A Prayer for Travelers

by Ruchika Tomar

  “Flaca,” I said, to make sure we were seeing the same thing. She pulled open the crumpled flaps of a nearby box, the cardboard sagging. She pulled out a dusty VHS tape—Flashdance—and handed it to me. She passed me an amputated G.I. Joe and several ribboned hair bows before lifting the box to set it on the ground, ripping open the one below. After a few minutes of digging she abandoned it for another, adding a pair of faux-cow print pants I remembered seeing Penny wear in middle school.

  “I actually like those,” I said, surprised to see them again.

  “Right?”

  “Are all these hers?” I asked.

  “No way,” Flaca said, holding up a football. “I don’t remember half this crap.” She punted the football to a corner of the room, where it landed behind another stack of containers.

  “Flaca! Jesus.”

  “Look.” Flaca drew out a soft, spiral bound notebook, flipping through to show off its contents. The pages were covered in disparate magazine clippings all pasted together. I set the items I was holding onto the carpet and took the notebook for a closer look. On one page, a shampoo model’s perfect head was fused with the corner to the Hollywood sign, an image of a surfer partially overlaid. The cut edges of a red Cadillac convertible were curling up, the distinctively cheap paper I recognized from the Carson car dealership’s circular. How easily those colors had bled when Lamb set his coffee cup on its pages.

  “Her collages,” Flaca said. “Remember?”

  I was almost touched by the idea that Flaca had momentarily forgot—we had not been friends then, I was still a year behind Penny in school. But I felt something clicking together in my mind; Penny at the thrift, her arms loaded down with magazines. And I remembered Mrs. Mason in third grade, the art project explained to us in great detail. Penny would have learned the technique first, and must have taken away something essential. I touched the pages: a collage of boy band members, a pastiche of wildflowers. Hadn’t I noticed piles of magazines on her bookshelves gathering dust? Didn’t I see a fashion glossy folded into her tote at work? Yet I had never asked. I handed the notebook back to Flaca, weary of this experiment, this evening, how often I was meant to review the same lesson over and over again: I didn’t know Penny at all. Flaca was digging deep with her free hand, nearly tipping over into the box’s depths. She pulled back a moment later, triumphantly brandishing a Slinky.

  I picked my way to the vivarium across the room, bending to examine the graded rock and saltbush habitat. What appeared so visceral from the doorway was, up close, only a paper backdrop clinging to the glass, the tactual contrast a trick of distance and light. A layer of wood chips and sphagnum moss covered the bottom of the tank, the cork hide and water bowl like miniature kiddie toys next to the large, thick-bodied snake, his cedar and buff-colored scales camouflaged to his surroundings. At the sight of it, I stiffened, a prickling sensation at the base of my neck. I hadn’t forgotten the half-moons Penny clawed in my arm on our hike up the mountain, the gopher snake slithering away from us in the brush. Though this snake lay coiled, his head and tail hidden from view, there was no mistaking the distinctive diamonds patterning his spine. It was the kind, as children, we had all been taught to avoid.

  “Flaca. Please tell me this isn’t what I think it is.” On the opposite end of the tank a small white mouse was curled tightly in a ball, petrified or newly dead. I turned around to find the room empty, the box Flaca had been digging through abandoned, its flaps sticking up. Alvaro stood in the doorway, watching me. I had no sense of how long he might have been there or when Flaca had left. I waited for him to come forward, picking his way down the center of the room. He smiled, reaching over to rub my bare arms with his warm, calloused hands. At some point I had broken into gooseflesh without noticing.

  “It’s good that you came,” he said.

  44

  Someone was shaking me awake in a room of halogen white to the sound of a shrill, mechanical wail. I had fallen asleep stretched in the margin of Lamb’s gurney, my head tucked against his shoulder. Lamb would wake to find me having stolen, once again, across his boundaries. All my life, trying to crawl into his skin.

  “We have to move you.” It was the nurse who had taken Lamb’s blood the night before. She stood at the edge of the bed next to the young resident in a white coat, his face stern as he bent over the screaming machine. He shut it down, then turned to the others one by one, their screens blinking off. I sat up on the bed to look at Lamb, my eyes still gritty. The nurse caught my face in her hand.

  “Honey,” she said.

  With the final echoes of the machines fading, I realized some part of me had imagined their wailing originated inside myself. I pushed the nurse’s hands away. Lamb still hadn’t opened his eyes, immune to the commotion. I grabbed his hand. My stomach lurched. “Is he sleeping?”

  “What did you say her name was?” the resident asked, impatient. “Cale? Cale, we need you to get down from there.”

  “Page the doctor,” the nurse said.

  “He’s on his way.” The resident took the nurse’s place next to the bed, leaning over, his breath stale with coffee.

  “No.” I screwed my eyes shut, my heart hammering. “Please don’t.”

  “I’m taking you. I’m taking her,” he announced, scooping me up, hefting me close to his chest. “Where do we want her?”

