by Noreen Ayres
The landscape became less desolate soon, between Barstow and Baker, and I took pleasure in the soft rust colors of sandstone crust and the deep blue shadows stairstepping down the craggy ridges in the near distance. In the far distance, the landscape softened as though a painter had swept a brushful of milk over the canvas to plead away the harshness. Slight trees at roadside knuckled with parasites. In the slow-vehicle lane next to me, a truck laden with pipe crawled toward Halloran Summit, and just ahead of it, a silver tour bus loaded with Vegas bettors droned on, and as I pulled away approaching the ridges, I saw the broken black stone left by the glaciers, and the bleached sand that had swept up the sides of the mountains from the valley floor in lonely drafts.
Ten miles before reaching Baker is Zzyzx Road, as in eye and six, and down it to the east about five miles is the Desert Studies Center. A zealot of one sort or another squatted the land many years back and built a spa, hotel, and church that were in operation till the BLM—Bureau of Land Management, a big honcho in these parts—confiscated the buildings. I knew about this because Jeri Landsforth, our forensic anthropologist, taught a class in insects there two years ago. Who knows, if our department had had the training dollars then, maybe I’d be pushing around insects with tweezers the size of knitting needles today, or out in the brush bothering birds. Joe S. told me, my first week in the lab, You’ll get one-sided here. Have a life apart from this, he’d say. Get involved in your community. Be around kids if you can. Enjoy your family. Join a baseball team. Play badminton or racquetball or bingo. If I were out of Building 16 more often, maybe I wouldn’t get “possessed.”
By the time I reached Baker and stopped, the temperature was warm enough to be summer in most other places of the world. In the last week of December the so-called Yukon Express had made noble attempts to break through the desert heat, but failed. My body wouldn’t have dry skin where I didn’t know I had skin if the storm had made it this far, because it would’ve pushed through to California too. Orange County was into big-time drought, at the same time that land developers were spilling millions of gallons of water on graded land to keep the dust down, and cities were setting up the Water Police and cajoling us to take sixty-second showers. No thanks. This citizen is going to order water every time she eats in a restaurant too, so there. Put me in jail. Then release me in fifteen minutes.
I drove up to Bun Boy and saw it was boarded up, then wheeled back to the omnipresent Denny’s, where I parked under the inadequate shadow of a palm and stood by my car to remove the long-sleeved denim shirt I had on over my white T. The bumper sticker of a car parked next to mine with the blue-and-black plates from Baja California read: NO A LAS DROGAS! So—some Mexicans don’t like drugs any better than we do. One time Raymond asked me to go blue-shark fishing in Mexico, before he moved in with Yolanda. I wish I had. But I was sick then. He brought back a seventy-pounder, showed the pictures around, and said, “Is that an ugly thing or what?” I said, “Which, the one standing on its tail or the one beside it?” and he said for someone who chickened out, I sure sounded jealous to him.
Inside, after taking care of business, I ordered a coffee and bagel, then sat imagining how it would be to take a vacation with Joe. Hours to talk with him, to ask what he was like as a little boy, what he wanted to be when he grew up; what his parents were like. To ask who his best friend was in grammar school—those kinds of questions. I wondered about things like who did Joe vote for in the governor’s race, and I was afraid to find out. And I wondered if he and Jennifer ever wanted more than one child. That night in his apartment, after we’d finished the first time, he laughed and said, “An old man with a weak heart has just been seduced by a woman with none.” I said, “Wait a minute. Who was it who kissed who right on the ever-lovin’ lips in the office, huh? You started this whole thing.” And then I asked him when was the first time he ever thought about me, and he said, “That’s naughty.” I pressed him, and he looked like he was thinking, and then said, “What’d you say your name was?”
In a quieter moment, he dragged a finger over my still-fiery scar and called it my evil grin. That thought, while I sat there in Denny’s, led me to thinking about how else Joe would make love to me—in the bathroom, in the kitchen, in a car, in a sleeping bag, one of my fave fantasies, like, Oh, we’re lost on this big bad mountain and only one sleeping bag between us, tsk, tsk. And after that, thinking I’d like to see him watching a movie. I’d like to watch him working on something at home, and cooking something I’d never eat.
