“VERY CREATIVE,” MARIA SAID about the charts Marcus had slaved over, which depressed him, for creative was a threadbare term to his mind. They sat in a booth in the restaurant of his hotel, charts spread across the Formica. She had called his room when he had returned from the bank to tell him that the car was ready and asked if he’d like to come along to pick it up. Something told him it would be best to decline, since the car salesman already assumed they were together, and Marcus did not care to propagate any lies here in this town where he had hesitated and been rewarded with what seemed to him a brand-new identity, as if he was a ward of the federal witness protection program. “Come by afterward and I will pay you and we can talk business over lunch,” he’d said. She showed up wearing the same outfit—low-cut jeans and a tank top—though her black hair was pulled into a tight ponytail, which made more prominent and noticeable the fine bones of her face.
Not that he cared what she looked like. He’d hardly be seeing her from now on, only when they exchanged the vehicle, the key to which she presented him attached to a twist tie.
“Nice key chain,” he said. “Very creative. Which reminds me, we’ve not yet discussed accessories.”
“Excuse me?”
“What’s your position on air fresheners—for instance, the ones shaped like Christmas trees?”
“Smelly.”
“Ditto. Bumper stickers?”
“Keep it to yourself.”
“Really? Across the board? What about ‘Viva Terlingua’?”
“Terlingua is a place people go to drink themselves to death. In tiny trailers in the desert. So the saying makes no sense.”
“ ‘Somewhere in Texas, a Village Has Lost Its Idiot’?”
She sighed.
“Guess that one might get us pulled over, right?”
“Not likely. The cops around here are too busy trying to catch smugglers to worry about your politics.”
“What’s your position on smuggling?”
“My position is that you lost your last vehicle due to carelessness and you should maybe try harder to keep this one, especially since it’s only half yours.”
“So no hikes along the border?”
“What you do with that car on your own time is your business, so long as it doesn’t end up impounded and sold to some dealer at the Border Patrol auction in Del Rio. Please remember to take the keys with you when you exit the vehicle. Do I need to paste a reminder on the dash?”
“I think I got it. What about my charts?”
She looked at them. She placed them side by side, then put one atop the other. She appeared to study them carefully.
“Very creative,” she said.
“Well, thanks. Creative Individual is a term to which I have long aspired. But tell me, which plan do you favor?”
“I suppose we should just try one. See how it goes. And then, if problems arise, go for the other.”
Marcus studied the charts to avoid looking at her. Was she affecting this casual attitude to appear easygoing, or was he correct in thinking that she was only after the kill and would leave the carcass to scavengers like him?
“Which do you want to try first?” he said, staring out the window, pretending that it mattered not a whit to him, either.
“I like the border on this one,” she said, pointing to a block of hieroglyphic-like doodling running around the edge of the paper.
“Thanks, but I’m not really talking aesthetics.”
“Doesn’t it depend on your daily schedule? I mean, I haven’t started working yet but I will this week and I’m sure I’ll know more. As, I assume, you will also?”
He’d not given much thought to his work schedule. The items on his list were purposefully general so as not to limit his options. Buy some wheels. Secure gainful employment. Far easier to tick off—and it was the sight of that yellow paper stained with cross-outs that would make Marcus feel as if he was not merely marking time here—if his to-dos were open to all possibilities.
“I guess, sure.”
“What kind of work are you looking for?”
“Oh, I’m flexible. What about you? I know you said you were starting a business, but what sort of business is it?”
“A successful one, we hope.” Marcus wondered who ‘we’ was, but he did not feel he could ask, and she wasn’t giving him time to ask. “Not much around here for Venus flytrap farmers. There’s a hydroponic tomato farm outside Fort Davis.”
“That’s a pretty far drive, isn’t it? I don’t know how I would get there on the days you have Her Lowness.”
“Her who?”
“I forgot to tell you I named it.”
“Her Lowness?”
“Play on words. You know, instead of Her Highness?”
“Right, I get it. I was just wondering why guys always call their boats and cars ‘she.’ ”
“Maybe to honor the women in their life?”
Why was it that, around Maria, he managed to say so many things wrong, or so many wrong things? The last thing he wanted was for her to think he was honoring her in some way.
“I mean, you know, women in general. Womanhood.”
“Right. Back to the tomato plant. Every morning the vans from Presidio stop at the Fina for breakfast. I’m sure they could squeeze you in, and it’s right across the street.”
“I have some savings,” he said, and he immediately regretted it, for what if Her Lowness threw a rod tomorrow and Maria turned out to have spent her last dime on her part of the car?
“Sorry, I wasn’t trying to pry,” she said, in a way that made him think his regret was noticeable and that made him feel a little less reckless for admitting he was flush. Though he wasn’t flush, not at all—he was just about to hand over a tenth of what he’d counted on lasting him at least six months, and this hotel, though cheap by city standards, was eating away daily at his budget, and wasn’t it strange that, because the money belonged to his sister, if not the Bank of America, he was even tighter with it than if it were rightfully his to spend? Shouldn’t he be rolling up fifties to snort drugs through, leaving twenty-dollar tips for a breakfast taco, buying drinks for the whole of the Hitchin’ Post Saloon? Isn’t that the way embezzlers went about disposing of their evidence? Acting out a not-so-subconscious desire to get caught?
