“Maya, what is all this for?” he said. “It’s a fool’s errand.”
She shrugged and pulled again on the shawl, setting off a shudder of pain from her neck to her fingertips. “I thought . . .” she started, but trailed off.
“Let’s just hope nothing bad happens,” Alex said.
She needed a cup of coffee, an ibuprofen for her neck, a cigarette. “We need to find a campground,” she said.
“A campground?”
“I want to camp with my son. You said cold is coming: Better to do it sooner.”
“I don’t understand,” Alex said, spreading his arms.
“Your preference is to spend the night in a vehicle,” she said. “I also would like to not sleep in a bed.”
“Maya, I don’t want to sleep in a tent.”
“I didn’t want to sleep in a car, but you didn’t ask. You can rent a hotel room. Max and I will sleep in a tent.”
“What is it you expect to find out?” Alex raised his voice. “You think he’ll sit up in the middle of the night and confess to you the secret of his being? We had a tent in the backyard.”
She looked past Alex’s shoulder. If she spoke, she would say something that would scatter the last of the goodwill stored up in Chicago. The morning fog was dissipating, setting loose a golden light streaked with pink. The brown humps had turned blue. If she kinked her head—fresh stab of pain—they looked like the shoulders of a beheaded colossus, buried below the rib cage, and the stony wrinkles that ran up and down the rock were his strain at trying to lift himself from the earth. Dumpy clouds hopped above the shoulders like little white horses.
Why did the hills in the distance becalm her with their mute, maintaining consistency, but the same quality in her husband made her unhappy? Was the vision in the distance especially majestic, or was she especially impatient?
“Maya,” he called to her, a peacemaking note in his voice.
Her head was sideways in an inspection of hills. Once upon a time there was a woman who left her husband and married a mountain. The blue giant’s headless torso, inspired by her love, wrenched its fingers from the ground and pulled at a wick in her belly until it had unfurled her like a scarf and the ground was covered with the eiderdown of an unraveled Maya. Nine months later, the woman gave birth to a tree. There it grows in the shade of the blue giant’s shoulders, watered by snowmelt and the brine of her tears. What the freshwater enlivens, her saltwater destroys.
There. Not only her mother could tell stories. Her mother found fairy tales annoying, however: the ticking grandfather clock, the house on stilts, the talking wolf. Her stories of their Kiev neighbors were about real people suffering real lives. Why the gloom of a fairy tale when you could have the desperation next door? That was fine, Maya thought: Fairy tales would be the daughter’s department. She touched her temples. Being out of New Jersey was having a strange effect on her. Her imagination was working, but not the remainder of her. Belatedly, she looked up at her husband. She said she was fine.
They heard Max climbing out of the car. He stood shading his eyes against the light, which, having vanquished the fog, had turned severe. Alex walked to his wife and placed a hand on her shoulder to reassure his son that mama and papa were not fighting, but it looked as if he was either leaning on Maya or keeping her in place.
“Max, honey, we’re going to camp tonight,” Maya said excitedly and walked toward her son, letting Alex’s hand drop from her shoulder.
“I need to go number one,” Max said unhappily.
“Max, what do those hills look like? Sleeping rhinos or a brown headless giant?”
“I need to go number one,” Max insisted, knocking his knees. He was blinking furiously. She walked over and embraced him, inhaling the sleep in his hair. He stomped his feet impatiently. She took his hand and pulled him toward a stand of trees by the fence. “There isn’t a bathroom?” Max said, pulling away.
“Maya,” Alex called out in reproof.
“Honey, you’ll be fine,” Maya implored Max. “Don’t be fussy. There’s nowhere else to go. Just quick in the bushes.”
The pair of them took the decline down to the trees. What kind of trees? Trees. Maya pointed Max toward a thick trunk good for concealment and faced back toward the road. They all heard the burp and whoop of a police cruiser at the same time. As it pulled up behind the Escape, the siren went off but the lights continued to rotate and flash, menacing in their silence. Max turned back to his mother and now she shook her head. Maya felt Alex’s furious gaze and avoided it. She felt a sweat on her spine. She remained in place, as if any movement could be misinterpreted, and took Max’s hand.
