Further Out Than You Thought

by Michaela Carter

  Lazy bones, lying in the sun,

  how do you expect to get a day’s work done?

  It wasn’t the first time she’d tried it on him, and there’d even been mornings it had made him laugh, but now he glared at her with his one open eye and rolled over.

  The dried blood on his sleeve looked worse in the morning light. The stain was darker, bigger than she’d remembered. She pulled the sleeve up and looked at the wound. It was livid, inflamed. She pressed on the skin around it and a bloody pus seeped. She pulled her hand back. “We need to get you to a hospital.”

  He held up his arm, gazing at the gash in a detached manner, as though he were assessing a work of art—something he’d made and was proud of. He ran his fingertips over it, and wiped the pus on the bedsheet. “It’s fine,” he said.

  “No, it’s not fine.”

  Valiant backed away from him. “It’s disgusting.”

  “I’m taking you to the emergency room,” said Gwen.

  Leo got out of bed. “My mom’s a nurse. Apparently our destination is San Clemente,” he grumbled. “We can stop by her place. She’ll fix me up.”

  Twenty-seven

  THEY WERE DRIVING for the border before the gringos who’d been at the bars the previous night were out of bed. The town was sleepy still, and almost pretty. It had a morning-after feel, hazy, with bright trash flattened on the sidewalk and a few vendors pushing their carts—fruit, tortillas, sombreros.

  At the border, there was only one car ahead of them. Leo was in the front seat and Fifi sat on his lap. Her head out the window, she was sniffing the air. “Oh, shit,” Valiant said. “Do they let you bring dogs in from Mexico?”

  “What do you mean? She’s my dog.”

  “We didn’t have any trouble getting across,” Gwen said, but her stomach did a flip. “Here,” she said, taking the shock collar from her purse. Leo strapped it on to Fifi. He covered her loosely with Valiant’s black jacket and slid her under his legs. They hoped she would look like a shadow on the floor.

  She rolled down the window for the agent, who asked if they were American. Gwen told her they were. The woman said she needed to see ID, and Leo and Valiant gave their licenses to Gwen, who handed them, along with her own, to the woman.

  When she peered into the car, nobody moved. She was broad-faced, with sharp eyes and thin lips that Gwen found herself wanting to see smile—to see if they could smile. She looked at Gwen and then at Leo in his TODAY I’M MEXICAN shirt with dried blood on his sleeve and scowled. She walked to a back window and tapped on it. Christ. Gwen felt the blood drain from her face. And then she heard it—the yip like a hiccup from under Leo’s legs. Fifi had been shocked midbark. Gwen held her breath, but all was quiet. She could see the woman in her side mirror, her expression unchanged, a good sign. Valiant rolled the window down. She looked at him, at his driver’s license photo and then back at him. With his legs crossed and his arm around Mary, he was the epitome of cool, but this was taking longer than Gwen expected. Leo bit his lower lip. His eyes were wide and blank, as if he’d just remembered something.

  If the agent found Fifi what would she do? Quarantine her? Gwen wasn’t sure Leo had kept Fifi’s tags up to date. He’d never taken her to the vet, not as long as she’d known him. Her tags, however old, would make her American, Gwen supposed, and they’d make Leo her owner. That had to count for something.

  The agent handed Gwen back the licenses, gave a slight upward nod, as if expression were precious and she meant to conserve it, and she let them drive past. They sighed a communal oh of relief. They were on the other side, in America, where the road was a freeway, wide and clean and smooth, where the signs of upcoming cities were big and plain—San Diego, San Clemente, Los Angeles. And Leo pulled Fifi out of hiding, took her shock collar off. He held her on his lap and stroked her head. “Well, Fifi, you almost got to live the dream.”

  Was he kidding? No. His face was set as though he meant it.

  They were in the desert now, and Gwen breathed it in. Such a particular smell. Creosote. The smell before the rains came. Its musty sweetness brought with it her childhood, a certain idle solitude, that feeling of wanting something and not knowing what it is, or else wanting nothing but an impossible changelessness.

  Everyone slept, everyone but Gwen. Gwen the driver. She yawned. A double, a triple espresso—she’d give anything to have one right now. There was a coffee bar in San Clemente, just an hour away. She told herself she could make it.

