“What did he die of ?”
“What a mess,” her mother said. “I haven’t been in here in ages. I need to get the girls in here and clean this sty.”
She turned to Maria as if she’d been talking to herself. “Alzheimer’s.”
Maria nodded, then swallowed. The math hit her without her even having to add: If Johnny Garcia died seven years ago, and Ray was already sick, that meant her father would have been in the last stages of cancer when Ray was diagnosed. How could her mother have endured all that and kept her house running, and a motel? No wonder she was too tired to run it.
“Did Ray have any family?”
“Somewhere. Ohio? Oklahoma? Starts with an O.”
“But none came to help?”
“He never talked about any of that with me.”
At least she’d had a few years with her lover, Maria had thought after her mother wrote to tell her of Ray’s death and asked her to come home. But the whole time her mother had been reminding Ray to eat and trying to keep him from wandering out into the street, she’d also nursed her father, who had no insurance and hated hospitals and demanded to be taken home to die in the very bedroom where he had always seemed so out of place. For the first time ever she came close to asking her mother why she stayed with her father all those years, when he must have known about Ray. How had he lived with that? She knew him to be the kind of man who cared how others saw him, which is why Randy’s death bothered him so deeply. But this was not the time to ask such a question, if indeed she was going to find a time, after not having laid eyes on her mother for ten years and neglecting her during that time of life when, though her mother would never have accepted help from her or anyone else, she might at least need someone to call her every day and ask her what she’d had to eat or whether it had rained, some small, mundane question that had nothing at all to do with whatever answer she supplied and everything to do with the sound of their voices traveling hundreds of miles to close the distance between them.
MARCUS SLEPT POORLY, DESPITE the fact that he’d driven over ten hours that day. All night he was awakened by train clank and warning beep. In the morning he walked across the street to the Fina station for gas-station coffee and a breakfast taco. This was a luxury, as he was accustomed to eating only one real meal a day, consisting of items bought on the cheap in a grocery store and kept fresh in an Igloo in the cab of the truck. Restaurants did not fit the budget. All he’d managed to hide from Annie and the bank was several thousand dollars—about twenty, give or take what it would require to get him down to San Miguel. Aside from the money, he had only his truck, a Ford F-150 434 with only 70K on it, and the contents of its bed: clothes, a few cooking implements, a bicycle, some couple of dozen books, and three boxes of sentimental junk—deeds, maps, love letters, a family Bible charting the lineage of those who had occupied the land he’d let the bank take away.
Shedding all the detritus of home did not bother him. He loved a certain type of movie in which a drifter turned up. The drifter was all about the present tense. If the actor was any good, you could see—in the way he lay across his cot smoking, wearing a wife beater, with his feet flat upside the pine-paneled walls of the trailer house behind the diner, horse farm, or sawmill where some gruff but kindly soul had given him gainful employment—the terminal crush of his yesterday.
The present-tense drifter might occasionally be sighted in some rainy city, but small towns and back roads were his territory. Here is Marcus Banks drifting right on up into right now. Good riddance to those years saddled by something chthonic and corrosive in the land he’d lost. Marcus here, Marcus now. He timed his steps down the street to the beat.
Pinto Canyon, Texas, came to life quickly of a morning. Three-quarters of the vehicles passing by on the street were pickups, and two-ton ones at that, which seemed to Marcus a good sign. Ranchers, maybe a few farmers. It felt like a fine place to break his trip, even though he knew he could stretch out his stash far longer across the border. The quicker he crossed over, the sooner he’d be able to live off something other than peanut butter and banana sandwiches. But he broke his fast on a bench by the train station, conjuring a new diet heavy on tortillas. Never again the tasteless squares of whole wheat Merita that passed for healthy from the Winn-Dixie in Silt. Everything swaddled in a layer of warm corn and flour. The chorizo in the burrito was so delicious that he walked back across the street and told the desk clerk he’d like to keep his room through the weekend.
Afterward he strolled the streets sipping coffee, checking out a hardware store, a thrift shop, and more than one gallery with questionable art more of the southwestern than border variety. Though what did he know? He’d never even given a thought to the notion of Texas. He’d only changed planes in Dallas once on his way to Mexico with Rebecca. It was one of the few places in the country that had somehow escaped his curiosity.
Small towns are the same anywhere, he’d been taught to believe, but this wasn’t Silt, which allowed him, walking the streets, a comfortable anonymity. Though no one he encountered was unfriendly, they did not know him beyond his smile, his nod, if they even noticed him at all. They did not know his family, his failures. They did not know or care that the money he paid with belonged by rights legal and ethical to his sister.
For weeks he had looked forward to disappearing, and walking the streets that afternoon, it seemed small-town Texas was just as good a place to court invisibility as Mexico. At least here he sort of spoke the language.
But this was still town. Marcus had come to prefer the country. He’d been happiest living twelve miles of back roads from Silt, which could only generously be referred to as town. Rebecca was of a decidedly more urban stripe. Once a week or so, Marcus would give in and take her into Wilmington, where they would shop at Target and see a movie and eat overpriced pasta and drink a bottle of wine marked up enough to make Marcus wince. Then they would head home up Highway 17 and turn finally onto 431, and immediately the wayside would close in above them, canopy even in the wintry months, turning their journey shadowy and lush, as if they were driving straight into a secret.
