American Elsewhere

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  Mona isn’t sure what to say to that. She knows too damn well what happens when people start self-policing. But there is a cold, quiet rage to Mr. Macey’s face that makes her reluctant to press the point. She is new in town, and it might be the light in this store—for it is very dim in here—but she almost thinks she sees something fluttering in the backs of his eyes.

  He takes a little breath and smiles again. “Now. Would you like me to get one of my boys to move this to your house?”

  Moving all this stuff into the house tires her out pretty quick, so Mona is more than eager to take Mr. Macey’s suggestion and head to the diner, which is still as hopping as it was this morning.

  Just before she walks in, though, Mona counts the vehicles outside. She’s not sure why—something’s just buzzing in the back of her head, telling her to keep an eye out. So she counts each car and truck and memorizes the first letter or number of each license plate before she feels satisfied enough to go in.

  Chloe’s turns out to be a bright, clean, well-lit eatery with wide, curving tables and snug booths. It is filled with the aroma of bacon and pancakes, and the hiss of the griddle makes the jukebox (which is playing some Perry Como number) sound like it’s coming through an ancient radio. Pies and cakes, each as lavishly prepared as a bridal gown, gracefully orbit one another on the dessert stands on the countertop, which is beaded with spotlights from the pendant lamps dangling above. Mona is a little disappointed to find it is not an all-night diner; she feels this would be the perfect place for restless night owls to come and contemplate their loneliness over a cup of coffee. That is, if Wink had any night owls.

  When Mona enters she stands at the door for a moment and watches the waitresses take orders from the customers. None of them, she notices, are writing anything down. Some of them aren’t even taking orders: people walk in and sit down, and a plate of hash browns and biscuits—or a plate of steak and eggs, or just a cup of coffee—is placed in front of them with no more than a happy greeting and an inquiry about the state of the family. They are all regulars, Mona realizes. Everyone knows everybody here, and what they want.

  Everyone except her. She can already feel the confused glances darting her way. They silently ask—Who is this? And then there is a turn, a realization when they all say—Oh, the girl from the funeral in the flashy car…

  Mona is too hungry to care. She sits down at the counter and looks at the menu, which is made of old and coffee-stained paper. The murmur of confusion dies, but she can still feel a few lingering stares.

  A waitress arrives, a girl Mona finds faintly familiar. She is a delicate, dark-haired thing with a neck so skinny Mona can hardly believe it’s holding up her head. Her eyes are huge and brown, with a certain glimmer of anxiety. “Can I help you, ma’am?” she asks.

  Mona glances at her name tag. It reads GRACIE. “Sure,” says Mona. “But I was told to say that, uh, Mr. Macey sent me…”

  “Oh, Macey,” says Gracie. She smiles briefly, but it feels like a formality: Mona gets the sense that Macey is one of those people everyone has to pretend to like, whether they really do or not. “Sure, we can take care of you, then. What’ll you have?”

  “What’s the house specialty?”

  “Specialty?” asks Gracie. “Well, ma’am, our pancakes and coffee are pretty talked about.”

  “Oh, please don’t call me ma’am. It just about kills me every time.”

  This brings about a small smile. “All right.”

  “I think I may need something a little more substantial than pancakes, but I would love to try a cup of your coffee. What else you got?”

  Gracie looks Mona over. She seems to come to some decision, and says, “I’d recommend the biscuits and gravy, if you haven’t had much all day.”

  “Hm. You know, I don’t mean to pry, but I think… I think I might have seen you today. Were you in the alley this morning, showing off your balance?”

  “What? Oh.” Gracie smiles, embarrassed, and turns a brilliant shade of red. “Yes. Yeah, that was me.”

  “I don’t think I’ve seen Marines go through training like that. You must be made of tough stuff.”

  She grins sheepishly. “Miss Chloe takes her customer service seriously.”

