We sat down. I noticed Louisa’s face was very red from the walk, but she was sweating only a little. The woman with the gun came over, and I ordered nineteen sodas.
“Sodas in the machine outside,” she said around a toothpick.
“What time does the bus come?” Louisa whispered.
“No bus.” The woman, somebody’s mother, moved down the counter to meet a heavy man who had just entered.
“I’d like to get a room,” the man said.
“No bus.” I turned to Louisa. “I’m sorry.” In a way I was.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Sure.”
“Want nineteen sodas? I promised.”
“Nine will do.” We went outside to the red antique Coke machine. There was one car on the gravel apron of the No-Brand, one of those slick car-truck things that I could never figure out. They look like cars, but are pickups. You’d have to be ashamed of what you’d be doing with it to buy one. Inside, in the air-conditioning, the man’s daughter waited. She looked like Silli, only younger. I started entering my coins in the cold-pop gamble and came up with four cans of Coke for my fifty-five cents.
“Must be our day,” I said.
“Yeah.”
I sat in the shade beside Louisa who leaned back against the machine. She didn’t look well at all. All the redness in her face was gathering around her nose and eyes. I watched her face for a moment and I could see the colors moving like clouds in the sky.
The big guy came out of the office-lunch counter and climbed carefully into the Ranchero as if he were testing the springs. The vehicle rocked to meet him and the girl came against his side like a magnet. No, not his daughter.
”Hitchhiker,” Louisa said as the car cruised around the building.
“You don’t feel too hot, do you?” I asked her.
“Does the bear shit in the woods?”
She drank both Cokes fast, and I could see they didn’t help. My own tasted odd, I mean stranger than the tin-can taste they have; it was a strange taste that my dehydrated body set up.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” Louisa said.
I swallowed the rest of my Coke, and thought about those commercials Steele and Rawlins and I used to watch on T.V. The ones where teenagers are riding horses in the sunlight into the water, and cold water is beaded everywhere, and the kids jump off the horses and grab bottles of Coke out of the river and chug-a-lug them to the music. The girls are laughing at the guys in the water. Someone has just thrown a little water on someone else, maybe, and the girls cock their heads that coy way. Steele used to cry unrepeatable wishes at those girls. Coke. The secret formula of Coke. I tossed the can onto the gravel.
Well, here I am full of Coke in Wikiup, girls. My companion is in the John entertaining the first spasms of heat stroke, and behind me, the primary hostess in Wikiup is twirling her six guns through the air.
I felt a chill and then a drawing cramp in my gut. Dizziness. I felt faint and lay back, but it got worse so I got up and found the john where my body made a reasonable attempt at rejecting me.
When Louisa joined me later on the No-Brand’s board steps, I was carefully holding myself still. She looked washed out. Her face was the gray-white of ashes, her eyes dark in their sockets.
“I’m sick,” she whispered.
“I’m weaker but better. Must be something going around.”
“I’m sorry.” She looked at me, her eyes blue pain.
“Forget it. Feel like eating?”
“No.”
“Feel like traveling?”
“I don’t feel like being harassed or raped or thrown in the goddamned bushes.”
“Me neither.” I got up. “I’ll get us a ride to California.”
My father lingered on his patio, the California sun burying itself sheetwise beneath the ozone. Setting down his fourth cocktail on the rock wall, he checked the driveway for my cab.
At twilight, the guy and the baby-doll girl came out of their trailer and boarded the Ranchero and pulled up for gas, but Louisa shook her head at me so I didn’t even ask them.
Two motorcyclists came in, but I let them go too.
A light green van drove in at dark. It was a passenger van with lots of windows and the words “Blue Mesa” shakily handpainted on each door. The driver was a young guy, bald with a long fringe, and he was in a hurry. His Ban-Lon sports shirt was circled with perspiration. Louisa gave me no sign either way, so while he was pumping the gas, I asked him whether my sick sister and I could have a lift.
He looked over at Louisa, and said, “To Kingman. Sure. I’m going to Kingman.”
