by Dyan Sheldon
Space is not the only problem. Paloma has always enjoyed the meals in First Class, but in Economy the food is so awful that she hands back her tray untouched with the information that she’d rather starve. Even the cabin crew, whom Paloma has always found to be so charming and solicitous, is surly and snappy the closer you get to the tail of the aircraft. They wouldn’t help you if you collapsed in the aisle; they’d just kick you out of the way. Not only have they stopped answering Paloma’s calls, whizzing by her like robots on wheels, but when Paloma ventures into the First Class cabin just to see if there is anyone else going to the dude ranch, the steward whose roots need touching up shoos her back behind the curtain as if she’s a stray dog with fleas. The only good thing about the flight is that it doesn’t take twenty-four hours. Even if it feels as if it does.
Paloma isn’t used to having time to think. Her days are usually as scheduled as a railway, from the moment she gets up to the moment she goes to bed. If Leone isn’t telling her what to do, it’s her voice coach, or tutor, or trainer, or a producer, or the director, or the sponsor. Rehearse, practice, work, sleep… rehearse, practice, work, sleep… day after day, year after year. And, as we know, when Paloma does have some free time she doesn’t spend it trying to disprove Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.
Which means that now, packed into her seat like toothpaste in a tube, might be the perfect opportunity for her to do some serious thinking. She could ponder the rather remarkable coincidence of her nearly getting arrested and the shooting of the new season of Angel in the House being postponed. She might consider why there’s been nothing on the news or the Internet about Audrey Hepplewhite’s tragic accident. She might wonder why she’s being sent to a dude ranch when the only horse she’s ever been on was part of a merry-go-round.
But Paloma doesn’t think about any of these things. Instead, she watches a mediocre movie whose name and plot she forgets even before it’s over, and thinks about how happy she’ll be when she finally gets to her hotel. First, because her skin feels funny from rubbing against the fake silk of her neighbour’s blouse and she’s worried that some dandruff has fallen on her, she’ll have a shower. Once she’s done that, since she’ll be starving by then, she’ll order something to eat from room service. Something Leone would never let her have. After that she’ll go down to the spa for a massage. Then she’ll go out to the pool – there’s bound to be a lot of people hanging around the pool. Paloma’s deciding what she’ll have for supper (lobster? Steak? Sushi?) when the seatbelt sign goes on and the announcement is made that they’re starting to descend.
Paloma doesn’t run anywhere unless it’s in the script, but she’s so happy to get off the plane, and so eager to start her temporary new life, that she walks extremely quickly to the baggage area. Her luggage – two large wheeled cases in what would be a zebra print, if zebras were pink and white and made in a laboratory, and a large make-up case – is last to come out of the hold. Of course. God isn’t doing her any favours today. At least she has her iPod or they might find her body hours from now, going round and round on the carousel, bored to death.
As Paloma finally comes into the arrivals hall, pushing a baggage cart with all her things on it in front of her, she’s mentally composing the tweet she’ll be sending the world about the hardships of Economy travel (mail yourself instead!!!). She comes to a stop, smiling her magazine-cover smile and looking around. Paloma’s expecting to see a group of celebrity teens gathered round someone holding a sign that says “Dude Ranch” and worrying about what happened to her. Because Paloma was once a special guest on a cruise where many of the staff wore mouse ears, she assumes that this someone will be wearing a cowboy hat and a string tie. But there is no sign saying “Dude Ranch”, no one wearing a cowboy hat and a string tie, and no one worried that it’s taken her nearly an hour to disembark. There isn’t even a driver holding up a rectangle of cardboard with SUSAN written on it. Paloma, still looking around expectantly, crosses to the doors, hoping to see a minibus or people-carrier emblazoned with the words “Dude Ranch” waiting at the kerb.
It’s so hot outside that everything looks slightly blurred. There are several cars and cabs picking up people, but there is nothing that looks like it comes from a celebrity retreat. Paloma is still squinting into the mirage-like distance when an aged pick-up suddenly judders to a stop almost in front of her. Paloma considers any vehicle over two years old a piece of ancient history, and doesn’t actually see the truck. The passenger door swings open and someone starts calling, “Susie! Susie!”