  “Well, it has definitely paid off. Tell Miss Chloe I’ll have the biscuits and gravy and a cup of coffee, if you could.” She folds up the menu and hands it to Gracie, who gives her a bit of a puzzled smile before heading to the back to relay her order. Within the blink of an eye, another waitress—this one giving her no more than a small smile and a “Here you are, shug”—has slipped her a ponderous mug of steaming coffee, along with some cream and sugar. Mona takes a sip, and she can immediately understand why it’s talked about: it is rich and strong and faintly chocolatey, so good it induces a sigh of satisfaction.

  For a moment she does no more than look around the diner, and as she does the clank of plates and the mumbled greetings and the scrape of silverware all align until it feels as if she’s in the center of some warm, cozy nirvana. Everyone here has been ordering the same thing since forever, and asking the same questions about the family and receiving the same funny little answers, and they’ll all keep doing it, over and over again, and that’s just fine with Mona. She’s almost disappointed when Gracie arrives with her food, which breaks the spell.

  “What’s in this coffee?” Mona asks her. “It’s like… chocolatey and piney, or something.”

  “It’s probably the pinyon nuts you’re tasting. We mix them into the grounds. It’s sort of a New Mexican specialty.”

  “Well, it should be a specialty in a hell of a lot more places.”

  “You’re new in town, aren’t you?” asks Gracie.

  “Yes,” says Mona, who already knows what’s coming next.

  “Not to be rude, but I think I heard about you. Are you the—”

  “The lady from the funeral,” says Mona. “I am. Word travels fast.”

  “It doesn’t have to travel far, here. Why are you visiting, if you don’t mind my asking? We don’t get much through traffic.”

  “Well, I’m not sure if it’s a visit.” Again, she has to explain about the house. She’s going to have to incorporate this explanation into all her introductions around here.

  “Oh,” says Gracie. “I’m so sorry to hear about your dad.”

  “Really?” says Mona. “I wasn’t.”

  Gracie smartly sidesteps this subject. “So your dad lived here?”

  “My mother. A long, long time ago, I guess. I don’t think she was born here, but I guess it was her hometown. I don’t know. You wouldn’t happen to have known much about any Alvarezes? I’d expect not, since you’re so young.” Gracie shakes her head, but Mona gets an idea. “Say—you wouldn’t happen to know where the hall of records is around here, would you? I’d like to try and find out more about her.”

  “I know where it was,” says Gracie. “Though it burned down before I was born. It was one of the buildings that got struck by lightning in the storm. They never got around to rebuilding it. It’s just a vacant lot next to the gas station.”

  “I heard about that storm,” says Mona. “It sounds like it was a disaster.”

  “I guess we think of it that way. There’s a memorial to the people who died in it just down the block, where the city park begins,” says Gracie. “It’s a tree that was struck. About half of it is still there. They lacquered it so it stays the way it is and doesn’t rot.”

  “I just might have to see that.”

  “It’s that way,” Gracie says, and points out the front windows.

  As Mona looks, she sees she’s being watched: there is a man in the corner booth in a blue-gray coat and a white panama hat. He looks a little like a Native American, with angular, tough features and long, straight black hair. Despite the meal steaming in front of him, he is sitting with his hands in the pockets of his coat, and he stays totally still. If he cares that Mona has spotted him, he doesn’t show it: his dark black e
yes just stare right back at her.

  “Is that so,” says Mona softly. Then she thanks Gracie and begins to eat her meal, though she’s a little less hungry now.

  When she is done Mona pays and leaves, looking to the side as she walks out. The Native American is no longer there, but his plate remains, the food untouched, though it’s stopped steaming. Once outside she looks up and down the sidewalk but does not see him.

  She counts the vehicles again. They’re all there. She wonders if he somehow set off her little mental alarm, or if it was something else.

  She walks up the street to the park with the huge white geodesic ball. She finds the memorial opposite the courthouse. It is a tall, splintered tooth of dark, gleaming wood, and it sits crooked in the lush green grass, about thirty feet tall. She sees there is a dark blush that starts at the top and curls down around the old bark. It looks almost like modern art.

