“Mother Roaders?”
“A small but devout group of travelers—most on motorcycles—who are fascinated with Route 66, also known as the Main Street of America and the Mother Road.”
“Is it that fascinating?”
“Let’s see what you think.”
“So my job is to see if Junior and or her mother looks like you and whether Route 66 is fascinating.”
“And to approve the motel I’ve selected,” I replied.
We eventually pulled in next to the Safari Motel sign topped by a 3-D plastic camel with a rider wearing a Yasser-Arafat-style head covering. Yasser would not have approved of this politically incorrect image of an Arab, but it’s hard to be offended by something so obviously kitschy.
Another plastic camel graced the registration area. Sharice stared at it as I registered.
The Safari is about a mile from Junior’s small frame house on West Railroad Avenue. Having been in the car for three hours, we decided to walk.
The most interesting thing on West Railroad Avenue was the old passenger station which is now a museum. The second most interesting thing was an automobile transmission repair shop with a damaged sign that read Transmiss. Given Tucumcari’s conservative population, it’s a safe bet the sign is not about gender.
The two most interesting things in the house, not counting Junior, were a tame racoon and pictures of Dana Andrews.
Junior greeted us at the door. I introduced her to Sharice. Junior hugged her and said, “Tristan has told me all about you. You are even prettier than he described.”
Sharice blushed. “Your son is one of my favorite people. You must be very proud of him.”
“I am,” Junior replied. Then she looked at her watch and said, “Oh my goodness; it’s almost 5:17.” She thrust out her arms and covered Sharice’s ears with her hands. I felt the room begin to shake. A roaring sound got louder as the shaking increased. Then I heard a train whistle change pitch as the locomotive sped by behind the house.
Junior released her grip on Sharice’s head and said, “Sorry I didn’t have time to warn you. How about some dandelion tea?”
“That would be lovely.”
As Junior led us to the kitchen, Sharice smiled at me, and I relaxed.
As she poured the tea, Junior explained that the dandelions grow wild in her yard, so all she has to do is pick them and dry them. Then she added that the tea prevents water retention, lowers blood pressure, fights inflammation, controls blood sugar, and reduces cholesterol.
“I love dandelion greens in salads,” Sharice said.
“You should never eat dandelions raw,” Junior scolded. “They scratch the lining of your stomach.”
“I didn’t know that,” Sharice said. “Thanks for telling me.”
A photo of my Aunt Beatrice was taped to the refrigerator door. I pointed to it and asked when it was taken.
“It was taken by Rhino a few days before Tristan was born. We were on a picnic with Mom out at the lake.”
I saw Sharice study the photo, which was why I’d asked about it.
“Something smells good,” I said.
“Mushroom stir fry. I gathered the mushrooms yesterday in the foothills of the mountains.”
My appetite disappeared. Junior is a good-hearted person, but not someone I would trust to distinguish an edible fungus from a poison one. After a moment’s reflection, I realized I am also someone I would not trust to distinguish an edible fungus from a poison one. That thought made me feel less guilty about not trusting Junior, but no less afraid of eating her mushrooms.
I was trying to think of an excuse for not eating the mushrooms when Junior set the bowl on the table. I looked at the dish and was happy I’d failed to think up an excuse not to eat it. I was staring down at morels, a species distinctive in appearance and obviously not poison. They are also one of my favorite foods even though I’ve had them less than a dozen times in my life. They’re rarely available in stores, and when they are, they cost something like fifty dollars a pound.
“You could have made a lot of money selling these,” I said.
“Money’s not important, Hubie. And anyway, I don’t know anyone else who eats them except for Tristan. Will you take the ones I didn’t cook back for him?”
“Be glad to.”
The racoon’s left front paw was missing. He took turns begging for food between me and Sharice. She offered him a morel, and he tried to grasp it between his good paw and his stump, but it dropped to the floor. He was sniffing at it when Junior said, “Lucky, you know you don’t like mushrooms. Now stop your begging,”
“Why did you name him Lucky?” Sharice asked.
“Because when the train ran over his paw, he came to my back door. If he’d gone to anyone else on the street, they would have taken him to the animal shelter where he would have been put down. But I took him in and bandaged him up.”
“Does he ever go outside?”
“He used to want out when any of the local females were in heat. But after I had him fixed, he’s been content to stay around.”
I swallowed the impulse to laugh when Sharice gave me a get-hold-of-yourself look. Then I started thinking about how to introduce the topic of Floss Man.
Junior placed a bowl of figs on the table and said, ”So you want to know if Tristan is my only child.”
It wouldn’t surprise me if she were psychic, but my guess was Tristan had warned her. Fair enough.
“I wouldn’t phrase it that way,” I said. “A man who was found dead in Old Town shares DNA with me, and I have no idea who he is. What I want to know is whether you know anyone related to us that I don’t know about. The FBI suggested the dead man could have been another child that my mother or father had. Or for all I know, my father had a brother he never mentioned, a black sheep so to speak. So the question is not as specific as whether you had a child in addition to Tristan; it’s whether you know something about our family tree that I don’t.”
