“Well, gee, he said to never tell no one but his mother lives up somewhere by Elko and sometimes he takes off there. She’s got a horse ranch.”
“Mom has a horse ranch? In Nevada?” says Ned. “I don’t believe it.”
“Oh yeah. I been there. Near Elko,” she says again helpfully. Then she stops and she gets those funny lines over her nose again as she has another lightning-quick flash of genius. “Oh yeah, she would be your mom too.”
“And you say John goes there?”
“On account of you’re brothers.” She circles back to this in case Ned is having a hard time keeping up with her deductive reasoning.
“Yeah, I know,” says Ned. “Now, you say that John goes to my mother’s horse ranch?”
“Near Elko. Well, I only know he went the one time, ’cause he took me there. He couldn’t help it, we were between shows and he thought it would be a good place to hide.”
“To hide?”
“Oh sure. I used to hide all the time with Johnny.”
“He calls himself Johnny?”
“No, I call him Johnny,” says Shirley gently as if Ned is stupid. “ ’Cause he don’t mostly call himself. Anyhow, maybe he’s there but don’t tell no one I told you. It’s, like, his …” She pauses. She is at a loss.
“Refuge?” says Ned.
“Yeah. Like with elephants,” she says.
“My mother is keeping horses and elephants?” squeals Ned.
I nudge Ned in the ribs. “I think she means refuge. There are wildlife refuges with elephants.”
The woman nods compassionately at Ned. She knows what it’s like to get all mixed up. “Yeah. I always wanted to go to Africa to those elephant refuges. Maybe I’ll do that now. You think it costs a lot?”
“Yeah, probably,” says Ned, so concentrated on our little problem that he isn’t worrying about raining on her parade.
“But, anyhow, if you see him tell him, like, I quit. You know, I don’t get paid when he don’t show up and he hasn’t been showing up regular lately. Okay? Like, how am I ever going to get to see elephants?”
“Yeah, sure. And listen, don’t tell anyone else about the horse ranch,” says Ned.
“Hey, I told you,” says Shirley in outraged tones. “It was, like, my secret. Maybe you shouldn’t tell anyone about the elephants.”
“Right,” says Ned. “Listen, do you know exactly where this ranch is?”
“Near Elko,” says Shirley, enunciating as if he is deaf.
“Can you be more specific?”
“You mean like an address or something?” says Shirley, looking confused.
“Yeah, like an address,” says Ned.
“Nah, I don’t pay attention to things like that,” says Shirley. “I’m kind of an in-the-moment girl.”
“I can see that,” says Ned.
“So where’s the guy I come out with?” asks Shirley, looking around the parking lot, but he has disappeared too. “Oh jeez, when it rains it pours.” She gets into a beaten-up old black car and speeds away with rubber burning.
We walk back to the car.
“She’s not the brightest lightbulb in the box,” I say to Ned. “I mean, she had no proof you were John’s brother. For all she knew you were one of the guys showing up to give John trouble. But she went ahead and told you where to find him.”
“I know,” says Ned, ruffling his hair in weariness. It stands up on end as if it has been gelled, but it’s just sweat. “We’re lucky anyhow that she was a trusting soul, because no one else around here seems to be.”
“Maybe it’s all this gambling,” I say. “Everyone looks kind of lean and desperate. So maybe they prey on each other and after a while no one really trusts anyone else.”
“You could say that about an awful lot of places, Bibles,” says Ned.
“Whoa!” I say.
“I’ve been around, Bibles, I’ve been around,” he says, but jovially, and smoothes his hair back down. Now it is lying as if gelled flat. He’s really not having a good hair day.
“What kind of trouble do you think John is in?” I ask as we get back in our car.
“Well, if it’s the kind that comes accessorized with a bag full of money, I don’t even want to guess,” says Ned.
We drive silently back to the motel. The bright lights keep flashing even though we are far away from the Strip. I am suddenly tired of all the speed and noise and light here and I just want to sit quietly on our porch in Massachusetts and listen to the waves.