Marcus would welcome what Rebecca would dread. As they drove home, she’d tense up against the passenger door, so far away he felt his voice rising when he tried to small-talk her out of her moodiness.
The day she left, she said for the first time what she’d known for months, and what he had known she had known, had felt in the way she held it in: “You say you can’t move because of your business, but your business is about to get taken away from you.”
“It’s not as bad as all that,” he said.
“You think I don’t ever get the mail? You’re always trying to beat me out to the box, but sometimes the mailman comes when you’re up at the center. Jesus, Marc. Just say it.”
“Say what?”
“You won’t move for me. You’d rather stay here and lose everything than meet me halfway.”
“Where is halfway?” he said, and it had turned out to be the last thing he’d said to Rebecca before she got in her Honda and drove away.
Remembering these words made Marcus crave back road. He needed to see the desert in daylight. According to the map, Big Bend National Park was nearby. A short hike would feel good after all those days driving. He was headed back to the hotel to fetch his truck when he spotted a park ranger coming out of the TransPecos Bank.
Marcus’s long-standing admiration of park rangers had peaked when he’d briefly been one himself. Well, sort of—he neither wore a khaki uniform nor drew a pension from state or government, but he was stationed there at the center to answer the questions, however idiotic, his visitors asked about the local flora. Who better to ask about a hike than a park ranger?
The man was halfway into his vehicle when Marcus hailed him from the middle of the street.
“Excuse me,” said Marcus. “I’m assuming you work down in the park?” Marcus knew enough not to call it by its full, proper name, having visited enough parks on h
is fact-finding road trip to know that employees and locals always referred to Yellowstone or Great Smoky Mountains as “the park.”
The man nodded. He looked to be about thirty. He had his keys in his hand, his other hand on the door of his truck. Marcus attributed his standoffishness to the fact that he’d just come out of a bank. Terrible places run by crooks. He was about to say so to the ranger but remembered his John Waters comment to the desk clerk and thought that, now that he was among people again, he best stick to business instead of trying to come across as funny or conspiratorial.
“I’m just here for a few days. You wouldn’t happen to know of a day hike down in the park, or anywhere around here, that would not prove too strenuous for a man who has been living at sea level for the last decade?”
“Where you coming from?” asked the ranger. He relaxed a bit, put his keys in his pocket, but still seemed a little curt, as if it should have been obvious to Marcus that he was off the clock.
“North Carolina.”
They small-talked for a few minutes about the Outer Banks and Asheville, which were the two places in the state people who had never been there wanted to visit.
“The park’s over a hundred miles from here, just so you know. And you’d have to go pretty deep in to get to the good trails. I know a place about an hour from here. Nice little walk that will take you along the border by the river.”
“Rio Grande?” said Marcus.
“Only river around, unless you want to drive four hours to the Pecos.”
“I’d love to see the Rio Grande.”
“I wouldn’t get too excited,” said the ranger. “Where I’m going to send you, it’s more like a creek. You could wade across, though I don’t have to tell you what a bad idea that’d be. The road’s paved for the first forty miles or so, but then it gets a little rough. You’re going to need some clearance. What are you driving?”
The ranger seemed suitably impressed by the F-150. Marcus did not tell him that it was filled with all he owned in the world and that he was not about to unload it. He’d left it packed both nights, in motel parking lots in Jackson, Tennessee, and Mesquite, Texas, and walked out the next morning to find the tarp as taut as he’d tied it back at the farm.
“Tell you the truth, it’d be best to wait till tomorrow. It’s not that far from here but the hike in will take you at least an hour. You wouldn’t want to get lost and be stumbling around in that terrain after dark.”
Tomorrow he might have changed his mind and be well into Chihuahua. He nodded at the park ranger in a way that suggested he’d take his advice, and left armed with a back-of-a-napkin map. Only later, when he was on the road, did Marcus realize that, aside from the brief and awkward exchange with the desk clerk, this was the only real conversation he’d had with another person in weeks. But two miles outside town, as he crested a hill and spotted a herd of pronghorn antelope springing away from him through high grassland, Marcus had the strangest feeling that soon he would no longer need to cut himself off from everyone he had ever loved and those foolhardy enough to love him back.
Brazil, Indiana, 1983
Courtney could tell her mother was terrified of the double-decker truck carrying a load of cars on its back by the way she sat up in the driver’s seat of the Astro—too straight, the same way she drove when it rained, or when she had to get on the interstate. Courtney’s mother hated to drive and had learned how only a month ago, when Courtney’s father made her. Mainly her mother had to get her license so she could drive Courtney to see the doctor in Indianapolis. Courtney had a hole in her heart. It wasn’t a big deal, but usually such holes closed on their own and Courtney was eleven and still had her hole in her heart, so she had to go to the doctor every month for chest X-rays and sometimes EKGs, and her father could not take a day off work every month.
“Elaine, you’ve got to learn,” he said, not one night at dinner but many nights, nightly, it seemed, for years.
