We were on an ominous desert sideroad after dark, without a single distant lightbulb in sight, when I shrieked. I felt a sudden hot pain on the skin of my ankle—a sharp, scalding stab—and instantly, because we were out west, presumed I'd been bitten by a rattlesnake that had somehow taken up residence in our car. "What?" my mother screamed, flinging an arm over my chest as the Fairlane swerved across the road throwing sideways bursts of gravel. "Snake!" I screamed back, which only increased the swerving; it felt like we were spinning 360s down the road. I skittered up onto the seat and grabbed my stinging ankle which to my befuddled surprise I found wet and hot, as if I'd been attacked by ... soup. "I'm covered in poison!" I announced, holding up my dripping hand, and as my mother said Wait wait and braked the car there was a tremendous explosion from under the hood followed by billows of steam or smoke (we weren't sure which) that came rolling across the windshield. The car spluttered and startled and I was thrown forward onto the floorboards where a blistering liquid rained all over me. When the car came to a standstill at the roadside we leapt out of it in tandem and ran panicked circles around it, in opposite directions, meeting at the front of the car where my mother gathered me into her arms to examine my wound and to issue a cc'd prayer to Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. "Oh, Benjamin, no," she said, which convinced me I was a goner even though the pain was dissipating. "I don't see any bite," my mother said, and brought a wet fingertip to her nose to smell it. She frowned. "I think it's car stuff."
"What kind of car stuff?"
"I don't know. Not gasoline. It smells..."
"Like what?"
"Like pee-pee—a little bit. Though sweeter..."
"The car peed on me?" I asked.
"Tinkled," she said. "We say 'tinkled.'"
Together, we turned our gaze to the Ford Fairlane. Steam was cascading from beneath the hood, and typhoons of it, smelling weirdly like corn syrup, were engulfing us. My mother stood up and gingerly approached the hood, ready to leap backwards, the way a pup appraises some unfamiliar thing that may or may not be alive and befanged. Meanwhile I walked beyond the rear of the car to assess our location. We were on the side of a two-lane road smack dab in the parched New Mexican nowhere. One of those "blue highways" Americans have taken to romanticizing now that our cars don't break down every four hundred miles. There were no road signs, and not a single car or truck had passed us or was showing distant, glimmering hints of approaching. The silence was downright stunning, if you got far enough away from the engine's hissing demise. No light, no sound, no humidity: the absence of everything. I remember thinking this must be what space was like—the night sky was breathtakingly overfreckled with stars—or the aftermath of Armageddon. Or the Faraway, I thought.
"Your damn father," my mother was muttering when I returned. "He spends all damn day tinkering with foreign cars but doesn't take care of his own cars, excuse my language. But isn't that just like him. Well, I guess he gets the last laugh."
"You said he doesn't laugh."
"It's a figure of speech, Benjamin," she said. "Now what do we do?"
I went to fetch the roadmap but it was soaking in a pool of antifreeze, the source of my scalding. I remembered that the map had cautioned drivers navigating the desert to always carry water in case of emergencies but we'd neglected that advice. For the first time I noticed how cold it was, which surprised me—I'd thought the desert would be hotter than New Orleans. Shivers overwhelmed me.
"I think we should lift the hood," I told my mother.
"You do it," she said.
A hot blast of steam clobbered me, not unpleasantly, as I unlatched and raised the car's hood. We stood for a while watching the roiling steamclouds and listening to the stalled engine rattle and ping until my mother suggested we climb back into the car to stay warm. "You should turn off the lights," I said. "That runs the battery down."
"So you're a mechanic now?" she snapped back. "Did your father teach you that?"
"Everyone knows that."
"Don't you 'everyone' me, Benjamin," she said.
"Well, it's true."
"I suppose you want to grow up to fix cars, is that right?"
"I don't know."
"Maybe you should have stayed back with your father then. The two of you could be greasemonkeys together. Just imagine! You could tinker with jalopies and never wash your hands and fall asleep in front of the damn television set, excuse my language, and eat those miserable pirogues every night for dinner. There's a life."
