American Elsewhere

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “Oh, I suppose it did. But even more so, though we like fun here, we just don’t like to make a show of it. Hence the, ehm.” She slurps noisily at her martini and waves at the surrounding trees. “Why don’t you sit down?”

  “I didn’t really want to intrude.”

  “Oh, you’re not intruding. I’m just being neighborly.”

  “But I thought you said you wanted to be alone?”

  “That was because I thought you were my daughter. I’ve been helping her and her kids—she’s married with her own kids, you see—and I insisted on having a few moments of my own. I mean, they can take care of their own shit for a few hours, can’t they?”

  “I guess?”

  “Of course they can. And Hector—Hector, that’s my husband—he could weigh in and actually do something occasionally, too. It’s good to let them be on their own. Sink-or-swim kind of thing. Now sit. You look like you’ve been working yourself half to death. Here.” Carmen fetches a martini glass from underneath her chair and pours something cool and clear. “I would like to state that this isn’t something I do often. I don’t just hang out here in the woods drinkin’ all morning. Life does not permit. But, you know, I sure would if I could. I can’t think of a better use for a morning.” She hands the drink out to Mona.

  “Uh, I’m not really a gin person.”

  “You’ll be this kind of gin person. I promise.”

  Mona sips, not wishing to be impolite. But the drink is cool and biting and refreshing, like a dash of cold rain on a hot afternoon. “Huh,” says Mona.

  “I told you it was good,” says Carmen. “Where you from, Mona?”

  “Texas.”

  “Where in Texas?”

  “All over.”

  “All over? That’s a big all over.”

  “I didn’t quite have a permanent address, I guess you could say.”

  “I see,” says Carmen. “Then what brings you to Wink?”

  Mona recites her usual explanation.

  “Goodness,” says Carmen. She appears honestly affected by Mona’s story. “It sounds like you’ve had quite a time.”

  “You could say that.”

  “Well. Why don’t you lie back and enjoy the morning with me? Sounds like you’ve earned it.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t possibly—”

  “I’m willing to bet you possibly could. Do you have anything else to do today?”

  Actually, Mona does. She’d meant to ask Mr. Parson more about Coburn today, and to see if she could get him to make a damn bit of sense. But she says, “Nothing that couldn’t happen later, I suppose.”

  “That’s the spirit. Relax. We get to relax so rarely. Give it a shot.”

  Mona lies back. Relaxing isn’t something she does easily, but she finds it easy here: the sun is warm but tempered by the overhanging tree, and the chuckle of the nearby brook makes her worries melt away.

  “So what do you think so far, Mona?” asks Carmen. There’s a soft slurp as she sucks at her own drink.

  “I think I could get used to this shit.”

  Carmen laughs. “I believe you, but I meant about Wink.”

  “Oh. Well. It’s… it’s damn nice.”

  “Yes, it is, isn’t it. I guess we get too used to it. Acclimated. Take it for granted. But then a morning like this happens, and you remember.”

  “It feels… a little different at night.”

  “Hm,” says Carmen, but she does not comment further.

  “New Mexico is a damn pretty state. I wish I’d come here sooner.”

  “You know, I’ve been here all my life, but I can’t imagine any place more pleasant than this. Well. I’d be lying if I said you didn’t have to look. Like this place here. Sometimes you have to work for your bit of peace. But it’s there. And I know what you’re thinking—you’re thinking, what the hell would a housewife know about work?”

  “I actually wouldn’t think that at all, ma’am,” says Mona.

  “Oh, really? Pardon my forwardness, but I didn’t quite see you as the family type.”

  “Tried it once.”

  “Didn’t take?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Ah,” says Carmen. She turns her black-glassed eyes to the sky. “Well, if anyone gives you any shit about that, you can tell them to go to hell for me. If they haven’t been there, they can’t talk.”

  Mona tries to smile gratefully at this bracing advice. “So is this part of your property?”

