“How are you, George?”
“Old! I got old like everybody else and I don’t particularly care for it, ha, ha. Do you? I added ‘And Sons’ to the sign. And I moved ‘up.’ I guess I’m the con-
sul
-tant now.” He made a two-handed gesture toward the door.
“Well, what are you up to?” He motioned for us all to sit down. “You called from Vegas, right? How are the kids? How’s Robbie?”
“Good,” Will said. “They’re all good. Those kids are out of control. Actually, we didn’t have much time to spend with them, since we were traveling.” When we didn’t contradict him, Will said, “We came to see you about some real estate. I want you to buy some land from me.” He tossed the big envelope on George’s desk. “Two plots out at Wasatch Memorial on Redwood Road. I just can’t use them; Liz is buried in Vegas.”
George looked at the papers. We could see the green borders through the onion skin sheets. “Well, ha, ha, I don’t really
do
anything here. I mean, Bo lets me keep the office so I don’t stay home and drive La Rae nuts.”
“That’s good,” Will said. “I couldn’t keep a desk. I’d forget where it was.”
“I don’t really have any authority anymore, Will.” George slipped the deeds back into the envelope.
Will stood. “George, I need the money. I can’t ask Robbie for it, not right now. Can you talk to Bo?”
George shifted in his chair.
Will went on, “They’re valuable plots.”
George put his palms out to deflect further argument, and then pushed himself up from the desk. “I know they’re valuable, Will. I just don’t know what Bo will say.” George walked out of the office leaving the door open.
“We’ll wait here,” I said to Will’s back as he followed. Louisa stood and leaned against the wall, nodding her head sadly as if this was a wrong address but she’d been here before.
After a while, George came back and shut the door behind him. I could see that he looked like Will from the eyes up, the forehead, the hair.
“Who are you?” Geroge said to me, coming around the desk. He cocked his head, waiting for the answer.
“I’m Collin Elder and this is Louisa Holz. We’re friends of Will.”
“What are you up to?” This question was to Louisa.
“We’re traveling. We’re …”
“Hey,” George said, jerking his thumb toward the door. “He’s eighty-four years old.” Resting his case, he added, “Now, do you want to tell me what you’re up to?”
Louisa pointed her chin at the old man, and she said, “
Wouldn’t
you like to know,” and then she walked out.
When George turned back to me, I checked out my shoes. I said aloud to them, “We’re traveling.”
Will came in. “Thank you, George. That’s a great help.” George still had remnants of some shame-related expression on his face. Will asked me, “Where’s Louisa going?”
“Out to the car. I guess I’ll join her.” I thrust out my hand to George. He took it. “I’m glad we finally met,” I said. “Good luck with the business.”
Outside Louisa was sitting on her favorite fender (front-passenger), leaning on the hood.
“You … ” I said, but she shook her head at me. I went on anyway. “You were good in there. What you said.”
She got into the back seat of the car. “We shouldn’t have come here. It wasn’t fair to Will.”
George had walked Will to the car. “See you later?” he asked.
“We’ll call,” Will said casually. “Don’t look for us until you see us coming.”
That day Will seemed happy to be in a place he knew well. He showed us a few of the pools that he’d installed in Salt Lake. It’s a lovely city, really, so different from Phoenix. All the citizens were raking leaves, no cacti, no skulls. We drove through the residential sections, stopping at certain driveways to walk back and see the pools. Most were already covered, but at each he’d point out some detail of the tiling or the plumbing which was unique. He showed us a pool where he had broken an arm; he showed us the first pool his company had built. It was still operating, along with the small motel it centered. And he showed us the largest pool he’d installed.
It was at this site, in one of the city’s parks, Fairmont Park, where we talked everything over. We sat on a stone wall just outside the drained pool, watching leaves dive into it through the sunny air.
“Now look. This money I got this morning is a bonus,” Will began. “Now you two can fly to California.”
Louisa said, “On the plane?”
“What will you do?” I asked him.
“I can do lots of things.”
“So can we.”
“Look. I can stay with George and La Rae. He’s my brother.”
