“How do you know it’s a man?” Courtney said to distract her mother, who was growing more terrified because the road was becoming more twisty. It wasn’t the blue car’s rocking that terrified Courtney but her mother’s fear of the blue car. Maybe because she had a hole in her heart, the things that terrified other people, her friends—for instance, big, snarling dogs, spiders, movies where people did thoughtless things like going into a cellar during a power outage when a known serial killer was on the loose—had no effect at all on Courtney. Of course she understood that it was the brain and not the heart that produced, or in her case did not produce, fear. But since she was born with a hole in her heart and she did not fear the things others feared, she had to think that it was not only her brain at work in this matter.
The blue car was the blue of a sometimes sky. A sweet and peaceful blue. Were it not for the trees and the swirling buzzards, the car might become the sky. There were things that terrified Courtney. Once, she had been standing by the bookcase in the living room. In a book she saw a pink slip of paper. Curious as to where whoever was reading the book (certainly her mother, as her dad did not read much) had stopped, she had opened it to where the pink slip held place. But she did not even notice the words on the page, because it was the slip that both fascinated her and made her shudder.
It appeared to have come from an office. WHILE YOU WERE OUT was printed across the top of it in blocky bold type. Below, there were a series of options, arranged in two columns, each followed by a box to check. But none was checked. TELEPHONED, CAME TO SEE YOU, RETURNED YOUR CALL, PLEASE CALL, WILL CALL AGAIN, WANTS TO SEE YOU. All boxes unchecked, nothing written in the space that ought to have told who called. Why did this make her feel so lonely and fearful? Why did she slip it quickly back inside the book and put the book back on the shelf and go to her room and crawl under the covers and cry and, later that night, when her parents were asleep, sneak downstairs and find the book in the faint streetlight that fell across the room and yank the pink note from the book and crumple it and throw it away in the trash can in the kitchen and then, on her way upstairs, turn around and retrieve it from the garbage and run it under the tap and wad it up all wet and throw it away again?
Her mother had become a parody of a woman terrified that a blue car was going to break free from its mooring and crash into her Astro, crushing her and her daughter, who was on her way to Indianapolis to get the hole in her heart checked out by a doctor with comb marks in his hair. Her mother shook and grabbed the wheel so tightly it was as if she were acting rather than alive, in real time, behind the truck on a back road. Courtney did not particularly wish for the hole in her heart to close on its own. She looked up at the blue car. It was not going anywhere but to some car lot where someone would buy it and drive it around and merge it with other cars fearlessly on an interstate. Hell’s bells, some blue car was not going to kill Courtney and her mother. Courtney, fascinated rather than terrified by the car, placed it in a sparkling pool, at the end of a lane, somersaulting, pushing off the wall, rising up from the water, blue car swimming.
Pinto Canyon, Texas, 2004
At dinner that night—takeout enchiladas so soggy it was difficult to distinguish tortilla from cheese—Maria discovered that when conversation with her mother dead-ended into silences that made her anxious and guilty for staying gone for so many years, all she had to do was ask a question about the motel.
Her mother might well have been tired—how could she not be, given all she’d endured in the past decade—but Maria quickly came to doubt she was too tired to run the motel. Running that motel would save her mother’s life. Men, love, romance, sex, domesticity, definitely motherhood—her mother was done with all that, at age fifty-three. She’d had enough of trying to accommodate the alternately selfish and helpless doings of men. Maria could see it in the way her mother had dealt with the few men they had come into contact with since she’d been home. Her cousin Alberto, who ran cattle behind the house, came by to check the water tanks and happened to spot Maria and her mother pulling into the drive coming back from the grocery store. He whipped in behind them and hopped out of his still-running truck to give Maria a hug and say to her mother, “How come you won’t even tell somebody Maria’s home?”
Maria’s mother looked at Alberto as if he was still back in high school, hotdogging around town in the Nissan Sentra he’d been so proud of, a tight end for the Javelinas who had scored a lucky touchdown in a play-off game against Sierra Blanca and let it ruin the next five years of his life.
“How come somebody won’t learn to keep his cows out of my yard?”
Her mother grabbed the groceries and went inside.