And before I knew it, I was thinking of Patricia, her telling me not only in Chi-Chi’s but another time, when it had been a long spell between interests for me, that she was going to have to get me some serious action. Patricia with the purple earrings and the tease in her eyes—strong, sure of herself. The only time I didn’t see her sure of herself was the time I took her to the jail. The only time I didn’t hear her that way was on the telephone when she told me Phillip had done something with or to a girl; oh, and yes, when she said someone’d been in her apartment How did my friend, Patricia Harris, wind up with Roland Fuckhead Dugdale, who looks like Chuck “The Rifleman” Connors, that’s who.
I slipped the Beaver Tail postcard out of my purse and studied it some more. Cactus waving “Y’all come” on front. Could be a whorehouse. Beaver Tail’s suggestive. Nah. Whorehouses are lying low these days, done in by AIDS or the IRS. The regular houses were more out in the hinterland, in Nye, not in Clark County, where Las Vegas is. Nevada’s big cities outlaw prostitution, so the houses string out along the arteries. Nye, eerily shaped like a mushroom, is close enough for Nellis Air Force boys to pop over for a poke. At the stem end of the mushroom is the Nellis Nuclear Testing Site. Pick your poison.
I turned the postcard over. Definitely my address, my name: Okay, Smokes, stare close. Maybe your powers can read Patricia’s whorls, loops, and arches right there on the postcard’s blue sky, spelling out her name in fingerprint language. Maybe you’ll turn a cactus wrinkle into a scrawled line of text. Like a message in a bottle.”
I put the card back, dredged the last of the coffee, and sat waiting for the check. Patricia’s voice moved into my memory again, telling me someone left the milk carton open in her apartment. Someone threw egg on her car. Saying, “Smokey, something completely weird is going on.”
My face flushed. I didn’t want to think about it. It was clear now that I had been so afraid for her at some unarticulated level, I had let the episodes slip right out of my mind; as if criminal things won’t—can’t—happen to people close to you, because your very presence in that person’s life is stop-order enough. Jerry Dwyer? True, we weren’t close. But he was “in” my life, and I in his. We traded jokes and regarded each other in that watchful way when you have an interest in someone but can’t fulfill it due to a whole car-lot of differences. Jerry, the kid with the morning full of smiles.
The waitress bid happy trails to me, and while I walked back to my car, I said to my mental picture of Patricia: I’ll be there, amiga. I’m coming. Hold on.
On the frontage road leading back to the highway, I saw the gray car again in my mirror. Nuts, I’m flipping out here, I thought, but I pulled across the road into the dirt lot of the fire station, and then I saw it was a one-horse police station too. How convenient. The Taurus went by. I circled back up to the road and picked up speed again.
From Orange County, figure five hours to get to Vegas. Barely anything in that long trip to break the fundamental monotony of the highway as it ribbons through sandstone, limestone, dry lakes, and lava beds, except the game of spot-a-cop-before-a-cop-spots-you. Yes, Samantha June Brandon does break some laws, shame on me. I try to put a cap on it, though. Honest, I do.
Ahead, a dust devil danced across the flat land, and even with my air conditioner on, I could hear the rasp of grit-filled wind as it broke across my windshield, and I slowed, and noticed for the first time the pale-green bushes on black wood poked up behind wire fences strung as far as the
eye could see. Everywhere, wire fences. Not a place to pull off the road and shoot at tin cans anymore.
A dark mound loomed in the highway; roadkill, no doubt. I was coming close when the humped shoulders moved and a turkey vulture lifted off from the meat, his bare, red, and wrinkled head like a raw drumstick. A glance upward showed me two more of the birds riding thermals, tilting unsteadily, their six-foot wings pitched to a dihedral; that is to say, a shallow V. Not a cop in a ’copter, just the graceful birds cleaning carrion for us. I’ve often thought, if the digestive systems of buzzards, call them vultures, destroy whatever malignant bacteria fester in ripe meat, then let us bottle that stuff, add a solvent here, a distillate there, press the jar mouth against diseases that attack human beings, or against the rough hide of a society that murders its own; clean its carrion.