  I was made of lightness and terror, a child again. His coat felt stiff against my cheek, his arm hard underneath my knees. He crossed the room easily, unbothered by my weight. Strong and able-bodied, he carried me out of the room, down the long white hall, hitching me close to maneuver a doorknob. In the hush of an empty room, he laid me down on an exam table, the paper crinkling underneath. I watched him rearrange his features into the clinical approximation of concern. This boy had gone to medical school. There was nothing he couldn’t fix. He was going to be a man someday. He thought he already was.

  I rolled onto my side, the exam paper sticking to my face. Rocking back and forth on the paper, this green, dense boy trying to hedge me in with his hands.

  “The doctor’s coming. I’ll tell him where you are.” He hesitated, flattening his palm against my hot back. I was making a horrible, familiar sound, the one I heard so often on the mountain in the middle of the night; the neighbors’ little dogs stolen from their yards, their forlorn cries as they were ripped apart by the coys.

  “I know,” he said.

  45

  The baby-faced doctor clicked on his penlight and pulled up my eyelid with his finger, shining the beam through the back of my skull. Another day I might have asked him what he saw there—if looking inside a person was like peeking inside a handmade pot, bumpy and cool with shadows, but nothing you could hold. The doctor’s fingers probed the base of my ear.

  “Cale?” He wanted me to speak, to make an effort signaling wellness. It felt as if a shroud had been lowered between this life and my feelings about it. I wanted to cry but if I started again, I wouldn’t stop. It was an old affliction, an infirmity of my person. When I was little, I woke up crying every night with an intensity that frightened Lamb so much, he threatened to drop me at the hospital if I didn’t quit. I wasn’t afraid of any monster, or myself. It was sorrow cracking me open, a fissure I couldn’t explain, a yearning for something or someone I didn’t know. Can you tell me what a mother is? Nothing you can measure.

  Though I cried every night, no woman ever came. When the tears lasted long enough, Lamb turned on the lights in the hall, trundling to my room in a drowse. His weight, when lowered onto the bed, tilted the mattress so far that I spilled onto him. He gathered me up in his Barbasol night smell and squeezed me too hard, forgetting I was a girl. If the heaving cries persisted and nothing else would work, he asked, Do you want me to tell you a story? I did.

  Lamb didn’t know any traditional fables. He had forgotten the nursery rhymes meant for children: boys living in the moon,
duplicitous wolves, princesses in tall castles lending their hair. To calm an inconsolable child, what he came up with in the middle of the night was Once there were three monkeys.

  Once there were three monkeys, and one monkey said, I want to build a spaceship.

  Once there were three monkeys, and one monkey said, I’m going to make some macaroni.

  Once there were three monkeys, and one monkey said, I want to ride a carousel.

  “I’m going to give you something to help you sleep,” the doctor said.

  50

  Alvaro moved a fleshy palm in the air in front of me, as if to stroke the neck of an invisible cat. “Relájese. ¿Usted siempre se pone nerviosa?”

  “That’s a rattlesnake. And that mouse—”

  “Mi amigo.”

  “The mouse?”

  He laughed, thawing into life. “Solo a los ratones le gustan los ratones, entiendes?”

  “Where did Flaca go?”

  “Son como perros. They can sense your fear.”

  “I’m not afraid.” Penny was afraid. Alvaro nodded along, his interest piqued. I hesitated, wondering if I’d made the wrong move. “Does it have a name?”

  “You name dogs in this country, mascotas. Pero no nombras a los animales salvajes.”

  I looked back at the tank. The snake did not appear to be sensing my fear or anything else. He remained coiled, his head tucked from view.

  “Is it sick?”

  “A little moody. Not as social as his friends. Do you want to see something special?”

  I looked around the room for anything that might explain the damp feeling still lingering in the room. The boxes and tapes and magazines must have taken a lifetime to acquire, but Penny hadn’t grown up in this overcrowded trailer. Penny grew up in a house with her siblings in the palo, close enough to Flaca and Lourdes and Luz that they all walked home together after school. So where am I? And where was Flaca? If she had driven away and left me behind, I would kill her. But I would have heard the deathtrap’s engine turning over. I hoped I would have heard it. I hesitated.

  “I think Flaca—”

  “Shhh.” He held a finger to pursed lips, his resemblance to Penny suddenly made clear; the abundant mouth strangely out of place on a face otherwise so flatly masculine. He pulled a shoebox-size container from the nearby stack, a loopy number 8 scrawled on the opaque plastic in red marker. He pried off the lid, bulleted with holes. The nagging feeling returned, a formless vapor curling through the vents. He motioned me closer. I took a step forward and looked inside. On a bed of newspaper, two thin, flame-colored serpents stirred, disentangling as if incriminated by their embrace. Corn snakes, siblings, too, their saddle markings nearly identical.

  “Not these,” Alvaro set the container on the bed, offsetting the lid. “Just wait. There are a few you have to see.”