  “Kinda,” says Carmen. “Our house is back toward downtown more. This is just mine, really. I asked Hector for it. For my little bit of sun I could lay out in—though I did ask for a little bit of shade, occasionally—and he went and got all that arranged. That’s kind of how things work for us. A lot of favor-corralling, I guess you could say. I’ve no doubt you’ll figure it all out, if you hang around long enough.”

  Mona looks around at the glen. Maybe it’s the gin, but it’s hard to have a troubling thought here. Yet there’s also something vaguely hermetic about this place, as if the trees have sealed them in and this tiny glen and its stunning vista are totally detached from Wink.

  “Will you be hanging around?” asks Carmen.

  “Sorry?”

  “Around Wink. You’ve got a house, you said, but are you thinking to stay?”

  “I don’t know,” says Mona. “Maybe. I guess the real estate market might not be exactly hopping here, if I want to sell the house.”

  Carmen gives a husky laugh and finishes her drink. “You’d be surprised, m’dear.”

  “I have to ask—you wouldn’t happen to have known my mother, would you?”

  “Sorry, hon. I didn’t. Or if I did, I don’t remember, which ain’t out of the question. My memory isn’t what it used to be. But if you ever need anything—advice, or a drink—I’m always available. Or I’ll make myself available, even if I’m not.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “Well, you seem like someone who’s seen a lot. It’s like I said, peace flourishes here, if you ask for it. I hope you’ll find some here.”

  Mona considers it as she finishes her martini. As she does, there’s a snort from Carmen, followed by a second one that never quite stops until it’s a snore. Mona sits up and looks in the shaker, and is not surprised to see it is totally empty.

  She gets up and follows the brook back up to the street, walking until she emerges in a greenbelt where three small girls play hide-and-seek, giggling and shrieking as they dash among the trees, and she turns toward home, thinking of peace.

  So far Mona hasn’t had a single good night in Wink. She tries to sleep, but it does not come easily. Often she awakens to roam the house’s empty hallways. The windows cast queer shapes on the faded wooden floor, and in some places the air takes on a hot, electrical scent, like the smell in a room with too many copiers and printers going at once.

  Mona thinks herself a practical person, so she knows the world abounds in coincidences that can really fuck with your head if you invest too much in them, and she tries to tell herself the shared date—of her mother’s suicide and the lightning storm—is one of them. Tragedies happen every day, and it doesn’t mean anything if two coincide. Yet each time she remembers that black, lacquered shard of wood leaning crookedly in the park, she is troubled.

  When sleep finally takes her it is blessed and hard, a dreamless black slumber that will leave her covered in pink wrinkles from the sheets when she wakes. Yet eventually—it is hard to say when—she begins hearing voices in her sleep.

  “… And she just came in the other night, she says,” says one voice. It sounds like it belongs to a very old woman who is standing just nearby.

  “She says so because she did. I was there,” says another. This voice is masculine, firm and deep. “I was the first she came to.”

  “To you? Was this your doing?”

  “Her coming to me was purely coincidental. I had no hand in it. I had no idea she was coming at all.”

  Mona do
es not open her eyes. She is sure she is dreaming, but she does not want to open her eyes in the dream, because then she might do the same in real life and wake up and ruin her sleep. So she lies on the mattress with her face in the sheets and her eyes tightly shut, listening to the two voices talk.

  “And do you think it is all coincidence?” says the old woman’s voice. “I would like to believe so, I must say. Then we could rest easy.”

  “Something this important… I cannot help but think otherwise.”

  “Why do you think her arrival is important?”

  “She comes right after a death. A new face, after an old one is lost. It is too soon for me to feel comfortable about it.”

  “Ah,” says the old woman’s voice. “So you think…”

  “Exactly. She is not here by accident. She was brought here. This is someone’s doing, but I am not yet sure whose.”

