All I Have in This World

by Michael Parker

  It never occurred to him that his search would be less than successful. In an area where the past was much celebrated and commodified—there were fossil shops, gem shops, Wild West trading posts, Mexican blanket shops, and several joints devoted to the exploitation of the aboriginals, which trafficked in trinkets blatantly Taiwanese and baskets supposedly woven by local Comanches—Marcus thought it plausible that he might discover, in some dusty box alongside such thrift-shop staples as albums by the Ray Price Orchestra and the novels of Irving Stone, a box brimming with obsolete tapes.

  Before he even got out of bed, Marcus had jotted down treasures the likes of which, if he even came close to matching them, would usher in a gratification nearly equal to unexpected sex.

  • Anything by the Chi-Lites

  • Merle Haggard

  • The song slash sermons of Shirley Caesar, especially “Don’t Drive Your Mama Away”

  • James Gang Rides Again

  The list reached the bottom of a legal pad, after which his ink stained the yellow paper with double columns. Once he started on a wish list, he could not stop, which was ironic in that the making of lists had in fact originally been prescribed to him by a monosyllabic psychologist to cure the condition for which Marcus, as a last resort, had paid the man a visit: his life had become ungovernable owing to impulse. He’d visited the man only once, not long before Rebecca left, when it became clear that he would lose his business and his sister’s inheritance. What drove him to it was the realization that his idea to build the Flytrap Educational Center had come to him in the middle of one sleepless night and had been put into action—without consulting a soul, not Rebecca or Annie, whose financial futures stood to be affected by his decision—as soon as the bank opened the next morning. He’d waited outside in his car for two hours, sipping coffee, like a drunk in line waiting for the OPEN sign to switch on at the liquor store.

  This was not the first time he’d acted on such an impulse. At nineteen he had met a girl at an outdoor festival held at a defunct racetrack and married her three days later, fittingly in the state of South Carolina, where there was no blood test required to see if you were marrying your cousin and where bad decisions were encouraged once you crossed out of North Carolina and encountered the massive, cheesy South of the Border, the Mexican-themed tourist trap infamous for its racial insensitivity and overpriced gasoline. That you could buy fireworks legally and get married in a matter of hours in this wretched state was telling, but Marcus liked this girl, whose name was Monte Gale, because she had curly hair down to her shoulders, spoke with a mountain accent so foreign to his ears she might have been Nova Scotian, and wore a straw cowboy hat, which she took off only to shower. He told no one in his family—actually he had told no one at all until he told the bearded doctor—about his marriage, which was only slightly harder to annul than it was to commit.

  Though he did not cotton to psychological evaluation, his fifty minutes were far from a waste. Thank you, Doc, for encouraging the supposedly prophylactic benefits of list making. Intended to temper his rashness with forethought, the tactic actually contributed to it. The lists he made made no distinction between impulsive and rational.

  Armed with fifty bucks from his stash he could ill afford to part with, Marcus set out on his journey. He had a rule: he could not ask the clerks if they had any cassettes, for numerous and obvious reasons. Such queries would rid the process of serendipity, not to mention mystery. No one in thrift shops ever indulged in the “Can I help you find something?” obsequiousness that marred the shopping experience in venues hawking the brand new. You were left on your lonesome to wander and poke.

  But lonesome was what he too often felt. He spent too much time in his head. He’d been accused of same all his life. Besides, the clerks he encountered were exclusively women sixty and upward with faces chapped and wrinkled from high desert wind and sun. Craggy wisdom of the stripe that would do him no good.

  “Do you have any cassette tapes?” he asked one in a store.

  “Lord, you’re going backward, aren’t you?” said the woman.

  “The past is not even past,” said Marcus.

  The woman looked at him long and blankly enough for him to want back inside his head. Rules were in fact necessary.

  “If you ask me, it better be. I’m well shy of it.”

  That beautiful phrase again: “if you ask me.” Anywhere else—back home in particular—he would have found it vain if not redundant. But when people in this place said it, it sounded modest, and entirely generous.

  “I hear you,” he said, which was something people said to discourage further conversation. It was what it was not. But Marcus meant it. He, too, was well shy of the past.

  “I believe there might be some on a shelf with the books,” the woman said, and Marcus found marvelous the fact that not even the clerks knew the stock.

  Because the reign of the cassette tape coincided with his late adolescence and early twenties, his purchases were a sound track from high school and college. How could, in pursuit of obsolete technology, the past not be past? Most of his finds were things he was too much of a music snob back in the day to admit to liking. The first thing he found was a copy of Pure Prairie League’s Bustin’ Out, the big hit of which—a syrupy ballad called “Amie,” featuring a fingerpicked solo geared, in its two-measure brevity, to the attention span of commercial radio—was the only weak song on the album. Next he found a still factory-sealed copy of the sound track from Saturday Night Fever, a secret vanity for years. Now that he was old enough to admit that disco did not entirely suck, he had no problems confessing that he admired Yvonne Elliman’s version of “Hello Stranger,” almost as much as the phenomenal original by Barbara Lewis.