  He pulled another container and set it on the bed. I took a step back, scanning the room, trying to count all the containers lining the room from the ground up, the reason they were all stacked Mad Hatter askew. Air holes. My breath was coming out ragged; Lamb in the hospital room trying to clear his lungs. I had never been afraid of snakes, not the occasional gopher on the mountain or the ball pythons trapped behind glass at the pet store in Noe. But the rattlesnake in the tank was wild, and any one of the storage containers might contain another feral surprise. I counted more than thirty storage containers on the floor, straining to make out the numbers scrawled alongside: 78 on one, 52 on another. Some seemed to be missing numbers altogether, or had been stacked backward, their codes facing the wall. I counted another twenty containers lining the path to the door. How many were piled behind others out of view? Was the large plastic hamper I spied in a high corner set apart for a reason, or was it crowning another tower of containers, invisible from where I stood? Even if the majority of containers held single snakes and only some held doubles, there were easily more than a hundred snakes in the room.

  Alvaro pried open another container and pulled out a thick white serpent, an indistinct pattern of cardamom-colored scales along its spine, fading into tail. He held her up for me to admire. I was reassessing the boxes and videocassettes, the playpen, all manner of chaos in the room and Alvaro blocking the path to the door. He let the white snake down on the bed where she lay still, cautious of her newfound freedom. He began moving other containers out of the way, amassing them into piles according to size, clearing his way to a large tub anchoring the stack. Before I could invent a reason to stop him, he was pulling off its lid, hauling from the plastic bin a heavy gray snake, one hand behind the snake’s arrow-shaped head, another hooked under the body; five, six, seven feet of stone-colored scales and still coming. The animal didn’t look thrilled about being handled, kinking his neck into a tight S, widening his mouth to hiss.

  “This is a constrictor,” Alvaro said. “Do you know what that means?”

  “It doesn’t bite?”

  “They bite,” Alvaro said, “and then they squeeze.”

  He draped the dense gray body around his shoulders. I’d never seen anything like it. How many more of these creatures were from our desert? How many had been bought and traded for, bred or captured on other lands? On the bed, one of the corn snakes poked his head over the lip of his container and seemed intent on slithering free.

  “Alvaro,” I said, intending to warn him. But Alvaro was still preoccupied with the constrictor. He came closer, offering me the animal’s long body to touch, watching my expression closely. It was a test, or seemed like one. I ran my fingers obediently down the boa’s dry scales. Alvaro was electrified, wholly transformed from the reticent man I had met a half hour earlier. I stroked the animal again, meeting Alvaro’s eyes.

  “I need to ask you about Penny.”

  “You have to be careful with snakes this big. They can kill a dog, a baby, just playing.”

  “Do snakes play?”

  “Todos jugamos,” he said.

  “The police must have called you about Penny. I’ve spoken to them. They’ve called Flaca. They’re just trying to understand where Penny might be. No one’s seen her for over a week.”

  Alvaro lifted the animal, draping the snake’s thick torso around my neck. It weighed heavily on my narrow shoulders, but I was grateful Alvaro hadn’t bothered to lift my hair free, that I still had some boundary, however thin, against the powerful body pressing like one smooth, protracted muscle against my neck. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the snake curling back its tail, seeking balance. I was careful not to turn my head. The energy in the room was tightening; the boa forked the air with a black tongue. I felt a sharp kernel of ancient alarm. How long did snakes live? I realized I didn’t know. On the mattress, one of the corn snakes had slithered free and was moving steadily across the bed. Alvaro wasn’t paying any mind, shifting and restacking other containers, absorbed by all the mysteries coiled inside their plastic dens, awaiting their brief reprieve. I hesitated, determined to try again.

  “If you could think of anything—”

  “Tú no conoces a mi hija,” Alvaro said, continuing his work. “Or you wouldn’t worry. Piénsalo. These snakes, you can catch them in the wild. Put them in a box for a week, a month, a year,” he looked up at me to make sure I was following. I pressed my lips together to keep from nodding. “We could go now,” he said. “Drive twenty miles and drop them in the brush. What do you think would happen? All of a sudden they’d forget? No. They survive better than us.”

  I coughed, the snake around my neck freezing at the movement, forking his cautious tongue. “Penny isn’t a snake.”

  But Alvaro had already turned away, squatting to open another container, then another, setting them down across the path, further obstructing the only exit from the room.

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  He shrugged.

  “Alvaro. Please, can you think of anywhe
re she might go?”

  “Where could she go?” He seemed suddenly surprised by the idea, looking up from his hands and knees on the floor. He stopped to consider. “Not far.”

  Why had Flaca brought me here? Alvaro wouldn’t help us, even if he could. But I forced myself to consider what he said. In my mind’s eye I saw Penny raising the tire iron over her head and bringing it down again and again. As if on cue, there was a sharp, sudden thwack behind me, the boa stilling against my neck. I turned carefully and saw the corn snake, having slithered to the edge of the mattress, had struck the glass and was now hovering in front of the rattlesnake’s tank, fixated on the mouse that had uncurled itself in the corner inside. The mouse was now scratching furiously against the glass. The mouse must have only been stunned before, or scared, trying to make himself as small as possible. Now he had come to understand the gravity of his situation, his whiskers twitching. Inside the tank, the rattlesnake was beginning to uncurl himself in languorous fashion.