Dorothea Dreams (Heirloom Books)

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  If it was me, she thought, I wouldn’t be scared. I’d take off in a minute and never look back. He just misses his dumb friends, that’s all. I wouldn’t miss anybody.

  “Listen, hijo,” Great-uncle Tilo said. “Listen to me. I been in trouble with the cops myself, you know? Long time ago, about some railroad union business. You don’t want to let cops get hold of you, not with one of their own laying hurt in the hospital. They won’t care that you’re a kid.”

  Somebody came crashing through the undergrowth. They all froze. Blanca thought, oh no, it’s not fair, it can’t be all over so quick!

  “Beto?” the intruder said hoarsely. “Is that you? It’s me, Bobbie. Mina sent me down here with some stuff for you.”

  Blanca could have laughed out loud: cousin Bobbie from the Heights, what a dope! He could have sent them all stampeding into the river, barging in on them like this.

  “Keep it down, will you?” Beto said. “What you mean, she sent you?”

  “She gave me some money for you. She says you should come up to the Heights. She can find you a place to hide out until all the fuss dies down. Boy, is she mad.”

  “She’s always mad,” Roberto growled. “And I’m not going up there, no way.”

  Not mad enough to come down and yell at him — or give him the money — herself, Blanca noted in silence. Mina was no kind of sister, money or no money. Blanca would show them about being a sister, somehow, and do it in person, too.

  “Where were you supposed to go?” Bobbie said.

  “To Aunt Marguerite in LA,” Beto said. “Shit. She could drive you crazy, all that religion and running to church all the time. Anyway, what am I supposed to tell her?”

  Bobbie sat down on the old half-buried timber that Roberto was sitting on, the two of them dark silhouettes against the sparkly surface of the river behind them. Bandits at night on the river bank, Blanca thought. That’s what we are.

  “Mina says you can’t stay with relatives, the cops will expect that. They’ll come looking.”

  That was when Blanca had her idea. She said, “I read about some guys who ran away from the draft in the Vietnam war. They went to Canada.”

  “Canada!” Bobbie said excitedly. “They’d never expect that, Beto. A kid I know, his uncle lives up there. In Toronto. I could get his name for you, maybe. It’s a long border up there. They can’t guard it, and there’s no fence. All that snow, Eskimos and wolves and things — Canada would be great.”

  Roberto rubbed his head where it must be bothering him again. “That’s crazy! How am I supposed to get to Canada?”

  Great-uncle Tilo said, “It’s not so crazy if you got some money in your pocket.”

  And if you’re not alone, Blanca thought, the idea blossoming gloriously in her mind. If they’re looking for a kid on his own, running away, and instead there’s a guy and his sister, traveling to visit relatives, hitching, a couple of nice kids —

  Great-uncle Tilo hawked and spat in the dirt. Blanca hated how he spat all the time. She looked at the shining gobbet of spit gleaming on the ground. She had loved Great-uncle Tilo a lot when she was little. He was saying how he went across Canada once on a train. Big country, he said, but cold. Good trains.

  “First you’ve got to get out of Albuquerque,” Blanca said. With me, Beto. But she’d have to go easy on that right now or he’d spook and say no, and she’d never budge him. She’d have to make him see that it was her chance to get out too.

  “I could go with you,” Bobbie said eagerly. “Part of the way, anyhow. They wouldn’t be looking for two guys, only one.”

  She could have strangled him, stealing her idea. But that wouldn’t stop her. Nobody could stop her.

  “I don’t know,” Great-uncle Tilo said, shaking his head. “It could get dangerous. You won’t know how dangerous until you try. For one thing, they’re looking for Martín too, remember. He’s an ex-con, so they’re all primed to start shooting, specially with one of their own shot already. Is it easier to slip two of you out of town, or just one? Maybe when Garduño takes his truck up into the mountains to cut pinion —”

  As if that sour old man would agree to carry Beto!

  Silence again. Everybody was thinking. Blanca ground her shoulder blade against the wood at her back, easing the discomfort of the cast. She was getting tired. She wished they’d get this over with so she could start working on Beto in private.

