Bright Angel Time

by Martha McPhee

  But Anton was a giver and he tried to teach us kids to be givers too. Generosity and forgiveness were the beauties of Christianity. And by evening I knew Dwayne would have his name scrawled on the list of dinner jobs and a space to put himself on the camper floor.

  “Utopia,” Julia whispered. “He’s joining our Utopia. U toe pee a. Another acolyte.” We laughed. Even that laugh with her made me feel sophisticated. I wanted to tell her that I could take care of her.

  Anton helped Dwayne into the back of the camper and we left that filling station and Los Angeles. The kids rode in the Eldorado with James driving and Julia and Nicholas by his side, flirting. An afternoon sun coppered our faces and the wind whistled in our ears. Now we had the convertible, no one wanted to ride in the camper anymore. It trotted in front of us, winding into the mountains and descending again into the desert on that long straight road. I thought of Dwayne alone in there and wondered if I’d have to love him too.

  “How long do you think this one will be around?” Sofia whispered. “The longest we ever had someone was a year.” Strands of her hair blew into my mouth and her breath was hot in my ear. “For that matter, how long do you think you guys’ll be around?”

  Not that much longer, I’d wanted to say. But I could tell, I knew she loved us. I loved her.

  ♦

  Dwayne called himself Consciousness of Breath, said that was his religious name, and asked us to believe. He’d been to India, where he’d lived in an ashram like Anton’s wife. He was twenty-one, and didn’t want to go to war, an idea we all thought would make Anton mad, but it didn’t. He believed in the concept of the war and the concept of the right to life, but respected individual choice and told Dwayne he’d support him in any way he could.

  At camp that night, after a game of football, when the desert came alive and snakes could be heard snaking through the sand and a million trillion stars lit up the sky, Dwayne led us in meditation which then became a dance. “We’re trying to regain ourselves,” Dwayne said. “Meditation is about throwing yourself back into your body.” The eleven of us sat in a circle with straight backs and I wanted to laugh. Anton thought it would be enlightening for us to see another religion. He thought it would help his kids understand their mother. “Neurosis is rooted in the body. At some point in our childhood we decide that in order to survive, to get the love needed to exist, it is necessary to stop being ourselves and be what our parents and society want us to be and so we become fakes. We forget reality and stop feeling, tensing our bodies to suppress our needs.” We sat with our palms up for several minutes and then with our palms down. Anton lit a joint, puffed on it and passed it around. One by one we took a puff. I watched Julia and Sofia when their turn came, watched them pull in a breath, hold it inside for a moment and then exhale. I tried hard not to cough. My eyes teared and my lungs burned. Slowly I let the smoke out and then my lips tasted of it, bitter. My head went dizzy. And then we smoked another.

  For a while we were silent until Anton interrupted the silence to talk to Dwayne about Catholicism, which led into a conversation about his book on love and I didn’t pay attention except that I heard Dwayne say that Catholics were the most opinionated people in the world and I thought that would make Anton mad, but it didn’t.

  “Palms up,” Dwayne said. “Gets rid of the bad energy. Palms down welcomes new energy.” He began to hum and asked us to hum too. “Hmmmmmmmmmmmm. Hmmmmmmmmm. Hmm-mmmmmm.” Our voices were loud and echoed in the basin, against the mesas and the mountains, and I was embarrassed that someone might hear and think we were doing something strange. But it seemed we were in the middle of nowhere with no one else around and when I thought about that I became sad and listened again to the humming, which soon turned to screaming. It did something for us, screaming. I screamed until my throat became sore. Finny clung to my side. Dwayne rose to dance, lifting Mom who lifted Anton who lifted Julia who lifted Nicholas who lifted Sofia who lifted Jane who lifted James who lifted Timothy who lifted me who lifted Finny. We danced, jumping, spinning, twirling falling. Shouting. Screaming. Falling backward to each other. I went crazy with the screaming, trying to make Finny scream too, but Finny wouldn’t scream.

  “You’re in your childhoods,” Dwayne screamed. “Be yourselves.”