"Pierogies," I said. "Pirogues are boats."
"I know what a pirogue is! I misspoke! And you have some nerve correcting me, young man. Honestly. Pirogues, pierogies. Your father wouldn't know the difference so long as he had ketchup." She lit a cigarette, smoking it with the ravenous inhalations of a junkie. "Oh for God's sake look where we are. Blast your father anyway."
When a car passed, without stopping or even slowing, my mother said, "There went our chance. There it went. Our last chance."
"I'm cold," I said.
This frail admission seemed to calm or steady her—to pluck some maternal string within her, however untuned. Gently, she said, "I know, honey. I'm cold too. It's our New Orleans blood. We weren't designed for this." She reached over and ran a hand through my hair. "Everything will be okay, I promise."
Roughly a half-hour later the interior of the car filled with a dazzle of white light; a pickup truck had pulled in behind us. We listened to the sputtery growl of its engine, filtered through an injured muffler, and the creak-clank of its doors closing, with our eyes fixed on the car's side-view mirrors for a glimpse of our rescuers. We each had a view: There were two men, approaching our car on both sides. The man on my side was young, somewhere in his twenties, and wearing a straw cowboy hat, bluejeans, and a woolen vest festooned with stripes of blue, purple, and black. The moment his face appeared in the window I could see he was an Indian or what are nowadays called Native Americans—glossy black braids dangled at the sides of his coppery face. When our eyes met he grinned, displaying wet purple gums where his two front teeth ought to have been, and with a knuckle he rapped on the glass.
"Oh my God!" my mother screamed. "Indians! Lock the doors, Benjamin, lock them now!"
I looked at the man on the other side of my window. "Need help?" he mouthed.
"For the love of dear almighty God I will not be scalped," my mother was saying.
"I think they want to help us," I said.
"They want our scalps, Benjamin! They're going to rip our foreheads off!"
The man outside my window—sweetly frowning, hands on his knees—appeared very puzzled. He stood up, looking at his companion across the roof of our car, and shrugged. I raised my index finger to him, to say please wait. He frowned and shrugged again but didn't walk away.
"They want to help us," I told my mother.
Miss Willa's hands were on the steering wheel, tight like a race-car driver's, and I could see her chest heaving. She seemed on the verge of vomiting but in an instant I saw that it was sobs coming, not vomit. Her grip on the wheel tightened even more as tears ran down her face. Her head bobbed up and down as if the tears were too heavy for her neck to support. A croaking sound echoed up from her lungs.
"They aim to kill us," she sputtered. "I saw it in a movie. Oh, Benjamin, what have I done?"
"No, Mother," I said. "Our car needs fixing. I think they want to help."
"Why?" she screamed, and then screamed it again, and then again, banging the steering wheel with the flat of her hands so violently I felt sure the wheel would snap off. "Why does this happen to me? Why can't it ever be the way it should be? Tell me that, why?" In a frenzy she searched the car for something else to hit and for a moment I feared she would slap me. Instead she punched the window with the side of her fist, six or seven times, and each time with an escalating shriek; I saw the Indian on her side jump back.
"Tell them to kill me," she said. "Do it."
"They're not going to kill you."
&nbs
p; "What do you know?" She was hissing at me. "You don't know anything. Do you have any idea what it's like to be an animal in a cage? Why in God's name do I even try anymore? You tell me that, Mr. Know-Everything. Tell me! All I wanted was to give you a better life. You! You've ruined me, you and your father. Y'all have sucked the life right out of me. I can't even sleep at night. What's the point of dreaming? There is no point with you two. It's cruel, is all it is. All I wanted was to give you a horse. A stupid damn horse. That's why we're here, Benjamin," she said, and at this she started sobbing again, barely able to make the words, "for your stupid damn horse."
"I don't want a horse anymore," I said. My voice was cracking. "I'm hungry. I just want a cheeseburger."