  Bobbie said, “Hey. The drawing class.”

  “What about it?” Beto said. He sounded really cranky.

  “The trip is day after tomorrow, remember? We’re supposed to go in that big old van.”

  “So what? Man, are you crazy, you think I’m taking some lousy field trip now?”

  “Would the cops stop a car full of kids going on a school trip?”

  Hey Mom, Blanca thought dreamily, guess what; I’m going to asthma camp in Canada with the wolves and the Eskimos.

  Ellie Stern had never seen Roberto look so subdued.

  “We have a ranch south of Taos,” he mumbled. “I mean we used to live up around there.”

  She looked at him, puzzled and wary but gratified. Had she finally broken through to him on some level, had she banished his belligerence and his bluster? With seven years of teaching behind her, she still found kids baffling much of the time, especially your more sullen, angry ethnics. She had not run into too many of them at the Marshall School in New York. Some kind of success with Roberto, here, would be all the more significant.

  The girl, his sister, piped up, “We used to spend our summers up there.” Such a clear, bright voice to come from that odd, slightly stunted body. What a striking child, with her apricot skin and honey hair; who’d imagine coarse, thick-set Roberto having such a sister? Ellie had hoped for some contact with Spanish or Indian culture on her vacation out here. This seemed to be it at last, the return for her bread of acceptance cast upon the murky waters of Roberto’s spirit.

  She was relieved that her reaction to the street closing had not driven Roberto away. She was to have a chance now to show that though she was — not cowardly, exactly, but sensible — about problems like that, she was a good person.

  He said, “The doctor said I should take my sister up there to spend some time with our grandma, as long as the class was going.”

  “The doctor?” Ellie said. Surely not a trip to the country for a broken arm? “Is your sister — ah, Blanca, is Blanca ill?”

  “She has asthma,” Roberto said. “All we need is a lift to Taos. Our grandma can pick us up there.”

  “It’s okay,” the girl herself said, in her curiously self-possessed manner. “I don’t get attacks in cars, and anyway I have my medication with me.”

  Roberto stood looking down and dug in the dirt with the heel of his boot. Angry at having to ask for help, probably; the pride of the Spanish heritage. Of course they would have no money for cars or gas or bus fare to Taos. Treatment for Blanca’s asthma probably devoured any spare cash they had.

  Ellie said, “We’re not stopping except for lunch, and that’s going to be a picnic with what we’ve brought — is that all right? Good; glad to have you join us.”

  Here came Joni across the parking lot toward them with a sketch pad and a big bag of sandwiches.

  Ellie introduced Blanca. “We’ll be giving her a lift with us. There’ll just be room: Angie’s twisted her ankle again and Paul can’t come.”

  “We’re going in that?” Joni sniffed. One of the parents, a man who ran a small sight-seeing operation in town, had provided the van. It was a snub nosed vehicle in rusting gray with a once-sleek roadrunner stenciled on the side. There were three big bench seats, a single bucket-seat up front next to the driver, and a cramped little stowage-space in the back. Ellie unlocked the back doors so the kids could load the food they’d brought and a big plastic jug of water.

  Thank God Mary had had time to take her on a test run, teaching her to drive the thing, because now Mary wasn’t coming. It was all Ellie’s sh
ow. Think of it as an adventure. But she was nervous, very nervous. Dorothea Howard was not exactly a nobody — she was a very distinguished artist, and Ellie hadn’t even met her personally.

  Of course having Joni Reed along was almost like having another staff member. Joni was so quick, so sure of where she was going, so adult. She wouldn’t be out of place in Ellie’s class at the Marshall School.

  “Can I sit in the van until we go?” Blanca said. “This cast is kind of heavy.”

  “Sure,” Ellie said. She was beginning to rather like the girl, who was certainly a great deal more open and accessible than her surly brother. “Open the window if you like.”

  They got into the back seat, the girl maneuvering her white-cased arm so that the cast rested against the window-frame. Roberto reached across her to push the window out as far as it would go, which wasn’t very far. The day was warm already, and the back of the van was probably going to be pretty stuffy. Ellie resolved that after lunch they would switch seating arrangements to give other people a crack at a window seat. Being fair was so important with the young.