“She never did understand me,” said Alberto. “She just don’t get me.”
Maria laughed instead of denying it, for though she had been gone for ten years, she knew it was true: her mother did not get why Alberto thought catching a ball could affect his life one way or the other beyond the time it took for the ball to be caught. Lorenzo the maintenance man at the motel provoked in her a similarly crusty demeanor, as did some poor electrician who stopped by the house to get paid for putting up a motion detector in the carport and made the mistake of attempting small talk. Her mother was over men. She would live alone for the next twenty-five or thirty years and she would not get lonely, having had to take care of two men at once and then watch them get sick and die within months of each other, and no one who knew her, who really knew her, would feel the least bit sorry for her or say aloud or even think, I wish Harriet would find someone to share the sunset with, it’s a shame, she’s not all that old, really. Maria herself knew some things about being alone but not lonely. But being back home, and around her mother, she understood them in a way that surprised and slightly worried her. Perhaps her independence, her need to have men enjoy their time with her without entitlement or jealousy or some claim on the next day, had less to do with what had happened with Randy than it did with her mother.
Was it inherited? Or something that arose out of the soil where both had been born? Theirs was, after all, land hospitable to only the least needy vegetation nature had to offer. Mesquite was a worthless plant but not a useless one, for though it was only good for flavoring grilled meat, it was useful as an example of the thick-skinned, thorny nature it took to survive here.
“What are you going to do with the restaurant?” Maria was hoping to draw attention away from her plate of enchiladas, from which she’d taken only a few bites.
“Let it sit. I don’t know what else.”
“Couldn’t you use the money?”
“I always have uses for money, but the question is, do I want to put up with what I have to put up with in exchange for an extra five or six hundred a month? Some things cost more than they pay.”
“But why? Wouldn’t you just rent it out and sit back and collect the rent?”
Her mother took a bite of her enchilada, which she had only picked at, as if talk of money, or at least of her livelihood, brought back her appetite.
“Way more complicated, Maria. I don’t get the four-star types in my place they get down at the Gage, but I keep it clean and my prices are fair. I have a responsibility to my guests. If I put a restaurant in there and the food is not worth hog slop, don’t you think it’s going to hurt my business?”
“What about Johnny Garcia’s son? Didn’t you say he was interested in taking over?”
“I got on pretty good with Johnny but it took some patience on my part. Ray and Johnny drank together and they’d get to playing cards and Ray’d get half-lit and lose his hand and Johnny’d come out good and he’d say to Ray, ‘Tell you what, Ramon’—that’s what he called him, Ramon, even though Ray’s just Ray, he’s not even a Raymond, I don’t even think the man had a middle name, to hear him tell, his parents did good just to give him a name, because they didn’t give him much else after—anyway, Johnny Garcia’d say, ‘Tell you what, Ramon’—he’d be about half-tipsy himself except he could hold
it way better than Ray—‘Tell you what, Ramon,’ he’d say—and he’d be rolling his r’s at Ray, I could hear them back in the office, that’s where they went to do their drinking—‘Tell you what, Ramon, I need a new stove hood and how about you just apply what you owe me to a new stove hood?’ and Ray would have gotten to that point in his fun times when he didn’t want to talk about money, he’d say, ‘Okay, Juan’—he’d try and pronounce it in the Spanish manner but it would come out sounding like a drunk man named Ray from some state that starts with an O would think Spanish sounded like, even though he had heard it spoke every day of his life for the past thirty years—‘Okay, One,’ he’d say—that’s how he pronounced it, like number one—‘Just deal them cards, One, I got some money to win back from your drunk ass.’ ”
Not only was this the longest speech Maria had ever heard out of her mother’s mouth, but it was the funniest by far. And she knew not to reveal how utterly delighted she was by this side of her mother, since if she even slightly egged her on or registered her pleasure, her mother would deem her speech frivolous, and silence would surely and swiftly drape the table.
“What about his son?”
“Who’s? Ray didn’t have any kids.”
“Johnny Garcia’s son?”
“Ray said no to him.”
