Inland Passage

by Jane Rule

  “What about school?” Joey asked.

  “Might keep you out of trouble for a while after you got back,” Anna suggested.

  Their problem with Joey was that he was too good in school, his patience more often tested than either his mind or imagination.

  “Then you like the idea?” Harry asked, encouraged.

  “Could I take Petey?” Sally asked.

  “I don’t think birds are allowed to cross the border,” Harry said.

  It was one of those remarks that sent all three others into rounds of laughter which mildly puzzled Harry.

  “It’s—like—birds, Dad,” Joey then said kindly. “Going south. Petey could migrate in his cage.”

  Mike had already taken January, and the office was too short-staffed for Harry to have a holiday at the same time.

  “Go for Christmas,” his boss said.

  “All right,” Anna agreed.

  “We aren’t going to miss Christmas, Sally,” Harry explained. “Everywhere is Christmas.”

  “Will it snow?”

  “No. We’ll probably go swimming on Christmas day, just the way they do in Australia.”

  “Can we cut our own tree?”

  “It will be a cactus. Now, look, you guys, the point is something different, all right?”

  “Christmas isn’t exactly boring the way it is,” Joey said.

  “It’s time they traveled,” Harry said later when the children had gone to bed. “They’re in a rut already.”

  “Well, kids are conservative about greed, that’s all,” Anna said. “They don’t want to get out of the range of Santa Claus. You can understand that.”

  “Since it’s Christmas, do you think, just this once, we might try for reservations?”

  “No,” Anna said. What she had refused to do all through crowded Europe, she was not about to agree to in the sparsely populated southern desert.

  “If there’s no room at the inn?”

  “We stay in the stable. Anyway, who but a family of nuts goes away for Christmas?”

  “Jews. Every Jew I know is trying to get his kids away from Christmas.”

  “Happy Hanukkah,” Anna said and yawned.

  The only elaborate preparations Harry tried to make were those for Sally’s canary, but, though he called every office from embassy to customs, he could get neither Canada nor the United States to object to taking Petey with them. The bird had as much right to go south as they did.

  “You don’t even want a certificate from the vet?” Harry asked, incredulous.

  “Not even proof of citizenship.”

  Harry finally resorted to reasoning with Sally. “What if the weather confuses him? What if he begins to molt?”

  But Sally, at five, could be as implacable as her mother.

  “The bird,” Anna reminded Harry, “was your idea in the first place.”

  Harry had one of those clairvoyant moments about the trip, his idea in the first place, during which impossible-to-imagine responsibilities and problems would fall to him to bear and solve. How he wished it had been Anna’s suggestion against which he could raise all that might be impractical and ominous.

  Joey, once he’d brought home his first book about the desert, was Harry’s enthusiastic ally.

  “There are rattlesnakes and flash floods,” Joey promised them all. “And much better earthquakes than we ever have.”

  He didn’t scare Anna, who was a fatalist, but he terrified Sally with stories of carnivorous birds and aggressive cacti.

  “You know, you can’t treat a cactus like a tree, Dad,” Joey explained. “They’re more like porcupines,” and to Sally he said, “You don’t even have to touch some of them to make them shoot their quills at you.”

  “We’re going to be picking grapefruit and oranges off the trees,” Harry said. “We’re going to be lying in the sun. We’re going to be swimming and playing golf and tennis.”

  “I don’t know how, most of those,” Sally said.

  “I’ll teach you.”

  In the spirit of their escape from winter, Harry tried to curse their first snow, which fell only several days before they were to leave, but with the new snow tires he’d bought for mountain driving, he had no trouble getting home, and the kids were out on the hill with garbage can lids having a lovely time.

  “This is going to be cake-and-eat-it year,” Harry said confidently.

  “It’s hard to look out the window and then pack shorts and bathing suits,” Anna said.

  She did not go on to compare the experience with daffodils on the Christmas dinner table, of which she didn’t approve.