Maybe it was the word cheeseburger that did it: How truly dire can your situation be if the word cheeseburger is involved? For what felt like a long time she wept, with her eyes clamped shut, and then she wiped her eyes and inhaled deeply to compose herself and wiped her hands on the pleats of her dress. When she said it was okay I got out of the car and spoke to the Indians who didn't ask about the woman sitting alone inside. Was I thus aware, at that single-digit age, of just how to fetch my mother from her mental Faraway? Did I know, consciously, that appealing to whatever splinter of maternal dutifulness was embedded within her—by lamenting that I was cold, or hungry, or hurt—would sometimes reel her back in? Children are instinctual creatures, wholly capable of strategy. I must have looked pathetic there, a skinny-legged child all but swallowed by the dark passenger seat, begging his mother to put aside her wild, discordant visions—the purple fantasies of idyllic independence and artistic freedom and sexual license clashing with her provincial fears of the unknown, with her numskulled nightmares of cinematic savages carving off her forehead—so that he could fill his small belly with a cheeseburger. Acting pitiable was a tack that would serve me well with my mother, as a child, but decidedly not so well with others, as an adult. I remember when Stella smashed me with that glass: I merely sat there, dazed but not entirely so, letting the blood pour down my cheeks and onto my shirt, contorting my face in the noble way of the punchdrunk & bloodsmeared Rocky Balboa when Mickey was begging him, in the ring-corner, to let him stop the fight, and invoking, furthermore, that most poignant detail: that Stella had hit me with our only water glass. As if my sole concern was for our domestic infrastructure—my eyesight be damned. I didn't curse and run to the mirror to flush my wound and pick the shards from my eye. I didn't push her away. I just sat there passively, using the gush of blood to appeal to her sense of pity, which was not so dissimilar to the pose I adopted in my "confessional" poems: that of a child, wounded and confused by life's fangs, pleading for a cheeseburger when all I really wanted was to scream Stop stop I want out.
We rode back to town in the Indians' truck. The driver had a kind, jowly face and his round belly was capped with a silver belt buckle the size of a 45-rpm record. The other Indian, the one whose face had appeared in my window, was his nephew, and he was drunk. His eyes resembled the famously red poppies that O'Keeffe was so fond of painting. The uncle had looked at our engine, while my mother sat in the car, and said a lot of automotive gobbledygook that even today I would probably have a difficult time following, though I vaguely remember his diagnosis: a hole in the radiator, a torn-up belt, some grim et ceteras. I asked him if he could fix it and he said no but told me he had a cousin who could—farther down the road, in town. He'd tow it in the morning. There was a "nice motel" in town too; the uncle pointed to his truck and said for us to load up. My mother never said a word to them; every now and then, on the ride to town, a little sob would escape from her and she would cover her mouth as if she'd burped. A preacher on the radio filled the silence for us with the story of a man who lost a finger to a grain thresher but whose prayers caused a new finger to grow from the nub of the old one. When the radio preacher shouted Hallelujah the Indians repeated it, even the drunk nephew who blazed through four cans of Coors on the way to town while staring out the black window.
They dropped us off at a motel with an unpaved parking lot and told us where we could find our car the next day. In a more humid and genteel version of her New Orleans accent, my mother called them "saints" and "Samaritans" and pressed into the uncle's hand a dollar bill, which was examined and accepted without comment. I felt I should follow them and say something more, but didn't. My mother's hand was planted on my shoulder while she blithely waved goodbye with her other hand.
I never got my cheeseburger though to be honest I was never that hungry. My mother went into the room, which smelled of antique cooking grease, and resumed weeping while I sat in an aluminum chair outside the door, bundled in a thin wool blanket, minding the activity at the town's single intersection. Those semis sounded like thunder. After a while I went to the front desk and asked the old woman there how to make a long-distance call and she guided me through the protocol of calling collect. It was two A.M. in New Orleans but my father answered on the first ring.
