Midnight Cactus

by Bella Pollen

  ‘So where are we going?’

  ‘Temerosa. I’ll take Benjamín’s truck on from there.’

  I say nothing, disappointed not to have the opportunity to see where Duval lives, but this is soon superseded by increasing anxiety about his skill behind the wheel. Duval drives like someone who simply doesn’t acknowledge the concept of traffic. He steers a haphazard line through every curve with a sort of lazy confidence, oblivious to the possibility that another vehicle might appear round these blind corners at any given moment.

  ‘So why did you go to the meeting?’ I ask, my eyes glued to the road ahead.

  Pause. ‘Curious.’

  ‘And what did you think?’

  ‘They made their point.’

  ‘The people in the town?’

  ‘Some of the men in that room have big cattle ranches on the border. They were plagued by Apache raids in the last century and now it’s the Mexicans or the Bureau of Land Management or the government. They’re tired of fighting. I can understand that.’

  ‘Hogan’s no cattle rancher, he’s a dentist.’

  Duval draws on his cigarette. ‘Last year a nine-month-pregnant woman shot dead an immigrant who entered her house. He was starving and unarmed, she was terrified and alone. This is an emotive issue.’

  ‘So who’s side are you on then?’

  ‘Nobody’s.’

  ‘But presumably you have some sympathy with people crossing?’

  ‘It’s not my concern.’

  ‘How can it not be? Your entire crew is Mexican.’

  ‘That’s business.’

  ‘I’m not really sure I believe that.’

  ‘Believe what you like. Mexicans are cheaper and work harder than anyone else.’

  ‘I see. So you’re saying you don’t care what their issues are.’

  ‘I’m no politician.’ He expels cigarette smoke into the night air.

  ‘But you live here, you must have an opinion.’

  Even as I say it, though, it occurs to me I don’t have one myself. Frankly, I’d never given border crossings much more than a second’s thought until this evening. Besides, nowadays it seems like the whole world is on the move. Hideaways, stowaways, refugees, asylum seekers. The terrible images wash over you until you don’t even notice them any more: cities of camps built on slivers of boundaries between countries populated by misery. Sangatte, the Channel Tunnel. Destination UK.

  Before first coming to Arizona, if I was ever to think about Mexico, it would be to conjure up images of mariachis in silver-threaded sombreros crooning mournful love songs, villains with pebbledash complexions blowing curling smoke from the top of guns, crosses atop churches in white sun-baked towns or braided virginal beauties fleeing banditos through verdant fields of tequila. Mine was the clichéd Mexico of Hollywood’s hard-bitten romances: The Magnificent Seven, A Touch of Evil. Then I saw a movie, Men with Guns, in which a professor at a medical university in Mexico City dispatches a bunch of his best students, all filled with the milk of human kindness, into the poor rural communities in the Chiapas region. When they disappear he sets out to find them. His search takes him to sugar-cane plantations and tiny towns in the mountains, lost and forgotten communities where he is met with a world of oppression and hostility. It turns out that all his students had been murdered, the only woman doctor amongst them raped and crucified first.

  Nevertheless Mexico looms invitingly on the other side of my mountains, a country to be dipped in and out of at will, but although I’ve a powerful curiosity to explore it, I’ve not yet done so, still awaiting I suppose some psychological visa that will allow me to embark on the great untapped adventure I know it represents.

  Duval still hasn’t answered.

  ‘Come on, Duval.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter what I think,’ he says finally.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it’s not my problem and it’s not yours either.’ He stops the truck at the turn-off to Temerosa. ‘Listen to me, Alice,’ he says roughly. ‘I don’t know what it is you’ve come looking for, but whatever it is, don’t count on finding it out here.’

  I look into his face, but it’s impossible to read anything in those dark eyes. It should make me angry, this second veiled warning of his, but it doesn’t. I just feel triumphant that after all this time he’s finally called me by my first name.

  Benjamín has got the children into bed and asleep by the time we reach the cabin. I find him sitting in the corridor upstairs, where he has stationed a chair outside their room like a White House security guard in charge of high-risk diplomats.