She pondered if for a minute or two. “I don’t know of any black sheep or lost relatives. But there is one thing. Did you know that when you were born, your father was on a sabbatical?”
“He was quite the researcher,” I replied. “He was granted many sabbaticals and published in various scholarly journals. But I didn’t know that one of his sabbaticals was when I was born.”
“So he was away from your mother for an entire semester. Maybe he had a brief affair that resulted in a child.”
“I don’t think my father would have done that.”
“People do things we don’t expect. We all have moments of weakness.”
“He wouldn’t have abandoned a child, even one born out of wedlock.”
“Maybe he never knew the woman was pregnant.”
“Wouldn’t she have told him?”
She shrugged. “She might not have known for a month or longer. Maybe he was gone by then, and she had no way of contacting him. Didn’t know his last name.”
“A one-night stand? No last names? I can’t believe—”
“It happens, Hubie. Believe me. I know. I never had a second child. But I could have because I’ve sometimes had unprotected sex. I’m wiser now.”
I now appreciated Tristan’s claim that his mother was incapable of keeping secrets.
Before we left, I brokered an exchange of gifts between mother and child. I gave her cash in an envelope and told her it was from Tristan. Which was partially true; he provided the envelope.
She asked me to take a gift to Tristan, a locket she had made from pull tabs people had thrown in her yard.
“So your father’s hypothetical scorned brother was a ‘black sheep’. If I had a brother like that, would he be a ‘white sheep’?”
We were walking back to the Safari Motel. A strong north wind was blowing and Sharice was clinging to me for warmth
.
“Sorry. That was an insensitive thing for me to say.”
She smiled at me. “Can’t you tell when I’m kidding? I guess the PC crowd might think it’s racial, but I just see it as nature. The black sheep is rare. And therefore special. And why did you almost laugh after Junior mentioned having the racoon fixed?”
“Because there’s an old story—almost certainly made up—that an entry in the pets section of the classified ads read: “Lost dog. Blind in one eye, missing front right leg, recently castrated. Answers to the name Lucky.”
“And Lucky the racoon almost fits the description of the lost dog.”
“Right.”
She shrugged.
I asked her if Junior or the picture of her mother Bea looks like me.
“All white people look the same,” she said and laughed. “Junior looks more like you than she does Tristan. Maybe they nicknamed his father Rhino because his genes were so strong.”
“But does she look like me?”
“Well, if I’d just seen her walking down the street and didn’t know who she is, I wouldn’t have thought, Gee, she looks like Hubie. But it wouldn’t be a total surprise to find out that you two are related. And the photo of your aunt Bea looks like the picture you showed me of your mother, but again not so much that I’d have pegged her as your relative.”
“Aunt Bea and my mother did look like sisters. They were both tall and thin, same facial shape, same hair and eyes, but at the same time, there was a difference. Not anything physical like one of them having a big nose. I guess it was that countenance thing again. Aunt Bea was like Junior, guileless and unconcerned with social norms. She had a relaxed this-is-who-I-am look. My mother was more on the prim and proper side.”
“What do you think of Junior’s idea that your father’s sabbatical might explain Floss Man?”
“Not buying it. My father had a sabbatical when I was in high school and another when I was living in the dorm. In both cases, my mother went with him.”
“Maybe she didn’t go on the sabbatical when she was pregnant because she had to stay in Albuquerque to have check-ups with her obstetrician.”
Having no idea about the protocols for pregnant women half a century ago, I made no comment. Instead, I asked Sharice what she thought of Junior.
“I like her. She’s her own woman. But what’s the deal with Dana Andrews?”
“Junior went into a deep depression after Tristan was born, a combination she now says of post-partum and grief about Rhino. My Aunt Beatrice raised Tristan for the first year or so of his life. Junior immersed herself in films, watching them twenty hours a day between four hours of fitful sleep. Then she saw a film called Strange Lady in Town about a woman doctor from Boston who comes to New Mexico in the 1880s to introduce modern medicine. The local doc, played by Andrews, doesn’t think women can be doctors and makes fun of her newfangled device, the stethoscope. But she eventually wins him over, and he even teaches her to ride a horse, telling her as she struggles to ‘sit up straight and try not to look like a sack of potatoes’. She thought Dana Andrews was delivering that line to her, so she started sitting up straight and not being a sack of potatoes. She took long walks, holding her head high and her chin out. And she began to recover.”
“Probably the exercise and the fresh air.” Sharice snuggled even closer to me as we walked quickly to our warm room. “Does that story remind you of someone you know and love.”
“You when you were saving money for a mastectomy.”
“That wasn’t all I was saving.”
The other thing she was saving was a drug called midazolam. She had access to it because it is sometimes used to sedate dental patients. In larger doses it has been used to execute murderers.
