cargo van with the widest and shortest ramp. She practises driving in a supermarket lot. Inside the supermarket, she steers a cart through the aisles, buying supplies.

Miriam has told Nina that she “just wants to look at the ocean one last time” before being carted down the hall to seriously assisted living, the part of the residence where they put you in diapers, she says, because it's less trouble for them than to inch you to the bathroom every—oh, in Miriam's case, every hour, and that's on a good day. If Nina will only drive her out of the desert, across the Laguna Mountains, west to San Diego and north to a secret cove Nina found, Miriam will say her farewells to the ocean. Nina has discovered that everyone who lives in the desert dreams of the ocean. She imagines Miriam has in mind the scene from the movie
Little Big Man
, the one where the tired old chief climbs a hill, says his prayers, and waits to die. Instead, it starts to rain and the old man gets up. Miriam probably believes her own plan will work, due to her especially strong will. She'll sit in her chair, the oak chair with legs ending in toes of lions; she's already told Nina that much. The feel of the sea rising and falling, swirling around her ankles and feet, no matter the condition of those feet—the bunions, the scabs, the gnarly ingrown nails—none of this will matter, because when the first wave breaks, Nina imagines that Miriam believes she will be cured of this life and die. “Ah,” Miriam says and closes her eyes.

“Are you practising?”

“What? What? I'm an old woman half asleep.”

Nina is perched on the ottoman changing the batteries in Miriam's
TV
remote. “I'm hoping we see a green flash.” She visualizes a riotous, no-holds-barred sunset for Miriam, with that special spark at the end, a flash of green as the sun disappears over the horizon.

“What? What?”

Nina interprets these grunts as questions. “A green flash is when the refractive light . . . curvature of the earth . . .” She stumbles around in the definition. Frank would explain it so charmingly a kindergarten child could understand.

“I miss him too, you know,” Miriam says as Nina hands her the remote.

Nina's eyes smart at the suddenness of Miriam's statement. She recalls a couple she met on the Oregon coast, checking out of the motel the day after they'd arrived. The woman, wearing a head bandage and an eye patch, had brain cancer. Too tired for a vacation. “God's will,” her husband had said. Nina waved goodbye and ran, frantic and beside herself, across the sand to the ocean's edge, where she railed against God. As the sun slid below the horizon, she saw a green flash.

Miriam is pounding her little fists on the chair. “I have never in all my years of living on the ocean seen a green flash.” Miriam was raised in Washington State on the Olympic Peninsula, and to hear her tell it, she practically lived at the beach. Nina has heard the stories many times, the families—cousins, friends—packing the cart with real dishes, real silver, the horses and their driver arriving after the Studebakers. Summer at the shore, in tents. Under umbrellas, the women fanned their plump faces while the children played in the sand. The men returned to the camp on weekends.

“Maybe this time,” Nina says. The slatted blinds at the open balcony door rustle. The air smells of orange blossom.

It's mighty strange for a U-Haul the size of the one Nina rented to show up at the residence entryway when no one has died and a family isn't hauling out furniture. The patients parked in their wheelchairs in the shade of olive and ash trees think they may have missed some news: “George was watching the
TV
one minute, then gone the next.” That's the story they like to hear.

Nina carries an empty suitcase up the carpeted elevator to her mother's room, packs the clothing Miriam has managed to lay out, sweeps the counter of creams, lipsticks, and the pastes to hold teeth in, and treks down. Up again, she drags the chair with the lions' feet to the elevator, and sails down. Her mother's chair has a broad, strong stance and a tight, black leather seat cushion. She pulls it up the ramp, into the back of the van.

“There,” she says to those gathered.

“You need to bungee it,” an old man points out, finger shaking.

Nothing gets past these people, but Nina has thought of that too, as well as two single foam mattresses, bedding, pillows, a porta-potty with stabilizers, and a cooler loaded with bourbon that her mother likes, with water, and vodka and tonic for herself. Crackers. Wheat thins, her mother's favourite. Saltines. Smoked oysters, toothpicks. Cottage cheese with pineapple pieces. A jar of pickled eggs.

The group watches as Nina helps Miriam out of her wheelchair, pushes the chair up the ramp, and straps it down. Nina brings a step stool around to assist Miriam into the van. When her mother is settled in the passenger seat, there's a smattering of applause from those not holding on to walkers. By now, jokes fly about Miriam's journey.