  By early afternoon he had a bag of hits as heavy as a sack of potatoes. And then at his last stop he found a case, dusty and stained but made of a black and crackly vinyl that would look good against the deep blue upholstery of Her Lowness. He could leave them for Maria, a present. When he transferred the contents of the sack to the case, there were only three empty slots. Only then did Marcus remember that he had no idea what sort of music his co-owner preferred. Since she owned half the vehicle, his tapes should take up only half the box. Reluctantly did he subtract some of his treasures and return them to his bag. He could bring them along, though, when it was his turn. But that would be a pain. On impulse he popped open the trunk and hid the bag in the tire well.

  The next morning Marcus arrived at the DQ forty-five minutes early. He backed Her Lowness into a spot near the rear of the lot and decided to sit for a while and drink a cup of coffee. He remembered a friend from grad school who was divorced telling him that the most stressful and awkward part of the rearrangement of his family life was the picking up and dropping off of his children: “If I just pull up in the drive and blow the horn, my ex accuses me of acting like a bloody cab driver. If I park the car and ring the bell and come in, there is the great risk that my children will be subjected to the tense and toxic silence—or worse, outright hatefulness—that led to my decision to leave in the first place.” When Marcus naively inquired if some mutually agreed-upon system might be worked out for the sake of the children, his friend looked at him with a mix of pity and incredulity. “Would that it were so easily solved,” said his friend, “but of course if it were, I would still be living with her and there would be nothing to solve.”

  The Buick was not a child and Marcus had no reason to assume that there would ever be any tension over its exchange, since Maria was very particular about when and where the drop-off should take place: Marcus was to leave it at the parking lot of the Dairy Queen by eight on her mornings and vice versa. When he offered to deliver it directly to her house in exchange for a ride back, there was, in the way that Maria smiled while declining, a rigidity that Marcus, whose first impression of her was of an easygoing copilot who would leave up to him the majority of the smaller details, found vaguely alarming. As trite as it sounded, people were ap
t to change after their desires were met.

  Sitting in the parking lot of the DQ watching the ranchers in pickups roll in off the highway to fuel their morning with food fast and greasy, Marcus watched a boy in a paper hat and brown DQ-issue polyester uniform wheel a mop bucket out the back door, dump it into a drain in the pavement. The sudsy water spilled wildly out of the bucket and began its surge toward Her Lowness, a black tide rising. Monte Gale in her cowgirl hat stretched across the bed of a Mexican-themed motel nearly thirty years ago. And in only her hat, her skin reddened and sweaty from sex. Marcus had gotten up and fetched her a cigarette from his pants pocket and lit one for himself, which he smoked naked on the balcony at dusk. Just beyond a cockleburred patch of grass and a fence separating the motel from an access road, cars and trucks fled north and south on I-95. Miami to Maine, that highway stretched, and he’d never been to New York. Plastic bags aloft in the breeze kicked up by the traffic caught in the diamonds of the chain link. Marcus was nineteen and he was married. His parents had been married for a quarter century at this point, but Marcus had seen them in the same room only twice in the past five years: once for a funeral, again for Annie’s graduation from Sweet Briar. He had tried hard with Rebecca, initially at least, to prove wrong their careless way with love, but now he imagined his presence in her life relegated to a photo album packed in a box, in which his image was no more significant than one of those strangers who crop up in the background of pictures, caught by timing and chance forever in the frame.

  He had not thought of Monte Gale in years and years. “Come back,” she’d called to him as he studied the flow of traffic on the interstate, and the sex they had next was rhythmically disappointing, as if they were in different time signatures. At first Marcus thought it was because they were married, until he remembered that this was the first time they’d as much as touched while sober.

  Was it the sudden wind whirlpooling dust and straw wrappers in the parking lot of the Dairy Queen that ushered in his fear that he’d Monte Gale’d again? Or was it the thought of his legal pad defiled with a list of cheesy records from his youth, a list he chose over the list, the one he’d made the morning after his truck was stolen? That list was a recipe for survival; though it was padded with the trivial, most of its items were responsible ones. Again he had been sidetracked by the inconsequential. “Of making many books there is no end,” was one of the few quotes he remembered from the Bible, and did it not distinguish between word and deed?

  Oh sweet Jesus. To distract himself from the tide, he tried to determine, from the swinging of the DQ sign and the rock of the chassis beneath him in the stronger gusts, which way the wind was blowing. He decided it was shooting down from Canada, down across the plains, nothing for thousands of miles to slow or divert it. Monte Gale had gotten up and pulled on her tight jeans and her halter top and announced that she had to be at work at three at some drugstore in some town Marcus had never heard of. In the parking lot of the DQ, Marcus reached for his legal pad to rip out the offending list but realized he’d left it in his room. At Monte Gale’s truck, which turned out to be her daddy’s truck, borrowed without permission, Marcus had stood at the window and said, “You know what, I can hitch back to my car, it’s not really on your way, I don’t want to make you late,” and she said, “Well, are you sure?” Out the window of Her Lowness a bag blew by and Marcus leaped out to chase it down, aware of the group of older Hispanic men drinking coffee at a table by the window, and all the ranchers eating their breakfast tacos in their high-idling extended-cab trucks, watching him. In the parking lot of South of the Border, Marcus had watched Monte Gale drive away in her daddy’s truck, and that was the last he had seen of her, but he had heard soon enough from her daddy, who said, “Son, I am going to send you some paperwork, and if you don’t sign it and get it back to my office in three days, I am going to come and find you and you will wish you had never left whatever shit-hole swamp you come from down there.”