I pulled her closer and said, “That was one of the items on your list of things you had to tell me before our romance could become serious. And as I recall, it was also on the list of things we were never again to speak of.”
“Strange thing about that list. Now that we’re a couple, there’s nothing we can’t talk about—even castrated animals.”
“Sharing everything is part of being a family. So I can tell you that Floss Man is morphing into Bogeyman. I’d like to talk about it, but I don’t know what to say. There’s nothing specific. Just constant dread. I don’t know of what. Maybe of not knowing.”
“Suppose you wrote a book called The Floss Man Murder.”
“If I did, I’d fit right in with the dozens of other New Mexicans writing murder mysteries.”
“What would be the key to the story?”
“The lab person accidentally labeled someone else’s DNA as mine and the whole thing was a big mistake.”
“Good ending. Now write one that might actually be the case.”
“I like the black sheep version. My father and his brother were both suitors for my mother’s affection. When she chose my father, Uncle Cain ran away and was never heard from again. He got married and had a son about my age. He never told the son about his uncle who was my father. But after Cain died, his son—Floss Man—found out somehow and decide to get in touch with me, the cousin he never knew. He wanted to wear an orchid in his lapel for his visit, and fell on a garden stake while cutting the orchid. He didn’t think the wound was serious. He had happy thoughts about meeting me until the wound opened and he bled to death, which is relatively painless.”
“Bravo! Great story. I like that you named your uncle Cain. Got another version?”
“There’s still the ‘my Aunt Beatrice was switched with another baby in the hospital nursery theory’. That means my mother’s real sister ended up with another couple. When she grew up, she got married and had children. Floss Man is either her son or her grandson.”
“Another good story. But after all these years, there’s surely no way to verify it.”
“Actually, there is.” I fished the locket out of my pocket. “What do you suppose is in this?”
“Junior’s picture?”
“Maybe. What else might it be?”
She smiled. “A lock of her hair?”
We had reached the motel. After we got inside and took off our jackets, we opened the locket. It was indeed a bit of hair. The desk in the room had envelopes with the Safari camel sign on the upper left where the sender’s address would be. I took a bit of the hair and sealed it in one of the envelopes, leaving the rest in the locket.
Sharice guessed that I was going to have Charles Webbe compare the DNA in Junior’s hair with my DNA. “What about HIPAA?” she asked.
“Who is Hippa? Rhino’s brother?”
She ignored my pun and said, “HIPAA stands for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. It forbids the sharing of people’s health information without their permission.”
“I’m not going to tell anyone about her DNA. All I want to know is if she’s actually related to me.”
“If she’s not, will you tell her?”
Good question. “You’re a health care professional. You understand HIPAA. You tell me.”
“Forget HIPAA. It applies only to healthcare professionals and institutions like hospitals and health insurance companies. This is about you and Junior.”
“If we are related, which I suppose is likely the case, I don’t think I’ll tell her. What would be the point? But if we aren’t related …”
“Sticky, right? On the one hand you might think she deserves to know the truth. But on the other, think how weird it would be for her to discover that your mother was not really her aunt.”
“Maybe it wouldn’t be all that traumatic for her. She and my mother were not particularly close. And her mother is still her biological mother and her son is still her biological son. On the other hand, maybe it would be better not to tell her. Why upset long-held beliefs? The point is to find out how Floss Man is related to me, not to interfer
e in Junior’s world.”
Chapter 21
I guess it’s time to explain Freddie’s quip that he didn’t want to return to Rio Grande Lofts because of security issues revealed by my breaking in. I don’t think he mentioned I did so seven times.
I had a good reason, perhaps even a noble one. I intended to retrieve and return sacred pots stolen from the Ma people of San Roque Pueblo. On my first visit, I got through the secure gate at the basement garage in the evening, slept in my Bronco, and then got past another security gate at the elevator in the morning. I expected a solo ride to the top floor because I was reverse commuting. All the residents would be headed down.
But the elevator stopped at the fourth floor, and the doors slid open to reveal a stunning young woman with impressively coiffed blond hair.
“Going down?” she asked
“Up,” I replied and reached for the ‘close door’ button.
“I’ll ride along,” she said and stepped in before I could get the door closed. “Why are you going up at this time of morning?”
I gave her a wan smile and patted my pockets. “Forgot my keys.”
“Looks like you forgot your iron, too,” she said flatly. Spending the night in the Bronco had taken a toll on my appearance.
She struck me as a take-charge person who would not hesitate to call security if she spotted someone suspicious in the building, and I figured I fell into that category. “Sorry,” I said, “ever since my wife left me, I’ve been sort of disheveled. I have no idea how to iron. In fact, I think she took the iron.”
It was a lame story, but I’m not good at improv.
“Why did she leave you?” she asked, unabashed.
“She met a younger man.”
She seemed to relax slightly.
The Pot Thief Who Studied the Woman at Otowi Crossing Page 12