CHAPTER
32
Bonnie and Clyde’s bullet-riddled death car rests in the lobby at Whiskey Pete’s. At the Prima Donna casino, across the highway from the “Death Car,” as it is billed, stands a Ferris wheel you can ride. Up the road a little is Kactus Kate’s, and beyond that the Gold Strike, behind which is nested, in this bleakest of terrains, the Sandy Valley Correctional Center, a medium-security state prison with rust-colored blockhouses and beige guard towers that stick up on the north and the south boundaries. Rectangular slits at the top of the towers look like the eyeshields of welder’s masks, only from the highway they seem to stare not at the yard, but at you. Guys at Sandy can look down at the Gold Strike and plot escape long enough to blow quarters down the chutes for the ten-thousand-dollar prize and then ride, man, outa there. I’d forgotten what Nevada could mean.
Here, in another life, I was Dusty Rose, and then I was Smokey Shannon. Alias Samantha Montiel or, rather, the other way around. My hair was red, my legs were long, my costume was less than I now wear to bed.
Fifteen years ago, Stretch Jones and I were on our way to San Francisco—’Frisco, we called it, but San Franciscans hate that. It was the middle of November. I was recently out of high school, working a couple of different jobs at local stores and trying to decide if I could avoid taking a job with my dad in his bookbinding business much longer, or if I should go on to college, as my biology teacher wanted me to. I’d been living more out than in at my parents’ in Camarillo, a sleepy little town about fifty-five miles south of Santa Barbara. The day I met Stretch I’d just hopped out of my boyfriend’s car after an argument and went hitchhiking up 101 in the rain. Not too far up the road, this guy in a yellow VW stopped and asked me if I needed a ride. I said no. But about a half-mile farther I came to a coffee shop and went in. There he was at the counter in his dry denim jacket and goatee, the same guy as in the Volks, sipping hot tea and eating a burger. He looked a little like the pictures of Ichabod Crane in schoolbooks, if Ichabod Crane wore denim and love beads. We talked a little. He had a quiet sense of humor and sad brown eyes. When it came time to pay, he dug with two fingers into his pocket, checked his wallet, and came up short. I bought the burger and invited him home.
A few days later we were on the road, headed north to check out the Haight because that’s where it was happening. In my heart I had misgivings, because I didn’t want to do heavy dope, and the pressure would be on in a big way there. Peyote and other psychedelics were available everywhere, including my mom and dad’s own middle-class abode, but I thought it would be worse in the Haight without my natural parent/child rebellion to account for abstention. Stretch got an idea we should go to Nevada and gamble, see if we could get a stake. We got as far as the city of Jean, just over the border. I said, If we’re going to do this, let’s hit the big casinos where they’d have more money to give away. There was a billboard I’d seen announcing Debbie Reynolds at the Desert Inn, and I thought, Wow, despite the fact that Debbie Reynolds was not what a teenager in my set would consider cool. The year before, I’d seen Valerie Perrine in Lenny. What a wonderful thing, I thought, that you can be a showgirl like her or Goldie Hawn, then switch careers.
What happened instead was that we escaped Jean, arriving in “the city without clocks” at about three. We wound up stopping at the first tiny casino outside the Strip, a place with wagon wheels in the front yard, and it was all over. Stretch, with his black headband and feather earring, drinking Jack D at the slots and telling me in his honey-smooth voice, You go do your thing, and I’ll do mine. It’s cool, baby. It’s cool.
So I did. The only problem was, it was Stretch’s car and only my knapsack and blanket. I went back into the place twice to try to reason him out of it, the last time telling him, Okay, I’ll leave the blanket; what’ll happen if you have to sleep in your car? And then coins came avalanching out of his machine, and after a good deal of whooping and smooching, he looked at me one solemn second, took up a handful of coins, using the other to pull out the right front pocket of my jacket, and poured the fistful in. He did that till I felt like a kangaroo with ten babies, and then he said, Oops, you’re listing, sister; and added more to the left.