The policeman took time climbing out. They watched him through the windshield of the cruiser, recording their license plate and murmuring into his radio as if they were fugitives. Maya had a panicked urge to laugh. Their first morning! She imagined the incredulous silence on the other end of the line when she called Eugene and Raisa from the local jail. Her neck ached incredibly. She remembered Max and rustled his hair. He stared at the police car inscrutably.
The policeman looked as if every grain of superfluity had been swept from him: His pale cheeks had been so closely shaved that they burned like mirrors in the cold sun. He covered the distance between his cruiser and the transgressors, Alex left in the margins, and greeted Maya, but her tongue had gone dry, so she only nodded.
“Your vehicle?” he said. “Welcome to South Dakota.”
“Will we be arrested?” Maya said.
“Arrested?” the cop said.
“It’s our first time,” Maya said in self-defense. “I’m sorry. We were driving all night—”
“They let you relieve yourself on the side of the road in New Jersey?”
He had a young man’s voice, and Maya realized she was probably older than him. She shook her head mournfully.
“We like our land urine-free, too,” he said. Alex, until now rooted in place, called out for permission to approach. The cop shrugged; it was a free country. Alex stepped carefully toward them.
“I’m sorry,” Maya croaked out. “It was a mistake. I’m very sorry.”
The cop watched her with curiosity. “I’m not going to arrest you,” he said, as if the trouble would be greater for him.
Maya was covered with gratitude, and felt on the verge of tears.
“But I will give you a ride to the diner,” he said. “It’s just up the road.”
“But there will be a ticket,” Maya said, wanting to offer up a lack of illusions.
“There will be a warning,” the cop said. “And a ride in my cruiser. Let’s go. Your husband can follow in your vehicle.”
Down the field, the white birds leaped and plunged. The birds dove for buried worms not only when the cows chewed the grass, but when they shat it out, the birds’ feathers turning oily and brown.
Alex watched with astonishment as Maya walked her son to the police cruiser. They climbed in behind a mesh-wire panel. The patrolman leaned out the front window and ordered Alex to follow. Alex nodded energetically and ran toward the Escape. The cop turned toward the backseat. “You all right?” he asked Maya. He looked at Max: “You ever been in a squad car?”
Max shook his head. He was taking in his surroundings like a cat—alert but unsure what to think of things.
“It’s going to be your first and last time. Unless you decide to sit where I’m sitting. We’ve got a deal?”
Max nodded. Adults were constantly striking deals with him.
A quarter mile up the road, the Badlands Diner sent gray plumes of wood-scented smoke out of a scuffed, dented chimney. The cruiser pulled up by the large windows, and Maya had the fresh experience of being watched by two dozen diners as she and her son idled in the backseat of a police cruiser.
The cop looked back at Max. “Keep your mother out of trouble,” he said. To Maya, he said: “Do you know where you’re going?”
Maya nodded feebly. “Thank you,” she managed.
&n
bsp; “Enjoy your stay,” he said.
“I don’t like New Jersey,” Maya blurted out in conciliation.
“I don’t blame you,” the cop said. “Though, to be fair, haven’t been myself.”
Maya nodded, as if accepting a reprimand, and opened the back door. The diners at the window stared. She climbed out, dragging Max behind her. “Thank you,” she said once again into the cavern of the car. The cop raised a finger to his temple. The last thing Maya saw before heading in was her husband’s glare from the wheel of the Escape, which he had parked sufficiently far from the cruiser to avoid obvious association with the woman getting out of it. He looked as if he wished the South Dakota law had addressed this case differently.