“You don’t want to do that.”
“It might be easier for you kids.”
“Nothing’s easier for us,” I said.
“What’s he talking about?” Louisa asked me.
“I thought we’d drive. Together,” I said.
Behind and above Louisa a million molecules of cotton from the monstrous cottonwoods dragged the air. Everything in the goddamned afternoon was falling down.
“Want to try the board?” Will said, pointing to the high steel scaffold of the high dive.
“I want you to come to California with us.”
He looked at me. I sensed that he knew
California
meant
impossible
, which it does. We would never get there. Louisa jumped off the wall and walked to the fence around the pool.
Will called to her, “400,000 gallons.”
She said to him, “Well?”
I went to Will and took his arm. Everything from now on was my responsibility; I was accountable and would have to stand up and figure things out. I had started this journey, and there was only one choice now.
“Come on,” I said. “Come with us.”
His gaze ran up my arm to my face, and he smiled, “If you want to drive, we could tune the car, at least.”
And so we spent the afternoon doing errands. I only mention this because errands are activities that you do with your own family sometime before a trip to gain a new sense of accomplishment, of going forward. We bought some thermos bottles and a small cooler. In the automative section of a large discount store, Will selected tiny packages of tools and parts for our tune up.
The automotive readjustment itself took place in a weedy alley on the west side of the city. Louisa sat in the driver’s seat alternatively starting and stopping the engine at Will’s command, while he and I bellied into the hood. He replaced the sparkplugs, handing the old ones to me, one at a time, asking for the wrench every two minutes. When we’d screwed in the new plugs and attached the wires, Will showed me how to adjust the tolerance so that the sparkplugs fired correctly. He had me set the last one, using the small knifelike tool, and when Louisa started the engine the final time, it rose and settled into a fine hum.
That night we did not go to George’s house. We took a room at the City View Motor Court, out near the airport, and we ate a chillified dinner on the Formica counter of the City View Café. Later, I shared a bed with Will, and Louisa sprawled across the other double bed. The two of us stayed up and watched
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
.
I knew it was going to be a great movie when Kevin McCarthy narrated: “I was scared for the first time. Dr. Kaufman’s explanation of what was wrong with the town did not explain the body on Jack’s billiard table.” Louisa had the covers up to her chin, a strangely comforting image. I began to understand:
this is life at home
.
My father was in every commercial, modeling jackets, and strolling through furniture showrooms, and inviting the general public to become bank depositors.
Even later we watched another movie about two people in love in Europe. They kept getting separated by their families and wars. The movie was mainly about the two saying goodbye.
“Run after the train, buddy,” Louisa said to the man in the scene at the railway station. “Touch her hand out the window.”
He did.
“There she goes! Now wave goodbye, you simple shit!”
And the guy started waving.
When the movie was over, Louisa looked at me as if to say:
Try something, you turkey
. But I would not try something. I had kissed her in the car once and we’d had dinner out tonight. I did not know what was going to happen to us, but I vaguely ached to cross the next few bridges before we came to them. I remember confusion and contentment meeting in me and turning into sleep.
*************
Turning west, as we did the next day at dawn, posed certain problems for me, as any good counselor would say. I had a terrific stomach-ache and my vision was blurred. If we went straight west, through the gray desert of Nevada, logic had it that we would certainly enter California and the end of the future as I was beginning to know it. I would confront things I was not prepared for, and could—in no way—prepare for. I thought it all over, and I felt exactly like opening my door and dragging my feet.
I knew what Nevada meant anyway; Salmon had taught me Latin at Noble Canyon.
Ne-vada:
don’t go. Oh, Salmon, you leaping visionary.
As it was to be, however, we would all go, but we would face first things first, and some last things, I guess, just off the Dwight D. Eisenhower Highway only a sharp stone’s throw from the Nevada border.