  Marcus snatched the bag from the wind and strolled back to the Buick. No one in this town knew who he was. They had no idea that liens had been slapped on him, that his assets were frozen. Slapped, frozen: the terms were so histrionic it was difficult for Marcus to believe they had anything to do with him. But that, according to Rebecca, was the problem: he never thought any of it had anything to do with him.

  The bag was stained with ketchup, which made the note he wrote to Maria feel all the more desperate. He sat with the bag propped on the steering wheel, trying to figure out how to say why he had done what he’d done. He could not say it was because he sensed her deep need, though he had told her, in their negotiations or what passed for them (the crazy way they went at each other in the parking lot of Fantastic Deals! firing off questions and answers as if they’d known each other for years, as if the script had been written for them, still felt unbelievable to Marcus, who had never communicated so quickly or easily with anyone), that he could not do it because she wanted it so badly. And yet he had done it. Because he could talk to her so easily, as if he’d known her for years? He knew nothing about her. A gust of wind rocked Her Lowness, his pen slipping. Maybe it had nothing to do with Maria, his decision; maybe it was the car itself. He wanted it so bad he would split it to get it. Others had wanted it before him, and he wondered about them as he stared at what he had written so far, which was “Dear Maria.” That the car had hardly been driven suggested its former owners did not feel its pull as he did. Or maybe they loved it so much they felt driving it would be a crime? More object of desire than method of transportation? Had any of those before him been seduced by it, allowed it to sidetrack them from their purpose?

  You can love without vision, and desire is almost always blind. And deaf to caution and reason and, Marcus decided, real damn dumb.

  Dear Maria,

  I have decided to push on down the road. Much as I love this town of yours, I believe my hesitating here would, as the poet said, get me lost. There are other reasons more abstract in nature. And as we discussed, there seem to be scant employment opportunities in the area for former Venus flytrap farmers. Not that I am unwilling

  “Fuck me,” Marcus said aloud to the ridiculous note on the ketchup-stained bag. “Just get to the point. She doesn’t need to know anything but ‘Here’s the extra key, I’m out.’ ” He crossed out his overly elaborate and tonally annoying false start. He thought of going back into the DQ and asking for another bag, for he liked a bag over, say, a napkin because it suggested in the empty but easily fillable space some pocket of hidden, deeper meaning. But he liked this particular bag. It bore the signs of his trying to get things right. The stain implied further reflection if not agonizing over his decision. I bled over this decision, said the bag as he turned it over and began anew.

  Dear Maria:

  I have decided to head down to Mexico after all. That was the original plan and I guess I got distracted? Please consider my stake in the vehicle my going-away present. I’m not sure it would have worked out so well, our arrangement. Seemed like a good idea at the time, though. Hey, I left you some tunes! Not all these tapes were ones I would have bought back when they came out, but there’s something about the perfectly good things that people get rid of that increases their value, you know? Especially if there is a lot of use left in them and you are lucky enough to realize it.

  Marcus stopped writing. He put the bag on the seat beside him. He cradled the steering wheel with both arms and rested his forehead on the still-soft vinyl. What was he talking about? Why could he not just get in and out of anything? Why did he have to get carried away educating the public about something anyone could learn all they needed to know about in a half hour on the Internet? He knew the difference, of course, between Wikipedia and nature, but what, finally, did it matter, his grandiose notions about truth and meaning, about the pocket of possibilities between the layers of a bag, the value of things thrown out with life left in them still?

  And yet he could not toss it out. He was not go
ing to go inside the DQ again, not this morning, not ever. He went over the crossed-out sentences with his pen until not even he, who had written them, could decipher them, and he folded the bag in half so it might at least resemble a missive, and he took the key with its twist-tie chain and laid it atop the bag.

  He was almost to his hotel when he heard behind him a sound it shocked him to recognize: the high-idling tenor of the Electra. Her Lowness in motion, its hum a song in his head, though not at all the type described as “stuck.” But then he realized that Maria had come to give him his money back. He would pretend not to see her, even if she called to him. No good could come from talking it over; his mind was made.

  In the street alongside him she braked slowly. A few cars pulled out and passed her, their impatience obvious by the sound of their acceleration. The car rolled to a stop as if coasting. Horns blew. He looked over to see her staring straight ahead. She had taken her hands off the steering wheel, and without looking at him, she slid across the seat toward him. He knew, then, what she wanted, or what she needed: for him to drive.

  Three

  Pinto Canyon, Texas, 2004

  Maria had never said his name aloud and she did not see why she needed to start now. She did not roll down the window and call to him when she stopped the car right in the middle of Pecos Street, morning traffic jamming up behind her. She did not ask him to drive. She just scooted across to the passenger’s side and waited for him to get in.