Right, Maria wanted to say, but Ray is dead. But she would never say such a thing, and of course she understood perfectly that whatever bad financial decisions he had made while drinking with Johnny Garcia, Ray’s word was law. If he said no to Johnny Garcia’s son—even though it was his illness, his delusional state, that had turned him against Mexicans—then the last person on earth she would rent that restaurant to would be the son of Johnny Garcia.
Maria realized her mother was staring at her.
“Why are you so interested in what I do with that space?”
“I just think it’s a waste to have it sit there empty,” she said, realizing too late what idea she’d put in her mother’s head, if—and Maria felt dumb then, and slow—her mother had not had it in her head already, when she unlocked the padlock to the restaurant, or even as far back as a few weeks ago, when she wrote to tell her daughter, I’m tired, come on home now, we’ll make us some money.
BECAUSE MARCUS DID NOT know the names of things he saw along the route mapped out on a napkin, which ran first, as the ranger promised, miles down a paved road through open pasture and ranchland covered in blond grass and then a half hour on a dirt road that dropped, hairpinning, through low, denuded hills and finally into a series of gulches, and because yucca and agave were the only two plants he could identify, he took to reciting the flora native to his farm. Trees: red bay, sweet bay, bull bay, bayberry, swamp myrtle, red cedar, cypress, fetterbush, loblolly and longleaf pine. Then his blessed carnivores: pitchers, sundews, bladderworts, butterworts, and of course the grande dame Dionaea muscipula.
That the flytrap adapted to the lack of nutrients in the soil by trapping lunch surely made it a cousin to the cunning cactus whose survival in this harsh place depended similarly on all sorts of adaptive strategies. Adaptive strategies were on his mind as Marcus stripped off his T-shirt in the late afternoon heat, though the air was so dry that his sweat evaporated instantly. He had only a few hours of sunlight left, so he’d grabbed a flashlight from the glove compartment and a bottle of water. He wore his boots against snakebite. Years of scouring swamps for traps had made him respectful, rather than skittish, of reptiles. People made him far more nervous, though this place was so isolated that he’d not thought twice about leaving all his belongings (save the duffel bag and a bag of toiletries that also contained his money back at the hotel) in the bed of the truck, which he’d parked under a stand of cottonwoods at the trailhead.
The trail was rock and sand, almost lunar in its sparseness, and once again he was overwhelmed by the contrast between here and home. After a half-hour hike he came to a wide, dry riverbed in the middle of which was, true to the word of the ranger, a muddy trickle. The Rio Grande, great dividing line, boundary both literal and abstract. Its decidedly ungrand stream both comforted and encouraged him, for he realized he’d grown increasingly nervous about crossing over, so much so that far West Texas seemed the same thing as Mexico, only lawful, safe, tame. Maybe he’d already settled? But now this stream. It was shallow enough, lazy enough, to wade across. He took off his boots and rolled his jeans up to his knees. He waded out until he could lean over and spit and hit another country.
Standing in midstream, Marcus watched the lowering sun redden high bluffs over in Mexico. Surely there was a way around them. He could go back to the truck, fetch a jacket for the cool nights of the desert, more water, what food he had stashed, start walking. He had left his money back in the hotel room, but what good had money ever done him? Wasn’t it money that had led him to this boundary? Get stopped by the Mexican police, and from what he’d heard, the money was likely to disappear, anyway. Then he would be at the mercy of the infamously corrupt lawmen. He would rather be at the mercy of the desert, of the night, of rattlers and mountain lions, scorpions and tarantulas. Wind and cold. To starve or die of dehydration was preferable to torture, or worse, a slow lingering in a Mexican prison.
What kept him on this side of the border was the fact that no one knew where he was. He could not do that to his mother and Annie. Nor to Rebecca, though he had not spoken to her since the day she’d packed up her Honda and bumped up the two-track to the highway. He’d stopped answering the phone weeks before she left, had forbidden her to pick up as well, since it was always a creditor, always bad news. Rebecca had left a couple of messages on the cell phone she’d bought him in the three weeks between her leaving and his abandoning the farmhouse, her voice at once hesitant and plaintive, her words innocuous (“just wondering how you are”), her tone turning, just before she hung up, bitter with what seemed to be self-disgust for giving in, for calling, for caring. Marcus wanted to call her hourly, but he kept from it by telling himself—often aloud, because once she was gone, he spent days without leaving the farmhouse, talking to himself, eating out of the cupboards if at all—that she was the one who’d left.