  Joyce came lolling out of the building. “Mary wants to check with you in the office before we go,” she said.

  Mary was absorbed in the frightening problem of a female student who had last been seen hitch-hiking homeward yesterday. The child had never shown up. In the office Ellie said comforting things and gave Mary the class list with checks by the names of the kids who were going. Mary reassured her: “Please, go on, it’ll make me feel better to know that something is going as planned in all this upheaval!” She swore again that Dorothea Howard would be perfectly delighted to see the class, even without Mary herself. “She’ll understand. She’ll be great.”

  When Ellie returned to the van she found that Roberto had the engine exposed and was doing something to it while the other kids watched.

  “Trying to fix up the air conditioning,” Bobbie volunteered. “Jeff says he heard it doesn’t work.”

  Roberto could not fix the air conditioning. They set out with all the windows open. Ellie left with a great sense of relief. Crisis and its atmosphere made her very tense.

  Driving out toward the Interstate, she wondered ruefully how she had gotten herself into this thing. Sometimes she thought she must have been crazy to volunteer to teach in Mary’s program during her vacation, and in a field that wasn’t even really hers. She had done it on impulse, in response to a radio-ad inviting people to come and teach something they loved and knew about. And what a relief it had been to leave her recalcitrant book project, a novel that wouldn’t move, for the familiar pleasures of the classroom — only so much freer than what she was used to at home. Eight kids! A fresh subject, her minor in college, instead of Benito Cereno and Moby Dick again!

  She looked in the rear-view mirror. “Joni, don’t smoke in the car, all right? The rest of us have to breathe too.”

  In the rear-view mirror Ellie saw the butt shoot out the window. She swore at a low-slung junk heap that swung suddenly in front of her without a signal. She remembered that she hadn’t told Mary about her extra passengers, but with that missing girl on everybody’s mind she had forgotten. Just as well. Suppose there was some school rule against taking non-school riders, after Ellie had agreed?

  Jeff, in the navigator’s seat, twiddled the knobs on the dashboard, but the radio, like the air-conditioning, seemed to be broken, thank God.

  Roberto looked covertly at the others seated ahead of him. All Anglos. The kind of people he was heading out to spend the rest of his life with. He couldn’t believe it.

  Another thing he couldn’t believe was that Bobbie had been right, Miss Stern didn’t know a damn thing about Pinto Street. She probably didn’t even watch the news, or she would have picked up on something. Man, was she dumb. And the rest of them were minding their own business just right.

  We are going to do this. We are going to get away with it.

  Canada. I’m starting out for Canada.

  The familiarity of the country sliding past as they drove north made him uneasy. Pretty soon that part would run out and it would all turn strange. No more landmarks then. Involuntarily he marked them off as they flowed past: the Alameda turn-off, the Bernalillo trailer parks down below the interstate embankment. His mind went to the scenes up ahead: the electrical station at Algodones; the yellow bluff near San Felipe Pueblo; the turn-off west to Peña Blanca and the town of Cochiti Lake; the steep red passage up La Bajada; Santa Fe; and Taos, sixty miles north; and beyond Taos, no road that he knew; and somewhere up in Colorado, mountains whose shapes he had never seen.

  Near Taos was the ranch where they had all lived before his father died. He wasn’t even sure he could spot the turn-off now. He didn’t remember much about the place. Anyway, he would just as soon not stop there. Maybe his father’s ghost, or his old grandma’s that they were supposed to be visiting, might be hanging around and spot him going away. If they even recognized him. He wasn’t the fat little kid he’d been up there, that was for sure. He was sitting here with a gun in the waistband of his pants, hidden by his denim jacket.

  Great-uncle Tilo had gotten the gun someplace — an old pistol with a dull finish but oily and clean. Thinking about it, feeling the warming pressure of it against his belly, made him tense up with excitement. Better not fool with me, man. Better not.