“One thing I notice about these charts,” she was saying, “is that on both of them you seem to have reserved Sunday morning for yourself.”
Marcus said, “Yes.”
“Otherwise we each have the car every other weekend. But the weekend does not include Sunday morning. Are you a churchgoer?”
Sunday morning rides were his church, ergo he was not lying when he said yes.
“Huh. I wouldn’t have pegged you, not that I have a thing against it. What flavor?”
“Oh, I like to try different denominations.”
“Well, around here, it’s mostly Catholic.”
“That’ll work.”
She studied his eyes, the set of his mouth, for much longer than she ever had, as if she were trying to figure out, not whether, but why he was lying.
“I guess if I need to go anywhere on a Sunday morning I can borrow my mother’s car.”
“Do you live with your mother?”
“For now.”
“And your father?”
“He passed away.”
“Sorry to hear that,” he said, but rotely, for as much as he was curious, he did not want to know details of her private life, lest he have to open up about his.
“Thanks. My father and I had not spoken in years when he died.”
“Oh. Ouch.”
“Yeah. It was bad. He was . . . I didn’t . . .”
Marcus studied her while she searched her mind for what words might work next, but suddenly she grabbed the every-other-day schedule and said, “Let’s go with this one.”
Marcus had come to favor the half-week schedule. That he did not feel free to make his wishes known, even though he had asked her t
o choose, both surprised and worried him. Was their every negotiation going to turn into a skirmish in his mind? He’d gone into this declaring that he had nothing at stake but the car itself, and he reminded himself that a car is all this was, and an ancient one at that.
“WHERE IS THE CAR?” Maria’s mother had said when she came home from the motel to find Maria busy in the kitchen and the driveway empty. Just the day before, her mother had said, when Maria brought the Buick home from the lot, “Looks like a keeper.” That was all. She’d looked it over in a way Maria felt was purposefully cursory, no doubt because she had just two days earlier hounded her with questions, and the only question her mother really seemed to want Maria to answer (who is WE?) Maria had ignored. So Maria assumed her mother’s indifference was slightly vengeful, especially since “keeper,” coming from her mother, was high praise, for her mother kept so little.
Considering how few things her mother kept led Maria to ponder her own need to travel light. She’d asked Beverly to ship her some things from her apartment, mostly clothes. Of the seven boxes that had arrived by UPS a few days earlier, six still sat taped and in the closet off the carport where her father had once kept his tools. Then there was her minimalist decorating aesthetic, which she had always claimed was a reaction to the tacky backdrops of the photos she had developed at the drugstore but which she was beginning to think she might have been born with. “Everything I have I give away and it goes away,” Maria had once read in a poem in a magazine in the waiting room of her dentist. The lines so reminded Maria of her estranged mother that her hygienist, cleaning her teeth thirty minutes later, had asked her repeatedly if she was in pain.
She was in pain, but not from dentistry or even her mother’s barren life. The line had reminded her of something her mother had said after Maria told her she was pregnant: “Do you not want to put it up?” Maria knew her mother was trying to be motherly, to present all options, though her choice of words, the way she left out the most important part of her sentence—“for adoption”—made Maria tearful and furious. “Put it up”? She might as well have said “give it away.” And Maria had thought about it, giving the baby to someone who could not have one and would take better care of it than two kids not yet out of high school, but she knew two things: that Randy would not rest with that child in the world until he found it, and that giving it away would not make it go away.
“Would you like me to take you for a spin?” Maria had said to hide her hurt over her mother’s dismissal of the Buick.
“Not now, I’ve got to run back up to the motel shortly,” her mother had said. And when Maria was alone with the empty house and the empty car in the drive, she’d thought again about that line in that poem, which after all these years still haunted her. Maybe her mother was able to give things away and make them stay away because she had chosen to stay here, where everything that had ever happened to her had taken place within thirty square miles, rather than flee. Her mother’s heart was so windswept, so uncluttered. Sometimes Maria saw next to no difference between her mother and this place where she’d been born and had lived out her whole life.
Maria wondered if her flight to the rain-soaked Northwest watered the part of her that dried up tragedy and swept it out of sight. It took her years to get used to the wetness, the lush and dripping foliage, the damp and ferny ground of the forests. She craved it and it terrified her. Depending on her mood, she saw it as either penance for sins committed in a place given only to dust and thorn, or a cleansing, an immersion, salvation. Sometimes the lack of sunlight, the shortness of the days, the fungus and the mold, holy Christ, the mushrooms and the giant slugs on the sidewalk, filled her with terror that was mostly longing for what she had forsaken, and at such times she had learned to convince herself that her sensitivity to climate and topography, her tendency to imbue landscape with mood, was but another indulgence, something to be shorn. Just get on the bus and go to work, Maria. Her new home was neither heaven nor asylum. It was just a place filled with more people in a square mile than lived in her entire county back home.
The day Maria brought the car home, her mother had ignored the car, but when it was not in the drive the next night, she was suddenly interested.
