Zigzag (23 page)

I'm sorry you have so much homework to do—doesn't seem fair in the summer, does it? Does your snotty roommate speak Italian well? I'm sure yours will improve over the summer since you know so many Italian kids.

Iris wants me to take a late night walk with her under the starry skies of Texas, so I'll have to wrap this up now. She probably wants to ask my advice about boys or something—it's like finally having a little sister—so much fun!

Miss you! Buenas noches.

Love,

Robin

It's not like I was really lying to him. Most of what I said was the truth. Okay, maybe not the part about taking a walk with Iris and thinking of her as a sister. And maybe I exaggerated the cowboy friendships a little bit, but when I read the letter over I was surprised at how much of it was actually true. I
did
love watching the western landscape change from state to state, I was getting along better with Dory and the kids, I
did
think Marshall was a terrific artist for a ten-year-old, and—most surprising to me—I
did
want to be part of the “big world out there.” I was starting to love the traveling for itself.

After I reread the letter and sealed it up to mail, I was feeling so many emotions I didn't know what to do with them. So I called my mother.

“Robin!” Mom said when she heard my voice. “I didn't expect you to call this evening.”

“I know. I just wanted to talk to you.”

“Is there something wrong?” I could hear her pull out the stool in the kitchen to sit down.

“No, not really. I just got a letter from Chris and he's having a great time in Italy, and . . . it just made me feel kind of rotten.”

“Oh, Robin. You don't want him to have a bad time, do you?”

“No, but . . . he's making all these friends. Girls, too. I'll never even meet them.”

She sighed. “Well, this is the beginning of the hard part, honey. When he goes away to school he'll make new friends, too. And when
you
go,
you'll
make new friends. That's the way it works.”

“I know, but . . .” Tears started to roll down my cheeks, even though I tried to sniff them back. “I don't want to lose him!”

At first Mom didn't say anything. I know she could tell I was crying. “If I were you,” she said finally, “I would try not to look too far into the future. Enjoy what you have right now. Everything changes, Robin, and I'm afraid crying about it doesn't help.”

It was her usual good sense advice, which sometimes made me crazy, but tonight it seemed just right. I reached for a tissue and blew my nose.

“How's everything else going?” she asked. “Are you still in Texas?”

“Yeah. We leave tomorrow for New Mexico. Dory is really looking forward to Santa Fe.”

“Oh, I'd love to see Sante Fe. Take lots of pictures to show me.”

“I will. I really love seeing all this country, Mom. I'm glad I came.”

“Good. How are the kids?”

“Some days fine, some days crazy. I like them, though—I mean, not all the time, but basically, they're okay. I think all three of them mostly need somebody to talk to. Sometimes I feel like their therapist or something.”

“Oh, dear.”

“I don't mind it. I feel like I'm helping them. It's good.”

I could almost feel her smiling. “Robin, you'll be fine, you know that? No matter what happens to you, you're a survivor.”

I laughed. “I guess I get that from you, huh?”

She laughed, too, but I could hear some noise behind her, like somebody else talking.

“Is somebody there?” And then I figured it out. “Is Michael Evans there?”

“Yes, Michael's here. We were just watching an old Cary Grant movie.” She said something to Michael I couldn't hear, which made me feel really weird. Now
both
my parents had lives I wasn't part of.

“I'm sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt you.”

“You didn't, sweetie. Well, you did, but a phone call from you is always more important than a silly movie.”

“Thanks.”

“Michael says it certainly
is
a silly movie. And he also says to tell you hi.”

“Okay, tell him hi, too.” Now I just wanted to hang up. Talking to Michael Evans with my mother as the intermediary was ridiculous. “I should probably go anyway—Dory and the kids will be back soon.”

“Okay. Have a wonderful time in New Mexico, and call me whenever you want to. I love you!”

“I know. I love you, too.”

“Michael says good-bye.”

Jesus. “Tell him good-bye.”

She smooched me an air kiss and then we hung up. It sounded like Michael Evans had become a regular part of her life. Which meant he was part of mine, too, whether I liked it or not. Another change I wouldn't be able to do anything about.

Don't look too far ahead. Tomorrow . . . that looked good.

Iris banged the door against the wall as she entered in her usual belligerent manner. “My mother drank a beer, and then went up on stage and sat on an actor's lap! I was never so embarrassed in my life!”

I smiled. Things change.

W
e pulled out of the Big Steer early, bringing muffins and juice with us instead of stopping for breakfast. Dory said it was a long, hot drive and she'd just as soon get underway. I drove first so she could drink her coffee and wake up, and so I could pull over at the post office and get rid of my letter to Chris before I had second thoughts about sending it.

We took Route 40 out of Texas and into New Mexico, a long straight highway with little to see but dust and sagebrush along the way. Dory told us that the “famous” Route 66 had run through all the little towns down here before Route 40 was built. Route 66 had started in Chicago and run south to St. Louis and then west to Los Angeles. I wondered if it was more fun to drive than Route 40, which was just one big trailer truck after another, breezing past fast enough to knock you off the road.

“This is the dullest part of the trip yet,” Iris said. “I thought you said New Mexico was beautiful?”

“Just wait. It's a big state.”

“Looks just like Texas to me.”

“Where are we going again?” Marshall asked.

“Now? We're heading for the Acoma Pueblo,” Dory said. “It's
called Sky City because it's up on a high mesa. Acoma people have lived there since 1075, which means it's the oldest—”

Iris interrupted. “
Oldest continually inhabited city in the country.
You've said that about twelve times already.”