Inside the diner, a fireplace was roaring and the short-order bell was clacking over and over—Maya had expected, in the wilderness, soul-chilling, funereal quiet, but her morning clamored with bedlam. Every scalloped red banquette was taken. A clothesline strung with fans of pleated red-and-blue bunting wavered lightly above the seating. There must have been rooms upstairs because the ceiling heaved with footsteps and scurrying. Children? Animals? Children fleeing from animals? Maya almost learned the answer—some cataclysm befell the feeble flooring, sending a skein of white dust onto the hostess stand. Maya quickly swept it off with her hand.
A mincing son at her side, she was ignored by two waitresses, gliding around each other with the resentful familiarity of people who have spent long hours in the same kitchen. Maya instantly feared both of them. “Well, they’re salting everything at the tables, Charlie,” one of them said to the sweaty face peering out of the short-order window. Her hair was pinned up in a businesslike pile, as if in the morning she gave you pancakes and in the afternoon she loaned you at the bank. “My job is to tell you,” she said to the sweating face. “What you do with it, that’s your job.”
A man at the counter was watching Maya; the manager? Maya tried to avoid his eyes, which bored into her with a glinting amusement—she did not feel up to another correction. The stains of paint on his jeans and his wrists, and his shoulder-torn sweater, would have made her think he was poor—Maya thought everyone in the American West would be poor—but the sweater was thickly woven, and his knife and fork were poised above his eggs with a strange delicateness, as if he was shy to cut in. A book was open next to his plate.
“Sit down, if you’re looking to order,” he said to Maya. “They don’t know what to do with you if you’re standing.”
Maya colored, feeling the interloper’s familiar cluelessness. It, not Alex, was her true life’s companion. Just when she began to get free of the feeling, she mispronounced a word or failed to apprehend some invisible rule, and lived the next days like a guest, a cherry pit of self-reproach in her stomach. How was one to know these things? The hostess podium said: “Please wait to be seated.”
“My son just needs to go to the bathroom,” she said timidly. Because she was trying hard to pronounce the words without an accent, she sounded to herself like someone who’d arrived yesterday. But the man only smiled in that American way, at once vacuous and reassuring, out of grayish-green eyes. With the tip of his butter knife, he indicated an alcove at the end of the counter.
“You can just go?” Maya said. “It isn’t only for customers?” Now, Maya was intent on scrupulously observing laws both written and unwritten. She would be the Badlands Diner’s most desirable customer. She would cause no further provocation this morning.
He plucked an inverted cup from a long tray with two handles shaped like buffalo skulls and set it to the right of him. “There,” he said. “You’re a customer.”
Maya knelt before Max. “It’s just that way, honey.”
“Come with me,” Max whispered.
“I can’t go with you. Girls can’t go into the bathroom with boys.”
“You have to wait just one minute,” the man said. “The Furies are in there right now.”
The bathroom lock cracked open and two teenage girls tumbled out. Giggling, they made their way down the counter. It was plain that they were sisters from their heavy legs and soft, swimming cheekbones, but their laughter rang out differently—one hid it in her chin and the other, a year or two older, sang it out. They were Laurel’s age when she delivered her son, if not older. But they were children, just children. But Laurel, in her home, had felt like a woman. The laws for each person are different. Maya saw the girls’ father in the strict cut of their mouths, the eyes glowing gray-green and mossy like his. They were like the same words in two slightly different languages. On the father’s face she saw a reticent satisfaction. Seated, the older one tried to steal an egg from his plate. She got the yolk, which dripped all over the counter, setting off a fresh round of laughter. He tried to get a corner of her shirt to wipe it, and she yelled. The waitress with the bank haircut laid down a pile of napkins on the counter without looking at anyone and went into the main room with a coffeepot.
Maya watched with the helplessness of someone behind glass; she was watching others live out their lives, the rituals familiar but incomprehensible. Max squirmed, and, smiling weakly at the man, she led her son down the length of the counter. “I’m right here,” she said, kneeling in front of him. Max took the knob of the door, looked back at his mother resentfully, and disappeared inside.
