“Oh, is that what you say? Is that what you say to them afterwards? ‘You’re sweet?’ Is that your postcoital patter?” I moved to the door with a self-righteous step; the action was possible because I was angry and because I had my shoes on and she did not.
I walked out into the white and I squinted out across the broad valley floor, a sandbank rising against the west side of every sagebrush.
It certainly looks like a planet
, I thought. Will and Rowena were motoring toward me in our old pearl Chevrolet. How they had dislodged the vehicle from its own bed, I’ll never know. But the car looked different. It was silvered and slid down the padded dusty road like a new rocket, bright and noiseless, leaving a little plume of dirt behind. When they wheeled into the yard, I could see they were laughing. Will hopped out, and I mean that: he hopped. A teenage act. He acknowledged me with a
Howdy
and Rowena called “Hey, buddy, you lost?”
They both went to the front of the vehicle and Rowena dropped to the ground and pulled most of herself under the front. Will, just as quickly, popped open the hood and looked into the chamber. From where I stood it appeared that they were looking at each other through the car.
Before Rowena had crawled back out, Louisa opened the camper door and hollered out at me, “No, it isn’t!” And then she added with a snide laugh: “
Post-coital!
You and your words!”
“What’s she saying?” Will asked me.
“Better be something about breakfast,” Rowena said, standing up. “Unless she’s going to change the oil in this heap.”
My reactions to the woman Rowena marched through the day. She was a huge woman, the layers of her mounting each other like Alaskan mountains toward the aurora borealis of her hair. When she moved toward me, I was caught by her magnetism, actually her gravity, and found myself moving also toward her. When she walked back and forth from our sand-rubbed car toward the sinking camper, she did what, at first, struck me as a strange thing: she put her arm around Will. And he, caught in the tangible warmth and naturalness and humor of the act, placed his arm in return around the mammalian girth of her own middle drift. As I have noted elsewhere, he was a giant, standing above other men by half a head and the white width of his combed hair. But Rowena dwarfed even him. Perhaps she was his mother, I don’t know. But his face, as they both constructed a day around the rehabilitation of our blasted vehicle, was a changed face. I’m guessing—my forte, right?—but I think he was in love.
She produced, in her incessant motion, every kind of implement known to boy from the many pockets of her skirt: a wrench, a short bit of hose, wire, a brush, a jar of bolts.
“Oh, my god!” she’d cry from underneath the Chev, “these things are easy.” And she’d hand me a bolt.
The mysteries: where she got the oil to replace ours during “the oil change,” a duet she and Will performed on our car; how she knew the method for polishing our windshield clear of its mist of microscopic abrasions; why she sang hymns (in English and Spanish) all the livelong day; who she was; and where she obtained the trout we ate for lunch, after the car was made roadworthy once more.
The final touch on the restoration was whisking the sand out of the thousand small grids in the radiator. For this task I had used Rowena’s stove bellows which did a thorough job of blasting the particles away from the car and into my eyes.
I flushed the cooling system with clean water, using a funnel Rowena handed me from her skirt pocket, and rinsed my face, and we all went back into the dining car for a luncheon of baked and flaking trout (and the obligatory and delicious tomatoes).
Will reclined on the bed on one elbow, working his face with the other hand. He looked tired, having come down from the exhilaration of the morning.
“All set?” he said.
“You’re going to rust, entirely,” Rowena said. “You want to stay a day and paint the thing, go fishing, have some fun?”
“Of course,” he said. “But I’ve got to deliver these kids to California.”
“They’re old enough to take care of themselves.” Rowena looked at me.
“Want to bet,” Louisa said. Then she too addressed me with another of her blatant, smug, nasty smiles.
In a rushing anxiety attack I folded my arms and inspected my shoes. Do you know what it’s like to have your mind in revolution? I mean, certain factions storming the capitol, which is on fire, while other factions run in circles inside burning the files, eating the important letters, the codes. General looting in the streets and criminal elements waving anarchistic multicolored banners from every balcony?
I stood there in my shoes.
“Yeah, well, what the hell do you do out here?” Louisa said. “I mean, besides fish and fix cars.”
