Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo

by Boris Fishman

  Rose was giving out information about the Badlands: It looked like hopeless rock, but two-thirds was actually grass prairie. Maya was gratified by the information: It answered her earlier question. “You could run a herd of cattle on here if you wanted,” Rose said. Maya pulsed Max’s hand. They were on a mile-long boardwalk that led from the visitor center to an overlook down on a hundred-mile ridge of striated stone that ran all the way into Nebraska. Nebraska! To Maya, the word was as exotic as Neptune, and yet Maya stood within sight of it. Actually faced, it seemed unfamiliar and ordinary all at once.

  Max looked up at Maya. “Grass, Max,” Maya said, and nodded encouragingly. But he gave no reaction.

  Rose was counting on her fingers, the thumbs male in their thickness: “Some of the last wildflowers you’ll see before we get this freeze in the next couple of days: prickly pear, prairie coneflower, needle and thread, sideoats grama . . .”

  After the dim glass cases of the visitor center, the wood-etched signage around the park, and the shit-brown bathroom stalls that followed their progress down the boardwalk, the names of the grasses were beautiful. Sideoats grama sounded like a Negro jazz act. Maya wanted to know who got to name them. Even though the seniors were regularly interrupting the lecture, calling out “Ranger Holliver?” with happy compliance, Maya was too shy to raise her hand. Max might know, she thought, but he was refusing to become involved.

  Rose was on to the animal life. Two small birds, black knobby heads and torsos like white eggs, were bouncing on the upper rail of the fence separating the visitors from the wilderness. “Little tuxedoes they’ve got on,” Rose said. The birds had a hot-turquoise cummerbund on each flank—nature’s bid for grace and surprise amid the universe’s black-and-white plodding. “Who can tell me who these little guys are?” Rose said. “Your prize is a refund on your tour ticket.” The retirees grumbled with laughter—the tour was free. Maya knelt in front of Max: “Max, honey, do you know what kind of bird that is?” Someone said butcher-bird. No, a flycatcher. “It’s just a magpie,” he whispered. Maya leaped to her feet. “We know!” she exclaimed. The retirees swiveled and gazed admiringly down on the young mother with the fair-haired boy. “Now this apple did fall far from the tree,” a tall man with watery eyes said. Chuckles murmured through the group. “I’d give a dollar to be your age, young naturalist. The bottom dollar.”

  Maya, stung by the first comment, was placated by the second. “Tell them, honey,” Maya said, looking down at Max. But her son stepped a half foot behind her and dropped her hand. Rose and the retirees waited. “Max,” Maya hissed. “Magpie.” He turned and faced away from the group. Maya colored. She looked back at the seniors and swallowed. “We’re shy today,” she said apologetically, wondering if her accent was coming through. What had seemed unimpeachable emerging from Max’s mouth felt like an embarrassing guess from her own. “Magpie?”

  “You got it,” Rose said. The gallery went up in cheers. “Sometimes the simple answer’s the right one, folks, that was the lesson on that one,” Rose said, and the retirees banged their walking sticks on the boardwalk in agreement as they touched off again, play in the boards after a summer’s use.

  Maya knelt again and took Max by the shoulders. “Max, what’s going on? Are you warm? Cold?” She touched his forehead.

  “Where’s Papa?” he said.

  “Papa’s with the map. Do you want to go back? I can try to get him on the cell phone.”

  “When we go on vacation, we go to the beach. This isn’t vacation.”

  “When your dad and grandma and grandpa go on vacation, you go to the beach,” Maya said. “I like different places to go on vacation. When you grow up, you can choose your own. Don’t you like it?” She motioned toward the outcroppings of striped sandstone before them, now looking like a horse’s head, now a marzipan cookie, now a hand clasping a cane. How rapidly the otherworldly magnificence of the sight ceased to seem otherworldly. But it remained magnificent. Maya wondered how such a barren, howling emptiness could fail to fill a watcher with fright; she felt light-headed, though not exactly with fright. Not barren, either—Rose Holliver’s mission was to make the group understand that the stony hills teemed with life. You just had to know how to see. Maya marveled at the rookie pleasure she’d taken in the nondescript elevation they’d seen in the morning, an immigrant marveling at the bounty of the corner grocery when the supermarket awaited. She thought to make a game of divining the shapes of the buttes, but her son did not look interested.