As I helped her into the van, I told Louisa, “I don’t think he would have raped us or thrown us in the bushes. Grebco. I think it was just a lesson.” She closed her door and I got into the second seat. Her face was a stricken white, and from time to time her eyes would narrow in what normally would have been a full grimace if she dared to let go. I still felt punk myself, but it was good to know we were moving now.
The driver was not at forty-five miles per hour when Louisa started on him: “Okay, listen: we just want a ride. If you bother us or yell at us or put gloves on we’ll tear your fucking head off. Just be nice to us or shut up and drive.”
It was a memorable little speech delivered with little visible emotion, but it was convincing.
I
was even convinced, and started thinking of how I was going to tear his head off. He had a pretty big neck.
“Easy, lady,” the driver said. His voice was smooth, even, as if he’d had a lot of practice speaking with the hysterical. “I’ll drive and you ride.”
The moment was so awkward that I had to say something.
“What do you do?”
“Don’t talk to him!” Louisa said to me.
He laughed. “You take her to parties, too?” he asked.
She leaned against her window in a flat sulk. “Well, I was a teacher. Kids your age, but there’s no money in it.”
“What did you teach?” I asked.
“History.”
“Where was George Washington born?” Louisa snapped.
The driver snorted a laugh and shook his head. “Spunky chick. Well,” he said to her, “where was he born?”
“Shut up or we’ll tear your head off.”
“Wowie,” he said and settled into driving. He turned the radio on to a ball game: Albuquerque versus Phoenix.
“What is this Blue Mesa?”
“It’s the retirement … a rest home I own.”
“A rest home?”
“Yeah, The Blue Mesa Boarding Home.”
The word
home
sounded very, very queer.
So we drove on toward Kingman as Phoenix slowly lost the ball game, walking everybody they could. I told the ex-teacher about Grebco and our travel plans: “We’re going to Palo Alto to join our father in a life of security and comfort.” When I told him we were short of funds, he offered to lend us bus fare, but I declined, watching Louisa’s reflection.
When Louisa finally did speak, it was to request a stop. She got down and was sick behind the van. I tried to help her, but she pushed me away. When she got back in, she lay on the back seat and I moved to the front.
With Louisa spread out in the back, the driver’s offers of assistance assumed a new relevance. His name was Jay Stisson. When he said we could have a place to stay and temporary work—if we wanted it—at his boarding home, I accepted.
At the time, Jay seemed so simple. At least: manageable. One of those ordinary guys making his way in the world as best he could, who shrugged a lot and seemed to tell you all his business in fifteen minutes. I didn’t sense his simplicity as being the single bright blade of his greed.
If you think I am naive, try walking down the street and pointing out the villains.
*************
Phantom morning. Not day, not night, no color, gray as old water.
Why am I awake?
Phantom light and no breeze. “
Naw law! Naw law!
” rose to me, an Indian chant, a song, a dirge.
I will return to sleep now, all right?
The night before, Jay aided me and a nurse, the nurse Ardean, to place Louisa in bed. He entered the activity of undressing her with a relish not associated with health care. Vigilant, I waited for him to descend the stair before going into my room to sleep. “
Lola! Lola! Lolalola!
” flew up from the house. I stood out of bed.
It is morning, but the first printing
. From the narrow room, I could see a thousand miles of desert under first light, under water. Below the third-story window, an old man slept on a couch which had been dragged halfway into a sagebrush. “
Naw-ah-law! Law! Naw!
” The house must be haunted.
Wake up. There are spirits singing in this place
.
I pulled on my pants, careful not to bruise my head on the slanted ceiling. I checked Louisa in her room across the hall: asleep. The stairway was more like an old ladder, and I picked my way down two flights and stepped out onto the rough concrete porch.
Two apparitions stirred. They were at once the largest and the smallest visions I had ever seen in wheelchairs. One man would have been about six-five if he had stood, and his white hair spilled back over his head like a motorcyclist’s, or a poet’s. I thought the other form was a shrunken black woman in work clothes. I was wrong.
“There he comes!” the big man said, pointing to a set of headlights fronting the gate of the barren yard.
I am in time for the milkman
, I thought.
Here comes the milkman to the haunted palace
.