Louisa drove, singing a song of her own composition called “Palo Alto,” bouncing in the seat, changing lanes frequently on the empty morning highway to demonstrate our improved car’s verve which almost matched her own. The Chevy did run more quietly, and it seemed, as we slipped west, from lane to lane, that the car could make the whole trip without a deep breath. Now Louisa was playing the radio, staying on a station long enough to back talk the announcer, then turning to the next victim. I was glad she was driving; I’d seen the same spirit take the form of “punching game,” which I could never win.
We began to see where people had spelled out their names with rocks in the salt along the roadway. They had slanted the names, BOB, JEFF, BLAIR, REGAN, SKIP, SUSAN, but still it was hard to read them because we were going so fast. We were moving right to left at sixty-two miles an hour, and I only read left to right at about eighteen miles per hour. Every tenth name would snap into focus DAVID! HI! and then we’d have a blur of littered, rocky names.
In the distance, the horizon consisted of low blue mountains cut out like alligators, ruined and reruined by mirages. The traffic was only large and small: oversize loads, semis carrying road-moving equipment, travel trailers, tandem semis, car carriers, U-Hauls pulling Volvos, and a sprinkling of motorcycles. The trucks would pass, taking half our lane, creating a vacuum menace out of the wind; the motorcycles would slip by unnoticed until we’d hear the blurring rip of their motors, sounding like a child imitating a motorcycle. Everyone was headed straight for the ocean, six hundred miles away, to relax with a cold glass of milk and a jar of honey.
Since it was the Dwight D. Eisenhower Highway, Will told us about Ike for a while, and we had a pretty good argument about whether it was better to have a dam or a highway named after you. We decided the
worst
thing they could name after you would be a toll booth. My first vote had gone for a sanitary landfill recreation park.
We edged off the highway onto the sloping bank which led down to the flat salt plain. When I got out, the wind took my hair in a sudden blast. Louisa and I jogged down the bank and onto the white crust. I jumped down first, making inch-deep footprints in the new planet. When she joined me, I held out my hand and said, “Welcome to the salt flats, windiest place on earth.” Her hair was winging.
“And saltiest.”
“Want a taste?”
“Let’s spell something,” she said. “Let’s spell something!” She called to Will, “Come on!”
While they gathered rocks and began arranging them, I walked out through the R in CURT 1978, farther onto the desert. It was gray-white and damp and took my footprints one by one. There was not a plant, weed, twig, leaf, bush in sight. I walked in large circles checking my trail from time to time to see if it was still following me. That was the way it was: a blank salt slate ahead, not a landmark, not a roadsign, and behind: my tracks. I could see little Will and little Louisa by our little car. They were arranging stones I couldn’t even see. The highway drew the horizon between the gray-white planet and the blue-white sky. The hard wind made it seem as if we were on the face of the earth. If I could only be in this wind a while longer, I thought, I might figure something out.
But even as we drove away and I turned to read the rocks, it was still too late. The stones swam in my vision, mixed, and slid behind. They would be future reading.
Will flexed his arms toward the windshield in appreciation of the recent work on the salt flats. When he finally folded them, he looked out and said, “Look at that.”
It was his old tone which I had first heard on the porch at Blue Mesa:
notice this: look; listen
. He was always telling us: look, listen. But now it was too clearly my turn. Ahead the landscape pulled the road under our car like a penny arcade driving machine. Eating me, I thought. Some big thing eating me. I remembered an old cartoon of a woman calling out from her hut to her husband:
What’s eating you?
His head was in a lion’s mouth.
What’s eating you. I have a confession to make: we have nowhere to go. I was kidding about my father. No, I wasn’t kidding. I was lying. I was kidding myself.
What I needed to do, instead of slumping like a beanbag in the backseat was to lean up and say to Louisa and Will:
Listen to me:
I’ve got some news. And spill the beans.
What I did instead, which could be the title for all my activities, was lean up on the seat and inquire, “What?”
“Over there.”
At first I thought he was indicating another of the mountain mirages floating like unstable hovercraft off the horizon but this was another shape. It was more solid, low in the sky, some trick of the desert or the distance.
“Rain?” I asked.
“Sand,” he said in kind of a wonder. “Sand and salt.
Look
at that.”