Marcus had the windows down. His left hand tapped the side-view, and she could hear music, and she realized the car was running, as if he was her getaway driver.
“It’s the Buick,” she said.
“Damn, Maria,” said Manny. “How old is that boat? I bet it don’t even have a catalytic converter?”
“Of course it does,” she said, amazed that he’d brought up the one thing Marcus had explained to her about the car that she remembered: that the government started requiring all cars to have catalytic converters a couple of years before their Buick was made. “It’s only an ’eighty-four.”
Manny looked at her as if he’d never seen her before. Then he looked back at the car and said, “Only?” and laughed. “Looks like it hasn’t been washed since 1984.”
“West Texas,” she said.
“Dust and bugs,” he agreed.
“You miss it ever?”
“I don’t put a whole lot of time into missing stuff,” he said. “Driving a truck, it’s something new every day, you never know where they’re going to send you.”
“You know it’s to a grocery store, though, right?”
“Yeah, and say I get hungry, I can just pull over and chow down,” he said, patting his belly. And then the awkwardness that had made the first minutes so painful and sluggish returned only because they both seemed to realize how easily they’d fallen into a jokey rhythm. She wanted to go home with him. She wanted to meet his family, who obviously had filled in any blank space left by the absence of his father, his mother, the sister he’d never even mentioned to his girlfriend. He seemed so devoted to this town, with its tiny houses and its tubers, and even more devoted to Gloria and the girls. Cling hard, she wanted to say, they’re all you’ve got. I’ll take care of Mom, you just cling.
“Well, I better let you go,” he said, “so y’all can get over to Desert Rain before it closes and get that car cleaned up.”
“I promise you next time you see that car it will sparkle,” she said. He did not acknowledge her hint, which sounded, once it was out of her mouth, more like a plea, but at least when he turned away he was smiling.
Shafter, Texas, 1986 – 2003
The day that the Buick Cord bought for her showed up in the driveway, Evelyn had taken the pickup into town. They had been down to one vehicle since Evelyn had hit a pronghorn coming home from church one night four months earlier.
All Evelyn said about the Buick when she got home was, “It’s a mighty pretty blue.”
“I know you never cared to drive this thing into town,” Cord said, helping her unload groceries from the extended cab of his truck, but of course what he meant was, I want my truck back and I will be goddamned if I am going to hang around town waiting on you to practice choir.
A month later Cord had a heart attack. He died alone, out penning cows. He was just sixty-six, but he hated doctors and hospitals, even though his father and one of his brothers had died young with bad hearts. Evelyn buried him and came home to the cries of mother cows calling for their babies. It was time to separate the calves from their mothers, and her husband’s friends and neighbors had skipped the funeral to take calves away from their mothers because this is what her husband would have expected them to do. This is how they should pay their respects. In all her years out here she had never gotten used to the wails of cattle mourning their taken-away calves. Sometimes it would last three or four days. She’d run fans and sometimes even turn up the radio to drown it out, but it lingered even after the cows had given up on ever seeing their babies again and then it was their silence that got to her. How could any of God’s creatures put up with the loss of a child and go right on eating and sleeping? She didn’t see how that was possible. She had wanted children and her husband had not. Cord was from a large family and had nothing to do with any of his siblings. Two of his sisters up in Fort Worth she had never even seen since their wedding forty-four years earlier. The few times Evelyn brought up wanting children, Cord said, “Once you start, you have to keep on going. You can’t have just one, because they’d need someone to play with and they say one is just as much work as five. More work, because the older ones will raise the youngest and let you do your chores. Fill a house up with young’uns and they’ll grow up hating how you made ’em share everything from toys to oatmeal to dungarees.”