  “I’ve told them we’re not hauling all our presents down there and back. We’ll have a second Christmas when we get home, all right?”

  “I guess so,” Harry said.

  It was not practical, of course, with limited room in the car, with customs, but he was not sure, come the day itself, how he’d be Santa Claus without presents.

  “Well, one each,” Anna said, modestly relenting.

  Petey was the only one to get his present early, a traveling cage a foot square with a light-tight cover.

  “It’s not just to shut him up at night,” Anna explained. “It’s to keep him from getting car sick.”

  “Do birds get car sick?” Harry asked, incredulous.

  “They don’t get seasick,” Joey said, “or gulls wouldn’t ride on the ferry boats.”

  “Is Petey going to throw up?” Sally asked.

  “How about leaving him home?”

  “Just because I get car sick, you don’t leave me home,” Sally answered indignantly.

  It snowed again the morning they were to leave, but nobody minded, and Harry presented them all with new plaid laprobes for the occasion.

  “I wanted to get beach towels,” he confessed, “but there weren’t any around this time of year.”

  The children were warmly settled in the back seat, cool can between them in which Anna had packed all they needed for breakfasts and lunches along the way, Petey in his covered cage on top of that. Anna was in front with her knitting.

  “We’re off,” Harry said, as the wheels spun for a second before the new tires grabbed and sent them in a jolt out of the driveway.

  Harry had planned three days for the trip. At the end of the first, he wondered if they’d ever get there at all. It had taken them twelve hours to get to Portland. He sometimes hadn’t been able to see more than fifteen feet in front of him, and patches of ice made braking no option, as the huge double trailer trucks jack-knifed across the road testified.

  “Wow, look at that!” Joey would exclaim, peering through the snow veil. “Is it going to blow up, do you think, Dad?”

  Sally thought it wasn’t fair not to let Petey see something of the trip, but, when she uncovered him and found him huddled in the corner of the tiny cage, his feathers fluffed out like a winter overcoat, she didn’t have to be told to cover him again.

  “Is he going to die?” she asked every fifteen or twenty minutes.

  They hadn’t dared to stop for lunch not only because they might have frozen to death but because there was no sure way off the road. The others ate, but Harry managed no more than half a sandwich and a couple of swigs of Anna’s vegetable soup which sat, a sour fist of fear, in his stomach for the rest of the day. He couldn’t even eat the hamburgers he finally managed to buy them after they were safely installed in a Portland motel.

  If the heat had worked, if the ice machine hadn’t kept him awake most of the night, Harry might have been tempted to suggest they hole in there until the storm—or winter was over.

  “We ought to be out of this in another day,” Anna said reassuringly.

  “Mike and Joyce fly to Mexico,” Harry said grimly.

  “We’re doing what they’re not doing,” Anna reminded him.

  Half way through Oregon, the snow turned to rain, but at Grant’s Pass it was snowing again, and Harry was told by the motel manager that both roads into Californi
a were closed.

  “For how long?”

  There was no way of telling. This motel room was, at least, warm, but it wasn’t until the next afternoon during the seventh game of monopoly that the sun finally came out and Petey began to sing. Though they had paid for a second night, Harry decided right after dinner, when he heard the roads were open, to leave at once. It would be the hardest part of the trip for Sally, the road twisting down out of the mountains, and this way she might sleep through it. After she threw up her dinner at a snow-narrowed turn out, she did, and Harry resisted taking up her question about the distressed bird. As they crossed the California border, they slowed to go through the inspection station where they had to give up the mandarin oranges they’d forgotten to declare at the international border. It seemed to Harry another symbolic deprivation of their Canadian Christmas.

  “I thought there were orange and grapefruit trees in California,” Joey said, peering out at the dark evergreen forests so like what they had left behind.

  “There will be, son,” Harry said determinedly.

  At dawn, the first miracle of the trip occurred. There on either side of the road were the promised orange and grapefruit groves, bright with fruit lovelier than ornaments on a Christmas tree, acres and acres of them.