  She walks up to it and reads the plaque at the bottom:

  IN MEMORIAM

  IN LOVING MEMORY OF THOSE TAKEN FROM US

  ON JULY 17TH 1983

  WE LEAVE THIS TREE AS A TESTAMENT TO OUR LOSS

  It doesn’t feel right to Mona to leave this tree as a memorial, really. This is not a pleasant memento at all. Wouldn’t they want something more inspiring, more hopeful? And…

  She stops. Thinks. Then she reads the date again.

  July seventeenth, she thinks. Nineteen eighty-three… she knows that date. Of course she knows that date. How could she forget?

  “My God,” she says out loud. “Oh, my God. That’s the day Momma died.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Around nine o’clock every evening Joseph Gradling gets the itch, and this night is no exception. Naturally, as a sixteen-year-old, Joseph is vaguely aware that the itch is a common malediction among his age group: nearly every young boy at Wink High has it in some way or another, though it manifests at different times and they take care of it in different ways. He has heard, for example, of Bolan’s Roadhouse on the outskirts of town, where some of the more adventurous boys have gone to spend money on something alternately described as blissful or repellent. And for the less daring there are smut magazines you can buy at certain stores in town, which quickly attain the value of cigarettes in prison among the student population, and are pored over with the enthusiastic disbelief of Old World peasants reading of foreign lands.

  But Joseph is convinced he’s found the best possible way in town: Gracie Zuela, who, for some reason, seems to hold some affection for him, or perhaps even like him. This revelation came to him quite slowly, as he could not believe it for the longest time. But one day, with his hands trembling and heart fluttering, he made some vague, stuttering proclamations to her about his feelings (to his embarrassment, he kept returning to the subject of her “niceness” because she was “so nice”), and, in a development that still confuses him to this day, she smiled and stood on her toes and whispered a time and a place into his ear.

  That was the first time they met in the woods outside her home. There have been a few others after that. And with each visit, Joseph has grown aware that Gracie is scratching a deeper itch than the one that originally made him seek relief. There is something to their nocturnal visits, something fleeting and wonderful, that draws him back to this place. He is not sure what it is. But though the itch might be managed, he is now more distracted than ever, yet he is perfectly content with this.

  Tonight, Joseph waits in their usual place in the woods, nursing a bottle of gas station champagne and a fearfully powerful erection. He’s brought two bottles, one strawberry-flavored the way she likes it, and he’s about a third of the way through his so he’s feeling a little puzzled by everything. He is puzzled by the way the very trees appear agitated, like a herd of deer that has just caught scent of a wolf. But he is also puzzled by the moon. Tonight it looks slightly pinker than usual.

  It is at times like these that Joseph tries to forget why he has no competition for the affections of Gracie Zuela: her house is just on the edge of a No-Go Zone, as his parents have termed them. These are the places no one ever visits, not even during the day. This Zone in particular is the woods on the northwestern side of town, just beside the mesa, and is said to be one of the worst places; but no one has found all of the No-Go places, or if anyone has, they haven’t told anyone about it. And who would ever go looking? The idea is unthinkable.

  But Joseph knows that Gracie’s family has an arrangement, so this place is actually quite safe. Though others might fear to come, he knows he can walk here without worry. Or at least without much worry. No one is entirely worry-free when out and about in Wink at night. Everyone knows it’s best to stay indoors. But he checks his watch again and drinks more champagne.

  Finally there is a soft footfall behind him. “You came,” says a quiet voice.

  He turns and sees Gracie standing behind him. She has always moved very quietly, though recently she seems to be getting quieter and quieter. One day, he thinks, her footfalls will make no sound at all. “Of course I did.” He holds the bottle of strawberry champagne out to her, but she shakes her head. “No?” he asks.

  “No,” she says.

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  Gracie is a slight, skinny creature, with toothpick arms and a stooped posture, but it is obvious she will one day be a great beauty. There is a placid sadness to her deep, dark eyes, as if she is pained by some phantom wound but does not know what to do about it. She stands in the pine needles with her shoulders slouched and her slight body turned away. Her arms are crossed and Joseph’s heartbeat quickens as he sees her fingers curled around her bicep: Gracie is a creature of fine, delicate features, and for some reason the sight of her hands and neck makes something fragile and trembling in him unfurl its wrinkled butterfly wings and take flight.