“Everything,” Rowena said. “Make fossils.”
Evidently, Rowena did make fossils. She extracted a dresser drawer full of the coin-size impressions of ferns and primal scarabs and was showing the display to her pal Louisa.
“Look,” I said to Will. “If you want to stay, no problem. I know how to drive.” For some reason, Rowena laughed at this.
“No, I don’t think so,” he said. He turned to Rowena and extended his hand. “Thank you very much, Ma’am.”
She just kept laughing and took the hand and pulled him up in a hug. “Lost again,” she said.
Rowena gave Will a red stone with a trilobite etched in it, kissed Louisa, and took me by the shirt and said, “You’re something. Your life may not be all you want, but it’s all you’ve got so stick a daisy in your hat and be happy.” I didn’t know if she was going to close with a slap or a kiss, but she just looked at me. Then she hollered at all of us, “And don’t stop in Wells, for god’s sake. It’s a terrible place!” When we left she had mounted a song (in Spanish), the kind of huge song which was obviously going to take the rest of the day to finish. This was at Rowena’s, no street sign, no zip.
*************
Louisa was wicked with energy, as she always was when she left places, and so I drove to avoid the gas- (and adrenalin-) wasting swerving, to which she was prone. Primarily she sat beside me in the front seat, staring at me.
“Act embarrassed why don’t you,” she said. “Avoid me, you queer asshole.”
Then: “How’d you enjoy Rowena’s camper, big boy?” Things like that.
I would tell them. I would tell Louisa and Will, end the charade. Sure I would, and then what? I would tell them when we arrived in Wendover.
And then what?
You’ve got a great profile, for a boy,” she kept on.
I threaded the car along the sinuous dirt roads, choosing the most defined branch when it forked, heading southwest, toward Wendover. But late in the day, regardless of how prominent the ruts we followed, I could not shake the feeling that we were lost again. When I’d turn to Will, he’d just nod and say, “You’re fine; this seems right to me.”
After a series of rising hills, we mounted one last knoll at dusk and found ourselves on a bare bluff a half mile above the town of Wendover, Utah/Nevada. I could see the lights going on in the gas stations.
Will got out. “What a road. What’s a road doing up here?”
Louisa was toeing the kind of obscene litter one associates with lovers’ lane. Or lovers’ leap. Or the Noble Canyon Home for Wayward Girls. She laughed a croaky little laugh. She was cranking up for some malevolence when Will walked to the edge of the bluff.
“Some storm,” he said. “They got the worst of it.” Along the highway, the only real street in the town, the lights flared from every drive-in and gas station, but there was enough of the evening light to see that Wendover had been ruined by the sandstorm. Directly under our noses a Shell oil sign lay shattered into a million yellow plates on a gas-station roof and we could see newly boarded windows along the single business route. The coin-operated car wash had been crushed like a cardboard box.
At the far end of town, one foot across the Nevada state line, the ten-ton cowboy sign for the State-Line Casino was imbedded in the highway. The red light in the end of his cigarette still pulsed on-off, on-off, and, due to reasons the men scrambling over the sign and between his legs (where two wreckers were parked, their yellow flashers snapping around) could not ascertain, his right arm still thumbed up and down for a ride, repaving a forty-foot arc of the asphalt. The sign had blocked all the lanes of traffic and we could see the cars easing through the Cut-Rate gas station across the street to avoid the tragedy. The men crawling over the cowboy were apparently trying to figure out how to disconnect him and prevent his thumbing from crushing despondent citizens out for a post-gambling stagger.
I closed my eyes and opened them again. It was all still there, glowering.
“Did you see all this shit?” Louisa indicated the orgasmic rubbish. “I mean where are we? Look at this!” She picked up the flattened rag of an old bra.
I closed my eyes again.
This is it
. If it is all still there when I open my eyes, I will tell them.
I did. It was.
It was the one point in our travels when I understood myself to have a distinct choice.
“Listen,” I said.