Evelyn thought this was either the strangest reason she’d ever heard of for not having children or the saddest. Because he did not want his children to have to share? She knew Cord had grown up in a house where nothing ever got talked about. He said to her once when they first started dating that his parents acted like two kids in a contest to see who could hold their breath the longest. About purple in the face and bug-eyed three-quarters of the time. He only mentioned this the one time, but she never forgot it because she had grown up in a house not too far off from what he described. Her father, home from work at the sawmill he ran, sat in his chair next to the radio asleep with his mouth open, and her mother sat knitting across the room from him. The whole house filled with flies that Evelyn went around swatting just to exercise something so deep and buried in her she favored it, something a little cruel and a lot desperate, maybe what made her marry whom she married when she married and surely what made her—still in the dress she wore to the funeral, her house filled with women of the church come to comfort her with rectangles of Pyrex they all knew she would give to the Mexican girl who came twice a week to help her around the house, or feed untouched to her dogs—climb into the Buick he had bought her and drive the six miles of two-track out to where the men were loading up the calves to the cries of mothers and tell them she wanted every last cow off the ranch as soon as they could move them, cow and calf and bull, all of them, and when they opened their mouths to tell her what she knew would be what her husband would have said to this, she got back in the Buick and backed it the six miles to the house, getting within the first half mile a crick in her neck so awful she welcomed it, for this sort of pain was far preferable to what she felt listening to the cows keep up their vigil for the calves who were not coming back.
The Buick went backward as good as it drove forward. She winced at the pain in her neck as she remembered a time when her older brother was driving her to a friend’s house in town and they came to a fork, and she said, “Go straight,” and her brother taunted her, saying, “You mean forward, dummy, not straight.” Her life had been straight but not forward. A path with no forks, but she stood in it more than traveled up or down it. She’d never thought to notice a difference between straight and forward until her smart-alecky brother claimed there was one.
The crying cattle were gone, but she still heard their cries in the wind whipped up in the winter night. After a year she sold the ranch and bought a small green cottage in town with a patch of grass and three oak trees. First shade she’d been able to savor other than a porch in nearly forty years. She was sixty-four years old. She pulled the Buick up under the carport and rolled the windows up tight against the dust, and there it sat. She was six blocks from church and only two to the market and she hardly ate anything but cottage cheese and Pepperidge Farm cookies and did not cook more than a sweet potato.
Her sister Edith and her husband came down from Amarillo when Evelyn turned seventy-two. They had meant to come when she turned seventy but something came up and then it was two years before they could make the drive. They were sitting out on the porch when her brother-in-law Herb got up and walked over to the Buick and started poking around it. He had already tried to put a washer in her kitchen faucet and it leaked worse than before, and here he was, about to act like he knew something about cars even though he sold insurance. Evelyn supposed this was his idea about what he ought to do when he visited a widow. She thought it was kind of sweet, but she didn’t like it when he started asking her questions about the Buick.
“How long has it been since you drove this car?”
“I drive it to the store some, but when it’s nice out, I’d rathe
r walk.”
“That’s a classic right there,” he said. Then he said he was going off to the library to do some research. When he was gone, Evelyn said to Edith, “What is Herb wanting to do research on exactly?” and Edith told Evelyn what she already knew, that Herb didn’t have one iota what to do with himself when he was a guest in someone else’s home and the reason they hadn’t come on her seventieth was that Herb acted like he was sick. “Let’s just let him go on acting like he’s going to take care of everything,” Edith said. “That way he’ll be out of our hair.”
Herb came back in an hour and told Evelyn that she owned a mint specimen of the last Electra they manufactured.
“You could get top dollar for that car,” said Herb.
“How’s she going to get around if she sells her car?” Edith asked her husband.
“She said herself she hardly ever uses it.” He turned to Evelyn and said he would be happy to take it off her hands.
Edith said, “Herb, come inside for a minute, I want to talk to you.” They went inside the house and Edith tried to whisper but it came out like a scream strained through a towel. Evelyn heard every word. Her sister lit into her husband, accusing him of trying to take advantage. Herb said he was going to pay her what it was worth, he liked the car, he’d drive it himself, and Edith said, “You got two trucks, Herb, and one of them sits in the yard,” and no.
