Old Border Road

by Susan Froderberg

  WHO KNOWS WHY they did it? Ham says. I’m ashamed to be telling you about it. Yet it be your husband and therefore you got to be told. Asides, word gets around town soon enough, even with what few folks is left of it.

  Why who did what?

  I’m not sure whose idea of the two of them it was, or if they just up and done what they done on impulse or for entertainment’s sake. Alls I can say is they’s mighty lucky to be let off. If it were not for the decency of Mr. Gomez, those two would be locked up. But he didn’t press any hard charges, Gomez didn’t, not formally, anyways. Though both kids has been slapped with six months of public service. Some agreement made between Gomez and the sheriff, sheriff says.

  What charges for what?

  We was just looking, Ham says, doing a shrill, mocking voice of his daughter. We was just playing around, she says. Ham lowers his register and says, But while Son has got Gomez cornered and is going on about this and that and the other thing to make small talk, Daughter Pearl is meantime reaching over into the glass cabinet to pick herself out a fine diamond ring. You know that cabinet way in the back, back where there’s that old-timer at—what’s his name?—the Israelite that sits in the glass box with them oddball glasses atop his head, fixing watches and other itty-bitty jewelry items. The old-timer would not’ve seen much anyways, even if he’d a picked his head up with them jeweler goggles on. Daughter Pearl must’ve figured she was clear to help herself, as she reached in and took out the ring real quietly and nonchalantly like, as Gomez says she did. He says she comes over and gets to chitchatting with him and Son, who I guess were chewing some pretty good fat by now. After a bit, she and Son say their adióses and head out the door and get into the pickup truck, and the two of them damned bandits just drive right off.

  With a diamond ring she’s wearing? I say.

  It didn’t take Gomez too long to see the thing missing and to curse hisself for having had his back turned. He right away puts a call into the sheriff and the sheriff takes off looking for Son’s pickup. It got spotted parked out at the levee. Finds the two of them there and, well…

  Better don’t tell me, I say.

  Finds them parked, let’s just say that, and the sheriff hauls them in. They says they was planning to take the ring back to Gomez anyways. They says they was just borrowering it for a day or two as so to get the feel of the fineness of it. They says they had ever intention of taking the thing back. Says it was a joke. A prank, they says. To show how easy it is in this town to go and take such a thing. Hell, I don’t know what to say, he says.

  You’re saying what you need to say, I say. You’re saying what I need to know.

  Alls I know is the sheriff hauls their asses back to the shop. Gomez is by then in the window, untacking that poster of you and Son on your wedding day he had up to advertise with, in which you look mighty nice in that picture, by the way. Daughter Pearl takes the diamond ring off her finger and is weepy and apologetic like all get-out, sheriff says. Just wanted to wear it about town for a while is all, is what she says, and they would’ve brought it back soon enough. Gomez takes the rolled-up poster and hands it to Son and tells them to get on out, that he doesn’t want to have to look at the neither one of them again. Sheriff says Gomez was so upset his mustache was twitching, like he was about to have some epilectric attack or something.

  Gomez is a decent man, I say.

  And them kids is awful dumb. Or something.

  I look down and study the cover of dust on my boots.

  The sheriff says he took each aside and said if ever one little thing goes wrong with either of them again, they will be busted without question. He must’ve thought one way to scare Daughter Pearl with the threat of this was to make her take a good hard look at what being locked up is like from the inside. So he’s got her working days at the jail, in the kitchen, helping with the cooking and the cleaning up. She’s been put on probation for a good three months.

  What about Son?

  He’ll be picking trash up along the highway starting Monday, they say.

  Now don’t get all weepy, Ham says. Could have been worse. The sheriff is been more than fair. It could have easily gone to the courts.

  I nod my head.

  Didn’t the sheriff have to haul you back home once? he says.

  He did once.

  He had eyes for yer mother, didn’t he?

  Probably.

  This world.

  This world, indeed.

  EIGHT

  THE QUECHAN

  We meet in our coming and going out on the porch in the too-early morning, me telling Son there’s a bowl of boiled eggs on the table and still-hot coffee in the pot, and Son telling me about not being away all day if my aim is to take the watertruck. He lets the screendoor go in a hard slap behind him, clipping my answer at the close. I turn into the settle of what’s left of what’s said, and head out and into the dim. The engine is still ticking when I climb up into the cabfront. The tires whine over the soaked and darkened road.

  Hold it while ye may.

  What a wholehearted wish it once was.

  I head into the day’s direction, turning off county roadway and onto highway, with the sun breaching over the blades of the peaks. The route cuts through a terrain pregnant with little desert animals that lie hidden underground, and all about the dormant seeds of plant species scatter and root and wait the drought out in secrecy. The landscape is whiskered with desertbroom and beargrass, panicgrass and rabbitbush, and other shrubs and scrubby thicket that might feed off the parched and mineraled earth. Gravelly washes wrinkle out from the shadows of the rocky bajada, aproning open onto sandy flats. Desertspoon and soaptree hatch the landscape to cast a laggardly shade. Nubbins of colored sunrise ebb into the pale above.