  San Diego came and went. And then there were fields, green and yellow with mustard flowers, and the ocean all misted over. Fog ebbed and flowed over the freeway. She drove slow in the right lane and opened her window. Breathing the fog, she felt clean, new. She shivered, grabbed Valiant’s jacket from the floor and wrapped it around her. It stank of smoke and booze, but it kept her warm.

  They passed Camp Pendleton, and the giant nuclear tits of the San Onofre power plant, passed the yellow, diamond-shaped warning signs—the family in silhouette, man, woman, and child with their hands linked, running across the freeway—what to watch for, what not to hit. At the border patrol immigration checkpoint, she slowed to a stop and waited for the line of cars to filter through. In the fog, the waiting felt, to Gwen, otherworldly. As if they were all just souls, bodiless souls, and when they arrived at the checkpoint they’d be escorted to the next stage—the officers wouldn’t be officers but orderlies in all white, and they’d take them by the arm to the depot where they’d each enter a womb and start a new life. She looked in the rearview mirror at Valiant, his face gaunt, but peaceful as he slept. He looked to her like an ascetic, as though he’d already given up the world. The cars inched forward. Leo yawned and stretched and Gwen thought of telling him—about the souls and the new bodies, about the orderlies in white. Tell a dream and you lose it, she reminded herself, and she kept the vision just that, a vision. At the stop sign the officer no sooner glanced at them than waved them on. No one in the car looked Mexican enough to bother.

  Fifi stuck her head out the window. The salt air blew her long hair back, flattening her face so she was all eyes, black nose, and lips. She looked like a white seal. She stayed there, blinking against the wind, and Gwen thought she saw her smile. Valiant was still out. “He lives over here,” Leo said, and she took the first exit and drove up a hill.

  Leo hugged his knees to his chest. “Why didn’t you tell me? You could have, you know?”

  “Tell you?”

  “About your mom. You told him but you couldn’t tell me?”

  “You were sleeping.”

  “Or trying to.” His look was petulant. Sad eyes, the tight jaw. “You can tell me things, Gwen. I’m here for you.”

  She wanted to believe him. It was why she had stayed with him, she knew—because, despite his erratic tendencies, his eccentricities, he was steadfast. So why hadn’t she told him the truth?

  He turned from her. She watched the road. What was she guilty of? Everyone has a mask. A face to meet the faces that you meet. It was timing, she told herself. She was coming clean with the world now—showing her true face. She wanted to explain, but found she couldn’t—couldn’t put this shift into words. Words were flimsy, surface reflections, the world as one saw it in still water, marred by the slightest wind. And she was deep beneath the water in her own slow, thick world. Her words would come out in burbles not even she could understand.

  The road traced the edge of a cliff; it went on and on. “The long and winding road, huh?” she said, talking against the silence.

  Valiant gasped and sat up. He blinked open his eyes. “Fuck.” He looked out the window. “Jesus, we’re here. I was dreaming. We were on a ride, in a car-thing, you know, on a track.”

  “A roller coaster?” Leo said.

  “Only it went just in a circle. We wanted to get off and they wouldn’t stop it. The guy who ran it was laughing and it went faster and faster, until it launched us, the three of us in the car, and the car was a magic carpet and we coul
d go anywhere. We were off the track.”

  “Where’d we go?” Gwen asked.

  “We didn’t get that far,” he said, laughing, and then coughing too long. “We each wanted to go different places, I think. But it was okay. We had all the time we needed.”

  His house was the last on a cul-de-sac, and it looked out over a canyon. She imagined that flaming car from Valiant’s youth screaming down the hill and soaring into the canyon, imagined the fire spreading for miles. All that light and heat and power. A god—or a goddess—unleashed. She pulled to the curb and parked the car.

  “That’s my room,” Valiant said, pointing to an upstairs window with a royal blue curtain half drawn across it. He hadn’t always been obsessed with darkness, then. He’d been just a boy once, one of the few black boys in San Clemente. Baseball and bubblegum. Maybe even girls? He’d said he’d tried them for a while, but it was hard to picture.