While they were in the kitchen arguing, Evelyn studied the Buick. It struck her as funny that it would turn out to be worth a dime. But she didn’t need another dime. She was set from selling the ranch and even if she were about to starve she would never try and make money off that vehicle. How could she admit to her sister and Herb the real reason she had let that car sit, even when she would have saved time or stayed warmer by driving it? How could she admit that she had never even turned on the radio because every time she got in that car she heard the cries of all those mother cows sounding out their loss night and day?
But that wasn’t the worst of it. It took her moving into town and living alone for the first time in her life and not minding it at all to realize her husband had bought her that Buick for the same reason he claimed he did not want children. He was tired of sharing his vehicle. Had he not wanted children because he did not want to share her? Was that out-and-out selfish or was there somewhere in it a sweetness? Was it straight or forward? Her brother had claimed there was a difference, but even if there was, she did not see how, at this point in her life, it mattered.
San Antonio, Texas, 2004
The Alamo was, as Maria had warned, not all that memorable, but it made Marcus remember things he’d gotten decent at forgetting, namely his education center, and in particular the crudely lettered and badly framed placards, with bullet points, that he had ended up designing himself after his disastrous and costly session with Dr. Elwood.
INSIDE THE VENUS FLYTRAP
CARNIVOROUS PLANTS MUST BE ABLE TO
• ATTRACT INSECTS
• CAPTURE BUGS
• DISCRIMINATE BETWEEN FOOD AND NOT FOOD
• DIGEST THEIR PREY
Despite his rudimentary skill with “visualizing the narrative,” as Dr. Elwood had referred to it, it was hard for Marcus not to feel a little envious of the line to get into the Alamo. After breakfast and a quick stroll along the River Walk, Maria had suggested hitting the Alamo early so that they could avoid the midday heat. The Alamo at nine in the morning had more visitors than Marcus had drawn in his first month. Though a part of him understood that a standoff ending in bloody annihilation was a bigger draw than some oddity of nature, Marcus still considered the flytrap to be—as Dr. Elwood had claimed he needed to “make” it—sexy. What was sexy about slaughter, about bullets ricocheting off adobe? The flytrap was the very definition of sex: attract, capture, discriminate, devour.
“Remember that scene in Giant where Elizabeth Taylor tells Rock Hudson at the breakfast table that she’d stayed up all night reading about Texas and it was clear to her that Texas was stolen from Mexico?” Marcus asked Maria when they were back in the Buick headed west on I-10. Maria was driving. She had insisted. “We share the car, we share the driving,” she had said, but he could tell she was not accustomed to—and there were signs she was in fact deeply terrified of—driving on the interstate.
“I’ve never seen Giant,” she said.
“Can’t much blame you,” he said. “I’ve never seen To Kill a Mockingbird.”
“Did you expect what you learned at the Alamo to agree with Elizabeth Taylor?”
What I Learned at the Alamo, by Marcus Banks. Floating down a central Texas river, I fell in love with Texas, Texans, and Texana, yet on the sacred grounds of its Bastille, all that consumed me was thoughts of my own failures, past but obviously not passed.
“I was just thinking about how the Alamo’s success depends on its manipulation of what happened, which is very different from a science museum. Not much room for revisionist history when you’re talking plants.”
“What are you talking about, Marcus?”
It was her use of his name—the first time he could remember hearing her say it aloud—that brought Marcus back into the Buick. The interstate was eight-laned and clogged with lunch-hour traffic. Maria’s hands gripped the wheel in a manner that seemed less steering than holding course in a treacherous current. Terra-cotta-topped haciendas crowned the far hills. Subdivisions of snow-weary refugees, gated against the undesirables who only a few generations back owned this land. A landscape ravaged by money. Surely the bank had taken San Antonio from the Mexicans and made it safe for pharmaceutical sales reps on the run from the windchill of lakes great and frigid.
“Sorry. I forget what I have told you and what I haven’t.” He’d had the sense, ever since coming off the river, that he was still hanging off her tube, talking or not, but moving slowly forward at a pace all the more perfect for the fact that it had taken them a while to calibrate. The night before, when he’d picked her up in the parking lot of the restaurant, he’d watched her in the rearview as she said good-bye to her brother, and it was clear to Marcus that it was good-bye, that she would not climb into the car and order Marcus to follow her brother home to share dessert with his family. Yet she wasn’t unhappy, really, or as distant as she’d been when she stopped in the middle of the street and scooted over to be driven away. Tentative seemed the word to describe her affect. She talked some, joked a bit, but she mostly went away. And he’d let her. Let her know that he was alongside still, keeping the tube from pooling in an eddy, but said nothing.