  “Do you want to stop?” she said.

  He shrugged.

  “Just give it a chance,” Maya said. “For me.”

  They banged the planks in pursuit of the seniors. Maya told herself to calm down. She heard Alex—she was frantic, and doing her best to make sure her son was, too. In the harsh clarity of the surroundings, she saw herself harshly and clearly: She spent her days waiting for ill news of her son, and had now set to demanding it. Her fright was so pervasive that it was no longer exceptional; its absence was exceptional. But she had not felt its absence since the day he ran off to the creek. Was she turning into a hypochondriac like a good Rubin? They lived in expectation of danger and setback, even walked accordingly, a slight stoop in deference to the axe that would swing. She hated herself for always trying to hold the Rubins responsible.

  After Max had vanished in June, Maya gave twenty nights to racking dreams involving a gang of small, malevolent boys peering into the glass on either side of the front door of the house—urinating on the doorframe, banging on the glass, sticking their tongues out, though never attempting to enter. Sometimes, in the dream, she confronted them—so large was her fury that once she leaped from the second story down to the foyer, a drop of ten feet. This scattered them from the window, but her sleep remained fitful. When it worked, she dreamed of the boys. The only way to stop the dream was to wake up, but then she was up at three thirty, four, a wreck at the hospital, misplacing plates and X-raying the wrong breast.

  She wanted to stop fearing. Did that mean that she had wanted the trip for herself, as Alex had said? No, she had wanted to give Max the gift of native feeling, for Maya was on intimate terms with its absence, knew its constant sensation of slight poisoning, of living in error. It was sprung on Maya right at Soviet customs. “Anything to declare, little sister?” a barbarous face in a uniform sneered at her. Only carefree thoughts and a sense of belonging.

  So what if the larger box of this gift to Max contained, like a nesting doll, the smaller box of a gift for herself? Some gift: She would feel twice as odd in Montana as she did in New Jersey, all so her boy, so ill at ease in New Jersey, might feel at home. She was increasing their alienation from one unit apiece to two for Maya and zero for Max. So that when Rose Holliver asked what kind of bird that was, Maya expected, as if she was dealing with a mechanical spring rather than a boy’s brain, that Max, bright with an unfamiliar ease, would answer. How simple she was; how hopelessly rigid her thinking. On a switch, he would become new? She really thought so—and it was her husband who had to correct her, in the grass earlier that morning. How much patience, after all, Alex had for her. She despised herself—in addition to fear, she lived according to a constant diminution of wits.

  Maya stared off at the magpies, black specks wheeling against the sandstone, a burning gold shading to bone-white in the glare of the sun. In her years at university, Maya could not pass a bird without demanding its name from the person next to her. This bird, that type of arch, those curlicues on the railing. She wanted to know the proper names for things; the prospect of filling these vacancies was ravenously satisfying. Anton the metalhead, Jeremiah the black Buddhist, her exotically named roommates Soraya and then Philomene and then Soraya again—had laughed at their peculiar lover and friend. They did not know what those things were called, and they did not care.

  Maya watched the shaking backsides of the seniors before her. They knew what things were called. Even if they had gotten this one answer wrong, they
knew. The only thing they did not know was what it was like not to know.

