by Sarah Bird
I thought about Didi. But it wasn’t to worry if she’d gotten home okay. All I thought about was what she would do in my place. How would she intrigue and entrance him? I ran up and took his arm. Then I pretended that I was the one who wanted to run ahead, that he was the one who had to keep up, and I tugged him to speed up his pace. “You’ve got to see this!” I hurried us past the Town House Restaurant and the tiny diner across the street where the Toddle House had been.
At the next cross street, I stopped, held my arm out toward the crumbling building ahead of us, and announced, “The Aztec Motel.” The Aztec was Didi’s favorite spot on her favorite stretch of Route 66. The old motel tried for a Pueblo style with flat roofs on the rows of one-room units and a ladder on top of the first-floor roof of the two-story office. But the structures were just the armature for the baffling, schizophrenic jumble of junk that the owners had felt inspired to scatter about the premises. Didi had taken me on the “Aztec Motel pilgrimage” many times. She especially loved what she called the Gin Garden, a collection of old green liquor bottles planted around discarded tires.
I hurried ahead like a kid eager to be the first on the playground, like Didi every single time she’d ever dragged me to the Aztec.
“I like to start back here at the Gin Garden,” I said, channeling Didi’s enthusiasm and affection for the kitsch that had always seemed much more trash than treasure to me. Arrayed along the base of the stucco wall at the back of the motel were dozens, hundreds, of old tires, each one holding a bouquet of fake flowers and empty, green liquor bottles.
“Next, we move on to the Aztec Motel Zoo.” I led him around to the other side of the wall where dozens of teddy bears peered down from an ancient cottonwood. Other trees held collections of other stuffed species. I left him staring up at hundreds of small, furry faces.
“Check this out,” I called from the side of the motel. The pink stucco was covered with talavera tiles in blue and white, an odd assortment of oil paintings, a gold velvet headboard, and doors. Not doors leading into rooms, just doors. Old brown doors covered in zigzagging patterns of tile and staked to the side of the motel. An actual garden with rosebushes and irises guarded by Saint Francis also hosted a melted fountain that cradled a plastic Minnie Mouse and a child’s wading pool filled with old gazing balls and more green bottles.
“This is where the really great stuff is,” I said. “The full-on schizophrenia.” That was what Didi called it. I raced off and gestured for him to join me beneath a yellow steel overhang that shaded the front of the motel office. Lined up on the overhang were dozens of Tonka trucks. Beside them a white ceramic kitty with a pink tongue peered down. The wall beside the overhang was covered with ads for Indian-brand motorcycles going back to 1914. Pottery, vases, statues, figures of the Buddha, many Madonnas, Saints Joseph and Francis, all three wise men, a Christmas wreath, scenes from a Mexican village in tile, a small windmill, Daffy Duck, Sylvester, they were all up there, all presided over by a mannequin in a blue dress.
“I call her the Virgin of Route Sixty-six,” I said, repeating Didi’s name for the mannequin.
He stared at the incomprehensible jumble. “This is great. This is so great! I’ve driven by this place hundreds of times and never really noticed how incredible it is. I love it. I love the kind of total insanity that makes a person do all this. Not caring that the sun is gonna beat hell out of the oil paintings and street trash is gonna walk off with half the shit and most people are gonna walk by and think you’re psychotic. I love it. I love that you love it. This”—he whirled around, his arm out to take in the entire mess—“this makes me understand why you get flamenco.”
A light of such pure happiness flooded me, I worried I would start glowing. I had shown him the right thing. It didn’t matter that it was Didi’s thing. It only mattered that it was right.
“This place is so flamenco. If you understand it, you understand flamenco.”
I nodded even though I had no idea on earth what the connection was between a garden of gin bottles and flamenco.
“I love that whoever created all this knows that they’re never going to get rich or famous. They’re not going to get anything. They’re doing it because they have to. Just like—” He held his hands out and mimed a strum that flared all the fingers of his right hand, then ended in a gesture that threw away all the beauty he had just created.