Perhaps he had become so adept at not asking, at listening, waiting, because he had something to hide. And so did she. If her long estrangement from her brother were all she was seeking to remedy, there would have been nothing tentative about her after leaving that parking lot. And she would not have asked if they could skip Austin this trip and then head back, which he agreed to immediately because, as much as he enjoyed seeing Texas, he had no business being on vacation, he had no job from which to vacate, and it seemed idiotic to be wasting his loot on a pair of bathing trunks he’d never wear again.
“It wasn’t just my failure at farming flytraps that did me in. I also built a flytrap educational center,” he said.
“Like a nature center?” Her response seemed reflexive, as if she could not fully converse while navigating the interstate. Just as well; it was more about the confession, for Marcus, than about her reaction.
“Sort of like that,” he said.
“Can we after viewing this object, hesitate a moment to confess, that vegetable beings are endued with some sensible faculties or attributes, similar to those that dignify animal nature,” wrote Bartram in that phrase Marcus had paid dearly to have cast in bronze and set in a block of Pennsylvania limestone placed at the entrance to the center. To this moment, Marcus had believed every word of it. His flytrap had no mind and no heart and yet in some ways it behaved the same as those equipped with such organs. Say a small twig or baby acor
n fell from the skies into its clutches. Such inanimate prey would not fire the trigger hairs, but the flytrap would remain closed for business for hours until the leaves spread apart and the unwanted prey was blown away or fell out. Carnivorous plants must be able to discriminate between food and not food. Who among us with heart and mind has not failed to distinguish between the two?
“So I’m assuming the flytrap center failed as well?”
A rapturous Bartram wrote, “We see here, in this plant, motion and volition.”
Where did Marcus want to go now, and why did he want to go there? Though commerce took you away from me, nature will always bring me back, my sweet Venus, and from your example have I fashioned my own adaptive strategies: silence, exile, and cunning.
“Apparently a scientific mystery ceases to be mysterious once you break it down into bullet points,” he said. “Also,” he said, desperate to get it all out in the hallowed and forgiving sanctuary of Her Lowness, “I never told my sister about the bank taking the farm.”
“Oh. But I thought you said you were in touch with her.”
“Some. But never about this.”
“Do you think she would not be supportive?”
“I imagine not, since we co-owned the property.”
“Oh,” said Maria. “Okay.”
“Yeah,” said Marcus.
“Well, I don’t know anything about it, but if she’s co-owner of the land and the bank takes the land, surely the bank would have notified her. I mean, how could she not know?”
“Yeah, the thing there is, see, Annie has a tendency to move quite a bit, usually a couple times a year, and so because she’s just not that great about details like change-of-address notices, at some point I just thought it best that she just have all the financial stuff related to the property sent to the farmhouse. I mean, I told her I was going to do it and she was fine with it. And I was planning on telling her about what was going on but I kept thinking that somehow something would happen that might bail me out, which is maybe the most embarrassing thing about it now. I mean, what, I’m going to find a buyer for a carnivorous plant museum? Maybe some venture capitalist was going to hear about my plight and charter a jet and airdrop bundles of cash in the swamp? Or maybe the state would finally realize the incredible resource they had growing on their native ground and maybe it would dawn on someone in Raleigh that these plants are far more valuable things to be known for than barbecue and basketball and the fucking Lost Colony. I used to sit on the porch and fantasize about getting the call from the gov himself. Not only would I get a fat pension, but they’d give me a slew of state vehicles, including a golf cart or two to tool around in, and some research associates, who I would get to hand-choose among the dozens of earnest young grad students in botany clamoring to lead groups of schoolkids around the center while I busied myself cultivating fructus naturales.
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