  ‘I’m sorry, Benjamín’, I whisper. ‘It’s so late.’

  ‘Noh, Alice, no problem.’

  ‘Someone slashed Duval’s tyres.’ I squint out of the thin slit of the corridor window. ‘He’s taking your truck home.’ Puzzled, I stare after the red tail lights. ‘Benjamín, why is he going that way? Surely you can’t get back to the main road that way?’

  Benjamín moves away from the window. ‘Maybe he left something in the boarding house.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I agree, but I go on watching until the tail lights disappear. ‘So how were the children. Good?’

  ‘Oh yes, very good.’ He breaks into a grin. ‘M-E bit me.’ He holds up his finger. ‘Little M-E,’ he says fondly, as though the bite has been the highlight of his week. ‘I go home now, Alice, thank you.’ He lays his hand briefly on my arm.

  ‘Benjamín, wait ...’

  He hesitates, foot on the top of the stairs, and I ask him the question I’ve been putting off for weeks.

  ‘Benjamín, you have children, don’t you? Children of your own?’

  His eyes drop from mine. He touches his jaw then turns and walks slowly down the steps, and because I know the answer already I make no move to stop him.

  The big window is shut in my bedroom and the air is dry and stale. The children have stripped off their pyjama tops and their bare skin shines brown against the whiteness of the sheets. They look like they’re practising synchronized sleeping – right arms are thrown to one side, left hands shoved under pillows. All four knees are bent upwards and the pyjama shorts they both like to wear are hiked up, revealing one buttock each. Emmy has an eczema scab on her back which has leaked a smear of blood where she’s been scratching it, and suddenly, from way out of left field, I feel turned inside out with loneliness. I creep into the bed between the children and hold their sweating bodies close. I blink out into the darkness and picture Benjamín making his way back to his cabin, replacing his children with mine; then, because I don’t want to think about it any more, I shut my eyes, but it’s no good, my head is filled with one sad image after another. Robert in the restaurant, his head in his hands; my father walking down the beach, a small hunched figure against the grey sea; fat Nora, alone somewhere, nursing a beer and probably minding the jibe about the hog season more than anyone could know. I think of Jack and Emmy forced to see their grandmother behind my back, of Duval steering his truck around the silent curves of the mountain. And right at this moment, the world does not feel like a place where anyone can find happiness. I think about what Duval said and maybe I don’t understand what I’m looking for and maybe I won’t ever find it here, but I am starting to believe that you don’t need to know what you’re escaping from to become a fugitive.

  15

  Jack sleeps like a dead man. If you were to chalk an outline around his body at night, he would still be lying precisely within its boundaries the following morning. Emmy, on the other hand, is not an easy child to share a bed with. On her stomach, her black hair spread across the pillows, her legs drawn up and bent, she is like a big black frog languidly scooting across the surface of a pond, using me as the rock from which, every few minutes or so, she painfully propels herself to a new position. By the time morning comes my eyes are scratchy with tiredness. Mechanically, I herd the children into the truck and off to school but afterwards I can’t face returning. Twitchy and cabin-feverish, it�
��s as though all my pioneering aspirations are today distilled down into one primordial urge: to go shopping and buy something I don’t need; to do something urban-like and self-indulgent in an attempt to cut this lingering knot of loneliness down to a manageable size. It’s not another human being I miss, although it would be nice to have a girlfriend to talk to, or even the moon face of Winfred to be annoyed by. It’s this feeling of displacement and not belonging which makes life seem very empty all of a sudden.

  Shops in Ague don’t open till ten o’clock so I default to the M&M and while away the time before my coffee arrives watching the industrial choreography of trucks drawing in and out of the petrol pumps and feeling vaguely sorry for myself. It’s later, though, in the washroom, splashing water on my face, that I see, to my horror, there is a much more immediate crisis to be dealt with. Somehow, I’ve managed to persuade myself that fresh air and lack of city smog have steadily been transforming me into a wild and natural beauty, a Barbarella of sorts, glowing with good health and youthful vigour–a fantasy easy to sustain on account of the detestable absence of mirrors in the cabin. Instead the face that looks back at me is positively Darwinian. It’s taken only these few short months to bypass cave woman and mutate straight back to ape. My eyebrows have all but knitted together in a vicious tangle across my forehead. My hair is a snarled sub-tropical growth of outgrown roots and split ends. Only the skin on my face, now that I’ve stopped using sun creams so religiously, has lost its customary translucence and acquired a healthy precancerous glow to it. I am less Jane Fonda and more Cousin IT.