I didn’t want him to even pretend to throw it away. I snatched it back. “Your playing is unbelievable.”
“In the world I come from ‘unbelievable’ is barely good enough.”
“The ‘world you come from’?”
He draped his hands over my shoulders and studied my face. “Are you sure you want to know about the world I come from?”
“I do,” I said and it was true. The truest words I’d ever spoken. My tone was too solemn, though, like a bride answering the question, “Do you take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband.”
“Yo también,” he said. “I do too.”
I didn’t know what he meant, what it was about his world he wanted to know, but I fastened powerfully on the absence, the hole that I could fill. Details. This is what I was good at. This is what I could offer him. Whatever it took, I would find and bring that knowledge to him.
“Yo también,” he repeated, his mouth so close to mine that I felt the words on my lips. Again, I was certain he was going to kiss me, but he spun away abruptly.
“Come on. It’s my turn now to show you something.” He led me down a street, away from the flashing neon along Central Avenue. There were no lights on anywhere in the quiet neighborhood. All the houses were dark. It was only then that I realized how late it was. That the rest of the world was asleep. I should have wondered about Didi then, if she was safe at home. But I didn’t. My mind was completely filled with following this stranger wherever he led.
“Look?” He stopped and tilted his face up. The full moon, which had been dazzling silver, was darkening to a color that reminded me of a blood orange.
“A lunar eclipse,” I whispered as the moon vanished entirely and the street fell into total darkness. We had met on the night of a lunar eclipse.
He grabbed my hand and tugged me along. “Come on. The stars will really be amazing now.”
We emerged on Lomas Boulevard where streetlights cast a dim glow onto the deserted road. When we passed Our Lady of Fatima, he crossed himself and kissed his thumb. To me, it was an act as exotic as if he’d knelt down before a cow in the streets of Calcutta. He glanced up and down the empty street, then set off west. “I think it’s up here.”
“What?”
“The secret park? You ever been there?”
I shook my head no.
“Good. I want to be the first to show it to you.”
We turned, then turned again, and once more the streets grew dark and silent. In the middle of a block, he led me off the street entirely, off the sidewalk, and onto a path that ran between the houses themselves. It was so well hidden I would never have noticed it. The narrow passage slithered dangerously close to the windows of houses on either side where sleepers dreamed. I thought of the gun Mom used to keep in her nightstand in case of “home invasion” and worried for one second about a nervous homeowner shooting us. In the next second, I realized that this night I was immune. I had walked through the gold curtains and emerged into a world where I could prowl the night streets and capture the attention of a man who might have descended from conquistadors or angels.
As we stole along the narrow path, a cloud of fragrance like a tropical rainstorm enveloped us. Any other time, I would have identified it as the exhaust from a dryer blowing out the smell of fabric softener, but on that night it was a tropical rainstorm.
The path abruptly opened into exactly what he had promised, a secret park. Hidden behind the houses of this ordinary suburban block was gloriously open space where cottonwoods soared into the night. We left the choke of houses behind and walked into the middle of the par
k. Only three of the dark houses that ringed the park still had lights on. Without the moon, we hid in a night that was as dark as nights get and stared at the lives illuminated in the lighted rooms more intently than museumgoers studying dioramas. In one display an old man stood in his open patio door, T-shirt tucked into white boxers, and smoked a cigarette. In another a young mother in a shortie nightgown walked a crying infant. A woman in her fifties sat in a living room completely dark except for the flickering light from the television she watched.
I was outside all those rooms. All the rooms where ordinary life was happening.
He took my hand, sat us down at a concrete picnic table, bent over his guitar, and played more of the music that poured directly into the hole in my brain. An odd luminescence played across his skin as he sang a song in Spanish that made all the vowels sing their names. They sang the a. The e. The i. The o. The u. And sometimes they sang the y. Daddy had been right, I would fall in love with the first boy who gave me vowels.