  “Look,” Joey said, “there’s fruit on the ground. Could we…?”

  “Waste not, want not,” Anna said to Harry who was always dubious about anything that might not be law abiding.

  So he stopped, and they all got out and picked up oranges which were more fragrant and tasted sweeter than any Harry remembered since his childhood. So peacefully euphoric was he to have brought his family safely out of the winter storms of the north to this amazing morning that he said aloud what he had nearly decided not to mention.

  “Old Carl lives in Bakersfield.”

  Anna did not respond.

  “Who’s old Carl?” Sally asked.

  “A friend of mine,” Harry said, preparing to regret his remark.

  Carl was the sort of friend you had until you got seriously enough involved with a woman to introduce them and within moments of seeing Carl in a woman’s eyes, even the most tolerant sort of woman, you wondered what you had ever seen in him at all, for he was fat, loud, and stupid. Yet, because Harry hadn’t seen Carl in ten years, his memory went back to those times before Anna when Carl had been one of Harry’s gang of to-hell-with-it college buddies, willing to go to any game, movie, night club, on any drunk, willing to take his car and spend his money.

  “He’s married now. He’s got kids,” Harry said. “Might just give him a call, stop for a drink on our way through, since it’s Christmas time.”

  Anna still didn’t comment. Joey was watching her; then he turned to his father and shrugged. “It’s okay with me.”

  Carl was, indeed, delighted to hear Harry’s voice on the phone, gave him instructions in confused detail about how to get to the house, told him to come for a drink, come for dinner, spend the night, whatever.

  “We are not going to impose on that man’s poor wife,” Anna began.

  “Of course not,” Harry agreed. “We’ll just drop in and say hello.”

  “Could we have a cookie?” Sally asked.

  “If you’re offered one,” Anna said.

  “They’ll probably be coconut,” Joey suggested brightly; he loved coconut, and Sally wouldn’t touch it.

  It was one of the dozen times a day the strategically placed cool can kept marginal peace with Petey functioning as a sort of one-bird UN force.

  When they arrived at the door, Carl opened it and said, much less enthusiastically than on the phone, “Come in and all, but my wife says to tell you the boy has mumps, so if your kids…”

  “I’ve had the mumps,” Joey said.

  “Sally, darling,” Anna said. “You’ll have to wait in the car. We’ll only be a few minutes.”

  Sally’s face filled up with tears like a glass at a tap.

  “You don’t want to be sick for Christmas.”

  “There isn’t going to be any Christmas,” she wailed.

  “Look, maybe we better make it another time,” Harry began.

  “At least, come in and see the tree,” Carl said. “Otherwise, I’m stuck here with my mother-in-law all afternoon.”

  “I heard that, Carl!” shouted a deep, sexless voice from inside the room. “It’s a question of who’s stuck with who.”

  At the sound of that voice, the tears began to drain out of Sally’s face.

  “I think I’ve had mumps,” Joey said.

  “Look,” Harry said, “both of you go back to the car, all right? We won’t be long.”

  He and Anna were back in twenty minutes.

  “What did the tree look like?” Sally demanded.

  “Just like a tree,” Harry said, “cluttering up the living room.”

  “Were there presents?”

  “Were there cookies?”

  “Mostly there were sick kids and crabby relatives.”

  “Was the lady inside a witch?”

  “More or less,” Harry said. “Now, aren’t you glad we’re not having a Christmas like that?”

  “We don’t have crabby relatives,” Sally said.

  “How fat do you suppose that guy is?” Joey said.

  “Even fatter than I remembered,” Harry said.

  Though he was promising himself not to remember anything on his own before Anna again ever, he was also feeling modestly smug about his own decent shape, his good-looking and agreeable wife, his healthy children. “Poor old Carl. Some people are born to make other people feel good.”

  “Good?” Anna asked.

  “Well, better,” Harry clarified.