  Mona has no idea what they’re talking about, but she’s slowly becoming aware that the air on the back of her neck is nothing like that of the air-conditioning in the house. It is far too cold and dry. It feels like a wind out of a barren desert, one that has never known moisture in all its life. And she feels she has heard those voices before…

  She begins to lift her head a little. She is not going to look, she is certain of that, because this is still just a dream. She’s just going to crack her eyes a little, and maybe something will just trickle in.

  She cracks her eyelids. And something does indeed trickle in.

  Mona is on her mattress, but she is not in her house: the mattress lies on a field of black stone, like volcanic basalt, its surface cracked into nearly perfect little hexagons. There is a red light shining down on the black stone field, and Mona keeps lifting her head until she spies a familiar sight: the red-pink moon, as fat as a happy tick, and just below it is the blue flicker of cloud lightning.

  This is some dream, she thinks.

  “Do you believe she has any involvement?” asks the voice of the old woman.

  “I do not think she knows a thing,” says the man’s voice. “She is mostly confused, and sad. She is a broken thing.”

  “So she poses no threat.”

  “I did not say that. With so much recent madness, how are we to be sure what is a threat and what is not?”

  “Hm. I believe I may wish to confirm for myself,” says the woman’s voice.

  “I do not think it’d be wise to attempt anything dangerous now.”

  “Oh, it wouldn’t be dangerous. At least, not for us…”

  Mona is now sure these voices are familiar. Did she not once hear one of them offer her breakfast, and the other one offer her tea? Confused, she lifts her head higher and begins to roll over.

  She sees there are two statues, one standing directly on either side of her, enormous ones done in odd shapes: one looks like a single queerly organic column, the other resembles a mammoth, headless bull with many limbs. They seem taller than the Statue of Liberty and the Sphinx, respectively, and appear to be made of the same black stone as the sunless wasteland. Both statues tower just above her, as if they were strolling by (if such things could stroll) and found her lying here and are investigating together. Yet the moon is just behind them, so she cannot see more of them as they look down on her…

  “Wait,” says the man’s voice. “Is she looking at us?”

  “Can she see us?”

  “How can she—”

  Then there is a flicker of movement, lightning-fast. It takes Mona’s brain a few moments to translate what it just saw, and though she cannot believe it her brain keeps on insisting it was real.

  The statue that looked like a bull waved a limb. Which statues should not be able to do, she says to herself. If it really did wave a limb, then it could not be a statue at all, but…

  Suddenly Mona is falling, plummeting away from the black wasteland and into darkness. She falls until she strikes her mattress—which is odd, because she is certain she was just lying on it—and she jerks awake with a gasp and looks around.

  She is lying in the corner of the master bedroom of her new house. Though she could have sworn that just now she was not alone, she looks at all the dark corners and sees no one at all. The room, though spacious, is empty.

  Then the braying, shrill peal of a bell splits the silence. Mona’s whole musculature flexes in surprise, causing a stab of pain in her belly and arm. Then the bell rings again, and she realizes it’s the aquamarine phone sitting in the dusty corner of her living room.

  She goes to it and watches it ring four more times. Whoever it is, he or she isn’t giving up.

  Mona expects it to be the same jerk who called earlier. So she picks it up and barks, “Who the fuck is this?”

  There’s an “Ah” of surprise on the other end, followed by an “Uh…”

  “Yeah?” says Mona. “Go on. Talk.”

  Silence.

  Then: “You need to go home.”

  “What?” says Mona. “What the hell do you mean?”

  “You need to go home, Miss Bright.” The speaker is talking through what sounds like a sock pressed against the phone, but this cannot disguise the fact that the speaker is obviously very young.

  “I am at home,” says Mona.

  “No. The home you came from. You need to leave this town.”

  “Okay, or—you could just mind your own fucking business.”

  “They’re watching you,” says the voice. There is a note of genuine terror in it. “They’re talking about you.”

  “Who?”

  “All of them. Don’t you know what they are?”

  “ ‘What’?” says Mona. “What do you mean, ‘what’?”

  “Go as soon as you can,” says the voice. “If they’ll let you.” Then there is a click, and the line goes dead.