The moment pooled on me, went deep, and I saw in a tenth of a second my father saying the last thing he ever said to me: “I’ve put you in a school.” I saw Steele laughing at my stories of my real home. I saw myself and all the waiting others call
growing up
. And oddly, I flashed a vision of
Morning Flight
, the sculpture that had killed my mother.
“Why would some cat use a golden rubber?” Louisa said.
I turned openly to Will.
It was a little easier not being able to see his face. And yet. Before he had met me, his life had run in a sensible chronology, an understandable process, which, for the most part, I guessed, had been full of kindness, if not charity and good faith. If I’d left him a boarder in Blue Mesa, he would still be wheeling around the place advising the
Mayor
.
Wherever my father was, he was doing his smile. Wherever he was, he was being a boy. I would see him again. I would see him up the aisle reading the oxygen instructions to the passengers on a transcontinental flight, and when he recognized me I would ignore the “You’ve grown!” and “How
are
you!” and I would only say: “You missed out,” and order another cocktail, double. Whatever that means.
But now, parked hazardously at what was clearly the end of the trail, mid-sentence, I wanted him. He should have written me the letters. It is what should have happened. He was my father. He was the measure between Steele and myself, and without him, I felt, I was lost. Without him I had only illusion, that dread illness, which I had been carrying around in my pocket like a letter for too long.
“Listen,” I said. “Louisa. Will. I don’t know where my father lives. I never had any letters or addresses.” And then I was able to choke out: “He never wrote to me … I … don’t know.”
Through tears, I saw Will’s silhouette melt and the glimmer of Wendover behind him go gummy in the distance. I was in Utah, a skull’s throw from Nevada and the tears came up in waves. Eleven hundred miles, three people, my fault, and no reasons anywhere.
Having people watch you cry as you stand out on a hill in the desert is just a measure or two worse than having them watch you sleep, and the rush of confusion I felt was dizzying. Will moved, walked up and past me, pausing to run his hand across my back. He went to the sanded Chevrolet, opened the door, and leaving it open, sat in the front seat.
Louisa joined him there and sat in the open rear seat, her legs crossed at the ankles. It was then, if I was going to, I should have leaped. But I walked back to them.
Will was plumbing his ear vacantly with one or two fingers, and he was moving a little in what I didn’t recognize at first as laughter. When I came up, Louisa lifted her hands from between her knees and said in a deadpan: “No address?” And they were both laughing, the bastards, in a steady low vibrato, laughing in the car.
The scene dismayed me like a flat slap, as I stood, arms down, and watched my associates giggle. But then after a while Will’s urgent laughing required that I too laugh, and soon tears, loitering near the surface, came again, helpless like orphans, thrown out for no reason, but happy to be getting out while the getting was good.
Louisa rose, clutching her side, and embraced me, hugged my body. I reciprocated, an important verb, limited as I was by the emotional ransacking. It was a pretty good moment there on a black bluff above the broken village, the dark silence measured unevenly by the periodic ha ha ha’s.
**************
Two hours and three detours later we too were in a short line of cars swinging out around the big cowboy’s hat and thumb, which now lay inert, the workmen having found the switch and turned him off. We entered the State-Line Casino to have dinner and think it over, and I was already thinking:
Nevada. Again
. We seemed to be going out of our way to repeat ourselves. As we passed the glass cases in the lobby—full of cowboy hats, perfume, and what appeared to be a sizable spillage of Rowena’s fossils—we heard the first strains of the band thumping out a brassy upbeat version of “Yesterday” from the cave of the cocktail lounge across the casino.
“Want to dance?” Louisa said, taking my arm long enough to press a breast against it.
“I am dancing.”
Will sat us in a window booth so we could watch the work on the fallen sign while we ate bacon and eggs for dinner. Louisa was in a state of malevolent titillation aggravated by the distant throbbing music and my recent confession. She was raging in ironic glee, and my first moments in Nevada were spent in the roaster. She took her clues from the other diners, most of whom ate with their faces in their plates while they outlined how to tell their children that they were now all penniless. Some of them may have been praying.
“Could that be your father in the corner eating noodle soup? Did he like noodle soup?”
I watched the workmen running cables to the large tow trucks between the cowboy’s legs.