  “So you snuck out okay?” he asks, coming closer.

  “Snuck out?”

  “Yeah. They didn’t notice you?”

  She looks at him, curious. “Joseph,” she says, “my parents know I’m out. Don’t you know what tonight is?”

  And at that, his blood runs cold. Joseph looks around at the trees and the cliffs and the queerly colored moonlight, and he realizes he has made a terrible mistake. “It can’t be,” he said. “Not again. Not so soon.”

  “It’s been a month,” she says.

  “It hasn’t felt like it.”

  “No,” she admits. “It hasn’t.”

  She holds a hand out for him to take, and, to his shame, he hesitates. He covers it up by fumbling with the bottles, and when he does take her hand it is ice-cold.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’ll leave if you want.”

  “Don’t leave,” she said. “You can’t come with me. Not past the woods, anyway. But I don’t want you to leave.”

  They walk through the woods hand in hand, with the grapefruit moon shining down on them. Up ahead the trees thin out and the rocky side of the mesa begins. In the moonlight the cliffs are white and gray, miles and miles of beautiful desolation. Were the sun up they would be pink and blood-red, but tonight under the clear skies they are like bone.

  “Is it bad that I’m here?” he asks.

  “It… might be,” she says. “I don’t know. Things are difficult right now. Everyone is upset.”

  “What is it? Is it why you left the diner early?” Gracie is currently in training at Chloe’s, and her early absence would normally not be tolerated. Something serious must have happened to excuse her.

  “Yes. A little.” She falls silent, and bites her lip.

  “Is it something to do with… what it wants?” he asks.

  “It’s a he, Joseph. We’ve talked about that.”

  “Or that’s what it says it is,” says Joseph sullenly. He wishes now that he had not come. On other nights Gracie is free and fresh and beautiful; he thinks of how he holds her in his arms, her black hair gleaming on the pine needles, her laughter and breath on his neck.
But tonight she is a frightened, shy little thing, disappointed with everything that’s ever happened to her.

  “It’s Mr. Weringer,” she says.

  “Yeah. I figured. Everyone is worried about it,” says Joseph. “I didn’t even think something like that could happen. Did you go to the funeral?”

  She nods. “But it’s not that. They don’t think he just died, Joseph… they think he was murdered.”

  Joseph is shocked. He almost stops walking altogether. The idea of Mr. Weringer being murdered is even more unbelievable than him dying. “Who told you that?”

  She nods ahead to the gray-and-white canyons. “Mr. First, of course.”

  His face darkens. “I thought you only saw Mr. First once a month.”

  “I visit him, yes, but sometimes he comes to me.”

  “And he visited you last night?”

  She reluctantly nods.

  “In your bedroom?” he asks.

  She does not answer.

  “Did he visit you in your bedroom, Gracie?”

  “Yes,” she says, and there is an edge to her voice. “Are you really interested in this?”

  “No,” he says.

  “You are. We always talk about this. I’m so sick and tired of talking about this. I wish we could talk about anything else.”

  “It’s just… I don’t like you keeping things from me.”

  “But you knew I would. Right from the start of this, I told you I would have to.”

  Joseph can think of no answer. It is true that she warned him about this. At first he laughed it off, thinking it was a small price to pay in comparison to the rewards he’d get out of it. But with each visit the subject grows heavier and heavier, and it feels like every conversation they have circles it but never truly touches upon it.

  But perhaps the problem is that he is getting older, and with each day he grows aware that the entire town is doing the same thing—treading carefully around many anxious, unspoken truths—and this perplexes and saddens him in a way he cannot articulate.

  “I’ll tell you,” she says. “It doesn’t matter. I was lying on my bed. About to go to sleep. But then I heard his sounds. It sounds like flutes, when he’s coming. And the doors to my balcony opened, and he came in and sat in the corner and talked to me. We just talked, Joseph. He’s very troubled.”