After we park, Ned and I go to our motel rooms, but no one is in mine. I go into the other one, where everyone is awake and dressed. My mother is sitting ramrod straight on the bed, looking unusually prim, her knees together, her hands folded in her lap as if she is waiting for a bus.
“What’s the matter?” I ask when I see their stricken faces.
“Bedbugs,” says Ned, looking defeated.
“It’s DISGUSTING!” yells Maya.
“We’ll have to find another motel,” says my mother. “We can’t sleep here.”
“I’ve got a better idea,” says Ned, suddenly brightening. “Who wants to go to Elko?”
We collect our things and head out into the night. Then we start driving north.
“Where are we going now?” asks Maya.
“We’re going to visit my mother,” says Ned. “She has a horse ranch up in cowboy country.”
“Cool,” says Max.
“Cool,” says Hershel.
“I can’t believe I am finally going to meet your mother,” says my mother.
“Yeah,” says Ned unenthusiastically.
“Where’s your mother been?” asks Maya.
“Well, that is the question,” says Ned. “Not that I was looking real hard.”
“Ned …,” says my mother.
“All right, aterlay,” says Ned.
“That’s ‘later’ in Pig Latin,” says Maya.
“Who taught you Pig Latin?” asks Ned. “Not Mrs. Gunderson?”
“Mrs. Gunderson speaks five languages,” says Maya enigmatically.
“There’s the moon!” screams Hershel, pointing out the window.
Tonight it is a luminous cream-colored orb. Why does the moon always look different? Always different, always personal.
“Listen, you kids may as well go to sleep. It’s a long, long drive ahead of us.”
“How are you going to find your mom’s ranch?” I ask.
“I’ll stop in at the sheriff’s. Sheriffs at these sparsely populated places know everyone. Especially the ranch owners. I think.”
“Jane, can you get some blankets out of the box by your feet? Max and Hershel, why don’t you take a blanket and curl up?” says my mother.
I pass out blankets to all. Ned has the heater on but it doesn’t work very well. The car was old when Ned bought it two years ago and things keep going wrong that we can’t afford to fix. I like being a little chilly with a blanket wrapped around me like a tent. It is also a place to escape from Maya. My mother wears a blanket as well. Only Ned has to be blanketless and cold but he says he doesn’t mind. He seems distracted and angry when we mention his mother. Angry is a new mode to observe him in. In the past two years I have barely ever seen him so.
All is quiet in the car. Maya falls asleep quickly. I had expected more pressing questions from her, her voice had that tone, but I guess she is too tired. Max and Hershel are completely worn out. I would like to sleep but I know that my mother and Ned are just waiting for us all to drift off so they can discuss this new turn of events. I pretend to doze. I let my head roll from side to side in case they are sneaking peeks at me through the rearview mirror. Then I start to breathe deeply and rhythmically. This is harder than you’d think. Finally, when they still do not speak, I begin to give out a little snore now and then. I hope I am not overdoing it. I am almost asleep for real when my mother says in a quiet voice, “So, what happens next?”
“We see if he’s at my mother’s ranch. If he is we give h
im the money.”
“What if he isn’t?”
“I don’t know. Maybe leave it in the desert and go back to Massachusetts. The whole thing has the feel of a wild-goose chase. I’ll tell you one thing, if she knows he’s in trouble, I’d be surprised if she takes him in. Self-sacrifice and maternal protectiveness have never been her strong suits.”
“No, you always describe her as if, after your father left, she wasn’t quite there,” says my mother.
Ned snorts. “No, she was thereabouts.”