  “This is idiotic,” Caroline said suddenly. Silence. We looked at her. She was shaking. She’d had too much to drink. It was the only time she spoke out. Her cheeks would flush as if burned by the sun and she could be either loving or hateful. Her hair was down and her eyes sparkled fiercely in the dark. She wore jeans and a sweatshirt and the sleeves were pushed up above her elbows.

  “Why is this ‘idiotic’?” Dwayne asked. His tone mocking the word idiotic. I didn’t like him. I agreed with Caroline. His face held this weird laughing expression, but he wasn’t laughing. He reminded me of a clown, a creepy clown. His platinum hair glowed in the dark.

  “Go to hell,” she said.

  “Caroline, babe,” Anton said, “you’ve had too much to drink, babe.” He was always gentle with Caroline and treated her cautiously as if he were afraid of her. He never seemed big around her and that made me jealous.

  “It’s. It’s just…” she stuttered and wiped her head. She said she didn’t know and then cried and apologized and Anton held her in his arms and stroked her hair and she rested her head against his chest. “It’s all right, babe.” His big hand patted her back and Mom came near and said something comforting, pouring love all over Caroline.

  “I’m acting stupid,” Caroline said softly.

  “You’re not,” James said, approaching her. Jane approached too and they comforted Caroline.

  “This must be difficult for all of you,” James said and he stared at us, an intense and puzzled gaze, as if for the first time. Dwayne gave James a quizzical look and I could tell he was jealous of James for knowing us so well. But that look of James’s momentarily scared me because I thought he could see something we couldn’t. For a moment his look reminded me of the look that Helmut had given us at Esalen so many weeks before and I became scared that he’d start to hate us the way Helmut had.

  “I feel…It’s no big deal,” Caroline said, stumbling over her words. She put her face in her palms and took a deep breath. “I just started thinking about Mom – that’s all.” There was something sacred about her words, somehow like prayers, like the way she said the rosary. Soothing. And something beautiful and good in her sadness. I thought Anton would get mad when she mentioned her mother. Whenever I brought up Dad, Mom got mad, but Anton didn’t. He held Caroline closer and her crying turned to muffled laughter and Dwayne looked on stupidly and I hated him because he, who actually knew nothing, already acted as if he knew everything. Anton said some tender words about their mother and about how wonderful she was, and the way he talked it sounded like he was still in love with her. I looked at Mom to see if she was annoyed, but she wasn’t. Then Caroline started dancing with Anton and we all started dancing and the moment passed.

  I thought about the day my father left, how it had taken me a long time to understand, to get it, as if I were an idiot, and my sisters refused to keep explaining it. I asked anyway over and over what had happened, while my sisters and mother cried into pillows. I kept thinking he’d come back – walk through the door in his dirty white shorts as he had after every tennis game that had come before. Brian Cain would vanish from the day like a bad dream. The moon was in the sky, a fingernail, and I watched it. I liked the moon better than the sun because it was constantly changing and always surprising you, up there when you expected it least. I wondered what it was like for the Fureys when the nun decided to go to India.

  We danced until too tired to dance anymore and then we ran. I ran deep into the darkness of the field, running with night splashing against my arms and my dresses brushing my legs and little Finny trying to keep up with me. I wanted to cry about Dad and have Mom hug me the way Anton had hugged Caroline. Better, I wanted Anton to hug me the way he’d hugged h
is daughter. Better still, I wanted Dad to come and explain why he had left us.

  Running, I became dizzy with excitement. Finny followed and then I stopped, breathless, and he caught up to me. I grabbed my BB gun from its holster and spun it on my finger.

  “What’s wrong, Finny? Speak, Finny,” I shouted and pointed the gun at his face. His big blue eyes looked into me and he laughed, laughed hysterically at me. “Leave him be,” Mom had said. “He’ll get over it if you leave him be,” she’d promised. He laughed and so I put the gun away. He wasn’t afraid of me, he never had been.