She craved coffee. Her head felt attached to the rest of her only by the stem of pain that rose from its base. Of course she could have taken Max into the bathroom; she had abandoned her son for coffee. Not knowing where else to go, she sat at the counter, by the cup waiting for her. The man squinted at her. He had a pleasantly shaped face that headed toward but missed handsomeness. The long, narrow nose flared out slightly on one side; the lips were thin; and his skin showed age. But it missed well. The features added up to make a coarse but appealing American face. She liked its Americanness, a different kind of Americanness than what she was used to. The face studied her with a slight sneer—the upper lip was up slightly—or maybe it was amusement again. The inspection was not unfriendly, something forest-like to the eyes, lush and somnolent. Melancholy—or maybe Maya was hoping; she felt a monopoly on despair while the rest of the world celebrated. He was not young—Maya liked this as well, because she felt disheveled and old. Up close, his eyes were grayer than green, baleful not playful.
“They’re nice girls,” she said, and nodded toward them. They were staring at the screen of a cell phone.
She remembered she had not brushed her teeth. Was wearing yesterday’s clothes. Bedding down in the bucket seat of a Ford Escape had sprung half her ponytail loose, and several strands hung in front of her eyes. Her usual instincts were asleep. With frantic casualness, she tried to feed her hair back into the ponytail. And then she was out of steam even for this simple mission, her hair falling over her shoulders. Her fingers worked the unemployed hair band.
The man studied the short-order window. In her sleepiness, she was touched by the intensity with which he gazed at it—he was looking for something to say. Of course the waitresses would have found her at the podium—he had wanted her to sit at the counter.
Finally, he turned to Maya and said, “In this book”—he indicated it with the tip of his knife; the spine said 21st Century Parenting—“they talk about how when a ewe lambs, it’s mystified by what’s come out of it. It wants nothing to do with that baby mess. She’ll sniff the lamb and head butt it down in the straw. But after a time, they’re inseparable. If the lamb dies, the ewe won’t take another. You have to skin the dead guy and sit that new pelt on some unmothered lamb, and smear the pelt with the dead liver. And little by little, the mother will agree to be fooled.”
Maya laughed—loudly, lavishly. She understood nothing except the keenness with which the speaker had spoken. He was older—at his temples, his hair, which came high off his forehead before falling past his ears, was flecked with gray—but he was not the only one at the counter with gray hair. She was ready to forget this about herself as readily as her occa
sional accent. There was no end to the things that needed forgetting. She saw the look of dismay on his face and beseeched him with her hands.
“I’m sorry—I wasn’t laughing at what you said.”
“I’m just blurting away,” he said. “I’ve had too much coffee, and you none.”
“Is it that bad?” Maya said, touching her hair.
“No . . .” he started, and she also held up her hands—they stared at each other in an awkward silence, then both laughed lightly, then looked away, then looked back at each other, and finally, he drove a hand at her.
“Marion Hostetler,” he said. Again, she saw the beads of paint on his wrist. She wanted to scrape them off, like crumbs off a tablecloth. She took his hand. How quickly a trip revised what seemed normal; she was shaking another man’s hand in a diner. But this is what Americans did; they just started talking to each other, a nation with the oafish amiability of the slightly touched.
“I slept in the car,” Maya said, trying to explain her appearance. It made her sound homeless.
“I’ve got no excuse,” he said. “I go on sometimes. Isn’t that so, girls?”
“Daddy, we love you,” the older one said. When she wasn’t laughing, she had a deep, reasonable voice.
“Only since you and Mom split,” the younger one replied to her father. Maya wondered if she was hearing a reprimand. Or he was. Behind the soft lips of youth, sharp teeth.
“Which left you with a calico cat with one eye and limited opportunity to express your mind,” the older one said. “You don’t have an outlet.”
“Well, the university is certainly doing its job,” Marion said mournfully. “Alma and Celia,” he wagged his finger between the girls for Maya.
“That’s ‘soul’ in Spanish and German, the two sides of the family,” Alma, the younger one, said. She was still smiling, but Maya saw that she was worried about her father.
“Let’s flag you some coffee,” Marion Hostetler said.
Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo Page 21