  They got out of the car. Fifi found a spot in the middle of the yard and peed. Valiant rang the bell and they all waited in the cool, suburban morning. A robin hopped along a fence. Overhead, a flock of gulls circled. One could see the ocean from here, she supposed, if it weren’t for the low clouds.

  A woman opened the door. She was dark-skinned, short and pear-shaped, wearing a bright, floral housedress. Her salt-and-pepper hair was in rollers under a hot pink scarf. She lit up when she saw Valiant, and her eyes filled with tears. “Meu Angelo, meu bebe,” she said. “I was worried. I’ve been calling, didn’t you get my calls?” She hugged him, coming up not quite to his shoulders. He picked her up and squeezed her. She turned her head, Gwen thought, away from his smell—cigarettes, tequila, and vomit, days of not showering. They all had to stink. They’d probably grown accustomed to it.

  “Maria, I want you to meet Gwen. Gwen, Maria.”

  Gwen put her hand out, and disregarding it Maria pulled her to her pillowy chest. She smelled of dryer sheets, of powder and perfume. She let Gwen go and took Leo into her arms. “Meu caro, it’s been so long.” She pulled back and looked him over. “What are those,” she said, “knickers?”

  “Part of a costume,” Leo said, blushing.

  “Theater?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Maria,” Valiant said. “I was hoping to stay, for just a while. A few days.”

  “Naturalmente, Angelo, you’ll stay. You take a hot bath, I wash those clothes. You have a bag in the car?”

  Valiant shook his head. “Just Mary,” he said, and Leo carried her over and set her on the stoop. “For you,” Valiant said.

  His mother beamed and hugged him to her again. “You stay as long as you like. I’m making coxinha.”

  “And pão de queijo?” Valiant said. Gwen thought he might jump up and down.

  “Come inside,” she said to Gwen and Leo. “You want some cookies, tea?”

  “No thank you, Mrs. Valente. We should get going,” Leo said.

  “All right, love. It’s good to see you.” She turned to Gwen, held her in her gaze. “Thank you, dear.”

  “For what?”

  “For bringing my boy home.” Her eyes brimming again, she turned and went into the house.

  The three of them stood in the quiet, as if no one were willing to break it.

  “Well,” said the Count at last. “I guess this is it.”

  “What are you talking about? You’re coming back,” Leo said.

  The Count nodded and tried to smile. He gave Leo a big-hearted hug. And somehow she knew this was it. The last time she would see him.

  “It’s been fun,” he said.

  “Shhh,” Gwen quieted him. It was too much. All of it. She wasn’t ready. “We have time,” she said, as if saying the words would make them real. Looking out, toward the ocean at the low-hung layer of clouds, her chest felt heavy. She should have been there more for him. He was right—she’d been selfish. She turned so he couldn’t see her tears.

  He put his arm around her, bent to her height, and rested his head on her shoulder. “Hey, kid. It’s okay. You two will make amazing parents. You will. Think of what a spiffy job you’ve done taking care of me.” He gave her a squeeze and whispered into her ear. “My camera’s in the car. I want you to have it. Develop the film and send me copies.” Unable to speak, she nodded.

  Like the Count that he was, he took a step back, bowed, and kissed her on both cheeks. “Your baby, girl or boy, will be a knockout.” He put a finger under her chin and lifted it. “Those Grace Kelly cheekbones. You should have been—”

  “A movie star?” He nodded. “I don’t know,” she said. “I think it’s better this way.”

  She wanted to give him something. A present. “Someday,” she said. “I’ll write a novel, about us. The three of us.”

  “All right,” he said, smiling for real now. “That sounds all right. But promise me one thing.”

  “Anything.”

  “It has to have pooping in it. No one ever poops in novels.”

  They all looked at Fifi, on the side of the yard, pooping on the pansies.

  Twenty-eight

  THE CAR FELT hollow without him. She pulled away slowly. They were heading back down the road, toward the ocean. The street curved, but just before the house was out of sight, she stopped. She could see, in her rearview mirror, the stooped figure of Angelo Valente. He was leaning on the railing as he climbed the few steps to his front door. She wanted him to look toward them and wave, but he didn’t.