  ‘Sure, there’s a beauty salon,’ Sharleen from Prestcott’s Hotel says. ‘Other end of town, right by the feed lot.’ She pats her own architectured locks coyly. ‘Be sure an’ ask for Missy.’

  I’m dubious, but surely just a trim, and who knows, even a pedicure, might do the trick. The last time I was in Tucson, I actually tried to buy one of those hard-skin scraper things from the pharmacy section in Wal-Mart, but the girl behind the counter informed me they were illegal.

  ‘Only registered podiatrists and pedicurists are allowed to carry ‘em.’ she said primly, before adding, ‘They’re very dangerous, you know.’

  ‘Dangerous?’

  ‘Oh yes, they’re very sharp. We wouldn’t be allowed to sell something like that here.’

  ‘But you can buy a gun in this store, right?’

  ‘Sure can,’ she chirruped. ‘Right over there by the hunting knives.’

  ‘So let me get this straight. I can’t buy a scraper, but I could buy a gun and shoot the dead skin off my feet, right?’ But she’d looked so bewildered I hadn’t the heart to take it further.

  As I wrench open the door to Vanillaheads, a great mushroom of hair spray escapes, stinging my eyes and forcing my throat to constrict in protest. The two girls inside wear green pinafores and sport Dynasty hair and white stilettos, which add four inches to their height at either end.

  ‘Help ya?’ says one, carefully extricating her client from underneath the dryer. When I fail to answer, the other prompts, ‘Here for a cut? We do hair and we do colour and we do manicures.’ She flips a paw my way and I duly admire her nail extensions, which are exquisitely decorated with tiny star-spangled banners.

  It’s a small salon, with only four hairdressing chairs. Three of them are occupied, two with clients whose heads are encased in flesh-coloured rubber hats permeated with holes through which selected tresses have been yanked then smeared with bleach, making the women look like burn victims who’ve lost most of their hair but who are, at least, having a soothing salve applied to their scalps. I panic, and instead ask for directions to the first thing that pops into my head.

  ‘What kind of church?’ the girls chorus helpfully. ‘There’s a First Baptist right round the corner, or a Seven Day Separatist opposite, there’s the Methodist over by the Ob/Gyn’s office on Portal Street . . .’

  ‘And what about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, back on up the north side of town?’ one of the poor burn victims offers up.

  I cruise the streets aimlessly, eventually driving south out of town. A few miles later, I slow the truck down at the sight of an upside-down brown Cadillac and the whirring lights of an ambulance in front of it. A couple of Indians are being administered to by the edge of the road, surrounded by broken beer bottles. One is lying on his side as though fast asleep, the other is having a comical slow-motion fight with a medic who is trying to clamp an oxygen mask to his face. Gingerly, I steer the truck round them then, on a whim, transfer its bulky weight to a random dirt track leading into the hills. The rocks here are the colour of clay and look as though they’ve had their clammy surfaces scored by Emmy’s fork before being baked hard by the sun. The track narrows further and just when I’m thinking it would be better to turn around than risk a quadruple puncture, it splits at a signpost for Wildcat Canyon and I stop the truck, remembering something.

  The menu of the M&M is designed as a newspaper, its front page printed with dishes on offer and its inside section a mixture of articles, ads, and one cracking good story with the headline: ‘Tucson Finds Hobbit Living in a Warren of Caves’, which I had torn off to show the children. Now I pull the crumpled piece of paper out of my pocket and there it is, a tiny ad on the reverse side of the article for ‘Wildcat Haircutting’. Out of mild curiosity, I drive on until the track dwindles to a dead end and a splintered B&B sign.