I walked up the Strip and applied for a job at the next casino, but was too dumb to lie about my age. I did that several more times, not missing souvenir shops and even one gas station, and I knew I should be lying, saying I was twenty-one, but I thought they’d laugh me right out of town. It was getting dark, and I was blue to the bone by now and a couple of miles away from where I started, and both mad and scared. Outside a drugstore, I saw a girl washing windows and asked her some questions. She looked me over once or twice and said she was going to a part of town, that had a lot more chances for jobs; she’d be off soon, and she’d drop me, if I liked. That night I stayed in a motel in North Las Vegas, paid for with slot-machine nickels.
The next day I walked up and down sidewalks, going in every furniture store and carpet place, every bakery, every newsstand hole-in-the-wall, looking for work. I can tell you grit sticks to your teeth when the hard wind blows. There’s a neat little three-pronged sticker that jumps right in your shoes, called devil’s weed for good reason. People told me Las Vegas suffered the worst flash flood in its history four months before, and sweeps of flood deposit were still visible at the roadsides; still, it didn’t flood away those stickers. But I was young, and I wasn’t worried. It was fun.
Then one day I found Cipriano Rycken, sole proprietor of Randy’s, a good-time place that, well, employed young women who liked to dance and didn’t mind taking off their clothes.
Cipriano—or Cip, pronounced “Sip”—was a nice man with quiet ways, the kind of man you’d expect to be running a restaurant or a lumberyard, not a strip joint. A beige canvas apron was tied around his waist when I first saw him, and he was carrying a pickle jar out the door of his place. Holding the jar to the light, he glanced at me once and went back to inspecting whatever was in there. I waited, thinking maybe they could use a dishwasher or even a waitress inside the establishment, because I assumed Randy’s was a café, there being a nice big window with geranium plants in front and a panel wall just behind and no sign to announce it as a topless, the reason being, I learned later, he was having one repainted. He wore green snakeskin boots, and I guess I was studying those when he said, “Look what my cat was playing with.” He lowered the jar, unscrewed the cap, and I looked in to see this amber-colored creature trying to grab a toehold on the glass. I jumped back, and he laughed and said, “Girls don’t see the beauty of these things. It’s just a little old scorpion. Long as they don’t whap you on the skull or face, you’re okay. Look at this, how he’s got a couple eyes on the top of his head. Cute little devil, don’t you think?” I looked again, but skeptically, and he said, “He’s got four or five more on the side and he’s still blind as a bat.” Then he grinned at me and put the lid back on, and that’s when I asked him for a job.
I told him I was eighteen, and he said, “Can you wait tables?” . . . “I don’t know.” . . . “Can you smile and look pretty?” I did, and he let me in, let me wear my own clothes and not a uniform, and told me, don’t
take no lip from nobody. Just come and tell him, he’d straighten it out. I worked three weeks as a waitress.
I stayed almost two years.
My name was Dusty Rose. I wore black stockings with seams down the back and a pink suit jacket that was longer than a miniskirt. The jacket was an old one of Cipriano’s; he was narrow enough in the shoulders for me to make it work. I wore a pink camellia in my hair. I learned to use makeup.
Frazier Baldwin, the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, taught me how to dance. She was a mix of White, Afro-American, Choctaw, and Thai. She told me she was “Thai dyed.” And telling me this that first day I met her, she smiled, and the history of all that was calm and lovely in the world beamed into that room. I am not gay, but I fell in love.
She was tall to my short, dark to my light, centered to my randomness. She wasn’t on dope, and she took a special interest in me. Frazier was the old lady among the rest of us: twenty-six, with a six-year-old son her mother took care of while she worked. I watched Frazier as a student would a master teacher. Not in a hundred years would I ever match that: the concentration so fierce on her face as she danced. I could see a bead of sweat trickle down next to her ear as I stood in the annex watching. To me it looked like a diamond. She did a flamenco wearing a shiny black hat and sleek rip-away pants. She dropped her top early in the dance. Her breasts were rather small, and after a while you simply forgot the top was not on, and so did the audience; you could tell, because when she’d finish there’d be this grand hush, and the calls from the back sounded different, respectful, and always at least one guy would stand and give an ovation.