  At the edge of darkness the camper stood lit up bright, home. The Eldorado with its roof up was elegant. I could see Mom and Anton disappearing into their tent. The others spread out. James played the harmonica and Nicholas strummed the guitar and Julia sang a Neil Young song. Everyone orbited in his own space. A heaviness pressed into my eyes. Inside me clenched up like a fist, and my mouth made that unsticking sound the same as Anton’s so often did. Everything seemed so incredibly complicated when I thought, so I tried hard not to think. Finny’s warm lips kissed my neck and I held on to him, pulling him close to me.

  ♦

  Many things made me feel lucky. I’d make lists about what was good out here. School. It was September. I didn’t mention school. I hoped they’d forget. I hated school. All over the roads there were school buses and older people. Bright yellow school buses and older people traveling in their silver caravans. At monuments and gas stations and roadside attractions there’d be only old people. It was as if the road were suddenly surrendered to a different set and now we didn’t belong anymore.

  Thousands of school buses, it seemed, a little different from the school buses we had back at home, a brighter yellow and somehow softer, older, rounded edges, with the stop signs that dropped like flags from the driver’s window, the white-roof tops, and the bright red brake lights that light up all over the back and the sides. In the mornings they chugged over those roads, their red lights flashing and the doors opening to suck up clusters of children. Afternoons the red lights flashed again and the clusters of little children coughed from the bus, running up their long drives to a trailer home or some small house that rested on cinder blocks. One blond girl with stringy long hair – a pink cardigan over her shoulder and a book bag almost her same size ran up the drive, running to get home. It was a hundred degrees at least, but still she had that sweater over her shoulder and still she ran. I imagined a snack waiting for her up there in her home, a place surrounded by trees to protect it from the wind. I imagined a mother in pink slippers with dinner planned for a few hours later, early, before the light faded. I thought about school and felt lucky. I wondered if our school bus still stopped at the foot of our driveway every morning. It occurred to me that our fat driver probably thought Dad was picking us up and I imagined he thought that Jane and Julia were getting along with Dad now because they weren’t there every day as they used to be.

  At a service station one of the older people had asked why we weren’t in school. She had beautiful blue hair spun like cotton candy and just as stiff from spray. She said we must be in private school to be out traveling this time of year. “We’re in free school,” I replied. “Erehwon. Nowhere spelled backward. We go to Erewhon in Dallas.” I trumpeted the phrase as Anton’s kids so often did. Mom had said that Anton was going to try to enroll us in Erewhon so that we’d be enrolled in school. “In free school you teach yourself. You decide what you want to learn and when you want to go.” The old lady had smiled. She wore a T-shirt that read WE SUPPORT OUR TROOPS.

  “What are you thinking about, Kate?” Mom asked. “What’s on your giant brain?” She rustled my hair and smiled down on me. All around was an ocean of space and wind. Nowhere to hide.

  “School buses,” I said.

  “Now that’s odd. What about school buses?”

  “About Felicity James.” She came to mind suddenly and I said her name. When I was five, Felicity was hit by a school bus and sent thirty feet into the air. Her neck snapped when she landed on the pavement and she died instantly. She was an English girl and was in America for one year because her father was doing research. At school we had traded sandwiches, her butter for my tuna fish. The thinnest white bread spread with sweet butter and nothing else. She had a pretty English accent and missed her front teeth and I had thought the beauty of her accent came from the missing teeth and had wanted to lose my front teeth so that I’d have the accent too. The bus hit her in the fall, just after the time changed and when the mornings suddenly became dark.

  “Oh, Kate, why were you thinking about Felicity James?”

  ♦

  Our camp was different by morning. The world was no longer ours. Instead, we shared it with a small white home on the other side of the road. In the doorway a woman stood, small in the distance. I couldn’t make out her face, if she were young or old, mad or indifferent that we were there. She watched us wake up, come from the tent and the camper, prepare breakfast, stretch in the cool bright morning. Mom set the table. Sofia cooked eggs and sausage and Bisquick biscuits at the stove in the camper. Chickens clucked in the woman’s brown yard. A barbed-wire fence marked off a square of land that I figured was hers. She fingered her ear and a breeze blew her hair away from her face. I wondered what she made of us, if she’d heard us chant and scream in the night. Four pairs of black pantyhose hung on a clothesline stretching from a window to a lone tree. The legs danced. Junk cluttered her yard. Dwayne waved and Anton tipped his hat and Finny stared hard. We all sat down to breakfast. She continued to stand there with her fingers on her ear. Anton took off his cowboy hat and placed it in his chair. He cleared his throat and blessed the food and welcomed Dwayne and then read a version of a prayer from St. Ignatius Loyola. He was calm and generous when he prayed, hands folded at his front, head bowed to the ground. His shirt inflated with wind.