In Paloma’s world, everyone else is part of the crowd scene, and she is the only one centre stage. Which means that she isn’t aware of the truck or the open door; and she doesn’t hear anyone shouting because she is listening to one of her favourite songs and half singing along. And then someone suddenly grabs the handle of one of her cases. Paloma isn’t a girl overburdened with ideals or principles. If the age-old fight against tyranny and oppression depended on people like Paloma, we’d all still be serfs and slaves. But the streets of Miami will be under six-feet of snow before she lets anyone steal her clothes and matching accessories. She automatically swings back her arm to wallop the thief with her handbag, which weighs as much as a loaded AK-47. She misses.
“Whoa there, Susie! What are you doing?”
Because one of her earphones has fallen out, this time she does hear him. Paloma blinks in surprise. In front of her is a middle-aged man, bearded and grey-haired, and dressed in filthy jeans and a matching T-shirt. His eyebrows need shaping. No cowboy hat, but he is wearing a bandana. Which is also covered with the dust of centuries. “What?”
“You’re Susan Minnick, aren’t you?” It takes Paloma a second or two to remember that she is Susan Minnick and nod. “I’m Ethan. Ethan Lovejoy. From Old Ways.”
Paloma’s never been told the name of her destination, but he can’t mean the celebrity Dude Ranch, can he? Wouldn’t the driver for a celebrity Dude Ranch be wearing a uniform, or at least a blazer with the company logo on it? And Ray-Bans? And be clean? “What?”
“Old Ways.” His voice is soft and shapeless but comforting and warm. A purring cat of a voice. As if he spends a lot of time speaking to very young children. “I’m really sorry I’m so late picking you up, Susie, but we had a couple of cows escape and there wasn’t anyone else around to bring them back.”
Behind him, Paloma finally sees the pick-up at the kerb, across the door of which is written in fading letters: Old Ways Ranch.
“Oh, right. Old Ways.” Being an actor means pretending to words and feelings that aren’t yours. Paloma smiles as if she’s glad to see him. “Hi.” She takes the dry and calloused hand he’s holding out to her, the nails of which have been cut with a saw, and he pumps hers as if he’s expecting to get water from it. A person slightly less self-absorbed and unaccustomed to disappointment than Paloma might now start wondering what’s going on. But Paloma, of course, isn’t that person. She tells herself that the cows and the pick-up and Ethan Lovejoy himself are probably just props; for atmosphere. Like when the director of Angel in the House had that Ancient Egypt party and there was a mummy case in the middle of the garden. There wasn’t anybody in the case – it wasn’t even made in ancient Egypt, it was made in China – it was just to get everyone in the mood. “Nice to meet you.”
“What say we get your things into the truck and we can be on our way.” He gives her a lopsided smile and a wink. “That is if I’m allowed to touch your case now.”
Paloma laughs. “Oh, yeah, of course… I just, you know… You surprised me.”
Which won’t be the last time.
She watches him pull one of her bags over to the pick-up and throw it into the back as if it’s a piece of junk from a discount store, causing a small cloud of dust to rise into the air.
Paloma stands there, waiting for him to come back for the rest of her luggage, which is what drivers are supposed to do, but instead he turns and waves her towards him. “Shake a
leg there, Susie. Grab those bags. We want to get a move on. There’s a lot to do to get you settled in before supper.”
Maybe he’s not the real driver. Maybe the real driver, who knows what his job is and how to do it, was trampled by a runaway cow and Ethan’s just taking his place for the day. Probably he’s the janitor. Or the guy who takes care of the livestock.
“Right,” says Paloma, and she yanks her bags from the cart. Just walking the few feet to the kerb in this heat makes her tired.
“I’m really pretty wiped out,” she says as he dumps the rest of her luggage into the flatbed. “I mean I had this really gruesome flight. It was so cramped my feet went numb and the food was disgusting and the man next to me smelled and—” She breaks off when she realizes that there’s no one there, and she’s talking to the back of the truck.