  +

  It was in the campground’s sclerotic showers, tauntingly situated within sight of the Ridgeline Motel, which, undoubtedly, offered doors on its showers, that Maya felt the full measure of that singular despair reserved for travelers and travelers alone. It is the despair of losing home and all that is familiar, a despair whose known temporariness allays none of the feeling. The bed, with its uncustomary sighs and creaks, is as welcoming as a cold hand in the gloom, no matter how tiring the journey; the view, even if of spellbinding peaks, is an affront; the smells of the street are the smells of people who make themselves at home in a different way. The whole world is a language the traveler does not speak. The soul, blind to reason, is bereaved. The soul—the part of the self where one is most honest, as Maya Rubin explained to her son—is bereaved; the life that’s been taken from it is its own. By undertaking the trip, the soul has engaged in a lie, and, therefore, for the trip’s duration, died off.

  All this is doubly so for the immigrant, who does not realize the tenuousness of his hold on the originally adopted home until he has cavalierly relinquished it in the service of . . . what? Scrubbing herself with an animal’s urgency under a lukewarm trickle from a showerhead speckled with rust, Maya was forced to ask herself the question Alex had been asking, if only she would listen: Why were they here? Rather, why here, in this awful dusty campground rimmed by signs about rattlesnakes? She tried to persuade herself that this was simply that American obsession with indemnification; who would build a campground in a spot beloved by rattlesnakes?

  Maya was frantic for pleasure. She turned toward the wall, ran her fingers toward her crotch, and rubbed with desperation, the water cascading off her shoulders and sluicing between her breasts. Despite the avidness with which she worked, her orgasm was as far away as New Jersey. She tried to think of Alex, but it didn’t work.

  She thought of the man from the diner, Marion. Maya, the weaver of fairy tales, altered the morning’s events: Outside they had decided that they wanted takeout breakfast; Maya returned to the diner, placed the order, decided she needed the bathroom herself. Marion said he would show her where, she said she knew, but he slipped off his stool and followed her anyway. Their eyes locked in a strange way. He followed her inside. The bathroom was cramped—eating places always saved money on bathrooms.

  “What now?” she said.

  “You have to go to the bathroom,” he said, nodding at the toilet.

  She hiked up her sundress, the one with the mother-of-pearl buttons running down the front, pulled her underwear down to her ankles, and lowered herself onto the seat. Maya’s heart was beating fast in the shower, and also on the toilet seat, so it took her some time. When a stream finally hit the toilet water, Marion leaned down and kissed her mouth as one of his hands reached underneath her. The yellow water hit his fingers; he held them there. As it slowed to a trickle, he closed his hand over her and held her this way while they kissed.

  Then he lifted her by the arms, turned her around, and led her palms to the rough paint of the wall. He kissed the back of her neck and undid the front buttons from behind her back, his fingers still wet. She took one hand off the wall and fished for him, but he knocked it back. Soon the dress was unbuttoned and on the floor around her feet. She felt him sliding inside from behind. She was tight and he moved slowly, opening her, until she felt him fully inside of her—she felt his waist pressed to her ass. She scratched the wall with her nails. She asked to look at him.

  He ignored her at first but then turned her to face him and lifted her slightly until she was wedged in the tiny alcove that had been hacked for the sink. It had been hacked for her—her torso fit with an inch on each side. She held the faucets for support. Kiss me, she said, and this time he listened. Her hands moved to his face. He entered and withdrew slowly as they kissed, the sharpness of the initial encounter changed into something gentler and pensive.

  It was then, near the moment of crisis, that an ominous clang went through the shower pipes imprisoned behind the wall and the trickle turned arctic, eliciting a yelp from Maya and forcing her to finish sooner than she wanted. She shuddered once and stepped out. In the parcel of space the cursed architect had sectioned off for a dressing room, two women were silently toweling themselves. She inspected them for detection, or solidarity, or both. They offered neither. They rubbed their tired, bloated bodies with inanimate rhythm, exercised by a million showers, tilting their hips, arching their asses, kinking their shoulders, lost in private illusion. They could not offer Maya even the camaraderie of fellow shipwrecks. But Maya had the wealth of her secret, still sending warmth down her legs, which trembled slightly. It helped where the temperature of the shower had not.