  On the outskirts of town, he found a motel with a kidney-shaped pool, and he slept in the California sun while Anna and the children played in the water.

  The next day in Palm Springs, they all did some secretive Christmas shopping.

  “Let’s get the kids a piñata,” Anna suggested. “We’re nearly at the Mexican border.”

  Once they had taken advantage of the stores, Harry was restless to be on their way.

  “You mean, this isn’t where we’re going?” Anna asked.

  “You don’t want to stay here, do you?” Harry asked, surprised.

  “Where else is there?”

  “The state park. Borrego Springs. It has everything Palm Springs has except Palm Springs.”

  Not until they were leaving town and Anna began to sing carols did Harry realize she’d been resigning herself to a week in that rich resort town where private guard services protected the mostly deserted houses of celebrities, where the chief conversation among the locals seemed to be skin cancer, and the tourists complained about the prices of flowered trousers. Harry had not spoken of Borrego Springs before because he wanted to seem spontaneous while being prepared. They would be in the real desert in a little community with, nevertheless, plenty of tourist accommodations, well before dark on Christmas Eve.

  As they all sang together “We Three Kings,” Harry heard Sally’s high, sweet version of “of Oreo Tar.” His cookie-obsessed daughter did not get in the way of his fantasy that they could be that new breed of agnostic wise men still following a star across the badlands in the delicate winter light to a simple place, to a yearly miracle.

  “Wow!” Joey said. “Did you see that sign? ‘This Road Is Subject to Flash Floods!’”

  Each time they dipped into a dry wash, Joey looked in vain for the rushing water. Then he saw a road runner with a snake’s tail hanging out of its beak.

  “Those big ones look like they’re on fire,” Sally said as they passed twelve-foot-high ocotillos, their bare, viciously thorned limbs tipped by fragile red bloom.

  Anna’s hand rested on Harry’s thigh. “I like the ones with halos,” she said, nodding to crowns of bright thorns.

  Then there before them, nearly at the foot of western mountains, as bare of vegetation as a dinosaur’s hide, was the
oasis of Borrego Springs, green with golf courses, punctuated by date palms.

  The two motels near the stores were full. The next three didn’t take pets or children.

  “No children?” Harry asked each time. “You’ve got to be kidding. And the bird’s in a cage.”

  He drove them back into the center and found a real estate office.

  “I’m willing to rent a house if I have to,” Harry explained, trying to sound reasonable.

  “To have children in it, you’d have to buy one,” the sales man explained. “Even then you couldn’t buy one at any of the clubs.”

  “What are you, paranoid about school taxes or something? Didn’t Proposition Thirteen take care of that?”

  “This is a retirement community and an adult resort.”

  “You could camp in the park,” a gas station attendant suggested. “There’s no objection to kids in the park.”

  “It gets down to forty degrees,” Harry protested. “We’ve got nothing with us but lap robes.”

  “I’d say your best bet is to go back to Palm Springs or over to San Diego.”

  “We want to stay here.”

  Sally was staring out the window watching a white-haired woman pedal a giant tricycle up the street.

  “This is a funny place,” she said. “She isn’t really children, is she?”

  “There aren’t any children,” Joey explained.

  “Did they die?”

  “They aren’t allowed.”

  Harry got a list of every place in the valley that offered accommodation. He stood putting dimes into the pay phone as if it were a slot machine.

  “Surely, on Christmas Eve you’d make an exception,” he’d try. Then exasperated, he’d begin to shout, “Children have rights, too, you know!”

  “Harry,” Anna finally said, “I think we better get out of here.”

  “I’m starving,” Joey said. “Are kids allowed to eat here?”

  “There’s that little Mexican restaurant,” Anna said. “How about some tacos, and then we’ll drive over to the ocean.”

  The place was jammed. They had to stand to wait their turn and were finally seated at a table for ten, otherwise occupied by aging couples.

  “What are people doing, eating out on Christmas Eve?” Harry whispered angrily to Anna. “They ought to be at home with their grandchildren.”