  She watched the door close behind him, and she drove down the hill.

  Leo reached under his seat and pulled out a small plastic baggie. “Ready for another trip?” he said. “An uncharted waters sort of trip?” He shook the baggie and the shriveled brown pieces danced inside it.

  She looked at the bag and then at him. “Not really.”

  “Really.” He was grinning like the Cheshire cat, as if he were already lit. He opened the bag and sniffed. “Smells innocuous enough.”

  “You brought that into Mexico? What were you thinking? Or do you think?” She tightened her grip on the wheel, faced the road because she sure as hell didn’t want to look at him.

  “It isn’t like it’s cocaine. They’re mushrooms, for Christ’s sake. They’re a vegetable. Or else a fungus. Is a fungus a vegetable? My point is, we might have been cooking a risotto for all the border patrol knew.”

  He was turning a piece in his fingers. “Amazing how inedible this looks,” he said and popped it in his mouth.

  “You remembered, didn’t you, at the border. You’d forgotten about them.” She was putting it together—his sudden look of terror and the fact of the mushrooms. And she’d been worried for Fifi. She was glad she hadn’t known.

  “Oh, God, I’d forgotten.” He was chewing, chewing, his mouth puckering and his eyes watering. “What do we have to drink?”

  “Here.” She reached behind his seat and handed him her last gallon jug of water, half full.

  “Will wonders never cease,” he said and washed the mushrooms down. He’d long ago learned not to touch her water, learned firsthand that the goddess could be fierce. Still, he had enjoyed the comment. She snatched the water from his hands.

  He took his time chewing another few pieces, as if he were trying to taste them. He swallowed them dry. “They really do taste like shit,” he said, beaming, and he dropped the baggie in her lap. “For you, my dear.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Jesus, Gwen. Since when did you turn prude?”

  She stopped the car in the middle of the empty, winding road. She looked at him.

  His face was blank. “What?”

  “Really, Leo?” she said. And then it dawned on him.

  “So you’re pregnant. God, Gwen. What’d you think, I forgot? It’s not like it changes anything. Think of all the hippies that dropped acid pregnant. Their babies were fine. You yourself were born in the Summer of Love.”

  A car behind her screamed to a stop, honked. She drove on.

  “That doesn
’t mean my mom did drugs.”

  “This is just mushrooms. It’s a—”

  “A fungus, I know. A fungus from a cow pie. Lovely.” She put the baggie of mushrooms in her purse.

  She turned down the main drag to the ocean. “Make a left here,” he said. “And a right. We can park at the end of my old street. The beach access is free.”

  They drove down a row of apartments that looked like they belonged to the seventies. At a beige duplex, he told her to stop. She pulled over, yanked the parking brake up. It was the apartment he’d grown up in, he said, where his mom still lived.

  “Why haven’t I been here?” Gwen had met his mom before, but it was at the Italian deli down the street. She’d loaded Leo up with parmigiana and salami, olives and pasta, so much food they’d lived off it for a month.

  “It’s small,” he said. “Two bedrooms. Brown shag carpet wall to wall. I didn’t think you’d want to see it.”

  “She needs to look at your cut. Let’s go up.” She killed the engine and opened the door and—before she could stop her—Fifi jumped from the car and bolted toward the apartment. Leo caught her at the bottom of the stairs. Holding her tight, he got in the car with her.

  “Start the engine, will you?”

  “No.” Gwen stepped from the car and crossed the lawn. She shouted back at him, “You need antiseptic, something. You said she was a nurse.”

  “She is.”

  “Well—”

  “No.” Jutting out his jaw, he was a toddler embracing the word. “No. I told her I’d be on the news, and I went to Tijuana instead. My son the bum, she’ll say.” He laughed it off. “And anyway, I can feel the mushrooms. The world is blooming! Come on, Gwendy, let’s go to the beach.”

  “It’s your arm,” she said, and got in the car and started the engine.

  Looking back at the apartment, she pictured his mother alone in her apartment, glued to her TV, waiting to glimpse her son. “I bet she’d just be happy you’re alive,” she said, and released the parking brake. She drove to the end of the street and parked the car in a cul-de-sac in front of a little Spanish-style church.