“Marshall was asking me.”

“Okay, I got it now,” Marsh said. “It's special because it's old.”

“Not just that. There's no water source on top of the mesa so in order to live up there the people have to haul their water up. There's no electricity either, and until recent years there wasn't even a road. For centuries the Native American people climbed up and down the side of the cliff. In a climate this hot and dry—can you imagine?”

“Why did they live up there then?” Marsh said.

“It was very safe. They could see their enemies coming from far away. They could never be surprised.”

What a life. Not only did you have to carry water up the side of the mountain, but you never got any surprise visitors either. I wondered if my dad and Allison had given any thought lately to moving to a place like that.

“Great,” Iris said. “You die of thirst, but at least you don't get an arrow in your back.”

Dory sighed. “Iris, I think we're all getting a little tired of your sarcasm, aren't we, guys?”

Marshall and I were silent as stones. Iris's smart mouth wasn't at the top of my list of problems. I'd spent the morning trying to rid my brain of the image of Chris and Gabriella bonded with sweat.

Iris shrugged. “Nobody else cares but you.”

“Well then, for me. Please cut it out.”

“No,” Iris said. “I don't think I will.”

Which was about the last thing any of us said until we ordered lunch outside of Albuquerque. I'd stopped paying close attention
to Iris's eating habits because she seemed to be more normal now. Of course, the news of the school change had put her back in a seriously lousy mood, and I wondered if that would affect things. But she ordered a tuna sub and ate three quarters of it, so I decided she'd turned a corner on the eating disorder thing.

We piled back into the van after lunch and were just about nodding off when Dory pulled the car over. “Look,” she said. “There it is.”

We were stopped at the top of a mesa from which we looked across a wide, open plain toward another very flat mesa, which seemed to be made of bleached pink stone. Perched on top, we could just make out some whitish structures—the pueblo of Acoma. The four of us got out to look.

“People still live up there?” Marshall asked.

“That's what the guidebook says,” Dory said.

“Cool.”

Iris obviously couldn't think of anything snotty to say so she kept her mouth shut.

“How do we get up there?” I asked. “Drive?”

“No, we park at the bottom and take a shuttle bus up.”

“Let's go!” Marsh shouted, jumping back in the car. “Come on!”

The long straight road up to the base of the mesa passed by big pink rock formations that seemed almost like man-made sculptures. We pulled into a parking lot next to a squat white building that said
TICKETS FOR BUS
on a sign out front, but it was hard not to be distracted by the line of vendors who surrounded the lot, all of them selling pottery. Dark-skinned men and women, young and old, sat on folding chairs with trucks and station wagons backed up behind them and card tables in front of them displaying their work. A few were talking, but most sat quietly. Two children, four or five years old, sat in the dust and played a slapping hands
game. A man in a baseball cap, the only person wearing a hat in the blazing sun, carved a figure from a chunk of wood.

“That's tacky.” Iris had found her voice.

“Shh! Iris, they'll hear you!” Dory said.

Iris shrugged but lowered her voice. “They sit right here by the parking lot? We're not even in the pueblo yet. It's like they can't wait to sell you something.”

“Well, they probably
can't,
” Dory said. “This is how they make a living.”

We trooped inside to buy bus tickets and found we could also purchase postcards, hot dogs, Lay's potato chips, or Coke.

Marshall whispered to me, “I'm not being mean, but it doesn't seem like it's
real
if you can buy Coke here.”

“I think this is what real is here now. Some things are the way they were hundreds of years ago, but I guess everybody in the world has junk food now.”

He thought about it for a minute, and then said, “That's sort of cool—how some things change and some things don't.”

“Yeah, it is,” I agreed, restraining myself once again from a fond, yet condescending, hair ruffling.

We boarded a shuttle bus and in a few minutes were headed to the top of Acoma Pueblo. A young man in a Nike T-shirt, his long black hair pulled back with a piece of leather, introduced himself as our guide, James. He was a good-looking guy, and I could tell Iris thought so too. But James never smiled at anyone—he didn't even seem to look at any of us—and his speech was so rehearsed you felt sorry for him having to say it all again.

“Here ahead of us is the San Estevan mission church. It was built in 1629 when the first priest arrived at Acoma. In order to build the church and convent, our people had to move twenty thousand tons of earth and stone from the canyon up to the top of the mesa. There was no road to the mesa top in those days—all
supplies were carried on burros or on the heads and backs of our people.”

It was pleasantly cool inside the white adobe church and a few people sat down in chairs. The four of us backed up against the chilly walls. There was something about the way James kept saying “our people” that made me feel like I didn't belong there, that even looking at the places he described was somehow stealing something from them.

“You will notice the vigas, or large beams, overhead. You will also notice when you look across the valley from the mesa top, that there are no trees within sight. These forty-foot-long logs had to be carried for over twenty miles, up and down mountains, to reach this place.” James's mouth clamped shut in a hard line as though he wouldn't let out one extra word for us—he would give us only what we had paid for, nothing more. He waited for us to react to the amazing abilities of his people before he continued.

We followed James out of the church, then wandered up and down the narrow dirt roads where a station wagon and a rusty convertible were parked beside ancient houses in which wooden ladders were still used to reach the upper floors. We saw the round adobe brick ovens that the community used for baking, and the steep “stairs” that they climbed up and down before the road was built. But mostly we saw people sitting beside tables full of pottery, hoping to make a sale.