I stare out the back window at the stars. The whole back of the station wagon window shows a sky resplendent with constellations. The universe goes out forever. Night covers the desert like a blanket. There is nothing like a sky full of stars to make you lose track of your thoughts. For instance, at first, you realize that all those stars, all those pinpricks of light, are far away from each other but repeated all over the sky thousands of times. They are each glowing hugely alone but not, connected by the deep dark of the universe, part of a whole picture of what we see, the night sky. The same and all different. Not aware of the picture they present as a whole. But not seeing us below either, the vastness of each of us and the many. Not, for instance, understanding that all these dots below are divided, into such things as Democratic and Republican parties. People who like sweet things and people who like salty or sour. People who put FREE TIBET bumper stickers on their cars and people who put THE MORE PEOPLE I MEET THE MORE I LOVE MY DOG and things like that on their bumpers. Actually, people who put anything at all on their bumpers and people who don’t. Then I just gaze contentedly at the stars and don’t bother trying to think about anything.
But later it occurs to me how Ned and I wanted to be outlaws and here we are, in the American West, in the high desert. We are escaping who knows what with a bunch of money from who knows where. Do things happen because you want them to? Can you create your life and adventures by imagining them? My head lolls from side to side for real now and when I next wake up, it is morning.
I open my eyes and stretch. I have woken up because instead of the smooth gliding asphalt beneath the wheels, we are bumping along over potholes and spitting gravel. Then I see it is not so much a road as a long driveway. Land stretches in all directions but there is a barbed-wire fence. The fence with its leaning old wood posts serves only to accentuate the vast emptiness of the land. The fence slants in disarray and there is a rightness to this too. This is not a country that values uprightness. In the distance is an old-fashioned windmill. The kind you see from time to time on the plains or the desert, looking as if they have been left here by time in a place that doesn’t change from century to century. They stand in the windswept dust and turn for no one but they still turn.
“Where are we?” I ask.
“At Ned’s mother’s ranch,” says my mother, yawning.
“How did we find it?” I ask.
“We stopped in town about half an hour ago and got directions. You were asleep,” says Ned.
We pull up in front of a big falling-down house. All the paint has been chipped off the siding by the centuries. When you look at it you see the decades that have gone by. A woman rushes out onto the porch. She squints her eyes to see who it is and yells, “NED!”
Dorothy’s Invitation
The woman flings herself at the car and practically drags him out of it. This reminds me of my mother’s first meeting with Ned on the beach when she ran across the sand and flung herself on him. If you want people yelling your name and flinging themselves on you, all you have to do is disappear for years at a time. It doesn’t seem fair somehow. Shouldn’t they upbraid him a little first for his neglect?
“Hi, Mom,” says Ned. “Look at you. What are you doing here?” Ned, who has been hugging her, drops his arms and steps back. “Actually, I’m looking for John.”
“Well, lordy Maudey, what do you want with him?”
“I’ve got something that I believe belongs to him.”
“Money,” says Ned’s mother, sighing; then she turns abruptly and walks to the porch and starts up the steps. We follow her. “I can’t say I’m surprised. How do you think I got this ranch? John bought it. It rightly belongs to him. There’s more of his money in it than mine. Where he got the money, I don’t know.”
“You bought a ranch with John’s money?” says Ned.
His mother stops and turns around and gives him a level stare, which because she is one step higher than him brings them eye to eye. “Well, not entirely with his money. I did have some of my own. Your father, when he died, left me some. That was a surprise.”
“Dad died?”
“You haven’t exactly been in touch, have you?”
“Wow, Dad died,” says Ned, and sits down right there on the steps.
“Well, John doesn’t think so. He thinks that your father just decided to disappear on a more permanent basis. He thinks he’s in Alaska somewhere and didn’t want to leave a trail so he faked his own death.”
“Oh, come on!”
“Well, there wasn’t a body, Neddie. He left a suicide note saying he was going to drown himself in the Fraser River and even though they never found his body the police said they had no reason to doubt him so they probated his estate—is that the word I want?—and I got it all and so I wasn’t going to argue.”
“Oh jeez, why disappear? He was never in contact with anyone anyway.”
“ ’Cause that’s what people in this family like to do, Ned. Look at you. Look at John. It’s in the blood. Anyhow, John said there was some talk that your dad had a new girlfriend and they staged the disappearance for her sake or something. Said they’re off together in Alaska having a nice ripping old time of it. Hope they freeze their butts off.”