But her mother said, “I will not do it. I am not a good driver.”
“And you know this how?” her father said. Courtney pretended not to listen but in fact she thought her father’s question pertinent if not obvious and she might have asked it herself, though she understood that her mother would probably not even acknowledge the question if put to her by an eleven-year-old girl. It was like her mother didn’t have to acknowledge it, even if the question involved the welfare of her eleven-year-old girl.
Her mother put her fork down. “When I was in high school,” she said, “everyone I knew claimed to have dreamt that they were driving. Before they got their learner’s permit, I mean. And I would ask them about their dreams, which is not something I would have done in any other circumstances, because frankly, listening to people recount their dreams bores me to the bone. But I would always ask about their driving dreams because I never had one, never ever. And everyone else did.”
“Sometimes you don’t remember your dreams,” said Courtney. “That doesn’t mean you don’t dream, though.”
“So you’re saying that because you never dreamed about driving, that’s your excuse for never getting your license?” Courtney’s dad said.
Courtney noticed how her father bit into the word “dreamed,” as if to highlight how affected her mother’s “dreamt” was.
“It’s not an excuse,” said her mother. “It’s a reason. There is a difference.”
“God Almighty,” said Courtney’s father. Sometimes when he was exasperated, he said, “Hell’s bells.” She loved it when he said, “Hell’s bells.”
“What did you dream about?” Courtney asked her mother, because suddenly her mother, who usually seemed far away and short and indifferently attired, as if a sheriff’s car had, deep in the night, trolled the neighborhood and some deputy had shouted through a loudspeaker for everyone to evacuate now and her mother had sleepily pulled open dresser drawers and yanked on the first garment she touched, seemed interesting.
“Flip turns,” said her mother.
Her father was chewing his chicken divan. He shook his head, chewing.
“You mean that thing where they somersault off the wall?”
“I was on the swim team,” her mother said loudly, as if this meant she did not have to get her license. As if she swam everywhere.
But one day at school, Courtney felt so tired she did not even think she could raise her hand to tell the teacher how tired she felt. This girl Dawn Delgado, who sat across the aisle from her in math, asked her what was wrong with her face. It took everything Courtney had to say to Dawn Delgado, “What’s wrong with yours?” Then Dawn Delgado raised her hand effortlessly and told the teacher that Courtney had said something, and the teacher, plainly annoyed, said, “Well, what something?” which even in Courtney’s deep exhaustion (she felt faint by then and nauseated) she enjoyed, and Dawn, mysteriously, instead of ratting Courtney out, said, “There’s something wrong with her, look at her,” and then Courtney was in the office. Only later, at home, did Courtney learn that her father was out in the field, as he called it—he bought timber for a lumberyard and spent much of his time wandering around woods wearing work boots that left little clots of mud all over the kitchen floor, the wavy tread of his soles stenciled in the mud—and that they called her mother to come pick her up and her mother had said, “I’ll be there in a minute,” and called the one cab company in Brazil, Indiana, but since their town was so tiny, there were only two cabs, both driven by Africans, and both Africans were either busy carting someone else who did not have a driver’s license around town, or, Courtney imagined, asleep in their cabs up under the pecan trees beside the auto parts store on the outskirts of town. Courtney imagined them dreaming of their home in Tanzania or Burkina Faso as her father said to her mother, “This is it. What if it had been more serious? You CANNOT NOT show up for an hour while you’re depending on Blue Bird. For God’s sake, you have to get your license.”
And so her mother learned to drive. But she hated it. And she was correct when
she claimed she was not good at it. She could handle driving around town, but driving in the rain scared her, and snow and ice, forget it. The interstate made her cry. Even Courtney knew not to stop at the end of the ramp like it was a stop sign; even Courtney knew to nose the car out into the stream like you had a right to, and you did, they were supposed to move over and welcome you into the lane, it was like a law or something.
So her mother took the back roads from Brazil to Indianapolis. Courtney couldn’t say she minded. It took a little longer but that meant she did not have to go back to school if her appointment was in the morning. Slow and lovely back roads: barns and rippled fields, buzzards circling woods, old men in Windbreakers zipped to their Adam’s apples peering into open mailboxes at the end of their long driveways.
That day, though, they got stuck behind the truck carrying cars. The cars rocked a little when the truck took a curve. One of them, bright blue, brand new, sat on the top layer, but the tier was sloped so the blue car looked like it was parked on a hill above them. Even though it was chained it shifted a little. Her mother, Courtney knew by the way she stayed as far back from the truck as she could, backing up traffic, was convinced the blue car was going to break loose and kill them.
“Why did he not take the highway?” her mother said of the driver of the car-carrying truck. “Highway” was what her mother called the interstate.
“Same reason you don’t. Maybe?” said Courtney. The “maybe” she tacked on to her sentence because she worried that without it her mother might think she was sassing her.
“I highly doubt that. It’s his job to drive. He is a professional. He was hired to drive all over the place, carrying all sorts of things like cars. It would be highly ironic if a man hired specifically to drive were scared of driving on the highway.”
All I Have in This World Page 5