We celebrated my birthday at a diner across the highway from the motel. My mother was in no mood to sing—she didn't have enough money to pay for the motel plus the car repair and was stricken with worry; she didn't know my father was on his way—but the fat waitress and a coffee-slurping trucker beside me serenaded the delivery of a bowl of ice cream in which a forest of ten candles had been planted. "You're a man now," the trucker said to me. "A big ol' man." He pulled a quarter from my ear and let me keep it and also gave me an American Legion baseball cap way too big for my head. My mother made me ask for his address so I could write him a thank-you note. The trucker laughed and said the diner was as close to home as anywhere and the fat waitress confirmed that with a caustic chuckle as she refilled his coffee mug. To me it seemed like a condition to admire.
My father arrived early the next morning—it was still dark. When we opened the door he was standing there holding a present for me, wrapped in the Times-Picayune's Sunday comics pages, a handsome toy horse with moveable legs. At first my mother was angry and accused him of hunting her down like a lost dog. They fought and she locked herself in the bathroom while my father sat on the edge of the bed with his head in his hands. She softened when he paid the motel bill and got the Fairlane out of hock at the repair shop. The plan was for us to follow him back to New Orleans. Outside the diner, after breakfast, my father sat in the Fairlane and revved its engine to assess its durability for the long drive home. "Okay, okay," he kept saying. We stood together beside the car door, my mother & I, me holding my toy horse and her stroking my hair. The air was dusty and filled with the screech-hiss sound of truck brakes and drifting gray puffs of diesel exhaust. The mesas to the west looked nothing like O'Keeffe's landscapes: They were muted and dunnish, bleached by the high late-morning sun, all traces of life burned from their flanks save for a stubble of metallic-looking plantlife. It was what I imagined the world would look like in the aftermath of nuclear war: the tops blown off the mountains, the land stripped of color, the air tinged with a toxic haze. Yet the evocation didn't frighten me. Let the world melt in flames, let it rip my forehead off. Let anything come. "It's good," my father said of the car. "If this needle start to go high, you pull over."
I remember my mother's smile: a half-smile, really, but affectionate, in her way. We'd been through this before: those two times to Florida, when I was too young to remember it all, and that time in Atlanta when my mother's cousin Sylvia placed the call to my father while her husband secretly disabled our car (I learned later) by stealing the distributor cap. She would flee, and my father would inevitably fetch her home. Maybe that was always the point: marriage as an awful game of hide-and-go-seek. Maybe my mother never expected, or even intended, to actually escape. After all she was terrible about not finishing her paintings and her suicide attempts were almost always dramatic half-measures. Standing beside the car in that hot cloud of road dust and tailpipe vapors, her hair tossed by the wind, she smiled at my father and said to him, "I don't know why you alw
ays do this."
"I did not know," he replied, with neither tenderness nor bitterness, "that I had choice."
***
Two A.M. at O'Hare. The airport resembles refugee camps I've seen on the evening news except for the more upscale luggage and the Starbucks cups strewn willy-nilly amongst the refugees. People are even curled up atop cardboard boxes. Cardboard boxes! Where did they find appliance-sized boxes in an airport? This world never fails to withhold its juicier secrets from me. An hour or so ago they issued a stern last-call for cots which were being distributed at Gate K2. Oh screw it, I figured: The Munchkin deserves cushioning, not me. Let the children sleep while this old coot goes spelunking back through his life, swinging this lamp in a dumb search for truth. So I've staked out a place up here by the ticket counters where it's not quite so crowded and where there's easy access to the nifty sidewalk smoking lounge. I found a seat with a broken chair arm and though I tried to snap the arm off, to widen the seat for the relief of my aggrieved spine, it wouldn't budge. Boy howdy this place is well-armed against comfort.
I should note that your giant neon logo, with its nuzzling A's and that art deco eagle betwixt them, currently looms above me, showering me with a buzzy blue light. How acidly appropriate (to crib the aa-alliteration). And now that I think about it, how ironic too: AA. If you ever ditch the sign for a newer one, I know a rehab clinic that would love it. That jumbo sign hanging in the "group room" would make for the flashiest AA meetings ever.
Dear American Airlines Page 12