“Hey, the giant’s swing.” He laid the guitar on top of a picnic table and ran to the tallest, oldest cottonwood in the park. Hanging from it on long, thick ropes was a swing. Not a cheap metal swing suspended from clattering chains either, but a big, old-fashioned swing someone had made from a plank of oak. It was a giant’s swing.
He jumped onto the swing with an explosive, balletic grace and, standing on the seat, rode it into the air. He soared up, then swept back down, his dark hair rising around his face like black wings. Up again, he rose high enough that he could reach out, grab a handful of leaves, rip them loose, and toss them into the air. I tilted my face up to receive the rain of greenery that showered down. I caught a leaf. It was a perfect heart. I tucked it under the waistband of my skirt.
“Come.” For a second, two, he opened his arms to me and balanced on the swing with no hands, then grabbed one rope with both hands and jumped off the seat, hanging by his arms, smiling a pirate smile. He was Errol Flynn swinging on the rigging across the deck of a ship he was about to plunder. His feet touched the earth; he sat down and patted the empty swing next to him. “Come on, ruka tan caliente, plenty of room.”
I ambled over, hiding my nervousness behind a slow saunter.
When I was near enough, he clasped my hips and dragged me toward him.
I could either fall face-first onto him or step over the sides of the seat. I stepped over the sides of the seat and sat down, straddling him. He leaned far back, stretching the ropes in his hands as he went, tugging me toward him until my chest rested against his, my face hovering above. A pocket of warmth rose up carrying the scent of beer and sweat, shaving cream and soap.
His arms were cables beside my head, straining to hold us both. I felt their intricate machinery work, pulleys lifting his head until his lips pressed against mine. His breath had the dense, smoky scent of marijuana, illicit and sweet. His tongue was delicate, a calligrapher’s brush on my lips writing words there I had never spoken, thoughts I’d never thought that became in that instant the only words I ever again wanted to speak, the only thoughts I ever again wanted to think.
Any lingering suspicions that I might be a lesbian vanished entirely.
I leaned forward, avid for his taste. The instant I pursued, the muscles of his arms bunched as he strained hard, pulling back against the ropes. His legs surged beneath me and we were launched, soaring together toward the black velvet sky. My hair streamed over my shoulders, onto his face, as the wind rushed through it. The stars, brighter in the eclipse-darkened sky than they had ever been, spattered dopplered light across his face as we flew heavenward.
At the top of the swing’s arc, we paused, then dropped back to earth. The direction of the pendulum reversed and it was my turn to look into the sky as we sailed up into the night. As I streaked upward, his body pressed down on mine. Above the lofted twirl of his hair, the bright stars blurred. My eye was drawn to the North Star, the one my father had shown me so that I could always find my way home. But like all the other stars, it had become a silver smear across the night sky rather than a fixed point.
He hauled back on the ropes, pumping his legs beneath us so that the swing rose as high above the earth as the long ropes would allow.
We swung back the other way. High at the top of the next arc, he let go and wrapped his arms around me. “Take the wheel, Lucille.”
“No!” I shrieked, struggling to hang on as the swing wobbled beneath us. He laughed, heedless and wild. I barely managed to keep my hands clamped on the ropes as we plummeted down. Willfully oblivious to the danger that I would lose my grip while we were thirty feet in the air, he kissed my neck, drew me close. His lips, his tongue whispered a warmth into my ear that made me forget to breathe.
“Don’t let go.”
As the swing rocked his weight onto me, he grew hard, a surging that, though I had never felt it before, still seemed both familiar yet thrilling beyond anything I had ever dreamed.
Gradually, the swing lost altitude, ticking through a shorter and shorter arc until we sat swaying slightly, me, drained, gulping for breath, still clinging to the ropes to hold us upright, him, kissing my neck, sliding the strap of the camisole off my shoulder, covering my breast with his mouth. My arms drooped from the ropes and he held me tighter. His hand was under my skirt. Pushing my panties aside, he felt how wet I was and fumbled with his fly. He pushed into me, then stopped.