And dying like this, estranged and incommunicado, in a foreign country, would seem like a choice, and everyone knew the aftereffects of such a choice on those left behind.
And so he turned around and headed back to the truck, thinking, as he hiked up the trail, of Rebecca still, of the last thing he had said to her: “Where is halfway?” Did she really expect him to abandon the center, even if he was on the brink of losing it? She should have seen the goodness in his dream, the altruism; she should have given him credit for mortgaging everything he had for a plant. Did he not deserve some credit for not squandering the money on drugs, or shady real estate, a Ponzi scheme? On other women?
Hiking up the trail in the gathering darkness, Marcus took the question away from her, away from them. No longer was it rhetorical, and no longer did it have to do with that line he’d fed fake-doctor Carrie Elwood in his kitchen all those years ago—“the capacity to merge your reality with someone else’s version of same.” “Halfway” referred now to distance, to where. And the answer—even as Marcus began to stumble a bit on the rocky trail as the batteries in his flashlight burned low, even though he’d underestimated the drop in temperature in the desert and wished he’d worn his T-shirt, even though he knew nothing, really, about the place—was right here where he had hesitated.
It was near dark when Marcus arrived back at the trailhead, but twilit enough to spot a white Ford pickup, had the truck still been there for him to find.
AFTER DINNER ON THE night they visited the restaurant, Maria’s mother announced she was going back to the motel for a while. To check on things. She’d done that the night before as well. Checking on the motel was her television, her crossword puzzle, her bridge club, church. She’d worked a full day already, and yet she gave the impression, sitting down to dinner with Maria, of someone on vacation who was not accus
tomed to being on vacation.
When her mother had made her announcement, Maria nodded. “Yes, of course, go,” she said, thinking that perhaps with her mother out of the house the house might warm to her and vice versa, for after the initial shock of standing in those tight rooms she thought she’d never see again, the house had begun to turn on her. You left, it seemed to say, and you took your loud music and your giggly friends who’d come over after school and slouch and scream with laughter and sit on my floors eating cantaloupe and chasing it with Pepsi, and one day you were here with your warm feet on my walls and then it was just the man who preferred to sit out under the carport in a lawn chair grilling chilies stuffed with string cheese and wrapped in bacon and letting the smoke waft in through my screens and singing Roy Orbison songs to Sonny the dog, and the woman who swept and scrubbed and dusted and vacuumed in a manner so detached from the intimacy of my rooms, so devoid of any notion that I belonged to her, that it was here that she had brought you and your brother straight from the hospital, that she’d spent nearly every night of her adult life here, that she might as well have been cleaning just another of her motel rooms. For the house knew of the motel. How could it not, the way her mother sneaked off to be with it night and day? And perhaps, like her father and Ray, the house just had to live with her mother’s ways, if the house wanted to live with her mother.
Maria went outside. There was enough moon to see her way down the drive to the cattle guard out by the highway. She traded her sandals for the pair of boots her mother kept out in the carport in case a snake lay stretched across the drive. It had been so long since she’d had to worry about stepping on a rattler; in her socked-in cities, walking at night had been dangerous in other ways. She did not care to study the ground on a night so clear, with a sky so bejeweled with star. Lift up your eyes. Her neck so extended she understood the derivation of the word crane. To the west the last of the light lit the high ridges, a twinkling here and there where lucky rich people had built houses with seventy-mile views. Or maybe they weren’t lucky, just rich. She liked the way you could see the sunset slinging sidearm through high grass and scrub at dusk down here in the valley, dust and hovering bugs brilliantly backlit. And she liked being able to look up, to see always the wide sky, the widely possible sky with all its untrammeled darkness between millions of blinking stars, and who up there on those hills, with the long expanse of valley below, the stretch of ranchland and occasional cluster of lights marking a settlement, would ever be able to remember to look upward at the sky, when they assumed they were a part of it?
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