“Mom,” says Ned.
“So there are kids with you,” says Ned’s mom, looking down for the first time at the four of us. We all have sleep creases on our faces and the boys are wrapped in their blankets. She sighs again. “All right, come in, the lot of you. I’ll make breakfast. Take your shoes off outside.”
“Mom, what’s with the horses?” asks Ned.
“Like I said, Ned, you haven’t been in touch,” says his mother, and disappears inside.
We follow her into the house. In the kitchen we all stand around awkwardly while she goes to the fridge and gets out eggs and bacon. She puts an apron on and silently begins the production of food for seven people. “I don’t know, Neddie, I don’t know what to think about you showing up like this twenty-some years later. When I saw you last you were a boy. Now you look so old.”
“Gee, thanks, Mom,” says Ned.
“I’m Felicity,” says my mother. It’s been hard to know where to jump in through this whole conversation.
“Well, good for you,” says Ned’s mother. “I’m Dorothy.”
“I’m Ned’s wife,” says my mother.
“OH LORDY!” says Dorothy, and leaves the skillet where she has been turning bacon. Her apron is already scatter-shot with grease but she throws her arms around my mother anyway. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place? Forgive me, dear. I thought you were just another one of the boys’ women. Seems like they’re always bringing them around like lost animals. Last one John brought around wore sequins and I could see she was going to come to no good end. So all these children are yours and Neddie’s? So I’m a grandmother?”
“I had all these children already when Ned married me,” says my mother. “Of course, you can be their grandmother if you like.”
I notice that this doesn’t really answer the question of whether Ned has fathered any of us. But I suppose now would not be the time for my mother to start revealing bloodlines.
“Well, thank you, I believe I’ll take you up on that. Four instantaneous grandkids. And I don’t care what happens to you and Neddie. If you divorce. If you separate. If one of you gets yourself shot or jailed. Don’t matter. These grandkids are going to be mine forever. That’s that.” She claps her hands together for empha
sis.
Her zeal is a little frightening. We all take a step back but she doesn’t seem to notice.
“Now, this is worth celebrating. Never mind eggs, let’s have PANCAKES!”
“Yay!” says Hershel.
“Yay!” says Max.
“Want to see the Viking bone?” asks Hershel. I think the idea of celebrating with cake, even pancakes, reminds him of the first time Ned brought out the Viking bone. When we were having cupcakes on the beach in Massachusetts.
“Maybe later, dear,” says Ned’s mom. “Now, I want you all to call me Dorothy, okay? You can even call me Grandma Dorothy.”
“Nobody had children?” asks Ned.
“Not a one,” says Dorothy.
“Not even the girls?”
“Feh.” Dorothy spits in the direction of the sink. “I don’t know where things went wrong with this family but no one seems to have the slightest interest in procreating. Okay, boys, you can take turns stirring this batter. And you”— she points at me—“what did you say your name was?”
“Jane,” I say.
“Good name. Like a plain name. And the other one?” She points at Maya, who pulls her blanket closer so it is almost over her face.
“Maya,” I say.
“Yeah, you two reach up on those shelves and set the table. Now that we’re family we can all pitch in. Isn’t this cozy?”
My mother has already grabbed a spare apron off a nail by the stove and is turning bacon and scrambling eggs. Soon we have everything on the table, the enticing smells of fried foods and maple syrup enveloping the warm farm kitchen.
“Now,” says Dorothy when we all sit down. “What’s this about John?”
“Aterlay, Mom,” says Ned.
“That’s ‘later’ in Pig Latin,” says Maya to Dorothy.
“Abokabay,” says Dorothy.
Maya furrows her brow. “That’s not Pig Latin,” she says.
“It’s Abenglabish,” says Dorothy. “You put ‘ab’ at the beginning of the word and between syllables.”
Northward to the Moon Page 6