  He was too young for prison. But if they caught him, and that cop died, he might never live to see the inside of Juvenile Detention. They would treat him like one of the Maestas brothers, hard cases with blood on their hands from way back.

  But Canada! What did he know about Canada? It’s a big, cold place. A lot of the people speaking French. A Spanish guy with a little cash and no job and no French and no family, what can he hope for there?

  The van slowed down. State Police cars were parked on both sides of the highway. The two lanes of traffic crawled up to cops who spoke to the drivers before passing them through.

  Roberto sat clenched with fear, thinking about the gun he carried. You don’t want to touch this thing unless you’re going to use it, Great-uncle Tilo had said. Use it? Shoot at this cop’s dark, narrow, face looking in at this car full of people? Jesus!

  “What’s this about?” the teacher said.

  Nobody else said a word.

  Roberto forced himself to breathe. He looked at the cop out of the corners of his eyes. The cop was chewing gum. He leaned in at the car window, squinting at the passengers. His partner spoke to the teacher on her side: “Driver’s license and registration, please.”

  She dug out the stuff and handed it over. He looked through the papers. He said, “You know everybody here, right, Ma’am?”

  “Of course. They’re my drawing class.”

  “Okay, go on through please. Have a good trip.”

  As he stepped back, she leaned out after him. “Could you tell us what you’re looking for?”

  God.

  “Go on please, Ma’am,” he repeated, and at the flip of his hand she stepped, thank God, thank God, on the gas.

  Just like that. Roberto couldn’t believe it. He wanted to howl with relief. Blanca was clutching his sleeve, he noticed. Bobbie, that wimp, looked green and sweaty.

  Jeff, in the front seat, said, “Looking for drugs, I betcha. They always pick on kids about drugs.”

  “Except today, right?” the teacher said. “Not that there’s anything in this car to find, I trust. There better not be.”

  “We smoked it all before we came,” Alex said.

  Everybody laughed except Roberto, who was watching Joni Brown-Nose digging into her big shoulder-bag. She got out a little pocket radio and switched it on. Christ. Just music, but she began to hunt along the dial.

  Die, you bitch, Roberto thought furiously. Keel over and —

  The teacher glanced back. “Joni, do you have to? It’s been so nice and peaceful.”

  Joni said, “Maybe if we get the news, we’ll find out what the cops are looking for.”

>   “Illegal aliens,” Alex said quickly, glancing at Roberto. Bobbie had talked to Alex; Alex knew. He was trying to help. Roberto wished he would keep his smart mouth shut.

  “Oh, it’s probably somebody escaped from the State Pen again,” Joyce said in that spacey way she had. “They’re always getting out of there, slipping through the stupid, clumsy fingers of the system. It makes you wonder why anybody bothers to stay in.”

  Roberto thought of Martín Maestas, wished he was with him. Martín would know how to do this really right, man. But he was off on his own. He knew how to be a fugitive. He wouldn’t be rolling north with a goddamn art class, stuck in here with them while Joni Reed’s radio told everybody what was up.

  The announcer said it was news time. Maybe he wouldn’t mention Pinto Street at all. But what difference would that make? Suppose there was another road block, more cops looking? Roberto knew he could not sit through another stop like that.

  He said loudly, “They’re looking for me.”

  Alex shivered with excitement. Roberto’s story had wiped that namby-pamby look right off Stern’s face.

  She said, “Did any of you kids know about this back in the parking lot?”

  Joni said, in the general silence, “Well I, for one, didn’t know anything about it until just now. I don’t even know where Pinto Street is.”

  “That’s okay,” Alex cracked. “Now Pinto Street has come to you; you’ll get to know all about it.”

  Miss Stern said, “But you knew, Alex?”

  Alex nodded. “I told Bobbie I was glad to help.”

  Jeff cleared his throat. “I knew a little bit about it before, from tv. Bobbie told me in the parking lot that Roberto just needs to lay low someplace up north for a while, until things get straightened out.”

  Miss Stern, driving hunched over her white-knuckled hands, said, “As soon as I find a place, I’m pulling over, and you three in the back can get out. I can’t possibly — Joyce, did you know?”