  Yet happy pair.

  Together we had washed the words away. Then even the tracings of etchings left were scoured to nothing by dust and by sun.

  The watertruck rattles and coughs and pings in its work up to speed. After a time comes a rougher stretch of highway, and soon enough a sign posted alongside. I clutch and shift and ease the watertruck to a stop and open the door for a closer reading, seeing on the road below a foot-size, sausage-shaped, gaudy-colored lizard of rarity where I’m just about to put a foot. It looks up and flicks its tongue, and I close the door and touch the pedal when suddenly the tires are blipping over something other that feels living. I hit the brake and look into the side mirror to see a little desert hare splayed on the blacktop behind, and already the monster lizard is crawling over to feed off the thing.

  My mouth waters up with that bile taste.

  Not to be taken as any kind of sign. Just accident. No more than circumstance, chance, nothing as onerous as foretold. I give my eyes a squeeze shut and wonder at my will in the matter. I open the door again and this time I vomit.

  YOU WERE SO big I couldn’t breathe, my mother said. She said, I had to sit up in bed at night to sleep. I was breathless. Sleepless near the end. Could not get a wink with you. Ahh! she sighed, in the colossal way she always did. She sat on the bed and was rested back onto pillows bolstered against the headboard.

  You were waxing gibbous, I said.

  Don’t get smart with me, she said.

  Anyway, it was lunacy.

  What lunacy?

  You would have to be crazy to have a baby at your age.

  I was young.

  You were my age.

  I had no idea about the pain.

  How could you have until you have it?

  You just wait.

  I plan to.

  She clucked her tongue. She sighed again.

  My mother’s closet was packed tightly as batting, the dresses and blouses and slacks crushed together airlessly. I put the flat of my hand into the body of the whole and spread to make an opening. I fingered about the neck of a wire and peeled a filmy pastel out and held the dress up. This one might do, I said.

  Before you, I had your waist, she said.

  I tur
ned to the mirror and raised the dress to my chin and smoothed the below of it out, pivoting one side to the next, smelling the smell of her perfume as I regarded her colors held next to my skin. I saw her there in the mirror with me too, my mother, leaned against the hardwood of the headboard with a hard look on her face.

  Who you going to this wedding with?

  I’m going alone.

  So go.

  What do I do about shoes?

  Just don’t mess the dress up.

  I turned to face her.

  She turned to look out the window.

  I plan on getting back into that one, one day, she said. She picked her tea up from the bedside table and took a drink. The ice tinkled in the glass. The glass left a ring.

  THE PAINT STOOD tethered to the post, eyes more closed than open, as I worked the curry brush over the shoulders and withers, my hand made small as a child’s on the animal’s great muscled neck. He huffed out a coarse horsey breath that waffled the dusty air about us. The earth trembled beneath. I turned toward a commotion in the distance and saw Ham’s rig coming our way. It twisted and bucked over the washboard road and slowed for a clutch of baby quail pacing behind a skittery mother bird. A hawk sighted in the fevery light above.

  The rig rumbled past the paddock, hauling a great burst of dirt behind. It came to a halt in front of the stables, and the towed sandwhirl voluted up and ahead, gobbling the rig up entirely. You couldn’t see a door opening but knew by the stiff creak of the hinge and the crunching of boot steps that someone was coming. Ham appeared out of the heap of mounting cloud that surrounded him.

  I called his name out, as if the dust had deafened us.

  Ham came over. He cleared his throat.

  I pulled the bandanna up over my nose.

  News, he said.

  Some good would be good.

  Wouldn’t it, he said.

  We stood in the midst of swirls and drifts until the kickup subsided and all settled about us again. Ham went quiet as the dust did. I waited for what he had come to say. Then I got impatient.

  I tugged the bandanna down off my face. What? I said.

  He reset the hat on his head. Daughter Pearl, he said.

  What about Daughter Pearl?

  Going away, he said.

  And to miss the competition? Hard to believe, this far in.

  She’s with child, he said.

  I shoo’d a fly away.

  Ham mopped his neck with a handkerchief.

  She’s going north to be with her mother, he said.

  Gives me a real chance at the barrels now.

  You had it anyway.

  I made some comment about hoping the paint had not soured too much in the layoff and went on to brushing a hindquarter.

  I noticed it you been laying off some, he said.

  I’ve not been feeling myself lately. I’ll be over it soon.

  Ham put a hand to the bridge of the paint’s nose and the horse tossed his head.

  You might have to fight him a bit in the beginning, he said.

  I looked out past burnt pasture and off into empty space, but no words would come to me. The paint lifted a leg and stamped it down. I went back to brushing him.

  Am I smelling envy? he said.

  I kept brushing, still trying for what to say.

  You don’t want to be wishing such a thing as a baby upon yourself, do you, now? Ham said. You at your age? Because from what there is to go by, I might speak a mind altogether different. You got ever bit of the world to go yet. Why add more cargo to it?

  Ham’s voice got softer. You savvy me, don’t you?