“Well, where is the car?” her mother said that evening when she came home from work. “Don’t tell me it’s already in the shop?”
Maria was at work on dinner. She’d begun to cook for them, trying out recipes on her mother that she thought she might introduce in her restaurant. Her mother was stingy with her reactions and would comment on a dish only if asked, and mostly she would say it was good, but in a way that made Maria think she preferred take-out brisket or enchiladas smothered in queso. That night she did not care what her mother thought of her meal—a risotto with squash and onions simmered in wine, and a salad of organic endive and heirloom tomatoes she’d found at the farmer’s market the previous weekend—for she simply needed work to do, chopping and stirring, while she told her mother about the car.
“No, it’s not in the shop. It runs fine. It hardly burns any oil.”
Maria paused, and her mother, as always, did not ask her to continue but made clear with the pinch of her lips that she did not care for gaps in the conversation, as conversation was, like most things, a transaction, and there were other transactions imminent, and let’s get on with it, shall we? I’ve got to run back to check on the motel here directly after we eat whatever in the world that is you’re stirring the life out of on the stove top.
“Remember you asked me the other night who ‘we’ was?”
Her mother played dumb. Maria was so irritated that she vowed to speak into the pot of simmering rice from that point on.
“You know, when I said ‘we looked under the hood’ and you kept asking me who ‘we’ was?”
“Was it not one of the Kepler boys?”
“No. I met this man at the car lot. How I met him was, he wanted the same car. The Buick,” she said, remembering to call it by name, as if this might make a difference in what she was about to reveal.
Maria took a deep breath. “Anyway,” she said, “we went in on the car together.”
“ ‘Anyway’?” said her mother, as if this word—which did suggest that she was only continuing a casual conversation, one that so far had been understood by both parties—were the most befuddling part of her confession.
“We’re going to share it,” said Maria.
“What guy? Who?”
“He’s really nice,” said Maria, stirring the risotto, grateful for the risotto, for risotto must be stirred, as stirring creates friction, which releases the starch from the grains of rice and results in its necessary creaminess. Thank God for risotto, thought Maria as she poured more wine into the pot, and then she said, “He’s a farmer from back east. He was moving to somewhere in Mexico but his truck got stolen somewhere down along the river, so he needed—”
“This man is Mexican?”
“No, he’s from North Carolina. So he needed a car because—”
“And you met this man at Kepler’s lot? You didn’t already know him?”
“I’m trying to tell you what happened. I’m going to, if you would stop interrupting me.”
“Good God Almighty, Maria. You went in on that car with a total stranger?”
Maria kept stirring. A wooden spoon would be preferable because it actually bruises the grains. But Maria’s mother did not own a wooden spoon.
“Was it that you needed money? Why did you not just ask me for it?”
“It wasn’t the money.”
“You just wanted to share a car with some man who got his truck stolen at the border?”
“He was hiking, I think. It happens. You read about it in the paper.”
“And here I thought you’d grown up.”
“I know what I’m doing.”
“Well, what? Tell me. What is this about?”
“I have to do it. I had this feeling about it and I had to do it because I guess it ha
s to do with—”
“With what?”
“I was about to say. With what happened. Why I left.”
Her mother sat down at the kitchen table. She had so rarely seen her mother sit down in her kitchen without being asked to—she often even ate standing up—that Maria gasped.
“I told you we could share the Cherokee,” her mother said to the table. “If you’re looking to share a vehicle.”
“It’s not the same. You’re my mother.”
“Meaning I’m not going to take off with it one night and sell it in El Paso for drinking money? Is that it? You need somebody to do you wrong? You need somebody to treat you bad so you can feel good about feeling bad?”
“No,” she said, so shocked and hurt by her mother’s shallow psychological explanation of her motivation that she dropped the spoon in the pot and gripped the edges of the stove.
“My God in heaven,” her mother said. “I just had no idea.”
“About what? What did you not have an idea about?” said Maria, immediately ashamed of the defensiveness and even hatefulness in her voice, for she knew her mother felt betrayed and she was beginning to understand why and at the same time it wasn’t any of her mother’s business. Her mother would rather rewire a lamp than have an intimate and uncomfortable conversation with her daughter about the past. Maria asked her mother again what she had no idea about, and her mother, looking as dejected as Maria had ever seen her, said, “I just did not see it, I just didn’t, I ought to have, I ought to.”
KNOWING NOTHING OF THE musical tastes of the co-owner of Her Lowness did not stop Marcus from spending his day with the car hitting all the thrift shops he could find in search of cassette tapes. The idea overtook him in the night, as did most of his ideas, lucid or not, and any idea solid enough to pierce his state of semiconsciousness struck him as more profound. So seized was he with his plan that he could not return to sleep. His task was essential, it could not be put off; hadn’t he, looking over Her Lowness in the lot, planned the appropriate playlist? It wasn’t as if the radio were much of an option. He’d switched it on once but a quick twist of the dial had turned up static, save for a couple of Norteño stations, some preaching, and the NPR affiliate he had listened to on his way.
All I Have in This World Page 14