“You’re a virgin?”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry? How can you be a virgin?”
“I don’t want to be. It doesn’t matter.”
“Yeah, it does.” He reached down and buttoned his fly. “Being a virgin is a big thing. A very big thing.”
“Not to me.”
He unhooked my legs from around his waist and stood us both up. “Well, to me it is.”
“But I thought it was, like, some big male deal to, you know, deflower a virgin.”
“You did, huh? Where are you getting your information? That friend of yours? The one in the parking lot?”
“Where are you going?”
“Taking you home.”
I followed him out of the park. The perfumed air no longer smelled like a tropical rainstorm; it smelled like fabric softener from a dryer.
We walked in silence back to Lomas, then up the street to Carlisle where he stopped and looked around. “Which way you live?”
I pointed in a vague direction. “Off that way. But don’t worry, you don’t have to walk me home.”
He didn’t argue. “Okay, well, see you around.”
With that, he strode off down Carlisle, toward the interstate. Car lights approached from a distance. He turned so that he was facing the lights, facing me, stuck his thumb out, and kept walking backward. The approaching car pulled over. It was a beat-up Toyota truck with a camper shell on the back covered with stickers from scenic wonders around the country. The driver yelled, “Where you headed, man?”
I ran closer so I could hear his answer. But all he said was, “Wherever you’re going. I’m headed wherever you are.”
“Throw your stuff in the back.”
He opened the little door at the back of the camper and stowed his guitar there. When he pivoted around and found me standing on the sidewalk blocking his way, he seemed surprised. Neither one of us could think of anything to say. Actually, I wanted to say a thousand different things and every one of them was wrong. Mostly I wanted the night to start all over, to sit at his feet and listen to him play the guitar forever.
“Will I—” I started to ask the most wrong of all the wrong things: if I would see him again. He was already shaking his head no, telling me not to say the words.
He backed into the truck and slammed the door. Before he left, though, he rolled down the window and peered up at me. “You’re trying to play out of your league, chica. It’s going to get you in trouble.” His voice softened and was kind as he added, “Just be who you are.”
He turned away and the camper drove
off. I watched until the taillights were specks of red that flashed when they turned onto the interstate, then disappeared.
Far overhead, the hidden moon slipped back into view, but the sun was already rising. Night was over.
Chapter Twelve
“Where the hell have you been?” Didi woke up when I was halfway through the window we’d “retrofitted” so we could come and go without encountering Catwoman. She blinked as if I were part of a dream she was having. “I thought you got arrested. What happened? Where did you go? Did you leave before the cops came? What time is it?” She grabbed the alarm clock on the floor beside her bed. “Shit, girl, it’s five thirty in the a. of m. I’ve got to pee.” Didi jumped out of bed and ran into the bathroom.
I plopped down on my bed. Everything in the Lair looked different. I’d wandered around for hours after he left, then tried not to wake Didi up when I finally got home. I was worried that one look at my face would tell her that I’d seen her and the cop last night. More than that, though, I wanted to keep last night, keep him, to myself. I wanted hours alone to remember every note he’d played and every word he’d spoken.
“Okay, details, details, details.” Didi came back out, patting her washed face dry with a towel. A stretchy orange band held her hair off her wet face. She plopped down on her bed, grabbed a Pop Tart from the package sitting on the nightstand, and settled in as if she were taking a seat in a movie theater. The Pop Tart’s white frosting was speckled with colored sprinkles like a kid’s birthday cupcake. Didi liked sprinkles as they fit in with her philosophy of Eating Obstacles. A fanatical dieter, always just a lettuce leaf or two away from anorexia, Didi made herself eat things in segments as small as were feasible so that consumption of the edible item took as long as possible. She could make a taco last an hour, eating every shred of cheese, every nubbin of tomato individually. Sprinkles, of course, offered fantastic food-stretching opportunities.