“Watch this!” the man said again, this time including me in the instruction.
We watched the lights approach and become a pickup truck. It circled the drive and pulled up before the mansion. It was not the milkman. A boy, about two years older than myself, jumped from the cab and leaped into the bed of the truck the way men mount horses in the movies.
The small, dark figure laughed.
The boy in the truck wrestled a thick chain from the load and manhandled two cylinders off the back of the vehicle. Before the dust settled, the boy was on the ground like a calf-roper and he had them upright and rolling up our ramp.
“Morning, Mayor. Hey, Will!” he said passing us, and rolling on into the house. As he opened the door, the “Lola! Lola” came up a volume.
“Now this,” the large, white-haired man said.
The boy walked out of the house, jumped off the porch, ran to the truck, slammed the tailgate, swung into the cab, waved, and turned the truck out and away.
The two men on the porch were laughing fully.
We have come to the wrong place
, I thought.
This is the funny farm
.
“God, but he can jump around!” the “Mayor” said. “
He does jump around!
”
I was in the company of Will Clare, big bones and white hair, and Mr. Daniel Duke, called “the Mayor” because he had actually been
the
mayor of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.
And I was in other company, as well, I was to learn in our days at the Blue Mesa Boarding Home. I like that word
learn
, though it doesn’t really speak about the ghosts waiting in the wings, nor about the smells and cries for help.
Behind me, in the main hall of this strange mansion, I found several of the elderly residents standing in their steel walkers and sitting in wheelchairs in the half dark. It was like a traffic jam in
Night of the Living Dead
. A few of the gaunt faces rose to my own as I entered and terror flashed in their eyes, as if I were a Martian. The hallway itself was one of those places that mugged you instantly with the overwhelming sense that individuals had been sitting still for years, consuming bad fish.
Louisa swam in a high fever for a day and a half after our arrival. Ardean, the resident nurse, looked after her, and told me that it was mild heat stroke. Ardean, herself, was a round, triple-widow, used to caring for men. She was a good-natured straight-shooter, nonchalant about grief and the fact she was a three-time loser in the inheritance game.
Louisa couldn’t keep anything down, and she looked terrible lying there, eyes swollen, sucking on a wet washcloth.
I told Ardean that we were on a late summer adventure, working here and there, just for the “experience” and that my sister and I would be staying a few days to earn some money, and then heading home to California where my father hosted the game show, “Hi-Way Robbery.”
It was good to be stopped and to have shelter even if Jay Stisson was as weird as everyone else. The Blue Mesa Boarding Home was actually a gerrymandered mansion, once the home of Clifford Ortiz who was a cousin of the original miner, Silver Kingman. Jay Stisson had bought it and the nine acres of wasteland around it for taxes. It now resembled a polygamist’s dreamhouse: an annex in every direction, none quite completed, but full of family anyway, the desiccated, the decimated, and fully cooked.
I began working in the kitchen with an old rabbit with scared eyes named Leonard who was Jay Stisson’s second great uncle or something. He didn’t speak, just washed the dishes and stirred the broth. Many times he appeared to be weeping, but I couldn’t be sure, and I figured this was just the way life had formed his face. He shuffled across the worn gray kitchen linoleum in no shirt but an apron, and I simply tried to stay out of his way—not touch him!—and guess what he wanted me to do next.
I enjoyed the work: plunging my arms into the hot soapy water, rinsing off all the white Melmac dishes and stacking them in the wire rack to dry. It was clean and orderly, though everything was centuries old and run with tiny lines—the sink, the dishes—and, at times when we weren’t cooking, the kitchen smelled as if somewhere deep beneath the floor something dead enacted an age-old biological rite.
*************
The second day, as I did the rhumba-hustle with a two-gallon tupperware shaker in which we mixed the powdered milk, big Will Clare rolled into the kitchen and announced: “The new nurse, reporting for duty.” Behind him, Louisa wandered into the room. She wore one of Ardean’s blue nurse uniforms which shrank her even more than the fever had, and her eyes bore the wide-open fishbowl quality I’d seen last in The Death Car.