  Mona looks at the receiver, thinking, then slowly puts it down.

  She knows that voice. She’s sure of it.

  She is back in bed, just on the verge of slumber, when it comes to her: didn’t she hear that voice recommend the biscuits and gravy to her once? But then she returns to sleep, and the thought is gone, and forgotten.

  Mrs. Benjamin’s luncheon is held in her backyard. It is a cool seventy-two degrees outside, and her cottonwood trees have been carefully pruned so that they form a light canopy that shields the yard from the noon sun. Her gardens are nothing short of astonishing: huge clumps of flowering vines sprawl along its iron fence, and blades of sprouting bulbs droop along the pink granite borders. It looks like something out of Southern Living, and, unfortunately for Mona, the same goes for the rest of the attendees: everyone here is wearing a sundress with matching jewelry, heeled sandals, and sleek sunglasses. Mona, who was raised in the oil flats with nothing but an unsociable ex–Army Ranger for company, has always felt profoundly insecure about her lack of femininity, and she feels incredibly out of place here, where she just can’t compete with this level of estrogen. It doesn’t help that she is quite short, dresses like she is planning for a hike, and is obviously Latina, unlike everyone else here.

  Yet it is odd: the question of race never pokes its head above the waves. This is unusual for Mona, who has been all over Texas and worked in some of the whitest communities out there and has witnessed a vast array of reactions to her race. Since Wink is about 98 percent white, she expects at least something, especially from these socialites: maybe they would ask her, somewhat tentatively, where she was from, or clumsily inquire if she was bilingual (to which the answer is a sort of no—the only Spanish Mona knows is what she picked up on the force in Houston, which is limited to commands, threats, and thoroughly indecent questions). But these questions never come. In fact, now that she thinks about it, no one in Wink has ever said anything about her race: both it and her general appearance have gone mostly without comment or reaction. It feels as if the citizens of Wink have gotten used to people different from them.

  Still, her insecurity intensifies as the luncheon goes along. These are a type of woman M
ona has never encountered: they drink cocktails at noon and smoke cigarettes in slender little holders, and they discuss almost nothing but housekeeping and the states of their husbands and children. Perhaps they are what Carmen was fifteen years ago. They seem a cheery, bubbly lot, with their hair perfectly coiffed and their eyes bright and smiling behind their sunglasses, and they greet Mona with an enthusiasm she finds downright intimidating. None of them seem to be employed. The mortgage rate around here must be great for everyone to live so well on a single income. She manages to briefly redirect the course of conversation to her reason for being in Wink, and pop in a few questions about her mother—but of course they, like everyone else so far, know nothing: they laugh at their own ignorance, and bounce gaily to the next subject. Though Mona feels contempt for them—so privileged, so sheltered—she also cannot help but wish to be one of them.

  For the most part they are all too happy to do the talking for her, but when they finally ask her a direct question it’s one Mona’s been dreading all along:

  “So, Mona, any plans to settle down?” asks one, who Mona thinks is named Barbara. “I know you’re young, but don’t wait too long.”

  The statement puts a bad taste in Mona’s mouth, but she still tries to smile. “I’m not that young,” she says. “I’m almost forty.”

  “What!” cries Barbara. “Almost forty! You don’t look a day over twenty-seven! What is your secret? You have to tell me. I’ll bend your arm if you don’t.” The other women nod. Some even look insulted to hear her true age.

  It is not a new response to Mona, who has watched friends grow gray and lined while she stays the same, more or less. She knows she’s lucky, but she’s never figured out why. Her mother and father looked well over their ages, but then one drank himself to sleep every night and the other was schizophrenic, so that doesn’t mean much.

  “Just genes, I guess. I can’t say it’s clean living.”

  “Well, it’s high time someone snatches you up,” says another, a platinum blonde who might be named Alice. “I notice there’s no ring on that finger…”

  Mona tries to smile again, but it comes out as a grimace. “Well. There was, once.”