“Climb on in!” calls Ethan from inside the pick-up. “Let’s get this show on the road. It’s a little bit of a drive.”
The drive takes over an hour and a half. Ethan Lovejoy’s idea of air conditioning is to keep the windows open, which means that though the air is still hot it’s moving, and dust and insects fill the cab. For the first thirty minutes or so they ride on a paved road, and he yammers on in his monotonous but soothing voice about how the cows got out and why it was up to him to get them back and about camp-outs and meteor showers and the county fair, but since, as topics of conversation go, these are as interesting to Paloma as instructions on how to wire a lamp, she isn’t really listening. She’s watching the buildings become fewer and fewer, and the number of cars they pass become fewer and fewer, and noticing how enormous and endless the sky suddenly seems. But she still isn’t worried that this may not be the vacation she expected. That’s why she’s come, isn’t it? So no reporters or photographers or fans could ever find her. The FBI would have a hard time finding her out here.
And then they leave the road for a dirt trail. The truck rattles like a tin full of bones tied to the back of a bucking horse, and her luggage bounces up and down in the flatbed, and the dust drifts through the windows in clouds. Ethan Lovejoy stops talking, partly because he is concentrating on navigating the treacherous holes and stones that have replaced the asphalt, and partly because the racket of the pick-up makes conversation a challenge. This silence is the one part of the drive that Paloma doesn’t mind; she’s never really liked making small talk with the help.
Paloma loses herself in her own thoughts, which, though not as gloomy as they will become, are not as pleasant as they could be. This is because of the episode of Angel in the House in which Faith Cross is sent to a wagon train going across the Great Plains during the California Gold Rush. The episode was shot on location in Wyoming or Kansas or South Dakota – some place where a gas station and a general store are considered a town. The cast all had air conditioned trailers, of course, and no one expected her to ride thousands of miles in a covered wagon, but a certain amount of wagon riding was involved, and the pick-up is reminding her just how unpleasant that was. Paloma is used to expensive cars with comfortable seats and good suspension, neither of which the pick-up has. A certain amount of walking, poisonous snakes, wolves, buzzards, coyotes, lizards, outlaws and Indians were also involved in the story, as it was in the lives of the real settlers – all of which made Paloma extremely grateful that she was born way too late to have the misfortune of being a pioneer. She’d rather live in a cardboard box under a flyover. Because Paloma has had a lot of trouble with her own car, which must be at least twenty years younger than the truck, she starts wondering what will happen if they break down. She’s not worried about Indians, but she’s definitely not discounting the possibility of things like outlaws, wolves, poisonous snakes and walking miles under a cancerous sun.
It’s as she’s discovering that her phone has no signal (and that if the truck breaks down they’ll probably die out here and be eaten by wolves like the parents of the orphans in the Angel in the House story) that Ethan shouts to be heard above the racket of the truck, “You’ve never been out to these parts before, have you, Susie? What do you think of God’s country?”
What Paloma thinks is that God can have it, but what she yells back, her smile bright as the relentless sun, is, “Oh, it’s really beautiful. Like a postcard.” Professional even in times of distress. She could win an Emmy.
“Wait’ll you spend a night out under the stars,” hollers Ethan. “It’s a truly religious experience.”
Since he can’t possibly mean sleeping on the ground out here in the exact middle of nowhere surrounded by wild animals, he must mean that the rooms have skylights or terraces furnished with beds like that hotel Paloma and Leone stayed at in the Caribbean. Paloma continues to beam. “Wow, that sounds severely awesome.”
Ethan Lovejoy nods enthusiastically, but his ardent words are lost as they hit some kind of crater and the bonnet pops up.
Long past the point where if the FBI teamed up with Army Intelligence, the CIA, Interpol, MI5 and Sherlock Holmes they still wouldn’t be able to find Paloma, she finally sees something in the distance that God didn’t put there; a high, barbed wire fence and a sign over the entrance: OLD WAYS RANCH. And way behind it, hunkered down among the trees and hills like sentries, a dark sprawl of buildings.