  ♦

  Teach us good Lord to serve you as you deserve, to give and not to count the cost, to fight and not to heed the wounds, to work and not to seek for rest, to labor and not to ask for any reward except that of knowing we have thy will.

  ♦

  Foot-high twisters swirled over the golden fields and tumble-weeds rolled, some catching in the wire fence, and everyone was silent, listening to Anton. When he finished he said that it was a beautiful prayer because it was the essence of pure love and that the difference between truth and idea was practice. We ate. The eggs were wet and good. A few buzzards circled in the sky. I looked at Dwayne drooling our honey on the biscuits, at his comfortable position in the chair like someone long away finally home. Then I looked at James, who sipped steaming coffee and whose blue eyes were tired from just waking up. I wasn’t sure why I felt generous toward him and not toward Dwayne. I wanted to understand more about God.

  The woman still watched. I wanted to explain us to her because I knew for sure that she had us all wrong.

  ♦

  James had been with us one and a half months already and he was as good as a brother and son by now, with no intention of leaving. Mom and Anton would have been upset if James had wanted to leave. They would have felt betrayed, as if he were leaving to spite them. And in the beginning, that’s the way it was with Dwayne. It didn’t matter that none of us kids liked him. He annoyed us actually and had this awful habit of referring to things by their initials. It didn’t matter that his parents weren’t at the ‘D P’, that they had never been to the ‘D P’, that they never intended to come. As far as we knew he had no parents, but he did have a reservation, for which we were grateful when Julia got sick.

  ∨ Bright Angel Time ∧

  Desert Princess

  I loved tourist bureaus for the same reason I loved gas stations. They were little huts of comfort in the middle of a nowhere town on some wide dusty street, offering bathrooms and information and little treats – colored suckers, fishbowls of them, and I always fisted a lot, shoving them into the pocket of my dress to save for later when di
nnertime had passed and we hadn’t yet eaten. Those huts were cold inside, well air-conditioned. The smell of coffee was strong and a fat woman with thick eyelashes always smoked a cigarette with a long ash teetering on the cigarette’s amber end. You knew what to expect inside those huts: menus and flyers from resorts and newspapers with calendars of events: festival of the fiddlers and square-dance jamborinas. Postcards for free. Pamphlets and leaflets, maps and brochures advertising Indian reservations and the sale of jewelry crafted by the Havasu, the Hopi, the Huala-pai, advertising the recent erection of the London Bridge, balloon rides over the desert at dusk, teepee tours. I collected all that information, heaps of it, so that I knew what was out there on those deserted roads, what we were driving through when it seemed we were driving through nothing.

  At one tourist bureau I spotted a leaflet written by the FBI warning vacationers, a blood-red leaflet with bold white lettering:

  THE BECKONING THUMB CAN BE A LURE TO DISASTER IN DISGUISE. THIS VACATION SEASON, COUNTLESS CITIZENS WILL BE INVITED TO PLAY A FATEFUL GAME OF CHANCE WITH HITCHHIKERS – WITH LIFE AND DEATH THE POSSIBLE STAKES.

  The back page listed several murders by hitchhikers. One driver had his throat slit, one was raped and then hanged, one was buried alive.

  ♦

  I didn’t trust Dwayne, but I almost loved him for having led us to the Desert Princess. It was the most beautiful hotel I had ever seen, rising in pyramids from a grove of coconut palms and green lawns that rippled out to the soft beige of dunes. Torches lined the drive and peacocks strutted across the lawn. There were eleven pools and seven restaurants with all-you-can-eat buffets. Mud baths and hot springs. Water, so much water, cascaded from fountains and sprinklers sprayed mists over the grounds. Small boats sailed on a network of canals, ferrying guests between buildings.