  The South Dakota climate had changed its mind once again. In the blue-colored dusk rising from beyond the motel, the temperature was falling. Maya, her hair wet and the cold of the water still on her, shivered back to their campsite. Despite being outside rather than inside in such weather, her hair incautiously wet (Raisa, if present, would be moaning in terror), and the impending sleep on hard ground, she tried to remember the elation she had occasionally felt during the day. Alex and Max were mincing uneasily by the tent.

  “It’s freezing,” Maya said quickly. “Let’s get inside there.”

  “Max seems to think there’s a rattlesnake in the tent,” Alex said.

  “A what?” Maya said, stepping back. “Max, honey. What? You saw a rattlesnake?”

  “Not exactly,” Alex said. “We left the tent flap unzipped when we all went to shower. He’s saying—he’s convinced—well, he’s right here. What took you so long, Maya?”

  “A snake went in there while we showered,” Max declared. He stared at the tent with—not fright, but a kind of chagrin.

  Maya exchanged glances with Alex, ignoring his question. “Have you looked inside?” she said. Alex shook his head. Maya’s heart was jumping, but she tried to conceal it. “We have to go to the office,” she said. “I’m sure they deal with this all the time.”

  “I’m afraid,” Max said.

  “But you’re not afraid,” Maya said, and crouched before her son in her bathrobe. She took him by the shoulders. “Right? You’re not afraid?” The boy wriggled out of her hold and encircled his father’s leg with his hands.

  “Alex?” Maya said.

  “You want me to look in there?” he said.

  Maya slumped onto the bench of the picnic table; they were nailed to each other. “First-time visitors to Badlands National Park frozen in the night while rattlesnake sleeps, warm, in their tent. The trip had been the mother’s idea.” She thought of what Raisa—better yet, the outdoorsman Eugene—would say about how quickly they had arrived at an emergency. She felt as if she had wished the rattlesnake into existence by thinking of it in the shower; in her mind, she heard Alex saying to their son, “Mama won’t rest until everything’s upside down.” She wrapped her robe more closely and stared, despondent, at Alex and Max.

  To her the light had been clarifying, to them barbarous. The sweep of the land was menacing to them, imperial to her. The abrupt departure of the morning’s cold had felt to Maya like the thaw of a steam bath in winter, to Alex and Max like a diabolical snap from freezing to burning. Even now, as a rattlesnake slithered across the floor of their tent, the indigo night settled on her with an aching crispness. It was beautiful here—epically, rinsingly beautiful. Her humpbacked hills (in the end, she preferred their modest spread even to the glorious sightings of the afternoon), squatted somewhere in the darkness, awaiting reunion with her at daylight. Maya breathed the wood smoke of campfires, the campsite’s inhabitants like a caravan of pilgrims bedding down for the night. Could something felt so cleanly and deeply be felt incorrectly? She felt far not only from her husband, but son.

  Alex went to call his parents; Maya went to the office. She reached a hand out for Max. He watched her warily. “You can come with, or you can w
ait for me here,” she said without energy. “I’ll be back with Mr. Wilfred. He’ll fix it.”

  Max gave her his hand. Silently, they walked up to the shed. They heard the shouting inside before they walked in. Maya stood outside on the small deck with her son, wanting to give Wilfred privacy. But then she grew cold and pushed open the door; she could hear every word anyway.

  He was pacing the small slot behind the reception counter. He stepped like a top-heavy animal—his shoulders shook with each step. She wanted to embrace him. He stopped striding and gazed at the mother and son from the morning. “I have to go, Carla,” he said, his shoulders sagging. “There’s customers.” A strangled squawk came through the phone. Wilfred’s eyes flashed and he shouted “Up yours!” before slamming down the telephone. He withdrew it and slammed it again. He withdrew it a second time and was about to shout into the receiver once more—then remembered the line was dead. He lowered the phone weakly.