Paloma was starting to nod off, but now she sits up, thinking of showers and swimming pools and cold drinks and a disco.
Ethan looks over at her as they come to a stop. “You wanna do the honours, Susie?”
“Honours?”
He points a finger rough as bark. “Open the gate.”
Paloma is not, of course, the kind of girl who opens gates – the gate at home opens by remote – but she is so relieved to have finally arrived somewhere that she jumps out of the truck without a word of protest.
“No, no,” he shouts as she starts to run after him. “You have to shut it again. I don’t want to lose any more cows today.”
People have a tendency to see what they want to see, even when what they’re looking at is the complete opposite of whatever that is. As an example of this phenomenon, although Paloma is looking at the wooden houses and barns of a working ranch in the distance, what she sees is more along the lines of the summer palace of Kublai Khan.
Even when they’re so close that it would be obvious to a fish that Old Ways has more in common with a tugboat than a luxury liner, it isn’t until Ethan Lovejoy says, “I’ll show you where you’re bunking so you can unpack what you need and have a shower if you want,” that Paloma finally starts to sense that something is very wrong.
“Bunking?” she repeats.
He swerves the truck around a pool of chickens, and laughs. “That’s just what we call it. It’s not really a bunkhouse. Two to a room and a bath you share with the girls on the other side.”
She opens her mouth to explain that she doesn’t share anything with anyone, but is so overwhelmed by the enormity of what he seems to be saying that she shuts it again.
“Then you can come on over to the office and I’ll explain how everything works,” he goes on. “Get you properly oriented before everybody comes back.”
Paloma, unused to having anything explained to her by the hired help, says, “You? Isn’t there a… you know, like a manager?”
His laugh, as anodyne as his speaking voice, is already getting on her nerves. “Well, that’d be me.” Ethan Lovejoy, of course, is not a janitor but the president and chief psychologist of Old Ways. “Dr Ethan Lovejoy. Founder, owner and chief honcho. But folks just call me Ethan.”
“I don’t understand.” Paloma has been known to throw a five-alarm tantrum because someone was sitting in her seat or brought her a latte instead of a cappuccino, but now that something really bad is happening she is eerily calm. “What is this place?”
“We’re a working ranch and what’s called a Wilderness Centre.” Paloma isn’t sure what a Wilderness Centre is, but it doesn’t sound like it’s likely to have a health spa or luxury shops. A stagnant pond, maybe. Maybe a dimly-l
it store heated by a pot-bellied stove. A store that only sells beef jerky and bird feed. “Which is just another way of saying we’re a good place to stay and chill and take stock of things.”
From somewhere very, very far away, Paloma says, “But I was told that this is, like, a ten-star hotel.”
“Ten stars? Pshaw! Ten stars is nothing!” Ethan Lovejoy doesn’t really have a voice, she decides, what he has is a whispery gurgle. The whispery gurgle of some warty creature that lives under a rock. “We have ten million stars out here, Susie. Wait’ll you see them, you’re going to be really glad you’re not in some fancy hotel.”
This, of course, is so astoundingly impossible that the only reasonable response would be to laugh out loud.
But Paloma doesn’t feel like laughing right now. There’s an old saying that she has never heard, and this is it: the scales fell from her eyes. Meaning that she’s realized the truth at last.
Or at least some of it.
Ethan Lovejoy’s office is a small room with a large window that looks out on infinity – assuming that infinity is made of sky and sand. There are two chairs, a desk and a bookshelf. The walls are blue and decorated not with prints or pictures like most walls, but with quotations: The shame is not in failing but in failing to try… Goals are the fuel in the furnace of achievement… What matters is playing the game not winning the prize… Today is the first day of the rest of your life… Your worst enemy is the one inside you… The only day you can be sure you have is the one you’re in… It looks more like a room you’d find in the basement of a church than the main building of a working ranch, though Paloma doesn’t find this thought as comforting as you might suppose.