  I can’t see a Bed and Breakfast anywhere, but like a pig after truffles, I follow an overwhelming smell of frying food, eventually dropping down into a small clearing with two low bungalows and a wooden cabin. The bungalows are identical with four doors apiece and metal numbers nailed to them. There’s a definite air of Texas Chainsaw Massacre to the whole place and if someone were to casually mention that the letters spelling out BAR above the door of the cabin had been daubed in blood, you wouldn’t be in the least surprised.

  Inside, a woman sits alone at a yellow formica table, an arrangement of plates in front of her. ‘Yup?’ she says, without looking up. She is larger than I remember from the meeting, but with the same Bass Buster cap perched high on her head. Her arms are white and blotchy as though they’ve never been exposed to a ray of sun. Purposefully, they work their way through a round of eggs and steak on a serving dish in front of her. A stack of hash browns as high as a woodpile sits in one bowl and a mountain of battered onion rings in another. Nora’s small dimpled hands cut through the steak with ruthless efficiency. She swallows and replaces the cubes of meat in her mouth with unfaltering regularity as though her tongue is a conveyor belt continually transporting food from source to destination.

  ‘A real semen-free zone,’ I remember somebody snickering as she’d slammed out of the hall last night.

  ‘You here to check the rooms?’ She swings a greasy chin in my direction.

  ‘No, don’t worry.’ I hover at the door. ‘I was just passing by. Didn’t mean to interrupt your breakfast.’

  ‘This ain’t ma breakfast.’ Nora scrapes back her chair. ‘It’s ma lunch.’ Above the door the Budweiser clock reads 10.30 a.m. She plucks a set of keys from a nail on the wall and pushes by me. ‘B’sides you’re here now, girl, so you may as well look.’

  I trot dutifully behind her as she propels herself out of the bar and towards the first of the bungalows. Sticking out of her back pocket is plastic bag full of chewing tobacco. Underneath the baseball hat, Nora’s hair reaches to her shoulder blades. Dirty though it is, it strikes me as a rather beautiful colour, pale grey lightened by streaks of almost pure white.

  She opens the doors of 1–4 with the same key. The bungalows have been decorated in warm, earthy tones though possibly not at any point during the last thirty years. They smell of thrift shops and are superficially tidy but I notice the trash hasn’t been emptied, and when Nora thumps on the polyester coverlet to demonstrate the quality of the mattress, so much static is let loose I worry the bed might spontaneously combust. The rooms are all identical,
notwithstanding small creative differences between the works of art hanging on the walls . . . room 1 has a picture of a startled deer printed on velour; 2, in the same material, an osprey plucking a fish from the rapids of the Colorado River; while 3 features a bobcat which looks as if it’s wearing Sony headphones.

  ‘This last one’s the biggest.’ Nora unlocks number 4. ‘It’s eight foot by ten, shower’s three foot by two. Go ahead, take a look.’ She sweeps back the shower curtain and gives the slab of greenish soap stuck to the tiled floor a kick with the toe of her sneaker before standing aside for me to pass. Very quickly, however, it becomes apparent that there is insufficient room for me to do so, thus with a tango of infinite grace and elegance, we both withdraw, advance and side-step until a clear view of the hellhole duly presents itself.

  ‘Nice,’ I comment.

  ‘It’s fifty-eight dollars twenty for two.’ Nora stands, feet apart, hands on hips.

  ‘Fifty-eight twenty. Wow.’ I hedge a little longer, not wanting her to think I’m wasting her time. ‘How did you arrive at that figure, I mean how did you decide on the twenty cents?’

  ‘Tax.’

  ‘Right, of course. So how much for one person?’

  ‘Fifty-eight dollars twenty.’

  ‘That seems awfully unfair.’

  ‘So git yourself a partner.’ She locks up the bungalow, then heads back up the slope. ‘Wanna beer?’ she throws over her shoulder.

  Inside the bar, she plucks a beer from a crate on the floor and tosses it over. ‘Shut the door, will ya.’ She sits down at the table and gathers the plates of food towards her with both arms. I’m not a big beer drinker, especially at eleven a.m. in the morning, but I snap the can open and take a swig, unsure whether or not I’ve been officially discharged.