  I shrugged. I’m going in for a mane comb, I say.

  He followed me into the tackroom. It was musty and on the dark side inside, as it’s always been, but for the mullioned light that broke in through the little window. Everything was kept in the disorderly order the old man had left it in—the rows of saddles all atop their perches, the headstalls and breastcollars mounted on the walls, the reins and bits and cinches and spurs draped on hooks and on pegs. Tins of horse ointment and tobacco were left in their place on a shelf. The old man’s old pipe sat cold in the dish atop the old metal desk. All of everything as it was, and all of everything so changed.

  There was a great weight to the place.

  There was the empty of missing filling the room up.

  Ham startled me by coming over and putting his arms around me. I turned and put my head on his shoulder, feeling a pang of something inside where a life was beginning. I stood leaning into him, letting him embrace me, waiting for the ache of what was, and what wouldn’t be, to go away.

  Now, he said. Now, now, he said.

  He patted me on the back. He felt as light and dusty as a raggedy-man made of hay and dressed to scare the field birds away. As if the air here had dried clear through to his marrow and lymph. There was the light boniness of his fingers on my back, the kindly patting becoming a stroking, and now the brittle hand traveling down my spine in a more deliberate and caressing way. I started to move away, but he held me against him, and I arched my back to look at his eyes, to see if I could find something there to know him by, but he brought his face close to mine, and I turned from him and felt his raw lips scrape the flesh of my cheek. I pulled out of his arms and was sorry for him and at the same time feeling guilty for whatever I might have done to tempt him.

  Right then, Son should walk into the tackroom. He looked at us with an oddball smile, as if he knew something about the way the world works that I never did or would.

  SPIKES OF LIGHT bolt up from the earth out in the distance. I turn toward the sight, heading off onto narrow dirt road and into the brush, the watertruck screeching at the bites and the scratches inflicted to the tank of it by the catclaw and mesquite. Soon enough in the clearing ahead the aluminum dwelling comes into view, ablaze in the sun’s rays. A giant saguaro towers out of the roof of the add-on added on to the side of it. I pull the watertruck up and a dog slips out from beneath the place and barks meanly in greeting. A woman appears at the sidedoor and she hollers at the dog, and it stops the noise and trots off with an air of injury or insult, either one.

  The woman stands in the glare of the sun holding the door open. She is big, despite her lack of height, dressed in a calico skirt and a man’s undershirt that she has girted about the waist with a concha that parts her bellypads in a bottom-heavy way. She wears a ballcap with a logo on it, a necklace of fetishes, and hoops of silver bracelets that slide up and down both forearms and make dainty chimey sounds when she reaches out to me. She takes my hand, her fingers ringed and thick as dumplings, and I think of the gila monster, likely still feeding off the meat and bones of the little hare back on the road.

  The woman is Quechan. You can see this in her broad face, rounded with weight, but still the high bones that abut the sockets remain prominent, her eyes dark and deep set. She nods me inside.

  The place smells of bark, or what could be a kernel or a pod, or some kind of root. My eyes adjust to the dimmer light, and forms come forward, becoming knowable things. There’s a card table and folding chairs in a kitchen area. A daybed appears in what would be a livingroom, with a large chair of the reclining type, and a television set set out in front of it. There’s a paint-by-numbers painting of a smiling clown hung on the wall, another one to the side of it—the same clown but frowning. The Quechan woman looks at me, without a sign of much of anything showing on her face. She raises her arm slightly and cues me through a short hallway and into the next room. There’s a long wooden table set up in the middle of it, a plastic bucket under the table, a rag in the plastic bucket. There’s a single metal chair, a little wooden stand, a shelf with some bottles and jars above a sink. A naked bulb drops from a cord above.

  Put the purse on the floor there, she says.

  Now here, she says, and she opens a door.

  Go in, she says. You make water first.

  The bathroom is little bigger than a telephone booth. I lift the lid
and sit on the toilet seat. My bladder is full, but nothing comes out. I rest my arms on the half sink in front of me and lay my head on my arms. The whole trailer quakes as the woman moves about it. I have a sudden urge to call out for my mother. My throat aches in thinking this. Stop it. Don’t go feeling sorry for yourself. And I raise my head, having heard the words.

  The urine starts. First a trickle, then an outpour.

  The Quechan opens the door. Come, she says.

  She leads me back into the room where the table is. She takes a muslin bundle from the pocket of her skirt and ties it around my neck. Her breath smells like smoked meat. She says to get up onto the table and I do, and she goes over to the window and opens the shade and lets the light pour in. She brings the single metal chair over and sits looking at me for a minute. I smile, who knows why. Nothing yet shows on her face. She asks me questions about flow, about weight, questions about the days, what I know and don’t. She asks about family. She tells me what she has to do.

  There’s a hook on the wall for my clothes and a robe that looks taken from a hospital, but the name on it has faded. She has me put the robe on and says to get back up onto the table and to lie down on my back. She takes my shoes and places them just so under the little wooden table. The shoes look helpless and left alone, open mouthed and calling out.